Days of the Dead by Barbara Hambly Page B

enquiries concerning Señor Sefton’s defense—at the Casa Municipal.”
    “I am the Lord thy God, and thou shalt have no other gods before me . . . ,” shouted the priest from behind the door.
    “Nor do I!” Don Prospero flung himself against the door like a maddened bull, and January heard a bolt shoot on the other side. “Coatlique—and even her great son the Left-Handed Hummingbird—I don’t hold them before the Lord of Hosts!”
    At Ylario’s nod the blue-uniformed men caught Hannibal’s arms and hustled him toward the outer door, leveling their pistols on January when he moved to stop them. Hannibal braced his feet but was nearly dragged off them; Don Anastasio made a move to close the outer door, but Ylario produced a pistol from his own pocket and pointed it at him: “I wouldn’t.”
    “Prospero!” Anastasio shouted, but Don Prospero was hammering on the study door, shouting, “The Lord of Hosts defeated the Indian gods, rode roughshod over them, conquered them forever. . . . And as for your nonsense about making graven images, I didn’t make those images!”
    “Prospero!”
    “Father!”
    “I’ve never made a graven image in my life! You lie-monger, you glutton, you troublemaker who tries to separate a loyal daughter from her father, how dare you . . . ?”
    Rose, who all this time had stood watching in the outer doorway, now closed the door and placed herself heroically before it. For an instant, January feared Ylario would threaten her with a pistol also, but he didn’t—though by his expression he clearly wished he could.
    He gestured to his guards to thrust her out of the way, and Rose flattened back against the door, her chill eyes promising the struggle—and the delay—that Ylario clearly wished to avoid.
    “Señora,” the little man said with steely politeness, “I do not know who you are, but I warn you that you are interfering with the justice of this country. If you and this man whom I assume to be your husband do not wish to spend the night in the jail yourselves—whatever else may transpire—you will let justice take its course.”
    Rose glanced across the room at Don Prospero, who was still shouting at the priest, oblivious to his closely-guarded guest’s imminent departure, and said nothing. Only braced herself and left it to Ylario to make the first move.
    January always wondered later what it would have been, because at that moment the door behind Rose opened—thrusting her forward into the room—and the gorgeously uniformed man standing framed in it asked in a voice of aggrieved reasonableness, “Ylario, what the hell is going on?”
    The westering sunlight slanting into the
corredor
flared on the curlicued scrolls of gold braid—January’s first wife, Ayasha, had called such designs “chicken guts”—that embellished the newcomer’s refulgent scarlet jacket, flashed on boots polished to the inner gleam of the newcomer’s grave, dark eyes. Don Prospero turned from the cornered priest and threw open his arms in greeting.
    “There you are!” he cried. “You tell this small-minded and unfaithful servant of the God of Hosts about being a god, my lord. Tezcatlipoca,” he introduced as the priest opened the study door cautiously and peered around it. “The Jaguar-God, the Smoking Mirror. . . . You tell him, eh, my liege, that I don’t worship you before this priest’s God.”
    The newcomer inclined his head with the sweet-tempered tolerance of a martyred philosopher forced to humor his benighted friend. “Of a certainty I am not worshipped before the True God,” he told the priest. “That would be a blasphemous thing.” He crossed himself, but his eyes danced with unholy amusement.
    Ylario stood where he had been, ignored by all, pistol in hand, and did not move, but the cold, still fury in his eyes told January who the newcomer was, in case he hadn’t deduced it already from the three uniformed aides standing in the
corredor
with their plumed hats