"What are you doing?" Judy asked, and in her surprise she was completely unable to keep the incredulity from her voice.
"What does it look like I'm doing?" Nick asked, and there seemed to be genuine curiosity in his voice.
At very nearly the same moment that the gate that connected the Outer Baronies to the Middle Baronies had closed with a rumbling finality, Nick had reached up to his neck and removed his torc. Judy had seen plenty of depictions of mammals from the distant past without torcs but had never before seen anyone except newborns without one. Even the youngest of her siblings had worn torcs that alternated solid panels with fine mesh chain that could be expanded as they and their necks grew, and the sight of Nick's exposed and slightly matted fur where his torc had rested brought forth a sense of impropriety and wrongness she couldn't quite put into words. The alchemist, however, seemed completely unperturbed by his act, simply looking down at her with his torc in one paw as the other massaged and fluffed the fur at his neck. The arcane symbols etched into the torc's interior surface glowed dimly in the sunlight before he stashed it away into an interior pocket of his bottle-green coat.
"You took your torc off," Judy said, feeling rather foolish at having to state the obvious.
"Yes, yes I did," Nick replied, and a smile crept across his features as he carelessly spun around and started walking away from the gate.
Judy stood rooted in place for a moment before her sense of duty demanded that she see to her job, and she quickly caught up with the fox, who was walking with something of a jaunty stride despite the heavy-looking pack on his back that clinked musically at each step. "Why?" she asked, and the fox chuckled.
"Why not?" he said, and the smile on his face grew a touch smugger, "It's not like it works outside the Middle Wall. And if it did—which it doesn't—it wouldn't do anything if you decided to run me through with that spear of yours. So why bother?"
Judy couldn't help but gape at him; he might as well have asked why mammals wore trousers or didn't relieve themselves in public. Dimly, some part of her mind recognized that both of his points were correct; the magic that empowered the torcs didn't function beyond the Middle Wall, and as a member of the City Guard it was true that she could inflict any injury she wished upon a mammal without the magic of their torc affecting her in an identical fashion. It was a privilege that had made the City Guard especially feared by some citizens, but Judy took her vow to use her authority responsibly seriously enough to be more than a little offended at his insinuation. "I hope I haven't put the idea in your head, by the way," Nick added, interrupting her thoughts, "I would hate to be stabbed."
"I won't stab you!" Judy protested, her ears back, and she pulled her spear back too to emphasize the point.
"I'm delighted to hear that," Nick replied, rather deadpan, and he continued walking.
Judy followed him silently for a while, taking in the bleak and ruined landscape of the Outer Baronies. The path they were following might have been a road, once upon a time, but centuries of blowing grit had left it as little more than an uneven rut. There were occasional craters, somewhat incongruously full of what looked like shattered and milky glass, but the landscape was otherwise fairly flat. Eventually, though, the view became monotonous, and Judy could no longer hold in her curiosity about her odd traveling companion. She had never even heard a mammal talk about the idea of taking their torc off, let alone one who had actually done it, and despite his rather blasé assertion that it didn't serve any useful purpose outside the heart of Zootopia she wondered if he had some ulterior motive. The possibilities she came up with—elaborate criminal scheme, a kind of deviant preference, something related to alchemy—all seemed about equally possible, but then she wondered if he had meant it as a distraction.
Perhaps he had meant only to throw her off-balance to conceal the true purpose for his trip to Phoenix and why it merited an escort by the City Guard. If that had been his intent, he had succeeded admirably; he hadn't quite answered her questions about his trip. "So why exactly are you going to Phoenix?" Judy asked, and she had decided that she wouldn't stop questioning him until he gave a straight answer.
It wasn't that she assumed that he was a criminal of some sort just because he was a fox, of course—she told herself she would have asked the same of any mammal acting so suspiciously—and his initial answer didn't do much to reassure her that he wasn't plotting something. "Do you know how government contracts are awarded?" Nick asked, slowing down his pace a little and looking over his shoulder at her.
"No," Judy said, and Nick shrugged.
