//------------------------------// // Chapter 21: The Curious Cure // Story: The Enforcer and Her Blackmailers (Enhanced & Augmented) // by scifipony //------------------------------// I never did knock. After a minute, the zebra healer opened the wide round door. She peered silently at me and at the cart with an expression of how did you get here, and, besides-which, who are you? (She would have made it rhyme.) I levitated the comedian out, keeping him flat. I looked from the beat-up stallion back to the zebra and said, "I need a healer really badly." Deep blue eyes looked at me like they had just seen me. She nodded, wordlessly pointing inside her home with a black hoof. Tears streaming down my cheeks, wobbling with the last of my energy, I followed her inside to find an unexpectedly small room that looked more like a pantry kitchen than a living space. As directed, I placed Rye Bald down on a table shoved against the wall. While she examined him, I looked around. A cauldron filled the center area, on a hearth filled with charcoal with an ingeniously shuttered flue that opened to a hollowed out branch that worked as a chimney. Clay pots of orange, red, and purple were stacked many deep on shelves. Bales of herbs were wrapped in tight packages of waxed and oiled papers; some hung from the ceiling. The smell was somewhere between a spice pantry and a vinegary-sulfury chemistry lab. Pointy ovoid stylized masks as tall as a pony, some smiling some leering, were propped in a corner. A lumpy hoof-sewn mattress filled another corner between a roughly carved dresser and an unusually spotted, but otherwise empty, wall opposite the door. I stiffened when I realized the wall moved. Attention riveted, my tears drying, I stepped closer and realized the wall moved because beetles swarmed on it—black ones, with a shiny green tinge that shimmered in the potion light from a half-dozen small potion lanterns. I could hear a click-click as the insects moved, climbing over one another, gnawing at the wood with pincer-like mandibles. They tore off tiny splinters, and upon eating their fill, would clamber toward a tiny mouse hole at the bottom of the wall. The silver-barked sticks that had been tied in a bunch in Streak's wagon were attached by pegs at the margins of the wall, the ceiling, and the floor. The sticks corralled the zebra's excavators and kept them at work extending her abode according to her design. "I am sorry I must be curt; but quick please, how was he hurt?" I faced her, feeling cold and guilty. I took a deep breath and said, "Beat up. Kicked. I don't know exactly. I— I did it, but I wasn't really there." "I ask for a reason noisome, need I treat him for a poison? And chilly filly, the missing you is plain to see for queer magic swirls around you in an odd degree." Magic. I was under an enchantment still? Rye Bald, first. "No poison. Even sleepwalking, I'd only know how to fight. Not only would I not know how to use poison, why would I use earth pony magic when my magic is far more potent?" She nodded and pointed at the pink pony who sweated and lay, wheezing, eyes shut, not moving. She pointed at his shoulder. "And this, to me, is something amiss." The gash. "I healed him." But unlike my work on my withers, this looked ragged, red, and scabbed. Sure, scar tissue had filled and stopped the bleeding, but in comparison, it appeared the work of an amateur. "It was all I could do at the time." She nodded again and grabbed an orange clay flask. She walked to a tea kettle beside the cauldron. She poured steaming tea into two wooden cups on a basket plate, then with a dexterity of an earth pony sure to marvel any unicorn, she nosed the flask on to the plate, and the plate onto her muzzle and forehead, and carried it all to our table, sliding them before me without spilling a drop. A strong astringent herbal tea struck my nasal passages, together with the scent of honey. She sat, raising her cup between her hooves for a sip. "All of this down you must drink, for in the next hour you must think." She examined the pony's fresh scar. She then examined the nearly healed scar on my withers. Her eyebrow raised. Related to Dr. Flowing Waters, are we? In spirit at least. "Yes, I sealed the wound. You want me to use my magic?" "An idea so stark it misses the mark?" I pursed my lips, but neither nodded nor shook my head. She reached for the pony, lifting his eyelid, revealing an unfocused magenta eye. He didn't respond. I began to shake ever so slightly as she tapped the air around his head without actually touching him. The puffy swelling on the left side meant I'd probably boxed him with my hooves. A kick would've outright killed him. It had to be something with his brain. "I'm no doctor." The zebra said, "A healer heals best when her knowledge she can trust, but, with a life on balance, a mare must do what a mare—must." I decided I needed to be careful about what I said around Zecora as she popped the lid off of a canister and shook some leaves into my tea. I recognized the medicinal saccharine scent of nettle-ewe. She caught my expression and said, "At poor Zecora you need not glower; using this herb once does not abuse its power." "Call me Starlight Glimmer. He's Rye Bald." "Of this Grimoire you wore like a mask, I am glad that we in the light of the sun now bask." With a sigh, she drank her tea in a gulp, then gathered herbs and vials. My tea was too hot to gulp, or perhaps the idea of the drug frightened me. She had mentioned poison. She seemed certain I could help, though. Since my top concern was ensuring that my assault didn't lead to Rye Bald's death, I took a deep breath and drank the sweet, lemony, metallic-tasting drink, despite my heart beating quickly and trying to tell me to stop. This was what duty felt like. I watched with growing fascination as