SBMS078
After I laid out the towels and the mares'-care materials I had managed to gather from what was available, I sat back and stared at a wall outside of the hot baths where Dior Enfant and the Bride were enjoying the new-built amenities of Dance Hall, such as they were. A small black cat wandered into the foyer, its skinny tail held high over its back. I reached down with a hoof, and rubbed it behind its ears. I whispered, in a voice like the wind, "Doll, conmare or for real?"
"Legit," sighed the cat in a mewl that might have merely been my imagination. Then it left, jumping through the open window, cracked to allow the steam from the heated bath spilling out from the chamber next door.
And I sat and thought harder than I had ever thought before.
Dior Enfant had fallen asleep in the bath, and the Bride, once more in her earth-pony guise, came out laughing to ask me to recover her road-companion from her pruning rest. I tossed the tired jenny across my withers, and carried her, damp and snoring, to the rooms the Lieutenant had cleared for our visitor. The jenny went into a cot, and I toweled her down and covered the snoring mare with a blanket. Not all of us can be immortal, tireless paragons of power, energy and resolve. I turned to the dark-furred ‘earth pony', and asked her if she wanted to tour the drier quarters of the Hall.
"But of course, dear sir. And it occurs to me, I've yet to have a name to put to your stripes. What shall I call you, my Dante?"
"I could almost take that for a new Company name, my lady, but it would confuse others, and they generally call me Sawbones, Doctor, or Annalist. For those are my functions within the Black Company. What should we call you within these walls, and wearing that coat?"
"Lady is as good a name as any. Annalist? That's an odd name."
"It is in truth a rank, and an occupation. I am the current chronicler of the Company, the thirty-sixth of that title since we lost the original chronicles of our association. We've been much more careful of our records since that failure; it is, in a sort of sense, my primary charge in our fellowship. Remembrance."
"Remembering the truth is a revolutionary act, and a subversive one. As a sovereign, a ruler, and a holder of power over donkeys, ponies and caribou for over two centuries now, I am well aware that the truth serves little public good, and that lies guard my realm with greater fidelity than legate, soldier or sheriff."
I sighed, and thought about that. We walked, her hide steaming still from her bath, and that trail of moisture blending from the mists outside. We were approaching the stairs of the central keep of Dance Hall, a less-than-imposing construct designed more for space and air than defense. Inner walls provided the nominal citadel, but the officers' quarters, the operations section, the kitchens and another mess hall took up most of the space, rather than the usual stores and fighting-positions to be found in a don-jon or motte. We had most certainly not bothered with a solarium or lords-suite. The stairs spiraled up a central tower, that leaned above the rest of the fortress, and allowed scouts to keep the fortifications and her surroundings under observation. We climbed.
There were two scouts, pegasi, standing watch in the belfry of the tower. I gestured for them to leave us, and, giving me the stink-eye, they complied. I was spending my Company credit with abandon this afternoon. The Lady watched with an arched brow as the pegasi flew away from the tower, their flight curving upward as they spiraled in search of a drier cloud to resume their watch somewhere nearby.
"Lies are a powerful weapon, but like all weapons, make for a hard bed-mate. You never know what you might cut open, rolling over in your sleep. Some might say that no liar can sleep well. The Company believes in feather-beds and heavy comforters, whenever we can procure them. But we are positively bristling with weaponry none the less, as we are, in our core nature, a weapon in institutional form. What lies must we carry in your service?"
"Hah! A better question than some I've been asked. I would rather ask you what truths you will destroy before your service to my name is complete, but I can see as how that might be a bit too much truth for a rainy afternoon. Let's start with what you have done here." She looked out over the wasted, melting wasteland in front of Dance Hall, the char and the ruined vegetation slumping into a muddy, indiscriminate brown as far as the eye could see. "Another ghoul infestation, you say?"
"How is it that you did not get word of this? It's been festering since Walker and the Stump sacked Caribou City seven years ago."
"Yes, I'm familiar with the exploits of my legates. They exterminated a fleeing division of the White Rose, and wasted an entire campaign season upon the siege."
"Did none of the pleas for succor from the Duc d' Pepin reach your office? The reports of the obliteration of Caribou City, and the years of devastation when the city rose in a single body from their unburied rest?"
Her silence was complex, and hard to parse. Her earth-pony semblance offered less character and charm than her actual self, which despite its cyanotic unequine elements, had offered more cues than this cold glamour, which I found increasingly unsettling. The chill of the mist made me shiver. And I pondered what truths a sovereign so enamoured with lies might hear in the course of her existence.
