In a world tucked somewhere between Equestria and Victorian London, the aardhorse detective Currycombs solves crimes with her friend and colleague, the unicorn medical mare Silver Scalpel.
Through a long-forgotten mirror buried deep within Starswirl the Bearded's laboratory lies the equine kingdom of Hevosenvalta. There, the unicorn medical mare Silver Scalpel has just received an honorable discharge from Her Majesty's cavalry due to injuries she sustained on the frontier. She finds herself at loose ends in the capital city of Ehwazton until a chance encounter with the aardhorse detective Currycombs changes both their lives forever.
The cover art was commissioned from Wilvarin-Liadon, and the first chapter, "A Study in Sorrel," was originally published in NonBinary Review #9, Spring 2016. But the rest of the stories are all new to the site here.
Upon my mustering out, I retained two mementos of my decade in Her Majesty's service: the scars from that damnable griffin's claws running deep and jagged along my left shoulder from chest to withers, and the sixteen hobs a month to which, I was assured by the quartermaster, my injuries entitled me for the rest of my life. Having no family but the cavalry, however, I quickly found myself adrift in Ehwazton, the entire city seemingly empty of ways to fill the time I now had on my hooves.
It was, to say the least, a most curious sensation. My life since fillyhood, after all, had been driven by such a desire to learn the healing arts that no one at the orphanage had even feigned surprise when the eigensigil that appeared upon my flanks at puberty was a crossed pair of silver scalpels, the very name the nuns had given me years before after performing the rituals on my Discernment Day. But now, every limping step I took reminded me of the frontier skirmishes and the field hospitals full of equines shattered and shredded beyond my magical ability to repair. The dark thoughts proved more than enough to quench my former drive: I was left with no desires, no needs, nothing I wanted, and nothing to the best of my knowledge that wanted me.
In my first few weeks as a newly minted civilian, I kept to myself during the day in the rooms I rented despite knowing that they would eventually prove too expensive for my pension. Then, once Her Majesty had used the Solara Scepter to lower the sun for the evening, I would don one of the rough, green, woolen blankets I'd grown to favor during my stint abroad and would venture forth in an attempt to lose myself among the aardhorses, pegasi, and unicorns who crowded the capital.
That attempt, of course, proved to be in vain. I've simply never understood how one could take oneself anywhere to lose oneself. But then, being too literal minded has ever been one of my faults.
On these nightly wanderings, I began to notice a tendency to gravitate toward the aardhorse parts of Ehwazton. I'd known plenty of pegasi in the service, of course, but their good-natured boisterousness didn't suit my current mood at all. And unicorns reminded me all too much of what I saw in the mirror every morning—or what I would have seen if I hadn't driven hobnails into the bathroom wall to more easily drape my blankets across that reflective surface.
The calmness of aardhorses under fire had always impressed me, and plodding along the streets among the simple apartment buildings they favored, I breathed more easily, their cafés serving good, solid fare to good, solid citizens finished with their daily work and now relaxing with family and friends. Steadiness, gentleness, and a quiet devotion to duty radiated from every aardhorse who passed me, their eigensigils honest symbols such as hammers and bricks, lamps and carts and baked goods: nothing fancy or pretentious or inconsequential in the lot. And not one, not a single one, stared or winced or seemed at all concerned with this lone unicorn in their midst. Their sweet indifference filled the night sky like the aroma of magnolia blossoms, and odd as it might be to say, it soothed me in ways that none of the well-meaning professionals in Her Majesty's rehabilitation facilities had been able to.
So the bellowed "I told you no!" from the alleyway ahead came as a complete surprise, every aardhorse around me snapping a head up, eyes going wide and white-rimmed, the air suddenly sour with fear. An equine tumbled from the alley's mouth—hooves flailing, coattails flying—and rolled upright in the glow of the firefly-filled streetlamp, the figure's hide as dark as charcoal, the red mane in a tangle.
The whole crowd but me shied away with whinnies and snorts, but the figure, straightening, aimed a front hoof in my specific direction. "You!" came a shout in a raspy but unmistakably female voice. "You're a medical mare! Come with me quickly! There's not a moment to lose!"
That she was an aardhorse I could see at once, no horn on her forehead or wings at her sides. Her eyes shone in the firefly light almost as if she were stricken with fever, but the wiry muscles evident beneath her unfastened Mulester coat betrayed neither twitch nor any other sort of uncertainty as she spun and dashed back into the darkened space between the buildings.
For an instant I hesitated, but the call to duty struck me as squarely between the eyes as a bucket of cool water on a hot day: unlimbering myself, I raced into the unknown—
And reared back almost immediately, the lane blocked by what appeared in the dimness to be multiple shadows. I managed to control my hooves before the fear I'd learned my last few months in griffin territory could cause me to strike out, and my eyes growing used to the darkness showed me the strange mare squatted down beside a pegasus stallion sprawled across the cobblestones. The salty tang of blood clung to the breath I gasped in, a telltale rivulet trickling down the stallion's forehead from his close-cropped blonde mane.
Without another thought, I lit my horn, slung off my blanket, and ripped a bandage from one end. "What happened to him?" I asked.
"Never mind that." The mare used a hoof to lift one of the pegasus' wings. "Would you call his coat chestnut or sorrel?"
"What?" I spared a heartbeat or two to blink at her, but having a patient to tend after so long a time focused my attention toward binding the gash between the stallion's ears. "Surely that can't matter in the slightest! Now, we must get this fellow away from here and to a—"
"This fellow," she said with a snort, "is wanted for questioning in regard to a murder, Doctor."
"Murder?" The word sent a chill racing through me, and my magic nearly sputtered out. "There's not been such a crime in Hevosenvalta since—" My memory began sputtering as well, unable to recall clearly the gruesome stories I'd heard as a filly.
Those feverish eyes glinted at me. "Forty-six years ago, as a matter of fact, during the reign of Queen Cumulonimbus' late grandmother." The mare's lips pulled back in a smile that seemed in the uncertain light to reveal more teeth than an equine's head should have. "And it lies now here within our power to solve this dreadful crime."
Goose flesh pimpling my neck, I automatically concluded bandaging the stallion's head. "But how are we to do it?"
"By the color of his coat." The aardhorse glanced around. "You make a good point, however, about moving our subject. Your horn, while useful, of course, glows much too dimly." With narrowed eyes, she surveyed me up and down as assessingly as any drill sergeant I'd ever known. "You lead the way; I'll carry him out to the street."
I began to object, for while the mare seemed as sturdy as any aardhorse, she was a hoofspan shorter than I, and I was several hoofspans shorter than the injured pegasus. Before I could form a single word of protest, however, she had scooted her shoulders beneath the stallion and was flexing her legs to rise up with him draped across her back. "If you would, Doctor?"
The mouth of the alley lay a mere several steps away, but covering that short distance seemed to jog my mind out of its shock. "See here!" I said, craning my head back. "Who are you? And how did you know I was a doctor?"
She gave another snort. "I made a series of inferences based upon your eigensigil, your species, your obvious military training, and your presence in this part of Ehwazton at this time of the evening." Her ears folding, she nodded past me. "Perhaps you could make certain the sidewalk is free of passers-by? I'd like to minimize the commotion we'll be causing when we appear."
A part of me wished to pursue the matter of this 'series of inferences,' but as we were at that point emerging onto the street, I instead focused my attention ahead as had been requested—
Only to see four winged members of the Ehwazton constabulary, their blue jackets and domed hats unmistakable, in earnest conversation with half a dozen uncomfortable-looking aardhorses. Overseeing these from a slight remove, a dour, ivory-coated unicorn in a Mackintosh and a slouch-brimmed hat cast his gaze about the scene as if it had all been especially staged to annoy him.
My first thought upon perceiving these personages, I'll admit, was to slink back into the alleyway. But my companion seemed to have a different idea. "Ah! There you are, Inspector Furlong!" she called from beneath her burden. "I'd begun to fear I'd misplaced you somewhere!"
The rest of the ensuing conversation I shan't record in any detail. Suffice it to say that Inspector Furlong threatened to arrest my companion for assorted crimes and misdemeanors, and when my companion rebuffed him by stating that if she were in jail, she'd not be able to do his job for him, the inspector did indeed arrest the both of us.
Which is how I found myself loaded into the back of a police trailer while the patrolsteeds hitched themselves to the front. To my left lay the unconscious pegasus, to my right sat the glowering mare in the Mulester coat—whose name, despite the loud and extended discussion, I'd still been unable to learn—and with a growl, the inspector clambered in to join us. "Enough of this!" he declared as the patrolsteeds with many a lurch and rattle began hauling us and the trailer away. "I warned you, Ms. Currycombs, what would result if you continued sticking your snout into police business!" He rounded then on me, his own snout wrinkled as if he'd smelled something unpleasant. "And who might you be, madam?"
I straightened my spine. "Dr. Silver Scalpel, late of Her Majesty's 4th Cavalry." And while the inspector was at least a decade older than I, the glare I'd honed in griffin territory, I'd been told more than once, held an edge that was sharp beyond my years. "And my concern here is the welfare of my patient." I gestured to the pegasus and noted with approval that the bloodstain on the front of my makeshift bandage hadn't grown appreciably since I'd applied it.
"Patient?" The inspector's widening eyes moved back and forth beneath his beetled brow between me and the pegasus before he spun upon my companion again. "By Her Majesty's Sun, Currycombs! If you attacked this fellow, I shall personally lock you in the deepest dungeon of the palace!"
"We had a difference of opinion." The mare shrugged, and knowing now that her name was Currycombs, I glanced at her flank for the first time to see whether that item was indeed her eigensigil—
Only to end up staring in confusion at the blankness of her ash-black hide.
A full-grown equine without an eigensigil? My mind raced back through the case histories I'd studied during my medical training, and I simply couldn't recall any mention of an unbesigiled individual older than the age of fifteen!
A clearing of throat snapped my attention back to the mare's face, a tight smile stretched thin across her muzzle. "Hypnotic, isn't it?" she asked with a shimmy of her hips.
Embarrassment heating my ears, I looked away.
The inspector had continued ranting about various forms of incarceration this entire time, and he went on for some minutes longer until Currycombs spoke, her voice slicing through his like one of my namesake blades. "Tell me, Inspector Furlong. Did not Violet Peony identify her father's killer as a sorrel pegasus stallion with a light blonde mane? Did she not give us a partial description of his eigensigil? Did not my own observations at the crime scene confirm the presence of a surprisingly large pegasus stallion with rectangular-headed nails in his shoes?" She moved one of my patient's legs to show his hoofgear.
Furlong's ivory face had darkened appreciably. "None of that excuses your—!"
The trailer jolting to a halt interrupted him this time, and the doors at the back were thrown open to reveal a flagstone courtyard flooded with magelight and lined with blue-coated equines. "Ha!" The inspector gave a sharp nod. "Shetland Yard at last! And now we'll be getting to the truth, Ms. Currycombs!" He gestured to the patrolsteeds peering in. "Take this stallion to the infirmary!"
"Carefully!" I employed the voice I'd used on many an orderly out in the field. "I've not yet had a chance to properly scan for head trauma, and if this buggy ride has had an adverse effect upon my patient"—I aimed my glare at Inspector Furlong once again—"your superiors shall hear of it, sir!"
For the briefest instant, Furlong seemed inclined to argue, but Currycombs gave a quiet chuckle that drew his attention back to her. "Yes, Dr. Scalpel, fine." The inspector waved a hoof again. "Attend your patient. I have more important matters to see to."
So Inspector Furlong and a still-chuckling Currycombs went off in one direction, and I, entwining several basic medical spells into the levitation magic performed by one of the unicorn patrolsteeds, went off in the other. I had no idea what I'd gotten myself involved in, no idea who this pegasus was, no idea how I'd come to be traipsing along the corridors of Shetland Yard among a phalanx of Ehwazton's finest—
But I'd not felt so alive in months.
The elderly unicorn in charge of the police infirmary had a military bearing to her. She introduced herself as Helpful Tonic, and when I inquired, she informed me that she was twenty years retired from Her Majesty's 4th. So we chatted about regimental issues as we settled the pegasus into a bed, and she graciously allowed me to assist her in the diagnostic spells that showed no heavy or permanent damage to our patient.
With both of us satisfied that the pegasus was largely out of danger, we had just settled at her desk so I could begin explaining to her the circumstances of my arrival when her office door burst open and a large group of equines pushed somberly in. Inspector Furlong stomped along at the front with Currycombs behind, her expression that of a cat who'd gotten into the creamery. Beside Currycombs wavered a tear-stained unicorn mare of a light purple hue, and the crowd following them consisted of mares and stallions with a constabulary look about them. Their jackets, ties, and scarves, however, showed them to be higher up the chain of command than anyone I'd yet met this evening.
The parade brought the situation back to me with a sobering shiver: this was the first murder investigation in nearly fifty years, after all...
"Oh, thank you, Ms. Currycombs," the purplish unicorn was saying as they all entered. "This experience has proven to be so horrible, and I can't tell you how grateful I am that you captured the roughneck!"
Inspector Furlong's face seemed one large sneer. "Possibly captured him, Ms. Peony. Let's not get ahead of ourselves."
Currycombs' smile somehow gained another level of smugness, and when her gaze met mine, she actually winked. She turned quickly, however, to the young mare at her side. "Fear not, Ms. Peony. We shall soon have this matter entirely cleared up."
The inspector rolled his eyes toward Dr. Tonic. "If you wouldn't mind, Doctor, we'd like the witness to take a look at your most recent patient."
"Of course, Inspector." She led the way back into the infirmary proper, and I found myself falling in beside Currycombs.
She gave me a nod. "A little excitement does wonders for the disposition, doesn't it, Doctor?"
I wanted to ask her what she meant by that, but a gasp from Ms. Peony drew my attention forward. She was staring at the pegasus. "That's him, Inspector! That's the equine who stabbed Father! Oh, I fear I shall never forget that terrible face!"
Furlong's own face had begun to approach a fairly terrible state itself, and Currycombs slipping through the crowd to our patient's bedside did nothing to improve his looks. "Tut, tut!" Currycombs said, an entirely inappropriate level of jocularity in her voice. "Nothing but absolute certainty will do in a case of this magnitude!" Reaching out a hoof, she raised the edge of the blanket and exposed the pegasus' eigensigil, a fairly generic scene of the sun peeking through some clouds. But instead of inquiring if she recognized the mark, Currycombs asked, "You said your father's murderer had a sorrel coat, did you not, Ms. Peony?"
"Confound it, Currycombs!" Inspector Furlong stomped a hoof. "Half the equines in this room are chestnuts! Coat color can't—!"
"Chestnut?" Currycombs blinked in what was obviously mock surprise. "But Ms. Peony said 'sorrel' rather than 'chestnut.'" She turned her blinking toward the young mare in question. "Wasn't that the word you used, Ms. Peony?"
Ms. Peony blushed a darker purple. "Yes, but surely there's no difference between the two."
"Ah." Currycombs' eyes began hardening. "There is in fact a vital difference. For 'chestnut' is the term used for this coat color here in Ehwazton and the eastern parts of Hevosenvalta. 'Sorrel' is most often used by those living in the western parts of our fair country, a place that, if I'm recalling correctly from our earlier discussions, Ms. Peony, you claimed never to have so much as visited."
"I haven't!" Ms. Peony squeaked. "You...you can check with anyone you like! I've not set hoof outside Ehwazton my entire life!"
Silence thickened the air around us until Inspector Furlong loudly cleared his throat. "If you've a point to make, Ms. Currycombs?"
"I have." Currycombs bent her head around, pulled a file folder from the interior of her jacket with her teeth, and set it on the table beside the bed. "Twenty years ago, according to the helpful staff at East Ehwazton Realty, a married couple, an aardhorse stallion named Collier and a unicorn mare named Keuper Marl, moved to the Lauraceous Gardens area of the capital from their former home in San Pinto. Their first and only child was born four months later, according to baptismal records kept at Our Lady of the Twilight church, which means that this young couple decided to make the arduous move two thousand miles across the country while Ms. Marl was already six to seven months pregnant." Everything about Currycombs had become sharply business-like. "This suggested to me that they were running from something."
"No!" Ms. Peony's demeanor had changed as well, a steeliness coming over her that hadn't been at all in evidence when I'd first set eyes on her. "My parents never ran from anything! Even Mother's illness and death two years ago only strengthened the bonds that united us as a family!"
"Exactly." Currycombs gestured to the pegasus. "So when Hope Springs here arrived at your doorstep—"
"A moment!" Furlong's chin wobbled. "We've only just begun the process of determining this fellow's identity, and you're saying you already know who he is?"
Currycombs sighed. "Hearing the word 'sorrel' and seeing the rectangular heads in the horseshoe prints at the crime scene had already shown me we were dealing with an equine of western origin. My further observation of the streets immediately surrounding Ms. Peony's home revealed an inordinate amount of taxicab wheel ruts: the suburbs of Lauraceous Gardens, after all, aren't exactly located on the main transportation thoroughfares. Feathers at the scene and Ms. Peony's testimony said we were looking for a pegasus stallion, and since few pegasi go into the carriage horse business, my inquiries at the local cab companies led me quickly to Hope Springs. He'd taken lodgings in that part of town where you and I first ran into one another, Doctor." She gave me another nod, then turned what I could only call a smirk at Inspector Furlong. "It's also the reason I asked you to canvass the area, Furlong. I knew your patrolsteeds would drive Springs into making a break for it, and I intercepted him as he attempted to flee." She sighed. "Alas, he was reluctant to accompany me, however."
Furlong's jaw was clenched so tightly, his mouth seemed to be but a single stroke of ink across his muzzle. "Very well, Ms. Currycombs. I shall admit your methods show some promise and will arrest this blackguard for the murder of—"
"Murder?" Currycombs stared at the inspector. "Haven't you listened to a word I've said? There's been no murder here!" She waved a hoof. "No murder at all!"
Most of the police officials, whom I'd almost forgotten were even among us, started back in alarm, and one stallion with gray streaks in his mane shouted, "No murder? How can you possibly—?"
"Superintendent!" Dr. Tonic's ears folded, and though her voice was quiet, every word hit like a slap. "This is an infirmary, sir!"
"But—!" The superintendent looked back and forth between the doctor and Currycombs. "You examined the body, Doctor! Collier was stabbed straight through the heart, was he not?"
"And yet?" Currycombs was looking at Ms. Peony again. "From their names and sigils, I assume your parents met while working the mines out west? And I further assume that your father was dying of the same lung disease that claimed your mother?"
Ms. Peony had gone completely still, her complexion now the palest possible shade of lavender. Currycombs went on: "And when Hope Springs appeared on your doorstep, whatever fear had driven your parents from San Pinto twenty years ago gripped your household yet again. Such was the desperation that overwhelmed you and your father that the two of you concocted this scheme whereby you assisted your father in using that knife to shorten his own life by a few months and then endeavored to blame his death on Mr. Springs. I don't know the details—oddly enough, Mr. Springs refused to discuss anything with me during our brief interview even after I informed him that you were attempting to frame him as your father's murderer."
"You—" Ms. Peony's voice had faded as well. "You have no proof."
Currycombs shrugged. "I need none. As for the law, they will now no doubt reexamine your father's body and confirm that he had advanced pneumoconiosis or some related ailment. They will journey to San Pinto and dig out the details of your parents' relationship to Mr. Springs' parents—I would recommend, Furlong, that you focus your investigation toward some sort of marriage contract that Collier and Keuper Marl decided not to honor."
"They were forced!" The words could barely emerge from Ms. Peony's mouth, her teeth were so tightly clenched. "Those bastards would've shunned them if they hadn't signed, and alone, they never would've survived out there on the—!" Falling onto her haunches, she clapped her front hooves over her mouth, her eyes closed and her ears back.
I'll admit to staring in astonishment, but I was hardly alone among those in attendance. "Then," I managed to say in Currycombs' general direction. "Everything you said? It's true?"
She made a popping sound with her lips. "It's my eigensigil, Doctor: the invisible, omnipresent truth."
My gaze hopped back to her empty flanks, but she was already turning for the door of Dr. Tonic's office. "I believe, Inspector Furlong, that you can manage the last few details yourself? I shall be happy to testify in court should you need me, though I'll have to get back to you with my new address: I'm to be evicted tomorrow morning from my current room." And she vanished through the doorway.
For another a pair of heartbeats, I stood as dumbfounded as the rest, but then I kicked my hooves into motion and clattered out after her. Half expecting the hall to be empty, I instead beheld her dragging her tail, her mane drooping down to nearly brush the tile. I reached her side quickly therefore, and before I could organize a single thought, I found myself blurting out, "Sixteen hobs a month!"
Currycombs blinked at the floor before lifting her head. "What are you proposing, Doctor?"
"I'm in need of lodgings myself," I said, my mind finally catching up to the rest of me. "Have you space for another in your rooms?"
"I haven't." Her ears perked. "But with an extra sixteen a month, we could afford the larger quarters upstairs. Come along and I'll show you the place." She cocked her head. "You don't mind hammer dulcimer music, I hope?"
The phrase "moving day" had always conjured to my mind a pair of conflicting emotions: excitement on the one hoof, and tedium on the other. For in my youth, the romance of leaving behind the old and the familiar while embracing the new and the fresh, it had seemed to me, would clash rather dissonantly with the commonplace but necessary tasks of packing, lugging, unpacking, and arranging.
Of course, having grown up in one of Her Majesty's orphan asylums, I had no personal experience with such matters. After all, upon my eighteenth birthday, I'd gone from the care of the nuns directly into the army as a newly minted medical mare with no chattels to speak of. And when the griffin-induced injuries I'd sustained on the frontier saw me mustered out after a decade in harness, the entirety of my personal possessions fit quite neatly into the pair of panniers slung across my back.
Therefore, with nothing of the commonplace clinging to my current circumstances, I allowed myself to toss my mane a bit as I trotted along the cobbled streets of Ehwazton. For not only was I moving into a room to which—novelty of novelties—I alone would retain a key, but the aardhorse who would occupy the apartment's other bedroom and with whom I would share the large sitting and dining area was indeed one of the most extraordinary equines I'd ever met.
Granted, I'd only been introduced to Currycombs the day before, but to say that she had made an impression upon me would be a great understatement. Assisting her and the detectives of Shetland Yard had rekindled a spark in me that I'd not felt since leaving my regiment, and when I'd learned at the conclusion of the case that Currycombs was in search of someone to share rooming expenses, we'd formed a partnership on the spot. Last night, the two of us had visited an apartment upstairs from her current digs along Bakery Row, and I was now unable to keep from high-stepping a bit as I inhaled the aroma of fresh bread that was to provide the atmosphere for my new life.
Bakery Row was an aardhorse neighborhood, and the flanks of those who shared the street with me all sported pies and cakes, carts and ovens, muffins and baguettes, eigensigils that symbolized the tasks from which the area had taken its name. Nonetheless, I received hardly a glance: other unicorns strode about patronizing the shops; pegasi wheeled down from the crisp blue autumn morning to deliver and carry away packages; and I'd carefully draped my shoulders in the longest of my sturdy green blankets to mask the foul scars puckering the hide along my left foreleg.
At the base of the stairs leading up to number 21, sandwiched between Trencher's Panini Emporium on the left and a tea house called 'Twas Brillig on the right, I stopped, took another breath—and had to cough at a sudden acrid tinge to the air. Motion pulled my attention upward, and my ears tightened against my head to see black smoke trickling from around the windows of my new apartment. Activating my magic, I wrenched the key from its spot in my panniers, but one of the windows flying open and a familiar ash-gray head lunging partway out arrested any further action on my part. "Ah!" Currycombs called down, seemingly oblivious to the billows pouring past her. "Good morning, Doctor! Might I ask your assistance in a small matter?"
"Fire!" somebody shouted across the street.
"Not at all!" Currycombs shouted back. "Contrary to the popular aphorism, this smoke"—she gestured dismissively with a hoof—"instead indicates my most successful experiment yet in detecting chemical reagents in ash particulates!"
"Fire, I say again!" came the same voice.
Currycombs rolled her eyes, then returned her gaze to mine. "If you'd kindly join me, Scalpel? Before I once again have to explain science to the clydesdales of the fire brigade?" And she drew her head back into the miasma.
Bounding up the steps, I stabbed my key into the lock and pulled the door open with a quick spell. Any further forward progress on my part, however, was impeded by Mr. Trencher, our landlord as well as the owner and chief baker of the panini shop above which our rooms were located. When I'd first met him the previous evening, he'd seemed a jovial stallion, heavy-set and a slightly darker dun color than the equilateral triangle of baguettes that formed his eigensigil. Now, however, not a trace of that joviality remained. "Dr. Scalpel," he said, his voice more a rumble than anything else, "I've made a point during the decades of my life not to form a lasting opinion of any equine I've known for fewer than twelve hours. But you, having enabled that damned Currycombs not only to remain under my roof but to move into a larger space..." He shook his head. "You are testing my resolve, Madam."
I forced my ears to perk. "My apologies, Mr. Trencher." I slipped past him to the stairway on the left side of the corridor. "I shall most decidedly speak to Currycombs about this." As quickly as I could gallop, I reached the upper floor, unlocked the door marked "B", and burst through into such a stinging cloud of smoke, tears welled up around the edges of my vision. A levitation spell raised all the remaining windows, and I summoned up several bits of magic I'd learned during my stint abroad that I'd found useful for sterilizing areas before performing emergency surgery; these and a carefully directed breeze forced the remainder of the smoke outside while simultaneously freshening the air.
My clearing eyes beheld Currycombs nodding in the center of the expansive room. "Excellently done, Doctor!" She trotted to a table set up in a small alcove along the wall to my left, bent down, and peered into a microscope settled there among a plethora of flasks, bottles, and tubes, none of which had been there the night before. "Ha!" Touching a hoof to the instrument's focusing wheel, she stepped back and gestured me forward. "Observe, Scalpel, and consider how beneficial this will prove in arson investigations!"
"Arson?" I squinted into the microscope and saw nothing but smudges. "Then you did start a fire?"
Had I been of a more fanciful turn of mind, I might've imagined that I could hear her eyes rolling this time. "A very small and controlled one."
With a clearing of throat, I glanced from the selection of flammable chemicals lined up upon the table to the large metal bin filled with charred wood chips that sat on the floor. "Small?" I asked.
Blowing a breath through her lips, Currycombs spun past a sofa sitting near the fireplace and collapsed onto a padded chaise lounge, also new arrivals since I'd last been in the room some twelve hours ago: I imagined she must've hauled them up from her former place downstairs during the night. "I must make myself indispensable to those fools at Shetland Yard, don't you understand? Otherwise, I'll have nothing whatsoever to occupy my mind!" She flailed a hoof at the Ehwazton Times spread across the low table between the sofa and the lounge. "Furlong's the only detective there with a modicum of imagination, and it's become obvious that his sole purpose in calling me in to consult is to discredit me and my methods! Even when I solve the biggest case in two generations, well, see for yourself how they represent things to the press!"
She draped a foreleg over her eyes, and settling upon the sofa, I glanced at the newspaper, folded open to display an article entitled "Another Triumph for Shetland Yard". And while it reported a fair proportion of yesterday's events, it omitted all but the barest mention of my friend: "Currycombs, a local skipchaser," I read aloud, "provided detectives with some assistance in locating Mr. Hope Springs after Ms. Peony had accused him of committing the crime."
"Skipchaser!" Currycombs spat the word. "And yes, I have indeed hired myself out to pursue bail jumpers in the past when desperate for some puzzle to solve, but still!" Leaping to her hooves, she stomped along the open windows, her shoes crunching the stiff, new carpet. "I present the constabulary with the entirety of their case, and this is how they repay me!"
I nodded. "We should put together an account of the event as it actually occurred and deliver that to the papers."
"Feh!" Her snort stirred the curtains as she turned at the far wall and made her way back to her table of experiments. "I've no time to dwell in the past! You may do as you like!"
So I did.
The next morning, I purchased a ream of writing paper, a quill pen, and a bottle of ink. I repositioned the desk in my bedroom to look out upon the street below—fortunately, my room had come equipped with its own furniture—and there I spent a week writing out the details of the case as I'd experienced it. Titling this account A Study in Sorrel, I sent the pages to the attention of Ink Slinger, the editor of the Times.
During the period of my article's composition and while then awaiting Ink Slinger's response, I began to accustom myself to the apartment, the neighborhood, and my new friend's habits. Currycombs kept no set schedule, I quickly learned: I would occasionally emerge from my room at my usual half an hour after sunrise to find her already well into her breakfast at the large dining table, but more often she would emerge bleary-eyed and disheveled from her chamber while I was engaged in one of the splendid lunches Mr. Trencher provided. I usually dined alone in the evenings, and it wasn't at all uncommon for the sound of her key in the flat's front door to rouse me drowsily from slumber in the after midnight darkness.
In certain matters, her demonstrated knowledge made me doubt I'd ever met an equine more accomplished. Fields ranging from chemistry and botany to logic and criminal psychology seemed to hold no mystery for her. And yet, when I remarked one morning that Queen Nimbus had begun the dawn a bit earlier than the time printed in the paper, I received a look of blinking confusion and the astonishing query, "Why would Queen Nimbus have anything to do with the dawn?"
I hesitated a moment, but Currycombs wore no trace of a grin. So I stammered out an explanation of something that every schoolfoal knows—that ever since the Age of Cacophony more than a thousand years ago, the Queens of Hevosenvalta have wielded the Solara Sceptre each morning and evening to start the sun and moon moving upon their proper courses.
Currycombs merely shrugged. "Yet another useless fact that I now must do my utmost to forget."
"What?" Even during my decade of military service, I had rarely experienced the sensation that the cheaper genres of fiction describe as 'blood boiling.' But I felt it now unmistakably. "The winged unicorns of Firebird House are the greatest treasure Hevosenvalta possesses! Without the guidance of each successive queen, we equines would still be herds of wandering nomads, laboring the entirety of our wretched lives without the comforting touch of civilization! How can you possibly denigrate the—"
"Please, Doctor." She waved a hoof from where she lay across her chaise lounge. "I merely meant that the mind has but a finite capacity for the retention of information. I must focus myself, therefore, solely upon whatever will help me unravel those skeins of crime to which my eigensigil calls me to attend." My gaze darted to the blank hide of her flank, still disconcerting to me after the two-and-a-half weeks of our acquaintance. "The invisible, omnipresent truth," she went on, her voice low and husky. "Anything not serving my pursuit of that goal must be left to the side of the road like so much unwanted baggage. Including the knowledge of who or what is responsible for making the sun rise."
Her moods vacillated just as variously, I'd quickly come to notice, expansive and entertaining one day, sullen and withdrawn the next, and while she never made any effort to hide her clients or her cases from me, neither did she show any sign that she wished my assistance with them. We chatted together amiably enough when we happened to meet in our shared space, but I must admit that I found the arrangement somewhat less than satisfactory.
In fact, a certain resentment began rankling at me. Had I been mistaken in thinking we'd felt some kinship, this odd mare and I? Or was our only true connection the larger rooms my monthly pension allowed her to occupy?
My outlook continued to darken as day followed day with no word from the Times. Wandering the streets and observing others at their daily employment made my hooves itch—idleness simply didn't suit me—but it also made my scars itch, my stomach fluttering at the mere thought of the work I'd spent my whole life pursuing. Lying sleepless in bed more and more frequently, I was unable to keep from dwelling upon the question: what could possibly be left for a medical mare whose nerves seemingly disallowed her to practice medicine any longer?
