Xotzin ran his canoe up onto the mud-slick edge of the dock channel and set his weight into the rope with the same care he used for a loaded balance. The line bit his blistered palm; he shifted his grip before the skin could split, then cinched the bow to a mooring post wrapped in old reed-fiber. Water lapped once, twice, as if testing the knot. He did not look down long enough to invite talk of omens.
He kept his travel cloak on. In this heat it would have been sensible to loosen it, but sense and custom were not the same thing in a place that measured days like debts. The lacquered cotton beneath stayed hidden, the way a cautious merchant hid spare cacao in a false pouch. He had come to trade grain contracts, not to show that he expected trouble.
The Canal Wardens stood where they could be seen without having to step closer. Two elders with reed-cord belts and one younger man with a paddle held upright like a staff. Their faces carried that practiced stillness that made an outsider feel he had arrived late to a conversation. Xotzin approached at an angle that did not challenge their space, stopped at the proper distance, and gave the courtesy due: chin dipped, shoulders unraised, hands open with the fingers spread to show he carried no blade in reach.
Before anyone could demand it, he drew out his Traveling Guild mark: a small, worn token stamped with a spiral and bar-glyph. He held it in both hands, flat on his palms, so they would not mistake him for trying to press it into someone’s grip. “Xotzin of the south routes,” he said, voice pitched for the dock to hear, not only the Wardens. “I come under clean count and fair measure.”
The younger Warden’s eyes flicked to his forearm, to the inked tallies that marked past deals and distances. One elder made no move to take the token, only stared at it as if a mark could lie. Xotzin kept his smile easy and waited, weighing silence like cargo, until one of them decided whether he was permitted to be a person here. Or merely a canoe to be recorded.
Around him the dock lived in small, practiced trades. A woman in a reed skirt set down a bundle of amaranth greens as if offering it to the boards; a fisher answered by laying two salted tilapia on a woven mat, their eyes glazed like obsidian chips. Cacao changed hands in tight little pinches, counted twice and never poured. Salt, precious as rumor, was scraped from a gourd with a bone spoon, each grain watched.
But the rhythm kept breaking. When a Canal Warden shifted his stance, conversations thinned as if a wind had passed through reeds. A laugh rose, then clipped short, trimmed to something safer. Even children who should have been chasing each other between baskets moved in straight lines, glancing toward the men with paddle-staves as if the wrong step might become a tally against their household.
Xotzin read it the way he read a market’s hunger: not by what was said, but by what was swallowed. Hands lingered on goods as though reluctant to let anything go unrecorded. Eyes tracked the Wardens’ gaze, and mouths shaped politeness like a ward, soft, careful, and meant to keep the day itself from taking offense.
He let his mouth rest in a merchant’s harmless curve and spent his attention where it paid best: on what slipped out when people thought they were only talking to each other. “Dry days that sweat,” someone muttered over a basket of beans, wiping a palm on their skirt as if the air itself had turned wet. An old fisher, salt-cracked lips barely moving, warned a boy not to cut through the eastern reeds at dusk; the reeds “whisper back” now, and whispers were debts that came due. Xotzin nodded at the right moments and asked for nothing, not even names, because need drew eyes the way blood drew gnats. He packed each half-phrase away like counted cacao, keeping his hands busy with small courtesies so no one saw how carefully he listened.
At the tide-poles, Xotzin let his gaze climb the carved graduations as if they were a merchant’s board of weights. Today’s wet stain sat higher than it had any right to, a dark scum-ring clinging where yesterday’s wind should have dried it clean. His inked forearm tallies prickled under the cloak. He measured the day-keeper’s promised dryness against the water’s blunt testimony, and the numbers refused to agree.
A fisher’s wife, hands red from gutting, muttered that the lake now “answers” the calendar instead of obeying it, as if water could be taught manners by named days. Xotzin let the words pass with a polite nod and stepped nearer the reeds. He pinched up drift, foam, seeds, a smear of scum, and rubbed it between finger and thumb. If the water was lying, it would lie carefully.
Xotzin read the tide-poles the way he read a ledger: once for the obvious, twice for the lie, and a third time to see what the liar had hoped he would miss. The graduations were cut clean, old cuts darkened by seasons of algae and hand-oil. No fresh chisel work. No smeared pitch to shift a mark. He crouched until the pole’s shadow fell straight and thin, then rose and shifted again, letting the sun strike from a different angle as if light itself had been bribed.
The waterline did not move to accommodate him.
A wet scum-ring clung above the last dry notch, a thumb’s breadth higher than it had been when he arrived in Xochitlan Milpa. Higher than it should be on a day the day-keeper had spoken of with the casual confidence of someone reciting a well-known path. Xotzin’s forearm prickled under its inked tallies, the sensation he got when sacks were short and everyone swore they’d counted. He could almost feel the missing weight in his palm.
He touched the pole where the damp began. The wood was slick, not only from water but from a fine grit that stayed on his fingertip when he pulled away. Silt. Too much for a calm morning. He brought his fingers to his nose with a merchant’s discretion. No rot from turned reeds. No sharp bite of storm-churned mud. The smell was clean-wet, like canal water drawn through stone: wrong for a lake edge that should have been drying.
Behind him, a pair of boys hopped from plank to plank along the dock, arguing over who had permission to check the tide stain. Their laughter thinned when they noticed him watching. One boy pointed, not at the waterline, but at the pole itself, tracing the older cuts with a grimy nail as if they were a game of ancestry.
Xotzin straightened with his smile in place, the polite one that asked for nothing. Inside, the numbers refused to settle. If the count said dry, and the pole said wet, then either the count was being bent: or something beneath the surface had learned to push back.
He let the canoe drift until its nose pressed into the reed fringe with a soft, obedient scrape. The dock sounds fell behind him replaced by the hush of stalks rubbing together. He kept his shoulders loose, as if he’d come only to spare the hull a dent, and slid one hand over the gunwale.
His fingertips combed the wet reeds. He felt for the familiar violences: leaf-splits from sudden wind, grit packed where a storm had worried the bank, the sharp bite of snapped wattle from a sluice gate that had taken a barge wrong. Any of those would be a merchant’s relief: an answer that could be carried to elders without inviting looks meant for someone whispering about spirits. He pinched a strand of green between thumb and forefinger and drew it down. Water beaded and fell in clean drops.
No torn fibers. No fresh sap. The stalks were bent, not broken, as if something heavier than a heron had slid through without haste. He found a smear on his skin (slick, pale, too smooth to be ordinary mud) and paused, letting the texture speak before he let his face do it.
The foam he lifts is not the ordinary lace of stirred algae that spreads to hide itself. It comes up in pale cords, springy between his fingers, and when he lets one fall it does not flatten; it settles back into a curl as if it has weight and preference. The reeds have caught it in deliberate loops, each coil snugged against a stalk, each turn echoing the last until the whole tangle suggests a spiral laid down by a patient hand. His gaze keeps wanting to travel the curve, to trace it inward the way a canoe follows a channel that narrows without warning. He forces himself to blink, to look away to the open water, then back again (counting turns, searching for the careless smear of chance) and finds none.
He pinched one cord of foam and lifted it to his nose, testing it with the same patience he gave cacao: first the smell for chalk, then the feel for grit. It was slick, almost oily, and beneath the lake’s clean-wet lay a faint mineral sting, like stone ground too fine. When he dragged his finger through the spiral to break it, the loops slackened, then crept back into order, as if the water kept a memory of the mark.
Xotzin wiped the slickness on the inside of his cloak where the damp wouldn’t show and lifted his eyes to the tide-poles. The wet line sat a finger higher than it had any right to, not for this named day, not under the count everyone mouthed like a safeguard. Yet the water and the spiral agreed with each other. If a canal could hold a glyph, it could be made to hold an instruction, too, and instructions always arrived with a price.
Xotzin ran the implication through his mind like beads on a cord, thumb worrying each one until the string burned his attention. If the day-keeper’s count could be wrong, then every rule that hung from it, when to sow, when to burn the stubble, when to lift the sluice boards and let the chinampa canals breathe, became guesswork dressed in ceremony. A farmer could do everything “right” and still be told he had offended the spirits by cutting reeds on a day that wasn’t what the Circle claimed. A traveler could obey the taboos and arrive too late to market, only to be laughed at for being timid. Or worse: arrive on the “wrong” day and be treated like a walking bad omen.
He thought of his own route marks, the ones he inked on his forearm in quick, honest strokes. Those tallies never lied because they answered only to what his eyes saw and his hands carried. The count was different. The count lived in mouths and in the Day-Count Circle’s knot of authority: breath turned into law. If that breath was false, then the whole village would still shape its days around it, the way water obediently follows a channel even when the channel has been cut crooked.
And who benefited when the channel ran crooked? Not the chinampa families, who would be blamed for “careless planting” if the harvest came thin. Not the Canal Wardens, who would be forced to choose between what the water demanded and what the shrine declared permissible. The only ones insulated from consequence were the ones who could rename consequences: call a flood a “warning,” call an accident a “lesson,” call a death a “payment.”
Xotzin’s smile came and went like a practiced greeting. He could already hear the polite phrasing: special necessity, unavoidable correction, the old ways reasserting themselves. He had traded in enough markets to recognize a ledger being adjusted after the fact. If the count was sliding, someone was either too incompetent to admit it: or skilled enough to use that slip as a lever.
A wrong count did not just sour maize in the field; it curdled the rules people used to live beside one another without knives. Named days held up more than planting taboos. They fixed when tribute baskets were “due” and when a delay was permitted; when a toll at a causeway was lawful and when it was theft; when a debt could be called in with honor and when calling it in would be called predation. Xotzin could feel the Traveling Guild’s agreements in it, too. Those tidy bargains written nowhere but remembered by every porter and dock elder: pass on Four-Reed and pay half, rest on Nine-Wind and pay nothing, deliver to the granary before the moon’s third notch and the late fee is forgiven.
Shift the count by even a day and every arrangement became a trap with a smile painted over it. An outsider arriving “wrong” could be accused of stepping on sacred time, and the accusation would sound like piety instead of politics. In disputes, the Circle could point at the calendar and make respect or disrespect out of the same act, depending on who needed to be humbled.
Xotzin had seen how fear travels in a chinampa town: it never runs straight, it seeps. A sprout that comes up late is no longer a farmer’s bad patch of soil, it is a sign. A fish trap pulled up empty is no longer the lake being fickle, it is someone “taking more than their share,” and the first question is not how to mend the weave but who laid it. The talk starts soft, as if out of kindness, Who cut reeds on the wrong day? Who missed the new-moon blood?. And then gathers weight as it passes mouth to mouth. “Hollow harvests” becomes a shape people can point at. And when people point, they prefer targets that won’t point back: a stranger, a widow, a debtor, an outsider with no cousins to argue on his behalf.
Uncertainty made people hungry for anything that could be counted. They clutched at procedures the way a drowning man grips reeds: tight enough to tear them up. A pinch of copal, a bead of blood, a bowed head at the right step: gestures that once eased a conscience became proofs of belonging. Decline, and your caution was recast as concealment; hesitate, and you were already accused.
Under that squeezing fear, remedies never stayed gentle. What began as “a little more devotion” always turned into extra cuts, extra bowls, extra witnesses: each offering meant to prove the town was still obedient to time. Xotzin had watched it elsewhere: men insisting blood could mend an unraveling count, because admitting the count was wrong meant admitting the Circle could be wrong too.
After sunset the town changed its gait. The laughter that usually drifted from cooking fires thinned, as if someone had laid a hand over every mouth. Reed torches appeared in pairs at the ends of canal paths, runners, boys too young to shave and men too old to sprint unless fear lent them legs. Their flames hissed in the wet air, smoke sweet with resin and panic.
Xotzin watched from the edge of the dock as the first pair came splashing along the planks, torchlight hopping over water and mud. They carried no drums, no conch: just urgency. One of them had a strip of white cloth tied around his wrist, the sort used to mark a duty shift with the Canal Wardens. The other held a length of cord with knots spaced like counts.
They did not shout names. They called households, as if the dwellings themselves had ears.
“To the Calendar Stone,” the older runner said, voice pitched so it would travel over reed walls without inviting argument. “All hearths. All hands that can bleed. The Circle has read it.”
His companion added the barb that made it a summons instead of news. “If your doorway stays dark, they’ll say you chose hollow milpas. They’ll say you refused the town.”
A door-latch lifted on a nearby platform. A woman leaned out, hair unbound, fingers stained with blue dye. “My husband is on the lake.”
“Then you go for him,” the older man replied, already turning. “Or you send your eldest. The Circle will tally who came.”
Tally. The word snagged in Xotzin’s mind like a hook. He touched the inked marks on his own forearm, a merchant’s private arithmetic, and felt how easily counting could become a weapon when the counter wore sacred authority.
Across the water, torches multiplied, moving in lines along narrow paths, stopping at each threshold long enough to make fear personal. Children were pulled close. Dogs stopped barking, tails low. Even the reeds seemed to hush, making room for the idea being carried: that absence would be translated, officially, into guilt.
The day-keeper stood halfway up the shrine steps, so the torchlight struck his cheeks from below and made his eyes look like cut obsidian. He held a bundle of knotted cords and a smear of red on his thumb, as if he had already begun. When he spoke, he did not chant. He counted.
“By the count,” he said, tapping the cords, “the milpas will stand high. The ears will be heavy. You will think the town is blessed.” A murmur ran through the gathered platforms. Half relief, half suspicion. He let it live for a breath, then pressed his thumb to the next knot. “But the reading turns. The husk will promise and the kernel will fail. You will break open your baskets and find wind.”
Someone behind Xotzin swallowed loud enough for him to hear it.
“This is not a common warning,” the day-keeper continued. “It is a special necessity. Time is owed tonight. The canal spirits have mouths. We have fed them lightly, and they have begun to take their own.”
He raised his hand, palm outward, like a toll-warden stopping a canoe. “Bring your lancets. Bring your eldest if you cannot. Pay what is required, and the hollow will pass over our chinampas.”
The Circle spoke of blood the way merchants spoke of cacao. A cut was not pain, they implied, but a payment against error; a drop, a mark set straight in the corded count. Xotzin watched the idea settle over the crowd, turning dread into something that could be totaled. Men who would have bristled at a direct command nodded as if agreeing to a familiar toll. Women shifted infants from hip to hip and checked the faces around them, not for comfort but for witnesses.
Under torchlight, obligation became visible. Who stepped forward first. Who kept hands hidden in sleeves. Who would be remembered as shorting the town. Even before the basin appeared, the ledger had begun: written in glances that asked, quietly, do you owe, or do you refuse to be counted?
A shallow clay basin was set on a reed mat, its rim already smeared with old cinnabar. A lancet, obsidian, freshly chipped, went hand to hand. Each cut was small, efficient, almost polite. When a man held back, the Circle’s speakers leaned in with gentle voices: the canals must be kept safe, the spirits appeased, and no one should let a stranger’s eyes carry home a story of a divided town.
By the time Xotzin reaches the reed mat, the “necessity” has hardened into rule. A Circle man stands beside the basin and calls each household name as if taking tribute, not offerings, tallying drops in a steady voice that leaves no space for refusal. Each person answers, cuts, shows red. Publicly counted, the blood feels less like prayer than receipt: protection purchased in witnesses.
At the Reed Gate the water pressed close to the stones, dark and patient, lipping at the lowest course of the causeway as if testing for weakness. Xotzin paused where the path narrowed between reed clumps. Above the damp smell of mud and crushed stems there was another scent, faint and wrong: foam left too long in the sun, bitter as old lime.
A child had taken the best lookout spot, not on the planks where adults clustered, but down at the stonework itself. He squatted with his heels in the silt, hair stuck to his forehead, one hand braced on a slick block while the other worried at a seam with a dirty fingernail. He glanced up at Xotzin with the bright, guarded pride of someone holding a secret in plain sight.
“Here,” he said, and scraped again until the gritty film peeled away in a curl. Beneath it the stone showed two cuts that did not belong to the soft, water-rounded face of the causeway: narrow V-shaped notches, sharp enough to catch a nail, pale where the rock had not yet taken back its usual stain. The marks sat beside older tallies, fainter, softened by seasons, like fresh ink beside a faded account.
Xotzin leaned in. The notch edges were too clean for accident. A tool had bitten there with intention, a steady hand and a practiced angle. He counted the spacing. Kept his face neutral while his mind did the same work it did with strings of cacao or bundles of reed mats.
“Who made those?” he asked, as lightly as asking a price.
The child shrugged, but his eyes flicked toward the group above, toward the men with wading poles and the reed-braided belts of the Wardens. “It’s for counting,” he said, lowering his voice as if the stone could overhear. “So boats can’t say they didn’t pass. But those. “Those weren’t there.”
The boy spoke as if he were reciting a lesson, not telling a secret. “When the canoes come thick,” he said, nodding toward the narrow throat of stone where the causeway pinched the channel, “the Wardens cut a mark. One for each boat. So later, if someone says, I didn’t pass, or I paid already, they can point and say: the stone remembers.”
He dragged the tip of his finger along the older tally cuts, rounded, clogged with silt, worn shallow by seasons of wet hands. “Those are old. Everybody knows those.”
Then he jabbed at the pale V’s again, the fresh bite of them. His expression tightened with the satisfaction of having noticed what adults had not bothered to explain. “But these two, ” He shook his head hard enough to sling a bead of water from his hair. “No. I sit here. I watch. They weren’t there before the last moon. I would’ve seen. I count too.”
His gaze flicked up, quick and wary, toward the Wardens’ belts and poles. “They say it’s only counting,” he added, softer, as if repeating the safe part of the story. “That’s what they tell.”
Xotzin brought his hand down as if to steady himself on the damp stone, then let his thumb find the first groove. The notch took skin cleanly, a sharp V that hadn’t yet learned to soften under water and silt. He measured the distance to the next by the span of his knuckle, then again with the edge of his nail, the way he checked a cord’s knots or a trader’s tally stick. Too far apart for a burst of passing canoes; too evenly isolated to be cut in the heat of argument at a toll. These sat like deliberate additions: entries made when no one was watching the channel, when the blade could bite slow and straight. He kept his smile in place, but his stomach tightened at the thought of accounting done after the goods were already gone.
A reed-hauler shouldered past with a bundle dripping canal water, muttering that it was nothing, “keeping order, that’s all”, as if the words could smooth the stone. Yet his gaze kept sliding to the waterline where the reeds combed the current. The same rumor clung in the air with the insects: two guild canoes gone, and now two fresh marks, loss squared and entered like maize in a tally.
The boy must have seen something shift behind Xotzin’s polite mask, because his voice dropped to breath-thin. “They said the Gate remembers,” he murmured, as if the stone itself might hear and take offense. When he pointed again, his finger shook, hovering over the pale V’s without touching. It didn’t feel like boats counted cleanly through. It felt like people turned into marks.
Xotzin crouched until his knees complained, bringing the fresh cuts to eye level. The stone was slick with algae where old hands had steadied themselves, but these V’s were pale and raw, their inner faces still granular, as if the rock had only just been opened. He read them the way he read a trader’s stick: not by the number alone, but by the manner of making.
The first groove was deep enough to catch the pad of his thumb. Whoever cut it had committed weight and time, driving the edge in and levering it out instead of scratching a quick line. Along one side the cut feathered, a tiny step where the blade had slipped, recovered, and bitten again. A hesitation. Not a child’s bored hacking, not a mason’s chisel skating off a repair seam. A hand that wanted the mark to be clean. He moved to the second notch. The spacing between them wasn’t the easy rhythm of busy traffic; it was measured. Too neat. The angle of the V’s matched, as if the wrist had been held the same way each time, as if there were a rule for it. And the stone around them wasn’t bruised by repeated tool strikes. No scatter. No collateral damage. A careful tally in a place that wasn’t meant to be a ledger.
Xotzin’s mind supplied the questions before he could stop them. If it was a count, who was keeping it, warden, priest, or someone who wanted to imitate either? What was being counted: hulls, bundles, bodies? His forearm prickled where his own tally marks lay under cloth, honest ink meant for debts that could be repaid.
He rubbed a smear of silt across the notch and watched it cling in the fresh bite. The grit held like ground cacao in a crack. New. Recent. Made with intention and, worse, with expectation: someone carving now for a reckoning later.
He let the boy’s whisper hang and tested the tale the cuts were meant to sell. Canal Wardens kept passage tallies where a man could touch them without bending: shoulder-high on a post, at the dry edge of a landing, safe from spray and rot. These sat wrong. Too low. His fingers had to reach down toward the slick band where algae began, and the V’s leaned subtly, their open mouths facing the channel.
Xotzin shifted his weight and followed the angle with his eyes. From the causeway, the grooves looked merely new. From water level, he imagined it from the seat of a canoe, they would present clean, readable faces, as if the stone had been taught to speak to those floating past. Or to someone walking in the shallows, keeping a hand on the wall, guiding a load that did not ride on the surface.
He pictured a warden standing proud with a counting stick and could not make it fit. He pictured instead a pair of arms braced low, rope over shoulder, dragging against the Gate’s shadow. The marks weren’t for traffic. They were for something taken.
Understanding settled in him with the dull certainty of a stone dropped into a canoe: the notches were not a count of passage, but of absence. A warden’s tally was meant to prove order: who entered, who paid, who moved on. These V’s did something uglier. They made loss legible. Each cut said not “through,” but “taken,” turning vanishings into a kind of sanctioned inventory, as if the Gate itself were a storehouse and people were sacks of maize marked off when removed.
He imagined the hand that carved them, steady, practiced, eager for the mark to stand. The same steadiness that could point at the count later and say, See? It is recorded. It was always so. And the lie would hold, because it had been given a place in stone.
His thoughts clicked from one motive to the next with the neat economy of a trader’s ledger. When fear rose as surely as the lake, someone could sell order: a tightened count, a declared taboo, a “special necessity” that made extra blood sound like maintenance. Close the causeway, choke routes, name the wrong day, and any missing canoe became proof. Anyone who challenged the arithmetic risked becoming its next notch.
His guild mark bought him courtesy, not safety, and it certainly didn’t buy him belief. He knew how men used omens like weights: shifted them to tip an argument, then swore the scale was sacred. That stubborn literacy made him hard to soothe with reed-smoke and whispered taboos. It also made him convenient: a foreign tongue to blame for offense, or a sharp-eyed witness to quiet. Either way, another notch the Gate could keep.
Xotzin kept his voice in the easy range (merchant-bright, unhurried) while his fingers worried the edge of his travel cloak where the lacquered cotton lay hidden. “I’m only trying to keep my route clean,” he said, as if the matter were no heavier than dried chiles. “At the Reed Gate, the toll marks. Have they shifted? Any new pole set, any reed tunnel closed? The Guild likes its counts straight.”
A farmer with mud up to his calves gave a smile that showed teeth but not comfort. “Counts are… kept,” he replied, and then looked past Xotzin’s shoulder as if someone else needed answering. Another man offered a shrug too quick to be honest. A woman at a basket of amaranth stopped sorting long enough to wipe her hands, not from dirt but from the feel of the question.
Xotzin nodded as though satisfied, then laid out a second weight on the scale. “Two canoes didn’t reach the market-city last moon,” he added softly. “If there’s a snag at the Gate I’d rather pay the right tribute than lose goods and names.”
Throats cleared. A boy with a gourd of water whispered something and was hushed with a look sharp enough to cut reed. Somewhere near the dock, a tide-pole creaked as it settled, and Xotzin’s mind, always counting, noted the mark: higher than it had any right to be for this point in the dry count.
“Night mist,” someone finally offered. “Swamp lights. Not a place for talk.”
