Master of the House of Darts

by Aliette de Bodard

  "Not to mention hot," Mihmatini said, hiding a smile. And, indeed, the Jaguar Knight's costume might have looked grandiose, but it was no more comfortable than my High Priest regalia: we were both sweating quite profusely under the withering glare of the Fifth Sun.

  Tlatelolco was nowhere as deserted as Tenochtitlan. But for the sick governor, the plague appeared to have touched it little – which made sense if Yayauhqui was behind it all. There were fewer people in the marketplace, but I suspected the missing were mainly Tenochcas.

  In the marketplace, the slave section was filled with merchants, discussing in small groups, looking at the slaves for sale – nearly all burly, unblemished men kneeling on the reed mats with the distant gazes of people who expected to be kneeling all day.

  Yayauhqui was easy to find: he towered over the other merchants by a head, and, with the true sight on, there was an empty hole where his souls ought to have been.

  "Acatl-tzin?" His gaze moved from Neutemoc to Mihmatini, and then back to me. "I did wait for you in the palace, but it was a while and you didn't come back…"

  The other merchants were frowning at us – their gazes were sharp and inquisitive, if not yet hostile. "Can we move away a little?" I asked.

  Yayauhqui smiled. "It all depends. What do you want?"

  "You're under arrest," Neutemoc said, curtly and harshly.

  "I don't understand." He sounded genuinely puzzled.

  "The plague is linked to Tlatelolco."

  "And you come to me? Do you have any idea how many people of Tlatelolca blood are around here?"

  "Few who knew Eptli, I'd wager," Mihmatini said.

  Yayauhqui considered her, thoughtfully. At length, he bowed. "I'll grant you this, my Lady, but I had little to do with Eptli, and certainly nothing to do with his death."

  And he sounded sincere. I knew he was a great liar, but surely, if he'd that much hatred of Mexica – if he was that much closer to his goal of unseating us – surely he would have shown some glee, some excitement? "Come with us," I said.

  He shrugged. "It's a nuisance, and I assure you I'm innocent."

  "Then you won't mind coming with us until it's all over." A matter of days, or perhaps of hours.

  His face darkened, slightly. "I do mind. I have business, and other things to attend to. But if that's what it takes to convince you…"

  He walked ahead of us on the way to the palace, his head thrown back, as casually arrogant as any warrior.

  "Are you sure it's him?" Neutemoc said.

  "He might want to be coming back to the palace," Mihmatini said, slowly, but she didn't sound convinced.

  I wasn't, either. If all he'd wanted was to get back into the palace, he could have walked. And someone who could paint spells into the remotest courtyards didn't need a pitiful excuse like an arrest to be at work within the palace complex. "Something is wrong."

  "We have the wrong person," Neutemoc said. He shrugged.

  "No offence to him, but Yayauhqui is a merchant. Your plague sounds like it's been orchestrated by a warrior with a good grasp of strategy."

  "He used to be a warrior," I reminded Neutemoc. "All Tlatelolca were both – merchants and warriors."

  "Don't lecture me." Neutemoc looked amused. "I know what you mean, but I still don't think it's him. Call it a gut feeling. He just doesn't seem to have the right mindset."

  I wasn't sure how much my brother's gut feelings were worth – but when it came to warriors, they had to be better than mine.

  Which left us, it seemed, with not much more to go on.

  TWENTY-TWO

  Beyond Death

  At the palace, we dropped Yayauhqui off into a room for "guests", and I managed to find one black-clad guard willing to keep an eye on him. Though Yayauhqui himself didn't look as though he had any intention of moving: he'd picked up ledgers from his merchant peers before leaving, and he was now sitting cross-legged with the papers spread in his lap, thoughtfully annotating them with a writing reed.

  It could have been an elaborate deception, but the most likely explanation was that it was all the truth, and that we'd been mistaken by picking him as the instigator of the plague.

  But, if not him, who else? As he had said, we did not lack Tlatelolca. Another of the former imperial family, with more military training, and a stronger will for revenge?

  Pochtic would know.

  We walked back to Pochtic's rooms, where Ichtaca had readied everything for the spell: my priests had brought back Pochtic's body from the temple, and laid it again in the position in which he had died: readying the teyolia – the spirit that travelled the world beyond – for being summoned. Around him they had traced the glyph for ollin – movement, the symbol of this Fifth Age – and around the glyph a circle which encompassed the whole room, a symbol for the rules and rituals which bound us all. Now nine of them – one for each level of the underworld – were chanting hymns to Lord Death, beseeching Him to help us summon the dead man's soul.

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

  The place where jade crumbles, where gold is crushed,

  The place where we go down into darkness…"

  "I think we'll wait for you outside," Neutemoc said. He shifted uncomfortably – unused, I guessed, to the matter-of-fact way with which we treated death.

  Mihmatini shook her head. "You wait outside. I want to see this." Her gaze was hungry, feverish, and I thought I could name the reason for her impatience – she'd leap on anything we could use to make Teomitl see reason.

  "Don't overdo it," I said.

  Her gaze was hard. "I know what I'm doing."

