Obsidian & Blood

FOURTEEN

Lord Death's Gift

The back of the room held a couple of rush brooms: Acamapichtli picked up one, and handed the other back to me.

Under other circumstances I would have protested, but we had already made clear the necessity of the journey.

"You want to dedicate this place to Tlaloc?"

"As small a space as I can." He grimaced. His eyes kept slipping to the entrance-curtain, as if he expected someone to interrupt us at any time. "Because of the plague, it's been touched by Chalchiuhtlicue, which should help. But still, if I can avoid Her…"

"She's your god's wife," I said, though I wasn't entirely surprised. Tlaloc and Chalchiuhtlicue formed a… tense couple, always ready to oppose one another. He had ended the Third Age, the one ruled by Chalchiuhtlicue; She had opposed Him when He'd attempted to rule the Fifth World.

I swept the room in silence – I hadn't swept anything since the days of my novitiate, and the dust, pushed back to each corner of the room, brought back memories of the month of Drought, Toxcatl, with everything cleansed for the arrival of the gods, and the palpable tension in the air, like moments before the storm…

"Aya! Paper flags stand in the four directions

In the place of weeping, the place of mists

I bring water to the temple courtyard…"

Acamapichtli knelt, and started tracing two glyphs in the beaten earth – Four Rain, the Second Age, the one ruled by Tlaloc. Then, with a swift, decisive movement, he raised the knife, and slit his wrist – not a superficial cut that would have nicked both veins, but deep enough to hit the artery. It happened so suddenly the blood was already spilling on the ground before I could even so much as move.

"You're mad," I said.

"Desperate," he grated, keeping a wary eye on the entrance-curtain. "Get inside that glyph, Acatl."

"But–" The blood pooled, lazily, at his feet, spreading into the furrows of the glyphs – shimmering with layer after layer of raw magic. Bright red blood, coming from the heart instead of going to it – pressing against the edge of the wound with every passing moment, pumping itself out of the body in great spurts. Acamapichtli was already pale, and swaying.

He was chanting as the blood pooled – not slowly and stately, but a staccato of words, the beat of frenzied drums before the battle was joined – a series of knife stabs into a corpse's chest.

"You destroyed the Third World

The Age of Rain, the Age of Mist and Weeping

The Age of your unending bounty

Drought swept across the earth,

The fruit of the earth lay panting, covered with dust."

And, as the blood hit the floor in great spurts, it turned to mist and smoke – with a faint hint of the stale odour of marshes – sweeping across the room, subsuming everything, until it seemed that nothing of the Fifth World was left. The glyphs shone blue and white for a bare moment, painful across my field of vision, and then faded, and when I looked up again, we were standing in churned mud, at the foot of a verdant hill.

Acamapichtli, however, had lost consciousness – his blood still spurting out from the open wound. Suppressing a curse against illprepared fools, I retrieved my obsidian knife from his limp hand, and slashed the bottom of his cloak into shreds – it was either that or my cloak, and I had no wish to argue with Ichtaca about damaging the High Priest's regalia. I worked quickly – there was no time – pressing my fingers against the nearby muscles to stem the flow of blood. He'd lose the hand – there was no way this would heal gracefully, not after he'd spent so much time bleeding.

At last, I was done, and looked critically at my handiwork – I was no priest of Patecatl, and the gods knew it showed. At least he was no longer bleeding, though it felt I'd spent an eternity with my fingers pressed against his cold skin. Now to make a rudimentary bandage…

I–

Was it just me, or was his wound no longer bleeding – the edges far closer together than they should have been?

The air was crisp and clear; I breathed it in, feeling it burning in my lungs, tingling against the mark in my hand. I'd expected to be down on my knees, struggling to remain conscious – as I had the last time I had visited a god's country.

But nothing happened: the land around me was verdant, endless marshes cut through with canals and streams. In the distance, I could barely make out ghostly silhouettes engaged in a ball-game: the dead who had drowned or died of suffocation, or of water-linked diseases, and who had found their final destination in Tlalocan.

Among the myriad destinations for the Dead, the land of the Blessed Drowned was a pleasant paradise – never lacking food or rain, the maize always blossoming on time, the reeds abundant. A warrior would have chafed, but for me, the son of peasants, the wet air reminded me of my faraway childhood spent on the edge of the lake, and even the ghostly boats passing each other in the canals brought familiar memories of rowing at night – when the sky darkened to two red lips above and below the horizon, and everything seemed to hang suspended on the edge of the Fifth World.

