The Sacrifice Game

(77)

My bearers lifted me off the Ocelot mat and Mask’s acolytes rolled it up for the last time. They carried me to the doorway and handed me my double-headed serpent bar scepter. I could smell lime plaster burning. The fires were already lapping at the stone precinct. The bloods and dependents were laid out below in their ranks and files and orders and levels, with only a few absences. There were four squads of five-score bloods each stationed at the base of the mul, with orders to defend it indefinitely. They looked a little uncertain. I wondered how long they’d actually stay after we disappeared. They all made their unified gestures of submission. But they seemed to be sinking into the sour haze and my horns and stone drums sounded muffled. I couldn’t even see the Nest of One Harpy, the Mountain of the East. The sun died behind me as if it were trying to reenact my seating as ahau, only it didn’t look so good this time.

Nothing like a little pomp ’n’ circumstance while everything goes to hell, I thought. At least there were enough people watching so there won’t be any question about where I was going.

What I was doing had been pitched to the public, if you could call them that, as a royal autosacrifice. Or that’s what anthropologists would call it. In Ixian it would be more like “freeing all our greatfathermother’s uays to intercede for us at the smokers’ hearths.” It wasn’t uncommon. In fact, after ruling for a k’atun you were really supposed to do away with yourself, unless you could fudge it with a proxy the way 9 Fanged Hummingbird had with me, way back in the day. I was just taking an early retirement as a grand gesture. Supposedly my uay would protect the city from the invaders, as long as my body stayed in its mul. I kind of hoped the poor bastards wouldn’t buy it, though. Maybe they’d wise up and finally get the hell out. Anyway, my body wouldn’t actually be under the mul at all. It would be way back in the cave under the hills, ideally covered with a few hundred tons of pulverized karst.

We should go in before we get smoke-cured, Hun Xoc said behind me.

I signed. The musicians stepped it up and crescendoed. The crowd answered. I withdrew my divine fucking presence and we stumbled back into the sanctuary.

At this point the only bloods in the sanctum were me, Hun Xoc, Alligator Root-who was acting as his hands-and Mask of Jaguar Night. Then there were my four bearers holding my mat and staff and private box, five attendants, and thirteen workmen huddled in clusters on heaped bags of gravel, holding unlit torches and bundles of flint axes. I signed for them to open the floor-door to the Nether Throat.

You should really go with 1 Gila, I said to Hun Xoc.

I wouldn’t enjoy it, he said,

“Now that I’m just a lump of dough with eyes.”

I next to you am sorry about that, I gestured.

Just tell your new clan about all the ball games we won, and list the captives we took, he said.

I said of course I would. Yeah, I’ll tell the gang that once there was a fleeting wisp of glory that was known as Camelot. And they’ll be like, so what?

Still, I did at least get the Sacrifice Game skillz, I thought. And the drugs. That’s something I haven’t quite fucked up on. Yet.

If it still works after all that time. Maybe when you take it out of Toyland the magic drains out Squelch. Cancel. Can But wait, even if everything works, how likely is it that your little rotten brain is going to work? Not bloody. Memember, Mebecca? They’ll screw it up, you’re just going to rot. I wasn’t even sure I’d made enough gel, the lodestones I’d managed to get seemed weak, maybe I didn’t have enough salt, maybe it was too wet down there, the sandbags might not work FOCUS, I yelled to the projectionist behind my eyes. Don’t even think about it.

The true flaming hell of it was, I thought, I didn’t even feel displaced or centerless or whatever here anymore. I felt at home. Even if I did get back to Planet Dismal I’d feel exiled there. I guess that’s part of the punishment, I thought, you only get things when you don’t want them anymore.

I sent a single torchbearer down ahead of us and let them carry me down the steep inner stairs. They were still dirty from the last excavation. Everyone followed except six of the workmen, who were going to fill the staircase up after us. The ventilation tubes had been cleared, too, and the Jaguar-adders’ singing from the ritual outside came in through the pipes and feedbacked around in the stone. I’d say it was like a death march except its melody didn’t repeat or resolve itself, it was more kind of an ever-rising fugue of sad, extended tonal interrogations, questions you felt you must have asked a long time ago and now somebody was asking you, and you didn’t have any answers. We went down three hundred and sixty steps from the top of the mul into the Jaguar’s caverns, the bearers lowering me in time with the beat of suspended logs on the facades resonating through the stone, the entire mul acting as a drum:

Throoomb,

Throoomb,

Throoomb…