XLIII
A Sword Named Sword
XLIII
A Sword Named Sword
Celestia had fully lowered the sun over Everfree City by that hour, but the orange glow hadn’t yet left the horizon, as we approached Cloudsdale. The pegasus city-within-a-city that hovered over the western edge of Everfree was an architectural marvel and nothing short of a glistening gem. Beautiful pillars of condensed cloudstone supported wide, puffy roofs as the city’s pegasi finished up their last tasks for the evening and made their ways home.
My mind took in rather little of the beauty though. I was working my way through what I had learned. I could be almost certain Wintershimmer had tricked me, and had never given me Silhouette’s real body. I had willingly let the candlecorn stay near me for days in Platinum’s Landing. But that meant that in my sleep, he had plenty of opportunities to kill me. Yet he hadn’t taken that chance. Instead, he had swapped out my real void crystal for the wax copy that he could use to spy on me, and presumably he somehow prepared to frame me for his crimes.
That virtually ruled out my suspicion that Wintershimmer wanted some kind of revenge on me for a perceived betrayal. Framing me instead of killing me alluded to some further motive; some purpose for which he would need to avoid scrutiny from the goddesses and Equestria. My instincts screamed that knowing that motive would tell me how to prove my innocence, but I had no idea what end Wintershimmer was aiming for.
At least I was rid of the wax crystal. Wintershimmer could not track me anymore, and I’d broken free from Equestria’s grasp—at least for the moment. The next thing I needed was time. And time would come from Gale.
Ahead of me in the chariot harness, Blizzard shouted something incomprehensible.
“What?” I bellowed into the wind, feeling my throat grow hoarse from the gust of air trying to stuff my words back down into my neck.
“Potion!” she shouted back.
Right. I reached forward to the straps of the harness, and just as Hurricane had promised, inside the pouch I found a milky green potion.
I imagine that, shortly after I swallowed the thing, my face made a decent match for its color.
“Landing!” Blizzard managed to shout to me after a few inaudible attempts. I braced myself on the sides of the chariot as we suddenly lurched forward toward a puffy white street.
To say I nearly fell to my death would be an understatement. When we reached the street proper after bouncing six or seven times, I was hanging onto the side of the chariot by just one hoof. Both my rear legs had ground rather shallow divots into the squishy ground, and my chest was sore from bouncing against the wooden planks of the chariot’s seat.
“Morty, are you okay?” Blizzard demanded, rushing around to face me. Of course, still harnessed to the chariot, her motion dragged the chariot, and that in turn dragged me forward. She stopped, mercifully, after I groaned. “I’m sorry!”
“It’s fine…” I muttered, releasing my grip from the seat’s handle. “Is…” I paused to retch onto the street beside me. “Is the place… here?”
Blizzard spoke as she fought with her harness straps. “That sign right there says ‘Legate’s Lookout’. See?”
“I can’t…” I muttered back as I finally, shakily found my hooves.
“You can’t see?” Blizzard asked, turning on me again. This time, at least, I wasn’t dragged down the street.
“I can’t read,” I told her, and then dry-heaved one final time, wiped my lips, and stood up. “And I got made fun of enough by her holiness, Lady Luna, for one lifetime. So let’s not talk about it.” I dragged a hoof over my face, wondering what I looked like now, if I had already been a zombie when Gale pulled me out of Diadem’s library. “Ah. The sign with the helmet plume.”
I have a pet theory that the Legate’s Lookout may, in fact, be some sort of immortal creature disguising itself as a tavern. From that day years ago to today as I sit writing this journal, the only change I have ever recorded in the cloudstone public room is the number of occupants slipping through its doors. On that particular day, it was fairly busy with Typhoon’s subordinates, some of them still armored and uniformed, who pushed in and out of the broad double doors. Blizzard quietly took up pace just behind me, and I led the way in.
The inside of the cloudstone walls weren’t as white as the outside, but rather a gray tainted by two roaring fireplaces, a few dozen tables with candles in their center, light fixtures hanging from the ceiling, and more than a fair share of pipes. Behind the bar, a young mare with a powder blue coat and a sandy blonde mane was mixing a familiar and blasphemous drink for one particularly familiar face.
