Chapter Forty Two

Along the River

Spike smiled as he woke up, the morning Baghdad sun shooing away the chill of the night before. Ponies from temperate climates didn’t realize the desert held no heat at night, and it frequently got very cold. Luckily for his wives, though, they had a nice warm dragon to snuggle up against. Gently brushing away said cuddling wives, Spike sat up and yawned, his long tongue flickering out like a snake’s to taste the air. He usually didn’t need to do this, as he had no interest in such things, and this morning it was no different from the other mornings he had been in a desert. The air was dry, and the slight silicate taste still held in the air. Of course Spike, being a dragon who frequently ate rocks, he could taste such a unique quality in the air.

Sitting back and watching his wives, Spike’s mind slowly drifted away from the city of Baghdad, and out towards the city of Istanbul. His wives would likely have little to worry about, as they were ponies, but how the city would react to him had him worried. A cultural dislike of dragons due to an unfortunate accident in the past meant there would likely be ponies who would want to drive him from the city upon seeing him, or worse. If they tried, they might also try to do so with his wives, as they carried his children. Should that proceed to happen, Spike would get angry, transform, and then he’d likely have a full-on war on his hands with the entire city, and then possibly the entire Ottomare Empire. He and his wives would likely be hunted throughout the country, with agents of the empire going after them far outside its boundaries. He’d always be looking over his shoulder for danger, always be on the move and never staying in one place for too long. If he somehow managed to live through all of that and make it back to Equestria, he’d have to talk with Celestia about a diplomatic envoy discussing the terms of the empire leaving Spike alone.

He would have to travel in disguise; this time not to avoid fame, but to avoid infamy. If his family came to harm in any way anywhere near that city, he might just burn it to the ground in rage. A terrible aura would follow him after that, and he’d become perhaps the most infamous creature on the planet, but it was one that would be inevitable if he did not move in secrecy.

The first thing he’d have to talk with Saladin about would be just that. Dressing slowly, he kept glancing over at his wives, making sure his actions did not awake them. Seeing them there, content and safe, made him feel all warm and fuzzy inside. Finishing with a pair of soft, sandal-like slippers, he walked out the room, making sure to gently close the door behind him.

Walking away from his room and down a narrow corridor, Spike took three rights turns and two lefts, though not in that order, to find what he was looking for. There, sitting at a table and pouring over a few letters, sat Saladin, a steaming mug of something in one hand and a faded-looking piece of parchment in the other.

“Is that coffee?” Spike asked as he sat down. “I thought that wasn’t a common drink around here.”

“Yes, though we in Baghdad who brew it usually do so a bit bitterer than some of our friends closer to the Meditermanean,” the stallion said as he took a long, slow sip. “Good morning, by the way.”

“Good morning to you as well,” the dragon said as he glanced over the papers. “What are these?”

“Just some reports from the front,” the stallion said, rubbing one of his eyes after setting his coffee down. “Skirmishes with bandits, sightings of Marengolian patrols, the occasional caravan guard duty; all rather boring, most of the time. This one from my sister and her children,” he added, brandishing the one in his hand. Indeed, the handwriting was rather splendidly done, but the signatures at the bottom were a bit crude, likely done by the hands of little ones.

“Are they well?” Spike asked, looking around the room. Other than he and Saladin, there wasn’t a single pony in sight. Either all of the other guards were asleep, or the night watch ones were outside of the barracks.

“More or less, although losing their home in Samarkand wasn’t easy on them,” Saladin replied, taking another sip of his drink. Seeing confusion in Spike’s face, he set his mug down once more. “Samarkand was a magnificent city in its time, but it has recently given way to corruption in the lower tiers of the judiciary ranks. My brother-in-law, bless his heart, tried to do a good deed for somepony in need. However, that pony soon turned around and bought out his business and threw him out onto the streets. He tried to make a case against the stallion, but the judge, being the nastier pony’s brother, refused to hear the case. So, my sister and her family left behind Samarkand.”

