Obsidian & Blood

by Aliette De Boddard

  The starlight limned its shape: a body half as large again as a jaguar's, a narrow snout, glittering fangs; and yellow, malevolent eyes that seemed to see right into my soul. That had to be what a deer felt, in the moment before the hunter closed on it.

  No.

  I had to–

  I threw myself aside again, and the leap which had been meant for my chest caught my left arm instead. Claws sank deep into my skin. I stifled a scream as the searing pain spread through the bones of my upper arm. My hand opened, out of its own volition, and the obsidian knife, the only one I had left, fell to the ground.

  The beast withdrew its claws. Its muscles bunched up, to snatch me and bring me closer to it. I did the only possible thing: I let myself fall to the ground. The beast's claws went wide. Frustrated, it shook its head, growling in a decidedly unpleasant manner.

  I flicked my eyes upwards, glancing at the sky: the moon was steadily rising higher and higher, but it would be a while before its light fell on the Floating Garden.

  Huitzilpochtli strike me down.

  At the threshold of the hut, a shaking Teomitl had hauled himself upwards. He was attempting to raise his sword, but I didn't think he'd arrive in time.

  There was no point in discreetly retrieving my obsidian knife. I simply dived for it, as the beast braced itself for another jump, straight in the direction I was going in.

  The shock of its weight sent me sprawling to the ground, fighting not to scream as my left arm became a mass of fiery pain. Its claws scrabbled at my jade pendant and the thread holding it around my neck parted. The pendant fell to the ground with a clink. The beast roared in triumph and reared, both paws held high above my chest – with all their claws unsheathed.

  "Acatl-tzin!" Teomitl bellowed.

  The world turned to thick honey; everything seemed to happen more slowly than needed: the claws descending to slash open my chest; Teomitl's unsteady footsteps, rushing towards me, but too late, it was already too late; the glimmer of the obsidian knife, lying in the mud inches from my left hand.

  My left hand.

  I had to–

  Focus. I had to focus.

  I clenched the fingers of my left hand – I think I screamed, then, as the pain became stronger than anything I had endured in my noviciate at the calmecac – closed them around the hilt of the knife. The weapon felt alive under my touch, beating like a living heart. Power pulsed deep within: a smell of sick-houses and rotting bodies, hovering on the edge of becoming something far greater.

  I didn't think. I couldn't afford to. In a quick, stabbing motion, I raised the knife, intending to sink it into the beast's chest before it opened mine.

  The claws raked into my flesh before I could complete my motion. My hand clenched, convulsively, but I didn't let go. I screamed and writhed, but I still raised the knife. And, scrabbling for some thing, for anything that could save me, I instinctively opened myself wide to the power within the knife.

  For a brief, timeless moment, the power of Mictlan seared through my flesh: the decay of every living thing, the loneliness and sadness of the dead, the dry smell of bleached bones and dust. For a brief, timeless moment, the pain was blasted away by emptiness. It was my hand and yet not my hand which pushed upwards, at an angle I would have been incapable of reaching with my wounded arm.

  The beast, completing its downward motion, fell upon the blade I held up, and grew still. Its weight crushed my chest, slowly emptying my lungs.

  The power of Mictlan slowly receded, leaving me exhausted: drained of joy, of hope. I had never had cause to draw on it that way. I had not even been sure it could be done.

  I hoped never to do it again.

  I lay, hardly daring to breathe. Every movement of my chest sent fresh waves of pain through my ribcage. My left arm would never be the same, either.

  The moon's light struck the Floating Garden, throwing into stark contrast the bed of maize shoots, and the blood that was pouring onto it. My blood.

  Someone – Teomitl – hauled the beast's corpse off me. "Acatl-tzin?"

  I didn't move, just stared at him, watching him blur in and out of focus. His left leg sported an ugly gash, and he leant on his sword – but the spell around him was still tight, and his upright bearing was undiminished.

  "I've been better," I whispered.

  He pulled me upright, into a seated position. "Good thing we came well-prepared," he said, searching in the herb pouch he'd taken from the temple.

  He pulled out a pad of dayflower and applied it to my chest wound. It turned dark; with a curse, he threw it away, and applied another one.

  "Don't move," he said, when the bleeding had slowed down. "I think there were things in that hut that might help us…"

  He was soon back, with a covered jar of clay that stank of alcohol. "Pulque," he said. "Unfermented maguey sap would have been better, but it will have to do."

  When he poured it over the wounds, I thought I would scream again. But I'd had my fill of screaming. I clenched my teeth, and attempted to bring the world back into focus.

  Teomitl tore my cloak into strips to make bandages; his gestures as he dressed my wound were cool, professional. "You're not – a – healer," I said.

  He shook his head. "But I've seen my share of wounds, and my share of warriors whose wounds filled with pus and turned black. Stupid. Those things are easily cured, if you take them at the beginning."

  "Your own wounds," I said, struggling to come up with something significant. My thoughts seemed to have scattered.

  He shrugged. "Damaging, but not serious. I'll splint my leg after I'm done with you."

