//------------------------------//
// Like A Thief In The Night 
// Story: In the Company of Night 
// by Mitch H 
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SBMS172 (?)

The pegasi charioteers flew through the remnants of a bit of a storm, breaking apart over the eastern districts of Rantoul.  It was a bad time to be out and about in the elements, but there had been a bit of an accident with the IV medical assault group, and my apprentice needed my personal attention.  The flares on the plain below cut through the haze and the freezing mist, and my feathered fellows flew me down into the landing zone with a minimum of flair or fuss.

A pair of militia-guards were waiting out in the freezing cold to guide me to the tent where Rye Daughter laid.  They both bore the Company sigil, carved roughly out of bits of greenwood.  The new recruits to the brotherhood had been given less and less ceremony and demonstrative bling in the months since winter and the ghoul flu burst out of the riverlands into the populated districts. I hadn't had anything to do with these two donkeys' recruitment – I didn't even recognize their muzzles.

But they were our ponies, none the less. I could feel you in them, Mistress.

Rye Daughter was lying on a relatively clean cot, clearly in agony.  Somepony had loosely bound her broken pastern, left foreleg, but hadn't done much more than that.  Admittedly, her orderlies and assistants were busy as they always were, and you could hear the moaning and coughing in the tents all around us in the gathering dusk.

They had been working the local districts, as all the medical assault groups were doing in these bitter cold weeks.  Pulling the sick out of their family homes, quarantining their exposed relatives, pouring into them curatives and as much hydration as we could get them to keep down.  But apparently two very sick ponies had gotten past the triage, and managed to both die and rise undead simultaneously while Rye Daughter's back had been turned.  One of her orderlies hadn't survived the outbreak, and she'd broken her foreleg in four places beating down the ghouls that had risen to bite and claw at the living.

The gashes and the tears were easily taken care of, but a complex fracture like this break was something that she wouldn't be able to shake off in the elements, on the front lines.  I put her through a lot of agony, and got that mess re-set.  Then I had my pegasi escort put my exhausted, heavily drugged apprentice into my chariot, and sent them with her back to home base.

She needed rest and attention; I needed to keep this MAG in the field.  As I'd been working, Rye Daughter's tactical commander had been explaining the situation to me, and I'd been listening as I had been working over poor, battered Rye.  The maneuver companies had been in contact five times in the last week; there were a dozen burnt-down farmhouses and small settlements here southwest of Rantoul.  The Bride's regiments had withdrawn into this country, and followed their last known orders – to fort up in hastily dug castra in a half-crescent array to the south and west of Rantoul City.

The only reason the regimental remnants weren't all rambling herds of slavering undead was because of the medical assault groups like that commanded by my redoubtable apprentice.  There were three regimental castra in this MAG's district, and none of them were combat-effective.  Rye Daughter's group had originally been half the size of the current force I now had thrust into my hooves.  The tactical commander – who had doubled as Rye Daughter's executive officer and lieutenant, after her support-physician had fallen deathly ill and had been evacuated – showed me the rolls, and the group journal.  They'd been recruiting heavily from the evacuated regiments in their district, in the course of multiple actions within the walls of the battered castra.

Rye Daughter's increasingly warlike medical assault group had mounted tactical assaults inside of each of the castra, on at least five occasions.  Each assault and sweep had carried more loyalist soldiers out of their original units, and into the ad-hoc MAG whose responsibility was keeping the ghoul apocalypse from breaking out in these battered precincts.

"How is it that we're not under siege by the sergeants and commanders of these definitively AWOL ponies you all have shanghaied into our ranks?" I asked Vieux Grogneur, Rye's tactical commander.

"We have three sergeants and a regimental major in the ranks, sir.  Their peers have found it hard to argue that what we're doing is rebellious or against orders when we're still nominally a loyalist outfit, and increasingly full up on members of their own command structure."

"Was that deliberate?  Was it your idea, or Rye's?"

