//------------------------------// // And Call It Peace // Story: In the Company of Night // by Mitch H //------------------------------// SBMS157 After a few days, we were fairly certain we'd staved off a general epidemic. The ones who had been over-weakened by exposure and partial drowning passed away; the ones with the strength to go on, found it, and started pulling out of their weakness. From that point on, it was a matter of treating the sickly ones with the right potions, and hoof-holding. I left Rye Daughter to do the hoof-holding, she was better at it than I was. For all her height, she had decent cot-side manner. We had reported some of the more alarming material to come out of our listening sessions, and command had eventually sent some investigatory details to look into the reports. The details found what our more haunted prisoners had been muttering about. First one, then a number of other mass graves, starting a quarter-day's march east of the edge of the Clearances. They had ordered Gibblets and a picked group of Company and allied ponies to start digging into the graves to see what it looked like, and now Gibblets wanted me on-site. No rush. On the long way 'round towards the investigation site, I stopped here and there to collect my things, and look in on the members of my medical corps. The mobile field hospital had put down tap-roots, and blossomed into a sprawling recovery complex, one that sat in an abandoned farm to the rear of the supply depots and base which had originally been the rear area of our defensive positions in the Clearances. The farm in question hadn't actually been in the Clearances, and was technically part of the next barony to the west. This became both apparent and important as the refugees that had fled the enemy's rampaging army started trickling in from the west, eastward. Which meant that the current heir-and-owner of the farm we were squatting upon was sitting there in the main yard when I trotted into sight. I was stocked up with full saddle-bags and a general disinclination to get involved in civilian drama, but that pony had other ideas, and had decided to ambush me in front of my main infirmary ward, which once had been her family's farmhouse. And this particular civilian was utterly unwilling to exempt me from her dramatic performance. She wept all over my shoulders, and threatened to ruin my good eye-patch with her tears. Apparently my head orderly had told her of the fate of the ponies who had stayed behind to mind the family property. I had never set hoof inside that farmhouse when we first took possession of the property, and had left the clearing-out to the rankers detailed to my support. So I had not thought much about the 'disposal' which had been reported, but apparently it included both the matriarch who had owned the land, and several of her children and grand-children. Thankfully, the orderlies had not informed this distraught relative that one of the 'disposals' had been of an undead relative – as I found out later upon asking for further detail – but the simple version of the story was enough to make a wreck out of the survivor. A stubborn, passive-aggressive wreck. This misery and bereavement was almost enough to distract this newly-minted farmer from her main point of contention with us, namely, our seizure of her family farm. Earth ponies are by and large a practical race, and while living family comes first, dead family comes third or fourth after family property and the waste thereof. And we had caused massive damage and waste to her inheritance. As she proceeded to tell me, at great volume, as I tried to walk away from her aria of injustice and outrage. I don't know what she was wailing about, to be honest. At least the battle wasn't fought on her property, and her barn had never been so sanitary in its lifetime. And the outbuildings were largely shoddy and would be easy to replace, if you ask me. I tried to leave that mess behind me, ignore her entreaties. She only stopped following me when we came into sight of the actual battlefield. Which must have meant, now that I think back on it, that she had literally followed me a mile and a half away from the field-hospital. That's stubbornness for you. But smoke and the smell of burning ponies was enough to repel even someone as stubborn as that farmer from the pursuit of her rights, and for that much, I was grateful. The owners of all of the properties we had destroyed in the Clearances proper were either too dead, or too timid to approach the site of the battle directly. The farmsteads were obliterated, either torn down for materials or destroyed in the fighting; the two hamlets at the heart of the district had been dismantled for their materials, and then fought over during the climax of the battle. The fields were unrecognizable, their aboitaeux were broken up, their dykes broken-in, and trenches and pits were dug up everywhere. If there had been distinct roads or lanes anywhere in the eastern half of the district, their beds had been likewise torn up and washed out. The many little streams which had once been locked into strict banks and courses on their way into the swamps of the Wirts, had everywhere broken their shackles and ran rampant across the landscape, curling here and ponding there, making an unrecognizable mess of what had once been the richest district of the region. Looking across the absolute ruins which had once been a well-irrigated farming district, I could only muse upon the words written down by Bitter Ambrosia. War is ruin, cruelty, and desolation, and it cannot be refined. Look how peaceable was our desert! Everywhere along the lines where the greatest fighting and dying had occurred, work details were feeding days-old corpses into the great bone-fires. Too much of the fighting and killing had been done by the regiments and the enemy; we couldn't put our confidence in Company steel when there had been so little of it on the battlefield. The work details laboured as quickly as they could, for fear that the dead might begin to stir. The tanners had set up their work-tents nearby the