The glyphs on the back of my hand grew uncomfortably warm, until I could have traced them with my eyes closed. The rest of the world, though, seemed to cool – until the tips of my fingers felt burnt and pinched, and even the light of the Fifth Sun seemed dimmer.
'In the land of the fleshless, in the region of mystery
In the house without windows, on the dais of bones
The house of dust, the house of the fleshless…'
A green, mouldy light spread outwards from the glyphs, playing on my skin and on that of the body, until we both seemed equally leeched of life, and the smell in the air was dry and faint, like old codices buried in the desert.
Bracing myself against the pain that would come, I lowered my hands over the corpse and felt the jolt as the symptoms crossed into my own body – the salty taste of an unfamiliar magic, and the sense of vastness as the blood vessels enlarged and disintegrated – and then, as the shadows around me grew larger and larger, everything else caught on, the throat, the stomach, the entrails, every single membrane in the body…
I came to with a start, almost tempted to feel my torso to check that I still had my major organs – but that was foolish, since the spell only granted me an impression of what the death had felt like, and I had known in advance it would be unpleasant. So, I had a better idea of how Chipahua had died, but not of how he had caught the disease.
Still… something was staring me in the face, and I was far too weary to make it out.
I looked around: most priests seemed engrossed in the preliminary examination of the bodies, but a few – including Ichtaca – had moved to similar spells.
Ichtaca. I looked again at Eptli's corpse, which was bloated and blue, but the skin wasn't dark, and there was no blood on the face. And he had died almost instantly.
I dragged myself to the corpse, and put my hands over the face.
This time, the rush of magic was far stronger; it came from my outstretched hands, coursing through my entire body until my saliva tasted like brackish, muddy water, and my whole body started itching and burning up, and I felt the blisters on my mouth and tongue, and the rush of the shadows, the images of the flailing limbs, of the dying bodies – and everything was disintegrating again, but it was my heart that gave out first, collapsing on itself with the dissolution of the major arteries and veins…
Oh gods. There were two versions of the sickness.
I dragged myself to my cane, trembling with the memories of dying twice, in close succession, and limped to the other corpses, watching them.
The corpse of the prisoner Zoquitl was also devoid of bleeding and I got the same impression when I lowered my hands over it, the feeling of unfamiliar magic spreading from outstretched hands…
And the others… Chipahua's household, his companions, his wife, his slaves – I stood over them all, and over them all I felt the same thing, felt myself destroyed piece by piece, bleeding into my own body, exhaling nothing but my own debris and blood…
'Acatl-tzin!' Firm hands yanked me, jolting me out of the trance of the spell, and I lay gasping, the mud squelching against my skin, so cold as to make me shiver. The Fifth Sun overhead blurred, quivering, the willows spinning and bending as if in a great storm….
'Are you mad?' Ichtaca's voice asked – coming from very far away.
'Not… mad,' I whispered, but he didn't seem to hear me.
'You were the one who said we'd examine them as a group, and then you go taking on their symptoms as if there were no tomorrow.'
He sounded angry, but I couldn't bring myself to care anymore. I lay gasping and choking, trying to banish the memories of the shadows from my vision – feeling everything twisting and bursting within my body, as if I were the one on the edge of death.
That settled it: whoever had cast that kind of spell was thoroughly mad.
Some time later, Ezamahual helped me get up, wrapping my shaking hands around the cane and lending me his shoulder so that I stood more or less upright. The weakness was passing; the memories of so many deaths so close together were passing away, becoming a distant nightmare. Thank the gods for fallible memory – what would I have ever done, if I had remembered perfectly every single one of the examinations I'd practised?
'They're different,' I said to Ichtaca.
He still looked angry, but he wasn't shouting at me anymore, which I guessed was an improvement. 'Different how?'
'Eptli said he felt cold after touching something, and I think Zoquitl caught it the same way: from an object, not a person. Everyone else on this island caught it from someone already sick, just like Teomitl and I.'
'So we're looking for an object impregnated with Chalchiuhtlicue's magic?' Ichtaca frowned. 'That doesn't help much.'
I shook my head. 'Several objects. It's not something unique. And yet it was peculiar enough that Eptli remembered it, so most probably not an everyday object.' And something else, too: this meant that Eptli and Chipahua had likely had direct contact with the sorcerer. 'Did you learn anything else?' I refrained from adding 'while I was unconscious', for both our sakes.
Ichtaca shrugged. 'A better understanding of the disease, I guess. It's based on the liquids within the human body – spreading through the blood and coaxing everything into destroying itself in a rush.' His round face was creased in distaste. 'It's a horrible, useless way to die.'
'But it brings power to Chalchiuhtlicue or to the sorcerer, if he knows how exploit it,' I said, slowly. 'Symbolically, they've all died of the water.' I thought of whoever had attacked the Master of the House of Darkness, of the mask spreading across his face, blocking off his nostrils and mouth. A sacrifice to the goddess who ruled water; likewise, it would have brought power to Her – or to whoever stood between Her and the Fifth World.
Tlaloc had said the epidemic wasn't Chalchiuhtlicue's will, and in truth, I couldn't have seen why He'd have lied to us. So the most likely explanation was a sorcerer – one ruthless enough to steal from the goddess.
Which wasn't exactly heartening, as far as explanations went.
