The Sacrifice Game (46 page)

( 66 )

T
he protocol was that I went last, with my two torch- and standard-bearers, and then Hun Xoc, Mask of Jaguar Night, Alligator Root, their three attendants, and finally four condemned workmen who weren’t going to come out. I held the wing-tip harpy feather close to my chest. Had 2JS given me the right password, or screwed me over with his final breath? Well, we’ll know in a few minutes. Hell, hell, hell. The long blank passage sloped down at about twenty degrees, but there were still planks underfoot that had been laid down to support rollers when the masons were rebuilding 9 Fanged Hummingbird’s tomb to my specifications, so it was easier going for me than normal and I could stump down on my own steam, propping myself up on the walls. Torchlight spiked out at the edges of my growing and then shrinking shadow, raking over the black spicules of rock like the ultradetailed nonlight in an electron microphotograph. There was a sweet smell of decaying vellum. We bent to the right, that is, north, and came to a wicker door. I untied the knots, my bearers unbound it and pulled it apart, and we walked into what you might call the library of the Ocelots’ house, although since at least ninety-five percent of the books weren’t ever opened I guess it would be more accurate to call it an archive, or maybe what the Hebrews called a
genizah,
a repository for old sacred texts that can never be destroyed. It was a high blank room one by three rope-lengths, lined with racks of horizontal folded screen-books. Most of them were accounts and tribute lists, or deeds and petitions and writs and torts and estoppels dating back five hundred years. But there were almanacs, bundles of suns and Venus-years, as they called the council records, and Books of Souls’ Names, that is, genealogical histories, mostly of the greathouses of Ix, and of course there were stolen chronicles of other city-states, some copied through scores of hands from now disintegrated books, and older copies from oral and written histories stretching way, way back, to before the Flight from the Five Northwesternmost Caves, and prescriptions of rituals and protocols and herbals with medicines and incantations and surgical procedures and recipes of healing-foods and schedules for the foods and diagnostic smells and tastes and sounds and proportions and properties, patterns for weaving and embroidering and farming and architecture and the programming of the fertilizing waters. There were square rope-lengths of texts of the theater of cruelty, orders detailing the schedules of different humiliations for different ranks of captives for different days, calendars of progressive maimings, recipes for torture by iguanas, by flesh-eating beetles, by food forced and withheld, by low-level poisons administered over years, by crushing with a slow addition of weights like they used on the Salem witches, by casting in plaster, by the sun, by slow-closing spike-traps, by selective flaying over decades, by inhaled spices, by smoke, by salt, by proxy, by demons, by induced ulcers and abscesses and other controlled pathologies, by blood poisoning, by what we would call hypnosis, by drug addiction and withholding, by sex forced and withheld, by speech alone, and on and on. Finally there were covered and sealed shelves, two of which held the chronicles of the hipball games, first the rules and strategies and outcomes of matches, bets won and lost, fabulous equipment and legendary players, and last and infinitely more importantly there was an empty cabinet that had held the chronicles of the Games against the Smokers, the outcomes of the secret Sacrifice Games the sun-adders of Ix had played over the b’aktuns, the movements of the deities and elementals through the layers of heavens, earths, and hells. I’d had the whole section brought up into the light, and I’d gone over it all for hours, but it hadn’t told me anything I could use, and the only hope I still had from that source was that the Jaguar venerators would come up with something from one of the forbidden texts they were still decoding. But I didn’t think they would. They were idiots. Or rather, to be fair, they were just kids who didn’t know anything. The heavy hitters had all killed themselves or gone with 9 Fanged Hummingbird. Except one. Hope.

