Obsidian & Blood (110 page)

  I was on my back, staring into the slack face of a woman, who pressed against me like a lover – her mouth open in a soundless scream, revealing teeth the colour of decayed corn. Her hands – or another's hands, I couldn't be sure – were clawing at my belly; there was a brief, fiery flesh of pain, and the slimy sensation of something wet against my skin, before the pain flared up again, destroying everything else. Distantly, I noted what it had to be, and what its loss meant, but the thought itself vanished in the welter of other ones – in the rancid smell of so many bodies pressed against mine. 

  Pain. Pain – was–

  Pain was an offering. Pain was– I could hardly focus anymore through the growing haze; didn't know where Teomitl was anymore…

  The gods took pain, which was the only sincere sacrifice. Prayers were nothing more than children's wishes, but pain and blood made them real – because it cost to give them, and because they were freely offered. 

  The gods–

  There was a familiar litany in my mind: repeated so many times in the calmecac school, in calmer times, on a hill away from the city, where I'd stood with my bloodied worship-thorns, offering up the truest sacrifice for the sake of the Fifth World and of Mictlan.

  I had no worship-thorns, and the stars were all gone – my sight blocked by mottled, bluish skin, by distorted limbs and glazed faces. But the hymn – the hymn always remained.

 

 

  My voice quavered and broke at the beginning, but soon the familiar words came back and with them some of my assurance. As I spoke, the pain seemed to recede, pushed back into a remote corner of my mind, to be dealt with later.

 

 

  I was High Priest for the Dead; I had endured worse than this. I would… I would stand.

  The bodies were still pressing against me, but now I saw that they flopped weakly, like fish on dry land, the motions of their limbs and fingers nothing more than reflexes, like the gestures of a man drunk on jimsonweed. I could feel their frantic heartbeat, echoing the mad beat within my own chest.

 

 

  There was… light, after a fashion – a weak, pallid radiance that threw everything into stark contrast. The bodies and faces paled, and seemed to recede too, their features growing dimmer and dimmer until they became part of the quivering shadows on the walls.

  The weight on my chest was gone; the whole episode feeling like the stuff of nightmares. I pulled myself upwards, slowly, limb by limb, wincing at the pain. My stomach wasn't bleeding, but I still felt as though I'd been mauled, and the fever wasn't gone – it had merely abated for a small moment, enough for me to regain a small part of my senses. But it would come backwhen the hymn stopped running in my mind, when I grew too weak to hold the sickness at bay.

  I needed help.

  In the darkened room, I caught sight of more bodies, spread around the remnants of a meal – none of them appeared to be moving. 

  "Teomitl?"

  My student was lying a few paces away from the body of Chipahua, twitching and shivering and moaning.

  "Teomitl!" I reached out and shook him – he had Jade Skirt's protection, he couldn't fall like this, not to something as foolish and as inconsequential… "Teomitl!"

  But there was no answer, and his eyes, when they finally opened, were the filmy white of rotting corpses. He hung limp in my grip and didn't answer. I could – with some effort – have stretched out my priest senses, but I could guess that the magic of Jade Skirt had gone from him.

  He couldn't die – he was Master of the House of Darts, heir-apparent to the Mexica Empire, agent of Chalchiuhtlicue in the Fifth World, commander of the army… He was…

  At the back of my mind ran the litany – the same words, over and over:
Lord Death's lands are vast and deep, and Grandmother Earth
awaits; as She does for us all.

  He couldn't die… but Tizoc-tzin had died, too, and come back only through a god-blessed miracle, a spell that couldn't be cast again in the Fifth World.

  Somehow – somehow I hoisted Teomitl on my shoulders, and staggered out of the house, calling out for the Jaguar Knights, but whether fallen or fled, they wouldn't answer. I couldn't find the boats we'd arrived in, either. So instead, I turned my face away from the blinding light of the sun, and started to walk back to the Sacred Precinct.

