held by a couple of the roped guards while a few more of Koh’s attendants rolled down, leaving spatters of blood on the white stairs. Some of her other women and a couple of attendants were coughing and gagging like they had rocks stuck in their throats. I got my hands on Koh’s crushed brittle headdress and threw it aside.
I thought for a beat that she’d smeared her face paint, because the white parts of her skin were a purple I couldn’t imagine was real. Below her the three bloods who’d caught Porcupine were sprawling back on the edge of the platform, gasping for breath and choking. Another one had gotten his quill costume off and was trying to ask him the eternal question, who’d sent him, but the clown’s tan skin was already turning to blueberry-black and there was a huge maroon erection popping out from under his raggedy underwear. His chest was pocked with little sticks.
I got Koh’s head into my hands. She had a surprised, disgusted look. She said, “You-”
“It’s all right,” I said stupidly in English, “you’re going to be great. Right?”
She didn’t answer. Foamy snot was running out of her nose and mouth and her open eyes were getting that matte finish. There were little sticks stuck to her face and chest and I picked one out of the underside of her chin, automatically holding it by the side. It was smooth and tiger-striped, a spine taken from a living scorpionfish, with a neurotoxin that kills by suffocation. They’d been woven into Porcupine’s suit, mixed in with the hard-oiled black feathers that mimicked quills, and when he’d hugged her some of them had gone into his own flesh too.
“Get water in her NOW!!!” I screamed in Chol. I got my hands around the back of her head and blew air into her mouth, but there was just this whiffling blob of mucus in there. I turned her over and tried to Heimlich her but she wasn’t responding, she was just a lump. I started hitting her but there was nothing. You’re dreaming, this shit’s lethal at half this dose. I yelled for someone to help me get the fucking quills out but they didn’t know what I meant because I was speaking English again and then they were afraid to touch her because they weren’t allowed. Alligator Root appeared and he and I pulled them out. Each time they left this blob of thick-looking blood. An attendant had gotten a pot of water and we tried to get her to drink, but there was nothing, and I made them find an enema gourd and we forced some down her throat, but she wasn’t really swallowing. I screamed to Alligator Root that there must be some antidote, that he had to run and get the surgeons, but of course there was no antidote. If they really knew one thing around here it was poisons. I got on top of her and started stupidly trying to massage her heart back to life, crashing down on her and breaking her ribs like I’d forgotten how to do from No Way’s survival books, but I just rolled off the stair and nearly tumbled down after the others, it was like we were on the steep slope of an icy mountain with barely any friction keeping us in place and it seemed for a beat like the whole knot of guards and attendants was going to come off its moorings and go rolling down the saw stairs, but one of the bloods got to me and tied me to a sacrificial rope with a scarf-he didn’t want the rope to touch my skin- and I got so upset at him for messing with me and not doing something for Koh that I elbowed him in the face and he skidded off down the blades of the stairs. I’m a jerk, I thought. I grabbed the enema gourd and sprayed water in her face. No response. I grabbed her puffy blue tongue and pulled on it. Nothing. Okay, still not too late. Miracle worker, right?
The well, I thought. We’re going to the Great Cistern.
No. How cold is that, fifteen degrees Celsius? That’s nothing.
The lake in the caves. How cold? Eight degrees, ten degrees?
Hypothermia temperature. But not brain-keeping temperature.
Jelly.
GET HER IN THE JELLY NOW, I mind-screamed, and then tried to put it into Chol, but it was already too late for that. Even if I could get her down there it would take hours to mix up the stuff.
Air too warm here. Come on. Get her down there. Two minutes, three minutes max. Otherwise her brain would have rotted to irrevocable stupidity. I yelled for them to get us down. The attendants held me while they practically sledded down on their ragged rumps. Face it, you’re fucked, I thought. The flying finger fucks. I was even crying, which was pretty silly in the context. It was probably mainly just about what a fuckup I was, am, and would be. She was the greatest and you’re the pits. About one beat faster and you would have gotten her out of there. We slid to the bottom, into a slick of blood and wheezing bodies. I got Alligator Root’s ear down to my mouth.