Xotzin let his smile widen, polite as a gift. He touched the inked tally marks on his forearm, habit, not threat, and lowered his gaze in the way outsiders did when they wanted to be seen as careful. “Then I’ll write ‘mist’ and keep my men indoors,” he said, light as before.
No one laughed. The silence that followed had edges, as if a rule stood between them and speech, unseen but absolute.
Work does not stop, not quite; it merely loses its rhythm, as if someone has laid a palm over the village’s mouth. A man in the path lifts his hoe and holds it at the top of the swing a heartbeat too long before letting it fall with a careful, muted chop. At the canal edge a basket of cut amaranth is lowered as though the reeds might be listening beneath it. Even the children, usually quick as minnows, move with their chins tucked and their voices thinned to breath.
Xotzin feels attention slide across him in short, measuring glances: then slip away, obedient to some invisible line. More than once a gaze skitters toward the stepped shrine at the center and snaps back to the soil, like a hand burned by a coal. The wardens do not speak, but their fingers creep higher on their staffs, knuckles whitening where the wood is polished by years of authority. It is the kind of warning that costs nothing to give and can be denied afterward.
He keeps his posture open, his smile in place, and notes how even the water seems to hesitate before it laps the bank.
Xotzin shifted as if changing goods on a mat, letting his questions fall behind him and bringing forward the safe language of trade. He praised the chinampas as if he had never seen such orderly raised plots, named measures that honored their labor without insulting their pride, and produced a small token, salted fish hooks and a twist of good cotton thread, nothing that would look like a bribe, only respect. Heads dipped. Hands moved. The village breathed again, but only shallowly.
When he threaded in his true concern about the tide-pole marks rising on days that should be dry under the spoken count, the answers came out too smooth. “The Circle has read it.” “The days are as they are named.” Each phrase sounded practiced, as if borrowed from someone else’s mouth and returned unchanged.
A Canal Warden drifted nearer, staff angled like an accident waiting to happen: no bared teeth, no raised voice, just a careful narrowing of space. The man’s shadow fell across Xotzin’s trade mat. Xotzin kept his smile, but inside he weighed the move like bad cacao: curiosity could be named disrespect, disrespect could become taboo, and taboo always found a way to demand payment, blood, or a scapegoat with a foreign face.
Before the hush can congeal into something that points, Nopaltzin steps into view at the forge edge, soot-smudged and steady, turning a half-finished tang between tongs as if nothing in the village could hurry him. He does not look up, yet the wardens’ staffs ease a finger’s width from their grip. A few faces reset. With Nopaltzin there, Xotzin is no lone outsider. He is being received by weight.
Nopaltzin did not meet Xotzin’s gaze. He kept his eyes on the brazier as if the coals held the safer truths, feeding the bellows with a slow, even pull that made the fire breathe without flaring. The sound covered what he chose to let out.
“Don’t ask here,” he murmured, the words falling between the hiss of quenching water and the scrape of stone on metal. His tongs turned a half-finished tang, checking its straightness by habit more than need. “But listen.”
He tipped his chin toward a rack set back from the open doorway, where work cooled in a neat row. Clay offering bowls sat there, their rims still pale with ash-dust, beside obsidian-set blades wrapped in reed to protect the edge. Too many bowls for a small town that prided itself on measured rites. Too many blades for harvest repair.
Xotzin let his own attention drift there as if merely admiring craft. He counted without moving his lips. More than a cycle’s worth, made in a rush, and in forms that would not sit on a household altar.
Nopaltzin’s thumb hooked again, impatient now, and the corner of his mouth tightened. “The Circle’s orders,” he said. “They came twice in one span of days. Not the day-keeper himself: runners. Always runners. They brought cacao and thread like it was trade, but they spoke like it was tribute.”
He paused to lift a bowl, turning it to show the base: the clay had been stamped while wet with a small spiral, feathered at the ends. A ward-mark, or a claim. He set it down as if it burned.
“Lancets by the handful,” he went on. “Not one set for a household, not a pair for a birth or a fever. Handfuls.” His voice stayed level, but his fingers worried the tongs. “Offering bowls stacked like bricks. I have never seen it, not even before a drought when everyone begs the spirits at once.”
Xotzin felt the shape of the numbers settle in his gut, heavier than copper. Doubling meant intent, not panic. A schedule. A convergence.
“And they don’t want talk,” Nopaltzin added, still watching the coals. “They want ready.”
Nopaltzin crouched and reached beneath the workbench where the charcoal dust lay thickest, as if the floor itself could keep a secret. He pulled free a short strip of fiber cord, the kind used to lash bundles, and with it a copper ring wrapped in scrap cloth to keep it from catching the light. Even muffled, it had weight: fresh-filed, edges squared down, the surface still holding the faint rasp-marks of hurried finishing.
He unwrapped it and set it on his own wrist as a measure. The ring slid over his knuckles without resistance and dropped with a hard little clink against the thicker part of his forearm. Too wide for restraint there; too deliberate to be ornament. He rolled it into his palm and tipped it so Xotzin could see the inside, smoothed until it would not bite skin, the curve made for long wear rather than ceremony.
“Ankle size,” Nopaltzin said, as if naming it made it less dangerous. He kept his eyes on the ring, not on Xotzin, and his jaw worked once like he was chewing down a name he wouldn’t risk speaking aloud.
Xotzin let the ring sit between them like a small, dull moon. “Who paid for it?” he asked lightly, as if it were no more than a farmer’s clasp.
Nopaltzin’s breath went out through his nose. He did not offer a name. He turned the copper on his palm and tapped a shallow maker’s notch near the seam: his own mark, but cut at a hurried angle, the way a man works when he’s being watched. Then he scraped a thumb along the inner curve and held it up: a faint smear of green grit clung to his skin, polishing stone from the western terraces, not the river sand the town used.
“Three sets,” he said, eyes still down. “Then five. Then another before the last market day.” The numbers came clean, practiced, held at arm’s length. Proof without accusation.
His caution showed in how he parcelled out truth like measured grain. The orders, he said, never came in daylight: intermediaries at the forge door when honest men were sleeping, faces half-hidden, voices trained to sound like errands. Payment arrived in cacao counted bean by bean, too precise to be casual. And always the warning. No talk. He would not name suspects; a wrong guess rode smoke-fast and burned the poorest roofs first.
Nopaltzin’s careful voice frayed. “I’ve seen lancets ordered alone. Bowls, too,” he said, and for once he looked up, meeting Xotzin’s eyes. “But ankle-rings with blood tools. Only when someone expects bodies kept close. Not honored. Held.” He swallowed. “You’re guild-marked. Use it as quiet weight in a bargain, not market talk. If the Circle hears gossip, they’ll make us all swear into it.”
Ixamala did not come closer than the drip-line of the irrigation gate. She stayed where the shadow cut the wall in a clean edge, letting the last light slide past her like water around a rock. Her burned arm rested against her ribs, guarded; her other hand lifted, fingers spread, hovering a breath from the painted feather-serpent spirals. Not quite a blessing, not quite a ward. Xotzin watched the small restraint and understood it the way he understood a seller who would not touch another man’s weights.
The serpents were common here (every gate and sluice had them, bold coils in faded pigment) but she studied this one as if it had a fever. Her eyes tracked the curves in slow passes, measuring where the line thickened, where it trembled, where a careless brush had left a ridge. She leaned in until her breath stirred the damp plaster and then stopped, as if the air itself had a boundary.
To Xotzin the design was only paint on lime, a farmer’s comfort laid over old stone. But standing beside her he felt what she must have felt: a pressure that was not wind, tugging at the skin behind his ears; a faint sense of direction, like a current running the wrong way under a calm surface. The reeds on the canal side barely moved, yet the moisture on the gate’s face beaded and slid in thin lines that did not follow gravity.
She withdrew her hand a fraction, and the gesture made his own palms itch, remembering blistered rope and wet wood. He kept his stance courteous, still, open, not challenging, while his mind did its inventory anyway: shrine nearby, waterworks older than the paint, and a community that treated lines on a wall as law.
Ixamala’s lips moved without sound for a moment, counting or listening. Then her gaze snapped to a lifted edge of pigment where the spiral should have lain flat. The flake curled up like a fingernail catching on cloth, and for an instant Xotzin thought he saw something under it that was not plaster, dark, glassy, impatient, before the light shifted and it became only shadow again.
Ixamala’s voice dropped to the level of a confidence traded over a low table. “They think it’s devotion,” she said, eyes still fixed on the feather-serpent coil, “but it’s craft. Every curl is a knot. Tied so wind stays wind and water stays water, and both keep to the channels they were given.”
Xotzin followed the painted line with his gaze. Up close the spiral was not smooth: tiny ridges where the brush had hesitated, grainy clots of pigment, a crack that ran through the serpent’s jaw like a hairline fracture in fired clay. The wall smelled of lime and damp reeds, yet beneath that there was a sharper note. Stone that had been warmed too often by bodies and smoke.
Ixamala did not touch, but the hairs on Xotzin’s forearm lifted as if she had. “Look,” she murmured.
Along the outer turns, the paint’s edge had peeled in thin crescents, curling outward, not from age but from strain, like cord fraying when it’s pulled past its limit. The knots, she implied without saying it, were being tightened from the wrong side. As though something inside the gate wanted the stitching undone: and was testing where it would give.
Xotzin shifted a half-step nearer, meaning only to see the flaked edge better, and the world answered with a draft that had no business in still evening. It caught under his travel cloak as if a hand had hooked the cloth and tested its weight; the damp on his lips went chalk-dry, and his tongue stuck for a heartbeat as though he’d swallowed dust instead of lake air. He did not look back at the canal. He kept his face neutral, merchant-calm, while his pulse made a quiet argument in his throat.
Ixamala’s head tilted, not toward him but toward the shrine, listening the way a weaver listens for a snag. “Do you feel it?” she asked softly. “That pull.” Her gaze fixed beyond the painted gate. “It’s worst at the Calendar Stone: like a seam being worried from underneath, thread by thread.”
Ixamala’s mouth tightened. “When they bleed on the wrong count,” she said, “it isn’t only manners they insult.” Her gaze stayed on the spiral, on the places where paint lifted like strained thread. “Blood is weight. Put it on a day that doesn’t hold it, and the boundary swells, then exhales. Like a lung learning it can. Those feather-serpent curls in foam and wind? Not blessings. Pressure marks.”
Xotzin let his smile show just enough teeth to pass for polite. “Then step,” he said, as if asking to see a bolt unrolled. “A handspan. Prove the seam is there.”
Ixamala’s eyes hardened. “Not like that.” She held up two fingers. “Aligned day. The hour when the wind turns. A measured offering: no more.” Her voice went flat. “If the count is wrong, forcing it only widens the tear. Doubt me, if you must.”
Citlali came off the reed-path as if she’d been spat out by the marsh. No greeting, no apology for interrupting. Water ran off the hem of her camouflage cloak in slow threads, darkening the hard-packed earth and leaving the sharp canal-scent behind. She stopped at the edge of their small knot of shadow, close enough that he could see the bone points on her necklace shift with her breathing. Her eyes did not settle on any face. They kept cutting past shoulders to the black water beyond the irrigation gate, counting ripples the way he counted measures of maize.
Ixamala’s posture changed: still calm, but alert at the joints. Nopaltzin’s hand went absentmindedly to the soot-dark cord at his hair, a craftsman’s habit when he didn’t like what he heard coming.
Citlali’s attention snapped to a harmless eddy licking the canal wall. Her fingers twitched as if they wanted to notch an arrow. “It followed me from the Reed Gate,” she said, voice low and flat. Not fear, exactly. Something practiced, like naming a thorn before it goes deeper.
Xotzin kept his mouth in the shape of courtesy. “Who?” he asked, though the question tasted foolish as soon as it left him. He made his tone matter-of-fact, as if asking about a missing canoe pole.
Her gaze flicked to him for a heartbeat, sharp, judging the weight of his doubt, then slid away again. “Not a person.” She shifted her feet, listening with her whole body. “You hear water and think water. I hear it and know when it’s repeating words.”
A draft moved through the reeds without bending them. The hair along Xotzin’s forearm lifted under the lacquered cotton. He set his hands behind his back so no one would see them flex.
Citlali leaned slightly, head canted toward the canal as if to catch a whisper. “Don’t stand too close to the edge,” she added, to no one in particular. “It likes when you forget where the ground ends.”
She named the pattern the way a hunter named a trail: not as story, but as proof. On the Circle’s declared “necessary” days, the swamp lights did not merely appear. They bred. One pale bead over the water became five, then a chain, then a low constellation pressed down into the reeds. Honest mist-fire wandered and died with a change of air; these did not. They held together like fish schooling in a net.
Xotzin followed her pointing chin toward the canal mouth. The lights were there even now, faint in the late sun, like oil on black water. He watched a ribbon of them slide sideways, slow and deliberate, against the push of the afternoon breeze. Reed tops bent one way; the lights drifted the other, as if some unseen paddle nudged them from below.
Citlali’s voice stayed flat. “They come when the Circle says ‘necessary,’” she said, tasting the word like spoiled maize. “Not on storm days. Not on feast days. Only when they ask for blood.”
She rubbed two fingers together, as if feeling for grit. “And they herd. Toward the Reed Gate. Toward people.”
At dusk, Citlali said, the Reed Gate stopped being a place and became a throat. The causeway’s long shadow lay across the canal like a tongue, and sound behaved wrong beneath it, caught, folded, and thrown back. Echo-voices gathered there, not loud, but persistent, as if the water had learned to mimic speech without learning meaning. She’d heard scraps that didn’t fit any living mouth: a child’s laugh with no breath behind it, a market haggler’s cadence stripped of words, a man’s plea cut down to a single syllable repeated until it lost sense. Mention an offering (say blood, say “necessary”) and the fragments rose, eager, pressing closer, like hands feeling for a seam.
As she spoke, a small ripple kissed the dock posts (nothing more than a fish turning) and Citlali flinched as if struck. Her right hand jerked up, fingers curling to draw a bow that wasn’t on her shoulder. She caught herself, held rigid, jaw working. “Sometimes,” she said through her teeth, “the water calls. It uses voices I know.”
Citlali studied them the way she’d measure a spoor in mud: no warmth, no apology. “I can take you,” she said, eyes on Xotzin’s hands as if counting what they promised, “to where the lights knot and the echo-voices pile up.” Her gaze flicked toward the causeway’s dark line. “But I won’t stand there alone at dusk. It answers to me. It says my name.”
Xotzin let Citlali’s last words settle the way grain settles in a jar, heavy, undeniable. The dock boards were damp under his sandals, and he could feel the village watching from the edges of reed shadow, measuring whether an outsider would make a promise too loud to keep.
He inclined his head, not deep enough to look like submission, not shallow enough to look like mockery. “Then you won’t stand there alone,” he said, voice even. He kept his hands visible, palms empty, as if showing the quality of a cloth. “Not at dusk, not under that gate. I am marked by the Traveling Guild. My word is my balance-stone.”
Ixamala’s gaze slid to his forearm where the inked tallies broke the skin like old accounts. She read his caution in the way he avoided saying the shrine’s name. Xotzin did not offer an oath, did not invoke any feathered-serpent ward, did not add a drop of blood to sweeten the promise. Oaths could be seized and twisted; shrines kept ledgers of their own.
Citlali’s mouth tightened. She stepped closer, close enough that he smelled marsh water and woodsmoke on her cloak. “Guild words are for markets,” she said. Her eyes flicked to his earspools, then past him to the canal. “The Reed Gate eats market-talk. It answers with teeth.”
Xotzin held the small smile that usually soothed angry buyers. He felt it fail to find purchase here, like a paddle striking weeds. “True,” he allowed. “So I’ll speak plain: if the water calls your name, it will have to call over mine as well.”
That earned him the hard look, flat, appraising, without gratitude. As if politeness were only another net with finer cord, thrown gently and drawn tight later. Citlali’s fingers hovered at her side as though remembering a bow. “You walk careful,” she said. “Careful men still drown.”
“Careful men,” Xotzin replied, “at least choose where they step.”
For a beat the only sound was the canal’s soft slap against the posts. Then Citlali gave a short nod, not agreement so much as acceptance of terms, and turned her head toward the dark line of the causeway as if listening to something already gathering there.
Nopaltzin shifted his weight, broad shoulders settling as if he stood before an anvil he could not step away from. Soot still lay in the creases of his hands; he rubbed his thumb across his palm, testing callus like a man checking a tool for cracks. When he spoke, he kept his voice low, for the dock carried sound along the water.
“You think they stare because you’re a guild man,” he said to Xotzin. “They stare because they’re waiting to see who gets named next. And if anyone makes it look like defiance, they won’t drag a hunter first. They’ll come for a forge. A forge is leverage.”
Xotzin watched him as he would watch a porter’s knots, simple, sure, hiding strain. “They can squeeze you,” he said, letting it sit between them like an offered weight. “How?”
“They choke charcoal. They claim copper. They call my work ‘unclean’ unless I pay it back in blood.” Nopaltzin’s jaw tightened. “And lately they want more than bowls and lancets. Someone ordered ankle-rings. Heavy. Not ornament.” He looked past them toward the shrine steps. “If I pretend I didn’t hear that, I become part of it. If I speak too loud, I lose the bellows by morning.”
Ixamala did not soften it with shrine phrasing or village comforts. She kept her voice level, almost weary, as if she’d repeated the lesson to people who wanted lullabies. “When blood is given on the wrong day,” she said, “it doesn’t feed anything you can bargain with. It drags. Like a blade across hide.” Her fingers traced a small spiral in the damp air. Feather-serpent without reverence, a diagram, not a prayer. “You feel the lake climbing when it shouldn’t. You see the gates sweating foam. That’s a seam being scraped open under your fields.”
Nopaltzin’s eyes narrowed, offended on behalf of custom, yet he didn’t deny it. Xotzin felt the implication settle cold: fear didn’t order extra lancets. A hand did.
Citlali’s head snapped up at the tightening in their voices, as if she’d caught a twig crack in the reeds. “Enough,” she said, flat and sharp. “I don’t care whose pride is bruised, or whose standing breaks if you breathe wrong.” Her fingers closed around her bone-point necklace. “The lights answer miscounted days. And someone keeps naming those days ‘necessary’: like making a knife into law.”
The standoff thinned, not into trust but into a kind of shared accounting. Nopaltzin saw his forge being bled by orders; Citlali heard the reeds answer to misnamed days; Ixamala felt the seam worrying itself open; Xotzin tasted leverage in every “necessary” rite. If the count could be bent, so could anyone. They agreed. Watch the tallies, the metal, and the Reed Gate, together, eyes open.
Xotzin herded them into the lee of the forge, where the heat made the air waver and turned every passerby into a smeared silhouette. The bellows exhaled with a wet, steady thump; charcoal snapped; the smell of hot clay and herb-smoke laid a veil over conversation. It was the closest thing to privacy the town allowed without calling it secrecy.
He kept his tone mild, the way he did when weighing cacao by the handful, but his eyes did not smile. “We can do this,” he said, “but not as if we are heroes. I have asked two small questions today and already paid for them in faces that stopped being friendly.”
Citlali’s gaze flicked to the doorway, then back, as if counting footfalls outside. Ixamala stood with her good arm tucked into her mantle, watching Xotzin the way she watched the shrine steps. Measuring where pressure would break.
“The Day-Count Circle doesn’t need to prove I’m wrong,” Xotzin continued. He tapped the inked tallies on his forearm, a habit that usually calmed him. Today it only reminded him how easily numbers could be made into a noose. “They only need to suggest I am dangerous. A merchant who meddles with omens. A guild man who ‘stirs the water.’”
He let the words hang a moment, then laid out the balance sheet as plainly as any trade. “If the Traveling Guild thinks I’ve brought scandal onto a route, they won’t wait for the truth. They will cut me loose to protect their toll marks. No safe house. No introductions. No witness when the Wardens say I broke taboo.”
His mouth tightened, then softened into courtesy again: an expression practiced for hostile tables. “So we move like traders, not like accusers. We watch first. We ask only what can be asked twice without drawing blood. And if we must step into the reeds at dusk, we do it with a reason we can name aloud.”
He looked from one face to the next, making sure each of them took the cost with him. “I am staking my name,” he said, “because if this count is being bent, it will bend the harvest: and then it will bend people. But if we slip, we won’t even get the chance to be right.”
Nopaltzin didn’t argue the politics; he set his hands on what could be held. “Then we keep it simple,” he said, voice low under the bellows’ breath. He reached for a charcoal nub and a scrap of fired-clay shard, and began making marks as if he were noting weights. Short strokes for lancets, longer for bowls, a twist for cord. For the rings he drew a closed circle, then another beside it, and frowned.
“I can’t stop them ordering,” he went on, “but I can see the shape of it. Who pays in cacao, who pays in favors. Who sends a nephew with a basket and who comes themselves after dark.” His eyes flicked to the forge door, then back. “I’ll tally every request that comes through my fire. If the Circle wants twelve bowls in a cycle, I’ll know if it becomes twenty. If someone asks for rings again, I’ll know the size, the number, and whose hands didn’t shake when they asked.”
He wiped the shard clean with his thumb. “And when you need tools, hooks, blades, nails, ask for repairs. I can pass what you need as what you broke. No trail that points to the shrine.”
Ixamala didn’t answer with outrage; she answered like someone setting stones across a current. She drew a thin cord from her mantle and looped it on the clay shard beside Nopaltzin’s marks, dividing the day with knots. “Not every hour is the same,” she murmured, eyes half-lidded as if listening through the forge’s thump. “There are spans when the seam lies flat. We move then. We speak then. On the named days the Circle has been forcing, we don’t test locks, we don’t pry gates, we don’t spill even a mouthful of blood.”
Xotzin watched her hands and felt his own carefulness sharpen into something else: a schedule that could be defended.
“The trouble,” Ixamala went on, “is miscounted rites don’t just offend spirits. They make ordinary waterworks feel hungry. A cistern lip, a sluice stone. Things that should only hold water begin to want more than water.”
Citlali took the task no one wanted to name. “I’ll walk you at dusk,” she said, blunt as a cut reed. “There are channels that don’t speak: soft mud, no echo, no lantern-glint.” Her fingers touched the bone points at her throat, as if checking they were still there. “When the swamp lights start to bunch, I’ll know first. After lights come voices. After voices, the Reed Gate takes someone.”
With their parts named, Xotzin fixed the only measure that mattered: time. Before the Circle proclaimed another “necessary” day, they would have three proofs in hand. Whether the count had been nudged, who was driving the sudden rush of bowls and rings, and what truly waited at the Reed Gate at dusk. After the announcement, doubt would be treated like blasphemy, and blood like bookkeeping.
Xotzin let the canoe drift a handspan off the dock posts and lifted his travel cloak with two fingers, careful not to make a show of it. Beneath the damp cotton, the lacquered under-armor caught a dull sheen, and along the inner seam the stitched mark of the Traveling Guild lay flat as a pressed leaf: clean thread, deliberate knots, the kind of sign that could open a gate or close a throat.
He held it where the nearest eyes could take it in. Not long enough to invite touching, guild marks were not for village fingers, but long enough to be counted. He watched the watchers as if he were weighing them: the boy at the tide-pole with reed stylus poised; the old man with a cord of keys at his belt; two shrine attendants lingering under the shade of the stepped platform, pretending not to listen.
The lake slapped the hull in small, impatient sounds. Xotzin’s hands stung where blisters had split under the rope work, and he kept his smile easy, as if pain were only another price to conceal.
Ixamala stayed back in the stern, eyes skimming corners and shadows rather than faces. Citlali’s reed-cloak made her part of the bank; only the bone points at her throat marked her as human. Nopaltzin sat still, a bundle of tools across his knees, the etched serpent spirals half-hidden under a fold of cloth.
