not hear it slam as she left. I was already reaching for the tequila.
It was late the next afternoon when I awoke with a pounding head, a foul taste in my mouth, and a sourness in the pit of my stomach that was more than physical. Twice in two days I had had to deal with ghosts from my former life and that was two times too many.
I dressed in a clean tunic and cloak, bolted down a cold tamale that settled in my stomach like a lump of basalt, and hurried out. It was not long until the market gates would close, and there was someone I wanted to see, as much for my own peace of mind as anything else.
The streets about the Fireflower Market were thronged with porters, slaves, housewives, and their maids. Here and there were caged parrots with their mouths open, hanging their worm like tongues as if they were dying of thirst. A barefoot Frog girl, barely old enough to be married, blocked my way to the entrance. She was holding a baby who had wooden blocks tied to his skull to make it slope like the forehead of a reptile, but she broke off her plea as we were pressed back against the wall to make way for a green-plumed noble and his retinue.
I followed in his convenient wake, being forced to pause only twice, as he stopped to watch the tiny daughter of a feather worker delicately plucking the feathers off of a skewered hummingbird with thin bone tweezers; and then as he paused by the tattooist, who was beating the line that would make a young man’s pretty face look as if it were covered with scales. Around us, the busy market was beginning to clear out. A few of the vendors had already shut their stalls, and here and there sweepers were at work. I dove into the maze of twisty lanes between the stalls, checked my bearings once, and pulled up before a narrow doorway hidden by a reed mat which still bore the stained and weary outline of a jaguar.
“Who comes?” A voice croaked as I thrust aside the matting and stepped through the door into the darkness.
“A pilgrim seeking wisdom from Mother Jaguar,” I answered. There was a shifting sound behind me, as if someone had just relaxed, and perhaps lowered a weapon.
“Enter then and be welcome,” the voice called, stronger this time. I stepped through the second doorway, thrust aside a cotton curtain and came face to face with Mother Jaguar.
She was kneeling at a low clay altar table, casting and recasting knucklebones too small for a deer or a pig. “Sit, my son,” she said in a voice that was stronger and younger than the one which had greeted me at the door. “What do you seek?”
She didn’t look up until I tossed three silver coins onto the table next to the knucklebones. She was ancient, but her eyes were black and sharp as obsidian points in her wrinkled, tattooed face.
“There is a maid named Four flower, a high-born maid,” I began. “It is said she was stolen from the marketplace on the day of the Ocelot, last. Her family seeks her and would be grateful for any aid.”
Mother Jaguar nodded. “I have heard this story, but I know nothing of such a maid or such a stealing.
Nor do any of my ones in the world of spirits know of such a thing.”
“A kidnapping for private reasons then? Perhaps lust?”
Mother Jaguar cast the bones again and shook her head. “I and my spirits know nothing,” she repeated.
I nodded. If you paid Mother Jaguar for information, and if she took your money, then she would tell you the truth. Which meant that neither Mother nor any of her kind knew anything about what had happened to Four flower.
“Thank you for your wisdom,” I said and rose to go.
“Your money,” Mother Jaguar said.
I tossed a fourth coin on the table. “It is yours. I asked, and you gave of your wisdom. It is not a fault that the answer was other than I hoped.” I turned to pass through the curtain.
“Wait,” Mother Jaguar said. I turned and she cast the bones, once, twice, and again, while I waited.
“Your maid is not the only one so taken,” Mother Jaguar said at last. “There have been several others, all of impeccable lineage, but perhaps not favored by fortune.”
“All maids?”
“Some maids, some boys, a few unmarried men and women, perhaps a hand count in all. All in the last two cycles of days.”
“Who?”
“No one knows. Nor why.” She turned again to her casting and the coins vanished from the altar as if by magic.
Uncle Tlaloc was impassive when I told him what I had found out about the kidnapping that evening.
It was still early and Uncle was drinking mate rather than alcohol. He took a last long pull on the gourd through his golden straw as I finished my report. “Diverting perhaps,” he rumbled, “but I fail to see why it should be of concern to us.”
I frowned. “There are ransoms, Uncle.”
He waved that away. “Assuming they are alive.”
“They aren’t?”
“The odds are strongly against it. Besides, I understand the Emperor’s Shadow has taken an interest in the matter.”
I started to ask why, realized it was a stupid question and closed my mouth. Kidnapped humans could be sacrificed, especially ones of little note but of excellent lineage. And, of course, it was treason for anyone other than the Emperor or the Imperial Priests to conduct a human sacrifice, since it implied a relationship to the Gods which was the Emperor’s alone. Yes, the Emperor’s Shadow would investigate a thing like that. And the Emperor’s Shadow was very bad news indeed.
“Uncle, do you think this is somehow related to the matter of the huetlacoatl?”
“It was not sacrificed, you said. Besides the Emperor’s Shadow has shown no interest in that matter.” He shifted his position on his great chair and sucked the gourd dry noisily. “No, I think for now we can consider such a connection unlikely.
“Meanwhile, my boy, I have another job for you. One that might shed some light on-the other matter.”
I leaned against the low stone railing with the midafternoon sun behind me and looked down upon the former lords of creation.
Not far away, a howler monkey bellowed and a jaguar cried.
Long ago, the Hero Twins, Quetzalcoatl and Tezcatlipoca, slew the water monster Cipactli. They made the world out of its mangled carcass, and human creation began. Before that, these, or ones like them, had ruled the Earth.
For their evil, lust, and impiety, the Gods had sent fire from the sky, and their rule had ended. Only on the southern continent, hidden behind a veil of storms, did they remain as a warning to men of the power and majesty of the Gods.
Or so the story went. Personally, I thought that if the Gods allowed man to continue, they owed the huetlacoatls an apology.
There were four of them in the pit below me, picking at the mass of greenery in the mangers on the walls.
When one of them stretched erect, its head came to within a few feet of the parapet. And these were not the biggest of the huetlacoatls, only two-legged browsers that walked with their bodies nearly horizontal and their tails straight out behind them. One of them lifted its head, with leaves dripping from its jaws, and cocked an incurious eye at me. For an instant, I wondered what the old lords of creation thought of the new. Then it dropped its gaze and went back to the manger.
That was about the closest I’d come to an insight in the course of a long, tedious afternoon at the Imperial Menagerie. Uncle Tlaloc wanted more information, and I’d hoped for something that would give me an idea, anything, about the murder of the huetlacoatl from studying the other creatures of the Viru.
I’d seen big huetlacoatls and bigger ones. Ones that were big and ferocious enough to be demigods, and ones that were ponderous and stupid. Apparently the southern continent was overrun with the things in all sorts of nightmare shapes. But nothing I saw gave me insight.
It was a rare sunny day, and the menagerie was thronged with nobility and their servants. There was even a fair sprinkling of commoners, admitted by “special dispensation”-actually a small bribe to the keepers.
The commoners were wearing their feast day best and the nobles the bright mantles appropriate to their stations. The people were far more colorful than the huetlacoatls, and a lot more interesting than tanks of water monsters, and cages of woolly beasts of the distant north.
