by Marc Secchia
“Three sunspot cycles, High Wizard.”
“Hmm. Why don’t you blood your new troops on those Human lice living out near Azoron’s Gorge, Tayburrl? They’ve defied my rule long enough. And remove this filthy corpse from my sight. The mess offends me. The Gryphons will arrive tomorrow. Everything must be perfect for the hour I bend my new subjects to my mighty rule.”
The Darkwolf Commander stooped, hooking up the body in one huge paw. He stepped over to the wall, opened a flap Zaranna had not previously noticed and stuffed the body inside. There was a brief scraping noise. A trash chute?
The odd, leprous finger tickled Zaranna’s tiny chin. “You don’t care much about the doings of Wizards and Pegasi, do you, little pony?”
She had the impression that beneath that impenetrable cowl, powerful eyes dissected her very soul, and the touch of that gaze felt like icy claws slitting her essence with the ease of razorblades parting skin. Zaranna had begun to wonder about Rhenduror’s actions; about how this Hooded Wizard could not have known a Plains Horse for what she was, unless the Red Dragon had somehow instilled those dreams in her mind? Worse, Azoron’s Gorge was the direction she was meant to take … but she froze. Flowers, food, play. Flowers …
“No. You’re just a magic-sucking parasite like the rest of your kind. Like the rest of that equine trash!”
Without warning, Worafion hurled her underarm at the closing trash-flap. She struck with a sickening thud, and fell into darkness.
* * * *
Zaranna jerked upright, off Alex’s left shoulder. The cabin was quiet, darkened for sleeping – ha, ha. Now there was a joke when it came to overnight flights. Her Mister Darcy lay as sprawled as only a long-legged young man could be in a bulkhead seat, enjoying a relative surfeit of space in Economy Class. He snored gently. Even his snoring was delectable. How did he do that? Yolanda had, in her inimitable way, made it known to the entire family that Zaranna snored like a buzz-saw. She had felt self-conscious about falling asleep ever since.
That’s what sisters were for, right?
“Alex?”
Her man wore stubble so artful, he ought to be arrested. Arrested, and thrown into a dungeon cell with her. Better still, sucked away into a dream where he could ride Jesafion through the endless turquoise skies of Equinox … for he was her Knight Gallant.
Very gently, Zaranna laid her head on his shoulder again. Now, if one could dream together, that would be neat.
Go, little pony. Don’t give up.
* * * *
Firmly stuck to a rancid, mouldy vegetable peel, Zaranna tumbled into space with a wild yell. The deep gloom yielded to a landscape of mounded heaps of garbage funnelling down toward a dark, central hole with no apparent bottom. Scavengers skittered across the heaps in their thousands, digging for bones and edibles. Raw sewage dripped onto the mess from pipes presumably leading from the fortress; she barely had time to consider the staggering stench before she landed with a wet splat like a rotten fruit flung at a wall. Her tiny wings popped loose.
At once, a dozen coarse-haired pony-rats which Jesafion had jokingly called ‘prats’ when describing the lowest life-forms of Equinox, threw themselves at her. They were the size of small grey cats, with short, nimble legs and stubby, chewed-off tails. Elongated front canines chomped around her, but in her Miniature form she found herself small enough to scramble away between their hooves. The overexcited scavengers turned on each other with a chorus of shrill squeals and whinnies. A vicious scrum of flying fur and gnashing teeth developed instantly.
She lurched away and transformed as Jesafion had suggested she would, without any warning whatsoever. A Plains Horse landed stomach-deep in a puddle of the finest, freshest fertiliser Worafion’s fortress had to offer. She almost choked at the stench. Instinctively, she began to swim-slop out, when a pair of paws suddenly gripped her, heaved her out and deposited her atop the nearest pile of kitchen scraps.
“Ah, thank you,” said Zaranna, peering at her rescuer.
The semidarkness of the garbage cavern revealed tentacles, wings, a pair of hooves protruding out of a stomach – she could not rightly tell. The tangled heap of body parts moved, giving her a brief glimpse of luminous white eyes. They blinked myopically. Oddly, the creature did not strike her as dangerous – although, how she sensed that was beyond her.
“Not often I’s gets a lives ones,” it sniffed, sounding disappointed. “Not tasty corpses, no. Wants soft rotten foods, yes?”
