People of the Morning Star (49 page)

She sipped, thankful for the bitter richness of the black drink. Smooth Pebble had brewed it strong, boiling the yaupon leaves into a foam before allowing it to steep.

“Feeling better?” Smooth Pebble asked as Blue Heron tossed her blanket aside and lowered her feet to the floor.

She yawned again, blinked, and took another sip of the hot tea before she said, “I needed the nap. Any news on Lace?”

“No. They are turning Cahokia upside down, but there is so much to search.”

“What about the Caddo? Is the Yellow Star sub-chief here?”

“He made it safely, Lady. He and the thief have been adding to the Tula’s unease. The captive knows that they’re biding their time, that whatever comes, it won’t be pleasant.”

Long association and familiarity told Blue Heron that Smooth Pebble was hiding something. She narrowed her eyes. “How long did I sleep? Tell me the truth. You know I’ll find out.”

“It’s afternoon, Keeper.” Smooth Pebble averted her eyes. “Do not rage at me. You’d hardly have the wits, or ability, to outthink Lace’s captor if you were stumbling around, sleep-stupid, and with your eyes swollen half-shut from fatigue.”

“You take chances,
berdache
.” Blue Heron tried to force all the threat she could muster into her voice, knowing all the while that Smooth Pebble was probably correct. Not that it eased her guilt.

Please, Niece, be safe. We’re coming.

She drank down the last of the hot tea, used her chamber pot, and tried to pull the wrinkles out of her woven-hemp skirt. For the sake of propriety, she draped a blue bird-feathered cape over her shoulders, and allowed Smooth Pebble to fix her hair into a copper-pinned bun. Squaring her shoulders, she nodded, and Smooth Pebble opened her door.

Blue Heron retrieved the cloth-wound bundle where it rested atop one of her boxes, and walked out into the main room. The warm air was heavy with the smells of roast venison and baking squash. Her household slaves went about their usual tasks, clearly curious about her entrance, and what it meant for the captive where he lay trussed beside the door.

Seven Skull Shield stood over the bound Tula, arms crossed, his hunting shirt bloodstained and filthy. His forehead was swollen and black with bruise. Takes Horn Fivekiller rose, bowed, and touched his chin as she walked up. The Yellow Star war second had stuck a couple of eagle feathers in the tightly wound bun atop his head. Several shell necklaces hung down on his muscular brown chest, and he wore an apron decorated with embroidery of the Hero Twins dancing around the World Tree.

“Forgive me,” she said irritably. “Smooth Pebble takes too many liberties with my schedule.”

Seven Skull Shield, lout that he was, grinned insolently. “Keeper, trust me, you needed the sleep. The way you dragged in just before dawn? You looked like the kind of refuse desperate dogs might have scratched out of a trash midden.”

She narrowed an eye, hissing, “And you take too many liberties with your guileless tongue, thief.”

His grin just widened. “Of course, I do. But down deep, a part of you enjoys the fact that at least someone is willing to talk to you like a friend.”

“The last thing I need is a common thief for a friend.”

Seven Skull Shield screwed his expression into feigned complacency and said, “If I were a common thief, I’d be lying dead in a blind passage in River Mound City with one of old Gray Mouse’s arrows sticking through my heart. And trust me, Keeper, the trap the scorpion laid was a good one. Layers within layers, carefully baited. Had it worked, it was designed to not only take out any opponent clever enough to sniff out his escape route, but to keep you off balance when yet another of the few people you can depend on was eliminated.”

She glanced at Takes Horn Fivekiller, who stood with arms crossed, his tattooed face impassive. To the side, one of his translators was whispering her and Seven Skull Shield’s words to him in Caddo.

To Seven Skull Shield, she said, “But you spotted the trap?”

He spread his hands as if in mock surrender. “I’ve been hunted by the best, Keeper. Angry husbands, jealous Traders, offended rivals, incompetent fools I just couldn’t help but cheat. I am so misunderstood … and by so many.”

“Get to the point,” she snapped.

“The Tula was good. He’d have fooled anyone who was half blind, from out of town, or just plain dumb.”