A hand shot out, and grabbed my ankle – I all but jumped up, before realising it was merely Acamapichtli, using me as a leverage to stand up. His face was still pale, but the wound I'd tied off was closed, sinking to nothing against his skin.

"You're lucky," I said. "Opening up an artery tends to be more fraught with consequences."

He shrugged – characteristically careless and arrogant. "Different rules."

I shifted my cane in a squelch of mud. "If you say so." He had still spent the blood, regardless, and I very much doubted he would get that back. "And those different rules also explain why I can breathe here? Last time, in the Southern Hummingbird's heartland–"

Acamapichtli grinned, unveiling teeth that seemed much sharper and yellower than before. "We're not interlopers here, Acatl. I asked the god for His permission, and He has granted it to us."

"Great," I said. Even with the god's permission, I still felt drained. I leant on the cane, watching the hill. It rippled under the wind, and…

Wait a moment. "That's not grass," I said. It rippled and flexed in the breeze, as green as the tail feathers of quetzal birds – pockmarked with thousands of raised dots, swept through with yellow and brown marbling.

Lizard skin.

Acamapichtli grinned again, an expression I was starting to thoroughly dislike. "Of course not. Come on. The god is up there."

Of course. Gingerly, I set out; when the cane touched the skin, I felt a resistance – not at all what I'd expected from grass or earth. It smelled… musty, like dried skins, and it bounced under our steps with alarming regularity. As we climbed higher past the darker streaks, I caught sight of folds and sharper patches – places where one set of skin overrode another – darker patches with the splayed shapes of claws, and larger pockmarks, and almond-shaped holes where the eyes should have been, opening only on blind earth. I didn't even want to know how many lizards had died to make up the hill.

It would have been an arduous climb, even had we both been fit – which neither of us was. I leant on my cane, and though Acamapichtli arrogantly strode ahead, he was pale-faced, controlling the trembling of his hands only through an effort of will: I could see the quiver in his fingers, quickly masked.

We didn't speak and the only sounds were flocks of herons, wheeling around us with harsh cries, and the distant sound of thunder, like the roaring of jaguars. As we crested a ridge about halfway up, we saw Tlalocan spread out under us, a mass of green and yellow shimmering in the sunlight, the distant rectangles of Floating Gardens interspersed with canals, with the shades of drowned peasants harvesting maize from the eternally ripe sheaves of corn, forever happy in Tlaloc's paradise.

The thunder peals got louder and, as we ascended on the path, storm-clouds moved to cover the sky, darkening the air all around us. I glanced at Acamapichtli, but he was still looking stubbornly ahead.

Tlaloc had given His permission, which meant we walked here without gagging or shedding flesh, but that didn't mean He wasn't saving things for later. I remembered the last time I'd seen the god in the Fifth World: the shadowy figure perched on the shoulder of his child agent; His fanged mouth level with the child's ears; the voice that had shaken like thunder; the words that dripped poison after poison – and I, sinking down with my brother's body in my arms, desperately struggling to come up, to breathe air again…

Ahead, the path flared; the texture of the ground under our feet had subtly changed. I paused to catch my breath and saw the curling pattern beneath us: a single skin going all the way to the top, and…

Outlined against the darkened sky were the head and jaws of a huge snake, its crown of feathers ruffled in the rising wind, its eyes the same bright red as Acamapichtli's blood, its fangs shining like pearls in the muck.

Acamapichtli was already headed towards the snake; I followed after taking the time to catch my breath – gods, how I hated that every step seemed to cost me, that even lifting the cane seemed to quench the breath in my lungs.

A familiar litany for the Dead was running in my mind – though my patron god Mictlantecuhtli wasn't there, couldn't ever be there.

"We live on Earth, in the Fifth World

Not forever, but a little while

As jade breaks, as gold is crushed

We wither away, like jade we crumble

Not forever on Earth, but a little while…"

The snake was half-sunk within the earth, its head facing the sky and the storm-clouds – so that its open jaws formed a cave. The higher ring of fangs looked as though they'd clamp shut any moment, and the lower ring was pierced through in the centre, leaving a space just large enough for a man to squeeze through, so that Acamapichtli and I had to enter single file, instinctively bowed, as if to protect ourselves against the fall of the huge teeth glinting above us.

