DEDICATION
For Healy, I guess. Whatever.
CONTENTS
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Epilogue
About the Author
Also by Adam Mansbach
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
CHAPTER 1
Izel Notchi Icnoyotl stood atop the sweep of glimmering quartz stairs that fronted the great golden temple of Tezcatlipoca and gazed down at a thousand of the empire’s most prosperous souls.
He could get used to this.
He would get used to this.
The guests were warriors and politicians, merchants and traders—all of them gathered to witness the minting of a new dynasty, to celebrate a consolidation of wealth and power that foretold the lessening of their own prospects and promised to nudge them further from the innermost circles of influence.
But to not be present would be even worse.
Izel breathed in their discomfort. It was intoxicating. The sun blazed overhead, fiery and huge, as if the celestial body itself sought a closer view of the union.
And why not? The prize of an empire was about to be bestowed upon its favorite son, in a perfect wedding of beauty and power, flesh and spirit.
His oldest sister, and his oldest friend.
New money, and ancient power.
It was a day for which Izel’s family had waited decades—though waited was a euphemism, a nicety; a truer word would have been plotted, or strategized.
Murdered would not have been inaccurate, either.
But all that would fade away now, the history rewritten by the winners. And besides, the machinations might have been unsavory, but they sullied neither the bride nor the groom; that young radiant pair was oblivious to the low-toned musings and raised-eyebrow speculations of their fathers. Neither was ignorant of politics—on the contrary, Izel’s sister was his father’s right hand in matters of business, and Cualli had been raised from birth to wield the full power of the Line of Priests—but their relationship’s prehistory, its convenience, did not concern them.
Cualli loved Chacanza with a fierceness so pronounced it was like a force of nature, and he had for as long as Izel could remember. Sometimes he marveled at the way Cualli’s will operated on the world, the force of it so intense that you could almost see mind and matter bend in accordance with the holy man’s desires.
Or perhaps Izel had it backward, and it was Cualli’s love for Chacanza that had shaped him. Perhaps through his devotion, the priest had grown into worthiness, become the very man she wanted.
It was impossible to say which of them was the sunflower and which the sun, and when it came down to it, Izel didn’t care.
His victory had already been secured.
Cualli had made him an initiate, ushered Izel and his sons and theirs into the House of Priests. It would not have happened if Cualli had not been negotiating for Chacanza’s hand, but in many ways the bond superseded marriage, was stronger, more sacred. And though Izel’s appointment warranted no grand display, it was just as magnificent a coup for the family.
He would never have Cualli’s power, but Izel would always have his ear.
And perhaps, in a few years, his younger sister.
Not bad for the grandson of a provincial spice merchant.
Izel’s dark eyes flicked away from the throng and settled on the couple, arrayed on a raised platform, their jeweled feet at the level of his waist. Normally, a priest would have performed the ceremony, but it was unthinkable to suggest that any man might be closer to the gods than the groom himself, so Cualli played both roles.
Marry himself, as it were.
Chacanza must have felt her brother’s eyes; she turned and treated him to an enormous smile, emerald eyes flashing, and Izel’s heart filled with happiness. She was dazzling, resplendent in a saffron dress, the jewels of her necklace throwing sunlight back at the heavens.
She deserved this.
Cualli’s attention followed his beloved’s, and as she looked away, Izel locked eyes with the priest.
In an instant, the happiness drained from his heart, and a cold, nameless dread descended. The sun might as well have vanished in a puff of smoke.
Something was wrong. Had he not known Cualli so well, Izel never would have seen it. But behind the smile, the healthy glow of his skin, the proud straight back, his friend’s dark eyes were like two bottomless pits. Cualli was somewhere else—somewhere this moment of triumph could not touch.
Where that might be Izel could not fathom and feared to know.
But to serve Tezcatlipoca was to know terror, just as it was to know power.
The terror of power.
The power of terror.
One did not exist without the other.
The serpent ate its tail.
The sun had returned to the world—it resided inside Izel’s chest now, pulsing with unbearable heat. Sweat burst from his pores, and Izel dropped his gaze, unable to bear the depths of Cualli’s eyes a moment longer.
Instead, he found himself staring at his friend’s hands. One was intertwined with his sister’s, their long, elegant fingers perfectly matched just like everything else about them.
The other, Cualli held behind his back, curled like a talon. His nails dug into the soft flesh of his palm, as if the priest hoped to redirect all the violence of the universe inward, visit it upon himself.
Izel startled as Cualli’s clear, resonant baritone boomed over the waiting crowd, reciting the first words of the matrimonial blessing.
Only Izel saw the fat droplet of blood fall from the priest’s hand and splatter into a vivid crimson blotch on the pristine white quartz below.
CHAPTER 2
The laws of the universe were simple, Domingo Valentine thought, as he folded his crisp white shirt into a precise square and placed it carefully atop a low stone table positioned close to the bathtub.
