robert Charrette - Arthur 02 - A King Beneath the Mountain (6 page)

"Surely you've had some contact with the legend?"

She had heard stories, but it had been a long time ago. Legends about gods were things of her childhood, long abandoned.

Nakaguchi didn't wait for her response.

"Quetzoucoatl was quite influential in the Central American region, though he wasn't a native. He and his companions arrived by ship from a place far to the east. Since he was black-skinned, you should have a good idea of where he actually came from, in a continental way, at least. He was a being with godlike powers who brought an age of peace and plenty. The primitives were saddened when he announced that he could not remain among them, but they were cheered when he said that he would return. They waited for him, making his doings into myth and always remembering his promise to return. When the Spaniards came, the Aztec coast watchers mistook the shining armor of the soon-to-be conquistadors as his sign, their coming a fulfillment of the prophecy of his return. They were wrong, of course."

Pamela knew how wrong the Aztecs had been. Mexico still groaned under the legacy of that fatal error.

Nakaguchi shrugged. "And, of course, he is not a god. Godhood, for him, was merely the inspired awe of a primitive people who had no true understanding of his nature."

Had Pamela heard correctly? "You said
is. Is
not a god."

"Of course I used the present tense, Ms. Martinez." Nakaguchi turned back to the undecorated wall and ran his fingers along the edge of the hollow. "Quetzoucoatl is not dead. He merely sleeps, awaiting the time of his return."

Nakaguchi detached a climbing hammer from his belt. Hagen stepped up to him and, disregarding all corporate etiquette, laid a hand on Nakaguchi's arm.

"If you won't destroy it, at least leave it be."

"Take your hand away," Nakaguchi said coldly.

Nakaguchi's voice was hard as steel and sharp as broken glass. Hagen removed his hand and took a step back. Hefting the hammer in his hand, Nakaguchi stared at Hagen until the small man took another step backward.

Nakaguchi turned back to the wall. Thrusting tool and hand into the darkness of the central aperture, he twisted his wrist to set the alloy spike against some unseen resistance. He tugged. A spidery crack ran from the edge of the hole. Nakaguchi tugged again. Powdery adobe exploded out as a stone shifted in the wall. Nakaguchi wrenched until he ripped the stone free from the wall to fall behind him. Attacking the wall again, he jerked and yanked until he tore another stone free, and another, until he had opened a half-meter hole. He peered through.

"Azana, the lantern!"

The Mexican stepped up. Pamela crowded closer as well. She had come this far to be in on the uncovering; she wanted to see. Azana shoved the lantern partially into the opening. Light speared into the space beyond, to be reflected in a dazzle of ruddy glints from something within the darkness. Pamela gasped when she realized she was seeing a golden face, serene and perfectly composed. Turquoise and emerald studded a headband from which a riot of plumage emerged. The regal face did not so much as twitch or lift an eyelid.

"Quetzoucoatl!" Azana gasped.

The Mexican jerked back and dropped the lantern, but Hagen caught it before it struck the floor.

Nakaguchi attacked the wall with a will, ripping and tearing until he had removed enough of the stones to squeeze through. Pamela and Hagen exchanged worried glances. Nakaguchi's hand thrust back from the other side.

"The lantern!" he shouted. "The lantern!"

Hagen handed it to him, then squeezed through the gap himself. Pamela had no desire to meet a god, but neither did she want to remain behind with the cowering Azana. Wondering what sort of fool she was being, she slipped through the opening.

Like the chamber on the other side of the wall, this one was plastered and painted. Nakaguchi stood in the center, bowing to the seated figure and throne that dominated the small chamber.

The sleeper gave no sign of awareness.

Pamela realized why: the gold visage was not a face but a mask. A death mask? She looked closer. The figure on the throne appeared to be enfolded in a cloak of feathers. Appropriate for Quetzoucoatl. Where the figure's limbs emerged from the covering they were sticklike and shrunken, like a mummy's. Was Nakaguchi wrong? Was his sleeper just another royal mummy? Such a find would have archaeological significance, but it was hardly the sort of thing the Charybdis Project sought.

But it was the sort of answer Pamela preferred when told an ancient god had just been rediscovered.

"The museums will be pleased with your find," she told him.

"He is not for the museums."

"Open your eyes, Nakaguchi. It's just a goddamn mummy!"

Nakaguchi continued to stare at the mummy. "Open your own eyes, Martinez."

Pamela looked more closely at the withered shell of the ancient Indian ruler. The mask was magnificent, a work of art. The cloak would have once been magnificent and might be again after the restorer removed the dust of the centuries. This ancient king must have been a powerful ruler to rate such an elaborate robe; it fell in heaping folds around his legs. Too bad the feathers there had become so dirty.

The feathers there?

She looked closer. What she had assumed were feathers were not feathers at all, but a pile of insect husks tumbled in a talus slope from the throne. Tiny dry corpses. Pale bones of small animals lay among the empty shells, tumbled in piles on the floor around the throne, and lay in windrows against the arms of the mummy, white against the body's dark skin.

A breeze puffed into the chamber, stirring the dust. The feathers of the crown rustled. Did that masked head nod? Or was it a trick of the light and the wind?

Nakaguchi turned to them.

"Gentleman and madam, may I present you to the Lord of Wind. His will be a wind of change, and it will fill our sails as we set our prows to the future."

The stirring air felt very, very cold to Pamela.

He became aware of others, nearby.

Time had passed.

Much time.

How much he did not know.

He was weak.

Very weak.

Their auras burned like distant fires in the night. Beckoning him. He reached out, all too aware of his weakness. He was eager, hungry. He—

Stopped.

The aura of the nearest one was different. He was not sure at first why, then he understood.

This one bore the sign.

