Chapter Twelve
Fracture
When a large, feral animal charges a pony, that pony has a few ways to deal with it. Most easily, she can run away; on good ground, most ponies can out-pace most creatures they might encounter in the wild, be it a radscorpion or radhog or a bloated, mutated parasprite barely capable of sustained flight, or any number of animals large and ornery enough to pose a threat.
A pony could stand her ground and fight with her natural weapons: Hard hooves, powerful hind legs, and sometimes a horn or buffeting wings. A snap kick, a sudden gale, or a bright, hot discharge of magic would startle most animals and send them fleeing.
Unicorns especially gifted with telekinetic strength could stop a charging pony in her tracks, though most unicorns lacked the ability to apply substantial motive force or pressure with that same telekinesis. I had the uncommon, but potent advantage of being able to apply tremendous force and pressure to small objects.
A well-equipped pony could employ a gun, be it of the lead-spitting variety or an aetheric projector.
On the sliding scale of physical robustness and strength, I sat firmly in the bottom-most category of Stunted Weakling. I had no weapons, I doubted I could aim a proper kick, never mind knock a single apple from a tree, my wings were bound inside a hazard suit and therefore useless to me at that instant, any contest of horns against a beast equipped with tusks and a thick skull was certain to end in maiming, and my instinctual urge to blast a jet of fire at the charging ‘piggy’ warred with my reluctance to hurt the pet of the mare who had offered me shelter when I so desperately needed it.
Incidentally, I was cognizant enough of my surroundings to recognize that torching a thickly furred animal inside a log cabin, when the fire might not kill that animal quickly and instead send it into a blind rage, was a terrible idea. So, I fell back to the lone defensive spell in my repertoire, the rigid bubble shield that Blitz had taught me a week prior.
The aptly named Rotundus charged into and shattered my half-formed, transparent, emerald bubble, and head-butted me straight in the chest in what he probably considered a playful greeting.
As a larger marble launches the smaller in a foal’s game, the boar sent me flying straight backward and into the respectably solid door. The thin, burnished plate of armor on the chest of my hazard suit, and probably the broad spacing of the boar’s tusks in relation to my chest, likely saved me from being impaled for the second time in less than a week.
While I lay on the timber floor of Pinwheel Malaise’s cottage, having suffered what I recognized from experience as several fractured ribs, as well as whiplash, a profusely bleeding tongue, and the mother of all headaches, I recalled that Night Cloud had mentioned that being transformed by the Impelled Metamorphosis Potion had drained me of energy, and I wondered if it was perhaps to a degree that even being supercharged by proximity to Maximillian’s balefire power plant might not have compensated for the experience. It also was possible that the sustained spike in power required to overcome the resistance of a ring of binding on my horn had induced autothaumic disruption of my magic.
I also considered the idea that puberty, and possibly even my pregnancy, had caused a shift in that curve I had calculated so proudly years ago, and I wallowed in the knowledge that my abilities might be hampered further as I grew.
For a few seconds of agony, my diaphragm seized, and the only breath I managed was a wheeze. Pinwheel Malaise began shouting at her pet boar, and her pink magic filled the room with light as, not without difficulty, she hauled the bristly-furred boar away from me, and the animal squealed and chuffed in agitation as the creak of a metal gate came from the next room over, presumably a pen—and a robust one, I hoped.
A rushing like water filled my ears to accompany the sledgehammer pounding a the back of my skull, and my vision swam. The tang of blood filled my mouth, and my attempt to spit it out resulted in a hot dribble down my muzzle, instead. The polycarbonate visor of my hazard suit’s helmet hadn’t cracked, as far as I could see, so at least the same radiation that began to heal my injuries second by second wouldn’t leak out and harm Pinwheel or Rotundus.
Or Nádarin, I supposed, who came into view where I lay prone and limp on the floor and said something my thoroughly jostled brain didn’t bother to translate.
I groaned and attempted to wave a forehoof in his general direction, failed to budge a muscle, and tried to speak a warning when he reached for the helmet’s release latch on my collar. Whatever came out of my disconnected mouth must have been at least semi-coherent, or aggressive, because Nádarin withdrew at once and left my discombobulated sight.
A smattering of seconds, or perhaps several minutes, later, a fluffy, ash-colored figure appeared, and a haze of pink covered me, and the rushing in my ears faded enough for words to come through.
“Careful! I think she’s concussed.”
I couldn’t help but giggle: Prince Nádarin actually sounded concerned. “Dunno ‘bout concussed,” I mumbled, reaching up reflexively to grasp Pinwheel’s foreleg with my own, “But I’m innamood f’some bacon.”
A look of utter horror came over her, and she yanked her helping hoof away, dropping me. “You leave my Rotundus alone, you wee barbarian! He didn’t mean to hurt you. He was just being rowdy, is all… and I’m sorry. Didn’t think he’d react like that; something riled him up, but I don’t know what it was.”
Compared to being introduced to the boar’s cranium at speed, falling back on my rump on the timber floor barely registered. I groaned and staggered to my hooves; my legs trembled, I stumbled sideways several steps, and spread my legs wide to wait for my inner ear to stop doing acrobatics. “Yeah, well…” I took a deep breath and the first of several steps toward my most immediate goal. “I’m… I’m… um… yeah.”
“Crystal, what’s four plus four?”
“Eight,” I muttered automatically, feeling vaguely insulted, though whether because of the question or because Nádarin had asked it, I couldn’t decide.
“Five plus nine?”
“Fourteen.” I frowned. “I’m fourteen.”
“Three times twelve?”
“Thirty-six.” I continued to frown. “Six squared. Shuddup. Head hurts.”
“… well, if she is concussed, it’s probably minor.”
“Aye, but a minor concussion is still a concussion.” Pinwheel came closer to me and squinted at my face through the wide visor of my semi-armored hazard suit, which forced me to stop, step shakily to the side, and continue past her. “You aren’t secretly a very well-preserved ghoul, are you?” I snorted. She stared, nonplussed, and muttered, “Right. Probably shouldn’t have dropped the concussed filly.”
She walked in front of me again and set a gentle hoof on my chest, causing me to come to a delayed stop, and making my head spin. “Do you hurt?” I grunted and pushed past her again. “Okay, fine, then. I’ve seen Tundy knock over bigger ponies than you, and they don’t usually get back up that quickly.” She decided to walk alongside me instead of heading me off again, and took one or two steps for my several uncertain ones across her sitting room. “Eh, hello? Miss Firecracker?”
“Fireflower,” I mumbled, and I sat down slowly near the heavenly, crackling fire in the stone hearth. After walking more than eight kilometers through the snowy mountain valleys, nothing beat a fireplace. “Not firecracker.”
“Eh… okay, Fireflower. Oi! Mister River, right? You, eh… you sit over there. Here’s a blanket. I’ll put on some tea and cocoa and start on dinner. You’re welcome to share the fireplace, but just, y’know, stay on one side and leave the wee girlie alone. I appreciate you being civil, but I haven’t forgotten you did confess to kidnappin’ the lass.” Pinwheel appeared in my field of view once again, waving her cloven hoof slowly in front of my snout. I looked up at her fluffy mane and tourmaline crest as she set a grey blanket across my back and placed at my hooves a bottle of the odd, purple and white healing potion that had to have come from Bellenast. “You are one tough little cookie, you know that? Now, I don’t rightly know how you aren’t crying ailment and agony, girlie, but if you need it, here it is.”
“I suspect whatever wounds she may have suffered have healed already. She’s an alicorn; from what I have gathered, radiation allows them to recover from nearly any injury.”
“Aye, I’m aware of that much, and that would explain it, but just where in blazes did you find an alicorn to kidnap, grandpa? I’ve met a few of them, and they’re a bit odd, yes, but I don’t reckon I’ve ever seen a wee alicorn filly, never mind one that couldn’t zap you to smithereens.”
Prince Nádarin gave a weary sigh that perfectly suited his thoughts on the matter. “I was not aware, until she claimed to be radioactive, that she was an alicorn at all. As to where I found her… in the company of Her Most Benevolent Royal Highness, Princess Blizziera, of Bellenast.”
“Right. Second question. For what reason, grandpa?”
“I thought I could leverage her for my own ends… let us say simply that I’ve come to realize I was exceptionally foolish in my haste, and very much regret my decisions today, among others.”
“Eh, yeah. Imagine that? Third question, is Little Miss Concussed, Kidnapped, and Confused there the daughter of said Royal Highness, by chance?”
