Crystal Rain (32 page)

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Authors: Tobias S. Buckell

BOOK: Crystal Rain
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Oaxyctl was convinced he would die in the cold. The bleak, colorless hills of snow stretched and stretched until they either hit small mountain peaks in the distance or disappeared into the gray haze that hung over the land. Each step into the deep snow, almost halfway up his thighs, seemed to bring more numbness. And the constant struggle through the powder exhausted him.
Hopefully he could do what he was commanded before the god caught up to them.
Sweat froze. First it trickled down his back and sides. Then it froze. Sometimes the beads of sweat would unfreeze again, and trickle farther down until his clothes caught it.
On the pallet they pulled through the snow, John lay in a slight fever. At least that was small consolation. Oaxyctl had been told Barclay would try to jail John, so that Oaxyctl could torture him for the codes, but it had also been understood that Oaxyctl might have to leave the ship with John to get the codes.
If he could return to
La Revanche
quickly enough with the codes, he should be safe. But even if he didn’t, Oaxyctl’s friends had told him that the god was out on the ice now, and it would catch up to them one way or another.
If he got the codes first, then they could return to the ship, Oaxyctl imagined. He would have done his duty to the gods.
Oaxyctl wasn’t sure what John dreamed or hallucinated now out in the cold, but he couldn’t imagine John would live long. And he needed the pass codes John had in him before John died.
Where was the god? Oaxyctl wondered. Close?
He wondered if he was supposed to kill John right after obtaining the codes, to seal them away for good. It seemed that the gods might want that, but Oaxyctl wasn’t sure he could do it. He’d spent too long in Nanagada and been through too much with John. He viewed John and his men as just that, men, like him. And they did not deserve slow deaths any more than Oaxyctl did.
Coward, he told himself. That is all you are. At one time he would have been glad to offer himself up as a sacrifice to the gods.
But now he no longer believed they were gods. Just that they were more powerful creatures than him.
All these thoughts swirled around his mind as he trudged along the icy wastes. But the one image that sat foremost in his mind was that of the glistening, black cocoon ensconced inside
La Revanche.
Oaxyctl wondered what form the god would take to track them through the snow.
 
The great fins towered a few hundred feet overhead, blocking out the strong winds that seemed to whip the cold right through them. Avasa agreed that they should rest in the shelter of one, away from the ten-foot-long icicles that had developed on the ledges overhead.
Oaxyctl sat close to the fire and listened to the snapping sound of ice. Avasa huddled close to him.
Times like this seemed surreal. They were so far removed from the things they considered normal that they began to lose themselves.
“Do you miss your wife?” Avasa asked.
Oaxyctl looked at the man. They both had dark skin, brown compared to the darker skin of the average Nanagadan. In the cold it seemed to turn gray. Avasa’s mustache drooped tiny icicles that moved as he spoke.
“I barely remember her,” Oaxyctl said. “Does that sound bad?” Over to his left John stirred, wrapped in blankets, only his eyes visible. “I’m so far out from anything I consider normal, I don’t even understand things. I just keep going.”
Avasa nodded. “I’ll miss seeing my wife again.”
“What makes you say that?”
“Kali’s infinite eyes stare back at me in this desolate shitland,” Avasa said. “I know I’m going to die of the cold here. Look.” He pulled at his gloves, tugged at them, until the stiff piece of clothing pulled off. The edges of his fingers were black. “I can’t feel them.” Avasa’s voice broke. “The cold is eating me away at the edges.”
He solemnly held the damaged hand close to the fire.
Oaxyctl looked down at his boots. He’d stopped feeling the stinging snow around his toes at midday. He wondered what his feet looked like.
“So why do it?” Oaxyctl asked. “You could have stayed on the ship.”
Avasa looked at him. “I’ve seen the plans to keep back the Azteca. We stand no chance. This long shot John chases, that Haidan came up with, it’s the only hope I have of saving my family, my children. One must do whatever they can, even it means one’s life, understand?”
Oaxyctl squinted at the dancing fire. Thinking of John’s struggle, he said, “Yes, I understand.” He huddled into his clothes as best he could. The wind whistled nearby, broken by the great slab of metal at their backs. He’d been right. Capitol City could not stand. There was no place that he could hide from the gods.
Their will demanded to be obeyed. He had no choice.
The other men glanced at each other, grim, quiet, mostly trying to catch sleep. Oaxyclt nodded at the two sailors who’d volunteered to come.
One was the man who had led him deep into
La Revanche’
s bilge to meet the god. The man nodded back.
 
