True to Nick's word, he was not up with the sun the following morning. Even after Judy had completely finished her morning training routine (using the spear that Nick had made himself instead of her own, which was still in two pieces) despite the protests of her muscles from the previous night, cleaned herself up, and eaten, she could still hear his gentle snores coming from his tent as she sat and looked off in the distance at Phoenix, turning the little golden carrot Nick had made her over and over in her paws. With nothing to do but wait for him to wake up, the memory of her fist connecting with his eye came back into her mind, unbidden, for what must have been about the hundredth time. Judy felt her ears drooping against the back of her neck, but even shaking her head couldn't clear the guilt she felt.
Her victory against Nick had been far from her first win in a sparring match; despite being easily the smallest member of her graduating class at the academy she had successfully fought her way to the top of the ranks. It wasn't even the first time that she had injured someone in a bout; Judy could vividly remember knocking a tooth out of the mouth of one of her fellow cadets with a particularly well-timed kick. The difference between that fight and the one against Nick, though, was that Nick was a civilian and not a fellow trainee.
Perhaps it was simply that Nick was also a fox, but the previous night, as she had tossed and turned trying to fall asleep, Judy had kept returning to the uncomfortable memory of Gideon and how he had clawed her face. It had been the pleasure, she had decided at last; in the moment before her torc had reached out and inflicted an identical wound the young fox's face had been full of the simple cruel pleasure of hurting her. Judy felt ashamed of the brief moment of pleasure she had felt, and had tried thinking up a way of really apologizing to Nick; she found herself wishing that he had been a bunny too.
If he had been a bunny (and Judy had briefly entertained the notion of a russet-furred buck with brilliantly green eyes lazily half-hooded and a seemingly perpetually smug expression), showing how sincerely she meant her apology would have been easy. She could have helped groom him, but she had no idea how a fox would take it; the last thing she wanted was to make him more uncomfortable, no matter how wonderfully soft his fur had to—Judy's thoughts were interrupted by Nick staggering out of his tent looking rather well-worn. His fur was completely disheveled, his ears and tail both drooping pathetically. His left eye was bloodshot and puffy, and his right wasn't visible beneath a faintly glowing strip of fabric wrapped around his head. Judy winced at the sight; seeing again how she had accidentally hurt him brought with it a fresh wave of guilt. "It's not that bad, is it?" Nick asked lightly, "Here, is this better?"
As he spoke, he unwrapped the bandage from around his head, and Judy caught a brief glimpse of the interior of it—the inside surface of the part of it that had been over his eye had a complicated pattern of interlocking circles and triangles that glowed with an odd pinkish color unlike anything Judy had ever seen before in the academy's infirmary—before she was distracted by the change in his face.
Judy was very familiar with how black eyes looked (and, thanks to one of her instructors, she knew precisely how they felt), and even with immediate treatment with an incomplete philosopher's stone Judy had never seen one disappear completely in less than two days. Judy had expected Nick's eye to still be swollen shut, but it looked perfectly normal. In fact, the eye she had hit actually looked better considering that the other was bloodshot. "Still doubting my alchemy, I see," Nick said with an easy smile as he seemed to take in her surprise, "I did tell you, I have powers beyond the ken of most mammals. Besides, you didn't hit me that hard."
He waggled his fingers as he repeated his boast, the same as he had the previous night, and Judy found a sense of relief swelling in her chest. For him to heal so fast even with the aid of alchemy it must really not have been all that serious a hit, and while she still wasn't proud of hitting an innocent civilian in the eye it did help assuage her guilt a little. "I'm still really sorry," Judy said, and Nick waved her apology aside.
"I'm perfectly alright," Nick said cheerfully, "Now here, let me see that spear of yours."
True to Nick's instructions, Judy had left the broken pieces of her spear where they were, although the odd sort of hairiness that the metal had taken on had continued to spread up both pieces of the shaft from where they had split. Nick repaired the break Judy had made in the circle he had drawn the previous night and quickly drew a square around the spear, setting up his elemental focuses at the intersections of the square and the circle. She supposed that, although he had already shown her that he was capable of transmuting materials incredibly fast when he wanted to, doing so more slowly took less effort, because it took him about a minute to repair her spear. Unlike his rapid transmutations the previous night, where the material seemed to simply briefly burst with light, Judy saw the spear's shaft distinctly go through each of the color changes as it flowed back together before Nick lifted it and gave it to her.