"It's simple, really," he said, "When the queen, or one of her dutifully appointed executors—of the law, I mean, not of mammals—decides that something needs to be done that they can't or won't do themselves, they write up their requirements. Very formal, you know, all sorts of clauses and 'wherefores' and 'as executed' and so on and on."
Nick rolled a paw to emphasize the dullness of the proceedings before breezily continuing. "In a lot of cases, those requirements become contracts that go to the friends of whoever has the ear of the mammal making the decision. That's usually the head of the largest and most powerful guild responsible for whatever needs doing. If a new government building needs pipes installed, that's the Plumbers Guild. If a public square needs to be repaired, that's the Stonemasons Guild. If—"
Judy saw where he was going and cut him off. "If alchemy needs to be done, that's the Alchemist Guild," she said, and the fox nodded approvingly.
"Precisely," he said, "Now, the reason that I'm going to Phoenix with your charming company is because the Alchemists Guild got greedy. Take my advice, Ensign, and never get greedy; that's always what gets a mammal caught."
Judy frowned, unsure of how truthfully he had meant his praise of her—his words had seemed earnest enough, but she somehow felt as though he was mocking her—and where precisely his experience in getting caught came from. "Caught doing what?" she asked.
"Oh, anything, really," Nick said with unnatural cheer, his tail wagging, "In the case of the Alchemist Guild, charging ten times as much for work in Phoenix as they do in the city center."
"So the government is sending you to do alchemy work?" Judy asked, thinking she had at last grasped the reason for his trip.
There was a certain kind of logic to it; if the Alchemist Guild was charging outrageous prices for their work, the queen or one of the mammals under her had stepped in to ensure the work would be done in a more cost-effective manner.
"Sending me? No, no, of course not," Nick said, waving her words away, "I'm going to make a bid on an alchemy project and you're going to make sure I get to Phoenix safe and sound to put my bid in. It'd be a shame if any 'accidents' happened on the way, after all."
He gave her a disarming smile as he spoke, not seeming to take the potential threat of the Alchemist Guild ensuring he couldn't undercut them very seriously. Not that Judy could blame him; from everything she knew of the Alchemist Guild they didn't seem the sort to send assassins. Even if they were, however, it would have been very difficult to sneak up on them; despite having walked for more than an hour the scenery didn't seem to have changed at all. They were still on a dusty and rutted path that led through a blasted wasteland marked only occasionally by glass-filled depressions or pools of stagnant-looking water surrounded by sickly plants, and the remains of the Outer Wall didn't look any closer than they had from the War Gate. It wasn't quite what Judy had had in mind when she joined the City Guard, but it didn't take her long to see that there was still a sort of greater meaning to her work. Saving the city money might not be quite the same as directly saving a mammal's life or even just stopping a pickpocket, but the money that the city saved could surely be put to better use. "What kind of alchemy project?" Judy asked, and it took Nick a moment to respond.
"Water purification," he said at last, "They need someone to transmute what's in the wells into something drinkable."
That, at least, seemed like a noble enough purpose; mammals couldn't live without water, after all, so even if she wasn't doing the actual work of treating it Judy still felt as though it would be making a difference. Assuming, of course, that Nick won the bid, but he certainly seemed rather confident in himself. She thought again that she might have misjudged her traveling companion, and as she forced down her guilt another set of questions occurred to her. "How did you become an alchemist?" she asked.
"Oh, that's a long and boring story," Nick said, "Lots of thick books and studying. Now how about you? What makes a bunny join the City Guard?"
Whatever other skills he had, Nick was remarkably adept at being an audience, and the words seemed to simply flow out of Judy as she told him what it had been like to hold such an unorthodox goal. It occurred to her after the fact that it was the first time anyone had ever simply listened to her explaining her dream of making the city better without dismissing it, and even if the fox—if Nick—had some reason to be friendly and polite beyond the fact that it was simply how he was, it didn't show. Shortly after she had finished explaining how Lord Corazón's push for mammals from species who had not traditionally been allowed to join the City Guard had made her admittance possible, she saw something that made any thoughts of further conversation impossible.
