The few times she’d glanced outside whatever room she was robbing, Lock had always found mansion hallways to be weirdly sterile. They had lots of stuff, but in that “look at how much stuff I can buy!” space-filling way. That sword on the wall was an expensive sword that was shiny and old, not the sword with which the family’s great-grandmatriarch had fought and won her title. Those paintings were expensive paintings that had been purchased at an auction, not the paintings that were gifts from a moderately-skilled friend. This cabinet was an expensive cabinet that had once stood in Canterlot Castle, not the cabinet that had been the perfect hiding spot for hide-and-seek two decades ago. It was like the inhabitants were divorced from the rest of ponykind, living in their own little bubble. Maybe that was why Lock liked robbing them so much.
Whatever the case, the cleanness and neatness and fakeness of it all would’ve unnerved Lock even if she didn’t know of the black magic ritual being practiced. With that knowledge, all of the items that tried to look normal (if expensive) felt like the disguise of an unreformed changeling — a thin, brittle veneer of ordinariness over the skin of some twisting monstrosity.
So besides staying quiet, Lock tiptoed delicately across the checkered floor because she felt unclean, somehow, in touching it. The bronze busts of this or that ancient pony glared at her. One rather large portrait hung on the wall, and Lock found herself double-checking it to be sure its eyes weren’t following her.
Lock knew it only took a few seconds for her to reach the corner, but it felt like ages and her heart was pounding as if she’d just run a dozen marathons. She listened. Silence. She cautiously glanced around the corner, exposing as little of herself as she could. Nopony. The hall kept stretching onward, still with the same heartless decoration. Featureless doors split off the hall, but Lock wasn’t interested in them. None of them would have the keys. Right?
She padded down the hall, dread making her stick to the wall whenever she could. She moved slowly to buy herself some time as she thought: just where was she going? Where on earth would the keys be? She had no idea of the layout of the house, and from what she’d seen on the outside, it was big. She didn’t even have much of a head for direction to keep herself straight.
Think, think, think. If this were your house, where would you keep your keys? Someplace not too far from the front door. Where was the front door? It’d been on the right side of the house when she’d jumped in. So… Lock stopped and closed her eyes to try and orient herself. The library was to her right. She was heading… into the house, away from the outside, so she was facing the same way she’d been on the outside. So the front door was somewhere to her right. She took a right at the first intersection.
There were windows ahead of her at the end of the hall, reflecting back the inside of the house. Edge of the house; good. Lock listened as she kept sneaking down the hall. Dead silence. The silence should’ve been pleasing to her, but not only did she keep thinking somepony was coming up behind her (she twitched and looked; nothing), it magnified her own sounds a dozen times. The slightest clip of hoof on stone sounded like a gong.
Lock passed a door without thinking twice, then stepped back and pulled at the handle. Just because she thought the keys were at the front door didn’t mean they were. Each room deserved a quick glance, if nothing else. This first room was the library she’d come in. Shame. Lock went to the door on the other wall. Locked. As she searched for the keyhole, Lock pulled out her pi-
There wasn’t a keyhole. Lock blinked and looked again. Definitely no keyhole. But, wait, this was an old-money house of unicorn nobility. They had some extremely tribalist door designs meant to keep out earth ponies and pegasi, but let unicorns move freely.
The design probably came from stupidity, not malice. If it was deliberate, it’d be harder to circumvent.
Ignoring her conscience for once that night, Lock inserted her dagger into the crack between door and wall and moved it up. When it clinked against the bolt, Lock tapped it to be sure it was a swingbolt and not a deadbolt (it was), then gave her knife a little flick.
The design was simple: concealed within the door was a handle, accessible only by magic. A unicorn could turn the handle and open the bolt via telekinesis, but somepony without magic couldn’t touch it. But the design was so simple — nothing more than a latch that rotated into place — that the latch could be manually opened by pushing at it with something thin. Like a knife.
