SBMS120
While I had been disabled by my inexplicable failure to be impervious and impossibly resilient, the rest of the Company reacted to the incursion the best that they could. The Lieutenant had taken charge of the search for the lich's trail, sending sections of pegasi out along the legate's known axis of retreat. It could have, of course, doubled back, split off, and otherwise disappeared into the landscape by the time we got the patrols into the air, but it was better than nothing, and allowed some elimination of possibilities. It had always been possible that she had just gone to ground and might have been lurking just outside of our gates for all we knew.
The warlocks had once told me that liches leave a trail, a magical malformation in the substance of the world underlying the world, which could be disguised but not totally obliterated. Shorthorn had been working on detection devices to alert the bearer of such trails; they found a number of prototypes in various stages of incompletion in his little laboratory when they went to pack up his stuff. The Crow took over the project, but the only thing that was immediately deployable wasn't even able to pick up a signal from anything inside of Dance Hall, let alone the open air. The tiles on the roof where the Marklaird had hidden her kite, on the other hand, apparently gave a good response. That gave them something to work towards, some way to calibrate. Tests with our ghoul-detection charms on the tiles showed a very slight reaction, and actually gave a better read on the lich's known trail inside the fortress than the late Shorthorn's purpose-built detector.
The next wave of patrols sent out to search for the lich carried ghoul-detectors. We had an overstock of those now that the ghouls had largely been eradicated from the province.
The barrowgasts' death-platform where Forlorn Hope and her section fought and died set off all the ghoul and lich-detectors, they lit up like Hearths' Warming Eve.
Except, apparently, the cavern in the southeastern gorge, the one that the ghouls seemed to adore. Five bands worth of undead had been winkled out of that little grotto over the course of nine months, to the point where we'd put a trip-switch charm in there to let headquarters know when a new group of tenants had moved into the caves. It did not escape Broken Sigil's notice that the caverns were now showing ghoul-sign, again. Despite there not having been any sightings of undead in that district or neighbouring districts.
We couldn't be sure if moving to reinforce any of our exposed external vulnerabilities wouldn't just reveal to the enemy which targets we valued, or worse, led her to a target she hadn't known existed. We could draw destruction down on the heads of the hidden colony just by moving to defend it.
In the end, it was the pegasi who found the trail, where the officers and the warlocks lost themselves in their maybes and their guesses and semi-functional spells. The tainted winds carried the stink of the Marklaird's kite-like flyer, and once the flyers got through the incomprehension of the witches and Broken Sigil, our view of the region and the lich's tracks across the skies of Pepin inverted, turned inside-out.
The pegasi could taste the filth of the lich upon the air itself. Something in their magic, their essential selves, rebelled against the unnaturalness of that bit of reanimated earth that intruded upon the kingdoms of the air.
Drifting trails that flowed with the prevailing winds, and drifted inexorably eastwards and to the south, ropey drooping traces of psychic filth that laid across the clouds and landscapes of districts far down-wind of her actual paths-taken. They followed the majority of the tracks back to the cavern-mouth, which they were careful not to approach directly or closely. It took longer to find the connections between the insertion-point of the barrowgasts on the slopes of the wooded wastes to the north of Dance Hall, and back and forth to the roof of the fortress itself.
And, alarmingly, freshly, to a series of overlooks and ridge-lines along the long, winding road between the Deep Mines and the Front, that road that led eventually to Duc Murs' castle-town home. Overflight along those ridgelines found four hot spots, bright ones, like dread things lying in wait.
And then one of the hot spots opened up on an overflight that got too close, They weren't just sitting doggo, there were active barrowgasts over the road north, and apparently they weren't especially good at keeping ambush.
The operational bifurcation caused a lot of argument. Gerlach, the pegasi, and the Lieutenant were suspicious of the way the caverns had lit up so suddenly, long after the tracks had started forming. The Lieutenant was convinced that the caverns were a trap, and the Marklaird was with her surviving barrowgasts in the wild slopes to the north, waiting to ambush the newlyweds when they returned to Pepin City in the next stretch of clear weather.
Obscured Blade, Broken Sigil and the witches thought it more likely that she had gone to ground in the ghoul-nest caverns, almost by accident, perhaps, but there was something about those caves that attracted the undead, some residue witchery that wasn't particularly clear to the living. The ambush on the north road was real, but it was an in-progress plot in abeyance, rather than the post-assault tactics of a rebuffed lich.
I thought it unlikely that if the lich had more barrowgasts, she wouldn't have used them to spread the attack more widely that night. They nearly broke the walls, and would have if they'd hit us in multiple places. We only had one standard-bearer, and one Spirit. Our performance against the barrowgasts had been notably unhappy in the absence of those two factors.
