Death Valley

by Rambling Writer

14 - Gardens of Stone

“It’s weird,” Charcoal said for the fifth time. “I’ve never seen any line triangulation this strong.”

“We know,” said Amanita.

“There’s practically no spread,” Charcoal continued. She held the map closer to her face. “If we take this at-”

“-at face value, it means the source of the ley line is less than five meters across.” Amanita tore off another hunk of her sandwich. “We know.”

Charcoal flinched and her ears dropped. “Sorry,” she said quickly.

Amanita decided not to add that they knew that, too. Fortunately, no one else said anything.

Lunch was late and Tallbush-less. From the way her ears were twitching, Amanita got the feeling Code was mentally writing a Shakespintoan soliloquy about her frustration in finding him. If she was, though, she kept it to herself.

Mostly. “It would be very, very nice,” Code mumbled, “if we could investigate the source of the thing we came to investigate.”

“We know,” said Amanita. (Code chuckled, just a little.) “And, I mean…” She bobbed her head around in uncertainty. “When you get down to it, it’s probably a good thing we don’t just rush in. Mines, dangerous, we all know this.”

Code raised an eyebrow. “So dangerous nobody gets black lung?”

“Weeellllll…”

“Eh, there’s different kinds of danger,” Code said with a shrug. “Having a condition slowly intensify into chronic lung disease is a bit different from having a mountain fall on your head.” She took a drink from a cup, one of the weaker whiskeys available. “Maybe we can persuade the miners to set up our equipment for us, if we get lucky.”

“That’s a ‘no’ on the miners helping, then?”

“Mmhmm.”

“Although,” Charcoal said, “they don’t get back l- black lung, and it could be related to the ley line somehow… Maybe we can ask them? Or study them or get readings off them?”

Everyone looked at Charcoal.

“…Oooh, right, yeah, that’d be bad.”

“You’re probably on the right track, though,” said Code. “I’d be very surprised if the lack of black lung is wholly unrelated to the line.” Another sip of weak whiskey. “What we could really use is MOTHER!” And she was off like a shot, running up the stairs without another word.

Everyone stared up the stairs. “Is she… like that a lot?” asked Charcoal. “All the time she’s been here, she’s been kinda…”

“I think it’s stress,” said Amanita. “With all the work-”

“It’s probably more frustration,” said Bitterroot. “You just need to talk to Tallbush to get closer to the ley line than before, but he seems to have vanished off the face of the earth.”

“…That makes more sense.”

Charcoal turned to Amanita. “Is she better when you’re working with her? Every day. Because… I don’t know.”

“She’s a lot better,” Amanita replied. “She’s calm and collected and-”

Code rocketed back downstairs and slid to a stop at the table. “Amanita, did you do anything with the grain mother after we brought it back to the inn yesterday?” she asked breathlessly.

Amanita blinked and twitched in her chair. “The- What-” Then her memory was jogged. “Oh, that. No, I didn’t put it anywhere.”

“You’re sure?” Code leaned closer. “You didn’t put it aside anywhere, or put it in some-”

Amanita gave Code a light poke in the chest, prompting her to draw back a little. “I know I didn’t. I just set it aside on one of the tables.”

With a sigh, Code slouched over the table hanging her head. “Well, I think I know what was stolen yesterday,” she muttered.

It took Amanita a moment to couple one train of thought to another and come up with- “They stole the grain mother?”

“Maybe. I might’ve missed it. Did anyone put it away yesterday when we were cleaning up?”

No one had, prompting Code to mutter, “Why, in Celestia’s name…” She shook her head and pushed up her glasses to rub her face. “Give me a moment. I’m going to go look some more.” She snatched her cup and trotted back up the steps. After a moment, Amanita followed her. Behind her, she heard Bitterroot and Charcoal get up as well.

Their room was small enough that the four of them covered it, top to bottom and wall to wall, then did it again, in mere minutes. They rooted through their bags, scoured the areas below the beds, pulled aside furniture, even had Bitterroot poke her muzzle through the ceiling slats. The mother did not turn up.

Sitting on her newly-disheveled bed, Code was taking drinks like she wished her whiskey was stronger. She grumbled something that sounded like, “Just when we have a clear path…” She massaged her head and said, more clearly, “The grain mother was tied to the valley, and therefore the line. We know they worked. So by studying that, we could get a connection to…” Another semi-alcohol-bereft drink. “Feh. Why steal that?”

“Well…” Charcoal pressed the tip of one of her hooves against the floor and twisted around. “I… I don’t wanna sound… mean or anything, but…” She briefly poked her head out the door; when she pulled back in, she locked it. “What if they don’t want us to study the ley line?” she asked.

