The Sacrifice Game by Brian D'Amato

Author:Brian D'Amato [D'Amato, Brian]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Literary, Science Fiction, General, Suspense, Fiction
ISBN: 9781101585504
Google: PsK68rNtxSMC
Amazon: 0525952411
Publisher: Dutton Adult
Published: 2012-07-04T22:00:00+00:00

( 54 )

I was a little freaked out, to say the least. I just sat there for two beats, and then eight, wondering whether to run for it. Although of course there wasn’t anywhere to go. Get outside to Hun Xoc? No, they’d be holding him too. My eye darted to the doorway. Koh’s nacom, an old skin-blackened Rattler sacrificer, was crouching in it with a long-handled flint knife.

Lunge forward. Grab Koh’s neck. Try to hold her as a hostage.

No. Won’t work either. They’ll pry me off her in two p’ip’ilob. She owns this place, I thought. I’ve had it. Serves me right for dealing with these fucking headhunters.

I looked back at Koh. Her look said it was all all right. Thanks a lot, I thought. The nacom kneed toward us. Four Rattler assistants came in behind him, lifted me up, and laid me over the little stone altar table in the center of the room, holding my arms and legs lightly, so that my back wouldn’t break. The nacom sprinkled purifying balche over me, said his little invocation, and touched his flint knife to my Adam’s apple, like he was lighting a fire with a long match. I felt an ultrasharp stone hook catching a fold of my skin and then drawing a long, nearly painless line down my chest. The nacom put the knife aside, put his unclean hand over my abdomen—dangerously close, but not quite defiling my skin—and lifted up a bright-red achiote tamale, sculpted into a stylized heart. He handed it to Koh. Shockingly—I guess it was part of her New Deal religion, showing that she was immune to the pollution of death—she broke off a piece of the crust and swallowed it. Evidently the Orb Weaver Sorority had toned down this part a bit since the even badder older days, back between the time when the Oceans Drank Atlantis and the rise of the sons of Aryas. Novelty baked goods, I thought. Yet another example of Koh’s terrific sense of humor. You never knew where you were with this chick. I leaned back, listening to my sweat and urine dripping on the stone floor. Koh was giggling a little bit. Laugh it up, I thought. She was always pulling stuff like that, riddles, gags, infantile practical jokes. Gullible me. Yuk, yuk.

The rattler ordinands moved me down onto a bobcat-fur-covered pallet and started washing me in three kinds of water and four kinds of sand, purifying me after sex and death and whatever.

I’ve got to have a talk with Koh Babe about this shit, I thought, it’s not funny and it’s wearing me down. A couple more brilliant moments like that and I’ll be the only white-haired aborigine between here and Iceland.

I guess she’s just testing me again, to see how cool I can be. Well, the SATs are over, sweetheart. I’ve been cool enough. I raised my head up on one arm, even though it wasn’t a pose anybody seemed to use around here. Another four-kid Rattler troop had crawled in with a human-size tray.

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