“That’s tragic,” Spike said softly, not knowing what he’d have done if he had lost his home when he was still living with Twilight. Sure, any one of their friends would have gladly taken them in, but it just wouldn’t have been the same as the two of them living in their own home. “Where are they now?”

“Last they told me, they had moved to a small town far north of Istanbul, in one of the Trannsylmania provinces,” the stallion said, draining his last dregs of coffee. “My brother-in-law found a decent-paying job for the local governor as a scribe, so at least my sister and her little ones won’t have to worry about food.” Scribes usually had it rough in life, but if one could find a job with a government official, they would earn more than enough to feed their family.

“Well, that’s good,” the dragon said. “So, what can you tell me of the Ottomare Empire? My wives and I will be traveling through there on our journey, and we’ll surely be passing through Istanbul at some point.”

“Well, I’d first recommend you find yourself a very fitting disguise,” Saladin replied. “I am sure you’ve heard of that city’s problem with dragons?”

“Indeed I have,” Spike said.

“Well, along with a disguise, you’ll be in need of papers to get you through many of the garrisons stationed around the city,” the stallion continued. “Istanbul is incredibly bureaucratic, so much so that I’ve overheard some say it’ll be their downfall. Most of these checkpoints are for stopping spies and scouts from rival armies, like the Marengols. The Ottomare Empire was founded by Turkish ponies, many of whom were simple nomads. However, in time, they grew in both power and influence, and lo and behold, they conquered the Byzantine Empire, technically formerly known as the Eastern Roaman Empire. They are a proud, easily-combative people if they are not shown respect, and the city of Istanbul, formerly Constantinople, formerly Byzantium, is an example of that. Ponies from all over the world live there, but have to adopt many of the local customs if they wish to get anywhere in life.”

“That sounds like a rather... condensed history lesson, if I do say so myself. So, where can I get these papers you mentioned?” Spike asked, wondering just how in the world he’d get through the city unscathed.

“I imagine anything signed by your own monarch would be enough for almost, if not every checkpoint,” Saladin said. “Would it be possible for that to happen?”

“Most definitely,” Spike said, thinking back to how quickly his method of sending messages could yield speedy results. “I’m guessing I’ll also be needing some money, correct?”

“Indeed,” Saladin replied. “Any currency is accepted so long as it meets a global gold standard, and seeing as how the majority of the world uses bits of some kind, I’m sure any currency from your country would be accepted in Istanbul.”

“Well, after that, then what? I’ll still have to get out of the empire before I’m discovered to be a dragon,” Spike said, knowing the mountains littering the Balkans would prove to be a rather formidable obstacle to a hasty exodus.

“Well, seeing as you are a good friend of Princess Luna, and as part of my oath to her services, you can stay with my sister’s family for a short while,” Saladin said. “It would not be hard to hide you, but I would not want to beggar my extended family by visiting strangers on them for too long; you understand.”

“Of course, and we shouldn’t be in one place for too long anyway,” Spike said. “Three of my wives are pregnant, and not only is it beginning to show on all of them, but the clock is ticking for us. We must be able to reach the Grand Duchy of Marescow before any snow storms close the mountain roads of the Balkans. We cannot afford to be stranded on our journey.”

“Then I wish you the best of luck, my friend,” Saladin replied. “I wish I could give you more, but it would likely lead you to ruin to be taken care of by my hospitality for the entirety of your journey, yes?”

“I can see your point. By the way, you said letting us stay with your sister was part of an oath,” Spike said slowly. Seeing the stallion nod in agreement, he continued. “What sort of oath did you take with Princess Luna?”

“It was a simple one, made several years ago,” the stallion said, piling some of the reports together. “I was just a new captain of the guard, freshly minted from the local barracks, if you will. Your princess visited here those few years ago to discuss a small treaty with the local magistrates. I was assigned as part of her guard detail.”

“And?” Spike asked, wondering why Luna never really talked about her worldly excursions with her apprentice.

“And that’s it: she and I became good friends before she returned to Equestria, and she had me take an oath before she did. A simple one, really; take care of the city, and any who may pass through its gates.”

