Harbinger of the Storm

by Aliette de Bodard

  Nezahual-tzin grabbed my cloak. "Where?" he asked. "You're the local."

  I almost snapped back that I hadn't been there for the previous imperial funeral, and that as Revered Speaker of Texcoco he had to know as well, but then memory flooded in, almost at an instinctive level. "They'll start at the temple for the Dead, where the High Priest of Lord Death will formally relinquish Axayacatl's body over to…" I paused. The rest depended on which god was watching over Axayacatl, whether he would be buried under the auspices of Tlaloc or Huitzilpochtli. Most emperors chose Huitzilpochtli, since the Southern Hummingbird was the most important god of the Empire. But Axayacatl meant "water face", and he had been born under Tlaloc's sign. "I don't know," I said at last. "But they'll be heading to the Great Temple anyway."

  "Hmm."

  I pushed my way closer to the Serpent Wall and used one of the friezes to gain some height over the crowd, whispering an apology to Quetzalcoatl the Feathered Serpent for defacing His effigies. Through the mass of headdresses and coloured garments I could make out the wake of the procession, a slightly emptier space that people were just starting to fill in again. They were almost at the stairs of the Great Temple.

  "Let's go," I said. The smaller empty space in front of us could only be Teomitl, he would arrive ahead of us, but not by much.

  I was almost at the Great Temple, close enough to see the priests gathered on the bloodied steps, and Acamapichtli and Quenami up there with the rest of the council, when the wards caved in.

  Darkness descended across the Sacred Precinct as surely as if a cloth had been thrown over the Fifth Sun; for a moment – a bare, agonising moment of stillness – everything hung in silence, and I allowed myself to believe, for a fleeting heartbeat, that Teomitl was right, that Acamapichtli was right and that we would survive this as we had survived everything since the beginning of the Empire.

  And then the stars fell.

  One by one they streaked towards the Fifth World, leaving a trail of fire in their wake, growing larger and larger, pinpoints of light becoming the eyes of monsters, becoming the joints on skeletal limbs, becoming small specks scattered across the dark-blue skirts of star-demons as they plummeted towards the Great Temple.

  I heard screams, but I was already running, elbowing my way through the press of bewildered warriors. I turned briefly to see if Nezahual-tzin was following, but could see nothing but a heaving sea of headdresses and garlands.

  Most of the crowd ahead of me was going in the opposite direction, away from the star-demons, and soon it was impossible for me to move at all, pressing against the current. As they flowed around me, I reached out for one of my obsidian knives. I brought it up in a practised gesture, and, rubbing my own warm blood against my forehead, whispered a small invocation to Lord Death. The cold of the underworld spread from the sign, and the press around me grew a little less dense. I pushed and pulled. I had to get there, had to warn Acamapichtli before it was too late, had to…

  Faces frozen in grimaces of fear, my elbows connecting with someone's chest, sending them tumbling to the ground, someone pushing back at me, me, stumbling, catching myself just in time, screams and moans, and the sour, sickly smell of fear mingling with that of blood.

  I was on the steps of the Great Temple, looking up into the faces of two Jaguar Knights. "The She-Snake–" I breathed, every syllable like fire in my throat. "Get… the She-Snake…"

  When they turned to look at the twin altars above us, I ran. The fire in my lungs spread to my midriff, and then to my legs and feet until everything burned, but I pushed on. They must have been going after me, too, but the aura of the underworld around me would be slowing them down, I hoped, they must be…

  And then, abruptly, the Fifth Sun was back, beating on my exposed back like the wrath of the gods. I cleared the last of the stairs, stumbled, out of breath, almost into the arms of another Jaguar Knight, who made no move to support me, or even raise his macuahitl sword against me. What…

  The world lurched back into sharp, painful focus, like a blow to the face, the limestone platform and its two altars was slick with blood, overflowing in the grooves. Darker masses punctuated the white stone, slumped in the unmistakable stillness of death. Further away, at the entrance to the leftmost shrine… I walked on, slipping several times in the mass of blood, more spilled power than I had ever seen, and yet curiously dry and empty, offered up to no god, sacrifices that had already taken place, prices that had already been paid, without meaning or magic within.

