Starlight Over Detrot
Act 2, Chapter 22: Heartburn
Once, the dragons considered ponies to be insignificant lesser life forms, not even threatening enough to be worth crushing. And why should they have seen ponies any other way? Adult dragons are massive, armor-plated fire-breathing beasts capable of singlehandedly destroying pony settlements and fending off entire squadrons of Wonderbolts by themselves, while ponies are small, squishy, and flammable.
Dragons stood at the very top of the food chain, but it was there that they grew fat and lazy, while Ponykind continued to develop to make up for their comparative bodily shortcomings. Spells became more complex and devastating. Devices, arcane and mechanical, placed more and more power into the hooves of the individual pony.
The dragons watched, and did not care. They were dragons; what could stand before them?
Perhaps this sort of laissez-faire deluded coexistence might have persisted to the modern era, had not adolescent dragons raided Baltimare during a Summer Sun Celebration with the stated goal of ‘putting those prissy ponies in their place.’ This was ultimately unfortunate for all involved: for the ponies, because of a death toll in the low hundreds, and for the dragons, because Ponykind had just developed the heat-seeking rocket launcher.
The retaliatory ordnance that destroyed a volcanic dragonhome came as something of a shock to a complacent dragonkind.
It was the first volley fired in what would escalate into the Cutie Mark Crusades: A bloody, many-year-long war led by Princess Luna and her generals, notable among them an orphaned pegasus mare and mechanized warfare specialist known best to the dragons as ‘The Demolisher,' a fiery earth pony alchemist and weapons developer called ‘The Blooming Death,' and a powerful mage with a voice that could shatter stone: ‘The Sweet Embrace.' Though thousands of dragons descended upon Equestria, they soon found themselves descending rather more abruptly and terminally than they expected. They learned that there were, finally, creatures with bigger fangs, as armor-piercing weapons cleaved dragonscale hides, fired from distances dragon breath could never hope to reach unaided; as spells beyond their comprehension, if they were lucky, merely killed them.
Ponykind did not emerge unscathed, but despite significant losses of life, Ponykind ultimately emerged victorious and has, in the intervening decades, mostly rebuilt. The dragons have not recovered. Given their slow breeding cycles, it's likely they will not for millenia, if they do at all. Their collective pride certainly never will.
Detailed treatises on the war and its events (Such as the Siege of Sunburst Mountain, the Appleloosa Valley Massacre, and the eventual Camp Spike Peace Accords) can be found in other tomes, but for our immediate purposes it is sufficient to note that even now, long after its conclusion, the war still echoes still in the hearts - and sometimes, the bodies - of dragon and pony alike.
--The Scholar
I was moving before my brain was, leaping to defend against the monster attacking my partner. I rolled sideways, using the motion to snatch my trigger into my muzzle and coming up with my sights trained. The light in the enormous parking lot wasn’t fantastic, but I made out several sets of eyes, flashing jaws, and pink tongues crouched over my partner.
I took up the slack, preparing to empty my chamber into the black shape, then made out a sound; Swift giggling.
That last part brought me to a skidding halt.
My heart was thumping, but looking down the sights of my gun at my partner being accosted by a hulking monster, I held my fire.
It was Cerberus; Cerberus writ very, very small. Very small, and very fluffy.
The beast was only big by pony standards. By mega-fauna standards, the creature crouched over Swift was puny. He was also licking her face with two of his huge canid heads, while the third tugged gently on the front pocket of her combat jacket, trying to pull the buckle off. There was something odd about its proportions.
The Warden just stood and watched.
“S-s-siiir! It’s tiiickling meee!” my partner yelped and that sent me into action. I trotted over, dropping my bit and selected the middle head of the great dog. Reaching up, I snatched its bright red collar in my teeth and hauled. Earth pony strength is not to be trifled with, but I tugged at him in complete futility. My hooves slid on the pavement and Swift flailed at the air while the devilish dog dodged every attempt to push him away.
“Little assistance here!” I called out. I could hear distant laughter from several of the watchtowers. No help there, then.
“Detective, it may be best if she simply gives him whatever it is she has in her front pocket,” the Warden yelled, though compared to that overpowering voice of command she’d used earlier, it was practically a whisper.
By this point, Swift’s face was bathed in saliva, leaving her fur sticking up in unnatural angles.
“S-sir! Help!”
“Kid, give it whatever’s in your pocket!”
“I-It’s my snacks, sir! Those are expensive!” she protested, wings beating the ground.
“Do you want to be licked to death?”
Swift made an unhappy grunt of resigned irritation and put both rear hooves on the beast’s middle neck, pushing its brown muzzle away from her stomach so she could reach the pocket, ripping open the snap. The great beast suddenly backed off and sat to attention in front of her, all three tongues wagging from wide, grinning canine mouths. She looked up, surprised, then fished around in her pocket until she came up with the little paper package.
Rolling over, she got to her hooves and shook a piece of jerky out, then tossed it to the creature. Its closest head snatched the tiny piece of meat out of mid-air and chewed it noisily.
A tiny smile appeared on my partner’s muzzle as she pulled out another bit and tossed it to the rightmost head, who also snatched it. When it came to be middle head’s turn, it just let the meat bounced off its nose, then snarfed it off the pavement.
Now I could get a look at the beast, I realized why it’d looked so odd earlier. Its heads and paws were too big for its body. On just about any other species, it would have been cute.
I jumped as the Warden spoke from my side, “Well, I’ll be damned. We’ve never managed to get him to obey us. I assumed it was largely just a matter of time. What sort of snacks are those, if you don’t mind me asking?” The question was directed at Swift.
She looked down at the paper package, then tilted her head. “Oh… um… Teriyaki?”
The Warden frowned. “Why does a pegasus have… meat?”
My partner’s eyes glittered with mischief as she gave her biggest, scariest grin. “I got some special chompers!”
I’d never seen the Warden show even the slightest hint of lost composure, and she wasn't about to start at the apparently humdrum sight of a pony with fangs. She merely nodded. “I see. You would be the ‘class four’ transformation we detected, then?”
