Brian D'Amato - The Sacrifice Game

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.

It 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.