  Several people stood in the doorway – the quetzal-feather headdress of Quenami, the heron-plumes of Acamapichtli, the unrelieved black tunic of the She-Snake, and Teomitl, breathing heavily with his hands on his knees, shock etched on every feature of his face.

  Across the threshold was a last, bloody mass, and even from where I was I could see the Turquoise-and-Gold crown, its radiance washed away by the gore, lying forlorn and scattered, the discarded remnants of a man who'd believed himself destined to rule us all.

  Tizoc-tzin – invested Revered Speaker of the Mexica Empire, Lord of Men, the Southern Hummingbird's agent in this world – was dead, and we were as children lost in the wild, teetering on the edge of utter extinction.

  TWENTY-TWO

  Sacrifice

  I could tell that Quenami was none too pleased to see me. By the frown on his face, he was currently debating how best to proceed with my arrest.

  We all stood on the wide platform of the Great Temple, in the middle of two altar-stones encrusted with blood. On the right hand side was the shrine of Huitzilpochtli, painted the colour of blood, with carved skulls on the mantel above the door; on the left hand side, the shrine of Tlaloc, with a simple vertical pattern carved in green. Everything seemed deserted, only a handful of people amidst all that blood, the pitiful few living among the dead.

  Acamapichtli's eyes flicked from Tizoc-tzin to me, and then to Quenami. "Don't be a fool," he snarled. "At least, not a bigger one than you've already been."

  "He… " Quenami said. "He killed…"

  How dare he accuse me of that? "You did that yourself," I said. "You and your schemes to put an unworthy man on the throne." I turned to the She-Snake, who was watching me with an ironic smile on his face, possibly the only person on the whole platform who seemed somewhat happy to see me. "Please tell me that he hadn't been crowned."

  The She-Snake shook his head. His gaze was expressionless, as if the slickness, the animal smell of the blood around him didn't matter at all. "That was his dearest wish, the one for which he had sacrificed everything. Did you think he wouldn't put on the Turquoise-and-Gold Crown as soon as he was able to?"

  I didn't know. I couldn't think. I could just stare at the damage, at the sky above us, and the lack of anything to protect us any more. In the space of days we'd lost two Revered Speakers, the last one killed by the god Himself, the god who had now withdrawn His protection from us.

  Absurdly, incongruously, I remembered a time a year ago, when the Storm Lord had attempted to seize power, when I'd sat in Ceyaxochitl's temple and wondered whether Tlaloc's rule would be any more gentle than the Southern Hummingbird's. I'd said no. I'd believed the Old Ones, the gods of the corn and of the rain, would be worse than the Southern Hummingbird.

  But now, standing on this platform where the whole council had just died, under the warm, merciless gaze of the Fifth Sun, I couldn't be so sure anymore.

  If Acamapichtli saw what was going through my mind, he said nothing of it.

  Footsteps echoed beside me. Nezahual-tzin, out of breath, had just finished crossing the platform. He leant against the largest altar-stone, the one dedicated to the Southern Hummingbird, his eyes rolling up, shifting to the white of nacre. No-one paid him more than a cursory glance. My stomach lurched, and I fought off a wave of unease. I felt like a fisherman's boat adrift in a storm, the shore masked by veils of rain and fog, and no other landmarks than the heaving waves rising to drown me. Nothing was right, not anymore.

  "T
here has to be something we can do," I said. "Something to–"

  "Crowning a new Revered Speaker would take days. There's nothing we can do, not in so little time." Quenami looked at Tizoc-tzin's body, the flesh of his face heaving up as if he was about to retch. "Nothing, Acatl. We played and lost."