Xotzin lowered the cloak again, slow, controlled. A warrant and a wager: if he claimed the Guild’s protection, he also accepted its scrutiny. He could feel that leash tighten in his mind, the way it always did when he put the mark in another person’s sight.
“We won’t ask for what isn’t ours,” he said, voice pitched to carry across water without sounding like an announcement. “Only passage to the terraces, by the canals as kept. You may note my name and route. If I break custom, let it be written so.”
He did not let his request hide in politeness. He tipped his chin toward the tide-pole and the reed stylus, then to the shade where the shrine attendants lingered, and he named them both in the same breath, as one names witnesses at a weighing.
“Dock-tally,” he said, and the boy’s shoulders tightened. “Shrine watch. Hear me plain.”
The old man with the keys shifted, metal clicking softly against his belt, as if to remind the water itself who owned the locks. Xotzin kept his hands open on his knees (no reaching, no secret signs) only the calm posture of someone who expected rules to hold.
“I ask for a narrow passage,” he continued, “within custom. Not across forbidden hours, not against your canal turns. Let my canoe be counted on the way out and counted on the way back.”
He glanced once at the stylus. “Write my route as you would a grain measure. Put down the terraces and the cisterns by name. If later someone says I slipped the count or skirted a named-day gate, you will have the marks to answer. And if I do stray, you will have the marks to hang it on me.”
A watcher’s gaze snagged where ornament met record: the jade beads in Xotzin’s ears, then the inked tally marks climbing his forearm, as if counting him the way he’d asked them to count the canoe. Suspicion didn’t need a voice; it sat in the stillness between the dock posts.
Xotzin met it with courtesies older than any one shrine. He named the elders before the attendants, the Wardens before the day-keeper, and spoke the order of proper tribute as if laying cacao beans in rows: what is owed, what is given freely, what is never taken without witness. His smile stayed easy, not pleading. Measured. Each word landed with the weight of a standard measure, leaving no space for the watchers to claim confusion later.
Ixamala leaned in just enough that her words could be taken for weather-talk, not defiance. “The count turns sharp at mid-afternoon,” she murmured. “Better to be off the water before the shadow touches the shrine steps.”
Xotzin did not look back at her. He lifted his voice instead, smooth as a practiced bid. “Then mark it so. If a taboo hour is crossed, it will be my guild name that bears it first. Not your farmers, not your boatmen. I’ll not borrow another’s neck for my mistake.”
Nopaltzin’s thick fingers nudged the bundled tools deeper under the fish mats, serpent spirals disappearing beneath the slick scales and salt stink. He kept his eyes down, like any man minding cargo, but his shoulders held ready. Citlali adjusted with her knees, keeping the bow canted from the open channel, a hunter’s patience in her stillness. One push and they’d vanish into reeds. Xotzin did not move. He let the pause do its work, counting breaths like measures, waiting for the lawful gap his name had purchased.
The first fork tightened as if the canal itself had decided to listen. Reed walls leaned inward, layered and lashed with fiber cord, their cut ends fresh enough to bleed sap. Someone had piled more on top: an intentional choke-point that forced a canoe to slow, bow turning half-blind into a narrow throat. Above it, a staked platform sat low over the water, not quite a dock, not quite a bridge: a place built for stopping people.
It squatted there with the stubborn patience of a trap. Poles driven into the mud made a fence of angles; between them hung netting weighted with clay pellets, ready to be dropped across the channel if anyone tried to slip past. A small brazier smoked on the platform’s edge, the resin smell sharp enough to cut the wet sweetness of the reeds. Xotzin noted the choices: resin for witness, smoke for memory, a smell that clung to hair and cloaks and could be repeated later as proof: you were here.
An elder sat cross-legged at the platform’s center as if he had grown there. His hair was bound with a strip of plain cloth, no shrine knots, but his posture had the authority of someone used to being obeyed without raising his voice. Across his knees lay a reed-bound ledger, pages pressed between thin wooden slats to keep them from curling in the damp. A stylus of bone rested in his right hand; his left thumb held the place like a thumb on a wound.
Behind him stood two boys, more limb than body, each gripping a pole as tall as he was. They planted the tips in the canal bed with practiced certainty, wide stances braced to lever a canoe sideways. Their eyes did not flicker like children’s. They watched like junior wardens, trained to measure a stranger’s worth by how he held his shoulders.
Xotzin kept his palms open on his knees, visible above the gunwale, and let the canoe glide until the current itself offered them up. He counted the platform’s stakes, the net’s weights, the ledger’s thickness. Then shifted his gaze to the elder’s face, ready to be priced.
Ixamala kept her face angled as if toward the far reedline, giving the platform no satisfaction of being measured back. Her attention stayed where few people bothered to look: the water’s skin, the way it tightened when the boys shifted their poles, the faint seam where canal-current met the slower lake pull. A film of mist slid over it in ragged sheets. She watched those sheets like a weaver reading tension in thread.
Xotzin felt her counting without hearing a number: breaths paced, shoulders barely moving, the burned arm held close as if it ached in certain light. Cloud-shadow drifted overhead, and for a moment the elder’s brazier smoke flattened, pressed down by a hush in the air. Even the resin smell seemed to pause, as though the world waited to decide whether it would remember this crossing.
Her eyes narrowed at the canal’s edge where reed reflections broke into fine teeth. A dragonfly skimmed, then veered away. The breeze died. The mist thinned a finger-width. Enough to show the net’s weights and the ledger’s damp corners clearly.
Ixamala’s chin lifted, small as a pulse: now, and not a heartbeat later.
Xotzin let his smile arrive a breath ahead of him, the way you send a scout before a caravan. Then his hands followed, slow, deliberate, rising to the level of the elder’s ledger with palms open, empty, the gesture that said he carried no knife in his intent. Between thumb and forefinger he held his Traveling Guild mark, turning it so the cut lines caught what little light the mist allowed. His voice settled into the old pattern: first lowering himself before the post, then naming his route, then naming the toll without daring to pretend it was a gift. A modest payment, fair to the channel and the boys’ labor. He did not volunteer more than he must. “Work at the Three-Cistern terraces,” he said, true enough. “No trouble, no broken hours.”
The elder’s gaze traveled from the guild mark to the canoe itself, measuring weight by how deep the hull sat, then settling on the fish mats as if they might breathe. Nopaltzin answered the scrutiny with stillness, correcting drift in thumb-sized strokes that wasted no sound, no splash. Beneath the mats the serpent-etched tools stayed swaddled in fiber and old cloth. Edges denied light, denied rumor.
One of the boys leaned close, nostrils flaring at the fish mats as if he could smell hidden metal; his pole clicked the gunwale, too casual to be innocent. The elder’s reed stylus rasped, carving a fresh notch beside a damp glyph, and he murmured that the water had a temper today. An extra pinch to soothe it. Xotzin let the pause pass, paid, and took the ledger’s mark, though the air tightened. Citlali’s eyes went distant: ears, ahead.
Citlali didn’t argue in words. She shifted her weight and let the canoe’s nose drift as if caught by a lazy eddy, then corrected with a pair of short, wrist-driven strokes that made no show of decision. The straight lane toward the causeway lay ahead like a cleared throat: too wide, too visible, the water slicked flat by traffic. In the distance, torchlight hung over it in steady dots, each flame a tongue. Xotzin knew how that light worked: it gilded faces, drew attention, and made any whisper travel like a thrown pebble.
Citlali tipped her chin toward that open water, not quite pointing, just offering the idea the way hunters offered wind direction. Her mouth moved once: no sound, only a tight press of lips that said: eyes. Then her gaze slid to the right, where the reeds thickened and the canal narrowed into a seam.
Ixamala’s head turned with it, watchful, as if she could feel the border before they touched it. Nopaltzin followed last, patience and mass in his posture, ready to brace the mats if the canoe kissed mud. Xotzin’s hands tightened on the cargo lashings by habit. A merchant preferred routes that could be named cleanly if questioned. A merchant also preferred to arrive whole.
Citlali brought them into the cut. Reeds leaned overhead, their stalks crossing like ribs, and the air changed, cooler, resin-sweet, damp with rot at the roots. The canal water here was darker, filmed with green scum that broke in slow, soundless ripples. When Xotzin dipped his paddle to help, he kept the blade flat and close, stirring rather than striking. The reeds swallowed what little noise remained; even the canoe’s creak became a private thing.
Beyond the reed wall, the causeway torches blurred into pale smears. Close in, there was only the hush of leaves brushing leaves and the occasional soft tick as a reed insect landed on the gunwale. Citlali’s shoulders stayed loose, but her head angled slightly, listening as if the water itself had begun to speak.
Xotzin lifted his eyes to the slit of sky above the reeds. The sun was there only as a pale glare caught between stalks, but he knew its slant the way he knew the weight of a sack before lifting it. His thumb found the inked tally marks on his forearm and brushed them as if the act could make time hold still.
“This cut is clever,” he murmured, keeping his mouth close to the hollow of his cloak so the sound stayed with them. “But clever eats daylight.”
Citlali didn’t turn. Her paddle continued in short, quiet pulls, and the canoe slid on, seam-deep in the reeds.
“At the terraces they’ll ask why we came late,” he went on, more to Nopaltzin than to her. “They always do. Schedules are a kind of law to water-men.” His gaze flicked back toward the blurred torch-smears beyond the green wall. “And if we arrive with the sun low, questions come easier than answers.”
He paused, letting the canoe’s hush answer him. Even a guild mark, he admitted inwardly, bought passage. Not privacy. In a place this watchful, silence was the only coin that didn’t clink.
Ixamala’s attention kept slipping off the water and into the narrow darks between reed stalks, where the gaps looked deeper than they ought to. She didn’t count strokes like Citlali, or landmarks like Xotzin; she counted cautions. The places a seam might thin, the moments a wrong breath could become an offering. Her fingers touched the burn-scar on her arm, then the little pouch at her belt, as if reassuring both.
“The named-day hour is closing its teeth,” she said softly, and the words made the reeds feel sharper. “If we arrive late, we choose: step onto the causeway when the taboo bites hardest, or arrive with the sun tilting and walk into the crowd when the shrine’s eyes open widest.” Her gaze flicked to Xotzin, weighing him the way he weighed goods. “Neither choice is clean.”
The channel tightened until the canoe could only breathe forward. Floating mats of algae clung like wet felt, and half-submerged roots reached up to comb the hull. Nopaltzin shifted his broad weight with slow precision, knees absorbing the scrape he refused to let happen. From his bundle he drew a small tool etched in serpent spirals and wedged it beneath the bowline, no chant, just craft, an unspoken ward for an unspoken risk.
Xotzin drew breath to argue for open water, for daylight bought with risk, but Nopaltzin spoke first, voice low and steady as a hammer’s pause. “Silence now. Haste when we have walls and witnesses. Reeds to the Three-Cistern, then we weigh what the water does against what the marks say.” Citlali gave one curt nod and angled the bow into thicker green, where even suspicion drowned.
The reed wall loosened into scattered stalks, and their canoe nosed out into a broader reach of silt-brown water that should have been a braided shallows at this point in the season. Xotzin had traded here in dry counts and wet counts both; he could picture where sandbars usually mottled the surface like pale scars. Now the water held a dull, unbroken skin, thick as stirred clay, and it gave back no hints of bottom: no dark seams where weeds clung, no faint glare off submerged stones.
He watched the tide-poles along the far bank, crooked stakes hammered into a berm of packed reeds. The highest notch (last cycle’s flood mark) sat lower than the present line. Someone had scratched fresh cuts above it, quick and nervous, as if the wood itself needed persuading. Xotzin felt an accountant’s irritation rise, the old discomfort of numbers that did not obey the season. It was hard to bargain with a town whose water refused its own history.
A breeze slid across the reach, thin and wrong. It combed ripples over the surface at an angle that didn’t match the reed-tops or the drift of algae. For a moment the ripples crossed each other like woven mats, making a pattern that reminded Xotzin of the Traveling Guild’s tally knots: order where there should have been none.
Ixamala’s posture tightened. She didn’t look at the tide-poles; her eyes tracked the empty middle as if expecting something to break it. One hand hovered near her belt pouch, not touching, refusing to name what she was measuring. Nopaltzin, steady at the stern, shifted his weight a fraction to keep the canoe from yawing, the serpent-etched tool at the bowline catching and holding the cord as if it had its own patience.
Xotzin opened his mouth to ask a plain question, how deep, how far, how quickly to the terraces, but the water seemed to listen. Sound carried strangely here, too clean, too eager, and he found himself swallowing the words back down, saving them like cacao he couldn’t afford to spill.
Citlali set her pole as if she were planting certainty. The motion was practiced and Xotzin watched for the small check that always came when wood met silt. It never came. The pole slid down as if into a mouth, the water taking it without complaint, without the faint grind of sand or the snag of roots.
Her eyes narrowed, not in fear but in calculation. She fed another span of pole into the reach, then another, until the reed-wrapped grip neared the surface and her knuckles whitened. Still nothing. No bottom. No buried stone. Not even the soft resistance of mud.
She drew it back with a wet, reluctant sound, as though the canal did not want to return what had been offered. The tip came up clean, too clean, only a smear of gray-green slime that smelled faintly of old rain held in jars. Citlali’s mouth tightened and stayed that way. She said nothing, but her gaze flicked to the open water, then to the reed bank, as if measuring where a body could vanish without leaving a wake.
Xotzin took the pole from Citlali with a merchant’s courtesy and a clerk’s stubbornness. He set it in again, not where she had tested, but a handspan to the left, angling for the berm’s hidden shelf. Slow pressure, the way he would press a cacao bean to find wax, the way he would weigh a sack by feel before he ever trusted a scale. He counted heartbeats instead of breaths, one, two, three, until the numbers steadied his hands.
The pole slid down with the same eager ease. No tap of silt. No soft refusal of mud. Only the quiet descent, as if the canal had been cut deeper in the night and dressed to hide the cut. Xotzin withdrew it and wiped the slime between thumb and forefinger, noting the cold, the faint metallic tang beneath the rain-jar smell.
The air moved, but it wasn’t the honest shove of wind. The surface answered in thin seams of ripples that traveled at slanting angles, stitching over and through one another, crossing the reed-tops’ sway with careless precision. Xotzin watched the pattern refuse the sky’s direction and felt his stomach weigh it like false measure. As if the water were being palmed from beneath, turned by an unseen hand.
Ixamala stilled as if a cord had snapped inside her. Her fingers hovered, then settled just shy of the burn-scar’s spiral, not touching. Listening. The skin there tightened; she swallowed once, eyes narrowing on nothing Xotzin could name. Her gaze slid along the canal’s dark sheen, following a line beneath it, and Xotzin felt that something below had turned its head toward them.
They nosed the canoe under the willow’s lean, into a pocket of shadow where the reeds thinned and the air held its breath. Xotzin laid the paddle across the gunwales with care. Wood on wood, no clack, no slap of blade to water. The hull drifted until the willow’s trailing fingers brushed the surface and wrote slow circles that didn’t match the current.
He drew out the stoppered gourd and unsealed it with a twist that barely rasped. Purified water (Ixamala’s method, ash and resin and time) tasted of smoke and faint bitterness, but it sat honest in the mouth. He measured the swallow the way he measured cacao: enough to do its work, not enough to invite questions. The canal was close and hungry at the edge of his vision, black gloss with that metallic undertaste still riding the air. He kept the gourd’s lip from tipping too far, as if a spilled drop might be counted by whatever listened beneath.
Citlali shifted in the bow, knees tucked, her reed-cloak damp at the hem. She scanned the open water beyond the willow like a hunter watching a trail that had learned to hide its tracks. “It’s quiet,” she said, not as comfort but as inventory. Her eyes flicked to the pale foam snagged on a reed stem. Too white, too fine, feathered in little curls.
Ixamala’s gaze stayed on the canal’s skin, unfocused in a way that made Xotzin uneasy. She breathed shallowly, testing the air as if it could tear. “This shade is… thinner,” she murmured, choosing the word like choosing a day-name. “Don’t let your blood touch it. Not even by accident.”
Xotzin capped the gourd and held it against his chest, feeling the small weight of it like a contract. He wanted to ask what “thinner” meant in terms of risk, tolls, remedies: something that could be bartered with. Instead he listened, because the reeds were too still, and the ripples under the willow continued to stitch themselves in slanting lines, as if the water below kept counting while no one spoke.
Nopaltzin drew a tight bundle from his satchel, cloth stained dark where resin had seeped through, and unfolded it with the care of a man laying out tools, not favors. The resin inside was hard as amber. He pinched off a shard, cupped it in both hands, and breathed into his palms until heat and moisture softened it. The sharp, pine-bitter smell rose and cut through the canal’s metallic tang.
Xotzin held out his hands without drama. The blisters had split where rope and paddle had bitten, leaving raw crescents that stung when the air shifted. Nopaltzin worked the resin until it went tacky, then pressed it into the torn skin with slow thumbs, sealing and smoothing as if he were fitting a new grip over a cracked handle. No wasted motion, no question asked about price.
Xotzin answered in the language he trusted: a trader’s nod, quick and complete. He rewrapped his palms, pulling the cloth snug. Beneath the edge, inked tally marks flashed (thin strokes of remembered weights and owed measures) before he tucked them away again, as if even numbers could be watched.
Citlali edged back along the canoe’s spine until her shoulder nearly brushed Xotzin’s. She did not ask; she simply took his paddle as if it were any tool laid out for work. Her fingers found the worn spots on the shaft, then she set his hands where she wanted them: thumbs forward, not pinched; wrists straight; the heel of the palm carrying the bite so the torn webbing could rest. “You’re fighting it,” she murmured, the words barely louder than reed rustle. “Let it push you. Don’t let it peel you.”
She drew a short, silent stroke beside the willow’s shadow, showing how to feather the blade so it didn’t slap and call attention. Then she returned the paddle with the same careful economy as a borrowed knife (handle-first, respectful) eyes still measuring the reedline for a flicker that didn’t belong.
For a heartbeat it almost settles into something like rest: breath paced to the reeds, water lapping soft, insects stitching their thin hiss through the shade. Then Ixamala goes still, head tilting as if her burned arm has become an ear. “Your guild mark,” she says, voice kept level, “does it shield an outsider when the day-keeper calls a rite ‘necessary’. Or do oaths turn into nets the shrine can draw tight?”
Xotzin kept the merchant’s smile, smooth as oiled wood, while his mind rummaged for a sentence that would not cost too much. He tested words the way he tested cacao and set each aside. Guild oaths were written to open gates, yes, but they could also close around a throat. His silence ran on, and the shade under the willow stopped feeling like cover.
The reeds behind them should have swayed with their passage, bent, whispered, sprung back. Instead they opened in a clean seam, as if a hand had parted them and held them aside. No breeze touched Xotzin’s cheek. The air stayed thick and sweet with resin and old water, and yet the stalks leaned away all the same.
A line formed on the canal’s face. First a faint stitch of ripples, then the full drawn wake, straight as a causeway cut through marsh. It came on without hurry, neither hunting nor hiding, the patient approach of someone who knew the measure of distance and the cost of noise. Xotzin’s eyes went to the water by habit the way they went to weights and measures: count the rings, judge the speed, read what can be read before it becomes bargaining.
No paddle flashed. No fish-dip, no bird splash. The wake kept its narrow spine, as if pushed by a pole set deep, pulled with steady shoulders. Whoever made it understood the canal like an inventory: where the mud sucked, where the reed roots grabbed, where a careless slap would carry. Xotzin found his breathing tightening anyway, the body’s arithmetic refusing the mind’s calm.
He slid his gaze to the reed shadows for a hull’s curve, a shoulder’s lift, the pale knuckle of a hand. Nothing. Only the dark mirror of water and the soft green walls closing behind the wake as if they’d never been disturbed.
His forearm tally marks prickled under the damp of his cloak. He could hear, absurdly, the Traveling Guild’s cautions recited in a supervisor’s dry voice: do not look like prey; do not look like accusation. He set his mouth into the courteous line that said he belonged anywhere trade could go, even as he eased his paddle angle the way Citlali had shown. Blade entering like a knife into clay.
If it was a fisherman, it was one who did not fish. If it was a warden, it was one who did not announce. If it was neither.
Citlali’s stroke faltered as if her paddle had struck something solid under the surface. She didn’t look back. She didn’t need to. The muscles at her jaw set, and her head angled a fraction toward the reed wall where sound liked to cling.
In the hush a single note landed. Pole against hull, wood answering wood. Not a clumsy bump, not the hollow knock of someone misjudging depth, but a placed tap, deliberate as a finger laid to lips. The water did not slap after it. No reed rustled. Even the insects seemed to thin their stitching for a breath, as if the whole channel had agreed to listen.
Citlali held her paddle poised above the skin of the canal. Xotzin watched the blade hover, a bright edge that could betray them with one careless drip. He measured her stillness the way he measured a trader’s pause before naming a price: it meant she had learned what noise bought and what it cost.
A second tap should have followed. Signal and reply, question and answer. Instead the silence was kept too well, too tightly cupped. Someone behind them was choosing restraint. That choice felt more dangerous than pursuit.
Xotzin let his paddle settle across his knees as if he had simply grown considerate of the quiet, not wary of it. The travel cloak slid back into place, hiding the lacquered cotton plates at his shoulders; he made the adjustment with the same mild care he used when straightening a trade bundle before elders. Courtesy was a shield here, thin, but better than bare skin. He kept his chin level, mouth relaxed, and let his eyes do the honest work. How far to the next bend where the reeds thickened into a blind? Which cut-channel could take a canoe without grinding on roots? If he raised his guild mark now, would it buy passage or invite a ledger of questions? He weighed each possibility, counting costs in heartbeats and water-lengths.
From the Calendar Stone’s direction, a conch gave one blunt, unquestionable note: too flat to be ceremony, too timed to be accident. It carried down the water like a thrown stone. Then it cut off hard, strangled mid-breath, as if a palm had sealed the shell’s mouth. Signal, answer, and silencing tangled together. Xotzin felt the hairs rise at his wrists: someone had heard, and didn’t want anyone else to.
Ixamala’s voice slipped between them, barely louder than breath, warning them into the reeds’ darker seam and setting a pace, three strokes, pause, three strokes, so their paddles would sound like one body moving. Nopaltzin drew the warded tools tighter; copper and stone made a restrained clink that felt too bright. Ahead, the canal exhaled a low mist, early and purposeful, blurring the waterline as if the channel meant to swallow its own face.
The canal ahead loses its edges first. Reeds, stakes, even the pale strip of the causeway dissolve until the world becomes a single sheet of milk-glass laid over dark water. Xotzin keeps paddling out of habit, then realizes the sound has vanished, no drip from the blade, no creak from the lashings, only the pressure of damp air on his teeth and the faint resin-sweetness of wet earth turned sour.
Light gathers where light should not. At first it is scattered, the way rot-glow sometimes frets at dead reeds, but these points do not cling to anything. They lift and hold, then begin to move with slow certainty. A line forms, then another, weaving together until a braid spans the canal from bank to bank. It is too neat, too deliberate, and it slides sideways as a unit, correcting itself to remain across their bow as if it knows their angle and refuses it.
Xotzin’s mind reaches for the practical. Wind can push mist; current can shear foam; men can hide lanterns behind reed screens. None of that explains the way the lights pulse in sequence, a traveling beat that makes the skin at his forearms tighten. The tally marks there look suddenly like offerings scratched into flesh.
Citlali’s breathing changes behind him, shallow and listening. Ixamala, in the stern, stills her paddle entirely; he feels her attention go somewhere under the surface, not out across it. The canoe glides on momentum into the boundary the lights imply, and the air thickens another degree, as if the canal itself is holding a lid down.
