by M. K. Hobson
“Believe me, young man,” the High Priest said with something like relief, “Stanton would never help us.”
“Not willingly, perhaps.” Utisz dropped his voice. “But love can encourage a man to compromise. He is engaged to be wed, the poor fool—”
Doest thou know, tonalpoulque, that the Chinese believe that the liver contains the ethereal spirit? The words rang through Utisz’ head with an odd reverberance that made it seem his skull was carved of brass. And the Egyptians, when someone is greatly beloved of them, say that person has a piece of their liver.
“Then you must be very greatly loved, Mistress,” Heusler said loudly, his voice ringing against the unseen walls, “for the piece you have is so very large.” Heusler hurried the lieutenant toward the pyramid. “She stirs. It is time. Save your plans for her, my boy. Though I warn you, it has been my experience that the most carefully crafted plans of mortal men are no match for the whims of a goddess.”
The pyramid was surmounted by an altar stone, and on the icy block a woman’s body lay beneath a translucent veil of white silk. But she was not dead, Utisz saw; her breath made the thin silk tremble, and he could sense a pulse at the wrist of the slender dark-skinned arm. Utisz stared at the mask that had been placed over the woman’s face. It was a hideous contorted sneer of carved ebony, dominated by curving fangs of amber-smoked ivory. Long braids—sliced from the scalps of long-forgotten victims—mixed with the woman’s own glossy black hair, twining down over her smooth bared breasts, brushing caramel-hued nipples.
“Her vessel waits atop the sacred teocalli,” Heusler said. “Just a local girl from one of the villages, but we do try to find the best. Her Divinity burns through a new one every time she awakens, and if we don’t get her a pretty one she pouts.”
“Very … pretty,” Utisz mumbled, trying to imagine how a goddess might pout.
“Now, if you’ll excuse me, she must be fed.”
The High Priest scaled the steep teocalli, and was puffing hard by the time he reached the altar stone. He removed his coat and then his shirt, revealing plush rolls of white flesh intricately decorated with writhing black tattoos. The inked designs covered him from throat to wrists to belly, vanishing below his belt like dancing snakes.
Lifting his hands, Heusler began to speak in low, resonant tones:
“Rise, ancient powers of blood.”
The words shuddered off the walls of glass, making the Exunge in its channels vibrate, slicing through the thick smoke like flying knives. Crackling tendrils of chain lightning danced over the surfaces of the room—flashes of brightness, viscid translucent cobwebs of bruise blue and bacterial yellow. The smell of ozone and charred bone layered itself over bitter incense and the reek of bile.
A rising light, cutting through the gloom, caught Utisz’ attention. The Liver, in its pit of Black Exunge, was starting to … glow. It was transforming the slick tarry Exunge around itself into a luminous golden substance—chrysohaeme. The golden blood of the earth, magical power in its rawest form. Utisz could barely breathe for astonishment. This … thing could transform Black Exunge into chrysohaeme? No wonder Blotgate had wanted to ally with a goddess who had such power. And no wonder Caul had wanted to destroy her.
The glow spread outward from the Liver, and the Black Exunge in the channels that outlined the great calendar luminesced as if it had been touched with a torch. The glowing streams flowed toward the teocalli, snaking up the pyramid of skulls to the altar stone. Like sharp golden needles, they pierced the dusky flesh of the Goddess’ vessel.
“Feed, Blade of Obsidian.”
Far beneath the floor, the rocks of the earth churned. The woman’s body on the altar stone spasmed wildly. The covering of white silk fell aside, revealing the woman’s jerking limbs, bound by twining ropes of chrysohaeme—unwitting prey caught in a nest of vipers.
“Awaken, Dread Mistress.”
At the words, the ropes of power jerked together at once, flaring to a supernatural brilliance. Utisz winced, shielding his eyes. When he brought his arm down, the light was gone utterly, replaced by a blackness as dark as the light had been bright.
The Goddess stood before the altar stone, looking down at him.
