Shadow of the Lords

SIX MONKEY
1

I woke to an angry buzzing. It came from one side of my head and then the other, as though its source were moving in circles around my head, and it was only when it settled on my nose and made me sneeze that I realized that I was being inspected by a fly.

My eyes snapped open.

It took me a moment to recall where I was. My head was still full of the sights and sounds of the night, and the strange, disjointed dreams that had come upon me while I slept. I shook my head briskly, dislodging the fly and creating a spasm of pain at the back of my skull.

What had happened to me, and what had I seen? Vague images of the god Quetzalcoatl and a beautiful woman filled my head.

I remembered a tale of Topilztin, the infinitely wise and good last king of the Toltecs. He shared the attributes of Quetzalcoatl, the god whose high priest he was and whose name he bore. He had fallen prey to the malice of Tezcatlipoca, his divine patron’s enemy. Tezcatlipoca had visited him in the guise of an old woman, a healer, and urged sacred wine upon him, saying it was for the good of his soul. Try just a drop on the tip of your tongue, the old woman had wheedled. He had refused; he knew that the taste would lead to a drink, and a drink to another, and so on until his soul was drowned in the stuff and lost for good.

At last he had assented to having a drop of it placed on his forehead, and from that moment he was lost.

Gourd after gourd he had downed, and then he had called his sister to him and had her taste the stuff too, and then, in a drunken frenzy, they had lain together.

Afterwards, consumed with remorse, he had left the city of Tollan, fleeing to exile in the East, never to be seen again.

Did this, I wondered, give meaning to the vision I had seen? Until that day, Quetzalcoatl had been celibate as well as temperate. Had the god, tempted by what had brought the man down, chosen to run away rather than risk the same fate?

I had come looking for the raiment of Quetzalcoatl, convinced I would find it in this room. Instead, I had seen the god himself. Or had I seen a man dressed as the god? Had I seen Idle’s killer?

I began to understand Stammerer’s fear and anger when he had described what he had seen from the top of the pyramid in Amantlan. Perhaps I had seen a man wearing a costume, but there was a power invested in the raiment of a god that belonged to the god himself and must not be misused, and I had felt it.

Daylight fell as a bright oblong across the floor and bathed the rest of the room in twilight. Still, it was not easy to see. My vision was blurred and it took a conscious effort to get my eyes to focus. With some difficulty I managed to lift my head off the floor. It came away with a sticky, tearing noise and an instant of blinding agony I squeezed my eyes shut against the pain and slapped my palms against the floor to brace myself and stop myself falling back. I took several deep breaths until the throbbing and nausea had diminished and I felt able to move again.

‘Got to get out, Yaotl.’

I got to my knees and then, gingerly, to my feet, watchingin puzzlement as several lengths of severed rope fell about me. Swaying a little, I looked down, noting the rope, the large patch of freshly dried blood where my head had been, and the fact that I was naked.

‘Where are my clothes?’

Fortunately I did not have to look far: my breechcloth and cloak had been discarded next to where I had lain. Something on top of them glittered. Ignoring the renewed dizziness that it caused, I bent towards it and recognized a small copper knife.

That explained how the ropes had been cut, I thought, as I tied the breechcloth. Once I had wrapped myself in the cloak and knotted it over my right shoulder I felt able to look around me and make some effort to piece together the things I could see and the vague, disjointed memories that they stirred up.

I noted the pile of rubbish by the back wall. I could see now that it had not grown out of a year’s worth of detritus thrown casually into a corner. Some effort had been made to sweep it all together. I stepped over to it and began sifting it experimentally.

As before, I was surprised by the number of feathers, and much else connected with the featherworkers’ craft: knives, needles, glue spreaders, and so on. As I stirred the rubbish with my fingers the air around me suddenly filled with feathers and I had to hold my breath to stop myself sneezing.

Something fell off the top of the pile as I disturbed it, a round, lightweight object that struck the floor with a hollow ringing noise and rolled a little way across it until it reached the opposite wall. When I picked it up I saw that it was a bowl. I put a finger inside it and found that its surface was moist, and a few hard little grains still adhered to its sides. By putting the finger cautiously to my tongue, I could tell that someone had been drinking an infusion of Morning Glory seeds.

