//------------------------------//
// Going Through The Motions 
// Story: In the Company of Night 
// by Mitch H 
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SBMS099

I put myself under arrest, of course.  I had been AWOL, twice.  While I had been out and about, they had sent up a proper cohort commander to take over the recruit-camp, the commander with most experience left in the Company.  Smooth Draw had left behind most of her own cohort, to take over the new recruit-heavy fourth.   Octavius was promoted to sergeant-major, and given the old third cohort.  

Not the choice I would have made.

Plans were made to swap out recruit-heavy sections from the fourth into the second and third as they were judged fully trained, so as to balance the cohorts properly, and make sure that none of the cohorts could truly be described as green, as a 'recruits' cohort'.

I quickly grew tired of Rye's restlessness and anxiety, and told her that this was the season for harvesting wild herbs.  The green shoots were starting to peek out of the brown brush, and trees were green-tipping everywhere across the face of the landscape.  I sent her out to harvest the local willow-stands, and to search for the standard early-season herbs.

I put in a request to have the herbals shipped up from my study in Dance Hall, they were full of illustrations and guides on how to identify useful plants.  Obscured Blade knew where to find them in the archival chest, they were in the unsecured, unencrypted shelves.

While I had been out, one of the Bride's vaunted civil engineers had arrived with a detail of veterans, Imperials with long experience in construction and field engineering.  They had been at work down in the vicinity of  Dance Hall, for nearly five weeks, undoing the mess we had made of the Bride's Road, tearing down ramparts, rebuilding roadsides, and laying out the new gate-and-bastion complex around a second, civilian drawbridge to restore the traffic-flow down into the wastelands, and through to the river and the road-net into northwestern Pepin and Pepin City proper.

I took stock of the recruits' hygiene and training health concerns.  The sections of the unrecruited 'companies' were properly and thoroughly interviewed, and I took detailed patient histories.  I called in Stomper, and we discussed targeted training regimens for some of the problem recruits, who had special circumstances that required addressing.

I told Stomper to leave her apprentice and his friends out in the hall.

While I was busy and on recruiting detail, the Company had kept itself busy by thoroughly posting the line of the upper great river, establishing a small blockhouse on a bluff on the heights west of the Deep Mines, over the river north of where Caribou City used to be.  The blockhouse included a number of barracks, a palisade, and a small tower and deployment facilities for the aerial ponies.  They called it the Aerie.  Gerlach ran regular patrols out of the Aerie, and by the end of the garrison season the new blockhouse housed a full dozen sections, keeping an eye out towards the White Rose side of the river, and aiding in the ongoing clearance and collection operations in the Deep Mines highlands.

I kept Rye Daughter as busy as I could, chasing herbs in the fields, helping with the countless minor injuries and strains of an intensive training season.  Out of my mane.

The 93rd Rear Support Battalion reappeared once again, and passed through Dance Hall to collect a final cull of thralls from the increasingly-depopulated Deep Mines range.  It turned dirty, and dangerous, with much of the work done in  the abandoned delvings and dead mining towns.  Mindful of the previous season's disaster in the mines, the Company's ponies were painstaking, cautious, and very, very careful.  They still had a couple cave-ins.  Forward-deployed unicorns and the Company's witches kept close and on call served to prevent a re-occurrence of serious casualties. It usually takes some blood, but the Company is capable of learning from its mistakes.

Gibblets and his witch-apprentices tried to see me two weeks after the incident.  I wouldn't see them.

Throughout the spring, the aerial patrols along the line of the upper river had spotted signs that somepony was coming across the river.  Small boats tied up along the far shore, drag-marks in river mud on the near shore, and the occasional tracks leading up into the wastelands.  Nopony saw anything living, but the White Rose was definitely doing something on our side of the river.  Deep patrols into enemy territory didn't find any new encampments or fortifications, but the existing ones were fully staffed, and a new flotilla of warcraft were under construction in the nearest fortified port-town southward from the site of Caribou City.  Messages were sent south via the small Imperial outpost in that town south of Le Coppice on the Road, and Her Majesty's brown-water navy was notified of the new threat.  They were occupied, as they always are, with facing down the White Rose's fleet-in-being in the mouth of the great river's largest tributary, the Housa.  Nothing was spared to go deal with a minor hoof-full of pocket triemes or glorified pirogues on a stretch of the great river far from the central theatre.

The signs of incursions caused the Lieutenant and Fuller Falchion to send out substantial hoof patrols through the wastelands between the river and the sally-gates of Dance Hall.  A full week of dancing back and forth ensued before a Company patrol actually laid eyes on a White Rose deep recon unit.  Another week of chasing each others' tails ensued, with each side burning each others' abandoned day-camps, and trying to lure each other into improvised ambushes.   The White Rose's scouts were very, very good. 

Eventually a Company patrol screwed up, and a mare got injured in the field, hamstrung in a pass of arms in the half-demolished remains of a farming hamlet south of the old city walls.  Her partner stayed to carry her to safety, while their section-mate galloped back to the rest of the unit to bring in reinforcements.  He didn't realize that the Spirit had already inspired a re-deployment which would have brought those reinforcements onto the scene without any conscious decision on the part of anypony.  The runner's interruption of the movement of the 'reinforcement' actually delayed the rescue. The isolated pair of Company ponies were trapped and killed by a party of White Rose scouts.  Dead in the encounter was Shifting Sand, earth pony mare, and her partner, the buck Roe Cain.   Their section-mates wiped out the White Rose recon patrol, counter-ambushing them while they were distracted by an attempt to interrogate the dying Shifting Sand.

Information beaten in turn out of a dying scout suggested that the probes across the river had began as poaching expeditions in support of the White Rose's own necromancers, looking to snatch up a few thralls of their own from the legates' previously-teeming ghoul reserve-lands.  Much to their surprise, they found nothing at all.  I'm not sure what the White Rose had thought was going on over here on the Bride's side of the river all last year.  We had not been particularly subtle about our extermination campaign, the clouds of smoke must have blighted the crops of the farms upwind from the wastelands.  But perhaps the White Rose's civilian populations had as little contact with their soldiery and witches as the Imperials did with their own.  Nevertheless, this ludicrous blindness had led several small enthralling parties to slink across the river and cautiously comb through the burnt fields and ruins around the dead port-city.  Apparently previous years had seen the legates' own culling parties come across White Rose intruding in their gamelands, and some spectacular massacres had trained the surviving White Rose on how to be unobtrusive while stealing from the legates' shamble-herds.

The search for ghouls, or any undead whatsoever, turned eventually into a proper military reconnaissance. By the time of the bloody ambush, they had more or less figured out our situation in the province, and were trying to figure out useful approaches, or whether to try us at all.  The information from the dying scout let us identify and pin down the rest of the White Rose on the wrong side of the river.  Reinforced Company columns converged on the enemy, and a detachment from the Aerie cut off their retreat to the river-banks.  They fought like cornered weasels, but were hopelessly outmatched.  Only the two bloodmages accompanying them gave the Company any problems, and unicorn shield-choruses suppressed those witches' desperate counter-attacks, until the Company's own warlocks were able to drop fire on their position and incinerated the necromancers in their nest.

No Company ponies died in the extermination of the White Rose recon battalion, but a good many were injured, some severely.  A chariot was sent up to the Palisades, and I was ordered insistently to deliver myself to Dance Hall for surgery.

I went along peacefully.  And I stitched the Company's wounded back together, and did my job.

What else could I do?