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Path
Nov 2, 2010

In, for a first time! (this is hemlock, from the discord)

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Path
Nov 2, 2010

gonna add on a :toxx: for myself

Path
Nov 2, 2010

prompt: postcolonial science fantasy

degenerate stars

Count: 6264

Aníbal did not cry on the day her sentence was announced.

She did not cry during the many dry briefings that followed, or during the mornings when she sat beside the others in the prison barge’s frigid medical bay, even when the skin on the back of her thighs stuck to the metal table. She didn’t shed a tear when they brought sharp needles, and tried to force-feed her vitamins; she bit out at the nurse’s fingers instead, delighting in obstinance.

Bembe would always frown sideways at her when she did this, like some sad uncle, every line under his eyes set like hardened clay, threatening to crack. Like she was failing him personally by refusing to behave, to take it all with her back straight—dignity this and Aníbal, don’t work to prove their assumptions right that— which honestly, was a lot of hot bullshit coming from a man who she knew had once wedged the tip of a plasma-spear through a conquistadors jaw, ignited it, and then stole his boat only to crash it later into another, larger boat.

How did they say it? El que la hace, la paga, motherfucker. Or something like that, anyway. Aníbal’s spanish had been deemed satisfactory by nobody who mattered, and she preferred familiar Kʼiche.

Bembe. She hated that confinement had made him old. And sad.

Aníbal didn’t cry the evening when their doomed little crew was finally forced to board the ship that would ferry them and their false cargo up, across the stars and into the black, via lactea, to Xibalba. Nor did she after the first week, the first month, the second. Aníbal made herself a desert. She fancied herself a husk. She imagined her emotions as single strands of maize-silk, carefully separated, dried and set adrift through the vents that clunked and wheezed—spreading her grief out to the far corners of the ship where they could be overpowered by the kitchen’s burnt-spice smells.

Their tiny cargo freighter was officially named La Cuna, but that was stupid, so everyone else just referred to it as Ahuizotl, because it was leaky and taking them to hell. There were five of them in total; prisoner-passengers. The livable section of the ship not taken up by storage was cramped and annoyingly vertical. Five was a meager crew, even for a vessel that wasn’t locked into a destination, and attempts to empty herself aside, Aníbal didn’t intend to be a difficulty. Not to these people. When Nina asked, she helped make food, which mostly consisted of reconstituting very dry, very geometric chunks in bags. She played cards and dominos with Lady Yohl, who she had at first deemed too courtly for a rebel, but Yohl cheated at cards, and had a sharp smile that Aníbal liked. At Sacniete’s behest, she polished the surfaces of the immersive black divining mirrors that lined the claustrophobic solar until she got sick of looking at her own face, and of imagining what might be peering back.

And then, two weeks out from their destination, from their worst possible deaths, they ran out of powdered horchata, and Aníbal reached a limit she hadn’t wanted to admit to.

She tried to throw the pouch, but because it was a pouch, it went about two inches before floating off in the low-gravity. Aníbal stared at it.

She was not a child. Trying, by some of Bembe’s accounts, but not demanding. She was Aníbal Tecú Kan, she was the daughter of a calender-priest. She was a fighter, an officer, a killer— she was itzel chu’mil, one of the last degenerate stars to stand between her people and annihilation. Assimilation. She cut her teeth on blades of obsidian and white-hot plasma. She’d licked the blood from the cheek of the man who killed her mother, and spit it back at him.

She was being mocked, in some of her final moments, by the image of a cartoon cinnamon stick.

Aníbal decided that this was the perfect excuse to finally give up. The pressure of weeks came down crashing down on her like a torrent. Without ceremony, she dropped onto her rear end in the middle of the mess, gripped her hair in her hands, and burst, at last, into furious tears.

