Sky Knife (2 page)

Stone Jaguar withdrew the knife, transferred it to his left hand, then plunged his right into the wound and thrust his hand up under the sacrifice's ribs. The young man screamed again as Stone Jaguar grabbed his heart. Sky Knife broke out in a cold sweat—no matter how many times he attended a sacrifice, he never got used to this moment, when the sacrifice felt Stone Jaguar's fingers enter his chest and squeeze his heart. The high, ear-splitting shriek was like no other sound Sky Knife had ever heard. The young man's final scream pierced Sky Knife right down to his gut.

But that was the last. The sacrifice's sufferings were—as always—over quickly. Stone Jaguar withdrew his hand from the sacrifice's chest. In his clenched fist, he held the young man's heart. It quivered and convulsed rhythmically.

Not a drop of blood defiled Stone Jaguar. He lifted the heart toward the heavens. The heart continued to beat, powered now by Stone Jaguar's sorcery.

“Accept now this sacrifice!” shouted Stone Jaguar over the shrieking of the gale that suddenly descended upon the temple. Sky Knife hunkered down against the cold wind that battered him from all directions. His shoulder-length black hair slapped his face, got into his mouth and eyes.

Tendrils of light—all colors of the rainbow—rained out of the sky and twisted around themselves, around the sacrifice's body, up to Stone Jaguar. The swarming colors climbed his arms and poured into the spasming heart.

Streaks of blue leaped from the sacrifice into the sky. Orange and red swirls danced around the temple. Where they touched Sky Knife, they tickled.

The wind gained in intensity. Sky Knife leaned on the sacrifice, refusing to be swayed. Then the colors, the noise, all descended upon the heart and entered into it. The glow around Stone Jaguar brightened until it hurt to look at him. Sky Knife blinked, but would not look away. The fate of his city hung in the balance. Would the sacrifice be accepted? He couldn't
not
look.

With a loud crack of thunder, the heart in Stone Jaguar's hands exploded into a thousand colored shards. They rained upon the temple, upon the crowd waiting below. The shards sparkled like stars and the entire plaza was lit as if it were noon rather than midnight.

Sky Knife hugged blood-soaked arms to his chest, laughing with joy. The gods approved. The sacrifice had been accepted.

Sky Knife said a silent prayer of gratitude to the soul of the sacrifice. Not that it needed his help or his gratitude; acceptance would mean the soul would reside forever in the blissful paradise of the seventh, and highest, heaven—the heaven reserved only for true heroes.

The young man was just such a hero. Without him, this night would have ended in disaster. Sky Knife was grateful for the young man's bravery. His courage had conquered the bad luck that lurked everywhere, waiting to victimize the city and its people. The sacrifice's bravery was worthy of song, and of paradise.

Sky Knife relaxed as the light in the plaza died and the glowing shards of heart faded into wisps of colored vapor that dissipated into the darkness of the night.

Stone Jaguar's sorcery had snuffed all the fires in the plaza. Tonight, a fire would be kindled in the gaping, bloody hole in the sacrifice's chest, and all the new ceremonial fires would be taken from it.

Sky Knife reached out to the body of the sacrifice and smoothed the young man's hair. The body was still warm. Sky Knife touched the body a last time in farewell and turned away.

A sneeze caught his attention. Sky Knife looked back toward the altar and his heart stopped cold in his chest. There, just behind the altar, stood a terrible figure. Its fleshless face and chest exposed bleached, white bone, while what skin it had was covered in black and yellow blotches. The figure convulsed with a second sneeze. Slowly, it raised its fleshless hand and pointed at Sky Knife. Dread and terror lanced through Sky Knife. He knew what this was—this was Cizin, the god of death.
Cizin.

Before Sky Knife could react, the figure leapt off the top of the pyramid and was gone, only the sound of another sneeze remaining behind to give witness to its presence.

Sky Knife dropped to his knees in horror. If Cizin were strong enough to appear here—especially
now,
with the sacrifice still warm on the altar—something was wrong. Terribly, horribly wrong.

Sky Knife glanced toward the others on the temple, but the others laughed and smiled, apparently unaware of the evil thing that had just visited them. That Sky Knife was the only one that had been granted the eyes to see Cizin terrified him. Who was he to see the god of death if the priests could not?

