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Rondeau and B shouted and dove out of the way as the hummingbirds all burst
simultaneously into flame, showering onto the ground in smoking ruin.
Marla nudged one of the hummingbirds with her foot. She looked around at her
companions, and showed her teeth. This was it. This was the kind of shit she lived for,
what she got out of bed in the morning hoping for and went to bed at night dreaming of.
“Onward and inward,” she said. “And keep clear of the frogs, if you’re not a snake god
like Ch’ang Hao or wearing a magical snake-belt like me.”
Since they’d already blown the element of surprise, Marla went straight up the path that
led to Mutex. In seconds the Buddha was in sight, but it was no longer even remotely
Buddha-like. It had grown to twice its former size and now towered nearly twenty feet
high. Its features had softened and run, and it was no longer recognizably anything, just
a squat, bulging bronze shape, vaguely froglike in its proportions. It did have a mouth,
though, gaping big enough to swallow a bread box, with darkness inside. Mutex stood
before it, surrounded by yellow frogs, his body streaked with blood. His back was
arched, his head thrown back in an ecstasy of worship, his arms raised high. A flock of
hummingbirds floated over the changing statue. They now carried the Cornerstone
suspended from silver chains, just as they had on Strawberry Hill, but they hovered
above the newborn frog god.
The smell of rotting vegetation was overwhelming.
Still running, Marla cried, “Mutex! This is for Lao Tsung!”
Mutex made no indication that he’d heard her, but he did sweep his arms down in a
grand, maestrolike gesture.
When he did, the hovering hummingbirds flew off in a dozen different directions at
once, severing the ties that held the Cornerstone. The stone—Marla’s one hope for
survival, the reason she’d gotten mixed up in all this madness anyway, the ultimate goal
of this entire ordeal—fell straight into the ur-Tlaltecuhtli’s vast, moaning mouth.
The frog-statue closed its mouth, and visibly swallowed.
The Cornerstone was gone.
Without breaking stride, Marla reversed her cloak.
With his superior vision, B could see right away that it wasn’t Mutex anymore, that his
genius had left his loci and successfully switched bodies with the ever-expanding
Tlaltecuhtli at the exact moment that the Cornerstone fell into the monster’s open
mouth. But Marla didn’t notice. She transformed into a beast, a jaguar of deep purple
shadows, and in half a bound she’d crushed a dozen frogs underfoot, and in another leap
she was on top of what had been Mutex.
B tried to imagine what Tlaltecuhtli must be experiencing—to have returned to
consciousness after so long, to have felt burgeoning strength, and then to suddenly be