She was no longer a woman, that much was clear. All the feminine softness of her vessel was gone. She was a pillar of glossy black hardness, her form molded of smooth black glass, her fingers edged like flint-chipped blades. Utisz watched the High Priest carefully lift the ceremonial torque from around his neck and place it over the Goddess’ head, arranging it around her frosty throat. She tenderly stroked one of the golden cages as she glided down the teocalli, vitrine feet barely brushing the skulls.
Utisz’ legs buckled beneath him. He fell to his knees without conscious thought. He could not take his eyes off her.
In a moment she was standing before him, huge and black, her edges indistinct. Waves of bitterest cold swirled around her, but Utisz could not even summon the will to shiver. She ran long sharp fingers through his dark hair, tilting his head up, seizing his gaze with hers. Her eyes were shifting traps, ancient abominations, the screams of a thousand generations of massacred innocents.
Such a tender young man.
Utisz was bare before her. He was nothing before her eyes—eyes that were the march of brutal history, oppression, and apocalypse. The light of torches glowed through her, flickering small as if smothered by her mass. She placed a bladed hand on either side of his head.
You have come to be initiated into our service, the Goddess said. For this, the ward that binds your emotions must be released. She did not need to ask his neologism, for she already knew it; she knew all. She leaned down and softly whispered it in his ear. His brain exploded, emotions surging through him like a hurricane flood—fear, hate, regret, remorse, terror. And at the crest of each wave rode terrible visions—visions of beauty and power:
The earth seen in a smoking mirror, twisted and tortured and transformed. Black slime gushing up from deep cracks in the earth’s crust … every living thing withered, frost-blackened, destroyed … winter-blasted air choked with the screams of the dying …
Itztlacoliuhqui, the Goddess of Obsidian Knives, enthroned atop a pyramid of skulls as high as the moon; rivers of blood cascading from her feet, gory rushing torrents … and at her side, a High Priest in feathers and jade, with a hand-shaped mark over his heart.
The world become ice and blood, as terrible in its beauty as the Goddess herself.
Temamauhti.
The Remaking.
With his last ounce of free will, Utisz lifted his hands to his throat in defense. Blotgate couldn’t have meant this. This went beyond national destiny, beyond human destiny … this was the end of all of that. This was the end of the world. But the Temple attendants had taken his alembic, his only source of magical protection. All he could do was scream as the Goddess’ voice caressed his mind.
Dear child, do not resist us. The fortunes of a little country, a fleeting thought in the infinite dream, do not matter. Our true aim is greater. It will be your honor to help us achieve it.
The Goddess lifted her free hand and held it out as if an invisible maidservant were placing a bracelet around her wrist.
Die for us, child.
The brilliant magic that hummed in the air coalesced around her outstretched hand, becoming a gleaming Obsidian Blade, long and slender. She closed her fingers around it delicately.
Her eyes held his, and Lieutenant Utisz knew that he would die for her. He knew that he would die, and that it had always been his place to die, and that it would be the greatest pleasure he had ever known.
Heusler missed the moment when her blade slashed downward, opening Lieutenant Utisz’ throat at the seventh cervical vertebra. He felt rather disappointed that he had missed that, but waking the Goddess always left him drained. Leaning heavily on the altar stone, it was all he could do to remain standing.
The young officer’s trachea gaped as blood fountained from the two huge
arteries that ran along it. Blood showered the Goddess as she watched the body struggle, then falter, then fall. She was bathed in the lieutenant’s blood, drenched in it; steam from its warmth rose up in clouds from her body. The mask’s ivory fangs were stained red, as if she’d been rooting in the belly of a corpse. She stroked a finger along one of the tusks, then licked it, savoring the taste with great thoughtfulness.
Poor lost orphan, she said, as if replying to some silent supplication. Be joyful. In our service, your blood will have its revenge on the blood that abandoned it.
The Goddess made a small movement with her sharp fingers and, slowly, the lieutenant’s slashed throat began to close. Tiny stitches of magic darted along the lips of the wound, pulling them together. When nothing remained but a white-seamed scar, she lifted a negligent hand.
