The Sacrifice Game (44 page)

Squelch that thought. Don’t worry. At least I now knew what the big deal was about this stuff. Bet if I live I’ll sleep for at least a week. Below us Porcupine had gotten back on the mul again and was teetering along the fifth step, holding a shrunken Dzonotob trophy head—which he must have yanked off somebody’s court dress—in front of his own white and black-masked face and working the mouth up and down.

“Help help, help help!” he ventriloquized. “How did my body ever grow so big?” He forced his right thumb in through the neck and wagged it through the mouth like a tongue. His left hand pretended to turn the reluctant head around, pulled it down to his crotch, and forced it into sucking motions. He howled. He’d gotten two other fingers of his right hand up behind the shell eyeballs and pushed them out from inside, making them bounce bug-eyed. Meanwhile his left hand had found a bowl of white atole and as he pretended to come he shrieked, blasted the gruel up over himself in a milky shower, pushed the head away, and shook himself off like a dog.

Charming, I thought. Japanese game-show humor. Next vee have zee socolate-mousse wrestlink—

“Six sproutings, fourteen witherings,”
Koh said.

She was at August 12, 2005.

“Next fifteen rainings, eighteen crackings; next,

Six sparkings, twenty-seven darkenings.”

The beat divided again into sixteenths—about the length of a p’ip’il, an eyeblink—and the branches of possibility spread out at such a steep curve that they almost headed into reverse, like the umbrella profile of a ceiba tree with branches that curve out almost to the horizontal, but never quite droop. I could see there was some equation there. If only I had room to write it down in the margin of my brain, I thought. My fingers were aching from setting and resetting the seeds, but it didn’t affect the performance of my autopiloted hands. Koh moved her sapphire right through the equivalent of 2007 and out toward the rim. I thrashed along after her. She was down to two quarries. The sun and moon and the two Venuses flashed their ellipses over the board, and it churned underneath them motokaleidoscopically like heaps of floating rhinestones going down a drain, although really I could have been either seeing it or just imagining it. The catchers closed in on the last runner. Koh came to the threshold at 2012.

( 62 )

T
he runner was surrounded at the northwest corner of the board, cut off at the edge of the world. It was like Koh and her avatar were checkmated, there was nowhere for the sapphire to escape to. Oh, shit, I thought, that’s really it, the end, the end, the end, the end. I looked up at Koh. She was still studying the board. I saw movement at the nose-edge of my right eye and bent down to focus on the board again. Koh was definitely seeing something, she’d made another move in her head, but I couldn’t imagine where. I tried to see what she was seeing on the board but it was all murky and distorted like the lens in my eye was melting. Koh picked up her sapphire and moved it toward the center of the board, like the runner was somehow jumping over the mass of catchers.

Something touched her shoulder and she looked up. The Porcupine Clown had gotten all the way up to our level and was leaning over Lady Koh herself, flirting with her like he was trying to lead her down into the zocalo. Was he supposed to do that? I wondered. Wait a beat, I thought. Koh stood up and I thought she was laughing but then I thought maybe something was actually wrong, the Porcupine was hugging her, and she wasn’t just being a good sport in the act, she was really struggling. Where were the guards? I wondered, but of course it had looked like just part of his act. I jumped over the table at them but I was too groggy and the Porcupine was too fast, he was already over the lip of the sanctuary and rolling down the steps with his arms and legs wrapped around Lady Koh. I lurched down after them but my Ahab leg slipped out from under me and I slid down into the arms of one of the guards. Attendants were bouncing down the steps below me and for a beat I thought Koh had rolled down all the way, but as I screamed for them to get me down, DOWN!!! Porcupine had fetched up on the tenth step below us, caught by a ball of belayed guards, and I saw some of Koh’s robe in the knot. I couldn’t hear anything over cataracts of blood through my ears, but the guard got me down to them and I sort of slid down into the cluster, held by a couple of the roped guards while a few more of Koh’s attendants rolled down, leaving spatters of blood on the white stairs. Some of her other women and a couple of attendants were coughing and gagging like they had rocks stuck in their throats. I got my hands on Koh’s crushed brittle headdress and threw it aside.

