Obsidian & Blood

TWENTY-THREE

Blessings of Mictlan

I took a swipe at the first ahuizotl, sending it leaping back a few paces – but not slowing it down, as its legs bunched up for another assault.

I'd never liked the things – they might have been Teomitl's, but they were creepy, and that was saying a lot, since I knew most of the beasts that haunted each level of the underworld. But never mind that, my goal wasn't to kill them – with the power that coursed through Coatl, he could surely summon more with a mere snap of his fingers – but to complete the circle, and open the gate into Mictlan.

The ahuizotl leapt again – I ducked, feeling clumsy next to its fluid grace. Power shimmered in the air around me – and over me reared a huge shadow. I guessed that Nezahual-tzin was calling on his patron god, the Feathered Serpent Quetzalcoatl; I could also guess that Neutemoc, Mihmatini, Acamapichtli and Cozolli would be fighting the rush of ahuizotls. What I needed was…

I evaded another leap of the ahuizotl – the Duality curse me, the thing was fast – and glanced around the courtyard. The blood we'd already spread shone in the sunlight, bunched up in three bundles, nowhere near the circle we needed.

What we needed was…

A distraction.

I waved my knife at the ahuizotl – catching its attention, as well as that of two of its neighbours. As my gaze roved, I caught bits and pieces of the scene, what looked like Palli's flailing arms as he waved an obsidian dagger, and Matlaelel's face, as pale as muddy milk. Then I was diving for the entrance of the courtyard, but more of the beasts were flowing up, barring my passage, and at the last moment I altered my trajectory, crashing into the entrance-curtain. The bells danced above me, their voices shrill and unpleasant; a prelude to the rough, jarring sound the three ahuizotls made as they tore through the cotton.

Having little choice, I retreated deeper into the shadows, holding my knife like a shield.

The room smelled of copal incense and food gone stale – hints of cold maize porridge, of amaranth seeds and the faint memory of spices. And I knew there had been someone – two women. "I apologise, but–"

A hiss came from the darkened centre. I steadied myself, preparing for the onslaught of the water-beasts – and met the glowing eyes of Chantico, She Who Dwelled in the House. Her hands wrapped around live coals, daring me to steal Her things.

A fresco. It was only a fresco. The goddess couldn't be here. "Get out!"

Too late. The ahuizotls were coming – one headed straight for me, and two others for the women. I couldn't spread myself so thin – it was all I could do to fend off one, struggling to stab the hand which terminated its tail – it leapt, bearing me down, and I was on the floor, squirming, while the hand swept down, aiming straight for my eyes – I raised the knife, whispering a prayer to Lord Death, and sank it to the hilt into the palm of the hand.

I'd expected blood, but of course nothing like this flowed – only weak ichor, as thin and as brackish as marsh water. The ahuizotl cried out like a hurt child – the Storm Lord strike me if I was going to fall for that. I raised my knife again, and while it was still wailing, transfixed it between the eyes.

It dropped like a log, trapping me underneath its corpse. The magic ebbed out of it in a painful tingling rush – the power of Chalchiuhtlicue was as much anathema to me as that of the Storm Lord Her husband, or of the Southern Hummingbird. I lay breathing heavily, struggling to collect myself.

The women.

I rolled the corpse of the ahuizotl off me, ignoring the ache in my arms, and stood up, fully expecting to see a pair of water-beasts feeding on corpse.

Instead, I met the irate eyes of a woman who looked formidable enough to take down the gods. "And the meaning of this is?"

I pointed to the dead ahuizotl – behind her, her attendant was kneeling in a quincunx glowing with the familiar heat of living blood, and the other two beasts lying dead at its centre. "Sorry. It was the nearest refuge. I thought…"

I paused then, wrenching my mind into another alignment. My sister was a powerful priestess in her own right, and Xiloxoch had brimmed with the power of her goddess. Why had I thought of those women as defenceless? "I apologise for disturbing you – you'd best stay there. There are people trying to kill each other outside."

The woman rolled her eyes, in a way that suggested this happened all the time. "Men. We're sealing this place, so I won't say it twice. You'll want to head out."

I certainly wasn't about to argue. Gingerly, I bowed to her, and walked out of the room – back into sunlight through the torn entrance curtain. I felt a breath at my back, and a hint of something large and angry beneath my feet – before the entrance-curtain fell again.