  I sighed, but said nothing. I couldn't push her any further. We walked into the room together – to find Ichtaca on the edge of the circle, watching the ceremony. He bowed to Mihmatini, with the look of uneasy reverence he always had for his magical and political superiors – excepting me, of course.

  "You don't look convinced by the ritual," I said.

  Ichtaca shrugged. "You know why."

  After death, the souls that went into Mictlan lay in scattered shards – not like the sacrifices or the dead in battle, who opened up wings of light to ascend into the Fifth Sun's Heaven, nor the drowned men, who entered Tlalocan whole. Rather, those souls destined for Mictlan needed to strip themselves of every remnant of the Fifth World, pulling their essence from the corpse that had hosted them. It took a few days for that transformation to be complete, but this assumed proper rituals – the washing and laying-out of the body, and the vigil: all the small things that kept reminding the soul of the next step in its journey. Here, there had been time for nothing of this; the body had been moved, cutting its link to the place of death.

  "Two days," I said, aloud.

  "It will have to suffice," Ichtaca said.

  We waited side by side, until the chanting subsided; it was time for me to take my place at the centre of the quincunx.

  Pochtic's body lay on the ground – not the pale, contorted thing I remembered, but something else. Palli and the others had dressed him in a semblance of a funeral bundle – given the little time they'd had, I suspected there were rather fewer layers of cotton than Pochtic's status warranted; fewer amulets and pieces of jewellery as well.

  I inhaled – feeling the cold of the underworld gather itself from the circle under my feet. Green light had seeped from the dried blood on the ground, until it seemed as though I stood in mist. Everything smelled faintly humid – like leaves on the edge of rotting. Then, with one of my obsidian knives, I drew a line across the scarred back of my hand, letting the blood fall onto the floor, drop after drop. There was a small jolt every time a drop connected, and the mist opened itself up to welcome it, with a hunger that was almost palpable.

  "From beyond the river,

  From beyond the plains of shards,

  I call you, I guide you out…"

  The light flared up, coming to my waist; I could see faint smudges within, and hear the distant lament of t
he dead; shapes moved within the mist – there were hints of yellow eyes and claws and fangs, and the distant glimmer of a lost soul, like dewdrops on flower leaves.

  "Past the mountains that bind and crush,

  Past the wind who cuts and wounds,

  Past the river that drowns,

  I call you, I guide you out…"

  Nothing happened.

  Or rather: the mist remained, and the feeling of emptiness arcing through me, telling me passage into the underworld was open. But no soul came; no vaguely human shape drew itself out of the murky darkness.

  The Storm Lord strike me, Ichtaca was right: we were too early, and the soul was still in four hundred scattered pieces.

  But no; there was something… some resistance, as if I'd hooked a fish at the end of a line, or rather, more than one fish: I could feel the pulling, the scrabbling of several smaller things trying to get out of the way, with the same intelligence as a shoal of fish or a flock of sparrows.

  I grasped my obsidian knife, letting the blade draw a bloody line within my palm – waiting until the obsidian was tinged with my blood. Then I wove the knife up, heedless of the small pinprick of pain that spread from my open wounds – up, and around, as if cutting into a veil.

  The air parted with a palpable resistance, and the pull I felt grew stronger – and then, in a moment like a heartbeat, something coalesced in the midst of the circle.

  The souls I had seen had been human, but this clearly wasn't. It moved and shimmered, barely within the Fifth World – I caught glimpses of wings and feathers within its ever-changing shape, as if the soul wasn't yet sure how it had died.

  "Priest?" It whispered. The voice was to Pochtic as a codex picture was to a god – small and diminished, its timbre extinguished. "Where–?"

  "The Fifth World – but only for a little while," I said. "Everything must tarnish and fade into dust, and you are no exception." My voice took on the cadences of the ritual – for this had to be done properly, lest Pochtic never achieve oblivion in Mictlan. "The blood has fled your body; the voice of your heart is silent. The underworld awaits you."

  The soul shifted and twisted. If he had been a man, he would have hugged himself. "I'm dead?"

  Quite unmistakably so. "Yes," I said.

  It moved again, extending tendrils of light to wrap around the funeral bundle – and withdrawing as soon as it touched it, as if it had been burned. "Dead…" it whispered.

  What a contrast to the vibrant, arrogant man Pochtic had been, but then, few spirits maintained their cohesion into death. I had only met one, and he had been Revered Speaker of Tenochtitlan, schooled in propriety and ritual since his birth.

  "Dead," I said. And, because strong emotions could survive even into Mictlan, "You committed suicide."

  A brief flare from the soul; a shifting of lights to become darker. "I did." There was a pause. "I… I was afraid."

  I said nothing, not wanting to break the fragile process of gathering its memories.

  "He was going to find me – arrest me, kill me. The Revered Speaker…" It paused, shifted again. "I… did something. I–"

  It was silent, then – hovering over its own corpse, not daring to touch it. At length, it whispered, and it was the voice of a broken man, "It can't be forgiven. It can't ever be forgiven."

  If it still had eyes, it would have wept.

