The dream was so vivid: Horn Lance was in the Temple of the Warriors in Chichen Itza. The bright red-and-black feathered-serpent columns cast bars of shadow as the late-afternoon sunlight slanted onto the polished stone floor. His leather helmet with its red macaw-feather crest felt almost too snug around his head. His skin had been painted black, and white armbands circled his biceps.
He grasped a naked man’s ankles, could feel the man’s warm bones and his racing pulse through the thin veil of skin. The victim was bent painfully backward over the low stone altar, his chest exposed, the skin stretched tightly across his ribs and stomach. The pelvis jutted up as if to make a mockery of his dangling penis and tight scrotum.
Horn Lance bore down, all of his weight keeping the man’s feet pressed to the bloodstained limestone. The awkward and painful position deprived a sacrifice of leverage should he resist at the last instant. The tightly stretched torso would gape wide as the keen blade severed skin, muscle, and sinew.
To the victim’s left, the black-painted priest raised a beautiful obsidian knife to the dying sun. Its rays shot through the dark volcanic glass: sparkles that danced and leaped with the slightest movement. Then, with a call to the Lords of Death, the priest turned in a Dance-like flourish of feathers. With practiced efficiency he drew the keen blade across the straining chest just below the ribs.
A terrified scream broke from the victim’s throat, only to fall silent as his muscles and diaphragm were severed and his rib cage spread wide.
Horn Lance looked up, seeing the multicolored serpent as it gathered itself and rose from the blood-caked stone. Green-blue quetzal feathers bobbed above the creature’s scaled head; the mouth gaped, and the tongue flickered between needle-sharp fangs.
Green eyes locked on Horn Lance’s; the brilliantly colored serpent’s head slipped sideways and down, the neck and body serpentine in movement. As the priest lifted the victim’s sacrificial heart the snake’s nostrils flared, and it inhaled the fresh scent of itz. The priest squeezed; blood spurted from the heart’s severed arteries and veins to run down over the priest’s fingers and trace patterns down his sinew-thick forearm.
“Dead Teeth!”
The call from another world pierced Horn Lance’s dream. Afterimages spilled through his souls. He straightened from the sacrificial victim’s ankles, looking down at the man’s surprised face … and saw Thirteen Sacred Jaguar, his limp body bent backward over the sacrificial altar, his chest gaping, lungs deflated, to expose the hollow where his heart had been. Pooled crimson streaked the severed diaphragm, liver, and intestines.
Thirteen Sacred Jaguar? I was sacrificing my ahau?
“Dead Teeth!” the bellowing call from outside the palace door brought Horn Lance fully awake. Coming to in this world, he nevertheless had to clamp his eyes shut and viciously shake the memory of Thirteen Sacred Jaguar’s dead face from his head.
What did it mean? I’d never allow my ahau to be sacrificed.
He forced himself to sit up, recognizing the palace, its walls unfamiliar, stripped as they were of the ornaments that had once hung there.
Around him, the Natchez were rolling out of their blankets, asking each other what was happening. Horn Lance didn’t need to count to realize that maybe half of them were missing along with their bedding and personal possessions.
Fled in the night. The worthless Natchez trash!
“Dead Teeth!” the voice bellowed again. “I challenge you!”
Horn Lance rubbed a hand over his face, standing. A bright shaft of morning light slanted into the room and extended past the central hearth and the smoking remains of last night’s fire.
Horn Lance yanked a breechcloth over his hips as he walked to the doorway and squinted into the morning.
A black silhouette stood between the guardian posts and cast a long shadow all the way to the veranda. Blazing light bathed its outline, as if the man were something ethereal beamed from sun to earth.
He held a shield and a wide-bladed copper-bitted ax; a leather-and-wood helmet encased the man’s head, and his chest was blocky with body armor.
“Who are you? What do you want?” Horn Lance was vaguely aware of the wet scent of the morning, the rising mist, the pooled water on the mound top. The terrible storm had left no trace of its anger in the crystal morning.
“I am Fire Cat, of the Red Wing Clan, in the service of Lady Night Shadow Star, of the Four Winds Clan. I come to challenge Dead Teeth to ritual combat. Man against man. I fight for Piasa and Horned Serpent. He may fight for whatever impotent Power he chooses!”
“Are you brain-addled? You are a slave of the ahau’s. You are his, as is all the other property belonging to your lady.”
“Then you had better send Dead Teeth out with his macuahuitl and shield to see if he can reclaim your lord’s ‘property.’”
As Fire Cat had talked, a crowd had been growing below the stairway. Every eye fixed on the Red Wing in his battle armor. The wide-bladed copper ax, Horn Lance realized, was one of the war trophies that had been hanging on the wall before Swirling Cloud’s folly.
“Get in here!” Horn Lance snarled. “That’s an order.”
“On command from my lady, I am forbidden from following Itza directions. If Dead Teeth will not face me, he, like all the Itza, is a coward!”
Fire Cat turned. The morning sun shone on the three-forked eye design he’d painted on his face. Addressing the crowd, he bellowed, “The Itza are indeed cowards! They refuse individual combat! If they so fear a bound servant, they must tremble before a Four Winds warrior! Their kukul must be a fraud!”
A peal of laughter rose from the crowd.
Horn Lance turned, aware that the Natchez and Itza had crowded behind him to hear. Now they were murmuring darkly to each other. Suspicious glances shot Horn Lance’s way to gauge his reaction.
He smiled as the end to one of his dilemmas became clear. Maybe his day with Wooden Doll hadn’t cost him as much as he’d thought. “By the White Bone Snake’s breath, I spent half the night wondering how to regain momentum after the Little Sun’s defeat. We needed a way to discredit the Red Wing’s victory, and the stupid fool walks right up and offers himself as a sacrificial victim.”
Raising his voice, he shouted, “Dead Teeth! Get dressed. Take your macuahuitl out there and cut that fool’s head off!”
But even as he uttered the words, he had to shake off the Dream image of Thirteen Sacred Jaguar’s gaping chest, the blood, and the surprised death-rictus on the ahau’s face.