"Captain General?" Cerdo's voice floated into Bogo's awareness with the distinct air of a mammal who had already tried and failed to get his attention.
Bogo blinked as he pulled his attention away from the files spread across his desk. In the end, Alfonso had given him the names of four blood magicians he thought to have the skills—and the lack of scruples—that would be necessary to manufacture a quauhxicalli from the very life of a cheetah. As to how promising those leads were, Bogo would have to wait to hear back from his officers; one of the sad truths of being the captain general was that he simply didn't have many opportunities to go into the field anymore. Even visiting Alfonso in prison had likely raised a few eyebrows as some would doubtlessly take it as an insult that he hadn't delegated the task. Certainly there would be nobles whispering that it was a sign that he didn't trust his top generals, and as little as Bogo cared what the useless and pampered members of the upper class thought he couldn't afford to alienate his actual officers.
It was why, not even an hour after visiting Alfonso, he was back in his office in the Royal Palace, reviewing files as others were actually doing the work of investigating the blood magicians and the would-be assassin. Bogo repressed a sigh as he swept the files together and looked across his desk at Cerdo, who was standing there with a somewhat anxious look upon his face. Part of that might have been Bogo's office, which had been deliberately set up to be intimidating by the first mammal to hold the office in a tradition too powerful for Bogo to break no matter how much he detested it. The desk was positively enormous, so large that even Bogo had to use an elevated chair—which seemed to him uncomfortably close to a throne—to see over it, and with his own natural size taken into account it meant he absolutely towered over most mammals who approached the desk even while sitting. The desk had been carved out of a single block of black volcanic stone, the top of it polished to glassy smoothness while the sides were covered with elaborate engravings depicting the founding principles of the kingdom's laws in the pictograms of the Old Tongue.
Behind him was a window with what Bogo knew to be an incredible view of the palace's grounds, as was to be expected considering that his office was about halfway up the oldest central tower. Sometime long ago it might have been possible, on a clear day, to see all the way to the Inner Wall, but the rise of buildings over the centuries in the Inner Baronies meant that his view ended shortly after the palace grounds ended. Something Bogo's predecessor had told him, immediately before vacating the office, was to remember that his view of the city told him almost nothing of how well or poorly it was running. It was an observation that Bogo had found to be completely true; even with the attempt on the princess's life mere hours in the past the ebb and flow of mammals below, tiny as ants, didn't seem to have changed any. None of the great towers were smoldering ruins, none of the distant banners of merchants hawking their wares from countless stalls and carts lining the streets had lost their luster; in short there was no sign to show that the city had narrowly avoided what would have been one of the greatest catastrophes to ever befall it.
It was a philosophical bent that Bogo's thoughts seemed to keep being inordinately drawn to, a sort of rumination on the seeming indifference of the city and his own powerlessness to actually change anything, and with greater effort than it had taken to sweep the surface of his desk into order he pushed the thoughts aside and answered the waiting pig. "Yes, Lord Cerdo?" Bogo asked, doing what he thought was a decent enough job in giving his words a pleasant tone, "How may I help you?"
Cerdo grimaced, the shuffling of his hooves on the polished marble floor making delicate little clicks, and Bogo was surprised to find that the pig actually seemed embarrassed. "I... Well, I wanted to apologize, first, Captain General," he said, and Bogo thought he saw a faint red flush coloring the pig's already rosy pink cheeks and ears through his nearly non-existent covering of fur, "Our princess was nearly assassinated, and the last thing I said before it happened..."
