Obsidian & Blood (2 page)

  That wasn't natural. Even in the calmecac, there were strictures on the use of the living blood, restrictions on the casting of spells. Furthermore this looked like the private room of a priestess, not a teaching room for adolescent girls. 

  "What happened–" I started, turning to Yaotl.

  But he was already halfway through the door. "Stay here. I'll tell Mistress Ceyaxochitl you've arrived, Acatl-tzin." In his mouth, even the
tzin
honorific sounded doubtful.

  "Wait!" I said, but all that answered me was the sound of bells from the open door. I stood alone in that room, with no idea of why I was there at all.

  Tlaloc's lightning strike Yaotl.

  I looked again at the room, wondering what I could guess of the circumstances that had brought me here. It looked like a typical priestess's room: few adornments, the same rough sleeping mat and crude wicker chests found in any peasant's house. Only the frescoes bore witness to the wealth of the calmecac school, their colours vibrant in the soft light, every feature of the gods sharply delineated. The paintings represented Xochipilli, God of Youth and Games, and His Consort, Xochiquetzal, Goddess of Lust and Childbirth. They danced in a wide garden, in the midst of flowers. The Flower Prince held a rattle, His Consort a necklace of poinsettias as red as a sacrifice's blood.

  Dark stains marred the faces of both gods. No, not only the faces, every part of Their apparel from Their feathered headdresses to Their clawed hands. Carefully, I scraped off one of the stains and rubbed it between my fingers. Blood.

  Dried blood. I stared at the floor again – at what I had taken for dark earth in the dim light of the brazier. The stain was huge – spreading over the whole room, soaking the earth so thoroughly it had changed its colour. I'd attended enough sacrifices and examinations to know the amount of blood in the human body, and I suspected that the stain represented more than half of that. What in the Fifth World had happened here?

  I stood in the centre of the room and closed my eyes. Carefully, I extended my priest-senses and probed at the magic, trying to see its nature. Underworld magic, yet… no, not quite. It was human, and it had been summoned in anger, in rage, an emotion that still hung in the room like a pall. But it didn't have the sickly, spread-out feeling of most underworld magic. Not a beast of shadows, then. 

  Nahual
. It had to be nahual magic: a protective jaguar spirit summoned in the room. Judging by the amount of blood in the vicinity, it had done much damage. Who, or what, had been wounded here?

  I had been remiss in not taking any supplies before leaving my temple – trusting Yaotl to provide what I needed, which was always a mistake with the wily slave. I had no animal sacrifices, nothing to practise the magic of living blood.

  No, not quite. I did have one source of living blood: my own body. With only my blood, I might not be able to perform a powerful spell; but there
was
a way to know whether someone had died in this room. Death opened a gate into Mictlan, the underworld, and the memory of that gate would still be in the room. Accessing it wouldn't be a pleasant experience, but Huitzilpochtli, the Southern Hummingbird, blind me if I let Ceyaxochitl manipulate me once more. 

  I withdrew one of the obsidian blades that I always carried in my belt, and nicked my right earlobe with it. I'd done it so often that I barely flinched at the pain that spread upwards, through my ear. Blood dripped, slowly, steadily, onto the blade – each drop, pulsing on the rhythm of my heartbeat, sending a small shock through the hilt when it connected with the obsidian.

  I brought the tip of the knife in contact with my own hand, and carefully drew the shape of a human skull. As I did so, I sang a litany to my patron Mictlantecuhtli, God of the Dead:

 

 

  A cold wind blew across the room, lifting the entrance-curtain – the tinkle of the bells was muffled, as if coming from far away, and the walls of the room slowly receded, revealing only darkness – but odd, misshapen shadows slid in and out of my field of vision, waiting for their chance to leap, to tear, to feast on my beating heart.

