She wasn't afraid of him, which was interesting. Even bound and helpless on the floor of his carriage, facing down his most emotionless stare, there wasn't so much as an ounce of fear on her face. The rabbit was dirty, dust caked into the fabric of her ruined uniform tunic and her breastplate dinged and scuffed. She was injured, if the bandages that wrapped her entire left arm were any indication. But she wasn't afraid.
"What species was your instructor in the use of quauhxicallis?" Bogo asked abruptly, breaking the silence he had allowed to linger after his deliberately ominous pronouncement that her fate rested with him.
The rabbit blinked up at him, obviously confused. "What species?" Bogo pressed.
The golden torc at her neck certainly looked real enough, the metal and insignia claiming that the rabbit was an ensign in the City Guard.
Saying a thing does not make it true, Lord Bogo. The queen's words came, unbidden, to Bogo's mind and he pushed them aside.
The fact that the rabbit before him looked to be Ensign Totchli didn't necessarily mean that she was. Out beyond the protection of the Middle Wall—the protection that the queen had decided was an acceptable risk to travel beyond—anything could have happened. The torc could be a fake, and the methods that usually worked for verifying that a mammal was part of the City Guard were currently worthless without the magic of the torcs active. Or the real Judy Totchli could have been murdered, her torc taken from her corpse and given to a different rabbit to wear. There were too many possibilities, all of them dire, and so Bogo had chosen one of the simplest methods of determining the rabbit's identity.
It was certainly possible for a different rabbit to stand in for Ensign Totchli, and just as possible for that rabbit to be prepared enough to make the illusion convincing. Given enough time, anyone could remember all the codes and regulations of the City Guard. They might even be prepared enough to describe the academy even if they had never set foot in it, or even to speak of the more memorable instructors. Jose Del Riendo, the hyena whose nervous and awkward chuckling at his own terrible jokes had been imitated by decades of students. Lucia of the Inner Baronies, who used the phrase "you're dead" like punctuation. But they wouldn't be prepared to describe Mateo Rumia.
He was almost completely unremarkable in every way. He wasn't fat or thin, dull or engaging. He was the sort of teacher students didn't like or dislike, a solid mammal who did his job without ever getting close to those he taught. But most importantly for the question Bogo had asked, he was—"A bison," the rabbit said, "Professor Rumia."
The confusion was still written across her face, but a degree of tension Bogo hadn't been aware he was carrying in his back left him. It wasn't enough to say that the rabbit wasn't some kind of threat, but it was enough for him to at least believe that she was who she claimed to be. The fox was a different story, and Bogo glanced from the rabbit—Ensign Totchli—to him.
The fox certainly didn't look like any alchemist Bogo had ever seen before. Leaving aside the fact that he was a predator, his clothes were far too plain. Even allowing for some damage and wear, there wasn't nearly enough embroidery to equal what Bogo had seen even the lowest apprentice alchemists wearing, and his bronze torc was strangely unornamented. Bogo had never run across a merchant of any kind who didn't decorate their torc in some way, whether it was with brightly colored threads and glass beads or intricately worked medallions of precious metal and gemstones, and he didn't trust the simplicity of it. It was the sort of thing a mammal did when they tried too hard to seem casual, a little lie that likely set the tone for whatever it was the fox spent most of his time doing.
Even with Bogo's considerable training and experience in interrogation, he couldn't get anything out of a sleeping mammal, and he paused as he considered his next move. He could wake the fox up—assuming that he wasn't simply pretending to be asleep in hopes of listening in on whatever discussion went on without him. There was, however, a simple way to test that. "Ensign Totchli," he said, turning his attention back to her as abruptly as he could, "Is the fox Nicholas of the Middle Baronies?"
"Yes sir," she said, her answer immediate.
Bogo nodded once. "Nicholas of the Middle Baronies," he said, drawing the words out as slowly as he possibly could, standing up and bringing himself to his full height.
The fox and the rabbit had been separated by a good four or five feet on his floor, and Bogo stepped around his desk until he was standing over the supposed alchemist. Unlike Ensign Totchli, who strained at her bonds to try to position herself better to watch what was going on, the fox was completely limp. Except for the regular rise and fall of his chest he might have been dead, his head lolled at an uncomfortable-looking angle with the tip of his tongue poking beyond his muzzle. Bogo drew his sabre from the sheath at his side, deliberately letting the metal of the blade drag against the buckle that attached it to his belt. He made the whispering sound of metal against metal last as long as possible, watching out of the corner of his eye as Ensign Totchli's expression resolved from confusion into worry. That, too, was interesting. "You've been sentenced to death for treason," Bogo said, and he raised the sword in preparation for swinging it down towards the fox's unprotected neck.
