And then the giant silver balloon arrived with two foreigners bearing the greatest gift he had ever received. A bucket full of coins! And not just any bucket—this bucket was bottomless! As soon as it was empty, all one need do was look away, and when one looked again, the bucket held however many coins as there were souls present. His latest ironsmith quickly got to work, and whenever the coin supply was depleted, the king threw a party in the Temple of the Jaguar, until the bucket filled itself once again, and then he threw everyone out.

The king’s ironsmith was a large boy who had the misfortune to die while wearing a blue luchador mask—a wrestling disguise that covered his whole head, leaving him looking somewhat like an executioner. No one knew what he looked like under the lucha libre mask, and no one ever would. The blue luchador worked tirelessly melting down the coins, with gloves on his hands to protect him from the coins’ magic. Then, as the metal cooled, he pounded them flat into thin skins that were then applied to the surface of the statue and shaped by hammer into a perfect likeness of the king.

“Add more muscle,” he would tell the luchador, for he had long since unremembered how scrawny he had once been. “The gods will be pleased,” he would often say, for a Mayan king was a reflection of the gods, so the more glory that he heaped upon himself the greater the joy of the gods—or so he reasoned. Overseeing this project was so important, he gave his vizier control over the kingdom—everything but allowing him to sit on the throne—primarily because the throne had been moved in front of the forge to face the statue. The vizier—a sort of mystical spiritual advisor—was more than happy to run the kingdom.

As the statue neared completion, the more obsessed with it the king became. He had unremembered that the statue was a worthless tribute to his own arrogance . . . and by the power of his own unremembrance, he turned something worthless into the single most important object in the world.

Upon arriving, Jix, Mikey, and Nick were brought directly to the forge. Had the vizier been able to intercept them, things might have gone differently, because he had a tendency to make visitors disappear before ever reaching the king—but the vizier was with the king at the time, so couldn’t prevent His Excellency from seeing them.

The vizier, however, behaved very oddly today. The moment the new arrivals were brought into the forge, the vizier hurried behind the statue to hide. The king might have wondered why, if he weren’t so absorbed in watching the metal-molding luchador build his glorious likeness.