SBMS086
Of course, guests of the Company were generally expected to pull their fair share of the weight. When they weren't demi-immortal imperial liches, that is. I strongly encouraged the spy to rise bright and early and assist my apprentice and I in unloading the medical supply carts. By which I mean…
"Rise and shine, spook! You'll just seize up and stiffen, laying about in bed all morning long with bruises like those. Long day of work ahead of us!" I refrained from the cold-water bucket I've used on occasion for slugabeds. No need to add insult to injury. Yet.
The supply wagons were loaded with medical records, medicines, dried herbal materials and components. My alchemical equipment, taken out of storage. Most importantly, the rest of my dwindling antiseptic supplies. The high rate of casualties and the astonishingly poor hygienics of the early months of the deployment had burnt through my antiseptic supplies like wildfire. That final, punishing imperial bacchanal had only put a cherry on that particular sundae. Which is part of why I had sent for the remainder of my supplies, and Rye while I was at it.
And why I had gotten them to ship me some cracked corn and milled rye as well. I've never been the sort of mercenary to service our sottish brethren with moonshining. I left that to Shorthorn and the late Chestnut Shell, and probably other ponies within the brotherhood who had more effectively shielded their clandestine distilling activities from my notice. They had to have been fairly good at it, though. We'd only had one serious case of methanol poisoning in my time with the Company, and my family recipe for that particular malady was iron-clad. Zebra culture might be a superstitious amalgam of ancestor-worship, grotesqueries, and silly fright-masks, but my people knew how to bash together a potion like nopony else. Especially hangover cures and remedies for alcohol poisonings of all stripes.
So this was really the first time I'd seriously run an alcohol still, aside from some small job lots to specification to create the aqua vitae necessary for various alchemical recipes. And a still wasn't all that different from the alembics of which I had long experience, right?
By mid-morning the wagons were unloaded, my supply shelves were heavy once again with material, and the heavy sacks of milled grain were stacked in the back-room with my alembics and copper tubing and so forth. It would become the distillery, I had hopes. Both Rye and the spy were looking peaked and hungry. Rye was a growing fawn, and, I supposed, the spy's superficial injuries might require sustenance.
"When's the last time you two ate?"
"On the road, Boss. Who travels without snacks?"
"Maybe two days ago? The bailiff of Guillaime's Ravin apparently isn't made of deniers, and refused to feed his prisoners. Said something about that being my relatives' and friends' business."
"Well, tartarus-fire, spook! Let's get some oats inside of you. Can't have you starving away into hide and bones. I hear tell you can make a revenant work, but you'll not like the results."
We caught the tail end of the dinner hour for the retiring evening shift, and my mouth watered from the savory smells coming- well, coming off the plates of a half-section of griffins from the aerial cohort. They were eating sausage out in public again. I ran my tongue over my recently-much-more-sharpened teeth, and pondered my sudden-onset case of salivation. Thestrals historically were held to be omnivorous, some of them even obligate carnivores, depending upon the source. None of us in the Trollbridge accident were going full thestral necessarily - Cherie was still the only pony in the company with full bat-wings - but there had been some with stronger transformations than others. And it had been marked by subtle, or not-so-subtle, changes in dentation.
Such as what I'd woken up with two days before. Nothing spectacular, but my incisors were definitely taking on an edge, and those bumps were probably my wolf teeth growing in. I eyed the plate of cooling pork sausages as we went through the buffet line, but decided to not freak out Rye Daughter her first day down at Dance Hall.
The porridge was worse than I remembered it being.
The ponies from the night shift lazing about the dining hall were giving us the stink-eye as we sat and ate, and I fumed for a second before I realized the shade was being cast at our involuntary guest. Word must have gotten around that we had a spy in custody. Jungle telegraph moves at the speed of imagination, after all. She looked appropriately nervous - you would be too if you thought it likely you were about to get stomped for being Not Around Here for the second time in a week.
"Alright, you lot. Back the buck off. Don't you have some cards to cheat at somewhere else? I'll let your corporals know if I need your intimidation services the next time I choose to interrogate our Equestrian guest."
"I'm NOT FROM EQUESTRIA!"
"Of course not, I'm sure your queen appreciates your loyalty."
"I've never even met the Pr- I am a good subject of the Empress of Tambelon!"
"The Bride has no good subjects, merely subservient ones. And you just slipped again, 'Cup Cake'. Who but the Equestrians bothers to call Celestia by her preposterous made-up rank?"
Everypony in the hall looked shifty and embarrassed, which didn't exactly help my case, but the reaction was so off-note that the spy just looked perplexed. Which was good, if she had looked enlightened, I might have gotten worried.
So the Equestrian foreign service didn't know why they were following us? Or were they under orders to pretend they didn't know about the exiled lunar princess? Interesting. I'd have to poke at that seam, see if it unraveled under pressure. Maybe not here, out in the open. Time for a distraction.
"You know, you're quite lucky you found us as we are, our modern selves. In the time of Fatinah, we were much less forgiving of espionage. That grim old mare would have taken you straight to Rime, nailed you up by the main gates, and mailed your consulate invitations to the crucifixion. Most military manuals still specify hanging for the crime of espionage without uniform in time of war, even now. We'll give you all benefit of the assumption that this is not, from your point of view, strictly speaking, a time of war. Thus, you are our guest, and not that of the hangmare."
"How gracious of you, my lord, to extend me the favor of not being murdered to terrorize some ponies I don't even know. I'm sure it shows how civilized you all are, and not at all a pack of primitivily armed savages." Her eyes were bright, and hard, and her body-language had folded into something low and sturdy. I thought that perhaps we had just seen a flash of the true Cup Cake.
I looked around at our audience, less salty than they had been a moment before. "What do you think, colts and fillies? Should we keep our spook? She thinks hanging miscreants is a mark of primitive savagery! That's a proper aristocratic attitude, don't you think? Let's have a hoof for ma Dame Espion!"
They drummed out a sarcastic salute for the bruised, pastel earth-pony, and filed out past us. Rye had never stopped eating her meal, and by the time the last donkey left the hall, she had cleaned her bowl out. I hoofed her my half-eaten porridge, and turned back to Cup Cake.
"You know, I've got an appetite for something else this morning. You want something from the kitchen? They're getting ready to clean up."
She shook her head no.
I went up and grabbed the plate of cold sausages before the cooks could toss them out, and brought it back to the table.
"So we seem like primitives by Equestrian standards, do we? I've heard tell you're quite advanced by our local technological standards. Almost a thousand years of peace and prosperity can do that for you."
She blushed at the realization she had given herself away again. I picked up a sausage-link with a fork.
"Have you ever watched a pony or a griffin make sausages? We keep pigs for some reason, and here in Tambelon, the Company is the only place you'll find a griffin for hundreds in miles in any direction. Why do you think they keep pigs here? Oh, I'll grant you, the leather for tack and other leather goods have to come from somewhere, and better mindless swine than thinking ponies. But sausage? Sausage is for eating."
I bit into the sausage I had been twirling on the end of a fork. Slowly chewed and then swallowed. She turned green.
"Where did the sausages come from? What made a pony say, 'let's take the guts from a butchered pig, scrape them out, and fill them with organ meat and chopped-up flesh, and then cook and cure them while we're tanning the rest of the swine for our leather goods!'? Once you understand why there is sausage, you'll understand why we keep pigs."
Now she looked sick and confused.
Well, foal steps. And damn, those sausages were good.