I pulled myself up, fighting another wave of nausea. "I know what I said. But Acamapichtli is right, it's going to get worse un less we do something. The Fifth World is stretched to breaking point already."
Teomitl's lips worked soundlessly for a while. "Then I'm coming with you."
"You're not. There has been enough imperial blood shed as it is."
Teomitl's eyes narrowed. "And what will you do when you're in the heartland, Acatl-tzin? Someone needs to plead Tizoc's case. Someone needs to make apologies. I'm his brother." He said it simply, with no arrogance, and yet it carried an authority worthy of a Revered Speaker.
"You're my student," I said. "I can't…" I stopped. We'd already had this conversation so many times. Ceyaxochitl had been right, he was an adult, and this was his own family at stake, and the Empire he might one day rule. I couldn't keep him forever. "It's not my decision to make."
"Then I'll come." His smile was like a rising sun, the same one, I thought with a pang of regret, he had displayed when I'd taken him as a student and given him permission to court my sister.
"You should take me as well." In the gloom, Nezahual-tzin's skin shone the same milky colour as his eyes, and the mane of the Feathered Serpent spread around him like a cloak.
"Out of the question," Quenami snapped. "This is a desperate attempt, not a wedding banquet."
Nezahual-tzin's eyes narrowed. "I am the representative of Texcoco, and wield the Feathered Serpent's magic in the Fifth World. Do you think it's wise to set me aside?"
"You're also under suspicion of interference in Mexica affairs," Quenami said. "And there's nothing we want of the Feathered Serpent now."
Oh, but we did: knowledge and safety, and compassion, all that gods like the Southern Hummingbird or the Storm Lord would never understand. But, nevertheless, there were far too many of us as it was, and this didn't concern Nezahual-tzin any more.
"I don't make it a habit to offer advice," Acamapichtli said, "but I'd follow Quenami's lead, if I were you. This is a Mexica problem."
Nezahual-tzin's white gaze moved up, towards the heavens. "Not any more."
"Then we'll need you here," I said. "To hold things together." I didn't say "if we fail", but the words hung in the air all the same.
Nezahual-tzin grimaced.
"There are far too many of us going to the slaughter as it is," I said.
He wavered, looking at me and Quenami and Acamapichtli, and at the She-Snake, who had remained silent all the while. "I suppose." He didn't sound as if he believed much of it.
"Then it's settled." Quenami looked at us as if we were foolish subordinates, and I fought an urge to strangle him. "Shall we go?"
I'd expected Quenami to take us to the Imperial Chambers, the place where the council's journey had started. But instead, he took us downwards, to the small room under the pyramid where She of the Silver Bells was still imprisoned.
"There's a wound in the Fifth World," Acamapichtli said, almost conversationally. He'd changed out of his finery, into clothes sober enough to belong to a peasant, though he still bore himself regally enough to be Emperor. "The star-demons come here to drag souls back to their master. The door's been thrown open, which makes it much easier to reach on our side." He sounded amused. "A good thing. Sacrificing two dozen people for this would have taken too much time."
And been a waste. I bit down on a sarcastic comment, and rubbed instead the amulet around my neck, a small silver spider blessed by Mictlantecuhtli, with the characteristic cold, stretchedout touch of Lord Death and of Mictlan. I'd sent to my temple to retrieve it rather than trust Acamapichtli to provide me with one.
Quenami was going around the room, around the huge disk that featured the dismembered goddess, mumbling under his breath, dipping his hands into the blood that dripped down from the altars high above us. The air shimmered with power, and a palpable rage, a deep-seated desire to rend us all into shreds, a feeling I wasn't sure any more whether to attribute to She of the Silver Bells or to Her brother, the Southern Hummingbird.
"Here is what we're going to do," Quenami said at last, turning back towards us. "You'll stand here in the circle, and not move until this is over."
Acamapichtli shrugged in a decidedly contemptuous way, and moved to stand on the stone disk, right over the torso of the goddess. Teomitl, who had remained uncharacteristically silent the entire time, moved to join him. Something shifted as they crossed the boundary of the disk – a change in the light or some indefinable quality that made their faces appear harsher, closer to stone than to flesh.
