This is part 4 of a series of posts on the setting of my Aztec fantasy series Obsidian and Blood, as a leadup to the release of Book 1, Servant of the Underworld, published by Angry Robot/HarperCollins (more information here, including excerpts and a book trailer). You can find part 1 (the Valley of Mexico) here, part 2 (the city of Tenochtitlan) here, and part 3 (about the Sacred Precinct and religion) here.

4. Acatl, and death in Mexica religion
My main character in the book is Acatl, High Priest for the Dead, who has the responsibility for investigating magical offences in the capital city of Tenochtitlan.

The word Acatl means “Reed”. It’s shorthand for his actual name, which is his date of birth in the calendar: Chiquacen Acatl, which means “The day Six Reed” [1]. I chose that name back when I was first writing “Obsidian Shards”, the very first story that featured him, for a number of reasons. The first is the association with the god Quetzalcoatl, Ce Acatl Topiltzin (see previous article)–who, among other things, was the patron of priests and of knowledge. The second is the symbolism of the day Six Reed itself: it has associations both with Mictlantecuhtli, the god of death (Acatl’s patron), and with the god of Justice–a fitting set of protectors for a death priest engaged in the investigation of magical crimes. [2]

Acatl’s patron is Mictlantecuhtli, the god of death. His name means “Lord of the Place of Death” (which I’ve shortened to “Lord Death” in the book for ease of reading), and he is one of the gods associated with the end of life. You can see a picture of him below, with the characteristic skeletal look.

The Aztec death system, like its religion, is complex. The basic idea is that there are several destinations for the spirits of the dead. What determines where someone ends up isn’t the respect of a particular morality (as in Christian religion). Instead, the only separating factor is the manner of death.

For those happy few who died in battle, their destination was Ilhuicatl Tonatiuh, the Heaven of the Sun. This included warriors who died on the battlefield, most sacrifice victims, as well as women who have died in childbirth. This last one can seem odd–but for the Mexica, childbirth was a struggle to bring a captive (the baby) into the world, an activity as dangerous as fighting other warriors in an effort to secure prisoners for sacrifice. Once ascended, the men would accompany the sun to its zenith; the women would then take over, from zenith to sunset. After four years, the spirits would come back into the mortal world: the men as butterflies, the women as moths. Below is a statue of a woman who has died in childbirth–transformed into a Cihuateteo, a fearsome female deity.

Another possible destination was Tlalocan, a watery paradise ruled by Tlaloc, the god of rain and storms. Those destined for Tlalocan had died of drowning, lightning strikes, and associated diseases (such as dropsy). There, they would enjoy the bliss of a land where crops bloomed year-long–Tlalocan is very much a peasants’ paradise, as Ilhuicatl Tonatiuh is that of warriors.

The babies who had died while still breastfeeding would go to Omeyocan, the Place of the Duality, where the supreme gods Ometecuhtli and Omecihuatl would keep their spirits until they could be reborn after the end of the current age. In Omeyocan, the babies would suck the sap from a huge tree, as they had sucked milk from their mothers’ breasts. You might wonder what is the significance of breastfeeding: the answer is that it goes back to the link between blood and fertility. Those children are the ones who have never tasted the fruit of the earth–the fruit that have been sprouted thanks to the blood offerings of men. Hence, those babies have no debt either to the earth or the sun, and their spirits exist in a state much like the Christian state of grace.

You’ll notice that this barely covers any people at all. What of all the other spirits? The vast majority of people, those who did not fall into any of the categories outlined above, would go down into Mictlan, the Place of Death, or the underworld. This was a gloomy, cheerless place split over nine levels–from the entrance all the way down to the palace of Mictlantecuhtli and his consort Mictecacihuatl. On each of those levels, the spirit would face a gruelling trial. After four years of tribulation, the spirit reached the last level, where it was finally allowed to dissolve.

I adapted some of Mictlan’s trials into the underworld creatures Acatl deals with. The Wind of Knives, an elusive creature made of obsidian shards, corresponds to level five, where a wind as cutting as broken obsidian would tear the spirits apart. The beasts of shadows, with their taste for human hearts, come from level eight, where the spirit had to present a jade heart in order not have their own devoured by beasts.

