Obsidian & Blood

home.

  It docked in front of Chipahua's house: we crossed the small stretch of beaten earth of the street, determined to finish this sordid business.

  Teomitl stopped short when he reached the courtyard. 'Acatltzin.'

  'I know.' There had been a slave, last time, and the sound of pestle against mortar as the women pounded maize into flour. Now there was no one.

  No, not quite. There was something… trembling on the edge of existence – a smell, a tightness in the air – something all too familiar that sent a thrill to my bones, and set my heart hammering against the cage of its ribs.

  'Death,' I said, aloud.

  One of the warriors drew his macuahitl sword – a thing of glittering edges, of cutting shards, reflecting the sunlight into a thousand fractured pieces. Magic quivered along its body: the warm, unwavering glow of the Southern Hummingbird's power in the Fifth World. 'Stay back, Teomitl-tzin.'

  But Teomitl was already moving – faster than a snake uncoiling, rushing inwards. I followed him at a more leisurely pace – taking in everything as if in a daze.

  The courtyard, bathed in golden sunlight; three still bodies under the pine tree – no, not quite still, for even as I watched one of them gave a last, heaving gasp, and I saw the ihiyotl soul gather itself from its seat in the liver, and unfold wings of blinding radiance, taking flight in an instant like a held breath, vanishing into the world of the gods.

  The second courtyard, and the woman I'd seen earlier – Chipahua's wife – lying on her back, looking at me with unseeing eyes.

  There was no blood. I might have understood it, if there had been blood – might have thought of sacrifices, of gods gathering back the power that belonged to Them. But everything smelled dry, as stretched as Mictlan the underworld.

  The reception room: Teomitl was standing in front of the dais, looking down at a mat filled with food – the smell of cooked amaranth wafted up, terrifyingly incongruous – and the frescoes themselves seemed to have dimmed, their bright colours passing away.

  Too late, I saw that it wasn't the colours that had vanished, but the shadows that had appeared, so many of them they covered the whole room, clinging to the pillars and the walls, packed tight against the faces of the gods. I caught a glimpse of screaming faces; of tangled limbs; of flaky skin, distorted by sores, and then they were unfolding like the wrath of a storm, and upon us before we could move.

  For a moment – a bare, agonising moment – it seemed my protection would hold; bathed in the familiar stretched emptiness of Mictlan, I saw this as no more than part of the rhythm of the Fifth World – all sicknesses leading, ultimately, to the throne of Lord Death, the place that belonged to us all: stretched and dry and dark, sending us back into the embrace of Grandmother Earth.

  And then, with a sound like bones caving in, the protection yielded. It left a faint, cold tingle on my skin – soon replaced by a blazing heat, and a sensation like a thousand bats beating wings around me; darkness rose and enfolded me in a crushing embrace, and I saw nothing but one screaming face after another; glistening limbs, wet with blood and with the white of bones poking out from wrinkled skins; over me, the bodies were all over me, feebly twitching; fingers scrabbling over my eyelids; limbs strewn across my chest, crushing the breath out of me; clammy lips pressed against my thighs and arms and hands, every touch seeming to rob me of more strength.

  Everywhere – they were everywhere, in the Fifth World, in the world above, in the world below – there was no escape…

  I was on my back, staring into the slack face of a woman, who pressed against me like a lover – her mouth open in a soundless scream, revealing teeth the colour of decayed corn. Her hands – or another's hands, I couldn't be sure – were clawing at my belly; there was a brief, fiery flesh of pain, and the slimy sensation of something wet against my skin, before the pain flared up again, destroying everything else. Distantly, I noted what it had to be, and what its loss meant, but the thought itself vanished in the welter of other ones – in the rancid smell of so many bodies pressed against mine.

  Pain. Pain – was–

  Pain was an offering. Pain was– I could hardly focus anymore through the growing haze; didn't know where Teomitl was anymore…

  The gods took pain, which was the only sincere sacrifice. Prayers were nothing more than children's wishes, but pain and blood made them real – because it cost to give them, and because they were freely offered.

  The gods–

  There was a familiar litany in my mind: repeated so many times in the calmecac school, in calmer times, on a hill away from the city, where I'd stood with my bloodied worship-thorns, offering up the truest sacrifice for the sake of the Fifth World and of Mictlan.

  I had no worship-thorns, and the stars were all gone – my sight blocked by mottled, bluish skin, by distorted limbs and glazed faces. But the hymn – the hymn always remained.

'We leave this earth

This world of jade and flowers

The quetzal feathers, the silver and the jade…'

  My voice quavered and broke at the beginning, but soon the familiar words came back and with them some of my assurance. As I spoke, the pain seemed to recede, pushed back into a remote corner of my mind, to be dealt with later.

'Down, down into darkness we must go

Past the rushing waters, past the mountain of knives

We leave this earth…'

  I was High Priest for the Dead; I had endured worse than this. I would… I would stand.

  The bodies were still pressing against me, but now I saw that they flopped weakly, like fish on dry land, the