XIV - In Her Secret Majesty's Service
XIV
In Her Secret Majesty's Service
“Platinum’s daughter?” I finally managed to sputter out. “Gale is Queen Platinum’s daughter?”
Despite my overriding shock, Travail was still obviously nervous around me. She trembled in the hallway, her gaze jumping between my face and Silhouette’s cell, where my crystal nemesis was slowly trying to find which of the six keys I’d thrown her actually opened it. “I d-don’t know a ‘Gale’. But the u-unicorn you were with w-w-was Princess P-Platinum the Third.” She slowly held up a placative hoof. “Y-you really d-didn’t know?”
“I knew she was a noble,” I muttered back. “But not that noble. Where is she?” A loud thud against the door out of the hallway signaled two concerns to me. “More guards… Silhouette, you’d better get out of there now.”
I heard the soldier scoff. “You think I’m helping you, Coil?”
“Me or Hurricane,” I told her. “Take your pick.”
Silhouette’s fiddling with the door grew faster. Another heavy blow slammed against the locked hallway door. The guards on the other side must have been doing their best to beat it down.
I returned my attention to Travail, lowering my voice for the sake of intimidation. The resulting gruff “Where is she?!” sounded ridiculous to my ears, but it seemed to have the desired effect on Travail.
“The T-T-Tagfahrt Chambers… W-Where the ruling c-council meets. G-Governor Tough S-Smith has her.”
I suppressed a snort of laughter at the stallion’s name. “Thank you very much, Archmage. Since you seem to have decided that I’m the ‘bad guy’ in this story, I suppose there’s only one thing left to do.” I glanced back to Silhouette. “I’m going to go kidnap a princess. Feel free to use that against me when you talk to the Equestrians.”
Silhouette rolled her eyes just as she finally got the lock on her cell to click. “If you keep up that fairy tale trash, I’ll turn us both in to the Butcher.” Stepping out, she hoofed me the keys, and then wrapped a foreleg around Travail’s neck. For what it’s worth, the mare who ostensibly could be called an ‘archmage’ resisted, though she stood no chance against an earth pony half her age and nearly twice her muscle mass. The simple pressure of the chokehold persisted for several seconds, until the middle-aged mare collapsed.
“Was that really necessary?”
“I was tired of hearing her stutter,” Silhouette grumbled, before rolling her neck and turning her attention to the door at the end of the hall. The wood was visibly warped, beginning to splinter from the blows it was taking. It lasted only two more. When the wood gave way, three ponies rushed in carrying padded clubs, obviously designed to take criminals alive and relatively uninjured.
They weren’t terribly effective against Silhouette’s stone body.
Her hooves, in contrast, were extremely effective against their bodies. In about ten seconds of what I’m inclined to call industrial disassembly, the three Lübuck guardsponies were rolling on the floor, moaning in agony and clutching various parts of their bodies.
“That was… fun,” I observed. “Alright, Silhouette, here’s the way the cards are falling. Right now, I’ve got spells to spare and you don’t have your void crystal. So I’m sure you understand why you aren’t going to follow me.”
She turned back to me and rolled her neck. “A little advice, Coil: never call a fight before it’s over.”
“It’s not a fight if I’m the only one who lands a blow.” I shrugged. “Go to Queen Jade and stop her from doing something even more stupid than what she already has. Or go to Tempest, if your urges are really that irresistible.”
The thought seemed to amuse her. “That sounds like a plan. He’s cute.”
I arched a brow.
Silhouette sighed. “Of course, you’re a stallion. You don’t get it.”
“Get what?”
“For a mare, sex is a weapon. Some ponies are too stupid to think of it that way, or too ‘noble’ to use the advantage they’ve got. They don’t want to be called ‘sluts’ or mocked for their ‘mineshafts’.” She glared at me pointedly. “Any mare who wants it can find a stallion. But a stallion has to put in a lot of effort to seduce a mare, because the stakes are a lot higher for us. So if I offer myself, you’d be surprised how many stallions can’t resist. And once you’ve got somepony interested in you, you’ve got a way to control them.” She flicked her tail once. “Who knows? If you’d ever given in, maybe we wouldn’t have been enemies like this.”
“So it’s just another form of extortion?”
Silhouette shrugged. “Pretty much. But when you call it ‘love’, you’d be surprised how much control you get over somepony.” Then she flicked her tail again, and glanced at the hole I’d blown in the wall. “And no, I’m not going to try and follow you. Are you leaving?”
I gave her a little nod, and then to her considerable surprise, walked through the door leading further into the prison building.
