//------------------------------// // The Palisades Along The Plateau // Story: In the Company of Night // by Mitch H //------------------------------// SBMS058 We built the second blockhouse and palisade on the edge of the plateau, among rich, well-drained farmland more than half-abandoned by its people for better-defended compounds further from the steep wooded slopes below that edge. Ghouls had taken to the wild, uncultivatible slopes like wild hogs, and the periodic eruptions of ravenous undead from that brush and woodlot had driven away all but the most intrepid and stubborn of ponies from their farms. Of those that remained, too many were dying in the daily fight against time, the weather and the mindless dead. It was beautiful country, the over-watered prairie of the interior falling away into sudden drops and over sudden precipices, the drainage of actual slopes drying out bogs and swamps, a constant headache north and eastwards, and leaving them perfected for rich crops. Even without the pressure of their masters' hooves, those happy fields threw sweet stalks of corn and grain at the skies, and spread wide leaves in worship of the summer sun. The abandoned orchards hung heavy with fruit among buzzing bees and teeming, healthful insects. And death stalked the field-rows and groves. They made their nests among the steep, plunging slopes beyond, the soil and dirt washed away from the fields above curling around and through eroded limestone cliffs, making soft aprons of effluvia around their bases. This was the point at which the giants'-rakes had ceased their northward scrape, and left the ancient land as it once was, wooded, rough, and broken. The ancient gardeners of the north had left this break as the mark of the edge of their vast garden. The limestone gorges were cut by sweet-watered rivulets and creeks, feeding into the northern-most tributaries, yes, but primarily in this region into the River itself. Small, feral and wild, the northern River was barely distinguishable from its many tributaries to the deep west and east, far to the south, and there, to the south, where it met its many children, where it became vast, lugubrious, and implacable in its course. Here, in the highlands, it was a vicious little beast, barely navigable, and that mostly due to weirs and careful cultivation by generation upon generation of clever river-donkeys and caribou. The ghouls haunted the slopes of those gorges, and in the rich bottomlands beside the rushing creeks, a deadly fight for existence among the surviving farmers, more colonists and pioneers now than settled tillers of the soil. While the fight for the plateau's edge was uncertain, the struggle to remain among the drainage between the slopes and the River was desperate, existential. The living were losing, and badly. Their losses were the gains of the dead. The clearance operation out of the first blockhouse had been something of a throat-clearing for the Company in chorus, a running of the scales. We took no serious injuries or casualties to speak of, and that without the innovations the witches-coven had developed in their laboratory-labyrinth. The building of the second blockhouse and the clearance of the plateau's-edge was the first serious fight of the summer campaign. The pegasi swept along the face of the gorges, and found that the wooded terrain and the many folds of the land made it fiendishly difficult to spot anything, let alone ghouls nesting, inactive. We found very few nests this way, although a couple larger ones were spotted in abandoned homesteads along the headwaters of some of the tributary streams. The charioteers flew in doubled sections of troops, with the pegasi and griffins in support, and cleared out three of these obvious, blatant nests, burning the corpses and the remains they had filled those structures with. But the ghouls continued to come over the wooded edge of the plateau at night, and our patrols on the ground along that verge fought a nightly running battle along the cordon, tracking the enemy by smell and fighting by dark-sight. That week saw a dozen casualties, two serious, and I had to displace my surgery from the nice, well-stocked and spacious hospital in Menomenie castra to the rough tents of the plateau-edge palisades. They mostly kept the ghouls from reaching the actual palisades, but it was a serious fight to make that happen, and ponies got hurt in the process. The second week, we brought forward the witches, and their apprentices. The charioteers had a new toy, a sort of one-pony aerial gig, light and flexible, seating only one, small pony. These rigs accompanied the strike-flights, and a warlock riding gig with a daring charioteer could hug the treelines of the gorges, and use the newfangled detection charms to spot ghoul-nests hidden below the canopy between the exposed cliffs and boulders. Both apprentices volunteered for shift after shift of this duty, and it was in these first flights that Bad Apple's pyromantic skill was first displayed, and her innate aggressiveness. More than one forest fire was started by her experimentation against undead nests in those flights, and the escorting ponies learned to not fly downwind of her gig when it dipped down below the branches. But the aerial ponies