And then, as abruptly as a cut breath, we were no longer alone. Itzpapalotl, the Obsidian Butterfly, stood in the centre of the room at an equal distance from each of us, huge and dark and towering, Her clawed hands curled up. Her wings spread out behind Her, glinting, hungry angles and planes, all shining with the blood She had shed.
'What a pleasant surprise.' Itzpapalotl's voice was low-pitched, strong enough to start an uncontrollable shiver in my chest. The itch on my skin redoubled in intensity, until it was all I could do not to scratch myself to the blood. 'Three high priests and a Master of the House of Darts, all for myself.' She smiled. Her teeth were obsidian knives, glinting in the dim light, their edges stained with blood.
'I'm not Master of the House of Darts,' Teomitl said.
She smiled again, held his gaze until he started to shake. 'You will be, soon.'
Quenami threw Teomitl an irate glance, and launched into another incantation. 'O Itzpapalotl, Obsidian Butterfly, Goddess of War and Sacrifice. We come before you as supplicants.'
Acamapichtli snorted, and I bit back a sarcastic remark. Even when summoning gods, Quenami was his old pompous self, as if it would make Her more likely to heed him. She was a goddess, and Her whims and desires would rule Her far more effectively than any human.
Itzpapalotl cocked her head, staring at Quenami as one might stare at an insect. 'Supplicants? It's not often that I have those.' Her eyes, the two small yellow ones in her face, and all those scattered across Her joints, opened and closed, and She made a noise which might have been a contented sigh. 'Unless pleading for their lives.'
To his credit, Quenami did not let that slow him down. 'We have need to enter the lands you guard.'
'I should imagine.' Her smile was malicious, but she said nothing more. Silence stretched across the room, broken only by the dripping sound of blood as it ran down from the altar platform, high above us.
'Will you let us pass?' I asked, slowly.
Her gaze turned to me, held me transfixed until a tremor started in my hand. I felt a pressure in my head, as if someone were driving a nail between my eyes, my heartbeat became distant and far too quick. 'Will I?' Itzpapalotl asked. 'I should think… Not.'
'There is need–' Quenami started, but She laughed, a harsh, scraping sound like stone on stone that drowned the rest of his sentence.
'You mortals are so amusing. There is always need.'
She was Goddess of War and Sacrifice, the altar on which warriors were destined to die, the blade that would cut hearts from living bodies. I dragged my voice from where it had fled. 'What is your price?'
Her smile would have sent a grown man into fits if She hadn't been half-turned away from us, looking at the disk and the dismembered limbs under Her feet. 'The price of passage. You're a canny one, for a priest.'
'Everything requires sacrifice,' I said, slowly. I shouldn't have been the one doing this, the one giving Her obedience and proper offerings. I was a priest for the Dead, and She was out of my purview.
'Sacrifice.' She rolled the word on Her tongue, inhaling once or twice like a man enjoying a pipe of tobacco. The eyes on Her joints opened larger, their pupils reduced to vertical slits. 'Yes. Sacrifice.'
I said, haltingly:
She listened to the hymn, nodding Her monstrous head in time with my inflections, Her lips shining dark red under the obsidian of Her teeth. But when I was done, She shook Her head, in a fluid, inhuman gesture; and the itch on my skin grew stronger, as if hundreds of ants were climbing up from the ground.
'You take living blood,' Quenami said. It sounded almost like an accusation.
'There are – other sacrifices. More potent ones.'
'A human heart?' Acamapichtli looked around him, at us all, as if pondering who would resist him least.
'You wouldn't dare.' Teomitl's hands tightened.
'For the Fifth World?' Acamapichtli spread his own empty hands, a pose of mock weakness that fooled no one. 'You'd be surprised what I can do.'
'Fools.' Itzpapalotl's voice echoed under the ceiling, coming back to us distorted and amplified, as if a thousand star-demons were speaking. 'Grandmother Earth wants to be watered with blood, to replenish what She lost when the gods tore Her apart to make the world. The Fifth Sun feeds on human hearts, for His own crinkled and died in the fires of His birth. I…' She laughed, and the sound sent me down on my knees with my hands going up, as if it would diminish the sensation of my ears tearing apart. 'I am what I always was, and I only take what pleases Me.'
I stared at the floor, at the outline of She of the Silver Bells, blurred and distorted. 'What… is it… that pleases You?' Beyond me, I could see just enough to know that everyone else was on their knees.
She laughed again. I managed to drag my gaze upwards, to see her move, come to stand before Quenami. 'A true sacrifice, something that will be missed.'
The price of passage, determined by a goddess' whims. My chest felt too tight to breathe. What would she ask for?
She moved faster than a warrior's strike – reaching out in one fluid gesture, towards Quenami, hoisting him up in the air as if he weighed nothing and enfolding him in the embrace of Her wings. The jagged obsidian shards
