“The engine?”
She laid one hand over his eyes, death-cool enough to make him shudder. “This world, with all its pleasures, its wellspring of misery — light and heat expressed through blood, the only fuel strong enough to keep everything going. Look.”
See:
A green, steaming jungle or an arid plain. Both. Maybe. Or neither. White cities rearing up huge as Egypt’s pyramids, their sides gingerbread chalet-stepped, plastered with gleaming lime — all but their central staircases, each one the shining metaphorical fulcrums of this alien word, atop which sat kings so hung with jade and gold they could barely move, surrounded by priests in huge, nodding masks and feather-cloaks, dancing, drumming, speaking in tongues. And wooden-armoured warriors carrying swords fringed with black glass, dragging endless coffles of prisoners tied at the neck and wrists: grist for the mill, meat for the altar-stone.
The same four moves, over and over, done until no part of the whole seems real as the whole itself, the object of all this sanguine worship. The dance which does not — cannot — stop, or the whole universe dies with it.
Cut the victim free, press him (or her) down. Let them rave with prophecy, the gods’ favour. Feed them pulque, that they may die drunk and happy, giving themselves over wholly.
With your stone knife, slice across the front of the chest starting between the second and third rib, cutting across the breastbone to the opposite side. After, break the bone transversely, with a sharp blow and a chisel. A gaping hole opens, exposing the lungs, which deflate like moonflowers at dawn.
While the heart continues to beat, reach into the chest and sever the arteries and veins. Grasp the organ, and lift it from its bloody cradle to the sky.
The blood is then deposited in a green bowl with a feathered rim, into which a hollow cane — also feathered — is placed. Through this reed, the gods suck their nourishment.
Again, and again, and yet again. Without cessation. Until those once-white stairs run red and slick and steaming, a gigantic gutter of constantly shed grue.
A machine, Rook thought, forced to consider it through her eyes, but still able to retain his modern perspective. Men as parts, blood as oil. Cogs and wheels.
To which she replied, equally silent: Show me this . . . machine. Then added, once he had — Ah. Yes. Very like that, yes.
So that was the world she wanted to bring about again, in a nutshell — the Mayan-Aztec Death Factory, a cotton gin of severed heads and heart-smoke, built on whitewashed bones. And he was going to help her do it, he supposed. Not so much in order to get what he wanted as . . . not lose what he had.
“Look you, little king — our reign was long. Four worlds came and went, cracked to pieces beneath us. We were well-fed indeed. A thousand thousand fellow magicians died unborn, their powers unrealized, to help keep us alive. But instead we grew fat, we quarrelled, we squabbled — like children, but with less reason. We could never bridle ourselves to work together, even at the very end . . . which is the only way your Steel Hats and desert-prophet howlers ever overcame us. We fell down to the Sunken Ball-Court, a dreamy morass, all blended together, and now we do not even recall who we once were, let alone how we might Become again. But the one great truth which watching four worlds come and go has taught me, is how that which is dead need not be dead forever, if the right sacrifices can only be made.”
Here she drew a long breath, oddly ragged. Almost sad.
“Yet of a hundred gods, only I — as yet — remain awake, alive,” she said, as though to herself. “Only I.”
“Not even that Smoking Mirror of yours, huh?”
Remote: “Not even he.”
Rook snorted, not overmuch inclined to sympathy. “So you are just a ghost, then,” he said. “A jumped-up Goddamn ghost, nothin’ more. You’re me, savin’ the meat.”
“Oh, but I am far more than that, husband. Now that I have fed on my betters, if not my elders, I am six gods at once — two more than Smoking Mirror himself — and the very least of them is far beyond your comprehension. You have heard their names already, remember?
“Ixtab, Mother of all Hanged Men . . . she was the one who first made contact with you, who reeled you up and hooked you in. Ixchel, Suicide Moon, Lady Rainbow — she of the Ropes and Snares — bound you fast, spun her web around you, anchored you in time and space. Yxtabay, She of the Long Hair, drew you into the wilderness, to tie you tight in desire’s meshes, with Tlazteotl Filth-eater ready at her left hand to redeem you of all the sins you’ve committed in love’s name — to eat them up, then shit them back out. Then comes Coyotlaxqhui, the Broken Moon, who opened the door to bring me up into your world. And Chalchiuhtlicue herself, with her spinning serpent skirt, is the womb that birthed me into flesh once more, the way she births and re-births the whole world. The way she drowned the last sun in order to make way for this one, which will shiver itself apart in earthquake and calamity.”
Rook looked at her askance. “The fuck you . . . look, shit. Look, now . . .” His words ran out. Then, weakly: “. . . I never asked for any of this.”
Another laugh. “Did you not? Well, it does not matter. You were to hand — the perfect instrument. Your utility will yet exalt us both.”
She laid her cool palm on him again, this time at temple, and let her silver voice’s tone drop accordingly, slow and soothing, murmuring, plausibly, “You want to keep your own power, as is understandable. Yet you want to save your lover, too — from himself. From you. The old woman lied to you, little king, perhaps without knowing it. Nothing must be given up. These things are not incompatible, so long as one of the magicians involved is — something more.”
“And how would that happen, exactly?”
“A man who beds with a goddess becomes a god, or dies. Or both.”
“Oh, is that so? Well, I don’t think I’m much cut out to be a god, really. Hell, I wasn’t even barely fit to serve one, by the end.”
“Perhaps. Things might differ, however, were the god you served one . . . you already loved.”
And at last, all at once, he saw what it was she’d had — always, from the very beginning — in mind.
Not him at all, not ever.