  You played and lost, the Storm Lord's Lightning strike you. Your own fault…

  No. No. That wasn't the way forward. I needed to think, to find a solution.

  But I had spent most of the journey to Tenochtitlan trying to think of precisely that, and found nothing.

  "I fail to see the difficulty." Acamapichtli's voice was harsh and cruelly amused.

  "He can send the star-demons any time–" Teomitl started.

  "Silence, whelp," Acamapichtli snapped.

  Teomitl's face contorted. "You–"

  "I am High Priest of the Storm Lord." Light was coalescing around him, a soft grey radiance like a torch seen through the gloom. "One of the three highest powers in the Mexica Empire."

  "You're nothing."

  "Teomitl!" I snapped. "Now isn't the time. What do you see that's so amusing, Acamapichtli?"

  He smiled again. "As I said. I fail to see the difficulty. The Southern Hummingbird has withdrawn His favour from the Mexica Empire, and taken the life of our Revered Speaker into His lands. All we have to do is convince Him to relent."

  Convince Him to– "You're mad," I said. Even a hint of the heartland had been enough to tear me to pieces; surely he wasn't suggesting that we go down into it. "He's a war god. They're not known for their forgiveness." Not many gods were, to be honest, but I very much doubted the Southern Hummingbird had any mercy at all.

  "It's not forgiveness. It would be in His best interests." He said it as though it was just a matter of strolling into a garden to speak with a senile relative. And, with a stomach-churning flip, I saw that Quenami's head had snapped up, like that of a man being offered a lifeline.

  "It wouldn't achieve anything," I said.

  Acamapichtli laughed, a hollow, mirthless sound that grated on my nerves. "We're the High Priests of the Mexica Empire, the keepers of the universe's order. If there is a chance, any chance, that we can achieve something, shouldn't we try?"

  He'd have had a point, I might have felt shamed, even, if he hadn't been spending so much of his time angling for personal gain. "You've both taken far too many risks with the Empire as it is."

  "They might have," the She-Snake's voice was deceptively soft. "But still… Quenami?"

  Quenami had risen, his face turned away from the bloody mass on the threshold, his eyes narrowed to give him the air of a vulture considering a kill. "Acamapichtli is right. There is still a chance."

  "You tried this once," Teomitl said, taking the words from my mouth. "Remember, when you sacrificed the whole council as a price of passage? It didn't work."

  I should have been arguing with them. But, as time passed, I found myself more and more ill at ease, nausea welling up in my gut, a strange, acrid taste filling my throat and mouth, as if I were going to retch. Unsteadily, I walked to Tizoc-tzin's remains, and, laying my hand in the warm blood, whispered the first words of a litany for the Dead, the familiar words a reassuring anchor to the Fifth World.

  "We leave this earth

  This world of jade and flowers

  The quetzal feathers, the silver…"

  I was on the floor, doubled over in pain The She-Snake's face loomed over me, swimming out of the darkness, mouthing words I could barely make out, something about funeral rites and evening falling…

  "Acatl-tzin?"

  I could feel it, the growing hole in the Fifth World, the yawning chasm waiting to devour us all – darkness and fire and blood, and everything out of kilter, everything as wrong as flowers in the underworld.

  "Acatl-tzin!!" Hands steadied me as I rose. Teomitl, his face distorted by fear.

  "It's nothing," I said. Acamapichtli was watching me with an ironic smile, and now that I knew how to look for it, I saw the slight tremor of his hands, the grimace of pain on Quenami's features, swiftly hidden as he turned his gaze away from me.

  "You're right," I said, each word coming out like a stone, cold and heavy on my lips. "We need to go into the heartland."

  "You said–"

  I pulled myself up, fighting another wave of nausea. "I know what I said. But Acamapichtli is right, it's going to get worse unless we do something. The Fifth World is stretched to breaking point already."

  Teomitl's lips worked soundlessly for a while. "Then I'm coming with you."

  "You're not. There has been enough imperial blood shed as it is."

