The party managed to gather up the loot and the corpses (or pieces thereof) that they wanted to take with them before any more changelings arrived, and quickly headed for the cover of the forest. Twilight and Macintosh had to climb down the vine-covered cliff wall, and… well, they didn’t die in the attempt, although they did their best.
During the trek back to the orcish fortress, the party got the feeling that they were being followed several times, although they never managed to spot anyone or anything specific. Perhaps they were simply jumping at shadows, and the rustles in the underbrush were from ordinary forest creatures. They made it back without having to fight, at least, and well before sundown, although too late in the day for the caravan to set out.
Twilight Sparkle dumped an oozing sack at the orcish sergeant’s feet. “There. The pass is safe.”
“Safer, anyway,” Pinkie Pie said.
The orc opened the bag, then closed it again without changing his expression. “Did you get them all?”
“We got their leader,” Applejack said, “and everyone who was at the camp. There might’a been a few out on patrol or something, but most of ‘em are there in that bag.”
He looked at the wrapped up body on Macintosh’s back. “Looks like you lost someone.”
“Heeheehee,” Pinkie Pie said, rubbing her hooves together. “She’s just… resting? Saaaay, do you have a dungeon or something we could lock her in for the night? Just in case she’s grumpy when she wakes up?”
The orc narrowed his eyes. “We’ve got a graveyard. It’s consecrated. Seems to hold them, if you bury them deep enough.”
“Please, sir,” Fluttershy said, smiling sweetly. “We know what we’re doing. We’re professionals. If you could show us to the dungeon, we’ll make sure that everything is taken care of by morning.”
The orc was unable to resist Fluttershy’s charms, although he did post a pair of guards at the dungeon entrance, just in case. The dungeon had a dozen cells, none of them occupied. Each had a small opening to an underground cave full of waste that could be used to stow dead bodies – or pieces thereof – that the party wished to remain dead, although of course the orcs preferred that they be buried properly, since that tended to last longer.
While they waited for Rarity to rise, Pinkie Pie took Rainbow Dash aside. “I think I’ve figured something out that might help,” she said, grinning. “Just stand right there, and don’t move.”
Rainbow Dash chirped curiously, as Pinkie Pie started to prepare one of her bombs.
“Trust me!” she said, bouncing it between her hooves, then gripped it in her teeth and poured the contents over the polymorphed griffon. There was a slight glow, and a tingling feeling, as if the songbird had an additional pair of legs that had fallen asleep – but then it faded, and she was still a tiny bird. “Rats,” Pinkie Pie said. “Let me try that again.”
“What are you doing?” Twilight asked, as Pinkie poured another vial over Rainbow Dash. Her question was answered immediately, as Rainbow suddenly popped back to full size, once more a griffon.
“Anti-magic bombs,” Pinkie Pie said. “They dispel magic. And without lighting the target on fire! Normally that’s a drawback, but if it’s a friend who needs it --”
“Aaaaaaahhhh!” Rainbow Dash said, as her hindlegs collapsed under her. She curled up, squeezing and rubbing them with her taloned forelegs. “Ow ow ow ow ow.”
“You okay?” Twilight asked.
“Cramps,” Rainbow Dash whimpered. “I haven’t moved these legs in like a week.”
“Huh,” Applejack said. “Does this mean you’re gonna start dyin’ again?”
“Hey, I haven’t died even once!” Rainbow said. “But yeah, it was kind of awesome being so tiny. Nothing could hit me! I don’t suppose you have a potion that’ll turn me back?”
“Hmm,” Pinkie Pie said, taking out her spellbook and flipping to an empty page. “I might be able to mix up something to make you a little smaller, but not as small as that. One day, though – I’ll turn everypony into songbirds! Heeheeheeheehee!”
The party waited around for something to happen, late into the night. Pinkie Pie spent the time turning the changeling glands into tanglefoot bags, but the rest had little to occupy them.
Sometime after midnight, Rarity’s body finally stirred, the zebra’s head lifting under the tatters of its robe. It let out an angry hiss, and lunged at the bars.
“Think!” Fluttershy shouted, glaring at her ghoul friend while wielding the threnodic rod.
Rarity blinked, and comprehension seemed to dawn once more in her eyes. “So hungry…” she growled, eyeing Fluttershy with drool dripping from her fanged jaw.
Twilight levitated the butchered pieces of kobold through the bars, tossing them to the ghoul one by one until they were all gone.
“That’s all you have?” Rarity asked, licking the last of the putrid juices from her hooves.
