Harbinger of the Storm

by Aliette de Bodard

  "Of course." Nezahual-tzin bowed his head. "Come with me. There is something you must see."

  "I don't play games," Teomitl said haughtily.

  Nezahual-tzin's smile was starting to become annoying. "This isn't a game," he said, slow, sure of himself. "Merely an invitation, as your host. A proffered hand."

  The last person to talk of proffered hands had been Quenami, and I had no wish for a repetition of what had happened afterwards. "And if we refuse?"

  "You do as you wish. It would be a shame, but I have no doubt all of us would recover." Nezahual-tzin started to move away. The warriors followed, one of them holding a large fan to keep his master refreshed.

  "Who does he think he is?" Teomitl whispered.

  Revered Speaker, sadly, and, secure in the familiar setting of his power a radically different man than the one who had chatted with me on the boat. One more disappointment. I was getting used to those. "Let's indulge him," I said in a low voice. "I don't want to sample the Texcocan cages."

  Nezahual-tzin must have had keener hearing than I'd assumed, for he turned, and smiled at me, sweet and innocent like a young warrior just released from the House of Youth.

  I was not fooled. Whatever he thought we should see would be to his own advantage. If we were lucky, we would glean useful scraps, but nothing more.

  If that was political acumen, then I was glad Teomitl was incapable of learning it.

  • • • •

  We went down the mountain, following the flow of the water. It shimmered to my priest senses, a reminder of who the palace complex was dedicated to. It made me slightly uneasy. The last time I'd dealt with the Storm Lord, He had been trying to overthrow the Fifth Sun. But still, the mark on my hand, an itch that grew strong the closer we went to the water, was a reminder that things were no longer quite the same.

  In the canals floated garlands of flowers and wood carvings of frogs and seashells; and everywhere were small reed islands, scattered in the shape of quincunxes, reminders of the harmony of the Fifth World. Power hung over the water, shimmering like mist. I breathed it in with every step, a liquid constriction in my lungs, a heaviness in my throat.

  We had been going for a while when Nezahual-tzin stepped into a courtyard, which seemed no different from all the others – save that the adobe walls surrounding it formed a circle, and that reeds had been carved all around the circumference. Dark stains marred the ground – living blood, a maze of power that thrummed in my chest, not the sharp, oppressive beat of Tlaloc's magic, but rather that of another god.

  Reeds, and a circle. A circle for the unbroken breath of the wind, and reeds for One Reed: Topiltzin, Our Prince, the man who had ruled the legendary city of Tula as the incarnation of Quetzalcoatl, the Feathered Serpent.

  Teomitl took in a sharp, unpleasant breath, and threw a glance at me. I nodded. It was a spell set in a circle wide enough to contain an entire battalion with the blood of dozens of… I paused, then, unsure of whether Nezahual-tzin would be ready to sacrifice so many of his subjects for one ritual. But no, the Feathered Serpent disliked human sacrifices. It had to be animals.

  Still, it was impressive.

  Shallow steps descended towards the centre of the courtyard, and so did the water too, flowing over them in a wide cascade. In the middle of the water was an island of stone, the part above the water carved over with a mass of serpents, that shivered and danced in the sunlight, almost as if they were alive… I shifted, and saw a yellow eye open and close. The gods take me, it was stone, and they were somehow alive.

  Slaves laid a bridge to carry us across the water. Nezahualtzin walked onto it with scarcely a break in his stride

  The only building on the island was an awning of cotton, a poor protection against the gaze of the Fifth Sun. Someone sat underneath – shifted slightly when Nezahual-tzin approached, in a way that was gut-wrenchingly familiar. Beside me, Teomitl tensed. "Acatl-tzin."

  "I know," I said, having only eyes for her.

  "You have visitors," Nezahual-tzin said, in the way of a priest enjoying a secret joke. "See that you behave yourself."

  "When have I not behaved myself, brother?" Xahuia-tzin, Axayacatl's missing wife, smiled up at us, as careless and as regal as if she had still been ensconced within the Imperial Palace in Tenochtitlan, but her eyes were dark and hollow, those of a woman already defeated.

  A quick, intelligent man would have made a snide remark to let Nezahual-tzin know that his manipulation had not succeeded. A smarter man would have smiled, enjoying the same secret joke.

  I was neither fast on my feet, nor smart, nor dishonest. I simply gaped, looking for words that seemed to have fled.

  "It has been a long time, Acatl-tzin," Xahuia said.

  Nezahual-tzin had retreated slightly, standing near the wooden bridge leading back to the palace, his hand carelessly wrapped around the hilt of his macuahitl sword. But, of course, like the She-Snake, he never did anything carelessly.

  Teomitl spoke first, his face as harsh as newly-cut jade. "You said you hadn't found her."

  Nezahual-tzin smiled. "I would have hated to waste a good ritual. Wouldn't you?" He inclined his head in a way that implied disagreeing with him would be foolish.

