more.
There was something… A faint, very faint trace of magic within the hut. I closed my eyes. It was god-given, like the magic that had hung in Zollin's room, but somehow different. Less angry. More desperate. It seemed to emanate from the wattle-and-daub walls of the hut. Puzzled, I knelt to take a better look. In the blood was the faint imprint of a human hand; and faint scratches on the ground.
I picked up the fallen torch, started to dust it off, and gave up when I saw how much mud was clogging it. I teased a branch loose from the torch, cleaned it as best as I could before plunging it into the flames of the hearth. It took a long time for the fire to take hold. When it did, it was a small and sickly thing, pulsating weakly at the end of my improvised torch. I moved back to the hand imprint, shone the torch on the ground. By its side, the blood had formed patterns…
No, not the blood. Someone had started to trace glyphs for a spell. That was the reason the magic, spreading out from the incomplete pattern, had impregnated this area.
The glyphs, trembling in the torchlight, were the ones for 'water' and 'escape': both badly smudged, traced in a shaking, fearful hand, and the last one incomplete.
I closed my eyes. The beast had brought Priestess Eleuia here, after abducting her from the girls' calmecac. The attempted spell had to be hers, a desperate attempt to escape her abductor. But Eleuia was, quite obviously, no longer here.
My torch wavered, and finally went out. I bit back a curse.
'Anything?' Teomitl asked, shadowing me from the threshold. He was leaning on a crutch, his leg neatly splinted with dried branches.
'Blood,' I said, with a sigh. 'She was here.'
Teomitl did the same thing I'd done: withdrawing a branch from the ruined torch, dipping it into the fire. He turned from one end of the hut to another, seemingly oblivious to the corpses. Of course, they'd only be peasants for him, not worthy of his attention.
'Mm,' he said. 'People came here.'
'The peasants?' I asked.
'No,' Teomitl said. 'After the peasants were dead.' He waved the torch towards the farthest end: outlined in blood were two foot prints, of different sizes.
'At least two people?' I asked.
'With sandals. So probably not peasants,' Teomitl said. 'And it wasn't long after the peasants' deaths, or they wouldn't have left marks.'
Eleuia had been there, too, while the blood was still fresh; otherwise she wouldn't have left a handprint.
'They took her?' I asked.
Teomitl shrugged. 'Probably.'
I glanced at the ground near the threshold, but we'd damaged too much of it with our battle. 'And we still don't know where.' Which was true, if frustrating. None of that would help me understand what was going on. 'Very well. Help me out, will you? I have memories to access.'
For the ritual, I needed a clean patch of land. One-armed and onelegged, Teomitl and I managed to drag the beast's corpse to the empty patch of earth before the hut. The wound I'd dealt it gaped in the moonlight, exuding faint traces of Mictlan's aura; of the magic that had coursed through me to bring the beast down.
I retrieved all my obsidian knives, and used one of them to draw a ragged circle in the earth. Then I withdrew to survey my handiwork. The circle looked as clean as I could make it. It would have to do.
Further away, in the field where the beast had fallen, its blood had shrivelled the maize, leaving a patch of emptiness oozing Mictlan's power. In that place, nothing would grow for many years.
Father, I thought uneasily, would have been angry at the way we'd damaged the harvest to come. The family might be dead, but the land would revert to the clan; and another married couple would soon cultivate this field, wondering why nothing would grow there.
Father wouldn't have tolerated this. But Father was dead. I had… I had run away from his drowned corpse, seeing in every feature of his face the disappointment that I'd turned out as I had. It was the single vigil I had never undertaken, and it still itched at the back of my mind.
Father was dead, buried into the bliss of Tlalocan, the Land of the Blessed Drowned. I had other things to worry about.
Teomitl's taut pose suggested the question he dared not ask: 'And now what?'
'Stay out of the circle.'
He made a quick, angry gesture. 'Surprise me.'
Ignoring Teomitl's taunt, I knelt inside the circle. With my good hand, slowly, methodically, I widened the wound in the beast's belly. The entrails came steaming out, exuding not the smell of bowels but the wet, musty odour of a grave long unopened.
I drew another gash, this time nearer the ribs, and went looking for the heart.
It was a small, pathetic thing when I finally pulled it loose: the size of a human one, as unmoving as the jade heart now was.
I arranged the entrails in an inner circle within the one we'd already cleared. Then I cut the small, stylised shape of a reed, my day sign, into the flesh of the heart. It barely bled, as if death had emptied the beast's veins.
Finally, I came to stand in the centre of both circles, holding the heart in my good hand. It was as smooth and as warm as the flesh of a young child.
'This is the day that saw me born, this is the name my father gave me,' I whispered, and the heart twitched under my fingers.
I wrapped my hand around the heart, and went on,
