In The Service Of The Hidden Council

SBMS001

"No, I don't think it's the clap. Have you been eating outside of the commissary?”

The third poisoning among the ranks caught my attention, too late for the first two. Something broad-spectrum enough to bring down a pegasus, a griffin and an earth-pony all in the prime of their lives was deliberate enough for enemy action. Thunder Feather and Adolf had sweated out their last in my infirmary before I had fully twigged to the threat. Stomper had lucked out, I was paying attention and caught it early.

"What, are you kidding, Sawbones? I've only been out a couple times, and only with the Locksteps,” objected the one-eared brown-coated mare, referring to one of our fellow-mercenary companies. She was a good corporal, we'd picked her up locally, out of some disgusting stews on the suburban isles somewhere. We'd been here too long on the edge of the tropics. Too many diseases, too many mosquitoes, too many options for the various cruds and plagues that washed names from the rolls onto the Annals for posterity. Sometimes they barely made the rolls before making the Annals. The money was good in Openwater Bay, and there was little butcher's blood to record, but it was harder than our last five contracts when it came to those terrible "miasmas”. Local superstition, didn't believe in pests and disease, didn't know to keep down the little bloodsuckers. Savages.

"Tell me where and when, and what,” I prompted. Her list lined up once with Adolf's, Thunder Feather died too early for me to have thought to quiz him on what killed him. Good enough for a match, and I put her on a potion to cleanse out her gullet before it put her in a weighed hammock like the others. Land was too precious around Openwater Bay for anypony to waste it on cemeteries, it was sea burial for the Company in those days.

I reported the target to Tickle Me, and she called in a strike force to descend upon the eatery before any open ears listening in could scatter the conspirators. Nothing fancy, none of our casters involved. Just a dozen ground-pounders to seize every entrance and hold down the random civilians who just happened to be eating at a place with a poisoner on the staff. The crowd tried to scatter, but our guys talked down the angry customers and held them until I was able to help Grable and Karl immobilize the staff, a waiter, a cook and a scullery wench. The wench was the one who ran for it, it wasn't exactly a detective story to figure out our malefactor. One has to wonder what goes wrong with a unicorn's life to leave her scrubbing dishes in a dive on the docks beside a mercenary company's compound, but whatever happened, she was ready to sell anypony to anypony else. I interrogated her in front of the gathered clientele, leaving nothing a secret. This turned out to be a terrible idea, but I had done it in hopes that her handler was in the collection. As she was implicating our employers in her plot, one of the pegasi in the crowd whipped out a concealed spike from a wing and killed our unicorn deader than the pirates hanging by the harbor gate. Karl crushed the pegasus's head with his warhammer, of course, but that kind of left us with no-where to go, and an entire crowd of frightened, confused citizens on our hands. The crowd got ugly, and eyed the ratty doorways and back exits.

We could have massacred the lot, but this isn't the way to endear the Company to the general populace. Not that we care one way or the other as a general principle, but it was a crowded town, and a dangerous environment for operations. No need to multiply enemies; we let them go. This also proved to be a mistake, as I found out later.

Normally I'd report to Tickle Me or the Lieutenant, but the news was so ugly that the Captain got roped into the debrief.

"So, what you're saying is, a simple infirmary follow-up turned into a major hostage-situation, two deaths, and the incrimination of the Hidden Council in a murderous plot against us? Why do you hate me, Sawbones?” The Captain normally was fond of me, as I kept his rolls neat and full of not-dead veterans rather than wet-maned recruits. But you can understand why he was miffed, and it seemed like the bad weather had disturbed his sleep, his eyes were shadowed even under his feathers, and he looked a bit haunted. Letting our employers be publicly revealed as the treacherous nest of vipers that they were was not exactly the sort of adroit professionalism we try to make the Company's hallmark.

"My apologies, sir. I expected the victim to be in the crowd, I just didn't expect our little show to be so… dramatic. And I certainly didn't think the Council was that perturbed with our service to date,” I offered. "Are they that irate over our refusal to provide shipboard levies?” There was a storm coming, and nopony in this forsaken hellhole was paying for weatherponies. The humidity and the thunder was ours to suffer without any sort of relief. The pressure was causing all of us to snap and snarl.

"Pfft, who can tell? They all wear those damn masks, and I swear it isn't the same ponies two meetings in a row. The last marine mutiny has got them unsettled, that's clear enough. "

"Might not even be the naval faction,” mused the Lieutenant, "might be the harbormasters mad at us for something, might be relatives of that clan they had us put down two years ago in the outer sugar islands.” A thundering underlined the mention of that blood-soaked little campaign. Few Company ‘pounders had been lost in the butchery, but we had won no friends by wiping out an entire clan of slaving sugar planters.

"This is why working for anonymous oligarchs is dangerous. You can't exactly follow the politics when they're all alicorn-damned faceless!” I vented. You'd think my tropical ancestry would leave me more tolerant of hot, humid miserable nights like this one. You'd be wrong, I was miserable, and my grey and black fur was soaked.

