“It would have been a lot simpler to put the stuff in the jar, wouldn’t it?”
Huitztic sniggered. “You’re not so clever after all, are you? Which jar would you put it in, then?”
I grasped his meaning: How could the poisoner have known which of the fifty-two vessels to dope? “All of them?”
“No. Lord Feathered in Black let some of his serfs drink the rest of the jars dry. You missed an opportunity there! They could barely stand up afterwards, of course, but it was nothing like what happened to Heron.”
I frowned. “The rest of the jars?”
“Heron had polished off the jar he was drinking out of before the stuff started taking effect. So we can’t tell what may have been in it.”
I was still puzzled. Cheating the gods was a fearful thing to do, but at least their vengeance was uncertain, and might be a long way off. I could not understand why a priest who had agreed to do that would go on to risk the immediate and all-too-certain consequences of angering Lord Feathered in Black.
Perhaps I was about to find out; for the long stone wall of the prison now loomed above us.
I knew the prison. I had been confined here once, awaiting punishment after my arrest for drunkenness. I had to halt on the threshold for a moment, clutching the doorway and shutting my eyes as the sights, sounds, and smells came back to me in a rush: the lines of cramped wooden cages stretching away into the gloom, the stench of piss and fear and starvation, the shouting. At almost any time of the day or night, as I remembered, somebody would be raving, protesting his innocence or hurling abuse at the guards or calling for his mother, and when he fell silent others would take up the cry, screaming or crying and rattling the wooden bars of their cages hopelessly.
Somebody was shouting now. The words seemed to run into one another as they echoed through the long hall, so that I could not make them all out.
Huitztic shoved me from behind. “Get a move on, before I have them lock you up too!”
I stumbled forward, almost colliding with the guard who had come to find out what we wanted. When we had told him he said: “Good thing you’re here. Maybe you can make him shut up.”
My master’s steward laughed harshly. “Just bash him over the head! That ought to do it.”
The guard, a stolid-looking man in a veteran warrior’s long cloak and embroidered breechcloth, hefted his cudgel and gave us a lopsided grin. “I don’t think so. I don’t want to have to explain to my chief why I laid out Two Rabbit.”
I frowned. “I thought it was his deputy you had in here.”
“It is. But the prisoner’s chief came to pay him a visit. And he’s the one shouting.”
We hurried past the rows of cages, ignored or tracked obsessively by the wretches who squatted in them. At our approach, the shouting seemed to reach a crescendo, before dying out abruptly as the tall, slender figure standing in front of one of the cages swung his gaunt face towards us.
If he not been making so much noise, I might have missed him altogether. As a priest, he was draped in black, and had stained his face and limbs with pitch, so that in the gloom there was little to see of him but his eyes, which were wide and startlingly pale.
The guard stepped forward. “Now, Two Rabbit,” he urged, “there’s no need for this. You’ll start them all off, and that’ll bring my chief running, and I’ll never hear the end of it.”
The priest turned back to the cage and kicked it hard enough to make the bars rattle. There was a rustle of movement in response, but with Two Rabbit between us I could not clearly see the occupant.
“Hey!” the guard yelled. “Be careful, that’s government property!”
“Do you know what this creature did?” the priest rasped. The words burst between his tightly compressed lips like steam from a green log thrown on a fire.
Huitztic pushed himself forward. “We know exactly what he did!” he cried eagerly. “And my master’s going to see him punished for it!”
“Your master?” The pale eyes narrowed. “But you’re Lord Feathered in Black’s steward, aren’t you?”
“That’s right, and the chief minister will...”
We never found out what the chief minister was going to do, because his steward’s words were drowned by the other man’s outraged howl. “Lord Feathered in Black! He’s as guilty as this vermin here. He ought to be in that cage with him!”
“Now, steady on,” the guard said anxiously. “That’s dangerous talk.”
“As dangerous as mocking the gods? As dangerous as making a laughingstock of their priests?” With a last, baleful glance at the cage, he moved, pushing past us before stalking out of the hall. “He won’t get away with it! Tell him that from me!”
Huitztic said nothing. It was the man in the cage who spoke next.
“Yaotl? Is that you?”
Everybody appeared to be staring at me: Huitztic, the prison guard, even the desperate, hollow-eyed prisoners in the shadows around us. They all seemed to be saying: You know this person? And the tone in which they seemed to be saying it was not friendly.
“You must remember me, Yaotl. We trained together.” With Two Rabbit gone, I could see his former deputy clearly now. Patecatl had pushed his hand between the bars of the cage in an imploring gesture.
At first I could only gaze at him while I tried to work out where he might have seen me before. When the answer came to me I could only whisper: “Fire Snake?”
“Yes!” the man cried eagerly, straining against the wooden bars until they creaked. “Fire Snake, that’s right! Your old pal. Listen, you’ve got to get me out of here.”
Fire Snake: a name from my childhood, from the House of Tears, the harsh school for boys who would be priests. We had not known each other well or liked each other much, but if I had been where he was, I too might have looked upon any familiar face as a long-lost friend’s.
Huitztic interrupted before I had a chance to reply. “ ‘Get you out of here’?” He took a step towards the cage and swung his foot at it, making the prisoner leap backwards as the wooden bars rattled for a second time.
“Will you leave my bloody cage alone?” the guard yelled.
Ignoring him, the steward went on ranting at the prisoner. “This slave isn’t going to get you out of anything! All he’s here for is to listen to you tell us how you poisoned Heron. Go on, how did you do it? How did those mushrooms get into that tube?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about!” the man in the cage protested. “Anyway, I’m not telling you anything. It’s your fault I’m in here. You set me up!”
“You’ll talk, or I’ll... I’ll...” Huitztic lunged at the cage, grasping the bars and shaking them impotently. “Let me at him! It’s time we got him out of there and knocked the truth out of him!”
“You keep away,” the guard warned. “Nobody touches my prisoners without orders.”
“This is ridiculous!” Huitztic spluttered. “Don’t you know I work for the chief minister?”
“So do I,” the guard pointed out.
Just then Fire Snake spoke up. “I’ll talk to Yaotl. No one else.”
“Who asked you?” the steward snapped. “We’ll make you talk!”
“How are you going to do that?” I inquired. “The guard won’t let you torture him.”
The steward turned on the guard resentfully. “What kind of a prison are you running here, anyway?”
“We usually just starve them,” the other man offered. “A few days without food loosens their tongues, and it’s much less messy than mutilation.”
“We haven’t got a few days!”
“I’ll talk to Yaotl,” the man in the cage offered quietly.
“Why don’t you leave him to me?” I suggested. “Lord Feathered in Black told me to investigate this business, didn’t he? So let me do it.”