“Who?”
“That’s what I need to find out.” Seven Skull Shield met Crazy Frog’s intent stare. “Not much goes on around the River Mounds or down on the canoe landing that you don’t hear about. And if you had heard something, you might not have realized just how much of a threat it might be to your continued and future enjoyment of chunkey.”
“What’s this all about?” For the first time, Crazy Frog was no longer paying attention to chunkey. His flat brown eyes were now fixed on Seven Skull Shield.
“Someone is trying to overthrow the Morning Star and destroy the Four Winds Clan. You and I might not think that was our problem, and that the elite can rotted-well take care of themselves. Then if we think a little further we realize that if the plotters succeed in assassinating the Morning Star and brewing a civil war…?”
“I won’t be watching much chunkey.” Crazy Frog’s expression tightened the slightest bit. He didn’t even notice when Badger Cape took his position, bowled, and cast. “The tonka’tzi?”
“The Four Winds Clan has managed, so far, to keep the pot from boiling over. Your people are in a position to hear things. If anyone mentions the tonka’tzi’s throat being slit with a big ceremonial knife? That, I’d want to know about immediately. And if you could nab the source of the rumors? You might end up having a chunkey match held in your honor.”
After thinking for a while, Crazy Frog said, “I’ll put my people on it. How do I contact you?”
“Send someone you can trust to the Four Winds Clan Keeper’s palace. Have them”—he watched Sun Bird take his position—“deliver a chunkey stone. A red one if it’s critical and needs immediate attention, white if you just think it’s important.”
“The Clan Keeper’s?” For the first time Crazy Frog’s face reflected astonishment. “So, that’s really true?”
He gave Crazy Frog a narrow-eyed squint. “Which is why you’re going to keep this in the strictest confidence, my friend. I’ve watched the old woman work, and believe me when I say your life will be both longer, and more profitable, with her as an ally.”
“And to think,” Crazy Frog mused, “I always thought you were something of a buffoon when you weren’t playing slick to seduce some woman.”
“I like being a buffoon. People who don’t take me seriously don’t watch their wealth or their wives. It’s just that I have trouble keeping up appearances when people are dying right and left, and assassins are sneaking in at night.”
“Then I guess I’ll have to rethink my opinion of you … Tow Rope!”
Twenty-five
The stench was overwhelming, worse even than the charnel houses where bodies were allowed to rot before the bones were picked clean. The difference, Blue Heron thought, was that in charnel houses the entrails were removed first and respectfully disposed of. Here they lay in smelly, fly-and-maggot-crawling piles where they’d been tossed into corners on the blood-soaked floor.
She batted at the buzzing flies and slowly cataloged the dim farmhouse’s interior. Body parts from five dismembered corpses were laid out in a large circle that arced from wall to wall. The pieces of a man, woman, two girls, and a small boy had been laid out artistically; the woman’s torso at the top, nearest the door, the man’s back by the benches. All were naked and had symbols painted in red, black, yellow, and blue. The throats were neatly severed under the angle of the jaw. So precise was the cut on each victim, and so wide the wound, that she could look down onto blood-caked vocal cords in their severed voice boxes.
Each torso had been opened from sternum to pubis. Their hearts and livers had been removed and placed in a smaller ring on the lip of the fire pit; the charred organs, having cooked through and desiccated, were easily identifiable. The intestines, however, had just been dropped and kicked to the corners. Each of the empty gut cavities now held a brownware pot filled with ash.
Blue Heron suffered a shiver, as if each person’s body-soul—the one that remained in a person’s bones at the time of death—was screaming at her through those now-gaping throats.
But it was to the corpse lying in the middle of the clay floor by the fire pit that her eyes kept returning. There—in a pool of coagulated blood and crawling with flies—sprawled the remains of a young woman. Her breasts had been cruelly hacked from her rib cage; packets of fly larvae rimmed her dried, gray, and shrunken eyes. Crisscrosses had been incised so deeply in her forehead they cut into the bone. The fleshy part of her nose along with her cheeks and mouth had been cut away from ear to ear to expose blood-caked teeth and her jaw bone. The tendons inside her thighs had been severed and her legs inhumanly spread wide. Long slices had been taken down the inside of her thighs. The wreckage that had been made of her pubis and mutilated vulva sent a shiver through Blue Heron’s bones.