“Did she know I would come here one day, perhaps with wives in tow?” the dragon asked, pieces of this puzzle seeming awfully well-connected in his head.

“Perhaps, though I think this oath was a far more broad one in scope, and not one specifically catering to you,” Saladin replied, standing up. “Well, you’d best be on your way soon; it would be a good idea to leave before most of the city awakens, or else it might take you an extra few hours to meander your way to the far northern gates.”

Spike rose from his seat and shook Saladin’s hand. “Thank you, Saladin; for everything.”

The captain of the guard merely shook his head, smiling as he did so. “May Allah smile upon your journey, my friend.”

Later...

Having found his wives awake and already packing, Spike hurried them along, making sure to carry all of the heavy things so as not to burden them with anymore unnecessary weight. Loading up everything they had collected in Baghdad, they set off, the carriages rolling past the opening market stalls as the rest of the city began to wake up. True to his word, Saladin had sent a small detachment of guards with them to see them off at the gates, though thankfully none of the ones who had confronted them were amongst them.

“Though I would have loved to stay in this city a while longer,” Chrysalis said, glad to be free of her disguise the moment they had cleared the outlying watchtowers half a mile outside of the gates. “I do have to agree with Maria on this one: getting through Istanbul is going to be rather dangerous. Possibly even more so than those pirates, since it won’t be just a few nasty ponies after us. It could be an entire city, and then an empire, should your true self be found out, Spike.”

“To think, it’s not even possible to pass around the city, from what we’ve heard,” Maria said. “To think, the minor rebellions along the coastline have made it impossible for anypony to charter a vessel outside of the capital that won’t sell them as slaves the minute they get the chance.”

“Tell me about it,” Spike said, lightly combing Trixie and Asalah’s manes as they all lay propped up in one carriage. The other few were crammed with the things they’d need to make the letters to Celestia asking for diplomatic papers, and right now, Spike didn’t feel like writing them. None of them did, actually; the rest of the day would be relatively smooth sailing along similarly sand-free roads, and with the possible threat of a Marengolian invasion, they likely wouldn’t have to worry about any bandits. “I can’t even imagine how we’d get through the first checkpoint without papers, and we don’t even know where that will be.”

“I’d think it’d be in one of the more outlying towns surrounding the capital,” Trixie said softly. “That’s usually how things like that work. Too far out and it’d take too long to report anything suspicious back to the city; too close, and reporting it would be not only redundant, but an unneeded expense, should it be an invasion of some kind. There’d be no time to mount any sort of defense if it was close enough to the city.”

“Yeah, I guess,” Spike said softly as he finished combing the two mares’ manes. “But we shouldn’t worry about that now, right? Can we just all sit back and relax before we reach the border?”

So they did, content to discuss rather plain and yet prospectively great things, like what royal life in Canterlot would be like. Spike had a general idea of what it would be like, but even he didn't know everything that went on in that city's upper echelons.

Seven days later...

Twilight blew a bit of her mane out of her eyes. Spike, in his infinite wisdom, had decided to send a complete list of the diplomatic papers he would need to pass through Istanbul. That in and of itself would have been fine, had it not been for the fact he sent it during the middle of a conference with the princess and several visiting dignitaries. Coincidentally, a pair of these dignitaries happened to be two ponies Spike would find awfully familiar: the king and queen of Saddle Arabia. Celestia had been expecting them for some time, but to see Spike’s absolutely enormous list of requirements suddenly poof into existence before the royals and the other dignitaries still brought a slight scowl to Twilight’s face.

Luckily for Spike, she was still in a three month long forgiving mood, as she had nearly passed out from exhaustion after categorizing all of the scrolls, stone tablets and manuscripts he had sent back the week before. However, since she had trained her body to do fine with less sleep than normal ponies (and the fact her go-to Instant REM sleeping spell helped rest in three hours what would take five normal hours to accomplish), she was rather chipper as she sorted through all of the tax forms needed to submit to any possible magistrates, judges or similar high-ranking officials in Istanbul, should they ask for them. Spike's information had been the easiest, as it was not only the most recent and well-documented, but the most readily-at-hand for her to go through.