Flee! Her hooves seemed rooted to the midden. “Who are you?” she asked.
“Who’s me? Who’s you? I’s been experimented,” it said, carefully spelling out the syllables. “Man-ip-u-la-ted. His doing, see? He whose eyes sees all of us, yes?”
“Ah,” said Zaranna, unwilling to say the name. “The Wizard?”
“Sees all!” the creature insisted. “No Wizards’ seasons, see? Just dark, dark, dark …” The voice trailed off into unintelligible mumbling, before there came a plaintive, “Sure horse is lives ones? Doesn’t wants to be meals, yes?”
“No, I do not.”
What she had taken for a smallish creature suddenly unfolded itself in unexpected ways, as though it had joints throughout its torso. She stumbled backward in horror. Dragon … thing! It was huge, the strangely flattened body curving back into the darkness, weird appendages and limbs dangling from its green torso and underbelly. She cast about swiftly. Was that a hint of light up there, far above?
“Wants lights, cunning she-horses,” it said. “Meals?”
“Um … lights? What do you mean? Would you help me escape this place?”
“Earthen Fires dark, dark, dark,” said the creature, pointing at the hole. “Man-ip-u-late. Changings, burnings, oh it burns, it burns!”
As the creature shrieked in her face, Zaranna lost her balance and slid backward down her slops-pile, fetching up against what appeared to be a half-rotted Darkwolf Clan corpse at the bottom. Mercy! A low cry burst out of her; the creature slid forward, fixing her with those strangely hypnotic eyes. Fey. Febrile, as if it could erupt into violence any moment, but a powerful need constrained it …
“She-Wizard gives light. She helps with horses.”
“I’m no Wizard,” she chuckled, uneasily, starting to understand what the creature wanted – healing. “Just a horse.”
“Secrets flutter, flutter, flutter.” Zaranna froze, but the creature only rocked back and forth, its scaly and hairy limbs undulating in evident distress. It moaned, “Rights? Truths? Not Earthen Fires, no. Magics wants lights, changings, burnings …”
All Zaranna wanted to do now was to escape this place, yet this creature’s plight moved her deeply. She said, “How?”
“Opens heart soft, sweet magics …”
Alright. Holding in tension the awareness of danger growing inside her mind, Zaranna tried to open herself to the butterflies, to that sense of power rushing through her. She struggled, sweated, having to work harder than she might have imagined to release anything at all. Perhaps it was the nearness of those Earthen Fires. Perhaps it was trepidation. Wind stirred. Wings tickled her ears and body. She remembered the softness of a beloved heart, the way Alex looked at her, the way he held her hand, how he had fought for her at Heathrow. Suddenly, as if a dam had broken, a beautiful song of healing magic seemed to pour from the deepest fonts of her soul to soothe the creature’s pain.
Those white eyes drank it all in, every last drop. The creature groaned loudly and long, a sound like steam escaping a pressure valve. It writhed in pleasure.
“More. It wants more, more horses, more magics …”
Zaranna sensed herself wilting, yet she could not withhold. The creature pulsed like some vast succubus gorging itself on the essence of her life. Gasping, she tried to stem the outflow.
“More! Wants more magics, needs sweet magics!” The eyes drew her in. Pleading. Powerful. As pernicious as the Earthen Fires which had shaped this creature’s strange, tortured life. “Gives it precious magics! No
w!”
Perhaps the very absence of light in this place made the Dragon-creature gluttonous. Desperate, even. Perhaps her innocence made her vulnerable; the creature having sensed this, now drank with vampiric glee. Squeezing her eyes shut, Zaranna forced herself to step backward, over the corpse. White thunderheads of magic continued to stream out of her body like a herd of galloping Storm-Pegasi, frothing and storming and thrashing the Twisted Dragon with their power. Its renewed groaning shook the cavern, making the pony-rats skitter in panic. Then, a prat leaped over the Dragon’s muzzle, bumping into its eye. The creature flinched, shutting its eyes momentarily.
With the eye-connection broken, she finally found the strength to desist, to deny the siren-song of magic’s power. Panting, trembling and perspiring as if she had galloped a three-mile steeplechase, Zaranna faced the creature. She tried to check from the corner of her eye. It seemed stupefied, almost drunk as it swayed in ghastly ecstasy.
