They were spoken by a reedy, frightened man who stood some distance away from me, clearly afraid to touch me. He smelled of copal incense and a mixture of herbs I couldn't place, sharp and bitter. The fever had receded, leaving my mind as clear and as brittle as polished obsidian. I noted the pattern of snakes on the ceiling arcing above me, and the frescoes on the wall were of a huge tree to which clung babies, drinking the sap like mother's milk; the hymn washed over me, again and again like waves on the shore, like the embrace of Chalchiuhtlicue Jade Skirt at birth, washing away all the filth and the sins of the ancestors.
I lay quiet, unable to move.
Some time later, an entrance-curtain tinkled; the priest started. 'He's awake, my Lady.'
'I can see that,' Mihmatini's voice said.
There was a silence; the priest's face stubbornly turned towards her, his gaze downcast. 'My Lady?' he asked, finally. 'You promised I could leave…'
Mihmatini snorted. 'I did, didn't I? Very well, you may go.'
He was scurrying out toward the exit before she'd even finished her sentence.
'Acatl?' Mihmatini asked. 'How are you feeling?' She knelt by the side of the bed – I'd expected sarcasm, or some biting remark about my tendency to get into scrapes, but there was none of that; merely thin lines at the corners of her red-rimmed eyes.
Then I remembered. 'Teomitl. Where–?'
'Ssh.' Mihmatini laid a hand on my forehead. She grimaced. 'What I need to know now is how you are.'
'I've felt better,' I said, carefully. My tongue scraped against my palate, as abrading as coarse sand, and there was a distant ache in my stomach, like a beast laying low, waiting for the best moment to pounce again. 'You haven't told me about Teomitl.'
'I need you to rest,' Mihmatini said. 'Whatever protection you had blocked part of the sickness, but you're not invulnerable, Acatl.'
Neither was Teomitl. I watched her – clad in the blue cloak of a Guardian, with feathers hanging down the nape of her neck and black paint, applied to her cheeks and forehead with a trembling hand, leaving large swathes of skin uncovered. And, on the ground beneath her feet, was a thread of yellow light – going straight through the wall, its radiance contracting and expanding with every one of her breaths, like a heartbeat. 'It's bad, isn't it?'
She wouldn't look at me, as if I'd somehow turned into her superior. 'Whatever it is, it's affected him worse than you. It's as if he had a special affinity with the sickness.'
Then why hadn't it struck before? But, of course, he had always
been quite far away from the corpses; he had given the first one only a cursory examination, and while he'd stayed in the room of the second one he hadn't cast spells or even strayed close to the body. Then again… for all I knew, he could have been affected already, and not said a word to me about whatever trivial symptoms he might have felt.
Southern Hummingbird blind the man and his pride.
'I need to see him,' I said, pulling myself upright. Or rather, trying to. None of my limbs seemed to work properly; it was all I could do to fall back in a vaguely graceful manner.
'You're staying on the sleeping mat,' Mihmatini said, in a voice I recognised all too well – reserved for disobedient children, or recalcitrant priests. 'You're quite obviously in no state to walk, Acatl, and I will not have you push yourself past your endurance.'
'It wouldn't be the first time,' I said, knowing what her answer would be.
'You know, that doesn't strike me as something to be particularly proud of,' Mihmatini said. 'Stay here.'
'And what? Wait? He's my student as much as he's your husband. If anything happens…' I wouldn't forgive myself.
'Then what?' Mihmatini's voice was low and terrible, that of a judge about to pass sentence. 'You're a priest of Mictlantecuhtli, Acatl. You don't do healing spells.'
'No,' I said. I pulled myself upwards again, more carefully this time, letting the full weight of my body rest on the wall. 'But I know about illnesses.'
Mostly as causes of death, granted. But still… still, the priests of Patecatl were quite obviously useless. For something like this – a deliberately cast disease – we needed to fight the sorcerer who had cast it: a man or a woman we still knew nothing about.
Either that, or… 'He's Chalchiuhtlicue's agent,' I said.
Mihmatini rolled her eyes upwards. 'I've already thought of it. We tried healing or cleansing spells that called on Her power.'
'And?' I said.
'They're not working. But then nothing else has.'
I shook my head. 'It's not spells you'd need, but Her personal attention.'
Mihmatini grimaced. 'Going into Her own land? We tried that, as well.'
'You have?' It was bad, then; for going into Tlalocan, the land of the Blessed Drowned, was far from simple or safe. By going into a god's world, one agreed to be bound by its rules and caprices – to face monsters and magic, and desires that predated the Fifth Age.
Mihmatini's face was pale. 'The way was closed. Perhaps She thought us beneath Her notice.'
'You'd be beneath Her notice, but Teomitl wouldn't.' She had schemes for him – whatever they were. She'd picked him up, chosen to wield Her powers in the Fifth World. She wouldn't have done that without a reason… and I had a feeling the days were fast approaching when we would come to know it. 'Unless something has gone wrong.'
