SBMS050
The White Rose’s trap had been well-planned, timed, staged. The undead had been collected – we did not know how they had been handling the ghouls, finding out how was a major priority as soon as the crisis was resolved – and stabilized in walled-off structures distributed to the four quadrants of the castra, unassuming squat one-story shacks placed behind barracks elsewhere in the camp, and behind false walls in the warlocks’ quarters and the questorium in the central complex. The trigger in the warlocks’ warded hall let loose all tartarus at once, throughout the castra. Three-fourths of the blow struck air, ghouls snuffling around emptied barracks and shuffling about aimlessly, a threat to nothing but spiders and the occasional colony of bats and other insectivores that had invaded the emptied precincts between those ancient walls.
The questorium ghouls nearly overwhelmed the witches’ guard detail, and drove them back in a desperate scramble. Nearly all of them were walking wounded by the time they fought their way back to the stockade, several of them dragged by main force behind a screen of desperately fighting brethren holding off the howling dead. Two did not make it to the stockade, although we did not come across their final stand until later. A unicorn blade-mare named Saffron Sabre had gone down in a ghoul-rush partway back to the stockade, and her partner, an earth-pony stallion named Bull Rush, had been seen dragging her away from danger, bucking his hoof-blades into the faces of ravening undead donkeys and ponies. A second rush had separated the two from the rest of the section, and nopony had noticed they were gone until later. The next day, a double-section clearing the deeper front of the stockade came across their final stand on the far side of the via quintana, a small mound of formerly-undead being faithlessly devoured by their fellow ghouls, and in the center, the remains of the two deceased brethren, Bull Rush stretched protectively over his partner. The patrol rolled over the surviving ghouls like a threshing machine.
The real threat had been the trapped shack inside the Company perimeter. It had lurked like a mine dug unheard beneath our walls, sitting unnoticed behind a barracks full of ponies, next to the rear of a mess hall. They overran and killed two carter-cooks before anypony could react. The earth-pony mare Golden Grits, and her special somepony Hoppin’ John. Charleyhorse was with them, and only the luck of the Company and the protracted death of his knight and master Hoppin’ John saved him from the same fate. He ran his little pony hooves off, screaming the alarm. The first responders pouring out of that barracks were barely armed, and we lost Rue Mechant, jack, and Rock Shelf, earth pony mare, before the properly armed and barded replaced that first desperate line.
The butchery was certain, but it took time, and distracted the Company from the external threat. We had ghouls coming over the eastern stockade before anypony noticed. There were several wounded in this flanking rush, but the stockade itself was our greatest advantage, clambering over it broke up the undead masses and kept them from forming a critical mass. By the time the relieving column had helped Gibblets and I drag our wounded warlocks through the stockade gates, they were making a start on pinning the ghouls into a corner of the Company perimeter, and reasserting control over the situation.
In the final analysis, the White Rose just didn’t have enough ghouls to overwhelm the Company, despite their perfect surprise and multi-axis attack. Once the Company had mobilized, the pegasi and griffins quickly identified the threats, their directions of movement, and the safe zones. From there, it was simply a matter of time and effort. By midnight, we had cleared the compound inside the stockade, and identified the ghoul clusters lurking throughout the rest of the castra. We chose to put off the destruction of those clusters until the next day.
We didn’t retrieve Goiter’s bones until two days later, as Company patrols quartered and re-quartered the castra, hunting every last shuffling corpse and dragging the remains into the forum to be destroyed in an improvised burn-pit. We left the Company dead sit outside in the forum next to the burn-pit, waiting to see if they rose. A full section stood vigil. They did not in the three days we waited.
On the third night, we built a pyre, and said goodbye to our brothers.
Shorthorn turned out to have nothing worse wrong with him than severe horn-burn, same as Octavius the summer before. Who just had to come in and mock the warlock for it, having taken enough grief from him in the past for the same injury. Octavius was in my hospital for the usual, having taken a nasty bite from a ghoul in the first rush to contain the outbreak inside the stockade. Hyssop was right behind him in the queue, with a nasty wound to her right orbital. Rye Daughter rinsed out Octavius’s bite with dilute antiseptic solution, and got ready to poke around in it, with him looking down in anxiety at the little fawn with her mouth full of one of my medical probes. I was working on Hyssop’s eye, which frankly was a higher priority than Octavius’s wound du jour. I thought I could save it, but I wasn’t positive. I cleaned out the wound, packed it with a new mixture we had concocted from the alchemical texts, and ordered her to wear the eye-patch. She seemed pleased with the piratical look.
Languid was a different story. Her barrel wound had suppurated, and shock had nearly taken her from us. I stuffed her full of every antiseptic and infection cure I had on hand, and then we sat back to hope that she woke up before she died of dehydration. Later on, after we had patched up the walking wounded and put the seriously injured away in their beds, I had Rye dripping small beer out of a soaked bandage into Languid’s mouth. She was out for three days, it was the closest I’ve ever had a patient get without dying. But we owed her.
And she eventually pulled through.
The Company conference a week later was a subdued affair. They had gotten us good. Nearly taken out a majority of the Company’s magical throw-weight, such as it was. We obviously needed better undead-detection methods. With both Shorthorn and Languid out of commission, and Goiter dead, we were shorthooved. Otonashi and the Crow had been on a forward reconnaissance flight with the charioteers at the time of the incident, so we weren’t naked, but it wasn’t a good place from which to advance into buffalo country.
Otonashi, Gibblets, and the Crow worked like diamond dogs for the next two weeks testing out detection methods. We kept a couple ghouls penned inside a fresh-built barricade in the corner of an unused quadrant of the castra, and the witches kept Mad Jack busy building a labyrinth as a sort of detection experimental laboratory. Two weeks became four, and the roads south dried out and summer began to threaten. Our deep patrols found the occasional cluster of undead, but no living White Rose. Our ponies became familiar to the fortified farming hamlets and family compounds along the Pepin border with Rennet, and we made ourselves almost popular there with our humorless approach toward the free-range undead. Our patrols extended further and further into Pepin, but we refused to take the Company proper out of the castra.
Time enough for the advance when we were ready. And we weren’t ready yet.