Gilda was normally slow to wake up, but a bucket of ice water really helped expedite the process. She came to, gasping and coughing, and saw nothing but the inside of a black hood. She felt nothing but an uncomfortable chair beneath her and ropes cutting painfully into her flesh. “Was that really necessary?” somepony asked.
The bag was removed, and she immediately missed it. A blinding spotlight kept her eyes from adjusting to the otherwise dark room and made her head hurt. I must have made someone mad, she thought darkly. Terrific. Now I get to start the day with waterboarding.
“Gilda?” the voice asked. “You are Gilda, aren’t you? It would be a shame to go through all this trouble for the wrong griffon.” It sounded cultured, with no accent that she could recognize. Probably the mob, then, she thought. Padre Amati loves doing this kind of thing.
“Who wants to know?”
“Unimportant.” Papers were shuffled around for a moment. “I represent a very powerful individual that has need of your services.”
Gilda tried to work her claws around to cut the ropes tying her to the chair, but everything below her wrists was going numb from the poor circulation. “You’ve got a funny way of asking for help,” she grunted.
A metal pipe smacked against her knuckles. Gilda squawked in pain and tried to snatch her claws away. “Keep those where we can see them,” a female voice warned.
Another voice chimed in with “We will be asking the questions, if you please.”
“You’ll have to excuse my friends,” the first pony said. “They were recently entrusted with the success of our operation, and it was a disaster. They are still upset.”
“We were simply unlucky,” the pipe holder complained. “We could easily do the job ourselves, but new help has been brought in without our consent. We find this to be quite irritating.”
“Now is neither the time nor the place for this argument!” the first voice snapped. “Gilda, we believe that you can help us. My name is Horte Cuisine. Consider this a job interview.”
Gilda looked around, trying to puzzle out where her kidnappers had taken her. All she could make out was a bare concrete floor. She craned her neck, trying to get a look at the pipe wielding pony, and instead saw a table of torture tools laid out behind her. “This is the weirdest damn interview process I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen a lot.”
Horte Cuisine laughed. “I’m in a bit of a bind, I’ll admit. I don’t have the option of letting you refuse. There is a carrot in addition to this stick, if it helps.” A small envelope dropped onto the table, its source hidden by the darkness. “Those are the details of your assignment. Not even I know what is inside.”
“Griffons aren’t wild about carrots,” Gilda said. “How much are we talking, exactly?”
“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”
Gilda rolled her eyes and tried to hurry the negotiations along. With a little prodding she finally got the stallion to tell her how much she would be paid, but he had to be lying. No mercenary ever made that much from a single job. Or any ten jobs, for that matter.
“What’s this?” a new voice asked. Metal grated on metal as something slid off the torture table.
“That’s a beak file,” Horte answered helpfully. He began to elaborate, but a horribly shrill grinding noise interrupted him. “Dear goddesses, what are you doing?”
The new voice giggled and swiped the file back and forth a few more times. “I’m going to borrow this for a bit,” she said. “Is there a bathroom around here?”
*****
Horte Cuisine and Lotus met in the mansion’s sitting room after leaving Gilda to think for a while. Aloe was still keeping an eye on her, though the griffon wasn’t likely to be a problem. If Lotus’s sister couldn’t keep her in line while she was chained up and blindfolded, then the twins were simply not fit for this kind of work.
“I’m worried about our new recruit,” Horte said the moment they were out of earshot. “I doubt that we can trust her.”
“She will do as she is told,” Lotus assured him. “Money can be very persuasive.”
“I meant the other one.” He cast a worried glance toward the bathroom. “I don’t like her. Our employer has no idea what kind of monster he’s hired.”
Lotus gave him a smug smile. “We spoke with him yesterday,” she said. “He seems very intelligent. I believe that he knows exactly what he is doing, and my sister agrees.”
It only took a moment for Horte Cuisine to suppress his frustration. He normally wouldn't have cared in the slightest who his employer decided to talk to, but this was supposed to be his operation. He had tactical command, while another pony held the purse strings. It was supposed to be a very standard arrangement, but the endless meddling was making his life quite difficult.
“I don’t appreciate it when ponies go over my head,” he said as politely as he could manage. “From now on, you’ll tell me before accepting any more clandestine meetings with our employer. Is that clear?” Lotus nodded obediently. “Good. You’ll also start carrying a firearm. I think that your pride has cost us quite enough already.”
