Chapter 26
It was unusually blustery for this time of spring, Mystic thought as the team made its way across the aerodrome runway. Or perhaps it was the constant jetwash and turbulence of all the airships coming and going above her head. Either way, it made her cloak flap wildly, as though she had some sort of giant, panicking bird tethered around her neck.
Caballus was in the lead, with an energetic mare from the port authority at his side. She was constantly reminding them of how honored she was to be aiding guests of the Plutarch. Meister had called ahead of them, and ordered that the special team of “salvage auditors” be given every assistance.
“I would go myself,” he had told them, “but somepony needs to take the helm of the Trade House, and I don’t dare name a new Seneschal to do it in my stead.” Meister seemed to believe that whoever was ordering the assassinations wanted him to be preoccupied with his business, and unable to orchestrate a response. It was why he needed Caballus.
“You shall be my eyes and ears,” the old pony said. “I don’t trust anypony under my own employ anymore, not with something like this. Any one of them would turn double agent for the right price.”
Then Caballus had suggested starting with Tier’s ship. It might have been the Killer or his associates who had done the third heir in, to send his father a message, or so Caballus had argued. It was a flimsy pretense, but it held up, and Meister gave them his support.
When they reached the hangar that the Glücksritter was stored in, the port official led them through a side-door. It took a moment for Mystic’s eyes to adjust as she stepped inside, but when she made out the finer details of the ship once again, it called back memories of the first time she had seen it: sand whipping against her face, furious roars filling her ears, and cold metal squeezing around her neck. She took a deep breath.
“Where was it picked up?” Caballus asked their escort.
“She was adrift in airspace to the west, my lord, riding the currents toward town. Even with all the traffic, we’re not used to seeing many sky-hulks in these parts. It took us a little by surprise.” The mare activated the ship’s loading ramp by remote. The long, metal slab began to lower, groaning irritably.
“Who found it?” the Inquisipony asked over the noise.
The official shrugged. “Some sky-barge called in a derelict sighting, so we dispatched a salvage team. By the time we got there, a few junk-trawlers were trying to board it, but they fled the scene as soon as we arrived. Then we towed it back to port and sealed it in here, pending an investigation by either the Constabulary or the Arboates.” Her smile didn’t quite succeed at hiding her nervousness. “I didn’t know that the Trade House would be sending its own… salvage audit team. I didn’t know it even had one.”
“It does now,” Caballus replied. He walked up the ramp into the primary cargo hold.
The ship’s main power was down, so the red emergency lights, drawing supplementary power from outside, were the only source of illumination in the cavernous space. It was empty, but it still contained the smell of penned animals, the same stench that had permeated Tier’s warehouse.
“Has anypony else been on the ship since it was recovered?”
The mare shook her head. “We were never cleared to inspect the hulk, so… you’re the first, my lord.”
Caballus dismissed her, and waited until she was gone before he laid out his plan. “Fyzzix, Roughshod and Hairtrigger, you search the other holds and the Enginarium. Look for anything missing or anything out of place. Mystic, you’re with me. We’ll be sweeping the bridge and crew quarters.”
Everypony acknowledged, and Fyzzix pointed them toward a hatchway with stairs. “This ship is an older configuration, but that should take you to the crew decks… or the waste filtration system… but it I’m about 89.6 percent sure it’s the crew decks.”
Mystic gave him a concerned glance, but Caballus forged on ahead, leaving her no choice but to follow. The stairs led up into a narrow corridor, and up another flight of stairs. They climbed those as well, and by the time they reached the top, Mystic’s breath was coming out in determined huffs. The first heavy breath she took at the top of the stairs turned to a cloud in front of her face, and she realized it had suddenly become very cold.
“Hmm, must be a malfunction of the coolant systems,” said Caballus, as though he had barely even noticed, “or the life support. Come on. These must be the crew quarters.”
