1 ~ Shadows In the Moonlight
It was shortly after Matins, and so the Moon had been shifted lower in the sky, and little of its light passed through the high windows of the scriptorium, leaving the room in deep shadow. The newest Assistant Librarian to the Grand Library of the Humble Servants of the Temple of the Celestial Dancers walked through the room, with only a faint radiance emanating from her horn to light her way.
The congregation of her brothers and sisters in the temple was dispersing, each pony returning to his or her cell for a few hours of sleep before gathering for the office of Lauds, when the Moon would be sent down to rest and the Sun drawn up over the horizon. But the new assistant librarian had made a detour, taking a stroll through what would, beginning tomorrow, be her domain—after a fashion. She knew such fancies were prideful, especially since she had only just been promoted, and to an assistant position at that. Further, she was displaying a dismaying lack of discipline, but she was far too excited to simply slink off to sleep!
The night was cool, but the warm smell of vellum filled the room. She breathed it in heartily; she had always loved that scent. Even during the day, when the scriptorium was a virtual hive of industry, it was a relatively quiet place, with only the hum of Levitation, the scribbling of quills on parchment, the occasional whispered request, and the clicking of the librarians’ hooves as they perambulated the room, bringing books and manuscripts to be copied. At this hour… the sound of her hooves still sounded, but the other sounds were absent, the room completely silent, as there was nothing but her to make a sound.
She loved the hustle and bustle of the daylight—so many ponies, scriveners, illuminators, binders, each with her own specialty and yet working together in a greater cause, to preserve and expand the knowledge and legacy of the Unicorn tribe. And yet… what she liked best were quiet moments like this; there was a magical feeling to the air, the feeling that anything could happen…
A slight noise, intruding on her reverie, drew her awareness back to the world around her. Craning her neck in the direction of the sound, she peered into the darkness. She could see little: the room was wide and the circle of light cast by her horn was small. It had been a faint and furtive sound—a rat, perhaps? The vermin loved the smell of parchment almost as much as librarians did. She had half a mind to ignore it, but still… was she not the Assistant Librarian? She closed her eyes to concentrate on her horn, intensifying its glow—
A ghostly form melted out of the darkness and flowed soundlessly under the scrivener’s desk to her left, with the fluidity of water, to emerge right beside her, rearing up in an unfolding of bone-white robes. The assistant librarian was jolted out of her concentration when a fore-hoof landed hard on the tip of her horn, grounding the magical flux. Her eyes snapped open with a gasp, but with her horn grounded, the glow was gone, and her sight was lost to darkness. Her head was wrenched sideways and smashed brutally against the edge of the desk. With a flick of the tail, her assailant cast a fold of its voluminous robes over the desk just before the impact, to muffle the sound, but the blow dazed her nonetheless.
The assailant shifted weight onto her horn, keeping her head pinned to the desk as the second foreleg reared. The fetlock joint flexed, and with a soft snick, a long, thin blade snapped out of the greave strapped to the foreleg, straight out over the hoof and in line with the leg bone. The librarian felt a searing lance of pain thrust in under her jaw, for the instant that it speared up through her mouth, but then it struck into her brain, and the pain vanished.
A scene unfolded in her mind’s eye. It was bathed in white light, brighter than it had been at the time, but it was a memory of her foalhood. She had snuck up one of the towers overlooking the fastness of her birth, and gotten out a high window and out onto the roof to have a look beyond the high walls that kept them safe from the other pony tribes, and yet kept them hemmed in as well. From the edge of the tower’s peaked roof, she felt as though she could see the entire world spread out before her, wide stretches of Earth Pony farmland, crisscrossed with rivers and dotted with forests, spreading out from the mountain atop which her home was built; and above, the grand, majestic whorls of vast clouds overhead, where the Pegasi made their habitation. So much to see, so much to learn and experience, just waiting out there for ponies to discover! She later joined the ranks of the library’s caretakers in part to have access to knowledge of the world beyond the walls…
Ah, but her mother had never understood: she had cowered behind her, clinging desperately to the window frame, fearfully calling her name—although the assistant librarian could not recall the word anymore. She wondered at that, not being able to remember her own name.
Then the light swallowed her up, and she wondered no more.
The assistant librarian’s killer watched, with eyes habituating to the faint light, until the Unicorn’s brown pupils dilated and she let out her last breath, at which point she drew her weapon out of her victim’s head. The long, slender blade came out clean, the Unicorn’s lifeblood falling off it like quicksilver, for it was lubricated with oils extracted from magical plants, to slip through armour without friction, and to shed blood as a duck’s plumage sheds water. The killer relaxed her fetlock, letting the hoof move back up into a more natural position, which took pressure off the trigger-stud hidden on the underside of her foreleg greave. The trigger slid back out, and a complex mechanism within the greave withdrew the blade, leaving the leg free until its wielder needed it again.
The killer released the Unicorn’s skull, and the late Assistant Librarian’s body fell limply to the floor, muscles spasming softly in death. Stepping away from the corpse, the pony tossed her head, letting her hood, beaked to fool the casual observer into mistaking this Earth Pony for a Unicorn, settle back into place. In the shadows beneath that hood, two blue eyes shone icily.
Her name was well known within the shadowy Order which had sent her, for she was the most accomplished adept it had ever produced: that name was Flint Heart, and it was apt.
Flint Heart twitched her pink ears, which extended out through the hood, to signal her partner. Another mare, dressed just as she was, coalesced out of the shadows. She had a cream coat, and the voluminous curls of her blue-and-rose mane bunched up somewhat within her hood, in contrast to her partner’s dead-straight hair. Her eyes were blue as well, though of a different hue, and they were troubled.
“Was that truly necessary?”
