Read Online Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars by Cody Goodfellow - Free Book Online
Authors: Cody Goodfellow
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only thing she truly owns, the only one who’d miss her if she disappeared.
Like a moth with its antennae singed off, I blunder through the cavernous, lightless hole where the rest of my life used to be. I start to forget things—stupid shit, like my PIN number, my mother’s name, how I make a living. But for every light that goes out in my head, for every dollar I pay, a little gray light goes on inside Brandi’s, and we are closer together. I am closer than her hogbitch boyfriend, closer than any man who’s ever had her. I look out of her eyes for hours at a time, now. When she’s sky-high, I can make her hands do things, and my control is growing.
I am building up a tolerance. It takes more every time to black me out, more to get me inside her. I can control her body better than my own, but I worry that they will cut me off for good, or that my money will run out. But I keep going. What we have is something special. She is almost paid for.
On the highest, holiest night in Tenochtitlan, it was unseemly for the people to be out in the streets celebrating, and the jaguar-priests feared that so much joy could only arouse the wrath of the god they honored.
At the head of the procession, flanked by his eight companions and four warriors, his four concubines and a horde of cheering spectators, the ixiptla of Tezcatlipoca capered and piped skirling plumes of languidly ecstatic song down the avenues and alleys of the imperial capital. Despite his obvious exhaustion, his suit of feathers and bells jingled a merry rhythm for the crowd to clap in time, and Ahuac, the high priest of the Smoking Mirror, noted with bored horror how they dared to look directly upon him, and hid their faces only when Ahuac marched past on the bed of crushed flower petals in the ixiptla’s wake.
Chosen from the prisoners taken in flowery combat with one of the neighboring cities, the ixiptla became the living vessel of Tezcatlipoca for a year. Showered with comforts such as the lords themselves could only covet, and bearing at the end of his reign the quetzal-plumed crown of the king himself, he paraded through the streets each night to remind the Mexica by whose grace they lived and prospered.
The ixiptla was a figure of dreadful authority, the god incarnate, and never so much as when he raged at his captors, cursed the Mexica, pleaded for his life or tried to escape. Tezcatlipoca was the arch-sorcerer, the Great Night who wrought the doom of Tula when the Toltecs denied him human flesh. In his palm danced the warrior god Huitzilopochtli, who drove the Mexica from nomadic poverty to lordship over an empire uniting the shattered Seven Tribes of Aztlan. But he was also the Smoking Mirror, god of deceit and contradiction, and lived to sow disaster among the gifts he brought, to remind the people that the world was unjust.
For his part, Ahuac was most displeased with this year’s ixiptla, and began to doubt the value of the entire ritual. This avatar of the god, a lewdly handsome captain from Tlacopan, confounded them. In battle, he had split thirty skulls before he was captured, yet under the raiment of Tezcatlipoca, he had become meek and mad as a village shaman. He was never seen to eat, yet he gave gifts of food from his robes, stolen from the lords’ banquets, for the poor. He blessed beggars and children, and gave them tiny toy jaguars carved from the walls of his luxuriant cell.
The people flocked to him tonight, and sang blasphemous songs begging for him to be spared, or at least shared out amongst the mob, and Ahuac waved the soldiers closer for fear they might lose their minds and take him.
He still harbored the hope that this year’s incarnation might grant him that moment of essential communion with the Smoking Mirror, and a momentary glimpse of the future, which the king so desperately craved and feared. But after months of fasting and bleeding and mutilating himself, of maguey thorns in his tongue and penis until he could taste
Like a moth with its antennae singed off, I blunder through the cavernous, lightless hole where the rest of my life used to be. I start to forget things—stupid shit, like my PIN number, my mother’s name, how I make a living. But for every light that goes out in my head, for every dollar I pay, a little gray light goes on inside Brandi’s, and we are closer together. I am closer than her hogbitch boyfriend, closer than any man who’s ever had her. I look out of her eyes for hours at a time, now. When she’s sky-high, I can make her hands do things, and my control is growing.
I am building up a tolerance. It takes more every time to black me out, more to get me inside her. I can control her body better than my own, but I worry that they will cut me off for good, or that my money will run out. But I keep going. What we have is something special. She is almost paid for.
On the highest, holiest night in Tenochtitlan, it was unseemly for the people to be out in the streets celebrating, and the jaguar-priests feared that so much joy could only arouse the wrath of the god they honored.
At the head of the procession, flanked by his eight companions and four warriors, his four concubines and a horde of cheering spectators, the ixiptla of Tezcatlipoca capered and piped skirling plumes of languidly ecstatic song down the avenues and alleys of the imperial capital. Despite his obvious exhaustion, his suit of feathers and bells jingled a merry rhythm for the crowd to clap in time, and Ahuac, the high priest of the Smoking Mirror, noted with bored horror how they dared to look directly upon him, and hid their faces only when Ahuac marched past on the bed of crushed flower petals in the ixiptla’s wake.
Chosen from the prisoners taken in flowery combat with one of the neighboring cities, the ixiptla became the living vessel of Tezcatlipoca for a year. Showered with comforts such as the lords themselves could only covet, and bearing at the end of his reign the quetzal-plumed crown of the king himself, he paraded through the streets each night to remind the Mexica by whose grace they lived and prospered.
The ixiptla was a figure of dreadful authority, the god incarnate, and never so much as when he raged at his captors, cursed the Mexica, pleaded for his life or tried to escape. Tezcatlipoca was the arch-sorcerer, the Great Night who wrought the doom of Tula when the Toltecs denied him human flesh. In his palm danced the warrior god Huitzilopochtli, who drove the Mexica from nomadic poverty to lordship over an empire uniting the shattered Seven Tribes of Aztlan. But he was also the Smoking Mirror, god of deceit and contradiction, and lived to sow disaster among the gifts he brought, to remind the people that the world was unjust.
For his part, Ahuac was most displeased with this year’s ixiptla, and began to doubt the value of the entire ritual. This avatar of the god, a lewdly handsome captain from Tlacopan, confounded them. In battle, he had split thirty skulls before he was captured, yet under the raiment of Tezcatlipoca, he had become meek and mad as a village shaman. He was never seen to eat, yet he gave gifts of food from his robes, stolen from the lords’ banquets, for the poor. He blessed beggars and children, and gave them tiny toy jaguars carved from the walls of his luxuriant cell.
The people flocked to him tonight, and sang blasphemous songs begging for him to be spared, or at least shared out amongst the mob, and Ahuac waved the soldiers closer for fear they might lose their minds and take him.
He still harbored the hope that this year’s incarnation might grant him that moment of essential communion with the Smoking Mirror, and a momentary glimpse of the future, which the king so desperately craved and feared. But after months of fasting and bleeding and mutilating himself, of maguey thorns in his tongue and penis until he could taste
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