It was a moment. By the time she was nearly finished Bembe had found her. Silently, he limped into the mess and sat beside her, though he had to drag up a bench because of his knees. He’d probably waited outside the door for her to wind down, to spare her pride, even though hers was such a different beast to his own now. It made her feel like a child again, like when she and her cousins would crowd around him on the events he’d appeared, hungry for his stories and their possibilities. But Bembe had run out of good stories some weeks ago, and her cousins were all long dead now.

But their bones will be there. Somewhere, tombed within the halls of Xibalba. Chamiabac will have stripped them of everything else. We never even had time to make a whistle for Izlet, or Gaspar, or..

“It’s not fair,” she said through a watery sniffle, hating the sound and the words. Weak words.

“No,” Bembe murmured, eventually. “It’s not.” He stared at the opposite wall where Nina, the cook, had hung up a weave depicting burgundy mountains in lieu of a window, along with a spray of plastic flowers. To brighten up the place, she’d said. What a joke.

“This is never going to work. You know it, I know it, Sacniete definitely knows it.” Counter to their usual responses to ‘heresy’, the Inquisition had let the old daykeeper keep her yappy macaw. But even though when they left the bird had been in good health, Sacniete had found it dead on its back after the fifth day. Aníbal knew next to nothing about augury, or about birds, but did anyone really need to in order to read that sign?

“We don’t make it back, either way. We fail, they’re going to take it out on the dominions. Both of them! Xibalba and the crown.” And there would be more war, more sickness, more impossible choice. A little impotently, she mumbled: “..fuckers.”

Bembe rubbed his knees. He made a noise low in his throat that could have been chiding, or was maybe just early-stage emphysema. Then he said, “They might be inclined to show mercy... if we reveal the deception quickly, very quickly, before it’s too late. Not for us, but for everyone else. Xibalba is already a grave. Appeasement doesn’t come from suffering ghosts.” He tilted his head. “Or from converts.”

“I think that’s a tall order for a group of Lords whose favorite trials apparently include ‘house full of hungry jaguars’ and ‘ninety-nine humiliating places to hide a razor blade,” Aníbal said.

“Ah, well...” He massaged his sternum with one gnarled hand, still staring. For a second she worried that he had lost track of the conversation, but then he said, in a rare spasm of his old humor: “You might even get along, in that case.”

“Bembe,” Aníbal deadpanned, “I do not want to meet the space jaguars.”

Which seemed to both of them like a fair place to leave it. After a minute, he stood up, and went to collect her empty drink pouch, which was still drifting around the room with a kind of cheerful indifference. Overhead, the mess lights fizzled and hummed, spotted dark in places by little collections of the dead or dying firebugs inside.

“They’re our gods,” Aníbal said, watching him, missing who he used to be. “The terrible ones, but they’re ours. We’re supposed to be bringing them tribute. Instead we’re bringing them a bomb.”

***

When she was younger, it had been a frustrating idea to wrap her head around: the destruction that could be wrought from other people’s mistakes. Certainly her ancestors and their neighbors had been surprised too, when the Spaniard’s caravel came careening out of the sky and wrecked somewhere down in Aztlán. That was over a century ago now, but the embers sparked there had set off a perpetual blaze determined to consume everything in its path. By the time Aníbal had been old enough to pick up a weapon, those flames had become a smolder, but that hadn’t stopped her from marking herself in ash and leaping into the wind. And when she had been captured she had decided to fight, with whatever she had, right up until the very end. Whatever public execution, or trial, or example the crown would try to make of them. She’d never been good at quiet.

But no one had expected the Inquisition to set its sights on Xibalba. At least, not this directly. Xibalba was the place of fear. It was a crypt, an end, a punishment. A place for criminals, for prisoners, and for the dead alike. Even growing up with a calendar priest for a father, Aníbal had always thought of it as a locus outside of time; light-years away from home, eternal and untouchable. The creatures and beings that inhabited its shadowy, labyrinthian halls were death gods, they were demon lords. They were sorcerers, or something more, or something that never was, and they had decided a very, very long time ago what exactly their priorities were.

