Obsidian & Blood (130 page)

  Coatl had left. No matter how I turned this around, I didn't like it. He'd said he hadn't taken the bribe, and he was honest, I was sure of that. But why leave at all, in such circumstances? He might have been frightened of the plague, but in this case he would have removed his whole household, not disappeared himself. 

  Why?

  I walked out of the palace, preoccupied, back to my temple, where – to my surprise – I found Neutemoc and Mihmatini in discussion with Palli.
  "What are you doing here?"

  Neutemoc was dressed for war in the fur-suit of Jaguar Knights, with his helmet tucked under his arm and his
macuahitl
sword in his right hand. And Mihmatini wore her Guardian clothes; her slave Yaotl trailing behind her, holding a basket of fruit and flowers – offerings for calling on the power of the Duality.

  "Mihmatini told me about the powders," Neutemoc said. "Why didn't you ask me?"

  "You know about cooking?" I couldn't hide my surprise.

  His lips quirked up, in that smile that wasn't a smile. "It's not about cooking." His voice took on the singsong cadences of sacred texts. "Forty baskets of cacao pinolli, and forty baskets of chia pinolly every eighty days, eight hundred mantles of cotton every eighty days, and eighty white and yellow cuextecatl costumes every year."

  "It's a tribute list," Mihmatini said. "For Tlatelolco. For the last eight years they've been paying this every year."

  "Tlatelolco?" The merchant, Yayauhqui.

  "Yes. I asked about Eptli," Neutemoc said. "Other than what you told me, nothing much that was new. Except this: his father was a messenger, originally. He was the one who carried back the news that Moquihuix-tzin, the Revered Speaker of Tlatelolco, was plotting against the Mexica Empire. That's how he became a nobleman."

  "Tlatelolco." I took in a deep breath. No wonder they'd wanted our fall, our failure in everything. "Let's go." 

  "Where?" 

  "To find and arrest someone, before it's too late."

 

Yayauhqui was not at his stall, and when we inquired at his household, we found him absent there too. The slaves showed us into the courtyard and served us bowls of chilli-flavoured cacao. After a while, a middle-aged woman by the name of Teyecapan came to see us, looking distraught. "They've told me you're looking for my husband. I can assure you, he's done nothing wrong."

  "Then let us see him," I said gently. "He can tell us ourselves."

  "He's not here," she said. She looked at us as if we were addled. "It's the Feast of the Sun. He'll be in the slave market, buying a sacrifice victim for the merchants."

  Neutemoc threw me an exasperated glance as we walked out. "I'm getting tired of walking back and forth between the houses and the marketplace."

  "Not to mention hot," Mihmatini said, hiding a smile. And, indeed, the Jaguar Knight's costume might have looked grandiose, but it was no more comfortable than my High Priest regalia: we were both sweating quite profusely under the withering glare of the Fifth Sun.

  Tlatelolco was nowhere as deserted as Tenochtitlan. But for the sick governor, the plague appeared to have touched it little – which made sense if Yayauhqui was behind it all. There were fewer people in the marketplace, but I suspected the missing were mainly Tenochcas.

  In the marketplace, the slave section was filled with merchants, discussing in small groups, looking at the slaves for sale – nearly all burly, unblemished men kneeling on the reed mats with the distant gazes of people who expected to be kneeling all day.

  Yayauhqui was easy to find: he towered over the other merchants by a head, and, with the true sight on, there was an empty hole where his souls ought to have been.

  "Acatl-tzin?" His gaze moved from Neutemoc to Mihmatini, and then back to me. "I did wait for you in the palace, but it was a while and you didn't come back…"

  The other merchants were frowning at us – their gazes were sharp and inquisitive, if not yet hostile. "Can we move away a little?" I asked.

  Yayauhqui smiled. "It all depends. What do you want?"

  "You're under arrest," Neutemoc said, curtly and harshly.

  "I don't understand." He sounded genuinely puzzled. 

