His eyes were wide in the dim light. "The name he said, at the end… Echichilli. Echichilli is in danger."
Not for the first time we found ourselves running through the deserted courtyards of the Imperial Palace. This time, though, we had Teomitl with us. My apprentice might not have had any idea of how to steer a boat or negotiate at the marketplace, as he had amply proved in the past year, but he did know the palace layout by heart.
Night had fallen. The stars overhead glittered down upon us like the eyes of a thousand monsters and the hole at the centre of the Fifth World was growing larger and larger, a sense of emptiness that pulsed in my chest, in my hastily bandaged wounds.
"Do you know where he is?" I asked Manatzpa, after what seemed like the tenth near-identical courtyard.
He made a short, stabbing gesture with his hands. "My rooms. That's where he was meant to wait for me."
"It might be a false alarm," I said. "A plan to get us away from the hunt."
"He doesn't need that." Teomitl's whole stance radiated an unearthly confidence – in the straightness of his back, in the calm shake of his head. "He's beaten us on that already."
We had left Yaotl behind, to continue the hunt for Xahuia. But whether Nettoni had cared for Xahuia or not, or had been allied with her and chosen to sacrifice himself in order to further the chaos in the Fifth World, if he had been the one to organise her escape, he would have gone about it methodically, secure in his god's favour. I very much doubted we would find her or her son.
"Then why warn us at all?" He hadn't cared a jot for us; for any of us. He was Texcocan, and he had tried to destroy us. Unless… unless he'd hoped we would die with Echichilli, thus giving him his revenge from beyond death.
I didn't like the explanation, but nevertheless I had to make room for it, in order to be ready.
"I don't know why he warned us," Teomitl said, frustrated. "Can you let me focus on where we're going?"
I bristled, but now wasn't the time to berate him for his lack of respect. "And once we've found them, then what?"
He turned, briefly, looking genuinely surprised. "I thought you'd know."
I hadn't really had time to think about it either. It was night, which meant the outside would afford us no extra protection. "There are enough wards on the outside walls to blast even a beast of shadows into oblivion," I said. "For all their power, I don't think the star-demons will be able to cross that line."
"So we take Echichilli outside?"
"The Duality House," I said, curtly. It was either that or the shrine of Huitzilpochtli at the Great Temple; but Quenami had made it abundantly clear that the Southern Hummingbird was all but powerless, merely awaiting a new agent to invest with His powers. "It's always a safe haven."
It would be, even with Ceyaxochitl's illness.
What we needed was to buy time, to slow down the star-demons.
We needed The Wind of Knives: the keeper of boundaries, the enforcer of the underworld's justice.
He'd have come on His own, if the boundaries between the Fifth World and the underworld had been breached. But the stardemons came from the Heavens, which were not His province.
However, He could still be summoned, by the adepts, or the foolhardy.
With any other minor underworld deities, I would have drawn a quincunx in blood, and stood chanting at the centre. But I had once merged my mind with the Wind of Knives, to bring down a god's agent in the city; and the link had remained.
As we ran, I slashed my earlobes, and let the blood pool into my hands, warm and pulsing, an anchor into the Fifth World. I sent my mind questing high above the deserted city, past the Houses of Joy and the warriors' banquets, past the peasants' dwellings squatting at the river's edge and the myriad reed boats bobbing at their anchor, down, into a dark cenote where rainwater pooled, away from the sunlight and the warmth of the Fifth World.
There was a shock, as if I'd run into a wall. Acatl, a voice like the keening of dead souls said. You are timely. The boundaries are breached. I am coming.
I could feel Him, gathering darkness into Himself, emerging from the cenote, wisps of shadows and fog trailing behind Him. He was flowing up the canals like a miasma, covering in instants what would have taken hours for a man on foot.
"Bad news," I said to Teomitl.
"What?"
"The boundaries are breached." The summoner, whoever he was, was already in the process of calling down a star-demon into the world.
Teomitl's face shifted, became the colour of jade. "Then I'm summoning the ahuizotls."
The ahuizotls were Jade Skirt's creatures, small and wizened beings which lived at the bottom of Lake Texcoco, dragging men down into the water to feast on their eyes and fingernails.
I shook my head. "They won't be effective." The palace was on the main island of Tenochtitlan, as far away from the water as it was possible to be in a city of canals and boats. Even accounting for the ahuizotls' supernatural speed, they wouldn't be here for a while, assuming they managed to get past the wards at the palace entrance.
"Do you have a better plan?"
Then again, the Wind of Knives probably wouldn't be here on time, either.
At length, we reached a courtyard much like Teomitl's, a quiet, secluded place where only a few slaves swept the ground. I glanced upwards: the stars remained in the same position, and there was no gaping emptiness. For once, we were on time.
The Wind of Knives was in my mind, a pressure like water against a dike, a whistle like the passage of air through obsidian mountains, a grave voice tearing at me like a grieving lament. Acatl. I am coming. He was flowing up the stairs of the palace now, the guards scattering in His wake like a flock of parrots.
Almost there…
I knelt, and collected more blood from my earlobes to trace a quincunx on the ground. "Acatl-tzin!" Teomitl said, exasperated.
"You heard me," I said. "The boundaries are breached. I'd rather have protection."
I started a litany for the Dead:
"In the region of the fleshless, the region of mystery
The dead men go forward
They crawl on bleeding feet, on bleeding hands
Forward into darkness
Away from the Fifth World's reach."
A veil fell over me, darkening the courtyard, and the stars in the sky receded, became as insignificant as scattered bones. The world shifted and danced, and the faces I glanced at – Teomitl's, Manatzpa's – seemed those of old men. Teomitl's voice came to me, tinny and weak, the veil leeching all resonance, all warmth from his words.
Gods, I hated that spell.
"Acatl-tzin!"
"Let's go," I said.
Teomitl pulled the entrance-curtain aside and strode in, barely holding it long enough for me to enter in turn.
The room stretched before us, as long and narrow as a fishing boat, interspersed with carved columns. Its walls were painted a vibrant ochre, engraved with leaping deer and jaguars.