The Obsidian Mirror, page 16
Kaylee listened to Chaco’s heart and breathing and felt his face, but there seemed to be little change, and certainly none for the better. Having nothing to do for the moment, she sat down on the floor next to Chaco’s couch and watched the woman as she went about her preparations. Fred snuggled into Kaylee’s side, like a dog seeking comfort, and she patted him. A chorus of small, bubbling snores soon issued from his mouth.
The woman was tall, with a round, brown face. Her black hair, streaked with silver, was caught in a clip, and streamed down her back in a straight fall. Although she seemed to be in her fifties, her face was not deeply lined. She had strong, high cheekbones and a high-bridged nose over full lips. She was wearing a pragmatic ensemble of jeans, running shoes, a T-shirt, and a gray fleece hoodie. Making an odd contrast to her very down-to-earth clothes, she wore a heavy silver necklace set with turquoise and red coral.
Finally, curiosity won. “Did Quetzalcoatl send you?” Kaylee asked. The woman set a bundle of dried plants bound with twine in a basket and looked at her.
“I don’t know,” she replied. “I was driving home from a healing, and something told me to stop at the park. I never ignore those messages, even if they seem crazy, so I stopped, and there you were. And Coyotl, dying. Even though he can’t die, exactly. As an Avatar, Coyotl can't be killed, but his spirit can be destroyed, changed into something evil. So someone sent me, yes.”
“I asked Queztalcoatl for help just before you arrived,” said Kaylee, daring the women to laugh at her.
“And he heard you? Well, stranger things have happened since the world began,” said the woman, and put a few small implements into the basket. “I'm Rose Ramirez. I’m a shaman, a traditional healer. Tell me more about this attack on Coyotl.”
Kaylee nudged Fred, who awoke with a snort. “Rose wants to know about the bad Avatar, whatshername,” she told him. Fred rubbed his eyes.
“Tzintzimitl. She’s an evil Avatar,” he told Rose. “She called dark stars from the Otherworld, and they are sucking the light from him.”
“Stars,” said Rose. “This Tzintzimitl is a sky power.” It was a statement, not a question, but Fred nodded. “She is the same one who killed Mayahuel?” The mannegishi nodded again. “Yes, Wise One,” he said in a respectful tone that was beginning to grate on Kaylee’s nerves just a tiny bit.
“Ah. Now I know what to do,” Rose said, and, going into the kitchen area, opened a cupboard and removed a bottle of amber liquid. “I’m ready,” she said, adding the bottle to her collection. “Let’s get him outside.” She nodded to the patio, now bathed in the pearly gray light of pre-dawn. Carrying her basket, she went through French doors to the patio, and returned to help Kaylee with Chaco. Fred brought up the rear, dragging seat cushions from the couch.
The patio was roughly paved with flagstones, and Fred arranged the cushions on these. “What are those for?” asked Rose, panting a bit with the exertion of carrying Chaco’s inert body.
“For Chaco,” Fred explained, in surprise. “He’s very cold, and he shouldn’t be lying on the cold stone out here.”
“No,” said Rose, regretfully. “I’m sorry, but he must be in contact with the stones, or with the earth. I need him to be near the fire, so you must let him lie on the stones.”
“But he’s freezing,” protested Kaylee. “And the stones are wet. Won’t that be bad for him?”
“He must lie on the earth,” Rose said firmly. “Please.” Kaylee, shivering with empathy, helped to place him flat on the flagstones, which were damp with the heavy fog from the nearby Pacific. His long legs sprawled, and though Kaylee tried to position his head comfortably, it lolled to one side, cheek against the stone.
As Rose went about her preparations, she began to tell them the story of Mayahuel and Quetzalcoatl. “Mayahuel was Tzintzimitl’s granddaughter, and she lived with her grandmother in the sky. Tzintzimitl was evil, and she stole the light from the people. She forced them to worship her with human sacrifices so that they could have a tiny bit of light to live by.”