We argued in circles and squares, getting no-where. While we argued, blood flowed in the streets. We restricted the troops to the compound except for patrols, and our lances were turned outwards. Even the other companies were locked out, no way to tell if the Brotherhood of the Lock had been somehow involved. At this point, we didn't want to ask questions. In the short term, this was another mistake, as it cut us off from the grapevine. In the middle-term, it kept us from being involved in the sudden, shocking outburst of public violence that set fire to blocks in every direction around us on the main island. But at least we didn't have our flanks caught in the slaughter in the gutters.

In the long-term, it was a catastrophe.

A week later, on the verge of a second storm blowing in from the west, somepony remembered we were still there, keeping the rioters and militias off the docks, preserving the warehouses full of goods in transit and loot awaiting ransom from going up in pricy smoke. Corpses were reportedly stacked up like cordwood in the inner sanctums and the wealthier neighborhoods, festering in the heat, breeding horrible insects and pestilences. The usual dynamic in which the conflicts of the rich and shameless were waged among the poor and defenseless had been inverted. Apparently our little dumb-show in that dockside dive had touched off the most amazing of bloodlettings among the faceless lords of the Bay. Their nasty little conflicts had been simmering for the better part of a decade, and those petty offenses which among those naked of face would have resulted in entertaining but simple duels had doubled down and festered like hidden wounds forever and aye. The Hidden Council, which had been conceived as a desperation move to bring the piratical clans of the thousand isles of the Bay into an orderly approximation of a sovereign state, had itself become a problem. Or possibly not, their reliance on mercenary companies like the Black Company might have been at fault. Except… we hadn't been involved in the violence. You'd think with all these sell-lances at their disposal, they would have used us for the bloodshed. Instead, the news seemed to indicate that the clans had fielded their youngbloods in the streets between their family fortresses. Once news started flowing, it was startling how much blood had been spilt so quickly. Who knew they had kept so many weapons in reserve?

After the poisoning, you'd also think we would object to being used to separate the factions from each other, but money is money, and we're the Company, damnit. Better to write the dead into the Annals due to a sword-cut to the groin or a war-hammer to the barrel than "died of malaria”, "died of Yellow Jack”, "died of some nameless crud”, "died of the clap”.

Our patrols separated the surviving youngbloods from each other under threatening skies, unslit throats kept unslit by our sweating, miserable ponies, zebras and griffins. Another month in pirates' heaven, one would have thought. Except the pause in front of the storm gave enough time for the imported warlocks to arrive on station.

Octavius's patrol encountered the first signs of the new round of civil war. They found a silent street sweltering in the late summer evening, still air over pavement painted in the blood of changelings, deep in the Free Minds district. Green ichor on every other wall, like a particularly soulless graffiti artist with a limited palette. I was called in to evaluate the numerous black lumps left behind.

"So, Sawbones, what happened here?” asked Octavius. He was clearly unsettled, which was disturbing in and of itself. The unicorn was a long-term veteran, who we had picked up before my time in a passage through Crossroads. He had seen a lot of battles, and anything that rattled him wasn't something I was thrilled to be involved with. The black-shelled Free Minds littered the alleys throughout the neighborhood, far too many for a simple tussle. Dozens, at least. And their wounds were…

Well, Tartarus. They clearly weren't simple weapon-wounds. Nothing crushing, no simple slices like you'd find from wingblades or swords, or punctures like from lances. This was claw-slaughter, something big and vicious. This was monster-work, and in an enclosed urban area. There was no magical forest nearby to produce manicores or basilisks or chimerae to hold to blame.

"Shitfire, Octavius, I don't know, this isn't my sort of thing,” I protested. "These aren't the usual sort of messes. This is magical horseapples, maybe monsters? Call in Shorthorn or Gibblets.”

He gave me the stink-eye, not thrilled with the proposal. The casters weren't well-liked among the ‘pounders. You'd think a unicorn would be comfortable with our warlocks, but despite popular perception, ninety percent of unicorns weren't magical powerhouses. Most of them were magical pygmies comfortable with using their levitation to swing their big honking swords and keep their guts within their hides and those hides unperforated by projectiles. Monsters like Shorthorn, his sister Bongo, or the repulsive… whatever the hell he was Gibblets were scarce enough that the Company grabbed on with all hooves whenever we get one into the ranks. Doesn't mean the ranks are ever particularly happy about this; the warlocks were generally either crazy or horrible, or both.

We got Bongo when she eventually arrived, all of us half-maddened by the airless heat, wishing for some sort of wind to draw the horrible stink away from our affronted noses and stifled sweat pores. We were promptly disappointed. The time between the slaughter and the arrival of the warlock-unicorn had been enough that the magical sign had evaporated into the heat and general stink. She was stuck with the same physical evidence as the rest of us, and didn't make any more than I had.

"Monster”, she muttered, playing with her little drum, "Maybe controlled by a warlock?” Yay, the wonders of magical support, am I right?