“More magics …”
Zaranna turned tail, and bolted.
Chapter 14: Into the Outland
The chase was an unending nightmare of bounding up and down rubbish piles and plying her hooves as best she could on the treacherous footing. A Plains Horse was a sturdy beast but lacked the wings and size of a Pegasus. In her desperation, she twice managed to destabilise huge mounds of rubbish which avalanched down on the Dragon-creature, burying it briefly. It surged behind her in a series of awkward hops, flapping its useless wings, chirping, “More! Wants more magics!”
When she despaired, Zara tried to imagine unleashing a single white steed of magic, but failed more often than she succeeded. Such a dunce! Obviously, her dyslexia extended to her failure to wield magic. Yolanda would have dissected this problem in a trice.
There was light. Somewhere ahead, light filtered into the strange cavern. Not sunlight, she realised. The flickering light of a forge.
Zaranna began to run over heaps of metal offcuts and broken swords and solidified slag. Even though she felt sharp pricks of pain beneath her hooves, the firmer footing gave her new confidence. She stretched her lead. With a roar and a shrill whinny, Zaranna rode an avalanche sideways, fetching up against what appeared to be an abandoned kiln. Go! Gallop! Picturing one of those rampant Storm-Pegasi, she thundered upslope toward the firelight with every ounce of determination she possessed, kicking up a spray of iron filings and cast-off mouldings and goodness knows what else. The Dragon-thing collected this in the teeth and kept right on charging after her.
Oh no, that light was too far and too high, the final pyramid of metal just pointing uselessly at a beautiful arched doorway into another realm, perhaps the base of a cavern, which hung over the garbage midden like every other pipe and outlet she had seen. The gap was forty feet or more. Impossible.
Zaranna set her chin. No way this girl was giving up. She knew what it was to struggle, to push through painful physiotherapy and healing and learning to walk on stumps rubbed raw by new prostheses; she knew what it had taken to re-learn how to swim and dress herself and live a new life. She knew the bitter taste of despair and loss, and she was having none of that. She refused to fail.
A wild, challenging neigh broke from her lips as she felt the Twisted Dragon’s breath warm her hindquarters. She galloped up the final mound of rubbish as though she meant to ride a rainbow into the sky. Striking the summit with her hooves, the Plains Horse bunched her muscles and leaped for the light. A memory leaped at her simultaneously, her hand reaching out to strike her mother out of the train’s path, the freakish strength she had no right to own save in the searing crucible of need. That strength lifted her now. Twice, three times, her hooves struck only air as she galloped up into the archway, then suddenly she skidded on a stone-paved surface with a tremendous clatter and there was smoke and sulphur and a terrible, clanging din …
She skidded to a halt in front of a startled bevy of large, shaven-headed Human slaves tending a furnace – one shovelling coal, another wheeling a pushcart of rubbish toward the trash cavern, a group sweating over tipping a vast vat of dark fluid, perhaps oil.
“Got stuck down there,” popped out of her mouth.
They stared at her in mute amazement.
“Where’s the way out?”
One of them lifted his hand to point to her left.
“Thank you,” said Zaranna, and trotted off as though sashaying through a perfectly congenial meadow.
Below, the Dragon voiced a mournful bugle of loss.
* * * *
On her ascent through level after level of forges and foundries and weapons rooms and storage caverns, Zaranna saw more than she could bear of the misery she had imagined must be rife in Worafion’s realm. Thousands of slaves, some Human and some clearly not, worked below ground in awful, stifling conditions. Many bore the marks of recent whippings or strange ulcers on their torsos – a disease, she wondered? The mark of the corrupting Earthen Fires? Some seemed to be the result of Worafion’s experiments, shambling, misshapen creatures that were hardly recognisable as Human. What was clear was the starvation, weakness and helpless oppression of these slaves, driven by the whips and snarls of their Darkwolf Clan overseers.
Three times, Darkwolf Clan tried to stop her, but Zaranna trotted on briskly as though she knew exactly where she was going. When in doubt, look important. Or busy. Plains Horse was not on the menu today. She did look somewhat like the hairier Obsidian Highlands Ponies Jesafion had identified for her, but nothing at all like the Obsidian Chargers, the battle-bred mounts famous for their ability to haul the heaviest load of horse-armour in all Equinox. Those horse-mountains, which she had seen in the courtyard, stood no less than twenty-four hands tall at the withers and weighed close to two tonnes each. Run into one of those and she’d be Zaranna-pancake, make no mistake.