  "Thank you," I said, when he was finished. My left arm was wrapped in maize leaves; my chest was covered in an array of cotton bandages soaked in pulque. The smell of alcohol was starting to go to my head, making me feel dizzy. I shook myself, and winced at the pain.

  "Don't overexert yourself!" Teomitl snapped. He looked at his own wound, critically. "Mm."

  I laughed, more sharply than I'd intended to. "The night isn't over. We still have to find who summoned the beast, not to mention Priestess Eleuia."

  "Do you think I don't know?" Teomitl's voice was low, angry. "I'm telling you those wounds won't heal if you keep running around the city."

  I rose, carefully. Even breathing hurt. Teomitl was pouring the rest of the pulque on his own wound, with an efficiency that made me suspect he didn't need my help.

  "I'll go and search the hut," I said. I still needed to access the beast's memories, but that would be best done a little later, when I'd had time to catch my breath.

  "By the way," Teomitl said, without raising his eyes. "You've got some nerve, throwing knives at me."

  I shrugged. I hadn't liked doing it, but there had been no other choice. "I wasn't throwing it at you. I used my priest's senses to target the beast. Anyway, it missed you."

  "It might not have."

  "You'd rather have lost?" I asked, pointedly. "If you want to exchange wounds…"

  He shook his head, sharply. "No. But I'd rather you didn't do it again."

  "If it had been me fighting, and you outside, I'd rather take my chances with a thrown knife than with the beast's claws. But I'll remember."

  Inside the hut, I carefully rekindled the dying fire, offering a brief prayer to Huehueteotl, God of the Hearth. The flames that rose between the three stones illuminated the walls, magnifying my shadow like that of a monster. The shards of the jade heart crunched under my feet.

  With some difficulty, I turned the three corpses on their backs. In the sweltering heat of the marshes, they had already decomposed, flesh sloughing off, revealing the bones beneath. I'd seen too many dead people to be unsettled by the half-visible skulls, or by the strong smell of putrescence that hung in the air.

  Their chests gaped open: an uncomfortable feeling, given how close I'd come to sharing the same fate. My wounds itched under Teomitl's bandages.

  I whispered a quick litany for the Dead, brushing blood fr
om my wounds over their rotting foreheads – the best I could do outside my temple and without much living blood of my own. Later, I'd make sure someone picked up the corpses and brought them back to give them a proper funeral.

  "We leave this earth

  This world of jade and flowers

  The quetzal feathers, the silver

  Down into the darkness we must go

  Leaving behind the marigolds and the cedar trees

  Safe journey, my friends, safe journey

  All the way to the end."

  Dark splotches of blood marked the floor of the hut. I knelt, rubbed my fingers on one of them. It flaked. Completely dry, then. By the look of the corpses, they had been dead for some time anyway: at least a day, if not more.

  There was something… A faint, very faint trace of magic within the hut. I closed my eyes. It was god-given, like the magic that had hung in Zollin's room, but somehow different. Less angry. More desperate. It seemed to emanate from the wattle-and-daub walls of the hut. Puzzled, I knelt to take a better look. In the blood was the faint imprint of a human hand; and faint scratches on the ground.

  I picked up the fallen torch, started to dust it off, and gave up when I saw how much mud was clogging it. I teased a branch loose from the torch, cleaned it as best as I could before plunging it into the flames of the hearth. It took a long time for the fire to take hold. When it did, it was a small and sickly thing, pulsating weakly at the end of my improvised torch. I moved back to the hand imprint, shone the torch on the ground. By its side, the blood had formed patterns…

  No, not the blood. Someone had started to trace glyphs for a spell. That was the reason the magic, spreading out from the incomplete pattern, had impregnated this area.

  The glyphs, trembling in the torchlight, were the ones for "water" and "escape": both badly smudged, traced in a shaking, fearful hand, and the last one incomplete.

  I closed my eyes. The beast had brought Priestess Eleuia here, after abducting her from the girls' calmecac. The attempted spell had to be hers, a desperate attempt to escape her abductor. But Eleuia was, quite obviously, no longer here.

  My torch wavered, and finally went out. I bit back a curse.

  "Anything?" Teomitl asked, shadowing me from the threshold. He was leaning on a crutch, his leg neatly splinted with dried branches.

  "Blood," I said, with a sigh. "She was here."

  Teomitl did the same thing I'd done: withdrawing a branch from the ruined torch, dipping it into the fire. He turned from one end of the hut to another, seemingly oblivious to the corpses. Of course, they'd only be peasants for him, not worthy of his attention.

  "Mm," he said. "People came here."

  "The peasants?" I asked.

  "No," Teomitl said. "After the peasants were dead." He waved the torch towards the farthest end: outlined in blood were two foot prints, of different sizes.

  "At least two people?" I asked.

  "With sandals. So probably not peasants," Teomitl said. "And it wasn't long after the peasants' deaths, or they wouldn't have left marks."

  Eleuia had been there, too, while the blood was still fresh; otherwise she wouldn't have left a handprint.

  "They took her?" I asked.

  Teomitl shrugged. "Probably."

