Crystal Rain

by Tobias S. Buckell

  John crossed his arms, chest still heaving. “I didn’t realize there were so many.” He wondered who among the familiar faces he’d seen on the streets, or on fishing boats, had been a spy that had helped the Azteca.

  Oaxyctl shrugged. “Lots of spies here. Not many in Azt-Ian.” He sat next to John and unfastened a tin water flask from his hip. He opened it and drank, water dribbling down the corners of his mouth, but didn’t offer the flask to John.

  “That’s understandable.” John fingered a buckle around his wrist. “I’m sure Azteca over here would rather not go back.”

  “You think Aztlan is that detestable?” Oaxyctl took another swallow.

  “If life there is anything like what just happened to me, yes. Fucking savages.” John spat. “I have a family in Nanagada. My wife, her name is Shanta, and my boy is—”

  “Dead,” Oaxyctl said calmly. “They are all dead. Even if they still breathe this second, they are prizes, slaves, or gifts to hungry gods. They will be sacrificed to help the crops grow, or for battles to swing in Azteca favor, or even just because the gods demand it.”

  Each word struck John like a pelted rock. He raised his hook and pointed it at Oaxyctl. “Are you trying to goad me, Azteca?”

  Oaxyctl capped his flask and returned it to his hip.

  “Quiet or you’ll kill us,” he hissed. “I’m not Azteca anymore, John. I’m a mongoose-man. I fight by their sides to kill Azteca spies. I betrayed my own kind. You are a just a townsman. I did not have to stop and save you when I heard the screams of the sacrificed on the eagle stone. I did not have to risk my life to save yours. And I certainly did not do all this for you to call me or my people savages.”

  “The blood spilled speaks for itself,” John growled.

  “It does. But speak ill of just the Jaguar scouts, not all Azteca. Or maybe I will kill you.”

  John took a deep breath. “I don’t understand you.”

  “Maybe you should try,” Oaxyctl snapped. “The mongoose-men lie with their hearts ripped out. That could be you, or me. So here we are together, John deBrun. Let us both live with it.”

  John let his hook fall slowly down to rest beside him. “I was better at hardships before I married Shanta. My son and my wife are a part of me now, understand? This is like losing half your body.”

  “What makes you think that I didn’t leave my family behind when I came over the mountains?”

  John wasn’t sure yet how to judge Oaxyctl. It was usually an easy thing for him to decide whether he trusted someone. But John sensed many different muddled things in Oaxyctl that sometimes didn’t feel right.

  He’d saved John’s life though, that meant something.

  Oaxyctl held up a finger, then carefully picked up a sheaf of five-foot-long spears and slung them over his back with the leather strap. “We must move.” A long rod with a notch at the end dangled from Oaxyctl’s right hand, ready to fit in a spear and throw it.

  “Azteca?” John asked.

  “Maybe. Not sure.”

  John stared into the forest. Why had he been arguing with the man who had just saved his life? He had to snap out of himself.

  “Capitol City is a long way from here,” John whispered, looking around the large, shady leaves for attackers. “Weeks by a good road.” Oaxyctl had a large pack of supplies. But John knew it wasn’t enough food and water to last a walking trip all the way to Capitol City.

  “I don’t plan on walking there,” Oaxyctl whispered back. He stepped toward the leaves and led them farther into the heavy jungle, quietly aiming down a nonexistent path south, away from the coast. John followed just as carefully. The more miles they walked, the more he could try to erase the feel of the sacrificial stone, warm and smooth against his back.

  The deeper into the jungle, the less they could count on any paths. Oaxyctl sliced his way through the thick bush, sure of his direction even as night fell and they continued on. Neither of them were interested in stopping due to the dark. Not with scouts behind them. And both knew it was stupid to fashion a torch that would give them away.

  “The nearest town to Brungstun is Joginstead.” John had visited Joginstead on occasion. It was due east from Brungstun. “Are we going there after we go south to avoid Azteca?”

  “We’ll get close,” Oaxyctl said.

  Eventually Oaxyctl gave John his flask for water as they continued in silence. But Oaxyctl mainly kept to himself, and John focused on strengthening his mind for the long voyage ahead.