Luckily, I thought at the time, the outer patrol had picked up an ichor-trail. Leading to the Council chambers, or at least, the old abandoned clan compound where the Council met. It had formerly been the fortress of the clan of the Synics, the corrupt and ineffectual predecessors of the Hidden Council.

We looked around at the steaming slaughterhouse the whatever it was had made of the Free Minds district, and thought twice about chasing the monster with a section, a single caster, and the company physician. Reinforcements were shouted out, and a significant fraction of the Company answered the call.

Talk about a "Company” to a member of a proper military, and they'll think you're going on about a small maneuver unit, a couple hundred ponies, a fraction of a regiment or a battalion, something like that. We're a mercenary Company, we use terminology from the ancient times, when a Captain outranked a general, and the Lieutenant might command a brigades-worth in the field. We referred to the fragments of the Company proper as cohorts and vexillations. In the days that the Company was in the service of the Hidden Council of Openwater Bay, we had three cohorts, and often fielded portions of those cohorts in battle-groups known as vexillations. The Company responded to our request with a vexillation of five sections under the Lieutenant herself, a purple-coated earth pony whose name had been dropped into obscurity when she had taken up the rank – she'd get it back when her time came to be named in the Annals.

So this felt like a sufficient supply of support, so we weren't exactly worried when we moved into the green-daubed compound, hours after the rampage. More fool us.

The compound, which wasn't technically claimed by any living clan, was indifferently maintained. The corridors leading to the council chambers were cleaned and not showing any obvious wear or tear, but the rest of the buildings in the complex… there was more than one ceiling collapsed, and rats, cockroaches, and worse things nesting in every corner. The interior was cooler than the streets outside, but moments within the heavy walls left us no better within than the sweltering world outside, simple body temperature defeating the cooling effect of heavy walls and stucco. The fools that the Council paid to "maintain” the facility hadn't survived the monster's initial incursion, and I wasn't exactly inclined to worry that our wait for reinforcements had enabled anything. The blood was well-dried in the previous coolness before our arrival; as cautious as we had been, this wasn't on our heads. But the beast itself was nowhere to be found, and as I bent to examine the mangled janitor in one back corridor, a ground-pounder named Firemane leaned over me to ask where it was. I had no answer for her.

I was looking up to answer the unicorn mare when the screaming above started. This caused a mad scramble as various sections ran or flew all over the place, trying to figure out who had made enemy contact. There's no chaos like a skirmish nearby you can't see, and I could see absolutely nothing. The stairs to the third floor and the turret had long since fell prey to time and neglect. The surviving pegasi who had seen anything at all later described the… thing that had attacked one of the aerial sections. None of the griffins in that section had survived to tell their version of the encounter. It sounded vaguely jaguarine, with a number of limbs, maybe tentacles. It killed fast, and it burst through the responding sections before anypony could observe and orient quickly enough to react. They had seen it scurry off in the direction of the harbor lighthouse.

Bongo ran off before the pegasi were done reporting, drumming furiously like she was leading a legion into the battle-line. I guess she recognized the description, based on some things that Shorthorn said later. I groaned the curses anypony obliged to stitch order around the rents left by the mad starts of warlocks might groan, and galloped off to find the Lieutenant before Bongo completely outran her supports. The Lieutenant, having completely lost control of her vexillation in the chaos, eyed me with disgust as if I were responsible for her lunatic wizard, and sent me off to find the other warlocks, hopefully back at the compound. Meanwhile she set about extracting the survivors of the mess she hadn't seen any more of than I had.

Luckily, the harbor lighthouse was in the same direction, more or less, as the company compound. At this point we had blood in the game, and my zebra was up. I paused in my quarters to retrieve my lance, and trotted into the mage's quarters. Shorthorn wasn't there, but that disgusting little green thing Gibblets was. He giggled when I told him what was the situation and relayed the Lieutenant's orders to converge on the lighthouse. I asked again where Shorthorn was, and all he said was…

"Sawbones, stop trying to suck up to command. No-one will remember how obedient you were when it comes time to write you down in the Annals. It's just your name and your rank. But you can find that humorless black-hearted old bastard in the Eastwards district, most like,” he snorted. This was not the sort of dismissal designed to keep me enthusiastic, but I couldn't do anything about the way the warlocks maintained the Annals, or treated us mundane mud-ponies. It was Bongo's obligation, after all, not Gibblets', and she kept it cleanly and clear, better than the days when Shorthorn had been left the responsibility, at any rate. Her brother had made a mess of his portion of the records, and everypony had been happy when he had left it to his little sister.

I had no way to harry Gibblets towards the coming confrontation by the harbor mouth, but I could track down Bongo's brother. They had sent him out into the wealthy neighborhoods, after some sort of altercation had set two of the clan freeholds on fire. When I got there, the flames were being suppressed by local unicorns and a team of merponies hosing down the walls with seawater from the nearby canal. Shorthorn was bullying some battered-looking caribou, tied up and naked. As I looked around, I spotted bits of carbonized bone surrounded by scorch marks, and realized that Shorthorn and his attached sections had put down a runecaster. As impressive as that sounded, it wasn't nearly as important as the tentacle… whatever the hell it was running for the harbor-mouth.

