"Are you expecting to find a book labeled 'Secret Evil Plan, Do Not Read'?" Nick asked.
They were searching Cencerro's office; after the eerie stillness of the streets of Phoenix Nick hadn't taken much convincing to go back into the barracks. His tone as he asked the question sounded, to Judy's ears, as though he was trying to be casual and not quite succeeding. There was a tense undercurrent in his voice; he sounded on the edge between worry and panic.
Although Judy herself wasn't afraid, she couldn't help but wonder if his reaction was the right one; the situation they had found themselves in was far more bizarre than anything she could have imagined. "The more information we can take to the captain general, the better," Judy replied as she went through the drawers of Cencerro's desk.
Everything was as perfectly organized as his office suggested that it would be; the drawer Judy was pawing through had nearly a decade's worth of operating budgets filled with dense and neatly written columns of numbers and descriptions. "If he won't take a bunny guard and a fox alchemist at their word, you mean," Nick replied.
He was looking through the more recent files that had been stacked with an almost geometric precision atop Cencerro's desk, but from his expression Judy could tell he hadn't found anything of interest as she looked up sharply from her own work. "Why wouldn't Bogo believe us?" she asked, and the smile Nick gave her was somehow sad.
"Oh, Carrots," he said, about turning the words into a sigh, "You really are too pure for this world, aren't you?"
His tone wasn't nearly as mocking as his words seemed like they should be; when he continued he sounded positively melancholy. "If it comes down to the word of a rookie—a bunny rookie—against the head of the Phoenix City Guard, do you really think he'd accept our side? We'd just end up in cells that'd be a tiny bit more difficult to get out of."
Judy wanted to be able to voice a protest but couldn't. She had seen Bogo speak once before, but had never had a conversation with him. Still, the buffalo had seemed to all but radiate competence and authority. If anyone could see through whatever web of lies Cencerro would spin, she had to believe it would be the captain general. And then, before her ears had the chance to so much as droop an inch, they suddenly shot up again as something occurred to her: she might not know what Cencerro's plan was, but she did know at least one of his lies. "If Cencerro is going to tell him that I'm dead, us showing up would be proof that he's lying," Judy said, "Bogo would have to believe us then."
Nick scratched at the side of his muzzle idly. "Unless he was lying about planning on telling that lie," Nick said, "Criminals can lie, you know."
Judy couldn't help but laugh, and Nick cocked his head to the side in apparent puzzlement. "I'm sorry," Judy said, trying to get herself under control, "It's just that— It's just—"
It took her a moment before she could get the words out. "Cencerro said the same thing about you, right here in this office."
Nick suddenly grinned, and it lit up his whole face. His ears, which had been at least partially pressed back the entire time since they had burst out onto the empty streets of Phoenix, stood up again, and his tail made a single sweep. "He said that about me?" Nick asked, and pressed a paw to his chest, his fingers elegantly tented to make it a positively foppish gesture, "I'm going to enjoy holding that over his head. Assuming we get out of this mess."
His expression darkened again, and Judy reached up to give his paw a quick squeeze. "We will," she said firmly.
"Who am I to argue with you?" Nick asked, and there was a smile in his voice as he went back to looking through the files on top of Cencerro's desk.
Judy had a small smile of her own as she returned to the thick ledgers she was looking through, which was good since they were about the most tedious documents she had ever seen. Her parents had insisted on showing all of their kits how the Totchli Barony kept track of its expenses and profits so she was at least somewhat familiar with accounting practices, but she had never been particularly interested in it. If Cencerro had been cooking the books as part of whatever he had been planning, she wasn't sure that she would have been able to spot it unless he had been exceptionally sloppy.
That, unfortunately, did not seem to be the case; every thick ledger was full of almost impossibly precise entries. Still, it was also possible that Cencerro had hidden something in one of the books, and Judy kept up her methodical search. The next ten minutes passed in silence, and Judy was just beginning to think that her idea was only wasting precious time that they could have used for travel when she opened the ledger that had been at the very back of the drawer. Although it had the same bland black cover as all the others, it didn't have a year written on the front. A spark of excitement shot up her spine as she flipped it open and saw that a number of pages had been precisely cut out of the front. The page that had become the first one had a neat grid of letters on it, but unlike the other ledgers it didn't look like a balance sheet. Judy blinked to clear her eyes, not sure at first if she wasn't looking at it right, but the contents of the ledger didn't look like anything. The letters filling the grid formed complete gibberish whether she tried reading it forwards or backwards, up or down, or even diagonally. Judy flipped through the remaining pages and saw that while every page looked to be unique nonsense, the way they were laid out was the same.
Each page only had text on one side, and the grids of seemingly random letters each had the same number of columns and rows. At the top of each page, above the grid, was a single number that Judy supposed were page numbers. She suddenly realized what the book was and called out. "Nick, look at this!"
