Servant of the Underworld

by Aliette de Bodard

  "You see," the fisherman was saying, "I get up this morning and go pull up the nets like I do all my life, except that they won't come up so easily. A big fish, is what I tell myself. A fish big enough to feed the whole family, sons and cousins and uncles and aunts." He barely stopped between two sentences, obviously proud of his find.

  Ceyaxochitl nodded from time to time, but didn't interrupt him.

  "So I pull harder and harder, and when the net finally surfaces, there's this white thing in it. A fish, I still tell myself, but then I see her hair trailing behind her, and then I continue pulling, I see her face and I know I have to tell someone…" His voice trailed off.

  "You did well," Ceyaxochitl said. "Ah, Acatl. You see what we have." The fisherman, curtly dismissed, stepped away from us.

  "Not yet," I said. I walked closer to the net. Neutemoc was standing behind me, frozen in shock. "Can we get it out of the water?" I asked.

  "I was waiting to know if you could see anything," Ceyaxochitl said.

  I extended my priest-senses, but felt only the everyday setting: the wide expanse of the lake, the peasants tilling the fields, the anchor of the earth beneath us. I shook my head. "Easier to see if you're on dry land." As Neutemoc and Yaotl started hauling the body of the net, I asked her, "I thought you'd be at the Imperial Palace?"

  Ceyaxochitl's eyes were on the muddy banks of the lake. Further away, boats ferried peasants with hoes and baskets from the town to the Floating Gardens. At last Ceyaxochitl said, so softly that no one but I could have heard, "There isn't much that can be done any more."

  No wonder the noblemen had been so numerous at the Imperial Audience. The succession of Revered Speaker Axayacatl-tzin grew closer and closer, and Tizoc-tzin would be in a prime position to claim it. "How long?" I asked.

  "A few months, if the Southern Hummingbird's protection holds. In reality… considerably less, I'd say."

  "I see." Neutemoc and Yaotl were laying the body on the bank; I went closer to take a better look at it.

  In life, Eleuia might have been strong and alluring, drawing men to her as peccaries will draw jaguars. In death, she was small and pathetic, her beauty extinguished. The lake's currents had torn her clothes off: her skin was as white as the new moon, and clammy, as unsettling as the touch of a Haunting Mother. Multiple bruises had formed on her arms and legs. Algae had twined with her hair, and her face… Her face was the worst: empty eye-sockets gazed at me, still encrusted with dried blood. Small scratches, like those made by tiny claws, spread around the place where the eyes should have been.

  I didn't need to take a look at her hands to know what kind of claws had pawed at her eyes, probing until they detached. "An ahuizotl?" I asked Ceyaxochitl.

  She nodded. "Yes. Her fingernails are also missing."

  I closed my eyes, remembering the monster that had tracked me across the canals. Too many coincidences. What was Chalchiutlicue's part in this?

  I looked at the body again. The last thing we knew about Eleuia was that Huei's mysterious allies had taken her. They might have released her, although it sounded unlikely, and I didn't think Eleuia would have gone to the town of Chapultepec. She'd have tried to go back to her temple.

  Which left the second option: she had been dead by the time she entered the water, and the ahuizotl had only feasted on a corpse.

  I could have cast the same spell as before, back in the calmecac, to see if Mictlan's gates had opened on the lake-banks – but that spell worked best in confined spaces. Here, sunlight and the passage of numerous fishermen and peasants would lessen the traces of Mictlan's magic. The results would be misleading at best. No, better to take the easier choice and examine the body. There would be time for spells later, if the examination wasn't conclusive.

  "I need to make sure what she died of. We'll take the body back to my temple," I said. "It will be quieter for a full examination."

  Neutemoc bent, stiffly, to lift Eleuia's left hand. He stared at the wrinkled skin of her hands, at the incongruously pale skin revealed by the absent fingernails. His face was rigid, washed of all emotion.

  "We leave this earth," he whispered, softly, slowly: the beginning of a hymn to the dead. "We leave the flowers and the songs, and the maize bending in the wind. Down into the darkness we must go, leaving behind the marigolds and the cedar trees…"

  I hoped Eleuia had indeed drowned. Drowned men and women went, not into the oblivion of Mictlan, but into Tlalocan, the Blessed Land of the Drowned: a place where flowers blossomed all year round, and where maize never lacked; where Father would be, tilling the eternal fields, blissfully unaware of me. I prayed that Eleuia, who had suffered so much during the Great Famine, would at least have this consolation.

  To us, the living, would be left the task of finding out what had happened to her.

  • • •

  Yaotl and Neutemoc carried Eleuia's body back to my temple. As we walked on the Tlacopan causeway, the macabre load elicited more than a few startled glances. But the presence of a Guardian deterred people from approaching us.

  Ichtaca was descending the shrine steps when we entered. He took a look at the body in Yaotl's arms, and a long, darker one at me. "You'll be needing one of the examination rooms, I take it?"

  I nodded. I really needed to speak with Ichtaca about the running of the temple, before whatever grievance he had festered into something incurable; unfortunately, time was hard to find.

