The Demon of the Air
An Aztec Mystery
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
"Hooked me in five pages. The main character is fascinatingly complex and unusual."
---Conn Iggulden, author of The Field of Swords
Mexico, 1517.
Emperor Montezuma rules the known world. Daily canoes and trains of sweating bearers carry tribute to his island capital, Mexico-Tenochtitlán, while squadrons of ruthless warriors enforce his will. Gold, silver, cotton, jewels, and precious feathers change hands in his markets. The temples run with the blood of human sacrifices.
All seems well, but Montezuma is troubled. Mysterious strangers have appeared in the East. Are they men or gods? Visions and rumors disturb his dreams. The soothsayers he turns to for guidance give him only enigmatic answers, and he knows he cannot trust his advisers---especially his chief minister, the unscrupulous Lord Feathered in Black.
Yaotl, the chief minister's slave, is troubled, too. He was ordered to escort a sacrificial victim up the steps of the Great Pyramid, but the victim ran amok, uttering a bizarre and sinister prophecy and leaping to his death before the War-God's priests could cut out his heart. Then Yaotl learns that the emperor's soothsayers have vanished.
The emperor senses a connection between these two events and orders Yaotl to find it---on pain of death if he fails. But it soon becomes clear that whatever the connection is, Yaotl's own master will stop at nothing---including murder---to keep it secret.
To get to the truth will take all Yaotl's wits and will to survive. It will lead him into confrontations with the peril destined to overwhelm the whole Aztec world and with a monster from his own past - and into the hands of a sadistic killer.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Historical novels, let alone debuts, don't get much better than British author Levack's outstanding effort, set in the heyday of the Aztec empire two years before the arrival of the Spanish conquistadors. Already, rumors of pale, bearded men with strange weapons have reached the emperor, Montezuma. When a human sacrifice to the war-god goes wrong the intended victim makes an ominous prophecy before jumping to his death off the Great Pyramid the ensuing uproar threatens the power of the emperor and his chief minister, Black Feathers. Both Montezuma and Black Feathers charge Yaotl, a disgraced priest now the minister's slave, with discovering the reason for the suicide. Yaotl, who narrates this rich tale, doggedly pursues a twisted trail of plots and counterplots toward the truth. Levack makes comprehensible and familiar a society that seems at first glance alien. Sixteenth-century Mexico comes to wonderful life in this gripping, multifaceted mystery, winner of the 2004 CWA Debut Dagger Award.