FFMS052
The morning after the mess in the chateau, fragments of the Company could be found scattered in the fields and lanes around the steaming wreckage and rank, overgrown foliage. Cherie's new monsters were feeding cannibalistically upon the growth which had birthed them. Well, nopony ever accused plant-life of being over-flowing with the milk of equine kindness. The only reason we do not live in mortal terror of our shade-trees is that they move far too slowly to ever dream of returning the indignities we inflict upon them, threefold.
Pondering upon the fact that our latest mess has unleashed, by my count, roughly five hundred ambulatory sentient floral monsters, I begin to fear for the future of Tambelon. Well, at least they seem to be affectionate for the time being.
They love Cherie, like puppies love a sweet-tempered foal. That's something to build on.
Most of the peasants' huts around the chateau had been torn down to provide the building material for the now-shattered ramparts. Their inhabitants were missing, fled, or recruited into the late empress's service. One rather hopes for the former, as nopony got out of the chateau alive. The few remaining, abandoned huts were converted to infirmaries for our wounded by the medical staff of the 4th MAG. Gibblets was worst-handled by our journey through the fires, and was suffering from severe dehydration. Other ponies had slipped through the actual crisis untouched, and then found the cooling remnants of their barding, whose melting had not burnt them in the least, in the aftermath scorched and scalded. The charring and burns left by melted chamfrons left an odd appearance, their damaged coats leaving the victims looking like zebras or some other striped creature.
The Burning Night had no actual fatalities on our side, for a change. I could only hope that it began a trend.
As that portion of the 4th MAG which had not participated in the abortive siege spread out into the district to conduct recon and look for possible hostile elements, those few members of the aerial cohort which hadn't been present for the 'Rainbow Flight' came into the growing camp around the destroyed chateau. Most of these were themselves recon flights and long-range couriers, deployed away from the Company's region of control, but they were less exhausted than the rest of the pegasi and griffins, and could be put to limited work.
The vast bulk of the Company was scattered across the districts and provinces of the Housa, from the ghoul-ravaged edge of the riverlands to the gates of Coriolanus. After consultation over the restored princess radio, the Captain had decided to draw in our details, and fort up in the castra and fortresses we controlled. Which is to say, the Braystown Shambles, and twenty-some castral fortifications strewn across the landscape, from the MACs' fortified hôpitals around Rantoul to the converted castral quarters along the Bride's Road.
Should we start calling those something else? Or is tradition its own justification? Something to discuss with Cherie. Along with the question of whether we should start calling her by her new name.
Stomper and the Order continued to operate on their own authority, still lurking, operating against the ghouls, and waiting to see if any liches surfaced among the White Rose's command structure. Nous trois fillies noires were the only contribution the Order had made to the Burning Night, but I like to think that our contribution was sufficient for the maintenance of the pride of the Order.
That ongoing operation within the White Rose, mind you, was complicated by an unexpected after-effect of the Burning Night, a complication which we learned of once the princess radio was back in operation. The ponies of the Order, like the rest of the valley of the Housa – and indeed, the whole of Tambelon from the uttermost north to the unknown south – had seen the ripples in the heavens. The coloured wave-fronts had rolled from some distant point in the high mountains of the east, and swept in their serried ranks across the skies, a disturbance which passed overhead like the trail of a comet that enveloped the world entire. They had passed from east to west, and apparently saturated the skies over the great river herself.
And once they had fetched up over the collective confluences of that great river, something broke. Like a rainbow-coloured tornado, those waves funneled, concentrated, and burst through the very substance of existence, boring like a driller's awl.
The miracle punched a hole in the world, five miles north-east of the shattered northern gates of the Second Mouth. Scouting columns sent out by the White Rose in that after-morning found the impact point, and explored the second new thing which that night had brought us.
A natural portal, ripped through our world, into the next. They are still exploring the edges of the rent as I write this. Cup Cake is being quite insufferable on the subject, and has said repeatedly that this was the event for which she had been sent. I rather suspect her of practicing the Bowmare Sharpshooter's Fallacy, but can't marshal the logic to pin her down on the subject as of yet.
Where did the miracle come from? Why did it come when it did? I suspect that any minute now, the Equestrian exiles will begin claiming the hoof of the Eternal Princess in this, and will smugly seize upon this 'rainbow from the machine', and claim omniscience, omnipotence, omnibenevolence for their demi-goddess. Perhaps it's merely my partisanship for my poor, abused Mistress, but I dissent from this interpretation.