  I sent the others to follow Ichtaca, while I stopped by the storehouse to recover a wooden cage with an owl. I might not need magic to examine the corpse, but one never knew.

  The examination room was a simple affair: a stone altar with grooves to evacuate the blood; a wooden chest holding a collection of obsidian knives; and at the back, a smaller altar of polished ivory dedicated to Mictlantecuhtli. I set the owl's cage on the floor, near the altar.

  I recovered a small, sharp obsidian blade from the chest, and made my offerings of blood to my god: three quick slashes across the back of my left hand, blood flowing onto the altar. "We come for the truth," I said, softly. "Blind not our eyes; deceive us not. We come for the truth."

  I touched the tip of my obsidian knife to the altar. A small jolt passed from the handle of the knife to my palm: a sign that some of Mictlan's magic had suffused the blade.

  Yaotl and Neutemoc had already laid Eleuia's body on the stone altar. Bluish blotches marked her stomach: the same place as the stretch-marks of her childbirth.

  Ceyaxochitl's cane tapped on the stone floor, until she found her place. She watched me like a vulture awaiting carrion.

  I put the tips of my fingers on Eleuia's purple lips, and gently forced them open. The touch was cold, numbing. Froth had adhered to the inside of her mouth. Not sufficient – many things other than drowning could cause the foam – but a good start.

  I retrieved a clean cloth from the chest and wiped off the foam. Then I pressed down on her chest, forcing her to exhale.

  Foam bubbled up, replacing what I had removed. So Eleuia had drowned: she had been alive before entering the water. Interesting. I would have expected her captors to throw her dead body into the lake, not for her to be dragged down by the ahuizotl.

  "Well?" Ceyaxochitl asked.

  I shrugged. Not much to say at that point. "She died of drowning. The ahuizotl is most likely what killed her."

  I turned my attention to the bruises. They were by no means abnormal: as the body bumped against branches and other obstacles, it was bound to gather quite a few of them. But something about their pattern…

  I felt them, carefully. The skin was bluish-black and swollen, resilient to my touch. But bruises inflicted after death didn't swell, and they seldom turned blueblack.

  Not all of the bruises were the same age. I stepped back, lifted one of Eleuia's arms. There was… a gradation: some of them were blue-black, bordering on a greenish colour, some of them were barely turning blue; and a few were still red marks on the skin.

  My stomach churned.
She'd been beaten up, consistently and regularly: in three days, the oldest bruises had had time to start discolouring, but the most recent ones were only burst vessels, the blood barely coagulating.

  "Someone tortured her," I said, slowly.

  Neutemoc's face turned white and harsh, like a shell.

  "They took her, and then they beat her, again and again."

  "What for?" Ceyaxochitl asked.

  I shook my head. "I don't know. I thought – she had a child, in the Chalca Wars." Even though I didn't see what the child would have had to do with all of this. Unless Eleuia had tried to blackmail Mahuizoh?

  "Yes," Neutemoc said. "I remember." His gaze was distant. "But it was stillborn, Acatl."

  "That's what Eleuia told you."

  Neutemoc said, "I was there, Acatl. I saw her bury the body. Trust me. He could never have lived."

  "You're sure?" I asked.

  Neutemoc's lips were two dark lines in the oval of his face. "Yes," he said. "I'll bear witness to that, if you wish."

  "No need," I said. Huitzilpochtli strike me down. The child had sounded like too great a thing to be ignored – and Eleuia herself not above doing whatever she had to do to ensure her future. But if he was dead…

  What could her abductors have wanted from Eleuia?

  I ran my fingers on the bruises. Perhaps I was mistaken. But no, there were too many of them, and they were too large to have been caused by random objects dragged by the currents. The way they were spread, too: few parts of Eleuia's body weren't covered in them. It spoke, not of rage, but of a cold-blooded method, from the summoning of the beast to Eleuia's deliberate, methodical torture. My stomach churned again. Who were those people?

  Mahuizoh? He had loved her, if I believed my witnesses, or at any rate, had had affection for her. Surely he wouldn't…

  My fingers, probing, found a raised area on Eleuia's cheek: a smaller bruise, barely old enough to have discoloured.

  It was the pattern of an object that had hit her, engraved into her flesh: a wound that dated from not too long before her death. I knelt, and stared at it. Unfortunately, the blood had spread and partially erased the contours. It had a shape: hints of curves, of stylised lines meeting to form the point of something else…

  "Neutemoc?" I asked. "Does this mean anything to you?"

  Neutemoc turned Eleuia's face to the light; carefully, as if afraid she'd crumble under his touch. He stared, for a while, at the eyeless hollows, at the small pattern on her cheek. His face was expressionless but his fingers had clenched into fists. "There was no reason," he muttered. "What kind of man…?"

  I knew what he was thinking, because I felt the same nausea welling up in me, tightening until I could barely breathe. "Neutemoc."

  At length, he shook his head. "No," he said. "That mark is too badly damaged, Acatl."

  Ceyaxochitl's cane tapped on the stone floor. "Let me see," she said.

  Neutemoc stepped aside, without a word.