Judy heaved the book from where she had been paging through it on the floor to the top of Cencerro's desk. Nick raised an eyebrow at the force with which she set the book down, but looked over the first page. "It's in code," he said, after a moment's examination, "Which, unless you happen to have a cipher—"
"No, no, don't you see?" Judy interrupted, gesturing forcefully at the book, "All the pages are like this. It's not in code, it is the code!"
The angle Nick's head was cocked at started to become more extreme, and Judy hastily launched into an explanation. "We learned about this in the academy. Two mammals each have identical books of random letters. You add the letters of the message you want to send to the first page of the book that hasn't been used yet. Then the mammal getting the message subtracts the letters in their book from the letters in the message. See, the pages are numbered so they can say which page to use, and they destroy the pages that have been used. That's why this book is missing a bunch of pages from the beginning."
Judy smiled at Nick triumphantly as she caught her breath; she had barely paused between sentences and found herself needing to take in a large lungful of air. To Nick's credit, he seemed to instantly grasp the point she was making. "Very clever. So maybe we can't find the messages Cencerro was sending or receiving," Nick began slowly, "But someone else is going to have a book identical to this one."
"Exactly!" Judy said, "And that means we'll know who he was conspiring with!"
They both looked at each other for a long moment. "Unless they were more careful than Cencerro and destroyed their book," Nick said, but he carefully closed the book and set it aside.
"It's worth looking into," Judy said, "For all we know, Bogo already has a bunch of suspects under arrest who haven't had the chance to destroy the evidence yet."
"It's possible," Nick agreed, "But I'm not sure we'll find anything else here."
It didn't take very much searching before Judy agreed that Nick was right. After they had both thoroughly searched Cencerro's office without finding anything else worth paying attention to, though, Judy had them make one more stop in the barracks. As she had hoped, everything that they had been carrying had been neatly locked up exactly where she thought it would be. Considering the circumstances he had made it under, the spear Nick had made her in the cell was a decent weapon, but she much preferred to have her spear back and the sword Nick had made her at her waist. If Nick understood the significance of her wearing it with the rest of the uniform she carefully reassembled he didn't comment on it.
Still, he was busy changing out of his rather tattered robes into an outfit he pulled from his bag that looked much the same as the one he had traveled in. It meant he had left her alone in the evidence room while he changed in the corridor outside, and it also meant that he hadn't seen her reaction to coming across the little golden carrot again. Judy had squeezed it in her paw, savoring the heavy solidity of the ornament, before sliding it into her pocket. It seemed as though it had been ages ago that he had given it to her, and everything had changed since then. They might be the only two mammals able to stop whatever Cencerro was planning, and Judy vowed that no matter what else happened she would make sure that Nick was safe.
"Ready to go?" Nick asked, leaning around the doorway to the evidence room with a remarkable casualness.
The evidence room itself was identical to how other barracks were set up; it wasn't much more than a series of variously-sized drawers set into the walls, with the harsh glare of an un-shielded alchemical torch embedded in the ceiling providing light. Even under such unflattering light, which completely banished shadows and made most mammals seem sickly and washed-out, Nick looked...
Judy wasn't sure she could put a finger on it; without the ornamented robes he had been wearing he certainly didn't look like the textbook-standard image of an alchemist, and even if he had been wearing his un-ornamented torc (which he wasn't) it wouldn't have quite made him look like a merchant. He looked like himself, which was a rather weak description but was about the best that Judy could come up with. His red-orange fur positively glowed, and while Judy thought she saw a shadow of worry on his face he had his usual smirk affixed.
"Ready," Judy answered, and they set off for the bridge that led out of Phoenix.
Although Judy would have liked to simply head out of town as quickly as possible, Nick forced her to walk slowly. There was still no sign of anyone on the street outside the barracks, but as they passed the tavern next door Nick pointed out something she hadn't noticed before. The tavern had a number of balconies and patios with tables and chairs on them, and at a number of tables there were plates of half-eaten food. No flies had started to swarm the remains, but the vegetables were starting to look brown and wilted and a half-eaten piece of fish looked somewhat fuzzy. "It's like everyone just got up and left," Nick observed quietly, and Judy nodded.
"Could an alchemist have, you know..." Judy trailed off, vaguely making the shape of an explosion with her paws.
"Transmuted everyone into gas or something?" Nick asked, his voice no louder than before.
Judy nodded again, and Nick shrugged. "I don't think so. It'd be like a mouse trying to carry an elephant, trying to control an alchemical reaction the size of Phoenix," he said, but his words weren't nearly as dismissive as she had hoped they would be.
