Master of the House of Darts

by Aliette de Bodard

  "Why? He wasn't fit to walk either?"

  The priest shook his head. "He died."

  A dead man?

  "There was no corpse. Someone took it away." Not good; not good at all. Eptli's corpse had still been able to propagate the sickness; I didn't want to see another instance like that.

  Tapalcayotl hadn't said anything for a while. He was staring at the rings on his hands as if they held some great truth, his face pinched and twisted. At length, not looking up, he said, "I think the other warrior took it."

  "Which warrior?"

  "He came several times to enquire about the health of Coatl and his companion," Tapalcayotl said. "We told him he couldn't have the corpse for funeral ceremonies, and he was angry. He said warriors took care of their own."

  Where had I heard that? "Did you know him?"

  "No. He wasn't a young man, more like the kind you'd expect to have married already – his thighs were covered in battle scars."

  Which about described every warrior who had survived a few battles: their quilted cotton armour didn't protect their legs, and the obsidian edges of the macuahitl swords inflicted horrific wounds in the melee. "Anything else?" I asked, struggling to contain my impatience.

  "He had another scar. Across his face. A sword must have sliced his right cheek open, and gone upwards to the temple." Tapalcayotl grimaced again. "My guess is that he was happy to be alive after that."

  "Acatl-tzin," Teomitl said behind me.

  I nodded; got up, as leisurely as I could. The scar was indeed distinctive, and I knew where I had seen it last.

  The warrior Chipahua – Eptli's comrade, who had been so frustrated at being deprived of the captive.

  We came out of the palace all but running. Teomitl had picked up two Jaguar warriors on the way – we'd run into them outside the aviary, and he'd used his authority as Master of the House of Darts to sweep them up. They didn't look aggrieved; rather, they held themselves with a particular sense of pride – an almost religious devotion, as if they were favoured of some god.

  Teomitl's face had taken on the aspect of carved jade again; perhaps it was that, or perhaps his regalia, which was distinctive enough, but the crowd of the Sacred Precinct seemed to part from us, the priests and worshippers shrinking away as if burned by the light.

  At the edge of the Sacred Precinct, Teomitl called over two boats with a mere wave of his fingers – two small craft, poled by women taking their wares back from the marketplace.

  "We could have taken a boat from my temple," I said as I climbed into one of the swaying craft. The woman's gaze was stubbornly cast down – one did not look the Master of the House of Darkness in the eye.

  Teomitl waved a dismissive hand. "Your temple is too far, Acatl-tzin. We would waste time."

  The boat slipped into the crowded canals like a knife through the lungs, weaving its way between the coloured craft carrying baskets of vegetables and cages filled with animals. The woman poled in silence, not looking at either of us – it occurred to me that I was just as impressive as Teomitl in my position of High Priest, holder of wisdom and knowledge; so far high above her I might as well have been sitting on the canopy of a ceiba tree.

  "What are you going to do?"

  "Warn them." Teomitl's voice was curt, deadly.

  "It might already be too late." The sickness came fast – faster than it should have, but if it was supernatural, it was only to be expected.

  Teomitl's lips tightened. "You're in a contrary mood."

  I guessed I was; someone needed to temper Teomitl's blind enthusiasm. My place as a teacher demanded no less.

  The boat passed under a wooden bridge, a hand's breath from a porter drawing water for a peasant. The houses thinned, growing larger and larger like trees unfolding from the ground – the adobe walls brightly painted, and the gardens on the rooftops spreading a smell of pine cones and dry wood, a sweetness that reminded me of home.

  It docked in front of Chipahua's house: we crossed the small stretch of beaten earth of the street, determined to finish this sordid business.

  Teomitl stopped short when he reached the courtyard. "Acatl-tzin."

  "I know." There had been a slave, last time, and the sound of pestle against mortar as the women pounded maize into flour. Now there was no one.

  No, not quite. There was something… trembling on the edge of existence – a smell, a tightness in the air – something all too familiar that sent a thrill to my bones, and set my heart hammering against the cage of its ribs.

  "Death," I said, aloud.

  One of the warriors drew his macuahitl sword – a thing of glittering edges, of cutting shards, reflecting the sunlight into a thousand fractured pieces. Magic quivered along its body: the warm, unwavering glow of the Southern Hummingbird's power in the Fifth World. "Stay back, Teomitl-tzin."

  But Teomitl was already moving – faster than a snake uncoiling, rushing forward. I followed him at a more leisurely pace – taking in everything as if in a daze.

  The courtyard, bathed in golden sunlight; three still bodies under the pine tree – no, not quite still, for even as I watched one of them gave a last, heaving gasp, and I saw the ihiyotl soul gather itself from its seat in the liver, and unfold wings of blinding radiance, taking flight in an instant like a held breath, vanishing into the world of the gods.

  The second courtyard, and the woman I'd seen earlier – Chipahua's wife – lying on her back, looking at me with unseeing eyes.

  There was no blood. I might have understood it, if there had been blood – might have thought of sacrifices, of gods gathering back the power that belonged to Them. But everything smelled dry, as stretched as Mictlan the underworld.

