SHADES OF GRAY
Chapter Eleven - The Tower Ponies
It was mere minutes later that Alile reached the bodies of the ponies the archers had shot down. True to their duties, the moment the alarm had sounded - and it had rung through the hallways where the defenders slept like high-pitched thunder, nearly rattling books off bookshelves and ponies out of their beds - the archers were on their hooves and at the battlements, peering between the merlons and aiming their stationary crossbows down at the intruders. Only two arrows missed; the rest hit their marks, some falling, some fleeing beyond the magical barrier. As long as they didn't get any ideas about coming back through, they could go. It wouldn't be the first time marauders had stumbled across their hideout.
Still, as Alile's muscled form, deep gray but still visible against the night, shrugged into his red cape and stood before the bodies, there were immediately several things wrong with the scene. He turned his head, his gaze swiftly reaching the ponies who had been coming behind him and urging them to reach him more quickly. Dante and Randal were well ahead of the others, the medium-gray flutterpony twins carrying a stretcher between them with amazing haste, as though they knew each others' moves and could match them without tripping up.
"These two were not marauders," Alile's gruff voice pronounced as the flutters reached him, his nostrils flaring as he let out a frustrated snort, "and they had a child with them."
Kibeth was still struggling under the weight of her mother's body. Her horn had dimmed to nothing, a dirty white point on her forehead and not immediately noticeable as Alile took closer surveillance of the carnage and looked closely at the other felled ponies, whose ragged countenances and piecemeal armor and weapons clearly identified them.
"What's happened here?" a familiar voice caused Alile's ears to perk. He shook out his deep green mane in frustration, his eyes narrowing. It was Regulus, one of the captains of the tower guard, and he seemed not at all happy about having to make his way out into the desert so late at night.
"Two marauders, two innocents. And a child, still alive," Alile responded gruffly.
"A child?!" Regulus' voice dropped to a grating whisper; Alile winced, his ears immediately pressing back against his head as he turned to look up to the pony. Regulus' neon green hair nearly lit up the night. His beard - a strange thing to see on any pony, considering even the ones who occasionally grew them had to shave, but at Regulus' rank he was allowed to keep it - swished in the wind created by his hasty approach, and he shoved past the ponies who were already carrying stretchers with the dead ponies' bodies back to the tower.
"What do you mean, there's a child? Why did the night guards not mention this? Were the archers mistaken? Who is at fault here?," the barrage of questions stampeded from Regulus' mouth like so many spears, thrown in his anger as he noticed Kibeth's tiny body lying, exhausted, in the dip on one side of a small hill of sand. Her head was now curled defensively under her hooves as she was exposed to the night air; Randal and Dante quietly carried her mother away. Regulus approached the filly carefully. He figured she couldn't have been more than a month or two old, her wings underdeveloped and legs far too long for her tiny body.
"What's your name, little one?" he asked. Kibeth uncurled slightly and Regulus reached out a hoof to touch her shoulder.
The hairs on the back of his neck suddenly stood on end and he felt a zap like electricity coursing through his body; a light zap, but enough to make him pull instinctively away. All he'd experienced was a jumble of memories and emotions, words and visions. He felt his heart beating rapidly in his chest and realized he was holding his breath. He exhaled slowly, trying to piece what he'd seen into something coherent and failing. The child was far too young to glean anything but her name: Kibeth. He had never experienced such a mental connection, however brief, and it dazed him.
As Regulus was regaining his composure, Kibeth rolled over and faced him, her large eyes peering up at him curiously, though they were filled with tears of fright. Her horn blinked a pale white light once, twice, as if alerting the flutter to its presence. Still, it took Regulus a moment to process it.
"She has a-..." but he trailed off, realizing he was voicing his thoughts aloud, a first for him considering his usually composed nature. He looked around to see Alile was the only other pony to hear him; the other flutter pushed forward and looked at what he was looking at.
"A horn," he stated flatly, as if he was unable to bring forth emotion even for this unusually rare discovery.
