SBMS068
The first indication of the trouble to come was a report from the bi-monthly voyageurs' caravan up from Le Coppice. The Captain had moved her headquarters down to Dance Hall to be more close to the intensive clearance operations east of the ramparts and in the ruins of the city on the river. They were trying to work out the details of how to move the mass of sensitive thaumaturgic equipment Broken Sigil had accumulated in his operations room up in the Palisades, but the sand-tables and ensorcelled remote-sensing apparatuses were not the sort of things you could just chuck in the back of a heavy wagon and carry dozens of miles through a battle zone, however pacified and near-cleared it might be.
The Lieutenant had made a deal with the Mondovans that their voyageurs would brief us about developments further down into the Riverlands, and we would provide a section of armsponies as convoy security for their rambles. In practice, this meant that the ponies assigned to play caravan guard became the Company's eyes and ears in the provinces to the south and west of us, as the voyageurs were close-mouthed and insular on the best of days, and damn near orphic when it came to tradable intelligence. There was so very little that the rest of the world wanted out of Mondovi, that the voyageurs had by default fell into the role of arbitrageurs, traders, and practitioners of cut-throat commercial espionage. Their idea of briefings was an airy tissue of platitudes about the state of the war and mostly value-less blather about the cost of barding in Boiling Brook or the possibility of labour unrest among the longshoreponies of Elgin.
The caravan guards, on the other hand, knew to inform management of troop movements, and the known locations of active players in the ongoing campaign season. Most of the legates were active that summer on an arc from the band of fortifications west of Sundowners to the lines along the great river south of Harmony's Root, along with those regiments in-theatre. More than half of the Bride's imperial regiments nominally deployed to the Riverlands were only there by courtesy, being deployed far from the front lines, entrenched in the rear. This was by report because many of them had been bled white in previous campaign seasons, and their ongoing recruiting efforts were running far behind requirements. Also, because the central Riverlands were effectively depopulated, as was the whole of the fortified region, which only saw the traffic of heavily-armed supply convoys. The rear-deployed regiments were in place by necessity to contain the natural fall-out from the fighting, such as it was. And more than incidentally, to survive on local produce and supplies, rather than straining at the hungry end of over-burdened logistical lines of communication.
From the accounts of the caravan guards, based on camp-gossip and word in the living towns behind the security cordons, most of the activity in the theatre consisted of sweeps by junior warlocks doing… something in the region between the front lines and the security cordon, and the weekly exchange of courtesies between the heavies along the main fortifications and their opposite numbers in the Rose's counter-fortifications. And by courtesies I mean massive magecraftings that flattened redoubts and melted the very earth itself from under the heavy foundations of the world. And the occasional rush of undead hordes for the resulting gaps in the walls made by the obliteration of entire bastions. The living battalions acted mostly as security details for the great monsters who commanded the witchcraft and the dead which fought the battle for the living. And, more productively, the living supervisors of the revenant construction details digging fresh ramparts and trench-lines behind the ruins or soon-to-be ruined forward defenses.
The season had seen no real breakouts, nor any serious movement in the armies. But rumor was that the undead hordes of the Imperial legates had seen significant attrition. And that might have something to do with the formation which had followed the latest voyageur's caravan halfway home, and had apparently occupied Le Coppice after they had left. The assessment of this force was vague, since the guards had been obliged to keep close to the caravan, but it was enough for the Captain to send a high-level long-range pegasi patrol to overfly our new neighbors to the south.
The flight of pegasi, led by Autumn Blade, passed over Le Coppice over 15,000 feet, cautious in expectation of possible heavy mage-artillery. The Company hadn't had any encounters with major Tambelon magic since that rune-caster wiped half a flight of pegasi from the skies on the road to Grosbach last summer, but we'd seen enough of what our nominal employer was capable in the short fall-season fighting. It was possible that a blood-mage or a rune-caster might be able to fling fire or projectiles at a distance, who knew how accurately?
Not much was visible that far up, but pegasi have crazy-sharp eyes, and they were able to get a rough head-count in the fortified camp along the riverside that defended the town on the far end of the bypass, and those lines of defense that kept back the ghoul menace on that side of matters. To be honest, the tributary branch of the great river behind which Le Coppice crouched was a better defense than their ramparts and defensive lines. Le Coppice actually had working agricultural land hidden behind levees and canal-networks. I'm told that those living cities and towns to the south, throughout the surviving portions of the Riverlands, employ similar measures to keep themselves from the edge of starvation.
