“Could be dead within the hour.”
The room they ended up taking over as their own was a corner office whose two converging walls of plate- glass window afforded a clear, uninterrupted view outside. There was a crossroads below, a cocourse with a monorail platform and a bunker entrance. Diagonally opposite the office building lay a block which Mal quickly deduced must be a Serpent Warrior barracks — rows of small rooms, each with a single narrow bed and little in the way of interior decor. Adjacent stood a water tower and, behind that, the functional concrete bulk of a fusion plant, the city’s source of power.
She used the desk to barricade the door, and for the next few hours she and Reston crouched by the windows and watched.
It was a hell of a show, and they had the best seats in the house.
About an hour after Huitzilopochtli and Itzpapalotl called off their initial assault, they returned for more. This time they brought along Quetzalcoatl himself.
Quetzalcoatl was as adept at aerial combat as the other two gods. He was also invulnerable, thanks to the spherical forcefield which enclosed him like an oily bubble and absorbed direct hits from the Serpents’ l-guns.
The Serpents, however, had upped their game since the previous attack. Not only were gunships in play now, but the sentinels on the outer walls were contributing intense surface-to-air barrages. The gods found making their approach runs to the city much harder. Beeline flying was impossible: Huitzilopochtli and Itzpapalotl had to dodge and swerve, and even Quetzalcoatl was knocked off-course by the pulses of heavy plasma fire. His forcefield repeatedly took a pounding and he was batted this way and that like a tlachtli ball.
Tenochtitlan did suffer during the second wave, but not as badly as before. When the three gods relented and pulled back, it seemed more like a retreat than a tactical withdrawal.
In the hiatus that followed, many of the armoured Serpents returned to the ground and trooped off down into the bunkers.
“Bingo,” said Reston. “Bet you anything they’re going to recharge their suits’ power packs.”
“Probably to have a pee, too. I would if I’d been stuck inside one of those things for so long.”
“Only you would think of a practicality like that.”
“Hello? Woman.”
“Yes, and therefore incapable of bladder control.”
She punched him on the arm, hard enough to leave a mark. “I bet you’d just piss inside it if you had to.”
“Actually, I would.”
“You’re even fouler than I thought.”
“You’re talking to a man who lay in a pile of fresh corpses for two hours, pretending to be one of them. I know foulness.”
“Yeah,” Mal said. “D’you know, when I realised that’s how the Conquistador must have got away from the City of London ziggurat, all I could think was how fucking batshit crazy this guy must be, whoever he was.”
“And now?”
“I still think you’re batshit crazy, but I sort of understand why. The Empire took everything from you.”
“It took something from you too.”
“My brother, you mean? Yeah, maybe, but the difference is, I gave Ix up. I’m the one who threw him to the wolves when I could have saved him. Because he compromised me. He was like a stain. Being related to a petty crim could have nobbled my career. So I scrubbed him off me, publicly, thoroughly.” She gave a bitter chuckle. “I told myself it was for his own good but really it was for mine. All said and done, he was still my big bro, wasn’t he? And I should have protected him.”
“You did what you felt was right at the time. You can’t condemn yourself for it.”
“Oh, yes I bloody can.”
“Well then, you mustn’t. Or else you’ll end up like me.”
“Perish the thought.”
“I mean it. There isn’t a day goes by that I don’t wish I could have helped Sofia, done more for her.”
“What, though? It wasn’t your fault at all, as I understand it.”
“Wasn’t it? I married her.”
“You didn’t make her how she was. You didn’t drive her to do what she did.”
“I knew, going in, that she was a bit flaky. But she seemed so right for me. For the man I used to be,” he amended. “Want to know why I first asked her out?”
“Because she was a catch, the trophy wife every bloke with a fat wallet was trying to bag?”
“No. Well, yes. But it was also because… I already knew about her, but when I actually laid eyes on her for the first time, at some drinks party or other, she was picking a piece of hors d’oeuvre out of her teeth.”
“Really?” Mal said. “That was it, the big attraction? She was picking her teeth?”
“She thought nobody was looking and she was digging at something stuck between two molars. Levering it out with one manicured, lacquered fingernail. This great swanlike society beauty. This ethereal, worshipped creature. Doing something so mundane and ordinary, her mouth wide open, hand rummaging away. That was when I knew I was in with a chance. That was also when I knew I could love her. She was human, after all.”
He looked wistfully out of the window.
“You like a bit of grit in the works, don’t you?” Mal said.
“If life’s too easy, what’s the point?”
“And yet the rest of us — the ‘other half’ — we’re all trying to fight our way up out of the muck, into the so- called good life, a life like you had.”
“Who’s content with their lot?” Reston said. “No one. Except maybe the Great Speaker.”
“Not even him, judging by how he whinged to Quetzalcoatl.”
“True. Then again, he seemed enthused by the prospect of this war. Like it was something he was looking forward to, after so long. Speaking of which…”
There was the distant sound of l-guns discharging on the outer walls.
“Looks like things are hotting up again.”
The Gods’ third strike was broad-based and comprehensive. They didn’t confine themselves solely to the air. Ground forces were also deployed.
The first sign was a terrific commotion originating from over in the direction of the main gate. There was shouting and a mass of concentrated gunfire. Shortly afterwards, non-armoured Serpent Warriors came hurrying into the concourse below the administrative ziggurat. They were on the run, pulling back, harried by an enemy.
“Xipe Totec,” said Reston. “And Mictlantecuhtli.”
The Flayed One was in full shock-mode, his skin transparent, all his viscera on display. Mal looked on with fascinated disgust as he cut a swath through the routed Serpents, wielding a pair of hook-shaped knives with finesse and almost surgical precision. He darted about, dodging his enemy’s shots; he seemed to have a sixth sense as to where the next plasma bolt was coming from. And his blades flickered and slashed, and here a Serpent fell with his torso opened wide from shoulder to waist, and here another Serpent staggered in circles with blood fountaining from a severed jugular, and here a third screamed and tried to stem the flow of life jetting from the stump of his arm.
“It’s like, he’s showing you his insides before he shows you your own,” Mal breathed.
Reston nodded. “Sort of a visual promise, isn’t it? ‘Look, here’s what’s coming your way.’”
Alarming as Xipe Totec was, however, he was nothing compared with Mictlantecuhtli. If the former was a scalpel, the latter was blunt force trauma. The Dark One strode like a juggernaut, implacably, as though nothing could daunt or deter him. His hands were encased in massive black gauntlets, and with these he did two things: deflected incoming l-gun shots and killed human beings. Often he would be performing the one action with one hand and the other with the other simultaneously. The gauntlets were large enough that a Serpent’s head could fit inside their grip, comfortably, at least until Mictlantecuhtli squeezed and the head was crushed, helmet and all, like a pistachio nut. A punch from one of those huge metal fists was capable of removing an entire arm at the shoulder. A swat easily disembowelled.
It was a hopelessly one-sided battle, right up until the moment armoured Serpents began buzzing out of the bunker like angry wasps and joined the fray. They pressed Xipe Totec and Mictlantecuhtli hard, pinning them down