The corridor was lined with hatches, scores of them on either side. Caballus opened the nearest one to look inside. It swung open with a rusty, metallic screech. The interior was sparse and clean, if rather cramped. But even though it had three bunks jutting from the wall and barely enough room to stand beside them, it was actually quite luxurious compared to the quarters on some naval ships or chartist vessels.
“It doesn’t look like there’s anything here,” said Caballus after a cursory search.
Mystic stepped out into the hallway, and looked forlornly down toward the other end. There had to be at least fifty more rooms. “This is going to take forever.”
When Caballus came out as well, she found him staring at her hooves. “Maybe not,” he said.
Following his gaze, Mystic saw what he had noticed: the floor had been burned. In spots and specks, the metal of the corridor had been scorched, as if by acid, leaving a trail pointing down the corridor.
The static crackle of Mystic’s comm-bead filled her ear. “Come in… er… uh… Captain,” said Roughshod over their channel. Even though Fyzzix assured them it was secure against outside listeners, Caballus would take no chances.
“What is it, Roughshod?” Caballus said.
“We found… the… uh… we found the…”
“We have located the crew,” Fyzzix said dispassionately.
“You have?” Caballus said. “Where?”
“Secondary cargo hold,” replied Fyzzix.
Caballus frowned. “Condition?” he asked, as though he already knew the answer.
Hairtrigger’s disembodied voice sounded unsure. “They’re… they’re all…”
“Fragmentary,” Fyzzix finished. “They were petrified by means consistent with the previous killings, then fractured by blunt impact, and sealed in shipping containers. Cursory examination indicates an overall volume of stone that would correspond to approximately one hundred and fifty adult male ponies. That is roughly the number indicated by the crew manifest in Ver Kaufer Trade House records, and matches the expected crew necessary to operate a vessel of this size and configuration. There’s also mild structural damage…”
“That’s all the proof we needed,” said Caballus. “The Stone Cold Killer is working with the Children, and right now he’s our best lead. We find him, and we’ll find them. Continue to the Enginarium. Mystic and I are going to check something before we go to the bridge. Over and out.”
The Inquisipony set off down the corridor, following the speckled trail of burns. Mystic followed, and it led them up another flight of stairs, through two bulkheads, and stopped at a broad oaken door.
“Must be the captain’s quarters,” Caballus mumbled as he put a hoof on it and pushed. With a groan, it opened, and the two stepped inside.
As soon as she crossed the threshold, Mystic felt the temperature drop, and she shivered. The entire room—the desk, the bookshelves and all the other expensive looking decorations, even the dead embers in the fireplace—were covered in a thin layer of frost. She pulled her cloak over her head and clutched it tight around her with magic.
Seemingly unaffected, Caballus began rifling through the desk drawers, pulling out scrolls and parchments, scanning for something useful. While he did that, Mystic picked apart the furnishings, looking under sculptures and behind paintings, but she found no hidden compartments, nor anything that appeared out of the ordinary.
She often marveled at Caballus’s keen eye for spotting clues amongst the mundane, having no such knack herself. If there was something here, it would be him who found it; that’s why he was the Inquisipony.
Instead, she trotted over to the bookshelves. Compared to them, her own collection aboard Her Solar Majesty seemed paltry. The thought that a traitor like Tier could take so many books with him wherever he went felt like injustice. It wasn’t like Caballus couldn’t requisition more books, or even a bigger ship, if that was an issue. So why didn’t he? An Inquisipony could have anything they needed to do their job, and whatever else they wanted besides. Maybe she would ask him…
“Find anything?” said Caballus, jarring Mystic from her train of thought.
“Oh, no. Nothing. But there might be something in these books.” She concentrated on her horn, building some heat there, and waved it across the bindings. The frost melted enough to reveal their titles.
His skeptical expression made it clear that Caballus suspected she just wanted to take a peek into the small library. He skimmed some of the books.