  I glanced at the ground near the threshold, but we'd damaged too much of it with our battle. "And we still don't know where." Which was true, if frustrating. None of that would help me understand what was going on. "Very well. Help me out, will you? I have memories to access."

  For the ritual, I needed a clean patch of land. One-armed and onelegged, Teomitl and I managed to drag the beast's corpse to the empty patch of earth before the hut. The wound I'd dealt it gaped in the moonlight, exuding faint traces of Mictlan's aura; of the magic that had coursed through me to bring the beast down.

  I retrieved all my obsidian knives, and used one of them to draw a ragged circle in the earth. Then I withdrew to survey my handiwork. The circle looked as clean as I could make it. It would have to do.

  Further away, in the field where the beast had fallen, its blood had shrivelled the maize, leaving a patch of emptiness oozing Mictlan's power. In that place, nothing would grow for many years.

  Father, I thought uneasily, would have been angry at the way we'd damaged the harvest to come. The family might be dead, but the land would revert to the clan; and another married couple would soon cultivate this field, wondering why nothing would grow there.

  Father wouldn't have tolerated this. But Father was dead. I had… I had run away from his drowned corpse, seeing in every feature of his face the disappointment that I'd turned out as I had. It was the single vigil I had never undertaken, and it still itched at the back of my mind.

  Father was dead, buried into the bliss of Tlalocan, the Land of the Blessed Drowned. I had other things to worry about.

  Teomitl's taut pose suggested the question he dared not ask: "And now what?"

  "Stay out of the circle."

  He made a quick, angry gesture. "Surprise me."

  Ignoring Teomitl's taunt, I knelt inside the circle. With my good hand, slowly, methodically, I widened the wound in the beast's belly. The entrails came steaming out, exuding not the smell of bowels but the wet, musty odour of a grave long unopened.

  I drew another gash, this time nearer the ribs, and went looking for the heart.

  It was a small, pathetic thing when I finally pulled it loose: the size of a human one, as unmoving as the jade heart now was.

  I arranged the entrails in an inner circle within the one we'd already cleared. Then I cut the small, stylised shape of a reed, my day sign, into the flesh of the heart. It barely bled, as if death had emptied the beast's veins.

  Finally, I came to stand in the centre of both circles, holding the heart in my good hand. It was as smooth and as warm as the flesh of a young child.

  "This is the day that saw me born, this is the name my father gave me," I whispered, and the heart twitched under my fingers.

  I wrapped my hand around the heart, and went on,

  "I am the knife that severs life

  I am the blade that stole this breath

  Mine is the heart

  Mine are the eyes that see in darkness

  Mine the muscles and fangs that claim life."

  It was as if a veil had been lifted from the world: suddenly I saw the whole of the Floating Garden. In the hut were the corpses I had already feasted on. By my side was a young, impatient warrior whose heart beat so strongly: such a treat, it would be such a treat to open his chest and feast upon it. But I couldn't. I had other tasks to take care of.

  "Mine are the eyes that see in darkness

  Mine the heart that longs for other hearts

  Mine the memories of the true hunter."

  The world flashed, then went dark. When I opened my eyes I wasn't in the chinamitl any more but tumbling through an open gateway, into a house that was hauntingly familiar.

  The sun hadn't yet set. I shied away from the light, growling softly, longing for the coldness of the Eighth Level, for the dry, clean smells of Mictlan. Here everything hurt, from the light to the sharp odour of maize wafting through the door.

  A man laughed, high above me. I couldn't see his face: just a warm, beating heart with many years of life ahead of it. "Such a powerful one. A very impressive summoning, my Lady."

  Another voice, deeper and graver. The heartbeat of this one was strong, brash. I salivated at the thought of devouring it. "Don't gape. It is adequate for the task."

  A sullen laugh.

  "My Lady, you know what we need," the voice said, turning to the third person, the one who hadn't yet spoken: an angry heart, all twisted out of shape by hatred. "Wait for night. And remember, do not kill. We need her alive."

  "I know exactly what you need," the woman said. And the voice… The voice, too, was hauntingly familiar.

  No. It could not be.

  She knelt to grasp my head, raising my gaze towards her face. H
er smell was intoxicating: anger and hatred and envy, all swirling around something else I couldn't name – and her heart… Such a young, delicate heart…

  "This is what you will do," she said.

  And there was no doubt left; none at all. For the voice, unmistakably, belonged to my brother's wife, Huei. I must have closed my eyes. When I opened them again, I was lying in the middle of the circle, sprawled over the beast's body. My chest ached fiercely under the bandages.

  Teomitl's scowling face entered my field of vision. "I told you–"

  "Not to move around. I know," I said, taking the hand he offered me, and rising. Around us, the moon cast its light on the desolate Floating Garden: the place where I'd accessed the beast's memories was now nothing more than a circle of charred ashes, blackened earth which would take years to heal. Mictlan's magic was anathema to life; and the beast had been bursting with it.

  More damage to the harvest. Just what I needed. I tried to remain focused on this – to forget what I had seen – but I couldn't.

  Huei.

  My brother's wife had summoned the beast.

  Why?