I untied a door in the right wall, let the proles pull it apart, and led the way down into a second sharper-angled tunnel. It was larger but irregularly shaped with a lower ceiling. At a point about a rope-length under the first level of the north slope of the mul we turned right again into the ossuary, a long room bigger than the genizah. We passed a forest of about ten or twelve thousand low-fired jars, in sizes from perfume to mummy. Next we filed through a little canyon of hanging baskets, with relics inside them wrapped in glyphic embroidery in a range of stages of decay. After that there were rows of unwrapped skulls, set on wooden racks carved with stylized skulls, like real flowers in flower-shaped vases. Each skull had a glyph on its sloping flat forehead with the original owner’s name-crests and dates affixed with the name of his captor, the date of his dedication, and spirit-quelling invocations on the order of “Rest in Peace or Else.” I noticed one tiny squat toothless blob of a skull with the delicately written label 14 Orchid, Death-born Son of 7 Ocelot Night. At one point there was a set of skulls with fake shell-and-obsidian googly-eyes and flint knives jammed through their nose-holes making grotesque bulbous probosci. It was a Teotihuacanob style that the Ixob Greathouses had affected for a while. In some of the highest, most recent baskets there were shrunken and inlaid heads corresponding to the skulls, and a few thin chest-skins stretched over triangular frames to display their tattoos. Three rope-lengths in, the floor dropped a level and we came to an irregularly rectangular door and I stepped through into a tunnel of living stone. It was nearly round, with ropy flow ridges under the planked floor and walls. Here and there the sharper prongs had been smoothed off the black-glazed walls, but otherwise it was only slightly adapted from its original cavern state. The passage was part of a network of lava tubes and bubbles radiating down from the spatter-cone chamber of the extinct volcano—also called 1-Ocelot-His-House—due west of their mul. The caverns had been one of the Ocelots’ semisecret foundations of power from way back, and supposedly in the early days of Ix they’d stayed out of sight in them for years at a time when they were under attack. Five rope-lengths down, the passage leveled off into a lopsided volcanic bubble with three hewn corridors branching west, southwest, and south-by-southwest. The west branch led down out of the dry volcanic caves into the much larger sedimentary-limestone caverns that stretched back under the western cordillera. The southwest branch led into a long stone torch-stained room with piles of carpenter’s tools and ropes and bags of limestone chips. Farther in there was a salted and wrapped pile of eighteen dead bodies, the porters and stonecutters who’d worked on the project so far, and then a two-rope-length tunnel sloping down at forty degrees to the tomb that 9 Fanged Hummingbird had built for himself, the one I’d been having modified. Its entrance had been masterfully cut out of living rock, but I’d had it braced with ten vertical mahogany logs and then wedged and cracked along its fault lines so that it would collapse when we set it on fire. A rope-length down, it joined another tunnel that had been filled with thirteen two-arm-length limestone blocks, polished, oiled, and braced in place on the greased floor with creosote-pine chocks and bags of resin-soaked sawdust, ready to slide down into the main tunnel and block the narrow vestibule of the tomb. It was more of an Egyptian-style setup than a Maya one, and it had taken my architect a while to grok what I was getting at. But I’d done all the tests I could think of, short of setting it off, and it seemed like it was going to work. Anyway, I’d know in less than four days. If my poor citizens could hold off Severed Right Hand even that long.

We took the southwest branch, which led up slightly from the lava bubble to a twisty corridor through the Jaguar Knowers’ chambers. There were irregular doors on the floor, ceiling, and each side, all with the dates of their last shutting on their seals. Some of them said they hadn’t been opened for five hundred years, but that was a little hard to believe. Three turns farther we came to a little hall right about under the apex of the Ocelot mul. I squatted down on a heavy octagonal wooden door in the center of the floor, found the little spirit-hole at its center, gave four harpy-whistles through it, and lowered down a long white-tipped harpy-eagle feather on an orange-beaded string.

( 67 )

I
t was a whole little society down there. The same bonded family had been tending the hiding places down here forever. You wouldn’t think native Americans could be pale, but they were, in a yellowish waxy way, with eyes that squinted and watered in our torchlight. The keeper didn’t even ask for our prepared spiel about why 2 Jeweled Skull couldn’t come himself, he just showed us through more tiny passages to a little room with a hewn limestone floor and heavily braced walls. It wasn’t so well vented as the passages had been, and the smell of sweat and salted feces and stale rush matting was almost too much to take at first, but I could still feel air rushing past us and up through the speaking tube, wherever it was, way up to the top of the mul.