Acatl himself takes on functions that pertain to all those places, since he investigates into magical crimes regardless of where the spirits might have gone (though he has access only to those spirits who have entered Mictlan, which can hinder him in his inquiries). I also gave him the more prosaic role of organising funerals, and helping the spirits’ passage into Mictlan. [3] Below is a particular form of funeral: a mummy bundle, which consists of putting the body in a foetal position, wrapping it in layers of clothes, and adding ornaments such as jade stones (the manner of disposing of the body also depended on the manner of death, but I’ll not go into details here).

And that concludes this series of articles about Aztec history–remember, Servant of the Underworld is out today if you want to check out what I did with all this nifty research. (order now–tell your friends–etc. :=) )

[1] The Mesoamerican calendar is a fascinating and complex system. I refer you to The Aztec calendar or Marie Brennan‘s article in Strange Horizons for brief introductions.
[2]In the series, I had to strike a balance between the Mexica fondness for tongue-twisting names, and readability for a Western audience unused to words of more than 4-5 syllables–so a lot of names were chosen for phonetic reasons and not because of any particular meaning.
If you’re curious, the names that do mean something, apart from Acatl and the gods’ names, are Ichtaca (“secret”), Mihmatini (“prudent one”), Palli (“leaf”), Teomitl (“arrow of the gods”), and Tizoc (“chalked leg”]). I’ll put up a character index at some point, promise.
For much the same reason of readability, I also fudged the rules for tacking on the honorific “tzin” at the end of a name (there’s a series of non-intuitive ways to tie together a noun and its “tzin”, but I figured I’d go a little easy on that before my readers went crazy).
[3]I fudged a bit here. There is, in reality, little evidence of a wide religious body associated with funerals. There is some reference to people who burnt bodies on pyres, but they seemed to have been officials rather than priests.

This is part 3 of a series of posts on the setting of my Aztec fantasy series Obsidian and Blood, as a leadup to the release of Book 1, Servant of the Underworld, published by Angry Robot/HarperCollins (more information here, including excerpts and a book trailer). You can find part 1 (the Valley of Mexico) here, part 2 (the city of Tenochtitlan) here, and part 4 (Acatl and death in Mexica religion) here.

Any questions or comments welcome!

3. The Sacred Precinct
Just as the valley of Mexico was the heart of the Empire, so the Sacred Precinct was that of Tenochtitlan. Its function was simple: to serve as the religious and ceremonial centre for the city.

Within the Serpent Wall that delimitated its boundaries, the Sacred Precinct included the major temples of Mexica gods, areas for specific sacrifices, and the houses and schools for priests. Its size was staggering–500m to a side, probably the reason why the Spanish maps of Tenochtitlan give it such a prominent (and distorted) place.

Mexica religion is a complex field, not least because the only information we have about gods came through the Spanish friars, who tended to be biased on such a fundamental subject. There are dozens of Mexica gods, each with several aspects: Tezcatlipoca, the Smoking Mirror, the god of war and fate, is also Yaotl, the Enemy, and Telpochtli, the Male Youth, patron of the education of young warriors. The sum of those aspects are often referred to as “complexes”: though the gods have separate names and aspects, they take their root in the same basic concept.

To understand the Mexica relationship with their gods, it’s once again necessary to go back–this time to the beginning of the current age[1]. When the sun first rose in the sky, it remained motionless, transfixing the land with its deadly rays. The gods, seeing that the sun was hungry, sacrificed themselves and gave him their blood, so that creation might go on. Men are thus macehualli, “born through divine sacrifice”, and, because the (dead) gods can no longer feed the sun with blood, that most sacred of duties falls to mankind.

