SBMS090
The days that followed brought a stream of enthralled dead led by Imperial trooper-nannies, each soldier guiding a dozen or more shamblers, their lacquered, colourful fetishes bobbing over their manes or crests like bright ribbons in the unkempt hair of corpses. Which, in a way, they were. Reports came back from the third cohort ponies in the field, as the Major and the 93rd went from enclosure to enclosure, processing the trapped ghouls like pigs in a slaughter-house.
The holding-pens south of Trollbridge quickly filled up, and more palisades were thrown together by the detachments of the Imperial rear support battalion left behind and detailed to the task. Across the Withies, the repairs to the wrecked fortifications likewise advanced apace, always with one of the witches' section in residence to maintain coverage against detection by the oblivious Imperials. They did their thing; the Company did its thing, and insofar as the two things coincided, matters advanced smoothly.
When they did not, catastrophe followed in their wake. The first attempt to clear an abandoned mine was a disaster; somepony knocked down a support beam in the unmaintained tunnels bored into a zinc deposit during a fight with a clot of the undead, and brought down the roof on both the Company armsponies fending off the shamblers, and the shamblers themselves. By the time the rest of the sections deployed to the area dug out the victims, more than half a section was dead from crushing trauma or asphyxiation. The rest of the section were variously wounded, mangled, or otherwise hors de combat; of the ones trapped on the far side of the collapse, only one survived, a caribou doe named Dunkelnadja. She participated in their brilliant rear-guard defense against the surviving ghouls trapped with her, but she was the one who survived, because she found a crack in the darkness, and crawled into that pocket of air and defended it against all comers, whereas her fellows fought where they stood and when they ran out of air, they were overrun.
Dead in the cave-in were the caribou bucks Albrecht and Gunter, and the earth-pony stallions Deep Root and Red Mask.
The victims of the cave-in, including the terribly battered Dunkelnadja, were successfully evacuated to Dance Hall, where they filled up my infirmary and occupied much of my and Rye's time as we set bones, cleaned wounds, and began treatments for their extensive respiratory damage. My knowledge of this particular branch of medicine was not precisely extensive or broad, and I found myself poring over the annals-chest's medical texts, trying to figure out what was wrong with these ponies, and how to help them keep breathing. I found nothing better than the fire-bellows forced-breathing treatment I was already using, but there were some positively mane-raising suggestions in the older texts, such as the one that recommended tobacco-smoke enemas. Good thing for my patients that I didn't have any tobacco on hand, I might have been tempted to try it out if only for the sake of the experiment.
The first snows of winter shut down the side-roads up on the plateau to our north and east, and heralded the last few campaign days down here in the bottomlands, and most importantly, in the Deep Mines range. Gorefyre and her last few strings of thralls wound down out of mining country to rejoin the rest of her battalion, and the lot of them hurried on south to find their way to the open Bride's Road out of Le Coppice before the bypass road got too muddy to traverse. She took another fifteen hundred thralls with her. As I watched her shuffle off in the rear of her slave-column, her pallor and weakness were visible from a hundred and fifty yards away. I was vaguely surprised that Sergeant-Major Whitesmith hadn't rigged her a travois litter, so weak did the Major appear. Evidently the blood-enthralling process was not without its costs. The Captain returned from sending the Imperial Major off on her deliveries. We would not expect them back until the last month before the spring rains, to make one last pickup before the summer campaigns.
"I think that marks an end to the year, don't you, Captain?"
"Seems like three years now that you mention it. How are you looking for supplies?"
"I'm doing as good as can be expected. Distillery should be producing by mid-winter. Antiseptic preparations aside, we might even have something potable by spring, although it'd have to be something simple. Seen any juniper bushes up on the Deep Mines?"
"Haven't really been looking for them. But I suppose if somepony wants to celebrate the return of spring with a dram of gin, I ought to put out a be-on-the-lookout, right?"
"How thinned are the herds up there? Will it be safe for somepony to hypothetically go up there to do a botanical survey?"
"By yourself? Not so much. Take a section or two, if you have to do it."
"Aren't the ghouls supposed to be going into hibernation?"
"Some of those abandoned mines make for a peculiar environment. Might be keeping some of them more active than they ought to, given the weather."
