The Dark Heart of Canterlot

Chapter 10: Plotting and Planning

"We have to do something...fast..."

"She what?" Cadence cried.

Shining looked round anxiously. A couple of young students approaching the Glimmering Spire of the High Halls had paused and were staring back. Shining took Cadence by the leg and led her round the nearby pillars.

"Keep your voice down" he hissed. "The last thing we want to do is draw attention to ourselves now."

"I'm sorry, but...I just can't believe..." Cadence drifted off guiltily.

"I'm just telling you what I saw and heard" Shining said brusquely. "She's got a creature locked up down there."

Cadence shook her head, her lusciously curled three toned mane bouncing. "What sort of creature?" she asked. "A pet, like Muffins? Or a guard animal? Or..."

"It spoke" Shining broke in.

The pink alicorn gasped. "Spoke?" she whispered. "Just repeated words? Like a parrot or a mimic-bird, maybe?"

Shining shook his head. "It pleaded. It reasoned"

"An intelligent creature then" Cadence sighed. "Some kind of sprite or pixie perhaps...and certainly a vicious one, judging by Celestia's wounds. I'm frightened, Shining, she was nearly killed."

"I know, I am too" said the white unicorn, as he remembered the sight of the Princess returning to him after his terrifying night in the underground maze. She had been limping badly, blood soaking the expensive starsilk robe, which was torn in many places. Then, as she raised her head, Shining had cried out as he saw the Princess' ear, hanging on by a thread as though something had tried to slice it off completely.

For a creature that had sounded so weak, so abject, so pitiful, it had certainly put up a ferocious fight. The Princess' harrowing words came back to Shining; words he hadn't taken quite seriously enough when he first heard them.

"Celestia called it an evil creature" he said softly.

"It must be, to cut her so badly. She's the greatest magic wielder in all of the Seven Realms...and yet..." she fell still. Shining waited expectantly for her to continue.

The only noise was the soft flupp flupp of the long and heavy banners that flew far above their heads on the summit of the Glimmering Spire, their purple fields emblazoned with a silver unicorn head. Although the air was almost still, the banners were high enough to catch the slightest of breezes.

"Yet what?" said Shining.

The young Princess looked up. Goddess...she's beautiful...

"I don't know" she said, her voice snapping Shining out of his daydream. "I was just imagining how I might behave if I'd been locked up against my will."

The blue maned unicorn nodded sympathetically. He knew how hard it must be for Cadence to conceive that her aunt might be in the wrong. It was heartening to see that she was not beyond putting herself in the place of the captive creature.

"We must go down there" she said abruptly. "You must take me down there, Shining. I must see for myself what's going on. And if we find that..." she hesitated. "If Princess Celestia has..." she stopped, her voice choking up in her throat.

"We'll do the right thing" said Shining earnestly. "I..."

All at once, there was a sharp grating noise above him. He looked up to see the same two students pulling their heads back inside an upstairs window in an effort not to be seen. "We're being spied on, Cadence" he hissed. "Let's get out of here."

As usual, rumours and gossip, whispered plots and lies filled the Court Gardens, so that the air above them hissed like the pressurised steam which was currently spurting from the ventilation vents on the roof of the opulently decorated Skyship Construction Docks. Like the steam, the words were heated, poisonous; sometimes opaque, sometimes crystal clear - and indicated that something dramatic was about to take place.

In the open sky, the Canterlot Weather Squadrons were preparing for the scheduled thunderstorm. In Canterlot itself - if half the rumours were true - an even greater storm was about to break. The Yellow Glade was more crowded than usual. As well as the habitual sprinkling of ranters and ravers with their conspiracy theories and apocalyptic warnings, there were other, less frequent visitors who were holding court in the tree lined park. They were the fortune tellers, the soothsayers, the prognosticators.

These sad individuals were said to be the last of the once proud White Council, members of the government that ruled Equestria during the years of the Great Pony War against the Pferdereich of Germaneigh, dispossessed when Celestia returned with the might of Equestria's Armed Forces. Now these poor unfortunate ponies of all races were little more than carnival performers, their knowledge of Canterlot's secrets reduced to myth and superstition.

The true, uncorrupted Canterlot Highlords despised them, but tolerated them as evidence of how inferior a conclave of politicians was in comparison to Celestia's rule. Each of the shabby soothsayers was armed with the tools of his or her trade: fate-stones, Everfree vines, fire roots. One - a gangly, wall eyed stallion with grizzled jowls - had amassed a particularly sizeable crowd around him.

"The bones cannot lie" he bellowed, his voice breaking with excitement as he waved the bleached rainfish skeletons at those standing closest to him. "I have seen death and despair in the Royal Palace. I have seen the great Princess Celestia ringed with blue flames and dancing with the dead." His voice voice grew hushed. "I have seen our mighty city - beloved Canterlot - being swallowed up..." His voice grew louder. "Chewed to pieces..." And louder still. "And spat out by a fiend..." He was shouting now. "A fiend unleashed by ignorance and desperation. A fiend no prison bars can contain. A fiend so fearsome that none will escape its terrible wrath!"

The crowd gasped as one. Fortune tellers were seldom as gory as this character.

"And how will we know this fiend?" somepony shouted.

"With great difficulty" came the reply. "For it is a shapeshifter. It will speak with a familiar voice and bear the face of a nearest and dearest. It is a deceiver. A seducer. The most terrible creature in all of the world!"

"Sounds like a changeling!" a high pitched voice came from the back of the crowd, and a ripple of laughter went all round.

