for your mercy.”
”No.” Teomitl shook his head, quick and fierce. “I’ve seen that happen, too, and it wasn’t anything like that. More,” he spread his hands, frustrated, “more like having someone you admire fighting for the other side. You know you’ll never stop trying to capture each other, but still…”
I thought of Manatzpa’s face when he had admitted Teomitl was the candidate he favoured above all others. I had assumed it to be a lie after he had revealed himself as a worshipper of She of the Silver Bells, but perhaps it had been more complex than that. “I see. What else?”
Teomitl grimaced. “He was unhappy about Echichilli’s death.”
I wanted to say it was obvious, but stopped. I couldn’t possibly hope to get anything out of Teomitl if I was putting my own words in his mouth. “How so?”
”He…” Teomitl floundered for a while, before collecting himself. “I tried to tell him allying with star-demons was a foolish thing to do, that this needed to stop before the whole Fifth World crumbled. And he said something about duty. About how I was being so impressively dutiful, but that duty had killed Echichilli, and that he was done with duty himself.”
Echichilli? I tried to remember who he had favoured. No one, as far as I could recall. He had been the oldest member of the council, aggrieved that no arrangement could be reached. “Duty to whom?”
”He didn’t say,” Teomitl said. “I’d guess either the She-Snake or…” He paused for a moment, and went on, “My brother. They’re the only two to whom Echichilli could possibly have a duty.”
Xahuia did seem like a pretty unlikely candidate. But we would gain nothing by being too hasty. And I had yet to understand how duty to anyone could have led to a star-demon killing Echichilli.
Unless he had been doing someone else’s dirty work?
But no, he couldn’t be the summoner of the star-demons, or, like Manatzpa, he would have been able to banish the one that had killed him. Instead, he had bowed to the inevitable…
”He knew something, too,” I said. “Whatever it was. And he was killed for it.”
”That doesn’t really help, does it?”
”It might,” I said. So far, I’d assumed the killings of the council had been random, intended to throw us all into chaos. But if both Manatzpa and Echichilli had been killed to silence them, then something else was going on. It was no longer exclusively a matter of making sure the council wouldn’t select a Revered Speaker. There was something else going on; something much larger. “There has to be a reason behind the sequence of the killings. Something we’re missing.”
Teomitl grimaced again. “And?”
”I don’t know.” I was feeling increasingly frustrated. “All the dead men have been taken by star-demons. They’re out of Mictlantecuhtli’s dominion. I can’t even hope to summon them and make them talk.”
The usual way to get the ghosts of people who did not belong to Lord Death was to go into the lands of the god to whom they belonged, either Tlaloc the Storm Lord, or Tonatiuh the Fifth Sun. However, with star-demons, that was the epitome of foolhardiness. There was no way in the Fifth World I would elect to go into the empty spaces of the Heavens where they roamed, or into the prison the Southern Hummingbird had fashioned for His sister.
”Anything else?” I asked. It looked as though Itzpapalotl had done Her work well, we would not find any evidence left behind by Manatzpa.
”He said he wasn’t the one summoning the star-demons, but that one seems obvious,” Teomitl said, biting his lips to the blood. “No, not much else.” He paused, his face unreadable. “He said other things, too.”
He would not look at me; and given how Manatzpa had felt about Tizoc-tzin, I could guess what he had told Teomitl; something about being his own man, about stopping listening to his brother’s voice.
To be honest, I doubted it would work. Teomitl might be thrown off for a while, bewildered by what appeared sincere admiration, but the fact remained that Manatzpa had been trying to take apart the Mexica Empire. Teomitl loved his country, and he would never forgive Manatzpa for that.
”I see. And Xahuia?”
Teomitl’s face fell. “I didn’t have time to broach that subject, Acatl-tzin…”
I raised a hand to cut him off. “No matter. You did great work. Come on. It’s time to get some sleep.”
TWELVE
The Coyote’s Son
When we came back, late in the following morning, the palace was still in shambles. The