  Survival. The instinct bubbled from deep inside him, past the nonexistent memory. John knew he was good at that. And when he was stronger and more prepared, there would be revenge. As much death as he could bring back on the Azteca. It felt comfortable to think that way.

  Maybe he’d been a soldier before he’d lost his memory.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Dihana held on to the door’s top edge as the steam car turned hard into one of Capitol City’s angled streets. She tried not to yawn despite its being late morning already. She’d just finished a live telegraphing session with the mayor of Brewer’s Village, Roger Bransom. The telegrapher on her side had translated her request into stutter, and the telegrapher in Brewer’s read the stutter out loud to the mayor. After a pause the machine in Capitol City would chatter, and the telegrapher would read the reply to Dihana that had been spoken 370 miles away down the coast.

  Dihana had asked Mayor Bransom several questions based on the mayor’s last visit to Capitol City to verify his identity before talking about any particulars of the impending invasion.

  The open vehicle bounced through a pothole and she winced.

  So now she knew Brewer’s Village had not been overrun. Brewer’s was sixty miles away from the several days’ silent Joginstead. According to Haidan, that meant Brewer’s Village had three to six days to prepare for an invasion. Dihana and Mayor Bransom agreed that he had to immediatly send the village’s women and children up the coastal road to Anandale.

  She’d had similar live “conversations” with mayors in Anandale, Grammalton, and Harford. They’d decided to send women and children up the coastal road while the men remained to fight. They’d head south into the bush if the Azteca army proved unstoppable.

  Which it would. Eventually Capitol City would be packed with refugees who would be unable to fight a siege.

  Something else gnawed at her. She didn’t pay much attention to anyone on the street waving or saying hello. Her telegrapher had told her that her secrecy was pointless. Word buzzed on the street that an Azteca army had got past Mafolie. The announcement was supposed to be released by papers the next morning so that Dihana would have more time to coordinate with mayors throughout the Triangle Tracks before panic broached, so this was a problem.

  Lines were starting to form at banks, people changing city notes for gold. Speculation was spreading, mutating, and turning dark.

  The steam car lurched to a halt as a ragamuffin with an unbuttoned shirt waved them down. They had stopped in the middle of Baker’s District, although Dihana hadn’t seen any bakeries on this block since childhood.

  Crowd noise one street over surged. People shouted. Glass broke.

  “What’s going on?” she asked while the ragamuffin caught his breath.

  “We found a dead man,” he said. “Sacrifice, Aztecastyle, heart torn out and all.”

  They had stopped just outside Tolteca-town, where most Azteca immigrants clustered. Dihana’s mouth dried as she saw a brown-skinned man stagger out from an alley holding a bloody rag to a gash in his head. “City people out in that street?” she asked the ragamuffin.

  “People standing around, trying to get in to see the body. Word spreading.”

  Dihana tapped the driver on the shoulder. “Get back for more ragamuffins.” She opened the door and got out. The driver looked at her. “Go. Now.”

  “Just four ragamuffin here,” the ragamuffin standing by her said as the car hissed and groaned, then lurched away.

  “Ta
ke me there.”

  It was the hair Dihana noticed. Fifty or sixty men with black, straight hair cut in a fringe across the forehead, clustered on the street around an abandoned building. They faced the crowd, their backs surrounding four ragamuffins who nervously held their rifles in a semiready position before a broken-in door.

  “They found it inside this old store. Flies coming out got people suspicious.” Xippilli, an Azteca nobleman Dihana knew well, pushed through his fellow men and approached Dihana. The Capitol City crowd gave them room. The words prime and minister fluttered through the crowd. “When we realized what we had, we sent for ragamuffins,” Xippilli continued. “And the pipiltin”—Tolteca-town’s Azteca nobility, Dihana knew—“ordered me to round up as many men as I could find to stand guard so nothing got meddled with. What should we do next?”

  Dihana walked Xippilli back into the Azteca crowd and leaned in close. “What am I supposed to do, Xippilli? We offer Azteca—”

  “Tolteca,” Xippilli interrupted.