I thought for a beat that she’d smeared her face paint, because the white parts of her skin were a purple I couldn’t imagine was real. Below her the three bloods who’d caught Porcupine were sprawling back on the edge of the platform, gasping for breath and choking. Another one had gotten his quill costume off and was trying to ask him the eternal question, who’d sent him, but the clown’s tan skin was already turning to blueberry-black and there was a huge maroon erection popping out from under his raggedy underwear. His chest was pocked with little sticks.

I got Koh’s head into my hands. She had a surprised, disgusted look. She said, “You—”

“It’s all right,” I said stupidly in English, “you’re going to be great. Right?”

She didn’t answer. Foamy snot was running out of her nose and mouth and her open eyes were getting that matte finish. There were little sticks stuck to her face and chest and I picked one out of the underside of her chin, automatically holding it by the side. It was smooth and tiger-striped, a spine taken from a living scorpionfish, with a neurotoxin that kills by suffocation. They’d been woven into Porcupine’s suit, mixed in with the hard-oiled black feathers that mimicked quills, and when he’d hugged her some of them had gone into his own flesh too.

“Get water in her NOW!!!” I screamed in Chol. I got my hands around the back of her head and blew air into her mouth, but there was just this whiffling blob of mucus in there. I turned her over and tried to Heimlich her but she wasn’t responding, she was just a lump. I started hitting her but there was nothing. You’re dreaming, this shit’s lethal at half this dose. I yelled for someone to help me get the fucking quills out but they didn’t know what I meant because I was speaking English again and then they were afraid to touch her because they weren’t allowed. Alligator Root appeared and he and I pulled them out. Each time they left this blob of thick-looking blood. An attendant had gotten a pot of water and we tried to get her to drink, but there was nothing, and I made them find an enema gourd and we forced some down her throat, but she wasn’t really swallowing. I screamed to Alligator Root that there must be some antidote, that he had to run and get the surgeons, but of course there was no antidote. If they really knew one thing around here it was poisons. I got on top of her and started stupidly trying to massage her heart back to life, crashing down on her and breaking her ribs like I’d forgotten how to do from No Way’s survival books, but I just rolled off the stair and nearly tumbled down after the others, it was like we were on the steep slope of an icy mountain with barely any friction keeping us in place and it seemed for a beat like the whole knot of guards and attendants was going to come off its moorings and go rolling down the saw stairs, but one of the bloods got to me and tied me to a sacrificial rope with a scarf—he didn’t want the rope to touch my skin—and I got so upset at him for messing with me and not doing something for Koh that I elbowed him in the face and he skidded off down the blades of the stairs. I’m a jerk, I thought. I grabbed the enema gourd and sprayed water in her face. No response. I grabbed her puffy blue tongue and pulled on it. Nothing. Okay, still not too late. Miracle worker, right?

The well, I thought. We’re going to the Great Cistern.

No. How cold is that, fifteen degrees Celsius? That’s nothing.

The lake in the caves. How cold? Eight degrees, ten degrees?

Hypothermia temperature. But not brain-keeping temperature.

Jelly.

GET HER IN THE JELLY NOW, I mind-screamed, and then tried to put it into Chol, but it was already too late for that. Even if I could get her down there it would take hours to mix up the stuff.

Air too warm here. Come on. Get her down there. Two minutes, three minutes max. Otherwise her brain would have rotted to irrevocable stupidity. I yelled for them to get us down. The attendants held me while they practically sledded down on their ragged rumps. Face it, you’re fucked, I thought. The flying finger fucks. I was even crying, which was pretty silly in the context. It was probably mainly just about what a fuckup I was, am, and would be. She was the greatest and you’re the pits. About one beat faster and you would have gotten her out of there. We slid to the bottom, into a slick of blood and wheezing bodies. I got Alligator Root’s ear down to my mouth.

Get us into the Ocelot caves now, I said. They picked me up and wound Koh into a sheet and the bloods started parting the crowds ahead of us, cracking their flails and blowing kazoos, and the crowd did scatter, but by the time we’d even gotten to the steps up to the mountain path behind the Ocelot mul I could tell it was already ten minutes since the attack, and then it took another ten minutes even to get to the first mountain shrine that led down to the caves, and it was way, way, way too late. Brain dies within two minutes. Dumb. Retarded.