I threw the bowl back on the heap and spat on the rubbish to get rid of the taste. I knew it from my time as a priest. We had drunk a little of it, on occasion, to induce visions, but we knew that if anyone had too much, the demons he saw would take both his soul and his life. I wondered how much I had had, and how many of the fantastic things I had seen and heard in the night had come out of that little bowl.

I surveyed the heap of rubbish again. This had been Idle’s and Marigold’s room, according to Butterfly, but it looked as if she and Skinny had taken advantage of their disappearance to dump all the debris from his workshop in here. It did not take me long to satisfy myself that there was nothing underneath the pile. If the costume had ever been hidden there, it was long gone.

There was little else to be seen in the room except a cheap, frayed sleeping-mat and an old cloak or blanket on the floor beside it. However, as I stood over them, I noticed something I could not see.

I sniffed the air and frowned.

By far the strongest smell in the room was the smoky, resinous odour of a pine torch that had been left to burn itself out. There were others that it did not quite mask.

Clinging to the air over the sleeping-mat were faint hints of musk and sweat and stale perfume. A woman had lain there most of the night. I gathered the discarded blanket up in my arms and buried my nose in it. Then I threw it away violently, because there was something familiar in the complex of smells that it bore, something horrifying, a reminder of things I did not want to think about. I thought of snakes, hissing and writhing and threatening me with their stifling coils.

Shuddering, I turned to go. Then I caught another smell.

This one was fainter than the others, but once I noticed it I could not avoid it. It was the smell I had noticed when I hadfirst come into the room, before I was knocked out, but now I remembered what it reminded me of all the things I instinctively shied away from, the smell of my worst nightmares — a mixture of putrefaction, decay, filth, piss and blood.

It was the stench of the Emperor’s prison, and for a moment my nose was filled with all the things that had assailed it in my time there, in my tiny, cramped, unlit cage, squatting, because there was no room to stand or lie down, and listening to the hoarse, rattling breaths of my neighbours while I waited for my turn to come.

I stumbled towards the doorway, gagging.

Something snagged my foot and sent me sprawling.

I scraped my knee painfully on the floor as I fell. The shock helped, reminding me that I was not in prison but free to blunder about and fall over things. I lay still for a moment while I repeated this to myself a few times, and then I turned to look at what had tripped me.

I realized it must be the same thing that I had stubbed my toe against in the night. It was a carved stone, one of a pair, because another, identical in style, lay next to it. When I picked them up I could see that they were two halves of the same piece. It had split, perhaps when someone had dropped it.

I rubbed my knee and then stood up, holding the broken sculpture. I could feel that when the pieces were fitted together there was a jagged surface left, where they must both have been joined to something else.

That gave me an idea. After a quick glance out of the doorway to make sure it was empty, I took the pieces out into the courtyard and carried them over to the broken plinth.

They fitted.

Holding the broken idol in place on its mounting, I was able to see it properly for the first time.

I knew it at once. It had a dog’s face, wrinkled and furrowed with age. Its ears were misshapen rags, covered with sores, and its hands and feet were shrivelled and bent, so that had it been an animated, breathing creature, it could have done nothing but lie in the dust, howling for release from its agony. It was Xolotl, who represented disease, deformity and those feared and ill-omened beings, twins, whose presence could bring disaster on a household by draining the life out of the fire in the hearth.

I put the idol’s two pieces on the floor carefully, so as not to make a sound. I wondered why it had been here: whether someone had been ill, or whether Marigold had acquired it because she felt she needed Xolotl to complete her collection. I wondered, too, why it had been desecrated so. Perhaps the god had been placated to get rid of an illness that had, in spite of everything, proved fatal. The smell in the room I had just left came to mind.

Or had Xolotl been venerated here for some other reason? It suddenly crossed my mind to wonder whether Skinny and his brother might have been twins, and what it might mean if they were. But if so, I thought, then why had the idol been broken?

I would have to think about that later. Now I had more pressing problems. The first was how to get out of the courtyard without having to go through the room leading to the street, where I might run into Butterfly or Skinny or both. Then I had to find a way of avoiding the Otomies. I tried not to think about what came after that. Kindly’s property and my son were still as elusive as ever.

I thought the best thing I could do would be to clamber up one of the walls and leave the way I had come in. A stout climbing plant, like a mature gourd vine, would do, just something to give my hands and feet some purchase.

