Master of the House of Darts

by Aliette de Bodard

  Of course. Gingerly, I set out; when the cane touched the skin, I felt a resistance – not at all what I'd expected from grass or earth. It smelled… musty, like dried skins, and it bounced under our steps with alarming regularity. As we climbed higher past the darker streaks, I caught sight of folds and sharper patches – places where one set of skin overrode another – darker patches with the splayed shapes of claws, and larger pockmarks, and almond-shaped holes where the eyes should have been, opening only on blind earth. I didn't even want to know how many lizards had died to make up the hill.

  It would have been an arduous climb, even had we both been fit – which neither of us was. I leant on my cane, and though Acamapichtli arrogantly strode ahead, he was pale-faced, controlling the trembling of his hands only through an effort of will: I could see the quiver in his fingers, quickly masked.

  We didn't speak and the only sounds were flocks of herons, wheeling around us with harsh cries, and the distant sound of thunder, like the roaring of jaguars. As we crested a ridge about halfway up, we saw Tlalocan spread out under us, a mass of green and yellow shimmering in the sunlight, the distant rectangles of Floating Gardens interspersed with canals, with the shades of drowned peasants harvesting maize from the eternally ripe sheaves of corn, forever happy in Tlaloc's paradise.

  The thunder peals got louder and, as we ascended on the path, storm-clouds moved to cover the sky, darkening the air all around us. I glanced at Acamapichtli, but he was still looking stubbornly ahead.

  Tlaloc had given His permission, which meant we walked here without gagging or shedding flesh, but that didn't mean He wasn't saving things for later. I remembered the last time I'd seen the god in the Fifth World: the shadowy figure perched on the shoulder of his child agent; His fanged mouth level with the child's ears; the voice that had shaken like thunder; the words that dripped poison after poison – and I, sinking down with my brother's body in my arms, desperately struggling to come up, to breathe air again…

  Ahead, the path flared; the texture of the ground under our feet had subtly changed. I paused to catch my breath and saw the curling pattern beneath us: a single skin going all the way to the top, and…

  Outlined against the darkened sky were the head and jaws of a huge snake, its crown of feathers ruffled in the rising wind, its eyes the same bright red as Acamapichtli's blood, its fangs shining like pearls in the muck.

  Acamapichtli was already headed towards the snake; I followed after taking the time to catch my breath – gods, how I hated that every step seemed to cost me, that even lifting the cane seemed to quench the breath in my lungs.

  A familiar litany for the Dead was running in my mind – though my patron god Mictlantecuhtli wasn't there, couldn't ever be there.

  "We live on Earth, in the Fifth World,

  Not forever, but a little while,

  As jade breaks, as gold is crushed,

  We wither away, like jade we crumble,

  Not forever on Earth, but a little while…"

  The snake was half-sunk within the earth, its head facing the sky and the storm-clouds – so that its open jaws formed a cave. The higher ring of fangs looked as though they'd clamp shut any moment, and the lower ring was pierced through in the centre, leaving a space just large enough for a man to squeeze through, so that Acamapichtli and I had to enter single file, instinctively bowed, as if to protect ourselves against the fall of the huge teeth glinting above us.

  Inside, it was dark and cool, smelling faintly of moist earth, with the pungent aftertaste of copal incense, a smell that clung to the inside of my mouth and throat as if I'd smelled nothing else for days and days – as I might have, for who knew what time the gods considered Their own?

  "Ah, Acamapichtli," a voice said. I'd expected it to be sombre, vindictive – the way I still remembered it in my nightmares – yet while it was deep, reverberating in the darkness, there was nothing in it but mild interest, the same one a priest might have shown to an unexpected pilgrim. "What a pleasure to see you."

  Acamapichtli had removed his sandals and set them aside; and he was crouching, his eyes on the ground – not grovelling, as he might have done before the Revered Speaker, but still showing plenty of respect. I crouched next to him, setting my sandals aside.

  "And you brought company, too," Tlaloc said. He spoke in accents similar to the Texcocan ones, reminding me incongruously of Nezahual-tzin – or perhaps my mind superimposed the accent afterwards, struggling for a human equivalent to the speech of the gods.

  "My Lord." I looked down and did not move, not even when footsteps echoed under the ceiling of the cave, and a shadow fell over me.

  Tlaloc laughed, and it was thunder over the lake. "Oh, do get up. I'm not Huitzilpochtli, and there is no need for ceremony, not for high priests."

  Slowly, carefully, I pulled myself upwards with the help of my cane, and looked at Tlaloc.

  He was tall, impossibly so, towering over us in the dim light – but then all gods were, especially in Their own lands. I caught only glimpses of His aspect: a quetzalfeather headdress streaming in the wind like unbound hair, fangs glistening in a huge mouth, a cloak that shifted and shone with the iridescence of a thousand raindrops, before I looked down. He was the rain and the thunder: savage, cruel and wild; one of the Old Ones who had been there since the First Age. Staring straight at Him would have been like looking at the face of the Fifth Sun.

