Italian on Kaiser

by totallynotabrony

Chapter 4

“I should say, leaving town seems rather prudent,” Lara remarked as they hurried into the hotel. They’d already made plans with Jonah and would be checking out immediately after gathering their things.

“Sorry, by the way,” she added.

Daring looked at her, but begrudgingly admitted, “It didn’t hurt too much.”

Having Daring carry the gun at the event was calculated, as if Lara was noticed, attention would be on her. Knowing this, Daring had tried to keep her back to Lara for easy access. Grabbing her to use as an unwilling shield during the gunfight had been spur-of-the-moment, and while Lara felt sorry for doing it, she’d rather the undead zombie be shot than her.

She also felt sorry for thinking of Daring as a zombie, regardless of evidence for the label.

In their hotel room, Daring attempted to pick up the backpack Lara had lent her, but immediately put it down again. “Something’s wrong with my arm.”

Lara gestured for her to undress, which they were going to do anyway before leaving the hotel. Despite just getting into a life-or-death gun battle, it was still somewhat uncomfortable for Lara to see another woman naked. Daring, the pony, did not seem to notice.

In any situation, the shot would have been a good one. “Shattered your sternum, looks like,” Lara said as she examined the bloodless hole in the center of Daring’s chest. “Not sure where the slug ended up.”

“I guess the two halves of my ribcage disconnected would explain why my upper body feels loose,” Daring replied dryly.

“I don’t think we can do anything about that at the moment,” said Lara. “If you can, er, keep yourself together for a bit longer, we’ll need to decide where to go next.”

The two of them glanced briefly at the map of Europe before Lara packed it away. “Perhaps Isozno,” she commented. “Though, that land doesn’t belong to Italy anymore. The river is now in present-day Slovenia, and it’s called Soča in Slovene.”

“What about Marseille?” said Daring, slightly mispronouncing it, but still clear enough for conversation.

Lara paused, and then nodded. “That could be a good idea. We could trace the artifact’s history backwards. Marseille, if I recall correctly, is also a trove of old civilization that could turn up a few clues on its own.”

After stripping the room, they met Jonah back downstairs and headed for the airport. The same private pilot they’d contracted to bring them to Austria had been retained. Calling in the middle of the night may have come as a surprise, but Lara happened to share a common trait with certain comic book superheroes: old money.

Flying overtop the Alps lengthwise this time proved to be a bumpy flight, but with all the globetrotting Lara had done, an intra-Europe trip was a mercifully short.

On the way, Lara and Jonah performed makeshift surgery on Daring in the back of the plane. A pair of pliers and stiff wire were not much with which to work, but there were no preexisting tools made to hold a zombie’s ribcage together.

Daring kept her teeth set and did not try to look. It was unpleasant enough already.

“Tell me more about Von Croy,” she requested, as a distraction.

Lara told her of the previous times she’d met him. “He seems to be looking better than I remember. He gets around very well for a man that must be pushing one hundred.”

“If he deals in things like this, you don’t suppose he might have some help?” Daring gestured at the site of her surgery and wished that she hadn’t.

“Well, I wouldn’t put it past him,” said Lara.

The plane made its approach to the airport just as the sun was rising over the sparkling blue of the Mediterranean. Marseille was located at the water’s edge in the province of Provence. Unable to sleep during the trip, Lara had looked up more information, confirming what she had vaguely remembered, that the city had been founded by Greeks in 600 BC.

Lara and Jonah had the credentials to rent cars all over Europe. Hopefully the sometimes-result of renting cars wouldn’t eventually catch up to them. Though, extradimensional monsters were usually not a problem.

After picking up a nondescript Renault, they found a hotel. While Lara had experienced her share of roughing it in the jungle, she did prefer a good bed as often as possible. Based on Daring’s general reaction, she did, too.

After a quick nap, they had lunch. Lara preferred French food to Italian, though maybe that was due to barely-remembered Julia Child reruns on the telly. Despite being American, something about Julia had struck the young Lara. Finding out she had been a secret agent during the second world war may have had something to do with it.

Lara had always preferred to drive her own escapades, and this one was certainly going to be memorable. While they were waiting for their food in one of the many sidewalk cafes that decorated coastal Mediterranean towns, Lara glanced at Daring, who had started the whole adventure. She paused to scan Daring’s face. She seemed more withdrawn than usual.

Lara didn’t think Daring getting a second hole punched in her chest would make that much difference. Not that she would know personally, but the first must have been the worst, right?

“Is something on your mind?” Lara asked.

Daring knew her feelings must have been written on her face and didn’t pause before confessing. “I’m worried about what’s going to happen.”

“I’m sure we’ll find something we can use,” said Lara, as Daring expected her to.

“But what are we supposed to do with it? Whatever it is? I’m undead.” Daring touched her borrowed shirt, hand resting on her chest. “Suppose we somehow fix that. Does that bring me back to life, or just make me regular-dead? And how am I going to return to Equestria?”

