"I live for Your favour."
Again, that terrible laughter – thunder and rain, and the sounds of a storm heard from a boat adrift on the lake. "We both know you don't."
Acamapichtli didn't move. "I respect Your power, and Your will."
"Yes. That you do."
I hadn't spoken up – I had to steer this conversation back to its proper goal, or they would be talking to each other for hours to come. But the prospect of doing so, to have Tlaloc's undivided attention fixated on me, was enough to cause nausea in the pit of my stomach.
What in the Fifth World had possessed me to come here?
"My Lord," I said. My voice was shaking; I quelled it, as best as I could. "There is an epidemic in the city."
Even looking at the ground, I
felt
His attention shifting to me – the weight of His gaze, the air around me turning tight and warm, like the approach to a storm. "There is." His voice was mildly curious. "As, as High Priest of Lord Death, no doubt you feel it concerns you."
"It concerns us all," I said. The pressure around me was growing worse. Now I knew why Acamapichtli had gone so strangely inarticulate.
"Unless it is Your divine will," Acamapichtli said, from some faraway place.
This time, Tlaloc's laughter seemed to course through me – through my ears and into my ribcage, lifting my heart clear of the chest and squeezing it until it bled. The ground rose up to meet me,and I fell down – pain radiating from my left knee, echoing the frantic beat within my chest.
"My will? You know nothing about My will, save what you see in the Fifth World."
"I need to know…" Acamapichtli's voice drifted from very far away, but I was too weary to focus on anything but the grooves in the ground under my hands, and my cane – lying discarded some distance away.
"Know what?" Tlaloc's voice was mocking again.
"If we're setting ourselves against You." His words fell, one by one, into the open maws of silence.
"What a dutiful High Priest," Tlaloc said, at last. "Your companion, of course, isn't so enthusiastic." I'd expected malice, but it was a simple statement of fact.
"He's often a fool." Acamapichtli's voice came from somewhere above me. "But he means well."
I managed to move – pulling myself into a foetal position, and then raising my head up. Acamapichtli's bare feet seemed to be the only things within my field of vision. "Are we – setting – ourselves against – Your wife?" Each word, like raw chillies, seemed to leave a burning trail at the back of my throat.
There was a pause. "No," Tlaloc said. "You're not setting yourself against either Me or My wife."
"Someone – is using Her magic." I managed to extend my hands towards the cane, hooking the wood with trembling fingers – and haltingly started to bring it back towards me. If I could get up, if I–
"Yes." Tlaloc did not offer any more information – and Acamapichtli, the Duality curse him, didn't seem inclined to question this further.
"I don't understand."
The air tightened around me again. "There is nothing to understand."
And there was something – a familiar tone to the voice, even though it was deeper and stronger than any human voice: an emotion I'd heard all too many times.
"My Lord–"
"There is nothing to understand, priest. Now leave." And there it was again: something I ought to have been able to put a name to, but with only the voice to go on, I might as well have been blind and deaf. Something was wrong. Something–
I needed to see – even if it burned my eyes, I needed to see His face.
The cane was almost within my reach… A last flick of my fingers brought it spinning towards me, raising a cloud of dust from the packed earth of the cave – and a sudden whiff of copal incense from the wood, a smell that didn't belong in Tlalocan, neither in the verdant marshes, nor in this dark and humid cave.
Slowly, carefully, I pulled myself up – my hands were shaking worse than ever, and I had to stop and start again more times than I could count. And of course, neither Tlaloc nor Acamapichtli offered any help. "If not Your wife," I said, slowly, "then who is it?"
And, shaking, I raised my eyes towards the hulking shape of the god, catching a glimpse of blue-streaked skin, pocked with dots, of a necklace of jade beads around His neck, each as big as a human skull, of two snakes on either side of the jaw, climbing upwards through the darkened cheeks, their tails wrapped around the eyes in perfect black circles – the eyes…
They were round, like sage seeds, like water drops, the blue of the sky, an instant before it darkened; the colour of lake waters, of turquoise stones, and at their hearts was a single dot of yellow – a kernel of ripe corn, moments before it was gathered up in the harvest, quivering in the warm breeze…
And I knew, in the instant before my vision was finally extinguished and darkness swept across the world in a great wave that swallowed everything up, that I'd been right – that I had read Him right, even though he was a god.
There had been fear in those eyes – not mild worry, nor annoyance at our trespassing, but a fear real enough to grip Tlaloc's whole being.
And, whatever was going on, if it was enough to scare a god, then it was more than enough to scare the wits out of me, too.
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 an urge to bring my fingers to rub 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.