Although Judy had always done her best to keep her duty spear in as close to parade-ready condition as possible, it had still picked up some scuffs and scrapes from normal use. Now, though, her spear had a strip about an inch wide that was perfectly and faultlessly smooth and shiny from where Nick had rejoined the metal, but there was otherwise absolutely no kind of visible seam or joint. In fact, it looked more as though someone had buffed a single portion of the shaft rather than that it had ever been in two pieces, and the spear's balance was completely unaffected.
Nick next set to work adjusting his sword, spreading out the cloth he had wrapped it in and positioning his focuses on it. In the light of morning, and at a much closer distance, Judy saw that the complicated pattern of triangles drawn on it hadn't been made with simple lines; each triangle was actually composed of lines of text, the letters rather cramped, although since Judy couldn't read the Dead Tongue she had no idea what they said although some of the words looked vaguely familiar. Before she could take a closer look, Nick had put his sabre on the cloth, after which he traced a few lines through the gritty dirt to where he sat, connecting it to the pattern already on the fabric. He placed his paws on either side of the sword and Judy felt the air seem to sharpen again, her fur standing on end, and watched as the sabre changed. Even as the color seemed to flow out of it, making it completely black, the sabre was shrinking. But rather than simply becoming smaller all over, Judy noticed that the pommel at the end of the hilt was actually growing larger, stretching and shifting into something that Judy at first couldn't recognize. As the sabre started to glow, though, the blade thickening somewhat, the ornament Nick had added to the pommel became unmistakable; it could only be—"A pretty good likeness, wouldn't you say?" Nick said, nodding his head in apparent approval of his own work even as he carelessly tossed away a little shiny cylinder of metal that seemed to be leftover from making the sword smaller.
The ornament on the pommel was, unquestionably, a miniature representation of a fox's head. Moreover, it was a representation of Nick's head. Unlike some officer's sabres Judy had seen, where the mammal wielding it had decorated the end with a little ornamental head of the same species they belonged to looking as fierce as possible, the little fox head had a perfectly recognizable half-smirk across its face and was winking one eye. It was playful in a way Judy had never seen a sword be before, but she thought it perfectly fit the character of the swordmaker. Besides, she thought suddenly, once she was done escorting Nick to Phoenix, and helping him buy the book he wanted, she might never see him again. The little representation of him at the end of the sword might be the only thing to remember him by for a very long time; if he made a habit of traveling back and forth to Phoenix and she got assigned to the Inner Baronies, their paths would simply never cross.
"It's perfect," Judy said, and Nick seemed to swell in satisfaction even as he gave the sword over to her.
Although the ornament had caught the majority of Judy's attention, she had noticed how the blade had thickened after it had first been remolded to fit her, and as she took the blade in one paw she saw why. The edge of the blade was no longer dull; there was a thin, transparent edge to it that caught the light and sparkled. "It's very sharp," Nick warned, "Try not to touch the edge."
She had been about to test the edge with one finger, but quickly pulled it back at Nick's words. He offered her a sheath he had pulled from his pack, and Judy put the sword away with no small amount of regret; it was perfectly balanced and sized for her, but she couldn't in good conscience wear it with her uniform until she made captain. "Now that that's taken care of, it's time for me to get ready," Nick said, rubbing his paws briskly to get the dirt off them, "I can't be seen walking into Phoenix looking like this."
"Do you want any help with that?" Judy asked, the words out of her mouth before she really had a chance to think about them.
She froze in horror as the realization as to what she had just said struck her; he had given her the perfect opportunity to show the sincerity of her apology in the way she would another bunny, and her response had been all but automatic. Nick arched an eyebrow, his eyes looking her up and down with surprising scrutiny, and then he shrugged. "Why not? I'd rather reach Phoenix before it gets dark."
In the end, even as Judy found herself brushing Nick's tail—which was just as luxuriously soft and fluffy as it looked; her fingers holding the brush could completely vanish into it—she couldn't help but wonder why he had agreed. Was it simply because, as he had claimed, he wanted to save time getting ready himself? Or perhaps foxes who were close friends helped groom each other the way bunnies did; Judy didn't know any foxes well enough to make a guess one way or the other. She couldn't even say if he thought she was his friend or if he was simply being polite to his escort. Whatever the case, Nick seemed to preen at the attention; there was absolutely no tension in his body. He had changed into a fresh pair of trousers and a tunic and was seeing to the fur of his head and neck even as Judy brushed the tangles out of his tail.
