The Sacrifice Game

(63)

“We had a burden,” I said. “Your final act

On the zeroth level can be to honor it.”

2 Jeweled Skull didn’t answer. I peered forward into one of his dry, sewn-open, upside-down eyes. He wasn’t even pretending to tune out, he wanted me to see how damn bloody yet unbowed he was. He’d made himself pass out into some kind of trance a couple times over the two and a half days since Lady Koh’s death, but the teaser had put a stop to that by force-feeding him peccaries’ adrenal glands.

“Tell me what it is,” I said again. I thought I saw some kind of insolence well up in his eye and in spite of myself I thought about Lady Koh again and just lost it for a beat. I started hammering his ears and nose with both hands. Pink lymph-thickened blood spurted out of his tear ducts. I guess that stuff really ran to your head. Anyway, that ordinary level of pain was barely registering at this point and after a beat I fell back, sitting down hard on the war mat. I looked up at 2 Jeweled Skull. He was hanging upside down on a blue-and-yellow scaffold inlaid with pink cowries, draining into a one-arm square basin carved from black serpentine. There were only five other people with us in the tiny courtyard, Hun Xoc, Koh’s herald Alligator Root, my teaser, and his two assistants. Normally there’d have been an audience, but this gig wasn’t for fun. I’d worried about Hun Xoc’s being there, but he didn’t seem too upset about the way we were treating 2JS. Generally your adopted father was someone you were expected to beg to die for, but either Hun Xoc had gotten enough of my influence or he was rebellious enough to begin with to get over that. In the little square of sky above us noon sun and overcast alternated on what seemed like even two-hundred-beat cycles. At midnight tonight it would be three days since the assassination and I had that sour cigar-stub feeling in my stomach that you get only after your lack of sleep shifts into its warning phase. A fattened dog was barking somewhere nearby like an unanswered telephone, but otherwise it seemed quiet enough. It was an illusion, though. Outside things had way degenerated.

Ix was already in near chaos, for a hundred reasons. A couple of rival prophets had come up after Koh’s death, probably working for the Snufflers. One of them was from the Rattler Temple of Ix and was trying to take over Koh’s whole act. Fights were breaking out between the Rattler partisans and the Snufflers and Skull clans. There was a question about 1 Gila’s loyalty. Most dismally of all, Severed Right Hand and the feline alliance were only a few days away. The beat he’d heard about Koh’s assassination, he’d marched triple-time for Ix without waiting for resupplies or reinforcements. We’d expected him, of course, but his speed took us by surprise, and even though we had every able body digging moats and putting up palisades, there wasn’t much chance of getting a defense together. At least, not unless I wanted to train and command another western-style blowgun troop. Which I didn’t have time to do. It was already only five suns until 2 °Cayman, which was my own personal outer limit. It was way past time for me to take the money and run, only I didn’t have the money. Lately Hun Xoc-who I’d made my first minister-had been saying he’d rather torch the whole city now than let Severed Right Hand get hold of even some of it. The idea made me feel kind of Brennt Paris? but I was starting to consider it. I could tell my brain didn’t have too many more days of functionality left in it. A month and a half, maybe, on the outside. And now without Koh looking out for me I couldn’t afford to pass out somewhere in front of people and maybe get separated from my tomb complex. I wanted to stay right here, to keep supervising the assistants as they finished making the gel compounds, and make sure the sarcophagus and the tunnels and everything were rigged to go at a moment’s notice. If I suddenly got worse, I’d need to get down there and get into the stuff, and trust Hun Xoc to finish closing off the crypt and dealing with the upshot of my autosacrifice. But that would be iffy. Hun Xoc was bright, but there was no way he was going to pick up on the chemistry and the engineering in time, and I was sure that the toastmaster was already intriguing with the Ocelot ministers… well, anyway, I wanted to see that everything was perfect myself.