  “—sanctuary in this city. Even despite the fact we know this allows spies in.”

  “We are Tolteca,” Xippilli said. “Tolteca spurn the worship of the war god. It is only Quetzalcoatl who deserves our attentions. And not with people’s lives. We left that behind. We ran from it. I climbed the great mountains myself, my child strapped to my chest, to leave that behind.”

  “I know that, Xippilli, I swear to you I understand. The Loa opposed me on this, many opposed me on this, but I worked hard to convince the city to allow Tolteca-town. But no matter what you choose to call yourself, Tolteca or Azteca, you came from over the Wicked Highs to live here. You were once Azteca, and that is all that matters to these people in the street right now. They’re understandably suspicious, and nervous. And on top of all that, the news is breaking around the city that the Azteca have crossed over the mountains.” Dihana had told the pipiltin herself the same night she’d found out. “I don’t want to go in, I don’t want to see this.”

  Xippilli turned and rested his back against brick, looking out at the murmuring crowd. Maybe a few hundred milled about right now, Dihana guessed, facing them as well, to Xippilli’s fifty men and the five ragamuffins with rifles.

  “What would you have us do, Prime Minister? Go back out into the open land? Where Jaguar scouts will find us? We face the same horror you face now. You now are in the nightmare we have feared ever since any one of us has slipped over the mountains for what we thought would be freedom.” Xippilli sagged and looked down at the deteriorating cobblestone sidewalk.

  “I will do what I can to help, Xippilli, but the solutions may be hard. This is bad. Both these things together, bad. I’ll have to get Haidan, we’ll need to coordinate a plan to patrol Tolteca-town.”

  “Do you have any idea who broke the rumor?”

  Dihana shrugged. “Could have been anyone. A telegrapher, a newsman, a Tolteca.”

  Someone pushed up close to the Azteca cordon shouted, “What did they do to that man in there? We have a right to know what they did!”

  “We don’t know anything yet,” Dihana shouted back at him. “Have some respect. Let the ragamuffins do their job.”

  “How raga go protect all of we if the Azteca live in the middle of everything?” someone else yelled.

  “The same way they protect you from any other criminal,” Dihana returned.

  “We want justice!”

  “You get justice by hunting down the man that did this,” Dihana told the crowd. “Not by kicking out your neighbors. We don’t even know if an Azteca did this.” She ended the conversation by turning her back to the crowd and facing Xippilli.

  Xippilli leaned closer. “Do you know for sure Azteca march at us?”

  Dihana pulled back and stared at him. “What do you mean?”

  “When you met with the pipiltin, you said Mongoose-General Haidan gave you the evidence that the Azteca were coming. Did you verify it with anyone else?”

  Dihana’s stomach churned, making her feel lightheaded. She couldn’t talk about her father’s warnings about the Spindle, it would seem ridiculous. But, “Brungstun and Joginstead don’t reply to any messages.”

  “Did they report an Azteca invasion before going quiet?” Xippilli’s dark eyes seemed like dark wells. “Any raids by Jaguar scouts in Brewer’s Village yet?”

  She shook her head. “No.”

  “I will say this, and then hold my tongue. If I wanted to take over this entire city, with a smooth transition, I would snip the telegraph wires to the first two towns along the coastal roads, station patrols to stop anyone in them from walking up to Brewer’s Village. Then I’d convince the prime minister to invite mongoose-men into the city to prepare for the invasion. And suppose there’s a riot as a result of the Azteca rumor. I could get the prime minister to invite more mongoose-men in quickly. I would have them position themselves all over the city in the name of preventing rioting.”

  “If Haidan wanted the city he could take it,” Dihana said. “He has thousands of mongoose-men to my hundreds of ragamuffins.”

  “I never named names. Haidan could be just as fooled as you are.” The crowd’s muttering pitched higher; a scuffle developed down at its end as more people joined and jostled for space.

  “You know something I don’t, Xippilli?” Dihana hissed.

  “All I know is that the mongoose-men are incredibly talented.” Xippilli remained calm, as if chatting about tea. “And Mafolie Pass is impregnable. The mongoose-men own the Wicked Highs, Dihana, trust me, I personally know how hard it is to get over. How did the Azteca do it in large numbers?”

