Aztlan: The Last Sun

by Michael Jan Friedman

  He grunted. “You’d be sure too if you weren’t thinking so hard about the one with the nice eyes.”

  “Who told you that?” I asked.

  “Who didn’t?”

  I turned back to my screen. “She’s got nothing to do with it.”

  “Right,” said Takun. “And if you believe that, I’ve got an irrigation ditch in District Two I want to sell you.”

  “Funny,” I said.

  “Good luck with your investigation, Colhua. Me, I’m going home to a nice cup of octli.”

  “Have a drink for me,” I said.

  “Get your own,” said Takun. Then he was gone.

  I sat there a while longer, studying Patli’s corpse. The open chest, the splintered ribs, the pool of white wax. I tried to picture someone doing that to another human being. I couldn’t.

  But I wasn’t going to get anywhere staring at the victim on a Mirror screen. Takun had a point in that regard, at least. So I left the office and went back to Centeotl.

  Before the seventh hour, I was walking the grounds of the pyramid again, hoping to find something I had missed.

  By then, news of the murder had shown up on the Mirror, at least in broad strokes. I would have preferred to keep even those out of the public eye until we solved the case, but the Emperor’s Law called for a certain amount of disclosure these days.

  Of course, Centeotl had been declared off limits. No one was allowed in the pyramid or on the grounds except security personnel. And the police, of course.

  Without construction teams around, the lighting installation on the north and west sides of the pyramid hadn’t proceeded any further. But then, what would be the point in doing so? Centeotl wouldn’t be considered again for sanctification until the murderer who desecrated the grounds was punished, and without another sanctification ceremony no one was going

  to move in anytime soon.

  Still, it wasn’t as dark as the night before—even on the north side of the pyramid, where Milin had found Patli. The overcast had cleared and the stars, herded by the goddess Citlalicue, were hard and bright in the sky, overwhelming the white hook of old Tecciztecatl.

  It wasn’t as quiet either. Off in the distance there was flute music playing, a love song that had become popular in recent days. It rode lightly on the breeze, the cool one that came out of the hills west of the city. And without a lot of people around, the squirrels were chittering as if they were demented.

  For a little while, I stood where Patli was found and studied the collection of sturdy wooden stakes that outlined his posture in death. In accordance with procedure, my colleagues had hammered them into the ground between the time I left Centeotl and the time the body was removed.

  Patli hadn’t been a runt. Not at all. Lands of the Dead, he was probably as tall as I was. And it was more than a few hands from where I was standing to the fence.

  If he had been carried all that way, it couldn’t have been the work of just one man. Not unless that man was a giant, and there weren’t any giants among the cultists we had questioned. But if even a handful of them had worked together, they could easily have carried Patli across the property.

  Of course, there was another possibility—that Patli had made the trip from the fence on his own two feet. He’d had octli on his breath, so his judgement might not have been so keen. Maybe someone else had paid for the octli. Maybe that same someone had dared him to trespass on the grounds of the new pyramid.

  I nodded to myself. That sounded better. Patli had made it easy for his killer. He had gone to his fate willingly.

  And the killer, who had had Patli’s end in mind all along, had brought along everything he needed—the hammer or other heavy object that would crack open Patli’s ribs, the knife that would carve out Patli’s heart, the candle, the matchsticks, the flint. . .what else? A bag to put Patli’s heart in, since we hadn’t found any sign of it. A bag with a waterproof lining, or the heart would have bled over everything.

  The breeze rustled the grass. I could see it all, hear it all. The cracking, the strangled screaming. . .because there had to have been screaming. The clutching and writhing and kicking. Then the soft, wet sounds of sharp edges slicing living tissue. The scratch of the matchstick. The flare of the flame.

  There had been no evidence of head trauma, so the killer hadn’t knocked Patli out first. He had simply gone to work. And yet the victim had had that look on his face—that expression of acceptance.

  It must have been one hell of a lot of octli.

  Then another angle occurred to me. What if Patli had known in advance what was going to happen? What if had allowed himself to be killed that way—and could only have faced what was going to happen with a belly full of dreams?

  In most cases, I could have dug up enough evidence to say one way or the other. But Patli had lived outside of civilization for so long, it was difficult to know for certain.

  If only the pyramid’s security system had been working, we would have caught some of the action on camera. But security always went in after lighting. You didn’t have to be a construction expert to know that.

  So where was I? No further along than before.

  Cycles earlier, when I began my training as an Investigator, the older Investigators told me time and again to consult my gut. That was what they had done when they were younger—they had gone with their instincts. And to hear them tell it, their instincts had never let them down.

  Of course, the world had changed since those Investigators were young. The Investigation business had become a lot more sophisticated. But there were still times when it wasn’t a bad idea to consult one’s gut.

  In this case, it told me that, despite what Takun had said, the cultists hadn’t killed Patli. They weren’t crazy enough. Or maybe I just wanted to believe that for Eren’s sake.

  For the sake of completeness, I took a walk along the fence. There were guards standing outside it at intervals. I nodded to each of them as I went by.

  But I didn’t learn anything else. And I probably wouldn’t, even if I stayed there all night.