Currycombs as well grew more dour, her complaints about the caliber of the jobs she was forced to accept becoming a regular feature of our conversations. "One month!" she announced one late morning as she emerged from her rooms to throw herself down at the table where Mr. Trencher had just laid out our lunch. "And nothing but the smallest and meanest of cases have come my way! Undoubtedly that miserable Furlong has blackballed me from any further consultation at Shetland Yard, and I shall be doomed to descend into madness and squalor!"
A knock at the door interrupted her further lament, and when I used my magic to undo the lock from where I sat, I blinked to see Mr. Trencher there with quite the arresting figure behind him: a honey-gold pegasus stallion in a carefully curled wig, his crisp white doublet bearing the Firebird Crest. I found myself climbing to my hooves at the sight of the royal emblem, and I was fairly certain that the wide-eyed incredulity I saw upon Mr. Trencher's face was echoed upon my own. "Ms. Currycombs," Mr. Trencher said, licking his lips. "You and Dr. Scalpel have a, uhh, a visitor."
"It's a summons, actually," said the liveried stallion, stepping forward and brandishing a card with the forefeathers of one wing. "Prime Minister Gears requests the immediate presence of you both at the Royal Palace."
I stared at him some more, none of the words making any sense. Me? To the Palace?
Swiveling my head, I stared at Currycombs. Her ears stood erect in a way I'd not seen them for weeks, her mane practically bristling along her neck. "Of course," she said as easily as if we'd been invited to tea at the bistro downstairs. She nodded to me, her eyes aglow. "Perhaps we'd best get our wraps, Doctor?"
Our ride through the streets of Ehwazton in the back of an open royal coach caused my self-consciousness to blossom into full blushing flower, but the blanket I'd grabbed covered enough of my scars to keep me from attempting to melt away completely. Currycombs, on the other hoof, gave the impression of never having traveled in any other fashion, her demeanor nothing but calm as the four armored destriers drew us from the tangle of the city's west end to the stately mansions upon the riverbank and at last to Windsoar Palace, the great and ancient edifice that formed the center of our beloved Hevosenvalta.
The gates drew open at our approach, and we passed through into the Grand Courtyard, a place I'd seen hundreds of times in photographs without ever dreaming I would enter there. The carriage came to a halt at one of the smaller marble staircases leading up into the magnificently crenulated buildings all around us, and the liveried pegasus alit upon the lowest step. "This way, please," he said, the first words he'd offered our entire trip.
Moving to Currycombs's side as we ascended the stairs after the stallion, I couldn't help murmuring, "I'm rather surprised you didn't pepper our guide with questions about all this."
Her mouth pulled sideways. "To what end? This fellow's given us all the information he'd been instructed to give. To ask him for anything more would've only proven an exercise in frustration for us all."
I blinked at her, and we entered corridors freighted with history: suits of armor, paintings, sculptures, vases, a display of every imaginable accouterment to the prime ministerial wing of the royal palace. With effort, I managed to keep from tripping too often, my attention seized by some artifact or other with nearly every step, while Currycombs walked along as if our surroundings interested her not in the least; it wasn't until the pegasus stopped at an unassuming door halfway along a hallway that her ears sprang to alertness.
The stallion knocked on the door, pushed it open, and said, "Prime Minister Gears."
Derailleur Gears rose from his desk, his shirt impeccably tailored to his narrow shoulders, his dark coat peppered with gray, the mane around his spiraling horn stylishly cropped. "Dr. Silver Scalpel!" He came across the room and extended a front hoof in my direction. "After reading your account, I feel I would know you anywhere!"
"Account?" My mind became even more of a complete and utter blank than it had been .
"Scalpel!" Currycombs cocked a smile at me. "You've surprised me! I never thought for a moment that you'd actually write it up!"
Light began to dawn. "You mean A Study in Sorrel?" I looked from Currycombs to the prime minister. "But however did you read—?"
Currycombs gave a snort. "Ink Slinger is Mr. Gears's sister-in-law! I'm not at all surprised that she shared her knowledge of me with him considering the present difficult situation."
Mr. Gears had gone pale looking at my friend. "How did you know about—?"
"Please, Mr. Prime Minister." Currycombs gestured to the office around us. "If the situation were not difficult, we would not all be here."
"Yes, I...I suppose that's true." The flash of Mr. Gears's smile vanished almost at once. "For you see, we...we've had some tarts stolen."
Never before or since have I seen a blanker look cross a mare's face. "Tarts?" Currycombs asked.
"Tarts." Mr. Gears started for his desk but still managed to wave a hoof in the air. "And little Princess Ephemera was nearly kidnapped as well, but as she's now safe and the tarts still aren't, you can see why I'm more concerned about the one than the other."
I opened my mouth to inform the prime minister that I in truth couldn't see that at all, but Currycombs touched my shoulder, shook her head quickly, and said, "Perhaps, sir, you could begin at the beginning."
"Of course." He slumped behind his desk, the glow from his horn plucking a kerchief from his pocket and dabbing it at his forehead. "In two days, we'll be marking the first anniversary of Queen Marigold's death. Along with the public commemoratory events, it's become customary for the current queen to honor her mother's memory by baking a batch of tarts and setting them out in the rotunda that serves as an antechamber to the family wing of the palace for the five days prior to the anniversary. Queen Nimbus indeed did this three days ago, but that same night—"
His voice caught, and he swallowed. "That same night, the tarts vanished! Guards heard a clatter from the rotunda and entered to investigate, but while they found Princess Ephemera wrapped in her blankets upon the floor, of the tarts, there was no sign! With the princess barely a month old, she certainly couldn't have reached the rotunda from the nursery on her own, but the family wing of the palace has been the most secure spot in all Hevosenvalta for a thousand years!" He smacked a hoof against his desk. "It's inconceivable that an outsider could've broken in, but it's even more inconceivable that anyone on staff could've attempted to kidnap the princess while succeeding in desecrating Queen Marigold's memorial!"
Covering his face with his hooves, Mr. Gears fell silent for several seconds before continuing: "Her Majesty told me not to concern myself as she would have her private guard investigate, but I served Queen Marigold for four decades, and I...I've been unable to sleep since all this occurred. Last night at dinner when Ink Slinger began telling us about this extraordinary account of detective prowess she'd received, I—" He lowered his hooves. "I would consider it a personal favor, Ms. Currycombs and Dr. Scalpel, if you would look into the matter."
As a foal, I'd attempted ice skating several times on the pond behind the orphanage, and yet, the slipping, sliding, crashing sensation I'd felt then was nothing compared to what was happening inside my head at that very moment. I couldn't begin to pick which was the more improbable: the whole peculiar tale he'd just unveiled to us, or that the prime minister knew my name.
Fortunately, Currycombs seemed as imperturbable as an afternoon cloud. "If we might see the family rotunda, sir?" she asked.
Which is how I came to be traipsing along musty corridors that had undoubtedly felt naught but the shoes of royalty and those in their direct employ for more than a millennium. Names I'd learned as a filly clattered about in my skull, and I couldn't help wondering if Queen Epona, shod in the black armor that now stood in the foyer of the Ehwazton History Museum, had once trod these floors, or if one of Queen Lanolin's many lovers had perhaps used the window we were passing to gain entry to the royal suite. It didn't help my suddenly surging imagination that the walls fairly bristled with portraits of queens and princesses, their consorts and courtiers, stretching back to the founding of Hevosenvalta and all seeming to regard with suspicion this daughter of no pedigree who trespassed in their domain.
At length, however, the spaces became more modern, the scents less dusty, and Mr. Gears slackened his pace, drawing to a halt a few steps from another nondescript door. "I shall ask the two of you to remain here a moment," he murmured, his eyes rimmed ever so slightly with white. "I shall advance into the family rotunda and make certain that Her Majesty is not within."
Currycombs merely nodded, but all four of my knees threatened to buckle at the thought of encountering Cumulo Nimbus, the great white winged unicorn who'd succeeded her mother Marigold as queen about the time that the crossed scalpels of my eigensigil had first appeared upon my flanks. Queen Marigold's death last year, though long expected, had shaken the realm to its core, but Queen Nimbus had proven herself a true daughter of House Firebird when she and Prince Feldspar had presented Princess Ephemera to a jubilant Hevosenvalta before the first anniversary of the late queen's passing.
Mr. Gears's horn seemed to sputter slightly, but the glow of his magic enveloped the doorknob. He pulled the door open, stepped through, and shut it behind himself, the silence suddenly as thick as custard, the air almost solid as I sucked it into my lungs.
"Scalpel?" For a change, Currycombs seemed just as affected as I, her voice so quiet and shivery, it snapped me from my own state. Focusing on her, I beheld folded ears and a downturned face. "I...I..." She swallowed.
My medical training kicked in, and I moved to her side. "Steady on, now, Currycombs. No matter the setting, never doubt that your abilities will carry the day." I touched a hoof to her shoulder.
She started back as if I'd stung her. "Doubt my abilities?" She blew a breath noisily through her lips. "Doctor, I was merely finding it difficult to admit that I—" She sucked the breath just as noisily back in. "That I owe you an apology."
The only answer I could manage to this admission was, "I beg your pardon?"
"As I beg yours!" She spun and waved at the corridor we'd traversed, paintings of royalty adorning every section of wall. "I once told you that the knowledge of who made the sun rise and set was useless to me, but the portraits in these halls prove me wrong! For every white-coated monarch for more than a thousand years has taken a black-coated stallion as her prince and borne a single black-coated winged unicorn for her daughter! While every black-coated sovereign has taken a white-coated stallion and borne a single, white, winged unicorn filly!"
I couldn't help pursing my lips. "Music hall comedians have been commenting on the subject since time immemorial, Currycombs. Powerful magic lies within Firebird House's family tree, that's all."
"Indeed." Currycombs's eyes shimmered. "And I had almost allowed myself to forget that."
My confused blinking was cut short when the door opened and Mr. Gears beckoned us through. Steeling myself, I followed Currycombs into as perfectly constructed a rotunda as one could possibly have imagined, the air cool and crisp and clean. Noontime sunlight streamed through windows of both clear and stained glass that took up most of the walls, the colors they cast so vibrant, the plush white carpeting almost seemed to swirl.
The clench in my stomach began relaxing at once, the place warm and inviting after the hallways we'd been marching through. In another contrast, the entire space was largely free of ornament: a small, plain, round table sat against the windows of the far wall and displayed a single decades-old photograph of the late Queen Marigold in her prime, her black hide glossy with youth. Sprigs of funereal cypress draped the upper corners of the photograph, and an empty platter sat before it.
"Here," Mr. Gears said, leading us across the room to the table, and there I saw that the platter wasn't entirely empty, a few crumbs scattered over the white porcelain. "As you can see, Ms. Currycombs," the prime minister was going on, "the tarts were—"
"Yes, of course, sir." Currycombs was looking at the floor. "And where was Princess Ephemera discovered?"
"She—" Mr. Gears began.
But a contralto voice as gentle as a summer evening interrupted him: "She was huddled just there, Ms.—Currycombs, was it?"
Startled, I spun to see Queen Nimbus herself, white as a snowbank and a head taller than Mr. Gears. Her wings lay tucked against her sides, and her horn glowed silver, her magic levitating a bassinet out of which peered the wide eyes of a filly whose midnight blue wings and horn proclaimed her to be the Princess Ephemera.
My reaction could only be described as instinctual: my throat closed up, my front legs bent, and I bowed myself to the floor. I straightened to see Currycombs rising from a similar bow, but she, as usual, had no difficulty speaking: "Pray forgive us, Your Majesty. With your assistance, however, I believe I will be able to reassure Prime Minister Gears that all is well in the palace."
"Your Majesty!" Mr. Gears recovered enough at that point to cry out. "This is Currycombs, an investigator who has consulted with Shetland Yard on some of their more tangled cases. I thought perhaps—"
"Investigator?" Her Majesty smiled and shook her head. "Derailleur, I told you there was no need to worry."
"Indeed," Currycombs cut in. "Especially as there's been no crime committed."
I wasn't the only one in the room to snap a shocked expression in her direction, but it was Mr. Gears who sputtered, "No crime? How can you possibly say that?"
Currycombs shrugged. "By a careful study of the facts, sir."
"Study?" Mr. Gears waved a hoof. "You've not been in this room for thirty seconds! Do you truly wish me to believe—?"
"Your Majesty?" Currycombs bowed again toward our sovereign. "Would it be possible to show the prime minister just how precocious the young princess is?"
"What?" Tendons stood out on Mr. Gears's neck; I half expected foam to begin flecking his nostrils. "The foal's not yet four weeks old! Are you saying she was somehow able to—?"
"Mama?" a tiny voice asked, and the princess rose upon dusky wings from her bassinet to settle on the carpet beside her mother. I couldn't keep from gaping: a month old, and not only was she nearly the size of a yearling, but her flanks already showed a simple version of the Royal Firebird eigensigil.
But if I was astonished, the reaction from Mr. Gears verged on the apoplectic, his face twitching, mere fragments of words dropping from his lips.
At this display, the princess leaped into a hover and clapped her front hooves together. "Funny!" she cooed, drifting forward to touch the prime minister's snout with her own. "Funny!"
"Ephemera," Queen Nimbus said in tones that even an orphan such as myself recognized as being parentally admonitory. "What have you to say to Mr. Gears?"
"Umm..." The princess cocked her head and piped cheerfully, "How'dja do, Mr. Ears?"
"Mera?" The barest rumble of thunder lurked at the edges of Her Majesty's voice.
Princess Ephemera's hooves and gaze settled to the floor. "Sorry 'bout the tarts." A grin wrinkled her snout, and she glanced up through a flutter of eyelashes. "Pretty tasty, though."
The briefest of pauses ensued, then Mr. Gears gave a guffaw so large, I was surprised the gust didn't knock the princess over. "Your Highness," he said, bowing to the foal, his eyes shimmering, "someday, I must tell you how much your grandmother relished a well-made tart."
Her Majesty smiled like the sun coming out from behind a cloud, and my throat tightened. Currycombs, however, barked a laugh. "Oh, she knows, Mr. Gears."
The prime minister swung a confused look toward Currycombs, but my attention was drawn to the royal equines behind him, their eyes widening, their ears dipping, and their wings springing partway out.
Currycombs shrugged. "I'm certain that Her Majesty has already begun chronicling Queen Marigold's astonishing life for the young princess." She dipped her head toward our monarch and her daughter. "But now that Dr. Scalpel and I are no longer needed here—"
"Yes." Queen Nimbus's display of alarm had passed so quickly, I began wondering if I'd imagined it. "Still, we thank you, Ms. Currycombs, for giving us the opportunity to ease our dear prime minister's mind concerning this matter." She nodded to Mr. Gears. "Perhaps, Derailleur, you could ask a coach to be sent around to the family entrance here?"
"Of course, Your Majesty." The corner of Mr. Gears's mouth gave a slight tick when he turned toward Currycombs and myself. "And I apologize for—"
"Tut, tut." Currycombs seemed to vibrate where she stood. "I've not thought deeply about Firebird House until today, but now that I have, I must admit that I've found the experience to be most gratifying." She clicked her rear hooves together and gave as formal a bow as any I'd seen during my days with the regiment. "I've never been prouder to be a citizen of Hevosenvalta and have never been prouder of the equines under whose wings and horns we've flourished."
That I wasn't the only one to find this speech odd showed in the prime minister's face. "Well," he said into the sudden silence, "I'll, uhh, get that coach."
The silence grew even thornier after Mr. Gears's departure, but then Currycombs said, "Rest assured, Your Majesties, that you may speak as freely before Dr. Scalpel as you can before me. She has my trust entirely, and so should she have yours."
Queen Nimbus's gaze wavered between the two of us, then settled at least upon Currycombs. "How?" Her Majesty asked, and the strange mixture of yearning and desperation I heard in that single word made the fine hairs at the base of my mane stand up.
Currycombs waved a hoof. "It was a number of small details that I'd never considered in juxtaposition before: the genetic unlikelihood that every White Queen would bear a Black Queen and vice versa every generation for so many centuries, for instance, and the way your eigensigils develop at such an early age." She cocked her head at Her Majesty. "Might I assume the two of you are born with them?"
"Impossible!" I blurted, then immediately covered my mouth with a hoof.
"And yet?" Currycombs gestured toward the frowning Princess Ephemera, the simple silver and blue firebird outline of her eigensigil unmistakable. "Furthermore, while no known magic can affect an equine's eigensigil, perhaps you'll notice how a few carefully applied daubs of dye could transform Princess Ephemera's sigil into the late Queen Marigold's? Indeed, with care, one could turn the princess's sigil into that of every black coated monarch who's served Hevosenvalta for the past thousand years, could one not?" She gestured to Queen Nimbus. "Her Majesty's sigil as well could be viewed as a lightly highlighted version of the same red and gold firebird every white coated queen in our history has possessed." Currycombs's voice got very quiet in the airy chamber. "Or perhaps one should say 'phoenix' rather than 'firebird?'"
"Enough," said Princess Ephemera, and while her voice was still youthful and chirping, nothing about her tone or her expression was. "Tread carefully, madam, for such thoughts have sent many an equine to their death."
"Sister?" Queen Nimbus stroked a hoof along the princess's back. "Who wears the crown at the moment?"
The princess pouted in what would likely have been an adorable fashion if I hadn't been so wracked with confusion. "You do, Sister," she said.
"And I choose to trust." Her Majesty fixed a kindly yet penetrating gaze first upon my friend, then upon me. "Ms. Currycombs? Dr. Scalpel? You have just joined a very select company." That gaze sharpened like a misaligned nail in my hoof. "Pray that my sister and I don't find cause to revoke your membership."
"Impossible!" I blurted again, the implications of everything beginning to trickle through my stupor. "Are you saying you continually give birth to one another?"
Princess Ephemera rolled her eyes, but Queen Nimbus smiled. "Whether it's a blessing or a curse," she said, "is a conversation we have every few centuries."
"And that," Currycombs said from somewhere behind me, "is why there's been no crime committed here. For how could Princess Ephemera have stolen tarts that were baked to honor Queen Marigold when they are both the same equine?"
Undoubtedly, I would've stood there gaping for the rest of the day if Mr. Gears hadn't returned then to tell us the coach was waiting. I retained just enough presence of mind to bow to our sovereigns and to notice the exchange between Princess Ephemera and Currycombs—the princess glared, Currycombs stuck out her tongue, and the princess broke into a giggle—before we were ushered down a corridor to an exterior door where a carriage sat.
Mr. Gears thanked us profusely, the glow of his magic drifting an envelope into Currycombs's jacket. Currycombs thanked him, and I found myself swept into the coach; it wasn't until we'd passed beneath the archway of the Grand Courtyard's entrance that I found my tongue again, and even then, I could only repeat, "Impossible."
Currycombs laughed. "If there's one thing I've learned in my profession, Doctor, it's that, once you've eliminated six impossible explanations, the seventh, no matter how impossible it might also be, must be the truth."
"But—!" I waved a frantic hoof at the palace slowly shrinking behind us, but aware of the destriers pulling our coach, I tried to temper my statements. "This knowledge! The questions it raises! It...it changes everything!"
"I hardly see how." Waving her own hoof more sedately, Currycombs brought my attention back to the city rising up ahead of us. "Ehwazton and Hevosenvalta remain secure, and with our help, our queen and princess will continue guiding them on to ever greater glories." She patted my foreleg. "Is that not answer enough for now?"
My mind still awhirl, I nonetheless nodded, and we rode in silence through the winding streets back to Bakery Row.
As accustomed as I'd become to that voice during the past six weeks, hearing it ring out from the dining table as I emerged into the common room of our shared apartment scarcely an hour after sunrise took me by surprise. But there indeed sprawled Currycombs, her mane damp and her red velvet robe thrown carelessly across her back. What seemed to be at least five copies of the Ehwazton Times sprawled in an equally indolent fashion across the table, and the dishes scattered among the pages looked more like the remnants of last night's supper than this morning's breakfast.
I refused to gape. "Just coming in?" I asked.
She waved a hoof, her gaze not leaving the papers in front of her. "With my mind refreshed by two entire hours of uninterrupted sleep, I'm ready to embark upon the solving of another crime."
That, I'll admit, did get me to gape. "Currycombs, I've told you that you cannot function at your peak without proper rest."
A smile pulled her muzzle. "Which is why, my dear doctor, I forced myself to take a full two hours."
Any further admonishment on my part was interrupted by a rap at our front door. Uncertain what to expect given the unusual vision of Currycombs conscious and responsive before midday, I sent a spell through my horn to push down the door handle and was delighted to see our landlord Mr. Trencher standing in the hallway. The owner also of the bakery and panini shop above which we lodged, he was an aardhorse like my friend and roommate, but two more dissimilar beings, I could scarcely imagine.
Rather than a matter of mere temperament, however, their differences, now that I thought upon them, more exemplified the gap between Currycombs and every other equine in the city, the country, and indeed the world. For Mr. Trencher bore upon his flanks three baguettes that formed an equilateral triangle—his eigensigil—and he wore his mark as we all did: with pride and respect. Our eigensigils, after all, stand as the most powerful sign that the magic filling our beloved realm of Hevosenvalta has touched us. Yes, the process begins with the ceremonies conducted on our Discernment Day when we receive our names, but most of us are much too young at the time to recall that event. The moment the crossed scalpels appeared upon my haunches at the age of fourteen, however, shall always live in my memory as the moment when I joyfully embraced my destiny.
Currycombs, on the other hoof, had no eigensigil. Or rather, as she put it, no apparent eigensigil. Her mark, she maintained, was nothing less than the invisible, omnipresent truth, symbolic of her calling as the only private consulting detective in the entire realm. And I couldn't deny that the powers of inductive and deductive reasoning that I'd seen her display in the month-and-a-half of our acquaintance were indeed remarkable.
As when she called out before I could even greet Mr. Trencher, "My condolences, sir, that your latest apprentice failed to meet with your approval! This makes six you've dismissed just this month, doesn't it?"
Mr. Trencher's dark brown face darkened even further. "Was that little miscreant up here?" He stomped, flour puffing into the air from his fetlock. "I sent him on his way not half an hour ago with the warning that if he ever attempted to enter this building again, I should have the law on him!"
"The law?" Looking up from the papers at last, Currycombs scowled. "Considering the addlepatedness of the Ehwazton constabulary, I shouldn't wish their attentions upon any but the most benighted of fiends!" She sprang to her hooves and stalked toward us across the carpet with her nostrils flaring. "I was merely unable to ignore the cloud of powdered sugar scent that wafts about you, sir, which led to the obvious conclusion that you've once again been forced to coat this morning's donuts yourself rather than assigning the task, as is your preference, to your apprentice."
Mr. Trencher stared quite openmouthedly at my friend. Currycombs for her part flashed a brief smile, slipped her head between me and the doorframe, and plucked an envelope with her teeth from the pocket of Mr. Trencher's apron. "In a similar fashion," she said, balancing the envelope across her upraised hoof, "I shall assume that this message is addressed to—" She glanced down, and her ears drooped. Sighing, she flicked the envelope toward me. "Dr. Scalpel. Of course." And she began slouching back toward the table.
These occasional outbursts from Currycombs no longer threw me completely; activating my magic, I caught the envelope as it drifted to the floor, thanked Mr. Trencher, closed the door upon his still-bewildered countenance, and looked at the letter's return address. "I say! It's from Sister Heartfelt, the abbess at Foster's Orphan Asylum." I couldn't help smiling at the familiar crest stamped below her name. "My alma mater, as it were."
Currycombs gave a snort. "I don't suppose one of the orphans has been charged with some atrocity of which she needs to be acquitted?"
I glared at her. "Sister Heartfelt and her nuns run an entirely respectable establishment, I'll have you know!"
"A pity." Her nose had already returned to scraping the newspaper.
Opening my mouth to launch into a full-throated defense of the only home I'd known before joining Her Majesty's cavalry, I instead restrained myself. Currycombs when forced into idleness was a very different mare than when she was engaged in the pursuit of justice. Even the tunes she so expertly coaxed from her hammer dulcimer took on a dreary and somber edge between cases, and the thought of what I might hear through the wall this evening if my friend didn't find some problem to engage her interest made me wince in anticipation.
With a shake of my head, I made my way across the room to the sofa, settled in, and used one of my scalpel spells to slice through the top of the envelope. The note inside bristled my mane. "It appears there is a bit of a mystery here."
"Oh?" Currycombs swung her head toward me, her ears quivering.
"A medical mystery, at any rate." I read the note aloud. "'Dear Silver. I hope you don't mind me writing to you, but a rather delicate situation has arisen concerning one of our wards. Anise is a lovely young pegasus mare of nearly one and twenty years, but she's yet to gain her eigensigil. She's in fact been returned to us five times from apprenticeships we've sent her into the city to pursue.
"'In the past, we've invited such rare individuals to take vows in the Hooves of Mercy. Their lack of external direction, we believe, indicates that they're already filling the position they're meant to occupy, and their sigils unfailingly appear once they've committed themselves utterly to serving Hevosenvalta by caring for the orphaned as a member of our order. But Anise has declined my offers—she says she's certain her destiny lies without our grounds—and she's further been reported to me as being ill-suited to every job given her here around the orphanage.
"'She's rapidly approaching the age at which our charter will no longer allow us to offer her room and board as a ward, and she's such a friendly and earnest young thing that I found myself wondering if there might be a medical reason for Anise's condition. I'll happily hire you as a consulting physician should you be willing and available.'" I shrugged at Currycombs. "Not perhaps the sort of conundrum with which you usually concern yourself, but—"
"On the contrary, doctor." That odd fiery light had come into Currycombs's eyes. "As one who often struggles to explain her own eigensigil, I find much to intrigue me in the case so far presented." She cocked her head. "If, of course, you wouldn't mind me tagging along on your investigation..."
I had to laugh. "After the tagging along I've done in your wake, you shall be most welcome!"
"Excellent!" Currycombs leaped to her hooves. "Allow me to slip into some more suitable garb, and we'll be off!"
My own wardrobe had remained the same since before I'd begun rooming with Currycombs—cavalry blankets, I'd found, served splendidly when draped across my shoulders to hide the deep scars left by the griffin whose attack had forced me into retirement—and while I waited, I dashed off a quick reply to Sister telling her to expect us within the hour. I'd just wafted the note toward the orphanage via my magic when Currycombs emerged from her rooms in her Mulster coat, the pockets stuffed with the sundry magnifying lenses, wax paper pouches, and glass tubes that made up the tools of her trade.
The morning outside shivered ever so slightly, the crispness of autumn rustling the air. Foster's Asylum lay just across the Cloven River in the countryside north and east of Ehwazton, and I had to smile at the entirely unaccustomed wave of nostalgia that swept through me at the thought of revisiting those well-remembered woods and vales.
We trotted along the cobbled streets with the city bustling about us for some ten or twenty minutes before Currycombs suddenly spoke. "These nuns: eminently trustworthy, I should imagine?"
The question made me blink. "Of course! The Hooves of Mercy are well respected for the work they do amongst the orphaned throughout Hevosenvalta and the entirety of the world!"
"Of course, of course." She shook her head. "I have a distrust, I fear, of charitable organizations. In my experience, they often prove more interested in sustaining themselves than in sustaining those they purport to serve."
I could think of no response, and it occurred to me that, despite our rooming together for a month-and-a-half now, I knew very little about Currycombs: where she'd grown up, where she'd been educated, any of that. My status as an orphan gave me no family history to share, and I'd never been one to fall easily into conversation, a trait, I'd discovered, that Currycombs and I shared. When she was on a case, she questioned relentlessly, probing with conversational feints and touches to exhume the buried veins of truth. But between times in our apartment, we could spend hour upon hour in each other's company without an uttered word passing between us.
So I didn't ask, and Currycombs didn't offer, the two of us a ball of silence rolling through the clatter and hum of the morning. Leaving the main road, we made our way through the sleepy suburbs of northeastern Ehwazton and soon crossed the river at Terebinth Bridge, the glass and brickwork of town giving way to the green fields and occasional patches of forest that made up the countryside inland of the capital.
"Lovely," I said, deepening my breaths.
"Concealing," Currycombs muttered.
This time, I was unable to mute myself. "And what, pray tell, do you believe to be hidden in this bucolic setting?"
She shrugged. "Just the natural horror and depravity of the equine race."
At this point in our acquaintanceship, I'd experienced Currycombs's idea of humor several times, but I saw no trace of a smile about her now. Not knowing how to politely ask what in the bright blue above she was talking about, I instead repeated, "Natural horror and depravity?"
"Undoubtedly." Her dark eyes darted from side to side as well as upward and downward, a constant motion that made me dizzy to observe. "Our wild, untamed ancestors raged and ravaged through these open spaces, waging war first amongst the three tribes and then against our non-equine neighbors when the unicorns, pegasi, and aardhorses finally united under the horrid principles of tribalism. It took the narrowing confines of civilization to force the equine mind and body toward moderation in thought and movement." She shuddered. "Even today, there's much that makes me wonder if we've not stalled somewhat on the path toward justice and decorum."
It took some effort not to raise my voice. "Do you honestly mean to say that you find the equines of modern Ehwazton to be as scrupleless and immoral as our ancestors in the centuries before the first queens of Firebird House came to rule over us?"
A sideways smile tugged her snout. "I was under the impression that recent events had made you uncomfortable discussing the queens of Firebird House."
I failed to repress a shiver. "True," I admitted. "But a large part of my reticence has to do with the secrecy to which we've been sworn." I glanced up and down the empty country road and lowered my voice even further. "But for all the peculiarity of our rulers' serial immortality, you can't deny that they've had a positive effect on Hevosenvalta as a whole."
"I agree entirely. They represent the confines of civilization to which I referred a moment ago, and their excellent example has made our species as a whole aware that scruples exist. So when we engage in criminal behavior nowadays, we at least know that we're transgressing the right and the proper." Currycombs shrugged. "That advances us from ignorant savages to hypocrites, I suppose—if such a movement can be called an advance."
"Now see here!" Again, I could barely stop myself from shouting. "Allow me to draw your attention to the rule of law under which the entire world now operates, to the breakthroughs in medicine and science we've experienced, to the peace and prosperity we've enjoyed for more than a millennium! We're not perfect, of course, but neither are we the vile creatures who came together under the tribalist banners during the dark ages with the intention of subjecting the entire world to their rule!"
The narrow-eyed look that Currycombs shot at me was equal parts exasperation and uneasiness. "If you truly want to have this discussion, Doctor, we shall have to venture into certain areas of conversation that I know for a fact make you even more uncomfortable than the truth about Firebird House."
"Indeed?" I tossed my mane. "And what areas of conversation are those precisely?"
"Griffins," she said.
Catching myself in mid-stumble, I clamped down on my body's desire to leap away from the mere sound of the word. "What about them?" I asked through teeth I could hardly unclench.
A scent arose from her, one with which I was familiar certainly but not one that I'd ever sensed from her before: the salty stink of nervousness. "I'll ask again, Scalpel, if this is a topic with which you really wish to engage."
"Damn it, Currycombs!" My forelegs had begun itching beneath the drape of my blanket, but I stomped my hooves against the paving stones and refused to succumb to the whimpering little voice in my head. "Kindly make your point, madam!"
Her ears flicked. "Let me ask you, then: why do we maintain garrisons such as the one in which you so valiantly served in the disputed areas between Hevosenvalta and several of the griffin kingdoms?"
I snorted. "Because several of the griffin kingdoms refuse to stop attacking us!"
"And what reason do they give for their continued aggression?"
