"I'm sorry, captain, but surely you can't be suggesting that crime going down is a cause for concern. Isn't that a testament to you and our brave City Guard?" the council member asked.

Captain General Bogo simply looked back at the mammal who had posed the question evenly. It had been years since he had been merely a captain, back before the queen had married, let alone given birth to the princess who watched the proceedings of what would eventually be her council with keen interest. It had been a deliberate slight, he was sure, but one that he refused to show any irritation at. Council member Esteban Cerdo was soft and pudgy, the pig's rolling folds of fat not quite hidden by his elaborately embroidered clothes. Still, although it was nearly hidden beneath his many chins, the torc around his neck was unmistakably made of platinum and encrusted with jewels where his grandfather's had been the bronze of a middling merchant. The council member's father had been the one to elevate the Cerdo family to the ranks of nobility, but it was Esteban who had managed to make them almost unimaginably wealthy. There was intelligence in those beady little eyes, no matter how much he liked to present himself as a dull flatterer whose rank was simply good fortune, and he was one of the mammals Bogo had vowed never to underestimate.

That the Queen's Council would be nearly as much trouble as the actual criminals of Zootopia had been one of the things that Bogo hadn't even considered when he had started his career with the City Guard, back when he had held no greater concerns than pickpockets and smugglers. His immediate predecessor in the role of captain general had joked with Bogo, immediately before her retirement, that the same tactics worked on both groups. At the time, Bogo had smiled politely and nodded, but years of political wrangling had completely eliminated any humor he had once found in the idea. "Crime going down is not the problem," Bogo said, choosing each word carefully, "The problem is not knowing what comes next. We need additional mammals for the City Guard or—"

"Forgive me for interrupting, captain general," council member Leodore Corazón said, "But hasn't my initiative already given you dozens of new officers? If you need more, I'm sure we can make arrangements."

For all the control that Bogo had shown in the face of Cerdo's words, the massive buffalo couldn't keep a slight frown from his face at Corazón's interjection, which he should have known was coming. The lion was responsible for what Bogo saw as the weakening of the City Guard by flooding it with candidates that never would have been accepted in the past. Still, Corazón could be surprisingly persuasive, and despite Bogo's protests the queen had at last bowed to his suggestion that a more diverse City Guard would be better-suited to the needs of policing the city-state and thrown generations of tradition on their head. The reports Bogo had read were frankly appalling—one of the newest officers was apparently a rabbit doe and another was a male raccoon, neither one of which had the size, strength, or natural aptitude for the work. "It is not that the City Guard is ungrateful," Bogo replied, "But we are in need of more traditional officers."

"Times change, captain general!" Corazón said, with quite a bit of cheer, "I hear it was one of my non-traditional officers at the top of her class."

Bogo ground his teeth as he considered the lion. Whether Corazón was deliberately attempting to weaken the City Guard or if he simply didn't care if that was the end result of his political machinations made no difference. "A fluke that will not be repeated," Bogo said.

"Why's that?" Corazón challenged, and the lion actually stood up from his seat as he began to pace the council room.

The Royal Palace was one of the oldest buildings in Zootopia, a massive stepped pyramid located precisely at the center of the city-state. Everything flowed outwards from it or fed back into it, and countless generations of mammals had shaped the design into whatever had suited their needs for the moment. The temple that had occupied the top of the pyramid had been razed generations ago as an indelible symbol of the conquest, and the palace that had been built in its place had continuously grown in the only direction it had left to go—upwards. The age of the council room was evident in how low it was in the building, nestled floors below the grandiose towers that branched outwards like the limbs of a tree, and the stone floor had been worn smooth by generations of feet. The circular table at the center of the room was a single massive piece of stone, so large around that no mammal could have reached from one end to the other, and the center of the table had a replica of the city-state in exquisite miniature that by itself was nearly six feet around. Alchemical torches lit the model from within, and significantly larger and brighter lights illuminated the windowless council room and gleamed off of Corazón's golden fur and the metal threads woven into his clothes. Although at the moment there were only seven mammals in the council room—Bogo, Cerdo, Corazón, the queen, the princess, Cencerro, and the door guard—the room could have easily sat a hundred mammals Bogo's size, and with its elaborately vaulted ceiling with massive flying buttresses all covered with vaguely grotesque engravings of faces even a giraffe would have found the amount of headroom excessive. The same design that made the room visually impressive also worked to Corazón's advantage as he spoke, his already booming voice amplified and made even more powerful with no magic beyond the skill of the long-forgotten architect who had designed the space. "Think of the advances we've made in the past few decades," Corazón said, the cadence of his voice changing as he fell into what seemed to be his favorite topic, "Fifty years ago, torcs like the ones we all wear now were impossible, but now the city's safer than it's ever been. We've pushed the limits of magic further than anyone ever has and reaped the rewards. With a modern set of quauhxicallis, any mammal can be an effective member of the City Guard."

