Obsidian Butterfly - Laurell K. Hamilton [115]
“I’m sure, Edward. She can’t help if she doesn’t have enough information.” We looked at each other for a few seconds, then he gave a small nod. I turned back to the waiting vampire. “Okay,” I said, and I told her about the survivors, and the dead.
I don’t know what I expected, maybe for her to be titillated, or to go, a-ha, and recognize the monster responsible. What I got was serious attention, good questions at the right places, and a glimpse at a very intelligent mind behind all the games. If she wasn’t a delusional, sadistic, megalomaniac, would-be goddess, she might have been likable.
“The skins of men are valuable to Xipe Totec and Tlazolteotl. The priests would flay the sacrifice and wear the skin. The heart had many uses for the gods. Even the flesh was used, at least in part. Sometimes, the insides of a sacrifice would have some strange thing inside it, and be an omen. Then the other organs might be kept for a time and studied, but it was rare.”
“Can you think why they would cut out the tongues?”
“To keep them from speaking the secrets they have seen.” She said it, like of course that was the reason. It made sense ritually, I guess.
“Why cut off the eyelids?”
“So they can never not see the truth, even though they cannot speak it. I do not know if this is why they have done these awful things.”
“Why would someone remove the outward secondary sex characteristics?”
“I do not understand,” she said, and she was holding the cloak close about her, as if she were cold. We’d been talking long enough, I had to remind myself not to look directly in her eyes.
“The genitalia on the men, the breasts on the women, were removed.”
She shuddered, and I knew something I hadn’t before. Itzpapalotl, the goddess of the obsidian blade, was frightened. “It sounds like some of the things the Spanish did to our people.”
“But the flaying and taking the organs, that’s more Aztec, than European.”
She nodded. “Yes, but our sacrifices were messengers to the gods. We caused pain only for sacred purposes, not for cruelty or a whim. All blood was holy. If you died at the hand of a priest, you died knowing it served a greater purpose. Literally, your death helped the rain to fall, the maize to grow, the sun to rise in the sky. I do not know of any god that would flay people and leave them alive. Death is necessary for the messenger to reach the gods. Death is part of the worship of the deity. The Spaniards taught us to kill for the sake of killing, not as a sacred trust, but just for slaughter.” She stared past me at the four women that waited patiently for her to notice them, for her to give them a purpose. “We have learned the lesson well, but I would rather have stayed in a world where it was not true.” I saw in her face that she had some clue to what she’d lost, to what her vampires had lost when she decided they would become as cruel as their enemies. “The Spaniards killed so many of our people along the road to Acachinanco that they tied white handkerchiefs over their noses because of the stench of rotting bodies.”
She looked at me then, and the hatred in those eyes burned along my skin. After five hundred years, she still carried a grudge. You had to admire someone who could hold on to hate like that. I thought I knew how to hold a grudge, but looking into her face, I realized I was wrong. There was room in me for forgiveness. In Itzpapalotl’s face there was room for only one thing, hatred. She’d been angry about the same thing for over five hundred years. She’d been punishing people for the same crimes for five hundred years. It was impressive in a psychotic sort of way.
I hadn’t learned much more about the murders than when I’d stepped through the doors. I’d mostly learned negatives. A genuine Aztec didn’t recognize the murders as the work of any god or cult associated with the Aztec pantheon. It was good to know, something to cross off the list. Police work is mostly negatives. Finding out what you don’t know, so you can decide what you do. I didn’t know anything