with ferocious salvoes of gunfire, forcing them to spend all their effort defending.
One Serpent was at the forefront of the fightback: Colonel Tlanextic. Mal felt herself tense up at the sight of that gold-zigzagged armour. She willed Xipe Totec to get the better of him, or Mictlantecuhtli. Either of the gods was welcome to kill Aaronson’s murderer. If she was unable to do it herself, she would settle for that.
No such luck, however. Tlanextic and the other armoured Serpents succeeded in repulsing Xipe Totec and Mictlantecuhtli and driving them off the concourse. The battle raged on down the streets of Tenochtitlan, out of view.
The few Serpents remaining at the bunker entrance had a brief respite. They reinforced their positions and tallied their living and their dead. By now the sun was setting. For a time, the air thickened and turned smoky gold. The sky was blood-red, then amethyst, then purple-grey. Stars winked. Streetlights came on automatically. Everything was still and quiet.
Then, amid the shadows on the concourse, shapes started to move.
At first Mal thought it must just be tired eyes, a trick of vision. That or wisps of dust being whisked up by breezes.
“Did you see that?” she murmured to Reston. “Down in that doorway just now. And over there by the monorail track. I could have sworn…”
“There’s something there, all right. Animals of some kind.”
“What?”
“Not sure.”
The Serpents themselves had noticed they weren’t alone on the concourse. They swung their l-guns in different directions, trying to train them on the creatures flitting and scurrying between pools of darkness. To Mal, from the fragmentary glimpses she was catching, the animals looked like large rats or perhaps small dogs. But they were furless, leathery-skinned, and their movements weren’t right. There was something of the reptile about them, not least the long tapering tails, and also something disturbingly humanoid, especially the paws, which bore a marked similarity to hands and feet.
All at once a Serpent screamed. One of the creatures had latched onto his back. He reached behind him, clawing desperately, and the animal squirmed out of his grasp and wrapped itself round his neck. It had a shovel- shaped muzzle, and twin rows of serrated teeth glittered like diamonds in the lamplight. It sank its jaws into the man’s throat and, with one wrenching twist of its head, tore out his trachea, Adam’s apple and a great deal of gristle and muscle. Blood gushed over it, and the creature became frenzied, burrowing deeper into the Serpent’s neck, hind feet scrabbling for purchase on his uniform, tail lashing the air.
This first drawing of blood was the cue for a concerted wave of attacks. More of the repugnant monsters sprang from the shadows onto the Serpents. Some threw themselves down off ledges and cornices and bit their faces, while others writhed up their legs and went for the soft parts at the crotch. Plasma bolts crisscrossed as the Serpents tried to fend off the creatures, but the vast majority of the shots were wild, fired by panicked or pain- wracked fingers. Martial discipline went to pieces in the face of an enemy that was so obscenely swift and that didn’t play by the standard rules of engagement.
“Just what the hell are those things?” Mal said. Rhetorical question. She wasn’t expecting Reston to have the answer.
It turned out he did. “Over there.” He pointed to one of the streets that fed onto the concourse. At the corner, lurking, was an old woman with wild white hair and an eager, gloating posture. “That’s Tzitzimitl.”
“So those animals would be…”
“The Tzitzimime.”
The Demons of Darkness. The mindless, rapacious servants of the mother goddess. According to the myths, they were destined one day to overrun the earth and devour all humankind.
Mal felt an old familiar chill creep through her. As a child, she had had nightmares about the Tzitzimime. There’d been one particular textbook at school, a religious primer, which had carried pictures of them, an artist’s pen-and-ink impression of how the demons might look. Those black, leering homunculi had plagued Mal’s sleep for years.
The flesh-and-blood reality was worse still. Uglier and more vicious than even that textbook draughtsman could have imagined.
Most of the Serpent Warriors were on the ground now, shrieking in horror and agony as the Tzitzimime ate them alive. Their suffering filled the old crone with delight. Tzitzimitl clasped her hands and shivered, and now and then did a little stiff-kneed jig on the spot.
“What did I tell you?” Reston said. “She really doesn’t like us.”
It wasn’t long before there were just three Serpents left, and they were attempting to get to the bunker and find sanctuary there, but the Tzitzimime kept cutting them off from the entrance. Every way they turned, there was a pack of the creatures spitting and snarling. They tried feinting at them, but the Tzitzimime simply feinted back. Eventually the Serpents were surrounded, encircled. Their lightning gun batteries were drained and for metres around they could see nothing but squat, quivering bodies and rows of deadly sharp teeth.
They were done for and they knew it. One of them made a proposal to the other two. All three drew their macuahitl s.
“Those won’t be any use,” Reston commented.
“I don’t think that’s what they’re up to,” said Mal.
She was right. The three Serpents formed themselves into a triangle. Each held up his sword point-first at the chest of the man on his right. Then one gave the command and they drove the swords home. All three fell, as one, and the Tzitzimime scampered onto the fresh corpses and feasted.
A sharp, loud whistle from Tzitzimitl had the Tzitzimime pricking their ears and raising their gore-streaked muzzles. A second whistle, and they abandoned their meals and hurried towards her, a great flowing carpet of low-slung bony beast. They assembled at the goddess’s ankles, clambering over one another and fawning for her attention. Tzitzimitl gave them all a gracious smile, patted a few heads, then set off with the Tzitzimime trotting behind her in a long obedient line, onwards to whatever atrocity she planned next.
“She bred them, didn’t she?” Mal said. “Trained them. Made them.”
“I’d guess so.”
“They were little bits of this and that. A bunch of different animals put together.”
“I think these gods can do things human scientists can only dream of. Manipulate genetics. Splice elements of one creature into another. You should see Xolotl. He’s half dog, half man, but it’s hard to tell where one ends and the other begins.”
“So that’s another gift they didn’t give us: how to tamper with nature.”
“Do you think it would have done us any good to have it? Or, no, put it this way — do you think we’d have done any good with it?”
“No.”
“Exactly. On the plus side, Tzitzimitl has at least given you and me something.”
Mal surveyed the concourse, now little more than an abattoir. “A clear run to that bunker.”
“So what are we waiting for?” said Reston.
TWENTY-NINE
Same Day
They picked their way across the concourse, around the heaps of slain Serpent Warriors. Here and there lay the charred body of a Tzitzimime. Mal found the creatures far harder to look at than the mutilated human remains; they were unnatural things, hideous and insidious. She steered clear of them as best she could. One, still just alive, snapped feebly at her ankle as she passed. She considered running it through with her macuahitl, but she liked the idea of the animal suffering a lingering death, and she didn’t want its blood besmirching her blade.
The sky was alive with explosions. Again and again the darkness was lit up by a bright flash, followed by a long resonant boom. Tenochtitlan was taking a pounding, but it was also dishing one out in return. An aerodisc streaked overhead in pursuit of an armoured god, blazing away with its lightning guns. The sound of street