She had had no trouble retrieving information from Maria’s parents, who had been beside themselves with glee when they found out that Maria was expecting. Maria had sent a letter to Twilight, who had then sent it to the Del Riviosos, since Spike’s magic fire breath couldn’t send to just any location in the world. Financial charts, the locations of guilds operated by her family, the total revenue she had stashed away in several different bank accounts across the Meditermanean: it had all been there.

The sultan of Agrabah, Asalah’s father, had been a bit more difficult to barter with, and Twilight refused to answer half of the questions he had sent back in his return message. Most of them pertained to whether or not Asalah was pregnant, to which she politely replied “no news yet”, or something along those lines. He himself owned and operated several large salt and gold mines, two of which were included in Asalah’s inheritance, should she provide him with a grandson.

Trixie needed double the work, as she was a grown mare with her own business and sorts of financial records. Her parent’s records had been easy to come by, and Trixie’s own were no state secret or anything. Business transactions, show earnings, taxes deducted from total income; all easily gathered in a fortnight. The compilation of those had been almost easy; it took Twilight only twenty minutes to have it all assembled before her.

However, when it came to Meia, Twilight found she could not find anything in the right place. There was a mentioning of a Meia Morphos on the Crowhop, including a fee paid to get on board and stay until Equineland, but before that, it was as if the mare was a ghost. A few purchases here or there in Manehatten, a small plot of land owned by her supposed family; none of it was easy to acces, and even harder to assemble. On one of her few days off from the Wonderbolts, Rainbow Dash had volunteered to look at the place where Meia hailed from, only to return saying that the “house” Meia owned had been bulldozed to make room for a park.

Now, Twilight liked Meia; everything from her personality, to her unending love for Spike, to her surprisingly insightful and rather detailed letters. She was ideal for Spike, and perhaps was one of the smarter wives in his herd, though by no means were the other ones unintelligent. So, naturally, Twilight didn’t want to think she had anything to do with the difficulties involved in finding out about her past. But the more Twilight looked, the more embroiled she became in what seemed to be a largely-empty trail of breadcrumbs.

Of course, her friends had all thought she was just putting too much effort into something she shouldn’t have been doing on her own, and normally Twilight would have agreed with them. She was working extra-hard to make sure Spike would be safe, and yet... there was something off about the whole situation, but for the life of her, Twilight couldn’t put her mind to work on finding out just what that was.

She was interrupted by a knock at the door to the library. Sighing and putting down the copy of the family registry of Trottin, she opened the door to find a rather skinny stallion waiting for her.

“May I help you?” she asked, wondering if she had seen him before.

“Oh, uh, this is for you, Ms. Twilight,” he said, a slight lisp accompanying his statement of her unmarried status. “I was told to bring this for something you were compiling.”

The purple unicorn gingerly accepted the package from the stallion. “Gee, uh, thanks?” she said, not sure if she had actually asked for any compilation-type work in the last day or two. “Who told you to give me this?”

The stranger rubbed his temples, as if deeply concentrating on a fleeting thought. “Uh, I think her name was... Futter... Fluller... Fluttershy!” the stallion said, smiling as he remembered the name.

“Oh, okay,” Twilight said, glad at least one little mystery was solved. She turned and retrieved a small bag of bits from her purse. “Thank you, by the way, Mr.-,”

He was gone. Twilight, blinking in confusion, stepped out of her doorway and looked every which way down the street. Whoever that pony had been, he was gone; just like that.

“Well, that was weird,” the mare said to herself, walking back inside and closing the door behind her. “Time to add these reports to whichever ones they are a part of.”

Meanwhile...

