Simon Levack - The Demon of the Air

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 towardme 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 rammedthe 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 somepoint, 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.”

Noon 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.