"Gather her up. Bring her back to Zith-lynd. We'll decide what to do with her there. Bundle her in your cape. Let's not leave her out here in the cold, at least. Bring her to counsel room five on the third floor," Regulus began delivering orders, something he found comfort in, in the strange situation. Alile heaved a sigh and removed his cape, draping it around Kibeth like a hooded cape, covering her flickering horn aptly before kneeling and hoisting her onto his back. She began to bawl immediately, and Alile rolled his eyes.
"Do we need a pacifier of some sort?" he muttered, but they were already headed back to the tower. His green eyes lifted to the seven spires atop the tower with reverence. "Am'hatai give me the strength and wisdom I need..." he trailed off, and began the trek back to the tower with due haste, hoping the bouncing of his withers would soothe the child somewhat.
The entrance gates to Zith-lynd were enough to allow six ponies through, side-by-side, with good reason, as was evident when you entered the atrium during the day; usually ponies would be bustling about from hallway to hallway, all concentrating intently on their current duties. As it was, in the middle of the night, the only ponies standing around were guards, those with night-related studies, and the occasional sleepless pony, wandering aimlessly. A few of these - all flutterponies, for nearly the entire occupancy of Zith-lynd was flutterponies - stopped to stare at Regulus and Alile as they made their way in. Alile's hard gaze fell on each one, silently instructing them to all be on their way.
The atrium was tiled expertly with fine marble in whites and pale grays. Where usually would stand a fountain or statue - the center of the impressive room - stood instead a series of seven tall slabs of marble, darker than the floor, and arranged in a heptagon shape, with their tops barely below the ceiling, which was at least fifteen feet high, if not more. The slabs had names chiseled into them. Aside from this decoration, the atrium seemed surprisingly bare to most visitors, its walls painted off-white and devoid of decoration and with only the simplest of light fixtures - spelled with magical light - adorning the walls.
As impressively large as the atrium may have been, it was dwarfed by the main hall, which was the bulk of the base of Zith-lynd. One could stand at one end of the hallway and it would take squinting to make out any pony at the other end, as wide as it was, likely hundreds of feet. The hall was tiled with the same white and gray checkerboard of marble, but here there was a lavish, deep gray rug bolted to the floor, reaching almost across the entire room, save where pillars - spiraled in shape - burst forth from the floor and reached up toward the arched ceiling to help support the floors above. On either side of the entrance to the hall from the atrium - which placed you at the hall's center - were staircases; four, one very close to each corner of the room, their worn stone steps wide and slowly inclined for easy use by ponies. Their railings were wrought iron, flecked with age, but clearly created by masters of design and scrollwork, and ponies dedicated to the smithing of metals.
On each wall, between the staircases and on either side of the atrium entrance - as well as a similar but smaller entrance directly across the room from the atrium - were tapestries. They were huge, elegant tapestries that must have taken years or even decades to weave, each telling its own well-worn story with timeless detail and adorned here and there with lavish golden thread and multiple jewels. Alile spared the fore-left tapestry a glance - as he often did - his eyes scanning the story for Am'hatai's eyes, the stars, diamonds fashioned into pointed shapes. It was the Creation story, the story that drove all of Azuyan, their world, and Alile found himself holding his breath at the beauty of the twinkling stars staring down at him as the group of ponies passed through a series of arches between the pillars toward the opening directly before them. Kibeth shifted on his back and he moved to accommodate her; before he could look back to the Creation, it was already too parallel to him to view. They took a nearly direct turn to the right, heading for the southeastern staircase.
The hallway the staircase lead to was vastly smaller than the main hallway, because the second floor of Zith-lynd (out of at least twenty) had a much lower ceiling, and was taken up mostly by living quarters. Here the hushed sounds of sleep could be heard. The main hallway was dim and the ponies' hoofbeats practically rang through it despite the carpets covering the plain stone floors. They made their way down, took a right down another hallway, and a left down another. Alile kept his eyes to the fore, ignoring the paintings and portraiture he'd seen a thousand times or more on his travels through the tower, 'till they reached a smaller, more hidden staircase that would lead them to one portion of the next floor. Guards stood at attention, here, for it lead to a more private, privileged area of the third floor.
"What's going on?" One of the guards queried as Regulus walked up, ignoring the stallion's purposeful look to his own detriment, as Regulus shot him a look that quickly quashed the question. Both guards looked as though they were itching to find out what the commotion had been about, moments before, and their gazes trailed over the hooded, concealed form of the small child on Alile's back. Even though the alarms only rang on the barracks floor - where the armies slept - they could be heard even all the way down here on the third floor, which meant a lot of questions that didn't deserve answers.
