Obsidian & Blood

by Aliette De Boddard

  I sat for a while in the courtyard, under the lone pine tree, chewing a day-old maize flatbread, the only edible thing I had left in the house. I should have thought of asking Ichtaca for supplies on the previous evening, but I had been too preoccupied with Teomitl.

  The Storm Lord blind him, what was wrong with the boy?

  Perhaps he had outgrown me. After all, I had known that he couldn't remain my student – or, indeed, Mihmatini's suitor – forever, that he was destined for politics and war, wholly outside my purview. Tizoc-tzin had taken him under his protection, and was teaching him what was necessary.

  Still, it wasn't as if I could shed my responsibility when it suited me. A man who would pick quarrels with the most powerful individuals in the Mexica Empire was not yet an adult and would not rise far, even through feats of arms. If even Tizoc-tzin, a canny politician, could not teach Teomitl that then it was also my responsibility to try. Perhaps he would listen to me more than to his brother.

  Admittedly it did not look very likely at this point.

  The sky was clear and blue, its colour as crisp and as vivid as a new fresco. I walked to my temple, intending to pick up Palli before going back to the palace. Instead, the first person I saw when entering the courtyard was Yaotl, Ceyaxochitl's personal slave, in the midst of a conversation with Ichtaca.

  My sandals on the paved stones of the entrance made enough noise that they stopped talking. "There he is," Ichtaca said.

  Yaotl turned, his embroidered cloak rippling in the breeze. "Acatl-tzin."

  I braced myself for more sarcasm, but his face under the blue-and-black paint was grim, an expression I had never seen on him before.

  Fear reached inside my chest and closed a fist around my heart. "What is it?"

  "It's Mistress Ceyaxochitl. She's been poisoned."

  SIX

  Princess of Texcoco

  The Duality House, unlike the palace, was silent and dark, and those few priests we crossed were in courtyards, down on their knees to beseech the favour of the Duality for their ailing superior.

  "She came back from the palace late at night," Yaotl said. "Everything was fine at first but then she started complaining of tingling in her hands and feet. And then it spread."

  "Something she came into contact with?" I asked. I had seen her yesterday, and she had seemed tired and weary, but I had attributed it to a long day, not to poison.

  Would it have changed anything, if I had noticed?

  I hoped it wouldn't have. I needed to believe it would make no difference. Regrets wouldn't serve us now; what we needed was to move forward.

  We reached the main courtyard of the shrine, a vast space from which rose a central pyramid of polished limestone. Ceyaxochitl's rooms were just by the stairs. Their entrance-curtain, usually opened to any supplicant, was closed, unmoving in the still air.

  Inside, Ceyaxochitl was propped up against the wall, her skin sallow, her whole frame sagging. A frowning physician was holding a bowl of water under her chin.

  "No shadow. Her spirit is still unaffected," he said. "It's a physical poison."

  "You know about poisons," Yaotl said.

  I couldn't help snorting. "Yes, but after death. Generally, I don't have patients. I have corpses."

  The physician withdrew the bowl of water. "That's as close to a corpse as you can get to, young man. Nothing is responding. She can't speak, or move any muscle." He turned to Yaotl. "I'd need to know the day and hour of her birth, to know which god is in charge of her soul."

  Yaotl's hands clenched, slightly. The physician's asking for her nameday could only mean that he intended a full healing ritual, which in turn meant the situation was desperate. "Quetzalcoatl. The Feathered Serpent." God of creation and knowledge, and the only other god to accept bloodless offerings. I couldn't say I was surprised.

  "I'll send for supplies, then," the physician said.

  I knelt and touched Ceyaxochitl's warm skin. Nothing responded. Her heartbeat was fast and erratic, as if the organ itself were bewildered.

  "She's in here," the physician said. "Conscious. It's just that her body is completely paralysed."

  About as cowardly and as nasty a poison as you could think of. They could have had the decency to make it clean, at least.

  "Acatl-tzin," Yaotl insisted.

  "Do you have any idea what she could have been poisoned with?" I asked the physician. He was the expert, not I.

  "What other symptoms have you seen?"

  Yaotl thought for a while. "She was rubbing at her face before the numbness came. And having some difficulty walking, as if she'd been drunk, but Mistress Ceyaxochitl never drinks."

  Indeed not. She might have been old enough to be allowed drunkenness, but she'd always seen that as a sign of weakness. She'd always been strong.

  Gods, what would we do without her?

  "Something she ate, then, in all likelihood," the physician said.

  "Something?" I asked. Surely things hadn't degenerated so fast at the palace that food and drink couldn't be trusted anymore? "Can't you be more precise?"

  "Not without a more complete examination," the physician said. His voice was harsh. "But I think you'd want me to see if I can heal her first."

  "Yes," Yaotl said. "But I also want to make sure that the son of a dog who did this does not get away with it."

  The physician looked at Ceyaxochitl again and scratched the stubble on his chin. "I seem to remember a similar case some time ago. I'll send back for my records, to see if anything can be inferred from it. In the meantime the best we can do is keep her warm."

