There was nothing here I could use; my weapons had been stripped from me, and none were in evidence. He had me backed against a wall, sitting between me and the only exit. Even if I hadn't been wounded...

The sensation of emptiness was becoming as crippling as the wounds. If I didn't act now, I never would.

I reached out in a heartbeat, the side of my hand catching the bowls of warm porridge and sending them flying into his face. Then I was up, ignoring the weakness that knifed through me, and running towards the exit with agility I hadn't known I possessed.

From behind me came curses, and the tread of heavier feet. He was wounded too, but I was drained. He would catch me...

I ran, pain beating like sacrificial drums in my chest. I swung the entrance-curtain out of the way in a jangle of bells, plunged into the courtyard and towards what I hoped was the exit.

I didn't look back, but I knew he was getting closer.

Another room; another set of entrance-curtains; another courtyard. I wasn't going the right way.

"Acatl-tzin. This is pointless," Manatzpa said behind me. His voice quivered, on the edge of breathlessness. "You cannot hope to get out."

I didn't bother to answer, just tried to run faster. But he caught the hem of my cloak, sending me sprawling to the ground. "You fool."

He stood over me in the courtyard under the red, swollen gaze of the Fifth Sun. Obsidian glinted in his hand; a knife. "This is going to be much harder to explain..."

The emptiness in my chest flared to life, a huge fist punching through the confines of the Fifth World. The air around us rippled, the sunlight dimmed, and a cold wind blew through the courtyard, prickling our skins like shards of obsidian.

"What?" Manatzpa asked, the knife pausing in its descent.

I didn't spare time to think. I pulled myself upwards again, and half-crawled, half-ran towards the entrance-curtain. There were voices, close by, indistinct murmurs that sounded like a lament for the dead.

I burst out of Manatzpa's rooms into the courtyard, and all but crashed into Teomitl.

"Acatl-tzin?"

He wasn't alone. A group of guards accompanied him and, just next to him, were a priest of Patecatl, and my sister Mihmatini, pale and wan and looking as though she wanted to tear me to shreds for deliberately splitting my wounds open again. "Acatl!"

I struggled to speak, the air in my lungs like searing fire.

The entrance-curtain tinkled again and Manatzpa staggered out, still holding the knife. It took him a moment to understand what he was looking at; but then his lips curled into a bitter smile, and he threw the knife away. "I see," he said. "It was good game. A pity I lost."

Teomitl looked from me to Manatzpa, but he had never been a man to hesitate for long. "Arrest him." He half-turned towards me. "And there had better be some explanations."

Explanations. Yes. I looked up, at Tonatiuh the Fifth Sun, Whose light was once more bright and welcoming. But I was not fooled. The hole in the Fifth World had widened again; and it could only mean one thing.

The Guardian of the Sacred Precinct a Ceyaxochitl, agent of the Duality in the Fifth World, my friend and mentor a was dead.

There were explanations; or, at any rate, all those I could offer Teomitl, given my current knowledge. He all but carried me to his room, where he insisted I lie down.

"You need rest," Teomitl said, fiercely. "You shouldn't over-exert yourself."

"As if he'd do it," Mihmatini said, from where she was sitting, in the furthest corner of Teomitl's room. "My brother is one of those men who can kill themselves quite effectively by sheer exertion."

Teomitl raised a hand. "Not now." He turned back to me, his face hardened into stone. "I want to know what happened."

He listened to my increasingly confused explanations, his face growing darker as I spoke. "The Guardian is dead?"

"I'm not sure. You could send to the Duality House." But I was sure, and the emptiness in my chest, the tightness in my eyes, weren't only because of the hole in the Fifth World. Ceyaxochitl had loomed large over my life, and, much as I wanted not to believe that she had gone, I had seen enough people deny Lord Death's grip on their lives, and pay the price for their blindness. Death should be accepted, and the living should move on.

I knew this. But still, I couldn't keep my voice from shaking, couldn't stop the prickling in my eyes.

"And Manatzpa is the summoner?"

"Yes," I said. "And the man who killed Ceyaxochitl." But it made no sense. Manatzpa's life had been as much in danger as ours and he had seemed genuinely angry at Echichilli's death. And, to cap it all, he had not been able to cast out the star-demon. "I'm not sure, actually. Some things just don't fit."

"I see." Teomitl's gaze was dark and thoughtful. "I'll ask Tizoc if I can interrogate him, then."

"He's in Tizoc-tzin's hands?" I asked. If he'd been in any hands but Teomitl's, I'd have expected the She-Snake's.

"Those were his guards." Teomitl sounded genuinely surprised. "Do you think I have my own?"

"You're Master of the House of Darts."

"Not yet." His voice was low and fierce. "I have to be worthy of it first."

"I should think you've proved yourself amply."

He sighed. "You're not the one who makes the decisions, Acatl-tzin."

A fact I knew all too well. "Still..."

"Still, I'm a troublemaker." His lips twisted into a smile. "Not ready for politics. But with Tizoc's help, this should sort itself out."

"You went to see him yesterday," I said. "When you said you were going to dismiss the ahuizotls."

"What of it?"

"Nothing," I said. "Except that you could have told me the truth."

"I know how you feel about my brother." Teomitl's face had grown cold again.

Silence stretched, tense and uncomfortable. It was Mihmatini who broke it. "Teomitl," my sister said. "He needs rest. Honestly."

Teomitl looked me up and down. His gaze darkened, as if he didn't like what he saw. "Yes, you're right." He rose, stopped by her side to run a hand on her cheek. "Take care of him."

She smiled. "Of course."

A tinkle of bells, and then he was gone, leaving me alone with my sister. Somehow, I wasn't sure this was an improvement. "Acatla"

I raised a shaking hand. "I know what you're going to say. I need sleep, I need my wounds to close; and I need to stop traipsing around the palace on too little food."