  "The plague is linked to Tlatelolco."

  "And you come to me? Do you have any idea how many people of Tlatelolcan blood are around here?"

  "Few who knew Eptli, I'd wager," Mihmatini said.

  Yayauhqui considered her, thoughtfully. At length, he bowed. "I'll grant you this, my Lady, but I had little to do with Eptli, and certainly nothing to do with his death."

  And he sounded sincere. I knew he was a great liar, but surely, if he'd that much hatred of Mexica – if he was that much closer to his goal of unseating us – surely he would have shown some glee, some excitement? "Come with us," I said.

  He shrugged. "It's a nuisance, and I assure you I'm innocent." 

  "Then you won't mind coming with us until it's all over." A matter of days, or perhaps of hours.

  His face darkened, slightly. "I do mind. I have business, and other things to attend to. But if that's what it takes to convince you…" 

  He walked ahead of us on the way to the palace, his head thrown back, as casually arrogant as any warrior. 

  "Are you sure it's him?" Neutemoc said.

  "He might want to be coming back to the palace," Mihmatini said, slowly, but she didn't sound convinced.

  I wasn't, either. If all he'd wanted was to get back into the palace, he could have walked. And someone who could paint spells into the remotest courtyards didn't need a pitiful excuse like an arrest to be at work within the palace complex. "Something is wrong." 

  "We have the wrong person," Neutemoc said. He shrugged.

  No offence to him, but Yayauhqui is a merchant. Your plague sounds like it's been orchestrated by a warrior with a good grasp of strategy."

  "He used to be a warrior," I reminded Neutemoc. "All Tlatelolcans were both – merchants and warriors."

  "Don't lecture me." Neutemoc looked amused. "I know what you mean, but I still don't think it's him. Call it a gut feeling. He just doesn't seem to have the right mindset."

  I wasn't sure how much my brother's gut feelings were worth – but when it came to warriors, they had to be better than mine. Which left us, it seemed, with not much more to go on.

 

 

At the palace, we dropped Yayauhqui off into a room for "guests", and I managed to find one black-clad guard willing to keep an eye on him. Though Yayauhqui himself didn't look as though he had any intention of moving: he'd picked up ledgers from his merchant peers before leaving, and he was now sitting cross-legged with the papers spread in his lap, thoughtfully annotating them with a writing reed.

  It could have been an elaborate deception, but the most likely explanation was that it was all the truth, and that we'd been mistaken by picking him as the instigator of the plague.

  But, if not him, who else? As he had said, we did not lack Tlatelolcans. Another of the former imperial family, with more military training, and a stronger will for revenge?
  Pochtic would know.

  We walked back to Pochtic's rooms, where Ichtaca had readied everything for the spell: my priests had brought back Pochtic's body from the temple, and laid it again in the position in which he had died: readying the
teyolia
– the spirit that travelled the world beyond – for being summoned. Around him they had traced the glyph for
ollin
– movement, the symbol of this Fifth Age – and around the glyph a circle which encompassed the whole room, a symbol for the rules and rituals which bound us all. Now nine of them – one for each level of the underworld – were chanting hymns to Lord Death, beseeching Him to help us summon the dead man's soul.

 

 

 "I think we'll wait for you outside," Neutemoc said. He shifted uncomfortably – unused, I guessed, to the matter-of-fact way with which we treated death.

  Mihmatini shook her head. "You wait outside. I want to see this." Her gaze was hungry, feverish, and I thought I could name the reason for her impatience – she'd leap on anything we could use to make Teomitl see reason. 

  "Don't overdo it," I said. 

  Her gaze was hard. "I know what I'm doing."

  I sighed, but said nothing. I couldn't push her any further. We walked into the room together – to find Ichtaca on the edge of the circle, watching the ceremony. He bowed to Mihmatini, with the look of uneasy reverence he always had for his magical and political superiors – excepting me, of course. 

  "You don't look convinced by the ritual," I said. 

  Ichtaca shrugged. "You know why."

