Master of the House of Darts (26 page)

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 there 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."

Its very end, and the birth of the Sixth Sun. "When is that?"

"Do you think I would tell you?" Amusement, again.

I knew He wouldn't. He did not gloat, or put Himself or His knowledge forward: what use, since everything came back to Him in the end? "I don't owe You any favours," I said, slowly.

"You never ask for any favours," Lord Death said, and He sounded almost sad. "I'll give you one nevertheless." Before I could say anything, He'd reached out, with fingers of tapered bone, and touched me on the shoulder. Cold spread from the point of contact, not slowly, but in a swift wave of intense pain that seemed to seize every muscle at once, sending me writhing to the ground.

As I lay on the cold, packed earth, breathing dust with every spasmodic struggle to breathe, with darkness barely held at bay, I heard His footsteps: He was standing right by my side, watching. "A gift, keeper of the boundaries," and His voice grew and grew until it became the whole world, and I knew nothing more.

I woke up gasping, in daylight, in a room which smelled of cold ashes and stale copal incense. My eyesight seemed to have returned, at least to some extent. I could see the adobe walls, and the frescoes, but everything was still slightly blurred. I couldn't remember if that had always been the case, or if some of the eye damage had persisted even beyond the events of the night.

My shoulder ached, and I felt… odd, stretched, as if the protection spell had returned, and I lay cocooned in Lord Death's magic. But no, it wasn't quite that.

Something was wrong. I reached out, wincing at the pain, willing all of it to Mictlantecuhtli Lord Death, an offering as suitable as blood, and rubbed the place where He had touched me in the dream.

There were three thin raised welts on my shoulder, almost like the marks of a whip – save that nothing had bled and they did not ache. They were cold to my touch, with the familiar feeling of underworld magic, and they did not seem to have had any effect on me.

Which was, to say the least, unlikely. If this hadn't been an ordinary dream – if Lord Death had been there with me, in this space out of the Fifth World – then He had given me something. A favour, a gift to His High Priest – dangerous, like all divine favours. It would be small, because things made in dreams couldn't endure for long in the Fifth World, but it wouldn't be innocuous.

I dragged myself up once again and went out in the courtyard.

Everything was deserted. The courtyard smelled of dried earth and packed ashes. Overhead, the Fifth Sun was descending towards the horizon, staining the sky with a deep scarlet colour like heart's blood. Using the cane, I made my slow way through the courtyard, and then through to another, and yet another, and they were all equally deserted – no, not quite, for there was the familiar, faint scent of death in the air; of corpses which had just started to cool. Through one entrance-curtain I caught sight of shapes stretched on a reed-mat, moaning and thrashing as if in the grip of a dream.

The sick. The dying. The dead. And I among them, all but blind. What a great combination.

Tlaloc had been afraid. Why – unless this was no ordinary sickness, but one that touched the very fabric of the Fifth World? I didn't like that. Gods were cruel and capricious, but not afraid. Never afraid – unless it was of something or someone more powerful than Them.

Something…

As I walked, fumbling my way through pillared porticoes, through empty courtyards – through the dry smell of dust and the moans of the sick – I slowly became aware that I was not alone. There were voices in my ears – faint at first, but growing in intensity until they seemed to fill the world. There was a smell like dry, stretched skin; and a wind that grew colder and colder; and ghostly shapes, walking by my side, as if exhaled by the underworld. They crowded around me, groping with cold hands, their faces obscured, their arms and legs translucent, like layers of water.

Was this Mictlantecuhtli's gift – to make me see the souls of the slain? But no, I had spells which could do that. Why waste His time giving me something I could attain for myself?

The ghosts didn't go away as I walked, but neither did they grow more solid. The voices wove in and out of my ears, and there was a hollow in my stomach, steadily growing and growing, even as the world wove in and out of focus – perhaps it was my eyes, but everything seemed to be spinning…

With some difficulty, I reached the next courtyard – the last one – crossing over a ghostly river, and found myself face to face with two of the She-Snake's guards, whose spears barred my way out of the wing.

"Look," I said, struggling, for behind the black-painted faces were ghosts, too – singing a wordless lament, whispering words of grief. "I need to get out. I am the High Priest for the Dead, keeper of the boundaries–"

The feeling in my stomach was worse; I wanted to curl up, to close my eyes until it was all over. I–

The boundaries.

I remembered lying on a cold stone floor, with everything spinning in and out of focus, feeling the hollow in my stomach grow and grow until it seemed to swallow me whole. It had been in the instants after the designated Revered Speaker Tizoc-tzin had died – when everything had hung in the balance, and the Fifth World itself had been close to tearing itself apart.

It had been worse, then. I had barely been able to stand up, and we had lain unprotected from the stardemons. Nothing like that here: the Fifth Sun was in the sky, and the star-demons' distant shadows cowering from His radiance.

But still… there were ghosts abroad, and the whispers of the dead, and – soon, perhaps – the panting breaths of beasts of shadow on the prowl.

Something was wrong with the boundaries.

"I need to get out," I said, again, to the guards.

They looked at me as if I were mad, with clearly no intention of letting me move more than a hand-span from them. "We have orders," they said.

"Then get me the person who gave you the orders."

They looked at each other, and then back at me. I saw ghosts drift between them, drawn like jaguars to a hearth-fire. My clothes were torn and slightly muddy from my visit into Tlalocan, but they were still the regalia of the High Priest for the Dead. "My Lord, we cannot…"

"Get me Quenami," I said, softly.

It might have been the tone, or the remnants of the regalia, but one of the guards left, looking distinctly worried.

In the meantime, I leant against one of the coloured pillars, desperately trying to look nonchalant, but the ghosts still hung in the courtyard like a veil of fog, and the slight nausea at the back of my throat wasn't getting better.

I'd expected Quenami to look smug or satisfied, but when he arrived, he merely looked harried. He wore his most ostentatious clothes – brightly-coloured feathers almost better suited for a Revered Speaker than for a High Priest – and his earlobes glistened with freshly offered blood. "Acatl. What a surprise to see you here." Even his sarcasm sounded muted.

I wasn't in the mood to play the dance of diplomacy. "Look, Quenami. There is an epidemic out here, and I don't need to be confined with the dying."

"Except that you might be sick yourself." His eyes were feverishly bright, his hands steady, but I could read the strain in his bearing.

"Do I look sick to you?"

"You never know. You might have it all the same."

He looked too worried – even for someone who had suffered the debacle in the courtyard. "It's worse, isn't it? It's spreading, and you have no idea how to stop it."

Quenami's head snapped towards me. "What do you know? You've been confined here since yesterday. I know you have. No one has seen you in that time; your own sister admits to knowing nothing of your whereabouts."

"I know enough," I said, softly. Gods, Mihmatini had been looking for me the whole time? She was going to flay my ears the next time we met. "Tell me it's better, that you have it all under control."

As Acamapichtli had; I hated that man's guts, but I had to admit he had a certain ruthless efficiency. Quenami was all bluster. "It's only a matter of time," Quenami said, haughtily. "The Empire is well protected, as you know."

It was – against star-demons and the celestial monsters that would swallow us. But still… still, nothing prevented a resourceful sorcerer from sowing havoc. "You know the Southern Hummingbird won't protect us against a small thing like a plague." To a god, especially a war-god, hundreds of dead meant nothing. The great famine, the great floods, all had happened under the protection of a Revered Speaker. Huitzilpochtli the Southern Hummingbird only guarded from large-scale attacks which would annihilate the Fifth World or the Mexica Empire.