“Bishop,” I say, “take us up.”
He and Visca lead the way. With vines wrapped around their black uniforms, they look like shadows moving across the yellow leaves that blanket the ziggurat’s orange-brown stone. Spingate, O’Malley, Aramovsky and I stand out more. We should wrap ourselves in vines, too. Maybe later—vines would add weight, and this damn spear will be heavy enough by the time we’re done.
The steps are wide but thin, and painfully steep. I have to raise my knee almost parallel to the ground to move from one to the next. I’m careful, as more often than not my foot lands on leaves and vines that want to squish out from under when I put my weight on them. The stone beneath is unforgiving—even a short fall could break bones.
I count as I climb: the ziggurat’s bottom layer has one hundred steps. By the time I reach the first plateau, my legs are already screaming.
Twenty-nine layers to go.
My eyes trace the steps that lead to the second plateau—yep, another hundred. At the ninety-fifth, Bishop stops and turns to me.
“Em, don’t be afraid of what you’ll see next—the woman is just a carving.”
We take the last five steps side by side.
I reach the second plateau and am grateful for his warning. A snarling woman in red robes is carved into the wall at the base of the ziggurat’s third layer, vines on either side of her held apart like drawn curtains. Bishop must have tied them off. A vine-covered block of stone sits in front of her. She’s plunging a knife down. She looks so real.
Bishop nods toward the woman. “When we came up, we thought we saw something behind the vines. It was her.”
Some of her color has chipped or flaked away, but if I had just glanced I would have thought she was moving, thought she was alive.
The woman has a double-ring on her forehead.
I walk to the block. Through the vines covering it, I see a carved man, on his back, hands chained to the block’s sides. The two images are meant to be viewed together—the red-robed woman driving a knife into his chest. The man’s face is forever frozen into a twisted mask of pain and terror.
A vine covers his forehead. I push it aside. His symbol is a half-circle.
“There’s more carvings,” Bishop says. “All the way up, on every plateau. We didn’t look at many. After the first few, well…we stopped looking at anything but our feet.”
Aramovsky walks to the carving. He runs his fingers down the woman’s robes, as if they were cloth instead of stone.
“This is important,” he says.
He closes his eyes. His brow furrows. I think back to when O’Malley told me I was a slave, how it felt to have blocked memories suddenly flare to life.
Aramovsky’s eyes open wide.
“Ritual,” he says. “The God of Blood demands ritual.”
That is Aramovsky’s important word, his cloud cover, his microorganisms.
I feel O’Malley looking at me. He stares hard, his message clear: I told you Aramovsky is a problem—now he’s going to be even worse.
“Let’s go,” I say. “We don’t have time to look at stupid art. Let’s climb.”
—
At the tenth plateau, we are already exhausted. We’re higher than most of the surrounding buildings, yet there are still twenty plateaus before we reach the top. And we thought walking “uphill” on the Xolotl was bad.
Every level has more images, all somehow worse than the level below:
…red-robed, double-ring priests cutting hearts from the chests of living people, throwing the bodies down the Observatory steps…
…severed limbs arranged into patterns, like the pinwheel of arms we saw up on the Xolotl…
…people with their hands chained above their heads, shot repeatedly with arrows, their blood draining into troughs that channel it to stone bowls carved into the terrace. Those images alone are disturbing enough, then I notice actual stone bowls beneath the vines at our feet, waiting to be filled with blood…
…scenes of two people fighting, one armed with a sword and protected by brightly colored armor, while the other is naked, holding only a small knife—or sometimes just a pointed stick…
…people pinned on their backs by bars like the ones that held me in my birth-coffin, one robed priest holding their jaws open, another pouring liquid down their throat…
…people being burned alive…
…people being skinned…
Every level holds images of torture, terror and death.
Was this what the Grownups wanted? A world of murder and human sacrifice?
We are all horrified. All, except Aramovsky.
—
We reach the twenty-fifth plateau. The tall statue is there, still looking up toward the ziggurat peak. Even this close I can’t make out if it’s a man or a woman, not with so many vines hanging all over it.