"Captain General, you honor me with your visit," the little shrew said.
His voice had a gravelly quality to it that belied his diminutive size, but not even the cultured and deliberate smoothness he spoke with could quite hide that the Old Tongue had been his first language. His accent was slight and mildly nasal; Alfonso had the voice of a merchant who had pulled himself up from nothing to the highest ranks of society outside of nobility. With great delicacy he stood up, pulling at his thin prison tunic to straighten it as though it was made of cloth-of-gold, and looked gravely up towards Bogo. "Your family is well, I hope," he continued, "There is nothing more important than family."
His words were, as they seemingly always were, as gentle and soft as silk, but Bogo didn't think he was imagining the implied threat that lurked beneath them. Alfonso had proven himself, over a long and violent career, to be as ruthless as he was devoted to his own family. Bogo had seen it for himself, nearly thirty long years ago, when their paths had first crossed. That Alfonso had stuck in his memory had, for some weeks afterwards, seemed strange to him, a quirk of memory when it had not even come close to being the worst part of that day. With time, though, Bogo had eventually realized what it was that kept his first memory of the shrew so fresh. He had delivered terrible news to many mammals over the course of his career and had seen mammals react in every possible way. There were those who denied it, those who wept, even those rare few who uselessly threw themselves at him, their grief turning into anger at the mammal who had delivered the news. Alfonso, however, had given no outward reaction to hearing that his brother Miguel had died, even as his mother, sister, and his brother's wife collapsed into each other weeping helpless tears. His face—thinner and with somewhat less bushy brows in those days—had remained stony as he asked a single question in a voice with an accent that had been much thicker. "It was an accident, you are sure?"
At the time, Bogo had thought it to be an accident, the sort of senseless tragedy that the unfeeling magic of torcs could and occasionally did cause. An elephant, drunk as a rabbit off octli, had stepped on a shrew, whose torc had made the elephant suffer identical injuries. Bogo had been one of the first members of the City Guard to the scene and he knew that he would never forget it. Bogo's partner had resigned nearly immediately afterwards, and Bogo couldn't blame him, because what they had seen had been the stuff of nightmares. If it hadn't been for the size of the remains—what was left couldn't be called a body—and the gleaming yellow-white bits of ivory left from the tusks like islands in a sea of red it would have been impossible to identify that the mammal had been an elephant. Gore had splattered up the sides of the buildings on either side of that narrow street, blood running down the gutters and unidentifiable pieces clogging drains swarming with buzzing flies. The smell, Bogo knew, would never leave him; the rich coppery scent of blood had hung over the scene like a haze, impossibly strong and yet not strong enough to overcome the far worse scent of everything that had been in the elephant, from the pungently sour and yeasty smell of octli (which even decades later Bogo still couldn't drink) to the harsh and nausea-inducing scent of excrement.
It had taken some time to find the even more mangled remains of the shrew, and dreams of digging through the elephant's remains had haunted Bogo for months afterwards, a task that had taken hours stretched out infinitely until it seemed it was all he had ever done or would ever do. The sensation of finding the shrew's torc, slick and grotesquely warm even in the cooling charnel mess, had brought about a nearly equal sense of revulsion and gratitude; it had been obvious what had happened to the elephant and after finding the poor victim that had been stepped on cleaning up the mess would be someone else's problem.
After cleaning up and contacting the next of kin, a task made possible only because of the engravings upon the torcs of the elephant and the shrew, there should have been nothing left for Bogo to do except try to move beyond what he had seen. The question Alfonso had asked, however, had haunted him nearly as much as the gore. There was no law saying that rodents and other small mammals had to stay within the confines of the New Quimichin Barony, of course, but it was still rather unusual for one to be wandering around a part of the city populated mostly by elephants, particularly one who had no reason to be there. Miguel, like his brother Alfonso, had been an unremarkable insect farmer, a delicacy not usually favored by elephants. The elephant himself—Hector de la Plana, a name Bogo would never forget—had lived in a house that was rather large and grandly furnished for a middle-ranked civil servant, and none of Hector's family or neighbors thought it was in his character to drink to excess, although he had seemed rather stressed to them shortly before his death.
