Brian D'Amato - The Sacrifice Game

The upshot was that in a direct fight we’d be in trouble. We’d agreed-we meaning Lady Koh, her provisional council of clan patriarchs, and I-had all agreed that our best strategy would be to just keep moving as fast as possible and draw Severed Right Hand away from his logistical support base in the Valley of Mexico.

“Severed Right Hand seems to be holding his own against your Lady Koh,” Maximon said.

“You mean in the Sacrifice Game?” I asked. She’d told me that she played against him every night-long distance, of course, and by the equivalent of telepathy. And then in the mornings she’d issue orders accordingly.

“Yes,” Maximon indicated, somehow.

“You’re right.” He seemed to be fading-I mean, visually-and my voice started hurrying. “In fact it seems like sometimes he knows where we’re heading before we decide to go there.”

“Of course, it’s really his advisers playing.”

“Oh?” I asked. “Who are they?”

He said they were five nine-stone players who’d worked for years for the capital’s twin synods, and who were so permanently in camera that nobody, not even the synodsmen themselves, knew their names. Supposedly they didn’t have tongues, and they spoke only in a house sign language, and they had white skin, like vestal virgins, and two of them were over a hundred and twenty years old.

“Well, that’s good to know,” I said. It sounded like it was just hocus-pocus.

“And they also say he’s a great hun sujri, ” he said. Now he’s really got to be jiving me, I thought. The word literally meant “skin slougher,” or, to save syllables, let’s say “molter,” that is, a skin changer or a metamorphoser, someone whose animal uay was so unusually strong that it could transform his physical body. It especially applied to people with big-cat uays, Jaguars and Pumas. They were known for metamorphosing into cats, of course, but they also supposedly sometimes appeared as boys, as capturing-age bloods, or as old men, depending on the occasion. And the most powerful of them were always adding to their stock of new uays, human and animal.

“Which of his uays would you over me guess that he’d favor?” I asked, trying for a nonconfrontive reply. That is, what would he likely metamorphose into?

“I’d keep an eye out for snatch-bats,” Maximon said. He meant the big camazotz vampire bats, Desmodus draculae, which had a longer wingspan than any of their related species that would survive into later centuries. They were fearsome-looking suckers.

“You wouldn’t happen to know whether Severed Right Hand is planning to attack us right now, would you?” I asked.

“He has his own problems,” Maximon said, or his glyphs said. “He’ll wait to cut you off at the Rio Capalapa.” His outlines seemed less distinct than ever.

Wow, I thought. How did he know that? Or, what I mean is, how did I know that? I mean, you only get out of these things what you already have in there somewhere.

Hmm. We were still four solid jornadas from the Capalapa. Send a runner back to Lady Koh? Except I don’t have any evidence. We could reroute the march west, and then go south along the Mixteco instead. But that’s a pretty big deal. Anyway, he could be wrong. That is, I could be wrong. Severed Right Hand could attack us tomorrow. Better wait and get back to her and then send out some recons and try to confirm.

“Thanks,” I said.

“You’ll be all right if you hurry.” He said something else, but I couldn’t read the last four glyphs. Damn. Ashes. I rubbed my eyes but the glyphs, and Maximon, looked blurrier than before.

“Thanks.”

“ Dominos Nabisco,” he said, orally. Did I hear that right? I wondered. “And also with you,” I said. I started to back away from him Maya-underling style, but after only ten steps all I could see was the tip of his cigar floating in the infrareddening haze.

“We’re turning whiteward,” I signed to Hun Xoc, shielding my hands with the drape of my manto so the men wouldn’t see that I was actually the one in charge. He didn’t ask why, he just gave the order, signing over his turbaned head so that everyone could see. We marched to the crossroads and turned onto the left path.

The redirect took up about fifteen hundred beats-around twelve minutes-because we had to signal the front-runners, and then they signaled that they were coming back to show us what they insisted was a path in the right direction, although when we got to it I couldn’t see it. We marched-well, let’s say “slogged”-toward the nearest mesa of the low northern sierra. If I remembered right we were about eight thousand feet above sea level now, so up there it would be nearly nine thousand.

This had better be the right decision, I thought. What if I’m really losing it? Maybe the fact that the Maximon thing had been so realistic was something I ought to worry about. Maybe I’d gotten a whiff of psychoactives back when we were raiding the Puma’s pharmacopoeia, and they’d taken until now to kick in. Or maybe it was the neoplasm. I mean, the brain tumors that would have been seeded by the downloading. They had to be getting big enough now to start causing problems. I’d picked up roughly two sieverts of gamma radiation that had zwapped an image of my memories into Chacal’s brain fifty-one days ago. The Consciousness Transfer Protocol and the downloading routine and everything were all amazing technology, but the downsides were that there was damage to the host brain, the host spinal cord, and a few other vital areas. I figured the body I was in was good for another seven months or so, tops. Sometime around the thirteenth k’in of this uinal-in the Gregorian calendar, say, before January of 665-I’d be too unhealthy to function at all normally. Well before that time, I’d need to be signed, sealed, and entombed. And we’d just have to see whether I’d get delivered.

Well, don’t stress on it. Except should I really be taking Maximon’s advice? I mean, it was really my own advice, but if I was getting screwy…

Well, even so, if I’d learned one thing from these Olde Mayaland folks, it was that-well, actually, I’d learned a few things, but one of them was-it was that your brain isn’t one thing. The way they put it, you had sort of a stable of different souls. Some were human, some were animals, and some, like your ik’ar, your “wind,” or let’s say your breath, were practically mineral. And if you were clever, you let them talk to each other, and you made sure they all listened.

The crew and I struggled up the slope of crumbled sandstone. Finally we gave up on dignity and climbed on all fours, with our feet turned outward for extra grip. Still, I slid more than once, ripping cuts in my forearms. I kept looking around and seeing, with a reliable little chill, how small our troop looked against the cyclopean landscape. Like I said, I’d only brought twenty-two porters, four Harpy Clan bloods counting my adopting brother Hun Xoc, Six Ixian Rattler bloods, 7 Iguana-the Harpy sacrificer-and our head outrunner, 4 Screaming, with his own crew of nine, and a few other miscellaneous functionaries. It wasn’t enough to fight off even a single veintena of actual soldiers. If they found us.

The slope leveled out into a wide oval tableland that floated over the ash shroud around us, so that it felt like we were in a crater on some C-class asteroid. We posted lookouts at the rim and I marked three hundred and fifty paces to the nearer center of the oval and signed to Hun Xoc. He relayed the command to the porters and they set down their packs, put together their wooden shovels, and started digging. Hun Xoc and his two porters and I got out a forty-arm’s-length right-triangle surveyor’s cord and marked out the four smaller holes where we’d drop in the lodestones. In the twenty-first century, they’d be brazenly visible from any of Warren Communication’s microwave-sounder satellites. Before that was done, the crew hit rock, four arm-lengths down, but they changed their wood shovels for picks and kept at it. Hun Xoc, the other bloods, 7 Iguana, and I all sat on the piles of rubberized bags and watched. Greathouse bloods didn’t do dirt.