'And?' Yaotl asked, shaking his head impatiently. 'Did he confess?'
Teomitl looked at him blankly.
'The murder of Guardian Ceyaxochitl,' I prompted him.
'Oh.' He did not look more enlightened. 'We didn't talk about that.'
'Then what about?' Yaotl was fuming by now.
'About the star-demons.' Teomitl's face was hard again, on the verge of becoming jade. 'He's said that he'll only talk to you, Acatl-tzin.'
I briefly woke Mihmatini to let her know where we were going. She made a face of disapproval I knew all too well, a mirror image of Mother's when my brother or I had broken a dish or muddied a loincloth. 'You haven't eaten anything.'
I pointed to the tray the servant had left. 'I had maize soup. And a whole newt with yellow peppers.'
Her gaze made it clear she wasn't fooled. 'Acatl, you're in no state to walk.'
'I feel much better.' And it was true; utterly drained, but much better. The pain was gone, leaving only the dull feeling that nothing would ever be right again.
Mihmatini made a face that told me she didn't believe me. 'I should come with you,' she said.
Teomitl put a hand on her arm gently. 'No. Not now.'
'But–'
'Out of the question,' I said. My judgment might be a little shaky now – a little pale and empty like the veins in my body – but there was no way I would let her walk into Tizoc-tzin's chambers.
'Acatl-tzin is right,' Teomitl said. 'My brother won't be happy to see you, and this isn't the time for this.'
'Teomitl…'
He shook his head again. 'No.'
And that effectively ended the conversation, though Mihmatini glowered like a jaguar deprived of its prey. 'I'll be waiting for you,' she said, and the way she spoke made it doubtful she'd hand out hugs or flowers.
I could feel Yaotl's amused gaze on my back all the way to Tizoctzin's chambers; but he said nothing.
I wondered what Manatzpa could have to tell me. How he could not hate me, when I had been the one who had brought him down? Most likely he would taunt me. I doubted that he would bend. In that way, he was very much like his nephews Tizoc-tzin and Teomitl. But there might be something to be gleaned, information that would help us. For if my gut feeling was right and he was not the summoner of star-demons, then we still had someone out there, busily plotting our ruin.
I'd expected some silence in Tizoc-tzin's courtyard; or at any rate, some mark that something was wrong with the palace, but it seemed like nothing had changed. Warriors gathered on the platform, laughing among themselves. Noise floated from Tizoc-tzin's rooms, the singsong intonations of poets reciting compositions, the laughter of warriors, the deep rhythm of beaten drums. But underneath, in the wider courtyard, were other warriors, dressed far more soberly, their long cloaks barely masking the whitish scars on their limbs. They talked amongst themselves, casting dark glances at the finery on the platform; the other part of the army, the true warriors, the ones who would support only a veteran, not a mediocre fighter like Tizoc-tzin.
If nothing else, things were starting to get ugly here, with factions openly declaring themselves.
Teomitl, oblivious, strode into a smaller courtyard, a mirror image of the House of Animals, loaded with exotic trees and bushes. It seemed as though we had stepped into another world altogether, a land to the south where the heat was stifling and quetzal-birds flew in the wild, raucously calling to each other. Cages dotted the landscape at regular intervals, huge, empty, their wooden bars almost merging with the foliage of the trees. The air smelled of churned mud, with the faint, heady fragrance of flowers. What was not expected, however, was the reek of magic, so strong it burnt my lungs.
'Something is wrong,' I said, but did not have time to go further.
She stepped out of the caged wilderness as if She belonged within it; tall, Her skin as black as the night sky, and stars scattered at Her elbows and knees, stars that were also the eyes of monsters. Her cloak spread behind Her – no, it was not a cloak, but wings made of a thousand shards of obsidian, glinting in sunlight – and her face was pale skin, stretched over the hint of a skull, with bright, malevolent eyes that held me until I fell to my knees, shaking.
'Priest. Warrior. Slave.' Her gaze swept through us all. I clenched my hands to stop my fingers from shaking. 'You're too late,' She said.
Something shone clung to Her wings, a light that was neither sunlight nor starlight; the memory of something that had once belonged in the Fifth World. A soul, ripped from its body.
Manatzpa.
She threw me a last searing glance, and leapt over me with an agility I wouldn't have expected from something so monstrous.
And then She was gone, with only the reek of magic to remind us of Her presence.
My obsidian knives were warm, quivering under my touch, as if She had affected them too. I looked around. The air smelled of charnel and blood, and the single cage ahead of us had its bars broken.
We'd arrived too late.
Both Yaotl and Teomitl had gone down. Yaotl was still shaking, and Teomitl was pulling himself up, with the wrath of Chalchiuhtlicue filling his face.
'What was that?' he asked.
'I–' She had looked like a star-demon; but different, too: not a mindless thing, but a goddess in Her own right, unmistakably female. 'Itzpapalotl,' I said, fighting past the constriction in my chest. 'The Obsidian Butterfly, Goddess of War and Sacrifice.' Leader of the star-demons, She who would take us all into Her embrace, when the time came.
'That's impossible,' Yaotl remained sitting in the mud, oblivious to the growing stain on his cloak. 'She's–'
