where everything seemed thinner, and yet more sharply defined than at lake level.
I knelt, and rubbed my earlobes until my recently opened wounds bled again. With the blood, I drew a careful quincunx around myself, all the while singing a hymn to Lord Death to grant me true sight:
'We all must die
We all must go down into darkness…'
The air tightened again – like water, drawing back together after a pebble had been thrown into it. It cut my breath for a single, painful moment; and then everything was back to normal.
Or, at least, as much of normal as was possible, given the circumstances.
The room receded in the background, becoming thin and translucent – letting me see the shadows. They played, lazily, between the walls, passing through the black-painted columns and the clay brazier as if they didn't exist. Again, I caught glimpses of flailing arms and legs within – of raised rashes, covering a torso like the scales of a snake, of pus, spurting out from broken skin while the body beneath contorted in a soundless scream.
Nausea welled up in my throat, and I had to steady myself within the circle.
Teomitl was already kneeling by the victim's side. 'Don't touch him!' I said. He jerked back as if burnt. The shadows congregated around him – I couldn't help but be reminded of a curious shoal of fish, gathering around a drowned body. Tlaloc's lightning strike me, I didn't need macabre imagery right now. If I couldn't even focus on the task at hand…
Nothing leapt from the body to him, and I might as well have been invisible for all the attention the shadows paid me. Perhaps Teomitl, who was a warrior protected by Huitzilpochtli the Southern Hummingbird – just as Eptli had been – was a better target?
Cautiously, I stepped out of the quincunx, half-waiting for something to happen, but nothing did. I looked at the body: a young, well-muscled warrior, who looked barely old enough to have left the House of Youth. His face was slack and blank, like all corpses, and I could see no obvious wounds. Though…
I knelt, being careful not to touch the body. The smell of wet earth and burning coal wafted up to me – the corpse itself didn't smell yet, it was too early. The limbs were locked in an unnatural position: the man had been dead for some time. I couldn't find any wounds, but there was a slight raised pattern on the skin, like scales on the skin of a lizard – sores which hadn't yet formed.
'Acatl-tzin,' Teomitl said, 'the death–'
'I know,' I said. 'It's not that recent. I don't know who was contaminated first, him or Eptli.'
'It's the same symptoms. Or lack of,' Teomitl said, sombrely.
I shook my head. 'Same symptoms. You can't see them, but the same shadows are in the room.'
'And?' He looked as if he expected me to have the answer. Of course. I was still his teacher – never mind that I wasn't sure whether he needed me at all. The Master of the House of Darts, the heir apparent, the joint commander of the army: he seemed to be doing well for himself, regardless of my interventions.
'I don't know.' I bit my lips. 'But I very much doubt it's one of Tlaloc's random interventions.' I'd have to ask Acamapichtli for help, but Tlaloc's fancies ran more to dropsy, leprosy or other disease, the kind that turned a man's skin as loose and as flowing as water, or made their breath rattle in their fluid-drowned lungs.
There was a single sleeping mat in the room, on which the dead man lay, and little else in the way of furniture. I rose from my crouch, ducked out of the room for a moment, in order to address the priest on guard at the entrance.
'Do you know if this was his room?' I asked.
'They all share rooms,' the priest said in a bored tone. 'But this one didn't.'
'Oh?' Why the special treatment?
'I guess he was an important man.'
'He was sick,' a thickly accented voice said.
I hadn't seen the warrior by the priest's side. He looked… alien, in a way that I couldn't quite place. The coat of hardened cotton was the wrong cut; and the single tuft of hair atop his shaved head reminded me of the Otomi elite warriors, but not quite – it was not long enough and not thick enough, and the man had no stripes of paint across his face.
'You're one of the prisoners,' I said.
He nodded. He held himself with pride – and why wouldn't he? He'd die for the confirmation, earning his place in the Fifth Sun's Heaven – the dream of all warriors. Surely the minor wound to his pride, that of having been captured by the despised Mexica, was worth all of this.
'I'm Cuixtli, the eldest.' He spoke Nahuatl with a thick, barely recognisable accent – but then Metztitlan, his birth country, was far away, a good six days' march to the northeast. 'Their leader, you might say.'
'I see. I'm Acatl – High Priest for the Dead.'
'I know who you are. We worship Lord Death, too, in Metztitlan.' Cuixtli nodded again, almost as one equal to another.
'You say he was ill?' I asked. 'Before you arrived here?'
Cuixtli spread his hands. 'I don't know. When they put us here, Zoquitl was shivering – that's why we gave him his own space, to be sure.'
Sacrifices were meant to be unblemished, and in perfect health – no wonder Zoquitl had been handled with such caution, in case his back luck passed on to his companions.
'And you noticed nothing before?'
'We were on the road,' Cuixtli said. 'Marching. I didn't see him lag, but I wasn't paying so much attention.'
So, if the prisoner – Zoquitl – had indeed been sick, it would have been barely perceptible. But then again, he was a warrior, and would want to avoid a show of shameful weakness.
Who had been ill first? He, or his captor? 'Did Eptli visit Zoquitl? While you were on the road.'
Cuixtli shrugged. He radiated a serenity that was almost uncanny – something I knew all too well, the