Amanita’s first impulse was to object. Amanita’s second impulse was to agree. Amanita’s third impulse was to be glad that she wasn’t the one to bring it up.

“It’s, it’s not just me, right?” Charcoal said. “They don’t really want us here to begin with, the ley line’s stranger than any I’ve ever seen before, the guy in charge of the place has just disappeared-” She blinked and tried to make herself small. “I shouldn’t have said that,” she mumbled.

Bitterroot spoke up for what felt like the first time that hour. “No, I, I agree. The longer we’ve spent here, the worse it smells. I’ve tracked down actual bounties that were easier to find than this guy.”

“How much for you to foalnap him and bring him to us?” grunted Code.

“You tell me. The government’s the one who sets the bounty. Oh, and you need to go to the nearest bounty office, get it registered…”

“And there probably isn’t a bounty office for two hundred miles.” More whiskey. “Amanita, what do you think?”

“I’m with them,” Amanita said. “Something just… I don’t know, it doesn’t feel right about this.” If you’d asked her why, she couldn’t say. It was like knowing rotten food was rotten just by looking at it, a feeling in her gut that wouldn’t go away. “If they had no secrets and just wanted us gone, don’t you think they’d help us so we’d be gone faster?”

“Mmhmm.” Code stood back up and looked around the room. “Now. I personally think they’re hiding something. Not necessarily bad, but something they don’t want coming out. It could be related to the ley line. It could be related to the mine. It could be both.”

Amanita waited on the upcoming “but”.

Code pulled in and let out a long psych-up breath. “But as to what we’ll do about it, we know too little about anything. A lot of suspicious events, yes, but legally speaking, we only have the authority to purify the line unless something major happens. We can’t run roughshod and start interrogating ponies for no reason.”

“Wait,” said Charcoal. She pointed out the window. “This down’s hiding something and we’re just ignoring it?”

“What should we do about it?” Code asked calmly.

“We-” Charcoal blinked. “We should-” She pawed at the floor; Amanita wondered if the points on her hooves ever carved little furrows in floorboards. “I… I’m not…” Her ears fell. “But it’s getting in the way,” she mumbled, although she kept her head up.

Bitterroot twitched her wings to get everyone’s attention. “I’m a bounty hunter,” she said, a hoof on her chest, “but that’s not a license to break into people’s houses. Sometimes, there’s just… nothing we can do.”

“But-!” Charcoal cut herself off and started running her hooves through her mane as she stared at the floor. “That doesn’t feel right,” she said.

Code chuckled mirthlessly. “Believe me, it doesn’t. We can keep an eye out for more information, but that’s it.” Shrug. “So it goes.”

Collapsing onto the bed behind her, Charcoal muttered something that would’ve been obscene if it’d been a word and the air around her seemed to flicker. Amanita sympathized; as a necromancer under Circe, it was distressingly easy to just go out and murder some thorn in a community’s side when you needed a body to experiment on. But she was in the Guard, now, and those sorts of ponies tended to frown on murder for the sake of Science. She always knew she was on the straight and narrow, but it was still harder to work with.

Charcoal snapped her head up, a “let’s change the subject” smile forced onto her face. “A-anyway!” she half-squeaked. “The, uh, the magic we bot- got from the, uh, geothaumomometers, that’s, that’s- as expected. Normal. Which is… kinda odd, since nothing else we’ve had here is normal. But, but I was thinking, maybe it’s not in the earth but in the water. The, the river.”

Amanita turned her ears forward. “I thought you said we had nothing to worry about with… waste,” she said delicately. (Bitterroot’s wings twitched.)

“We don’t, we don’t,” Charcoal said, shaking her hooves. “They’ve got that all under control. It doesn’t even go into the river! But rivers carry ley energies, and sometimes they can affect ley lines in ways the land doesn’t.” A pause. “Sometimes,” she added quietly.

“Sometimes isn’t never,” Code mused. She started pacing a tight circle. “The report didn’t say anything about the river, but they could’ve missed that… And that could explain the river in Midwich Forest, yes?”

“If…” Charcoal made small, vague gestures in front of her. “…everything comes together right… maybe?”

“After the last few days, that’s good enough for me,” said Code, bringing her pacing to a stop. “I assume you have some aspects of the river you want to study? I know some simple rituals to shape them further. Inspired by beavers, of all things.”

“Oh, yeah, that’d be great. And of course it’d be beavers, there aren’t many other living things that shape rivers nearly as much as them.”

