Master of the House of Darts (20 page)

Somehow – somehow I hoisted Teomitl on my shoulders, and staggered out of the house, calling out for the Jaguar Knights, but whether fallen or fled, they wouldn't answer. I couldn't find the boats we'd arrived in, either. So instead, I turned my face away from the blinding light of the sun, and started to walk back to the Sacred Precinct.

Teomitl grew heavier as I walked, and the world shrank into a whirl of colours and sounds: vague faces, fading in and out of focus; a morass of feather headdresses, black-dyed cheeks, and the glint of gold caught in hair as black as night. My feet dragged in the dust and the sounds of the city seemed far away; the clacking noise of the women's loom no more than a distant irritation. The shadows came back, too, swooping over the canals like
ahuizotl
water-beasts – quivering, always on the edge of leaping.

"We leave this earth,

This world of jade and flowers,

The quetzal feathers, the silver and the jade…"

They were slowly rising – casting the adobe house into darkness, making the coloured clothes dull and insignificant. My world shrank to this: the burning light of the sun – echoed in the itching that seemed to have overwhelmed my skin – and the shadows, the same that had killed Eptli, which would engulf us all…

My hands shook; I held Teomitl tighter against my chest, afraid I'd let him fall into the dirt. I couldn't let go: I had to get him back to safety – he was my student… My whole body was afire, my stomach a mass of pain. If only I could pause, rest for a while, doubled up in a foetal position, until the pain went away…

The shadows shifted lazily over the canals and the bridges, the assembled throng of peasants in loincloths, the matrons holding baskets of tomatoes and squashes close to their chests. Like the wind, they ruffled the cloaks of war veterans, exposing old, whitish scars that took on the appearance of suppurating sores once more. I trudged on, dragging my feet in the earth. The sun beat on my back – and it seemed that the beat was echoed within me, at the junction of skin and muscle, an endless rhythm like thousands of hands hammering from inside, demanding to be let out.

Ahead, I caught glimpses of the Serpent Wall – the shadows congregated around the snakes atop the wall, in the quetzal-red jaws and green bodies, darkening the scales and the crown of feathers around their heads. Almost there…

Abruptly, Teomitl weighed nothing – no, it wasn't that, it wasn't that. Someone had taken him from me. I had to… had… to…

"Teomitl! Acatl!" My sister's face swam out of the morass of shadows – a scant few moments before the fever rose again, and I knew nothing more but the nightmares.

ELEVEN

Bitter Medicines

My dreams were dark and numerous; in all of them I lay on my back, while something crushed my chest, and in every shadow I saw the faces of the sick, opening their mouths to scream. Sometimes I heard them, sometimes I did not – but they were always by my side, blindly scrabbling for the raging warmth of my body.

At some point, sleep claimed me, dark and exhausting, and the bodies faded, to be replaced by the sound of distant chanting, while I lay panting and burning, every breath searing the inside of my throat.

I woke up, and there was still chanting – as my mind cleared, I recognised the words of a hymn to Patecatl, god of medicine.

"Come, you the five souls,

I expel from this place the green pain, the tawny pain,

Come, you the nine winds,

I expel from this place the green pain, the tawny pain…"

  
They were spoken by a reedy, frightened man who stood some distance away from me, clearly afraid to touch me. He smelled of copal incense and a mixture of herbs I couldn't place, sharp and bitter. The fever had receded, leaving my mind as clear and as brittle as polished obsidian. I noted the pattern of snakes on the ceiling arcing above me, and the frescoes on the wall were of a huge tree to which clung babies, drinking the sap like mother's milk; the hymn washed over me, again and again like waves on the shore, like the embrace of Chalchiuhtlicue Jade Skirt at birth, washing away all the filth and the sins of the ancestors.

I lay quiet, unable to move.

Some time later, an entrance-curtain tinkled; the priest started. "He's awake, my Lady."

"I can see that," Mihmatini's voice said.

There was a silence; the priest's face stubbornly turned towards her, his gaze downcast. "My Lady?" he asked, finally. "You promised I could leave…"

Mihmatini snorted. "I did, didn't I? Very well, you may go."

He was scurrying out toward the exit before she'd even finished her sentence.