"Stop!" Ensign Totchli cried, and her voice sounded unnaturally thick.
The fox hadn't moved at all, betraying either a truly impressive degree of self-control beyond what any mammal could reasonably be expected to exhibit or the fact that he really was asleep. "Please, don't do it," Totchli said, her voice cracking, "He hasn't committed treason, he—"
"So he is asleep. I do apologize, Ensign Totchli," Bogo interrupted, and he smoothly sheathed his blade in a single motion, "But it's necessary for you to understand the stakes."
Bogo had neither liked nor enjoyed the little bit of theater he had engaged in; threatening a citizen, even a fox, was below the dignity of his office. But he had no time to waste in lengthy explanations, and he thought he had succeeded in several goals at once. Beyond verifying that the fox really was asleep, and impressing upon the ensign just how serious the situation was, he had also learned something he hadn't expected.
She cared about him.
In the way that an upstanding member of the City Guard would care about any civilian, increased by the naturally emotional nature of rabbits, perhaps. But Bogo thought there was something more to it. Certainly mammals who went through experiences that nearly killed them tended to end up as friends. Or perhaps...
Bogo brushed the thought aside. Ensign Totchli trusted the fox, whether or not he turned out to be who he claimed to be. At least in his case, it'd be quite simple to verify his identity; if he couldn't perform alchemy then he was an impostor. Or he had somehow cheated his way through becoming certified to perform alchemy jobs for the city, but that was a problem for later.
"The stakes?" Totchli asked.
There was genuine heat in her words, which seemed only fair. It had been a nasty move he had made, no matter how much circumstances might excuse it, and there was a very real possibility he had given her a reason to distrust him, to be less than forthcoming with information. It was the gamble he had made, but there was no way of taking it back.
"Sir, Lieutenant Colonel Cencerro made everyone in Phoenix disappear. He's planning something and—"
"The stakes," Bogo interrupted, "Are that someone committed treason. Perhaps not you or your companion, but someone. And if you are anything less than honest and forthcoming in your testimony, you'll be helping them get away with it. That's also treason."
She didn't respond, and Bogo let the silence last only a moment. "I want to hear everything. From the beginning. Every detail, no matter how unimportant it might seem."
As it turned out, Ensign Totchli was not particularly good at telling stories.
Perhaps she might have done a better job organizing her thoughts into a written report, but he had put her on the spot, and she stumbled over her words, occasionally diving down tangents and cutting herself off. More than once, he caught her glancing at the sleeping fox, who hadn't given any kind of indication that he was waking up. The details came out slowly, and Bogo let them paint him a picture.
To a certain point, everything Totchli reported aligned with what he knew. She had been sent as an escort as a last minute replacement for the mammal originally assigned to the job of bringing the fox to Phoenix to enter a bid for a public works project. Totchli had jumped ahead a bit at that point, saying that Cencerro had claimed the original mammal assigned to be the escort would have framed the fox for something, and Bogo had made a note of it before urging her to continue.
From there, she had nothing of any particular interest to report on the journey she had made to Phoenix on foot with the fox at her side. They had made excellent time, but at no point had spotted any other mammals on the road. It was more or less what Bogo had expected; it aligned with the convoy schedules, at least. He had half-hoped for some unusual traffic to give another clue, but he hadn't expected things to be so easy.
Once in Phoenix, Totchli claimed to have reported to Lieutenant Colonel Cencerro in his capacity as the head of the Phoenix City Guard. That was strictly by the book protocol and quite unsurprising, as was the fact that Cencerro had divided up his troops to search Phoenix for the mammals Bogo had requested. Totchli didn't have any information to report on the tiger and the wolf who lived in Phoenix and practiced blood magic, which was rather disappointing. The reason for it was quite surprising; she claimed that Cencerro had ordered her to spy on Nicholas of the Middle Baronies rather than join the ongoing effort to find those blood magicians.
If she was telling the truth, Bogo had to wonder why Cencerro would have done that. Had he perhaps been partnered with one or both of those blood magicians, quietly feeding them information so that they could avoid his patrols? If he didn't trust a green ensign with contributing to a simple search, why had he trusted her enough to assign her to determine the fox's true motives for visiting Phoenix?
Ensign Totchli claimed that Cencerro was suspicious of the fox—Nick, she called him, with a familiarity that struck Bogo again—showing up in Phoenix just after an unsuccessful attack on the princess where blood magicians in Phoenix were prime suspects. That Cencerro's thoughts had apparently echoed his own struck Bogo as a peculiar bit of irony; as much as he disliked the sheep he was nothing if not competent.
