He could barely see out of the heavily stylized wolf’s-head mask. It hadn’t been made to fit him, but it hid his dreadlocks, and the original owner didn’t need it anymore. Yesterday Pepper had waited offshore until night before he landed. He had found the high-class warrior guarding the docks and killed him, then destroyed all the boats in the harbor with explosives taken from the Azteca’s own stores.
Disguised as this warrior, Pepper had visited the town’s center to find records. The Azteca loved documentation. They had a whole class of scribes dedicated to it. And the scribes were busy: all around Brungstun, Azteca lords were taking inventories of food supplies and farms. Some moved into the nicer houses, while the empty barracks at the end of the wharf had been filled with Jaguar scouts. Brungstun children milled about in pens surrounded by barbed wire.
Pepper found deBrun’s address and lit all the records on fire.
He’d be damned if any Azteca used them to hunt any Brungstunners hiding from them still.
He killed three Azteca with their own macuahuitl on his way out, dashing their brains out against the whitewashed wall with the effective wedge-shaped clubs. Then he climbed up a wall in the nearest alley, walked over several roofs, and jumped back down to the ground.
He walked out of town unchallenged.
Fifteen minutes out of Brungstun, Pepper found the smoldering ruin of deBrun’s house. He followed tracks from there to find a sacrificial stone in the middle of a cleared area not too far up the coastal road. The Azteca had sacrificed a few victims just before and during the attack on Brungstun, asking their gods for a good battle.
It was an odd scene, though. Several Azteca lay dead on the ground. One lay suffering from gunshot wounds.
“Great sir!” three warriors called out in Azteca when they saw him. Though Pepper wore dark blue colors from the nobleman he’d killed, and they wore red, they looked to him as a superior. “Our priest was slaughtered yesterday like an animal by a one-handed savage. Some of our brothers have broken the orders to stay here. They chase him and his accomplice in the forest. May we have permission to join and hunt the nopuluca?”
Nopuluca: barbarian. Pepper grimaced behind his wooden mask. He slapped the macuahuitl he’d gained into the ground thoughtfully. He knew enough Azteca to understand what he heard, but he doubted he remembered enough to speak well. He’d last taken to learning it so long ago. He rubbed his throat, readjusting to speak Azteca.
“Gather before me,” he told them.
Several frowned at his badly pronounced Azteca words and fractured grammar, but they obeyed. Pepper adjusted his pronunciation. “Describe to me about one-handed man.”
An eager young warrior, looking to curry a lord’s favor, spoke up. “A man with one hand killed them. We saw it from the clearing. He should honor the war god with his blood. Instead he runs. Our brothers ordered us to stay here and wait for orders, but we wish to chase the heathen.”
How many one-handed men lived on the outskirts of Brungstun? Pepper wondered. The four warriors moved closer.
Time to act before they spread out enough to make this harder.
Pepper swung the macuahuitl in his left hand up with enough force to smash the nearest warrior’s jaw into his skull. In the same breath Pepper fired into the group with his own gun, wading forward through the bewildered Azteca and swinging the macuahuitl in long bone-jarring arcs. Those that still stirred afterward, groping around in their own blood, he calmly executed with their own guns to save his bullets.
He saved one, wrapping a dropped net around the young man. The warrior flailed and tripped back against the sacrificial stone.
“Tlatlauhtilia … he whispered. I beg …”Kill me now.”
Pepper crouched next to him. “How many warriors here?” he asked in fractured Azteca.
The warrior shook his head. Pepper sniffed. He could torture the man, but many Azteca resisted torture well. This one looked young, inexperienced, so he would start with something easier. He looked the warrior in the eyes and pulled his right hand out of the netting to find a pulse.
Pepper took several deep breaths. “You number only in thousands, here to capture people for sacrifices?”
The fluttered eyelids, slight blush, negated the warrior’s lying nod of agreement.
“Is this a … Flower War?” Pepper asked. Slight pause. Different Azteca regions, as far as he could tell from both ancient history and the tiny regional wars fought in the Azteca areas when he had last left Nanagada, waged ritual wars on each other to capture sacrificial victims. “Is this a small war?” Long pause. “A big war?”
