Master of the House of Darts

by Aliette de Bodard

  "And Teomitl?" I asked

  "He left yesterday," Yaotl said, curtly. "A couple of warriors came to pick him up."

  Like the warriors who had removed their sandals? I didn't like this; I didn't like this at all.

  I walked back to my temple in a thoughtful mood, but found it flooded as well, my priests barely able to deal with the flow of supplicants, and Ichtaca himself having taken refuge in the shrine atop the pyramid, looking pale and harried.

  "Acatl-tzin! We thought–"

  I raised a hand. "It's quite all right," I said, thinking I was making a speciality of running out on them. "I ran into someone, rather unexpectedly, and spent the night stuck in the palace grounds."

  Ichtaca looked bewildered. "We looked for you after the riot, but we couldn't find you."

  "I was in Tlalocan," I said, briefly – ignoring the awe which spread across his face. "Not my idea. Acamapichtli's."

  "But Acamapichtli-tzin–"

  I mentally ran through the necessary explanations, and gave up. "Look," I said. "I promise I'll explain everything, but right now there is something slightly more urgent. I think there is a problem with the boundaries."

  Ichtaca looked as if he might protest, and then he took a look down into the overcrowded courtyard. "It could be," he said, slowly. "It would explain why so many people have turned up here. They speak of ghosts, and of odd portents…"

  "The boundaries are weakened," I said.

  "But the Revered Speaker–"

  The Revered Speaker should have been protecting us against that, yes. "I don't know," I said. "But it's the only explanation that fits." I thought of Tizoc-tzin; of the stretched bones beneath the sallow skin; of the shadowed eye-sockets that might as well have been empty. A dead man walking in the Fifth World.

  "Oh, gods," I said, aloud. "We did it."

  We'd brought him back, crossing the boundary between life and death, and it had never closed properly. "It's something we did, with the spell to bring Tizoc-tzin back."

  Ichtaca grimaced. He hadn't liked the story when I'd told it to him, but he'd had to bow down to my decision. To our decision. We had taken that as a group – as High Priests and equals, for once. "We don't have star-demons in the streets," he said.

  "Because we have a Revered Speaker," I said. "The Fifth World is protected. But that doesn't mean things can't be wrong. Ghosts are hardly a menace."

  I stopped, then – and thought of all the sorcerers we'd defeated – all the people who had died in our wars of the conquest, thirsting for revenge over the Mexica. I thought of how easy it was to call up a ghost and listen to their advice. No need to be a sorcerer frighteningly good at magic: our culprit merely needed to call on the right ghost.

  Oh, gods. "I take it back. Ghosts can be a menace. A sorcerer advising someone…"

  "Ghosts can't cast spells," Ichtaca pointed out.

  "I know. But they can give the instructions, if you ask them the right questions." Oh gods. The living were quite enough to deal with; I didn't want to have to contend with the dead as well.

  "Can you look into this?" I asked Ichtaca. "I need to know what exactly is wrong with the boundaries."

  "You've stated it." He looked genuinely startled.

  "I could be wrong." And I dared not, not on something this large. "I want to be sure."

  He grimaced. "I know it's important, but–"

  "There are other things, I know. You have to spread out the priests. I know you can do that."

  "As you wish." He rose. "I was planning to direct the examinations of the bodies."

  Ah, yes. The bodies. Finally, we had some time to examine them quietly, and to get a better idea of the nature of the sickness. "They're on an island in the Floating Gardens, if I remember correctly? I'll come with you," I said.

  Ichtaca nodded, as if he hadn't expected anything less of me. It was a balm to my heart, in a time when my confidence was severely shaken.

  Before we left, I took a moment to seek out the storehouse, and to help myself to a simple grey cloak, the one customarily worn by priests for the Dead as they walked through the streets of the city. I didn't look like a High Priest anymore, but at least I had lost the resemblance to a beggar mauled by a jaguar.

  Ichtaca, of course, insisted I take the huge barge of the High Priest, with its highly-recognisable spider-and-owl design of Mitclantecuhtli, while he and the other priests sat in smaller reed crafts.

  The priest with me was Ezamahual, the dour-faced peasants' son who always walked as if unbelievably blessed. He didn't speak as I carefully wedged myself into position within the barge – much harder than I'd thought possible, with my legs shaking.

  He rowed in great, smooth gestures – a familiar rhythm for someone who had grown up at the river's edge – lulling me into a sleep that was almost restful… until I saw the first hints of ghosts trailing over the water.

  The drowned, too, were rising up. This was more serious than a mere summoning from the underworld. Something was deeply wrong, and the gods knew it, from Mictlantecuhtli to Tlaloc.

  And all, I suspected, because of us. It had to be – what else would cause such a massive disruption?

  At the time, we'd thought it the lesser of two evils. The death of Tizoc-tzin, our newly designated Revered Speaker, had opened the gates wide to star-demons and their depredations. To name another Revered Speaker would have taken weeks – time we didn't have. Far better to seek the Southern Hummingbird's favour, and bring back Tizoc-tzin's body and soul from the heartland.