“Unless you want to eat changeling heads,” Rainbow Dash said. She’d spent the last hour bouncing one of them off the wall and catching it again. At some point it had animated, gaining the ability to hover, and occasionally tried to bite her as she swatted at it, but whatever sort of undead a hovering severed changeling head was didn’t seem to be much of a threat. The rest of them were safely locked in one of the other cells, where they bobbed around like some sort of skull swarm.
“No… no,” Rarity said. “I think they’ll be more useful as they are. It’s been too long since I had an undead minion. We can keep them in Xologrim’s basket.”
In the morning the sergeant gave Rarity a thorough inspection, and wasn’t fooled at all by her attempts to hide her undead state. Seeing that she was lucid, he grudgingly allowed her to go unburied. “What’s in the basket?” he asked.
“A few friends of mine,” Rarity replied, opening it to unleash the swarm, although she kept it from attacking anyone. “If you have any more skulls to donate to my collection, it could get significantly more powerful.”
“They’ve got a whole graveyard,” Pinkie Pie said. “All you’d have to do is dig them up!”
“You are not unearthing the bodies of our fallen to add to your collection, necromancer!” the orc snarled, putting a hand on his axe.
“We’ve lost enough time as it is,” Twilight said. “We don’t need to spend all day fighting undead.”
Rarity sighed. “Fine, fine. I’m sure I’ll come across plenty of skulls in our further adventures.”
The next few days of travel seemed like they were designed to make a liar of her. The pass was as safe and quiet as it was supposed to be, with no sign of monsters, or changelings, or kobolds, or even other travelers. On the third day they reached the second of the three orcish fortresses guarding the pass, only to find it completely deserted, and stripped of everything useful. A poster plastered across the main gate declared that the garrison had been reassigned in its entirety, and directed travelers to move on to one of the other fortresses if they needed assistance.
The poster had been placed across the gate as a seal, but since it had been posted the gates had been opened, leaving it fluttering in the quiet breeze, the wax affixing it to the gate broken in half. A quick inspection revealed that the intruders were small, with clawed feet – possibly kobolds. The tracks were days or weeks old, so there was little else that Pinkie and Fluttershy could discern from them.
The central fortress was located at the top of the pass, and by flying a few dozen feet in the air, most of the fey could get their first view of Rally, far in the distance. When it had been founded, hundreds of years ago, it had been nothing more than the rallying point for the hundreds of formerly independent orcish tribes that wandered the wastes past the mountains – a collection of tents and wagons, with no permanent structures.
Now, the city was massive – as large as Bright Valley, meaning a population in the hundreds of thousands, at least. Most of it was a tangled warren of shoddy buildings built in no particular pattern, filling every inch of space inside the high stone walls. Here and there, seemingly at random, a large tower, ziggurat, or blocky keep rose from the chaos. Unlike Bright Valley, there was no form of zoning or planning involved in the city’s layout, with one exception: in the center was the Military District, off limits to everyone except for the orcish military, and even then only if they were under direct orders to enter. It was surrounded by its own wall, even higher than the one around the outskirts of the city, and even under the best conditions it would have been difficult to get a good look at what was inside, even from the elevated position inside the pass.
At that moment, it was impossible, because the entire military district seemed to be on fire. There was no visible glow or anything, but a thick column of smoke rose from it, obscuring it completely and dissipating only slowly as it rose into the sky, where it formed into the hazy grey clouds that they’d been seeing and thinking nothing of for days now.
“Wow,” Rainbow Dash said. “They must be burning a lot of coal.”
“This probably isn’t the only mine feeding Rally’s industry,” Twilight said, appraising the load they were escorting. It was a great deal of coal, but also represented several months of the mine’s output. It seemed unlikely that it could be responsible for the sheer amount of pollution visible from the pass. “What could they possibly be making that would put out that much smoke?”
“Maybe they’re building an army of iron golems?” Pinkie Pie suggested. “That’s what I’d make.”
“Yeah, that would be great,” Rainbow said. “Do you think they’d let us have one?”
“No,” Twilight replied. “Iron golems are expensive.”
“Expensive, but totally worth it,” Pinkie Pie said. “When they’re finished, all those silly kobolds and goblins and zebras and diamond gnolls are going to be like ‘Oh please please don’t hurt us mister Emperor! We’ll be good! Honest!’”
“I suppose we’ll find out more once we arrive,” Twilight said. “I doubt Wind Seed would have called an army of iron golems ‘insanity’, though. It’s actually a quite sensible use of resources.”
“She’s a crazy sun-addled bandit who’s been talking to too many druids,” Rarity said. “She probably thinks golems are ‘unnatural abominations’.”