Bogo hadn't learned it all at once, of course—he had puzzled out the pieces over the course of months, continuing to investigate on his own, slowly at first and then with a nearly obsessive focus as every little detail that pointed to foul play came out. There was the canid four eye-witnesses had seen leaving the scene of Miguel's and Hector's deaths, a canid just as out of place on Savanna Street as a shrew. There wasn't quite any agreement from those witnesses on whether the mammal had been male or female, or even whether it had been a coyote, a wolf, or a fox, but they all said that despite being painted red with blood it had walked calmly and purposefully towards a nearby alley. There was the distribution of Hector's possessions among his heirs, which revealed quite a bit of expensive finery he simply shouldn't have been able to afford. There had been the way that Miguel had simply vanished shortly before his death, his last known destination being to arrange a contract with a restaurant catering to anteaters.
What it had all pointed to was that Hector de la Plana had been accepting bribes at his job until, at some point, he hadn't. The mammals paying those bribes had seemed to take exception to that, and Hector must have known it, the stress driving him to drink. Miguel had simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time, kidnapped by mammals who needed someone small enough to be completely crushed under an elephant's foot.
When Bogo had at last identified the canid who had positioned Miguel under Hector's foot, a male coyote suspected of being a member of the Six Brothers, his commanding officer had considered it a job well done. The coyote had been arrested, Bogo had received a promotion to captain and a transfer across the city, and that had been that. Until, of course, other members of the Six Brothers, once the most notorious gang in all the city, had started dying in a variety of unusual ways, but Bogo shook the thought aside. Seeing Alfonso again had dredged up memories he didn't like dwelling on, and his answer to Alfonso's comment was sharp. "Quite well," Bogo said, "It would be unfortunate if that changed."
Alfonso nodded slowly. "It would," he said, but whether it was an apology for the implication or simply an acknowledgement of fact was impossible to tell.
"I have not had a visitor since my sentence began," Alfonso continued smoothly, "To what do I owe the honor?"
Bogo was struck by how poised the shrew remained, as though they were negotiating a minor business contract rather than being on either side of an interrogation. He had carefully planned out how he wanted to question Alfonso on his trip to the cell, and rejected a number of potential approaches. He was sure that suggesting that Alfonso's daughter had been taken into custody would work quite well—but only if it was true. Unfortunately, Alfonso had apparently had the foresight to see her to safety before his own arrest, and as of yet the City Guard had come up with nothing in their search. Alfonso was not stupid, though, and any trick was unlikely to work on him. In the end, Bogo had decided to go with the simplest possible approach, and so he said, "Someone tried assassinating the princess."
Alfonso's eyes became briefly visible as they widened in surprise and his heavy brows shot upward, but they quickly vanished again. "You suppose I might have been involved," Alfonso said blandly.
"Yes," Bogo said, "The queen has given me permission to take any action I think appropriate to find the mammal responsible."
After a brief pause, Bogo added, as ominously as he could manage, "Any. Action."
"We both know you are an honorable mammal, Captain General," Alfonso replied, "Do not insult me with such obvious—"
"This isn't a game!" Bogo snapped, banging one hoof against the thick piece of diamond that separated him from the prisoner, "Don't think I won't do what I have to."
Bogo immediately regretted losing his temper, and not only because his fingers were throbbing painfully from the force he had struck the unyielding barrier with. Giving in to his anger was giving Alfonso control of the conversation, and giving the prisoner the advantage was a disaster waiting to happen. "I cannot tell you what I do not know," Alfonso said quietly, "I have learned this, although perhaps you have not."
Bogo supposed that if there was any mammal who knew about the results torture provided it would be the former gang leader; some of the mammals who had crossed him had ended up almost as badly off as Hector de la Plana. There were weaknesses in torcs that even civilians could take advantage of, and Alfonso had been creative enough to find them. "Your stay here can be even more unpleasant," Bogo said, reaching down deep to find the well of calmness and authority he relied on, "I can authorize bloodletting."
