“Yeah.”
“The blowgun squad’s enough and enough is always correct. I don’t want to trip the Cosmic Censor or anything.”
“There is no Cosmic Censor.”
“Well, I just thought somebody might hear about a machine gun or something so it wouldn’t work. Or something.”
“I guess.”
“Anyway, everything’s pretty secure here. I’m not worried. Unless we can’t find Koh.”
“Great,” I said. I could tell he meant that he had the whole tomb setup ready to be installed. The folgerite, the gel stuff, everything. He was planning to head back for the bad old latter days right on schedule.
“I just wonder whether there’s something you’re not telling me. And I do need to learn that Sacrifice Game business.” He was trying to sound casual about it, but of course he was as nervous as I was. If Koh was dead there wasn’t much of a chance that he’d get very far with the Game. Especially not with setting up a human game. According to her—and although she could be cagey, I believed her on this one—there were only a few other living people who knew how to do it, and they’d been scattered with the fall of Teotihuacán. Maybe one or two of them were in Severed Right Hand’s camp, but even that wasn’t certain.
“Ask the Ocelots,” I said.
“That may be a bit difficult,” he said. “They’re a recalcitrant bunch. Anyway, I had to let 9 Fanged Hummingbird go just to get you back. For which you’re welcome, by the way.”
“Thanks.”
“It’s okay,” he said. The English words sounded odder than ever in this context. “Anyway, we should talk to Koh. And I don’t want to risk running around looking for her.”
“I don’t know where she is,” I said. “Why don’t you just bring out your nefarious instruments and we’ll get started on proving it?”
“Listen, we’re twins,” he said. “We’re even better than twins, we’re clones.”
“Clonies. Cronies,” I said.
“If we fight we’re just fighting ourself.”
“Come to me, my son,” I said in the deepest voice I could manage, imitating James Earl Jones playing Thulsa Doom in a Geraldine fright wig in Conan the Barbarian. Needless to say, he knew exactly what I was referring to. He laughed. I know I always laughed out loud whenever I thought about that scene.
“Come on, think about it, if I’d let you know I was just like you, you might have come after me. Right? How could I know what you were going to do? The right thing was to make it as possible as possible for you to get the Sacrifice Game. And meanwhile make sure everything here was ready.”
Well, it was the kind of thing I would have thought of, I thought. Except I wouldn’t have done that to myself. Would I? No. I don’t think so, anyway—
“I hear you got along well with Miss Koh,” he said.
“Well, yeah, pretty well.”
“So maybe she told you what she was going to do.”
“Well, or maybe not,” I said. “Maybe she didn’t trust me.”
“No, I think she probably told you something. Or gave you something to do, maybe. Maybe you were supposed to mislead me.”
“Oh, I’d never do that.”
“No, there’s something,” he said. It seemed we were having a stare-down contest. “I ought to know.”
“Uh, okay,” I said. This is getting weird, I thought. It was like when the Tin Man finds his old “meat head” in a cupboard in the eleventh Oz book and they don’t get along with each other. More of a monologue than a dialogue. Except it was also like I was one of those split-brain patients whose right hand didn’t know what the left one was up to.
“Tell you what,” I said, “you give me my command back and I’ll go find Lady Koh and bring her back here and we’ll all talk.”
“I don’t think so,” he said. “You’ll probably come back with an AR-15 and take me out.”
“Well, so, like they’re going to say, if you can’t trust yourself who can you trust?” I asked.
“Yeah, that’s the problem,” he said. “Listen, we’re short on time.”
“Sorry,” I said. There wasn’t much more to talk about. Except for the stuff he didn’t know, he knew everything. If you know what I mean. The first dresser, who I guess was now officially a teaser, held me a bit tighter while the second went off to get something.
And Koh had run out on me too. Silly me, I guess I’d thought a deal was a deal and we’d all live happily ever after. I guess I hadn’t really been ready to play in the big leagues. Where the main difference is the rules. Lack of.
Or maybe she was regrouping, planning a second raid.
No, she’d probably given up on the whole project and headed farther south. Leaving me stranded.
