Obsidian & Blood (12 page)

  "You're too hard on yourself," I said. An uncanny trait, when coupled with his staggering arrogance.

  He shook his head. "Realist. Give me something else to do." 

  "I don't have–"

  "You're in the middle of an investigation, and you're doing it alone." He must have seen my face, for he said, "The Guardian told me."

  I wish I could tell Ceyaxochitl some words of my own. "You're not giving the orders," I snapped. "That's the first rule you'll have to learn."

  Teomitl smiled, and I knew why. I'd already given halfway in. "Tell me the others," he said.

  I'd sworn I wouldn't take any apprentices, that I wouldn't hold out my heart to be torn apart. "You have no idea where this will lead you." 

  "The underworld?" he asked.

  "You should have enough good sense to be afraid of Mictlan." 

  "Yes," Teomitl said. "I'm afraid. But don't the courageous go on, even in the face of fear?"

  Again, an unexpected answer. There was obviously more to him than his arrogance, and that had to be the reason Ceyaxochitl had sent him to me.

  But I still didn't know what to do with him.

  "I can help," Teomitl said. "I can do better than this."

  I was going to regret it. But still… "Very well," I said. "Go back into the girls' calmecac. See if you can find some trail, or someone who's seen something. That nahual didn't enter here through the main gate, and we still don't know how it left the building." What in the Fifth World had happened to that beast? At least, it would keep Teomitl busy for a while.

  Teomitl nodded. If he was excited, he let nothing of that show on his face, just went rigid, like a warrior taking orders from his commander. 

  "I'll be back," he said.

  As he walked past, a tendril of something brushed me. I narrowed my gaze, opening up my priest-senses. A slight, almost transparent veil of magic hung around Teomitl: not nahual, not underworld magic, but something tantalisingly familiar. Something… 

  The more I tried to bring it into focus, the more it slipped away from my mind. 

  "Teomitl!" I called.

  He turned, halfway through the courtyard. "Yes?"

  It was as if something had reached out, and brushed against his whole body, leaving an intricate network of marks over his skin. It didn't look harmful. Quite the reverse, in fact: it was an elaborate protection spell, one I had never seen. 

  "No, nothing. Be careful," I said, finally.

  "He's an interesting man," Ezamahual said to me after Teomitl had left. "A bit abrasive, but interesting."
  I nodded. "He must have stories to tell."

  Ezamahual's lean, dour face lit up. "He's heard tales of the jungles to the south, and he's even met a merchant who went north, into Tarascan land. But he's not boasting. Just sharing." His unquestioning, almost boyish enthusiasm was endearing. In many ways, Ezamahual reminded me of myself at a younger age, when everything in the priesthood was still a wonder, opening pathways that radiated through the whole of the universe.

  "I imagine Teomitl hasn't seen many things himself, though," I pointed out.

  Ezamahual shrugged. "Second-hand accounts are better than nothing. And he's too young, in any case."

  With a jolt, I realised that Teomitl had to be at least four years younger than Ezamahual: an adolescent, barely out of childhood. "Yes," I said, finally. "He's very young."

  Ezamahual shifted position slightly. "He'll have time to see the world," he said, always pragmatic. "Warriors travel quite a bit." 

  They did. Most battlefields those days were further and further away from Tenochtitlan. Perhaps, one day, the fabled jungles, where the quetzal birds roamed free, would be part of the Mexica Empire. And Teomitl would have taken his place in their conquest. 

  None of my concern now. I had other things to do, like try to see Neutemoc and coerce him into admitting the truth about his relationship with Eleuia.

 

I walked back to the Imperial Palace on my own, under the light of late afternoon. Outside the Jaguar House, some sort of ceremony was going on. Three warriors and three sacred courtesans were going through the steps of a dance, to the piercing, slow tune of flutes: the jaguar pelts the warriors wore mingled with the courtesans' garish cotton skirts, weaving a pattern like a spell cast over the world. 

  Among the crowd that watched the dance, several faces stood out: a young girl of noble birth, her face flushed with lust, and a scruffy, ageless man, his face covered in grime, the wooden collar of a slave around his neck. His expression was hard to decipher, but I thought it was hatred. Odd.

