Aztlan: The Courts of Heaven

by Michael Jan Friedman

  “Neighbors?” I asked.

  “Quetzalli is talking with them now. So far, no one heard a thing. But then, in these luxury pyramids, no one ever does.”

  I understood. Places like Tonatiuh boasted extra-thick walls and floors so people with beans could have their privacy.

  “I’m taking this blood back for analysis,” said Necalli. “You’ll be here a while, I suppose?”

  “A while,” I agreed. “By the way, about that other thing . . ."

  “Nothing yet,” he said. “Just sit tight.”

  He had been telling me that, or some variation on it, for weeks. Never mind that I felt like a stranger every time I went to work. No—worse than a stranger. A traitor. Never mind that the police force might be turned on its collective ear.

  “All right,” I said. “I’ll sit tight.”

  He saw I wasn’t happy. “Look, we’ve got an Investigation here. Why don’t we take care of this while we’re waiting to hear about that?”

  I shrugged. “Whatever you say, Chief.”

  “See you later, then,” said Necalli.

  As he left Coyotl’s apartment, I headed for the kitchen. Back when I was new at Investigations, one of the veterans on the force told me to check a victim’s cold cabinet before anything else. “You can learn a lot about a man by what he eats,” he said.

  Coyotl’s box was nearly empty—just a quarter-full pitcher of octli, a paper bag full of limes, a couple of loose chiles, and a cloth-covered bowl of cactus worms. Apparently, I thought, the guy eats out a lot.

  My next step was to pull out the kitchen’s built-in storage bins, one by one. As it turned out, they weren’t much better stocked than the cold cabinet. One had a couple of boxes of maize chips, both unopened. Another had a big jar of pickled grasshoppers with little but leg and wing debris left at the bottom. A third had an unmarked container of powdered chocolate mix, a ceramic jug of honey, and a few tins of beans.

  The chocolate mix was illegal, of course, but no one was going to get arrested for it. Especially not Coyotl.

  Nothing so far, I thought.

  Then I checked the waste basket. After all, what people threw out was often as interesting as what they hung onto. It wasn’t the most pleasant part of my job, but I did what I had to.

  It was under an empty peanut bag and some melon rinds that I finally found something enlightening.

  Chapter Two

  The Eagles missed Coyotl at the Arena that night.

  Pactonal, their second leading scorer, tried his best to pick up the slack. Though he was “well on the sunset side of his career,” as the Mirror journalists liked to put it, he played that night with the ferocity of a rookie.

  It didn’t matter. Without Coyotl, there was nobody big or strong enough to stop Yopitzinco from commanding the corridor. At the half, the score was still a respectable 2-1, but by the time the final pipe sounded it was a considerably less respectable 7-2.

  I didn’t see the whole thing, of course. Mostly, I listened to the radio coverage in the rail carriage that took me from Coyotl’s apartment to the Arena. It was only the last quarter or so that I witnessed in person, having used my Investigator bracelet to get myself inside.

  But even my bracelet wouldn’t have gotten me access to the locker room. That was why I buzzed Ichtaca to leave word with the attendant to let me in.

  It wasn’t exactly a scene of jubilation I walked in on. Ichtaca was reaming out his team for losing to what he called “an inferior opponent.” He neglected to mention that without Coyotl, the Eagles weren’t superior to Yopitzinco at all. Of course, none of the players mentioned it either.

  The word the Arena’s public address voice had given to the fans was that Coyotl was ill. Needless to say, the news wasn’t well-received. The real story would have been even less so.

  The players, on the other hand, would have seen through the lie. They, at least, were told the truth.

  As soon as Ichtaca finished his tirade, he indicated me with a tilt of his head. “Some of you know Maxtla Colhua,” he said. “He’s an Investigator, but he used to be one of us. Answer his questions to the best of your ability and maybe we’ll have Coyotl back for the Malinalco game.”

  Then he left the room. Everyone looked at me—all twelve faces on the roster. The only one of them I’d ever played with was Pactonal, a wiry guy with a long face and sad eyes, and that was only for a cycle or so.

