Authors: Simon Levack

The Demon of the Air (15 page)

BOOK: The Demon of the Air

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W
hen 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.

The steward had set it in the next room, after poking a hole in the plaster separating it from Costly's and mine. I could imagine him working quickly and quietly so as not to disturb either of us before he had time to get back outside. Rabbit, anxious to keep his dereliction of duty to himself, would have assured the steward that I was still in the room, and the Prick, having decided to take no chances, had tried to smoke me out rather than risk going in after me. I was meant to be driven into the courtyard, coughing and weeping, and yoked securely before I came to my senses.

I wondered whether either the steward or our master had spared Costly a thought.

As I backed away, my heels fetched up against the wicker chest.

I spent the last of my air in a gasp of relief. Knowing where the chest was positioned meant I could find my way out. I got up, grabbed the chest in both hands and stumbled from the room, barely noticing when my shoulder smashed into the edge of the doorway on the way out.

Outside I dropped the chest on the ground and collapsed, panting, on top of it. I could not stay here, I knew, but the need to rest, to gulp down clean, fresh air, was too strong. I lay there, slumped over the chest, until I heard women's voices.

“What's up with these three?”

“Isn't that the steward?”

“What's that funny smell?”

I raised my head reluctantly. There were two of them. They both carried brooms, and were eyeing Rabbit, the steward and me as critically as our fathers might have done if they had found us asleep after daybreak.

“It's Yaotl!” one of them cried. “What happened? Why are you all lying here?”

A quick look at the sky, which was lightening steadily, reminded me I did not have much time. Soon the Sun would be up and the courtyard would be full of people, including my master. At some
point, too, the steward and Rabbit would wake up, since I was sure I had not hit either of them as hard as I should have.

“Aren't you two late?” I mumbled, as I pulled the lid of the chest open and peered inside it. From the top of the Great Pyramid, the bellowing of a conch-shell trumpet warned us that the Sun was up.

“We were here ages ago,” one of the girls protested, “but the steward sent us away. Very rude about it, too, he was.”

“And now here he is, lying in the middle of the courtyard. He'll have to move, I want to sweep that bit.”

“Can't you go around him?” I suggested wearily.

I looked at the contents of the box with a feeling of despair. The few items of value were smoke-damaged beyond hope of repair, but I was past caring about that. They had been Costly's, and he was dead, and I could not even weep for him because I had no tears left and no time now in which to shed them.

There was nothing more I could do for Costly now, but I knew what he would have wanted me to do. He would have wanted me to use the chance he had given me by getting clean away as fast as I could, and then following my plan to catch the killer of the man in the canal, find the sorcerers and get them to the Emperor.

I had to get away, in any event, because my master was clearly more determined than ever to deliver me into Curling Mist and his son's hands. That explained the smoke and the slave collar; they had been his response to the message of the previous evening, the body in the canal with my name on it. Lord Feathered in Black must have instructed his steward to make sure I was handed over in such a state that I could not run away again.

I got up slowly.

“You may as well take this,” I said to the girls, gesturing toward the wicker chest. “Some of it might be salvageable. Anything you can use is yours. We won't be needing it anymore.”

N
oon found me in Pochtlan, contemplating a stone wall at the rear of the merchant's property.

I was not about to announce myself at the gateway. I had a simple message to deliver, but I wanted to make sure it got to the right person: to Shining Light's mother, Lily. The only way to be sure she received it, before either my master sent men to fetch me home or the merchant himself or his allies tried to kidnap me again, was to speak to her face-to-face. I wanted to come upon her without warning, surprise her with what I had to say and get away in time to plan my next move. That meant sneaking up on the household, and the obvious way to do that was to climb over the courtyard wall.

I knew I ought to wait until nightfall before attempting it. On the other hand, while I might just survive getting caught doing this during the day, to do it at night would be a sure way of being taken for a sneak thief. Besides, there was an ash tree growing next door, one of whose stout limbs dipped temptingly within my grasp before reaching across to shade the courtyard of Shining Light's house, and there was no one about.

Seizing my opportunity, I scrambled up onto the limb. Further good luck greeted me on the far side of the wall, much of which was covered with a mature passionflower whose woody stems gave me a soft and silent landing in the courtyard.

It was as I had seen it before, except that there was no old man slumped against the wall. There was no one about. Not even a dog stirred.

I breathed a sigh of relief and stepped across to the nearest doorway. The screen had been pulled away from this one and lay propped against the wall beside it, so that I could walk straight in.