Get us into the Ocelot caves now, I said. They picked me up and wound Koh into a sheet and the bloods started parting the crowds ahead of us, cracking their flails and blowing kazoos, and the crowd did scatter, but by the time we’d even gotten to the steps up to the mountain path behind the Ocelot mul I could tell it was already ten minutes since the attack, and then it took another ten minutes even to get to the first mountain shrine that led down to the caves, and it was way, way, way too late. Brain dies within two minutes. Dumb. Retarded.
You were supposed to be her primary guard, you know, I thought, you were her husband, after all, you little freak. Big shot, right? Sitting on a big smelly pile of rubble with a dead girl and no Snow? Could have had her dumped in snow. Could have had a giant tub of snow always ready. A couple of hundred runners working round the clock to keep it stocked, that’s all it would have taken. Save her. Take ’er back.
Brain rotting. Dead, dead. Dead, my lords and gentlemen.
“Send forty running teams,” I said. “They’re going to Ice Mountain. For a hundred times four hundred bags of snow.”
Alligator Root looked at me. I looked back at him. He didn’t move. I looked down.
No point. No point. It was four days’ run away.
(63)
“We had a burden,” I said. “Your final act
On the zeroth level can be to honor it.”
2 Jeweled Skull didn’t answer. I peered forward into one of his dry, sewn-open, upside-down eyes. He wasn’t even pretending to tune out, he wanted me to see how damn bloody yet unbowed he was. He’d made himself pass out into some kind of trance a couple times over the two and a half days since Lady Koh’s death, but the teaser had put a stop to that by force-feeding him peccaries’ adrenal glands.
“Tell me what it is,” I said again. I thought I saw some kind of insolence well up in his eye and in spite of myself I thought about Lady Koh again and just lost it for a beat. I started hammering his ears and nose with both hands. Pink lymph-thickened blood spurted out of his tear ducts. I guess that stuff really ran to your head. Anyway, that ordinary level of pain was barely registering at this point and after a beat I fell back, sitting down hard on the war mat. I looked up at 2 Jeweled Skull. He was hanging upside down on a blue-and-yellow scaffold inlaid with pink cowries, draining into a one-arm square basin carved from black serpentine. There were only five other people with us in the tiny courtyard, Hun Xoc, Koh’s herald Alligator Root, my teaser, and his two assistants. Normally there’d have been an audience, but this gig wasn’t for fun. I’d worried about Hun Xoc’s being there, but he didn’t seem too upset about the way we were treating 2JS. Generally your adopted father was someone you were expected to beg to die for, but either Hun Xoc had gotten enough of my influence or he was rebellious enough to begin with to get over that. In the little square of sky above us noon sun and overcast alternated on what seemed like even two- hundred-beat cycles. At midnight tonight it would be three days since the assassination and I had that sour cigar- stub feeling in my stomach that you get only after your lack of sleep shifts into its warning phase. A fattened dog was barking somewhere nearby like an unanswered telephone, but otherwise it seemed quiet enough. It was an illusion, though. Outside things had way degenerated.
Ix was already in near chaos, for a hundred reasons. A couple of rival prophets had come up after Koh’s death, probably working for the Snufflers. One of them was from the Rattler Temple of Ix and was trying to take over Koh’s whole act. Fights were breaking out between the Rattler partisans and the Snufflers and Skull clans. There was a question about 1 Gila’s loyalty. Most dismally of all, Severed Right Hand and the feline alliance were only a few days away. The beat he’d heard about Koh’s assassination, he’d marched triple-time for Ix without waiting for resupplies or reinforcements. We’d expected him, of course, but his speed took us by surprise, and even though we had every able body digging moats and putting up palisades, there wasn’t much chance of getting a defense together. At least, not unless I wanted to train and command another western-style blowgun troop. Which I didn’t have time to do. It was already only five suns until 2 °Cayman, which was my own personal outer limit. It was way past time for me to take the money and run, only I didn’t have the money. Lately Hun Xoc-who I’d made my first minister-had been saying he’d rather torch the whole city now than let Severed Right Hand get hold of even