“No,” answered Flint Heart. “It was expedient.” Her voice always surprised ponies when they first heard it: it was higher in pitch than any pony would expect, given her pinched demeanour. To find the discrepancy amusing was... unwise.
“ ‘Stay your blade from the innocent,’ ” the second pony quoted, “that is our Creed.”
“What ‘innocent’?” Flint Heart snorted in derision. “That’s a Unicorn—was a Unicorn,” she corrected herself with a sneer. “None of them are innocent. You should know that better than I.”
“The Second Tenet, then? ‘Be discreet’?”
“You’re the one who made the noise.”
“I would have recovered,” insisted the second pony, bristling. “She wouldn’t have seen me, not if she’d lit the whole room with her magic—there was enough cover! She would eventually have assumed she’d heard a rat or suchlike, and moved on.”
Flint Heart rolled her eyes in frustration, as though she were dealing with a simpleton. “We are here to steal books. Did you think their loss would go unnoticed? Unicorns never stop tallying their possessions: it’s practically all they use their vaunted writing for.
“Cut the body open; make it look like a Unicorn murder. They will chase the false trail and we will never be suspected.”
“It still seems excessive…”
“ ‘Everything is permitted’, Tasty Treats,” Flint Heart quoted, pronouncing her partner’s name as though it were an insult. “Understand the meaning of these words.” She turned and strode away with a contemptuous flick of her tail.
“Now carve up that corpse while I find the catalogues.”
Tasty Treats looked down at the Unicorn body that was softly twitching on the floor, the blood from her wound a dark stain against her white Temple robes and ivory coat. She could faintly smell the sour tang of urine; the bladder had already relaxed in death. Best hurry, she told herself. The longer she took, the more discrepancies would accumulate between the scene she needed to present and what had actually transpired, and while Unicorns might have many hateful qualities, stupidity was not common amongst them.
Sliding a hoof under the cooling corpse, she levered the body up enough to wedge first her muzzle, then her whole head under the late Unicorn’s barrel. Lifting the body, she half-lay it on the disturbed desk, letting the head and forequarters lean over the edge. She caught hold of the front of the pony’s mane with her teeth and drew up the head, exposing the throat and ensuring that it was the lowest point of the body. She breathed patiently through her nose for a few moments, waiting for the blood to pool. Then, she drew up her right foreleg and flexed the fetlock, causing the hidden blade within to flick out over her hoof.
Treats slashed open the Unicorn’s throat, making sure to twist the blade when it drew across the wound Flint Heart had inflicted, savaging the flesh to conceal the deeper, piercing stroke. The pooled blood dropped out, spattering across the stone floor in a rough semicircle. She released the mane, allowing the head to fall forward, the remaining blood that oozed from the wound staining the corpse’s robes about the collar. Finally, she allowed the body to slide off the desk and fall heavily into the fan of blood. The blood would soak into the robes and hide the stain caused by the original wound.
Holding up her right foreleg, she relaxed the fetlock, taking the pressure off the greave’s trigger. Her sharp hearing picked out the soft click and whirr as the sophisticated spring-loaded mechanism within unlocked and began withdrawing the blade. The draw was instantaneous, but the recall required a moment to complete. This was the single greatest obstacle when it came to mastering the use of the hidden blades: the wielder had only three legs upon which to stand—two when both blades were drawn at once—and there was a slight delay in switching back to full mobility. Though brief, in melee that delay was not insignificant.
Flint Heart had already found the library’s registries, though she was struggling to elucidate its codes. Secure in the belief that only their tribe could read the writing system it had devised, Unicorn scribes rarely sought to disguise the contents of their lists with ciphers, but quills blunted quickly, and parchment was complex to manufacture. The archivists used idiosyncratic shorthoof notations to save resources, and it took time to deduce the thinking behind each librarian’s abbreviations.
“These tithing records will suit us best for ambush sites,” declared Flint Heart with a tone of defiance in her voice, as though daring Tasty Treats to disagree: while Flint Heart was by far the better killer, Treats outpaced her in reading skill.
“I’ll check the names of the communities,” nodded Treats, taking care to remain deferential, “and make sure we have the right volumes.”
“No, I can do that. You need to find the floor plans the Old Mare needs. And be quick about it,” she added grumpily as Treats turned back to the registries. “We need to finish before the next service, or somepony will find that corpse early and raise the hue and cry.”
And who left that corpse on the floor? Treats retorted silently, but she forced down her frustration—she needed a clear head. She flipped through one of the chief indices, skimming entries, lips moving silently as she perused the records, considering the best means of approach. The Unicorns of the Temple did not write their books for the benefit of Earth Pony intruders; it was necessary to come at the solution indirectly.
They had been sent to discover more about the layout of the Crow’s Roost, a recently built fastness erected ostensibly as a short-term storage site for goods tithed from the surrounding Earth Pony villages, but far too close to their Order’s mountain headquarters for their leader’s liking. The recent construction, at least, significantly narrowed her search, but there was a chance that copies of the appropriate records had not yet been transferred to the Grand Library, at which point she would have to deduce where the originals were being housed.
She swiftly picked out instances of the ideograms for “crow,” but there were four different ways to write the character, and that was assuming the name wasn’t written as a rebus, combining ideographic and simplified characters based on their appearance or referents rather than their pronunciation. The recent completion of the fastness meant that its name had not yet found a widely recognised abbreviation, however, and so was written out full and plain, which made her work much easier. She soon deduced the correct combination of characters.
“ ‘Lair of the Trickster,’ huh?” she whispered under her breath, translating the implication behind the character choice. Treats wondered if the name was portentous: Unicorns could not resist being clever with their writing system. Well, Earth Ponies would endeavour to find out. She made a mental note of where to find the records mentioned and swiftly moved through the stacks. At least no record had been shunted into the deeper, magically sealed sections of the archives—everything was close at hoof.