"Well said," Cencerro chimed in, the little ewe nodding her approval at Corazón's words, "I have heard—and I'm sure you've heard the same, captain general—that there are a number of mammals from my own barony now proudly serving our great city."

As the representative from the Lanolin Barony the diminutive mammal held quite a bit more power than either Cerdo or Corazón, as the queen was from the same barony even if there was no direct relation between the two sheep. For the most part, she held her tongue in council meetings, although Bogo suspected that she had the queen's ear in private more than anyone else did. "Be that as may," Bogo said, "The void left by the collapse of the Black Paw will not last long. We must—"

"Empty the city's accounts to deal with your what-ifs?" Cerdo interrupted, his face almost hatefully smug, "You've done fine work, but it is as Corazón said. We've reached the point where we simply don't need a large City Guard."

"I believe you've misunderstood my point, Lord Cerdo," Corazón said, "It's not that—"

"Did you not say that our magic is more powerful than ever?" Cerdo interrupted again, "I simply do not see—"

"You must—" Corazón began, and then the queen coughed delicately.

"We seem to have gotten somewhat distracted," the queen said, and any further retorts anyone else at the table might have had were instantly lost.

Although the queen was a sheep, the same as Cencerro, their similarities ended there. Cencerro was unusually short, her clothes fairly unremarkable for a member of the nobility, and she had something of a tendency to vanish from notice due to her typically timid nature. Queen Lana III was the direct descendant of King Oveja I and despite the generations separating the two the resemblance to the ancient depictions of the first king of Zootopia was obvious. Queen Lana was tall for a sheep and unusually slender even when the fact that she preferred to keep her wool sheared close to her skin was accounted for. She wore a dress of pale blue silk, precisely the same color as her eyes, with tiny feathers at the shoulders. The dress was delicately embroidered with birds and flowers in glittering beads of precious stones, and her crown was a magnificent creation that alternated feathers worked in gold with real ones. The platinum torc around her neck had an enormous diamond that had been turned into an unparalleled alchemical torch which glowed with its own internal light, and the sheer opulence of the queen's clothes completely outdid what everyone else in the room was wearing.

"Captain General Bogo," she continued, and Bogo thought he saw the small glimmer of a smile at the queen's lips despite the serious expression on her face, "You believe we have the opportunity to prevent the rise of another criminal syndicate such as the Black Paw?"

"Yes, your majesty," Bogo replied, bowing low, "We cannot rely on getting lucky with informants."

That the Black Paw had fallen apart at all had been an incredible stroke of luck made possible only by a bear highly placed in the organization giving up everything he knew, which had been quite a lot. It was undeniably the greatest success of Bogo's tenure as the head of the City Guard, and quite possibly the greatest success the city's protectors had had in the last hundred years, which made it all the more appalling to Bogo that it was leading to yet more political maneuvering as each of the most important members of the Queen's Council vied for an advantage. The only saving grace of the current meeting was that the full council had not been convened; if everyone who sat on the council had been present it likely would have taken hours longer to accomplish even less. "Princess Isabel," the queen said suddenly, "What do you think?"

The princess suddenly sat up somewhat straighter, her mouth momentarily wide in surprise before she caught herself and checked her reaction. Princess Isabel did not particularly resemble her mother, or indeed any other mammal Bogo had ever seen before, because she was a chimera, a mammal that only existed thanks to the influence of powerful magic that had made it possible for a sheep to be the mother and a jaguar to be the father. Although she was not quite fully grown at thirteen she was still quite a bit taller than her mother, and while her legs ended with hooves her arms did not, and the claws in her paws looked as wicked as any full-blooded predator. Her coat wasn't exactly fur or wool, but somewhere in between with a blurry pattern of tawny rosettes and black spots. Her tail wasn't quite as long as that of any jaguar Bogo had ever seen before, although her ears were longer, and her mouth was full of both sharp fangs and blunt teeth.

