"Acatl-tzin–" Teomitl said.
I raised a hand to silence him and knelt on the platform, drawing one of my obsidian blades. With the ease of practise, I opened my veins, letting the blood drip on my knife – and drew a quincunx on the platform. It pulsed, gently, as if to the rhythm of an alien heartbeat, the air above it shimmering as if in a heat haze.
Then, standing in the centre of the quincunx – in the place that might as well be the centre of the universe – I started the invocation to Lord Death.
"We all must die
We all must go down into darkness
Leaving behind the marigolds and the cedar trees…"
Light blazed, outlining the quincunx in radiance; the wounds on my hands tingled, like coals in a brazier.
"We all must die
We all must leave our flowers, our songs
All jade breaks, all feathers crumble into dust
Nothing is hidden from Your gaze."
In my previous spell of death sight, a veil had gradually descended over the world, until everything material seemed to grow dim and meaningless. But here, the only thing that seemed to happen was that the air grew sharper, burning in my lungs, and the shrines suddenly loomed larger, the inset black stones shining like inverted suns amidst the larger structure of limestone. And under my feet, under the stone, I could see the corpse in the pyramid, its bones as green as jade, its heart a shrivelled, bloodless lump amidst the exposed ribs, my patron god's mortal remains, from before He became a god, unnervingly small and pathetic.
No, better not think about that.
Teomitl was waiting for me at the top of the stairs, the magic around him shimmering, a beacon of jade light strong enough to blind. "And now?"
I looked down. Dust shimmered over the Valley of the Dead, which had become an opalescent path like a spider's web. The pro cession of priests left a trail of magic, green with a red core, writhing like the tail of a snake, going towards the pyramid of the Moon at the end of the Alley, a looming mass of pale, cold light emitting rays like the thorns of a maguey.
Aside from the priests, there was no sign of any human presence near the pyramid of the Moon. I looked towards the pyramid of the Sun, which had become an almost unbearably strong radiance, but could distinguish no sign of life, either.
Odd. If I were Pezotic, our missing councilman; if I were so afraid of the star-demons I'd sought the protection of the Fifth Sun himself, then I'd have expected him to be near the pyramid of the Sun, which was the focal point of the complex. But there seemed to be no one there.
So much for that brilliant idea. It looked like I was going to go back to Nezahual-tzin like a beaten coyote, my tail tucked between my legs. I didn't quite have Teomitl's level of contempt for him, but still… still it would rankle.
Unless…
I looked at the procession of priests again, and back at the third pyramid, the one dedicated to the Feathered Serpent. The priesthood was a long and difficult calling, and Pezotic wouldn't have been able to invent himself that kind of identity. However…
I watched the procession for a while – feeling, again, that subtle sense of wrong, which had nothing to do with graves or with the rise of the Fifth Sun. One of the last priests, though he wore the same red-and-green clothes, didn't seem to fit in. I had noticed it, but in a vague, unfocused way, and it had bothered me. And now that I had the death sight on me, I could see that the trail of magic ignored him, the translucent, writhing snake going right through him, instead of rippling as it did around the other priests.
"That's him," I said to Teomitl. "Our missing councilman."
Teomitl was down the steps, obsidian-studded sword drawn, before I could stop him.
TWENTY
The Missing Man
To his credit, Teomitl approached the procession silently enough, but Nezahual-tzin's guards, trooping after him with no stealth or subtlety, gave him away. The procession came to a swaying stop, the priests turning with angry looks on their faces, the magic of the Feathered Serpent gathering around them.
Pezotic just ran. He must have known that we were after him, and that there was no easy escape.
Teomitl sprinted after him. The guards stopped to argue with the priests, waving what I assumed was Nezahual-tzin's authority. In the time it took me to finish rushing down the stairs, I could see that it seemed to be working, or at least to be mollifying the priests. They had stopped looking threatening, and the trail of magic was back to its original state.
Since matters appeared well in hand, I went after Teomitl.
By the time I caught up to him he had Pezotic down in the dust of the Alley of the Dead, and was standing over him, his macuahitl sword resting on the other man's chest, the obsidian shards just cutting into the skin.
"Acatl-tzin, there is your suspect." He stood as rigid as a warrior before his commander.
"Teomitl, I don't think this is necessary…"
"He's a coward," Teomitl said. "He's shown this clearly enough. I'm not letting him escape."
I got my first good look at our missing councilman. Pezotic was a small, hunched man, with a face not unlike that of a rabbit, round and harmless, with soft features that made it hard to notice him at all. He wore the priests' green-and-red clothes uncomfortably and his hair was matted haphazardly with blood, not the regular offerings of a priest, but the panicked gesture of a man seeking to blend in.
And he smelled of fear – reeked of it, from his shaking hands to the sallow tint of his skin, from his sunken eyes to the subdued, almost broken way he moved. Something, somewhere in the past, had touched him, pressed on him, and he had snapped like a bent twig.
"I don't know what you want," Pezotic said. "But you don't have the right–"
Teomitl pressed on the macuahitl sword, enough to draw blood. I could see it pulsing along the obsidian shards embedded in the blade, blazing like water in sunlight. "We want to know what's going on," he said. "And don't lie. We know you ran away from the palace. We know you were frightened for your life. We know something happened."
Pezotic's eyes widened, and the fear grew stronger. I hadn't thought it was possible, but in the death sight, I could make out a yellow aura around him, exuded from his body like noxious sweat. "You don't know anything," he said.
"People are dead," I said, and saw him flinch, not in surprise, but because he was imagining what could have happened to him had he stayed behind. "Three councilmen. Ocome, Echichilli. Manatzpa." And Ceyaxochitl, but that was a wound I carried on my own, an event like a cold stone in my belly, but one that wouldn't affect him.