I signed for the attendants to lower 2JS so I could reach him without getting up and I scooted over next to his head. His mouth was open and dry and his breath had some foreign rot element in it that was really hard to take. The teaser had drawn a sort of map like an acupuncture chart onto his body, with little glyphs with dots. I took a medium-length reed skewer, dipped it in a dish of a nonlethal dilution of scorpion venom, and turned it slowly into a dot just beneath-or now above-2 Jeweled Skull’s earlobe, drilling into the attachment of the facial nerve. For a moment his neck and torso quivered like he was lying on an old vibrating bed from some honeymoon motel, but there was no vocalization and the next beat he had it almost totally under control. I moved the point farther down in tiny increments like it was controlled by a Trac-Ball, feeling for variations in his current of trembling. Supposedly there was no kind of toxin that was more painful. His sternocleidomastoid muscle contracted and writhed under my hand again, but his face held on to that willed blankness.

God dog, I am such a twonk, I thought. Koh had mentioned back in Teotihuacan that 0 Porcupine Clown had been a gift from 2 Jeweled Skull, and then I’d just forgotten about it.

She should have thought of it herself, though. Anyone can be a sleeper assassin, even somebody who hadn’t been planted so openly. Well, damn it. She’d had a lot to think about and it slipped her mind.

For most of the last three days, when I hadn’t been fiddling with 2JS, I’d been staring at a Sacrifice Game board set up to Koh’s last move. Of course I hadn’t been able to make anything out of it. And of course we’d consulted everyone, Mask of Jaguar Night and the other Jaguar-adders, the three Orb Weaver mothers Koh had brought with her, all the independent adders I could get hold of, everyone who was even just a six-stone player or above, and they were all stumped. Nine-stone players just knew something that eight-stones didn’t know.

So all I really had to go on was that last moment with Koh, when she’d said “you” and looked at me with a sort of surprise. What had she meant? Was me getting back somehow essential to the events she saw in the future? And had she meant me, or the other Jed, Jed 1, who I’d left back in 2012?

As I said, 2 Jeweled Skull had supposedly killed the two remaining nine-skull Scorpion-adders Koh had brought back from Teotihuacan. Even so, we went through the trouble of interrogating the men who’d been with 2JS when Koh captured him, and finally we tracked down and identified what was left of the Scorpion-adders’ bodies. They brought them to me in three big baskets, but it was way too late for CPR and we weren’t going to get much out of them.

And as I also think I said a long time ago, there were only four other Maya cities with nine-skull adders attached to the cat mat, and none of them were friendly. There were six cities in the north, none of them friendly either. And no matter what kind of commando squad I could come up with or what kind of deal I offered, there wasn’t much chance of getting to one of them, interrogating the nine-skull, and getting back, all within a few days.

I was coming to realize, of course too late as usual, that there had been a dynamic at work here no one had put into words. Teotihuacan had been in severe economic decline for over a hundred years, and its two great families knew as well as anyone that its collapse was inevitable. The only thing that had kept the Empire going for the last several decades were the sun-adders, the custodians of the Sacrifice Game, shoring up the bloated, decaying city with the accumulated awe value of their predictions. And for whatever reason-maybe because of pressures from each other, more than pressures from outside-instead of spreading the Game knowledge, the leaders of Teotihuacan had restricted it, allowing fewer and fewer players to reach the nine-skull level and keeping the ones who did near-prisoners in their own city, the way Lady Koh had been. Like most rulers who realize their power’s fading, they’d preferred to hang on to the scraps of loot as their edifice collapsed around them, and to take whatever they could to the grave. The whole culture of the Sacrifice Game was in deeper decline than I’d realized. And as I knew from later history, it was just a matter of slow entropy before the whole Maya civic culture would decay in its wake.

Even so, if we’d had time, we might have been able to get hold of some other nine-skull players eventually, even if we had to lose ten thousand bloods in the kidnap raids. We might even have been able to play another City Game. If we’d had time.

But the Jaguar hierophant of Ix was the only one we had a real shot of getting to. Which was easier said, though. The hierophant was still down in the Old Cats’ Cave-which I pictured as a smoky bar with an octogenarian jazz combo-somewhere near the other end of the speaking tube he’d used to phreak me out when I was up on the mul. It was part of a complex of dry chambers past 9 Fanged Hummingbird’s tomb, deeper down on the way into the wet caves that supposedly led to the river to Xibalba.