Princess Isabel had been an unprecedented compromise, and Bogo wasn't sure what would have happened if her mother hadn't married the descendant of Emperor Ocelotl and agreed to bear an heir that would for the first time unit the two lines of royalty. "Well," the princess said hesitantly, "I suppose we must trust Captain General Bogo's judgement. You have told me a queen is only as strong as her advisers."

The queen nodded slowly. "And should he be wrong and we bankrupt the treasury as Lord Cerdo fears?" she asked, and Bogo thought he caught a slight sarcastic tinge to her words as she poked at the pig.

"Then the responsibility is ours," Princess Isabel replied promptly, and the queen smiled slightly.

Bogo knew she was proud of her daughter; although it was relatively rare for him to speak to the queen alone he thought he knew her well enough to tell that much. The queen would sometimes ask him what the general populace thought of her daughter, who was one of likely less than two dozen chimeras in the entire city, and Bogo had always been honest. It wasn't always easy—there were sometimes incredibly cruel messages daubed on walls or spread through illicit publications—but from what Bogo had seen the princess would make a fine queen one day. If, that was, a suitable husband could be found for her; by the very nature of her birth it seemed as though every noble family, no matter how small or large, thought they had a chance at making a match since all of the princess's offspring would by necessity have to be chimeras. The political scuffles almost made Bogo long for his days of patrolling the streets; he would have taken pickpockets over nobles any day.

"I believe the matter to be settled, then," the queen said, "Captain General Bogo, you have authorization to recruit an additional two cohorts, looking first to non-traditional candidates."

It was about the best that Bogo had hoped for, and it wasn't as thought there were an excessive number of mammals from species who had not previously been permitted to join the City Guard interested in the organization. The likely worst case scenario, in his mind, was perhaps a half-cohort lost to Corazón's scheme, which was at least tolerable. Getting the queen to revoke her support for the lion's pet project was likely a losing battle, but it was one he would fight at a later day. "Thank you, your majesty," Bogo said, bowing low again.

Bogo had turned and was about to walk towards the exit when the door to the council room, an enormous piece of stone so heavy that two elephants couldn't have carried it but so perfectly balanced on its hinges that just about any mammal could open it, slammed open hard enough to fill the room with the echoing crack of shattering stone. The mammal guarding the door to the council room didn't even have time to react as a mammal suddenly ran in with unnatural speed directly towards the princess, slipping past the guard before he could so much as lower his spear. Bogo's reaction, though, was immediate. One hoof went to his heavy cloak of feathers and released the clasp as the other went to his waist, his fingers unerringly seizing the quauhxicalli engraved with the image of a colibri. His cloak had barely hit the ground by the time he had the quauhxicalli to his mouth, the metallic taste of the contents burning the way that they always did. It couldn't have taken more than a few seconds, but the mammal who had ran into the room had already covered almost half of the distance between the door and the princess, moving with such speed that they were a blur.

Until, that is, the intruder suddenly wasn't. Bogo's vision sharpened and pulsed as the effects of the quauhxicalli's contents took hold, the potion derived from the blood of a hummingbird making the mammal seem to move no faster than a normal mammal could by running. The intruder was a llama wearing an unremarkable tunic and trousers, both of roughly spun fabric, charging forward with a sword held straight out in a way that told Bogo the llama had never had any formal training with it. A tin torc gleamed dully at the llama's neck, and his features were distorted into a terrible expression of hate and anger as he continued to run unerringly for the princess.

