Naamah's Blessing

immense, with twin staircases stretching up into the blue sky to reach a pair of shrines impossibly high above us. I glanced uneasily at it. All seemed quiet and there was no indication that the stairs had run red with blood anytime recently, but there was no mistaking its purpose. Tall racks of human skulls lined the base, hollow-eyed and grinning. There must have been tens of thousands of them altogether. Some were clearly ancient, long ago picked clean by scavenging birds and bleached by the elements.
    Others still bore traces of weathered flesh and skin.
    I swallowed hard, trying not to shudder.
    Following my gaze, Lord Cuixtli spoke to Denis. I caught the gist of his words, which was that he understood the custom wasdistasteful to the strangers from beyond the sea, and no sacrifice was scheduled for today.
    “When is the next?” I made my first attempt since Orgullo del Sol to hold an actual conversation in Nahuatl. “Soon?”
    “Not soon, no.” Lord Cuixtli shook his head. “Only during the high—” He used a word I didn’t know. Seeing my lack of comprehension, he addressed Denis in a spate of rapid language. Denis nodded, listening with a mixture of repressed horror and a scholar’s perennial fascination.
    “It’s as I told you before, Moirin,” he said to me when the fellow had finished. “The Nahuatl have gone some way toward accepting Mithras Sol Invictus as a substitute for Tonatiuh, their sun god.” He licked his lips as though they’d gone dry. “The Aragonians have imported sacrificial bulls for the sacred rites, and that appears to be… satisfactory. Lord Cuixtli himself is an initiate in the mysteries. But the Aragonians have no worthy substitute for the rain god or the war god, so as a precaution the Nahuatl continue to offer the appropriate sacrifices at the high festivals.”
    “I see.” As I recalled from Porfirio Reyes’ tale, the rain god was the one who required the tears of children. I pushed the thought away. It would do me no good to loathe the Nahuatl for their beliefs when we so urgently needed their goodwill.
    The Emperor’s palace was on the far side of the wall that bordered the ceremonial square. There, my bearers lowered the palanquin so that I might disembark and proceed on foot along with the others.
    Although not so elaborate in construction as the Palace in the City of Elua, or the Celestial City in Shuntian, the palace was every bit as imposing in terms of scale. Inside, it reminded me more of the Celestial City in that there were a great many people going about their business with a sense of tremendous order and purpose.
    The stone walls of the palace were thick, and I felt them pressing in on me, a sensation that had not troubled me for some time. My head felt thick, my skin felt hot, and there was an uneasy stirring in the pit of my belly.
    “Are you all right, Moirin?” Bao murmured. “You look pale.”
    “Man-made stone.” I made myself breathe the Breath of Wind’s Sigh, inhaling deeply through my nose and drawing air into the space behind my eyes until my head began to clear. “I’ll be fine.”
    Bao nodded, understanding.
    After a brief wait, Lord Cuixtli ushered us into the throne room and the Nahuatl Emperor’s presence.
    Emperor Achcuatli was seated on a gilded throne inlaid with jade. He regarded us with an impassive mien, although it was to me that his gaze went first. He was a fellow of some thirty-odd years, with a warrior’s bearing. His eyes were as black as obsidian and gave nothing away. There were round obsidian plugs in the lobes of his ears, and a plug of gold piercing the skin beneath his lower lip. He wore a feather headdress finer than any I’d seen, a mantle of feathers over his shoulders, and an embroidered cloth wrapped around his waist. His brown chest was bare, save for a collar of gold. On his feet, he wore sandals that laced to the knees, and the soles were made of solid gold.
    My uneasy feeling returned.
    All six of us bowed deeply to him. His sharp gaze passed over each of us, returning to me.
    “So it is true,” he said in Nahuatl, slowly and distinctly enough that I could understand him.
    Unsure of the protocol, I inclined my head. The intensity of the Emperor’s gaze made me raise it again.
    His fingers drummed on the arms of the throne. “You seek your kinsman who came here before you?”
    “Yes, my lord,” I said, concentrating hard on every syllable. “We come to beg for help.”
    The Nahuatl Emperor