  Teomitl's eyes narrowed. "And what will you do when you're in the heartland, Acatl-tzin? Someone needs to plead Tizoc's case. Someone needs to make apologies. I'm his brother." He said it simply, with no arrogance, and yet it carried an authority worthy of a Revered Speaker.

  "You're my student," I said. "I can't…" I stopped. We'd already had this conversation so many times. Ceyaxochitl had been right, he was an adult, and this was his own family at stake, and the Empire he might one day rule. I couldn't keep him forever. "It's not my decision to make."

  "Then I'll come." His smile was like a rising sun, the same one, I thought with a pang of regret, he had displayed when I'd taken him as a student and given him permission to court my sister.

  "You should take me as well." In the gloom, Nezahual-tzin's skin shone the same milky colour as his eyes, and the mane of the Feathered Serpent spread around him like a cloak.

  "Out of the question," Quenami snapped. "This is a desperate attempt, not a wedding banquet."

  Nezahual-tzin's eyes narrowed. "I am the representative of Texcoco, and wield the Feathered Serpent's magic in the Fifth World. Do you think it's wise to set me aside?"

  "You're also under suspicion of interference in Mexica affairs," Quenami said. "And there's nothing we want of the Feathered Serpent now."

  Oh, but we did: knowledge and safety, and compassion, all that gods like the Southern Hummingbird or the Storm Lord would never understand. But, nevertheless, there were far too many of us as it was, and this didn't concern Nezahual-tzin any more.

  "I don't make it a habit to offer advice," Acamapichtli said, "but I'd follow Quenami's lead, if I were you. This is a Mexica problem."

  Nezahual-tzin's white gaze moved up, towards the heavens. "Not any more."

  "Then we'll need you here," I said. "To hold things together." I didn't say "if we fail", but the words hung in the air all the same.

  Nezahual-tzin grimaced.

  "There are far too many of us going to the slaughter as it is," I said.

  He wavered, looking at me and Quenami and Acamapichtli, and at the She-Snake, who had remained silent all the while. "I suppose." He didn't sound as if he believed much of it.

  "Then it's settled." Quenami looked at us as if we were foolish subordinates, and I fought an urge to strangle him. "Shall we go?"

  I'd expected Quenami to take us to the Imperial Chambers, the place where the council's journey had started. But instead, he took us downwards, to the small room under the pyramid where She of the Silver Bells was still imprisoned.

  "There's a wound in the Fifth World," Acamapichtli said, almost conversationally. He'd changed out of his finery, into clothes sober enough to belong to a peasant, though he still bore himself regally enough to be Emperor. "The star-demons come here to drag souls back to their master. The door's been thrown open, which makes it much easier to reach on our side." He sounded amused. "A good thing. Sacrificing two dozen people for this would have taken too much time."

  And been a waste. I bit down on a sarcastic comment, and rubbed instead the amulet around my neck, a small silver spider blessed by Mictlantecuhtli, with the characteristic cold, stretched-out touch of Lord Death and of Mictlan. I'd sent to my temple to retrieve it rather than trust Acamapichtli to provide me with one.

  Quenami was going around the room, around the huge disk that featured the
dismembered goddess, mumbling under his breath, dipping his hands into the blood that dripped down from the altars high above us. The air shimmered with power, and a palpable rage, a deep-seated desire to rend us all into shreds, a feeling I wasn't sure any more whether to attribute to She of the Silver Bells or to Her brother, the Southern Hummingbird.

  "Here is what we're going to do," Quenami said at last, turning back towards us. "You'll stand here in the circle, and not move until this is over."

  Acamapichtli shrugged in a decidedly contemptuous way, and moved to stand on the stone disk, right over the torso of the goddess. Teomitl, who had remained uncharacteristically silent the entire time, moved to join him. Something shifted as they crossed the boundary of the disk – a change in the light or some indefinable quality that made their faces appear harsher, closer to stone than to flesh.