After eyeing her work and judging it satisfactory (although he did add, with mock severity, that it didn't count as the favor she had promised him), Nick put on a fresh coat he had pulled from his seemingly bottomless bag and declared himself ready to go. The rest of their walk to Phoenix passed in easy and pleasant conversation; if Nick held any kind of grudge about being punched in the face he didn't show it.
As they got close enough to really see Phoenix, Judy found herself a little disappointed at how plain and rough it looked. Considering that she had learned it had been built on the ruins of the Quimichpatlan Barony, Judy had expected something more like the Inner Baronies, or failing that even like her own home in Tochtli Barony. But instead of graceful towers and squat stepped pyramids, even in ruins, or fields of rustling grain and the occasional farmhouse, Phoenix looked to have been built mostly from the collapsed stone of the Outer Wall; all of the buildings she could see were made of irregular chunks of white stone that were only vaguely cube-shaped and none of them would have been more than two stories tall for any mammal larger than a jaguar.
Phoenix was, admittedly, an entirely respectable size; there could easily be a few thousand residents Judy's size or larger without it being cramped. Still, knowing that it was built on the ruins of the barony where a conspiracy of vampire bat blood magicians had plotted to overthrow the second king of Zootopia, Judy had expected something a little more visually distinct. Then again, she supposed that the alchemists of King Oveja II had simply been thorough; in response to what was undeniably treason the king had ordered Quimichpatlan Barony to be completely destroyed.
It was a pity, though, that there wasn't anything left, not even a memorial like the one so close to where Judy grew up that marked where the Middle Wall had been breached and then repaired. Judy's thoughts must have shown on her face, because Nick said, "Disappointed, Carrots?"
A slight smile touched his features as he awaited her response, both of them still walking along the path that led into Phoenix itself. "A little," Judy admitted, "I expected Phoenix to be..."
She trailed off, unable to find the right word, but Nick's smile broadened into a grin. "Do you hear a waterfall?" he asked.
"Yes," Judy said, and suddenly realized how strange that was; the aqueducts from the Inner Baronies didn't reach Phoenix, or else Nick wouldn't have had a contract to bid for on purifying water from wells, but there weren't any bodies of water that she could see.
"Over there," Nick said, gesturing her over to a stone lattice railing that went alongside one edge of the path, "You can look down if you want."
Judy remembered that Nick had seemed afraid of heights when they had crossed the Cozamalotl Bridge, and as she walked over to the railing she expected to see a similar gorge. Through the stone lattice she could see sheets of water flowing over the edge of a crack in the earth, but when she looked down to see where the water collected she at first couldn't believe what she was seeing.
When Judy had been young, perhaps seven or eight, wasps had built a nest in one of the less frequently used sheds on her parents' estate. The shed had been full of battered old furniture that her father had said he would eventually fix up (although he had made that promise for at least five or six years with absolutely no progress), so the kits of the barony had used the shed as a sort of play fort. Or at least, Judy had; none of her siblings had held any interest in imagining the thin and shabby walls of the shed to be the mighty Middle Wall that protected Zootopia and playing at guarding it. But even though her sisters especially preferred to play house, imagining the shed to be the manor of some ridiculously wealthy rabbit lord from the Inner Baronies, it had been Judy who had been the first to open the door to the shed that season.
She didn't think she'd ever forget the feeling that had come over her when she had opened the rickety wooden door and peered in. Her first sense had been of something being terribly wrong in such a visceral way that nothing else had come close even years later. The familiar shapes of the tables and chairs had been deformed, softened and blurred by the ugly asymmetry of what everyone in the Tochtli Barony would later agree was the largest wasp nest anyone had ever seen. The feeling of wrongness had eventually resolved itself into a powerful sense of revulsion at the horrible way in which the familiar had been turned alien; even the peaceful quiet of the shed had been replaced by the harshly atonal buzzing of the wasps swarming over each other deep beneath the thin and rough skin of paper they had built.
