The Demon of the Air

by Simon Levack

  There was a long, awkward silence. Then Rabbit said nervously: “Look … I mean … I’m fine now, no problem at all, but if it ever came back, well …”

  “Actually, come to think of it, the stuff might even be poisonous by now. No, forget I mentioned it … .”

  “How much do you want for it?”

  “I wouldn’t dream of selling it to you.”

  “How much?” Rabbit demanded again, this time with an edge to his voice.

  Costly sighed. “I told you, I can’t sell it to you. But look, at your own risk …” I could not see what he was doing in the darkness of his corner of the room but I could hear him rummaging for something beside his sleeping mat, followed by the faint sloshing of liquid in a gourd. “I’ll give it to you. But I really think …”

  “Thanks!” Rabbit almost snatched the gourd from him. “If this works, I owe you one!”

  A moment later he was gone and the old slave’s body was heaving up and down on his mat in time to his convulsive wheezing laughter.

  “Was that what I thought it was?” I said.

  His mirth brought on a fit of coughing. “That moron!” he spluttered when he could draw breath. “He’ll drain it to the dregs! By midnight his bowels will be flowing like the aqueduct! You’ve got all the time you need, now.” The laughter overcame him again. “Oh dear!”

  I like to remember Costly that way—laughing so much he could hardly breathe.

  It helps me to forget what happened afterward.

  7

  It was easy to work out where they had taken the corpse from the canoe. My master would not want to be concerned with it, and the steward had neither the brains nor the imagination to do anything other than the obvious.

  I could assume it would not be left where it was. The obvious thing to do with the body was to move it before it stiffened, but it could not be taken far in the middle of the night. In any case, I thought, my master and his steward could have no idea where to take it, unless they knew where the dead man’s family was or who his friends had been. They would have had it carried as short a distance as possible and left somewhere convenient, from where it could be got away from the house as soon as the Sun came up.

  Few households were ostentatious enough to have torches burning through the night, but my master’s was one of them. I took one and hurried to the front of the house, to the room where the litters were kept, near the foot of the broad steps up to the patio.

  As I ducked through the entrance, I realized that the steward had not let me down. The body was there. In fact, as I straightened up, I saw that it was altogether too much there. Lifting the torch, I saw the dead man’s shadow projected, much larger than life, against the far wall, hunched over the angular shape of a litter. Not even the torch’s flickering, however, could account for the way the shadow flowed and changed shape as the corpse got to its feet.

  I dropped the torch, which fell at my feet, turning the dead man’s shadow into a dark streak that shot up the far wall until it loomed over me. The torch went out. It did not matter: there was already one burning in the wall above my head. I stepped back, my hands groping behind me, looking for the doorway. The moment I found it, I intended to run.

  Then the dead man spoke.

  “S-sorry. I shouldn’t be here. I’ll go now.”

  It was the voice of the young priest, one of the pair that had brought the body out of the water. As soon as I heard him I made my eyes take a fresh look at the scene in front of them.

  The dead man cast no shadow to speak of. It was the priest who had frightened me, suddenly getting up from where he had been squatting by the litter because he was as startled as I was. The corpse sat in the litter itself, propped against the tall wicker back of its chair, looking quite peaceful apart from the hideous gash at his throat and the way his jaw hung slack and open. He was still naked. Surrounded by the heron feathers and paper streamers that decked my master’s plainest litter, and swaddled in the rabbit’s fur covering its chair, he looked more pathetic than when he had just been pulled out of the canal.

  I bent down to retrieve my torch. It was just as well it had gone out. Otherwise it might have set fire to something. Any of the embroidered cotton canopies resting against the walls, or the shining blue and green feathers that bordered them, some as long as my arm, could have caught in an instant.

  I studied the priest. As light and shadow danced around and behind him his soot-stained face remained uniformly dark. Watching his eyes shift from side to side as he sought a way around me to the door, I had the unsettling feeling that I might have met him before that night.