Inventory of Stores Ferried Overland—lists of materials and quantities ferried between fastnesses. That information might have been useful half a year ago, but the size of the construction could now be gauged by direct observation. Records of food stores would not be useful either: if the fastness truly was meant to warehouse them, they would say nothing about the size of the garrison. Worthless.
Dispatch to the Office of the Royal Cartographer—putting the new fastness on the map: a dot and a name and nothing more. Worthless.
Allotments and Allowances—a record of resources allocated to building the fastness, and dated for the previous year, when construction was only beginning. Worthless.
Tasty Treats silently blew air out through her nostrils. This was a waste of time; clearly the construction was too recent to have been extensively catalogued in the Grand Library. In all probability, the only currently extant copies of the floor plans were still on site, or worse, in transit. They had hoped to kill two ponies with one rockfall during their visit, but the timing had not proven favourable. They would need to send word back to the Mountain, and have other agents sent to investigate the new fastness; hopefully they could lay hoof upon what their leader desired.
Unless—there was perhaps another way. The chief architect, the pony who had drafted the plans in the first place: she would likely retain a copy. If they could glean her name, they could either steal the plans, or… ‘convince’ her to share details with them. Quickly she returned to the index she had perused previously, flipping back through the pages. She had passed over the earliest entries concerning the Crow’s Roost, as they would have been too preliminary to include a copy of the building plans—but they could tell her the name of pony they needed.
She quickly located the early documents in the stacks and, after a swift perusal, learned the name of the pony commissioned to design and oversee construction: the chief architect. With a thin, satisfied smile, Treats tightly rolled up the scroll and returned it to its box. She was on the verge of sliding the box back into the alcove when she caught sight of the split seal that had once closed the missive. Now this was interesting….
“Flint Heart,” she whispered.
And she was there. The pink master of murder was always right there when a pony whispered her name. It was a thing beyond understanding—and it never failed. No pony breathed her name unless they wished to see her, and that was seldom.
“Speak,” Flint Heart hissed in a low voice, practically in her ear.
“Take a look at who commissioned the Crow’s Roost,” Treats explained, pushing the two halves of the seal together.
“The wand and swirl?” Flint Heart’s eyes narrowed. “The Grandmistress of the Temple herself?”
“It gives a pony pause, doesn’t it?”
“The Old Mare will decide what that means. Did you get the floor plans?”
“They’re not here—but I know who has them.” Tasty Treats replaced the box and let the lid fall down over the scrolls. “Let’s get out of here.”
“We can take a Leap from the North-Western corner of the keep; follow me.”
The two Earth Ponies, in single file, hopped up a trio of storage chests conveniently arranged in a way that could serve as a stepladder, ran up the side of a towering book shelf, leapt off from it and, twisting in mid-air, caught the top of the bookshelf opposite before scrambling up over the edge. They ran over the top of the bookshelf, leapt from its far end onto a giant, wrought-iron candelabra and, scampering across that, bounded from it to a high window, through which they exited the building.
The window overlooked a sheer drop to the courtyard far below, but the ponies simply adjusted their foreleg greaves, setting their hidden blades to half-length, before turning their faces to the wall and beginning to pick their way along it, uncannily finding purchase on the slightest irregularities in the masonry, and flicking out their shortened blades as needed to leverage support from even the finest of cracks.
The Moon shone above them, peering through ragged swirls of cloud, but their robes were woven out of star spider silk, and blended with the moonlight and starlight. They drifted like ghosts across the white stone wall of the sprawling headquarters of the Temple of the Celestial Dancers, intent on the North-Western corner of the building, from which they could make a great Leap down into an outer courtyard, thus sidestepping the entire inner bailey—and the Unicorns that kept watch.
Treats passed a fairly large window, unusually lit, given the late hour. She glanced inside, only for the space of a moment, as she slid past it. So brief a glimpse had she spared the room within that she was three body-widths along the wall before the significance of what she had seen struck home. Stopping, she gave out a low whistle, pitched to sound just like an errant breeze blowing along the length of the building. But this breeze was modulated in a very specific manner, and Flint Heart, ahead of her, instantly recognized the signal for what it was.
Pausing herself, the pink pony looked back at her partner. Tasty Treats twitched her ears, one to signal something of interest, the other pointing back the way they came. Although she seemed annoyed at the proposed delay—more annoyed that she usually seemed, at any rate—Flint Heart reversed direction, climbing back along the wall after Treats until they could both clandestinely peer through the lit window.
Beyond was a wide audience room, down the middle of which had been spread a rich scarlet carpet, with matching drapes hung along the walls. The rare dye was a sign of wealth even among Unicorns: it seemed the “Humble Servants” were given to ostentation. At one end of the room, through a pair of imposing doors, two stallions easily identified as members of the Temple’s militant order from their lorica—a barding composed of layered strips of hardened leather—and their ornamental iron helmets, marched in another, much smaller pony between them. Tasty Treats did not recognise the embellishments on her robes, and so could not place her in the Temple’s hierarchy.
But what had drawn Treats’ attention was the pony standing further inside the room itself, in the middle of the red carpeting, clearly the most important pony present. Treats had not seen her before, but the straight, long, powder blue mane swooping out in an arc over the slightly darker blue fur that covered her face, combined with the purple eyes and the superior expression of haughty disdain stamped upon her features left no space for doubt. Her robes, proclaiming her rank, merely confirmed the obvious.
Prestige, the Grandmistress of the Temple of the Celestial Dancers.
“She’s not supposed to be here,” Treats whispered, her voice just loud enough to reach the ears of the pony clinging to the wall next to her. “Our intelligence placed her up North.”
