After fifteen minutes of Nick guiding them, creeping slowly through the abandoned streets, Judy wasn't impressed by the guildhall they stopped at. The building was particularly shabby, the white stones that made it up covered with lichen and other unidentifiable stains. A battered wooden sign, hanging crookedly from iron rings weeping runnels of rust, proclaimed "ADVENTURER'S GUILD" above the message "APPRENTICES WANTED." The letters looked like they had been carved by a kit, they were so uneven and lopsided, and didn't exactly inspire confidence.

If the guild had been perpetually accepting new apprentices, as the weathered nature of the sign implied, it didn't say much for their competence. Then again, perhaps they were the best that Phoenix had to offer and whatever lurked in the ruins beneath the settlement was really just that dangerous. "Don't let the name fool you," Nick said.

Despite being a fair distance away from the fissure outside Phoenix—and the army beyond it—he still spoke quietly. "They don't so much as 'adventure' as they 'loot,'" he said, the ghost of a smile touching his features, "I guess they thought it sounded better this way, though."

Judy nodded and carefully pushed the door open. Inside the guildhall, there was the same eerie feeling that the mammals inside had simply up and left. Contrasting to the somewhat grandiose name of the guild, but matching the exterior quite well, the interior was surprisingly mundane; it looked like a more ill-kept version of the City Guard barracks. The first floor seemed to be about half one large room with a pitted and scuffed wooden floor that creaked and groaned no matter how carefully they stepped. There was a small reception desk with a massive set of filing cabinets behind it, messily crammed with papers that made the drawers droop slightly from the weight. A large number of desks were scattered across the room with only the vaguest semblance to a pattern, most of them covered with sloppy stacks of paper and odd artifacts. Some of the desks had half-eaten plates of food or cast-off personal items; one had a half-oiled dagger resting atop a whetstone and another a single thick-soled boot beside it.

Nick slowly shut the front door behind them and started in the direction of the wall that separated the guild's desks from whatever took up the rest of the floor. On the way he had explained—quietly—that the best way to access the ruins under Phoenix would be through one of the many guilds dedicated to recovering useful artifacts. Judy was sure that it would have been easy enough for Nick to simply make them an opening, but she could appreciate the logic in using an existing access point that would open into tunnels and not simply drop them into one of the cavernous open parts of Quimichpatlan Barony she had seen in cross-section.

Nick paused by the door, waiting for her to join him, before he spoke again. "It occurred to me," he said softly, "That maybe that army outside got here through the same tunnels we're going to use."

"Oh," Judy said.

She froze in place, her paw reaching out for the doorknob. An image flashed through her head of twenty or so armed mammals, pouring up from the tunnels below, waiting for them on the other side of the door. "That would be bad," she said at last.

Nick sighed. "You're going to open that door, aren't you?" he asked.

"Yes."

Nick held his breath as she pulled the door open, but there were no mammals, armed or otherwise, in the next room. Judy stepped in, and after a moment Nick followed cautiously.

It was filthier than the other room, dirt seemingly ground into the floor and splattered up the walls, and was dominated by an enormous set of shelves filled with artifacts of all sorts. Somewhat incongruously, every shelf was neatly labeled with a small tag that identified what it was, covering everything from "Plates, silver" to "Candelabra, gold" to "Unknown." There were more shelves labeled "Unknown" than Judy really felt comfortable with; it seemed to her that centuries-old junk should at least be identifiable. But she had no idea what some of the items on display were; some looked almost like alchemical torches, the central stone cracked and chipped and surrounded by an elaborate mesh of bent and corroded wire. Others looked like clocks designed by an insane mammal, with a dizzying number of gears and springs set in battered cases all engraved with odd symbols. One shelf contained a few brittle-looking fragments of something that looked disturbingly like an alpaca's pelt somehow embedded in a clear crystal. There were squiggly strokes that looked like writing on the raw side of the pelt, but it wasn't any language Judy had so much as seen before, and the label on the shelf read "Unknown — Possibly Blood Magic."

"This is the sort of stuff they recover from the ruins?" Judy asked, wrenching her attention away from the bizarre collection of artifacts to look at Nick.

