Rainbow Dash led her subdued companions to the gate in the wall protecting the city of Cliffside Eyrie. They had journeyed through dusk, and judging by the stars Rainbow estimated the time to be about midnight. The twelve chimes of the city’s clock tower bell confirmed it. Scootaloo had long since cried herself to sleep over the loss of Apple Bloom and was now lying on Big Macintosh’s back.
Applejack blinked at the large group of guards at the gateway. “Howdy fellas. There sure are an awful lot of ya for just one gate.”
“Hey, Applejack,” grinned the sergeant. “We got word of some kind of assassins in the area, planning to kill the Duchess, so we’ve tripled the guard at all posts this side of the canal.”
“Assassins?” asked Rainbow. “Yikes. Well, keep up the good work, guys. We have to see Duchess Coloratura immediately.”
The sergeant raised an eyebrow at her. “At this hour? How do I know you’re not the assassin?”
“Easy there, Sergeant Flare,” said Applejack. “She’s with us. Do ya really think Big Mac and I’d be bringin’ an assassin to Countess Coloratura?”
A sheepish expression passed the guard’s face. “Of course not.” He turned back to Rainbow. “My apologies, miss. But we have to be - wait,” - he whirled back to Applejack - “Countess Coloratura?”
Big Mac chuckled while Applejack rolled her eyes. “She’s been doin’ that all day,” he noted.
“Sorry guys,” Applejack said. “I meant Duchess Coloratura, o’ course. So are ya goin’ ta let us all in or not?”
Sergeant Flare waved the group through. “Go on in, guys. Hey, when’s your next apple shipment coming in?”
“Ooh, shoot,” said Applejack as Big Mac winced. “Sorry fellas, but our load was, uh, destroyed earlier today.”
“Destroyed?” asked Sergeant Flare.
“Yeah,” replied Rainbow. “You guys are gonna have a busy day tomorrow.”
The guards looked at each other in confusion while Applejack led her companions through the gate into the city.
Rainbow looked around as they made their way along the streets toward the wall surrounding the inner city. The various houses were built with stone walls, some roofed with stone tile and others with wooden shingles. “Huh. These houses all look normal. I thought this city was built by the griffons.”
“This is the outer city,” Applejack explained. “This part was made by ponies when they couldn’t fit any more in the inner city. That’s the part that the griffons made.”
“Ah. Got it.”
Before long, they arrived at the gate to the inner city. This gate also had a triple-size serving of bored-looking guards, becoming somewhat alert at the arrival of the four travellers.
“Hey there guard guys,” said Rainbow to the guards. “We need to get through. We have important stuff to talk about with the Duchess.”
One of the pegasus guards looked at her, eyes still half closed with boredom. “Name?” he asked.
“Rainbow Dash,” replied Rainbow.
The guard opened his eyes at that, standing up a little more stiffly. “One moment.” He whispered to a unicorn guard, who then trotted off into the guardhouse by the gate. The guard returned with a piece of paper, and held it in a forehoof for the spokespony to read. He looked it over before snapping his wings out. “You are all under arrest!” The guards moved to surround the group, who looked on in surprise.
“What’s goin’ on?” asked Applejack.
“Stand down and stop any furycraftings you are doing, now!” demanded the guard.
Rainbow flicked her wings, ready to call on Tank, before she felt a hoof on her shoulder. She looked back to find it belonged to Big Mac, who shook his head. He tilted his head back at Scootaloo, still asleep. Rainbow sighed, before relaxing and allowing the guards to slap on a set of manacles.
Applejack and Big Mac were similarly restrained when Scootaloo woke up. Upon seeing her adoptive family in chains, she sprang up off of Big Mac with a yell and immediately called upon her fury, slinging her fiery blades to free the three manacled ponies. The guards promptly dogpiled on her, while Applejack tried to calm the panicking pegasus filly.
Rainbow blinked at her severed chains, and decided to use the distraction Scootaloo was providing to flee the melee, zipping straight up before she shimmered out of visibility. She landed softly upon the wood-tiled roof of the guardhouse, and watched to see what would happen next.
“Consarnit, Rainbow Dash!” cried Applejack, the guards replacing her severed chains with a new set. “Git back here!”