  The reception room: Teomitl was standing in front of the dais, looking down at a mat filled with food – the smell of cooked amaranth wafted up, terrifyingly incongruous – and the frescoes themselves seemed to have dimmed, their bright colours passing away.

  Too late, I saw that it wasn't the colours that had vanished, but the shadows that had appeared, so many of them they covered the whole room, clinging to the pillars and the walls, packed tight against the faces of the gods. I caught a glimpse of screaming faces; of tangled limbs; of flaky skin, distorted by sores, and then they were unfolding like the wrath of a storm, and upon us before we could move.

  For a moment – a bare, agonising moment – it seemed my protection would hold; bathed in the familiar stretched emptiness of Mictlan, I saw this as no more than part of the rhythm of the Fifth World – all sicknesses leading, ultimately, to the throne of Lord Death, the place that belonged to us all: stretched and dry and dark, sending us back into the embrace of Grandmother Earth.

  And then, with a sound like bones caving in, the protection yielded. It left a faint, cold tingle on my skin – soon replaced by a blazing heat, and a sensation like a thousand bats beating wings around me; darkness rose and enfolded me in a crushing embrace, and I saw nothing but one screaming face after another; glistening limbs, wet with blood and with the white of bones poking out from wrinkled skins; over me, the bodies were all over me, feebly twitching; fingers scrabbling over my eyelids; limbs strewn across my chest, crushing the breath out of me; clammy lips pressed against my thighs and arms and hands, every touch seeming to rob me of more strength.

  Everywhere – they were everywhere, in the Fifth World, in the world above, in the world below – there was no escape…

  I was on my back, staring into the slack face of a woman, who pressed against me like a lover – her mouth open in a soundless scream, revealing teeth the colour of decayed corn. Her hands – or another's hands, I couldn't be sure – were clawing at my belly; there was a brief, fiery flesh of pain, and the slimy sensation of something wet against my skin, before the pain flared up again, destroying everything else. Distantly, I noted what it had to be, and what its loss meant, but the thought itself vanished in the welter of other ones – in the rancid smell of so many bodies pressed against mine.

  Pai
n. Pain – was–

  Pain was an offering. Pain was–

  I could hardly focus anymore through the growing haze; didn't know where Teomitl was anymore…

  The gods took pain, which was the only sincere sacrifice. Prayers were nothing more than children's wishes, but pain and blood made them real – because it cost to give them, and because they were freely offered.

  The gods–

  There was a familiar litany in my mind: repeated so many times in the calmecac school, in calmer times, on a hill away from the city, where I'd stood with my bloodied worship-thorns, offering up the truest sacrifice for the sake of the Fifth World and of Mictlan.

  I had no worship-thorns, and the stars were all gone – my sight blocked by mottled, bluish skin, by distorted limbs and glazed faces. But the hymn – the hymn always remained.

  "We leave this earth,

  This world of jade and flowers,

  The quetzal feathers, the silver and the jade…"

  My voice quavered and broke at the beginning, but soon the familiar words came back and with them some of my assurance. As I spoke, the pain seemed to recede, pushed back into a remote corner of my mind, to be dealt with later.

  "Down, down into darkness we must go,

  Past the rushing waters, past the mountain of knives,

  We leave this earth…"

  I was High Priest for the Dead; I had endured worse than this. I would… I would stand.

  The bodies were still pressing against me, but now I saw that they flopped weakly, like fish on dry land, the motions of their limbs and fingers nothing more than reflexes, like the gestures of a man drunk on jimsonweed. I could feel their frantic heartbeat, echoing the mad beat within my own chest.

  "The precious necklaces, the precious feathers,

  The songs and the flowers,

  The marigold and the cedar trees,

  We leave this earth…"

  There was… light, after a fashion – a weak, pallid radiance that threw everything into stark contrast. The bodies and faces paled, and seemed to recede too, their features growing dimmer and dimmer until they became part of the quivering shadows on the walls.

  The weight on my chest was gone; the whole episode feeling like the stuff of nightmares. I pulled myself upwards, slowly, limb by limb, wincing at the pain. My stomach wasn't bleeding, but I still felt as though I'd been mauled, and the fever wasn't gone – it had merely abated for a small moment, enough for me to regain a small part of my senses. But it would come back when the hymn stopped running in my mind, when I grew too weak to hold the sickness at bay.

  I needed help.

  In the darkened room, I caught sight of more bodies, spread around the remnants of a meal – none of them appeared to be moving.

  "Teomitl?"

  My student was lying a few paces away from the body of Chipahua, twitching and shivering and moaning.

  "Teomitl!" I reached out and shook him – he had Jade Skirt's protection, he couldn't fall like this, not to something as foolish and as inconsequential… "Teomitl!"

  But there was no answer, and his eyes, when they finally opened, were the filmy white of rotting corpses. He hung limp in my grip and didn't answer. I could – with some effort – have stretched out my priest senses, but I could guess that the magic of Jade Skirt had gone from him.

