The Sacrifice Game jd-2

by Brian D'Amato

  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 Jed 1 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?

  Maybe I was only good to her for the well run. Koh couldn’t have sent her own squad to the well because then 2JS would have wondered what they were doing there. The most convincing story would be that I was trying to escape. It would keep him from thinking about where I was when I was captured “Where were you going when they took you?” 2JS asked Hun Xoc.

  “The mainland,” Hun Xoc said.

  “To do what?”

  “To meet someone, that’s all I know,” Hun Xoc said.

  Ah so, I thought. 2JS thinks we were going to meet Lady Koh. The teaser twisted off Hun Xoc’s forearm and started working on the other one. To my right they were peeling strips of skin off Armadillo Shit’s cheeks.

  2JS walked over to me, reached out, and took my chin, like he was thinking of pulling my jaw off. His hand left little images of itself trailing after it in the air. Evidently I was still pretty messed up.

  “So, Koh has something up her cunt, right?” he whispered in English.

  “Sure, she’s heading for Kaminaljuyu,” I lied. “By a west-coast route. She’s going to regroup her force there and decide on the next move.”

  “Bullshit,” he said. “If there’s one thing I know about it’s what’s going on in fucking Kaminaljuyu.” He reached out and touched my jaw with a sharpened index nail.

  (45)

  “Well, it is a secret,” I said.

  “Listen,” he said. “Jeddy face. Buddy.”

  “Yeah?”

  “You know you can’t last, right?”

  “Uh, yeah,” I said.

  He was probably right. It’s not totally true that everyone cracks eventually. Hun Xoc would never crack, for instance. But I wasn’t that strong a character anymore. I wouldn’t hold out all the way through to a horrible death. I wasn’t Chacal, I was Jed, and Jed was just a mixed-up punk kid.

  “So let’s not mess up the whole project just because you’re disappointed that you’re not going to be the one going back. You do want the project to work, don’t you? You do want to keep the world running. Jed?”

  “Yes?”

  “Are you following me?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  He let go of my chin. He’s rushing, I thought. Even if my Jedness would weaken me it might still take hours to get me to talk. A couple of days if I was really motivated. And normally he would have expected to wait that long. The teasers might work on you for months, until they were sure you’d do anything to just be killed without another session. Everyone was so hard around here that if they were ever actually trying to get information o
ut of someone, the levels of pain and time involved multiplied exponentially. And if you were the victim, the general wisdom was that the only thing to do was to be so maddeningly bland that they’d kill you ahead of schedule.

  But if you were the interrogator, if you rushed the process you might kill the subject. Or drive him insane, or at least make it actually take longer. It was a bad idea to allow for less than a couple of days.

  So 2JS didn’t think he had a couple of days The attendant behind me held my head up and my eyes open. 2JS took a pinch of dry chili strings in two fingers. I got in a last, and I hoped scornful, glance at him. He held his hand up and delicately blew the threads into my eyes. At first it just felt like I’d peeled and chopped a mound of onions in a couple of beats, there was all that tearing and burning and itchy-nose liquefying way back up in my sinuses and the needing to blink-although in this case I wasn’t able to-but as the powder worked its way up into my eyelids and down and around into my tear ducts it got to a whole different level, buzzing heat bubbling up into explosions of dry-ice bergs spiking through cracks in my skull.

  “Jed?” 2JS asked.

  Come on. Think of something really, really plausible. Something that’ll take a while to check out.

  “She’s coming after you,” I said. “I gave her all these plans and she’s building onagers and crossbows and shit right now. She’s going to level this place.”

  “Yeah, sure.”

  “Blowgun squad indeed. Fuck that, you should have come up with an antiartillery squad.”

  “You’re not convincing me,” he said.

  “Fine,” I said. Don’t say anything more, I thought. That’s the worst thing you can do. Stick with the one story. Eventually he’ll start asking about it again. Catapults. I could hear sizzling and smell burning flesh and skin. They must have been holding Hun Xoc’s stump against a hearthstone to cauterize it. The hot tears streaking down my neck felt acidic, like they were loaded with salts of despair. 2JS asked Hun Xoc something but I couldn’t hear what it was through the popcorn cracklings in my ears. Hun Xoc answered that he didn’t know. His voice sounded pretty normal. It must have taken a big effort. This kind of test of will was a big deal in a blood’s life. If you screwed up and cracked it meant your uay was shit-weak, but if you were cool you were in like Flynn. It was something you almost looked forward to. Attaboy, I thought. Just try not to mention where I was going when they caught you. Please.

