Harbinger of the Storm

by Aliette de Bodard

  When I stepped onto the stone I felt a resistance, like the crossing of a veil, and my skin started to itch as if thousands of insects were attacking me. The pendant around my neck became warmer, pulsing slowly like the heart of a dying man.

  Quenami was on his knees, smoothing out the blood to create a line around the stone circle. Unlike Acamapichtli he still had his full regalia, the yellow feathers of his headdress bobbing up and down as he worked, the deep blue of his cloak in stark contrast to the blood dripping in the grooves and pooling in the hollows of the disk.

  "Feathers were given, they are scattering

  The war cry was heard… Ea, ea!

  But I am blind, I am deaf

  In filth I have lived out my life…"

  The blood spread, slowly covering the distorted features of the goddess until nothing was left. Under our feet the earth trembled, once, twice, and a deep, huge heartbeat echoed under the stone ceiling, growing faster and faster with every word Quenami spoke.

  "The war cry was heard… Ea, ea!

  Take me into Yourself

  Give me Your wonder, Your glory

  Lord of Men, the mirror, the torch, the light…"

  Quenami withdrew to the centre of the disk, still chanting. In his hands he held a small maize dough figure of a man which he carefully laid on the ground. Blood surged up to cover it from the legs up, as if sucked into the flesh. Quenami withdrew and the manikin seemed, for a brief moment, to dance in time with the quivering all around us, standing on tottering, reddening legs before the pressure became too much, and it flew apart in a splatter of red dough.

  "With blood, with heads

  With hearts, with lives

  With precious stones

  In the service of Your glory…"

  And then, as abruptly as a cut breath, we were no longer alone. Itzpapalotl, the Obsidian Butterfly, stood in the centre of the room at an equal distance from each of us, huge and dark and towering, Her clawed hands curled up. Her wings spread out behind Her, glinting, hungry angles and planes, all shining with the blood She had shed.

  "What a pleasant surprise." Itzpapalotl's voice was lowpitched, strong enough to start an uncontrollable shiver in my chest. The itch on my skin redoubled in intensity, until it was all I could do not to scratch myself to the blood. "Three High Priests and a Master of the House of Darts, all for myself." She smiled. Her teeth were obsidian knives, glinting in the dim light, their edges stained with blood.

  "I'm not Master of the House of Darts," Teomitl said.

  She smiled again, held his gaze until he started to shake. "You will be, soon."

  Quenami threw Teomitl an irate glance, and launched into another incantation. "O Itzpapalotl, Obsidian Butterfly, Goddess of War and Sacrifice. We come before you as supplicants."

  Acamapichtli snorted, and I bit back a sarcastic remark. Even when summoning gods, Quenami was his old pompous self, as if it would make Her more likely to heed him. She was a goddess, and Her whims and desires would rule Her far more effectively than any human.

  Itzpapalotl cocked her head, staring at Quenami as one might stare at an insect. "Supplicants? It's not often that I have those." Her eyes, the two small yellow ones in her face, and all those scattered across Her joints, opened and closed, and She made a noise which might have been a contented sigh. "Unless pleading for their lives."

  To his credit, Quenami did not let that slow him down. "We have need to enter the lands you guard."

  "I should imagine." Her smile was malicious, but she said nothing more. Silence stretched across the room, broken only by the dripping sound of blood as it ran down from the altar platform, high above us.

  "Will you let us pass?" I asked, slowly.

  Her gaze turned to me, held me transfixed until a tremor

  started in my hand. I felt a pressure in my head, as if someone were driving a nail between my eyes, my heartbeat became distant and far too quick. "Will I?" Itzpapalotl asked. "I should think… Not."

  "There is need–" Quenami started, but She laughed, a harsh, scraping sound like stone on stone that drowned the rest of his sentence.

  "You mortals are so amusing. There is always need."

  She was Goddess of War and Sacrifice, the altar on which warriors were destined to die, the blade that would cut hearts from living bodies. I dragged my voice from where it had fled. "What is your price?"

  Her smile would have sent a grown man into fits if She hadn't been half-turned away from us, looking at the disk and the dismembered limbs under Her feet. "The price of passage. You're a canny one, for a priest."

  "Everything requires sacrifice," I said, slowly. I shouldn't have been the one doing this, the one giving Her obedience and proper offerings. I was a priest for the Dead, and She was out of my purview.

  "Sacrifice." She rolled the word on Her tongue, inhaling once or twice like a man enjoying a pipe of tobacco. The eyes on Her joints opened larger, their pupils reduced to vertical slits. "Yes. Sacrifice."

  I said, haltingly:

  "I will offer You sheathes of corn taken from the Divine Fields

  Lady of the Knife

  Ears of maize, freshly cut, green and tender

  I will anoint You with new plumes, new chalks

  The hearts of two deer

  The blood of eagles…"

  She listened to the hymn, nodding Her monstrous head in time with my inflections, Her lips shining dark red under the obsidian of Her teeth. But when I was done, She shook Her head, in a fluid, inhuman gesture; and the itch on my skin grew stronger, as if hundreds of ants were climbing up from the ground.

