Alexander C. Irvine Read Free Page A

the alley before he had reounted the wagon.
     
    The girl wriggled in Riley Steen’s grasp again. He shifted her Into the crook of his arm and climbed back onto the wagon. She cried out, and he fished a plug of leaves from his pocket and worked itinto her cheek before flicking the reins to move back out onto Broadway. The drug, together with the wagon’s creak, seemed to soothe her a bit, and he caught himself rocking her as he turned south. Don’t get sentimental, Riley, he told himself. You know how this ends. You’ve been waiting nearly thirty years to have her.
    Steen looked to his left, in the direction of Richmond Hill: General Washington’s quarters during the Revolution, John Adams’s home when New York had been the nation’s capital, and later home of Aaron Burr. The Richmond Hill mansion had been the site of the first meeting between Burr and General James Wilkinson, governor of the Louisiana Territory and consul to Spain who had first hinted to Burr that his political ambitions did not have to end with the killing of Alexander Hamilton. The Florida question might lead to war with Spain, Wilkinson said. In the event of such a war, a certain kind of man might be able to lead an army into Mexico, and once there, might be able to keep it. Might, indeed, be able to claim everything between the Rockies and the Alleghenies, the Isthmus of Darien and the Ohio River. Was Burr that sort of man?
    Burr thought he was, and he had in fact raised support from such luminaries as Andrew Jackson to equip his nonexistent army. On several trips through the West and south to New Orleans, Burr incited idle young men with talk of oppressed peasants and border incursions. Merchants built him boats and bought him guns. In the fall of 1806, he actually embarked on the enterprise, gathering an army of roughly one thousand men on an island in the Ohio River belonging to one Harman Blennerhassett.
    Blennerhassett had money, and revolutionary fervor—he’d once been involved in Irish terrorism before fleeing to the United States under suspicion of an incestuous marriage. He also had an interest in the sciences, particularly those of an occult flavor, and in the history of Mexico Blennerhassett had discovered the Holy Grail of both his learning and his ambition. “The Aztecs,” he said, “were once the most powerful people on this earth. Now they are forgotten, but the power they wielded may yet be ours.”
    With those words, Blennerhassett had sent the young Riley Steen to Mexico. Steen had spent a full year there, absorbing what lore he could and crating artifacts for shipping to Blennerhassett. At some point during that year, Steen had discovered he had a minor talent for magic, and when he returned to Blennerhassett’s island in August of 1806, he held more power over the Burr Conspiracy than either Burr or Blennerhassett knew.
    Burr was visiting when Steen returned, and the three of them gathered in Blennerhassett’s magnificent library on the mansion’s upper floor. “So at last it begins,” said Blennerhassett, and Burr nodded. “We go south in December,” he said. “The men will gather and provision here before setting out for New Orleans.”
    “And if you have not discovered rhe chacmool by then,” Blen-Berhassett asked nervously, “then what?”
    “Then we go ahead,” Burr snapped. “I have read the codices just as you have, Harman. April is the critical month. We must be prepared by then. But this is August, and I am certain that the chacmool lies buried somewhere in Kentucky. I will find it.”
    “Steen here has something that might help,” Blennerhassett said, and Riley Steen uncovered an obsidian bowl in the middle of Blennerhassett’s desk. It was nearly brimful of mercury. Blennerhassett gestured to Burr. “Look inside.”
    “I should think your study would be a better place for this, Harman.” Blennerhassett’s study, at the end of a long, curving hall leading away from the main house, contained a