As much as I wanted to snort again, I couldn't quite manage it, the lovely warmth of the sun overhead suddenly feeling every bit as oppressive as the heat I'd known in my various postings. "They give a number of answers, but I would boil it all down to fear. We've beaten them before, and they know we could do it again if we ever set our minds to the task. We tell them we're not interested in that sort of thing any longer, but their fear disallows them to believe us. So they bluster and squawk and slash their talons like so many pinpricks against our sides." The heat whisked away from me just as suddenly, my scars now as cold and hard as stone. "It all has very little effect and serves even less of a purpose."
An oddly tentative note crept into Currycombs's voice. "And what reason do we give for their continued aggression? And by 'we,' I don't mean equines such as yourself who've given the matter a great deal of careful thought. I mean the average unicorn, pegasus or aardhorse in the streets of Ehwazton or serving on the front lines."
The cold had spread like a fog across my entire hide, but ahead, my gaze picked out the trim little Foster's Orphan Asylum sign. A gravel path led away from the main road there and wound across a grassy meadow to the sycamore and cypress trees that had marked the western boundary of my world for more than half my life.
Shaking my attention away from the unpleasant places Currycombs's questions had taken it, I grabbed eagerly at the excuse to conclude our conversation. "I believe we've arrived."
"Yes," Currycombs said quietly beside me. "I believe we have."
Whether the disappointment in her voice was real or imagined, I ignored it and focused instead on the matter at hoof. "We're here," I said—more for my benefit, I must admit, than for hers—"to help a young mare in need. Therefore, I shall investigate in my way and you shall investigate in yours, and we shall see what can be done."
"Excellent advice." Currycombs crunched into the gravel and started down the path.
We reached the asylum's front gate, nestled among the sycamores, in short order and I was more than a little surprised to see Trailing Arbutus, the old pegasus jack-of-all-work, curled up amid some blankets and dozing in the doorway of the little gatekeeper's hut, the morning sun slanting through the branches overhead to further dapple his already dappled hide.
A snorting laugh came from Currycombs. "You're the native here, Scalpel. What's the protocol in this situation?"
Mr. Arbutus gave a similar snort. "Scalpel?" he asked, sitting up, his eyes still closed. "No, no. I'm afraid our Miss Silver Scalpel joined Her Majesty's cavalry some ten years back."
Swallowing against the sudden lump in my throat, I raised my voice. "It is I, Mr. Arbutus, come home for a visit."
The stallion blinked, then broke into a wide smile. "Why, it's Miss Silver indeed!" He put a hoof to his mouth. "Or forgive me. Dr. Scalpel it is now, isn't it?"
The various escapades into which I'd dragged him during my years here flashed through my mind, and I had to do a bit more swallowing. "You need never ask my forgiveness for anything, Mr. Arbutus. This is my friend Currycombs. Sister Heartfelt asked us to stop by."
"Currycombs?" Mr. Arbutus did some more blinking in her direction. "Is that the same Currycombs as I've been reading about here and there in the papers?"
For all that Currycombs had no wings, she managed nonetheless to preen. "Quite probably, sir." She gestured at the hut. "That seems a small apartment, if I might be so bold. Is there no room for you in the main house?"
I gave her a glare. "Of course Mr. Arbutus has a room! What makes you think—?"
"The bedding." Currycombs gestured again. "Why would anyone rise from a perfectly good bed at so early an hour merely to repair to a few blankets on the floor of a hut? Correct me, in fact, if I'm wrong, sir, but this isn't the first night you've slept out here."
Mr. Arbutus engaged in another round of blinking. "Well, you'd do the same, I daresay, rather than spend the night under the same roof as a—" His brown and white speckled face reddened. "I don't like to say it, do I? But—" He glanced from side to side, then sidled up to whisper rather loudly directly into my ear. "A heretic, Miss Silver! Here! At Foster's!" He stepped back and shook his head. "Not worth my life to be anywhere too near when the Spirits finally catch up to punish her, now, is it?"
The words struck me with nearly the force of a physical blow. For the idea that the Spirits of Hevosenvalta punished those they deemed to be heretics lay at the center of ancient tribalist dogma.
Memories flooded me from my decade in harness. As Currycombs had seemingly inferred earlier, in my assignments at the far-flung edges of Her Majesty's Realm, I'd heard more than my share of such rubbish. I'd in fact been forced to upbraid many an underling who'd called our neighbors—griffins, dragons, barghasts, kappas, what have you—lesser beings and heretics since they remained untouched by the Spirits whom the ignorant thought gave us equines our names and eigensigils. One might just as well have said that pegasi and aardhorses were inferior to unicorns since they channeled magic more indirectly than we did, or that pegasi and unicorns didn't qualify as truly equine since we lacked an aardhorse's dexterous hooves.
The sheer wrongheadedness of this drivel never ceased to infuriate me. Magic was a natural phenomenon, after all, no different from the gravitational force that drew us all downward or the pressure gradients that the pegasi manipulated to make the wind blow. Nonsensical talk of Spirits ill-became any true child of Hevosenvalta, and, well, suffice it to say that it was a subject upon which I'd often lectured rather passionately.
So to hear these sentiments not more than a twenty-minute trot from Ehwazton, on the very threshold of my childhood home, and from a stallion for whom I had nothing but admiration and respect? To call me tongue tied would've been a severe understatement.
Fortunately, Currycombs never seemed at a loss. "Well! It looks as if we arrived just in time!" She nodded to the gates. "May we enter, sir?"
"Of course!" Mr. Arbutus stumped over, gave the gates a push, and they swung smoothly open. "I'm sure you two'll deal with this before any of us honest folk get stricken."
Currycombs was already marching through, and I hastened to join her after forcing myself to nod amiably at Mr. Arbutus. The silence of the woods, however, pressed down upon me, and we'd scarcely gone around the first bend in the path before I was hissing out, "It's impossible! Spirits and heretics? How could someone like Mr. Arbutus honestly subscribe to such outdated and tribalist ideas?"
"Forgive me, Scalpel." Currycombs was glancing about as she always did when her attention had been engaged, her ears twisting and her nostrils flaring. "But neither he nor this place strikes me as particularly modern." She gave a little skip that caused the tail of her coat to flare, exposing her unmarked flanks. "Imagine if he'd caught sight of my own heretical features!"
I wanted to stomp and assert that Mr. Arbutus would never show anything but loving kindness and concern to anybody, but still shaken, I held my tongue.
Fortunately, the path between the gate and the orphanage wasn't long, so I couldn't continue brooding. The house itself looked much as it had when I'd been in residence, the ivy neatly trimmed and the shutters neatly painted. The door opened at my knock, and Sister Heartfelt herself smiled up at me from beneath her black and white wimple, a few more lines on her face but otherwise unchanged. "Oh, Silver!" she exclaimed. "Thank you so much for coming! It's wonderful to see you even in such troubled circumstances!"
I bent down so we could tap horns and hug, the sweet, familiar scent of cinnamon and cloves trying to conjure more bubbles of nostalgia in me. But other thoughts kept lurking to the fore: did Sister Heartfelt know that Mr. Arbutus subscribed to tribalism? Did she herself perhaps—?
No. I squashed any and all groundless conjecture and stepped back to introduce Currycombs. Almost wincing in anticipation of her letting loose with one of her tone-deaf but factually accurate instant character sketches, I was instead pleasantly surprised when she merely bowed her head and said, "I hope we can be of some assistance to young Anise."
Sister Heartfelt nodded. "The children are finishing their breakfasts now. If you'd care to come this way?"
Walking through the familiar hallways after an absence of ten years made me step as gingerly as a cat across damp grass. Everything seemed the same, but Mr. Arbutus undoubtedly had held his unfortunate opinions on non-equines and magic during my time here. Had the topic simply never come up?
The clutter of foals' voices roused me from my funk, and we stepped through the large oaken doorway into the refectory, the same rows of tables filling the sunlit room as I recalled from my youth. The fillies and colts who'd yet to gain their eigensigils sat to the right of the central aisle while those who had become besigiled sat to the left—and, oh, with what joyous ceremony did a youngster move from the one group to the other. The head table along the entire far wall of the room belonged to the nuns and novices of the order, but at the far left end of it sat a red-maned filly just at the cusp of marehood with no wimple on her head. She appeared to be sharing a joke with some of the youngsters among the unmarked, all their ears perked and their eyes sparkling.
"All right, now," Sister Heartfelt called, her horn giving off the jingle of sleigh bells. "I'll ask you all to rise and greet our guests, Dr. Silver Scalpel and Ms. Currycombs, then we'll break a bit early for classes and chores."
The foals all stood and recited, "Good morning, Dr. Silver Scalpel and Ms. Currycombs," then began trooping past us, their eyes and whispers flitting in our direction. Most of the sisters followed in their wake, bowing slightly to Sister Heartfelt, but three of the nuns remained seated: Sister Verdant and Sister Clear Water as well as an aardhorse whom I didn't recognize. The young mare at the end of the table had stayed as well, though the act of rising with the others had revealed quite clearly that she bore no eigensigil.
Sister Heartfelt turned to me, her smile suddenly a bit more strained. "Thank you again for coming on such short notice, Silver." Her horn glowed, the door to the refectory swung closed, and she began moving down the aisle toward the head table. "I don't believe you know Sister Pleasant Vale. She joined us four years ago now."
The aardhorse nodded, her black mane and white hide very nearly the same colors as her wimple. Her smile was also the only one in the room that I would've called unshadowed.
"And this," Sister Heartfelt continued, moving along the table to the end, "is Anise."
"Oh, but please." The young mare's head came up, and the tone of her voice coupled with the open but somber expression on her face made me understand why Sister Heartfelt had used the word 'earnest' in her letter. "Would you be so kind as to call me Anisette? It has a much crisper sound to it, and I simply adore a—"
A snort from the other end of the table interrupted her. "And there," Sister Pleasant Vale said, her voice sweeter than the snort would've led me to think, "is the very root of the problem laid bare." The look she aimed at the girl seemed too soft to be a glare but too purse-lipped to be anything else. "We cannot choose our names, child. The magic of Hevosenvalta gives them to us as it does our eigensigils—as signs that we are true equines—and it is for us to accept them with grace and humility." She sniffed and turned away. "I for one would certainly never wish to be so ungrateful as to refuse this perfect gift."
Ears flicked around me, my own included. And while what Sister Pleasant Vale had said wasn't as objectionable as Mr. Arbutus stating that mysterious Spirits had not only singled equines out as the world's master race but that they also spent their time monitoring our behavior and punishing those who didn't conform to certain societal norms—
Currycombs gave a snort of her own. "And may I inquire, sister, as to your passive-aggressive opinion of hair dye?"
Sister Pleasant Vale's head snapped back, her eyes going wide. "What in Her Majesty's realm do you mean by that?"
"I mean a product that one uses to change the color of one's mane." Currycombs gestured with her snout toward Sister Pleasant Vale. "Is not naturally blonde hair like your own also a gift from Hevosenvalta? Or should we be allowed to change our manes to a darker shade should that more suit our stark and severe self-image?"
Something between a cough and a laugh came from Sister Heartfelt, but Sister Pleasant Vale's mouth tightened. "That's an unbalanced view of the cosmos, my child," she said.
"Fortunately," Currycombs said, "I'm not your child, or I would likely receive the same sorts of negative reports you've been arranging to be sent to Sister Heartfelt about Anisette."
"She's named Anise," Sister Pleasant Vale more hissed than said. "And I certainly cannot be blamed for her failure at the most basic of tasks!"
"Basic?" With a wave of a forehoof, Currycombs indicated the closed door. "Like caring for the younger among her fellows? Perhaps you're referring to the way she was amusing several of them when we entered? Or perhaps you mean the concern in their voices when they left, all of them wondering in whispers what would become of their dear friend Anisette."
"Anise!" Sister Pleasant Vale leaped to her hooves. "Names are holy marks of Hevosenvalta's favor! Like eigensigils, they are perfect and unchanging!"
Currycombs cocked her head. "And Hevosenvalta itself? Should we forbid unicorns from using spells because they alter the natural world? Perhaps farming should be outlawed since it repurposes the land! Or dams should be scorned for shifting the courses of rivers!"
"Please!" Anise—or Anisette, I'll rather say—flared her trembling wings. "If I'm to be turned out of the asylum, then let's just cease arguing and get on with it!" Blushing, she bowed her head to Sister Pleasant Vale. "But I shall say again with respect, sister, that I cannot see anything positive arising from creating categories when it comes to the many and wonderful gifts we receive simply by being alive and aware. All are surpassingly wonderful, and ranking them upon some arbitrary scale will only serve to devalue some while overvaluing others."
"Outrageous!" Sister Pleasant Vale stomped a hoof. "I'll not be lectured by a pair of ignorant snips!" She wheeled on Currycombs. "Hevosenvalta gives herself specifically to us equines so that we might reshape her! That is intrinsic to our faith, and to believe otherwise is to commit—" She stopped, her mouth still open and her eyes going wide.
My eyes felt very wide as well. 'Heresy' was the only way I could imagine that sentence ending, but to admit to such tribalist leanings would have been a career-ending blow for anyone who claimed herself devoted to the Hooves of Mercy.
Beside me, Sister Heartfelt took a step forward, her eyes narrowing. "Might I recommend, sister, that you think carefully before you next speak?"
With a twitch, Sister Pleasant Vale's face became a mask of shock. "I don't know what you mean, sister! I was merely—"
"Demonstrating," Currycombs cut in, "a complete and unfortunate misunderstanding of how magic works!" She moved past Sister Heartfelt. "For you seem to honestly believe that our ability to tap more deeply into the world's natural magic makes us equines the true inhabitants of this world while all other peoples are secondary at best!"
Sister Pleasant Vale's glare at this was unmistakable. "I'll not have you putting words into my mouth! I was merely pointing out how ungrateful it is to turn our backs upon—"
"Backs?" Currycombs flipped the tail of her coat aside to unveil her own unmarked flank, and everyone in the room save myself gasped.
Unfortunately for Sister Pleasant Vale, her gasp was followed by the word, "Heretic!"
This outburst largely ended the day's discussion. Sister Heartfelt quietly and icily asked Sister Pleasant Vale to accompany her to the main office, and the two other sisters in attendance recalled some urgent class work that needed their attention. Which left Currycombs and I alone in the refectory with Anisette.
She was staring at Currycombs. "Your mark," she said breathlessly. "It must be invisible! For I can't imagine you haven't one, not a mare as accomplished as yourself!"
Currycombs barked a laugh. "Such insight from one so young!" She gave the floor a stomp. "Now, if you'd care to come away with us, we live above a bakery that's in need of an apprentice. It's likely not the work you'll be dedicating your life to, but it'll give you a place to stay and something to do till you find yourself."
"Oh, Ms. Currycombs!" A flap of her wings carried Anisette over the table; landing, she galloped past the spot where I remained rooted and wrapped a hug around Currycombs' neck. "Thank you!" She shuffled back with a blush. "Sister Heartfelt has been ever so kind to me as have most of the other nuns and the children, but, well, I feel that it's rather incumbent upon me to show them that life carries on even when one doesn't have an eigensigil."
That finally stung me from my stupor. "Ah, but you're mistaken there, Anisette." I gestured toward Currycombs. "Your eigensigil is every bit as present as my friend's. The invisible power of kindness, I should judge it. Or perhaps love."
Anisette did some more blushing, and Currycombs nodded. "Excellently put, doctor. And now back to town for the three of us, I think, to let Mr. Trencher know that his days of powdering his own donuts are once more at an end!"
Sudden angry voices in the next room drew my attention away from my latest attempt at setting "The Case of the Stolen Tarts" onto paper. It was quite the welcome interruption, to be honest, since the narrative had vexed me for several weeks by that point.
The basic events were so drearily commonplace—young scamps often absconded with trays of tarts—that it was the cast of characters who truly made the tale. Unfortunately, that cast included the Queen, the Princess, and the Prime Minister of our beloved Hevosenvalta, and the solution to the mystery hinged upon a revelation of such world-shattering import, I still shivered every time I allowed my thoughts to turn toward it. All of which meant that any account of the case written with an eye toward publication could discuss neither the equines involved nor the actual solving of the mystery, and this had so far proven to be much too intransigent a problem for my still-nascent talents as an author to resolve.
Happy to turn my mind elsewhere, I rose from my desk overlooking the mid-morning hurly-burly of Bakery Row below, shook my mane into some sort of order, applied my magic to the doorknob, and poked my head into the common area of the apartment Currycombs and I shared.
The door to the hallway stood open, and Currycombs herself was busily lunging about on the carpet between the windows and the sofa, her long-tailed Mulster coat showing that she'd only just come in. "No!" she was exclaiming at the top of her prodigious lungs. "Not even if you fall to your knees and beg me!"
"Confound it, Currycombs!" And even though I was seeing and hearing Inspector Furlong of Shetland Yard, the presence of the off-white unicorn still shocked me enough to make me doubt my senses. My last contact with him, after all, some three months ago had involved him arresting Currycombs and myself in connection with the unfortunate affair of Hope Springs and Ms. Violet Peony. But now he stood in our parlor with his hide growing redder and redder beneath his Mackintosh. "This is larger than just the two of us! Surely you won't allow—"
"I won't allow?" Currycombs spun on the inspector and jabbed a hoof into his chest with such ferocity, I could hear the poor fellow puff out a breath at the impact—for all her small stature, Currycombs was an aardhorse through and through. "I am not at issue here, Inspector! I am but a private citizen trying to make a living by the only means at her disposal: her wits! You are the one doing everything in your power to prevent me!"
"That—!" The inspector clamped his teeth shut over whatever he'd been about to say and took a deep, long breath. "—is not an entirely baseless conclusion," he said in a more regulated tone than he'd heretofore had recourse to. "I am, however, bringing you a case now, a case that, I will state quite frankly, has me and my colleagues baffled."
Currycombs snorted. "Tying an ascot would leave you lot baffled!"
The way Inspector Furlong's face began bunching up caused me to step completely out of my room. "Good morning, Inspector," I said in what I hoped would be a jovial fashion. "What a surprise to see you here."
The inspector snapped his head around, and once again I watched him stopper and smooth himself before answering. "Ah. Yes. Good morning, Dr. Scalpel."
"Scalpel!" Currycombs's expression transformed as well, her smile as glowing as a general's looking out upon a successful battlefield. "You're a mare given to impartiality! Should I treat the inspector here the way he's treated me these past several months and tell him I'm not at all interested in whatever muck he's gotten his hooves mired in? Or should I rather show mercy to the halt and the infirm by allowing him the benefit of my intelligence and wisdom?"
I scarcely had to consider the question. When not working on a problem, I'd soon discovered upon becoming her flat mate, Currycombs descended into a melancholy that had on occasion frightened me with its depth. Add to this the way that, for as long as I'd known her, she'd complained about Furlong blackballing her from cases at Shetland Yard, and to have him here finally asking for her help, I instantly concluded, could only be positive for both her peace of mind and mine.
And yet, the act of him doing exactly what she wanted apparently wasn't enough to satisfy her. Perhaps with a few incentives... I fixed my gaze upon the abashed inspector. "Are you offering to pay Currycombs the same consulting fee you'd pay to any other specialist you called in to examine, say, some medical or magical aspect of the case in question?"
"Well, of course!" Furlong waved a hoof. "Shetland Yard always makes good its debts!"
"And the press?" This, it seemed to me, had been at the base of Currycombs's complaint in the aftermath of the incident I'd called "A Study in Sorrel" in the slightly successful write-up I'd done of the case. After all, the official version downplaying Currycombs's contributions had appeared in the Times with a circulation of millions; my account had been printed in a small journal entitled The Riverside Review and had perhaps been seen by hundreds. "When Currycombs solves whatever matter you've brought to her," I continued sternly, "will she receive proper credit in the accounts Shetland Yard releases to the public?"
Currycombs stood behind him very nearly vibrating, her ears perked and her nostrils flared, her attention riveted so firmly on the inspector that I expected to see him flinch under the pressure of it. His only apparent reaction, however, was a single twitch of his left eyelid, and the silence that fell over us made me fear that this would prove too great a sticking point.
At last, though, with an outpouring of breath and a slumping of shoulders, the inspector said, "Fine. Full credit for success—or failure." His eyes narrowed, and he wheeled to glare at my friend. "That last is a promise, Currycombs! If the police are to be excoriated in the Times for this fiasco, I'll see to it personally that you go down with us!"
The ardent desire in Currycombs's expression had vanished completely by the time Furlong had swung around to face her. "How fortunate, then, that I don't plan to fail." She gave me a nod before turning her attention back to the inspector and gesturing at the sofa. "Perhaps you'd like to have a seat and give me the facts of the case."
"Impossible." Furlong spun again, this time toward the door. "You won't believe me unless I show you, and possibly not even then."
That got a raised eyebrow from Currycombs, and she nodded to me once more. "Shall we, Doctor?"
I grabbed one of my green cavalry blankets as well as my medical panniers with my magic and slung them over my shoulders and back. Following in the inspector's wake, we came out onto the street and started at a brisk pace toward downtown Ehwazton. My curiosity had been piqued by the inspector's rather melodramatic announcement, however, so I called out to him, "Surely, sir, you can give us some clue as to what lies in store for us!"
Furlong didn't answer, but Currycombs, trotting along ahead of me, tossed her head in the direction we were traveling. "Raise your eyes to the skyline, Scalpel, and tell me what you see. Or rather what you don't see."
Blinking, I lifted my gaze to the rooftops above the streets through which we'd begun to canter. The buildings now that we'd left Bakery Row had grown larger and continued to increase in size the closer we came to the city center, but I for my part had no idea what it was Currycombs wanted me to see—or not see, as she'd said.
We'd reached a gallop by then, tearing along behind the inspector, crowds thickening with each block we traveled toward Unity Plaza. Rounding the corner where Dunbarton Way met the much-larger Riverside Boulevard, we nearly collided with a solid wall of equine hindquarters, every tail switching and the air thick with the salty scent of concern. "Make way!" Furlong shouted, scarcely slackening his pace. "Police coming through! Please clear a path!"
Blue-coated pegasi of the Ehwazton constabulary were circling at the other end of the street where Riverside entered Unity Plaza, and the patrolsteeds whooshed toward us to open a way among the unsettled bystanders. "What's happening?" more than one voice called at us, and even more peculiarly, "Where's it gone?"
Having no answer, I merely kept my hooves moving at the pace Furlong and Currycombs were setting. We arrived at the front of the crowd where a cordon of uniformed unicorns met us, half of them facing their fellow citizens and the other half facing the plaza. Several saluted Inspector Furlong and stepped aside, letting us through, and we entered a Unity Plaza entirely bereft of equines, something I'd never seen in all my years living in and about Ehwazton.
To call the experience eerie would be a severe understatement. Unity Plaza, at the heart of the city, served as town square, public forum, and open-air atrium for Hevosenvalta's finest museums, their various marble facades facing the plaza to the north, west, and east with the more palatially grand Parliament building occupying the entire south side. The plaza itself displayed more than a few fine and inspiring monuments to those equines whose good example and good sense had helped unite the three tribes under the banner of Firebird House a thousand years ago, and I took solace in seeing those statues even though the silence of the place set my ears to twitching.
"As you can see," Furlong said, his quiet voice somehow seeming even quieter, swallowed up under the expanse of the blue midmorning sky, "we're keeping everyone out until we can determine what's happened, but I hope you'll agree, Currycombs, that this isn't the usual sort of thing we handle at Shetland Yard."
I was opening my mouth to ask what he was talking about when the sight before me actually registered in my mind and I froze in my hoof prints. How long I'd been seeing it—or as Currycombs had said, not seeing it—I had no idea. But standing there, staring across the empty plaza, I suddenly realized that it was missing more than the crowds. It was missing its centerpiece.
"Epona's Column," I said aloud, my eyes not quite believing that the sixteen-story tall black iron pillar with the statue of Hevosenvalta's first queen rampant atop it was not standing proudly in the midst of its circle of bronze hippogriffs. "Where—? And how—? And—?"
Currycombs had likewise drawn to a halt beside me, but when I glanced over at her, instead of the dawning horror that I knew featured prominently upon my own countenance, her face bore the broad smile and sparkling eyes of a child gazing upon a pile of birthday presents. "Furlong?" Currycombs said, her words quivering with an emotion I wasn't prepared to identify. "For bringing me in on this affair, I hereby retract every negative comment I've ever made about you. Now!" She stomped a hoof, the retort echoing from the museum fronts around us. "Give me what details you can."
Furlong gave her about half a glare, then began walking toward the circle of hippogriffs. "The regular beat patrolsteeds, an aardhorse and a pegasus, came through the plaza just after dawn." He gestured with his snout to the large boulevard across the square beside the art museum, a row of unicorns and a cloud of pegasi keeping the citizens at bay. "They entered at Montlemore there, crossed the center of the square and exited at Riverside. They both say they felt something odd as they passed the column, but they swear on their badges it was there. But when they reached Riverside, the aardhorse, Officer Carob, turned back like he says he always does to get once last glimpse of Queen Epona. And all he saw was this."
We were rapidly approaching the center of the square, the center of Ehwazton, the center of all Hevosenvalta, and I was still blinking, trying to get my mind to process what I was seeing. Six massive hippogriff statues, legendary creatures representing a long-sought and largely fictitious amity between equines and our griffon neighbors, stood or sat in various positions facing outward from where the column had once stretched majestically into the sky. "Impossible," I said, not meaning to speak aloud but unable to remain silent.
"Indeed?" Currycombs rushed ahead, leaping up the stone steps of the circular dais upon which the pedestal had stood for so many centuries, and was now surveying the twelve-foot diameter space marked out by the bronze statues. "How is anything impossible for magic?" She turned a grin back toward Furlong and me. "Perhaps you two unicorns wouldn't mind educating a poor, mundane aardhorse on matters so far beyond her ken?"
I couldn't keep from rising to Currycombs's bait. "You know full well that aardhorses have no lack of magic!" I declared, stomping up to join her. "And if any matters exist that are truly beyond your ken, then I declare myself to be unfamiliar with them!"
Behind me, Furlong snorted, and I glanced back to see him climbing the steps as well. "Well, you wanted a case, Ms. Currycombs. So show me a unicorn capable of teleporting a sixteen-story column of solid cold iron, and I'll declare you the finest detective in Hevosenvalta." He waved a hoof through the emptiness. "'Cause the fact of the matter is—not to be disrespectful, mind you—but the Queen herself with the Princess joining in for good measure couldn't've pulled this off."
Rummaging through the pockets of her Mulster coat, Currycombs brought a front hoof out with one of her magnifying lenses crooked in the pastern. "Tell me," she asked, squatting down close to the ground and examining it through the lens, "which would you consider to be the limiting factor: the amount of material to be moved or the material itself?"
"The amount," I said immediately while Furlong answered just as promptly, "The material."
Currycombs looked back at us with one eyebrow arched, and I turned to glare at Furlong. "Iron and steel are no more difficult to manipulate magically than silver, gold, sulfur, or magnesium, and I'll thank you not to raise the false distinction between 'cold iron' and any other sort of iron." Activating my horn, I pulled a pair of scissors from my pack and snipped them in his direction. "During my days as a cavalry medical mare, I would operate with a variety of steel implements aloft in my magic for hours at a time." A twitch rustled across the scars marring my front legs, and I tucked the scissors away before the shaking that often overtook me when I contemplated my past could begin.
The glare Furlong aimed at me seemed almost as pointed as my own. "I don't doubt your prowess with medical equipment, Doctor, but I believe you'll find that the difference between cold and warm in metallurgy hinges upon the purpose of the item being struck. Cold iron and steel are only used in the manufacture of weapons, y'see, so they've got a bit more obduracy than the sorts of metals used to make scalpels and stethoscopes and the like." He gestured again to the broad blank circle at the center of the monument. "The column was formed entirely of melted-down round shot, cannonballs captured when Queen Epona's forces stormed the griffon capital of Aerie."
It took some effort to keep my ears from folding, but I wasn't looking to get into an argument with the inspector. "That fact notwithstanding," I said, "were we speaking about a like amount of brick or stone or cheesecake, our perpetrator would still have been forced to utilize a vast reservoir of magical power to make it translocate."
"I'll agree there." Furlong shook his head. "And make no mistake, the power expenditure here was massively vast. Whoever did this tore such a hole in the aethersphere, it's still swirling over the entire plaza. Everything's so unsettled, not a single one of my mages has been able to even start getting a spell trace."
I nodded. "Teleportation magic is by its nature quite energy-intensive. Every regiment in Her Majesty's army has unicorns who specialize in it to the exclusion of all other forms of spellcraft." I swallowed as the implications of the thought fully stuck me. "We might be dealing with a cabal of malefactors, judging by the scale of the operation."
"And yet, inspector," Currycombs called from where she was nosing about the far side of the circle, "there's been no ransom demand? No megalomaniacal claim of responsibility? No word at all from the perpetrator or perpetrators?"
Furlong touched his horn. "As soon as anyone hears anything, it's to be sent to me directly."
Currycombs snorted. "Such a dashed nuisance, magic! I don't see how you unicorns can manage anything if it takes such a fearsome amount of folderol to achieve the simplest of effects!"
"Simple?" The inspector stared at her across the flat stone surface. "After everything we've just said, you call this simple?"
"I do," Currycombs said with a toss of her mane. "It's quite elegant, certainly, if my hypothesis is correct. But for all the power evidently expended, the doing of the deed seems to have been simplicity itself."
As I often found when dealing with Currycombs, I had to restrain myself from shouting. "Then you know how the column was taken?"
"Correction." She tucked her magnifying lens away. "I have a hypothesis. But before I can set up a test, I'll need to know how much concentration it would take to set this impossible teleport into motion."
I could only blink at her; it was Furlong who answered, "None at all, really. If the caster had access to the unlimited reserves of magical energy such a spell would require, a mere instant's thought would be sufficient. Teleportation isn't a continuous spell, after all; once the caster triggers it, it sucks its power away and is done."
Nodding, Currycombs rubbed her chin. "And the range of such a spell?" She gestured to the imposing buildings around the edges of the plaza. "Could a unicorn have stood hidden within one of these buildings and cast it? Or would it require the tapping of a hoof or a horn against the item to be whisked away?"
The air almost seemed to be simmering around Furlong's hat. "There's no contact required," he said, his voice rising, "because it can't be done!"
"But if it could be done?" Currycombs asked, tapping one hoof against the marble.
Furlong didn't look capable of answering, so I did. "I've seen teleportation spells fired from a unicorn's horn at a target, but only when short distances are involved. There are formulae for determining how quickly the various classes of magic will dissipate if the caster attempts to use them at range, but—"
"Excellent!" Currycombs sprang to her hooves and trotted across the center of the monument's former spot. "I shall need three things from you, inspector, and then we shall see if we can't locate Epona's Column."
The inspector had gone completely still. "You...you honestly mean that, Currycombs?"
Reaching his side, Currycombs fixed him with as intense a gaze as I'd ever seen from her. "There are certain matters about which I do not jest, sir, and the queens of Firebird House have lately become one of those matters."
The fresh water scent of relief that rolled off the inspector tickled my nose like pollen from a springtime flowerbed. "You shall have whatever aid I can provide," he said, his voice quivering.
"First." Currycombs waved again at the grand structures surrounding us. "I will need your absolute assurance that these buildings have been cleared of all equines including your own patrolsteeds and officers. Can you give me that assurance?"
"I can." The flare of Furlong's horn drew a notebook from the depths of his Mackintosh and began paging through it. "Only the plaza's regular vendor carts were doing business when the column vanished, and we rousted what few staff were at work in the museums when we cleared the area."
Currycombs nodded. "Second, we shall need the most trustworthy unicorn on the Ehwazton police force—other than yourself, of course—to join us here." She tapped the stone, then jabbed that hoof at the middle of his chest. "This must be the one unicorn to whom you would entrust not just your life but the safety of all Hevosenvalta. For I assure you, those are quite possibly the stakes we will be playing for this morning. Can you summon that unicorn here?"