He trailed off, but Bogo didn't need him to continue. Cerdo had been smugly asking why Bogo was worried about a falling crime rate, seemingly totally convinced that there was absolutely no cause for concern. Whether the embarrassment Cerdo felt was because he had been so clearly wrong, or simply the result of his political rivals in the form of Corazón and Cencerro almost certainly coming out ahead of him in the queen's eyes, Bogo wasn't going to question it. Bogo's distaste for political games didn't blind him to the realities of life in the royal court; grudges had no place in the City Guard, where impartiality was of paramount importance to its very stability. If he went after every single noble who irritated him, as some captain generals had in the past, he would end up just like them—the head of an army with a completely insufficient budget, staffed by totally inadequate officers, and at the mercy of the private guards that the wealthiest of nobles maintained for their own protection. Bogo pushed down his very real and very petty desire to make Cerdo squirm and simply said, "Your presence here shows you've rethought those words."
Cerdo looked up at Bogo, his eyes brightening at the life line he had just been provided, and eagerly nodded. "Precisely, precisely!" he said, his heavy jowls wobbling at how emphatically he spoke, "I wished to volunteer my own resources to assist your investigation—and the City Guard—in any way I can. I have nearly two hundred guards of my own, all of them highly trained and some even veterans of your noble institution, that I beg you to allow me to place at your disposal."
Bogo sat back in his chair, the old wood of which groaned in complaint as he shifted position; the chair was one of the things he would have loved to have changed about his office, if only he could. Traditions were, however, sometimes too strong to overcome, which made Cerdo's offer all the more surprising. It was very nearly an immutable fact, such as how the sun would rise in the East or how an alchemist would be self-important, that nobles would not volunteer their own personal guards for service to the city. There were always excuses, of course; four years ago when there had been a rash of bandits striking travelers in the Middle Baronies, all the nobles had put on performances that would have done an acting troupe proud. They would have been happy to spare soldiers, but they had to protect their own caravans of supplies, or the guards were already engaged in construction projects, or they couldn't afford the expense. The only excuse Bogo had actually believed had been the one that came from the head of the Tochtli Barony, who claimed not to have a private guard; it was typical of rabbits to expect others to protect them. Cerdo's excuse, as Bogo recalled, had been that his soldiers didn't have the training to stop bandits unless they were issued the same sort of torcs as the official City Guard. Otherwise, Cerdo had claimed, his soldiers would simply die themselves for each bandit that was struck down.
As the queen was not so foolish as to overlook the obvious problem with allowing the various lords and ladies that made up the nobility to have private armies at their disposal that could strike with impunity, Bogo had devised an alternate solution by forcing the nobles to contribute either money or conscripts. It was not a decision that had made him popular; no matter how much Bogo himself pointedly did not show grudges he was sure it was the source of many against him personally, and Cerdo had been one of the mammals most vocally in favor of the City Guard being reduced in size once the bandit threat was no longer quite as urgent. Corazón, by contrast, had deftly outmaneuvered Bogo's desire for worthy members of the City Guard by pushing for his ludicrous scheme to allow mammals from species that had not previously been called on to serve, allowing the lion to keep the most useful members of his own personal guard and sending pitiful soldiers as conscripts in their place.
For Cerdo to volunteer his entire personal guard, Bogo could only guess that the pig was attempting a particularly bold move in the hopes of getting in the queen's good graces again, as she was unlikely to forget that he had pushed against the very sort of expansion of the City Guard that might have prevented the attempt on the princess's life. It was certainly unprecedented in Bogo's experience, but he wasn't about to give Cerdo a chance to change his mind. Perhaps he'd even be lucky and other nobles would fall over themselves trying to copy Cerdo's example; there was no telling what Bogo could accomplish with another thousand or so guard mammals. "I appreciate your offer," Bogo said, "And I accept. Have your guards sent to the central garrison at once."
Bogo pulled a blank piece of paper towards himself, but before he could pick up his fine silver fountain pen Cerdo pulled a piece of parchment from an interior pocket and slid it across the glossy surface of Bogo's desk. "I've already prepared what I believe to be a suitable order," Cerdo said, and Bogo quickly scanned the text.
