The Sacrifice Game

(66)

The protocol was that I went last, with my two torch- and standard-bearers, and then Hun Xoc, Mask of Jaguar Night, Alligator Root, their three attendants, and finally four condemned workmen who weren’t going to come out. I held the wing-tip harpy feather close to my chest. Had 2JS given me the right password, or screwed me over with his final breath? Well, we’ll know in a few minutes. Hell, hell, hell. The long blank passage sloped down at about twenty degrees, but there were still planks underfoot that had been laid down to support rollers when the masons were rebuilding 9 Fanged Hummingbird’s tomb to my specifications, so it was easier going for me than normal and I could stump down on my own steam, propping myself up on the walls. Torchlight spiked out at the edges of my growing and then shrinking shadow, raking over the black spicules of rock like the ultradetailed nonlight in an electron microphotograph. There was a sweet smell of decaying vellum. We bent to the right, that is, north, and came to a wicker door. I untied the knots, my bearers unbound it and pulled it apart, and we walked into what you might call the library of the Ocelots’ house, although since at least ninety-five percent of the books weren’t ever opened I guess it would be more accurate to call it an archive, or maybe what the Hebrews called a genizah, a repository for old sacred texts that can never be destroyed. It was a high blank room one by three rope-lengths, lined with racks of horizontal folded screen-books. Most of them were accounts and tribute lists, or deeds and petitions and writs and torts and estoppels dating back five hundred years. But there were almanacs, bundles of suns and Venus-years, as they called the council records, and Books of Souls’ Names, that is, genealogical histories, mostly of the greathouses of Ix, and of course there were stolen chronicles of other city-states, some copied through scores of hands from now disintegrated books, and older copies from oral and written histories stretching way, way back, to before the Flight from the Five Northwesternmost Caves, and prescriptions of rituals and protocols and herbals with medicines and incantations and surgical procedures and recipes of healing-foods and schedules for the foods and diagnostic smells and tastes and sounds and proportions and properties, patterns for weaving and embroidering and farming and architecture and the programming of the fertilizing waters. There were square rope-lengths of texts of the theater of cruelty, orders detailing the schedules of different humiliations for different ranks of captives for different days, calendars of progressive maimings, recipes for torture by iguanas, by flesh-eating beetles, by food forced and withheld, by low-level poisons administered over years, by crushing with a slow addition of weights like they used on the Salem witches, by casting in plaster, by the sun, by slow-closing spike-traps, by selective flaying over decades, by inhaled spices, by smoke, by salt, by proxy, by demons, by induced ulcers and abscesses and other controlled pathologies, by blood poisoning, by what we would call hypnosis, by drug addiction and withholding, by sex forced and withheld, by speech alone, and on and on. Finally there were covered and sealed shelves, two of which held the chronicles of the hipball games, first the rules and strategies and outcomes of matches, bets won and lost, fabulous equipment and legendary players, and last and infinitely more importantly there was an empty cabinet that had held the chronicles of the Games against the Smokers, the outcomes of the secret Sacrifice Games the sun-adders of Ix had played over the b’aktuns, the movements of the deities and elementals through the layers of heavens, earths, and hells. I’d had the whole section brought up into the light, and I’d gone over it all for hours, but it hadn’t told me anything I could use, and the only hope I still had from that source was that the Jaguar venerators would come up with something from one of the forbidden texts they were still decoding. But I didn’t think they would. They were idiots. Or rather, to be fair, they were just kids who didn’t know anything. The heavy hitters had all killed themselves or gone with 9 Fanged Hummingbird. Except one. Hope.

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.