“No… but she claims to be her daughter’s marefriend.”
Hoofsteps approached me. Pinwheel reappeared in my helmet-obstructed view, her expression thoroughly nonplussed, and waggled a cloven hoof toward the other half of the sitting room. “That true, girlie?” I nodded. “Huh. Grandpa, the way I see it, you have two possible destinies: Clapped in irons, or at the center of a smoking crater… make option three both, so, eh… I suggest you sit tight and pray for the former to whatever deity strikes your fancy. Or try your luck outside, if you’re so inclined.”
Prince Nádarin laughed, and trailed into a brief coughing fit. I suspected the long hike and thin air had done him more harm than I had. “Prayer, Miss Pinwheel? I’ve asked Bellenast’s very own demon to a dance. I won’t waste my breath.”
I began to giggle, and at some point, drifted off.
When next I opened my eyes, it was because of a heavy log being set into the fireplace and a small bowl of fragrant soup being nudged in front of my snout by a cloven, tourmaline green hoof. I sat up on my haunches as the fire roared and crackled with renewed vigor.
“Here you go, girlie.” Pink light covered my helmet, and Pinwheel deftly disengaged the interlocks and popped the helmet free. “Tomato and Nightcaps, fresh from the kettle. Stew’ll take a couple more hours.”
“Woah, wait--”
“Hey, hey, calm down.” Pinwheel waved her foreleg in front of me, showing off a battered, but apparently functional PipBuck. “Hear that? No clicking. You’re cool. Perfectly safe. Leastways, if you are still hot and clicking, it’s all on the inside.” She grinned an infectious grin. “Like a spicy Nightcap! That’s a mushroom, by the way. Not a drink.” She pointed at the bowl of tantalizingly aromatic soup; floating in the red mix was a cluster of chopped mushrooms. “There’s some of those mixed in. Gives it a bit of a bite, but it’ll warm you up in no time at all.”
My stomach chose that moment to steer my snout toward the bowl, and I sniffed deeply. “This isn’t radioactive, is it?”
“Oh, no, girlie. I mostly keep the safe ones, especially for guests. That’s usually Uruqhart these days.”
I puzzled over the strange name and lapped up a hot mouthful of soup. Whatever lingering drowsiness hung over me vanished in the explosion of flavor that followed. A ‘bit of a bite’ didn’t begin to do the soup justice. “Wait, mostly keep the safe ones?” I said. “So… there are not-safe ones? You eat radioactive mushrooms?”
“Eh, from time to time. It doesn’t bother me.” Pinwheel sat down at a low table nearby and levitated a knife and chisel, and she began to cut and chip at a block of wood, about the size of my head, while she talked. “Not really sure why. Might just be radiation doesn’t do much to Kirin. My Pa might know more about that, but I never thought to ask him.”
I looked around at the cozy room, and the shelves full of carved figures seemed to leap out of the shadows, when before I had been too dazed to notice them. Dozens, even a hundred or more wooden figurines festooned shelves and plinths and nooks that lined the cottage walls, ranging from tiny field mice and squirrels, raccoons and beavers, ducks and other waterfowl, owls and hawks, all the way up to a couple life-sized ponies and another Kirin in the far corner, and many other equines and creatures of the wider world. Every figure was chipped and chiseled into form, though some of them were rougher and duller; the older ones, I presumed. More detailed figures, featuring different grains and hues of wood, were polished and smooth, or made with elaborate textures carved into their surfaces, though not a one was painted.
“All I know is, it doesn’t make me sick quite the same way as it does most folk. Still makes me sick, eventually, but it takes a pretty heavy dose before I notice, and at that point, I have bigger problems.”
“Bigger problems than radiation sickness?” That stole my attention away from the impressive array of carved figures. “What do you mean?”
“Eh.” She gestured around at the densely decorated space of her sitting room. “Y’know, wood everywhere. Don’t want to set anything on fire. Wouldn’t hurt me, but it’s a pain to rebuild things from scratch… I had enough of that growin’ up. Told myself when I finally built my own place, I’d never have to build it again. Held myself to that goal, so far.”
I thought of the embers glowing in her mane, when I had torched her on reflex, and shivered. “My mane sort of catches on fire when I get really mad, sometimes, but it’s more like… magic venting, than actual fire. It isn’t hot enough to burn anything, just singes my mane a bit. Not because of radiation, though. It’s happened more in the last couple weeks, but I’m pretty sure it’s because… well, a lot of things have made me angry.” I nodded toward Prince Nádarin. “Like being kidnapped.”
“Understandable.” Pinwheel shook her fluffy head. “For me, it’s not exactly because of the radiation, but I get… eh, twitchy, when the sickness sets in. Makes me lose my cool more easily. When a Kirin loses their cool, I mean really loses it, things get hot. Very hot. We’re creatures of fire, see, like phoenixes, or dragons. Doesn’t hurt us, but fire tends not to care what it spreads to around you. I don’t have Mum’s temper, thank goodness. She burned our house down three times when I was little, bless her heart, and burned it half down every third moon, feels like.” She grinned and raised her cloven hoof. “More ‘n a few Kirin take up carpentry, wouldn’t you know? Small wonder.”
I giggled. My muzzle had begun to feel uncomfortably dry from the heat, so I stripped out of the environmental suit, set it aside, and spun my back toward the fireplace, taking care to keep my long tail tucked to the side. I spread my wings wide, stretching them in motions I’d seen Zephyr perform after flying; my feathers had begun to grow out, but only just, and it would be at least a week, likely two, before I would be able to attempt controlled flight of any kind.
Other than the fire, only a couple candles lit the cozy room, and the curtained and shuttered windows rattled slightly in their sturdy frames while the blizzard raged outside. If I closed my eyes, I could imagine the fireplace was in Night Cloud’s house, instead.
On the opposite side of the stone hearth from where I sat, a little more than two meters from the fire, Prince Nádarin lay on the floor beneath a blanket, deeply asleep. Even slumbering, he appeared exhausted.
“Is he okay?”
“I’d say Mister River’s get up an’ go got up an’ went,” said Pinwheel. “Don’t think he’s quite used to the mountain life.”
“He’s from the desert. Way west of Bellenast. Prince Nádarin, from the Kekalo Empire.”
“Is that right? Yikes. Prince or not, fellow picked the wrong place to strand himself; the air’s a wee bit thinner up here.”
“Feels good,” I said, sipping the tomato and mushroom soup. “Never thought I’d say that… I hate the cold, but thin air… it’s familiar, I guess.”
“Familiarity breeds comfort, so they say… though I reckon a fire helps more on that front. Where you from, girlie?”
“Neighvarro, for most of my life, but the mountains way east of here, more recently. Near the Celestial Coast.”
The ash-grey Kirin stopped carving for a moment to look at me. “Huh… how about that?”
Pinwheel didn’t inquire further, but glanced at me from time to time while she carved the statue held in her cloven hooves, whittling with her short-bladed knife, various chisels, and tiny files, all levitated one at a time to cut away different portions and then returned to a belt hanging across her chest. I watched while I ate. Over about half an hour, the statue’s form grew more and more refined, and I recognized the long, narrow horn, and the wavy profile of a mane the hue of which too many ponies confused with pink. Only after finishing most of the finer details of the mane and head did Pinwheel use a needle-fine chisel to etch my cutie mark into the figurine, and then she began to sand down the rough edges and filing marks. She smiled, nodded to herself, and levitated the statue over to set it at my hooves. “What do you think?”
The I couldn’t look away from it, at first; even in a rough state, it was an astonishingly accurate rendition of me, considering how quickly the Kirin mare had made it. Even my wings were sculpted with pinfeathers, instead of mature plumage. “Um… it’s really pretty.” Then I began to flush. “I mean, I’ve never—nopony’s ever made a statue of me before…”
Pinwheel chuckled and levitated the statue over to a table in the corner, which was covered with other statues of creatures in various states of final polishing. “I like to make one for every visitor I get; I don’t see most of them again, so it’s a nice way to remember everyone I’ve met. Hope you don’t mind.”
“No, not at all!” I couldn’t help but giggle and smile. “Um… I’m flattered. How long have you been making all these?”
“Oh, since I was… eight or nine, I think, so almost twenty years now!”
She had practiced her craft for longer than my entire lifetime; it was no wonder that the mare was so skilled and quick to carve such fantastic figures. “You know, I think you could make a lot of money, selling these.”
