This time all the fur on Rhiow’s back that hadn’t stood up on sight of the charm-effect finished the job. “Now here,” Rhiow said softly, “I think we’re on familiar ground.”
“It looks like this was from a different source than the first few pages,” Helen said. She peered at the image. “Maybe from a later period than the first few. But the Feathered Serpent is known all through the Mesoamerican cultures. Kukulcan, Quetzalcoatl, the Nine-Wind God: he has so many names.”
“One of the Powers that Be — ” Aufwi said.
“That’s right,” Helen said. “He’s a cognate of the one that Western tradition calls the Michael Power, and the One’s Champion – though as usual the correspondence isn’t exact. There are legends all through the Mesoamerican lands of how he lived for a while in one or another of the civilizations, teaching the ehhif the arts of peace. But he attracted the Lone Power’s enmity under one of Its many names – Texcatlipoca maybe is the best known. So rather than enter into a battle that would destroy the surrounding civilizations, the Serpent moved on and made his home elsewhere. That was how he came to the Mayans, the story says, after leaving the Toltec lands.” She shook her head. “In the old stories, the Serpent never stays long — just for enough time to bring his gifts to mortals and make sure they’ve mastered them. After that he’s always on the move, always eager to get back to the homeland of the Gods. He doesn’t fight unless he’s forced to it, because in this particular manifestation he’s too powerful. An all-out battle could have destroyed everything he was trying to save.”
“Well, he has another name in our time,” Rhiow said. “And I have a feeling we may need to introduce you. But that’ll wait for the moment. The Serpent’s enemy– That’s one of our bigger cousins, surely.”
“A jaguar,” Helen said, looking more closely at the rubbing. “Normally there would be spots in the drawing, but there aren’t, which can mean a couple of things.” She sounded uneasy. “But the headdress makes the identification easier. It’s a god called Tepeyollotl.”
Suddenly everyone was exchanging glances.“There’s a name we’ve heard recently…” Rhiow said.
“From the Lady in Black?” Helen said. “Yes. I remember the epithets she was attaching to the name. The Devourer of Worlds…” She shook her head. “But they’re not the usual descriptions attached to the Black Leopard. Originally Tepeyollotl was the personification of the Dark at the Heart of the Mountains. He ruled caves and deep places, and the Mayan eighth hour of night, when they felt that darkness had completely fallen.” Helen paused, swallowed. “But most importantly, he was the lord of echoes and earthquakes.”
That last word brought everyone’s heads up. “Earthquakes…” Aufwi said.
“Yes,” Rhiow said, her fur rising again at the memory of that awful moment in the tree. “There do seem to be a lot of those going around, don’t there…”
“What’s the problem with the lack of spots?” Urruah said.
“It suggests that this image wasn’t of the everyday version of Tepeyollotl,” Helen said. “Earthquakes have their place in the natural order, and the ancient peoples knew that. But they also understood that it wasn’t past the abilities of the Lone Power to cause them when It had reason. The dark pelt would mean that this is also an avatar of Tezcatlipoca, of the Mesoamerican version of the Lone Power: the Lord of the Smoking Mirror.” She rubbed her face. “But he has other names that were supposed to belong to a power even above him: an older one. Ilhuicahua Tlalticpaque, the One who wants to own Heaven and Earth: and Chalchihuihtotolin, the Master of the Sorceries from Outside.”
“Meaning outside our universe,” said Rhiow, feeling as distressed as the Whisperer had earlier sounded.
Once again here was the issue that Hwaith had originally brought to them– slightly better defined, but with no sense of where they were supposed to look for a solution. For a wizard on the One’s and the Powers’ business, there was a tendency to consider Them the rulers or managers of pretty much everything in the known universe-bundle, and the Lone Power the mainsource of trouble. But it was rare for one’s business to require a wizard to deal with issues that reached outside the Powers’ sheaf of universes, or were sourced outside them.
“Arhu,” Helen said, “were there any more pages in that folder?”
“That’s all I saw,” he said.
“All right,” Rhiow said. “Let the Eye go for now…”
The room came back.
“So first we have the poor soulsplit Lady in Black,” said Urruah after a moment, “with her talk of her friend the Devourer shredding up whole universes, ours very much included. And now a concrete connection between her and the group that’s meeting and doing Iau knows what at Dagenham’s… but something that’s helping her nasty universe-devouring friend: very likely at the very least a string of serial killings. Those are bad enough, but what they’re up to is going to destroy their entire world. Are these vhai’d ehhif completely out of their minds??”
It was almost a yowl. Everyone froze in place for a second, and Rhiow threw a glance at the Silent Man’s bedroom door, half expecting him to emerge and demand to know what the problem was. But nothing happened.
“Sorry,” Urruah said then, and tucked himself down against the floor. His tail was still twice its normal thickness. “I don’t know about everybody else, but I am finding this… disturbing.”
Helen sat back on the sofa and started unbraiding the hair she’s braided earlier. “You wouldn’t be alone,” she said. “But let’s take this piece by piece. Somebody in that house – probably Dagenham – has been studying these images hard enough to want to keep copies where he can get at them easily.”
“That’s causing about half of my freak,” Urruah said. “The ehhif in these particular cultures were big on spilling blood, weren’t they? Lots of it.”
“Not at the beginning of their histories,” Helen said. “But they got that way.”
“That being the connection, you’re thinking, to the serial killings,” Aufwi said to Urruah.
“And at the same time,” said Hwaith, “somebody in that house… maybe Dagenham… has been dabbling in charms.”
Everyone was quiet for a few seconds, considering what this new complication might mean.“What’s bothering me,” Helen said, “is that information that we might need is missing from those pages.”
“The gaps…” Aufwi said.
“We need to see the tablets or whatever that those rubbings were taken from,” Helen said. “If there are just gaps in the originals, we need to know that. But there may be remnants of data that didn’t transfer properly.” She looked thoughtfully at Arhu. “We’re going to have to find outwhere the original carvings are.”
“Unfortunately there’s no way to tell that by just looking,” Urruah said. “One of the only weaknesses of using the Eye for research…”
Arhu bristled a little.“Calm down,” Urruah said. “I just mean that we’re going to have to go physically touch those documents to find out where they came from.”
“That’s a project for a little later,” Rhiow said. “Helen, you said the two peoples who did this writing were apart from each other in time – “
“The Mayans abandoned their cities in the ninth century,” Helen said. “The Aztecatl, the People from Aztlan as they called themselves, dominated the Mexican region later – the fifteenth, sixteenth centuries as modern Western ehhif culture reckons it. But they started a great migration from the south, so Azteca legends say, a hundred years after the Mayans vanished.”
“Strange, then, to find the two sets of characters together. We need to sit down and clarify what they mean, what relationship they have to one another – “
So abruptly that the noise made everyone in the room jump, a brassy she-ehhif’s voice burst out singing: “There’s no business… like show business… like no business I know – “