I turned my attention to the bruises. They were by no means abnormaclass="underline" as the body bumped against branches and other obstacles, it was bound to gather quite a few of them. But something about their pattern…
I felt them, carefully. The skin was bluish-black and swollen, resilient to my touch. But bruises inflicted after death didn't swell, and they seldom turned blue-black.
Not all of the bruises were the same age. I stepped back, lifted one of Eleuia's arms. There was… a gradation: some of them were blue-black, bordering on a greenish colour, some of them were barely turning blue; and a few were still red marks on the skin.
My stomach churned. She'd been beaten up, consistently and regularly: in three days, the oldest bruises had had time to start discolouring, but the most recent ones were only burst vessels, the blood barely coagulating.
"Someone tortured her," I said, slowly.
Neutemoc's face turned white and harsh, like a shell.
"They took her, and then they beat her, again and again."
"What for?" Ceyaxochitl asked.
I shook my head. "I don't know. I thought – she had a child, in the Chalca Wars." Even though I didn't see what the child would have had to do with all of this. Unless Eleuia had tried to blackmail Mahuizoh?
"Yes," Neutemoc said. "I remember." His gaze was distant. "But it was stillborn, Acatl."
"That's what Eleuia told you."
Neutemoc said, "I was there, Acatl. I saw her bury the body. Trust me. He could never have lived."
"You're sure?" I asked.
Neutemoc's lips were two dark lines in the oval of his face. "Yes," he said. "I'll bear witness to that, if you wish."
"No need," I said. Huitzilpochtli strike me down. The child had sounded like too great a thing to be ignored – and Eleuia herself not above doing whatever she had to do to ensure her future. But if he was dead…
What could her abductors have wanted from Eleuia?
I ran my fingers on the bruises. Perhaps I was mistaken. But no, there were too many of them, and they were too large to have been caused by random objects dragged by the currents. The way they were spread, too: few parts of Eleuia's body weren't covered in them. It spoke, not of rage, but of a cold-blooded method, from the summoning of the beast to Eleuia's deliberate, methodical torture. My stomach churned again. Who were those people?
Mahuizoh? He had loved her, if I believed my witnesses, or at any rate, had had affection for her. Surely he wouldn't…
My fingers, probing, found a raised area on Eleuia's cheek: a smaller bruise, barely old enough to have discoloured.
It was the pattern of an object that had hit her, engraved into her flesh: a wound that dated from not too long before her death. I knelt, and stared at it. Unfortunately, the blood had spread and partially erased the contours. It had a shape: hints of curves, of stylised lines meeting to form the point of something else…
"Neutemoc?" I asked. "Does this mean anything to you?"
Neutemoc turned Eleuia's face to the light; carefully, as if afraid she'd crumble under his touch. He stared, for a while, at the eyeless hollows, at the small pattern on her cheek. His face was expressionless but his fingers had clenched into fists. "There was no reason," he muttered. "What kind of man…?"
I knew what he was thinking, because I felt the same nausea welling up in me, tightening until I could barely breathe. "Neutemoc."
At length, he shook his head. "No," he said. "That mark is too badly damaged, Acatl."
Ceyaxochitl's cane tapped on the stone floor. "Let me see," she said.
Neutemoc stepped aside, without a word.
Ceyaxochitl, unlike Neutemoc, probed Eleuia's flesh like a buyer investigating the fitness of a dog. A faint trace of magic hung in the air: she was calling on the power of the Duality to aid her sight. "Hum," she said. "It is very deformed."
"Spreading blood," I said. "She was alive for some time after that bruise."
"How long?" Ceyaxochitl asked.
"Not very long," I said. "So?" I felt sick. In my years as a priest for the Dead, I had seen death; I had seen cruelty. But never had I seen it so methodically applied.
And yet they had released Eleuia, or she had escaped. Unless… unless they had summoned the ahuizotl to kill her, thinking to hide their crimes. Possible. It was a risk – no one summoned the Jade Skirt's creatures without paying a price – but possible.
Ceyaxochitl stared at the mark for a while. "I have seen something like it. But I can't remember where."
"Can you find out?" Neutemoc asked.
"Yaotl will take a copy of it," Ceyaxochitl said. "I can't guarantee I'll remember, but maybe someone at the Duality House…"
Neutemoc said nothing while Yaotl sketched a copy of the mark on a maguey paper. He was watching Eleuia like a man dying of thirst, as he must have watched her while she was still alive. I couldn't help thinking of Huei's anger; and how, ultimately, it had been justified.
FOURTEEN
Two Knights
Ceyaxochitl and Yaotl left soon after that, claiming pressing business at the palace. Neutemoc remained where he was, staring at the corpse, in what seemed to be a particularly bleak mood.
I stopped Ceyaxochitl at the door. "I don't suppose you could summon someone from Tlalocan?"
Her eyes held me, expressionless. "From the Blessed Land of the Drowned? You want to summon Eleuia?" Finally, she sighed. "No. The Duality is the source and arbiter of all the gods, but They have no power over where the dead go. And you…"
I could summon the dead, but only those who belonged to my god, Mictlantecuhtli. Eleuia, who had drowned, belonged to Tlaloc, and I couldn't summon her without the Storm Lord's blessing. But there was another way. "If she won't come to my call, I could go to her."
Ceyaxochitl raised her eyebrows. "Risky."
In a god's world, I would be an exile, my magic diluted, my body weak. And there was a risk, no matter how insignificant, that I would meet Father's souclass="underline" a small thing compared to the stakes, but not something I was looking forward to, by any means.
"I know," I said. But Eleuia would know why she had died, and who had abducted her. It was the most direct way to find out the truth.
"I really have to be at the palace," Ceyaxochitl said. "But if you're not back in three hours, I'll know what happened."
I nodded. By trying to enter Tlalocan, I would subject myself to Tlaloc's whims. If I hadn't come back in three hours, there wouldn't be much Ceyaxochitl could do, except perhaps succeed where I had failed.
After Ceyaxochitl and Yaotl had left, I went back into the room. Neutemoc was still staring at Eleuia's body, with a naked hunger that made me sick. He obviously hadn't been listening to a word we'd said, and what he was thinking of was quite obvious. It rankled. Here I was, endangering my life, and all he could think of was Eleuia? Not even Huei, or his children, or his family?
I asked, angrily, "This is what you'd have destroyed your marriage for? This flesh?" I made a sweeping gesture towards the altar, encompassing Eleuia's small, reduced body: the whitened flesh, the wrinkled fingertips… the missing eyes.