The caravan camped for the night at the fortress – even deserted, it was still a good defensive structure – and moved on in the morning. After three more uneventful days, they were approaching the final fortress, when they spotted something unusual off to the side of the pass. A wide, paved trail led up to a cave in the side of the mountain, which had been completely collapsed and blocked off by rubble. The gem ponies in the caravan were able to tell the adventurers that on their last trip, it had been open.
“That’s the entrance to the kobold caves,” Applejack said, as the party took a short break to investigate the collapse. “It’s how their ambassadors and the like get out from the underdark to talk to everypony.”
“It looks like it was collapsed deliberately,” Twilight said. “And recently.”
“And explosively,” Pinkie Pie added. “You can still smell the gunpowder. I mean, if you stick your hoof in the gunpowder residue and then sniff really deep.”
“So what?” Rainbow Dash asked. “We already knew the kobolds were causing trouble. The orcs decided they were sick of those gravel-brained cave-lizards and dropped a bunch of rocks on their heads.”
“They collapsed the entrance, not the entire underdark! Do you really think this was the only way out?” Twilight said.
“It’s a big, convenient exit right next to one of their forts,” Rainbow Dash said. “How far are we from the fort, anyway?”
Applejack flew up and peeked over the next ridge. “Um… about 300 feet?”
Twilight blinked. “Okay, I can see how that would be too close for comfort.”
Like the other fortresses in the pass, the third fortress was understaffed, with no more than twenty orcs in the garrison, although the commander was a full Colonel, and in charge of security for the entire pass. He explained that as a temporary measure, most of his troops had been called back to Rally – and that judging from the other forces he’d seen coming through the pass, it had been happening everywhere in the lands to the east. Not just orcs – pegasus, griffon, unicorn, and earth pony troops had also come through.
“Any zebras?” Pinkie Pie asked.
“No, no zebras,” he replied. “They were part of the Horde, so they’ve got their own command structure. Not like most of you lot, who had to be crushed underfoot until you saw what was best for you.”
“What about goblins?” Pinkie asked.
“The goblins live to the north,” Twilight answered her. “They’re from this side of the mountains, and also autonomous. The ones we saw at Black River probably came through the Nightmare Pass, north of Dream Castle.”
“You’ve seen goblin activity on the far side of the pass?” the colonel asked, looking surprised.
“Nothing official…” Twilight said. “But yes.”
The colonel nodded. “I’d like to hear anything you have to say about conditions out east. Since the recall, we haven’t gotten much word. Why don’t you all join me for dinner, and we can compare notes?”
“Sure, I don’t see why that wouldn’t work,” Twilight said.
“Yeah, I’m getting sick of trail rations,” Rainbow Dash said.
“Already?” Pinkie Pie asked. “You were eating birdseed, like, a week ago.”
“And now I’m eating trail rations,” Rainbow replied. “And they suck.”
As it turned out, joining the Colonel for dinner meant eating in the large mess hall, with most of the troops – save for a few who were needed to keep a lookout. He explained that this was the officer’s mess, but since they’d taken most of his orcs but not his cook or his supplies, they’d all been eating together whenever they could.
The spread was simple, but hearty – a large roast goat, some heavily spiced potatoes, along with steamed cabbage and a heavy drink made out of yogurt. Most of the fey weren’t carnivores, but what they could eat was delicious –
“Stooooop!” Fluttershy said, leaping over to knock a forkful of meat out of Rainbow Dash’s claw. “Everyone, stop eating!” She tried to lift the table and flip it over, but was far too weak.
“Fluttershy?” Twilight asked, a forkful of cabbage halfway to her mouth.
“It’s poisoned!” she said. “It’s all poisoned!”
The Colonel looked insulted, but before he could reprimand her, several of the orcs, the ones who hadn’t paid attention to Fluttershy’s initial outburst and had eaten some of the food, started to choke and thrash and foam at the mouth.
“Guards!” he shouted, pointing at the party. “Arrest them!”
“What?” Twilight said. “That’s insane! Fluttershy is the one who warned you about the poison!”
“You’re the only newcomers we’ve had in days,” the Colonel said. “Do you think it’s a coincidence that poison suddenly shows up in our food the same day that an alchemist arrives? Everyone knows they’re poisoners.”
“Noooo, I’m more into arson,” Pinkie Pie said, hovering up into the air and looking nervous, as the orcish guards started to draw their weapons.
“Now look here,” Applejack said. “Let’s not do anything hasty. We know the kobolds are causing trouble, and they like poison as much as ten alchemists. They probably staged this to target us –“
“It’s no good,” Fluttershy said, as she watched the orcs close in. “They’re charmed. All except for him.” She pointed to the Colonel.