The room was empty.

I cursed myself for an idiot. Of course it was empty: why else had the doorway been left uncovered? I turned to go, but something made me turn back.

There was something odd about this room.

The walls were only half painted. The back of the room, the half farther from the door, was bare, and the division between the two halves was a straight line. Either it had been left that way on purpose or there had been some physical boundary that had been painted up to and that was no longer there.

When I inspected the line closely I could see what had happened. The false wall had been knocked away cleanly and the remains of the plaster swept away, but the traces of it were clear enough.

“So you did hide your wealth here, after all,” I muttered. “I wonder where you put it all?”

“I wish I knew, too,” said a voice from behind me. “But like I told you before, if you want to talk business, you'll have to ask my daughter.”

Fright made me yelp like a dog. I jumped and tottered forward a couple of steps into what had been the hidden part of the room, before regaining my balance and turning to face the old man.

Shining Light's grandfather stood in the doorway. His face was hidden in shadow but his bent frame and the sour smell of sacred wine that clung to the air around him were instantly recognizable.

“What are you doing here?” I asked, absurdly reproachful. “I thought you were all asleep!”

“Had to get up for a piss. Saw you skulking about, thought I'd come and see what you were up to. Besides,” he added, as though the thought had just occurred to him, “shouldn't I be asking you that question, Yaotl? How did you get in?”

Drink and age had not dulled his mind too much, I noted, as he seemed to have no trouble remembering who I was.

“The servant let me in.”

“No he didn't. You climbed that ash tree over the back, didn't you? I ought to have made them cut it down years ago. In summer the kids use it to steal passion fruit off that wall.”

I was still standing in the bare half of the room. “You told me there was no money here,” I said, adopting the reproachful tone again as I looked at the space around me.

“There isn't. There used to be.” Disconcertingly, the old man seemed not to mind being questioned by someone who was on the face of it a burglar. “My grandson took it all away. I gather a friend of his found a better hiding place for it. But as I keep saying, you'll have to ask â¦”

Another voice interrupted his. It was a man's but sounded as querulous as an old woman's. “What's going on? Who're you talking to?”

Kindly glanced sideways at the newcomer and then stepped back to let him see through the doorway. As he did so the sunlight fell on his gnarled face, revealing a lopsided grin.

“It's an old friend of yours, Constant,” he said, as the servant who had let me into the house on my previous visit peered myopically into the room. “Yaotl, the Chief Minister's slave.”

“Yaotl!” The servant jumped back as if I had just stung him. “Him! All right, I'll go and tell the Parish Chief. We'll have him taken away!”

“There's no need.” The old man laid a restraining hand on the servant's arm. “I'm sure Yaotl was just goingâweren't you? I dare say he only wanted a word with Lily.”

“Yes, I do!” I said eagerly.

“Well, you can't have one,” the servant informed me curtly. “She's not here.”

“Where is she, then?” Somehow it had not occurred to me that Shining Light's mother would not be at home, patiently waiting for me to slip over the back wall so that I could deliver my message to her.

“Mind your own business,” rejoined the servant instantly.

“Why do you want to know?” the old man asked mildly.

I hesitated, fearful of saying too much, although it occurred to me afterward that my presence was revealing enough by itself. “I want to tell her something that will interest her.”

“He's lying,” growled Constant.

“Only a bit,” said the old man. “He came here for a reason, and I don't suppose it was to steal our wealth from us. If your master was after money,” he added, looking shrewdly at me, “I imagine he'd just have demanded it.”

“I'm not working for the Chief Minister now,” I said hastily.

“Really?” The old man looked thoughtful. “Well, in the end it's
up to my daughter whether she wants to listen to what you have to say or not. She makes up her own mind about everything else. Oh, shut up!” Kindly directed his last words at the servant before turning back to me. “Try the ball court in Tlatelolco.”

What would a respectable merchant's widow be doing at a ball court? “You mean Lily has gone to pay off her son's gambling debts?”

Or was her motive more sinister than that? I had to face up to the possibility that, whatever Shining Light was up to with Curling Mist and Nimble, his mother was in on it too. If you wanted to arrange a discreet meeting then the ball court, thronging with gamblers, was the obvious place.

The idea of her conspiring with my kidnappers was enough to make me shiver.

“You said your daughter didn't know there were other vices that could seduce a man,” I said bitterly. “I take it she knows all about them now!”

Shadows fell across the old man's face as he looked away.

“Some of them, anyway,” he muttered.

BOOK: The Demon of the Air

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