The last light of the Fifth Sun bathed him, surrounding him in a glow like molten gold,and all of a sudden I saw the ruler he'd become, the one his sister had believed in so desperately – not who he was now, but who he would be, in a few years' time: a man brimming with the power of the gods, smart enough to forge his own alliances and make his own opinions, respected and feared by the army, quick to love and quick to hate – a man who would lead us all to the Southern Hummingbird's promised glory, whose name would spread far and wide, like smoke, like mist – who would make the Empire great and wealthy, and eclipse the name of Tizoctzin as if it had never been.
'No,' I said, 'it hasn't changed.' But he had; oh, he had, and the world seemed to blur and bend a little as I looked upon him.
Neutemoc had said that even beloved sons and beloved students went astray – that, like I and my brother, they ended up a bitter disappointment to their parents or teachers.
And sometimes, they outgrew us, and some of their light shone back upon us, making our faces wider than anything we could have done on our own.
THE SHORT STORIES
Obsidian Shards
First published in
The obsidian shard, half the size of my palm, lay in my hand: a sharp, deadly thing still stained with blood. Its black surface shimmered with green reflections, and it quivered with the aura I associated with the underworld: blood and pain and death. Odd, to say the least. One did not find such objects in a dead warrior's house.
I raised my eyes to look at Magistrate Macihuin, who stood in the courtyard, a few steps away from me, watching me intently.
“Where did you find it?” I asked.
He shrugged. “It was embedded in his heart, and quite deeply – the guards and I had some trouble extracting it.”
“How did you think of opening the chest?” I asked.
Macihuin's face was grim. “From looking at the corpse, I would have said his heart had failed him. But the neighbours heard him scream. And once we undressed him, there was a small splotch of blood over the heart – not large enough to be an entry wound. Just… a mark. What do you make of it, Acatl?”
I was a priest for the Dead: I assisted in preparing the corpses, in saying the proper prayers and making the proper sacrifices. And if the underworld was involved directly in a death, as seemed to be the case here, I advised magistrates such as Macihuin.
“There's magic involved, to put the shard straight into the heart with so little damage to the skin.” I closed my hand around the shard. I had handled obsidian blades before. This felt wrong – too smooth, too charged with latent power. I had felt this once before, but… “There is underworld magic in this, but I don't know what kind exactly. Not yet,” I said.
“Do you want to see the body?” Macihuin asked.
We moved from the courtyard to the inside of the house, where two guards watched over the victim's body.
There was not much to see. It lay on the reed mat in the bedroom, its face bearing the blank expression of corpses. Behind it, the rich fresco on the adobe wall depicted Tezcatlipoca, God of War and Fate, and His eternal enemy Quetzalcoatl, God of Creation and Knowledge. Tezcatlipoca's clawed hands carried the obsidian mirror that held His power, and His face was creased in savage laughter, as if the death amused Him. Quetzalcoatl stood next to Him, holding a skull in His hand. His eyes were sad.
Macihuin's guards had opened up the chest to remove the shard: jagged cuts marked the edge of the wound, and the strong smell reminded me of the altar room of a great temple, encrusted with the blood of hundreds of sacrifices.
The heart had been cut in two, but everything else seemed normal. I had seen enough open chests to learn something of human bodies.
Macihuin said, “His name was Huitxic. He was a warrior and a respected member of his clan. Beyond that, I know nothing of why he might have such a shard in his heart. I was hoping you'd tell me.”
I could sense his impatience, his worry. For him, this murder involving magical obsidian was unfamiliar territory, the intrusion of something dangerous into his life. For me…I did not know the dead man. However, the shard was all too familiar: seven years ago, I had found a similar one in my student Payaxin's chest.
“It's from the Wind of Knives.” I felt a chill in my heart as I told him this. “The guardian who sees that the boundary between the underworld and the world of the living is maintained.”
“The Wind of Knives? And why should He come here and kill Huitxic?” Macihuin's face had hardened, but I could hear the fear in his voice. He had probably hoped I would deny the underworld's involvement in this death, that I would say it was a purely mundane murder. No such luck.
“Huitxic must have transgressed,” I said. “He must somehow have blurred the line between the underworld and the mortal world.”
Macihuin's gaze would not meet mine. He had sounded far too worried, even for such an unusual death. “What are you not telling me?” I asked, softly.
At length he said, “He's not the first man to die like that. The first were dismissed as heart attacks. This one would have been, too, if the neighbours had not heard the screams.”
I did not like this. It was one thing for the Wind to kill a man, but several of them? “How many have there been?”
“Two before this one. They all had the same mark, but I did not make the connection until this death, and they were buried normally. They were warriors all,” Macihuin said. “Pochta had just taken his first prisoner, and shaved his childhood hair. But Itlani, the first one, was a
A
“Yes, and not peasants' deaths either. I need explanations, Acatl. And fast. If they have indeed transgressed, I need to know how.”
“We all need to know,” I said, softly. “If those dead men have summoned anything from the underworld, it is a danger to us all.” I knew what kind of monsters peopled each level of the underworld: beasts of shadows feeding on human flesh, giant birds that ate human eyes, monsters standing on two deformed legs, with claws instead of hands. The thought of their walking among us was not a pleasant one.
The Wind of Knives would kill the human transgressors, but His role ended there. It was priests and especially Guardians who kept the balance of the world, by preventing monsters from coming among us.
I sighed. I stared at the obsidian shard I still held in my hand. The Wind of Knives. After my student Payaxin had died, something had withered in me. I could no longer trust the Wind of Knives, not when He killed so casually.
Still… Still, I was a priest for the Dead, and responsibilities could not be evaded so casually.
“I will summon the Wind of Knives,” I said. “And see what He has to tell us.”
“Good,” Macihuin said. “I will look further into the registers, and find out what I can about those men.” He moved away from me, and then seemed to change his mind. “Oh, I forgot.” He gestured, and one of the guards handed him something. “This was around his neck.”
It was a small jade pendant with two glyphs engraved on it. “Four Wind,” I said aloud. “His birth date?”
