Bogo had raised a daughter of his own, and although he would never admit it to the queen he oftentimes saw the princess in the same way. Not that he would have ever claimed to be a father figure to her, but he supposed that whether a child's parents were a teacher and a guardsmammal or a queen and a prince consort that the challenges of parenthood were not unique. Everyone, from commoners to royalty, would see their children learn to walk. Learn to talk. Watch them grow taller and stronger and wiser.
And, of course, watch them make abysmally foolish decisions.
Bogo wasn't quite sure what had possessed the princess to run off into the ruins under Phoenix—she was not stupid by any means—but his worry felt as sharp as the time a messenger had burst into the guard post to let him know his daughter had jumped out of a window with a blanket, thinking it would let her fly. She had only been five at the time, which Bogo supposed was young enough to come up with the idea but not old enough to realize how bad it was. Although it had resulted in nothing worse than a broken arm, Maria had been beside herself with worry, blaming herself for not watching their daughter closely enough.
Bogo, though, had never blamed his wife for so much as a moment. He had told Maria, as they watched their daughter sleep after her trip to the doctor, that jumping out of a window hadn't been her idea. Maria had sighed as she folded herself against his side, reaching out and grabbing his hoof. "I've never had a student get so badly injured on my watch," she had said, "Never. But my own daughter..."
"Will keep making decisions of her own," Bogo had said, and he could still remember how Maria had felt against him as she nodded.
"The gods help us when she starts being interested in bulls," Maria had said, chuckling, and Bogo had known then that his wife would stop blaming herself for the accident.
Not entirely, or even all at once. But eventually, he knew, she would. And for her sake, he had made one of the jokes most of the mammals who knew him professionally wouldn't have guessed him capable of. "I'll arrest them," he had said in his best deadpan, and Maria had laughed, gently pushing his arm.
As Bogo walked through the ruined tunnels, the queen at his side and half a dozen of his best and most trustworthy trackers arrayed around them, he considered telling her the story before deciding against it. Telling someone not to blame themselves when their child was lost and likely in great peril was unlikely to be particularly helpful, and he didn't want to make the queen worry about anything else. The last thing she'd need would be to think his mind was slipping to the point he'd try telling her a story rather than focus on the task of finding Princess Isabel.
Still, the queen was doing an admirable job of hiding her worry; if he hadn't known her so well Bogo might have thought that she was simply intensely focused. But he could tell, from all the little cues that other mammals would miss, that she was only barely restraining herself from rushing off down the tunnels by herself, screaming herself hoarse as she called for her daughter.
But as horribly as it must have tormented her, she had deferred to Bogo's expertise in the search for Princess Isabel in every way except one. Namely, that the queen herself was accompanying him and his search party. As a father, he couldn't blame her. But as the leader of the City Guard...
Bogo blinked and almost stumbled as an odd realization hit him. He should have protested the queen accompanying him. She was putting herself in grave danger, considering everything that lurked below the surface of Phoenix, and he should have said something. He would have ultimately deferred to her decision since he wasn't the sort of mammal to try executing a coup, but he should have protested.
And yet, unless his memory was failing him in new ways, he had not.
An icy twinge of unease started stirring in Bogo's gut, and although he tried to keep himself alert to the subtle clues that his guards were following that would hopefully lead them to the princess alive and well he couldn't. He had started becoming uncomfortably familiar with the realization that his attention wandered more freely than it ever had in the past, but all that had ever robbed him of was the knowledge of what someone had said to him. Completely forgetting what he himself had said was unsettling in a way he couldn't put into words.
Or, Bogo supposed, he could put it into words if he was honest with himself. It was frightening. Either he had completely forgotten a conversation in which he had tried convincing the queen to stay behind under guard or there never had been such a conversation in the first place. Neither option was good; either his mind was falling apart even faster than he could have guessed or he was becoming dangerously incompetent.
Bogo tried to ignore the snuffling of the wolves leading the tracking effort—with quauhxicallis boosting their already sensitive noses they were peerless trackers—and cast his mind back to the conversation that had led him deep underground. The beginning of it was easy to remember; he had been meeting with Cerdo and the queen about... something. Cerdo had been prattling on about something, Bogo recalled vaguely; the precise details escaped him but they didn't seem important. They had been interrupted by a messenger reporting that the princess was gone and all the evidence pointed to her having fled into the ruins under Phoenix.
And then?
A scowl crossed Bogo's face as the memory came to him. The queen had ordered a search party assembled at once, to be led by him, and said she would go along. He could remember it happening, but it felt wrong somehow. He knew the queen very well after his years of service, and she wasn't one to blandly make declarations. She should have made some kind of comment about putting him in charge of the search party, whether it was to tell him that she trusted him alone to lead it or something similar. But Bogo couldn't remember anything along those lines. It all just struck him as particularly flat, in a way that was difficult to grasp. There was absolutely nothing wrong with his recollection, and yet there was.
But any further thoughts on the topic fled Bogo's mind when the lead guard came to a sudden halt and threw out one arm in a wordless warning to proceed no further. The remaining guards rearranged themselves into a tighter circle around him and the queen while the wolf slowly advanced, playing his alchemical torch here and there. For a while, Bogo wasn't sure why they had stopped, but he trusted that there was a reason for not talking.
The queen shot Bogo a questioning glance and he nodded reassuringly before looking back ahead to try spotting whatever had alerted the guard, but he couldn't make out anything out of the ordinary. The glow of the wolf's alchemical torch vanished into the darkness hundreds of feet ahead of them, swallowed by distance, and the minutes crawled slowly along until the light reappeared and the guard came jogging briskly back.