The courtyard was a mess: the fountain had been blown to pieces, and the wind was lifting up a cloud of dust that prevented me from seeing much. But magic still glowed within, and I could follow the progress of the circle: it was three quarters complete, its largest missing chunk right behind Coatl's greenish radiance. Not surprising.

I hefted my knife closer to me – feeling the stretched emptiness of Mictlan gather in my chest, the familiar sense that I'd never breathe again in the Fifth World – and went straight into the dust.

Shapes moved: moaning faces, flailing limbs, as if I were back within the fever-dream, weighed down by four hundred thousand bodies. I felt the sickness, curled at the edge of my thoughts, questing for a way in. I'd had it once and survived, which gave me an edge, but I couldn't count on this.

Also, the ahuizotls had to be somewhere, and I certainly didn't have an edge against them.

I had gone perhaps three paces when I found the first body – blackened by the plague, blood streaming out of its orifices. It was the young offering priest, Matlaelel, the whites of his eyes completely red, blood welling up from under his nails and nipples. His mouth opened – blood had run down from his gums, staining his teeth – and his lips shaped a word I couldn't understand – my name, perhaps? I fought the urge to lay my hands on him, to whisper the litany for the Dead and grant him safe passage into the World Beyond.

I said the words, regardless – because I was High Priest for the Dead, and it was my province, and because I had dragged him into this, and I owed him at least this.

"We live on Earth, in the Fifth World

Not forever, but a little while…"

Shadows moved within the murky gloom. I made for the only thing I could see, which was the gaping emptiness within the circle.

"Acatl-tzin!" Palli's hand on my arm almost made me jerk in surprise.

He was pale and wan, but more from loss of blood than anything else – and covered in the brackish ichor of wounded ahuizotls. Blood covered his hands, welling up from a dozen cuts.

"We need to finish the circle," I said. "Coatl–"

"Nezahual-tzin and your sister are keeping him busy," Palli said grimly.

Mihmatini? I ought to have known.

"Fine. Then we're headed for the other side of the courtyard. Can you see it?" I assumed Acamapichtli would be able to take care of his own problems; perhaps a mistake, but he certainly wasn't incapable.

"Yes, but–" Palli's face was pinched with fear.

I could have lied, made promises about how the plague couldn't touch him, but I had never had the ruthlessness for that. "We need to close that circle," I said. "Or more people will die. Not only us, but everyone here."

Palli grimaced, but he nodded. "Let's go."

As courtyards went, it wasn't a large one – at least, I was sure it hadn't been. As we fumbled around in the dust cloud, it didn't appear so small anymore. The shadows twisted and shifted, and even Palli seemed impossibly far away – I soon lost him, as veil after veil of reddish dust rose to cover everything. A dark silhouette loomed through the fog: a huge snake which had to mark Nezahual-tzin's location. My gaze swept left and right – where were the ahuizotls – surely they hadn't disappeared? But all I saw were the faces, slowly coalescing into focus, distorted with pain, their mouths open in soundless screams – men, women and children, with the shadows of rich headdresses and jewellery.

I couldn't tell at which point the nagging suspicion at the back of my mind coalesced into certainty as heavy as a stone in my belly – perhaps it was the woman, with the fine line of cuts across her face, or perhaps the child with sticky blood clogging his hair, gathered all in the place of the single wound that had dashed his brains out, or perhaps the dour warrior who looked hauntingly familiar, until I realised he could have been Yayauhqui's father.

Tlatelolco. The dead of Tlatelolco, weighing us down like stocks on a guilty man's neck. But there hadn't been so many of them – and they were dead, they had been dead for years and years, enough time for their souls to have moved on, found their true rest…

I'd been wrong, then. This was a plague passed on by the dead, by all the ghosts flittering through the diminished boundaries. It couldn't have existed without what we had done, Quenami, Acamapichtli and I.

Focus. Focus. Breathe, slowly, calmly – every step I took seemed to be through mud or tar; the faces swam in and out of focus, all crying out for revenge.

I wasn't a warrior, or a devotee of Huitzilpochtli the Southern Hummingbird. But, in the end, it didn't matter. The god had chosen us, and favoured us, and we had grown and grown, taking over our neighbours. It was sheer survival: everything that lived had to grow, or ossify and die. Nevertheless… I could understand their anger at what had been done to them.