The hoof Bogo had used to free his overly heavy and restrictive cloak of colorful feathers had gone for another quauhxicalli the instant it was free, but he felt as though he was moving underwater, his body unable to match the speed at which he could see until he had finished drinking the little vial engraved with the image of a cheetah. Even then, as he ran to intercept the llama, it didn't seem as though he would be fast enough, not even the speed of a cheetah the potion had granted him even close to how fast the llama assassin was moving. It didn't seem possible—criminals sometimes did get their paws on quauhxicallis, but almost never ones as good as what the City Guard had and absolutely never ones that were better—but the proof was before his own eyes. The llama twisted as Bogo approached, his long nails clattering on the worn stone of the floor as he tried to dodge. With the power of the colibri quauhxicalli enhancing his reflexes, the sound was oddly distorted, and Bogo shook away the observation that had bubbled up into his mind as he focused on stopping the llama before it was too late.

Dimly, Bogo was aware that he had yelled for the llama to stop, but the sound was just as distorted to his ears, seeming to come out too slowly to make any sense as he lunged for the llama. The llama twisted again, impossibly fast, and Bogo saw flecks of blood coming from the llama's feet as whatever quauhxicalli he had used pushed his body beyond its limits, the flesh of his soles wearing away as he ran. For a moment, which might have only been a second but felt like an eternity, Bogo thought that he had failed, that the llama would make it past him, but then the llama stumbled.

It seemed as though the would-be assassin had slipped on the blood he was losing through the bottoms of his feet, his last dodge making him lose his balance faster than he could recover it. The llama staggered and with a wordless cry stabbed at Bogo, the tip of the sword glancing off the buffalo's silver-plated breastplate before finding its mark in his shoulder. At nearly the same instant that Bogo felt the pain of being stabbed, slowed and dulled though it was in his heightened state of awareness, he felt the magic of his torc lash out.

It had been decades since Bogo had been injured before in the line of duty, more often by mammals too panicked to realize what a terrible idea it was, and to his relief despite whatever the llama had used to push his speed beyond even what a quauhxicalli derived from cheetah blood could do he wasn't immune to the torc's response.

A bloodstain suddenly appeared on the shoulder of the llama's tunic as a wound identical to the one he had inflicted appeared, a small red patch that grew sluggishly to Bogo's perception but must have been bleeding rather quickly. The sword fell from the llama's fingers as the mammal collapsed in slow motion, his momentum carrying him across the floor even as his feet came out from under him. He left a streak of blood across it, and Bogo could hear the slow crack of breaking bones as the unyielding floor mercilessly met the llama's fragile body.

Still, Bogo took no chances, his own injury completely forgotten as he ran over to the limp form of the intruder. The colibri quauhxicalli was already beginning to wear off, burning off the way it always did even as it made his vision swim in and out of focus as colors seemed to go from being unnaturally bright to gray-tinged. The speed of a cheetah would last a few minutes longer, but before even reaching the llama Bogo knew it would make no difference. The llama's head was twisted at an impossible angle, turned almost all the way around on his neck from tumbling across a stone floor far faster than any mammal should have been able to run. The llama's chest was completely motionless, and Bogo knew that he was dead.

Bogo turned around, looking to the other occupants of the room. The lion who had been guarding the door—Bogo searched his memory briefly for his name and couldn't come up with it—was only a step behind him, his spear at the ready. "Lieutenant," Bogo said, his voice surprisingly even to his own ears; the buffalo was not even slightly squeamish when it came to violence, but the aftereffects of taking quauhxicallis tended to be unpleasant, "I want to know how this mammal got in and I want to be sure there aren't any more assassins. Have the entire palace searched, top to bottom. No one leaves and no one enters without my permission."

The lion, to his credit, saluted crisply and ran for the door. "And get more guards in here," Bogo called after him.

The lion called back an acknowledgement as he left the room, shutting the ruined door behind himself. "Your majesties," Bogo said, turning to face the queen and the princess.

The two mammals were clutching each other, eyes wide with fear, and Bogo couldn't blame them. It had been generations since it had last happened, but it was far from unheard of for a ruler to be deposed by assassination, and in all the time Bogo had led the City Guard he had never seen an attempt come so close to success. The Royal Palace should have been impossible for an unauthorized mammal to enter, and no mammal should have been capable of moving as fast as the llama. Clearly, the llama had been devoted enough to his cause to be willing to die with his target, because even if he had succeeded in inflicting a mortal wound on the princess her torc would have caused him to suffer the same. "I promise you, we will find the mammal or mammals behind this," Bogo said.

