Aztlan: The Last Sun

by Michael Jan Friedman

  She stopped putting out the statuettes and looked up at me, the candlelight dancing in her eyes. “Masks?”

  “Yes. Black masks. Why?”

  My aunt didn’t say anything in response. She just lowered her eyes again.

  I moved to her side and put my arm around her. “Are you all right?”

  “Fine,” she said.

  But she didn’t look fine. She looked as if she had eaten something that spoiled the week before.

  “I need to sit down,” she added, alarming me. Then she sank into the nearest chair.

  I sat next to her. “Tell me what’s wrong.”

  She drew a ragged breath. “I think I know who hurt you.”

  It seemed absurd. “How could you?”

  “I thought they got rid of it,” she said. “But maybe not. Maybe it came back.”

  “Maybe what came back?”

  “Something a bunch of Investigators created a long time ago. They called themselves the Knife Eyes. A goon squad was what they were. If you did something they thought was bad, they gave you a reason not to do it again. But not the way the Emperor’s Law gives you a reason. They did their business outside the Law.”

  “You mean they were vigilantes?”

  The Empire had known such individuals over the cycles—citizens who interpreted the Emperor’s Law their own way and doled out punishments as they saw fit. Usually they were aberrant personalities, people unable to live within the bounds of modern society.

  More often than not, they wound up in the prison house. Occasionally they wound up dead, killed by the people they were trying to punish. Either way, their careers as Lawmen didn’t end well.

  But police officers didn’t get involved in vigilanteism. They were instruments of the Emperor, after all. To make up their own Law would have been to usurp the Emperor’s authority.

  “Yes,” said Aunt Xoco, “vigilantes. Backed by someone with a hill of beans—because sometimes they needed a doctor, or a little cooperation from a judge, or something else that didn’t come cheap. But they didn’t hurt their own, Maxtla. They never hurt their own.”

  In other words, me. And yet they had.

  It was a scary thought—the idea that it was my fellow police officers under those masks the night before. Not cultists, but police.

  But I had a question: “Aunt Xoco, how do you know about this?”

  “How do I know?” she echoed. She smiled a hard smile. “I know because your father was part of it.”

  The words hit me like hammer blows. “My father . . . ?” I said with someone else’s mouth.

  My aunt shrugged her thin shoulders. “The fool.”

  We sat there for a while in silence for a while, the rainbow-colored Renewal candles guttering in their silver holder, as I tried to come to grips with the whole thing. As I tried to picture my father in a black mask, his hand stick clutched in his fist, running down a dark street in pursuit of a citizen who hadn’t broken any written Law.

  Part of a . . . what had Aunt Xoco called it? A goon squad.

  “You couldn’t be mistaken?” I asked.

  “No, Maxtla. It happened.”

  Suddenly, I began to see something I had failed to see before. “Did my father and his Knife Eyes go after First Sun?”

  My aunt nodded. “With a vengeance. They thought First Sun was taking advantage of the Emperor’s leniency—so they took matters into their own hands.”

  “Lands of the Dead . . .” I said, my mind racing.

  My father had been killed during the last Renewal by members of the First Sun cult. Not by Nochtli, according to the police reports, but by someone like him.

  High Priest Itzcoatl was still new at the time. However, he was well-versed in the city’s tradition, which went back hundreds of cycles to the first High Priest of Aztlan. So he began his journey that evening—the evening of the Fifth Unlucky Day—at the eastern bank of the River of Stars. There, with Tonatiuh setting fire to the water before him, Itzcoatl and his entourage of four honored citizens knelt and bathed their arms to the elbows in the river, renewing their vow of devotion to the sun.

  After that they were slated to walk through the city all the way to the building that housed the High Priest’s sanctum. Then Itzcoatl would come out onto his balcony, holding the obsidian knife that was the symbol of his office, and guide the people below him in their passage from one Sun to the next.

  My father was on one of the police teams walking alongside Itzcoatl and his honor guard. A couple of blocks from the river, a commotion in the crowd brought the High Priest’s procession to a halt. My father’s team and a few others waded through the crowd to clear the way.