For his part, Nick didn't appear to have any particular interest in what was on display; he was rummaging through a set of lockers that Judy hadn't noticed set against one wall. "Hmm?" he said, emerging from one locker with a particularly odd-looking torch, "Yes, there are all kinds of things down there. That's why we want these."

He brandished the torch toward her triumphantly, but Judy simply stared at it. Most alchemical torches designed to be held followed the same general structure, just at different sizes and in sometimes slightly different shapes to make it easier for one species or another to hold them. But unlike the typical design of an elongated cylinder with an opening at one end that could be covered to hide the light the glowing stone produced, what Nick held was a blocky cube that dangled from a wire handle. It did have what looked like a standard alchemical torch opening, but set next to it was something that reminded Judy of parties—a metal shade around a glass-walled partition surrounding a wick.

Alchemical lights were so cheap that Judy had only ever seen candles on the rare occasions when her parents had tried putting on a "proper" party, and she couldn't imagine why anyone would want to include a dimmer light that needed to burn fuel as part of a lamp meant for exploring dark ruins. Nick must have noticed her puzzled expression, because he chuckled to himself. "It's a safety measure," he said, tapping one claw against the shade surrounding the fuel-burning lamp, "If this light goes out, it means the air's no good to breathe or it might explode on us."

Then he tapped the alchemical torch portion of the lamp. "And if this light goes out, it means something down there is blocking alchemy from working."

"There are things that can do that?" Judy blurted, the words out of her mouth before she could think about them.

Nick raised an eyebrow at her. "Assuming you aren't forgetting the jail cell we just escaped from, yes. There are things down there that can stop alchemy."

"How? The same as the cell?"

"If the anti-alchemy array was on the shell of a giant turtle, yes."

Judy blinked at Nick, but he looked rather more serious than he usually did. "A giant turtle?" she repeated, turning it into a question.

"A turtle the size of a city block," Nick said, "Or something turtle-y, anyway."

Judy could barely imagine anything living being so enormous, but she couldn't see any sign whatsoever that Nick was joking. "Maybe the blood magicians made them to fight the alchemists," he continued after a brief pause, "There isn't exactly anyone left to ask about it, but they're probably not natural unless you think the gods have a cruel sense of humor."

"I see," Judy said after a moment; there was nothing else she could think of worth saying.

"They're called Nopalayotl, if you were wondering," Nick said.

"Because that'll help if one attacks us?" she asked.

Nick actually laughed at her little joke, but to Judy's ears it sounded a little strained. "How do you manage that, Carrots?" he asked, shaking his head, "Why doesn't anything scare you?"

"You think I'm not scared of anything?"

"You're the bravest mammal I've ever met," he said.

Judy felt her ears flushing at the compliment; it was perhaps one of the nicest things anyone had ever told her. Nick coughed, turning aside. "Or maybe the dumbest," Nick continued, "Our best bet is to get through Quimichpatlan as quickly as possible. If we run into anything, we just keep running."

"Nick," Judy said, and she reached out to grab his paw, "Thank you."

Nick turned back to look at her, cocking his head to the side and then looking down at his paw, but he didn't pull away from her grasp. He was warm to the touch, the roughness of his paw pads and the size of his fingers making him unlike any bunny. "I haven't exactly done much, you know," he said, "Wait until we're out of this mess."

"I never would have gotten out of that cell without you," Judy said, "And I don't think I can get through the ruins alone. I need you."

Perhaps it was just a trick of the light, but Judy would have sworn that she saw the insides of Nick's ears flush before they fell bashfully back. "You know how to make a fox feel wanted," he said at last, pulling his paw free from her grasp and tugging at his coat, "But that was a pretty terrible prison. Rogelio only made the bars out of diamond because real anti-alchemy cells have walls made out of diamond. Just be glad my proposal didn't win or we'd still be in there."

"Really?"

Nick coughed. "Well, maybe. Maybe not. Who can say?" he said, shrugging his shoulders carelessly, "Now come on, we've got everything we'll need and I'd rather just get this over with."

Despite his words, Judy thought she could see a tremble in his body as they walked towards another door on the far side of the room. Judy knew that whatever method led down to the ruins—whether it was a lift or stairs or a ladder—they would find it behind the door. Judy didn't even hesitate to open it, and she saw Nick cringe a bit away as she did. "Don't worry," she said, "No matter what, I promise you're making it back out."

