Before leaving Seattle, I had scanned some anthropology on the public databases, reading up on the ways the ancient Aztecs killed their sacrificial victims. They cut out their hearts and tossed them down pyramids by the thousands, tied them to altars and made them fight with useless, feather-tipped weapons against warriors armed with deadly obsidian blades, or tied them to an X-shaped framework and shot them full of arrows. The latter, which seemed to have been the source of the blood spirit that attacked us in the pulquería, was reminiscent of the ceremony I’d seen Vargas perform on the trid documentary. The arrows caused the captive to "rain" blood upon the earth, nourishing it and guaranteeing its fertility. It smacked of Vargas’ god, Xipe Totec.