He knew.
I glanced at the entrance-curtain. The guard was standing just behind it. I couldn't tell with certainty, but there was probably a second guard as well. No choice, then; no way back; but I had known that before entering the room.
"So," Commander Quiyahuayo said. "Do sit down."
Neutemoc had been watching him with a mixture of horror and fascination. "Going through your pretence of politeness?"
Commander Quiyahuayo bowed his head. The quetzal tail-feathers on his headdress followed his motion, bending like stalks in the wind. "The proper gestures, at the proper time," he said. "Incidentally, don't even think of trying to attack me, physically or otherwise." He said the last with a quick nod in my direction, having seen my hand tighten around one of my obsidian knives. "It would only make things more painful. And believe me, I have no wish to do so."
He sounded sincere, and in many ways that was the worst. "More painful than you made them for Eleuia?" I asked.
"Ah," he said. "Eleuia. Do sit down," he repeated.
"I'd rather remain standing," Neutemoc snapped. "Since you judge that what happened to me was just an inconvenience?"
"A minor thing," Commander Quiyahuayo said. He set his clay tablet aside carefully. "Compared to the stakes."
"What stakes?" I asked, wondering what kind of man would speak of human lives as if they were part of some vast game. Not a man I would like.
Commander Quiyahuayo's smile was ironic. "Why, the Fifth World. What else do we play for?"
"I don't understand," I said, just as Neutemoc snapped, "Are you going to toy with us all night? Or just do to us as you did to Eleuia?"
Commander Quiyahuayo's smile slowly faded. "You still care for the bitch," he said, surprised. "Why? She tried to kill you."
If Neutemoc was shocked at this, he didn't show it. "So did you," he said.
Commander Quiyahuayo shrugged. "Hazards of combats."
This was obviously leading nowhere. Neutemoc was right: Commander Quiyahuayo was toying with us until he became bored. "What's your interest in Eleuia?" I asked. "Does it have anything to do with her child – the one she had in the Chalca Wars, in a temple dedicated to the Storm Lord?"
Commander Quiyahuayo recoiled visibly, though he soon recovered.
"Tell me what is going on," I asked. "We know about the child. We unearthed his bones. We know something is wrong with them." I couldn't help shivering as I said this.
"You've been busy, I see," the commander said.
"Yes," I said. "But I still don't–"
He cut me with a frown. "You're a priest, Acatl. Don't you know what those bones are?"
Eerie, was my first thought. I remembered the feeling I'd had when holding them, the same feeling as in Tlaloc's shrine. "Powerful," I said.
Commander Quiyahuayo shook his head. "Power."
"I–"
Gently, Commander Quiyahuayo rested his hands on the reed mat. "Power incarnate."
"The Storm Lord's power?" I asked.
He shrugged. "The gods' powers are constrained in the Fifth World. That's why They find human agents." He probed at the clay tablet on the ground as it were an aching tooth. "But agents are tricky. Unreliable. They have a will of their own. Some gods desire a vessel that is more… pliant, shall we say?"
I stared at him, my contempt forgotten. Surely… "Tlaloc made a child?" I asked. "He fathered a child with Eleuia?"
Commander Quiyahuayo smiled with the pleased expression of a teacher who had just managed to pass on knowledge. In the flickering light of the braziers, the fangs of the jaguar maw framing his head shone: a second, far more dangerous smile. "The Storm Lord wanted a child who would hold the full extent of His powers. To create life with those constraints is hard, more so when one is a god with no idea of where to start." His voice was grim. "Hence the stillbirth."
It was a fascinating story he was telling me, but I couldn't trust him. Every one of his words was a lie. This was the man who had arranged Eleuia's abduction. "Why should I believe you?" I asked. "You tortured her. You killed her."
"I didn't kill her. The bitch escaped." Commander Quiyahuayo sounded angry. "As to why you should believe me… That, I'm afraid, is your own problem. If you don't, it won't change many things for me."
He was right: either way, he had us at his mercy. I ought to have felt frightened. But I'd entered the Jaguar House knowing what I was doing. I wanted explanations.
Commander Quiyahuayo spread his hands. "Think of Eleuia. Of the kind of woman she was."
The problem was that for a lie, it rang true, too much in keeping with Eleuia's character. Bearing a child would earn her the Storm Lord's favour: an easy way to rise through the hierarchy, borne on the god's powers. And what better way to be safe from hunger than to have the favour of the God of Rain – He who made the maize flowers bloom?
"I still don't understand," I said slowly, to give me time to compose my thoughts. "The child is dead. Whatever Tlaloc wanted to do, it wouldn't have worked."
From outside came shouted orders and the sound of footsteps, running in the distance. Commander Quiyahuayo shook his head in distaste. "My, they're noisy tonight. Pay no attention. Where were we? Ah yes. The child." He smiled. "You see, there was a second child. And this one survived his birth."
I stared at him, incredulous. "That's why you tortured her?"
The shouting had moved away from us, and the sounds of running men were gradually dying down. A breeze stirred the curtain. Neutemoc cursed, and moved away from the draught.
"No," Commander Quiyahuayo said. "I knew there was a child, made jointly by Xochiquetzal and Tlaloc, and borne in Eleuia's womb. I know that it was given to a family of peasants, to raise as their own."
By Xochiquetzal and Tlaloc. Of course. Xochiquetzal had brought the expertise about childbirth; and the Storm Lord the raw power. That was why the Quetzal Flower had lied to me about Mahuizoh and Eleuia. What a fool I'd been.
Commander Quiyahuayo went on, "And I also knew this: that this year is the year the child comes of age. The year Tlaloc can transfer His powers into him. What I wanted to know from Eleuia was where she'd hidden him."
A god-child. A child invested with immeasurable powers, loose in Tenochtitlan, with no constraints placed on his magic. The living extension of the will of a capricious, angry, cruel god…
I shivered.
"I fail to see what the Storm Lord could want," Neutemoc said. He was clearly uncomfortable with the thought of the gods directly interfering in the Fifth World.
I was more used to the idea. And there was only one thing that Tlaloc could want. Xochiquetzal Herself had told me.
He moves up into the world, becomes the protective deity of your Empire. And We – the old ones, the gods of the Earth and of the Corn, We who were here first, who watched over your first steps – We fade.
Xochiquetzal and Tlaloc had both been displaced by Huitzilpochtli's rise to power.