”Oh,” Teomitl said. He walked to the gates of the compound, and stared at the pyramids in the distance. “The safest place is the religious complex, isn’t it?”
The complex was mostly pyramids, but not only that. Under the massive limestone structures the gods had buried Their physical bodies, the ones they had sacrificed to give the Fifth Sun His nourishment in blood. If any place in the Fifth World was brimming in magic, if any place was safe, under the gaze of every god in the universe, it was that complex.
”It’s huge,” Teomitl said. “We can’t possibly–”
”Magic could help.” Not the huge, strenuous magic that came straight from the gods, and that either Teomitl or Nezahual-tzin practised almost as a second nature, but the small spells, the ones anyone could learn, the faithful tools that had served me so well over the years. One in particular…
I could have waited until Nezahual-tzin was more advanced in his meditation. But, with such heavy stakes, I couldn’t afford to play games. I was no Tizoc-tzin, and no Quenami. I had sworn to uphold the balance of the universe, and so I would.
“Come on. Let’s go see him,” I said.
To say that Nezahual-tzin was less than taken by the idea would have been an understatement. His grimace grew more pronounced as I explained myself, until I came at last to a faltering halt.
”That won’t work,” he said.
”I don’t see why not,” I said.
”You’re counting on the complex being mostly empty.”
”It is,” I said. “Except for pilgrims, and it’s not the season for them.”
”Still…” Nezahual-tzin scratched his chin, as if his beard were bothering him. “The death-sight doesn’t work like that, Acatl.”
”You’ve never cast it,” I pointed out. He had so much power he didn’t bother with such small spells.
”I know.” Nezahual-tzin said. “You’ll be able to see all living beings within the radius of its effect, but that’s not going to allow you to discriminate.”
I had my own idea about this, too, but I saw no need to explain. He would have found it mad. Our Revered Speaker had grown too used to magic coming with barely any cost, to the point where he barely could envision functioning without it. As High Priest of a god who interfered very little with the mortal world, I’d learnt when to use spells, and when to refrain from shedding blood.
”Fine. If you don’t believe it will work, will you at least allow us to try?”
His eyes narrowed. I could tell what he was thinking: was this our ploy to escape him? And, as a matter of fact, it was our best chance yet, though the main purpose wasn’t escape at all. “Look,” I said. “I’m just trying to make this as fast as possible. It’s in none of our interests to have the star-demons come down.”
Nezahual-tzin’s gaze rested on Teomitl, thoughtfully. “You can try,” he said at last. “It should keep you busy until I’m done. But I don’t expect any results.” He gestured to four of his warriors. “Go with them.”
Not unexpected. We’d have to see about those later.
The wall around the complex was lower than the Serpent Wall which circled Tenochtitlan’s Sacred Precinct. It had familiar elements though, the same snakes’ heads on top of it, the same dark green carvings along its length.
The warriors had deployed to form an escort around us and Teomitl, who, judging by his dark face, could hardly wait to attack them.
We passed under a wide arch, and found ourselves in the religious complex. Before us stretched a long alley, bordered by dozens of smaller buildings like primitive shrines, and from every one of them wafted only silence, a heavy, oppressive atmosphere I knew all too well, the silence of the grave.
The alley was called the Avenue of the Dead, and each of the small edifices held a body, the physical remnants of those who had once been gods, before They offered up Their blood to the Fifth Sun and gave up Their mortal nature.
About halfway up the avenue was a pyramid, a huge, massive thing made of uncemented stone, every section of its construction visible. Even under the cloudy sky it shone like limestone in sunlight, like polished obsidian or chalcedony, the light pulsing to a slow, fierce rhythm like that of sacrificial drums. “That’s where…?” Teomitl asked, seeing the direction of my gaze.
I swallowed. “Yes,” I said. Even this far, I could feel I wouldn’t be welcome there. “That’s where the Fifth Sun rose into the sky from His pyre.”
