There was a small round of applause as Rainbow Plume rejoined the group, blushing modestly.
“So, where are we going next?”
“Opera house?” somepony suggested.
“Go and see the sea pony districts! I know a unicorn who can do the waterlung spells on the cheap!”
“Maybe tomorrow. We’ll get soaked, and it’ll be freezing up here by the time we get back. How about the Old Quarter?”
“Cursed bridge! The cursed bridge!”
“Oh, not bad. It’ll be getting dark soon. How about it, Hearthfire? Ready for something a little different?”
Hearthfire grinned and rolled her eyes. Their enthusiasm was totally infectious, not that she needed any more.
“Sure. But if you think I’m going to be scared by some stupid bridge, you’ve got another thing coming. We Equestrians are made of sterner stuff.”
“All right!” Blossom, one of the older ponies in the group, took to the air, turning a loop in excitement, “Hang on a minute...”
“What?” Stonefeather asked. Blossom was gazing off towards the mouth of the bay, but the walls of the buildings around them blocked those on the ground from seeing what had caught her eye.
“Looks like there’s a big storm brewing. You guys go ahead. They might need all hooves on deck for this. Plume, you coming?”
“Um. Okay. I’ve been to the bridge before, anyway.” Rainbow Plume hadn’t seemed thrilled with suggestion for where to go next, and now looked positively relieved despite her attempts to pretend otherwise.
“You know, maybe you shouldn’t go?” she called back as she took to the air, “If this storm hits, you won’t want to be out in the open water.”
“We’ll be fine! The storm’s not going to be allowed to get anywhere near the city, right? No problem.”
Plume’s reply, if there was one, didn’t carry down to ground level, and the two pegasi were already wheeling about to head south west. Stonefeather sighed as they vanished from sight.
“She’s probably right, though. It would’ve been cool, but better safe than sorry. We can go another day.”
“Don’t worry about it. I’ve been on my hooves for ages anyway. I think I’ll go back to the hotel, and we can go tomorrow night if the weather’s settled.”
There was a half-hearted clamour of disappointment, but it was more for show than anything. Blossom had looked pretty rattled, and if there was going to be a big storm, nopony really wanted to be out and about.
“Meet you in the Council Market tomorrow? Nine o’clock. We can get breakfast and see some more of the city. Maybe even get those waterlung spells cast and dive to visit the sea ponies?”
“Sounds good. I’ll see you tomorrow morning, then.”
The group said their goodbyes and split apart, each pony hurrying their separate ways with an eye to the sky.
* * *
The storm did hit in the night, and hit hard. The seaward side of the city bore the brunt of it, but the choppy waters caused instability across the city. In her second-floor room, Hearthfire couldn’t even imagine managing to sleep; the floor, and by extension her bed, shifted in a most unpleasant fashion. The sound of rain hammering on the shutters was an endless counterpoint to the wind and interludes of thunder.
Cas and Hearthfire huddled under the duvet, supremely grateful for the day’s lessons in Whinnycian engineering. If she didn’t know just how sturdily constructed the buildings of the city were, she would probably have been screaming her head off all night. Instead, she clung to half-remembered explanations of triple-keeled support rafts and centre of gravity calculations. Oh, it would be nice to be a sea pony right now, safe in their bizarre underwater structures...
To take her mind of her queasy stomach, she tried to imagine what they must look like. Stonefeather had said that the city was almost mirrored, underwater. For each building that extended up from the bay, its opposite plunged down towards the sea bed, counterbalancing and steadying its twin. That was where the nickname, the Twin Cities, came from; pegasus, unicorn and earth ponies living below the sky, sea ponies below the waves, and the two meeting at the surface, the intersection of the two halves...
Another rumble. Hearthfire tried not to imagine a tower overbalancing, the rumble of falling masonry as it collapsed onto nearby rafts, spreading the carnage across who knew how many streets. No, definitely just thunder.
Eventually, the efforts of the pegasi seemed to be paying off, and the storm began to calm. Hearthfire managed to fall asleep, but her dreams were full of rushing water, falling towers, and cries for help.
* * *
They were still alive and the building was still standing when she awoke. Cas was pawing at her muzzle to wake her; she realised that there was already a strong line of sunlight coming through the crack in the shutters, and it must be after eight. She threw back the covers, and trotted over to the window.