  "I think a little honesty would have served us all better," I said, more sharply than I'd intended – cutting Teomitl mid-sentence, before he could say something irreparable. Perhaps it was a good thing, after all, that he was far removed from the imperial succession; or he and Nezahual-tzin would tear what remained of the Triple Alliance apart.

  "Perhaps," Nezahual-tzin just smiled that smug, annoying smile of the superior. He looked every bit the warrior parading through the streets. "Won't you talk to her, Acatl?"

  "I don't see why I should. You've already learnt everything you need to."

  "You're assuming I spoke to him," Xahuia said. She threw a glance at her brother that was– no, not hatred, but something more complex, a mixture of reluctant admiration and determination. "I don't see why I should."

  It occurred to me that someone was missing from the family reunion. "Your son–"

  "My own business," Nezahual-tzin cut in. "Talk to her, Acatl."

  Like his suggestion for the ritual, it was an order from a Revered Speaker in his own right. One day, I'd get used to the fact that the person speaking in such a composed, authoritarian tone was a boy, barely old enough to have left calmecac school.

  But then again… I might as well make use of the opportunity before me, before he did whatever he'd intended to do with us all along. "I'm not sure you'll want to talk to me," I said to Xahuia.

  She lifted her head and there was still, in spite of everything, a hint of the same attractiveness I'd seen back in the palace, in another life. Her eyes met mine, held my gaze for a while.

  "I'll speak to you," she said. "Alone."

  Nezahual-tzin's shoulders moved, in what might have been a shrug. "As you wish. Teomitl?"

  Teomitl glared back at him, but they stepped back onto the shores of the islands, unconcernedly.

  I remained alone with a woman I wasn't quite sure how to deal with. Her only crime, as far as I knew, had been ambition, but it would have led her to worse if we hadn't intervened. Her sorcerer would have stopped at nothing to get her the Turquoise-and-Gold Crown.

  "Things have changed, haven't they?" Her gaze took in her surroundings – the coiled power of Quetzalcoatl the Feathered Serpent, the ground under us, the throbbing stone mass that was composed of living snakes – no, better not to think about that. There were visions I wasn't quite ready for, at least not until I was back on dry land.

  "They have." I crouched on my haunches, coming to rest at her level. "They could have turned out another way."

  She shook her head. "Very differently, perhaps. And then you'd have been the one coming to me as a supplicant."

  "Am I not?"

  The corners of her mouth twitched, a little. "So it is that even prisoners and slaves have power, in the form of knowledge.
" Her hands clenched. "That's what Nezahual would say, at any rate."

  "He's not always right."

  "He's right in too many things." Her gaze drifted again, coming to rest on Teomitl and Nezahual-tzin, standing side by side like two comrades, if one didn't know any better. "Enough small talk, Acatl-tzin. You have questions. Ask them."

  "I'm not sure why you'd answer them," I said, carefully.

  "What difference, as long as you have the answers?"

  "I'd know how true they were likely to be."

  That made her laugh, sharp, bitter, joyless. She had changed indeed, away from power. "Fine. I'm not a fool. I know when to swim into stormy waters, and to stop before ahuizotls drag me down. I can play for Tenochtitlan, Acatl. I won't play for the Fifth World."

  I looked at her; she returned my gaze, her eyes steady, not a muscle of her face moving. I had heard the same thing so many times, from so many different people; and they had all been sincere. The problem was the line between reasonable risk and endangering the Fifth World, a line everyone seemed to place much further out in their minds than it really was.

  "Fine," I said, finally. "Let's say I believe you. For the moment. What did your sorcerer do?"

  "Nettoni?" She looked surprised. "He was my bodyguard."

  "Bodyguard?"

  "As you no doubt saw, it wasn't a safe place to be after dark." Her voice held the lightest touch of irony.

  "Yes," I said. "You employed him before the murders started, though."

  "One can never be too careful." Her smile was bright, and just the tiniest bit forced, not quite spreading to her eyes.

  "I don't think it's that," I said. I was carefully dancing around the subject. What I truly wanted to know was what had frightened everyone in the council. But if I asked directly, I suspected she'd clamp up like a shell. "The palace was a busy place after Axayacatl-tzin's death."

  Her lips tightened, her eyes moved away from me. I thought of the tar. "Before his death, too, wasn't it?"

  "I was a fool. I came in too late. Axayacatl had told me–" She closed her eyes. "He told me that I need not fear the future. And I believed him." Her hands came up, as if to push me away. "Fool."

  He had told her… I thought about it for a while. Unbidden, a memory was rising to the surface of my mind, a deep voice on cold shores, and a shadow that became more and more indistinct the further it walked into Mictlan, and its words to me, a mystery that had remained unsolved.

  "I'd always known there would be a rift when I died. But only for a time. I've made sure it will close itself."

  "He did something," I said, slowly, carefully, building my sentence in the same way a child will pile wooden blocks in the mud. "To make sure his choice was respected. He and Tizoc-tzin–"

  Oh gods. Was I truly sitting here, accusing the former Revered Speaker of colluding with Tizoc-tzin, of arranging the summoning of star-demons to sway the council his way? I couldn't possibly…

  "You're wrong," Xahuia said, in the dreadful silence that froze my heart. "Axayacatl was many things, but he was a warrior first and foremost, a servant of Huitzilpochtli. He would have wanted to do the right thing, and preserve the Fifth World."