Cup Cake is the white alicorn's agent upon this world, the Equestrian sphinx-paw within the Company. And she was nowhere near the scene when the miracle occurred. And, strikingly enough, the little baker-spy herself has failed to make the claim for salvation as of yet. She may yet be tempted to claim the credit for her own Mistress, and I cannot speak to her future conduct on that account. But it is notable that miraculous natural-portals aside, she seems to have been as surprised by the events in and around the chateau outside of Rantoul as anypony else.
It is notable that Cup Cake, despite being an agent of the white alicorn, rarely if ever refers to her, or swears by her, or bothers to talk up her employer's case. In all the time I've known the little baker, she's talked a great deal about Harmony, and very little about the alicorn princess who is the absolute ruler of her nation.
And if I were forced to make an estimate, or an explanation, or ascribe a cause to our salvation, I think I would myself choose Harmony.
Not fate, not destiny, not some winged unicorn on a throne five worlds above us on the Chain of Creation. Some chord was played upon a distant strand of unimaginable vastness, and as that great note rang upon the Chain, it found harmonic resonance, here, there, somewhere, elsewhere, in places we know of – and those of which we know nothing.
Those terrible energies set loose by the great traitor, that chain-reaction of murders and slaughter that threatened to tear a hole in poor, battered Tambelon – they were an antenna, a strand here, now, that sang in contrapuntal resonance with this hypothesized, distant energy. And like the lightning drawing the fire of the heavens down to the receiving earth below, those energies poured through our world, shattered our despair as if in passing, and found ground in a nondescript, overgrown field in the riverlands.
It is entirely possible that the rainbow sky was a natural phenomenon, and this is simply what the Chain of Creation looks like when it's blowing another hole through reality, birthing a new world. It is possible that our salvation was a simple coincidence, as blind and natural as a lightning-strike. I will have to ask Gibblets. He's the one pony in the Company old enough to have seen the Chain of Creation when it decides to give another heave and extend the chain another link, or two.
We haven't gotten much of any reports back from the new portal yet. If I weren't so madly busy, I would be dying of curiosity.
Speaking of which, once we pulled ourselves back together from the shock of the Burning Night, we found ourselves in the admirable position of knowing more about what was going on, what had happened, than anypony else in the central provinces. The Bride was dead – but that wasn't common knowledge. She had gone into seclusion in her stolen chateau, had been avoiding contact with her officials and commanders, and nopony would be expecting anything from her until the spring thaws.
Taxes continued to be extorted, provinces governed themselves, regiments supplied themselves. All the blind machinery of Empire grinds on – with or without an Empress to direct the machinery. The Bride's own fascination with total information control operated in our favour. There was literally nopony left to contradict our temporary seizure of those reins that had been let drop by the disappearance of the sovereign herself.
We had time to shape the next battlefield. We had that most precious of treasures – an information monopoly. And the Captain and Cherie and the Spirit between them enforced our monopoly with a strong blockade around the destroyed chateau, around Rantoul in general. It helped that it was ground zero in both a plague and ghoul outbreak. Politicians, officers, spies, and other pests were easily kept at a distance by the dangers of the ghoul-flu.
Which was still a serious problem, mind you. The infected were everywhere, and one of our MAGs had been pretty badly knocked around in the late unpleasantness. But the apparent removal of the source of the waves of further infection seemed to have taken some of the energy out of the equation. Cases continued to be reported, the dead continued to conjure forth pyres, and yet more families would be mourning their lost ones before the last of the outbreak burnt itself out. But we seemed to have gotten on top of the problem. Fewer and fewer mass outbreaks, and the incidents reported started rolling back westwards, instead of spreading eastwards.
Sometimes it might appear from these pages that the entire world was drowning barrel-deep in the undead, that we were trembling on the precipice of true Tartarus. And that can be accurate at a certain resolution – when you're muzzle-deep in the shit, all the world looks like a latrine. But sometimes, you're just fallen into the outhouse, and you just need to get your fool hide out of the shitter, as Sawbones used to say.
In the end, the ghoul flu had been corralled within the valley of the Housa, from the districts west of Leveetown, to the Second Mouth, and north about a day and a half's march from the gates of Rantoul. Sawbones' all-hooves-on-deck field deployment of the medical assault groups had kept the worst of the outbreak from getting into the provinces around Rime, or Harmony forfend, the great cities themselves.
