Free Shadow of the Lords by Simon Levack Page A

know the warriors would chop the whole forest down if they had to before they stopped looking. So they can’t be hiding here.’ When I saw the solution, I had to suppress a grin: it was so elegant I almost believed it myself. ‘On the other hand, they can’t have run very far, can they? Not with one of them carrying the other. So …’
    The captain twisted his sword threateningly. The shards of obsidian sunk in its shaft flashed as the sunlight caught them,
and his own eyes glittered as he watched them. When he spoke he seemed to be talking to the weapon, as though reassuring it that it would have work to do yet.
    â€˜So what you are telling me is that the men we’re after can’t be running away and they can’t be hiding either. What, then? They just vanished? Are they sorcerers? Did they turn themselves into moles and burrow into the soil? Are they down there now, laughing at us?’
    He drove the blunt end of the shaft into the ground. It struck the earth with a ‘thump’ that seemed to reverberate in the open field’s empty silence, and when he let the weapon go, it stood upright unsupported.
    â€˜Somebody,’ he reminded me, ‘is going to pay for all this. If these men are lost …’
    â€˜They’re not sorcerers,’ I assured him hastily. ‘I didn’t say they weren’t hiding. I just said they would not be hiding out here.’ I glanced quickly at Handy again: he was looking at his feet, no doubt wondering whether he had been right to take my side.
    I took a deep breath. I might live or die by my next few words. But I saw what I had to do. I could not fight the Otomies, nor could I run away from them. I had to take them somewhere where they could not hurt me no matter how angry and frustrated they got and where I would not need legs like a roadrunner’s to outpace them. I had to lure them on to my own ground. I thought wistfully of the city I could not see, out on the lake, hidden by the tall rushes. I imagined its vast, bustling crowds, its networks of narrow streets and canals, the baffling mazes of its marketplaces, the refined manners of its people, most of whom could admire a man like the captain from afar but would go out of their way to avoid talking to him. I could have lost the warriors there in no time.

    My own city was beyond my reach, but there were others.
    â€˜Where’s the nearest large town?’ I asked innocently.
    Â 
    The captain got Fox to draw a rough map in the dirt with the point of his harpoon.
    â€˜Say this is Chapultepec,’ he began, digging a small hole.
    â€˜Don’t bother putting the little villages in,’ I said helpfully. ‘They wouldn’t go near those. Everybody knows everybody else, so they’d spot strangers straight away, and they’d tell you about them as soon as you asked just to get rid of you. Telpochtli and the boy would know that.’ I knew there was no point in my trying to hide in a village either, for the same reason.
    Fox glowered at me. ‘Right. Here’s the lake …’
    â€˜I think the shoreline should come out further west than that …’
    â€˜Shut up. This is a map, not a work of bloody art. How far could they have gone? I need to know how big an area to cover.
    I thought about that: the bigger the better, as far as I was concerned, since it meant the Otomies would have to divide themselves between more towns. ‘Hard to say …’
    â€˜You told us they rested up the first night and we know one of them was too lame to walk.’ The captain’s voice was subdued, for him. He was clearly thinking about how he was going to keep control over his men if he had to disperse them widely over the countryside. ‘Even if he was walking by yesterday morning he won’t have been going very fast. He won’t be up for a climb either, so we can forget anywhere very high up. They certainly haven’t left the