  Teomitl grew heavier as I walked, and the world shrank into a whirl of colours and sounds: vague faces, fading in and out of focus; a morass of feather headdresses, black-dyed cheeks, and the glint of gold caught in hair as black as night. My feet dragged in the dust and the sounds of the city seemed far away; the clacking noise of the women's loom no more than a distant irritation. The shadows came back, too, swooping over the canals like
ahuizotl
water-beasts – quivering, always on the edge of leaping.

 

 

  They were slowly rising – casting the adobe house into darkness, making the coloured clothes dull and insignificant. My world shrank to this: the burning light of the sun – echoed in the itching that seemed to have overwhelmed my skin – and the shadows, the same that had killed Eptli, which would engulf us all… 

  My hands shook; I held Teomitl tighter against my chest, afraid I'd let him fall into the dirt. I couldn't let go: I had to get him back to safety – he was my student… My whole body was afire, my stomach a mass of pain. If only I could pause, rest for a while, doubled up in a foetal position, until the pain went away… 

  The shadows shifted lazily over the canals and the bridges, the assembled throng of peasants in loincloths, the matrons holding baskets of tomatoes and squashes close to their chests. Like the wind, they ruffled the cloaks of war veterans, exposing old, whitish scars that took on the appearance of suppurating sores once more. I trudged on, dragging my feet in the earth. The sun beat on my back – and it seemed that the beat was echoed within me, at the junction of skin and muscle, an endless rhythm like thousands of hands hammering from inside, demanding to be let out. 

  Ahead, I caught glimpses of the Serpent Wall – the shadows congregated around the snakes atop the wall, in the quetzal-red jaws and green bodies, darkening the scales and the crown of feathers around their heads. Almost there…

  Abruptly, Teomitl weighed nothing – no, it wasn't that, it wasn't that. Someone had taken him from me. I had to… had… to… "Teomitl! Acatl!" My sister's face swam out of the morass of shadows – a scant few moments before the fever rose again, and I knew nothing more but the nightmares.

 

 

My dreams were dark and numerous; in all of them I lay on my back, while something crushed my chest, and in every shadow I saw the faces of the sick, opening their mouths to scream. Sometimes I heard them, sometimes I did not – but they were always by my side, blindly scrabbling for the raging warmth of my body. 

  At some point, sleep claimed me, dark and exhausting, and the bodies faded, to be replaced by the sound of distant chanting, while I lay panting and burning, every breath searing the inside of my throat. 

  I woke up, and there was still chanting – as my mind cleared, I recognised the words of a hymn to Patecatl, god of medicine.

 

 

  They were spoken by a reedy, frightened man who stood some distance away from me, clearly afraid to touch me. He smelled of copal incense and a mixture of herbs I couldn't place, sharp and bitter. The fever had receded, leaving my mind as clear and as brittle as polished obsidian. I noted the pattern of snakes on the ceiling arcing above me, and the frescoes on the wall were of a huge tree to which clung babies, drinking the sap like mother's milk; the hymn washed over me, again and again like waves on the shore, like the embrace of Chalchiuhtlicue Jade Skirt at birth, washing away all the filth and the sins of the ancestors. 

  I lay quiet, unable to move.

  Some time later, an entrance-curtain tinkled; the priest started. "He's awake, my Lady."
  "I can see that," Mihmatini's voice said.

  There was a silence; the priest's face stubbornly turned towards her, his gaze downcast. "My Lady?" he asked, finally. "You promised I could leave…"

  Mihmatini snorted. "I did, didn't I? Very well, you may go."

  He was scurrying out toward the exit before she'd even finished her sentence.

  "Acatl?" Mihmatini asked. "How are you feeling?" She knelt by the side of the bed – I'd expected sarcasm, or some biting remark about my tendency to get into scrapes, but there was none of that; merely thin lines at the corners of her red-rimmed eyes. 

  Then I remembered. "Teomitl. Where–?"

