Aztlan: Investigator for the Empire
Date: 2022-06-30 00:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Literature & Fiction; Mystery; Thriller & Suspense; Mystery; Science Fiction & Fantasy; Police Procedurals; Science Fiction; Alternative History; Alternate History
Description: Continuing the adventures of Maxtla Colhua, gritty Investigator for a 21st-century Aztec Empire, as he hunts down those who disturb the Emperor's peace!
Publisher: Amazon Digital Services LLC - Kdp

MICHAEL JAN FRIEDMAN

Copyright © 2012 by Michael Jan Friedman Cover and design by Aaron Rosenberg All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information contact Crazy 8 Press at the official Crazy 8 website: www.crazy8press.com First edition

Aztec Names: A Pronunciation Key
a as in father e as in net
i as in police o as in note
u as in flute
au as in flautist ai like the first e in eye c hard before a, o, or u and soft before e or i ch as in choose cu like the qu in queen h as in hello
hu like the w in way l as in lose
m as in make
n as in nose
p as in pie
qu like the k in kite t as in tell
tl like the ll in llama tz like the ts in cats x like the sh in shell y as in you
z like the s in sun

Chapter One

It was the End of the World.

It was the Last Sun, the Final Days. It was, as the commentators on the Mirror liked to put it, The Millennium.

The Calendar of a Thousand Cycles was grinding to a halt. Time itself was faltering like a wounded jaguar, bleeding out its life’s blood into the rich, dark earth of the jungle, seeking a cool, shaded place to lay its head down and expire.

And all my aunt could talk about, in the guttering light of her rainbow-colored Renewal candles, was her heartburn.

“If only I could get some nice, dark chocolate,” she said, placing tiny ceramic statuettes of the gods around her old, tarnished silver candle-holder, each little god a riot of turquoise and red ocher and amber hues. She slid me a sideways glance. “Chocolate would take care of my heartburn, Maxtla.”

My aunt, a slender, pinch-cheeked woman with gray streaks in her long, braided hair, never asked for anything directly. It was always “If only” and “How I would love,” never “Can I have?”

Standing over by the curtains, I smiled to myself. “Aunt Xoco,” I said, as if I were the elder and she the younger, “I’m pretty sure that chocolate causes heartburn, if it does anything at all.”

“Maybe so, when it comes to other people,” she allowed, standing back to consider the way she had distributed the statuettes. “For me, it works.”

“Even if there were some medical support for what you’re saying, you know that—”

“Chocolate is off-limits to us,” she said, cutting me off.

“Well,” I said, “yes.”

She dismissed my objection with a flip of her bony wrist. It jangled her clutch of antique silver bracelets, which had belonged to her mother and her mother’s mother. “And yet people get their hands on it, don’t they? Somehow, Maxtla, they get their hands on it.”

What she said was true. There was a thriving black market for the stuff, now more than ever before. But then, a pocketful of chocolate was no longer the death sentence it had been in ancient days.

“And you want me,” I asked, “an officer of the Empire, to acquire this chocolate for you? How would it look for someone in my position to break the Emperor’s Law?”

She snorted. “You’re too obedient, Maxtla.”

“Too obedient? How is that possible?” I gibed.

Instead of answering, Aunt Xoco closed her eyes and touched her heart in obeisance to Huitzilopochtli, Tonatiuh, and Chantico, just as she had at holiday dinner the cycle before and the cycle before that, all the way back to the time of my earliest memories. The candle light picked out the hollows in her face, making her look like some other woman entirely.

Finally, she opened her eyes, signaling that she had completed her devotion. “In my day,” she said, “officers of the Empire overlooked such technicalities as the Chocolate Law. They did whatever they could for those they loved.”

“Things were looser then,” I pointed out. At least in some ways.

She harrumphed. “Looser.” Then she added, “Close the curtains,” and vanished into the kitchen, which was situated right alongside the eating room.

I smiled again. Then I turned to my aunt’s big, north-facing window. A vast panoply of red-gold lights rolled away from me in every direction across the city’s carefully ordered, geometrically shaped districts, sparking fiery reflections in a thousand still pools and a thousand narrow canals, interrupted here and there only by the splendid, silver web of Aztlan’s rail lines.

The River of Stars, which bisected the city, wasn’t visible from this angle. But that too, would be ablaze with reflected light, a gargantuan, scaled serpent slithering silently under and alongside the walkways of man.

Normally, those walkways would be full of people, millions of them, most of them on their way home from work. The food markets would be full, the octli vendors busy, the taverns packed with young men and women. But not that night.

That night, not just in Aztlan but everywhere across the vast Empire of Mexica, from the Bay of Ice in the far north to the Land of Fire in the distant south, every business was closed. The only doors that were open were the doors of fathers and mothers, grandfathers and grandmothers, aunts and uncles. It was a night for family, for solemnity, for gratitude.

And adult men all across the Empire would be doing exactly what I was doing—pulling closed white linen curtains against the uncertainties of the world, asking the gods to cup our kin in their divine hands the way we might cup a match against a savage wind.

That night—on the first of the Five Unlucky Days that preceded the Fire Renewal—there were no nobles, no commoners, no workers, no chiefs. No distinctions whatsoever. Or so it was said.

There were only the People. And the People, for the time being, were at peace.

By the Fifth Day, it would be an entirely different story. Starting early that morning, Aztlan would lose its mind. There would be fires in inconvenient places, and people doing odd things in the streets, and crimes of passion.

All kinds of passion. And all kinds of crimes, including the worst of them.

But such depravities were to be expected when a bundle of cycles came to an end, when a Fire Renewal burned away the veneer of civilization and exposed the painted, pierced, howling wild men in us. Because no matter how far the Empire advanced, no matter how sophisticated we became, we never knew in what light the gods would see us when our time came, or—having seen us—what they would decide to do with us.

And it was not knowing that drove us crazy.

We would be driven to this madness by any Fire Renewal. But this one was different. It was, as I’ve mentioned, the End of the World.

When Aunt Xoco came out of the kitchen, it was with a platter in each hand—one piled with spiced corn cakes, the other full of bulging vegetable bundles.

“We’ve always had laws,” she said, resuming our conversation as if it had never been interrupted. She set the plates down around the statuettes. “You know that, Maxtla. And there has always been a risk involved in breaking them.”

I was about to respond when my aunt left me again. She returned with a bowl of deep-green limes from Texcoco and a decorated gourd full of newly distilled octli. I knew about the limes and the octli because I had bought them on my way there.

This time I actually got a couple of words out before she held up a hand, silencing me. “The food, Maxtla. It’s hot now.”

A third time, she retreated into the kitchen. When she emerged, she was carrying a mound of grilled gopher and a poached water snake. The aroma should have been illegal, like chocolate.

Placing the plates on the pitted wooden surface of the table, Aunt Xoco surveyed the landscape of delicacies for a moment. It was more food than we could possibly eat. But that was the way my aunt liked to cook—as if she were feeding not only us but every last one of our ancestors.

“Sit,” she said at last.

I pulled out a chair and sat.

As she took the seat opposite mine, she looked like she had every intention of continuing our conversation. I, on the other hand, wanted to change its direction.

“Now that I think about it,” I said, as I picked up my knife and fork, “chocolate is supposed to be good for diarrhea. Is that the problem, Aunt Xoco?”

“Please,” she said, holding up a blue-veined hand and rolling her lidded eyes, “must we talk about such things while we’re eating holiday food?”

The eye rolling reminded me of my father. He had been a lot broader than my aunt, a strong man for his modest height, but no one would ever have missed the fact that they were brother and sister. My father had the same mannerisms as Aunt Xoco, the same facial expressions, the same dark eyes and high cheekbones.

I, on the other hand, took after my mother’s side of the family. I was taller than most men, longer of leg, and my eyes were brown rather than black. That had always bothered my father—the fact that I didn’t look like him. But he left his imprint on me all the same.

“No,” I agreed, “we can avoid such topics.”

I sliced off a dark, juicy piece of gopher meat. Then I laid it on my orange, blue, and white holiday plate, obscuring the likeness of medicine-bringer Patecatl, Aunt Xoco’s birth-god.

The gopher meat was rubbed with an assortment of spices, the names of which my aunt would not have divulged on pain of death. It melted in the mouth the way the sun melted in the Western Ocean.

“You approve?” she asked, taking some white, flaky water snake for herself.

“As always,” I said.

“Then why don’t you come for meals more often?” She indicated the otherwise unpopulated holiday table. “It’s not as if I’ve got so many to cook for that there’s no room for you.”

It was an old complaint. As ever, I did my best not to hurt her feelings. “You know that investigators keep crazy hours, and seldom take meals at reasonable times.”

“Your father kept such hours,” she reminded me, “and yet he seemed to find time to eat my food. Even after he was married to your mother, he came here for a meal now and then. Especially at . . .” Her voice broke a little, and she took a moment to collect herself. “Especially at Renewal Time.”

I felt a stone in my throat as well. Placing my hand over my aunt’s, I waited for the stone to go away.

“I miss him too,” I said finally, as gently as I could.

“At least,” she said, “he died a hero.”

“Yes,” I said, “at least that.”

My heart beat once, twice. The drapes fluttered around the open window and the candles danced in the breeze.

“Anyway,” I said to my aunt, again trying to change the subject, “I get some time off after the holiday. What if I were to take you down to the Gulf for a couple of days? They’ll be opening the Western Markets.”

Aunt Xoco’s eyes narrowed to arrow points. “I’m sure that’s what you want to do with your time off—drag an old lady around and look at sea shells.”

“First of all, you’re not an old lady. You’re a lovely, vibrant woman with an eye for quality. Who else would I want to take to the Western Markets?”

“Well,” she said, ignoring my compliment, “someone in the Merchant City, for starters.”

I pretended to double over in pain. “Now that was a low blow.”

“She was a beautiful girl, Maxtla. You should have pursued her. You still can.”

“Beautiful, yes,” I conceded. “But too flashy. And too ambitious.”

“You were ambitious once,” said my aunt.

“Once.” I felt the old bitterness rising in me and tamped down on it. After all, this was a holiday dinner. “Now I’m an officer of the Empire,” I said genially. “I uphold our traditions. I don’t trample them to gather a few more beans.”

Aunt Xoco poured herself some octli, then offered me the gourd. “Gathering beans is a tradition too, Nephew.”

So it was. The Merchant City had been around for five hundred cycles. So what was my problem?

I picked up the gourd and poured out a cup of my own. Then I took one of the limes, cut it in two, and squeezed half of it into my octli. “Maybe it wasn’t the bean-gathering,” I allowed. “Maybe it was just the girl.”

My aunt sighed. “Always so picky. How am I going to fill this table with little ones if you insist on imposing such impossible standards?”

I shrugged. “All I require is that she be like you, Aunt Xoco. Is that so much to ask?”

She pressed her lips together to keep from laughing, but it didn’t work. And as she began to laugh, her face turning a dark red, I laughed as well.

“Gods,” she said as she attempted to regain her composure, “we haven’t even had the octli yet!”

That made us laugh some more.

We might still have been laughing if my radio hadn’t buzzed. Fishing it out of my pouch, I activated it and said, “Colhua.”

It was my chief, Necalli. There was no mistaking the gravel in his voice.

“Sorry,” he said, “but something’s come up.” Unfortunately, I knew what kind of something he meant. “I want you to take the lead.”

“I’m off-duty,” I said hopefully.

“Not anymore,” he told me, making it clear there was no room for negotiation.

It had been the same way with my father, more times than I could count. I put the radio back in my pouch and looked at Aunt Xoco.

She shook her head, doing her best to hide her disappointment. “Always during the Unlucky Days. Can’t they wait until after the Renewal to kill each other?”

I felt as if someone had slipped a knife between my ribs. After all the cooking she had done, for her to eat alone . . . and yet, what could I do? I was an Investigator.

“I guess they can’t,” I said.

I got up, came around the table, and drew her up out of her chair. Then I hugged her. She was little in my arms, littler every cycle.

“Go,” she said finally, pushing me away. “Catch the criminals, Maxtla. Make me proud.”

“I will,” I assured her.

“See you tomorrow, then. By the way, I’m making your favorite.”

“Venison?” I asked, excited already.

“That’s tomorrow,” she said for emphasis, as if I might not show up if she didn’t entice me with food. She saw me to the door of her apartment. “And if you change your mind, Maxtla, remember . . .”

“Yes?” I said.

She pulled my head down and whispered in my ear: “Dark chocolate.”

The Centeotl Pyramid sat by the River of Stars where it made a wide, lazy turn through the shabbier parts of District Seven.

Chimalma Milin, a small woman with a child’s face, was a security guard on the night shift at the pyramid. When I arrived, she was sitting on one of the redwood benches in the building’s huge, black lobby, as pale as a maize cake in the light of the partially completed ceiling grid. Her chief, a heavyset man, was standing next to her, trying to maintain an air of business-as-usual when what had happened that evening was very definitely unusual.

Either he or someone else had given Milin a cup of cane water. She was clutching it with both hands, the way a drowning woman clutches a lifeline.

I nodded to her superior, then knelt beside her. “My name is Maxtla Colhua,” I said. “I’m an Investigator for the Empire.”

Milin nodded, but didn’t look up at me. “You want to know what happened.”

“Yes.”

She drew a ragged breath, still a little sour-smelling from all the vomiting she must have done. “I was on the north side of the property, making sure the crazies hadn’t come back.”

“The crazies,” I repeated. “You mean the cultists?”

Milin nodded. “The cultists.”

For the last moon or more, a cult of religious fanatics who called themselves Ancient Light had marched in a single line around the pyramid site, singing for the benefit of anyone who would listen that the erection of the building was an offense against the gods. No one had stopped them. After all, protests were legal in the Empire, even if the protestors in question had a screw loose.

Then, one night, some of the protestors tried to burrow under the fence and desecrate the pyramid so it couldn’t be sanctified. Fortunately, one of Milin’s fellow guards spotted them and called the authorities. I had seen the story on the Mirror.

The sanctification ceremony, scheduled for the next day, began on time nonetheless. As soon as the High Priest arrived, the cultists were forced to back up out of respect for his presence. A little while later, the rites were completed without incident.

They were more than a nod to old Fire Renewal traditions. Tenants liked to be able to say they had taken space in a sanctified building. It was considered bad luck to visit with people whose premises hadn’t been sanctified.

“I saw a yellow light,” Milin continued, “about halfway between the pyramid and the fence. It was small, close to the ground, and it flickered every time the breeze came up. Like a candle. I approached it to see what was going on.”

She stopped talking, her eyes wide. It seemed she was stuck on that moment.

“Then what?” I asked, hoping to get her going again.

Milin frowned. “I saw a man. He was lying on the ground next to the candle as if he were sleeping. I wondered why someone would have broken into the site just to take a nap, and also why he would have brought a candle with him. Drunk, I decided. Too much octli. What else could it be?

“I called out to him, hoping he would wake up. But he didn’t. I should have buzzed for help then, but I thought I could handle the problem on my own. After all, he looked harmless. So I moved closer. It wasn’t until I was almost next to him that I saw—”

She doubled over and started to gag. I put my hand on her shoulder and waited until she regained control of herself.

“His chest,” she said, her voice little more than a whisper now, “was cracked open. Like a crab shell. And the candle. . .it wasn’t next to him, as I had thought. It was inside him. Someone had lit it and planted it in his chest.”

Lovely, I thought.

I exchanged glances with her chief. “Unfortunate,” he said, knowing how big an understatement it was.

“Yes,” I agreed.

In as kindly a fashion as I could manage, I obtained Milin’s assurance that she would remain on the premises for a while. Then I got up and went to see the victim for myself.

Centeotl, which was slated to open its doors in a few days, was a cascade of gaudy golden light on two flanks—the side that faced east and the side that faced south. But the northern and western quadrants were still dark, leaving the grounds in those directions deep in shadow.

There wasn’t any starlight, either. Just a talon moon, barely visible through the overcast of the sky.

Of course, there were other pyramids nearby—Amimitl to the east, Tonantzin to the west, and Xilonen just across the river—and they were lit up, as usual. But I couldn’t see anything except the very tops of them, thanks to the landscape of smaller, more modestly illuminated buildings that rose between us.

So it wasn’t easy to make out the two police officers standing there beside the body, a thousand hands from the base of the pyramid. In fact, if I hadn’t already known they were there, I might have missed them.

But I knew to look for the yellow tunic of the Seventh District that they would be wearing over their white police shirts. After all, an Investigator had to train for two cycles with a district police force, and for those two cycles I had worn a yellow tunic.

As I approached the officers, I saw that I knew them. Or rather, I knew their faces. But they looked paler than I remembered.

“Investigator,” said the taller of of them.

