Harbinger of the Storm

by Aliette de Bodard

  Well, he was not here, that was certain. Where in the Fifth World could he have hidden himself?

  I cast a hesitant glance towards the south, where the redtinged silhouette of Tizoc-tzin's chambers towered over Teomitl's small courtyard. Could he be at Court with his brother? If that was the case, we were lost. I couldn't risk coming back, not on such stakes.

  The hollow in my stomach wouldn't close, an unwelcome reminder of how anchorless the Fifth World had become with the death of the Revered Speaker.

  Manatzpa had been waiting politely for me at the entrance to the courtyard. He bent his head towards the sky, where the sun was climbing into its apex, a graceful way of suggesting we needed to hurry without actually saying the words.

  We walked out again, and attempted to locate the youths of imperial blood.

  I found them lounging at the exit of steam-baths, lazing in courtyards over patolli games, listening to slaves playing rattles and drums. None of those I questioned – smooth-faced and careless, with the easy eyes of people who had never had to wonder about their next meal – could tell me where Teomitl was. And time, through it all, kept steadily passing, each moment bringing me closer to Yaotl's deadline.

  At length, a fist of ice closing around my heart, I headed back towards the entrance, Manatzpa in tow.

  As I passed the House of Animals, I caught a glimpse of orange in the darkness.

  I slid inside, unsure whether I had truly seen anything. The House of Animals spread over several gigantic courtyards, cages of woven reeds held rare or beautiful animals, from emerald-green quetzal birds to the graceful, lethal jaguars; from web-footed capybaras munching on palm leaves to huge, slumbering armadillos curled against the bars.

  The flash of orange came again, in the direction of the aviary, where the Revered Speaker kept the birds with precious plumage that could be turned into feather regalia. I crossed the arcades of a gallery, and found myself facing a couple of quetzal birds and, through the bars of their cage, Teomitl, who stood watching them with the intentness of a warrior on a reconnaissance mission.

  "Acatl-tzin?" He sounded shocked and not altogether pleased. But our grievances could wait.

  I raised a hand to forestall him. "I need your help," I said. "To prevent Yaotl from getting into trouble."

  "Trouble?" Teomitl's face focused again on the present.

  "Arresting a sorcerer," I said, curtly.

  "But surely Ceyaxochitl–"

  "Ceyaxochitl is dying," I said. This time, my voice did not quiver. I felt terrible, as if uttering the words to him finally made them reality.

  Teomitl's gaze hardened. "Who? The sorcerer?"

  I nodded.

  He wrapped his cloak around his shoulders, casting a last, regretful glance at the birds. "I'm coming."

  When we reached the entrance neither Yaotl nor the Duality warriors were there.

  "Acatl-tzin?" Teomitl's voice was slightly resentful, as if he expected me to apologise for the disturbance.

  The Storm Lord strike me if I gave in, though. This was not a time for indulging his pride. "They're inside," I said. "If we hurry…"

  But, even as we ran towards the women's quarters, the sounds of battle cut through the courtyard. We were going to be too late.

  NINE

  Fire and Blood

  Teomitl, Manatzpa and I took the courtyards at a run, heedless of the hissing noblemen who barely made an effort to move out of our way. The sound of fighting got closer all the while – obsidian striking wood, obsidian striking obsidian, the familiar cries of the wounded and of the dying.

  By the wall that marked the boundaries of the women's quarter, a guard in the She-Snake's black uniform lay choking in his own blood. Teomitl knelt by his side, assessing the wounds with an expert gaze. He shook his head. His face was still, strangely frozen in a moment between human and divine, half brown skin, the colour of cacao, half the harshness of jade, hovering on the verge of taking over.

  "…by surprise…" the guard whispered. Froth bubbled up from between his lips. His gaze rose towards Tonatiuh the Fifth Sun who hung over the courtyard, swollen with the red of evening light.

  "Spare your effort." Teomitl's voice was curt, an order that could not be refused. "Acatl-tzin?"

  I shrugged. "We go in." I reached up, and fingered the wounds in my earlobes. The scabs easily came off, and my fingers came with blood pooling at their tips.

  I knelt by the dying man, and drew the glyph for a dog on his forehead, whispering the first words of a litany for the Dead, to ease his passage into the underworld.

  "As grass becomes green in spring

  Our hearts open and give forth buds

  And then they wither

  This is the truth

  Down into the darkness we must go…"

  Teomitl watched me in silence, though his whole stance was that of a snake coiled to strike, eager to draw blood.

  "Let's go," I said, with a curt nod.

  Inside, every courtyard was deserted, the entrance-curtains drawn. From time to time the pale faces of women peered at us through the cotton. The sounds of battle were dying out. Whatever had happened, it was over.

  As we approached the courtyard where Xahuia had received me, the air became tighter, as if we were tumbling down a mountain towards denser climates – and magic saturated the air, an unhealthy, suffocating tang that crept over my whole field of vision. I could have extended my priest-senses, but I already knew what it was – Tezcatlipoca's touch, a miasma that rose from the deep marshes, from corpses and from rotten plants.