The ground of the Outer Baronies was so flat, excepting the craters that dotted the landscape on either side of the path, that it had been easy to get lulled into the sense that it would continue being so flat all the way until they reached Phoenix. However, what started as a hazy and shimmering patch of darkness soon resolved itself into the single largest depression that Judy had ever seen. Judy had thought that some of the other craters that they had passed on the way, which were large enough to swallow elephants, were large, but they were absolutely nothing compared to what they stood before. Unlike the craters, there was no raised rim of rocks and translucent glass; it was simply an enormous trench, which looked as though it ran all the way from the remains of the Outer Wall to the Middle Wall and had to be more than a hundred feet deep and half a mile wide. Although the end of the trench at the Outer Wall was too far away to make out clearly, they were still close enough to the Middle Wall to see something Judy had never seen before—the foundation of the wall. If she had been asked before, Judy might have said that such an enormous wall would have a correspondingly enormous foundation; her father had been too minor a noble for her to have been excluded from chores on the farmlands such as building and repairing walls. While she knew how the weight of a low wall would gradually make it sink into the softer ground, she never would have guessed that the Middle Wall extended below ground for at least the hundred foot depth of the trench and likely much further.
The trench itself was what really caught her eye, because unlike the milky and dirty-looking lumps of irregular glass that were in the other craters the interior of the trench had a certain geometric elegance to it that struck her as unnatural. Despite the gritty film of dirt that covered much of its surface, Judy could still see that it was faceted as precisely as a jewel with interlinked patterns of triangles and hexagons that glittered. The interior surface was at least ten feet thick and seemed almost perfectly transparent, the dying light of the sun forming glittering rainbows that danced across the yawning expanse. The most spectacular rainbows gleamed off what seemed to be the only way across the chasm, a bridge of the same material as the inside of the trench.
The bridge was about eight feet wide with high sides and looked to be more than a foot thick at its narrowest point, but at the side of the chasm they were standing on—and, it seemed, most likely on the other side—the bridge had complex triangular supports that branch out and anchored it like an enormous spider's web made out of prisms. It was one of the more amazing structures Judy had ever seen in her life, even after her training at the heart of Zootopia and its marvelous mixture of buildings both ancient and new. Although Judy had memorized the simple map that had been provided for her that showed the path from the War Gate to Phoenix—which had seemed rather pointless, since there was only one gently counterclockwise turning path—the map hadn't quite impressed on her the true nature of the Cozamalotl Bridge. Nick had paused at the foot of the bridge, although in his case it did not seem to be awe at the structure; his ears had pressed back against his head and his features were set in a resigned grimace. "I hate this part," he muttered in a voice so low Judy thought he had meant her not to hear it before stepping gingerly onto the bridge.
As Judy had never doubted would be the case, the bridge gave absolutely no protest at his weight, seeming as solid as the nearby Middle Wall. Unlike the wall, however, the bridge was just as transparent as the parts of the trench not covered in grime, and through either some accident of the design or clever foresight the numerous triangular gaps in the side rails of the bridge must have allowed the wind to blow through and keep the surface relatively clean except where the dirt caked up around the supports. It meant that there was at best a hazy film preventing a look down from appearing as though she should be plummeting to her death and at worst gave virtually no sign that there was anything blocking such a fall. Nick was picking his way across slowly, his eyes almost entirely closed and the fur on his tail seeming to stick straight out, and Judy realized the obvious. "Are you afraid of heights?" she called to him.
"What would make you think that?" he asked, and to his credit his voice was remarkably steady, "This is wonderful, really it is."
They kept walking along the bridge, the occasional gust of wind making an eerie and somehow mournful sound come off the trench even as it ruffled Nick's coat and the feathers at Judy's wrists. "This bridge was made with alchemy, right?" she asked, breaking the silence by blurting the first words that came to her head.
"What?" Nick asked, turning to look back at her with a puzzled expression across his features.
"This bridge... This trench... It's alchemy, right?" she said.