"Shorthorn, stop bucking around with your damn runecaster and respond to the actual emergencies! Bongo's run off and the rest of us are hoping to keep her alive!” I bellowed, beyond subtle suasion and simplicity.

"Sawbones, you hack, what the hell does that mean?” he bellowed right back, putting his captive down with a horn-flash and a sleep-spell.

"Tentacled cat-thing butchered a bunch of bugs and ponies on the south side, killed some of our flyers, ran for the lighthouse!” I gasped out in a hurry. That was enough to make Shorthorn mutter something about foreva-something-or-other and teleport right the Tartarus out of there. I knew he wasn't such a powerhouse that this was a simple flourish, he had heard something that upset him, clear enough. He had left me the only officer in the vicinity, just a couple corporals and their sections. I quizzed them about what the hell was going on, and straightened out the mess Shorthorn had left in his wake. This meant that I missed the entire confrontation at the lighthouse, so I can't tell you the details. It was bloody, and protracted, and whatever the hell it was killed Bongo dead. They thought they killed the beast in turn, but just because they brought back a body… well, it had tentacles, that much was true.

I wasn't given enough time to really dig into the autopsy of the thing they brought me, because other problems popped up in the interim. The runecaster had apparently implicated one of the clans, and the Captain and the Lieutenant, who had over a dozen dead Company ponies on her conscience, were on the warpath. Nopony seemed interested in the dead whatever the hell it was and the presumed warlock behind the monster which had caused all the actual casualties.

The assault on the clan compound was as bloody as such things generally are. Nopony can crack a fortified compound without casualties, nopony who isn't an alicorn, anyrate. They sent an entire vexellation along with Otonashi into the breach. We slaughtered the entire family as part of our vengeance, the price for holding a wall against the Company. You never refuse a door when a mercenary company comes calling, we consider having to breach equivalent to a storming, and all the mercilessness of the storming of a fortress is part and parcel of the laws of war, such as they are. No quarter for a fortress that doesn't surrender and makes us storm its walls.

In the end, It wasn't particularly expensive as such things go, but it was the principle of the thing. And the principle of the thing left an entire extended family, women children and greybeards, efficiently slaughtered. It was all justified from our point of view and in the eyes of tradition and law, such as it is. It illustrated just how little humor the Black Company had about assaults on its personnel and honor. It was well within the honor of mercenaries and the rights of an armed military force. None of that mattered in the least, because that clan had clearly been part of the Hidden Council.

Suddenly no-pony would talk to us. No-pony was moving on us, but… that was it. There was quiet, but not peace, and we were suddenly without any supports. Suddenly, after six years in the Bay, we were pony non grata. Nopony wanted to sell to us, nopony wanted to talk to us. We were victorious in almost every encounter, but we were going to starve if we sat in our compound.

When we had a set of ships willing to ship us out of that mess, the Captain jumped at the opening. It was a golden road, probably provided by the naval faction, and we took it right out of Openwater Bay.

Openwater Bay was a watery crossroads on that world, but the options elsewhere were not exactly mouth-watering to a large mercenary company with far too many hungry mouths. Professional militaries had taken that world by storm, which was part of why we had kept to the same contract for so long with the Hidden Council of the Bay. They hadn't figured out how to maintain a professional military in the time we had been in service – there was the non-zero chance that any such army or navy would have mutinied like the Marine regiments whose rebellion had brought us into the Bay back when I had been a shave-tail and a part-time assistant in the infirmary, and whose replacements had kicked over their traces again and again. So we were not exactly welcome in any port upon the face of that worldlet in the midst of a faddish fascination for national militaries. Condottieri were no longer in fashion, nationalism was all the rage on the mainlands. This limited our options severely, and there were only so many roads off the surface of this particular lump of dirt. We would have been bucked if there weren't portals in the offing, but the Road had a couple stops on this benighted dirtball. Crossroads was the nearest to Openwater Bay and our bought boats set sail for that port of portals.

Shorthorn wasn't taking the loss of his little sister softly. A great soaking sea of booze was part of his family's mourning process, and Gibblets wasn't willing to give him the space to soak up that sea without interference. Everytime Shorthorn was in his cups, the cups themselves started berating him and anypony in ear-range. The little monster didn't care about space or tolerance or any of that pony crap, he just gave it to Shorthorn with both barrels as if the poor unicorn hadn't lost his only little sister to some sort of monstrous thing. Of course Shorthorn blew off like a volcano, and the ship he was on was on flames before we were able to put together a fire brigade. I mean, we put the flames down before the flames put the ship into the deep, but the captain of the ship was less than enthused about his equine cargo at that point. We moved Shorthorn to a second ship, and kept Gibblets far from his victim, but nopony was happy about warlocks at that stage of the game.