I could have told them this, but they wouldn't have listened, or understood.

I walked on. The dust thickened, and every step seemed to cost me. The dead wailed and screamed and pleaded, demanding to be acknowledged – but I closed my ears to their pleas, and went on.

Ahead, the circle shimmered – broken still. I couldn't see Palli, but the three darker silhouettes shimmering with magic were presumably Mihmatini, Moquihuix-tzin and Nezahual-tzin. I passed them by – a hair breadth's away, and I thought they would turn, or feel me, but they were too engrossed in flinging magic at each other.

I trudged on – only walking mattered, step after tottering step, ignoring the dead and their twisted faces, ignoring the memory of Matlaelel's blood-filled eyes. When my feet finally met the edge of the circle, it felt like a miracle, like a god's blessing descended to me, who had least deserved it.

I knelt in the dirt, and rubbed open the previous slash across my palm – there was a slight stinging pain, such as when I made an offering to the gods, and then blood flowed again.

The faces in the dust hovered closer – it shouldn't have been possible, but they were pressing against me, their mouths opening as if to taste my blood. If they did so – I didn't even want to think about it. Blood was many things, among which an entry point into the body – and the illness, carried through my veins, would surely kill me as it had killed Matlaelel.

There was no time for finesse – I rubbed at the wound again, feeling it open further, the blood greedily pouring out – and tottered across the circle, trying to seal it shut before the plague faces could touch me – I could feel their foul breath on my skin, smell the dry, musty smell of their approach, like fire-crinkled mummies suddenly springing to life…

Step after step after step – the circle grew wider and wider, and it was almost complete…

The woman with the cut-up face was a finger's width away from my bleeding hand. I could see her body now, pulling itself out of the morass of faces, her arms and legs covered in similar wounds, her breasts hacked away and a pulsing mass of blood between her legs….

Almost there… The words of the hymn welled up as irrepressibly as the blood, spilling out into the Fifth World as the woman's teeth brushed my skin.

"Above us, below us,

The heavens, the place of heat

Above us, below us,

The region of the fleshless, the land of mystery…"

I felt the plague, coursing within my body – the pressure in my veins and arteries, travelling to my heart and liver – my vision blurred and became red, and my body shook, and I was on my knees, struggling to remain standing…

"The path out of the Fifth World, into the city of the Dead

The city where the streets are on the left, where the houses have no windows…"

Dark green light washed across the pattern – starting at the circle and rising like an unstoppable tide as the sounds of battle receded and became a lament for the Dead, and the stretched emptiness of Mictlan expanded, shrivelling my heart a fraction of a moment before the rising tide of blood caused it to burst.

And then everything went blessedly dark.

There was dust in my eyes and a gritty taste in my mouth, but the air smelled wrong – too wet and scorching to be that of the underworld. I lay on something hard and unyielding, feeling the Dead passing through me – hearing, like a distant mumble, their endless prayer to Lord Death:

"Not forever on Earth, but for a little while

Even jade crumbles, even gold is crushed

Not forever on Earth, but for a little while…"

Hands held me down – stroking me like a mother stroked her child – there was something wrong with them, but I couldn't remember what…

Everywhere they touched, fire blazed – not the conflagration of war, but rather that of a funeral pyre, tightening and drying flesh, shrivelling bones. Something impossibly heavy was tightening around my chest, squeezing my lungs until it hurt to breathe – and before the flames, the last touch of the fever on my mind receded, crushed into utter insignificance; there was nothing left but a familiar, stretched emptiness in my bones and sinews.

I opened eyes gummed with secretions, struggling to form anything from the blurred darkness around me. But I knew, or suspected, what I would be seeing.

"My Lady. My Lord."

The hand on my arm had the sharpness of finger bones, and a skeletal face swam in and out of focus – Mictecacihuatl, Lady Death, Her grin the wide one of skulls – and behind Her, looming out of the darkness, Her husband Mictlantecuhtli, fingering the bloody eyes of his necklace.

"Acatl. What a surprise."

