The Demon of the Air

ONE REED
1

I did not want to go to the prison, but since I seemed to have no choice, I steeled myself to visit it.

Rainwater had pooled on the flat roof and dripped into the wooden cages that lined the walls. The rushes strewn on the floor had absorbed all the moisture they could and now floated uselessly in shallow puddles. The floor was crisscrossed by thin streams of liquid stained with filth from the overflowing pots the prisoners were given to relieve themselves in. The only light came through tiny apertures set high in the walls: not enough to show you where you were putting your feet, but enough to reveal the misery on the faces of the prison’s handful of desperate inmates.

Each prisoner huddled naked on the floor of his cage. There was a sameness about them, each one alone, unable or unwilling to speak to his neighbors, surrounded by the smell of his own and others’ ordure-reduced to everything an Aztec was not.

“They’re drunks, mostly.” The Emperor’s majordomo dismissed most of the wretches in his care with a single word. “Don’t feel too sorry for them, they’ve only themselves to blame. And these are the worst offenders-the ones their own parishes couldn’t handle. Still, you’d know all this, wouldn’t you?”

“What do you mean?”

My tone must have been too sharp, as he gave me a curious look. “I thought you were Lord Feathered in Black’s man. He is the Chief Justice, isn’t he, after all?”

“Oh … yes, yes, of course …”

“We had some more interesting characters,” the major-domo went on. “But you know all about the sorcerers, of course.”

“The men who escaped? They really were sorcerers, then?” I asked innocently.

“They must have been, to get out of this place. Turned themselves into birds and flew out through the windows.”

Having seen the windows, I thought nothing much bigger than a hummingbird could have got through any of them, but I kept this to myself.

“That’s what I came to talk to you about,” I said. “Lord Montezuma wanted me to see where the sorcerers had got away from, so that I could see what manner of men we are dealing with. He would want me to eliminate all the mundane explanations first, though.”

“Lord Montezuma?” He sounded surprised, and when he stared at me his eyes were pale discs in the prison’s gloom. “The Emperor sent you? But I thought you said you were the Chief Minister’s man?”

“The Emperor asked the Chief Minister to find out what happened,” I explained, “and then he asked me.”

“He asked you himself?”

“Yes.”

The man looked at his feet. His toes turned over some rushes. I wondered why he seemed to be prevaricating; after all, I could hardly be the first person to ask him these questions. What difference did it make who had sent me? To encourage him, I added, “And so when I ask you a question, it’s as if Lord Montezuma were asking it, except I personally don’t have the power to have you dismembered if you don’t tell me what I want to know. Now, are you going to answer me, or do I have to tell the Emperor you won’t cooperate?”

The majordomo let out a theatrical sigh. “All right. I suppose it can’t hurt if I run through the whole story from the beginning. These men-they’d been rounded up from all over the place, fingered by the headmen of their villages, I think, and brought in by order of the Emperor. He interrogated them personally.”

“What about?”

“What do you think?” The man lowered his voice to an awed whisper. “The omens! It sounded to me as if the Emperor was afraid of some huge disaster, and just wanted some sorcerers to look into the future and give him a straight answer about it. That’s why he had them rounded up, I think, so that he could consult them without thewhole city knowing what they were talking about. He was asking them whether they’d had any visions.”

“And had they?”

“Of course not! If they had been able to predict the sort of catastrophe the Emperor had in mind they would have been fools to own up to it. How do you tell an emperor his realm is about to perish? They just kept saying they’d seen nothing. In the end Montezuma ran out of patience, had them thrown in here and sent me along the next day to question them.”

“What did you find out?”

“Nothing! All they’d tell me was that whatever was going to happen would happen and that a great mystery would come to pass-not exactly helpful. Montezuma was so angry that he kept them in here on starvation rations and then sent me back to interrogate them again. But that was when …”

The majordomo licked his lips. His voice seemed to have dried up and he had to clear his throat before continuing.

“We had a double guard on the place, because the Emperor was so troubled about these men. The guards were all men I’d known for years, men I’d trust with my children’s lives, and none of them saw a thing. They’d all gone-flown away like … well, like bloody birds!”

“How did you explain that to the Emperor?”

“How do you think? I had to go and tell him his most important prisoners, the ones he’d taken a particular interest in, had vanished into thin air. What would you have done?”

“I suppose I would have either run very far away or groveled a lot.”

“Yes, well, I just told him he might as well have me cut to pieces there and then, because there was no sign of his prisoners and none of my guards had seen or heard a thing. I thought I was a dead man. He’s had people disemboweled and their wives and children strangled for less, but I got away with it somehow.” He paused thoughtfully. “It’s not as if he wasn’t angry, mind you. If he ever catches those men, he’s going to make them suffer-and anyone else who gets the blame for their disappearance. But I was lucky. It never seemed to occur to him that it might be my fault-not that it was, of course!”