Arise, newborn. Receive the blessing of your Goddess.
The young man’s body rose from the ground, upright but slack, a puppet on invisible strings. Leaning forward, holding his face in her hands, she pressed icy black lips to his forehead. His eyes flew open. He gulped air deep, gasping like a drowned man pulled from the ocean’s depths. When she released him, he sank to his knees, whimpering and moaning in a mix of terror, heartbreak, and ecstasy.
The Goddess’ kiss had been tender, but even from atop the teocalli, Heusler could see the mark it left—a violent bruise, an oblong mark right between the young lieutenant’s eyes, as if he’d been struck by a hammer.
We have taken your life, and given it back, she said. Do our will faithfully, and you shall be rewarded.
Turning from him, she did not watch as red-robed acolytes swarmed from unseen alcoves to carry the lieutenant away. She moved toward the center of the Calendar Chamber, her cold black feet gliding over the inscribed channels of Black Exunge. She stopped at the railing that surrounded the pit. She stared down longingly at the trembling mound of glossy flesh. Its glow had faded, and once again it swam in bitter, slimy black. Her gilded nails hammered against the silver rail like tiny smiths.
Heusler carefully made his way down from the teocalli to where she stood.
He lowered himself to the ground (an indelicate and undignified maneuver) and stretched his arms out before himself.
“Does he please you, My Divine? He will make a fine servant. The debt he is owed is powerful. In asserting his claim, he will be able to unlock doors that would not open before.”
There was a long silence, in which Heusler furtively watched her for a response. Finally, the Goddess shrugged indifferently. Never once did she take her eyes from the Liver.
He is not who we want, she said softly.
Heusler despised the pathos in her tone. This ancient manifestation of the darkest of powers, the Killing Frost, the Obsidian Blade, feared and adored … mooning over a lost love. For all that she was a goddess, Heusler thought, it was still greatly disappointing that she was nothing more than a female.
He had served her faithfully for more than three hundred years—his life preserved by its proximity to her divine magnificence. But it was impossible to remain so long in the company of a female, even a divine one, without suffering some form of disillusionment. He knew her shameful secret—her sordid feet of clay. It was not for the exaltation of her own magnificence that she pursued the great work of temamauhti; no, it was for the resurrection of one man—one miserable human man! Xiuhunel, the Aztec High Priest who had perfected the blood-soaked magical ritual that allowed the Goddess to manifest herself within a mortal body. Her time upon the earth was always fleeting; her vast power would destroy the fragile vessels she inhabited within a few short hours. But those hours had been enough. He had taught her the pleasures of incarnate existence—killing-frost thawed by the warmth of a living embrace; razor-edges blunted by desire. She had fallen in love with him.
In his idle hours, Heusler sometimes amused himself by trying to conceive of a crime a mortal man could commit that was more monstrous than making a goddess fall in love with him. He had never succeeded.
When Xiuhunel had died upon a Spanish blade during the fall of Tenochtitlán, the savage rites to incarnate the Goddess had ceased, and Itztlacoliuhqui was left to brood and pine in her own incorporeal eternal realm. Why did he not send for her? She did not learn of his death until many years later, when Heusler—then a mercenary Warlock in service to the Spanish crown’s ambitions in the New World—had come across a description of Xiuhunel’s great rite in a war-tattered codex. He had decided to give it a try.
Heusler shuddered at the memory.
She had never quite forgiven him for that first time, when she had woken in a new vessel, only to find that Xiuhunel was gone, lost forever. She had grieved on a divine scale, wreaking her awful vengeance on the city that had once been the capital of the great Aztec Empire. She massacred two thousand Spanish in one magnificent night, their bodies slashed into unrecognizable ribbons of flesh. Soaking the ruins of Tenochtitlán in the blood of usurpers sanctified her great vow—that she and Xiuhunel would be reunited, their bodies whole and undying, even if the entire world had to be torn to shreds to do so.
It frequently astonished the High Priest that something as seemingly simple as the former should require the unthinkable profligacy of the latter.
Love. Such a lot of damn fuss.
