Simon Levack - The Demon of the Air

The next voice he heard was Lion’s. “If you won’t do it for the Chief Minister,” he growled, “then you can do it for me. I’m the Guardian of the Waterfront. Either you do what you’re told or I’ll cut your legs off!”

The man slumped miserably in the bottom of his boat. “All right. Tell me where you want to go, but you’ll need another boat-this is a one-man job.”

“Fine.” My master lurched into the canoe and installed himself in the bow. “Lily can come with us, she doesn’t weigh much. Bring the torch.”

“We’d better get in the next boat,” I said, as Handy gave the woman the torch.

“It’s empty,” protested Lion. I raced along the line of moored canoes until I found one with a boatman in it, but the man was fast asleep and snoring resoundingly.

“Hurry up!” cried my master, as Lily settled herself in his boat. His boatman, probably eager to put some distance between himself and my brother, pushed off from the jetty immediately.

I ran back to join Handy and Lion.

“They’re getting away!” My brother’s tone was anguished. “We’ll never rouse another boatman in time to catch them up.”

“Then we’ll have to do without,” I said. “We’ll take this one. Handy, you can paddle a canoe, can’t you?”

Once we had cleared the last of the canals and reached the open water of the lake we turned left, following the glint of torchlight in front of us until the Chief Minister, Lily and their boatman reached the causeway. There they stopped.

As we drew alongside it became plain that something had got them excited. We could hear raised voices and see the boatman’s paddle waving uncertainly in the air as he tried to make his point.

“What’s up?” Lion called out.

Lily answered. “This man thinks he knows the boat we’re looking for!”

“If it’s the boat with the birds,” the boatman replied, “then everyone on the water knows it. Anyone could have told you, if you’d asked, and they’d have told you to give it a wide berth, too! I’m not going anywhere near it. There’s no telling what would happen!”

“I can tell you exactly what will happen if you don’t go on,” my master snapped. “What are you afraid of, anyway?”

In a low voice, the man said: “Sorcery.”

“Aha!” cried his Lordship triumphantly. “We’ve found them!”

“What do you mean by sorcery?” I asked.

“There are sorcerers on that boat. You can tell, because they can change themselves into birds and fly away. I haven’t seen it myself, but I know people who have. And why isn’t it moored near the city, instead of tucked away in a creek by itself? And strange sounds have been heard from it-horrible sounds, like men screaming.”

Lily sat impassively, holding the torch up unwaveringly as she listened.

“How do you know the birds are sorcerers?” I asked. “How do you know they aren’t just birds?”

“They talk,” the boatman said in a hushed voice.

The surface of the lake was like polished obsidian, the stars’ reflections, broken by ripples, as enigmatic as the shadows that would rise and fall in an obsidian mirror.

There were no voices or footsteps on the causeway and no paddles except ours broke the water around us.

The light from Lily’s torch fell on the raised side of the causeway, throwing into relief the stones set into the wall. Since we had caught up with His Lordship’s party, his boatman had been less eager than ever and Handy had no difficulty keeping up with him.

“You’re on the wrong side of the causeway, for a start,” the boatman had pointed out sulkily.

“That’s all right,” my master had responded blithely. “The bridges are all raised at night. We’ll pass through at the last one. We’d better cut across the lake and head straight for your creek after that. I’ve no intention of explaining myself to the warriors in the guard post at the end of the causeway.”

“Suppose we find Young Warrior’s boat,” I had said, thinking it was high time somebody asked an obvious question, “what do you propose to do then?”

“We’ll make him come quietly, or we’ll kill him. The boy too.”

“No!” My cry of protest had burst out of me before I had time to think about it. To the five shocked faces that turned toward me, I had explained: “You can’t just murder the lad out of hand. You don’t know what he’s done-maybe he couldn’t help it, maybe his fatherforced him into it!” I had turned to my brother for support. “The sorcerers-what about the sorcerers?”

The torchlight had thrown Lion’s face into sharp relief, casting deep shadows that made it look like a bare skull and about as easy to read. His eyes had glittered like jewels in the flickering light as he looked from my master to me. “We’ll take the sorcerers-the ones that are left-and put them back where they belong: in prison. That’s right-isn’t it, my Lord? Those were Montezuma’s orders.”

There had been a long, uncomfortable silence then, before my master had finally pronounced: “It all depends on what we find when we get there. I will decide then!”

“And my son?”

Lily had still been holding the torch steady in the Chief Minister’s canoe. Her hand had trembled slightly, shaking loose a few embers that had spiraled slowly into the water.

“It all depends,” my master had repeated gruffly.

Now Lion, Handy and I sat in silence as we watched the causeway slide by and waited for a dark interval to appear, revealing the last bridge and the place where we were to cross to the southern side.

Handy said: “I still don’t understand what Shining Light’s doing on that boat. I thought he was on a trading venture. I saw him leave. He had a canoe full of provisions. It was One Reed, remember, and you thought it was a funny day to be off on a long journey.”

“I suppose the provisions were for Young Warrior, the boy and the sorcerers,” I said.

“Which means,” my brother pointed out, “that whenever the merchant and his boyfriend-or his boyfriend’s father, whatever-had their falling out, it must have been after that, mustn’t it? Shining Light would hardly have delivered himself up as a hostage, complete with his own food supply.”

“So what did they have a row about?” Handy asked.

I hesitated while I tried to imagine what might have been going through the merchant’s mind. “I suppose Shining Light was going to lie low for a while, to keep out of the way of the merchants-not to mention the Chief Minister! He told his mother to pretend he’d gone on a trading venture. Maybe that’s why you were asked to deliver his message to my master, Handy-so that you could attest to the fact that he was off somewhere with a boat full of provisions, asif he was going on a long journey. In fact he wasn’t, but he needed somewhere to hide. The obvious place was Young Warrior’s boat. Maybe being cooped up with that vicious young man for a few days was enough to convince Young Warrior and Nimble that he was more useful as a hostage than a guest. Then again …”

Then again, I realized, what I had just said was nonsense. Lily had told me that Shining Light had not known where Curling Mist’s warehouse was. If that was the truth, then Shining Light could not have delivered himself to Curling Mist-or Young Warrior-willingly or otherwise, because he would not have known where to find him.

If that was the truth.

Lily had no reason to lie to me about that; nor had her father, who had told the same story, accounting for the bare room in their house. But suppose Shining Light had lied to both of them?

As soon as that thought occurred to me, the fabric of the story I had woven together out of the past few days’ events began to unravel. Things that I had seen and heard and all but forgotten about came to mind, and each was like a loose thread pulled away from the cloth until there was nothing left of it but the truth.