Xibalba had seemed untouchable to her, but that hadn’t been the case for everyone. Although for the most part the gods affected disinterest in the worldly suffering of their dominions, they still wanted for things. For bones and bodies, for treasure and blood. For sport. Appeasement. A cosmic cry for attention maybe. Aníbal hadn’t been born yet, the last time Xibalba saw fit to bring its wrath down upon the planet, but she could still remember the plague-scars one of her aunts bore, the insect tracks. So even through the wars, and the slaughter, and the missionaries, the dominions had continued to ship their tribute, their dead and their sacrifices to the heavenly underworld, and they did not suffer mistakes.

That was also the thing of it. The crown couldn’t have discovered Xibalba’s location without help. Not the routes, or the codes and prayers necessary to skirt a ship along the impossible edge of the galaxy; it would have been like trying to cave-dive, blind, between stars. Someone had ratted out hell, along with her people’s relationship to it. And she still wasn’t sure how to feel about it.

Aníbal wished she could be angry with them. She wasn't unfamiliar with the Inquisition's interrogations. But she had fought and she had refused, and like with Bembe’s biddable dignity, it rankled. But she wasn’t angry. Instead, she had the sinking feeling that whoever they had been, their body was now one of many lying wrapped within the Ahuizotl’s hold, preserved and stuffed to weight with inert chunk plasma, and glistening matchlock beetles.

***

Nine days before they were due to arrive at Xibalba, Sacniete died.

She was very old, even older than Bembe, so it wasn’t exactly unexpected. Long-haul space travel was not easy on the body. Nina took it harder than anyone else, which surprised Aníbal, because she hadn’t known they were close. Sacniete had kept to herself. More concerning was the fact that she was the only daykeeper among them, and was technically the only one qualified to oversee her own funeral.

Like with everything else, they made do. Aníbal and Lady Yohl worked together to prepare the body so Nina didn’t have to. Yohl washed the old woman with a delicate care that might have made Aníbal feel a little jealous if she was more self-deprecating, and also the part where it was a corpse. They laid Sacniete out on a gorgeous blue cotton cloth, and placed a whistle carved to look like a macaw on her chest.

“Nina made it.” Lady Yohl said simply, when it looked like Aníbal was going to ask.

“Good timing.”

Yohl went to poke around the daykeeper’s room to look for other small belongings they could wrap up with the body. Books, or trinkets to take with her on her journey. Aníbal crouched over Sacniete, trying not to step on the funerary cloth with her boots. With some effort, she pried open the daykeeper’s mouth so she could place a piece of maize on her tongue, along with a jade bead for the toll. She stopped.

The daykeeper’s teeth were stained bright red. Her tongue was a swollen lump, and covered with little crimson bits of grit. Aníbal ran her finger around the inside of the old woman’s gums and came up with more.

You didn’t, she thought solemnly. And then, Why now? Maybe she’d been hoping her spirit would get to Xibalba ahead of the ship and skip all the drama.

Aníbal closed Sacniete’s mouth a moment before Lady Yohl returned, and watched as she deposited a sparse jumble of items onto the cloth. There was a large beaded bracelet, a small hide bundle (it was so hard to get real hide anymore), a book of dates, and a collection of stingray spines used for bloodletting. More than Aníbal would have thought the Inquisition would have allowed her to keep, but then again, they had said yes to the bird.

She picked up the bundle and opened it. Inside was a handful of tiny red seeds and a few scattered shards of quartz. Aníbal recognized them. Sacred, beanish tzité seeds, gathered from a coral tree, and used for calendar divination among… other things. There should have been two hundred and sixty seeds inside the bag, but of course there weren’t anymore.

“What is it?” Yohl asked carefully, watching her cinch the pouch shut and pocket it.

“Confusing. Annoying,” Aníbal muttered, starting to roll the body up. They were definitely committing a dozen counts of sacrilege, but she’d forgotten many of the practices, or had never been able to learn.