  I decided to show up for dinner at Aunt Xoco’s a little early. I had a feeling she wouldn’t complain.

  Chapter Three

  As my aunt had promised, she made venison that second night. Broiled venison with the juices running, just the way I liked it.

  One wasn’t supposed to talk about death at the dinner table, especially during the Unlucky Days. But my aunt had learned, over the cycles, to talk about it without talking about it.

  “That article I saw on the Mirror,” she said, “about Centeotl—that was why they called you away last night?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I was just back there.”

  “Any answers?” Aunt Xoco asked.

  “Not yet. But we’re working on it.”

  She smiled. “Working on it. That was what your father used to say all the time. You remember?”

  I remembered. “And my mother would tell him not to work on it too hard or he’d pull a muscle.”

  My aunt’s smile deepened. “Your mother had a sense of humor. But not like your father’s. He was in a class by himself.”

  I remembered that too.

  One Renewal dinner, when I was eight or nine, my father excused himself from the table to answer a buzz. When he came back into the room, he said, “I have to go to work,” which always meant that he had a crime to investigate and would be gone all night. My mother heaved a sigh of grudging acceptance because she had known what she was in for when she took my father for a mate.

  But Aunt Xoco, never too shy to speak her mind, said it was an affront against the gods for someone to interrupt a family dinner during the Five Unlucky Days. We tried to carry on with the celebration after my father left, but his departure had laid a blanket over the festivities. There was no one to make little jokes at my aunt’s expense, no one to wink at me or pinch my mother under the table. It just wasn’t the same without him.

  Before too long, there was
a knock on the door. Aunt Xoco didn’t answer it at first, hoping that whoever it was would take the hint and go away. But the knocking continued, and became more annoying by the moment, until finally my aunt swore beneath her breath, went to the door, and swung it open.

  She was greeted by a man wearing a big red-and-gold mask with a crown of white feathers—the laughing visage of Xochipilli, the flower god. It was my father under the mask, of course. But as I ran to him, squealing with joy at the trick he had played on us, he produced a sack and flung its contents into the room—just as if he were the real Xochipilli.

  Suddenly there were flowers everywhere—yellow ones, white ones, deep purple ones. They went flying over the dinner table, over the floor, over the food and over us. Even Aunt Xoco laughed at the wild extravagance of the gesture.

  “Flowers for my flowers!” my father bellowed, embracing my mother and my aunt at the same time.

  “Where did you get so many?” my mother asked, a note of disapproval in her voice despite the smile on her face. She had always been the practical one.

  My father shrugged. “From the god, where else? He favors poor Investigators who get called away from their families to do the bidding of the Empire.”

  I could still see that night in great detail.

  But I had another Renewal memory that I wished I could forget: The night that my father’s chief came to the door and whispered something horrible to my mother, and left her a blighted cornstalk the rest of her days.

  Still, I thought of Renewal as my father’s favorite time of the cycle. He had always loved the display of colors, the fires leaping into the night sky, and the animal heads that people wore to the celebrations.

  And the food, of course. Always the food.

  That night, my dinner with my aunt was uninterrupted. We ate, we drank our octli—in moderation, of course, because I would be going out in public on my way home—and we laughed.

  Once again, because she was as persistent as the drop of water that over centuries carves out a canyon, she tried to get me to go out with the woman from the Merchant City. And again, I fended off her suggestion. The woman just wasn’t my cup of cane water, I said.

  “Then who is?” Aunt Xoco insisted.

  I thought of Eren, though I didn’t mention her to my aunt. Eren, whom I had always held deep in my heart. Eren, with whom I had an undeniable connection, though our lives had walked distinctly different paths.

  I was still thinking about her when I hugged Aunt Xoco and wished her a good night, and assured her that I would be back for the third of the Unlucky Days regardless of which specialty she set in front of me. It wasn’t as if I was risking anything. Whatever she made was fit for the gods.

  I had left her building and was halfway to the rail station when I got the buzz. “Colhua,” I said.

  “Investigator, this is Pyramid Security at Centeotl.” It was the chief there, the man I had met the night before. “We found someone lurking outside the fence, near the hole.”

  “Did he say what he was doing there?” I asked.

  “Not exactly. But he did say he was a friend of yours. His name is Yaotl.”

  I frowned. “Zuma Yaotl?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll be there as soon as I can,” I said. “Ask the fellow to remain with you until I arrive.”

  “Of course,” said the security officer.

  I made a left at the next corner and headed for a different rail line—the one that would take me back to Centeotl. The carriage came just as I got to the top of the stairs, which was good because I didn’t like the idea of Yaotl waiting for me any longer than he had to.

  For the third time since dinner the day before, I walked into the lobby of the Centeotl Pyramid. Yaotl, a small man about sixty cycles old with big ears and sad eyes, was waiting for me, sitting alone on one of the redwood benches. A couple of security guards—the chief and one other—were standing in his vicinity, but not so close as to be offensive to him.

  After all, Yaotl had been an Investigator once himself, and I had no doubt that he had informed them of the fact.

  “Maxtla!” he called out as he caught sight of me. His voice echoed in the shiny, black lobby. “So good to see you!”