Oaxyctl stamped out the fire. He looked at the last embers wistfully, recalling the warmth and already missing it. The fierce, constant wind kicked up snow, making it hard to hear anything.
“My name Lionel.” Oaxyctl turned around toward the accomplice who was yelling at him over the wind, the sailor by his side. “I never introduce myself before.” Lionel nodded over at the other sailor. “He name Vincent. He with us.”
“Okay.” Oaxyctl pulled Lionel close and whispered,
“Your task is the two mongoose-men. Get them out of sight, kill them.”
“Yeah.”
They crunched over the ice away from each other, breath puffing out in front of their faces.
John’s fever had let up again, Oaxyctl noticed. John craned his head back and looked up at the great fins of metal around them all. “Oaxyctl, are those letters?”
Oaxyctl looked up the sides of a large fin across from the party.
“Yes.” Faint shadows of symbols could barely be discemed.
“Read them to me.”
Oaxyctl squinted, but couldn’t read the faded shapes. “I can’t.”
“Damn.” John struggled around a bit, then stopped. “I don’t know where my spyglass is.”
“We left it on the ship.”
“Oh.”
Oaxyctl walked out toward the end of the rope, taking his place next to Avasa and Lionel. The two mongoose-men walked out in front, scouting the way. They’d found the ice to be treacherous, filled with crevasses. They walked with splintered lengths of plank to stick into the snow every other step to search for lethal gaps.
“Oaxyctl,” John called out. “I think we lost my leg.”
Oaxyctl said back over his shoulder, “I know.” He picked up the rope, then he and Avasa began to pull. They weren’t as fast as the ship. And
La Revanche
didn’t fall into crevasses as they might.
Three, or four, more days of this hell.
It didn’t help Oaxyctl’s nerves that at any moment he knew something horrible could burst out from the gloom. The god was out there, tracking them by now.
He felt it.
 
 
Lionel’s attack came three hours later. The mongoose-men and the two sailors left to explore up ahead. They were out of the great forest of fins into gentle hills of snow.
Oaxyctl heard a scream, and then another.
Lionel returned alone, fifteen minutes later. He looked shaken, a good actor. “A big crevasse,” he panted. He shook his head. Looked at Avasa with a tired expression. “My man Vincent dead. And you two mongoose-men.”
Avasa dropped the rope, calm. “My two best men?”
Lionel nodded. “We go need avoid that area.”
Avasa walked over to him. “Those men never made mistakes like that. Not ones
you
would have been able to walk from.”
“What you saying?” Lionel asked.
“We keep going. Straight. I want to see what happened for myself.”
Lionel hesitated, but Oaxyctl took up the rope. “Let’s keep going.”
 
Avasa circled the scuffed marks in the snow and squatted. Oaxyctl stood next to him. The crevasse, he thought, was a few feet away. If he just shoved and kicked Avasa in, he could be done.
But he could see a wariness in Avasa’s posture that told him otherwise.
And even if he didn’t see it, he wasn’t sure he could do it.
Coward, he berated himself again.
“They fought,” Avasa said. “I don’t know about that man Lionel. He is lying. He killed my men.”
“Maybe the other man, Vincent, did something,” Oaxyctl said.
Avasa shook his head. He pulled a gun out and trudged over to Lionel.
Oaxyctl pulled the ax out of his belt and followed. “Listen, there is no need for any of this!” He tried to get closer to Avasa.
Lionel stood up and pulled a long knife out from his boots. He and Avasa circled each other. The sound of a shotgun being cocked stopped them all.
John sat upright, shivering in his blankets. “No one kills anyone. You all stay right in front of me. You all put your weapons on the sled, slowly. Then we continue on.”
The silent face-off continued until John fired a shot between the three men. Snow spray kicked up into the air.
“Now.”
They complied. John sat upright, shotgun cradled under his good arm, watching them with a strength none had suspected he still had.
Oaxyctl began thinking about the sign of Ocelotl again.
 
 
Pepper trudged his way through snow. To any other eye, the constant white sleet would have rendered them lost. Even as Pepper moved forward, his footprints disappeared.
But he kept tracking John, as he had promised.
The cold numbed him. Pepper increased his body temperature. He’d lose some body mass. It would impede his ability to survive more than a week out here, but that didn’t matter. If he didn’t survive the week and find the
Ma Wi Jung,
he was dead anyway. Why prolong it?
A faint change in the wind.
He sniffed the cold, barren air and paused.
Snow crunched far to the left, and Pepper realized he wasn’t the only one out among the featureless hills and sudden crevasses tracking prey.
The nearest snowy hillock exploded. Pepper planted his feet and turned to face the Teotl.
 
