Obsidian & Blood

Serpent.

  I could have chosen this place for the spell, for Quetzalcoatl was neutral to me, unlike the Southern Hummingbird or the Storm Lord. But the Feathered Serpent was also Nezahual-tzin's god, and I had had quite enough of the boy's peculiar brand of magic for the time being.

  'Come on,' I said to Teomitl, and headed towards one of the tombs. As I walked, it grew larger in my sight, and yet still remained small and pathetic, diminished like a corpse in death. Silence spread around me, the chants of the priests receding in the background, meaningless snatches in a language that no longer seemed mine. It wasn't the silence of the grave, but something different, something indefinable, like the quiet after a battle, like the calm after a death, when the priest for the Dead has just arrived, a sense that something of large import had happened here and wouldn't take place again, it was a memory of a moment like a held breath, now vanished into the depths of this age, a moment that wouldn't happen again until Grandmother Earth split apart and the Fifth Sun tumbled from the heavens.

  I bypassed the first such tomb, and the second. At the third, however, the silence was a little heavier than it should have been, and twisted a little more in my chest, like a hooked spear.

  Carefully I climbed to the top of the platform, standing above the earth with only bare limestone under me. There was only silence, stretching over me like flowing cloth, a familiar aching emptiness in my breast. And a little something, nagging at the back of my mind, an ache I had forgotten, something that wasn't quite right.

  But of course things weren't right. It was Mictlantecuhtli lying underneath that shrine, buried in the chamber under the steps of the pyramid, Lord Death, my own god, as unmoving and as powerless as the corpses I did my vigils for. There was something wrong about the thought. The gods might have been capricious and arbitrary, but They were still more than us, and, although none of this was new to me, to see Them as former mortals was… disturbing, to say the least.

  'Acatl-tzin–' Teomitl said.

  I raised a hand to silence him and knelt on the platform, drawing one of my obsidian blades. With the ease of practise, I opened my veins, letting the blood drip on my knife – and drew a quincunx on the platform. It pulsed, gently, as if to the rhythm of an alien heartbeat, the air above it shimmering as if in a heat haze.

  Then, standing in the centre of the quincunx – in the place that might as well be the centre of the universe – I started the invocation to Lord Death.

'We all must die

We all must go down into darkness

Leaving behind the marigolds and the cedar trees…'

  Light blazed, outlining the quincunx in radiance; the wounds on my hands tingled, like coals in a brazier.

'We all must die

We all must leave our flowers, our songs

All jade breaks, all feathers crumble into dust

Nothing is hidden from Your gaze.'

  In my previous spell of death sight, a veil had gradually descended over the world, until everything material seemed to grow dim and meaningless. But here, the only thing that seemed to happen was that the air grew sharper, burning in my lungs, and the shrines suddenly loomed larger, the inset black stones shining like inverted suns amidst the larger structure of limestone. And under my feet, under the stone, I could see the corpse in the pyramid, its bones as green as jade, its heart a shrivelled, bloodless lump amidst the exposed ribs, my patron god's mortal remains, from before He became a god, unnervingly small and pathetic.

  No, better not think about that.

  Teomitl was waiting for me at the top of the stairs, the magic around him shimmering, a beacon of jade light strong enough to blind. 'And now?'

  I looked down. Dust shimmered over the Valley of the Dead, which had become an opalescent path like a spider's web. The pro cession of priests left a trail of magic, green with a red core, writhing like the tail of a snake, going towards the pyramid of the Moon at the end of the Alley, a looming mass of pale, cold light emitting rays like the thorns of a maguey.

  Aside from the priests, there was no sign of any human presence near the pyramid of the Moon. I looked towards the pyramid of the Sun, which had become an almost unbearably strong radiance, but could distinguish no sign of life, either.

  Odd. If I were Pezotic, our missing councilman; if I were so afraid of the star-demons I'd sought the protection of the Fifth Sun himself, then I'd have expected him to be near the pyramid of the Sun, which was the focal point of the complex. But there seemed to be no one there.

  So much for that brilliant idea. It looked like I was going to go back to Nezahual-tzin like a beaten coyote, my tail tucked between my legs. I didn't quite have Teomitl's level of contempt for him, but still… still it would rankle.

  Unless…

  I looked at the procession of priests again, and back at the third pyramid, the one dedicated to the Feathered Serpent. The priesthood was a long and difficult calling, and Pezotic wouldn't have been able to invent himself that kind of identity. However…

  I watched the procession for a while – feeling, again, that subtle sense of wrong, which had nothing to do with graves or with the rise of the Fifth Sun. One of the last priests, though he wore the same red-and-green clothes, didn't seem to fit in. I had noticed it, but in a vague, unfocused way, and it had bothered me. And now that I had the death sight on me, I could see that the trail of magic ignored him, the translucent, writhing snake going right through him, instead of rippling as it did around the other priests.

  'That's him,' I said to Teomitl. 'Our missing councilman.'

  Teomitl was down the steps, obsidian-studded sword drawn, before I could stop him.