Zecora mixed ingredients and chanted in continuous rhyme. In minutes, she created mustard poultices and odd salts drawn out of leaves. I could see magic swirling around her hooves and knew it wasn't all potion magic. It didn't involve numbers, per se, but it did involve magic being pulled out through her hooves; she was manifestly not manipulating magic summoned by chemistry or the rules of contagion and sympathy. After minutes, I could almost grasp how the shaman physically pulled splendors from the magic pulse by using the shimmy and sway of her body and limbs, and by evoking forest spirits. That was the nettle-ewe talking. Lecturing... I sat back, sipping the last drop of the tea so unconsciously that I was surprised to find myself holding the cup in my magic. All my fatigue vanished, replaced by uncanny clarity. On a whim, I ran a Barthemule transform on a weak levitation spell, watching Zecora's tiny room swarm with a flock of sparrow-like burning numbers, circling and diving and combining en masse, a galaxy of computation all in my head. First the omega and then color-charm corollary... Then ideas and litanies hinted at by massaging another pony. A pegasus. Then, if that worked… The spell triggered on its own. I had to finish by adding a half-pony length delta to the vector matrix sum to prevent a time paradox because... Because suddenly I was floating midair, in a blue-green aura the shape of a prism of topaz, but composed of a magic field just big enough to reach from the tip of my horn to the tips of my hooves. It held me completely aloft, lifting my mane and tail toward the ceiling as if I were submerged underwater. After two heart-beats, enough for Zecora to glance my way and raise an eyebrow, it popped. The wooden tea cup bounced on the floor. I blurted, "Aerial Buoyancy!?" What had I done? What had the drug done to me? Complexities kept mounting. I'd found the key to Pegasus Simulation! Rainbow neon and hot fiery numbers kept gathering, building, swarming. Possibilities mounted. Oh, no— This was why nettle-ewe was so addictive! "Starlight Glimmer!" Someone shook my head; hooves held my cheeks. "Starlight Glimmer, come back and shimmer. Now you must focus; we need your hocus-pocus." "Gah!" I was back in the hollowed out tree. It looked as normal as a hollowed out tree house filled with herbs and zebra carvings might, but then I noticed... Everything wood in the walls to the thread-thin black hair sticking out near her nose was composed of vibrating, streaming digits. Numbers were the shape of reality! I lived in a new type of starry realm, one surrounded by screaming potentialities that shrieked that the magic pulse would do my bidding if I only chose what to command it to do. I felt incredibly focused and horribly distracted at the same time. Invincible and impotent. A paradox of understanding!! Zecora waved purple crystals in front of my nose. A scent of rancid turpentine speared up my sinuses and struck me knife-sharp, clearing my head of everything, clearing away the noisy numbers and the chattering voice of worry in my head. In that instant, I existed, silent. I sighed. Zecora's rhyming voice filled the background, but didn't reach my consciousness. I knew what she wanted and she drew me physically forward. Without real thought, I scrambled onto the table, smelling the sweat and dried blood and bile sickness of the unconscious stallion. I let intuition work as I regarded the bruises and contusions around his head. I dimly became aware of a thick nimbus of numbers whirling about me, but muted and marshaled and working more efficiently and reflexively than ever before. Zecora waved more salts by my nose, emerald green ones this time. The herbal concoctions, except for the poultice, were all to guide me and to control me, to calm my mind—to allow a mare to do what this mare had to do. I touched my horn to Rye Bald's temple and found myself floating in the midst of a lightning storm. Electricity sizzled and spat from every little cloud, lighting the region with a blue and white strobing glare while filling my senses with ozone and thunder. In this uncanny space, rain surged not so much in raindrops but as an almost-ocean of air droplets, foamy but transparent. In it, I sensed a growing wrongness—a taste of mineral sharpness in what the environment told me ought to be wet purity. When I looked for it, I changed place to find a wall of what at first seemed like intrusive columnar granite, but proved to taste more like marble. It had to be bone, but it looked so crystalline to my eyes that I wasn't sure if I was thinking in metaphor or magic. I saw the cracks. I could see the storm pushing at the rock face and realized that the bone thrust into this space did not belong. It grounded and dissipated the electricity of the grey clouds, and the pressure was building between the the element of water and the element of earth, making the ocean thicker, darker, and cold. I asked the marble cliffs what was wrong. Where did they belong? They sang in chorus, telling me. I told them to return, and with my constant, consistent voice telling them to do so, so they did, pulling splendors from my magic and making it their own—reconstituting, repairing, retreating. As I babbled on, the storm strengthened in all its blue-white glory, and the rain became a proper sweet-salty mix, warming gradually until… *** I woke, opening my eyes. I lay on Zecora's straw mattress covered in red-ticking. My drool wet the cloth in a rivulet that stretched to a puckered seam that demonstrated the zebra wasn't much of a seamstress. Two sensations struck me hard that instant: the first, the need to pee, the second, with a choke, that I was going to vomit. A wooden pail shoved unceremoniously under my muzzle at the right instant solved the latter splendidly. The wood bottom made