Inside, it was dark and cool, smelling faintly of moist earth, with the pungent aftertaste of copal incense, a smell that clung to the inside of my mouth and throat as if I'd smelled nothing else for days and days – as I might have, for who knew what time the gods considered Their own?

"Ah, Acamapichtli," a voice said. I'd expected it to be sombre, vindictive – the way I still remembered it in my nightmares – yet while it was deep, reverberating in the darkness, there was nothing in it but mild interest, the same one a priest might have shown to an unexpected pilgrim. "What a pleasure to see you."

Acamapichtli had removed his sandals and set them aside; and he was crouching, his eyes on the ground – not grovelling, as he might have done before the Revered Speaker, but still showing plenty of respect. I crouched next to him, setting my sandals aside.

"And you brought company, too," Tlaloc said. He spoke in accents similar to the Texcocan ones, reminding me incongruously of Nezahual-tzin – or perhaps my mind superimposed the accent afterwards, struggling for a human equivalent to the speech of the gods.

"My Lord." I looked down and did not move, not even when footsteps echoed under the ceiling of the cave, and a shadow fell over me.

Tlaloc laughed, and it was thunder over the lake. "Oh, do get up. I'm not Huitzilpochtli, and there is no need for ceremony, not for high priests."

Slowly, carefully, I pulled myself upwards with the help of my cane, and looked at Tlaloc.

He was tall, impossibly so, towering over us in the dim light – but then all gods were, especially in Their own lands. I caught only glimpses of His aspect: a quetzal-feather headdress streaming in the wind like unbound hair, fangs glistening in a huge mouth, a cloak that shifted and shone with the iridescence of a thousand raindrops, before I looked down. He was the rain and the thunder: savage, cruel and wild; one of the Old Ones who had been there since the First Age. Staring straight at Him would have been like looking at the face of the Fifth Sun.

"You know why we are here," Acamapichtli said.

"I know you are desperate," Tlaloc said. "Not many people come offering heart's blood." A touch of malice crept into His voice. "As your companion said, you are lucky not to have lost the hand, or worse."

"I live for Your favour."

Again, that terrible laughter – thunder and rain, and the sounds of a storm heard from a boat adrift on the lake. "We both know you don't."

Acamapichtli didn't move. "I respect Your power, and Your will."

"Yes. That you do."

I hadn't spoken up – I had to steer this conversation back to its proper goal, or they would be talking to each other for hours to come. But the prospect of doing so, to have Tlaloc's undivided attention fixated on me, was enough to cause nausea in the pit of my stomach.

What in the Fifth World had possessed me to come here?

"My Lord," I said. My voice was shaking; I quelled it, as best as I could. "There is an epidemic in the city."

Even looking at the ground, I felt His attention shifting to me – the weight of His gaze, the air around me turning tight and warm, like the approach to a storm. "There is." His voice was mildly curious. "As, as High Priest of Lord Death, no doubt you feel it concerns you."

"It concerns us all," I said. The pressure around me was growing worse. Now I knew why Acamapichtli had gone so strangely inarticulate.

"Unless it is Your divine will," Acamapichtli said, from some faraway place.

This time, Tlaloc's laughter seemed to course through me – through my ears and into my ribcage, lifting my heart clear of the chest and squeezing it until it bled. The ground rose up to meet me,and I fell down – pain radiating from my left knee, echoing the frantic beat within my chest.

"My will? You know nothing about My will, save what you see in the Fifth World."

"I need to know…" Acamapichtli's voice drifted from very far away, but I was too weary to focus on anything but the grooves in the ground under my hands, and my cane – lying discarded some distance away.

"Know what?" Tlaloc's voice was mocking again.

"If we're setting ourselves against You." His words fell, one by one, into the open maws of silence.

"What a dutiful High Priest," Tlaloc said, at last. "Your companion, of course, isn't so enthusiastic." I'd expected malice, but it was a simple statement of fact.

"He's often a fool." Acamapichtli's voice came from somewhere above me. "But he means well."

I managed to move – pulling myself into a foetal position, and then raising my head up. Acamapichtli's bare feet seemed to be the only things within my field of vision. "Are we – setting – ourselves against – Your wife?" Each word, like raw chillies, seemed to leave a burning trail at the back of my throat.