He tastes copper without biting his tongue.
The braid tightens. A few lights drop low enough to skim the water, and a thin hiss follows, like a thread drawn through wet fingers. Not words (nothing a merchant can bargain with) only insistence. The path ahead is not blocked by reeds or poles, but by permission.
Xotzin raised his palm, not in command but in pause, and inclined his head toward the water as if addressing a dock elder. Courtesy was a kind of armor; he had worn it through toll disputes and temple queues, and it was the safest thing he owned. “For passage,” he murmured, keeping his voice low so it would not carry oddly in the smothered air. He chose the trader’s old formula (neutral, unboastful, leaving no opening for challenge) then let his hand drift to his pouch.
The string of cacao came out warm from his body, beads on fiber. He pinched one between thumb and forefinger, rolling it with the practiced impatience of a man who had caught too many cheats. It should be firm, slightly oily, faintly bitter at the skin. Hollow beans gave under pressure; dyed ones left a stain, their scent wrong: too sharp, too clean. This one held true.
He did not look at Ixamala or Citlali. He did not want to see their faces asking what price he was willing to name. Instead he lifted the string over the gunwale, breathed once through the copper taste, and chose a bean as if choosing a word.
He let the first cacao bean fall from his fingertips. It clicked once against the canoe’s rim and vanished with a small, swallowed plip. The nearest lights shivered as though a net had been plucked. For a breath they scattered, then drew together again, more orderly, more intent, their pulse quickening in a sequence that made his forearm hair rise.
Under the surface, something answered: not a wave, not a fish roll, but a precise pull, as if the canal itself had taken a sip and tested the flavor. The current tugged at the hull and at the loose end of the cacao string, a polite demand masked as physics.
The mist thinned in a single straight seam ahead, showing darker water like an offered lane. Then snapped shut. The meaning landed with mercantile clarity: passage had a rate, and he had paid only the greeting.
He kept his face smooth, though the loss bit behind his teeth. One cacao bean, then another, steady, unhurried, the way a careful debtor pays to avoid insult. Each dark bead fell with a soft, swallowed sound, and each time the lights slackened, strands of the braid unspooling into a thin corridor. The opening quivered, barely canoe-wide, as if it might close on a careless oar.
They went in silence, oars dipping and lifting on Ixamala’s minute tilt of fingers, as if she were counting a beat only she could hear. Xotzin kept his strokes shallow to avoid knocking the mist loose. The corridor trembled around them. Once past, the swamp lights knitted back together, neat as basketry, sealing the gap. His pouch hung slack; his sweetest beans were gone, and so was easy bargaining.
Citlali eased off the canoe’s edge and into the reed mat, letting the mud accept her in slow increments. No slap of water, no reed-stem clack: only the soft surrender of silt around her calves. Xotzin held his paddle suspended, wrist aching from the discipline of stillness. He watched the line of her spine flatten and settle, as if she’d folded herself into the marsh’s own patience.
She became smaller at once, not by distance but by intent. Her reed-camouflage cloak drank the mist, and her hands disappeared under the surface to feel what eyes could miss. The canal here should have been all irregularities: reed shadows, wind-scuffed ripples, the lazy circles of insects dying. Instead, she searched for what did not belong. Straight decisions in a place that only made curves.
Xotzin’s mind, trained by markets, wanted to name prices and owners. A clean wake meant a boat with purpose. A disturbed reed meant a shoulder brushing through. A gap in the duckweed meant someone had pushed through with a pole and then taken time to smooth it, the way a thief wipes a footprint at a storeroom door.
Citlali lifted two fingers, then flattened her palm. Stop. Wait. Her gaze didn’t flick to them for approval; it tracked past the reed wall as though listening with her eyes. For a moment, Xotzin thought he heard it too: a faint, wet drag, measured, followed by a pause that felt like someone holding breath.
He caught himself weighing the risk the way he’d weigh dyed thread: how far the dye had bled, how much could be cut off before it ruined the whole length. If she called out what she found, the others would tense, oars would knock, and whatever lurked in these lanes would be told exactly where to look.
Citlali’s hand rose again. Two short motions, sharp as knife work: follow my line. Then she sank lower, and the reeds swallowed her.
Citlali read the canal the way she read a game trail in dry scrub: by what moved, and what refused to. The surface should have been busy with small life, gnats stitching circles, fish nosing up to take them, but here it lay too smooth, as if a hand had pressed it flat. A thin V-wake ran between the reeds, narrow and confident, then ended too sharply, as though whatever made it had stopped without drifting, pole-braked in a single practiced check. Near a clump of duckweed, a faint slick clung to the skin of the water, the dull shine of oil or wet pitch where a hull had recently kissed and turned. She watched the reeds themselves: one stem bent against the current while its neighbors stood straight, a shoulder-brush, not wind.
Xotzin followed her stare and felt his stomach tighten with the old merchant’s instinct for routes and theft. This was traffic, controlled, repeated, and the canal was holding its breath around it. Even the insects kept away, a long hush where ripples should have dimpled the misted surface. Something had passed. Something else might be waiting, patient enough to let the water lie.
Her fingers met resistance where reed roots braided into a knuckle of mud. She worked them apart by feel, not force, and something yielded with a soft, fibrous scrape. Cord. Not marsh rope: too tight, too even. She drew it free a little at a time, keeping it under the surface until she had the length coiled in her palm. When she pinched it between thumb and nail, the twist bit back with the familiar hardness of merchant craft. Traveling Guild work, the kind meant to hold crates steady through chop and insult.
The end made her throat tighten: no fuzzing, no worry from rot, only a flat, bright cut as if an obsidian edge had kissed it once and meant it. Deliberate. Recent. Wrong in a place that swallowed everything.
Citlali’s eyes flicked back once, quick as a heron’s check for hunters. Xotzin caught the look and read the calculation in it: a warning spoken aloud would buy them nothing but noise, questions, blame, oars striking gunwales, and the reeds would carry it. She tested the cord’s weight like proof in a palm, then tucked it into the inner fold of her cloak, deep enough that no pale fiber would betray them to lanternlight.
Keeping her voice buried, Citlali shifted to the reed-hunter’s language of hands. Two fingers dipped: silence. A quick hook of her knuckle. Follow. Then a flat palm, pressed down toward the gunwale: slow. Xotzin tightened his grip on the paddle and let her lead them into a narrower lane where the reeds stood thicker and the mist held. Her eyes never left the faint V-cuts and soft hesitations on the water, waiting for the canal to answer their intrusion.
Citlali stopped so abruptly the bow nosed into the terrace lip with a dull kiss of wood on stone. She lifted a hand, not for quiet this time but for sight. Two quick taps of two fingers: there, and there.
Xotzin followed the line of her gesture to the first cistern basin. The waterline crawled upward against the stained masonry, climbing in small, confident increments as if a ladle were being poured just out of view. No splash, no incoming runnel; only the steady gain, the reflection lifting its own face higher.
The second basin did the opposite. Its surface was slipping away, unthreading from the stone like cloth pulled from a loom. It sank without a sound that belonged to draining: no gurgle at an outlet, no thin ribbon spilling to feed the next terrace. The wet line it left behind gleamed, then dulled as if something drank the sheen.
A heartbeat later the third answered, too, swelling in a slow, heavy rise that made Xotzin think of storm season and fat rain, not this point in the count. Mist clung to the terrace edges; the reed hush pressed in. The air smelled of warm algae and the sharpness of crushed marigold offerings gone stale.
He glanced at the spillways, stone throats set to speak only when the basins were full, and saw nothing moving there. The carved lips were dry. A small bead of water trembled on one edge, then crawled back into the basin as though recalled.
Citlali’s mouth tightened. She didn’t look afraid so much as offended, like a hunter seeing tracks that changed species halfway through a print.
Behind them, Ixamala shifted her weight and held her scarred arm a fraction away from her side, listening with skin instead of ears. “It’s trading,” she murmured, careful with the word. “Not spilling.”
Xotzin swallowed the urge to call for a Warden. Outsider noise would only bring their eyes and their explanations. He watched the basins a moment longer and tried to count the pattern, rise, sink, rise, like a market rhythm gone wrong and yet deliberate enough to make his stomach go cold.
Xotzin eased into a crouch at the terrace edge, cloak pooling around his boots, and set two fingers to the masonry. The stone was cool where it should have been sun-warm, slick in a way that wasn’t algae. He traced the seam lines like he would read a woven sack for tampering, pausing at each spillway throat and each gate latch. No wedge was lifted. No reed plug swelled in the slot. The carved channels lay as innocent as a sealed storeroom.
Yet the water kept moving.
He watched the first basin climb, then the second fall, then the third answer, and it felt, wrongly, like watching tribute pass from hand to hand: quick, practiced, unseen. He leaned closer to the spillway lip and listened for the telltale pull of a drain. Nothing. Not even the smallest suck of air.
His thumb rubbed at the stone and came away with a faint grit that smelled copper-sour beneath the wet. Old blood, he thought, and wished he hadn’t.
This wasn’t wind pushing a surface. It had a cadence. Too tidy for accident, too patient for panic. A merchant’s rhythm, almost. As if something under the terraces was balancing accounts.
Ixamala’s burned arm prickled as if the scar itself had learned to listen. She edged nearer, careful not to let her sandals scrape the terrace stone, and the world answered through her feet: a thin vibration threading up her shins, not quite a tremor, not quite a hum. More like a pulled cord under tension. A seam. Raw. Worked and reworked until the boundary thinned to a membrane.
In her mind it drew itself with unwanted clarity: a slant beneath the cisterns, a bend that wasn’t a bend but a fold. One step taken at the right angle would not move them forward so much as place them elsewhere: past the reed tunnel, past the lantern-mist, beyond the stretch where the swamp lights clustered like baited hooks. The stone seemed to warm under her palm, as if inviting agreement.
The idea arrives in Ixamala’s head with the blunt neatness of a tool: one step cut along the seam’s angle, a sting of blood to fasten it, and they would be on the far side of the worst canals before dusk knotted the mist shut. Practical. Merciful, even. Then she runs the count against her inner tally and it catches: wrong named day, wrong wind. A crossing now would not bind; it would tear, and tears become mouths.
Ixamala tore her hand from the stones as if they had bitten, tucking her fingers into her mantle to keep them from drifting back. Refusal should have cooled the place. Instead the vibration thickened, less hum than breath, warming through the terrace like a listener pressed close to a door. The cistern skins quivered and traded their levels again, too crisp, too pleased. Along the edge, the swamp lights slid nearer, clustering with purpose.
The spillway’s surface dimples in a line that isn’t wind or fish, a patient crease sliding upstream against the outflow as though something below has learned the feel of current and decided it can argue. Xotzin watches the pattern hold its shape, too straight, too deliberate, then advance a handspan at a time with pauses between, like a buyer weighing whether to commit.
Citlali stiffens. Her chin lifts, not toward the reeds where a heron might startle, but toward the water itself. “Don’t blink at it,” she says, voice flat, as if warning a child away from a snare. Her fingers drift to the bone points at her throat, touching each one as though counting them back into the world.
A swamp light that had been hovering near the terrace edge lowers until it kisses the surface. The glow stretches, thins, and bobs then steadies again. Not drifting. Held. The light’s reflection does not smear with ripples the way it should; it pinpoints and shivers like something trying to look up through glass.
Xotzin’s mouth goes dry. He tells himself it’s algae-gas, the common lanterns of marsh and rot, but his merchant’s senses refuse the easy explanation. The air above the spillway smells wrong: wet stone, yes, and mud, but threaded with an old copper tang that isn’t from any tool. His forearm tally marks itch under the lacquered cotton like a debt being called in.
The dimple-line reaches the seam where water pours from the cistern and simply…doesn’t break. It climbs into the falling sheet, splitting it cleanly, creating two smooth curtains around an absence. For a heartbeat Xotzin can see through that absence into darkness below, darker than shadow ought to be at midday.
Citlali exhales through her teeth. “It’s tracking us,” she says, and for once she sounds unsure.
Xotzin shifts his weight in the canoe, careful not to slap the hull. Courtesy becomes survival. He keeps his voice low, as he would in a shrine. “Then we don’t give it a price worth paying.”
The canoe’s bow slid into the shallows as if into spilled clay. The water turned thick and brown, and the hull settled with a slow, deliberate drag that wasn’t just weight but appetite. Xotzin felt it through the planks: first a gentle resistance, then the catch, then the quiet insistence of suction building underneath. He lifted his paddle and held it poised, unwilling to churn the mud and give whatever watched below a clearer invitation.
Around them the reed wall stilled. Even the usual insect rasp seemed to thin, as if the marsh had decided to listen instead of speak. A smear of mist crawled across the canal surface and the nearest swamp lights drifted closer, not scattered but in a loose line that matched the canoe’s length.
Nopaltzin clicked his tongue under his breath. “We drag it free. Fast.” His voice tried for annoyance, taboo, delay, the Wardens’ fines, but it carried the tightness of a man reciting rules to keep fear from taking the lead.
He slid over the gunwale and set his feet down with care, only to his ankles. Practical. Measured. Refusing to look like prey.
Something hard kissed Nopaltzin’s calf through the brown water: too smooth to be stone, too precise to be chance. For a blink it was only a glint beneath the surface, copper-bright and perfectly round, half-buried upright in the mud as if set there by a careful hand. Then it caught him.
The ring slid up, found the narrow above his heel, and clamped with a pressure that was not weight but intent. Pain flared dull and deep, bruise-promising. The water around his ankles went strangely cold, not lake-cold but cellar-cold, tightening the mud so it gripped his feet like a fist closing.
Xotzin saw the muscles in Nopaltzin’s jaw jump, heard his breath hitch, and felt the canoe’s hull answer with a faint tremor. As if something below had taken hold of more than one thing at once.
Nopaltzin jerked back with a hissed oath, hauling his leg as if from a snare. The mud released him and, in the same breath, the canoe eased free. Too exact, too timed, like a tribute accepted and the toll lifted. He lunged for the ring. His fingers sank into silt and wiry reed roots. Nothing. The spot it had occupied felt slick, oiled, as though something had slipped away clutching copper in a blind fist.
Nopaltzin hauled himself back over the gunwale, water streaming from his shins, and pressed his palm to the bruise blooming above his heel as if he could argue it smaller. He stared down at his adze and knife, at the feathered-serpent spirals he’d etched with such care. In the last gray light they looked like mere scratches. No weight, no bite. His jaw set, hard and quiet: a ward that could be taken so easily meant something below was already deciding what tribute it preferred.
Xotzin edged up the slick shoulder of Black Tooth with the caution of someone who had slipped on worse and learned to hide it. The outcrop rose from the reeds like a broken tooth indeed. Obsidian showing through the basalt skin in dark, promising seams. He told himself he was only taking what any merchant would take: a few flakes to judge the stone, a habit as harmless as checking a canoe’s lashings.
The surface looked right. Glass-dark, tight-grained, with that clean fracture that meant a sharp edge and easy trade. He worked his fingernail under a scatter of thin chips trapped in a crease and lifted them free one by one, letting them click softly into his palm. The weight was nothing; the meaning, always, was more.
When he wiped his thumb across his forefinger, he expected the usual. Powdery grit, a clean squeak of stone on skin. Instead his fingertips dragged. A faint film clung there, damp but not watery, like resin that had been warmed and then left too long in a sealed gourd. He rubbed again, harder, and the tackiness did not roll away into harmless crumbs. It smeared, thin and reluctant, as if it wanted to stay.
Xotzin held his hand up to the last light and turned it. Nothing visible shone on his skin, no obvious stain, yet his fingers felt coated. He tried his forearm cloth and found it snagging slightly, as though on dried sap. Only the sensation was wrong. Sour. Metallic at the back of his tongue before he had even tasted anything.
He chose a flake with a clean edge, pinched it carefully between nail and pad, and tested it the way the guild taught: not with faith, but with senses. He touched the shard to his lips, just enough to catch whether it carried the chalk of bad stone or the grit of sand-adulteration. The cold of it was normal; the afterfeel was not.
His hand stilled. He brought the flakes closer, near enough that the air off them would tell the truth his eyes couldn’t.
He brought the flakes to his nose, meaning to catch resin or fish-oil. The usual cheats, the easy lies. The breath he drew in stopped halfway. Not sap. Not smoke. A thin, sharp tang like copper left too long in a damp bowl, threaded through with the sour-sweet reek of lake weed turned in its own slime. Old blood, not fresh enough to be sacred, not clean enough to be forgotten: blood that had sat and cooled and been rinsed in water that didn’t know how to carry it away.
His stomach tightened as if he’d swallowed a bad cacao bean. The smell was a hand on the back of his neck, pushing his mind where it refused to go: stone steps slicked with offerings, a shallow basin catching drips, canal water darkening in a slow bloom around a stake while people watched and called it necessary. He hadn’t been there; he didn’t need to be. Trade taught him that some truths traveled faster than boats.
Xotzin turned his head and spat into the reeds, angry at the betrayal of his own throat. The flakes clicked softly in his palm, innocent in shape, guilty in breath.
Nopaltzin’s broad fingers started toward the handful, habit, curiosity, the smith’s instinct to judge any edge that might be worked, when Xotzin folded his hand shut with a quick, almost polite finality. Not a snatch, but close enough. He felt the artisan’s glance, the brief question in it, and answered with the smallest shake of his head. Even a respected forge-hand did not need to be seen sharing blame with a stone that carried shrine-breath.
He tucked the flakes into the hollow of his palm and wiped hard against the inside of his travel cloak. The cloth dragged, then slid. When he checked, there was nothing. No smear, no darkening, no proof for any daylight argument: only that faint metallic rot rising when he moved his hand.
Invisible wrong was worse. It could be denied aloud and still cling to you in the dark.
He made his voice mild, each courteous phrase set down like a measured weight, but the smile he wore for bargaining stayed absent. “Have you seen odd wash along the terraces?” he asked, eyes on their hands as much as their faces. “Anyone been quarrying Black Tooth?” Behind the words his ledger ran: a tainted shard could buy dockside whispers: or buy him a whisper of his own, the kind that turns “traveler” into “accomplice” when blood is near.
For a breath the surplus contract shrank to a child’s toy beside what that stink suggested. He saw his guild mark dragged into the same mouthful of words as “necessary blood,” and his belly went hollow with it. Still, he slid the flakes into his pouch, not sure if he’d pocketed proof, leverage, or a curse, then tipped his chin toward the reed line and kept them moving as the mist crowded closer.
Citlali checked her stroke and let her canoe drift at a break in the reeds where the canal drew itself tight, a slit of ink between stalks that leaned in like eavesdroppers. She did not speak at first. She listened, head tilted, as if the water were a skin she could read with her ear.
Then she lifted the length of cord she’d found snagged earlier. Merchant-grade, twisted even, cut clean. She held it up from her belt with two fingers, not proudly but the way you hold a thorn you’ve pulled from a foot: proof and warning in one.
Xotzin’s attention went to the cord immediately. His mind supplied its uses without asking. Lash a cargo bundle, bind a pole, tie off at a dock in a hurry. Not the cord of a peasant fisher. Someone with trade in their hands had been here, and had taken time to cut instead of tear. He felt the old habit of inventory rise in him: cord like that, you didn’t waste unless you were leaving something you did not plan to return to.
Out on the misted water behind them, the swamp lights shifted. They had been wandering in loose clusters, dim curiosities tugging at the eye. Now they straightened into a line so neat it made his teeth tighten, each glow spaced like beads on a counting cord. Order where there should have been drift. The line pointed into the narrow gap, patient as a finger.
Citlali’s shoulders stiffened. Her gaze did a small unfocusing, the look of someone watching a thing that refuses to be seen directly. “They’re making a road,” she said, voice flat.
Ixamala’s hand hovered near her own small knife, not drawing it, only reminding herself it existed. Nopaltzin swallowed and kept his paddle still, as if any ripple might be taken for an answer.
Xotzin could have suggested they turn back. He could have wrapped the decision in courtesy and caution: taboo days, bad light, better to report to wardens. But the line of lights felt like a tally already scratched, and he understood with a merchant’s clarity what retreat would cost: not safety, just a different kind of risk. Turning around meant admitting fear to the reeds, and to anyone who might be waiting beyond them. It meant arriving later with questions and no proof, marked as the sort of outsider who startles and flees.
Citlali did not look back for agreement. She angled her canoe into the slit, the cut cord lifted once more like a sign, and the rest of them followed because the canal had already counted them in.
The reed tunnel cinched shut behind them as if the stalks had been waiting for their bodies to pass. Xotzin felt cool air slip under his travel cloak and find the lacquered cotton beneath, a polite theft that raised gooseflesh along his ribs. The reeds breathed out resin and green bruising, and the sweetness that came with it was wrong. Thick as cacao left in sun, the kind offered to gods when no one expected it to be eaten by people.
His paddle blade entered the canal and the sound that should have been a slap arrived as a muffled syllable, swallowed before it could become a word. Water here did not echo; it kept accounts. Each drip off the blade seemed to fall into a ledger only the canal could read.
Nopaltzin dipped his paddle to correct their line, and the splash came out small and dull, as if the surface wore cloth. The air made even breathing feel like a breach of etiquette. Xotzin found himself counting his inhales the way he counted cacao beans, quiet, measured, unwilling to waste a single one in a place that might remember.
The black surface began to lie in small, courteous ways, as if it were only adjusting a balance. Xotzin saw his own face, travel-worn and reasonable, and then watched it draw long as taffy under moonless water: cheeks lengthening, jaw narrowing, eyes sharpening into a brightness no lamp could buy. The hunger in that clarity was not his, but it wore him neatly.
Across from him Ixamala went still. The burn-scar spiraling her arm rose in a fine rash; she set two fingers to the gunwale as if taking a pulse. A low hum answered through the wood, steady and wrong, a seam-note like stone scraped thin by patient hands.
The pressure in Xotzin’s ears climbed by degrees, never quite pain, only insistence, like a conch held to the mouth and refused its breath.
Citlali lifted two fingers, palm down, listen, and let her canoe lose its way into stillness. Xotzin eased his paddle flat. Close by, water slid through reed roots with the careful patience of a thing that could place their hulls by feel alone. Along their wake, a pale smear of foam curled, uncurled, and for a breath became a feathered spiral before collapsing into black. His tally-marked forearm tightened. He thought of the “off” obsidian in his pouch and could not decide whether it had been washed clean here. Or taught to stink.
The reed walls began to loosen, thinning toward an opening that, by habit and canal geometry, should spill them toward the Calendar Stone. Though no stone showed, only darker sky. The swamp lights ahead held their dim file, neither drifting nor dimming, patient as a judge who already knows the verdict. Then behind them: a single pole-tap on wood, crisp, close, deliberate. Silence shut over it at once. Xotzin turned and found only reeds and black water. And the certainty of a follower who knew the route better than any map.
Xotzin stepped to the edge of the causeway where the reeds thinned, careful not to put his sandals on the damp stones marked with old red-brown stains. He lifted both hands, palms out, the Traveling Guild’s calm on display. An open-bodied promise that he carried words, not knives. The lacquered cotton under his cloak tugged at his shoulders as he leaned forward, polite as a buyer inspecting grain.
“Tazun,” he said, making it sound like an introduction rather than a summons. “You’re hauling a boat like you plan to vanish before night fully settles. That’s a poor bargain with your own lungs.”
The man’s wrist tattoo, woven reeds in a tight ring, twitched as his grip tightened. Xotzin kept his smile small, not warmth but a sign: I know the forms. I will not embarrass you unless you force it.