Lara’s lips tightened. “We’re both resourceful.”

Her forced optimism didn’t convince Daring. “There might be some reference in some old book by Starswirl the Bearded, except we’re in the wrong world. There might be some spell that could work, except there isn’t a third of the population here that can do magic.”

“That doesn’t mean there’s no hope. We don’t really have another choice,” Lara reminded her.

That was true. Daring wanted to say something else, but wasn’t sure she could form the words coherently. She didn’t feel like crying, if her body even could in its current state, but Lara’s words couldn’t take away her growing despair and it sat like a lead weight in her gut.

Her attention was distracted by the plate of veal brain that was put in front of her, but her sudden rush of appetite was balanced by the disgust it caused her.

---

Lara was no stranger to the auction scene. When one could not otherwise obtain an artifact, sometimes the only recourse was to buy it. One of her contacts was able to find some information about where the item in Von Croy’s collection had originated. With an address, they set out that afternoon.

The house sat to the west of the city and was surrounded by green hills. However, it became apparent that the place was empty. The lawns were cut, but not manicured as if the hired service knew someone was watching. Taking a look through the windows, the furniture seemed to be draped in dust covers.

“What else do we have?” Lara said as they got back in the car.

“Not much,” Jonah explained, handing her a tablet. “About the same time as the sale of the artifact, the house went on the market. That’s been a couple of years. Even before then, it’s been a mess of shell corporations owning it. Someone does not want junk mail.”

“Somepony doesn’t want their secrets to be found out,” Daring said.

She and Lara traded a look.

“I’ll run surveillance, then,” Jonah said resignedly.

---

The group returned that evening carrying tools of the trade. They were dressed all in black, with the exception that Daring also wore her pith helmet. Lara had strapped on her faithful pair of USPs. Daring, completely unfamiliar with firearms, had borrowed a climbing axe and hung it on her hip. She also carried along a backpack filled with a variety of tools, reference materials, and spare magazines, feeling rather like a mule for it.

They left Jonah on a hill with a rifle and a radio. He’d known Lara long enough to accept that she did things her way - and apparently Daring did, too.

There were security cameras, of course, but Jonah gave them some help with a dazzling laser to get them close to the building unseen. If anyone was actively monitoring those cameras, then they might have company shortly. However, as long as the house had sat empty, that seemed unlikely.

Lara led Daring to the corner of the house where they’d located the cable junction box. She didn’t often deal with modern technology compared to all her brushes with ancient, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t plug in a spoofing device. It set all cameras and sensors in the house to a loop, allowing them to slip by but without the telltale sign that just cutting the power would leave.

That done, they simply went in the front door. It was quite a sturdy lock, but they hadn’t brought a bag of tools for nothing.

“You’re quite handy for an heiress,” Daring commented as the lock clicked open.

Lara looked up, a few metal picks between her lips. “I daresay you’re the only author I’ve ever met who goes around breaking into places and stealing their artifacts.”

“It’s not stealing if the owner is long dead,” Daring retorted as they walked into the house’s expansive foyer.

Lara nodded. “ ‘The difference between graverobbing and archeology is time.’ ”

That put Daring in another mood, thinking about graves and time. She hid it, though, and helped Lara canvas the house.

They swept through the quiet rooms with flashlights. It would have taken far too long to search every nook and cranny, so they focused on rooms that appeared to be office-like. Lara was not hoping to find a safe, as they generally were more difficult to crack. Still, they would do whatever they had to in order to find more information on the mysterious carving.

The house, while modern, clearly hadn’t been lived in much. There were no computers or televisions. All the appliances were unplugged. There were no clothes in the closets.

They checked all the usual places - behind pictures and under carpets, the undersides of tables and inside air vents. There was no evidence of a safe, much less anything valuable. There didn’t even seem to be a place for a secret room - none of the bookshelves had books in them.

They had started at the top floor. By the time that and the main floor had been thoroughly checked, Daring had begun to lose patience. That was saying something for somepony who had ventured alone across half the Equestrian continent and sat tediously behind a typewriter to write a dozen books. Then again, the creeping fear in the back of her mind about what might happen if her condition were allowed to fester too long kept her pushing forward.

“This place has to have a basement,” Lara remarked as they concluded their search of the ground floor. “We haven’t seen any utilities.”

Daring paused. Her expertise, like Lara’s, was in the ancient, but she realized there hadn’t been any sign of things like a water heater or a furnace.

They checked again, carefully examining trim on the walls and the cracks between boards. It was Lara that discovered the countertop on the kitchen island was loose.

“Give me a hand with this.” She put her flashlight in the crook of her arm and gave the slab of granite a shove with Daring’s help. The countertop slid back, exposing a hole that had been concealed behind an artificially shallow cabinet in the island. There was a ladder.

Lara grabbed a chemlight out of Daring’s backpack, cracked it, and dropped it down the ladderwell. Happily, it only dropped about ten feet and didn’t illuminate anything unpleasant. It was almost anticlimactic, but better safe than sorry.

