Brian D'Amato - The Sacrifice Game

We’re going that way, I repeated. Hun Xoc and the captain seemed up for it but the other five Rattler bloods just gawked at me.

Everybody’s a fucking superstitious insubordinate schmuck, I thought. Good help indeed. You could never get things together, nothing ever worked. And things never will work.

Hun Xoc got a handsaw and stood in front of the nearest blood and ordered him through the door. The kid was terrified but he still started to make some objection, something about how it wouldn’t be good for us. While he was still talking, Hun Xoc reached down into the kid’s scale-patterned apron, grabbed his penis and testicles, knocked his legs out from under him, and whipped the short saw under his hand. The kid barely made a sound. Hun Xoc stood up and tossed the kid’s bloody genitals at one of the other bloods. They splatted on his chest and flopped jiggling on the floor.

“You’ll take the women’s path as men right now,

Or we can make you women first,” Hun Xoc said.

The amputee sucked in his whimpers and tried to stand up, and the rest of the crew just stood around silently. It was a weird moment. The bloods seemed to be really considering the alternative.

I pushed in through the shredded leather into the creepy mauve light.

A couple of old greathousewomen were in the tunnel and freaked out and scuttled off. I stuck my head out. Finally the amputee limped for the door, and one after another the rest followed him. Maybe they figured it was okay now because the streaks of blood down his legs added realism. Hun Xoc prodded from the rear.

We went about twenty rope-lengths west and south and two rope-lengths uphill through the twisting walkway to another courtyard, a so-called “moon-blood latrine,” where the unclean water from the female compound emptied into the “excremental water” of the canals. There was a cistern in the center fed through an open half-log pipe from the mountain above. We all boosted each other up onto the roof terrace. The culvert led up to a branch of the great southern aqueduct. Hun Xoc climbed one rope-length up the intricate relief into the culvert. I followed him and the guards came after me and we crouch-ran uphill in single file, stepping on the sides of the channel, trying not to slip on the trickles of water. It was twilight but with the damn big moon it was just too bright. So much for under the cover of darkness. There were spatters of coded alarm cries behind us. We’d definitely been spotted. The aqueduct zigzagged up the slope and at the first bend I got a view down to the Ball district.

Usually fighting around here was more like a series of little duels than a battle, but this was different. There was still a knot of Harpy bloods in the center of the northern platform, and each one had a long blowgun. It was the same story on the steps of the council house, except the Harpies there were arrayed in a four-deep line, with the ones in front aiming and the ones in back loading, Frederick the Great style. They must have snuck in the blowguns broken down into two or three pieces, I thought. And then at the last minute they’d twisted them together. Meanwhile the Ocelots had taken control of the court floor as well as their back and some of the east zocalo, but there seemed to be as many dead and dying Ocelots as live ones. I heard a Harpy whistle that sounded suspiciously like a signal to load, and then the wet sound of hundreds of darts sliding into spit-wet breeches. A bunch of Ocelots charged up at them but the Harpies fired a single volley across the court into the wave of bloods. It sounded like a huge cough and hiss. I couldn’t see anything, and the Ocelots certainly couldn’t, just this invisible tidal wave of poison rolling at them at four hundred feet per second. Five out of six Ocelots pitched back and sank into the mass of emerald-speckled bodies. A second wave of Ocelots somehow sped up and rolled at them before the platform squad had quite gotten themselves together for a second volley What’s going on? Hun Xoc asked. I’d stopped running. I looked around and he pointed down to the zocalo. There were about twenty or twenty-five people definitely on our tail and Emerald Immanent was definitely the ringleader. They’d been slowed down by the crowd and were still at least four hundred beats away, but it was still disturbing, we’d gotten less misdirection out of the situation than I’d hoped. Some of them saw us looking at them and shouted to us to stop and come join the party.

Nothing, I signed to Hun Xoc. I got myself together and ran on uphill. Yeah, what the hell is going on? I wondered, but I knew the answer. 2 Jeweled Skull-my brain mate and adopted and spiritual father-had been drilling his Harpy bloods. He’d taught them to keep together in a tight body, seek cover, lay down fire, and most of all don’t try to take live prisoners, all the most basic stuff from a pre-radio-communications military perspective. But it wasn’t obvious in a wigged-out chivalry system. I mean, in Europe it had taken hundreds of years just to get the generals not to ride out in front of their troops with a flag labeled SHOOT ME.

I turned another zigzag. The Ocelots probably hadn’t even expected them to aim to kill, I thought. If anything they always expected an opposing force to drop back out of missile range and challenge individuals to come out and fight.

Fabulous. Maybe 2 Jeweled wasn’t in so much trouble as I’d thought. I certainly could of, should of, and really would of figured he’d come up with something. What would he think of, after all? Probably the exact same thing I would think of.

Would it be enough for him to win? I snuck another look back and down. The Harpies were throwing wounded bodies down into the irregular charging chunk of bloods. They’re acting cleverly for once, I thought. Maybe they do have a chance.

What did that mean? Something I wasn’t thinking about. No time now.

About six rope-lengths farther on-one vertical rope-length above the highest roof of the Ocelots’ greathouses-the aqueduct passed over the Ocelots’ mountain’s southern walkway, and we dropped down onto the stuccoed surface. It was pretty narrow, just a processional path that led down from the peak through stepped passes to the inner yellow gate to the Snufflers’ quarter and out to the mainland. There was no railing or anything on our left, just a one-rope-length drop down to the level of the lower terrace. The emerald wall of the Ocelots’ poison garden was on our right hand. It was only half a rope-length high but it was topped with a big nasty crucifixion-thorn hedge, the kind with the two-finger-width needles. Behind us, about two hundred paces back, the causeway intersected with a more major route-which meant two people could almost walk abreast on it-leading from the inner rectories of the mul complex up to the top of the mountain behind it. There was a bigger gang on our tail now, charging up the main route only about a hundred paces away from the intersection, frustratingly clear in the zinc light. They’d figured we were heading for the mainland and had just gone around the women’s house. I didn’t see Emerald Immanent’s standard but I was pretty sure it was them.

We can make it, Hun Xoc said. He gestured ahead and down to the canal. I could see a few emerald-sashed figures on the causeway-Ocelot partisans-but not anyone we couldn’t get through. I’d forgotten that Hun Xoc still thought I was going for the mainland. There seemed to be new Harpy blowgun squads out in boats in the canals. Beyond that there was fighting in the Snufflers’ quarter, but from this distance the battle looked purposeless, like a red ants’ raid on a black ants’ nest, a thousand higgledy-piggledy games of ritualized tag.

We have to break into groups, I said. I noticed that we’d lost Armadillo Shit somewhere. Whatever, don’t think about it. I picked out two of the Rattler bloods and ordered them to go hold the path against Emerald Immanent’s hunting group. Their captain repeated the order and they didn’t hesitate, they just charged down to certain death. I turned around south again because there was something going on. Two Ocelot guards had come up out of nowhere ahead of us on the path, and a couple of the Rattler bloods were fighting them off. I’d thought it would be deserted up here, wasn’t everybody supposed to be watching the ball game? The Rattler captain smashed one of them on the head with his mace but the guy just staggered a bit and kept coming and he had to hit him another few times to get him down. The other Rattlers had gotten the other gardener down to the ground and were working on skinning his face-they weren’t into that scalp thing around here, by the way, that was strictly for low-life nomads from the deserts north of Teotihuacan-but the captain told them to skip it and they straightened up. There were already another bunch of four or five Ocelots behind them, coming up toward us from the yellow gate. I wondered how they’d been alerted. I looked around. There were only five of us, one still bleeding and limping from his emasculation.