Alexander C. Irvine (34 page)

E
ach rock Archi
e
grasped seemed a small miracle to him, a solid bit of certainty holding firm against the void around him. He belly-crawled slowly, painfully, in what he hoped was the right direction, shying away from slight dips in the floor that might suddenly drop away. The knowledge that he could be moving deeper into the cave ate at his fragile will, but he forced himself to keep moving. If he was going to die, he was going to die moving.

His left shoulder brushed a solid vertical surface and he laid both hands on it, reaching up and out to both sides. It was a wall, thank God. If he had set off in the right direction, it would lead him to the entrance, where Stephen had dropped the wooden object before abandoning him. A new world, Stephen had said as he left. Archie wondered if Stephen had seen this new world, had heard the meaty crackle of burning hearts and seen the pillar of smoke from the sacrificial fires. What had the chacmool shown him?

“If I see him again, I’ll ask,” Archie croaked. He was terribly thirsty. His tongue felt swollen and it stuck to the roof of his mouth. “When I see him.”

Archie stood, hunching against the wall. He reached over his head and felt only emptiness. He was still in the main domes, then; the passage leading to them narrowed toward the ceiling, and he thought he could have found the sloping roof without jumping. Not that he had any intention of leaving his feet.

His control slowly returning, Archie began to look at the darkness as a problem to be solved.
I’ve been buried alive,
he thought.
What do I have to fear from being lost in a cave?

The thing Stephen had dropped had to be near the entrance, but not against the walls; Stephen had been coming back from throwing torches when he put out the light. Archie would have to leave the wall to find it.

Slowly expanding vertigo twisted in his stomach at the thought. But what was the alternative? He couldn’t just follow this left-hand wall all the way back to the river. Far too many intersections and slippery slopes lay between here and there. The only way he was going to survive was if he found the thing Stephen had left for him.

Archie supposed that he owed Stephen a certain amount of gratitude. After all, Stephen could certainly have killed him any time. Stranding him in these remote domes had been an act of direct defiance, particularly since Stephen had left a way out. And why had he done that, if the chacmool’s promised new world was all he had to believe in?

He has doubts, Archie realized. He’s torn between the chacmool’s promises and its cruelty. After all, he must know it’s going to kill Jane. He said as much.

This is a test, isn’t it? He wants something else to believe in.
S
ee the
Mask-bearer,
Tamanend said.
He is torn, and you must give
him peace
. Solve the problem, Archie thought. If he was going to find the Mask-bearer, it had better be soon. And he would need the mask to do it. So he was looking for a mask. Good. The idea of searching for an object—a mask, wooden to judge by the sound it made hitting the ground, probably near the way out of the domes—focused Archie, made it a little easier to hold blind terror at bay. I can do this, he thought.

But giving the Mask-bearer peace … how can I give Stephen peace?

“Don’t be stupid, Archie,” he said aloud. “The man’s a slave, and the chacmool’s a Negro, isn’t it?” But if freedom was the chacmool’s promise, what could Archie offer in this world?

Archie remembered the clergyman’s speech, back in New York the previous fall. Blackbirders stealing children. Ironic. He’d had his own daughter stolen and hadn’t even known it then, hadn’t known how much he had in common with the Negro father chasing through the Five Points after his vanished daughter. How very much he hadn’t known about himself. He thought of the three slaves aboard the
Maudie,
drowned by their shackles. I never knew their names, Archie thought. Alfonse, Punch, Judy: those aren’t real names. No one should have to die that way, and each of us is a little bit to blame.

“All right, Stephen,” Archie promised, his voice fading into the domes. “If that’s your peace, I’ll do what I can to give it to you.”

And if I don’t get out of here, that will be exactly nothing.

So there was a mask lying among the rocks somewhere on the floor. Archie placed his back squarely against the wall and took two shuffling steps away from it. He did an about-face and took the same two steps, finding the wall exactly where he had left it.

“Here we go.” This time he took four steps, then turned to his left and counted five steps before the floor began to rise. The passage out must be dead ahead, he thought, unless he’d gone in the wrong direction. But that didn’t really bear thinking about, not at this point. Archie turned left again, took a step, and went sprawling as his foot caught a rock protruding from the floor. He stayed where he’d fallen, getting his bearings as best he could. The floor under him sloped slightly down to his left; the wall should still be in front of him, then. Not wanting to stand for fear of knocking himself unconscious on an overhang from the entry passage, he taised himself to hands and knees and began a slow crawl toward where the wall should have been.