  And, if I didn't vividly remember the carnage in the courtyard, perhaps I would have bent or relented – but Tapalcayotl's face was in my mind, black and twisted out of shape by sores, and the memories of a dozen bodies scattered like a grisly harvest, and the vulnerability in Acamapichtli's eyes. "What did you do?"

  "I– I– " Its voice was low, halting – ashamed? "He was talking in my sleep, always – whispering, suggesting, threatening – always talking, until I couldn't take any more of it. I just couldn't! He – he wanted me to help him, to get revenge, and I couldn't say no."

  Talking. Dreams. "You had herbs, in your room," I said. "Jimsonweed, and teonanacatl. You were speaking with the spirits." But even as I said that, I thought of the decayed wards – they had been familiar, but they weren't for better communication with the departed. They were the reverse: walls to keep the spirits out, attacked until they'd ruptured. We'd had backwards: it wasn't the living seeking to spread the plague with the help of the dead. It was the dead seeking revenge, and influencing the living to get it.

  "He found you," I said, slowly. "A tool for his plans. And you helped him," I said. From the start – giving the feather quills to Eptli, to Zoqutil, engraving the spells within the palace – corruption in our midst, like the rotten core of a cactus.

  "I–"

  "Tizoc-tzin won't forgive; the Southern Hummingbird doesn't forgive." It was a lie, for his soul would go down into Mictlan, where there was no judging, no weighing of deeds – where everyone, prince or nobleman or peasant, was equal. "Who was he, Pochtic? What did he want?"

  "I–" Something rippled across the soul, as if it were caught in some inner struggle. Vaguely, I heard Ichtaca cry out from beyond the circle. "Revenge, but I can't say anything – I can't, he would kill me…"

  "You are already dead," I said. "Wrapped in the bundle of your funeral pyre, awaiting entry into the land of the dead, the land of the fleshless, the land where jade crumbles and feathers become dust." Every word fell into place with the inevitability of a heartbeat – further ritual, hemming the soul in, reminding it that there was no escape. "And he can't harm you anymore, whoever he is."

  "You're wrong – wrong, wrong," the soul whispered. Around it, the circle was crinkling inwards – the green mist receding into the stone floor, to reveal once more the frescoes of the gods on the walls. "Wrong…"

  "No," I said. "You're dead – you belong to Lord Death now, and to Mictlan. No one can take away from you, and no one can reach down into the underworld. What does he want? Tell me."

  The soul shifted, twisted – writhed, trying to escape – the wings were falling away, and the outline of arms and legs were forming, flailing wildly as if in great pain. "He – revenge," he whispered again. "On all of Tenochtitlan, if need be. May the cities you hold fall one after the other; let the temples be awash in fire and blood…"

  I was losing him. The time for the ritual was past, and he was going away from me, gathering himself for the plunge into Mictlan. I needed to get something, and fast. "What does he want, Pochtic?"

  The soul was unravelling like a skein of maguey fibre, faster and faster – drawing away from the corpse, coalescing into the shape of a man, but growing fainter and fainter the whole while. "Pochtic!"

  But he was gone, and I remained alone with his corpse, within a circle that was stone again. The room was cold; and the wind on my exposed arms chilled me to the bone.

  Something was left behind, a mere whisper on the wind: a name, quivering out of existence with each spoken syllable. "Moquihuix-tzin."

  "Moquihuix-tzin?" Mihmatini asked. She sat on the terraced edge of Pochtic's quarters, looking down into the courtyard. Neutemoc was by her side – as if standing guard. "That's the last Revered Speaker of Tlatelolco. He's–" she stopped. "It doesn't matter whether he's dead, does it?"

  I grimaced. "Partly. The dead can't cast spells, or summon creatures. But they can influence." And Moquihuix-tzin had been a strong character – both Nezahual-tzin and Yayauhqui had described him as a man used to getting his way. No wonder Pochtic had been such a pliant tool.

  "Which isn't helping us, is it?" Mihmatini said. "With Pochtic gone, he could be influencing pretty much anyone."

  Below, a few noblemen were crossing the courtyard, and a couple was coming towards us, the woman ahead of the man – her face utterly unfamiliar, as sharp and rough as broken obsidian, her clothes slightly askew, as if she'd dressed in a panic.

  They were almost upon us when I realised that the man behind her – tall and unbending, with a headdress of heron feathers – was Acamapichtli. He stood once more with his old arrogance, as if his sc
arred face and sightless eyes meant nothing. He wore a carved fang around his neck, a beacon of power I could feel even without my true sight, and he moved confidently, as if being blind were no trouble at all.

  "Further evidence of your charms?" I asked.

  He shook his head, impatiently. "Behave, Acatl. This isn't a time for levity. I've brought my Consort, as you asked."

  The woman bowed to me. Up close, the lines on her face were clearly visible – she would never be called beautiful, but she was striking as only priestesses could be, secure in her identity and power, which gave her a place in society above the common folk. Two black lines ran on her cheeks, calling to mind the face of the goddess Herself – whom I had seen once, more than a year before, when Teomitl had been granted his powers. "Greetings, Acatl-tzin. I am Cozolli, priestess of Chalciuhtlicue, and Consort of Tlaloc."