Code blinked and one of her ears drooped. Then she shook her head. “Amanita, if you don’t have anything to do-”

“Actually, I was thinking of going up to the coal breaker,” Amanita said. “I want to see what they’re doing with the tailings.”

She knew from the blank looks she was getting that those words meant nothing to the others. “Tailings are coal refuse,” she said. “Uh, rocks and other debris that gets separated out from the coal and thrown out. Kinda like the stuff you have to dig up to get at the coal. And the tailings need to go somewhere, or else they’d overwhelm everything else.”

Code blinked cluelessly, but nodded. “If you think that’s the best course of action, follow it. I don’t know anything that can help you, unfortunately.”

“That’s fine. I’ve talked with Charcoal about earth magic and she’s been a big help.” (Charcoal actually grinned at that.)

“Good.”

Bitterroot’s wings suddenly twitched and she cleared her throat. “Hey, uh, Amanita? If you don’t mind, I’d like to talk to you on the way up. It’s… kinda personal.”

Really? Huh. Why hadn’t she said anything before? “That’s fine. You’re probably just looking for something to do, right?” Amanita chuckled.

“Something like that,” said Bitterroot.

Silence, but only for a moment. Code snatched up her cup from the side table and downed the rest of it in a single swallow. “Let’s finish lunch,” she said. “And I need something stronger to drink.”

---

Okay. Finally. Midwich Valley was dark again, but lunch was over. Bitterroot had Amanita alone for a moment as they headed towards the coal breaker. She wasn’t in the middle of anything, not yet. No one was waiting on her. It was just the two of them, walking south. Nothing in the way between the two of them. No time crunch. No problem. Nothing to stop the two of them from having a conversation.

…And repeating how this was the perfect time to talk did nothing to actually get her talking. Bitterroot felt her stomach prepare to knot itself up as she- “Uh, hey, Amanita?”

“Yeah?” The response was casual.

“How’re you doing?”

Amanita shrugged. “I’ve been through worse.”

“That bar’s so low you could be in Tartarus and still clear it. How are you doing?”

One of Amanita’s ears drooped as she looked at Bitterroot. “…Fine. Really. Why?”

“Be- cause- Okay. After your talk in Canterlot, you seemed depressed and ready to go into a spiral.”

“You’re still worried about that?”

“Well, I- Look, no offense, but you turned to necromancy on a whim a moon after your marefriend died. Once you got out of jail, you were content to just live the rest of your life in a hotel room. You gave a presentation on a spell nopony else could’ve made and you somehow immediately started worrying about being replaced. I…” Deep breath in. “…don’t think you’re the best at handling your feelings.”

Amanita’s laugh was a bit high-pitched, but otherwise normal. “I, I could be better, yeah.”

“So, I just… I thought I’d… come along and see if you needed help after…” Bitterroot waved a hoof around vaguely as her voice trailed off. There. Done. Out in the wild.

The look Amanita gave her was about a quarter askance, three-quarters amused. “You know I’m an adult, right?”

“You know your adulting skills leave something to be desired, right?”

“…Yeah.”

“I really should’ve said something, but letting you come all the way out here-” Bitterroot gestured around the dim, frigid valley. “-without any friends was… I dunno, it just seemed wrong. Especially when you were so down after that symposium.”

“Seminar. Symposiums are larger.”

“But I messed up by not telling you why I was really coming out here, and I’m sorry. If you want me to scram, I will. I… Yeah, this was just stupid.”

Silence fell, but not like an anvil. Amanita’s ears weren’t folded back in anger, but up and twitching back and forth, complete with little tail flicks. She was thinking, and thinking deeply. Bitterroot held her breath.

After a few moments that felt a lot longer, Amanita said, “You know, for a bounty hunter, you’re… You’re really… I dunno, empathetic. How many of your targets got away because they had an amazing sob story?”

Bitterroot grinned, half in relief. “None. Sob stories usually aren’t a good legal defense. I tried to let one get away, but she insisted on going to jail.”

“Sounds like a weirdo.”

“Eh, she turned out alright.”

Amanita chuckled. “Okay. For real, I’m doing fine and you can leave if you want. But if you want to stay, I won’t say no to having somepony to scream at if something goes wrong and I get too stressed.”

“Scream at or scream with?”

“…Scream with. The second one.”

“Screaming with, I can handle. I think I’ll give it a day or two, and then if nothing changes, I’m gone.”

“Alright.”

They walked along in silence for a few moments more. When Amanita didn’t continue, Bitterroot asked, “You’re not mad or anything?”

“I feel like I should be,” Amanita said, “but you’re the only pony who’s cared about me that much in years, so it feels nice.”