His tone had been thoughtful, and Judy got the sense it was a question he had asked himself. "I know I couldn't do it, but maybe they teach master alchemists something besides the secret of making a philosopher's stone," Nick said, and he smiled thinly, "Alchemists do love their secrets."
"So I've seen," Judy said, and Nick's smile widened slightly.
"My mystery is all a part of my charm," he said lightly, "Mammals don't like it if they get the sense that alchemists aren't wise and powerful beyond mortal reckoning. Bad for business, you see."
He was still slowly scanning the street, his ears swiveling in all directions as he seemed to be anticipating an ambush, but Judy appreciated the fact that even under the circumstances he was able to make his little jokes. Perhaps it was just his way of dealing with his fear, but it was better than raw panic. "What about that book?" Judy asked, as they turned a corner onto a street that looked little different than the one they had just left, "Was there something in that Golden Codex that could have done this?"
As before, there were no mammals present, but there were the signs of them. An abandoned cart piled high with stacks of newspapers tied together with twine, some of which flapped weakly in the wind where the knots had been poorly done, rested on one side of the street. The door to a bakery rattled on its hinges in the same wind, and when the door gusted open Judy saw a neatly wrapped loaf of bread on the counter with a short stack of coins to its side. It really did look as though everyone in Phoenix had simply disintegrated no matter what Nick said. He had previously as much as admitted that the masters of the Alchemist Guild knew things he did not, though, and Judy wondered if it had been a coincidence that Cencerro had arrested Nick during the attempt to buy the Golden Codex.
"Excellent question, Carrots, but as far as I know, no one knows," Nick said.
Before Judy could ask the obvious question as to how he knew that, Nick continued. "It is a book of alchemy, but it was written hundreds of years ago. Maybe in code, maybe in a lost language, but as far as I know no one alive can read any of the codices."
Judy frowned. "How do you know it's a book of alchemy if no one can read it?" she asked.
"All of the old codices have an ouroboros on their covers and the pages are full of complicated diagrams. But they don't look like modern alchemy tables and no one can read the text so it's anyone's guess what they're trying to say. Maybe they're actually cookbooks," Nick said with a shrug.
"And you thought you could crack the mystery?" Judy asked, and Nick shrugged again.
"What can I say?" he said, "I am an extremely clever fox—if you'll forgive the modesty."
Judy laughed, and Nick clutched at his chest as though she had wounded him. "Most of those old codices just make a treasure hunter a few coins and then go right into the collection of some minor noble who thinks having books he can't read makes him look respectable," Nick said, "But I thought I'd see if I could make anything out of it."
Judy had, in fact, heard of other minor nobles in the Middle Baronies engaging in what her father dismissively called "putting on airs" by assembling collections of artifacts from earlier eras of Zootopia's history. So far as Judy knew, most of those nobles knew very little about their collections; her uncle had once told her the amusing if somewhat implausible story of a near-sighted goat lord who had been tricked into buying what he had been assured was an antique vase but was actually a relatively new chamber pot. The mammal who had swindled that goat had been, or so the story went, a fox, and Judy looked at Nick. "Did you know any of those nobles?" she asked.
She didn't want to think of Nick as a swindler, especially in light of her lapse in judgement when he had been innocently helping that shrew and her bird, but she had the awful feeling that if she ever took Nick home to the Totchli Barony that it was the sort of thing her family might assume about him. Not that there was a reason to bring him to Totchli Barony, of course, although it would be nice to get to show him around and maybe—"There aren't too many nobles who want to do business with a fox," Nick said, interrupting her thoughts.
"I'm a noble," Judy blurted, the words out of her mouth before she could think about them.
"A really minor one, and I'm not going to inherit the barony but—" she continued, unable to stop the flow of words until Nick interrupted.
"You should have mentioned it earlier, Lady Carrots," he said, putting a posh accent on the words, "I'll keep that in mind."
"Please don't call me that," Judy said, and Nick's only response was that his smile widened a degree.
They had passed through more of Phoenix's eerily quiet streets, but before turning the corner Nick suddenly threw out a paw and stopped her. "The bridge is around this corner," he said in a low whisper.
Judy nodded, straining her ears. The wind was blowing the wrong way, from beyond the wall and towards the center of Zootopia, but when the gust stopped Judy froze. "Do you hear that?" she asked, and when Nick shook his head Judy carefully got on all fours.
She cautiously peeked around the corner and almost instantly pulled her head back. "The bridge is gone," she hissed, and Nick's eyes widened in surprise.
"Gone?" he asked, "What do you mean, gone?"
The massive bridge that connected Phoenix to the rest of the Outer Baronies wasn't as elaborate as the Cozamalotl Bridge, but it had seemed especially solid. Where before there had been a sturdy bridge of white stone, it looked as though a giant playing with enormous blocks had destroyed their creation. There was now a massive chasm between either side of the bridge, the borders on either end irregular where blocks must have fallen into the gorge after the bridge was split. "Someone destroyed it," Judy said, which seemed to be the simplest way of getting the point across, "There's an army on the other side."