Sacrifice to the Mexica was not cruelty or mere bloodthirstiness–rather, it was a fundamental act, continuously keeping the end of the world at bay. It was a ritual, and even in the aspects that horrify us the most, the point wasn’t to cause pain for pain’s sake: the Mexica did not practise torture, and were horrified when the Spanish had such casual recourse to it. Rather, a sacrifice victim became a substitute/incarnation for the god, recreating the fundamental sacrifice the gods had made at the beginning of time–giving their blood for the sun and the continuation of the current age.

Of all the gods of the pantheon, the two most important ones had place of pride in the Sacred Precinct: the largest building there was the Great Temple (Templo Mayor), a twin pyramid dedicated to Tlaloc, the god of rain and storms, and to Huitzilpochtli, the tribal god of the Mexica. Tlaloc, characterised by his google-eyes and by the fangs protruding from his mouth, was an old divinity (traces of him are found as far back as Teotihuacan, a millenium before the Mexica). Huitzilpochtli, a youthful man with a blue-green hummingbird headdress and a black mask around his eyes, was a newer god, elevated to supreme rank and twinned with Tonatiuth, the Fifth Sun, the provider of light and upholder of the world’s order. He was a god of war to whom prisoners were sacrificed; celebrated during numerous festivals. Below are images of both, drawn from various Mexica codices.

Two other gods also had large temples: the first was Tezcatlipoca, the Smoking Mirror, god of war, fate and rulership. It was before Tezcatlipoca that a new Emperor would meditate and do penance before being crowned. Tezcatlipoca was a capricious god, as likely to curse as to help–another of his associations was with sorcerers, the dark ones who used potions and body-parts to poison men, rob houses and despoil innocent people.

The second, and the last one I’ll mention in this very short introduction, is Quetzalcoatl, the Feathered Serpent. Under the name Ce Acatl Tolpitzin, he had been the ruler of the legendary Toltec city Tulla–his reign a golden age with no sicknesses, famines or human sacrifices. His temple in the Sacred Precinct honoured him as Ehecatl, the god of wind: it was a round tower without any asperities, so that it would not break the wind’s course as it sped through Tenochtitlan.

Among the other curiosities of the Sacred Precinct was the temalaccatl, or gladiator stone, where a captive warrior was given wooden weapons to fight against other, better-armed warriors until he finally succumbed; and the Jaguar and Eagle Houses, communal places for the elite warriors, those who had captured more than four prisoners on the battlefield. [2] My main character’s brother Neutemoc is a Jaguar Knight, and he would have looked much like the one depicted below: a full bodysuit made of a jaguar’s skin, the helmet worked out of the animal’s head so that the warrior’s own head protruded from between the teeth of the jaguar.

Though the emperor was the closest thing to a god on earth, standing for the authority of Tezcatlipoca and Huitzilpochtli, he did not live within the Sacred Precinct, but rather just outside it. We have evidence of several palaces built along the Serpent Wall, bordering the Precinct: that of Axayacatl (1469-1480), Ahuizotl (1486-1502) and Moctezuma II (1502-1519). It’s not clear whether the other emperors chose to inhabit a predecessor’s palace, or whether we haven’t yet found evidence of other constructions.

Those palaces were huge compounds, spread over a square kilometre or more: as well as a living space for the emperor and his family and the other members of the Triple Alliance, they also housed the courts of appeals, the workshops of imperial artists such as featherworkers, and goldsmiths, the treasury that held the tribute from the whole empire, and many other administrative functions of the empire. There were separate courts for civilians and the military, and the emperor acted as the supreme appeal. Those courts obviously play a large part in the book, which is focused on investigations and their consequences.

That’s all for today. Come back tomorrow for the final article, on my main character Acatl, and the Mexica approach to death (and the book launch, of course 🙂 )

[1]The current age was the fifth one in the cycle: previous ages had ended in worldwide disasters such as floods or rains of fire, and with humanity either completely wiped out or changed into animals. The current sun, Tonatiuh, is also referred to as the Fifth Sun. In the novel(s), I use the term “Fifth World” to refer to the mortal part of the universe, by analogy with the Fifth Sun.
[2]The orders of the Jaguar Knights and of the Eagle Knights tend to be listed as a single large body, with a single set of buildings. I have chosen to give them separate compounds, for plot-related reasons.