Bitterroot’s skin crawled at how casually Amanita said that.

---

Amanita was growing used to the cold. Not enough to like it (Celestia, no), but now it was closer to a low ache than anything biting or gnawing. Could’ve been better. Could’ve been worse.

Weird to think Bitterroot had come all the way out here, just for her. Then again, Bitterroot had died for her, once. That mare could be very protective.

They passed by a chicken run with one of the hens clucking out her egg song and climbed the slope to the train station. It wasn’t a steep slope, but it made Amanita wonder about the miners climbing it every day to get to work. They were probably used to it, just like… well, just like she was already getting used to the cold.

They crested the hill. Between the time and the narrowness of the southern portion of Midwich, the hulking mass of the coal breaker was already covered in shadow, illuminated only by the light piercing out of its windows. Those small bits of light were just enough to trace the outlines of the breaker and throw it into starker relief against the valley wall. The train had moved as well, shuffled about the small railyard; Amanita could hear the clanks and creaks of the metal as the locomotive pushed the hopper cars into position next to the-

Bitterroot suddenly came to a stop. “Son of a dog,” she said, almost in surprise. “He’s the engineer.” And she was off like a shot, although she wasn’t flying.

Amanita was taken aback by her speed and tried galloping after her. Bitterroot was still faster. “Who is?” she yelped out.

“Tallbush!”

Ah.

Bitterroot slid to a stop next to the train when Amanita was still over twenty feet away. She looked into the cab and her wings twitched. “Where’ve you been?” she didn’t quite demand.

Amanita could hear the response. “What dae ye mean?” She recognized the voice.

“We’ve been looking everywhere for you since- since breakfast!”

Amanita stumbled to a halt alongside the locomotive just in time for Tallbush (thank Celestia) to lean out. His ears were twitching. “I’m the Duke,” he said, looking Bitterroot in the eye. “Must needs be all ’round the place.”

“Nopony knew where you were!”

Tallbush shrugged. “That happens. I’m here. What dae ye need?”

Bitterroot’s wings flexed and she blinked. She took a breath a bit too loudly and said, “We need to get into Midwich Mine.”

“Beg yer pardon, but nay. Too dangerous,” Tallbush replied. He ducked back into the cab.

Before Bitterroot could say anything more, Amanita lightly nudged her aside. “Listen, it’s really important,” she said. “The source of the ley line is in the mine, and if we can get close-”

“Too dangerous.”

“-it’ll be a lot easier for us to study the line and we can fix this-”

“Too dangerous.”

“-and we’ll be out of your hair that much quicker.”

Tallbush turned back around and fixed his gaze on her. It felt unusually intense. “Ye ken how dangerous mines are?”

Amanita blinked and pretended her eyes weren’t ready to water. “Yes. I’ve nearly died in them. I’ve heard stories of entire towns ruined because of mine collapses. I’ve been in one of those towns.”

That actually got a pause from Tallbush; he blinked and his jaw dropped oh-so-slightly. Amanita seized that pause and continued, “We all know how dangerous mines are. That’s why we’re asking you for permission. If we didn’t, don’t you think we’d’ve just gone straight in?” (Bitterroot hiccupped for some reason.)

“I’m- sorry,” Tallbush said after another pause, “but I cannae risk it.” He was still looking Amanita in the eye, although he didn’t seem quite so intense. “If’n ye were tae die, I couldnae live wi’ myself. ’Tis jes’- There’s too many- things that can gae wrong.”

“Then can your miners set up our instruments?” Bitterroot suddenly asked. “Well, their instruments.” She nudged Amanita. “But you know where to go, where’s the safest, what to do-”

“Have tae think about it,” Tallbush cut in. “But I dinnae want ary of ye goin’ intae the mine. At all. Ye dinnae ken the kinds o’ things ye’ll run intae.”

Amanita looked at Tallbush. Tallbush looked at Amanita. And were his ears trembling? Was he nervous about something? Part of her wanted to stay, their eyes drilling into each other until one of them broke down, but she had a job to do. Reluctantly, she stepped away from the cab. “Please,” she said. “It’s very important that we get this all sorted out.”

Tallbush just said, “Aye.” Then he ducked back into the cab.

Feeling like she was wading neck-deep through molasses, Amanita pulled herself away from the train. “Code and Charcoal are looking for you,” she called out. “They’ll be either down by the town hall or somewhere along the river. You should talk to them.”

“Thankee fer lettin’ me ken,” Tallbush hollered back. “Be keepin’ that in mind.”