Bongo's death left the annalist position wide open, and Gibblets and Shorthorn's stupid vendetta left the Captain and the Lieutenant not inclined to pass the position to one of our other warlocks' as tradition obliges. Our warlocks were effective enough in a military sense, but they were imbeciles when it came to scholastic pursuits. Which, since so many of our groundpounders weren't literate, left very few options available. I ended up the annalist by simple elimination, being literate and not insanely vengeful against any other parts of the Company. So, that was a thing. I vowed to record everypony properly, as something other than a simple name and vital description in the Annals - as a measure of that last full measure, so to speak.

We had come to this world through Crossroads a year or so before the contract with Openwater Bay. It was the assumption that they had no particular bad memories, as we hadn't spent any time in that polity to affect bad memories or good memories – we had simply passed through. We hadn't taken into account the third-party accounts of our behavior in the Bay. This had sounded poorly enough in those retellings that it was a serious problem in Crossroads. It was a mostly unicorn town, but it was a suspicious and paranoid unicorn town. Their portals were tightly locked down, and they were very careful of what passed into and out of the world that Crossroads protected. A mercenary Company like the Black Company was apparently the sort of thing which set off every warning signal they had in operation.

We wouldn't be able to survive long stuck in a town like Crossroads, there was no suppliers, no cash to work our way around the lack of sadlers, and the town itself had sufficient military and carabinieri to not make making a mess worth the effort. I talked to the Lieutenant, and she closeted with the Captain and they worked it out between each other and some critter I didn't lay eyes on at the time, but apparently had pull with the portal-masters.

The major portal in town was made available to the Black Company, highest priority. Clearly Crossroads recognized that they wanted our troublesome selves outside of their world as soon as possible. The mechanics of that doorway meant that we had to exit in a regimented way unlike anything since I had become the physician of the Company - we weren't really an evolutions-and-parade-grounds sort of outfit, not even in the lackadaisical days of garrison life. I took the opportunity to evaluate the whole in a way I hadn't before - for my new assignment, as it were.

We were a fair size organization in front of the portal in Crossroads. Eleven hundred, fifteen lances, twenty-five officers and twenty support ponies, pony, griffin and whatever-the-hell-they-are. Surprisingly enough, we didn't accumulate any caribou, merponies or changelings in our time in Openwater Bay, and the majority of troopers were ponies. Forty griffins in addition to the Captain himself were the majority of our nonequine ponypower. Another fifty-three zebra and twenty-five donkeys which I was generally inclined to include in the "equine" category, and three oddities in addition to Gibblets. Tradition holds that we were originally a pony company in the days before we lost the original Annals, but it was somewhat startling that we still continued to present a pony face to the world, despite the Captain being a griffin and the centuries we've spent in non-pony lands. Hurrah for tradition and instinctual racism!

We lined up in sections before the portal, our baggage and materials arranged properly in expectation of the transition. Rumor had it that that there was a contract waiting beyond the glass, although I wasn't certain how anypony knew.

The mirror-portal, like every one I've seen, was simple in appearance, but terrible in substance. The passage was dreadful, all synthesia and rainbow-smearing horror. I can see why some call them the Rainbow Bridges, but that label has such religious connotations that it's probably for the best that we don't use that term consistently. No need to leave the credulous the idea that bullying godlets have control over our doorways. Transit is difficult enough without superstition and god-bothering foolishness.

Well, I say that as if the Company had any control over the portal we were transiting. We were being put out a lot of bits to get the whole complement out of Crossroads to the next station, along with our chattels and supplies. The portal-owners were tying up their doorway with unprofitable mercenaries instead of the materials which actually paid a premium on either side of the threshold, you know, gems, gold, silks, spices… whatever. I don't know, I'm not a merchant. All I know is those skintflints held us up for what seemed like every bit we had on hand. They were lucky we didn't sack their cheap asses, burn out their offices and butchered their laughable security details. In short, never hold a mercenary company up for the last jangle, it isn't worth the color.

When I finally got my turn through the rainbow blur, it was something else. The other side was very much like the other world it was. Cool breezes and sweet prospects, a small town surrounding the portal in an alpine hillside, despite the enormous wealth reflected by that interdimensional roadway. I suppose the lack of water and access in that high mountain perch kept that little nameless town from growing like it ought to have, there just wasn't the resources to make of it anything but an outpost. As the Company organized itself in the open space around the portal, the officials in charge on this side circled like predatory birds, maybe hawks, but more likely like buzzards. This breed could smell the bribes from a dozen miles away.

Except they were circling around a void within their rotation, avoiding something nearby. Something slight, black, and alarming in a way I had difficulty quantifying in the immediate moment after transit. It came slinking up to the Captain and the Lieutenant ahead in a cluster of sergeants who had come through before me. I couldn't make out what the black figure was, not whether it was a pony or a griffin or something else. As it came closer, the uncertainty increased, a strange blurring with accents of… animal hide and straps and magical haze.
The officers exchanged greetings with the… well, it must have been something important locally. I still wasn't certain of where we had transited, although they'd tell me eventually, as the new Annalist. I'd need to know in order to write down the details properly. The Company might not care for the personal details of the soldiers recorded in its pages, but the Company's career along the Roads must always be properly documented. Never again could our history be devoured by savage Fate as it was four centuries ago.

