The 13 Secret Cities (Omnibus) (42 page)

“You look nothing like what I saw in José María’s books,” I said. I had expected human shapes, skinned skulls and feathers. Instead, there was glass, light, nebulae and spirals of light.

They spoke back to me in a music that was full of knowledge, but which contained no words.

The edges of the pit dripped with the luminous streams of shining streams of particles, and they dripped onto the Lord’s bodies, shimmering.

Each of the Lords had a pair of human lips, and they shifted their numerous limbs to find a more comfortable position. Then they kissed. The kiss was sensuous, and I could see spiral galaxies beneath the transparent skin.
 
Stars went supernova and shrank back upon themselves behind that transparent skin, and the kiss made a melancholy music, too.

The Lords unlocked from their kiss, and as they took a break, they turned their human mouths upward, to take a moment to drink the multicolored particles.

Their drinking swallowed all light, and it released endless music out from the snow pit.

After satiating their thirst, the Lords returned to their lovers’ kiss.

“I want my tonal,” I said. The blue membrane grew so transparent that it virtually disappeared.

“You already have it,” they spoke. “Our daughter handed it to you.”

“Your daughter?”

“Tonalpohualli, the Heart of the Mictlán City. She rotates over the lake.”

“Yes, I do know her.”

“She says you gave her a gift. You are kind.”

“And what is my tonal, then?”

“Your tonal is the symbol of the house, just like our daughter. You are like her in so many ways.”

“When I came to visit Mictlán in dream at the age of thirteen, I came back without a tonal, even if the calendar said it was supposed to be the house.”

“We remember,” they said. I shuddered at the thought of what memories these beings might have. “But your will was too strong. So strong you left your tonal down here, in the Coil.”

“And how can I prove I have it now?”

“You don’t have to prove anything, Wanderer. Not to us, and not to anybody. As long as you have language, you don’t have to prove anything.”

The rivulets of sparkling liquid thickened. The Lords were beginning to consume the rainbow streams of liquid faster and faster, and I felt my feet slipping on the snow.

I fell on my ass, and the snow slid beneath me. Tiny colored particles clung to my coat and my boots.

They’re pulling you in.

If I didn’t find a foothold, I would fall into the limitless bodies of the Lords.

They will eat me. I know they will eat me.

“One more thing,” I said, and the pit echoed back my words. “I want to talk to my brother José María. I didn’t leave things okay with him.”

The gravitational pull on my flesh eased up for a moment, and I felt the Lords’ gaze—a gaze made of a million eyes—focus on me. They stared and stared.

The Lords pulsed with music, but without anything even close to eyes, I had no real signs of their having heard my request.

“I want to see my brother. I
need to see
my brother.”

The Lords emitted a long musical note, forlorn and alien.

The galaxies inside their translucent skin exploded, bloomed, and then faded into an inky darkness. Were they ignoring me?

Is this all there is?

“It can’t be,” I said. “It can’t.”

The beings beneath me flooded my eyes and ears with fright and beauty, but I had come here for a reason, and I wanted answers.

I felt an anger rise in me. I had wanted to see José María in corporeal form, right inside the Coil, just like he had been there with me the other two times before.
 

“I came here to take my brother back to my world,” I said.

But my brother was nowhere to be seen.

The glow of the snow intensified, and for a moment, it lit up the field around me. It burned so bright, in fact, that for a few moments, I could see up into the vastness of the canyon of Mictlán, as if a flash had gone off from a camera. From my spot at the heart of the canyon, I could see the top of the city of Mictlán, and the temple of flowers, and much farther up, a series of blue eyes on the head of Blue Hummingbird as she nestled in the upper levels of the Coil.

“This is the mouth of the river, Wanderer,” the Lords said. “The nine rivers lead here. Your sibling has swum in their waters, and he flows toward us.”

José María had been a particle of colored light in the snow beneath my feet, flowing into the pit, but how would I know which one?

I got down on my knees and plunged my hands into my snow, hoping to recognize something, anything in the flecks of snow.

Which one is he, dammit? Which one?

I shoveled snow in big handfuls, and its rainbow light turned my clothes red, green, and violet. But in these tiny specks I found nothing that could help me find the one speck I was looking for.
 

“Give him to me,” I screamed, raking my hands through the snow. I lowered my face so I could see the flakes up close, but I didn’t see him. I didn’t hear him.

But the sense of peace in this place continued, and the Lords ignored me. Their gravitational pull was still making me slide toward the edge of the pit. I stood up and took a few steps back. My eyes were not made to see these colored pinpoint at this scale, and I knew I could spend an eternity looking for the right speck.

“So, you will agree to your task?” the Lords said.

“What task?”

“To widen the gates between worlds.”

Even though time had come to a standstill in this pit, my heartbeat quickened in fear.

“I thought you didn’t want that to happen.”

“It is the flowers that would deny the gates, but my wife agrees,” the Lord said.

“And my husband feels the same,” the Lady continued, “that we can’t stop the gates from opening. The time is now. And we love you too much to deny you that journey.”

“But opening gates and all this death—does this mean you will kill everyone on Earth if I do this?”

“We do not kill. We only transfer souls into the other side. Once we take them in, they emerge on the other side of our consciousness.”

“And who does the killing, then?”

“Well, it’s the creatures in
your
world that do. The plants, the insects, the cats, and the men. You all kill. You all die.”

“Why don’t
you
open the gates, then?” I said. I was very angry with these two beings.

“Because we are too old, too far inside the wheels. That is not our role.”

I considered everything I learned inside the Coil, and I wished for a moment that I too could be dead and turned into a particle of colored light in one of these rivers.