This is part 2 of a series of posts on the setting of my Aztec fantasy series Obsidian and Blood, as a leadup to the release of Book 1, Servant of the Underworld, published by Angry Robot/HarperCollins (more information here, including excerpts and a book trailer). You can find part 1 (the valley of Mexico and the Mexica Empire) here, part 3 (the Sacred Precinct and Mexica religion) here, and part 4 (Acatl and death in Mexica religion) here.
Any questions or comments welcome!

2. The City of Tenochtitlan and the Migration Myth

If the basin of Anahuac was a place of waters (see previous post), Tenochtitlan was the archetype of an island city. It’s been referred to as the Venice of Mesoamerica, and not without reason, as most of the city was laid along canals.

The city was built on an island in Lake Texcoco, a naturally defensible place. Three huge causeways (1-2km long each), linked it to the mainland, each bearing the name of the city they led to: Tepeyacac, Tacuba/Tlacopan, and Itzpalapan. Each of them was guarded by several forts, and by an additional defence mechanism: the causeways were made of sections of stone-and-mortars, which alternated with wooden bridges, easy to demolish in the event of an invasion. This would allow the island city to become a veritable fortress.

Tenochtitlan itself followed a grid pattern: urban planning had left nothing to chance (indeed, there was a set of officials in charge of city planning, who had to approve major building works), and the houses were neatly aligned along the canals and streets. Those houses tended to be spread around patios; the more luxurious ones were compounds big enough to have one or several private courtyards, and perhaps even two storeys (a privilege reserved to noblemen).

The core of the city was divided into four districts or campans: Cuopepan, Moyotlan, Zoquiapan, and Atzacualco (see map below–I’m afraid it’s got one of the districts named wrong, but I couldn’t find anything clearer). Each district was in turn divided into calpulli [1]. A calpulli was a series of people related by birth and/or by profession, all living in the same area of the city: a tribe as well as an administrative unit. They had their own temples, marketplaces, civic centres, and their elders administered basic justice. We don’t understand yet all the ramifications between the calpulli or what kind of mobility you could have between them. I chose to make one of the characters in the book, Neutemoc–aka the social ascender–a member of a Tenochtitlan calpulli by marriage (his wife Huei being the one with the Tenochtitlan ties). My main character Acatl, being not only a priest but also the head of his order, stands a little apart from that particular system, but has retained some ties with his Coyoacan calpulli.

You’ll notice the presence of what seems to be another district north of the map. In reality, Tlatelolco was not another district, but the remnants of another city. Back when Tenochtitlan was founded, some of the Mexica disagreed on where to place the heart of the city. This opposing faction came to found Tlatelolco some kilometres north of Tenochtitlan itself. The cities cohabited peacefully for the better part of a century. But under Emperor Axayacatl’s reign, about 7 years before the story started, war broke out on a flimsy pretext, and the Mexica armies conquered Tlatelolco, all but absorbing it into Tenochtitlan. Tlatelolco was known for its daily market, set on a huge plaza where you could find anything from live animals to jewellery to ceramics. It had its own police system as well as its own court, which punished thieves as well as dishonest merchants. This market is where the priests in the book go for their daily rounds of purchases.

At the centre of Tenochtitlan was the centre of the religious life: the huge Sacred Precinct, which housed the major temples, and around which were arranged the Emperors’ palaces (I’ll dwell more on the Sacred Precinct in the next article).

So, why Tenochtitlan? I briefly touched on Tenoch in the previous post, the semi-mythical leader of the Mexica who gave his name to Tenochtitlan, the capital city of the Empire. In reality, it’s a little more complex: like the name “Mexica”, there are several interpretations of the name Tenochtitlan. One of those is “The place of the prickly pear cactus”, and this refers to the founding of Tenochtitlan.

