Free The Demon of the Air by Simon Levack Page A

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.
    â€œThey’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?”
    â€œWhat 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?”
    â€œOh … yes, yes, of course …”
    â€œWe had some more interesting characters,” the major-domo went on. “But you know all about the sorcerers, of course.”

    â€œThe men who escaped? They really were sorcerers, then?” I asked innocently.
    â€œThey 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.
    â€œThat’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.”
    â€œLord 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?”
    â€œThe Emperor asked the Chief Minister to find out what happened,” I explained, “and then he asked me.”
    â€œHe asked you himself?”
    â€œYes.”
    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.”
    â€œWhat about?”
    â€œWhat 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 the
whole city knowing what they were talking about. He was asking them whether they’d had any visions.”
    â€œAnd had they?”
    â€œOf 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