I had a quick look at the walls at the back and sides of the courtyard but found nothing. I turned to the front, but could not see anything there either, because there was someone standing in the way.

He was tall. My eyes were on a level with his chest. As they travelled upward, I tried very hard not to believe what they were telling me. Unfortunately there was no mistaking the short, plain, functional cloak tied at the throat, the grim mouth with its lips pressed firmly together, and the hooded eyes, the piled-up hair and the sword whose handle projected over one shoulder, ready to be seized and brought into use in an instant.

I took a step back. ‘Up … Upright?’ I spluttered. ‘This … this isn’t your parish. What are you doing here?’

‘No. But it is theirs.’ The policeman jerked his head once across his shoulder to indicate the men behind them. At the same time all three of them stepped forward. One was his own deputy, Shield. The others, judging by their thickset forms and harsh faces, were policemen too: at a guess, the parish police of Atecocolecan.

‘I … I was just leaving,’ I said.

‘Quite right, you were.’

In one fluid movement Upright reached behind him, plucked his sword from its harness and had it poised over my head. Quick glances to the left and right told me his companions had done the same, and moreover that the two local men had stepped forward so that I was effectively surrounded.

‘Now, Yaotl, we can do this the easy way where you come with us on your feet, or we can do it the hard way …’

‘Where you have to carry me because I can’t walk with both legs broken. Right.’ I sighed. ‘Look, you don’t understand … No, wait, what did you call me?’

‘We don’t need to understand,’ growled the bear on myright. ‘Look, Upright, we’re here, it looks like you’ve got your man, why not just bash him over the head and get going? We’ve got work to do.’

‘But my name isn’t …’

‘We know perfectly well what your name is, you murdering little bastard! The woman went and reported you to the local lads here.’ Shield suddenly jabbed me with the blunt end of his sword, not hard enough to hurt but with enough force to make me stagger. ‘And this time there’s no wealthy widow to back your lies up with her own. You didn’t think my boss was joking, did you?’

‘No,’ I cried hastily, as the sunlight flashed off four sets of cruelly sharp obsidian blades. ‘No, but you said … you called me a murderer — I had nothing to do with Idle, I tell you. I swear it, I will eat earth …’

‘Idle?’ To my amazement Upright laughed. ‘You don’t think we still care about Idle, do you?’

‘You mean there’s someone else?’

‘Oh, this is pathetic!’

The end of the sword hit me just below the rib cage, knocking the breath out of me so that I could not cry in pain but only collapse, doubled over and gasping vainly for air.

I barely heard what Upright said next, but I managed to follow it somehow.

‘You’re such an idiot, Yaotl. If you’d stopped with Idle I don’t suppose anyone would really have given a toss. Certainly I wouldn’t. I gather his family might even have paid you for getting rid of him. But you had to go on, didn’t you? You didn’t seriously expect the Amanteca to overlook the death of someone like Skinny, did you?’

There was an argument over whether or not to search the house. Upright wanted to, but the local men wanted to leaveand were not prepared to let the men from Pochtlan have the place to themselves. It was not a prolonged or heated discussion, since Upright and Shield were convinced they had got their man. It would be easier and more fun, they assured their colleagues, to get any evidence they needed by beating it out of me rather than breaking up the courtyard or rifling through wicker chests full of old skirts and breechcloths.

By the time this was settled I had got my breath back enough to be frog-marched through the empty front room to the canoe the two men had brought with them. At least, I told myself as I was bundled into the swaying craft, I would be spared the walk back.

Shield took up the pole. As he pushed us away from the shore he let his eyes linger on his two local colleagues as they turned their backs indifferently and walked away along the side of the canal.

‘Get a warm welcome around here, don’t you, boss?’

Upright grunted. ‘We wouldn’t like it if a couple of strangers turned up on our patch and started telling us what’s what.’ He leered at me. ‘Maybe we should have told them our suspect was from Tenochtitlan. They wouldn’t have minded then. Round here I don’t suppose they like Southerners any more than we do.’

‘We didn’t know …’

The constable shot a warning glance at his deputy but it was too late to stop me from picking up his meaning. ‘You weren’t out looking for me, then?’ I asked innocently.

Upright looked suddenly sick. ‘Mind your own business!’

‘Only, if you weren’t, then who were you after? What made you connect me with whatever’s happened to Skinny?’

