The Devil's Bag Man (21 page)

“Cualli is born anew,” he said, and the searing bright green eyes flashed back to him. “You know this. You have felt it.”

“I have,” she said, but something else had captured her attention; Izel felt the slip, the drift, and tried to follow its vector, to imagine what could possibly be of more interest to her than this.

“We can destroy him, but we must act now,” he said. “We can—”

But she was not listening. She returned him to his perch on Sherry's shoulder and strode over to Gum, until they stood an inch apart.

She leaned in close and inhaled. Smelled him deep and long.

He did not flinch.

“My queen,” he said when she pulled back to regard him from a slightly greater remove, and he gave a small, graceless bow.

“What are you?”

“Your loyal servant always, my most merciful queen.”

Her brow furrowed, and she cocked her head.

“Queen of what?”

He raised his eyes, met hers.

“Of the Dominio Gris.”

Her arm shot out, hand striking Gum's neck like a viper. She lifted him effortlessly into the air, and Izel felt his own throat constrict in sympathy.

“How do you know my dreams?” she demanded.

Gum's arms hung limp at his sides; either he understood the futility of fighting back, or he saw another way through this.

“They aren't dreams, my queen. The Dominio Gris is real. You created it. You and Tez—”

She jerked her hand back as if it had touched flame, and Gum fell, crumpled to the ground. She stared down at him, wild-eyed, watched, waited as Gum brought a hand gingerly to his throat. Finally, he looked up at her.

“It's real,” he said again. “I'm there right now, and so are you.” He jerked his head at the cavern below. “And all of them. The only difference
is, I know it. It's not a dream. That's your soul trying to communicate with your body, or something.”

Gum planted an arm against the floor, pushed off, regained his feet.

“I
know
you there,” he said. “You made it all. The ocean in the sky. The blue mountains. All of it. That was his gift to you when—” Gum broke off and winced, Adam's apple lolloping in his throat. “When things were better,” he finished softly.

They stared at each other for a long moment, and then Gum said, “It could work, what he's talking about. There's a guy there, Galvan—”

Her eyes pulsed, so hot they seemed to light up the room.

“You've seen him,” Gum surmised. “Maybe you've . . . had dreams about him?”

The queen only nodded.

“That's whose body Cualli took. But he's—Well, he's a fighter. He kept Cualli at bay for longer than I woulda thought possible. And to hear him tell it, he ain't done with this world yet.”

“That's my father,” Sherry declared, stepping forward, bringing Izel with her. Neither of them paid her the slightest mind.

Izel took the opportunity to rejoin the conversation. “He's at the temple,” he told his sister. “Where it all started. He's gathering his strength. Building his army. We need to march on him now, before it's too late. Let your girls do what they were meant—”

She whirled toward him.

“The temple,” Chacanza repeated, snatching Izel from his perch again.

“Where you betrayed me,
brother
.”

It is justice,
Izel thought to himself.

He closed his eyes and said a silent prayer to the gods beyond the vale—the gods he knew could hear him still, hard as they might try not to listen.

He was completely at peace by the time Chacanza dashed his brains against the cold stone wall of the cavern.

G
alvan craned his neck to gaze at their destination and realized that contrary to his initial impression, Tezcatlipoca's palace didn't sit atop the looming mountain; the mountain simply became the palace. It was all one.

Of course it was. There was no carpentry here. No labor. No grafting of one form onto another. The god had thought it into being, and if tomorrow he wanted to dwell underwater, or reside in a floating mansion among the clouds, then this mountaintop keep might disappear entirely or sit abandoned.

Word made flesh.

Except, not flesh.

According to Gum, that was the one power Tezcatlipoca had been unable to conjure in this purgatory turned playground.

Every last soul had been imported.

“What the fuck,” huffed Galvan, short of breath, thighs aching, and unaccustomed to both these human shortcomings. “Why doesn't he just teleport me up there or some shit?”

Gum shrugged. “Dunno. He could.”

“What else can you tell me?” Galvan asked. “I'm flying blind here. I mean, is he . . . am I gonna be talking to a man, or a six-headed eagle, or, I dunno, a giant glass of orange juice, or what?”

Gum pulled up short, and Galvan almost ran into him.

“There's only one thing I can tell you.” He glanced up at the citadel and lowered his voice. “He's a sick fuckin' insane lunatic.”

“Okey dokey, then,” said Galvan. “Thanks. That's helpful.” And he trudged on.

Voicing it seemed to open the floodgates, turn Gum from reticent to chatty. “I mean, imagine you're all-powerful. You can make anything, do anything. But you're trapped. There's nobody to bump against, nobody who even comes close to being on your level; it's just you and your big fuckin' divine brain and all these luscious chicks keep on pouring in—these virgins who stay virgins no matter how many times you fuck 'em. What's there to do, after the first hundred, two hundred years except figure out more cruel and depraved shit to do with your time, right?”