Yohl raised a brow at her and Aníbal blew air out through her teeth. “Do you ever get the impression that old people think you’ll just be able to pick up right where they left off, without question? Happily? Every elder I’ve ever met would have rather died first than give me a straight answer.” And maybe there was no real answer here, but it would have been nice. “So…this tracks.”

Looking thoughtful, Yohl pursed her lips. She carefully tucked the corners of the cloth around Sacniete, and eventually she said “I think..if there really was a meaning, or a test here Aníbal, then it probably wasn’t meant for you. You are not the riddle type.”

Aníbal asked, “What am I then?”

“Whatever the opposite of a riddle is.”

Later, the remaining four of them gathered in the mess for a more proper mourning ritual. Nina had been putting aside a few of the higher quality rations, saving them for an occasion like this, or as a plan for their last meal. Together they feasted on rehydrated squares of tamal colado and pouches of spicy, chemical-orange subanik. Near the end of the meal, Bembe produced a miraculous bottle of something occult and fermented, to no small amount of praise and wonder.

“Aníbal, your father was a priest,” Nina chanced, shortly after they were finished eating. “Do you remember, well... anything? Sacniete would have liked it, I think. She even said a prayer for her bird when it died, but I can’t remember what it was.”

Bembe was giving her that look again. Aníbal closed her eyes. She’d seized the biggest share of the liquor for herself while ruminating on the tzité. Nina looked hopeful. Yohl looked half asleep, and pretty. She shuffled through her memories for something, a little sluggish.

“..thrice embraced in the clouds, four times embraced in the wind. Thirteen times I stood up, to split open the malignant wind.” So much wind. No wind in space. A half prayer, half remembered. Her father had done it better, and had actually stood up. “I borrow you.” Something for Nina, kinder than saying who cares, who cares, the gods might be listening but the gods are going to eat us. “You who thoroughly embrace the spirit of Ix Uuc Yobal Nicte.” Something for poor Sacniete, who had given her the problem of seeds.

“And I hurl you… into the middle of the underworld.”

***

Aníbal knew there were rules for this sort of thing. Rules about when it was safe to look, and for how long—to spare the mind or the imagination, maintain some reverence. They had notes written in frantic sounding Spanish; explanations from some nice pilgrim who had made the trip before and had been blessed enough to return. Probably the rat.

The ship, made for hauling freight, had very few windows. Bembe, with oddly robust persistence, rounded the halls, making sure they were all shuttered tight well before they started their approach. A few hours earlier, he had taken her aside and asked her, gently, not to look.

Aníbal looked.

Kinich Ahau was three times the size of the sun she knew. It burned like a giant red eye in the center of a vast black nothing. Not just red, but a rainbow: rings of deep blue-green, flares of purple, and blooms of marigold yellow that seared into blinding white. Seeing the flares and feathers of color and fire made something in her blood leap, made it course like lightning. It was a kaleidoscope of a star, it was the heart of all creation. It was dying, and it had been for some time.

And hanging there, the adhesed iris of God’s great eye, was Xibalba.

Aníbal felt her heart drop into her stomach. The lightning sputtered out.

It was a station—no— it was a citadel—no—it was. A lot. The structure—structures, because there were many, had been built, or fashioned or had grown within and across the surface of a massive pitted asteroid. Smaller than a moon, the rock itself appeared incomplete, a snarling maw; like part of it had been blown away, but from the inside out. The city of the dead blanketed the surface like a colony of barnacles, hard to differentiate, squirmy. Palaces and mansions of pulsing rock and metal unfurled petal-platforms that became gardens, became docks, became ball-courts and arenas. Towering pyramids carved from mountains of oily bismuth stair-stepped into oblivion, a hundred levels high. Rivers of blood and pus spilled from corbelled arches in utter defiance of physics, and formed canals that bobbed with boats sailing sheets of skin.

The dominions had cities, they had many. Aníbal had only ever seen photos of Palenque before its glassing, but it had sprawled throughout the valley, a jewel of a capital. At the time she had thought the temples there must have been the grandest in all the world. But Xibalba was not the world. It was a thing outside worlds. It was a living nightmare, magnificent and terrible.