Nick looked from her to the center of the room. There wasn't much to it; it was as dirty as the storeroom they had crossed through to get it, and all that was in it—besides clods of dirt that glittered in the harsh light of a single alchemical torch—was a wide and well-worn set of stairs made out of marble. It looked as though it had actually been a part of some building that had gone from the depths of Quimichpatlan Barony to the surface, although what it had been Judy couldn't guess at. Despite the lines of alchemical torches that had been somewhat haphazardly fashioned to the beautifully carved banisters, Judy couldn't see how far down the stairs went. "Well if you promise, what do I have to worry about?" Nick asked, but Judy didn't think she heard any sarcasm in his voice.

She started down the stairs, and Nick followed.

As it turned out, the staircase was quite a bit longer than Judy would have even guessed at. To her eyes, it looked like the members of the Adventurer's Guild had carved out the ground around the staircase where it had collapsed in centuries ago; in some spots large rocks protruded onto the stairs themselves, shattering the ornate banister on one side or the other. It certainly helped explain why the guildhall had been so dirty, considering the volume of earth that they must have removed, but it also meant that for a descent into a mysterious and ruined barony it was surprisingly boring.

All she could see, in the light of the alchemical torches set in the stairs and in the light of the one that Nick carried, was rough dirt walls and worn stairs. Compared to the cross-section of the barony she had seen upon approaching Phoenix, it certainly didn't give her the same sense of wonder. "It doesn't look like an army passed this way," Judy said after perhaps ten minutes of silent descent.

"I guess not," Nick said.

They were quiet a moment longer, the only sounds the muffled fall of their feet and a far-off moaning that Judy sincerely hoped was simply the wind blowing through the ruins, before Judy said, "What do you think it means, that the army had the Betrayer's banner?"

"The Betrayer?" Nick said, "More like the Patsy."

Judy didn't think she could ever remember anyone coming to Oztoyehuatl's defense; she had always been taught that the fox had been a wicked usurper. Then again, most of those lessons had also implied that Oztoyehuatl had been wicked because he was a fox, which didn't seem fair to Nick. "You don't think he betrayed Duke Ocelotl?" she asked, turning to look at him.

"Oh, no, he probably definitely did that," Nick said, "But did you ever wonder why he did it?"

Judy knew the story as well as any kit did. After Emperor Ocelotl had abdicated the throne and allowed King Oveja I to rise to power, he had been named a duke and worked tirelessly to build connections between the new regime and the old society. He had become a symbol of Zootopia's synthesis, and remained much beloved by his former subjects. Oztoyehuatl, one of the Emperor's old blood magicians, had hated how much the city had changed—especially, it was said, the ban on mammal sacrifice in performing blood magic—that he had conspired to murder King Oveja I and re-install Ocelotl on the throne to return to the old ways. Duke Ocelotl, who had been totally ignorant of the plot, immediately turned the treacherous fox in once he learned of what was planned, preventing what would have likely been years or decades of civil war and further enshrining himself as a powerful beacon of Zootopia's future.

"He wanted things back the way they were," Judy said.

"Things never go back to the way they were," Nick said, and Judy saw a shadow of something she had never seen on his face before.

What it was, she couldn't quite name, and he continued before she could think on it further. "What I mean is, if he wanted blood magicians and predators like himself to have unlimited power again, why bother trying to reinstate Ocelotl? Why not just kill the king and declare himself Emperor?"

Judy's feet stumbled a step. It wasn't a question she had ever heard asked, let alone discussed. "Because... Ocelotl was a symbol," she managed at last, "Oztoyehuatl needed him."

"Maybe," Nick allowed, "But if his entire plan hinged on Ocelotl taking the throne again, shouldn't he have done a better job making sure Ocelotl would agree to it before committing treason?"

Judy didn't have an answer to that. "Maybe Oztoyehuatl was just evil and short-sighted and blind to what the subjects of Zootopia really wanted," Nick said, and the pattern of the words caught her; one of her textbooks had described that long-dead blood magician fox in nearly the same words, and Nick had clearly read the same book.

"Or maybe Ocelotl really did want to be Emperor again and sold Oztoyehuatl out to save his own neck. Maybe mammals would have rioted in the streets if King Oveja had Ocelotl executed for treason. Maybe it would have just kicked off a war even larger than the one they just fought. Against that, what's the life of one fox who may or may not have been guilty of treason anyway?"