We walked the bypass back through the secured sector. The gap north-east of Trollbridge was still open, but the steep slopes of the ridge overlooking Mondovi made that terrain difficult to traverse. There had been some discussion of building a lookout tower and another palisade along that slope, but given the angle of incidence and way things laid, any palisade would be more of fence than a proper line of defense. The Captain and I discussed the idea nonetheless. And some work closing out the defile between the curve of the Withies beneath the bluff and the ridge proper would at least offer some sense of finality to the outer fortifications line.
There was heavy traffic coming down from the Palisades along the Bride's Road, and the traffic-jam along the northern ramparts continued to illustrate the Bride's entirely justifiable irritation with our deliberate blockage of her engineers' hard work. There had been a rumor that the Bride might be sending us one of her prized civil engineers to smooth out the admittedly field-rough edges of 'her' fortress.
They could certainly be helpful in laying out an expansion of the main Road along the defensive rampart, and no doubt would insist on cracking open the ramparts laid in blockage across the section of the Road that led into what used to be Caribou City. Currently, all traffic passing into the dead lands had to move through Dance Hall's gates, over the drawbridge, and out past the ravelin and over the plank-roads run cross-country out to the isolated section of the Road. We had some notions of how it all might proceed, but it was almost as far outside of Mad Jack's wheelhouse as Dance Hall itself, and that had been a collaboration between that old mule and some engineering texts pulled from the aging depths of the Annals chest. An actual trained civil engineer would be a boon.
The wagon traffic was the first fruit of the Bride's financial gifts to her new Company, credit and banked cash alike priming the pump and drawing vendors and suppliers down from Rennet and points north and east. Suddenly we were a favoured destination of merchants and bulk haulers. We had even put out notices for the hire of construction ponies, to build new warehouses for the storage of all the largess pouring down the Bride's Road out of the northlands, and masons if we could lure any of those skilled ponies into the debatable lands. None of those potential new hires had made it down off the plateau yet, but notice had come in this morning that some of them had shown their muzzles at the Palisades. The new Lieutenant flew up there to interview the new ponies and make sure we didn't have any more Cup Cakes in the crowd.
When the Captain and I returned to the Hall, we found Dior Enfant waiting with Compte Coup and Brass Ring, talking in the marshaling yards among a convoy of supply carts being unloaded and shuffled about.
"Doctor! The young jenny here tells us that you're a passionate poker player," said Brass Ring in greeting. "Would you mind playing a hoof or two over some decent whiskey I brought down with us?"
"Dior lies like a rug, unless she means by 'passionate' that I show every emotion on my muzzle and am the greatest mark in the Company. There's a good reason why I only play for small stakes, and I still keep all my friends well-funded for their future losses to even better players than they. Like the young jenny, who is a properly cold-blooded filly when it comes to cards."
She blushed at the compliment. She was definitely looking better in those days, and had largely recovered from her melancholy and lingering illness. "You can't blame a mare for trying, Sawbones. We've not seen you the last two poker nights."
"Well, we are in funds again. No thanks to you, Monseiur Ring. Where is that bank draught you promised us?"
"Seigneur, I am wounded. I have just now presented it to the young lady," protested Brass Ring. "Contingent, of course, on your fine ponies clearing the agreed-upon villages and mine complexes."
"And by doing so, instead of having your bankers pass the information directly to our own, you delayed payment a good two weeks, Mr. Ring. We know how this sort of thing works. But I will forgive you your minor trespasses, contingent, of course, on a fair share of said whiskey. And the chance to fleece you tonight at the table." Dior Enfant was definitely in a fine mood, to be so flirty over a bit of booze and a night of gambling. "Sawbones, please come. We need a fifth at the table."
"A fifth? Who is the fourth?"
"Might I present Mademoiselle Apiculteur? She's our new purchasing agent in Rennet." Dior Enfant waved a hoof over to a donkey who had been lurking in the shadow of a wagon piled high with dry goods and sacks of sugar. A roan jenny of a certain age stepped out into the fading sunlight, although she still hid her face beneath a vast, impractical sun-bonnet so wide that I was astounded she had made it down the great ramp off the edge of the plateau without the prevailing winds having picked her up, hat and all, and sailed the both of them out over the abyss below.
The Duchesse of Rennet had arrived incognito in Dance Hall. And she was starting to 'show', a quite noticeable bulge around her mid-section.
As she had to be, being at least nine months pregnant.