The Captain made the decision, and opted to seal off the caverns in strength. The possible ambush-positions had too many lines of retreat, all we could do is drive them away if the lich was up there with her constructs. The cavern-mouth could be surrounded, and its contents reduced by regular approaches.
Somewhere in all of this, the decision, to take the war to the lich rather than to appeal to the Bride, was made without being made. Action has its own logic, half-measures, taken actively while the deliberators dither, make the choices themselves; passive and implicit measures fail to carry the strategic day without the will of an actor who can stand up, and say, clearly, simply do nothing. Our precautions overcame caution.
The aerial cohort set out in strength, and delivered the supports to the vicinity of the caverns. They formed up along the ridgelines and slopes of that stretch of the Pepin Front and above the southeastern gorge that held that ghouls-nest cavern. Otonashi and Obscured Blade and Gibblets led small unicorns'-choruses that would cover the approaches of multi-section vexillations on three sides of the cavern-mouth. The pegasi and the standard-bearer in a modified witch-gig waited on the ridge facing the slope at whose base the caves lurked. The pikestaff barely extended past the shoulder of the charioteer, even in a gig with the traces radically shortened. The arrangement reduced that long weapon to a sort of glorified lance for the pair, Corporal Cake and his gig-driver, the deep-chested and strong-winged Long Haul.
Bad Apple accompanied her knight and his vexillation. Her own witch-gig had been wrecked in the assault on Fallaises du Conseil, and Gibblets had wanted to leave her back at Dance Hall, but everypony else agreed that the firepower she offered couldn't be left at home. Her growth spurt was still in her future, but in that season she was the biggest gun in the Company arsenal, the biggest gun they could get up there in the forested hillsides, anyrate. They hoped to place her over the cavern-mouth, and pour flaming tartarus into that hole until something either fought its way out or expired burning.
Nopony noticed when Cherie slipped through the deployment, appearing like a white shadow inside every shadow that the chariots cast upon the ridge-tops and slopes below.
Otonashi's ponies weren't quite in position when we learned that the enemy had noticed our approaches. Flying things burst out of the cave-mouth, grey-winged chaos boiling out and upwards like a screeching tide of panic and terror. The witches drew together their choruses in reflex, and the magical shield-walls lit up the darkened slopes like daylight.
The gap in their defenses was a river of darkness in the darksight-destroying glare. And the Marklaird upon her flyer's kite flit through that gap like a dead leaf on a driving winter wind.
The vile little beasts poured out of the cavern - hundreds, maybe thousands of necromantically animated bats, squirrels, and other forest-critters, roadkill collected by that mad undead necromancer and stored in the depths of the caves. They swarmed over ponies outside of the shield-walls, and bit and scratched and screamed horribly. There's nothing quite so terrible as the cries of dead small mammals, you don't expect such noises to come out of tiny furry bodies like that. The slopes and valley floor before the cavern was absolute pandemonium.
The pegasi fell upon the fleeing Marklaird like a suffocating blanket, as much as she tried to jink and sweep out from under the attacking reserve, her airspeed just wasn't such that she could outfly born flyers. She sprayed her sticking black fires like a skunk spraying in retreat; several ponies were caught in the fires. We had come prepared for that, and their wingponies wrapped them in the pre-positioned dampened sheets that had been the logistics and medical corps' contribution to preparations. But that took ponies out of the fight and the flight, and the lich's spiraling kite spun about and about, each approach against her surrounding tormenters left bigger and bigger gaps in the caracole.
Long Haul and Corporal Cake tried again and again to line up their charges against the lich, but the witch's gig, so graceful as a bomber and a weapon against the ground-bound, was awkward and ungainly against something that fluttered about like the lich's flying-kite. Cake was reduced to swinging about the banner-lance like a pioneer hewing at ghouls with a wood-axe. He was lucky he didn't lose the precious artifact right there and then. Or, for that matter, that he didn't tumble out of the tiny chariot himself. I'm told by witnesses that he positively danced upon the rail-sides of the gig, hanging more than halfway out over the six-thousand-hoof drop while Long Haul cut the chariot about in punishing, deep spiraling curves.
The slopes below burned like memories of the ghoul-campaign the year below. Several ponies caught outside of the shieldwalls had been overrun and pulled down by the swarm of small terrors. The veteran zebra stallion Black Stripe and the earth pony mare Open Hearth - one of the recruits from Lait Blanc - died in the chaos. Bad Apple burned everything within range of her raging hooves. But the barrowgasts were climbing out of the cavern mouth, and began to direct their horrible ranged attacks upon first one, and then another of the warlocks' shield-walls.