There was a pause. "No," Tlaloc said. "You're not setting yourself against either Me or My wife."

"Someone – is using Her magic." I managed to extend my hands towards the cane, hooking the wood with trembling fingers – and haltingly started to bring it back towards me. If I could get up, if I–

"Yes." Tlaloc did not offer any more information – and Acamapichtli, the Duality curse him, didn't seem inclined to question this further.

"I don't understand."

The air tightened around me again. "There is nothing to understand."

And there was something – a familiar tone to the voice, even though it was deeper and stronger than any human voice: an emotion I'd heard all too many times.

"My Lord–"

"There is nothing to understand, priest. Now leave." And there it was again: something I ought to have been able to put a name to, but with only the voice to go on, I might as well have been blind and deaf. Something was wrong. Something–

I needed to see – even if it burned my eyes, I needed to see His face.

The cane was almost within my reach… A last flick of my fingers brought it spinning towards me, raising a cloud of dust from the packed earth of the cave – and a sudden whiff of copal incense from the wood, a smell that didn't belong in Tlalocan, neither in the verdant marshes, nor in this dark and humid cave.

Slowly, carefully, I pulled myself up – my hands were shaking worse than ever, and I had to stop and start again more times than I could count. And of course, neither Tlaloc nor Acamapichtli offered any help. "If not Your wife," I said, slowly, "then who is it?"

And, shaking, I raised my eyes towards the hulking shape of the god, catching a glimpse of blue-streaked skin, pocked with dots, of a necklace of jade beads around His neck, each as big as a human skull, of two snakes on either side of the jaw, climbing upwards through the darkened cheeks, their tails wrapped around the eyes in perfect black circles – the eyes…

They were round, like sage seeds, like water drops, the blue of the sky, an instant before it darkened; the colour of lake waters, of turquoise stones, and at their hearts was a single dot of yellow – a kernel of ripe corn, moments before it was gathered up in the harvest, quivering in the warm breeze…

And I knew, in the instant before my vision was finally extinguished and darkness swept across the world in a great wave that swallowed everything up, that I'd been right – that I had read Him right, even though he was a god.

There had been fear in those eyes – not mild worry, nor annoyance at our trespassing, but a fear real enough to grip Tlaloc's whole being.

And, whatever was going on, if it was enough to scare a god, then it was more than enough to scare the wits out of me, too.

I regained consciousness in the Fifth World, my eyes itching as if someone had thrown chilli powder in them. I could see nothing of the world beyond pale shapes against the darkness. I fought an urge to bring my fingers to rub my eyes, knowing it would only make matters worse. It was my own fault for staring so long into the face of a god I didn't worship, and it would pass, in time.

At least, I hoped so.

Distant noises drifted: flutes and drums, and hymns to the Southern Hummingbird. It sounded as though we were back in the palace.

"Acamapichtli?"

I half-expected him to be gone, but finally he answered, his voice coming from somewhere to my left. "I am here."

"What… happened?"

"Nothing of interest." He sounded amused.

"You saw–"

"I didn't see anything."

He hadn't raised his gaze. He hadn't looked his god in the face – it was odd that he wouldn't, but then again, perhaps I was assuming too much from my own relationship to Mictlantecuhtli and His wife. I had never knelt to either Lord or Lady Death, and they would no doubt have laughed if I had removed my sandals and flattened myself on the ground. After all, what need was there for obeisance, when almost everything in the Fifth World descended into Mictlan at the very end?

"Well, what did you see?" Acamapichtli asked.

He hadn't moved to help me. His voice was relaxed, casual, as if I owed him everything – whereas I was the one who could barely see. But surely I didn't have to tell him? What could he do in his current state, hunted down by Tizoc-tzin's men?

But, if I did this – if I withheld information, playing games with the truth – then I was no better than he. "He's afraid," I said.

"Of us? That's ridiculous."

"Of what's going on," I said. "He knows something." Not that we were ever going to find out what: getting information from a god in Their own world was fraught with risk, as we'd amply demonstrated.

Acamapichtli sighed, rather more theatrically than was required. "I have to go. But I'll try to pass a message to my Consort to see if she can help you track down whoever is using Chalchiuhtlicue's magic."

"I thought they'd arrested her," I said.

"Not yet." He sounded smugly satisfied.

"Go… where?"

