[Aztec 04] - Tribute of Death

around the dimly-lit space, taking in what they could. They returned to the sack. It lay in one of the far corners of the room, against the wall, as though it had been thrown there out of the way. While my gaze rested on it and I began to get used to the light it occurred to me that it might not be as normal as I had thought. There was something not right about its shape. What would you keep in a sack in a house, I wondered? Chillies, squashes or greens? But the thing I saw did not look like a bag of vegetables, all bunched together by the cloth that held them: it was somehow sprawled across the floor. Then I became aware of something else: there was a nasty smell in the room.

Behind me, Lion made a disgusted sound. ‘What in all the nine regions of Hell happened in here? It’s like someone kicked over a chamberpot!’

‘Oh, no,’ I whispered, as I stepped towards the thing. ‘Lily? Not you as well. Please, not that…’

Part of me wanted to turn and run then, to forget about lord Feathered in Black and Handy and Mexico and even my family, just to go far away, far enough for me put all the horrors I had found in my home city out of my mind for good. Even while I was thinking this, with every instinct urging me against it, another step had brought me to the thing on the floor and I was plucking at the cloth with my fingertips.

I tugged at the material. I whimpered in grief and disgust as the smell flooded my nostrils and I felt the weight of a stiff, inert human body resisting my efforts. I dropped to my knees and reached out with both hands in an effort to shift the corpse, to get it onto its back and look it in the face.

The horror of what I had felt, imagining the body was Lily’s, was swept away by what I saw when I finally had those sightless eyes staring upward into mine.

I was staring at a rigid mask, with its lips drawn back and its teeth clamped together in a mirthless grin. Spittle and dried vomit coated its chin. It was a woman’s face. However, it was not my mistress’s. And even as understanding dawned on me, I realized why it had been so hard to turn the body over. It was not one corpse at all, but two. Two human beings, a man and a woman, their stiff limbs forever locked in a last gruesome embrace.

I was too shocked to be relieved. I could only stare dumbly at the twisted, soiled features, the arms and legs grotesquely contorted, and try to find in them something I might have recognised in a living, breathing human being.

‘Who is it?’ Handy asked. ‘Is she dead? What happened to her?’

Nausea threatened to overwhelm me. I felt as though I were about to fall over. I put a hand out to steady myself, inadvertently touching the body. ‘It’s Gentle Heart,’ I said, in a hushed voice. ‘And Cactus!’

‘Well,’ said Lion coolly, ‘that rather upsets your theory, doesn’t it, brother? Unless they killed themselves!’

‘Maybe that’s what happened,’ I said. ‘What’s this?’ A small, shallow earthenware vessel, decorated with bands of black and orange glaze, lay on the floor by my foot. It was the kind of thing that could be found in almost any house in the city; my mother probably had a shelf full of them. ‘One of them dropped it, I think. See, it’s cracked here? And there are some dregs in the bottom.’ I lifted it until its edge was level with my nose for a cautious sniff. ‘Smells like chocolate!’

‘That’s a rich man’s drink,’ Lion protested. ‘What would a midwife and a small-time curer be doing with it?’

‘I wonder...’ I put a finger into the bowl to touch the residue at the bottom.

A piercing shriek split the air in the room. There was a sound of running feet, and then wild confusion as something warm – I realised it was an arm – was thrown around my neck and began tugging at me, pulling me away from the dead woman and shaking me until my teeth rattled. The shrieking became words: ‘Don’t touch that! Did you touch it? Don’t put that finger near your mouth. Yaotl! Are you all right?’

The faces of the dead became a blur as my head jerked backward, while a living woman’s furious cries battered my ears, for a moment driving every thought out of my head.

‘What are you doing?’ Lion sounded as shocked as I was. ‘You’re mad, woman! Hey, stop! Handy! Help me get her off him!’

It was like being snatched out of a bad dream and having, all of a sudden, to take in what was happening around me and make sense of it.

The woman whose voice filled my ears and whose arm was locked around my throat, preventing me from answering her, was Lily.

She let me go with a violent jerk that pitched me forward beside the midwife’s body. From behind me, there came a crash that shook the walls of the little house and brought plaster and sawdust down from the roof.

‘Hold onto her, Handy, she’s bloody dangerous. Just let me get up!’

Lily was sobbing now, hysterical tears choking her voice.

Groaning, I stood and turned around.

My mistress lay against the wall where the three of them had fallen, her face crumpled with distress. Handy stood over her, slack-jawed with bewilderment, while my brother got slowly to his feet, shaking his head and blinking.

I stepped across the floor to extend a hand. ‘Lily,’ I said loudly. ‘It’s all right. Look at me! I’m all right!’

She glanced up, fixing me with wide, glistening eyes. The sobs subsided. ‘Are you… Are you sure?’ she whispered fearfully, as I bent down and took her arm to help her up.

Lion was standing by now. ‘Is one of you going