Power—real power, brutal and awesome, the kind most people didn’t know existed and could not have fathomed even if they’d come face-to-face with it—did not simply disappear. It might change shape, abandon one form for another, but it did not cease to be.
None knew this so well as Domingo, for none had stood as close to power. For six years, he had provided Cucuy—the Great One, the Ancient One, the Timeless One—with the only form of sustenance he required. He had watched Cucuy devour the beating hearts of countless virgin girls, the vessel of the gods, and desired nothing more than to remain at the right hand of the master forever.
Domingo stepped out of his trousers and added them to the neat piles of garments. Candlelight grotesqued his shadow, threw an elongated, flickering version of himself across the earthen wall
s.
A dim memory, dormant for years, flitted through his brain, like a piece of paper animated by a sudden breeze. Domingo was seven years old, sitting with his grandfather by the sea. It was a time before time—before the fire and the city, before the brothel in which his mother worked became his home, before his own induction into the business of selling female flesh. And long before he’d been thrown in jail to rot and instead found his true calling, here in the bowels of Ojos Negros Prison, in service to the Timeless One.
Domingo’s abuelo had pointed at the water and whispered into his grandson’s ear. All the water in the world has been here since the beginning of time. And since the beginning of time, not a single drop has been lost. It’s in our bodies, our oceans, our sky. It never stops moving, but it’s always the same. How’s that for magic, mijo?
If water didn’t disappear, then how could power?
Yes, two months ago he had discovered Cucuy’s body, lying in a chamber adjacent to this one in an advanced state of putrefaction, the flesh melting from the bones, the heavy amulets sinking into a murky stew of organs.
This despite the fact that he had been alive no more than a few hours earlier—alive, and making grand plans to abandon his five-hundred-year-old body for another. A pure, still-beating heart imbued with all his power was en route to Texas, where Cucuy’s son Aaron Seth would consume it and be consumed.
At least, that had been the plan.
But Cucuy had not returned. In Seth’s body or any other.
Hence this desperate attempt to communicate.
Domingo removed his underwear, raised his leg over the side of the tub, and paused for a moment, foot poised inches from the surface of the bath.
The candlelight did no justice to the color, made the blood that filled the deep basin appear dull and rusty instead of bright and thick and—well, if not alive, then vital. Brimming with the stuff of life, like some primal stew just waiting for lightning to strike. Domingo could feel the heat rising off it, in the cool damp air; it was exactly the temperature of a living body.
Had to be, or the communion he was attempting would surely fail.
It would probably fail anyway, he told himself, tamping down expectations as he eased his leg beneath the surface, inch by precious inch, acutely aware of the young lives that had been forfeited so that this tub might be filled.
Domingo was no initiate. No priest. Nothing holy flowed through his veins. But desperate times anointed men. Demanded that they become other than they were.
For better, or worse.
As the Great One’s procurer, Domingo had supplied him with far more than a steady flow of young girls. His expertise had expanded with his responsibilities, until he provided all that Cucuy’s vast, unknowable plans required: guns, drugs, men to move them both. As his devotion to his master grew, the outside world faded like an old photograph, withered to the size of a chessboard, with Cucuy looming over all.
Domingo’s eyes and soul had adjusted to the darkness; candles replaced the sun, and the old religion overtook the new. Erased it, like a mistaken calculation scribbled on a scrap of paper.
That part had been easy. Effortless, even. Domingo had always been a creature of logic—and if man had been created in God’s image, as the priests of his youth insisted, then how ridiculous was the lame on the cross, suffering gladly for the sins of his own creation? Or his holy mother, sacred of cunt, a perversion of every elemental truth?
Domingo knew how a mirror worked. If man was a reflection of God, it was a god like the Ancient One—cruel and ruthless, straining against the confines of the body, the strictures of the world. That was an image he could believe he had been made in.
He, and everybody else he’d ever met.
And now, perhaps inevitably, Cucuy had escaped those confines, cast off his mortal coil the way a snake shed skin.
Perhaps Cucuy had never been alive to start with—at least, not in the narrow, mortal sense of the word.
In which case, he certainly could not be dead.
Domingo’s line of reasoning had bent itself into a circle those first days. He’d paced that track endlessly, looking foolishly for an exit.
Finally, he’d shaken himself free of the impulse to understand and turned back to the practical matters at which he excelled, the skill set that had made him indispensable to his master to begin with—and asked himself the only question he might hope to answer.
Where was Cucuy now?
It ran through Domingo’s head on a loop, as he struggled to maintain the illusion of normalcy, hold together the sprawling, fractious empire the Timeless One had left behind. Perhaps his role was simply to hold down the fort, wait for Cucuy to reestablish contact from whatever realm he now inhabited, whatever vessel now contained his multitudes.