“One day, Quetzalcoatl wearied of this, and went to the sky to find Tzintzimitl to kill her and put an end to the everlasting darkness and the human sacrifices. Because Quetzalcoatl has always opposed human sacrifice. He is a creator of life, not death, and a lover of light, not the dark. But when he came to the sky, he beheld Mayahuel, the beautiful, and he fell in love. So instead of hunting down Tzintzimitl, he and Mayahuel fled together from the sky.”
“Now Tzintzimitl was very angry at losing her granddaughter, and she pursued the couple. Quetzalcoatl and Mayahuel ran and hid from her, but Tzintzimitl sent out her light-destroying dark stars to seek them, and eventually the stars found the lovers. Quetzalcoatl fought with Tzintzimitl, but the dark stars killed Mayahuel. Quetzalcoatl eventually banished the evil one, and light returned to the earth. But Quetzalcoatl was very sad and mourned the beautiful Mayahuel. The gods saw his sorrow, and on her gravesite, they caused the agave plant to grow. From the agave plant Quetzalcoatl made a sweet nectar, the Blood of Mayahuel, and with this, he soothed his sorrow.”
“So you see, Tzintzimitl is an Avatar of the sky. Coyotl is an Avatar of the earth. The power of the sky is destroying Coyotl, and he can be saved only through power of the earth. He must be in contact with the earth to receive its healing. But there is more work now to do,” Rose concluded, and she asked Kaylee and Fred to help place various objects in a wide circle, enclosing them and the fire pit. Rose quickly kindled a small fire with fatwood sticks. On the fire, she placed bundles of herbs, which caught and began issuing a thick and fragrant white smoke. Rose wafted the smoke over Chaco’s body with a fan made of brown and white feathers, chanting in a language Kaylee did not recognize.
The singing went on for a long time, and Kaylee found herself drifting off despite her anxiety for Chaco and the dawn chill. When Rose stopped chanting (causing Kaylee to rouse herself from a dream of swimming in the Arctic), she picked up the bottle of amber liquid and uncorked it. She lifted Chaco’s head, putting the bottle to his lips. As she removed it, a rivulet of fluid ran from the corner of his mouth, and Kaylee smelled the sharpness of alcohol and something sweet, almost flowery.
Rose put Chaco’s head gently down on the stones again, and watched him. Minutes passed, but there was no change. Chaco lay like a broken toy on the stones, not even shivering from the cold. Then Rose repeated the process, this time succeeding in getting more of the liquid down his throat. Still nothing. Rose applied the amber liquid a third time. The women and Fred silently watched Chaco’s face, the flickering of firelight and shadow over the contours of his cheek and brow the only movement to be seen. Kaylee opened her mouth to ask Rose what she was going to do next, when suddenly, Chaco’s eyes flew open and he gasped. Then he curled up, choking, as Rose bent over him.
Kaylee and Fred pressed as close as they could to Chaco without getting in Rose’s way. Again, Kaylee smelled that peculiar fragrance with its sharp, alcohol undertone. She was certain she had smelled it before, but could not bring to mind what it was. Finally, Chaco stopped coughing and wiped his streaming eyes. He looked up at the women leaning over him and smiled tenderly. He reached out his arms, folded Kaylee into his embrace, and kissed her passionately.
“That might be the tequila talking,” observed Rose dryly. “The Blood of Mayahuel. He’s had a fair amount of it.”
Chapter 19
Sierra awoke again to impenetrable darkness. This time, it was clear she was not in a soft and comfortable bed, but lying on a hard, cold floor, and she was gagged with some sort of soft cloth. She lay on one side, her ankles bound, and her wrists tied together behind her back. Her head ached abominably, and when she strained against the ropes, testing them, pain stabbed through her skull and she saw colored starbursts behind her eyelids. These were pretty, but she was not in the proper frame of mind to appreciate them. She was cold, in pain, and she desperately needed to go to the bathroom.
The adventure novels don’t go into mundane things like needing to pee, she thought glumly, and wondered how long she could hold out before the dam burst. Despite the pain, she tried the ropes again. Apparently whoever had tied them had known what they were doing, so all she accomplished was to chafe her wrists and cause more painful, pretty lights to dance around inside her head.
About the time she had counted to ten thousand in an effort to distract herself from her full bladder, she heard a key grate in a lock. A door swung open, and a light went on overhead.
