The Sacrifice Game

(17)

“We’re turning whiteward,” I signed to Hun Xoc, shielding my hands with the drape of my manto so the men wouldn’t see that I was actually the one in charge. He didn’t ask why, he just gave the order, signing over his turbaned head so that everyone could see. We marched to the crossroads and turned onto the left path.

The redirect took up about fifteen hundred beats-around twelve minutes-because we had to signal the front-runners, and then they signaled that they were coming back to show us what they insisted was a path in the right direction, although when we got to it I couldn’t see it. We marched-well, let’s say “slogged”-toward the nearest mesa of the low northern sierra. If I remembered right we were about eight thousand feet above sea level now, so up there it would be nearly nine thousand.

This had better be the right decision, I thought. What if I’m really losing it? Maybe the fact that the Maximon thing had been so realistic was something I ought to worry about. Maybe I’d gotten a whiff of psychoactives back when we were raiding the Puma’s pharmacopoeia, and they’d taken until now to kick in. Or maybe it was the neoplasm. I mean, the brain tumors that would have been seeded by the downloading. They had to be getting big enough now to start causing problems. I’d picked up roughly two sieverts of gamma radiation that had zwapped an image of my memories into Chacal’s brain fifty-one days ago. The Consciousness Transfer Protocol and the downloading routine and everything were all amazing technology, but the downsides were that there was damage to the host brain, the host spinal cord, and a few other vital areas. I figured the body I was in was good for another seven months or so, tops. Sometime around the thirteenth k’in of this uinal-in the Gregorian calendar, say, before January of 665-I’d be too unhealthy to function at all normally. Well before that time, I’d need to be signed, sealed, and entombed. And we’d just have to see whether I’d get delivered.

Well, don’t stress on it. Except should I really be taking Maximon’s advice? I mean, it was really my own advice, but if I was getting screwy…

Well, even so, if I’d learned one thing from these Olde Mayaland folks, it was that-well, actually, I’d learned a few things, but one of them was-it was that your brain isn’t one thing. The way they put it, you had sort of a stable of different souls. Some were human, some were animals, and some, like your ik’ar, your “wind,” or let’s say your breath, were practically mineral. And if you were clever, you let them talk to each other, and you made sure they all listened.

The crew and I struggled up the slope of crumbled sandstone. Finally we gave up on dignity and climbed on all fours, with our feet turned outward for extra grip. Still, I slid more than once, ripping cuts in my forearms. I kept looking around and seeing, with a reliable little chill, how small our troop looked against the cyclopean landscape. Like I said, I’d only brought twenty-two porters, four Harpy Clan bloods counting my adopting brother Hun Xoc, Six Ixian Rattler bloods, 7 Iguana-the Harpy sacrificer-and our head outrunner, 4 Screaming, with his own crew of nine, and a few other miscellaneous functionaries. It wasn’t enough to fight off even a single veintena of actual soldiers. If they found us.

The slope leveled out into a wide oval tableland that floated over the ash shroud around us, so that it felt like we were in a crater on some C-class asteroid. We posted lookouts at the rim and I marked three hundred and fifty paces to the nearer center of the oval and signed to Hun Xoc. He relayed the command to the porters and they set down their packs, put together their wooden shovels, and started digging. Hun Xoc and his two porters and I got out a forty-arm’s-length right-triangle surveyor’s cord and marked out the four smaller holes where we’d drop in the lodestones. In the twenty-first century, they’d be brazenly visible from any of Warren Communication’s microwave-sounder satellites. Before that was done, the crew hit rock, four arm-lengths down, but they changed their wood shovels for picks and kept at it. Hun Xoc, the other bloods, 7 Iguana, and I all sat on the piles of rubberized bags and watched. Greathouse bloods didn’t do dirt.

We waited. Maximon had been right about the wind. Lord Papagayo had been walking strong on the plain, but up here when you dropped dust out of your hand it fell straight down. Weird.

We’d brought six nearly identical terra-cotta round ovens, each about twenty finger-widths across. Each one was wrapped in rubberized deerskin so that it looked like a half-deflated yellow beach ball. Inside each of the vessels were two more nested terra-cotta bowls with a layer of wax between them. So each round oven had only about forty cubic inches of interior space. Still, one of these interior spaces held four duplicate screenfold books with my notes on the Game, copied, two tiny jadeite bottles of the refined tsam lic compounds, toads and other critters mummified six different ways, and two folded miniature feather-cloth Game boards, all packed in expensive Cholulan rock salt. I hoped it would give Marena and company enough information to stave off Armageddon. Still, I couldn’t just slack off. Even if they got the package-well, I was pretty sure they’d get it, but let’s say even after they got it-there’d be a chance that without the sort of specialized knowledge and skills I was picking up from Koh, they wouldn’t be able to use the Game effectively enough to stop all potential doomsters. If we wanted to be closer to certain, I’d have to get my working brain back, with all its precious cargo. Or most of it.

The other five round ovens held various counterfeit versions of the stuff, convincing enough, I hoped, to satisfy any treasure hunters who might get the gossip.

After four hundred times four hundred beats I strolled over and looked in. They’d gotten down another two arm-lengths. Good enough. We started them on the second hole, one rope-length-about twenty-one feet-west of this one. Again, we sat and watched. Armadillo Shit picked fleas out of my hair. The flint pick heads struck showerlets of sparks on the bedrock. Hun Xoc told them to speed it up.

He’s right, I thought. They’re working hard, but they don’t seem eager to finish.

They know.

Well, it can’t be helped.

After another hundred-score beats they’d finished fifteen holes. Enough to fill the Albert Hall, I thought. All right already. I signed to 7 Iguana to get ready, and he opened his pack and took out a short muffled mace, like a ball-peen hammer with its head wrapped in rubber tape.