  He couldn't die – he was Master of the House of Darts, heir-apparent to the Mexica Empire, agent of Chalchiuhtlicue in the Fifth World, commander of the army… He was…

  At the back of my mind ran the litany – the same words, over and over: Lord Death's lands are vast and deep, and Grandmother Earth awaits; as She does for us all.

  He couldn't die… but Tizoc-tzin had died, too, and come back only through a god-blessed miracle, a spell that couldn't be cast again in the Fifth World.

  Somehow – somehow I hoisted Teomitl on my shoulders, and staggered out of the house, calling out for the Jaguar Knights, but whether fallen or fled, they wouldn't answer. I couldn't find the boats we'd arrived in, either. So instead, I turned my face away from the blinding light of the sun, and started to walk back to the Sacred Precinct.

  Teomitl grew heavier as I walked, and the world shrank into a whirl of colours and sounds: vague faces, fading in and out of focus; a morass of feather headdresses, black-dyed cheeks, and the glint of gold caught in hair as black as night. My feet dragged in the dust and the sounds of the city seemed far away; the clacking noise of the women's loom no more than a distant irritation. The shadows came back, too, swooping over the canals like ahuizotl water-beasts – quivering, always on the edge of leaping.

  "We leave this earth,

  This world of jade and flowers,

  The quetzal feathers, the silver and the jade…"

  They were slowly rising – casting the adobe house into darkness, making the coloured clothes dull and insignificant. My world shrank to this: the burning light of the sun – echoed in the itching that seemed to have overwhelmed my skin – and the shadows, the same that had killed Eptli, which would engulf us all…

  My hands shook; I held Teomitl tighter against my chest, afraid I'd let him fall into the dirt. I couldn't let go: I had to get him back to safety – he was my student… My whole body was afire, my stomach a mass of pain. If only I could pause, rest for a while, doubled up in a foetal position, until the pain went away…

  The shadows shifted lazily over the canals and the bridges, the assembled throng of peasants in loincloths, the matrons holding baskets of tomatoes and squashes close to their chests. Like the wind, they ruffled the cloaks of war veterans, exposing old, whitish scars that took on the appearance of suppurating sores once more. I trudged on, dragging my feet in the earth. The sun beat on my back – and it seemed that the beat was echoed within me, at the junction of skin and muscle, an endless rhythm like thousands of hands hammering from inside, demanding to be let out.

  Ahead, I caught glimpses of the Serpent Wall – the shadows congregated around the snakes atop the wall, in the quetzal-red jaws and green bodies, darkening the scales and the crown of feathers around their heads. Almost there…

  Abruptly, Teomitl weighed nothing – no, it wasn't that, it wasn't that. Someone had taken him from me. I had to… had… to…

  "Teomitl! Acatl!" My sister's face swam out of the morass of shadows – a scant few moments before the fever rose again, and I knew nothing more but the nightmares.

  ELEVEN

  Bitter Medicines

  My dreams were dark and numerous; in all of them I lay on my back, while something crushed my chest, and in every shadow I saw the faces of the sick, opening their mouths to scream. Sometimes I heard them, sometimes I did not – but they were always by my side, blindly scrabbling for the raging warmth of my body.

  At some point, sleep claimed me, dark and exhausting, and the bodies faded, to be replaced by the sound of distant chanting, while I lay panting and burning, every breath searing the inside of my throat.

  I woke up, and there was still chanting – as my mind cleared, I recognised the words of a hymn to Patecatl, god of medicine.

  "Come, you the five souls,

  I expel from this place the green pain, the tawny pain,

  Come, you the nine winds,

  I expel from this place the green pain, the tawny pain…"

  They were spoken by a reedy, frightened man who stood some distance away from me, clearly afraid to touch me. He smelled of copal incense and a mixture of herbs I couldn't place, sharp and bitter. The fever had receded, leaving my mind as clear and as brittle as polished obsidian. I noted the pattern of snakes on the ceiling arcing above me, and the frescoes on the wall were of a huge tree to which clung babies, drinking the sap like mother's milk; the hymn washed over me, again and again like waves on the shore, like the embrace of Chalchiuhtlicue Jade Skirt at birth, washing away all the filth and the sins of the ancestors.

  I lay quiet, unable to move.

  Some time later, an entrance-curtain tinkled; the priest s
tarted. "He's awake, my Lady."

  "I can see that," Mihmatini's voice said.

  There was a silence; the priest's face stubbornly turned towards her, his gaze downcast. "My Lady?" he asked, finally. "You promised I could leave…"

  Mihmatini snorted. "I did, didn't I? Very well, you may go."

  He was scurrying out toward the exit before she'd even finished her sentence.

  "Acatl?" Mihmatini asked. "How are you feeling?" She knelt by the side of the bed – I'd expected sarcasm, or some biting remark about my tendency to get into scrapes, but there was none of that; merely thin lines at the corners of her red-rimmed eyes.

  Then I remembered. "Teomitl. Where–?"

  "Ssh." Mihmatini laid a hand on my forehead. She grimaced. "What I need to know now is how you are."