“At least she’s free,” noted Scootaloo. “Maybe she can get to the Duchess in time.”
Good idea, squirt, thought Rainbow. Not sure how I’d get you free on my own anyways.
She watched the guards lead her friends away through the gate and into the inner city. Rainbow flew up and over the wall to see where they ended up, just in time to see them taken to a stone building with a bell tower. She landed on the wood-tile roof of the bell tower when the bell started ringing.
Rainbow quickly willed Tank to block the bulk of the sound before she went deaf. Able to hear and think at the same time, her eyes widened in recognition. The cadence of the chimes was the signal for a windcrafting criminal on the loose. “Uh-oh.”
Within moments, she heard the windstreams of many windcrafters flying in. Rainbow looked around in time to see over two dozen soldiers arrive from the outer wall, most of them pegasi but a few were earth ponies and one was a unicorn.
The new arrivals glanced at each other, figuring out which of them held the highest rank, before one of the earth ponies stepped forward to speak to the gate guards. “Report,” he barked.
“Lieutenant. We’ve detained three ponies travelling with the assassin we were warned about,” said the pegasus guard. “But the assassin herself got away, flying and hiding from sight.”
The lieutenant closed his eyes as he stomped the ground. Rainbow’s sharp eyes made out the telltale tremor of earthcrafting probes as the guard searched for any sign of his quarry. “Nopony but us on the ground,” he said.
Rainbow glanced down at the wooden tiles she stood upon, smirking.
The earth pony then raised a hoof. Rainbow recognised the shimmer in the air around him as an incipient windcrafting, and she promptly dropped her sound and sight barriers before Tank could be detected. The sound of the bells promptly returned to full volume, and Rainbow twitched in surprise before shoving her hooves in her ears and lay flat on the roof.
A slight blurring of the air passed over her when the lieutenant released his crafting, but with Tank inactive he found nothing.
“No invisibility veils,” reported the lieutenant. “Spread out and find her, and keep your furies looking for veils, sound barriers, and windstreams.”
The guards saluted before taking to the skies, the air around each of them periodically rippling with the presence of their wind furies. The bell finally stopped ringing and the gate guards returned to their posts.
Rainbow considered making her way to the ground, but decided against it when she spotted the lieutenant still down there, repeating his earthcraft probe. So I can’t fly without being found, and I can’t walk without being found. Now what?
Rainbow looked around, and found nopony in the air nearby. The nearest building was a few dozen ponylengths away, it’s thatched roof somewhat below her. Her brow furrowed as she considered the distance, before she sighed.
“Too far, I think,” she muttered to herself. “But it isn’t like I have any other choice.” She stood up and leaped towards the building, opening and flapping her wings without calling for her fury. To her great surprise, her flight path was far less vertical than she had expected, enough that she actually soared over two roofs to the third building along the street rather than crashing into the first.
Rainbow looked back at her wings. “How’d you two do that?” she whispered. She turned to look at the rest of the inner city, noting the position of the Ducal Manor on the side of some sort of branch-like structure rising up from over the side of the cliff. “And can you do it again?” A deep ache began to set in to her wings as she fluttered them. “Ow. Maybe not.”
She looked around, trying to find a way to reach the manor that would let her stay on the rooftops where earthcraftings could not find her. Deciding on a path, she set off, leaping from building to building. She found that she could, with some effort, sustain a glide by holding her wings stretched out, but even that worsened the ache. Gradually, Rainbow made her way to the half-ring of houses before the Ducal Manor, where Duchess Coloratura both lived and held court.
Rainbow looked at the wrought iron fence protecting the manor. The bars were spaced closely enough to prevent ponies from slipping through, but far enough apart that Rainbow could clearly see that the grounds within were swarming with alert guards. “I’m not getting in that way.” She looked up at the roof of the manor, noting a few guards looking out over the city. “That’s not gonna work either.”
She decided to move around the boundary of the manor to the cliffside, and stopped on the roof of the last house. It had a breathtaking view of the cove at which the city had been built, and of the earthcrafted canal linking the Great Northern Ocean with the Dawn Sea. A great stone bridge soared out over the bay from the city, terminating at a massive fortress on the far side of the cove. Rainbow realised the fortress was Fort Eyrie, the fortress built to protect the city from griffon attack.