You were supposed to be her primary guard, you know, I thought, you were her husband, after all, you little freak. Big shot, right? Sitting on a big smelly pile of rubble with a dead girl and no—

Snow? Could have had her dumped in snow. Could have had a giant tub of snow always ready. A couple of hundred runners working round the clock to keep it stocked, that’s all it would have taken. Save her. Take ’er back.

Brain rotting. Dead, dead. Dead, my lords and gentlemen.

“Send forty running teams,” I said. “They’re going to Ice Mountain. For a hundred times four hundred bags of snow.”

Alligator Root looked at me. I looked back at him. He didn’t move. I looked down.

No point. No point. It was four days’ run away.

( 63 )

“We had a burden,”
I said.
“Your final act

On the zeroth level can be to honor it.”

2 Jeweled Skull didn’t answer. I peered forward into one of his dry, sewn-open, upside-down eyes. He wasn’t even pretending to tune out, he wanted me to see how damn bloody yet unbowed he was. He’d made himself pass out into some kind of trance a couple times over the two and a half days since Lady Koh’s death, but the teaser had put a stop to that by force-feeding him peccaries’ adrenal glands.

“Tell me what it is,” I said again. I thought I saw some kind of insolence well up in his eye and in spite of myself I thought about Lady Koh again and just lost it for a beat. I started hammering his ears and nose with both hands. Pink lymph-thickened blood spurted out of his tear ducts. I guess that stuff really ran to your head. Anyway, that ordinary level of pain was barely registering at this point and after a beat I fell back, sitting down hard on the war mat. I looked up at 2 Jeweled Skull. He was hanging upside down on a blue-and-yellow scaffold inlaid with pink cowries, draining into a one-arm square basin carved from black serpentine. There were only five other people with us in the tiny courtyard, Hun Xoc, Koh’s herald Alligator Root, my teaser, and his two assistants. Normally there’d have been an audience, but this gig wasn’t for fun. I’d worried about Hun Xoc’s being there, but he didn’t seem too upset about the way we were treating 2JS. Generally your adopted father was someone you were expected to beg to die for, but either Hun Xoc had gotten enough of my influence or he was rebellious enough to begin with to get over that. In the little square of sky above us noon sun and overcast alternated on what seemed like even two-hundred-beat cycles. At midnight tonight it would be three days since the assassination and I had that sour cigar-stub feeling in my stomach that you get only after your lack of sleep shifts into its warning phase. A fattened dog was barking somewhere nearby like an unanswered telephone, but otherwise it seemed quiet enough. It was an illusion, though. Outside things had way degenerated.

Ix was already in near chaos, for a hundred reasons. A couple of rival prophets had come up after Koh’s death, probably working for the Snufflers. One of them was from the Rattler Temple of Ix and was trying to take over Koh’s whole act. Fights were breaking out between the Rattler partisans and the Snufflers and Skull clans. There was a question about 1 Gila’s loyalty. Most dismally of all, Severed Right Hand and the feline alliance were only a few days away. The beat he’d heard about Koh’s assassination, he’d marched triple-time for Ix without waiting for resupplies or reinforcements. We’d expected him, of course, but his speed took us by surprise, and even though we had every able body digging moats and putting up palisades, there wasn’t much chance of getting a defense together. At least, not unless I wanted to train and command another western-style blowgun troop. Which I didn’t have time to do. It was already only five suns until 20 Cayman, which was my own personal outer limit. It was way past time for me to take the money and run, only I didn’t have the money. Lately Hun Xoc—who I’d made my first minister—had been saying he’d rather torch the whole city now than let Severed Right Hand get hold of even some of it. The idea made me feel kind of
Brennt Paris?
but I was starting to consider it. I could tell my brain didn’t have too many more days of functionality left in it. A month and a half, maybe, on the outside. And now without Koh looking out for me I couldn’t afford to pass out somewhere in front of people and maybe get separated from my tomb complex. I wanted to stay right here, to keep supervising the assistants as they finished making the gel compounds, and make sure the sarcophagus and the tunnels and everything were rigged to go at a moment’s notice. If I suddenly got worse, I’d need to get down there and get into the stuff, and trust Hun Xoc to finish closing off the crypt and dealing with the upshot of my autosacrifice. But that would be iffy. Hun Xoc was bright, but there was no way he was going to pick up on the chemistry and the engineering in time, and I was sure that the toastmaster was already intriguing with the Ocelot ministers . . . well, anyway, I wanted to see that everything was perfect myself.

