Master of the House of Darts (39 page)

"A parting gift," I said. "One of the vectors for the sickness." It might have been an elaborate lie from Xiloxoch, but then why give us two, one on Eptli's body, and one directly? The most likely explanation was that it really was the vector of the sickness.

"This?"

"Yes," I said, gloomily. "It's meant to be money from a symbolic standpoint, but what's inside is not gold. I can't figure out–"

My sister made a sound – I thought she was going to cry, but after a while I realised she was laughing. "Oh, Acatl. Sometimes, you're such an idiot."

"What?" I asked, looking at the cloth again – what had I missed.

"Men," Mihmatini snorted. "You're all the same. What was the last time you actually entered the slaves' quarters?"

"Fairly recently."

"For an investigation, right?" She wiped tears from her eyes. "Sometimes, I swear, you're useless."

"If you're finished with the mocking," I said, strongly suspecting I was going to end up looking like a fool again, no matter what I did – why could I never win anything against her? "What is so funny?"

"If you cooked at all, or dealt with food at all, you'd know what the powder is."

"I cook," I said, stiffly.

"Only when you can't find food at your temple or at the palace kitchen." Mihmatini shook her head, amused. "The powder is cacao pinolli – cacao powder mixed with maize flour."

"It's a drink."

"And a base for flatbreads, yes," Mihmatini said.

"Someone is killing people through food?" It made no sense. "Try this one," I said. I gave her a brief description of the other powder, the one Palli had found.

"A deeper yellow than maize flour?" Mihmatini asked. She puffed her cheeks. "It could be many, many things, and I can't be sure without having a look at it. But I think it's chia pinolli – chia seeds and maize flour."

"I detect a pattern," I said. Unfortunately, it was the kind that stubbornly refused to coalesce into anything coherent.

"Yes, me too, but why would anyone want to use those for propagating a sickness?"

"I don't know," I said. I rose, wrapping the broken quill into a piece of cloth, and tucking it into my belt. "If anything occurs, do tell me. I'll be at the palace." I needed to speak to Coatl again – and to see what I could get from either of them about the bribe.

In the corridors and courtyards, the bustle was worse than ever, and the crowd abuzz with the rumours of Tizoc-tzin's departure. Apparently, he'd left at dawn with a close circle of his faithful, leaving Quenami and the She-Snake in charge – a radical departure from tradition, and one that had tongues wagging from the military courts to the treasure halls.

When I reached Coatl's quarters, though, he wasn't there. According to the slaves, he'd left in the night and hadn't come back. "He's going with Tizoc-tzin?" I asked.

The slave shook his head. "Not that we know of. We have received no orders for the removal of his household."

Not knowing what else to do, I went to see the SheSnake, but he was busy with Quenami, and the line of supplicants and noblemen was already overflowing the courtyard of his quarters. I chatted, briefly, with one of his slaves, but it didn't look as though his guards had even started looking for Xiloxoch or Yayauhqui.

Coatl had left. No matter how I turned this around, I didn't like it. He'd said he hadn't taken the bribe, and he was honest, I was sure of that. But why leave at all, in such circumstances? He might have been frightened of the plague, but in this case he would have removed his whole household, not disappeared himself.

Why?

I walked out of the palace, preoccupied, back to my temple, where – to my surprise – I found Neutemoc and Mihmatini in discussion with Palli.

"What are you doing here?"

Neutemoc was dressed for war in the fur-suit of Jaguar Knights, with his helmet tucked under his arm and his
macuahitl
sword in his right hand. And Mihmatini wore her Guardian clothes; her slave Yaotl trailing behind her, holding a basket of fruit and flowers – offerings for calling on the power of the Duality.

"Mihmatini told me about the powders," Neutemoc said. "Why didn't you ask me?"

"You know about cooking?" I couldn't hide my surprise.

His lips quirked up, in that smile that wasn't a smile. "It's not about cooking." His voice took on the singsong cadences of sacred texts. "Forty baskets of cacao pinolli, and forty baskets of chia pinolly every eighty days, eight hundred mantles of cotton every eighty days, and eighty white and yellow cuextecatl costumes every year."

"It's a tribute list," Mihmatini said. "For Tlatelolco. For the last eight years they've been paying this every year."

"Tlatelolco?" The merchant, Yayauhqui.

"Yes. I asked about Eptli," Neutemoc said. "Other than what you told me, nothing much that was new. Except this: his father was a messenger, originally. He was the one who carried back the news that Moquihuix-tzin, the Revered Speaker of Tlatelolco, was plotting against the Mexica Empire. That's how he became a nobleman."

"Tlatelolco." I took in a deep breath. No wonder they'd wanted our fall, our failure in everything. "Let's go."

"Where?"

"To find and arrest someone, before it's too late."

Yayauhqui was not at his stall, and when we inquired at his household, we found him absent there too. The slaves showed us into the courtyard and served us bowls of chilli-flavoured cacao. After a while, a middle-aged woman by the name of Teyecapan came to see us, looking distraught. "They've told me you're looking for my husband. I can assure you, he's done nothing wrong."