“I...guess so. What’s class four?” Swift asked.
I shook my head. “It’s some kind of weird system they use up here. Think the PACT classification system for mega-fauna. Whoever was looking at your teeth apparently thinks you could be dangerous.”
Swift’s eyebrows drew together as she looked around at the guard towers. “Dangerous here?”
“They take no chances in Tartarus,” I murmured, then turned to look at the huge dog. “I wasn’t aware there were two Cerberus’... Cerberi?... Or that one of them was so...dinky.”
Warden sniffed, which sounded like a broken vacuum cleaner sucking up a bit. “Cerberus is our guardian’s name,” she said, the tiny stub of muscle and bone that used to be her tail flicking back and forth. “The guards call this one ‘Goofball'. Apt, considering he has taken three months to learn ‘come’ and is still extremely vague on ‘sit'. He will obey if you have food or are willing to scratch various parts of him.”
“Three months? He’s a puppy?” Swift sounded surprised, tossing the huge animal another of the bits of her snack, this time a little higher. It landed on Goofball’s middle head’s muzzle, then the left head snagged it, prompting a snarling dis-agreement which the right head just rolled his eyes at.
“Yes… bit of a palava there. Cerberus escaped some months ago, and by the time we’d managed to hunt him down, he’d doused an entire dog kennel in his… mmm…” She tapped her chin, looking for a tasteful way to say whatever it was she had in mind. “-his ‘issue.' We thought it surely impossible that he might have any get from this, but...we were wrong. The mother was an enormous mutt herself, though I doubt she’d have survived the pregnancy if we hadn’t managed to build a magical womb inside the father and...well, the details of a mega-fauna canid surrogacy are somewhat dull, I suppose.”
“Okay, I get… that he exists and I don’t mean to sound cold, but why?” I inquired.
The Warden coughed, softly, then nodded in what I thought was a random direction. Far off, I heard a sound like a tornado drill siren; the howl of something much bigger than your average spaniel. “Since leaving Tartarus, I fear...Cerberus, the immortal hound… may be… aging.”
“Aging?” Swift asked, surprised. “I… I heard stories about Cerberus when I was a filly. He’s been around for centuries!”
“Longer than that. We believe it may have something to do with his departure from the original Tartarus. This is not to say he is unlikely to live several more centuries. His species is naturally long lived. They say their ‘larger’ cousins in ancient times once hunted dragons. Now… he is all that remains. It placed a certain imperative upon us to find his replacement. That...” The Warden waved her hoof at Goofball, who rolled onto his back with all four legs in the air, snuffling at Swift’s hooves. She popped a piece of meat into her mouth, then into each of his, “-is aging at something like one one hundredth the rate an ordinary dog would. He will be an infant longer than we-” she hesitated, then corrected herself, “-I should say... longer than you will be alive.”
“But...that’s...centuries from now!” Swift exclaimed. “What makes you think we’ll even need Tartarus by then?”
The Warden shrugged her bony shoulders. “Change happens. The Princesses have not survived this long by leaving things to chance. There will always be a Tartarus, whether or not it houses prisoners.”
Swift shook the bottom of her bag of jerky out over Goofball’s face, then stepped back and tossed him the paper. He began furiously licking it again and again, shredding it into tiny pieces. When he was done, he sat down in front of her once more.
She rubbed the back of her head. “Uh...that’s all. I don’t have any more.”
Goofball’s heads all cocked in different directions, which meant left and middle conked skulls and snapped at one another, while right just glanced at his companions with a sort of annoyed disgust before coming back to Swift. He took a couple of steps forward and pushed his nose against her chest gently.
“I said I don’t have any more,” she insisted, putting one hoof on his muzzle. He sank onto his belly, staring up...well, staring at her with three sets of mournful puppy eyes.
“Come along.” The Warden exhaled, turning back towards the squat, grey building in the distance. “We’ll leave him at the door. At the very least, I’ve managed to train the great wretch not to come inside of buildings without my permission. He might be immune to fire and bullets, like his father, but he’s not immune to a dozen or so newspapers on the noses.”
I set off behind the Warden and, after a few seconds, Swift followed, with Goofball at her heels. His big tongues wagged as he padded along at my partner’s back.
The rain had let up at some point, though I hadn’t noticed it, and a stiff wind whipped across the car park. I glanced back at the Night Trotter, to Taxi, who hadn’t said anything or so much as moved during the little drama with the hound. She was still there, her head resting on the steering wheel and shoulders shaking.
I left her to her grief.
****
The Warden led us into the building through a barred metal door, which shut out the drizzle, the wind, and the insufferable itch of the magical scans. Goofball did stop just outside, though he whined so piteously as Swift stepped over the threshold that she had to go back for a minute to scratch a few of his ears.
When the door closed, I still heard him outside, scratching and sniffing.
We were in a narrow, carpeted hallway lit by white neon lights. It was as cold and uninviting as the chilly night outside.
“Miss Warden, Ma’am?” Swift turned from the door and looked at the burnt mare. I realized, after a short pause, she wasn’t looking directly at her but rather at a spot about three hooflengths above her head.
“Yes, Miss Cuddles?”
Swift paused, then plowed on. There was just something about the Warden that suggested correcting her might be a poor idea. “Ma’am, if it’s not rude, wh-what did you mean when you said Goofball would out live… us? You made it sound like you weren’t… you know… a pony.”
“Is Princess Celestia a pony, Miss Cuddles?” Warden asked, the scaly flesh above one eye twitching as her bare teeth clicked together.
“O-of course she is.”
The flesh that was all that still clung to her upper lip twitched into a sneer that I think - at some point along the collection of carbonized noodles she used for a nervous system - was supposed to be a friendly smile. Swift crouched low to the paved floor, then forced herself back to a standing position as the Warden replied, “Simply because I do not age, does not mean I am not alive. I am a pony.”
Ever the blunt one, Swift asked the obvious question, “B-but what happened to you? You don’t have a face!”