And that was that. So unsatisfying. Amanita nearly shook her head as she walked. That was the best he could do? The Crown had sent a team for one reason, and he couldn’t even-

Then Bitterroot froze and looked back at the train, frowning. “He should be there already,” she muttered.

“Hmm?”

“It’s- Crosscut said he’s always at the town hall at this time of day. Always always. Except for when we’re looking for him.”

“…Huh.”

Amanita and Bitterroot looked at each other. And Amanita knew that thoughts of suspicion were doing the same jig in her head as they were Bitterroot’s.

“We’ll tell Code next time we see her,” Bitterroot said.

“Yeah.”

Silence.

Bitterroot coughed. “So, uh, tailings?”

Amanita could nearly hear the screech as her train of thought was forcibly rerouted. Not that she was complaining. “Um. Coal trash, basically,” she said. “When you dig up something like coal, it’s… It’s got stuff on it. Dirt, muck, ore you don’t want on it, that sort of thing.”

“Gems?”

“Sometimes. And you need to get rid of it all somehow, so it usually ends up in tailings piles. They’re also called spoils tips. And, uh, they really build up over time, so you need to get rid of them, but in a place like this, it’s hard to do.”

“Huh.” Amanita could tell from Bitterroot’s expression that the words weren’t really sticking in her head. But she was trying to listen. “How do you know that?”

“I’ve- been around,” Amanita said. No one was near them, but she couldn’t help it; she glanced around shiftily. “When I was, you know, in the North.” As a necromancer. “I just, passed through a lot of towns and picked up some terminology.”

From the way Bitterroot’s wings tightened, she got it. “Ah.”

Thankfully, before the silence got too tight, they turned the corner around the breaker. And there before them were the tailings. There were several piles, all of them similar: wet heaps of mixed dirt and rock and Celestia knew what else, not unlike chunky mud. They reflected light from the breaker, but it was too dull to gleam or shine. A pipeline chute ran from the breaker, dumping wet muck on the tallest pile, with a gantry that allowed it to be pushed to one of the others. None of the piles was very high, as Amanita had suspected — the tallest was only slightly taller than her if she held her head as high as she could. Tratonmane was definitely doing something with the tailings, or else they were getting their coal from someplace else. But this far north, Tratonmane was the “someplace else”. How could you get someplace elser out here? Unlike most tailings piles Amanita had seen, these were surrounded by low walls, maybe a foot tall, that kept the water from running off into the rest of the valley.

Amanita kept walking, but Bitterroot came to a sudden stop. “Those-” Her swallow was audible. “Those are tailings?”

“Yeah,” Amanita said, looking over her shoulder. Was it her imagination, or did Bitterroot look slightly green in the dim light? “Why?”

“It looks like earthen diarrhea,” Bitterroot said flatly.

“It- kinda is?” Amanita admitted. “To get the stuff off, miners usually wash the coal. Like, literally wash it with water. So… there’s water in there. Lots of it. And other gunk. It’s earthen waste.”

The pipe shuddered as slurry ran through it and was dumped out.

“Pleasant. So what’re you gonna do?”

Amanita looked at the tailings and grinned. “I’m going to be strange again.”

“What?”

Amanita glanced over at Bitterroot, one ear down. “I’m… going to be strange again?”

“…Should I know what you mean by that?”

“W-well, uh…” Amanita felt her cheeks redden. “Back in, back in the- forest, at the bear, you said-”

“Ooooooh. Right, that.” Bitterroot’s wings twitched outward slightly. “What kind of strange?” She grinned. “Are you gonna climb into those piles, too?”

“Actually, yeah.”

Amanita swore she could hear something break in Bitterroot’s mind as her wings sagged slightly. She coughed. “…Yeah, I already know this is over my head,” Bitterroot said. “I’ll… just go, then.”

“That’s probably for the best,” Amanita said, grinning. “Be seeing you.”

“You, too.” Bitterroot flared her wings and hovered just above the ground. “And thanks for the talk.” She wheeled north towards Tratonmane. Amanita watched her go, then turned to the tailings.

Necromancers liked mines for more than just their isolation and security. The earth was both alive and dead, the two intermixing until it was hard to say where one ended and the other began, assuming they were even separable at all. The ground was inert, yet all life sprang from it, one way or another — plants grew in it and animals ate either plants or animals that ate plants. As you went further underground, death became more prevalent; for every vein of coal you found, you had to carve your way through massive swathes of nonreactive rock. Yet although it did nothing but sit there, that mere rock, with all of its weight pushing down on you from above, could be death to you if handled poorly.