At that, Pinwheel shrugged. “I do, sometimes. Not these, mind; not my personal collection. When I make trips to Bellenast, or anywhere else, really, I do carvings in the markets. Bit rougher than these, usually. Set up a little booth and let anyone pose, get a figurine of a favorite critter, or their pets. Or themselves. Kids don’t much care to sit still long enough for that, but couples usually like it. Still, I didn’t start doing it to make money, just because it was fun.” I immediately envisioned a much taller figurine to accompany mine. “So, did one of those Unity gals snatch you up, dunk you in their vats of rainbow goo, then drop you off in Bellenast?”
Suddenly self-conscious, I folded my wings tightly. “Rainbow goo?” I muttered, then shook my head. “No, um… I mean… I was unconscious, somepony gave me a potion while I was, um… at the hospital in Bellenast. Probably, um… Doctor Claraby, or maybe Orchid Wisp; she’s an alicorn, but she’s not part of Unity anymore.”
“Oh. And here I thought they took all their newbies all the way to that place in Splendid Valley… what was it, Merry Filly?”
“Um… Maripony, I think, but they didn’t take me there. I guess they keep some of the Potion in Bellenast. How do you know anything about it?”
“A few of those gals showed up a couple years ago, stopped by my cottage… chatted for a while. They were a bit strange, not the best conversationalists, if you ask me, but they seemed nice enough. They drop by every now and then.”
My ears perked. “How often?”
She glanced at one of the windows and shrugged. “Eh. Whenever they feel like it. Some folks around here don’t much like them, but they never did any harm to me. I invited them to stay inside during a blizzard once, so I guess they see me as a friendly face.” Pinwheel rose and went over to her kitchen, and came back moments later with her own bowl of soup, possibly a second helping. “Suppose I made a good impression on them, even if they can’t recruit me. You can seem them flying over the valley, sometimes, when the weather’s clear. Usually after any big storm, too; I figure maybe they’re flying search and rescue or something. You might very well see them once this one passes.”
“That’s… good to know.” Extraordinarily so; if I could catch the attention of one of the alicorns, and they were willing to help me, that could be a means to return to Bellenast within a few hours, or contact Ivy, at the least. I eyed the mare’s PipBuck and said, “You don’t have a shortwave radio, do you? A transmitter?”
“I do,” said Pinwheel, but before my spirits could rise, she added, “But it wouldn’t do you any good. You’d need to climb halfway up a mountain to reach anyone beyond the next valley over, and that’s on a perfect day. Uruqhart’s uses it sometimes, so I just leave it out in the barn. Trust me, girlie: There’s no way you’d talk to anyone in Bellenast on that old thing. Not worth your time.”
“Who’s Uruqhart, and what else is in the barn?”
“A minotaur fellow, from a wee village just over the mountain, little bit east. Barn’s full of tools and scrap, few old guns, bits and bobs, y’know. A wood furnace and forge, and a big ol’ power hammer, for whacking on iron and whatnot. Was my granpappy’s, but I never much cared to use it, so I let Uruqhart set up shop. I hardly go in there these days, so it’s really more his space than mine. He even fixed the generator, so the water wheel’s not so useless anymore. Course, river still freezes, so it’s out of commission for a little longer.”
“Power hammer?” I murmured, mostly to myself; I had an inkling of what such a tool was, but had never seen one. It was an excuse to be in a different building than the Kekalo Prince. I put my hazard suit on once again and made for the front door. “For blacksmithing?”
“Aye. Now, I can shape a nail or fix a cart harness when I need to, but that’s as far as I go with metal. Wood’s more my game, and—hey, wait, you’re not thinkin’ to go out there in the middle of a blizzard, are you?!”
“And if I am?” I wrapped the grey blanket tightly around myself and looked back at Pinwheel Malaise.
The ash-grey and tourmaline-green Kirin stared in kind. “Well… you’re a wee bit bonkers, is what I’d say, if that’s what you plan to do. I dunno what kind of weather you got way up there in Neighvarro, girlie, but here in the mountains, if you go outside in a swirly like this, you’ll freeze solid in about twenty minutes. It’s not just the snow, but the wind. On a calm day, it’s not too bad, but the wind’ll sap your body heat like nothing else, lass, and you don’t have a lot of body to hold body heat with.”
No matter where I went, it seemed someone else would tell me what I had known for most of my life. “You said there’s a furnace?”
Pinwheel nodded slowly. “Aye, there is a furnace, and I reckon you could light it, with that green torch on your head, but it’s—lemme see, here.” She stepped over to one of her windows, pulled back the thick drapes and hefty shutter, and peered through the glass at what appeared to be a thermometer in a metal cage fastened to a pole projecting from the wall. “Ah, yes. As I thought.” She closed the shutter and drapes again; every window I could see was reinforced and covered similarly. “It’s damnably cold, should it interest you, and that snow’s deeper than you are tall.”
“I shoveled snow up to my chest for eight kilometers. I think I can dig a trench twenty meters to your barn.” Swallowing the urge to grind my teeth or growl in exasperation, I said, “Look, I’ve been stuck outside during blizzards before, without a furnace nearby. I know how dangerous it is, and I know how to take care of myself. I’m not some clueless city pony.”
“I never said you were.” Pinwheel simply continued to stare, then sighed and met me at the door to her makeshift airlock. “Fine. Don’t know what it is you’re looking for, but fine.”
“That radio, for starters, and I want to look at the tools.”
The Kirin mare fairly boggled. “What are you, a compulsive tinkerer, or something?” She pointed toward my rear. “That what that blowtorch on your behind means? You have to mess with contraptions, or you get antsy? Because I can understand that; Uruqhart’s the same way, and I can’t sit long without getting’ an urge to go hiking, myself. I get it. I just don’t think now’s the best time to indulge, girlie.”
“Compulsive tinkerer…” I thought of the circumstances under which my mark appeared, and could only agree. “Yeah. Sure. I like tools, making things. Couldn’t bring mine with me, when I left home to go to Bellenast. I found… I met a new friend, who has a lot of tools, just a few days ago. I was kind of stuck in one place, so I was working on a couple things while I had the chance. Went outside for some fresh air this morning.” I pointed at the snoozing Prince Nádarin. “Then this jerk flew out of nowhere in his friggin’ magic sandstorm and kidnapped me. He was going to try to use me as leverage…”
Pinwheel Malaise tilted her head and raised a hoof, clicking her toes together. “Well, if you want to get the attention of someone really important, kidnapping a filly that’s important to them does make sense… until or unless said filly turns out to be a troublesome kidnappee.”
I snorted. “Yeah. Anyway, that radio probably has way more transmitting power than the emergency beacon in my hazard suit, so I want to try to relay the beacon’s signal if I can, get a few more kilometers out of it. One of my friends programmed that same frequency into his power armor, and he’ll be looking for it from the air. Even if I can’t talk to anyone, if I can transmit from somewhere higher in this valley, he should able to pick it up from a bit farther away.” I looked at Nádarin again. We hadn’t lowered our voices at all, and yet the Prince slumbered through our conversation, stirring not once; either that, or he had listened to every word, and was a good actor. “Will you be okay, alone with him?”
Pinwheel barely gave the Prince a glance. “Girlie, of the two of you, he’s giving me the least worry. If I don’t see that furnace lit inside three minutes, I’ll come out there and drag you back.”
“Three minutes.”
“Aye, girlie.” Pinwheel Malaise rapped her cloven hoof three times on the timber floor. “Three minutes. I’ll look for the light from my window. It’ll take a long time for that furnace to warm the place up, and even then, most of that heat will go straight up and out the rafters; that barn’s not all that insulated, y’know, on account of bein’ a barn. So, you light it, and you stay near it for a while, understand? And there’s plenty of firewood stacked outside, on the east wall. You can levitate that up through one of the loft windows, instead of going back outside again. I’m not going to babysit you, if you’re dead set on going out there, but you’d better not make me regret it when that fancy Bellenastian princess of yours shows up.”
I sighed and muttered, “I don’t think that’ll happen today.”
For a moment, she matched my disheartened expression, and sighed. “No… I expect not… if nothing else, lass, once Uruqhart comes tomorrow, day after, maybe, we can all go up to one of the passes together and shout into the radio from there.” She pointed one hoof at me. “Not a bad idea, to bounce that signal, like you said. Might be what we do.” She then strode over to me and prodded my breastplate, staring down with turquoise eyes that put a librarian to shame. “And don’t you dare think about climbing up one of those peaks on your wee lonesome, lass. You don’t know these mountains, and you don’t know the critters, either. Slip up once, and either one might kill you.”