I imagined more than saw him make a stabbing gesture. "Back to my cell, before my clergy pays the price for my little… escapade."

He sounded almost sincere. "You don't care for your clergy. You never did."

"Don't I?" He laughed, curtly. "You're right. Perhaps I don't. Till we meet again, Acatl."

"Wait," I said. "I can't–" But his footsteps had already moved out of the room, and he wasn't answering me anymore. Which left me alone – within a deserted section of the palace, cordoned off because of the plague.

Great. Now how was I going to get out and find Mihmatini?

I fumbled around, and finally found the cane – by touch more than by sight, since everything was still dim and blurred. Its touch was comforting, but I didn't use it to drag myself up just then – I suspected standing up was going to be near impossible without shaking.

From the lack of sounds nearby, it was the middle or the end of the night. The air was cold, without a trace of warmth, and what little I could see was unrelentingly dark: the middle of the night, then, and I was in no state to walk. And even if I had been, I was half-blind, weak and in no state to find my own way through a deserted section of the palace.

Trust Acamapichtli to abandon me in the middle of nowhere. Although to be fair, he hadn't known I was half-blind.

Fine. Much as I disliked the idea, it made more sense to sleep here. Now if only I could make my way to the wall in order to sleep against something hard…

Rising, under the circumstances, felt a little pointless. Using the cane as a prop, I half-walked, half-dragged myself across the room. At some point, I hit one of the mats, and felt the jewellery scatter with a crunching sound. But, after what felt like an eternity of shaking and dragging myself – to the point my legs barely obeyed me anymore, threatening to collapse altogether – my hands met the solid surface of the wall. I could have embraced it at that point.

Instead, I propped myself against it with the last of my strength, and settled down to sleep.

I fell into darkness. In my dreams, the blurred shapes of the walls around me became the vast, watery shapes of Chalchiuhtlicue's Meadows: deserted Floating Gardens with maize growing in wide clumps, and canals over which hung mist and, in the distance, the silvery shape of a lake, where the ahuizotls – water-beasts – lay in wait, their yellow eyes barely visible below the surface.

There was someone pooling a raft in the canals, well ahead of me. I'd have recognised that haphazard way of rowing anywhere: Teomitl.

I wanted to call out to him, but darkness sucked me in again, and no matter how I called out I couldn't find him again.

Instead, I stood alone in the dark, and gradually became aware that I was not alone. As my eyes became accustomed to what little light there was, I caught a glimpse of polished bone – of a soft light, as yellow as newborn maize, glinting through hollow eye-sockets.

"Acatl," said a voice – one I knew as well as my own.

Mictlantecuhtli. Lord Death, ruler of the house of the fleshless, lord of mysteries and withered songs.

I did not bow, or make obeisance, for this He would not accept. "My Lord," I said. And, more slowly, more carefully, "This is a dream."

"Of course." Mictlantecuhtli said. He sounded amused – not maliciously, like Xochiquetzal or Tlaloc might have –merely like a man taking in a good joke. "We're not there yet."

Not there? "I don't understand," I said, slowly.

"The time of the jaguars, the time of the eagles – when gods will walk the Fifth World once more."

Its very end, and the birth of the Sixth Sun. "When is that?"

"Do you think I would tell you?" Amusement, again.

I knew He wouldn't. He did not gloat, or put Himself or His knowledge forward: what use, since everything came back to Him in the end? "I don't owe You any favours," I said, slowly.

"You never ask for any favours," Lord Death said, and He sounded almost sad. "I'll give you one nevertheless." Before I could say anything, He'd reached out, with fingers of tapered bone, and touched me on the shoulder. Cold spread from the point of contact, not slowly, but in a swift wave of intense pain that seemed to seize every muscle at once, sending me writhing to the ground.

As I lay on the cold, packed earth, breathing dust with every spasmodic struggle to breathe, with darkness barely held at bay, I heard His footsteps: He was standing right by my side, watching. "A gift, keeper of the boundaries," and His voice grew and grew until it became the whole world, and I knew nothing more.

I woke up gasping, in daylight, in a room which smelled of cold ashes and stale copal incense. My eyesight seemed to have returned, at least to some extent. I could see the adobe walls, and the frescoes, but everything was still slightly blurred. I couldn't remember if that had always been the case, or if some of the eye damage had persisted even beyond the events of the night.