  “Who are you?” I asked.

  “My name’s Heart of a God,” he replied. There was no tremor in his voice. Instead there was an unnatural stillness, a conscious control that betrayed his fear as eloquently as if he had been begging for mercy. He seemed even younger than when we had spoken by the side of the canal. He had been right: he should not be here. He should be in the Priest House or watching over a temple fire and offering his blood to the gods.

  I asked the obvious question.

  Realizing he was not going to get past me, he seemed to relax a little. “I was curious.” He indicated the body. “About him.”

  I took a step toward him and grinned. “That makes two of us!”

  The priest moved aside to give me a closer look at the corpse, and hovered over my shoulder as I examined it. It occurred to me afterward that he could easily have got to the door then, had he chosen to.

  After a few moments he said: “It’s the wounds, isn’t it?”

  I grunted assent. I was looking at the neck, probing the edges of the gash with my finger. The skin around it was cold and unyielding and dry, as if there was no blood left in the body.

  “This would have killed him, no doubt about that. I wonder what it was?”

  “A sword?” he hazarded.

  “Maybe. It’s a very clean cut—too clean for a flint knife. It must be obsidian.” That would argue for its having been a sword, I knew, a flat shaft of fire-hardened oak with rows of obsidian blades set into its edges. “It’s quite shallow, though, isn’t it?” I imagined a sword swishing through the air and slicing through a neck or a limb at the bottom of its arc. “I think it was a knife or a razor. A sword blow would have taken his head off.”

  “Not if whoever was using it didn’t have much space to swing it in.”

  I glanced back at the young priest peering eagerly over my shoulder. I had been right to think he was no fool, I thought, but his brains were going to get him into trouble one day.

  “You’re right,” I said. “So either it was a knife—made of something sharper than flint—or he was killed in a cramped space. Or both. No reason why it can’t have been both. The less space you have to work in, the more likely you are to prefer a knife.” I tried to imagine the cramped spaces I knew: small rooms, steam baths, the niches at the backs of temples. If you were going to murder somebody it made sense to do it somewhere enclosed and private.

  I took a step away from the body to survey the rest of the wounds.

  “What do you make of these marks?” I asked.

  The skin seemed to have shrunk and turned gray, bringing the punctures, slits and blisters into a gruesome kind of relief.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “But it was done on purpose, wasn’t it? Just before you came in I was thinking it looked like he’d been pricked with maguey cactus spines and beaten with burning sticks, the way they do in the Priest Houses.”

  “Why would anyone have done that?”

  “To punish him?”

  “Maybe.” I knew that was why the priests did it. The memory could still make me squirm. “Maybe it was to get him to talk.” I looked from the dead man’s ravaged skin to his face. His eyes were still open and clear and glittering in the torchlight. Their irises had not begun to blur as they do after death. What might they have seen that someone would use torture to learn?

  I looked curiously at t
he priest.

  “Why did you want to see the body again?”

  “I kept thinking about those marks. I thought I’d seen something like them before.”

  I had thought the same. It was what had brought me here.

  “I have the honor to serve the war-god at the great temple in the Heart of the World,” the young man explained. “I was there at the Festival of the Raising of Banners, when the merchants were presenting their slaves to be sacrificed to the god. One of them had scars like this—pricks, scratches, burns. I noticed them when we stretched him over the stone. I remember …”

  “So do I,” I said. “He was dead before he got to you, wasn’t he? I was there. He jumped off the temple steps halfway up. We had to haul him all the way back to the top, and then we had a job persuading the Fire Priest to accept him.” I remembered Heart of a God now as the young acolyte who had greeted us at the top of the steps. “I saw the scars too, when the body was being butchered.”

  “It was you, then! I remember, now. The one with the mouth! It’s strange, isn’t it? You bring us an offering with these scars on it, and a body turns up here in the same state, right in front of your master’s house. What’s going on?” His eyes narrowed as he looked at me. I kept mine fixed on the body in the chair.

