Desperate, I blurted out the first word that came into my head, a word for the men and women whose home was darkness.
“Sorcerers!”
Sorcerers: men and women who went abroad at night, changed into jaguars, coyotes or weasels. Men and women with the power to cure the sick or paralyze and pillage a whole household, as the mood took them. Men and women who could travel to the next World and bring its secrets back with them. “My Lord, if I needed to know who those strangers were, I would need a sorcerer to tell me.”
For a long time there was silence from behind the screen. Then I heard something else: something that sounded like the ghost of a wry chuckle.
Was the Emperor laughing? He seemed to be, although nobody else was joining in; and it was the interpreter who replied.
“That was wisely answered. We consulted sorcerers. His Lordship, the Keeper of the House of Darkness, will explain what became of them.”
Out of the corner of my eye I saw one of the four councillors give a start and risk a quick scowl at the screen before condescending to look at me.
“Lord Montezuma sent for sorcerers to interpret the omens hespoke of,” he said mechanically. “He had them brought from their homes and questioned them personally. When they failed to give him the answers he wanted, they were imprisoned.”
“They were imprisoned,” Montezuma’s interpreter added, “in a place you know very well.”
“My Lord, please!” I begged. I was shivering, because there was only one place the Emperor could be referring to. “Tell me what you want me to do.”
“Find them,” came the short reply.
“Find …?” I gasped, as I realized what the command meant. Nobody escaped from the prison: either you were let out or you died there. “But …”
The interpreter ground on relentlessly. “Your master, slave, is Chief Justice and Chief Minister. When the sorcerers disappeared we commanded him to look for them. He sent men after them, but did not find them. He took extreme measures-ill-advised measures, perhaps, because they are still at large. We find this hard to understand.” He let the Emperor’s words hang in the air for a moment before continuing. “Granted that these men were sorcerers, did they turn themselves into birds, bewitch their guards, or use some other form of magic to escape? Where are they?
“Your master has not been able to account for what happened. Perhaps these men did fly away on the night air. We might believe that-but when we see a man presented as a Bathed Slave who is plainly no such thing and hear him utter prophetic words and learn that our Chief Minister ordered his own man to be present when he died, we start to wonder.”
“My Lord-you can’t mean that Shining Light’s offering …?”
The words died in my throat as the Emperor spoke again-this time to me alone.
“You are spoken of most highly, slave. I know that your life has been troubled, but we can only accept whatever fate it amuses the gods to send us. Now I need a man of discretion and good sense. I know there are things I have not been told.” Montezuma paused significantly. “The sort of man I need will remember his duty to me-Quetzalcoatl’s heir, the servant on Earth of the Lord of the Here and Now.”
The silence that followed was full of memories of a dark, damp,noisome, cramped place, the agony of an empty belly, the despair of knowing you might never stand upright or see the Sun again.
“Now tell me you are the man I need, Yaotl.” The voice behind the screen had become so soft it was almost inaudible.
“Yes, my Lord.”
I could say nothing else now. If the Emperor had told me he needed a man who could produce live rabbits out of his anus, I would have been that man.
I barely heard the interpreter’s words as he gave me my instructions. I did not need them. It was plain what I was being told to do: find the sorcerers who had vanished from Montezuma’s impregnable prison, although my own master, the Chief Minister, had failed to locate them; and find out if there was any connection between them and the man I had seen die this evening.
“Bring those men to us, slave-not your master, or anyone else!”
In short Montezuma wanted me for his spy in his Chief Minister’s household; and if my master had secrets he was determined to keep from the Emperor, then so much the worse for me.
The interpreter’s final words were like one more twist in the cord I could already feel tightening around my neck. “You will begin your search tomorrow,” he informed me loftily, “at the Cuauhcalco Prison.”
7
My brother’s guard made as if to fall in as we left the Emperor’s apartments, but he dismissed them with a gesture, and we crossed the patio alone, silent apart from the flapping of his sandal straps and the padding of my bare feet in his wake. He spoke to me only when we had got out onto the open plaza and I had turned to leave.
“We need to talk, Yaotl.”
Stars were starting to come out overhead. “My time isn’t my own,” I pointed out. “I’m late already. When my master can spare me …”
He snapped at me, in a strained voice: “This is the Emperor’s business! Do you think I’m wasting my time with you for the sake of my health?” Then he added, more mildly: “I have to show you something. So you know how important finding these sorcerers is to the Emperor.”
“I already know! He as good as told me I’d find myself in a stew with maize and beans if I don’t find them-that’s important enough for me!”
Lion was already trotting briskly across the plaza. After a quick, nervous glance at the heavens I set off after him.
“Where are you going?”
“The palace of Axayacatl.”
The palace that had been built for Montezuma’s late father was on the far side of the Heart of the World. It was now used to store weapons and valuables, and so although dark and silent was heavily guarded.
The warriors at the entrance took one look at my brother and let us through with barely a nod. He seized a torch and plunged into the maze of echoing corridors that was the deserted complex’s interior.
“Look, I told you, my time isn’t my own. The Emperor won’t thank you if I can’t serve him because my master’s had me beaten to death for keeping him waiting …”
Ignoring my protests, my brother turned one last corner and stopped. Anchoring the torch in a niche in the wall, he turned to me and gestured silently at something lying by his feet.
We were in a small, bare room. The flickering torchlight lit up no details except for the thing Lion had evidently brought me here to see: a large wooden box in the middle of the floor.
“What’s this?” I asked suspiciously.
“Open it.”
The lid was heavier than those of the wicker chests I was used to. At first sight there was not much underneath it: a few old pieces of cloth and one or two other things I did not recognize.
“Clothes?” I said. “What, the Emperor wants me to do his laundry as well?”
“Pick it up,” he said sourly. “Touch it. Then you’ll see.”
At the top of the heap was something like a woman’s blouse, but with long sleeves and an opening in the front like the jackets that priests and imperial envoys wore on special occasions. It had been white, with a simple but unfamiliar pattern embroidered on it, although even in the torchlight I could see it was now badly discolored. It was not the design or the pattern, though, that made me catch my breath. The cloth had a texture like nothing I had ever felt: it slipped through my fingers, slithering between them so smoothly I thought I would drop it, but when I dared to tug at it I realized it was also stronger than any cloth I had handled.