They both turned, then, to look at me. One, as I had known, was Xiloxoch, wearing a drab tunic and skirt like a demure housewife; the other was Pochtic – Master of the House of Darkness, his face still swathed in bandages, his skin sallow against the vibrant colours of his feather headdress.
'Well, well.' His voice was deeply mocking. 'Our High Priest for the Dead. You're too late; they've taken the corpse away.'
'I was aware of that,' I said, but didn't elaborate. 'What are you doing here?'
Xiloxoch shook her head. 'I know my rights,' she said, again. In her hands was a golden trinket, shaped in the likeliness of the Fifth Sun.
The things of the dead man: taken by the courtesan who had ministered to him and thus customary for sacrifices. 'Only if you slept with him,' I said. 'Did you?'
'I brought him comfort,' Xiloxoch said. Her hands tightened around the trinket. What was so important about it?
And, more pressingly, what was Pochtic doing here? 'The work of the Master of the House of Darkness,' I said, very slowly, 'doesn't include the care of prisoners.'
Pochtic threw me a pitying glance. 'A prisoner died, and both I and Coatl were attacked.'
'Coatl is ill,' I said, slowly. 'It's not quite the same.'
'He's right.' Xiloxoch's voice was malicious – the trickster, closing people's eyes with burning coals, stirring up filth and ashes. 'You shouldn't be here. Neither you nor Coatl.' She spat the word. 'Not after what you did.'
'I can't speak for Coatl, but you're mistaken–'
'Am I?' Xiloxoch opened her hands, angling them so that the light coming in through the entrance curtain glimmered on the gold, so that, for a moment, everything shone as yellow as the Fifth Sun. 'Gold and jade; precious stones, precious stones. Was that all it took, my Lord?'
Pochtic's bandages shifted; his lips tightened in pain. 'You will not speak to me like this.'
'Why not?' Her voice was mocking. 'Will you call me a whore and despise me, like they all do? I am a priestess, too.' She threw her head back, her long hair shifting like a cascade of crows' feathers; for a moment, she was bathed in a warm, pulsing radiance that wasn't hers – something that smelled of the jungle, humid and primal, the odour of churned earth, of rutting beasts, and of jaguars slithering in the shadows, just out of sight.
Even through the bandages, I saw Pochtic's eyes narrow. 'Your – goddess–' he spoke the term as if it were an insult 'doesn't frighten me.'
Xiloxoch smiled, licking her lips, her teeth wide, and as black as obsidian. 'Pity. Try another god, then. Itztlacoliuhqui.'
The Curved Point of Obsidian, god of frost and ice, and of blind justice – of victims lashing out in pain, back at their tormentors. 'You have nothing,' Pochtic said. He brushed off some invisible dust from his clothes, and walked out without a word for either of us.
Xiloxoch spat on the ground. 'As wily as a beast.'
I watched Pochtic back – remembered the tense set of his hands, the false assurance in his voice. He might have been no better than an animal, as uncultivated as fallow fields, following the roads of the deer and the rabbit, but he was something else, too: scared.
Because of the plague? But he had not been among its victims. And why come here, to see the prisoners? Was he hoping to find an explanation into deaths that shouldn't have been concerning him?
Huitzilpochtli strike me down, why was everyone running scared?
'I need to talk to you,' I said to Xiloxoch.
She sighed, raising her eyebrows as if it were a performance within her temple. 'If you must.'
I opened my hand – the one that wasn't clenched around the cane – to reveal the twisted feather stem, still wrapped in a cotton cloth.
Xiloxoch looked at the feather for a while. Her face was expressionless – remote, as distant as if she were the goddess herself. 'What of it?'
'You know what this is.'
She shrugged. 'Not in so many words.'
'Then you're a liar,' I said. 'Because I knew what this was as soon as I saw it, and I'm not that knowledgeable.'
Xiloxoch's lips turned downwards, a small, dainty grimace. 'Fine. It's a broken feather stem, like the ones that hold gold dust. It was used as the vector for a spell.'
'And you had nothing to do with this?' I asked.
'Why should I have anything to do with it?'
'Money. Bribes. What Eptli gave to the judges. It would have been poetic, wouldn't it, if he had died by touching tainted money? Worthy of flowers and songs, all the way to the underworld.'
Xiloxoch's face shifted – reducing itself to a single, powerful emotion that was gone in an instant. Anger, or fear? 'I can tell you what I see, not how to interpret it.'
Still evading me? 'I need interpretations,' I said, dryly. 'That's what we thrive on. For instance, tell me what kind of illness would kill Eptli and Zoquitl – and then spread to all our warriors?'
'You're mistaken.'
'I see,' I said. 'You protect your goddess's interests, but I don't know what She wants.'
Xiloxoch's lips were curled in anger. 'I can swear this to you: I have nothing to do with this.'
'As Pochtic had nothing to do with the bribe.'
That, if nothing else did, went straight to her guts. 'Pochtic is an arrogant fool, and one day he'll get what he deserves.'
Not while Tizoc-tzin was Revered Speaker. Something of what I thought must have shown on my face, for
