Obsidian & Blood (137 page)

  “There's magic involved, to put the shard straight into the heart with so little damage to the skin.” I closed my hand around the shard. I had handled obsidian blades before. This felt wrong – too smooth, too charged with latent power. I had felt this once before, but… “There is underworld magic in this, but I don't know what kind exactly. Not yet,” I said.

  “Do you want to see the body?” Macihuin asked.

  We moved from the courtyard to the inside of the house, where two guards watched over the victim's body.

  There was not much to see. It lay on the reed mat in the bedroom, its face bearing the blank expression of corpses. Behind it, the rich fresco on the adobe wall depicted Tezcatlipoca, God of War and Fate, and His eternal enemy Quetzalcoatl, God of Creation and Knowledge. Tezcatlipoca's clawed hands carried the obsidian mirror that held His power, and His face was creased in savage laughter, as if the death amused Him. Quetzalcoatl stood next to Him, holding a skull in His hand. His eyes were sad.

  Macihuin's guards had opened up the chest to remove the shard: jagged cuts marked the edge of the wound, and the strong smell reminded me of the altar room of a great temple, encrusted with the blood of hundreds of sacrifices.

  The heart had been cut in two, but everything else seemed normal. I had seen enough open chests to learn something of human bodies.

  Macihuin said, “His name was Huitxic. He was a warrior and a respected member of his clan. Beyond that, I know nothing of why he might have such a shard in his heart. I was hoping you'd tell me.”

  I could sense his impatience, his worry. For him, this murder involving magical obsidian was unfamiliar territory, the intrusion of something dangerous into his life. For me…I did not know the dead man. However, the shard was all too familiar: seven years ago, I had found a similar one in my student Payaxin's chest.

  “It's from the Wind of Knives.” I felt a chill in my heart as I told him this. “The guardian who sees that the boundary between the underworld and the world of the living is maintained.”

  “The Wind of Knives? And why should He come here and kill Huitxic?” Macihuin's face had hardened, but I could hear the fear in his voice. He had probably hoped I would deny the underworld's involvement in this death, that I would say it was a purely mundane murder. No such luck.

  “Huitxic must have transgressed,” I said. “He must somehow have blurred the line between the underworld and the mortal world.”

  Macihuin's gaze would not meet mine. He had sounded far too worried, even for such an unusual death. “What are you not telling me?” I asked, softly.

  At length he said, “He's not the first man to die like that. The first were dismissed as heart attacks. This one would have been, too, if the neighbours had not heard the screams.”

  I did not like this. It was one thing for the Wind to kill a man, but several of them? “How many have there been?”

  “Two before this one. They all had the same mark, but I did not make the connection until this death, and they were buried normally. They were warriors all,” Macihuin said. “Pochta had just taken his first prisoner, and shaved his childhood hair. But Itlani, the first one, was a
tequiua
.”

  A
tequiua
. One entitled to tribute. An important man, then. I shook my head in disgust. “Three deaths.”

  “Yes, and not peasants' deaths either. I need explanations, Acatl. And fast. If they have indeed transgressed, I need to know how.”

  “We all need to know,” I said, softly. “If those dead men have summoned anything from the underworld, it is a danger to us all.” I knew what kind of monsters peopled each level of the underworld: beasts of shadows feeding on human flesh, giant birds that ate human eyes, monsters standing on two deformed legs, with claws instead of hands. The thought of their walking among us was not a pleasant one.

  The Wind of Knives would kill the human transgressors, but His role ended there. It was priests and especially Guardians who kept the balance of the world, by preventing monsters from coming among us.

  I sighed. I stared at the obsidian shard I still held in my hand. The Wind of Knives. After my student Payaxin had died, something had withered in me. I could no longer trust the Wind of Knives, not when He killed so casually.

  Still… Still, I was a priest for the Dead, and responsibilities could not be evaded so casually.

  “I will summon the Wind of Knives,” I said. “And see what He has to tell us.”

  “Good,” Macihuin said. “I will look further into the registers, and find out what I can about those men.” He moved away from me, and then seemed to change his mind. “Oh, I forgot.” He gestured, and one of the guards handed him something. “This was around his neck.”

  It was a small jade pendant with two glyphs engraved on it. “Four Wind,” I said aloud. “His birth date?”