“Half of these are listed on the Index Proscriptus,” he said doubtfully. “If Tier had done nothing else wrong but be caught with these, he would have been burned at the stake along with them. In Defense of the Future: A Logical Disc-Horse… Bestiaria Prohibitae… The Eight Sermons of the Dread Saint Blasphemius. We don’t have time to spare for these right now, and when we do, it will only be to destroy them or have a few of the more benign ones sealed in the Friendquisition’s archives forever.”
“Well… how about… this one?” Mystic replied, levitating a tome that had none of the grotesque pictograms or macabre script of the others.
Caballus read the title. Tactica Equestrialis: A History of the Later Equestrian Crusades. He must have sat through a hundred lectures about that ancient and venerable tome in his years at the Stablea. The hopeful, pleading look on Mystic’s face was almost too much to bear.
Almost.
“No.” he said sternly. He could get her another copy later if she really wanted to read it. Everything on this shelf, no matter how harmless it looked, had to be considered tainted.
Hanging her head, Mystic floated the book back to its place. Caballus put a hoof on her shoulder. “Come on, there’s nothing here. Let’s get to the bridge.”
The captain’s quarters were never far from the bridge on most ships, and they found it after only a few minutes of wandering the empty halls. To Mystic, it seemed that they could have found it just by going in the direction that felt coldest. They stopped just outside the door.
“Come in, Captain,” said Fyzzix in their ears.
“Go ahead.”
“We have reached the Enginarium, and I believe I have identified the ship’s navigational stack.”
“Can you download it?” Caballus asked, a hint of excitement creeping into his tone. With the data contained in the ships nav-stack, they might be able to retrace the ship’s steps and find out where else Tier had been plying his heretical trade, and where the Children might be hiding.
“Standby,” Fyzzix replied. The following pause was altogether too long for Mystic’s liking, who was now shivering where she stood. “Negative. It has some kind of… encryption. I’ve never seen anything quite like it, except…”
Caballus perked up. “What? What is it?”
Another moment of silence, save for the chattering of Mystic’s teeth, passed before Fyzzix responded. “I can’t be sure. But I will have to remove the stack to properly access and decode it. It’s going to take some hardware.”
“Do it,” said Caballus. Then he put his hoof on the door lever. It swung open with a metallic screech.
The bridge looked like a frozen tomb. The red emergency lights gave the room a menacing, infernal tint. Every surface was coated with ice, reflecting the light in all directions and illuminating every cogitator terminal and system workstation.
It was deathly still, every crunch of hoof on the ice echoing like shattering glass. Mystic lit her horn, pushing back the red and turning the room a green-blue color. They walked between the crew stations, cautiously making their way from one end to the other in search of something useful.
“Do you see anything?” Caballus asked her.
She turned to him to answer, but she brushed up against an icicle hanging from a holo-table while she wasn’t looking. When it clinked on the ground, she flinched.
Caballus gave her a deadpan look and started chipping the ice off the helm controls with his hoof. Sheepishly, Mystic tugged her cloak even tighter, closing her eyes and taking a deep breath.
Between the clangs of Caballus’s strikes, Mystic thought she heard another sound. “Quiet,” she told him. Caballus stopped his picking and perked his ears up.
Mystic strained her hearing, and followed the sound. It was faint, like someone was… crying. She bent down under the holo-table, and her horn-light revealed a pony there.
“Caballus, over here!” she cried. The figure was curled up in a fetal ball, trembling and pale as snow. The poor creature’s mane was a frozen, tangled patch on its head, though Mystic couldn’t tell its gender. “Are… are you alright?”
The pony shuddered, but otherwise didn’t move. Mystic heard it mumbling something, but she couldn’t make it out. “What happened to you?”
“He t-t-told m-me to wait f-for somep-pony to c-c-come,” it said.