“Name,” Xotzin continued, “and whose water you work. Wardens? Shrine? Or a private hand that doesn’t like daylight?” He let the questions land one by one, spaced like cacao beans counted into a trader’s palm. “What route did you run last moon? Who paid, and in what. Nopaltzin’s breath came steady, controlled, like a bellows held half-closed. Citlali said nothing; that silence felt like an arrow nocked but not drawn.
Tazun’s throat worked. His eyes refused Xotzin’s face, skimming instead along the waterline, as if the canal itself had become the elder at the meeting. Xotzin watched the details that mattered: the salt sores around the man’s heels, the tremor in his fingers, the way his shoulders rose when the reeds sighed. Fear, yes: but also rehearsal. He had been told what to say and what not to say.
“You can accuse outsiders after you answer,” Xotzin said, the courtesy thinning into edge. “I don’t trade in riddles. Tell me who hired you.”
The sailor dragged the empty canoe another pace, reed-mud scraping off the ribs in a sound too loud for dusk. His knuckles blanched against the gunwale; the tendon at his jaw jumped as if he were chewing words he could not swallow. He kept looking past Xotzin’s shoulder but at the canal’s black ribbon where the reeds parted like a mouth.
Xotzin followed the line of that stare and felt, for a breath, the unreasonable certainty that something stood there listening. The water lay flat, yet the foam along the stones gathered into little curls that suggested a spiral before breaking apart. Tazun’s shoulders hitched as if a hand had gripped the back of his neck.
“Don’t,” Tazun whispered, not pleading so much as repeating an instruction. His eyes widened, tracking an invisible movement along the surface. “It says, ” He cut himself off, swallowing hard, and yanked the canoe again, desperate to keep it between himself and the canal. “You don’t hear it. You don’t hear the counting.”
Xotzin let his smile remain, but he trimmed the softness from his timing. The questions came clipped, merchant-fast, as if he were striking tally marks in the air. “If the canoe’s been working, why is the hull dry clear up to the ribs? Why’s there no weed-slick on the seams? And that line, ” he nodded at the frayed tow-rope dangling like a dead vine, “, cut clean, not snapped. Who doesn’t want you tied to anything tonight?” He tasted the dampness in the wind and the old shrine pigment on the stones and didn’t name it, not yet. Instead he shifted, one careful sidestep, placing his body between Tazun and the black lane of canal, making a human gate. “Reed Gate at dusk,” he added, voice still courteous. “Explain that choice.”
Tazun swallowed so hard his throat clicked. “No,” he breathed, and the denial broke apart as if it had been scored. “No. Wasn’t me. You come with your market talk, your guild marks, your neat questions, and you wake it.” His voice rose, then frayed. He wouldn’t meet Xotzin’s eyes; he kept following the same slick patch of water, pupils sliding as though something there shifted against the still air.
The swamp lights answered him. Pinpricks swelling to greenish tongues that licked at the mist and withdrew. A murmur layered up through the reeds, not one voice but many pressed thin, like counting whispered through wet cloth. Xotzin felt his practiced courtesy fissure. “Straight,” he said, hard now. “Who cut the rope?” Tazun’s gaze snagged on the water and wouldn’t let go.
Ixamala moved before Xotzin could place another question like a coin on the table. She did not shove him, she never wasted force, but she occupied the space that mattered, shoulder and mantle cutting the line between merchant and sailor. Her palm rose, fingers spread, the gesture of someone stopping a panicked animal from bolting into a ravine.
Xotzin’s first instinct was irritation. Distance was a luxury in bargaining; closeness let you read breath, sweat, the twitch that betrayed a lie. But the swamp lights had brightened again, and even his practical mind filed away the way they leaned toward Tazun as if he were a torch.
Ixamala’s eyes did not settle on the man. They slid past his hunched frame to the waterline where the reeds met the canal’s black sheen, and her gaze went slightly blank, as if she were counting something not written. When she spoke, her voice had the same clipped economy she used when naming a storm’s teeth or warning of rotten planks.
“Don’t press him,” she said. “Not here.”
Tazun flinched, not at her words but at the space behind them. His lips moved without sound, a quick pleading motion, and his stare drifted farther off, following something Xotzin refused to pretend he could see.
Ixamala inhaled through her nose, and the shell beads on her mantle clicked softly. “There’s a seam,” she continued, and the word made Xotzin’s forearm hairs lift as if the night had grown colder. “Working. Not open: working. Tight and hungry.”
Her lifted hand angled, not toward Tazun’s chest, but toward his bones, as if she could feel an unseen net tugging at his joints. “It’s already half-knotted around him. If you pull for answers, you’ll pull on the knot.”
Xotzin swallowed his retort. He watched her fingers tremble once, the smallest betrayal of effort, and he weighed the cost the way he weighed sacks: answers now, or a problem that would not stay in one canoe. “A seam,” he repeated, careful, testing the word like a sample of dye. “Here. At the Gate.”
Ixamala shifted her weight and made a slow circuiting step, not around Tazun himself but around an unseen middle point between him and the canal, as if she were testing where a snare’s loop lay by tapping the ground beside it. Her boots did not splash; they seemed to hesitate, meeting a thickness in the air that Xotzin could almost feel on his own skin: like walking into hanging cloth.
The reed tips along the bank quivered, each thin blade twitching in place though the water sat glassy and the dusk held its breath. Mist curled, then flattened, as if pressed by an invisible palm. Xotzin’s nose filled with a damp sharpness that did not belong to lake mud or fish rot. It was metallic, clean-edged, the scent you got when obsidian bit too deep and blood hit stone.
Ixamala’s mantle beads clicked once, then fell silent. Her gaze tracked along nothing visible, measuring distances without looking at landmarks, and her scarred arm tightened as if something tugged it. Xotzin found himself counting his own breaths, absurdly careful, as though even exhaling might draw the loop tighter.
“Distance,” Ixamala said again, and it was not a plea. It was a rule spoken the way a day-keeper names a taboo: plain, final. “Don’t feed it.”
Xotzin opened his mouth on instinct, questions were his trade, but she cut him off with a glance that made the words feel like coins he was about to throw into deep water. “Attention is an offering,” she went on, voice low. “So are names. So is pity.”
She lifted two fingers and indicated, without touching, the narrow spaces at Tazun’s wrists and along the ribs that rose and fell too fast under his shirt. “There,” she murmured. “That’s where it tugs.”
Her fingers turned, not accusing the man, but the air around him. “It isn’t inside him. He’s the handle.”
“Doorway” struck the air like a stone dropped into a cistern. No splash, just a deep, traveling thud that you felt in your teeth. Xotzin’s practiced angle of shoulders and smile slipped, as if the word had shifted the price of every next sentence. Nopaltzin’s thick fingers curled and uncurled, hunting for a hammer that wasn’t there. Tazun jerked, eyes snapping past Ixamala to the canal, stricken the way a dog stiffens at a whistle only it understands.
Ixamala backed off in measured steps, palms half raised, trying to pull them with her without touching. “If you pen him with questions,” she said, each word weighed, “you brace the hinge. You make it easier to swing.” Her eyes never left the canal behind Tazun. Not his face. His shadow on the water. As though the dark would lean forward and test them the instant they refused to yield.
Citlali’s neck prickled as if a web had been drawn across her skin; beneath her cloak the bone-point at her throat turned warm, not with sun but with something waking. Xotzin saw her swallow and thought, absurdly, of a merchant testing cacao against his lip for grit: only this was fear taking measure.
She eased two fingers under the cord and held the carved point away from her chest. The polished bone caught what little light the dusk had left, and a faint sheen ran over it like oil on water. Her gaze did not go to the object, but beyond it, into the reeds and the narrow lane of canal where sound traveled wrong.
“Do you hear that?” she asked, and her bluntness had gone thin at the edges.
Xotzin listened. At first there was only the expected: insects ticking, reed fronds rasping, the soft slap of Tazun’s canoe hull as it scraped along the mud. Then a second layer pressed through. Too many breaths in the same space, a susurrus with syllables that never resolved. It had the rhythm of speech and the weight of drowning, as if words were being pushed through wet cloth.
Tazun’s shoulders hitched. His stare drifted past them again, not meeting any face, fixing instead on a point just above the waterline. His mouth worked like a man repeating a prayer he didn’t believe. “Don’t. Don’t say it,” he muttered, and Xotzin couldn’t tell whether he meant a name, a question, or an accusation.
Citlali flinched as if someone had touched her. The bone-point pulsed hotter, and a coldness answered it, rising off the canal in a thin skin that licked at Xotzin’s ankles through his sandals. He caught himself shifting his weight, careful as if stepping around a spill. The air smelled of wet reed and something metallic, the faint tang that followed a cut finger before blood showed.
Nopaltzin moved a half-step closer to Citlali, protective without knowing what to do with his hands. Ixamala’s posture tightened, her attention fixed on the dark water behind Tazun like a trader watching a scale settle.
A whisper slid through the reeds, close enough that Xotzin felt it more than heard it (half plea, half command) and Citlali’s eyes sharpened, recognition like pain.
Out on the canal, the swamp lights did not wander the way folk stories claimed. They tightened, patient and exact, until they made a ring around the Reed Gate pilings, each pale bead holding its place as if pegged there by an unseen hand. The circle narrowed by small degrees, like a noose drawn slow to savor the moment, and the water inside it went oddly still. Ripples that should have traveled from Tazun’s dragging hull reached the edge of that light and died, smothered.
Xotzin found himself counting without meaning to: the spacing between the lights, the number of posts in the Gate, the breath between the bell’s distant strikes. His mind wanted measures the way it wanted prices, but the canal refused to be weighed. The ring seemed to take the last of the dusk and keep it. Beneath its calm surface, the dark thickened, as if something large had turned in place.
Tazun’s hands tightened on the canoe gunwale until the reeds creaked. The smell of metal sharpened, sudden as bitten lip.
A whisper threaded through the reeds, not one voice but many laid over each other, stretched and rasped as if they had been pulled across wet stone. It came in pulses that didn’t match the wind. Half of it begged, hurry, listen, come closer, and half of it pressed like an order given to a servant who could not refuse. The sound worried at the edge of hearing the way a thief worries a latch, patient, testing for weakness. Xotzin kept his face smooth and found his fingers had gone stiff against his cloak clasp. He told himself it was only dusk carrying talk from the causeway, only reed-hollow echoes. Yet the canal answered with a cold breath that smelled faintly of iron, and the whisper seemed to know his name without speaking it.
Tazun drew in a breath that seemed too deep for his thin ribs, and the sound came threaded with another timing. An extra hitch, a drag, as if water still sat in a throat. Citlali jerked back, hand rising to her necklace. She had heard that borrowed cadence before: in fever-dreams when the dead crowded close, in wind that slid along graves and tried to speak.
Tazun’s gaze skated past Xotzin’s shoulder again, fixed on the canal’s black center as if someone stood there, waiting. Citlali stiffened. Xotzin saw it: not in the water, but in her: a shiver that traveled up her throat, the fine hairs lifting along her jaw. The bone-point at her chest thumped once, hard as a knuckle-rap from inside her ribs, warning without words.
Nopaltzin moved before anyone decided for him. He did it the way he approached a bellows too hot or a door about to give. Without hurry, without apology, and with the blunt confidence of a man who knew where his weight belonged. One step put his shoulder in line with Tazun’s shaking frame. Another closed the space. In the dim, his breadth made a wall out of ordinary flesh.
Xotzin tracked the motion as if it were a negotiation piece laid on a mat. Nopaltzin’s stance was clean: feet planted on the packed mud, knees soft, ready to hold or to yield by inches but not to topple. His hands came up empty and visible. The right palm opened toward the others in a flat stop, fingers spread. No knife-grip, no reaching hook. The left hovered closer to Tazun’s elbow, not touching, just marking a claim: this man is not to be dragged like a sack.
Tazun’s breath caught at Nopaltzin’s back, a panicked flutter. The sailor tried to look past him again, eyes sliding toward the waterline as if some figure waited there with a rope already looped. Nopaltzin didn’t follow that stare. He kept his gaze on the living, on the faces that might harden into duty.
Xotzin felt the calculation in his own throat: the cost of resisting wardens, the cost of letting them take a frightened boatman to the Circle. His fingers flexed once against his cloak clasp. He could read a market, read a man’s hunger, but this was a different scale. One that balanced fear against fear.
Nopaltzin’s palm remained up, steady as an anvil face. The gesture said what his mouth hadn’t yet spoken: you will have to move me first.
Nopaltzin’s voice stayed level, the way it did when he quoted a price for copper and meant it. “Cleansing,” he said, tasting the word like grit between teeth. In his world, there were honest names for things: requisition, levy, waste. This was not mercy; it was a taking made polite so it could be swallowed.
He lifted his soot-stained hands a fraction, palms still open. “When a forge runs cold and a master panics, he shovels in whatever’s closest: good charcoal, green wood, even reeds. It flares, it smokes, it eats itself. The bellows groan and everyone pretends the flame is proof of skill.” His eyes cut toward the dark line of the causeway, where the Gate bell’s echo still hung. “That’s what your Circle is doing. Feeding a mistake until it looks like duty.”
Xotzin heard the craft in the insult: not a curse, a diagnosis. Nopaltzin’s jaw tightened. “They call it balancing omens. I call it burning people to make numbers come out neat. I won’t hand over a breathing man so someone else can close their ledger.”
Tazun flinched at the word neighbor as if it had been thrown like a stone. His eyes skittered to the waterline, to the seam where reed-shadow met open black, and Xotzin felt the pull of that stare. An invisible cord drawing the sailor’s attention away from every living face. Tazun’s fingers worried the canoe’s gunwale in a tight, repetitive rub until the wet wood squeaked, small complaints that sounded too much like a voice trying to start. His breath came in thin, salt-burned pulls; each inhale hitched, as if he expected water where air should be. He mouthed something without sound, then swallowed hard, jaw working. Xotzin caught the sheen of fear-sweat on his upper lip and the tremor that ran through his wrists, as though answering a pressure only he could feel.
Nopaltzin spoke like he was laying out tools on a mat. Shelter first. Restraint. “We lash the canoe and roll it above the waterline. We put him in my shop, where there’s light and walls.” He nodded once to Xotzin, counting on practicality. “One watch at the door, one at the canal. No shrine, no Gate, not until day can see what night is hiding.”
Nopaltzin’s calm did not soften the moment; it honed it. Xotzin tasted the decision like unripe fruit, bitter, necessary. Pull Tazun under a roof and invite whatever rode his shadow to find a doorway, or shove him back toward the causeway and let the Day-Count Circle’s “cleansing” finish its work. Either way, the village’s quiet would be paid for in blood or breach.
Their words stacked and slipped like wet cargo. Xotzin kept his voice in the register he used for tribute disputes but it kept getting cut by Ixamala’s insistence, quiet and sharp as a stone blade. She did not argue to win; she argued the way a person points at smoke before the fire is seen. Nopaltzin answered with a bark that surprised even him, the sound of a man used to heat and hammer suddenly faced with something that could not be shaped.
Citlali said little, yet the air around her seemed to tighten whenever Tazun shifted, as if her silence was another voice. Xotzin heard her breathing between sentences, controlled and shallow, and it made him aware of his own breath. Of how quickly it could turn ragged if he let the fear show.
Someone’s grip on the canoe line failed. The cord, slick with canal water, slid through fingers with a whispering rasp and the bow nudged the stones. A paddle blade, held too loosely, shed droplets in patient taps that sounded like counting. Each tap landed in the pause after a phrase, accusing them of wasting time.
Xotzin tried again, softer, aiming at Tazun as if at a wary buyer: stay with them, speak plainly, they would keep him out of the Circle’s reach. The sailor’s stare did not meet his. It kept drifting, fixed on the Reed Gate’s dark throat, on the water’s thin skin where the last light turned the ripples to metal.
Ixamala’s gaze flicked to the reeds. “We shouldn’t be here,” she said, as if naming a taboo could hold it. Nopaltzin stepped closer to the empty canoe, broad shoulders making a wall without meaning to, and Xotzin realized their triangle of bodies was becoming a decision the canal could see.
Then the first heavy bell-note rolled over the water, and the second followed it, closer than it should have been. The sound did not hurry; it announced.
Tazun flinched at each new sentence as if it struck him in the ribs. The motion was small but total: shoulders jumping, breath catching, then a forced stillness that looked like obedience until it broke again. His hands stayed on the empty canoe as if it were the only thing that would not accuse him. He worried the gunwale with two fingers, rubbing a damp groove into the wood, then stopped and did it again, knuckles blanching and unblanching in a rhythm that matched nothing human.
Xotzin watched for the telltale signs of a liar, eyes seeking exits, mouth preparing excuses, but Tazun’s gaze did neither. It kept sliding past them, never landing, fixed on the line where dusk thickened and the canal’s surface lost its last reflection. When a reed hissed in the breeze, Tazun’s head snapped toward it, and his lips parted as if to answer. No sound came out, only a swallow that lifted his throat like a hooked fish.
The empty canoe rocked once, gentle, and he gripped harder, as if the water beneath it had shifted its weight.
The reeds drank their voices and returned them altered, thinner, as if strained through teeth. Between the stalks, swamp lights winked in and out with a spiteful steadiness, not random but paced, like someone tallying their raised syllables and pauses. Xotzin’s skin tightened along his forearm where inked marks lived; the habit of counting answered the lights before he could stop it. A cold dampness slid low over the canal, skimming the surface in a ribbon, and with it came whispering: too soft to be speech, too deliberate to be dismissed as wind. It shaped itself around names half-said, around guilt not admitted, and left a metallic taste in his mouth like bitten obsidian.
The Reed Gate bell spoke, one stroke drawn so low it vibrated along Xotzin’s jaw, then a second that came sooner than breath allowed. The sound traveled the causeway stones and returned off the water, as if counting their hesitation aloud. It was not alarm. It was notice. Somewhere beyond the reeds, measured footfalls and pole-taps began to answer: the Wardens closing in.
Their bodies answered before any plan could form: Xotzin’s heel found a slick stone and adjusted, not toward shelter, there was none, but toward a stance that looked harmless. Paddles froze above the water, dripping slow counts. Nopaltzin’s fingers left his knife-hilt. Ixamala’s chin lifted, listening. Even Citlali’s breath went shallow. Whatever they chose now would be witnessed; the canal held their words like a ledger.
The bell’s echo thinned and vanished into the reed tops. In the moment after, Tazun jolted hard, shoulders locking as if a line had been yanked tight inside him. The empty canoe he hauled rasped against mud and root; his hands clenched the gunwale until the tendons stood out white, and the skin over his knuckles looked ready to split. He did not look at Xotzin. Not properly. His gaze kept skimming past earspools, past Ixamala’s steady eyes, past Nopaltzin’s soot-dark face, to the black seam where water met reed-shadow.
Xotzin measured the man the way he would a suspect bundle: weight, damage, what might be hidden under plain wrapping. Panic had a smell, sour sweat, stale breath, and Tazun carried it like wet cloth. Yet beneath it there was something else, a sharp tang of brine and old incense, as if he’d been too close to a place where offerings sat and rotted.
“Easy,” Xotzin said, keeping his tone market-calm. He shifted his hands to show them empty, palms forward, a courtesy taught by toll-keepers with knives. “Wardens will hear anything you shout. Tell us what you need before they. His lips moved soundlessly for a beat, jaw working as if he were chewing an answer given by someone else. The swamp lights answered, three quick blinks close to the waterline, then a longer burn, casting brief green on the canoe’s ribs. Tazun flinched at the light as if it had spoken his true name.
Citlali’s posture tightened; her chin angled, listening into the reeds. Xotzin saw the fine hairs on her forearm rise, and the sight made his stomach sink with an accountant’s certainty: two hauntings in one place were not additive, they were bargaining. Ixamala’s scarred arm drifted half-lifted, fingers splayed, as though feeling for a seam in the air.
“Don’t,” Tazun rasped, voice raw from holding back something larger. “Don’t go closer.” The plea came out strangled, and then he swallowed it fast, eyes still fixed on that waterline, waiting, terrified, as if someone unseen might step out of the canal and claim him by the throat.
Tazun’s breath hitched and then burst out of him in a rush of heat. “You,” he snapped, and the word landed on Xotzin like a bad coin: common metal painted to pass. “Outsiders. Traders with smooth tongues. You come with your guild marks and your counting sticks and you pry at days that aren’t yours.” Spittle shone on his lip in the last slice of dusk; his voice cracked high, then slammed down again, as if someone else were yanking it by a cord.
He jabbed a shaking hand toward Ixamala. “Omen-meddler.” Toward Citlali, his eyes widening as if he recognized a shadow at her shoulder. “Hunter of bones.” The swamp lights answered his pointing with a quick flare, and he recoiled from his own accusation, swallowing hard.
Xotzin saw it then: the anger was not strength. It was a lid forced down over a boiling pot. Beneath it, something pleaded: don’t make me say what I carried, don’t make me name where I went, don’t make me admit who paid. The words he couldn’t speak crowded his throat until his shout turned ragged, almost a sob, and his stare skittered back to the water as if begging it to interrupt.
Tazun retreated a careful half-step at a time, heel searching for footing in the mud as if the ground might betray him to their faces. The empty canoe skated with him, its ribs scraping roots and stone, and he kept one trembling hand hooked under the gunwale, drawing it across his body. Xotzin watched him set it, not random, not blind panic, angling the hull so it blocked a straight reach, a practiced move from dock fights and drunken debts. The canoe became a thin wall of reed and wood, a shield that said: you will have to come through what I know best. His eyes never left the dark channel. In them was a grim bargain: the black water would not judge him: unless it was the judge he’d already paid.
The swamp lights answered him as if on command: pinpricks all along the Reed Gate’s edge flaring in one breath, swelling from sparks to steady, watchful beads that threw green sheen over mud and oar-scratches. Citlali went rigid, head canting, listening; faint syllables, water-thick and broken, braided through the reeds like a chorus trying to borrow mouths. For an instant, Xotzin felt the canal turn its attention on them, measuring, waiting.
Their forward drive died in the mud between reed roots. No hand sign passed, no story settled on, only half-formed options that all tasted of guilt: drag Tazun away, step into the canal mist, stand and be counted. Behind them, the bell’s last shiver faded into measured footfalls. Lantern light bobbed, widening and narrowing through the reeds, cinching the dusk tight as a drawn cord.
Xotzin peels away from the others at the first bend of canal, choosing the narrow run that angles back toward town. He does it without haste, timing his turn to the moment a pair of ward-lanterns bob on the far causeway. Bright enough to be seen, distant enough not to matter. The reeds rise higher here, combing his cloak with wet fingers and swallowing the last soft sounds of his companions’ paddles. Good. Separate stories travel cleaner than tangled ones.
He lets his shoulders hang loose and keeps his chin level, the posture of a man returning from a routine errand. Under the travel cloak, the lacquered cotton armor holds its stiffness against his ribs; it makes him feel too visible, like polished goods on a mat. He presses his forearm against his side, hiding the inked tally marks that mark him as guild-trained. Outsiders were measured here the way grain was measured: by what could be counted and what could be taken.
Water slaps the hull in a steady, small rhythm. His palms sting where rope had burned them earlier, and the blistered skin on one thumb catches on the paddle-shaft. He adjusts his grip, careful not to grimace. Pain reads like weakness to wardens, and weakness invites questions.
He rehearses the story again, quietly, syllables shaped behind his teeth: he returned to the dock to check tide-poles for the guild’s records, to confirm market weights, to leave word with a courier bound north. All true enough to stand, none of it leaning toward omens or ghosts. Nothing that could make his guild mark smell like scandal.
