The Sacrifice Game

It’s a heavy, fragile, floppy organ, but I found and cut the vena cava and the portal vein, got both big lobes out-along with the gallbladder-and plopped them into the dish. An acolyte wiped my hands with palm oil. I took the dish, turned, and walked up into the sanctuary. It was darker inside now but there were still flares burning and a single feline acolyte crouching in the back next to the heirophant’s casket. I set the basin down on the old great-mat. The acolyte lifted the old man’s torso. He looked at me and then bent down over the liver to inspect it. I came forward and watched. He turned it over. It seemed like a big, healthy, blood-rich sucker, but then he reached into the fissure between the left and quadrate lobes, and pointed to a smelly little abscessed necrosis, like a popped tube of anchovy paste. He looked at me.

“All right for now, but not for later,” he rasped. Or, well, his voice was a little thi

“Kimak-kimak,” I said. “All’s good to swim,

Forward, four times four hundred solar years.”

The crowd answered with a din like a giant cave full of sea lions. Just to show off, the ordinands released 18 Jog and let him stand on his own for a beat. He just stood there for five beats. His chest and legs were solid red but he was still alive. Finally he tried to take a step toward me but tilted forward, and just as he was about to fall into my arms the acolytes caught him and held him while the nacom expertly sawed the rest of his head off his body and handed it to a preparator-acolyte for wrapping. There was almost no blood from the neck. The ordinands released the body again and the nacom nudged it downstage, over the lip of the saw-stairs. It tumbled over and down almost noiselessly. The crowds went silent for a beat and then slid back into a softer, more awed-sounding cycle of the chant. I felt this wave of protectiveness of them, and I could feel how grateful they all were, love and relief rising off them like heat waves. Sacrifice can create this incredible bond, maybe the strongest bond you can have with more than one other person at a time. And especially with throngs of people you haven’t met. There’s this community epiphany, you get a rush of shared exaltation of surviving on together. You know so clearly you’ve all felt the same thing and lived through the same little terror, it’s like you’ve just had sex with everyone there.

They rolled the next batch of sacrifices down the stairs alive, just to get the party mood going again, first Loopy, then Retarded, and then Jock, Sullen, and Scuzzy all at once. Since the atole was finished it was all right to pollute the stairs with inferior blood. They bounced over and down and around and around, glortching and squealing, their movements defining five separate arcs from living to dead. To the audience-I almost said “to my family”-it was pretty much the fu

An acolyte tapped the platform next to my foot. I turned. He was offering me a regulation-size ball, freshly wrapped out of white rubber ribbon. Its glyphs said 18 Jog’s head was inside, just in case there was any doubt. I took the ball and held it over my head. I could feel the inrush of breath underneath me. I threw it down the steps. It bounced higher and higher as it fell lower, finally arcing high into the crowd, and then bobbing from one lucky person to another as they hipped it back and forth across the square.

Pitzom pay-ee, I thought. Let the Game Begin. I signed for Koh’s escort to bring her out. The hissing rose up again from Star Rattler’s mul. The snake poured down her steps again. The crowd below scattered aside. The mul’s temple doorway, recently resculpted as Star Rattler’s giant mouth, vomit-birthed a big blue egg-box and flicked its rattle against it. The egg exploded and Koh emerged headfirst, like a baby, in a cowl of metallic green beetle shells sewn in a celestial map onto a manto pieced from the skins of four hundred black iguanas.

(60)

She floated up the steps toward me, twice as tall as her actual height, carried by a pair of dwarf bearers hidden under her long star-scale-skirt. Four of her own attendants followed her, two steps behind. It was a little out of the ordinary for her to be here and there’d be some muttering among the oldsters. But really, since the gifts were over, women could step on the holy ground without polluting anything. Anyway, things are go

I reset my stilt-sandals on the sharp lip of the threshold and nearly fell forward again. In the smoke and the amethyst half-light things seemed closer than they were, even without depth perception. A new set of Harpy Fliers had climbed the poles and were spi

Koh rose up in front of me. Invisibles spread the ancient great-mat at the edge of the platform. I stepped onto it and sat down-so slowly that it took over a minute-facing north, so that when I looked over my left shoulder I could see the vertiginous rush of the Steps and the whole roiling zocalo. Actually, the entire area between the two great pyramids was considered a kind of ball court. But it was at least a hundred times the area of an actual playing trench, much too big for humans to play on. Instead the balls were the planets and moon and sun. Normally it just worked on its own, slowly, but in this one ritual Koh and I were going to bounce them forwards ourselves, and use the people to mark where they might land.