People of the Morning Star(162)

Assuming they survived. Assuming they didn’t end up like Lace, their throats slit, their blood offered to the Powers of the Underworld.

Across from her the once-proud Sun Wing stared through fear-dazed eyes into a distance of nothing. Her shoulders periodically shook as she wept. Her young body had been painted in the transformation symbols before she’d been tied to the bench post. From the angle of her binding, the circulation had to be cut off. How cunning of Walking Smoke. His victims couldn’t struggle effectively with their limbs gone numb and useless.

In an attempt to stem her failing courage, Columella let her eyes play over the walls of her once-beautiful palace. But everywhere she looked his presence and malignant Power was manifest. Every surface was covered by the hideous drawings. The brilliant crimson of fresh blood had darkened, browned, and was now edging into red-black.

Whatever the symbols meant, they were some part of Walking Smoke’s polluted magic.

By the Creator, please, get me out of here.

She purposely kept her eyes away from where her soul-twisted cousin now sat cross-legged before his sweat lodge, arms up, hands out as they held a steaming cup of black drink. The drying blood had turned them dark red, and his singsong chant filled the air.

The Tula warriors watched him with a mixture of awe and wonder. Nor did they lower their guard in the least when it came to her, her family, and the remaining slaves.

She steadfastly refused to look at the limp remains of Lace or her bluish-pale and lifeless male fetus. For the moment, Walking Smoke had placed the tiny corpse on Lace’s chest, the infant’s slack mouth pressed to her left nipple in a mockery.

Columella fought to purge the images from her memory. But she kept hearing the echoes of Lace’s scream, seeing the flash of the long chert knife. Even while Lace’s and the infant’s dying bodies were being bled out, Walking Smoke had performed some peculiar ritual with a spindle whorl, twirling it above their nostrils and repeating some incomprehensible singsong chant.

The Tula had watched, awe-struck, each whispering softly to himself and making warding signs with their fingers; so it had to be some barbarian trick Walking Smoke had adopted from the south.

Where he shifted uneasily beside her, High Dance rubbed his face as if to peel it from his very skull.

Just wait, Walking Smoke will do it for you.

“Someone will come,” he whispered under his breath. “It’s just a matter of time.”

“It’s been most of a day,” she answered. “I don’t know how, but he’s taken steps. Some sort of spokesman outside giving orders in our name that we’re not to be disturbed.”

“Where’s your dwarf when we need him?”

“If he’s got the sense Power gave a pollywog, he’s running like a winter hare from a red wolf.” Flat Stone Pipe had obviously seen enough to know when to slip out his hidey hole and flee. In spite of her brave words to High Dance, she fervently wished that even now Flat Stone Pipe was being carried at the head of War Duck’s massed squadrons as they crossed the river to storm her palace.

Please tell me that’s the case. Please, blessed Father Sun, get me out of this, and I’ll prostrate myself before you for the rest of my life.

Down from her, her children whimpered and squealed in terror as Walking Smoke opened his eyes and shot a radiant smile in their direction.

“Soon,” he promised them. “I’ll be ready for you soon!”

Tilting the cup, he raised it to his lips, throat working as he chugged the strong and bitter tea to the last drop. One of the Tula stepped forward and handed him a short stub of rattlesnake master root, bowed, and retreated.

Walking Smoke tilted his head back, chewed, and stiffened. Leaning forward on his knees, his stomach pumped. Vomit spewed out to splatter on the bloody matting.

Having purged, he climbed to his feet, carefully washed the long chert knife in a jar of water, and began cutting Lace’s dead infant apart.

Columella’s stomach knotted as he carefully laid the dismembered little limbs on the matting, placing them just so, as if to create some abominable pattern.

* * *

With each rhythmic stride, Fire Cat’s moccasined feet hit the hard-packed surface of the Avenue of the Sun. For once he could actually bless the Morning Star for his administrative prowess in keeping the avenue graded, flat, and free of holes and dips. For a runner, in the middle of the night, Fire Cat was making extraordinary time.

Occasionally the three-quarter moon would peek through the clouds illuminating the avenue. But even when obscured by the moon-silvered fog the route was easily followed, having been surfaced in white sand.

Pus and blood! How far is it?