I couldn’t help but laugh as I approached. Gale was sitting right there in front of me, next to some ancient, white-maned mass of scars and forest green wrinkles that you might be forgiven for mistakenly calling a pegasus stallion. He certainly looked like Hurricane’s elder, though he lacked much of the legend’s subtle size and unspoken presence.
“That was easier than I expected…” Blizzard muttered.
“Be careful,” I warned. “Last time Gale and I were in a tavern like this it ended poorly.” I made my way up to the bar and sat down right beside Gale without a word.
“This is private—” Gale cut herself off when she actually looked up at me from her hunched, miserable posture. “Morty? How the fuck are you… this is Cloudsdale.”
The old green scar-tissue mass leaned forward. “That’s Morty?”
“The one and only.” Gale chuckled pathetically, her shoulders lifting a lot more than her depressed voice did, and I smelled more than a few Luna’s Unmentionables on her breath. Judging from the small glasses arranged on the bar in front of her, she’d put away seven shots, and the fact that she could still pronounce any of her words led me to realize the crown princess was a much harder mare than I had realized before. “Finder, meet Morty,” She introduced me with a half-hearted wave of a hoof. As an afterthought, she added “And that’s my cousin Blizzard. Morty—”
“Blizzard?” Pathfinder asked, both his notched ears perking up as he rose to a full posture. “You’re…”
Blizzard’s shoulders hunched up until her wings hid a bit of her face. “Don’t say it,” she whispered, nervously looking around the room.
“Right…” Pathfinder sighed. “Guess I should have realized. Sorry, kid. Well, like Gale was saying, I’m Pathfinder. Technically ‘Scout Centurion’, though I’m unofficially retired. Pleasure to meet you both.” He extended a hoof and offered me a strong shake. Blizzard was more reluctant, but she too took the motion.
“What are you doing up here?” Gale asked. Then her face soured even further than it already hung, and she stared into her empty collection of drinks. “Did Dad send you?”
“No,” I told her. “We need to talk.” I glanced at Pathfinder, and briefly considered telling him ‘privately’, but something about the scout’s inquisitive brown eyes told me that would lead to trouble.
Despite her inebriation, Gale proved more than adept at reading my face. “Finder, can you give us some space?”
Pathfinder snorted back a laugh, and wide wrinkles from a well worn smile peeled back the shallow scars on his cheeks. “Yeah, yeah, alright. I’ll be in my corner if you need me.” He hooked his hoof through the loop on his mug and walked away with excellent balance for a stallion with three legs and several mugs of beer in him.
I glanced nervously at Pathfinder as he walked away, then leaned forward to Gale, speaking in a conspiratorial whisper. “You know Typhoon brought Silhouette’s body with us when she brought me here?”
Gale sighed, not even pretending to lean into the hushed conversation, and speaking at her (admittedly low) miserable volume. “Yeah, I remember. What about it?”
“It wasn’t Silhouette’s body. It was a candlecorn. I think Wintershimmer used me to sneak it into Everfree City.”
Behind me, Blizzard tentatively raised a hoof like a schoolfoal. At least she gathered the sense to speak when I turned toward her with a raised brow. “Um… if Wintershimmer can make the candlecorns look like whoever he wants, why bother having you sneak it in? Why not just turn into a farmer or somepony unimportant and walk in the gates like we did?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. It probably has something to do—”
“You don’t know?” Gale interrupted, rolling her eyes. “Seriously?” Something in the way she swayed on her seat betrayed her inebriation. “Mr. Smart Ass knows everything in the world about magic, but you can’t figure that shit out?”
“Am I missing something obvious?”
Gale nodded. “Hold on.” Then, waving her hoof toward the bartender, she mumbled. “Cirrus.” Frustration grew in her tone when the blue pegasus mare failed to hear her over the din of the tavern. “Cirrus! Hey, bitch!”
Her answer finally arrived after that shout. “What, Gale?”
“Get my friends drinks. And I need another lick. Put something for Finder on my tab too.”
“Your father’s tab,” the bartender grumbled, shaking her head. Nevertheless she started pouring drinks into a few sizeable wooden tankards.
“Fuck my dad,” Gale answered, before turning back to me. “What were we talking about?”
“Wintershimmer,” I told her with a sigh. “And how bad of an idea it was to come to you—”
“Right. If Wintershimmer snuck in and did something on his own, it would make you look innocent.”
