lives before, like I’d been staying in a dark haunted old hotel room and suddenly one of the staff just came in and turned on a ceilingful of arc lights and I could see all the electric wires powering the hologram ghosts.
We coasted down into level minus four, past shores cluttered with impaled bodies of humans and animals, white sea-maggots pouring out of their mouths like extruding blobs of mayonnaise and the staccato reports of gas- swollen stomachs popping around us, and then the dendritic copper channel narrowed, roaring through a canyon into Blood River, and spat us through an intersecting gorge into Pus River. Lymph bubbled over the gunwales but Skitters steered us down staggered cataracts into Lancet River, a wide reach of churning spines, and finally into a sluggish river of black bile, with drifting clumps of necrotic liver and gangrene slicks. For a minute I wondered whether it was something I was making up because of 2JS’s liver problem, but then I remembered, no, the hierophant had mentioned it.
Spine and Scarlatina had given up on me and taken out their paddles again, and they steered us through linked lagoons of molten ruby and gold and mercury mixing and separating in marbleized swirls and into a long, straight waterway, and we just coasted forward under crystal epidote vines arching overhead, past milpas of kidney-ore corn growing on neatly heaped bodies. Ahead of us the Halls of the Lords of the Night loomed up at the dead end of the canal like a range of karst towers over the Huang Ho Valley, but no matter how much I paddled they didn’t seem to get any larger, until after monotonous dark suns of stroking, when I was just collapsed over the thwart gasping the molasses-thick atmosphere, the temples finally rose up over us in fungally excrescent magnificence, cultivated porphyry-basalt columns and buttes of black jade erupting with boil-clusters of opal- dripping carnalite on terraces of tiled yellow crocolite in matrices of banded ironstone.
We pulled up onto a sort of ridge of ghats and the Scullers inhumanhandled me out of the canoe onto the granite, thwacking me with their paddles like multiple Charons. Crowds of Sickeners, or I guess we should more respectfully call them Xibalbans, clattered out and pressed in around us, lifting the canoe over me and shaking it. Wet gristly bones and ornate reliquaries fell around me, the boxes bursting open, spilling clouds of dyes and feather embroidery and expensive smokes. The Xibalbans grabbed them but I managed to grab the smallest box, the one for Jaguar Night, and tucked it under the skin of my groin while they were frantically lighting the cigars and smoking them down in single gigantic drags. I watched Serpigo do a fancy exhalation but then Scald closed her mouth over his snot-stringed nose, and she sucked the fumes back into his mouth and down her own throat. Flesh-stained smoke jetted out of carbonized holes in her chest. Scab and Bloody Teeth were fighting over a tied culebra — twist of seven lit cigars, poking for each other’s eyes with their sharp-forked tongues. Finally Bloody Teeth got possession of the bunch but Scab got hold of his arm, ground Bloody Teeth’s stub-holding hand into a pile of tumbled coals, put the smoldering hand in his mouth, took a huge drag, and farted a gigantic brown-green cloud of tar, nicotine, and burning fat. I tried not to breathe.
Ulcer grafted a big floppy skeletal of my bamboo leg and poked at me until I staggered up the ghats through the eastern gate. There was a low screech from a giant cracked flute and the Xibalbans all parted and scattered, and I walked alone into the trench of a ball court the size of all outdoors, with sloped banks cloven out of solid mesas of wave-green jade threaded with veins of cyanotrichite and olivine. As I walked toward the reviewing stand at level seven I focused on the ground, trying not to look up at the Magister Ludi, and so I couldn’t see the thousands of ghouls in the stands, but I could hear their cackling and feel their bulbous eyes on distended optic- nerve stalks, like slugs’ eyes. I stood on my marker.