  “I don’t know,” I said slowly. “I’ll have to think about it.”

  I was still thinking about it when the young priest remembered where he was supposed to be and left. I was still thinking about it when the torch sputtered and went out.

  I went on thinking about it in darkness.

  I could not simply return to my room and wait to be sent for. I had to get out of the Chief Minister’s clutches, especially now that I had seen for myself what he was capable of, but that would not be enough. I had to find the sorcerers quickly and deliver them to Montezuma before my master caught up with me. Then I could throw myself on the Emperor’s mercy, and if he inclined his heart toward me, I might survive.

  So all I had to do was track down the sorcerers! I might have wept from sheer desperation, but I suddenly saw how I was going to do it—and at the same time, catch the killer of the man we had found in the canal, and find out why my name had been left on him.

  The dead man had been half a message, but my name had been the other half. Either the message was for me—although if it was, I did not understand it—or it was about me. Either way, I reasoned, I would have to answer it. All I had to do was reply, and the killer would come for me.

  And the killer would lead me to the sorcerers. Shining Light’s Bathed Slave had been treated in the same barbarous way as the dead man beside me, which meant the same person had had them both at his—or her—mercy. The Bathed Slave had been one of the men my master and the Emperor were seeking, and it seemed reasonable to assume that the man in the canal had been another. If he had been kept in the prison on starvation rations it was no wonder he was thin.

  I remembered what my master had said to Curling Mist’s boy: “Do I just have to watch those men being killed, one by one, until he chooses to tell me what he wants?” The Bathed Slave had been a message too, of a sort, and I felt a chill as it occurred to me that maybe that original message had concerned me as well. Whoever was responsible for what had happened to the Bathed Slave, it must have been me that he had wanted all along. Whoever it was had the sorcerers in his power. He was behind the attempt to kidnap me, and when I escaped, had killed one of the sorcerers and sent his body to my master as a reminder.

  What had I done that anyone would kidnap, torture, kill, and risk the wrath of the Emperor and his Chief Minister for the sake of it?

  I had no idea, but I knew of someone who certainly wanted something from me: Curling Mist and Nimble, who had abducted me from outside Shining Light’s house. Did this mean the three of them were working together?

  Whatever lingering faith I might have had in the story of Shining Light’s exile died then. Whether his mother had genuinely believed what she had told me I did not know, but in any case I decided I would have to confront her with the truth. Find her son, I thought, and I would find the sorcerers—and the murderer.

  FOUR VULTURE

  1

  When I slipped out of the room with the litters the sky was still a deep blue. Somewhere within the house tortillas would be cooking. I felt a pang of hunger at the thought and found myself sniffing the air. Sure enough, I caught the expected hint of smoke, although it did not smell altogether right. Instead of the wholesome odor of maize dough on a griddle, the air bore an acrid tang that I could not quite identify.

  I reminded myself that I had to get out of here and off to the merchant’s house as quickly as I could. I wanted to look in on Costly, however, and I thought that if Rabbit was still incapacitated then I should be able to sneak across the courtyard our room opened onto, ignoring the women sweeping up imaginary dust with their brooms, and vanish indoors undisturbed for a few moments.

  As I peeped cautiously into the courtyard I realized it was not to be that simple.

  Nobody was sweeping the earth floor, although this was a duty owed to the gods and always done before dawn. I looked quickly up at the sky to see whether it was earlier than I had thought, but it was not. It was as if the women had been told to stay away this morning.

  The burning smell was stronger here. A whiff of it stung the back of my nose, forcing me to suppress a sneeze.

  Rabbit was there, squatting in the middle of the courtyard. He had his back to me, and so I could not tell what state he was in. He was not alone: a second man stood beside him, with his feet braced slightly apart, and, like Rabbit, gazing at the doorway into my room. In the slowly gathering daylight, I noticed a wooden pole slung over his shoulders.

