Aztlan: The Last Sun by Michael Jan Friedman Page A

investment.”
    “Exactly. For reasons that should be painfully obvious, Molpilia didn’t want to renege on his deal with the Empire. So he used what resources he had left, cut corners wherever he could, and made the pyramids look as if they were nearing completion—even though he didn’t have the beans to actually finish them.”
    Eventually, he would have been found out. The Empire was slow to act sometimes, but it knew a half-finished pyramid when it saw one.
    “He was a dead man,” said my informant, “unless he found a way to keep his problem from becoming public. And what better way to stall a construction project than to de-sanctify it?”
    “At the expense of human lives.” A cold-blooded plan, to say the least. Yet I could see Molpilia being capable of it if the stakes were high enough.
    It was interesting, I thought, if it was true. But I would need evidence before I could pursue it. “And you know this how ?” I asked.
    “Never mind that. Just see to it that Molpilia gets what’s coming to him.”
    Then the line went silent.
    I looked back at the building where Molpilia had his offices. It towered over the edifices around it, resplendent in the dying sunlight. As resplendent as the pyramids he had built over in Aztlan.
    And yet, as much as Molpilia had made, he had lost most of it in the ball court. Or so my caller had insisted. Big beans, he had said. For many cycles.
    If that was true, had I scored some of the goals that had been Molpilia’s undoing? Had I cost him a pile one night? Maybe more than one night? It felt strange to look at it that way.
    In the ball court, all the players saw were the ball, the other team, and the stone walls. We never thought about the fans, much less the betting parlors.
    At least, I hadn’t.
    Pecking a number into the face of my buzzer, I called Necalli again. He would want to hear about this.
    Because I couldn’t think of anything but the murders, I almost missed the rail stop near Aunt Xoco’s place. Fortunately, I looked up just in time to get off. It was a good thing. Otherwise there would have been one more murder for the force to investigate . . .
    Mine.
    I was hoping my aunt wouldn’t faint at the sight of me. She didn’t. She didn’t even stop in the middle of setting out her statuettes. All she said was, “You look terrible.”
    “Don’t get upset, Aunt Xoco. I just—”
    “ Upset ?” She laughed. “You think I’ve never seen bumps and bruises, Maxtla? You think your father never came home from work looking like a carriage ran him over—and then backed up and ran him over again ?”
    I recalled a couple such times. But my father always made light of it—at least to me.
    “Who did it?” Aunt Xoco asked, the same way she might have asked if I had seen the Emperor on the Mirror the other day.
    “I don’t know,” I said. “They were wearing masks.”
    She stopped putting out the statuettes and looked up at me, the candlelight dancing in her eyes. “Masks?”
    “Yes. Black masks. Why?”
    My aunt didn’t say anything in response. She just lowered her eyes again.
    I moved to her side and put my arm around her. “Are you all right?”
    “Fine,” she said.
    But she didn’t look fine. She looked as if she had eaten something that spoiled the week before.
    “I need to sit down,” she added, alarming me. Then she sank into the nearest chair.
    I sat next to her. “Tell me what’s wrong.”
    She drew a ragged breath. “I think I know who hurt you.”
    It seemed absurd. “How could you?”
    “I thought they got rid of it,” she said. “But maybe not. Maybe it came back.”
    “Maybe what came back?”
    “Something a bunch of Investigators created a long time ago. They called themselves the Knife Eyes. A goon squad was what they were. If you did something they thought was bad, they gave you a reason not to do it again. But not the way the Emperor’s Law gives you a reason. They did their business outside the Law.”
    “You mean they