And then a word froze my thoughts:
Reina.

Reina.

José María would never have walked away from such a challenge from the Lords of Death. I knew this. He would have thought it was cool as shit, and easy to do. And he
never
would have wished he was dead. He was too brave.

I took a deep breath.

“Sure, I’ll accept.”

“It is decided. And thus, you will need to defeat the Ocullín, Wanderer. Because opening the gates allows his passage, too.”

“My knife—” I said, unsheathing my grandmother’s blade.

“You can keep your object, Wanderer, but in time you will understand that you do not need such things,” the Lords said.

“And what will opening the gates do?” I said.

“It will spill knowledge over your kin,” the Lords said. “And for this, you’ll have to answer to the the flowers and their ancestors one day.”

“And how should I do this? I mean, my world is a whole planet—“

“Nothing is as expected, Wanderer. Stop struggling, and you will find your way.”

The membrane grew thick and blue again, and the incomprehensible bodies of Mictecacíhuatl and Mictlántecuhtli disappeared beneath the shield. And the snow returned to its still state as darkness crept back over me.

Time was frozen down here, yet I could still understand for a moment — for a fraction of a second — how beautiful the Lords really were. If newborns, thirteen-year-olds and twenty-six-year-olds glimpsed these two lovers in dream, what other dreams were possible?

I now understood what my parents had meant about rites of passage. Despite the travels I had made inside this crib of darkness, I still only felt like I was just a nineteen-year-old girl, and
 
deep down inside I feared I was not ready for the Lords’ task.
 

But I had no choice. I gave the things in the pit my word, and their music had only shown me kindness, and peace. And I had seen that rainbow-colored snow that melted in their mouths. Snow made of trillions of souls of living things, like the trees and the moss, babies and adults, birds and insects. I would never want to destroy that.

The silence that swelled from the pit made me uneasy.

I walked back toward the northern road and the city of Mictlán.

I did some quick math as my footsteps echoed along the Northern Road, and I realized that if I emerged from Mictlán again, I would be twenty years old on Earth, but I would be closer to twenty-eight years old from the two journeys I had already made here. The numerals looked beautiful in my mind as I saw them lined up next to each other, and as I moved in the darkness toward the city, I stopped paying attention to my surroundings.

I could see the cylinder of the city about three miles in the distance when I felt a stir in the waters of the lake.

“I will be happy to see you when your teeth fall out, girl,” said a gnarled voice beneath the water. “Weathered, old, ready to die.”

The water’s surface remained smooth, but I knew what lay down there, inside the surface. Whatever magic the Ocullín used made reflections possible on this lake, despite the lack of any light.

This time, instead of letting him chase me like an animal, I sharpened myself to greet him. Now that I was out of the Snow Fields, I removed my coat and wrapped my mother’s shawl around my hips like a sarong. In my right hand I held the tiny knife I had brought with me.

I dragged the knife along the surface of the lake and it sliced open, letting out sharp notes of music and the smell of fresh blood.
 

“I see you in there,” I said. “Show me how you travel.”

“Stupid girl,” roared the Ocullín. “It’s as simple as mirrors. The doorways made of mirrors belong to my father, Black Tezcatlipoca. You used one of his doors when you prayed to Rhinoceros at the music temple in your world. Maybe you’d like to meet my father and tell him about your silly concert someday?”

I turned my blade in front of my eyes, and I stood next to the water as the sound of thousands of legs scuttled toward me.

If the sound was accurate, the Ocullín would tear my back within seconds.

But I called his bluff. No attack came. He only wanted me to fear such a thing.

I knelt on the ground and stabbed the water again, and with my free hand, I reached in.

I emerged with something resembling a wet caterpillar, and it spat in my face. It cut my skin, and it burned. Its body rose from the water, thick, bulbous, like a cancer cell that would never stop dividing.

I wrestled the creature on that road, and I lost my breath as I clawed at it. I slashed it as hard as I could.

I screamed the names of the hummingbirds, and two of them flew down to my location. One distracted the Ocullín, slashing him with its beak. It distracted the Ocullin enough for me to hop on the back of the second bird. We rose in the air. The Ocullín sprouted moth wings and flew upward, chasing after us.

It screamed in a thousand unique voices:

“BITCH”

“CUNT”

“PUTA”

I swatted its caterpillar hairs away from my face, and I sang my own name, just like I did in Chicago at the Parade of Lights. The Ocullín recoiled, and it slashed at my arms, making tiny cuts that stung like fire.
 

“HELL IS REAL. COME SEE IT”

“YOU’LL DIE BURNED AND MUTILATED”

“JOSÉ MARÍA BURNS IN HELL”

The creature’s tongue lapped the blood from my wounds, despite the hummingbird’s attempts to shake off the invader.

We tumbled through a jungle in the upper levels of the Coil, and I crashed into the leaves. The trees shrieked as I slashed at the Ocullín, and the Hummingbird plucked me out with its beak to resume our flight.

We flew past the layered levels of the canyon and emerged onto a flat land dotted only with a mountain with a snowy peak. The very same mountain I had felt and heard the first time I entered Mictlán.

“Take me to the top,” I commanded, and the bird beneath me soared to the destination as the smoke trail that he left with his tail screamed like a bottle rocket.

As we approached the Snow Fields, the Ocullín crawled over my body, and its caterpillar barbs raked my skin.

I knew we were headed toward the Xolotl’s gate, where the snow of the mountain began. As we neared it, I stabbed the Ocullín many times in its face, which was both insect and human. It recoiled and shrieked, and as we dove through the gate, it called me more names, fading into the darkness as I exploded out of Mictlán through the gate at the top of the mountain.