Furlong's eyes went wide, and he gave a single nod. His horn lit up again and a tiny red fireball shot away from its tip toward the Verdugo Boulevard entrance to Unity Plaza. Several heartbeats later, the air to Furlong's right fizzed and burst into a shower of sparks; these cleared quickly to reveal a deep-orange unicorn mare, her short-cut blonde mane graying around the edges. "You rang, guv'nor?" she asked with a grin.
"Stand by, Sergeant Tufts." The inspector turned back to Currycombs. "And third?"
"Third." Swiveling her head and moving in a slow circle, Currycombs surveyed the entire empty square of flagstones around us. "Have your cordons move away from the plaza. We need to expand the exclusion zone and clear the citizenry and the constabulary further up the boulevards into the city at least a block. Can you give that order?"
"Cor," the sergeant more breathed than said. "This all that dangerous, then?"
"It is." Currycombs looked from Tufts to Furlong to me. "If there are any equines other than the four of us within a square quarter mile of this spot, then the perpetrator will have succeeded and we will have failed. Anarchy and injustice will run riotous throughout Hevosenvalta, and we will never again know another moment's peace."
Tufts eyes widened and her ears fell, but Furlong just set his horn to glowing even brighter. "There," he said after a moment of nothing but the morning breeze whispering past us. "Hope you're in no hurry, though. Backing up those crowds won't be easy."
Currycombs poked Furlong a few more times in the chest. "And your patrolsteeds as well. Every aardhorse, pegasus, and unicorn must be away from the area, or—"
"Yes, yes." Furlong scowled down at her. "Anarchy running riotous and all that. Trust me, Currycombs: the entire center of the city will be deserted save for us within a few moments time."
"Good." Currycombs turned back to face the center of the hippogriff circle. "Scalpel, I'll ask you to remain with me here. Furlong, you take a position just beyond the second statue to the right." She gestured to a spot a third of a turn around the circle. "Sergeant Tufts, you're to stand just beyond the second statue to the left, the three of you equidistant from each other. Your attention mustn't waver from the column's former location from so much as an instant. Is that understood?"
I gave a nod, and the sergeant began making her way toward the position Currycombs had assigned her. But Furlong, of course, wrinkled his brow and frowned. "What are you saying? That the column's still here?" He waved at the emptiness. "It's not invisible, or we'd still be able to feel it! And making a massive spire of steel insubstantial would take just as impossibly much power as teleporting it! You can't seriously—!"
"Inspector!" Currycombs stomped a hoof. "When you brought me into this situation, it was my understanding that you wished for my assistance! I've told you what we must do to recover Epona's Column safely and intact! If you choose not to follow my instructions, then I cannot be responsible for the outcome!"
Furlong's scowl deepened, and for a moment, I thought I would need to step in as I'd done earlier in the morning. But the inspector merely snorted, marched to the place Currycombs had given him, and took up a stance glaring at the air where the column had formerly stood.
I took up a similar stance, Currycombs beside me, and all became silence and inactivity for what seemed half an hour.
A small grunt from Currycombs tickled my ears. "So many variables," she murmured, her gaze also locked on our common focal point. "I've not missed even a single indicator, Scalpel; I'm certain of it. This is the only possible solution! It must be!"
The intensity of her hissing whisper almost caused me to glance in her direction. But at that very moment, the air overhead crackled and cracked. Black tears ripped through the blue sky, an invisible curtain shredding away to reveal Epona's Column floating in all its majesty some fifteen feet above its base.
For a fraction of a heartbeat, I could only stare. Then Currycombs's shout slapped me into action. "Levitation! Now! The spell that cloaked it is failing, and—!"
The column began to drop, slowly tipping sideways, and I fired every ounce of my magic at it. At the very same instant, two similarly intense beams enveloped the giant sculpture from my left and right.
"Tufts!" I heard Inspector Furlong shout. "You concentrate on steadying her north-south! I'll hold her east-west, and Doctor, we'll follow your lead guiding her back down!"
I can honestly say that I'd never before sweated so profusely during an operation. The weight of it—not just the physical mass of the statue but the cultural significance of our cargo and the realization that the entirety of Hevosenvalta was at that moment watching what we did—made my vision blur and the scars along my legs tighten almost to the point of bursting.
But Currycombs's calm voice soothed me like cool water on a scorching day: "Excellent, Scalpel, excellent! You're at ten feet now! I could feel the binding spell still active in the stone of the base, so simply lowering it into place again should cause it to reactivate and take its charge like a cradle holds a foal. Five feet! Three feet! One foot! Contact!"
Ancient magic of a sort I'd never before experienced enveloped mine in a welcoming embrace, and drawing what might've been my first breath since the column had reappeared, I relaxed my own magic, took a step back, and nearly collapsed.
Strong legs caught me, a strong back buttressing my side. "Careful, now, Doctor," Currycombs said, amusement now trickling among her words. "There's no use losing yourself after you've saved the patient."
Shuddering, I sucked in what felt like several gallons of air, pushed them all back out, and sucked in another several. By then, my blinking had cleared the spots from my eyes, and the first thing I saw was Furlong and Tufts, their heads craned back and staring upward.
I'm certain I heard my neck creak as I followed their example, but all my ailments puffed away like fog on a summer morning when I saw Queen Epona reared back in all her fiery magnificence high atop the column that now stood exactly where it was supposed to be.
"How?" Furlong said, drawing my attention back down to ground level. His eyes were sliding around in their sockets as if he couldn't decide where he wanted to look: the statue, or Currycombs.
For her part, Currycombs shrugged. "You convinced me that teleportation was an impossibility, so I discarded it from consideration. As Dr. Scalpel so fervently pointed out, we aardhorses are no strangers to magic of a certain sort, and when I could sense only about half the panic I would've felt from the stone here if its accustomed pedestal had simply vanished after so many centuries, I concluded that Epona's Column was still nearby. I just needed to get our spell caster out of range to break whatever magic was occluding it."
"Cor!" Tufts wheeled to stare at the street ends now cleared of watching equines. "Y'mean the blighter was in the crowd the whole time?"
"Possibly," Currycombs answered, and I realized I was still leaning heavily against her; my face heating up, I pushed myself away and back onto my own hooves. "More likely, however," she went on after giving me a nod, "the perpetrator was disguised as a patrolsteed."
"What?" The inspector's gaze fastened solely and completely upon Currycombs.
She shrugged. "My working theory is that this was a test, Inspector. The perpetrator would wish to observe the outcome, so I surmise that he or she donned the blue coat of the Ehwazton constabulary and stood among your other unicorns today. Doing crowd control would give him or her a perfect vantage from which to view the events unfolding."
Furlong's face reddened and tightened. "Tufts!" he shouted. "Did you see anyone unfamiliar along the line at Verdugo Boulevard?"
"No, sir!" she replied.
"Nor did I at Riverside." His horn began charging up. "You take Montlemore Boulevard and I'll take Bristleway!" With a burst of silver light, he vanished, and the sergeant did the same.
I blinked to clear the afterimage from my eyes. "But surely," I said, turning to Currycombs, "if the villain was among the police, he or she would be long gone by now!"
"He, I think," came Currycombs's voice. She was no longer standing beside me, however: the sound had come from around the pillar to my right.
Trotting in that direction, I came to Currycombs standing and staring at the plaque that marked the front of Epona's Column. "I was checking the binding spell when I sensed an anomalous magnetic field." She pointed to the plaque.
I followed her gesture and saw two metal currycombs stuck there in such a way that they held a large red rose in place against the black iron.
"So I was wrong," Currycombs said quietly. "This wasn't a test for the constabulary. It was a test for me."
"But—" was all I managed to say before she'd sprung into action; pulling one of her large, wax paper sacks from an inside pocket of her coat with her teeth, she rose onto her hind legs and chivvied both the combs and the rose into the bag. "Currycombs!" I said then.
"Yes, I know," she said, after tucking the bag away and lowering herself back to all fours. "But I'll find more trace evidence on them than those fools at Shetland Yard. And I rather think this has become just a bit personal at this point, don't you?"
That, I certainly couldn't disagree with. "You'll tell Furlong about them, though?"
"Of course." She started down the steps toward the flagstones of Unity Plaza. "He may have the combs when I'm done with them, but the flower, I think, is unlikely to last more than another day or two. Still, it'll look lovely on the mantelpiece for a while."
Returning Epona's Column to its proper place at the center of Unity Plaza brought a good deal of change to our lives. "The Case of the Purloined Pedestal," as I called the account I wrote up for the weekly Riverside Review, gained Currycombs as many clients as she could manage, and I found myself included more and more in resolving their complaints both at the request of the clients themselves and at Currycombs's invitation.
It all made for quite the exciting month, and in that time, the editor of the Review bought three more accounts of slightly fictionalized cases Currycombs and I had pursued. The journal's circulation, I was informed, had nearly doubled since they'd published "A Study in Sorrel," and while the rate I was paid per word didn't increase at such a precipitous rate, it nonetheless did increase with each sale. I truly began having trouble deciding which I welcomed more: Currycombs's call of "Come, Scalpel! The game's ahoof!" or those days when her absence allowed me to devote my time to arranging my mental notes into story form.
That particular morning when I arose at my usual half hour after dawn, the common room of the apartment I shared with Currycombs lay neat and tidy, a sure sign that my friend was out. She possessed a number of unmistakable talents, Currycombs did, and one of the most unfortunate was her ability to create a seemingly spontaneous nest of stones, flecks of paint, wood shavings, used wax paper, and who knew what all about her whenever she stopped moving for more than three minutes.
I'd been reprimanded several times for calling these items detritus. "It's evidence, Scalpel!" she tended to declare with many a scowl and hoof wave. "I've set each piece in exactly the place I need it to be, and I'll thank you not to disturb the least of them!"
The sun slanting through the curtains made the burnished wood of the room glow, the floors unmarred, the rugs not askew, and no piles of unknown substances oozing over the tabletops. My inventory also couldn't fail to include the rose, still red and vibrant in its vase upon the mantelpiece more than four weeks after Currycombs had plucked it from the magnetized currycombs that had held it in place to the side of Epona's Column.
I knew little of horticulture, but such longevity from a cut flower seemed indicative of magic to me. My examination of it had been unable to detect anything out of the ordinary, however, and Currycombs, though she hadn't mentioned the rose since putting it in place, had also shown no inclination to dispose of it.
Even apart from the pleasant romantic shivers the whole situation engendered, the rose was a lovely thing to rest one's eyes upon, and the regular, quiet, contented noises of Bakery Row outside soothed my ears after the pell-mell of our increased caseload. An approaching clatter of cutlery perked me up, though, the very welcome aroma of breakfast seeping into the air. The doorknob rattled, and Anisette came bustling in, a tray balanced across her back, her wings helping hold it in place. "Good morning, Doctor!" she exclaimed with a smile brighter than the sunlight. "I've a note from Ms. Currycombs, too!"
Sparking my horn, I took the tray in my magic and settled it to the dining table while Anisette peered into the various pockets of her apron. "It's so exciting," she continued as she searched, "to be of use to an equine doing such noble work as Ms. Currycombs." Her eyes widened, and she snapped her head up, her ears going flat. "And yourself as well, Doctor! Reading your accounts of Ms. Currycombs's cases brings them so instantly to life that I feel quite giddy thinking that they're taking place nearly under my very nose! Or rather above my very nose! Or rather—" She stopped and rolled her eyes. "I daresay you understand my meaning better than I understand it myself!"
I couldn't help but smile. Anisette was settling in quite nicely as Mr. Trencher's apprentice downstairs in the panini shop. The young mare hadn't yet received her eigensigil despite Mr. Trencher's continued insistence that it couldn't be long now since she was a natural baker and did so well with the customers. For my part, I felt it rather supported my theory that Anisette, like Currycombs, had an invisible sigil, something I'd never heard of nor so much as considered possible before meeting my friend.
"Ah!" Anisette plunged her snout into a fold of cloth that didn't appear to be an actual pocket and straightened with an envelope clenched in her teeth. I plucked it away with my magic and arched an eyebrow when she remained standing there with her wide eyes and toothy grin aimed at me.
She showed no sign of taking the hint, so I cleared my throat. "Thank you, Anisette. Don't let me keep you from your duties."
Her grin sagged a bit. "Oh. Yes. Of course, Doctor." But in the time that I'd known her, I'd yet to see her go long with a dour countenance. By the time she'd nudged my breakfast dishes from her tray and gathered it once again onto her back, her smile had returned full force. "I suppose I'll be reading all about this moment in one of your stories!" She touched a hoof to her strawberry-blonde mane. "Might you make me a true blonde in your account, Dr. Scalpel? I know it's only a small thing, but—"
"Now, now." I employed a much-diluted form of the glare I'd often employed during my years in Her Majesty's cavalry. "You know how important small details can be when Currycombs is involved."
It was hard to say which went rounder, her eyes or her mouth. "Oh! Of course, Doctor! I wouldn't want to impede the investigation in any way!" Spinning, she very nearly bolted from the room.
With a shake of my head, I settled in to breakfast while summoning a quick scalpel spell to slice open the envelope. My yogurt and oatmeal, however, nearly went down the wrong pipe when I read in Currycombs's unmistakable mouth-scrawl: Scalpel. By the time you see this, I'll be deep inside Nougat Prison. When you've a moment, might you stop in for a visit?
Needless to say, I was on my hooves at once, my magic flailing out to grab one of my blankets and my traveling kit before I burst out into the hallway and clattered down the stairs. Racing along the cobbled streets, I couldn't stop my mind from likewise racing: had Currycombs aimed one insult too many at Inspector Furlong? Had she bent more laws than usual in pursuit of justice for a client? Had she been caught in some fiendish trap set for her by the villain who'd taken Epona's Column and left her the rose as a calling card?
Several blocks and several more thoughts slowed my rush. For what could I actually do on my own? It was certainly too early for visiting hours at the gaol, and pounding on the great iron doors—four times as wide as any equine and as tall as a three story building—would either have no effect or get me thrown into a cell for disturbing the peace. Currycombs was counting on me: I needed to approach this problem using her own brand of deductive and inductive reasoning to show that her faith in me was not misplaced.
By this time, I was trotting more than galloping, and coming around a corner to see the western gate of Nougat Prison, I stopped completely. The former guardhouse in the city's original wall, the prison had expanded along with Ehwazton, Her Majesty's gaolers carving cells from the solid rock inside the wall itself to form a warren of rooms and passages that filled the ancient structure and circled the center of the sprawling metropolis rather than marking its outskirts. The rather gooey look of the yellowish limestone had inspired the name, but little that could be called sweet occurred within its precincts.
Turning away, I cantered back up the street with a new target in mind and quickly arrived at the no-less-imposing gates of Shetland Yard. These gates stood open, at least, and my association with Currycombs had accustomed me to the layout of the place: the first door on the left led into the sparsely furnished reception area, a square opening in the back wall showing a uniformed pegasus sorting papers. "Dr. Silver Scalpel," I informed him upon crossing the room, "here to see Inspector Furlong."
He blinked at me from where he reclined on the other side of a scarred countertop. "Sorry, ma'am. The inspectors don't usually get in till nine, but lemme—" He leaned back and shouted, "Hey, Sarge! Your biographer's here!"
That got me blinking till the sturdy orange figure of Sergeant Tufts stuck her graying blonde head through the doorway behind the patrolsteed, her blue uniform jacket hanging open. "You want another three weeks of this duty, Burr?" she growled at the pegasus. Then her gaze came up to meet mine, and her eyes widened. "Dr. Scalpel? Is ev'rything all right?"
Without hesitation, I produced the note I'd received with my breakfast. After all, Furlong had summoned Sergeant Tufts to the scene of Epona's missing column when Currycombs had requested the equine he most trusted in the entirety of the constabulary, and while Furlong could be more than a bit officious and obtuse, I had no reason to doubt him as a judge of character.
Focused on the note, Tufts's eyes got even wider. "Quick as you can, Burr," she said quietly, "gimme the booking sheets for Nougat this shift."
The pegasus put a hoof on a short stack of papers. "Got 'em right here, Sarge."
Restraining myself from scooping the papers up in my magic, I watched Tufts shuffle quickly through them. "She's not listed, Doctor." She flashed the slightest of grins. "Thought for sure His Nibs had finally gone off his nut and locked her up."
I couldn't keep a grin from tugging my own snout, but neither could I keep it there long. "So if she's not been gaoled under her own name—"
"Cor!" Tufts began leafing among the sheets again. "Here! Aardhorse mare, late twenties, bottled up for drunk and disorderly not more'n two hours ago." Tufts coughed a laugh. "Took a couple swings at the coppers who nabbed her, too."
"But why?" It took some effort not to stomp a hoof. "I've come to expect eccentric behavior from Currycombs, but purposefully getting herself arrested?"
Tufts snapped her uniform coat closed. "Might be we'd best go ask her." She smacked the pegasus on the shoulder. "Let Haymaker know he'll be having gentlemare callers in half a shake, will you, Burr? There's a good lad."
Frowning, the pegasus rubbed a hoof over the shoulder Tufts had struck while with the other he tapped a section of the desk, my horn tingling when a communication spell sparked to life. Tufts for her part jabbed a part of the wall; a door appeared just off to my right, and the sergeant stepped through to join me in front of the counter. "Now, then," she said, starting for the reception area's entrance. "Let's see what Ms. Currycombs has gotten herself into this time."
We made our way swiftly through the increasing bustle of the city streets. Tufts had the same self-assured way of moving through a crowd that I'd admired in the more-skillful sergeants that I'd worked with during my stint in harness. "Were you ever in the cavalry?" I asked her.
"Nah." Tufts tossed her mane. "Patrolling the streets of Ehwazton runs in the family back to the days of Queen Beryl." She beamed at the aardhorses hauling carts past us, the pegasi slicing back and forth through the morning blue above, the unicorns trotting along with packages floating in the glow of their horns. "Never wanted to do anything in my life but this."
As much as I tried to cultivate the sergeant's sang-froid, I found my nerves quivering. Rounding the same corner where I'd stopped earlier, we continued on to the black iron gate, the strange, lumpy wall of Nougat Prison stretching off through the more modern buildings of the city. Tufts came to a halt a dozen paces from the portal and said, "Hold up here, Doctor, and we'll let Haymaker's crew get a squint at us through their peephole." She gestured to a point perhaps two-thirds of the way up the massive arched door.
I neither saw nor sensed anything especial about that portion of the gate, but then a voice crackled out at us with the unmistakable tinniness of magical amplification: "What's all this, then, Sarge? You giving tours?"
"Open up, you great horse apples!" Tufts shouted. "You lot're at end of shift same as me, so the sooner we get this settled, the sooner we can all get home!"
For another moment, we stood in silence, then the groan of heavy but well-tended hinges creaked ahead of us. The gates swung outward, parting down the middle, and Tufts trotted in as blithely as if she were entering a park for afternoon tea. I entered with a bit more trepidation.
The friendly cobbles of the street became flat, cold, slabs of flagstone spattered with dark stains, and the sunlight that had begun warming the air vanished entirely behind the beetled brow of the building. The only light in the enclosed courtyard we entered came from the wall ahead: a magelight so blindingly bright, the shadows it threw seemed sharp enough to cut. A dank miasma of nearly palpable despair draped itself across my back, and I shivered, wishing I'd brought a second blanket.
Tufts, however, raised her head and called toward the magelight, "Like you to meet Dr. Silver Scalpel, Haymaker! She's the one writes about Ms. Currycombs's doings!"
"Currycombs?" a voice as deep as a well responded, and a figure moved into place between me and the light, a veritable clydesdale of an aardhorse, his snout scarred and crooked with the results of an apparently pugilistic life. "Can't say as how I dislike it when she makes the crooks and toffs of the world look right jackanapes." He towered up, larger than even the broad-shouldered infantry steeds I'd known, and for all that his gap-toothed smile was wide and open, I found it somewhat difficult to keep my ears upright. "What brings you down into the winding bowels of Ehwazton, Doctor?"
Swallowing brought no moisture to my throat, but Sergeant Tufts spoke before I could even begin squeaking: "Might be Ms. Currycombs was the drunk 'n' disorderly you packed in here a few hours ago." Her horn flared, and the note floated up to hover before Haymaker's face. "Dunno if she's on a case or what, but couldn't hurt to visit the tank, d'you think?"
Haymaker's long face got longer and longer as he stared at the note. "Well, slap me sideways," he finally rumbled. Turning with a grace I'd not have expected for an equine his size, he vanished into the shadows as thoroughly as if he'd never been there. "Come on, then, the pair of you," I heard him call back. "Help the doctor along, will you, Sarge? Ain't the easiest thing, navigating this place."
With a laugh, Tufts flared her horn. "I'll cast a darkness spell, Doctor, and you cast one for light. Just focus it straight ahead, and you'll see the way." A shadowy cone telescoped away from her, striking the magelight and plunging the whole courtyard into darkness.
Shaking myself, I sent out a beam of light as narrow as my namesake blade, and it sliced through the black to reveal an archway. I moved to it and entered, trusting Tufts would be at my tail, and found myself in what looked for all the world like a large open office suite, uniformed equines working at desks, carpets on the floor, narrow window slits letting in more light than I would've expected.
"Right, then." Haymaker wove among the desks without so much as brushing a one. "Lemme grab a key ring, and we'll see what's what." Reaching the far wall, he stuck a front hoof through one of the glowing silver bands that hung there; the band flared once and shrank to fit snugly about his pastern. He turned then and gestured toward a stone door in the wall to our left. "If there's one place 'round here Sarge knows the way to, it's the drunk tank. So how 'bout you lead the way?"
The look Tufts shot at him would've bruised a lesser equine, but Haymaker merely blinked, his smile as slow and sweet as syrup.
Snorting, the sergeant stomped away, and we passed through several corridors in this fashion, Tufts a solid glower ahead of me, Haymaker a large and shadowy shape behind. The hallways bent, narrowing and widening at seemingly random intervals, barred doors now and again revealing empty cells, until we came into a larger space divided neatly in half by a wall of steel mesh stretching from floor to ceiling.
"My mistake," Tufts said, something like her previous good humor dancing in her voice. "Looks like I brought us to your digs, Haysie."
Haymaker, however, was staring at the enclosed section of the room with his ears back and his nostrils flaring. "We're one drunk short," he muttered.
I looked from him to the cage. Two stallions and a mare lay in three of the corners, their heads lolled on their forelegs in various attitudes of repose, and I knew at once who would be found absent should a roll call be taken. Nodding to the gate, I asked, "Did Currycombs at least have the decency to relock it after breaking out?"
Tufts rattled the door, and it didn't swing open. "How considerate." She didn't sound quite as jolly as a moment ago. "Still, looks like you don't get to meet her after all, Haysie."
The stallion's ears remained folded, and he somehow seemed to expand in the uncertain light of the tiny firefly lanterns. "Don't much care for gaolbreakers," he growled.
Raising a hoof, I felt obliged to say, "We don't know that she's broken out of the gaol, actually. It scarcely seems credible that she would go through such efforts to get herself arrested only to immediately leave."
To judge by the continuing storminess of Haymaker's expression, this use of logic failed to impress him. Tufts, however, gave me several blinks. "Whaddaya s'pose her scheme is, Doc?"
All I could do was gesture toward the doorway opposite the one by which we'd entered. "Perhaps we should find her and inquire."
"Find her?" Haymaker's countenance had darkened so much, it made me quite nervous to see. "That's the least I'll be doing to that—"
A shout echoed from the corridor ahead, and the two patrolsteeds raced forward, myself not far behind. "Damn it!" a rough but high-pitched voice shrieked somewhere off in the semi-darkness. "Stand still so I can kill you!"
The hallway banked sharply to the left, and I followed the sergeant and the gaoler around the corner only to narrowly miss colliding with Tufts. Haymaker was smacking his oversized hoof to the barred door on our right through which I could make out quite the frenzy of activity. Bright green hoofs and feathers flashed, a pegasus mare nearly the size of the gaoler himself flailing about and yelling, "I swore I'd take that secret to my grave! Now that you know, I've gotta take you to yours!"
The metal band around Haymaker's pastern flared silver, and the cell door leaped open to reveal a wiry aardhorse within darting and spinning away from the much larger mare's attempts to strike her. Haymaker and Tufts sprang upon the pegasus, and Currycombs, her eyes bright and her chest heaving, gave me a nod. "Exactly on time, Scalpel! Well done!"
"Currycombs!" I rushed to her side, my ears folding at the bloody slash along her cheek. A quick antiseptic spell wiped it clean, and I proceeded to apply a sticking plaster from my saddlebag. "What in the Queen's name have you been up to??"
"No!" the pegasus mare screamed from across the rough-hewn room where she struggled against the grip of the patrolsteeds. "You're Currycombs?? Then I'm doomed! You'll tell the world, and my oath'll be broken!"
"Fear not, Emerald." Currycombs touched a hoof to her own chest. "I shall act upon the information you've given me, of course, but I shan't divulge the information itself even though the equine you're protecting is as foul a mass of putrid horseflesh as I've ever come across."
The pegasus froze, her eyes wide and staring. "You...you promise?"
"I swear it."
Sighing, Emerald relaxed so completely, Haymaker easily bore her to the ground while the glow of Tufts's magic wrapped some sort of restraining bands about her hoofs.
Beside me, Currycombs gave a brisk nod. "Come, then, Scalpel. Our work here is done."
"Done??" roared Haymaker, leaping up from the now-quiescent pegasus. "That's exactly what you are! Done! You come into my prison—!"
"On a charge," Currycombs interrupted, "so minor that the general practice is to allow drunken equines to sleep it off before sending them on their way with the payment of a small fine." She began advancing toward him. "I shall happily pay that fine, sir, if you don't mind the story being spread about that one of your charges managed to squeeze from your holding facility, enter the cell of a dangerous criminal, and could have lost her life to said criminal if you'd been much longer in arriving!"
Even though Currycombs had to tip her head back to meet Haymaker's gaze, it was the stallion's eyes widening, his ears falling, his scent growing sour with fear. "A gaoler's duty," Currycombs continued, her snout jutting forward while his drew back, "is to protect and reform those who've been imprisoned! With this facility seemingly unable to guarantee the basic physical safety of those ensconced within it, perhaps a review of all procedures from top to bottom wouldn't be entirely uncalled for!"
Haymaker blinked, his mane no longer bristling but now lying flat and limp along his neck. Currycombs held him frozen in her glare another half a heartbeat, then she snorted, turned, and marched for the cell door. "Lovely to see you again, Sergeant Tufts. Might I further prevail upon you to escort Scalpel and me out of this rabbit warren?" She stepped into the hallway and vanished around the corner.
Tufts made a sound that could've been either a gasp or a laugh and galloped after Currycombs. I spared a glance at Haymaker, white still rimming his eyes, his prisoner still lying quietly on the floor beside him. "It was a pleasure meeting you, sir," was all I could think to say before I likewise bolted after the other two.
I caught up with them quickly enough, Tufts evidently in the middle of a low-pitched but very fervent lecture: "—can't just wander about once you've been locked up, Ms. Currycombs! That sort of thing simply isn't done! Nougat has a reputation to maintain, and if word got out that we—"
"Ha!" Currycombs cut through the shadowy corridors as if she knew every step of the way intimately. "Until the blackguard truly responsible for my being here has been brought well and firmly to justice, I have no other concerns."
That got my ears falling. "Are you saying that you were imprisoned due to another's false testimony?"
Currycombs shot me the blankest of blank looks, but then a smile tugged her snout. The tendons that had been standing out along her neck subsided a bit, and she actually gave a bark of laughter. "Forgive me, Scalpel. I fear I misspoke. I alone was responsible for allowing myself to experience incarceration this fine morning. The reason I left you that perhaps overly cryptic note before going out to pretend an assault upon a police officer—" Her gaze darted back toward Tufts, the sergeant gaping back at us. "But perhaps this is information that should wait." She gave Tufts a toothy and completely false grin. "Client confidentiality and all that: you understand, Sergeant."
With a shallow frown, Tufts lead us to the office once again and from there back out onto the street. "My shift's over," she announced as the great iron gates creaked shut behind us. "And I plan to head home, wrap myself in blankets, and stuff pillows in my ears. That won't keep Inspector Furlong from rousting me out and demanding a report on what's gone on here this morning once he learns of it, so if you've anything you need to do before he hauls you in to shout at you, Ms. Currycombs, best you be doing it quickly."
Squinting through the sunlight, I nodded to her. "Thank you, Sergeant, for everything." I expected to hear Currycombs echo the sentiment, but when I looked around, she was already cantering off into the crowds moving up and down Dovecote Street. One more nod, and I hurried after my friend. "Really, Currycombs!" I said with just a touch of asperity. "I can't believe we're in such a hurry that we can't—"
"We are," she replied shortly, her attention focused solely on the path she was weaving through the equines around us.
I struggled to keep up. "But why? What's this all about?"
"Several things, I'm hoping." Cutting suddenly to our right, she leaped into the mouth of an alleyway; barely avoided a cart of onions, I followed.
Entering the alley, I caught sight of her ahead, galloping as if a squadron of griffins pursued her. I picked up my hooves and raced along in her wake, but not even reaching the cross streets caused her to slacken her pace. She shot over the cobblestones like a stone from a sling, seemingly unconcerned with the traffic. I took a more reasonable path, slowing up at the boulevards and giving at least a cursory glance before plunging through, but I always managed to keep her dark hide and red mane in sight.
Finally, with no idea where in Ehwazton we were and my nostrils flaring with each gasping breath, I saw her stopped in the middle of the block we'd just entered. She gave a nod, rose up on her hind legs, wrapped her front pasterns about the rungs of a fire escape ladder, and began shinnying up. Barely pausing at the base—this was the most exertion I'd undergone since sustaining my injuries all those months ago—I clambered after her.
At the roof, I hauled myself over and beheld her creeping across the flat tarpaper shingles. She paused only to swing her head around and touch a hoof to her lips, then she sidled up to the low wall that marked the other edge of the building's roof and peered over.
It took me a moment to calm my panting sufficiently to join her, and when I did, I was astonished to see Mr. Trencher's panini shop below us on the other side of the street. I swung my head toward her to start asking the questions that had been popping into my head for the past several minutes, but she only touched her lips once more and then gestured to the roof of the building next door to the shop.
That building was one of the many bakery supply warehouses that dotted Bakery Row. Like the others, the building had a loading ramp on the roof to accommodate pegasi delivery teams, and in the shadow of that ramp, I could just make out an equine figure wrapped in a dark coat with a wide-brimmed hat pulled down across its face. Currycombs moved the hoof with which she'd brought the figure to my attention and pointed it at the row of windows that marked our rooms above the panini shop, and I realized there could be no doubt: the cloaked equine was very specifically watching our apartment.
The figure jerked suddenly upright, my attention darting over to see a flash of purple and lavender under the encompassing garments. Light flared beneath the hat's brim, and the figure vanished, employing the least ostentatious transport spell I'd ever seen.
Beside me, Currycombs grunted, her gaze fixed upon the now empty spot across the street, a tight smile on her snout. "Impressive," she muttered. "But one can almost smell the fear, can one not, Scalpel?"
I sniffed, and she gave a laughing sigh. "Figuratively," she said, settling back against the balustrade we'd been peering over, the bowstring-taut tension of her back relaxing.
That got me glaring. "Can I get back to my breakfast now?" I asked, refusing to give her the satisfaction of asking what this had all been about.