2 Jeweled Skull gestured over my shoulder to the teaser. I got the first little hit of that deep-down fear-bloom, when it feels like a little hole just opens in the bottom of your stomach and all this crud starts trickling out. The second teaser kneeled down in front of me.
Think, I thought.
Maybe Koh hadn’t told them about the earthstars. I guess I’d just kind of assumed she was getting the word to them. Maybe she hadn’t told anyone. Maybe she wanted to take out everybody.
And nobody’d told him they’d picked me out of the Great Cistern. If they had he’d have gotten wise to what had happened in about a yoctosecond. And he would have told me he was taking care of it, just so I wouldn’t have any lingering hopes.
And it’s only twelve hours since I dumped the stuff, I thought. At most. The Harpies wouldn’t have started drinking the affected water until a couple of hours ago. That meant there might be a few people just starting to feel the effects pretty soon. Even longer if it was as slow as Koh said it was in cold water.
It’s going to be a hot day, I thought. They’ll taste the water for the usual poisons and they’ll all be drinking up a storm. And they’ll be having a victory party then anyway. Maybe nobody’ll wise up until tomorrow, even.
Don’t tell him. Maybe he’ll even drink some of the shit himself. If you only don’t tell him one thing, that’s it.
The jerk, I thought. Bad timing. He should have cozied up to me a minute longer.
“So, what’s Miss Snake up to?” he asked.
“She wouldn’t really tell me,” I said. “We didn’t talk that much, I wasn’t up to her social class.”
“Liar,” he said. “Prick on fire.” The teaser pulled my penis out from under the little padded ball-loincloth and held it in his right hand.
“You can’t mess with me,” I said, “I’m 400-Capturing 9 Wax Ahau.” The teaser gently inserted a little reed-skewer into the tip and pushed it three fingerwidth up into the urethra. It was pretty painful. 2JS crouched down closer to my face, reading me, looking for something. It wasn’t just like there wasn’t any warmth there anymore. He’d never had warmth, exactly. It was like he looked like the lethal injection room at the Terre Haute Correctional Facility, nicely decorated but not a place you want to be. But something in his face was also mine. My stupid, goofy expression, all transformed into something crisp and efficient. I got a wave of that “Give Up!” feeling, like you get in chess when you get down a piece early in the game. Stifle that, I thought. Come on. Be Muhammad Ali. Bounce fucking back.
Think.
He’s pretty eager for me to give up Lady Koh. That means he thinks she’s coming after him.
Okay. Think. Get to that glassy-calm cool state. Take the long shot. Plan L. What would a Starfleet commander do in this situation? Think, think, thinkedy-dink—
EOOOOAOAOAAAAEEAEEEAEEEAEEEIIIEIIEIIIIIYIYIYYYY!!!!!
The teaser was blowing chili-water up into me through the reed. I tried to flex my eyes and suck the tears back into their ducts, relax the face, relax the face.
Thimk. What actually happened?
Maybe our whole expedition to Teotihuacán would have worked for him anyway, even if we hadn’t brought back the tzam lic, because the main idea was to distract the Ocelots�
� attention from 2JS’s preparations. And when 2JS was sending us all those messengers on the road about how much trouble he was in, it was all just bullshit. He had to create a balanced effect. The impression that the situation was dire enough that we’d believe in his air of resignation when we got here, but not so dire that we wouldn’t get here at all. 2JS planned to use Koh’s force to fight his battle for him, then blame it all on her and turn her and the other Rattler leaders in to Severed Right Hand as a peace offering. And 2JS would stay on the throne here in Ix, without threat from the Ocelots. No mierda, Miss Marple.
And then if Koh didn’t make it to Ix, 2JS was planning to defeat Severed Right Hand with his Frederick the Great squad, and then turn her and the other Rattler leaders in anyway, from a distance.
The teasers jerked my head down and there was another blast of pain, a column of magnesium sparks up through my abdomen into the roots of my hair, and when I was sane again I realized they’d blasted the chili extract up my ass with one of those enema things. The arc of pain seemed to descend for a moment and then somewhere inside me the two blasts met and interacted somehow, and it was like I was a mother parthenogenic fly, being eaten by my own ten thousand babies. Find the gray zone, I thought. Not many people know about it, but far out in the sea of pain there’s a not-unpleasant island.