“The Temple’s entire resources are at her disposal,” Flint Heart reminded her. “She’s only one far wink away from any fastness. Still, something important must have called her back.”
The two burly stallions marched their timid seeming charge up to the edge of the carpet, where one of them roughly forced her to her knees. The smaller pony’s hood was down, revealing a frightened young mare, mint green with a jagged mane in the same shade that sported a broad streak of white. Prestige advanced towards the trio with an arrogantly regal gait, looking down her muzzle at the little green mare, who quailed and kept her gaze on the stonework before her.
Prestige stopped at the edge of the red carpet, and there she waited. And waited. Seeming in no hurry, she stood silently over the kneeling pony, looking as menacing as an executioner’s blade, poised to fall. There was a water clock recessed into an alcove set in the far wall; its slow drip, drip and the soft moaning of the night breeze were the only sounds in the scene.
To Treats and Flint Heart, the wait was nothing: though they clung to a sheer wall, they had trained all their lives to make climbing as natural as walking, and they were Earth ponies, so the stones, cut from the Earth’s bosom though they had been, supported them. To the mint green Unicorn grovelling before her Grandmistress, however, the wait was harrowing. With every slow drop that fell through the water clock, she seemed to fray further and further, growing ever more afraid.
“So,” barked Prestige at last. The sudden interjection was loud as a thunderclap after the prolonged silence, and the shivering mare jumped like a frightened mouse.
The Grandmistress continued, slowly, deliberately, each word steeped in venom: “I labour, day and night, for the good of the Temple and the observance of our sacred task, as well as the preservation and welfare of our tribe. I co-ordinate the efforts of our brightest and most brilliant mages, probe the deepest mysteries of the world, labour to wrest the court’s misguided ear from the cowardly whispers of that doddering fool Star Swirl the Bearded and his accursed proxy, bring all of our brilliance to bear upon the problems of our age and now—now that we are entering a critical phase, I am pulled away from all my actually important functions to deal with what?
“A miserable, lowly Chorister unable to discipline herself?! This is how I am to employ my inestimable time?!”
The ‘Chorister’—whatever that was—made haste to cast herself once more at Prestige’s fore hooves. “I-I m-meant no dis-disrespect,” she stuttered, her chattering teeth ruining any eloquence she might have mustered.
“Can one have disobedience without disrespect?!” Prestige demanded hotly. “You penetrated the Library’s Sanctum Sanctorum, a place forbidden to the uninitiated, and read interdicted texts! And you dare imply you did this respectfully?”
“Re-respectfully,” echoed the prostrate mare, “it w-was concern—in part, concern—that drove to p-penetrate the sanctum, c-concern for—”
“For what, fool?! What concern does a Chorister have with the disposition of the Temple? Yours was only to fulfil your function and leave the task of reasoning to your betters!”
“B-but we in the lower orders h-have many doubts, Grandmistress, which impair our functions! We h-hear nothing from above, are given nothing to assuage our fears—and what harm could come from knowing truth? The truth does not change for being unknown! We’re not sheep, Grandmistress: we can’t walk blindly in the dark!”
Flint Heart let the slightest snort escape her nostrils, just loud enough for Tasty Treats to make out. She underlined it with a disbelieving shake of her head. Treats understood her meaning: did that little pony truly think she was successfully defending herself? She was digging her own grave: the look on Prestige’s face spoke frightful volumes on the matter.
“A-and if I may borrow an argument from the esteemed philosopher Guiding Light, curiosity can never be a sin. The quest for knowledge is, in this life—”
“Guiding Light?! She was convicted of heresy two moons prior, and but days ago recanted her wayward whisperings! You would quote such a mare?!”
“I—I didn’t know,” gasped the Chorister, taken aback. “B-but why—”
“Silence!” demanded Prestige, shouting the other Unicorn down. When she began again, she addressed the guards, speaking as though the green mare were no longer present. “Clearly this pony is a lost cause, and I’ve no time to waste on such as her. Drag her down to the dungeons at once and have her excoriated.”
“Excori—NO!” With a great cry of horror, the green pony threw herself at her superior’s hooves once more, her jagged mane brushing the edge of the crimson carpet as she repeatedly kissed the hem of the Prestige’ robe.
“Mercy, Grandmistress, please! Anything but that! If—if my time is ended, then let me lead the Dance! Let my magic serve some purpose before… Let me burn! Please, oh please let me burn!”
Prestige gently stroked the crown of the other Unicorn’s head, as though to offer comfort. “You grovel well,” she sneered, suddenly thrusting downwards, violently driving the pony’s face into the floor. The frightened begging abruptly converted to a shriek of pain as bright red blood sprayed across the flagstones. “You’ll serve your new masters well,” she smirked as the condemned mare writhed on the floor, clutching her muzzle.
“Get her out of my sight,” Prestige haughtily commanded, speaking over the stricken pony’s form. “I want her out of the fastness and well on her way to the auction block by Prime. Let me never hear of her again. And make sure,” she added, establishing eye contact with a guard—her first time to do so since they had entered her presence—“that they cut out her tongue before they finish with her.”
“To hear is to obey,” the two guards spoke, promptly and in unison. They bowed and turned away, heading back through the double doors from whence they had come. One of them caught hold of the sprawled pony’s tail with his Levitation, dragging the little green mare away with them, even as she scrabbled desperately at the flagstones with her fore hooves, wailing and begging for mercy that would never come.
Tasty Treats’ eyes flinched away from that sight, and she quickly rolled them, attempting to pass off her aversion as mere distaste rather than the weakness that it was. Flint Heart’s face, as always, remained unreadable. She always appeared angry, but her true feelings were not easy to guess. She seemed to consider the situation one mute moment. If she saw through Treats’ subterfuge, she gave no sign.
