Simon Levack - The Demon of the Air

“The Keeper of the House of Darkness told me much the same thing,” he said to no one in particular, “although he was more polite about it. So my esteemed cousin still thinks I have his precious sorcerers! If only I did!” He sighed. “You two may go. Yaotl will remain.”

He said nothing to me while Rabbit and the steward backed out if his presence and hastened away down the steps. He sat in his high-backed reed chair, looking at me the way a man might look at a bowl of stew if he suspected the meat was rotten. I said nothing to him. What would have been the point?

As the silence endured, I reflected on what had just happened to me. I realized that my situation was now more desperate than ever. If I survived whatever punishment my master might have in store for me for running away, it would only be because he still expected me to recover the sorcerers for him. The purpose of the Keeper of the House of Darkness’s visit had obviously been to remind us both that the Emperor himself wanted them back. Even if I could find them, what was I to do then, if his Chief Minister was still intent on keeping them for himself?

A girl appeared at the edge of my vision, carefully stepped around the quivering mess on the floor and passed my master a clay smoking-tube. Its end was already lit, and as he drew deeply on it the room filled with the complex aromas of a rich man’s tobacco-the leaf itself, the resinous scent of liquid amber, bitumen and a hint of vanilla.

When he finally spoke, addressing me through a cloud of fragrant smoke, his voice was calm and steady-neither the bellow of his superficial rages nor the sinister hiss of his deadly ones.

“You must understand that a man in my position simply cannot afford to have his most valuable slave disappear the way you did. I would be a laughingstock. At the very least I am going to have to have you formally admonished, and you know what that means.”

I tried in vain not to stare at him in astonishment, until the smoke caught my eyes and forced me to squeeze them shut.

Formally admonished?

“Oh yes, my Lord,” I said hastily, scarcely able to believe what I had heard. It meant that I would be subjected to a ritual harangue about my shortcomings as a slave before at least two witnesses. This was not a fearsome punishment at all, except that the third time it happened I could be sold, and as a slave known to be habitually recalcitrant I would be bought for only one purpose: as a very cheap gift for the gods. But I had been expecting far worse: the prospect of a savage beating had seemed optimistic.

My joy and relief were quickly tempered by the thought that the old man would not be merciful without reason. I waited fearfully to hear what else he might have in mind.

“Good. Well, now we’ve got that distasteful subject out of the way, I want you to tell me what you’ve been doing since you ran away.”

I told him what I dared. I had been to the ball court in Tlatelolco, seen the boy there and been attacked by Curling Mist. I had been taken to the merchant’s house, and there Curling Mist had attacked me again. I did not say I had gone home to Toltenco. I could not deny having been to Handy’s house, of course, since the steward had found me there, but I explained that to my master the same way I had to his steward, by claiming I had wanted to talk to Handy about Shining Light’s Bathed Slave.

I realized that he probably did not believe I was telling him the whole truth, and that it did not really matter. Each of us was playing a part. He was pretending to be my genial, indulgent master and I was pretending to be his loyal slave. That would last while I kept up the act on my side and he still had a use for me.

He did not interrupt my story. At the end of it he sat in thoughtful silence, watching a perfect smoke ring curling and flattening out as it rose toward the ceiling before slipping like a ghost through a small opening high in the wall.

“Curling Mist,” he murmured at last. “You think he is really an old enemy of yours from your days in the Priest House-what did you say his name was, Young Warrior? And he’s the one who’s trying to use the sorcerers to blackmail me into giving you up to him?”

“My Lord, yes. Hasn’t he been sending you messages, demanding that you hand me over? There was one on the body we found floating in the canal.”

A puzzled frown creased my master’s forehead. “Curling Mist, sending me messages? I don’t think so.” He put the smoking-tube down beside him delicately. “Let me show you something.”

The Chief Minister of the Aztecs got slowly to his feet and made his way over to a small reed chest under the little window. As he bent toward it a shaft of sunlight caught his face, picking out in shadow every line that nearly forty years in office had etched into it.

“Ah! Here it is. I want you to look at this.”

As he lowered himself back onto his seat he held out a single sheet of paper.

“It’s a letter. Why, it’s from Shining Light!”

“Your merchant,” the Chief Minister confirmed. “Read on.”

“It’s been written in some haste, and not by a very practiced hand,” I continued. “But I think it says …” The words died in my throat as I read them.

“Your friend Handy gave it to my steward, on Two Jaguar-the day you visited the prison.”

“That was the day Shining Light was kidnapped-when his mother said he left the city.” I looked at the paper again. “But that doesn’t make sense-not if I read this correctly.”

My master had taken up the smoking-tube again and leaned back in his seat. I watched the lines on his face shift as the muscles under them relaxed, and for the first time in the years I had known him wondered how much pain he was in.

“I took it to mean this,” he said. “‘This is my price for the rest of the sorcerers. Give me Yaotl, and they are yours.’ Do you agree?”

“Yes. But if he’d gone …”

“If he’d gone into exile, as his mother was saying, then I would have had to deliver you to his house, wouldn’t I? Which I duly did, the next day. I assumed his mother would take charge of you in his absence. In the event Curling Mist and his boy obviously tried to handle the thing themselves, and they made a mess of it, since you managed to escape.” He reached for the pipe again. “I have had other messages. The one you found on the corpse out there”-a slight turn of his head indicated the general location of the canal-“was one of them. But you think Curling Mist-or Young Warrior, if that’s who he really is-has the sorcerers, not Shining Light? That would mean the merchant was just carrying messages between me and Young Warrior. How amusing!” There was no laughter in his voice.

“I think their relationship is more complicated than that, my Lord. Shining Light and Young Warrior seem to have been lovers, and now Shining Light is Young Warrior’s prisoner. He has the merchant and his merchandise, as well as your sorcerers.”

“So you said. So where does he live, this Young Warrior?”

“You don’t know?”

“Of course not! What, you think the Chief Minister is going to beseen plucking at the hem of some small-time criminal’s cloak?” In his agitation he waved the smoking-tube about, sending flecks of ash flying from its end. “I have taken great care never to meet the man. It’s bad enough that I have to entertain that boy of his on occasion.”

“But if you are to find the sorcerers …”

“I could simply do what Shining Light or Curling Mist or Young Warrior or whoever has them asks me, and hand you over!”

There was a long silence. I wriggled nervously while the Chief Minister drew comfortably on his pipe. I wondered whether that meant the playacting was now over, and the steward would be told to finish what he had set out to do on the morning of Four Vulture, by trussing me up like a deer and delivering me to Young Warrior.