He wasn't sure what the omen meant, except he knew it to be bad. And bad omens left bad luck behind in their footsteps.

2

“Sky Knife,” said Death Smoke. He was a skinny, white-haired man. Sky Knife stood on shaky legs. Death Smoke's breath stank, and the rotting black stumps of his teeth disgusted Sky Knife, but Sky Knife swallowed his feelings and stepped toward the old man.

“Yes,
Ah kin?
” he asked. Technically, Sky Knife should be allowed to address Death Smoke by his name rather than his title now that the ceremony was over, but Death Smoke was touchy about such things.

“Blood House—where is he? He should be the one to kindle the new fire.” Death Smoke's breath hissed out of his throat when he finished speaking. It brushed against Sky Knife's face, sickeningly foul.

“I don't know,” said Sky Knife. “I'll look for him if you wish.”

Death Smoke dismissed Sky Knife with a wave. “Go,” he barked.

Sky Knife dashed down the steep thirty-six temple steps—four terraces of nine steps each—as fast as he dared. At the bottom of the steps, he walked into the joyous crowd. The men and women of Tikal drank
pulque
and ate delicacies the merchants had prepared for this special occasion: turtle soup, roasted river snails, and, most prized of all, wild pig baked with sweet potatoes.

Sky Knife pushed his way through the crowd and tried to ignore the gurgling in his stomach. In preparation for the ceremony, all priests and attendants had not eaten for a day. The overpowering, heavy smell of the
pulque
and the food only made him feel more hungry. Sky Knife waved away a
pulque
vendor, and hurried south toward the acropolis.

Even more than his hunger, Sky Knife was tortured by his awful vision. His heart was in his throat. He knew bad luck was coming—he needed to tell someone, so that the priests could prepare for the bad luck to follow. Blood House was a man of great wisdom. In the six years since Sky Knife had lived with the priests, Blood House had always been kind and patient with him. Blood House would know what to do.

To the south of the Great Plaza, on a small hillock, stood the southern acropolis, home of the priests and attendants to the temple. No red-painted step marked the acropolis' boundary, for no disaster would rain upon the city if anyone besides the priests entered, but still, the people of the city gave it a wide berth. As soon as Sky Knife climbed the first step, he left the crowd behind.

Sky Knife pushed aside the blue cotton drapery that hung over the main entrance and stepped inside. A fire burned inside the main room, which was shallow, but wide. Stone benches lined the walls. The meager light from the fire lit the center of the room, but the corners and vaulted ceiling were left in the shadow of midnight. Sky Knife turned away from the fire and walked toward the dark entrance of Blood House's personal quarters; as a priest, Blood House's quarters were close to the airy, open front room. Attendants were crammed into smaller, smoky rooms deeper in the stone structure.

Blood House's quarters were dark. The feeling of unease that had plagued Sky Knife all night blossomed into a terrible dread. He retreated to the fire and pulled out a flaming brand. He walked back to Blood House's quarters.

Blood House lay on the stone bench that served as his bed. His hands were clamped down on a tobacco leaf that had been pressed against his bare abdomen. His tattoos, which normally stood out in stark contrast with his lighter skin, now seemed blurred, as if Blood House were bruised over his entire body. Blood stained Blood House's face around his mouth and nose. In contrast to the blood that stained Sky Knife's arms, which was dark and sticky now, almost dry, the blood on Blood House's face was bright and wet.

Sky Knife, trembling, stepped closer. He touched Blood House, but the priest's skin was clammy and cold. He did not seem to be breathing. In the flickering light from the small tongue of flame Sky Knife carried, it was difficult to tell anything at all for sure, but inside he knew. Blood House was dead. No wonder Cizin had appeared. The god of death gloated over the bodies of priests as he gloated over no other—for they knew the secrets of the gods, and kept the rituals pure and holy. How sweet it must have been for Cizin to breach the wall of good luck around the temple and appear on its very summit. How terrible for the city of Tikal.

Grief tugged at Sky Knife's heart. Blood House had been a good teacher, a mentor to Sky Knife. The priest had had a gentle soul and a kind way that had helped Sky Knife in his first frightening days at the temple, when his grief over his parents' deaths had been new and raw. Stone Jaguar was a hard but fair man, a man Sky Knife could respect, but Blood House alone had been someone Sky Knife could not only respect but admire.

