SBMS167(?)
The traitors' fifth attack against the Company came not against another supply train, or officer, or loyal warlock, but humble little Cup Cake, still afloat within her limbo beside the brotherhood, half-in, half-out, not anything in whole. Was she a Company pony, or simply our eldest prisoner? I'm not sure she herself could say at this point. No, I retract that – she would still claim to be a paroled prisoner, no matter how much work she does for us, no matter how loudly the Spirit talks to her. Although these days, she might be the only pony left in the Company the Spirit was still talking to.
She was approached by one of the surviving carters from the previous week's massacre of the High Earth supply caravan. This Company pony, whose name I am barred by order of the Captain from recording in the Annals from now until the Breaking of the Chain, had escaped serious harm in that vicious and infuriatingly effective ambush, an ambush which had taken far too many of our brethren. No suspicion had fallen on this lucky pony, because she had been only one of a number who had escaped the initial trap, had run for cover, had survived until the patrols had responded and driven off the traitors and their ghoul shock-troops.
It had not occurred to us at the time that the ambush could have been an inside job. It only became apparent in retrospect, posthumously after the second attempt.
Cup Cake was vague about what exactly the pony had used to lure her out of protection. Her reticence makes me suspect she was evangelizing again, or possibly had been lured with the prospect of the opportunity to do so. We tolerate her Harmonism; I can hardly fault her for jumping at the chance to preach to an open ear, but I suppose she fears we might see it as touching on her parole.
The little baker was very lucky that her stallion was far more suspicious of the circumstances than she; he followed her, armed and barded, having passed word to a pegasi patrol that they should overfly the area just to be sure. I have no idea what exactly provoked this uncharacteristically cynical outburst from the usually easy-going Carrot Cake, but he had sensed something, something wrong about the hidden traitor. He had known that something was in the offing.
The carter led Cup Cake towards a group sitting in the brush behind a copse of trees, out of sight of the main camp. Cup Cake may have expected that this was to be an audience for one of her little parable-sermons, but whatever she was expecting, her screams of terror surely demonstrated that she hadn't expected what she got. Her shadowing support reached her just in time. The charging Corporal Cake met the on-rushing ghouls with a great clash, as his pegasi backup stooped out of their passage overhead to cut off the rest as they tried to flank the standard-bearer. Destroying the initial rank of the ambushing undead was the work of seconds – our ponies had by this point become absolute terrors in the swift and unsentimental demolition of unsupported ghouls in the open field.
Carrot Cake turned to find the baker-spy wrestling with her betrayer, a long knife fallen into the dirt and brush beneath the two struggling earth-pony mares. He quickly settled the fight on his lady's terms, and that was when the second set of jaws on the trap slammed shut on them. Another, larger body of ghouls emerged out of the nearby woods, led by three traitor unicorns and a half-dozen likewise traitorous earth-ponies.
Obscured Blade's gospel had lured more of the Company to his standard than I like to admit.
The small band of loyalists would likely have been overrun in a matter of minutes, if the commotion had not brought out the troops en masse. As it was, both of the Cakes took serious wounds, as well as the flight of pegasi who came to their aid. The only fatality on our side was Mud Slide, an earth pony stallion from Hydromel who was so badly burnt and mangled in the fight that I couldn't save him on the table.
The carter-pony and four of the traitors commanding the ambush paid for their poor planning with their lives. The rest fled with pegasi and griffins swarming them every hoof-step of the way, until Obscured Blade himself arrived in a swirl of blackness and screaming phantasms to secure their retreat.
Escaped again, damnit.
The traitors kept plinking away at us – rarely achieving any effect, and never landing a truly mortal blow, but poking and prodding. They waged their little war like a poor chess-player trying to win via attrition, by stealing pawns until the other player's line was bare. We were blessed in the feebleness of our opposition – their inability to craft a true strategy. But it made it impossible to pin them to the board and put an end to the game.
On the other hoof, they kept trying for Cherie. The third assassination attempt came two days after the attempt against Cup Cake. As with the previous two attempts, the little thestral slipped away from the strike without a hair turned in her coat. We caught this one alive – a III Verdebaie turncoat, one who hadn't escaped with the rest of her battered comrades, one who had apparently been seduced by her captors, turned to their cause. We gave her the third degree, but got precious little of value from that blot on my soul.
After I was done vomiting, I told the guards to dispose of the body somewhere discreet. The regimentals didn't need to know about this; I didn't want to know about this. Nothing we were doing was working, and all it was accomplishing was dragging us down into the muck and filth with Obscured Blade. He kept killing and zombifying civilians, we kept chasing him, and putting down his meat-puppets. Nothing accomplished but dead civilians, and the occasional executed traitor.
Or call it was it was, tortured to death.
