Empire of Shadows (Raiders of the Arcana #1)

PROLOGUE

Cayo District, New Spain, 1632

Friar Vincente Salavert had never imagined that he would await holy martyrdom while covered in hives.

For weeks now, he had been imprisoned in a hole in the ground. It was a relatively comfortable hole, as holes went. His captors had lowered down woven blankets and a rough mattress stuffed with dried palm fronds, dropping them through the ragged gap thirty feet overhead. There was even a convenient crack in the stone floor through which Salavert could take care of the more humiliating necessities.

The mosquitoes still managed to find him.

It was all rather in keeping with the theme of the last six years of Salavert’s life—a saga of dreams, itching, and abysmal disappointment.

Six years ago, Salavert crossed the sea to the New World alight with visions of sainthood. What other fate could possibly await a man who had committed his body and soul to the salvation of a continent yet ignorant of Christ’s grace?

The reality of his situation became clear to him shortly after he arrived in the festering, fly-infested mission of San Pedro Flores.

Some of the local people had received the blessing of being relocated from their wretched villages to the mission’s settlement, a move that brought them from ignorance into the light of the Holy Roman Church. Yet as soon as they were done mouthing the proper responses to the Latin liturgy, they returned to their cabins to set out flowers and fruit for strangely-named saints whom Salavert knew no pope would ever recognize.

The villagers who didn’t trudge along to services simply ran away, or engaged in outright revolt—or they died as smallpox ravaged through the community, forcing the mission’s hired mercenaries to go out and round up a new batch of converts.

None of this boded well for Salavert’s heavenly prospects. He had dreamed of doing great things in the name of God—the sort of things that might eventually see him rewarded with a nice, cushy cathedral post or maybe even a move to the Vatican. But one did not get to the Vatican by way of mass graves and followers who ran away from you.

Then Salavert heard the whispers of a great city hidden in the unexplored vastness of the mountains to the west—rumors of a gleaming metropolis where even the poor laborers drank from jeweled goblets and the kings slept in rooms paved with gold.

No man Salavert spoke with had seen this legendary place for themselves. The stories came in tantalizing hints and fragments… but it was enough to resurrect a tiny seed of hope from the rot of Salavert’s dying ambitions.

If he could gain the ear of a true king, Salavert had no doubt that he could bring the great man into the grace of the church. And where a king went, surely his subjects would be compelled to follow. Salavert could be single handedly responsible for converting an entire nation.

Surely this was the great destiny that he had known awaited him since he was first called to the service of his faith.

Salavert pleaded with his abbot until at last he was granted permission to investigate the rumors of the hidden city. Accompanied by one of his brothers in Christ, he headed into the wilderness alongside two dozen of their new local converts, who had been assigned to carry the essential food and supplies.

Half of the converts escaped as soon as they left the mission.

Salavert trekked northwest with the others through crocodile-infested swamps and snake-riddled wasteland. Halfway through the second week, the food ran out. The converts harvested strange plants and killed animals that Salavert felt certain were forbidden in Leviticus. He stoutly refused to sully himself by eating them… at least, until he got a bit hungrier.

At last they reached a range of high, dark mountains where no Christian foot had ever stepped. What lay within those unknown peaks was a mystery even the wildest men could not illuminate.

Salavert plunged into that wilderness, trusting God to lead him to his destiny.

God was determined to test him. Salavert and his brothers remained lost for weeks in a verdant hell, subsisting on fruits that made his skin break out in a rash, and insects—which were surprisingly palatable.

Eventually, he knew he must find civilization or die… and at last, his prayers were answered. Like a dream glimpsed through a haze of desperation, the clouds before him parted, and the light of heaven gilded the secret Salavert had been seeking.

The city was even more magnificent than the rumors had promised. Truly, there was no place on earth so near to paradise… or to hell.