  Ceyaxochitl, unlike Neutemoc, probed Eleuia's flesh like a buyer investigating the fitness of a dog. A faint trace of magic hung in the air: she was calling on the power of the Duality to aid her sight. "Hum," she said. "It is very deformed."

  "Spreading blood," I said. "She was alive for some time after that bruise."

  "How long?" Ceyaxochitl asked.

  "Not very long," I said. "So?" I felt sick. In my years as a priest for the Dead, I had seen death; I had seen cruelty. But never had I seen it so methodically applied.

  And yet they had released Eleuia, or she had escaped. Unless… unless they had summoned the ahuizotl to kill her, thinking to hide their crimes. Possible. It was a risk – no one summoned the Jade Skirt's creatures without paying a price – but possible.

  Ceyaxochitl stared at the mark for a while. "I have seen something like it. But I can't remember where."

  "Can you find out?" Neutemoc asked.

  "Yaotl will take a copy of it," Ceyaxochitl said. "I can't guarantee I'll remember, but maybe someone at the Duality House…"

  Neutemoc said nothing while Yaotl sketched a copy of the mark on a maguey paper. He was watching Eleuia like a man dying of thirst, as he must have watched her while she was still alive. I couldn't help thinking of Huei's anger; and how, ultimately, it had been justified.

  FOURTEEN

  Two Knights

  Ceyaxochitl and Yaotl left soon after that, claiming pressing business at the palace. Neutemoc remained where he was, staring at the corpse, in what seemed to be a particularly bleak mood.

  I stopped Ceyaxochitl at the door. "I don't suppose you could summon someone from Tlalocan?"

  Her eyes held me, expressionless. "From the Blessed Land of the Drowned? You want to summon Eleuia?" Finally, she sighed. "No. The Duality is the source and arbiter of all the gods, but They have no power over where the dead go. And you…"

  I could summon the dead, but only those who belonged to my god, Mictlantecuhtli. Eleuia, who had drowned, belonged to Tlaloc, and I couldn't summon her without the Storm Lord's blessing. But there was another way. "If she won't come to my call, I could go to her."

  Ceyaxochitl raised her eyebrows. "Risky."

  In a god's world, I would be an exile, my magic diluted, my body weak. And there was a risk, no matter how insignificant, that I would meet Father's soul: a small thing compared to the stakes, but not something I was looking forward to, by any means.

  "I know," I said. But Eleuia would know why she had died, and who had abducted her. It was the most direct way to find out the truth.

  "I really have to be at the palace," Ceyaxochitl said. "But if you're not back in three hours, I'll know what happened."

  I nodded. By trying to enter Tlalocan, I would subject myself to Tlaloc's whims. If I hadn't come back in three hours, there wouldn't be much Ceyaxochitl could do, except perhaps succeed where I had failed.

  After Ceyaxochitl and Yaotl had left, I went back into the room. Neutemoc was still staring at Eleuia's body, with a naked hunger that made me sick. He obviously hadn't been listening to a word we'd said, and what he was thinking of was quite obvious. It rankled. Here I was, endangering my life, and all he could think of was Eleuia? Not even Huei, or his children, or his family?

  I asked, angrily, "This is what you'd have destroyed your marriage for? This flesh?" I made a sweeping gesture towards the altar, encompassing Eleuia's small, reduced body: the whitened flesh, the wrinkled fingertips… the missing eyes.

  "It wasn't about carnal lust," Neutemoc snapped.

  I walked to face him, words I couldn't hold any more welling up in me. "Wasn't it? You had everything, Neutemoc. It's not my fault if you tried to throw it all away."

  "You can't understand."

  "No," I said. "You're right. I can't even start to fathom it." I knelt on the ground, and gently traced the outline of the glyph for "water" on the stone: the mouth of a jug, out of which issued the serpentine shape of waves.

  "What are you doing?" Neutemoc asked.

  I shrugged. "You'll see." I retrieved the owl's cage from the altar, set it in the centre of the room, and withdrew the cloth that was covering it. A deafening, angry screech came from the bird in the cage.

  "You're going to do magic here?" Neutemoc said.

  I didn't answer.

  "Acatl!" he said.

  I raised my eyes briefly. "Yes," I said. "And I'm going to need you here, watching out."

  "What for?"

  I went back to the altar, and picked the jade plate and the spider carving. "I'm going to enter the World Beyond. To speak to Eleuia."

  "Can't I come?" Neutemoc asked.

  Gods, could the man think of nothing else but his would-be mistress?

  "No," I said, curtly. That would be risking two lives instead of one. "You stay here."

  I withdrew the owl from its cage and slit its chest. Blood spurted out in a rush of quiescent magic, its pungent animal smell mingling with the bittersweet odour of decomposition from Eleuia's body. I retrieved the owl's h
eart, and set it on the jade plate, above the First Level.

  "Every year Your banners are unfolded in every direction Every year you turn again to the place of abundant blood Coming forth from the place of clouds

  From the verdant house, from the water's edge…"

  Magic blazed, closing the water-glyph pattern. It was if a veil had been thrown over the room, hiding Neutemoc and the altar, and the stone walls. The ground under my feet shifted, started to become mud.