By then, Caballus was beside her. “Who told you?” he demanded
“C-C-Can’t you hear them?” the pony squeaked, “They howl b-beyond the veil. They feast on our hate, and drink our fear. He s-said they w-wouldn’t stop, the t-tears wouldn’t s-stop, not until somepony c-came.”
She brightened her light, making him cringe, and she made out the shape of his cutie mark: a snowflake, surrounded by sparkles.
Sparkles. Just like hers. A chill that had nothing to do with the cold ran down Mystic’s spine.
“What does that mean?” she asked, the hair on her neck standing on end. “What happens when somepony comes?”
Finally lifting its head, the pony, a colt only just younger than Mystic, looked her in the eye. Though they were red and puffy, they still were bright blue, and long streams of tears had run from them down his cheeks and frozen there. An on his forehead, jutting like an icicle, was a horn.
“I was sup-p-posed to kill them,” he whispered.
Caballus shoved Mystic away to avoid the jagged shards of ice that erupted from the floor. Numb from cold and shock, Mystic kicked and struggled to find purchase on the icy metal beneath her. Her mind reeled; it was a unicorn, a rogue in thrall to the Darkness. A witch.
“Run!” Caballus shouted, helping her to her feet. An instant later, more frozen spikes flew at them like darts, impaling cogitators and vid-screens as the two ducked behind them. They had almost made it to the door when Mystic heard more of the frozen missiles whistling behind her. Glancing back, she must have slipped, because she suddenly felt the sensation of falling, and saw flashes of a dark, grey shape over her.
She wasn’t sure how she ended up in back in the corridor outside the bridge, but that was the next thing Mystic remembered. She was running, with Caballus behind her yelling into his comm-bead.
“We have to get out of here, now! Just rip it out if you have to, and meet us in the cargo hold!”
They reached a bulkhead door that Mystic didn’t recognize from their route up. Were they lost? Fyzzix’ reply was garbled to Mystic, but Caballus responded with “I don’t care! There’s a rogue unicorn on the loose in here!”
He cranked the lever to the side and put his hooves on it to push, but ice started to form around the edges of the door, sealing it shut. It spread so rapidly that it engulfed his hooves before he could pull it away, leaving him stuck to the metal. Mystic turned back, and saw the unicorn at the far end of the corridor, panting thick clouds of mist.
She was shivering even harder now, only now it was from fear. She felt cold sweat and helplessness trickle down her back. Caballus couldn’t help her. She had to face the unicorn alone, against every instinct that told her to run.
How could you run when he needs you? her inner voice said. This is what he keeps you for: to fight the enemies that only you can fight.
It was right. Caballus, with his courage and his cunning, could defeat any heretic or zoono. Of that, Mystic was sure. But he had no defense against magic. No defense but her. This was her purpose.
Filled with resolve, Mystic planted herself in the center of the corridor. She pulled arcane power toward her horn, preparing it for an attack. The ice-witch struck first, flinging more icicles at her. Without time to properly defend, she released her offense instead. A web of lightning shot from her horn down the hallway, filling it with crackling energy. The projectiles were vaporized in mid-flight, and the metal walls were shredded as the spell passed through them.
When the deadly net reached the other end, it burst in a blinding flash. For a moment, Mystic lost her enemy in a cloud of vapor. But then the rogue emerged, encased in a thick layer of ice, like a suit of armor that sizzled and steamed from the dissipating electricity. A cold wind whipped up in narrow hall, swirling around him until it lifted him off the floor. Snow stung Mystic’s vision, but she saw blue light shining in the witch’s eyes like beacons in a blizzard. She suspected that she had made him angry.
As if to answer, the red emergency lights in the corridor began flashing, and klaxons blared. Between the loud wails and howling winds, Mystic could barely hear Fyzzix’ voice shouting over the comms. She didn’t catch most of what he said, but she did manage to pick out a few phrases, such as “cascading failure,” “plasma reactor,” and “explosion imminent.”
“We need to get out of here!” Caballus yelled. “Help me with this ice!”
