FFMS050
The caribou refused to respond to the hailing of their gates by those Order ponies who had taken over the outer security of their parameter. Their posted guards were visible, and overflights – flown by Filly-phantasms for safety's sake – revealed the same activity, the same pon- er, the same deer as were to be found a week before, the week before that. There were no visible corpses or undead anywhere inside the enclave's walls, and the remains of only two burnt-out pyres could be found. Although they clearly hadn't been able to keep the disease outside of their walls, it was apparent that they had it under control within them.
I walked back from my excusion into the city, my curiosity about these survivor-deer unsatiated. The precincts we had under control were still unpopulated, and would continue to be so until the rest of the infected city was well-combed-over and properly purged. Block after fire-scorched block lay ruined. Half of the city's endless rows of half-timbered homes and shopfronts had been wrecked or destroyed, burnt or collapsed in the fighting and the chaos that came after. Nopony but the occasional patrol were visible in the empty, wind-blown streets. The storms had petered out, leaving little drifts of snow and re-frozen sleet to rot in the corners and draft-traps. The remnants of pyres were far more numerous here, outside of the caribou quarter, marking the stages of our battalions as their rear elements had advanced to dispose of the equine remnants. Each pyre was surrounded by three or four pulled-down townhouses or sheds, their lumber seized for the disposal of the destroyed undead.
Still, we had been responsible for no more than 5% of the ruins. 8% at most.
The population was gone, evacuated by sequential waves of helpful military forces, eager to clear the battlefield of raw materials before the necromancers of the enemy used the vulnerable to refill their depleted herds. The Bride's army had evacuated the majority of the city in the early days of the fighting, and those ponies and donkeys had been scattered from Rantoul to Rime and New Coltington. They were the refugees, unwanted ponies. Those refugees that had not had family or friends, or could not find them in the social unrest of these war-years, fell into the hooves of Rima's ruthless labour-bosses, or ended up sharing crops, or working farm-labour for the narrow and hard farmer-ponies of the south.
Or, they had fallen into the ranks of depleted Imperial regiments, recruited as substitutes for southern militia regiments called to the colours. They were the fodder for all the traps that unprotected, unwanted ponies fall into when there is an excess of hungry mouths and empty bellies and strong backs. I thought of these refugees, and their fellow-suffering exiles from long-lost Caribou City, whose bitterness had boiled, curdled, and rose up. Those deer whose mutinies among the regiments of my home province dragged her into rebellion, a rebellion shorn of all ideological content except bitterness and desperation.
Those precincts of the Second Mouth which had quickly fallen to the White Rose had likewise been exiled westwards into the cities and farmlands of Traverses and the far West, and the fate of those ponies are beyond my ken at this writing. They say that donkeys aren't murdered out of hand in the West these days, and I can only put my hopes in these assurances, for I have no trust left for them.
The last wave of civilian evacuations was pitifully small, outnumbered by the military disease casualties we likewise had on hoof, and much of that 'evacuation' had been pulled into the medical crisis to keep the sick from feeding the ranks of the undead. And anyways, we had nowhere to put these survivors, and they'd avoided previous sweeps by both sides. These ponies were both stubborn, and the hardest of the hard. They were survivors. So they simply filled up our camps, and did what needed to be done.
I had recruitment plans for these ponies, but I was in no special hurry.
But in the meantime, I was hungry, and my wandering hooves led me to a walled compound our own rear elements had converted to a vast dining-hall, an entire fortification converted to the purposes of feeding our ravenous, wind-and-ghoul-battered line-companies. This compound had originally been a bastion on the east side of the city wall, broken in with siege-weapons, her walls breached, and burnt as a final outrage upon her corpse. The White Rose had used the rubble to re-build a lower compound out of the ruin, expanded out into a sort of low motte and bailey arrangement. The space within the motte had been full of barracks and one single solitary dining hall. The cooks and carters had converted all of them to dining-halls, and when they slept, they forted up in the bailey which had been, for a while, the headquarters of a division of the White Rose.
Every single structure within this fortification had to have been cleaned out. It had been full of an enormous pack of ghouls, completely lost to the chaos. Luckily, they had been so packed into this space that they had been easily destroyed, and the tight quarters had kept them from flanking our assault companies. The results, however, had to be dragged into the city before they found enough timber to build the pyres.
All that was in the past, though. That night, Fort Messhall was roaring with hundreds of hungry Order ponies eating their fill, and letting loose the fears and tensions of another long shift hunting the dead. Most of the dining halls were well-lit with tallow candles and oil lamps, but I noticed one such hall which was pitch-black along her siblings. And yet, that doorway echoed with the same brash roar of a company at supper, boisterous and well-lubricated. I went in, and activated my thestral eye.
Within I found a mixed company of ponies glowing-eyed, chowing down with brio and enthusiasm. Dozens, even hundreds of armsponies, many bandaged and battered, almost all original Order members. And every mare, jack and stallion with the Mistress's blessing, slit-eyed, draconic and sharp-toothed. The Company had bit deep into this warlike shard of the Black Rose, and even at the table, here they were, seeing as things of the night saw. And I realized, looking around, that I was seeing a night-shift company at breakfast.
I grinned at them all, letting my eyes glow back at them. "What are you all doing here, lingering over your eggs and sausage? Finish your meal, ponies, and go do good work!"
They roared their cheerful fury at the interloper. I was to go teach my granmere to suck her own eggs, these were theirs and no-pony else's.
I laughed and flicked my tail at the company as I trotted off to find something for those ending their days, and not beginning them.
After I ordered my blood sausage at one of the well-lit canteens, I found the pony who came out with my platters to be a familiar one. Too many of the cooks and servers in Fort Messhall were recruited civilians from among the refugees. This, however, was our very own Cup Cake, playing at food service again.
