It was an exhausting climb. The steps were narrow, and the risers high, and when the platform that crowned the height opened at last before them she was dizzied. Clouds piled into stormy risers to the east. She thought she heard the growl of thunder, but it faded. The Impatient One, with a frown and a lift of the elbow, waited for her to begin the ritual.

First, the circuit of the platform, paced west to north to east to south. She wept to see the city laid whole around her, so long desired and now fulfilled. On the western face of the pyramid the lower stairs had crumbled away into a dangerous slope of loose shards and the weathered, broken remains of what once were stairs. It was possible to actually see the ragged joining where new met old, but it was disorienting. She felt she might fall and fall, tumbling down the slope into the forgotten past now yanked unexpectedly into line with the present.

Farther down, at the northwestern corner along the base, lay a field of impressive rubble jamming what had once been the sacred entrance to the Heart-of-the-Universe, the cavern beneath the temple.

She licked away a tear from the corner of her mouth as she returned from her circuit and walked to the center. She halted beside the blood stone and removed from the hem of the feather cloak a pair of sap cactus spines. One she handed to Kansi-a-lari.

“Will you cease work on the rockfall?” she asked the other woman. “If we could unearth the entrance to the Heart-of-the-Universe …”

The Impatient One wiped sweat from the back of her neck. “Then what? Will the gods blast our enemies? Will the earth open up and swallow them? Will we gain the ability to see what they are doing without them knowing, or to move faster than they can move themselves between their weaving crowns?”

“Respect the gods,” said Feather Cloak, shocked at such talk even from The Impatient One. “We have survived, and suffered. Let us seek peace, not confrontation.”

‘As you did, with the blood knives?” mocked the Impatient One.

“Do you think they are your allies? Do you think you can control them?”

The Impatient One smiled cruelly. “Blood will sate them.”

She stuck out her tongue and held its tip with thumb and two fingers. Raising the spine, she touched its pointed end to the pink flesh.

Feather Cloak sighed. “With this blood,” she said, “I let authority pass from my hand into the hand of the one who is chosen.”

She settled down crosslegged on the blood stone, leaning over the shallow basin that marked its center. She held her own tongue and pierced it smoothly. The pain flashed like fire, and it throbbed, but sharp red blood dropped into the basin made by the blood stone.

Kansi-a-lari did the same. Where blood melded and mixed, it smoked, bubbling for the space of one breath before it dissipated into the air with a scent so acrid that both sneezed.