and release their uay back to their relatively immortal clan-spirit. Even somebody like Koh might not be totally herself after she died. She’d be more, like, one of the Rattler pack, and not even the main one. But she’d want to get to the other dead and unborn members of her clan, which meant taking the long way around, going down before she could go up.
I picked up Koh’s hand, did my little obeisance, and started to take my goddamn leave of the abominable hierophant. He asked me to leave the hand with him. Probably so he could try to jerk himself off with it, I thought. Oh, well, why begrudge him his bit of fun, right? I said okay.
This is not going to work, I thought, as I trudged up the sweating steps. No, wait, squelch that. I couldn’t afford to doubt at this point. Who knows, maybe these guys do know something besides the one equation.
Which they also don’t even know Squelch. Just try it.
Damn.
Must I do everything myself?
(68)
I got back to 2 Jeweled Skull at the end of the second afternoon watch. The teasers had kept him alive, but he’d managed to trance himself out somehow and it took a while to get him responsive again. When he was finally focusing on me I asked for the Giving Knives and laid the large one on his abdomen.
He couldn’t speak but his eyes asked me if I was actually going to let him go for telling the truth about the feather.
“No,” I said, “I take it back.” I tried to smile but his face was just bleak and exhausted like a ragged mouthless moth’s, completely exposed to my tough mercies, just trying to die. I probably look more evil than I can imagine, I thought. Face it, Jed, you’re a jerk. Chacal would have been pleased. I made a transverse cut under his rib cage, worked my hand in with the small knife, cut through the diaphragm, and wriggled up to his heart. When you were executing somebody yourself you were supposed to be kind of a psychopomp and help him on his way into the reflecting world. But you’ve got to be a pretty smooth character to pull it off. I think most often at the moment you start to kill someone the only feeling you remember later is frustration, it’s like, just get out of my world. It’s the pesky-fly syndrome. His heart struggled electrically against my hand and I twisted and pulled, snapping it like it was the spine of a rat. There was a peak of tension and spastic shuddering and a long exhalation of wet breath, then total relaxation and then there wasn’t anything there, he was just a shriveled old corpse. It felt like I’d birthed his uay like a scent essence. I fell backward and signed for them to get my dresser. So, fuck you, your punishment was to get screwed, I thought. I felt a little bad about just plain lying and everything, but in his case it seemed okay to make an exception to general principles. Anyway, I still wondered whether he’d told me about the feather because of what I’d offered, or just because he came up against that level of terror that’s so basic, anyone from any culture’s the same. Or maybe he had another reason. My attendant lifted me up and I signaled for him to rub me down and change me into court dress. I was feeling kind of misty and sentimental, and at first I thought it was because I was tired and upset about Koh but then I realized that despite myself I might be missing 2JS, since now I really was kind of alone here.
I put in an hour on my ruling mat, getting a few details in order. I ordered a few offerings, including a jaguar and an unblemished and good-looking fourteen-year-old captive. I lined up seven more attendants, two flautists, two cantors, a beater, and two messengers. Just before the sun died I led the team back down into the caves and toward the western tube. I’ll meet her again, I thought. Believe, believe. I will, I will, I will.
(69)
The twenty of us-or twenty-one, if you count 2JS’s body-descended in a widening sinistral spiral, first down gravel but then onto flagstone steps again as we passed clusters of sealed passages, each one marked with coded numbers, some of them tripled or quadrupled because the passages beyond them branched out farther on. Even with four porters handling 2JS’s body-we’d brought him along to help with my coming excursion-they dropped him two and a half times. The attendants leading the fourteen-year-old didn’t have an easy time, either, since he was too drugged to really walk. And the jaguar-well, drugged or not, you can imagine. At the fifty-ninth passage we checked the markings and cut our way through into a limestone passage that opened out around us. It was dripping with tiny silver stone-roots. There were ragged holes in the ceiling and even through the cantors’ dirge I could hear a trillion intergalactic clickings of far-off colonies of bats. Two rope-lengths in, the floor fell away again into a steep slope. My bearers took me and helped me down a rope rigging to a wicker bridge over a still clear pool that glowed in the green-gold light like it had been made with a few shots of creme de menthe. From the middle of the bridge I could follow the cliffs of striated agate down three rope-lengths. I thought the cliff sides were rippling somehow under the water and then saw they were covered with tiny white crabs, all scuttling away from the light.
Another rope-length past the bridge the bubble-passage ended suddenly in an ancient cave-in and the attendants spread out my mats and put me down. Mask of Jaguar Night traced his finger over a stained, convoluted wall to the side of the collapse. It looked the same as any other. Alligator Root looked around a little anxiously, lifting one foot and then another up off the cold ground. The head workman hammered leather-wrapped flint wedges into a vertical crack with a wooden mallet. I readjusted my bamboo leg and rubbed the oiled scar tissue on the side of my stump. It was getting flaky and raw. A fleck of torchlight brushed a cluster of tiny white eyeless newts clinging to a white-lichened rock. There was a soft crunch and the wall seemed to cave in a few finger- widths, blowing puffs of lime dust. The workmen positioned their staves and pushed against it. At first there was just the woody sound of plaster, but finally the chunk swung inward, it was counterweighted somehow, and there was a shrieking KREEEEEEEEEEN that I saw as a shower of icy scarlet ripples, and a hiss of old, unbreathed, mineral-rich air.
Mask of Jaguar Night tossed a triple-headed torch through the cleft to test the air. Light filtered back through the dust.
We sent an attendant back up to the sentries, to make sure this Grandfather Heat had died. Even though we knew he had, you still had to check to make sure, the way they don’t start the Islamic month until they actually spot the new moon. I sent everyone back a bit and waved for Hun Xoc to stay.
You’re going to have to make a decision, he said. He was the only person left who’d talk to me like that. The only one who’d start a conversation or talk directly to me at all, actually. He meant my choice was to stay aboveground to lead the defense of Ix or go down to look for Koh.
I said of course I was going to choose going down, since it was only probably futile as compared to definitely.
“Then start the fires but take the people with you,” I said.
I’d done enough dirty deeds for a few lifetimes and didn’t want to commit more genocide than necessary. My idea was that Hun Xoc would arrange for any clans that wanted to leave to spirit their way out of Ix by the river routes at night. Then he’d lead them north with what was left of Koh’s cult. Ideally when Severed Right Hand got here he’d find a destitute gang of collaborationists and a whole lot of charcoal.
“No, I don’t need to live and wear a diaper,” Hun Xoc said.
“I’ll plan the exodus, but stay with you.”
I tried to talk him out of it, but I didn’t have the whatever to order him. It was hard trying to talk with the sort of death march in the background, it felt like we were all in some old war movie about to jump out of an airplane. Hun kept saying how he really wanted to go down with the ship. Finally I said all right.
The expectation was for me to go through the cleft first. It was kind of disconcerting but I just scrunched through the jaggies into blackness. I wondered whether they were just going to seal the opening behind me and leave me to go insane in the dark and die nibbling on my toes. But they squeezed in after me, the porters maneuvering their big bundles hand to hand. The first thing I saw was a starburst of thirteen skeletons shrink- wrapped in skin, laid out on the floor of the cavern at my feet, ringed with bits of brain coral and stingray spines. They were the workmen and attendants who’d assisted in the last ritual here, 9 Fanged Hummingbird’s seating