But he discarded these thoughts quickly. She could so easily read his mind if she chose. It would not do to annoy her with such impertinence—not after decade upon decade of exacting preparation. Not now, with the final culmination so near. Before the moon was new, the calendar would ripen in its most powerful configuration in fifty-two years. In a year governed by the Jeweled Fowl, the year of greatest sorcerous potency, she would come into her greatest strength on 1-Cuetzpalin—the first of thirteen days that she ruled, the trecena of her ultimate apotheosis.
June 30.
The last day of the month. The last day of the world.
We have heard, Keeper of the Calendar, that humans deem June an auspicious month to wed.
The strange question startled Heusler out of his reverie. His legs and feet had gone all pins-and-needles from kneeling so long, and he suddenly realized just how long her silence had been.
“Indeed, My Divine. By the debased mortal calendar, June is the month for weddings.”
Is what the initiate said true, tonalpoulque?
Heusler wasn’t quite sure what she meant, but he sensed danger in the question.
“He said many things,” he said cautiously.
Is Dreadnought Stanton to be wed?
Heusler wiggled his sleeping toes. So she liked the young lieutenant’s idea, did she? Of course, he could see why she might find it satisfying—on many levels. “There is a girl from California. A Witch. She was at the Grand Symposium.”
Is she pretty?
Heusler frowned. Certainly, he had found the girl toothsome, but he wasn’t about to tell her that.
“How can I answer, My Divine?” he said. “When I am in your presence, your beauty makes it impossible for my weak mortal mind even to conceive the face of another.”
She laughed, a deep chiming sound that started in her throat and expanded as it spread downward, making the earth beneath her feet shudder. One of the smoking braziers toppled with a resounding clang.
Flatterer, she said. You have never even seen our true face.
“I have seen it in my dreams.”
And the Witch’s name, tonalpoulque?
“Emily Edwards,” Heusler said.
CHAPTER ONE
The Message
in the Steam
Wednesday, June 18, 1876
New York City
Emily Edwards sat in her future mother-in-law’s front parlor, sweating in a stiff dress of lilac-colored taffeta and contemplating death.
Could one die from boredom, she wondered? From complete, oppressive, crushing, unmitigated boredom, the likes of which made all other boredom seem like ecstasy’s sweet thrilling embrace? And in such a case, if one ha
ppened to have a life insurance policy, would it pay?
The room was stifling. None of the windows were open, even though it was eighty degrees out and muggy as the inside of a dead badger. The room’s carved mahogany paneling sweated the sharp pungent smell of old lacquer. The wallpaper above it—a profusion of gilded leaves and obsessively wrought peonies in shades of plum and peach—seemed to glisten humidly. A pair of cherubs, frolicking blissfully naked atop a gilt mantel clock, were almost certainly laughing at her.
There were six women in the room, waiting for tea that would be served piping hot. It was herself, Mrs. Stanton, Mrs. Stanton’s three daughters (Euphemia, Ophidia, and Hortense), and Miss Jesczenka. They had decided it would be pleasant to read a selection from Wordsworth. Or rather, Mrs. Stanton had decided that it would be pleasant, and as seemed to be the case in all things pertaining to the precise ordering of Mrs. Stanton’s world, no one had dared contradict her.
This, apparently, was how people amused themselves in New York.
Or, Emily reflected, perhaps the Wordsworth was just a gloss, and all the women were really having fun placing secret mental wagers on who was going to faint first. Indeed, that dubious mental exercise—and her idle musings about life insurance—were the only things keeping Emily upright.
That, and indignation. What kind of freakish constitution did these New York women have, anyway? Mrs. Stanton looked as if mechanically chilled ice water were being piped into her through a special arrangement of plumbing in her red-velvet chair—and the perfect rigidity of her carriage gave Emily a pleasantly unpleasant idea as to how the piping was plumbed. The elegant Miss Jesczenka—Emily’s Institute-assigned chaperone—sat placidly, hands folded in her crisp lap, not a hair out of place, not a trickle of sweat upon her smooth brow.