The new visitors had brought about a reinforced company, nothing much more. Enough to not worry about being overrun by a sudden rush of undead, and probably enough to survive an ambush by bandits or a long-range reconnaissance patrol, but nothing that could withstand an "exchange of courtesies" or even a stand-up fight by any prepared force worth talking about.
Consensus was that this force was probably one of those sweep-detachments rumored to be trolling the rear areas of the dead zone. We found out soon enough, because a couple days after moving into the fortifications of Le Coppice, they moved our way, slowly.
While the Captain and Tickle Me were observing the slow and peculiar advance of the unknown force to our south, the Lieutenant and the bulk of the Company's main maneuver force continued the clearance of Caribou City, and made good progress towards burning it flat. We were almost finished with the initial clearance and getting ready for the clean-up phase when the first scouts of the 93rd Rear Security Battalion made contact with the Captain's guard detail holding the troll-bridge over the Withies.
The sergeant who commanded that flank of the defensive lines had thrown up a small blockhouse beside the troll-bridge on this side of the river to provide a retreat for the ladies harvesting the meadow-grasses and river-reeds, and it had become the preferred position for our outer security post on the bypass road. The hoof-full of pegasi flights which were overseeing the odd, apparently purpose-less sweeps of the force inching out of Le Coppice had taken to using the Troll-bridge blockhouse as an anchor to their deployment. So it was no surprise when the unknown platoon of lightly-armed donkeys approached the mixed section of caribou and earth ponies the Captain had sent out that morning to show the Company's banner, metaphorically speaking.
There was much speculation about what would happen. Would they attack? Send up a flag? Greet us in a civil manner? Offer to exchange bootlegged booze and compare techniques in hiding stills from the officers?
In the event, the scouts approached in a cautious deployment. One trotted forward within hailing distance, and exchanged rank and unit details with the corporal of the guard. Then she turned around, and the scout-section retreated back the way they came. And that was it for the day. The pegasi said that the rest of this rear security battalion continued to sweep the region between the Withies and the Coppice River. This was a portion of our own "rear area" which was still suffering from the occasional clot of ghouls, the more cautious and sly ones, by sheer attrition and process of natural selection. We had wiped out the most mindless and aggressive undead in the region by that point, although we hadn't put the same sort of effort on the far side of the Withies as we had on this side of the little river.
Several days later, the Lieutenant was well into the final clean-up phase of the extermination campaign in the city, and we were making plans for a fall of intensive patrolling and clearance sweeps in the rest of the province. We had long since made contact with the defenders of the northwest corner around Pepin City, but our concentration on Caribou City proper had prompted the officers to leave the clearance of the undead on that front to the locals. Now we had invited the Duc de Pepin down for a conference about what to do about the cleared region in front of Dance Hall, and about co-ordination and cooperation in clearing the still-infested, mostly inaccessible slopes between Pepin City and the rest of the province to their east. We had screened that region, concentrating on the protection of the main agricultural region clustered around the Bride's Road and our own communications. Now, with the central objective of the campaign a heap of smoking cinders and colorfully grotesque bonework trophies lining the ramparts of Dance Hall, we had time for a late-fall campaign against the secondary infestations.
We were waiting with Compte Coup for the arrival of the Duc's escort inside the barely-dignified-by-the-term 'comforts' of Dance Hall, when the message came up the bypass from the Troll-bridge. The commander of the 93rd had made an appearance, and demanded the presence of the commander of the Company. The Captain, resplendent and foolish in her oversized chamfron, rolled her eyes and told the Lieutenant and Compte Coup to convey to the Duc her apologies, and waved a hoof for me and Broken Sigil to accompany her to find out what was the deal.
It still wasn't a short trot out to Troll-bridge.
We found a short donkey covered in nasty little fetishes, blood-stained kerchiefs and twists of twigs and such. Under all that witchy nonsense was a jenny no older than Dancing Shadows. She was surrounded by an honor-guard of- Ghouls! I slammed my chamfron down over my eyes, and reached for my - absent! - axe. Then I registered that she had them under full domination, and realized that I was looking at a necromancer. The Company guards had already made that connection, which explained why we didn't have half the Company responding to the alarm. Broken Sigil gave me a raised eyebrow, and I blushed.
The little necromancer didn't even introduce herself before launching into her high-pitched harangue.
She was pissed that we had burnt down her hunting ground.