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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 bodieswhole 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 happened 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