Author's Notes:

So, if you don't recognize this from the unoriginality and the dark tone of cynicism, this started out as a ponification of Glen Cook's Black Company stories, but then took a bit of a random-walk through the halls of military fantasy. I noticed prior to starting this that no-one had actually written anything exactly along these lines, despite dozens of Warhammer 40K and XCOM and other grimdark settings. I guess it's a minefield ponifying an actual novel series, but hopefully I've hoofed my way through the toepoppers so far. And as time goes on, it has meandered further and further from the original well-mined fortress, although you can occasionally see the distant spires of that inspiration just barely visible over the non-euclidean curvature of the not-earth.

As you can see, I borrowed some of the ideas behind Chengar Qordath's Freeport setting in this first chapter, but Openwater Bay is more an allusion to that wonderful hive of scum and villainy than the thing itself. Thanks to Chengar Qordath for letting me borrow their ponified pirate town as a sort of inanimate Expy. We quickly passed from that particular reference into an almost unrecognizable version of Tambelon.

The March Down-Country Into Tambelon

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SBMS002

As I walked up to the cluster, the Captain turned towards me and held out a talon, telling the black thing, "…and this is our company physician and Annalist, Sawbones. That makes him an officer of sorts. Sawbones, this is our new employer – "

"Legate Marklaird, doctor. It is [skktt] good to meet you. [ttkkkt] I am an avid consumer [vvttkt] of historical records and chronicles. Might I [kttvt] see a copy of your work one of these [kkttkt] days?” The legate's voice was horrifying, shifting registers, genders, age and tone without warning. I will not try any further to replicate the exact experience of listening to that freak, as it hurts my mouth to write almost as much as it hurt my ears to hear.

"We will see what can be done in the way of a summary if I ever can find the time, Legate, but the Annals themselves are not to be read by non-brethren. They're something in the way of a sacred text, and part of that is that they themselves are a… mystery. No outsider can read them, at least not without doing violence to the Company's traditions. Some of our ponies would get… violent if they thought I was neglecting my responsibility,” I equivocated. There was no way in Tartarus I was ever going to find that time, not for some strange critter that wouldn't show me its face, and my second job was honestly already straining my time as it was.

I could have sworn the legate smirked behind its featureless mask, no more fooled by my mendacity than I was at its alleged historical curiosity.

Under all that dark wrapping and creepiness lurked a warlock who went by the name Marklaird, and it was an imperial legate, which in the local parlance meant it was a representative of the Bride of Tambelon. The Bride was something of an empress, sovereign over a vast swathe of the continent, from the blasted sands five hundred leagues to the south, to the edge of the permafrost a thousand leagues to the north. She ruled everything from sea to sea but the empire by its very nature meant that she hardly governed anywhere outside of her capital in, let's see if I got this spelled right – Bibelot? At least according to the bright-eyed ambitious young things that followed in the wake of the legate. The Bride had enough land and fractious vassals that, even given her principle of "ruling but not governing”, there was always a rebellion somewhere in that vast expanse, and her own vast forces were largely tied up in pacification campaigns of varying violence amongst her loving vassals. It was a matter of course that she would have use for a band of condottieri like the Black Company, if only to make messes that her more diplomatic corps could swoop in and "solve” with a display of heroic patriotism and open-hoofed mercy.

Any which way, the Company couldn't linger on the threshold at that nameless outpost for long – our horsepower would strain the resources of that pretty but barren little plot of land in even the shortest of timeframes, and we needed to move onwards down-country before hunger and thirst began to undermine the health of our mares and stallions. It doesn't take starvation to start wiping names off the rolls when you're dealing with an entire organization, just a bit of malnutrition can weaken constitutions and fill my infirmary cots with goldbrickers and malingers. Since the cots were currently buried at the bottom of a number of wagons towards the back of the column, I felt our march held a certain urgency, and did my best to communicate my urgency to command. We needed to get on the road.

This well-meaning urgency had to wait, tapping its hooves in anxiety, because the supply corps and the ground-pounders were in no condition for long road marches. We had a lot of ponies in light shoes, and some in nothing but raw hoof, especially the serious spellcasters, who often complained that all that cold iron played hob with their matrixes. So the farriers did a land sale business, ripping out old shoes and hammering in heavy iron shoes day and night, aided by every pony and griffin that could be trusted near a fetlock with a pair of pliers or a hammer.

"This is nonsense,” I muttered as it was my turn to get nails driven into my poor hooves, "Our ancestors out on the sahel didn't have to wear pounds of glorified grey rocks on their hooves when they pounded predators into the grasses. We just thundered across the turf naked-hooved as the day our dams dropped us.”

