Brian D'Amato - The Sacrifice Game

Koh really should have let me in on that one. Should’ve trusted me instead of that Porcuputz fucker. Oh, well. Or maybe she thought that even if she told me everything she knew I wouldn’t be able to utilize it anyway. You never knew with that girl.

I liked her anyway, though A click. A little rattle. There was still breath in there. I raised one of his eyelids with my thumb. The pupil contracted.

It focused. He saw me.

IS HE STILL THINKING INSIDE?

“Everybody leave,” I said.

Hun Xoc scuttled everyone out. 2 Jeweled Skull and I were alone.

“I’m here,” I said. “I’m here, last call, last move.”

I moved my eye over him to where he could focus on it. His expression was weird but I thought he was conscious and that I had his attention. I put my one hand on the back of his head and stroked his forehead with the other.

Come on, friend, I said in Chol. Friends. Right?

There was a hint of a sound in his throat like someone cutting a tiny hole with a keyhole saw.

I’m sorry it got this way, I said. I mean, I’m sorry too. I won’t tell anyone I learned from you. I’ll say spies told me…

He seemed to be tuning out. I shifted into humilific court language.

“My father, you have me in you, and I

Apologize for giving pain; I know

We’re both the same on different sides; I’m honored…”

I was losing him.

“Come on,” I said in English again. “Look in what you know from me. When you die you don’t just end, you never even happened. This planet’s a dust ball with a few suicidal cannibal viruses on it, and you’ll just, that’s it.” This is bullshit, I thought. We’re not getting anywhere.

“All right,” I said. “Here’s the deal. I’ll take you back. I’ll dump your brain into the guck and have it in the casket and we’ll scan it into some poor shmuck in my k’atun.”

Nothing.

“Come on, look in my consciousness,” I said. My heart was whamming against my ribs. “You know I can do it. I’m offering you a chance. Come on. Just look in me and see what you can get, I’ll give you a monument and honors in the overtime, a whole new dynasty-”

“YOU WON’T,” he said. His vocal cords weren’t working and his tongue was sewn down onto the inside of his lower lip so he couldn’t swallow it. His breath was like swamp gas. I recoiled but got it back together.

“I might,” I said. “That’s all you have. Play balls.”

He was staring at me. My skin tingled.

“Come on. It’s the closest thing to immortality you’ll ever have. You might as well start from scratch at this point. Right? And your name will still mean something. Or just do it because it’s the right thing to do. Even you can see that. Or just do it for fun, you know, sacal chakan can kin bin yx bolon. Just do it for the hell of it.”

No response.

“You know,” I said, “death, we all do it, right? In fact I probably won’t even live as long as you have. Just do it for me. We had a lot of fun, right? You did great here. You’re the greatest. Come on. It means you’ll stay in the game, right? No game, no fame, right? More game. Come on. Please, please, pretty please, ugly please with sugar and the blood of four hundred immortal kings on top, pleasy pleasyweazy pluz plaz pleez.”

2 Jeweled Skull looked into my eyes for nine beats and I thought he almost smiled, and then I realized he was repeating something, over and over:

“A wing-tip harpy feather,” he choked, “a wing-tip harpy feather, a wing-tip harpy feather…”

The 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.