Generally speaking, the jail only took blood from those prisoners who belonged to species that had attributes that made their blood useful for quauhxicallis. Prisoners did, however, tend to be more compliant when they were weak from blood loss, as most of the ones Bogo had passed on his way to visit Alfonso had been, and his sense of honor had no qualms about ordering it. "Do what you must to fulfill your duty," Alfonso said, "I understand. It is the burden of mammals such as ourselves."
Bogo thought that he understood Alfonso perhaps as well as any mammal could, and he thought Alfonso meant the comparison honestly enough. Bogo had needed to understand Alfonso because there had been no other way to combat the Black Paw. Bogo had even swallowed his own pride and given Leodore Corazón a major political victory by, for the first time in Zootopia's long history, incorporating the New Quimichin Barony into the overall City Guard rather than allowing the little lords (both physically and in terms of political power in the greater city-state) who had previously overseen the district's security to run it according to their whims. Officers from the New Quimichin Barony had no place in the greater Zootopia City Guard, of course, but they had their uses, and a better understanding of Alfonso when he had been known as Tlatoani had been one of them.
In the New Quimichin Barony, Alfonso had not been feared or hated; he was widely loved by the mammals who saw him as standing up to the corrupt lords who ran the barony as they pleased with almost no oversight. By becoming a crime lord even more vindictive and cruel than any of the othersin Zootopia, he had completely put an end to the practice of other gangs kidnapping small mammals to use as murder weapons the way his own brother had been used; he had given the mammals of the New Quimichin Barony what they had wanted most. Alfonso had promised safety and stability, and the costs he asked were so small in comparison. What did it matter, if mammals larger than the residents of the New Quimichin Barony suffered? It was only the larger mammals getting what was coming to them, after all, the larger mammals who had carved out so much room for themselves and so little for those smaller than them.
Their grudge stretched back generations, to when the original Quimichin Barony had been obliterated along with the rest of the Outer Baronies in an alchemical apocalypse unlike anything that had happened before or since. The New Quimichin Barony, it was said, was a poor imitation of what had been lost, although of course there was no one alive who could make an honest comparison. Perhaps it had been no better, but Alfonso had sold the mice, shrews, voles, and other tiny mammals of the New Quimichin Barony the dream of it, that with hard work they could surpass their ancestors. He had, in short, taken on the improvement of the New Quimichin Barony as his duty and his burden, in much the same way that Bogo had taken responsibility for every mammal in the city-state when he had accepted the rank of Captain General.
The difference between them, though, was not something that had ever cost Bogo any sleep. No matter what Alfonso or any of his supporters said about his purpose or intentions, Bogo knew that the shrew was driven by the anger he had seen but not quite recognized when they had first met. Alfonso hid it as well as he did his accent, but it was always there, fury turned cold and sharp by time. He had taken his revenge on all of the mammals even remotely responsible for his brother's death, and when there had been no more vengeance to have he had not stopped.
Bogo, however, knew when to stop. Torturing Alfonso would give him no pleasure—the day he delighted in inflicting pain, no matter how well it was deserved, was the day he would no longer be fit to serve as Captain General—and it was his duty to serve the queen's needs and not her wants. No matter how badly she wanted someone to pay for attempting to murder her daughter, what she needed was for the culprit to be caught. No more, and no less. "It's the burden of a parent," Bogo said slowly, "If someone attempted to kill your daughter, would you do any less?"
Alfonso considered the question for a long moment. "I could not," he said at last.
Bogo waited, choosing his next words carefully. The shrew had not quite volunteered to help provide answers, but he also had not quite closed himself off from saying anything more. "The assassin used powerful quauhxicallis," Bogo said, "The most powerful I've ever seen."
"Powerful?" Alfonso echoed, his tone thoughtful, "Describe, then, what made them so powerful."
