Aztlan: The Last Sun

by Michael Jan Friedman

  Unless he was just being kind. A possibility, certainly. But my gut told me otherwise.

  “Excellent,” said Itzcoatl. “Well, as I said . . . I just wanted you to know.”

  “Thank you, High Priest.”

  “Feel the gods’ blessings, Colhua.”

  And he ended the connection.

  I sat back in my chair and felt better than I had since I left the ball court the night before. Better than I had in a long time, in fact.

  I loved my father.

  It was from him that I got my love of the ball court. It was because of him and his understanding of the game that I eventually came to prosper in the Arena and make a name for myself there. And when that bastard Acama kicked me in the knee and ended my career between the stone walls, it was my father’s reputation that got me a position with the Emperor’s police force.

  I was glad that someone else remembered him as Aunt Xoco and I remembered him—as a hero. And I was even gladder that it was the High Priest of Aztlan.

  I would tell my father about it the first chance I got. Tomorrow, I thought. It would be the last of the Unlucky Days, the one on which we were supposed to visit our ancestors.

  Tomorrow.

  I had barely concluded the resolution when Necalli came by my desk. He looked happy for a change.

  “Something good?” I asked.

  “Very good. One of the cultists just turned himself in.”

  It was a surprise, to say the least. “Which one?”

  Necalli told me. I couldn’t match the name with the face. After all, there were forty-three of them.

  “The one with the funny ear,” Necalli said. “Does that help?”

  It did. One of the cultists was missing the lower half of his ear. I remembered thinking that a dog must have bitten it off.

  “He’s confessed?”

  “To both murders. We’re checking out his story now, but I’ve got a feeling we have our man.”

  “That would be a relief,” I said.

  Certainly, Itzcoatl would be happy to hear it. Molpilia too.

  Eren would be on the other side of the fence. In the public eye, one guilty cultist would make all the cultists look guilty.

  But that wasn’t my problem.

  Except for his mangled ear, Eyahue Quimichetl had no distinguishing characteristics. He was of average height, average build, even average intelligence according to his file.

  “So you killed those two men,” I began.

  It was just the two of us in the lowest floor of the Interrogation Center. After the crowds of cultists over the last few nights, the place seemed empty.

  “Yes,” said Quimichetl. His voice was steady and without inflection, his eyes fixed unflinchingly on mine.

  “Alone? Or with help?”

  “Alone.”

  “Do your fellow cultists know you’re here?”

  “No,” he said. “But they will, of course.”

  “Of course. So why did you do it?”

  “The gods demand sacrifices, especially at a holy time like this one. I gave them what they want.”

  “I see,” I said. “Was there anything special about these victims? I mean, why these two in particular?”

  He shrugged. “They were available.”

  “Just that?”

  “Yes.”

  “Don’t the gods prefer victims who are young and strong?” I knew my history as well as anyone.

  “They do,” he conceded. “However, I had to be circumspect or I would have gotten caught.”

  He had gotten caught anyway, but I didn’t see any need to point that out. I placed pictures of the victims on the table. He had no reaction. I pointed to the pyramids in the background.

  “These buildings were de-sanctified as a result of your sacrifices,” I said. “Do you know who developed them?”

  “No.”

  “That had nothing to do with it? The de-sanctification part, I mean.”

  “Correct.”

  “I see. And which gods did you say you were honoring with your sacrifices?”

  “I didn’t say. But I can tell you that my first victim was a sacrifice to Itztlacoliuhqui-Ixquimilli.”

  “Our god of punishment and misery,” I noted.

  “Our god of justice,” he said.

  “That’s another way of looking at it. And your second sacrifice?”

  “Was given to Tezcatlipoca.”

  “Our god of change.”

  “Change through conflict.”

  “I’ll take your word for it,” I said. “And how many other sacrifices did you intend to carry out?”

  He looked the slightest bit uncomfortable. “There are many gods.”

  “How many specifically?”

  “Different people recognize different pantheons,” said Quimichetl, his voice rising slightly in pitch.

  “What pantheon do you worship?” I pressed.

  “I . . .” He swallowed. “I worship the gods my father worshiped, and his father before him.”

  “But you don’t recall exactly which ones. Outside of Itztlacoliuhqui-Ixquimilli and Tezcatlipoca, I mean.”

  He didn’t say anything in response.

  “I hope,” I added, “that you were going to figure that out before you carried out any more sacrifices. Otherwise, you might not have known in whose name you were committing murder.”

  A muscle below his eye began to twitch. “It wasn’t murder. It was a ritual.”

  I sipped at my cane water. “You know, Eyahue, the Empire’s punishments are rituals too. I learned that in police school. Do you know what the ritual is for lying to an Investigator?”

  That shook him up—though not, I suspected, because he was scared of the Empire’s punishments. It was because I had suggested that he was full of crap.

  “I killed those men,” he insisted. “I cut their hearts out and burned candles in their open chests.”

  “Of course you did. Excuse me, won’t you? I have to pee.”

  Necalli was waiting for me outside the interrogation room. “So what do you think?”

  “I think he’s lying,” I said. “Or crazy. Or both. Either way, he’s not the murderer.”

