Obsidian & Blood

'Past the mountains that bind and crush

Past the wind who cuts and wounds

Past the river that drowns

I call you, I guide you out…'

  Nothing happened.

  Or rather: the mist remained, and the feeling of emptiness arcing through me, telling me passage into the underworld was open. But no soul came; no vaguely human shape drew itself out of the murky darkness.

  The Storm Lord strike me, Ichtaca was right: we were too early, and the soul was still in four hundred scattered pieces.

  But no; there was something… some resistance, as if I'd hooked a fish at the end of a line, or rather, more than one fish: I could feel the pulling, the scrabbling of several smaller things trying to get out of the way, with the same intelligence as a shoal of fish or a flock of sparrows.

  I grasped my obsidian knife, letting the blade draw a bloody line within my palm – waiting until the obsidian was tinged with my blood. Then I wove the knife up, heedless of the small pinprick of pain that spread from my open wounds – up, and around, as if cutting into a veil.

  The air parted with a palpable resistance, and the pull I felt grew stronger – and then, in a moment like a heartbeat, something coalesced in the midst of the circle.

  The souls I had seen had been human, but this clearly wasn't. It moved and shimmered, barely within the Fifth World – I caught glimpses of wings and feathers within its ever-changing shape, as if the soul wasn't yet sure how it had died.

  'Priest?' It whispered. The voice was to Pochtic as a codex picture was to a god – small and diminished, its timbre extinguished. 'Where–?'

  'The Fifth World – but only for a little while,' I said. 'Everything must tarnish and fade into dust, and you are no exception.' My voice took on the cadences of the ritual – for this had to be done properly, lest Pochtic never achieve oblivion in Mictlan. 'The blood has fled your body; the voice of your heart is silent. The underworld awaits you.'

  The soul shifted and twisted. If he had been a man, he would have hugged himself. 'I'm dead?'

  Quite unmistakably so. 'Yes,' I said.

  It moved again, extending tendrils of light to wrap around the funeral bundle – and withdrawing as soon as it touched it, as if it had been burned. 'Dead…' it whispered.

  What a contrast to the vibrant, arrogant man Pochtic had been, but then, few spirits maintained their cohesion into death. I had only met one, and he had been Revered Speaker of Tenochtitlan, schooled in propriety and ritual since his birth.

  'Dead,' I said. And, because strong emotions could survive even into Mictlan, 'You committed suicide.'

  A brief flare from the soul; a shifting of lights to become darker. 'I did.' There was a pause. 'I… I was afraid.'

  I said nothing, not wanting to break the fragile process of gathering its memories.

  'He was going to find me – arrest me, kill me. The Revered Speaker…' It paused, shifted again. 'I – did something. I–'

  It was silent, then – hovering over its own corpse, not daring to touch it. At length, it whispered, and it was the voice of a broken man, 'It can't be forgiven. It can't ever be forgiven.'

  If it still had eyes, it would have wept.

  And, if I didn't vividly remember the carnage in the courtyard, perhaps I would have bent or relented – but Tapalcayotl's face was in my mind, black and twisted out of shape by sores, and the memories of a dozen bodies scattered like a grisly harvest, and the vulnerability in Acamapichtli's eyes. 'What did you do?'

  'I– I– ' Its voice was low, halting – ashamed? 'He was talking in my sleep, always – whispering, suggesting, threatening – always talking, until I couldn't take any more of it. I just couldn't! He – he wanted me to help him, to get revenge, and I couldn't say no.'

  Talking. Dreams. 'You had herbs, in your room,' I said. 'Jimsonweed, and teonanacatl. You were speaking with the spirits.' But even as I said that, I thought of the decayed wards – they had been familiar, but they weren't for better communication with the departed. They were the reverse: walls to keep the spirits out, attacked until they'd ruptured. We'd had backwards: it wasn't the living seeking to spread the plague with the help of the dead. It was the dead seeking revenge, and influencing the living to get it.

  'He found you,' I said, slowly. 'A tool for his plans. And you helped him,' I said. From the start – giving the feather quills to Eptli, to Zoqutil, engraving the spells within the palace – corruption in our midst, like the rotten core of a cactus.

  'I–'

  'Tizoc-tzin won't forgive; the Southern Hummingbird doesn't forgive.' It was a lie, for his soul would go down into Mictlan, where there was no judging, no weighing of deeds – where everyone, prince or nobleman or peasant, was equal. 'Who was he, Pochtic? What did he want?'

  'I–' Something rippled across the soul, as if it were caught in some inner struggle. Vaguely, I heard Ichtaca cry out from beyond the circle. 'Revenge, but I can't say anything – I can't, he would kill me…'

  'You are already dead,' I said. 'Wrapped in the bundle of your funeral pyre, awaiting entry into the land of the dead, the land of the fleshless, the land where jade crumbles and feathers become dust.' Every word fell into place with the inevitability of a heartbeat – further ritual, hemming the soul in, reminding it that there was no escape. 'And he can't harm you anymore, whoever he is.'

  'You're wrong – wrong, wrong,' the soul whispered. Around it, the circle was crinkling inwards – the green mist receding into the stone floor, to reveal once more the frescoes of the gods on the walls. 'Wrong…'

  'No,' I said. 'You're dead – you belong to Lord Death now, and to Mictlan. No one can take away from you, and no one can reach down into the underworld. What does he want? Tell me.'

  The soul shifted, twisted – writhed, trying to escape – the wings were falling away, and the outline of arms and legs were forming, flailing wildly as if in great pain. 'He – revenge,' he whispered again. 'On all of Tenochtitlan, if need be. May the cities you hold fall one after the other; let the temples be awash in fire and blood…'