 
John’s leg stopped throbbing. Chill crept throughout his whole body. He wasn’t too sure if his left hand was a hook. He remembered both that it was a hook, and that he had once had a hand and that was new. He hadn’t remembered what it was like to have a hand for a long, long time.
And Starport: he saw a map of where they sat in his head. He spun it around a bit, rotated it, then pushed it away.
He had a kid. Jerome. He remembered a wife. Shanta.
Interesting. When had that happened?
“Johnny, Johnny, what the fuck is going on?” he chattered.
He’d fucked up something serious. Left himself bits and pieces.
Gonna have to amputate this soon or die. Only an ax around, strapped to a bundle of canvas. Ax wouldn’t do the job. Kill him quicker. And the three men standing at the edge of the rope looking back at him might do the job even sooner.
John didn’t trust them. Couldn’t trust the motivations. Several things were in the air.
Emergency, man. Focus on the necessary. Discard excess.
You’re dying, he told himself. By the way, if you amputate, you’re going to have to cut through some stuff in your leg tougher than bone. Don’t forget that you’re not all natural.
What?
He tried to make sense of the new memories bubbling out from behind the brick wall of his mind. The memories weren’t specific images, or anything swirling out like a dream. They were just things that happened to be there when he turned his thoughts different ways.
For example, the name Starport felt familiar. He remembered being there before.
One of the men walked back toward John. He held the rifle up. Focus on the moment. “I’ll shoot you if you don’t get back out on the rope,” John growled. It was in his eyes. This one was bad news. Oaxyctl, it was familiar to roll that name around in the back of his mind.
The fever, the shock, must be shaking old memories loose, he thought. I finally remember myself. And all it took was getting shot, gangrenous, and half frozen to death.
He laughed, and they looked back at him.
John gestured with the rifle. “I’m fucking serious.”
Of course, he thought, he needed them to pull him, so he couldn’t shoot them in the legs. If they rushed, he’d
wait until he could hit an arm. They could still pull him there with a shot arm.
Some of them wanted him dead. Or needed something from him.
They were so close to the dockyards, he thought, leaning back and drowsing off. He could feel the
Ma Wi Jung
calling him.
 
The man called Lionel stood overhead, blocking out the sun.
John placed the end of the barrel against Lionel’s chin. “I’m napping.”
Lionel scrunched back to the end of the rope and joined the two waiting men.
How long would this last? Wasting away, almost at the end. The memories he’d grabbed during the last wave of semiconsciousness fled again.
Where the hell was Pepper? He’d have to get the man’s attention.
John fired the shotgun into the air three times, fumbling to reload, then leaned back. Let them think he was mad. That would keep them back for a while longer.
He was kidding himself. He was too tired. Whom could he trust out of the three men? Oaxyctl had saved his life before. John relaxed, called him back.
“I can’t do it any longer.” He handed Oaxyctl the shotgun. “I’m too tired. You protect me. Keep us moving.”
Avasa walked up behind Oaxyctl and whispered. Oaxyctl nodded.
“John.” Avasa leaned down next to John. “John. Your leg is gangrenous, and you’re hallucinating. We need to cut it off now. We’re trying to save your life.” Avasa cut and pulled away John’s trousers. John protested weakly. The numbing wind crept through the rest of his clothing from the inside out.
“Here.” Avasa held a bottle of rum to John’s lips and grabbed his good hand as warmth spread. “I’m sorry, John, but I have to cut.”
“Please don’t,” John whimpered as Avasa unwrapped one of the packages lashed to the sled and unwrapped a saw. “Too dangerous.”
Avasa picked up the long saw and positioned it above John’s knee, his back turned to Oaxyctl. Oaxyctl raised the shotgun, aimed it at them, and fired. The back of Avasa’s head exploded over the snow in front of the crude sled and John’s bare leg.
“I don’t understand.” John blinked.
“He was trying to kill you.” Oaxyctl walked away, head down, shoulders slumped, shaking his head. Lionel sat next to John. The sled creaked down into the snow.
“We need the code,” Lionel said.
“What code?” John stared at the pieces of gleaming skull fragments on his boots.
“The
Ma Wi Jung.
” Lionel dribbled more rum down John’s throat, then leaned down and pulled a long knife out from his left boot. “The
Ma Wi Jung,
” he repeated. The rum’s warm calm fled. Lionel was the fucker trying to get something from him. “
Ma. Wi. Jung.
”
Lionel slammed the knife into John’s kneecap. On the good leg.
John screamed.

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