The Demon of the Air

by Simon Levack

  I threw myself to one side.

  The cloak missed, but as he darted out of its way Shining Light slipped and toppled over me. Obsidian blades buried themselves in the deck beside me with a sound of splintering wood.

  Roaring furiously, Shining Light tore the weapon free and jumped up to face my brother. Lion charged him with just his bare hands. The sword became a blur as it sliced the air between them. It carved flesh from both my brother’s arms, but the blow was mistimed: Lion was too low and too fast and his wounds were shallow. He did not groan or cry out, but as the sword reached the end of its arc, before Shining Light had time to react, he straightened up and delivered a kick to the other man’s stomach that sent him sprawling onto his back, gasping for breath.

  “Got you!” Lion cried joyously as he threw himself on his foe, hands clutching at his hair and twisting it brutally. “You’re mine now! My beloved son!”

  “Lion!” I hauled myself to my feet. “You’re not on a battlefield now! Just fucking kill the bastard!”

  I was too late. Shining Light writhed, twisted, slithered like a live fish out of my brother’s grasp and jerked himself free to the sound of his own hair tearing. He ran toward the shelter, screaming for Nimble.

  Shining Light still had the sword. As he scrambled away it flailed wildly behind him, missing Lion’s face by a finger’s breadth. My brother, thrown off balance, took a moment to get after him, and by the time he did, the merchant was on his feet again and facing us.

  The boy stood by him, holding the paddle in both hands.

  “What now?” I asked.

  “The merchant’s mine,” said my brother. “You take the boy. When I say go—”

  “Wait a moment! They’re still armed!”

  “Come on, Yaotl! Do what he says!” roared Shining Light. “Let’s finish this now!”

  “Stop this!”

  Nimble’s cry was not loud. It was something between a sob and a muffled scream, a noise of distress and desperation that made the rest of us, all three, pause for an uncertain instant, staring at each other as though we had all seen something so momentous it dwarfed our quarrels.

  “I didn’t want this,” the boy gasped. “I didn’t ask you to kill those men. I only wanted to talk to Yaotl, to find out how it was.”

  “I got you out of the marketplace,” said Shining Light.

  “You didn’t get me out of the city! You made me run your errands for you, you made me stay on the boat, you wouldn’t let me go and see him, you wouldn’t—”

  “He’d have taken you away!” the merchant shouted. “I’d have lost you! Didn’t you want what we had—wasn’t that enough?”

  Suddenly I saw how it had been with Shining Light: the years of smothering and pampering by Lily, the urge to be free and what had resulted: the lies and the bizarre parody of a household he and the boy had built, here on the lake. Nimble had depended on him utterly, but there had always been a nagging doubt, the fear that someone would rival him for the lad’s affections.

  When it happened, it made no difference if the rival was the boy’s father.

  “Put the sword down, Shining Light,” I said gently. “I’m not the one you should be afraid of.”

  His head darted left and right, taking in the boy, my brother and me, before alighting for the last time on Nimble’s upturned, troubled face.

  “I’ve lost you, then,” he said desolately.

  Nimble stared at the deck. The paddle slipped from his fingers and clattered onto the planks by his feet. “It can’t be like this,” he mumbled.

  Shining Light did not speak again. He just raised the sword high over his head and charged.

  He ignored my brother. He came for me, his mouth open in a scream of rage and his weapon poised to split my skull. I had no time to move or defend myself. It was Nimble who reacted, throwing himself forward and crashing into Shining Light from behind, knocking him down just as the blades began to fall.

  Lion jumped in from the side, hurling himself at the merchant as he stumbled under the youth’s attack. My brother made sure of the sword this time, snatching the wooden handle with both hands and twisting it as violently as he had earlier twisted his enemy’s hair.

  There was the briefest struggle before Shining Light relinquished the weapon. He did not want it. He wanted me. As my brother reeled backward, caught off guard by the ease with which he had won his prize, Shining Light charged me again, leaving Nimble behind him and slamming his forehead into my freshly broken nose.

