Chương 147: Chapter 145: What Came Back

The hall Alice had found was the largest room we'd seen since the plaza in the upper city, and unlike everything below it, it had been built to be looked at.

The far wall was a single mural, floor to ceiling, and where the pillars in the temple hall had recorded a structure and the carvings on the ramp had recorded an order, this was a painting, with color still clinging to the stone after all the centuries, ochre, jade and a deep dried red, rendered with a care that the defaced columns downstairs had only hinted at before someone took a chisel to them.

It showed the city in its golden years and then in its dying ones, the whole story we'd been chasing since the first avenue, laid out at last with nothing held back. There was also a table in front of it: long and black, running most of the mural's width, and set out across it in a single, even row were bowls.

"Eighteen," Cyrus said, beating me to it.

"One for each of us," I agreed. Lune, padding at my heel, was not part of the count, and she made that clear by stopping a good three meters short of the table and sitting down, watching the bowls with clever eyes. They were stone, shallow, and each one held a dark liquid that lay perfectly still, not a speck of dust on its surface, throwing back the light of the room in small coins. It did not look like water; that much was certain.

"So," Scale said after a moment.

"We're not drinking those. Right? Tell me we're not drinking those."

"Eighteen bowls," Somnus said.

"Eighteen of us. And a fox who wants nothing to do with it," he looked at Lune apologetically after my companion growled.

"The game has rarely been this obvious about anything."

"That doesn't mean we drink the spooky death-temple soup, Somnus."

"I'm afraid it does, yes." Rafael had walked the length of the table once and come back, and the look on his face did not reassure the Rogue.

"There's no other way out of this room. I checked. The mural's solid, the walls are solid. We came up the stairs from the burial chamber, and that's the only door." He gestured at the bowls.

"They put eighteen out and sealed the room behind them. I don't love what that implies, but I don't think the dungeon means it as a riddle."

"It could be a trap," Carmen said.

"Poison, a debuff, something that splits us up. We could go out, explore the city more."

"We could," Cyrus allowed. He'd crouched by the end of the table, studying the nearest bowl without touching it, and I could see him running the odds.

"But think about how this place has worked. It hasn't lied to us once. Other than someone trying to erase parts of the carvings, the pillars or the murals down there, everything down here was telling the story of the people of this city. The dungeon's whole theme is memory." He nodded at the wall.

"I don't think that's poison. I think it's the rest of the tale, and they meant for whoever made it here to know it."

"You think," Carmen said.

"I think. Which is why I'll drink first, and the rest of you wait to see whether I fall over."

"That's not going to happen," I objected, and the mage looked at me.

"It is the best—""It isn't, Cyrus." I walked up to the table with Alice following me. She was thinking what I was thinking, surely.

"If it is a trap, there will be seventeen of us with potentially no way of helping you. If all it is is a vision, we should all see the same thing. If it's something worse," I looked at the group.

"Well, I'd rather we spring it together, and deal with it together." That got several nods from the participants, so we lined up along the table, one to a bowl, and I looked down the row at faces lit gold and uneasy, and Verdugo, predictably, was the one who broke the silence.

"To the worst idea any of us has ever had," he said, lifting his bowl." Salud."" Salud, I guess," Talion muttered, lifting his.

"See you on the other side." I picked mine up. It was cold, colder than the room, and heavier than the little stone bowl had any right to be. Lune made a growling sound behind me, and I caught Alice's eye across the table, and she gave me the smallest nod. We drank.

The hall went out like a snuffed candle, and the city came up around us instead. It was Xibalba, but Xibalba alive. It wasn't the silvered, half-there echo from the plaza, but solid, full, loud, much unlike a ghost of the past.

We stood in the middle of the great market square we'd walked through hours and centuries ago, and it was thronged with goblins, straight-backed and clothed and arguing over goods, herding pale eyeless cattle of never-before-seen animals through the lanes, hauling baskets of strange crops up from the terraces. Children ran underfoot. Smoke rose from fireplaces.

Above it all, vast and folded into the cavern roof, the bat hung in its place, and the goblins lived their whole bright lives in the shelter of its wings without ever once looking afraid. None of them could see us. We drifted through the memory like the dead drift through the river Styx in Greek mythology, and the vision carried us forward through years at a time. And as time went by, the Bat above was slowly turning away from the world below, and as it turned, the city began to suffer.

The cattle that had grazed the dark unharmed started vanishing from their pens, dragged off in the night by things with too many limbs that came creeping out of the deeper tunnels the moment Camazotz stopped watching them. The crops failed in the lightless beds. Goblins who walked too far from the temples did not come back. I watched a herd-keeper find his pens torn open and empty, and I watched the fear arrive in that city for the first time, and settle, and grow. Reading on Amazon or a pirate site?

This novel is from Royal Road. Support the author by reading it there. He's leaving them, I thought, and felt the entire party think it with me, eighteen of us sharing one slow dawning horror. Their god is walking away, and they're starving in the dark. They did the only thing they knew. They gave him more.

The vision took us into the temple — this temple, the high one, when its halls were full and its channels ran bright — and showed us the priests at their work, the bowls and the knives, the offerings climbing the altar steps, the blood going down the channels and downhill into the dark in the desperate certainty that if they only gave enough, the bat would turn back. They sacrificed their cattle.

Then, when the cattle ran out, they sacrificed each other, the old and the sick and at last the willing, and the more blood ran in those channels the further the great wings turned away, and not one of them understood why. That was the moment the vision chose to explain instead of show, and it landed on all of us at once. They had it backwards. The blood was never an offering the bat wanted; it was the very thing driving it off.