The people of the gilded kingdom took Brother Francesco first, restraining his arms and holding a bowl of smoldering herbs under his nose. His eyes rolled up in his head as he went limp in their arms. A band of painted acolytes dragged him up the massive steps of their gleaming pyramid and disappeared inside the idolatrous temple at its summit.

Francesco did not emerge again.

Three days later, Salavert was forced, stumbling, toward a neat row of rectangular pyres on the outskirts of the city. He feared he would be compelled onto one of them to meet his death in flames—and then realized that the pyres were already full. The pitch-soaked stacks of kindling held the bodies of several of his converts. The bodies bore no sign of violence, but Salavert knew without doubt that their deaths had not been natural. They had been murdered by some foul means for their failure to recant, or as a sacrifice to the demon gods of this place.

The people of the city gathered around the pyres, watching with a solemn stillness Salavert might almost have mistaken for grief.

As one of their demon priests set his torch to the wood, Salavert realized with a start that several of the corpses were marked with raw, red lesions.

He knew the significance of those signs all too well. The oozing pustules were a clear indication of the smallpox pestilence.

Flames whirled up to consume the bodies—but it was too late. The disease had already been unleashed. It would sweep across this place like a wind. Salavert had seen how it ravaged the villages near the mission of San Pedro de Flores, leaving them empty of everything but ghosts and flies.

He realized that he had indeed been called to this unholy place by God—but the instrument of redemption that he had been chosen to deliver was not prayer.

It was death.

Weeks passed, and the regular deliveries of food and water Salavert had enjoyed in his prison became more sporadic. He took to shouting through the ragged opening overhead about the deplorable conditions in which he was being held.

No one answered.

At last, he resigned himself to the truth. It was not the red robes of a cardinal or a choice post at the Vatican that God had chosen for him. Salavert had been destined for martyrdom.

He strove to await his glorious death with grace and equanimity—at least when he wasn’t frantically scratching himself and cursing at the ever-present bugs.

Finally, a rope unfurled from above, slapping down to the stones beside him. Salavert woke from his doze with a jerk of surprise, and was hauled back to the surface.

The men who fetched him were weak with fever and covered with sores. As they marched him to the center of the city, Salavert found that the paradise he had seen on his arrival had been transformed into a nightmare.

Black clouds rose from burning fields. Bodies were piled in fly-haunted masses. More of them lay where they had fallen along the verges of the great plaza. The air was dense with smoke and the stench of rot.

His captors dragged him to the tiered pyramid that loomed like a pale ghost through the haze. Salavert staggered up each massive step, half-carried by the guards until they reached the pinnacle.

Someone waited for him there—a slight figure made larger by the elaborate feather headdress and jade breastplate of a priest.

But this was no priest. It was a woman of perhaps thirty with umber-hued skin and fiery golden eyes. The beauty of her face was marred by an unseemly old scar on her cheek, a jagged lightning bolt of puckered skin that any self-respecting lady back in Spain would have kept hidden under a veil.

Around her neck hung a medallion of dark stone. Salavert had last seen the ornament on the chest of the most prominent man who had watched over the slaughter of his converts. It was a symbol of rank he was sure this mere woman would never have attained if not for the plague.

With horror, Salavert wondered whether martyrdom at the hand of a female would even count in the eyes of God.

The priestess made an authoritative gesture, and the two guards pulled a dark hood over Salavert’s head. The cloth stank of another man’s fear as it enclosed him in darkness.

He stumbled blindly along an obscure, tortuous path of rough stones and low, tight turns. The air around him grew cool.

At long last, the bag was pulled from his head. To his profound surprise, Salavert found himself inside a massive cave filled with soaring pillars and graceful veils of stone. It looked like a cathedral formed by the hand of God from the very earth itself. The vast space whispered with the soft hush of the glittering water that ran across the floor to a deep pool at the far end of the cavern.

At the center of the vast space lay a flat, black disk, smooth and clear enough to reflect phantom glimmers of the nearby torches.