Inside, an attendant was helping the hierophant sit up on his invalid’s mat. The old man had a horrible bottle-imp gargoyle face with marionette lines descending like cliff-cuts down into folded shale, but he still had a full head of real hair, divided into twenty-decades-old braids trailing down from silver into black. Supposedly he was a hundred and two solar years old, about five normal lifespans. I didn’t believe it, though. He probably just looked that way because he didn’t take care of himself. Or smoked too much.

I signaled over my shoulder and everyone backed out, even Hun Xoc, so it was just the hierophant, his attendant, the keeper, and me. The keeper set the torches behind him so he could see me. I pushed an offering-dish of cigars toward one of the hierophant’s frozen knees, put my fist on my chest, and looked below his chin. He lifted one arm and made a feeble “Well, speak, what do you want?” sign.

“My great-grandfather, could it be my turn

To pose my great-grandfather a question?”
I asked.

He waved a “permitted.” I untied Koh’s traveling board and set up the position just before her last move, the one she hadn’t had time to make. Like I said, the position would take a book the size of
Modern Chess Openings
to explain clearly in words, but basically the runner was being forced into the corner, off the edge, but wasn’t quite surrounded yet. I didn’t see how you could get around past the end date at 4 Ahau to the center of the board again, but Koh had evidently seen there was some equivalency there, that you could take a shortcut. Like a ladder in snakes and ladders, or like the secret passages in Clue. The hierophant bent down, studied it for a few minutes, and then looked up and got my eye in his, peering through cascaded cataracts. Like I mentioned, eye contact was unusual, aggressive behavior, good for staring down a bear or an attacker, but not for company. I’d gotten unused to it and had trouble not flinching. Don’t blink, I thought, instantly needing to blink more than anything else. I thought I saw his face crags recrumble into a pseudosmile, but maybe it was just me.

“And so what should I tell you, new-ahau?”

he asked, in ancient-accented holy language. His voice wasn’t from vocal cords, it was a stomach thing that seemed to be squeezing out of a hole in his back.

I asked what he meant.

There are thousands of possible moves, he said, how could I tell you the next one?

Shall I play it out for you up to this point? I asked.

You don’t really know that much about the Sacrifice Game, do you? the hierophant asked.

No, I said.

I started to tell him what was at stake, about how Koh had said only “you” at the final moment, but after a few minutes he cut me off. It seemed like he already knew that I came from sometime else, or maybe a lot more about me than that, but wasn’t that interested. He said you might be able to get from the corner to the center through some vast sequence of steps, but it was much too much for most players to deal with. Especially himself, he said. He said he wasn’t so quick as he once had been. I could believe him on that one. Koh had been thinking somewhere between two and three hundred moves ahead, he said. How could we know which result she was working toward?

“Then what would you do, Great-Grandfather?” I asked. Figure it fucking out, you useless old trog.

“Ma na’atik,”
he said. “I just don’t know.”

He said that whatever Koh’s shortcut was, it was something she’d invented with herself. Maybe some other players had figured it out, too, but it sure wasn’t a general thing, since it wasn’t a position that often came up. Or ever came up. Anyway, he’d have to get the human players together again to hear how the counting was going before he could even guess at the moves. Maybe just talking to me gave Koh some insight, he said.

Then talk to me, I said.

I’m too tired, he said, I’m a babbling mush-bowl. He giggled a little and I noticed he still had four or five fang-filed red-enameled teeth left.