The warrior smiled. “We will take this whole land as ours and rule it as ours. We will destroy your gods in Capitol City. We will take your machines and technologies, your—” He stopped as Pepper folded the warrior’s fingers back almost flat with his wrist.
“Speak when I ask,” Pepper growled. “Your warriors who move forward, tens of thousands?” That was on target. It was in the way the warrior’s broad face allowed blood to heat it. All these things—flutters, unconscious gestures—told Pepper more about people than people often knew about themselves.
“Our gods command us. We march through towards your great city.”
Pepper leaned close to the netting over the warrior’s face. Black face paint had rubbed off onto the net’s knots. “How did you get over the mountains?”
The warrior hesitated.
“By airship?” Pepper asked. No, he saw. “Boats?” Not that either. “Did you cross mountains somewhere?” The right direction. “Where?”
The Azteca ground his teeth. He would not answer this one.
Pepper pulled the man’s hand forward and folded it into a fist. He cupped it in his own, large hands and squeezed. A cracking sound came from each of the Azteca’s fingers as they snapped.
Both men locked eyes, not wavering. Pepper squeezed harder and kneaded until he got a whimper. “I destroy hands and feet. You will be cripple. No honor, no glory?” He wished he were more fluent in Azteca than this. “Your bones will be dust if you do not answer.”
The Azteca groaned as Pepper squeezed again. “Tunnel,” the warrior whispered. “Through the mountains.”
“How long it take to make tunnel?”
“Many generations. The gods directed it. We obeyed.”
“And Nanagada people don’t know about this?”
“It is hidden from them. Their spies are few and are lied to.”
Pepper dropped the man’s hand and wiped the blood off his own on the grass. This was ugly. The Azteca didn’t have a supply chain. He only saw warriors living off the land, pillaging for their food as they moved toward Capitol City. That was a huge gamble for the Azteca. They could starve before reaching Capitol City, could all likely die here. But many Azteca remained in Brungstun. If the Azteca kept each city and captured its supplies intact, and used the population as slave labor, they could set up a limited resupply system as they advanced up to the peninsula. Taking Capitol City would be almost impossible with an initial unsupplied mad dash, but this method would deliver the entire coast into Azteca hands. Bad news.
A grimmer thought was that the Teotl were most likely also hunting the Ma Wi Jung.
Three hundred years later those damn creatures were still carrying on their war against each other, with humans caught in the middle.
Pepper looked at the prints leading away from the sacrificial stone and into the jungle. “Time to think about catching up, John, isn’t it?” Pepper said. The Azteca struggled, confused by the change in language. Pepper ripped the heavy mask off. It bounced in the grass. Behind the netting the warrior’s eyes widened. Pepper slammed a macuahuitl down into the man’s ribs.
“Die slowly.” Pepper left the Azteca on the crude eagle stone gasping through a punctured lung. He followed tracks to a tree where a second pair of boots joined the original pair and then headed south. Together.
John had a friend. How interesting.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
A man born under the sign of Ocelotl, even if of nobility, could only struggle toward a better life through fasting, sleep deprivation, and the application of his intelligence.
So it was said.
When Oaxyctl’s parents presented him as a newborn to the Calmecac chiefs at a sumptuous banquet in the heart of Tenochtitlanome, the chiefs asked his parents for his sign. Upon hearing it they gravely shook their heads.
“Children born under this sign grow to become thieves,” they said. “If this child were female, we might offer you the honor of waiting until she grew hair to her waist, then place her head between two rocks and offer her to Tlaloc for a better rainy season.”
Oaxyctl would not be a priest, or a judge, or a leader of warriors.
He attended the Telpochcalli instead, with dirty kids and commoners. They sang history and trained to become simple warriors. The instructors pricked his skin with thorns when he forgot his lessons.