“Interesting,” she whispered at last, very low, after the Templar Grandmistress had herself turned and begun to recede from their position. She resumed her previous course along the wall, but at a quicker pace, signalling for Treats to follow.
Treats glanced back at Prestige’s retreating form in confusion. She had thought—there were no other ponies in the hall; the Grandmistress was unguarded and did not suspect their presence. Surely… Tasty Treats herself could have assassinated her then and there; Flint Heart would have had no trouble at all. Did she truly intend to let this opportunity go by?
“Prestige is wide open, right now! Are we just going to let her walk away?” Treats asked her mentor as she caught up with her on the wall. “We’ve silk rope—we could have carried the body away so as not to tip our hoof over our work in the library…”
Flint Heart had paused in her climbing to press an ear against the stonework. Treats held her peace, that the pink pony might listen. “We’ve a more enticing target,” Flint Heart answered as she began to move again, this time descending diagonally along the wall, towards the floor beneath them. “We’re taking that mint mare.”
“The condemned pony? But why? How could she be more important that the Grand—” Treats was seised by sudden doubt. “We… we can’t do that, Flint Heart.
“We’d have to kill the two guards at the least, probably more, and then egress from the prime Temple of the Humble Servants of the Celestial Dancers with hooves on the ground. We’d never be able to disguise that, and then they’d be suspicious of the death in the library. And if they were to catch us with a book—!”
“Prestige herself couldn’t catch me,” Flint Heart haughtily declared.
“ ‘Do not compromise the sisterhood,’ Flint Heart,” Treats cautioned, quoting once more. “You’ve already violated the first two Tenets of our Creed tonight. Don’t break the Third.”
“Do you know what excoriation is?”
Flustered and frustrated in equal measure, Treats let her silence speak for her as she climbed after Flint Heart. She was moving quickly, and it took concentration to follow.
“It’s a form of capital punishment,” came the explanation. “The Unicorn’s horn is gouged out of her head and the wound cauterized to ensure it can never regrow, crippling her magic forever. The pony—no longer a Unicorn—is then considered dead, and sold to our tribe as a slave.”
Treats paused in her climbing to digest that a moment. “That’s cruel… even by Unicorn standards.”
“It’s an insult,” corrected Flint Heart, signalling once more for Treats to keep after her. “It implies that a Unicorn without a horn is as low as an Earth Pony.”
“Little surprise Prestige would make use of it,” Treats remarked darkly, “but what does that have to do with us? What do we care about—”
“I don’t give two flicks of my tail for that Unicorn or her horn,” interjected Flint Heart. “It’s her tongue that interests me.”
“Her…?”
“Excoriation doesn’t involve the removal of the tongue. She had to give a separate order for that, and she was very specific that it be carried out. And all this for a pony whose crime was to penetrate the Great Library’s inner sanctum.” She arched her eyebrows pointedly.
“She knows something!” whispered Treats excitedly. “She stumbled across something so valuable, knowledge so absolutely forbidden that she can’t be allowed to tell anypony, not even another Templar, and that’s why she’s to be rendered mute so she can’t speak of it, and cast out from her tribe, the only tribe that possesses writing!”
Treats brow creased, hope hesitant. “Why not just kill her, then?”
“Because Prestige is a Unicorn, a vindictive bitch who revels in the power she holds over others, why else? Let it be her undoing: that’s justice. That is the true meaning of our Creed, Tasty Treats! Let Prestige live to deal with court functions and bureaucracy all she likes; she’s no danger to us there. It’s her secrets we want.”
Abruptly she added, “They’re moving out of the stairwell; we breach on this floor. Remember: every time you kill, there’s a chance your target will manage to make some noise as she dies, raising the alarm. Walk with confidence and most ponies will believe you belong; kill only those who are directly in the way of the mission.”
With that, Flint Heart slid the tip of her half-blade between the closed shutters of the window before her, flipped open the inner latch, and silently pried the far panel open before flowing into the darkened room beyond. Treats followed, directly on her tail.
They landed in a small sleeping cell. Their eyes took a moment to adjust to the deeper darkness of the room, but their other senses told them what they needed to know: there were two ponies sleeping in the bunks recessed, one atop the other, on one side of the narrow room. Their steady breathing—one was even snoring softly—indicated deep sleep; they had not heard their intrusion, nor even the passing of the condemned pony in the hallway, which might mean that she had not been dragged down the corridor this cell was bound to abut.
Flint Heart quickly stepped over to the door giving onto the hallway which, judging by the light coming from the cracks around the light door, was decently lit. Tasty Treats, keeping on her mentor’s tail, surmised that light to be produced by Unicorn lighting spells: the illumination that slipped into the room was too bright and regular to be cast by flame.
Flint Heart opened the far door and stepped casually into the hall, with Treats, as always, on her tail. The hallway was empty of ponies, but they had both known it would prove so before they had opened the door. They swivelled their ears about, listening for the sounds of their target; these were quick to come. They could hear the sobbing of the condemned pony—far quieter and more subdued now—fading off somewhere to their left, along with the faint sound of Unicorn Levitation, which they had trained their ears extensively to prioritize against nearly all other background noises. The sound receded at a fair pace; perhaps the guards were eager to be quit of this duty. Dragging a pony via Levitation was physically effortless, so they were making good time.
The two intruders followed after, themselves keeping the brisk walk of ponies who had errands to perform. It was around an hour after Matins—neither of them needed the water clock upstairs to determine this—and the ponies of the Temple would for the most part be ensconced in their cells, snatching a precious couple of hours of sleep before the bell rang for the next Office, so they had little fear of running into many alert ponies in the halls.