We had been really quite fortunate, all things considered. And the regiments of the Army of the North had been almost entirely spared from the outbreaks, courtesy again of Sawbones' hygiene policies. All in all, the outbreak was roughly twice the geographical extent of the one that had wiped Caribou City from the map, and the body count was perhaps half again as that catastrophe, on a much broader front.
But at least the Company was on the scene. There would be no leaving an entire province abandoned like a necromantic hunting preserve this time. If we had to exterminate every last necromancer on the continent to make sure of that… well, that was always an option. But not just yet.
I miss the old zebra terribly. I miss his editorial hoof, I miss his sarcasm, his cynicism. I find his voice speaking from my quill even now, that bitter loathing of authority, even his own. Most of all I miss being the trainee, the foal who has the right to be wrong.
I'm far too young for all of this. If I have done great things before now, it has been in the name of my mentors, under their guidance and wisdom. Who can I blame when things go wrong, now that there isn't that striped back-stop to fall back on?
I couldn't send for the Annals chest, not without forcing poor Throat-Kicker to take a flight all the way from the Braystown Shambles. I had to go retrieve the actual physical annals myself, in person. It took a while to schedule a chariot ride, and in the meantime, I helped the Company officers and staff in their preparations and re-organization.
The vast expansion of the Company in the past two seasons had severely taxed the command structure of our organization, to the point of breaking down entirely. Sawbones' medical assault groups had been the last organizational straw, drawing hundreds of armsponies out of the old cohorts, minting new Company left and right, until there were more Company in the MAGs than in the old units. Considerably more.
The old Company had been stripped of non-coms, and officers, and anypony who looked like they might have had potential as either. Even Hyssop was running her own MAG over by Leveetown. The only 'old Company' left in the ranks were the terminally inept and hopeless losers, and most of those had died of one cause or the other in the four years since the Company had burst onto the scene like a comet.
If it weren't for Cherie and the Spirit, I think the Company would have collapsed into an undirected chaos of confusion in those last weeks of winter. And Cherie really did come into her own in those days. The Mistress had been humbled by the Burning Night, and her personal loss – if a gestalt spiritus coetum can be said to have such a thing as a person. She was, at least for a season, no longer the dominant, arrogant driver of ponies she had been for as long as I'd known her. When she and the Princess sat presiding over our dream-palace consultations with the command and staff, they sometimes looked like paired book-ends – sad, a little lost, and so very much like the twin sisters they definitely were not.
It will pass, of course. The Mistress is far too much herself to linger long in this melancholy. She will find herself, eventually.
But in the meantime, Cherie has taken over the inspiration and direction that usually was a sort of group effort between the aspects of the Spirit and our living banner-thestral. She sits there, at the head of discussions, petting one or another of her growing timberlings, and directs the direction of our deliberations.
I believe the Company itself will fall into the orbit of the new White Rose, given time. Cherie and her timberlings – who are beginning to bud blossoms that I suspect will bloom in her trademark white and grey and red flowers – will be our claim to sovereignty over the rebellion. The White Rose Rebellion is over, complete. The rebels have, in a perverse fashion, won. They just don't know it yet.
Hopefully it won't take too many bloody-hooved campaigns to convince them of this fact.
Meanwhile, we have begun planning the shape of post-Bride Tambelon. The political prisoners in the Braystown Shambles were pulled out of their oubliettes and cleaned up. Lists of provincial officials were drawn up, and handlers assigned among our expanded membership.
And then as the first thaws of spring began to shut down the roads in the central provinces, we summoned General Knochehart, her staff, and the surviving officers of the shattered remnants of what had been the Bride's army before it fell apart in its retreat out of the riverlands.
The ossified, fortification-bound lunatics of the Grand Army could continue to eat their heads off down in the heart of the riverlands. They hadn't been a factor in all the time the Company had been in Tambelon, and they certainly wouldn't be one this spring, either. Nor, for the same reasons, would the White Rose's own grand army in their own imprisoning fortification system. A significant fraction of the horsepower of the continent were tied up in those useless, pointless leagues of blood-stained battlements.
Something had to be done about that. And about the liches who may or may not be still in command down there along the Rima. Did they feel the moment when their own mistress was taken from them? The destruction of the remaining lich-legates and their opposite numbers in the command structure of the White Rose would be the primary strategic goal of the Company for the foreseeable future.
And while I was occupied with all these matters, the Cakes reported from the detachments which had been exploring the new portal, and I forgot about petty details like the Company's plans for the next decade and a half.