Finally alone and no longer putting on the airs of perfect calm that I needed to portray myself in a position of strength over Travail and Silhouette, I let my shoulder’s slump. After a moment to catch a couple of deep breaths, I analyzed my surroundings. The guard post or prison or whatever it was promised to be a smaller structure than I would have guessed. For one thing, I could clearly see the doors leading out. For another, it seemed that the three guardsponies who had rushed Silhouette were the only ponies in the building, other than the now unconscious excuse for an Archmage. They’d left behind a small lunch table, a single desk in the corner, and one other meaningful door set next to an interior window. Behind the barred glass I saw another room containing countless racks of weapons and armor, but they weren’t the only treasures of note.
“Master Coil! Oh, thank goodness you’re alright! Are you well, Master Coil?” Angel shouted at me in his tinny rasp from the other side of the glass. The rock in question was rather amusing. Without his golden halos to let him fly, angel was literally just a hoof-sized stone who happened to be able to speak, laying flat on a shelf near-ish the door. All around the golem were the confiscated ‘treasures’ of Lübuck’s criminal underworld: knives, bottles of exotic alcohols and poisons, a sizeable pile of scrolls, and more than a few heavy winter coats.
I barged into the room, whose door was fortunately unlocked, and set about gathering my things. “I’m doing quite well, Angel, thank you for asking.” I paused for a moment in the act of donning my jacket. “You know, you were fantastic in the cathedral. I don’t know if we would have made it without you.”
“Oh, you needn’t thank me, Sir. It is my pleasure to serve.”
“I know; I made you that way. Don’t let the praise go to your core.” He had meant the comment more literally than the idiom would imply; the artificial soul of the golem defined service as a form of joy. “Letting others know when they’ve done a job well is still a matter of common courtesy.”
“Why, thank you, Sir. Might I ask what your plan is now? Do you intend to take me with you when we run this time?”
I nodded. “It wasn’t exactly the plan to leave you behind the first time. And for the record, it should be enough for you to trust my planning without my spelling it all out for you. I was desperately busy trying not to wind up cornered by Jade. Did she treat you alright?”
“Better than I expected,” came his cheerful reply. As he continued speaking, I hefted his golden halos and held them aloft on either side of his central body. Slowly, the small stone rose into the air between the two magical rings. “Of course, had I known she intended to use me as a way to track you, I might not have been so grateful.”
I shrugged. “That doesn’t matter now. You look for Wintershimmer’s grimoire.”
“What do you intend to do, Master Coil?”
Rather than answer him directly, I wandered over to the suits of armor, stored on roughly equine wooden models against the wall. Though it took a little bit of effort, I soon appeared as one of Lübuck’s finest—which is to say ‘considerably less fine than my usual appearance’. A little bit of my jacket was visible between the pauldrons of the steel armor and the bracers of the same, though I doubted that slight slip in formal uniform would give me any trouble. With virtually no knowledge of swords or guard batons, I chose one of each completely at random from the shelves and slung their belts over my withers, one on each side.
“Now, Angel, I want you to follow at about the roofline. Try and stay under eaves and awnings so you aren’t obvious from the sky, but more importantly don’t come down into view of ponies walking on the streets.”
“Where do you intend to escape to, Sir?”
I smiled. “Well, first thing to do is kidnap—” I held my tongue abruptly; Angel was many things, but foremost amongst them was a rock. Subtlety was not his strong suit. “That is to say, we have to go rescue Gale and Graargh.”
“I see. Well, Sir, lead the way.”
My disguise worked more effectively than it had any right to. Civilians not paying attention to me had been the goal, but when I crossed paths with another guard patrol, even they offered me unquestioning nods before going about their business. Only in retrospect did it occur to me how small the population of Union City was, that virtually every guardspony knew one another. Thankfully, Lübuck was much larger.
The Council Chambers belonged to a group known as the Tagfahrt, or something similarly unpronounceable and flatulatory. They were housed in an enormous structure that I was able to identify from a distance simply by looking at the two buildings of governmental size on the hills overlooking the city, and then choosing the one that wasn’t the cathedral.
When I reached the doors, two earth pony guards in far more sizeable and formal armor were standing in wait. Each carried a spear, which were rested together to form a larger-than-life ‘X’ across the entrance to the structure.
“Constable,” one of the guards grumbled, looking down on me in more ways than altitude. “What’s your name, kid? And what are you doing here?”
I nodded up at the building. “Um… Tempest.”
“Tempest?”
I shook my head. “Oh, uh, no. My name’s Brick.” Clearly, amongst my many talents, I am the best improvisationalist who ever lived. “Tempest is the other answer. You know, Centurion Tempest? Commander Hurricane’s grandson?”