“May the gods smile on you,” I said.

“If the gods were in a mood to smile,” the officer said, “they would have saved this for someone else’s shift.”

Having been an Investigator for a while, I knew better than to position myself downwind. Corpses always smelled terrible, and this one smelled worse than most.

I took my light out of my pouch, hunkered down beside the victim, and waved away some of the flies circling above him. There were dozens of them. But then, they knew a feast when they saw one.

The candle had gone out, but everything else was as Milin had described it. The victim’s chest had been split wide open as if with an axe. His splintered, ghostly-white ribs protruded from the mess, giving testimony to the force of the blow.

I played my light inside him.

“He’s got no heart,” said the shorter of the officers.

He was right. The victim’s heart was missing. There was an island of ghostly white wax in its place, floating in a sea of black, crusted blood.

In ancient days, the sun priests had dragged themselves to the tops of stone pyramids, leading human sacrifices who were too drunk to know what was happening, and up there, so close to heaven they could almost touch it, they had ripped open the chests of their victims and torn their hearts out to honor the gods. As far as I knew, it wasn’t ancient days anymore.

Unfortunately, someone hadn’t gotten the news.

I studied the dead man’s expression, which was a remarkably calm one, especially in contrast with the bloody ruin below it. The beam from my pocket light glinted in his eyes. Now that I was close to his face, I could smell the octli on his breath among all the other smells.

If he had been drunk, it would have made him that much easier to kill. But why this way—unless it meant something to somebody?

I felt a breeze, the same warm one that had lifted my aunt’s curtains, hard as it was to believe. Aunt Xoco and her statuettes seemed a million worlds away.

“Any identification?” I asked the officers behind me.

“Nothing,” said the shorter one.

“Murder weapon? Other evidence?”

“Not yet.”

“You think it’s those cultists?” asked the taller one.

“I don’t know,” I said. But by the gods, I was going to find out.

Chapter Two

After the fence-burrowing incident, the police had made sure to create a file on the cultists. It contained thirty-six names. I ordered their owners picked up without exception.

Each one of them had a long, red and green image of Quetzalcoatl, the Feathered Serpent, tattooed on his or her forearm, so they wouldn’t be difficult to identify.

Thirty-three of them were found sleeping, some with each other, in a Fourth Sun pyramid in District Five. Two more were attending mourning vigils at the homes of relatives. The most elusive of them was sitting in an all-night motion picture theater in the Merchant City, well into his third bag of cayenne popcorn.

By dawn, we had every last one of them packed into the lobby of the City Interrogation Center, a squat, black building with turquoise inlay that sat squarely in the heart of Aztlan. We had only twelve interrogation cells, including the eight below ground, so we had officers shuttling the cultists from the lobby to the cells and back again non-stop.

In accordance with the Emperor’s New Law, we told them we were investigating a murder, but we didn’t share any of the details. Naturally, they claimed to a man—and a woman—that they were innocent. They only sacrificed animals, they said, not people.

It was their right to say whatever they wanted. It was ours, as Investigators, to see if we could wring a different truth from them.

As I questioned one tattooed cultist after another, their voices gradually merging into a single shrill chorus in my head, I tried not to remember how my father had died. I was an Investigator, after all. There was no room in my work for personal feelings.

Early in the morning, seven other people appeared, identifying themselves as more of the cultists. When I got the word, I emerged from the depths of the Interrogation Center and had the newcomers arrested as well.

It was at that juncture, as they were discovering the inadvisability of their showing up, that I heard someone call my name.

“Maxtla . . . ?”

It was a female voice. A really nice one.

I turned in response. At first, I didn’t recognize the cultist standing in front of me there in the brightly lit lobby. She was too out of context. Then my brain clicked and I said, “Eren . . . ?”

She was drawn, weary-looking. It was understandable. She had dragged herself out of bed in the middle of the night.

But in spite of all that, she was beautiful. Her eyes were black and almond-shaped, her lips full, her chin small and pointed. Altogether, a very appealing combination. It was the look against which I had measured other women my entire adult life.

But then, I had grown up with Erendira Nacatl—Eren for short. She was, incidentally, the only girl who had ever punched me in the face. But that hadn’t stopped me from from developing a crush on her that lasted all the way through first school and well into second.

When I was fifteen, she and her family had moved to the capital. It was a black day, if I remembered correctly. Dark, stormy. Twists of rain in the streets.

I hadn’t seen her since.

“I heard you had become an Investigator,” she said, her voice like pipe music. I had forgotten how much I loved that voice. “Congratulations, Max.”

I was pretty sure I heard a hint of irony in that word, but I ignored it. “What are you doing with these people?” I asked, indicating the other cultists with a gesture.

“You sound angry,” she said.

“I have reason.”

She tilted her head, eyes narrowing. It was an expression I had seen many times before. “Reason . . . ?”

“My father,” I said.

Then she got it, and her expression softened. “Maxtla, I cried when that happened. You know that. I cried as if he were my own father. But we’re not like the people who killed him, not even a little.”

“I heard,” I said. “You only kill animals.”

Her brows came together over the bridge of her perfectly chiseled nose. “You make it sound like we go around destroying them whenever and however we feel like it. That’s not the way it is. We do it only at the prescribed times and in the prescribed ways, and only for the right reasons.”

“To honor the gods,” I said. I glanced at her tattoo, which was all too visible on her bare forearm. “I’m sure the gods are very appreciative.”

“You mock them?” she asked.

“I have some doubts that they want animal sacrifices. This is the Fifth Sun, after all.”

“That’s right,” she said. “I forgot. The gods don’t have the same place in the world, not anymore. Now they’re only fit to decorate cereal boxes and the walls of ball court arenas, and street signs, and children’s toys.”

There was fire in her eyes, a fire I used to love. It made it hard to ignore what she was saying.

“They’re no longer the gods of old, Maxtla, the ones who demanded our grandfathers’ awe and devotion. The priests you protect have let them fall into disrepute. But we—the people you see assembled here in your interrogation center—we want to restore the gods’ glory. We want to give them back their power.”

I nodded. “Of course you do. That’s why you try to desecrate the pyramids erected in their honor.”

“The pyramids,” Eren spat, throwing away all pretense of polite debate, “are erected so their builders can honor their money pouches. The gods have nothing to do with it.”

I smiled. “That’s how you see it.”

“That’s how anyone would see it,” she insisted, “if he even once bothered to open his eyes.”

I was about to reply when I felt a meaty hand on my shoulder. “Is there a problem, Investigator?”

I turned and looked into the square-jawed face of Eloxo Necalli, Chief Investigator for the Fourth Sector. A short, stocky man with bowed legs and the thickest forearms in the Empire, Necalli prided himself on protecting his employees from the bureaucratic abuses of the higher-ups. The only question, of course, was who would protect us from Necalli’s abuses.

I shook my head from side to side. “No problem at all.”

“That’s good,” said Necalli. He shot a look at Eren. “I like it to be nice and peaceful here. A placid environment helps us serve the public more efficiently.”

Eren frowned at him, but didn’t hit back. Seemingly satisfied, he moved away.

“Serve the public, Maxtla,” Eren said, watching Necalli go. She turned back to me. “In your way. And I’ll do the same in mine.”

Then she left me so she could stand in solidarity with the other cultists. Obviously, she found their company less objectionable than that of an old friend.

I should have gone back to an interrogation cell and gotten on with my work. But I didn’t. I stood there staring at Eren, old feelings rising to the surface like bubbles in a hot, spicy stew.

Until I heard a voice in my ear. It belonged to Quetzalli, one of the female Investigators.

“Don’t get drawn into an argument with them,” she told me. “They’ll talk you blind. They’re good at that.”

I nodded. “So they are.”

“Go finish your interrogations,” she told me. “File your reports. Go home.”

I assured Quetzalli that I would do that. After all, it was long into the night.

With a last glance at Eren, I returned to the interrogation cell where I had been working, thinking I had liked her better when all she had done was punch me in the face.

I went home eventually, got some sleep, and woke up in the middle of the day, the golden disc of Tonatiuh streaming through the window into my eyes. For a moment, I thought I had played a ball game in the Arena the night before. Why else would I be waking up at such an odd time of day? Then my head cleared and I remembered.

I didn’t play in the Arena anymore. I was an Investigator.

I sat down at my monitor to see if there was anything on the Mirror about Ancient Light. There was—live coverage, in fact. The cultists were demonstrating at one of the other newly erected pyramids, way on the other side of Aztlan, coiling around the sun-painted building the way a snake coils around a fat, huffed-up toad. I tried to spot Eren among them but I couldn’t, so I turned off the monitor.

I was used to eating my morning meal at home but it wasn’t morning anymore, and I didn’t feel like eating honey tamales. So instead I got off the rail line halfway to work, at Xipe Totec Street, and walked the block and a half past the octli shops to One-Eyed Zolin’s street cart.

Even this early in the day, there was a line of people. Naturally, they were all standing downwind of the cart.

For me, there were more convenient places to pick up a meal in Aztlan. But I was a sucker for Zolin’s deep-fried salamander, and had been for a long time. It had gotten to the point where I couldn’t let two days go by without getting off the rail line at Xipe Totec Street.

And, of course, I wasn’t the only one.

Had Zolin been serving food and nothing else, the line would have moved a lot more quickly. But his wit, as well-seasoned as his maize batter, was part of the experience. So the line crawled and Tonatiuh climbed up the sky.

Finally, it was my turn. “My friend Zolin,” I said.

“It’s a blessed day when I get a visit from a Colhua,” he replied, his one good eye twinkling in the sunlight.

“You flatter me,” I said, savoring the smell of the batter frying in hot oil. “Business is good, apparently.”

“Thriving, as always. That is why I live in the Twenty-third District, among the priests and the champions of the ball court. Soon I will be so rich they will make me a nobleman.”

I laughed, though—technically—he had committed an offense against the Empire. Citizens were forbidden to mention the noble caste in public.

“That’s good to hear,” I said.

He leaned closer to me. “Don’t worry. When I own the Eagles, which will be any day now, I will make sure you have a seat overlooking the corridor. A place of honor.”

“You’re too kind,” I said.

“Of course, for me to become that rich my customers must be very hungry. Are you hungry, Colhua?”

“As famished,” I said, “as if I had never eaten a bite in my entire life.”

“Then you have come to the right place.”

I ordered two fried salamanders, watched him pull them out of the hot oil as deftly as if both his eyes worked perfectly, and held the waxed-paper bag for him to fill. Then I paid him, wished him well with his aspirations to nobility—such a wish also being an offense against the Empire, strictly speaking—and made my way back to the rail line.

I ate in the carriage, as people do. By the time I got back to the interrogation center, the cultists had all been released. That was fine with me. I had more important things to do than grill people who knew less than I did about the murder at Centeotl.

It took me several hours of hunting on the city’s Mirror system, but I finally found a match for the corpse’s fingerprints. Normally, it would have taken a fraction of that time to identify someone. But a couple of cycles earlier, it seemed, the deceased had slipped off the face of the Earth.

In Aztlan, there’s a job for everyone. That is, for everyone who wants to work. For reasons difficult to fathom, an otherwise sane and coherent person sometimes chooses not to do so.

Such people lose their possessions because they can’t pay the taxes on them. They lose their homes because they stop paying rent to the Empire. Their families, appalled at their lack of industry, eventually turn their backs on them.

In effect, these individuals cease to be subjects of the Emperor. They walk the streets like ghosts, untracked and unaccounted for, without privileges or responsibilities. For all intents and purposes, they are invisible.

Yaretzi Patli was such a person.

He hadn’t always been that way. According to our files, he was forty-two cycles old when he gave up his job as a sandal salesman in District Twenty. He was allowed to live in his apartment for another two months before his landlord, obviously a patient man, finally kicked him out.

Patli had only one blemish on his record. We had booked him about ten cycles earlier for gambling illegally in District Twelve—in other words, in an establishment that wasn’t sanctioned by any of the noble families.

That was it, though. No other missteps. And no obvious reason for anyone to want to gut him and light a candle inside him.

I called up the pictures we had taken of the corpse before it was removed from Centeotl. Once again, I was struck by the victim’s expression—so calm, so accepting.

I leaned back in my chair, closed my eyes, and massaged the bridge of my nose. My gut told me there was more to this atrocity than met the eyes. I was just missing it.

I was so focused on Yaretzi Patli, I didn’t hear the sound of approaching footsteps on the marble floor until they were almost on top of me. But even with my eyes closed, I could tell to whom they belonged. There was only one person in my office who chewed gum laced with cinnamon.

“Takun,” I said, “what are you doing here? Scavenging for raw meat?”

He chuckled, rasping like a saw cutting through pinewood. “You look tired, Colhua. Why don’t you take a nap?”

Takun wasn’t charming—or particularly hygienic, for that matter—but he got the job done. That made him worthy of respect in my estimate, and I wasn’t alone in that regard.

“I would,” I said, “if I thought you could pick up the slack. But as we all know, you can’t locate your ass with both hands and a map.”

Takun pointed to my screen with a thick forefinger. “The guy is dead, gods look kindly on us. That’s not going to change no matter how long you stare at him.”

“I’m just trying to figure out why someone killed him. Last time I looked, that was my job.”

“You’re wasting your time,” Takun told me. “The cultists did it. There’s no question.”

I looked back over my shoulder at him. “What makes you so sure?”

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.”

“An event we’re all looking forward to,” said the commentator.

“No one more than I,” said Molpilia.

Bastard, I thought.

It would have been lovely if catching the killer were that easy. But it wasn’t. The cultists weren’t the ones who had killed Patli no matter how many programs Molpilia paid for.

The next morning I got to the office early, so early that the sky was still on fire in the east.

I skimmed the Mirror to see if the cultists were up yet. Apparently not. At least, I couldn’t find any mention of them.

I didn’t have any love for Eren’s people, but it irked me that Molpilia was hanging the blame for the murder on them, and without a shred of proof. He had been careful not to actually accuse them in so many words, because he would run afoul of the Emperor’s Law if he did that, but his implications were accusation enough.

And in the process, he was accusing the police as well. Because if Molpilia could identify the killer, why couldn’t we? All of which made me desperate to prove him wrong—as if I needed more motivation to find Patli’s murderer.

But when I sat down to get to work, it wasn’t the details of the murder that filled my head. It was something else.

That is, until I saw a shadow fall across my desk and I realized I wasn’t the only one who had come in early.

“Takun,” I said. I could tell by the scent of cinnamon.

“What happened?” he asked. “Did you get evicted?”

“That’s right,” I said. “They found out I’d had you over once and my building doesn’t allow animals.”

“Which would be funny,” he said, taking a seat on the corner of my desk, “if you’d ever invited me. But it works out fine that you didn’t. In this line of work, you see enough piss holes. Why add one more?”

“Good morning to you too,” I said.

“So what’s the problem?”

I shrugged. “What makes you think there’s a problem?”

“I haven’t seen your face crease like that since you had that constipation a couple of cycles back.”

I didn’t see any reason not to tell him. “You remember Zuma Yaotl?”

Takun thought for a moment. “Sure. Never knew him too well. What about him?”

“I found him at the Centeotl property last night.”

“Where you found the murder victim?”

“Yes. He said he wanted to see the place for himself. He was bored sitting at home, watching the news coverage.”

“Bored?” said Takun. “I’d retire right now if I could afford it, and never look back. Wouldn’t you?”

“No,” I said. “I’d probably feel the way Yaotl does.” But that wasn’t the point, and I said so. “Have you ever heard of a retired officer haunting a murder scene?”

“Can’t say I have.” Takun looked deadly serious all of a sudden, his brow bunching above the bridge of his nose. “Hey, you think he did it? Killed the guy, I mean?”

He started laughing.

“Go ahead,” I said, “make fun of me.”

“As if I need your permission,” he said. “Have a good morning, Colhua. And pray for the gods to have mercy on the mentally retarded.”

It was a joke, of course, but there wasn’t anything funny about it. At least not to me.

Yaotl had had no business being anywhere near Centeotl at that hour. I couldn’t help feeling that he was holding something back from me.

The Investigator in me wanted to know what.

• • •

The morning was halfway gone when I got a call I never thought I would get in a thousand cycles. Necalli never thought so either, judging by his expression.

“You’re kidding,” I said after he told me who was on the line.

He shook his head, said “I’m not,” and handed me his buzzer.

I put it to my ear and said, “Colhua.”

“Investigator,” said the rich, cultured voice on the other end of the connection, “this is High Priest Itzcoatl. I would appreciate the opportunity to speak with you here in my sanctum. In fact, we could make it right now if you’re not too busy.”

I had to smile. The High Priest of Aztlan was calling me.