  And breathing. It didn't take a physician to know that if the paralysis was progressing, the lungs would stop functioning at some point, not to mention the heart.

  I moved my hand from Ceyaxochitl's hands to her chest, feeling the heart within fluttering like a trapped thing. "I know you can hear us. We'll find out who did this. Stay here. Please."

  Please. I knew we'd had our dissensions in the past, our disagreements on how to proceed, but they had been spats between friends, or at least between peers. To think that she was dying, that she might not see the next day…

  The Flower Prince strike the one who had done this, with an illness every bit as bad and as drawn-out as the poison that now coursed through Ceyaxochitl's veins. "Did she say anything?" I asked Yaotl. "Any clues?" Anything we could use…

  He shook his head. "Not that I can remember. She complained about the whole afternoon having been a waste of her time."

  But she must have seen something, or suspected something after the fact. Otherwise why take the risk of poisoning her? The penalties for such a crime would have been severe, death by crushing the head, at the very least.

  "Nothing at all?"

  The physician, who was lifting the entrance-curtain in a tinkle of bells, stopped, and then turned back towards me. "When I was first called, the paralysis hadn't quite reached everywhere. She managed to say something, for what it's worth."

  "Yes?"

  "Well, her lips were already half-paralysed, but I think it was something about worshipping bells."

  Yaotl and I looked at each other. "Acatl-tzin?"

  Bells. Silver Bells. Huitzilpochtli's sister Coyolxauhqui, She of the Silver Bells, who waited under the Great Temple for Her revenge.

  "I don't know if it makes any sense," the physician said.

  I withdrew my hand from Ceyaxochitl and carefully stood up. "It does make sense. Thank you."

  "Not to me," Yaotl said.

  "Silver Bells. She's been poisoned by a devotee of Coyolxauhqui," I said, and watched the pallor spread across his face.

  Our enemies were indeed in our midst. One person, or several, were worshippers of She of the Silver Bells; summoners of star-demons, harbingers of chaos, determined to sow destruction among us.

  The only question was who.

  I ate a sparse lunch in my temple with my priests: a single bowl of levened maize porridge, flavoured with spices. Then, instead
of going straight back to the palace, I detoured through the Wind Tower, the shrine to Quetzalcoatl. Like the other shrines it stood on a platform atop a pyramid; unlike the other shrines, which were squat and square, the Wind Tower was made of smooth black stones and completely circular, offering no sharp angles or purchase. For Quetzalcoatl was the Feathered Serpent but also Ehecatl, the Breath of Creation, and to hinder Him in His passage through His own shrine would have been an unforgivable offence.

  And He was the Morning Star and the Evening Star, our only ally in the night skies in those dangerous times.

  I could have prayed to Lord Death in Ceyaxochitl's name, for He was the only god I claimed, as familiar as a wife to a husband or a digging stick to a peasant. But, somehow, it felt wrong to appeal to Him to keep a soul out of His dominion.

  I stood for a while on the inside of the shrine with pilgrims crowded around me, unsure of what to say. I did what I had always done. Kneeling, I pierced my earlobes with my worship thorns, and let the blood drip onto the grass balls by the altar. The Feathered Serpent took no human sacrifices, but only our penances and our gifts of flower and fruit. He had given us the arts and the songs. He had once descended into the underworld for the bones of the dead, had braved death and darkness so that humanity might be recreated.

  "Keep her safe," I whispered. "Please.

  You who know the metals in the earth

  The jade and the flowers and the songs

  You who descended into Mictlan

  Into the darkness, into the dryness

  Please keep her safe."

  I wished I could say that He'd been listening, but the shrine remained much the same as ever. I was not His priest, I did not have His favours. My prayer was no doubt lost among the multitude.

  I walked back into the palace in an even bleaker mood than I'd left it. As fate and the Smoking Mirror would have it, the first person I met in the corridors was Quenami, the High Priest of Huitzilpochtli, who looked unusually preoccupied.

  "Acatl." He frowned. "I haven't seen you this morning."

  "I had other business to attend to." I was not in the mood for niceties. "Did Ceyaxochitl come to you yesterday, Quenami?"

  There was a brief moment before my words sunk in, which I could almost follow by looking at his blue-streaked face. "The Guardian? She might have. I don't remember."

  "Only a day ago, and you can't remember? What a fickle mind you have."

  "I thought yesterday's little interview would have removed your inclination to insult your peers or your superiors." Quenami's voice was cutting.

  So many things had changed since yesterday. "Perhaps. That was before someone poisoned Ceyaxochitl."

  "Poisoned? That means–"

  "She's dying," I said, curtly. I tried not to think of her warm, unresponsive skin under me, of the feeling of her heartbeat lurching out of control. She'd been at my back for as long as I could remember. We'd fought, but I'd always known she'd be there when the Empire truly needed her. "And whatever happened, it was in the palace."

  "Do you have any proof of that?" Quenami appeared to have recovered from his shock, feigned or genuine I did not know.

  "Who else would dare poison the Guardian?"

  "More people than you'd think." His voice was condescending again. "Foreign sorcerers–"

  "The only sorcerers of any note are in this palace," I snapped. "And I'm going to make sure they can't do any harm anymore."

