The Foreign Account

by DynamicEquilibrium115

II

Mind’s Eye emerged from the mud and reeds, exhausted from his brush with adrenaline, the smashed remains of red Bloodbuzzers adorning his face and coat. Looking behind him, he saw the remains of the bridge engulfed by the black sludge of the rising river, barring passage for at least two weeks. His saddlebags of vital Commission documents were likely thoroughly dissolved by now and swept away with all the other rubbish. He hoped he could recall the names of his contacts in Port Maresby.

Guile was striding purposefully forward through the reeds, waving ineffectually at the swarms of Bloodbuzzers. Mind hurried after him.

“Celestia smiles on us, we’re in luck.” The Pegasus said, which given the circumstances seemed to Mind an extraordinarily odd thing to say, until he saw exactly what Guile was referring to.

Twenty-one old wagons, each a conglomeration of rotten wood and rusted iron, sat sunk in the soft earth ahead.

“The caravan is right on time.” Guile smiled.

A crowd of zebras, dull and gray, the sort of sullen manual laborers common in outer territories, idly hung about the area. One had pulled a wagon away from the others and was emptying from it a festering purple jelly into the muck, which from the smell Mind guessed to have been blackberries at some point in the distant past.

Mind took a look at the other wagons, half hoping to find a lavishly decorated open spot with his name on it. Four of them were empty enough to hold a few occupants and had been crudely fitted with planks to sit making for an uncomfortable ride. The rest were overflowing with vegetation, meats and fruits of bizarre shape and colour all in varying stages of corruption.

“How long ago were these harvested?” Mind asked the zebra who appeared to be in charge.

"At the end of the cold season obviously.” He replied churlishly.

If ‘cold season’ was the local term for Winter, the goods had been in transport for a little over two months. Clearly, Mind thought, there were issues with transportation that needed to be resolved quickly, but that was his purpose here as a representative of Lord Goldenhoof’s Building Commission after all.

It turned out that their destination was indeed Port Maresby and yes they said, Mind could ride with them.

After some pointless meandering about, the zebras pushed and pulled the wagons back into formation, detaching the front wagon and hitching it to the back for reasons left unknown. The workers moved with dispirited lethargy and after forty minutes Mind was able to take his seat. He figured he’d get friendly with some fellow travellers and sat in the wagon where one Griffon and three Earth Ponies, their coats as dull and matted as the zebras themselves, were waiting.

One pony absent from their ranks was Mind’s guide Guile, who had not taken a seat on one of the wagons but on a rock to the side of the road. Mind looked quizzically at the Pegasus who in response pulled out a hairy carrot and started munching on it.

“The deal was I get you to the caravan and meet you in Port Maresby.” He said solemnly, earning an even more confused look from Mind.

“I’ll see you on the other side.”

Mind thought to protest but the chain of dilapidated old carts had slowly started forward and with too little time to argue Mind elected to stay where he was.

His fellow travelers grunted at Mind's extensive questioning, clearly annoyed as if the diatribe made the ride even worse than it already was. The Griffon turned out to be a merchant based in the capital and two of the ponies were residents of the island, although Mind didn’t manage to pry their occupations out of them. The last pony was a trader of sorts but offered any further details sparingly. A handler of sensitive cargo, Mind thought.

The cart they were in rocked back and forth along the trail, as though someone on the outside was pitching boulders at it, and jerked suddenly upwards causing each rider to clear their seat by a full body length. Mind opted to look outside and immediately recognized the atrocious state of the road, covered in potholes that resembled massive pitfalls and waves of weeds that made it feel as though they were riding against a fierce ocean current. Mind also noticed that the lead driver wasn’t terribly concerned with avoiding the rough patches or how it might compromise the structural integrity of the wagons.

“This is the commerce road?” Mind asked incredulously to nobody in particular, “what of all this uncontained vegetation? Doesn’t anybody look after this place?”

The Griffon answered him, “it’s solid ground, somewhat. The zebras eat parts of it and we set fire to it sometimes, but it just grows back twice as thick.”

