SBMS136
The Spirit did not reappear that morning at the scene of the crime, which made the explanations to Throat-Kicker awkward and halting at best. In the end, Throat Kicker got her apprentice to go back to bed, and I promised a… mentee conference the next time I could get Obscured Blade, Gibblets, 'Kicker and I together. In our copious spare time, as the new Company schedules meant that we would all be very, very busy packing up our shit, giving away that which we couldn't carry with us, and preparing for the road.
For many of the veterans and simple arms-ponies, the preparations for the campaign season to come largely consisted of increased training, re-shoeing, sharpening their weapons, and properly blacking their war-gear. Company 'blacking' wasn't actually black, if I've never mentioned it before, but rather a dulling mixture that kept the shiny bits from catching the glare, softened and strengthened the leather bits, and generally gave the ponies of the Company a sort of darker-dun colouring to them. Less intimidating in the full glare of daylight, but once you laid a glamour over top of it in the darkness, the dun turned a disturbing nacreous green-black, with the occasional inlaid blue grace notes. It was notable that these colours could not be seen in the light of day, being something that only magic and the night called forth.
The spy in his purdah was left to his isolation, while we inched tentatively around the problem. The Spirit was the Spirit, and Cherie was Cherie, and nopony was eager to further confuse the two. Bad enough that our tutelary Spirit suffered from multiple-personality issues; no need to pitchfork a new persona on the swaying pile of crazy. And there was more than enough to distract from even vital, existential questions like 'is Cherie likely to be possessed by the Spirit? Or vice-versa?'
Things were sparking strange in that last season of the Company's sojourn in the province of Pepin, independent of spies and Spiritual issues. As the halting and intermittent thaws and re-freezes of late winter exposed the soil and new shoots poked their heads, intrepid and doomed, through the black patches in between slush and old crusted snow, I received strange reports one morning from the guard-corporals along the ramparts and the bastions. I strode out to one of the reported areas of problematic growth, and found an armspony laying by the Baneway, her mane grown out madly long and trembling, like tendrils of sea-weed or some under-water beastie like a water-hydra. The shivering earth-pony was comforted by her partner, and other alarmed guards stood in small clusters at a certain distance from the afflicted pony.
Forewarned, I reached back to Rye Daughter, who had accompanied me, and grabbed a surgical mask to cover my nostrils and mouth, and gestured for her to cover up as well. We climbed up onto the abandoned fighting platform and looked over the wall into the ditch below.
"Jiwe busara, boss? And a lot of it! The mother-lode! We can make up a couple years' supply with this!" A straggling sea of blue-flowered plants stretched out along the bottom of the ditch between the antler-spikes, many of which were starting to slump over or tumble out of their settings in the muck and puddling slush. But the plants weren't growing the red berries of philosopher's stone.
"I thought I taught you better," I said through my surgical mask. "What direction is the wind right now? That there is sumu utami, and one unholy Tartarus-lot of it. Go order those lookie-loos back there to fall back upwind of here."
"What are you gonna do?"
"Me? I'm gonna go harvest me some poison joke. That veteran back there needs treatment. And discordweed extract has its own alchemical uses. Afterwards… maybe we ought to tear it up by the roots? Can't have sumu utami pollen blowing all over Dance Hall and Mondovi." I threw down the rope-ladder from the platform into the ditch, and started climbing down.
We ended up recruiting intrepid farm-ponies from the shantytown to deal with the poison joke outbreak, which had emerged along most of the drainage ditches around Dance Hall, and throughout the valley of the Withes. Some bright spark had the idea of out-competing the noxious plant with water-lilies or some such thing, but that was well outside of my bailiwick. Rye Daughter and I were busy that entire week making up discordweed-curative for the bathhouse, which did a land-office business until the vile weed ceased spewing its pollen everywhere the wind wist. In the mean-time, the great fortress and its clutching skirt of civilians and locals found themselves dealing with a be-wildering array of unsettling bodily distortions and unpredictable reactions to the tartarus-pollen.
Best I can say about the situation is nopony died, although a couple expressed the desire to do so.
Sumu utami was hardly the only spark of wild magic burning in the central districts in that last season. Reports had started trickling in from some of the back hollers in the uplands and the middle black-soil districts, which had been heavily resettled by returning refugees and displaced ponies. Of strange little critters rustling through the brush, and occasionally leaving tracks through the snow laying heavy on the fields, along side of the few squirrels to have trickled back along with their equine fellow-returnees.
A number of samples were caught by our patrols, which really weren't necessary in this last, ghoul-less season, but leadership wanted to humour the locals. What they brought back, rattling around in the live-traps and cages, were small animate bundles of sticks and saplings, smaller than cats, fierce little beasties composed entirely, as far as Gibblets and Obscured Blade could determine, of plant matter.
Gibblets recognized the family and order, if not the exact genus. "Timberwolves, by Rakuen! Well, obviously not wolves, the little nippers," he chortled as he patted the vicious little thing as it tried its best to eviscerate his knee-cap. "Maybe more in the line of stick-voles, or brush-weasels. But look at it!" He grabbed it by the green-sticks of its scruff, and shook it, hissing, in my face. "This is alicorns-damned impossible! Everything I've read about Tambelon and seen since I've got here says Leafy here is an impossibility! Shouldn't be enough ambient life-magic to keep this little guy spitting without a real thaumic seal. He's bumbling along as if he's undead, or a natural beast!"
"Are you sure this isn't some wild and weird species of natural Tambelon you just haven't laid eyes on until now?"
"Positive! You and your dead nose, you can't smell it, but this whole valley stinks of wild life-magic now. Well that and poison joke. I wouldn't be surprised if we have a parasprite outbreak by second harvest the way things are bubbling along!"
The goblin cuddled his vicious little plant-monster, and cooed at it as it snapped and tried to eat his bulbous, greasy nose. "Who's a lovely freak of nature? You are! Yes you are! Sawbones, I haven't had a familiar in a cockatrice's age! Think if I feed Leafy here enough wild rose, he'll grow thorns?"
I stared at the infatuated immortal, and then looked around the witches' lab, which was half-overrun by the little green beasties. Bad Apple and Feufollet ran around trying to corral a small herd of the damn things scurrying about, loose in the chamber. A magically animate twist of conifer-branches was gnawing on the door-frame of the labs' exit as I retreated from the madponies' asylum, and I resolved that the Company couldn't possibly leave Dance Hall fast enough.
We had been in one place too long, and maybe the consequences were catching up with us. Like guests and dead fish, we were beginning to stink up the place.