  I guess right around there I passed out for the first time of the session-and like I said, way too early-because the attendants were holding my eyes open and one of the teasers was spitting drinking water into it to clear it enough for me to see what was going on. Servers were setting up two tripod stands on the lip of the platform in front of us, with big steaming dishes right out of a cookhouse. The attendant behind me released my right arm and I was instantly rubbing it into my eyes. Even a little relief really is blessed. It felt like I’d just won the lottery. Fuck, itching is really something. It needs a stronger word than itching. A server took the lid off the first dish. It was just a stack of waah, tortillas. He peeled off one and handed it to me. The other server took the lid off the second. It was Hun Xoc’s forearms, quick-baked over a big eternally hot river-stone and then infused with chocolate ale and sliced in almost a spiral cut down to the bone. Very Morton’s. The tattoos on the wrists had been touched up with food-paint and the hands were arranged to sign “I traitor.” I closed my eyes but my head-holding guard pried my eyelids up with his fingers and turned my head back down to the dish. The roaster peeled off a well-done strip from the end and they guided my hand to roll it into my tortilla and moved it up to my mouth. I wasn’t thrilled but at this point I was already like, anything to put off the next inevitable, so I just chomped into it. It wasn’t too good. Everything tastes like ostrich. They made sure I swallowed and moved over to Hun Xoc.

  “Please taste yourself,” 2 Jeweled Skull said in Chol, laughing under his breath in a way I wouldn’t have. “We mixed 9 Wax shit with the sauce for you.”

  Hun Xoc just clicked his tongue twice to refuse. They started force-feeding him. He was laughing a little himself. 2JS took a tortilla with a good slice of Hun Xoc in it and chomped into it with his old filed teeth. On my right they were blowing salt water on Armadillo Shit’s raw cheeks, and he was cracking, but just babbling gibberish. They didn’t even pretend that he might know anything. 2JS must have been getting impatient because he signed for the attendant behind me to hold my eyes way open, and he came over and held a sharpened-nailed finger up to my right eye. He didn’t ask anything, he just chewed.

  “Like I said, I told Koh everything,” I whispered. That earthstar shit had better be working, I thought, and I almost thought he could hear me thinking, GO EARTHSTAR! GO EARTHSTAR! Don’t say it. Don’t even think it. Keep him focused. “I gave her the recipe for gunpowder. You’re fucked through the dick with a battle saw. She’s going to bomb this place back into the Stone Age. Oh, sorry, we’re still in the Stone Age around here, aren’t we-”

  He poked his finger into my eye. There was a flash and the feeling of a balloon popping all through the right side of my head, and then I could feel him prying out the eyeball and ripping it off the optic nerve. It was painful, but not more so than some other things I’d put up with lately. It was really just that instinctive urge to protect an eye, the panic and the helplessness, that was tough to take.

  He held my deflated eyeball up to my remaining left eye. Its pupil was dilating. A pink drop of vitreous humor stretched out and finally dropped off.

  “This sucks,” I said.

  2JS said something you could translate as “Your ball days are over. Would you like me to take the other ball as well and put out your sun?” But it was kind of an untranslatable pun, since he used the same word, k’iin, to mean “ball,” “eye,” “day,” and “sun.”

  “So you’re giving up on the English?” I asked. He put his fingernail against the eyeball. “I don’t need that eye either,” I said. “Not if I’m going to be looking at you, anyway. You look like if Margaret Hamilton had been in Once Were Warriors.” I was still acting blustery but actually I was worried I was about to crack, getting to that point when the doctors of pain really do become a lot more frightening than death, just flailing on this macker of panic. The pain and the idea of blindness were heavy enough but 2 Jeweled Skull’s character was another whole level of pressure, I was fighting his insight into character and his near-mirror-perfect insight into me especially, fighting his old dominance over Chacal, fighting his Jedness, it was rough. Maybe I’ll just tell him what’s going on and we’ll all laugh it off later. No, wait. Squelch that. Cold out. But instead of using up the other eye he wiped his finger off while one of the teasers stuffed my empty eye socket with chili strings. At first it was just shrieking sound and flashes of lightning, my reptile brain thinking I’d been frozen and dropped and shattered, and then it peaked and settled into a long, slow shriek of the razor wire through the vessels, sharkskinning all 862 receptor neurons from the wrong side, the inside. For some reason I came out of it singing, “I don’t care, I don’t care,” like Judy Garland in In the Good Old Summertime. I could hear tears dripping out of my eye onto the mat, but was pretty sure everyone could tell they were only from laughing. Someone threw water over me to shut me up and get my attention.

  “This is your last chance for me to just kill your friend,” 2JS said too impatiently. “Otherwise he’s going to be a twenty-year captive.”

