“Where are you taking me?” I gasped.
“Why, home, of course. Lord Feathered in Black will be so glad to have you back. He’s missed you!”
“Pleased to hear it,” I croaked. There was one thing I urgently had to tell the steward, and then I did not care if I never spoke to him again. “Listen, you must want to know what I was doing at Handy’s house.”
“Oh, all in good time. Don’t spoil things by telling me everything at once, Yaoti-I’m looking forward to beating it out of you!”
“I’m still looking for the prisoners-the ones the Emperor and our master told me to find,” I said carefully. “The man Shining Light offered to the war-god at the Festival of the Raising of Banners, he was one of them. His Lordship knows this. I wanted to find out if Handy remembered anything about him.” At all costs I must not give the steward or my master any reason to go back to the commoner’s house, at least until Lion and Storm were safely out of the way.
“That’s very interesting,” the steward said insincerely.
“He didn’t know anything. In fact he didn’t want to speak to me at all.”
“Well, you can tell it all to Lord Feathered in Black. I’ll be sure not to cut your tongue out until afterward!”
The rest of the journey to my master’s house was uneventful. The steward taunted me but I ignored him. For all his bluster, I knew no words of his could hurt me. It was what my master might choose to do and say that I had to worry about, and I distracted myself from his steward’s infantile threats by trying to master my fear of what was to come. I kept telling myself that Lord Feathered in Black could do nothing more than admonish me, that that was the law, but the image of those charred bones at Coyoacan kept forcing itself into my mind. Had the woman and children thought they were safe before the soldiers came?
As the Chief Minister’s residence came into view, I noticed a small party standing at the foot of the stairway leading to my master’s apartments. Most of them were warriors, but my heart skipped a beat when I saw the man in their midst, whose escort they plainly were. For an instant I thought he was my brother, from his clothes, his hair and his demeanor, but then I remembered that I had left Lion at Handy’s house, and at the same time I noticed that the ribbons in his hair were red rather than white. He was the Keeper of the House of Darkness: another of the Constables, and one of the advisers who had attended Montezuma when I had been summoned before the Emperor.
He his eyes tracked us as Rabbit brought the canoe to the side of the canal, and as we scrambled ashore, each of us throwing ourselves at the man’s feet with a cry of “My Lord …”
“Enough!” he snapped, and our obeisances ended abruptly. For a moment there was silence. I looked up from the floor, puzzled, wondering why he was standing there wasting time on us rather than getting on with whatever business had brought him to the Chief Minister’s house.
His eyes met mine. “Well, Yaotl?” he barked suddenly. “Your master told me you were missing, but I assume you have been looking for the sorcerers, as the Emperor ordered?”
“Er … Yes, my Lord …”
“So where are they?”
I swallowed, but could not find any words.
“The Emperor is getting impatient. The sorcerers, Yaotl. You were told to bring them to him. Where are they?”
The Steward spoke then. “My Lord, Lord Feathered in Black is on the track of them,” he announced, “and his slave here …”
“Shut up.”
I struggled to come up with an answer that was close enough to the truth to be convincing but not so close that the Emperor would conclude I had let him down. “M-my Lord,” I stammered, “I’m very close to them. A man named Curling Mist has them, in a merchant’s warehouse.”
“Where is this warehouse?”
“That’s the one thing I can’t tell you yet, my Lord … But I’m close to it, very close …”
The man leaned toward me, until his face was so near mine I could see little bubbles of spittle at the side of his mouth, popping in time with his words. “‘Very close,’ eh?” He stood up and half turned to glance up the steps behind him, toward where my master must be waiting for me. “How much closer will you be when you get up there, I wonder?”
“I won’t tell Lord Feathered in Black any more than I’ve told you, my Lord! I can’t! It’s all I know!”
“So you say.” He looked at each of his escorting warriors in turn, and they looked back at him, as if expecting an order. I tensed, wondering just how impatient Montezuma was-impatient enough to have told the Keeper of the House of Darkness to end it all here, on my own master’s threshhold?
“We go back to the palace,” he told his guards. As they fell in he turned back to me.
“Consider this your last warning, slave. The Emperor is relying on you. You will find those men, and bring them to Lord Montezuma, or your life will be forfeit!”
Rabbit and the steward frogmarched me up the steps and dumped me unceremoniously at my master’s feet.
Lord Feathered in Black listened in silence to his steward’s account of the encounter at the foot of his stairway.
“The Keeper of the House of Darkness told me much the same thing,” he said to no one in particular, “although he was more polite about it. So my esteemed cousin still thinks I have his precious sorcerers! If only I did!” He sighed. “You two may go. Yaotl will remain.”
He said nothing to me while Rabbit and the steward backed out if his presence and hastened away down the steps. He sat in his high-backed reed chair, looking at me the way a man might look at a bowl of stew if he suspected the meat was rotten. I said nothing to him. What would have been the point?
As the silence endured, I reflected on what had just happened to me. I realized that my situation was now more desperate than ever. If I survived whatever punishment my master might have in store for me for running away, it would only be because he still expected me to recover the sorcerers for him. The purpose of the Keeper of the House of Darkness’s visit had obviously been to remind us both that the Emperor himself wanted them back. Even if I could find them, what was I to do then, if his Chief Minister was still intent on keeping them for himself?
A girl appeared at the edge of my vision, carefully stepped around the quivering mess on the floor and passed my master a clay smoking-tube. Its end was already lit, and as he drew deeply on it the room filled with the complex aromas of a rich man’s tobacco-the leaf itself, the resinous scent of liquid amber, bitumen and a hint of vanilla.
When he finally spoke, addressing me through a cloud of fragrant smoke, his voice was calm and steady-neither the bellow of his superficial rages nor the sinister hiss of his deadly ones.
“You must understand that a man in my position simply cannot afford to have his most valuable slave disappear the way you did. I would be a laughingstock. At the very least I am going to have to have you formally admonished, and you know what that means.”
I tried in vain not to stare at him in astonishment, until the smoke caught my eyes and forced me to squeeze them shut.
Formally admonished?
“Oh yes, my Lord,” I said hastily, scarcely able to believe what I had heard. It meant that I would be subjected to a ritual harangue about my shortcomings as a slave before at least two witnesses. This was not a fearsome punishment at all, except that the third time it happened I could be sold, and as a slave known to be habitually recalcitrant I would be bought for only one purpose: as a very cheap gift for the gods. But I had been expecting far worse: the prospect of a savage beating had seemed optimistic.
My joy and relief were quickly tempered by the thought that the old man would not be merciful without reason. I waited fearfully to hear what else he might have in mind.
“Good. Well, now we’ve got that distasteful subject out of the way, I want you to tell me what you’ve been doing since you ran away.”
I told him what I dared. I had been to the ball court in Tlatelolco, seen the boy there and been attacked by Curling Mist. I had been taken to the merchant’s house, and there Curling Mist had attacked me again. I did not say I had gone home to Toltenco. I could not deny having been to Handy’s house, of course, since the steward had found me there, but I explained that to my master the same way I had to his steward, by claiming I had wanted to talk to Handy about Shining Light’s Bathed Slave.