Lily glared defiantly at him. Lion and I looked at each other the way two small boys might if they were caught stealing squashes.
“So my sorcerers are on a boat, are they?” my master gloated as he rose, a little unsteadily, from his seat. “Let’s go and pick them up, then!”
We made a strange party, all looking for the same things-a boatman and a boat, to take us to where the sorcerers were-but at odds over what we would do if we found them. We worked our way along the landing stage outside Lily’s house in a wary silence, while the noises of the banquet faded behind us and the water lapped loudly in the space under our feet.
Finding a boatman turned out to be as easy as finding a boat. Some of Lily’s guests, including my master, had sent their canoes home, but others had left theirs tied up against the landing stage. Many of their crews had been left as well, to wait with their charges until their masters were ready for them sometime after daybreak. Most had curled up and gone to sleep in the bottom of their boats, but we eventually found one awake.
He sat gazing up at the stars, as well he might. It was a clear winter’s night and the sky was ablaze. He seemed oblivious to our approach until he had my master standing next to him.
“We need this boat,” Lord Feathered in Black told him bluntly.
The man almost fell in. He was still recovering himself as the rest of us gathered around my master, holding onto the jetty with one hand as he tried to stop the canoe swaying under him.
“What do you mean, you need the boat? You can’t have it, it isn’t yours! Who do you think you are, the Emperor?”
“Almost,” said his Lordship dryly. “Handy, bring that torch over here.”
Handy was approximately sober. Before we had left the house Lion and I had poured four cups full of strong honeyed chocolate down his throat. My brother had suggested tipping a fifth over his head, but there had been no need. At least he was capable of speech and had not stumbled into the canal, and the torch we had borrowed swayed only a little as he held it over the Chief Minister’s headdress.
The boatman made an inarticulate noise.
“If this boat belongs to my cousin, the Emperor,” my master went on pleasantly, “then I will apologize to him personally in the morning. If it doesn’t, then it’s mine!”
“But it’s the middle of the night!” the poor man protested. “You can’t go anywhere in the dark!”
“Nonsense! The merchants travel by night all the time!”
The boatman went quiet. At night a woman’s voice heard out of doors was as likely as not to be a portent. She might be the goddess Cihuacoatl, or the soul of a dead mother returned to Earth to haunt the streets and bring sickness to men, or one of those hideous hunchbacked dwarfs that would accost a man visiting the latrines after dark to tell him he was about to die. Lily was none of these, but the boatman did not know that.
The next voice he heard was Lion’s. “If you won’t do it for the Chief Minister,” he growled, “then you can do it for me. I’m the Guardian of the Waterfront. Either you do what you’re told or I’ll cut your legs off!”
The man slumped miserably in the bottom of his boat. “All right. Tell me where you want to go, but you’ll need another boat-this is a one-man job.”
“Fine.” My master lurched into the canoe and installed himself in the bow. “Lily can come with us, she doesn’t weigh much. Bring the torch.”
“We’d better get in the next boat,” I said, as Handy gave the woman the torch.
“It’s empty,” protested Lion. I raced along the line of moored canoes until I found one with a boatman in it, but the man was fast asleep and snoring resoundingly.
“Hurry up!” cried my master, as Lily settled herself in his boat. His boatman, probably eager to put some distance between himself and my brother, pushed off from the jetty immediately.
I ran back to join Handy and Lion.
“They’re getting away!” My brother’s tone was anguished. “We’ll never rouse another boatman in time to catch them up.”
“Then we’ll have to do without,” I said. “We’ll take this one. Handy, you can paddle a canoe, can’t you?”
Once we had cleared the last of the canals and reached the open water of the lake we turned left, following the glint of torchlight in front of us until the Chief Minister, Lily and their boatman reached the causeway. There they stopped.
As we drew alongside it became plain that something had got them excited. We could hear raised voices and see the boatman’s paddle waving uncertainly in the air as he tried to make his point.
“What’s up?” Lion called out.
Lily answered. “This man thinks he knows the boat we’re looking for!”
“If it’s the boat with the birds,” the boatman replied, “then everyone on the water knows it. Anyone could have told you, if you’d asked, and they’d have told you to give it a wide berth, too! I’m not going anywhere near it. There’s no telling what would happen!”
“I can tell you exactly what will happen if you don’t go on,” my master snapped. “What are you afraid of, anyway?”
In a low voice, the man said: “Sorcery.”
“Aha!” cried his Lordship triumphantly. “We’ve found them!”
“What do you mean by sorcery?” I asked.
“There are sorcerers on that boat. You can tell, because they can change themselves into birds and fly away. I haven’t seen it myself, but I know people who have. And why isn’t it moored near the city, instead of tucked away in a creek by itself? And strange sounds have been heard from it-horrible sounds, like men screaming.”
Lily sat impassively, holding the torch up unwaveringly as she listened.
“How do you know the birds are sorcerers?” I asked. “How do you know they aren’t just birds?”
“They talk,” the boatman said in a hushed voice.
3
The surface of the lake was like polished obsidian, the stars’ reflections, broken by ripples, as enigmatic as the shadows that would rise and fall in an obsidian mirror.
There were no voices or footsteps on the causeway and no paddles except ours broke the water around us.
The light from Lily’s torch fell on the raised side of the causeway, throwing into relief the stones set into the wall. Since we had caught up with His Lordship’s party, his boatman had been less eager than ever and Handy had no difficulty keeping up with him.
“You’re on the wrong side of the causeway, for a start,” the boatman had pointed out sulkily.
“That’s all right,” my master had responded blithely. “The bridges are all raised at night. We’ll pass through at the last one. We’d better cut across the lake and head straight for your creek after that. I’ve no intention of explaining myself to the warriors in the guard post at the end of the causeway.”
“Suppose we find Young Warrior’s boat,” I had said, thinking it was high time somebody asked an obvious question, “what do you propose to do then?”
“We’ll make him come quietly, or we’ll kill him. The boy too.”
“No!” My cry of protest had burst out of me before I had time to think about it. To the five shocked faces that turned toward me, I had explained: “You can’t just murder the lad out of hand. You don’t know what he’s done-maybe he couldn’t help it, maybe his fatherforced him into it!” I had turned to my brother for support. “The sorcerers-what about the sorcerers?”
The torchlight had thrown Lion’s face into sharp relief, casting deep shadows that made it look like a bare skull and about as easy to read. His eyes had glittered like jewels in the flickering light as he looked from my master to me. “We’ll take the sorcerers-the ones that are left-and put them back where they belong: in prison. That’s right-isn’t it, my Lord? Those were Montezuma’s orders.”