To understand why, we’ll have to backtrack a bit, and get back to Aztlan/Chicomoztoc, the mythical, paradisiacal place of origins. The Mexica believed that in times immemorial, they had lived in caves near Aztlan. They emerged from those to find their tribal god Huitzilpochtli, the Southern Hummingbird. Huitzilpochtli charged them with a mission to found a city to his glory. They set out, led by four priest-rulers, who were also the bearer of the idol of the god–and to whom he spoke in dreams. The Mexica migration was to take them over most of the Mexica valley: each time they settled down somewhere, disaster would strike, for Huitzilpochtli had a precise destination in mind, and would not let them grow soft among foreigners.

Several incidents are recounted, but the one that has the most bearing on Tenochtitlan is the battle against Copil: Copil’s mother, Malinalxoch, was an evil sorceress whom the Mexica had abandoned in the interest of the tribe. Her son came some time later to avenge his mother, but was defeated through the intervention of Huitzilpochtli, and his heart thrown into the marshes.

Generations later, the Mexica, hounded by the other tribes in the basin, had no choice but to enter the marshes, where they wandered around for days, dazed by fatigue and lack of food. In their moment of greatest despair, Huitzilpochtli spoke to them in a dream, telling them to look for his sign: an eagle perched on a cactus, which marked the place where they would found their city. The cactus had sprouted from the heart of Copil. It’s a striking image, laden with meaning: the cactus springs from an original sacrifice, which reinforces the link between blood and fertility. The fruit of this particular cactus, which is red and bud-shaped, also bears more than a passing resemblance to human hearts, and the fact that the eagle is feeding upon those is significant [2]. The eagle is also a symbol of the sun; and the vessels for holding human hearts were called cuauhxicalli, which means “eagle gourd bowl”. Taken together, all those elements form the Mexica ideal of providing nourishment for their god in the form of human hearts, either from themselves or from defeated captives.

Thus the migration had led them back to Huitzilpochtli’s place of victory–where, with the god’s blessing, they founded the city of Tenochtitlan. It was the place where they would “keep guard, await, meet the people in battle (…), vanquish them all and make them captive.” From the beginning, Tenochtitlan’s mission was thus to be a base for the conquest of its neighbours.

That’s all for today. Tomorrow: the Sacred Precinct and Mexica religion.

[1]The singular is calpulli, the plural calpultin, but I’ll stick with just the singular to make matters simpler.
[2]Depending on the legend, the eagle can also be feeding on other birds, a clear symbol of the neighbours who must be conquered. The variant depicted on the Mexican flag has the eagle eating a serpent, with a symbology I’m a little unsure of (I may be wrong, but it sounds to me like Christian overtones, and pretty much the only source of that image seems to be a post-Conquest document)

This is part 1 of a series of posts on the setting of my Aztec fantasy series Obsidian and Blood, as a leadup to the release of Book 1, Servant of the Underworld, published by Angry Robot/HarperCollins (more information here, including excerpts and a book trailer). You can find part 2 (the city of Tenochtitlan and the myth of origins) here, part 3 (the Sacred Precinct and Mexica religion) here, and part 4 (Acatl and death in Mexica religion) here.
Any questions or comments welcome!

1. The Valley of Mexico (and Aztec Empire)

Who are the Aztecs? The first question you’ll ask yourself when you read the book is why I refer to them by the name of “Mexica”. What’s with that, you ask? Well, the Aztecs never called themselves Aztecs. That was a name foisted on them later by the Spanish: it comes from Aztlan, the White Place (which the Aztecs listed as their place of origin and which you can find in hymns within Servant of the Underworld), but they never used it that way. The name they used for themselves was either Colhua Mexica or Tenochca. The second refers to Tenoch, their mythical first leader, who gave his name to Tenochtitlan (it’s a little more complicated than that actually, but I’ll get to that in part 2 of those posts). I used the first, shortening it a bit to make things easier.

No one is sure where “Mexica” comes from exactly: a popular hypothesis is that it comes from Metzli, which means “moon” in the Nahuatl language; another explanation is that it derives from the secret name of their tribal god, Mexitl.