  Teomitl's face seemed to be made of jade now, as he ran forward.

  But, in the last courtyard, all that we found was an exhausted Yaotl, standing over three bodies. Two were Duality warriors, and the third I would have known anywhere, even without the aura of sorcery that hung around him.

  Something had changed with the courtyard. It took me a while to realise that a new entrance-curtain had appeared where there had been only a frescoed wall. It opened in the midst of a fresco depicting the Southern Hummingbird. As the curtain fluttered in the breeze I saw that it was only the start of a series of holes pierced through several walls, a path that led through courtyard after courtyard, until…

  "Where does it go?" I asked.

  Yaotl nodded, grimly. "I sent the remaining warriors to check, but I would think outside."

  Manatzpa bowed, briefly, to Yaotl, and wandered near the entrance-curtain to get a better look.

  "Of course it goes outside." Nettoni's voice was a spent whisper. "Don't be a fool like them, Acatl."

  I knelt by his side. He had no wounds, and the strength of his magic was still gathered around him, potent enough to give me nausea. And yet… his face was as pale as muddy milk, his mouth curled back, showing the blackness of his teeth. "That's where you sent Xahuia."

  His lips moved, as much a grimace of pain as a smile. "I told you. I was privileged to serve her."

  Axayacatl-tzin had told me otherwise; that they only served each other because their goals lay in the same direction. But he could have been wrong.

  Nettoni grimaced again. "Not much point, in any case. You'd have caught me easily enough. Sometimes, you have to admit defeat."

  Teomitl's hand brushed Nettoni's forehead, and withdrew as if scalded. "Acatl-tzin."

  "She's not a goddess of healing," Nettoni said. The whites of his eyes were slowly filling with blood – red at first, and then darkening as if it was drying inside. "She's never been. And She's not your servant."

  "I'm not naïve enough to think She is," Teomitl snorted.

  We had other things to worry about than Jade Skirt's motivations. "I think it's your god we should be talking about, Nettoni. The one you tried to help."

  He smiled again, and it looked like the death-grin of a skull. "That I tried to help? In many ways, I was as ineffective as you were, Acatl."

  "We put Xahuia to rout, and killed you. I hardly think that's ineffective." I kept nothing back; there
was no point in being polite or kind – not to a dying man, not to a servant of the Smoking Mirror.

  He snorted. His eyes were now as black as obsidian, glimmering with the same harsh light. "Then perhaps I've been more ineffective than you."

  "You killed Ceyaxochitl." Yaotl's voice was harsh. "You poisoned her, you son of a dog."

  Nettoni smiled again. "Have you understood nothing?" His hand closed around my wrist before I could pull away – his touch burnt, and cuts blossomed everywhere he touched me. "You fool…"

  I tried to free myself, but every movement I made widened the cuts. I sucked in a breath against the myriad pinpricks of pain climbing up my arm. "Let me go, the Southern Hummingbird blind you!"

  Yaotl and Teomitl moved, each seizing their obsidian weapon, but Nettoni just smiled, his face taking on the harsh cast of one possessed by the gods. The shadow of black and yellow paint hung on his features, and, like Axayacatl-tzin, I could guess at the shape of a feather-headdress, crowning him in glory. "You're a fool, then… But even fools can learn… Do you not see, Acatl? Do you not see?"

  Teomitl's macuahitl sword swung down, connecting with Nettoni's arm just below the elbow. It sheared through the skin and bone as if through air. Blood spurted in a warm fountain that sank into my clothes. The smell of sacrifices filled the air. Nettoni's face went a little paler, but his smile did not diminish.

  "Not too late…" he whispered, "My Lady…" The blood flow was pouring from him into the beaten earth, power shimmering over it. He whispered a string of syllables I could not understand, and then his eyes closed, as if peacefully asleep, and the light fled from him. His hand and lower arm fell, limp – the fingers opening up, were studded with shards of obsidian like a sword, but, as I watched, even they faded away, until nothing but the severed hand of a corpse remained.

  The sense of coiled power, of wrongness, died with him. I breathed in a burning gulp of air, feeling lighter already.

  "Acatl-tzin." Manatzpa was frowning down at me. "We have to hurry."

  I couldn't understand his urgency. "The Duality warriors have got a head start on us. If they can't find Xahuia, then it's likely we won't. I'm touched by your confidence, but…"

  He cut me with an impatient shake of his head. What in the Fifth World was wrong with him? "Didn't you hear, Acatl-tzin?"

  "I heard a lot of allegations, and most of them were too cryptic for their own good."

  His eyes were wide in the dim light. "The name he said, at the end… Echichilli. Echichilli is in danger."

  Not for the first time we found ourselves running through the deserted courtyards of the Imperial Palace. This time, though, we had Teomitl with us. My apprentice might not have had any idea of how to steer a boat or negotiate at the marketplace, as he had amply proved in the past year, but he did know the palace layout by heart.

