“I have.”
“What did you find out?”
“The sorcerers aren’t there anymore.”
He slapped his bowl angrily on the floor, sending a tiny dribble of expensive chocolate over the edge. “You think this is funny, don’t you?”
“No, as it happens, I don’t. I don’t find being put up as the stake in some game between the Emperor and the Chief Minister very funny at all.”
“So get Montezuma his sorcerers,” he replied unsympathetically, picking his drink up once more. “The game’ll be over then.”
“It’s not that simple. My master says he hasn’t got them. The Emperor seems to have got the right idea about that Bathed Slave who killed himself yesterday-he was one of the sorcerers. My master doesn’t deny that much, but he says it’s the merchant, his owner, who’s holding them.”
“And you believe him?”
“Not necessarily. But I’ll talk to the merchant and find out.” I watched him drinking luxuriously. If he had come across me dying of thirst I would not have put it past him to drain a gourd full of water in front of me just to add to my suffering, but then I might havedone the same to him. “There’s something I want to know first, though. Whose idea was it to give the Emperor my name?”
The cup hid my brother’s face. He said nothing.
You are spoken of most highly, the Emperor had said.
“It was you, wasn’t it?” The suspicion had planted itself in my mind while we were at Axayacatl’s palace. In the hours since then it had sprouted and put down roots. “You bastard! This is all your doing, isn’t it? You got me involved in this. Why?”
“Why did I bring you to the Emperor’s notice?” My brother drained his bowl and laid it carefully on the ground between us. “Why do you think? So that you might have a chance to make something of yourself! I told you yesterday-you can repair some of the damage, give your family something to be proud of.”
“For sure, they’ll be proud to see me flayed alive for going against my master,” I retorted bitterly, “and that’s only if the Emperor’s right and old Black Feathers really does have the sorcerers. What if he doesn’t? What’s the Emperor likely to do then?”
My brother frowned. “But your master does have them! The Emperor as good as said so.”
“Only because someone put the idea in his head. Now I wonder who that was?”
“What are you saying?” My brother gripped the sides of his chair so tightly that I heard the woven canes crack under their hide covering. Something had dislodged his mask: suddenly he was not the renowned warrior taking his ease but the boy I had known as a child, our father’s favorite son, who became the man he was because he grew up more scared of failure than death.
“I don’t understand why you’re so convinced that my master is hiding the sorcerers, and so determined that I should be the one to find them. I don’t believe this has anything to do with our family. They gave up on me years ago, Lion, and nothing I do now is going to make any difference to them. You had some other reason for wanting me brought into this. Some reason of your own.”
He picked up his chocolate bowl then, looked at it absently, saw it held only a shallow puddle of froth at the bottom, and put it down again.
“All right,” he said at last. “I’ll tell you what I know. I think-Imean, I heard-well, you know what the army’s like for rumors.” He was not looking at me. He seemed unsure of himself. “Montezuma told you he asked the Chief Minister to find these men when they escaped. I’m not sure exactly what your master did about it. It was all a big secret, but there were warriors involved-I heard there were warriors involved. I heard someone say he’d talked to someone who’d been handpicked for a special mission by the Chief Minister. Apparently he had to go to a village near Coyoacan.” He paused. “Coyoacan,” he repeated, as if wanting to make sure I had caught the name of the place.
“And what happened there?” I remembered another expression our Emperor had used: Extreme measures. What had that meant?
“He … he didn’t want to say.” He looked up then, and there was something in the way he stared at me, through eyes that seemed obscured, as though they had somehow withdrawn into his face, which made me think twice about asking any more questions.
Eventually he added, in what for him was a quiet voice: “All I can tell you is this. I think the Emperor’s decided the reason your master came back from that village empty-handed is that he wanted to.”
I looked into my brother’s eyes again, but could make nothing out in their darkness. He was concealing something, and if I knew him at all, you could roast him over a slow fire before he would say what it was. One thing was obvious enough, though. Whatever he had seen or heard that was haunting him so, he believed I could do something about it-even though he could not bring himself to tell me what it was.
“You think I should go to Coyoacan,” I said at last. “You want me to see for myself what old Black Feathers did, don’t you?”
3
It was no great distance from Montezuma’s palace to the Chief Minister’s house, through streets that now, in the early afternoon, were largely empty. After parting company with my brother I walked home slowly, giving myself just enough time to work out how many kinds of trouble I was in.
Montezuma wanted me to find his sorcerers, on pain of death. He thought my master had them. My master claimed he did not have them, and since he had asked me to find them himself, I was inclined to believe him. However, he obviously knew more about them than he was letting on. And now it seemed my brother had some interest in this affair as well, something connected with whatever had happened at Coyoacan, but I would have to go there to find out what that was all about.
And all I had found at the prison was that it truly was impregnable. Maybe, I thought morosely, I was dealing with magic after all.
Thoughts were still chasing each other around my head when I reached my master’s house. I was so caught up with them that I did not see the big man until I almost walked into him.
“Yaotl!”
The voice was familiar: it belonged to Handy, my comrade in our encounter with the priests.
I greeted him like an old friend. Anyone who was neither old Black Feathers nor his steward was a welcome sight. We sat in a quiet corner of my master’s patio and drew our cloaks over our knees while we exchanged pleasantries. He asked me where I had been. I replied by asking him what he was doing here.
“Carrying a message. Come to think of it, you might like to hear about it.”
I wondered what sort of message he could have to deliver here.
“The same young lad who put me on to that last job sought me out in the marketplace. They must have been impressed, in spite of what happened, hey? It turned out they wanted me to go all the way to Pochtlan to pick up this letter …”
“Pochtlan?”
“Yes, odd, isn’t it? You’d think they’d have found someone in Tlatelolco market, where they’d have had more choice, but anyway … Guess who it was from?”
“No idea.”
“Shining Light.”
“Really?” Considering what I had been through on the young merchant’s account the day before and what I had heard about him from my master since, any news of him was bound to get my attention. “What did it say?”
“How would I know? I’m just a commoner, I got my schooling at the House of Youth, and you know they don’t teach reading there. I was just told the message was an urgent one for the Chief Minister. I’d sort of hoped to see him-never met a great lord before.” He suddenly had the half-hopeful, half-anxious manner commoners often adopted at the prospect of meeting their rulers. “As he was out when I got here, I had to give it to the steward, though … was that right?”
“Oh, yes.” The steward could be relied upon to pass a letter straight to my master-and to hang around afterward in the hope of overhearing its contents. “It’ll get to His Lordship, don’t worry.”