Harbinger of the Storm - By Aliette De Bodard Page 0,30
to any supplicant, was closed, unmoving in the still air.
Inside, Ceyaxochitl was propped up against the wall, her skin sallow, her whole frame sagging. A frowning physician was holding a bowl of water under her chin.
”No shadow. Her spirit is still unaffected,” he said. “It’s a physical poison.”
”You know about poisons,” Yaotl said.
I couldn’t help snorting. “Yes, but after death. Generally, I don’t have patients. I have corpses.”
The physician withdrew the bowl of water. “That’s as close to a corpse as you can get to, young man. Nothing is responding. She can’t speak, or move any muscle.” He turned to Yaotl. “I’d need to know the day and hour of her birth, to know which god is in charge of her soul.”
Yaotl’s hands clenched, slightly. The physician’s asking for her nameday could only mean that he intended a full healing ritual, which in turn meant the situation was desperate. “Quetzalcoatl. The Feathered Serpent.” God of creation and knowledge, and the only other god to accept bloodless offerings. I couldn’t say I was surprised.
”I’ll send for supplies, then,” the physician said.
I knelt and touched Ceyaxochitl’s warm skin. Nothing responded. Her heartbeat was fast and erratic, as if the organ itself were bewildered.
”She’s in here,” the physician said. “Conscious. It’s just that her body is completely paralysed.”
About as cowardly and as nasty a poison as you could think of. They could have had the decency to make it clean, at least.
”Acatl-tzin,” Yaotl insisted.
”Do you have any idea what she could have been poisoned with?” I asked the physician. He was the expert, not I.
”What other symptoms have you seen?”
Yaotl thought for a while. “She was rubbing at her face before the numbness came. And having some difficulty walking, as if she’d been drunk, but Mistress Ceyaxochitl never drinks.”
Indeed not. She might have been old enough to be allowed drunkenness, but she’d always seen that as a sign of weakness. She’d always been strong.
Gods, what would we do without her?
”Something she ate, then, in all likelihood,” the physician said.
”Something?” I asked. Surely things hadn’t degenerated so fast at the palace that food and drink couldn’t be trusted anymore? “Can’t you be more precise?”
”Not without a more complete examination,” the physician said. His voice was harsh. “But I think you’d want me to see if I can heal her first.”
”Yes,” Yaotl said. “But I also want to make sure that the son of a dog who did this does not get away with it.”
The physician looked at Ceyaxochitl again and scratched the stubble on his chin. “I seem to remember a similar case some time ago. I’ll send back for my records, to see if anything can be inferred from it. In the meantime the best we can do is keep her warm.”
And breathing. It didn’t take a physician to know that if the paralysis was progressing, the lungs would stop functioning at some point, not to mention the heart.
I moved my hand from Ceyaxochitl’s hands to her chest, feeling the heart within fluttering like a trapped thing. “I know you can hear us. We’ll find out who did this. Stay here. Please.”
Please. I knew we’d had our dissensions in the past, our disagreements on how to proceed, but they had been spats between friends, or at least between peers. To think that she was dying, that she might not see the next day…
The Flower Prince strike the one who had done this, with an illness every bit as bad and as drawn-out as the poison that now coursed through Ceyaxochitl’s veins. “Did she say anything?” I asked Yaotl. “Any clues?” Anything we could use…
He shook his head. “Not that I can remember. She complained about the whole afternoon having been a waste of her time.”
But she must have seen something, or suspected something after the fact. Otherwise why take the risk of poisoning her? The penalties for such a crime would have been severe, death by crushing the head, at the very least.
”Nothing at all?”
The physician, who was lifting the entrance-curtain in a tinkle of bells, stopped, and then turned back towards me. “When I was first called, the paralysis hadn’t quite reached everywhere. She managed to say something, for what it’s worth.”
”Yes?”
”Well, her lips were already half-paralysed, but I think it was something about worshipping bells.”
Yaotl and I looked at each other. “Acatl-tzin?”
Bells. Silver Bells. Huitzilpochtli’s sister Coyolxauhqui, She of the Silver Bells, who waited under the Great Temple for Her revenge.
”I don’t know if it makes any sense,” the physician said.