  "Then why–" I hesitated, but now I was standing on the brink, and all my careful dancing had done nothing but bring me closer to the bitterness holed up inside, the raw memories of the past few days. "Why is the council so frightened? Why did so many of them disappear, or buy the strongest protections they could afford? Why…?" What had Quenami and Tizoc-tzin tried to kill me for?

  My voice trailed into silence; embarrassed, I hovered on the edge of an apology, but Xahuia went on as if nothing had happened. "You forget. I was one wife among many, and I very much doubt he would have confided in women, in any case." She didn't sound sad, or angry, just stating a fact.

  "So you don't know anything?" This was starting to sound more and more like a waste of time, whatever Nezahual-tzin might have thought.

  She shook her head. "I didn't say that, merely that Axayacatl's plans were beyond me." She shifted slightly, moving away from the glare of the sun and the pinpoints of starlight in the sky. "But I wasn't completely inactive."

  I couldn't see what she was hinting at. "You had spies in the palace," I said slowly, as much for effect as to compose myself. "You saw–" I stopped, then. What could she have seen?

  When I didn't speak for a while, she went on, with a tight smile, "I can't give you much, Acatl-tzin. Not much at all that you won't already know. A councilman went missing…" She stopped, raised a hand to her throat as if to remove something lodged in her windpipe.

  Pezotic. "And you don't know why," I said, carefully. If that wasn't what she wanted to tell me… "But you know what happened to him."

  "I know where he went. Pezotic," Xahuia said, with a quick, fierce shake of her head. "For all I know, it isn't where he is now. But still–"

  "Go on."

  "I had him followed because he was a coward, and a weakling. A man who could be bought." Her lips curled up, halfway between a sneer and a smile. "He bought passage on a boat headed east."

  "East?" I asked. "Into Texcoco?" It would have been convenient, but I was reasonably sure luck was not with us. From the start, it had never been.

  "No," Xahuia said. "To Teotihuacan."

  Of course. Teotihuacan, the Birthplace of the Gods, a sacred place where the gods had made the sacrifice that had led to the birth of the Fifth Sun, a place of pilgrimage and of worship, a place of safety, the bastion of Their strength.

  "He might have moved," I said.

  "He might," Xahuia agreed. "But it's all I can give you, Acatltzin. Take it and use however you wish."

  "Thank you," I said. I rose and bowed to her, in the same fashion as if she still had been imperial consort. Her gaze rested, for a moment, on me; that of a weak, broken woman, grounded by her brother's magic and utterly at his mercy. "I'm sorry," I said.

  "Don't be." She did that peculiar half-smile, with no hint of joy in it. "It's a game, Acatl-tzin. That's what you never understood. You have to be ready to gamble it all in order to win. And sometimes, you lose."

  "I can't play that kind of game," I said.

  "I know. But you'll find that all Revered Speakers can."

  Xahuia's words still echoed in my mind as I walked back to Nezahual-tzin, who stood waiting next to a scowling Teomitl with a half-amused smile on his face.

  "So, did you find out anything?"

  "What you expected me to find. It's all a game to you, isn't it?" I asked.

  He watched me, as dispassionately as one might watch a mouse or an ant. "Perhaps. Perhaps nothing is real, after all… just the gods, putting us on the board with the other patolli pieces."

  "You're the one putting us on the board," I said.

  "Why so much anger?"

  "Because we've wasted time," I said. "Because we're here in Texcoco, indulging your taste for mysteries while Tizoc-tzin is getting elected."

  Nezahual-tzin's shoulders moved in a gesture I couldn't read. "There was nothing you could have done about it, Acatl."

  I knew. And the Southern Hummingbird strike me, it hurt, as much as obsidian shards, as much as salt in wounds. He'd disgraced me, sent Teomitl fleeing away from his own city, insulted my sister, who, unlike us all, had no means of defending herself. I hoped she was safe, that Tizoc-tzin hadn't thought to follow her out of the city. "Still," I said, as we walked away from the basin, "still, there was another way."

  "Not that I could see." Nezahual-tzin's face was serene.

  "And now what?" Teomitl asked.

  Nezahual-tzin stopped, looked at us, pondering for a while. His eyes rolled up again, becoming the uncanny white of pearls, of milk and the looming Moon in the Heavens. "It depends."

  "On how much we're worth to you?" I asked.

  He smiled. "You're learning."

  "Not what I wish to learn."

  "All knowledge is good." He smiled again.

  "You want to sell us?" Te
omitl's hand strayed to his macuahitl sword. "You'd dare to–"

  "Teomitl," I said, warningly. The palace wasn't ours and it was full of warriors, not to mention whatever sorcerers Nezahual-tzin might have in his service. "He'd sell his own sister." He already had, unless I was grievously mistaken.