Obsidian & Blood (109 page)

  A light played on my hands, turning them paler – a radiance as green as quetzal feathers seen through water, first quivering on the edge of being, and then growing stronger and stronger, until it had washed out every colour in the room, making even the painted frescoes on the wall seem of carved jade, gilding the faces of gods and warriors on the adobe until they, too, seemed alien and faraway. Teomitl knelt by my side, his hands outstretched over the body of the priest.

  "Coatl," he called, and his voice was the thunder of storm-tossed waves, the slithering sounds of
ahuizotl
water-beasts moments before they fed on a corpse. "Honoured one, keeper of the red and black codices, holder of the wisdom – of the words as precious as wealth. Honoured one, travelling far in the wilderness, in the jungles – the time has come to wake up."

  Coatl went rigid. "My Lord," he whispered, without opening his eyes.

  "Wake up, honoured one." Teomitl's voice had the cadences of ritual – and its pitch was getting higher and higher – deeper, too, no longer the voice of anything human.

  Coatl shuddered again. "I can't, my Lord!" Foam pearled up on his lips – his body arched, as if in the grip of a seizure, and then he fell back down again, hitting the mat with a thud.

  Teomitl looked as though he was going to reach out and seize the body. "No," I said, laying a hand on his arm – a mistake, for the power within him struck as quickly as a coiled snake – pain travelled up my arm, and for a bare moment I had the feeling my skin was being flayed away, exposing muscles and bones that bent and snapped, sending my arm into spasms…

  I jerked back, biting my lips not to scream. "Don't – touch – him," I managed through dry lips. "You–"

  Teomitl's gaze moved towards me – held me, and for a moment I saw not him, but Jade Skirt – waiting for me with arms outstretched, to drag me down into the waters that had cleansed me at my birth… "Teomitl!"

  "I'm the one you shouldn't touch, priest." His lips quirked into a smile – lazy and cruel, nothing human anymore – and then, as abruptly as She had appeared, the goddess was gone, and we were left in an empty room with an unconscious priest – unconscious, not dead, thank the Duality, for while I could see the shadow of Lord Death hovering over him, his spirit had not yet departed his body. 

  Teomitl looked at me questioningly.

  "I did something foolish," I said, a little more abruptly than I'd intended to. Chalchuihtlicue, Jade Skirt, like most gods, always made me uneasy: pretty much the only god I could claim a modicum of common understanding with was my own god, Mictlantecuhtli – ruler of a place that welcomed everyone, patiently waiting for the corn to ripen and wither, the fruit to fall and rot.

  "So did I." Teomit's face was harsh again. He looked down at Coatl. "I don't think he'll be awake for a while."

  I didn't think he'd ever been in a state to hear us. On the positive side, though, he wasn't going to walk away and spread the sickness yet further.

  My eyes caught on the third sleeping mat, and I froze, remembering what Acamapichtli had said. "There was a third man in confinement, wasn't there?"
  "That's the first I hear of it," Teomitl said.

  I shook my head. "A warrior, one of those who carried the body. Acamapichtli told me they'd found him, and that he was sick."

  I didn't like that empty mat: it made me feel uncomfortable. It was one thing to have healthy warriors possibly passing on the sickness unawares, quite another to have a sick man get up and leave. 

  "But we don't know where he is," Teomitl said.

  "No," I said. And we were obviously not going to find out from either Coatl or the priest of Patecatl. I decided on a more constructive approach: I walked out, yanking the entrance-curtain out of my way in a tinkle of bells, and asked the first guard of the SheSnake I met where the priests of Tlaloc had gone.

  He looked at me, hard. "You're not one of them." It sounded halfway between an accusation and a question: he didn't quite know what to make of me.

  "No," I said, bowing my head – letting him take in the regalia. "I'm High Priest for the Dead in Tenochtitlan."

  "Tizoc-tzin said they were traitors," the guard said.

  He– he had arrested the whole clergy of Tlaloc – as thoughtlessly as that? He– What could he be thinking of, cutting away everyone that sustained him?
  He–

  Focus, I needed to focus. Little good I would do, if I managed to get myself arrested yet another time. "They… might have information we need," I said, gaining in assurance as I spoke. For the good of the city." I felt soiled, even though it wasn't quite a lie. 

