SBMS115
The maps of the central districts were patchy at best. Those for Modovi district were intact, but largely irrelevant. The records for Caribou district had been destroyed along with the courthouse and the surrounding city, and those of the two dead districts north and south along the riverside might as well have been destroyed. The district seats had been sacked, abandoned, overrun by ghouls, and heavily fought-over in the extermination campaign of the last fall. Sections sent to pick through the ruins of those courthouses had returned with half-rotten, half-moldy logs of congealed parchment and wood-pulp. Some desultory efforts had been essayed towards tweezing those sodden masses into recoverable documents, but nothing of interest had been recovered so far. Mostly birth and irrelevant court records, to be honest.
So, the Duc's Caribou Trust had begun drawing up fresh maps from the Company's very limited supply of parchment, ghoul-hide having turned out to be dreadfully unsuited to the task, especially after a Company blade or lance-head had gotten through with the ghoul in question. Tends to rot right through, no matter how you preserve it. Shame, really.
Maps, right. The new terrain of Mondovi district - with hundreds of acres of prime farmland seized and built over by the rambling lines of fortification and claimed for cleared lines-of-fire and glacis. Dance Hall herself took up nearly a hundred acres of what I was repeatedly, tearfully informed to have been the most productive cropland in the central provinces by a, let's say, heavily interested party. Waving a legitimate deed in her hoof, more's the pity. You never want to spend time reading property deeds, they are monumentally cryptic, often written in an unreadable or incompetent hoof, often incorporating survey references to neighboring structures, and even trees which have been long-lost to time and memory. My source for the quality of the lost acres under Dance Hall was writ down for a hundred equivalent acres from the Trust's exchange reserve - when we got around to surveying said reserve. Almost the entirety of the district's titles had either been pooled voluntarily by the Mondovans, or invalidated by construction, or seized by the Mondovans in their zeal to get fallow fields within hoof's-reach planted and productive. Again, grist for the hypothetical exchange reserve.
More important than the technical details of title and ownership of lands condemned for current usage by Dance Hall and its clients in the incorporated town, was the practical matter of putting the angry, landless farmers - burdened with sacks of grain seed and unemployment - to some sort of productive work. And we were rocketing towards the drop-dead end of the planting season for the winter crops.
All the returning ponies who had claim on outlying acreage not under cultivation by Mondovi had already cleared and worked their seed into the thirsty soil, new or re-established homesteads having sprung up like mushrooms all along the cleared corridors and here and there throughout the bottomlands. One of the Mondovi judges, along with one of her peers from Guilliame's Ravin, was making the circuit of the new plantings along with a section from the Third for… let's call it emphasis of authority. There was little we could do about adventurers simply claiming to be the surviving niece or grand-son or second cousin once removed of the deceased landowners, absent a rival claimant, but to record the claims, and leave the matter to later legal counter-claims once the Duc got his courts in the central districts onto a less distinctly ad-hoc basis.
Of course, this buck-the-can-down-the-road approach wouldn't suffice if there actually were two or more claimants to a given plot actually present in the district. There were three sets of these lovely ponies glaring at each other in the queue of petitioners to appear before the board of trustees.
Who couldn't see a damn one of them before we established some sort of baselines. What we really needed to do was hire some surveyors to go out and do a proper survey. Sadly, ghouls seem to have eaten the last pair of trained surveyors in the province. Or perhaps they were just hiding somewhere in the northern districts, or hadn't been found yet, or something even more prosaic. But the prolonged exposure to the giddy foolishness of land squabbles had left me feeling rather punch-drunk and increasingly silly.
I was on the verge of proposing we draft all disputants and send them out to burn over and prepare an arbitrary swathe of land deep in the wastelands, and let that be their contribution towards future consideration from the Trust once we got our horseapples in a presentable state, when my attention was arrested by the sudden eruption of an alicornic phantasm at the back of the hall, bellowing at the top of her nonexistent lungs.