The Captain and I had promised General Knochehart that we'd run down that mad unicorn, and make restitution for his murder of the Beau. It was our problem, our problem to fix. I had, damn my soul, promised Knochehart that we'd find them and kill them like rats in a drain.
"Freude an deinem Rattenkrieg, Chirurg. I want nothing to do with it," she'd said, grimacing, and then returned to the subjects that truly interested her – the securing of the supply line into the riverlands, and the holding of the northern bank of the Housa against the enemy's fleet.
Well, I was having joy of my rats' war, that was for certain. I searched for some glimpse of the Spirit, hoping to distract myself from the taste of bile in my throat, but there was nothing. She had withdrawn from both sides, I think. We were too busy hating each other, to spare love for her, and it piqued her sense of self-worth.
She had new toys to play with, anyways.
Most of the army of the north had shifted base westwards, exterminating the bison menace, and pushing battalions down the roads into the riverlands. But not too far – the more regiments based on that road-net, the less the volume of supplies the General and her officers could push westwards into the starving hooves of the Bride's forces locked in empty-stomached stalemate around the Second Mouth. Entire regiments had been partially dis-armed and pressed into carting service, to carry the supplies overland. We started pulling our detached sections out of the regiments they'd been assigned to support. We had other uses for our ponies, and the General's war was growing less kinetic. We told her she didn't need us anymore.
I'm not sure she agreed, but her own sense of self-worth led her to agree that no, she didn't need us to fight her regiments. She had waged war with couriers and messengers before she'd had the benefit of our lines of communication, she could do it again.
The general left us behind to pursue our war with the rats. The Company was overstretched, trying to protect the countryside against the depredations of our traitors, and the citizenry were becoming disenchanted with our services. Our name was being dragged through the mud. The attempt on Cup Cake's life had come as we were moving the Company's rear echelons into the protective embrace of Braystown's Shambles, and the siegeworks in front of that grim old fortress's gates. Those grand, tumbledown walls had done nothing to protect the paranoid Beau against our enemy, but we were not a mass of mindless, soulless ghouls. We could do more with those walls than the Beau had, and he had done great things before Obscured Blade appeared and walked through them like they were a night's heavy fog.
We had danced with the politicians' representatives in High Earth and New Coltington for a few weeks via Dancing Shadows and Cup Cake, and then the Captain got bored with the music, and sent sections to deal with the distraction. They foalnapped the representatives, and tossed them in cells to be dealt with later. They were languishing in one of the inner wards of the Shambles until somepony had a better idea of what to do with them.
Meanwhile, we had to deal with the demi-brigade of Order ponies smuggled out of Coriolanus, rejected for being too whatever to pretend to be slaves. I loathed the entire project, the idea of that mad scheme. I don't care how much of a performance, an act, the entire gambit was – slavery was slavery, and I despised the way we'd prostituted ourselves by lending our name to the institution. But Cherie was my filly, my responsibility, and I had to support her in her schemes.
However vile their expression was in the real world.
But in the meantime we had about fifteen hundred former White Rose whose existence we had to launder, to explain to the watching world. The wrecked, shocked remnants of the once-proud III Verdebaie had been shipped north to recuperate in their home province by a general with more pity in her than I thought possible of somepony in higher command. But nopony local really knew about this, or had noticed the movement. They'd left much of their equipment and armaments behind.
Who looks at the pony, when they're wearing proper livery and barding? We put those Order ponies into III Verdebaie livery, told them to try to act like shocky northern militia, and let them drill for a week or two as a unit. A demi-brigade of former White Rose became a slightly battered regiment of northerners with more ease than you'd expect.
The sight of those ponies drilling gave the Captain, the Lieutenant, and Cherie a solution to the problem of how to deal with the marine detachments on the ships of the fleet to be filled full of Black Rose oar-slaves. Quite a bit of luck. Almost foreordained. After thinking about it, I started getting nervous that the fickle bitch, Destiny, was stalking us again. But maybe she had her eyes on the new ponies, Cherie's army of pretend-slaves. I wished them luck of their fate. The Company knew better than to court that horrible curse known as 'destiny'.
And still, the stalk for the traitors went on. It's fine and well to bluster about rats in a drain, but New Equestria and the baronies weren't a nice, enclosed wash-basin, let alone a drain. It was more like the tumbledown warren of stone, rubble, and old bloodstains that encased the inner sanctums of the Shambles. A rats' paradise, with the rats maddened and at each other's throats.
It was a rat's war, and the Spirit wasn't helping either side. Learn to fight like a rat, soldier, or die!
As noted in an earlier section, this represents the first manuscript from the Annalist, Sawbones, after an apparent gap in the documents provided by the unnamed source. It is possible this gap is more apparent than real, but internal evidence suggests otherwise. We're just missing a section, possibly several sections. - Faded Palimpsest, 2nd Grade Archivist, Restricted Archives