  The guard looked at me, dubiously. Fortunately, Teomitl chose this moment to join me, and the sight of the Master of the House of Darts – Tizoc-tzin's brother – standing by my side helped the guard decide. "Fine." He gave me a location, which was a set of courtyards reserved for the private usage of officials.

  When we arrived there, we found the courtyard had been turned into a jail: wooden cages filled it from end to end. Through the bars, I caught glimpses of the men crouched within – whispering hymns in a low voice, beseeching their god to help them. The hubbub of their voices was almost deafening – there had to be more than a hundred priests in that courtyard. Magic flowed over us: the harsh, pitiless feel of Huitzilpochtli's magic, laid over the cages and the courtyard to prevent the priests from casting any spells. 

  At the other end, under the pillars, a couple of wooden cages had been set aside for the higher ranks: Tapalcayotl and two other priests sat – it wasn't easy to look dignified and haughty while sitting hunched under a low canopy, but Tapalcayotl managed it. I guessed Acamapichtli had been giving his second-in-command lessons in arrogance.

  "Well?" he asked when I came closer. "I assume you're not here to tell me we're to be freed."
  "Not exactly," I said.

  Dealing with Acamapichtli was bad enough; I didn't have to bear with that kind of attitude from Tapalcayotl, as well. "You're not in much of a position to argue or make demands."

  Tapalcayotl grimaced. "Fair enough," he said at last. "What do you want?"

  "The third sick man – the warrior. Where did he go?"
  "He went away?" one of the priests asked.
  "Why? He wasn't fit to walk either?"
  The priest shook his head. "He died."
  A dead man?

  "There was no corpse. Someone took it away." Not good; not good at all. Eptli's corpse had still been able to propagate the sickness; I didn't want to see another instance like that.

  Tapalcayotl hadn't said anything for a while. He was staring at the rings on his hands as if they held some great truth, his face pinched and twisted. At length, not looking up, he said, "I think the other warrior took it." 

  "Which warrior?"

  "He came several times to enquire about the health of Coatl and his companion," Tapalcayotl said. "We told him he couldn't have the corpse for funeral ceremonies, and he was angry. He said warriors took care of their own."

  Where had I heard that? "Did you know him?"

  "No. He wasn't a young man, more like the kind you'd expect to have married already – his thighs were covered in battle scars." 

  Which about described every warrior who had survived a few battles: their quilted cotton armour didn't protect their legs, and the obsidian edges of the
macuahitl
swords inflicted horrific wounds in the melee. "Anything else?" I asked, struggling to contain my impatience.

  "He had another scar. Across his face. A sword must have sliced his right cheek open, and gone upwards to the temple." Tapalcayotl grimaced again. "My guess is that he was happy to be alive after that." 

  "Acatl-tzin," Teomitl said behind me.

  I nodded; got up, as leisurely as I could. The scar was indeed distinctive, and I knew where I had seen it last.

  The warrior Chipahua – Eptli's comrade, who had been so frustrated at being deprived of the captive.

 

We came out of the palace all but running. Teomitl had picked up two Jaguar warriors on the way – we'd run into them outside the aviary, and he'd used his authority as Master of the House of Darts to sweep them up. They didn't look aggrieved; rather, they held themselves with a particular sense of pride – an almost religious devotion, as if they were favoured of some god.

  Teomitl's face had taken on the aspect of carved jade again; perhaps it was that, or perhaps his regalia, which was distinctive enough, but the crowd of the Sacred Precinct seemed to part from us, the priests and worshippers shrinking away as if burned by the light.

  At the edge of the Sacred Precinct, Teomitl caught two boats with a mere wave of his fingers – two small crafts, poled by women taking their wares back from the marketplace.

  "We could have taken a boat from my temple," I said as I climbed into one of the swaying crafts. The woman's gaze was stubbornly cast down – one did not look the Master of the House of Darkness in the eye.

  Teomitl waved a dismissive hand. "Your temple is too far, Acatltzin. We would waste time."