My vision was returning, little by little – I stood on the dais of bones that marked Their seat of power; below me was a sea of pallid souls, ghostly hands lifting up the offerings that had been buried with them, from sewing tools to toys, from macuahitl swords to fragments of weaving looms. A cold wind blew through them all and lifted up the faint, translucent shapes of bodies to face the gaze of the gods, under which they seemed to shrivel and vanish.

Mictlan. The deepest level of the underworld – no, wait. If I focused enough, I could hear the sounds of battle, the cries of ahuizotls, and Acamapichtli's sarcastic laughter. "I stand on the boundaries," I whispered.

The underworld wavered, in and out of focus; the bare outline of the courtyard began to appear again, with the shadowy shapes of ahuizotls leaping onto the beaten earth. I banished it with an effort, to focus on the scene before me – my gods required no less than my full attention.

"Of course you stand on the boundaries. You always have," Mictecacihuatl said, shaking Her head.

"I – " Everywhere I turned, I saw only the Dead – an innumerable crowd flowing from the shadows of ruined buildings – the furthest ones mingling together like the waters of some great rivers, their faces receding into featurelessness – they whispered and sang, and prayed to Lord and Lady Death to grant them oblivion, at the very last. "I came with some people–"

Mihmatini. Nezahual-tzin. Where were they?

A sound, from Lord Death's throne, echoing amongst the skulls and femurs that made up His chair: laughter, coming from His vestigial lungs, lifting up his prominent rib-cage. "You come here for Our favour?"

Amongst the massed dead, a space was clearing up – silhouettes flickering in and out of focus, moving like shadows in the background of a fresco. Coatl – no, not Coatl anymore, but a tall, stately man with a feather headdress, and a cloak of turquoise, who wielded not only a sword, but a flint cutting axe, its blade shimmering with all the colours of oil on water.

Moquihuix-tzin.

The scene was, for a single moment, mercilessly clear – it wasn't Nezahual-tzin that Moquihuix-tzin was facing, for the Revered Speaker of Texcoco lay unconscious at the feet of the combatants.

It was my sister.

She moved slowly and a touch awkwardly, but somehow she always managed to be there when he struck. She didn't have a sword, but both her hands held daggers – mismatched ones, the one in her left hand small and mundane, looking more like an everyday knife for cutting maize and tomatoes than a real weapon; the other was a longer knife, and a translucent snake curled up from the hilt to the point of the blade, shimmering with the radiance of the Feathered Serpent's magic – she must have picked it up from Nezahual-tzin's body.

She fought better than I'd expected, but it was clear that they were mismatched. Her opponent was a war-chief and a sorcerer; Mihmatini's only experience with weapons must have been in the Duality House. Her stance was purely defensive – it was a dance to her, I realised, and she sidestepped the blades, but couldn't bring herself to break the pattern by stabbing her partner – surely she had to realise she couldn't hold – surely she had to shift her stance?

Neither of them looked up to the dais – they flickered in and out of existence, and I was beginning to suspect that they couldn't see us at all. Within a god's world, the gods made the rules – and Lord Death could alter reality as it suited His whim.

The Storm Lord's Lightning strike me, where was Neutemoc when you needed him?

"Guests," Mictlantecuhtli said, behind me. "What an odd thing to bring here." He sounded genuinely puzzled.

I needed – I needed Nezahual-tzin awake, to complete his part of the ritual – if Mihmatini had managed to speak with him at all, before they tumbled into Mictlan. I needed Acamapichtli – as I thought this, the scene in front of me wavered, and I stood once more in a dusty courtyard, watching an ahuizotl leapt straight for me. With an effort, I shifted – making the beast vanish as if into smoke – and shifted again.

The courtyard was shrouded in greenish mist, but as I stood within the gate, I saw Acamapichtli standing within the circle, hefting his blade thoughtfully. Besides him, Neutemoc and the Consort Cozolli were fighting two ahuizotls, albeit with difficulty. "Acatl!" Acamapichtli said.

I made a gesture with my left hand. "I'm working on it."

"You'd better work fast."

I didn't brother to protest. Instead, I banished the scene again, and turned back to Mictlantecuhtli – who stood watching me as if nothing had happened.

"You warned me the boundary was broken," I said, slowly.

"A favour." He smiled – revealing teeth as yellow as corn, and stars caught within his throat. "For you, who never asked for any."

"I don't understand."