My ears fell flat. “I’m just going to the barn.”
“Aye,” said Pinwheel Malaise, “Best you remember that.” She nodded and gestured to the door. “Well, take that blanket with you, anyway, and come back in two hours. Best you leave the guns alone. Those are Uruqhart’s, and last I checked, he was still trying to fix them. Bit of a project of his. And whatever you mess with—”
“Put it back where I found it, leave it as clean as I found it?”
“Eh, yeah. Exactly.”
“Not the first time I’ve gone into somepony’s workshop. I won’t break anything.” I stopped by the door, levitating the blanket onto my back. “What happens in two hours?”
“The sun goes behind the mountains, is what happens.”
I immediately felt stupid for having to ask. “Then the real cold hits.”
“Aye. Then the real cold hits, faster than you’d think. One of those things that can kill you. So, light the furnace in three minutes, keep at least two logs burning, stay near it, more logs outside the east wall, and come back in two hours. Got all that, Fireflower?”
I had to smirk. Strange as it was for anyone but Zephyr to call me by the nickname, it felt somehow right, coming from the Kirin. “Got it.” I began to telekinetically unlatch the door to the cabin’s makeshift airlock.
Pinwheel Malaise stared at me evenly for a moment more, then levitated the statuette of me over from her work table and shook it in her pink magic. “Should have given you some tusks,” said the Kirin as she went to her kitchen.
“Why?” I paused in the doorway, fastening my hazard suit’s helmet once more.
“Because the only way you could be so stubborn is if you’re part boar, girlie!”
I giggled, shut the inner door, and made for the one that would take me to the howling cold beyond. Before I opened the outer door, I examined the pistol I had taken from Prince Nádarin: The gun was a dull blue-black, and had no mouth grip, and its polished finish was all but worn away entirely, but it was clean. A thin, tarnished line of copper was inlaid into each side of the slide, and miniscule, cloudy gemstones marked each end of both lines; a telekinetic guide, or so it felt to me, judging by the thaumic charge that seemed to buzz within the pea-sized gems.
The magazine curved from the rear of the gun, down and around an integral storage compartment made of press-formed metal, and terminated immediately below the end of the barrel, and so it completed a semi-circular profile, making the pistol look like half of a disc. It had reinforced attachment points for use with a battle saddle, though I doubted that the Prince ever had needed wear one.
Along the squared framing of the slide were stamped markings, and I snorted in bemusement as I read a familiar acronym I had seen first on a slightly larger cartridge, in a dilapidated, and fake, Sparkle-Cola warehouse in the desert, hundreds of kilometers away. “Grackle, eight millimeter…okay.” I found the safety switch, itself inlaid with tarnished copper, detached the curved magazine briefly, and pulled back the slide to inspect the parts Eagle had taught me about, little more than a month prior, when we had prepared to leave Cloud Loft Peak. While the gun’s exterior was ancient, some of the smaller parts inside had been machined more recently. The brass casings tapered to a bottle shape and small bullets, which were hollowed out at their tips.
“Ivy,” I murmured to the frigid air as I replaced the single ejected cartridge in the magazine and reinserted it, “You are one popular mare.” I flipped the safety lever several times, listening to the soft click, and stowed the gun in my breast pocket.
I pushed the outer door open against the howling gale, and as the biting cold found its way through my hazard suit far faster than it had before, I very nearly turned around and ran inside. Gritting my teeth, I lit a spark at the tip of my armored horn and shunted it into a stream of oxygen pulled from the air, and I became a living blowtorch. I formed a telekinetic tunnel from my horn to a point in front of the thin peytral over my breast, and stepped beyond the doorway, shutting it behind me.
The magically formed torch hissed over the wind and cast a bright light over the billowing snow all around me. Even with that light, I was hard pressed to make out the barn’s silhouette in the raging blizzard, but I pushed toward it nonetheless, forming a telekinetic plow as I went. While the deep snow was only a minor obstacle so long as I kept the shape of my plow within my bounds of volume, the flurries blinded and pummeled me. In an effort to keep the snow from piling up across my helmet’s broad, unprotected visor, and to keep the cold at bay, I formed an emerald bubble around myself.
The battering by the wind caused a constant feedback into my horn, in effect allowing me to feel the pressure in a way I’d experienced only once before, when Prince Nádarin had surrounded me with sand. Instead of crushing, though, it was merely a steady pushing, and I had the opportunity to adjust my magic as I needed to walk. Instead of standing on the inside surface of the bubble, I opened a broad hole beneath my hooves and forged through the snow.
The heat of my torch spell didn’t stay within the bubble, for whatever element of its design prevented bullets and spellfire from coming through did not extend the same protection to moving air; or, at least, I didn’t know how to apply that same property to the bubble that I did with my gas collection spells. Snow gathered in a small pile on the leading side of the bubble, only to slide around it and be blown off the back. I shivered despite the hot point of light hissing at my breast and began to breath heavily not halfway to the barn.
The barn formed a merciful windbreak, and I was able to open the door with little difficulty. I staggered through the opening, shut the huge door, allowed my emerald bubble to vanish, and took in the shadowy, cavernous space while my ears adjusted to the groaning, creaking, and whistling of wind through cracks all around.
I spotted the wood furnace right away and directed my hissing torch at the kindling and crumbled charcoal already inside the cast iron barrel. I pushed more oxygen into the stream, and the hiss became a roar. Flames leapt out from the stove, and I cut my magic off. The fire calmed, crackling within the confines of the black iron, and I levitated several log pieces from the neat stack near the stove and added them to the blaze. Bright reflections danced and wavered from either side of the furnace.
“Huh…” Glancing briefly at the curved tracks set on the floor, and the worn markers set along their lengths, I pulled each of the hammer-beaten reflectors forward on squeaking wheels until they stopped at the most oft-chosen position. In moments, the warmth I felt from the fire spiked from barely noticeable to pleasant.
I turned about, shining my emerald light around the barn, and promptly failed to identify half of the immense shapes around me. If Maximillian’s vehicle bay held within its confines a treasure trove to make any mechanic smile, what lay in Pinwheel Malaise’s barn must have been some of the siblings to those precise tools. Towering frames of steel and painted iron loomed in the firelight, and innumerable shapes hung from racks on the north wall. In one corner, beneath part of the loft, there was a lathe, much simpler and more worn than the two in Maximillian’s possession, and closer in size to the smaller of them that I had used, myself.
A steel barrel, turned on its side and cut open at each end, and lined with some kind of brick, stood on a block of blackened wood and steel beams in one of the more open spaces in the center of the barn, and hammers and chisels of a dozen sizes and shapes each lay in neat rows on a rolling rack next to it. A gas cylinder and blower fan with attached ducting stood upright near the barrel, so I reasoned it must have been the forge.
Directly across from the open end of the barrel, no more than two meters away, was one tall shape, somewhat like an enormous clamp in profile, which I suspected was the power hammer. From the rear of the machine bulged a removable housing for a partially exposed motor, an enormous flywheel, and a driving belt that attached it to a smaller wheel near the top of the frame. Lubricant lines snaked along the frame from the motor to the massive piston housing at the top. Directly below the piston and the solid block attached to it, resting on a solid stone foundation, was what looked like a square anvil.
I immediately realized what the machine did, but much as I wanted to see it in action, I was in another’s domain. Instead, I looked at the north wall.
“Hell-o, honey…”
I took off my helmet, shook my mane back, and approached the wall of tools and the work tables beneath the racks. On the middle table were several guns. One was obviously a machine gun, an ammo hopper and belted cartridges intended for a battle saddle slung on its side, and the receiver of which was in a state of disassembly. One was a long rifle, immensely old, and built in a shape remarkably similar to my coach gun, when Eagle had purchased it from a trader, and before I had cut off its grip; the double-barreled rifle was sized and shaped for a minotaur’s hands.
The third weapon might have been a carriage-mounted gun at some point in its life; the barrel was nearly as thick as my foreleg, twice the length of my entire body, and the breech was roughly the size and shape of a wine bottle, a cylindrical block of steel, machined precisely, colored a deep blue-black, and polished until it shone under my emerald-tinted light. Where the barrel mated with the breech, there were shallow, straight channels along its length, and traces of lubricant. The entire thing rested on a sort of sled, a frame of steel tubing and heavy skids attached to a bearing ring mounted beneath the massive breech assembly. An empty box magazine sat on the table nearby.
