Brian D'Amato - The Sacrifice Game

“Uh, okay,” I said. This is getting weird, I thought. It was like when the Tin Man finds his old “meat head” in a cupboard in the eleventh Oz book and they don’t get along with each other. More of a monologue than a dialogue. Except it was also like I was one of those split-brain patients whose right hand didn’t know what the left one was up to.

“Tell you what,” I said, “you give me my command back and I’ll go find Lady Koh and bring her back here and we’ll all talk.”

“I don’t think so,” he said. “You’ll probably come back with an AR-15 and take me out.”

“Well, so, like they’re going to say, if you can’t trust yourself who can you trust?” I asked.

“Yeah, that’s the problem,” he said. “Listen, we’re short on time.”

“Sorry,” I said. There wasn’t much more to talk about. Except for the stuff he didn’t know, he knew everything. If you know what I mean. The first dresser, who I guess was now officially a teaser, held me a bit tighter while the second went off to get something.

And Koh had run out on me too. Silly me, I guess I’d thought a deal was a deal and we’d all live happily ever after. I guess I hadn’t really been ready to play in the big leagues. Where the main difference is the rules. Lack of.

Or maybe she was regrouping, planning a second raid.

No, she’d probably given up on the whole project and headed farther south. Leaving me stranded.

2 Jeweled Skull gestured over my shoulder to the teaser. I got the first little hit of that deep-down fear-bloom, when it feels like a little hole just opens in the bottom of your stomach and all this crud starts trickling out. The second teaser kneeled down in front of me.

Think, I thought.

Maybe Koh hadn’t told them about the earthstars. I guess I’d just kind of assumed she was getting the word to them. Maybe she hadn’t told anyone. Maybe she wanted to take out everybody.

And nobody’d told him they’d picked me out of the Great Cistern. If they had he’d have gotten wise to what had happened in about a yoctosecond. And he would have told me he was taking care of it, just so I wouldn’t have any lingering hopes.

And it’s only twelve hours since I dumped the stuff, I thought. At most. The Harpies wouldn’t have started drinking the affected water until a couple of hours ago. That meant there might be a few people just starting to feel the effects pretty soon. Even longer if it was as slow as Koh said it was in cold water.

It’s going to be a hot day, I thought. They’ll taste the water for the usual poisons and they’ll all be drinking up a storm. And they’ll be having a victory party then anyway. Maybe nobody’ll wise up until tomorrow, even.

Don’t tell him. Maybe he’ll even drink some of the shit himself. If you only don’t tell him one thing, that’s it.

The jerk, I thought. Bad timing. He should have cozied up to me a minute longer.

“So, what’s Miss Snake up to?” he asked.

“She wouldn’t really tell me,” I said. “We didn’t talk that much, I wasn’t up to her social class.”

“Liar,” he said. “Prick on fire.” The teaser pulled my penis out from under the little padded ball-loincloth and held it in his right hand.

“You can’t mess with me,” I said, “I’m 400-Capturing 9 Wax Ahau.” The teaser gently inserted a little reed-skewer into the tip and pushed it three fingerwidth up into the urethra. It was pretty painful. 2JS crouched down closer to my face, reading me, looking for something. It wasn’t just like there wasn’t any warmth there anymore. He’d never had warmth, exactly. It was like he looked like the lethal injection room at the Terre Haute Correctional Facility, nicely decorated but not a place you want to be. But something in his face was also mine. My stupid, goofy expression, all transformed into something crisp and efficient. I got a wave of that “Give Up!” feeling, like you get in chess when you get down a piece early in the game. Stifle that, I thought. Come on. Be Muhammad Ali. Bounce fucking back.

Think.

He’s pretty eager for me to give up Lady Koh. That means he thinks she’s coming after him.

Okay. Think. Get to that glassy-calm cool state. Take the long shot. Plan L. What would a Starfleet commander do in this situation? Think, think, thinkedy-dink EOOOOAOAOAAAAEEAEEEAEEEAEEEIIIEIIEIIIIIYIYIYYYY!!!!!

The teaser was blowing chili-water up into me through the reed. I tried to flex my eyes and suck the tears back into their ducts, relax the face, relax the face.

Thimk. What actually happened?

Maybe our whole expedition to Teotihuacan would have worked for him anyway, even if we hadn’t brought back the tzam lic, because the main idea was to distract the Ocelots’ attention from 2JS’s preparations. And when 2JS was sending us all those messengers on the road about how much trouble he was in, it was all just bullshit. He had to create a balanced effect. The impression that the situation was dire enough that we’d believe in his air of resignation when we got here, but not so dire that we wouldn’t get here at all. 2JS planned to use Koh’s force to fight his battle for him, then blame it all on her and turn her and the other Rattler leaders in to Severed Right Hand as a peace offering. And 2JS would stay on the throne here in Ix, without threat from the Ocelots. No mierda, Miss Marple.

And then if Koh didn’t make it to Ix, 2JS was planning to defeat Severed Right Hand with his Frederick the Great squad, and then turn her and the other Rattler leaders in anyway, from a distance.

The teasers jerked my head down and there was another blast of pain, a column of magnesium sparks up through my abdomen into the roots of my hair, and when I was sane again I realized they’d blasted the chili extract up my ass with one of those enema things. The arc of pain seemed to descend for a moment and then somewhere inside me the two blasts met and interacted somehow, and it was like I was a mother parthenogenic fly, being eaten by my own ten thousand babies. Find the gray zone, I thought. Not many people know about it, but far out in the sea of pain there’s a not-unpleasant island.

2JS signed to the second teaser to bring in the others. Time to quit screwing around and start the real show.

They strung me in the center of the platform and set Armadillo Shit on my right, a little ahead of me and facing in so I could look at him. They’d trussed him up in a fetal position, stuffed him into a big wicker jar, and poured wet lime-plaster down around him so that only his head was showing. I gave him a “Sorry” expression and he gave me that pathetic anything-for-you-boss devoted-underling look back. There was a ring of morning glories around his panting head. The setup was artful in its way. I guessed they were going to keep him alive as long as possible and just see what happened. I shivered at it a bit, but I could understand their fascination in the experiment. It’s like the way little kids’ curiosity is totally cute, but it has a cruel side. I’m not proud of being receptive to it, but that stuff has an allure that’s hard to explain to Fifth-Sunfolks, that is, citizens of the twenty-first-century. You have to think of that stage that children go through. I guess it’s usually around the ages of nine to fourteen, at least in the industrialized late-capitalist West or whatever. Anyway, at some point in there, most kids, especially the boys, are obsessed with really gross-out stuff, including theoretical if not actual torture devices. Supposedly they prefer whatever toys seem most repulsive to their parents. And we still had a lot of that sensibility. I mean we, like, the Maya ruling class. Twenty-first-century sophisticates would dismiss it as preadolescent humor, but we thought of as tragicomic religiotheatrical art.