"Then let us see him," I said gently. "He can tell us himself."

"He's not here," she said. She looked at us as if we were addled. "It's the Feast of the Sun. He'll be in the slave market, buying a sacrifice victim for the merchants."

Neutemoc threw me an exasperated glance as we walked out. "I'm getting tired of walking back and forth between the houses and the marketplace."

"Not to mention hot," Mihmatini said, hiding a smile. And, indeed, the Jaguar Knight's costume might have looked grandiose, but it was no more comfortable than my High Priest regalia: we were both sweating quite profusely under the withering glare of the Fifth Sun.

Tlatelolco was nowhere as deserted as Tenochtitlan. But for the sick governor, the plague appeared to have touched it little – which made sense if Yayauhqui was behind it all. There were fewer people in the marketplace, but I suspected the missing were mainly Tenochcas.

In the marketplace, the slave section was filled with merchants, discussing in small groups, looking at the slaves for sale – nearly all burly, unblemished men kneeling on the reed mats with the distant gazes of people who expected to be kneeling all day.

Yayauhqui was easy to find: he towered over the other merchants by a head, and, with the true sight on, there was an empty hole where his souls ought to have been.

"Acatl-tzin?" His gaze moved from Neutemoc to Mihmatini, and then back to me. "I did wait for you in the palace, but it was a while and you didn't come back…"

The other merchants were frowning at us – their gazes were sharp and inquisitive, if not yet hostile. "Can we move away a little?" I asked.

Yayauhqui smiled. "It all depends. What do you want?"

"You're under arrest," Neutemoc said, curtly and harshly.

"I don't understand." He sounded genuinely puzzled.

"The plague is linked to Tlatelolco."

"And you come to me? Do you have any idea how many people of Tlatelolca blood are around here?"

"Few who knew Eptli, I'd wager," Mihmatini said.

Yayauhqui considered her, thoughtfully. At length, he bowed. "I'll grant you this, my Lady, but I had little to do with Eptli, and certainly nothing to do with his death."

And he sounded sincere. I knew he was a great liar, but surely, if he'd that much hatred of Mexica – if he was that much closer to his goal of unseating us – surely he would have shown some glee, some excitement? "Come with us," I said.

He shrugged. "It's a nuisance, and I assure you I'm innocent."

"Then you won't mind coming with us until it's all over." A matter of days, or perhaps of hours.

His face darkened, slightly. "I do mind. I have business, and other things to attend to. But if that's what it takes to convince you…"

He walked ahead of us on the way to the palace, his head thrown back, as casually arrogant as any warrior.

"Are you sure it's him?" Neutemoc said.

"He might want to be coming back to the palace," Mihmatini said, slowly, but she didn't sound convinced.

I wasn't, either. If all he'd wanted was to get back into the palace, he could have walked. And someone who could paint spells into the remotest courtyards didn't need a pitiful excuse like an arrest to be at work within the palace complex. "Something is wrong."

"We have the wrong person," Neutemoc said. He shrugged.

"No offence to him, but Yayauhqui is a merchant. Your plague sounds like it's been orchestrated by a warrior with a good grasp of strategy."

"He used to be a warrior," I reminded Neutemoc. "All Tlatelolca were both – merchants and warriors."

"Don't lecture me." Neutemoc looked amused. "I know what you mean, but I still don't think it's him. Call it a gut feeling. He just doesn't seem to have the right mindset."

I wasn't sure how much my brother's gut feelings were worth – but when it came to warriors, they had to be better than mine.

Which left us, it seemed, with not much more to go on.

TWENTY-TWO

Beyond Death

At the palace, we dropped Yayauhqui off into a room for "guests", and I managed to find one black-clad guard willing to keep an eye on him. Though Yayauhqui himself didn't look as though he had any intention of moving: he'd picked up ledgers from his merchant peers before leaving, and he was now sitting cross-legged with the papers spread in his lap, thoughtfully annotating them with a writing reed.

It could have been an elaborate deception, but the most likely explanation was that it was all the truth, and that we'd been mistaken by picking him as the instigator of the plague.

But, if not him, who else? As he had said, we did not lack Tlatelolca. Another of the former imperial family, with more military training, and a stronger will for revenge?

Pochtic would know.

We walked back to Pochtic's rooms, where Ichtaca had readied everything for the spell: my priests had brought back Pochtic's body from the temple, and laid it again in the position in which he had died: readying the
teyolia
– the spirit that travelled the world beyond – for being summoned. Around him they had traced the glyph for
ollin
– movement, the symbol of this Fifth Age – and around the glyph a circle which encompassed the whole room, a symbol for the rules and rituals which bound us all. Now nine of them – one for each level of the underworld – were chanting hymns to Lord Death, beseeching Him to help us summon the dead man's soul.

"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 vigil: 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,