  The boat slipped into the crowded canals like a knife through the lungs, weaving its way between the coloured crafts carrying baskets of vegetables and cages filled with animals. The woman poled in silence, not looking at either of us – it occurred to me that I was just as impressive as Teomitl in my position of High Priest, holder of wisdom and knowledge; so far high above her I might as well have been sitting on the canopy of a ceiba tree. 

  "What are you going to do?"

  "Warn them." Teomitl's voice was curt, deadly.

  "It might already be too late." The sickness came fast – faster than it should have, but if it was supernatural, it was only to be expected. 

  Teomitl's lips tightened. "You're in a contrary mood."

  I guessed I was; someone needed to temper Teomitl's blind enthusiasm. My place as a teacher demanded no less.

  The boat passed under a wooden bridge, a hand's breath from a porter drawing water for a peasant. The houses thinned, growing larger and larger like trees unfolding from the ground – the adobe walls brightly painted, and the gardens on the rooftops spreading a smell of pine cones and dry wood, a sweetness that reminded me of home.

  It docked in front of Chipahua's house: we crossed the small stretch of beaten earth of the street, determined to finish this sordid business.

  Teomitl stopped short when he reached the courtyard. "Acatltzin."

  "I know." There had been a slave, last time, and the sound of pestle against mortar as the women pounded maize into flour. Now there was no one.

  No, not quite. There was something… trembling on the edge of existence – a smell, a tightness in the air – something all too familiar that sent a thrill to my bones, and set my heart hammering against the cage of its ribs. 

  "Death," I said, aloud.

  One of the warriors drew his
macuahitl
sword – a thing of glittering edges, of cutting shards, reflecting the sunlight into a thousand fractured pieces. Magic quivered along its body: the warm, unwavering glow of the Southern Hummingbird's power in the Fifth World. "Stay back, Teomitl-tzin."

  But Teomitl was already moving – faster than a snake uncoiling, rushing inwards. I followed him at a more leisurely pace – taking in everything as if in a daze.

  The courtyard, bathed in golden sunlight; three still bodies under the pine tree – no, not quite still, for even as I watched one of them gave a last, heaving gasp, and I saw the
ihiyotl
soul gather itself from its seat in the liver, and unfold wings of blinding radiance, taking flight in an instant like a held breath, vanishing into the world of the gods.

  The second courtyard, and the woman I'd seen earlier – Chipahua's wife – lying on her back, looking at me with unseeing eyes. 

  There was no blood. I might have understood it, if there had been blood – might have thought of sacrifices, of gods gathering back the power that belonged to Them. But everything smelled dry, as stretched as Mictlan the underworld.

  The reception room: Teomitl was standing in front of the dais, looking down at a mat filled with food – the smell of cooked amaranth wafted up, terrifyingly incongruous – and the frescoes themselves seemed to have dimmed, their bright colours passing away. 

  Too late, I saw that it wasn't the colours that had vanished, but the shadows that had appeared, so many of them they covered the whole room, clinging to the pillars and the walls, packed tight against the faces of the gods. I caught a glimpse of screaming faces; of tangled limbs; of flaky skin, distorted by sores, and then they were unfolding like the wrath of a storm, and upon us before we could move.

  For a moment – a bare, agonising moment – it seemed my protection would hold; bathed in the familiar stretched emptiness of Mictlan, I saw this as no more than part of the rhythm of the Fifth World – all sicknesses leading, ultimately, to the throne of Lord Death, the place that belonged to us all: stretched and dry and dark, sending us back into the embrace of Grandmother Earth. 

  And then, with a sound like bones caving in, the protection yielded. It left a faint, cold tingle on my skin – soon replaced by a blazing heat, and a sensation like a thousand bats beating wings around me; darkness rose and enfolded me in a crushing embrace, and I saw nothing but one screaming face after another; glistening limbs, wet with blood and with the white of bones poking out from wrinkled skins; over me, the bodies were all over me, feebly twitching; fingers scrabbling over my eyelids; limbs strewn across my chest, crushing the breath out of me; clammy lips pressed against my thighs and arms and hands, every touch seeming to rob me of more strength.

  Everywhere – they were everywhere, in the Fifth World, in the world above, in the world below – there was no escape…