Age of Aztec Read Online Free PDF Page A

interested Mal. She squatted at the ziggurat’s rear edge and peered over. She probed the stonework below the lip of the apex, feeling with her fingers. Finally she found what she was after.
    “Come and see this.”
    “No thanks.” Aaronson felt dizzy just being this far above ground, never mind watching his superior officer leaning out over empty space.
    “Don’t be such a wuss.”
    “Still no.”
    “I’ll hold you.”
    “Oh, all right.”
    Aaronson shuffled forward and, with Mal gripping his trouser leg, craned his neck. It was a sheer drop of some two hundred feet to the enclosure below.
    “What am I looking for?”
    “See that there? In the cement between those two blocks?”
    “No. Oh. Yes. Is that...?”
    “A climber’s piton.”
    The ring-shaped head of the piton protruded out barely half an inch, and was as dark as the stonework around it. Unless you were searching for it, you could easily have never spotted it.
    “Are you a climber, Aaronson?”
    “Only career and social. Look at me. I’m shaking like a leaf. Do I look like I’ve got a head for heights?”
    “My guess is our friend the Conquistador anchored the piton in with a hammer and abseiled down on a line looped through it. Then he reeled the line in and hid himself among the dead bodies.”
    “You’re kidding.”
    “I don’t think I am.”
    “But surely eyewitnesses would have spotted him coming down.”
    “Maybe. But nobody hangs around close to the corpse enclosure, do they? Plus, it’s behind the ziggurat, hardly prime viewing position. The temple obscures the altar from here. And if he abseiled quickly enough, and the line was thin, he might look from a distance like just another body falling. In all the confusion it’d be an easy mistake to make. Then the retrieval truck arrives, and to the workmen he’s just another partially clothed stiff.”
    “The truck didn’t turn up until two o’clock. You’re saying he lay there for two hours in a pile of hacked-up corpses, playing dead?”
    “I am.”
    Aaronson whistled. “He is one determined fucker, that’s for sure.”
    “I’d guess, too, that he smeared himself with blood, and maybe also stuck on some bone fragments and gristle from the bodies, so that at a glance he’d appear like all the rest of them.”
    “Determined and sick.”
    “No,” said Mal, “he simply doesn’t care. He does what he has to, whatever it takes, so that he can survive and attack again another time.”
    “A madman.”
    “It can look like madness, to be that focused on your goal.” Mal worked out the piton with a pocket knife, bagged it as evidence, then stepped back from the edge, contemplating. “This man – somebody did something to him once, something that changed him. He was hurt or damaged in some way, and he blames the Empire and wants to show everyone how consumed with hate he is. Everything he does, it’s showboating, designed for maximum effect. State occasions. Public ceremonies. Priest investitures. If it’s holy, he has to desecrate it. Hence the armour and weaponry resembling something an old-world Spanish explorer would have been kitted out with. This is all about making a statement, the same one over and over.”
    “Not a fashion statement, I hope.”
    “I’m serious,” Mal snapped. Sometimes Aaronson was too flippant for his own good. He needed to rein it in if he ever hoped to get ahead. “He’s set himself up as the opponent of the Empire, its nemesis. When the Spanish invaded Anahuac, they were expecting to find a primitive culture ripe for the picking, based on their and other Europeans’ experiences in North America. They got a hell of a shock when it turned out that the Land Between The Seas had technology and capabilities far beyond their own, and was in fact readying itself to expand its territory. They fought the Aztecs hard and committed countless atrocities, but it was inevitable that they would be defeated. Conquistadores – an ironic name, in the