"Her's, sir.  But I understand she got the idea from something they've been doing on the other side of the fence." Grogneur looked a hair sheepish. "And.. and it isn't as if those sergeants and that major weren't exposed and ready to die from their wounds, really." 

"Don't fret, sergeant.  I like it. Anything to recruit their indecision in our favor is something to be embraced.  Keep it up."





I took up the reins that Rye Daughter had been obliged to let drop, and the fourth medical assault group became my own, until I could get a replacement for Rye out here on the flank-end of nowhere.  The districts the MAG covered were largely snow-bound by this part of the season, but there were inhabited farmsteads and settlements scattered all through the region, as well as two major market-towns, and the aforementioned castra.

And it seemed as if every inhabited structure in the province had sickness lurking behind their tight-bound and reinforced doors. We had to make tactical breaches on three fortified farmhouses in the next four nights, in each case, the family had lost control of their own sick.  We only took four living ponies from those three families, and they went into our quarantine-tents, to survive, or die with the Princess's consolation.

I hated that part of the job.

The remnants of the veteran regiments largely kept behind their walls in my first week with the 4th MAG.  One of them had come out of the riverlands with their own regimental surgeon, who knew more or less what she was doing.  The other two Rye had taken in glorified orderlies and knifed them into the Company's expanded medical corps, and now, with our extensive dream-palace educational assistance, were more or less effective in keeping their regiments from breaking down into ghoul chaos.

Well, they did in this part of the winter.  Rye Daughter had fought hard and long to get her district into this well-organized and regimented state, and all I could do was faithfully maintain the order she had carved into these lands.  The more I saw of the trembling knifes-edge her people crouched upon, the prouder I became of what she had accomplished out here.
This was the worst of the worst, the shockwave storm-front of the tartarus which had tumbled out of the riverlands on the frogs of the Bride's defeated army. She had done well down here.

The end of the first week, or rather, I should say, the beginning of the second, I still hadn't found a spare medic with the command authority and experience to take over this boiling pot of frozen tartarus, and the XIX Peace River Regiment's castra had stopped responding to hails at their gates.

A quick check through the princess radio got us into contact with the green orderly with the XIX Peace River who passed for their regimental surgeon.  He was locked in a rear panic room in his infirmary, protecting his surviving patients from the inevitable outbreak.

We picked up scatterings of reports here and there from survivoring and hidden Company members. The XIX Peace River wasn't exactly fertile soil for the Company's message, and the lack of good armsponies to deal with the dead as they fell out of the ranks of the living – well, if there was any regiment in this district which would fall, I couldn't say I was surprised that it had been the XIX Peace River.

And so, eight days after taking over from Rye Daughter, and at least a week from getting a proper replacement to take over the outfit, I and Vieux Grogneur were ordering our assault companies in front of the abandoned gates of the XIX Peace River castra, preparing to force the gates.  My tactical unit of orderlies, interns, and medics were forming up along with stretcher-carriers in the rear of the three assault companies, and the assault reserve which Gorganeur was ready to lead into any gap opened by the fighting.

You could hear the moaning of the dead on the other side of the wall, even over the moaning of a bitter, skirling wind.

The push came with a high screaming howl from the mares in the assault, shouting against the roaring wind, the stallions bellowing a hur-hah-hur-hah as they charged for the barred gates.  The planking of the gates shattered in a cloud of splinters, and our ponies poured through the gap, lances dropping to couch  as they pushed forward.

We followed at the head of the assault reserve, and I listened to the screaming and the groaning as a haze of gore and filth began blowing back in our faces, the high western winds carrying the smell of the slaughter with its mist and the sharp, attenuate stench of frozen fields in the westwards.