"If Oztoyehuatl wasn't guilty," Judy said, and it felt incredibly bizarre to be saying those words; it was like she was entertaining the notion that water was dry or the sun was cold, "He shouldn't have been punished. And if Duke Ocelotl was part of the plan, he should have been."

"Even if it led to war?"

Judy wanted to say yes. Her moral compass wanted to say that punishing the innocent or letting the guilty go free in the name of stability was a terrible crime in and of itself. Laws had to exist for a reason, and if anyone was above them they meant nothing. And yet her mind came back to what Nick had just said. What's the life of one fox?

Against the thousands who would have died in a bloody and terrible civil war, what was one life? "Even if it led to war," Judy repeated.

Every instinct said it was the right answer at the same time they said it was the wrong one. Nick looked surprised at her answer, and he grinned. "The rich and powerful better be afraid of you, Ensign Carrots," he said, "You keep answering like that, and you'll never make it to lieutenant."

Judy wondered how much truth there was to his words. Had Captain General Bogo made it to his rank through political manipulation, letting criminals walk free because of their connections or what it would mean for the city's stability if they were arrested? She wanted to believe that he was an honorable mammal who would have answered Nick's question with far more ease than she had. She could imagine him saying, in that gruff voice she recalled from the commencement address he had given, "Crime is crime. If we ignore criminals we are criminals."

But then she could also imagine him saying, with a sort of bemused weariness, "The City Guard exists to ensure the stability of Zootopia. Nothing more and nothing less."

Dwelling on it wouldn't help any, though, and Judy forced the thoughts aside. Perhaps, once they had gotten past the ring of soldiers around Phoenix, she'd have the chance to speak directly to Captain General Bogo and hear for herself how he thought. In the meantime, though, she tried to think of what the army meant. "So maybe that army is using Oztoyehuatl's sigil because he's a symbol," she said, returning to a thought that had occurred to her the first time she saw the banners.

"Maybe," Nick said, nodding agreeably, "I'm pretty sure he's long dead. Makes it a little hard to lead an army, or so I hear."

They kept walking down the staircase, which turned ninety degrees every thirty feet, and at last Judy saw something that broke up the monotony. There, thirty feet in front of them, was where the staircase ended. Dirt had been crudely moved away from a crumbling and irregular opening, supported by a surprisingly sturdy-looking array of thick wooden beams. Then again, Judy supposed that if there was one thing you didn't want to happen when your job depended on looting ruins it was having the ground collapse on you.

A dim light was coming from beyond that gateway, and Judy pressed onward. What she saw took her breath away.

Even the glimpse of the ruins she had caught from outside Phoenix hadn't prepared her for what she stood amidst; those ruins had been broken apart and exposed to weather, not to mention obviously already looted. The chamber she stood in was so massive that she couldn't see where it ended, the pools of light coming from the alchemical torches simply not reaching far enough. The ceiling might have been forty feet above her head, where the light fell just short of, or it might have been eighty or more. What she could see, though, was absolutely incredible. They were standing in what looked like a city street, except stretched out to at least four levels in height; there might have been even more levels further down where the light didn't reach. Massive ramps and walkways bridged the gaps between buildings that might have almost looked at place above ground. By and large, they weren't in ruins, either.

Elaborate mosaics of volcanic glass, silver, amber, and gold covered the walls forming crazed abstract patterns that bulged in and out into complicated three-dimensional shapes that seemed to change entirely depending on the angle Judy viewed them at. The light glittered off brightly painted storefronts, and while most of the grubby windows were empty it was obvious that it was because they had already been looted. Behind other windows, Judy could see the tattered remnants of cloth of gold and strange tools, all illuminated by the weak greenish glow of ancient alchemical torches. Here and there, scattered across the ground, were skeletons of mammals who had died centuries before her great-great-grandparents had been born, some of them half-buried in drifts of dirt. Others had obviously been excavated, and Judy felt a moment of disgust as she realized why; the members of the Adventurer's Guild had looted the jewelry off the skeletons. Some of the skeletons, though, were even stranger than Judy could have guessed at. She saw a bat skeleton that looked as though it had been partially transmuted into some kind of crystal, irregular hexagonal prisms suddenly giving way to bone. In another spot, what looked like the skeleton of a giant cat—a tiger or a lion, maybe—seemed to have been merged with the bones of a bear, as though two soft bits of clay had been mashed together.