2JS signed to the second teaser to bring in the others. Time to quit screwing around and start the real show.
( 44 )
They strung me in the center of the platform and set Armadillo Shit on my right, a little ahead of me and facing in so I could look at him. They’d trussed him up in a fetal position, stuffed him into a big wicker jar, and poured wet lime-plaster down around him so that only his head was showing. I gave him a “Sorry” expression and he gave me that pathetic anything–for-you-boss devoted-underling look back. There was a ring of morning glories around his panting head. The setup was artful in its way. I guessed they were going to keep him alive as long as possible and just see what happened. I shivered at it a bit, but I could understand their fascination in the experiment. It’s like the way little kids’ curiosity is totally cute, but it has a cruel side. I’m not proud of being receptive to it, but that stuff has an allure that’s hard to explain to Fifth-Sunfolks, that is, citizens of the twenty-first-century. You have to think of that stage that children go through. I guess it’s usually around the ages of nine to fourteen, at least in the industrialized late-capitalist West or whatever. Anyway, at some point in there, most kids, especially the boys, are obsessed with really gross-out stuff, including theoretical if not actual torture devices. Supposedly they prefer whatever toys seem most repulsive to their parents. And we still had a lot of that sensibility. I mean we, like, the Maya ruling class. Twenty-first-century sophisticates would dismiss it as preadolescent humor, but we thought of as tragicomic religiotheatrical art.
Come on, think, I thought. Maybe last chance to think for a while. Come on. Get it straight. I was having trouble getting it together. I was still a bit more disturbed by the possibility that Koh had abandoned me than by the possibility of spending the next twenty years in continuous and indescribable torment.
Okay. 2JS never had any intention of honoring his commitment to Koh. He wouldn’t need a rival in Ix later anyway. Once he was entrenched in Ix he’d need peace with the Ocelots, the Pumas, all the other cat clans, everybody. Right? Right. He’d want to become one of them. He’d have zero reason to keep his word. Except for his family bonds. Which he probably cared less about since he’d gotten an infusion of relativism out of my consciousness. My little contribution had created a monster—
They brought in Hun Xoc. He’d been knocked around a bit but not badly wounded. The Ocelots had probably let him take out two or three of their bloods in order to get him alive. They tied him to a prefabricated scaffold in the Good Thief position, a bit in front of me on my left. I looked at him like “Sorry, I screwed up,” and he looked back like “No, I screwed up.” Otherwise he just looked confused. Why was his father doing this to him? Because he hadn’t played well enough in the ball game? One of the teasers started playing with Armadillo Shit, tweaking his face with a thistle stalk. Just a warm-up act. No more massages, I thought. No more fixing up extensions for old 9 Wax’s hair. I was getting a little sad. Squelch that. Armadillo Shit’s breathing was already quick and shallow and it got worse. I wondered what his skin felt like. Lime is corrosive. Another one tied a thong around Hun Xoc’s left elbow, twisting it tighter and tighter with a stick.
Damn, I thought, I blew it. I nearly had it, just forty-seven days left, and I failed. Fail, flail, frailed.
Maybe it’s okay if 2 Jeweled Skull goes back instead of me. I mean, instead of this me.
Except it’s not, is it? If he does go back he’s going to do something rotten. There’s just something bad about that guy. Maybe I was a bad influence on him. No, maybe he was always bad. I don’t know.
I was sure he wouldn’t do the right thing, though.
2 Jeweled Skull’s attendants put an ocelot-pelt cushion behind him and he sat back on it, nibbling a honey tortilla and watching us like we were TV. Trying to act casual. It’s not going to work, I thought. He’s worried something’s up.
“Ti ku ti bin xot u cal tumen,” 2JS said to Hun Xoc. “You (inferior) have shat in our house.” Suddenly he was all Chol court language again.
He’s not me, I thought, 2JS isn’t me.