  But my father himself hung back, following his instincts. As it turned out, the disturbance was a distraction staged by First Sun—while one of its members went after the High Priest with a knife, meaning to cut his throat.

  My father interceded and disarmed the assassin. But there was another cultist with another knife, and that one plunged his blade into my father’s neck, slicing open an artery.

  Too late, the assassins were wrestled to the ground. My father was rushed to a medical facility. Unfortunately, he died before he got there. Officially proclaimed a hero by his chief, he was cremated immediately in accordance with the Emperor’s Law, so no one in my family ever saw him again.

  Over the cycles, there would be other attempts on Itzcoatl’s life by the deranged and the discontented, but never by anyone as organized as First Sun.

  To my knowledge, no one had ever questioned the circumstances of my father’s death. He had died protecting the High Priest, end of story. But I was questioning the circumstances now.

  “If my father was one of the Knife Eyes,” I said, “First Sun may have identified him as such—and marked him for death. So maybe the High Priest wasn’t the cult’s real target that day. . .”

  “Yes,” said Aunt Xoco. “I believe that. I have believed it for some time.”

  The world lurched beneath me. I had to grab the armrest on my chair to keep from flying off. Because if my aunt was right . . .

  My father’s death hadn’t been what it had seemed. And Nochtli had been lying to me for cycles on end about First Sun’s motives that day.

  I felt my teeth grinding. “Who else beside my father?”

  “You mean in the goon squad?” asked Aunt Xoco. “Many others. But most of them would be retired by now.”

  “Who?” I insisted as gently as I could.

  She told me.

  I felt guilty about leaving my aunt in the middle of dinner, but I knew she would understand. And the gods? I hoped they would understand too. It was considered a bad thing in their eyes to do on one of the Unlucky Days what I meant to do.

  Departing Aunt Xoco’s building, I took the rail to see Yaotl. I could have called first, given him warning that I was coming. But I didn’t want him to be prepared.

  He lived in the Paynal Pyramid. It wasn’t an especially new building or an especially nice one. Most retired Investigators could have done better.

  But then, Yaotl had never been much good at managing his beans.

  The doorman, who was asleep when I walked into the lobby, woke up just in time to see me flash my bracelet. “Which apartment is Zuma Yaotl’s?” I asked.

  He told me. “Should I buzz him?”

  I shook my head. “No.”

  Since it was only the second floor, I took the stairs. Yaotl’s door was halfway down the hall. I knocked on it.

  It took Yaotl a moment to respond. “Who is it?”

  “It’s Maxtla Colhua,” I said.

  He opened the door, a look of surprise on his face. “Maxtla? What happened to your—”

  “Can I speak with you?” I asked, interrupting him.

  “Of course,” he said. “Please, come in.”

  I went inside and let him offer me a seat in his eating room. Not that it was any of my business, but the place was a mess. It looked like he hadn’t cleaned a dish in about a w
eek.

  Yaotl looked embarrassed. “I apologize, Maxtla. Since my wife passed on, I haven’t paid much attention to the place.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” I said.

  “So what can I do for you?”

  I got right to the point. “Tell me about the Knife Eyes.”

  “The Knife Eyes?” he echoed. He smiled a little. “Who are they?”

  “Don’t play games with me, Yaotl.”

  His smile got bigger. “Games? Maxtla, what are you talking about?”

  I hated the idea of pressuring a friend of my father, and an older man at that, but I had no choice. Two people had died already. Others might join them unless I brought the Knife Eyes to light.

  Not that I was sure they had committed the murder. But at this point, they were high on my list of suspects.

  “I mean you’ve got information about those murders,” I said, though I wasn’t sure of that at all, “and I’m not going to stop until I get it. Isn’t that how an investigator operates?”

  “I don’t remember,” Yaotl said, his smile fading. “It’s been a long time since I conducted an investigation.” In other words, I’m an old man. Have some respect.