  I shrieked in pain. With Shining Light’s weight upon me I fell with a crash that jarred my backbone. The man’s hands were around my throat, throttling me, jerking my head up and down and slamming it against the wood. I felt my feet kicking spasmodically and my hands clutching empty air.

  In my brother’s hands the sword seemed to move so slowly. As it descended, I saw starlight glance off every sliver of obsidian, from the base to the tip. I saw the last blade flash and go dark like a fire being doused, and heard bone splitting as my brother sank the weapon into Shining Light’s skull.

  5

  Even dead, Shining Light kept up his assault, his head butting me violently as my brother tugged at the sword buried in his skull, before dropping onto my shoulder as if from exhaustion when Lion abandoned the weapon.

  My brother turned on Nimble, ready to fight him with his bare hands.

  The youth had not moved, and the paddle still lay where he had dropped it. He stared passively at Lion through pale, unblinking eyes.

  I could hear my brother’s breathing, heavy and rough from the struggle with Shining Light. He was poised in a feline crouch, ready to break Nimble’s neck the moment the lad took a step forward, but Nimble just stood there, waiting for him, saying nothing and acting as if he did not really care what Lion did.

  Dead men are heavy. I had to fight to get the corpse off my chest, shaking my head to get the blood out of my eyes as I rolled it away from me and stood up next to my brother. My head swam with the pain from my twice-broken nose.

  Lion gave me an uncertain glance.

  “What now?” he muttered tensely.

  I looked at Nimble. “How’s it going to be, then, lad?” I asked quietly.

  He said nothing. He kicked listlessly at the paddle, sending it sliding toward me across the spreading slick of blood. I left it.

  “Where are the sorcerers?” Lion asked.

  Nimble spoke for the first time since his lover had died. “Here,” he said shortly.

  “Here? But …”

  I looked around me at the shapeless bundles lying on the deck. We were surrounded by corpses. It was the aftermath of a massacre.

  My brother turned a full circle as he took in the scene, his head snapping from left to right as he counted the bodies. “This isn’t all of them?” He gave a despairing groan. “Who did this? When?”

  “He did.”

  I dropped to my knees beside one of the huddled bodies. I pushed it with the palm of my hand and it turned over, showing flat, pale eyes and white teeth to the stars. It was cold, but not stiff: that had already worn off.

  “He’s been dead for days,” I said, looking up at Nimble. “And the others?”

  “After you got away from him at his house, Shining Light went mad. He came straight back to the boat and killed them all with the sword.”

  “And what were you doing?” snapped my brother.

  “Talking to his mother—I was at the ball court, trying to tell Lily her son wouldn’t be coming home yet. I didn’t know what he was doing. When I got back here he was … they were lying here, all around him, and he was sitting in the middle, grinning and covered with blood.” Suddenly his voice broke. “I swear I didn’t want any of this to happen! I only wanted to know … I only wanted to know about my father, but once Shining Light started this I couldn’t stop it!”

  I stood and faced the weeping youth. “I don’t understand why you had to go through all this just to talk to me. You could have seen me at my mas
ter’s house at any time.”

  “Shining Light said I mustn’t. You might have told your master, or anyone, and then people would have known about us. If we talked to you, he said, we had to have you in our power. And besides, he—Shining Light—he was enjoying himself! I didn’t see it until it was too late, but he enjoyed making a fool of your master. He thought it was funny, when he had the idea of making him send you to watch that peasant die at the Festival of the Raising of Banners, so you’d be implicated in what happened.”

  “So Kindly was right,” I said, half to myself. “He thought his grandson and Curling Mist had dreamed it all up as a joke. Couldn’t you have stopped it?”

  “I didn’t know he was going to do it—I thought at the time he was joking. It wasn’t until he saw me afterward, and made me go to your master and tell him what had happened, that I realized what he’d done.” Nimble groaned, a tormented sound. “He hurt those men, the sorcerers. He tortured them to make them tell him what they’d told the Emperor, even though they obviously had nothing to tell—you could tell they weren’t real sorcerers at all, just peasants who knew a few conjuring tricks. But Shining Light didn’t really care—he just wanted to hear them scream.”