No wonder the Inquisition wanted to blow it up.

Intense pressure thrummed behind her eyes. Aníbal reached up to rub them, and when she pulled her fingers back the tips were damp and red. She watched as a tower erupted with breathless flame, and spilled forth a flock of bat-like phantoms that she knew from stories to be monstrous camazotz. They screamed and she could hear them, through the glass and through the soundless void of space.

She looked away, eventually. But it proved a little harder than she’d first thought.

***

The Ahuizotl docked into one of the impossible bays with an otherwise bizarre lack of incident. After witnessing Xibalba as a whole, Aníbal had at least expected an escort of screeching man-bats to meet them at the gate, but nothing did.

“Don’t take anything, don’t agree to anything, don’t even think about leaving the floor.” She told everyone when they had all gathered in the cargo hold, as if anyone besides her was going to do something very stupid. “The coffers and slabs are pressured. Once they’re detached, the timer is going to start running down, which gives us about forty minutes.”

There was a pause. One where another, less tired group of people might have asked her: Forty minutes until what? The daring escape or the beetle powered fission explosion? But Nina only smiled sadly, dressed for an end in fine pink cloth and many heavy, gleaming necklaces. Bembe sat quietly on a crate next to Sacniete’s shrouded body, which hovered on a slab a few feet off the floor. They’d all decided he would stick to inventory because of his knees, for as much as anything in this ruse still mattered. He seemed to take it well.

Yohl only grimaced, but about five minutes after they started to unload their first wave of counterfeit sacrifices, pulled her aside and said, in a low voice, “Aníbal, are you sure?”

Gods, she wished. She wished she had a better plan, any plan, that wasn’t practically the same as no plan. That they weren’t here, having to choose between dying horribly at the hands of their own awful lords, or dying horribly while they struck an unwilling blow to their people, just another nail in the coffin of their civilization.

Yohl stared at her, and Aníbal stared back, and it was probably a good thing she was going to die soon because her voice cracked embarrassingly when she exclaimed, “Absolutely!” and then stumbled down the ramp into hell without another word.

The bay was creepy, but also a little plain, all dark stone walls broken up by metal fixtures that shed clumps of wires in organic tangles. A dozen crystalline stelae lined depicting various lords of Xibalba had been raised in the center, and it was before them that they were to deposit their offerings. Aníbal, Nina and Lady Yohl unloaded the cargo without speaking, coffer by coffer, slab after slab. What should have been a trove full of gold, jewels, and spools of fabric instead contained many painted metal mock-ups, glass gems, and rigged corpses. The crown would never have wasted all that stolen coin and spice on a trap.

Fifteen minutes after the countdown began they were greeted by a demon Lord.

‘Greeted’ was a strong word. It was a hushed, sapling-thin figure, with emaciated arms that separated at the wrists into hundreds of straw bristles that were so long they brushed the floor. Its face was more of an impression of a face, like someone had smudged a few charcoal lines into the handle of a broom and called it a day.

It had an owl perched on its head. Everyone jumped when the owl clacked its beak and said, “Hail Ahalmez, Lord of Sweeping, Lord of Ash, Half of Ahaltocob! We welcome you to Xibalba, children of the sun. What a long journey you have had. No, no, don’t stop what you’re doing.”

For about five minutes, Ahalamez, Lord of Sweeping stood there, watching them deposit the coffers in quick but steady succession, until it finally approached the largest collection and made a motion with its bristles. The coffers and some of the slabs rattled. Then they sprouted tiny, hair-thin legs, all along the bottom, and began to march out into the dark hall.

Considering their current effort, this was somewhat insulting. The whole process came off as rather below a Lord’s station, and she wondered if it was more janitor than Lord. But when Aníbal ducked down to lift a box of painted shells, she caught sight of hundreds of razor-thin blades nestled between the bristles, and remembered Ahaltocob was also named the Stabbing Demon.

Twenty-five minutes. Ahalamez left without saying anything else or stabbing anyone.

