Mouse hastened to obey. Now she’ll kill me, she thought. Now she’ll command the eunuchs to run me through.
Instead, the Speaker wrapped her arm around Mouse’s shoulders and drew her close. Then she turned to Sparrow, and the lower half of her face contorted into an ugly expression. “Seize her,” she said.
“What? No!” Sparrow cried as two slaves stepped forward and grabbed her by the arms. “Speaker! I am not the traitor! This girl you favor so blindly, it was she who loosed the heir, she who has turned her back on the goddess!”
“You have always resented Mouse,” said the Speaker, her voice as cold as the shadows around them. “Mouse, to whom I have shown favor that you believed due yourself. Don’t think I have not noticed. I’ll hear no more of your slander.” She addressed the eunuchs. “Take her away.”
Mouse shuddered as she watched Sparrow dragged screaming into the darkness. The Speaker’s hand remained comfortingly on her shoulder. She turned to the silent cluster of priestesses and slaves around her. “Have you found the heir?” she asked.
“No, Speaker,” a priestess replied.
“Fire burn!” the Speaker snarled, and it was a curse not a prayer. But she did not release her hold on Mouse.
“We will send the slaves after him,” someone said. “They will track him down! They will find him!”
“No,” said the Speaker. “No, they’ll never find him. They will only become as lost as he is. There is only one way to catch him now.”
The high priestess never loosened her hold on Mouse as the company retreated through the darkness of the Diggings, climbing to the world above. They emerged into sunlight that was dreadful to see, ascended the red stairs carved into the stone, and on through the lower temple. Mouse, her robe firmly gripped in the high priestess’s fist, was dragged to the Spire itself, and then the long, long climb, up and up.
What would be done to her? Would she be brought before the Dragonwitch? Did the Speaker, despite her words to Sparrow, know the truth? Or would one look at Mouse’s face reveal the betrayal?
But even as they neared the final turn of the stairway approaching the door that led out onto the roof, the high priestess said, “You did well, child. Many, addled by darkness, would not have noticed his disappearance. I heard you give the alarm. Thanks to you, we may act quickly and, I hope, not lose much time.”
Then the door was opened, and Mouse followed the Speaker out upon the rooftop. The sun was setting, burning the sky so that it looked as though the fire upon the altar itself blazed into the heavens. To Mouse’s surprise and horror, she saw through the smoke and heat-shimmered air that the curtain was flung back from the doorway beyond the altar.
The Dragonwitch stood framed by fire and silence. Her blind eyes burned.
“Where is it?” Sparks fell from her tongue. “Where is Halisa?”
Only then did the Speaker release her hold on Mouse’s shoulder and fall on her knees before the altar. The Dragonwitch was taller, Mouse thought, than when she had seen her earlier. Or perhaps she merely seemed so out here on the rooftop, her hair disintegrating into the breeze.
“Where is it?” she cried and leaned forward over the altar itself, her hands grabbing hold of the burning brands, clutching them as though she clutched Fireword itself.
“Flame at Night, holy goddess!” the Speaker said, unable to raise herself up. How frail and pathetic she looked to Mouse now. Gone was the powerful woman she had always appeared. Mouse saw her now for what she truly was: A child playing foolish games of strength, toying with death.
Mouse cowered into the shadows by the door. Though her knees trembled, she could not make herself kneel, and she hoped the Dragonwitch would not turn those coal eyes upon her and blast her to oblivion.
“Tell me!” the Dragonwitch cried, crawling onto the altar and dispersing the bonfire, which should have caught upon her flaking skin and set her hair ablaze but seemed instead to recoil from her presence. She crouched upon the altar stone, her hands clasping embers and coals, shuddering with pain. “Tell me!”
“The heir escaped,” the Speaker said. “We were betrayed by one of our own, and he was released into the Diggings.”
From the look on that tortured, broken face, Mouse expected the Dragonwitch to burst with fire, to consume the high priestess in her agonized frustration. Instead, she stood, and the smoke from her hair and skin was black as it rose to the darkening sky. Without another word to the priestess, without a look, she raised her arms and cried out in a pain-filled voice, for it hurt her to speak at all.
“Yaotl! Eztli!”