Brian D'Amato - The Sacrifice Game

You don’t really know that much about the Sacrifice Game, do you? the hierophant asked.

No, I said.

I started to tell him what was at stake, about how Koh had said only “you” at the final moment, but after a few minutes he cut me off. It seemed like he already knew that I came from sometime else, or maybe a lot more about me than that, but wasn’t that interested. He said you might be able to get from the corner to the center through some vast sequence of steps, but it was much too much for most players to deal with. Especially himself, he said. He said he wasn’t so quick as he once had been. I could believe him on that one. Koh had been thinking somewhere between two and three hundred moves ahead, he said. How could we know which result she was working toward?

“Then what would you do, Great-Grandfather?” I asked. Figure it fucking out, you useless old trog.

“Ma na’atik,” he said. “I just don’t know.”

He said that whatever Koh’s shortcut was, it was something she’d invented with herself. Maybe some other players had figured it out, too, but it sure wasn’t a general thing, since it wasn’t a position that often came up. Or ever came up. Anyway, he’d have to get the human players together again to hear how the counting was going before he could even guess at the moves. Maybe just talking to me gave Koh some insight, he said.

Then talk to me, I said.

I’m too tired, he said, I’m a babbling mush-bowl. He giggled a little and I noticed he still had four or five fang-filed red-enameled teeth left.

I couldn’t say anything for a minute. Damn it, I thought, I knew she was a genius. She’d seen that single line of code that would generate an entire fractal planet, the repeating pattern at the heart of chance. God plays dice with the universe, but you can win at dice. But, hey, she didn’t share it in time, and the rest of us were just blundering doomed retards. We’re fooked, I thought, for the octillionth time. Tilt, fins, it’s domino for us now, and cetera. Nearly had it. The greased pig just kept squealing out of my hands. Total disappointment has a very specific taste and it welled up in my mouth and drooled out onto my greasepainted chin. I felt like I’d come to see a cancer specialist and he’d said, “Sorry, it’s too late to help you, if you’d come to me three months ago you would have been fine.”

I knew the interview was over, that I was supposed to thank him and ask him if it was all right for me to leave, but I was too dizzy to do anything but stare at the intersection of two stained reed-fibers on the mat underneath me. I needed a word for frustrating the size of Popocatepetl.

You’d better ask your wife, he said all of a sudden.

I looked back at him.

You’ve brought me something else, he said.

Oh, yeah, that’s right, I thought. Mask had insisted, even though I’d said the whole idea was a gross-out. I signaled for my attendant. He entered, handed me a jade-scaled box, and backed out. I unbound the lid, lifted out Lady Koh’s stiff salt-cured hand, and passed it to the hierophant’s dune-dry baked-thin fingers. I tried not to shiver until he took his hand away. It felt like he had hollow bones, like a bird’s. He examined the hand from every side, stroking the nails against his cheek, counting her fingers over and over and chortling each time when he got to seven.

“Well, I can’t read her move from this,” he said.

“But maybe you can still go down and ask her.”

It was like he wasn’t suggesting anything unusual. Evidently he chatted with dead people all the time. Why, can you get me in to see her? I wondered. I didn’t say anything, though, I just looked at him and tried to slow down my breathing.

“She passed this way four suns ago,” he said.

“I saw her walking upside down, and sobbing.”

I leaned forward. His breath was like meat ashes. This is totally stupid, I thought, except, you know how when you’re totally desperate you’re ready to believe almost anything?

“And how then would I get to her?” I asked.

“Don’t go back up, keep going down,” he said.

“She’s strong, she’ll last, she’s going to find the tree

And climb it. Ask the Sickeners to help you.”

“Great-Grandfather, please lead me there,” I said.

“No, I’m too old right now,” he said. “The oracle

Can show you to the shore; then call the oarsmen;

They’ll bear you four more gorges west-Blood River,

Pus River, Lancet River, Gangrene River And vomit you up on the Xibalban shore;

Attend the court, implore Lord Jaguar Night

Before Star Rattler swallows her newborn.”

Whoa, okay, I thought. Sure, I can handle that. I’m sure I’ve still got three whole days left. Plenty of time. Okay, I’ll just head back upstairs and deal with this. It’s got to work. Well, why not? Ya gotta believe. At least when there’s nothing else to do.

What the hierophant was talking about wasn’t really an afterlife like a Christian one, and it wasn’t reincarnation either. It was more like some people, like Koh, are just so powerful they’re already among the immortals on this level. In fact, if you are that powerful death just makes you more so, but most people are so transient they’re practically dead even while they’re alive, and when they die they’re just supposed to do their thing and release their uay back to their relatively immortal clan-spirit. Even somebody like Koh might not be totally herself after she died. She’d be more, like, one of the Rattler pack, and not even the main one. But she’d want to get to the other dead and unborn members of her clan, which meant taking the long way around, going down before she could go up.

I picked up Koh’s hand, did my little obeisance, and started to take my goddamn leave of the abominable hierophant. He asked me to leave the hand with him. Probably so he could try to jerk himself off with it, I thought. Oh, well, why begrudge him his bit of fun, right? I said okay.

This is not going to work, I thought, as I trudged up the sweating steps. No, wait, squelch that. I couldn’t afford to doubt at this point. Who knows, maybe these guys do know something besides the one equation.

Which they also don’t even know Squelch. Just try it.

Damn.

Must I do everything myself?

I got back to 2 Jeweled Skull at the end of the second afternoon watch. The teasers had kept him alive, but he’d managed to trance himself out somehow and it took a while to get him responsive again. When he was finally focusing on me I asked for the Giving Knives and laid the large one on his abdomen.

He couldn’t speak but his eyes asked me if I was actually going to let him go for telling the truth about the feather.

“No,” I said, “I take it back.” I tried to smile but his face was just bleak and exhausted like a ragged mouthless moth’s, completely exposed to my tough mercies, just trying to die. I probably look more evil than I can imagine, I thought. Face it, Jed, you’re a jerk. Chacal would have been pleased. I made a transverse cut under his rib cage, worked my hand in with the small knife, cut through the diaphragm, and wriggled up to his heart. When you were executing somebody yourself you were supposed to be kind of a psychopomp and help him on his way into the reflecting world. But you’ve got to be a pretty smooth character to pull it off. I think most often at the moment you start to kill someone the only feeling you remember later is frustration, it’s like, just get out of my world. It’s the pesky-fly syndrome. His heart struggled electrically against my hand and I twisted and pulled, snapping it like it was the spine of a rat. There was a peak of tension and spastic shuddering and a long exhalation of wet breath, then total relaxation and then there wasn’t anything there, he was just a shriveled old corpse. It felt like I’d birthed his uay like a scent essence. I fell backward and signed for them to get my dresser. So, fuck you, your punishment was to get screwed, I thought. I felt a little bad about just plain lying and everything, but in his case it seemed okay to make an exception to general principles. Anyway, I still wondered whether he’d told me about the feather because of what I’d offered, or just because he came up against that level of terror that’s so basic, anyone from any culture’s the same. Or maybe he had another reason. My attendant lifted me up and I signaled for him to rub me down and change me into court dress. I was feeling kind of misty and sentimental, and at first I thought it was because I was tired and upset about Koh but then I realized that despite myself I might be missing 2JS, since now I really was kind of alone here.