It wasn’t as if I had never seen Itzcoatl in person before—pretty much everyone in Aztlan had done so on one holy day another. But like everyone else, I had seen him only from a distance, looking up at him from the crowed street below his balcony.

I had never spoken with him on the phone, much less in person. And I had certainly never been invited to his private sanctum.

“Of course, High Priest,” I heard myself saying. “I can be there in. . .” I estimated the trip on the rail line and suggested a time.

“Splendid,” he said. “I look forward to seeing you. Gods bless your house.”

“And yours, High Priest.”

The connection ended. As I gave Necalli back his buzzer, I saw that he was smiling too.

“The High Priest,” he said. “Talking on the buzzer just like anybody else. I have to tell my mate when I get home.” His smile faded. “You know what he wants to talk about, right?”

I did.

Chapter Four

Huicton Itzcoatl was only a man, like me.

He had been born in Aztlan a district over from mine. He had gone to the same kind of schools, attended the same kind of religious services, thrilled to accounts of the same ball court games.

He was older than I was, sure, closer to my father’s age than my own. But what did that mean? Lands of the Dead, he didn’t look much older.

And yet as we stood there with three of his attendants in his immense, echoing sanctum, shafts of morning light stabbing down at us through open slits in a high, vaulted ceiling, I felt like a child in his presence.

But then, Itzcoatl was the venerable High Priest of Aztlan, speaker for the ancient gods. In his Mirror appearances, he was as charismatic as any public figure I had ever seen. When he stood on his balcony overlooking a crowd, conveying the gods’ blessings, he was—as one commentator had described it—“overwhelming.”

Not because he was a big man. On the contrary, he was of average height, and lean—almost too lean. He wouldn’t have lasted ten heartbeats in the ball court.

Yet there was something about him that seemed to exalt him over other men. Maybe the way he held himself, or the shape of his clean-shaven head, or the cast of his eyes.

Itzcoatl had those light-colored irises, the color of amber, that people were born with from time to time. It was the legacy of the Euros who had come to Mexica with Cortez. Considered gods when they arrived on our shores, Cortez and his men had enjoyed their pick of any women they saw, and they saw quite a few.

But in Itzcoatl’s case, it wasn’t just his eyes or his bearing or the shape of his skull. There was something more to him. I couldn’t pin it down exactly, and pinning such things down was part of my job.

Whatever the reason, he seemed to radiate the peace of Quetzalcoatl as he stood there in his long, white robe, his head glinting with sunlight, his feet encased in thread-of-gold sandals.

In ancient days, priests had worn black to symbolize death. But that custom was buried in the past. Priests didn’t terrify the people any longer. They comforted them.

And when the priests themselves needed a source of comfort, they turned to Itzcoatl.

“Colhua,” said the High Priest in his chocolate-smooth voice.

I inclined my head. “High Priest.”

He gestured to his attendants, who were dressed in white robes as well. They departed without a word, leaving us alone in Itzcoatl’s sanctum.

“It was good of you to come,” said the High Priest, his eyes crinkling at the corners. Thanks to the acoustics, his voice seemed to surround us.

“It was no trouble,” I assured him. “I imagine you’re concerned about the murder at Centeotl.”

He nodded. “Very concerned. I’m told that you’re in charge of the investigation.”

“That’s true.”

“Have you made any progress in identifying the parties responsible?”

“Not very much,” I had to confess.

The High Priest frowned ever so slightly. “I am sorry to hear that. It is important that this matter be resolved before the Fire Renewal. The people are agitated enough about the End of Days as it is. With an incident such as this one stirring the pot, with its echoes of ancient rituals. . .it has the potential to turn agitation into the kind of turmoil Aztlan hasn’t seen since the Rebellion.”

“I understand,” I said.

He nodded his shaven head. “I knew you would. I have heard good things about you, Colhua.”

Surprised by the remark, I felt the blood rush to my face. “Have you?”

“I have indeed.”

I recalled the first time my father praised my footwork in the ball court. I was six cycles old. I could have died happy then and there, basking in my father’s approval.

Standing there before Itzcoatl, I had the same feeling.

“I speak with the First Chief of Investigators every so often,” he said. “More frequently, of course, when the police and the priesthood share an interest in a case, as they do in this one.”

That made sense.

“Which,” Itzcoatl continued, “was why I requested that you be placed in charge of this investigation.”

At first, I thought I had heard him wrong. Then it sank in: The High Priest of Aztlan had requested my services.

I was at a loss for words.

“I know you were torn away from your holiday dinner,” said Itzcoatl. “That was unfortunate. However, when the First Chief buzzed me to tell me what had happened, I knew who I wanted to handle the case. And he approved my choice without reservation.”

Finally, I managed to speak up: “It’s kind of you to say so, High Priest.”

“Kindness has nothing to do with it, Investigator. Given the magnitude of what we’re dealing with, I wanted the best man for the job. I trust you will justify my faith in you.”

I was feeling good about myself, feeling proud, so I brought up a question I never thought I’d have a chance to ask. “I wonder,” I said, “if you remember my father? Ohtli Colhua?”

His forehead puckered. “Your father? Perhaps if you were to refresh my memory . . . ?”

“During the last Fire Renewal, there was an incident. He saved your life.”

Itzcoatl looked at me for a moment, then shook his head a little sadly. “Forgive me, I have no recollection of such an incident.”

My heart sank in my chest.

“However,” the High Priest continued, “it sounds like your father was a most courageous man.”

That made me feel a little better.

“Please stay in touch with me,” said Itzcoatl. “Let me know how the case is going. And if there is anything I can do to assist you, don’t hesitate to ask.”

I assured him that I would do all those things. Then he ushered me out of his sanctum with such grace and subtlety that I was out in the hallway before I knew it, in the midst of the attendants he had kicked out a few moments earlier.

I left the building feeling a redoubled sense of commitment. I was more determined than ever to crack the case, and in the process remove a blight from the holiness of the Fire Renewal.

I only wished that Itzcoatl had remembered my father.

Interestingly enough, the High Priest’s building was only seven blocks from the temptations of Zolin’s street cart. I hadn’t gotten up that morning planning to feast on fried salamander, but who was I to resist the machinations of the gods?

The line on Xipe Totec Street was as long as always. And as always it moved slowly, giving me plenty of time to ponder where I had come from.

When I reached the cart, I wanted to tell Zolin about the High Priest. But I couldn’t. At least, not until the murder investigation was over.

Lands of the Dead, I couldn’t even tell Aunt Xoco.

So all I said was, “Zolin. It’s good to see you.”

“And you,” he said, “even if it is only with one eye. You look perplexed, my friend. Is something troubling you?”

Zolin knew I was an Investigator. “There’s always something troubling me. It’s my job.”

“In that case,” he said, “I will ask the gods to smile on you.”

“You have some pull with them?”

“As you know, I am only a humble salamander vendor. But the gods have to eat too, my friend.”

I chuckled. “So I’ve heard.”

“Two?” he asked.

“Two,” I confirmed.

As usual, Zolin gave me a waxed-paper bag to hold open for him, then reached into the hot oil with a set of tongs and grabbed a salamander. But as he slipped it into the bag, a funny look came over his face, and I got the feeling that he was looking past me rather than at me.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Forgive me,” he said, “for intruding on your personal business, but I would be a bad friend if I didn’t tell you that someone is following you.”

I barely resisted the urge to look around. “How do you know?”

“I saw him the last time you were here, and now I see him again, yet I didn’t see him in between. He is standing past the end of the line. Not buying, just watching.”

“You’re sure it’s the same guy?” I asked.

Zolin shrugged. “He stands out in a crowd.”

“In what way?”

“He has big shoulders. A long pony tail. And his face is pitted—with acne scars, if my eye does not deceive me. Do you know him?”

“No,” I said. “Past the end of the line, right?”

“Correct,” said Zolin. “May I be of assistance in some way?”

“That won’t be necessary,” I assured him. “But thanks.”

I wasn’t playing with the Eagles anymore, but I was still in good shape. I could run the guy down if I had to.

As casually as if Zolin hadn’t said anything, I paid him, put the salamander away in my pouch, and turned to glance at the end of the line.

There was a guy in a pony tail, all right. But he was already halfway down the block, heels flying.

I gave chase. But he was fast, as fast as I was. Before I knew it, he had ducked around the corner of a building. By the time I got there, he was nowhere to be seen.

Gods, I thought, disgusted.

Who was this guy? Why was he following me?

Did it have anything to do with the murder at Centeotl? I had to believe it did—but what? Was he the killer?

If so, I was really disgusted.

Anyway, there wasn’t much I could at that point besides call in the guy’s description and hope for the best.

• • •

Back at work, I found Quetzalli watching a news report on the cultists. They were back at the same building where I had seen them the day before, marching and singing out their slogans. I hoped for Eren’s sake that the gods appreciated her tenacity.

When I went to see Aunt Xoco later that evening, I had a lot on my mind. It must have showed.

“You’re not eating,” my aunt said sharply.

She wasn’t an easy person to insult. There were lots of things I could have said or done that night, and she would have let them slide off her back. But not eat her food?

Worse than murder, in her estimate.

I slid a piece of roast turkey into my mouth. I loved the way Aunt Xoco made it, with honey, sage, and pumpkin seeds.

“Good,” I said, shaping the word around the morsel of turkey meat.

“I know it’s good,” said my aunt. “So why are you sitting there with your eyes glazed over instead of eating it?”

I apologized. “I’ve got a lot on my mind. Work, I mean.”

She flipped her wrist, jangling her bracelets. “Your father used to say the same thing. He couldn’t tell me about his investigations. They were big secrets, not to be discussed on pain of death.”

I nodded. “Something like that.”

“All right. Suit yourself.”

I met the High Priest today. He handpicked me for the Centeotl case. That’s what I wanted to say. But what I said instead was, “I’m glad you understand.”

Of course, there was another reason I wasn’t stuffing myself at Aunt Xoco’s table. I had an obligation to fulfill later that night—one that she seemed not to remember.

And if she wasn’t bringing it up, I wasn’t about to do so either.

Truth be told, I didn’t feel like playing ullamalitzli as I took the rail line to the ball court that night. Despite my restraint, I had eaten and drunk too much by the time I left Aunt Xoco’s place, and I had an investigation on my hands so big that even the High Priest was keeping an eye on it.

Those were two good reasons to take the night off. But the ball court game was played in the gods’ honor, one of the few holy obligations left over from ancient days, and it was considered even more holy as we approached the Fire Renewal.

Also, to be perfectly honest, it was a key match. Our team, the Scale Beetles, was first in the standings. The club we were supposed to play, the Hummingbirds, was second—but only by a point. If we beat them, we would stay on top. If they beat us, they would secure a piece of first place.

As I said, a key match. So it wasn’t only the gods pushing me into the ball court that night. It was my teammates as well.

And there was a third reason: I needed to clear my head. Sometimes I felt compelled to immerse myself in an investigation. Other times, I felt I needed to back off. This was one of the latter times.

It wasn’t until I stepped out onto the stone court with my teammates that I started feeling the fire in my belly. It was good to be among men I could depend on, men who depended on me.

Over the cycles the roster had changed, with only Ocelopan, Ecatzin, and me remaining from the original squad. Ocelopan, like me, was an attacker. Ecatzin, the oldest one on the team by a good seven or eight cycles, was our floater. Huemac, a big, strong guy who could take a lot of punishment, held down the center position. And Atl and Panitzin, neither of whom was more than twenty, put their youthful energies into playing defender.

Ecatzin and I were the only ones who had played in the Sun League. In fact, I had competed against him in the championship game five cycles earlier, me playing for Aztlan and Ecatzin for Yautepec. I was young then and he was an aging veteran, but I was the one who blew out my knee.

No one had ever had a knee repaired and re-entered the tlachli, the professional ball court. The gods simply demanded too much of a man between the stone walls. Even for perfect physical specimens, it was hard to play the game. For someone as badly damaged as I was, it would have been impossible.

Not that I’d had an easy time accepting that. Which was one of the reasons I had begun playing again a few cycles earlier, if only as an amateur in the city men’s league.

Some nights the Scale Beetles won in that league, some nights we lost. That night we won, and we did so by kicking the ball through the hoop in the last few seconds.

It was a proud thing for a man to score a goal, something to brag about at least until the next game. Two goals was a rare and exquisite occurrence, the gift of a kind and generous god.

That night, I scored three goals.

The walk from the stone court back to the locker room was a sweet one, full of whooping and singing and skull-rapping. It was always better to be on the winning side than the losing one, even if the practice of sacrificing the losers had gone out hundreds of cycles earlier.

I wasn’t the kind who liked to lose myself in celebration, but I enjoyed watching the others have a good time. So I had a smile on my face as I stood in the shower and washed the beetle’s-blood paint from my body, and listened to my teammates jaw at each other.

When I came out in my towel, Huemac was still holding court in the middle of the room. He had a broken nose, as usual, and a host of little, tomato-red wounds on his knees and elbows, but he didn’t seem to mind any of them.

“So tell me,” ranted Huemac, who did like to lose himself in celebration, “why is it I’m out there busting my butt every thirteen days, fighting for the ball all by myself, getting knocked around by two or three guys at a time? Because Colhua’s poor little knee is too delicate. But all of a sudden, his knee is good enough to make a move like this!” And he swiveled his hips in an exaggerated circle, drawing laughter from the others.

I didn’t answer. I just took my breeches off their wall-hook and sat down to slip them on.

“You tell him!” cried Ocelopan, pointing a crooked finger at Huemac.

Taking the imperative to heart, the big man held his hands out in an exaggerated appeal for reason. “He’s a little girl, this Investigator for the Empire. Am I right?”

“You’re absolutely right,” said Atl, caught up in the spirit of the thing. “He should wear a skirt and braid his hair!”

Another round of laughter, echoing from wall to wall. Atl and Panitzin contributed the loudest part of it.

Suddenly, Huemac was looming over me. “You know what they call a guy like you, Colhua?”

“No,” I said, playing along, “what do they call a guy like me?”

Huemac leaned down until his nose was pressing against mine. “A monster of a ballplayer,” he roared, “that’s what!”

Then he clapped me on the shoulder, nearly knocking me off my stool.

“Quiet, Huemac,” said Ecatzin, “the gods will hear you!” After all, it was bad luck to praise someone in public.

“Bugger them!” said Huemac. “Tonight we were gods!”

The youngsters laughed, but the rest of us remained silent. It wasn’t wise to bait the Deathless Ones.

In any case, the celebration abated soon afterward. In the end, it was only a single game. It wasn’t as if we had beaten the Hummingbirds in the championship round.

I ended up walking out with Ecatzin. He was limping a little. When I took note of it, he smiled and said, “It’s not an old man’s sport, Maxtla. Not even at this level.”

“Don’t worry,” I said, “you’ll be playing it with my grandchildren some day, teaching them as you taught me whenever we played Yautepec.”

We laughed, both of us. But not loud enough for the gods to hear.

“So,” he said, “all kidding aside, your knee must have felt pretty good tonight.”

It felt good, all right. But the next game it might creak like a rusty wagon. “Good days and bad days, my friend. Good days and bad days.”

When we got to the rail station, Ecatzin went up the stairs for the eastbound line and I went through the concrete tunnel for the westbound. I got home that way after every game, so I knew the schedule pretty well. The next carriage would be along in a matter of minutes.

I was halfway through the tunnel when I realized I wasn’t alone.

Looking back over my shoulder, I saw two figures, both of them wearing hooded shirts with their hoods up. They were just standing there, looking in my direction.

Trouble, I thought.

“I’m an Investigator,” I called out, my voice echoing wildly in the tunnel. “You sure you want that kind of headache?”

They started walking toward me, undeterred by the warning. A moment later, I understood why. The tunnel mouth ahead of me was blocked by two other men. They too wore hoods.

And because the lighting was better in that direction, I could see that under the hoods they wore masks.

Every police officer carried a hand stick, even when he wasn’t on duty. I was no exception. With an economy of motion, I extracted it from my pouch and unfolded it. Its obsidian blades would cut to the bone, if necessary.

And it looked like it would be necessary.

The two ahead of me started walking my way as well. Little by little, they closed the jaws of their trap.

“Last warning,” I said.

It had no more effect than the first one.

They took out sticks of their own, the kind people can get in the Merchant City if they know where to look. No blades, but with the odds in their favor they didn’t need any.

Suddenly, everything began to speed up. That was fine with me. The faster they came at me, the better.

No doubt, they were expecting me to wait for them and try to defend myself. Instead, I went for the pair who were up ahead of me.

As I had hoped, one of them got ahead of the other and took a swing at me. I stopped it with my stick, then drove my fist into his face. As the other one tried to slam the end of his weapon into my temple, I reached across my body and caught that attack too.