  “I’ll start with the obvious question,” I said, my voice echoing slightly from one tiled wall to the other. “Any idea who might have wanted to kidnap Coyotl?”

  No one answered. But then, I hadn’t expected anyone to.

  “In that case,” I said, “I’ll need you to stick around after you get dressed so I can collect individual statements. It will take some time, so make yourselves comfortable.”

  There was grumbling. Lands of the Dead, I would have grumbled too if an Investigator told me to linger after a game—especially one I wanted to forget as soon as possible.

  I had to start the interrogation parade somewhere, so I began with Pactonal. It certainly wasn’t because he was the brightest star in the sky. Truth be told, he was closer to the dullest.

  In the trainer’s room, with the door closed, there was no need for him to worry about his teammates hearing us. Still, he didn’t seem to have anything I could use.

  “Sorry,” he said, speaking with difficulty because of the bruises on his face, the results of some well-placed Yopitzinco elbows, “but Coyotl didn’t run with the rest of us. He wasn’t the easiest guy to get to know.”

  I understood. Stars liked to be by themselves. Some of them, at least. “If anything occurs to you, and I mean anything, give me a buzz, all right?” I gave him my radio code. “Day or night.”

  “As long as I’m not between the walls,” said Pactonal. He smiled a thin smile. “Ichtaca doesn’t like us making calls during the game.”

  Pactonal had never been much at telling jokes, and this wasn’t a particularly good time to tell one. To be polite, I smiled back and said, “Just as well. I don’t like to answer my radio when the game is on.”

  I talked to each member of the team before I left the Arena that night. None of them was as helpful as what I had fished out of Coyotl’s waste basket.

  On the way home, sitting in an empty rail carriage with the city lit up around me, I buzzed Necalli. He sounded tired.

  “All I can tell you,” he said, “is that it’s Coyotl’s blood. It matches what the Sun League has on file. Anything on your end?”

  “The team,” I said, “wasn’t of any help. If one of them knows something, he’s not saying. But I found something interesting at Coyotl’s place.”

  “What’s that?”

  “A red and white paper bag. From Rabbit Run.”

  “The fast food place?”

  “That’s right. And it still had some bones in it, along with a time-stamped receipt—which said that a single order of fried rabbit had been ordered late this morning for delivery to Coyotl’s apartment.”

  “So?” said Necalli.

  He didn’t get it. But then, he had never played in the Sun League, or anywhere else for that matter.

  “So ball court players don’t eat rabbit before a game,” I said. “It’s considered unlucky.”

  “Come on,” said Necalli.

  “It’s the truth. Ask anyone in the league.”

  He sighed. “All right, let’s say it is. But you’re telling me Coyotl ordered it anyway. Which means . . . what? That he wasn’t planning to play against Yopitzinco even before he disappeared?”

  “That’s right. Which brings up the question of why a ball player of Coyotl’s stature, in good health by all accounts, would decide to take himself out of a game.”

  It was still hard for me to believe. Everything I knew about Coyotl said he would have played that night no matter what—it was one of the qualities that made him great. And yet, I’d pulled evidence to the contrary out of his waste basket.


  “It’s almost as if he knew he was going to be kidnapped,” said Necalli.

  I had to agree.

  My radio was silent as my boss turned the information over in his mind. He didn’t accept a lot at face value, and I didn’t think what I had told him would be any exception.

  “Wait a second,” he said, justifying my faith in him. “Maybe it was someone else who ate the rabbit.”

  “That’s a possibility,” I had to admit. “But there wasn’t anything else in the apartment for Coyotl to make a meal of. And if Coyotl had a guest, why would he have ordered food only for that person and not for himself?”

  “Maybe he ordered his meal from somewhere else.”

  “Then why didn’t I see a second bag in the waste basket—or anywhere else in his apartment?”

  Necalli didn’t have an answer. “All right. Let’s say he ate the rabbit. So what’s your next step?”

  “Xochipilli,” I said.

  Not that I particularly liked dealing with nobility. But in this instance, I had no choice.

