Aztlan: The Last Sun by Michael Jan Friedman Page B

were vigilantes?”
    The Empire had known such individuals over the cycles—citizens who interpreted the Emperor’s Law their own way and doled out punishments as they saw fit. Usually they were aberrant personalities, people unable to live within the bounds of modern society.
    More often than not, they wound up in the prison house. Occasionally they wound up dead, killed by the people they were trying to punish. Either way, their careers as Lawmen didn’t end well.
    But police officers didn’t get involved in vigilanteism. They were instruments of the Emperor, after all. To make up their own Law would have been to usurp the Emperor’s authority.
    “Yes,” said Aunt Xoco, “vigilantes. Backed by someone with a hill of beans—because sometimes they needed a doctor, or a little cooperation from a judge, or something else that didn’t come cheap. But they didn’t hurt their own , Maxtla. They never hurt their own.”
    In other words, me . And yet they had.
    It was a scary thought—the idea that it was my fellow police officers under those masks the night before. Not cultists, but police .
    But I had a question: “Aunt Xoco, how do you know about this?”
    “How do I know?” she echoed. She smiled a hard smile. “I know because your father was part of it.”
    The words hit me like hammer blows. “My father . . . ?” I said with someone else’s mouth.
    My aunt shrugged her thin shoulders. “The fool.”
    We sat there for a while in silence for a while, the rainbow-colored Renewal candles guttering in their silver holder, as I tried to come to grips with the whole thing. As I tried to picture my father in a black mask, his hand stick clutched in his fist, running down a dark street in pursuit of a citizen who hadn’t broken any written Law.
    Part of a . . . what had Aunt Xoco called it? A goon squad .
    “You couldn’t be mistaken?” I asked.
    “No, Maxtla. It happened.”
    Suddenly, I began to see something I had failed to see before. “Did my father and his Knife Eyes go after First Sun?”
    My aunt nodded. “With a vengeance. They thought First Sun was taking advantage of the Emperor’s leniency—so they took matters into their own hands.”
    “Lands of the Dead . . .” I said, my mind racing.
    My father had been killed during the last Renewal by members of the First Sun cult. Not by Nochtli, according to the police reports, but by someone like him.
    High Priest Itzcoatl was still new at the time. However, he was well-versed in the city’s tradition, which went back hundreds of cycles to the first High Priest of Aztlan. So he began his journey that evening—the evening of the Fifth Unlucky Day—at the eastern bank of the River of Stars. There, with Tonatiuh setting fire to the water before him, Itzcoatl and his entourage of four honored citizens knelt and bathed their arms to the elbows in the river, renewing their vow of devotion to the sun.
    After that they were slated to walk through the city all the way to the building that housed the High Priest’s sanctum. Then Itzcoatl would come out onto his balcony, holding the obsidian knife that was the symbol of his office, and guide the people below him in their passage from one Sun to the next.
    My father was on one of the police teams walking alongside Itzcoatl and his honor guard. A couple of blocks from the river, a commotion in the crowd brought the High Priest’s procession to a halt. My father’s team and a few others waded through the crowd to clear the way.
    But my father himself hung back, following his instincts. As it turned out, the disturbance was a distraction staged by First Sun—while one of its members went after the High Priest with a knife, meaning to cut his throat.
    My father interceded and disarmed the assassin. But there was another cultist with another knife, and that one plunged his blade into my father’s neck, slicing open an artery.
    Too late, the assassins were wrestled to the ground. My father was rushed to a