His hand fell on something smooth, and his heart skipped a beat. He felt the object with both hands, picking it up and turning it this way and that. It was a mask, of polished wood; he could feel the grain under his fingers.

If you are what I think you are, this’ll lead you out,
Stephen had said. Archie assumed that meant he had to put it on, but it had no straps, or even eyeholes. It was simply a convex piece of wood, with a protrusion where a nose would be and a narrow slit of a mouth. Well, he could always hold it to his face; it was heavier than he thought it should be, but not so heavy that he couldn’t hold it up to save his life and Jane’s. And God knew how many others as well, he thought, remembering a sky stained brown by smoke from the chacmool’s fires.

The mask fit snugly over Archie’s face, and he held it there, wairing for something to happen. After a moment he realized he’d closed his eyes when he put it on; he opened them, feeling his eyelashes brush against its inner surface.

Shock blasted through him as the feather talisman froze to his chest. Shriveling cold spread into his chest and a terrible squeezing sensation settled around his heart, cutting off his breath. Archie ripped open his coverall and seized the talisman, his fingers instantly numbed by the contact. He cried out as he tore it loose, feeling a patch of skin come with it. It stuck to his hands, sending waves of freezing pain up his arms to his laboring heart.

He tried to fling it away, couldn’t. His head began to swim and he pitched forward, breaking his fall with his frozen hands.

The impact tore the talisman partly loose, and Archie scraped it frantically along the floor. The back of one hand banged against a rock; Archie raked the talisman along the rock’s edge, bloodying his hands as each pass loosened it a bit more. His labored breathing whistled through the mask’s mouth slit, and he could hear his heart, slow and ponderous like the drumbeat of a military funeral.

Last resort,
he thought, getting to one knee. He laid his hands flat on the cave floor, the talisman frozen crookedly between them. Placing one foot squarely on the brass medallion, Archie lunged to his feet.

The talisman came loose, tearing long shreds of skin from Archie’s hands. He scrambled away from it, then lost his balance and fell, remembering not to break the fall with his hands this time. Pain rolled his stomach into a somersault as Archie watched the bits of his skin stuck to the talisman shrivel like green leaves in a fire. His breath returned and he sucked in huge grateful breaths, the cold fading from his hands. The pressure lifted from his chest and his heart began to beat again, erratically at first but settling in a moment to a fast, excited hammering in his aching chest.

He could see. The talisman lay before him, its quetzal feathers gummed with blood and bits of wrinkled skin. Above and behind it Archie could clearly make out the passage leading out of the domes. He looked from it to his hands, which throbbed with pain far worse than what he’d felt when Royce had stabbed him, months ago now; his palms and fingers looked as if they’d been clumsily butchered. Touching bloody fingers to his face, Archie found that he was still wearing the mask. It had no weight now that it rested securely on his face, covering his eyes, and he was confused enough to wonder how it stayed attached.

I’m the Mask-bearer now,
he thought, wondering if that was what Tamanend had meant all along.
And it’s time to seek my peace.

As soon as he thought of Tamanend, something in the air shifted, as if an unthinkably vast face had swung toward him and begun watching him. Archie stood and looked around, but the presence—if there was any real presence—stayed just outside his field of vision. Its attention was hungry somehow, neither hostile nor encouraging but uncomfortably curious. Using the mask attracted its attention, Archie thought. It’s waiting to see what I’m going to do next, watching me like that man Wilson did in the Brewery basement. He repressed a shudder at the thought that Wilson—no, Pope—had been somehow an agent of Ometeotl.

Steen must have felt the same gaze when the rabbit exploded in that boy’s hands. He had said as much, warning Royce that the
huehueteotl
was watching and going to bizarre lengths to escape the Old God’s attention. Of course, Steen had reason to avoid the Old God—he was working in Tlaloc’s service.

This enemy is your ally,
Tamanend had said. But he had also warned Archie that this ally was not entirely to be trusted. The knife in Archie’s belt grew warm, and he decided that the less attention he drew at the moment, the better.

If he was lucky, removing the feather talisman had blinded the chacmool to his whereabouts. But he had, in essence, traded the talisman for the mask, and given up some of his own flesh and blood to do it, and Archie had no idea what sort of allegiance that exchange had committed him to.