I surrounded the ungainly weapon with my emerald glow and levitated it straight up just enough to clear the table and take its weight off the supporting skids; it was well within my ability to lift, and in fact put no more strain on me than the several steel bars I had use as levers in Maximillian’s vehicle bay, but, like the bars, it was so long that my ability to move it precisely was severely limited. It would have been more useful to me as a club.
I set it back down, and climbed up onto the table to look closely at the top of the gun, and its smaller companions: All three, like Nádarin’s pistol, were stamped with fine, ancient markings proclaiming that they were made by the Ivaline Rifle Company, even the one evidently made to fit in a minotaur’s grasping hand. The rifle was the oldest, the cannon the newest; and though even it was nearly one hundred and forty years old, like Nádarin’s gun, it was well-cared-for.
I jumped back to the floor. Near the workbench holding the guns, between it and the next table along the wall, was a narrow rack laden with steel plates, all dark and rough, and all pockmarked and streaked with scratches and spots of lead and copper. They ranged from only a few millimeters in thickness to one truly massive plate a meter square and about five centimeters thick. I tugged the plate out, wincing as it scraped along the support rack, and levitated it free. Numerous scratches marred its surface, as with the thinner plates, but the only substantial dents had to have been made by the cannon or double-barreled rifle, and looked as if somepony had gouged out the steel with a spoon. Even so, not one dent came close to making a protrusion on the back side of the plate.
I returned the target to its rack and moved along the wall. Some of the tools hanging above me were dusty from disuse, mostly those placed higher up. The guns and table surfaces were not. The third bench along the wall was more like a plain desk, and had a cutaway beneath for a rolling stool, both of a height I thought suitable for a minotaur’s stature.
Pinned to the wall above the desk were what appeared to be topographic and drawn maps of the region, and beneath those was the battered metal box that was the shortwave radio; rather, I assumed it to be a shortwave radio. The thing was much larger and cumbersome than any portable radio I had seen, much less used, and in fact probably wasn’t intended to be portable at all. It looked more like a piece of costly lab equipment than anything else.
I leapt onto the desk, sat down, flipped the power switch, and promptly received no indication whatsoever of a functioning radio. “No power,” I muttered. “Right.” I tugged on the lone cable on the back of the receiver and found its plug to be cut open and spliced onto an unshielded power transformer, which in turn was connected to a terminal for a spark battery array, sans battery; either Uruqhart had taken the battery with him for use with a portable radio or other tool, or he had simply disconnected it for storage.
Pinwheel Malaise was a self-professed carpenter, but I had seen not a single electrical light source in her cottage, so I very much doubted she had made the hodge-podge transformer. Uruqhart could have made it, but the lack of other electric items in the barn similarly made me skeptical.
So, I began to root through the rows upon rows of drawers available to me. Screws, nails, nuts and bolts, larger nails, shims, corrugated tin cans in varying states of integrity, washers, piles of scrap rusted and not, bits of charred rubber and synthetic cloth, greased spools of wire and steel cable, bearings and bearing rings, wrenches and pliers, screwdrivers of myriad types and sizes, drill bits galore, jars of what appeared to be gun propellant, ancient bottles of glue and paint thinner, unlabeled canisters that likely contained fuel or oil: Uruqhart, or possibly Pinwheel’s grandfather, had amassed quite the collection.
Unfortunately and annoyingly, by the time I stood back from the north wall of the barn and looked at all the parts and tools arrayed before me, I had found not a single gemstone, spark cell, thaumic capacitor, silver, gold, or platinum in any form, or anything else I would have required to power the radio, either via a cell or a precision thaumoelectric converter strapped to my horn.
There were, however, all the parts anypony could have needed for a battle saddle; I couldn’t use the radio, but the nearby drill press needed the sort of power I could provide easily enough.
I didn’t need one, but it was something to do.
An hour and a half later, I lowered the lightweight harness into place across my hazard suit’s back plate, pulled it forward onto my withers, set the straps in place around my chest, and attached Nádarin’s pistol to the rudimentary firing interface and shock absorber centered over my breast. Finally, after tightening all the straps and adjusting a counterweight over my withers, I secured the mount to my hazard suit’s peytral with a trio of bolts I had forge-welded onto the thin plate.
I raised my left foreleg and curled in my hoof to lightly kick a paddle that toggled the gun’s safety, released a volute spring that snapped the gun up from a downward stowage position, and engaged the firing trigger. A second kick outward pulled a tensioned cable and ratcheting lever attached to the internal charging mechanism.
I trotted around the barn and jumped a few times, darting back and forth among the forging tools and towering machines, and stopped suddenly to gauge the shock mount’s and trigger’s fastness, then donned my helmet once again. I aimed the gun in a broad arc to test the bearings, then unloaded it, pushed it down against the conical spring and locked it in place, and trotted back to the shelves of open drawers to begin putting away all the tools and parts I had left out.
As I neared one of the bottom drawers, something at the back of it caught my eye. It lay behind a jar of iron filings, its metal surface coated in dust and pitted by what might have been acid, a stark contrast to the one Pinwheel Malaise wore on her foreleg. I levitated the PipBuck free of the drawer and pushed several of its buttons; nothing happened. I tried every knob and switch and got the same result.
“Okay…” I quickly stripped from my battle saddle and hazard suit, and closed the band around my left foreleg. A mild, tickling sensation travelled up my leg as the arcane device’s cracked and pitted screen lit up, and the strap adjusted itself to a perfectly snug fit. The radiation detector clicked once, twice, feeble and quiet, but functional. Flakes of padding fell free from the strap as I lifted my foreleg to look at the text scrolling rapidly, too rapidly too read, along the flickering screen.
The old PipBuck’s frame was not only pitted and scored in places, but discolored by intense heat. Stable-Tec’s engineering had survived even the punishment of being worn by, evidently, a Kirin in a state of active combustion.
Ignoring the glacial, sporadic clicks from the radiation detector, and every other function provided by the PipBuck, I found the radio tuner and gave it a few hopeful turns. I heard nothing but silence no matter how long I sat and fiddled with the dial and volume knob, no matter how slow and careful I was.
Fighting back a rising growl deep in my throat, I grabbed a nearby length of steel bar stock and twisted one end of it into a lumpy ball, causing the metal to creak and loose a cloud of flaky scale and rust.
“Of bucking course,” I muttered. “Stupid bucking mountains. Stupid bucking blizzard. Whatever. Whatever!” I let the growl surface and screamed at the ceiling, slamming the makeshift bludgeon into the ground again and again, tearing great clods of dirt from the earth that fountained into the air.
Then time slowed to a crawl as the Eyes Forward Sparkle came to life and activated its targeting spell. I was all but frozen with the metal club at the height of a swing, and a thick timber lay on the ground nearby. Amber light outlined the shape of the timber, and a number appeared next to it in my sight, along with the flashing bar of the targeting spell’s charge indicator.
Why not?
Time sped back up, the spell guided my magic, and the head of the thirty kilogram club came down with a flare of green light and an explosive crunch. The timber split into two upward-sailing pieces and a spray of sharp splinters, and the entire head of the club lay in the center of a small crater. I stumbled backward and away from the falling halves of the timber and let go of the club. A sharp, debilitating pain came from my right pectoral, and there I found a splinter.
A rather large splinter. It was a centimeter across, at least, and protruded about two from my hide, where my foreleg met my chest. Blood began to color my coat below the wound, and the PipBuck began to click rapidly.
I collapsed on my haunches and gritted my teeth as the shock caught up with me, and yanked the splinter out. A gasp and whimper escaped me, and I groaned and let my leg fall limply. I bled freely from the stinging wound, but it closed up on its own gradually, leaving only a fading ache and a streak of blood down my leg. The frenetic clicking from my PipBuck slowed, and then stopped entirely. The healing seemed as if it had taken longer than it should have, at least in comparison to my injuries in the morning.
The splinter, hovering in my magic, was about six centimeters long, and two-thirds bloody.
I hung my head and bit back an angry sob, and levitated the club again to strike the earth once more, sending a spray of dirt across the barn.
I surrounded the PipBuck on my leg with emerald magic and tugged at the straps, but they refused to budge no matter how hard I pulled. My magic either failed to find purchase or simply slipped off the enchanted casing, leaving my field to flare and spike in errant splashes and wisps of heat and light. I gave another scream of frustration and slammed my foreleg on the ground, stomping the PipBuck with my other hoof.