‘The fact that you did it!’ rumbled Shield dangerously. He was taking out his annoyance and embarrassment on the pole, stirring up the muck at the bottom of the canal and cleaving adark wake through the weeds and scum on its surface. I hoped he might be furious enough to capsize us or run us hard aground and give me a chance to run, but he was too skilful for that.

‘We just came here to tell Skinny’s wife the bad news,’ his superior said. ‘Of course, we called on the local police on the way, and what did we find? The newly widowed Butterfly tearing her hair out and babbling about finding you, of all people, trying to burgle her house. Wouldn’t you say that’s a bit suspicious? Especially since you’ve never answered for what happened to Idle. And we know the story you and Lily came up with was a pack of lies.’

‘Did you ask Kindly about it?’ As soon as I posed the question I realized it was pointless. Whatever Kindly may have said scarcely mattered since the truth, at least about who I was, had come out anyway. I had a vision of the merchant’s daughter striding into Howling Monkey’s courtyard, her skirt flowing around her and the sound of her sandals striking the floor, and was suddenly aware of the risk she had taken and the fact that, for whatever reason, it had not come off. ‘And what about Lily?’ I asked, in a small voice.

‘What about her?’ Upright grimaced. ‘Like father, like daughter, aren’t they? And she had a son who was just as bad. If any of that family told me my own name I’d have to run home and ask my mother, to check!’ He laughed shortly. ‘Don’t worry, she set the record straight. After you did a runner — wasn’t I surprised when that happened! — she went and told your master what had happened.’

‘What?’

Shield gave an unpleasant chuckle. ‘Old Black Feathers himself! The Chief Minister!’

‘Of course, there wasn’t much for us to do once we knew whose slave you were. He’s got enough men of his own tosend running around after you without needing any help from us. If we’d wanted to get you for doing Idle, we reckoned we might as well wait and see what was left after they’d finished with you.’ He gave me what may have been a pitying look. ‘And from the look of some of them, you’re bloody lucky we found you first!’

I wondered what had possessed Lily to go to my master, but I had more urgent worries on my mind now. ‘So where are you taking me now?’ I asked in a low voice. ‘Back to Lord Feathered in Black?’ I could guess what would happen after that. My master would gloat over me for a while and then hand me over to the captain’s tender mercies.

‘Oh no. Not now You’re going to the Governor.’

‘Itzcohuatzin? Why him?’

‘Why do you think? I told you Skinny was a mistake. As soon as we knew who the dead man was, every parish policeman in Tlatelolco was told to bring whoever did it to the Governor. Now I don’t know whether Lord Feathered in Black has any other ideas, seeing as you’re his slave, but since I’ve had no orders to the contrary, it’s to the Governor you’re going.’

‘What happened to Skinny?’ I asked.

Shield groaned. ‘Here we go again!’

Upright snorted. ‘You might tell us. We know you attacked him on the Pochtlan side of the canal, right near the bridge with Amantlan. Why so close to where we found his brother? I suppose you were unlucky, though. I don’t reckon you hit him hard enough to have killed him outright, but of course he drowned. You could have pulled him out, though.’

‘Maybe he thought he was doing him a favour, letting the poor bugger die like that,’ Shield suggested. People who died by water were spared the terrors and misery of the Land of the Dead; instead they were destined to spend the afterlife inTlalocan, the rain-god’s paradise, where the seasons never let you down and there was always plenty to eat.

‘I didn’t kill him,’ I said, for the sake of saying it.

‘Well, you can tell that to the Governor and whoever else asks you,’ Upright said indifferently. ‘I’m curious, though. Why’d you do it? What were Idle and Skinny to you?’

‘He fancied getting up the widow’s skirt!’

Shield’s crude jibe jolted some memory, a dream I thought I had once had, or rather a nightmare, and suddenly I was in a dark, cramped space, and a great snake was wrapping its coils around me, its woman’s voice cooing softly in my ear, saying things that should have been beautiful and arousing and were all the more grotesque and sickening because of it.

I struggled. I tried to cry out, to stand up, to flee, and then there was a massive hand on my shoulder, driving me back down into the bottom of the boat.

‘Don’t even think about it!’ Shield snarled.

I sat, shivering, while Upright looked at me thoughtfully. ‘Interesting,’ he said at last.

