The Change: Tales Of Downfall And Rebirth - The Change: Tales of Downfall and Rebirth Part 30
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The Change: Tales of Downfall and Rebirth Part 30

But they stood their ground before the rush of the burly, angry man who'd been their impending sacrificial victim until moments before. He had to give them credit for their courage. Or their crazy.

The middle one, a tall, lean, light-skinned woman, uttered a piercing scream and began swinging at him in figure-eights with her machete. He only just managed to avoid getting gutted like a trout by stopping flat and sucking his big belly back away from the blade.

She still might've got him had she advanced. Instead she stood where she was, screeching and slashing air, until he timed her and decapitated her with a single backhand stroke.

As her head, elaborate headdress and fierce expression both firmly in place, fell away to be displaced by a pulsing jet of blood, her associates threw down their weapons and scattered into the twilight.

He ran to the pen. Small, frightened faces stared at him through the peeled-sapling bars. "Better stand back, kids," he said gruffly.

Then he realized that was a pretty silly thing to say. They were all pressed as far back toward the granite outcrop that formed the enclosure's rear wall as they could fit, staying back away from the naked, bloody, crazy dude who had just hacked a lady to death in front of them. Even if it was a lady who was about to kill them.

The enclosure was fastened with an old-fashioned padlock. He hacked it partway free of the wood, breaking his macuahuitl in the process. Dropping the weapon, he started pulling on the door with both hands, even the one that still held his own knife.

A couple of small shapes appeared beside him, to help tug on the bars. He looked down to see two of the first four kids who'd been led out to sacrifice. The other two squatted nearby, too small to help and smart enough to notice.

In a moment they-okay, mostly he-got the pen open.

"Okay," he declared. "We gotta get going. The birds won't keep those cabrones busy for long."

They stared at him. He looked down at himself.

"Don't mind me," he said. "I'm the good guy."

He got them all out of the pen. The ones who'd survived to this point, anyway: twenty-odd kids from just barely walking to just-shy-of-marriageable. Which, granted, wasn't all that much older these days. It hit him hard to reflect that the reason they all were fit to flee was that only the near perfect had been kept alive for sacrifice to power Coatlicue's return. But he still thanked the Virgin that they were.

They hadn't made it more than a couple hundred meters from the camp before he heard the angry sounds of pursuit firing up behind them. And barely half a klick beyond that when he heard the crashing of enemy scouts in the brush off to their left.

They were caught. No way to hide that many fugitives, even small, well-motivated ones, from people who knew the area. Even though it was full dark now, with the light of a million stars offering little more illumination than they did heat.

He held a brief debate with himself. The outcome was never in much doubt. Between not being able to live, and not being able to live with yourself, was no real choice at all.

He shook his head.

"You kids keep going that way," he rumbled, pointing southeast, at an angle to their course but basically away from the pursuer blundering around to the north of them, with one of his bowies.

He'd recovered the second from the corpse of the High Priestess. Who was in shape to make Brodie look ready for an open-casket funeral when he found him. He had also snagged a cultist's cotton shirt that wasn't too bloody, and bound up his loins. Because even with everything else on his mind he just didn't feel right, running around with his business swinging freely right next to a bunch of kids.

"Keep together, help each other, and keep quiet."

"Mister," said one of the bolder ones, an indio-looking boy of maybe nine or ten. "There's lights coming from the east."

Zamora looked. He shook himself like a wet dog.

"All right," he said, "change of plan. You all hide out in the scrub here and keep out of sight. And remember-you never saw me!"

They nodded solemnly.

"When can we come out?" a girl asked.

"You'll know."

And just like that, they vanished as if they'd teleported out of there.

And right about then several dozen cultists, led by a handful of Eagle Knights, ran headlong into several hundred pissed-off peasants with pitchforks and torches, led by the young local priest. Who was waving an arming-sword, of all the gods-damned things.

"Careful!" squawked Pensamiento from the inner pocket of Zamora's coat, as the man squatted to reach for the Smoking Mirror, beside the horribly contorted and bloated High Priestess. "You'll squash me!"

"Yeah," Zamora told him. "Sure. After I went to all the trouble of setting your broken wing after your hermano found you in that bush, I'm gonna forget and fucking sit on you."

Off to the east of the now deserted camp it sounded as if some cultists were still busy dying. That sort of sound carried a long way, especially at night up here on the Chihuahua Plateau.

Zamora didn't hold with torture, even a little. But he figured what was going on was strictly between the local peasants and the fanatics who wanted to murder children to unleash untold horror into the world. None of his business.

"Neat trick with the locals," Tezcatlipoca said, as soon as Zamora turned over the obsidian node. "Why'd you play it that way, though?"

"You mean, why'd I pretend to be the Devil, taunting farmers as they made their way to the local church?"

It was a stroke of luck today was a Sunday, with Mass celebrated twice.

"And why'd I tell 'em my worshippers had their missing hijos, and were fixing to feed them to me? Here I thought that was a nice, theatrical choice. With my best growly voice and everything."

"But why not rally them and lead them yourself?" Tezcatlipoca asked. "And given what your normal voice is like, I'm not sure I want to hear your 'growly' one."

"Hey, man. That stings. Anyway, you're a Mexican deity, right? You know how things work around here. If I tried to gather me up an army and bring them back, we'd be setting out about noon Tuesday."