It was a mirror—a great mirror made of stone. The dark perfection of its surface in the still, haunted atmosphere of the cavern transfixed him.

As the guards pushed Salavert closer, he was haunted by the unexpected sense that something murmured to him through the soft crackle of the flames and the gentle susurration of the water.

It sang of dreams—and of glory.

The priestess took a black obsidian dagger from the sheath at her belt.

The spell over Salavert broke in a fresh, desperate pulse of fear. His scream echoed off the delicate frills of stone, but the guards held him fast, dragging him to the edge of the glass as the priestess began her incantation.

The melodic tones of her profane liturgy melded with the fading echo of his terror, and the uncannily resonant walls of the cave transformed her worship and his fear into a symphony.

Salavert began to recite the last contrition, grasping frantically for some semblance of control. He would not achieve sainthood while shrieking like a maniac. As a row of insect bites on his back took up itching again, he determined that he would meet his end with dignity.

The priestess drew the blade across the skin of her palm. She whispered a few phrases laced with grief and desperation, then knelt at the edge of the mirror and pressed her bleeding hand to the surface.

Smoke welled up from between her fingers. The priestess leaned into it, breathing deeply. Her eyes glazed over.

The air around Salavert grew colder as he realized that something was at work in that unholy cathedral—something old and powerful.

Something that had nothing at all to do with God.

With her eyes still unfocused, the woman extended her free hand, uttering a single word of command. Salavert bit back another yelp as the guards forced him to his knees. He closed his eyes, preparing for the inevitable blow.

Instead, the woman grasped the neck of his robe. With shocking strength, she pulled his face into the column of smoke that rose from the place where her blood met the mirror’s surface.

With a gasp, Salavert inhaled… and the cave around him vanished.

Vincente Salavert stood in the soaring nave of the cathedral at the heart of his native Valencia—a rich and glorious monument to the might of God.

He wore the robes of a bishop. They looked very fetching on him, as he’d always known they would.

The pews were deserted. Candles flickered along the aisle, but all the reverent activity that Salavert should be nobly overseeing—the murmured prayers and quiet footsteps—was gone.

Only silence remained… silence, and a woman.

The barbarian priestess with the unsightly scar on her face stood at the altar, holding the cathedral’s prize—the Santo Cáliz, a chalice of finely wrought gold and blood-red agate believed by many to be the Holy Grail itself. It fit her small brown hands as though it had been made for them.

Her heathen trappings had been replaced by white robes. She looked as sad and solemn as the Holy Virgin.

“What is this witchcraft?” Salavert cried, mustering an admirable tone of holy outrage as he pointed a finger at where she stood.

The fiendish woman ignored him as she held the chalice to her breast.

“I do not know what I will see,” the woman said.

Her words had the aura of a confession. They met Salavert’s ears in the warm tones of his native Valencian, yet other languages with which Salavert was far less comfortable seemed to weave within and between.

“I am torn by too many desires. I want… conquest.” Her gold-flecked eyes flashed to Salavert. The cold, fierce rage in them made his bowels go over a bit shaky. “I want to raise the dead,” she continued, and her expression shifted to one of fresh and terrible grief.

“Those are unholy desires,” Salavert pronounced, mustering a little spurt of holy authority.

“They are,” the woman softly agreed.

She looked down at the holy chalice in her hands.

“We have been like gods,” she said. “But we bought our power with blood… and death.”

The cathedral around Salavert shivered—and then changed. The space grew immense. Pews stretched into a dim and terrible distance.

All of them were full. The seats were packed with row upon row of seated corpses, their skin blackened with death. Unnatural red mouths opened over hearts and across throats.

The horror of it rooted Salavert where he stood—and then the woman was there, her eyes blazing as she glared up at him from a breath away.

“You would give it more,” she declared fiercely. “You and those who rule you. You who already tear the world apart for what you want.”

The priestess hissed the word like a curse. Salavert felt the sting of it like a whip against his skin and flinched back from her.