Mystic launched a fireball down the hallway. “A little busy!” she replied, but she tried to start a torch spell to heat the door. With all the noise, however, she found it impossible to concentrate long enough to melt anything, and was interrupted by staving off another volley of sharpened ice. By now, the hostile unicorn was halfway to them, close enough to hear his sobbing, broken by manic, unnerving cackles.
Desperate, Mystic shot another fireball, aimed not at the witch, but at the pipes running along the ceiling above his head. A jet of pressurized water drenched him, and his reflexive defense was to lash out with yet more ice-magic, sealing himself in a frozen prison.
“That won’t hold him for long,” said Caballus.
Mystic nodded, and aimed her horn at the cold metal door. “I have an idea.” Magic gathered at the end of the appendage, a ball of distorted space appearing there. After a moment, she touched it lightly against the bulkhead. A loud CLUNG! rang out as the compressed kinetic force was released. The shock wave shattered the ice around Caballus’s hooves.
She did it once more, ignoring the sound of cracking ice behind her. This time it was even stronger, the ball vibrating violently in her magical grasp. Caballus braced her, and they both closed their eyes. Ice build-up and steel hinges alike gave way in a deafening crash, blowing the door into the next corridor beyond.
“NO!” yelled the ice-witch, in the disturbing timbre that reminded Mystic uncomfortably of herself. “You have to die! He said you do!”
“Are you in the hold yet?” Caballus said into his comm.
Roughshod’s voice emerged from the static a moment later. “Yeah, we’re here! Where are you? This whole ship is about to go critical!”
Caballus and Mystic jumped over the mangled door and galloped as fast as they could. She even heaved up the metal telekinetically, and flung it backward at the rogue.
“We’ll be there in sixty seconds,” said Caballus. “I want you to rig the ramp to close and lock itself. Then you three get out. We’ll be right behind you.”
“But… are you gonna-“
“Just do it!” the Inquisipony snapped. He bounded down the stairs ahead, flung open one last hatch, and skidded into the primary cargo hold. Mystic followed behind, tumbling on the last few steps and rolling through the final passage. Caballus slammed it closed and locked it. Finally able to light her torch spell, Mystic welded the locking mechanism permanently shut.
Caballus looked behind them. On the far side of the hold, the loading ramp was rising, slowly but implacably. “That’s enough,” he told her. It was obvious there wasn’t enough time for her to seal the edges. “We have to move!”
The pair galloped across the empty hold, hooffalls drowned out by the banging coming from the other side of the door. Halfway to the ramp, Mystic glanced back. Huge dents bulged from the door with every blow. Then gouges appeared, as though claws of ice were slashing at the other side. Finally, with a shriek of tearing steel, the door gave way. Furious winds nearly tore the cloak from Mystic’s neck.
Ahead, the gap between the ramp and the roof of the hold was quickly disappearing. She could hear Caballus panting and wheezing, and saw deep wounds on his flank and side. From when I stumbled on the bridge, she realized, he must have shielded me.
Her own lungs burned almost too much to breathe. The incline was increasing as well, taking more and more effort to keep going up. It felt to the green unicorn that every stride she took only brought it closer to locking them in the doomed ship. At least we’ll have company, she thought.
But in spite of her estimations and the protests of her legs, she was almost there. Caballus reached the opening first, straddling it and reaching a hoof back to help her. Just one last lunge and-
Pain shot through Mystic’s left leg and she faltered. She tried to move it again, but it felt… stuck. Eyes watering, she looked down and saw an icicle impaling the ankle, pinning it to the deck. The sight of it made her feel faint…
“Give me your hoof!” said Caballus, grasping for her.
She tried, but he was just out of reach. Mystic looked down at her leg, and past it, at the witch. He was almost on top of her.
“Do you hear them?” he shouted. “Do you hear the voices too?”