He shrugged. "Guess that's better than it would've been back North in the old days. Anglos'd take twice that long, just to set up a committee to study the issue.

"Anyway, nothing gets these folks riled up like a threat to their children. Or any other folks. And belief in Luzbel is mighty powerful in these parts, which up until a few days ago I would've said was rank superstition. So I figured I'd scare 'em and piss 'em off to the max."

"But why not try the direct approach? You still might have been able to frighten and anger them sufficiently to act at once, persuasive chap that you are."

"And from a standing start, the cultists would eat their lunch. Those Eagle Knight assholes are pretty heavy dudes, and between them and fanaticism, the locals would lose. Also I worried about the bulk of the cultists holding off the rescuers until a few of their buddies could complete the sacrifices. Or just kill the kids out of pure meanness. So I decided to give the anthill an almighty kick, then sneak back in and see what kind of diversion I could cause here."

"You weren't expecting divine assistance, then?"

"Not from you."

"Point taken. So it all went according to plan?"

"So it all went nothing like the chingado plan," Zamora said. "Yet here I am. And the kids are safe."

"So they are. And so is my Mother, in the other world. I wonder how she and Buddy are taking it."

"Buddy?"

"Huitzilopochtli. My brother."

"Oh. Not so well, I think. Now: I reckon you owe me, vato. You said if I did this you'd tell me what Brodie was doing mixed up in all this evil shit."

"But you know," Tezcatlipoca said. "Don't you?"

Reluctantly, Zamora nodded. "Yeah. The damn weird-ass High Priestess told me, right before her eyes started going all black and shit. The eagle did that too. What was all that about, anyway? Demonic possession?"

"Close enough."

"Anyway, I reckon the Priestess was old enough to have watched too many movies before the Change. The ones where the bad guy explains everything to the captive hero, for some damn reason, instead of just offing him."

He drew a deep breath.

"But that wasn't all you promised."

"You expected some other reward? I thought knowledge was what you were Seeking."

"And it's all I want now. I don't got much need for money. Also, I already tossed the camp and the stiffs. How you think I got my own stuff back? But you promised to tell me just what the hell broke the universe."

"Not the universe, my boy. The sun still burns, doesn't it? The Change is a pocket phenomenon, clearly. So-remember the notion that consciousness was a quantum phenomenon? And that sufficiently intense and particular observation could lead to an ability to resculpt Reality itself?"

"Yeah. But that was all a bunch of bullshit pseudoscience."

Tezcatlipoca chuckled. "Ah, you mortals. You're so amusing in your presumptive arrogance. When you behold a truth that clashes with your prejudices, you have to turn away. For a generation or two. And in this case-"

From his head movement, Zamora could tell he shrugged.

"You didn't have that much time. You see, you mortals-therefore we gods-had a problem."

"Which was?"

"Remember the creatures we protected your ancestors from?"

"The monsters below the horizon? We had to feed you guys hearts and blood because you were all that kept them out-and they were even worse than you?"

"Precisely."

"They fucked up the world?"

"They brought the Change about, let us say."

"Wait. You said, 'we gods.' That implies those Montival crazies are right, and all kinds of gods are real."

"Of course they are."

"Hijo de la chingada! The world is even more fucked-up than I thought. So what about human sacrifice? You used to be a big fan of that yourself, back in the day. Are you really any better than Huitzilopochtli and the Rattlesnake Mother?"

"Yes," Tezcatlipoca said. "I don't want to drown the world in blood and fire. I like the world."

"But don't you need blood and souls too?"

"That's Arioch, from the Michael Moorcock stories. He wrote about a character-"

"Elric of Melnibone. Yeah, I know. So, blood, anyway. And the smoke of hearts."

"Our particular type of deity-our familia, if you want to call it that-do obtain sustenance from human sacrifice, yes. But all that ended with the conquest of the Spanish, who burnt offerings to different gods."

"So that really is what made you go away?"

"Not exactly," Tezcatlipoca said. "There is another kind of sustenance you mortals can provide."

"Which is?"

"The one thing more powerful than any god. Or rather, the lack of it is: attention."

Zamora laughed. "So when we forgot about you, you went away?"

"Not all the way. Faded into the background, more."

"What brought you back?"

"We were forced to act, by what you might consider pooling our wills. Otherwise, your kind would simply have been destroyed. And the Change-well, human sacrifice is a potent energy source for my kind. The attendant loss of life refueled all of us, willy-nilly."

Zamora was frowning. The gears were turning in his mind. Slowly; he'd had a rough day. But turning.

"So after the Change people started thinking about the old gods again," he said, "since the technology that supplanted them had failed. And that brought you all the way back?"

"As near as may be, yes."

"So-I'm feeding you right now."

"Of course."

Zamora shuddered.

"So why'd you drag me in on this in the first place? You used to have your own Jaguar Knights. Why not use them?"

"You were already in it up to your shaggy eyebrows," Tezcatlipoca reminded him. "These days I employ Knights more on a . . . contract basis. What you might call a different enterprise model."

Zamora's eyes went to slits.

"You don't mean-"

"Of course you're serving as a Jaguar Knight. What did you think you were doing?"

"Acting on my own damn hook."

"You can show surprising navete, for one so crusty, Buscador."