When he grew old enough to fight, Oaxyctl left for a small village far away in Imixcoatlpetl’s shadow, the Cloud Serpent’s Mountains, known to most simply as the Great Mountains. Back then nopuluca lived on the Aztlan side of the Great Mountains. Oaxyctl captured many to gain respect, feathers in his hair, and eventually a wife.
The pipiltin of Aztlan then gave Oaxyctl the chance to become quimichtin and spy on the lands on the other side of Imixcoatlpetl. Since then his life had become a complicated mess of double spying, fear, blood, and long journeys over the Great Mountains. He’d turned in many spies he had once called friends. And then killed many mongoose-men who thought him a friend. And he’d repeated the cycle again in Brungstun to hunt for John deBrun.
Oaxyctl did not believe in curses, or unlucky life signs, but about now he was beginning to change his mind. Oaxyctl had once never believed in gods either. He’d assumed they were the results of men who dreamt too much. A suspicious man, Oaxyctl sneered at all mystical things. The priests in Aztlan smelled of death, were painted black, and had shaggy, snaggled hair soaked with the blood of the sacrificed. Their shredded earlobes and bitten lips caused Oaxyctl to avoid them. And what they did to their genitals with knotted ropes …
He’d thought them mad until the day the priests brought the chairs to his town. And inside them sat the ancient, pale, squinting gods.
So unhuman. So different. Oaxyctl shivered. If he’d been wrong about the gods, then maybe he was wrong about his life.
Maybe he needed to fast more, sleep less.
But the practical warrior in him told him that right now, those actions would lead to death. Better to stick with the application of his intelligence. And what did his intelligence tell him?
Something had worried Oaxyctl since he’d met the Teotl: the god’s explanation that there were those who wanted John dead, no matter what.
Were there really other gods who might kill him for doing what he was doing as it was against their wishes? Did the gods argue often? He’d never heard such a thing. And how did he make sense of such a thing, him, Oaxyctl, just a mere human?
Oaxyctl wished that he’d had more time. Then he could have taken John and tortured him for the Ma Wi Jung secrets at leisure.
Gods. He’d barely rescued the man in time from the Huitzpochli offering, and that involved shadowing some very good Jaguar warriors and waiting for exactly the right moment. He’d prayed that it would work, offering blood from his cheeks even, that John could escape from the eagle stone as Oaxyctl struck the warriors down. He’d come so close to failing, he still shook slightly when he thought about it.
But he’d done it. Found the right man from talking to people in Brungstun, gotten to the right location, and done his god’s bidding.
Oaxyctl’s own countrymen still chased them. And Oaxyctl needed time to make the right potions and tools to force the truth out of deBrun. With the invasion happening, he knew time was something he didn’t have.
Could he risk stopping, letting the warriors get to them, and claim he was one of them? Too risky. Suppose they killed deBrun in the process? The god said they had no orders to save deBrun, but rather to kill him.
The god would not like that to happen. Oaxyctl was sure he’d suffer if it did. He felt sick remembering how close deBrun had come to death.
Once deBrun released his secrets, Oaxyctl could return to Aztlan and forget this foreign wilderness in the gods’ good graces. He wouldn’t have to worry about whom he really spied for anymore. He could go back to a normal life. He missed having a wife.
He couldn’t remember much about her; he had left many years ago to become a spy. By now she must have given him up for dead and have a new husband. Yet he still fantasized about that life. Two of them alone in a small home, cuddling by a stove fire and the small statue of a local pulque god on the wall, while a mountain fog rolled by at night.
He liked how soft women were, bringing flowers and scents into the environment. He hated mud, sticky sweat, blood, and long, long treks for his own life. He missed the way things had been, for a small time in his life when he lived on the foothills of the other side of the Wicked Highs.
John deBrun had been muttering about Joginstead and a bath under his breath, while every once in a while Oaxyctl caught the long-off look of mourning in the man’s eyes.
They spent part of the early morning asleep under a tree, covered in twigs and leaves. Oaxyctl gave John jerky and dried fruit, and some water from his canteen. Both slept uneasily; John kept crying out and waking up sweating.