were in more danger of smacking into tree-limbs than being caught by ravening ghouls. As vicious as they were, they couldn't fly, nor could they jump any more effectively than you or I given no head start or push. If we had all year, we could have taken our leisure and simply sat back and let the pegasi exhaust themselves and the witches hunting the hapless dead from the air, one javelin at a time, one unreasonable outburst of slope-scorching unnatural fire at a time, and in the meantime scattering the ghouls hither and thon across the province. The Company could be hunting ghouls and revenants in that terrain for the rest of our natural lives, become nothing more than jaegers of the undead. The other witches did their job as directed, and laid markers for the ground strike-forces, and then the Company did things by the book. Hammer-and-anvil sweeping operations, clearing each nest by isolating it first, and then driving into it with sufficient force. It was a grinding sort of battle, and the injuries and casualties began to mount. My ward in the palisades grew fat with broken limbs, the majority of the injuries, generally incurred in falls or bad tumbles on that uneven and steep ground. We had to extend the battlements to include more space for the greater and greater proportion of the Company housed in the Plateau Palisades. In the third week of the campaign, an earth pony stallion named Mirror Way took a tumble off a limestone cliff chasing an escaping ghoul, and broke his neck on the rocks below. He didn't survive the trip back to the Palisades. In the fourth week of the campaign, her section-mates lost track of a unicorn bowmare named Taunt Strings during a clearance operation in one of the more remote gorges to the northwest. Her remains were found five days later in a subsequent sweep in the next cove over from where they had been fighting, surrounded by a dozen dismembered, rotting ghouls, her backup blade buried in the skull of the one nearest to her. She seemed to have bled out from her wounds; her body showed no signs of having been devoured, aside from the wounds that killed her. She died alone, but well. It was sickening how few ponies remained in the gorge bottomlands; those that did, had largely retreated to the hamlet and town walls along the roadsides, and cultivated those fields and orchards which could be reached at a dead run, in clear sight. They had cut down all the trees within two hundred yards of the hamlets and towns, preserving their sight-lines and maneuver space. The remaining ponies of the bottomlands were a people under arms. They had not reacted well when the White Rose of Rennet had passed down the Road and tried to assert their dominance and claim over supplies. We found a battlefield outside two of the three towns on the Road as it passed down the biggest gorge bisecting the Pepin Front. They fought an inconclusive skirmish outside Guillaume's Ravin, which made things bad enough on the Road. But they sacked little Durand, and burnt it. The surviving refugees were a burden on their neighbors up and down the Road, and everypony was feeling pretty salty when we moved down the Road after our caribou friends. Nopony in Mondovi were certain what had happened to the rebels after Durand. They supposedly had camped in the snow outside of Mondovi for two nights, not even approaching the gates. The second night, there had been a great commotion and sounds of a fight. Then the next morning, their tents were gone, and aside from a great deal of blood, a good number of unburnt recent dead, and scorch marks on everything wooden around where they had camped, nothing. Two trails leading away, one up the bypass south around the ruins of Caribou City, and another straight into the City. The ponies of Mondovi were strange even by Pepin provincial standards. They held onto the little city's fortifications by the skin of their teeth, not more than five miles from the heart of the infestation. There were no inhabited hamlets between Mondovi and the ruins of the river-port. They survived by maintaining the Road between the upper province and the riverports further south along the extension of the Road, and running guarded convoys on the Road. They certainly didn't get enough food from what little cultivated land they were able to protect from their walls; they imported from their less-pressed neighbors to the northeast and south around the living river-ports. We began making plans for a regimental fortress across the bypass from Mondovi. If any point in the province was better-suited for a clearing operation against that city of the dead on the upper River, we hadn't found it. And in the meantime, it was a good position to seal off further movements of ghouls into the gorges and bottomlands to the north and east, and to help complete the clearance of the northern half of the province. We also had hopes of making contact with the forces of the Duc de Pepin, whose quarter of the province had its communications with the rest of the province through Mondovi. And throughout those long days and short nights of that second summer in Tambelon, the Company's armsponies continued their hunt for the dead among the wooded cliffs and abandoned farms on the northern fringe of the Riverlands.