  And I told Necalli why.

  It wasn’t what he wanted to hear. “Lands of Death,” he muttered, and trundled back upstairs.

  Chapter Seven

  Quimichetl had turned out to be a dud and our surveillance

  of the other properties hadn’t turned up anything either. With hours to go before I had to be at my aunt’s place for dinner, I decided to pay Lolco Molpilia a visit.

  I called him to let him know I was coming, then rode the rails to his office in the heart of the Merchant City.

  His reception area was immense—two stories high—with windows that stretched from floor to ceiling, offering a panoramic view of the colorful, haphazardly built Merchant City and, beyond it, the geometrically perfect, more dignified profile of Aztlan. I could see a number of pyramids from where I stood, each of them dwarfing everything around it. No doubt, some of them were Molpilia’s.

  I introduced myself to his receptionist: “I’m the Investigator.”

  “Please have a seat,” she told me, trying not to stare at my face.

  The furniture was both elegant and comfortable. I hadn’t felt lizard hide that soft in a long time.

  Cylindrical kiosks displaying Mirror monitors were strategically positioned around the place. One of them was right in front of my chair. It showed me Eren’s people marching around yet another pyramid.

  I wondered if Molpilia was watching them in his office.

  As I waited, I saw his employees walk in and out through the reception area, dropping off packets of papers or picking them up. They didn’t so much as glance at the view through the two-story window. Evidently, they had other things on their minds.

  Like the fact that two of their pyramids weren’t going to open on time, maybe. But really, I was just guessing.

  Finally, Molpilia
’s secretary smiled at me and said, “He will see you now.” No mention of the guy’s name. Just “he,” as if there were only one “he” in the world worth talking about.

  “Thanks,” I said, freeing myself from the clutches of my lizard-leather chair.

  The receptionist pressed a button on her desk and a door slid aside behind her, revealing a corridor beyond. I went in and the door closed behind me with a soft hiss of air.

  It was the kind of thing you would expect to see in a rail carriage, but not in an office. I had to hand it to Molpilia—it was an interesting touch.

  Unfortunately, of the several conventional doors that opened off either side of the corridor, not one of them had a name, a title, or even a number posted on it. I was wondering which door was Molpilia’s when he saved me the trouble by appearing at the end of the hallway.

  The developer looked different in person than he had on the Mirror screen. Older, I thought. Wrinkled. And he had a noticeable paunch.

  “Can I get you something?” he called to me, his speech distorted by a brown tobacco stick protruding from his mouth. “Some cane water?”

  I waved away the suggestion. “No, thanks.”

  “No problem,” he said. He beckoned. “Come back this way. It’s quieter.”

  I did as he asked. When I reached him, he extended his hand. “Colhua, is it?”

  “Yes. Thanks for seeing me on short notice.”

  “Looks like you walked into something,” Molpilia observed of my face.

  “Occupational hazard.”

  “I don’t envy you guys.” He took out his tobacco stick and pointed with it. “Come on, I’ll show you something.”

  He opened one of the doors, then stood aside so I could walk past him. I found myself in a sprawling, windowless room in which Molpilia had laid out Aztlan to scale, district by carefully ordered district, its biggest buildings almost as tall as we were. There was just enough space separating the districts for us to walk single file between any two of them.

  As a child, I had seen a motion picture about a monster bigger than any pyramid. It had emerged from the Eastern Ocean and torn up Aztlan in its search for its lost offspring. As I towered over Molpilia’s model of the city, I felt a lot like that monster.

  “What do you think?” the developer asked.

  “Impressive,” I said.

  “And necessary, if I’m to be effective at what I do. There are things I can see in this room—opportunities and pitfalls alike—that I can’t see when I’m out walking the streets.” He surveyed his miniature Aztlan a moment longer. Then he said, “So what can I tell you that will help you bring those cultists to justice?”

  “What if it’s not the cultists who committed those murders?” I asked.

  Molpilia smiled around his tobacco stick. “Who else would it be? I don’t want to do your job for you, Investigator, but aren’t they the ones with the motive?”

  “That’s the question,” I said. “Is there anyone you’ve offended lately? Anyone who might hate you enough to kill in order to de-sanctify a couple of your pyramids?”

  The developer puffed on his tobacco stick for a moment, considering the notion. But in the end he said, “No one comes to mind.”

  “What do the other developers think of your good fortune?”

  He shrugged. “They envy me.”

  “Enough to want to hurt your business?”

  “Absolutely,” said Molpilia, “if they thought for even half a moment that they could get away with it. But they’re too scared of guys like you to take that kind of chance.”

  “Is there anyone else who might have reason to take a shot at you? A former employee perhaps? Someone who swore to get back at you after you fired him?”

  He laughed. “You think I remember everyone I ever fired?”

  “Maybe one of them stood out. One who was a little angrier than the others.”

  He studied his tobacco stick for a while, then made a face. “I can’t think of anyone like that.”

  “A former partner, then? An old girlfriend?”

  “My old girlfriends are all well taken care of,” said Molpilia. “They have nothing to be bitter about. And I’ve never had any partners. Land of Death, I can barely stand working with myself.”