  I did not dwell on it for long: I elbowed my way out of the crowd, and made my way to the display platform in front of the Imperial Palace.

  But when I arrived, Neutemoc was not there any more.

  Stifling a curse, I paced up and down among the cages, drawing glances and a few jeers from the prisoners awaiting trial. My brother wasn't anywhere to be found.

  "Excuse me," I asked one of Neutemoc's former neighbours in captivity. "The Jaguar Knight who was here…?"

  The prisoner, a middle-aged freeman with a tattered loincloth, spat at my feet. I didn't step back. I had nothing to do with his case, and so could do little to him. And he knew it. Intimidation was the only strategy possible.

  After a while, he shrugged. "They took him for questioning."

  "They?" I asked, with the first stirrings of fear in my belly.

  "The magistrate and some good-for-nothing, fancy priest."

  Nezahual. The servant of the High Priest of Tlaloc, the one who wanted my brother convicted at all costs.

  "Thank you," I said, and I climbed the rest of the steps into the palace.

  Like the Great Temple, it was a huge complex: a maze of gardens, private apartments and sumptuous rooms. On the ground floor were the courts of justice and the state rooms; on the upper floor, the apartments of Emperor Axayacatl-tzin, and of the Rulers of Texcoco and Tlacopan, the other partners in the Triple Alliance that kept the Mexica Empire strong.

  I headed straight for the military courts. The vast, raftered room was deserted: I made my way towards the back, and the patio opening on the gardens. Only one magistrate remained: an old man sitting on a reed mat and dictating notes to a clerk. 

  "And you would be?" he asked peevishly.

  I didn't know him, but then my cases seldom came to a military court. "I'm Acatl. I'm looking for a Jaguar Knight."

  The magistrate sneezed, turned to his clerk with his eyebrows raised. The clerk said, "He's being heard in the Imperial Audience." 

  What?
It wasn't possible. The Imperial Courts were reserved for grave crimes that touched on the security of the Empire. 

  "It's not that serious," I said, when words came back to me.

  The clerk shrugged. "It is, when the High Priest of the Storm Lord becomes involved."

  I cursed under my breath, consigning politics and politicians to the depths of Mictlan. "Where is the audience?" I asked. 

  "Closed audience," the clerk said. He laid his writing reed on top of his maguey-fibre paper, and looked at me. "No one comes in." 

  "But I'm in charge of the investigation," I protested.

  "Not any more, it would seem," the clerk said. He might have been sorry, though it was hard to tell. I wanted to scream, to tear something, anything to lessen the growing feeling of frustration in my chest. 

  "An important case?" the old magistrate asked. Beneath the rheumy veil, his gaze was still sharp.

  I didn't want to discuss the details of the inquiry with a stranger. "Very important," I said.

  He tapped his cane against the stone floor, in a gesture eerily reminiscent of Ceyaxochitl. "Supernatural case, eh? That's why you'd be involved. Though the High Priest…" He looked at me again. "I'm not without influence myself," he said.

  Hardly daring to hope, I asked, "Can you get me into the Imperial Audience?"

  He coughed. "No," he said. "I won't waste my influence on a guilty man."

  "I don't know whether he's guilty. There's barely enough evidence," I said, a hollow growing in my heart. I didn't know what to think any more. I had few leads, and every time I seized hold of one, things seemed to become worse.

  "That's not what I heard," the magistrate said. "It seems to be damaging, the situation they've found him in."

  "Yes, but I don't…" I started, then caught myself. Whatever I admitted to couldn't make things worse. "He's my brother. I can't let him fall because of politics."

  The old magistrate watched me, as unmoving as the statues of the gods in the temple. "The Emperor's Justice is swift," the old magistrate said. "But not that swift. It will take at least another three days of audiences for the Revered Speaker's representatives to reach a decision. If you have any evidence, you may bring it to me. Ask for Pinahui-tzin." 

  "What kind of evidence?" I asked.

  "Proof of his innocence, or of someone else's guilt," Pinahui-tzin said. 

  "In a bare handful of days?" It was hope, of a kind, but barely within my reach, unless Chicomecoatl, Seven Serpent, saw fit to bless me with Her luck.