  “The Knife Eyes,” I insisted. “There’s someone behind them. Someone with a pile of beans.” That’s what Aunt Xoco had said, and it was as good a place to start as any. “I want to know who it is.”

  Yaotl looked away, but not before I had seen in his eyes that he knew what I was talking about.

  “Come on,” I said. “You know I’ll find out eventually, with or without you. But if you’re obstructing justice, you’ll be sent to prison, and they don’t exactly welcome Investigators there with open arms.”

  His throat apple bobbed up and down. “Your father wouldn’t have done this to me, Maxtla.”

  “My father isn’t here now,” I said. “I am.”

  He spat on the floor. Then he looked up at me with red-rimmed eyes, eyes full of helplessness and shame, and told me who was funding the Knife Eyes.

  I had to think, and I did so on the way home, with the splendor of the illuminated city unfolding like an immense, exotic flower on either side of my rail carriage.

  Thanks to Yaotl, I had a handle on the Knife Eyes, as well as the bean man behind them. And a job to do, as a result.

  But I had to tread carefully. If some of my fellow Investigators were Knife Eyes, I couldn’t let them know I was onto them.

  At least not yet.

  Before I left Yaotl’s place, I had asked him to swear on my father’s ashes that he wouldn’t tell anyone what he had revealed to me. He didn’t hesitate for a moment. After all, it was in his interest as well as mine for him to keep his mouth shut. The Knife Eyes wouldn’t look kindly on the man who had ratted them out.

  The only piece I couldn’t find a fit for was Olintecke, who was neither a police officer nor a Knife Eye but was following me nonetheless. Was it possible that his motivation had nothing to do with the murders?

  That seemed like a pretty big coincidence—too big for me to swallow. Olintecke was a fanatic, a member of the cult that had killed my father. It wasn’t much of a stretch to see him killing Patli and Mazatl.

  It looked like I’d have to find Olintecke before I could get a handle on what he was up to. But Xiuh had been my only lead in that regard, and he had proven useless to me.

  That night, after I finally got to sleep, I had a dream. In it, the sun lurched out of the sky like a man drunk on a gourd full of octli, and crashed into Aztlan. The pyramids burned in braided plumes of fire and black smoke, and the people shriveled like raisins and died.

  It was so real that I woke up gasping for breath, feeling as if I were inhaling flames. I padded into the kitchen, got some water out of my cold cabinet, and drank until I quenched the infernos in my throat and in my mind. Only then did I look outside and see that it was still black as death out.

  Unfortunately I couldn’t sleep after that, so I sat by my window and waited for Tonatiuh to come up over the city. This time, he didn’t crash. He topped the horizon slowly and majestically, in no hurry to begin the last day of his reign.

  I didn’t want the day to go quickly either. Not while I had yet to answer what I needed to answer.

  The ride into work was quiet. Nobody in the rail carriage spoke. It felt like the calm before the storm.

  When I got to work, I saw Necalli sitting at his desk. He was nothing if not punctual.

  “Chief?” I said, sticking my nose into his office.

  He looked up at me from his monitor. “Yes?”

  “Can I speak to you for a moment?”

  He shrugged. “Why not?”

  I went in and closed the door behind me. Then I sat down.

  “So?” he asked.

  I told him everything I knew about the Knife Eyes.

  About Yaotl. About the names he had given me, including that of the bean man backing the organization. And about my father. The only one I left out of the story was my aunt. If anything happened, I didn’t want her involved.

  Then I sat back and watched Necalli’s reaction. Closely.

  “I’d heard about this kind of thing,” he said, “but I thought it had died a long time ago.”

  “Apparently not.”

  “I’ll conduct an investigation,” he promised.

  “Thanks,” I said. “In the meantime, I’ll be making an arrest.”

  “I figured.” His eyes narrowed. “You know, you’re looking at me funny, Colhua. You think I’m part of this thing?”

  “It’s not outside the realm of possibility. So are you?”

  “If I tell you I’m not, are you going to believe me?”