Sky Knife brushed away the tears that rained on his cheeks and pushed his grief away. He put the flickering light as close to the body as he dared, looked at the tobacco leaf, and tried to think around the hard knot of sorrow in his heart and mind.

From around the edges of the tobacco leaf dribbled a dark, sticky liquid. A tobacco leaf over tobacco juice—Blood House had treated himself for some sort of bite or sting. Gently, Sky Knife lifted the edge of the leaf. Two small puncture wounds marred the priest's skin.

A bite. Bleeding, bruising. A relatively quick death. Sky Knife knew what had happened here. The snake called Yellow Chin had bitten Blood House. Yellow Chin lived in fields as well as jungle, but rarely entered the city itself, and never entered the dwellings of man if it could help it. Sky Knife shook his head. He knew Blood House had not left the acropolis all day—none of them had, until the time for the ceremony. So Yellow Chin had had to come here.

Yellow Chin might still be here. Alarmed at the thought, Sky Knife swung his meager light about, looking for a small, brown and black serpent with the diamond pattern on its back. The room was cluttered with the copious garments Blood House had planned to wear to the sacrifice. Yellow Chin could be hiding in a fold in any one of them. Or behind the water jug, or any of a dozen other places in the dark corners of the room. Sky Knife backed out of the room slowly, unwilling to touch anything.

Sky Knife turned and ran into someone. He yelped and dropped his makeshift torch.

“What took you so long, boy?” asked the tremulous voice of Death Smoke. “Did you find Blood House?”

“Yes,” whispered Sky Knife. He stepped away from the older man. “Dead. He's dead.” Sky Knife's voice cracked with emotion.

“What?” shouted Death Smoke. “That can't be—the ceremony went perfectly. There's no room here for bad luck.” He shoved Sky Knife aside and mumbled the fire-calling incantation. Flames spouted into existence above Death Smoke's head, filling the vaulted ceiling, and illuminating the entire room and Blood House's quarters with a brilliant blue light.

The blue drapery to the outdoors was swept aside and Stone Jaguar strode in, his jaguar skin cloak still in place. “What's going on?” demanded Stone Jaguar. His searching gaze swept past Sky Knife, dismissing him. “Death Smoke? Claw Skull went ahead and kindled the new fire. It would have been unlucky to wait any longer. Where's Blood House?”

“In here,” called Death Smoke. “It would seem that the ceremony didn't go as well as we thought. Yellow Chin has been here.”

Stone Jaguar's face wrinkled in a terrible frown and his face purpled in rage. Sky Knife backed up, unwilling to call attention to himself while Stone Jaguar was so angry.

“Yellow Chin?” said Stone Jaguar. “The
Bolon ti ku
take the Yellow One and cast him into the lowest hell,” he hissed. “Itzamna!”

Sky Knife's gut twisted painfully as part of the import of Stone Jaguar's words hit him.
Yellow
—the color of death, the color of evil. Of course it had been Yellow Chin who had come to do the bidding of Cizin, the Yellow One. Cizin wasn't content to merely gloat over this death; he revelled in it. And had shoved the noses of the priests in it for good measure.

Angry as Stone Jaguar was, he needed to know what Sky Knife had seen. “The Yellow One,” Sky Knife said softly. “He was here.”

“Of course he was,” snapped Stone Jaguar. “He has taken Blood House.”

Sky Knife fought the urge to run out into the night, away from the priest's anger, away from the bad luck that undoubtedly clung to this entire building.

“No,” said Sky Knife. He straightened his shoulders and spoke firmly. “He was on the temple. After the sacrifice. I saw him. Actually, I heard him first. He sneezed.”

“Can't stand the smell of tobacco,” cackled Death Smoke from the other room. “Thought I heard sneezing, too, but I didn't see anything.”

“He was
on the temple?
” roared Stone Jaguar. “Has our luck deserted us completely? Cizin
here,
and only an attendant with a bad luck name saw him?”

Sky Knife lowered his gaze and dropped to his knees before Stone Jaguar. He knew his name was bad luck, even if his mother said she'd received instructions in a vision to name her child after the Knife of Stars that swung in a slow circle overhead during the year. Still, Sky Knife thought his work in the temple, his efforts to please the gods, merited him luck. To hear Stone Jaguar as much as blame him for Cizin's presence rocked him.