"I do not think you understand the extent of my holdings, nor the volume of information that crosses the desks of my clerks. I had been informed that the late Duc was enraged by the outcome of the siege, and that there might have been… irregularities during the aftermath. But my attention in recent years has been upon the current activities of my legates, which extend far beyond this province, or even the misbehavior of two or three of them. I've two dozen legates, and every single one of them has skeletons in their closets. The Marklaird is hardly the only one who finds it meet to disappear for months or years at a time. I suspect that some of them are conspiring with the rebels. My attention must of necessity be focused upon those possible traitors, and the central theatre of the war. Where a dozen Caribou Cities expire every season, where every year the blight expands further into the heart of my holdings."
She turned her dead eyes to me, all the worse for them being dark, brown, and soulful in semblance. Under the glamour was a gaze that held no empathy whatsoever.
"You must understand, I recognize that my realm prospers on your side of the great divide. But it is not a border that I have any feel for, any emotional connection. The death of one, or a dozen, or ten thousand, means nothing to me in here." She pointed a hoof at her chest. "They merely join the majority of existence. We all will spend more time in the grave than we ever did upon our hooves."
The dead pony turned her gaze out over the fortress.
"Although I do understand in an intellectualized fashion that a ruined city is of less utility than a living one. And for that, somepony will hang. Where are the ghouls?"
This was the moment of truth, and I now realized that it would be a painful one.
"Sent to their final rest, most of them. We're working with one of your 'rear support battalions' to enthrall the remnant, and send them off to your field necromancers. But the overwhelming balance of those killed by the infestation? Put down as a threat to the realm."
She smiled, horribly. Not from joy, or amusement, or good humor, but as a deliberate act, as though a puppeteer had pulled the strings that stretched her lips, the levers that raised her eye-lids, worked the complex devisings that controlled how her ears swiveled and lifted.
"Oh, happy children, who have found their rest so soon after setting out! May all our voyages find safe harbour so swiftly. Did you fear that I would take offense at the destruction of so many? Ghouls are hardly such that I hold any fellow-feeling for them. Even a living dog has more to recommend it than a ghoul. Revenants I have a love for, they have personality and charm. Ghouls are simply gluttons, appetites given locomotion and a certain mindless direction. If the armies have use for them, well and fine, but I could see ten times ten thousand flame out like Roamish candles and not shed a tear. If, that is, I could still shed tears. Come, I would see more of this gift of yours."
We walked down the tower-stairs, and I opened the southern sally-port to let her out in the misting rain upon the ramparts. She trotted cheerfully along the walk, from platform to platform, gazing with joy at the gruesome trophies that lined every yard from the fort to the southern watch-tower. "Oh, all that lives must die, passing through nature to eternity. It's a most common decoration you've draped across your gift, physician!" She looked over the shoulder of a guard, shivering under his mac against the rain. "And a moat studded with antlers, none the less! Charming!"
She was less amused by Trollbridge, and its ramshackle defenses, partial and patchwork as they were. "What happened here, Sawbones? There was a vigour to the western walls lacking in these."
"Lack of money and time, my lady. Our resources are not infinite, and the threat from the west was present, fierce, and compelling, while that from the south was contingent, distant, and hypothetical. We've been working on the extension as time and materials allow, but you see the extent of the project is less than complete. And the current weather has put all to a stand-still. We've secured some further funding for when the weather turns, though. A bit of a side-project."
"Moonlighting on your master's time? How wicked of you."
"Until the master pays his apprentices, he cannot chide his charges for working for those that pay them."
"So, what witchery allows you to slay my dead so adroitly?" she asked out of no-where, playfully twirling between a set of crucified ghoul-remnants decorating the central span of the trollbridge. "Some fire-charm? Most of these are well-charred. Some protection that keeps their curse from killing your ponies in their turn? An enthrallment, to keep them still while you remove their heads?"
"That, my lady, is a mystery of our brotherhood. Hidden in the mists of time. We are a pledged association, bound in ceremony and ritual upon our initiation. And, it would seem, death to the undead."
I drew a blade, and flourished it in illustration. She reached forth a hoof, her attention captured by the knife. I pulled back the point, and cautioned, "Careful, lady. I do not know what might occur. As I said, there's something in the blades of the Company which carves the undead as if they wore living souls. And, from my observation, we do not suffer from the curse of second lives. None of our losses this season have rose again."
She reached forward, and pinked her frog on my blade. She stared at something, hidden under her glamour which I could not see. She said nothing, for several long moments, fascinated with whatever hid under her witchery.
Suddenly she looked up, her glamour glowing with warmth and joy. "Well, isn't that a marvel for the ages?" And the glamour of the dark-furred earth-pony trotted with delight in the direction of her new Dance Hall as the rain faded into heavy mist and the failing light heralded the onset of night.