That said, the layout of this section of the building was unknown to them, and proved more warren-like than they had expected. Their path forked many times, though fortunately they rarely had to explore far to find another drip or smear of blood from the mint mare’s bloodied muzzle, inadvertently blazing her trail for them to follow. Still, many doors were shut against them, each sporting the damnable round door handle so beloved of Unicorns and so difficult to turn with mouth or hoof, each delaying their pursuit. They did not make visual contact with their quarry until they had reached a low level, carved into the bedrock on which the fastness was built, where moisture dripped and dribbled down the walls, the stink of things long left to rot drifted in the air… and the way forwards lead through a guarded antechamber.
A pair of burly stallions stood flanking the entrance, in all points identical to the two who, from the fresh blood smear across the bottom step and the furrow cut through the rushes scattered over the floor, had clearly dragged their target through not moments prior. These differed only in their armament: each cast his Levitation spell to bring up a long, heavy-bladed pole arm as they approached, crossing the hafts before the grille that partitioned off this antechamber from the rest of the floor. The two Earth Ponies neither flinched nor slowed their advance—either would have aroused suspicion—instead striding intently towards them.
“State your purpose,” called out one of the guards. In lieu of an answer, Flint Heart hopped forward without warning, bringing both her hind legs forward at once, the way a rabbit would, the movement obscured by her robes until she used them to bound ahead, forelegs rising up to the double-snick sound of her hidden blades deploying simultaneously, at full length. She landed as a dancer might, right hind hoof forward, the left back from it and directly in line with the right, her tail raised for balance—and the point of each blade deep into a guard’s throat. The Unicorns did not even have time to blink. Each opened his mouth in shock, but only blood burbled forth.
The lances fell to the ground as the animating spells holding them aloft failed. Flint Heart again used her tail to flick a fold of her robes underneath the blades just before they struck the floor, muffling the clatter. Signalling for attention with a curt click of the tongue, she positioned her ears to relay the bundle & cache signal, though in truth Treats had not needed to be told.
The stallion on the right was closest to Treats, so she pounced on him, catching a panel of of his own robe and casting it over his throat and face as Flint Heart twisted on her hooves to withdraw her hidden blade from him and turn to the stallion on the left. Quickly, both Earth Ponies bundled the writhing Unicorns in their robes even as they drowned in their own blood, minimizing the amount of gore that reached the floor.
The grille that blocked the way forwards out of the antechamber was fastened by a mere latch: a flick of the tail and a quick shove with one flank saw it opened, and the two wrapped bodies were swiftly dragged into the corridor beyond and thrust into the shadows on either side of the door: the lighting on this level was far inferior to that on the levels above it, meaning the concealed corpses had a fair chance of being overlooked by a casual passer-by. They could bet on having until the changing of the guard—probably at the next Office—before the dead were discovered. By then they should be clear of the fastness.
“Do you feel that?” asked Flint Heart, as she swept the floor rushes about with her tail, obliterating the signs of struggle and hiding the blood spray they had not been able to contain.
Treats had no need to ask what she meant: of course she felt it, had felt it halfway down the last turn of the stairs. “The bedrock beneath us is whole; this is the lowest level of the fortress—which means the guards’ destination is on this floor.”
Flint Heart gave a curt nod. “Find them and secure the target; I’ll sweep and clear.”
Tasty Treats dipped her own head in acknowledgment and quickly darted off down the corridor. She stopped just before the first crossing of corridors, careful not to extend her head beyond the corner and so present a target. Closing her eyes briefly, she directed her awareness downward into the floor beneath her hooves, before letting it flow outwards through the rock.
Earth Sense, it was called. A simple name, but a subtle discipline.
Unicorn magic was almost entirely analytical: tricks to be performed, brought forth at a whim. Earth Pony magic, however… that was inborn, instinctive—it was lived. Every Earth Pony drew strength from the land, being clearly stronger than the other tribes as long as their hooves stayed on the ground. But this ease of use was a double-edged blade: most Earth Ponies plumbed their connection to the land no further than what came casually to them. Tasty Treats, however, belonged to a secret order of Earth Pony warriors who had delved deep indeed, unlocking abilities most Earth Ponies never realised were possible. The Earth had so much more to grant than mere strength. Here she drew awareness from it, reaching through it to feel distant hooffalls reverberating through the bedrock.
There were doors scattered along the corridor walls, and she felt the occasional weak stirring from within—prisoners rotting in cells, no doubt. Beyond, there were single ponies, presumably guards or servants, walking slowly about. None were near her. Even as she listened, one of those sets of hooffalls staggered suddenly, followed by a larger mass hitting the ground, once, and Treats felt no more from that quarter. Flint Heart was wasting no time; neither should she.
Come on, where are they?
Stretching her awareness further, she finally found her object: two sets of hoof falls, moving together, dragging a load across the ground behind them. Based on the set of the corridors, she had to go straight on and look for a left after thirty body-lengths or so. Treats headed off, her hooves making little noise despite her breaking into a trot, for she knew how to make herself one with the Earth.
As she closed with her quarry, she soon became able to track their hoof falls with her ears. Slowing her pace—her hoof falls were not completely silent—she approached the final corner, coming to a halt there so that she could peek around it.
She had enough time to see a heavy door open at the end of the corridor to admit the two guards and their unfortunate charge into the space beyond. There was a red glow within, a far cry from the magical lights that lined the hallways: the glow of fire. Belike it was some torture room, and the guards’ intended destination. The corridor was not long; she could, perhaps, dash down it and attack, now, before the door was shut upon her quarry, but the guards would see her coming—she could take down two guards in close quarters, of that she was certain, but the hallway was not wide, and if they drew their dancing knives… could she run through six blades in a straight line? Treats bit her lip. Flint Heart would charge at once, but did she dare? Was it wise? Or…?
She was wrenched out of her deliberations by a shriek of terror. The condemned mare, who had fallen into silence, had looked ahead into the room beyond, and given a sudden scream at the sight of what awaited within.
