Instinctively Blue Heron made a warding sign against the haunting souls of the outraged dead. She jumped, unsure if the tickle on her skin came from grasping Spirit fingers, or scores of fly feet.
“I’m here to help you,” she implored the dead, and forced her heart to beat normally as she shielded her lips to keep from sucking any of the vile flies into her mouth or lungs.
Once more she glanced back and forth between the victims. The ones laid out in pieces in the circle had been carefully sacrificed, each cut made with precision and for an apparent purpose. She could almost think they’d been treated with reverence. The woman on the floor, however, had been hacked at, the viciousness of the attack readily apparent.
Why the difference? What had the young woman done to incite his anger?
She sucked a breath, two flies racketing around her mouth. Her gag reflex spasmed as she spit the little beasts out.
Come on, concentrate.
She glanced again at the interior walls. Intricate images had been painted carefully, first in blue, yellow, black, and red. Then the artist apparently went back and savagely splashed bloody designs over them, as if to deface the bright images.
“Keeper?” Five Fists asked from where he stood just inside the door.
She turned, glancing at him from the corner of her eye as she batted away the buzzing flies. “I’ve never seen anything like it. But something … There’s a similarity here. As if…”
He pointed. “The blood on the wall, like with the tonka’tzi?”
She glanced at the smears and crisscrosses on the plaster. The colorful images beneath had once been butterflies, cocoons, tadpoles, frogs, mudpuppies and salamanders, seeds, and corn stalks. All images of transformation.
“No snakes,” she murmured.
“What do you want done with this place?” he asked softly. “The crowd outside is waiting, as are High Chief Right Hand and the Matron Corn Seed. People are worried, Keeper. The talk of witchcraft is spreading.”
She sighed, making another warding by twining her fingers together then flinging them apart to disperse both evil and the angry ghosts of the dead. “Burn it.”
She turned as Five Fists stepped out the door, admitting a shaft of light that illuminated the woman’s wounded crotch. Something glinted in the mutilated flesh. Blue Heron slashed impotently at the column of flies that rose as she crouched, careful to keep light on the gleam.
She reached out, grasping a thin bit of cold stone between her thumb and forefinger. The sliver had been jammed into the midline where the two bones joined above the sheath; it had apparently stuck in the cartilage before being snapped off. Patiently she worked the fragment loose, holding it up in the slanting light.
I know this stone. She’d seen the like of it before: brown semitranslucent chert, finely chipped to a razor edge. A knife of similar stone had been held by Cut String before Night Shadow Star had driven arrows through this chest. Another had been wielded by a nameless assassin as he came within a whisker of cutting Blue Heron’s own throat.
“And now here,” she mused, cocking her head as she studied the body pieces laid out so carefully on the floor, their throats gaping wide. “Ritually sacrificed,” she murmured. “To appease what Power? Which Spirit world?”
None of which explained the savage brutality inflicted on the slashed remains of the young woman. “What went wrong?”
And what does it mean?
She stepped outside, away from the flies, maggots, stench, and horror, and into the clean afternoon sunlight. Nevertheless the feeling of pollution and filth stuck to her, as if a clinging film. The crowd went silent as she glanced around the bluff-top farmstead with its shabby ramada, worn log mortar and pestle.
Right Hand, High Chief of the Deer Clan, under whose jurisdiction this part of the bluffs fell, stood uncertainly with his sister Matron Corn Seed. She was the titular ruler of the Deer Clan, which remained traditionally matrilineal. The Matron stepped forward, touching her forehead respectfully, and asked, “What happened here, Keeper? Have you seen anything like this before?”
Blue Heron considered, eyes thinning as she weighed her options. Corn Seed looked uncharacteristically nervous. Generally the woman was a rock; now her eyes had a frantic quality. The set of her mouth was almost that of guilt. Power alone knew why? She couldn’t oversee every single dirt farmer on the bluffs. As to being upset, all it took was a glimpse inside that accursed farmhouse, and anyone would have been shaken.
“Witchcraft,” Blue Heron declared in a voice loud enough to carry to the crowd. But for a handful of younger individuals, the rest just stared at her with uncomprehending eyes. Then the few who understood began translating. The word, in several languages, ran through the crowd like ripples from a cast stone.