we could in the half-light. I didn’t even tell Hun Xoc which of the vessels was the important one, although he might have been able to guess from the pattern of the other nine holes. Each of these-the smaller holes-received a heavy rubberized deer-hide sack the size of a bowling-ball bag. Five of the bags were full of very ordinary rocks in a big wad of wax. The other four, the ones forming a perfect two-rope-length cross with the primary vessel at the center, were full of chunks of meteoric magnetite, which I’d bought thirty-one days ago at the fetish market in Teotihuacan, at a cost equal to about fifty good adolescent male slaves. The magnetite was also, of course, in a big wad of wax. I figured it was probably overkill, but why cut corners on your signature project? As the men filled in the holes I rotated them around a bit, hoping they’d get confused. Not that it would matter unless we got stopped unexpectedly Bdrdrdrdroododoodoot. We all froze.
A pygmy-owl hoot. Also just detectably artificial. It was the outrunners. Seventy beats later a silhouette materialized on the north ridge and held his hands over his head, palms down, signing “No danger, but wait.” A hundred and thirty beats later-a Maya beat was a little shorter than a second, so say about two minutes-4 Screaming, our chief outrunner, was standing next to us. His rubber-soled-sandaled feet hadn’t made even a slight crunch on the cinders and packed gravel. His name was 4 Screaming, but despite his name, he was silent and permanently furtive, and like all the outrunners-actually they were called k’antatalob, “sniffers,” because around here you usually smelled your enemies before you could see them-he was long-legged and wiry, with pocked skin smeared with deer feces.
“No Pumas,” he signed, “but there are tracks half a day north, and in Coixtlahuaca we counted about twice four hundred skinless bodies.” The Pumas-who’d been the leading war lineage of Teotihuacan, and whose remnants were following Severed Right Hand-routinely flayed their kills, animal and human. He started to go through the list of the towns and paths and milpas where they’d seen the biggest concentrations of corpses, but after a minute I just looked at Hun Xoc-who was senior to me and nominally the ranking captain but who was easygoing enough to be basically acting as my second-in-command-and flicked my eyes northeast. Hun Xoc signed for 4 Screaming to take his squad that way as far as possible for two-ninths of a night-about four hours-and then report back again.
4 Screaming took thirty beats to sign to his squad, and they all took off again without even asking for drinking water. God, I thought, these guys are tough as jackboots. Gluttons for punishment.
Well, good for our side. We could keep digging.
By eighty-score beats before dawn, or what would have been dawn under normal conditions, the top of the mesa looked exactly like it had when we’d gotten here. To me, anyway. To an experienced tracker, it-well, you can’t cover everything, I thought. Better to get the hell out of here even if it’s not perfect. Anyway, there was still wood ash falling. That would even it out a bit. I gave the signal for the crew to reassemble at the southeastern rim of the basin. Without being asked, thirty-eight of the men squatted in two rows of nineteen, facing northwest, toward their birthplaces. 2 Hand-another adopted son of 2 Jeweled Skull’s, who was also officially senior to me but who was increasingly acting as my third lieutenant-went down the rows, taking their offering letters. We’d burn them to Star Rattler at the next celestial date. The first one signed that he was ready and our nacomour untouchable executioner-squatted behind him and hammered, or almost just tapped, once, on the back of his head, driving the occiput into the brain stem. The sound was as soft as if he was hitting balsa wood, not bone.
The porters loaded the bodies onto the empty sleds and started to pull them down the mesa. They’d be defleshed and, presumably, brought all the way with us to-well, to wherever we were going, which was a bit of a vexed issue-and then stored in the Star Rattler’s ossuary. It wouldn’t do to have any of their cranky uays hanging around here, leading some warlock or fortune-hunting wraith or whatever back up here to the basins. On either side of the trail, every so often, you could just make out one of the outrunners lurking along, making sure that none of the much-reduced crew ran off. But it didn’t look like they would. The thing was, these days, you really could get good help. Or, to be less flip, these guys counted themselves among the lucky ones. Around here, the rodent- uayed-that is, ordinary people-didn’t do much better in the afterlife than they did here on the zeroth level. Most of their multiplicitous souls would just wander around and eventually starve. After all, nobody among the living would bother to feed them, or at least not for long. These guys had guaranteed, if not lavish, support in the next levels. They wouldn’t have to be slaves to one of the Nine, or even to the Thirteen. They could relax a bit, finally, and work their way toward what everyone aspired to: oblivion. And it would take them only twenty years or so. Only the feline-uayed stuck around for any length of time-not because immortality would be fun, since it wouldn’t, especially when people on the zero level started to forget to send you blood and tobacco-offerings-but because they had a responsibility to keep an eye on the other members of the clan, living, dead, and unborn.