  Dihana shook her head. “Even if you’re right … no. I can’t consider this right now.” Why was he trying to sow so much doubt in her mind? Was Xippilli a spy, trying to confuse her? Or maybe he was just right.

  “The crowd is getting larger. We have retired warriors amongst us,” Xippilli said. “Maybe you should deputize some of us.”

  “No. I can’t afford to have a war start inside the city over that.” The scuffling at the edge of the crowd increased: ten mongoose-men and a pair of ragamuffins arrived, yelling at people to move aside. “Xippilli, the man inside. What is he?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  Xippilli bit his lip. “He isn’t Azteca.”

  “Prime Minister. Rubin Doddy.” The first mongoose-man joined them and shook her hand. “We got a car coming in quick with ten more mongoose.”

  “What about ragamuffins?” Dihana asked.

  “We nearest. Ragamuffin coming, just not here yet,” Rubin said.

  The crowd, now maybe five hundred up and down the street, filled the air with discontent. “There’s a body in the shop. Give the ragamuffins what time they need to investigate. Then we need to wrap it up and get it out of here as soon as possible. Get your men to clear out this crowd.”

  “Heard.” Rubin turned around and signaled his men. They fanned out. The car of promised extra mongoose-men steamed down the street, and ten more mongoose-men leapt out and added themselves to the cordon. The ragamuffins walked into the broken building.

  “What about you, Prime Minister?” Rubin still stood next to her.

  “Where is Haidan? I need to talk to him.”

  “Down the Triangle Tracks now, in Batellton.”

  “Doing what?” Dihana asked. He hadn’t told her he’d leave the city.

  Rubin looked at her if she were crazy. “Preparations. Prime Minister, the word is spreading throughout the city that something wicked happened in Tolteca-town.” Too quick, Dihana thought. Far too quick. Most rumors were slower to spread. “Haidan didn’t give orders for anything like this, but I think we can get more man out on every street corner—”

  “No.” Dihana knew what she was going to do. She steeled herself, projected authority, made the leap. “We’re getting all the ragamuffins out on patrol.”

  “That don’t make no sense,” Rubin said. “How many ragamuff
ins you got?”

  “Enough to let everyone know we’re serious. Everyone knows the ragamuffins. For some they’re family. For others, it’s just the familiar uniform. We don’t need outsiders patrolling the streets.” Dihana looked out at the crowd. “But we need mongoose-men to lock down Tolteca-town. No one goes in, or out, unless at a checkpoint. Who do I have to talk to to get that started if Haidan isn’t here?”

  “Gordon is second-mongoose,” Rubin said.

  “Xippilli, come with me. We need to find pipiltin to come with us. We’re going to quarter all the mongoose-men right here, in Tolteca-town, and get them off the Ministry’s grounds.”

  “The city’s going to explode,” Xippilli said, and Rubin nodded in agreement.

  “The ragamuffins will take bullhorns and read an announcement. We’re going to distribute paper explanations. Tonight we’re going to explain that the Azteca are coming, and that the Tolteca are helping by quartering the mongoose-men who will fight the Azteca army.”

  She stood in front of the two men and raised her eyebrows. They looked at each other, then Rubin whistled for the car, pointed out two mongoose-men, and leaned in. “My two best mongoose will ride with you. Get out quickly. When more come, we’ll push them out. We will start securing the area. Good luck convincing Gordon.”

  Dihana pulled Xippilli into the car. One mongoose-man took the wheel and began pressurizing the boiler. The other sat next to her. “Keep low,” he said. “You probably a target. Don’t risk you own head.”

  She complied. Xippilli bent down and looked across at her. “I hope this works.”

  Dihana nodded.

  She did too.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Pepper tracked his way through the bush in the stolen cotton garb of the higher nobles: thick, starched cotton, the inner sides layered with blue and fiery-red parrot feathers. He carried a round shield with leather fringes hanging from the bottom. He’d ripped off the gold decoration. Gold was universal currency, he could use it later.