  Quenami's face was frozen into what might have been anger or fear. "So you'll just badger us into confessions? You're making a mistake."

  "Why? Because I'm impinging on your privileges? Look, I'm not intending to probe into secrets or shatter your face and heart in public, but you must realise that someone tried to kill the Guardian of the Sacred Precinct – agent of the Duality in this world, the keeper of the invisible boundaries. If they dare to do that, then no one here is safe."

  Quenami's face shifted to disdain. He was going to tell me that he was High Priest of Huitzilpochtli, that out of all people, he should be safe.

  I forestalled him. "It was poison poured into a meal, or a drink." I kept my voice as innocuous and as innocent as possible. "That could happen to anyone. Even if you could have your meals tasted by a slave, it was slow-acting. She didn't show any symptoms until a few hours after the poisoning."

  "What poison?"

  "I don't know," I said. "But a nasty one. The muscles refuse to obey. You're trapped as a prisoner in your own body, until your lungs or your heart give up. It's not a pleasant way to go." Not to mention pointless. Sacrifices and wounds dealt on the battlefield were painful, but this pain was an offering to the gods, the whole body becoming a sacrifice. But, for Ceyaxochitl, there would be no reward, no justification for enduring this slow slide into oblivion.

  "Fine," Quenami said. "What do you want me to do, Acatl?"

  "Just answer a few questions. Did you or did you not see Ceyaxochitl yesterday?"

  "Yes," Quenami said. "Very early in the morning."

  "And?"

  He hesitated for a while, trying to see what he could and could not tell me. "She kept insisting to know where I stood."

  "Not surprising."

  "I suppose not," he said with a trace of the old haughtiness. "But still, she was annoying."

  That I had no doubt of – she could be. "Did she eat or drink anything while she was with you?"

  He looked at me for a while. "I could deny it, but I think you wouldn't believe me." His face creased into an uncharacteristic smile. "She had maize porridge, brought by the slaves."

  "Your slaves?"

  Again, Quenami hesitated. "Yes."

  I made a mental note to see if any of that maize porridge was left. There were spells to detect the presence of poison, although they took a long time to be cast and could be finicky. "And what

  about Ocome?"

  "What about him? I barely knew the man."

  "I think you're lying."

  "And I think you're trying to draw me out." He looked me in the eye, his aristocratic face exuding casual pride.

  "I know you came to see him."

  "Who wouldn't?" He made a dismissive gesture. "The man had a vote, and he was selling it. Who wouldn't leap at the chance?"

  "An honest man," I said, a little more acidly than I'd meant to.

  Quenami smiled pityingly. "It's a wonder you've remained High Priest so long, Acatl."

  And it was a wonder he'd become High Priest at all. But I held my tongue.

  "Seriously," Quenami said. "You know who I support, and who Ocome supported. Why would I kill him?"

  "Because you couldn't trust him not to change sides?"

  Quenami snorted. "Murder is a serious matter, not decided so lightly." For once, he sounded sincere. Not that it changed anything. I could well imagine him planning a murder with much forethought, and though it looked as though he'd become High Priest only through his connections, I very much doubted his magical abilities would be insignificant.

  "I see," I said. "What do you know about Coyolxauhqui?"

  "My, my, just full of questions today, aren't we? I can't possibly see what I can tell you about She of the Silver Bells that you don't already know, Acatl. Sister of the Southern Hummingbird. Creator of the star-demons. Rebelled against Him during the migration to found the Empire. Defeated, and imprisoned beneath the Great Temple." His tone was bored, as if he were reciting something learnt by rote. But, if he had been worshipping Her all along, he would have learnt to hide his allegiance.

  "That's all you know?"

  "What else would there be?" He lifted a hand, thoughtfully staring at his tanned, long fingers, covered with jade and turquoise jewellery. "I can still feel Huitzilpochtli's power, so She's still imprisoned. And we're warded against star-demons."

  He was, as usual, far too confident. He had not even bothered to check.

  But still, as High Priest of Huitzilpochtli, he made a poor candidate for a secret worshipper of She of the Silver Bells.
He had passed both the initiation as a priest, and the investing with the Southern Hummingbird's powers, all of which would have been difficult to do with conflicting allegiances.

  After I was done with Quenami, I could have gone back and seen the council; but there was one person I had not interviewed at all, and who appeared far from uninvolved in the whole business – Xahuia, the princess of Texcoco who had sent away the guards at Ocome's door on that fateful night, and who had either been the last person to see him alive, or worse.

  Accordingly I crossed the palace to the women's quarters and asked for an audience, which was granted immediately, a welcome change from the current trend.

  The women's quarters were at the back of the palace, protected by a stout wall adorned with red snakes, and a large image of Chantico, She Who Dwells in the House – with a crown of thorns and a tongue twisting out of Her mouth, as red as the paprika She held in Her cupped hands. Those quarters were, more than anywhere else, a place of seclusion. The courtyards I crossed were small, the rooms that opened into them had their entrance-curtains all drawn closed, and I saw no one but the slaves that accompanied me.