My shoulder ached, and I felt… odd, stretched, as if the protection spell had returned, and I lay cocooned in Lord Death's magic. But no, it wasn't quite that.

Something was wrong. I reached out, wincing at the pain, willing all of it to Mictlantecuhtli Lord Death, an offering as suitable as blood, and rubbed the place where He had touched me in the dream.

There were three thin raised welts on my shoulder, almost like the marks of a whip – save that nothing had bled and they did not ache. They were cold to my touch, with the familiar feeling of underworld magic, and they did not seem to have had any effect on me.

Which was, to say the least, unlikely. If this hadn't been an ordinary dream – if Lord Death had been there with me, in this space out of the Fifth World – then He had given me something. A favour, a gift to His High Priest – dangerous, like all divine favours. It would be small, because things made in dreams couldn't endure for long in the Fifth World, but it wouldn't be innocuous.

I dragged myself up once again and went out in the courtyard.

Everything was deserted. The courtyard smelled of dried earth and packed ashes. Overhead, the Fifth Sun was descending towards the horizon, staining the sky with a deep scarlet colour like heart's blood. Using the cane, I made my slow way through the courtyard, and then through to another, and yet another, and they were all equally deserted – no, not quite, for there was the familiar, faint scent of death in the air; of corpses which had just started to cool. Through one entrance-curtain I caught sight of shapes stretched on a reed-mat, moaning and thrashing as if in the grip of a dream.

The sick. The dying. The dead. And I among them, all but blind. What a great combination.

Tlaloc had been afraid. Why – unless this was no ordinary sickness, but one that touched the very fabric of the Fifth World? I didn't like that. Gods were cruel and capricious, but not afraid. Never afraid – unless it was of something or someone more powerful than Them.

Something…

As I walked, fumbling my way through pillared porticoes, through empty courtyards – through the dry smell of dust and the moans of the sick – I slowly became aware that I was not alone. There were voices in my ears – faint at first, but growing in intensity until they seemed to fill the world. There was a smell like dry, stretched skin; and a wind that grew colder and colder; and ghostly shapes, walking by my side, as if exhaled by the underworld. They crowded around me, groping with cold hands, their faces obscured, their arms and legs translucent, like layers of water.

Was this Mictlantecuhtli's gift – to make me see the souls of the slain? But no, I had spells which could do that. Why waste His time giving me something I could attain for myself?

The ghosts didn't go away as I walked, but neither did they grow more solid. The voices wove in and out of my ears, and there was a hollow in my stomach, steadily growing and growing, even as the world wove in and out of focus – perhaps it was my eyes, but everything seemed to be spinning…

With some difficulty, I reached the next courtyard – the last one – crossing over a ghostly river, and found myself face to face with two of the She-Snake's guards, whose spears barred my way out of the wing.

"Look," I said, struggling, for behind the black-painted faces were ghosts, too – singing a wordless lament, whispering words of grief. "I need to get out. I am the High Priest for the Dead, keeper of the boundaries–"

The feeling in my stomach was worse; I wanted to curl up, to close my eyes until it was all over. I–

The boundaries.

I remembered lying on a cold stone floor, with everything spinning in and out of focus, feeling the hollow in my stomach grow and grow until it seemed to swallow me whole. It had been in the instants after the designated Revered Speaker Tizoc-tzin had died – when everything had hung in the balance, and the Fifth World itself had been close to tearing itself apart.

It had been worse, then. I had barely been able to stand up, and we had lain unprotected from the star-demons. Nothing like that here: the Fifth Sun was in the sky, and the star-demons' distant shadows cowering from His radiance.

But still… there were ghosts abroad, and the whispers of the dead, and – soon, perhaps – the panting breaths of beasts of shadow on the prowl.

Something was wrong with the boundaries.

"I need to get out," I said, again, to the guards.

They looked at me as if I were mad, with clearly no intention of letting me move more than a hand-span. "We have orders," they said.

"Then get me the person who gave you the orders."

They looked at each other, and then back at me. I saw ghosts drift between them, drawn like jaguars to a hearth-fire. My clothes were torn and slightly muddy from my visit into Tlalocan, but they were still the regalia of the High Priest for the Dead. "My Lord, we cannot…"

"Get me Quenami," I said, softly.

It might have been the tone, or the remnants of the regalia, but one of the guards left, looking distinctly worried.