Or properly. Amid all that death, necromantic rituals frequently became easier to work. Even ordinary ponies could feel it; why else would the afterlife be called the underworld? Circe had spoken rhapsodically about death and caves. As an earth pony, she’d said, she could feel all the history around them when they went underground — history of the land, of the flora and fauna that lived there, of its sophontic inhabitants, of the earth itself. And as the future became history, things died. It was inevitable. Circe had always seemed happy when they went below.

Tailings and spoils didn’t quite have the same properties as caves, but they were still regular rocks specifically separated from valuable gems and lumps of energetic coal. The miners were imbuing them with death simply by discarding them. It wasn’t to any great degree, and since it wasn’t biological, Amanita couldn’t work with them the same way she could a corpse. But death was death, and Amanita knew death.

Amanita hopped the wall surrounding one of the piles and landed fetlock-deep in water. Walking up to the pile, she kneaded the soaked rubbish beneath her and sent out a pulse of magic. Memories of something that wasn’t not death lingered in its wake. If you looked at it the right way, the tailing was a pile of corpses, sitting there, rotting, waiting to be burned.

Amanita collapsed into it, let herself get immersed in it. She wiggled her legs; rubble and slurry dribbled down them, half-burying them. Keeping her muzzle above the rock, she breathed deeply and let her awareness simmer out. Her sensation danced around things just barely removed from physicality, things Ponish had no word for. Not dangerous things; they were merely things most ponies never experienced, things Ponish never needed a word for. Cells had existed long before anypony peered at one through a microscope, much less dubbed them “cells”. Just because it was Other and unnameable didn’t mean you were at risk from it.

You needed death to study necromancy. Circe had kept her well-supplied. The Guard, while certainly the more preferable situation overall, didn’t exactly take kindly to having piles of bodies on lab tables (that made even Code a bit anxious). The death around Amanita felt more like an old friend than she really wanted to admit.

And the thing about old friends was that you knew how they changed.

Charcoal had told Amanita how to examine the living earth. Maybe Amanita could use that to examine the dead earth.

She breathed deeply and let her soul wander.

---

Sometimes, Bitterroot wondered if she’d ever really get Amanita. Not because of the quick forgiveness, but because… she was the kind of pony who would casually cut open a bear and climb inside or jump into a pile of wet coal sludge. She just worked a bit differently from… just about everyone Bitterroot had ever met. That wasn’t even getting into necromancy.

Getting her didn’t matter, not really. It was just something Bitterroot turned over in her head.

At first, Bitterroot had headed north because that was the only direction to go. But the meeting with Tallbush was still in her head, so she soon figured she might as well tell Code as long as the memory was still fresh. Following the river it was.

She’d never paid much attention to the river while coming in. A waterfall was slowly carving a slit down one of Midwich’s walls, at about the halfway point of the southern shelf. It collected in a small pool before overflowing and running north, turning a waterwheel as it tumbled over the smaller cliff. From there, it wound down Midwich outside of Tratonmane’s borders, occasionally turning more wheels before it disappeared into the forest. Even in the dark, it glinted with whatever light it caught, so following it was simple.

Bitterroot stayed low and slow as she flew. It’d be easy to miss someone in the dark. Or so she thought; as she curled around, she caught a glimpse of two fires close to each other along the shore, indistinct shadowy figures standing near them. She flew a bit closer and landed. One of them had a curly horn that meant she could only be Charcoal, hunched over some arcane device or another. The other fire had some blankets and… clothes?… folded near it. Just outside the flickering light of the fire, Whippletree was standing watch over several small foals who were looking out eagerly over the river, where…

Code was dancing on a rock in the middle of the river, unclothed. The rock was uneven, rather small, and obviously slippery, yet although she performed twirls and wild gesticulations with a nearly reckless abandon, she never once looked like she was even an inch out of place. Something about her motions was captivating the same way a catchy song was; Bitterroot found herself bobbing her head to the beat Code set. And was the river curling around the rock to the rhythm as well? Perhaps throwing a soft glow over the scene as well. Then Bitterroot heard what Code was singing.

“Give me moo-oore… / Razzle dazzle… / Glitter eyes, big surprise / Lights and cameras / Whooaa-ooaa-oa-oa-oa…”

…Okay.

Code’s voice wasn’t even that bad, so Bitterroot couldn’t object by pretending she was butchering Countess Coloratura. She finished the song and struck a pose that… wouldn’t have been that out-of-place at a Coloratura concert, but definitely needed more practice. Her chest was heaving and her breathing was ragged. But when she dropped back onto all fours, she was grinning.