  After death, the souls that went into Mictlan lay in scattered shards – not like the sacrifices or the dead in battle, who opened up wings of light to ascend into the Fifth Sun's Heaven, nor the drowned men, who entered Tlalocan whole. Rather, those souls destined for Mictlan needed to strip themselves of every remnant of the Fifth World, pulling their essence from the corpse that had hosted them. It took a few days for that transformation to be complete, but this assumed proper rituals – the washing and laying-out of the body, and the vigil: all the small things that kept reminding the soul of the next step in its journey. Here, there had been time for nothing of this; the body had been moved, cutting its link to the place of death. 

  "Two days," I said, aloud. 

  "It will have to suffice," Ichtaca said.

  We waited side by side, until the chanting subsided; it was time for me to take my place at the centre of the quincunx.

  Pochtic's body lay on the ground – not the pale, contorted thing I remembered, but something else. Palli and the others had dressed him in a semblance of a funeral bundle – given the little time they'd had, I suspected there were rather fewer layers of cotton than Pochtic's status warranted; fewer amulets and pieces of jewellery as well.

  I inhaled – feeling the cold of the underworld gather itself from the circle under my feet. Green light had seeped from the dried blood on the ground, until it seemed as though I stood in mist. Everything smelled faintly humid – like leaves on the edge of rotting. Then, with one of my obsidian knives, I drew a line across the scarred back of my hand, letting the blood fall onto the floor, drop after drop. There was a small jolt every time a drop connected, and the mist opened itself up to welcome it, with a hunger that was almost palpable.

 

 

  The light flared up, coming to my waist; I could see faint smudges within, and hear the distant lament of the dead; shapes moved within the mist – there were hints of yellow eyes and claws and fangs, and the distant glimmer of a lost soul, like dewdrops on flower leaves.

 

 

  Nothing happened.

  Or rather: the mist remained, and the feeling of emptiness arcing through me, telling me passage into the underworld was open. But no soul came; no vaguely human shape drew itself out of the murky darkness.

  The Storm Lord strike me, Ichtaca was right: we were too early, and the soul was still in four hundred scattered pieces.

  But no; there was something… some resistance, as if I'd hooked a fish at the end of a line, or rather, more than one fish: I could feel the pulling, the scrabbling of several smaller things trying to get out of the way, with the same intelligence as a shoal of fish or a flock of sparrows.

  I grasped my obsidian knife, letting the blade draw a bloody line within my palm – waiting until the obsidian was tinged with my blood. Then I wove the knife up, heedless of the small pinprick of pain that spread from my open wounds – up, and around, as if cutting into a veil.

  The air parted with a palpable resistance, and the pull I felt grew stronger – and then, in a moment like a heartbeat,
something
coalesced in the midst of the circle.

  The souls I had seen had been human, but this clearly wasn't. It moved and shimmered, barely within the Fifth World – I caught glimpses of wings and feathers within its ever-changing shape, as if the soul wasn't yet sure how it had died.

  "Priest?" It whispered. The voice was to Pochtic as a codex picture was to a god – small and diminished, its timbre extinguished. "Where–?"

  "The Fifth World – but only for a little while," I said. "Everything must tarnish and fade into dust, and you are no exception." My voice took on the cadences of the ritual – for this had to be done properly, lest Pochtic never achieve oblivion in Mictlan. "The blood has fled your body; the voice of your heart is silent. The underworld awaits you."

  The soul shifted and twisted. If he had been a man, he would have hugged himself. "I'm dead?"
  Quite unmistakably so. "Yes," I said.

  It moved again, extending tendrils of light to wrap around the funeral bundle – and withdrawing as soon as it touched it, as if it had been burned. "Dead…" it whispered.

  What a contrast to the vibrant, arrogant man Pochtic had been, but then, few spirits maintained their cohesion into death. I had only met one, and he had been Revered Speaker of Tenochtitlan, schooled in propriety and ritual since his birth.