Thirty minutes. Yohl and Nina stood by the Ahuizotl’s ramp, breathing heavily, sipping on packaged water with nervous energy. They were pale. Thirty-five minutes.

Counting to the beat of her own heart, Aníbal watched the last of the millipede-legged tribute scuttle away (they had started sprouting faster than they could put the packages down, which had been fun) and turned to face them. Her friends, her family. Thirty-three.

“Everyone get back on the ship.” she breathed.

And Death said, lightly: “I think not.”

***

Say, where is your head?

Say, what enters your eyes?

Say, what enters your throat?

Once, when she was sleeping, a spider crawled inside her ear. This was nothing like that. This was a lot worse. The voice, untethered, scratched around inside her skull, searching, like insects in rotwood. Aníbal forced open her eyes and gasped. So did everyone else. She rocked forward, nauseous, bile burning in the back of her throat. Slowly, her vision cleared, and the room and it’s new arrivals swam into muddy focus, She looked up with dreadful certainty.

“Bembe.” Oh, old man.

Her oldest teacher stood at the feet of the gods, hands clasped apologetically. He still looked so sad. On each of his shoulders perched an owl, talons pricking through his jacket. The space above their heads was a riotous chorus of flapping and falling feathers. Aníbal didn’t bother to look up

The multitude of birds spoke all at once. It came down on them like thunder.

“Praise Hun-Came, One Death!” clacked the owls. “Praise Vucub-Came, Seven Death! The first to rise, and the last to fall. High Lords of Xibalba, gods of seed and soil, lords of blood and dust. Hail. Hail. Hail.”

Hail.

One Death was a gilded scarecrow, bound in maize. He stood three times the height of a person, thin and robed in a rasping cloak of husk and mouldy silk. His head was a hollow, caved in like an egg, and the inside was a tiled mosaic of the sun. He wore a golden halo for a crown, flat like a coin and patterned with skulls, and from his six spindly arms dripped heaving pustules of fuzzy black huitlacoche,

Seven Death was smaller, and much harder to make out, even as Aníbal stared right at her. She was a skeleton, or many skeletons tied with lengths of catgut, but her outline gave the impression of a bird. She wore a mantle of blue and yellow feathers, and her skull was a snake’s. She twitched in permanent rictus, clacking. When the god moved clumps of dirt and insects dropped from the cloak, and were then absorbed, only to scatter again with the next cadaverous motion.

The snake skull opened, bearing rows of teeth. Seven Death said, disapprovingly, “We found your explosives.”

Aníbal nodded.

One Death tilted his cracked head in their direction. His voice like wind through the fields. “It would not have worked. Even if the man had not brought it to our attention. You should be glad he did.”

They were both silent then, and Aníbal was okay with that. Bembe stepped forward instead, and he frowned when she did, which was the easiest expression to make her face do in the moment.

“You know this was the right way Aníbal. Everyone,” he started, sounding weary. “This was the only choice. Xibalba is a part of us, Aníbal. And we have so few parts left.” He moved closer, lifting his head. “The Lords have witnessed our devotion. They will show mercy to the dominions if we pledge ourselves in service to Xibalba.”

“Service.” She said, flat, wondering when he’d slipped away from the ship, or maybe he had been summoned. “Always to someone else. Aren’t you tired of it?”

An old resolve flashed in his eyes. “Aníbal, you have never thought ahead, not once, not from the moment you were born.” He walked towards her now, the owls preening on his shoulders. She couldn’t remember the last time she had seen him angry, or close enough. She wished he’d been angry earlier.

Bembe stopped and tried to grip her shoulder, but she moved before he could, and he glared at her. “Your father knew. Up until his final breath, he knew when it was the right time to fight, and when it was to time to kneel down and beg the gods for—”

Beg for what, he didn’t get to say. Bembe stumbled. He shuddered. He sprouted. Branches, mottled brown and heavy with thorns curled out of his ears. They peeled out from under his nails. His eyes burst into fluffy, cottony white ceiba pods. His torso grew up, and his feet grew down, and Bembe rooted to the floor.