  My office was in the City Interrogation Center, a squat, black building with a strip of bright turquoise that sat in the heart of Aztlan. For cycles I had been happy to go to work in that building, eager to do my part in administering the Emperor’s justice to the citizens of my city. Lately, that hadn’t been the case.

  In the course of investigating a series of ritual murders on the eve of the Last Sun, I had uncovered a secret ring of police officers who called themselves Knife Eyes. The ring seemed to have started out cycles earlier as a league of vigilantes, intent on punishing those who couldn’t otherwise be forced to pay for their crimes. At some point, it had become a goon squad that rich men could hire for their own purposes.

  I had told Necalli about it, and he had passed the word on up the chain of command. Unfortunately, we didn’t know who in that chain was a Knife Eye himself. Lands of the Dead, I couldn’t even be sure about Necalli.

  So for the last several weeks, I had felt the eyes of my colleagues on me, boring into the back of my neck, silently condemning me for exposing the Knife Eyes. Was it my imagination? Maybe. Were they steeped in guilt—or as innocent of wrongdoing as I was? I had no idea.

  But until I knew one way or the other, sitting at my desk was a very uncomfortable proposition. Still, I couldn’t stop going into the office. As Necalli had pointed out, any noticeable change in my schedule might have aroused suspicion.

  So I made sure to show up there at least once a day. That particular morning, I had gone in for two reasons. One was to talk with Takun, who had questioned Coyotl’s doorman. The other was to talk with Quetzalli, who had talked to Coyotl’s neighbors.

  Of course, my first priority was to make an appointment with Xochipilli, the high-born owner of the Aztlan Eagles. Xochipilli’s slave advised me that His Excellence wasn’t awake yet, and that the earliest Xochipilli could see me would be midday. It didn’t come as a shock to me that a member of the aristocracy was sleeping late. Few of the high-born saw a need to get up with the rest of us.

  Unfortunately, the likelihood of finding a missing person decreased precipitously with time, so I tried to impart a sense of urgency to Xochipilli’s slave. He was unmoved. But then, slaves who disobeyed their master’s orders didn’t last long in their master’s employ, so it was hard for me to blame him.

  “Midday it is,” I said.

  Next, I went to talk with Takun. Apparently, he had called the doorman with the runs earlier that morning to ask the guy a few more questions. To that point, the doorman hadn’t seen fit to return Takun’s call.

  “Can you imagine?” asked Takun, a big man with all the charm of a rabid wolverine.

  “Hardly,” I said.

  “So what happened to your eye? What did you do, piss off an old lady or something?”

  “That’s right,” I said. “I suggested she let you date her daughter.”

  “It’d be the luckiest day of her life,” said Takun.

  I grunted. “I’d hate to see all the others.”

  Quetzalli, who looked like a little girl but was the toughest of my fellow Investigators, hadn’t had any more luck with Coyotl’s neighbors. “Nothing,” she told me. “How about you?”

  I didn’t mention the rabbit-dinner wrapper. I had always trusted and respected Quetzalli, but for all I knew she was a member of the Knife Eyes. The less she knew about me and my Investigation, the better—even though she was part of it.

  Crazy, right? And yet that was the reality I was dealing with.

  “Hey,” said Quetzalli, as I turned to walk away, “you find that lizard turd Coyotl, all right? I don’t think I can take too many more scores like last night’s.”

  “I’ll try,” I assured her.

  The Aztlan Rail System was designed to take you anywhere in the city, even the most obscure and otherwise inaccessible parts. And, of course, the Imperial Rail Network took you from Aztlan to the other ninety-six cities in the Empire, some as far away as the Bay of Ice in the north and the Land of Fire in the south.

  But there wasn’t any rail that stopped just outside the city. For that, you needed to contract an auto-carriage.

  Fortunately, the police force had a few at their disposal. One of them picked me up just before midday and drove me out to the estate of Mictlan Xochipilli, second cousin of the Emperor and owner of the Aztlan Eagles.