On the right, an irrigation gate bears the feather-serpent spiral in white paint. In daylight it looks like pride; in dusk it looks like a warning scratched onto a door. A thin drift of foam gathers along the posts, and for a moment the bubbles arrange into a line that seems too deliberate, like beads strung on invisible cord. He blinks and the pattern breaks, scattering with the current.
He keeps paddling, eyes forward, and does not look back at the reeds as if they might answer. He heads for the town dock with the practiced pace of a man arriving on schedule, cloak pulled close over the hidden sheen of lacquered cotton, one hand resting on the edge of his travel pack like it holds nothing but invoice cords and harmless goods.
The canal narrowed into the town’s outer reach, where the reed walls lowered just enough to show the dock’s tide-poles and the low silhouettes of storehouses. Xotzin kept his pace measured, neither hurried nor lagging, as if his body knew the exact weight of a proper arrival. His cloak stayed drawn tight, hiding the lacquered cotton that would read as readiness for trouble. Ready men were questioned; unready men were tested. He preferred to be neither.
His left hand rested on his travel pack, fingers splayed over the flap with an easy possessiveness. The pack held trade knives, dyed thread samples, and a sealed packet of guild tallies. Nothing a warden needed to see. His fingertips brushed the cord knots anyway, checking them by habit, the same way he would check cacao by smell without seeming to.
Ahead, two dockhands paused over a coil of rope. Their eyes slid to him, then away, the practiced glance that says outsider, count him, file him. Xotzin let a small, courteous smile find his mouth, not inviting talk but not refusing it. He breathed through his nose, tasting resin and fish-salt, and kept walking as if the dock had been expecting him all along.
As he walks the last plank-lengths toward the dock, he sorts his explanation the way he once sorted cacao and thread: by weight, by smell, by what would be missed if it were missing. A delayed delivery. True enough; the canoe traffic had been slow and the wind wrong. A respectful detour. Also true; he had watched for the named-day signs and kept his paddle out of water when the taboo hours tightened. Courtesy to local custom. Always true, because courtesy was cheaper than fines.
He tests each phrase in his mouth without moving his lips, tasting how it might sound to a toll-keeper hungry for a story. He leaves out the foam that arranged itself like beads, the way the reeds seemed to listen. Let fear live in other men’s throats, not near his guild mark.
At the dock he finds a familiar knot of boatmen and toll-keepers and lets his smile arrive first, warm as if he belongs to their routine. He offers a palm-up greeting, asks after the wind, the rope prices, the ward-lantern oil. Then he listens, weighing answers. He lets “Reed Gate” fall like an idle detail, “Calendar Stone” like a civic courtesy, watching for flinches, while his own voice stays flat, harmless.
The reed-hush behind him grows too focused, like a breath held for listening. Xotzin does not give it the courtesy of a glance. He shifts his feet instead, turning his shoulders toward the open stretch of water where everyone’s eyes are meant to go, and busies his gaze with dock truths (rope coils, tide-pole notches, yesterday’s wet line) until it can pass for simple caution.
Back in the forge’s soot-warm shelter, Nopaltzin sets the bellows to a steady rhythm and greets anyone who enters with the same patient nod, as if today is only tools and tempering: nothing more. The mouth of the clay furnace glows like a half-lidded eye; each breath of air he feeds it makes the coals hiss and settle. He keeps his shoulders loose, his face unreadable, and lets the ordinary sounds do the talking: leather creak, iron ring, the soft spit of flux.
A farmer comes first with a chipped obsidian-set sickle, apologizing too often, hands stained green from amaranth. Nopaltzin takes it, tests the tang, and speaks only of edge angles and the cost of new pitch. No mention of the shrine. No mention of the Wardens’ dredging plans. He returns the tool truer than it was, as if honest work can straighten the day.
Two youths follow with a basket of broken fishhooks and a request for “quiet repairs”: their words, not his. They glance past him at the back wall where molds hang and copper scraps are sorted by size. Their eyes pause on the stout rings he has been asked to make, then slide away as if burned. Nopaltzin says, mildly, that copper likes patience and that impatience pays twice. One youth nods too quickly, like he’s agreeing to something else.
When the door-slat clicks again, he hears the hesitation before he sees the man: the scrape of a sandal held back, a breath counted wrong. A sailor’s silhouette, thin with wakefulness, stands in the smoke line. Nopaltzin does not ask his name. He asks what needs mending.
“A nail,” the sailor says, and places a small bundle on the anvil with fingers that shake. “Iron-hard. For wood that won’t take.”
Nopaltzin unwraps it: a handful of bent nails, their heads hammered flat as if to silence them. He turns one between his thumb and forefinger, feeling for cheap metal, for hurried quenching. The man’s gaze keeps drifting to the furnace-mouth and then away, like he’s afraid it will speak.
“Who taught you to ruin good nails this way?” Nopaltzin asks, as if it’s a joke.
The sailor swallows. “Night work. Bad light.”
Nopaltzin grunts in the language of craftsmen. Understanding without permission. He sets the nails aside, lifts his hammer, and makes his strikes fall at a pace that invites eavesdroppers to grow bored. But his eyes stay sharp, taking inventory of what the sailor won’t meet: the soot on his wrists in the shape of reeds, the raw salt sores on his feet, the faint copper smell that clings to someone who’s been too close to offerings.
Outside, the village water slaps its steady warning against the posts. Inside, Nopaltzin keeps the forge sounding like nothing at all.
While the charcoal catches, Nopaltzin makes a show of tidying: cord bundled by fiber, awls returned to their gourd, the marked beam wiped clean with a rag. Routine, to anyone watching. But he lays out the new lengths anyway, one by one, and draws them taut against the beam’s notches with the care he’d give a straightedge.
The pattern has stopped being coincidence. Always the same measure, always doubled. Long enough to loop an ankle and still have room to knot, long enough to couple two together if you wanted the binding to share strain. He presses a thumbnail into the twist, feels the grease someone used to keep it quiet when it rubs.
Payment comes in cacao, but never as a full count. A handful slid forward, then another on the next day, always with eyes on the doorway, as if the payer expects a voice to follow them in. Guild traders pay clean. Farmers barter openly. This is neither. This is fear buying in pieces.
He ties the measured cords into neat coils and sets them beneath the bench, where soot will make them look like old stock, and keeps his face mild as the coals begin to breathe.
He reaches into the shadowed shelf where unfinished commissions sleep and draws out the copper rings one at a time. The metal is thick, workman’s copper, not the thin bright band a bride might wear. Firelight licks along the curve and shows his own file marks, careful, even, made by someone who expects the piece to bear weight and not complain.
He sets a ring against his calipers, the same tool he uses to judge a knife tang for a tight fit. The jaws close with a soft click. Again. And again. Each ring answers with the same measurement, as if the request was spoken with a ruler in hand.
Too consistent for a farmer’s improvising. Too heavy to be decoration. He turns one and lets it thud against the anvil, listening to the dull note it makes. A shackle’s voice, trying to pass as craft.
When petitioners asked for “quiet repairs,” Nopaltzin lowered his voice as if soot could hear and kept his hands moving (turning a nail, wiping a tang, feeding the bellows) so no one could accuse him of staring. But he watched anyway: salt-cracked fingers that paused at a ring’s inner edge, wrists that jerked from the serpent-spiral etch, eyes that slid off the furnace-glow like it might name them.
After the last set of footsteps fades, Nopaltzin finds a broken clay shard and uses an awl to score his own ledger. Marks for cord length, ring diameter, the stingy cacao payments, and the faces that came when the light was going thin. No names spoken aloud; just enough to summon them later. He slides the shard under the anvil stone and stills, ear turned to the canal’s hush, counting its slow breaths.
Ixamala takes the long way toward the Calendar Stone, not out of reverence but out of habit: avoid straight lines when straight lines can be called accusation. She threads between bean rows where the leaves slap her shins with damp applause, then steps onto the raised backs of chinampas, balancing on packed earth that holds the day’s warmth like a secret. From a distance, she could be anyone: a traveler with a patched mantle, keeping her feet dry, minding her own business.
She keeps her gaze low on purpose. Not submissive. Careful. In town, eyes are counted like cacao. If you look too often toward the shrine, someone will decide you’re either hungry for favor or hungry for trouble. She watches instead for the things people don’t think to watch: the way canal scum gathers in a perfect curve where the water ought to run clean; the reeds that lean against a wind that isn’t there; the thin hiss that comes and goes at the edge of hearing, like a clay jar cooling too fast.
At each turn she pauses, hand loosely at her throat, thumb finding a shell bead and pressing until it bites. She times her own breath to the pauses, inhale, walk three heartbeats, exhale, and listens for the moment the air slips. When it does, it is never dramatic. The world simply becomes a fraction shallower, as if the sky has lowered its lid.
A dragonfly skims the canal and then jerks away, wings flashing. Small fish shiver the surface and scatter as if something below them rolled in its sleep. Ixamala angles farther from the main towpath, letting a fisherman’s distant cough cover the soft sound of her sandals on wet roots.
She does not look up at the Calendar Stone. Not yet. She watches the ground around it: the pale salt crusting in a ring where nothing grows, the footprints that stop and begin again without matching strides, the faint soot streaks on a boulder as if someone had set down a smoking bowl and thought better of it. She keeps walking, slow enough to be harmless, quick enough not to be called lingering, and waits for the seam to announce itself in her lungs.
She stops at the pinch of canal where two chinampa edges crowd close enough that the water forgets how to ripple. Sunlight is hard on the surface, but the stones along the bank glisten as if they have been dipped: dark sweat beading on rock that should be chalk-dry at this hour. Ixamala crouches, pretending to retie a sandal strap, and lets her gaze skim the sheen.
The first breath tastes of copper. Not the clean bite of a cut lip. This is thin, flattened, metallic on her tongue, wrong the way watered blood is wrong: too pale to honor anything, too sharp to ignore. Her throat tightens around it. She swallows once, then again, and feels the air resist her lungs as if the world has turned slightly thicker.
A faint pressure pushes behind her eyes. The canal smell, mud, algae, crushed reed, drops away for a heartbeat, replaced by something like rain on hot stone. She keeps her face calm, hands busy, while her pulse counts out an answer she doesn’t want.
With two fingers she draws the shell-bead mantle up, pinning it lightly at the hollow of her throat. Not supplication. Something to hold herself in place when the world tilts. She counts in her head, steady as a day-keeper: one heartbeat, two, three, marking how the air thins and then, reluctantly, remembers depth. On the fifth beat the pressure behind her eyes loosens; on the sixth, the copper taste fades to ordinary canal damp.
She does not move right away. She watches for the tell. The reeds along the pinch of water stop their constant whisper all at once, every blade arrested as if a hand has cupped the wind. Even the insects seem to hover quieter. It feels less like calm than attention: like something pausing to hear whether she will speak.
Ixamala slips a thumb-sized fleck of obsidian from her pouch and presses it into the mud where the bank stays unnaturally wet. No prayer, no flourish. Just a quiet point of record. She moves on, circling wide, pausing at each corner where stone, reed, and water meet. Each time the air turns thin in her lungs she notes it with another shard, mapping the bad-breath places the way a weaver marks a snag.
From beyond the reed walls, town voices arrive in pieces: boastful recitations of the named day, then the soft, practiced word necessity spoken as if it were mercy. Ixamala keeps walking, but her mind lays their claims beside the beat-count she trusts. The numbers refuse to sit together. Her mouth firms, and she marks the next thin-breath corner without looking back: someone is making the calendar lie.
Citlali lets the main canal slide past on her left like a safer life she is refusing. With a nudge of her pole she noses into a side cut where the reeds grow thick enough to braid shadows, and she stops paddling. The current is slow here but insistent; it takes her canoe and turns it a fraction at a time, the way a hand might turn a bowl to see what is hidden at the bottom.
Ahead, Tazun’s stern is only a smear of darker dark between stalks. She keeps one canoe-length behind him. Close enough to catch what he drops into the water with his fear, far enough that his wake won’t slap her bow and announce her.
His paddle is a dull rhythm: dip, draw, lift. He is good. Too good to be calm. The blade enters without splash, and the V of disturbed water lays itself flat almost immediately, but Citlali has hunted in shallows since she could walk. She reads what remains: the faint crease that hesitates against a reed root, the tiny swirl where the blade brushed a floating leaf. Even the minnows give him away; they scatter in a quick, silver flick and then regroup behind him, as if the water itself is relieved when he passes.
She drops her chin until her breath warms the rim of her cloak. Inhale through the nose, slow; exhale into cloth, so the sound dies. The air smells of wet pollen and old fish. Beneath it is something sharper, like stone struck in the dark.
Tazun pauses at a narrow throat where two reed walls lean close. His shoulders hitch, and for a moment his head turns as if listening to a voice from the open water. Citlali freezes her hands on the gunwales. He doesn’t look back but his mouth moves, forming words that don’t match the quiet.
“No,” he whispers, and then, softer, like bargaining with a creditor, “Not yet.”
He pushes through the throat. The reeds rasp together behind him, closing like teeth. Citlali waits three heartbeats, four, then lets the current take her into the same dark seam, following the last thin signature of his passage.
The swamp lights come first, before any sign of his shoulders or paddle. They bead along the reed knots where the canal pinches into braided tunnels. Cold pinpoints that rise and sink as if on invisible cords. Citlali has seen them scatter for otter and eel, seen them drift with wind, but tonight they behave like they’re being counted. Three gather, then five, then a tight little ring that holds its place against the slow pull of water.
She lets Tazun’s outline go. In this thickness of reed, a man can vanish with one careful stroke, but a haunting is greedy; it shows itself. Citlali angles her canoe toward the brightest drift and watches how each light tugs toward the same unseen center. When she lifts her pole, the tip breaks through a film on the water that shouldn’t be there. Slick as fat, smelling faintly of copper and crushed flowers.
Ahead, the lights thin, then flare again at a low arch where reeds have been cut and re-tied, making a mouth. She doesn’t need his wake now. She follows the glow’s insistence, trusting whatever rides him to lead her where it wants to be.
Tazun reaches a slow bend where the canal widens enough to show a strip of sky, then he stops as if the pole has struck stone. The canoe drifts on its own momentum, turning him a finger-width at a time. His head tilts toward nothing (no reed rustle, no frog-call, only the hush of water sliding past roots) and his eyes fix on a point just above the surface, like he’s watching someone stand there. His lips work without sound, counting or pleading, and Citlali’s scalp tightens. The air grows dense; her ears fill the way they do before a storm, pressure building behind the bones. When Tazun finally speaks it is a torn whisper, syllables drowned in his throat, yet she feels the reply: a second cadence threading through the canal, carried under the water instead of through it.
Tazun threads into a throat so tight the reeds stroke his cloak and whisper against his arms. Citlali keeps to the downwind shadow, letting her canoe idle whenever the swamp lights surge, as if warning her off. Twice she sees his mouth form the same small shape, two careful breaths of speech, then a swallow, as though he is repeating a prayer he hates to know.
A coolness slicks over the canal like a hand laid flat, and the swamp lights sink from pinpricks to dull embers. Even the frogs fall silent. In that hush Citlali hears it clean, not from Tazun’s mouth but from beneath his canoe: unfinished voyage. The words carry a weight that makes her ribs tighten. The water seems to pause, listening back, waiting for agreement.
Xotzin moved through the evening market the way he moved across a causeway in fog. Measuring each plank before trusting his weight. Smoke from roasting fish hung low beneath the thatch awnings, sweetened with chile and the sting of lime. The lake breeze carried it all in slow gusts that set hanging gourds clicking like small, nervous teeth.
He kept his hands visible, palms open when he greeted, fingers tucked when he didn’t need to show them. A laugh here, a respectful dip of the head there; he let familiar faces see the Traveling Guild mark at his belt without ever letting them touch it. He bought two handfuls of cacao beans from a boy he’d never met, bit one cleanly to show it wasn’t chalked or oiled, then paid a half-bead more than asked. The boy’s eyes widened, and the whisper moved before Xotzin did.
He worked the whispers the way he worked prices: not by pushing, but by letting others feel clever for offering. To the salt-fish woman he offered an owed discount and in return she told him which canal warden had been seen at the shrine steps after dusk. To a thread-seller with a cough like wet cloth, he traded a small roll of dyed cotton for a name and a shrug: “Day-Count Circle says the count is tight. Says the lake is hungry.”
That was the phrase being passed hand to hand: hungry.
At last, under a lamp of rendered fat, a man with a guild-scar on his chin stopped pretending to admire obsidian blades and leaned in as if sharing a joke. His breath smelled of pulque and fear.
“Be careful where your canoe points,” he murmured. “They’ve been calling ‘necessity’ more often. And ‘necessity’ has teeth now. If you’re seen near the Calendar Stone when the lancets come out… they’ll name you a helper when the blood is counted.”
Xotzin kept his smile in place, gentle as a shopkeeper’s. Inside, he tallied the new cost: proximity itself had become a debt. He thanked the man with the same courtesy he’d use to accept a fair measure of maize, and turned away before anyone could watch him weigh the warning too long.
Nopaltzin stood at the mouth of his forge where the light was honest. Charcoal glow, copper gleam, the clean ring of a hammer when it struck true. He rubbed soot from his knuckles with a strip of reed cloth and kept his voice as even as his measuring hand.
“Those copper rings,” he said to the cord-seller who’d brought a coil for bell clappers. “The order was heavy. Good metal. I only need to know. Whose gait am I fitting? I won’t waste a span if the measure is wrong.”
He tried to make it sound like thrift, like pride in workmanship. A craftsman’s concern, nothing more. He even smiled, brief and polite, the way you did when you asked to borrow a tool.
But the wrong ear had been waiting for the word rings.
An elder from the Canal Wardens, one of the men who liked to stand close to shrines as if the stone warmed him, turned his head slowly. The forge noise faltered. A bell mold hovered over its clay bed. A tonged obsidian-set sickle stopped halfway to the quench water, steam dying before it began.
“Measures are given when they are needed,” the elder said. “Not when a smith grows curious.”
Ixamala chose the irrigation gate where the feathered-serpent paint had weathered into scales of dull green, flaking at the edges like old mica. It was a quiet place, only the soft cluck of water through reeds and the distant market murmur carried thin on the damp air. She crouched, set her pack down with care, and drew a travel needle from a stitched pouch. No ceremony. Just precision.
The prick was shallow. A pinbright ache, then a bead of blood welled up. She pressed it to the stone lip beneath the serpent’s eye. The drop clung, reluctant, before soaking into a hairline crack.
The world tightened. Breathing turned costly, as if each inhale demanded permission. Her seam-sense answered with a sharp, inward flare, pressure against pressure, like a door held shut from the other side, flexing under a careful hand.
Citlali let her paddle kiss the water in half-strokes, more steering than speed. The reed tunnels swallowed sound, then returned it wrong: a knock against hull, a breath she hadn’t taken, a voice that rode the ripples like a thin film of oil. She didn’t answer. She only listened until the phrase came again, sharper and the reeds all at once drew stiff, as if a cold hand had slid between them and brushed her shoulder.
The four paths paid in different coin (smiles spent like cacao, temper held in the teeth, blood beaded and taken, nerves rubbed raw by reed-whispers) and each came back with a thread. Xotzin’s careful courtesy bought one loose tongue and the shape of a warning. Nopaltzin’s “thrift” question drew a careless measure. Ixamala’s sting met a seam that pushed back. Citlali marked the cold water-lanes Tazun refused, and felt the count tightening toward the next named day.
Xotzin chose his trade good the way he chose his words: something fine enough to flatter, common enough not to look like a bribe. A bolt of cotton thread, dyed the deep cochineal red that never quite stayed on the fingers, lay across his palms as he waited near the guild’s lean-to where couriers warmed their hands over a brazier and pretended not to listen to one another.
The boy (not yet a man, cheekbones sharp, hair tied with a fraying strip of maguey) kept his eyes on the water, on the dock posts with their carved tide marks, anywhere but Xotzin’s face. He accepted the bolt with the careful speed of someone who has learned what gifts can cost.
“You carry messages,” Xotzin said, polite as weighing stones. “You can tell me if the Circle has been… restless.”
A swallow. “People say things.”
“People always say things.” Xotzin let his smile show, then softened it. “I’m not asking for names. I’m asking for numbers. Numbers don’t get anyone cut.”
The boy’s fingers worried the dyed edge until red stained his nails. “They seal them with the spiral,” he said, as if the symbol itself had ears. “Not the day-keeper’s plain stamp. The Circle’s.”
“How many?”
The boy took a breath that hitched in the middle. “Three. In one cycle.” His gaze flicked to the town center where the stepped shrine rose above the roofs. “That’s not normal.”
“And when were they carried?” Xotzin asked, voice mild, mind already laying the question against his internal calendar.
“Before dusk. Every time.” The boy’s shoulders tightened, as if dusk were a hand closing on his neck. “Like they wanted the doors shut before the mist comes up.”
“To whom?”
The courier’s lips pressed together, refusal rehearsed. Then his fear slipped out sideways, in the shape of a pattern. “Same doors,” he whispered. “Same route. Circle seal, three times, just before dark.”
Xotzin nodded as if he’d received a simple delivery schedule. Inside, he felt the weight of it settle. Three decrees, one cycle, one set of thresholds, and a dusk chosen on purpose.
At the forge, heat made the air shimmer and turned every sound into something blunt: the bellows’ sigh, the anvil’s iron cough, the hiss of quench water that smelled faintly of river mud. Nopaltzin kept his hands busy, stone on a blade, oil on a hinge, while his eyes stayed on what mattered.
The apprentice, a thin boy with ash in his lashes, uncoiled a length of cord and did not loop it around his own wrist as most did when guessing size. He dropped to one knee and marked it low, near his ankle bone, careful as a scribe. The motion snagged Nopaltzin’s attention like a hook.
“Why there?” Nopaltzin asked, mild.
The boy’s mouth twisted, half proud, half uneasy. “Paid in cacao,” he said under his breath, as if saying it made it less like theft. “To fit it on a woman who won’t stop walking.”
Not bride-words. Not festival-words. No talk of honor, only stopping. Nopaltzin filed the phrase away, measuring it against the heavy copper rings cooling on his shelf, and felt his jaw tighten without showing it.
Ixamala kept the Calendar Stone at her back and the reed line between herself and any watchful eyes. The shrine’s steps sat quiet, but the air around it was not: thin in a way that made breath feel borrowed. She pricked her thumb with a thorn and let one bead of blood touch a shard of obsidian, no more than etiquette demanded for a test. The world answered at once: a pressure that drew tight across her skin, like a drumhead being tuned too far, the soundless promise of a tear.
She pressed charcoal to a palm leaf and marked the moment, then another, and another, timing her offerings against the village’s shouted proclamations. Not storms, not moon-turns. The worst constrictions arrived with new taboos: words spoken in the right order, used like hands on a lever.
Citlali kept to reed-shadow, letting Tazun’s paddle-murmur draw her along the tunnels where water ran black under mats of duckweed. Twice he chose longer turns, skirting a narrow cut that would have brought him to town in half the time. When the avoided bend came in sight he went rigid, head cocked, as if listening to breath in his ear. The swamp lights thickened, patient, corralling him toward any mistake.
By late afternoon Xotzin had four separate reports laid in his mind like goods on a mat: a courier’s whispered dates that put decrees ahead of talk; copper restraint rings sized before any “need” was announced; Ixamala’s seam-pressure tightening whenever taboos were proclaimed; and Tazun, herded by an unheard voice away from certain cuts. The pattern bent toward one thing. An oncoming named day meant to gather the fearful at the canals, where water and count both lied.