“I…” I stared for a very long few seconds at Gale, who was casually drifting to the very edge of balance on opposite sides of her stool as she waited for yet another drink. “How did you figure that out?”
“Because my mom’s a scheming evil bitch,” Gale snapped. “Did you think the stupid nasal voice with the bears was the only thing I ever learned from her? I can’t avoid all of it.”
“Sorry,” I offered hastily, holding up my hooves to try and wave off Gale’s obviously drunken temper.
“I’m not nearly as much of a fucking brick wall as you,” she continued, obviously not paying attention to her words. “I do actually learn things sometimes.”
I took that one in stride, if only for how many drinks Gale had downed. “Gale, I realized that I’m never going to be able to prove my innocence in court the way we tried today. That’s trying to prove a negative, and the only good solution there is to offer proof that Wintershimmer really is behind this, rather than that I couldn’t have done it. I need to figure out exactly what Wintershimmer is after. And knowing what he wants in Everfree seems like the clue to that.”
Gale gave me a motion that loosely resembled a nod. “So what else do you know? Anything actually useful?”
“I have no idea.” I sighed. “I thought Wintershimmer wanted revenge because I refused to kill Clover, but if that were true, he could probably have killed me at Platinum’s Landing. He’s gone really far out of his way to frame me for what happened.”
“No shit,” Gale noted. “The only other option is that Ty and Mom and Aunt Luna get their heads out of their asses and admit he’s the one responsible. And if Aunt Luna comes after him, he’s basically fucked, right?”
“I would have to think so,” Blizzard added. “They’re immortal. Gods, right?”
“Wintershimmer always claimed they were just ponies who had found some sort of magic,” I concurred. “If not spirits of some kind who had taken pony form…”
“They’re not fucking ghosts!” Gale caught herself shouting and shook her head. The vigor of the motion very nearly toppled her from her stool. “Okay, Morty, that doesn’t matter. Wintershimmer doesn’t want to pick a fight with Equestria, so he basically has to blame you. Here’s something different. Why bother killing Clover?”
“Because she…” No. It wasn’t that she had spared the Windigo. The truth of the accusation didn’t mean the motive was likewise true. “Revenge against Star Swirl for having him exiled?”
“That’s not the read I got on him.” Gale watched as a drink slid down the bar to stop in front of her and scowled. “Cirrus, I’m not drunk enough to mistake water for beer yet.”
“I don’t care. You’ve had enough, kid.”
Gale grimaced and slammed back the tankard, using her hoof in place of her magic. A few audible glugs later, she slapped the half-drained vessel back on the bar. “So what it is?”
I shrugged. “I thought you were building to something.”
“Fuck that, no.” Gale groaned. “You’re the wizard. I just know revenge is bullshit. Even just talking to him when you tried to teach me to teleport, I know that’s a steaming pile of shit. It’s something practical. What else do you know?”
“Well… since he gave me a candlecorn, he still has Silhouette’s body.” I frowned. “Actually… that does bring something else to mind. Right before he took Silhouette’s soul, I was holding her foreleg, trying to pull her up over this broken board in the street—the streets there are all these raised boardwalks above the swamp, so—”
“I’ve been there before,” Gale muttered. She glanced over her shoulder, as if her own boisterous volume was somehow still keeping our secrets. Thankfully, the bar still held no small modicum of noise—or at least, a modicum of ponies smart enough not to stick their noses in Gale’s family business. “So? What did Silhouette say”
“How did it go? She said ‘a project turn against you.’”
“What?” Gale stared at me, and then to Blizzard. “Did I have too much to drink? That isn’t even a sentence.”
“Yes on both counts.”
Despite her obvious tipsiness, Gale still had the coordination to drop a hoof square between my eyes. Blizzard leapt back from her own stool, fluttering her wings just as I collapsed across her seat. In the moment, I recall a ringing in my ears. Looking back, I can say with amusement that the incident proved Gale was a regular at the Legate’s Lookout. Almost nopony even bothered looking up from their drinks as I climbed back onto my stool. “Well… you asked.”
“You want another?”
Blizzard frowned. “Gale, there’s no call for that.”
For my part I held my silence a few seconds which satisfied Gale. “She say anything else?” she asked.
