SBMS057
I found Shorthorn sitting in a watchtower on the castra wall, looking over the labyrinth they had built out of the ghoul-wrecked mess that used to be the southwestern quadrant of the camp. He had a set of physical spyglasses to hoof, and was watching something going on below through one of them, the glass held in the curve of one leg. At least he wasn't straining his horn with random levitation this time.
"Come on, come on, take the bait this time… ha! There we go! Watch them scurry."
I looked over the edge, and tried to spot what he was looking at. There was some movement between the walls below, but the afternoon shadows made it difficult to pick out what was going where against the glare of the green wooden walls in the bright sunlight. But I certainly could hear the sudden squealing as something caught something else - sounded like a stuck pig.
Sounded a lot like a dying pig, actually.
"What the tartarus are you maniacs doing? What is it, ghoul feeding time? Tell me that's not something sentient getting ate down there."
He looked up, and jerked backwards in shock at my having appeared in his blind spot. "Sawbones, don't sneak up on a warlock like that. You're lucky I didn't incinerate you!"
"As if you could set me on fire even when you weren't horn-burnt. You're making me miss Languid already!" I'd just gotten back from shipping Lady Languid off to the convalescent home we had set up in Hydromel. I had hired a local surgeon to keep herd on Languid and the rest of the convalescents, and provided her with a supply of antibiotics and instructions on how to harvest more from the right sort of mould. I could only hope that the surgeon didn't muck that up; I had suggested that she partner up with an apothecary, but you know how ponies can be about trade secrets and working outside of the guild.
"Again, what is fresh Tartarus is this?"
"We're playing 'who can hide ponies from ghouls; who can lure ghouls after things that ain't ponies' with the foals."
"You're WHAT?" I thought seriously about tossing the lunatic off that tower into the labyrinth to be eaten by his own pets.
"Calm your mellow, Sawbones. See that box over there, in the middle of the race? We have a tunnel that goes in there, you can't get from the race inside of it, it's reinforced. We have Feufollet or Bad Apple operating in there, casting enhanced illusions. Bad Apple can't get the ghouls to notice her illusions - they might as well be hot air for her and them - but something about Feufollet's illusions take. If she wants them to act as if there's meat on the hoof, they go slavering after the bait ten times out of ten. If she wants them to ignore live flesh right in their faces, they don't even twitch. It's bloody wonderful, it is. We think it might be the blood; it interacts somehow with the death-magic that animates the ghouls. That scream you just heard was a pig we set loose in the race to feed the beasties. There's more swine running around down there with Feufollet's glamours on them. We're seeing how long she can maintain the hex in pony. Tomorrow? We're going to try it with charms instead."
"Huh. How is she glamouring them without being able to see her targets?"
"Otonashi's secret sauce. It's some sort of mental trick, abstract-like. Gibblets and I can't get the hang of it, but foals are flexible, the both of them just picked it up like playing jacks. Shame Bad Apple can't get the ghouls to recognize her illusions as glamours, though."
"You'll need to have it work with charms. I'll be damned if you're going to send a half-grown filly out with the snake-stompers to play magical ghillie suit among the pony-eaters."
"Preaching to the choir, pastor. We're making progress. Figuring out the daily cycles from the portal-penumbras straightened out our detection gliltches, thanks for your idea, by the way."
"So it wasn't tidal?"
"Nah, but the suggestion got us twisted around thinking on the right slant. Languid pointed out the overlapping pulses of portals operating against each other, and once we figured that out, I could calculate the probable cycle of the three signals causing the fades. We still don't know where the other two portals are, but I've got an idea what direction they're in, given where the portal to Crossroads is located."
I thought of the common theory that an out-world sovereign power was using the White Rose to destabilize the Bride's imperium. "Any chance one of them is in the direction of Traverses?"
"No, actually, one's to the northwest, a far distance away. Probably on the coast of the Outer Seas, or maybe on an island from the intensity. The third's due south, way south. Nothing nearby, really. We're still closest to the portal we came in on."
Unicorns and their capacity for nearly impossible feats of mental calculation never ceased to appall me. I could barely deal with quadratics, and that only with a pencil, time, and a lot of foolscap.
As I looked down, I spotted what I hadn't noticed earlier. There were three pegasi and a griffin crouched on half-ruined rooftops throughout the labyrinth like gargoyles, fully armed and as barded as aerial ponies could carry. They were still as the grave, but I could see them focused like raptors on the little reinforced box Shorthorn had pointed out. Feufollet was under constant supervision, and surrounded by her elders in the Company. Any ghoul who started trying to dig its way through the heavy planking around her priest-hole would get a gullet full of javelins before they could do more than raise a cloud of splinters.
"So you spooks can keep track of the shambling dead now? Spot concentrations, that sort of thing?"
"Pretty much. It's up to you when I'm cleared for field service, of course. I've been a good colt, resting my horn according to doctor's instructions," he said, waving his spy-glass around with his hoof. "As you can see, we've progressed to working on the 'edges' you told Gibblets we needed. Force-multipliers, the old Captain used to call them. "
"Blood-magery, is it? Shame we haven't recruited any adult practitioners. The Crow doesn't know anything about that?"
"Despite her ears, she's pretty much a unicorn magus. No sign of blood-magic, sad to say. And the Imperial Army reportedly snaps up every bloodmage that breaks cover. It's pretty much a magic draft. It was a matter of time before they found Feufollet and recruited her into the rebellion or the Imperial Army. In my opinion, that probably was why her parents were keeping her at home and away from the local schoolmarm. They were hiding her under a bushel."
"And why we never heard boo from them about having foalnapped her into the Company. Guilty consciences. Bad Apple's rotten parents hated her, and the rest of them came out of an orphanage or apprenticeships, but it was always sort of a mystery why Feufollet's parents never came to retrieve their missing jenny." We both fell silent, as the ghouls finished off their late snack, and wandered off into the depths of the maze. I hadn't quite believed in the hidden pigs, until a couple sparks lit off in the lengthening shadows. I heard a rumbling noise as the pigs stampeded for the gate, having been prodded by somepony's magic in the right direction. As they passed through the suddenly-opened gate, Feufollet apparently dropped the glamour. A herd of a half-dozen pigs appeared out of shadow and mist, and an earth pony stepped up with a shillelagh to play swineherd, driving them to their troughs.
We might actually be ready to leave Menomenie when the time came. Were these signs, wonders and miracles, by the gift of the Spirit according to her madness? Or just the fruit of hard, dangerous work; the Spirit that helps those con-ponies that grift for themselves?