Aníbal would have liked to scream, but her throat felt full of splinters. Her limbs locked up, and she shuddered, paralyzed, unable to even turn to check on Nina and Yohl.

“There,” One Death said calmly. “There is nothing so lovely a mercy as the patience of trees.” He spread his arms wide, all six of them. “Now.”

Aníbal felt so stiff, so tired. Thirsty, and hungry, in need of rest and light. But she was also so angry. Angry enough to claw at her throat and struggle. No, no! She wasn’t going to be a tree. She was going to be a problem. “A test!” she cried, straining up, dumping whatever faith she had left into the hope that Death would listen. “I—demand a trial.”

Lightning sizzled in her blood again. Her ability to breath returned. Both Deaths stared at her as she panted and hacked up a leaf.

“You love play,” she hazarded again, swallowing air. “Right?”

“There is no prize we want from you, child. We have everything.” Seven Death said.

“Good.” She swayed up, refusing to lean on the Bembe-tree. Her thoughts raced, adrenaline filling her the way it did before a fight. “So nothing changes for you, but things can always get worse for me. And you want. So..a trial, a bet. And if I—if I win, I get the prize.”

One Death stroked a bulbous sack of infected corn at his wrist. “What prize?”

“The title of One Death,” Aníbal said, without pause. “I want your job.”

Aníbal waited. She expected them to protest, really. They always did the stories. But after a beat, Seven Death loped towards her, bones shaking, her serpent mouth split in a large grin.

“A trial. We will set your test,” Seven Death said. “But which?” muttered One Death.

Aníbal chanced a look back at her companions. Yohl had collapsed into a crouch, and was furiously shaking petals out of her hair. Nina was on the ground too, but her face was dry if flushed, and she was snarling.

They waited. The owls perched in Bembe’s branches thrilled. “Yes, yes,” the Deaths murmured. “We know, we do.” And together, taking a word a piece, they said: “Jaguar—”

“Oh for fucks sake.”

“—House.”

“Child, your task is this,” One Death said with obvious glee. “You will return whole, un-devoured. You will lose when the jaguars of Xibalba rend your flesh from your bones, and lap up your blood. They will eat you alive. Your companions will be planted in the eighty second garden of Cuchumaquic, and the Lords will feast upon the fruit they produce until the dawn of the fifth cycle of creation. Your people and their conquerors alike will learn the meaning of pain, for insolence and for treachery.”

Uh-huh. “Whole,” Aníbal repeated, processing a lot. “I keep all my meat.”

“Yes. Not a scratch. Not a drop of blood spilt. Or all is forfeit.”

“Fine.”

The room seemed to bow in. The clusters of wires flexed. It had already been dim, but the room darkened further. Her ears began to ring, like she was crossing into a higher altitude. Aníbal blinked. “Wait. Do I even get a—”

Forest. The smell of humid rain and rot. Her feet slammed down onto uneven stones, and she had to stumble to keep her balance.

“—weapon? Oh.”

She was in a cavern. Or a mansion, some vast inner courtyard where the sky above her was also ceiling, painted bruise-blue. The room was bathed in watermelon light, the kind you got when the sun set over the mountains, and when she looked up she saw trees in every direction, heavy green palms and budding jacaranda. A beautiful fountain tiled in blue and red trickled squares bubbled happily in front of her. The burble became a rumble. The rumble became a growl.

Jaguar House was indeed, full of jaguars. And she had been given a weapon.

A heavy, feline shape lept towards her on the right side. Aníbal gripped the handle that had appeared in her hand, and she swung it.

The macuahuitl took the cat’s head clean off. It hit the ground with a bloody splatch and did not stop snarling. The club’s prismatic blades shined in the warm light, and with practiced ease Aníbal found the switch that would ignite the plasma edging the obsidian and flicked it on.

Then she ran.