It was a long, slow slog.  The XIX had lost their training-yards, their marshalling-yards, and the dining halls and part of the command quarters.  They seem to have pushed their dead into the common areas after losing control, and barred themselves severally into their back-rooms and their fortified inner halls.  Despite the roiling horror we'd found in their common areas, most of the surviving regiment had survived the outbreak. They'd just not tried to fight the undead – they'd fallen back in the face of every massed attack.  Once our assault-companies had cleared their fronts, Vieux Grogneur and his fellow-sergeants only found two hundred or so bodies in the mud and the gore.  Give or take a few fragments.

After the assault, came the hard part.  My orderlies, interns, and medics led assault packets into each barred room, hall, and back-quarters, never knowing if there were living ponies or more undead on the other side of those barred doors.

Well, that's not true. We had some guidance from the princess radio, and those surviving hidden-Company who were forted up with their fellows here and there.  But not every pocket had an armspony with them, and with some of them – we didn't get in quickly enough.  A jack named Fière Gueue, an earth pony mare named Pinkhoof,  a stallion named Granpa Colt – sadly, we didn't get there in time. They left the dead around them unrisen, until the ones they couldn't reach to give the Princess's consolation overran them, and tore our poor ponies to bloody flinders. 

It took two days to clear out the XIX Peace River castra, and it wasn't anything I could blame on Rye Daughter or Vieux Grogneur. The command staff of that regiment hadn't cooperated with the 4th MAG, or the 'surgeon' we'd imposed upon them, and they paid for it with a nasty little outbreak.  I'll spare you the ugly scene that broke out when we pried those fools out of their barricaded quarters. Two hundred and twenty-five dead, and not a one of them were officers or noncoms.

I damn near spit in the face of that worthless major that was the senior surviving officer of the XIX Peace River.  In retrospect, I wish I had, because I'm pretty surprised that vicious mare was the architect of my betrayal, although I didn't know it at the time.

We left the XIX pacified, and well-seeded with watchful newly-recruited Company, who would be vigorously trained every night between daylight and daylight under the glare of the dream-moon.  The rest of the districts the 4th MAG was responsible for still waited out there, creeping each and every one of them closer and closer to the frozen, slick edge of the precipice.

All this time, we ignored the frozen riverlands to our west, and Rantoul City in our rear. The former was increasingly empty, unpopulated, only belching forth a pack of undead now and again; the latter had barred their gates against the chaos in the wintery wastes outside, and was besides the responsibility of the 5th MAG.  My responsibility in the grander scheme of things, true enough, but Broken Sigil was keeping track of my nominal command while I held down this particular part of the war against the plague and the ghouls.

And, locked up in an impromptu castle, erected overnight by her terrible magic and the labour of her surviving, true loyalists – was the Bride.  On the edge of the 4th MAG's region, and responding to absolutely nothing anypony outside its gates had to say one way or the other – this was the empress's winter quarters.  She had marched her army out of the riverlands – left it discarded like a trail of barding dropped by a weary, undisciplined ranker in a barracks-hall – and pulled her command-headquarters around her like a drunkard pulls his evening's bed's coverlets around him against the cold of the night.

No messengers left her little castle, and none were accepted within her gates.  We collected the occasional intrepid party of aristocrats who tried to charm their way into the presence of the empress. They inevitably had been sickened and infected by the time our patrols collected their silly, sorry selves.  There were at least three such parties to be found in the 4th and 3rd MAG's infirmaries or recuperative blockhouses, which both medical assault groups had licensed and set up in their respective regions.

The empire in winter stumbled along without guidance, their empress ignoring all of her responsibilities, all of her lands and feudatories' entreaties.  This fact was to be found, in equine form, laying sickened upon our infirmary cots.

Which is not to say that we controlled the access to the Bride's gates.  The medical assault groups weren't large enough, or active enough to control the land approaches to any of the major towns, cities, or fortresses.  Our primary focus was the control of the rural populations, the maintenance of the health and integrity of the urban, fortified cities.  We weren't oriented towards maintaining police control, or military authority. Our sole purpose and goal was the preservation of the population and the battered, shattered regiments she had led, trailing behind her skirts, out of the apocalypse of the eastern riverlands.

