The Sacrifice Game

(62)

The runner was surrounded at the northwest corner of the board, cut off at the edge of the world. It was like Koh and her avatar were checkmated, there was nowhere for the sapphire to escape to. Oh, shit, I thought, that’s really it, the end, the end, the end, the end. I looked up at Koh. She was still studying the board. I saw movement at the nose-edge of my right eye and bent down to focus on the board again. Koh was definitely seeing something, she’d made another move in her head, but I couldn’t imagine where. I tried to see what she was seeing on the board but it was all murky and distorted like the lens in my eye was melting. Koh picked up her sapphire and moved it toward the center of the board, like the runner was somehow jumping over the mass of catchers.

Something touched her shoulder and she looked up. The Porcupine Clown had gotten all the way up to our level and was leaning over Lady Koh herself, flirting with her like he was trying to lead her down into the zocalo. Was he supposed to do that? I wondered. Wait a beat, I thought. Koh stood up and I thought she was laughing but then I thought maybe something was actually wrong, the Porcupine was hugging her, and she wasn’t just being a good sport in the act, she was really struggling. Where were the guards? I wondered, but of course it had looked like just part of his act. I jumped over the table at them but I was too groggy and the Porcupine was too fast, he was already over the lip of the sanctuary and rolling down the steps with his arms and legs wrapped around Lady Koh. I lurched down after them but my Ahab leg slipped out from under me and I slid down into the arms of one of the guards. Attendants were bouncing down the steps below me and for a beat I thought Koh had rolled down all the way, but as I screamed for them to get me down, DOWN!!! Porcupine had fetched up on the tenth step below us, caught by a ball of belayed guards, and I saw some of Koh’s robe in the knot. I couldn’t hear anything over cataracts of blood through my ears, but the guard got me down to them and I sort of slid down into the cluster, held by a couple of the roped guards while a few more of Koh’s attendants rolled down, leaving spatters of blood on the white stairs. Some of her other women and a couple of attendants were coughing and gagging like they had rocks stuck in their throats. I got my hands on Koh’s crushed brittle headdress and threw it aside.

I thought for a beat that she’d smeared her face paint, because the white parts of her skin were a purple I couldn’t imagine was real. Below her the three bloods who’d caught Porcupine were sprawling back on the edge of the platform, gasping for breath and choking. Another one had gotten his quill costume off and was trying to ask him the eternal question, who’d sent him, but the clown’s tan skin was already turning to blueberry-black and there was a huge maroon erection popping out from under his raggedy underwear. His chest was pocked with little sticks.

I got Koh’s head into my hands. She had a surprised, disgusted look. She said, “You-”

“It’s all right,” I said stupidly in English, “you’re going to be great. Right?”

She didn’t answer. Foamy snot was running out of her nose and mouth and her open eyes were getting that matte finish. There were little sticks stuck to her face and chest and I picked one out of the underside of her chin, automatically holding it by the side. It was smooth and tiger-striped, a spine taken from a living scorpionfish, with a neurotoxin that kills by suffocation. They’d been woven into Porcupine’s suit, mixed in with the hard-oiled black feathers that mimicked quills, and when he’d hugged her some of them had gone into his own flesh too.

“Get water in her NOW!!!” I screamed in Chol. I got my hands around the back of her head and blew air into her mouth, but there was just this whiffling blob of mucus in there. I turned her over and tried to Heimlich her but she wasn’t responding, she was just a lump. I started hitting her but there was nothing. You’re dreaming, this shit’s lethal at half this dose. I yelled for someone to help me get the fucking quills out but they didn’t know what I meant because I was speaking English again and then they were afraid to touch her because they weren’t allowed. Alligator Root appeared and he and I pulled them out. Each time they left this blob of thick-looking blood. An attendant had gotten a pot of water and we tried to get her to drink, but there was nothing, and I made them find an enema gourd and we forced some down her throat, but she wasn’t really swallowing. I screamed to Alligator Root that there must be some antidote, that he had to run and get the surgeons, but of course there was no antidote. If they really knew one thing around here it was poisons. I got on top of her and started stupidly trying to massage her heart back to life, crashing down on her and breaking her ribs like I’d forgotten how to do from No Way’s survival books, but I just rolled off the stair and nearly tumbled down after the others, it was like we were on the steep slope of an icy mountain with barely any friction keeping us in place and it seemed for a beat like the whole knot of guards and attendants was going to come off its moorings and go rolling down the saw stairs, but one of the bloods got to me and tied me to a sacrificial rope with a scarf-he didn’t want the rope to touch my skin-and I got so upset at him for messing with me and not doing something for Koh that I elbowed him in the face and he skidded off down the blades of the stairs. I’m a jerk, I thought. I grabbed the enema gourd and sprayed water in her face. No response. I grabbed her puffy blue tongue and pulled on it. Nothing. Okay, still not too late. Miracle worker, right?

The well, I thought. We’re going to the Great Cistern.

No. How cold is that, fifteen degrees Celsius? That’s nothing.

The lake in the caves. How cold? Eight degrees, ten degrees?

Hypothermia temperature. But not brain-keeping temperature.

Jelly.

GET HER IN THE JELLY NOW, I mind-screamed, and then tried to put it into Chol, but it was already too late for that. Even if I could get her down there it would take hours to mix up the stuff.

Air too warm here. Come on. Get her down there. Two minutes, three minutes max. Otherwise her brain would have rotted to irrevocable stupidity. I yelled for them to get us down. The attendants held me while they practically sledded down on their ragged rumps. Face it, you’re fucked, I thought. The flying finger fucks. I was even crying, which was pretty silly in the context. It was probably mainly just about what a fuckup I was, am, and would be. She was the greatest and you’re the pits. About one beat faster and you would have gotten her out of there. We slid to the bottom, into a slick of blood and wheezing bodies. I got Alligator Root’s ear down to my mouth.

Get us into the Ocelot caves now, I said. They picked me up and wound Koh into a sheet and the bloods started parting the crowds ahead of us, cracking their flails and blowing kazoos, and the crowd did scatter, but by the time we’d even gotten to the steps up to the mountain path behind the Ocelot mul I could tell it was already ten minutes since the attack, and then it took another ten minutes even to get to the first mountain shrine that led down to the caves, and it was way, way, way too late. Brain dies within two minutes. Dumb. Retarded.

You were supposed to be her primary guard, you know, I thought, you were her husband, after all, you little freak. Big shot, right? Sitting on a big smelly pile of rubble with a dead girl and no Snow? Could have had her dumped in snow. Could have had a giant tub of snow always ready. A couple of hundred runners working round the clock to keep it stocked, that’s all it would have taken. Save her. Take ’er back.

Brain rotting. Dead, dead. Dead, my lords and gentlemen.

“Send forty running teams,” I said. “They’re going to Ice Mountain. For a hundred times four hundred bags of snow.”

Alligator Root looked at me. I looked back at him. He didn’t move. I looked down.

No point. No point. It was four days’ run away.