“I don’t know what you’re trying to imply, but you can explain yourself from the inside of a cell,” the orcish Colonel replied. “Guards, take them into custody. If they resist, kill them.”
“Yeah,” Rainbow Dash said. “That’s not going to happen.”
There was a flash of light and smoke, as Pinkie Pie tossed a stink-bomb at the middle of the table, engulfing the orcs seated closest to the party. “We can get out the top!” she said, nodding towards the stairwell at the back of the room, as she hovered up towards the ceiling, out of reach of the orcs’ axes.
Twilight drew her hammer, and trotted around the edge of the table to attack the Colonel, who blocked her blow. “If we take him down, will that break the charm?” she asked. “Because that’s a lot of orcs.”
“Nope,” Pinkie Pie said.
“Colonel, we can’t just arrest an adventurer!” said one of the orcs who’d been poisoned.
“But if he attacks them, like with poison, that’ll break the charm. So those orcs might be on our side,” the pink pegasus added.
Several of the other orcs stood back from the table, looking confused and wary, as their companions robotically drew their weapons and then flew into a rage.
Applejack tumbled out of her seat and around behind the Colonel, stabbing him in the back and opening a long, bleeding gash, as Rainbow Dash leapt across the table, shouting “Stunning fist!” as she punched him right in the face, breaking his jaw.
Meanwhile, two of the charmed orcs charged at Macintosh, their axes rebounding from his armor with a loud ‘clang’, while another two hacked away at Rarity with rather more success, leaving her nearly destroyed – but still animate, for the moment. Two more of them choked on the fumes from Pinkie’s bomb, while the last two moved to guard the door, since they couldn’t get to the adventurers to attack without climbing onto the table, which was on fire.
The boss tried to give further commands, but the blow to the face had, in fact, left him stunned, so he stood there like an idiot with his mouth open, until the loss of blood from Applejack’s strike finished him off, and he collapsed face-first onto the table.
And turned back into a changeling.
Fluttershy cast a small negative energy spell on Rarity to heal her as much as she could manage, just before the heavily wounded wizard ducked under the table and vanished from sight – and in her place, a swarm of skulls engulfed her attackers, biting them and firing force bolts at other orcs nearby.
Not wanting to destroy the swarm, Pinkie Pie threw another bomb at the orcs attacking Macintosh, engulfing them in flames and knocking one prone with a grease patch. “Or we can fight them right here in the dining room,” she said. “I guess that works too.”
Twilight jumped up on the table and slammed her hammer into the orc who had kept his feet, crushing the bones of his shoulder, although he was too angry to notice. “Any orc who isn’t charmed – your leader was replaced by the enemy! Help us fight off his charmed minions!”
With a roar, the remaining orcs flew into a rage and attacked, two squaring off with the door guards while the other two charged the orcs on either side of the table, one hacking at an orc engulfed in the swarm while the other slammed his axe repeatedly into the orc who’d slipped in the grease. The orcs fought with no concept of defending themselves, and every axe strike struck true, slicing flesh and drawing blood, as the enraged humanoids hacked away at each other.
Applejack and Rainbow Dash charged at the orcs who’d been menacing Rarity – while her invisibility might have let her escape, it was better to have friends covering her. Applejack cut a long gash in one orc’s belly, but as the loops of his intestines started to ooze from him, he gave no sign of noticing the injury, and it certainly didn’t slow him down. His axe rose and fell, opening huge gashes in the purrsian’s hide, while his friend swatted randomly at the skulls, to no effect.
“Stop hurting my friends!” Fluttershy said, meeting the gaze of the orc fighting Applejack – and as if her eyes had shot daggers, he reeled back and collapsed, unconscious.
On the other side of the table, the orc who’d fallen tried to stand up, flailing about in the grease and giving Macintosh an opportunity to skewer him – and managed to lift his head just high enough to take the lance in the back of his neck, his entire face coming detached as it pierced his brain and cracked open the front half of his skull. The other orc slammed his axe twice into the giant pony’s side, however, the firm blows cutting clear through the armor and opening grievous wounds.
There was the sound of Rarity’s voice incanting the words of a spell from the back of the room, and a wave of colorless energy swept over the party, speeding their movement. Twilight’s hammer rose and fell rapidly on the orc who’d cut at Macintosh, turning both of his shoulders into useless lumps of shattered bone and meat, before caving in his chest and sending him plummeting to the ground, quite dead.
Pinkie Pie used her extra speed to swoop across the room and drop a flaming grease patch on the charmed orcs guarding the door, burning them and dropping them to the ground, and their less charmed friends easily chopped them to pieces as they tried to stand back up and get back into the fight.
