Obsidian & Blood

remnants of the teyolia and tonalli souls, gathering their scattered pieces before entering the world of the gods – close enough to touch, if I were so minded. But their words would be garbled and confused – their selves incomplete – and I would learn nothing.

  Instead, I focused my attention on the pillars. Magic pulsed from them, an angry, steady beat – as I walked closer, the frescoes mingled and merged with each other, receding away until all that remained were the red glyphs, their contours bent like maize stalks in strong sunlight: a pyramid surrounded by smoke, a temple pierced by arrows, a body lying on the ground, torn into four hundred pieces…

  May everything you start turn against you, wither into dust, into filth. May your priests lose the black and red of the ancients – their codices, their memories of knowledge and ritual. May you be left without faces or hearts, thrown in the mud with the god's shackles weighing you down… 

  Jade Skirt's magic, washing over me like waves in a stormy lake – flashes of writhing bodies, contorting in the agony of drowning, of ahuizotls feasting on the eyes and fingernails of bloated corpses…

  Enough.

  I drew a shuddering breath and stepped away from the wall.

  Ichtaca was waiting for me at the courtyard's entrance. 'I need to know who came here.'

  He raised an eyebrow. 'Half the palace. They were on trial, and I'm sure neither Tizoc-tzin nor the court would have deprived themselves of the opportunity to mock them.'

  'You don't understand. Someone engraved a spell within this courtyard, and they had to have done it after the cages were set up.'

  His face set in a grimace. 'Acatl-tzin–'

  'I'm sure of it.'

  Xiloxoch. Yayauhqui. Which of them had it been? I had been weak, and ineffective. For once, Teomitl had the right of it: we had to act. 'You need to arrest people,' I said to the She-Snake.

  'You know who is responsible for this?'

  'No,' I said. 'But it's too late for those considerations.'

  The She-Snake grimaced; I could tell he didn't entirely agree. But, like me, he had to bow to necessity. 'Who?'

  'A courtesan named Xiloxoch, and a Tlatelolcan merchant. Yayauhqui.'

  Which, of course, might stop nothing, even if it was one of them. If they had accomplices, the plague would go on.

  No, not only the plague. They'd made a deliberate sacrifice to Jade Skirt, gathering up power with those deaths packed so close by. The plague wasn't the finality: our sorcerer was preparing for something much, much worse.

  'I'll try to locate them. But you must know–'

  That the palace was large, and in utter chaos; that they might not want to be found. 'I know.' But it had to be tried, all the same.

  'I'll inquire,' Ichtaca said. He looked at the She-Snake, who still stood near the empty cages, looking at the corpses as if it could all make sense. But of course it would all make sense, once we caught the culprit. Once the Mexica Empire was safe. 'One more thing, Acatl-tzin. About the Master of the House of Darkness.'

  'Pochtic?' Our mysterious suicide, who was probably mixed up with all of this.

  'Yes,' Ichtaca said. 'I examined the room in which he died, as you requested me to.'

  I hadn't – not exactly – but the gods knew I wasn't about to begrudge him for taking initiatives. 'And?'

  'There is something I have to show you.'

  'Ichtaca, there is no time–' I started, but his face was set.

  'I could tell you, but I need your opinion.'

  I sighed. 'Fine,' I said. 'Let's go.' At least it would get me away from that courtyard and that pervasive smell of meat and blood – else I was going to retch up the little I had in my stomach.

Pochtic's rooms were deserted, the focus of attention having moved elsewhere. We climbed the stairs of the pyramid, passing by a couple of bored-looking guards – and found ourselves in the room again.

  The body had been removed to our temple, and everything smelled – stale, neglected, as if reflecting the misery and despair that had led Pochtic to commit the sin of suicide. The braziers had been extinguished, and the smell of copal incense had turned into the unpleasant one of cold ashes. The frescoes, though, were as vibrant as ever – the painted faces of the gods such as Tezcatlipoca the Smoking Mirror looking back at us, at the stains of blood that had changed the colour of the floor – mocking and empty-eyed, as if They knew secrets we weren't worthy of.

  Tlaloc the Storm Lord had known something – something that had scared him. And if a god, one of the Old Ones, could be scared of something…

  The Duality curse me, I didn't want to think about that, not now.

  Ichtaca stopped at the back of the room, near one of the windows, looking down at the blood-stained sleeping mat. 'Here,' he said. 'Can you look at this?'

  I still had Lord Death's true sight upon me, and for a moment, all I could see was death – the memory of blood spurting out from cut arteries, of a soul sleeping away into the underworld. 'Not the blood,' I said.

  'No,' Ichtaca said. 'Beneath.'

  Beneath… There was something – not an image, but the faint memory of a smell, something I'd seen before, sweet and sickening…

  Jimsonweed. Peyotl. Teonanacatl, the gods' food, the sacred mushrooms – a compound of powerful hallucinogens that pierced the veil between the Fifth World and the world beyond. So close to a sleeping mat. 'Dreams,' I said. 'Portents. He was in contact with the spirit world.'

  Ichtaca grimaced. 'Yes.'