motions of their limbs and fingers nothing more than reflexes, like the gestures of a man drunk on jimsonweed. I could feel their frantic heartbeat, echoing the mad beat within my own chest.
There was… light, after a fashion – a weak, pallid radiance that threw everything into stark contrast. The bodies and faces paled, and seemed to recede too, their features growing dimmer and dimmer until they became part of the quivering shadows on the walls.
The weight on my chest was gone; the whole episode feeling like the stuff of nightmares. I pulled myself upwards, slowly, limb by limb, wincing at the pain. My stomach wasn't bleeding, but I still felt as though I'd been mauled, and the fever wasn't gone – it had merely abated for a small moment, enough for me to regain a small part of my senses. But it would come backwhen the hymn stopped running in my mind, when I grew too weak to hold the sickness at bay.
I needed help.
In the darkened room, I caught sight of more bodies, spread around the remnants of a meal – none of them appeared to be moving.
'Teomitl?'
My student was lying a few paces away from the body of Chipahua, twitching and shivering and moaning.
'Teomitl!' I reached out and shook him – he had Jade Skirt's protection, he couldn't fall like this, not to something as foolish and as inconsequential… 'Teomitl!'
But there was no answer, and his eyes, when they finally opened, were the filmy white of rotting corpses. He hung limp in my grip and didn't answer. I could – with some effort – have stretched out my priest senses, but I could guess that the magic of Jade Skirt had gone from him.
He couldn't die – he was Master of the House of Darts, heir-apparent to the Mexica Empire, agent of Chalchiuhtlicue in the Fifth World, commander of the army… He was…
At the back of my mind ran the litany – the same words, over and over:
He couldn't die… but Tizoc-tzin had died, too, and come back only through a god-blessed miracle, a spell that couldn't be cast again in the Fifth World.
Somehow – somehow I hoisted Teomitl on my shoulders, and staggered out of the house, calling out for the Jaguar Knights, but whether fallen or fled, they wouldn't answer. I couldn't find the boats we'd arrived in, either. So instead, I turned my face away from the blinding light of the sun, and started to walk back to the Sacred Precinct.
Teomitl grew heavier as I walked, and the world shrank into a whirl of colours and sounds: vague faces, fading in and out of focus; a morass of feather headdresses, black-dyed cheeks, and the glint of gold caught in hair as black as night. My feet dragged in the dust and the sounds of the city seemed far away; the clacking noise of the women's loom no more than a distant irritation. The shadows came back, too, swooping over the canals like
They were slowly rising – casting the adobe house into darkness, making the coloured clothes dull and insignificant. My world shrank to this: the burning light of the sun – echoed in the itching that seemed to have overwhelmed my skin – and the shadows, the same that had killed Eptli, which would engulf us all…
My hands shook; I held Teomitl tighter against my chest, afraid I'd let him fall into the dirt. I couldn't let go: I had to get him back to safety – he was my student… My whole body was afire, my stomach a mass of pain. If only I could pause, rest for a while, doubled up in a foetal position, until the pain went away…
The shadows shifted lazily over the canals and the bridges, the assembled throng of peasants in loincloths, the matrons holding baskets of tomatoes and squashes close to their chests. Like the wind, they ruffled the cloaks of war veterans, exposing old, whitish scars that took on the appearance of suppurating sores once more. I trudged on, dragging my feet in the earth. The sun beat on my back – and it seemed that the beat was echoed within me, at the junction of skin and muscle, an endless rhythm like thousands of hands hammering from inside, demanding to be let out.
Ahead, I caught glimpses of the Serpent Wall – the shadows congregated around the snakes atop the wall, in the quetzal-red jaws and green bodies, darkening the scales and the crown of feathers around their heads. Almost there…
Abruptly, Teomitl weighed nothing – no, it wasn't that, it wasn't that. Someone had taken him from me. I had to… had… to… 'Teomitl! Acatl!' My sister's face swam out of the morass of shadows – a scant few moments before the fever rose again, and I knew nothing more but the nightmares.
ELEVEN
My dreams were dark and numerous; in all of them I lay on my back, while something crushed my chest, and in every shadow I saw the faces of the sick, opening their mouths to scream. Sometimes I heard them, sometimes I did not – but they were always by my side, blindly scrabbling for the raging warmth of my body.
At some point, sleep claimed me, dark and exhausting, and the bodies faded, to be replaced by the sound of distant chanting, while I lay panting and burning, every breath searing the inside of my throat.
I woke up, and there was still chanting – as my mind cleared, I recognised the words of a hymn to Patecatl, god of medicine.
