The codex lay open before Tizoc-Chimalli in the dark chamber beneath the House of Darkness, that repository of sacred calendrical knowledge adjacent to the Great Temple, and the numbers would not align. Outside, the city of Tenochtitlan breathed with fifty-thousand voices — merchants closing their stalls in the great market of Tlatelolco, the distant percussion of preparation drums, children calling to one another across the causeways — but here, in this chamber where no light entered save through the narrow vents cut into the temple's eastern face, there was only silence and the weight of stone and the terrible arithmetic of the cosmos.
The count was wrong. Not by much — three days, perhaps four — but in the tonalpohualli, three days was the difference between propitious and catastrophic, between the gods receiving what was offered and the gods taking what they required.
He had been the tlamatini of this chamber for eleven years. He had checked this calculation four times. The numbers did not lie. The calendar was drifting, and no one above him wished to know.
Tizoc-Chimalli set down his brush. In the silence after the brushstroke, he became aware that he was not alone.