Warden laughed, which wasn’t a pleasant sound on the best of days. “Mmm...tea. We will speak over tea. It is one of my pleasures.”
****
The Warden’s office was at the end of a hallway that required her to stop no less than four times to disable traps and wards, her horn squirting that fiery magical glow each time she did. Swift seemed fascinated by it and I remembered that when I’d first met the Warden, I had been as well. It was unlike the power of any other unicorn.
She pushed open the door and stepped inside, flicking on a lightswitch. The Warden trotted around behind her desk to a small kitchenette and began filling a pot with water from a bottle. She lit the tiny gas stove with a burst of magic.
Where the halls outside had been all utility, the little office was almost pleasant. Not quite pleasant, but very nearly. The smell of burnt flesh, which we’d managed to avoid while outside in the open air, became immediately pervasive. Swift made a soft slurping noise as she sucked back a muzzle full of saliva.
“Mmm, something smells...delicious, Sir,” she whispered to me.
I couldn’t hold in a full body shudder the like of which Celestia herself had never seen. It almost took me off my hooves.
“Kid… That’s the Warden,” I replied, forcing myself to swallow.
“What?!” she squeaked, falling onto her haunches.
“You will find, Miss Cuddles, that despite the condition of my ears, I am not deaf,” the Warden said, aloud, as her tea kettle began to whistle softly. Levitating it off the burner, she began filling three porcelain tea-cups. “I must say, you are the first, outside of my griffin inmates and subordinates, to mention my distinctive scent as a ‘plus’, however.”
Swift’s cheeks colored and she lifted herself into one of the seats in front of the Warden’s desk. “I’m sorry, Ma’am.”
“Be sorry when you have committed an act worthy of guilt, Miss Cuddles,” the burnt mare said, curtly, then floated a cup of tea over to Swift. “You did not know, so guilt is unwarranted.”
“I’m…” my partner paused. I heard another apology coming, but instead she fluffed her wings out and began smoothing the water off them with her hooves. “I’ve seen some really… um… some really ‘new’ things this month and I’m still not used to everything.”
“I am still seeing ‘new’ things after nearly seventy years of life, Miss Cuddles.” The Warden replied, dropping a straw into her tea. She slid her pink tongue between her blackened teeth and caught it, then sucked noisily. Without lips, a straw is especially difficult to use. “Of course, I suppose you are right to be curious. Incurious minds make poor officers. Ask your question, then I will ask mine.”
Swift’s ears flattened and she looked at me for permission. I nodded. “Go on, kid. We’ll have this over faster if you’re not falling all over yourself every time you look at her.”
“R-right…” Bucking herself up, she faced the Warden, looking into that one glowing red eye. “Miss Warden. What… why are you… so badly hurt?”
She considered the question for several seconds, then nodded, “Still tactful. I’m sure Hard Boiled will beat that out of you one day.” Rising, she walked back and forth behind her desk, then stopped and set one hoof on the table top. There was a piece of flesh there just above the fetlock that seemed seconds from falling off that drew my eyes. I squirmed, uncomfortably and looked away. “Miss Cuddles, whilst you were unconscious, I said a thing to Hard Boiled. I assume you are aware of his relationship with Chief Iris Jade?”
“Y-yes.”
“Have you wondered why she does not kill him? She certainly has the capacity. She hates him with a passion. She has demonstrated a willingness, in the past, to go outside of the law.” She asked, staring at me with her one good eye. “Why, then, does he live?”
Swift thought a little, then rubbed her upper lip with her toe. “I don’t...I don’t know.”
“Mmmph. I will tell you.” Warden’s tongue snaked out, running across the fronts of her discolored teeth. She seemed to be relishing this conversation and Swift quickly sipped her tea to cover her discomfort. For my part, I sucked down some of mine, enjoying the tangy, sweet flavor and trying to keep from smiling. Smiling would have ruined the Warden’s mojo.
“It is precisely because she hates him.” The old mare’s eye seemed to glitter a little brighter.
“She does?” Swift asked, glancing at me. I raised my cup to her.
“Oh yes, Miss Cuddles… She loathes him. It is a powerful hatred. Years he defies her, years he fights her and struggles, even when she has him under her hoof… and when it comes to it, when he’s spat in her face like he did on the news some days ago… she gives him permission to come here. Why do you think that is?”
Swift shivered. It was a tiny thing, but the Warden took it as signal to continue.
“Hatred… is not unlike love. It makes us do things we could not otherwise. We become... attached, to that which we hate. It gives us a reason to keep going. Ponies like Jade… ponies like me… need those reasons. During the war, I fought. If you could see what is left of my mark, you’d wonder just what talent I held.” She turned to one side, showing the burnt, fur-less skin on her hip. “My mother believed I was a leech. She told me that I was often enough.”
“That’s awful!” my partner exclaimed. “A mother should never say something like that to her foal!”
“I suppose,” Warden said, thoughtfully, lifting herself into the folding chair behind the desk. “A pony can only hear something so many times before they embrace it. A leech survives. A leech continues, while the animal it feeds off of dies. A leech may kill a dragon, where a bullet may not. That was my talent and my mark. I specialized in stealing magics. My power was to take the power of others.”
“Is that… is that why there’s all the magical disruption stuff here? You made all of that?”
The Warden bobbed her skinless chin. “Back then, I was a soldier in the Royal Guard. Warding the Princess, stealing the magics of any who would attack her and using them to protect the ponies of Canterlot. I was in Cloudsdale during the great attack. They teach that in history still, yes?”
“Of course!’ Swift said, half rising. “I had a whole section on the Cloudsdale campaign! B-but they never mentioned… you.”
“And why should they? What good would come of mentioning something like me, Miss Cuddles? I assume, however, they mentioned the dragon’s generals?”
My partner wet her lips, then whispered the name like she might conjure up that ancient evil, “High General Astraxis...”
“Yeeesss…” The Warden hissed, her gaze sliding up to the ceiling as she sank into reminiscence. “I was there. I remember it, clear as you see me. I remember standing on the palisade overlooking the great courtyard of the cloud city. I wore enchanted shoes back then and walked on clouds. I remember his mighty shadow as he dropped from the sky over Cloudsdale, diving out of the sun.”