The need would remain unfulfilled. For the moment. The hunger was strong, but his will was stronger. He had waited so long.

He could wait awhile longer.

Officer Shirley Hamett swung open the door of her GM Urban Patroller™ and looked around before she got out. Things didn't look any better outside the tinted Perspex windows. Something had gone down since she passed by earlier on her patrol. Whatever had happened had left the area looking more trashed than normal for this stretch of urban blight. A fire burned in a pile of trash spilling out of the alley behind the old Mallon Brothers warehouse. The fire made a mystery of the alley; the glitched thermal circuits on her Tsurei Com-Eye helmet couldn't handle it. The starlight circuit wasn't much better; at least not from this angle.

She got out of the car and listened.

Quiet. The streets were quiet and empty. The lack of streetlife was the strongest sign that there had been something going on down here. The only activity she could see was the crackling trash fire. So where was the fight that had been reported?

"This is one-Zulu-twelve," she said into her helmet mike. "I'm on scene at Harris and Lovatt. It's quiet here. Over."

"Zzzchk
Zulu
crkkkk. Kckckzz
Dispatch. We've got no picture.
Bzzzz."

What a surprise. Seemed like the damned Tsurei ComEye helmets didn't transmit more often than they did. So much for milspec quality. She knew that it didn't help that she was down by the old rail yards, which put a lot of buildings between her and the tower, but that didn't ease her anger. The damned corps thought that they could slough off any old junk on the cops just because they worked for the government, and the government didn't care what it bought so long as the corps paid their nice fat kickbacks. And the media said that
cops
were corrupt.

Of course, it also didn't help that Fumble Freer was on the dispatch console. Freer was a techno disaster; he'd probably spilled coffee on the keyboard again or cross-linked his entertainment program to the report channels and fritzed out the system.

"This is one-Zulu-twelve. Trying alternate channels. Let me know if you get something."

"ZzzcMzz-twelve. Still noth
-ikkkk crkkkk."

Great. Why couldn't they have a satellite-laser link like she'd heard they had down in the Bait-Wash sprawl? Probably 'cause it wasn't the kind of half-assed solution that the New England Cooperative's oh-so-wise politicians favored.

Bitching didn't get the job done. "Dispatch, I'm gonna take a look around and check it out."

"Nkatck,
one-Zulu-twelve.
Bzz-chratckkk. KKanzz
[pop]
xck
backup on the way."

"Say again, Dispatch. What was that about backup?"

Fuzz and static.

That was the way of it. Backup was people and things you could rely on. You had to work with what you could count on; Freer's promises of more cars weren't something a smart officer relied on. If she waited and the promised backup didn't show, she would be the one explaining why she'd spent time unproductively. The brass upstairs didn't like timid officers, especially timid female officers.

Shirley switched her commo to her car's channel. "Hey, partner, give me some light down here. High beams."

Her link with the Patroller's dogbrain was good; she'd made sure of that. The rent-a-nerd's fee had come out of her pocket, but it was money well spent.

Gravel snapped out from under the tires aS the Patroller shifted to bring its headlights to bear on her position. The patrol vehicle was small enough but its computer wouldn't allow it entry into the alley; its motion controllers weren't sophisticated enough, another economy. Still, the car could sit at the entrance and block it while giving her some support. The Patroller's lights blinked onto high and flooded the alley with daylight, throwing stark shadows against the building and casting deep pools of dark deeper into the alley. Halfway down the alley something scurried out of the sudden illumination. The filters on her visor were still adjusting and she didn't get a good look.

Too big to be rats.

Somebody was still around. A witness, maybe. She ought to find out. Skirting the fire, she entered the alley.

She found the first body twenty feet into the alley. He wore a shredded synthleather Beasts jacket. The Beasts were a powerful gang in the district. Whoever had messed with them was asking for trouble. She hoped this wasn't the start of a gang war.

The second body was a Beast too. So was the third. She counted half a dozen and no sign of any other casualties. Shirley recognized one of the corpses as Mag Quidellia, one of the Beasts' toughest warriors. There'd be a war for sure.

But who could have taken on this squad of Beasts and come away clean?

"Hey, hey, the lights are itchy making," said a voice from the darkness.

She turned, searching for the speaker. Even with her enhanced vision, spotting him wasn't easy. He was a shadow within the shadow of a dumpster.

"Come out where I can see you," she ordered. She didn't reach for her weapon; that would be premature.

The guy who emerged was a dark-skinned, lanky sort, who moved with surprising, catlike grace. Shirley slipped the restraining strap off her weapon. The guy wore a sleeveless Beasts jacket; by the fit, it wasn't his.

As he stepped forward he raised a long-fingered hand with pointed nails that glistened in the light. Implants? He turned that raised hand back and forth in the beams from the Pa-troller. "It kinda burns, you know. Makes me feel nasty. Like somebody ought to be hurt for making night into day. Ain't right, you know. The world's got a proper order. Ain't right to mess with the order. We don't like it when people mess with the proper order. Do we?"

Gravelly voices mumbled agreement as more lanky forms emerged from the shadows around Shirley. There were eight or nine of them. She wasn't sure what they were wearing; somehow they were hard to see. This was trouble. She hoped Freer hadn't been blowing air when he'd said backup was on the way. She needed help. She needed time for the help to get to her.

"Proper Order? That what you guys call yourselves?"

Their laughs were metal-on-metal screeches. They grinned at her and light reflected from their teeth, teeth filed to sharp points. They all wore red wool caps as their colors and they all had mutilated themselves; these were hard-core types, but they weren't a gang she'd heard about.

"We're new in town," one of the gangers said. "Just out for a good time. You gonna show us a good time?"

She unholstered her weapon. "I think maybe you better go looking elsewhere."