No matter what else he could say about Cerdo, the pig's writing was beautiful and perfectly legible, and the order ran only a few simple lines. Cerdo was transferring the contracts for two hundred soldiers to the city as well as a sum of money so enormous that it would be sufficient to pay for their wages for at least five years. Cerdo had already signed it with an elaborate flourish, and Bogo added his own far simpler signature to the page. Bogo pulled the bell cord that hung near his desk for alerting a guard that they were needed in his office and then turned back to Cerdo. "Was there anything else, Lord Cerdo?" he asked.
"Only to ask if there is anything else—absolutely anything at all—that I may help with to find the mammal responsible," Cerdo said, and his words were rather solemn.
After Bogo had dismissed the lord in the awkward dance of politeness that always seemed to happen when Cerdo was involved and a guard had arrived to take the freshly signed order to the central garrison, he turned his attention back to the files that had been pulled at his request. Unlike alchemists, who were virtually entirely under the rigid control of a single powerful guild, blood magicians were more loosely aligned with at least half a dozen guilds. The guilds of blood magicians were, however, somewhat more cooperative with the City Guard than the Alchemist Guild tended to be, and they kept meticulous records on all of their members. For each of the four mammals Alfonso had named, Bogo had detailed summaries of their education, specialties, shops, and even their earnings, supplemented by the information the City Guard maintained.
Unfortunately, each of the four mammals struck Bogo as being about equal in terms of their potential for having been the creator of the quauhxicalli that had been used by the llama in his attack. There was a tiger who maintained a shop in Phoenix who specialized in quauhxicallis made from feline donors, but there was absolutely nothing either in the file her guild maintained on her or in the City Guard's own records to even suggest at a motive. In contrast, another of Alfonso's leads was a bear who had been questioned by the City Guard several times concerning anti-monarchist views, but she had never been formally arrested and her guild's documentation showed her specialty was quauhxicallis made from birds. The third mammal was a weasel who had served a jail sentence and nearly been dropped from his guild after being accused of selling counterfeit quauhxicallis that didn't quite have the advertised effects, but even if he had the moral flexibility to craft a quauhxicalli that required the sacrifice of a life he didn't officially have the required skill per his guild's assessment. The last lead Alfonso had provided was for a wolf who had served a brief prison sentence and been blacklisted from all of the major blood magic guilds following a disastrous attempt at healing a patient who would likely have been better served by an alchemist, after which he had moved to Phoenix.
As the weasel lived in the Inner Baronies and the bear in the Middle Baronies, Bogo anticipated that his officers would quickly have updates for him to add more information to the rather thin files that he had. The tiger and the wolf were the two leads it would take the longest to follow up on; although Bogo had dispatched a messenger hawk as quickly as he could to Phoenix with orders for the garrison there to investigate the suspects, it would take days for a response to come no matter what the cocky mouse rider had promised. Considering how much the diminutive messenger had charged, citing the dangers of flying his bird all the way to Phoenix, Bogo had found himself in the rare situation of actually agreeing with Corazón about something; the City Guard needed its own messenger birds.
Bogo frowned as the thought crossed his mind, absently tapping at the surface of his desk with his pen. He trusted Alfonso's information only so much as he believed that the shrew didn't have any personal involvement in the attempted murder of the princess and that the shrew hadn't deliberately withheld anything from him. Considering that the four mammals Alfonso had named didn't seem to have any obvious connection to one of Alfonso's rivals it suggested that the shrew still knew quite a bit that the City Guard either didn't or that well-placed bribes were keeping from reaching official files. However, Alfonso had moved in rather different circles than the ones that Bogo moved in, and he had never rubbed elbows with the most highly placed of nobles.
It was entirely possible that Alfonso's leads would prove totally fruitless, particularly if a noble was the mastermind, and somehow Corazón simply felt suspicious in a way Bogo couldn't put a finger on. For as long as Bogo had known the lion, Corazón seemed to have climbed from one political victory to the next, always a step ahead of his rivals and always being proved right. Although Corazón had had the good graces not to brag about it when they had spoken in the Hall of Ancestors, Bogo's conversation with Cerdo had made it clear that the lion had scored yet another win. The case for expanding the City Guard had been made quite clear with the failed assassination, and Bogo suspected that it would elevate Corazón even higher in the queen's eye. High enough, perhaps, to finally arrange a marriage between Corazón's son and the princess—or maybe even between the queen and Corazón himself.