“You...saw him?!” Swift gasped.
“Mmmhmmm. Gorgeous, he was. Gorgeous, flaxen, and terrible.” There was a touch of genuine wistfulness in the way she said that. “Our forces had retreated. We’d been ordered to form a perimeter in the great courtyard, with the civilians at its center, and our general -- the finest of his age -- cast his mightiest spell to shield them. I remember it, glittering purple in the mid-morning. But I...I was outside of it. I wanted to see Astraxis with my own eyes.” She pointed to the gory remnants on her face.
Swift gulped, “What h-happened?”
The Warden nickered and her tea floated down to the table. She stared into space, apparently lost in that long ago moment.
“As I said. I saw him, Miss Cuddles. I saw him coming. I was standing on one of the highest points, a shoulder of cloud once used as a lookout tower by the weather teams of Cloudsdale. The wind whipped through my mane.” The two charred holes where her nostrils contracted slightly. “I smelled that dragon before he came.” She snorted and crossed one hoof over herself, resting her cheek on the surface of her desk. “Mmm...they don’t tell you about the smell. He smelled of fire. He smelled of sex.”
The pegasus was enraptured, and I drained my teacup. I’d heard the story before, but it wouldn’t do to interrupt. We needed the Warden receptive.
“He was beautiful,” she murmured. It was an odd thing, for a pony without much of a mouth to speak so clearly. After some time, one realized her horn never really stopped glowing. Its light was muted, but persistent. “Then he turned his great silver eyes on me. He looked down at me; a little girl playing at soldier, not even a snack to him. He looked down and I could almost hear his thoughts as I stood there. I could see him make the decision. He might have strafed the city as his first attack. He might have blasted the general’s shield or chased a few of the civilians who hadn’t made it into the perimeter.” The Warden’s eye flicked towards Swift. “He decided, in that moment, to come after me...”
“How are...how are you still alive? I read about Astraxis. He was the greatest of the dragon’s generals! His fire melted entire forests down to the bedrock!” Swift exclaimed.
“It could. I am in a unique place to say, I do believe, that his fire could have burnt the world,” she assured her, flicking her tongue over her ashy teeth. “When he opened his great jaws, I saw a flame that would put the sun to shame.” The Warden cackled, madly, then slid off her chair and came around the desk, leaning in close to my partner who tried to get as far from her as she could without falling off her seat. “You know what I thought then? It’s the sort of thing you think when you’re about to die.”
“Wh-what?” Swift said, just loud enough to be heard.
The charred face pushed in close as she could and said, very softly, “I thought ‘I wonder what would happen...if I ate his fire!’.”
There wasn’t, I suppose, much a pony could say to that. Swift just sat there, staring up into that glowing eye, and I imagine she saw what I’d first seen all those years ago when Juniper first took me to Tartarus and introduced me to the then-new Warden. She saw a dragon’s fire, swallowed up by a little filly.
“I burned, Miss Cuddles,” the Warden growled, her voice husky. “He blew his mighty flame, intent on snuffing out that little fly on the tower, and I burned and burned and burned...and my horn drank and drank and drank. It drank until I was full, and then drank some more. It drank until I burst, then drank until I was alive again.”
If she could have, I’m sure she would have been grinning. Swift was quivering in her chair. It was a heck of a performance.
“I drank until his fire was dry… and he screamed his fury at the sky, finding his fire stolen. I burned alive, and would not die. I have burned for longer than you have lived, and will probably burn after you’re dead.” She twisted a piece of dried flesh from her leg and tossed it away. Another grew immediately in its place, crackling into a cinder instantly as we watched. “So you understand then, why Jade can’t kill Hard Boiled?”
Swift looked confusedly up from the gruesome display and answered, “No, Miss…”
The Warden threw her shoulders back and turned, marching back behind her desk. “One day, I will find Astraxis. He is what drives me, Miss Cuddles. One day, I will find him and he will live to see my face each morning. In the night, he will scream only my name…and when he dies, it will be with my kiss on his lips.”
A tiny wisp of smoke escaped from her nose and she winked her darkly glittering eye at my partner.
Without taking her eyes off of the Warden, Swift said out of the corner of her muzzle, “S-sir… I think I need to go pee…”
****
Swift was off down the hall to the bathroom, leaving me alone with the Warden in her tiny office. With the kid out of the room, she relaxed, leaned back in her seat, and put her rear hooves up on her desk, one crossed over the other.
“Where did you find this one? I like her,” she chuckled, topping off her cup of tea.
“Jade dropped her in my lap a bit more than a month ago. Been a wild-ass month, but she’s held on alright.” I sighed, turning the tea-cup around as she offered me a refill. It had little pictures of dragons painted around the rim.
“I noticed. Smarter than the last one. Innocent, but smarter than...whatever his name was. Stinky.”
“Stink Bug...and yeah, he was a two week long pity party before I got him drunk and had him piss in Jade’s mail box. Swift’s less innocent than you think. Killed a pony she loved to save my life.” I tipped a cube of sugar into my tea as the charred pony on the other side of the desk drank hers with a hearty sigh of enjoyment. “Did you have to freak her out?”
She quirked her eyebrow, or at least, the general area that her eyebrow might have been. “Hard Boiled, I don’t have enough skin left to screw and I’ve got more time than I know what to do with. I woke up in a hospital three decades ago and I haven’t gotten a minute older. My skin doesn’t grow back. I haven’t needed a mane-cut since I came out of the blasted coma. Ironic as it sounds, I was in heat when I got burned so unless you’re offering your cock to the pyre in my belly, I think you don’t get to tell me who I do and don’t get to freak out. I don’t get many other joys out of this perpetual life besides my work.”
I waved my hooves, placatingly. “Fair enough.”
“So… tell me about that thing on your chest. Looks like you got attacked by a psychotic electrician.” She nodded her horn towards my heart.