“Could take up needlepoint,” said Galvan, and he put one foot in front of the other again. He had a feeling he'd be dead of exhaustion before he ever reached the top and found out for himself.

“You'd fuckin' lose it, man. Everybody needs boundaries, know what I mean? Or, like, goals. Shit, even me. I was a low-life fuckin' dope fiend half my life, but I had that next high to chase, and that kept me connected to something. Tez—he goes by Tez, that's another thing you oughta know—it's like he's high all the time. His body or whatever, it can
handle
that. No such thing as an OD for him, boss, lemme tell you. Shit, he can fuck for a month straight if he wants to. Or have a fuckin' daylong orgasm. There's a girl here who—”

“I get it,” Galvan interrupted. “I get it.” He glared up at the peak one more time. “You know what? Fuck this shit.” He cupped his hands around his mouth like a bullhorn.

“Hey! Yo! Tez! You wanna see me, I could use a little help down here!”

He glanced at Gum, found him pale with trepidation.

Galvan shrugged. “Nothing ventured, nothing gained, right?”

No sooner had he said it than the ground beneath them disappeared, and Galvan found himself tumbling upward at tremendous speed, head
over heels, ears popping, the mountainside a blur beside him, and then gone, pink sky in its place, an open vista—

And then he was falling, the polarity reverse. Gum's flailing form followed the same trajectory a few feet away, both of them overshooting the mountaintop and slamming toward it now—

Galvan came down hard, side first, his hip and rib cage connecting with a springy green mosslike ground cover.

He rolled onto his back and looked up. He was in a kind of open-air parlor of vast proportions, vegetation creeping and climbing over regal stone furniture, all of it jarringly—comfortingly?—earthlike compared to the rest of what he'd seen: no wild colors, no outlandish formations. Even the trees bore familiar fruit.

He stood and turned to take it all in. There was something familiar about this place.

Perhaps, he thought dizzily, he'd seen it in a dream. Glimpsed it during one of his encounters with the woman in yellow, the prize Tezcatlipoca had wrested from Cucuy and built this empire around. Perhaps this place was her attempt to re-create some semblance, some shadow, of the life she'd had.

Where was she, then?

He narrowed his eyes, as if she might be hiding in plain sight—then startled as a shrill, piercing cry cut through the heavy air, and spun to locate its source.

It took him a moment to realize that it came from above. Galvan looked up and understood for the first time the limits of his own imagination.

Hovering in midair, some thirty feet above, was a huge, muscled human form that could only be Tezcatlipoca. He spun like a centrifuge, or a tornado, and in his clutches was a woman—no, there were two women, both shrieking, both splayed flat, one in front of him and one in back, one faceup and one facedown, the three of them forming a six-pointed star. His glistening torso pumped in either direction as he fucked them with two enormous organs, faster and faster, spinning all the while.

And then suddenly, the spinning stopped, and both girls flew away from him. Tezcatlipoca roared, and both his cocks grew longer and
gave chase. They were the length of spears when, at precisely the same moment, they reached the girls and entered them. The girls screamed, as the god forced himself deeper inside.

He'll break them,
Galvan thought in disbelief and horror.
He'll split them apart
.

And indeed, a moment later, with a guttural moan that shook the treetops, Tezcatlipoca climaxed and his organs tore through their torsos from inside, emerged covered in viscera just below their rib cages. He spun again and sloughed their bodies to the ground. They came down hard, one to the left of Galvan and the other to the right, lifeless, bloodied and broken.

He stared down at them, unable to fathom what he'd just seen, and missed Tezcatlipoca's landing.

His transformation.

The being Galvan saw when he looked up was tall and slight, almost elfin in the delicacy of his features, with arms that seemed too long for his body and a flat, hairless chest. The monstrous cocks were gone; he appeared asexual now, almost prepubescent. The only points of continuity were a golden glow that emanated from within his chest, and the utter blackness of his eyes.

He stepped toward Galvan without so much as a glance at the bodies lying between them and wiped a trace of perspiration from his thin upper lip.

“Never fear, Jess Galvan,” he said, in a voice that seemed to come from everywhere, a voice that was neither high nor low, resonant nor flinty, but all those things at once. “It is a deathless realm.”

He gestured to the girls, and Galvan glanced down and saw that their wounds had healed. Their eyes were closed and they were breathing deeply, regularly, as if sound asleep.

“Isn't that right, my queen?”

Chacanza was walking toward them, her eyes fixed on the prostrate girls, her face a husk of silent hatred. She didn't look up at Tezcatlipoca to acknowledge his question and didn't appear to notice Jess. She knelt before the closer girl, brushed a lock of bloody hair off her forehead, then raised her head and nodded into the distance.

Four more girls approached on silent feet, clad in identical tunics
made of a burlaplike plant fiber. They bent before the sleeping girls, lifted them expertly beneath the knees and arms, and carried them away.

“So,” Tezcatlipoca continued, “you are the one from whom Cualli reaped new life.” He looked Galvan up and down and then glanced at Gum, who hovered by the parlor's periphery as if hoping to go unseen. “And I am told that you resisted for some time. That must have caused him no end of misery.”