Bogo rolled the end of his pen across his desk with increasing speed as he considered another new angle. Perhaps the assassination had never been intended to succeed; perhaps the mastermind had always intended for the llama to fail even if the llama hadn't been aware of that. If Bogo had been ever so slightly slower in responding, would Corazón have been the hero of the hour? It was possible; although the lion was no blood magician himself, he was fond of wearing expensive quauhxicallis at his belt in a silent yet ostentatious display of wealth, and the llama would have been forced to pass him on his way to the princess. Bogo pulled the piece of paper he had intended to use for drafting his orders for Cerdo's guards and carefully wrote a note: "Investigate Corazón's connections to blood magicians."
Somehow, the act of writing the words down brought with them the same simple pleasure Bogo remembered from his days walking the beat of Zootopia. There was nothing quite like that feeling of solving a problem, and while he certainly didn't have any evidence of Corazón's guilt it was well worth looking into. After Bogo had sealed the message, addressed it to a trusted general, and dispatched it with another member of the City Guard, he sat quietly considering his other leads. Although the llama's torc had been somewhat mangled by the force with which it hit the ground, it had still been possible to read the mammal's name off of it. Jorge de Cuvier was, so far as the city's official records could tell, an absolute nobody. He was thirty-two years old, had dutifully paid his taxes every year since coming of age, and had never had any kind of run-in with the City Guard. His tax records showed him to work as an unskilled stonemason, where he had earned enough to live a modest life in a small apartment. Jorge de Cuvier had never married or had any children, and from official records seemed to be the sort of mammal who made up the bedrock of Zootopia. Bogo looked forward to hearing what his officers interviewing Cuvier's neighbors and boss would say about him; there had been no mistaking the look of anger and hate twisting the llama's face as he charged at the princess and it seemed impossible that he had managed to completely hide his feelings from the mammals who knew him best.
Bogo was still waiting to hear back from the court's blood magician as to whether any additional information could be divined from the llama's remains, which seemed to be the running refrain. All he could do was wait, and he hated it. Bogo heaved a sigh no one else was around to hear, pushing himself upright from his overly ostentatious chair, and turned to look out his window. The palace grounds were a riot of color, carefully chosen plants tended to by the best gardeners in the entire city-state forming artful patterns too far below to make out individual leaves or flowers. The additional guards Bogo had ordered posted, even with their red tunics and gleaming breastplates, weren't visible from where he observed, and Bogo thought again of the illusion of stability. It was not a thought that the queen was likely to appreciate, and Bogo resolved not to mention it to her.
It had been several hours since he had last seen her or the princess, however, and lacking any action he could take personally to find the mastermind Bogo decided to visit them. The princess especially deserved a sign that what had almost happened was a fluke; she was still, in Bogo's mind, too young to fully realize the truth of how fragile her world really was and needed the reassurance. Or maybe he was giving her less credit than she deserved. Certainly Bogo's own daughter had frequently surprised him with how much she understood when she had been a calf, and she hadn't been the future heir to all of Zootopia. Bogo felt a smile tugging at the corner of his mouth as he remembered the time when his daughter was twelve and—"Captain General?" a voice called, interrupting his thoughts.
The smile had vanished from Bogo's face by the time he turned around and faced one of the mammals he wanted to see least. There, framed in the enormous doorway to his office such that she appeared even smaller than usual, was the Lady Alba Cencerro. "I was wondering," the ewe said, holding up one hoof with her fingers less than an inch apart, "If I could have just a little moment of your time?"
Bogo settled himself into his own chair, ignoring its creaks, and gestured at the chair on the other side of his desk. "By all means," he said, resigning himself to yet another political matter.