  “Yaotl,” I said in return.

  He got up, and laughed as he started to close the distance between us. He had a limp, the result of an injury he had sustained while chasing down a murder suspect twenty cycles earlier.

  I grasped his hand and said, “You should be at home.”

  “Sorry, Maxtla. You know what they say. Once an Investigator, always an Investigator.”

  I turned to the security chief. “I’ll take it from here.”

  “As you wish,” he said.

  I put my arm around Yaotl’s thin shoulders and guided him toward the entrance. “I knew you would come,” he said. “This is your jurisdiction.”

  “You know,” I said, “a pyramid is private property. You could have been arrested, no matter who you used to be.”

  “I know,” Yaotl replied contritely, “and I apologize. But I heard about the murder on the Mirror, you know? I wanted to see the place for myself. And they said there was a hole in the fence.”

  “So you were going to wriggle through it? Even though you knew better?”

  He shrugged. “It’s not easy to sit at home and do nothing, Maxtla. You start wishing you were still on the job.”

  That didn’t change anything. “Come on,” I said as I pushed open the door to the lobby, “I’ll see you back to your place.”

  “An escort?” He pretended to polish his chest. “I didn’t know I was a nobleman.”

  “Just for tonight,” I told him. “You’re still on Ehecatl Street?”

  “Still,” he said.

  It was on my way home.

  Outside the pyramid, I walked slowly so Yaotl could keep up. When we got to the rail station, I took my time going up the steps as well. He used the wooden rail alongside the stair, but he didn’t let me help him. Despite everything, he was a proud man.

  Zuma Yaotl had retired from the force seven cycles earlier. He and my father had been friends for a good long while. They had earned their bracelets on the same day, worked many of the same districts, started their families at the same time. Gods of Life, they were appointed Investigators within a moon of each other.

  They had even planned on attending the same retirement ceremony. It just hadn’t worked out that way. My father had died first.

  And Yaotl had gotten beaten up in the Merchant City one hot, summer night when he was off-duty. It had left him a little soft in the head.

  When we reached the platform, I waited for him to catch his breath. I didn’t mind. It was what my father would have done if he were still alive.

  “They’re saying the cultists did it,” Yaotl said abruptly.

  I smiled at him. “Is that what they’re saying?”

  “Yes. You believe them?”

  I shook my head. “Not really.”

  He looked back over his shoulder at the pyramid, which was easily visible from the station. “I guess you know more than I do. Have you got any leads?”

  “None I can talk about. You know that.”

  Yaotl nodded. “Sure. Police business. And I’m not police anymore.”

  “Sorry,” I said.

  “Don’t be sorry, Maxtla. I would have told you the same thing if I were the Investigator and you were the tired, old has-been.”

  “We all get old, Yaotl.”

  He patted my shoulder. “If we’re lucky.”

  When the carriage came, we got in. As Aztlan passed below us, we talked about my job, and about Aunt Xoco, whom he had always liked. He mentioned how lonely it was for him during the Unlucky Days with his mate in the Lands of the Dead.

  “Why don’t you have dinner with us?” I asked. “I’m sure Aunt Xoco won’t mind.”

  He waved away the suggestion. “Thanks, Maxtla. I appreciate it. But it’ll only make it lonelier when I
go home, you know what I mean?”

  I didn’t exactly, but I nodded.

  Pretty soon, Yaotl’s stop came up. “Don’t even think about walking me in,” he said. “Thanks for the escort, Maxtla.”

  “It was my pleasure,” I told him. “Just stay away from murder scenes, will you?”

  Yaotl laughed.

  I watched him leave the carriage and walk along the platform. There were people around, more than a few of them, probably coming back from holiday dinners with their relatives. Yaotl would be all right. He wasn’t so addled that he couldn’t get down the stairs and find his way home.

  Satisfied, I sat back and waited for the carriage to get moving again.

  That night, I noticed a program on the Mirror paid for by the guy who owned the Centeotl project. His name was Lolco Molpilia. I knew the name from news reports over the years, but I didn’t think I had ever seen his face before.

  A middle-aged man with a large head and small eyes, Molpilia was sitting on one side of an expensive ebony table. A commentator from one of the news sites was sitting on the other.

  I had missed the first few minutes of the program but I got the gist of it pretty quickly.

  “And you’re dissatisfied with their efforts?” the commentator asked, following his script.

  “I’m just disappointed,” said Molpilia. “We pay our share of taxes in Aztlan. We should receive value in return.”

  “It’s only been a day and a half since the incident,” the commentator pointed out. After all, he had to maintain at least a semblance of credibility.

  “Forgive me,” said Molpilia, “but even a day and a half is too much when the person—or people—responsible for this crime are right in front of our faces.”

  “You mean Ancient Light?” said the commentator. “It’s true that they have been demonstrating in front of Centeotl for weeks now, trying to keep it from opening its doors, but isn’t the idea of committing a murder on the property a bit of a stretch?”

  “It’s not my place to identify the killer or killers,” said Molpilia. “That’s the job of the police. I just want them to do that job on a timely basis so I can get about the business of re-sanctifying my property.”