Although the shrew was not, to Bogo's knowledge, a blood magician, he had employed many at the height of his power. The quauhxicallis manufactured by the Black Paw had been among the strongest available, and Alfonso had always struck Bogo as the sort of mammal who had made it his business to understand his business. Bogo described, in as much detail as he could, how rapidly the llama had moved, how he had seemed to exceed what his body could handle. When he had finished, Alfonso had remained silent for a while. "Quauhxicallis are more powerful if the sacrifice is made willingly," he said at last, "Did you know this?"
Bogo nodded; it was why quauhxicallis made from prisoners weren't distributed to members of the City Guard, and also why the ones they did use were so expensive even with members being frequently tapped for volunteers. It was also, Bogo supposed, why the quauhxicallis made by the Black Paw had been so strong; Alfonso had not been lacking in mammals willing to sacrifice for him. "I have heard that quauhxicallis may be made with something stronger than blood alone," Alfonso continued, "They may be made with a life."
"A life?" Bogo repeated, equally horrified by the idea as well as by how calmly Alfonso described it.
Sacrificing mammals to create quauhxicallis was said to have been what made the armies of the old emperors so powerful; each mammal had fought with the strength and abilities of dozens or more mammals. The warrior Xiuhcoatl, it was said, had fought with the hearts of a hundred mammals, all willingly given, and had defeated nearly ten thousand soldiers sieging the Inner Wall alone before falling in battle herself. Even if the story was an exaggeration, as Bogo thought it must be, it showed the barbaric depravity of Emperor Ocelotl that had been outlawed for centuries. "Then someone killed a cheetah to make the quauhxicalli the llama used," Bogo said, and Alfonso shrugged slightly.
"It is not impossible," he said, "It may have been done beyond the Middle Wall."
Besides Phoenix there simply wasn't much in the Outer Baronies; there were no other settlements and no resources worth speaking of. The mammals at the gates did, however, dutifully log all the mammals who came and went, and Bogo had the beginning of an idea. Phoenix was the logical place for a cheetah to willingly sacrifice him or herself. Perhaps that cheetah had been a longtime resident of Phoenix, but it seemed just as possible that a deliberate trip had been made there for the purpose of fulfilling the sacrifice. "I have names that may be of some help to you," Alfonso said, interrupting Bogo's thoughts, "None of my blood magicians would do such a thing, but I know of others."
Alfonso must have read the obvious question on Bogo's face—what could possibly make him trustworthy—and he continued speaking. "I have never thanked you for finding my brother's murderer. I should pay my debt now, on one condition."
"What's that?" Bogo asked.
"I should like to know if my daughter is found," Alfonso said, and for the first time the shrew's composure had cracked.
A flicker of exquisite misery crossed Alfonso's face, full of the pain and despair only a parent could know. Alfonso, Bogo realized, was admitting that he had not succeeded in spiriting his daughter away after all. She had made her own escape, and not knowing what she was doing, whether or not she was safe, must have been eating away at him. Another mammal might have cracked the instant his forced isolation from other mammals had ended, begging and pleading for help and promising anything in return, but that wasn't who Alfonso was. It wasn't that he didn't love his daughter, because Bogo thought Alfonso loved and cherished her above anything else he had, but because it was in her best interest if the City Guard thought her location was something Alfonso alone could give up.
"If she is found, she can tell you herself," Bogo said, "There's no warrant out for her arrest."
It was, strictly speaking, not exactly true, but it would be easy enough to change; as Captain General Bogo had the power to ensure she would suffer nothing more than questioning.
"Do you swear this on your honor, Captain General?" Alfonso asked, his voice low.
"I swear it on my life," Bogo replied, as forcefully as he could, and the shrew nodded.
"Do you have something to write on?" Alfonso asked, "I have much to tell you."
Bogo pulled out a small bound book, and once he had settled himself to take notes, the former gang leader began to speak.
Author's Notes:
The Old Tongue, in this story, is Nahuatl; I imagine that the translation convention is in effect and whenever the characters are speaking English they're actually speaking Spanish.