At noon they stretched and kept walking. But well before Joginstead, Oaxyctl veered off to the east even farther. They walked a good many miles before they came to the clearing Oaxyctl aimed for.
If John deBrun died before giving up information about the Ma Wi Jung, then Oaxyctl would die a horrible death. He knew this with certainty. And if any Azteca caught them, Oaxyctl could still not figure out how to guarantee that John would remain alive.
So he had chosen a different path.
Gaining himself more time.
Oaxyctl tramped through the clearing, knelt in the middle, and cleared off leaves and dirt to reveal trapdoors set into the ground. “We are here,” Oaxyctl declared.
“But this isn’t Joginstead,” John said.
“I never said we were going to Joginstead. It is probably also occupied.” Oaxyctl pulled the oak doors up with a grunt, then let them drop open on either side. He led John down the stone stairs of a mongoose-man depot known only to a few courier mongoose-men. Two of them lay dead back in Brungstun.
Oaxyctl felt for the controls set against the wall’s corner, groping along in the dark. When he triggered the switches, air hissed and spit. A large hole opened above them; flush hangar doors slid aside despite the heavy weight of earth and vines carefully arranged over them. Dirt spilled down over the edges.
In the new light they could both make out a shapeless gray mass of an airship’s unfilled bag. It hung in midair from ropes and nets fastened to the large cavern’s underside. The Nanagadan military, nopuluca though they were, had some fascinating tools they’d taught Oaxyctl how to use when he’d trained with the mongoose-men once.
“We’ll take this emergency mongoose-courier airship to Capitol City,” Oaxyctl said. “First we need to fill it, though.”
John deBrun nodded. Oaxyctl saw trust grow in the man’s eyes.
Oaxyctl smiled.
With the help of spies in Capitol City, Oaxyctl could drug and take John somewhere to interrogate him. He could take the careful days he needed to slowly pull the information out of John while the Azteca warriors slowly made their way up the coast toward the peninsula.
Better dangers he knew in Capitol City than Azteca warriors here.
Oaxyctl wondered what it meant that he felt more comfortable among the Nanagadans than his own warriors.
Nothing, he told himself fiercely.
With a definite plan before him, though, for the first time in three days Oaxyctl relaxed somewhat.
He would accomp
lish his tasks. The gods would respect him yet.
Oaxyctl was not cursed.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
John watched as Oaxyctl checked the hoses leading to the gasbag, then followed them back to the cavern walls. Oaxyctl then spun the valves open. The hoses straightened and filled out, and after a slow hour the airship’s bags started to visibly fill. The floppy lengths of fabric expanded and filled the cavern.
In the dusky light John cocked his head to look at the airship. Amazing. The cavern itself, a natural sinkhole, must have had its top shaped with dynamite, and the courier airship roped into its hidden hangar beneath the jungle clearing. Several netlike lengths of rope hung on the airship’s dull-colored gasbag, just like rigging on a ship. Presumably to allow maintenance of the whole structure.
Oaxyctl ran around shutting valves. He yanked on small ropes leading up the sides of the hoses. They popped off with puffs and dropped away from the airship.
“Get on,” Oaxyctl ordered.
“How?” John asked. The ground dropped away to darkness just a few feet in front of the steps leading in. John kicked a small pebble with his muddy boots. It jumped forward and disappeared, occasionally hitting a wall and bouncing. Finally a distant plop floated up and weakly reverberated around the cavern.
Oaxyctl pointed. A rope ladder ran from the side of one of the walls to the airship’s undercarriage. “You first,” he said as he looped his bundle of spears over his back.
John put a hand to the cavern wall. The rock chilled his fingers as he slowly walked along the edge toward the rope.
“Are you sure this is secure?” John looked out to the end of the rope ladder attached to the airship. The ledge beneath his feet slimmed down to mere inches.
The cavern echoed their voices back and forth between its walls.
“You scared?” Oaxyctl asked.
“No.” John looked at the rope ladder. It rose upward at a slight angle and swayed slightly as a gust from above played with the airship. “I’ve been on rigging like this. But it was my rigging.”
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