![]() ![]() “Obsidian shards are driven into your hands, into your feet, And shadows trailed, darkening the painted frescoes on the walls – singing a wordless lament, a song that twisted in my guts like a knife-stab. ![]() The adobe floor glimmered as if underwater. Grey light suffused the shrine, the pillars and the walls fading away to reveal a much larger place, a cavern where everything found its end. The mountains crush, the mountains bind.” I slashed my earlobes and drew thorns through the wounds, collecting the dripping blood in a bowl, and started a litany for the Dead. As High Priest for the Dead, it was now my responsibility to ease his passage into Mictlan, the underworld. My priests had bandaged the gaping wound on his forehead and smoothed the wrinkled skin as best as they could they had dressed him with scraps of many-coloured cotton and threaded a jade bead through his lips – preparing him for the long journey ahead. In the silence of the shrine, I bowed to the corpse on the altar: a minor member of the Imperial Family, who had died in a boating accident on Lake Texcoco. ![]() SERVANT OF THE UNDERWORLD, BY ALIETTE de BODARD ![]()
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