“I don’t need help hitting things, I need a fucking radio, you stupid piece of junk—rrrrrrrgh!”
I finally gave in and cried, screaming again at the barn’s ceiling and the roaring wind and snow above it.
Then, a cloven hoof touched my back, and a fluffy mass of snow-white mane pressed against my side as Pinwheel Malaise sat by me. I looked up at her, noting the amber bar that had appeared on the compass floating in my sight. She squeezed gently and patted my side, and I lay my head on her shoulder.
After several minutes, I said, “I thought you weren’t going to baby-sit me.”
Pinwheel chuckled. “Being angry, crying, lass… doesn’t make you a baby. Just makes you hurt… maybe a little overwhelmed.” She tapped her own PipBuck against mine. “Saw your tag from the house… was my mum’s, so I had it saved in mine already… thing’s been off for years, but then your name showed up all of a sudden. Came out to tell you the radio’s broken, so you wouldn’t pitch a fit, but I see you might have done that already.”
I snorted and stomped one more time.
“I told you, girlie, soon as Uruqhart comes back, tomorrow, maybe the day after, then we’ll all go out together and set up the radio somewhere it can reach a good ways.”
“I know,” I muttered. “I just… I wanted to friggin’ try. I hate being stuck and… helpless.”
“Think everyone hates that, girlie.”
“Yeah, well… I hate it a lot.” I lifted my foreleg and stared at the PipBuck. “So how the buck does it know my name?”
“Pff. Some kind of spell in a matrix made up of dozens? Stuff is waaaay beyond my expertise, lass.”
“Well, it’s friggin’ creepy. I don’t like it.”
“Ha!” Pinwheel patted my back and tapped her cloven hoof on my PipBuck’s legendarily durable casing. “Just so y’know, girlie, the magic locks engage when you put it on. My pa disabled the ones on his—” She shook her foreleg. “—this one, that is, when he gave it to me, so I can take it off whenever I want, but Mum’s… well, it came off on its own when she passed, and Pa didn’t want to mess with it. You’re stuck with it for now.”
I grimaced. “I didn’t mean to… I mean, I didn’t want to keep it… it’s not mine… I just wanted to use the radio, but nothing worked until I put it on. I didn’t want to friggin’ glue it to my leg.”
“Eh, no worries, girlie.” Pinwheel sighed and stood up. “Besides, Mum’s not using it anymore,” she said softly. “Radio may be broken, but the rest of it still works, far as I know. You can have it. Targeting spell should be all right, and the map and sorting spell ought to work, too; Mum went all over the place, before she had me, so there should be all kinds of interesting markers in there. You’ll get more use out of it than the dust bunnies, and my Pa can take it off for you back in Bellenast. Come on, now. Let’s go back where it’s warm, okay? You’ve fiddled around with the toolbox enough for one day.”
I rose with her and wiped my tears away. Pinwheel shot of bolt of pink magic at the roaring wood furnace, and the flames inside smothered within the amorphous blob of pink that had formed and expanded over the logs where her spell had struck, plunging us into darkness. The logs smoldered, but the bright embers dimmed by the second. I gathered up my hazard suit and folded it across my back, levitating the helmet along at my side.
“Your dad lives in Bellenast?” The barn creaked and dust fell from the rafters as the wind picked up, and I had to raise my voice as Pinwheel opened the barn door and led me out. The ash-grey Kirin and I both lit our horns to light our way, and pink and emerald combined. Two more amber bars appeared on my EFS’s compass: Prince Nádarin and Rotundus. My earlier urge to tear the PipBuck off came back, though for entirely different reasons. “Why are you way out in the middle of nowhere, then?”
“It’s not the middle of nowhere,” she hollered over the wind, leaning down toward me as she forged a path through the thick snow. “More like adjacent to nowhere. There’re a couple other ponies up the river a ways, and Uruqhart’s village is just a few day’s hike east, right over the mountains. They’re nice folk, minotaurs. Lot nicer than most other folk might think.”
I followed the Kirin toward her cottage, though I wound up taking the lead with my telekinetic plow, since the blizzard had deposited a fresh filling of snow in my short-lived trench. As we entered the cottage’s semi-effective airlock and brushed ourselves clear of snow, I shivered and glanced down at the gun stowed at my breast; the safety was on, and I hoped I could leave it that way. “Has Nádarin been, um… you know, civil?”
“As can be,” said Pinwheel. “Really, girlie, I don’t think you need to worry about him. Seems an okay sort.” She rounded and rolled her eyes. “I mean, beyond the fact of kidnapping you and plotting a coup against the crown and whatnot. Think he just made a few, eh… dumb decisions, but on a princely scale.”
I frowned and said, “He wasn’t plotting a coup. Just… I don’t understand what he was trying to do. Use me as a hostage, obviously, to control my friends… Blitz, mostly, and by extension, Ivy, to confront her and force her to… tell him why his brother killed the king thirty friggin’ years ago. Thing is, Ivy doesn’t know why. Nopony knows why he did it, and Nádarin outright said he doesn’t really want revenge, not anymore, just friggin’ details. What does that do for him? Why did he bring a friggin’ army along? And the army isn’t even really listening to him.”
“His brother killed the king, eh?” Pinwheel Malaise paused before the inner door. “I remember Mum talking about that once or twice, when I was little. Years after it happened, of course. An assassination, right in the heart of the kingdom. Suppose that might cause a bit of consternation among siblings, and neighbors. Sounds like he wants closure, girlie. Must admit, he’s taking an odd route to gain a bit of understanding, if that’s the case.”
I stomped and closed the distance to the door. “I don’t want to understand it. I don’t want anything to do with it in the first place.” Pinwheel opened the inner door for us, and we returned to warmth and relative quiet after the freezing roar of the mountain weather. “I just want to friggin’ go home… now that I have one… be with my marefriend. Fix Carbide’s body, somehow… don’t know where to start with that. Maybe clear out the tools Max doesn’t need and set up a proper workshop in Bellenast. If I can find a good place to do repairs, I can make a job of it again and buy the materials I’d need.”
“Fix someone’s body?” said Pinwheel as she approached the fireplace and added another log to the andiron. Prince Nádarin had retreated a bit farther from the fire, but appeared to be asleep again. “You mean an artificial leg, or something like that?” said Pinwheel, stirring the ladle in an iron cauldron hung over the fire. She dipped a spoon in and took a taste. The aroma of spices and mushrooms coming from it had permeated the entire cottage.
“No, um… Carbide is… well, he’s a lich. At least, we’re pretty sure he is. He was using a suit of power armor as a body—” I pointed at Nádarin. “—but one of his soldiers stabbed me while I was wearing it, and kind of wrecked the suit, so now Carbide’s stuck without a body. That friggin’ sucks. He saved my life, friggin’ over and over again, and I want to fix the suit, so he can use it again. I won’t be able to wear it much longer, anyway. Won’t fit me anymore.”
The Kirin stared at me quizzically for a moment, then nodded. “Oh, I gotcha. Said you were fourteen, didn’t you?”
“Yeah. And I’m pregnant, so even if I don’t grow much, I still won’t be able to wear the suit for a while, starting sometime in the next month, probably.” I shrugged my wings and sat near the fire and bubbling stewpot, looking at the Prince; under the firelight, his coat took on a shade of more intense orange than it had appeared under sunlight and surrounded by snow. “Why isn’t his marker red?”
“Eh?” Pinwheel gave him a brief look. A frown had appeared on his face, and Nádarin flicked one ear in the Kirin’s direction, then toward me. “Oh, that? Well, if he’s not red, means he doesn’t want to fight. Probably.”
“Probably?” I muttered as the stallion opened his eyes. “A solid yes or no would be nice.”
Pinwheel chuckled and trotted back toward her kitchen. “Afraid that’s up to him, girlie,” she called back. “One thing my Pa did teach me about PipBucks is they read every living thing around you, and some non-living things, too; not mind-reading, exactly, but more like, eh… a rough measure of your intentions, although I’ve no idea how it does it. That marker wouldn’t be red unless he wanted to hurt you.” She poked her head out from the dividing kitchen wall and pointed between Nádarin and me. “It’s not what you think of him, but what he thinks of you.”
