Beautiful Sacrifice

sacred jade Chacmool that had been among the stolen artifacts that had brought Hunter to Lina. Silently Water Bat kneeled in front of Carlos.
    No Tomorrows wore the black of sunset, Boox. Another man wore white, Sak, the north.
    The four pillars, the Bacabs, Lina realized, separating heaven and hell.
    In the ancient belief, when the Bacabs fell, Xibalba would rise to the gods and everything in between would be cleansed, destroyed, a storm of change that would make room for the next creation, the next age.
    The Age of Kings, which Carlos believed he would lead.
    Grimly Lina looked around the temple. Its shadows were empty, no man-size limestone altar lurking nearby.
    He won’t be killing anyone here. So why are they posed like costumed actors waiting for the director to appear?
    As though Carlos had heard her silent question, he spoke to her in soft English. For all his men responded, it might as well have been the wind rustling.
    “I regret that I didn’t have time to make you understand,” he said. “But know this, it is not only your blood, your pain, that Kawa’il needs today. I will bleed, too, an act of reverence to strengthen me for what comes.”
    “Really? Last time I checked, you weren’t the one dying.”
    “Silence, or I will tie knotted twine in a loop through your tongue and yank on it each time you speak.”
    Put that way, silence had definite appeal. She shut up.
    Carlos went back to preparing himself to turn the key that would open the lock on the Age of Kings. As he did, he continued to instruct her in English.
    “The twine I hold in my right hand is from a wild cotton tree growing near my natal village, gathered as our people have for over six thousand years. I wound the twine myself and knotted it twenty times, following the instructions in the Codex of Kawa’il. On one end of the twine is the barb from a stingray I hunted and killed myself with a stone knife.”
    Lina found herself unable to look away from the ancient ritual Carlos was reenacting. The stingray barb was almost as long as his hand and nearly as thick as his little finger. At either side of it were curved spines that had only one purpose—to dig into flesh and not let go.
    Carlos set the box on the floor, moved his loincloth aside with his left hand, and pinched a deep fold of foreskin between his thumb and forefinger. He plunged the barb through the hypersensitive skin, stopping only at the first knot.
    Lina didn’t know whether he gasped or she did. She did know that it couldn’t have been the first time Carlos had performed this agonizing rite. His hands were too steady, too sure. Blood welled and began to drip down his penis. Bile crawled up her throat. She swallowed hard. Twice.
    “With each knot pulled through, I draw closer to Kawa’il,” Carlos said. “When the whole cord is dipped in my life, Kawa’il speaks to me.”
    Twenty knots embedded beneath and then pulled through his foreskin, Lina thought, feeling a bit dizzy. That would bring enough pain to hear voicesin your head and make you believe in an alternate reality rooted in blood, flowering in agony.
    Carlos tugged the twine and more blood flowed as the first knot pulled through the slit in his skin. The cord turned crimson in the candlelight. Blood trickled into the jade Chacmool held by the kneeling Bacab.
    Lina forced herself to breathe. From the corner of her eyes, she watched the men dressed as the Bacabs. Three of them were absorbed in the ritual.
    No Tomorrows watched only her.
    The metallic scent of fresh blood curled through the small room like copal smoke.
    Knots kept crawling into the slit and emerging drenched in red.
    “Earth lies flat on a field of four colors, black and white and red and yellow. Each of the field’s corners is held up by a man who is becoming a tree, roots plunging down, drinking earth’s blood, flowering in the heavens…the four pillars of creation…hot wind blowing…stars glowing…Xibalba in black pulses reaching for the stars…my breath is his breath, hot, hotter, too hot…agony…Kawa’il…is all…”
    Carlos’s words wound through the room with the smoke, and the smoke became a serpent whose blood rippled in feathers the color of rainbows, jaws opening and opening more, until the room was swallowed and the last knot was red and Carlos was ecstatic, held within the pulsing center of agony.
    For a long time there was silence but for Carlos’s ragged breathing. Then, at a nod from him, Chak stood and