In Totchli's version of events, she hadn't observed the fox doing anything suspicious; he had never gotten the chance to put in his bid for the water purification project, but had attempted to purchase a book on alchemy only to find the shopkeeper dead. She said Cencerro had shown up shortly thereafter and arrested both her and the alchemist, throwing them in Phoenix's cell meant to prevent alchemists from escaping.
Where her story became difficult to believe was when she got to the point where Cencerro had visited them in that cell, gloating about his victory over them and claiming to have held sway over the mammal originally assigned to escort the fox. "That doesn't sound like the Diego Cencerro I know," Bogo interrupted mildly once she got to that point.
It didn't, but he was more interested in her reaction at the moment than her words. "I know," Totchli said, her ears drooping, "It sounds crazy. And he was so... so cold and stiff before. When I first met him, I mean. But when he came to the cell, he sounded like he was enjoying it."
Bogo nodded slowly. In his experience, when mammals made up stories to cover up crimes, they tended to make one or more of three basic mistakes. They overlooked details that should have been there, as he had tested Totchli on when it came to her time at the academy. More than once over the course of his career, he had watched testimonies fall apart over such trivialities; there had been one time a stoat who had claimed to have witnessed a robbery couldn't even name the street the robbery had been on. A little prodding had quickly unraveled his testimony and revealed that he hadn't been anywhere near the scene of the crime and was trying to frame someone. Sometimes criminals gave too much detail; the unfortunate truth of memory was that no one could remember everything in perfectly vivid detail. The more embellishments a story had, the less likely Bogo was to believe that it was true. The final way could be the most subtle, though: they said what they thought the interrogator wanted to hear.
So far, Totchli's testimony had sounded true enough, if only because of how bizarre it was. He would have expected Cencerro to act the same as he ever was if he was really guilty of what Totchli accused him of. But then again, perhaps she was simply adding too much detail, telling a story that sounded plausible to her.
"Sir?" Totchli said tentatively, interrupting his thoughts.
Bogo realized his attention had wandered away for an instant. "Continue, ensign," he said, waving one hoof.
"He said that he didn't have enough members of the City Guard in Phoenix loyal to him to just kill Nick and me without a court martial," she continued, and Bogo hoped dearly that it was true.
If Cencerro had led a grand conspiracy out of Phoenix, it was comforting to think that he had been limited in the number of co-conspirators he had. "So he said that he'd leave us in the cell and we'd die in a few days anyway."
"You didn't," Bogo observed.
He was, he had to admit, more than a little curious as to how they had escaped a cell designed specifically to contain an alchemist. "No sir," Totchli replied, "But before he left, he said he'd be the captain general. He, ah..."
She paused awkwardly, and swallowed hard before continuing. "He said your mistakes would lose you the position. And that he'd be a hero soon."
Her tone was deeply apologetic, but Bogo was careful to keep his face a neutral mask. Frankly, it was a little grating that Totchli was trying to be careful around his feelings; if hearing someone accuse him of making a mistake was enough to hurt him he never would have risen to his rank. "I see," Bogo said, "Did he say anything else? Anything at all?"
"He said he'd tell my parents I died an honorable death," she said.
Cencerro had claimed that she had died such a death, and Bogo was reasonably confident that she was who she claimed to be. As Bogo saw it, there were really only three possibilities. Either virtually everything Ensign Totchli had said was a lie, or virtually everything Lieutenant Colonel Cencerro had said was. The third option, that the truth was somewhere in the middle with Cencerro either being mistaken or deliberately lying about Totchli's death seemed implausible to say the least. If that was the case, why would Totchli spin such an elaborate lie? It wasn't impossible—for all he knew, Totchli was a conspirator who had deliberately incapacitated the mammal ahead of her to escort the alchemist, and was now coming to him to muddy the truth. But unless she thought she had killed Cencerro or otherwise gotten him out of the way, that made no sense; surely she would have known that Cencerro's testimony wouldn't align with hers.
Bogo managed to snap his attention back to her before Ensign Totchli's impatience won out, which was something of a victory for him; it was getting to be somewhat embarrassing how easily his focus seemed to drift. The part of her story about her escape from the cell was interesting only inasmuch as it revealed how poorly designed the cell was; thankfully the high-security cells in the heart of Zootopia had no such vulnerability.
From there, she explained how they had found a book in Cencerro's office, which she said was in the bag on the floor. Considering that Bogo hadn't yet trusted her enough to break her bonds (if his occasional lapses in focus were embarrassing, being killed by a bunny would have been even more so), he cautiously opened the bag. If it explodes, this all becomes someone else's problem, he thought darkly, but nothing happened.