“We have no need for your weapons,” Lotus sniffed.
The stallion’s laugh made her grit her teeth, and the noise made him shiver. It sounded like glass being ground into powder. “Of course not. Why would you?” he asked. “I doubt you could handle one anyway. The mighty guardians of the Empire have no need for the weapons of lesser creatures, do they? Nine hundred years, and you still haven’t learned.”
Lotus’s eye began to twitch. “Tread carefully, Renaissance stallion.”
He allowed himself a rare moment of self indulgence. “Do not expect me to dance around the truth to preserve your pathetic sense of nostalgia. You are the product of a culture that was too weak and stagnant to survive. You cling to foolish superstitions and outdated customs rather than innovating and adapting. It’s no wonder the rest of your kind died out; they were so busy being self-righteous and bigoted that they failed to notice the world changing around them.”
The cool composure of Lotus’s face shattered. Horte Cuisine leaned back to avoid her kick and, with a deft twist of his hooves, dropped her into a submission hold. “Stop struggling!” he ordered after one of her flailing hooves nearly broke his jaw. Her prodigious strength made it almost impossible to hold her in place, even with his superior position. “You’ll force me to hurt you, and that would make you much less useful.”
Lotus snarled at him in a language that hadn’t been spoken in centuries. Horte rolled his eyes and tried to cling to her leg for a while longer. He wasn’t sure how long he would be able to restrain her. “Yes, yes, you’re a vengeful remnant of a bygone age. We’re all terribly impressed.” He leaned in closer to whisper into her ear. “Do ancient warriors feel pain? What would happen if I decided to break your leg off? Would it eventually grow back?”
He pushed just a little harder, twisting Lotus’s leg in a direction that it wasn’t built for. A sound like splintering glass filled the air, and Lotus whimpered in pain.
“Let her go,” Aloe warned. Horte looked up and discovered that she had snuck into the room during all the commotion. “If you harm my sister I will pull each of your limbs off, one by one. Not even you could survive a fight against both of us at once.”
“I assume that it would be much easier if one of you were missing a leg,” Horte pointed out. “Nevertheless, you are correct. At the moment you have me at a disadvantage.” He rolled away from Lotus, climbed shakily to his hooves, and dusted himself off. “Circumstances will be different if you fail again,” he warned, and stormed out of the room.
I should never have accepted this assignment, Horte thought sourly as he climbed the stairs and made for the master bathroom. I don’t need the money, nor do I need this kind of aggravation. From now on, I need to do more research before accepting work from strange voices on the phone.
Unfortunately, turning down this job hadn’t been an option. Horte Cuisine and his companion were, for some reason, marked for death. He had no idea who wanted him dead, but the assassins would keep coming endlessly unless he could find a way to disappear. Fixing the problem would require both money and powerful friends. He had plenty of the former, but was short on the latter. His reclusive lifestyle had finally come back to bite him.
Sorbet was sitting by the window in the master bedroom, flipping through a study of the War of Unification. She looked up as he entered and immediately tossed the book aside. “It was just a minor disagreement,” Horte assured her. He watched her make a few quick gestures with her hooves and nodded in agreement. “Yes, I know that I’m a fool for antagonizing them. There’s no need to point it out.”
Several more words in sign language followed, and tears began to build up in Sorbet’s eyes. “There’s no need for any of that,” Horte said comfortingly. He stroked her mane with one of his hooves. “I’ve deal with worse situations. We’re going to be fine.”
Sorbet’s hoof tenderly brushed against his bloodied jaw. “That’s nothing,” he assured her. “Really, I’m quite alright. It’s just a scratch.” He sighed heavily as she ran to the bathroom and began digging through the medical cabinet.
“I’m quite capable of taking care of myself,” he said gently, but made no attempt to stop her. Sorbet cleaned the shallow cut across his jaw, bandaged it, and scrutinized her work with slightly skewed eyes. Horte pecked her on the cheek, glad that she was at least having one of her good days.
That’s the spirit. The “Renaissance stallion” smiled and turned his head to the side so that she could further inspect her work. There’s always a silver lining. “Things are going to be alright,” he soothed. “I promise.”