Soon, though, Domingo had tired of waiting. It was not his way; he was a doer, a man who made things happen.
So he’d made things happen.
In the library was a book the Terrible One had read and reread ceaselessly, seeming always to glean new knowledge, excavate old memories. Perhaps, Domingo mused, some explanation of what had happened might be found there—or better yet, some method of communication. And so the procurer had extended his long arms, reached into corners of the world that had never before concerned him. But it was all the same.
There was always a price.
Either you paid it, or they did.
He brought in a translator, an esteemed professor of religion and antiquity said to be one of the few who could decipher the language contained within the ancient scrolls. Munoz was his name: a nebbish-looking man, long faced and crooked toothed. The blindfold he’d been forced to don before stepping into the armored car didn’t seem to worry as much as excite him.
But after fifteen minutes in the Ancient One’s cavernous, domed library, carved from the bedrock of the earth, discretion had given way to stronger emotions. The professor’s hands shook as he turned the gold-leafed pages, traced the ornate handwritten script. Sweat beaded on his brow; every few seconds he dabbed it with a handkerchief, lest he sully the volume splayed open on his lap.
This is unbelievable, he had stammered as he looked up wide eyed at Domingo, standing at the room’s threshold with his arms folded across his chest.
Do—do you understand what this means? If this is authentic, it, it—well, it rewrites everything we know about the Aztec Empire.
Munoz jabbed a bony finger at the page, and Domingo felt an unexpected stab of disgust, as this peon’s digit made contact with the sacred, burgundy handwriting.
Right here—right here!—is the story of how the cult of Tezcatlipoca began! The historical community knows almost nothing of this cult. Even its existence has never been proven! And now . . .
Domingo had turned on his heel and stalked off down the corridor. He was a man who hated mistakes, and the instant he realized he had made one, he sought to eradicate all traces of it. It was a compulsion that threatened to trump even his pragmatism, and he knew himself well enough to avoid the temptation to indulge it. Munoz’s passion meant he could never be trusted, never be allowed to leave. The realization set Domingo’s body vibrating, made it sing with the urge to kill.
Where he came from, problems were best handled swiftly, directly, and brutally; to let a resentment fester or an uncertainty unfold was to invite worse trouble tomorrow. That impulse had served him well on the outside. There was even a certain blunt honor in it. But in the Timeless One’s employ, Domingo had begun to learn more artful methods—to look beyond both today and tomorrow, and to find pleasure in subterfuge.
The honor in dishonor.
And so he had stepped into the chamber that served as his office and summoned the guard who’d fetched the professor.
“Sí, jefe?”
Domingo looked the heavyset minion up and down, searching for some sign that he suspected. He did not. None did. Why would he? A man might serve Cucuy for years and never see his face. Most of them prayed not to. Th
ey were used to taking orders from Domingo.
“Tell our friend he’s looking for anything about communication,” he said, voice low and level, forcing himself to keep his eyes buried in the ledger lying open on his desk. “Ancient ways of making contact across long distances. Comprendes?”
“Sí, jefe.”
“If he finds something, he writes it down. When he’s done, he calls you. You take him out of the library and shoot him in the head.”
“Sí, jefe.”
Domingo glanced up and nodded in dismissal. The guard swiped a hand over his bushy mustache, as if patrolling for crumbs, then turned and lumbered away. From his carriage, he might just as well have been on his way to retrieve a lunch order. Domingo appreciated that in these men: they questioned nothing, and they didn’t spook.
Then again, once you’d seen the devil, what else was there to be scared of?
It was a question that seemed particularly poignant now, as Domingo Valentine took a deep breath and sank the rest of the way into the tub, letting the warm viscous liquid fill his ears.
He was no priest, and he was no monster. He had taken no pleasure in the hundreds of deaths he’d arranged. But nor was he a sentimentalist. The butcher did not mourn the cow. He recognized that it gave up its life for a higher cause, and in his own way he honored that.
Just as Domingo honored the girls he had procured on the Great One’s behalf.
And the girls whose blood was the medium that might allow him to reach out now, across the cosmos.
Domingo closed his eyes, and waited.
You must clear your mind, Munoz’s notes had said.
He did his damnedest.
Nothing happened.
He became acutely aware of an itch on his left ankle. He scratched it with his right foot, tried not to disturb the surface of the bath, the profound and unexpected heaviness of the blood against his chest and stomach. But his movement caused a slight ripple, and the taste was in his mouth now, hot and metallic. A slight burn to it, even, perhaps generated by Domingo’s imagination.
He resettled. This ritual, like every other Munoz had revealed before his passing, was only to be undertaken by the Line of Priests. What exactly that meant, Domingo did not know. Except that the line was broken—that much was for sure. And the way he figured, that meant all bets were off, and anything was worth trying.
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