The contents of the bag seemed to be mostly assorted alchemy supplies, but he found the book easily enough. It was a small ledger with a bland black cover, but as he pulled it out a frown involuntarily crossed his face. He had the vague notion he had seen a book exactly like it before, and that quite recently, but he couldn't remember where. Then again, it was rather unremarkable; there were likely hundreds if not thousands of books that looked identical to it from the outside. As for the contents of the book, Bogo thought them much more likely to be relatively unique; he saw instantly that it was certainly a code book for encrypting and decrypting messages. "So Cencerro must have been in contact with someone else, probably outside Phoenix," Ensign Totchli explained needlessly but eagerly, "I couldn't tell if the last message was one he received or one he sent, but the timing must have been important, right?"
Bogo nodded, and then carefully closed the ledger and set it aside. If he could find the mammal or mammals who had the matching partner of the ledger, it'd be proof of their guilt. Or at least, that someone had tried framing them, but it would be a tremendous start. He made a note to himself to have the belongings of the members of the queen's council searched; there was no telling if he might have a stroke of luck. "Continue, please," he said, rather than explaining himself to the ensign, "I want to hear your impression of Phoenix as you left."
Considering that he had his newest member of the City Guard flying reconnaissance, he was quite interested in whether Totchli's testimony would align with the little rodent's once he returned. "It was like everyone had just up and left, sir," the bunny explained, "There was no one in Phoenix, just abandoned meals and tables and chairs."
"And I know how this must sound," Totchli added hastily, "But maybe the army around Phoenix is made up of the citizens of Phoenix. Something that controls their minds. If that's possible, that is."
That seemed to Bogo a rather fanciful flight of imagination, but Totchli was young, inexperienced, and a rabbit. He could certainly forgive wild speculation so long as she reported the facts accurately. "I see," Bogo replied as neutrally as possible, "We are considering all the possibilities, ensign."
She nodded eagerly; apparently Bogo had successfully kept his feelings off his face. Totchli's subsequent description of the mammals surrounding Phoenix told him nothing he didn't already know, and she hurried through her explanation of escaping through the ruins. She hadn't seen any sign of the invading army entering through those ruins, which didn't necessarily mean that they hadn't, but it was another point of data. Her explanation of her injured arm was of no interest to Bogo; he was well aware of the danger that the monsters under Phoenix posed. He had pressed her along before she could go into any kind of detail, and it didn't take her long to reach the point where his scouts had found her and the fox in the wastelands, tired and hungry.
"Thank you, Ensign Totchli," Bogo said, once he was sure she was done, "Your testimony will be invaluable. I'll want to talk to the fox once he wakes, of course."
If Totchli was telling the truth, as he was starting to suspect she was, he was not surprised that the fox was unconscious; he knew even master alchemists could be exhausted by complex bits of alchemy, and breaking out of a cell and then making a bridge sounded as though they would fit the bill. Adding to that several days of little food or water, and it was somewhat surprising he was still alive.
But whether or not the fox lived was not his primary concern at the moment; Bogo ran one thick finger down his meticulous notes, and realized he hadn't asked about something he had meant to. Cursing his attention's tendency to drift, Bogo looked up over his desk at where Ensign Totchli was still on the floor.
She hadn't complained about the restraints at all, which put her a step above most criminals Bogo had arrested, and while she looked tired there was an eager-to-please brightness in her eyes that hadn't dimmed. "Just one more thing, Ensign Totchli, and then we can look into finding you some more suitable arrangements. There was a messenger bird that made it out of Phoenix shortly before communication stopped," Bogo said, eying Totchli carefully, "There was a female shrew riding it, who might have used the name 'Fermina.' Did you see her, or see Nicholas speaking with her?"
Author's Notes:
Bogo remembers something that the queen said in chapter 28 when relating a story from her own youth; "Saying a thing does not make it true, Lord Bogo."
Del Riendo's name is derived from the Spanish word for "laughing," which seemed appropriate for a hyena.
The instructor who peppers her speech with the phrase "you're dead," is naturally a reference to Judy's drill instructor from the movie, who seems to see the possibility for fatal consequences in everything.
In real life, swords generally don't make an impressive noise when you draw them from a sheath; that's a bit of Hollywood dramatic flair. You don't want your blade being dulled by scraping it against something metal, so sheaths are either made out of or lined with something relatively soft, letting you draw in near-silence. In this instance, Bogo wanted a dramatic sound, hence him deliberately letting his sword rub against a metal buckle as he draws it.
Bogo notes that the ledger Nick and Judy found is small, whereas Judy did not; he is quite a bit larger than her, so it's really all a matter of perspective.
As always, thanks for reading! If you're so inclined as to leave a comment, I'd love to know what you thought!