  Macihuin shook his head. “The register says he was born on the day One Rabbit.”

  “Odd,” I said.

  We finally parted ways at the entrance of the house; Macihuin walked back to his tribunal, and I went back to my temple. As I walked through streets clogged with people, from warriors in feather uniforms to humble peasants wearing only loincloths, I dwelled on the summoning I would have to perform.

  I did not look forward to it.

 

Priests for the Dead lived alone. There were plenty of temples like mine within the city of Colhuacan, hidden at the end of small alleyways, their facades unadorned. Inside, a single priest would wait for the bereaved. Sometimes a student waited as well, learning the craft of his master. I had taken on no one since Payaxin's death.

  In my temple, I laid the shard on a low table. The midmorning sun created further reflections on the obsidian, images with glimpses of deaths: warriors dying ignominiously of old age or sickness, far from the glorious battlefields, women clutching their chests as they fell, their faces contorted in pain.

  The underworld. The Wind of Knives.

  Four Wind. If it was not the dead man's birth date… I knew only one other thing it could mean. Four Wind was the day on which the Second Age of the World had come to an end.

  There had been Four Ages before our own, each named after the day that had seen it end. Each Age had been created by a god, who then became the sun in the sky, the giver of warmth and life. Different people had worshipped each Sun – until the gods grew tired and ended each Age in a cataclysm.

  This Age was Four Movement, the Fifth Age, and it was said that Tezcatlipoca, God of the Smoking Mirror, would end it in an earthquake, tumbling the Fifth Sun from the sky, and rising himself as Sun of the Sixth Age.

  But why would a dead man wear this around his neck?

  The Wind of Knives would perhaps know, if I dared to ask Him.

  I could wait to summon Him, always running from that moment when I would speak the words – knowing that if I did anything wrong the Wind would kill me as He had killed Payaxin.

  No, better to do it now, and have it behind me.

 

I went out again, to the marketplace. It took me some time to wend my way through the various stalls, every one of them displaying more outlandish things than the others: feather cloaks, yellow makeup for women's faces, embroidered tunics with gold and silver threads…

  I reached the district of bird-sellers. Raucous cries echoed around me as I went from stall to stall. I finally found what I wanted: a small greyish owl in a wicker cage, dwarfed by the other, more colourful birds the seller kept for their feathers. I bartered a copper bowl for the owl. It kept hooting on the way back – clearly it did not care much for daylight.

  I had not summoned anything from the underworld since Payaxin's death, and especially not the Wind of Knives. I had resumed my life without Him.

  I knelt behind the small altar, and opened the wickerwork chest that held my own possessions. Inside was a jade plate, much bigger than the pendant on Huitxic's corpse: it depicted the voyage of the soul through the nine levels of the underworld, from the crossing of the River of Souls to the Throne of Mictlantecuhtli, the God of the Dead. I also took out a small bone carving of a spider.

  On the altar I laid both these things, the shard of obsidian, and the wicker cage with the owl. And something else, something I had kept all those years: another obsidian shard, the one I had found in Payaxin's heart.

  The owl struggled as I opened its chest with the obsidian knife, but I had had years of practice. Blood spurted out, staining my hands and my tunic; I retrieved the heart on the tip of my blade, and laid it on the altar. Then I traced a square with the blood, and drew diagonal lines across it. I ended my drawing in the centre of the square, laying the knife point near the middle of the jade carving, on the fourth level of the underworld.

  My hands shook as I recited the words to complete the summoning.

 

 

  At first nothing happened and I thought I had failed, but then darkness flowed, catching me in its grasp. The hollow in my stomach was an all-too-familiar feeling, dredging up old memories, old fears.

  A wind rose, whispering in my ears words of mourning.

  The Wind of Knives coalesced into existence behind the altar. I saw nothing but a blurred, shining impression of shadows, planes of obsidian shards making the vague humanoid shape, a monstrous head, and eyes that glittered. And I felt His presence in my mind, battering at my own barriers, trying to get in. But I would not yield.

  “You summon me,” the Wind of Knives said. His voice was the lament of dead souls.

  “My Lord. I need answers.”

  “You are brave.” He sounded amused. “I answer to no one.”

  As I well knew. He did not answer, even to pity.

  “But you may ask, all the same.”