I had intended to hit him in the ribs, thinking it would open the way in front of me. But he parried my attack with a move of his own, taking away my advantage.

And by then, the guys behind me had joined the festivities.

Whirling, I took a shot at the closer of the two and felt my blades sink into flesh. But before I could go after his partner, I got hit in the back of the head. Hard.

I felt myself stagger, found a wall with my hand, righted myself. Then I got hit again, this time in the jaw.

Suddenly, the concrete flew up and hit me in the face. Before I could push myself up, a weight settled onto my back. I tried to roll out from under it, but it was too heavy.

Then my ribs began to ignite, one after the other, over and over again. I think I cried out in pain, but I’m not sure. Anyway, it wouldn’t have sounded like much with my face pressed into the cement.

At some point the punishment stopped, and the weight lifted off me. For a heartbeat or two, as I lay there, I thought my tormentors had left—until I felt a hand on my shoulder, and realized that one of the masked faces was close to my ear.

“The murder at Centeotl,” it said in a rough voice, “let it go. For the sake of the gods we revere, forget it happened. Or you’ll be next.”

Then someone kicked me in the ribs again and the beating resumed.

Chapter Five

I blacked out at some point.

When I woke up, the guys in the masks were gone. But they had pounded me pretty good. My face was on fire and my ribs screamed every time I took a breath. If their goal was to get my attention, they had succeeded—admirably.

I got up on my hands and knees, spit out some blood, and thanked the gods they hadn’t seen fit to claim me yet. Obviously, the Lands of the Dead were crowded enough as it was.

Just then, I heard what sounded like little whip cracks somewhere beyond the tunnel. Footfalls, I thought, my heart beginning to pound in my chest. They’re coming back for another go at me.

I listened more closely. But to my relief, all I could make out was the sighing of the wind.

Funny, I thought. You get the life beat out of you, you start hearing things.

I found my hand stick lying on the cement a body length away. Crawling over to it, I saw that my attackers had broken it in half. For emphasis, no doubt.

Picking up the pieces, I put them in my pouch. Then I dragged myself to my feet, put my hand against the tunnel wall for support, and stood there for a moment. I moved my hands and feet one by one. Everything worked, though not without complaint.

Well, I thought, there’s something to be thankful for.

From the opposite wall, a colorful rendition of the goddess Chantico glared at me with big, dark eyes beneath her crown of green cactus spikes. Her face was an angry red, as livid as if she had been rubbed raw by the enormous serpent entwined around her hips and legs.

Chantico was the embodiment of fire, both the explosive fury of the volcano and the gentle flames of the hearth. She seemed to be asking me a question, but I was too battered to figure out what it might be.

Still hugging the wall, I shuffled the length of the tunnel to its exit. The sound of my soles scraping the ground echoed around me, again making me think I wasn’t alone.

The stairs were bad. I felt like there were weights tied to my ankles, making each step up an adventure. It seemed like a long time before I reached the rail platform.

The time dial by the platform told me I had missed my carriage by a half hour—no more. Funny, it felt like I had been lying there all night.

When was the next carriage? I knew they didn’t all stop at Chantico Street.

I was about to look for a schedule when I saw a headlight in the distance, all the way down the track. I’m in luck, I thought. Yes, it had been one lucky night all around.

Fortunately, there was no one sitting in the carriage when I got on. No one I needed to assure that I was all right, no one to whom I needed to explain anything. It was quiet there, peaceful, except for the regrets that kept popping up in my head.

Idiot, I thought.

It was a tunnel. It was late at night. You should have looked around before you walked in.

But I had walked through that tunnel every thirteen days, cycle after cycle, and I had never had a problem. Not even once. Why would I have expected to have one this time?

One thing was certain—if I had ever entertained the possibility that the murder was the work of a single sick mind, that possibility had gone out the window. Clearly, it was the effort of a group, and a dangerous one if it wasn’t reluctant to take on an Investigator of the Empire.

“For the sake of the gods we revere,” one of the masked men had said.

That sounded like something the cultists would say. Or maybe it was just someone trying to sound like the cultists.

And who would that be? I had no idea.

I got off the carriage line at my stop, Quetzalcoatl Street, and walked stiff-legged the three blocks to my pyramid. By then everything was cramping up on me. I felt like a man forty cycles older, and one in bad shape at that.

The door attendant had never seen me that way. Wide-eyed, he asked me if I needed medical attention. I thanked him and said I was all right, and crossed the lobby to the lift.

I pushed the button. Eventually, the compartment arrived and the doors slid apart.

It occurred to me, if only momentarily, that there might be somebody inside waiting to jump me as I’d been jumped earlier. But that didn’t make sense. If the masked guys had wanted to kick me around some more, they could have done that back in the tunnel.

Anyway, the place was empty. There was nobody to kick me around except myself.

I rode the compartment to the top floor. Being an Investigator had certain perks. Even after paying for Aunt Xoco’s place, I could afford a nice view in a nice building.

It wasn’t easy to open my door with my hands shaking. Still, I managed to punch in the security code on the third try. As the door slid aside, I again got the feeling that there was someone waiting on the other side of it.

There wasn’t.

The first thing I did was go the cold cabinet in the kitchen and take out a frosty bottle of cane water. Even though it hurt a little to press my mouth against the bottle, the water felt good going down. But then, getting beaten up always gave me a thirst.

Only after I had quenched that thirst did I go to the bathroom to check myself out in the mirror. It wasn’t as bad as I had imagined. Some blood, some swelling, mostly around my mouth and under my left eye, but it could have been worse. In fact, I’d sustained more gruesome injuries in the Arena.

I washed away the blood with a wet cloth. Then I got out an ice tray, emptied its contents over a second cloth, pulled the ends of the cloth together, and tied them off with olli bands.

Holding the compress against my eye, I went back into the kitchen and got out some pineapple extract. A swig of it had always accelerated the healing process when I played for Aztlan. I figured it would help this time as well.

I was going to sit down with my compress and contemplate what had happened when my radio buzzed. I got up, crossed the room, and removed the radio from my pouch. Then I said, “Colhua.”

It was Necalli. He didn’t sound happy.

“Where under the heavens have you been?” he asked. “I’ve been calling you forever.”

“I was in a tunnel down by Chantico Street Station. You know, just lying there.”

A pause. “What are you talking about?”

“I was jumped by four guys in masks. Apparently, they didn’t want me to continue my investigation into the Centeotl murder.”

“You were attacked?”

“Yes.”

“You’re joking.”

“I’m not,” I assured him.

“You were really attacked? Are you all right?”

“I’ll live.”

Another pause. “How do you know that’s why they attacked you? Because of Centeotl, I mean.”

“They said so.”

Necalli cursed again. “I don’t like the idea of police officers getting assaulted, Colhua. For any reason. Investigators especially. And you have no idea who they were?”

“Not a clue.”

“Well,” he said, “I’m glad you’re still alive.”

“So am I.”

“Because we’ve got another murder on our hands, and it would be a pain in the butt for me to have to break in a new Investigator.”

I felt a chill climb my spine. “Another one? Like the disaster at Centeotl?”

“Yes. Same deal. Heart ripped out and replaced with a burning candle.”

“Where?” I asked.

“At the Atlaua building.”

“Another pyramid,” I thought out loud.

Like Centeotl, Atlaua had been sanctified recently and was primed to open on the holiday.

“Seems like someone is trying to keep these pyramids from opening,” Necalli observed. “And get this—it’s the same developer. Lolco Molpilia. You know who that is, right?”

“I do. I saw him on the Mirror not too long ago.”

“You think it’s a coincidence?” asked Necalli.

I sighed. “Maybe not.”

Was Necalli’s suspicion right? Was someone trying to hurt Molpilia by de-sanctifying his buildings?

And if so, who was it?

Only the gods knew.

“I’m sending an auto-carriage for you,” said Necalli. “That is, if the guys who jumped you haven’t talked you out of pursuing them. Have they?”

“What do you think?” I asked him.

I had just enough time to put some bandages on my face and change my clothes before the carriage showed up. Strangely enough, I thought as I climbed in, my knee still felt good. But it was the only part of me that did.

At Atlaua, it wasn’t a security guard who had discovered the body. It was a maintenance team working on the pyramid’s eastern flank, replacing a section of bulbs that had shorted out.

I questioned them as I had questioned Chimalma at Centeotl. They looked as pale and shaken as she had. But then, it wasn’t every day a maintenance team turned up a body.

Especially in the kind of shape this one was in.

If they were curious about what had happened to my face, they didn’t say anything about it. They just answered my questions, went off together into a corner of the lobby, and sat down to await further instructions.

And I went outside to see what had happened.

The Atlaua property, I noticed, was bigger and hillier than that of Centeotl. It seemed the body was in a low-lying area between two of the hills.

In this case, the officers keeping it company were from the Twelfth District rather than the Seventh, so they wore blue tunics rather than yellow ones. But like the guys from the Seventh, they would rather have been doing almost anything else.

It wasn’t just that it was a corpse. It was what it looked like.

I didn’t kneel beside the poor bastard. I was too stiff from the beating I had taken. Besides, I could see all I needed to without bending down.

As Necalli had said, it was the same deal as before. The same splintered ribs, the same gaping cavity where the victim’s heart should have been, the same pallid pool of candle wax congealed in his gut.

But this victim was a lot more prosperous-looking than Patli had been. His clothes were made of the finest fabrics, so fine that one might almost have mistaken him for a nobleman.

Except for the jewelry, of course. Unlike a nobleman, he wasn’t wearing any.

“Colhua?” said a familiar voice.

I looked back over my shoulder and saw Necalli coming over the hill. He looked tired. But then, it was late, and I had no doubt he would rather have been in bed.

“Did you just get here?” he asked.

“Just,” I confirmed.

He took a look at the victim and made a face. “Gods of Death. It makes you want to lose your dinner.” He turned to the police officers. “Identification?”

“Not a thing,” said one of them.

Just like Patli. “But not because he’s homeless,” I noted. “Not with those clothes.”

Necalli nodded. “I doubt we’ll have as much trouble identifying this one.” He knelt beside the body. “Smells from octli. The other one did too, right?”

“Right,” I said.

“So they had that in common.” He looked up at me, no doubt meaning to add something—and winced. “Say, you really did get beat up.”

“I told you I wasn’t joking.”

His whole face seemed to furrow. “You’ll file a report when we’re done here. It’s bad for people to think they can beat up police officers and get away with it. It makes other people think they can get away with it too.”

The officers from the Twelfth nodded. Obviously, they approved of the sentiment.

“Well,” said Necalli, glancing at the corpse again, “I’ve seen enough. How about you, Colhua?”

“More than enough,” I said.

As we walked back to the pyramid, Necalli shivered. “I’ve eyeballed my share of corpses, but none like that one. Whoever did that had to be a real sicko.” A pause. “You think anyone in Ancient Light is that sick?”

“No,” I said.

“Even after those guys in the masks said what they said?”

“Even then.”

He shrugged. “We’ll haul them in anyway. I mean, we’ve got to do something.”

In accordance with Necalli’s orders, we rounded up the cultists again. This time we had files on forty-three of them, including the seven who had come in the last time of their volition.

Eren was one of those arrested, of course. She didn’t talk to me. She wouldn’t even look at me.

We questioned her people as we had previously, and got pretty much the same answers. If they were covering something up, they were doing a remarkably fine job of it.

Eventually we let them go, but I wasn’t there to see it. Because I looked like I had one foot in the Lands of the Dead, Necalli sent me home halfway through the night.

It wasn’t so much because he felt bad for me. It was more because having me around was bad for morale.

I didn’t care. I was just happy to drag myself back to my place, drink enough octli to dull the pain, and put my beat-up bones to bed.

Chapter Six

In the morning, I was hung over. That was bad. But I was able
to bend a little here and there, which was good.

When I arrived at work, Necalli told me that he’d set up a surveillance detail after I left the night before. After all, both murders had taken place on properties slated to open during the Fire Renewal. It made sense to monitor all the other properties in that category.

There were three of them. Two, as the gods would have it, were Molpilia projects.

Cycles earlier, the Emperor had ordered every city in the Empire to set up a network of high-powered surveillance cameras on the roofs of strategically selected buildings. At the time, it was believed he was anticipating another Rebellion.

The rebellion never happened, but the network came in handy sometimes. This was one of those times.

The Emperor’s cameras afforded us a level of scrutiny far beyond what the pyramids’ security systems provided. But someone had to monitor the camera feeds. Hence, the detail.

I went upstairs to see how it was doing.

When I entered the surveillance center, which was a big room but seemed small because of all the monitors packed into it, I saw that Necalli had Takun, Quetzalli, and Izel on vigil.

Takun made a face when he saw me. “Necalli wasn’t kidding. You really do look like shit.”

“What did you do,” said Quetzalli, “try to stop a rail carriage with your face?”

“Thanks for the sympathy,” I said. “See anything?”

“Tons,” said Takun, “if the killer’s a squirrel. Otherwise, no.”

Izel laughed softly. “If we were lucky, Necalli told us, the murderer would show up. If we were really lucky, he would show up before we lost a night’s sleep. Guess what? We weren’t lucky.”

Of the three of them, Izel looked the worst for wear. But then, he had never been the sturdiest looking guy around.

He was tall, even a little taller than I was, but skinny to the point where you had to wonder if he ate at all. He looked like he might blow away in a strong wind.

A nice guy, though. Izel was the one Investigator in the office who always remembered everybody’s birth-gods. Some people said he was too motherly to be an Investigator. Obviously, at least one chief along the line had thought otherwise.

Whatever the remarks, Izel didn’t seem to mind. In fact, he often made fun of his frailty. He started working for the police, he once told me, because he was tired of getting beaten up.

Quetzalli, on the other hand, was small and tough. No one in the department wanted to mess with her, me included.

Looking over her shoulder, I saw that Necalli had given her Tepeyollotl in District Nine, the Molpilia project that Eren’s people had been marching around lately. But they hadn’t shown up yet. One thing I had learned about them was that they liked their sleep.

I thought about Eren lying in her bed, her long, dark hair fanned across the pillow. Then I thought about me running my fingers through that hair.

Then I remembered where I was.

I cleared my throat and said, “Tepeyollotl looks further along than Centeotl.”

“It is,” said Quetzalli. “All four of its sides were illuminated last night, and its security system is active—a good thing in that neighborhood. All that’s left is some cosmetic work inside.”

Takun was watching Mayahuel, Molpilia’s other pyramid, in District Eleven. Before I asked, he told me it was in pretty much the same shape as Tepeyollotl.

“By the way,” he added, “you should try some surveillance work yourself. It will keep you out of trouble.”

I turned to Izel, who had responsibility for Mixcoatl in District Nineteen. “What about your place?”

“Well,” he said, “the rent is a little high.”

“I meant Mixcoatl,” I said.

He shrugged. “It’s lagging behind the others. Even if we don’t find a corpse there, it probably won’t open on time.”

“Maybe because Molpilia’s not the developer,” Quetzalli suggested. “His projects always seem to be right on schedule.”

“Which is why he’s so pissed off about those murders,” Izel noted.

Takun sat back in his chair and stretched. “When I was a rookie, I used to think standing vigil would be a vacation. It sounded so easy.”

“Little did you know,” said Izel.

“Did you see see Coyotl last night?” Quetzalli asked me.

“No,” I said, “I missed him. I was playing in my mens’ league.”

When I first left the ball court, I watched every game presented on the Mirror, even the bad ones between teams like Zempoala and Oxtlipa. Now I missed one here and there.

“Was he good?” I asked, sitting down on an empty counter.

Quetzalli chuckled appreciatively. “He was great. In one play he took out two attackers, just laid them out on the ground. They had to be taken off on litters.”

“He’s a beast,” said Izel.

“A demon,” said Quetzalli. “Malinalco didn’t score a goal in the first half. They wouldn’t have scored at all except for that idiot Chipaua. I don’t know why they keep him on the team.”

“Who else are they going to get?” asked Izel. “You think defenders grow out of the ground like sweet potatoes?”

“Coyotl played well against Xoconochco too,” I said.

“You mean last week?” asked Quetzalli. “How would you know that? It was blacked out.”

“I didn’t see it on the Mirror,” I explained. “I saw it in the Arena.”

Quetzalli looked at me as if I had sprouted eagle-wings. “You got a pass? How in the name of—”

“Colhua was a star,” Takun reminded her with a twisted grin. “He can get a pass any time he wants.”

I ignored the remark. “An old teammate helped me out. He’s still with the organization.” Not so high up in the organization that he could get me passes on a regular basis, unfortunately, but high enough to slip me a cloud seat once in a while.

“Nice,” said Quetzalli.