“So you set him up?” She stared down at the Tula, wrapped up in rope as if he were a fish. “What happened to his lip?” Blue Heron’s expression soured. What remained of the man’s face was a mess. Pale red fluids drained from the wreckage of his eye socket. The nose was swollen, misshapen, and turning black. But that lip? It sent a shiver through her.

“Um, I think it was bitten.”

“Can he even talk?” the translator asked for Takes Horn.

“Ask him.”

Takes Horn bent down, staring into the Tula’s pain-slitted eye. With great deliberation he began speaking.

The translator said, “He asks if the Tula can understand him. It’s a misleading question since Tula speak perfect Caddo.”

The Tula nodded.

“Can you talk?”

The Tula’s voice slurred, and he winced at the movement of his savagely torn and swollen lip and cheek.

The translator said, “The Tula says he thinks so.”

Takes Horn continued, the translator repeating, “Who do you work for?” A pause as the Tula answered. “He says he serves the sorcerer.” Another pause as Takes Horn questioned. “The Tula says the sorcerer is here to unleash great magic. He will uproot Cahokia the way a tornado does a giant oak. And the Tula says he does not fear death, for the sorcerer will recall his life-souls from the land of the dead and install them into other peoples’ bodies. He says he’s seen the sorcerer do this. This makes him happy, because the body he now has is damaged, but he will be resurrected in a new body after his death.”

Takes Horn asked something else.

The translator took up the Tula’s words. “He says he will say no more. He asks that you kill him now.”

Blue Heron unwound the cloth from the beautifully chipped blade the assassin had tried to use on her throat. The Tula’s eye widened, and he gasped, then winced at the pain it caused him.

“Ask him where this came from,” she told the translator.

“He says he will speak no more. Use the blade and kill him.”

Takes Horn glanced up at Blue Heron. “I know a way to make him talk. Do you have a drill? The kind a wood or shell worker would use? And I’ll need a spindle whorl. The common kind for spinning buffalo wool or yarn.”

“And what would a drill and whorl gain us that a sharp knife would not?” she asked.

“Your sorcerer has convinced Bleeding Hawk, here, that once he dies, his souls will be resurrected into a new body.” Takes Horn shot a sidelong glance at the thief. “Since Seven Skull Shield has made rather a mess of this one, that new body is now rather appealing. But he’s a Tula, Lady. Torture will not work. The more you hurt him, the more he’ll laugh because it proves his courage and endurance. Tula, however, are superstitious and do have fears that will unnerve them. They can be manipulated by playing on those fears, just as this ‘sorcerer’ has discovered.”

“Find a drill,” Blue Heron told Smooth Pebble. The
berdache
slung a cape around her broad shoulders and was out the door.

“And just what are you going to do with the drill and spindle whorl?” Seven Skull Shield asked, sidling over to extract a boiled ear of corn from a cooling pot. Obviously he’d been waiting for Smooth Pebble to leave. Before Blue Heron could say anything, he’d sank his teeth into the kernels.

To Blue Heron’s amazement, Smooth Pebble was back—just that quick—a lapidary’s drill clutched in her hands. Takes Horn accepted it with a smile. Smooth Pebble noticed the corn, gave Seven Skull Shield a reprehensible scowl, then went to one of the storage boxes under Mica’s sleeping bench. She opened it and retrieved a spindle whorl.

The Tula was watching through his single pain-crazed eye.

“Seven Skull Shield, I will need you to hold his head.” Takes Horn said, then glanced at Smooth Pebble. “Keep the spindle whorl at hand where he can see it.”

Seven Skull Shield had laid his dripping corn on the closest bench and now hunkered down, his knees on either side of the Tula’s head. The man tried to flop, but the rope windings made it futile.

Smooth Pebble prominently displayed the spindle whorl: little more than a ceramic disk on a pointed stick as long as her forearm.

“What does this gain us?” Blue Heron asked.

Nodding to the translator, Takes Horn bent down over the squirming Tula and spoke in Caddo, the translator repeating, “We’re going to drill a hole in his head. And with the spindle whorl, we’re going to use ancient Cahokian magic to draw his life and body souls out of his head the way a root is pulled out of moist dirt. Then we’re going to place his terrified souls in an enchanted well pot, and bury it beneath the corpses of four decapitated snakes. Locked away, imprisoned so, the souls will wail in terror and blackness forever.”