I couldn’t say anything for a minute. Damn it, I thought, I knew she was a genius. She’d seen that single line of code that would generate an entire fractal planet, the repeating pattern at the heart of chance. God plays dice with the universe, but you can win at dice. But, hey, she didn’t share it in time, and the rest of us were just blundering doomed retards. We’re fooked, I thought, for the octillionth time. Tilt, fins, it’s domino for us now, and cetera. Nearly had it. The greased pig just kept squealing out of my hands. Total disappointment has a very specific taste and it welled up in my mouth and drooled out onto my greasepainted chin. I felt like I’d come to see a cancer specialist and he’d said, “Sorry, it’s too late to help you, if you’d come to me three months ago you would have been fine.”

I knew the interview was over, that I was supposed to thank him and ask him if it was all right for me to leave, but I was too dizzy to do anything but stare at the intersection of two stained reed-fibers on the mat underneath me. I needed a word for
frustrating
the size of Popocatépetl.

You’d better ask your wife, he said all of a sudden.

I looked back at him.

You’ve brought me something else, he said.

Oh, yeah, that’s right, I thought. Mask had insisted, even though I’d said the whole idea was a gross-out. I signaled for my attendant. He entered, handed me a jade-scaled box, and backed out. I unbound the lid, lifted out Lady Koh’s stiff salt-cured hand, and passed it to the hierophant’s dune-dry baked-thin fingers. I tried not to shiver until he took his hand away. It felt like he had hollow bones, like a bird’s. He examined the hand from every side, stroking the nails against his cheek, counting her fingers over and over and chortling each time when he got to seven.

“Well, I can’t read her move from this,”
he said.

“But maybe you can still go down and ask her.”

It was like he wasn’t suggesting anything unusual. Evidently he chatted with dead people all the time. Why, can you get me in to see her? I wondered. I didn’t say anything, though, I just looked at him and tried to slow down my breathing.

“She passed this way four suns ago,”
he said
.

“I saw her walking upside down, and sobbing.”

I leaned forward. His breath was like meat ashes. This is totally stupid, I thought, except, you know how when you’re totally desperate you’re ready to believe almost anything?

“And how then would I get to her?”
I asked.

“Don’t go back up, keep going down,”
he said.

“She’s strong, she’ll last, she’s going to find the tree

And climb it. Ask the Sickeners to help you.”

“Great-Grandfather, please lead me there,”
I said.

“No, I’m too old right now,”
he said.
“The oracle

Can show you to the shore; then call the oarsmen;

They’ll bear you four more gorges west—Blood River,

Pus River, Lancet River, Gangrene River—

And vomit you up on the Xibalban shore;

Attend the court, implore Lord Jaguar Night

Before Star Rattler swallows her newborn.”

Whoa, okay, I thought. Sure, I can handle that. I’m sure I’ve still got three whole days left. Plenty of time. Okay, I’ll just head back upstairs and deal with this. It’s got to work. Well, why not? Ya gotta believe. At least when there’s nothing else to do.

What the hierophant was talking about wasn’t really an afterlife like a Christian one, and it wasn’t reincarnation either. It was more like some people, like Koh, are just so powerful they’re already among the immortals on this level. In fact, if you are that powerful death just makes you more so, but most people are so transient they’re practically dead even while they’re alive, and when they die they’re just supposed to do their thing and release their uay back to their relatively immortal clan-spirit. Even somebody like Koh might not be totally herself after she died. She’d be more, like, one of the Rattler pack, and not even the main one. But she’d want to get to the other dead and unborn members of her clan, which meant taking the long way around, going down before she could go up.

I picked up Koh’s hand, did my little obeisance, and started to take my goddamn leave of the abominable hierophant. He asked me to leave the hand with him. Probably so he could try to jerk himself off with it, I thought. Oh, well, why begrudge him his bit of fun, right? I said okay.

This is not going to work, I thought, as I trudged up the sweating steps. No, wait, squelch that. I couldn’t afford to doubt at this point. Who knows, maybe these guys do know something besides the one equation.

Which they also don’t even know—

Squelch. Just try it.

Damn.

Must I do everything myself?