taking orders from his commander.
'I'll be back,' he said.
As he walked past, a tendril of something brushed me. I narrowed my gaze, opening up my priest-senses. A slight, almost transparent veil of magic hung around Teomitl: not nahual, not underworld magic, but something tantalisingly familiar. Something…
The more I tried to bring it into focus, the more it slipped away from my mind.
'Teomitl!' I called.
He turned, halfway through the courtyard. 'Yes?'
It was as if something had reached out, and brushed against his whole body, leaving an intricate network of marks over his skin. It didn't look harmful. Quite the reverse, in fact: it was an elaborate protection spell, one I had never seen.
'No, nothing. Be careful,' I said, finally.
'He's an interesting man,' Ezamahual said to me after Teomitl had left. 'A bit abrasive, but interesting.'
I nodded. 'He must have stories to tell.'
Ezamahual's lean, dour face lit up. 'He's heard tales of the jungles to the south, and he's even met a merchant who went north, into Tarascan land. But he's not boasting. Just sharing.' His unquestioning, almost boyish enthusiasm was endearing. In many ways, Ezamahual reminded me of myself at a younger age, when everything in the priesthood was still a wonder, opening pathways that radiated through the whole of the universe.
'I imagine Teomitl hasn't seen many things himself, though,' I pointed out.
Ezamahual shrugged. 'Second-hand accounts are better than nothing. And he's too young, in any case.'
With a jolt, I realised that Teomitl had to be at least four years younger than Ezamahual: an adolescent, barely out of childhood. 'Yes,' I said, finally. 'He's very young.'
Ezamahual shifted position slightly. 'He'll have time to see the world,' he said, always pragmatic. 'Warriors travel quite a bit.'
They did. Most battlefields those days were further and further away from Tenochtitlan. Perhaps, one day, the fabled jungles, where the quetzal birds roamed free, would be part of the Mexica Empire. And Teomitl would have taken his place in their conquest.
None of my concern now. I had other things to do, like try to see Neutemoc and coerce him into admitting the truth about his relationship with Eleuia.
I walked back to the Imperial Palace on my own, under the light of late afternoon. Outside the Jaguar House, some sort of ceremony was going on. Three warriors and three sacred courtesans were going through the steps of a dance, to the piercing, slow tune of flutes: the jaguar pelts the warriors wore mingled with the courtesans' garish cotton skirts, weaving a pattern like a spell cast over the world.
Among the crowd that watched the dance, several faces stood out: a young girl of noble birth, her face flushed with lust, and a scruffy, ageless man, his face covered in grime, the wooden collar of a slave around his neck. His expression was hard to decipher, but I thought it was hatred. Odd.
I did not dwell on it for long: I elbowed my way out of the crowd, and made my way to the display platform in front of the Imperial Palace.
But when I arrived, Neutemoc was not there any more.
Stifling a curse, I paced up and down among the cages, drawing glances and a few jeers from the prisoners awaiting trial. My brother wasn't anywhere to be found.
'Excuse me,' I asked one of Neutemoc's former neighbours in captivity. 'The Jaguar Knight who was here…?'
The prisoner, a middle-aged freeman with a tattered loincloth, spat at my feet. I didn't step back. I had nothing to do with his case, and so could do little to him. And he knew it. Intimidation was the only strategy possible.
After a while, he shrugged. 'They took him for questioning.'
'They?' I asked, with the first stirrings of fear in my belly.
'The magistrate and some good-for-nothing, fancy priest.'
Nezahual. The servant of the High Priest of Tlaloc, the one who wanted my brother convicted at all costs.
'Thank you,' I said, and I climbed the rest of the steps into the palace.
Like the Great Temple, it was a huge complex: a maze of gardens, private apartments and sumptuous rooms. On the ground floor were the courts of justice and the state rooms; on the upper floor, the apartments of Emperor Axayacatl-tzin, and of the Rulers of Texcoco and Tlacopan, the other partners in the Triple Alliance that kept the Mexica Empire strong.
I headed straight for the military courts. The vast, raftered room was deserted: I made my way towards the back, and the patio opening on the gardens. Only one magistrate remained: an old man sitting on a reed mat and dictating notes to a clerk.
'And you would be?' he asked peevishly.
I didn't know him, but then my cases seldom came to a military court. 'I'm Acatl. I'm looking for a Jaguar Knight.'
The magistrate sneezed, turned to his clerk with his eyebrows raised. The clerk said, 'He's being heard in the Imperial Audience.'
'It's not that serious,' I said, when words came back to me.
The clerk shrugged. 'It is, when the High Priest of the Storm Lord becomes involved.'