“Then she said ‘remember’.” I stood up without really thinking about it, pacing slowly just behind the row of barstools holding my two friends and the strange old stallion Gale insisted I could trust. It was amazing how he blended into the scenery if I wasn’t focusing on him. Looking back, if I’d been more conscious of his presence, I might not have said some of the things I did. “Wintershimmer had said it when we were fighting a little bit before that. I think I said something off-hoof about how his candlecorns track teleportation, and he was trying to compare that to my betraying him or some forced metaphor like that. ‘How does it feel to have a project turn against you?’”
Gale’s eyes widened, cold sobriety flashing in her expression. “Morty, I’m not sure what this means, but you had heard that before.”
“Before Wintershimmer?”
“You had that exact same conversation in Lübuck with Silhouette, when we were trying to rescue Graargh. Remember?” At my look of confusion, the fatigue and lack of focus in Gale’s expression swept back. “Whatever. I was in the middle of trying to make sure she couldn’t grab Procellarum by holding it up in the air with one of the chapel pews.”
“You’re sure?”
Gale gave me one firm nod, managing not to lose her balance this time. “I am dead certain on this, Morty. Not sure what good it does you to know that, though. Do you think she was trying to tell you to do something with a bell? Or drop something on his head?”
I almost hit myself in the face when I finally realized what it meant, and then I slowly lifted my hoof to my brow as I tried to put the pieces together. “Wintershimmer could not have known those words unless he was already there. Which would mean he was already in one of the candlecorns…”
“What? But they were all just mindlessly following her orders, weren’t they?”
“No, there was one…” I tapped my hoof twice on my brow—after all, if pressure on the chin scares up neurons, slapping your own skull is sure to make some real progress. “I didn’t come up with the bell thing completely alone, Gale. One of the candlecorns gave me that hint. No… Wintershimmer gave me that hint. That’s how he knew what I had said to Silhouette.”
“Wait, wait…” Blizzard leaned forward. “Wintershimmer helped you?”
“At the time, I was doing what he wanted” I countered, turning back to my pacing. “But we know he had to have been watching us in Lübuck. And one of the candlecorns subtly helped me. So I can say he definitely was already in a candlecorn then. And if he was already in a candlecorn before I fought Clover… then how in Tartarus can that even be true? I seanced him an hour before that. That was when we were working on teleportation, Gale.”
Gale shook her head from her place on the floor. “Not the right question.”
I pivoted in place, cocking my head. “Don’t we need to know how the magic works?”
That earned me a shake of Gale’s head, and she stood up. “Morty, you just told me you couldn’t prove you were…” a hiccup slipped past her lips, and she groaned. Magic flared on her horn, and she gritted her teeth as a glow surrounded her head. “Mother fucker!”
“Are you okay?” Blizzard pressed, leaning across my now empty stool.
“Drink fix,” Gale muttered, sounding eerily like Graargh for just a moment. “Learned it from Star Swirl. Skips you ahead to the ‘hangover’ part. And makes the hangover way fucking worse.” She ran a hoof down her muzzle. “I think he meant it to stop me drinking so much. But I’m sober now… Sorry if I curse at you or hit you. A lot.”
“Better late than never,” I told her with as much of a grin as I could muster over my fatigue and the throbbing headache her blow had given me.
“Look, my point is that it doesn’t matter how he did the magic right now.” Gale nursed a few more sips of her water. “You know he did. You gave evidence. We need to look at what that tells us. We need to know why.”
“Okay…” I muttered. “But I don’t know why. Wintershimmer told me he wanted revenge on Star Swirl and Equestria for being banished by King Lapis decades ago. But if that’s true, why does he even care about me?”
Gale rolled her eyes and adjusted her mane with her magic when rough bangs dangled in front of her view. “Words are cheap, actions are everything.”
I frowned. “Solemn Vow told me that.”
“Yeah, and Mom taught him. What a long string of assholes that is.” Gale shrugged and sighed in pain. “Let’s start over from the beginning, Morty. You killed Wintershimmer, right? What happened after that?”
“Well, one of the candlecorns thought I was responsible for killing Wintershimmer, so it fired a spell and stunned me. Later on, Jade told me that somepony had slit Wintershimmer’s throat. They thought it was me.”
Gale nodded once, and even that motion was barely noticeable. Blizzard, however, cut in again. “Did Wintershimmer usually have the candlecorns stun other ponies? With how you talk about him, I didn’t think he would be so… gentle.”