“It’s… Honestly, that story would take a month. It’s a transplant. Runs off the mains. I got stupid and I got shot and I like to think I learned some humility.”
“You? Hah! I doubt it!” she guffawed, sounding not unlike a lawnmower running over a pet turtle.
I decided to change topics. “Speaking of that, where on earth did you find a piece of work like Bramble? That guy strikes me as ‘gonna die with one of his own stallion’s bullets in his back’.”
“If he is lucky. You remember what I said about ‘unfortunate trends’?”
“I do.” I replied. “I was too busy being glad that prick didn’t decide to nullify me on the spot just to be safe to ask what you meant.”
“You’re lucky I was nearby. I wouldn’t put it by him. Half the prisons and jails across on this continent are sending me their puffed up little pissants to whip into shape.” A dribble of saliva ran down between her teeth but she quickly wiped it away with the back of one fetlock. “Princess Celestia levies guards from everywhere to come here to Tartarus. They train here and with any luck go home a little kinder and a lot smarter. Rehabilitation only works if the guards aren’t making the situations these ponies and other beings come in from worse.”
“Lemme guess. That means every time some warden somewhere has some jerk off who thinks it’s a good idea to beat on a prisoner, they send them to you, right?” I asked, sliding my tea back across her desk. She shifted the cup back onto its tray.
“Precisely. Bramble smacked a prisoner for asking him directions to the toilets. It was either an assault charge or come train with me. He picked train here.”
“Bet he’s regretting that just now…” I said, waving my hoof in what I thought was the direction the unfortunate guard had been dragged off by Cerebrus.
“That pup can make a right mess,” she agreed. “So...tell me then. What brings you to my prison? The kid ate up that line about Jade not killing you because she hates you so much, but I expect there’s probably some less poetic reason.”
I nodded and pulled my coat open to get some air around my barrel. The tiny room was stiflingly hot with the Warden in it. She radiated a certain permanent warmth that was impossible to escape except outside. “You might say that. You know the Church of the Lunar Passage?”
If she’d had facial features, I’m pretty sure the Warden would have flinched. As it was, she drew back several inches and sucked a breath down her ruined throat. “...Yes. Sad to say, I know those ponies quite well. It took me months after that Skylark witch left to scrape the last of her taint out of my prison.”
“That bad, huh?”
“Worse than you can imagine,” she said, turning to the wall beside her desk. Her horn flared a little higher and part of the wall slid to one side, revealing a row of filing cabinets. Extracting a file from the third drawer from the top, she plunked it on the desk and opened it. Turning it around, she pushed it across the table to me. Inside, there were pictures of Skylark. Her face was bandaged, but she was sitting with a group of about a dozen of the toughest, nastiest looking ponies I’d ever seen. She looked like a choir girl leading a biker gang.
“We emphasize a therapeutic approach to rehabilitation here, but it’s intermingled with the need to keep some of the most dangerous things you can imagine from either escaping or killing us. That… mare…” she spat the word like it tasted foul, “...emphasized blaming everything on Celestia and said you could redeem yourself utterly just by confessing, serving a sentence of incarceration or penance, and feeling guilty enough. Doesn’t matter the sin. Of course, according to her, these sentences are meant to be short and anything longer than a few months is ‘the cruelty of the sun bitch’. Her favorite personal pleasure was long, nasty descriptions of what it was like to be Luna, trapped on the moon for a thousand years. The inmates ate that right up.”
“She was popular, then?” I asked.
“You better believe it.” The Warden shut her eye and rubbed a spot of loose skin over her temple. “She herself kept a low key, but I had a half dozen guards injured in private altercations with prisoners in her sect. They took to calling us ‘the sun’s lackeys’ and me ‘Celestia’s rug muncher.' Blamed us for their continued imprisonment after they’d ‘repented.' We were ‘keeping them from their rightful place at Luna’s side.' She single-hoofedly set our therapy schedules back five years. We had a few who might have gotten paroled if not for that deluded pony.”
I put my hoof on the picture, pointing to Skylark’s bandaged face. “What’s with the bandages?”
Warden shook her head. “Not a clue. She came in here with those and would not talk about them to anypony, myself included. She took them off after a few weeks and it looked like she had scars under her fur, but the fur grew in quickly.”
“Mmm...well, you asked why Jade’s not presently using my skin to pad her chair?”
“I asked a number of things. Neither you nor Miss Cuddles in there are official officers of the law and there are, I’m certain, plenty of ponies in city hall who would love to personally pick your brains with sharp instruments after your appearance on the news. That you have managed to elude my sensor net is disturbing as well.” An exposed muscle just below her jaw distended slightly, pulling her teeth open an inch or so. “My respect for the work you’ve done as well as the likelihood that you wouldn’t live terribly long if I were to turn you over to an interested party has, so far, stayed my hoof. Give me additional reasons.”
“Somepony has kidnapped Iris Jade’s daughter.”
The Warden didn’t move for a moment and she had no expression to read.
“Cerise…” she said at last, very quietly.
“You know her?” I asked, pushing my chair back from her desk so I could stretch my neck.
“I am aware of Jade’s child, yes. She was a right hellion when she was younger. She takes after her mother, like that. She was caught shoplifting some years ago and her mother brought her to me to ‘scare her straight’.” A thick gout of flame boiled out of the Warden’s nose.
“How did that go?”
“I had Cerebrus swallow her.” The light in her eye socket danced with merriment at the memory.
I choked and if I’d had anything in my mouth, it would have painted the far wall of the little office. “Swallow?!”
“She was a powerful little telekinetic even then, but spend a minute or so in the gullet of a giant dog and suddenly spell-casting becomes the last thing on your mind.”
“Did...did it work?”
Warden raised one toe to her teeth, tapping the front two. The action scraped away a little of the ash, but her next breath replaced it. “She stayed away from the law, if that’s what you mean. Sadly, I doubt being swallowed or vomited did anything for her relationship with her mother.”