To understand where the “Colhua” bit comes from, you have to understand that the Aztecs were late comers to the Basin of Mexico. The area had been inhabited for centuries if not millenia; and it was fundamentally different from the basin as it is now. For starters, there was a lot more water: see the map below for reference (Tenochtitlan, the island in the centre of the lake, is about where Mexico’s railway station is today). The Spanish drained it away to control the flooding, but before they came, the whole place was basically a marsh. It’s not for nothing that the Aztecs called the Basin of Mexico Anahuac, which means “The Place Between the Waters”: they were water people, just as their cousins the Maya to the South of Mexico were jungle people.

When the Aztecs came on-stage in the mid-13th Century, many civilisations had already come and gone: it’s a small area (the map covers about 40-50km over 30km), but it’s a fertile one, and a series of city-states fought each other for its political and economical domination. They each tried to legitimise their power by availing themselves of the legacy of the Toltecs, a semi-legendary civilisation said to have been ruled by the benevolent god Quetzalcoatl, the Feathered Serpent. The Aztecs were no strangers to this policy, and their first emperor married a princess from Colhuacan in order to establish themselves on the political map.

By the time 1480, the year of the novel, rolled around, the Basin of Anahuac had become radically different: the city-states warring for domination had been replaced by a network of tribute-paying vassals. The tribute flowed to the Triple Alliance, established in 1428: it was made up of Tenochtitlan, the capital of the Mexica, Texcoco, and Tlacopan (see the second map). Though Tlacopan had started out as an equal-rights partner, it gradually lost its importance, and the Triple Alliance was soon steered by only two cities, Tenochtitlan and Texcoco. They sent joint armies to war every year, and grew rich on the astonishing amount of tribute sent them from every province, which included quetzal feathers, jaguar skins, adorned suits but also firewood, seashells, cotton…

A quick word about the Aztec Empire. By geographical standards, it was not that huge: to give you an idea, the Alliance didn’t control the whole of the basin until 1465, when they conquered Chalco (bottom right of the map) after a prolonged war. To be fair, they had started expanding out of the basin beforehand, and Chalco was the last troublesome province left within.

You can see the actual expansion of the Empire at the date of the novel below. It includes that basin, and territories around it: the red, purple and dark blue areas (you can sort of recognise part of the basin in the red zone around Tenochtitlan). It’s a little deceptive, because recently conquered areas tended to rebel and need more military interventions by the Mexica–so it’s not a map of political divisions as stable as, say, the Roman Empire. At its height under the reign of Moctezuma II in 1519, the Empire covered about 500,000 square kilometers, less than the total surface of France today. Again, not that big a place–it barely reached down to the Maya in the south of Mexico.

It didn’t help the Mexica conquests, though, that most of their territory was either mountains or marshes, which the armies had to walk on foot or navigate by boat (it’s often said that the Mesoamericans had no wheel, which isn’t quite true. They had the wheel on children’s toys, but in terrain so mountainous they judged it pointless to bother with chariots and other wheeled conveyances). Similarly, the basin of Anahuac was one huge lake (in fact, five separate lakes all merging into one at the rainy season) surrounded by mountains. It’s a testament to the Mexica ingenuity that they managed to field armies out of it.

The basin of Anahuac was the heart of the Empire and its most tightly controlled zone. It was a densely populated area. It’s hard to estimate the population, but most estimations are between 1 and 2.5 million inhabitants in 1519 (the date the Spanish arrived on the scene). For the area, this is pretty big: to give you an idea, Paris, one of the biggest cities in the 15th Century, held about 200,000 inhabitants.

Other places of importance in the basin:
-Teotihuacan (east of the map), “The Place where the Gods are Born”, was the site of an earlier civilisation which had grown to power by controlling the obsidian mines. It collapsed long before the Mexica, in the 7th or 8th Century AD–but the monuments that remained (including the massive pyramids of the Sun and of the Moon) led the Mexica to believe that this was a sacred place–the place where the sun had risen into the sky at the beginning of the current age. It was a city in its own right as well as a place of pilgrimage.
-there is a green line separating the lake in two different parts: this is a dyke built by Nezahualcoyotl, ruler of Texcoco, in order to separate the saltwater from the freshwater. It wasn’t enough to ensure a supply of water to the city of Tenochtitlan: an aqueduct had to be built, which brought water from the springs to the west.
-the chinampas, or chinamitls, or floating gardens: again, what little land was available wasn’t enough to support the population of Tenochtitlan, so the Mexica added some. The chinamitls are artificial islands made of the muck of the lake, held into place by wooden stakes driven into the lakebed (and by trees if necessary). They formed a dense grid of very productive fields, occasionally topped up by more muck in order to preserve the fertility.
-Coyoacan (on the first map, bottom left) is the place of birth of my main character Acatl.

