‘Did you hear me?’
I hesitated, unsure how to answer the warrior. He responded by turning on his heel and walking back towards me. He stood glowering down at me. ‘Listen, you. I don’t want to do this. We can always go back. I’ll tell Rattlesnake you’ve changed your mind…’
‘No!’ I said hastily. ‘Sorry, let me think… Why don’t we try the Council of Music? There were several men — poets, sorcerers, whatever they were — with Mother of Light in the courtyard. Some of them must know where to look for her.’
‘Forget it,’ he said sourly. ‘This has happened before, you know. She appears at one of these meetings — just drops in without warning, as far as I can tell — and disappears again before anyone knows about it. You were incredibly lucky to find her. Everyone’s supposed to report to us if they see her, but we only got to hear after you did.’
‘And the men I saw in the courtyard?’
He snorted. ‘Waste of time! They’re all nobles, palace people, not nobodies or foreigners like you. We can’t lean on them in the same way. They just laugh at us. And you’ll have seen how they were with her. Among that sort of people, it’s the height of fashion to have her favour your little gathering with her presence. I’m told it’s like having the late King among them again! All bollocks, of course, but that’s how they think, and the fact that she has all this mystery about her just makes them more keen.’
So, I thought, the Council of Music was probably not the place to start. ‘How about the gateways, then? If she’s not in the palace…’
Hunter sighed. ‘You take us for complete idiots, don’t you? Oh, sure, we can go and ask the guards, and we can ask the guards at the entrance to the marketplace too, for that matter, since you have to go through there to get out into the city. But I can assure you it will be a waste of time. None of them will have seen her go out of the palace, or come in, for that matter. We told you before — she disappears! She’s like a ghost!’
I swore. ‘This is absurd! You mean Maize Ear has this little army of spies and torturers and bully-boys but can’t even keep one woman out of his own palace, or find her when she is here? What’s going on? I thought Tetzcocans were supposed to be clever?’
I knew as soon as I said it that that was a mistake. The big man was advancing on me again, and this time he did not stop at talking. He seized my upper arms, twisted me sideways and slammed me against the wall of the passageway so hard that my head rebounded off the hard stone with a loud crack.
As I whimpered in pain, he said softly: ‘Now, listen here. You may think squashing somebody’s finger ends and threatening women is something we do for fun, but you ought to take notice of what you’ve seen and learn from it. We don’t even know what this woman’s done, or whether she’s done anything at all. It doesn’t matter. She’s found a way to get in and out of this palace without anyone knowing about it, and make fools of us in the process — especially Rattlesnake and me, who are supposed to be keeping an eye on her. If we don’t find her. Maize Ear’s likely to give all of us the kind of treatment that spy got. So as long as you want to be walking around like this, and not screaming your lights out in agony in some forgotten part of the palace, I suggest you watch your mouth and cooperate! Now, any more bright ideas?’
He let go, giving me a chance to rub the bump that was already rising on the back of my scalp. ‘Where did you see Lily and Mother of Light together?’ I asked.
‘The marketplace.’
‘Well, let’s try there. Come to think of it, why didn’t you grab her then, when you had her in your sights?’
‘Should have done,’ he conceded. ‘But we wanted to find out where she went when she was outside. That’s another mystery, you see — nobody seems to know that, either. But we had to split up, so I could follow her and Rattlesnake could follow Lily…’
‘And you lost her.’
‘Not for the first time, either! See what we’re up against?’
‘Maybe she is a ghost, after all. Or a sorcerer.’
‘If you can catch her, we’ll find out.’
Hunter eventually agreed to try the marketplace. He had no fear that I would try to take advantage of the crowds to escape, leaving Lily trapped in her cage, and he knew, from me, that Mother of Light had been at the market the day before, with the old man who appeared to be her father.
‘I bet she was happy with you when you went charging into that argument with the pedlars!’ he laughed.
‘Not very,’ I said. ‘I was wondering what became of the old man.’
‘He’ll have vanished too. Rattlesnake told you: he’s as bad as she is, and no one even knows where he came from. He may be her father — Hungry Child certainly didn’t pick her for her pedigree — but as for who he is, I can’t even tell you his name!’
‘Isn’t there a record from when she came to the palace, in Hungry