Sierra’s attention was focused on the person at the door, not her surroundings. Where she was didn’t matter; what counted were the newcomer’s intentions toward her. As her eyes adjusted to the light, she recognized Theresa, the diminutive maid summoned by Chris Jumlin to the breakfast table. So she was probably still in Jumlin’s house.
“MMMpffff!” Sierra said, looking pleadingly at Theresa. Surely, the woman was here to help. Theresa came to Sierra’s side and looked coldly down at her.
“You probably need to go to the bathroom,” she said. “I’ll let you up, but don’t even think about trying to escape.” Sierra saw that Theresa held a pistol in her right hand. It was pointed at the ground, not at her, but there was no question that Theresa was not interested in helping Sierra to escape.
Keeping the pistol ready to hand, Theresa untied Sierra’s arms. Then she picked the pistol up again and pointed it directly at Sierra. She waved the pistol at Sierra’s ankles. “Untie your feet.” Sierra leaned over, head spinning, and picked at the tough knots with numb fingers. She finally managed to free her feet, and Theresa grasped one of Sierra’s elbows and pulled. “Get up,” she said, and Sierra somehow got her legs under her and stood up, head swimming.
Theresa stood behind her. “OK. Put your hands together in front of you.” Sierra obediently did so, and Theresa tied her wrists again with swift, efficient motions. She said,“Now walk slowly to the door.”
Sierra did so. There was a short hallway outside the door, and directly across was a bathroom. The whole setup was a stark contrast to Jumlin’s elegant rooms with their Persian carpets. This was clearly a basement. There were windows at either end of the hallway, with sunlight streaming down through the grimy glass. The hallway floor was concrete, none too clean, and there were old cardboard boxes, a mop and a broom, and miscellaneous odds and ends stacked along the walls. The bathroom consisted of a rusty old toilet, a metal sink, and a cracked mirror.
Theresa pushed Sierra roughly from behind as she was getting her bearings. “Stand in front of the toilet,” she ordered. Sierra stood facing the toilet, and Theresa said impatiently, “Not like that, stupid. Turn around.” Sierra did, wondering how she was going to get out of her jeans when Theresa jerked down the zipper of Sierra’s jeans and yanked everything down to the floor. She stood there watching as Sierra relieved herself.
As Sierra was still gagged, she couldn’t ask how she was going to take care of the cleanup, but Theresa made it clear that she wasn’t going to have the opportunity.
“Get up,” Theresa said, and pulled at Sierra’s arms. She then pulled up Sierra’s jeans, zipped them roughly, and led Sierra back to her original location, Sierra was too alarmed to worry about the nastiness of not being able to clean up. As she stepped into the room she had just left, she took it in for the first time.
It was not the stone hall of her visions, but it bore a strong resemblance to it. It had originally been just a large basement. Houses built in California prior to World War II sometimes had basements, but after the war, the builders who scrambled to put up cheap subdivisions to house post-WWII families had dispensed with the trouble and cost of building basements. Jumlin’s house had been built long before World War II, and the basement was roomy. In this large room, there was none of the usual detritus of broken chairs, boxes, trunks, and other things that families tucked away in basements, thinking to mend, or use again, or save for some future need.
The room was almost empty. There were murals painted on the walls, murals that Sierra recognized with a lurch at the pit of her stomach. There were the paintings of bloody sacrifice, of captives bleeding to death with a thousand cuts to their bodies, of hearts held triumphantly over their owners’ torn corpses. Over and over, there was the same bizarre figure presiding, so abstractly rendered with yellow and black lines that it was barely discernible as anthropoid. Sierra thought it represented Necocyaotl, the Obsidian Mirror. She had looked up images of Necocyaotl on Google, and the painted figure here had an ominous similarity, a black band painted across the face, one foot drawn to represent an obsidian mirror, while the other was drawn as a deer’s hoof. A single bulb hanging from the ceiling illuminated the space, but blackened sconces fixed to the wall showed that the room could be lit by torches—perhaps to create a less prosaic atmosphere than the bald glare of the single bulb.