I signed for the attendants to lower 2JS so I could reach him without getting up and I scooted over next to his head. His mouth was open and dry and his breath had some foreign rot element in it that was really hard to take. The teaser had drawn a sort of map like an acupuncture chart onto his body, with little glyphs with dots. I took a medium-length reed skewer, dipped it in a dish of a nonlethal dilution of scorpion venom, and turned it slowly into a dot just beneath—or now above—2 Jeweled Skull’s earlobe, drilling into the attachment of the facial nerve. For a moment his neck and torso quivered like he was lying on an old vibrating bed from some honeymoon motel, but there was no vocalization and the next beat he had it almost totally under control. I moved the point farther down in tiny increments like it was controlled by a Trac-Ball, feeling for variations in his current of trembling. Supposedly there was no kind of toxin that was more painful. His sternocleidomastoid muscle contracted and writhed under my hand again, but his face held on to that willed blankness.

God dog, I am such a twonk, I thought. Koh had mentioned back in Teotihuacán that 0 Porcupine Clown had been a gift from 2 Jeweled Skull, and then I’d just forgotten about it.

She should have thought of it herself, though. Anyone can be a sleeper assassin, even somebody who hadn’t been planted so openly. Well, damn it. She’d had a lot to think about and it slipped her mind.

For most of the last three days, when I hadn’t been fiddling with 2JS, I’d been staring at a Sacrifice Game board set up to Koh’s last move. Of course I hadn’t been able to make anything out of it. And of course we’d consulted everyone, Mask of Jaguar Night and the other Jaguar-adders, the three Orb Weaver mothers Koh had brought with her, all the independent adders I could get hold of, everyone who was even just a six-stone player or above, and they were all stumped. Nine-stone players just knew something that eight-stones didn’t know.

So all I really had to go on was that last moment with Koh, when she’d said “you” and looked at me with a sort of surprise. What had she meant? Was me getting back somehow essential to the events she saw in the future? And had she meant me, or the other Jed, Jed
₁
, who I’d left back in 2012?

As I said, 2 Jeweled Skull had supposedly killed the two remaining nine-skull Scorpion-adders Koh had brought back from Teotihuacán. Even so, we went through the trouble of interrogating the men who’d been with 2JS when Koh captured him, and finally we tracked down and identified what was left of the Scorpion-adders’ bodies. They brought them to me in three big baskets, but it was way too late for CPR and we weren’t going to get much out of them.

And as I also think I said a long time ago, there were only four other Maya cities with nine-skull adders attached to the cat mat, and none of them were friendly. There were six cities in the north, none of them friendly either. And no matter what kind of commando squad I could come up with or what kind of deal I offered, there wasn’t much chance of getting to one of them, interrogating the nine-skull, and getting back, all within a few days.

I was coming to realize, of course too late as usual, that there had been a dynamic at work here no one had put into words. Teotihuacán had been in severe economic decline for over a hundred years, and its two great families knew as well as anyone that its collapse was inevitable. The only thing that had kept the Empire going for the last several decades were the sun-adders, the custodians of the Sacrifice Game, shoring up the bloated, decaying city with the accumulated awe value of their predictions. And for whatever reason—maybe because of pressures from each other, more than pressures from outside—instead of spreading the Game knowledge, the leaders of Teotihuacán had restricted it, allowing fewer and fewer players to reach the nine-skull level and keeping the ones who did near-prisoners in their own city, the way Lady Koh had been. Like most rulers who realize their power’s fading, they’d preferred to hang on to the scraps of loot as their edifice collapsed around them, and to take whatever they could to the grave. The whole culture of the Sacrifice Game was in deeper decline than I’d realized. And as I knew from later history, it was just a matter of slow entropy before the whole Maya civic culture would decay in its wake.

Even so, if we’d had time, we might have been able to get hold of some other nine-skull players eventually, even if we had to lose ten thousand bloods in the kidnap raids. We might even have been able to play another City Game. If we’d had time.