I eyed him skeptically. “So what did the Emperor think had happened?”

“That they’d used magic to escape, of course.”

So the Emperor had done as any Aztec would in his position. If you needed the favor of the gods, you might go to a priest, but sometimes that was not enough. Perhaps the war-god and the rain-god at the summits of their pyramids seemed too remote from the affairs of men. Perhaps what troubled you was the work of some malignant spirit whose name you did not even know. Then, if you had a dream that needed interpreting, or were about to set off on a long journey or try planting your beans too late in the season, you would go to a sorcerer.

Sorcery came at a price, however. It meant dealing with strange, unnerving creatures who could easily do you more harm than good. If the sorcerers Montezuma had questioned were genuine then they may have been able to tell him what the future held. Obviously he believed they had not dared to and had used their powers to escape him.

And the more convinced he was that they had seen his future, the more desperate he would be to get them back.

I examined the nearest empty cage. “Let’s leave magic aside, for the moment. If I were shut up in here, how would I get out?”

“You wouldn’t!”

“No, but just suppose I were to try it.”

He sighed. “Oh, all right. To begin with, there’s no door. You’d have been dropped in through the trapdoor on the roof-see it? Once you were inside we’d have weighed it down with a stone slab and no way would you get it open. Don’t even think about pushing it out of the way-we won’t stop you, but trust me, it won’t budge.” He gave me a nasty grin. “Shall I shut you in and let you try it for yourself?”

“No!” I stepped hastily away from the cage. I could still remember the wood creaking under the weight of that stone slab. “I’ll take your word for it. So I’d have to have someone open the trapdoor from outside.”

The majordomo looked suspiciously at his inmates, a couple of whom had lifted their heads and seemed to be taking an unwelcome interest in our conversation. He raised his voice deliberately. “Forget it! To begin with your accomplice would have to get in past my guards-and I’ve told you, they were doubled up that night. He’d have to find the right cage, open it and let you out, and do all thiswithout being spotted. What’s more, he’d need help shifting that stone. Then he and his mate would have to sneak you out, again past my guards, who wouldn’t have missed them going in in the first place! There’s only one way in or out of here, you know, and you’ve seen how small the windows are. Oh, and on this occasion, he’d have had to do the same trick five times.” He looked about him smugly, as though he had forgotten that in spite of everything a number of his prisoners had managed to slip away. “I tell you, it couldn’t be done!”

“Who’s allowed in here, besides your guards?”

“Nobody! Apart from the judges, of course, if they want to question the prisoners-and the work details who come in to clean up when it’s their parish’s turn at the job.”

I could not help grimacing. Forced labor was a part of the common man’s lot and most would cheerfully tackle dredging a canal or hauling stone to the site of a new public building, but for a people who liked to keep themselves clean, mucking out the prison would be a different matter. “I suppose you’re going to tell me they’re always escorted?”

“All the time! We count them in, we watch them and we count them out again. Face it, there are only three ways out of here. The rats eat you, the judges let you out, or …” He lowered his voice again. “Or you use sorcery! That’s what we told the Emperor, and he believes us!”

I asked the majordomo whether I could question his guards.

“Go ahead,” he said indifferently. “It’s the same shift we had on duty when the prisoners went missing, but they won’t be able to tell you anything I haven’t.”

Each of the guards had been handpicked for two qualities: being able to wield a huge cudgel and being able to tolerate enough boredom to crush the mind of anybody that had one to crush. I could not credit any of them with great powers of observation, but I could not imagine any of them falling asleep on the job either. Each of our conversations was a repeat of the last, with me staring up into a slack-jowled, thick-jawed, heavy-lidded face that bore all the expression of one of the masks of human skin worn at the Festival of the Flaying of Men. It would go something like this:

“What did you see the day the prisoners went missing?”

“What prisoners?”

“The sorcerers.”

“The sorcerers?”

“Yes, the sorcerers-the ones the majordomo says turned themselves into birds.”

“Oh, the sorcerers!”

There would be a pause.

“Well, what did you see?”

The guard I was questioning would turn to one of his colleagues-preferably the one I had last spoken to.

“Did you see anything, mate?”

“When?”

“When those sorcerers went missing.”

“Sorcerers?”

“Yes-you know.”

“No.”

“No what?”

“No, I don’t know.”

“The sorcerers-the men who got out. When that happened, what did you see?”

There would be another pause.

“I didn’t see anything.”

The guard I was questioning would turn to me in triumph.

“See? He didn’t see anything either. I reckon they must have flown away, like bloody birds!”

After three attempts at this I gave up. I had found out as much as I was going to here.