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PROLOGUE

Cayo District, New Spain, 1632

Friar Vincente Salaverthad 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.

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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.