"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 She-Snake's guards strode in the corridor, trying very hard to look in charge but only managing a particular kind of extreme bewilderment. They looked at Teomitl as though he might have the answers to their aimlessness; but Teomitl glared at them, and even without the ahuizotls, he looked daunting enough that no one wished to approach him with trivial matters.

I probed at the wards on my way in. They still seemed solid and reassuring, but there was something, some yield to them, like pushing against taut cotton. They might hold, but they could be torn.

Ceyaxochitl could have woven more, but she was dead, and Quenami had made it clear he couldn't or wouldn't help.

"Where to?" Teomitl asked.

I shook my head. "Manatzpa's rooms. I'll met you there. I have something else to check first."

What I did was brief: I merely checked with Palli that the search was progressing as foreseen a and that the She-Snake's promised guards had indeed arrived. There were more of them than I expected, though most of them were young, callow youths who still seemed to remember the feel of their childhood locks.

I guessed the She-Snake had a sense of humour.

"I've had better subordinates," Palli said with a sigh. "More respectful, too. But I guess I shouldn't complain."

"We'll take everything we can," I said, finally. "Everyone else seems to have other priorities at the moment." I hadn't seen my fellow high priests in a few days. I couldn't say I missed their company exactly, but imagining what else they might have done did go a long way towards making me nervous.

Palli spread his hands, in a gesture that seemed an eerie mirror of mine. "We'll make do, Acatl-tzin."

And I had to be content with that.

"On another subject," Palli said, "I've found something about the tar."

"The stains on the floor?" I asked, suddenly interested again. They seemed to fit into the larger puzzle, though I wasn't sure how.

"Yes," Palli said. "Tar isn't exactly common in the palace."

I couldn't even think of where the nearest tar pit might be, or what they would use it for. "And?"

Palli grimaced. "You know Echichilli-tzin?"

The dead councilman? What had he got to do with it? "Yes, but..."

"He was the one who asked for it, about fifteen days ago. And..." He grimaced again, a nervous tic. "He asked for a lot of it, Acatltzin."

A lot of things hadn't made sense lately, but this was firmly near the top of the list. "A lot?"

"Ten full jars," Palli said.

My mind balked at the mental picture. It did have cosmetic uses, but ten whole jars seemed excessive. "And what happened?"

"They came in. Echichilli-tzin sent his slaves to collect it. I've asked them. All they know is that it was brought here to the Revered Speaker's room."

"While he was still alive."

"Presumably with his consent."

"Hmm," I said. "Thank you. This is... intriguing." To say the least. "Let me know if you can find out more." Where had those jars gone, and what had they been used for? The only use that came to mind was seal the hull of a boat, and the thought of building a boat right in the Revered Speaker's rooms was absurd.

What was going in this palace? Whatever it was, it had started before the Revered Speaker's death, and it looked like we were the ones caught up in the consequences.

I fully intended to make sure the consequences weren't drastic.

I found Teomitl outside Manatzpa's rooms, in conversation with a stern, middle-aged woman who introduced herself as Manatzpa's wife. They'd had five children, the two eldest of whom were away, educated in the calmecac school. The three youngest were much too young to have noted much of importance; and Manatzpa's wife wasn't much more useful. She had barely known anything of her husband's affairs; the household policy had apparently consisted of "to each their own". She had not spoken of matters of domesticity; he had kept whatever business he had with the council and the Revered Speaker's election private.

The gods were decidedly not on our side.

We made a cursory examination of the rooms which didn't yield anything useful, and moved onto Manatzpa's private quarters.

In daylight they seemed much smaller than in my fevered imagination. They did wrap around two courtyards, but even the largest of them barely covered the surface of the Imperial Chambers. They had loomed much larger in my frantic flight of the night before.

As I had already noticed, the rooms were bare, with few ornaments. Manatzpa might have been a nobleman, but he had not believed in pomp any more than Teomitl. A few wicker chests and a few circular fans, carelessly tossed in corners where the feathers had creased, their colours all but faded; thin and simple reed mats, serving as little more than places to sit; and two unlit braziers.