I tried to keep my eyes from the end of the Alley of the Dead, all the way past all those tombs, to the smaller but still massive pyramid which shone with a colder light, the one where the Moon, who was She of the Silver Bells, who was our bitterest enemy, had risen into the sky, hoping to challenge Her brother’s radiance and dominion.
”Right,” Teomitl said. He shook his head. “And now?”
”I’m not sure.” I eyed the Alley of the Dead. Someday, I would know the place better, but I hadn’t been High Priest for long enough to have come there for a formal celebration. On the other side, a white-and-ochre wall surrounded what looked like a complex within a complex. A procession was exiting through the main gates, priests in green and red, their hair matted with blood and their earlobes torn from years of penance, carrying a feather standard in the direction of the tombs. Priests of Quetzalcoatl, the Feathered Serpent; the pyramid looming over the complex, not quite as grand as that of the Moon or that of the Sun, looked to be dedicated to the Feathered Serpent.
I could have chosen this place for the spell, for Quetzalcoatl was neutral to me, unlike the Southern Hummingbird or the Storm Lord. But the Feathered Serpent was also Nezahualtzin’s god, and I had had quite enough of the boy’s peculiar brand of magic for the time being.
”Come on,” I said to Teomitl, and headed towards one of the tombs. As I walked, it grew larger in my sight, and yet still remained small and pathetic, diminished like a corpse in death. Silence spread around me, the chants of the priests receding in the background, meaningless snatches in a language that no longer seemed mine. It wasn’t the silence of the grave, but something different, something indefinable, like the quiet after a battle, like the calm after a death, when the priest for the Dead has just arrived, a sense that something of large import had happened here and wouldn’t take place again, it was a memory of a moment like a held breath, now vanished into the depths of this age, a moment that wouldn’t happen again until Grandmother Earth split apart and the Fifth Sun tumbled from the heavens.
I bypassed the first such tomb, and the second. At the third, however, the silence was a little heavier than it should have been, and twisted a little more in my chest, like a hooked spear.
Carefully I climbed to the top of the platform, standing above the earth with only bare limestone under me. There was only silence, stretching over me like flowing cloth, a familiar aching emptiness in my breast. And a little something, nagging at the back of my mind, an ache I had forgotten, something that wasn’t quite right.
But of course things weren’t right. It was Mictlantecuhtli lying underneath that shrine, buried in the chamber under the steps of the pyramid, Lord Death, my own god, as unmoving and as powerless as the corpses I did my vigils for. There was something wrong about the thought. The gods might have been capricious and arbitrary, but They were still more than us, and, although none of this was new to me, to see Them as former mortals was… disturbing, to say the least.
”Acatl-tzin–” Teomitl said.
I raised a hand to silence him and knelt on the platform, drawing one of my obsidian blades. With the ease of practise, I opened my veins, letting the blood drip on my knife – and drew a quincunx on the platform. It pulsed, gently, as if to the rhythm of an alien heartbeat, the air above it shimmering as if in a heat haze.
Then, standing in the centre of the quincunx – in the place that might as well be the centre of the universe – I started the invocation to Lord Death.
“We all must die
We all must go down into darkness
Leaving behind the marigolds and the cedar trees…”
Light blazed, outlining the quincunx in radiance; the wounds on my hands tingled, like coals in a brazier.
“We all must die
We all must leave our flowers, our songs
All jade breaks, all feathers crumble into dust
Nothing is hidden from Your gaze.”
In my previous spell of death sight, a veil had gradually descended over the world, until everything material seemed to grow dim and meaningless. But here, the only thing that seemed to happen was that the air grew sharper, burning in my lungs, and the shrines suddenly loomed larger, the inset black stones shining like inverted suns amidst the larger structure of limestone. And under my feet, under the stone, I could
see
the corpse in the pyramid, its bones as green as jade, its heart a shrivelled, bloodless lump amidst the exposed ribs, my patron god’s mortal remains, from before He became a god, unnervingly small and pathetic.
No, better not think about
that.