Evidently, 9 Fanged Hummingbird had hidden the guy and his caretakers down there at the beginning of the siege, twenty-nine suns ago. And he’d provisioned them for a couple of months and sealed them off. And then he’d put another set of doorkeepers in the cavern above them, in the Ossuary-which was the only entrance to the Cats’ Cave-and barricaded them off with instructions to kill the Jaguar hierophant and then themselves if anyone but he or his representative came to get them. Which meant there was a code you could give to the doorkeepers to get them to let you through. Most likely it was a symbolic object that you’d lower down through one of the air holes in the barricade.

After that, what must have happened-as Hun Xoc, Alligator Root, and I worked it out after questioning Mask of Jaguar Night-was that 2 Jeweled Skull got the hierophant’s pass key from 9 Fanged Hummingbird. Probably 9 Fanged Hummingbird used it as a bargaining chip to get 2JS to let him go. Then, when Koh took over, 2 Jeweled Skull did exactly the same thing as part of his deal. After that, just like Koh had told me, she’d held out the possibility of releasing the hierophant to the Jaguar Society. She promised Mask of Jaguar Night that she’d let the hierophant out after the seating, and he made her promise that the hierophant would administer my final ordeal for admission to the society, as always, through his damn tube. And Koh had said okay in order to let the Jaguars-theoretically at least-still be the final arbiters of who was who.

Mask of Jaguar Night and the Jaguar-adders had even been talking to him through the damn tube during the time before the seating. But obviously the hierophant didn’t know the pass tchotchke.

And Koh hadn’t told anyone else. Not even Alligator Root. Or at least he said she hadn’t wanted to put him in that position and I believed him. She was a close-mouthed gal, and anyway, he didn’t have anything to gain from keeping that secret. And Koh had told him she wanted to help me. There didn’t seem to be anyone else who knew. 2 Jeweled Skull had killed 9 Fanged Hummingbird’s two ministers, and his own ministers had killed themselves before Koh captured them. For that matter, we just had to hope that Koh hadn’t changed the code. And so here we were, in this stupid position, trying to get it out of 2 Jeweled Skull, and it was like trying to extract mercury out of cinnabar with a cigarette lighter. It’s like, really, you’d think that without computers and encryption software or even electricity or even metal locks and keys or whatever, you wouldn’t come up against problems like this. But actually these guys worked hard to make it all more complicated. It was like how in the seventeenth century, before they had safety deposit boxes, everybody’s office desk had about a hundred little secret compartments in it.

I was ready to try anything, of course. I’d had Mask of Jaguar Night yelling and banging and calling for the hierophant through the tube, but he wouldn’t answer. He hadn’t even left a message on his machine. And we had a team of foundation thralls digging down to him, exposing a flight of stairs from the mul sanctuary to the chambers underneath that had been filled in eighty years ago. But since it had to be done silently so as not to alert him, it was going to take days. Anyway, even if we did get to them, the hierophant and his society would follow orders and kill themselves if we cut through to them without giving them the right pass sign.

I’d even suggested we try to strike a deal with Severed Right Hand, that maybe 9 Fanged Hummingbird could give us the key in exchange for a peaceful surrender. But as Hun Xoc and Alligator Root said, 9 Fanged Hummingbird might not even still be alive. Severed Right Hand may have gotten rid of him. And even if they did make a deal with us, why should we believe them? They’d probably give us the wrong passkey and the guy would be dead by the time we got in. Also, if we surrendered the city without trashing it, 9 Fanged Hummingbird might dig up his old tomb again, no matter how many boulders I’d piled above it, and my pickled body would be out in the cold. And time’s pretty cold. Anyway, “peaceful surrender” wasn’t really in these peoples’ vocabulary to begin with.

So finally I’d said they were right. I could hardly stand the frustration, though. Knowing right where the guy was and not being able to get to him. I could tell I was working on an ulcer, on top of everything else. And torturing 2JS wasn’t helping. I mean, not only hadn’t it gotten anywhere so far but it also wasn’t making me feel any better. I would have probably tortured him anyway, of course, after what he did to Koh. But now I had to be careful about it. I pulled the point of the skewer back, slid it onto the mastoid process, and, starting delicately, scraped it against the bone.