High Dance tried to swallow. It took two tries to get past the tightening knot in his throat. He took another step back, ready to …
“That’s far enough.” Bead extended his arm, palm out. “Besides, even if you ran, you’d have to get past my wolves outside. You’ll go when I tell you, and not a moment before.”
“What do you want from me?”
Bead gave him a wary smile, his eyes gleaming like angry obsidian. “Just your cooperation. Oh, and you might place the Earth Clan squadrons under your control on high alert. When I finally kick Cahokia into a panic, I’ll need them to maintain order while you take over.”
Twenty-three
In her palace great room, Columella hunched as she sat on in her litter chair atop the clay dais. Through half-lidded eyes, she stared uneasily at her solitary “guest.” Her palace, high atop its mound in Evening Star City, should have been her safe haven. Instead the now-empty great room left her feeling vulnerable and curiously impotent. The fire attendants, her servants and slaves, everyone having excused themselves at the Keeper’s request.
The great room with its familiar war trophies, the brightly painted red, white, and black walls decorated with shields, bows, and the giant effigy carving of Birdman behind her, radiated an inexplicable chill. The sleeping benches displayed rumpled hides and an abandoned pile of weaving that Cricket had been working on. Here and there bowls had been left behind, dropped at her command.
Clan Keeper Blue Heron—the focus of Columella’s unease—sat just to the right of the fire where her porters had placed her litter on the intricately woven, mat-covered floor. Blue Heron’s pensive eyes were fixed on the large and detailed carving of Birdman where it hung on the woven-cane wall behind the dais. The piece was an older design that many now said presaged the resurrection of the Morning Star. The depiction invoked the memory of when Morning Star had changed into an eagle and flown up into the sky world in the Beginning Times.
Columella had waited long enough. The silence had stretched her nerves to the breaking point. “Very well, Cousin, we can’t get more alone unless you rout the mice from their holes in the walls.” Columella accented her words with a suggestive eyebrow as she propped her chin in what she hoped looked like apparent unconcern.
Blue Heron took just enough time to flaunt her authority before asking, “Do you think there are more sparkflies this spring?”
“Excuse me?”
“I haven’t seen as many.” Blue Heron continued to stare at the great carving behind Columella’s elevated perch. “I can’t decide if it’s because of the weather. Warmer this year. Or is it the number of children we have running around and catching them? Used to be deer closer than a couple of days’ walk, if you’ll remember. Now hunters won’t even try to bring in fresh meat in the summer time. It takes so long to get it here that the meat sours. Too many people, too much hunting. Is it the same with the sparkflies?”
“I haven’t a clue, Clan Keeper. Somehow, I just can’t fathom you spending the time to journey to River Mounds City, be loaded onto a canoe and ferried to my side of the river, then brought up to Evening Star City, to empty my great room and ask about sparkflies.”
“Doesn’t seem logical, does it?” Blue Heron agreed. “But sometimes logic fails us, cousin.” Blue Heron’s gaze shifted, her keen eyes boring into Columella’s. “For example, it seems entirely illogical that the tonka’tzi would just die in the night.”
“I don’t understand. What does illogic have to do with his death? You’re not making sense.” She paused, putting the pieces together. “Unless the facts of the tonka’tzi’s death are not what we’ve been told.”
Blue Heron was watching her with the same intensity her namesake watched a little fish as it surfaced in a still pond.
“That’s it, isn’t it?” Columella felt an icy tingle run through her guts. “And if you’re here … Ah, I begin to understand. You’re looking for the responsible person. And that leads me to assume this was no crime of passion, no spontaneous fit of jealousy. What was it? Poison? Someone sneaking up from behind with a club?”
Blue Heron lifted her chin so that Columella could see the dark line of stitches. “More like a ritual sacrifice.”
Columella’s heart skipped, and she swallowed hard. “I don’t understand, Clan Keeper.”
“The tonka’tzi’s throat was slit. The same was done to his wife. A second assassin was in the process of cutting my throat when a fortuitous interruption left me alive … and him dead.” She pointed a gnarled finger at the long wound. “But he came this close.”