"Just do your job," Alile reprimanded the single curious guard; the other looked visibly thankful he hadn't decided to ask anything. The group of ponies ascended the staircase.
The top of the staircase opened up into a small hallway which lead to only six different rooms. Regulus took a confident right at the top of the stairs and quickly opened the small door to the room labeled 'Counsel Room 5'; Alile entered, and – after placing Kibeth on the long, wide mahogany table before them - immediately sat, even as Regulus was still gaining his own seat. The table , draped in a rich purple tablecloth, sat at the center of the room. The rugs below each seat were purple, as were the banners - six, three on each long side of the rectangular room, and each decorated in a silver griffin's head - which hung on the walls. Even the lights in the room seemed to glow purple, though it could have just as easily been an illusion.
There was a moment of silence before Regulus spoke.
"This is a grave matter. Innocents are dead. However, we will punish no one; there is no single pony upon which to place the blame... it is shared. If we raise this child, she must be raised without this being a determining factor of her adulthood. She is young enough that we can raise her with no memory of this.
"Alile, please instruct the training captain that there will be some changes to policy and procedure henceforth. I trust you to be discreet with this. Please wait a few days to propose this. I will speak privately with Dante, Randall, and the guards on duty.
"We will not speak of this, but we must all remember. It has happened before and it will happen again, so long as we wish to keep this tower safe, but we should do all there is in our power to keep it from happening regardless.
"As for the child's unique attribute," he paused but there was no motion needed toward Kibeth's horn to explain it, "it will not be discussed."
"Shouldn't we at least let the doctors see her?" Alile suggested, as carefully as possible.
"No," Regulus quickly countered, softly but with evident authority, "No one will see her. She will be kept in a locked room and tended to until such time as I decide what to do with her."
"And the Council? The Seven?" Alile asked, his eyes narrowing as the gears in his brain started to turn. He clearly didn't understand what was happening, but his reaction was to become distrustful and annoyed, rather than curious.
"They need not know about this, either; they have other things to attend to, don't you think?" Regulus asked this question in a condescending manner. It was true, the Council had been training for some time, and the Seven were not yet done with their zhufast. It seemed like something they ought to know about, but Alile kept quiet, even suppressing the caustic answer he would have liked to give to Regulus' back-hoofed reprimand.
"I trust you to keep quiet about this until a decision is made. I will come to you five days hence and we will discuss this in greater detail. Until then, Alile, please follow me to the eighth floor, maidservants' chambers. I happen to know of a recently-emptied room which we may keep locked. You will be taking care of the child."
"What?!" Alile's hushed whisper still reverberated around the meeting chamber, "you can't be serious. I have no idea how to take care of a foal."
"The maidservants can teach you. Or you could find a mother in the nursing quarters to ask a question of. Am'hatai knows you could use some time speaking with some mares, anyway," Regulus shot him a glance. He looked away when an extremely upset look suddenly passed over Alile's face, as if a particularly dark storm cloud had suddenly taken up safe harbor there and was floating around behind his eyes.
"This meeting is adjourned. May Am'hatai's many eyes always be watching over you," he waved a hoof dismissively, uttering the common phrase that ended most conversations. Alile sat motionless, still looking just as upset.
"Your protests will fall on deaf ears, Alile," Regulus finally heaved a sigh as he pushed himself to his hooves.
"Oh, I'm not protesting. I'm just wondering what you have to hide," Alile shot back, his still-narrowed gaze keenly following the other stallion's motions as he made for the door, then stopped. There was a short pause; short enough that even a pin could have dropped and not hit the ground before words were said again.
"Nothing at all, except our incompetence," he said coldly, refusing to even look back over his shoulder to Alile as if doing so would acknowledge the comment as more than a passing thought. Alile knew, however, that the pause was enough. More words than Regulus could have said in the entire meeting resided in that one, thoughtful pause, and even as Regulus left and Alile pushed himself to his own hooves, eyeing Kibeth warily, he vowed he would find out what that pause was for.