  "You take living blood," Quenami said. It sounded almost like an accusation.

  "There are – other sacrifices. More potent ones."

  "A human heart?" Acamapichtli looked around him, at us all, as if pondering who would resist him least.

  "You wouldn't dare." Teomitl's hands tightened.

  "For the Fifth World?" Acamapichtli spread his own empty hands, a pose of mock weakness that fooled no one. "You'd be surprised what I can do."

  "Fools." Itzpapalotl's voice echoed under the ceiling, coming back to us distorted and amplified, as if a thousand stardemons were speaking. "Grandmother Earth wants to be watered with blood, to replenish what She lost when the gods tore Her apart to make the world. The Fifth Sun feeds on human hearts, for His own crinkled and died in the fires of His birth. I…" She laughed, and the sound sent me down on my knees with my hands going up, as if it would diminish the sensation of my ears tearing apart. "I am what I always was, and I only take what pleases Me."

  I stared at the floor, at the outline of She of the Silver Bells, blurred and distorted. "What… is it… that pleases You?" Beyond me, I could see just enough to know that everyone else was on their knees.

  She laughed again. I managed to drag my gaze upwards, to see her move, come to stand before Quenami. "A true sacrifice, something that will be missed."

  The price of passage, determined by a goddess' whims. My chest felt too tight to breathe. What would she ask for?

  She moved faster than a warrior's strike – reaching out in one fluid gesture, towards Quenami, hoisting him up in the air as if he weighed nothing and enfolding him in the embrace of Her wings. The jagged obsidian shards seemed to open up like cruel flowers, and swallowed him whole. There was a brief splatter of blood, and then he was gone without so much as a whimper.

  Somehow, that made it worse.

  Itzpapalotl turned to us, considering. "From him, I have taken my price. Now…" She'd have looked like a peasant's wife at the marketplace, considering whether to buy tomatoes or squashes if she hadn't been so large, Her features too angular and too huge to be human, Her eyes deep pits into which we all endlessly fell.

  She lunged towards Acamapichtli before any of us could move. Teomitl, the faster among us, was only half-rising from his kneeling stance, but Acamapichtli was taken and gone before we could stop Her.

  And then there were only the two of us
remaining. The goddess stared between us, for a moment that seemed to stretch on forever, and then…

  I had a vague impression of speed, of something huge pulling at my body – not strongly, but with a dogged persistence that would never stop come fire or blood. The itch flared up, engulfed me in flames, and there was the face of the goddess, looming up amidst a headdress that wasn't feathers or gold, but hundreds, thousands of obsidian knives, her eyes yellow stars that opened up to fill the whole sky.

  I landed with a thud on something hard. The pain and the itches were gone. When I pulled myself up shaking I saw a land that seemed to stretch on forever, scorched and blasted. Overhead hung two huge globes of fire – I couldn't stare at them long, for my eyes burnt as if someone had thrown chilli powder in them – and the ground under my feet was dry and cracked, an old woman's skin. No–

  The cracks weren't just superficial: they crisscrossed the whole of the land, went in deep. The ground wasn't cracked, it was broken.

  "It has been broken for a long time," Itzpapalotl said, beside me.

  She stood at my side, looking much as She had in the Great Temple. We were the only two living beings in this place. I couldn't see either of the other two priests, or even Teomitl. "What is this place?" I asked.

  "The first sacrifice." She smiled. "The greatest."

  "The Fifth Sun…"

  A low growl came up. Startled, I realised it was coming from the earth itself.

  "Oh, priest." She shook her head. "For all your knowledge, you're still such a fool. In the beginning of time, the Feathered Serpent and the Smoking Mirror fought the Earth Monster, and broke Her body into four hundred pieces. To appease Her, the gods promised Her blood and human hearts, enough to sate any of Her appetites. Do you not hear Her, at night, endlessly crying for the meal She was promised?"

  Grandmother Earth. But She had never been… She was remorseless and pitiless, but She wasn't a monster. She wasn't against the gods. "I didn't know–"

  "You mortals are very clever at rewriting what was," Itzpapalotl said. "And the Southern Hummingbird even more so."

  A chill ran though me. "You don't serve Him–"

  "I am His slave." She smiled again, like a caged beast, waiting for its time to strike. "But even that will end, someday. Enough talk. It's time for your sacrifice, priest."

  "I don't understand–" In my hands lay my obsidian knives, and my amulet – and there was something else, a sense of absence, as if a part of me were missing.

  Her voice was almost gentle. "This was what you brought, to fight your way to the god. Set it aside."

  "But I can't –"

  "Then you won't pass."

  "What about the others?" I asked.

  "They all made a sacrifice, according to their natures and their beings. Now it is your turn, priest."

  Without them, I would be naked in the heartland, worse than that, a dead man walking with no protection that would keep the magic of the Southern Hummingbird from destroying me. It would be like the imperial jails, only a thousand times worse.