  Pinahui-tzin rapped his cane on the floor: a parent scolding a disobedient child. "I'm no maker of miracles, young man. I offer you a chance. Whether you take it is your own problem."

  I nodded. I had no real choice. But I prayed that Pinahui-tzin was right, and that Neutemoc would survive a few more days. 

  Otherwise I couldn't see myself telling the news to Huei, or to Mihmatini.

 

I did try to locate the Imperial Audience, but Pinahui-tzin had been right: the guards wouldn't let anyone in, not even me.

  The Duality curse politics and politicians. If Neutemoc was innocent– 

  You don't know that, my inner voice pointed out to me.

  No, I didn't. But let oblivion take me if I allowed Neutemoc to die because of priestly politics.

  I left the Imperial Palace in a sour mood, and headed back to my temple. In front of the Jaguar House, the dance had ended and the dancers had left. The scruffy slave was still there, though the two guards at the entrance pretended not to see him.

  After my first aborted attempt at the House, I hadn't come back – if I thought about it, more out of fear than out of genuine reasons. But time was growing short for Neutemoc. Already the sun was low in the sky, and night would soon fall.

  I walked straight to one of the guards and bowed to him.

  He was dressed in full Jaguar regalia, in a uniform even more sumptuous than Neutemoc's. The jaguar skin covering him had no visible seams: it wrapped around him tightly, the jaguar's skin fitting tightly around his own head. A plume of red, emerald-green and blue feathers protruded from between the jaguar's ears; and his face between the jaguar's jaws was painted in an intricate red pattern. In one of his hands, the knight held a spear; in the other a shield covered with red feathers. He looked at me, puzzled, as if an insect had suddenly elected to speak to him.

  Sometimes, I remembered why I hated warriors, and Jaguar and Eagle Knights worst of all. "I want to speak to a Jaguar Knight," I said. 

  The guard shook his head, and subtly moved to bar my way. Nothing unexpected, sadly. "Your kind isn't allowed in here." 

  "I know," I said, exasperated by the thoughtless slight. Only Jaguar Knights could enter the House. "But you can at least tell me whether he's here."

  The guard looked thoughtful, probably deciding whether I would leave faster if he answered me than if he didn't.

  "His name is Mahuizoh," I snapped. "I don't know his calpulli." From the corner of my eye, I saw the ill-kempt slave was leaning forward, suddenly interested. 

  The guard shrugged. "We have several of those."

  "I know." Two, according to Teomitl's research. "Unfortunately…" I started, and realised that admitting to lack of knowledge would allow him to dismiss me. "He has a sister in the girls' calmecac." 

  "Mahuizoh of the Coatlan calpulli?" the slave said, his mouth yawning wide open. Half his teeth were missing – knocked out, by the jagged looks of the remains – and the others were stained as black as dried blood. He breathed into my face the rankness of someone who hadn't washed body or teeth for several days. I recoiled. 

  The guard slammed his spear on the ground. "Huacqui. Be silent." 

  The slave smiled. "I don't see why I should. The mighty Mahuizoh got me thrown out of the Brotherhood, didn't he?"

  "Be silent," the guard said, raising his spear, but Huacqui leapt back, with more agility than I would have credited him with. 

  "Let me tell you about Mahuizoh and his high standards of behaviour. He gets me expelled from the Knights on a trifle–" 

  The guard growled, but he was clearly unwilling to abandon his post. "You stole from your comrades, Huacqui. That's an offence." 

  Huacqui cackled. "Yes, yes," he said. "But Mahuizoh… he enjoys his women, doesn't he?"

  My heart gave a lurch in my chest. "What do you mean, he enjoys his women?"

  "The talk of our clan," Huacqui said. "He has his own little prostitute in the girls' calmecac–"
  "He has a sister," I said.

  "A convenient excuse. He'd have found another if she hadn't been there. He's been sleeping with that priestess for ever." Huacqui stamped on the ground with both feet. "And he gets the honour and the glory, while I have to sell myself as a slave to earn a living."

  "You were always too lazy for your own good," the guard snapped. "And there is no truth – none at all, do you hear? – in those rumours." That last was obviously addressed to me, but in the tense features of the guard's face I read the exact opposite of what he wanted me to believe.