  “Well, I just have to let him go,” I said. Just don’t tell him, I thought. Don’t tell him about the earthstar compound, and don’t tell him what Lady Koh’s planning to do. Just those two things. Anything else is fine. Just hang on to those for a little longer and… and… well, and then there’s at least a chance, a slim chance…

  2JS gave the order to gag me. The teasers started packing up Armadillo Shit, who I guess had died. If I was going to talk like that, 2JS wanted to talk to me alone. He turned fo
r a last stab at Hun Xoc. Three fingers were sticking out of his mouth in an actually pretty comical way.

  Your skin tastes sour, 2JS said. Like you’re nervous, like you’re lying. Where did 9 Wax go after he abandoned you? He pulled the fingers out of Hun Xoc’s mouth.

  He ran south, down the path to the yellow gate, Hun Xoc said. There were traitors from the Snuffler clan waiting there to meet him. They were going to smuggle him to Kaminaljuyu.

  Whoa, I thought.

  Hun Xoc had figured out I’d been going for the well. Maybe he’d heard about the earthstar stuff or maybe he just figured out that something was up.

  Either way, he was lying for me. It was unheard of.

  Even I was shocked. Resisting your father wasn’t just individual disobedience. It was irreparably damaging the family’s eternal uay. It was heavy business.

  “Behead me, please,” I said in a flood of resignation. No need to be flip. Just get it over with. Just don’t tell him. “I don’t know anything, just offer me. Make me holy.”

  Hun Xoc looked at me. His eyes had sunk into that steely war face, that don’t-tell-them-anything-no-matter-what expression. I signed “Agreed” with my remaining eye.

  Which was about it for a while. Maybe they blasted me again. I can’t have blacked out right then, but whenever I did go under I must have lost the time just before.

  (46)

  I realized I was awake again, but there was a minute or so before I could remember where I really was, and instead I thought I was back in the hospital in K’oben, where I’d been when my parents were killed. It was all soaked with gallons of urine and just this solid despair when you don’t even know what despair is. I’ll remember that smell forever, I mean, at least once per minute between now and forever. Anyway, at some point I figured out that I wasn’t a fantasizing sick little kid anymore, I was in this really unusual situation, and I wasn’t in a cinder-block building or underground or anything, I was just bandaged over my eyes, and I was in one of an array of captive baskets set in rows like livestock pens. It was stuffy but there was a ventilating shaft overhead. At some point I realized Hun Xoc was nearby. But we just identified ourselves with the usual apologies and it’s-all-rights, and didn’t say anything else. They were hoping we’d start talking. Idiots, I thought, of course I wasn’t going to say anything. I wouldn’t say anything if we were tied up outside in the middle of a desert for a year and I was sure no one was listening. We worked out an alternating “beater” job position so we could keep track of time. My roughly eight-hour shifts were from what we figured was dawn to noon and then from dusk to midnight. Sometimes I got tired of counting time by Maya beats and started to do it by running through the B side of the Beatles’ Abbey Road album over and over. It’s 19.2 minutes long and it’s so easy to hum it’s like “Happy Birthday,” you can keep time with it and still think about whatever else you want. Maybe we’d be here for years, I thought. Maybe 2JS had worked his thing out and we were just being stored until we cracked. Or didn’t. Twenty years is 547,500 Abbey Road B sides. When it wasn’t my turn to be the clock I just drifted in and out. When you’re a bound prisoner you get to a stage where you can’t sleep, it’s just too uncomfortable, so you sleep in patches, conking out and starting awake again. At about twenty-six hours into our confinement torchlight came in from one side under my bandages and someone pulled our heads up and poured water back into our mouths. Probably the giggle water, I thought. Who cares. Anyway, we’ll get to check it out. The guard didn’t change or even loosen the bonds. Although I already felt I was sensing where the spy was, about one rope-length behind us. No matter how quiet he was being you could learn to distinguish it from the breezes outside. At thirty hours, the flies started biting. At least they stuck to my left side for some reason. Maybe it was wetter. A better spot for their eggs. At thirty-one hours in I started to smell a black tinge of Clostridium, the herald of gangrene, from my poisoned right foot. Great, I thought, on top of everything else. I just lay there, straining my right wrist-rope in a circular motion against its wicker cleat that, in a couple of years, might even wear it through, feeling my scabs crinkling, skin rotting, my body just turning into bits of dirt. My okay leg could feel the heat from my bad leg’s decay. I’m just a compost bin, I thought. Postconsumer. Consumed. There weren’t a lot of events. Sounds rose and fell outside, all too confused to read. They could have been a battle, a party, a herd of moose, anything. Once in a while a pair of red rats ran under the baskets. I made friends with the columns of flies and Pediculidae lice surveying me for development. The thing is, pure despair isn’t really that interesting to talk about. After a while, even pain gets boring. Forty-one hours into our confinement, right after my morning clock shift, the wind died down and the rot wafted up again.