(73)
Jaguar Night, ahau and k’alomte of the nine underwaterworlds, lounged in a high referee’s chair woven from the ribs of whale sharks. He was all gooey with baby oil and laden with bracelets and anklets of glistening human eyeballs and a belt of severed hands endlessly clasping each other. His cape was sewn of thousands of woven eyelids, their lashes rippling over the surface like a thin layer of scalloped fur, and he had barbels on his mucous- slick face, like a catfish. White chunks of raw porous bone protruded from his wrists and his brow ridge and his knees and his back, and fat round ticks and white leeches crawled over his irregularly sited pseudopods, leaving interlocking slime-trails. Blue fungi bloomed in the crevices of his groin. He was sick and decayed and in obvious pain, but in his case his condition just increased his strength, he lived on the power of his own diseases, like a sea urchin digesting the mites on its skin. Beautiful little girls and boys climbed over him, oiling him, scraping and licking his pustules. They weren’t Xibalbans. As far as I could tell, they were living humans from the middle-world. Maybe the Xibalbans snatched them every so often. Or they’d captured some a long time ago and kept them here to breed. A few of the boys and girls lay in gnawed pieces on big plates. A giant fat hairless food dog with a peg-toothy grin rolled on the amber floor, chewing a child’s ear. Four-hundred-scores of husks of lunar fanged rabbits imploded overhead and rained bloody fur like rose petals into the Domus Auria, and orange twilight filtered flickering through a lattice in the floor, the captive sun struggling in the dark below. “My greatest greatfather-greatmother,” I said.
“I know you from somewhere,” he mewed. “Somewhere later on.”
I repeated the salutation.
You don’t fool me, he said, you’re not 2 Jeweled Skull. His voice was a nonvoice, like something on an old Moog synthesizer. He peeled a dark-red strip off this little Scab Boy he had next to him-it was a kid who’d evidently been sanded down a few days ago and allowed to crust over until now-and chewed it up like a tortilla chip.
No, I said, I’m not, I thought you might want his skin so I kept it fresh for you. I didn’t think my voice sounded too convincing. Jaguar Night gestured and two of his preparators came out, carefully cut the skin’s stitches, and shucked it off me. I hung on to my last gift box. The preparators sewed 2JS’s skin onto a big howler monkey, like it was a mannequin, and let it hop around. The crowd went wild. I was naked and getting a serious case of that Maidenform-dream vulnerable feeling.
Why haven’t you brought me anything? Jaguar Night asked.
I brought you a cat and a boy, I said, and Where are they? he asked.
Your ambassadors ate them on the way here, I said.
I don’t believe you, he said.
I cracked open my last box, unrolled the bundle in front of me, and fanned out four hundred of the largest and most perfect whole quetzal skins. I made him an offertory gesture. It’s hard to explain how valuable those things were, but they were like Leonardo drawings. If you worked it out in terms of man-hours or whatever, what I’d brought would be worth the Ixian equivalent of between thirty and forty million 2012 dollars. Still, their main attraction wasn’t the cost. We’d chosen them because we figured they were hard to get down here, even more than fresh chewing tobacco.
One of the boys slid a plate under the green fan and climbed up to the Lord’s mangler-hand. He took one of the skins and raised it to stroke his pustulated cheek, enjoying the soft pressure of the feathers against his boils. I guessed it was okay to assume they were accepted. Meanwhile, I’d noticed the largely defleshed name-soul of 2JS seated in the row of ghouls on the reviewing stand, smirking at me. Like everyone who died and went to Xibalba, he was aging in reverse, and despite his skeletality he already looked a little younger than when I’d seen him last.
“Hmm, look who seems to be seated below the salt,” I said.
“2JS has been given the position of Chief Convivitor,” Jaguar Night said. He meant that 2JS mixed up the blood and burning turpentine they drank as toasts to each other.
“Ooh, I’m impressed,” I said. “They really gave you a platinum parachute, didn’t they? You’ve done really well for yourself. That’s like being head urinal attendant at the Wilshire Grand.”
“Laugh while you still have a trachea,” 2JS said.
“Hey, I’m going back and you’re staying here in Tabascoenemastan.”
Enough, I thought. I was being rude to my primary host. I turned back to Jaguar Night.
A question, please, I said.
He made a “whatever” gesture.
We thought you might know where Lady Koh’s uay has gotten to, I said as casually as possible.
We ate it, he said.
Nonsense, I said.
You’re right, we didn’t, he said. She stopped by, but she left two nights ago.