In a way, it was. People killed for passes to the games—sometimes literally. But in another way, it hurt. After all, I wasn’t that old. If I hadn’t torn up my knee, I would still have been playing instead of just watching.

“It’s inspiring to work with Colhua,” said Takun. “Like drinking chocolate with the Emperor.”

“Be inspired to find something on those monitors,” I told him, “and I’ll forget to report your abuse of a fellow Investigator.”

“You’re too generous,” said Takun.

It felt good to banter with them. I should have gone downstairs and gotten to work reviewing the cultists’ interviews. But after what I had been through the night before, after what I had seen at Centeotl and Atlaua. . .I relished the distraction.

“Speaking of abuse,” said Izel, “is it possible to get a better grade of tea in here?” He held up his chocolate-colored ceramic mug. “This stuff is terrible.”

“No kidding,” said Takun. “A dog wouldn’t drink it.”

They all laughed. I would have joined them if my face hadn’t felt so stiff.

“By the way,” Izel asked me, “did you hear about the armistice?”

“No,” I said. “What armistice?”

“Among the Euros,” said Quetzalli. “We talked about it all night, I think.” She turned to Izel. “Who was it again? France and Germany? Or France and Spain?”

“France and Germany,” said Izel.

“You know how it is with those idiots across the water,” said Takun. “They love to make alliances, and then to go to war over them. It’s their passion.”

“And no sign of their stopping, is there?” asked Quetzalli, turning back to her monitor.

“No sign,” Izel echoed. “Not like us, eh? One empire, one people, all the same from north to south. Not a bunch of warrior ants trying to rip each other’s heads off.”

“It wasn’t always that way,” Quetzalli reminded him.

“Of course not,” said Izel. “When we were savages, we fought. We killed each other, we took each other’s women. But that was before Cortez.”

“Ah, yes,” said Takun, “Cortez. The great conqueror.”

“He tried to divide us,” said Izel, “but in the end he unified us. He gave us a common enemy.”

“That’s how the story goes,” said Takun.

Izel glanced at him. “What do you mean? You don’t believe it?”

“How do I know?” Takun asked. “I wasn’t there.”

“Speaking of Euro alliances,” said Izel, “I saw a funny story on the Mirror. In the first Euro War, Italy got itself screwed up. How did it go again?”

“I don’t know,” said Takun. “You’re the one telling the story.”

“Oh yeah,” said Izel. “I remember now. After the war started, Italy geared up to fight. It got all its planes and boats and armored carriages together, all its soldiers, preparing an offensive that would have knocked out its enemy in no time and carried the day for its allies—until it realized it had allies on both sides. Imagine—in order for the Italians to honor their agreements, they would have to go to war with themselves!”

“I never heard that one,” said Quetzalli.

“It’s true,” Izel said earnestly. “You can look it up.”

I had a feeling that I wouldn’t find that story anywhere, no matter how hard I looked. But I didn’t tell Izel that. Takun was giving him a hard enough time as it was.

“And this armistice between France and Germany,” I said, “how long will it last?”

“How long does it ever last?” asked Quetzalli.

They laughed again. I almost laughed too.

I could have stayed and listened to them all morning. As I said, I liked the banter. But I had a couple of murders to solve.

When I got downstairs, I stuck my head into Necalli’s office. “Nothing from surveillance,” I reported.

“I know.” He gestured for me to come in. “I want to introduce you to somebody.”

“Who’s that?” I asked.

“Our victim.”

I came round his desk and read the file on his monitor. The guy’s name was Zuma Mazatl. As we had guessed, he was far from homeless. In fact, he had a very nice home in a pyramid overlooking a canal in District Fifteen.

“A slave broker,” I said, reading further.

I had never had much use for slave brokers. Not that they were doing anything illegal, in most cases. The idea of buying and selling people just rubbed me the wrong way.

“No mate,” I continued. “No children on record. No living siblings. Looks like the Empire’s going to get a windfall.”

That was how it worked when somebody died without family. The Emperor got all his worldly goods.

“Looks that way,” said Necalli. “Get out to District Fifteen and talk with the guy’s neighbors. See if they know anybody who would want to murder him and pluck out his heart.”

“Done,” I said.

We both knew it wasn’t a personal matter that had gotten Mazatl killed. But maybe he and Patli had had something in common. Talking to Mazatl’s neighbors might bring that something to light.

Unfortunately, it didn’t turn out that way. I spent a couple of hours talking with Mazatl’s neighbors, but I couldn’t establish any obvious connection between Patli and Mazatl. I did learn, on the other hand, that the woman who lived next door to Mazatl had a niece who could cook the daylights out of chicken mixiotes, and that she would be only too happy to meet a nice young man like me.

Even if I had been beaten up recently. Apparently, that wasn’t a deal-breaker.

• • •

The rail carriage I took back to the Interrogation Center was equipped with a two-sided Mirror screen, which hung from the ceiling and ran the long axis of the train. It was new, a test model, intended to provide passengers with critical information in the event of a disaster like the one in Tehuantepec.

Supposedly, any city in Mexica could have been shaken by an earthquake of such magnitude, though none had been so afflicted in all of recorded history. And, under the same life-threatening conditions, any population could have panicked the way the people did in Tehuantepec, or so the experts insisted.

There was no good way to die, but getting trampled under the feet of a terrified mob seemed pretty bad. So if the Emperor wanted to install Mirror screens in public places, I was all for it.

Of course, it was seldom necessary for Aztlan to provide its subjects with disaster information. That was why the screen showed me something else from the moment I set foot in the carriage—another interview program paid for by Lolco Molpilia.

This time, I watched from the beginning.

Molpilia and the interviewer—the same one as before—took a moment to exchange pleasantries. After all, it was Renewal time; people were supposed to speak kindly to one another. Then they got into the heart of the matter.

“There have now been two murders,” said the commentator, “both of them on your properties. A coincidence, you think?”

“Hardly,” said Molpilia.

“You sound pretty certain.”

“It’s a shame,” said the developer, “when someone does his best to erect large, handsome pyramids worthy of the gods’ blessings and someone else sees fit to desecrate them. It’s even more of a shame when that same someone is responsible for both acts of desecration.”

“Desecration,” the commentator repeated. “You think that’s the murderer’s motivation?”

“I leave that in the hands of the police to prove or disprove,” said Molpilia. “But under the circumstances, it’s difficult to come to any other conclusion.”

“And you still think the Ancient Light cultists are the ones responsible?”

“I’ve never said that,” said Molpilia. He turned to the camera. “But I think I speak for your viewers when I say that some conclusions are inevitable.”

Not to all of us, I thought.

Molpilia’s program had finished and started a second time before I reached my stop. As I stood up, I looked around at the other passengers. They seemed enthralled by what the developer had to say.

But then, Molpilia had learned somewhere how to work an audience. Beans could do that.

When I got back to my office, there was a message waiting for me. It was from High Priest Itzcoatl. He wanted me to call him back.

I did so.

One of his attendants answered, then connected me with the High Priest. A moment later, I heard his voice. “Colhua?”

I assumed that he was looking for news regarding the murders—two of them now. Unfortunately, I didn’t have anything to tell him.

“Gods favor you, High Priest,” I said.

“And you.”

“I wish I could say I’ve made progress since you and I spoke, but I can’t. The investigation is going slowly.”

“That is too bad,” said Itzcoatl. “But I have faith in you, Colhua. You will find the murderer. It is only a matter of time.”

I wished I was as confident as he was.

“There is something else,” said the High Priest.

I wondered what that could be.

“I want you to know,” he said, “that I remember your father. It took me a little while to place him, but I remember now. And I remember how he perished, sacrificing his life to save mine. He was a brave man. You must be very proud of him.”

“I am,” I said, feeling a wave of satisfaction and relief.

It had been a little unnerving to think my father had been forgotten by the man he died for. But, apparently, that wasn’t the case.

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.

Somehow, we ended up grappling. I had his wrist in my left hand and he had mine in his. That was when I saw the tattoo on his forearm—just for a second, before his sleeve slipped down again to cover it. But it was long enough for me to realize I had seen its like before.

I must have been thinking too much about the tattoo and not enough about Pony Tail, because he twisted his wrist free and slugged me in the chin. It wouldn’t have been so bad except the back of my head hit something behind me.

Everything went black for a second. By the time I recovered, Pony Tail was gone.

Using the wall behind me, I pulled myself to my feet. Suddenly, I heard someone shout.

Looking back over my shoulder, I saw a police officer appear in the mouth of the alley. He was wearing the red vest of the Merchant City and he had a hand stick in his fist.

For a moment, he looked ready to grab me with his free hand. Then he must have seen the bracelet on my wrist.

“Investigator?” he asked.

“Colhua,” I said. I pointed to the far end of the alley. “He went that way. But you won’t find him.”

The officer pelted past me anyway.

After a few minutes, I felt better. Battered, but better. By then, the police officer had come back empty-handed. Pony Tail had gotten away—not just from me, but from the Merchant City police.

Unfortunately, my mysterious caller was no longer on the line.

Well, I thought as I buzzed Necalli to tell him what had happened, that could have gone better.

I had a lead, though. And maybe more, if the guy I had rushed off the phone decided to forgive me and call back.

Most large cities in Mexica had two or three prison houses. They were featureless, red-brick buildings relegated to the least desirable parts of town.

Aztlan had only one prison house—a fact on which we prided ourselves. What’s more, it had been built just four cycles earlier with private money—that of a grateful citizen, whose identity had been withheld from the time the project was announced.

One rumor said the citizen was Lolco Molpilia.

In any case, the Aztlan Prison House was one of the nicest-looking structures in District One, made of pale, rough-hewn sandstone with greenish-blue bands of copper separating each level from the one above it. A real treat for the eye, especially at dawn and dusk, when the sun’s rays turned the sandstone a soft pink.

But inside, where the inmates were, Aztlan’s prison house was like any other, stark and gray with row upon row of individual cells, each one barred and windowless. Not the kind of place one would want to find oneself for any length of time.

As an Investigator, I found myself there a lot. There was always an inmate who could supply information for a price—usually a token reduction in his or her sentence, which it was in my power to grant—and I took advantage of the resource as often as I could.

Sometimes such information turned out to be useless. But on more than one occasion I had broken open a case with it, which was why I went straight to the prison house from my little adventure with Pony Tail in the Merchant City.

Escorted by a guard, I passed through the petlacalli—the outermost cell blocks, set aside for those who had committed relatively minor offenses like illicit gambling, public drunkenness, and chocolate trafficking. The maximum for someone in the petlacalli was three and a half cycles but the sentence was often less, depending on the generosity of the judge who presided over the case.

Moving deeper into the prison house, my escort and I passed through the teilpiloyan, the layer of cell blocks occupied by Aztlan’s debtors—men and women who owed money either to the Empire’s tax collectors or to other citizens, and couldn’t or wouldn’t pay up. If they changed their minds or found the wherewithal to take care of their debts, they would be released. If not, they would find themselves in the prison house for a long time.

When debtors owed money to the nobility, it was a different story. Then they wound up in the innermost block of cells, called the cuauhcalli—what had been known in ancient days as Death Row. Of course, hardly anyone was executed anymore—few, even, of the murderers, rapists, and seditionists incarcerated there alongside the debtors, though most people thought they should be.

The Emperor decided most things in Mexica, including how severe to make a penalty for criminal misconduct. And like his father before him, he was the merciful sort.

It was because of the Emperor’s mercy that Ichtaca Nochtli was still alive. Nochtli was one of the leaders of the First Sun cult that had cropped up during the last Fire Renewal—the one that marked the end of the Fourth Sun—and terrorized the people of Aztlan.

Like Ancient Light, First Sun had been a religious cult. And like Eren’s people, they had harkened back to a more primitive way of honoring the gods.

But, despite what I had said to Eren the other day in the Interrogation Center, that was where the resemblance ended.

First Sun hadn’t marched around pyramids trying to make a statement about modern society. They had confronted people in the streets, approaching them in groups of four or five, and tried to shame them into renouncing their evil ways. More often than not, those they confronted were prominent subjects of the Emperor—food brokers, tax collectors, and so on.

When Nochtli’s people didn’t get the results they wanted, they got rougher. They didn’t just shame the Emperor’s subjects, they beat them up. And when even that didn’t work, they cooked up a plot to kill the High Priest—whom they believed was the source of their troubles—on the evening of the Fifth Unlucky Day.

Thanks to my father, Itzcoatl survived.

After Nochtli and the others in First Sun were caught, he was given forty cycles. It was a heavy sentence. But then, the judge had wanted to warn people against twisting arms in the name of the gods, and the Emperor must have agreed.

When Nochtli saw me through the bars of his cell door, he gave me a gap-toothed grin. The officers who had apprehended him all those cycles ago hadn’t been gentle. Then again, it could have been worse. One of Nochtli’s friends in the cult had lost a kidney.

“Colhua,” he said, “to what curiosity do I owe the pleasure?”

The guard took his hand stick out of his pouch, just in case Nochtli decided to give him a hard time, and tapped a code into a pad on the wall next to the cell. A moment later, the door slid aside.

Nochtli moved to the back of his cell, so there would be no mistaking his inclination to be cooperative. I went in, and the door closed behind me.

“Five minutes,” I told the guard.

“Five minutes,” he acknowledged, and walked away.

“Have a seat,” said Nochtli, indicating the only chair in the room. As I took it, he sat down on his bed.

“I’m looking for a name,” I said. “A guy with a First Sun tattoo. I thought you might know him.”

Nochtli shrugged. “What does he look like?”

I told him. After I mentioned the pony tail, a light came on in his eyes.

“Sound familiar?” I asked.

He nodded. “Olintecke. Luc Olintecke.” He smiled to himself. “I thought he’d be dead by now.”

“Why is that?”

“Olintecke was crazy. I mean, people said everyone in First Sun was out of his mind, but in Olintecke’s case it was true.”

“Out of his mind . . . in what way?”

“There wasn’t anything he wouldn’t do for the cause. Drink spit, run naked under the moon, brand the bottoms of his feet—you name it.”

“He did all those things?”

Nochtli thought for a moment. “I never actually saw him drink spit. I just heard about it.”

Crazy, all right. “He wasn’t with you the night you were arrested. Why not?”

His answer was interrupted by a loud exclamation from one of the other cells. Nochtli’s mouth twisted and he shouted back, his voice echoing throughout the cell block.

“I apologize,” he said, turning to me again. “My neighbors can be a pain in the ass sometimes. Now, what was your question?”

“Why wasn’t Olintecke with you when you were arrested?”

“He was too unpredictable. We couldn’t trust him.”

“Then you’d gone out without him before?”

“Definitely,” said Nochtli. “You know, it’s funny.”

“What is?” I asked.

“That he’s still out there and the rest of us are in here.”

I nodded. “Ironic. So, if you wanted to find this Olintecke, where would you look?”

Nochtli thought for a moment. “There was another guy. . .
what was his name? Xiuh? Yeah, that’s it. When we started First Sun he was right there with us, but he faded out of the picture pretty fast. Never knew what happened to him until after we got put away. I heard he became a silversmith in the Merchant City, and that Olintecke was working for him, making pickups and deliveries and such.”

“Xiuh,” I repeated. “First name?”

He thought again, but came up empty. “Sorry.”

“It’s all right. There can’t be too many silversmiths with that name.” I got up. “You’ve been a big help.”

He smiled again, exposing his broken tooth. “Big enough to shave a couple of moons off my sentence?”

“Sure,” I said.

“In that case, come by any time.”

I felt a little chill climb my spine. By then, the guard was waiting outside Nochtli’s cell.

“See you around,” I said.

“Sure,” said Nochtli.

A moment later I was out in the corridor, and the door to his cell was closing behind me.

As I made my way down the corridor past the other cells, I heard Nochtli call after me: “Gods take pity on you, Colhua.”

It was a typical First Sun thing to say. And as far as I could tell, he had said it sincerely.

Chapter Eight

As soon as I left the prison house, I looked up Xiuh the
silversmith. His first name was Atl, apparently—like my teammate on the Scale Beetles. And just as Nochtli had said, the guy had a place in the Merchant City—not far, in fact, from Molpilia’s offices.

By the time I got there, the sun was near the horizon. Every west-facing pane of glass in the Merchant City was a drop of molten gold, giving Tonatiuh back his full glory before he had to descend into the Lands of the Dead.

Xiuh was a plump man with two chins and an odor of sweat about him—maybe more so because he was talking with an Investigator. His shop was full of silver trinkets, but none of them were nice enough to fetch more than a few beans.

He knew Olintecke, just as Nochtli said he might.

“He worked for me as a delivery man,” he said. “But I haven’t seen him in a couple of cycles. Why do you ask?”