Though feared by foals throughout the world, whose mothers, fathers and nannies would tell them blood-curdling tales about the treacherous creatures, among adults it was only the more primitive ponies from the Outer Reaches and Far Realms who believed in the changelings. Those who had left the far flung lands for Equestria had abandoned not only their families and villages, but also their superstitions, while those born in the shining city of Canterlot or the surrounding settlements like Ponyville had never considered the stories of the evil creatures might be anything more than ancient myths and legends.

The fortune teller brandished his fish bones furiously.

"You can scoff!" he roared.

"Thank you kindly, sir!" somepony shouted back sarcastically, and the laughter became louder.

Undaunted, the fortune teller turned round slowly and surveyed the crowd darkly. With his eyes pointing in different directions at the same time, it was impossible to tell where his gaze fell. A hush descended.

"So you don't believe in changelings, eh?" he said, his voice an icy whisper. Nopony spoke. Nopony moved. "I know of those who didn't believe in trees that grow by themselves either, yet that didn't stop them from becoming lost in the Everfree Forest. Your lack of belief , my friends, is the changelings' strength." his voice became louder, sharper. "Mark my words and mark them well, the changelings are coming! The earth shall shake in pain and Canterlot will fall into dust! For so it is written in the bones!"

A derisory laugh went up.

"What do you take us for?" a voice called out.

"Ignorant foals" another shouted, and the crowd began to disperse.

Rumours of impending doom and gloom were nothing new in the Court Gardens. Before the fortune teller with the rainfish bones had even arrived on the scene, feverish gambling activity was already taking place up and down the Grove of the Crimson Willow. Despite their scepticism, news of the latest prognostications soon led to a fresh bout of wagers and bets. The tally-outs were besieged.

"Ten gold bits say the Royal Palace will be struck by lightning" said a tall mare in an extravagant dress.

"Fifteen gold bits says the Princess will be gone by the next full moon" said her companion.

The tally-outs noted the wagers and exchanged the gold coins for slips of paper bearing a record of both the bets and its odds. Further into the garden, the odds were shortening on whether the changelings really existed. A week, a day - even an hour earlier, you could have placed a bet at a thousand to one that the creatures were no more than the stuff of foal stores and nightmares. But now the rumours had firmed up, the gossip had turned to gospel truth, and already there were several who were claiming that friends of friends had witnessed the terrible creatures firsthoof.

Further along the Court Gardens, an unusual cluster of nobleponies had assembled in the Garden of the Twilight Equinox. Situated beneath the middle of the Great Viaduct, this garden was considered neutral ground, a kind of no-pony's land where academics, politicians, nobleponies and ordinary Canterlot citizens could meet with one another anonymously.

Although they had all arrived without the characteristic outfits and insignias of their positions in the intricate hierarchy of Canterlot, those who knew their faces would have spotted a dozens or so Sun-Deans from the High Halls deep in conversation with a group of fresh faced young politicians and Professors. Everypony, it seemed, was trying talk at once.

"But aren't the proposals a little extreme?" somepony asked.

"A drastic situation calls for drastic measures" came the reply.

"The behaviour of the Princess has been reprehensible. Intolerable. Unacceptable..."

"And now she must go!"

"And since she won't leave of her own free will..."

"Those who will not jump must be pushed..."

Moving unnoticed through the increasingly agitated crowd was a tall robed unicorn, his hood down low over his head. As he turned to his companion, the light glinted on his protruding silver muzzle mask.

"You see how easy it is to set rumours rolling, Thorn Sprout" he whispered. "To plot, to scheme, to sow dissent..."

The old earth pony, also dressed in a long cape with the hood up, nodded enthusiastically.

"It's all going better than I imagined" he whispered back. "But what of the deed itself?"

"It's all set" came the reply. The pair of them looked round furtively. "When the Princess uses her elevator tonight, she will find the chains cut..."

Still deep in whispered conversation, Shining Armour and Cadence continued slowly along the bank of the central canal which led from the roaring Twin Falls of Everwhite. The water, it was aid, where the tears wept by the First Mare when her children grew up and left her alone on the summit of Mount Everwhite. The water coursed along the narrow canal and into the pipes which would deliver it to all but the very oldest and run-down buildings of Canterlot. As she listened to Shining, Cadence absent mindedly tossed a small stone into the foaming stream. She turned away.

"It sounds horrible" she breathed.

"It was" said Shining. "Snuffling, snorting, slurping - and there was this glow. Green, Cadence. Like...deathly green!"

The alicorn shuddered. "As if the underground caverns weren't treacherous enough already" she said, "now you're telling me that they're full of...of...well, what exactly?"

"I don/t know" said the white unicorn, shaking his head. "I've never seen or heard anything like it before. But I'll tell you what - I count myself lucky to have escaped with my life."

Cadence smiled weakly. Shining turned to her.

"Cadence" he said, "are you sure you still want to go down there?"

"What?" said Cadence, her eyes blazing.

"I...I just wondered" said Shining. "I mean, what with the rickety elevator and the dark maze of tunnels, not to mention the great deathly green whatever it is down there...it's still not too late to change your mind."

The young Princess snorted. "Change my mind?" she said. "Of course I'm not going to change my mind. Wild manticores couldn't keep me away." And with that, she turned and hurried off. "Meet me in the Statue Gardens an hour after sunset" her voice floated back.

Shining stood there watching Cadence's body bustling away into the distance, a look of bemusement playing around his lips. He didn't think he would ever be able to make her out.

Or make out with her...

"Shut up..." Shining told his brain.