  He laughed again. I laughed a little as well.

  “There must be someone,” I said. “Everyone’s got enemies.”

  He shook his head. “Not me. At least, not the kind who would break the Emperor’s Law.”

  I couldn’t tell if he was being truthful or just obstinate. And it was getting late. I had to get to Aunt Xoco’s.

  “Give it some more thought,” I told the developer. “It may help our investigation—and save the life of the next victim.”

  “Sure,” said Molpilia. “No problem, Investigator. Have a blessed holiday.”

  I wished him the same.

  I was halfway to the rail line when I passed the window of a large flower shop. I had intended to bring Aunt Xoco a bouquet from the store down the block from her building, but a ceramic container full of trumpet-shaped mixitl caught my eye.

  I didn’t think I had ever seen mixitl that purple, or that big, or that delicate. And there in the Merchant City, prices were always better than in Aztlan proper.

  I was about to go inside and make a purchase when I saw something in the window—not something on the other side of the glass, but the reflection of something behind me, way on the other side of the street.

  It was him. The guy with the pony tail I had seen by Zolin’s street cart.

  Sometimes you get a glimpse of someone and you think it’s someone you know. Then you take a second look and realize it isn’t him or her at all. I forced myself to consider the possibility that my mind was playing that trick on me.

  But the more I studied the guy’s reflection, the more certain I was: It was definitely him.

  And he had been following me since I left the Interrogation Center. Otherwise, how would he have known I would go to see Molpilia? Yet I hadn’t caught sight of him until just that moment.

  Pretty good, I thought.

  He didn’t seem to know that I’d spotted him, but he would if I stood there long enough. So I went into the shop to buy some time if not some flowers.

  The owner approached me to see what he could sell me, but I waved him away and said, “I’m an Investigator.”

  “Of course,” he replied, his smile fading, and obediently returned to his place behind his counter.

  Keeping my back to the guy with the pony tail, just in case he crossed the street for a closer look, I took out my buzzer and called Necalli.

  “I’m half a block from Molpilia’s office on Oaxaca,” I said, “in a flower shop between Texcoco and Tiacopan. There’s a guy with a pony tail across the street. I want him taken.”

  “Done,” said Necalli.

  I looked back over my shoulder. The guy with the pony tail was still there.

  There were a couple of hundred police officers stationed in the Merchant City. It wouldn’t take more than a few minutes to put one at either end of the block.

  That is, as long as the guy in the pony tail cooperated. And it looked like he would.

  Good, I thought. I couldn’t wait to find out why he was on my tail. Was he the killer? I could only hope.

  My buzzer sounded. “Colhua,” I said, putting it to my ear.

  “Maxtla Colhua?”

  The voice was tinny, difficult to make out, and the number on my buzzer screen was untraceable. “Who’s this?” I asked.

  “Never mind that. I have information for you.”

  “Information,” I repeated.

  “That’s right. The information you need to solve your case. You want to do that, don’t you?”

  Before I could respond, I saw the owner of the floral shop point in the direction of his window. “He’s getting away,” he said.

  I whirled and saw that he was right. The guy with the pony tail was walking off down the street.


  I didn’t know what had tipped him off, or if he had just gotten nervous standing in one place for so long. But he was on his way, and I hadn’t heard from Necalli that there was anyone positioned at the end of the block to stop him.

  Cursing under my breath, I thrust my buzzer into my pouch. Then I shoved the shop door open and ran outside.

  Whoever had called would have to wait. The guy with the pony tail was my priority at the moment.

  He was still walking, obviously trying not to draw attention to himself. I didn’t have that concern so I broke into a run. A moment later, he started running too.

  I was still stiff from the night before, but that didn’t keep me from closing the gap, and more quickly than I would have thought. Obviously, the guy didn’t move as well as I remembered.

  We crossed the intersection at Tiacopan and headed for Culhuacan. I was feeling confident. Some time soon, a police officer would materialize up ahead of us, and the chase would be over.

  That is, if I didn’t catch Pony Tail on my own, which was looking more and more like a possibility.

  I was just about to bet on the latter when my prey darted to his right and vanished. An alleyway, I thought. The Merchant City had millions of them.

  Cursing beneath my breath, I ran even harder. I wasn’t going to let the guy elude me a second time. Not if there was even a chance he was the murderer.

  Maybe ten seconds after he swung into the alley, I did the same. I leaned into the turn as hard as I could, hoping to catch a glimpse of Pony Tail before he ducked through the back door of some shop.

  Which was why I didn’t see what he hit me with until it was too late.

  The next thing I knew I was lying on my back, the metallic taste of blood thick in my mouth, a trash can lid lying on the concrete beside me—and Pony Tail was making his way down the alleyway.

  My head was swimming, but I got to my feet and lurched after him. Surprisingly, I managed to catch up. He wasn’t just slow, I realized. He was hurt, maybe worse than I was.

  I grabbed him by the shoulder, spun him around. He swung at me and I ducked. Seeing my opening, I uppercut him.

  Hard.

  His head snapped back and he fell into the alley wall. I went after him, thinking I might end it then and there. But as I took another shot at him, he moved his head enough to make me miss.