Outside was not the complete scene of carnage she had feared. It was true, there was a lot of damage, but she couldn’t see any obvious gaps in the skyline or serious structural damage to the buildings across the street. Shredded awnings, bits of broken timber, and partially flooded or overturned boats littered the waterway, and here and there she could see relieved looking ponies bailing out or struggling to right their craft.
“Oh, pony, I hope Swift is all right.” There was no time to check on the boat shed immediately; she was already likely to be late to her appointment at the market. There didn’t seem to be many gondolas braving the debris-strewn waterways, so she would have to try and navigate the tortuous hoof route across scattered bridges and narrow walkways, and hope they were still intact. She ran a basin of water and dunked her head to dampen some of the tiredness, and made her way downstairs.
“Nothing damaged in your room, was there, ma’am?” the hotel’s owner asked, as she emerged into the lobby, “I’m sorry your first night had to be so rough.”
“No, not that I could see. Do you know how bad it is out there?”
“Not as bad as it might have been. The pegasi did good work on such short notice... the sea ponies are still combing the waterways, but as far as I’ve heard no one’s been reported missing. Be careful though, ma’am, there might still be strong gusts now and again.”
“Does this happen a lot, then?”
“Not often, but enough that we have learned to cope with it when it does.”
She had been right in her suspicion that getting a gondola ride would be difficult. There didn’t seem to be anyone on the waterway this morning. She let lighter and far more agile Cas lead the way, and watched her own hooves closely, wary of walkways that could have been damaged in the night. Aside from a tense crossing of a dangerously swaying timber bridge that creaked with each step, the route was without incident. Whinnycian architecture apparently incorporated a lot of natural give into its designs, to accommodate the tendency of adjacent buildings to shift in relation to each other, and the philosophy had served them well under the brunt of the storm.
By the big clock on the front face of the city hall, it was just coming up to twenty past nine when she reached the market square. Most of the shops that fronted onto the square had their doors open, even if they were mostly devoid of customers, but in the square itself there were only a handful of stalls set up.
However, the thing which truly caught the eye as Hearthfire emerged into the open ground was the group of about ten ponies stood silently on the city hall steps. It was too far to see them clearly, but they stood as still as statues, grim determination carved into their stances. Arrayed around them, standing to attention, were several dozen armed ponies in uniforms she recognised from the Water Market, the same one worn by the oarspony on Stonefeather’s gondola.
Something was very wrong.
“Psst!” She looked back and left, and there, in a narrow cut-through between two buildings, she saw Stonefeather and most of his friends. “Get in here!”
“Stonefeather? What in hay is going on?” She and Cas ducked quickly out of sight, sensing that she didn’t want to be spotted loitering by the grim-looking ponies on the steps.
“Rainbow Plume’s not been seen since the storm, and my uncle... Dancing Pinion’s completely lost it!” Stonefeather was on the verge of panicking. The rest of the ponies huddled in the gap looked equally lost.
“She’s missing?”
“There’s search parties out looking for her all over, but no one’s found her yet! After she went up to help try and clear the storm with Blossom, she... I don’t know what happened! But she’s gone, and Pinion says Blossom set her up.”
“What! Why?”
“Why not? Half the pegasi in the city were up there last night, he’s got dozens of ponies who’ll swear they were together last time they saw Rainbow Plume. He says the Verdants knew they were going to lose this week’s ballot, and decided they’d get the upper hand by making sure one of ours couldn’t show up to vote!”
“He managed to convince some of the city watch to go along with it,” one of the other chimed in; Arbor, if Hearthfire remembered correctly, “He’s had Blossom arrested!”
“What are the Verdants doing about this?” Hearthfire asked, suspecting that she probably had an idea of what the answer was going to be.
“Wild Reed says Blossom had nothing to do with it, and that it was Feather ponies who arrested her, not members of the watch, that it was basically kidnapping. He was talking like he was coming here for a showdown. He’s absolutely furious.”
“Oh, buck...” Stonefeather was peering around the corner, into the marketplace, where a flotilla of boats loaded with more armed ponies was storming up to the quay. “Here he comes.”