  Except, it seemed, that it had solved nothing – merely sowed the seeds for further blood and fire in the Fifth World.

  At this early hour, it made more sense to take one of the largest western canals, swinging under the Tlacopan causeway and continuing due south around Tenochtitlan. The houses of adobe became mud and wattle – with coloured roofs at first. Then even those went away, and the crowds heading to the marketplace thinned out, until we reached the Floating Gardens: a network of artificial islands used as fields for the planting of anything from maize to squashes. The farmers were up already, consolidating the ditches for irrigation and making sure the earth was well-watered in preparation for the planting of maize.

  The island that hosted the bodies was visible from afar, if only for the whiffs of Mictlan's magic emanating from it, as dry and as stretched as desiccated corpses.

  The boat touched the ground between two willow trees: we all disembarked, and waited for Ichtaca to lead the way.

  He looked at me enquiringly – unwilling to break the rules. I suppressed a sigh and went towards the centre of the island, towards the greater concentration of Mictlan's magic. The bodies lay side by side in the hollow of a maize field, naked and bloated. The smell that wafted up to me nestled in the hollow of my stomach, strong enough to make me feel nauseous again. I might be used to handling corpses, but I'd never examined so many at the same time – and not in such a state. Thank the Duality it was the dry season now, and nowhere near as hot or as humid as it could get.

  "If you'd do the honours…" Ichtaca said.

  I didn't much feel like it, quite aside from my current weakness, but it would mean something to all of them, and especially to Ichtaca. With a sigh, I walked towards the bodies – cane in one hand, knife in the other.

  The bodies lay on their backs in the mud of the Floating Garden, the willows at the edge of the island casting long, twisted shadows across their skins – and death, too, casting its own twisted shadows, in the form of blotches and bloated skins, all the signs of rot that we knew all too well.

  Eptli's body was the worst: bloated and blue, barely recognisable as human. The others – the prisoner Zoquitl, Chipahua and his household – were not as bad. Chipahua and his companions in particular had the characteristic rigidity of the newly-dead, but their skins were dark rather than livid blue.

  Before starting, I cast a quick spell of protection, calling on the power of the underworld to shield me. The noises of oars in the wate
r receded, the peasants' tilling and digging became far away, and the sky itself became as grey as dust.

  "Only here on earth, in the Fifth World,

  Shall the flowers last, shall the songs be bliss,

  Though it be feathers, though it be jade,

  It too must go to the region of the fleshless."

  I crouched by Eptli's body – the most important for us – and considered. I had already examined it; I could cut into the flesh, releasing the noxious air contained within, but it was likely I wouldn't get anything more out of it, not without magic. It had decayed too much.

  So, instead, I moved to Chipahua's body – setting the cane aside in the mud of the Floating Garden. He lay against the radiant blue of the sky, his eyes wide open, seeing nothing of the Fifth World, his scar crowded by the raised blisters on his entire face. They formed a faint pattern that would have been vaguely reminiscent of a mosaic, save that most of them had burst through the skin, bleeding into the body. His entire skin had turned dark and the whites of his eyes were now the red of blood. Blood had also pooled below the other orifices – nose and mouth and ears, eager to leave the body by whatever holes there might be.

  The same pattern of burst blisters had also spread to his limbs, though they were more dense on the hands and feet than closer to the torso. Using the knife, I slashed at his tunic to reveal the body underneath: more burst blisters, and faint red spots covering the entire skin. I moved to the groin area, lifting the penis to have a better look – and its skin came away in clumps, as neatly as that of a flayed man, disintegrating like worn paper.

  Breathe. He was dead; it wasn't as if anything worse could happen to him.

  Breathe. I needed to–

  With some difficulty, I focused on the corpse again, and looked at the penis and anus; both were flecked with dried blood.

  I fought a surge of fresh nausea. I had seen many things, but not a corpse that looked as though every blood vessel had burst or decayed.

  "Ichtaca?"

  "Acatl-tzin?" He'd been waiting on the edge of the Floating Garden for me to finish my examination.

  "There are a dozen bodies here," I said. "If you and the other priests don't start examining them, we'll still be here tonight."

  Ichtaca nodded, and started pointing to priests, assigning them bodies. He crouched by Eptli's body – trust him to take the hardest one – and drew his own blade, thoughtfully.

  I didn't stare for longer – whatever mystery there was, he would solve it, and I needed to focus my energies on the body I was currently examining.

  The mundane examination didn't seem overly conclusive; time for other methods.

  I rubbed at my earlobes, dislodging the scabs from the previous offerings. With the blood, I drew glyphs on the backs of my hands – "one" and "knife", the week that was ruled by Lord Death. As the blood dripped down towards the hungry earth under my feet, I started chanting.

  "In the land of the fleshless, in the region of mystery,

  Where jade crumbles, where gold is crushed,

  Where all our songs, all our flowers come to an end."

