"In the region of the fleshless, in the region of mystery
The place where jade crumbles, where gold is crushed
The place where we go down into darkness…"
"I think we'll wait for you outside," Neutemoc said. He shifted uncomfortably – unused, I guessed, to the matter-of-fact way with which we treated death.
Mihmatini shook her head. "You wait outside. I want to see this." Her gaze was hungry, feverish, and I thought I could name the reason for her impatience – she'd leap on anything we could use to make Teomitl see reason.
"Don't overdo it," I said.
Her gaze was hard. "I know what I'm doing."
I sighed, but said nothing. I couldn't push her any further. We walked into the room together – to find Ichtaca on the edge of the circle, watching the ceremony. He bowed to Mihmatini, with the look of uneasy reverence he always had for his magical and political superiors – excepting me, of course.
"You don't look convinced by the ritual," I said.
Ichtaca shrugged. "You know why."
After death, the souls that went into Mictlan lay in scattered shards – not like the sacrifices or the dead in battle, who opened up wings of light to ascend into the Fifth Sun's Heaven, nor the drowned men, who entered Tlalocan whole. Rather, those souls destined for Mictlan needed to strip themselves of every remnant of the Fifth World, pulling their essence from the corpse that had hosted them. It took a few days for that transformation to be complete, but this assumed proper rituals – the washing and laying-out of the body, and the vigiclass="underline" all the small things that kept reminding the soul of the next step in its journey. Here, there had been time for nothing of this; the body had been moved, cutting its link to the place of death.
"Two days," I said, aloud.
"It will have to suffice," Ichtaca said.
We waited side by side, until the chanting subsided; it was time for me to take my place at the centre of the quincunx.
Pochtic's body lay on the ground – not the pale, contorted thing I remembered, but something else. Palli and the others had dressed him in a semblance of a funeral bundle – given the little time they'd had, I suspected there were rather fewer layers of cotton than Pochtic's status warranted; fewer amulets and pieces of jewellery as well.
I inhaled – feeling the cold of the underworld gather itself from the circle under my feet. Green light had seeped from the dried blood on the ground, until it seemed as though I stood in mist. Everything smelled faintly humid – like leaves on the edge of rotting. Then, with one of my obsidian knives, I drew a line across the scarred back of my hand, letting the blood fall onto the floor, drop after drop. There was a small jolt every time a drop connected, and the mist opened itself up to welcome it, with a hunger that was almost palpable.
"From beyond the river
From beyond the plains of shards
I call you, I guide you out…"
The light flared up, coming to my waist; I could see faint smudges within, and hear the distant lament of the dead; shapes moved within the mist – there were hints of yellow eyes and claws and fangs, and the distant glimmer of a lost soul, like dewdrops on flower leaves.
"Past the mountains that bind and crush
Past the wind who cuts and wounds
Past the river that drowns
I call you, I guide you out…"
Nothing happened.
Or rather: the mist remained, and the feeling of emptiness arcing through me, telling me passage into the underworld was open. But no soul came; no vaguely human shape drew itself out of the murky darkness.
The Storm Lord strike me, Ichtaca was right: we were too early, and the soul was still in four hundred scattered pieces.
But no; there was something… some resistance, as if I'd hooked a fish at the end of a line, or rather, more than one fish: I could feel the pulling, the scrabbling of several smaller things trying to get out of the way, with the same intelligence as a shoal of fish or a flock of sparrows.
I grasped my obsidian knife, letting the blade draw a bloody line within my palm – waiting until the obsidian was tinged with my blood. Then I wove the knife up, heedless of the small pinprick of pain that spread from my open wounds – up, and around, as if cutting into a veil.
The air parted with a palpable resistance, and the pull I felt grew stronger – and then, in a moment like a heartbeat, something coalesced in the midst of the circle.
The souls I had seen had been human, but this clearly wasn't. It moved and shimmered, barely within the Fifth World – I caught glimpses of wings and feathers within its ever-changing shape, as if the soul wasn't yet sure how it had died.
"Priest?" It whispered. The voice was to Pochtic as a codex picture was to a god – small and diminished, its timbre extinguished. "Where–?"
"The Fifth World – but only for a little while," I said. "Everything must tarnish and fade into dust, and you are no exception." My voice took on the cadences of the ritual – for this had to be done properly, lest Pochtic never achieve oblivion in Mictlan. "The blood has fled your body; the voice of your heart is silent. The underworld awaits you."
The soul shifted and twisted. If he had been a man, he would have hugged himself. "I'm dead?"
Quite unmistakably so. "Yes," I said.
It moved again, extending tendrils of light to wrap around the funeral bundle – and withdrawing as soon as it touched it, as if it had been burned. "Dead…" it whispered.
What a contrast to the vibrant, arrogant man Pochtic had been, but then, few spirits maintained their cohesion into death. I had only met one, and he had been Revered Speaker of Tenochtitlan, schooled in propriety and ritual since his birth.
"Dead," I said. And, because strong emotions could survive even into Mictlan, "You committed suicide."
A brief flare from the soul; a shifting of lights to become darker. "I did." There was a pause. "I… I was afraid."
I said nothing, not wanting to break the fragile process of gathering its memories.
"He was going to find me – arrest me, kill me. The Revered Speaker…" It paused, shifted again. "I – did something. I–"
It was silent, then – hovering over its own corpse, not daring to touch it. At length, it whispered, and it was the voice of a broken man, "It can't be forgiven. It can't ever be forgiven."
If it still had eyes, it would have wept.
And, if I didn't vividly remember the carnage in the courtyard, perhaps I would have bent or relented – but Tapalcayotl's face was in my mind, black and twisted out of shape by sores, and the memories of a dozen bodies scattered like a grisly harvest, and the vulnerability in Acamapichtli's eyes. "What did you do?"
"I– I– " Its voice was low, halting – ashamed? "He was talking in my sleep, always – whispering, suggesting, threatening – always talking, until I couldn't take any more of it. I just couldn't! He – he wanted me to help him, to get revenge, and I couldn't say no."