“That was a close one,” Clearwing muttered to himself, barely making it into the edge of the Everfree Forest before his disguise fell away. Surprise, surprise, he was a changeling, and yet no ordinary changeling at that: he belonged to a special caste, the Scraetori, which directly served the queen in times of need, whether or not she knew. In the minds of every changeling involved, this most certainly was a time of utmost importance. A foal had not been born into the ruling caste since Chrysalis, and not one with so powerful a heritage. A changeling ruler, with the might of a dragon and power of a shape-shifting race gifted in the magical arts; it would be... interesting, to say the least.

That was why the instant the Scraetori had heard of Twilight Sparkle’s little “research project” pertaining to their queen, they had sprung into action. Several had posed as distant cousins of Meia, both to fool busybodies and to help supply documents of Meia’s existence. Of course, those documents were are genuinely real in a sense, but they were also entirely forged by the most brilliant mind the Scraetori had at their disposal.

Gibby the Grubling, a changeling born with the innate abilities of a changeling, but with the mind of the greatest thinkers in the animal world; an octopus. His conception between a female changeling and a male octopus would likely be the stuff of some poorly-written fanfiction involving tentacles, tremendous amounts of bukkake and ink-based watersports, but he was nonetheless a marvel. He could make forgeries seem genuine, write things down in such clarity and interconnecting purity that few questioned his methods, and could even fly, something nopony thought possible.

It helped with his writing that he had tentacles coming out of his back to write with, and they could even spin around like propellers on a windmill, thus granting him flight.

Anyway, Clearwing knew those forgeries by Gibby would be good enough to pass inspection by one even as careful and studious as Twilight Sparkle, but they would have to remain cautious. Twilight had a knack for finding things out when least expected. The Scratori could only pray she remained unwary until Chrysalis chose to reveal herself.

“Seems to me you’re rather worried,” a voice said from one of the bushes. Turning around, Clearwing spotted his partner for this mission: a changeling by the name of Nymphie.

“Of course I’m worried: that unicorn could discover everything, and we cannot do anything truly overt to protect our queen,” the male changeling replied.

“No, I meant you seem worried, even more so than the rest of us,” the female changeling said, placing a hand on his shoulder. “Why?”

“My baby brother was born the other day, and he’s one of the different ones,” the changeling said as the pair walked deeper into the forest. “I’m worried our queen’s... decision could spark a war.” His little brother was one of the newer breed; stronger, faster, and far more powerful than previous changeling incarnations. The discussion had been long and very divisive, but the consensus was clear; Spike’s draconic heritage was seeping into the changeling race, as had countless other’s.

“There will be no war, Clearwing,” Nymphie said softly. “You need to start relaxing a bit more. Here,” she added, pulling his hand from his side and up to her no-longer-clothed breasts. “Let me show you how to relax.”

She always did know how to relax him: that tongue of hers....

Meanwhile...

In the mountains of the Ottomare Empire, the carriages passing below were like tiny, gleaming jewels to the two hooded figures. High above, on a secret and ultimately quicker path, the pair had made good time. In fact, they would likely reach the city of Istanbul a full three days ahead of those carriages.

“So tell me, my friend, when I first found you on that beach, what did you think I was?” the one hooded figure asked.

“A fool,” the other figure said, the raspy voice sounding like that of one permanently on their death bed.

“And now?” the first asked. “I have delivered you thus far, and they are within your grasp. Soon enough, they will be in your grasp.”

“I still think you a fool, Turkish goat,” the second figure said. “A deadly and dangerous fool at that, from what I have seen.”

“My friend, you do not know the half of it,” the Turkish pony replied. “So tell me, what have these fellows done to you that is so horrid that they deserve the punishments you suggest?”

“I told you once already, and I will not repeat myself,” the second figure replied. “That dragon will see his entire life end in that city, I tell you. If not by my hand, then by the hand of your superiors. Although, I am not sure of how you will bring that part along, should my part in this fail.”

“Oh, do not worry, my friend,” the Turkish stallion said as they went along their way. “There are events about to happen in Istanbul that will shake the very empire. All I’ll have to do is... nudge it in the right direction, and your part in this plan will not be needed.”

After that, they moved in silence, outpacing the carriages far below.