“I can say damn sure it didn’t,” I answered, trying to find a more comfortable position on the folding metal chair. “Apparently, Cerise got herself involved with those bottom feeders in the Church some time ago. I’ve been on the trail of some answers. Somepony is making a play for the city. A big one. Having Jade off the board is a part of that.”
“And...you wanted information on Skylark? From me?” she scoffed. “You must be dredging the bottom of the barrel if I am the pony you come to.”
“It’s a pretty shallow barrel, but… thankfully, no. Supermax. Were you aware Skylark had purchased it?”
"I… was… aware, yes." I don’t know what expression the Warden would have made just then, but several muscles in her throat and chest contracted simultaneously. “Just precisely what is this about, Detective? How does the Church of the Lunar Passage relate to the kidnapping of Cerise?”
“No more calling me Hard Boiled, then?” I quipped.
The temperature in the room suddenly climbed several dozen degrees. I began to sweat and reconsider my smart mouth. A dribble of something hot and red began to run down her jaw, dripping onto the floor behind her desk. Smoke rose from where it landed.
“I fought the city council on the sale of that… place. I fought them with every fiber of my being, and they threatened to have me replaced. Replaced! Me!” she snarled and the warmth built even further. I scooted my chair back a few steps. “I… could not stop it. I even wrote to Celestia on the matter. I do not know if she even received my message. Everything has to go through so many layers of flappers and fools these days. The reply was that the land lay fallow and with the construct disabled, its sale would be… harmless!”
I tried to scoot further, but my back hit the wall. I quickly rose, preparing to leave the room, find Swift, and head for the fire exit if the building started melting. Warden’s eye was like a red coal, but she wasn’t looking at me. She was somewhere else. Somewhere that was inspiring an anger I felt certain could cook the world if it ever came unleashed.
At that moment, she seemed to finally notice my discomfort and the heat abated instantly. The room was still hot, but no longer felt like I was standing in front of a blast furnace.
“Excuse my temper,” she apologized, sliding up onto her chair once more. Steam rose under her backside. “Few things get my dander up like stupid, greedy bureaucrats.”
“I’m less worried about your dander and more worried about my fur burning off, thanks very much…”
“Of course.” She waved away my worries with one flip of her hoof. “As you were saying. I was aware Skylark bought The Hole. She turned it into a church or homeless shelter or somesuch, I believe.”
“A convent, actually. I’ve got reason to believe she’s keeping Cerise there,” I explained.
“You think Skylark… Astral Skylark, of the largest religion in Detrot… stole the Chief of Police’s daughter as part of a power play?” The Warden sneered.
“I don’t… I… dammit, I’m on short time. Can we start from a place of trust and just say that I have reasons?”
“You do not sound like you are in a sharing state of mind. What about this makes you believe I will be?” she asked, persistently.
“You’d think I was insane, lock me up, and several ponies would probably die, myself included,” I shot back, fanning myself with the edge of my coat collar.
“I already think you’re insane. Now I am simply determining whether or not you are correct.” The Warden’s teeth clicked together and her horn light faded to barely a flicker. I realized she was examining me with the sort of high powered intuition good cops learn or die violently without. After a long minute, she uncrossed her forelegs and sat up. “Alright. You let me scare the piss out of the rookie and that was kind of you, so if I were to say ‘Yes, I’ll help'… what would that entail?”
“Simple. We need to see the architect of Supermax, Saussurea. We need to know how to get inside."
I wish, just then, I could have seen what look would have been on the Warden’s face. I don’t imagine it was a friendly one.
“You… want to get into… Supermax. Sneakingly, I presume?” she asked, barely above a whisper.
“That’s right.”
“You would, thusly, bother my first inmate with this mad venture?”
“You got it.”
Two twin rings of smoke shot from her nose, dashing off my face. I struggled not to cough.
“I’ve been from one end of that pit to the other, Detective. One does not sneak into Supermax. It is a place ponies will go to die if they are unwelcome. You might die. I knew your father, and your grandfather, and would find that...unfortunate,” she murmured.
“You might be surprised to find out that death is less unpleasant than it’s chalked up to be,” I replied, pushing my hat back on my head.
“Oh… believe me, I know precisely how unpleasant dying is, Hard Boiled. I have been dying for many, many years. I will probably be dying long after you are dead and your flesh has fallen from your bones and your bones have turned to dust.”
“But that’s dying. As for death… well, let me just say I found it almost relaxing,” I replied, tapping the socket on my chest. “Either way, we need to speak to Saussurea. Is it happening or are we sending Cerise to her grave to satisfy your ego?”
The Warden spread her hooves wide. “No need to get pushy, Hard Boiled. I was simply bored and curious. You’ll see Saussurea.”
“That easy?” I asked. “Nothing’s been that easy, lately.”
“If you want reasons, I can give you three. One, you brought me that rookie who is taking quite the long time to urinate and I imagine is more likely bucking herself up in the hallway to come back in here. Two, Jade and I have history and Cerise doesn’t deserve to get involved in Detrot politics, if that has, indeed, happened. I will keep my own council, being as I’m certain Skylark or whosoever pulls her strings is listening to the major information channels. Three...mmm…” She stopped for several seconds, then shook her head. “Your grandfather and father were good ponies. Your father fought to stop the abuses at Supermax and your grandfather fought in the Cloudsdale campaign. That gun on your leg is part of a legacy of ponies who fight for Equestria. You best not break that legacy, or there will be a whole long list of angry beings who’ll happily char-broil you alive.”
I digested that for awhile, then patted my gun and eased off the chair. “I think I can deal with that. Now, Saussurea?”
Warden stepped from behind her desk and waved towards the door. “The Architect is, for some reason, often awake at this hour. She’ll be glad for the company. If you did have in mind to show your gratitude for this little service, you might arrange a date for me with the shrimp. I’d love another crack at her psyche. It seems wonderfully fragile,” she said, mischievously, wagging her tail stump.
I grinned. “Done. If we survive, I’ll buy you two the first bottle of wine.”
“Sir?!”
I jerked, falling off the chair backwards with my rear hooves in the air, facing the door.
Swift stood in the doorway, eyes wide as platters.