Her first glimpse at what Phoenix had been built upon brought forth a nearly identical feeling; because the ground had been more or less level it hadn't been visible until she was right on top of it. She was standing near an enormous fissure in the earth, one so deep that it was impossible to say how far down it went but easily two or three hundred feet wide at the part closest to a collapsed portion of the Outer Wall and the scrublands beyond. It was clear that there had at some point been an enormous underground community, the fissure cracking open tunnels large enough for a giraffe to walk upright through and exposing enormous caves that could have swallowed her family home. Judy could see what looked like apartments and shops, but whatever had split the ground had also melted the exposed rock into unsettling patterns that reminded her of nothing more than that wasp nest. In some parts of the depths of the fissure, glowing dimly where the fading sunlight didn't reach, were the deformed remains of alchemical torches, their brightness faded to a nearly invisible and vaguely greenish glow over the countless centuries, the formerly perfectly formed lights twisted and distorted.
Puddles of what had once been solid rock, glistening translucently in some places and firmly opaque in others, had dripped over what had once been floors into amorphous stalagmites. Or rather, as Judy realized, what had once been ceilings. The way the very rock itself had run and dripped like hot wax had been only a large part of the reason Judy had made her mistake, but it was the force of habit more than anything else to assume that all mammals would build their homes the way that bunnies did, with floors below and ceilings above.
By contrast, the remains of the Quimichpatlan Barony treated ceilings and floors interchangeably. Judy could see the lumpy remains of what could have only been a stone table, with beautifully carved legs, hanging from the ceiling in one ruined apartment, while in another spot a shop held the ruins of a display stand melted into the floor. Judy realized that her jaw was hanging open but she couldn't do anything to help it; she had never imagined from what she had learned from her teachers that Quimichpatlan Barony had ever been so large and grand. Judy tried to imagine what it must have been like before it had been destroyed in the failed Second Uprising and couldn't; time had ruined the details that the intense heat of melting rock hadn't hundreds of years ago. Still, there were some signs of what must have been; one large cave was coated in tarnished silver that was thinnest at the tops of the walls and formed a puddle that dripped over the exposed edge and down into the depths of the fissure, whatever details had been on the wall ruined by it melting. Like the table in the apartment that had caught her attention, here and there some remaining bits of stonework had retained some of the detail they had been carved with, which to Judy's inexpert eye looked to be about the equal of anything she had seen while training in the very heart of the Inner Baronies.
The waterfall left plenty of gaps to see it all in, as it was less a continuous sheet and more many smaller falls no more than twenty feet wide or so, and it didn't come close to obscuring the massive fissure. The water did, however, have a somewhat oily-looking sheen to it that reminded Judy again of the contract Nick hoped to win; she found it very easy to believe that the water was in need of purification. "There are pumps way down there," Nick said, having appeared over Judy's shoulder while she was taking in the view, "Way, way down there."
She couldn't help but notice that he didn't look down the fissure himself, instead looking her right in the eyes. "Not that anyone's seen them in centuries, of course," Nick said, "The lower dozen levels or so are supposed to be completely flooded."
Judy looked from Nick and then back down into the fissure. Even the point where the sunlight stopped reaching had to be three hundred feet below them, and if there were a dozen or more flooded levels even deeper... Although Judy wasn't afraid of either heights or swimming, she felt a touch of vertigo at the idea. "And are they?" Judy asked, "Do mammals go down there?"
Nick chuckled, shaking his head. "Not the smart ones. There are things down there worse than dirty water."
Judy turned her head sharply back in Nick's direction. "Like what?" she asked.
"Oh, you know, the usual things mammals say to scare kits. Ancient booby traps, half-mad mammals who got lost and couldn't find their way out, ghosts..." Nick said, ticking each off on one finger.
As he trailed off, he snapped his fingers suddenly. "And monsters, of course. Can't forget those."
Judy peered down into the depths of the ruins again as though some horrible beast might be staring back up at her. "Monsters?" she repeated.
Nick's tone had been half-teasing for all of the other supposed horrors he had named, but when he got to the last item, his words had seemed more serious than joking. "Monsters," Nick repeated, "Supposedly, the alchemists who destroyed Quimichpatlan Barony wanted to be sure there were no survivors, so they sent in chimeras."
His tone had continued to be surprisingly serious, but at the idea of chimeras being sent into the ruined barony Judy couldn't help but laugh; he was obviously just trying to scare her. "Chimeras like the princess?" Judy said, doing her very best to exude skepticism with every word; even with her limited knowledge of alchemy she knew that the first chimera had been born about forty years ago.
"Not like the princess, no," Nick said, shaking his head, "They weren't mammals."