Beyond the door was a study, probably for the lord or lady of the house, with lots of dark, dramatic colors. Bookshelves lined the walls. A desk sat in the middle, and on the desk sat a small stone statuette with glowing eyes, a sickly green. It was technically of a pony, but the design made Lock think of a pony that’d been sculpted in putty and then stretched up and down. Maybe it was the extremely ovoid eyes, maybe it was something else entirely, but Lock’s bile rose just from looking at it. Dark magic, maybe? A focus item in whatever ritual this family was planning? Evidence, then, and stealing it would at least slow them. But something that valuable was almost definitely rigged, even leaving aside just toting around a dark magic artifact in her bag. She’d get it once she had the key.
Lock closed the door and set off down the hall again. Just what sort of family was this? They had focus items sitting around in studies, a sacrifice secured to a makeshift altar in a room that wasn’t even a hidden one… But Lock knew that there was old money, and there was old money. Families that had been in wealth for a long time, versus families that had been fabulously rich since before Equestria’s founding and only gotten more money since then. The latter was almost completely untouchable from reputation and connections alone, with obscene amounts of cash taking up the slack. They couldn’t do dark magic out in the open — it’d destroy their reputation and leave them exposed — but as long as they made a token effort to keep it secret, guards could be persuaded to look away.
With her mind occupied, Lock pulled at a particularly small door, just under five feet tall, without really paying attention to it. Locked. Her mind spat out something about a utility closet, and she walked on. After a few seconds, Lock wheeled around. Utility closet or not, what was a door that small doing locked? That meant something. Maybe- Maybe even a dumbwaiter. She pulled out a pick.
The picking itself took less time than the retrieval of the tools necessary; dumbwaiter locks were meant to keep the door closed when the dumbwaiter wasn’t on that floor, not provide security. For it was indeed a dumbwaiter — a small shaft, a little less than four feet square, stretched up and down into darkness. There wasn’t any cable in the middle, so Lock guessed the dumbwaiter was above her. She illuminated a light gem and dropped it down the shaft. Ten, twenty, thirty feet… A little over thirty feet; if this was the second floor, the shaft must’ve ended in a wine cellar.
After a moment’s hesitation, Lock wiggled her way into the shaft, braced her back against one smooth stone wall and her hooves on another, pulled the door shut, and slid down. She’d take a sneaky way to get around the house any day.
She stopped at the first-floor door, on the opposite wall as the second, and put her ear to it. Vague sounds muffled by the wood. Maybe some metallic clinking. Probably the kitchen. Not an exit for now. She slid down to the bottom floor, where the temperature dropped six or seven degrees. She plucked the still-glowing light gem from the ground and laid it in the corner of the doorframe. She didn’t even need her picks for this; the mechanism was exposed on the inside of the door. She pushed the bolt aside and nudged the door open an inch (no squeaking, thank goodness). She wiggled her ear through the crack, listened. Nothing. Taking the light gem in her mouth, she slid out the door and looked around.
Yep: a wine cellar. A pretty big one, too; the gem illuminated only the wall she’d just climbed out of, while the others were beyond its reach and shrouded in darkness. Barrels and shelves and casks of all kinds were laid around the cellar, creating a twisting maze. If nothing else, it’d be a great place to hide in. Still, not the kind of place she wanted to be bumbling around in the dark. She turned back to the dumbwaiter-
Hello. There were two panels on the wall, right next to the door. One was obviously for controlling the dumbwaiter, with several numbered buttons. The other one was a single button; the lights, maybe. Lock swivelled her ears around. No sound. Holding her breath, Lock poked it.
The spells quietly hummed to life immediately, drenching the entire cellar with light. Looking through the gaps in the shelves, Lock could see that it was even bigger than she’d imagined, at least a hundred feet square. Shelves and barrels went up almost to the ceiling, with maybe three feet of space above the top. She did a chin-up over the top of one of the barrels and looked around. Solid stone walls surrounded her, except in two places where they were broken up by stairs: one far to her right in the near corner and another in the far left corner. Lock bypassed the maze by crawling over the tops of the barrels and shelves, rolling through the slim gaps, and investigated the closer one. Locked from the inside. Probably a way to the outside, for wine to be delivered. She slid her knife through the gap between the doors and wiggled it. From the vibrations she got back, the doors were fairly thin. With her earth pony strength, breaking through them wouldn’t be too hard, if it came to that. Lock hoped it wouldn’t; breaking doors was noisy.
