Beautiful Sacrifice

before?” Hunter asked, unable to take his eyes off the endless, seething sea of scales and feathers.
    “No, not this big, not this detailed,” she said. “Even the paintings in the Petén don’t compare to this. Petén’s art is shallow and flat. But this…Bonampak might compare, maybe, but I don’t believe it. I can’t believe this.”
    “Is there any way to date the room?” Hunter asked. “I mean the painting, not the site itself.”
    “We can try to find soot for carbon dating, maybe even take some paint samples.” Yet even as she spoke, she was shaking her head. “I couldn’t bear to chip off a single piece of this. You could reach out and touch Kukulcán, feel the wind off its wings, breathe the sacred presence.”
    “That’s the breeze through the hallway,” Hunter said.
    She gave him a glance from gold-shot dark eyes. “You hope it is.” But she smiled, understanding a modern man’s unease with ancient things that had no good explanation. “I’d guess that this temple is between four and five centuries old. I’d haveto do some soil analysis and compare construction styles and techniques. Someone—generations of someones—have kept this in beautiful shape.”
    “PFM,” he said absently.
    Hunter was compelled by what his penlight revealed. The snake figure ended or changed before repeating itself. It was hard to tell. The whole painting flowed, seethed at the edges where darkness was.
    The broader beam of Lina’s light joined his, and he saw the serpent’s jaws were gaping, revealing rows of teeth and a very wide red human tongue. There was an eerie, almost human aspect to the face, but it wasn’t benign or inviting. The artist had captured the raw, primal majesty of a god that was worthy of awe and reverence. Its eyes were open, glowing gold with ruby irises. When the angle of the light changed, the pupils seemed to flicker between the vertical slit of a reptile and the rounder aspect of the human.
    In candlelight, the effect would be terrifying.
    The mouth was big enough for a large man to be swallowed inside. Hunter wondered if the man would emerge again, filled with godlike knowledge, or simply disappear to be digested by darkness. His skin rippled in primal response, making body hair stand on end.
    He had no desire to be the priest-king swallowed by this god.
    Hunter’s pencil beam moved on to another part of the wall. A figure leaped out of time. He was a tall, muscular, idealized man wearing a mask.
    “Lina,” he said, “I need some more light over here.”
    With a reluctance that said more than words, Lina’s light moved slowly to join his.
    The figure was wearing a mask made of obsidian, gleaming and black as midnight water. The mask had aspects of birdand bat, beast and human.
    Her breath came in, stopped. “That’s a painting of the missing mask. It shows how it was meant to be used, in whose honor, in which ceremony.”
    Hunter stared at a representation of the mask that had been stolen from the shipment seized by ICE.
    The figure wearing the mask had a single hand outstretched to the mouth of the serpent, fingers wide in courageous expectation. The other figures around him were very small, barely ankle-high, signifying their relative unimportance.
    “This was a priest-king,” Lina whispered.
    “The marking on his chest.” Hunter’s voice was like hers, hushed.
    “Blood. See the torn edges of the skin around the nipples? The blood dripping from beneath the loincloth? He cut himself beyond the point of pain to reach a different kind of consciousness.”
    Hunter winced. “Glad I was raised in a church where all we did was peel off a little cash for the Communion plate. Damn, it takes huevos or insanity to slice into your own dick.”
    “Look at the pattern of the fallen blood,” Lina said. “There, between his feet.”
    Uneasily Hunter looked. Blood that had dripped and streamed red became transformed into a blue glyph on the floor. “Kawa’il. Again.”
    “That’s who the offering is for, but who is the man performing the ceremony?” she asked. “I don’t see any sigils or historical glyphs indicating house and lineage and battles.”
    “Is that unusual?”
    “Very. There should be exploits, explanations, genealogies.” She swept the beam around but found only a sea of colored scales, the serpent in its thousand aspects, watching her.
    “Over there,” Hunter said. “The priest or king or whatever is reaching for something.”
    Slowly she