“Eh?” This wasn’t the way he expected the conversation to go. “Why, eggs, of course. Like crocodiles, or birds.”
Shit!Another beautiful theory murdered by a gang of ugly facts.
“Although,” Foureagle continued slowly, “not all of them lay the eggs in a nest. Some of them, like some snakes, hold the eggs in their bodies until the young hatch.” He looked at me sharply. “Like the huetlacoatls.”
“And the one who died was female.” It wasn’t a question. “Toltectecuhtli keeps talking about a great joining of humans, English, and even huetlacoatls. To make that work he’s going to need something like the Speakers.” The effort made me cough, which hurt my ribs even more. I wondered how many were broken.
“Except they would be huetlacoatls raised among humans rather than the other way around,” the old man finished my thought. “Young sir, I believe you have it.” He smiled, and I felt the grip on my arms loosen imperceptibly. Then he frowned. “But it is still just a theory, of course. And it does not tell us where the eggs are.”
“I think I know,” I said slowly. “Uncle, may I beg the boon of a handspan of days to find out?”
Foureagle rubbed his chin. “I will give you one day,” he said.
Considering the obvious alternative, I took it.
One thing about being beaten up, it makes disguise easier-if you’re disguising yourself as a cripple, that is. And I was. Some artificial scars and pockmarks helped the effect. But the bruises on my face and the swollen eye were real. So were the limping, halting gait and the painful, gasping breath. The ragged tunic was my servant’s, but the sword underneath was mine.
The public parts of the temple were easily accessible. There was no service tonight, but a fair number of pilgrims wandered the halls, pausing at small shrines to pray and make offerings. No guards, of course.
One would have to be truly mador very young and stupid to profane or steal from a temple, even a temple of such an odd religion.
I hadn’t really seen much of the place the last time. It turned out the inside was just as gaudy and probably just as disturbing as the outside. “Probably” because the place was lit by torches rather than gas lamps and much of it was lost in the gloom.
Now if I were a huetlacoatl egg, where would I be?
Someplace secure, of course. Out of the way, yet an important place. A sacred place. Then I remembered the use the Frogs traditionally made of their temples that the Reed folk did not. If this place followed the custom, there would be a crypt beneath the structure, a place for the burial of kings.Or the birthplace of kings.
The place had probably been a maze to begin with and the group’s alterations hadn’t improved that any.
I drifted along the corridors, stopping at shrines to pay my respects and generally trying to look like I belonged.
Toltectecuhtli came striding down the corridor, resplendent in a headdress of quetzal plumes and beaten gold. He still wore the lizard-skin stomacher and the gold Quetzalcoatl gorget, but his elaborately embroidered kilt was new. From his belt hung a maquahatl, the flat wooden war club fitted with blades of keen obsidian along the edges. With his sloped head he looked like he had stepped out of a temple wall painting.
What the hell? I followed him. He went to the center of the ground floor, then down a stairway that was framed by the masterfully sculpted gaping jaws of gigantic huetlacoatls. It reminded me of stories of the underworld, the many Hells beneath the earth. An undistinguished soul on his way to oblivion, or one of the Lords of Death?
Down the stairs it grew dark, and the air became clammy. I heard moaning. Horrible moaning. I shuddered. Could the myths be true?
At the end of the narrow stair was a long corridor, with light showing from a side passage far down and off the right. I pressed myself against the wall and glided toward the light. The dank silence was broken only by an occasional moan.
Toltectecuhtli stood in the middle of a wide chamber lit with many lamps. The light flickered and shifted, making it hard to see things. Which was, perhaps, for the best.
The place was a ghastly parody of the Death Master’s laying-out room. Stone tables dotted the room and forms covered with sheets lay on most of them. Toltectecuhtli was bending over one of the tables with his back to the door. He did something, and the thing on the table moaned like one who has been flayed but is not quite dead yet.
As Toltectecuhtli stood up I could see that the person on the table still had her skin, at least from the waist up. The priest strode away from the table to a door in the rear of the room. He unlocked it, passed through, and I heard the lock click as he relocked it from the inside.
I stayed where I was, listening hard. There was no sound through the damp, close air, not even from the tables. But there was a smell: the stink of strong tequila.
I moved carefully into the room and approached the table where Toltectecuhtli had uncovered the woman. She was young, with breasts that were full but had not yet begun to sag. She might have been pretty once, but suffering had drained all the beauty, and most of the humanity, from her.
“Four flower?” I whispered. She turned drug-dimmed eyes to me. They were like the eyes of a dumbanimal. No hope, no pleading.
Then I saw why. There was a gaping red wound from breastbone to groin. The belly skin was pink and healthy with no flush of infection, but the edges of the wound were separated by a hand-breadth and the belly was pushed out, as if bloated.
I looked closer and saw there was something in the wound, inside the woman.
It was grayish, rounded, and netted all over like a melon. I didn’t have Foureagle’s knowledge of human insides, but I knew that this thing didn’t belong in a human belly. I shifted to get a better view and saw it was about twice the size of a large goose egg.
Eggs?Then all the fragments fell together. Like a shattered obsidian butterfly reassembling itself and flying away.
There are priest-surgeons, specialists, who can open a man up without killing him to treat a sickness of the body. They use the finest obsidian blades, take the greatest care not to cut into the bowels and carefully sew the flesh and skin together after dousing the area with the purest double-distilled tequila.
Most of the time the patient even recovers.
Toltectecuhtli wanted a blending of huetlacoatl and human. What better way to blend the two essences than incubating huetlacoatl eggs within human bodies?
There was a crash behind me of something shattering on the stone. I whirled and saw Toltectecuhtli standing in the door I had come through. The remains of a jug at his feet and the stronger smell of tequila told me where he’d been. In the semi-darkness with the lamps hitting him from below he looked like a vengeful wall painting come to life. About a ten-foot-tall wall painting.
“Good evening,” I said pleasantly, to distract him while I figured out whether I’d have to take him out or could just run.
If Toltectecuhtli’s eyes were crossed, there was nothing wrong with his hearing.
“You do not belong here, Tworabbit.”
“I couldn’t agree with you more,” I said amiably. “So I’ll just be going.”
“Your part was ignorance! I told you to play your part in the great change.”
“Ignorance is an expensive commodity,” I said, moving sideways toward the main door. “Too expensive for a lowly person such as me.”
He growled in inarticulate fury and leaped to the door, blocking my way out. In a single swirling motion he went for the bladed war club at his belt and launched a furious overhand swipe at my head.
I ducked and barely got my sword up to parry. The force of the blow drove my forearm down onto my forehead and twisted my sword in my grip. But the club went skittering off my sword and missed my body altogether. I tried a fast counterslash to his chest, but the old man twisted away easily and brought his maquahatl up in a disemboweling blow. I parried and gave ground and he came after me swinging left-and-right at my head.
That damn club was heavy, which made it hard to parry, and the obsidian blades set along the edge could open me up as efficiently as any steel sword. In spite of his age this priest was strong as an ox and fast as a teenager. I was neither and I was in a lot of trouble.
I tried to dodge around to his left side, but he spun on his toes before I could complete the move. He aimed another at my head. I raised my sword to parry and with a twist of the wrist he dropped the blow toward my legs. I
