“We’ll manage it,” I said. Be confident. Chicks and gods dig confidence. And it was true, right now I was ahead of the game. Especially with this Lady Koh thing. I knew a star when I saw one. She already had her eighty thousand-plus people under her little blue thumb. And she was just getting started. And for whatever reason of her own, to the extent that she understood my plans to preserve the Sacrifice Game and get myself back to the last b’aktun, she approved of them. “And I’m going to get the hell back too.”

This time he didn’t ask “Back to where?” and I was sure he understood that I meant back to the twenty-first century. If one can use the word understand in this context.

“You’re not worried about Severed Right Hand?” Maximon asked.

Zing. Maybe I’d sounded a little too flip there. Watch it.

Hmm. Severed Right Hand’s name had come up around Koh’s council mat, but he was kind of a shadowy figure. Supposedly he’d been a junior member of the synod of the red moiety of Teotihuacanian, that is, the war clans, and he owned only two bundles of pink reeds-that is, he was only eighteen years old. Yesterday, according to Lady Koh’s G2, he-well, of course we didn’t call them G2, we called them b’acanob, “whisperers”-hmm, let’s say, according to our intelligence units, he’d already killed the remaining patriarchs of his own Swallowtail Clan, and had captured the next two Puma duarchs and most of the surviving synodsmen.

“Maybe I should be much more worried,” I said.

“Severed Right Hand is quite energetic,” Maximon said. “And he’s just adopted another twenty-eight thousand bloods.”

I clicked three times, respectfully, meaning, “Please go on.”

Maximon said that Severed Right Hand was now commanding at least four thousand veintenas, that is, platoons of twenty. About fourteen thousand of those were full bloods from the Puma clans. They were experts with the javelin launcher, the Teotihuacanian signature weapon, and they’d be the hardest to fend off if there was a direct battle. He’d set up his mobile headquarters at Tehuacan-which, despite the similar name, was not the same as, or even a satellite town of, Teotihuacan. It was two jornadas due whitewards, north, of us. He’d brought along what was left of the city’s council of four hundred, which he now dominated. And he’d sworn to capture all the Rattler’s Children and give their heads and skins to the Green Hag, a sort of fresh-water elemental who’d been the elder patroness of Teotihuacan.

Severed Right Hand was claiming that Koh-or, as she was now styling herself, the Great-Elderess of All Star Rattler’s Children-hadn’t just foretold the city’s destruction, but had caused it. The claim had the advantage of being basically the truth, although this hadn’t seemed to have hurt Koh’s standing with her own followers. Even our cleverer clan leaders, the ones who’d gotten the gossip about her machinations, seemed more loyal to her than ever. So even though the official motive for the now-unavoidable civil war was, as always, revenge, it was revenge in the Maya sense of capturing Koh’s uays.

More specifically, Teotihuacan had been like the Lourdes, Jerusalem, Rome, and Mecca of Mesoamerica, and anyone who could have destroyed it was vastly powerful. If Severed Right Hand captured Koh and, through torture, annexed her uays-her most active souls-her powers of prophecy and domination would accrue to him. Her former followers would be constrained to obey him, since his uays would hold hers within his skin. He would become both the avenger of the destruction of Teotihucan and its prime beneficiary.

But even with all that, the main reason they were after us, like the real reason for almost anything, was economic. The displaced Puma clans had lost most of their wealth and they needed negotiable items to trade for new homesteads. And every family in our volkerwanderung had brought as much of their high-value gear as they could drag, jewelry, celts, top-grade blades and obsidian cores, textiles, feathers, furs, raw jade, gold dust, and even some chips and pebbles of unworked turquoise-which we called xiuh, a proto-Nahuatl word, since there was no word for it in Mayan, and which was the latest almost-unaffordable sensation from the farthest edge of the world’s bleached northeast. The greathouse lineages had also brought thousands of rubber-sealed baskets swelling with about a hundred varieties of spices and drugs, and thousands of examples of the sort of jade objects that we twenty-first-centuryites would call “art.” And, especially, they’d brought slaves. Although they weren’t really like old-world slaves. Maybe it’d be closer to the Cholan sense to call them “thralls.” For one thing, there wasn’t any clear line between slaves and nonslaves, since even rich clans were like slaves in respect to their local ruling lineage, and then that lineage was like slaves to the ahau, and then, the ahau was a slave to his most deified ancestor. And the slaves could be from any ethnic group. Still, they could be ordered around, and sold, and eaten. Just as, theoretically at least, anybody could be, all the way up to the ahau. And he could get eaten by the smokers.

Anyway, the point is that we-the long train of Koh’s followers-were, despite our bedraggled look, a seductive target. And we wouldn’t be able to put up much of a fight. Most of the support for Koh’s Star Rattler Society had come from Teotihuacan’s white moiety, the peace clans, who were related to the red war moiety through mandatory exogamy, but usually didn’t train their own sons as warriors. Our caravan had about eight thousand bloods with war experience who’d come from other Rattler-pledged clans, but they weren’t well organized like the Teotihuacanian infantry, or, yet, very well coordinated with each other. To say the least. And we had a few thousand Maya bloods from the expatriate Ixob Ocelot lineage and some allied Maya trading clans from Tik’al and Kaminaljuyu, but they already weren’t getting along with the Teotihuacanians. Finally, at the bottom of the social pyramid, we were dragging along about eighteen thousand families of thralls. About twelve thousand of these were warrior-aged males, nonbloods who we could send in to fight, but who were armed only with pikes and weren’t effective in battle except as a buffer. And their kinsfolk-well, they fetched and carried, and their young folks took care of the greathouse males’ sexual needs, and they were meat on the hoof, as it were-but really, most of the time they felt like a liability.

The upshot was that in a direct fight we’d be in trouble. We’d agreed-we meaning Lady Koh, her provisional council of clan patriarchs, and I-had all agreed that our best strategy would be to just keep moving as fast as possible and draw Severed Right Hand away from his logistical support base in the Valley of Mexico.

“Severed Right Hand seems to be holding his own against your Lady Koh,” Maximon said.

“You mean in the Sacrifice Game?” I asked. She’d told me that she played against him every night-long distance, of course, and by the equivalent of telepathy. And then in the mornings she’d issue orders accordingly.

“Yes,” Maximon indicated, somehow.

“You’re right.” He seemed to be fading-I mean, visually-and my voice started hurrying. “In fact it seems like sometimes he knows where we’re heading before we decide to go there.”

“Of course, it’s really his advisers playing.”

“Oh?” I asked. “Who are they?”

He said they were five nine-stone players who’d worked for years for the capital’s twin synods, and who were so permanently in camera that nobody, not even the synodsmen themselves, knew their names. Supposedly they didn’t have tongues, and they spoke only in a house sign language, and they had white skin, like vestal virgins, and two of them were over a hundred and twenty years old.

“Well, that’s good to know,” I said. It sounded like it was just hocus-pocus.