"Give over, Sawbones. I remember that town we pulled you out of, nopony there had seen open savanna in generations. You probably couldn't tell elephant grass from crab-grass!” the head smith jeered at me over his shoulder as one of his drafted privates fumbled with my hooves and a hammer.

"Pay attention to my hooves!” yelped Iron Hoof's current victim, a carter and cook named Asparagus, as the smith rapidly drove in the nails without looking at his work.

I looked aside in disgust, and glared as shadows passed over us. The damn flyers, they didn't have to get all this crap hammered into their precious toes. Why couldn't zebras have grown wings? What was the Creator thinking when he was handing out racial bennies? I'd like to fly over the rocks and the mud, too, damnit!

Finally, the necessaries were completed, and the mobile smithies were packed up and made as mobile as those heavy damn loads could be made, and we hit the road. I could swear I could hear the outpost's supply clerks weep in our wake as they mourned their empty larders.

***

The mountainsides rose around our column as we followed behind the carriages of the legate downhill. I had hitched myself up to the medical supplies wagon, leaving the heavy stuff to a set of taciturn brothers seconded to me from one of the ground-pounder sections. Earth ponies are really the greatest when it comes to being dumb muscle. For the rest of us… I sweated like a unicorn doing heavy labor. We had really gone a little soft lounging around garrison in the Bay. I'd have left this heavy-ass wagon to one of the Eyupers except the medical supplies were full of narcotics and other precious, highly abusable drugs. I trust my brothers, but I don't believe in tempting the herd.
The Eyupers had names –for the record, and for the Annals, those were Driftwood and Rhubarb Fritter – but everypony just called them "Eyuper”, and they both answered to the name, mostly because it was the only thing they ever seemed to say. I suppose they'd say something else if it bothered them.

The alpine meadows quickly fell behind us as we descended below the treeline, a barely logged terrain lightly harvested for the town we had left behind. The roads were steep enough I almost considered re-hitching to the back of our wagons and letting the wagons drag us - but I wasn't sure how to re-rig the tack. Iron Hoof had my number, I really was more of an urban zebra.

As we marched beyond the immediate back country of the outpost, we descended into a wilderness of sorts, held back from the road by imperial fiat and forced labor imported from the inhabited regions below. Apparently the corvee fell under the rubrick of "ruling, not governing”, but it was explained to me at some point in my military apprenticeship the inestimable value of good roads to any imperial project. Good roads, well-maintained meant lightning-fast and heavy-hoofed response to any un-necessary independence of thought or worse, disagreement among vassals.

But the long trip impressed upon us the following facts: any military organization the size of the Company in those days could never stand still for any period time, especially in a wasteland like those wooded slopes. A thousand or more ponies would eat their own heads off in no time at all left to their own devices in such a place. Any single soldier is free – a regiment is tied to the apron-strings of whichever master it can find, soonest possible. A squad can go bandit – an entire Company has to hold to the lordship in whatever land it finds itself.

That first night on the road, as I set up shop by the light of a fire and examined a series of overstrained hocks, sore-hooves, and one serious sprain case, the warlock-legate came back to my wagon to talk some more.

"So, my dear doctor, how far back does your mystery chronicle go? We've found tales of a Black Company going back centuries elsewhere,” buzzed the Marklaird in the voice of an elderly stallion with his vocal cords crushed by some half-healed wound.

"First off, I'm no doctor of medicine, I'm a surgeon. I work for a living. Never seen the inside of an academy, let alone a university. Names and titles are important, that's a big part of why the Annals are sacred to us. In a real sense, the Annals are the Company, its memory and history. And we go back five centuries, when the Company made the mistake of signing on with the second false Mahdi in the Dar al Hisan. The Eighters caught us in a vicious trap on the edge of the irrigated lands, and drove us into the open desert. Some of the Company came out the other side, but the Annalist of the time and his assistants weren't among them. It is the earliest disaster we can remember, but hardly the last one. War isn't a safe occupation,” I trailed off, eyeing the new shoes on a bellyaching donkey. He'd have to go back to the farriers and get his shoes re-set, someone had botched it. As I sent the ground-pounder off to bother the smith-ponies, I eyed my visitor.

The Marklaird was a damn creepy pony, and I use that term advisedly. It was covered entirely in animal hide, skinned from some poor fool, I have no idea if from a nonsentient creature like swine or some talking beast like a deer, cow or (shudder) pony. Whatever it came from, that hide, called I found out later "leather”, was dyed black, and covered in some sort of terrible glamour so that you couldn't make out what exactly the Marklaird was. It could be a pony, it could be a donkey or a diamond dog or even a centaur. The only thing I was fairly certain was that, if it was winged, it had bound its wings firmly against its barrel with those terrible straps of animal hide. You'd expect a warlock to be a unicorn, but there were mages who were other races, rare enough, you come across them now and again, especially when dark magic was involved.