Now! Move now!
But even as her leg muscles bunched beneath her, the Unicorn guards yanked their captive forward through the door and shut it hard behind them, stranding Treats on the far side.
Shale, Treats cursed silently. Her hesitation had cost her a window of opportunity. She wasted no more time, rushing out and scuttling up to the door. She cursed again when she saw it was made of stout oak, reinforced with iron bands. Moreover, the hinges were on the other side.
She leaned gingerly into the door, careful to test its give without alerting anypony inside—particularly the guard whom her Earth Sense told her had taken up a position to the right of the entrance. There was no give at all. She had heard a faint scraping sound as she had rounded the corner, wood on wood. The door was clearly held fast not by a small bolt but by a heavy bar, quite possibly thrust through a bracket fixed in the door rather than simply swung down from above.
This was getting worse and worse. She could kick down the door, given time, but not in one stroke: she’d seen that its thickness was about equal to one of the guards’ hooves as she watched them enter. She could slide a hidden blade between the door and its frame—there was just barely enough room—but if the bar was meant to be slid horizontally across the wall, she would never be able to shift it, and even if it were not, the guard next to the door was sure to notice her fiddling.
And yet she had to get in there quickly, and with complete surprise. Both guards had heard Prestige’s addendum to the prisoner’s sentence; if they had any wits at all they could deduce, as she and Flint Heart had, that their charge held valuable secrets. If it seemed likely she might be taken, if they had much time to react, they might decide to silence her. The bastards could even do it from across the room with a Levitated blade. The only way to prevent that was to put them to sudden, unexpected death.
She could not open the door quickly enough, so the Unicorns would have to open it for her; guile was her only recourse now. Even then there was a complication: the door had been fitted with a small window, closed with an oaken shutter that could be slid aside to let those within gaze out at anypony who demanded entry. Her beaked hood and white robes could pass her off as a Templar Unicorn to casual inspection, but the guard scrutinising her would presumably be more alert than that. What if he asked to see her face, or demanded to know her rank within the Temple? She could kill him with a quick hidden blade thrust through the window and into his eye socket, but that would not open the door, and her Earth Sense told her that there were two additional ponies in the room—the keep’s torturers, presumably—that she needed to quell in addition to the doorward’s partner.
Treats slid a fore hoof up inside the folds of her robe, brushing along the barding she wore underneath. She felt the knobs of her darts’ draw-rings, four on each side. Flexing her fetlock, she flicked out a hidden blade; its tip speared through one of the iron rings, letting her draw it out of its sheath. She spun the projectile—a straight, double-edged blade affixed to the draw ring and made of simple iron, as it was meant to be disposable—around her extended hidden blade, before deftly hooking it into the fine gap between the door and the sliding panel that occluded the window set within it.
Allowing her hidden blade to withdraw, she carefully pushed against the draw ring with one hoof, quietly wedging the dart between the two wooden surfaces, hopefully preventing the shutter from opening. Treats then gave a quick, imperative series of raps upon the door.
“Message from the Grandmistress,” she barked. “Open the door!”
There was the tooth-jarring hum of the Levitation spell that was every Unicorn’s birthright, and door’s window-shutter took on a sparkling blue glow. The panel slid over less than a farthing before jamming, just as Treats had hoped. An expression of surprise sounded from the other side of the door, followed by annoyed mutterings as the guard struggled with the stuck shutter. She felt him, through the Earth, coming about to face the door.
“Well?” demanded Treats impatiently. She did not want to give him too much time to think.
“Bloody shutter’s jammed…” came the muffled reply.
“So open the door, then! Do you think I have all night?”
“What’s the message?” asked the guard, still fiddling with the jammed shutter. He actually stopped his attempt at magical manipulation and tapped it with a hoof.
“It’s sealed, with the Grandmistress’ own seal! You expect me to open it?! Would you like me to wipe your arse for you as well? It’s about some condemned mare or something.”
“Damned cheeky little….” The rest of the guard’s grumbling was inaudible.
“You want me to go back and tell the Grandmistress you couldn’t be bothered to accept her orders? Because I can do that.”
“Hold on, hold on!” The frustrated fiddling at the shutter stopped, to be followed by the hum of Levitation, though this time Treats saw no glow. Instead, she heard the wood-on-wood scraping of the door’s bar being pulled out of the way. Her mouth twisted into a savage smile of triumph: the guard hadn’t moved his hooves; she had him!
With a quick hop, Treats spun around one-hundred-and-eighty degrees, turning her hindquarters to the door. She crouched, head dropping below the level of her hips, her entire body curling up like whip-coil, ready to strike. She felt the bedrock beneath her hooves: cool and smooth, and strong—oh, so very strong.
Treats stood tensed, waiting for her moment. To still her mind, she silently recited the Litany:
Patient as the Mountain,
—She heard the bar slide free—
Silent as the Silt,
—The world stood still a moment—
Treacherous as the Quicksand,
—A blue glow engulfed the door behind her; the air hummed with magic—
Sudden as the Avalanche!
Treats shifted her weight her weight onto her bent forelegs and with both hind legs unleashed a ferocious kick into the door, right next to where it met the door jam, with all the might she could channel. The titanic blow tore the door from the unsuspecting guard’s Levitation, the panel swinging open with terrible force. The sharp edge of the door caught him in the face, the impact driving the wedge through his iron helm, splitting the metal and twisting the torn edges into his flesh, putting out his left eye and fracturing his skull. Bright red sprayed out as he was knocked back, his head lolling as a marionette's whose strings have been cut. He toppled onto the soiled floor like a felled tree.
