Simon Levack - The Demon of the Air

Handy cocked his head to one side for a moment, listening.

“It’s Snake,” he announced. “Why’s he making such a row?” He stood up and took a step toward the doorway. “Who’s he arguing with … Oh, shit!”

My brother was on his feet too, running for the women’s room. “Star! Quick, the maize bin!”

I was left alone with my head darting about like a turkey’s, looking for somewhere to run or hide. I thought briefly about the bathhouse, but I was too late to reach it in time and it would have been too obvious a hiding place anyway.

“Handy!” called a voice I knew only too well. “Congratulations! You’ve caught our runaway!”

I let my arms go limp at my sides as I watched an old adversary striding through the entrance to the courtyard toward me, with Snake plodding disconsolately at his heels.

It was my master’s steward.

Ilet the steward drive me out of the courtyard like a stray dog, submitting meekly to the blows falling on my shoulders and back. He was so pleased with himself for having caught me that he did not stop for whatever business had brought him to the house.

“That canoe there. Go on, move!” He propelled me toward the canal beside the house with a vicious shove. Floating there was the canoe he had obviously come in, a little two-man craft with a boatman in the stern. He looked up in alarm when he realized that he had a second passenger. Then he recognized me and his expression changed, first to wide-eyed amazement and then to a broad grin of pure joy.

My heart sank. The boatman was none other than Rabbit, my master’s litter bearer, the man Costly had fooled into taking his medicine while he was supposed to be watching me and whom I had last seen sprawled on the ground after I had hit him with a slave collar.

“In!” the steward roared from a hand’s breadth behind me.

He kicked me as I was stepping into the boat. I had one foot on the bank and one in the bottom of the canoe and his foot swung up between my legs. Pain exploded in my groin and shot up into my guts, driving the breath out of me in a high-pitched whistle. I crashed into the bottom of the boat, rocking it violently and sending spouts of water over the sides.

“You’ve got worse than that to come,” the Prick assured me.

Rabbit gripped the boat’s sides to steady himself. “I haven’t got room for both of you!”

“Oh yes you have,” the steward growled as he stepped over me into the canoe’s bow “Yaotl won’t take up much room lying there like that. If he’s any trouble, we can always chuck him overboard!”

“Where are you taking me?” I gasped.

“Why, home, of course. Lord Feathered in Black will be so glad to have you back. He’s missed you!”

“Pleased to hear it,” I croaked. There was one thing I urgently had to tell the steward, and then I did not care if I never spoke to him again. “Listen, you must want to know what I was doing at Handy’s house.”

“Oh, all in good time. Don’t spoil things by telling me everything at once, Yaoti-I’m looking forward to beating it out of you!”

“I’m still looking for the prisoners-the ones the Emperor and our master told me to find,” I said carefully. “The man Shining Light offered to the war-god at the Festival of the Raising of Banners, he was one of them. His Lordship knows this. I wanted to find out if Handy remembered anything about him.” At all costs I must not give the steward or my master any reason to go back to the commoner’s house, at least until Lion and Storm were safely out of the way.

“That’s very interesting,” the steward said insincerely.

“He didn’t know anything. In fact he didn’t want to speak to me at all.”

“Well, you can tell it all to Lord Feathered in Black. I’ll be sure not to cut your tongue out until afterward!”

The rest of the journey to my master’s house was uneventful. The steward taunted me but I ignored him. For all his bluster, I knew no words of his could hurt me. It was what my master might choose to do and say that I had to worry about, and I distracted myself from his steward’s infantile threats by trying to master my fear of what was to come. I kept telling myself that Lord Feathered in Black could do nothing more than admonish me, that that was the law, but the image of those charred bones at Coyoacan kept forcing itself into my mind. Had the woman and children thought they were safe before the soldiers came?

As the Chief Minister’s residence came into view, I noticed a small party standing at the foot of the stairway leading to my master’s apartments. Most of them were warriors, but my heart skipped a beat when I saw the man in their midst, whose escort they plainly were. For an instant I thought he was my brother, from his clothes, his hair and his demeanor, but then I remembered that I had left Lion at Handy’s house, and at the same time I noticed that the ribbons in his hair were red rather than white. He was the Keeper of the House of Darkness: another of the Constables, and one of the advisers who had attended Montezuma when I had been summoned before the Emperor.

He his eyes tracked us as Rabbit brought the canoe to the side of the canal, and as we scrambled ashore, each of us throwing ourselves at the man’s feet with a cry of “My Lord …”

“Enough!” he snapped, and our obeisances ended abruptly. For a moment there was silence. I looked up from the floor, puzzled, wondering why he was standing there wasting time on us rather than getting on with whatever business had brought him to the Chief Minister’s house.

His eyes met mine. “Well, Yaotl?” he barked suddenly. “Your master told me you were missing, but I assume you have been looking for the sorcerers, as the Emperor ordered?”

“Er … Yes, my Lord …”

“So where are they?”

I swallowed, but could not find any words.

“The Emperor is getting impatient. The sorcerers, Yaotl. You were told to bring them to him. Where are they?”

The Steward spoke then. “My Lord, Lord Feathered in Black is on the track of them,” he announced, “and his slave here …”

“Shut up.”

I struggled to come up with an answer that was close enough to the truth to be convincing but not so close that the Emperor would conclude I had let him down. “M-my Lord,” I stammered, “I’m very close to them. A man named Curling Mist has them, in a merchant’s warehouse.”

“Where is this warehouse?”

“That’s the one thing I can’t tell you yet, my Lord … But I’m close to it, very close …”

The man leaned toward me, until his face was so near mine I could see little bubbles of spittle at the side of his mouth, popping in time with his words. “‘Very close,’ eh?” He stood up and half turned to glance up the steps behind him, toward where my master must be waiting for me. “How much closer will you be when you get up there, I wonder?”

“I won’t tell Lord Feathered in Black any more than I’ve told you, my Lord! I can’t! It’s all I know!”

“So you say.” He looked at each of his escorting warriors in turn, and they looked back at him, as if expecting an order. I tensed, wondering just how impatient Montezuma was-impatient enough to have told the Keeper of the House of Darkness to end it all here, on my own master’s threshhold?

“We go back to the palace,” he told his guards. As they fell in he turned back to me.

“Consider this your last warning, slave. The Emperor is relying on you. You will find those men, and bring them to Lord Montezuma, or your life will be forfeit!”

Rabbit and the steward frogmarched me up the steps and dumped me unceremoniously at my master’s feet.

Lord Feathered in Black listened in silence to his steward’s account of the encounter at the foot of his stairway.