a resounding thunk. The sounds I made only left me more nauseated. I threw up the last two days of food, by the volume of it, and possibly some of my liver. The instant I could get my trembling hooves under me, I shot out the door with Zecora's assistance and found relief by lantern light. It had to be the next evening. I heard birds and weird chittering sounds, and saw no light other than the wane shadows of the surrounding trees by the flickering kerosene flame. I was surprised my bladder could hold that much. Again inside, shaky on my hooves, my head literally thumping as if it were about to explode, I found Rye Bald awake, covered in blankets beside the glowing coals of the hearth below the cauldron, smelling of wood smoke. I could hear him laughing, a horsey sounding noise, emanating mostly as puffs of air from his nose. He looked shrunken into himself, but had a cup of tea clamped between his front hooves. I had healed his leg, too. I gathered he would survive. I stopped and stared, trying to compose myself. I had to say something, but guilt left me tongue-tied. The last time I had faced someone I had attempted to murder, it was a pegasus stallion who had first attempted to murder my employer and would have succeeded except for my inadequate grab and throw. This time, however, I was the sole bad actor... Perhaps because his voice wouldn't work, he said in a whisper, "You don't have to apologize. Zecora explained that you were under an evil enchantment. She also explained that you saved my life, that if you had taken me to a hospital in Canterlot, I would have died." I looked to Zecora. The lantern hooted as she blew it out, wafting the smell of kerosene and soot my direction. By the potion light, her eyes glittered as she nodded gravely. I said, "But, but, but— I beat you." "No. A monster beat me." "Had I not pursued such a hateful life, I would not have been tricked into hurting you." "Had I not decided that telling a joke was more important than earning a living, I might not have racked up a debt that put you in a position to be used and abused. I know I'll have nightmares about this." He shuddered. "But I'm not completely stupid either. There is plenty of fault to share, but plenty else not to share." I folded much too hard on the floor with a bunch of painful thumps. Zecora brought me a tea, too. I smelled chamomile. "For what it's worth, I want to help ponies, to protect them. I don't want to hurt them. That's what I told—" "Running Mead?" "—Running Mead, yes, before he did what he did to me. I consider myself more of an actor than an enforcer. You saw my act. I scare ponies into paying up, basically. Didn't work on you, though." I sipped the simple honeyed drink. It helped the headache. He adjusted the blankets. I could see plasters adhered to his side and a pink crust on the left side of his face. "Maybe we haven't chosen the best professions. Perhaps I should go back to being an accountant." "I've had an offer to become a physician." He smiled, a ragged thing that didn't quite reach the right side of his face. He probably had a lot more healing to do. He said, "From what I've been told, that might be a good choice." But, did I like it? What if it required drugs to be good at it? Without them, getting lost inside somepony or being able to do little more than first aid would not qualify me to be a nurse, let alone a doctor, or to become the princess' doctor—not that a criminal would ever be allowed that close! I sighed. The next day, we worked out that he would take a train from Ponyville to Manehatten as soon as he had recovered. If Running Mead had an inkling he was alive, we'd both be in trouble. I facilitated his relocation by finding a purse filled with twenty gold bits in my saddlebags. At least sleepwalker-me had extracted a hard bargain, and had collected payment first. I gave him fifteen. Though he was understandably reluctant to say how I could find him should I need to prove my relative innocence at some point, I did get him to agree to post me the address of someone in Ponyville that would know how to contact him. The next day, I stood outside in the dim dappled sunshine, a meal in my belly, my hair up in pigtails, and my saddlebags strapped on securely. I looked at the Everfree and thought of its dangerous denizens. "How is it," I asked, "that you live here safely without weapons or battle magic?" "As an equine you see I am no phony, but as far the forest is concerned I'm no pony." "The creatures of the Everfree don't like ponies?" The zebra shaman nodded, her blue eyes sparkling. "Give them their due and consider it true: Near a thousand years ago I've heard from the spirits in verse, the two reigning ponies corrupted harmony—and grew this elemental curse." I blinked at her. Reigning? Two princess, not one? And now there was one? Did one die? "The princess survived?" Celestia was certainly old, but that old? In my opinion, Celestia was a curse, so maybe it was her. I'd runaway because of her. My parents had died because of her. Carne Asada had tricked me into setting the bomb, and perpetrated her other evil, because of tales of Celestia's crimes hoofed down over nine centuries... "You are surely keen; all is proven, in a castle's ruin, I have fully seen." She pointed deeper into the Everfree. If I had time, I was going to have to do some research. Or pay attention, gasp, in history class. And.. I had to get to school! I had appointments with councilors, a class schedule to rearrange, and I was supposed to have started yesterday! Worse, I had a pressing problem to solve. If there was one thing that I wasn't going to do, it was get within sight of Running Mead ever again. My profession as an enforcer was over. Worse, I lived in Running Mead's territory, which was why I'd given Rye Bald Sunset Shimmer's address, not my own.