But the Jaguar hierophant of Ix was the only one we had a real shot of getting to. Which was easier said, though. The hierophant was still down in the Old Cats’ Cave—which I pictured as a smoky bar with an octogenarian jazz combo—somewhere near the other end of the speaking tube he’d used to phreak me out when I was up on the mul. It was part of a complex of dry chambers past 9 Fanged Hummingbird’s tomb, deeper down on the way into the wet caves that supposedly led to the river to Xibalba.

Evidently, 9 Fanged Hummingbird had hidden the guy and his caretakers down there at the beginning of the siege, twenty-nine suns ago. And he’d provisioned them for a couple of months and sealed them off. And then he’d put another set of doorkeepers in the cavern above them, in the Ossuary—which was the only entrance to the Cats’ Cave—and barricaded them off with instructions to kill the Jaguar hierophant and then themselves if anyone but he or his representative came to get them. Which meant there was a code you could give to the doorkeepers to get them to let you through. Most likely it was a symbolic object that you’d lower down through one of the air holes in the barricade.

After that, what must have happened—as Hun Xoc, Alligator Root, and I worked it out after questioning Mask of Jaguar Night—was that 2 Jeweled Skull got the hierophant’s pass key from 9 Fanged Hummingbird. Probably 9 Fanged Hummingbird used it as a bargaining chip to get 2JS to let him go. Then, when Koh took over, 2 Jeweled Skull did exactly the same thing as part of his deal. After that, just like Koh had told me, she’d held out the possibility of releasing the hierophant to the Jaguar Society. She promised Mask of Jaguar Night that she’d let the hierophant out after the seating, and he made her promise that the hierophant would administer my final ordeal for admission to the society, as always, through his damn tube. And Koh had said okay in order to let the Jaguars—theoretically at least—still be the final arbiters of who was who.

Mask of Jaguar Night and the Jaguar-adders had even been talking to him through the damn tube during the time before the seating. But obviously the hierophant didn’t know the pass tchotchke.

And Koh hadn’t told anyone else. Not even Alligator Root. Or at least he said she hadn’t wanted to put him in that position and I believed him. She was a close-mouthed gal, and anyway, he didn’t have anything to gain from keeping that secret. And Koh had told him she wanted to help me. There didn’t seem to be anyone else who knew. 2 Jeweled Skull had killed 9 Fanged Hummingbird’s two ministers, and his own ministers had killed themselves before Koh captured them. For that matter, we just had to hope that Koh hadn’t changed the code. And so here we were, in this stupid position, trying to get it out of 2 Jeweled Skull, and it was like trying to extract mercury out of cinnabar with a cigarette lighter. It’s like, really, you’d think that without computers and encryption software or even electricity or even metal locks and keys or whatever, you wouldn’t come up against problems like this. But actually these guys worked hard to make it all more complicated. It was like how in the seventeenth century, before they had safety deposit boxes, everybody’s office desk had about a hundred little secret compartments in it.

I was ready to try anything, of course. I’d had Mask of Jaguar Night yelling and banging and calling for the hierophant through the tube, but he wouldn’t answer. He hadn’t even left a message on his machine. And we had a team of foundation thralls digging down to him, exposing a flight of stairs from the mul sanctuary to the chambers underneath that had been filled in eighty years ago. But since it had to be done silently so as not to alert him, it was going to take days. Anyway, even if we did get to them, the hierophant and his society would follow orders and kill themselves if we cut through to them without giving them the right pass sign.

I’d even suggested we try to strike a deal with Severed Right Hand, that maybe 9 Fanged Hummingbird could give us the key in exchange for a peaceful surrender. But as Hun Xoc and Alligator Root said, 9 Fanged Hummingbird might not even still be alive. Severed Right Hand may have gotten rid of him. And even if they did make a deal with us, why should we believe them? They’d probably give us the wrong passkey and the guy would be dead by the time we got in. Also, if we surrendered the city without trashing it, 9 Fanged Hummingbird might dig up his old tomb again, no matter how many boulders I’d piled above it, and my pickled body would be out in the cold. And time’s pretty cold. Anyway, “peaceful surrender” wasn’t really in these peoples’ vocabulary to begin with.