"No, actually." All trace of laughter disappeared. "I need to explain everything to you in a place where that villain can't overhear us."
"Villain?" I glanced back at the recently vacated spot, and my heart rate, only just slowing from our run, shot upward once more. "You mean that was the mystery stallion? The one who cast the spell on Epona's Column and left you the rose?"
"Yes." Currycombs's mouth went sideways. "Except she's a mare rather than a stallion, I realized when I first managed to catch sight of her some weeks ago. I assume she was initially hoping to create an air of romantic mystery with that rose so that I'd be more inclined to keep it in the apartment and thereby facilitate her magical eavesdropping."
Every hair in my mane stood up. "You mean she's been spying on us through the rose for more than a month? And you didn't see fit to so much as mention it to me?"
Currycombs blinked. "You're as stalwart and honest a mare as I've ever had the privilege to know, Scalpel. I decided that I'd rather not force you into a situation where you had to constantly prevaricate."
Not for the first time since getting to know Currycombs, I wanted to simultaneously shout at her and thank her. Still, it took me some seconds before I could form coherent words. "Then I take it," I squeezed out through clenched teeth, "that you're through pretending you don't know about her?"
"Indeed." She shook her head. "I'm certain she'll see through this morning's ambuscade fairly quickly—she's quite intelligent for one so wracked with self-doubt. I just wish we'd gotten here sooner! A few more moments' observation might have revealed even more details about her!"
I was slowly trying to assemble an idea of what had been occurring around me this morning. "Then you arranged all this—why, exactly? To lure our mysterious villain further out into the open?"
"In part. I needed to speak to Emerald, but with her currently residing in Nougat Prison—" Currycombs cocked her head at me. "You recall, I assume, Doctor, the circumstances of our meeting? 'A Study in Sorrel,' I believe you called it in the largely fictitious version you published some months ago?"
"Of course," I answered, biting down on my impatience. Speaking with Currycombs often reminded me of assembling a jigsaw puzzle: one needed to trust that the picture would come together eventually.
"Well." Currycombs slumped a bit against the balustrade. "After I proved that Violet Peony was lying when she said Hope Springs had murdered her father, I stupidly left the case in Inspector Furlong's hooves to resolve, and he's so far been unable to link Peony to any crime whatsoever! There's no evidence that she assisted her father in killing himself; she speaks quite eloquently in blaming her distraught state of mind for the charge she leveled against Hope Springs; and Springs, the love-struck fool, is refusing to take any civil action against Peony for falsely accusing him of the most heinous crime known to equines!"
Grinding her teeth, she lapsed into a seething silence. "And?" I prompted.
She waved a hoof. "And Emerald shared a cell with Peony while they were both in the Old Hayley. Emerald got six months in Nougat for her crimes along with the supposed attentions of a psychiatrist, but Peony's on the verge of being released without a single charge leveled against her! She who plotted in cold blood to send an innocent stallion to the gallows for a crime no one's committed in generations will be a free mare by the end of the week, and I see no way in which I can prevent it!"
For all that I knew she didn't care to be touched, I reached over to set a hoof on her shoulder. The memory of the scene earlier in Emerald's cell, however, brought me up short. "But...didn't you tell Emerald that you would act upon the information she gave you?"
"I did, and I shall." Currycombs tapped her chin. "But while it's undoubtedly interesting, it's not probative of any crime on Peony's part." Her gaze softened, unfocusing as if she were looking inward rather than outward. "Unless...hmmm..." The silence into which she lapsed this time seemed less angry and more contemplative, too. "That might indeed be a possible course of action," she said after a moment.
I was still seeking to assemble the puzzle. "But how is Ms. Peony connected to the villain who took Epona's Column?"
"What?" Her head snapped around so sharply, I was surprised her neck didn't creak. "She's not, Scalpel! Whatever made you think she was?"
It took a bit of effort to contain my own seething. "Isn't that what we're doing here?"
Currycombs rolled her eyes. "I took advantage of the situation created by my investigation of Peony to alarm our mysterious villain. She obviously has some concern for me and my doings, and you racing from our flat this morning in obvious distress, I felt, would cause her to abandon her usual subterfuge in an attempt to discover what had become of me." A rather self-satisfied little smirk pulled at her muzzle. "It worked rather better than I'd expected, though I doubt she'll fall for the same sort of trick twice."
"So..." I took a breath and blew it out, but my throat still felt a bit tight. "You withheld from me the information that a villain was spying on our apartment, then you used me without my knowledge in a plot to draw this villain out. Is that the gist?"
Her eyes widened. "When you put it that way, I can see that I might have something to apologize for."
She didn't go on. I raised an eyebrow. She cleared her throat. "Yes, I kept you in the dark," she said, shifting against the roof's shingles. "I have what I feel are very good reasons for this, but I can understand how you might disagree. I will therefore resolve that, in the future, when I'm using our shared apartment as bait to trap an archvillain, I will bring the matter to your attention sooner rather than later."
It was, I felt certain, as close as I was likely to get to an actual apology. "Thank you," I said with a nod. "I take it, then, that we'll be disposing of the rose once we go downstairs?"
"We will." Currycombs sighed. "She's a deucedly slippery character, but the glimpses I've caught over the past few weeks have confirmed my resolve not to make the very mistake with her that she's made with me."
"And what mistake is that?" I asked, rising to my hoofs and stretching.
"The cardinal mistake, Scalpel." She likewise stood and started for the fire escape. "She doesn't consider me her equal and therefore underestimates me. I refuse to do the same."
My instinctive reaction nearly drove me to declare that I could think of no equine I would call Currycombs's equal, but watching the unmistakable spring in her step as she crossed the roof froze the words on my tongue.
That this villain had demonstrated her sheer magical power in unequivocal terms, I was more than happy to admit, and her cleverness, too, in what she'd done and the way in which she'd done it. Whether there was more to her than that, however, I found to be very much an open question, but, well, looking at the matter from Currycombs's perspective, I could see that she perhaps needed this villain to be her intellectual equal.
So instead, I asked, "And what of Violet Peony?"
"What indeed?" Currycombs stopped at the top of the ladder and looked back at me. "How prepared are you to make a sudden trip out of Ehwazton, Scalpel?"
I shrugged. "I have very little holding me here."
"Excellent!" She began clambering downward. "We may have to decamp for San Pinto rather expeditiously depending upon the actions our Ms. Peony chooses to pursue. So first, a bit of housecleaning, and then we're standing by for a possible journey west."
It's at this point in my narrative that I must beg the reader's indulgence. For while certain of the events that I've presented heretofore might seem a bit on the extraordinary side, the events to follow are such that, even as I was experiencing them, I found myself nearly unable to believe they were actually occurring.
After my first glimpse of the mysterious mare who'd caused Epona's Column to vanish, the atmosphere in the apartments I shared with Currycombs steadily thickened as if before a thunderstorm. Currycombs grew more agitated than ever I'd seen her at the impending release of Violet Peony from police custody, and the sounds she extracted from her poor hammer dulcimer at all hours of the day and night qualified more as moans and utterances than anything one might classify as music.
Even worse, however, were those hours when she lay sprawled across the chaise lounge in our sitting room, one foreleg as often as not draped across her face and the phrase, "I'm a fool, Scalpel," murmuring from her lips. This all went on for a week until, on the night before Violet Peony would trot forth a free mare, the metaphorical thunderstorm finally hit.
Currycombs had shown herself more lethargic than usual that entire day, not venturing from her couch for breakfast, lunch, or dinner. I had no idea when last she'd taken a case, and my attempts to engage her interest by reading crime notices from the evening edition of the Ehwazton Times didn't even meet with grunts.
At last, I'd had enough. "This is unhealthy, Currycombs," I said, folding the paper with my magic and setting it neatly upon the table between us. "Your obsession with Ms. Peony—"
"Obsession?" Currycombs whipped her foreleg away from her eyes, and they shone like those of the fever patients I'd treated on the frontier. "The nearest thing to a murderer Hevosenvalta has seen in generations, Scalpel, and I'm about to let her fly from my hooves!" She leaped up and began stomping back and forth between the sofa and the windows that looked out upon Bakery Row. "If she wishes to return to her familial home in Lauraceous Gardens, she'll be not half a mile away, flicking her ears at all things right and proper, and I'll be able to do exactly nothing! Nothing!"
I chose—perhaps unwisely—to speak. "The law has determined that she committed no crime."
"The law??" The stomp Currycombs gave dented the wooden floor. "The legal system of Hevosenvalta is the only thing I account to be more of a fool than I am! I never should've turned Peony over to Shetland Yard!" She stomped again, creating another divot. "I should've dealt with that vile succubus myself!"
Which brought me to my hooves. "Now see here! Surely you're not advocating some sort of vigilante justice??"
She snorted. "Law and justice have at best a nodding acquaintance, and in a case such as this where the one has proven itself so woefully inadequate, the other must take precedence!"
"Impossible!" I doubt that my stomp left any sort of a mark: for all that Currycombs was shorter than I, she was an aardhorse and outweighed me by several stone. I leveled the hoof I'd stomped accusingly at her. "As you have argued yourself, the very basis of civilization—!"
A knock at the door interrupted me. "Dr. Scalpel? Ms. Currycombs?" someone called, and I recognized it as Anisette, the apprentice to Mr. Trencher, our landlord and the owner of the Panini Emporium above which our rooms were situated.
My ears tightened against my head; I spun, activated my horn, and pulled the door open. "Forgive us, Anisette," I said to the wide-eyed pegasus on the other side. "Our discussion became a bit agitated. Please convey our apologies to Mr. Trencher and any we might've disturbed."
She blinked. "Disturbed? Oh, no, doctor! It's just that Ms. Currycombs has a rather, umm, determined client, and—" A dusty purple glow appeared around Anisette's muzzle, squeezing her mouth closed as her eyes widened even further.
"That's enough of that," an oddly accented and nasally voice said from the hallway. The purplish glow expanded, surrounded Anisette, lifted the young mare bodily from the floor, and moved her through the doorway into our apartment.
My mane bristled at the sheer profligacy of the power being channeled into the spell, and my mane bristled even further when a cloaked figure in a large slouching hat stepped in behind Anisette, that same lavender magic springing forth to push the door closed. The barest rustle of sound behind me, and Currycombs moved to my side, her ears perked and her eyes more focused than I'd seen them in a week.
"Both of you," the new arrival said, and I became certain she was a mare although her head remained downcast, her hat blocking any view of her face. "Stay right where you are, please. None of us wants this to get ugly, so I'll ask the little horse girl to remain." Her magic didn't so much flare as ooze, something thick and unnatural about it as she set Anisette onto the floor between herself and the part of the room where Currycombs and I were standing.
"Now see here!" I exclaimed, a number of retorts springing to my tongue.
But Currycombs slid half a pace forward, her shoulder pressing against mine, her attention not straying from our uninvited guest. "Hostage taking?" she asked, the quiver in her voice one of excitement, I could tell. "Surely there's no need for such melodramatics between the two of us."
The mare froze, and I did as well. The concealing hat; the shadowy cloak; the lavender magic radiating power from each and every flex: this was our mystery mare, the one we'd caught spying on our apartments, the one who'd absconded with Epona's Column!
Silence filled the room until our visitor drew in a shaky breath. "I don't trust you," she said. "I don't trust any of you creatures! I don't trust what I'm seeing or what I'm thinking or what I'm doing! But I can't— I haven't— There isn't—" Her head snapped up, her face younger than I'd expected, white rimming her eyes and her lips pulled back. "My name is Starlight Glimmer, and I'm not a horse!"
The word bristled my mane yet again, but Currycombs pushed me back a bit more forcefully than before. "None of us are," she said, and I'd never heard her speak more gently. "We're equines, and as such, we can talk calmly and quietly without threatening anyone. In fact, it's your manner of speech that leads me to believe that you're not yourself right now, so perhaps we can sit down and speak some more?" Still without looking away, she waved a hoof at the furniture behind us. "You've come here for help, and I can think of nothing more fascinating than assisting you in regaining your rightful shape."
I somehow restrained myself from gaping at the back of Currycombs's head, but our guest—Starlight Glimmer, if one were to believe such as outlandish name—dropped her jaw, a visible shiver passing through her. "A trick," she muttered after a moment. "How do I know you're not just saying that to capture me?"
Currycombs's ears flicked, and I caught a sour whiff of annoyance drifting up from her. "I have a more-than-passing familiarity with a large percentage of this world's languages, and I've studied the way the physical differences among our neighbors—griffins, dragons, kobolds, minotaurs and the like—affect their pronunciation of our modern Equish. The nasal quality of your voice intrigued me the moment I first heard it, and one possible explanation would be you having spent most of your life speaking without a muzzle." She touched the end of her nose with a hoof.
A shiver of a more violent nature shook Ms. Glimmer; her eyes rolled closed, and she pitched forward onto the floor. Leaping past Currycombs, I managed to cushion her head before she struck, dropped to my knees beside her, and deployed my diagnostic spells. "She's fainted." Brushing her hat away revealed a matted purple and blue mane and a horn displaying a raw sheen that screamed of overuse. "I'm reading extreme levels of physical and mental stress exacerbated by fatigue and malnutrition."
Glancing away, my gaze next found Anisette, now free of her restraints, her scent salty with fear as she clutched her hooves to her chest and stared at my sudden patient. "Off you go, lass," I said. "This no place for anyone who needn't—"
"On the contrary." Currycombs spun, leaped over the chaise lounge, and pushed it with her head across the room to where I knelt. "I'll ask you, doctor, to settle our client here as comfortably as you can. Anisette?" She fixed what I could only call a giddy expression upon the young pegasus. "Is Mr. Trencher likely to come looking for you at this time of the evening?"
Anisette's gaze flickered back and forth between Currycombs and the unconscious mare I'd surrounded with my silver magic. "I...I don't think so, Ms. Currycombs." Anisette shook herself. "The dinner rush is over, and I'd set the dish washing spells to running before this lady appeared at the door asking for you."
"Excellent." Currycombs waved vaguely toward the door. "Perhaps you could bring up some bread and barley broth? I have a feeling our client will be needing some actual food here once Dr. Scalpel awakens her."
"Client?" I squeezed out through clenched teeth. Ms. Glimmer weighed physically less than a unicorn her size should have, but the magic that crackled over, around, and through her even in her current incapacitated state wrestled against mine in a most disconcerting way. Still, I raised her from the floor and did my best not to dump her too unceremoniously upon the lounge. "Currycombs! Surely you can't mean—"
"But I do, Scalpel." The gleam in her eye had passed feverish and entered a realm I'd come to know all too well during the several months of our acquaintance. "Whatever manner of being this Ms. Glimmer is, she needs our help."
"You mean—?" The volume of air set in motion by Anisette's gasp would've snuffed candles had any been placed near her. "She's really not an equine?"
I snorted, but Currycombs gave me one of her infernal grins. "Perhaps you could examine her shoes, doctor?"
Blinking, I directed my attention downward. "She...she has none!" I looked more closely at her chipped and damaged hooves. "I'm detecting the residue of some odd cushioning spell and—" I swallowed. "The most brute-force sort of healing has been done here! Multiple times! But no reputable doctor would ever cast such grotesque magic!"
"Exactly," Currycombs more whispered than said. "She has no experience with hooves and therefore no understanding of how to maintain them. You've already noted the puffiness around her horn, I assume, indicating that she has no experience with magic and is learning to cast spells very much on a 'trial and error' basis. Add to that my linguistic analysis, and it becomes clear that she is indeed telling the truth." She turned slightly narrowed eyes toward Anisette. "The bread and broth?"
Anisette blinked, then gave a little gasp. "Oh! Yes! Of course!" And she raced from the room with a speed of which I'd not thought her capable.
Chuckling, Currycombs nodded to me. "Now, how gently can you awaken her, doctor?"
I swallowed and extended a waver of my magic into the shifting tumult of her own, stroked her power as one would a frightened dog, and coaxed my way through to the uneasily shifting center of her mental processes.
She cried out, her eyes shooting open, her power clutching mine in a grip like nothing I'd ever felt before. "Be at ease, Ms. Glimmer!" Currycombs called quietly but intensely. "You are exactly where you had hoped to be: among friends who wish to help you!"
Her frantic gaze fixed itself on mine, then shifted past me to where Currycombs stood. The tendons along her neck slowly sank, and the clench of her magic began to relax. "You believe me," she said, and it was more a statement than a question, her eyes rolling closed again. "I've been so afraid for so long, I don't— I can't— I haven't got the words."
My magic still monitoring her vital signs, I shook my head. "She needs sleep."
"No!" Desperation filled her voice, but she moved in less frenzied a fashion as she struggled to sit up, blinking rapidly and repeatedly as if to clear her vision. "There's no time! The guy I followed to get here, he's leaving as soon as his girlfriend's out of jail or whatever, and if I don't follow him back, I don't know how I'll ever get home again!"
Currycombs moved to my side, and I looked over, wanting to ask her if this could somehow be a reference to Violet Peony. But the way Currycombs's ears were folded so deeply into the red tangles of her mane that they nearly vanished gave me all the answer I needed. "Very well, Ms. Glimmer," Currycombs said, the words as taut as the string of a drawn-back bow. "I've asked young Anisette to bring us up some provender, and then you will tell us the sequence of events responsible for bringing you here."
The expression on Ms. Glimmer's face was that, I would say, of a drowning mare beholding an approaching vessel. She answered my questions readily enough—no, she didn't need the lounge slid any closer to the fireplace, but yes, she would happily accept one of my blankets to drape about her shoulders—but I'm almost entirely certain that she didn't look away from Currycombs the whole time. Currycombs busied herself with moving our motley selection of chairs to the spot just inside the front door where we'd set Ms. Glimmer, and she was shoving the table into the middle of the ring she'd created when Anisette returned only slightly out of breath with a nearly full tureen of soup and enough bread to founder a party twice our size.
A rumbling arose from Ms. Glimmer's interior, and the four of us finished off the bread and the contents of the tureen in short order, about half our provisions passing between Ms. Glimmer's lips. The air of tightness surrounding her relaxed further, and that in turn relaxed the tightness of my own shoulders. Yes, eight or ten hours of sleep would've been the best medicine for her at this point, but if her predicament was indeed wrapped up in the imbroglio surrounding Violet Peony, then time was, alas, not on our side.
With our supper concluded, Currycombs leaned forward from her perch on the edge of the large easy chair she usually occupied when listening to a client. "Now, Ms. Glimmer, I'll ask you to begin at the beginning and to leave no detail unremarked no matter how trifling it might seem."
And with Anisette and I likewise hanging on her every word, she began.
"It's just...it all seems like a dream, a weird nightmare that started—" She gave a choked sort of laugh. "I don't really know when it started. I mean, I don't know how long it's been since I fell through that old mirror and—" She stopped again, took a breath, and blew it out. "From the beginning, though, you said.
"My name is Starlight Glimmer, and I'm a human being. You don't seem to have any of us here, but we walk upright on our two hind legs, and our forelegs end in hands instead of hooves."
"Oh!" Anisette gave a small flap of her wings. "Like a minotaur, Ms. Glimmer?"
The smile Ms. Glimmer turned toward Anisette was perhaps the most natural expression I'd yet seen from her. "I should've guessed a world full of unicorns and pegasi would have minotaurs, but where I come from, only humans can talk and think and all that." She brushed one front hoof along her snout. "Our faces are pretty much flat like you said, Ms. Currycombs, and I have skin there instead of this horsehide. It's the same lavender color, though, and my hair's the color of my mane, but I don't have a tail back home..."
She shook her head. "I grew up in a small town called Sire's Hollow, but when my test scores showed that I was going to need better schools than the little ones we had nearby, we moved to the capital city of Canterlot where my grandmother lived in a big old house not far from Crystal Prep, one of the best schools in the country, maybe even the world!"
The excitement in Ms. Glimmer's voice caused me to revise downward the age I'd assigned her after my cursory examination when she'd lost consciousness. Somewhere in her late teens or early twenties seemed much more likely than somewhere in her early thirties no matter how developed her magical abilities.
"My grandmother and I..." Ms. Glimmer shifted against the cushioned lounge. "I...I don't really know if I can explain this, but, see, my world runs entirely on scientific principles. We haven't got anything even remotely like magic anywhere at all, but there are still a lot of people who like to believe that magic exists even though no one has ever demonstrated any sort of real magic in a controlled setting."
Just the thought of it made my horn tingle. Yes, certain of our non-equine neighbors had very little ability to channel the natural force known as magic, but I could hardly imagine how civilization could possibly develop in a people who lacked even the slightest access to magic's all-pervasive touch.
But Ms. Glimmer was going on. "Now, I'm really into science and tech and all that—my dad sometimes calls me his little know-it-all." The corner of her mouth twitched. "But Grandma, she used to talk all the time about magic and mysticism and the fairy creatures she knew were slipping around just out of sight. We used to get into these big arguments—or I guess I used to get into these big arguments. She'd just smile and tell me I didn't know as much about the world as I thought I did.
"Which just got me madder, of course." She waved a hoof. "The point is, everything kind of started with her. Because after she died last month—" The breath she took rattled in and out. "Or maybe it was the month before that, now. But that's when things got weird."
Anisette had drawn her front hooves up to her chest, but now she stretched one wordlessly toward Ms. Glimmer. Ms. Glimmer nodded to her with a twitch of a smile. "Grandma died pretty suddenly: one afternoon, she wasn't feeling well, so she went to her room to take a nap, and when Mom went to get her for dinner, she couldn't wake her up. The ambulance took her to the hospital, and she...she died two days later without ever opening her eyes again."
Again, her breath caught. "It turned out that, in her will, she had this whole section made out specifically to me where she left me this great big old mirror in the basement and this whole weird story about how her great-great-great grandmother or somebody like that way back had been given this mirror by—" Swallowing, she looked around the ring at the three of us in turn. "By some guy who claimed he was actually a magical unicorn. He called himself Starswirl the Bearded."
My face, I'm certain, reflected the blankness I saw on Currycombs's.
Ms. Glimmer blinked. "You don't know who that is?"
I gave as gentle a shrug as I could. "It's not a name I learned in school, I fear."
"But—" Her ears dipped.
"Please, Ms. Glimmer." Currycombs in general masked her impatience imperfectly, but this time, possibly in deference to our guest's delicate condition, she made the effort. "Time is of the essence as you know, so pray continue, if you would."
Ears still partially folded, Ms. Glimmer seemed on the verge of objecting, but she shook her head quickly and went on. "So I was maybe a little upset with Grandma." She shrugged. "I mean, I'd seen the mirror down in the basement plenty of times. She'd never said a single thing about it, and now, saying it was some weird magical artifact, well, she'd pretty much gotten the last word in our argument, hadn't she? It kept poking at me like a sore tooth, and the night after her funeral, I went down into the basement and..."
Her eyes lost focus. "I kind of shouted at the mirror a lot, and way more viciously than I'd ever shouted at Grandma. I got really riled up, too, and without even thinking, I swung a fist at the mirror, swung at the image of my shouting self, and...and my fist passed right through." She swallowed with such force, I could see it travel down her neck. "It was like punching fog except that it...it grabbed me. It pulled me off balance, and I fell forward, hitting the glass but not...not hitting anything. The light cut off, the air I sucked in all cold and dry, and I was rolling, flailing my arms and legs, fetching up on my side, and...and..."
She held up a foreleg, her eyes wide and staring at it. "They weren't my arms stretched out over the rough stone floor, and I didn't have hands anymore. I felt all unbalanced and misshapen: it took me like ten minutes just to get up onto all fours." Her leg dropped back to the cushions. "I wasn't even a horse! I mean, we have horses back home, but they're just animals, not like you people here even though you look a lot like them. But what I saw when I looked up—"
A shiver quivered her flanks. "I was in this cave, and all along the walls everywhere stood these mirrors, hundreds of them, all glowing with this weird grayish light! And reflected in the mirrors, looking back at me, the only thing in the whole cave, was this...this thing that looked like a kids' toy or something out of a cartoon! It had my color skin, my color eyes, my color hair, this stubby unicorn horn sticking up from its forehead, and when I moved, it moved! And I realized it was me, but it wasn't me at all!"
At this point, Ms. Glimmer was gasping more than breathing, and I reached out to place a comforting hoof upon hers. Anisette, however, leaped bodily from her chair and wrapped a leg around Ms. Glimmer's shoulders. "Take courage, please, Ms. Glimmer!" she entreated. "These are trials you've successfully overcome, and you are here in safety with us now!"
Pressing her head against Anisette's chest, Ms. Glimmer murmured. "I'm sorry. I haven't had anyone to tell this to, so it's all been kind of bubbling and festering inside me."
I nodded. "If recollecting becomes too much for you, let us know, and we'll bring this interview to an end."
"No!" she said, her voice at once much firmer. She pushed herself into a more upright posture and smiled warmly at Anisette. "Thank you, Anisette. I'd like to say that I won't need to lean on you again, but I'm pretty sure I will."
Without hesitating, Anisette wriggled into a position partially reclining across the end of the chaise lounge. "Then I shall remain here close at hoof."
For another fraction of a moment, I thought Ms. Glimmer might be preparing to pass out again: her eyes drew closed, and she wavered in place. But she took a deep breath, opened her eyes, and continued. "I looked at myself—or at the little pony thing I'd become—in all those mirrors for I don't know how long. And then, well, then I realized that I wasn't sure which mirror it was I'd fallen through.
"I mean, yes, it had to be one of the three or four closest to me—I hadn't tumbled all that far—but the cave floor was solid rock and not covered with dust or dirt or anything helpful like that. So I just picked the nearest mirror, touched the surface with my weird not-even-a-hoof thing, and it grabbed me again. I couldn't help laughing, thinking it was going to pop me back into Grandma's basement, but instead..."
She reached out and rested a hoof on Anisette's. "I fell into another cave, this one darker and smokier with a couple of flickering lanterns hanging on hooks beside a big wooden door. I still had lavender horse legs underneath me, I saw right away, but now I had actual dark purple hooves instead of the weird stumpy things I'd had a few seconds ago.
"I stood up, and a bell started ringing, the whole place shaking so hard, it almost tipped me over again. Something rumbled behind me, and I spun around just in time to see a slab of rock sliding down to cover the mirror I'd just come through. My ears began buzzing, and everything smelled sickly sweet all of sudden. It made me feel dizzy, and I...I think I must've passed out."
"The fiends!" Currycombs whispered harshly. "No wonder Furlong's investigation proved fruitless!"
We all turned to look at her, and she started back as if awakening from a dream. "Pray forgive me, Ms. Glimmer." Currycombs's jaw was set with a determination I'd only seen from her in some of our more perilous cases. "My outrage at hearing of your poor treatment is causing me to conjecture in advance of the facts. Please continue."
Ms. Glimmer swallowed and nodded. "When I came to, I was tied to a bed by these golden glowing ropes. I know now that they were magic, but, well, like I said, in my world, we have science instead of magic, so I just thought I was seeing a glow because I wasn't quite recovered from whatever had knocked me out. The room around me was small and lit only by the light coming in from a tiny window up along one wall. Between me and that wall stood these two horses staring at me, a unicorn and a pegasus. But since I was still a horse, too, I figured they might be people. So I asked out loud, 'Can you talk?'
"My voice sounded weird, and my lips felt so big and flappy, it was like I'd just been to the dentist. I couldn't imagine horse people would speak the same language as me, but if they spoke any language, I thought they might recognize that I was trying to communicate. So I asked more questions—where am I, can you understand me, things like that—but they just kept staring at me and not making a sound.
"I made eye contact with them each in turn, told them my name, where I'd come from, everything I could think of, really. But they just flicked their ears till I gave up and stopped, my stomach feeling like I'd swallowed multiple rocks. Then the pegasus turned away and walked across the room to a door I hadn't even noticed in the wall at the foot of my bed. He pushed it open with a hoof and stepped out; the unicorn followed, the door swung shut, and I was left all alone."
She rubbed her hoof over Anisette's. "I panicked then. I mean, really panicked. I remember thinking that I needed to hear what was happening in that next room—I mean, somebody had to have tied me down, and maybe they were on the other side of the door. I was straining at the bonds, straining to make out any sound of voices or anything, and...and then my forehead starting to tingle in a way I'd never felt before. Something above me started to glow, and—"
Reaching that same hoof up, she touched the base of her horn. "And suddenly, I could hear two people talking quite distinctly. 'Exactly as the prophecy said,' one voice was saying.'
"'No,' said a second, slightly deeper voice. 'Whoever—or whatever—this Starlight Glimmer is seems to know nothing of the Word or the Promise. She might be one of the creatures the prophet warned us against for all we know!'
"'But we don't know,' the first voice said. 'And without our hierophant—'
"'We have a hierophant,' the second voice interrupted. 'Her family may believe that they've renounced us, but they haven't, and—' The second voice broke off with a gasp. 'That's what this is, Hope! This creature was sent to us to bring back our hierophant!'"
Currycombs gave a snort, and when I glanced over, her ears were folded so tightly against her head, they practically vanished into her red mane. The tightness all along her jaw had increased, and had she been a unicorn, I would've been concerned that the fire in her eyes might escape and ignite the furniture. "Forgive me again, Ms. Glimmer," Currycombs said. "I'm merely reflecting upon Hope Springs and Violet Peony and coming to realize that I've not been so thoroughly and wholeheartedly lied to for such an extended period of time on any case I've ever worked. They have a great deal to answer for, the both of them, but I think my plan will—"
I cleared my throat in as ostentatious a fashion as I possibly could. "Perhaps we could allow Ms. Glimmer to finish her tale, Currycombs?"
"Yes, please!" Anisette set her other forehoof atop Ms. Glimmer's. "For I find myself on the very edge of my seat wondering how Ms. Glimmer managed her escape!"
For a moment, I thought Currycombs might object, and I was prepared to invite her to join me on the other side of the room so I could explain to her how curatively cathartic it can be for traumatized patients to recount the circumstances by which they surmounted their difficulties. But Currycombs simply nodded. "By all means, Ms. Glimmer, do continue. It's not until the morning that we must begin to move against our adversaries, so the more details you can provide, the better prepared we shall be."
Tears shone in Ms. Glimmer's eyes. "Thank you, all of you, for everything. And please, call me Starlight, okay? I...I haven't had a lot of friends in my life, but the three of you..." She sniffled, and I levitated a linen kerchief toward her. She took it in her strangely rough magic, wiped her eyes, and went on.
"Well, the second voice quickly convinced the first voice, the one he'd called Hope, that they could use me to force their hierophant to come back. I didn't know what they were talking about and didn't want anything to do with any of it, and, well, I have to admit that I panicked again. All I wanted was to get out and get away, and I must've—"
She rubbed her horn again. "I've come to understand that I'm a lot more magical than most other unicorns here, and when I began struggling against the bindings, I must've triggered it again. Because everything around me blinked, and I found myself suddenly outside under a darkening sky, lying on my back in what felt like thousands of sharp, tiny rocks.
"I sat up, not sure if I was dreaming or imagining things. But then everything had been like a dream at that point, so I rolled over, struggled to my feet—or to my hooves, I guess—and found that I was up on top of a cliff, big jagged stones sticking out of the dirt all around me.
"Ahead of me down at the bottom of the cliff lay what looked for all the world like a mining camp out of some old western movie: a row of six or eight little cabins, only one with lights showing; a bigger building facing these little cabins; and a stretch of railroad track running between the cabins and the bigger building. The tracks led to the mouth of a mine dug into a part of the cliff face to my right, and the mine and buildings and everything seemed to be down at the end of a canyon, a sandy trail winding away into the tall rocks to the left.