"See? I don't even need to say it." Her face went grave again. "Seriously, Acatl."

"Seriously," I said, pulling myself up against the wall. "You shouldn't be here."

She puffed her cheeks, thoughtfully. "Why?"

I wasn't deceived. I might not have been a big part of her childhood, since more than ten years separated us, but I knew all her ways of deflecting my attention. "You must know that you're not welcome here." That you weaken Teomitl's position a that you open him wide to Tizoc-tzin's accusations, however unfounded they might be...

But I couldn't tell her that. I couldn't repeat the horrors Tizoctzin had said about her.

"Acatl." Her gaze narrowed. "My brother is gravely wounded. I don't care what it looks like. Knowing you," she said, darkly, "you might have killed yourself before I got there."

Manatzpa had almost taken care of that. "Looka"

"No, you look. I'm not a fool. I know who doesn't want me here; and I know that he's not Revered Speaker yet."

"He's still powerful enough to cause you a lot of trouble."

"What's he going to do?" Her gaze was bright and terrible, and for the first time she looked more like a warrior-priestess than my smiling, harmless sister. "I don't have a position at Court, or anything he can touch. He can order me not to see Teomitl againa" she stopped, her eyes focusing on me. "Oh."

I shook my head. "No. He wouldn't dare displace me. Not now." I wasn't so sure, but it was reassuring that more than a day had elapsed since my interview with Tizoc-tzin, and that I was still High Priest for the Dead.

Or perhaps Tizoc-tzin was just biding his time. I didn't know. I'd never pretended to understand how his mind worked.

I steered the conversation to another, albeit related, subject. "Teomitl has been different lately."

Mihmatini sat by my side with a sigh. She wore her black hair long in the fashion of unmarried women, it fell back from the smooth, perfect oval of her face. that is, until she spoiled the effect by grimacing. "He has a lot to face. He might be Master of the House of Darts in a few days, one of the inner circle, moving in the wake of power."

"I didn't think that would frighten him," I said, finally.

"No. But you know how he is." She smiled, a little self-consciously. "Always trying to be the best at everything, always judging himself to have fallen short."

Was that the only explanation? "And that's why he talks to Tizoc-tzin."

"You might not like him," Mihmatini said, and the tone of her voice implied she didn't much care for him either. "But he's still Teomitl's brother. They still share something."

"I guess," I said, finally. Out of all my brothers, the only one I saw semi-regularly was the eldest, Neutemoc, a Jaguar Knight and successful warrior elevated into the nobility. But our understanding was recent and fragile, and I couldn't say he'd ever been much of a confidante.

If anyone had filled that role, it had been Ceyaxochitl.

"Acatl?" Mihmatini asked.

"It's nothing." I watched the light glimmer across the entrancecurtain, and wondered if things would ever feel right again.

I couldn't believe they would.

ELEVEN.

The Obsidian Butterfly I must have slept again. The priest's healing spell was more effective than bandages, but still no miracle. I woke to the bright light of early morning. A whole day had elapsed, lost to my healing.

Teomitl was nowhere to be seen; not surprising, given my student's inability to sit still at the best of times.

Mihmatini lay curled up in sleep behind me, looking oddly young and innocent a she who was eighteen, almost too old to be married and have children of her own already. I revised my opinion of Teomitl's disappearance. I wouldn't have been surprised if he had slept elsewhere, rather than cast a slur on my sister's virginity.

Good.

Everything ached, from the ribs in my chest to the stiffness in my legs, and I felt even more empty than before, as if hope and joy had drained out of me into the hole in the Fifth World.

I got up. My head didn't spin, a vast improvement over my previous awakening, and I could stand steadily on my legs. Slowly, carefully, I dressed again into something suitable for the High Priest for the Dead, and went back to the Revered Speaker's room.

The room was subdued, the few priests for the dead left were renewing the blood around the quincunx with their own, making sure that nothing untoward could follow the Revered Speaker into the underworld. Palli himself was sitting cross-legged at the centre of the quincunx, watching a silver plate which depicted the progress of the soul through the nine levels of Mictlan. From time to time, his lips would move around an incantation, and he would nod. Everything appeared under control.

I leaned against a wall, watching them, the familiar chants and litanies washing over me, reassuring and unchanged. For all the chaos and the uncertainty, death remained constant, always by our side, something to be relied on no matter what else might transpire.

A refuge, a goddess had once told me accusingly. I'd flinched at the time, but now I knew that she was right, and that it was nothing to be ashamed of. Everyone had a refuge: some in pomp, some in family. Mine was a temple and chants and bodies, and the god that was everywhere in the Fifth World, underlying even the most boisterous songs, the most vivid flowers.

At last, there came a pause in the rituals. Palli looked up, and his eyes met mine. He gestured to another of the priests, and motioned him to take his place at the centre. Then, carefully, he stepped out of the quincunx and walked towards me. "Acatl-tzin."

"Tell me what's going on," I said.

"Revered Speaker Axayacatl-tzin is on the third level," Palli said. "Nothing unexpected so far."

The third level was the Obsidian Hills, still a relatively friendly place by underworld standards. If something bad happened, it would be on the deeper levels, where the beasts and creatures of the underworld prowled. "And the search?" I asked.

Palli grimaced. "For the place of the star-demon summoning? I put all the priests the order could spare into this. So far, no one has reported anything useful."

I suppressed a curse. A full dozen priests searching the palace, I knew the place was huge, but they had the help of spells, and surely one of them would have found something useful by now. "I see. Send to me the moment they find something."

Palli nodded. He hesitated, then said, "Acatl-tzin, one more thing. You remember the tar you noticed on the floor?"