The forest came alive with crashing sounds of movement and yowling. Not usual for jaguars, which only meant there were a lot of jaguars. Fangs bit into the thick sole of her boot and she rocked forward again, yanked it back, and kicked out at the spotted cat. It yelped. Even though she wasn’t stopping to check closely, they did not entirely resemble their terrestrial cousins. She clocked crimson fur and bristling porcupine spines, front limbs that looked too long and thick. There were many. Too many to fight. Too many to run from.

She ended up circling back around to the fountain. It had five tiers, and Aníbal hoisted herself onto one, then the neck. Water soaked through her trousers, and it stunk like iron and cinnabar. She rolled herself onto her knees, and from the height, she watched as a sea of starving fangs bore down on her.

Aníbal reached into her soaked jacket. She drew out the hide bundle that held Sacniete’s remaining tzité seeds, and she poured every last one out into her palm. She shoved them in her mouth and chewed, until amber spittle ran down her chin, and her breath became short and thin. Grinning feraly through ruddy teeth, Aníbal wheezed, and tightened her grip on blazing macuahuitl.

The wall of space jaguars slammed into the fountain.

She died.

***

The first thing Aníbal heard after coming back to life was: “You cheat.”

“No,” she croaked doggedly, after a minute of wondering how to talk without air. “I suffocated, there’s a difference.”

“You died. You forfeit.”

Right, there was the protesting. “I’m whole,” she continued, sitting up. “With all my meat.”

One Death had drawn himself up to his full height. The chorus of owls had dissipated, not a fleck or feather in sight. Somehow, intrinsically, Aníbal knew the mass was spreading throughout Xibalba, tattling. She stood up.

Lady Yohl and Nina were still laid out beside the Ahuizotl, awake but confused, exhausted. But they would be fine, Aníbal knew. And she would be able to give them a whole host of new choices, of necklaces, of feasts and of stories. But she probably owed them an explanation first. Always the hardest part.

Yohl mouthed, What the gently caress?

Aníbal winked.

Bembe was still a tree.

One Death slammed four of his lengthy, jointed arms into the ground. The fungus jiggled, the gold clamored. The mosaic inside his face was going dark as the daylight tiles became stained with night, or maybe dawn. “Rotten child, imputent offspring of a dying star, you know nothing of this place or of its needs. Your people are a fading memory, your world is set to strangle itself before it can be truly born. Xibalba has no reason to honor this, to honor you—”

“Xibalba already has,” Aníbal said sharply, cutting right through the divine conniption, and all the other bullshit. She didn’t want to hear it. Not from her father, not from the Inquisition, not from Bemebe and especially not from god. “Because I’m still here, and I won. I hate you, and I hate them. And I’m dead, and so are you. So we’ll just see who wears it better.”

Deaths One through Seven stared at her with twin intensity, faceless, eyeless, pissed.

But Aníbal had really had enough of talking to monsters. She turned her back to the gods, and went to help up her friends.

***

Xibalba could really move when it wanted to, it turned out.

Earlier, far too many owls had announced to her that they would soon be within range of the Inquisition's frontier satellites, and that if they wanted to remain a surprise, they could divert into one of the lower heaven’s, as a shortcut, and because it would be funny.

“It’s fine,” she told them, even though she agreed it would be pretty hilarious. “Let them see us coming.”

She continued her walk through the garden until she made it to the usual spot. Bembe was usually happy to see her. He seemed to find being a tree agreeable, somehow. She’d stopped questioning it, because it seemed to upset him. She brought him stories instead. She told him about Xibalba, and how Yohl and Nina were settling in, and how the jaguars were actually quite cuddly if you remembered to feed them. He couldn’t see well, so she usually brushed over the way her skin was starting to harden like ceramic, the gold pushing up through her lips, and how she missed counting her heartbeats.

“It could be worse,” she mused to him. She’d taken to counting many, many other things instead.

A single seam split open in the bark. “You really didn’t have a plan at all, did you?” Bembe sighed.

Death said: “Nope.”

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