The foals on the shore started stamping in tiny applause. “Dae it again! Dae it again!” one of them yelled.

“Wythe, she’s real busy nowabouts, dinnae distract her,” Whippletree said.

“But Pa-”

“Nae buts!”

Code jumped into the river, swam-waded to shore, and walked over to the fire with the blankets. “Give me a moment to rest, first,” she said. “I don’t mind.” She shook the worst of the water off, wrapped one of the blankets around her, and took a seat by the fire. She was shaking semi-badly; Bitterroot couldn’t imagine being in water that cold, even for just a few seconds.

Bitterroot took a seat opposite Code. “You’d kill it at karaoke night.”

“I do,” Code said, smirking. “Most Thursday nights at the Bars Bar.” Her voice was quite firm, given where she’d just been.

“Hmm. I’ve heard of that place . So what’s up with ‘The Spectacle’?”

“A song’s a song. Sometimes they connect you to the heartsong, sometimes they just help you focus. When you’re shaping magic to your will in a ritual, anything that can make your will more focused on shaping that magic helps, no matter how inane it may seem.”

“So, in the right circumstances, I could turn back a hurricane by singing a catchy folk song?”

“There’s actually evidence that the various Winter Wrap-Up songs started life as ritual incantations,” Code said with a straight face. “Developed by earth ponies during the Three Tribes Era in an attempt to loosen the pegasus stranglehold on the weather, especially snow. Based on the instructions we’ve found, the rituals wouldn’t have worked, but the oldest evidence is from the beginning of the windigo invasion, so it’s possible that they simply still needed refining and were abandoned when Equestria was formed and they were no longer needed.”

“…Have you ever tried putting together a metal band for rituals?”

“Several times. Sadly, the intersection between ritualists and metal musicians borders on nonexistent, no matter how low your standards go for either. We’re left with me singing modern glam pop.”

“And it’s been working great!” Charcoal said brightly. She didn’t look up from her machine. “You’re amazing with shaping magic, Code, I’ve never seen anything this smooth before-”

“I’m not the High Ritualist for nothing,” Code replied airily. “I-”

“Did ye write that song?” one of the foals asked. Bitterroot flinched; the little cadre had somehow snuck up on them in the dark. “It was a plumb good ’un!”

To Bitterroot’s surprise, Code chuckled. “I wish I could write songs that good, but-”

“I wish I had a mane like yours!” the one Whippletree had addressed as “Wythe” said to Charcoal. “It’s so fluffy!”

“W-well, uh…” Charcoal grinned nervously and half-leaned away from the foals. “It’s, I was just- corn- born with it-”

“Why cannae ye speak right?”

“Okay, listen, you little-”

“Why’s yer horn sae headin’?”

“Wythe, her horn ain’t headin’!” said Whippletree. “It’s jes’ her horn. I beg yer pardon, ma’am,” he quickly said to Charcoal, “but she’s-”

Charcoal flinched as one of the foals pounced on her tail. “Yer tail’s neat!” the colt squeaked.

“They’re all young,” Whippletree said. “Tuckpoint, dinnae touch her-”

“I’m fine!” Charcoal said, yanking her tail out from under the colt. “I’m, I’m fine.”

“Are you fine?” Code yelled out. “I can help keep them away!”

“I’m fine!” Charcoal half-yelped. “They just need to get their energy out! I’m vine!”

“Do you think she’s fine?” Bitterroot whispered.

“Heh.” Code pulled the blanket more tightly around her. “For the moment? Yes. In a minute? That remains to be seen. I think she will be, though.”

Bitterroot glanced over. On a second look, Charcoal’s smile was less “nervous” and more “surprised”. Maybe. “So, what’re you two doing, again?”

“An exquisite combination of modern arcane analysis and ritualism,” Code said with a grin. “There are ley energies running through the river. Charcoal, as the environmental expert, tells me how she wants me to shape them. I perform the proper ritual to do so-”

“A ritual powered by pop diva chart-toppers.”

“Stupidity that works is far better than cleverness that doesn’t. I perform the ritual. And she takes the measurements on that device.” Code pointed at the box Charcoal had been fiddling with, a small thing with some glowing dials and meters and Bitterroot didn’t know what.

“How’s it going?”

“It’s tiring.” Bitterroot blinked, and Code confirmed, “Yes, even as an earth pony. I’m moving the magic rather than letting it move me. But I expected nothing less, and it’s going well, if Charcoal’s reactions are to be trusted.” Code twisted her neck and groaned before eating some dirt. “Now, I presume you came down here with news?” she said with her mouth full.