He strolled closer and fixed his bottomless eyes on Galvan. “This pleases me. I may allow you some enjoyment here.”

He opened his palm and offered Galvan a glinting, marble-sized bit of matter; it looked like a clump of earth, or a globule of resin.

“An intoxicant of my creation. Based loosely on the fruit of the poppy, but infinitely stronger. It may kill you, for a while.”

Galvan stepped closer.

“I'm not interested in that. I've got a deal for you.”

Tezcatlipoca regarded him with curiosity and popped the drug into his own mouth.

“There is nothing I want.”

Whatever the hell he'd just ingested was taking effect fast. A ripple of iridescence streamed down the god's body like a gentle wind; in its wake his limbs took on a new lugubriousness.

Tezcatlipoca crossed his arms behind his head, his body rising slightly off the ground as he reclined on an invisible bed.

“Speak your mind,” he slurred, looking up at the sky. “If I don't like it, I'll tear out your liver twice a day for the next hundred years.”

“Fair enough.” Galvan took a deep breath and wondered whether Tezcatlipoca's state would make him more receptive to the pitch or less. He sensed movement in the periphery of his vision and looked over to see Chacanza striding toward him, slow and stately. He caught her eye, hoping for some hint of recognition, of confederacy. But there was nothing.

“Put me back in my body and let me kill Cucuy. The right way. Once and for all.”

Tezcatlipoca's body swung vertical, and he leaned toward Galvan.

“Why would I want that?”

“Because if he dies any other way, you lose all this. No more virgin
fucktoys, no more drugs, no more conjuring shit into being. Just seven billion assholes busy destroying the planet all by themselves.”

Tezcatlipoca was quiet for a moment. Whether he was weighing the words or simply too zooted to listen, Galvan didn't know. But he continued.

“I dunno, maybe that sounds like fun to you. Pop back up, surprise-surprise, hey, wow, it's Tezcatlipoca, the Divine Sorcerer, Most Fearsome and Beloved. Bam, he's blowin' shit up, he's real, boom, fall the fuck in line, humanity. Except here's the thing: three-quarters of them would rather die than turn their backs on Jesus or Allah or fuckin' Vishnu. And even if you do convert them all or kill off the heathens, then what? Spend twenty years waiting for a bunch of slaves to build you a castle you could've snapped your fingers and created here? Float around double-dicking chicks to death Dominio Gris style, except out there they got wills of their own, plus you gotta find 'em and replace 'em cuz they won't just heal up afterward?”

Galvan paused, trying to gauge how this was going over, but Tezcatlipoca was inscrutable.

“Bottom line, there's not a single reason for you to trade this for that, so let me unmake that fucker. Because believe me, if I don't kill him right, sooner or later somebody else is sure as hell gonna do it wrong.”

He realized he'd reached the end of his sales pitch, shut his mouth, and waited for a response. Tezcatlipoca was undulating in a slow, hypnotic rhythm now. The outlines of his body blurred, became indistinct and wavy. As if he were fading into the ether, becoming one with the air.

That was some fuckin' drug, all right.

“Do you know how to do it?”

Galvan's head snapped toward the voice.

It was Chacanza. Her hands were folded, her shoulders squared to his.

Her face was seared into Galvan's memory in a wide range of states: seduction and aggression, determination and abandon. But this expression, Galvan could not read.

It took him several moments to understand that it was hope.

“Think so,” he said.

“Then allow me to remove all doubt.”

A stalactite of lightning crackled through the sky, and Galvan spun in time to see it hit Tezcatlipoca square in the middle of the chest.

Where his heart was, assuming that the god had one.

And precisely where you'd slam a junkie with a syringe of adrenaline to bring him out of a nod.

His body shuddered and Tezcatlipoca groaned in ecstasy as the surge of electricity crackled through him, blue sparks shooting in all directions.

His feet found the firmament.

His body found form.

The bottomless black eyes found Galvan.

“I have renounced the earth. This realm is my only home.”

He raised a hand, and Galvan watched as the fingers grew together, turned metallic, became a reaper's sickle. “But if I were forced to return, it would not be to wage petty war. It would be to finish the job my brothers and sisters abandoned, and destroy that world entirely.”

“All the more reason for me to do it right.” Galvan clenched his teeth, felt his jaw flare. “He stole from you. Kept what wasn't his to keep. You landing on your feet here doesn't change that.”

Galvan spread his arms. “Make me your weapon of vengeance.”

For the first time, the full weight of Tezcatlipoca's attention came to rest on him. The pressure seemed to begin inside Galvan's head, as if the god were probing the very folds of his brain. He winced, as the pain ratcheted up to excruciating and the world beyond went fuzzy.

“It is not a decision to be made on faith,” Tezcatlipoca intoned. “You must prove yourself worthy to be my sword.”

Galvan felt the ground beneath him drop away, and then everything went black.