Acamapichtli bowed, but his gaze was mocking. "As you wish. Meanwhile–"
"Meanwhile, we keep this palace warded." Quenami's voice was firm. "We make sure everyone is safe."
"Safe?" I all but choked on the word. "This is the second murder, Quenami. I'd say it proves beyond a doubt that we can't keep ourselves safe."
"Not so fast, Acatl. The first murder was a star-demon, but the second attempt… I grieve for Ceyaxochitl-tzin, believe me, but this was purely mundane."
Mundane – this was how he would dismiss her? "She had found a devotee of the Silver Bells," I snapped.
"Still mundane." Acamapichtli sounded angry, as if he couldn't believe my foolishness. But I wasn't able to let him cow me into silence.
"Heavily linked to the first," I said. "Enough to make it necessary to hunt down whoever is summoning the star-demons."
"And we will," Quenami said.
"I've already said it, you put far little trust in our resilience," Acamapichtli said. "We have always endured. We will this time, too."
Quenami said, smoothly, "But your investigation is important too, Acatl."
Another way of saying he had no intention of helping. "Quenami."
"Acatl." Quenami's voice was firm. "We have reached a decision."
"You have," I said.
"No, we," Quenami said. "Do you forget? We are the high priests. We make the decisions as a group."
Only when it suited him. But I couldn't say that. Teomitl might have, in my stead, but I was just a peasant ascended into the priesthood, with no influence or powerful relatives to shelter me. With Tizoc-tzin and Acamapichtli against me, I could not afford to gainsay Quenami. I clenched my hands. "Fine," I said. "Now if you will excuse me, I have a body to prepare for a funeral."
They could not contradict me on this, and let me walk away without another word.
One man with too much confidence in his wards, and another who kept insisting that the Fifth World would resist anything, as if he still wanted to find out how to break it once and for all. That was what we had, for high priests, Duality curse me.
Should another star-demon come down, they would be useless.
I, on the other hand, was determined not to be.
EIGHT
On Mictlan's Threshold
I entered the Imperial Chambers with more reluctance than the last time, remembering the unpleasantness of my previous visit.
I passed them with a deep bow, and divested myself of my sandals in the antechamber. Everything was silent; not the hostile, pregnant atmosphere everywhere else in the palace, but a final silence I knew all too well, one that could not be appealed against or dissipated.
My six priests had withdrawn against the wall as I entered. Palli bowed to me, the blood on his pierced earlobes glistening in the dim light. "It is done, Acatl-tzin."
The body of the Revered Speaker lay on the reed mat, dressed in multi-coloured garb, the knees folded up until they touched the chin. A golden mask with a protruding tongue, symbolising Tonatiuh the Fifth Sun, covered his face, and his body had been painted red, the colour of the setting sun. A jade bead pierced his lips. When I touched it, it pulsed with magic.
As befitted that part of the rites, they had brought a cage containing a yellow dog. It lay curled on the ground, its short-cropped fur completely still save for the slight rise of its breathing, its large head nestled between its paws in a strange pose of resignation.
A faint odour of rot wafted from the body, sour and sickly – nothing I couldn't handle. I knelt in preparation for the ritual, and was about to open the cage, when I saw the traces. There had been other rituals before mine, spots of black and grey peppered the ground, along with scratches like the traces of a knife blade. Whatever it was, it had been cleaned, but not well enough. I drew one of my obsidian blades from its sheath, and scratched at it in turn. It was hard, not like congealed blood or sloughed-off flesh, but more like solidified stone, and it wouldn't yield. I managed to take only a small scrap of it, which lay cold and inert in my hand. Tar? Why would anyone want to use tar?
"Palli?" I asked.
He and the other priests had been quietly leaving the room, for this was a moment for the High Priest alone. When I spoke, he turned around. "Do you know what this is?" I asked.
He walked back, carefully navigating around the accumulated traces of magic in the room. "Tar?" he said.
"That's what I think, but–"
"We didn't use tar," Palli said. "It must have been here before. But it's odd."
Decidedly odd. Tar was an uncommon ingredient to use in a ritual, save for very specific gods; and why use it in the imperial chambers themselves?
"Do you want me to look into it?" Palli asked.
"Yes," I said. "Later, though." Whatever ritual had been accomplished, it was old. I couldn't detect any traces of magic, and the spots of tar didn't look as though they would interfere with the spell I was about to cast. "Now isn't the time."
I waited until Palli had left the room to open the cage. I held the dog by the neck and, with the ease of practise, brought the blade up to slice its throat. It gave a little sigh, like a spent hiss, as it died. Blood ran down my hands, warm and beating with power, staining the blade and the stones of the floor.
I used the knife to draw the shape of a quincunx around us: the five-point cross, the shape that symbolised the structure of the world from the Heavens down to Mictlan.
I sang as I did so, the beginning of a litany for the Dead.
"We leave this earth, we leave this world
Into the darkness we must descend
Leaving behind the precious jade, the precious feathers,
The marigolds and the cedar trees…"
The familiar green light of the underworld seeped into the room, hanging over the stone floor like fog. Shadows moved within, singing a wordless lament that twisted in my guts like a knife-stab.
"Past the river, the waters of life
Past the mountains that crush, the mountains that bind
Past the breath of the wind, the breath of His knives…"
The frescoes and the limestone receded, to become the walls of a deep cenote, at the bottom of which shimmered the dark waters of a lake that had never seen, and would never see, the light of day. Small figures moved over the water, growing fainter and fainter the further they went – first they had faces and features that looked almost human, and then they were mere silhouettes, and finally they seemed as small and insignificant as insects, vanishing into the darkness at the far end.
Cold crept up my spine, like the fingers of a corpse or a skeleton. The air became saturated with a dry, musty smell, like old codices left for too long, or the cool ashes of a funeral pyre.