When I stepped onto the stone I felt a resistance, like the crossing of a veil, and my skin started to itch as if thousands of insects were attacking me. The pendant around my neck became warmer, pulsing slowly like the heart of a dying man.
Quenami was on his knees, smoothing out the blood to create a line around the stone circle. Unlike Acamapichtli he still had his full regalia, the yellow feathers of his headdress bobbing up and down as he worked, the deep blue of his cloak in stark contrast to the blood dripping in the grooves and pooling in the hollows of the disk.
"Feathers were given, they are scattering
The war cry was heard… Ea, ea!
But I am blind, I am deaf
In filth I have lived out my life…"
The blood spread, slowly covering the distorted features of the goddess until nothing was left. Under our feet the earth trembled, once, twice, and a deep, huge heartbeat echoed under the stone ceiling, growing faster and faster with every word Quenami spoke.
"The war cry was heard…. Ea, ea!
Take me into Yourself
Give me Your wonder, Your glory
Lord of Men, the mirror, the torch, the light…"
Quenami withdrew to the centre of the disk, still chanting. In his hands he held a small maize dough figure of a man which he carefully laid on the ground. Blood surged up to cover it from the legs up, as if sucked into the flesh. Quenami withdrew and the manikin seemed, for a brief moment, to dance in time with the quivering all around us, standing on tottering, reddening legs before the pressure became too much, and it flew apart in a splatter of red dough.
"With blood, with heads
With hearts, with lives
With precious stones
In the service of Your glory…"
And then, as abruptly as a cut breath, we were no longer alone. Itzpapalotl, the Obsidian Butterfly, stood in the centre of the room at an equal distance from each of us, huge and dark and towering, Her clawed hands curled up. Her wings spread out behind Her, glinting, hungry angles and planes, all shining with the blood She had shed.
"What a pleasant surprise." Itzpapalotl's voice was low-pitched, strong enough to start an uncontrollable shiver in my chest. The itch on my skin redoubled in intensity, until it was all I could do not to scratch myself to the blood. "Three high priests and a Master of the House of Darts, all for myself." She smiled. Her teeth were obsidian knives, glinting in the dim light, their edges stained with blood.
"I'm not Master of the House of Darts," Teomitl said.
She smiled again, held his gaze until he started to shake. "You will be, soon."
Quenami threw Teomitl an irate glance, and launched into another incantation. "O Itzpapalotl, Obsidian Butterfly, Goddess of War and Sacrifice. We come before you as supplicants."
Acamapichtli snorted, and I bit back a sarcastic remark. Even when summoning gods, Quenami was his old pompous self, as if it would make Her more likely to heed him. She was a goddess, and Her whims and desires would rule Her far more effectively than any human.
Itzpapalotl cocked her head, staring at Quenami as one might stare at an insect. "Supplicants? It's not often that I have those." Her eyes, the two small yellow ones in her face, and all those scattered across Her joints, opened and closed, and She made a noise which might have been a contented sigh. "Unless pleading for their lives."
To his credit, Quenami did not let that slow him down. "We have need to enter the lands you guard."
"I should imagine." Her smile was malicious, but she said nothing more. Silence stretched across the room, broken only by the dripping sound of blood as it ran down from the altar platform, high above us.
"Will you let us pass?" I asked, slowly.
Her gaze turned to me, held me transfixed until a tremor started in my hand. I felt a pressure in my head, as if someone were driving a nail between my eyes, my heartbeat became distant and far too quick. "Will I?" Itzpapalotl asked. "I should think… Not."
"There is need–" Quenami started, but She laughed, a harsh, scraping sound like stone on stone that drowned the rest of his sentence.
"You mortals are so amusing. There is always need."
She was Goddess of War and Sacrifice, the altar on which warriors were destined to die, the blade that would cut hearts from living bodies. I dragged my voice from where it had fled. "What is your price?"