Applejack, limping and badly hurt, tried to hide under the table and toss her dagger at the last orc still fighting in the middle of the swarm, busy trading blows with one of his fellow orcs, but he kept his eye on her and managed to take it in a less vital part of his anatomy, although it still drew blood. Rainbow Dash flew up over his head and dropped down, shouting “Stunning F—whaaa?” Lightning flashed around her claw as it slammed into his head, the electricity crackling over him and scorching his skin.
“Hey, cool. That never worked before,” she said, then threw herself to the side to dodge the orc’s counterattack, his axe swinging wide as he roared in agony.
“I said stop fighting!” Fluttershy said, and although this time the rays of force from her admoninshing gaze slammed into the back of his head, he still collapsed.
Macintosh charged the last of the still-charmed orcs, and his lance impaled the hapless soldier, pinning him to the ground while his former comrade finished him off.
The party looked around at the carnage – the feast table on fire, the changeling in badly-fitting orcish armor slumped at the head of it, red orcish blood and the bodies of soldiers scattered all around. “This is going to look really bad, isn’t it,” Twilight said. “The rest of the garrison is probably charmed too.”
“We will stand with you,” one of the orcs who’d fought on their side said. They’d all been injured, but none of them badly, and the small amount of poison they’d ingested hadn’t been enough to burn through their orcish constitution.
Fluttershy tried to see if she could save any of the orcs who they’d downed, but orcs tended to fight on well past the point where other races would fall to the ground, dying – which meant that all of them were dead, except for one of the ones she’d hit with her spell, who was rapidly bleeding to death from Applejack’s attempt to gut him. She touched him with a hoof and gave him a small healing spell, which brought him just barely conscious.
That was conscious enough for him to swing at her with his axe, opening a large gash in her side before Pinkie Pie’s bomb splashed over him – without any fire, this time. He blinked, and dropped his axe, holding his barely-patched together gut. “I yield,” he said, holding up his hand. “Kill me if you must, my life is forfeit for this shame!”
“Nah, it’s okay,” Pinkie Pie said. “You were just charmed. Could happen to anybody with a really, really weak will.”
Twilight raised her hoof to her forehead.
Pinkie Pie nodded. “Like Twilight there – she would totally have been charmed, just like you were.”
As it turned out, the rest of the garrison was not charmed – the changeling spy must have had the ability to cast something resembling the Charm Person spell at will, but not to maintain it any longer than the few minutes that it normally lasted, so only the orcs actually in his presence at any given time were under his spell. They were not happy to see so many of their friends dead, but they were orcs, and soldiers, and the fallen had died in battle, so they were not about to grieve, either. They did send a message to Rally by signal mirror, telling them what had happened.
The cook, who had poisoned the meal, was nowhere to be found. A search of the keep revealed the true cook’s body, along with that of the Colonel, packed into a crate in an unused basement store room. Both had animated – or been animated – as mindless zombies, who neither attacked nor acknowledged the orcish soldiers who found them during the search.
On the lighter side, the orcs confirmed that since the party had defeated the fake colonel in fair combat, and avenged their true leader, they were allowed to claim his equipment – a powerful magical glaive that could freeze its targets, a magical version of the standard orcish breastplates which Twilight could adjust to fit one of the party, if any of the fey were up to wearing medium armor, and another cloak of resistance.
“None of us use medium armor, so that’s just something to sell, I guess,” Twilight said, examining the breastplate. She turned her head to the other side and frowned at the glaive. “The real question is if I can modify this into a lucerne hammer without destroying its magic.”
“I’m sorry, dear,” Rarity said. “Magical weapons don’t work that way.”
“The real question, is who closed that tunnel just over the ridge,” Applejack said. “Was it you folks?”
“Yes,” one of the orcs answered. “The Colonel ordered it sealed. He said there were rumors of trouble with the kobolds, although we hadn’t seen anything.”
“Was this before or after he was replaced with a bug?” Rainbow Dash asked.
“It was recent. Three days.”
“Judging by the state of the zombies, that would be ‘after’,” Rarity said. “Soon after.”
“That’s about what I figured,” Applejack said. “The kobolds wanted that tunnel closed. I reckon they’ve got something in there that they don’t want anyone stumbling across.”
“Of course they do,” Twilight groaned, glancing towards the smoke column rising from Rally. “Do you think we could come back and investigate it after we finish escorting the caravan? We’re only about a day’s travel from the city at this point, and we could really use some better equipment.”
The party waited around for a few seconds, but none of the orcs or caravan ponies chimed in with a reason why they should invade the kobold cave immediately.
Twilight sighed with relief. “Right, then it’s settled. Let’s find some non-poisoned food, and set out for the city in the morning.”