"You're our High Priest," Mictecacihuatl said. She stretched out a bony hand, to point at the dead. "Most people in your place would scheme and intrigue."

Why was She telling me this? "But that's not what you need," I said, slowly.

"That's not what you can give us, either." Mictlantecuhtli waved a dismissive hand. "We don't ask worship. We ask for you, as our High Priest, to keep the boundaries. Do you know why?"

Was this really the time for childish questions? "Because the Fifth Word will end if they're not maintained."

I heard a sound, then, a clicking like bones rubbing together, and it was a while before I realised He was laughing. "Oh, Acatl. Have you learned nothing? We ask you to keep the boundaries because there is no life without death, and no death, either, without life. What is Our dominion, if the dead can come back into the Fifth World when they will it?"

"Then…" I said, slowly, "then… you don't approve of this, either."

The combatants flickered into existence again – Mihmatini had lost the shorter blade; she clung to the other one in bleeding hands, holding it in front of her like a shield.

"Of the plague?" Mictecacihuatl asked.

Of what I had done, bringing Tizoc-tzin back, I thought, but could not voice the sentence aloud. Mictlantecuhtli's face was turned towards me, but I wouldn't look at the shadowed eye-sockets.

"Acatl," He said gently. "Do not torment yourself. We do not stand against the will of the Southern Hummingbird."

"But–" But that wasn't what I wanted to know. I realised I'd meant to ask Him if we'd made the right decision, but stopped myself in time. He would have had words, and they would have been wise and detached. But the truth was, it was past time to be selfish and worry about my conscience, or dwell on things I could not take back. A course had been set, and we would not turn back.

Mihmatini blocked a strike that would have decapitated her; her eyes were wild, looking right and left, as if she expected to see me.

Time to end this. I took a deep breath. Even if Nezahual-tzin woke up, he wouldn't be able to do his part in the ritual, not while Mihmatini was still pressed by the fight.

The fight needed to end, first. Moquihuix-tzin needed to die. And for that…

"My Lord," I said, slowly. "I ask for no favours; merely for things to take their course. I want what should happen here, on the ninth level of the underworld, to happen." For the dead – the defeated – to find oblivion at Mictlantecuhtli's feet.

"Why?" Again, genuine puzzlement. "Would you put your sister in danger?"

He was a god – had been mortal, once, in the beginning of the Fifth Age, before He gave his blood to move the Fifth Sun across the Heavens. He couldn't understand us, not any more – couldn't understand fear and hope and despair, and the knowledge that I needed to bargain for this now before knowing who would win the fight – that I needed to put my own sister's soul in the balance, agree to consign her to Mictlantecuhtli's oblivion if she lost the battle – so that the Mexica Empire could be great, could follow the destiny set by the Southern Hummingbird – guzzling hearts and captives like a glutton, taking in riches from the northern deserts and the southern jungles until it choked on them.

"I–"

"Acatl?"

They were shadows again – the fight a hint, like a painting hidden underneath a layer of maguey paper – and all I could do was guess, and hope against all hope – and do what was needed.

"My Lord." I kept my voice steady, focusing on the polished bones of the dais, on the musty smell of earth and dry corpses. "A soul that comes before Your throne finds oblivion."

"That is truth." I felt Him shift, high above me – waiting as He always waited, for everything to come to an end.

"I–" The words caught in my throat – I kept my thoughts away from the fight, focusing them on the memory of the dead and the wounded – of Tapalcayotl, of Chipahua, of Acamapichtli. "What of a soul who dies before Your throne?"

There was silence – flowing like the calm after a successful birth. At length, Mictlantecuhtli made a sound I couldn't interpret – a bark of laughter, of anger? "Look at Me, Acatl."

"I–"

"You're asking for no favours. You never do. You merely want Me to take my due as I have always done. You know as well as I do that there is no ceremony in Mictlan."

Slowly, carefully, I pulled myself up – how was Mihmatini doing? Could she hold out for that long? – and looked him in the eye.

His face was smooth, polished bone, His cheekbones spattered with drops of blood; His headdress was of owl feathers and paper offerings; His teeth were white, and as sharp as those of a jaguar. His eye-sockets weren't empty like those of a skull, but rather filled with a soft, yellow light, like the Fifth Sun at the end of the afternoon. "Few have asked this. Your need must be pressing." Between His teeth glittered light, too – a hundred stars, caught in His throat, in His empty rib-cage, imprisoned there to keep the Fifth Sun safe.