The two guards glanced at one another, and then back to me in sync. “Well, I assume you have a message, colt.”
“Yeah. The wizard escaped.” It was the first thought that came to mind, and I immediately regretted it.
“The wizard?”
I nodded, even if in my mind I was wielding more than a bit of Gale’s vocabulary at myself for my choice of ‘message’. “The crystal pony wizard. You see, the Centurion is concerned that he’ll try to come for her majesty.”
“He knows…” The as-yet-silent guard whispered.
The one who’d been speaking rolled his eyes. “Of course the ‘fancy’ pegasus sends some rookie who can’t even wear his uniform right to deliver messages. Well, ‘Brick’, apart from keeping our eyes open, what does he intend us to do about it?”
A hint of a plan came to mind. “He—that is, Centurion Tempest—said the wizard might try to do something sneaky and warp past you, or he might blow a hole in the wall. You’re to stand guard outside her majesty’s room, instead of at the front gates. That way, maybe Lübuck will finally manage to maintain control over one single prisoner, for a change.”
They glared at me for my slip. I made a show of coughing embarrassedly into my hoof. “Um, those were his words.”
“Hmph.” The guards glanced at each other, and the primary speaker rolled his eyes. “Typical Cirran pride. Well, we’ll show him.”
“I’ll need to see the Princess before I can return to the Centurion.” A special emphasis went into rolling my eyes as the two guards looked at me questioningly. “He insisted. Apparently, he’s worried she might have tried to sneak out already.”
“Through a locked door? Or out a fifth story window?”
I shrugged. “You know how it is with Cirrans.” Of course, I had no idea ‘how it is with Cirrans’, but that didn’t seem to matter to ponies who understood ‘typical Cirran pride’ as a familiar occupational irritation.
The doors opened moments later on an opulent forechamber with an elaborate carpet, polished marble columns, rich red wood, and the stench of politics. Unfortunately, like so many large buildings built to display the wealth of the exceptionally arrogant, the aforementioned qualities continued to describe all the further halls and rooms we traveled through. Eventually, even plush carpets and marble pillars become a tedious drudgery.
We stopped somewhere on the fifth floor, as the guard had mentioned earlier, in front of a stout wooden door with a sizeable lock. “Chancellor Puddinghead’s quarters, when he visits,” the more vocal of my escorts explained while fiddling with the lock and key. The door swung open with a creak. “Here she is.”
I reached out a hoof, holding open the door as the guard reached to close it again. I needed a moment’s thought. Gale was laying upside down on the chamber’s bed with her head aligned toward the door, so that her face wasn’t really visible. The act of not addressing the ponies at the door was clearly deliberate, as if the silent treatment would somehow let her continue in her journey. Still, there was no mistaking her. “There was a foal as well?” I asked the guards.
“Next room over,” the speaker answered, tweaking his head to indicate the direction. “Do you need to see him?”
“No, gentlestallions. You are dismissed.”
The brief moment of confusion that played across the faces of the less-than-gifted guards was absolutely priceless. The more vocal of the pair opened his mouth to speak, right as I allowed mana to flood my horn. A moment later, both guards found themselves on the roof of the Council Chambers.
As promised, I don’t always teleport myself away from problems. And I still hold that to be a more elegant solution than my original plan of bludgeoning them into unconsciousness with one another.
“Sorry it took me a while, Gale. I’m here to kidnap you.”
The purple mare on the bed didn’t seem to believe my voice. She turned her head slowly, eyes widened, until they settled on me properly.
“Morty?”
“Don’t recognize me? Is it the armor?”
“Holy shit!” Springing off the bed, Gale wrapped me in an enthusiastic (if platonic) hug. “Why are you here? How are you here?”
“‘How’ is a long story.” I pulled back from the embrace and looked her in the eyes. “But I wasn’t going to let you get dragged back to Everfree City for trying to do something good.”
Gale scoffed. “So I’m some sort of damsel in distress to you, is that it?” Her voice carried hints of sarcasm, in the same sense that bread carries hints of wheat. Her smile also helped clue me in about her genuine feelings.
Still, I shook my head for an honest reply. “Gale, I’ve seen you in two fights now. I know you can take care of yourself.” I shrugged. “Plus, after you held off Silhouette in the cathedral, I figured I owe you. Now come on. Let’s go get Graargh, and then I’ve got a ship waiting.”
“You… How? You don’t have any real money!”
“Wizard!” I replied enthusiastically, embracing an ancient and proud wizarding tradition. Namely, the ancient and proud wizarding tradition of being pedantic and deliberately unhelpful.
