Free Master of the House of Darts by Aliette de Bodard Page B

us."
    Neutemoc didn't have much of a sense of humour, especially for grave matters. "Yes, I am."
    "Go ahead. I'm listening."
    He looked surprised. Did he expect me to ignore him? I would have, a year before. But things had changed, and he had to know that. "Look, Acatl. You're not in the army, so you don't have much information on how it's going."
    "I am, though," Teomitl said.
    Neutemoc stubbornly avoided his gaze. "The army is losing faith with Tizoc-tzin. The deaths of the council a few months ago were bad enough, but the campaign was just one series of setbacks after the other. Some of the higher-level warriors are still with him, some others are wavering. And some never had faith at all."
    I didn't ask him which of those categories he fitted into; neither, I noticed, did Teomitl. "And now the death of the warrior and a prisoner… it's a lot. You're going to have touchy people, and not only among the warriors."
    "The merchants?" I asked. They preceded the armies on campaigns, and followed them, too, gathering goods from newly conquered provinces.
    "Yes. Tensions everywhere," Neutemoc said. "It's a bad time for a priest to come barging in with questions." He raised a placatory hand. "I don't see you that way, but I'm your brother."
    I thought about it for a while. Being High Priest didn't make me exempt from the contempt of warriors for noncombatants – but then again, what choice did I have? "It's my calling," I said. "Making sure this stops before it becomes a threat to us all. Keeping the Fifth Sun in the sky, Grandmother Earth fertile. I don't have a choice."
    "I know." Neutemoc grimaced. "Nevertheless – Chicomecoatl walk ahead of you, brother. You're going to need Her luck."
    • • • •
    Mihmatini insisted on giving Teomitl and me amulets to protect against magical attacks. I had no idea how effective they were, but she had had a point on the previous night – much as I hated to admit it, she and Acamapichtli might be right. The last thing we needed was Teomitl and I carrying the sickness everywhere over Tenochtitlan.
    I left Mihmatini at my temple – the last I saw of her, she was in deep conversation about the epidemic with Ichtaca, my moon-faced second-in-command. He looked a little dazed, as if unsure of what had happened to him – he had expected her to be meek and compliant, like most women; criteria which had never applied to my sister – and even less now that she had become Guardian.
    Teomitl went back to the palace, to find the mysterious woman who had been visiting our prisoner, and I set out to see Yayauhqui, the merchant who had had such a blazing argument with Eptli.
    I'd thought that Yayauhqui would be from Pochtlan, like Eptli and his father, but he was unknown there. After spending a good hour enquiring from one blankfaced compound to another, I finally gave up. The man had been with the army and his return couldn't have passed unnoticed: therefore, the more probable explanation was that he wasn't from Tenochtitlan at all. That left Tlatelolco, our sister city to the north – where the largest market in the Anahuac valley congregated daily.
    I dared not take a boat from the temple docks, and in any case it wasn't far. I walked on foot through the canals, gave the Sacred Precinct a wide berth – and went on north, into the district of Cuopepan. Then north again, crossing the canals on foot – I stopped to buy water from a porter by a bridge, handing him a few cacao beans.
    At last, I reached the markers: the huge grey-stone cacti driven into the ground that marked the separation between Tenochtitlan and Tlalelolco. They were, by now, purely symbolic, since Tlalelolco's last Revered Speaker had perished in a short and messy war, eleven years before – putting the Tlatelocan merchants under the direct authority of the Mexica.
    I headed straight for the marketplace, reckoning that a merchant such as Yayauhqui wouldn't waste an opportunity for profit, even after having barely returned from