Obsidian & Blood

  Instead, I met the irate eyes of a woman who looked formidable enough to take down the gods. 'And the meaning of this is?'

  I pointed to the dead ahuizotl – behind her, her attendant was kneeling in a quincunx glowing with the familiar heat of living blood, and the other two beasts lying dead at its centre. 'Sorry. It was the nearest refuge. I thought…'

  I paused then, wrenching my mind into another alignment. My sister was a powerful priestess in her own right, and Xiloxoch had brimmed with the power of her goddess. Why had I thought of those women as defenceless? 'I apologise for disturbing you – you'd best stay there. There are people trying to kill each other outside.'

  The woman rolled her eyes, in a way that suggested this happened all the time. 'Men. We're sealing this place, so I won't say it twice. You'll want to head out.'

  I certainly wasn't about to argue. Gingerly, I bowed to her, and walked out of the room – back into sunlight through the torn entrance curtain. I felt a breath at my back, and a hint of something large and angry beneath my feet – before the entrance-curtain fell again.

  The courtyard was a mess: the fountain had been blown to pieces, and the wind was lifting up a cloud of dust that prevented me from seeing much. But magic still glowed within, and I could follow the progress of the circle: it was three quarters complete, its largest missing chunk right behind Coatl's greenish radiance. Not surprising.

  I hefted my knife closer to me – feeling the stretched emptiness of Mictlan gather in my chest, the familiar sense that I'd never breathe again in the Fifth World – and went straight into the dust.

  Shapes moved: moaning faces, flailing limbs, as if I were back within the fever-dream, weighed down by four hundred thousand bodies. I felt the sickness, curled at the edge of my thoughts, questing for a way in. I'd had it once and survived, which gave me an edge, but I couldn't count on this.

  Also, the ahuizotls had to be somewhere, and I certainly didn't have an edge against them.

  I had gone perhaps three paces when I found the first body – blackened by the plague, blood streaming out of its orifices. It was the young offering priest, Matlaelel, the whites of his eyes completely red, blood welling up from under his nails and nipples. His mouth opened – blood had run down from his gums, staining his teeth – and his lips shaped a word I couldn't understand – my name, perhaps? I fought the urge to lay my hands on him, to whisper the litany for the Dead and grant him safe passage into the World Beyond.

  I said the words, regardless – because I was High Priest for the Dead, and it was my province, and because I had dragged him into this, and I owed him at least this.

'We live on Earth, in the Fifth World

Not forever, but a little while…'

  Shadows moved within the murky gloom. I made for the only thing I could see, which was the gaping emptiness within the circle.

  'Acatl-tzin!' Palli's hand on my arm almost made me jerk in surprise.

  He was pale and wan, but more from loss of blood than anything else – and covered in the brackish ichor of wounded ahuizotls. Blood covered his hands, welling up from a dozen cuts.

  'We need to finish the circle,' I said. 'Coatl–'

  'Nezahual-tzin and your sister are keeping him busy,' Palli said grimly.

  Mihmatini? I ought to have known.

  'Fine. Then we're headed for the other side of the courtyard. Can you see it?' I assumed Acamapichtli would be able to take care of his own problems; perhaps a mistake, but he certainly wasn't incapable.

  'Yes, but–' Palli's face was pinched with fear.

  I could have lied, made promises about how the plague couldn't touch him, but I had never had the ruthlessness for that. 'We need to close that circle,' I said. 'Or more people will die. Not only us, but everyone here.'

  Palli grimaced, but he nodded. 'Let's go.'

  As courtyards went, it wasn't a large one – at least, I was sure it hadn't been. As we fumbled around in the dust cloud, it didn't appear so small anymore. The shadows twisted and shifted, and even Palli seemed impossibly far away – I soon lost him, as veil after veil of reddish dust rose to cover everything. A dark silhouette loomed through the fog: a huge snake which had to mark Nezahual-tzin's location. My gaze swept left and right – where were the ahuizotls – surely they hadn't disappeared? But all I saw were the faces, slowly coalescing into focus, distorted with pain, their mouths open in soundless screams – men, women and children, with the shadows of rich headdresses and jewellery.

  I couldn't tell at which point the nagging suspicion at the back of my mind coalesced into certainty as heavy as a stone in my belly – perhaps it was the woman, with the fine line of cuts across her face, or perhaps the child with sticky blood clogging his hair, gathered all in the place of the single wound that had dashed his brains out, or perhaps the dour warrior who looked hauntingly familiar, until I realised he could have been Yayauhqui's father.

  Tlatelolco. The dead of Tlatelolco, weighing us down like stocks on a guilty man's neck. But there hadn't been so many of them – and they were dead, they had been dead for years and years, enough time for their souls to have moved on, found their true rest…

  I'd been wrong, then. This was a plague passed on by the dead, by all the ghosts flittering through the diminished boundaries. It couldn't have existed without what we had done, Quenami, Acamapichtli and I.

  Focus. Focus. Breathe, slowly, calmly – every step I took seemed to be through mud or tar; the faces swam in and out of focus, all crying out for revenge.

  I wasn't a warrior, or a devotee of Huitzilpochtli the Southern Hummingbird. But, in the end, it didn't matter. The god had chosen us, and favoured us, and we had grown and grown, taking over our neighbours. It was sheer survival: everything that lived had to grow, or ossify and die. Nevertheless… I could understand their anger at what had been done to them.

  I could have told them this, but they wouldn't have listened, or understood.

  I walked on. The dust thickened, and every step seemed to cost me. The dead wailed and screamed and pleaded, demanding to be acknowledged – but I closed my ears to their pleas, and went on.