But that didn't mean that we didn't maintain patrols and scouting coverage of our assigned region.  The only way we could keep track of all the scattered households throughout our districts was by sending actual patrols tromping through the snow and the sleet, and knocking on actual doors.  A full company at any given time was occupied, in packets and sections, marching from foyer to doorstep, doorstep to farmyard, checking for pockets of sickness and disorder.

It was one one of these patrols a couple days after the assault on the castra of the uplanders of the XIX Peace River, that we lost some of our ponies.  A full half-dozen died in some confused ambush, we think.  Yard Arm – stallion – Danke Bitte – buck – Viel Gluck – doe – High Spirits – mare – and two jacks named Dis Bonjour and Pot Profound. All of them disappeared from the ken of the princess radio, in an unexpected outburst of violence in a farmyard halfway between the riverland marches and the Bride's silent castle.

Vieux Grogneur and I led a double-section patrol over to the household where our half-section patrol had disappeared from the knowledge of the Mistress and the dream-world.  You told me that all of them had been taken within your 'mane', within the starfield, but nothing more about what had wiped them from this world's knowledge.  Only that they'd died somehow.

We'd assumed that it was some sort of large ghoul outbreak, and that they'd been overwhelmed by a surprise attack.  Which is why we moved in armed for ghoul, organized and aimed for a direct assault, cryfoals and honeypots deployed to protect our flanks.

Which is why Vieux Grogneur and I mostly neglected those flanks. Because we'd gotten used to ghouls, to their easy manipulation by simple magics and glamours and cantrips like the honeypots and the cryfoals.  Why worry about your flanks when magic can hold them for you?

And which is why we didn't notice when actual ponies swept in behind our flanks, and overran our useless honeypots and repellant cantrips, and plunged into our unprotected rear.  

Jurgen Loche, Kelp Bed, Sol Dur, Aiguille Etroite. Deep Bed, Long Neck, Selle Haute, Green Apple, Sweet Cherry, Mine Shaft, Coquille Chêne, Vieux Grogneur, and Tam Lane – the fighting was sudden, terrible, and murderous.  All of these ponies were lost in minutes as we fell before the blades of living, unpredictable ponies – and the savagery of terrible magics.  Fire, spears, and blades took down pony and donkey and deer before I could even blink.

I think at least a half-dozen of my escort escaped the initial assault.  What further happened to my poor ponies, you, Mistress, know better than I.  They struck me down, and bound me halter and hobble, shoved my head into a sack, my battered legs into bonds, so that no matter how much I struggled, the ropes only tightened, tighter and tighter.

After a while, I realized that I wasn't about to be eaten.  And I recognized the vile and disgusting magic which had held us in place while their assault elements poured into our unprotected flanks.

The legates.  They had returned to the battle-field, in the depths of frozen winter.  And while we fought to keep the consequences of a terrible season of unrestricted, filthy warfare from the Bride's exposed ponies, these monsters had bided their time.

Until they took us unawares, killed over a dozen of my ponies.  Butchered my lieutenant.  Took me prisoner.  And so, I tell my story – perhaps my last entry in the Annals – to you, my Mistress.  Because I know not where these undead monsters take me, only that I am in their power, until they are such fools as to cut my throat and send me to you.  To take my place in your mane, in your eternity.

I am ready, my Mistress. I am only sorry that I was not properly careful of my flanks, of the possibilities.  Sorry that I let them get the jump on my poor ponies.

Forgive me, Mistress.  I will try to survive long enough to report to you what I can before they take what little remains of me.

This is clearly an entry from Sawbones, from internal cues and details, but the hoof is likewise clearly that associated with Feufollet's work.  I rather fear that the worst happened here, and we're looking at a transcription of an oral recording.

-  Faded Palimpsest, 2nd Grade Archivist, Restricted Archives