I was pretty sure. I wasn’t running 2JS, or rather, the other copy of Jed1 wasn’t running him. He was running himself. It wasn’t because he was being such a bastard and I was such a great guy or anything. It was just because I really would have handled everything a little differently. Maybe worse, even, but differently. It’s hard to explain. Somehow you could tell this guy was still thinking like a Maya ahau. Not like screwed-up little me.
“Please offer me, my father,” Hun Xoc said.
His arm was puffing up like a nuked hot dog.
“Your brother’s parasite came here to wreck us,”
2JS said. “It’s just a gut-snake speaking through
The mouth of Son Chacal’s decaying skin.”
“This blind, unworthy non-son didn’t know,” Hun Xoc said.
He said he didn’t know what he was being asked for or how he’d screwed up. No kidding, I thought. 2JS can’t really be expecting Hun Xoc to know much. They’d brought him here more for my benefit. What did Hun Xoc really understand about me, anyway? Not a lot when you got down to it. I’d really leveled with him, almost as much as I had with Koh. But he wasn’t the intellectual she was. I was sure he expressed it all to himself in terms of familiar concepts, wandering uayob and whatever. He thought I was still Chacal somehow, like Chacal’s disembodied spirit had visited this weird place during a night journey. He’d asked a lot about the seventy-eighth hotun but I’d always had to simplify my account. Certainly I’d never been able to really explain how engines worked or anything. He’d been interested in it but it was like Strange Tales of Another Dimension to him, he’d never apply any of it to his own experience—
2JS signaled again. One of the teasers had a short wood-and-flint bone saw, and he positioned it on Hun Xoc’s forearm, just below the elbow, and pulled the first stroke. Purple deoxygenated blood sprayed up like beads, turning red in the air. His teaser twisted his arm slightly, directing the spray away from himself and into Hun Xoc’s face. I hadn’t been watching but my own teaser had gotten another mouthful of chili water and blew it up into me, farther this time, while someone behind me squeezed the enema bag again. Staccato sting-rolls spread out of my groin and through every micrometer of my earth’s-diameter-length network of arteries and veins and capillaries, and congealed into a mesh of razor wire. When I could think at all again I waited for the pain to slide onto its descending curve. It was the only part where you could get anything together mentally.
Okay. I retreated into chess mode. Next move. Other side. On track. Think. I visualized a pudgy little Hercule Poirot
doll waddling around in my head, stroking his mustaches and pointing out inconsistencies.
What’s Koh doing?
Maybe she’d gotten herself killed somehow. Or maybe when she saw she was going to get captured she’d just cut herself with a poison ray spine. Maybe she didn’t want to be traded out to what was, after all, just another enemy. Maybe 1 Gila took control of her troops and didn’t tell her.
No, that’s ridiculous. They’re fanatically loyal to her. She has Unlimited Personal Power. Her armies are still out there somewhere, waiting for something.
Okay, Logic.
Koh hadn’t trusted 2 Jeweled Skull and she wouldn’t trust the Ocelots either.
She’d anticipated that 2 Jeweled Skull would sell her out once he’d used me to lure her to Ix. She never had any illusions about what would happen to her once she helped seat 2 Jeweled Skull on the Ocelots’ Emerald Mat. She knew he would have come after her next. Even if he wanted to promote the Star-Rattler cult after he came to power, he’d to do it through manipulatable venerators, not through a headstrong leader like Koh.
Okay. So she saw it coming. She knew he’d fuck her over, so she told the Rattler Children to stay away. No wonder we didn’t get any word from the twelve Harpy emissaries all that time, I’d bet a buck she issued orders for 1 Gila to kill them immediately so they couldn’t report back to 2JS.
For that matter, she’d probably set up 1 Gila’s idea to split the forces in the first place. That whole thing was just an act. Okay.
Koh’s still out there, with her army, or what’s left of it. Okay. So when Koh’s army didn’t show up, though, that actually surprised 2JS. Right? Right. He’d been counting on them to take the heat in the fight. The idea was to co-opt them and then sacrifice them once they put him in a good position. Even so, though, his blowgun squad carried the day.
Okay. So what about Koh’s long-range plan? What was she up to? Or more to the point, what was she up to with me?
The Sacrifice Game Page 28
