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The next big group we passed was a clanlet of well-to-do Swallowtail-affiliated traders, about fifteen blood family members and two veintenas of thralls hauling them on eight extralong sleds. On the last sled, three eight-year-old girls, who looked like triplets, fa
There were about three hundred big palanquins in the high-rent district of the line. They varied in size and opulence but they all had arrays of cushions and big round wicker roofs covered with embroidered cloth, so that they looked incogruously like psychedelicized Conestoga wagons. Lady Koh held court on the largest of the palanquins. It was only about eight arms wide-still wider than any of the others-but about forty long. Right now there were sixteen people sitting on it and forty carrying it. There was a breeze, but another gang of thralls carried a portable windbreak, and the feathers on the mat barely stirred. A squad of guards ran alongside on each hand. There was a strong smell of monarda-a kind of horsemint that upscale valets crushed and strewed around their masters-which didn’t much cover up the hellish odors, and under that a hint of what people said was the breath of Koh’s most secret uay, and what a modern person would call her signature scent. When I’d first smelled it I’d described it to myself as the opposite of the smell of ci
Koh’s guards all knew Hun Xoc, but it still took a while to pass through their circles. I was already doing rage-abatement breathing by the time my bearer finally set me down on the edge of the platform. It rocked just a bit as it moved along, pleasantly boatlike. Koh sat in the turquoise center of a feather-cloth Sacrifice Game board two arm-lengths square. Her eyes were closed and she was mumbling to one of her uays in some animal language. There were eight members of the popol na — the mat house, that is, the council, up here, and they greeted me and went back to talking among themselves. They were all in expensive gear, but it was still a pretty motley crew. Crue. Whatever. The youngest of them, 14 Wounded, was eight tuns, that is, a little less than eight solar years, older than I was. He’d been the trade representative in Teotihuacan for my adoptive clan, the Harpies, who were the richest family in Ix besides the ruling clan, the Ocelots. Or they might now be even richer, because of the Ocelots’ gigantic debts, except it was harder to put a value on things here than it was back in the twenty-first. Anyway-oh, except there was one who was younger, Koh’s Steward of Invisible Things. His title meant he was something like a legal counsellor. His name was Coati, that is, kind of a raccoon. I’d barely met him back in Teotihuacan, but now he was with her every minute.
The group had started as a temporary meeting of the major greathouse ahaus, but now it had hardened into a government. Well, whatevs. The other seven people on the platform were attendants, fa
Hun Xoc manuevered next to me and squatted. I kneed to the edge of the Game cloth. It was strewn with jade and quartzite pebbles, and after a minute I could see that she was using it as a battle map. A long line of turquoise pebbles, stretching diagonally from the center of the white quadrant to the upper corner of the black one, represented our caravan. The clusters of pink quartz that approached it on its north side were Severed Right Hand’s army, and it looked to me like they were color-coded like in an old Kriegspiel layout, darkening as they became increasingly hypothetical. But beyond that I couldn’t read what she was up to. There was at least an equal number of other stones, mainly black and yellow, distributed in other zones of the board, and aside from the fact that they had more to do with time than space I couldn’t tell what they represented. For all I knew, some of them were just there to confuse the other members of the council.
Well, if so, it was working. They were all stone-cold killers and word-is-law patriarchs, and now they were sitting patiently, waiting, speaking in hushed mutters, and casting apprehensive looks at her as we jogged along. Either they all believed she was getting her orders from a higher authority, or they figured enough of the others believed that none of them wanted to question her.
When I — Ow. Damn. One of the scareflies had gotten a hair into my eye. I glared at him. He quaked in terror, almost literally. And I almost felt guilty, but I got over it. I watched Koh. She moved two of the black stones. She was as unhurried as though no one else was there.
Hmm. When I know more of tactics than a novice in a nu
Geez Belize, I thought, I’ve created a monsteress. I gave this girl her start. I mean, I was the one who’d contacted her in the first place, because there was a picture of her in the Codex Nuremberg. But the Codex wouldn’t be written until long after this, sometime in the 1100s. And it wasn’t clear from the Codex whether she’d still be alive or not after she became a big deal. She could end up like Jesus and be dead for a hundred years before the franchise really got going. And if she turned into a martyr, most likely she’d take me down with her. Well, don’t worry about it. I was still pretty useful to her. Wasn’t I? I mean, I knew stuff nobody around here knew, not even her. I could even still mix up some gunpowder if she wanted me to, although of course I didn’t want to call that much attention to myself. Somebody’d say I was a dangerous scab-caster-like a warlock-and every other ambitious blood would be looking to off me.
The mumbling stopped. Lady Koh raised her eyes, and they met mine, and, without actually moving a single muscle of her face, somehow she conveyed a smile.