Xotzin brought his canoe in low and quick, letting the reeds swallow the sound of his paddle until the last safe angle. The dock at Xochitlan Milpa was busy in the way a place grew busy when it wanted to look unbothered: nets laid out to dry, a boy with a pole pretending to count fish, two elders arguing over a coil of rope with too much seriousness. He slid into the shadowed side where hulls bumped softly, not the open planks where a warden could make a greeting into a summons.
He kept his Traveling Guild cord draped across his chest where anyone could see the knots and the seal bead, but he didn’t lift his chin as if he expected it to protect him. Outsiders did not get thanked for arriving on the wrong edge of a named day; they got remembered.
A canal warden in a reed cap watched the landing with the blank patience of someone measuring more than cargo. Xotzin met his eyes once and offered the smallest nod that said, I know your customs and I am not here to bruise them. The warden’s gaze slid off him, lingering instead on the canoe’s stern where the water had left a faint line of scum like pale foam.
Xotzin stepped onto the dock and let his hands go still, forcing himself not to rub the blisters that paddling had raised. He was travel-worn, but he could not afford to look desperate. He adjusted his cloak so the lacquered cotton beneath did not show; armor made men curious, and curiosity turned into questions.
He moved as if he had time, slow enough to look harmless, while his mind sorted what mattered: who was missing from the dock, which boats sat unclaimed, and why two women near the grain shed went quiet when a shrine runner passed with a folded strip of bark paper tucked inside his sash. Named-day talk, he reminded himself. The kind that hardened into patrols and gossip by sunset.
He found a stretch of dock where the shade fell thick and the chatter thinned, and made a show of waiting for someone who had not arrived. His eyes, meanwhile, kept returning to the tide-poles. Smoothed cedar stakes scored with old cuts, each notch a season’s argument settled by water. The newest wet line sat higher than it had any right to be.
Xotzin crouched as if to retie a sandal thong and let two fingers rest on the darkened grain. Cool, fresh. Not yesterday’s splash. He breathed in; the water smell carried a faint, sour sweetness, like bruised reeds stirred from the bottom. He set his thumb at the line and glanced away, giving anyone watching only the posture of a man counting his own inconvenience.
In his mind he laid the mark against other docks, other poles, other mornings: the market-city’s stone steps, the ferry post at the western causeway, the safe house where the canal ran narrow. Same wrong rise, same days. The count said dry; the lake answered otherwise. The mismatch settled in him like a debt someone meant to collect.
Xotzin let the dock’s shade carry him into the nearest line of stalls where reed mats hung like curtains and talk pooled in the cooler air. He did not stop long enough to be claimed by any one gaze. At a basket of dried chilies he listened to a woman repeat the shrine’s decree: no canoes past the Reed Gate at dusk, not on this named day. Two steps later, an old man at the fish-salt jars said it differently. Travel was permitted, but only for those “called to cleansing,” as if the water itself had issued invitations.
The differences were small, but they clung to certain households. Some were warned early, in time to pull nets and move cacao into lofts. Others heard late, after their routes were already cut. Piety did not sort like that. Someone was counting people the way Xotzin counted goods.
A shrine courier stopped at a clay jar to drink, throat working like he’d run hard. Xotzin drifted close, easy as a buyer, and slid a pinched twist of cacao into the man’s palm with a courteous joke about messengers always arriving hungry. The courier’s laugh came out thin. Under it, he breathed names and thresholds: who received bark-paper first, who only at last light. Xotzin weighed each whisper like grain, building a ledger no one could seize.
Before his stillness could become a question in anyone’s mouth, he sealed the courier’s murmured list into his head, households, thresholds, the order of warning, then let the dock swallow him back into its ordinary traffic. He moved off with a buyer’s pace, nothing hurried. By the time he angled toward Nopaltzin’s smoke-scented quarter, his smile sat politely on his face, and beneath it a hard count: the calendar was being used to herd flesh toward water.
Nopaltzin did not greet them with questions. He greeted them with motion: an arm extending to hook a leather apron from a peg, a foot nudging a basket of obsidian flakes away from the clear stretch of stone where he did his measuring. The forge yard was half-open to the canal breeze; reed-smoke drifted in, met the heavier smell of charcoal, and curled along the ground as if it, too, looked for seams.
He shifted a sickle blank off the slab with the careful impatience of a man used to making room for urgent things. The metal was cooling; it clicked softly against the stone. Nopaltzin wiped soot from the slab with a palmful of ash and resin, leaving a dull sheen, then nodded once. Speak.
Xotzin stepped in with his travel-cloak still on, as if he had simply paused mid-route to inspect a shipment. The habit of ease held his shoulders, but his eyes did not. He set down what he carried the way he’d set down cacao in a buyer’s palm: with enough gentleness that no one could accuse him of aggression, and enough precision that no one could pretend not to see.
A strip of bark-paper lay unrolled. Not the day-keeper’s board, not stolen. Only his rough copy, sketched from memory and a fast glance, glyph strokes counted and re-counted until they matched the shape of the thing he feared. Beside it, he placed a smaller scrap where he’d drawn the same sequence twice, once as it should sit, once as it sat now.
“Your eyes are steadier than mine when the smoke gets bad,” Xotzin said, courteous as always, offering Nopaltzin the paper first. “Tell me these strokes aren’t wrong.”
The tallies held tiny betrayals: lines too crisp at their ends, as if cut atop older marks; pools of darkness where ink had been laid thick to hide a correction; a shine that caught the forge light in a way old soot-dulled ink never did. Dates that should have fallen on open-water days now crowded against taboo. Names for travel days slid backward as if pulled by a hook.
Ixamala stood just inside the yard’s shade, watching the slab more than the papers, as if the stone itself might answer. Citlali’s attention went to the canal beyond the fence; she listened like a hunter listening for a reed’s tremor.
Xotzin kept his smile in place and waited, but his fingers hovered over the tallies, ready to count again if anyone tried to call it chance.
Xotzin drew his smallest knife, not to threaten. Only to borrow its point. He bent over the bark-paper and tapped the suspect glyphs with the nail-tip, each click placed like a weight on a scale. “Here,” he said, and kept his tone as light as if he were discussing damp maize. “This stroke should fade. Instead it sits on top. Fresh.” He angled the paper so the forge light skated across it; the new ink shone where old soot should have dulled.
He traced the older line half-hidden beneath, following it with the patience of a man counting beans by touch. “The taboo days have been walked forward,” he murmured. “And the travel days” (his knife-tip moved back along the sequence) “pushed away. See? It forces people to gather when the canals are high and the mist is thick.”
The tally marks inked on his forearm tightened as his fingers flexed. He counted under his breath, careful, repeating the cycle once, twice, until the pattern held even when he wanted it to break.
“Mistakes wander,” he said softly, eyes lifting to the others. “This one marches.”
Nopaltzin studied Xotzin’s copy a breath longer, then set it aside with a care that felt like refusing to let it contaminate his work. From under a stone weight he drew his own strip of bark-paper, creased, heat-scorched at one corner, and laid it flat. Burned into it were order marks: clean brand-lines, the kind that came with authority and demanded silence. He slid a measuring cord beside it. The cord was oiled, his knots deliberate: paired loops, spaced for ankles, not wrists, wide enough for a full-grown captive who would struggle.
Xotzin’s throat tightened; his buyer’s smile thinned but held.
“Who brought this?” he asked.
Nopaltzin didn’t look up. “A runner with shrine wax on his nails,” he said, voice kept low as banked coals. The yard seemed to lean inward at the word, as if even the charcoal wanted to hear and not be blamed.
Ixamala drifted to the water jar and stopped short of it, hands hovering as if touch might invite notice. She watched the surface until the forge light broke into warped bands. “The seam by the Calendar Stone,” she said, voice measured, “feels like a clay pot held too long in the kiln. Pressure hunting for a flaw.” Her gaze tightened. “Each miscounted offering thins the lip. The pull grows.”
Citlali arrived with wet reeds clinging to her cloak and spoke as if naming trap-sign. Tazun’s favored tunnels, the shallow cuts no one else used, the way his fingers fluttered when the wind leaned toward the causeway. “At dusk,” she said, “his feet always choose away from the Reed Gate.” Then the refrain he couldn’t swallow: a midnight load. The yard went still; their agreement took shape without words, and they moved.
Mist thickened around the Reed Gate until the world narrowed to breath and water-slap. The causeway lanterns became pale smears, floating without edges, their light swallowed and returned as a dull sheen on reeds. Xotzin kept his paddle across his knees and his hands still, the way you did when you wanted to look harmless and were counting exits.
Across the mouth of the canal the Canal Wardens set their canoes crosswise, hulls bumping softly as they knotted them together. A line of men, not soldiers but elders with hard forearms and river-ropes, made a barrier that said: no passage. Each took up a tool as if it had been laid out for a feast. Poles shaved smooth, hooked chains coiled like sleeping snakes, a rake head with teeth too new for dredging. Their movements had the sober rhythm of practiced ceremony: lift, settle, wait for the signal.
A warden with a shell-bead collar stepped onto the causeway and called a named day, his voice dampened by fog. Villagers answered with murmurs and shuffled closer, pressed into a single watching mass. Xotzin caught the shift in their posture. The obedience that came from fear of being the one who broke pattern. He tasted resin and wet earth and, underneath, the sour tang of iron that didn’t belong to lake mud.
Ixamala stood just behind his shoulder, eyes on the water rather than the men. Her fingers flexed once, as if counting beats only she could feel. Citlali crouched near the reeds, head angled to the mist, listening for a second voice in the warden’s words. Nopaltzin had come in plain cloth, but his gaze kept measuring ankles, chains, the spacing between boats.
Tazun was among the crowd at first, shoulders hunched, face turned away. When a hook clinked against a canoe gunwale, his head snapped up. His stare skittered over the fog as if someone stood there, unseen, beckoning him toward the cordon.
Xotzin watched the wardens’ line tighten and understood the net was not for silt. It was to hold whatever rose when the water finally answered.
At the shell-collared warden’s lift of his hand, the line of elders moved as one. Poles went down first. The shafts shuddered up their arms, and a few men glanced at each other as if the canal had pushed back.
Chains followed. Links spilled over gunwales and slipped under with a wet, swallowing hiss. Xotzin heard the change in sound the way he heard a dishonest weight in a basket: not the muted scrape of silt, but a clean, wrong note. Metal touched stone, tap, tap, then paused, as though whatever lay below had corners that could be found.
A warden leaned his shoulder into the pull. The chain drew taut and began to drag. The sound came up through the fog in jerks: rasp, clink, rasp, a grinding complaint that traveled along iron into bone. Too steady for a snag of roots, too heavy for a lost paddle.
Xotzin’s mouth went dry. Something down there had weight enough to answer their effort: and edges enough to make the lake remember it.
The canal did not roil. It answered in slow, deliberate dimples, as if a great body below tested the surface with the tip of a finger. Each dimple lengthened into a ripple that traveled the wrong way and Xotzin felt the hairs at his nape lift at the quiet defiance of it. Along the lashed canoes, pale foam began to collect where no current should have pinned it, threading itself into spirals that mimicked the feather-serpent wards painted on the gates back in town. The curls formed, broke, re-formed, too regular to be chance, pulsing in measured intervals like breaths taken through clenched teeth. The hulls bumped once, gently, as if nudged from beneath.
The shell-collared warden raised his palm. The lashed canoes shifted, closing the mouth of the canal by a handspan, and the elders on the causeway swept their arms to herd people off the side paths. Bodies compressed into one knot of faces and breath: no one allowed to look away, no one allowed to slip out. A clay bowl was carried forward, cradled like a child. The mist seemed to thin around it, the air sharpening with the clean, terrible expectation of blood.
Tazun watched the chain draw tight and heard it sing. A thin, clean note that belonged to midnight work and shrine steps. The watching crowd pressed inward, a wall of faces, and his breath split. He recoiled as if struck, swatting at the nearest pole with a frantic forearm, then pitching toward the reeds. Behind him the lashed canoes lurched, water tugging like recognition: iron, and what iron invites.
Citlali slid through the reeds without a splash, a shadow separating itself from shadow. She caught up to Tazun where the causeway’s torchlight died and the mist thickened into a wet cloth. He staggered sideways, trying to put anything, people, poles, reeds, between himself and the narrowed mouth of the canal. She moved to block the open water first, planting her feet in the slick mud and making herself the nearest solid thing.
“Breathe,” she said, low and flat, the way you spoke to a trapped animal before it tore its own leg. “Look at me. Not the foam.”
His eyes flicked past her shoulder anyway, snagging on the dimples that kept answering from below. His throat bobbed as if he were swallowing lakewater. One hand fluttered near his wrist, worrying at the reed-tattoo band there, circling, circling, as though it were a cord that might tighten if he stopped moving.
Xotzin stood a few paces back, half-hidden by cattails, weighing the scene the way he weighed cacao by smell. If Citlali raised her voice, the Wardens would notice. If Tazun bolted, the chain and the crowd would swallow him, and whatever lay under the surface would take its due before any bargain could be struck.
Citlali inched closer, not reaching for him yet. Her gaze stayed on his pupils, not on his shaking hands. “You ran because you recognized something,” she said. “The sound of iron. The order of it.”
Tazun’s lips parted. Nothing came out but a wet exhale. He flinched hard at a distant shout from the causeway, as if the syllables had teeth.
“Listen,” she went on, steady as a snareline. “If you drown in panic, you give it what it wants. If you speak, you choose the ending.” She lifted her hand, slow, and let her fingers hover beside his wrist without closing. “Who told you the day was safe?”
At that, his eyes finally snapped to hers. Bright with terror and anger, as if he’d been accused of a theft he couldn’t explain. His jaw worked. A word tried to form and broke.
Citlali didn’t fill the silence with comfort. She held it like pressure. “Who put the iron on,” she asked, “and what did you carry to the Calendar Stone?”
Tazun’s gaze kept snagging on the canal, not on Citlali. On the small, patient dimples in the skin of water as if something beneath were breathing against it, listening for its name. His fingers twitched in empty air, remembering the bite of a pole and the tug of a load that had fought him like a living thing. His mouth worked without sound, lips shaping around whispers only he could hear; now and then he swallowed hard, as if the words were trying to climb back down his throat.
Citlali did not offer him soft phrases. She stepped closer until the reeds brushed her shoulders and her presence blocked his line to the open channel. Her voice stayed low, flat: practical as a trap set before dawn.
“Who put the iron on?” she asked, each word placed like a stone in a path. “Whose hands. Whose order.”
Tazun’s eyes flicked past her again, hunting the foam, the faint spiral marks that kept forming and breaking.
“Who told you the day was safe?” she pressed. “Say the name.”
His jaw clenched. His reed-tattooed wrist jerked as if it wore a ring already.
“And what did you carry to the Calendar Stone,” Citlali said, “heavy and bound. What was it?”
Tazun jerked as if to spring past her, toward the reeds and whatever dark lane might hide him. Citlali’s hand shot out, not for his throat, not for his hair. Just the hem of his tunic. She caught cloth, twisted, and hauled. He went down hard, knees and hip sinking into the sucking mud with a wet slap that stole his breath. His palms met earth, not water.
“Stay,” she said, voice low enough to vanish in the mist. “You don’t get to drown in this.”
He tried to scrabble up, but she leaned in, pinning him with her weight and her stare, making him feel the cold grit under his nails. “Tell it clean,” she continued, blunt as a bone point, “or it takes you anyway.”
The word clean hit him like a rope thrown within reach. His shaking changed, less flight, more giving-in, and his eyes finally stopped chasing the canal.
Between ragged breaths, Tazun forces it out: the midnight run with no torches, paddles wrapped in cloth to choke the splash, straight for the Calendar Stone on a day nobody sane would touch water. The load nearly stove in his canoe ribs: something heavy, trussed tight, copper biting at it like a vow. He never saw a face, only ankle-rings flashing when the wrappings shifted. The order came through the Circle’s mouths, he says, but the voices behind them were older. Pleased the count was wrong, and hungry to keep it wrong.
Citlali didn’t let him retreat into vagueness. She made him say it again, and again until even the reeds seemed to hold their breath around the words. In Xotzin’s mind it settled into inventory, into ledger truth: not rumor, but a trail laid by deliberate hands. Citlali loosened her grip only after she named the bargain plainly: Tazun would take them to the unloading place, or the voyage would keep claiming him.
Ixamala took the lead without ceremony, stepping off the packed earth and onto the shrine’s lowest run of stone. The steps were half-swallowed by lake scum; algae lay on them like green oil, and the carved spirals along the risers sweated moisture in the mist. Xotzin kept his weight on his heels and watched where her feet went, counting each placement the way he counted sacks on a dock: one slip here and you didn’t just bruise yourself, you gave the Wardens a story to pass around.
The lake breathed against the carvings in soft pushes, as if it were testing the shrine’s patience. With each push, the feather-serpent paint on the nearby irrigation gate looked less like a ward and more like a warning mark laid down too late.
Ixamala halted two steps from the waterline. Her face didn’t change much, but her right hand drifted toward the spiral burn that climbed her forearm, fingers hovering as though afraid to touch it. “It’s awake,” she said, not to anyone in particular.
Xotzin had seen people claim omens to win arguments. This wasn’t that. The skin around her scar mottled, and she breathed through her nose like someone smelling smoke.
“The seam isn’t sitting on the right day,” she went on. Her gaze went past the water, past the reflection of reeds, to something only she could measure. “The edge is sliding. The count says one thing, but the boundary is obeying another.”
Nopaltzin shifted behind Xotzin; the forge-smell of him felt suddenly out of place here. Citlali stayed near Tazun, ready to drag him back if the water called too loudly.
Ixamala’s voice flattened into instruction. “If they hold the next rite on the day they’ve named, it won’t mend anything. It will pry.” She swallowed once, and when she spoke again there was a roughness under her calm. “It will tear it wider, and it won’t be the shrine that drinks first. It’ll be the canals.”
Ixamala sank into a crouch, careful as a heron on slick stone, and set her palm against the damp glyphwork. Xotzin watched the contact point the way he watched a scale’s beam. Waiting for the smallest tilt that meant fraud. The carvings were old, but the moisture on them felt new, as if the shrine had been sweating. Where her skin met the spirals, the mist seemed to thin, and the hairs on Xotzin’s forearm lifted under his cloak.
The air carried a sharp, penny-blood taste that didn’t belong to lake wind. Ixamala drew a slow breath and went still, listening through her hand. At the waterline her fingers hovered, then touched; the surface tugged faintly, not with current, but with a remembering pull, the insistence of something that had been fed the same way too many times.
“It isn’t their god they’re feeding,” she said, voice low and precise. “It’s a doorway. The wrong one.”
Her eyes tracked the glyphs as though they were a map only she could read. “The pull you felt at night (when it tries to take a canoe sideways) that isn’t weather. The seam is trying to finish a shape. Each miscounted offering gives it another line.”
Xotzin began, out of habit, to frame the problem in terms the town understood. “If it’s tribute they need to, ” His hand lifted, already weighing what he could promise without wrecking his name.
Ixamala didn’t let the sentence land. “Don’t bargain with rot,” she said. Her eyes stayed on the wet spirals, not on him. “Nothing the Circle offers is clean. Nothing they demand ever stays paid. You feed it once, and it learns your taste.”
From within her mantle she drew a small obsidian flake, sharp as a fresh lie, and a narrow strip of cloth folded tight. She set both on the stone as if arranging tools, not offerings, and closed her eyes to catch the right beat. When she spoke again, it was measured. “I’ll spend only what I can account for.”
She nicked the pad of her finger with the obsidian, so clean it looked like nothing until a bead rose and darkened. She tipped her hand over the carved channels and, with the folded cloth, coaxed each drop into the old grooves, pressing it where the spirals wanted it. The seam answered like sinew: the creeping heat up her scar snapped back, and the lake’s inward tug loosened, a forced swallow. For a breath, the shrine was only old stone, not appetite.
The cost arrived like a wave after calm: her knees unhooked, breath stuttering, color sliding from her cheeks. Nopaltzin’s hand closed on her elbow, steady and sure, keeping her from cracking her skull on the wet steps. Ixamala pinched the cut, wiped the smear with the cloth, careful as if dressing a wound. Yet a dark stain remained in the grooves, and something sharper than blood hung in the air, a calling-card for any trained to sniff out rites done off the Circle’s leash.
Ixamala kept one palm on the shrine’s edge as if the stone were the only thing in the village that still held to a rule. Water filmed the steps; her fingers squeaked on lichen. She drew in a breath, failed to keep it smooth, and tried again. Her cut was small, but the air carried it. Iron-bright, warm, wrong here in daylight. Xotzin felt the scent hook attention the way fresh cacao drew flies. Someone would notice. Someone would report. Then the Circle would arrive with soft voices and hard conclusions.
He measured time by his own pulse and by how quickly sound traveled over water. A canoe pole tapped somewhere beyond the shrine wall. A laugh from the canal path cut off too neatly, as if swallowed.
“We move,” he said, keeping his tone merchant-mild, nothing that could be quoted as alarm. His eyes stayed on Ixamala just long enough to confirm she was upright and not about to faint onto the grooves she’d fed. “Before the air carries stories.”
Citlali was already half turned toward the reeds. Xotzin caught her attention with two fingers, quick, economical. “Bring people. Not the Circle. Farmers who work the gate-channels. Tell them it’s about water and dues. Tell them to come where the sun can see our mouths.”
Her gaze sharpened, the haunted distance snapping into purpose. She ghosted down the steps without a splash, reed-cloak blending into the path.
To Nopaltzin, Xotzin spoke like he was assigning loads. “Find Wardens. Not whichever ones sit closest to the shrine. Tlalocel and Old Matlan: by name. You know who still argues about silt instead of omens.”
Nopaltzin’s jaw tightened once. No questions. He wiped his palm on his apron, as if to keep shrine-wet off his work, and strode away toward the docks.
Xotzin stayed, because leaving looked like guilt. He lifted his travel cloak higher, hiding lacquered cotton and tally-ink, and stood at the base of the steps as if waiting to make a polite offering. Inside, he counted: the next pole-tap, the next footfall, the moment when whispers would turn into orders.
Mist clung to the Reed Gate like wet cloth, beading on the stacked dredge-poles that leaned in bundles, spear-straight and waiting. Xotzin stepped where the causeway widened and the sun could strike the water, then drew his bundle from beneath his cloak: knotted tally cords and thin bark slips wrapped in oiled reed.
He did not hold them up like a priest presenting a sign. He laid them flat on a plank, smoothing the curl with two fingers, as if opening an account book for inspection. Around him, Wardens gathered with their poles, farmers with mud on their calves, and a few shrine-men who kept their hands folded as though that made them harmless.
“Look here,” he said, and kept his voice the same he used to name weights at market, clear, courteous, difficult to twist into disrespect. The cord’s soot-marks were old, dull as hearth ash. Between them, a darker line sat too glossy to be age: fresh ink riding atop dried strokes, nudging one knot’s meaning into another.
He traced the shift with his nail. “A safe day renamed as taboo. A taboo day renamed as necessity.” He glanced up, smiling lightly. “Not an omen. An edit.”
Nopaltzin stepped in without flourish and set his burden down as if he were laying out tools for inspection. Copper caught the sun. Two heavy rings, each wide enough for a grown man’s ankle, their edges rubbed smooth where skin would chafe. He placed beside them a bark-slip bearing the shrine’s own order mark, the seal pressed deep, not the sort of thing a common smith could invent. Then came smaller things: a coil of cord, thick as a thumb and twisted tight; a fist of iron-hard nails; a short board with fresh peg-holes and an extra strip braced across it.
He did not point at anyone. He counted. Weights, lengths, quantities. The Wardens’ hands tightened on their poles as the crowd did the rest of the reckoning: dredging did not need shackles, and “necessity” did not need carpentry meant to hold a living struggle.