With horror, she recognized the stone table at one end of the room. A black stone knife lay on the altar, which was discolored with brown stains. Behind it stood another rendering of that fierce, abstract figure, and in its hands it held a roughly rounded, black shape that shone unevenly in the light of the bulb. It was, Sierra realized, a tiny version of the great, black obsidian mirror of her visions. She twisted around to face Theresa, trying to communicate a plea for help through her eyes alone.
Theresa paid no attention. “Down on the floor,” she ordered, waving the pistol, and watched as Sierra awkwardly kneeled, then flopped awkwardly on to one side, unable to brace herself. Theresa competently tied Sierra’s ankles together again and then freed Sierra’s hands, retying them at her back. The servant stood, slipping the pistol into the pocket of her apron.
“It’s not as if I don’t have enough to do,” she said in a resentful tone, glaring at Sierra. “Now I have to babysit you. Well, you’ll be gone soon enough, I guess.” With that grim pronouncement, she turned off the light and closed and locked the door, leaving Sierra alone in the dark again.
It’s funny how small things make such a huge difference when you’re reduced to having no options, Sierra thought. Just the relief from her distended bladder made all the difference, in spite of her still-throbbing head and the general discomfort of lying bound hand and foot on a hard and chilly floor. Now at least she could think.
Although what good thinking did, she wasn’t sure. Her bonds were as immovable as before, she quickly discovered. She was helpless, no one knew where she was, and she was evidently in the hands of Necocyaotl’s followers. She had hoped for some empathy from Theresa, but if the woman felt any sympathy for Sierra’s plight, she was adept at concealing it. And there seemed to be only one possible outcome of the situation, if the evidence of the murals, the altar and the stone knife was anything to go by.
Now would be a good time to use her alleged power. She closed her eyes and remembered the leaping flames under Quetzalcoatl’s warm touch. She focused on the flames, hoping to breathe real life into them, but they flickered and faded like real flames, leaving her in the hopeless dark of her captivity.
Remarkably energized by this thought, Sierra tried to inch her way across the floor to the altar. Maybe she could somehow knock the knife to the floor, and use it to saw through her bonds. Inch by painful inch, Sierra scraped her way across the rough concrete. A particularly energetic movement brought her head sharply into contact with the altar. More pretty lights ensued.
Once her head had cleared, she braced her shoulder against the stone, and managed to get up onto her knees. Her body felt as though she had been slowly passed over a cheese grater. Again, she leveraged herself against the stone, and climbed awkwardly to her feet. This placed a nearly intolerable strain on her joints as it painfully increased the pressure of the ropes, which bit into her flesh.
Sierra leaned over the altar, cringing at the thought of touching those grim brown stains, and swept her torso across its surface. She quickly encountered the knife, but it seemed reluctant to move across the uneven stone, stubbornly twisting aside. Grunting with the effort, Sierra tried again and again. Finally, the knife dropped to the floor, and she heard it land. Land, and shatter into what sounded like a thousand pieces.
Swearing unintelligibly behind her gag, Sierra carefully lowered herself to the floor once more. She leaned against the side of the altar. Her hands, bound tightly behind her, had only limited scope of movement, but she swept her fingers across the floor, searching for a shard of the knife. There were many small, sharp pieces that her fingertips encountered—far too small to use for her purpose, but she felt several sharp stings as some of the razor-thin slivers bit into her skin.
Finally, her questing fingers found a piece that was large enough to pick up. Squirming back against the stone altar, she tried to maneuver the edge into a position to saw at the ropes, using the side of the altar to stabilize her hands. At last, shoulders cramping, she felt the edge of the shard bite into the rope. She worked slowly and carefully, afraid that more vigorous movement would make her lose her grip on the shard.
Just as she felt the rope’s strands parting, she heard the key grate in the lock again. Quickly, she rolled to the ground, hands behind her still wrapped in a few fibers of rope, hoping that Theresa wouldn’t see what she had been doing.
The overhead light snapped on. Chris Jumlin, looking stylish and cool, stood in the door. In a split second, he was by her side. As she twisted away, freeing her hands, he gripped her throat and forced her back against the floor.
“Well, well,” he said, “Looks like you’ve been a busy girl.”
Chapter 20