She wiggled her way over the shelves, cutting diagonally across the room to the other staircase. There was another light switch next to the door, so Lock turned the lights off, just in case. Silence greeted Lock when she listened, so she carefully nudged the door open (thanking her stars the rich ponies here were the kind who oiled their hinges) and looked around. The walls had attention-grabbing darkwood molding and the floor was lavishly carpeted, but the only other doors were at either end. Some kind of entry hall, maybe a side hall off of the main one. It was hard to tell, as Lock had no experience with mansions beyond the rooms she robbed. Lamps flickered on the walls with the healthy flame of plenty of oil.
Which way from here? To the entrance, but that was… to the right, since that was the direction the exit stairs had gone from the cellar. Lock trotted down the hall, muffling her steps on the carpet and put an ear to the door. Silence, but… a very roomy, cavelike sort of silence. Like the echo you get when draining a tall glass. Entrance hall? Lock cautiously opened the door.
Entrance hall. Big, grandiose, meaningless, overdesigned. Chandeliers hung from the ceiling, casting pillars into shadow. Lock was emerging on one side of a wide staircase going to the second-floor balcony and cringed at the hollow, echoing sound her hooves made on the floor. She took the room in in seconds and quickly made a beeline to the one thing that mattered: the big double doors that were obviously the front entrance, the ones Lock begged to herself had the gate keys hanging nearby.
There was a series of keyhooks next to the doors, many of them draped with keys of various kinds. But none of them were the kind of key she needed. Gate keys were big, steely, and basic. No-frills taken to an art form. These… Sweet princesses, these ponies were so taken with their wealth that even their keys had to look glamorous. Even beyond their showy gilding, none of the keys had the solid workmareship needed for a big gate lock.
Lock held back a sob and planted her head against the wall. Pointless. This whole trip had been pointless. She’d never-
So where would they keep the key? A family like this would be prone to showing off their wealth. So they’d make a little display of something as visible as the grounds gate getting unlocked for the day. So they wouldn’t keep the gate key here, it’d be with the servants; the family would show off that they could afford to pay servants for something as minor as that. Which meant the key was probably in the servants’ quarters, which were-
Lock quickly opened the front door and squinted into the gathering gloom. Yes, the front gate was closed, and so almost certainly locked. She’d look like a right ninny if she ran around the house looking for the key, only for the gate to be wide open.
Servants’ quarters. Lock had done some cursory research on these sorts of houses, back before she’d laid down her rules and expected to go further into whichever place she was robbing. Servants’ quarters were usually on the top floor or belowground. After all, there was no need for the hired help to be as comfortable as the ponies who really mattered, right? With the cellar, subterranean quarters were unlikely, so-
Clickrrrr-rrrr.
At the sound of a door being opened, Lock instinctively bolted, her hooves booming throughout the entrance hall. She vaguely pinpointed it as coming on the opposite side of the stairs as the side she’d come in, but didn’t spare a second to look. She scrambled into the hallway and across the rug, but she could still hear hoofsteps. She was being followed.
She didn’t bother looking behind her. It would’ve taken too much time. She jinked into the cellar, tripped, tumbled down the stairs. She bit her lip and blood trickled down her chin. The pain barely registered. She rolled out of view of the door and ducked behind a barrel. She held her breath and listened.
Clip clop, clip clop, clip clop. Silence. “Huh.” And the door was shut.
Lock kept listening. She thought she could hear footsteps leaving. Maybe. Dangit, why’d she leave the door open? It only would’ve taken a second to close. She was lucky. She was very, very lucky. She didn’t even know if the inhabitants of the house were still eating; there could be servants spread out all over the place.