Citlali caught Tazun by the forearm before his feet could find the reed-shadow, her grip firm but not cruel. She leaned in, speaking low: words meant for his ear, not the shrine-men’s. He trembled under the weight of open faces and full sun, then broke. “Midnight,” he rasped. “A thing. Bound. Heavy. To the Calendar Stone. They said the count was changed.” As he confessed, the canal skin puckered into slow, coiling dimples. When the Wardens stalled and no one raised the answering chant, the patterns eased away, flattening as if a latch had not been lifted.
The dredging order unraveled into quarrel, then stopped as if a cord had snapped: poles sagged, ropes slid through callused hands, and men searched one another’s faces instead of the shrine’s. Xotzin did not raise his voice. He asked for a re-count in open light, for named witnesses to hold the tallies, for any “necessity” to be spoken and weighed like tribute. Denied fear’s easy consent, the Day-Count Circle slipped back. The canal lay too still: refusal settling over it like a lid.
Morning laid a pale skin over the canals, and the dock filled before the mist had fully lifted. Men and women came with sleep still stuck in their eyes, children tucked against hips, as if they expected a scolding for being out at this hour. Instead, no one called for incense or a chant. No conch sounded from the shrine. The first sound was a reed broom rasping against wood.
Two Canal Wardens crouched at the tide-poles and scraped them clean down to the old cuts. Green slick and dried salt came away in strips. When the pole’s face was bare, Nopaltzin stepped in with a shard of charcoal and a steady hand, drawing a black line where the water lapped now. The mark looked too simple to be sacred, which was exactly why the crowd leaned closer.
Xotzin stood just back from the edge, cloak damp at the hem, and watched the line darken. A measure you could see. A measure you could touch. His forearm itched where yesterday’s rope had burned his skin raw, and he held his hands open anyway, palms forward, a merchant’s sign that nothing was hidden.
“Yesterday’s notch,” an elder said, voice rough, pointing at a cut a finger’s width below the new line. “That is where it stood at dawn.”
“And this one,” said a young fisher, jabbing at a deeper cut, half-swallowed by old stains. “That is the last dry-count day, when the Circle said the lake would fall.”
Murmurs spread. No prayers, only the blunt exchange of remembered mornings. Someone brought out a gourd of water and poured it over the pole to make the cuts gleam. The old marks did not align into any comforting pattern; they told a story in uneven steps, rising on days that should have been calm.
Xotzin felt the crowd’s attention keep sliding, as if seeking permission to believe their own eyes. He nodded once, small and formal, like sealing a bargain.
“Mark it,” he said quietly to the nearest Warden, “so it cannot be argued later.”
The charcoal line held. The lake lapped over it again, as if to insist it was real.
Xotzin did not let the gathering slide back into whispers. He set his feet where everyone could see him and spoke with the same careful courtesy he used when tribute was weighed: names first, then hands.
“Witnesses,” he said, and waited until each was called aloud so no one could later claim the morning had been a dream. He lifted his own palms, fingers spread, showing he held no charm, no hidden tally-stick. Others copied the gesture, awkward at first, then steadier, as if the simple honesty of empty hands could be learned.
When the day-keeper brought out the knot-strings, Xotzin asked that they be passed, not displayed. The cord moved from elder to farmer, from farmer to the girl who ran errands at the granary. Those who could not read glyph cuts counted the turns anyway, one knot, two, three, lips moving with the numbers. The day-keeper recited each named day, and the rope answered him without reverence.
“Say it so the reeds can hear,” Xotzin murmured, and the crowd began to speak the tallies back, together.
The Canal Wardens did not retreat back into their usual shade. Whatever shame had bitten them, it became a tool. They hauled a plank to the open side of the dock and nailed up the irrigation turns where anyone passing in daylight could read them: reed tablets pinned in rows, each weighted with river stones so the wind could not steal a duty. Names were set beside canal bends, not beside offerings. Households were paired by strength until the work looked like a ledger instead of a favor.
When arguments rose, no one reached for incense. Nopaltzin’s scales came out, and the granary keeper’s knots. Labor was counted. Grain was measured. A debt could be paid without a vein opened.
On the irrigation gates the feather-serpent was repainted, not prettied. Made thicker where wood met wood, spirals packed tight at the hinges as if to bind them shut. Its eyes were set downstream, toward the canal mouth. Ixamala spoke softly beside the wet paint, in trade-metaphor Xotzin understood: not a mouth to feed, but a crossing to watch; any claimed “alignment” must be handled, counted, and proved.
By midday the new habits had hardened into something sturdier than a promise. Matters were settled where sun touched faces, in circles anyone could step into; a question was no longer an insult but a tool, like a straightedge on a warped board. The Day-Count Circle kept only what it could show, knots, marks, counts. The canals stayed quiet, and for once that quiet felt owned: measured, witnessed, shared.
No drums, no summons. The choice arrives without being carried by anyone important, the way a change in wind arrives. Noticed first by the people already outside. By the time Xotzin reaches the causeway, the gathering has formed itself in a loose line along the stones, leaving the shrine steps empty. There is no incense threading the air, no call to kneel, no warden lifting a hand to make silence official. The quiet is not imposed; it is held.
They bring what sits within reach of ordinary lives. Maize-beads, the pale kernels drilled and strung on maguey fiber, click softly as wrists shift. Little twists of salt fish, tied in reed ribbon, leave a clean brine smell on fingers. Someone sets down a pinch of cacao in a folded leaf, dark, precious, the sort of thing that used to turn arguments into contracts. No one announces its value. No one asks whose permission it has.
Xotzin stands at the edge, travel cloak still damp at the hem, tally marks on his forearm half-hidden by his sleeve. He expects, out of habit, a recitation: names weighed, debts assigned, the dead turned into a lesson that binds the living. Instead, names are spoken like breath in cold air, brief, careful, and gone. Two merchants from the far market-city. One sailor who never came back from a “simple crossing.” The words are not aimed at the Circle or the Wardens. They do not become leverage.
A child offers a reed whistle and stops, uncertain. An older woman touches the child’s shoulder and guides the whistle onto a mat of woven stalks. That is the only signal: hands showing hands how to do a thing without being ordered.
Xotzin feels the unfamiliar cost of it. No claim means no protection, no patron’s banner to stand under. Grief, unclaimed, belongs to everyone. And to no one who can be bargained with. The canal laps at the stones, patient as a creditor. The village lets the dead remain dead, refusing to spend them.
Reed mats set afloat The first mat goes down as if it might bruise the water. Fingers spread, then lift away; no paddle splashes, no show of strength. The mat settles, reed ends darkening, and the maize-beads on it shift with a dry, patient click. A twist of salt fish gives off its clean brine as it drifts, the smell sharp enough to cut through the sweet rot of the canal edge.
More follow. Each one is plain. Small tables, set for guests who won’t sit. Xotzin watches for the old reflex in himself: to calculate value, to read the offering as a message to someone with terms. But no one speaks terms. They push the mats out with fingertips, as if pressing a bruise, and then leave them to the current.
The canal accepts without ceremony. The mats ride low and steady, and the villagers keep their eyes on them longer than comfort allows, long enough to see whether the water lies. Whether it circles back, whether it stalls at the stones, whether it hurries toward the Reed Gate like a mouth remembering.
Near the Reed Gate the line tightens, not into a crowd but into attention. They speak the two merchants’ names without titles or guild-tags, as if naming wind direction: facts that do not ask permission. Someone adds the sailor’s name, the one pulled from the water with his mouth full of reed fuzz, and no one softens it with a proverb. There is no auction of grief, no offering of blame to buy safety.
Xotzin hears his own mind reach for its old tools: routes taken, toll days, which named-day should have kept traffic away. He gives what he knows in plain sequence, then feels the edge of it. How quickly a fact can become a shield, how easily a name can be turned into proof. He closes his mouth before the dead become entries. The absence stays unbalanced, and that is the point.
A canoe turned to mark absence A spare canoe is rolled from the racks and set belly-up beside the causeway stones. No paint, no incense, no knot of ribbon. Only the curve of its ribs holding air where bodies should be. It does not speak to the shrine or warn travelers; it simply states what the water has not returned. The adults edge the children back, not in panic, but so they don’t cut themselves on the plainness.
When the last reed mat passes out of sight, the air holds, waiting for the question everyone has been trained to ask: what the canal wants back. No one gives it voice. They remain shoulder to shoulder an extra breath, claiming grief as fact, not bargain. Then they drift apart without closing words, already arranging themselves into smaller risks: barred doors, staggered routes, names kept unspoken.
The last voices thin to foot-scuffs and the small coughs people use when they have nothing safe to say. What remains feels scrubbed raw, too orderly: an emptied shoreline with the wet shine of it. Xotzin has the uneasy thought that the canal prefers it this way: fewer bodies to count, fewer witnesses to argue with what the water decides to keep.
They do not leave together. Not openly, not with a shouted rule, but with the same quiet obedience as taboos. A mother pauses as if to wait for her sister, then changes her mind and adjusts her load so she can take the narrow boardwalk alone. Two boys who arrived shoulder to shoulder drift apart when an elder clears his throat. Even the Canal Wardens, who usually move like a single plank, split their routes at the first fork, one along the chinampa edge, one across the drier berm, practicing separation like a new kind of ward.
Xotzin stands a moment longer than is wise. Habit tells him to seek a companion, a witness, someone who can later repeat the sequence of events in the right order. But he feels the looks and the careful lack of them. Outsiders are a risk that walks on two feet; today, risk is being measured and distributed.
He touches the inked tallies on his forearm through his cloak, as if numbers could steady him. Grain promised, salt fish offered, tolls paid: those are balances he understands. This is a different ledger: who goes home alone, who is too bold to look back, who chooses the path that keeps the shrine out of sight. He watches routes being broken into smaller routes, like maize kernels scattered so no single hand can seize the whole.
A thin mist starts to lift from the reeds, not yet dusk-thick, but enough to soften faces into silhouettes. Xotzin exhales once, quiet, and turns for the dock and the granary records, making himself a lone figure on purpose, trying not to feel the water behind him listening.
Nopaltzin takes the back lane, where the chinampa berm rises just enough to cut the shrine from view. He keeps his head down, listening for the soft clink of copper rings in his memory, for any footfall that might be following the same cautious logic as his. The forge door gives under his palm with the familiar rasp of warped wood; the heat inside is only a ghost of itself, a dull breath trapped in clay.
He sets out what is left on the packed-earth floor as if arranging offerings: ingots stacked by stamp, coils of wire hung from a peg, obsidian-set sickle tangs waiting for their final binding, a scatter of half-finished fishhooks like black seeds. His hands know the weights without needing a scale. He counts anyway, jaw tight, and the missing copper feels like a hollow in his chest. The best of it (his cleanest, brightest) burned into emergency spirals and hurried wards that will never be sold, only spent.
Outside, voices drift close. A neighbor calls for a pot rivet, another for a paddle nail. Nopaltzin answers through the door with careful politeness and a silence where certainty used to sit, because now every promise has to be measured against what the shrine might demand next.
Citlali is gone before dusk fully settles, a reed-shadow slipping into the marsh where footfalls don’t keep names. The boardwalk ends; the world becomes water-sigh and stem-whisper, and she moves as if the reeds part for her out of habit. The swamp lights drift ahead in slow clusters, pale as fish-bellies, and she tracks them the way she tracks predators: never closing, always angling. When the cold prickles the back of her neck, when the faint echo-voices thicken like breath against her ear, she changes her line by a few careful steps and lets the lights “notice” her instead of the lanes that lead to kitchens and sleeping mats.
Twice she pauses, listening. Once she murmurs a blunt warning to whatever follows: not the children. Then she goes deeper, drawing the glow away from doorways and narrow bridges, taking the hunger of attention onto her own back.
Xotzin makes for the dock and the granary as if routine can still pass for innocence. He checks the tide-poles, then the maize tallies, retying the ledger cord with fingers that sting where rope has raised blisters. He speaks of weights, spoilage, next market-day: safe words. Each reply comes after a small pause, the hush where a neighbor decides whether he is still only a merchant.
Ixamala keeps to the town’s rim, following old berms and half-buried canal cuts where the earth never quite settled into agreement. At each irrigation stone she lays her scarred arm along the cool face, eyes half-lidded, listening for the seam’s thin complaints: no voice, only a tremor like a plucked cord. When the wind turns, she jolts, tasting iron on her tongue, and knows the boundary remembers what held it. It will ask again.
Dawn comes thin and gray over Xochitlan Milpa, but the fields answer with color. Maize stands in disciplined rows, tassels pale-gold and clean, no soot of blight clinging to them. Amaranth heads hang heavy enough to make the stalks bow, brushing the canal edge where reeds tick softly against one another. Even the men and women who swear by named-days and knife-bowls cannot pretend the plants are lying.
Xotzin watches from the first chinampa bridge, cloak damp at the hem, and lets his eyes do what his mouth cannot. He counts bundles by habit (one, two, three) measuring the pace of relief in shoulders that have carried fear all season. The air smells of crushed leaf and wet soil, not the copper-iron tang that usually rides the morning when someone bleeds for permission to cut. His forearm itches where tally marks run, and he resists the urge to add a new line for “survived.”
They begin work without waiting for a day-keeper to clear his throat. Knives flash, reeds are bent aside, cords bite into palms. A young man pauses with his sickle half-raised, glancing toward the shrine out of reflex, then looks down at the grain in his hands as if it has been placed there personally. He exhales and cuts.
Along the canals, canoes nose in and out like steady insects, taking on sheaves and gourds. The usual bowl, painted, solemn, hungry, does not appear at the field edge. Instead there is only muscle: backs bowing, feet slipping on wet planks, a grandmother spitting on her palms and tying a knot tighter than she needs to.
Xotzin steps into the flow where help is help, not declaration. He takes a bundle when it wobbles on a shoulder, lifts the weight, feels straw bite his blistered hands, and says nothing that could be turned into a claim. Around him, quiet spreads: not the hush of obedience, but the careful silence of people testing whether they are allowed to be merely alive.
The granary doors swing inward with a groan of swollen wood, and what waits beyond is the dull, honest weight of baskets: maize cobs stacked like bone-white bricks, amaranth bundled in red-brown sheaves, squash set carefully so their skins won’t bruise. No one steps aside to make room for a knife-bowl. That absence is loud. Elders enter first, moving as if they expect a hand to catch their wrists and turn them toward the old habit. They murmur the prayers anyway, words worn smooth by years, their palms hovering over the threshold where a smear of blood should have sealed the store against rot and envy.
A boy laughs: too sharp, then clamps his mouth shut as if he has bitten himself. A woman answers with a breath that might be a sob, might be relief. Others do not look at the grain at all. They look at the doorway’s clean lintel, at the blank earth beside it, at each other’s uncut forearms. The empty space becomes a sign in its own right, and it makes shoulders tense as if punishment could still arrive late, drifting in on a calm canal.
Xotzin learns, in the days after, that choosing a side is a kind of barter no ledger forgives. His easy guild-smile, once a seal of harmlessness, now makes people’s eyes narrow as if he is offering them something they cannot see. At the dock a woman accepts his greeting a heartbeat late, fingers tightening on her basket rim. A Canal Warden answers his questions with courtesy sharpened to a blade, watching Xotzin’s mouth more than his hands.
He hears it in the new caution around his name: not “merchant,” but “the one who spoke against the count.” When he suggests a route to avoid a toll pole, someone asks who benefits. When he offers a fair measure, a man checks the scales twice, as if truth itself can be tampered. Xotzin keeps his voice calm, but inside he counts the cost: neutrality spent, reputation re-minted into suspicion.
Nopaltzin tallies what it cost him in a language only his hands speak: copper that should have become bells or fishhooks instead burned away into ward-etching smoke, leaving shallow cuts in gates and deeper cuts in his stores. He keeps his shoulders square when neighbors pass the forge, but inside the workshop the air feels thinner. Not poorer only in metal: poorer in the old belief that careful craft can buy distance from ritual debt.
Fear didn’t leave with the knife-bowl unfilled; it just found a new vessel. Obedience, once simple as a swallowed prayer, splintered into questions that landed like hooks: who miscounted, who profited, who touched the shrine-water and came back wrong. Greetings grew thin. Barter turned brittle. Even a shared drink carried an edge, and the saved harvest sat under measuring eyes instead of songs.
Ixamala found the first payment at sunrise, before the village voices had fully climbed out of sleep. She sat on the edge of the dock where the tide-poles stood, water beading on the wood, and unwrapped the cloth from her arm as if she were unrolling a map. The spiral burn that had always looked like a healed accident, pale, puckered, easy to ignore, had changed overnight into something too deliberate. It was darker now, a glossy braid pressed into her skin, near-black where the turns tightened, like obsidian rubbed with oil.
Xotzin watched without asking permission. He had learned that some things (blood, grief, fear) could not be negotiated into softness. Even so, his merchant’s mind counted details: no swelling, no fresh seep of pus, no heat of infection. This was not sickness. This was a mark that had decided to become a contract.
From the plaza, the day-keeper’s voice carried thinly through the reeds as he named the count for the morning rites. The words should have been harmless air. At the last syllable Ixamala’s fingers jerked, and the spiral cinched, not like a cramp but like a cord taking slack. Her jaw set; she made no sound. Xotzin saw the tendons in her wrist stand up as if the skin itself had braced.
She rose and tested the world the way she tested seams: one careful step, then another, away from the Calendar Stone shrine and toward the causeway where merchants took their leave. With each pace her posture stayed calm, but something unseen gathered behind her navel and tugged. Not pain at first. Direction. A gentle insistence that became absolute by the third step, as if the land were holding a line tied through her scar.
Ixamala exhaled through her nose and stopped. Her gaze flicked to Xotzin, warning and apology braided together.
“Anchor,” she said, the word plain, like naming a weight.
Xotzin swallowed the impulse to offer remedies. He understood weights. He understood when a bargain had already been struck.
Ixamala treated the darkened spiral as if it were only memory refusing to fade. She wrapped her arm in clean cloth, tied it with a patient knot, and when anyone’s eyes lingered she spoke of ordinary things: wind that turned sharp before rain, heat that settled low in the reeds, a season that couldn’t decide what face to wear. Her voice stayed even, her metaphors careful. If the world was pulling a line through her, she would not give it the courtesy of a name.
But the named days found her anyway. The count was called from the plaza, and something in her body answered like a hooked fish. The ache came sudden and intimate, a thread drawn through flesh, tightening with each breath until her ribs refused to open fully. She would pause mid-step, fingers white on the cloth, eyes sliding, always, unwillingly, toward the feather-serpent-painted irrigation gates, as if she could hear a knot there worrying loose.
The villagers watched her stillness and mistook it for consent. They saw her stand through it and decided she could stand through more. Fear, denied its old sacrifice, softened into expectation.
Xotzin discovered quickly that a man could be anchored without a scar. News ran the canals ahead of him, hopping from paddle to paddle, from dock to hearth: the outsider merchant had put his shoulder under the shrine’s midnight load; the outsider had put his fingers on the copper rings and refused their purpose. Now every greeting came with a half-beat of measurement. Hands that once reached for his bundles hesitated, then took them as if they might sting.
He spoke the old courtesies, salt first, then price; praise before refusal, and heard how they had changed in other mouths. Even a fair trade sounded like a test. Offers arrived wrapped tight: “Your word would settle this,” “Your eyes would keep this honest.” Each bargain felt edged, as if somewhere inside it lay a small, waiting blade.
Requests began arriving like gifts. Salted fish, polite bows, a bundle of reeds tied with the right knot. Mediate this boundary quarrel. Stand for this oath. “Advise” the Wardens on what the canals require. Each time Xotzin’s smile held, and each time the same pressure pushed beneath it: if the lake rose again, if the count slipped, would he pay in blood: or be named the one who refused? The inked tally marks on his forearm no longer felt like accounts, but like evidence a crowd could point to.
They noticed the pattern at once, each from a different ledger. Ixamala’s scar did not merely ache; it answered distance, pulling her breath and steps back toward the gates she had pinned shut. Xotzin, meanwhile, heard a hidden tariff in every number he named, blood, favor, blame. The seam held because it was tethered, and the town steadied because it had a tale with living faces. A knot: tight, serviceable, and always hurting.
Dawn thins the night’s dampness into ribbons that slide off the canals, and the chinampa paths reappear as if they are being permitted back into the world rather than simply uncovered. Xotzin watches the mist retreat in narrow, careful strips, the way a merchant watches a debtor’s hand loosen from a purse: not generosity, not surrender, just a calculated release.
The water is too still for the hour. It holds the sky with a hard, clean shine that makes the canal edges look sharpened. Along the reed line, droplets tremble without falling. The hush has weight. Even the birds seem to test their first calls as if listening for an answer from below.
He steps onto the packed-earth ridge between plots. The soil is dark, laced with last season’s stalks and the pale threads of roots. His blisters pull as he balances: hands remembering rope and cold mud, the drag of a bound thing hauled from the shrine’s waterline. The pain is honest; it’s the only simple account in him this morning.
A canoe glides through a cross-channel without sound. The paddler does not wave. Two women on a far path pause with their baskets and look his way, then look down at their feet, as if the ground might accuse them for standing too long. Xotzin keeps his chin level. Courtesy is a tool, but so is silence.
Near the reeds, one swamp light hangs back from the bank, no larger than a thumbprint, dim as breath on stone. It wavers when the breeze touches it and steadies again, undecided. Xotzin’s stomach tightens. The town has stopped feeding it with ceremony; that does not mean it has forgotten the taste.
As the mist continues to peel away, the familiar lines of gates and terraces return with a strange new clarity: as though someone has redrawn the village overnight and left the ink wet.
On the nearest irrigation gate, the spiral wards have been worked in with a blacksmith’s stubborn precision: not painted, not merely scratched, but bitten into the wet grain so the lines refuse to soften back into plain wood. Where the gate swelled in the night, the cuts stand proud and pale, catching dawn as if they are made of bone. Xotzin can see where Nopaltzin’s chisel slipped once and then corrected: an honest flaw that makes the rest feel more deliberate.
The air around the gate is different. It carries the sharp, metallic tang of copper taken past its patience, mixed with resin that has cooked until it turned bitter, and the old, flat smell of smoke trapped in damp fibers. He breathes it in and tastes last night’s urgency: the kind that spends good material without bargaining.
Along the posts, little beads of sap sweat from the heat that sealed the grooves, and the ward lines shine through them like veins under skin. The gate looks newly made, and newly accused.
Villagers drift toward the etched gate as if pulled by habit and caution in equal measure. No one calls a gathering; they simply slow, one by one, and the path narrows around the posts. A man with mud still on his calves stops with his hoe balanced on a shoulder and stares too long. An old woman lifts two fingers to the nearest spiral, then hesitates, as though the wood might burn or accuse. When she finally touches it, she presses lightly, testing the ridge of the cut like a healer testing a child’s brow for heat. Others follow each contact brief, polite, afraid of being seen as devotion.
They listen anyway. Not for a voice, but for the absence of one.
Beyond the Reed Gate causeway, the lone swamp light rides just above the waterline, dimmed to a sour ember. It wavers as if testing names it no longer has permission to answer. No drums call it closer; no prayers dare to shoo it off. Men and women merely mark where it lingers, shoulders tight, pretending they are watching weather while counting, by instinct, the distance between their lives and that patient glow.
The canal holds itself unnaturally still, a sheet of dark glass laid over moving things. Dawn’s pale color sits on it with a knife-edge honesty, too clean to trust. Xotzin watches villagers approach and, without any signal, each one glances down before stepping, as if the water might speak their names. He understands the bargain: harvest spared, reputation spent. And the canals, once fed, do not forget the hand.