"For an instant, all was quiet. Then, I heard a voice shout, 'She's gone!' so loudly, the sound echoed from the bluffs. I blinked, then two horses—or what did you say you call yourselves? Equines?"
I nodded as did Anisette, and Ms. Glimmer—or since she'd asked us to call her Starlight—Starlight nodded back. "Two equines, then, came charging out of the lighted cabin, the same two equines, I realized quickly, that I'd seen when I'd woken up. They were calling to each other in the voices I'd heard from the other room, too, and when the unicorn's horn began glowing, the pegasus spreading his wings and leaping into the sky, I froze in place, wanting nothing more than to disappear.
"Which I guess I did, because when the pegasus flew by, I swear he looked right at me without seeming to notice before he swept past and moved on. I was feeling the warmth on my forehead again, and watching the unicorn below casting light from his horn, I began to realize that magic—or something like it—must work in this place."
She sniffled. "I could almost hear my grandma laughing at me about all this, and thinking about her made me more determined than ever to get back to where I was supposed to be in my proper shape and as my proper species.
"Right then, though, I settled in at the top of the cliff and concentrated on being invisible or whatever I was doing. Night was falling pretty quickly, too, so the other unicorn and the pegasus went back inside after not that long. I stood, checked all around the little canyon without seeing any other lights, and then thought very hard about making the air ahead of me solid. I was able to step up onto it like an invisible box, so I focused my energy toward getting the box to drift down to the floor of the canyon."
It took a bit of effort to keep myself from objecting. A spell of such complexity, and she cast it merely by thinking?
Then, of course, I recalled that this young lady had caused the entirety of Epona's Column to both levitate and vanish. And that made it quite a bit easier to hold my tongue.
"Once I'd reached the ground," Starlight was going on, "I directed my horn to mask any sound I might make and any scent I might give off." The tiniest smile flickered across her snout. "Back home we have these things called hazmat suits, and I imagined myself wearing an invisible, horse-shaped one so nothing outside would be able to affect me."
Currycombs chuckled. "Might you be able to teach Dr. Scalpel that spell? I can see it being useful in a variety of situations."
I had to snort at that, but Starlight simply shrugged and smiled. "Sorry, Ms. Currycombs. I don't know how I'm doing it, so I sure couldn't show anyone else. It did let me move soundlessly up to the window of the lighted cabin, though. The blind was pulled down with the light shining around the edges, but I could hear talking and moving around from inside.
"'Be insistent,' the deeper of the two voices said: that was the one that belonged to the unicorn whose name I still don't know. 'This is the event we've been awaiting for hundreds of generations, and we can't allow a few little arguments about protocol to stand in the way of the Order fulfilling its mission.'
"'Right,' said the other, the pegasus called Hope. 'And you're sure the portal will be safe while you gather the rest of the members?'
"The unicorn laughed. 'It's got a thousand years of protective spells woven into it. And even if this Starlight Glimmer is a monster as powerful as those the Prophet warned us of, there's only one of her here now. She'll never risk destroying the mirror and jeopardizing her fiendish mission.'
"'Right,' Hope said again. 'Then if all goes well, I'll be back in a month with Collier and Keuper Marl's daughter.'
"'All will go well,' said the unicorn. 'The whole Order will be waiting here, and once our hierophant's dealt with this monster, we can deal with her.'"
Starlight shivered on the sofa. "His voice got very hard when he said that, and, well, we have a saying where I come from: the enemy of my enemy is my friend. This hierophant's family had apparently broken away from the equines guarding the mirror or whatever they were doing, so if I could follow Hope when he went to find her, maybe I could convince her that these guys were wrong about me, that I wasn't a monster. Maybe I could get her to uncover the mirror and send me back through or something." She shivered again. "It was the best plan I could think of. The only plan, really..."
In the ensuing silence, Anisette touched Starlight's hoof again. Starlight sighed and leaned against her. "The two of them left the cabin after that with saddlebags over their backs. I kept right behind them through the winding maze of fissures—that's why I need Hope if I'm ever going to find the place again—and after a couple hours, we all squeezed out of a narrow crevice onto the flatland of a desert, a starry night sky spread out all over everywhere.
"The two said good-bye to each other, and the unicorn went off to the right along the big crumbly rock face we'd just come out of. Hope turned left, and I stuck with him.
"He trotted on all night, stopping every couple hours to rest, drink from his water bottles, and chew on some of the snacks he'd brought. I started getting a little worried because, well, I was magically filching from his supplies, and that meant he only had half as many provisions as he thought he did.
"Fortunately, though, we reached some little town about sunup." Starlight gave a tired giggle. "In the old western movies, they would've called it a one horse town, but, I mean, everybody was a horse, so..." She shook her head. "Sorry, I'm getting a little..." Her eyes pulled closed, and she gave a giant yawn.
"Starlight." I leaned forward. "You need to rest."
"Yes'm." She sighed and blinked. "Just the basics, then, for the rest of it. The town had a train station, and Hope bought a ticket to a place called Ehwazton. I snuck on board after him, but I was finding it harder and harder to keep my invisibility suit in place."
I nodded. "That's the standard limitation on concealment magic: the more eyes, ears, and noses the spell must fool, the more power it draws."
Starlight brushed a hoof across the lapel of her coat. "That's why I picked up this sporty little outfit when I got to town. Wearing an actual cloak seemed to make it a little easier to concentrate on a cloaking spell."
With some effort, I refrained from launching into a lecture on the elementary principles of sympathetic magic, and Starlight went on:
"I had a few touch-and-go moments dodging the conductors on the train, but I kept Hope in sight the whole time. I could hardly believe it when we pulled into your city here—I think you equines must have much sharper senses of smell than us humans do 'cause the scents everywhere were just about overwhelming. But I followed Hope all over the whole time he was trying to find this hierophant, saw him when he finally introduced himself to Violet Peony, heard the argument when she took him home to meet her dad, and—" She swallowed. "I'm pretty sure they killed him together."
"Of course!" Currycombs made a sort of choking noise, her eyes wide. "Since Peony's parents fled from San Pinto before she was born, they doubtless never even told her of the honored place she was meant to have as hierophant! Hope Springs likely appealed to her abundant vanity, and her father's refusal to let her go while continuing to disparage the mirror cult would've enraged the both of them!"
Currycombs leaped to her hooves and began pacing back and forth along our wall of windows. "Peony didn't trust Springs, however, and tried to frame him alone for the crime. I spoiled that, so she began ingratiating herself, flirting and feeding his budding infatuation with her. For his part, Springs was giving her a romanticized account of the luxury and privilege that awaited her in San Pinto—this is, in fact, the information I confirmed during my visit to Nougat Prison, Scalpel—and now that I know he's been dangling a word as opulent as 'hierophant' in front of her, her desire to head west with him seems much more understandable."
I nodded, the mix of anger and triumph on Currycombs's face quite effectively stilling my tongue. "Two murderers," she said then. "A pair of fiends beyond any born in centuries."
"Yeah." Starlight shivered and nestled closer to Anisette. "My whole idea of talking to Peony about getting me back home went out the window as soon as I saw her in action." She straightened, her face brightening. "But that's where I first saw you, Ms. Currycombs, when you were investigating the crime scene at Peony's house."
She slumped against Anisette again, her eyes losing focus. "Back where I come from, we have these great old mystery stories about a detective named Churchill Downs. I always loved how she could solve any crime just by being so smart, and...and you reminded me of her. Then Peony was in jail and Hope wasn't going back to the desert and I was getting a little desperate—and a little crazy, I guess, and homesick and tired and not having anyone to talk to and being afraid all the time and sleeping so much then not being able to sleep at all so I don't even know how long I've been in your city or even in your world and then I put together this whole weird scheme to see if you were really good enough to help me and...and...and..."
This last mumbled comment got an arched eyebrow from Currycombs, but even she knew that Starlight had fallen into half-conscious rambling at this point.
"Still," Starlight said with another yawn, "I should've come here openly a month ago, but I couldn't...I wasn't...I didn't..." Her breathing deepened, and half-conscious became unconscious.
Anisette looked up from our guest. "Please, Ms. Currycombs," she whispered. "You'll help her, won't you?"
I had never seen the fire in Currycombs's eyes burning as brightly. "Oh, yes," she said, her voice soft but deeply determined. "No force on this world—or any other world, for that matter—will keep me from bringing this case to a successful conclusion." She pushed herself to her hooves. "Scalpel, you and Anisette tend to our client. I've arrangements to make and only a few hours in which to make them." And before I could so much as move, she bolted out the door.
"Dr. Scalpel?" a voice asked quietly, and I bolted awake, my hooves clattering against a wooden floor rather than the carpets I'd spread around my bedroom. Once again, however, I had reason to thank the training I'd received during my decade in Her Majesty's cavalry: I could fall asleep nearly anywhere and be ready for duty the moment consciousness returned.
At this particular moment, I started upright to see the grey light of dawn filtering through the curtains of our front room. Young Anisette stood beside me, and she reached a steadying hoof to my shoulder. "Use caution, I beg you, doctor." She gestured with her snout toward the sofa, still pulled into the entryway and still containing the slumbering form of our mysterious visitor. "Ms. Starlight's sleep remains deep but fitful, and I'm expected in the bakery downstairs to perform my morning—"
Which was when the door burst open, and Currycombs spun into the room with the ferocity of a whirlwind. "We must be away at once!" she shouted.
Starlight leaped whinnying from the sofa, power bloating from her unfortunate horn and charging the air as if a thunderstorm had suddenly sprung up. "No!" she cried. "I won't let you take me!"
I flared my own horn, every tranquilizer spell I'd ever learned bursting to the forefront of my thoughts, but Anisette moved even more quickly, her wings carrying her at once to Starlight's side. "It's us, Ms. Starlight! Your friends! Ms. Currycombs and Dr. Silver Scalpel and Anisette! You have nothing to fear! Nothing!"
For a tick of the clock, I'll admit I feared we might all be reduced to ash by multiple lightning strikes, but Starlight somehow managed to hold all that energy in suspension once again, her rapid blinks aimed at Anisette. "Oh! I— I'm so sorry!" Every wisp of magical force vanished in complete contravention of all known thaumaturgical laws, and Starlight stepped forward to press her face gently against the side of Anisette's neck. "I thought I was back in the—"
"Yes, yes, yes," Currycombs snapped. "But we haven't the time!"
"Confound it, Currycombs!" I couldn't keep my voice down. "I'll not have you bullying my patient when she's in such a—!"
"Fine!" Wheeling toward Starlight, Currycombs sketched the most perfunctory bow I'd ever witnessed. "Forgive me, Starlight," she said through clenched teeth, "but if you and Scalpel aren't on the first train to San Pinto, we lose our best possibility of getting you back to your world and bringing both Violet Peony and Hope Springs to some semblance of justice."
The rest of us stared at Currycombs for yet another tick of the clock, then Starlight straightened, her jaw tightening with determination. "Just point me in the right direction," she said.
"Misdirection, actually," Currycombs said, and I could hear the flash of a smile in her voice as I whisked my magic out to gather the saddlebags I'd begun leaving packed and waiting just inside my bedroom door. "For you must get to San Pinto ahead of our quarries. In fact, if you can retrace the path you took through the desert when Hope Springs inadvertently led you into town however many weeks ago and find the canyon wherein the mirror lies hidden, that would be ideal."
Starlight's face fell. "I...I'll try...."
Slinging my traveling blanket over my withers, I looked up to see Currycombs nodding at me. "If not, Scalpel, find a spot where you can watch the railway station while keeping yourselves out of sight. I shall be following Ms. Peony and Mr. Springs in as ostentatious a fashion as I can manage to ensure that their gazes will always be focused on me behind them. The longer, therefore, that you can remain in front of them, the better chance we have of taking them unawares and gaining our ultimate goal."
I dropped my bags into place over my blanket. "If circumstances conspire to keep us in San Pinto till they arrive, should we attempt to make contact with you?"
"No." Currycombs seized her Mulester coat in her teeth and flung it about herself. "Under no circumstances should you concern yourself with my situation: this is of the utmost importance. If you have no other options, follow our quarries into the desert, but with the time constraints under which we're operating, we must of necessity construct our plans of string. Shift them however seems best to you in the moment, and remember that Springs's associate said that he would be gathering their fellow guardians at the mirror. But the two of you must—"
"The three of us," Starlight said, stepping sideways to press her flank to Anisette's.
That got Currycombs blinking, and I slipped into my best 'attending physician' tones. "Anisette has duties here," I began, but Starlight cut me off as she had Currycombs.
"Anisette has to come." A trace of the fanaticism she'd shown us briefly last night sparked in her eyes. "I don't know why, but—" She rubbed the base of her horn, the greyish-purple light of her magic flickering around it. "I can feel it. Without her, we won't succeed."
It took some effort to keep my mouth closed. Augury has ever been the most nebulous of the magical arts, and for all that Her Majesty employs unicorns specially trained in making such predictions, my experiences with them on the frontier had shown me that even the best were mistaken at least half the time. Moreover, the tightened muscles along Starlight's back and the desperation in her face convinced me that the matter had more of the psychological about it than the thaumaturgical. She'd been so very alone in a world not remotely her own that she now feared losing any of the small group that had come to be gathered about her.
Still, keeping Starlight calm seemed to me to be a very worthwhile goal, so I turned to Currycombs. "Do you think we could arrange with Mr. Trencher for Anisette to travel with us?"
"You cannot." Currycombs waved a hoof at the door. "For you must get to Puddington Station without delay." She leapt forward to stand before Starlight and Anisette. "Starlight, I know it's difficult, but I must ask you to trust me even further than you already have. I give you my word that Anisette will be at my side when next we meet, but you and Dr. Scalpel cannot wait. Everything depends upon you catching the early train."
Starlight wavered, her head dropping, but again, Anisette proved herself invaluable. "Please, Ms. Starlight!" The young pegasus very nearly fell to her knees, crouching before the taller unicorn so as to look her straight in the eye. "Know that I will never be induced to abandon you! But if Ms. Currycombs says that we must be parted for a time, than we must bravely face the prospect until we can be reunited."
For another fraction of a moment, I feared it wouldn't be enough. But Starlight drew in a shuddering breath before blowing it out and saying, "Yes, of course. I just—" She took another breath, and when she raised her head, she was once again the scared but resourceful young mare we'd gotten to know the evening before. "Shall we be on our way, then, doctor?"
And so we were. Leaving Currycombs and Anisette, I led us out into the early-morning bustle along Bakery Row, my glances alternating between finding a path through the crowd ahead and watching Starlight to make sure she didn't fall behind. She'd donned her full cloak and slouch-brimmed hat once more, but she kept her eyes up, the barest shiver of her chin hinting at whatever emotions might be swirling beneath her impassive surface.
The mile-and-a-half from our apartments to the station passed with silence between us, and Starlight stood just as silently at my side while I purchased tickets on the Great Western's 7:06 for Los Caballos, scheduled to stop in San Pinto approximately eight hours after departing Ehwazton. We reached the platform to the ringing cry of the conductor's last boarding call, and we settled onto adjacent couches in a coach near the front of the train mere moments before the engine blew its whistle and we rumbled forth on our journey.
I nodded to Starlight, swaddled in her cloak beside me. "Might I recommend you take this opportunity to get some more sleep? It's truly the best treatment for your current condition, and we'd best be prepared for whatever might await us once we disembark."
Her hat was already slumping forward onto her hooves. "A couple hours," I heard her murmur, "then I'll need some...brunch or something." Her breathing deepened, and I didn't need any sort of diagnostic magic to tell that she'd relaxed into slumber.
Fortunately, I'd procured for myself a notebook small enough to fit into my panniers but large enough for me to do more than take notes. So I spent the rest of the morning organizing my thoughts on how I would present this current adventure in the ongoing fictionalizations I'd been putting together based upon the cases Currycombs and I had pursued. Of course, we first had to survive the adventure, and with it having begun some weeks ago with a deadly crime the likes of which the realm hadn't seen in multiple generations...
However much I sought to keep my thoughts away from such contemplations, I simply couldn't avoid them. Mortality and I had a nodding acquaintance already, after all, due to my time in the cavalry and more specifically to my near-death experience at the claws of that foul griffin. Here, however, I found myself faced with the dilemma of explaining such violence to an audience unused to considering it. Even more daunting, this case revolved around equines committing the ultimate atrocity against another equine. Discussing magic mirrors that led to worlds of non-equine beings was all well and good, but how to discuss murder?
Seeking respite from this dilemma, I would occasionally rest my eyes upon the scenery racing by outside the window of our coach at speeds approaching 300 miles per hour. We'd left the more civilized portions of the realm behind some time ago, so I beheld nothing too terribly inspirational. Rows of cabbages or barley or corn or tomatoes gave way to dun-colored soil stretching off in all directions the farther we traveled. Patches of green here and there along the horizon signaled some farm or other, but this was the deep countryside, the heart of Hevosenvalta, a place I understood less than most equines understood the concept of taking another life.
The scars along my forelegs itched. I drew my blanket about them and wished I had something more cheerful to dwell upon. Turning away from the current case, then, I levitated my pen to sketch outlines for retellings of a few of our less-problematic cases.
Eventually, Starlight stirred beside me, and we took ourselves back to the dining car for some lunch. She seemed a good deal less flyaway than even this morning, and she set upon the sandwiches the stewards made available with an evident enthusiasm.
After her sixth, she slowed enough to say, "I had a dream about how different everything smells here, so maybe we can try that when we get to San Pinto. 'Cause there's only two things in this whole world that come from somewhere else: me and that mirror!" Her eyes and smile gleamed. "If we can manage to quantify some differences between you and me—not in actual smells, but in magical vibrations or life force emanations or whatever—maybe we can find similar differences in the desert around San Pinto, and that'll lead us in the right direction!"
I cleared my throat. "I'd call that a valid approach to the basic problem, but the differences we'd be looking for would be extremely subtle. When I examined you last night after you passed out, for instance, you presented nothing too terribly out of the ordinary compared to the hundreds of other equines I've looked at in my career."
Her smile faded.
Quickly, I set a hoof upon hers. "What we'll be needing to search for is something called 'affinity,' a rather nebulous quality I've read about in the work of spellcrafters much more advanced than I shall ever be. To use your scent analogy, we'll be trying to find a rose buried in a field of violets. It can be done, but even with the power you've already demonstrated, we'll need to practice a great deal of patience."
Her frown grew more thoughtful than distressed, and she nodded. "Then maybe we could just try to detect a large group of equines out there in the desert. All the mirror guardians are supposed to be gathered at the site waiting for Hope and Peony to arrive, so that should give off kind of a glow or something shouldn't it?"
That seemed a better idea to me, and I told her so. "Though again, it will be affinity we're looking for, similarities and differences and all." As a medical mare during my cavalry days, I'd often been the nearest thing to a thaumaturgical therapist available when in the field, so my mind now rifled through the techniques I'd employed to help injured unicorns regain their sensitivities. "Let's return to our seats, and I'll attempt to guide you through some exercises that might give you an idea of how to approach the problem."
The next several hours flew by, and I found Starlight to be a most attentive student, her mind quick to make connections when I'd only begun pointing her toward them. "Magic is like a science, isn't it?" she asked as we neared San Pinto. "I mean, in a place like this where it actually works. It's got rules and principles and an underlying logic and...and everything."
"It's a way of interacting with the world." I sent a silver curl out from my horn to lift the last remaining apple from the snacks we'd purchased. "We're surrounded by innumerable magical triggers, some more complicated to access than others, but by learning about the world, by cooperating with it, or in some cases cajoling it, we can create effects and affect outcomes in ways that contravene other natural laws."
Starlight nodded, her brow furrowing. Her lavender hornglow reached out slowly and gently to stroke against mine, and when I withdrew my magic, she caught the apple as neatly as if she'd been using magic her entire life. "Wow," she whispered. "If Grandma could see me now..." Her mouth went sideways. "She would have the biggest, smuggest smirk on her face." Her magic flipped the apple upward, caught it again, and set it onto the table between our seats.
Then the speaker at the front of the coach chimed, the conductor announced our imminent arrival in San Pinto, and we disembarked once the train had pulled up to the station.
For all that I'd spent most of my ten years in harness traipsing through outposts and border towns, I'd never expected to find such a rustic spot here within Hevosenvalta herself. Indeed, 'rustic' struck me as too polite a word. A 'tank town' I would rather have termed San Pinto, a community that only existed because the railroad, striking a straight course across the plains, needed a spot to empty and refill certain of its tanks. A river flowed past the town therefore, though again, 'flow' seemed the wrong word for the lethargic curl of water oozing along at the bottom of the channel the train passed over before sliding into the station.
Suffice it to say that the place did not esteem itself to me at first sight.
Starlight likewise disembarked from the railroad carriage with her ears folded, more than a little white around her darting eyes. Few equines inhabited the station lobby, visible through the dusty windows that ran along this entire side of the station, and nearly all of them whom I could see wore a hat or a scarf that identified them as an employee of the railroad.
I nudged her shoulder. "Any familiar faces?" I asked.
She shook her head convulsively, and I nudged her a bit harder toward the exit gate. "Then let's absent ourselves from the platform and decide upon our next move."
Her nod came just as roughly, but she did move her hooves, her steps not as steady as I would've liked. "I don't know what—" she began, but she took in and blew out a shaky breath before she continued. "Something here isn't right, Dr. Scalpel. I feel like...like—" Another breath flexed her nostrils. "Like there's pins and needles in the air."
My own breath slid through me as easily as ever, but that only meant it wasn't a physical hazard. "An abrogation spell, I would guess," I muttered. "One the mirror guardians cast against you specifically to keep you from approaching the site."
"Huh." Narrowing her eyes, she began swinging her head back and forth, but she said nothing more until we reached the gate. Then, "Yes," she said, the dissolving into a hiss. We crossed the threshold and came out from under the rusting, corrugated roof into the watery afternoon sunlight. "That'll make things easy."
"I beg your pardon?"
She was still swinging her head, her eyes wide when she was facing toward the river canyon and away from town but her entire body tensing when she looked past the station and toward the desert. "It's directional." Her forehoof came up, and she waved it through the air in front of her. "It feels like an ice storm blowing straight at me." Her hoof came to a stop pointing roughly northwest. "And it's coming from right there."
"Of course!" The pieces fell into place. "Blanket abrogations are deucedly difficult to maintain! They must have the spell radiating outward from their headquarters so it won't prove too taxing for whoever's casting it!"
"Well, then." Gritting her teeth, she started up the street than ran north from the station. "Let's just follow it right back to 'em, shall we?"
"Starlight!" I kept my voice low and hurried to catch up with her. "The spell will only get stronger the closer we get!" My mind raced. "Perhaps we could formulate a general anti-magic spell to cast upon your hat and cloak the way you cast that invisibility spell when you were—"
"It's fine." And in fact, each step she took now seemed firmer than the last. "I'm spinning a sort of windbreak in the air ahead of me. It seems to be working." She smiled for the first time since we'd gotten off the train, and while it was slightly strained, that she could manage it at all under the circumstances made me once again realize how formidable a young lady she was.
Still, as much as I admired her bravado, I wasn't willing to abandon practicality entirely. "You said it took you most of the night to traverse the desert when you followed Hope Springs into town. I'll suggest, therefore, that we procure some basic provisions before setting forth. You're likely to be spinning this counterspell during our entire trek, after all, and that will prove a great deal more wearying than the journey alone."
She nodded without speaking, and we wended our way along the hard-packed dirt road, ramshackle buildings of uncertain utility lining the way. At the second intersection, a scent of sour melons invaded my nose, and I turned in its direction with a sort of dread-filled fascination.
It was indeed a general store I'd smelled, but the less said about its unfortunate selection of produce, the better. The trail mix gave a better impression as did their canteens of water, so I stocked my saddlebags with some of the former and more of the latter while Starlight remained near the door with her hat pulled down and her cloak bunched up to cover her rather distinctive two-tone mane.
The shopkeeper gave no sign of recognizing her, but he did ask what we were doing in "these parts," as he termed it. I spun some fabrication about the two of us representing an Ehwazton mining consortium investigating the buttes to the north as a possible site to dig for tellurium, but I diverted his attention away from that subject by asking his opinion on which of the wide-brimmed hats he had for sale he might recommend I purchase.
A bit more comfortably laden, then, and with me sporting my new haberdashery, we set out for the northern edge of town, Starlight keeping her cloak partially draped over her face. "Enchanting the cloth was a good idea," she said, a certain relaxation evident in her tone. "Like a coat against the cold."
I cast a sidelong glance at the sun, still perhaps three hours from setting. "As long as we moderate our pace and remain hydrated, we should be able to maintain the two hour advantage we have on our quarry." It took some effort, but I managed not to look eastward toward the spot where the railroad tracks disappeared.
Starlight, however, did look, a bit of her namesake glimmer shining from her shadowed eyes. "I hope Ms. Currycombs can convince Anisette's boss to let her come along."
"Fear not." I couldn't stop a smile. "Currycombs can be quite convincing."
At about that moment, we reached the edge of town, two final clapboard shacks on either side of the road, then nothing but dirt and sand and stunted, spiky shrubbery. Mesas of weathered stone stood at the horizon in several directions, but Starlight didn't hesitate at all. She shifted course slightly to our right and continued onward.
The hours till sundown passed steadily. We chatted about our respective worlds, and between the two of us, I couldn't say who expressed their astonishment more often. We stopped for regular breaks during which I monitored her horn for signs of stress, and while they were indeed present, they weren't as alarming as they'd been the night before.
With darkness, the air became noticeably colder, but I allowed us neither fire nor light. "In fact," I told Starlight, an idea occurring to me, "can you see what I'm doing with this?" And I cast some basic dappling and muting magic over myself, a spell I'd learned in the cavalry to muddle the senses of any griffin who might be patrolling above.
She blinked, cocked her head, and her form became a good deal less distinct in the night deepening around us. I dropped my magic, asked her to drop hers, then I cast the spell again over the both of us. "We're deep within enemy territory," I said as we once more began our trek, "and the abrogation spell shows that our foes have made preparations for your return. We cannot afford to be anything but vigilant in case they have pegasi aloft watching for you as well."
My speech, I fear, rather dampened the mood, and we walked on another hour or so in near silence before, at what I estimated to be just past the halfway point of our journey, an all-too-familiar rumbling pricked my ears: hooves, perhaps a dozen sets of them, charging toward us from the north-west.
My training took over, and I skimmed my gaze over our immediate surroundings. The rocks and sand in the area fortunately combined to create a patchwork of low dunes, and I nudged Starlight toward the one that was both closest and largest. "Behind that hillock as quickly as you can. I shall be pressing close upon your tail."
Starlight moved without hesitation—I suppose having spent the better part of the last month in a survivalist frame of mind had attuned her senses to danger. I followed while conjuring up my breeze spells to blur our tracks for as many yards behind us as I could manage. Crouching beside her, I dug more deeply into my arsenal of camouflage magic and did my best not to dwell upon how it was the failure of this very spell that had exposed me to the griffin whose attack had ended my military career and very nearly cost me my life.
"One with the earth," I muttered, my chest tightening, my eyes clenched, and my ears folding at the hoof beats getting louder by the second. My horn felt as if it were sputtering and spurting, but huddling closer to Starlight, I forced myself to relax—an oxymoron, yes, but one of the many at the heart of the sorcerous arts—and pictured a blanket drawing over us, a blanket of darkness and silence and sand, a blanket of warmth and protection, a blanket as passive and natural as the rocks and cacti around us.
The hoof beats thundered closer and closer, then they were passing us by, not a one breaking stride. I kept my face pressed to the side of the hillock and discerned what I took to be the sounds of fourteen individual equines, a mix of stallions and mares with perhaps a few donkeys or mules, none of them showing any sign that the darkness or the uncertain terrain bothered them in the slightest. I was largely concerned with being sand and wind, however, so it wasn't until Starlight touched her snout to my ears and whispered, "I think that's all of them," that I took my first breath in what felt like hours and dared to raise my head.
I could still smell the sour saltiness of equine sweat, but whether it was mine or belonged to those who'd charged past us, I was unprepared to say. That they had indeed charged past us, however, I didn't allow myself to believe until I'd stretched my ears into the night and heard silence ahead and retreating hooves behind.
Swallowing, I stood. "Do you still detect the abrogation magic as strongly as before?"
Beside me, Starlight also stood and glanced to the northwest. "Yes, though—" She swung her head back and forth. "It's not as strong as it was!" When she faced me, her eyes nearly glowed. "Like you said, it's been getting more and more annoying the closer we got, but now its...it's maybe only as stabby as it was back in San Pinto!"
Full realization struck me then, and to keep myself from gasping, I focused on shaking off as much of the sand clinging to my chest and stomach as I could. "Then let's pick up our pace a bit, shall we?" And I started in the direction the mob had come from.
"But—" Starlight moved quickly to my side. "If they're looking for us, why are they all in a group like that? It's a good thing you were using that shadow magic against any pegasi, but, I mean, shouldn't the ones on the ground be spread out and, I don't know, being quieter?"
"They're not looking for us." It took some effort to keep my voice calm, but I couldn't keep her in the dark as to the danger that I believed the current situation entailed. "You recall the word Currycombs used this morning? 'Misdirection.'" I jerked my head over my shoulder. "When the train carrying Hope Springs, Violet Peony, Currycombs and Anisette pulled into San Pinto two hours ago, Springs must've been able to send word to the other mirror guardians. Those who just passed us would've set out from their base of operations at that point and are no doubt intent on meeting Springs and Peony in order to—"
"No!" Her horn flaring, Starlight spun. "We can't let them capture Currycombs and Anisette! We've got to—!"
"Starlight!" Wheeling myself, I caught her neck between my forelegs, crooked my hooves over her withers, and touched my horn to hers; hopefully, the unaccustomed and slightly intimate physical contact would be enough to shock her into listening. "This has evidently been Currycombs's plan from the very beginning! She must've surmised that Springs would call in reinforcements and that this would leave a bare minimum of guardians behind at the mirror! We have therefore been placed in the perfect position to enter their stronghold with less opposition!"
Eyes wide and jaw trembling, Starlight didn't pull away, didn't push me from her, didn't seem really to be breathing. So I continued in a lower voice. "We must continue on, and we must further trust Currycombs to do what she does best: outwit her foes." It took a further effort on my part not to blurt out that these particular foes had already committed the unthinkable act of murder, but I did manage to keep the thought firmly under wraps. "She's counting on us to play our parts, and we cannot disappoint her."
Another trembling moment went by, then Starlight whispered, "And I made her promise to bring Anisette..."
"No recriminations." I stepped away and lowered myself back onto all fours. "If Currycombs did indeed bring her, then she did so for her usual well-thought-out reasons." I nodded to the tracks of those who'd passed us by, the stars providing just enough light to find the trail. "Shall we?"
"We must," she muttered. Hunching her shoulders under her cloak, she started forward at more a canter than a trot.
I matched her and began speaking aloud certain thoughts I'd had as to how we could approach our upcoming infiltration. My purpose was merely to distract her from brooding upon what might be happening behind us, but her agile mind took to the process quite readily. And so it was that, as the last few hours passed and we continued drawing ever nearer our goal, the two of us came up with a loose framework—she quoted Currycombs' admonition about making our plans of string almost constantly—that we thought would suit us well.
Blocks of a darkness even deeper than the night above had begun appearing close to the horizon during our last hour of travel, and Starlight steered us toward the third one on the left. This butte seemed to be the largest of the whole group, and I could only imagine that it would appear fairly impressive in the light of day. I estimated as we approached that it would rise perhaps a quarter of a mile above the desert's surface, but how much acreage it might cover, I couldn't begin to guess.