"Acatl?" Mihmatini asked. "How are you feeling?" She knelt by the side of the bed – I'd expected sarcasm, or some biting remark about my tendency to get into scrapes, but there was none of that; merely thin lines at the corners of her red-rimmed eyes.

Then I remembered. "Teomitl. Where–?"

"Ssh." Mihmatini laid a hand on my forehead. She grimaced. "What I need to know now is how you are."

"I've felt better," I said, carefully. My tongue scraped against my palate, as abrading as coarse sand, and there was a distant ache in my stomach, like a beast laying low, waiting for the best moment to pounce again. "You haven't told me about Teomitl."

"I need you to rest," Mihmatini said. "Whatever protection you had blocked part of the sickness, but you're not invulnerable, Acatl."

Neither was Teomitl. I watched her – clad in the blue cloak of a Guardian, with feathers hanging down the nape of her neck and black paint, applied to her cheeks and forehead with a trembling hand, leaving large swathes of skin uncovered. And, on the ground beneath her feet, was a thread of yellow light – going straight through the wall, its radiance contracting and expanding with every one of her breaths, like a heartbeat. "It's bad, isn't it?"

She wouldn't look at me, as if I'd somehow turned into her superior. "Whatever it is, it's affected him worse than you. It's as if he had a special affinity with the sickness."

Then why hadn't it struck before? But, of course, he had always been quite far away from the corpses; he had given the first one only a cursory examination, and while he'd stayed in the room of the second one he hadn't cast spells or even strayed close to the body. Then again… for all I knew, he could have been affected already, and not said a word to me about whatever trivial symptoms he might have felt.

Southern Hummingbird blind the man and his pride.

"I need to see him," I said, pulling myself upright. Or rather, trying to. None of my limbs seemed to work properly; it was all I could do to fall back in a vaguely graceful manner.

"You're staying on the sleeping mat," Mihmatini said, in a voice I recognised all too well – reserved for disobedient children, or recalcitrant priests. "You're quite obviously in no state to walk, Acatl, and I will not have you push yourself past your endurance."

"It wouldn't be the first time," I said, knowing what her answer would be.

"You know, that doesn't strike me as something to be particularly proud of," Mihmatini said. "Stay here."

"And what? Wait? He's my student as much as he's your husband. If anything happens…" I wouldn't forgive myself.

"Then what?" Mihmatini's voice was low and terrible, that of a judge about to pass sentence. "You're a priest of Mictlantecuhtli, Acatl. You don't do healing spells."

"No," I said. I pulled myself upwards again, more carefully this time, letting the full weight of my body rest on the wall. "But I know about illnesses."

Mostly as causes of death, granted. But still… still, the priests of Patecatl were quite obviously useless. For something like this – a deliberately cast disease – we needed to fight the sorcerer who had cast it: a man or a woman we still knew nothing about.

Either that, or…

"He's Chalchiuhtlicue's agent," I said.

Mihmatini rolled her eyes upwards. "I've already thought of it. We tried healing or cleansing spells that called on Her power."

"And?" I said.

"They're not working. But then nothing else has."

I shook my head. "It's not spells you'd need, but Her personal attention."

Mihmatini grimaced. "Going into Her own land? We tried that, as well."

"You have?" It was bad, then; for going into Tlalocan, the land of the Blessed Drowned, was far from simple or safe. By going into a god's world, one agreed to be bound by its rules and caprices – to face monsters and magic, and desires that predated the Fifth Age.

Mihmatini's face was pale. "The way was closed. Perhaps She thought us beneath Her notice."

"You'd be beneath Her notice, but Teomitl wouldn't." She had schemes for him – whatever they were. She'd picked him up, chosen to wield Her powers in the Fifth World. She wouldn't have done that without a reason… and I had a feeling the days were fast approaching when we would come to know it. "Unless something has gone wrong." Acamapichtli – abruptly, I remembered the trial. "Acamapichtli's arrest. That's what's gone wrong." And Tapalcayotl in his cage; and probably the whole clergy, all over the city – the Consort, High Priestess of Chalchiuhtlicue, and her own clergy… "The arrest of her husband's clergy must give Her enough to be busy."

