But Itlani, the first one, was a tequiua.”Ī tequiua. One entitled to tribute. “Pochta had just taken his first prisoner, and shaved his childhood hair. They all had the same mark, but I did not make the connection until this death, and they were buried normally. It was one thing for the Wind to kill a man, but several of them? “How many have there been?” This one would have been, too, if the neighbours had not heard the screams.” The first were dismissed as heart attacks. “What are you not telling me?” I asked, softly.Īt length he said, “He’s not the first man to die like that. He had sounded far too worried, even for such an unusual death. “He must somehow have blurred the line between the underworld and the mortal world.” “Huitxic must have transgressed,” I said. He had probably hoped I would deny the underworld’s involvement in this death, that I would say it was a purely mundane murder. “The Wind of Knives? And why should He come here and kill Huitxic?” Macihuin’s face had hardened, but I could hear the fear in his voice. “The guardian who sees that the boundary between the underworld and the world of the living is maintained.” “It’s from the Wind of Knives.” I felt a chill in my heart as I told him this. However, the shard was all too familiar: seven years ago, I had found a similar one in my student Payaxin’s chest. For him, this murder involving magical obsidian was unfamiliar territory, the intrusion of something dangerous into his life.
Beyond that, I know nothing of why he might have such a shard in his heart. He was a warrior and a respected member of his clan. I had seen enough open chests to learn something of human bodies. The heart had been cut in two, but everything else seemed normal. Macihuin’s guards had opened up the chest to remove the shard: jagged cuts marked the edge of the wound, and the strong smell reminded me of the altar room of a great temple, encrusted with the blood of hundreds of sacrifices. Quetzalcoatl stood next to Him, holding a skull in His hand. Tezcatlipoca’s clawed hands carried the obsidian mirror that held His power, and His face was creased in savage laughter, as if the death amused Him. Behind it, the rich fresco on the adobe wall depicted Tezcatlipoca, God of War and Fate, and His eternal enemy Quetzalcoatl, God of Creation and Knowledge. It lay on the reed mat in the bedroom, its face bearing the blank expression of corpses. We moved from the courtyard to the inside of the house, where two guards watched over the victim’s body.
“Do you want to see the body?” Macihuin asked. I had felt this once before, but… “There is underworld magic in this, but I don’t know what kind exactly. This felt wrong–too smooth, too charged with latent power. “There’s magic involved, to put the shard straight into the heart with so little damage to the skin.” I closed my hand around the shard. And if the underworld was involved directly in a death, as seemed to be the case here, I advised magistrates such as Macihuin. I was a priest for the Dead: I assisted in preparing the corpses, in saying the proper prayers and making the proper sacrifices. And once we undressed him, there was a small splotch of blood over the heart–not large enough to be an entry wound. “From looking at the corpse, I would have said his heart had failed him. “How did you think of opening the chest?” I asked. “It was embedded in his heart, and quite deeply–the guards and I had some trouble extracting it.” I raised my eyes to look at Magistrate Macihuin, who stood in the courtyard, a few steps away from me, watching me intently. One did not find such objects in a dead warrior’s house. Its black surface shimmered with green reflections, and it quivered with the aura I associated with the underworld: blood and pain and death. The obsidian shard, half the size of my palm, lay in my hand: a sharp, deadly thing still stained with blood. OBSIDIAN SHARDS: AN OBSIDIAN AND BLOOD SHORT STORY The Obsidian and Blood Reading Order (Complete)Ġ.5.
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