"An army?" Nick asked, his voice almost too loud, and they both looked around for a second after he spoke to see if there was any indication that he had been heard.
It had been what Judy had heard; the flapping of banners and the creak of armor, and when Nick risked a quick look of his own Judy saw from his expression that she hadn't been imagining it. "That's an army," Nick said, pointing at the corner of the building they were hiding behind.
The disbelief was evident in his voice; Judy hadn't recognized the banners being flown by the mammals, and they were too far away to get a sense of the uniforms that the mammals were wearing. But there had to be thousands of them, mammals of all different sizes standing watch as though they were waiting for an opposing army to come meet them. If Judy was remembering the military history that had been drilled into her at the academy correctly—and she saw no reason to think she wasn't—it had been centuries since an opposing army had marched into Zootopia. "Do you think they're from beyond the Wall?" Judy asked, and Nick's shrug was helplessly expressive.
"I know that banner," Nick replied.
The banners the mammals had been carrying were black with a curious yellow sigil on them; it might have been a crude representation of a lightning bolt, but Judy didn't know it. She knew she had the sigils of all the existing noble houses memorized, and she stared at Nick. "That was Oztoyehuatl's sigil," he said, and the wonder in his voice was obvious.
"Do you know what that means?" Judy asked.
"No. Do you?"
"No."
They both fell silent, Judy turning the idea over and over in her mind. Was it possible that Oztoyehuatl had somehow survived the punishment for his treason all those centuries ago? He couldn't possibly still be alive, of course, but what if he had fled beyond the wall, his descendants amassing an army in preparation for revenge? Or perhaps it was someone simply using Oztoyehuatl's banner for the symbolism; the fox had tried to overthrow the royal family.
"There's no way we're getting past an army," Nick said, "I could fix the bridge well enough for us to cross, but there's no point if there's an army waiting for us."
Judy chewed at her lip. There had to be another way to get out of Phoenix; it had become more important than ever to get a warning to the captain general. "What if we cross at a different point?" Judy asked, but Nick shook his head.
"We'd be seen no matter where we do it," he said.
She thought he was right; the way that Phoenix was nestled in the roughly triangular section formed by the Y-shaped fissure that surrounded it, it was easy for mammals standing at the fork of the fissure to see all of it. Judy couldn't see how far around the fissure the army ranged, but they'd be horribly vulnerable while Nick made a bridge with alchemy and they crossed.
Nick suddenly sighed, and Judy looked up at him. "I know how we can cross," Nick said, but he didn't look particularly happy about it, "I hate the idea, but—"
"But what?" Judy interrupted, "How can we get across without being seen?"
"We're going to go down. We'll go through what's left of Quimichpatlan Barony."
Author's Notes:
Cencerro did tell Judy, in chapter 23, that he planned on telling her parents that she died a hero, and here Judy makes the assumption that he would first tell this lie to Bogo. In chapter 15, Cencerro did warn Judy that criminals can lie and was speaking about Nick.
In this chapter, Judy theorizes that the book she found in Cencerro's desk is a one-time pad, to use the proper cryptology term, and the explanation in the chapter matches up the use of real one-time pads. The idea is simple: two or more parties who wish to send secret messages to each other both have identical pads containing identical sequences of randomly generated numbers. To send a message, you can add the letters of your message to the corresponding letters of the one-time pad (for example, if the first letter of your message is A and the first letter of the one-time pad is C, you would add A+C (1+3) and have D (4) as the letter in the coded message. The recipient then subtracts the one-time pad from the encoded text to get the message.
The advantage of one-time pads is that, if proper security measures are taken to ensure that pages of the one-time pad are not reused, that no one else besides the intended senders and recipients has a copy of the one-time pad, and that the sequence of random letters is truly random, they are impossible to crack. Of course, that's a significant number of caveats that I've listed, but if you can meet the requirements then the message is truly secure. One-time pads were first invented in 1882, but it's one of those methods that could theoretically have been invented at any time. Considering that this is a fairly out-there AU, I didn't think it out of place.
The special significance of Judy wearing the sabre Nick made her is a reference back to chapter 13, when Judy notes that only members of the City Guard at the rank of captain or higher have the privilege of carrying swords as part of their uniform.
When Quimichpatlan Barony was first mentioned, a number of readers mentioned that they wanted to see for themselves what it was like down there, what with the ruins and the horrible monsters. Well, I won't spoil what's actually down there, but you will indeed get your wish!
As always, thanks for reading! If you're so inclined as to comment, I'd love to know what you think.