That’s it for today. Tomorrow: the city of Tenochtitlan and the myth of Mexica origins.

OK, so it’s time to shake up things a bit. 4 days left until the UK/Australia release of Servant of the Underworld, my Aztec murder-mystery with blood magic (and ghostly jaguars, and fingernail-eating monsters).

So what I figure out is that I’m going to set the stage a bit, by doing a series of posts on setting. The first will be on the Valley of Mexico and the Aztec Empire; the second on the city of Tenochtitlan; the third on religion and the Sacred Precinct, and the fourth and last on my main character Acatl and his patron Mictlantecuhtli, aka Lord Death. First one should run tomorrow.

Stay tuned :=)

Saw a couple of reviews trickle in during the holidays:
-Liviu Suciu at Fantasy Book Critic:

The novel fits most comfortably under the heading of “dark fantasy” with the tropes of contemporary urban fantasy – magic, sorcerers, powerful supernatural beings – called Gods here – lots of blood and violence, mostly urban setting – but is set in the Aztec Empire at its peak in the late 15th century.
The world-building is exquisite and we *believe* we are transported to the 15th century Tenotichtlan and together with the superb voice they formed the main reason I enjoyed this book so much… Highly recommended; Ms. de Bodard is a writer to watch.

-Nik Butler at Loudmouthman:

The mystical Aztec setting had every opportunity to become a tongue twisting and convoluted mish mash of vowels and golden thingies. Fortunately none of this occurs as day to day temple life and the duties of its citizens are described you can feel the richness of this bloody empire without once tripping over some unpronounceable God or location.
This is Book 1 in a trilogy and I am eager to get my hands on the next book when it is released.

*happy writer*

If you want something that looks like a book, Angry Robot has a sample of Servant of the Underworld to download, which contains the first chapter. Available in Mobipocket, EPUB or PDF.

Or you can also read the first three chapters online at My Favourite Books (they were cut into five parts to make them more manageable, hence the number of links).

In the silence of the shrine, I bowed to the corpse on the altar: a minor member of the Imperial Family, who had died in a boating accident on Lake Texcoco. My priests had bandaged the gaping wound on his forehead and smoothed the wrinkled skin as best as they could; they had dressed him with scraps of many-coloured cotton and threaded a jade bead through his lips – preparing him for the long journey ahead. As High Priest for the Dead, it was now my responsibility to ease his passage into Mictlan, the underworld.

I slashed my earlobes and drew thorns through the wounds, collecting the dripping blood in a bowl, and started a litany for the Dead.

Up to 41,800 words today. May not have won Nanowrimo, but I’m slowly chipping away at that novel…

The cover art for Servant of the Underworld:

Isn’t it full of awesome? (some stuff might shift around a bit, but overall it’s meant to be pretty much final)

For the curious, the central design is lifted from the Calendar Stone. It represents the Sun God along with the Four Ages of the World, which makes it pretty appropriate for the book (I won’t say why because of spoilers). You can find explanations on the symbols here (scroll down a bit for the first ring).

Now I’ll go and have that much delayed dinner…

My Servant of the Underworld proofs have just arrived, and I have a little over a week to check them. I think I’m going to be scarce on the internet this week…

But, OMG, it looks like a real book. It’s both elating and scary (as in, oh dear, I can’t hide behind other TOC-mates anymore).

The BF’s only complaint so far was a lack of cover art 🙂 (which should arrive sometime in the week, I’m told. Another reason to be freaking out…)