The Demon of the Air (14 page)

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Authors: Simon Levack

BOOK: The Demon of the Air
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“Y
ou get in there and stay put,” the steward snarled as he shoved me through the doorway. “I've got to talk to Rabbit.”
Rabbit was a large, dim man who had been in my master's household since boyhood and had risen eventually to the menial position of litter bearer. He had had the misfortune to cross our path as the steward was dragging me back to my room, and had been ordered to come with us. The steward had no intention of spending the rest of a winter's night huddled in the open courtyard watching my doorway, and thought poor old Rabbit would be the ideal deputy.
I slumped against the wall in a corner of my room, with all thought of sleep gone. I had come home that evening with my mind in turmoil.
Why had a message bearing my name been left on the body? Did it have something to do with the sorcerers? I felt that it must, but could not see what.
There had been something about the dead man himself—but I would have to see his body again to be certain, and I could hardly do that, I told myself gloomily, while I was confined to my room.
And I suspected that by the time they came to let me out of here it would be too late.
 
“So what have you done this time? And what's Rabbit doing out there?”
On any other night I would have dreaded the sound of Costly's voice, but tonight it was a relief to hear he was awake. It gave me a chance to share my troubles instead of brooding on them. The old slave lived for gossip and devoured every word eagerly.
As soon as I had finished he said astutely: “So let me guess. You think the body in the canal might be one of those sorcerers the old man's so anxious to get his hands on, is that right?”
“It could be,” I said. “I'd need to look at it again—and that still wouldn't tell me why it had my name on it.” I growled in frustration. “But I can't do anything about it from in here, can I? How do I get past Rabbit?” I could picture the litter bearer on guard opposite our doorway, no doubt wishing he was curled up on his own sleeping mat rather than squatting in this chilly courtyard, but wide-awake nonetheless and not about to let his master down.
“Rabbit?” the old man scoffed. “I've known him since he was a boy. You leave him to me. Let's just get him in here, shall we?” Before I could react he had raised his voice to a loud croak and was calling the litter bearer's name.
A suspicious-looking face appeared in the doorway. “What do you want?”
“I don't want anything,” responded Costly cheerfully. “We just thought you might be more comfortable in here with us than freezing your balls off out there in the courtyard!”
Rabbit scowled. “What's it to you if I would?”
“Oh, come on.” Costly put on an air of hurt innocence. “We all know it's nothing personal between you and Yaotl.” That was true enough: I had never thought of the litter bearer as anything other than an amiable buffoon. “You just had the bad luck to get picked on by the steward. But if you're going to keep an eye on Yaotl, you might as well do it in comfort from where you can see him, don't you think?”
The face in the doorway took on a puzzled frown as Rabbit tried to work out what Costly was after. “I'm not sure …” he began.
“So where's the harm? Besides,” the old slave added, lowering his voice mischievously, “I'm fed up with hearing Yaotl's problems. You could tell me yours, for a change. Say, how are things between you and the wife now?”
This appeared to have a disastrous effect. It was followed by the briefest of pauses and then the single word “Fine,” and Rabbit's head vanished.
“You idiot!” I hissed, but Costly seemed unperturbed. “So the old trouble hasn't come back, then?” he called out after the other man.
A moment later Rabbit was back. He took two steps into the room and growled at Costly: “No, it hasn't! And I'll thank you not to mention it in front of him!”
The old slave cackled lewdly. “Oh, don't worry about Yaotl. He used to be a priest, and you know they never do it at all—he hasn't the faintest idea what we're talking about!” I kept silent. “Still, I'm glad to hear everything's working properly now. It's funny, though: I was thinking about you just the other day, and remembering when I had the same trouble myself. I had to go to a curer for some medicine …”
“Did it work?” The eagerness in the litter bearer's voice told its own story.
“Work? It was like walking around with a lump of hardwood between my legs! I never even had to use it all. Probably still got some, somewhere.”
I could not believe even Rabbit was stupid enough to fall for a simple ruse like this, but he was obviously desperate. “I don't suppose it still works, though,” he said nonchalantly.
“Oh, I should think it's gone off by now,” the old slave agreed. “And it probably never would have worked in the first place unless you invoked the right gods when you took it. It wouldn't be much
use to me now, anyway! But if you had still been having problems—well, I'm just glad to hear you aren't.”
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.
I
t 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 the 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.

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