Master of the House of Darts (27 page)

"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," Nezahual-tzin 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 worship-thorns 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.

FIFTEEN

Corpses and Curses

Contrary to what Nezahual-tzin had told me, Mihmatini wasn't waiting for me at the Duality House.

Instead, I found people grouped in the courtyard: mothers with children on their backs, entire families from the grandmother to the young toddlers, and quite a few warriors, who presented their emotions as an odd mixture of terror and annoyance – as if they were aware they should not have been so afraid of the supernatural. There appeared to be no sick people, but I strongly suspected those were being herded away by the priests of the Duality.

After many enquiries, I finally managed to get hold of Yaotl, my sister's personal slave, who looked at me with his customary sneer and informed me that she'd left for the city, in order to take a look at some of the sick.

"And Teomitl?" I asked

"He left yesterday," Yaotl said, curtly. "A couple of warriors came to pick him up."

Like the warriors who had removed their sandals? I didn't like this; I didn't like this at all.

I walked back to my temple in a thoughtful mood, but found it flooded as well, my priests barely able to deal with the flow of supplicants, and Ichtaca himself having taken refuge in the shrine atop the pyramid, looking pale and harried.

"Acatl-tzin! We thought–"

I raised a hand. "It's quite all right," I said, thinking I was making a speciality of running out on them. "I ran into someone, rather unexpectedly, and spent the night stuck in the palace grounds."

Ichtaca looked bewildered. "We looked for you after the riot, but we couldn't find you."

"I was in Tlalocan," I said, briefly – ignoring the awe which spread across his face. "Not my idea. Acamapichtli's."

"But Acamapichtli-tzin–"

I mentally ran through the necessary explanations, and gave up. "Look," I said. "I promise I'll explain everything, but right now there is something slightly more urgent. I think there is a problem with the boundaries."

Ichtaca looked as if he might protest, and then he took a look down into the overcrowded courtyard. "It could be," he said, slowly. "It would explain why so many people have turned up here. They speak of ghosts, and of odd portents…"

"The boundaries are weakened," I said.

"But the Revered Speaker–"

The Revered Speaker should have been protecting us against that, yes. "I don't know," I said. "But it's the only explanation that fits." I thought of Tizoc-tzin; of the stretched bones beneath the sallow skin; of the shadowed eye-sockets that might as well have been empty. A dead man walking in the Fifth World.

"Oh, gods," I said, aloud. "We did it."

We'd brought him back, crossing the boundary between life and death, and it had never closed properly. "It's something we did, with the spell to bring Tizoc-tzin back."

Ichtaca grimaced. He hadn't liked the story when I'd told it to him, but he'd had to bow down to my decision. To our decision. We had taken that as a group – as High Priests and equals, for once. "We don't have star-demons in the streets," he said.

"Because we have a Revered Speaker," I said. "The Fifth World is protected. But that doesn't mean things can't be wrong. Ghosts are hardly a menace."

I stopped, then – and thought of all the sorcerers we'd defeated – all the people who had died in our wars of the conquest, thirsting for revenge over the Mexica. I thought of how easy it was to call up a ghost and listen to their advice. No need to be a sorcerer frighteningly good at magic: our culprit merely needed to call on the right ghost.

Oh, gods. "I take it back. Ghosts
can
be a menace. A sorcerer advising someone…"

"Ghosts can't cast spells," Ichtaca pointed out.

"I know. But they can give the instructions, if you ask them the right questions." Oh gods. The living were quite enough to deal with; I didn't want to have to contend with the dead as well.

"Can you look into this?" I asked Ichtaca. "I need to know what exactly is wrong with the boundaries."

"You've stated it." He looked genuinely startled.

"I could be wrong." And I dared not, not on something this large. "I want to be sure."

He grimaced. "I know it's important, but–"

"There are other things, I know. You have to spread out the priests. I know you can do that."

"As you wish." He rose. "I was planning to direct the examinations of the bodies."

Ah, yes. The bodies. Finally, we had some time to examine them quietly, and to get a better idea of the nature of the sickness. "They're on an island in the Floating Gardens, if I remember correctly? I'll come with you," I said.

Ichtaca nodded, as if he hadn't expected anything less of me. It was a balm to my heart, in a time when my confidence was severely shaken.

Before we left, I took a moment to seek out the storehouse, and to help myself to a simple grey cloak, the one customarily worn by priests for the Dead as they walked through the streets of the city. I didn't look like a High Priest anymore, but at least I had lost the resemblance to a beggar mauled by a jaguar.

Ichtaca, of course, insisted I take the huge barge of the High Priest, with its highly-recognisable spider-and-owl design of Mitclantecuhtli, while he and the other priests sat in smaller reed crafts.

The priest with me was Ezamahual, the dour-faced peasants' son who always walked as if unbelievably blessed. He didn't speak as I carefully wedged myself into position within the barge – much harder than I'd thought possible, with my legs shaking.

He rowed in great, smooth gestures – a familiar rhythm for someone who had grown up at the river's edge – lulling me into a sleep that was almost restful… until I saw the first hints of ghosts trailing over the water.

The drowned, too, were rising up. This was more serious than a mere summoning from the underworld. Something was deeply wrong, and the gods knew it, from Mictlantecuhtli to Tlaloc.

And all, I suspected, because of us. It had to be – what else would cause such a massive disruption?

At the time, we'd thought it the lesser of two evils. The death of Tizoc-tzin, our newly designated Revered Speaker, had opened the gates wide to star-demons and their depredations. To name another Revered Speaker would have taken weeks – time we didn't have. Far better to seek the Southern Hummingbird's favour, and bring back Tizoc-tzin's body and soul from the heartland.

Except, it seemed, that it had solved nothing – merely sowed the seeds for further blood and fire in the Fifth World.

At this early hour, it made more sense to take one of the largest western canals, swinging under the Tlacopan causeway and continuing due south around Tenochtitlan. The houses of adobe became mud and wattle – with coloured roofs at first. Then even those went away, and the crowds heading to the marketplace thinned out, until we reached the Floating Gardens: a network of artificial islands used as fields for the planting of anything from maize to squashes. The farmers were up already, consolidating the ditches for irrigation and making sure the earth was well-watered in preparation for the planting of maize.