Somewhere within its crevices and hollows, however, stood a gateway to another world...
Among some low dunes a good half mile from the wall of stone, Starlight and I stopped as we'd agreed we would, and I whispered, "Is the abrogation spell still tolerable?"
She nodded, but when she said, "I think we'd better go with Plan B," I could hear that her teeth were clenched.
"You're certain?" And even though I didn't believe it, I said, "Plan C is a perfectly viable option."
That got a low chuckle from her. "It's nice of you, doctor, but I'm not so completely out of it that I'd let you do this by yourself." She ducked her head so that both myself and the dunes stood between her and any watchers who might still be stationed ahead of us and set her horn to glowing. Her magic wavered a bit around the edges as a consequence of the repellent force pouring over her from whatever unicorn still remained hidden within the butte, but I could only nod as she cast one of the spells we'd been discussing. The already dark purple of her aura scattered quickly to her fetlocks, and with a nod of her own, she stepped upward, her hooves finding purchase in the dark, empty air.
It was the same air-walking magic that she'd utilized when making her escape from confinement in the mirror guardians' lair, but this time, she employed it to mount into the sky, her form quickly disappearing from my sight. Plan A had in fact called for us each to cast the spell so that we might simply stroll over the butte and descend into the interior without alerting our foes as to our approach. Unfortunately, however, her lack of formal training precluded her from explaining the spell's methodology in a way that I could understand, and with the abrogation magic performing exactly as it should, Starlight didn't trust her concentration enough to cast the spell safely upon us both.
Plan C had been our contingency should the abrogation magic prove too unpleasant at these close quarters for her to expend any magic whatsoever, but that was evidently not the case. Which left us with Plan B.
I took a breath and started my trek toward the base of the butte. We'd gone back and forth, exchanging thoughts on how I might find the passage into the hidden center without her at my side, but none of our ideas seemed feasible. But as we'd trekked along in silence both thoughtful and fretful, my gaze had found itself drawn to the dozen or so sets the hoof prints marking in the sand ahead of us.
We'd felt slightly stupid for having spent so much time worrying over the point when we'd been quite literally staring at the solution for several hours, and we'd sworn a solemn vow that, when we detailed our adventures to Currycombs, we would state unequivocally that the idea of backtracking our enemies to the mouth of the correct crevice had occurred to us at once.
Moving carefully, I kept my ears perked and my eyes focused for any rustle or spark that would signify a sentry on duty. That one such guardian might remain behind when most of the others had set out seemed plausible to me, but I had no way of knowing whether their confidence in their own ability to protect the place outweighed their fear of whatever they believed Starlight to be. They already had a magical barrier set against her, after all, so the question became whether they felt the need for any additional—
A sound ahead of me like a sudden, partially muffled sneeze was followed immediately by the unmistakable thud of a body crumpling to the ground. Arresting my forward motion, I caught my breath, and a glowing purple bubble began inflating several yards away. The color of the magic smoothed my ruffled mane at once, and I could now make out Starlight standing above the slumped form of a young aardhorse stallion.
I hurried to her side, but her gaze remained fixed upon the stallion. "I saw movement as I passed over," she whispered, her face even paler in the glow of her horn than the lavender light should've made it. "I don't think he saw you or gave a signal or anything, but I...I just...I wasn't sure what I could do other than..." She finally looked at me. "I imagined a padded club and smacked him over the head with it."
My cursory examination showed he was still breathing, but trauma inflicted by a magical cudgel can be every bit as serious as that caused by a material one. Still, we hadn't time to dwell on it now. Lifting him in my hornglow, I draped him across my back, thankful that he wasn't much more than a colt, and began a standard course of spells for tranquilization and the treatment of shock. "He'll be fine," I told Starlight as I straightened my legs and shifted my shoulders to accommodate my new burden. "You continue on from above and find the path through this maze; I can't imagine we'll meet anyone else till we arrive at the center."
"Okay." Her voice seemed uncertain, however, her magic sparking fitfully. "I'll come down at each intersection and wait for you to catch up, I guess. Or—" She touched a hoof to her chin. "How 'bout I leave a little mark?" Reaching out with the same hoof, she pressed it to the sandstone wall of the crevice where the colt had been lurking, and when she pulled the hoof away, an impression of it glowed in dim purple light. "You poke it when you go past, and that'll send a signal back to me so I can track your progress."
I couldn't help but smile. "We'll make a proper sorceress of you yet."
"I—" She swallowed, blushed, and dimmed her horn. "It just...made...sense..." Shaking her head, she began climbing the darkened air once more.
The next three-quarters of an hour were for me the most unpleasant of our entire journey: dusty, dim, and claustrophobic. I kept the light of my own horn to a minimum to reduce the possibility of discovery by either sight or magical sensors, and with the colt sprawled across my back, I had to tread even more carefully lest what appeared to be a shadow along our route might turn out to be a spur of rock or something equally solid and injurious. True to Starlight's word, however, purple hoofmarks, guttering like the charcoal remains of a bonfire, appeared every now and again on the close-pressing walls, leading me to alter course after a tap had extinguished them.
The twists and turns muddled my sense of direction quite thoroughly, but I kept thinking the passage couldn't possibly continue, that we must be on the very verge of the center. And yet, another marked branch would reach my eyes ahead, and I would squeeze myself into it and keep trudging forward, mindful all the while of my patient.
At the seventh or eighth intersection after I'd begun, I turned with a sigh and sucked the breath back in to see an equine figure settled there. The cloak and hat told me immediately that it was Starlight, and fear for my own safety shifted to concern for hers. Had the abrogation spell finally grown too strong for her to resist? Had her magic faltered and sent her crashing to the ground?
The colt I was already bearing foiled my attempt to leap to her side, but her head came up, her eyes fluttering as if I'd startled her awake. She raised a quick hoof, touched it to her horn, then puffed up her cheeks and blew a breath at me.
I blinked before her meaning dawned upon me, and I doused even the scant light I'd been generating. She meanwhile had climbed to her hooves, and the last image I registered before utter darkness closed in around us was the pained expression drawn tight across her face. "We're here," she whispered. "The next right turn leads to a fairly straight section, and that then opens out into the central canyon."
Beginning to nod, I checked myself and whispered back, "Very well." Her obvious discomfort made me grind my teeth, but a sudden thought stopped me. "Do you think you could design something similar to the abrogation magic they're aiming at you? Something to shake the concentration of whoever they've left behind to cast the spell and perhaps give you some relief?"
"I'd like that," she answered. "But not from here. If I remember right, this is the only way into and out of the canyon other than, y'know, flying, so if we do something, let's not be between them and the door." My eyes had adjusted sufficiently to the night that I could just discern her moving away from me, and I followed, my unconscious passenger seeming to gain weight with each step I took.
Fortunately, as Starlight had said, turning the next corner brought us within sight of our destination. And I mean "sight" quite literally: the barest flicker of light touched the walls ahead and revealing a tall, narrow crack of an opening at the end. Starlight continued plodding forward, and we quickly emerged from the confines of the maze into a space the size of which still surprised me for all that I'd been expecting it.
Only the high rocky walls told me we still remained within the mesa. Light flickered red over these walls from one of the five or six cabins clustered before a larger building, train tracks running between them and back into the darkness at the far end of the canyon just as Starlight had described it during her recitation— Had it really been just last night?
I shook my head and kept close to Starlight. She somehow managed to huddle even deeper into her cloak as she walked, and I found myself again concerned for her welfare a mere hundred paces away from the source of a spell designed specifically to keep her away.
The need to tend my patient struck another idea in me, and I sidled up to Starlight. "Your invisibility spell," I whispered. "Would you be able to throw it into place the moment this abrogation magic ceased?"
She nodded without answering, her teeth clenched.
Gesturing my snout toward the cabin with the lantern light showing at its windows, I started toward its door. "Stand by, then."
After the briefest of pauses, I heard the chuf-chuf-chuf of her hooves in the sand that covered the floor of the place. Whoever was inside, I hoped, would be too absorbed in their own magicworking to likewise hear the sounds of our approach, though I was fairly certain they'd notice it when I stepped up to the door and slid the colt off my back so that his forehooves crashed loudly against it.
Two gasps rang out at largely the same time: one from inside the cabin and the other from Starlight. The light purple waver of her hornglow sprang up in my peripheral vision, and I slid over to press my flank to the folds of her cloak just as the door flew open. An elderly unicorn stallion, a scar running jaggedly along the length of his snout, glared out with eyes that seemed both angry and frightened until his gaze reached the colt crumpled in the sand.
"Pensive!" the older stallion cried, and I reached out with my emergency anesthesia spell, a bit of magic not quite as unsubtle as a club to the head but very nearly.
The stallion's gasp this time seemed to deflate him, slumping forward onto the form of his young colleague. Moving quickly, I scanned their vital signs and found them to be within acceptable parameters. "Let's get them inside," I said, turning back to Starlight.
The grey of her hide was already regaining its lavender hue, and she smiled, lifted both the unconscious equines in her magic, and levitated them through the doorway.
The cabin's interior was rusticity incarnate: a single large room with a fireplace along the far wall and cots pushed up against the other three. The cot to the left of the doorway showed signs of recent occupation—a pillow propped against the wall, a worn paperback book splayed open upon the canvas to one side—and Starlight deposited the unicorn there. The aardhorse whom I'd carried through the mesa's labyrinth she set onto the next nearest cot, and then she turned to me. "Okay. What do we do now?"
I'd not thought this far ahead, and I was unashamed to admit it. "The other wardens," I said, thinking aloud, "will be returning in some few hours with Hope Springs and Violet Peony as well as Currycombs and Anisette."
Starlight's ears flickered, but she didn't gainsay my last point. Whatever her opinions might've been on the matter, I knew absolutely and unflinchingly that Currycombs would somehow convince this group of desperadoes that she held the key to their every dream coming true. I refused to think otherwise.
"When they arrive," I continued, "it would be best if we could see them without being seen."
"Easy." Starlight tossed her mane. "With that awful grinding magic gone, I can cast my invisibility spell over both of us. We could stand right beside them, and they'd never know."
Shaking my head, I kept my voice gentle. "Until they started casting their abrogation spell again."
Her face fell, but only for a moment. "How 'bout this? Where I come from, there's these things called duck blinds. You build them so they look like a pile of leaves or something on the outside, but inside, they've got space for hunters to hide and wait for—" She stopped and blinked. "Uhh, I'm guessing you folks don't eat a lot of meat around here..."
Images of the horrors I'd seen while on patrol in the frontier wanted to flash through my memory, but I forced them aside. "You mean a place of ambuscade," I said, "somewhere along the canyon wall where the shadows lie more thickly. We can dig back into the cliff face a bit, cover your cloak in dust and stone chips, and drape it across the opening. My camouflage magic can do the rest." I started for the door. "Let's get that set up, then if we still have time, we can scout about the rest of the buildings for some sign of the mirror you came through."
"The mine," Starlight said absently, following me out into the cool night air. "The mirror's down in the mine."
I turned to blink at her.
She was blinking at me. "Didn't I mention that?" She gestured with her snout toward the small sets of rails that ran deeper into the canyon. "I can feel it like a cold shiver off in that direction."
Differing plans of action scuffled for primacy within me, and I once again missed Currycombs and her decisiveness. "But you also said, if I'm recalling correctly, that your emergence triggered some sort of alarm with a wall sliding down over the mirror and a variety of other defensive mechanisms."
Her nod decided the matter to my mind. "Then, yes," I said with a firmness I didn't actually feel. "We'll construct our bolthole before trying to locate the mirror. Having a place of safety into which we can withdraw once the guardians return will serve us best in the long run, I should think."
Starlight agreed with me, and we set off beside the tracks, the light from the building behind us growing scanter and scanter. The mouth of the mine loomed dark and roughly square at the base of the rock wall ahead, and several lesser shadows suggested themselves as good spots for our hiding place. I pointed them out to Starlight, and she nodded toward one about halfway along between the buildings and the mine entrance. "That way," she noted, "we'll have a chance of hearing whatever's going on in both places."
The shadow resolved into an outcropping of rock as we approached the spot, providing an even-better bulwark against our being observed, and we set to work. The digging went much more quickly than I'd thought it would: I used the entrenching expertise I'd picked up during my time in Her Majesty's cavalry to create a space behind the outcropping, and Starlight cleared the detritus away with a teleportation spell so crackling with energy, I again found myself shaking my head to think that she came from a world where magic didn't function...
Once we'd cleared an area that seemed well suited to our needs, Starlight slung off her cloak, and I employed a quick seam-sealing spell to attach one edge to the cliff face. It draped well to cover our workings, and apologizing to Starlight, I dashed sand and rock chips against it. "Sympathetic magic," I said by way of explanation. "It's easier to create an illusion when one involves a certain amount of reality."
She laughed. "The best lies always stick close to the truth." Her last word stretched into a yawn, and she shook her head. "And the truth is: I'm gonna need a nap when this is all over."
I puffed noisily through my lips. "One of the hazards of leading a life of constant adventure, I fear." Focusing, I tapped my horn against her dusty cloak and set the first harmonic resonances of my camouflage spell to vibrating through it. "Can you feel that?" I asked.
Motion in my peripheral vision told me she'd stepped closer. "Yes. It...it hums, maybe. Like a circuit that's waiting to be closed."
My rudimentary knowledge of electricity let me nod. "Now, if our foes arrive, don't wait for me. Get here as quickly as you can and complete the last phase of the connection."
"What?" Her lavender hide went grey again. "I'm not leaving you behind!"
Bumping her shoulder with mine, I gave a grin. "In a perfect world, yes. But should the situation devolve to the point where we're both in danger of being caught, see to it that you get yourself away so that at least one of us will be free to plan a rescue."
The wrinkles around her mouth showed her distaste for the idea, but instead of arguing, she sighed. "Let's hope it doesn't come to that." Her head swung toward the mine entrance as creakily as a rusty gate. "And let's hope we can find the mirror before the guardians get back."
With a nod, I tossed my hat into our redoubt, suggested Starlight do the same, and we then made our way through the sandy gravel toward the spot where the narrow-gauge tracks vanished into the tunnel. Those tracks at least meant that the opening stood wide enough for us easily to enter side by side; I summoned silver light to the tip of my horn at the same instant as hers began to glow with lavender, and we stepped into the darkness.
A side branch opened almost immediately on our right, but Starlight shook her head. "It's like..." Her voice sounded muffled, the spongy rock around us absorbing the sound. "Like there's light reflecting all blue and shimmery off a pool somewhere in the distance, but I'm not seeing it. I'm...I'm smelling it all warm and salty, but with my horn instead of my nose." She shook her head. "Every time I think I've gotten used to how weird this place is..."
A part of me wanted to begin talking about how the thaumocrine system did have certain links to the respiratory system, but fortunately that part was small and easily ignored. Besides, with fatigue settling firmly along my shoulders the farther into the tunnel we went, I began to feel the atmosphere becoming more oppressive, the air seeming to thicken with cold and damp as I sucked it in and heaved it out along my own respiratory system.
Starlight appeared to be having no difficulty, taking a side branch after some minutes, then another, then another. I followed along as best I could, but after a number of minutes, I finally had to gasp out, "The ventilation. Do...do you suppose it's...not functioning?"
"Oh!" Starlight turned to point her horn at me. "I'm sorry, doctor! I've been casting this anti-magic spell on myself all night, so I didn't even think—" A flash of lilac-colored magic blinded me, and opening my mouth to gasp in surprise, I found myself taking the deepest breath I had since we'd entered the mine.
It took some effort not to smack myself in the forehead. Of course the guardians would have enchanted these tunnels against trespassers! "The fatigue," I mumbled more to myself than to her. "If I'd taken more time to sleep on the train, I'd be of more help to you now."
The immediate touch of her shoulder to mine warmed me. "If it weren't for you, I'd still be stumbling around, completely lost in an alien world. But now, I—" A shudder ran through her so strongly, she stumbled; I pushed myself more closely against her side to steady her. "It's here!" she cried, lurching away and practically leaping down a side corridor just ahead and to the right. "I'm sure of it! I can—!" Her shudder this time was accompanied by a gasp, her hooves slipping and propelling her sideways into the roughly rounded stone wall beside the tunnel opening.
"Starlight!" I stepped forward, uncertain what might ail her, but she was already spinning, her eyes wide and staring past me into the darkness.
"The spell!" The light of her horn flickered. "The awful one that wants to peel my skin off! It...it's started again!"
Glancing back up the tunnel, I found myself unable to reliably calculate how much time had passed since we'd seen the guardians heading across the desert. Sufficient for them to return, apparently: my anesthetizing spell would render its subject unconscious till dawn, and I couldn't believe it had gotten that late.
With a swallow, I returned my gaze to Starlight. "Can you guide us back to our redoubt?"
She was blinking more rapidly than I liked to see. "Maybe," she said without an ounce of conviction. "I mean, I'm sure I could, but...wouldn't we be safer here?"
Again, I was torn by indecision. Starlight's hide had already turned ashen, her breath already deepening and quickening into gasps. A trip back up these wretched tunnels was very nearly the last thing she needed right now, but staying here... "After finding their colleagues unconscious," I said, keeping my voice gentle, "they must suspect that you've breached the perimeter. And I imagine they'll want to check the mirror as quickly as they—"
"Steady on, now!" a voice brayed from somewhere off in the darkness, the sound distorted and echoing from who knew how far up the tunnels.
Nonetheless, my ears practically leaped from my head. For it was Currycombs speaking! Unmistakably!
"Some of us," she was going on, "are still a bit fatigued from galloping halfway across that foul desert! And now we're expected to spelunk?"
The echoes died away, and leaning forward, I thought I could just catch the whispery sort of hissing that might signify an equine speaking in an ordinary tone of voice near the cave mouth. But Currycombs had employed her ringing contralto to let us know that she was alive and in the company of our enemies. It was a warning I had no intention of ignoring.
Starlight had gone completely still. "Was that—?"
"Yes." I glanced back at the tunnel she'd been about to enter when the abrogation spell had struck her. "The mirror's down here?"
"It must be," she panted. "I mean, I can't really sense it anymore with all this buzzing in my head, but it was so clear a minute ago."
I nodded. "That's where they'll be heading, and it's where we need to be as well for whatever scheme Currycombs has planned." I pressed my shoulder to hers. "Lean against me if necessary, but we must get moving."
A moment, then her weight shifted into me; with careful steps, I started forward, and she remained alongside, her hoofs scuffling against the rocks. Knowing that Currycombs was nearby firmed my knees considerably, and I guided Starlight through the opening and down the tunnel beyond, the soft silver glow of my horn reflecting back from the various flecks of the mineral deposits that filled the walls.
The tunnel stretched straight for a good dozen paces, then a circle of non-reflective darkness appeared ahead. This proved to be an opening, and we staggered through it into a larger chamber. Quickly, I sent the light of my horn sweeping the walls as I'd been taught in the service, my senses attuned to any magical cantrips or caltrops that might've been set to entrap the unwary.
I felt sconces along the wall, their ignition spells ready and waiting to illumine the cavern, but the other magic that rustled in the background set the hair at the base of my mane to shivering. Not wanting to touch anything off, I made a point of brushing over those spells as lightly as I possible. After all, something had rendered Starlight unconscious when she'd first emerged from the mirror, and the vague impressions I sensed looming over this place told me in no uncertain terms that I wanted nothing to do with whatever had been cast here.
Starlight gasped, and I nearly leaped out of my shoes. "The mirror, doctor!" she said, raising her nose and inhaling. "I...I can smell it again!"
Directly ahead of us, several heavy dark velvet drapes hung from the ceiling, and it was toward these drapes that Starlight thrust her snout. And as they provided the only cover in the room, I propelled us toward them as quickly as I could. "Be prepared for anything," I murmured to Starlight, then I shouldered the curtain aside so we could slip behind them.
A very narrow space lay between the drapes and the wall of the cavern, and in the darkness that enveloped us as I let the drapes fall back into place, I felt nothing especially magical. Not that I had time to make a full appraisal of the area: reaching out with my hornglow, I deadened the sway of the curtains just in time, Currycombs's voice once again echoing along the rocks.
"Confound it, Springs! We've no reason for stealth! The creature has undoubtedly passed back through the mirror into her own realm again!"
"Damn you!" a stallion unfamiliar to my ears roared. "You can't possibly know what that monster will do!"
"On the contrary." I could exactly picture the smug look that must've been adorning Currycombs's face. "I tangled several times with this Starlight Glimmer when she rampaged through the streets of Ehwazton, and I've come to understand—"
"Rampage?" This was a mare's voice, and though I'd only heard Violet Peony speak on the one occasion back when this entire adventure first began, I was almost entirely certain that this was she. "You said she was behind the disappearance of Epona's Column, but I hadn't heard any other—"
"Of course not," Currycombs said, all their words becoming clearer with each passing second, the clatter of several sets of shoes against stone now audible as well. "Shetland Yard kept a tight lid on events once I informed them that we were dealing with a criminal unlike any other Hevosenvalta had ever seen. And that was before I learned what she'd told Anisette here while holding her captive in her—"
"Damn you!" the unknown stallion shouted again, but another stallion interrupted him:
"For the Sun's sake, Bolide! We're trying to be quiet!"
"Damn you, too, Hope! If we'd killed these two in the desert—!"
"Please, Mr. Bolide!" Anisette's voice sounded strained, but it was unquestionably her speaking. "We only want to help remove Starlight Glimmer from this world before anything else terrible happens!"
For a long moment, only the hoofsteps echoed, growing louder. Then— "Fine," the gruff stallion more grunted than said, and light flared on out in the cavern, the barest traces of it seeping in around the edges of the curtains. "If I'd followed my instincts when that thing first crashed through our mirror, I could've saved us all a lotta bother. But without our hierophant, we couldn't be sure—"
"Yes, yes," Ms. Peony cut in. "And while I will admit that I'm interested in reclaiming the position that my parents decided I ought not to hold, I must further admit, Mr. Bolide, that I'm somewhat dismayed by the way in which Hope's description of this place apparently contained a few, oh, let's call them 'embellishments,' shall we?"
"Meaning what?" this Bolide fellow growled. "You want to abandon your birthright helping contain the forces of madness and horror that constantly threaten to consume our world just because the place isn't fancy enough for you?"
"Please," Anisette said again, and again, the sincerity of her tone seemed to sweeten the mine's cold, damp air. "We all want the same thing right here and right now, so can't we put aside our differences until we've dealt with Starlight Glimmer?"
Another moment of silence passed, then Hope Springs said, "She's right, Bolide. Ms. Currycombs was smart enough to track me down out of every equine in the whole of Ehwazton, so if she wants to go through the mirror to confront Starlight Glimmer and stop her from leading her ravening hoards against us, then I say let her go. The prophet appointed our ancestors as guardians, after all, so it's our duty to guard, not to go into the realms beyond and fight whatever's plotting there."
The outline of Currycombs's plan had slowly been coming together in my mind, but I couldn't say I had a complete picture of it yet. She'd evidently convinced Springs and the other guardians that she'd come here to defend Hevosenvalta against Starlight, but what was all this talk about going through the mirror? Did she mean to—?
"Fine," Bolide said, interrupting my thoughts. "The Word given to us by the great prophet Starswirl and the Promise our ancestor made all have to do with keeping this blasted thing closed, so whatever happens next, Hope, will be on your head."
"Of course, Bolide." Springs's teeth were clenched, I could tell. "But with our proper hierophant here, we'll be able to open the mirror and send Ms. Currycombs through. And with the entire rest of the Order gathered at the entrance to the mine, if any of Starlight Glimmer's fiendish brethren attempt to escape, they won't survive the experience."
"But—” Violet Peony's voice shook. "I know nothing about any of what you're talking about! How am I to open this Starswirl's mirror?"
An orangish glow sprang up along the top of the curtains, and they began to draw open. "You're the hierophant." A calmness seemed to have seeped over Bolide, a calm that made me think of a patient under the effect of narcotics. "The Word of Starswirl says that your presence is enough to activate the deep magics within."
And indeed, as the curtains bunched towards Starlight and myself, huddling in the rough corner of the cavern, I could feel something like a breeze kick up around me. Not a breeze that ruffled my ears and mane, however, but a breeze that sent alternating bands of cold and warmth scattering up and down my horn.
Several gasps came from the other side of the curtain followed by Springs's voice: "It's never looked like that before!"
"Behold the power," Bolide intoned. "Behold with awe. Behold and bow down before the legacy of the great prophet Starswirl."
The breeze that wasn't a breeze kicked up more forcefully, and Starlight, shuddering beside me, began to slide forward as if the ground had suddenly changed to ice.
"Umm..." Violet Peony said, the unsteadiness growing in her voice, "why is it...pulling on me?"
"Close it!" Springs shouted. "This must be Starlight Glimmer's doing! She dragging us all into the hellish world that spawned her!"
"Not exactly." Currycombs's smirk come through quite clearly in her tone. "According to Starlight, we should find ourselves first in something of an intermediate area."
And indeed, my hooves had also began inching along the stone toward the edge of the bunched curtains.
"One with the prophet," Bolide was muttering, the force increasing its tug against me. "One with the prophet. One with the prophet."
"No!" Springs and Ms. Peony yelled at the same time, but then the pull became completely inexorable, Starlight and I very nearly flying from our place of concealment. I caught the briefest glimpse of a large, smooth, shiny surface, my own startled face reflected back at me with five or six other equally shocked equines arrayed at various distances—all except Currycombs, of course, whom I could see grinning like a madmare.
And then I was smashing headfirst into the mirror.
Neither I nor it shattered, however. Instead, a cool and silver flow both thick as butter and airy as mist surrounded me for the space of an indrawn breath. Then I was stumbling forward, a solid surface swarming up to tangle with my hooves. I pitched sideways to land hard on my shoulder, cries and thumps smacking my ears and at least one body tumbling across my left rear leg.
Blinking, I raised my head. Around me, Starlight, Anisette, Ms. Peony, Hope Springs, and a fire-orange unicorn who had to be Bolide lay scattered over a smooth, bluish stone floor upon which Currycombs alone still stood upright. Her hooves firmly set, her head turning rapidly from side to side, her red mane seeming to puff up like a cloud, she was unmistakably the equine I'd gotten to know so well over the last several months, but—
But she also looked completely different, her eyes larger, her snout blunted, her stature more compact, her whole person rounder, softer, less angular, and her hooves completely gone, her ash-gray hide covering her strange new legs from top to bottom without a break. The others, I saw with my next blink, had undergone a similar transformation, and I recalled the phrase Starlight had used when describing her initial journey through the mirror: she'd become like a cartoon drawing, she'd said, and now the entire group of us seemed more like living illustrations from a foals' book than anything else.
The tunnel surrounding us also possessed a certain painterly quality. The bluish stone curving up and above us to form the ceiling seemed to glow with a diffuse and directionless light, and along the walls, side by side both to my right and to my left, stood mirrors, all of them rectangular, all about twice the shoulder height of an equine, and all again just as Starlight had described.
"It worked," Starlight whispered beside me, and she leaped to her not-quite hooves. "It worked!" She cried it aloud this time, the words not echoing at all somehow from the rocks, then spun to look at me. "Doctor! We—!"
"Uhh, Twilight? Starswirl?" someone else said from behind me, and jangled as I was, I felt certain that these words were also spoken by Starlight. "You might want to come take a look at this."
Starlight's already large eyes went even wider, and pushing myself upright, I turned.
Another Starlight Glimmer stood staring back at us from the mouth of a cross-tunnel a few paces away. She sported a slightly different mane style, but her coloring, her bearing, even her eigensigil matched in every detail the Starlight I'd gotten to know.
"Of course," I heard Currycombs mutter. "Using mirrors in the spell would inevitably lead to a certain level of duplication..."
"Starlight?" another mare's voice called from down the side tunnel, and with a jingling of bells, two more figures stepped out: a purple winged unicorn mare whose pretty yet unadorned demeanor bespoke a royalty that seemed tinged with friendliness itself, and an older, white-bearded stallion, his wide-brimmed hat fringed with the bells that were—
"No!" Bolide shrieked, lurching into a crouch. "What blasphemy is this? You dare appropriate the name and likeness of the prophet?"
The princess—for her obvious youth precluded me from thinking of the winged unicorn as a queen—and the duplicate Starlight both folded their ears and turned in unison to regard the stallion.
His mouth shifted sideways among the curls of his beard, his eyes narrowed, and he said, "Ah. From one of those mirrors, are you?"
"Blasphemy!" Bolide shrieked again, and he charged up the tunnel toward the three newly arrived equines.
"Bolide!" Hope Springs shouted, still huddled on the floor. "No!"
But by then, the older stallion had already taken a wider stance and lowered his head, a silver-white blast coruscating from his horn to envelop the onrushing Bolide. "Behold," he said, his words rustling the air around me, "and know that you have entered into the presence of your prophet Starswirl."
Bolide froze the instant the older stallion's magic touched him, balanced on two legs in the act of galloping. His voice taking on that same slurred, breathy quality that I'd first heard back in the cave, he murmured, "One with the prophet," before tipping slowly over sideways, the cloud of the older stallion's magic lowering him to lie once more upon the floor.
Springs's jaw gaped. "It can't be! You— Starswirl— It— That was over a thousand years ago!"
"Yes. Well." The older stallion gave a little snort. "Time can so easily get away from one."
The duplicate Starlight cleared her throat. "Speaking of things getting away..." She nodded toward our Starlight. "Since Twilight's safely met one of her mirror selves, I'm guessing we don't have to worry about anything unpleasantly exothermic happening here, but still—"
"The mirror!" our Starlight blurted beside me. "It was in my grandmother's basement! She said someone named Starswirl had left it for our family to take care of generations ago!"
"What?" Springs cranked his head around to glare at our Starlight. "You're no guardian! You're one of the monsters Starswirl warned us about!" He pointed a shaking hoof at Currycombs who was examining one of the nearby mirrors. "Ms. Currycombs said you kidnapped Ms. Anisette and committed all sorts of mayhem in Ehwazton! She said she'd followed Violet and me so we could team up and stop you!"
"Actually?" Currycombs said almost lazily, her attention focused on the mirror and the one front hoof she was tapping against its surface. "Nearly everything Anisette and I told you in the desert was a lie." She turned a very sharp smile toward Hope Springs. "In truth, Mr. Springs, I had two reasons for pursuing you and Ms. Peony: first, to trick you into showing us the mirror so that we might get our version of Starlight Glimmer back to her own universe, and second, to exact some sort of justice against the two of you for the murder of Ms. Peony's father Collier."
Several bits of pandemonium sprang up at this, the young princess exclaiming, "Murder?" as if she wasn't quite sure what the word meant while both Starlights leaped toward each other with grins on their muzzles and near unison cries of, "You're me!" Springs and Ms. Peony leaped up as well, their expressions twisted with fury and the word "Lies!" prominent in the outraged denials they lobbed back at Currycombs. Anisette had also risen shakily by this time and had backed away from the two miscreants till she stood at Currycombs's side.
For her part, Currycombs continued placidly gazing upon the two excoriating her, but Starswirl's deepening scowl concerned me. He seemed very much the sort whom Currycombs's usual insouciant manner might rankle, so I was not at all surprised when he stomped a hoof, flared his horn, and roared, "Enough!"
Springs and Ms. Peony dipped their ears and squeezed their mouths shut, both Starlight Glimmers snapping their heads over to stare at him.
Currycombs, however, stepped forward into the sudden silence and nodded to the old stallion. "Quite right, sir," she said briskly. "For the sooner we get this nonsense settled, the sooner you can match the magical signature of our friend Starlight Glimmer with the mirror out of which she originally came, and the sooner the rest of us can return to—"
"Enough!" This time, Starswirl snapped the word more than shouted it, his eyes narrowing at Currycombs. "Now, which of you are from the same mirror as this fellow?" He jerked his horn at Bolide, still lying on his side and murmuring quietly.