Gale slapped me across the top of my head, tweaking an ear. Despite the pain, I couldn’t help but smile. “Come on.” As we started walking, I shouted up toward the ceiling of the hallway. “Angel, you still here?”
“As ever, sir,” the golem replied, floating down into view. “It is good to see you again, Mistress Gale.”
“It's just Gale.”
“A thousand apologies, Mistress Gale the Just. Master Coil would have me for a door jam if he heard I'd failed to title a friend of his.”
Gale groaned aloud; she only refrained from what was certain to be a vibrantly worded diatribe when we arrived at another heavy door. Only in that moment did I realize that I’d also teleported the keys onto the roof.
Fortunately, to my surprise, Gale proved more than capable of bucking down a wooden door. The act took her more than a few good kicks, but soon, we had a pile of sawdust falling on a little green colt.
“Morty!” There were tears in Graargh’s eyes as he lunged at me through the broken door. I backed away just one step before I felt the weight of his forelegs around my neck, not angry but desperately terrified, seeking comfort in my embrace. After my momentary shock, I wrapped my forelegs tight around his little body. He nuzzled into my neck, only to be thwarted by my helmet. With a casual jolt of telekinesis, I tossed it to the side; that seemed to cheer him up. Half-dried tears matted my mane as he pulled closer into me, almost as if he wanted to bury himself in my neck.
I took silent notice of the fact that he felt thin in my forelegs. As I ran my hoof down his back, I could feel the spurs of his spine and nearly every rib around his barrel. He must have been even more malnourished than he had seemed when I first met him.
“Are you okay, Graargh?”
He nodded into my neck.
“Alright. Good. You’re alright; we’re all here now. See, Gale’s here?” I gestured over. “And my friend Angel, whom you haven’t really met yet. You two can talk later, okay? For now, we need to get going.”
Graargh shook his head. “Not leave!”
“We’re not leaving you, kid,” I told him. “You’re coming with us.”
“Here,” Gale offered stepping forward. “You wanna ride on my back, Graargh? It’ll be fun.”
That offer was apparently close enough to the group and a tempting enough chance for fun that Graargh finally released his frail grip on my neck. I sighed a little breath and helped the colt climb onto Gale’s withers. Though he wasn’t quite a perfect substitute for her pack of medical supplies and golden bits, the replacement didn’t seem to bother Gale.
The rest of our trip was unremarkable; apparently, Gale was no more recognizable to the public as the crown princess of Equestria than she had been to me before I knew that particular secret. Between her anonymity and my disguise, it wasn’t hard to reach the docks. And, as frantic life and an even more frantic pony hunt swept the streets of Lübuck, my group of friends and I finally found our way to the gangplank of The Little Conqueror.
Sitting on the edge of the railing with his hind legs dangling down toward the sea, a pegasus with a coat startlingly similar to my own looked up at our approaching group. “I thought there was only going to be one of you. You took long enough.” His restrained, salty voice matched his apparent irritation.
“Plan changed,” I told him. “You still going to carry us, or—?”
“Heh. I can’t exactly decline a royal commission, can I? I’m Winterspell. This is the Little Conqueror. Hurry aboard.” He turned back over his shoulder to a group of other ponies mulling about the deck. “Mr. Signal! We’ve a tide to catch!”
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Winterspell, huh? Interesting that I remember that name...
Oh, I am hanging on every word of this. Good show good show.
7720033
There will be more coming, eventually. Per my earlier blog post, I've gotten enough of my wedding planning done that I can be back to writing this, but progress is still slow.
I'd give you a date to expect new content if I had one, but for now, I'll just let you know to watch this space.
7720033
Note from the Editor (not the author): Loyal's actually done a fair bit more, and is still going. I've advised him to finish the rest before updating on a fixed schedule. I suspect you'll like it.
7707409
Come! Join us in Discord...
7212754
This is a Price of Loyalty story. EVERYPONY dies... at least once.
8103028 ...Dusk I've been in the discord since EFNW last year.
8103025
Wait, there's a discord for this?
8312885
There is, but it's limited to authorial and editorial staff. There's often discussion about future events and mechanics that would ruin the suspense if it was common knowledge. You'll just have to wait and see how things unfold.
I can tell you, however, that the story is now finished and undergoing final edits and revisions. Once that's done, there will be updates on a fixed schedule. I can also divulge that portion that has beed published is somewhere short of the halfway mark in terms of overall length, though I won't say by how much.
There's also been some revisions to the chapters that have been published, so you might want to go back and start from the begining once you see updates happening again.
Regards,
Dusk Watch, Technical Editor
I kind of hope this new title sticks.
Tempest should have been just a little more careful with who the royal commission forces the trip was allowed to carry.