burning-pits, and you could smell those ponies at work as well. The aftermath of a battle was almost as dreadful as the great dying itself. Eventually, I picked my way out of the sprawling battlefield, and into the region beyond. The soil and roadbeds in the district immediately to the east of the Clearances weren't nearly as torn up as what could be found inside that blasted district, but they were still heavily saturated with ground-water, and had been churned to a chaos by the passage of a large, desperate army – and the retreat of the much smaller rabble which was all that was left of that army after its defeat and rout. I passed the occasional supply-column and regimental patrol as the roads became more intact, and I followed the course of the General's deliberate pursuit of the remnants of the White Rose. The first mass grave was a large area of disturbed soil in an open field a hundred yards or so from the nearest market-road. Gibblets and a work-detail of regimental rankers and Company armsponies had dug up the disturbed earth, and found bodies. Body after body after body, found clothed in civilian gear and materials, some showing signs of a fight, but most clearly murdered upon their knees or haunches. By and large, too badly decayed to see much of their condition at the time of death, but you can make out a good deal from angles of wounds and the marks on bone and so forth. "Any good idea how long they've been in there?" asked Gibblets, leaning on a dirty shovel. He'd been helping with the digging; had said something about physical labour being good for the soul. "You know this world does odd things to decay rates, old frog. But as wet as this soil is, and their condition – I'd guess about two weeks, maybe a week and a half. Matches what we heard from ponies who say they were ordered to bury them, afterwards. You find the ritual-space?" "It was badly effaced, almost entirely cleaned up. They did their best. But anyone with a nose for that sort of thing will have smelled the stink of necromancy. Too big of a ritual, too many times. About four hundred yards east of here. And the pegasi say there's four other burial-sites about as far from the ritual-site as this one is, off in almost the cardinal directions. Like the burial of the dead was somehow part of a Great Circle." "You think they were all killed at once? That's a lot of killing in one batch, a lot of murder. The ones who we talked to, it damn near wrecked them, I can't see anypony getting away with something that big without breaking the morale of their army." "I… don't know. I've got guys opening up one of the other burial sites, come on, let's take a toddle." We walked back to the road, and I followed the goblin-warlock to the ritual site, which was as he described. Barely recognizable as anything other than a particularly level bit of farmland, but there was a subtle and horrible stink to it, a psychic revulsion that hurried my hooves and made me rush behind Gibblets, until after a few strides I was damn near galloping away from the Place. The next mass grave was similar in all general characteristics to the westernmost one, full of dead ponies, nothing moving but for the digging-details, who were hard at work exposing body after body, dozens, if not hundreds of the dead. I bent down, and began my examinations. Much older bodies, some reduced by the action of the soil and creatures of the earth to nothing more than skeletons. I looked up after an hour or two. "At least four weeks, maybe six, maybe longer. Definitely not contemporary with the murders in the first grave. Even someone as untrained as I am at this sort of thing can tell that." I looked around the burial site, looking for sign of undead breaking out of the mass grave. "Nothing rose again from this? There's been enough time, this many dead by violence, mass murder? Something should have rose revenant, if not ghoulish." "Yeah, that was my thought, too, Sawbones. These bones have been drained dry, vampirized. True necromantic ritual. They tapped these kegs empty, whatever they were doing in that ritual circle, it didn't leave any power with the remains, nothing to rise with." I thought for a moment, fighting against the obvious, the assumption. I lost. "So, we're thinking they were making the barrowgasts you've been finding?" "At the least. There are a lot of bodies in these graves, Sawbones. The texts I've been shown say that even three barrowgasts don't need this sort of sacrifice. Either they were building an entire army of barrowgasts, or they were trying to do… I don't know what. Nothing aimed our way. Nothing I've heard was thrown at the loyalists in front of Coriolanus." "Maybe something aimed at the legate holding the Braystown Shambles?" I asked. "Damn, maybe? Or they could have just been topping off their own tanks if Obscured Blade's theories about who was running this army turn out to be true." "You think this is because some liches were hungry?" "I've heard stranger rumors." "Gibblets, there is nothing stranger than rumor. You wouldn't believe how many ponies have told me with all certainty that the recruit-companies from the militias sent to the front are simply fed into the wood-chipper and turned into ghouls by the legates. Rumor is a wild-eyed and dangerous beast. No greater wickedness is there, than the motives ascribed to their fellow ponies by the gossip of the suspicious and terrified." "You keep telling yourself that, stripling." The ancient amphibian looked around us, at the victims of some unknown mass-murderer among the command staff of the defeated army of the White Rose. "I have long since given up trying to limit my notions of just how wicked my fellow creatures can become, given the right motivation." He leaned down and looked at the scattered bones of a victim whose portion of the grave had been disturbed by a badger's tunnel. "And the greater undead groan under motivations which we the living can hardly even imagine, let alone sympathize with. Be careful of treating liches as if they were still people. They're not. They seek out life, and leave nothing but death in their wake."