  There was no way I could get past them. Nonetheless I hesitated, looking at the two men while I convinced myself that it was best just to leave quietly. I wondered what they were doing here, and I was curious about that wooden pole.

  I was just about to turn away when I realized what it was they were both watching so avidly.

  Through the doorway into my and Costly’s room, tendrils and then clouds of smoke were coming.

  Without thinking I dashed into the courtyard as the clouds became a billowing gray wall that threatened to hide the doorway altogether. “Hey!” I called out. “There’s someone in there! We’ve got to get him out!”

  The old slave could not walk. Without help he was going to be burned alive, unless he choked to death first. I broke into a run, calling again to the men in front of me: “Come on! Move yourselves! What’s wrong with you?”

  Neither Rabbit nor his neighbor seemed to hear me at first. They seemed intent on the smoke, which had started issuing from the room next door to mine as well. I was almost on top of them before either of them reacted to me. Rabbit tried painfully to get to his feet; the other man whirled.

  “You!” he cried.

  At that moment the smoke caught them both. Costly’s medicine must have weakened Rabbit badly because he suddenly bent double around a fit of agonized retching that left him on his knees. His companion fared a little better, keeping his feet despite the dry cough that suddenly racked him and made him stagger. Then the smoke reached me too, stinging my eyes like a blow and stopping the breath in my throat, before I could gulp any of it into my lungs.

  I staggered blindly to a halt, gasping: “Burning chillies! You bastards!”

  Through the tears I watched the man stumble toward me. He could see less than I could, but he knew my voice. “What are you doing there?” he gasped.

  It was my master’s steward, and the pole he was carrying was a wooden collar, the kind used to stop cheap and unreliable slaves running away from the marketplace.

  Holding on to the slave collar with one hand, he fumbled toward me with the other. I kicked him. He dropped the collar to free his other hand and blundered, still blind, toward me, but I had dodged out of his way. I kicked him again, harder, on the side of the knee as I passed him. He fell over.


  I went for the collar. It was awkward and heavy and not designed as a weapon but it was all either of us had. As the steward tried to get back to his feet, I swung it as hard as I could against the back of his head. He tipped silently over onto his face.

  A noise beside me reminded me of Rabbit. He was trying to rise, supporting himself with one hand while the other batted ineffectually at the curtain of smoke enveloping him. He stared blindly in my direction with eyes that were raw and streaming. When I hit him with the collar, he collapsed next to the steward and lay still.

  The whole fight had been silent. It had not attracted any attention: I glanced swiftly around the courtyard but there was still nobody around.

  I badly needed to breathe. I ducked, trying to get under the waves of smoke, and ran parallel to the wall, away from the direction the fumes were drifting in, until I could stand and fill my lungs without burning them. I took great, whooping breaths, blinking rapidly at the same time to clear my eyes.

  Looking back, I saw that the dense clouds pouring from the two doorways had thinned to a fine haze, with puffs and twisting strands of smoke drifting lazily through it. I hoped the fire was burning itself out, but it made no difference to what I had to do.

  Taking a deep breath and wrapping my cloak around my face, I ran back to my room and plunged into the acrid, searing darkness.

  Involuntarily, I dropped the cloak covering my nose and mouth to rub my streaming eyes. It made them worse. I could not breathe, with or without the cloak. I could not see. I staggered around and tripped over something soft, crashing to the floor and jarring my knee so hard I had to bite my tongue to stop myself from screaming and letting the fumes into my lungs.

  On my hands and knees, I turned around to find out what I had fallen over. It was a body. I hit it roughly, twice. I shook it. I found a fold of skin and pinched it cruelly. There was no sign of life.

  Disoriented, I could only blunder about before the air in my lungs ran out and I either escaped, passed out or started to choke. I rammed the wall with my head. Exploring it with my hands, I found something unexpected: a hole, just over a hand’s width across, at floor level. I thrust my fingers through it incautiously, snatching them back as soon as they met the fierce heat of the fire.