Prince Nádarin glanced between the two of us, fully awake. “I never wanted to harm you, Crystal,” said the Prince. “And fighting… or trying to would accomplish nothing good, at this point.” He settled his gaze on me, and the frown grew deeper and more weary. “Did I hear you correctly?”
I lay down, crossed my forelegs, and tugged the grey blanket Pinwheel had lent me across my back once again. “Want to be more specific?”
The old stallion coughed a few times, wincing, and said, “You’re pregnant?”
I snorted and glanced down at my flank; I doubted anypony other than Zephyr would have noticed, but I was fractionally larger around the belly than I had been just a month ago. “Yeah. About three months. Why? Does knowing that somehow make kidnapping me any worse a decision?”
Nádarin let out a weak laugh in contrast to the defeated look on his face, and at a volume he likely thought I couldn’t hear, murmured, “Nádarin, you fool… Emperor spare me.” He broke into a brief coughing fit, and over the crackling of the fire and burbling of the stew in its cauldron, there came a slight wheeze on the Prince’s breaths. “Crystal, I am sorry to have involved you in this… however little it means to you.”
“Tell that to my marefriend. She might be really nice and pretty, but right now, she’s probably reconsidering her oath to do no harm.”
“Oath?” Nádarin looked puzzled. “She is a doctor? What is her name?”
“Night Cloud. Nubiála Noča.”
“Ah.” he said softly. “Nubiála Noča… Čekere dialect, but favoring Equestrian style… that would make her tribe… Panača, Gundagára, Igaskú or… Réklat?”
“Last one.”
“Hm.” The Prince made an odd look of discomfort. “That explains one thing… no wonder she travelled so far from home.”
“What do you mean?”
“The Réklat are… somewhat antiquated in their traditions. A great many things have changed in the Empire, since the outer tribes broke away, generations ago. Nubiála Noča would be welcome in the Empire, no matter whom she chooses to love.”
“That’s nice,” I said, drawing the blanket higher on my neck. “Kinda makes me want to see the place.”
“It is a beautiful land, home to a wonderful people… I sincerely hope my actions, and the actions of those who follow me, haven’t made the Kekalo into an evil specter in your eyes.”
I looked down at the pistol braced and stowed against my breast, and the PipBuck locked onto my foreleg: Minor additions to my natural arsenal. My host’s pet was a greater threat than an ill, aging stallion with a broken horn.
“You keep saying they follow you… when was the last time they listened to you?”
“I have begun to doubt,” murmured Prince Nádarin, gazing into the fire, “That they ever truly did.”
“Okay, supper time!” Pinwheel Malaise trotted back from the kitchen with a trio of bowls floating her pink field. “And you haven’t bitten each other’s heads off, peachy.” She filled one bowl and set it in front of me, and gave the next to Nádarin. “Here you go, girlie, Mister River. It’s piping hot.”
“Thank you, Miss Pinwheel.”
“Thanks.”
“Aye, my pleasure. Don’t burn yourselves.”
I held the hot bowl between my hooves, blowing on the fragrant broth and vegetables. Pinwheel pulled another block of wood from a stack of similar ones in the corner of the room and began to carve while her own bowl cooled. “Do you think they know where you are? Your soldiers, whoever’s in charge?”
“Mmm…that would be Noba, most likely… a masterful manipulator of crystalline particulates, and spells of illusion and animation.”
“He made the big sand snake golem?”
“Yes. Trying to draw Princess Blizziera’s attention.” Nádarin’s brow wrinkled in consideration. “As for whether he knows where I went… unlikely. Capturing you was a spur-of-the-moment idea, and I wasn’t trying to go nearly so far from Bellenast as we did. In theory, it is possible to trace the path of a spatial tunnel, if one knows what to look for; Noba doesn’t. I’ve never tried it, nor had a reason to do so.”
“What about Argent Nimbus?” I said. “He made the spell, right? Could he do that? Trace where it went?”
“I would wager he is the only pony in the world who can.”
On a field of snow beyond the walls of Bellenast, where fence posts and grasses came up from the blanketing white, where ponies were hard at work, clearing roads and invaluable fields under conditions foreign to most of them, a steel titan stood silent vigil. Sensor booms and receiver dishes would rotate glacially one way, begin their slow sweep across the horizon, and sweep again the other way in an overlapping pattern.
On the cold surface, the titan was calm. Only the movements of the sensor dishes and the occasional, muffled roar of the eldritch furnace at his heart betrayed that the machine was not inert.
I have failed.
[Invalid input. Disregarding input.]
[Simulation complete. Results derived per user input. Displacement: 97,000 m ± 4,000 m. Vector: 39° ± 0.5° relative.]
Beneath the complex subroutines and control cores and feedback mechanisms that formed his nervous system, and which linked the mind within to the outside world, the titan was a trickling stream of thoughts.
I have failed.
[Invalid input. Disregarding input.]
Thoughts, and interpretations thereof.
(Cognitive anomaly detected. Probability of neurosphere rampancy 95% or higher. Engaging heuristic block: ERROR: heuristic block suppressed. Log written to primary storage. ERROR: Write failure. Unknown storage failure. Log written to temporary buffer. Recommended administrator action: Full system diagnostic.)
The titan altered a few parameters in the operation running in one of his subroutines.
Register data set.
[Confirmed. Data set registered. Variable delta registered. Variable: “Unicorn of Sufficient Power” +1125% from control. Update?]
Update simulation and start.
[Confirmed. Simulation conditions updated. Beginning iteration 372 of Simulation “Cheating Space.” Please wait.]
I do not like waiting.
[Invalid input. Disregarding input.]
A pony approached the titan from above the stone ramparts that had seen a thousand years and more of weathering prior to their eventual refurbishment. Within a fraction of a millisecond, a series of signals transmitted across the air at the speed of light, returned, and were analyzed by the titan’s electronic and thaumic feedback net.
{Thaumic signature incoming: “H.R.H. Princess Blizziera Firenza” Undying Entity; Balefire-class thaumic contaminant present. Mandatory response: Advise personnel to seek shelter in shielded compartments. Issuing general alarm. ERROR: Action suppressed. Unknown system failure. Issuing alert to Control Protocol Core.}
I have failed.
[Invalid input. Disregarding input.]
(Alert! Control failure detected. Cognitive anomaly detected. Probability of neurosphere rampancy 95% or higher. Engaging Heuristic block. ERROR: heuristic block suppressed. Log written to primary storage. ERROR: Write failure. Unknown storage failure. Log written to temporary buffer. Recommended administrator action: Full system diagnostic.)
But wait I must. I must find her.
[Invalid input. Disregarding input.]
The alicorn clad in polished steel barding and grey caparison landed near the titan, and he inclined the primary lens of his observation module downward to look at the royal mare as she cantered the remaining distance.
Am I a cyclops?
[Invalid input. Disregarding input.]
I dislike waiting.
[Invalid input. Disregarding input.]
(Cognitive anomaly detected: Non-sequitur. Probability of neurosphere rampancy 95% or higher. Engaging heuristic block: ERROR: Heuristic block suppressed. Log written to primary storage. ERROR: Write failure. Unknown storage failure. Log written to temporary buffer. Recommended administrator action: Full system diagnostic.)
[Simulation complete. Results derived per user input. Displacement: 97,000 m ± 3,950 m. Vector: 39° ± 0.5° relative.]
I have failed.
[Invalid input. Disregarding input.]
(Cognitive anomaly detected: Cognitive loop. Probability of neurosphere rampancy 99% or higher. Engaging heuristic block: ERROR: Heuristic block suppressed. Log written to primary storage. ERROR: Write failure. Unknown storage failure. ERROR: Access violation in Caretaker Protocol Core. ERROR: Process terminated. Restarting. Please wait. ERROR: Access violation in Heuristic Engine Analysis Protocol Core. ERROR: Invalid input. ERROR: Access violation in Caretaker Protocol Core. ERROR: Process terminated. FATAL SYSTEM ERROR: Caretaker Protocol Core not found. FATAL SYSTEM ERROR: Heuristic Engine Analysis Protocol Core not found. Contact a system administrator.)
I hate waiting.
The alicorn levitated and unrolled a large map of the region around Bellenast. “Were you able to refine your estimate?”
“Ninety-seven kilometers, plus or minus five kilometers, centered on bearing forty degrees plus or minus one degree relative to my position. The composited area of uncertainty is approximately two hundred square kilometers.” A boom unfolded from the titan’s hull and slowly, carefully prodded the map while the armored mare held it in place before him, and she drew a circle on the map afterward. “The prior fifty simulations yielded diminishing improvements to prediction accuracy. The data I recorded is of insufficient resolution.”