  “He was your lover,” I said.

  “He saved me! He bought me out of the marketplace. He didn’t make me go back there! He was kind. Do you know what it’s like, never knowing kindness, never being loved for your own sake?” He looked me straight in the eye then. “I’d no father or mother. I’d been bought and sold so many times, I’d lost count. So much money has been paid for me, but before Shining Light no one ever treated me as if I was worth so much as a cocoa bean.”

  “What do you mean, you had no father?” my brother asked harshly. “What about Young Warrior?”

  “Young Warrior wasn’t my father.”

  “You can’t know that!” I cried.

  “Yes I can—he and Maize Flower never made love. He wanted to—but he wasn’t like you. He couldn’t: his vows to the gods stopped him, and he’d mutilated himself too much, offering blood. I know, I saw what he did. They just used to talk, and hold each other. That’s all some men want, some of the time,” he added, as one who knew.

  “In the end you were the only one she’d give herself to, Yaotl. I’m your son.”

  To hear it said was to hear and see so much misery: a woman I barely recalled, dying with my name on her lips; the child we had made, abandoned among savages when his only friend and protector was killed and eaten in the name of foreign gods; the young man passed from one pair of rough filthy hands to another; the mother who could not stop loving her only child, though she knew he was a monster; the madman tormented by a kind of jealousy I could scarcely begin to understand. I put my hands over my ears, then over my eyes, as if they could shut them all out.

  I barely heard my brother asking why Young Warrior had treated Nimble as his own.

  “For my mother’s sake. He was devoted to her. He made a promise, to return me to my father—he made me promise, too.”

  And all that misery to be laid at my feet. I could see now why Maize Flower had been wrong, and why the gods were stronger than us, after all. They could see the ends of things. If I had known what it would lead to, I would not have left her. I might have died, but I would not have felt like this.

  “Nimble,” I heard myself say huskily, “I’m sorry.”

  “So am I.”

  In my arms he was not the muscular youth I had seen on the boat and at the ball court. He was a child, trembling and weeping for everything we had both lost.

  “You’ll both be more than sorry in a moment,” my brother growled. “Look over there.”

  In the darkness it was hard to see what he was looking at, until a pale flash of spray showed where a paddle had been dipped in the water.

  The curses that reached us faintly across the water might have come out of any canoe on the lake, but the voice uttering them was not male.

  “Your master and Lily,” said Nimble. “And she’s paddling.”

  “Their boatman must have escaped,” my brother said, “and good luck to him! But they’ll be here soon.” He looked speculatively at Nimble and then at me. “So what are we going to do? I have to get you back to Montezuma.”

  “You can’t!” I cried. “Montezuma would kill him! He was holding his sorcerers prisoner, remember? And if Montezuma didn’t kill him then old Black Feathers would.”

  “But …”

  “And besides, he’s your nephew! Remember what Mother said?”

  My brother opened his mouth to reply and then shut it again. That was unanswerable. An Aztec would raise his brother’s children as his own, if his brother died. His nephew was his own flesh and blood.

  He looked across the water again.

  “I don’t know what to do,” he confessed. “If we get Nimble back to the Emperor, it will be the end of old Black Feathers, won’t it? On the other hand …”

  “On the other hand, how are you going to do it? Our canoe’s sunk and my master’s got the only boat—unless you’re planning to paddle this enormous thing all the way back to the city!”

  “I’ve got a canoe,” said Nimble. “It’s the one we took you in, when we abducted you.”

  My brother stepped over to the side of the boat opposite where we had crashed into it. He looked down into the water for a long moment.

  “Take it, then,” he said shortly.

  Nimble looked helplessly at me. “But …”

  “Yaotl’s right,” snapped Lion. “If you’re found, you’ll be killed. Get in this canoe and paddle for dear life!”