"I see." Currycombs looked past him to where the princess stood. "Well, since this fellow apparently has no way of matching us to our mirrors, I'll ask you, Your Highness, if you have the magical power to tell which of us goes where."
"What?" Starswirl's beard bristled. "I'll have you know, young lady, that I constructed every one of these mirrors myself!"
"And yet?" Her voice dropping into something of a growl, Currycombs waved a hoof at the rows of looking glasses. "If you knew how to operate them correctly, none of us would find ourselves in our current predicament!"
Starswirl sucked in a breath, and I have no doubt that he would've employed it to expel a number of words in Currycombs's direction if the young princess hadn't said, "Maybe I could have a moment, please, Starswirl?"
For a stretch of seconds, I felt certain that he was about to ignore his sovereign. But instead, he blew out the breath he'd pulled in and said rather grumpily, "Oh, by all means, Twilight. Perhaps you can find something in your Friendship Journal to cover the situation..."
The princess gave a grin. "Introductions, first." She touched a hoof to her chest. "I'm Twilight Sparkle, and, well, you apparently already know Starswirl the Bearded and Starlight Glimmer."
"Parallel dimensions!" our Starlight breathed out—her dusty hide and frazzled air differentiated her from the other even more distinctly than did the cut of their manes. "And so many mirrors! Do...do they all go to weird magical horse worlds?"
That got the princess's ears perking. "You're not usually a magical horse, then?"
And the smile that spread over Currycombs's muzzle nearly lit up the whole tunnel. "Princess Sparkle, you have hit upon the very heart of the matter." She bowed ever so slightly. "Currycombs at your service, Your Highness, and—"
"Yes!" The word fairly burst from our Starlight's mouth. "That's Currycombs and that's Dr. Scalpel and that's Anisette! Currycombs is the greatest detective ever! Better than Churchill Downs, even!"
"You—" Princess Sparkle blinked at Starlight. "You know about the Churchill Downs books?"
Currycombs moved quickly to our Starlight's side. "Before we lapse into a literary discussion, might I suggest, Starlight, that you describe your usual appearance to the princess and her companions?"
"Oh, please." The princess waved a hoof. "Just call me Twilight." She leaned forward, her scent spicy with eagerness. "And since Starswirl only ever found one mirror that didn't lead to a world of magical horse folk, I'm going to ask if you were, by any chance, bipedal and had these things called hands and fingers on the ends of your front legs."
Our Starlight's expression became one that I can only describe as gobsmacked. "Wait," the other Starlight said beside her. "You mean she's me from Sunset Shimmer's world?"
The princess—or Twilight, rather, since she'd asked us to call her that—Twilight held up a hoof to the other Starlight, her gaze fixed on our Starlight. "Are you familiar with a place called Canterlot High?"
"Yes," our Starlight whispered. "It...it's across town. I attend Crystal Prep." She sucked in a gasp and took a step back. "Wait! You said you were Twilight Sparkle! But she—! And after the Friendship Games—! And all the weird stories lately about—!" Her voice dropped to a whisper again. "Magic..."
Twilight's smile shone with reassurance. "We know exactly where you come from, Starlight." She turned to Starswirl, her smile clouding up. "Except, of course, that the only known mirror between your world and ours is currently sitting in my library at home. Which makes me wonder how you ended up down here."
If Starlight had looked gobsmacked, Starswirl looked as if he'd had every other part of himself smacked. "Of course!" He shook his head, his bells clattering. "After we sent the Sirens away, I thought it would be prudent to have a secondary access portal to that place. I entrusted the far end to someone I met there who was fascinated by magic, but with Stygian and the Pony of Shadows and Limbo and all, I never had a chance to use it." A wave of silver mist wafted from his horn to settle over all the mirrors, and one of them just up the corridor began to glow. "It had slipped my mind completely."
"You mean—?" Our Starlight's eyes wavered, and she leaped over to wrap her forelegs about my neck. "Oh, thank you, thank you, thank you!" She practically burst from me to Anisette and then to Currycombs, and while Currycombs's face betrayed her discomfort at the embrace, she still allowed it. "I can't believe it's all almost over!"
"Now, now," Currycombs said. "Few things are ever truly over, as this whole blasted case continues to remind me." She pushed Starlight gently away, then gestured with a hoof toward the indicated mirror. "Still, let me recommend that you step through the mirror ready to spring back in case Starswirl's magic proves as shaky as his memory."
Without even looking, I could hear Starswirl's beard crinkling in outrage.
"In fact," Currycombs went on, a flick of her ears telling me she knew very well the effect her words were having, "if you don't return within, say, sixty seconds to tell us that you've indeed reentered your family's cellar, Scalpel and I shall come charging through in pursuit." She raised her gaze to mine. "Are you amenable to this plan, Scalpel?"
"Most amenable," I answered heartily.
"Now see here!" Starswirl began.
But Twilight cut him off. "It's not a bad idea to take precautions." An edge entered her voice. "Wouldn't you agree, Starswirl?"
He merely grunted.
"See?" Currycombs's smile, still focused on our Starlight, was about the sunniest I'd ever seen from her. "Now, we'll all wait here while you scamper through the mirror. Once you've ascertained that it leads to the correct place, simply return here to tell us, and you'll be back to your normal life."
"Thank you," our Starlight said, then her ears shot straight up. "My parents! I've been gone a month! They—!" She spun, galloped up the corridor, and very nearly dove into the still-glowing mirror.
Several silent seconds crept by before Starlight's head emerged from the mirror's surface. "It's my basement, all right! I've got to get back, but I don't know—!"
"Sunset Shimmer!" the other Starlight called. "She's at Canterlot High, and since she's met me, she'll recognize you!"
"Exactly!" Twilight added. "She's got a book that sends message to me, so once everything gets settled down, we can decide what to do with your mirror."
Our Starlight's eyes wavered again. "Thank you! And thank you, Currycombs, Anisette, Dr. Scalpel! I'll see you again! I promise!" And she vanished once more from sight.
Another bit of silence stretched before Currycombs turned away from the mirror, all humor gone from her face. "Now," she more growled than said, "we can get down to our actual business."
"No." Starswirl's horn began to glow, his words cold and sharp. "You can all get back to your foul world, and I can shatter that mirror the way I should've over ten centuries ago."
Twilight's mane nearly swallowed her folded ears. "Starswirl! What're you—?"
"All worlds," the old stallion said, his gaze locked on Currycombs's, "have a potential for unhappiness, a potential for betrayal, a potential for tyranny and madness, neglect and abuse and various other evils. But some worlds, some very few and far-between worlds, also have a potential for murder: purposeful, cold-blooded, premeditated murder. On those worlds, when I found them in my explorations, I established a caste of guardians for whom I was the great prophet. And my single commandment to them was that they keep their mirrors closed."
"One with the prophet," Bolide muttered from his heap on the floor. "One with the prophet."
"My goal," Starswirl went on, "was to keep their contagion from spreading into our Equestria while still allowing me access to study—"
"That's crazy!" It was the remaining Starlight who shouted this, though judging from the wrinkle-browed expression on Twilight's face, she'd not been far from a similar pronouncement. "I mean, Sombra! Nightmare Moon! Chrysalis! Tirek! The Storm King! Even Cozy Glow! Sure, maybe they didn't actually kill anypony, but they were definitely headed in that direction!"
"And me," Twilight said so quietly, I wasn't certain I'd heard her correctly. Judging by the startled reactions of Starswirl and Starlight, however, I could only think that they were as shocked as me. "The Storm King," she went on, her eyes downcast. "In that last battle, Tempest caused his magic to backlash and turned them both to stone. But when they fell from the balcony, I...I only grabbed her with the Staff of Sacanas. I let him shatter to shards in the courtyard below."
Starswirl and Starlight continued staring at her, but I had to speak up. "In battle, Twilight, the world operates under different rules." I'd been avoiding any thought of my scars since seeing the physical transformations we'd all undergone in this place, but now I flicked the folds of my blanket aside to reveal bone-white, puckering lines crisscrossing my forelegs. Their cartoonish quality somehow made them even more awful to my eye than they regularly were, but I left them uncovered despite the gasps of the three equines native to the realm.
"It leaves scars," I went on, "both external and internal." Glancing at Currycombs, I didn't have to force my smile. "We must find ways to live with them, however, learn from them, never forget them, but nonetheless move on with our lives."
"My school." Twilight swallowed, but she nodded as well. "After how I behaved when we were fighting the Storm King, I needed to relearn what friendship meant, needed to show myself that I really did know how it worked, needed to teach it to others so I could make sure that I hadn't forgotten it or abandoned it or—"
Starlight threw an embrace around her. "Twilight! You've been feeling like this since then and didn't mention it? I mean, come on!" She took a wide-hoofed stance in front of the princess. "Don't you know that that's the best thing about having a friend and student who used to be an evil genius? I'm right here whenever you need to unload the deep, dark secrets festering inside you!"
That got a twitchy little grin from Twilight. "Thanks, Starlight." She looked past Starlight to meet my gaze again. "And thank you, Dr. Scalpel. I don't know what your world is like—"
This time, Currycombs's snort cut her off. "It's like every other world, Twilight, in direct contravention to Starswirl's theory and practice, something I believe you and your resident Ms. Glimmer were just pointing out."
Starswirl gave a snort of his own, but it lacked heft to my ears.
Currycombs held up a hoof. "We've had one murder in the past forty-six years." She leveled her hoof at Hope Springs and Violet Peony, the two still standing with ears folded and eyes wide as they had been for some minutes now. "And the perpetrators are these equines right here."
"It's not my fault!" The words shot from Ms. Peony's mouth as quickly as air from a punctured tyre. "Father refused to let me go fulfill my destiny! If he'd been more reasonable—" She aimed a glare at Mr. Springs. "Or if you'd never shown up and told me about my rightful place as hierophant—!"
"Oh, no!" Springs stomped a hoof. "I'll not take the fall for you again, not now that I know you! I mean, by the Sun, Violet! We coulda just left! Coulda just turned around, and there wouldn'ta been nothing your Pa coulda done to stop us! But no! You had to start levitating knives and getting into arguments!"
"How dare you?" Her lips pulled back and her horn flared—
But dark purple bubbles of magic surrounded them, Twilight stepping forward as gingerly as a cat crossing damp grass. "Actual murderers." A salty trace of fear came into her scent, but she fixed a steady look on Currycombs. "We have a place here called Tartarus where we keep those monsters who don't seem capable of coexisting with the rest of Equestria. You said you were pursuing these two, so I'm assuming you've nowhere back in your world to hold them?"
"Oh, we have." Currycombs's brow clouded. "But even though I'd trained myself for years to follow the evidence and only the evidence, when confronted with an actual murder, I can only say that I flinched. My deep-set conviction that no equine would ever commit such a foul offence twisted my intellect away from the truth and led me to a plethora of incorrect conclusions that allowed these villains to escape justice." Her eyes closed, and she bowed to the princess. "So if I could transfer them to your custody, I would be eternally grateful."
"But—" It was barely a hiccough, but the sound drew my attention to Anisette, her wings clenched where they jutted out through the slits in her cloak. "You...you mean simply to imprison them?"
Twilight sighed. "It's all we can do sometimes."
"But," Anisette said again, "you...you said you had a school? To teach friendship? I taught classes at the orphan asylum, and I...well, I don't know how I could help, but I...I'd like to." Sparks seemed to flash in the depths of her eyes. "If there's anything I can do, I'd very much like to do it." The air sizzled against my horn, and a glow arose from her cloak's tail.
Her eyes went wide, and she flicked her cloak aside to reveal an eigensigil fading into existence along her flank: a bank of clouds frozen in the act of parting to reveal a heart behind them.
"Did—?" Astonishment filled Twilight's face. "Did you just get your cutie mark?"
"Eigensigil," I said, my expression undoubtedly as astonished as hers. "But...how?"
"Come now, doctor." Currycombs shook her head. "It was the only possible conclusion."
I turned my astonishment toward her. "I beg your pardon?"
Currycombs sighed. "Starlight's tale revealed the existence of other worlds. Given that Anisette had been unable to acquire her eigensigil in the ordinary course of her life in our world, when Starlight insisted that Anisette accompany us on this journey, it seemed only reasonable that Anisette's sigil would be awaiting her in whatever extraordinary world we would find ourselves entering."
"Reasonable?" I repeated. "Is that truly the word you mean to use here?"
Her mouth went sideways on her stubby little snout. "The train of logical inferences led inexorably to this point. And had you seen how Anisette's heart-felt pleas kept Bolide and his more blood-thirsty colleagues from killing us in the desert, I daresay you would find yourself in complete agreement with me. Although..." Uncertainty—a rare sight—flickered in Currycombs's eyes, and she turned to regard Anisette. "Are you honestly convinced that your destiny lies here, trying to rehabilitate these two—" She seemed to consider for half a heartbeat before finishing with, "—individuals?"
Anisette had been looking back and forth between our conversation and her new sigil. "I am," she said. Facing forward, she touched a hoof to her chest and bowed to Twilight. "If you'll let me stay, Your Highness, and help you make a difference?"
Twilight opened her mouth, closed it, and looked back at her two fellows. The remaining Starlight Glimmer nodded vigorously, and while reservations showed clearly through his snow-white beard, Starswirl nodded as well.
"Of course, Anisette." Twilight reached out a hoof to touch her shoulder. "You'll be most welcome here in Equestria." Looking at Hope Springs and Violet Peony, she stopped the purple glow around her horn, an action that dispelled the bubbles surrounding those two individuals, as Currycombs had put it. "You're welcome, too." Something sad and serious came over her, then, tinged with a hardness I hadn't quite thought her capable of. "But you have some work ahead of you. All of us here will help you with it, but it's work that only you can really do."
White showed around their eyes, their scents awash in sour trepidation, but neither of them made a single sound.
Returning to face Currycombs and me, Twilight brightened. "I hope we can make arrangements to call upon each other in the future? I'd very much like for you to see more of Equestria than this tunnel."
I bowed to her. "And we'll be honored to show you Hevosenvalta, Twilight."
"Hevosenvalta." She seemed to roll the word around on her tongue, then did a quick little high-stepping dance in place. "I can hardly wait!"
"Yes," Currycombs drawled. "There's just one final problem that I can see."
Blinking, I turned to her.
She blew out a sigh. "We must inform Mr. Trencher that he's lost another apprentice."
Matters progressed fairly smoothly after that, all things considered.
Starlight Glimmer—the local Starlight, I mean, of course—took charge of Anisette, Hope Springs, and Violet Peony. "We'll get you settled in some rooms upstairs," she said, leading the three of them down the mirror-filled hallway. "We're in the basement of the Royal Palace in Canterlot right now, but we'll be heading back to Ponyville and your new life tomorrow morning." She glanced back over her shoulder. "One thing, though."
Spells lashed from her horn so quickly, their visual traces had already puffed to multi-colored smoke before I could even begin parsing their thaumaturgical content: a wing-numbing cantrip for Springs and a magic-dampening field for Peony. "Princess Twilight's a very kind and forgiving pony." Starlight's voice echoed with quiet intensity from the tunnel walls. "But I know how hard it is to trot the straight and narrow even when you want to. And since I haven't seen any sign yet that you two are interested in changing your lives, while we all get to know each other, I'll be taking a few precautions..."
At that point, they reached the end of the corridor, turned a corner, and vanished from our sight.
Twilight sighed. "I'll have a talk with her."
"When you do," Currycombs said with a calmness that seemed deeper than any I'd seen her evince of late, "kindly commend her for her perspicacity. Mr. Springs and Ms. Peony are slipperiness incarnate, and seeing them delivered to the care of someone who knows the rough road to redemption fills me with a good deal of confidence."
A frown pulled at Twilight's muzzle, but before she could speak, Starswirl rose to his hooves. He'd been kneeling beside Bolide for some time while speaking to him in low tones, but now, he said at a normal volume, "For my part, I'll take Bolide through the mirror and defuse whatever situation remains on the other side." He blew out a breath. "Especially since, as Ms. Currycombs pointed out, I'm almost entirely responsible for setting up that situation."
Currycombs gave a sharp nod. "Might I suggest, sir, that you use your standing as their great prophet to thank them for their generations of service. Tell them further that your return completes said service, that you'll be taking charge of the mirror yourself from now on—" She moved a hoof back and forth between herself and me. "And that you'll be appointing new guardians now that the danger that once lurked behind its surface has been overcome."
"Overcome?" Bolide looked up, an odd and earnest mix of hope and fear on his face. "Sir? Then we've fulfilled the Promise? Carried out the dictates of your Word?"
Starswirl's beard bristled slightly, but with another sigh, he said, "You have, Bolide, and far more thoroughly than I'd ever have thought possible." He held out a hoof. "Let us so inform your associates."
Bolide practically leaped up. "Yes, sir! Thank you, sir! This'll mean so much to us all! Knowing that the sacrifices we've made for more than thirty generations have led the forces of light to victory!" Tears began trickling from the corners of his eyes. "So many even among our fellows have doubted, but now! Now you'll show us that it's all been worthwhile!"
"Yes," Starswirl said, his voice rumbling and his eyes narrow. Still, he stepped along the smooth blue stone to stop before the mirror standing against the wall a pace or two from the one our Starlight Glimmer had vanished into several moments before. "Come along, and we'll see to it."
Very nearly prancing, Bolide joined Starswirl, and the two passed through the mirror's surface—
Leaving Currycombs and I alone in the tunnel with an equine who, for all her lack of pretension, was still royalty in this realm.
All awkwardness, however, dissolved under Twilight's friendly smile and manner. She invited us to join her in a nearby sitting room till the others returned, and a very homey little nook it proved to be, ferns and firefly lanterns, cushions and a magical vent through which, she explained, fresh air from the surface was constantly circulated.
Settling in, we chatted easily for some time, I telling the two of them about the journey Starlight and I had undergone from Ehwazton and Twilight telling us how she and the Starlight Glimmer of this realm had been spending the last several weeks helping Starswirl sort through the hundreds of mirrors he'd locked away in this cavern workshop of his before the unfortunate series of events that had led to him and his friends spending more than a thousand years sealed in Limbo. "You're the first ponies we've had tumble out of one, though." She clapped her hooves together. "It's so exciting!"
"Indeed," Currycombs said. "The information I've gathered so far about the differences between our two worlds has already proved fascinating."
"Information?" I blinked at her. "We've been in two hallways and a room. What could you possibly have gleaned in so short a time?"
Currycombs smiled, smugness incarnate.
But Twilight let out a gasp before Currycombs could so much as open her mouth. "That's right! The other Starlight Glimmer said you were like Churchill Downs! In the stories, she's always picking up on these little details and adding them together to solve whatever mystery she's facing!" She leaned forward on her cushion. "Are you going to do that now? Have you noticed something that's led you to some conclusion about Equestria? Or about me? I'd love to hear what you've deduced about me!" A flare of her horn summoned a quill pen and a small roll of parchment. "May I take notes?"
And while Currycombs's smile remained every bit as large, all the smugness drained from it to be replaced by a sort of delight that I seldom saw from my friend. "That you are an eager student of the world is so obvious, I hestitate even to mention it. That you are a princess who rules by consensus rather than decree and who sees her advisors as friends speaks well of Equestrian society in general. And that you were not born with those wings but rather attained them and the royal status accorded to all winged unicorns in some manner tells me that—"
"What?" I sprang from my cushion. "Currycombs! You—! That—! How could you possibly—?" Heat flooding my whole body, I turned and bowed to Twilight. "She meant no disrespect, Your Highness! She—"
"She's correct." Twilight had gone completely still, but her face displayed amazement rather than the outrage that I'd expected to see. "I assume it's the way I move." She flared her wings and looked back at them. They seemed cartoonishly small, but then everything about these bodies did: ponies, they'd called themselves more than once, and I had to admit that it seemed an apt term. "I've grown more accustomed to having wings in the years since I picked them up, but—"
"Picked them up?" A tightness clenched my chest. "Forgive me, You Highness, but—"
"Please." Twilight's ears dipped. "Call me Twilight."
For all that I didn't want to sputter unintelligibly at her, honesty forces me to report that that's exactly what I found myself doing. To be a 'princess of the people' was one thing—and a very good thing, I'd always thought. But for Currycombs to say that Twilight had somehow attained royalty? And for her to agree? The thought scoured my every nerve as harshly as the sandy windstorms of the frontier.
Lost in dismay, fatigue, and sudden, grating memories of more unfortunate days, I vaguely registered that Twilight was speaking about some of the other local princesses. My attention snapped back with crystalline clarity, however, when I heard Currycombs say, "Our royal family, the equines of Firebird House, are inundated with a magic that gives them the most extraordinary sort of serial immortality."
My heart, I was certain, had come loose and was crashing about now amongst my ribs. Lurching immediately into action, I cried, "Currycombs! We were told that information in strictest confidence!"
Currycombs gave me a look that, even with her unnaturally large eyes, conveyed her exasperation quite profoundly. Still, when she returned her gaze to Twilight, not a hint of irritation sounded in her words. "We may trust you, Twilight, may we not, to hold our state secrets as closely as you hold your own?
"Of course!" Twilight said, earnestness a very scent surrounding her. A slight blush darkened her cheeks. "I'd have to think a few minutes to come up with a state secret, but yes, you have a solemn word that I'll treat the subject as completely sacrosanct." She made a series of motions with her hooves that ended with her tapping a closed eye, an action that gave me an odd sense of reassurance. "But," she went on, "since the subject seems to be distressing Dr. Scalpel, maybe you could tell us instead, Currycombs, about your journey here? Since you and Anisette traveled a different road than the doctor and the other Starlight Glimmer did?"
To this, Currycombs agreed readily enough, and her recitation of their fraught journey soon roused me from my black study. As our Starlight had foreseen, Anisette had proven vital to their success, her sincerity swaying the hearts of the guardians who'd accosted them in the desert. "I'll thank you, doctor," Currycombs said, giving me a grin, "to accord her all the credit for our survival when you translate this adventure into one of your tales. For she performed marvelously well under extreme pressure and never once told an actual lie to our would-be captors in the act of convincing them that we shared their goals."
I nodded, but upon giving the matter a second thought, I had to stop and shake my head instead. "What with the story involving murder, the truth about Firebird House, Starlight Glimmer, and now these mirror universes, I'm beginning to think that this entire adventure has become altogether too involved for the general reading public. I'll fabricate some end to the matter and—"
"Fabricate?" Currycombs arched an eyebrow. "Need I remind you, Scalpel, that some of us have a literal, physical connection to the truth?" She flipped the tail of her Mulester coat. "My eigensigil, after all."
A choking sound splayed my ears wide, and I turned to see Twilight staring open-mouthed at Currycombs. "You...you haven't got a cutie mark?"
This led to Currycombs expounding her theory about her sigil being invisible as truth is invisible, and that led to Twilight denying that any such thing could ever in any way occur. The discussion grew heated rather quickly, and with each party in possession of facts which the other declared to be irrelevant, my attempts to referee went nowhere.
Fortunately, Starlight Glimmer—again, I mean, of course, the local Starlight Glimmer—came into the room before their exchange of views had quite escalated into full-fledged, hoof-stomping argument. "Whoa, whoa, whoa!" she called immediately upon entering. "What—?"
"Starlight!" Twilight aimed a shaking hoof at Currycombs. "She says she's got an invisible cutie mark!"
"Eigensigil," Currycombs and I both said at once, but since Currycombs had already scoffed at such a silly name as 'cutie mark' to designate something that meant so much to any equine's very existence, neither of us brought the point up again.
"And that," Twilight went on, the slightest dart of her eye acknowledging that she'd heard us speak, "is impossible in every way, shape, and form, right? I mean, the very idea of an invisible cutie mark makes a mockery of everything—!"
"Mockery?" Mane bristling, Currycombs snorted. "Do you call the air a mockery, Your Highness, since you can't see that? Or—"
"Enough!" Starlight shouted, and the extra reverberation she apparently put behind the word made the rest of us flinch. "Now," she went on in less explosive tones, "I think you'll agree, Twilight, that I know a little something about cutie marks?" She narrowed her eyes in a way that seemed designed to lend weight to her statement.
Twilight's ears fell.
"And as an expert," Starlight continued, her horn glowing and a similarly colored light gently lifting the hem of Currycombs's coat, "when I look here, I'm sensing a cutie mark every bit as strongly as I am from you or me or Dr. Scalpel."
My gaze was drawn once again to contemplation of my friend's blank hindquarters, but a clearing of throat from the doorway startled me back to see Starswirl regarding us with the most quizzical of expressions. Two small squeaking noises came from Twilight and Starlight, and when I turned toward them, they both had more than a bit of red tingeing their faces, Currycombs's coat swinging into place and not a single waver of Starlight's hornglow visible.
Currycombs, of course, to the best of my knowledge, has never known a single moment's embarrassment, and she merely nodded to Starswirl. "All went well on the other side?" she asked.
Something very close to a smile twitched beneath Starswirl's beard. "Not as well as things here, from the look of it."
Twilight and Starlight both began sputtering, but Starswirl merely held up a hoof and outlined how he'd made a brief but effective speech to the descendants of those he'd left to guard the mirror that led out into Hevosenvalta. He'd used the same spell on them that he'd used here to prove his identity to Bolide, and with much weeping and rejoicing, the guardians had left their outpost and begun the trek back to San Pinto.
"Excellent!" Currycombs nodded crisply. "Then we shall return to our side of the mirror and convey said object back to our flat in Ehwazton." She cocked her head at me. "I think it will look quite well against the wall in the front room beside your bedroom door, Scalpel."
I could only blink, my ears muffled and yet buzzing as if a beehive had been stuffed into my head. "Perhaps," I managed to get out, "we could first prevail upon our new acquaintances for the use of these cushions for the next several hours? For I find that riding the train all day, walking across the desert all night, and then journeying outside the confines of our universe has left me in need of a nap."
The shock and concern that flooded Currycombs's face surprised me a bit: in truth, I'd been expecting an argument from her. But instead, when Twilight immediately offered us the use of an actual bedchamber not far down another corridor, Currycombs became quite insistent that I avail myself of it. "And in fact," she said from the doorway as I settled gratefully among the silk sheets and flannel blankets, "I may return shortly and throw myself across that chair in the corner."
Dropping off in the middle of my nod, I knew nothing more till I slowly realized that I was drifting awake. The room remained in the same state of semi-darkness that had filled it when I'd fallen asleep, but raising my head, I saw that Currycombs had indeed entered at some point and was now sprawled over the lounge chair she'd pointed out earlier.
Had I ever seen her look so relaxed? I found myself thinking not.
I pulled in a lungful of air, wondrously bracing yet at the same time soothing. It had to be a magical effect, the way everything about this place—
"Yes," Currycombs said softly across the room. "Quite the unusual sensation, isn't it?"
"How—?" I started up but stopped, settling back onto the sheets. "You heard my intake of breath and inferred that I was noticing the quality."
She rolled into a sitting position, her eyes and grin nearly sparkling. "Well done, Scalpel! I shall have you fully versed in my methods within the year, I'm certain of it!"
I had to laugh. "I shall do my utmost, then, to become less observant lest I abscond with your clients."
That got a laugh out of her, and she leaped from the chair, her hooves scarcely making a sound against the plush carpeting. "Ah, but before we can become ruthless competitors, we must make our way back to San Pinto carrying that mirror between us." A slight frown tugged her snout, and she glanced around the shadowy chamber. "In all honesty," she murmured, "I shall very much welcome the pungency of Ehwazton in my nostrils again. For I find this place every bit as unnerving as I do exhilarating."
"Unnerving?" Wriggling from the blankets onto the floor, I stopped to blink at her.
Currycombs shifted her shoulders beneath her Mulester coat. "We've discussed before, I think, the way my mistrust of equines, places, and things increases the more perfect they appear. And what I've seen of this Equestria..." She shifted again, but this time, it seemed rather to be a shiver than a shift. "One of the perils, I suppose, of the profession I follow."
Not sure how to respond to this, I got my hooves under me, moved across the carpet, and touched my shoulder to hers.
She smiled, slipped past me, and poked her snout at a crystalline box sitting upon the table beside the door. "Ah," she said. "This device Twilight provided to summon her when we awakened displays the time as well." She looked back at me. "With a nice, leisurely, six-hour trot through the desert night, we should easily reach San Pinto in time to meet tomorrow morning's train bound for Ehwazton."
Which was just what we did. Twilight arrived to guide us back to the proper mirror and bid us goodbye, clapping her hooves together and saying, "I'll move this mirror to my castle so we'll have a direct link from your home to mine." Her eyes shone. "A diplomatic mission to a whole new world! I can hardly wait!"
"Of course," Currycombs said, her smile already tighter than it had been, her gaze darting toward the mirrored surface.
I nodded to draw Twilight's attention. "We'll need to lay some ground work on our side of things first, Twilight, but yes. This is just the beginning."
Twilight clapped her hooves again. "I'll look forward to hear from you!"
Currycombs practically leaped into the silver. I felt obliged to bow before following.
The less said about our trek, the better. At least we'd returned to our accustomed shapes and sizes, so we were able to balance the mirror lengthwise across Currycombs's back while my horn directed as much steadying force toward the thing as I could muster. Trudging then hour after hour through the darkness, we reached San Pinto just before dawn began glowing at the horizon. Between the two of us, we convinced the porter that the mirror would fare better in the passenger compartment with us rather than the baggage car, and muscling the thing aboard, we managed to get it stowed securely just before the train lurched us all off toward the rising sun.
I'd retrieved my pack and all from the redoubt Starlight and I had spent so much time digging in the side of the once-again-deserted canyon, and I spent the journey dozing and making notes for my eventual retelling of these events. Currycombs sat silently beside me the entire trip, her mood as near as I could tell neither happy nor unhappy.
Arriving at Puddington Station in the mid-afternoon, we hired a cart to haul the mirror to Bakery Row, and I ventured my first comment since we'd departed the world of Equestria. "Whatever shall we tell Mr. Trencher about Anisette?"
Currycombs gave one of her brief, explosive laughs: she'd taken the traces herself, slipping into harness and hauling away as easily as any carter while I trotted alongside. "We shall summon her from the mirror and send her downstairs to tell him herself." The humor faded from her face, and she glanced around. "No, there's something I fear more than that, if I'm once again to be honest, Scalpel."
A chill stroking my spine, I followed her gaze. Equines bustled over the sidewalks, voices and laughter clattering from the public houses as early evening approached. The air seemed thick compared to my memories of Equestria, but it wrapped around me as welcoming as a woolen blanket or a bowl of barley broth.
"Recall," Currycombs said softly, "that Starswirl's concern lay in our world infecting theirs. I have to wonder what might happen if the opposite is true and our Hevosenvalta becomes all shining, friendly, and cute." She shuddered. "What place has a consulting detective in a world where serious crime happens less often than it does here? What puzzles worth solving could possibly present themselves to my eager gaze?" Shaking herself, she pulled the cart around the corner into Bakery Row. "But I suppose I'll deal with that problem if it arises."
As for my own worries about how to present this story in writing, I shall leave the matter in hooves more capable than mine. Once Your Majesty and Your Highness have read this account, Currycombs and I stand ready to do your bidding. I recommend opening a dialogue with Princess Twilight of Equestria, and I know that she would be overjoyed to meet with either or both of you. But should you decide that that is a course we shouldn't take, well, a simple stone tossed with sufficient velocity is all that would be required.