“You’re right,” I answered. “Wintershimmer wasn’t a very firm believer in second chances.” Then I frowned. “I assume you’re saying that even right then, that was him in the candlecorn stunning me? But how—”
“Doesn’t matter,” Gale interrupted, drawing a firm arc in the air with a foreleg that would likely have bruised my muzzle if I were just a few inches closer. “We know Wintershimmer is behind this. We know he possesses candlecorns, and he could do it very early in your journey. That candlecorn acted unusually. It was probably Wintershimmer. Then we say Wintershimmer was behind his own stabbing while you were unconscious.”
I couldn’t help but frown at that. “After he lied to Jade and I had to escape the Union, he did tell me to my face that he thought I would have stayed and taken over being Archmage in his place.”
“So he needed you to leave,” Gale nodded. “But he also wanted you to think he was dead.”
“Think he was dead?”
Gale nodded. “The candlecorns can look like him, right? And if his throat wasn’t slit, you could have just put him back into his body, right? How do you know he actually got killed at all? And for that matter, if we do think he was able to take over that candlecorn, why would he slit his own throat, instead of just hopping back into his body?” Apparently amused at my widened eyes, Gale gave me a confident grin. “So now everypony in the world, you included, thinks Wintershimmer is dead. He tells you to go kill off Clover and sends you off on this long damn quest. But he’s following you as a candlecorn too, right?”
Again, I had to nod. “But if he’s still got his real body, why not use that? His horn is so much stronger than a candlecorn’s candle, even if he is getting old, and…”
As my expression widened in a final realization, Gale chuckled. “The word you’re looking for is ‘motherfucker’. Try it, Morty.”
“Immortality.”
“Not even fucking close. And I thought I was the one drunk.”
I ignored the comments; my mind was racing down a path I’d just discovered at breakneck speed. “Wintershimmer told me that was what the Summer Lands ritual was for, but when he died, I assumed he’d failed. But if that is somehow letting him control the candlecorns from afar and steal bodies, then it did exactly what he wanted.” I whirled at the end of my pacing. “And the point of sending me after Clover was that the only way I could ever hope to kill her was with his spell. Her body would still have been alive, and he could have slipped in and stolen it.”
Gale nodded. “That makes a twisted sort of sense. It explains why he only turned on you after you refused to kill her.”
“Why not just stay in a candlecorn?” Blizzard asked. “They don’t age, do they?”
“No, but it would destroy his soul.” I sighed as I realized what metaphor would make my point stick. “Pony souls aren’t meant to stay in dead bodies, whether they’re artificial like a candlecorn, or natural like a real corpse. A short stint won’t do noticeable damage, but over time the soul starts to degrade. That’s what I meant when I was talking to your grandfather. That’s why I’m so worried about what Luna has done with your mom.”
“So he needs a living body,” Gale observed.
“A unicorn body,” Blizzard cut in, and then grimaced. “Wait, Morty you aren’t saying Clover—”
“I would bet my life on it,” I answered. “Wintershimmer ‘dies’ and Clover keeps on living. Wintershimmer probably would have turned on me then to tie up the loose end. But I didn’t kill her like he wanted.”
The whole conversation put a dour expression on Blizzard’s face. “So why wouldn’t he kill you?”
I tapped my horn. “My horn isn’t… Well, it isn’t normal. I can only cast three spells in a day, and it took me a long time to learn enough control to do anything other than destroy whatever my horn was pointed at. I wouldn’t be any good for the kind of magic Wintershimmer wants to do. He needs another living body. So who is he thinking of in Everfree?”
Gale shrugged. “Star Swirl is liable to keel over any day now. So Diadem would be my best guess.”
“But that would reveal him,” I countered. “If a candlecorn snuck into her tower and just murdered her in cold blood, that would prove me innocent and bring the Divine Sisters down on his head.”
“You don’t think he’s just going to kill some poor unicorn in the streets, do you?”
“No,” I answered. “Too much risk of getting noticed for barely any reward. He’ll want a wizard’s horn.” A moment later, I stood up from my bench. “This is all conjecture, but it’s the best idea we have. I’m not sure of what I’m about to say, but I think I have to bet on it anyway.”
“Yeah?” Gale asked.