“Shut up!” Crying herself, Mystic aimed her horn at her ankle. She had no choice. Just one more spell and she would be free. All it would cost her is…
Suddenly, Caballus was above her. He put his mouth on the end of the ice-shard sticking up. “Hold still,” he said through clenched teeth, and pulled. It snapped, and he hefted her onto his back, crawling toward the edge of the ramp. In seconds it would close, either trapping them inside or crushing them.
“No, don’t leave me alone with them,” cried the rogue. By now his tears had frozen in long streams that hung off his face. “They’ll go away! All you have to do is DIE!”
“You first,” the Inquisipony said, and he pushed off.
The next thing Mystic was aware of was a falling sensation. It was strange; it felt so far away, like it was happening to somepony else. Caballus’s grip slipped and suddenly she couldn’t see him anymore, only the ceiling of the hangar spinning above her. Blackness started to creep into the edges of her vision. Getting darker…
She felt hooves around her again. Deceleration jarred her back to her senses, and she saw an orange face with a big, red eye. “Got you, little missy,” said Hairtrigger, grunting from the g-forces.
Mystic looked down and saw Roughshod, galloping beneath her with Caballus on his back. Up ahead, Fyzzix was beckoning them toward the open hangar doors. She blinked, and they were outside, the hangar falling away behind them.
“Keep going!” the Meq-priest said, no exertion in his artificial voice. Mystic must have blinked again, because the hangar was now shrinking into the distance. “We haven’t reached minimum safe distance yet. I estimate plasma containment failure should still be a few-”
Mystic didn’t know if he ever finished that sentence, because there was a flash that swallowed the world, and a BOOM! that finally sent her into darkness.
The light bathed Sniffles, white and blinding, but he did not blink. If his eyes even still felt pain, he didn’t know it, since the sensation had long since become alien to him. It faded, leaving spots on his retinas, which would fade in turn. If there was one truth Sniffles was sure of, it was that everything faded eventually.
“Like a flower,” his companion said to him. A glass of punch, dark, strong and served in the finest crystal, floated to the pony’s lips. A forked tongue licked the juice from a row of glistening fangs. “See how it blossoms? Its petals open to us, and show us another sun that Equestria might worship. A new dawn of war.”
Sniffles sniffled. “I never fancied you a poet.” The light from the explosion had just subsided, and a cloud of super-heated dust began its ascent over the rest of the aerodrome. Perhaps it was shaped a little like a flower, the Pony marine supposed. The deck shifted beneath their hooves, their ship adjusting its course to steer wide of it.
“Oh yes,” the pony replied, his gaze fixed on the fireball through the glass dome of the observation deck. “I’ve studied all the greats. If you like, I could recite from The Salt-licks of Longing for you.”
“Never heard of it,” said Sniffles. He wiped his nose on his armor. It wouldn’t do to ruin the carpet here; it was much nicer than on the Glücksritter.
“It’s a classic. The only book of poetry to be officially endorsed by the Heliarchy for its spiritual fortitude. It was even written by an Inquisipony. Quite stirring.”
Sniffles’ disinterest was palpable. “Is that so.”
“Most assuredly,” his companion said, unperturbed. “Whatever your boorish tastes in the written word, you can’t tell me there is no beauty down there in this scene before you.”
The Apostle of Smooze nodded slowly. “A shame about Hoarfrost, though. He was such a sweet colt.”
“And loyal too,” the pony said, “He had nothing when I found him. When I did, I gave him the two things he had always lacked: power and purpose. Unfortunately, he was proving to be too unstable to continue his… studies. Still, his instability gave him a perfect place in my plans, and he performed it well.”
A mare in servant’s garb totted up with a data-scroll resting on a tray on her back and holding a hoof over her nose. She presented it to Sniffles, and timidly retreated away.
“It seems our… asset is ready to begin the next phase.”
“So impatient,” the pony said, taking another sip. “Always hungry for that next kill. Very well. If all is prepared, call the Children. We've got a party to prepare for.”