Gods of Jade and Shadow(55)

“Stitched?”

“Connected somehow. Xibalba could draw on the power in Baja California. That was the general idea. But I refused to listen,” Hun-Kamé said, shaking his head.

“Why?”

“Vucub-Kamé’s idea violated the natural order of things. It was fueled by greed and fear.”

“What would a god fear?”

“Irrelevance. Eventually, the eternal sleep our godhood grants us,” Hun-Kamé said. “Since I would not partake in his mad action, Vucub-Kamé decided to dispose of me, and he managed it, for a while. But after I regain my throne, he shall pay dearly for this affront. I spent a few decades in that box. He will spend centuries, no, millennia in the prison I will fashion for him after I hack off his head and limbs.”

The darkness Hun-Kamé carried grew in intensity and it brought with it a chill, like touching ice. It made Casiopea feel as if she were tasting frost, and from her half-parted lips there escaped a soft plume of her breath, dissolving almost instantly. She closed her mouth, frowning, and crossed her arms.

“You wouldn’t do such a thing, not truly, would you?” Casiopea asked.

“Do you think me kind?” Hun-Kamé replied. “He cast me into an unbearable torment. I wished to cry in the dark but had no voice. I wished to move but was a pile of timeworn bones. I was and was not, like an insect dashing against a glass dome. He will taste the same misery.”

“If you know such a thing is unbearable, then why would you subject anyone to it? Even him.”

Hun-Kamé gave her an amused look. “Virtuous child who has not known the true measure of unhappiness, how could you ever imagine the breadth of my enmity? What games do you think gods play?”

Casiopea thought Hun-Kamé was mocking her and yet, when she looked carefully at him, she realized there was a wild earnestness about him. “Did your brother obtain everything he wanted, then?” she asked. “The connection he dreamed of?”

“Had he done it I’d know and you’d know it too. The world would not be the same at all,” Hun-Kamé said. “But I suspect trickery awaits us in Baja California. I am not stupid. He has seeded the road and wants us to find him, and therefore I suspect his dream may not be forgotten.”

“How would the world be different?”

“It would run with the blood of sacrifices and the adulation of mortals. The cenotes would be piled with gold and corpses. Men would be painted blue and their bodies riddled with arrows, although, certainly, the supreme offering is the severing of the head.”

She had seen this imagery in books, had read about the wooden rods displaying hundreds of human skulls at the entrance of the temples, the bloodletting rituals involving shells and obsidian blades, but these were practices long forgotten.

“Surely that wouldn’t happen now?” she said. “You wouldn’t have a…a man riddled with arrows in the middle of Mérida?”

“That is precisely what my brother would have, and not simply Mérida. He would engulf many cities north and south of our peninsula. He desires power, more power than he’s ever tasted, more than we were ever meant to have. Incense is not enough for him. He’ll burn the land, the forests, swallow the smoke that rises from it.”

In that moment Hun-Kamé was again cold, boundless. And, of course, dark. The chill of Hun-Kamé was the chill of the grave. Her grave, perhaps. Why worry about the sacrifices of others when she was scheduled for her own death? And yet, she worried, for the picture he painted in her mind was vivid and for a moment even more real than their compartment. It was crimson and black, and an obsidian throne upon a pile of bones, and the stench of rotting flesh in her nose. She felt like gnawing at her nails or covering her eyes, like a girl.

She shook her head. “You ought to have said all this before.”

“I assumed you realized this was greater than you and me.”

“Liar,” she muttered.

He bristled at that, and she guessed he’d give her some grand speech about how this is what gods do, they keep their mouth shut and don’t go spilling all their secrets to lowly mortals.

“I thought you’d be afraid,” he said instead, after a minute.

“I am!”

“Hence why I didn’t say it. If you were a hero you’d know this is the way things go. It is patan. When Hunahpu and Xbalanque descended to Xibalba they realized—”

“There were also two Hero Twins and they were divine,” she said, interrupting him. “So maybe that helped them know the rules and…and kill monsters. Did you think I’d run off if you told me? Is that it? I would not.”

“I know you won’t run away, but I didn’t want to burden you with all of this. To sour your days more than I have already,” he said most politely.

She felt this politeness masked his true feelings. That he did see her as a coward, as unworthy. She knew about patan. Not just tribute, but duty and beyond duty, the obligation that carves your place in the world, and she wasn’t about to disregard it. But her hands were trembling.

Maybe she was a coward. Cuch chimal, dragging her shield on her back and retreating from battle. She bit her lip.

“I’m not useless,” she assured herself more than him. “I can be brave.”

“I am not implying you aren’t brave,” he said. There was something heavy and dark in his gaze as he looked at her, something quiet too, that muffled his voice.