Bitterroot privately wondered if that was achieving anything; shouldn’t they have seen an effect by now? “Well, Amanita and I finally found Tallbush, but he said he wasn’t letting us into the mine under any circumstances.”

Code’s ears went up and her eyes narrowed as she swallowed. She opened her mouth, glanced at the foals, closed it again. “That is a bummer,” she said, pouring enough invective into the last word to make it a profanity. (Whippletree even looked her way, like he’d caught the tone.)

“Yep. He said it was too dangerous.”

“And Amanita. Is she…?” Frowning, Code tapped her chin. “Actually, what is she doing?”

Bitterroot shrugged. “No idea. But she seemed pretty confident in it, whatever it was. And you probably know Amanita.”

“Her being confident is a good sign.”

“Yeah. Oh, and another thing: we found Tallbush moving train cars around in the railyard. Except before lunch, that one lumberjack mare, uh, Crosscut, she said he’s always in the town hall at that time.”

“Did she.” Code’s words fell like hammers on an anvil.

“She did. We also told Tallbush where you were and that you’d prefer to hear the news from him, so if he doesn’t turn up-”

“Right.” Code took a breath that sounded like the first inhale of a forge’s bellows, making Bitterroot tighten her wings. “Thanks for the heads up. I’ll keep an eye out for him,” she said in a voice normally reserved for soldiers anticipating an ambush.

“Need me for anything else?”

Code snorted. “You’re going to work yourself to death. Again,” she added under her breath. “No, we’ve nothing you could help us with. Not unless Charcoal needs a diversion of the juveniles. We’ll do another analysis once I’m warmed up a bit, and I think you know a little less about arcane analysis than us.”

“Heh. Yeah, no argument there.” Bitterroot glanced over at Charcoal.

Still surrounded by foals, Charcoal had taken one of her legs out of her furs to display her cloven hoof; the foals were openly gawking at it while Whippletree was doing his darndest to not look like he was gawking at it. “I can even move them a little!” Charcoal said cheerfully. As Bitterroot watched, the hooftips moved slightly in relation to each other. The foals oooooooed while Whippletree flicked his tail and rustled his wings.

“It looks like you’ve got this under control,” Bitterroot said.

“Yeah, I’m fine,” Charcoal said calmly. “I just needed to-”

“How dae ye ken which ’un’s which?” chirped one of the foals.

“It’s sae weird!” said another.

“Plumb! Jig! Must I tell yer parents about-”

“Don’t!” said Charcoal, shaking her head. “It’s, they’re learning! Learning’s always good! I’m fine! I’ve been through worst! Uh, worse, not worst.”

Whippletree didn’t seem reassured from the way he pawed at the ground. His wings rustled as he took a seat next to Charcoal. “Lissen,” he said sternly to the foals. And the foals actually did listen. “All o’ ye. I ken Charcoal here’s bein’ nice, but you’uns must needs bein’ civil. I dinnae want-”

Yeah, Charcoal was doing fine. Which meant Bitterroot had nothing to do.

In a small Northern town where the train came once a week.

Joy.

Suppressing a shudder, she bade Code farewell and winged her way back towards the Cave. She’d brought some books, just in case, but she was already thinking of leaving. The place just needed to stay quiet.

Comments

[TCC56]

The place just needed to stay quiet.

Oh come on. You're a professional, Bitterroot. You know better than to think that!

[redmar]

I guess that Aminata will learn something about the mine from the tailings. The town really wants them to go away soon which means they're worried that something will be revealed if they stay longer than the town wants.

[Mr Swanky Hat]

No Bitterroot! That'd be exactly when things would pear shaped!

[Notrab M]

Why does this chapter sound like the calm before the storm?

[FanOfMostEverything]

Hmm. I'm starting to wonder if someone's gone and taken the decision from Tallbush, whether through magic or more old-fashioned coercion. Or he's in on it, whatever "it" may be. There was definitely some degree of hesitation there; the question is for what reason.

In any case, there are other means to gather information, from both the living water and the dead earth. Not as efficient, certainly, but hopefully still informative. We'll see what comes of it... and how Bitterroot comes to regret that last thought.

[AppleTank]

11905433
She'll be fine, what's a little death every once in a while?

[Oberth Effect]

How easy/hard is it to travel from/to Tratonmane without the train? IIRC there was a courier sent a day or so ahead, which doesn't quite match the train schedule, and I don't think we've met them. Did they just fly in then fly out?

[Lurks-no-More]

I keep expecting Charcoal to flame out, and she never does. Go on, girl, let your nirik side out! I'm sure the Tratonmane kids would love the show.