And besides, I thought, Koh had insisted. Right? It couldn’t be helped. Except, no. Don’t try to shift the responsibility, Jed-head. You had the witnesses iced and that’s all there is to it. And, not even very indirectly, you’ve accounted for a lot of other poor bastards over the last few few tunob. And, frankly, it’s started not even to bother you very much. You’re just another realpolitiker. You evil fuck.
We humped back southwest down the long grade. The porters kept begging for the honor of carrying me, or at least pulling me on a sled, but Chacal’s body had been feeling like it was getting soft-he’d been a top athlete, after all, before all the excitement started-and I insisted on marching. I wore out another pair of rubberized sandals on the scurf. That’s five so far, I thought. 4 Screaming rematerialized and he and 2 Hand and I had a quick, silent confab. He said Lady Koh and her entourage had moved six-score rope-lengths up the line already, so we adjusted our course to intersect hers, branching off our previous track onto a new route that zigzagged down out of the high ground into charred scrub and then into damper air and what you could charitably call rolling meadows. Each of the recently abandoned milpas-that is, corn-and-squash fields-had a scarecrow of sorts in the center, usually a dog skull with a ragged cape on a tall stick, with strings of bird femurs and clamshells clicking and clopping in the occasional breeze. It was as though somebody’d mandated that everyone go out of their way to make things as creepy and depressing as possible. It looked like some of the corn had been harvested, too young, but most of the pinkie-sized ears were burnt and withered on the stalks, with a few popped kernels standing out like big whiteheads. Even this far south the drought had lasted fifty-six days so far-since the eruption of San Martin-and everything had burned as fast as Chinese dead money. It seemed like even the rocks burned. We’d seen villagers spreading the fires around their houses, torching their own granaries and huts with their wives and children screaming inside them.
It wasn’t logical, but the average Mesoamerican still seemed to think that the world needed some help ending itself, and there’d been a thousand orgies of self-immolation all the way from the Sonoran Desert to what would be Costa Rica. We’d seen whole families staked out alive on the ground for the insects and vampire bats, kids peeling strips of loose arm skin off exhausted but conscious oldsters and eating it like it was Fruit Roll-Ups, mothers killing their toddlers by forcing pink-hot pebbles down their throats, a thousand things you wish you could unsee. And by now, except for the animals on the run, there was basically nothing left. Fuck Severed Right Hand, I thought. He won’t be able to feed his troops around here. Ten more days and he’ll lose interest. Why was he so determined? It can’t be because of the tsam lic. According to Koh’s informers he had his own sun-adders and they were rebuilding the pharmacopeia in Choula.
There’s got to be something else going on that I don’t know about. Maybe I should confront Koh about it? Except, in general around here you didn’t get very far with direct questions. Just watch her, I thought. Watch and deduce. Then when she gets the people to wherever they’re going-hmm. Well, I needed to get back to Ix for my last act. That is, the entombment. But the refugees-well, even if the Maya lowland zones hadn’t been agriculturally exhausted yet, the way they would be in two hundred years, there still wouldn’t be enough unclaimed farmland in Ix’s orbit. If they could even learn how to do that kind of bog-reclamation planting, which I doubted they would. People don’t learn. Lately, Lady Koh had been saying that the Rattler had shown her the site of a new city, in the coastal flats on the farthest marches of the Harpy Clan’s red territory-that is, somewhere on the Quintana Roo coast. The current deal was that 2 Jeweled Skull would provide an escort for safe conduct to the site and give her lineage the area in perpetuity. But it sounded vague to me. And most of these people wouldn’t get nearly that far anyway. We had food for another forty days or so, but once we were into the dry season, it was… hell. It was depressing.
Don’t think about it. Anyway, you did the main thing, right? Maybe the Lodestone Cross bit was going to be enough. Maybe I’d already just become the biggest hero since Hercules. Since Jesus, for that matter. Maybe I was done here. Maybe I can just relax. Except not. Still ought to go through with the backup plan. Get back to Ix. Get the ol’ memories back to Marena. Do the full meal deal.
The light faded to a more delicate shade of scab. 4 Screaming’s second-in-command came up and signed that they’d sniffed a large crowd of strangers to the northeast. They couldn’t tell yet if they were the Teotihuacanian
