Cripes. Two hundred and fifty-four steps to go. If I pulled this off, it really would be because of divine intervention.
The beaters signaled the next step. Okay. Next. Go. I had to move up one step every five beats. We hadn’t made any allowance for the fact that I’d been maimed. If we changed the requirements or faked it at all, I’d lose too much of my already leaky credibility.
I’d rehearsed this, of course, on a forty-step mock-up. But I hadn’t been brilliant and I’d been too sick to risk the drinking and blood loss. And it was getting breezy, and dark. And mainly I just wasn’t feeling too good. It wouldn’t have been so bad without the damn towering beaky Eagle headdress, I thought. And without the claw-foot Elton John platforms, of course. But I was starting to feel like with them I didn’t have much of a shot. I raised my foot but somehow I flicked my vision upward, toward the sanctuary, and my Cyclops eye somehow let an awareness of depth into my head.
Uh-oh. I’m in trouble.
The stairs just went up and uppity up, but it wasn’t even the horribly steep fifty-one-degree angle that had really hit me, it was the unbrokenness of the span, the subtle strangeness of the absence of railings, absence of landings, absence of turns between flights, the lack of all those little-noticed amenities that all stairs in the rest of the world always have. The stairs projected utter antihumanism, architecture as weapon, not just a complete disregard for comfort and safety but a will to grind you down, to trick you into climbing and then to make you slip and saw you into pulp. There’d never been and wouldn’t ever be anything like these stairs in the architecture of the entire rest of the world. You’re nothing against them, I thought. Call it off.
Nope. Don’t even think about it.
They’ll tear you to bits. Even now. They don’t love you that much. As far as I knew, all the kings and adders who had fallen had been posthumously disowned and wiped out of the records. It was one thing you just couldn’t wuss out on, the risk of being on the stairs was an essential bit of realness in the trial by ordeal.
I pushed up to the second step. I felt synovial fluid squirt out of my knee. I cracked and wrenched and got my peg into the hole almost on cue. Really, I could handle these stairs in a jiff, I thought. I mean if I weren’t also crippled, drunk, blood-poor, and in stilts Stop whining, I thought. Just shut up and deal. Third step. I blasted myself up faster than I was supposed to. My sweat-drenched foot slid forward on the plaster. Christ, watch it, watch the hell out. Slow down. Save it. You aren’t the athlete Chacal used to be. You were able to play that one ball game okay but it’s pretty much spoiled you for anything else. Not even counting injuries sustained since then. Chill. Beat. Fourth step. I could feel eyes pressing on my back, my clansmen and their clansmen, adders and bloods and dependents, all looking up at me, or rather to me. I could feel their need to trust, feel all the responsibility, all that stuff that sounds so dopey. Something was clicking into position beyond fear and resignation. I guess I’d have to call it a comprehension of the particularity of the moment, or of the brittleness of existence, but it was more abstract… anyway, only two hundred and fifty-two steps to go, I thought. No big whoop. Fifth step.
It sounds like I’m bragging but in spite of everything else that had gone on in Mayaland or anywhere else, and no matter what else I’ve ever dealt with, walking up those stairs in that condition was the single most extreme thing I’ve ever forced myself to do. It still feels like it took longer than my entire life before and since. I remember the unique ache of each and every step, so that every number between one and two hundred and fifty-five has an indelible association. The only thing I want to really crow about, ever, is finishing that climb, because I went on for a long time after I’d made up my mind to give up and die.
So anyway, I made it but it was like I’d never do anything again, and I don’t think I really remembered who I was. There was a vibration of relief in the air behind me, but nothing I could hear over my blood-roar. The top level of the mul really had four sublevels, the scarlet level of the floor of the sanctuary, a black step leading up to that, a wide turquoise apron-step below that, and a second narrower black apron-step before you got on to the stairs proper. I got my peg into its hole in the lip of the threshold stone and looked up into the mul’s throat. It was ringed with nacreous barbs like the grinding mouthparts of a lamprey eel. I wavered on my flesh leg, the void behind me sucking on my back, pulling me into the big easy. Watch it. That was exactly how I’d blow it, I thought. I always screwed stuff up that way. I’d finally get through everything and get back here with the drugs and the girl and get it all set up great and then I’d just wipe out at the very last beat. I found my center of balance and let the roaring fade until there was silence everywhere.
“Ahan Bolom,” I said. “Wake Ocelot,
White North, black West, yellow South, red East, and turquoise
Here and near offer you our corn, our children.”
There was an intake of breath that faded into another purr and then into a rumble of compression like the Ross Ice Shelf getting ready to calve, and then it drew itself out into a long rattle and a crack, like lava rolling off Mount Erebus into the volumes of layered ice. I knew it was the orchestras around me cutting the scaffolding out from under their tree drums and letting them collapse and smash onto the flagstones, but even so at the last snap it seemed to me that One Ocelot appeared against the hemorrhaging sun and called me into the citadel. Fire flared up in his mouth and eyes and light flashed out in irregular rays through the smoke, flickering with a greenish aurora-borealis tinge. The flares had been rolled from refined wax-myrtle berries and mixed with whale oil and the whole thing was brighter than any artificial light anyone had seen since the seating of 9 Fanged Hummingbird. The crowds below went weirdly silent. I stepped forward, up onto the second apron, forward, up the two steps, and into the hole in the sky. It seemed bigger than outdoors, even though there were all these cat people-most of them mask-enhanced mummies but a few with living bodies inside-around me and all this heat and light, the fire reflecting and rereflecting off walls mosaicked with polished pyrite, the flames not regressing infinitely like they would with a smooth glass mirror but jumbling together in a kind of metallic fog like a whirlwind of gold watch springs. The oracle came up behind me and led me into the adoratory, the holy of holies, the Kodesh Hakodashim as we Hebrew buffs would call it. It was all full of jars and vases and big pots on hot braziers. I knelt down on a hot mat. In front of me, 6 Murmuring, a captive tortoishell jaguar lay prone, unbound but heavily narcotized on a wide, slightly concave altar. The hierophant squatted on her left and set a short table between us, with five little tamales on it, each the color of its direction. The blue one in the center was bigger than the others. Each of the four outer tamales was studded with tiny sea-urchin spines, and each spine was wound with that same black-and-yellow skin from poison-dart frogs. The oracle backed out and headed down the steps.
I looked around. The shapes around me looked so unsavory that I closed my eyes again. I wobbled, a little still dazzled from the smoke and the fresh darkness. A voice cawed:
“Now still you aren’t our flesh.”