"Miss Cake! Have you had better luck here among the true Westerners, finding your precious powdered sugar? If anywhere on this continent can get you the stuff, I'd think it would be the ones squatting over the crossroads to the canefield provinces."
"Feufollet! I thought it might be you, asking for this disgusting slop. Get a better diet, before you catch something awful and non-equine. And what do you care about proper sugar, all you ever eat is this griffin-bait."
"Maybe I've just never had one of your truly sugary concoctions? You've always complained about using honey."
"Ah! Ah! You insult my baking, to insinuate I can't get the same results out of bug snot that I can from proper cane-sugar! And your answer is, they get me 'cane sugar', and it's mostly actual cane. Nopony around here knows how to properly refine the stuff!"
"More like the product of the mills are expensive, and not worth shipping up here to the front lines, so they send you the scrapings and the stuff smuggled straight in, I think. Is that some sort of sugared drink you have there?"
We shared her sweetened tea, which was far colder than I preferred in this sort of weather, but I wasn't one to complain about what I was given. Eventually I figured out that she had something she wanted to talk about, but it took some tugging to get it out of her.
"So, what is it you had on your mind?"
"Couldn't I have just wanted to spend some time with my favorite devil-worshipping jenny?"
"Pretty sure that's Cherie, Miss Cake. So, what's up?"
"Oh, I was just homesick, and wanted a little reminder of home."
"How am I a reminder of your home? We're closer here to Equestria than we ever were back up in the North. Bells of Tartarus, this isn't even my native language. All that aside, you can't even spend ten minutes without insulting my faith!"
"Oh, don't pull that one, you know as well as I do that this Nightmare Moon business isn't a 'faith', it's a scam. I'd think you would know that better than most."
"Not all put-ons are scams, Miss. And the Mistress isn't listening in at the moment, but she could be here in an instant if you keep pulling on her tail like that."
"What do I care what the night-terror does with her time? Until that night she loses control of herself and gobbles me up in front of all of her cultists, I will give her exactly as much respect as she deserves, which is none." She was glaring and incensed, but I could see behind her a Filly, her ears folded down and looking teary-eyed. I thought about pointing the plump mare's haunt, and saying something about how much she was hurting her, but let it slide.
It wouldn't help matters. And Cup Cake was still talking.
"You know, I've known you since you were a foal, Feufollet. Twist and pull all you like, you're one of my kids now. And I need one of my kids now. I got some bad news the other night."
"Wait, what? Did something happen back east? Are the elders and the rest of the Company OK?"
"Oh, no, not the rest of the devil-worshippers, they can take care of themselves. No, you know how I keep up my reports to my superiors?"
I nodded my understanding, not wanting to air her laundry in front of all of these Order ponies. They were, after all, fanatics, and might not react well to discovering that our Cup Cake was an off-world spy, even if she was sort of our captive spy & designated mail-box.
"Well, they forward letters now and again from my home-town ponies. Not my family – they know better than to endanger me with a lot of correspondence, but the rest of the town? They think I'm just off on some sort of very, very long wander-year, exploring the universe of baking mysteries that lurk out here on the Chain. And in a way, I am. I certainly have learned a half-a-hundred ways to substitute for proper ingredients in this dunghole of a half-world."
I wiped a heel of toasted bread through the remaining grease of my demolished dinner, and listened to her heartache.
"So I get letters. About my friends, my acquaintances, the rest of the town. And about Buttercup and her foals. My best friend growing up, solid farmer stock. We learned a lot together. I ever tell you she was the one who showed me my way? Brought me this basket of ingredients – pears, of course, eggs, wheat flour, and all of those precious ingredients that I can never find here in this benighted wasteland. Came up with a wonder of an upside-down cake, and suddenly I knew what I was going to do with my life!"
"How did a baker-pony like you end up in the foreign service, anyways, Miss? I never did figure out that one."
"Oh, that's a long and stupid story, and the short version is that there are families in my sleepy little town with long connections to the monarchy. The sorts of familial obligations which lead us into… well, the kind of trans-portal adventures that we're never supposed to talk about with the rest of the world. Equestria balances on a sort of precipice, you know, and we're supposed to maintain that balance by never, ever telling the foals and the folks back home about what has to be done to keep us plumb. So those of us who catch the black ball, we give five years of our youth to holding back, well, things like you lot. To keeping Tartarus in Tartarus, the out-worlds from coming inwards, and to keep Equestria Equestria.
"My five years are almost up. But it wasn't soon enough for Buttercup. Her husband, he died in a farming accident a while back, left her with two growing foals and another on the way. And I wasn't there. Wasn't there. I knew she needed somepony, and she'd cut off her own family when she married into the Apples."
"Apples! Our Bad Apple's Apples?"
"Oh, child, there are Apples everywhere. They grow up wherever somepony drops an apple-seed. No, these were solid, inoffensive, home-town Apples. Nopony to go off and have adventures. Salt of the earth, you know. And not to be counted among those of us who had obligations to the Peytral, bless 'em all. Not that it spared Bright Mac from dying so young, and from something so foolish.
"And it broke Buttercup's heart, must have. Her last two letters were… not her. I could tell she was hurting. But I honestly thought she'd stay around for her foals. But I guess none of us can count on being there when you're tempting fate, and foaling when heartbroken is a heck of a temptation to fate.
"She didn't survive the birth. Had to hear about it from Burnt Oak of all ponies. I don't think the rest of the Apples knew we were in correspondence. But I should have been there. Should have been there to help my friend. And I wasn't. And it's too late now. I've still got six months on my tour.
"But I'm far from home, and I'm ready to go. Because I knew it was always possible that I wouldn't be able to go home, but I never thought -
"I never thought that home might not be there when I came back."