He still seemed to be serious, and Judy pressed him on it. "Do you really believe those stories?" she asked.
"I've seen some of the things the mammals stupid enough to go down into the ruins bring back with them," Nick said, "Feathered snakes with wings... enormous lobsters with stingers..."
He shrugged. "You'll see things in the market that would make your tail puff out," he finished, and after shooting a sidelong glance at her tail added, "If it could, anyway."
Judy chuckled, a little uneasily; although Nick seemed to take the existence of monsters seriously enough, he didn't seem particularly worried about them. Considering that he apparently thought mammals who descended into the ruins were stupid, she would be entirely willing to bet that he had never gone into the depths himself. "You'll have to show me what's worth buying," Judy said, and Nick hooked his thumbs into his coat.
"Well, there is the book you're buying for me to start with," Nick said, "Otherwise..."
He stroked at his chin, apparently deep in thought, "I hear there's a fox alchemist who stops by Phoenix from time to time. He might have something worth buying when he sets up his stall. Quite the conversationalist, too, and all the vixens say he's very good-looking."
"Ah," Judy said, doing her best to hide a smile, "He sounds pretty remarkable."
Author's Notes:
In chapter 1, there are some hints at what Judy remembers in this chapter, so far as Gideon clawing her in the face goes.
Real rabbits do in fact groom each other both as a sign of affection and a means of establishing a hierarchy within their group. I think there's plenty of evidence in the movie that the Hopps family is physically affectionate, and I'd imagine that grooming as means of apologizing and smoothing things over seemed appropriate as a typical bunny behavior. Foxes do groom each other as well, but considering Judy's lack of knowledge about foxes her concern about how Nick would take it are not unfounded.
Black eyes typically last about a week or so, although in a world where most everyone's face is covered with fur they probably become less obvious faster.
In chapter 8, I had noted that I refer to Nahuatl as the Old Tongue; in this chapter I'm referring to Latin as the Dead Tongue. Latin was last used as a primary language by around the 9th century CE; although Latin remained important as a language that many things were written in, it no longer had any native speakers and was used as a second language. Latin is, therefore, a dead language, and has been now for centuries. The romance languages, including Spanish, are derived from Latin, so considering the translation convention in effect it makes sense that Judy might see some words as looking somewhat familiar.
The cutting edge of the sabre is made of diamond, using alchemy to bond the carbon in the diamond to the carbon in the steel at the molecular level. This is something that would be essentially impossible to do with any known chemical techniques, but with the perfect control of matter that alchemy provides would be both possible and extraordinarily strong. Diamond can hold an incredibly sharp edge, but making an entire sword out of it would make it prone to shattering, so by having only the cutting surface be diamond it's making it a much better sword. The closest we can come with modern techniques is a diamond knife, which are frequently used in eye surgery due to their ability to hold such a sharp edge that it minimizes damage as it cuts, but the blades are extremely small and would make a poor weapon.
Quimichpatlan Barony takes its name from the Nahuatl word for bat; one of the things that occurred to me when I was setting up the background of this story was what the existence of blood magic might have interesting implications on animals that subsist on blood. There are, in fact, three species of vampire bat that subside exclusively on blood, with ranges that overlap that of modern-day Mexico, and I thought the idea of what it would mean for them to practice blood magic would be pretty interesting.
This barony is inspired by my idea of what a Nocturnal District would be like if Zootopia had one; locating it underground seems reasonable as a means of ensuring that it's dark. Of course, for a lot of the various districts mammals could simply live in the one that's appropriate for them and just go out at night, so I think if there is a Nocturnal District it could be a sort of microcosm of Zootopia, where it has a variety of climates and caters to naturally nocturnal mammals who want to be awake at the same time as diurnal mammals and diurnal mammals who want a taste of what the nocturnal life is like without having to stay up late.
The winged, feathered snakes that Nick claims lurk in the depths of the ruins of the Quimichpatlan Barony are a nod to Quetzalcoatl, whose name literally means "feathered serpent." In Aztec art, he's variously represented as both a human and as a snake with feathers.
The lobsters with stingers are a nod to Stephen King's Dark Tower series, where horrible creatures dubbed lobstrosities live on the beaches of the Western Sea and resemble enormous lobsters crossed with scorpions and are capable of producing something like speech.
As always, thanks for reading! I'd love to know what you thought!