The aerial envelopment of the lich and her kite had been falling apart as it was, and when the pegasi began to notice the collapsing situation on the valley floor below, everything fell to shit. Long Haul and Corporal Cake made one last futile pass at the lich, but everypony was getting ready to give her up. The ponies below were about to be overrun.
Then Cherie dropped out of nowhere and landed upon the spinning back of the flying-kite, screeching a reedy little battle-cry. The startled lich spun her device into a dizzying series of barrel-rolls, trying to dislodge whatever thing had attached itself to the top of her kite, in her blind spot. The little thestral grasped the wooden struts of the kite's construction with her hooves, and bit again and again at the cloth and wrappings that held it together.
It took surprisingly little for that kite, flying beyond its material strength as it was, to just simply - fly apart in a spray of unravelling wrappings and tumbling struts. The little thestral and the slightly larger lich flew apart in divergent arcs, the lich cursing and tumbling as she fell without any hope of control. Three ponies followed her descent at a cautious distance, wary of her fiery black revenge.
Corporal Cake and his charioteer broke off from the aerial dogfight, and fell themselves downwards, flying to the rescue of the battered armsponies below. Long Haul and the gig nearly crashed when a gast's air-burst nearly struck the two of them, but the banner-lance in Cake's hooves took the brunt of the strike, and the pegasus pulled up the chariot before it impacted into a tree at speed.
Carrot Cake leapt from the speeding gig and hit the valley floor at a gallop, crushing undead squirming things under his iron hooves as he ran. The first barrowgast burst like a full balloon when his lance-head struck it square, the shock-wave deanimating every roadkill construct in two-hundred yards radius.
He spun about from this first charge, and lined up on the next target. And the next. He destroyed the three of the barrowgasts which had gotten out of the cavern-mouth while the aerials had been chasing the lich overhead. Freed from the pressure of the barrowgasts' attack, Gibblets and his apprentice approached the cavern entrance, and Bad Apple started pouring fire down into that foul hole. Steam and smoke billowed out in great terrible clouds as the rest of the witches and their supports swept the valley floor and slopes of the remaining monstrosities. What had been an overwhelming wave, once broken, was reduced to a simple, nasty chore.
Which, now that I think about it, describes roughly ninety percent of warfare as the Company knows it.
The Lieutenant directed the pursuit of the fallen Marklaird, her impact upon the ridge-top a mile or two northeast of the cavern-fight having made a helpful mess that led straight to her stumbling trail. She had left most of her leather wrappings behind, they having burst like she ought to have done, if she was anything mortal or seelie, having fallen some five thousand hooves without any sort of support. But nothing so mundane as a fall could kill a lich, and they found her right where they expected her, burning the brush and slope about her in a tattered fury, screaming at her tormenter.
Cherie danced through the shadows cast by the lich's fires, laughing at the terrible dead thing. The Marklaird wasn't laughing now.
The pegasi heavies started cutting rough bollards, while their lighter peers flew forward to relieve the small harrier, to take over the task of tormenting and piquing the lich until she was brought to bay.
The Lieutenant set up a schedule, and started rotating her ponies through the pursuit. A lich couldn't be exhausted, but she could be kept from organizing a defense, she could be drained of power and resources, and she could be kept busy until the standard-bearer and the witches were done with their extermination of the lich's lesser creations.
And the lich provided a marvelous opportunity for the aerial cohort's heavies to practice their targeting upon a moving pony-sized object. The lich was struck again and again by live-wood logs flung at terminal velocity from above, far away from any counter-fire by the frazzled animated corpse.
Just before noon, an exhausted Long Haul delivered an almost-as-tired Corporal Cake and his battle-pike to a clearing just ahead of the fleeing Marklaird. They waited, patiently, until she burst out of the brush, chased by a pegasus and a griffin, who despite all appearances, were carefully keeping their distance.
The lich was almost upon the lanky orange earth pony before she noticed that her gallop was over. She neatly spitted herself upon the pike.
Carrot Cake says that her last words were, simply,
"This wasn't supposed to happen!"
We still don't know what she thought would happen. What were her plans? Who had died to make all of these monsters she had brought into Pepin? Why had she kept so many resources in reserve? There had been more firepower hidden in that cavern than she had sent against Dance Hall in the first place.
A week later, the Company cleared her barrowgast ambuscade from the north road. They turned out to be a bit more challenging than vanilla ghouls, but once you had their measure, and weapons in place, they were just another problem to solve.
We had worse things on our minds by that point, anyways.