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.