In the meantime, I leant against one of the coloured pillars, desperately trying to look nonchalant, but the ghosts still hung in the courtyard like a veil of fog, and the slight nausea at the back of my throat wasn't getting better.

I'd expected Quenami to look smug or satisfied, but when he arrived, he merely looked harried. He wore his most ostentatious clothes – brightly-coloured feathers almost better suited for a Revered Speaker than for a High Priest – and his earlobes glistened with freshly offered blood. "Acatl. What a surprise to see you here." Even his sarcasm sounded muted.

I wasn't in the mood to play the dance of diplomacy. "Look, Quenami. There is an epidemic out here, and I don't need to be confined with the dying."

"Except that you might be sick yourself." His eyes were feverishly bright, his hands steady, but I could read the strain in his bearing.

"Do I look sick to you?"

"You never know. You might have it all the same."

He looked too worried – even for someone who had suffered the debacle in the courtyard. "It's worse, isn't it? It's spreading, and you have no idea how to stop it."

Quenami's head snapped towards me. "What do you know? You've been confined here since yesterday. I know you have. No one has seen you in that time; your own sister admits to knowing nothing of your whereabouts."

"I know enough," I said, softly. Gods, Mihmatini had been looking for me the whole time? She was going to flay my ears the next time we met. "Tell me it's better, that you have it all under control."

As Acamapichtli had; I hated that man's guts, but I had to admit he had a certain ruthless efficiency. Quenami was all bluster. "It's only a matter of time," Quenami said, haughtily. "The Empire is well protected, as you know."

It was – against star-demons and the celestial monsters that would swallow us. But still… still, nothing prevented a resourceful sorcerer from sowing havoc. "You know the Southern Hummingbird won't protect us against a small thing like a plague." To a god, especially a war-god, hundreds of dead meant nothing. The great famine, the great floods, all had happened under the protection of a Revered Speaker. Huitzilpochtli the Southern Hummingbird only guarded from large-scale attacks which would annihilate the Fifth World or the Mexica Empire.

"What do you want, Acatl?"

"What I've told you. I want to get out, and I want to help. That's all. Is it really so hard to understand? I'm not working against the Fifth World."

Unlike you, I wanted to say, but I knew it wasn't the best time for airing this particular grudge.

Quenami looked at me, and back at the courtyard. "It's not safe…"

"No," I said, with a quick shake of my head – I'd never seen him so uncertain, and I wasn't sure what it presaged. "But for all you know, you might have it as well. Tizoc-tzin might have it as well."

"Very well," Quenami said at last. He made it sound like a special favour granted to me – as if he were Revered Speaker, and I a lowly peasant. "You may get out."

I didn't need to be told twice: I walked past the two guards, and came to stand firmly on the side of the healthy, the cane warm in my hands. Quenami made no comment, but let me follow him through a few courtyards – enough for me to realise the palace had grown uncannily silent, as if a cloth had been throw over everything. The servants wove their way among ghosts – not seeing them, but not saying anything in any case – and the few noblemen who were still out hurried past us, intent on not staying out any longer than they had to.

"How much worse is it?" I asked Quenami.

He shrugged – a contained movement, but I could still feel his anxiety. "The She-Snake says he has every thing under control."

Which wasn't the same thing as saying the problem was solved. "And what he has under control…"

Quenami shook his head – of course he wouldn't allow himself to look embarrassed. "About a fifth of the palace has been affected, and it sounds like it's spreading through the city."

"And you still think you can keep a handle on this?"

"Tizoc-tzin thinks so," Quenami said.

It was the closest he'd ever come, I guessed, to saying he didn't agree with his master. "And Tizoc-tzin still thinks it's a good idea to arrest the clergy of Tlaloc."

Quenami looked away, and didn't speak. At length he said, in a much quieter voice. "Your sister's priests are with us, to find rituals to slow this down. It will suffice. It has to."

But we both knew it wouldn't.

• • • •

I detoured through the kitchens to find some food since, in addition to being weak and still wounded, I hadn't eaten anything since before leaving for Tlalocan. Then I made my halting way out of the palace, to check on Mihmatini and on my own priests.

The air was sweltering, wet and heavy, and the sky was an overbearing shade of blue, which promised no respite from the heat.

