SBMS123
The previous week's events, a week of which was supposed to be one of rest and refitting for the Company, left Dance Hall and its immediate environs a chaos of wreckage, of tumble-down masonry and shattered roof-timbers. Mad Jack in the moment of his death had been at work tearing down the offices and foyer of my hospital, in preparation for re-building that portion of the fortress, within the heart of the fortress. The charred and tumbled timbers had been removed, the surviving structure had been braced and scaffolded, and falsework had been mostly put into place to re-build the entrance as a proper arched vault.
Mad Jack had many ponies into whom he had beaten the principles of practical construction. He didn't believe in apprenticeship, had no time for foals, or formal instruction. He simply seized the labour of his fellows and subordinates, and showed them by demonstration what they were about. He didn't play favourites, or request the same ponies detailed again and again. Rather, those ponies sought out his projects, and threw themselves into his quiet enthusiasms with a sort of joy which was something more than infectious.
Mad Jack's Company was a building cult, a worm which digested wood, and earth, and stone, and left cocoons of timber and earthwork and masonry behind itself. We built faster, wider, and finer than any mercenary regiment of our size should really have been capable. Ponies brag of their special talents and the magic that destiny works through them, but this mule, who had no inherent magic, no destiny but a supposed life-work within his long-abandoned family's tanning business, took the special skills and the simple mute labour of his brethren and… He found a lesser world, and left it a greater one. If only all of us could be carried to our pyre beneath that sort of eulogy.
True to his inherited traditions, Mad Jack had left instructions that his hide was to be put to use as those uses go. We don't generally talk of the work of the tanners, but it was something that must always have been somewhere at the back of that old mule's mind. It was the life he had left behind, the way of life for his mother's family, the way of life that his father had married into. They were the corpse-handlers - those who prepared the dead for their journey into the next life. They claimed those things which cannot be used in that next life, but can be of use to those left behind. All most ponies know of death and its rituals are the funerals, wherein the deceased's face is all that the bereaved were shown. The tanners know the tanning-sheds within which they cured pony-hide. The tanner's work was those threads of pony that they unraveled from their charges before that brief journey into the sod or the fire.
Without those tanning-ponies, and their horrid stinks and their nightmare-tasks, our economical lives would truly be a vale of misery and struggle. The tack and the wagon, the waterproofed sealing-grommet, saddle-bags, belts, the wading-boot, weapons-holsters. Parchment and the bindings of codexes! And prosthetics, Grogar, the prosthetics! Much can be done with wool, and pig-leather, but in the end, wool isn't resilient, and pig-leather is coarse and substandard. Fine, resilient work, material that neither chafes nor frays nor splinters nor tears under the quill, calls for the services of the tanners, the skinners, the flensers.
In the world that Mad Jack's family came from, the skinning business wasn't nearly the mad, dare-discord trade that it was of necessity in death-haunted Tambelon. Every flenser upon this wicked world keeps a decapitating-axe and leather-strap restraints beside their skinning-racks, always ready to terminate their task upon the merest twitch of a possibly-reanimate corpse. And still, the most likely cause of death in every tanning family was 'industrial accident', and more than one ghoul infestation began in an overrun tannery whose ponies had not been careful enough of their charges. And the funeral services always ended in the fire, for those with sense and any sort of caution.
There were no surviving tanners in Mondovi or Guillaime's Ravin. It had been too dangerous, too exposed. The two Company ponies with a side-line in tanning had taken over the business on a full-time basis upon our settling in the region, and had set up with the rest of the smiths and makers on the outskirts of Dance Hall; the smell rarely put off the strong-lunged smiths, and nopony cared to get too close to the clangour and stinks of ironsmithy, either. This is where we took our dead, those that could be recovered in sufficient time for the attentions of the tanners.
The world of ponies rests upon unexamined supports. Even that vast herd which sits back and prides itself on its vegetarianism, its pacifism, still feed upon grains and fruits hauled in leather-worked wagons, eat cheeses made by processes at their base quite literally blood-curdling in their origins, thrive behind walls bathed in the blood of the guilty and the innocent.
I nearly lost my lunch when somepony finally explained to me what rennet was, and I regularly eat pork sausage, and I kill ponies for a living. I feel easier these days, eating sausage, than eating even Rennet's finest cheese.
I made arrangements to have an eye-patch made for my lost eye from Mad Jack's bequest. It was the least I could do to show respect for what he had left us.
We got together with the Captain and the Lieutenant after the later returned with the warlocks and the task-force still half-winded from the killing of the lich. Word had started filtering north of the Spirit's flight south, and we were getting more and more alarming indications of the extent of the compromise of our operational security. This would be more than a mere rumour, more than just unsettling barracks-talk and the sort of tavern-talk that makes ponies wary of an outfit. This was becoming something of which the Imperial infrastructure, the Bride's government would have to take notice.
So there we were, in the mostly-intact operations room, listening to the sounds of Company ponies shoring up the shattered walls of the neighbouring great hall, and arguing with ourselves over how to present ourselves to authority in the most flattering light.
How exactly do you explain to a government that refers to itself by the material focus of lich-craft, to 'the Phylactery', that you have deliberately and with fore-thought destroyed three of that establishment's most deathless and powerful master-undead? That you have killed that which ought never have died again, and could easily do so again if brought to another such conflict? The Company had destroyed more legates in a year and a half than the White Rose had in three hundred years of insurrection and open war.
We could easily argue that we had taken back two provinces from the rebel and the ghoul, that we had pushed back the White Rose to the banks of the great river, and beyond, and that we had secured the northern flanks of the armies in the riverlands, assured the safety and prosperity of the northlands, done everything asked of us by the Bride and her Imperial military command.
That still didn't paper over our obliteration of the Walker, the Stump, and our one-time employer. No matter their assaults upon our persons and our fortifications, the Marklaird's repeated attempts to steal and kill, their unwarranted hate and violence. We had resisted being killed by liches, and that was a hell of an offence in a country ruled by lawless liches and their codified whims-made-law.
I argued for the tactical use of the news of our cache of phylacteries as a massive distraction from our campaign of lich-murder, and the search for the source of the barrowgasts as a bureaucratic option that could substitute for the vigorous suppression of the Company by those ponies which paid our salaries. The former, however exciting and distracting said news might be, got voted down as too likely to inspire a new round of assaults, quarreling, or possible intra-lich warfare for the right to seize the artifacts from our possession. We could see actual armies drawing up before our walls to fight for the right to storm our bastions.
Any which way we pared it, we were pretty sure the cat was out of the bag. The Bride's engineer had been with us for months, and had almost certainly been sending back regular reports, reports which we dared not intercept or modify in any way. I was somewhat surprised that no administrative follow-up had arrived before the Marklaird had decided to make an armed surprise inspection.
In the end, we only decided that which was obvious. We'd expedite repairs to Dance Hall, so as to not give the coming inspectors the appearance of chaos or weakness. We'd keep the Captain and the Spirit in magical couple's counseling, in hopes of keeping the both of them sane and coherent. The Spirit might have to take a turn on stage with the Imperials to give them some context and understanding of what had happened down in the central riverlands. The remaining barrowgasts would be exterminated as soon as a task-force built around the standard-bearer could be fielded on the ridges around the road north to Pepin City.
Meanwhile, it was time for the funeral services, and the pyres. They weren't as numerous as in previous weeks and months, but Mad Jack had been with us for decades. His energy and skill would be missed.