Harbinger of the Storm - By Aliette De Bodard Page 0,105
I wasn’t quite sure how to deal with. Her only crime, as far as I knew, had been ambition, but it would have led her to worse if we hadn’t intervened. Her sorcerer would have stopped at nothing to get her the Turquoise-and-Gold Crown.
”Things have changed, haven’t they?” Her gaze took in her surroundings – the coiled power of Quetzalcoatl the Feathered Serpent, the ground under us, the throbbing stone mass that was composed of living snakes – no, better not to think about that. There were visions I wasn’t quite ready for, at least not until I was back on dry land.
”They have.” I crouched on my haunches, coming to rest at her level. “They could have turned out another way.”
She shook her head. “Very differently, perhaps. And then you’d have been the one coming to me as a supplicant.”
”Am I not?”
The corners of her mouth twitched, a little. “So it is that even prisoners and slaves have power, in the form of knowledge.” Her hands clenched. “That’s what Nezahual would say, at any rate.”
“He’s not always right.”
”He’s right in too many things.” Her gaze drifted again, coming to rest on Teomitl and Nezahual-tzin, standing side by side like two comrades, if one didn’t know any better. “Enough small talk, Acatl-tzin. You have questions. Ask them.”
”I’m not sure why you’d answer them,” I said, carefully.
”What difference, as long as you have the answers?”
”I’d know how true they were likely to be.”
That made her laugh, sharp, bitter, joyless. She had changed indeed, away from power. “Fine. I’m not a fool. I know when to swim into stormy waters, and to stop before ahuizotls drag me down. I can play for Tenochtitlan, Acatl. I won’t play for the Fifth World.”
I looked at her; she returned my gaze, her eyes steady, not a muscle of her face moving. I had heard the same thing so many times, from so many different people; and they had all been sincere. The problem was the line between reasonable risk and endangering the Fifth World, a line everyone seemed to place much further out in their minds than it really was.
”Fine,” I said, finally. “Let’s say I believe you. For the moment. What did your sorcerer do?”
”Nettoni?” She looked surprised. “He was my bodyguard.”
”Bodyguard?”
”As you no doubt saw, it wasn’t a safe place to be after dark.” Her voice held the lightest touch of irony.
”Yes,” I said. “You employed him before the murders started, though.”
”One can never be too careful.” Her smile was bright, and just the tiniest bit forced, not quite spreading to her eyes.
”I don’t think it’s that,” I said. I was carefully dancing around the subject. What I truly wanted to know was what had frightened everyone in the council. But if I asked directly, I suspected she’d clamp up like a shell. “The palace was a busy place after Axayacatl-tzin’s death.”
Her lips tightened, her eyes moved away from me. I thought of the tar. “Before his death, too, wasn’t it?”
”I was a fool. I came in too late. Axayacatl had told me–” She closed her eyes. “He told me that I need not fear the future. And I believed him.” Her hands came up, as if to push me away. “Fool.”
He had told her… I thought about it for a while. Unbidden, a memory was rising to the surface of my mind, a deep voice on cold shores, and a shadow that became more and more indistinct the further it walked into Mictlan, and its words to me, a mystery that had remained unsolved.
“I’d always known there would be a rift when I died. But only for a time. I’ve made sure it will close itself.”
”He did something,” I said, slowly, carefully, building my sentence in the same way a child will pile wooden blocks in the mud. “To make sure his choice was respected. He and Tizoc-tzin–”
Oh gods. Was I truly sitting here, accusing the former Revered Speaker of colluding with Tizoc-tzin, of arranging the summoning of star-demons to sway the council his way? I couldn’t possibly…
”You’re wrong,” Xahuia said, in the dreadful silence that froze my heart. “Axayacatl was many things, but he was a warrior first and foremost, a servant of Huitzilpochtli. He would have wanted to do the right thing, and preserve the Fifth World.”
”Then why–” I hesitated, but now I was standing on the brink, and all my careful dancing had done nothing but bring me closer to the bitterness holed up inside, the raw memories of