I was dimly aware of movement around me, and sounds: shuffling and grunting noises from the dark figures sleeping or daydreaming in the cages around us. Perhaps, I thought, she had not heard me, and I reached out and touched her shoulder.
She flinched and a violent tremor passed through her.
‘Lily,’ I groaned, ‘where are you? It’s me, Yaotl. Your slave, your…’ I swallowed, suddenly aware that I did not truly know what I might have been to her: a friend, a lover, the man who had tried to save her from Lord Feathered in Black, none of these or all of them? The thought that I might never know filled me with sadness, which was quickly chased away by a sudden dread as I realized what might have happened to her.
She might have lost her soul.
I knew that this could happen. The soul was such a delicate thing: a terrible shock, or a drunken rage, or even something as superficial as being interrupted in the act of making love could drive it from a man’s or a woman’s body, and if it were not retrieved quickly then it would be gone for good. But that would need a soul doctor, and plainly there would be none here. I shook the woman again, overcome now by an irrational feeling of despair. Without her soul, her body would die. It might take four years, but Lily would slowly decay from within. Somehow that prospect terrified me more than the likelihood that we would be executed in the morning.
‘Lily! It’s me!’
She looked at me with dull but not lifeless eyes. Slowly her lips moved. ‘Yaotl,’ she said flatly.
I moaned with relief. ‘You do know me!’
‘Yes, of course,’ she said in the same monotone.
‘Do you know where you are? Do you know what happened to you?’
‘In the prison,’ she mumbled, and then, as if that were all she could remember, she repeated it.
‘Your hands,’ I said urgently. ‘Did they…’ It was hard to put into words. ‘Did they take your fingertips?’
She looked down at her maimed hands, the bloodstained rags that ended her fingers. I wondered at the fact that they had been bandaged at all, but thought that perhaps that had been for the judges’ benefit. ‘No,’ she said absently. ‘Only the nails.’
‘Oh, Lily!’ This time, when I reached for her, it was not to shake her but to hold her, as though my arms could give her some reassurance that my voice could not. She accepted the embrace passively, as she seemed to do everything else now, neither shrinking from it nor returning it.
‘We’ll be all right, you know,’ I whispered into her tangled hair, whose silver strands seemed to shine even in the gloom of the prison. ‘They won’t kill us.’ Who was I talking to, I wondered even as I formed the words, who was I trying to reassure, her or me? ‘The judges didn’t believe your confession.’
She replied, in voice I could barely hear even though we were so close together: ‘But it was true.’
I pulled away from her a little, just enough to study her face. ‘No, no. Look, I know what they did. I know what you had to say, just to make them stop. But it’s over now, don’t you realize? Rattlesnake and his men — they’re dead. The Otomies killed them. They can’t hurt you any more, Lily. You don’t have to lie any more.’
Then I hugged her again and listened to her repeating what she had said still more softly: ‘But it was true. It was too hard to lie; it hurt too much.’
I rocked her gently, whispered soothing words to her, and hoped the obsidian-bladed winds in the Land of the Dead were flaying the naked souls of Rattlesnake and his men, carving strip after strip from whatever remained of their substance until there was nothing left but agony, and I prayed that that would go on for ever.
We must both have slept. It seemed to me that one moment I was cradling the woman in my arms, talking nonsense, and the next I was in the middle of a nightmare, trapped in a dark, airless place with a monster that shrieked and lashed out, striking me with hands and feet, and reeked of blood.
I struggled to free myself, jamming my body against the unyielding bars then trying to defend myself by hitting wildly back.
The shrieks became a long wail, which in turn dissolved into a cascade of desolate sobs.
I knew where I was then, and whom I was with. This time, when I reached for her, she threw herself into my arms, pressing herself against me so that I felt every spasm as it racked her.
‘Lily, Lily, Lily!’
‘Don’t go!’ she cried into my chest. ‘You mustn’t leave me! Please!’
‘Not much danger of that, lady,’ I murmured as I stroked her hair.
I looked around quickly. It was too dark to see anything, although noises from the other cages told me that some at least of our fellow inmates had been disturbed by Lily’s nightmare. I wondered what time it was; had the Sun set, or was he about to rise? This deep within the interior of the palace, I suspected, it might be impossible to hear the trumpets and drums that would signal to the city at large nightfall and morning and other times of the day and night.
I suppressed a moment’s panic at the realization that there was no way of knowing how long we had to wait to learn what was to become of us. Then, with a feeling like a swarm of bees waking up in the pit of my stomach, I discovered that we might be about to find out.
I could see something now. The bars of the surrounding cages and the huddled shapes inside them had begun to throw huge wavering shadows across the walls. Someone was approaching with a torch in his hand.
‘Something’s happening,’ I whispered fearfully.
Lily pushed herself