Suddenly, she saw the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel. She trotted on up and directly into the courtyard where they had first entered Worafion’s fortress – the Obsidian Pentacle.
Right, Miss Busy-Legs. Shake a hoof!
She was halfway across the courtyard before a commanding voice cried, “You there! What are you doing?”
One of the Obsidian Chargers approached her officiously. He wore a mail surcoat and ornate plate armour over his withers and chest. His armour bore a fancy sigil of a charging horse over crossed swords. A commander? Captain? Oh dear, Jesafion had not briefed her on horse ranking systems … the Charger glared at her as she stood gathering flies in brainless confusion.
“What are you doing?” he snapped.
“M-Message from Commander Tayburrl, s-sir,” she stammered, trying to sound martial and instead, sounding like a student about to fail their English oral exam.
“Tayburrl, eh?” he scowled. The Obsidian Charger’s voice was all rough, burred consonants. His coat was as black as night, apart from a white oval on his forehead. “For the Fort?”
“Ah … yes, sir.”
“Sir? Address me as Captain of the Phalanx, curse your cheek!” Leaning over her with a parade-ground blast, he roared so loudly that spittle shot into her earhole, “Who am I, little filly?”
Zaranna could not help but feel intimidated. His massively muscled chest stood level with her eyes. She blurted out, “Mighty Captain of the Phalanx!”
“Mighty Captain? What are you playing at, filly?”
“Uh …” Zaranna racked her brains. Lie? Stammer? Flirt? She tried to look up at him through her eyelashes, as coquettishly as possible. Sorry, Alex! “You should see the view from down here, o Captain. Mighty is surely too mean a word.”
To her surprise, his mouth opened in a thoroughly disgusting sneer. “Ah. I see. Carry on, filly. And by the Earthen Fires, stop at the waterfall and clean yourself. You reek! What the hells happened to you?”
Rushing on to evade a snaking bite aimed at her haunches, Zara threw over her shoulder, “Accident with a rubbish midden, Mighty Captain.”
Ugh. She had an inkling of his thoughts and they were no more pleas
ant than the sewage she had just bathed in. No mind. She whipped past him and away through the gates. Yes! She had just reverse-burgled Worafion’s fortress! And Jesafion had suggested that would be the easy part. Just let him deal with a Twisted Dragon. Yet he would likely as not be tortured by Worafion and his goons, she realised, feeling her heart sink into her hooves. Even a royal windbag did not deserve that.
Zaranna headed along the gravelled path leading north from the fortress, running what she must accomplish next through her mind.
She passed manicured lawns fringing perfect fields of crops in the brief quarter-mile before the mountains closed in. It was surreal to contrast the abundance of plum-like maroon fruit trees and ripe grain with the wretchedness she had just experienced below ground. Breathing deep of the crisp mountain air, she tried to put that out of her mind. Focus on the mission – because here came trouble, in the form of a cohort of Human soldiers guarding the path ahead.
Apparently, Tayburrl’s name was her golden ticket to Willie Wonka’s Chocolate Factory. Every time someone stopped her – no less than five separate occasions as she trotted up a gravel trail running alongside a clear brook in that ribbon of green she and Jesafion had noticed from above – she gave the Darkwolf Commander’s name and mentioned her fictional errand. Instant passage. Once, she boldly added that if they did not let her through, she would likely be eaten. This produced nervous laughter from the Human soldiers and some slobbery chop-licking from their Twisted Darkwolf Clan leader, stained purple tongue and all. Delightful. Zaranna tried not to think of herself as a juicy rack of ribs on legs. Pass the barbecue sauce!
The slopes above her were incredibly steep, vertical cliffs in most places and clearly impassable to any ground-bound horse. So the Plains Horse cantered on until she came to a side-ravine that appeared to take an eastward bent. Hmm. Did she hear a waterfall? A cursory glance at the ground revealed a number of recent boot prints and copious wolf spoor leading along this eastern spur, but no hoof prints that she could see.