Mimahtini shook her head. "I know it's serious, Acatl, but that's not what we're focusing on right now."

No. She was right. One couldn't grasp four hundred stalks of corn at the same time. We needed to shape our minds to a single purpose, or Teomitl would be gone just the same way as Eptli.

I thought again of the corpse – small and forlorn and abandoned, and my stomach lurched within me at the thought of Teomitl's being there, in Eptli's place.

"You don't know healing spells either?" I asked Mihmatini.

"I've thought of something, but it cannot possibly work as it is. Come and see."

She found a cane for me, which looked suspiciously like her predecessor Ceyaxochitl's cane. I used it to prop myself upwards – and half-carried by Mihmatini, halfpushing myself on the cane – I made my way out of the room. Ironic, really – Ceyaxochitl herself had been the fittest old woman I'd known, using the cane mostly for show in order to enjoy the respect and pity accorded to the frail elderly. She'd never been one much for frailty, and she would probably have scolded me for being such a weakling.

Gods, what I wouldn't have given to have her back – overbearing and patronising as she'd always been. The cane was warm under my fingers, but she was gone, down into Mictlan, never to return, her wisdom and knowledge going the way of dust blown by the wind.

The entrance-curtain opened into the main courtyard of the Duality House: like most temples, it had a rectangular layout, with a pyramid shrine in the centre, and various rooms and compounds opening into the main courtyard, their entrance-curtains shaded by a pillared portico.

Yaotl was waiting for us at the entrance, sitting on his haunches in a position of attention. He unfolded himself when Mihmatini came out; she acknowledged him with a curt nod. For me, he had nothing but his usual, mildly sardonic glance – not that I had expected more than that.

"Anything?" Mihmatini asked.

Yaotl shook his head. "No change." He handed his mistress a folded piece of paper. Mihmatini took it, but didn't open it.

"Come," she said, and all but dragged me to another room, the entrance-curtain of which was marked only by a few glyphs.

Inside, an antechamber led into a deeper, more shadowed room – Mihmatini's quarters, in as much disorder as usual. The wicker chests bulged with clothes: colourful headdresses and skirts spilled out from under their lids, and a feather-fan I'd last seen in Neutemoc's house rested on top of one of them. The two sleeping-mats had been unrolled: one was empty; the second one held Teomitl.

He was so pale – his skin so leeched of colours it seemed like pallid gold. His eyes were sunk deep into his face; his hair, curled and plastered with sweat, clung to his scalp in clumps, and he tossed and moaned. I dragged myself closer, and painstakingly crouched down – not so much a deliberate gesture as a gradual sagging of my body, stopped at regular intervals by my grip on the cane – slow and messy.

Teomitl did not move, or give any sign that he had registered my presence; after a while, I realised that he wasn't moaning, but talking under his breath, so fast I could barely follow – delirious snatches of sentences mentioning anything from Jade Skirt's touch to beasts of shadows. I touched the mat; it was already soaked. "You said you had something."

A flutter of clothes, and then Mihmatini was crouching by my side – the thread between her and Teomitl reduced to an arm's length, bright and vivid, like blood in an open wound. Her face was calm, expressionless – like obsidian in the instant before it shattered. "I haven't been idle. We've cast spells of protection in the Duality's name, and we have also been looking into possible causes for the sickness. It's one – or more – of four things. He's carrying something within him, which was put there by a sorcerer. I don't think it's the case: insofar as I can tell, none of the dead men touched anything?"

I thought, uneasily, of Eptli. "It might have started that way, but I don't think it's using a physical vector anymore."

"Hmm." Mihmatini unfolded the piece of maguey paper Yaotl had given her: it was a transcription from a divinatory priest's calendar, listing horoscopes and fates for a particular birth – a beautiful piece, with coloured glyphs swirling around the images of the protector gods.

"His?" I guessed. A man's birth influenced many things, not least of which the healing rituals which would be effective.

"It was hard to find," Mihmatini said. "Fortunately, Yaotl is frighteningly efficient at what he does."

I wasn't surprised. It wasn't only healing rituals that depended on the birth-signs, but also vulnerabilities – naturally, someone as paranoid as Tizoc-tzin would not want his war-council to be on display for any sorcerer to tackle.