 

 

  A crack shimmered into existence, in the centre of the chamber: the entrance to a deep cavern, a
cenote
, at the bottom of which dark, brackish water shimmered in cold moonlight. Dry, wizened silhouettes splashed through the lake – the souls of the Dead, growing smaller and smaller the farther they went, like children's discarded toys. They sang as they walked: cold whispers, threads of sound which curled around me, clinging to my naked skin like snakes. I could barely make out the words, but surely, if I stayed longer… 

  If I bent over the cenote until I could see the bottom of the water… 

  If I… 

  
No
. I wasn't that kind of fool.

  With the ease of practise, I passed the flat of the knife across the palm of my other hand – focusing on nothing but the movement of the blade until the image of the skull was completely erased. 

  When I raised my eyes again, the crack had closed. The walls were back, with the vivid, reassuring colours of the frescoes; and the song of the Dead had faded into the whistle of the wind through the trees of the courtyard outside.

  I stood, for a while, breathing hard – it never got any easier to deal with the underworld, no matter how used to it you became. Still…

  I had seen the bottom of the cenote, and the Dead making their slow way to the throne of Lord Death. I had not, however, made out the words of their song. The gate to Mictlan had been widening, but not yet completely open. That meant someone in this room had been gravely wounded, but they were still alive.

  No, that was too hasty. Whoever had been wounded in this room hadn't died within – yet I didn't think they'd have survived for long, unless they'd found a healer.

  "Ah, Acatl," Ceyaxochitl said, behind me. "That was fast."

  I turned much faster than I'd have liked. With the memory of Mictlan's touch on my skin, any noise from the human world sounded jarringly out of place.

  Ceyaxochitl stood limned in the entrance, leaning on her wooden cane. She was wearing a headdress of blue feathers that spread like a fan over her forehead, and a dress embroidered with the fused lovers insignia of the Duality. Her face was smooth, expressionless, as it always was.

  I'd tensed, even though she had barely spoken to me, preparing for another verbal sparring. Ceyaxochitl had a habit of moving people like pawns in a game of
patolli
, deciding what she thought was in their best interests without preoccupying herself much with their opinions, and I seldom enjoyed being the target of her attentions. 

  "I don't particularly appreciate being summoned like this," I started to say, but she shook her head, obviously amused. 

  "You were awake, Acatl. I know you."

  Yes, she knew me, all too well. After all, we had worked together for roughly nine years, the greater part of my adult life. She had been the one to campaign at the Imperial Court for my nomination as High Priest for the Dead, a position I neither wanted nor felt comfortable with – another of her interferences in my life. We'd made a kind of uneasy peace over the matter in the last few months, but right now she was going too far.

  "All right," I said. I brushed off the dried blood on my fingers, and watched her hobble into the room. "Now that I'm here, can we dispense with the formalities? Who was wounded here, Ceyaxochitl?"

  She paused for a moment, though she barely showed any surprises. "Hard at work, I see."
  "I do what I can."

  "Yes." She watched the frescoes with a distracted gaze. "What do
you
think happened here?"

  I ran my fingers over the traces of the skull I'd drawn on the back of my hand, feeling Mictlan's touch cling to me like damp cloth. "A nahual spirit. An angry one."
  "And?" she asked.

  It was late, and someone was in mortal danger, and I was tired, and no longer of an age to play her games of who was master over whom. "Someone was wounded – at Mictlan's gates, but has not yet gone through. What do you want to hear?"

  "The nahual magic," Ceyaxochitl said quietly. "I mainly wanted your confirmation on that."

  "You have it." I wasn't in the mood to quarrel with her. In any case, she was my superior, both in years and in magical mastery. "Do I get an explanation?"

  She sighed; but she still didn't look at me. Something was wrong: this was not her usual, harmless games, but something deeper and darker. "Ceyaxochitl…" I said, slowly.

  "This is the room of Eleuia, offering priestess of Xochiquetzal," Ceyaxochitl said. Her gaze was fixed, unwaveringly, on the hollow eyes of the goddess in the frescoes. "Most likely candidate to become Consort of Xochipilli."

  The highest rank for a priestess of the Quetzal Flower. "And she was attacked?" What was Ceyaxochitl not telling me? 

  "Yes."

