His lips quirked up. "I could say the same thing about you."
I shrugged. If he wanted to make me angry, attacking my dress was hardly the best way.
"Your sister is waiting for you at the Duality House," Nezahualtzin said.
And I could guess she wouldn't be particularly happy. But I didn't want to say this to Nezahual-tzin – who was Revered Speaker of Texcoco, not my friend or equal. "Anything else I ought to know?"
Nezahual-tzin shrugged. We'd started walking towards the palace entrance, the two warriors following us. "I might have a lead on why Teomitl survived the sickness."
"A lead?" I said.
"I asked the stars," Nezahual-tzin said. It was probably literal, too – his patron god Quetzalcoatl was Lord of the Morning Star among His other aspects. "Magic flowed towards the Duality House that night."
"Hardly surprising," I said. With my healing, and our repeated attempts to heal Teomitl, the place must have been a riot of lights.
"Actually," Nezahual-tzin said, "it was Toci's magic."
That stopped me. "Grandmother Earth? Why would She–?" She was the Earth that fed the maize, that would take us back into Her bosom when the time came: an old, broken woman renewed with every offering of blood; a goddess born from the fragments of the Earth-Monster, eternally thirsting for human hearts and human sacrifices. And, in many ways, She was the opposite of the Southern Hummingbird, our protector deity: the incarnation of female fertility, the nurturing mother, whereas He was the virile, eternally young warrior. "Why would She want to heal Teomitl?" I asked.
"I don't know," Nezahual-tzin said. "But I intend to find out. It seemed to come from a house in the district of Zoquipan." His youthful face was that of an artisan, nibbling away at a massive block of limestone until the sculpture at its core was revealed. "Care to join me?"
I shook my head. "I have to get back to the Duality House." That, or Mihmatini was finally going to lose patience with me.
Nezahual-tzin didn't look particularly disappointed. He did, though, walk with me up to the Duality House, claiming it was for my own safety. I wasn't sure of his motivations, but I welcomed the company, for I was none too steady on my feet.
We parted ways amidst a crowd of pilgrims carrying worshipthorns and balls of grass stained with blood – ranging from gangly adolescents barely old enough to have seen the battlefield to old men walking with canes, wearing long cloaks to hide the scars they'd received in the wars.
"Oh, one other thing," Nezahual-tzin said.
I stopped, and painstakingly turned around. "What?"
"You might be interested to know you're not the only one to have disappeared recently."
Acamapichtli? "I'm not sure–"
Nezahual-tzin's face was utterly impassive. "No one has seen your student since yesterday. Officially speaking, of course."
Of course.
"And you?"
Nezahual-tzin shrugged, casually. "I haven't seen him, either. But I have it on good authority some of the warriors under his command have gone missing."
He'd almost died. He'd said it to me, attempted to warn me: that he couldn't wait any longer for the things he thought were due to him. For the Mexica Empire to flourish under good leadership, and of course Tizoc-tzin's leadership was anything but brilliant. But surely he couldn't mean to… he couldn't want to sink us back into a civil and magical war…?
"I did warn you," Nezahual-tzin said.
And he had; I didn't want to hear it any more now than I'd wanted to hear it back then. "Yes," I said. "Thank you." And I pushed my way into the crowd of the Sacred Precinct without looking back.
FIFTEEN
Corpses and Curses
Contrary to what Nezahual-tzin had told me, Mihmatini wasn't waiting for me at the Duality House.
Instead, I found people grouped in the courtyard: mothers with children on their backs, entire families from the grandmother to the young toddlers, and quite a few warriors, who presented their emotions as an odd mixture of terror and annoyance – as if they were aware they should not have been so afraid of the supernatural. There appeared to be no sick people, but I strongly suspected those were being herded away by the priests of the Duality.
After many enquiries, I finally managed to get hold of Yaotl, my sister's personal slave, who looked at me with his customary sneer and informed me that she'd left for the city, in order to take a look at some of the sick.
"And Teomitl?" I asked
"He left yesterday," Yaotl said, curtly. "A couple warriors came to pick him up."
Like the warriors who had removed their sandals? I didn't like this; I didn't like this at all.
I walked back to my temple in a thoughtful mood, but found it flooded as well, my priests barely able to deal with the flow of supplicants, and Ichtaca himself having taken refuge in the shrine atop the pyramid, looking pale and harried.
"Acatl-tzin! We thought–"
I raised a hand. "It's quite all right," I said, thinking I was making a speciality of running out on them. "I ran into someone, rather unexpectedly, and spent the night stuck in the palace grounds."
Ichtaca looked bewildered. "We looked for you after the riot, but we couldn't find you."
"I was in Tlalocan," I said, briefly – ignoring the awe which spread across his face. "Not my idea. Acamapichtli's."
"But Acamapichtli-tzin–"
I mentally ran through the necessary explanations, and gave up. "Look," I said. "I promise I'll explain everything, but right now there is something slightly more urgent. I think there is a problem with the boundaries."
Ichtaca looked as if he might protest, and then he took a look down into the overcrowded courtyard. "It could be," he said, slowly. "It would explain why so many people have turned up here. They speak of ghosts, and of odd portents…"
"The boundaries are weakened," I said.
"But the Revered Speaker–"
The Revered Speaker should have been protecting us against that, yes. "I don't know," I said. "But it's the only explanation that fits." I thought of Tizoc-tzin; of the stretched bones beneath the sallow skin; of the shadowed eye-sockets that might as well have been empty. A dead man walking in the Fifth World.
"Oh, gods," I said, aloud. "We did it."
We'd brought him back, crossing the boundary between life and death, and it had never closed properly. "It's something we did, with the spell to bring Tizoc-tzin back."
Ichtaca grimaced. He hadn't liked the story when I'd told it to him, but he'd had to bow down to my decision. To our decision. We had taken that as a group – as High Priests and equals, for once. "We don't have star-demons in the streets," he said.
"Because we have a Revered Speaker," I said. "The Fifth World is protected. But that doesn't mean things can't be wrong. Ghosts are hardly a menace."
I stopped, then – and thought of all the sorcerers we'd defeated – all the people who had died in our wars of the conquest, thirsting for revenge over the Mexica. I thought of how easy it was to call up a ghost and listen to their advice. No need to be a sorcerer frighteningly good at magic: our culprit merely needed to call on the right ghost.