Kawaguchi answered. “My best guess is that several employees volunteered to become the initial victims to trigger their Powers’ presence here.”
“Again, this seems likely,” Michael agreed.
I nodded, too. Kawaguchi probably had the right of it, despite his curiously bloodless way of describing sacrifices of the bloodiest sort. But constables, who see so much blood in their work, need to ward themselves from the reality of what they do with mild-seeming words. After all, words have power, too.
Then something else occurred to me. “You said those were the initial victims. Have there been more?”
“Unfortunately yes, an unknowable but large number,”
Kawaguchi said. “Because of the strength of the Powers evoked within the Chocolate Weasel building, we have been compelled to draw back our lines several times. The perpetrators have taken advantage of this to raid surrounding businesses and homes. We do not know the precise status of all individuals captured, but some will almost certainly have been employed to nourish Huitzilopochtli and Huehueteod.”
I thought about some poor lunk whose stomach decided to growl while he was flying up Nordhoff. He’d spot the Golden Steeples, pull in, grab himself a burger… and end up with his still-beating heart torn out of his body, just for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. You’d have to be a very thoroughgoing Calvinist to find the mark of divine plan in that.
Then I had a worse thought. Much worse. I’d been acting on the assumption that the people from Chocolate Weasel had something to do with kidnapping Judy. If she was hidden away somewhere in the building when the constables flew into the lot…
“God forbid,” I whispered. I tried not to think about it, to tell myself it was impossible, but I knew too well it wasn’t.
Just then, the roof of the building that housed Chocolate Weasel started burning a lot brighter. It wasn’t an ordinary flame; it wasn’t even like the flame from a salamander, which is powered from the Other Side but manifests itself here.
This flame you didn’t just see; you felt it in the place where prayers come from. I close my eyes, but that didn’t help. My soul still felt scorched.
“Huehueteod,” Legate Kawaguchi and Michael said in the same breath. Quietly, Michael added, “One must conclude that the sacrifices within the building have reached a critical mass, allowing him to manifest himself fully in Angels City.”
“I wonder how long we have to wait for Huitzilopochtli,” I said numbly.
“He being a greater Power, more sacrifice will be necessary to bring him onto This Side,” Michael answered.
“Hueheuteod’s manifestation, however, will only speed his translation from the Aztecian gods’ realm on the Other Side to our present location.”
“Thanks for the encouragement,” I said. Michael gave me a puzzled look, then recognized irony and nodded.
The flames on the roof leapt higher. After some delay, thick smoke began to rise as real flames joined the spectral ones emanating from Huehueteod. I wondered how the people inside the Chocolate Weasel building were faring now that it burned around them. Maybe Huehueteod protected them from the flames so they could go on sacrificing. Or maybe they’d just keep doing what they were doing until they burned to death. Every faiUi has its martyrs willing, even eager, to the for the greater glory of the Powers they reverence.
I wished the Aztecians would have shown their piety another way.
Kawaguchi was shouting into a constabulary-model ethemet set. It held two different imps, so he could both send and receive messages. He looked toward the burning building, then to Michael and me. “Are you gentlemen familiar with the Hanese ideogram for the term ‘crisis’?”
“I am,” Michael said; I might have guessed he would be.
He went on, “It combines the ideograms for ‘danger’ and ‘opportunity.’”
Kawaguchi looked surprised and maybe a little disappointed that,a pale blond chap had stepped on his lines. But he nodded and said, “Exactly so. And developments here have now reached the crisis stage. If in the next few minutes Huitzilopochtli succeeds in manifesting himself as dioroughlyas Huehueteod has—”
That was the danger, all right. If it happened. Angels City was in more trouble than it had ever known. The only problem was, I didn’t see any skin of the opportunity.
“I have been in touch with the archdiocese of Angels City,” Kawaguchi said. They will do what they can for us.”
“An acute strategic move. Legate,” Michael said, nodding in approval. The Power based at Rome successfully overcame those centered on Tenochtitlan almost five hundred years ago; with luck, it will do so again.”
“Alevai,” I said, a most un-Catholic endorsement of his sentiment. But I didn’t stop worrying, or even slow down.
The Spainish who’d brought Christianity to Aztecia were fanatics, nothing else but; they had to be, or else they never would have tried it. But over the years, the Church has turned fat and lazy and rich and comfortable. The fanatics were in the Chocolate Weasel building now, doing their best to fuel the revival of the old Aztecian gods.
Balance of Powers, I thought, and shivered.
“What are we waiting for?” I asked Kawaguchi. “Exorcists to come and try to drive Huitzilopochtli back to the Other Side before he can fully establish himself here?”
The constable, you will have gathered, was a worn, dour fellow. Now he surprised me with a wall-to-wall smile. The response the cardinal offered me was nowhere near so halfhearted.”
I wished he hadn’t said halfhearted, not when you thought about how Huitzilopochtli and Huehueteod were being summoned into Angels City. But the cardinal, that stiffnecked Erseman—I’d thought he was on the fanatical side when he refused to grant the burned Thomas Brothers monks a dispensation for cosmetic sorcery. Most of the time, I still thought that kind of fanaticism out of place in our century.
But right this minute, it might end up saving all our asses—and maybe our souls, too.
Kawaguchi kept watching the sky. Had Quetzalcoad shown any skin of manifesting himself along with the other Aztecian Powers, I would have tried to get hold of Burbank again to see what the Garuda Bird could do against the Feathered Serpent As things were, though, I didn’t see how the Bird could help.
I wondered what Kawaguchi was waiting for. Whatever it was, I hoped it would be good—and powerful. Something nasty—something else nasty, I mean—was going to happen inside that building any minute now. I could feel it coming, in the same part of the inner me that felt the growing presence of Huehueteod like a bad sunburn.
Suddenly, Kawaguchi pointed. I spotted a flying carpet, way above the usual flyways and ignoring their traffic grid as if it didn’t exist. Maybe it had a constabulary clearance that overcame all the anti-flying invocations that gave people and business their privacy… or maybe it was under the control of a higher Power.
As it got closer, I saw it was a big carpet, a freight hauler, and heavily loaded. It was gold, with a white cross—the colors of the Vatican flag. I knew the Vatican rug would also bear a woven—in legend in white—IN HOC SIGNO VINCES—but it was too high and too far away for me to be able to read that.
It was heading straight over the Chocolate Weasel building. Huehueteod’s magical fire flamed up to meet it. I was afraid the flames would bum down the carpet and everybody on it. But one thing I give the Catholic Church—it has a saintly hierarchy in charge of looking out for more different things than all the bureaucrats in D.StC. put together. St. Florian watches specially over those who must contend with fire. I have no idea whether his power would have been enough to overcome Huehueteod down inside the Chocolate Weasel building, but it sufficed to keep the god from crisping the carpets. One of the monks riding the carpet (I could see his bare pate shining in the late afternoon sun) tipped a big earthenware urn down onto the roof of the Chocolate Weasel building, then another and another and another, mediodical as if he were on a carpet bombing run over Alemania in the Second Sorcerous War.
Those ums and whatever they held were heavy—I could hear them smashing on and maybe through the roof from several blocks away. And whatever was in them was spectacularly efficacious. The constant heat on my soul that radiated from Huehueteod went away, as if my spirit had suddenly dived into a clear stream. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters.
He refresheth my said ran through my head.