  Like any nobleman, Xochipilli disdained the environs of the city, even its most elegant districts, unless he was coming in for a big event at a posh hotel. But then, his private estate sprawled across nearly one hundred acres of meticulously tended lawns, stone pathways, and expertly sculpted greenery. If I’d had a place like that, I too might have spent all my time there.

  Actually, I had been to Xochipilli’s place once before, cycles earlier, when I was playing for the Eagles. He was away at an academy for young noblemen at the time, too young to own a team. Or so his father told me shortly after I arrived, as we sat on the huge stone patio behind the house and watched a flock of geese nibble at his grass.

  “Mictlan is a little like them,” said Axaya Xochipilli, who had still looked trim and bright-eyed at the age of eighty-four. He pointed a wrinkled finger at the geese. “He starts out doing an effective job but often leaves a mess in the end.”

  He spoke to me as if I were a fellow nobleman and not the low-born son of an Investigator. I felt honored. I might have been a star in the tlachtli, the ball court, but I never forgot that I was still an employee of someone much richer and more powerful than I was.

  I recalled the note of reason in the elder Xochipilli’s voice that day as he brought up the subject of my contract. “Well,” he said, “you’ve been with the team a cycle and a half now, Maxtla, and you’ve established yourself as one of the best players in the league—both statistically and in the opinion of people who know the game. Fans come to see you as much as they come to see the outcome of the match. Fair to say?”

  I could hardly argue.

  “On the other hand,” Axaya Xochipilli continued, “the Eagles’ fortunes in the ball court have been declining of late. Last cycle, we came close to winning the championship. This cycle, we’ve fallen back to the middle of the pack—and a player is only as valuable as his team’s record. Also fair to say?”

  I said it was.

  I didn’t know which position Xochipilli would take. As it turned out, he took neither of them.

  “I could offer you a contract based on your first cycle,” he said, “but that might be unfair to one of us. Or I could offer you a contract based on this second cycle, in which the Eagles have struggled, but that might be unfair as well. So what I’m going to do is base your contract on your third cycle—the one in which you’re going to bring me a championship.”

  “A championship . . . ?” I said.

  “That’s right,” he said, and handed me a two-cycle contract worthy of the star on a championship team.

  That next season, my third in the leag
ue, I got Xochipilli his championship. It was in my fourth cycle, as we seemed headed for our second first-place finish in a row, that I saw my career come to an end.

  My contract, like all Sun League agreements, said that the team could cut me at any time for any reason, and discontinue my salary. Axaya Xochipilli paid me anyway.

  Later I heard a story that one of the old man’s ancestors had played in the ball court in ancient days, and that he had played so long and so well, by the standards of some arcane point system, that he was finally elevated to the level of the nobility. Of course, that was just a story. But if it had any truth to it, it could have explained his sympathy for me.

  “Here we are,” said my driver, a police officer from District Seven.

  Putting my memory of the nobleman aside, I peered out my window at his house. It stood at the top of a long green slope, a brilliant, white-marble structure so massive that it seemed to bear the weight of the sky.

  Of course, it no longer belonged to the elder Xochipilli, except maybe in the most poetic sense. He had died a couple of cycles earlier of a massive brain hemorrhage, leaving his only heir the owner of all he possessed—including the Eagles.

  “Some place,” said my driver.

  “Some place,” I agreed.

  We pulled into its stone courtyard, in the center of which rose a three-tiered fountain. Its cascades glittered playfully in the sunlight, each of its basins encrusted with enough turquoises and fire opals to pay my rent for the next thirteen cycles.

  The carriage negotiated a path around the fountain and stopped by the front doors. They were taller than I was by half, made of dark oak bound with copper. Round, white columns rose on either side of them like the legs of gigantic sentinels.

  Yes, it was some place all right.

  As I got out of the carriage, the door on the right opened outward, propelled by a slave in the traditional ocher-colored livery of House Xochipilli.

  “Welcome,” said the slave, a young man with carefully clipped hair and a broad smile.

  “Thanks,” I said. “I’m here to see—”

  “My master, of course. He is expecting you.” He gestured inside. “Come. I’ll show you to his study.”