The darkness pressed in on her. Lock curled up into a ball and bit her tail to keep herself from screaming. She could leave, like she’d told herself earlier. Leave, get the Guard, come back. It couldn’t take that long. Why was she doing this at all? She didn’t even know the unicorn. Every second she waited in here was another second for her to be found and sacrificed. She’d already been here far, far too long. Time was running out.
If you really cared that much about time, would you have looked into those screams?
Lock wasn’t sure she would have.
But she still spat out her tail and stood up.
So, next stop: servants’ quarters on the top floor. Going up the staircase in the entry hall was a no-go, what with the other pony lurking around just outside, but that was fine by Lock. She flipped on the lights, hopscotched over the barrels back to the dumbwaiter, flipped off the lights, and pulled herself back into the shaft. She stood up on her hind legs, braced her left legs on one wall and her right on the other, and began shimmying up the shaft. She didn’t ignite a light gem; the darkness was creepy, but she didn’t want to waste a limited resource.
When Lock passed by the first-floor entrance, she listened. Still sounds. Servants still making food or were they clearing up already? Lock didn’t have the faintest clue what the rich ate or how much. She’d heard vague tales of lavish dinners that took hours to prepare, which just seemed silly. Ninety percent of the time, a sandwich and an apple washed down with some water served her just fine, thank you. Shaking her head, Lock kept pushing up.
She passed by the second-floor entrance, aiming to exit as high as she could, but she was blocked by the dumbwaiter before she reached the third floor. Unfortunate, but she’d manage. Lock slid back down to the second floor and exited. The entrance hall was… left, and then left again. Staircases further up had to be nearby, right? But the memory of the other pony (whoever they were) still lingered and she was very hesitant when she nudged open the door. Thankfully, the entrance hall was cavernously empty and quiet.
Lock dropped to her stomach to minimize visibility and crawled down the balcony to the right, towards the outside wall. The entrance hall stayed quiet. So quiet, in fact, that Lock began imagining she could hear something. Ponies talking? Somepony walking? Something being pushed? The sounds her mind conjured weren’t anything coherent. She wiped down her forehead and kept crawling.
At the edge of the balcony, Lock pushed open the last door, and- Yes! A square shaft shot up and down through the building, bordered by a winding spiral of stairs. Lock slunk up the steps, staying right at the join between stair and wall. It meant staying off the stair tread rug that ran down the center of the steps, but she’d get less creaks that close to support. Hoof over hoof she went without incident, passing the third floor and arriving at the fourth, right at the top of the stairwell. Peek; nothing. Deep breath.
Her supposition that the top floor was for servants seemed to be correct; the halls were noticeably more drab than those on the lower floors and less spacious. A relieved Lock sneaked through the lack of pretension easily, even as her ears kept swiveling for noises in case one or two of the servants were still up here. Nothing yet. Now, the dumbwaiter had been… ten feet ahead and twenty to the… left, right? …Or was it the right? How many times had she circled the stairwell?
But the location of the dumbwaiter hardly mattered, right? It probably ended in a laundry room. No, Lock was looking for the servants’ quarters, and probably their wardrobe inside that. They’d want the keys close at hoof. Lock didn’t know what the door to the servants’ quarters would look like, though, so- eenie-meenie-miney… mo. Lock cautiously tugged the (unlocked) door open and peeked inside. A storage room, mostly empty except for a few household essentials, like bleach and lamp oil.
Lock followed the right-hoof wall. It was something her father had taught her about mazes when she was eight: keep your hoof on one wall and, eventually (he stressed that significantly), you’d find your way out. As long as she stuck to the wall, she’d eventually wind up back at the stairs again.
Staying glued to the wall, Lock nervously opened door after door on both sides of the hallway in silence. Nothing much; storage closets, two or three recreation and relaxation rooms, even a dining room. All completely devoid of life. The few small bedrooms she found were empty or had their furniture covered with those dust-sheet things and a few thin, dusty cobwebs; definitely not places where keys would be held. The roof groaned in the slight wind, but Lock couldn’t feel a draft. And even if she had, she would’ve been too caught up in her own thoughts to notice it.
