The ash cloud was all around us now, as though we’d gone through a big door into a world all modeled out of gray Plasticine. Once I thought some of the ash flakes were alive and then realized they were clouds of mating whiteflies. Every village we passed had the corpses of at least a few sacrifices staked up in the scrungy little zocalos, usually good-looking little kids, but in a lot of different stages of decay. There was one style of doing it where the stakes went up through their anuses and came out their mouths. Some of them looked like they’d had their hands or feet burned off when they were alive to put them in sympathy with the Toad’s fiery mood. Obviously the offerings hadn’t helped, though, and a lot of the villages were abandoned. Sometimes there were drifts of old offerings of yams and manioc and dogs that were way too magotty and dessicated to eat, but our small chain of captives grabbed them and gnawed on them anyway.

By the death of the fifteenth new sun we were in the asphalt swamp around the Toad’s Cigars, cracked flats pocked with sputtering vents. When a gas bubble would tear up through the sticky crust the bloods would invariably say “She’s hatching another whopper,” or something, like they were saying “gesundheit.” The great cinder cone grew imperceptibly on our left, jarringly regular with the same forty-nine-degree angle as the Rattlers’ mul in Teotihuacan, silhouetted against its own dust and streaked with thin glowing pink seeps that folded and congealed into scoriac glaciers. The guides made us veer west to detour around something called Xibalba-Chen, Deathland Well, which from what they said must have been a crater lake that spurted out tons of carbon dioxide. Supposedly it had killed a whole lot of people and animals. We picked our way through a plain of fumaroles and steaming mineral wells down to a path along the Atoyac River, southeast through the Sierra Madre del Sur past Etla and Mitla, places I’d thought I knew pretty well from the twenty-first that were now unrecognizable, even though we passed less than a jornada from the city they later called Monte Alban. I guess some of it was beautiful but I remember mainly monotony, the smell of the runners’ skins crisping in the sun, the fatal localness of the jillion little no-name hamlets, all beginning to feel the domino effect of the continent-wide wave of depression that had started in Teotihuacan.

We’d abandoned thousands of the slower travelers when we’d doubled our pace, but the heralds were still going ahead, proselytizing villages and irrigation societies, making private visits to village cargo-bearers and promising them positions of power in return for the support of their war bloods, shrugging off threats from the greathouses, trying to overwhelm the old hierarchy by numbers, the same old story. By 16 Jaguar we barely had to do anything, we’d come up on a town and the people would hear the rattle-flutes and rush outside, strewing monkshood and fringed gentians in front of Koh’s train, and crouch by the side of the road, looking into the ground, chanting Koh-songs the heralds taught them as we walked through the middle of this weird audience that couldn’t see us. Then as they’d fall into lockstep behind us you could hear their travois poles scraping on the gravel in this unending hiss, and I could feel our bloods’ probably misguided optimism growing, especially when they came back from an audience with Koh. At least the girl had charisma. No matter how many people our outrunners said were chasing us, no matter what rationing and logistics and disease crises we had, no matter how panicked Hun Xoc and I were about getting the hell to Ix before the big hipball game before somebody could head us off, practically everybody seemed to treat the whole thing as a big holiday. Anyone close to Koh was a celebrity. The younger bloods gambled over who’d get to be in my third circle of “pets,” that is, guards/valets. That was outside, or on top of, the ten Rattler bloods who were assigned to protect me and my inner “sleeping circle” of three Harpy bloods. And I wasn’t even one of the major stars.

Before 24 Jaguar-the new incarnation of Grandfather Heat-rose behind the brown clouds, the whistlers said the Harpy emissaries were less than a sun away, and that there were only twenty-two of them. It was all about runners around here, like in a Greek tragedy, the way messengers keep coming in and saying “My King, I bear dreadful tidings from Paedophilopolis,” or whatever. Which maybe means those plays were more realistic than I’d thought. The king and the chorus and whoever were all hunkered in their bunker out of harm’s way, and all the dangerous stuff really did happen offstage. Anyway, before the sun’s midlife crisis we got hit by a rainless sandstorm called the Razor Wind. Ash sand burrowed into our leggings and rubberized sandals and our most tightly wound bandages and salved-together eyelids, and the skin painters covered us with salves and balms and ointments and shit, to the point where my testicles were frozen in this lake of goo, but it was either that or chafe city. No one could look ahead, you could only peek down once in a while at the trail in front of you, and most of us were holding on to some rope or rag dangling from the ass of the person in front, like circus elephants. After a quarter-sun Hun Xoc had to call it quits and sent word down the line for a noncombat halt. We were at a nothing old town called Coloa to triage the wounded bloods. A lot of them would have to kill themselves. The village wasn’t situated right to be much of a refuge, but 2 Hand spread our guest mats and set our backrests in the little mud council house. There were only two other decent buildings. We designated one for the emissaries and one for the captive Pumas. The bloods converted the square into a barracks and the converts overran the rest of the town, trying to find shelter, haggling with the locals, scrounging through garbage heaps for critters to munch on, crows, rats, anything that would normally be shooed away. Some of the converted families set up pathetic little offerings and started chanting. At first I thought they were praying for Koh, but as I listened more closely I could tell that as usual they were just praying to her.

14 Wounded ordered the porters to get the palanquins and sedan chairs together because he insisted that every and each blood had to ride into town just ahead of Lady Koh. Giving ourselves airs, I thought. It was like how people hire a limousine to take them to an event three blocks away because they need something to step out of. But then I didn’t say anything because it occurred to me that the idea might actually have come from Her Worshipfulship. Maybe Koh was a little insecure herself.

At our Grandfather Heat’s next birth we met three of the Harpy emissaries. They’d been among the bloods who’d adopted me in the cave, way back in the day, before we left for Teotihuacan. We exchanged cakes and did a whole “welcome, my brothers” trip. They kept making jokes about how 2Hand had lost weight during the trek, how his eyes had sunk so deep into his baby-fat face that they looked like two black pebbles in a bowl of dough. Actually, it really was like coming home, I felt a little cozy in spite of myself. Still, gloom hung over the situation like, I don’t know. I guess like gloom. Like, basically, a whole lot of hanging gloom. If the Harpies didn’t win the great-hipball game we’d lose everything, including the fillings in our teeth. Or at least the jade fillings. Maybe they’d let us keep any wooden ones.

And we wouldn’t win. The hipgall game would be worked. And the fix would be tight. If we won, it would be like getting a real upset in a World Wrestling Entertainment event. It couldn’t happen. If the Harpies persisted in trying to win anyway, the ball game would be called against them, the Harpies would object, and a fight would start, which the Ocelots were confident they would win. Then they could justifiably take all the Harpies’ possessions and probably a good chunk of them as captives. After that, the other raptor clans in the area would retrench and make deals with the Ocelots.