In other places, there were more obvious signs of transmutation. She saw one storefront, and the ground surrounding part of it, was made out of gold in what looked like the cross-section of a perfect sphere. The transition from gold shaped exactly like the rest of the wall to stone was so perfectly precise that it didn't seem possible alchemy hadn't been involved; so too was that the case of a different store front that had a pentagonal section simply missing. The borders of that pentagon, even centuries later, were perfectly precise, and where they cut through the contents of the store—which looked to be elaborately painted clay pots—that perfection was maintained.

Judy couldn't help but gawk, every direction she turned her head revealing a new wonder or horror. Nick, though, was simply looking at the ground. "No sign of monsters," he said, gesturing at the paw- and hoof-prints in the soft dirt, "It might not be deep enough for them."

His voice echoed weirdly in the wide open space of the buried barony, the sounds becoming clipped and distorted as they faded. Judy forced herself to examine the ground as well, and from what she could see Nick was right. The only prints she saw were for recognizable mammals; she didn't know what a monster's feet looked like—or even if they had feet—but she didn't see anything that looked out of place. Besides footprints, all she saw were ruts that looked like the tracks of a cart, which she supposed might be useful depending on what the guild was pulling out of the ruins. "Which way?" Judy asked, looking around.

She had lost her orientation sometime on their descent down the stairs, but Nick simply pointed off. "That's north-east," he said, with absolute confidence, "We want to go south."

He spun to face the right direction, and Judy simply stared at him. "How did you do that?" she asked, "You don't have a compass."

Nick had impressed her above ground with his sense of direction through Phoenix, but she had assumed that he simply had the settlement's layout memorized after years of visiting. She didn't see how he could have possibly repeated the feat underground; until that moment it hadn't occurred to her how they would make sure they didn't get lost with no landmarks. "I don't need one," he said, shrugging.

"Is that an alchemist trick?"

"A fox one, actually," he said, smiling slightly, "But you can think it's magic, if you'd like."

"Do you know how far we have to go?" Judy asked.

Nick shrugged. "We'll know when we get to the fissure," he said, "Once we get past it, we can go up more or less wherever we want."

It made sense to her, and she started off in the direction Nick had indicated. They walked in silence, the only sound their footsteps and that far off moaning of wind. "Nick?" Judy said suddenly.

"Yes, Carrots?" he replied.

"I think you're braver than you give yourself credit for."

He was silent a moment. "Thanks," he said, and she felt his tail brush past her leg.

Author's Notes:

The design of a typical hand-held alchemical torch is, of course, inspired directly by a typical flashlight. There have been a few references in earlier chapters that alchemical torches are essentially always on, and thus if you don't want them to glow you need to cover them.

The lamp that Nick "borrows" from the guild is inspired by safety lamps, which were first created for coal miners in the 19th century. In the days before electric lighting, the means of providing miners with light was a serious problem. Open flames, like candles, could cause combustible gases that built up in mines to cause explosions, or even just cause fine particulate to combust. Safety lamps were cleverly designed to not only not cause explosions, but also to indicate the air quality. Some were designed such that they would go out if there was too high a concentration of explosive gas or too low a concentration of oxygen, either being situations where the miner would want to get out.

"Nopalayotl" would literally mean "cactus turtle" in the Nahuatl language. What that implies is left to your imagination.

This chapter finally gives a more or less full description of what Oztoyehuatl the Betrayer is considered to be guilty of. As established way back at the beginning of this story, the ruling emperor was deposed and became a duke under the new regime; this fills in some more details as to how the official version of that story goes.

Red foxes in real life do indeed have what appears to be some kind of sense of where magnetic north-east is; although nothing has been proven definitively, it certainly appears as though they have the ability to sense magnetic fields. I figure that's a useful trick that Nick has up his sleeve when it comes to finding his way around, and it'd be one that he'd find largely unremarkable himself. It'd be like someone with normal color vision distinguishing between green and red; if you have the sense it's simply obvious to you.

As always, thanks for reading! If you're so inclined as to comment, I'd love to know what you thought.