When I finished chanting, the dog sprang to life, running around the shadow like an excited puppy, its tinny barks the only sign of life around us. Its paws struck up dust where it passed.
'It's time,' I whispered to Axayacatl-tzin.
'I see,' the former Revered Speaker said, and his voice was clearer, stronger than on the other shore. He was among his own kind now, in the only place where his existence still had meaning. He turned towards me, a featureless shadow among featureless shadows.'Thank you, priest.'
I couldn't help a slight recoil of surprise. The Dead tended to be tremendously self-focused – for such was the nature of death, which severed all bonds of the Fifth World – and I had never had any spirit turn back and thank me before setting on.
'I am Revered Speaker, Huitzilpochtli's own agent.' There was a hint of self-deprecating humour in Axayacatl-tzin's voice. 'I have known propriety all my life, in death I will not forget.'
Though I'd only seen him from afar when he was alive, already I liked him, more than any of those who would claim his ruler's mat. 'I am honoured,' I said, bowing. 'But I was only doing my work.'
'And you do it well.' If the Dead could look amused, he would have. 'I'll leave things in your capable hands.'
I could not help a slight grimace, and he was shrewd enough to see it. 'Do you not think yourself capable?' His head moved, slightly. His eyes shone yellow, the same colour as the dog at his feet, a memory of the sunlight that had once been poured into him. His features had been completely washed away, so that he seemed to have become the mask they had put onto him. 'Ah, I see. It's others you don't trust.'
Tizoc-tzin had been his choice and he would have approved the nomination of the other two high priests – not to mention of Xahuia, favoured enough to bear him a son. 'I apologise–' I started.
'No need to.' He sounded amused again. 'I'd always known there would be a rift when I died. But only for a time. I've made sure it will close itself.'
'How?'
His head cocked towards me, a fluid movement like a bird's. 'Let that be a surprise, priest.'
'Someone poisoned the Guardian,' I said, the words torn out of me before I could think. 'A devotee of She of the Silver Bells.'
'The Silver Bells? Her worship should be dead.' His eyes blazed, touched for a bare moment with all the might of Huitzilpochtli.
'So you don't know who it could be?' I was pushing my luck. One did not interview the Revered Speaker – even less so the soul of the dead Revered Speaker – as if he were a witness in a courthouse.
He was silent for a while. At length, he hunkered down on the dry, dusty earth as if he were still sitting in judgment. 'I didn't know in life, and so wouldn't know in death. But…' he paused, as if admitting something painful. 'The She-Snake has always had unorthodox worship practises. Not surprising. His father used religion as a tool, and made the worship of Huitzilpochtli into a political act.'
'You think he's reacting against that?' I asked. A touch of Mictlan's cold went down my back. If the She- Snake was worshipping She of the Silver Bells, things had just escalated. His men were all over the palace, keeping watch over all the key areas – not only of the palace, but also of the Sacred Precinct and of the city itself. All the temples, and all the Houses of Darts, the arsenals where we stored weapons.
'I don't know,' Axayacatl-tzin said. 'But I can tell you this, priest – beware of him. He can act with the best of them, and you'll only know he's lied to you after he's twisted the knife in your chest and taken out your heart for his own purposes.'
I nodded. That would teach me to trust a pleasant face. I hesitated; but there was too much at stake. 'Your wife Xahuia–'
'I remember Xahuia.' His eyes softened.
'Do you remember her sorcerer?' I asked. 'Nettoni?'
'Dedicated to Tezcatlipoca, the Smoking Mirror? Yes,' Axayacatltzin said. 'An ambitious man to serve an ambitious woman. His ally, for as long as their goals overlap.' He rose, turned back towards the waiting darkness. 'But I don't think–' He paused. A thread of cold light wrapped itself around his waist; climbed, snake-like, to his ears, as if to whisper words I couldn't hear. 'Ah, yes. A reminder, worthy to be heeded, priest. It's the star-demons who will end us, coming down from the sky to devour us, swarming over Tonatiuh until His light is extinguished and the age of the Fifth Sun comes to an end.'
'And?' I asked, but I had remembered, too. I knew what Lord Death had told him, nothing more, nothing less than what I had already known.
If Axayacatl-tzin still had a mouth, he would have smiled. 'The Smoking Mirror is the Sixth Sun. It is His destiny to climb into the sky and take His place as supreme god of the new age.'
And His desire, perhaps, to see the Fifth Age, the age of the Fifth Sun Tonatiuh and the Southern Hummingbird Huitzilpochtli, end much sooner than it should.
'I see,' I said. The cold was in my bones and in my heart. 'I see. Thank you, Axayacatl-tzin.'
When I opened my eyes, I was back in the Fifth World within my blood-quincunx, the potency of which was slowly leeching away. Axayacatl-tzin's corpse still sat facing me, but something seemed to have gone out of him, some bright, subtle light that even death had not extinguished. His soul – his heart, the divine fire which animates us all – had passed into Mictlan, never to return.
But what he had left me with was troubling. I had forgotten that the Sixth Sun was Tezcatlipoca, and that the devotees of the Smoking Mirror would therefore have ample motivation for ushering in chaos – a chaos that would lay the ground for their god's rise to power. They might not worship She of the Silver Bells, but did it matter, as long as they could control the star-demons?
But still, that would require the devotees of both gods to be in collusion. It wasn't uncommon. The previous year I'd uncovered a plot between Xochiquetzal, the Quetzal Flower, Goddess of Lust and Desire, and Tlaloc, the Storm Lord. But it still seemed a very complicated conspiracy, if conspiracy there was.
I sighed. The light that filtered through the entrance-curtain was the pale, grey one before dawn. as expected, the ritual had taken all night. There would be time, later, to reflect on the consequences of what I had learnt. What I needed now was rest.
I made it home just in time for the blast of conch-shells and drums that announced the rise of the Fifth Sun, did my offerings of blood; and fell on my sleeping mat.