But Treats was in motion long before then, straightening her forelegs to thrust against the ground; her forequarters bounced up as her hind legs dropped. Her back hooves touched the floor, and she reared up onto them, fore hooves already sliding inside her robes. With the ease of long practice, her hidden blades flicked out, each spearing a draw-ring among her waiting darts.
Her left leg swung out and back; pivoting, she landed upon it, going into a tight, fast turn on a single hoof. Her head snapped around—this moment was crucial. The two ponies standing close to the prisoner were her highest priority, but while her Earth Sense had revealed their approximate position, she had only a split-second to acquire her targets.
There was a mare on the captive’s left, a stallion on her right, working her into some sort of stock. Both were wearing black leather hoods and trappings—no armour. She unwound her forelegs as she spun, the movement drawing her darts out of their sheaths. There was a short shivery scraping sound as angular momentum slid the draw-rings up and off her hidden blades, hurtling the darts on flat trajectories out towards the torturers. The mare was in side profile, and her head had snapped around at the sound of the door being kicked open; she caught one blade through her right eye. The stallion has his tail to Treats, and was only beginning to turn around; the second blade took him in the throat.
The captive mare shrieked in fear as they collapsed into her field of vision, spurting blood, but Treats snapped her head around through her turn to focus on the remaining guard. He was a couple of body-lengths away, and he was quick: already his three dancing knives were sliding out of their sheaths, lit with Levitation, and his lips were parting to cry for aid. Her own blades were now bare, but she brought her tail around, accelerating its spin.
Her long tail was cinched near the tip by an ornament designed to appear decorative, but which was in fact a weapon: two short magazines each holding a pair of darts, feeding into a narrow groove in line with the tail, its aperture facing towards the tip. The manticore, they had named it. While she was bluffing the door warden, Treats had rolled the device such as to load a blade into the flinging chamber; she now swung her tail into her spin and snapped it sharply back, like a cracking whip. The manticore was snatched back, but the blade in the groove kept its course, leaping out and hurtling across the open space to catch the guard in the mouth as he opened it to raise the alarm.
The blade cleaved his tongue before ramming into the back of his throat, converting his cry to a gurgling gory froth. His blades went spinning off in three directions as his Levitation spell failed, and he fell thrashing to the floor.
Treats brought her back hooves together before she could go into a second spin, allowing herself to fall forward onto the first guard she had felled. She put her weight behind her right hidden blade and drove its point easily through the stunned stallion’s lorica—and his heart. She caught herself on a bent left foreleg to give the blade the moment it needed to withdraw, before rising on three legs.
In a quick about-face, she thrust her right blade into the draw-ring of the dart she had used to jam the door shutter. She pulled the weapon loose, made a quick hop back into the room, and slammed the door shut, all in a single fluid motion. Treats spun the dart around her blade and deftly slid it back into its sheath, under her robes. Grabbing hold of the bar—a sliding bar, to the side of the door, just as she had guessed—she slid it across the door as her right hidden blade retracted, locking herself and the prisoner in the room and so denying any chance of outside interference. She doubted this precaution necessary, with Flint Heart bent on clearing the entire floor; nevertheless, she strove kept her fieldcraft tight.
“Um… hello?” The prisoner was calling out in a trembling voice. “Is anypony there?” She was tugging ineffectually at the stock into which she had been locked. The device enclosed only her upper neck, but blocked off her peripheral vision, hiding most of the room. Most importantly from Treats’ point of view, however, her horn was free, but she had not yet cast a spell. Hopefully her magic was useless in the current situation. A ‘Chorister,’ she had been called—what did that mean? Something to do with music?
Tasty Treats came up alongside her and the bound pony gave a mighty start and a yelp of surprise and shame when Treats flipped a panel of her robes over her back, revealing her Mark. A golden lyre. She was some sort of musician, then. Well, she had no instrument, so hopefully she was crippled at the moment. They would have to be careful that she did not start humming or singing. Treats had heard tales of far-off creatures, called Sirens, that could draw a pony to her doom with a charming song. She would certainly not put such evil past a Unicorn.
The mint-green pony was trembling in her bonds, even beginning to whimper in fear. Treats did not need this. She resolved to shock her out of it, that the prisoner might be ready to move: Flint Heart had surely cleared the floor by now.
She thrust her head into the Unicorn’s field of vision, provoking another start of fear. “Do you want to keep your horn?” she asked abruptly.
“I—I—what?” stuttered the terrified mare. Her eyes were golden, like ripened wheat, caught in bright sunlight. The colour of a Unicorn’s greed, Treats reminded herself harshly.
“Do—you—want—to—keep—your—horn?” she repeated, enunciating carefully. She hooked the pony’s horn with the rim of a fore hoof and gave it a good shake, to drive the question home.
“Ah, yes! Yes, I do! Please!”
“Then follow me,” ordered Treats. “I am your only hope now.” She looked to the fastening mechanism behind the stock, and found it to be a simple leather cord. Unicorns could generally only Levitate things they could clearly see; the cord’s position behind the stock, and the complex knot into which it had been woven, would be impossible for the trapped pony to untie. She sheared clean through it with a hidden blade, then used the blade as leverage to lift the top part of the apparatus off the Unicorn, freeing her.
The mint-green pony quickly drew her head out of the stock, turning to face Treats. “Oh, thank y—” she began, but froze mid-word as her eyes fell on Treats’ hidden blade, still extended. The Unicorn watched in horrified fascination, her eyes first following the blade as it withdrew, then sliding down the greave until they lit on the design embossed onto it. It was meant to be subtle, to be passed over by a casual glance, but a pony who knew what to look for, or who was expecting it, could pick out the emblem of Treats’ Order.
The Unicorn stared wide-eyed at her rescuer, too frightened to speak, but though no sound emerged, her lips silently mouthed a single word, naming Tasty Treats for what she was:
Assassin.