I didn’t tell him that Olintecke was part of a murder investigation, knowing it might make discourage him from being entirely open with me. “Why did he stop working here?”

“Actually,” said Xiuh, “I fired him. He was getting mixed up, showing up at the wrong times or making deliveries to the wrong places. My business isn’t so good that I can afford to piss off my customers.”

“Any idea why he started getting confused?” I asked.

“None. He just seemed distracted, as if there was something else on his mind.”

Something like First Sun? I wanted to ask. But I still didn’t want to put the silversmith on his guard. I might need to talk to him again sometime.

“Thanks,” I said. “I’ll get in touch with you if I need you.”

“Anything I can do to help,” he said.

As I left his shop, I buzzed Necalli to tell him we needed to find Olintecke. He said he would put out an all-points call.

I was on my way to the rail line, thinking I would be right on time at Aunt Xoco’s, when my buzzer went off. Thinking it was probably Necalli getting back to me about something, I answered it: “Colhua.”

“Is this a better time?” asked the voice on the other end—the same one that had called me earlier, after I spotted Olintecke’s reflection in the flower shop window.

It was still tinny, still hard to hear. And as before, the number was untraceable.

“Yes,” I said. “Sorry about before.”

“It’s all right.”

“Can you tell me who you are now?”

“I prefer not to.”

“How do I know the information is dependable if you won’t identify yourself?”

“Hear me out and judge for yourself.”

I didn’t want to scare the guy away, if it even was a guy. So I said, “All right.”

“It’s not the cultists who are responsible for those murders. It’s Molpilia, the developer.”

Molipila? “How do you figure that?”

“He’d like you to believe that the de-sanctification of those pyramids will hurt him in the pouch. But in fact, it’s the other way around. If they hadn’t been de-sanctified, they would have ruined him.”

I didn’t get it. “He went on the Mirror—”

“Misdirection,” said my mystery caller. “Forget it and think about this. Molpilia’s a luxury builder. The Patecatl, the Xilonen, the Itztli. . .they’re all his. He’s never built in anything but a high-income district before. Why start now?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “You’re the one telling the story.”

“Because he got a special, one-time sweetheart deal from the Empire to build pyramids in districts other developers wouldn’t touch. You with me?”

“Sure.”

“Of course, he had to build these pyramids on a fast track so they would open in time for the Fire Renewal. That way, the Empire could demonstrate its regard for the common people during the Five Unlucky Days—a time when the winds of dissent and rebellion were likely to blow their strongest.”

“If you say so.”

“And in exchange for his cooperation, Molpilia received huge tax breaks with regard to not only his new properties, but his other properties as well—amounting to a sum considerably greater than what he had ever made as a builder.”

“Good for him,” I said.

“It was very good for him. Critical, you might say. You see, Molpilia had been putting big beans on ullamalitzli for many cycles, and—because he wasn’t very good at it—losing a lot more than he won. His debts had become more than even he could handle. The Empire was aware of this, of course. It knew that Molpilia would do anything to stay out of the prison house. And with the Empire’s help, he did.”

“A happy ending.”

“It should have been. Molpilia’s windfall was precisely enough to wipe the slate clean and keep him out of debtors’ court. Except he couldn’t resist using some of it to bet on Ixtapaluca versus Malinalco.”

I recalled the game. After all, it was just a few moons earlier. Malinalco had been the better team by far. It should have won going away, but Ixtapaluca pulled it out at the last moment. The upset of the cycle.

“Molpilia had put his beans on Malinalco. He believed he couldn’t lose.”

“Yet he lost,” I said, seeing where this was going. “Suddenly, he was back where he started from. Except now he had the additional burden of having to build low-income pyramids, which would take forever to return his investment.”

“Exactly. For reasons that should be painfully obvious, Molpilia didn’t want to renege on his deal with the Empire. So he used what resources he had left, cut corners wherever he could, and made the pyramids look as if they were nearing completion—even though he didn’t have the beans to actually finish them.”

Eventually, he would have been found out. The Empire was slow to act sometimes, but it knew a half-finished pyramid when it saw one.

“He was a dead man,” said my informant, “unless he found a way to keep his problem from becoming public. And what better way to stall a construction project than to de-sanctify it?”

“At the expense of human lives.” A cold-blooded plan, to say the least. Yet I could see Molpilia being capable of it if the stakes were high enough.

It was interesting, I thought, if it was true. But I would need evidence before I could pursue it. “And you know this how?” I asked.

“Never mind that. Just see to it that Molpilia gets what’s coming to him.”

Then the line went silent.

I looked back at the building where Molpilia had his offices. It towered over the edifices around it, resplendent in the dying sunlight. As resplendent as the pyramids he had built over in Aztlan.

And yet, as much as Molpilia had made, he had lost most of it in the ball court. Or so my caller had insisted. Big beans, he had said. For many cycles.

If that was true, had I scored some of the goals that had been Molpilia’s undoing? Had I cost him a pile one night? Maybe more than one night? It felt strange to look at it that way.

In the ball court, all the players saw were the ball, the other team, and the stone walls. We never thought about the fans, much less the betting parlors.

At least, I hadn’t.

Pecking a number into the face of my buzzer, I called Necalli again. He would want to hear about this.

Because I couldn’t think of anything but the murders, I almost missed the rail stop near Aunt Xoco’s place. Fortunately, I looked up just in time to get off. It was a good thing. Otherwise there would have been one more murder for the force to investigate . . .

Mine.

I was hoping my aunt wouldn’t faint at the sight of me. She didn’t. She didn’t even stop in the middle of setting out her statuettes. All she said was, “You look terrible.”

“Don’t get upset, Aunt Xoco. I just—”

“Upset?” She laughed. “You think I’ve never seen bumps and bruises, Maxtla? You think your father never came home from work looking like a carriage ran him over—and then backed up and ran him over again?”

I recalled a couple such times. But my father always made light of it—at least to me.

“Who did it?” Aunt Xoco asked, the same way she might have asked if I had seen the Emperor on the Mirror the other day.

“I don’t know,” I said. “They were wearing masks.”

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 week.

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.”

“If you say so.”

“I don’t care who we’re talking about,” said Molpilia. “Maybe it’s my biggest enemy. Maybe I hate his guts like I’ve never hated anyone before. I do what I can to take him down, sure. I put the fear of the gods in him. But I stop short of murder.”

“I’m sure the judge will appreciate your restraint,” I told him.

After I dropped Molpilia off at the Aztlan Temporary Detainment Facility in District Six, where he would await the next available judge, I returned to my office.

I had always looked forward to being there, ever since my first day as an Investigator. I loved the activity, the camaraderie. But the place felt different all of a sudden.

I allowed that it might be my imagination. It would have been normal for me to experience a little paranoia after what I had told Necalli. But I didn’t think it was paranoia.

I felt like I had been exposed. In fact, as soon as I sat down at my desk, I felt like my colleagues’ eyes were drilling holes in the back of my neck.

Some of them had to be Knife Eyes, just by the law of averages. Sure, the names Yaotl had given me hadn’t included any of my fellow Investigators, but he had made it clear he didn’t know everyone in the organization.

And I believed him. I mean, who knew more about keeping a secret than a bunch of Investigators? They would never have trusted someone like Yaotl with everything there was to know.

I tried to tell myself that I could trust Necalli, that of everyone I knew in the place he had always been the most straight-up with me.

Still, every time someone walked behind me I felt a little twinge between my shoulder blades. I didn’t like it.

For a long time, my desk had been my home away from home, my sanctuary.

Now I felt as if I had been evicted.

I wanted to stand up and challenge everybody at the top of my lungs, get it over with. But I couldn’t. Not until Necalli had conducted his investigation.

Fortunately, I only had to sit there long enough to file my arrest report. Then I had somewhere to go.

Just as I was finishing the report, my radio buzzed. I picked it up and said, “Colhua.”

“This is High Priest Itzcoatl,” said the smooth, measured voice on the other end.

“High Priest,” I said. “How may I serve you?”

“You have already served me better than I might have hoped,” said Itzcoatl. “By apprehending the murderer, you have defused an explosion that threatened to shake Mexica to its foundations.”

“You mean Molpilia?” I asked.

“Who else?”

Lands of the Dead, I thought. I knew the High priest was well-connected, but I had arrested Molpilia only an hour earlier.

“Honestly,” I said, giving away a confidence I should have restricted to police officers, “I’m not sure if he’s the one. I have another lead.”

“Then, by all means, pursuit it. But as you have access to certain sources, I do as well. And I am confident that you have found the one you seek.”

I had to smile. If the gods were on my side, maybe I had cracked the case.

Or maybe Itzcoatl was just too eager to put the murders aside. It was understandable, considering who he was and what he was preparing to do that evening.

“But I am not calling merely to praise you, Colhua. I would like to mark your accomplishment in a more public way.”

“Public. . .?” I echoed.

“As you know,” said Itzcoatl, “I will be making the journey from the river to my sanctum this evening. I would like you to walk at my side as part of my Honor Guard.”

Inclusion in the High Priest’s Honor Guard was usually reserved for noblemen and prominent government officials who had in some way benefited the priesthood. Not police officers.

“Are you sure?” I asked.

Itzcoatl laughed softly. “You mean is it a wise decision, when so many powerful men will feel slighted to see a man of your station in a place they covet? At a time like this, there are more important things than placating the powerful. There are also the common people to consider. And,” he added, “to be honest, it is not only your efforts I wish to honor. I wish to recognize your father’s as well.”

I was touched.

But the High Priest had said himself that it wasn’t simply a matter of rewarding me. The common people had to be soothed in times of change, and I was one of the common people. By serving in the High Priest’s Honor Guard, I would be telling them that they had a place in the new millennium.

“I don’t know what to say,” I told Itzcoatl.

“You need not say anything. Simply meet me at the river before dusk. You know the place, I trust.”

I said I did.

“Gods’ blessings, Colhua,” said the High Priest.

“Gods’ blessings,” I replied.

When the connection terminated, I leaned back in my chair. The High Priest’s Honor Guard. Now that was something I could tell Aunt Xoco.

Yet I didn’t feel completely comfortable with the idea. Itzcoatl might have been certain that I had caught the killer, but I wasn’t.

I needed to know more—and there was a place where I might satisfy that need.

Eren’s apartment was in District Five, not far from the edge of town, in a pyramid that had seen far better days. If it hadn’t been torn down and replaced yet, it would be soon.

In the meantime, the rent was low and the neighbors didn’t seem to mind the animal sacrifices. Or maybe they did, and they were just afraid to say anything.

The majority of the cultists lived in the building. I knew that because that was where we had found them after each of the murders.

There wasn’t any doorman, so I walked in and took the lift to the fourth floor. According to our files, that was where Eren lived. When I emerged from the lift, I checked the day-signs on the doors.

New buildings just used numbers, and had for the last fifty or sixty cycles. But for a short time before that, builders had decided it was charming to use day-signs like Flint, Wind, and Monkey instead.

Eren’s door had the sign Dog on it. I rapped on it and waited.

A few moments later, it opened. But it wasn’t Eren standing there. It was one of her fellow cultists.

The phrase “a bull of a man” came to mind. In fact, I had seen bulls smaller than he was. His neck alone was the size of my waist.

There were others standing behind him—a man and a couple of women. I didn’t see Eren, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t somewhere in the back of the apartment.

“I’m an Investigator for the Empire,” I told the guy with the bull neck. “I’ve come to see Erendira Nacatl.”

“I know who you are,” he responded in a clipped, northern accent.

And he wasn’t moving aside. He’s got balls, I thought.

“This is a bad decision,” I told him.

He smiled a cold, dangerous smile. “Mocking the gods is a bad decision too.”

“That’s a worthwhile sentiment,” I noted, “but it’s entirely irrelevant to the situation at hand. As a public service, I’m going to summarize that situation for you. Ready?”

Bull Neck’s eyes narrowed.

I took that as a yes. “You’re impeding a police investigation. Do you know what the penalty is for that?”

“Only the gods can judge a man.”

“That’s where you’re wrong,” I said.

All I’d come for was to see Eren. But now that this lizard turd had challenged me in front of the others, I had to do something about it. Otherwise, I’d be derelict in my duty.

I remembered one guy, maybe a cycle from retirement, who had backed down from a public confrontation in the course of an investigation. As soon as his superior learned of it, the guy was fired. No retirement celebration, no benefits, no nothing.

He hadn’t complained, either. He knew he had been wrong.

People had to have respect for the police. Otherwise, all kinds of bad things would happen. That was what it said in the Investigator’s manual, and that was what I believed.

Faced with an oppositional citizen, I was supposed to go for my hand stick. That was another thing it said in the manual. And as stiff as I was from my beating, no one would have criticized me for it.

But hand sticks left scars, and I didn’t think I needed to do that to make Bull Neck see reason.

The first thing I did was throw a left at his face. He managed to block the attack, but he had to use both hands. That deprived him of a chance to strike back. Too much weight-lifting, I thought, and not enough time in the sparring house.

Taking advantage of the opening, I stepped forward and planted my other fist in Bull Neck’s belly. It doubled him over, if only for a moment, but that was long enough for me to hook him hard in the ear with my left.

He didn’t go down, but he staggered. If I’d believed that he would let it go at that, I would have stopped. But I knew he wouldn’t, so I hit him again.

That dropped him to his knees.

I looked past him, half-expecting someone to take Bull Neck’s place. But it wasn’t another challenger I saw standing there in the doorway. It was Eren.

“It’s all right,” she told the cultists behind her, signaling for them to stay back. “Just take care of Cuetz.”

One of them, a tall fellow, swung a finger in my direction. “But this shitbug Investigator—”

“Watch your mouth,” I told him.

“It’s all right,” Eren insisted, putting her hand against the tall man’s chest.

The cultist’s eyes were a fiery red, but he choked back whatever else he had to say. Then he bent to pick up his friend Bull Neck, though he didn’t look happy about it.

Eren didn’t look happy either. Slipping sideways past Bull Neck, she grabbed my arm and said, “This way.”

We went back down the corridor, into the lift, and down to the lobby. Then she walked me out the back door of the pyramid into a big concrete courtyard, the likes of which was popular fifty or sixty years ago as well.

Somewhere in the expanse of dirt and grass beyond it was the place where the cultists conducted their animal sacrifices. I tried not to think about that. After all, I had more important salamanders to fry.

Eren studied my face. “That didn’t happen just now, did it?”

“No,” I said. “Two days ago.”

She frowned. “You should have buzzed before you came. We’re all on edge. We’ve gotten a lot of threats.”

“I’m not surprised,” I said.

“Neither were we. And we’re not going to let them stop us.”

“Because the gods will protect you?” I asked, unable to resist the gibe.

“Because if we die,” she said, apparently unperturbed by my remark, “we’ve died doing the right thing.”

“Always a praiseworthy idea. But it’s better to live.”

She tilted her head to one side. “So you came here to talk theology with me?”

I bit my lip. Why did I let her get under my skin? Unfortunately, I knew the answer.

“No,” I said. “I came to talk about a buzz I got the other day. From an unidentified informant. It was you, wasn’t it?”

Eren didn’t reply. She didn’t have to. I could see the answer in her eyes.

“Where did you get your information?” I asked.

“I can’t say,” she told me. “People would lose their jobs. Maybe more than their jobs.”

“How do you know these people? From the capital?”

She smiled, despite herself. “Good guess.”

“It wasn’t much of a guess. You lived there a long time. And there’s no record of the work you did there. Which suggests—”

“That I worked for the Emperor. Which I did.”

“Until you met some people who belonged to Ancient Light, and decided you would better serve society by teaching it to honor the gods.”

“Not some people,” she said, reddening a little. “Just one. But yes, I felt a calling.”

I felt a pang of jealousy, but I managed to put it aside. “Well, for what it’s worth, your friend Molpilia is awaiting an audience with a judge as we speak. But I’m not convinced that he or the people who work for him committed the murders.”

“Why is that?”

“Because there’s no hard evidence that they did it. The story you told me about his gambling problem certainly sounds plausible. But until I have something more tangible, I’m not going to be able to pin a murder charge on Molpilia.”

“So why is he going to stand before a judge?” Eren asked.

“Another charge,” I said. “One I can’t talk about.” For any number of reasons, I had to keep my business with the Knife Eyes to myself.

She seemed to find that hard to accept. Finally, she asked, “So who do you think did commit the murders?”

Olintecke maybe. And the Knife Eyes were still in the running, with or without Molpilia.

But what I said was, “I was hoping you could help me with that. After all, you knew about Molpilia. If there’s anything else, anything at all . . .”

Eren thought for a while. Then she shook her head. “Nothing I can think of.”

“Well,” I said, “it was worth a try. Thanks anyway.” And I left her before I was tempted to say anything else.