I’m not proud of what I did just then.
I could be a bad pony.
“Oh, hey kid! Was just discussing a night of romance with you and the Warden here! You up for it?”
****
Five minutes later, we’d left the Warden’s office, heading for the treatment areas. That involved several more security checks and a gradual downward journey, though mostly on sloping paths rather than stairs. Without the Warden there, I doubt any of them would have let Swift or I through, period, even unarmed as we were. Each one insisted on a thorough inspection of my partner’s muzzle and my chest.
We’d been forced to surrender our weapons at a tiny glassed in office and no amount of complaining or whimpering would budge the pony behind the counter on that front. It was mostly Swift doing the whimpering and complaining. Since she’d gotten Masamane back, she’d been extremely reluctant to part with it.
Swift had been gracious enough not to shoot anypony, but I think she was considering it. She marched along, head between her foreknees, tail tucked between her legs, and enormous orange wings clamped tightly to her sides.
The Warden, for her part, was still letting out little mirthful noises I interpreted to be giggles. They sounded like pennies rolling around in a clothes dryer full of fresh intestines. I shuddered and tried to put that case out of my mind.
“Sir, that was so not funny…” she whispered for the fourth time in as many minutes.
“Who’s joking? Besides, you want some interesting stories, I guarantee, Warden is the one to speak to. She lived through the Crusades, after all.”
Swift brought her head around to look at the mare trotting down the hallway in front of us. “Sir, if the price of us getting what we need is a date with anypony, when we get out of this, we’re going to make it a double. I get to pick your ‘double’. Agreed?”
I shuffled nervously. “Who would my ‘double’ be in that instance?”
“Scarlet Petals,” Swift purred, bopping me in the side with one wingtip.
****
We caught up with Taxi sitting in one of the ‘waiting areas’, playing chess over a tiny table with somepony I thought should probably be familiar, but I couldn’t place him. He was a short grey-green stallion with an unruly mane, wearing a thin black collar around his neck. The area they sat in was just behind the last of the checkpoints; a small circular table surrounded by comfortable chairs set to one side of a long hallway. It looked like a perfectly ordinary waiting room until one realized the chairs and table were bolted to the floor.
It was always just a little unsettling to pass that last checkpoint in Tartarus. Once a pony had, the guards just sort of vanished. There were still ponies in pure white uniforms, but the entire place more closely resembled a giant hospital than it did a prison. The uniformed ponies didn’t radiate the kind of easy aggression that the guards upstairs did.
Taxi was sitting across from the stallion, minus her saddle-bags, which was a strange look for her, though I doubted she could have gotten them by the guards as it was. Under the sharp white light of the hospital’s overheads, the scars seemed to move with a life of their own. I forced my eyes away from her flanks. Swift was not so gracious, though she’d seen my driver without her saddlebags on a few different occasions. Seeing her like that in public made her seem somehow indecently naked. Reaching over, I poked Swift in the hip and she jumped, then turned red.
“Sorry, sir,” she muttered, “I...really should ask Miss Taxi what happened one of these days.”
“You do that, kid, and good luck to you. If she won’t tell me, I somehow doubt she’ll tell you.”
The Warden trotted over to one of the orderlies standing at a long reception desk stretching the length of the hallway and off around the corner. The row of nurse ponies rose to their hooves from whatever they’d been doing as she approached and she quickly waved them back to work as she levitated a clipboard over, making her mark on the sign-in sheet then exchanging a few words with one or two of those behind the desk.
I walked over to Taxi and her new friend. My driver looked up and smiled; it was one of her ‘I’m trying not to scream’ smiles rather than the ‘I want to be here and am perfectly content’ variety. Swift stayed where she was, uncomfortably trying to look everywhere at once as though some burly beast with a machete was about to pounce on her.
“Sweets? You ready for this?” I asked. Her eyes were red, still, but she looked like she’d managed to master her emotions.
“We’ve got the Warden’s permission?” she inquired, pushing herself off the chair and pulling her braid down on one shoulder.
“Yeah, we’ve got it.” I grimaced. “I offered her a date with Swift and she was all over the idea. That or we’re walking into another trap.”
“Why do you not sound happy about that? You usually enjoy traps.”
“I’ll tell you later,” I replied, then turned to the stallion she was seated with. “Pardon me, do you mind if I steal my driver? We’ve got some work to be done.”
The stallion laughed and shook his head, reaching out to tip over the Princess Luna figure on his side of the board. “Not a problem, Detective Hard Boiled. We’d just finished anyway.”
“Do I know you?” I asked, tilting my head to one side. “You seem familiar, but then, I just spent a month in a coma so my memory is a bit iffy.”
“No, I doubt you’d remember, coma or not,” he replied, with a dismissive flick of his toe. “If you ever come back this way, Detective, be sure to send me your driver. I need a decent chess partner and the Warden’s usually busy.”
“Sure, will do.” I turned to Taxi. “Shall we?”
She shook herself, shifting her hips like she usually did to hike up her saddle-bags before realizing they weren’t there.
“Can we make this quick? I’m going to need some sleep at some point.”
I paused, for an instant, as I got the strangest feeling there was something she wasn’t telling me. Maybe it was the haunted look in her eyes or the way she kept her gaze, very carefully three inches above mine.
“I make no promises,” I replied, finally, chalking it up to a case of nerves. We moved away from the little reception area. Once we were out of earshot and standing with Swift again, I asked, “By the way, do you have any idea who that pony was?”
Taxi tilted her head and scrunched her nose at me. “I thought you were just being polite because you couldn’t remember his name. You seriously don’t know who that was?”
“I’m drawing a blank here.” I shrugged.
“That was the Light Bulb Killer, Hardy. I’m going to get your brain checked again if you don’t remember him now...”
That brought back a flood of memories as my internal librarian finally got off her drunken flank. “That was Spider Shade? Sky and stars, he was barely an adult when we locked him up!”
“Who is ‘Spider Shade’, sir?” Swift inquired.
