Aztlan: The Last Sun (2 page)

“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
un
usual.

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.

A
fter 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.