I had already opened the back door to the lobby when Eren called my name. As I turned, I saw her coming after me. To my surprise, she had what looked like tears in her eyes.

“I just wanted you to know,” she said, “that I had a crush on you. When we were kids, I mean. I thought you were the handsomest, smartest, most wonderful boy on Earth.”

It was nice to hear, I said. “But why tell me now?”

“Because,” she said, “I don’t think we’re ever going to see each other again.”

I did something stupid then: I kissed her. Me, an Investigator of the Empire, working a murder case in which Eren Nacatl was still, technically, a suspect. And I kissed her.

“I wondered what that would be like,” she said.

“So did I,” I confessed, “when you weren’t slugging me in the face.”

Her eyes narrowed. “I slugged you . . . ?”

“I can tell you the day and time.”

“It must have been . . . memorable.”

So was this.

I ran my fingertips along her cheek. It was as soft as I’d always imagined. “I’ve got to go,” I told her.

“Then go,” she said.

She had barely gotten the words out when my radio buzzed. Taking it out of my pouch, I said, “Colhua.”

It was Necalli. “You know the call you put out on Olintecke? They found him.”

My heart beat faster. “Where?”

He told me.

“I’ll be right there,” I said.

Eren looked at me. “Something?”

“Yes,” I said. “But not what I hoped.”

“Max,” she said, “I hope I’m wrong. I mean about never seeing you again.”

“So am I,” I said.

Then I really did leave her.

As it turned out, Olintecke lived in District Two, in one of the older pyramids there. Even older, I believed, than the one in which Eren and her friends had taken up residence.

When I got to his apartment, there was a police officer at the door. I showed him my bracelet and he let me in.

The place was a mess. There were food wrappers and cardboard cups everywhere I looked, and it smelled faintly like dog urine though there weren’t any animals in evidence.

The only other living person there was a doctor, sitting on a chair in the eating room and making notes. She looked up as I joined her.

“Colhua?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said.

She jerked a thumb over her shoulder. “He’s in there.”

Following her gesture, I went through the doorway and saw a man sprawled on the floor, facing away from me. I could tell by the ponytail that it was Olintecke.

“Gods of Judgement,” I muttered.

The doctor had followed me into the room. “You know him?” she asked.

“I know who he is,” I said.

But then, at that point the doctor had to know that too.

I knelt beside the body. The officers who had found Olintecke had cut him down and removed the rope from his neck to see if they could revive him, though in fact there hadn’t been any chance of their doing so. His face was dark and bloated, and the way his eyes popped made him look like the last thing he had seen was a big surprise.

Maybe it was, if the stories about seeing the Lands of the Dead in one’s last living moments had any truth to them.

“How long ago?” I asked.

“Not long. A few hours, maybe. Any idea why he did it?”

I shook my head. “None at all.”

I also didn’t know why he had been following me. And with Olintecke silenced, it looked like I never would.

“Anyone we should notify?” the doctor asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Sorry.”

“That’s all right. We’ll figure it out.”

Olintecke’s pouch was lying beside him, still tied to his belt. I removed it and checked its contents.

He had carried the usual things—a radio, a handful of spending beans, a metal identification card. Also a piece of paper, neatly folded in quarters. I unfolded it and saw that there was a list written on it.

Three names.

The first was Patli’s. The second was Mazatl’s.

The third was mine.

I took a breath, let it out. It was chilling to see my name on Olintecke’s list, written in his own handwriting. More chilling, even, than seeing his reflection in the window of that flower shop.

And where had the names come from? We hadn’t yet released them to the public. Sure, Mazatl’s neighbors knew what happened to him, but Patli hadn’t had any neighbors.

So was Olintecke connected to the Knife Eyes after all? As Investigators, they could have given him not only the victims’ identities but mine too.

Most disturbing of all was the question of what Olintecke planned to do with his list. Had he simply been following the case, and therefore also been following me—the Investigator assigned to it? An innocent subject of the Empire, curious to see how it would all turn out?

I didn’t think so.

More likely, the names were those of his intended victims. He had already killed Patli and Mazatl. And if he’d had his way, I would have been next.

As if that would have kept Olintecke from being caught in the long run. If he had killed me, Necalli would only have put another Investigator on his trail.

Except . . . that next Investigator might have been one of the Knife Eyes. And if Olintecke was aligned with them . . .

I closed my eyes and massaged the bridge of my nose. It was all just speculation: Was Olintecke the murderer? Would I have been next? Was he in league with the Knife Eyes?

And what under heaven had made him kill himself?

I might get some answers at some point, but not from Olintecke. For better or worse, he was with the gods.

I got to my feet, the list still in my hand. The most bizarre thing about it was that Olintecke had written it at all. Was he afraid that he would forget the names—all three of them?

Bizarre. But I was talking about the mind of a serial killer. It didn’t get any more bizarre than that.

I took another look at the paper in my hand—at how neatly it had been folded, how carefully the names had been rendered. Olintecke might not have kept his apartment very clean, but he was obviously meticulous when it came to some things.

Then I noticed something else: Mazatl’s name had another one written above it. It was scratched more than written, as if Olintecke had been in a hurry when he wrote it. But I could still make it out . . .

Acacitli.

Some names could be either first names or surnames. But Acacitli? That was just a first name.

What did it mean? Was there someone named Acacitli who was also on the murderer’s hit list? Had Olintecke gotten that guy as well? If he had, we would find out eventually—when the body turned up.

But if he hadn’t, we would never know which Acacitli he meant. In Aztlan alone, there were hundreds of them. Maybe thousands.

So many that even if I’d gotten hold of the list right after Mazatl was killed, I couldn’t have warned the guy. I could just see the force sending out an advisory over the Mirror: Be careful if your name is Acacitli. There’s a serious nut job out to get you.

But why, I wondered, had Acacitli been listed by his first name when the others were listed by their last names? Was it just the way Olintecke thought of the guy? Did it have any significance whatsoever?

Maybe not.

And then again . . .

Chapter Ten

I
spent the better part of the afternoon on my monitor at work,
pursuing a hunch. It was a good thing. It kept me out of the streets, where Aztlan’s panic over the end of the calendar was finally starting to show through.

One elderly man, wearing a lizard head and painted yellow head to toe, went for a swim in the sacred river and nearly drowned. Another guy killed his pet rabbits—all fourteen of them—with poisoned darts and an antique blowgun. And a couple of women, lovers apparently, tried—unsuccessfully—to push a police officer into the path of the oncoming rail carriage at the Tlaloc Street stop before leaping onto the rail themselves.

Two hours before sundown, the frequency of such cases began to increase. There were hundreds of them, even more than I had expected. Investigators were sent out to supplement the efforts of the police. I too would have been assigned to an incident if not for my invitation from Itzcoatl.

After all, Necalli didn’t want me snubbing the High Priest of Aztlan. How would that have looked for him?

Eren’s people were out in full force as well. But Necalli didn’t ask me to watch them either.

So I sat in front of my monitor and searched the Mirror, and finally found some of those answers I had been looking for.

An hour later, with the last of the afternoon ebbing away and the High Priest’s ceremony beckoning, I found myself sitting on a wooden bench in the center of a stately, grey-marble chamber, holding the stoppered urn that contained my father’s ashes.

The chamber was one of several in Aztlan’s Hall of the Fallen, where those who died in service to the city were entombed. It was the smallest pyramid in the district—maybe in any district. But then, fallen public servants were few and far between, and ashes didn’t take up much space in any case.

I remembered the day my father was cremated. I was nine. I didn’t see the procedure, of course, but I spent the day hiding under my bed nonetheless. My mother had to talk me out of there as if she were cajoling a jumper off a ledge.

When my father’s ashes arrived, I was scared of them. I wouldn’t even look at the vase that contained them. It was my mother who told me my father still loved me as much as ever. It wasn’t his love that had changed, she said, it was just the form the gods had chosen for him.

Of course, it wasn’t only my father’s ashes in the vase, though my mother didn’t choose to mention that fact at the time. The vase held a dog’s ashes too.

In ancient days, it would have been a living dog that was sacrificed to lead the deceased through the often-confusing landscape of the afterlife. However, the Empire had become more civilized since that time, adopting the practice of freezing dead dogs and burning them instead.

Still, it still wasn’t the sort of thing a nine-cycle-old really wanted to hear about, especially after the gods had taken his father.

Sitting there now in the marble chamber, I turned the urn around in my hands, taking note of its weight, its workmanship, its renderings of the death-god Mictlantecuhtli and his wife Mictlancihuatl in bright parrot colors. I had never studied it so closely before. But then, I hadn’t felt so close to my father since the day he died.

Usually, when I visited him there in the Hall of the Fallen, I told him about the latest Eagle game, picking out the highlights as if I were a commentator on the Mirror. Or I described the case I was working on at the moment, especially if there was something unusual about it. Those were the kinds of things he had liked to talk about when he was alive.

But this time I had something more to say.

“I know what happened to you all those cycles ago,” I told him. My voice, soft as it was, echoed from wall to wall. “And I know who was responsible for it. Your spirit can rest easy now in the Lands of the Dead.”

I could almost hear him answer in that easygoing tone he had, a smile in his voice: “Don’t worry about me, Maxtla. Just take care of yourself.”

That was the way he had been with me. It was the way I wanted to be if I ever had a family.

My father hadn’t been perfect. I saw that now. He had made mistakes, caring so much about justice that he was willing to break the Emperor’s Law to carry it out.

But his mistakes didn’t make me love him any less. If anything, they made me love him more.

I arrived at the River of Stars half an hour earlier than the High Priest had suggested, sweaty from making my way through the thousands of masked celebrants to get there. But Itzcoatl and his entourage were all present already, dressed in their white robes and their gold sandals, smiling and waving to the crowd.

Itzcoatl wore a headdress made of yellow gold and turquoise and a weave of thick, red parrot plumage, topped with a wild cascade of blue-green feathers taken from the tail of the crested quetzal. His attendants wore the same sort of thing but with a more modest cascade of deep blue cotinga feathers.

The rest of the High Priest’s Honor Guard was in evidence as well, all three of them wearing sleeveless white tunics made of finely woven lamb’s wool and long earrings made of iridescent hummingbird feathers. One of them was the First Chief of Investigators, Eztli Zayanya. He was smaller than I thought he would be, with dark eyes that seemed to bore into me like bone worms as I approached.

Several police officers moved to intercept me, but Zayanya waved them away. Obviously, he knew who I was.

As he was my boss, protocol demanded that I greet him before anyone else. “First Chief,” I said, holding out my hand.

He grasped it. “Colhua. Congratulations.”

I nodded. “Thank you. You too.”

The other members of the Honor Guard were Tupac Cualli, the First Administrator of Aztlan, and Xipil Nenetl, the willowy, attractive woman in charge of the city’s Mirror coverage.

I felt a hand on my shoulder and traced it to the High Priest, who smiled at me from beneath his headdress. He said, “Good to see you, Colhua.”

Then, like everyone else, he noticed the scabs and the black-and-blue marks on my face.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

“I’m fine,” I said. “Just part of the job.”

Itzcoatl shook his head disapprovingly. “It is unfortunate that it should be so. I will ask the gods for your quick recovery.”

I smiled. “I’m grateful.”

“My attendants,” he said, “have a pair of earrings for you.”

Normally, I would have declined. I wasn’t the earring-wearing type. But in this case, I made an exception and accepted a pair from one of the white-robed priests.

As I put them on, hooking them through the slits in my earlobes made just after I was born, I wondered what celebrities Itzcoatl had left out of his Honor Guard in order to include me. I made a mental note to ask him later.

I expected that I’d have to wait a while before the ceremony began. But the time went quickly. Before I knew it, Tonatiuh was touching the horizon, spreading his blood-fire over the water.

The High Priest and then the rest of us got down on our knees and immersed our arms in the river, a demonstration of awe and piety. The water was warmer than I would have thought, as warm as my bath. The only chill I felt was when I took my arms out, exposing them to the breeze.

To my right, beyond Zazanya, the High Priest closed his eyes and said a prayer to the gods. Then he got to his feet, turned, and began walking away from the river, the gold in his headdress glinting sharply in the light of the Last Sun. The rest of us in his Honor Guard followed, and Itzcoatl’s white-robed attendants fell in behind us.

The crowd, an immense sea of god-masks and animal-masks as wild and colorful as any I had seen before, cheered and blew conch-horns and parted for us. Hands everywhere lifted toward the sky in fear and supplication. In every direction except the one behind us, towering torches were lit.

But not everyone was there in order to mark Tonatiuh’s passing. Among the multitudes were the same sort of police teams on which my father had served during the last Renewal.

I should have felt safe. After all, my fellow officers were watching over me. The First Chief of Investigators himself was walking beside me. But I couldn’t help thinking about the Knife Eyes, and what I had told Necalli, and what he might have told someone else.

It wouldn’t take much for the Knife Eyes to kill me. A little misdirection, a hidden blade, a citizen who could be blamed for the deed. They could have their revenge on me the way First Sun had had its revenge on my father.

So I kept my eyes open, searching the crowd for anything that suggested malicious intent. Block by block, as we passed the huge torches set up at each intersection, I maintained a lookout, and not just for myself. After all, I was an Investigator, and the High Priest of Aztlan was arrowing through the masses just ahead of me.

At one point, with the river a few blocks behind me, I began to wonder how pervasive the Knife Eyes’ influence might be. What if someone like Zazanya had been one of them earlier in his career? What if he had maintained his ties to them as he ascended to the rank of First Chief?

Yaotl might not have known about him, or he might have known and not said anything.

My eyes slid in Zazanya’s direction—and met his, which were looking back at me. He smiled, as anyone caught up in such a huge, dizzying celebration might smile. But I wondered if there were something behind the smile, and maybe something sharp in his pocket as well.

So it went, as Tonatiuh died for the last time in glorious streaks across the sky. The people on either side of us threw fistfuls of flower petals, white and yellow and purple. They fluttered and fell on our heads and shoulders, some of them sticking to the High Priest’s headdress.

But to my relief, that was all the people threw. No knives. No darts. Nothing threatening at all.

The sky darkened to indigo. The torches grew more fearsome, imposing their orange fury on the night. But there was no trouble. The High Priest’s procession moved through Aztlan like the gleam of hope it was supposed to be, all the way to the building that housed Itzcoatl’s sanctum.

As we reached it, I saw one of the god-masks on my right suddenly loom closer—close enough for its wearer to reach out and touch the High Priest. Instinctively, I moved to intercept him. But before I could do anything, a couple of Investigators did it for me.

The mask was pulled back into the crowd. A moment later, I couldn’t find even a sign of it. I breathed easier.

As if oblivious to the incident, the High Priest turned in his tracks to face me and the rest of his Honor Guard. He was beaming beneath his headdress, aglow as if with an inner light.

At that point, I knew, he would choose one of us to accompany him up to his sanctum and help him prepare for his appearance before the people. Because even within the Honor Guard, there was one honored above the rest.

Itzcoatl looked at all four of us—Cualli, Zazanya, Nenetl, and me. But in the end, his gaze settled on me alone.

I wasn’t surprised.

After all, he had said he wanted to honor not only me but also my father. And he had said as well that he wanted to touch the common people. In making me his choice, he would accomplish both his goals.

Feeling the eyes of Zazanya and the others on me, I joined the High Priest and entered the building with him. The lobby was lit but, in accordance with tradition, there was no one inside.

“You know,” said Itzcoatl, turning to me, “it has been a long time since I’ve done this. But as I recall, it was a most amazing experience.”

I nodded. “I have no doubt of it.”

At the end of every cycle, the High Priest addressed a crowd from his balcony. But not this kind of crowd. Though he was merely the proxy of the gods, he had to be feeling godlike himself.

Together, the High Priest and I took the lift up to his sanctum. All the way, he smiled to himself. It was hard for me to take my eyes off that smile, hard to remember that it was just a man standing beside me, a creature of flesh and blood and not something more ethereal.

Eventually, we reached the top floor of the building. As we emerged from the lift into the hallway, I heard cheering. It was faint but unmistakable.

“The people,” said Itzcoatl.

“Yes,” I said, “the people.”

Pausing at the door to his sanctum, he pressed a pad on the wall. Instantly, the holy space revealed itself to us, its immensity illuminated by lighting strips placed at intervals. At the same time, the cheering from outside became a roar, so loud that I felt as if we were standing in the crowd below us.

Last time I was there, the open slits in the vaulted ceiling had let in the sun’s rays. Now they gave us glimpses of the emerging stars instead.

Moving inside, the High Priest beckoned for me to follow. The doors to the place closed behind us, probably triggered by an electric eye. Caught in the embrace of Itzcoatl’s sanctum, I felt as if I were part of a great, joyous, and terrible secret.

