Simon Levack - The Demon of the Air

“You can’t!” I cried. “Montezuma would kill him! He was holding his sorcerers prisoner, remember? And if Montezuma didn’t kill him then old Black Feathers would.”

“But …”

“And besides, he’s your nephew! Remember what Mother said?”

My brother opened his mouth to reply and then shut it again. That was unanswerable. An Aztec would raise his brother’s children as his own, if his brother died. His nephew was his own flesh and blood.

He looked across the water again.

“I don’t know what to do,” he confessed. “If we get Nimble back to the Emperor, it will be the end of old Black Feathers, won’t it? On the other hand …”

“On the other hand, how are you going to do it? Our canoe’s sunk and my master’s got the only boat-unless you’re planning to paddle this enormous thing all the way back to the city!”

“I’ve got a canoe,” said Nimble. “It’s the one we took you in, when we abducted you.”

My brother stepped over to the side of the boat opposite where we had crashed into it. He looked down into the water for a long moment.

“Take it, then,” he said shortly.

Nimble looked helplessly at me. “But …”

“Yaotl’s right,” snapped Lion. “If you’re found, you’ll be killed. Get in this canoe and paddle for dear life!”

“I don’t want to leave you!” cried the boy.

“I know, son.” I had to force the words out past an obstruction in my throat. “It’s the only way-go on!”

Nimble hesitated. He reached out and touched my arm, and then he did the same to Lion. My brother flinched and said nothing.

The young man gave Shining Light’s body one last lingering glance, and what passed through his mind at that moment I could not begin to guess.

Then he was gone.

“They’ve stopped,” Lion observed.

The splashing had ceased. I could just make out the vague shapes of Lily and my master in their boat, apparently drifting.

“Can’t hear what they’re saying … What’s that?”

To the voices drifting across the lake from the canoe a third had been added. It seemed to come from nearby, from the surface of the lake itself. Following it with my eyes I saw, silhouetted against the starlit ripples, a dark round shape: someone’s head.

“It’s Handy! Lily’s stopped to pick him up!”

“I bet your master’s not happy about that,” Lion said sardonically, “but it gives us a breathing space. What do we tell them when they get here?”

I thought quickly. “My master will want to send men out looking for Nimble. They won’t begin until the morning, of course, so he’ll have a good start on them, but it will be better if we can slow them down by making them think they’re looking for two men instead of one. So we tell them this: after knocking Handy in the water, the boy bested you and broke my nose with his paddle. Then Young Warrior killed Shining Light with the sword and they got clean away.”

“You think your master will believe that?”

“Why shouldn’t he? The sorcerers are dead. He’ll be happy with that-they can’t implicate him now, so as far as the Emperor is concerned he’s safe. Montezuma won’t be pleased, but he’ll get the sorcerers back-and a dead sorcerer is much less frightening than a live one, especially a live one who’s gone missing. And besides,” I added ruefully, “I don’t want to be the one to have to tell Lily what happened to her boy-do you? Let her go on thinking Young Warrior was here, after all. We can tell her her son tried to do something-he fought, he had a Flowery Death, whatever.”

“It beats me how you knew who he really was. I still thought we were after Young Warrior.”

“So did I, until tonight. But when Handy reminded me about seeing Shining Light in his canoe, I realized that the story of his being held hostage didn’t add up.”

“How do you mean?”

“I just remembered what I’d said to Lily earlier-you know, about how nobody had ever set eyes on Curling Mist? Not even my master,who had regular dealings with him. All we knew about him was that he took bets-but never in person, always through the boy-and had some sort of mysterious hold over Shining Light which led to the merchant’s moving all his family’s stock into his secret warehouse. That never really made sense-but once I thought the warehouse might really be Shining Light’s own and he and Young Warrior were the same man I could see there was no mystery at all.

“Then there were other things. My master was amazed when I told him Young Warrior had his sorcerers-because he thought Shining Light had them! We convinced ourselves Shining Light must be acting as Young Warrior’s go-between, but in fact my master had been right all along, and the messages he thought were from Shining Light-well, they really were from the merchant.”

I was talking to myself, reproaching myself aloud with all the reasons why I should have worked out the truth days ago. “I saw Shining Light-in disguise, of course-at the marketplace, on the day I was attacked. I thought it was a coincidence, but it wasn’t-he was looking at his own family’s feathers, only I didn’t realize that until Kindly told me about them at the banquet. Then there’s the fact that he killed Constant. It wasn’t because the servant was in his way. He could just have pushed him aside, but Constant was the one member of Shining Light’s household who had seen him up close in his disguise. Shining Light knew he was probably too shortsighted to see through it, but he wanted to make sure.” I sighed. “His grandfather told me what he was like. He thought he and Curling Mist had a lot in common. It didn’t occur to us that they had everything in common!”

“So you worked out that Shining Light faked his own kidnapping? That’s amazing. Mind you,” Lion added, in what for him was a thoughtful tone, “you were bound to find out who he was eventually-he’d have wanted you to know before he killed you. It’s strange-even I never hated you that much!”

“Hate? I don’t know, Lion. He might have said it was love. His mother told me once he had so much love in him. Maybe he had too much love for Nimble, maybe that was his trouble.”

My brother gave a noncommittal grunt. “I’m not sure that’s the word I’d use for it.”

The splashing had resumed, in a firm, steady rhythm that told us Handy had taken over the paddle. We both looked at the approachingcanoe and its occupants: the sturdy commoner, the vile old man scowling in the stern, and between them the pale face of the woman. She was too far away for me to see her expression, but I could imagine it: the tight-lipped, impassive, distant look she had worn when we had first met.

“He’s going to get away with it, isn’t he?” My brother had eyes only for my master, and his voice was full of venom.

I did not reply. I was not much interested in the Chief Minister; tomorrow would be a good time to worry about him. It was the woman I was looking at, her pale features exaggerated and made angular by the night’s deep shadows, as the boat brought her closer to us. What was going through her mind?

We had each lost a son. Was it worse, I wondered, to bring your child up, nurture him, love him for his faults and virtues and see him dead at your feet, or to find a child you had never known you had, only to lose him again that same night?

I barely noticed the thump as the canoe came to rest against the great boat’s side. Handy scrambled aboard with a rope, and he had to greet me twice before I answered him.

All I could see or hear then was my son, out there somewhere, running for his life.

The murderer is cruel, a dog at heart-a dog indeed. He is a hater of people, a troublemaker, a killer, a spy, a tempter. Daring, he is rash, brutal, disorderly. He bears false witness; he accuses people; he hates, slanders, calumniates, libels them. He strikes, he charges at them; he kills, he leaves his mark on them. He is a demon of the air-a demon. He sheds blood.