Simon Levack - The Demon of the Air

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 beenough. 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 ShiningLight’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.

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?”