Harbinger of the Storm - By Aliette De Bodard Page 0,48
but his smile did not diminish.
”Not too late…” he whispered, “My Lady…” The blood flow was pouring from him into the beaten earth, power shimmering over it. He whispered a string of syllables I could not understand, and then his eyes closed, as if peacefully asleep, and the light fled from him. His hand and lower arm fell, limp – the fingers opening up, were studded with shards of obsidian like a sword, but, as I watched, even they faded away, until nothing but the severed hand of a corpse remained.
The sense of coiled power, of wrongness, died with him. I breathed in a burning gulp of air, feeling lighter already.
”Acatl-tzin.” Manatzpa was frowning down at me. “We have to hurry.”
I couldn’t understand his urgency. “The Duality warriors have got a head start on us. If they can’t find Xahuia, then it’s likely we won’t. I’m touched by your confidence, but…”
He cut me with an impatient shake of his head. What in the Fifth World was wrong with him? “Didn’t you hear, Acatl-tzin?”
”I heard a lot of allegations, and most of them were too cryptic for their own good.”
His eyes were wide in the dim light. “The name he said, at the end… Echichilli. Echichilli is in danger.”
Not for the first time we found ourselves running through the deserted courtyards of the Imperial Palace. This time, though, we had Teomitl with us. My apprentice might not have had any idea of how to steer a boat or negotiate at the marketplace, as he had amply proved in the past year, but he did know the palace layout by heart.
Night had fallen. The stars overhead glittered down upon us like the eyes of a thousand monsters and the hole at the centre of the Fifth World was growing larger and larger, a sense of emptiness that pulsed in my chest, in my hastily bandaged wounds.
”Do you know where he is?” I asked Manatzpa, after what seemed like the tenth near-identical courtyard.
He made a short, stabbing gesture with his hands. “My rooms. That’s where he was meant to wait for me.”
”It might be a false alarm,” I said. “A plan to get us away from the hunt.”
”He doesn’t need that.” Teomitl’s whole stance radiated an unearthly confidence – in the straightness of his back, in the calm shake of his head. “He’s beaten us on that already.”
We had left Yaotl behind, to continue the hunt for Xahuia. But whether Nettoni had cared for Xahuia or not, or had been allied with her and chosen to sacrifice himself in order to further the chaos in the Fifth World, if he had been the one to organise her escape, he would have gone about it methodically, secure in his god’s favour. I very much doubted we would find her or her son.
”Then why warn us at all?” He hadn’t cared a jot for us; for any of us. He was Texcocan, and he had tried to destroy us. Unless… unless he’d hoped we would die with Echichilli, thus giving him his revenge from beyond death.
I didn’t like the explanation, but nevertheless I had to make room for it, in order to be ready.
”I don’t know why he warned us,” Teomitl said, frustrated. “Can you let me focus on where we’re going?”
I bristled, but now wasn’t the time to berate him for his lack of respect. “And once we’ve found them, then what?”
He turned, briefly, looking genuinely surprised. “I thought you’d know.”
I hadn’t really had time to think about it either. It was night, which meant the outside would afford us no extra protection. “There are enough wards on the outside walls to blast even a beast of shadows into oblivion,” I said. “For all their power, I don’t think the star-demons will be able to cross that line.”
”So we take Echichilli outside?”
”The Duality House,” I said, curtly. It was either that or the shrine of Huitzilpochtli at the Great Temple; but Quenami had made it abundantly clear that the Southern Hummingbird was all but powerless, merely awaiting a new agent to invest with His powers. “It’s always a safe haven.”
It would be, even with Ceyaxochitl’s illness.
What we needed was to buy time, to slow down the star-demons.
We needed The Wind of Knives: the keeper of boundaries, the enforcer of the underworld’s justice.
He’d have come on His own, if the boundaries between the Fifth World and the underworld had been breached. But the stardemons came from the Heavens, which were not His province.