Daring went first, without a word between them. She still wasn’t quite accepting of her role, but reasoned that her body was more expendable than Lara’s, as they’d already discovered.

She stepped off the ladder at the bottom and stood in the green glow of the chemlight as Lara descended. When they were both down, they panned their flashlights around the room.

It was concrete and cinder block, only a little bigger than the kitchen above. There were the expected utilities, with neat wires and pipes.

On the other wall was a timber-framed tunnel that led into the darkness.

Lara called Jonah. “We’re going to be out of communication. We’re going underground.”

---

The tunnel had stretched further than the beam of the flashlights. It was cut through the rocky soil and seemed to be rising slightly. Daring remembered the hills behind the house that angled upwards and eventually became the mountain range Lara had called the Alps.

She wasn’t sure how long they had been walking. Tens of minutes, she guessed. Whatever was at the other end of the tunnel had apparently motivated someone years ago to create a secure access.

The going was slow. They were fortunate to usually be shorter in stature than the limited height of the ceiling, though occasionally it dipped low or they encountered a broken support beam or other debris. Daring in a horizontal pony body probably would have fit through much better.

For her part, Lara was thinking about stopping for a granola bar. Tunnels were boring. Ruins were the real draw. So when odd, flat stones began to appear amongst the dirt and natural rocks, she took notice.

The tunnel developed a cobblestone floor and seemed to grow larger. And then, they were met with a sudden upheave that terminated in a rough wooden cover.

“Floorboards? Trapdoor?” Daring speculated under her breath. There was no telling what was on the other side and she kept her volume down.

Lara retrieved a small prybar and poked at the wood. Despite its obvious age, it was still sturdy. “I suppose we’ll find out.”

The two of them braced, and then pushed. The wood was heavy, but did move, lifting slowly as trickles of dirt fell into the tunnel.

They found themselves peering out of a hillside from under an otherwise unordinary clump of grass. Across from the trapdoor were a few stones in rough order, tall grass growing over them.

Lara was closest and heaved herself out of the hole, putting a hand back to give Daring a pull. They turned off their flashlights and crouched for a moment, letting their eyes adjust to the darkness of a starry sky.

“Jonah,” Lara breathed into her radio.

“Copy,” he replied. “I have your position nearly two klicks east.” He paused for a few moments. “Map says there’s ruins there.”

“Sure are.” Lara glanced around. She could make out a few foundations of old buildings and scattered other stones and half-walls broken from age. As her eyes continued to adjust, the rocky hillside slowly revealed more. The town was old, certainly, but probably not ancient by the standards of some of the places Lara had been.

“You’re looking at Rocca Sparvièra,” Jonah advised.

The name rang a bell for Lara, but she couldn’t remember why. Nodding to Daring, the two of them moved into the abandoned town, keeping low. There was precious little to cover behind, but it was better than silhouetting themselves against the sky.

“There’s some...intense history here,” said Jonah, apparently doing research on the fly.

“The written history goes back to the twelfth century. The village had grown to about 350 people by the 1400’s, when there are unspecific rumors of a curse. Locusts, bouts with the plague, wars, and a series of earthquakes.”

“Could be cursed,” Daring agreed.

“Probably because in 1357, the local queen’s children were murdered and, by some accounts, served for Christmas dinner.”

Lara and Daring traded a glance.

“And then, in the 1790’s during the French Revolution, Rocca Sparvièra was a stronghold of counter revolutionaries who captured some French soldiers and forced them to eat their officer’s heart. There was also an arsenic mine nearby, which partially explains some of this story but also only makes it sadder.”

“Dear Lord,” Lara muttered.

Well, they were on the right track, then. If nothing else, the eating of children mirrored the Greek legend.

“Wait one,” said Jonah suddenly. “There are vehicles coming up the driveway.”

“Found us a bit quicker than I hoped,” Lara lamented. “Well, we’ll have to get in and out before they make it here.”

“There are six-no, make that eight armed men.” Jonah paused. “It’s Von Croy.”

“Are they responding to the security system, or after seeing us did he just assume we’d come here looking for the previous owners of that tablet?” Daring asked.

“No time to worry about it.” Lara started moving again through the ruins. “Come on, we need to keep ahead of them.”

They hadn’t gone ten steps forward through the ruins and piles of stone before a shadowy figure slipped from a doorway ahead and stood a dozen meters away, the meager starlight revealing nothing but a silhouette.

Lara froze, her hands dropping to her guns. She heard Daring shift behind her and stole a glance in that direction, spotting another figure that had appeared in the darkness.

Others began to materialize. Some from within the ruined buildings, or ducking out from around corners. Some seemed to even rise up from the ground. They looked human - or at least, human-shaped.

It wasn’t until one crept close enough that Lara could make out its face that she realized what they actually were.

Comments

[Mitch H]

Well, cliffhangers are a thing.

In general, the French Revolutionaries were the ones making people do unnatural things - see the democide in the Vendee and elsewhere.