  Without this…

  I thought of Acamapichtli, of what he had said about risks and acceptable sacrifices. The Duality curse the man, he was right, and admitting it cost me.

  "Take them," I said.

  Her hands became a round ball of grass, into which my obsidian knives slid, one by one. The amulet went last, hissing as it went in. The grass turned a dull red, the colour of fresh blood, and something ached within me, more subtle than the pain of slashed earlobes or pierced tongue: a sense that I was no longer whole, no longer surrounded by protection.

  She parted Her hands again and they seemed different than they had been before, more sharply defined, the obsidian a ittle less hungry. "Pass, priest," She said.

  There was a gate, by Her side, a half-circle of painfully bright light, as if a piece of the sun had descended into this strange world. It flickered, and grew dimmer, until I could stare into its depths, and catch a glimpse of lakes, and verdant knolls dotted by houses of adobe.

  I walked up to it. My body shook, and I couldn't command it properly. My whole sense of equilibrium seemed to have been skewed, my perception of myself no longer accurate.

  What had She taken from me?

  The light grew bright again as I crossed, searing me to the bone. Before I had time to cry out, it was over, leaving me with nothing more than a slightly painful tingle all over. I was kneeling in a circle traced on grass, the blood that had been filling it slowly draining away, sinking back into the mud. Then the circle was gone, and I stood in the middle of grass and reeds, under a sky so blue it was almost painful, with a gentle breeze caressing my skin.

  "Acatl?"

  It was Quenami, but I hardly recognised him. His hair was dishevelled, his face stained by mud, his finery all gone, replaced by the torn loincloth of a peasant, his gilded sandals faded and broken. There was nothing left of the authority he'd effortlessly commanded.

  "Where is–" I started, but then saw Acamapichtli lying at his feet in a widening pool of blood. I hobbled closer. The feeling of something missing receding as I breathed in the air of the heartland. It was warm and pleasant, though I wasn't fooled. It would gradually wear me down, as it had done in the imperial jails.

  Acamapichtli looked as if he had been mauled. Streaks of red ran down his arms and his back, lying parallel to each other, like the wheals of a whip, or the claws of some huge feline. His clothes were tatters, heavy with the blood he was losing. Mud had seeped into his feet, as if he had been running barefoot in a swamp.

  I looked up at Quenami, but saw nothing over me but the face of a frightened peasant. "The Duality take you!" I snapped. "We need cloth. Is there anything out there that can help us?"

  "We're alone, Acatl." Quenami's voice quavered, but he finally controlled it, coming back to some of his usual smoothness. "No villages or any habitation I can see."

  Stifling a curse, I took off my cloak and tore it to make bandages. With the help of Quenami, we managed to bind the worst wounds. If only we'd had maguey sap, or dayflower to cleanse them with. A pity Teomitl–

  Teomitl? I looked around me, and saw, as Quenami said, nothing but the blades of grass around us, and a hill rising above us. "Where is Teomitl?"

  "I don't know." Quenami finished binding the last of Acamapichtli's wounds, his distaste for such a menial task evident on his face. "I was the first here, and then you came one after the other. But since then–"

  Since then, nothing. I could hear Itzpapalotl's laughter in my mind as she took my knives and my amulet, all the things I'd been counting on to fight my way to the god.

  And I'd been counting on Teomitl's magic, too. That was what I'd been missing since the start.

  "He won't come," I said. I didn't know if it was part of my sacrifice, or if it was the thing She'd asked of him in exchange for our safe passage. But he wasn't there, and that was what mattered. I hoped he was safe. I hoped She had not taken his life, or even a small part of him, as a price in Her games. But I couldn't be sure, and there was no point in regrets or fear; not now, not here. It was too late for that, the game was set, and we would have to play it to the end.

  I knelt and lifted Acamapichtli. He was heavier than I thought, his limbs unresponsive, continually sliding out of my grasp. Carefully I slung him over my back, and wrapped his arms around my shoulders. It was the best I could do, on my own.

  Quenami had been watching me all the while. "He's not coming? But–"

  "I know," I said. And, without looking back, I set out towards the top of the hill – unprotected and unwarded, alone with a wounded man and a coward – knowing that each moment that passed brought me closer to unconsciousness.

  I could have spared a prayer, had I believed any gods but the Southern Hummingbird were listening.

  TWENTY-THREE

  The Heartland

  It was, as far as the lands of the gods went, a pleasant land. I had been in Tlalocan, the paradise of the Blessed Drowned, only br
iefly, but this seemed very much like it. Verdant vegetation covering the land, flocks of white birds disturbed by our approach, and the small ponds we passed teemed with fish and newts.

  Acamapichtli grew heavier as time passed, his arms bearing down on my shoulders, his legs dangling closer and closer to the ground until it felt as though I were dragging mud.

  The sky, too, changed, the only thing that seemed to change at all in this endless succession of hills and lakes. Clouds slowly moved to cover it, and its blue darkened, the air turning as crisp and as heavy as that before a storm.