Instead, I found people grouped in the courtyard: mothers with children on their backs, entire families from the grandmother to the young toddlers, and quite a few warriors, who presented their emotions as an odd mixture of terror and annoyance – as if they were aware they should not have been so afraid of the supernatural. There appeared to be no sick people, but I strongly suspected those were being herded away by the priests of the Duality.
After many enquiries, I finally managed to get hold of Yaotl, my sister's personal slave, who looked at me with his customary sneer and informed me that she'd left for the city, in order to take a look at some of the sick.
'And Teomitl?' I asked
'He left yesterday,' Yaotl said, curtly. 'A couple warriors came to pick him up.'
Like the warriors who had removed their sandals? I didn't like this; I didn't like this at all.
I walked back to my temple in a thoughtful mood, but found it flooded as well, my priests barely able to deal with the flow of supplicants, and Ichtaca himself having taken refuge in the shrine atop the pyramid, looking pale and harried.
'Acatl-tzin! We thought–'
I raised a hand. 'It's quite all right,' I said, thinking I was making a speciality of running out on them. 'I ran into someone, rather unexpectedly, and spent the night stuck in the palace grounds.'
Ichtaca looked bewildered. 'We looked for you after the riot, but we couldn't find you.'
'I was in Tlalocan,' I said, briefly – ignoring the awe which spread across his face. 'Not my idea. Acamapichtli's.'
'But Acamapichtli-tzin–'
I mentally ran through the necessary explanations, and gave up. 'Look,' I said. 'I promise I'll explain everything, but right now there is something slightly more urgent. I think there is a problem with the boundaries.'
Ichtaca looked as if he might protest, and then he took a look down into the overcrowded courtyard. 'It could be,' he said, slowly. 'It would explain why so many people have turned up here. They speak of ghosts, and of odd portents…'
'The boundaries are weakened,' I said.
'But the Revered Speaker–'
The Revered Speaker should have been protecting us against that, yes. 'I don't know,' I said. 'But it's the only explanation that fits.' I thought of Tizoc-tzin; of the stretched bones beneath the sallow skin; of the shadowed eye-sockets that might as well have been empty. A dead man walking in the Fifth World.
'Oh, gods,' I said, aloud. 'We did it.'
We'd brought him back, crossing the boundary between life and death, and it had never closed properly. 'It's something we did, with the spell to bring Tizoc-tzin back.'
Ichtaca grimaced. He hadn't liked the story when I'd told it to him, but he'd had to bow down to my decision. To our decision. We had taken that as a group – as High Priests and equals, for once. 'We don't have star-demons in the streets,' he said.
'Because we have a Revered Speaker,' I said. 'The Fifth World is protected. But that doesn't mean things can't be wrong. Ghosts are hardly a menace.'
I stopped, then – and thought of all the sorcerers we'd defeated – all the people who had died in our wars of the conquest, thirsting for revenge over the Mexica. I thought of how easy it was to call up a ghost and listen to their advice. No need to be a sorcerer frighteningly good at magic: our culprit merely needed to call on the right ghost.
Oh, gods. 'I take it back. Ghosts
'Ghosts can't cast spells,' Ichtaca pointed out.
'I know. But they can give the instructions, if you ask them the right questions.' Oh gods. The living were quite enough to deal with; I didn't want to have to contend with the dead as well.
'Can you look into this?' I asked Ichtaca. 'I need to know what exactly is wrong with the boundaries.'
'You've stated it.' He looked genuinely startled.
'I could be wrong.' And I dared not, not on something this large. 'I want to be sure.'
He grimaced. 'I know it's important, but–'
'There are other things, I know. You have to spread out the priests. I know you can do that.'
'As you wish.' He rose. 'I was planning to direct the examinations of the bodies.'
Ah, yes. The bodies. Finally, we had some time to examine them quietly, and to get a better idea of the nature of the sickness. 'They're on an island in the Floating Gardens, if I remember correctly? I'll come with you,' I said.
Ichtaca nodded, as if he hadn't expected anything less of me. It was a balm to my heart, in a time when my confidence was severely shaken.
Before we left, I took a moment to seek out the storehouse, and to help myself to a simple grey cloak, the one customarily worn by priests for the Dead as they walked through the streets of the city. I didn't look like a High Priest anymore, but at least I had lost the resemblance to a beggar mauled by a jaguar.
Ichtaca, of course, insisted I take the huge barge of the High Priest, with its highly-recognisable spider- and-owl design of Mitclantecuhtli, while he and the other priests sat in smaller reed crafts.
The priest with me was Ezamahual, the dour-faced peasants' son who always walked as if unbelievably blessed. He didn't speak as I carefully wedged myself into position within the barge – much harder than I'd thought possible, with my legs shaking.
He rowed in great, smooth gestures – a familiar rhythm for someone who had grown up at the river's edge – lulling me into a sleep that was almost restful… until I saw the first hints of ghosts trailing over the water.
The drowned, too, were rising up. This was more serious than a mere summoning from the underworld. Something was deeply wrong, and the gods knew it, from Mictlantecuhtli to Tlaloc.