The ghosts didn't leave, though they did grow fainter, at the same time as the numbness in my shoulder faded. Mictlantecuhtli's gift, whatever it had been, was slowly returning to its maker. But it had accomplished its purpose.

A gift, keeper of the boundaries.

There was something wrong with the boundaries. Acamapichtli had said they were weaker; he had thought the plague had weakened them. I wasn't so sure. The hollow, nauseous feeling in my stomach – the one that was now slowly receding to bearable levels – was the same I'd had much earlier, when the army had returned, long before the plague was set loose.

There was something else, something we needed to work out with Ichtaca and the rest of the order.

I was munching on my tamales, enjoying the solidity of the maize sliding into my empty stomach – something firmly of the Fifth World, and not of Tlalocan or Mictlan – and slowly heading out of the palace, when someone grasped my shoulder. "Acatl."

If I hadn't been so bone-weary, I would have given a start. Nezahual-tzin moved within my field of vision. As usual, he was escorted by two Texcocan Knights, though he'd eschewed his regalia in favour of a more discreet cotton cloak and a simple headdress of mottled brown quail-feathers.

"Going round in disguise?" I asked.

His lips quirked up. "I could say the same thing about you."

I shrugged. If he wanted to make me angry, attacking my dress was hardly the best way.

"Your sister is waiting for you at the Duality House," Nezahualtzin said.

And I could guess she wouldn't be particularly happy. But I didn't want to say this to Nezahual-tzin – who was Revered Speaker of Texcoco, not my friend or equal. "Anything else I ought to know?"

Nezahual-tzin shrugged. We'd started walking towards the palace entrance, the two warriors following us. "I might have a lead on why Teomitl survived the sickness."

"A lead?" I said.

"I asked the stars," Nezahual-tzin said. It was probably literal, too – his patron god Quetzalcoatl was Lord of the Morning Star among His other aspects. "Magic flowed towards the Duality House that night."

"Hardly surprising," I said. With my healing, and our repeated attempts to heal Teomitl, the place must have been a riot of lights.

"Actually," Nezahual-tzin said, "it was Toci's magic."

That stopped me. "Grandmother Earth? Why would She–?" She was the Earth that fed the maize, that would take us back into Her bosom when the time came: an old, broken woman renewed with every offering of blood; a goddess born from the fragments of the Earth-Monster, eternally thirsting for human hearts and human sacrifices. And, in many ways, She was the opposite of the Southern Hummingbird, our protector deity: the incarnation of female fertility, the nurturing mother, whereas He was the virile, eternally young warrior. "Why would She want to heal Teomitl?" I asked.

"I don't know," Nezahual-tzin said. "But I intend to find out. It seemed to come from a house in the district of Zoquipan." His youthful face was that of an artisan, nibbling away at a massive block of limestone until the sculpture at its core was revealed. "Care to join me?"

I shook my head. "I have to get back to the Duality House." That, or Mihmatini was finally going to lose patience with me.

Nezahual-tzin didn't look particularly disappointed. He did, though, walk with me up to the Duality House, claiming it was for my own safety. I wasn't sure of his motivations, but I welcomed the company, for I was none too steady on my feet.

We parted ways amidst a crowd of pilgrims carrying worshipthorns and balls of grass stained with blood – ranging from gangly adolescents barely old enough to have seen the battlefield to old men walking with canes, wearing long cloaks to hide the scars they'd received in the wars.

"Oh, one other thing," Nezahual-tzin said.

I stopped, and painstakingly turned around. "What?"

"You might be interested to know you're not the only one to have disappeared recently."

Acamapichtli? "I'm not sure–"

Nezahual-tzin's face was utterly impassive. "No one has seen your student since yesterday. Officially speaking, of course."

Of course.

"And you?"

Nezahual-tzin shrugged, casually. "I haven't seen him, either. But I have it on good authority some of the warriors under his command have gone missing."

He'd almost died. He'd said it to me, attempted to warn me: that he couldn't wait any longer for the things he thought were due to him. For the Mexica Empire to flourish under good leadership, and of course Tizoc-tzin's leadership was anything but brilliant. But surely he couldn't mean to… he couldn't want to sink us back into a civil and magical war…?

"I did warn you," Nezahual-tzin said.

And he had; I didn't want to hear it any more now than I'd wanted to hear it back then. "Yes," I said. "Thank you." And I pushed my way into the crowd of the Sacred Precinct without looking back.