Were the servants in on the family’s little side activities? They almost had to be. They had the run of the house, even more than the actual owners. Sure, the aristocrats could declare certain rooms off-limits, but exactly how would that be enforced? The servants had all the keys. And Lock didn’t think these were the types of ponies to clean up after themselves, anyway. No, somepony else would do all the nitty-gritty. Maybe the servants were brainwashed, somehow. She’d heard whispers of mind control spells, which would easily fall under the purview of dark magic. Or maybe they would benefit from the ritual, somehow, as long as they kept quiet. It didn’t take a lot for ponies to look the other way.
Maybe the servants didn’t have a choice. The empty bedrooms suddenly took on a whole different meaning.
Lock glanced down a hallway running into the house, then did a double-take when she saw a window, far closer than she would have expected. After a second’s hesitation, she trotted over. If her sense of direction was so bad that this was the outside wall, she wanted to re-orient herself.
When she opened the window, Lock was immediately assaulted by the cool evening breeze. She blinked through the chill and looked out, at another window right across from her. She looked down; a large shaft, maybe fifteen by fifteen feet, burrowed down all the stories in the house, a window on each wall on each floor, terminating in a garden well below her. However, the solid walls and lack of doors at the bottom suggested it was less a “garden” and more a “bundle of weeds growing wherever it could”. She looked up; less than ten feet above, the shaft was open to the sky. She’d heard of these; they were called “lightwells” or something, meant to help with ventilation. She filed the information away as she reclosed the window. At least her spatial awareness wasn’t terrible.
Back to the outside wall, around and around, with only her own hoofsteps for company. What did ponies even need with all this space? Three stories of “regular” space and another one just for servants, each with more square footage than her entire house. That wasn’t even getting into the cellar. Was it a compensation thing? That was all Lock could think of. She valued efficiency and couldn’t imagine how ponies could even use that many rooms. This is the sitting room… This is the other sitting room… This is the sitting room where everything’s gilded… This is the other other sitting room… This is the sit- No, this is the standing room… Honestly.
She was about halfway around the floor, if she remembered correctly. She’d passed by another stairwell in another corner of the house. Lock opened another door and- Yes! Some kind of bedroom; it didn’t have the probable opulence of the owner’s bedroom, but it was big and expansive for the rooms on this floor, arguably nicer than her own room back home. Head servant’s quarters? Lock guessed so, since a four-poster bed was pushed up against one of the walls and the usual dresser and tables and vanity were laid out around the room. As good a place to look for keys as any. She delicately closed the door behind her and padded across the floor, grateful for the small amount of carpeting. As she looked around, her happiness began slipping away — where would keys be kept in here? — but then her shiny sense started buzzing. They wouldn’t be out in the open. Any potential thieves (Like you? said her conscience) would spot them immediately. They’d be out of sight, in someplace or something, not too hard to get to in an emergency, somewhere you passed by every morning.
She moved towards a bedside table, but her shiny sense prickled her. Too obvious. That’d be the first place a thief would look. Jewelry box? She looked around. No jewelry box. She stared at the floor and tapped her forehead. Think, think, think…
A jolt from her shiny sense sent her to the wardrobe. There were two whole rows of clothes inside. Dang. Even her own closet wasn’t that big. Lock pushed aside the uniforms, the casual wear, the- There they were. Hanging right on a hook on the back wall was a keyring. Although the keys most likely opened the same doors, they were simpler than the ones she’d seen downstairs, less ornamental and more functional. Standing out from the rest by virtue of its size was undeniably the gate key: big, stocky, meant to stand up to the elements. Lock wiggled it off the ring — taking the whole ring would be suspicious the second the servants returned — and dropped it into her bag. She was grinning to herself as she closed the wardrobe back up. That wasn’t too hard, was it? Now she just had to-
She heard a creak as the doorknob was turned.