‘Look,’ I said, mustering all my self-control to keep my voice steady, ‘I didn’t kill Skinny because I wanted his wife or for any reason. I didn’t kill Idle. I was asked by Kindly the merchant to look for some property of his that he thought they had. That’s why I was at their house.’

Why had I found Shield’s words so disturbing? More of the visions of gods and serpents that I had had in the night were coming back to me. I wondered why the images were so enduring. Dreams, even those induced by the seeds of the Morning Glory plant, were fragile, evanescent things, usually dispersing like mist as soon as the Sun came up, but these would not go away. They were like the memory of a real event rather than something I had had to travel to the land of dreams to see.

‘We know why you were at their house.’ Shield’s voice, outlining his theory, dragged me back to the present. ‘You’d got rid of Idle and Skinny so there wouldn’t be anyone to get between you and Skinny’s wife. I bet you also got her sister-in-law out of the way too, didn’t you? We haven’t found her body yet, but we will. So now you thought you had everything nicely set up and it was time to go and enjoy yourself.’ He gave a raucous laugh. ‘You must have been really looking forward to that. I’ve seen Butterfly!’

Upright looked at me again. ‘Why’d you bring up Kindly again? We know you aren’t his slave. What’s this lost property you were talking about? Why would you have been looking for it?’

I thought quickly. There was one thing I knew I could never reveal to the policemen or anyone else, my search for my son, because I could not risk giving anything away that might help Lord Feathered in Black to guess who he really was or that he was still in the city That was my secret, I decided, but other people’s, including Kindly’s, were none of my business.

‘I was running away. I needed cash — something I could carry, like a few quills of gold dust or some copper axe heads. The merchant said he’d pay me quickly if I did this job for him. He’d bought some featherwork from Skinny and … well, we were pretty sure he’d stolen it back again. Skinny himself told me he knew nothing about it but I didn’t believe him, so I went back to look for myself.’

‘Balls,’ muttered Shield.

Upright curled his lip. ‘Well, either way, the Governor will have to make up his own mind about you. We’re nearly at his palace.’

I looked up in surprise. I had not noticed how far we had come, but there was no mistaking the shape of Tlatelolco’s great pyramid towering over the buildings in front of it. TheGovernor’s palace faced the sacred precinct at its base, imitating the palaces of the Emperors in Tenochtitlan. Also next to the sacred precinct was the world’s largest marketplace, a huge open space surrounded by colonnaded walls where up to sixty thousand people came every day to buy, sell, cheat, steal or just pass the time. I could hear them from here, the constant background rumble of an uncountable number of unraised voices.

The canal we were on now was a wide one, as were the ones it crossed, and the large, blank-faced buildings and sturdy landing-stages around us told me that this must be where the merchants unloaded and stored goods ready for the market.

‘Not the most direct route,’ Upright explained. He was looking forward to getting rid of me and passing the responsibility on to someone more senior, and his sense of relief made him positively chatty ‘But it’s easily the quickest. Hardly anyone uses these canals except merchants going to their warehouses, and they only travel at night. At this time of day, everywhere else will be jammed solid.’

Sure enough, it was quiet, with no traffic beside our canoe and little sign of life apart from a few weary-looking sedges growing up between the wooden reinforcing posts at the canal’s edge.

We were not quite alone, however.

Shield saw him at the same time as I did: a lone figure standing beside one of the warehouses, in the centre of the path running between it and the canal, with his legs braced slightly apart and his head turning slowly from side to side, as though scanning the area around him. ‘What’s he up to?’ Shield asked suspiciously. ‘Doesn’t look like a porter or a merchant — off he goes!’

The stranger had vanished around a corner, leaving only a blurred impression of a cloak flapping behind him as he ran. I blinked, thinking he must be extremely fleet to have coveredthe distance that quickly. ‘I thought he looked more like a warrior,’ I said slowly, suddenly filled with foreboding.

‘Around here?’ Upright replied. ‘I doubt it. Some of the merchants hire muscle to guard their property, sometimes. He was probably one of them.’

‘More likely a lookout man for a robbery,’ his colleague suggested. ‘Once we’ve dropped our little friend here off we ought to come back and check.’

Either of them might well be right, I thought, but hired guards tended to sit or lounge, dozing peacefully, against a handy wall, rather than standing, alert and ready for action, in the centre of a path. And robbers and their lookout men did not run like a jaguar after a deer when there was no one pursuing them. They did not wear their hair piled up on their heads and flowing over the backs of their necks, either, but neither of my escorts seemed to have noticed that.

