I wasn't, either. If all he'd wanted was to get back into the palace, he could have walked. And someone who could paint spells into the remotest courtyards didn't need a pitiful excuse like an arrest to be at work within the palace complex. 'Something is wrong.'
'We have the wrong person,' Neutemoc said. He shrugged.
No offence to him, but Yayauhqui is a merchant. Your plague sounds like it's been orchestrated by a warrior with a good grasp of strategy.'
'He used to be a warrior,' I reminded Neutemoc. 'All Tlatelolcans were both – merchants and warriors.'
'Don't lecture me.' Neutemoc looked amused. 'I know what you mean, but I still don't think it's him. Call it a gut feeling. He just doesn't seem to have the right mindset.'
I wasn't sure how much my brother's gut feelings were worth – but when it came to warriors, they had to be better than mine. Which left us, it seemed, with not much more to go on.
TWENTY-TWO
At the palace, we dropped Yayauhqui off into a room for 'guests', and I managed to find one black-clad guard willing to keep an eye on him. Though Yayauhqui himself didn't look as though he had any intention of moving: he'd picked up ledgers from his merchant peers before leaving, and he was now sitting cross-legged with the papers spread in his lap, thoughtfully annotating them with a writing reed.
It could have been an elaborate deception, but the most likely explanation was that it was all the truth, and that we'd been mistaken by picking him as the instigator of the plague.
But, if not him, who else? As he had said, we did not lack Tlatelolcans. Another of the former imperial family, with more military training, and a stronger will for revenge?
Pochtic would know.
We walked back to Pochtic's rooms, where Ichtaca had readied everything for the spell: my priests had brought back Pochtic's body from the temple, and laid it again in the position in which he had died: readying the
'I think we'll wait for you outside,' Neutemoc said. He shifted uncomfortably – unused, I guessed, to the matter-of-fact way with which we treated death.
Mihmatini shook her head. 'You wait outside. I want to see this.' Her gaze was hungry, feverish, and I thought I could name the reason for her impatience – she'd leap on anything we could use to make Teomitl see reason.
'Don't overdo it,' I said.
Her gaze was hard. 'I know what I'm doing.'
I sighed, but said nothing. I couldn't push her any further. We walked into the room together – to find Ichtaca on the edge of the circle, watching the ceremony. He bowed to Mihmatini, with the look of uneasy reverence he always had for his magical and political superiors – excepting me, of course.
'You don't look convinced by the ritual,' I said.
Ichtaca shrugged. 'You know why.'
After death, the souls that went into Mictlan lay in scattered shards – not like the sacrifices or the dead in battle, who opened up wings of light to ascend into the Fifth Sun's Heaven, nor the drowned men, who entered Tlalocan whole. Rather, those souls destined for Mictlan needed to strip themselves of every remnant of the Fifth World, pulling their essence from the corpse that had hosted them. It took a few days for that transformation to be complete, but this assumed proper rituals – the washing and laying-out of the body, and the vigil: all the small things that kept reminding the soul of the next step in its journey. Here, there had been time for nothing of this; the body had been moved, cutting its link to the place of death.
'Two days,' I said, aloud.
'It will have to suffice,' Ichtaca said.
We waited side by side, until the chanting subsided; it was time for me to take my place at the centre of the quincunx.
Pochtic's body lay on the ground – not the pale, contorted thing I remembered, but something else. Palli and the others had dressed him in a semblance of a funeral bundle – given the little time they'd had, I suspected there were rather fewer layers of cotton than Pochtic's status warranted; fewer amulets and pieces of jewellery as well.
I inhaled – feeling the cold of the underworld gather itself from the circle under my feet. Green light had seeped from the dried blood on the ground, until it seemed as though I stood in mist. Everything smelled faintly humid – like leaves on the edge of rotting. Then, with one of my obsidian knives, I drew a line across the scarred back of my hand, letting the blood fall onto the floor, drop after drop. There was a small jolt every time a drop connected, and the mist opened itself up to welcome it, with a hunger that was almost palpable.
The light flared up, coming to my waist; I could see faint smudges within, and hear the distant lament of the dead; shapes moved within the mist – there were hints of yellow eyes and claws and fangs, and the distant glimmer of a lost soul, like dewdrops on flower leaves.