  “Not necessarily.”

  “So let’s see what happens.”

  “All right.” As if I had a choice in the matter.

  Lands of the Dead, I had to trust somebody.

  Chapter Nine

  This time, I didn’t call ahead to speak with Molpilia. I just walked in and told his receptionist I wanted to see him.

  “Is he expecting you?”

  “No,” I said. “I’m on Imperial business.”

  “I’ll let him know you’re here,” she said. “Won’t you have a seat?”

  “It’s all right,” I said, though I’d be giving up the lizard-hide chair. “I’ll stand.”

  A couple of minutes later, someone came out to see me. But it wasn’t Molpilia. Not unless he had suddenly grown a couple of knuckles in height, gotten a lot brawnier, and shed a dozen cycles.

  “What is this about?” asked the guy who had come out in Molpilia’s place.

  The funny thing was that I knew him.

  He had been an Investigator, like me. But unlike me, he had brought shame to his bracelet a couple of cycles ago. I didn’t remember the details, but it had something to do with missing evidence.

  And now he was working for the developer.

  “That’s between the Empire and Lolco Molpilia,” I said.

  “I represent Lolco Molpilia,” the fellow who had been an Investigator maintained.

  “Well,” I said, “I’m glad to see you’re coming up in the world. But I’m not here to see Molpilia’s representative. So either go in and get him or I’ll do it myself.”

  Just then, Molpilia emerged after all.

  As usual, he had a tobacco stick in his mouth. “It’s all right,” he told his man. “The Investigator is just doing his job.”

  The guy stood there a moment longer, just to show me that he could. Then he stepped aside.

  “You want me,” the developer told me, “you’ve got me.”

  “Good,” I said, as I opened my pouch and removed the rope-manacles from it. “Hold your hands out.”

  The former Investigator took a step between us, but Molpilia put his hand on the fellow’s shoulder. “I’m sure this is a mistake.” He eyed me. “But I’ll go along with it. After all, I’m a law-abiding subject of the Empire.”

  He put his tobacco stick in a
receptacle on his receptionist’s counter. Then he held out his hands and I bound his wrists.

  “Care to tell me the charge?” the developer asked.

  “All in good time,” I said.

  Molpilia looked down at the manacles for a moment, then looked up at me and smiled. “A law-abiding subject, Colhua, just like you. Just like anyone.”

  “Just like anyone,” I said, “who beats up his fellow subjects. Or more accurately, pays others to do it.”

  And maybe kills a couple of people into the bargain, I added inwardly. Though that might be a little harder to prove.

  The developer’s forehead creased. “That’s a serious accusation. Can you back it up?”

  “I guess we’ll find out,” I said. “Let’s go.”

  “I’ll accompany you,” said the former Investigator.

  “That won’t be necessary,” I told him.

  Molpilia’s man looked to his employer. “No need for concern,” said the developer. “I’m sure the Investigator will take good care of me.”

  My only response was to take his arm and guide him in the direction of the lift. He didn’t say anything the whole way down. All he did was look straight ahead, which was fine with me.

  The auto-carriage that had brought me to Molpilia’s building was still waiting outside. I put him in the back, then sat down beside him.

  “Detainment Facility,” I told the driver, an officer from District Fourteen.

  “Whatever you say,” he assured me.

  I was glad that Necalli had gotten me the carriage. It was a little slower than the rail lines but no suspect had ever escaped from an auto-carriage. Also, it was a lot more comfortable.

  As we pulled away from the curb and joined a couple of other southbound vehicles, Molpilia ended his silence. “All right,” he said. “I support the efforts of the Knife Eyes. And in return, they support mine.”

  “An equitable arrangement,” I said. “So it was your idea for them to attack me in that tunnel?”

  He nodded. “I wanted you to think it was the cultists so you’d finally go after them.”

  “And forget about the real murderers—you and the Knife Eyes.”

  Molpilia’s face reddened. “I’ve never asked anyone to kill, Colhua. You hear me? That’s not the way it works.”