Whatever Camazotz had been, whatever a true Spirit of the Deep Dark actually was, it had sheltered them freely for as long as they simply lived under its wings, and the slaughter they'd built to honor it was the one thing it could not abide. The carvings called it a god turning its face from unworthy worshippers. The truth was a creature recoiling, year after year, from people who answered its silence by cutting more throats, and who read every inch it retreated as a demand for more.

They had misunderstood the one power that ever kept them safe, and they were killing themselves trying to appease it for a crime that was the appeasement. I heard Desirae make a small sound somewhere beside me. Verdugo said something under his breath that was not a joke this time. And then the vision showed us the old shaman. Ah Puch, bent and thin even then, standing before his starving people with his staff in his hand, and we did not need sound to understand what he offered.

The greatest sacrifice the city had left to give: himself, their leader, their priest-king, laid willingly on the altar to buy back a god's mercy. The people wept as the priests took up their knives. Whatever else he became, the vision was merciful enough to show us he began as a man trying to save the only people he had, and believing to the last that he knew how. He laid himself down, and the knives came down with him. The blood ran into the channels, the largest offering Xibalba had ever made.

The Great Bat, high above, turned its face fully away and did not so much as glance down. Camazotz did not take the sacrifice. Camazotz never had. But something else did. The vision changed in a way I had no clean words for.

The dark beneath the altar, the deep below the deep, the place all those channels had been draining into for generations noticed the powerful sacrifice, and a presence rose into the memory that the goblins had no carving for, because nothing that ever saw it had lived long enough to tell the tale and put it on a wall. It had no shape the vision was willing to hold.

It was simply a presence, a will, something that had been lying at the bottom of all that spilled blood drinking it down for years, patient, fed, and the moment the city offered up its own king it reached up out of the dark and took him. The thing in the vision wore no name.

It poured itself into the dead shaman and stood him back up off the altar, and the figure that rose was the one from the burial-chamber mural, taller than it had been, wrong in its proportions, Ah Puch's shape with none of Ah Puch left inside it but a servant's obedience. The thing had not answered their prayers; It had simply found a door propped open by a lifetime of blood, and walked through it. The rest, the vision showed us quickly. The thing that wore Ah Puch did not save the city.

It turned the people from the bat that had abandoned them toward the nameless power that had answered, because that was what it had risen to do, and it did not ask. The blood never stopped, the channels never ran dry, and generation by generation, kneeling to a master that fed on them and called it worship, the goblins of Xibalba emptied out from the inside until there was nothing left of them but the grey, hollow, forgotten things still drifting through the dark above us.

The last thing the vision gave us was the bat. One final image, the great wings folded into the far reaches of the cavern, turned away from a city that had chosen, unwillingly and in grief, the one thing in the dark worse than being abandoned. Then the bowls were empty in our hands, and we were somewhere else entirely.

We came back not to the mural hall, but to open air, or at least what passed for it down here. We stood on a small, round platform of black stone with no roof above us but the lost dark of the cavern, and I understood after a disoriented moment that we'd been moved to the very top of the high pyramid we'd fought our way into at its base. The temple district lay somewhere far below, out of sight, and for the first time since we'd entered, the air was moving.

Ahead of us, a bridge ran out from the pyramid's crown into nothing. It was narrow, railless, and very long, a single span of stone arcing out, and it ran straight as a drawn line into the dark, toward a far place none of us could see. The current of air came from out there. Lune stood at the very lip of the bridge, facing the dark where the bridge led, ears forward, and there was none of the recoil in her that the altar and the burial mural had pulled out of her.

If anything, she looked the way she had at the foot of Camazotz's temple a while ago in the upper city: drawn, quiet, almost grieving, for a thing she seemed to understand far better than the rest of us did. I crouched beside her and looked out along the bridge, and I thought I finally understood why.

"That leads to the bat," I said. The party had gone quiet behind me, still half inside the vision.

"Camazotz. The upper caverns. That's where it nests."

"We've had it wrong since the first mural," Alice said.

"All of us. We came down here thinking the bat was the monster."

"This whole thing," Leona sounded shaken, "I…what are we supposed to do?" I understood why she'd ask something like that. The vision had shaken me as well, more than possibly anything else that had happened in Godsrealm so far. I felt similar when the Elder Stag had asked me about the children of the forest; the animals that I'd hunted to get stronger. With the goblins — no, the people — of Xibalba, I had a similar feeling. They were not the enemy. And from what we'd seen, neither was Camazotz.

"If this leads to the bat," Verdugo said.

"Do we need to fight it?"

"I don't know," I said.

"It looks like there is something else, way deeper, that is supposed to be the enemy. Still…" I didn't really know how to put it into words. In the vision, Camazotz felt sad and betrayed, but it also felt angry. Angry, and final. It did not need the goblins for survival, like vice versa, and whatever compassion it had felt toward them, it was not the primal trait of Camazotz, and somehow I felt like despite all the favors it had done to the people of Xibalba, it would not hesitate to fight when the time came.

Besides, even if the big bad was down here, that thing didn't feel like anything within the scope of our power. That much was clear: we couldn't even touch it, not the way we were right now. As for its… avatar, Ah Puch, that was a different question, and I was almost certain that the goblin-king was the one waiting for us at the end of the road. I just didn't know how long it would take to get there.

I zoned back into the discussion to Verdugo talking after stepping up to the head of the bridge, looking out into the dark where the cold wind came from.

"Then we go and see it," he said.

"The bat. We at least go and look at the thing this whole sad city got wrong." He shouldered his axe.

"Seems rude not to, after all that."