  I stared at the blood on the frescoes – felt the anger roiling in the room. A nahual spirit would have had claws sharp enough to cut bone, and even a trained warrior would have had trouble defending himself against it.

  "Did you find her?" I asked. "She needs a healer, at the last – if not a priest of Patecatl." There were healing spells – meagre, expensive things that the priests of the God of Medicine jealously hoarded. But a priestess such as Eleuia would surely have a right to them.

  "I've had my warriors search every dormitory. We don't know where Priestess Eleuia is. No one has been able to find her, or to find her trail. She is the only one missing in the whole calmecac, though."

  My heart sank. If it had been a beast of shadows… there were ways, and means, to track creatures of the underworld. But a nahual… There were too many of them in Tenochtitlan at any given time: any person born on a Jaguar day could summon their own nahual, though it would take years of dedicated practise to call up something material enough to carry off a human, or even to wound. 

  "I can attempt to track it," I said, finally, even though I knew it was a futile exercise. Nahual magic was weak to start with, and the coming of sunlight would annihilate it. We had perhaps four hours before dawn, but I doubted that would be enough.

  Ceyaxochitl appeared absorbed in contemplation of the brazier: a studied pose, it suddenly occurred to me.

  "But I still don't see–" I started, with a growing hollow in my stomach.

  She turned, so abruptly I took a step backward. "I arrested your brother tonight, Acatl."

  Her words shattered my thoughts, yanking my mind from worries about Eleuia and the nahual to something much closer to me – and much more unpleasant. She had… arrested my brother? 

  "Which one?" I asked, but I knew the answer, just as I knew why she'd asked about the nahual magic, and why she'd waited for my confirmation before telling me anything. Only one of my brothers had been born on a Jaguar day.

  "Neutemoc? You can't arrest him," I said slowly, but Ceyaxochitl shook her head.

  "He was in this room, covered in blood. And there was magic all over him."

  "You're wrong," I said, because those were the only words that got past my lips. "My brother isn't–"

  "Acatl." Her voice was gentle but firm. "When the priestesses arrived, he was searching the room, overturning the wicker chests and even the brazier. And I've never seen so much blood on someone, except perhaps the Revered Speaker after the Great Sacrifices. Your brother's hands were slick with it."

  I finally dragged my voice from wherever it had fled. "My brother isn't a killer."

  That made no sense, I thought, trying to close the hollow deepening in my stomach. Neutemoc was a successful warrior: a member of the elite Jaguar Knights, a son of peasants elevated into the nobility after his feats in the Tepeaca war. My parents had all but worshipped him, back when they had both been alive. He could do no wrong. He had always been the precious, beloved child – whereas I, of course, was less than nothing, a humble priest who had never had the courage to seek wealth and honour on the battlefield. Of course he was a warrior. Of course he'd know how to kill. 

  But surely… surely he wouldn't do such a thing?

  "I'm sure your brother can explain what he thought he was doing in her room. So far, he hasn't been helpful." Ceyaxochitl's voice was ice again. She disapproved of Neutemoc's arrogance, but I wasn't sure why. Knowing my brother, he'd have said the wrong things to her. The Duality knew it didn't take much to anger her these days.

  I tried to think of something to say, but couldn't form any meaningful words.

  Ceyaxochitl tapped her cane against the clay of the brazier, with a hollow sound. "You're the High Priest for the Dead, in charge of the Sacred Precinct. A case like this is your province, and mine." 

  Guardian, and priest: a Guardian to wield the magic of the Duality, and a priest that of the underworld. We'd done it before; many, many times, both here and in the smaller town of Coyoacan. But this was different. I couldn't…

  Not Neutemoc. Duality, no. We'd parted ways four years ago, and the last thing I wanted was to see him again. I had left him alone in his grand house with his success, freeing him of the burden of my presence. His acts, in any case, had made it painfully clear that he might not completely share my parents' disapproval of me; but that he would do nothing to change it, that he would not even speak up in my defence when Mother was screaming at me from her death-bed. The hollow in my stomach wouldn't close.