Author's Notes:
A reader using the handle Deathsmallcaps said that they drew art of Princess Isabel based on this story. This is hugely flattering for me, and I'm amazed that Deathsmallcaps went to such efforts based on something I wrote; from the description alone I can tell they put a lot of thought into how to draw her. Unfortunately, the site's anti-spam policy ate the link to the image that was provided, leaving only the following text:
gallery/1fWj6PG
Even worse, Deathsmallcaps wasn't a logged-in user, so I can't even PM them. If Deathsmallcaps or someone else can provide me with the full link, I'd be incredibly grateful and I'll definitely link to it!
As previously mentioned, the Tochtli Barony is where this version of Judy comes from and is located in the Middle Baronies; I think it's pretty in character for her parents not to have a massive personal guard the way richer nobles do.
Aztec writing is an interesting topic, particularly because there's still debate as to whether it was a complete form of writing or not. Unfortunately, the vast majority of Aztec writing from before the time of Spanish colonization was destroyed, most of it by Spanish clergy members, and very little remains for study. What is known, however, is that the language used pictograms and ideograms (that is, pictures that visually depict the concept that they stand for) and did not have an alphabet the way English or most Western languages do. However, in a manner similar to some Asian languages, some words were represented by glyphs for other words that are pronounced the same way; for example the way to represent the name of the city Tenochtitlan was through the symbol for stone (te-tl) and the symbol for cactus (nochtli). Surviving works written in the Aztec system used for the spoken language frequently seem to be mnemonics for lists of information rather than the transcribed forms of sentences or paragraphs.
All that can be said for sure is that Aztecs did at the very least have a proto-writing system that could encode information in a pictorial fashion, and a growing body of research shows that they had a fairly sophisticated system for doing so, even to the point of having visual representations of spoken puns and wordplay. That's a lot of words to say that it would indeed be possible to carve, using the Aztec system, a representation of the legal system into the sides of a desk.
Fountain pens were first made sometime around the 10th century, but a number of difficulties prevented them from becoming practical until about the middle of the 19th century. Most notably there were difficulties with creating a suitable ink that wouldn't clog up the pen or cause it to corrode. I imagine that in the universe of this story, however, the greater control over matter that alchemy allows would make the mass adoption of fountain pens easier than it was in our world.
This chapter indicates that there are messenger hawks in this setting that have small mammals riding them. I figured that it made sense considering the complete lack of anything analogous to telephones or radios. The possibility of riding a bird seems to me like it'd be one of the greatest perks of being a small mammal in Zootopia, although it's probably safe to assume that comparatively few mammals would actually get to do so. Or might even want to, considering that, unlike a human riding a horse in the real world, a mouse riding a falcon might have to deal with his ride being both capable of and inclined towards eating him.
Out of the mammals that Alfonso named, the bear having a history of anti-monarch sentiment is a small joke on my part, referencing the common symbolic association of bears with Russia, a country that does indeed have something of a history of opposing monarchs. For the others, I won't say anything now, but there are probably some reasonable conclusions that can be drawn.
The llama's name being Jorge de Cuvier is a nod to Georges Cuvier, the French naturalist who first taxonomically categorized llamas separately from alpacas. His living in an apartment may seem kind of modern, but in fact apartments have a long history in Mesoamerica. The city of Teotihuacan, which was likely first established more than two thousand years ago, shows evidence that virtually the entire population of the city lived in apartments in a manner rather similar to most modern cities. I imagine that, particularly for the Inner Baronies where the buildings are the most densely packed, this is also the case, with only nobles and the extremely wealthy capable of affording large plots of land.
"Alba" means "sunrise" or "dawn" in Spanish and is commonly used as a female name, making it seem appropriate for this version of Bellwether. Bogo not being particularly happy to see her is, perhaps, a universal constant even in an AU work.
As always, thanks for reading! I'd love to know what you thought!