Under other circumstances I would have protested, but we had already made clear the necessity of the journey.
"You want to dedicate this place to Tlaloc?"
"As small a space as I can." He grimaced. His eyes kept slipping to the entrance-curtain, as if he expected someone to interrupt us at any time. "Because of the plague, it's been touched by Chalchiuhtlicue, which should help. But still, if I can avoid Her…"
"She's your god's wife," I said, though I wasn't entirely surprised. Tlaloc and Chalchiuhtlicue formed a… tense couple, always ready to oppose one another. He had ended the Third Age, the one ruled by Chalchiuhtlicue; She had opposed Him when He'd attempted to rule the Fifth World.
I swept the room in silence – I hadn't swept anything since the days of my novitiate, and the dust, pushed back to each corner of the room, brought back memories of the month of Drought, Toxcatl, with everything cleansed for the arrival of the gods, and the palpable tension in the air, like moments before the storm…
"Aya! Paper flags stand in the four directions
In the place of weeping, the place of mists
I bring water to the temple courtyard…"
Acamapichtli knelt, and started tracing two glyphs in the beaten earth – Four Rain, the Second Age, the one ruled by Tlaloc. Then, with a swift, decisive movement, he raised the knife, and slit his wrist – not a superficial cut that would have nicked both veins, but deep enough to hit the artery. It happened so suddenly the blood was already spilling on the ground before I could even so much as move.
"You're mad," I said.
"Desperate," he grated, keeping a wary eye on the entrance-curtain. "Get inside that glyph, Acatl."
"But–" The blood pooled, lazily, at his feet, spreading into the furrows of the glyphs – shimmering with layer after layer of raw magic. Bright red blood, coming from the heart instead of going to it – pressing against the edge of the wound with every passing moment, pumping itself out of the body in great spurts. Acamapichtli was already pale, and swaying.
He was chanting as the blood pooled – not slowly and stately, but a staccato of words, the beat of frenzied drums before the battle was joined – a series of knife stabs into a corpse's chest.
"You destroyed the Third World
The Age of Rain, the Age of Mist and Weeping
The Age of your unending bounty
Drought swept across the earth,
The fruit of the earth lay panting, covered with dust."
And, as the blood hit the floor in great spurts, it turned to mist and smoke – with a faint hint of the stale odour of marshes – sweeping across the room, subsuming everything, until it seemed that nothing of the Fifth World was left. The glyphs shone blue and white for a bare moment, painful across my field of vision, and then faded, and when I looked up again, we were standing in churned mud, at the foot of a verdant hill.
Acamapichtli, however, had lost consciousness – his blood still spurting out from the open wound. Suppressing a curse against illprepared fools, I retrieved my obsidian knife from his limp hand, and slashed the bottom of his cloak into shreds – it was either that or my cloak, and I had no wish to argue with Ichtaca about damaging the High Priest's regalia. I worked quickly – there was no time – pressing my fingers against the nearby muscles to stem the flow of blood. He'd lose the hand – there was no way this would heal gracefully, not after he'd spent so much time bleeding.
At last, I was done, and looked critically at my handiwork – I was no priest of Patecatl, and the gods knew it showed. At least he was no longer bleeding, though it felt I'd spent an eternity with my fingers pressed against his cold skin. Now to make a rudimentary bandage…
I–
Was it just me, or was his wound no longer bleeding – the edges far closer together than they should have been?
The air was crisp and clear; I breathed it in, feeling it burning in my lungs, tingling against the mark in my hand. I'd expected to be down on my knees, struggling to remain conscious – as I had the last time I had visited a god's country.
But nothing happened: the land around me was verdant, endless marshes cut through with canals and streams. In the distance, I could barely make out ghostly silhouettes engaged in a ball-game: the dead who had drowned or died of suffocation, or of water-linked diseases, and who had found their final destination in Tlalocan.
Among the myriad destinations for the Dead, the land of the Blessed Drowned was a pleasant paradise – never lacking food or rain, the maize always blossoming on time, the reeds abundant. A warrior would have chafed, but for me, the son of peasants, the wet air reminded me of my faraway childhood spent on the edge of the lake, and even the ghostly boats passing each other in the canals brought familiar memories of rowing at night – when the sky darkened to two red lips above and below the horizon, and everything seemed to hang suspended on the edge of the Fifth World.
A hand shot out, and grabbed my ankle – I all but jumped up, before realising it was merely Acamapichtli, using me as a leverage to stand up. His face was still pale, but the wound I'd tied off was closed, sinking to nothing against his skin.
"You're lucky," I said. "Opening up an artery tends to be more fraught with consequences."
He shrugged – characteristically careless and arrogant. "Different rules."
I shifted my cane in a squelch of mud. "If you say so." He had still spent the blood, regardless, and I very much doubted he would get that back. "And those different rules also explain why I can breathe here? Last time, in the Southern Hummingbird's heartland–"
Acamapichtli grinned, unveiling teeth that seemed much sharper and yellower than before. "We're not interlopers here, Acatl. I asked the god for His permission, and He has granted it to us."
"Great," I said. Even with the god's permission, I still felt drained. I leant on the cane, watching the hill. It rippled under the wind, and…
Wait a moment. "That's not grass," I said. It rippled and flexed in the breeze, as green as the tail feathers of quetzal birds – pockmarked with thousands of raised dots, swept through with yellow and brown marbling.
Lizard skin.
Acamapichtli grinned again, an expression I was starting to thoroughly dislike. "Of course not. Come on. The god is up there."
Of course. Gingerly, I set out; when the cane touched the skin, I felt a resistance – not at all what I'd expected from grass or earth. It smelled… musty, like dried skins, and it bounced under our steps with alarming regularity. As we climbed higher past the darker streaks, I caught sight of folds and sharper patches – places where one set of skin overrode another – darker patches with the splayed shapes of claws, and larger pockmarks, and almond-shaped holes where the eyes should have been, opening only on blind earth. I didn't even want to know how many lizards had died to make up the hill.
It would have been an arduous climb, even had we both been fit – which neither of us was. I leant on my cane, and though Acamapichtli arrogantly strode ahead, he was pale-faced, controlling the trembling of his hands only through an effort of wilclass="underline" I could see the quiver in his fingers, quickly masked.