I opened the wicker chests to find piles of vibrantly-coloured codices, ranging from lists of rituals to the tribute of the provinces. In the chest after that was poetry, carefully re-transcribed. Pride of place was given to a volume collecting the poetry of Nezahualcoyotl, the previous Revered Speaker of our neighbouring city Texcoco. The codex had been well-thumbed, but the glyphs were intact with no markings on the paper, the treasured possession of a man who seemed to have had few of them.

Altogether they painted the picture of a man whose interests had been broad, a scholar, an intellectual whose curiosity extended to everything and anything. A man I might have appreciated, more than I ever had Quenami or Acamapichtli, had the circumstances been otherwise.

Teomitl was rummaging through another chest, shaking his head as he discarded clay vessels and worship thorns. At length he crossed his arms over his chest. "This is pointless, Acatl-tzin."

I couldn't help shaking my head in amusement. Teomitl might have had the raw power and the fighting spirit, but the minutiae of investigations would always be beyond him. "Have a little patience," I said, pulling aside a third chest to reveal treatises on medicine. "Whatever he left behind, he wouldn't have wanted us to find it. It's likely well hidden."

Teomitl frowned and moved to stand against one of the frescoes, his head at the level of Huitzilpochtli's angry face. "We're wasting our time while they move against us."

I lifted an almanac on plants and their uses, and moved to the rest of the pile. "The problem is that we don't know who 'they' are."

"Too many suspects?" Teomitl shook his head.

"Too many agendas," I said. It was a given that everybody was dabbling in magic or planning political moves against their opponents. The question was whose moves included star-demons. Manatzpa had sworn it wasn't him; and his death tended to prove it. But Xahuia was still on the loose; not to mention those who still remained within the palace compound.

And, the Duality curse me, I still had no idea of how it all intersected or made sense. A plot to bring the star-demons down shouldn't have had this many complications, this many people dying to prevent them from talking. Whatever else I might have said about She of the Silver Bells, She'd always been straightforward, much like Her brother. No tricks, just fire and blood and war.

"I see." Teomitl was silent for a while. "Acatl-tzin, I wish to apologise."

I turned, genuinely surprised. "What for?"

"For the other night."

It took me a while to see what he was referring to. Ages seemed to have passed since that night when he had walked away from me in the wake of our interview with Tizoc-tzin. "Don't mention it. We have bigger problems on our hands."

"It's the little cracks that break obsidian. The flaws that undo jade," Teomitl said. He looked me in the eye a proud, unashamed, his was as unlikely an apology as I had ever seen, and yet oddly touching. "You have your opinion about my brother, and I have mine."

"Yes," I said, cautiously. I wasn't quite sure of what opinion to have about Tizoc-tzin anymore, except that we were still at each other's throats.

"Let it remain that way." Teomitl made a small, dismissive gesture, a command that could not be denied. "Let's not talk further about this, or we'll disagree."

Probably, but I didn't say this. "As you wish."

I lifted another medicinal codex. I was almost at the bottom of the pile now, and still had nothing to show for my labour. The Southern Hummingbird blind us, it looked like Manatzpa had been prudent to excess.

Wait.

The second-to-last paper in the pile was much smaller, a single sheet of maguey fibre. The writing on it was the neat, elegant hand of someone used to glyphs, every colour applied with a sense of context and decorum that could only belong to a temple.

"Ueman, Fire Priest of Quetzalcoatl, the Feathered Serpent, the Precious Twin: "On this day Ten Flower in the year Two House, Councilman Manatzpa gave the temple ten rolls of the finest cotton cloths, fifty gold quills and one bag of quetzal tail-feathers, in exchange for the Breath of the Precious Twin."

The Breath of the Precious Twin was a costly protective spell that put the holder under the personal gaze of the god. Along with the Southern Hummingbird's protection, it was one of the most effective wards a man could barter for. I was wary of using it. Mictlan's magic was not compatible with Southern Hummingbird's spells, and while the Feathered Serpent might be one of the most benevolent deities, there was something inherently disturbing about having His eye permanently on me.

I hadn't seen it, but then he'd have taken precautions so it wasn't obvious. He had been a canny man a save, I guessed, when he'd started to resort to murder to have his way.