  "Ssh." Mihmatini laid a hand on my forehead. She grimaced. "What I need to know now is how you are."

  "I've felt better," I said, carefully. My tongue scraped against my palate, as abrading as coarse sand, and there was a distant ache in my stomach, like a beast laying low, waiting for the best moment to pounce again. "You haven't told me about Teomitl." 

  "I need you to rest," Mihmatini said. "Whatever protection you had blocked part of the sickness, but you're not invulnerable, Acatl." 

  Neither was Teomitl. I watched her – clad in the blue cloak of a Guardian, with feathers hanging down the nape of her neck and black paint, applied to her cheeks and forehead with a trembling hand, leaving large swathes of skin uncovered. And, on the ground beneath her feet, was a thread of yellow light – going straight through the wall, its radiance contracting and expanding with every one of her breaths, like a heartbeat. "It's bad, isn't it?"

  She wouldn't look at me, as if I'd somehow turned into her superior. "Whatever it is, it's affected him worse than you. It's as if he had a special affinity with the sickness."

  Then why hadn't it struck before? But, of course, he had always

  been quite far away from the corpses; he had given the first one only a cursory examination, and while he'd stayed in the room of the second one he hadn't cast spells or even strayed close to the body. Then again… for all I knew, he could have been affected already, and not said a word to me about whatever trivial symptoms he might have felt.

  Southern Hummingbird blind the man and his pride.

  "I need to see him," I said, pulling myself upright. Or rather, trying to. None of my limbs seemed to work properly; it was all I could do to fall back in a vaguely graceful manner.

  "You're staying on the sleeping mat," Mihmatini said, in a voice I recognised all too well – reserved for disobedient children, or recalcitrant priests. "You're quite obviously in no state to walk, Acatl, and I will not have you push yourself past your endurance." 

  "It wouldn't be the first time," I said, knowing what her answer would be.

  "You know, that doesn't strike me as something to be particularly proud of," Mihmatini said. "Stay here."

  "And what? Wait? He's my student as much as he's your husband. If anything happens…" I wouldn't forgive myself. 

  "Then what?" Mihmatini's voice was low and terrible, that of a judge about to pass sentence. "You're a priest of Mictlantecuhtli, Acatl. You don't do healing spells."

  "No," I said. I pulled myself upwards again, more carefully this time, letting the full weight of my body rest on the wall. "But I know about illnesses."

  Mostly as causes of death, granted. But still… still, the priests of Patecatl were quite obviously useless. For something like this – a deliberately cast disease – we needed to fight the sorcerer who had cast it: a man or a woman we still knew nothing about. 

  Either that, or… "He's Chalchiuhtlicue's agent," I said.

  Mihmatini rolled her eyes upwards. "I've already thought of it. We tried healing or cleansing spells that called on Her power." 

  "And?" I said.

  "They're not working. But then nothing else has."

  I shook my head. "It's not spells you'd need, but Her personal attention."

  Mihmatini grimaced. "Going into Her own land? We tried that, as well."

  "You have?" It was bad, then; for going into Tlalocan, the land of the Blessed Drowned, was far from simple or safe. By going into a god's world, one agreed to be bound by its rules and caprices – to face monsters and magic, and desires that predated the Fifth Age. 

  Mihmatini's face was pale. "The way was closed. Perhaps She thought us beneath Her notice."

  "You'd be beneath Her notice, but Teomitl wouldn't." She had schemes for him – whatever they were. She'd picked him up, chosen to wield Her powers in the Fifth World. She wouldn't have done that without a reason… and I had a feeling the days were fast approaching when we would come to know it. "Unless something has gone wrong." Acamapichtli – abruptly, I remembered the trial. "Acamapichtli's arrest. That's what's gone wrong." And Tapalcayotl in his cage; and probably the whole clergy, all over the city – the Consort, High Priestess of Chalchiuhtlicue, and her own clergy… "The arrest of her husband's clergy must give Her enough to be busy."