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rest. It kept revisiting the evening’s events.
    My master plainly knew more than he ought to about the Emperor’s missing sorcerers; and the Emperor was not fooled. As Montezuma had said to me himself, there were things he had not been told. However, it seemed that he could not move openly against his Chief Minister without evidence.
    I was under no illusions about why I had been picked as the man to get him that evidence. “You are spoken of most highly,” Montezuma had said, but what he really wanted was a spy in Lord Feathered in Black’s household: someone who was in no position to deny him whatever he demanded. I wondered, though, where he had got my name from.
    It was not hard to guess why Montezuma thought my master was playing him false. Having heard from his own lips how fearful he was for the future and how little he trusted his advisers, I could put myself in the Emperor’s place and imagine the questions he would ask himself. “I rounded up these sorcerers to consult them about my future,” he would have thought, “whether my rule would persist, whether I would live or die. Now they have vanished from a place nobody has ever escaped from. Who might have an interest in what they have to say? Who else, but my rivals for the throne?
    â€œSo what do I, the Emperor of the Mexicans, do about it? Of course, I ask my trusty chief minister to investigate. But for reasons that he cannot or will not explain, Lord Feathered in Black fails to find the missing sorcerers. And the next thing I hear is that a Bathed Slave has died uttering what sounds suspiciously like a prophecy—just the sort of thing a sorcerer might be expected to come out with. And who was sent to assist at the sacrifice? None other than the Chief Minister’s own slave—Yaotl!”
    What else could the Emperor be expected to conclude, other than that my master knew all along where his sorcerers were, deliberately failed to account for them when he was ordered to look for them, and then made sure that his slave was on hand to hear and report whatever one of them might say in his last moments?
    Had I been Montezuma, I grudgingly admitted to myself, I would probably have concluded that the Chief Minister was up to no good
too. But why? What could Lord Feathered in Black possibly have to gain by deceiving the Emperor in such a complicated fashion?
    I lay on my back and stared up at the ceiling. Somewhere above it were the Chief Minister’s sleeping quarters. “What’s this all about?” I muttered. “Are you just trying to show you’re cleverer than the Emperor?”
    â€œIf you can’t sleep,” grumbled a voice out of the darkness, “then you can come here and turn me over before I get fucking bedsores.”
    Talking to myself, I had woken my roommate up.
    Patiyoh was his name—or rather, it was the name he had been known by for as long as I had dwelled in my master’s household. I was sure it was old Black Feathers’ idea of a joke, for it meant “costly.” He had once been a useful slave, but he had been crippled by a stroke years before, and now all he did was lie on his sleeping mat, consuming his master’s food and doing no work in return. He was safe enough as long as he gave his master no cause for complaint. A few of his fellow slaves, including me, kept him alive by small kindnesses, such as changing his soiled breechcloth from time to time and carrying him out into a secluded corner of the courtyard when the weather was good. The others did it because they knew they might one day find themselves in Costly’s position. I had my own reasons to feel indebted to the old man.
    Seizing him by his bony shoulders and rolling him on his side took little effort. As I crawled back onto my own sleeping mat, however, I learned I was not going to get away that lightly.
    â€œSo, what’s old Black Feathers done to you now?”
    â€œNever