"I do what I must." The words were ashes in my mouth.

"For the Fifth World?"

I could have said the Empire, but it would have been a lie – I wasn't sure I could believe in that anymore, not with our current Revered Speaker. Or perhaps I needed to believe in it – in the idea rather than the man, to make it all somehow palatable. "For balance, and our survival. And justice." For the warriors and the crippled clergy of Tlaloc, and all those dead before their time.

"I see." His eyes were – no, not warm, for He was death, and would ever be cold – but there was sadness in them, and sympathy, and for a bare moment, as we looked at each other I had the feeling the He encompassed me, and weighed me, and understood me better than anyone ever would, and it was a thought as bitter as raw cacao. "I said it before, Acatl, it is not a favour – mainly an extension of rules."

"Then You agree?"

He was silent, for a while. "It sets an uncomfortable precedent. But you are My high priest, and I know your need. So go, with My blessing." He smiled – a bare uncovering of the stars that whirled within Him. "For what it's worth, Acatl."

Something shimmered and tightened in the air. When I turned around, the fight had stopped shivering in and out of reality, and had become entirely real.

"We shall meet again, Acatl." They were fading away, leaving me on an empty dais – with a sense of odd warmth running through me.

Not a promise; a mere statement of fact. Almost all the Dead were His.

I didn't move. I couldn't, for I stood on the threshold of the gateway, and I couldn't enter one world or another, lest the ritual fail. I kept my eyes on the fight ahead – Mihmatini was moving yet more awkwardly, stumbling every other step. On Coatl – Moquihuix-tzin's – face was nothing but sheer determination. He had lost his sword, but wielded the axe with the ease of one of Chalchiuhcutlicue's devotees – thank the gods he couldn't use his magic, not here in the underworld where Lord Death's wards were at their strongest.

I called up the courtyard, briefly, and met Acamapichtli's exasperated eyes. The ahuizotls seemed to be all dead, though Neutemoc was limping, and Cozolli held her arm awkwardly. "Any time you feel like starting the ritual…"

"We still have – a problem," I said. "Hold on, will you?"

In the underworld, Nezahual-tzin was stirring, dazedly pulling himself up – and they were all so far away, stuck as if behind a pane of glass, neither of them seeing me – I would have screamed, but even as I shifted, Moquihuix-tzin sent Mihmatini's dagger flying – and closed in for the kill.

"Mihmatini!" The scream was torn out of me before I could think, fear and rage mingling in one primal, unstoppable force that seemed to take its substance from my wrung lungs. "Mihmatini!"

At the last moment she sidestepped and, for a moment, her eyes met mine, and saw me. She smiled, shaking her head – that same expression she had whenever I tried to mother her.

Oh, Acatl. You're such a fool sometimes.

It happened in an eye-blink – she rolled to the ground, avoiding the axe stroke which would have split her skull; her outstretched hand met Nezahual-tzin's, and she rose, holding something sharp and white – the aura of Duality magic around her flaring like the hood of a snake, an expenditure of power that must have utterly drained her – and, grasping the axe in one hand, used the other to drive her weapon into Coatl's chest.

He gasped, and collapsed like a felled tree, while Mihmatini stood over him, her face expressionless, her hand dripping blood from the deep wound she'd taken from seizing the axe.

She smiled up at me, then turned to Nezahual-tzin and pulled him towards the dais. I couldn't hear them at first – my sister seemed to be whispering furiously, and Nezahual-tzin, still dazed, mostly nodded – a fact which must have pleased her no end.

At last, they stood below me. Nezahual-tzin smiled up at me. "As timely as ever, I see."

I shook my head – now wasn't a time for jibes. "Are you–?" I asked Mihmatini. "I thought he was going to kill you." I thought I was going to lose her forever, that I'd bargained for nothing but one more death. "I–" It hurt, to breathe.

"Oh, Acatl." Her voice was pitying. "Have more faith."

I said nothing – I couldn't think of any smart answer to this. Instead, I turned to Nezahual-tzin. "Have you–?"