Cloth-of-gold is a real material that dates back thousands of years, and was historically made by wrapping a strand of fiber (typically silk, but sometimes also wool or linen) with a finely drawn band of gold, and then weaving the strands together. Cloth-of-gold is therefore quite heavy, as it contains gold, and due to the expense of making it was largely reserved for nobility in the past. It's also possible that the Greek myth of the Golden Fleece was inspired by the practice of making cloth-of-gold, although there are several other plausible theories.
Octli is the original name for the drink now known as pulque, which is made of fermented agave sap. The drink is milky in color and has a viscous consistency, and while it is deliberately manufactured the sap of the agave plant can also naturally ferment within the plant. The consumption of pulque was strictly controlled in the pre-colonial days of Mexico; it was a drink reserved for elders and priests, but following colonization became much more frequently consumed. Pulque does have a somewhat sour and yeasty smell; I can't say that I'm a fan of it, but to each their own when it comes to libations.
Arctic shrews, in real life, subsist largely off of insects, and I figure farming insects in the world of Zootopia, even in an AU, can be a decent business.
Bogo's narration considering the elephant as drunk as a rabbit is in reference to the Centzon Tōtōchtin (meaning, literally, "four hundred rabbits"), a group of divine rabbits in Aztec mythology who go around having wildly drunken parties. I figured it made an interesting stereotype for rabbits in this version of Zootopia; not only are they looked down upon as being weak but they're also considered inveterate drinkers. It gives another dimension to why Bogo isn't fond of the idea of a rabbit member of the City Guard, too; like his film counterpart this version of Bogo has his own prejudices.
When describing what happened to Alfonso's brother, my goal was to get across the horror of it without going too far; hopefully it worked in that respect. Fairly early on in this story, reader CorvidaeHakubi asked what would happen if a larger mammal stepped on a mouse. This chapter really answers that question in terms of how poorly it would end for both mammals, as the magic of the torcs would cause the larger mammal to suffer identical fatal injuries.
In real life, the voice actor for Bogo, Idris Elba, is 46 years old. I figure in this story Bogo is around 50 or so, and thus rose through the ranks pretty quickly, putting his promotion to the rank of captain in his early twenties.
The New Quimichin Barony is named using the Nahuatl word for "mouse" and is essentially this setting's version of Little Rodentia. In the movie, really the only information that we know about Mr. Big is that he's a parody of Don Corleone from the Godfather, and considering that this is an AU I took some latitude in how I interpreted his past. This chapter directly relates a lot of it, including what can be seen as his origin, although it doesn't cover much of his rise to power. I figured, though, that he's most interesting as a villain who doesn't see himself as a villain; he's pretty clearly done terrible things in the interests of protecting the residents of the New Quimichin Barony and doesn't show any obvious remorse.
This chapter describes two of the sources for the blood used to make quauhxicallis: prisoners and members of the City Guard. I thought these were logical enough sources of blood, and this chapter also expands a little on what makes quauhxicallis work. The idea of them being more powerful if the animal providing the blood makes the sacrifice willingly is inspired by the way Aztecs practiced human sacrifice, in which those being sacrificed often (although not always) submitted willingly. It also illustrates why alchemy is held in higher regard at the time this story is set; the most powerful means of making quauhxicallis is illegal and (rightfully, I think) considered barbaric, and I don't think it's much of a stretch for a similar disdain to accompany the field of magic as a whole.
The word "Xiuhcoatl" is Nahuatl for "turquoise serpent" but less literally means "fire serpent." The Xiuhcoatl was both a mythological creature as well as an atlatl (a spear thrower) wielded by Huītzilōpōchtli, the primary Aztec god of war.
Warrants, including arrest warrants, have been used for a very long time, although the issuing authority depends on the type of government. In a monarchy, such as this version of Zootopia, warrants could be issued by judges or by the crown, but Bogo's confidence in being able to ensure Alfonso's daughter doesn't come to any harm suggests that the City Guard, as a military force, has a significant amount of power in the legal system. Warrants have sometimes been broadly used; the reason for the Fourth Amendment to the US Constitution, for instance, is that before the American Revolution British customs officials had sweeping powers to conduct searches of private property under extremely general warrants.
As always, thanks for reading! I'd love to know what you thought.