“Wintershimmer was banished for trying to put a horn on an earth pony’s body. And he still had all that research.” I glanced to the door, and hopefully symbolically to the world below. In retrospect, I probably shouldn’t have relied on that symbolism when Gale was suffering a magically strengthened hangover. “Now he has an earth pony body.”
“You think he’s going to stick somepony’s horn on Silhouette?” Blizzard asked with a gasp.
Gale shook her head, and winced as she regretted it. “That doesn’t answer who, Morty. Everything you said about killing somepony to get a body is exactly the same if he sneaks up with a knife and lops their horn off. Probably worse, since then there would be a survivor too.”
“If he takes a living pony’s horn, sure. But that doesn’t matter. Because I know there’s one wizard’s horn in Everfree City—or at least, somewhere nearby. Gale, do you know where Solemn Vow is buried?”
Gale swallowed heavily. “Umm… shit. Okay. Uh… hey, Finder!” Gale shouted at Pathfinder while waving a hoof, then her ears flattened against her mane as the sound of her own voice burrowed into her skull.
“What, kid?” the old scout asked, his mass of scars rippling as he approached. “You done with all your secrets?”
“Just got a question,” Gale answered. “You and Ty fought Solemn Vow in his basement, right? The old haunted house?”
Pathfinder frowned. “I don’t like that question. You aren’t about to do something stupid, are you, Gale?”
“It’s stupid,” I told him, cutting in. “But it’s also necessary.”
“Yeah? And I’m just supposed to take your word for it?” the scout asked.
I nodded. “You are. Because now Hurricane owes you six barrels.”
Pathfinder’s eyes widened just a touch. “Well… I do not like this, for the record. But yes. I wasn’t in it much, though. Typhoon finished that business alone.”
“Is his body still there?” I asked.
That earned me a big frown. “Now I ought to arrest you.”
“I have no intention of bringing him back.” Technically, that was a lie, though it was certainly true I didn’t intend to do it any time soon.
“We need to make sure nopony else does,” Gale told him. “Besides, if Vow does turn up all zombie-d up walking around, you can basically just say Morty’s guilty as fuck and kill him.”
Pathfinder’s eyes swept between the three of us, and then he nodded. “Yeah. Last I heard, Vow’s still down there. Commander Typhoon made some crazy ice that didn’t melt for years. For a while, we would go down, make sure none of his magic was left, and it never thawed a drop.”
“Alright.” I took a deep breath, if only to buy myself time to think. “Pathfinder, I need you to fly and find Celestia. Tell her to bring Angel and… my bear to Vow’s manor.”
“You honestly expect me to just run some errand for you, kid? You’ve got some nerve.”
“Should I go?” Blizzard volunteered. “If you’re going to go fight Wintershimmer, I’m not going to be much use, after all, and…”
I waited for her to trail off against the slow shaking of my head. “You said you had ice magic, Blizzard. We almost certainly will need your help.”
Gale stepped away from the two of us, right up almost against Finder. “Morty might have a bad habit of sucking his own cock in public, but he does tend to be right about this kind of shit. If Aunt Celestia or Dad get on your case, I’ll take the hit.”
He was quiet for a very long time before he dipped his head. “Alright, fine kid. But when this is over, right or wrong, seven barrels.”
Gale spat on the frog of her hoof and slapped it against the scout’s. “Deal. Gimme your sword.”
I hadn’t realized Pathfinder was wearing one until he lifted a wing and produced a decent sized blade in his teeth. Gale lifted it with her magic. “So help me, Gale, if you don’t bring Ensis back to me, it’ll be my wife chasing you down the next time you run off.”
“Ensis?” I asked.
Pathfinder nodded at the weapon. “Sword.”
“No, what does it mean?”
“That is what it means. Sword. Unlike some ponies, I don’t come from a family with a name like ‘the storm blades’.”
Gale spun the rather plain blade, then pulled the sheath off Pathfinder’s side, revealing a set of very narrow straps that I had mistaken for even more of his substantial scar tissue. With a bit of a struggle, the harness tightened around her own barrel. “Alright, Morty. Blizzard. Ready to kick some ass?”
Blizzard’s answer was a mute and nervous nod. I grinned more honestly. “Let’s go snuff a candle.”
In retrospect, the second of Gale’s blows to the growing bruise on my muzzle probably didn’t make the impending battle any easier.