  The glyphs on the back of my hand grew uncomfortably warm, until I could have traced them with my eyes closed. The rest of the world, though, seemed to cool – until the tips of my fingers felt burnt and pinched, and even the light of the Fifth Sun seemed dimmer.

  "In the land of the fleshless, in the region of mystery,

  In the house without windows, on the dais of bones,

  The house of dust, the house of the fleshless…"

  A green, mouldy light spread outwards from the glyphs, playing on my skin and on that of the body, until we both seemed equally leeched of life, and the smell in the air was dry and faint, like old codices buried in the desert.

  Bracing myself against the pain that would come, I lowered my hands over the corpse and felt the jolt as the symptoms crossed into my own body – the salty taste of an unfamiliar magic, and the sense of vastness as the blood vessels enlarged and disintegrated – and then, as the shadows around me grew larger and larger, everything else caught on, the throat, the stomach, the entrails, every single membrane in the body…

  I came to with a start, almost tempted to feel my torso to check that I still had my major organs – but that was foolish, since the spell only granted me an impression of what the death had felt like, and I had known in advance it would be unpleasant. So, I had a better idea of how Chipahua had died, but not of how he had caught the disease.

  Still… something was staring me in the face, and I was far too weary to make it out.

  I looked around: most priests seemed engrossed in the preliminary examination of the bodies, but a few – including Ichtaca – had moved to similar spells.

  Ichtaca. I looked again at Eptli's corpse, which was bloated and blue, but the skin wasn't dark, and there was no blood on the face. And he had died almost instantly.

  I dragged myself to the corpse, and put my hands over the face.

  This time, the rush of magic was far stronger; it came from my outstretched hands, coursing through my entire body until my saliva tasted like brackish, muddy water, and my whole body started itching and burning up, and I felt the blisters on my mouth and tongue, and the rush of the shadows, the images of the flailing limbs, of the dying bodies – and everything was disintegrating again, but it was my heart that gave out first, collapsing on itself with the dissolution of the major arteries and veins…

  Oh gods. There were two versions of the sickness.

  I dragged myself to my cane, trembling with the memories of dying twice, in close succession, and limped to the other corpses, watching them.

  The corpse of the prisoner Zoquitl was also devoid of bleeding and I got the same impression when I lowered my hands over it, the feeling of unfamiliar magic spreading from outstretched hands…

  And the others… Chipahua's household, his companions, his wife, his slaves – I stood over them all, and over them all I felt the same thing, felt myself destroyed piece by piece, bleeding into my own body, exhaling nothing but my own debris and blood…

  "Acatl-tzin!" Firm hands yanked me, jolting me out of the trance of the spell, and I lay gasping, the mud squelching against my skin, so cold as to make me shiver. The Fifth Sun overhead blurred, quivering, the willows spinning and bending as if in a great storm….

  "Are you mad?" Ichtaca's voice asked – coming from very far away.

  "Not… mad," I whispered, but he didn't seem to hear me.

  "You were the one who said we'd examine them as a group, and then you go taking on their symptoms as if there were no tomorrow."

  He sounded angry, but I couldn't bring myself to care anymore. I lay gasping and choking, trying to banish the memories of the shadows from my vision – feeling everything twisting and bursting within my body, as if I were the one on the edge of death.

  That settled it: whoever had cast that kind of spell was thoroughly mad.

  Some time later, Ezamahual helped me get up, wrapping my shaking hands around the cane and lending me his shoulder so that I stood more or less upright. The weakness was passing; the memories of so many deaths so close together were passing away, becoming a distant nightmare. Thank the gods for fallible memory – what would I have ever done, if I had remembered perfectly every single one of the examinations I'd practised?

  "They're different," I said to Ichtaca.

  He still looked angry, but he wasn't shouting at me anymore, which I guessed was an improvement. "Different how?"

  "Eptli said he felt cold after touching something, and I think Zoquitl caught it the same way: from an object, not a person. Everyone else on this island caught it from someone already sick, just like Teomitl and I."

  "So we're looking for an object impregnated with Chalchiuhtlicue's magic?" Ichtaca frowned. "That doesn't help much."

  I shook my head. "Several objects. It's not something unique. And yet it was peculiar enough that Eptli remembered it, so most probably not an everyday ob
ject." And something else, too: this meant that Eptli and Chipahua had likely had direct contact with the sorcerer. "Did you learn anything else?" I refrained from adding "while I was unconscious", for both our sakes.

  Ichtaca shrugged. "A better understanding of the disease, I guess. It's based on the liquids within the human body – spreading through the blood and coaxing everything into destroying itself in a rush." His round face was creased in distaste. "It's a horrible, useless way to die."

  "But it brings power to Chalchiuhtlicue or to the sorcerer, if he knows how exploit it," I said, slowly. "Symbolically, they've all died of the water." I thought of whoever had attacked the Master of the House of Darkness, of the mask spreading across his face, blocking off his nostrils and mouth. A sacrifice to the goddess who ruled water; likewise, it would have brought power to Her – or to whoever stood between Her and the Fifth World.