"There's a body ahead, sir," the wolf reported in a low voice, "Looks like the fox got attacked by an Ehecatl."
Bogo saw the queen's hooves reflexively clench themselves into tight fists, and he asked the obvious question. "And the princess?"
In the harsh glow of Bogo's own alchemical torch, the wolf's features took on an almost theatrical cast, his shaggy and dully gray fur making him look almost like a part of the wall given life. "She definitely went past, sir," the wolf reported crisply.
Bogo turned to the queen, whose relief was still mixed with worry. "You ought to go back, your majesty," he said, as gently but firmly as he could, "If there are Ehecatls—"
"If there are monsters, then you will protect me," she interrupted sharply.
The color seemed to have drained from the insides of her ears, and there was a firmness to how her jaw was set that made Bogo think she was forcing herself not to tremble. He couldn't help but admire and despair at her courage, the thought occurring to him that once again that as a parent he couldn't blame her resolve. "Your majesty—" he began again, and once more she interrupted him.
"It's not up for debate, Lord Bogo," she said.
They continued on through the tunnels, their most recent conversation only strengthening Bogo's conviction that there was something very odd about the one that had led them down through the tunnels. He wrestled with it even as he eventually saw what the wolf must have smelled.
There was drying blood coating the walls and floors of the tunnel.
It looked to have been a terrible and vicious fight; Bogo knew enough about Ehecatls to know that the results were never pretty. They eventually passed the corpse of the traitorous fox, and Bogo barely spared it a passing glance until one of the wolves spoke. "There's something strange about this, sir," she said.
"Can you tell what happened here?" Bogo asked.
The wolves exchanged glances, seeming to wordlessly communicate between themselves before the one who had been in the lead answered. "No sir," he said, "The fox seems to have been killed by an Ehecatl, but there isn't the fresh smell of one around here. The princess and Commandant Totchli both went that way."
The wolf paused briefly to indicate the direction, and then continued, "But the fox's scent continues in that direction too."
Bogo looked around, frowning. "He did bleed a lot," the queen observed, and despite the circumstances Bogo found it a peculiarly funny thing to hear her say.
"Yes, your majesty," the wolf replied respectfully.
"Is it possible that's why the scent goes on?" she asked.
The wolves exchanged another one of those wordless glances. "It's... unlikely, your majesty."
Bogo walked over to the corpse and looked at it more closely. It was, indisputably, the body of a fox. It seemed to have been badly mangled, but from the nauseating smell of blood coming off it it was—
Bogo's frown deepened. Ehecatls had a dangerous venom, he knew, one that caused blood to thicken into something like tar around the bite wound. Commandant Totchli herself had nearly died to such a wound, after all, and his memory wasn't so poor that he had forgotten that. It wasn't impossible for an Ehecatl to have ripped the fox apart without injecting him with that deadly venom, but if that had been the case, why was there a body at all? Ehecatls ate their victims, after all. And, as disgusting as the idea of eating meat was, there was an awful lot of it left on the fox's bones.
Bogo tried imagining what might have happened, the image flowing vividly through his head. The fox, desperately fleeing, with Commandant Totchli hot on his heels and the princess not far behind. When he ran across a monster, the fox died to it, and then it retreated when the rabbit caught up. It made a certain kind of sense; he could believe that a monster would leave its food behind rather than risk getting killed. But if that was the case, why had Totchli and the princess continued on deeper into the tunnels under Phoenix?
No matter how he pushed the possibilities around in his mind, none of them made any kind of sense. He wondered if the corpse could be some kind of fake, but even with his limited knowledge of alchemy he knew that it'd take an absolute master to make something so convincing, and the fox was at best half-competent as an alchemist. If the augmented noses of his best trackers said the corpse was real, he was inclined to believe it was, and that made other possibilities—such as that it belonged to some other fox with spectacularly poor luck—seem implausible.
"This doesn't make sense," Bogo said slowly, thinking aloud before he even realized he was doing it.
None of the wolves seemed surprised at his pronouncement, and even the queen seemed puzzled at what they had just come across. "It doesn't, Lord Bogo," she said, "But if my daughter's scent is still traceable, we must keep going."
Bogo didn't have a counter-argument for that; every minute they stood waiting around trying to figure things out was another minute in which something awful could happen to the princess. "Lead on," he ordered the wolves.
Still, he would have felt better with more mammals at his side.
They were beginning to move with greater urgency, which Bogo recognized as a sign that they were getting closer and closer, the scent fresher and fresher. The wolves unerringly led them through tunnels that looked so similar that Bogo doubted he'd ever find his way back alone, and eventually the tunnels started rising. As they came to a large opening, the lead wolf suddenly stopped again, and Bogo did the same.
There, sitting on the ground near a sliver of what must have been an absolutely enormous alchemical array, was the traitorous Nicholas of the Middle Baronies, apparently completely unharmed. Cradled in his lap, unconscious or asleep but still breathing, was the form of Commandant Totchli. Standing near them, anxiously twisting her paws together, was Princess Isabel.
Bogo couldn't help but pause, staring at the bizarre sight before him; he never would have guessed that something so unexpected would be awaiting him. "Isabel!" the queen cried, but Bogo stretched out an arm to keep her back.
He had no idea what sort of strange trap they might be blundering into, but he had no intention of letting anyone—least of all a fox who should have been dead—harm the queen. "Mother!" Isabel shouted back, although Bogo couldn't help but notice that she seemed to be rooted where she stood, not budging so much as an inch, "I... We..."
"We can explain everything," the fox interrupted, his voice as cheerful as his expression suddenly became.