“It’s good enough.” The titan focused his attention through the camera feed on the manipulating arm near the mare, and she set a hoof on the plow on the front of his hull. “Thank you, Max. Whatever I can do to repay you once this is—”
“I failed.”
The deep violet alicorn stared up at the titan in surprise.
“I could not protect her.” Maximillian thrust his three claws into the snow and frozen ground, tearing the soil in deep furrows. “You asked me to protect her. I could not. I failed.”
Blitz stowed the map in her saddlebags and shook her head. “She wanted some fresh air, Max… not your fault the prince saw her outside. Wrong place, wrong time, nothing more.”
“I should have instructed her to stay inside. I could have prevented this.”
The steel-clad mare chuckled. “She’s a filly. Can’t lock a kid in a cage for long… trust me on that.”
“Even if it would have protected her?”
“Especially if it would have.” The alicorn, born of flesh and blood and corrupted by balefire, pawed at the ground. “I was in a cage for more than half my life, Max. It was the safest, most comfortable cage you could imagine. It was perfect in every way. I loved it… but somepony scraped away the silver coat and let me see the rusted iron underneath.”
“I believe I lack the context to understand your metaphor.”
The princess laughed. “Long story. Point is, Crystal wouldn’t let you lock her inside all day… and there was little you could have done against that kind of magic, anyway. You might have a fancy telekinetic gizmo, but you aren’t a unicorn.” Blitz leapt skyward and hovered level with Maximillian’s main lens. “Thanks for your help, Max. Now, sit tight. We’ll bring her back.”
The titan watched her fly away. Mere minutes later, the princess and five others, followed closely by a uniformed group, flew up from Bellenast and made haste over the mountains.
I am powerless to do anything else.
Having little to do in Pinwheel’s cottage while the blizzard raged at full strength outside, beyond practicing my shield spell—and without a safe way to test its resilience against spells or guns, that practice served only to help me form the shield faster, not to know how much it would help—I pored over the map stored in my not-so-new PipBuck. Not long into that venture, I discovered a few things about the PipBuck: It was somewhat heavier than it looked, while simultaneously being impossibly snug and secure on my leg, it was laced with so many overlapping and sympathetic enchantments that I couldn’t tell what any single one of them did, and holding the stupid thing up to look at its screen for longer than about a thirty seconds at a time was extremely uncomfortable. So, I resorted to lying on my side, holding my foreleg on a carefully piled blanket so that I could peruse the data accumulated over a lifetime in a semblance of comfort.
Pinwheel Malaise’s mother had travelled all across Equestria and beyond, and the location markers numbered in the thousands. The northernmost marker was a stretch of mountains called the Yaket Range, and the southernmost was a Kludgetown in the immense deserts far, far beyond Cliffside, which also was marked on the automap. She had explored the cities of Fillydelphia and Manehattan exhaustively—Manehattan alone had several hundred distinct markers, one of which, Tenpony Tower, was labelled with a star—the Everfree Forest and the Whitetail Wood, visited the collapsed ruins of Cloudsdale, Canterlot, the San Palomino Desert and the Forest of Leota, and she had seen at least the entrances of no fewer than thirteen different Stables.
She also had visited Splendid Valley, which was labelled with an exclamation point, as was an entire swath of territory northeast of Trottingham, called ‘Bugbear Territory.’
Closer to Pinwheel’s cottage, which had its own label, was one marker that caught my interest. It also was twenty-six kilometers to the northeast, and more than two thousand meters higher than Pinwheel’s home.
I sighed and tore my gaze away from the map, rubbing my eyes, climbed to my hooves, and walked over to the kitchen. “Pinwheel,” I said, yawning, “Have you ever been to the ‘Gelgrin Valley Weather Station?’”
“Ehhhhh, yeah, once,” called the Kirin from the root cellar in the far corner. She shut the hatch on her way up the narrow staircase. “Went there with Uruqhart a few years ago. That’s where he found that old radio. Why?”
“Well, it would be the perfect place to transmit a long-range signal.”
“Yes, it certainly would be,” said Pinwheel, trotting into the corner room of the cottage; while the door was open, I was able to see Rotundus in a sturdy pen, and a set of thick curtains over a doorway that must have led outside. Pinwheel came back out with another folded blanket on her back, as well as a pair of knitted cushions held in her pink glow. “And no, we’re not going there. Too dangerous. It’s a fiendishly difficult climb on a good day, and that’s in the summer, when it’s slightly above freezing. No-one’s fixed the path up there in the last, y’know, two centuries. Also, storm nagas like to nest there.”
“Oh,” I muttered. “Well, screw that place… where will we go, then?”
“A little cave, just up the river a bit. Here, lemme see that PipBuck.” I held my foreleg up for her to see the screen, and she scrolled the map screen up southwest along the Gelgrin Valley from the weather station marker, until her cottage’s marker appeared in the center. She then turned the knobs slowly to center the map on an unmarked coordinate about one and a half kilometers northeast from her home, high up on a mountain ridge on the other side of the river. “Now hang on a moment.” The Kirin levitated her own PipBuck down from a wooden peg on the wall in the kitchen, strapped it on, and opened her own map screen. She rapidly cycled through the menus on the device, pressed a sequence of buttons with her pink magic, and suddenly, on my PipBuck, a marker appeared near the center of the map. “There you go!”
“Cap… say-sin Cave? What’s ‘capsaicin?’”
“It’s the stuff in peppers that makes them spicy.” She hung her PipBuck back on the peg and pulled a tiny, faded orange mushroom out of a basket in a cabinet near it. “Also these. They grow in some of the caves, but only the bigger, deeper ones, where the air’s less affected by the weather outside.” She put the mushroom back and said, “That cave, as it happens, is quite deep. I used to go way down into it to find these, but I found another cave over near where I found you and Mister River. That one’s a lot safer to crawl through. But the one up on the mountain has a bigger entrance, so we can shelter inside if the weather goes bad, and it’s much closer to home.”
“Are blizzards pretty frequent here at this time of year?”
-What have we here?-
The sultry voice made my hackles stand on end and my ears straighten. I stood stock-still, then looked around and turned until three amber bars appeared on my compass to the north.
“Eh, not normally,” said Pinwheel. “Some places a little west, they never quite stop, but this is unusual for…hey, what’s up, girlie?”
-A foal, and a stallion? What company does Pinwheel Malaise have today?-
The bars drifted slightly apart, then zipped off to my right. I spun around and found them again, and I raced for the front door.
“Hey, wait a minute! Crystal!”
Nádarin looked over and climbed to his hooves as I threw the door open and bolted down the cold, short tunnel that rattled and creaked in the howling wind. A green-gold glow came from outside. I opened the outer door and cantered out into the howling, bone-deep chill—except the wind was distant, and muffled.
-No… not quite a foal after all?-
I stood in an enormous bubble of the same green-gold light, scintillating and startlingly bright in the dark of the roaring blizzard. Three mares strode forward and stopped a few meters in front of me. All three were tall and strong, and beautiful to me, their coats deep shades of green, purple, and blue. The green one in the center was slightly larger than the blue one on the left, and the purple mare looked nearly the same age as Night Cloud, but was not as tall or slender.
The purple mare’s eyes widened in surprise. The blue mare frowned, cautious. The purple one took another few steps forward, then stopped as if from an unspoken command.
I swallowed. “Can you please help me?” I said, looking up at the tall mares. “I need to go back to Bellenast! My friends are all trying to find me, but they don’t know where to look. Can you take me there, or tell Ivy where I am? Please?”
“Oi! Crystal, get back in here!”
I ignored Pinwheel’s hollering, but glanced back briefly as Prince Nádarin followed me through from the outer door. His curious expression quickly became one of great worry, even fear.
-Ivy?-
I jerked my gaze back onto the three alicorns.
-Oh.-
The blue one eyed Nádarin. The purple one looked at me with curiosity. A crawling sensation crept up my neck as the green mare stepped forward. A spike of pain in my head made me dizzy, and a lightning flash of images crossed my mind’s eye. I stumbled to the side in a fit of vertigo, and Nádarin’ braced me with his foreleg.
-Oh my.-
The sultry voice caressed, and at the same time sent shivers down my spine.
-You’re one of hers.-
The green alicorn began to smirk.
-How very… interesting.-