Outside the Old Brewery, Archie remembered, Steen had insisted that Royce and the Geek follow directly in Archie’s footsteps. The two Rabbits had lived long enough afterward that Archie decided to give the same tactic a try now.

Ally or not, he thought, I believe I’d rather proceed without anyone watching, just for now. He searched the floor and caught the trail of Stephen’s footprints leading out of the domes. Perhaps the
huehueteotl
would see Stephen instead of him, Archie thought. He fell into Stephen’s trail and followed it into the maze separating him from the chacmool and Jane.

The feeling o
f
being watched fell away as Archie retraced Stephen’s path through the nameless canyon passages. The trail persisted even over bare rock, and Archie realized that he wasn’t seeing actual track, but presences. Stephen’s prints took the shape of bare feet, recording the passage of the man rather than the impact of his bootsoles.

I’m still blind,
Archie thought.
It’s not my eyes I’m seeing through.
Whose, then?

He felt the Old God’s attention return as he worked his way through the long crawl back to the junction Stephen had called the Pass of El Ghor. Every time his flayed palms touched the damp gravelly floor, Archie’s stomach flipped and pain rose up like a roaring in his ears, but behind the stabbing agony he could feel the patient gaze of the
huehueteotl,
like a weight on the back of his neck. Would this happen every time he wasn’t able to follow Stephen exactly? What if Stephen hadn’t gone back to the chacmool, how could Archie escape the Old God’s Eye then?

And why did he want to?
This enemy is your ally.
Tamanend had been maddeningly obscure, but he had never lied. Somehow the Old God’s attention could be turned to Archie’s advantage.

None of that matters, Archie thought. He paused to pick a triangular pebble from the base of his thumb. If I have to carry the Old God on my back, I will.

But as soon as he came out of the crawl and picked up Stephen’s trail again, the presence faded, and Archie made his way laboriously along, passing through Purgatory with the quiet rippling of Echo River sounding all around him.
God, I’m thirsty,
he thought, but he didn’t dare stop. He had no idea how long he’d been cowering under the domes—for all he knew, the ceremony could already have taken place.

No, the Old God would have given up on him then; there must still be some time. But even if Archie had time for a leisurely lunch on the riverbank, he thought that the chacmool—talisman or no—would notice the moment he came into contact with the river.

Archie pressed ahead, cursing at the knot of pain tightening at the base of his spine. Stephen’s stride was shorter than his, and following the tracks forced Archie to take toddler steps even when the path was broad and level. His ankle was throbbing again, threatening to buckle with each step, and as fatigue slowed his reactions, he stumbled more often, once nearly slipping into the river.
Would have solved my thirst problem,
he thought, but through the mask he could see things moving in the river, things that took the shape of its spidery currents and waited for a certain interloper to make a misstep. Archie thought of the
chaneque
and wondered whose bodies and souls had been conscripted to watch for him from the water.

After the
torturous
trip through Purgatory, Archie was stunned to see the rowboat still tied up to its post on the rocky beach of Lake Lethe. It hadn’t yet occurred to him to worry about it; getting even this far had seemed impossible.

Stephen,
he thought.
But then how did he get back?

Even this good fortune, though, left Archie having to row back using his flayed hands. Quickly he tore strips from his shirt and bound his hands as best he could. Then he untied the boat and pushed off into the river.

It was only a short distance to the end of Lethe, and thence to the River Side-cut that led around most of River Styx, ending in a natural bridge. Archie worked into a steady rhythm after a few minutes, doing his best to ignore the ragged pain in his hands and chest.

Something tugged suddenly at his right hand, and he nearly dropped the oar on that side. He looked down and stifled a scream.

Maudie’s
rudderman Alfonse was there, his bloated hands clamped on the oar and his teeth clenched on the bloody trailing edge of Archie’s bandage. Vacuous hunger animated Alfonse’s face as he chewed away at the bandage, pulling Archie’s arm toward the water. Below Alfonse drifted Punch and Judy, floating along in tandem, their legs dragged down by rusty shackles with chains that trailed away to invisibility.

Blood in the water, Archie realized. I can’t touch the water, especially not here.

He let go of the oar and swiftly unwrapped the bandage, then threw it as far as he could back the way he’d come. The bloody strip of cloth unwound over the river, landing like a clumsily cast fishing line.

Around it the water surged as the dead rose from the river and fought over this offering. Alfonse lost his grip on the oar and was dragged away by his clenched teeth, his eyes rolling back to stare at Archie as he faded into the dark water.