“A very old case that a very young Hard Boiled solved by the skin of his teeth.” Taxi snarked, then glanced back at Shade who was quietly folding up his chess board and dropping the pieces, one at a time, into a small box.
“Juniper solved that one, mostly by keeping me from becoming a tasteful addition to that nutcase’s end-table,” I said, darkly.
“I was speaking to one of the orderlies when Spider was in the toilets,” Taxi said. “She told me he’s cleared for release, but he’s refused parole the last five times it came up. His mental health is fine, but he likes it here, apparently. There’s plenty of light and every time he gets the urge to make a lamp out of somepony’s bones, he has his therapist just up the hallway.”
“I’ll try to take some comfort in that. When I testified at his trial, he swore he’d have my cutie-mark for his ‘fall line-up’ that year at the Canterlot furniture show,” I said, sliding my coat down over my flanks, protectively.
“Creepy…” Swift said, making a face.
****
We waited for a few minutes, exchanging small talk, until the Warden was done with her conversation with the ponies behind the nurse’s station. She strolled leisurely back to the three of us with a trio of metal rings levitating along beside her. Peering over my shoulder, I noticed they were identical to the one around Spider Shade’s neck.
“Warden, I do hope you’re not intending on putting us in a box somewhere,” I said.
“Unless you want to submit to magical nullification, it’s strip naked and wear this as long as we’re in the containment areas,” she answered, waving the metal ring in front of my muzzle. “We have protocols for a reason. This is to keep everypony safe, prisoners included. The last thing I need is a gung ho cop punching one of my inmates.”
I sagged slightly, then turned to Swift. “Alright, kid. Fur and feathers time.”
Her lips slid to one side as she gave me a pensive examination. “Sir?”
“We’re heading down to the actual prison.” I explained, waving a hoof at the lobby around us, “This is just the treatment areas. The ring is...mmm...think of it as a ‘full body’ restrictor ring like we use on unicorns. You try to fly, try to use weather magics, or do anything besides walk, talk, and breathe and the prison’s security system will shut off your voluntary muscle groups. You’ll be on your back in about five seconds.”
“Wait, why do we need to wear them, then?” Swift asked, studying the rings. They had a tiny locking mechanism around the throat with a keyhole and five gems.
“Because we’re guests and guests don’t shit on the carpet. Warden’s protocols are designed to make sure everypony feels safe, prisoners included. We’ll leave our weapons and clothing here and get it when we’re leaving.”
She nodded, and began unsnapping her combat vest, dumping several spare clips of ammunition on the nursing station. Meanwhile, I removed my revolver, tugged out the empty cartridge, and tossed my coat down along with my hat. We stood back, side by side. Feeling the air blowing up my sides in public has always felt a bit odd and Swift quivered in the air-conditioning.
Warden’s teeth clicked together. “Come on, Hard Boiled. Don’t waste my time. The rest of it.”
Swift and I glanced at one another, then blinked at her.
“Gun harnesses...” she hissed.
“Oh come on! Do you have any idea how difficult these things are to get out of?” I complained, tugging at the strap secured around my upper leg.
“Yes, I’m entirely aware, and if you need a small room to do the work in, I am sure we can arrange that for you.”
Swift peered sideways at me. “She’s...talking about a cell, isn’t she?”
“Yes, yes, she is.” I exhaled and sat, starting the laborious process of uncoupling the snaps under my legs. “Can we at least have a hoof?”
The Warden wiggled the rings with her magic, her eye locked squarely on Swift’s rear end as my partner rolled onto her back, using her wings to brace herself while she squirmed into position to tug the rear leg reload mechanism off. “Can’t. I’m holding things already. Oooh, so heeeavy...” she said, with a hint of mocking.
Taxi could only take so much.
“Sweets! Either stop laughing and help us or go find a friendlier unicorn!” I snarled as my driver collapsed in a fit of uncontrolled laughter.
“I c-caaan’t! I f-forgot what w-watching somepony take onea those off was like!”
****
Dignity.
Be dignified.
I forced myself to breathe. The office ponies were giggling. Swift was hiding under her wings. The Warden was still staring at her butt.
Thankfully, the stallion behind the counter was a stoic sort with the composure of a Royal Guard. He shuffled Swift’s tactical jacket, and ammo into a basket then carefully affixed a tiny label before passing it to one of his fellows to secret away in the back. My trenchcoat, hat, and gun went in a second box.
The Warden levitated over the rings and I lifted my chin, trying to pretend for all the world like I hadn’t just spent ten minutes writhing around in the floor like an idiot while everypony watched. She opened the ring at the lock, sliding it around my throat. The gemstones flashed, then let off a soft click.
Swift and Taxi were similarly dressed for prison.
“Alright, Hard Boiled. I believe you know how these operate. Jade, I’m certain, would like to have one around your throat one of these days.” She inhaled, and when she spoke again it was with the well practiced boredom of an airline hostess. “Now then! Guests of Tartarus Correctional. You will follow me as we proceed from treatment into containment. Do not deviate from the path. Do not attempt to use magic. Do not attempt to eat anything unless given explicit permission. Do not attempt to urinate or defecate without explicit permission-”
“Seriously, sir?” Swift asked, looking to me.
“Seriously, kid. You know how many ponies have tried to smuggle things into prisons like that?”
“Oh…”
“If I may continue?” the Warden grumbled.
“Yeah, yeah…”
“Follow all instructions given by the Warden or orderlies. If you attempt to teleport, death or liquefaction will result.”
“Death… or?” Swift squeaked.
The Warden didn’t respond to the question. She turned towards a bank of crisp, corporate style elevators at one side of the hall. Taxi and I stepped into line behind her and Swift got the hint, hopping in along side.
“We are proceeding into the prison complex proper. Do not attempt to pass anything to anyone. Do not accept anything from anyone besides a prison attendant except with explicit permission. Failure to comply with these strictures will cause the control ring around your neck to disable parts of your central nervous system to insure compliance. Do you wish to continue?”
“I’m not seeing a choice.”
“Then I bid you, welcome to Tartarus.”