Her smile would have sent a grown man into fits if She hadn't been half-turned away from us, looking at the disk and the dismembered limbs under Her feet. "The price of passage. You're a canny one, for a priest."
"Everything requires sacrifice," I said, slowly. I shouldn't have been the one doing this, the one giving Her obedience and proper offerings. I was a priest for the Dead, and She was out of my purview.
"Sacrifice." She rolled the word on Her tongue, inhaling once or twice like a man enjoying a pipe of tobacco. The eyes on Her joints opened larger, their pupils reduced to vertical slits. "Yes. Sacrifice."
I said, haltingly:
"I will offer You sheathes of corn taken from the Divine Fields
Lady of the Knife
Ears of maize, freshly cut, green and tender
I will anoint You with new plumes, new chalks
The hearts of two deer
The blood of eagles…"
She listened to the hymn, nodding Her monstrous head in time with my inflections, Her lips shining dark red under the obsidian of Her teeth. But when I was done, She shook Her head, in a fluid, inhuman gesture; and the itch on my skin grew stronger, as if hundreds of ants were climbing up from the ground.
"You take living blood," Quenami said. It sounded almost like an accusation.
"There are – other sacrifices. More potent ones."
"A human heart?" Acamapichtli looked around him, at us all, as if pondering who would resist him least.
"You wouldn't dare." Teomitl's hands tightened.
"For the Fifth World?" Acamapichtli spread his own empty hands, a pose of mock weakness that fooled no one. "You'd be surprised what I can do."
"Fools." Itzpapalotl's voice echoed under the ceiling, coming back to us distorted and amplified, as if a thousand star-demons were speaking. "Grandmother Earth wants to be watered with blood, to replenish what She lost when the gods tore Her apart to make the world. The Fifth Sun feeds on human hearts, for His own crinkled and died in the fires of His birth. I…" She laughed, and the sound sent me down on my knees with my hands going up, as if it would diminish the sensation of my ears tearing apart. "I am what I always was, and I only take what pleases Me."
I stared at the floor, at the outline of She of the Silver Bells, blurred and distorted. "What… is it… that pleases You?" Beyond me, I could see just enough to know that everyone else was on their knees.
She laughed again. I managed to drag my gaze upwards, to see her move, come to stand before Quenami. "A true sacrifice, something that will be missed."
The price of passage, determined by a goddess' whims. My chest felt too tight to breathe. What would she ask for?
She moved faster than a warrior's strike – reaching out in one fluid gesture, towards Quenami, hoisting him up in the air as if he weighed nothing and enfolding him in the embrace of Her wings. The jagged obsidian shards seemed to open up like cruel flowers, and swallowed him whole. There was a brief splatter of blood, and then he was gone without so much as a whimper.
Somehow, that made it worse.
Itzpapalotl turned to us, considering. "From him, I have taken my price. Now…" She'd have looked like a peasant's wife at the marketplace, considering whether to buy tomatoes or squashes if she hadn't been so large, Her features too angular and too huge to be human, Her eyes deep pits into which we all endlessly fell.
She lunged towards Acamapichtli before any of us could move. Teomitl, the faster among us, was only half-rising from his kneeling stance, but Acamapichtli was taken and gone before we could stop Her.
And then there were only the two of us remaining. The goddess stared between us, for a moment that seemed to stretch on forever, and then….
I had a vague impression of speed, of something huge pulling at my body – not strongly, but with a dogged persistence that would never stop come fire or blood. The itch flared up, engulfed me in flames, and there was the face of the goddess, looming up amidst a headdress that wasn't feathers or gold, but hundreds, thousands of obsidian knives, her eyes yellow stars that opened up to fill the whole sky.
I landed with a thud on something hard. The pain and the itches were gone. When I pulled myself up shaking I saw a land that seemed to stretch on forever, scorched and blasted. Overhead hung two huge globes of fire – I couldn't stare at them long, for my eyes burnt as if someone had thrown chilli powder in them – and the ground under my feet was dry and cracked, an old woman's skin. No–