Teomitl was waiting for me at the top of the stairs, the magic around him shimmering, a beacon of jade light strong enough to blind. “And now?”
I looked down. Dust shimmered over the Valley of the Dead, which had become an opalescent path like a spider’s web. The procession of priests left a trail of magic, green with a red core, writhing like the tail of a snake, going towards the pyramid of the Moon at the end of the Alley, a looming mass of pale, cold light emitting rays like the thorns of a maguey.
Aside from the priests, there was no sign of any human presence near the pyramid of the Moon. I looked towards the pyramid of the Sun, which had become an almost unbearably strong radiance, but could distinguish no sign of life, either.
Odd. If I were Pezotic, our missing councilman; if I were so afraid of the star-demons I’d sought the protection of the Fifth Sun himself, then I’d have expected him to be near the pyramid of the Sun, which was the focal point of the complex. But there seemed to be no one there.
So much for that brilliant idea. It looked like I was going to go back to Nezahual-tzin like a beaten coyote, my tail tucked between my legs. I didn’t quite have Teomitl’s level of contempt for him, but still… still it would rankle.
Unless…
I looked at the procession of priests again, and back at the third pyramid, the one dedicated to the Feathered Serpent. The priesthood was a long and difficult calling, and Pezotic wouldn’t have been able to invent himself that kind of identity. However…
I watched the procession for a while – feeling, again, that subtle sense of wrong, which had nothing to do with graves or with the rise of the Fifth Sun. One of the last priests, though he wore the same red-and-green clothes, didn’t seem to fit in. I had noticed it, but in a vague, unfocused way, and it had bothered me. And now that I had the death sight on me, I could see that the trail of magic ignored him, the translucent, writhing snake going right through him, instead of rippling as it did around the other priests.
”That’s him,” I said to Teomitl. “Our missing councilman.”
Teomitl was down the steps, obsidian-studded sword drawn, before I could stop him.
TWENTY
The Missing Man
To his credit, Teomitl approached the procession silently enough, but Nezahual-tzin’s guards, trooping after him with no stealth or subtlety, gave him away. The procession came to a swaying stop, the priests turning with angry looks on their faces, the magic of the Feathered Serpent gathering around them.
Pezotic just ran. He must have known that we were after him, and that there was no easy escape.
Teomitl sprinted after him. The guards stopped to argue with the priests, waving what I assumed was Nezahual-tzin’s authority. In the time it took me to finish rushing down the stairs, I could see that it seemed to be working, or at least to be mollifying the priests. They had stopped looking threatening, and the trail of magic was back to its original state.
Since matters appeared well in hand, I went after Teomitl.
By the time I caught up to him he had Pezotic down in the dust of the Alley of the Dead, and was standing over him, his
macuahitl
sword resting on the other man’s chest, the obsidian shards just cutting into the skin.
”Acatl-tzin, there is your suspect.” He stood as rigid as a warrior before his commander.
”Teomitl, I don’t think this is necessary…”
”He’s a coward,” Teomitl said. “He’s shown this clearly enough. I’m not letting him escape.”
I got my first good look at our missing councilman. Pezotic was a small, hunched man, with a face not unlike that of a rabbit, round and harmless, with soft features that made it hard to notice him at all. He wore the priests’ green-and-red clothes uncomfortably and his hair was matted haphazardly with blood, not the regular offerings of a priest, but the panicked gesture of a man seeking to blend in.
And he smelled of fear – reeked of it, from his shaking hands to the sallow tint of his skin, from his sunken eyes to the subdued, almost broken way he moved. Something, somewhere in the past, had touched him, pressed on him, and he had snapped like a bent twig.
”I don’t know what you want,” Pezotic said. “But you don’t have the right–”
Teomitl pressed on the
macuahitl
sword, enough to draw blood. I could see it pulsing along the obsidian shards embedded in the blade, blazing like water in sunlight. “We want to know what’s going on,” he said. “And don’t lie. We know you ran away from the palace. We know you were frightened for your life. We know something happened.”