I knew the interview was over, that I was supposed to thank him and ask him if it was all right for me to leave, but I was too dizzy to do anything but stare at the intersection of two stained reed-fibers on the mat underneath me. I needed a word for frustrating the size of Popocatepetl.
You’d better ask your wife, he said all of a sudden.
I looked back at him.
You’ve brought me something else, he said.
Oh, yeah, that’s right, I thought. Mask had insisted, even though I’d said the whole idea was a gross-out. I signaled for my attendant. He entered, handed me a jade-scaled box, and backed out. I unbound the lid, lifted out Lady Koh’s stiff salt-cured hand, and passed it to the hierophant’s dune-dry baked-thin fingers. I tried not to shiver until he took his hand away. It felt like he had hollow bones, like a bird’s. He examined the hand from every side, stroking the nails against his cheek, counting her fingers over and over and chortling each time when he got to seven.
“Well, I can’t read her move from this,” he said.
“But maybe you can still go down and ask her.”
It was like he wasn’t suggesting anything unusual. Evidently he chatted with dead people all the time. Why, can you get me in to see her? I wondered. I didn’t say anything, though, I just looked at him and tried to slow down my breathing.
“She passed this way four suns ago,” he said.
“I saw her walking upside down, and sobbing.”
I leaned forward. His breath was like meat ashes. This is totally stupid, I thought, except, you know how when you’re totally desperate you’re ready to believe almost anything?
“And how then would I get to her?” I asked.
“Don’t go back up, keep going down,” he said.
“She’s strong, she’ll last, she’s going to find the tree
And climb it. Ask the Sickeners to help you.”
“Great-Grandfather, please lead me there,” I said.
“No, I’m too old right now,” he said. “The oracle
Can show you to the shore; then call the oarsmen;
They’ll bear you four more gorges west-Blood River,
Pus River, Lancet River, Gangrene River And vomit you up on the Xibalban shore;
Attend the court, implore Lord Jaguar Night
Before Star Rattler swallows her newborn.”
Whoa, okay, I thought. Sure, I can handle that. I’m sure I’ve still got three whole days left. Plenty of time. Okay, I’ll just head back upstairs and deal with this. It’s got to work. Well, why not? Ya gotta believe. At least when there’s nothing else to do.
What the hierophant was talking about wasn’t really an afterlife like a Christian one, and it wasn’t reincarnation either. It was more like some people, like Koh, are just so powerful they’re already among the immortals on this level. In fact, if you are that powerful death just makes you more so, but most people are so transient they’re practically dead even while they’re alive, and when they die they’re just supposed to do their thing 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.