  Night had fallen. The stars overhead glittered down upon us like the eyes of a thousand monsters and the hole at the centre of the Fifth World was growing larger and larger, a sense of emptiness that pulsed in my chest, in my hastily bandaged wounds.

  "Do you know where he is?" I asked Manatzpa, after what seemed like the tenth near-identical courtyard.

  He made a short, stabbing gesture with his hands. "My rooms. That's where he was meant to wait for me."

  "It might be a false alarm," I said. "A plan to get us away from the hunt."

  "He doesn't need that." Teomitl's whole stance radiated an unearthly confidence – in the straightness of his back, in the calm shake of his head. "He's beaten us on that already."

  We had left Yaotl behind, to continue the hunt for Xahuia. But whether Nettoni had cared for Xahuia or not, or had been allied with her and chosen to sacrifice himself in order to further the chaos in the Fifth World, if he had been the one to organise her escape, he would have gone about it methodically, secure in his god's favour. I very much doubted we would find her or her son.

  "Then why warn us at all?" He hadn't cared a jot for us; for any of us. He was Texcocan, and he had tried to destroy us. Unless… unless he'd hoped we would die with Echichilli, thus giving him his revenge from beyond death.

  I didn't like the explanation, but nevertheless I had to make room for it, in order to be ready.

  "I don't know why he warned us," Teomitl said, frustrated. "Can you let me focus on where we're going?"

  I bristled, but now wasn't the time to berate him for his lack of respect. "And once we've found them, then what?"

  He turned, briefly, looking genuinely surprised. "I thought you'd know."

  I hadn't really had time to think about it either. It was night, which meant the outside would afford us no extra protection. "There are enough wards on the outside walls to blast even a beast of shadows into oblivion," I said. "For all their power, I don't think the star-demons will be able to cross that line."

  "So we take Echichilli outside?"

  "The Duality House," I said, curtly. It was either that or the shrine of Huitzilpochtli at the Great Temple; but Quenami had made it abundantly clear that the Southern Hummingbird was all but powerless, merely awaiting a new agent to invest with His powers. "It's always a safe haven."

  It would be, even with Ceyaxochitl's illness.

  What we needed was to buy time, to slow down the star-demons.

  We needed The Wind of Knives: the keeper of boundaries, the enforcer of the underworld's justice.

  He'd have come on His own, if the boundaries between the Fifth World and the underworld had been breached. But the stardemons came from the Heavens, which were not His province.

  However, He could still be summoned, by the adepts, or the foolhardy.

  With any other minor underworld deities, I would have drawn a quincunx in blood, and stood chanting at the centre. But I had once merged my mind with the Wind of Knives, to bring down a god's agent in the city; and the link had remained.

  As we ran, I slashed my earlobes, and let the blood pool into my hands, warm and pulsing, an anchor into the Fifth World. I sent my mind questing high above the deserted city, past the Houses of Joy and the warriors' banquets, past the peasants' dwellings squatting at the river's edge and the myriad reed boats bobbing at their anchor, down, into a dark cenote where rainwater pooled, away from the sunlight and the warmth of the Fifth World.

  There was a shock, as if I'd run into a wall. Acatl, a voice like the keening of dead souls said. You are timely. The boundaries are breached. I am coming.

  I could feel Him, gathering darkness into Himself, emerging from the cenote, wisps of shadows and fog trailing behind Him. He was flowing up the canals like a miasma, covering in instants what would have taken hours for a man on foot.

  "Bad news," I said to Teomitl.

  "What?"

  "The boundaries are breached." The summoner, whoever he was, was already in the process of calling down a star-demon into the world.

  Teomitl's face shifted, became the colour of jade. "Then I'm summoning the ahuizotls."

  The ahuizotls were Jade Skirt's creatures, small and wizened beings which lived at the bottom of Lake Texcoco, dragging men down into the water to feast on their eyes and fingernails.

  I shook my head. "They won't be effective." The palace was on the main island of Tenochtitlan, as far away from the water as it was possible to be in a city of canals and boats. Even accounting for the ahuizotls' supernatural speed, they wouldn't be here for a while, assuming they managed to get past the wards at the palace entrance.

  "Do you have a better plan?"

  Then again, the Wind of Knives probably wouldn't be here on time, either.

  At length, we reached a courtyard much like Teomitl's, a quiet, secluded place where only a few slaves swept the ground. I glanced upwards: the stars remained in the same position, and there was no gaping emptiness. For once, we were on time.

  The Wind of Knives was in my mind, a pressure like water against a dike, a whistle like the passage of air through obsidian mountains, a grave voice tearing at me like a grieving
lament. Acatl. I am coming. He was flowing up the stairs of the palace now, the guards scattering in His wake like a flock of parrots.

  Almost there…

  I knelt, and collected more blood from my earlobes to trace a quincunx on the ground. "Acatl-tzin!" Teomitl said, exasperated.

  "You heard me," I said. "The boundaries are breached. I'd rather have protection."

  I started a litany for the Dead:

  "In the region of the fleshless, the region of mystery

  The dead men go forward

  They crawl on bleeding feet, on bleeding hands