  I raised my trembling hand, pointed it at the two obsidian shards lying side by side on the altar. “One of those was found in a dead man's body this morning. I want to know why you killed him.”

  One hand glided towards the altar. The fingers were blades of obsidian, each catching the sun's rays and making the light cold and lifeless. They closed around Huitxic's shard, lifted it to the light.

  “That is not mine,” the Wind of Knives said.

  It had to be His. “I don't–”

  “You don't believe me? That is a dangerous path for a priest of the Dead.”

  I shook my head. “I–”

  He extended His hands towards me. Each held a shard of obsidian. The leftmost one, the one Macihuin had given me, glinted green even in that cold light. The rightmost one, which I had salvaged from Payaxin's body, did not. “This is mine,” the Wind of Knives said, lifting His right hand.

  “You left it in Payaxin's body.”

  “Your student had transgressed,” the Wind of Knives said. “You know the law.”

  “Yes,” I said, bitterly. “I know the law. He meant only to summon a ghost, to comfort a widow.”

  “Then he should have paid more attention to his ritual. He should not have summoned me,” the Wind of Knives said.

  I could have argued for hours over Payaxin's death, and still I would have gained nothing. So I held back. “Then whose is it?” I asked.

  “Any priest can have access to magical obsidian.” He shrugged. “It is none of my concern.”

  But His voice did not resound as before. If He had been human I would have said He was lying. I knew better, of course, than to accuse Him, even though Payaxin's death still filled me, still clamoured to be accounted for.

  “Is that all? Didn't you know the dead man?” I struggled to remember his name. “Huitxic. Does he mean nothing to you? Pochta? Itlani? Had they transgressed?” All He cared about were rules.

  “I did not kill him,” the Wind of Knives said. And He did sound sincere, gods take me. “Nor those other men.”

  “And the pendant? The pendant with the Second Age of the world?” I asked, but He was shaking His head in a blur of obsidian planes.

  “I have given you enough.”

  “I need to know whether they have transgressed,” I said. “What they have summoned.”

  “They summoned nothing from the underworld,” the Wind of Knives said, fading already. “And I end all transgressions.”

  And then He was gone. I remained alone, shaking with the memory of that presence.

  I slowly put away Payaxin's shard, and cleaned the altar, wondering what the Wind had not told me.

 

“The deaths definitely are connected,” Macihuin said to me that afternoon, as we walked on the canal banks. He sounded worried. “I went to the temple, and the registers. The dead men are noted as members of a religious sect.”

  “What kind of sect?”
  “The Brotherhood of the Four Ages,” Macihuin said.
  Four Ages. The pendant made sense. I told Macihuin that, and he nodded.
  “Yes, there are four members noted in the registers. I found where the last man lives.”
  “I suggest you keep a watch on him,” I said.   “Possibly.” Macihuin scratched his face. “And on your side?”
  “They didn't transgress. At least according to the Wind of Knives. And He didn't kill them either.”
  Macihuin's gaze moved away from me. “So we do not have monsters abroad?”
  “No,” I said. It was a relief, but still…if the Wind of Knives had not killed them, someone else had. And I didn't relish the thought. A sect. Well, there was someone I could ask about sects. Again, not a pleasant thought. “I know a woman,” I said cautiously. “She could tell us more about those men.”
  “Who–?”
  “She's the Guardian of Colhuacan,” I said, darkly.
  Macihuin grimaced. “I had no idea you knew her.”
  I shrugged. “I met her a long time ago. I don't know whether she will remember me. But part of her role is watching over the religious sects – in case one of them upsets the balance of the world and she has to step in and restore order.”
  Macihuin pondered this for a moment before saying, “But she is only accountable to the other Guardians in the Empire. If there has been no transgression, she may not want to waste time with a murder investigation.”
  “No,” I said. “She may not. But it is worth a try.”
  I left Macihuin to his own devices. He was going to interview the last survivor, and I was going to find out all I could about this sect, and why its members had died.
  Unfortunately, that might involve going straight to the person who was killing them. For Ceyaxochitl was known over Colhuacan for another thing than her role as Guardian: many years ago, she had dispatched the members of a harmless sect, coldly going after them and opening their chests with obsidian blades.
  She had said they were a possible danger to the Empire, and the matter had been hushed.
  She had called it justice.
  I called it murder.