"INTRUDERS! Wait, no, petitioners? What in Tartarus is going on here?" The Spirit in her Nightmare aspect had appeared in full archaic panoply, ready for battle. Surprisingly enough, this did not cause a panic among the civilians in the hall, not even among the glowering petitioners sitting not-especially-patiently in the benches around the transparent hooves of the Nightmare. I looked around, and noted that the guards and Dancing Shadows were quite aware of our Dark Mistress and her increasingly perplexed countenance, but nopony else was even glancing in her direction.
I marched down the aisle to address the Spirit, saying, "My apologies, Mistress, but you seem to be manifesting only to the Company at the moment. Is there an emergency? Please, tell me there's an emergency!"
"A limited manifestation? How bizarre! I'm not sure I can recall this happening before. Actually, I'm not sure I can recall what I was doing last. What night is it?"
Well, that was disconcerting. A disoriented Spirit sounded like the sort of thing I should probably get well away from uninvolved civilians.
"Chairmare, I believe I have another engagement of which I have just been reminded. My apologies for leaving you in the lurch?" I turned to look at the nonplussed Dancing Shadows.
She nodded, voicelessly, staring at the Spirit. Then she found her voice, saying, "Of course, Doctor. We will miss your input, but I can see that requires your attention. Carry on."
I walked out of the hall the board had been given for its deliberations and audiences, and the Spirit followed me, looming tentatively behind and to the left. Once I had found a place in the corridor outside where my talking to apparent thin air wouldn't alarm the civilians, I turned around and addressed the Spirit.
"It is the sixth week of autumn, Lady. I haven't seen you in weeks, but I've been away from Dance Hall. Nopony reported seeing you at either the fords or Hohonahkemenie, which I found rather surprising. We had almost a full deployment, and I really had expected some sort of manifestation, especially when things started getting… spectacular."
She looked down at me, pensive. "I have only been seeing the foals this last - several nights? I am not sure I am experiencing time at the same rate as my subjects right now. It was summer only - three nights ago? And a few nights before that, the sneaking intruder. I think I - I smell another intruder. Maybe several? Not inside the walls, not yet." She looked around, not at our surroundings, but something beyond it.
All my cock-eyed good humour bled out of me. The Spirit was missing entire weeks of time, perhaps even months. And it might have been going on for even longer. What did we really know about her, how she worked? I wasn't even positive that she was truly the ghost of Gibblets' lost, exiled princess, all I could be sure of was that she acted like it, and reportedly behaved and thought like the long-gone alicorn. She certainly terrified our pet Equestrian enough.
But I'm told that the lost Equestrian princess is imprisoned upon her celestial body, the proverbial 'Mare in the Moon'. Was she projecting somehow through portals, across magical wardings, through world after world after world, to walk in spirit with us here on the other side of the Chain? Or was our Spirit some sort of fragment, some - artifact? Was she so princess-like because Gibblets was here to project his princess upon the screen of our aetherial essence?
It hadn't mattered before, because whatever else the Spirit was, she was very real, very substantial, in somewhat limited but increasingly potent ways. And we had always known that she was mad, disordered in her thoughts. But the lost princess had been, according to our goblin-source, also quite mad in her own hide, her time before the exile. How do you tell madness and disorder from - somepony not complete in their existence? The two states were easy to confuse from external observation.
I stared pensively at the discomfited Spirit, who wilted under my gaze, despite her great height and undoubtable stature. "How do you know it's only been a few nights? Would you notice if several or many nights had bled together with each other, discontinuously, if nothing else was apparent to show the change in nights? Do ponies often appear and disappear from your sight?"
"Constantly, Acolyte. It is rather a condition of our existence. Things blink in and out of our vision, ponies come and go. But perhaps things have gotten… more erratic? I have no idea. But - " Her head jerked away, focusing on the world outside of these walls.
"ATTACK!"
And she leapt away at a dead gallop. I could hear the alarm in the distance, even through the walls, and then the main watch-tower echoing the alarm. Assault on the walls, sounded like the north ramparts.
Enemies at the wall!