The Tula’s eye was flicking back and forth, a panicked whimper tore from his throat. Seven Skull Shield clamped the man’s head between his knees. Takes Horn leaned forward and placed the drill tip against the Tula’s forehead. The captive tried to swallow, but choked on his fear. He coughed, blowing clots of coagulated blood from his nose and tearing part of his lip loose. The howl in his throat sounded like a wounded dog’s.

“You can stop this,” Takes Horn said reasonably. “Who is the sorcerer? What is his name?”

The Tula gasped for breath. The translator filled in when Bleeding Hawk finally spoke. “He is called the Two-Footed Smoke. He came to us demonstrating great Power.”

“Came from where?”

The Tula narrowed his eye. “He is Cahokian, but lived among the Yellow Star for a time.”

“And that’s why he had you kill the
amayxoya
? Because the war chief knew him?”

The Tula tried to sneer, but it pulled at his bleeding and ruined lip. “My master’s arrow killed the Yellow Star pollution. So great is his Power he walks among you like a winter mist. But you do not see him. He hears your words, though you do not speak to him. Your hearts are like fresh tracks in the forest to him. Laughing, he will destroy you all.”

“Tell me about this knife.” Blue Heron held the slim and delicate blade before the Tula’s eye. He averted his gaze, tried to clench his jaws, despite the pain.

Takes Horn pressed against the drill and began to turn.

“It was Bobcat’s!” came the translation.

“And do you have a blade like this?”

He nodded, glanced at the spindle whorl, closed his eye in defeat. “I gave it to the Deer Chief.”

“What Deer Chief?”

“The one up on the bluffs. The one with the wounded hand. Two-Footed Smoke, the great sorcerer, owns that one’s souls. What the Deer Chief did with my blade, I do not know.”

Blue Heron felt her heart skip. “The wounded hand? It is his right? And he has a scar here, on his chin?” She pointed.

“That is him.”

“Was a woman with him? Older, with snakes tattooed on her back, arms, and chest?”

“Yes.” The translator gave her a sidelong glance.

Blue Heron sank to the bench beside Seven Skull Shield’s half-chewed ear of corn. She should have suspected, but over the years Right Hand had never given so much as a hint of his resentment.

“What’s this about?” Seven Skull Shield asked, reading her shock and dismay.

“Nothing that concerns you.” She gestured. “Go ahead, Takes Horn. Keep him talking. Ask him where they’ve taken Lace.”

Takes Horn lifted the drill to the Tula’s head again, preparing to spin it. As he did he asked something in Caddo.

“I do not know where the Two-Footed Smoke has taken your woman!” the Tula cried. “This I swear upon my umbilical cord! And my father’s umbilical cord! We only serve! And then only at his orders!”

“Umbilical cords?” Seven Skull Shield asked.

“Tula believe it is the most Powerful talisman,” Takes Horn told him. “They think it controls the length and quality of their lives. Each warrior takes his cord and hides it in a secret place, knowing that as long as it remains hidden, his souls are safe.”

“Until you drill a hole in his head and draw them out with a spindle whorl?” Blue Heron countered, still stunned at the Tula’s revelation.

Right Hand? I never would have guessed.

“Ask him if he has any idea why Lace was taken.”

The answer translated as, “The sorcerer needs her for the ceremony. Like the one he conducted in the Deer Chief’s land on the bluff. The final ceremony. The one where he unleashes the greatest of Powers. That will be the day he brings devastation to Cahokia. He has told us that even First Woman will tremble at his feet.”

“Bah!” Seven Skull Shield growled, “As if anyone could conjure
that
!”

“Where are the rest of the Tula?” Takes Horn asked.

“You do not want to find them. They will kill you, Yellow Star.”

The drill was placed to the Tula’s forehead, and this time, Takes Horn actually had to begin grinding it into bone before the Tula wailed, “The warehouse! Just west of where the thief caught me. Some chief owns it!”

“War Duck?” she asked, and the name was translated.

“The fool sells us his warehouse even as we work toward his destruction!” The Tula’s frantic eye darted back and forth. “But you are too late! Two-Footed Smoke is drawing in the strands of Power that will trap you all! There is nothing for you, only death from which you will never be resurrected!”