Brian D'Amato - The Sacrifice Game

I put in an hour on my ruling mat, getting a few details in order. I ordered a few offerings, including a jaguar and an unblemished and good-looking fourteen-year-old captive. I lined up seven more attendants, two flautists, two cantors, a beater, and two messengers. Just before the sun died I led the team back down into the caves and toward the western tube. I’ll meet her again, I thought. Believe, believe. I will, I will, I will.

The twenty of us-or twenty-one, if you count 2JS’s body-descended in a widening sinistral spiral, first down gravel but then onto flagstone steps again as we passed clusters of sealed passages, each one marked with coded numbers, some of them tripled or quadrupled because the passages beyond them branched out farther on. Even with four porters handling 2JS’s body-we’d brought him along to help with my coming excursion-they dropped him two and a half times. The attendants leading the fourteen-year-old didn’t have an easy time, either, since he was too drugged to really walk. And the jaguar-well, drugged or not, you can imagine. At the fifty-ninth passage we checked the markings and cut our way through into a limestone passage that opened out around us. It was dripping with tiny silver stone-roots. There were ragged holes in the ceiling and even through the cantors’ dirge I could hear a trillion intergalactic clickings of far-off colonies of bats. Two rope-lengths in, the floor fell away again into a steep slope. My bearers took me and helped me down a rope rigging to a wicker bridge over a still clear pool that glowed in the green-gold light like it had been made with a few shots of creme de menthe. From the middle of the bridge I could follow the cliffs of striated agate down three rope-lengths. I thought the cliff sides were rippling somehow under the water and then saw they were covered with tiny white crabs, all scuttling away from the light.

Another rope-length past the bridge the bubble-passage ended suddenly in an ancient cave-in and the attendants spread out my mats and put me down. Mask of Jaguar Night traced his finger over a stained, convoluted wall to the side of the collapse. It looked the same as any other. Alligator Root looked around a little anxiously, lifting one foot and then another up off the cold ground. The head workman hammered leather-wrapped flint wedges into a vertical crack with a wooden mallet. I readjusted my bamboo leg and rubbed the oiled scar tissue on the side of my stump. It was getting flaky and raw. A fleck of torchlight brushed a cluster of tiny white eyeless newts clinging to a white-lichened rock. There was a soft crunch and the wall seemed to cave in a few finger-widths, blowing puffs of lime dust. The workmen positioned their staves and pushed against it. At first there was just the woody sound of plaster, but finally the chunk swung inward, it was counterweighted somehow, and there was a shrieking KREEEEEEEEEEN that I saw as a shower of icy scarlet ripples, and a hiss of old, unbreathed, mineral-rich air.

Mask of Jaguar Night tossed a triple-headed torch through the cleft to test the air. Light filtered back through the dust.

We sent an attendant back up to the sentries, to make sure this Grandfather Heat had died. Even though we knew he had, you still had to check to make sure, the way they don’t start the Islamic month until they actually spot the new moon. I sent everyone back a bit and waved for Hun Xoc to stay.

You’re going to have to make a decision, he said. He was the only person left who’d talk to me like that. The only one who’d start a conversation or talk directly to me at all, actually. He meant my choice was to stay aboveground to lead the defense of Ix or go down to look for Koh.

I said of course I was going to choose going down, since it was only probably futile as compared to definitely.

“Then start the fires but take the people with you,” I said.

I’d done enough dirty deeds for a few lifetimes and didn’t want to commit more genocide than necessary. My idea was that Hun Xoc would arrange for any clans that wanted to leave to spirit their way out of Ix by the river routes at night. Then he’d lead them north with what was left of Koh’s cult. Ideally when Severed Right Hand got here he’d find a destitute gang of collaborationists and a whole lot of charcoal.

“No, I don’t need to live and wear a diaper,” Hun Xoc said.

“I’ll plan the exodus, but stay with you.”

I tried to talk him out of it, but I didn’t have the whatever to order him. It was hard trying to talk with the sort of death march in the background, it felt like we were all in some old war movie about to jump out of an airplane. Hun kept saying how he really wanted to go down with the ship. Finally I said all right.

The expectation was for me to go through the cleft first. It was kind of disconcerting but I just scrunched through the jaggies into blackness. I wondered whether they were just going to seal the opening behind me and leave me to go insane in the dark and die nibbling on my toes. But they squeezed in after me, the porters maneuvering their big bundles hand to hand. The first thing I saw was a starburst of thirteen skeletons shrink-wrapped in skin, laid out on the floor of the cavern at my feet, ringed with bits of brain coral and stingray spines. They were the workmen and attendants who’d assisted in the last ritual here, 9 Fanged Hummingbird’s seating twenty years ago at the age of sixteen, on April 30, 644 AD. Beyond them the dumbbell-shaped primeval cavern branched into irregular feeder tubes flecked with cancrinite. Near the center a stump of petrified softwood had been ground down into a low altar table and I hobbled toward it, my foot crunching a thin membrane of white lime-crust that had accumulated like frost over the last k’atun. My attendants spread my mat over the table, laid me down on it, and undressed me while Mask’s acolyte laid out his baskets of pouches and jars and started the process that would, supposedly, protect me when I came into contact with the Sickeners.

“Thirteen are the coolings of your skin,” Mask said,

“In thirteen layers are our carbon salves;

You are the great exuder, the great stancher.”

They wiped and strigiled me and started to fill each sector of my body with a different essence: my foot and stump got the head oil of an iguana that could lose an entire leg and regenerate it, supposedly overnight, and my eye and socket were daubed with vitreous humor from the eyes of harpy eagles. They shot ocelot musk into my anus and rubbed my genitals with ointments made from the skin-husking creatures of transformation, the coral snake, the Barba amarilla, the fer-de-lance, and Star Rattler’s daughter, the giant diamondback. They rubbed my head and torso with thickened oil from Ocelot were-toads, which weren’t the pretty little tzam lic toads but big warty black things from a colony the Ocelot-adders had kept forever, children of Earthtoad they’d taken as hostages when they entered these caves long ago, right after the first birth of the fourth sun. Behind me Mask was lighting something. I just lay back and went with it all. Of course, no matter how Ixian I’d become I didn’t believe I’d exactly meet the Lords of Tonight the way Mask thought I might. What they were really talking about was what the dream-catcher school of native-American buffs call a vision quest. Anything that happened down there-besides getting lost or assassinated or freezing to death or whatever-was going to be happening in my own head. But I had seen enough weird stuff around here-not magic stuff, maybe, but certainly borderline psychic stuff-to at least give them a chance, since it was the last thing left to try. Anyway, I couldn’t let myself start thinking like a skeptic or I wouldn’t get into it enough for anything to happen. I had to doublethink myself into credulity.