SBMS066

With the successful digging of Dance Hall's wells, the Company turned a corner. The rest of the work on the walls and the buildings was done almost in a giddy haze. More than sleep, more than food, more than mere simple physical safety - being able to waste water, being able to shower, being able to be *clean* after weeks and weeks of living in filth - is simply indescribable. Those primitive gravity-shower stalls might as well have been the great Thermae of Fatinah's ar-Bayruha as far as we were concerned.

The new security introduced by the completion of the curtain walls also allowed us to displace forward the company ironsmiths and most of the support ponies to the safety of Dance Hall. A small security detail held the blockhouse in Little Ridings, while a large fragment of the aerial cohort and a hoof-full of ‘pounder sections held the Plateau Palisades and patrolled the rear areas. But we were able to house more and more of the pegasi and griffins in Dance Hall as high summer faded and the Company's control in front of Mondovi expanded like an ink-blot on a ruined scrap of parchment.

We established civilization in central Pepin by destroying nature. The glacis in front of the long ramparts of Dance Hall was scorched earth, the brush and the soil murdered for the sake of clear lines of fire, and our response to the inevitable clusters of ghouls formed around the honey-pot traps was full of fire and destruction. We advanced into the dead zones with torches and axes, and left desolation in our wake. The ruins of the dead hamlets were demolished one by one, the undead flushed out of burning shambles in a dozen former villages. The wilderness which once upon a time were tended hayfields and corn were put to the torch, and we let the wildfires rage across the landscape, driving the ghouls from their potential hidey-holes in the tangled, trackless half-Rakuen which once had been the richest agricultural bottomland in the province.

The great pillars of fire and smoke filled the western skies, and turned sunsets baleful and wild. The firestorms formed their own weather, a continuous roaring wind from the east and north that would have tossed the tree-tops about if Mad Jack's loggers had left any standing within miles of Dance Hall.

Our consumption of firewood was prodigious. We were cremating the dead, the death of a dozen districts, and those sickly pyres scorched what was not burned by wildfire. We put the little old ladies of Mondovi to industrial-scale work, and the banks of the Withies was denuded of its sweetgrass and other growth, fuel for our pyres to reduce the smell of that rotten flesh to something just this side of bearable.

The ruins of Caribou City herself perched on the outside bend of a wide curve of the River. Not a particularly defensible position, as her long-dead citizens had discovered, but it had been a happy location once upon a time for a bustling river-port, the deep waters of that lazy bend leaving much space for boat construction, piers, and a vast log-weir for the seasonal storage of the fruit of the army of lumberjacks who once harvested the forested, remote hills of the River's uppermost watershed and floated their timber down the many rivulets coursing their way south past Pepin City and other lesser towns and villages to the north.

The great weir was shattered, the boatyards a tumble of unidentifiable wreckage, the piers long since washed downriver, and their many warehouses long-sacked and roofless, home only to wary owls and the ghouls who competed with those silent predators for the mice and rats, and occasionally snatched an avian meal while they were at it.

The Company's advance into the Caribou district felt at times rather like an armed archaeological expedition; seven years of ruin and neglect had left just enough of the traces of lost civilization as to fire the imagination of an amateur historian - just before our arms-ponies put torch to those reminders of the past, and burned it all away.

History hides hungry death. And in the remnants of Caribou City, the past was definitely not past. Her former occupants were most certainly still in residence, and quite firm on their intention to remain so. In one sense, we were the thugs the absentee landlord the Duc de Pepin had sent into to clear out the rabble from his property so that he could tear down the structures and begin the long, expensive process of gentrification.

In a more rational sense, we were doing what we had proposed in the spring. We industriously reclaimed Caribou City from the undead.
And we could only do it by destroying it utterly.

It took weeks of systemic demolition, going block by block, cordoning them off as we went, and destroying the ghouls that fled the flames. We went through a forest of torches, and consumed what felt like three provinces' yearly production of saltpetre, charcoal, and sulfur, and five years' worth of moonshine. Half of Mondovi was converted into fletchers' workshops, turning out miserable, half-fletched darts, bolts and arrows for the Company's scattering of bowmares, whose consumption of ammunition was simply prodigious. We spent money like water, and the Company impoverished itself in the process. I wasn't in charge of our finances, but I knew that nopony was footing the bill for our profligacy but the Company itself. Perhaps we could guilt our nominal employers into paying cost-plus post-facto, but the prospects didn't look good.

By the beginning of the second harvest, the undead were largely penned into a series of dead neighborhoods to the north-west of the city centre, and that city centre itself. Ghouls continued to drift back into the combat zone from the outer fringes of the province-wide infestaton by sheer, random brownian motion - like water flowing back from the outside of a pond, flowing back towards the operation of a powerful pump drawing from the centre of the lake. But the aerial cohort's patrols and the action of the witches' coven dealt with those distractions, and the main effort of the Company's ground cohorts continued to be the systemic extermination of the centre of the infestation.

By the time of Caribou City, it was simply work. Hard, terrible, dreadfully dangerous work, as if we laboured on the shop floor of a vast griffin's slaughterhouse, wading through a small ocean of clotted, rotting blood and gore, doing a nasty job well. One with a truly horrendous industrial safety record. The recovery wards up in the Plateau Palisades and Little Ridings were full to bursting. For a half dozen brothers of the Company, gangrene and poor sanitation had forced me to remove their limbs to an extent beyond the possibility of future combat effectiveness. We had to send those long-term convalescents to a newly-purchased retirement townhouse up in Hydromel.

We lost three ponies to the first stage of the clearance of Caribou City, none of them to particularly enlightening or elevating stories of heroism. Silver Mirror, bowmare unicorn, and Wellstone Beach, sword-stallion unicorn, were caught in a back-fire from a runaway burn in the second week of clearance of the approaches to Caribou City, and died, mostly of smoke inhalation. Fifth Cup, an earth pony stallion, was in the wrong place and the wrong time in eastern Caribou City, and was overrun by a clot of ghouls fleeing the burning ruin of a warehouse. I was vaguely surprised we didn't lose more than we did, to be honest. Perhaps the Spirit was looking over us at our work.

And the dirty work continued in and around the corpse of that riverport as the weather lowered clouds over our heads, and the first winds of autumn fought for control of the skies of Pepin with the ceaseless pillars of smoke and fire.

Author's Notes:

One Moment in Annihilation's Waste,
One Moment, of the Well of Life to taste---
The Stars are setting and the Caravan
Starts for the Dawn of Nothing---Oh, make haste!