Her attempt at distracting him from the crossing was probably obvious to him, but even as he kept walking forward he did answer. "Of course it is. There's not a natural diamond anywhere this large."
"How do you know it's not a natural diamond?" Judy asked, and she wasn't feigning interest to keep him talking; it was amazing to think that a mammal had made such a thing even if the alternative was that someone had found a diamond tens of miles long.
"Besides the size, you mean?" Nick asked, but he was still walking forward, "It's too perfect. No flaws, no inclusions, nothing."
Judy wasn't anything close to an expert on gems, but he did appear to be correct. The bridge was unsettlingly perfect, despite the fact that it had to be centuries old from the uprising that had resulted in the Outer Baronies being laid to waste. "It's easy making something perfect with alchemy," Nick continued, "It's the flaws that are tricky."
"That sounds like counterfeiting," Judy said, and Nick actually laughed.
"Well, I wouldn't know," Nick said, and for the first time since they had gotten on the bridge his voice had a different quality to it than a forced calm ruined only by a slight edge.
He was, Judy realized, teasing her, since he continued, with one paw raised, "You have my solemn oath, Ensign Carrots, that I am not a counterfeiter."
"I told you not to call me that," Judy replied, but there was no heat in her words.
"Did you?" Nick asked, "It must have slipped my mind."
Judy could only shake her head as they crossed the rest of the distance to the far side of the chasm. Nick was, she thought, truly an unusual fox.
Author's Notes:
As CorvidaeHakubi rather shrewdly guessed from the last chapter, there are different kinds of torcs; as is touched upon in this chapter, the ones worn by City Guards do not react to injuries that they cause to other mammals, which would otherwise make subduing a suspect rather difficult. Additionally, the effective radius of the torcs is limited to everything inside the Middle Wall, which does cover virtually every mammal living in this version of Zootopia as there isn't much in the Outer Baronies. I've been trying to establish the rules, so to speak, of this setting in such a way that they come out naturally through the course of the story rather than simply dumping them all at once; hopefully it's working as a logical progression.
What Nick describes as the usual state of government contracts in this setting is what would typically be called cronyism or no-bid contracts in the present era. Cronyism isn't exactly uncommon in non-democratic societies (and certainly isn't unheard of in democratic ones, either), and historically guilds were formed in part to take advantage of having the ear of power. One of the simplest ways of ensuring steady work, after all, is to ensure that your group is the only one capable of doing it, which can take many forms in how it's actually executed. Stonemasonry is the real profession of working with stone, and is one of the oldest professions. Although plumbing may seem to be rather modern, several ancient societies had sophisticated plumbing systems, and the word "plumber" is actually derived from the Latin word "plumbum," meaning "lead," due to the use of lead in constructing piping by the ancient Romans.
The word "cozamalotl" means "rainbow," which seemed apropos for a bridge made out of diamond. One of the things I enjoyed about this setting was thinking up different ways that the ability to transmute matter via alchemy could be used practically. Although in the real world it is possible to create diamonds synthetically (they are, after all, just a precise arrangement of carbon atoms into a regular cubical crystal structure) creating a single diamond of the size described here would be impossible with modern techniques. On the other hand, Nick isn't right about there not being enormous natural diamonds. Arthur C. Clarke suggested that the core of Jupiter might consist of a massive diamond larger than the Earth, and while he may not be correct it is known that the white dwarf star BPM 37093 (located about 50 lightyears away from Earth) has a core of crystallized carbon about the size of the Earth's moon.
The use of the word "counterclockwise" to indicate the direction that Judy and Nick are traveling indicates both that it isn't a straight line path from the War Gate to Phoenix but rather a curving arc, and also suggests that there are clocks in this setting. Although there are many older forms of clocks (such as hourglasses), mechanical clocks were first developed around the year 1300; considering this story is based around two societies that existed in the 1500s and then have developed together for quite some time afterwards, I thought clockwork was a plausible part of the setting.
As always, thanks for reading! I'd love to know what you thought.