  "You know why we are here," Acamapichtli said.

  "I know you are desperate," Tlaloc said. "Not many people come offering heart's blood." A touch of malice crept into His voice. "As your companion said, you are lucky not to have lost the hand, or worse."

  "I live for Your favour."

  Again, that terrible laughter – thunder and rain, and the sounds of a storm heard from a boat adrift on the lake. "We both know you don't."

  Acamapichtli didn't move. "I respect Your power, and Your will."

  "Yes. That you do."

  I hadn't spoken up – I had to steer this conversation back to its proper goal, or they would be talking to each other for hours to come. But the prospect of doing so, to have Tlaloc's undivided attention fixated on me, was enough to cause nausea in the pit of my stomach.

  What in the Fifth World had possessed me to come here?

  "My Lord," I said. My voice was shaking; I quelled it, as best as I could. "There is an epidemic in the city."

  Even looking at the ground, I felt His attention shifting to me – the weight of His gaze, the air around me turning tight and warm, like the approach to a storm. "There is." His voice was mildly curious. "As, as High Priest of Lord Death, no doubt you feel it concerns you."

  "It concerns us all," I said. The pressure around me was growing worse. Now I knew why Acamapichtli had gone so strangely inarticulate.

  "Unless it is Your divine will," Acamapichtli said, from some faraway place.

  This time, Tlaloc's laughter seemed to course through me – through my ears and into my ribcage, lifting my heart clear of the chest and squeezing it until it bled. The ground rose up to meet me, and I fell down – pain radiating from my left knee, echoing the frantic beat within my chest.

  "My will? You know nothing about My will, save what you see in the Fifth World."

  "I need to know…" Acamapichtli's voice drifted from very far away, but I was too weary to focus on anything but the grooves in the ground under my hands, and my cane – lying discarded some distance away.

  "Know what?" Tlaloc's voice was mocking again.

  "If we're setting ourselves against You." His words fell, one by one, into the open maws of silence.

  "What a dutiful High Priest," Tlaloc said, at last. "Your companion, of course, isn't so enthusiastic." I'd expected malice, but it was a simple statement of fact.

  "He's often a fool." Acamapichtli's voice came from somewhere above me. "But he means well."

  I managed to move – pulling myself into a foetal position, and then raising my head up. Acamapichtli's bare feet see
med to be the only things within my field of vision. "Are we – setting – ourselves against – Your wife?" Each word, like raw chillies, seemed to leave a burning trail at the back of my throat.

  There was a pause. "No," Tlaloc said. "You're not setting yourself against either Me or My wife."

  "Someone – is using Her magic." I managed to extend my hands towards the cane, hooking the wood with trembling fingers – and haltingly started to bring it back towards me. If I could get up, if I–

  "Yes." Tlaloc did not offer any more information – and Acamapichtli, the Duality curse him, didn't seem inclined to question this further.

  "I don't understand."

  The air tightened around me again. "There is nothing to understand."

  And there was something – a familiar tone to the voice, even though it was deeper and stronger than any human voice: an emotion I'd heard all too many times.

  "My Lord–"

  "There is nothing to understand, priest. Now leave."

  And there it was again: something I ought to have been able to put a name to, but with only the voice to go on, I might as well have been blind and deaf. Something was wrong. Something–

  I needed to see – even if it burned my eyes, I needed to see His face.

  The cane was almost within my reach… A last flick of my fingers brought it spinning towards me, raising a cloud of dust from the packed earth of the cave – and a sudden whiff of copal incense from the wood, a smell that didn't belong in Tlalocan, neither in the verdant marshes, nor in this dark and humid cave.

  Slowly, carefully, I pulled myself up – my hands were shaking worse than ever, and I had to stop and start again more times than I could count. And of course, neither Tlaloc nor Acamapichtli offered any help. "If not Your wife," I said, slowly, "then who is it?"

  And, shaking, I raised my eyes towards the hulking shape of the god, catching a glimpse of blue-streaked skin, pocked with dots, of a necklace of jade beads around His neck, each as big as a human skull, of two snakes on either side of the jaw, climbing upwards through the darkened cheeks, their tails wrapped around the eyes in perfect black circles – the eyes…

  They were round, like sage seeds, like water drops, the blue of the sky, an instant before it darkened; the colour of lake waters, of turquoise stones, and at their hearts was a single dot of yellow – a kernel of ripe corn, moments before it was gathered up in the harvest, quivering in the warm breeze…

  And I knew, in the instant before my vision was finally extinguished and darkness swept across the world in a great wave that swallowed everything up, that I'd been right – that I had read Him right, even though he was a god.

  There had been fear in those eyes – not mild worry, nor annoyance at our trespassing, but a fear real enough to grip Tlaloc's whole being.

  And, whatever was going on, if it was enough to scare a god, then it was more than enough to scare the wits out of me, too.

  I regained consciousness in the Fifth World, my eyes itching as if someone had thrown chilli powder in them. I could see nothing of the world beyond pale shapes against the darkness. I fought the urge to bring my fingers to my eyes, knowing it would only make matters worse. It was my own fault for staring so long into the face of a god I didn't worship, and it would pass, in time.