The doors to the balcony were closed for the time being. In front of them stood a red-veined marble pedestal. On the pedestal lay the glassy, black obsidian knife that the High Priest would raise as he addressed the crowd.

He picked up the knife and turned it over in his hand, studying it as if he were looking at it for the first time. “Once again, Colhua, I must thank you.”

I waved away the notion. “I am honored to serve you.”

Itzcoatl looked up at me and smiled. “You have no idea how honored—or how well you will serve.”

With his free hand, he took off his headdress and placed it on the marble pedestal. Then he opened his robe and let it slip to the floor, revealing a black robe underneath.

The kind priests had worn in ancient days.

“I don’t understand,” I said.

“Of course not,” said the High Priest. “Allow me to explain. You see, despite what I said to you earlier, Lolco Molpilia had nothing to do with the murders at Centeotl and at Atlaua.”

“How do you know that?” I asked.

“Because they were carried out by me.”

“You . . . ?” I echoed.

“Yes. Surprised? And they were not the first murders I committed. I did the same thing at the last Fire Renewal.”

I shook my head. “Why?”

“I was young when I first became High Priest, Colhua. I was optimistic. But my optimism soon became discontent. I saw the way the gods were treated in our time. No longer the all-powerful arbiters of death and deliverance, their likenesses were abased on storefronts and mocked in the form of toy figures.”

He sounded like Eren. But there was a difference: Eren hadn’t just admitted to committing murder.

“The priesthood was a sham,” said Itzcoatl, “a shadow of what it had once been. Disgusted, I delved into ancient texts, seeking something more, something greater. And do you know what I found?”

I didn’t answer him. But then, I didn’t have to. He was having a conversation with himself.

“I found that the gods we pretended to worship were not the only gods. Once,” he said, caressing the knife in his hand, “the people had paid tribute to an older pantheon. Gods whose names sounded like snakes slithering among stones.”

I took a step back toward the doors, in case he decided to use the knife on me. Unfortunately, the High Priest seemed to notice my retreat.

“Don’t bother,” he said. “The doors are locked and they will stay that way. Now, where was I? Oh yes—the older gods. They demanded blood, Colhua. And I gave it to them. My first victim was a man named Acacitli Mazatl. Sound familiar?”

“Mazatl’s . . . father?”

His light-colored eyes danced. “Very good. And my second victim should sound familiar as well. His name was Patli—the father of Yaretzi Patli. It was gratifying to take their lives, a pleasure to serve deities still worthy of my respect. But there was an Investigator . . . a clever fellow, like you. He had his suspicions about me. In time, he might have exposed me.

“So I leaked word to First Sun that he was going to shut them down. I knew that their backs were against the wall, that they would move quickly and decisively. And they did, during the Fire Renewal ceremony, as I led the procession from the river to my sanctum. They stabbed the clever fellow in the neck. The wound proved fatal.”

I felt a pit open in my stomach.

“That was your father,” said Itzcoatl. “The hero credited with saving my life.” He laughed. “Ironic, isn’t it?”

I felt my hands ball up into fists. But I didn’t go after Itzcoatl. Not yet.

“It gets better,” he said. “Because after I received his body in the Hall of the Fallen, I did to it what I had done to Mazatl’s father and Patli’s father—I opened him up and placed a candle inside him, and dedicated his death to the dark gods—all before I burned him to ashes.”

My throat constricted. Wherever my father was in the Lands of Death, he was writhing. He had been a devout man all his life. To know that his death had honored Itzcoatl’s pantheon rather than his own. . .

Animal, I thought.

“That bothers you,” the High Priest observed. “I knew it would. But I haven’t been all bad for you, Colhua. I did you a favor as well, with the help of Luc Olintecke.”

“What favor?” I spat out.

“I came across Olintecke a few cycles ago. He was working for a man named Xiuh, another former member of First Sun. I saw how devoted Olintecke was to the gods, and offered him a chance to serve me. He took it, gladly. As this Fire Renewal approached, I thought he would help me with the murders, especially since this time I wanted to leave the mutilated bodies out in public for everyone to see. But he was too honest, too forthright for me to even ask. Once again, I had to carry out the rituals on my own.

“First the son of Patli. Then the son of Mazatl. That left only one more—the son of the third man whose death I had given to the elder gods.” He smiled. “You, Colhua.”

I remembered that priests in ancient days had favored multi-generational sacrifices, considering them more appealing to the gods. Father and son, dipping twice into the same bloodline. Apparently, Itzcoatl’s gods were no different.

“But you fell afoul of Molpilia and the Knife Eyes,” he said, “or so I learned from my contacts. That presented me with a problem. I needed someone to preserve you, to follow you and make sure you came to no harm. Who better to do so than a brute like Olintecke?

“That night you were attacked in the tunnel at the rail station? Olintecke was there. He intervened, kept you from getting beaten even worse, though he himself was hurt in the process.”

I had thought I heard footfalls as I woke up in the tunnel. And the second time I saw Olintecke, in the Merchant City, he hadn’t been able to run very well.

So he hadn’t been following me with malice in mind. Far from it, he had been looking after me.

“But Olintecke wasn’t as stupid as he looked,” said Itzcoatl. “Not nearly. In fact, he had two very impressive talents. One was that he could navigate the Mirror as if he had invented it. Using this talent, he broke through police protocols to learn more about the murders you were investigating.

“When he came across the names Patli and Mazatl, his other talent came into play: an ability to recall details other men had long forgotten. It came to him that the fathers of both victims had died in the last Fire Renewal. Some additional research showed him something else: Of all those who had perished in that Renewal, only one had a son who was still living.”

“My father,” I said.

“Yes. Your father. Olintecke came to me with the information. He said you were in danger, all right. Real danger. But not from the cultists or the Knife Eyes, because they had had chances to kill you and they had refrained from doing so. There was someone who had murdered Patli’s father, Mazatl’s father, and your father—and now, it seemed to him, that person was killing their sons.

“We needed to go to the police, Olintecke said, and tell them what was going on. I dismissed his theory, told him your enemies wouldn’t go so far as to commit murder. But he knew better. He said he would go to the police on his own if he had to—which was when I forbade him to say anything.

“The moment I did that, he saw through me. After all, he had been with me for a couple of cycles, and he had come to know me in that time. So he got a glimpse of my involvement in the murders.

“That put him in something of a bind. After all, he had sworn to obey me, and he had always borne that obligation with the utmost seriousness. He would rather have carved out his own heart than defied me. But he also couldn’t allow me to kill you as I had killed the others, because the idea of what I had done—what I was still doing—horrified him.

“So what could he do? Nothing, I thought. But I underestimated him, Colhua. Olintecke threatened to kill you himself in order to keep me from making you a sacrifice. I couldn’t allow that, of course. So I ordered him to kill himself—an order he carried out with admirable efficiency.”

Yet another death on Itzcoatl’s hands, I thought.

“And now,” he said, “there’s just one thing left to do—kill you, cut you open, and pluck out your heart—with the crowd down there watching.”

“Watching. . .?” I asked.

He smiled again. “There are cameras in the walls. They’ll go on in a moment. Then everyone, all over the Mirror, will see the power of my gods—and the weakness of yours.”

“And you think you can take me down?” I asked. “Why? Because you have a knife?”

I hadn’t been able to bring my hand stick to the ceremony—a condition of being part of the High Priest’s Honor Guard. But I was still a police officer. I’d had training.

“You believe I’m soft because I’m a priest,” said Itzcoatl. “It will be my pleasure to demonstrate otherwise.”

Just as he spoke, I saw a tiny camera protrude from the wall with a mechanical whirr. Then I heard other such sounds around me, coming from what must have been similar mechanisms.

“Excellent,” said the High Priest, his lips pulling back in a wolflike grin. “We can get started.”

And with his obsidian knife held low, he came for me.

True to his word, he wasn’t a pushover. I barely avoided his first slash. The second one sliced my tunic open.

Fast, I thought.

Then he moved even faster. This time, he nicked my chest—though it could have been worse. Then he did it a second time with his backhand. And he kept coming.

I was in trouble. Obviously, Itzcoatl hadn’t spent all his time praying.

Maybe when I was playing in the ball court, I could have kept up with him. But not now.

My tunic was turning red with blood—that is, where I still had something resembling a tunic. And I was running out of room as the High Priest backed me toward the wall behind me.

“Police!” came a sudden bellow from the hallway outside the doors to the sanctum. “Open up!”

Necalli, I thought. He couldn’t have shown up at a better time.

Itzcoatl stopped and glared at me, his eyes wild with realization. “You knew.”

“I found a list on Olintecke’s body,” I said. “It had three names on it—Patli’s, Mazatl’s, and mine. But above Mazatl’s name, there was another one—Acacitli. I did some research and found out who Acacitli was, and when he had died. Then I checked and saw that Patli’s father had died in the last Renewal as well.

“So I asked myself . . . who could have sacrificed everyone on that list, both father and son? Who could have performed a ritual dismemberment of them without anyone’s knowing? And who would have the opportunity to sacrifice me as well before the end of the Unlucky Days?”

“Flimsy evidence,” said the High Priest. “How could you be sure?”

“I couldn’t,” I said, “which is why—after no one went after me during our procession—I had to come up here and give you a chance to incriminate yourself.” I pulled out the recording wire I’d been wearing, which had been transmitting our conversation back to the Interrogation Center. “Thanks to this.”

Itzcoatl’s eyes nearly popped out of his skull. With a cry of rage, he charged at me.

Had he remained focused, he probably would have had me. But I was able to take advantage of his anger. Sidestepping his charge, I grabbed his robe and added to his momentum.

As he crashed into the wall, he lost control of his knife. It clattered away, giving me the opening I needed.

But as I pounced on Itzcoatl, hoping to finish him off, he lashed out with his foot. It caught me in the jaw, spinning me around.

He’s not just quick, I thought through a haze of pain. He’s strong too.

Then he showed me how strong—as he got up, put his shoulder into me, and sent me crashing to the floor. Before I knew it, he was on top of me with his hands around my throat. He began to squeeze.

“Police!” This time the cry was louder, more urgent, and it was followed by a pounding on the door.

The High Priest had managed to ignore Necalli’s shouts, but the pounding seemed to bother him. Distracted, he turned his head away from me for a moment.

Taking advantage of the opportunity, I hauled off and drove my fist into Itzcoatl’s jaw. His head snapped around like the business end of a whip, but he didn’t release his hold on me.

I hit him again. And again. But still he hung on, trying to crush my windpipe with his bare hands.

My vision started to narrow, darkness closing around the edges of it. I was running out of time.

“You’re finished,” the High Priest growled. “I can’t wait to tear your heart out.”

I’m not giving in, I thought.

My father had taught me that when I was little. It was what made me a champion in the ball court. Not my speed or my strength, or the accuracy with which I struck the ball. It was my refusal to give in.

That came from him.

With one hand I reached out and grabbed Itzcoatl by the ear, so he couldn’t move his head. Then, with the other hand, I punched him in the throat.

That made him release me—and a little room to move was all I needed. Grabbing him by the front of his robe, I threw him off me. Then I scrambled to my feet.

To his credit, the High Priest did the same. He was gasping hard, one hand clutching protectively at his throat, but he wasn’t done yet.

That was fine with me, because I wasn’t done with him either. Like a bull I lowered my head and charged, and rammed him square in the center of his chest. Together, we sprawled across the room.

The difference was that I saw the marble altar in time to avoid hitting it. Itzcoatl, on the other hand, struck it full force with the back of his skull.

I was ready to hit him again, whatever it took. But he didn’t get up again. He just lay there, moaning, a tiny puddle of blood gathering beneath his shaven head.

A moment later, the doors to the High Priest’s sanctum flew open and Necalli burst in, followed by a half-dozen officers.

“Sorry,” he told me. “He must have set the doors to lock behind him. It took a while to override the mechanism.”

I started to answer, but my throat hurt too much. So all I did was nod.

“Lands of the Dead,” Necalli said, glancing at my face on his way to see to Itzcoatl, “I’ve seen corpses that looked better.”

“Thanks,” I croaked.

It had occurred to me earlier in the day that if Necalli were one of the Knife Eyes, he might leave me hanging in Itzcoatl’s sanctum. But he hadn’t. So more than likely, the investigation of the Knife Eyes would be an honest one, and—to my mind, at least—the force would be better for it.

A few moments later, some of Necalli’s officers carried the High Priest out of his sanctum. He didn’t look so good either. His face was bruised and swollen, and he was dripping blood from a wound in the back of his head.

“Come on,” said Necalli, clapping me on the shoulder. “Let’s get you to a doctor.”

“Not yet,” I whispered. I pointed to the balcony doors. “I want to see what the Fire Renewal looks like from up here.”

Necalli was going to tell me I was crazy. I could see it in his face. After all, I was pretty beaten up.

But he had seen me beaten up before, not even so long ago. And maybe it occurred to him that I had earned a little leeway.

Whatever the reason, he said, “Knock yourself out.” Then he left me alone in Itzcoatl’s sanctum.

I went over to the balcony doors, opened them, and stepped out. Below me, in the torchlight, the people were still cheering. They didn’t know what had happened to the High Priest.

Not yet.

Over the cycles, the High Priest had emerged onto his balcony many times to address the crowd. But for me, stepping out there was a new experience. It made me feel the way I used to feel in the ball court when thousands of people were screaming my name, urging me on to feats that went beyond the limits of blood and bone.

I waved to the people. They must have wondered why it wasn’t Itzcoatl up there, but they waved back anyway.

Eventually, they would realize that the High Priest wasn’t coming out. They would disperse. And when they got home, they would see what had happened.

Itzcoatl’s cameras had seen to that.

Cualli, the First Administrator of the city, would release some kind of statement. Maybe Zazanya as well. They would try to give the people some solace, some comfort, some sense that nothing had changed.

But that wasn’t true. Everything had changed.

Our lives had been shaken to their foundations. Whatever people believed they knew about the priesthood. . .they would realize that it was a lie. A shameful lie.

Not that all priests were murderers and madmen. Certainly, that wasn’t the case. But they were human. They were fallible. That was the lesson the people would learn—that the men they admired, even worshipped, were no more venerable than Zolin the fried salamander man.

They weren’t better than anyone else. They were just people, a mixture of good and bad.

And if the priests were flesh and blood, so were the men and women who carried out the edicts of the nobility. And ultimately, difficult as it was to contemplate, so was the nobility itself.

That, without question, was the biggest change anyone could imagine.

But the Empire had lasted a millennium, enduring the Spaniard Cortez and his kind, and plague, and famine, and rebellion. And now it had survived the Last Sun. Despite everything, I assured myself, it would go on.

The next few days would be a challenge, to say the least, and a hardship, and a heartache. We had a mess to deal with, no question about it.

But it wasn’t the end of the world.

About the Author Michael Jan Friedman is the author of nearly 70 books of fiction and non-fiction, about half of them set somewhere in the wilds of the Star Trek universe. His first book, The Hammer and The Horn, was published by Questar, an imprint of Warner Books, in 1985. In the next couple of years, he wrote The Seekers and The Sword and The Fortress and The Fire, completing what has come to be known as The Vidarsaga Trilogy, as well as the freestanding novel The Glove of Maiden’s Hair.

In 1992 Friedman penned Reunion, the first Star Trek: The Next Generation hardcover, which introduced the crew of the Stargazer, Captain Jean-Luc Picard’s first command. Over the years, the popularity of Reunion spawned a number of Stargazer stories in both prose and comic book formats, including a six-novel original series.

Friedman has also written for the Aliens, Predator, Wolf Man, Lois and Clark, DC Super Hero, Marvel Super Hero, and Wishbone licensed book universes. Eleven of his book titles, including the autobiography Hollywood Hulk Hogan and Ghost Hunting (written with SciFi’s Ghost Hunters), have appeared on the prestigious New York Times primary bestseller list, and his novel adaptation of the Batman & Robin movie was for a time the #1 bestselling book in Poland (really).

Friedman has worked at one time or another in network and cable television, radio, business magazines, and the comic book industry, in the process producing scripts for nearly 180 comic stories. Among his comic book credits are the Darkstars ongoing series from DC Comics, which he created with artist Larry Stroman, and the Outlaws limited series, which he created with artist Luke McDonnell, as well as tales of Superman, Batman, Green Lantern, Flash, Fantastic Four, and the Silver Surfer. He also co-wrote the story for the acclaimed second-season Star Trek: Voyager episode “Resistance,” which guest-starred Joel Grey.

Friedman lives with his wife and two sons on Long Island, where in his rapidly dwindling free time he enjoys running, kayaking, and playing single-wall handball.

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