They caught up with us just short of the Governor’s palace.

Shield poled the canoe slowly along a broad waterway in the shadow of one of the marketplace’s outer walls. The distant rumble I had heard before had become as loud as thunder over the mountains, or perhaps a waterfall: a continual babbling, a sound made up of many smaller sounds that caught the ear a thousand different ways without ever increasing or diminishing.

‘Hold your noses,’ he advised us. ‘This is where they moor the dung boats.’

Upright and I both looked ahead. We were passing scores of vessels filled with the contents of the city’s privies and brought here for sale to parishes, landowners and makers of dyestufl’s.

‘Not surprising there aren’t many people about, is it?’ Shield went on nasally. It was nearly the warmest part of the day. I was breathing through my mouth and I thought the air even tastedfoul. I did not want to dwell on what it must be like in high summer.

‘Look out!’ Upright shouted suddenly. A canoe had appeared in front of us, blocking our way. It looked as if it had been launched from the side of the canal straight into our path.

‘What’s he doing? Move that thing, you idiot!’ yelled Shield, but the last word died in his throat as he had a clear look at the other craft’s only occupant.

This time there could be no mistaking his occupation. If his green costume and his hair had not given it away, the deft, familiar way he handled the sword in his fist would have done. He was using it to motion us towards the bank with a curt, slashing gesture.

The captain and his men stood in a semicircle by the side of the canal.

‘What do we do?’ Shield whispered.

‘What he says,’ Upright muttered tensely. He glared at me. ‘You know anything about this?’

I said nothing. I was speechless with terror.

‘Well, hello, stranger.’ The living half of the captain’s face twisted into a lopsided grin as he caught sight of me. ‘I was afraid we wouldn’t meet again!’

‘Now look …’ Upright began.

‘Shut up. Out of the boat, the lot of you.’

Upright swore under his breath, but complied. Shield and I had no choice but to follow him. The captain and his men formed a semicircle around us as we scrambled ashore.

I stood at the very edge of the canal, with the policemen on either side of me. At that moment they felt like my only protection.

‘What do you want?’ Upright demanded.

‘Him, of course.’

‘On whose authority? He’s going to the Governor. If his Lordship tells us to hand him over to you, you’re welcome to him, but …’

‘This is my authority.’ The captain lifted the wicked, four-bladed sword I had seen him with earlier and jabbed Upright in the stomach with its blunt end, just once and not hard, and then raised it further so that the blades glittered in front of the policeman’s eyes. ‘You do what it tells you, see? Sod the Governor!’

What Upright did then was instinctive. If he had thought about it, even for a moment, he might have lived, but it all happened instantly, and by the time I saw what he was about it would have been too late to intervene even if there were anything I could do.

He raised his right hand towards his shoulder, where he wore his sword slung over his back.

He was dead before his fingers could so much as brush the weapon. Fox’s blade took him with a casual backhanded slash across the stomach. For a moment Upright just stood, watching, with a bemused look on his face, while his guts spilled out in front of him, and then he made an odd belching noise, blood gushed from his mouth and he fell over.

Two warriors had Shield’s arms pinioned behind him before he could move. He seemed unable to speak. He stood staring down at his chief’s body, open mouthed, the colour draining from his face even as I watched.

‘Fox,’ the captain said, ‘you are so clumsy Who’s going to clear up that mess?’

Shield was still struggling to find his voice. ‘You …’ he gasped.

‘Forget it.’ The captain thrust his brutal, ravaged face into the policeman’s. ‘Sorry to hear about your colleague’s unfortunate accident. The Chief Minister sends his condolences. It’simportant you remember that. “Accident” and “Chief Minister” — got it?’

Shield made a noise that the captain was obviously willing to take as assent, as he turned to me.

‘Now, as for you.’

He raised the four-bladed sword. I watched the glittering black razors set into its edges, one by one, as they swept past my face on the weapon’s upward swing. I felt my stomach lurch and I squeezed my eyes shut to spare myself the sight of the blow coming.

Nothing happened.

I opened my eyes again.

The handle of the weapon ended in a heavy wooden knob. That was the last thing I saw, filling my vision as it was driven down between my eyes like the head of a mallet, before everything went dark.