“I have seen you,” she said coldly. “I saw you long before you came here. I know exactly what you are.”

She closed her eyes and stepped back. The cathedral returned to a familiar space of candlelit shrines and a soaring nave that would have framed Salavert’s sermons very nicely.

“We bought it all with blood,” the woman repeated softly.

She raised her eyes to him with a look of desperation. The look shifted, hardening into determination, and Salavert was overcome by a sense of terrible anticipation.

“W-What are you going to do?” he stammered.

The priestess turned to face the altar where the chalice of Christ glimmered in red glory.

“I will choose,” she declared.

The words echoed through the emptiness of the cathedral like the tolling of a bell.

She dropped to her knees, pressing her small hands to the stones of the floor. Salavert felt the tremor of it through his shoes. Gold flaked from his vestments, shivering to the ground.

“I want to end this,” the woman vowed.

Her voice broke against the force of her words.

An answer rasped through the hollow space around them. It smelled of dry earth and bones—of incense and the green of growing things. A strange wind stirred the folds of Salavert’s robes, chasing uncanny chills up his skin.

The wind passed, and the cathedral was deserted once more.

The woman let out a short, hard laugh like the croak of a carrion bird.

“So that is to be the way of it,” she said.

It seemed to Salavert that he could see flames burning behind her eyes.

“Wake up,” she ordered.

He came to himself choking as he lay at the edge of the devilish mirror. Beside him, the priestess pushed herself upright with shaking arms as the two guards watched from a distance in stoic silence.

She climbed painfully to her feet and gave a sharp command in her idolatrous language. The two men responded with a shocked exclamation, clearly doubting the evidence of their own ears—but the priestess’s look left no room for debate.

The guards grabbed Salavert by his tattered cassock and yanked him away from the mirror.

Clearly they were moving him somewhere. Perhaps they would bring him to a more prestigious place for his martyrdom.

He hoped that was the case. If his death took place in this devil-haunted underworld, Salavert found himself terribly afraid that God might fail to notice it.

Salavert’s captors shoved him forward. He staggered to keep upright. The men marched him up a close, winding staircase to a dim chamber carved with images of pagan idolatry. Glancing through its narrow windows, Salavert realized that he stood inside the temple at the top of the city’s massive pyramid.

The priestess was the last to emerge. As she straightened, she turned to where Salavert waited between the two guards.

She drew her black knife.

Salavert swallowed another undignified shriek at his impending demise—but once again, the woman’s blade moved to her own body rather than his. She severed a leather thong at her throat and caught the weight of the black medallion in her hand.

Grabbing his wrist, the priestess forced the cursed thing into his palm.

Salavert gaped down at it. A demon grinned back at him from the medallion’s carved black surface. The stone felt cool against his palm—uncannily so, given that it had just been worn against a woman’s skin.

He knew that he should toss it aside. He was a man of God. He should not suffer such a wicked object to contaminate his holy person.

But Salavert did not toss it aside. Instead, his fingers curled over the stone as though of their own accord.

They wanted to hold it. They wanted to keep it close.

The priestess watched his fingers clench around the medallion. As she did, the great effort that had been bearing her up suddenly gave way. She looked younger and more vulnerable than she had before. Sorrow and exhaustion darkened her eyes.

She spoke a single word. Though he did not know the tongue, Salavert found himself entirely certain of its meaning.

Go.

He offered no resistance as the guards hauled him toward the doorway that would lead them out of the temple. Only as he was about to pass from that heathenish space did he look back.

Stones rasped together as the entrance to the passage slid shut and sealed with a thud. Kneeling on the ground where the opening had been, the priestess pushed a small, square block back into place against the wall.

As Salavert watched, she lifted the knife over her head—then plunged it deep into her own chest. She slumped back against the wall, her blood seeping out across the stones.

With nothing but smoke and silence at his back, Friar Vincente Salavert hitched up his tattered robes and ran.