  At least, I hoped so.

  Distant noises drifted: flutes and drums, and hymns to the Southern Hummingbird. It sounded as though we were back in the palace.

  "Acamapichtli?"

  I half-expected him to be gone, but finally he answered, his voice coming from somewhere to my left. "I am here."

  "What… happened?"

  "Nothing of interest." He sounded amused.

  "You saw–"

  "I didn't see anything."

  He hadn't raised his gaze. He hadn't looked his god in the face – it was odd that he wouldn't, but then again, perhaps I was assuming too much from my own relationship to Mictlantecuhtli and His wife. I had never knelt to either Lord or Lady Death, and they would no doubt have laughed if I had removed my sandals and flattened myself on the ground. After all, what need was there for obeisance, when almost everything in the Fifth World descended into Mictlan at the very end?

  "Well, what did you see?" Acamapichtli asked.

  He hadn't moved to help me. His voice was relaxed, casual, as if I owed him everything – whereas I was the one who could barely see. But surely I didn't have to tell him? What could he do in his current state, hunted down by Tizoc-tzin's men?

  But, if I did this – if I withheld information, playing games with the truth – then I was no better than he. "He's afraid," I said.

  "Of us? That's ridiculous."

  "Of what's going on," I said. "He knows something." Not that we were ever going to find out what: getting information from a god in Their own world was fraught with risk, as we'd amply demonstrated.

  Acamapichtli sighed, rather more theatrically than was required. "I have to go. But I'll try to pass a message to my Consort to see if she can help you track down whoever is using Chalchiuhtlicue's magic."

  "I thought they'd arrested her," I said.

  "Not yet." He sounded smugly satisfied.

  "Go… where?"

  I imagined more than saw him make a stabbing gesture. "Back to my cell, before my clergy pays the price for my little… escapade."

  He sounded almost sincere. "You don't care for your clergy. You never did."

  "Don't I?" He laughed, curtly. "You're right. Perhaps I don't. Till we meet again, Acatl."

  "Wait," I said. "I can't–" But his footsteps had already moved out of the room, and he wasn't answering me anymore. Which left me alone – within a deserted section of the palace, cordoned off because of the plague.

  Great. Now how was I going to get out and find Mihmatini?

  I fumbled around, and finally found the cane – by touch more than by sight, since everything was still dim and blurred. Its touch was comforting, but I didn't use it to drag myself up just then – I suspected standing up was going to be near impossible without shaking.

  From the lack of sounds nearby, it was the middle or the end of the night. The air was cold, without a trace of warmth, and what little I could see was unrelentingly dark: the middle of the night, then, and I was in no state to walk. And even if I had been, I was half-blind, weak and in no state to find my own way through a deserted section of the palace.

  Trust Acamapichtli to abandon me in the middle of nowhere. Although to be fair, he hadn't known I was half-blind.

  Fine. Much as I disliked the idea, it made more sense to sleep here. Now if only I could make my way to the wall in order to sleep against something hard…

  Rising, under the circumstances, felt a little pointless. Using the cane as a prop, I half-walked, half-dragged myself across the room. At some point, I hit one of the mats, and felt the jewellery scatter with a crunching sound. But, after what felt like an eternity of shaking and dragging myself – to the point my legs barely obeyed me anymore, threatening to collapse altogether – my hands met the solid surface of the wall. I could have embraced it at that point.

  Instead, I propped myself against it with the last of my strength, and settled down to sleep.

  • • • •

  I fell into darkness. In my dreams, the blurred shapes of the walls around me became the vast, watery shapes of Chalchiuhtlicue's Meadows: deserted Floating Gardens with maize growing in wide clumps, and canals over which hung mist and, in the distance, the silvery shape of a lake, where the ahuizotls – water-beasts – lay in wait, their yellow eyes barely visible below the surface.

  There was someone pooling a raft in the canals, well ahead of me. I'd have recognised that haphazard way of rowing anywhere: Teomitl.

  I wanted to call out to him, but darkness sucked me in again, and no matter how I called out I couldn't find him again.

  Instead, I stood alone in the dark, and gradually became aware that I was not alone. As my eyes became accustomed to what little light the
re was, I caught a glimpse of polished bone – of a soft light, as yellow as newborn maize, glinting through hollow eye-sockets.

  "Acatl," said a voice – one I knew as well as my own.

  Mictlantecuhtli. Lord Death, ruler of the house of the fleshless, lord of mysteries and withered songs.

  I did not bow, or make obeisance, for this He would not accept. "My Lord," I said. And, more slowly, more carefully, "This is a dream."

  "Of course." Mictlantecuhtli said. He sounded amused – not maliciously, like Xochiquetzal or Tlaloc might have – merely like a man taking in a good joke. "We're not there yet."

  Not there? "I don't understand," I said, slowly.

  "The time of the jaguars, the time of the eagles – when gods will walk the Fifth World once more."