  “I don’t want to leave you!” cried the boy.

  “I know, son.” I had to force the words out past an obstruction in my throat. “It’s the only way—go on!”

  Nimble hesitated. He reached out and touched my arm, and then he did the same to Lion. My brother flinched and said nothing.

  The young man gave Shining Light’s body one last lingering glance, and what passed through his mind at that moment I could not begin to guess.

  Then he was gone.

  “They’ve stopped,” Lion observed.

  The splashing had ceased. I could just make out the vague shapes of Lily and my master in their boat, apparently drifting.

  “Can’t hear what they’re saying … What’s that?”

  To the voices drifting across the lake from the canoe a third had been added. It seemed to come from nearby, from the surface of the lake itself. Following it with my eyes I saw, silhouetted against the starlit ripples, a dark round shape: someone’s head.

  “It’s Handy! Lily’s stopped to pick him up!”

  “I bet your master’s not happy about that,” Lion said sardonically, “but it gives us a breathing space. What do we tell them when they get here?”

  I thought quickly. “My master will want to send men out looking for Nimble. They won’t begin until the morning, of course, so he’ll have a good start on them, but it will be better if we can slow them down by making them think they’re looking for two men instead of one. So we tell them this: after knocking Handy in the water, the boy bested you and broke my nose with his paddle. Then Young Warrior killed Shining Light with the sword and they got clean away.”

  “You think your master will believe that?”

  “Why shouldn’t he? The sorcerers are dead. He’ll be happy with that—they can’t implicate him now, so as far as the Emperor is concerned he’s safe. Montezuma won’t be pleased, but he’ll get the sorcerers back—and a dead sorcerer is much less frightening than a live one, especially a live one who’s gone missing. And besides,” I added ruefully, “I don’t want to be the one to have to tell Lily what happened to her boy—do you? Let her go on thinking Young Warrior was here, after all. We can tell her her son tried to do something—he fought, he had a Flowery Death, whatever.”

  “It beats me how you knew who he really was. I still thought we were after Young Warrior.”

  “So did
I, until tonight. But when Handy reminded me about seeing Shining Light in his canoe, I realized that the story of his being held hostage didn’t add up.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “I just remembered what I’d said to Lily earlier—you know, about how nobody had ever set eyes on Curling Mist? Not even my master, who had regular dealings with him. All we knew about him was that he took bets—but never in person, always through the boy—and had some sort of mysterious hold over Shining Light which led to the merchant’s moving all his family’s stock into his secret warehouse. That never really made sense—but once I thought the warehouse might really be Shining Light’s own and he and Young Warrior were the same man I could see there was no mystery at all.

  “Then there were other things. My master was amazed when I told him Young Warrior had his sorcerers—because he thought Shining Light had them! We convinced ourselves Shining Light must be acting as Young Warrior’s go-between, but in fact my master had been right all along, and the messages he thought were from Shining Light—well, they really were from the merchant.”

  I was talking to myself, reproaching myself aloud with all the reasons why I should have worked out the truth days ago. “I saw Shining Light—in disguise, of course—at the marketplace, on the day I was attacked. I thought it was a coincidence, but it wasn’t—he was looking at his own family’s feathers, only I didn’t realize that until Kindly told me about them at the banquet. Then there’s the fact that he killed Constant. It wasn’t because the servant was in his way. He could just have pushed him aside, but Constant was the one member of Shining Light’s household who had seen him up close in his disguise. Shining Light knew he was probably too shortsighted to see through it, but he wanted to make sure.” I sighed. “His grandfather told me what he was like. He thought he and Curling Mist had a lot in common. It didn’t occur to us that they had everything in common!”

  “So you worked out that Shining Light faked his own kidnapping? That’s amazing. Mind you,” Lion added, in what for him was a thoughtful tone, “you were bound to find out who he was eventually—he’d have wanted you to know before he killed you. It’s strange—even I never hated you that much!”