He nodded, brusquely. "Let's get to it, shall we? I don't know how long I can stay upright."

The courtyard shimmered into existence again – except that I stopped it halfway through, before it became fully material. I could see Nezahual-tzin, slowly breathing – calling down the Feathered Serpent's power until his skin glowed with pulsing magic – and Acamapichtli, his blind eyes thrown back, looking up at the sky, which slowly filled up with storm clouds. There was a noise like wings unfurling, and the distant rumble of thunder.

And I – I, who belonged in neither of those worlds – I felt the touch of Mictlantecuhtli spread from the marks on my shoulder,a cold that seized my bones and muscles, and then my heart until I could no longer feel it beat. My hands curled up into claws, my skin reddening against the cold.

"I stand on the boundaries

On the edge of the region of mystery, on the edge of the house of the fleshless

I stand on the boundaries

On the edge of the gardens of flowers, of the expanses of grass…"

And, as I spoke the words of the hymn – as Acamapichtli and Nezahual-tzin joined me – light slowly appeared, washing us all in a radiance that was neither the harsh one of the Fifth Sun, nor the green mouldy one of Mictlan, but something that had been there for the birth of the Fifth World, something that would always be there, underpinning the order we kept.

"We stand for sickness, in the house of the living

For the breath of the wind, in the region of the fleshless

For life and death, caught on the threshold…"

And there was… something, like a tightening, as if a loose garment had just readjusted itself: the world knitting itself back together. My gate wavered and shrank, and the nausea that I'd carried with me all this time finally sank down to almost nothing.

"With this we will stand straight

With this we will live

Oh, for a while, for a little while…"

And then the feeling was gone, and I sagged to my knees like a wounded man whose feverish rush of energy had just worn off.

"Acatl!"

"I'm fine, I'm fine," I said, but I could barely pull myself to my feet. I shouldn't have left the cane behind us. I turned back, to stare at Moquihuix's body – and, to my surprise he stared back at me, his face clouded with the approach of death.

The weapon Mihmatini had used to stab him – a sharp reed which shone as if it had been dipped in gold – was still embedded in his chest. He didn't look like Coatl at all, but like his true self, a Revered Speaker lying in the dust of Mictlan.

"Priest." His voice still carried far, as if he were addressing the crowd from atop his pyramid temple. His lips curled up, in a smile that was painful. "It is Tenochtitlan's destiny, indeed, to rule over the valley of Anahuac, to expand into the Fifth World and make everything theirs. I wish you joy."

"Wait!" I said, but his eyes had closed, and his body was already shimmering out of existence, his limbs growing fainter and fainter, followed by his torso, and, last of all, the turquoise cloak which had marked him as a Revered Speaker and his quetzal feather headdress, crumbling into a fine powder which mingled with the dust.

A wind rose, carrying a faint, familiar smell – rotting maize, or leaves – and his soul rose upon it; not the faint memory of a human, but a bright radiance made of hundreds of people: the people of the plague, the dead that he carried with him. He rose towards the dais, and was lost to sight.

When I turned around, Nezahual-tzin and Mihmatini had both joined me on the dais. Nezahual-tzin was binding Mihmatini's wound, with a mocking smile. She was glaring at him, daring him to make a comment.

"You'll be fine?" I asked.

She shook her head. "Of course I'll be fine, Acatl. Don't fuss like an old woman. It doesn't become you."

"Sorry," I said. "It's just that–" I saw, then, that her free hand was shaking, her back slightly arched, and I could only guess at the effort she used to hold herself upright. "Never mind. Let's go back."

We came back to the Fifth World in the same courtyard we'd left from. It was bathed in sunlight, the corpse of Matlaelel and the bloody remnants of a few ahuizotls the only signs of the battle. And another corpse, too, shrivelled like a dried fruit, who might have been Coatl, who might have been Moquihuix-tzin: it was hard to tell anymore, with the decay.

I'd expected a crowd of noblewomen, irate at our intrusion upon their lives – who were, I was beginning to understand, neither as weak nor as defenceless as I'd allowed myself to think.

I hadn't expected the warriors: an army large enough to fill the place, their macuahitl swords glinting in the sunlight – and, at their head, the old woman and Teomitl – and my brother Neutemoc and my offering priest Palli, standing in their path with the desperate assurance of doomed men.