A cold noxious wind, stinking of rotten sulphurous compounds picked up from the wretched swamps blew across the caravan making Mind’s eyes water. Mind peered out at the dense canopy of trees which prevented most of the sunlight from ever reaching the ground along with the thick obscuring haze of fog and mist which danced across the endless, featureless expanse of reeds. Long shadows periodically flitted across the landscape, and when Mind looked up, he saw they were being cast by long serpentine creatures with thin wings and beaks filled with saw like teeth that could fell trees.

“Amphipteres,” Silver Slider, the pony to Mind’s left whose name didn’t match up very well with his appearance, remarked. “Like everything on this forsaken island, they’ll pounce as soon as you stop moving, give you a bite and come back to feast once the toxins kick in.”

Mind trembled, he hoped they’d reach the port city before nightfall. Just then it occurred to him that the sun was in the wrong side of the sky.

“Excuse me, sir?” Mind called to the wagon master. “You said we were headed to Port Maresby, yes?”

The wagon master nodded.

“Why then are we going north, when we should be going south?”

There came not a reply but an augmented sigh.

After confirming with his fellow travellers Mind concluded that they were all indeed going to Port Maresby, although none seemed too concerned of the circuitous route being followed to get there. The hard bench and constant bumps of the road were hard on his back and neck but the rhythm of the caravan in addition to the hypnotic waving of the reeds gradually lulled him off to sleep.

***

Mind’s Eye awoke some time later, the darkness of the outer swamp so deep that he was uncertain of their location. The caravan was not moving and Mind was beneath a bench, behind some small boxes. He could hear, outside the wagon, a hissing clicking sound and voices speaking a dialect unknown to him.

While peeking out between someone’s legs Mind caught a glimpse of glistening scales, razor sharp claws and long jaws filled with rows of jagged teeth. He quickly scurried back underneath the bench, their beady black eyes had not fallen on him yet.

The legs in front of Mind began to thrash wildly before their owner was violently pulled from his seat. Mind crouched further back to put as much distance between him and the imminent threat as possible, hiding from danger was one of the few skills he possessed.

Shortly after there was the sound of struggling followed by a hideous scream, followed by silence.

The routine repeated itself three times, each scream with a different accent and timbre but each one conveying the same articulate message. Terror and pain, horrifying pain. Mind tried to swallow but his mouth was bone dry, he instead whispered a prayer to himself.

The agonizing silence stretched on for seconds, minutes… years.

And then the caravan started moving again.

Mind carefully crawled out from under the bench, Silver Slider gave him an amused look.

“There you are,” he said. “I was certain the tengus had taken you.”

“I b-beg your pardon?”

“Tengus,” he repeated, “large nasty things with four arms and two legs. The short ones are nine foot and have a vicious temper. Come from the inner swamp now and then but they prefer to stay there, so they’re particularly peevish out here. A posh unicorn like you is just what they’re looking for.”

Mind never thought of himself as posh in any way. If anything, his dirty mud and Bloodbuzzer covered coat seemed middle class at best. “What would they want with me?”

“To mug, obviously,” the earth pony smiled. “And to kill. Didn’t you see what happened to the others?” He frowned for a moment as if struck by an unpleasant thought. “You didn’t try anything from the boxes down below did you? You know, the white sugary stuff?”

“Goodness no,” Mind grimaced.

Slider stifled a sigh of relief. “You just seemed a bit off. First time to Papua New Whinny, I presume?”

Mind was about to answer when the rain began.

A foul corrosive downpour of yellow-brown liquid battered the wagons with the accompaniment of thunder rumbling off in the distance. Silver worked to pull the cover across the wagon they were in, glaring at Mind until he helped with the arduous task.

Mind shivered, not just because of the freezing rain but at the thought of the already rotten produce in the other wagons being subjected to the same horrendous precipitation.

“We’ll have shelter soon enough,” Silver said, pointing ahead to what Mind hoped was the gates of Port Maresby.

He had never been to such a far off equine settlement but assumed it to be well-kept with shops and homes resembling the streets of Canterlot, with all the comforts and amenities of Canterlot.

The jumble of leaf huts half sunk in the mud was decidedly less.

“What is this?” Asked Mind, appalled at the sight in front of him.

“Hornoka,” replied Silver, pronouncing the odd name with a bit too much cheer. “Looks like you were right after all. We were going north when we should have been going south.”