Looking closely at the fortress, Rainbow noted that many of the arrow slit windows were dark. “So, I guess that’s where all the extra guards over here came from.” Shrugging off the thought, Rainbow looked down to see if there was a way into the manor from below. “Wow,” she said, eyes wide. “So that’s what griffon cities look like.” The branch-like structure the manor was built upon was in fact part of a huge tree carved out of the stone of the cliff face. Various houses and other buildings were built on the numerous branches, while the roots, built out over the waters of the bay, held warehouses and docks for sea-bourne shipping. One of the branches just below the Ducal Manor served as a skydock, with one small cargo ship docked and berths for a few more airships.
Shaking off her surprise, Rainbow focused on the manor. She saw shimmers in the air around it, suggesting wind fury sentinels, but try as she might Rainbow could not spot anypony that might be holding them. “Bound wind fury sentinels. That’s not easy to do.” Rainbow looked down to see if she could find a way to climb up to the manor before blinking and looking back at the shimmering air. “They’ll go off if I windcraft my way in… so what if I don’t craft at all?”
Glancing round to ensure there were no guards looking her way, Rainbow prepared to launch herself into the air on wingpower alone. “Wings, don’t fail me now.” Leaping into the air with a quick push from Tank before dismissing the fury, Rainbow lined up with an open window high in the manor and powered forward. She cringed when she passed through the wind furies guarding the air around the manor, but they remained silent allowing Rainbow to enter the manor through the window.
Setting down on the floor with a sigh, Rainbow let her aching wings droop. “I hope I don’t have to do that again anytime soon,” she mused to herself, before glancing back out the window to the house she started from. “But I might have to practice that furyless flight trick. It could come in handy.” Rainbow tucked her wings back by her sides and cautiously reached through her connection to her fury. Tank reported that there were no more wind furies active nearby, and so Rainbow once again veiled herself from view before setting off to explore the manor.
Aimlessly wandering the hallways in search of Coloratura’s chambers, Rainbow was startled when she crossed paths with a maid. Quickly checking to ensure she was invisible, Rainbow decided to follow the maid. Then, she thought of a better idea.
Rainbow willed Tank to alter her voice in an effort to match that of the guard who had Applejack and Big Macintosh at the outer gate, and spoke to the maid. “Excuse me, miss maid.” Rainbow quickly pushed Tank into a sound barrier as the maid screamed in shock at the voice coming from nowhere. “Sorry for scaring you, miss, but I need your help.”
“Wh… who’s there?” the mare asked with a quivering voice.
Uh-oh, what was his name again? Oh yeah. “I’m Sergeant Flare, part of the guard. I’m invisible for… um, guard reasons. But I got a bit lost. How do I get to the Duchess from here?”
“Oh,” said the maid, calmer now. “Is this about that invisible assassin the guards are all looking for?”
“Uh, sure, why not,” replied Rainbow. “This is definitely about the invisible assassin, yes.”
“Okay then, this way,” said the mare, heading off down the halls. “I’m glad you told me who you were, because otherwise I’d have thought you were the assassin.”
Rainbow facehoofed. “I promise you, I am not an assassin,” she said through her invisibility veil and voice-changing windcrafting. “So, how did you hear about the assassin?”
“First Class told me,” replied the maid.
“Uh,” Rainbow said, “I meant how did the city hear about the assassin?”
“Oh, First Class said an auditor came in and told the Duchess about it,” said the maid. “I wonder how an auditor found out about an assassin though. Maybe she found something in somepony’s accounts ledger…”
Rainbow blinked at that. “Maybe. Yeah, that totally makes sense.” I thought that all the ducal staff were supposed to know about the auditors. “Wait, who was this auditor?”
“Oh, I think I saw her,” the maid replied. “She had a grey coat, with a black mane. Some sort of purple cutie mark.”
Octavia? thought Rainbow. “Earth pony?”
“That’s right.” The maid stopped at a large set of double doors. “Ah, here we are. Would you like me to announce you in?”
“Uh, no. No thanks,” Rainbow replied. The mare curtsied towards the empty air on the opposite side to where Rainbow was standing, before leaving Rainbow to open the doors and slip into Coloratura’s personal chambers.