Some two hundred of them have crept back home, the rest fly to and fro through the air in the gizzards of the zaphilotes, or crouch on the earth in the bellies of jackals.

Death has them all, and you led them to their deaths.

Is it then much that we should seek the lives of you two in payment for those of twenty thousand of our sons, our husbands, and our fathers?
But we do not even ask this.

Here beside me stand ambassadors from Malinche, the captain of the Teules, who reached our city but an hour ago.

This is the demand that they bring from Malinche, and in his own words: '"Deliver back to me Otomie, the daughter of Montezuma, and the renegade her paramour, who is known as Teule, and who has fled from the justice due to his crimes, and it shall be well with you, people of the Otomie.
Hide them or refuse to deliver them, and the fate of the City of Pines shall be as the fate of Tenoctitlan, queen of the valley.