No one else in the room seemed capable of saying anything; Cerdo's normally pinkish skin had gone almost white, his weak jaw hanging loosely, and the expressions of shock that Cencerro and Corazón wore were nearly identical. Still, as Bogo looked at the members of the Queen's Council in the room, an unpleasant thought occurred to him. Was it one of them, or one of the members of the Queen's Council who hadn't been present who was responsible? Had the petty political bickering at last exploded into treason? "Captain general," the princess said, rather faintly, as she interrupted his thoughts, "You're bleeding."

Bogo looked down at his chest and saw that blood was flowing down his armor, the droplets only sticking to his breastplate in the scuff mark the llama had gouged into it. The pain of his stab wound suddenly forced itself to the forefront of his mind, and along with it a dull ache in his chest from the glancing blow the llama had made to his armor before finding a softer target. "I'll be fine," he said.

"Thank you," the queen said, and Bogo nodded, his attention already elsewhere.

Perhaps the assassin had done a thorough job of covering his tracks, or perhaps not. Whatever the case, Bogo would absolutely not stop until he had answers.

Author's Notes:

I've based the ranks in this story off of the Spanish military; the rank of captain general is the highest rank in the Spanish Army. Similarly, Judy's rank of ensign is the lowest possible officer rank in the Spanish military. I chose to use the English spellings for all ranks, although there was some appeal to having her title be alférez and Bogo's be capitán general.

In any case, this story also does something I've never done before by having not just different viewpoint characters but also different plot threads that they follow. My first story did switch between the perspectives of Nick and Judy, but since they were almost always together I suppose it didn't really make much of a difference. In this case, Nick and Judy are traveling to the point in Zootopia furthest away from where Bogo is, so there will be quite a bit of difference in what they're experience. Next week it will be back to Judy and the trip across the wastelands; hopefully you'll find both of these different plots engaging.

As part of my attempt to suggest a history inspired by the Spanish-Aztec War, the Royal Palace is somewhat inspired by the Templo Mayor, an Aztec temple in the city that was the seat of the Aztec Empire, which eventually became Mexico City.

"Corazón" is Spanish for "heart" and serves to give a name to this story's version of Lionheart. Similarly, "cencerro" is Spanish for "cowbell" and gives a name to this story's version of Bellwether, while "cerdo" means "pork" and gives a name I thought appropriate for a pig. The Lanolin Barony is named for lanolin, a wax that wool-bearing mammals (such as sheep) secrete that helps in waterproofing their wool.

This chapter begins to reveal some of the details of the systems of magic that I created for this story, beginning with the existence of chimeras. For the purposes of this chapter, I didn't think it really fit to explain how exactly chimeras are created, but Princess Isabel is what would be an impossibility in the real world due to being the offspring of a sheep and a jaguar. I generally assume, for my Zootopia stories, that only hybrids of the sort possible in the real world are possible, but the existence of magic opens up quite a few possibilities. I will say, though, that the creation of chimeras is something that needs to be deliberately done rather than being possible without magical intervention.

Next up, in terms of magic, is the quauhxicalli. These were inspired by the Aztec practice of human sacrifice, and while in real life a quauhxicalli would be used to store human hearts following sacrifice, in this story they are small vials containing potions made from blood that temporarily give someone the traits of the animal that the blood came from. "Colibri" is the genus of hummingbirds, which really do have an incredible ability to track fast moving stimuli.

The torcs are my take on the shock collars from the early version of Zootopia, with something of a twist in how they work. In this series, everyone wears one, with the material it is made of and how it is decorated serving as an indicator of social rank, and they serve as a deterrent to physical violence in a very simple way: if you injure someone, their torc will cause you to suffer an identical injury. Subsequent chapters will go into a little more detail about how they are made, how they work, and their limitations, but I thought it would just bog down the narrative in this chapter. I did develop this setting in such a way that I wanted to avoid the trope of medieval stasis, where a fantasy setting has apparently gone with absolutely no advances for hundreds or thousands of years. The torcs are explicitly said to be a fairly recent development in this chapter, having been if not invented than at the very least having been made practical less than a century before the story starts, and there will continue to be other nods to things that have changed.

As always, thanks for reading! I'd love to know what you thought.