It lay on the reed mat in the bedroom, its face bearing the blank expression of corpses. We moved from the courtyard to the inside of the house, where two guards watched over the victim’s body. “Do you want to see the body?” Macihuin asked.
I had felt this once before, but… “There is underworld magic in this, but I don’t know what kind exactly. This felt wrong–too smooth, too charged with latent power. “There’s magic involved, to put the shard straight into the heart with so little damage to the skin.” I closed my hand around the shard. And if the underworld was involved directly in a death, as seemed to be the case here, I advised magistrates such as Macihuin. I was a priest for the Dead: I assisted in preparing the corpses, in saying the proper prayers and making the proper sacrifices. And once we undressed him, there was a small splotch of blood over the heart–not large enough to be an entry wound. “From looking at the corpse, I would have said his heart had failed him. “How did you think of opening the chest?” I asked. “It was embedded in his heart, and quite deeply–the guards and I had some trouble extracting it.” I raised my eyes to look at Magistrate Macihuin, who stood in the courtyard, a few steps away from me, watching me intently. One did not find such objects in a dead warrior’s house. Its black surface shimmered with green reflections, and it quivered with the aura I associated with the underworld: blood and pain and death. The obsidian shard, half the size of my palm, lay in my hand: a sharp, deadly thing still stained with blood. OBSIDIAN SHARDS: AN OBSIDIAN AND BLOOD SHORT STORY The Obsidian and Blood Reading Order (Complete)Ġ.5.
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