I listened to it boast of the glories of its empire, taking it all with a grain of salt. Its voice was no clue as to what it was, as every sentence, or rather, every breath was in the voice of a different beast, one statement in the voice of a little filly, the next in that of an aged old grampa, and the one after that in the dulcet tones of a new-betrothed bride. The legate was no common warlock, but rather a horror that spoke in the voices of a multitude, a legion. One hopes that it held power consummate with its terror, something to compensate for its unseelie nature, because by the alicorns, it was an unsettling creature.

The next day we broke out of the wilderness. Tambelon was the name of the continent we had cast ourselves up onto, and it was a rich country, increasingly fertile as we worked our way down out of the mountains. It was more donkey country that it was pony or zebra or griffin country, which made our current roster stand out more than I was comfortable, to be honest. Hamlet by hamlet, we passed out of the logging backcountry and into the granaries. At least this meant that we were no longer marching hoof to hoof, dependent on the wagons-loads dispatched by the legate's bureaucracy. Each town had reserves more than sufficient to feed the company for the day or two we spent in their vicinity. it was comforting to be in such a rich country, and a bit perplexing to encounter such peacefully prosperity, given what we had been told of the rebellious nature of the country. But further details provided by the legate's eager young staff settled my curiosity; the currently rebellious provinces were weeks' worth of march from our vicinity. There was a port downcountry that we would be using to transit to the vicinity the Bride needed us to be without months of march wasted overland. Meanwhile, the imperial roads paid for by the distant Bride were making many a sullen peasant quietly prosperous, and fattened the burghers of each town we passed with the crops and taxes of a deep back-country. Towns which elsewhere would have to have squatted like fat spiders on navigable rivers or well-harbored coasts had sprung up here at actual crossroads, limited only by local water supplies, as far as I could tell. The more I saw of the Bride's roads, the more I was a convert. No tyrant, however horrible, could be all bad if she built good roads.

Rime, on the other hand, was a fat and stupid port, perched at the head of a long lake, really, more of an inland sea, full of the taxed excess of thousands of square miles of rich back-country, the sort of fat and stupid which inexorably produces thoughtless corruption, worthless carabineri, and officials with their hooves continuously stretched out in selfish expectation. The Bride's central administration was light-hoofed and distant; all this meant was that her local vassals were free to be as awful as their consciences and their peasantry allowed them to be. The Company generally passes through such nonsense without much of a wake. Our history and the Annals give us an edge in how to deal with this sort of petty nonsense. We can dodge their expectations and demands without too much expended energy.

Command chose to raise the banner for a recruiting stop in this foul, impacted burg. Sometimes I can't comprehend the thought-processes of officers, even though the Annalist thing technically means I was now in the line of command. At that point I hadn't really processed the change in my status; I had been safely irresponsible as the zebra who stitched up management's mistakes, not the pony who was being paid, even theoretically, to make those mistakes. Even though I had already started making my very own mistakes back in the Bay. The Good Idea Fairy leaves her eggs in us early, and they grow fat on our lack of self-introspection and quicken with the fuel of self-deception.

I suppose I haven't described the Company's banner yet. The flag itself wasn't technically important, it had been replaced on a regular basis for centuries, although the earliest Annals report that the current flag is mostly faithful to that long-rotted rag that the flag-bearer dragged out of the desert in the Dar-al-Hisan. The Annals are the memory of the Company, but the banner-lance is its heart, and its heart precedes its remembrance. It may very well be the original pikestaff of the Company's long-forgotten founding; there are hints in that first surviving Annal of the contents of the lost volumes, and they all suggest that the lost history of the Company is as long as the history that is written. The banner lance certainly looks old enough to be almost a thousand years old. You'd think that wood would have lost its strength, that steel would have rusted away, but there was something unearthly in that pikestaff. It…. oozed. I've read accounts of the flag-bearer stabbing enemies, even great and terrible enemies, true monsters, with that lance and killing them ugly. Its prick was death.

The pikestaff was what the brethren revered, but the would-be recruits were attracted by the silly cloth hung from its lethal length. This was a long pennant-flag, elongated triangular, with a sable unicorn's-head over a field bleu celeste, superimposed over a crescent moon, argent. Its provenance was long-lost in the Annals, but the description in that first volume was quite clear. It had been briefly replaced in the days of our service to the Hashish-mares and their dun stallion al-Telekker, by a banner with twelve argent hung earth ponies over a sable field, but once the underlying vendetta which drove that unprofitable service had been satisfied, the Annalist of the time had prevailed on a new Captain to revert the banner-flag to something more traditional.

As it was a donkey town, our recruits were likewise mostly donkeys. They weren't quite as useful to a mercenary company as the stolid earth ponies which compromised the iron core of the Company in those days, but still, donkeys could be hard enough if hammered into shape. Especially in Tambelon, where there was something in the soil and the air which gave them a certain advantage which meant that not every wrestling match was won by a veteran earth pony, and a surprising number of donkey hedge-wizards could be beaten out of the brush if one put one's mind to it. Rime's recruits weren't quite enough to compose another cohort, and we wouldn't have concentrated the wet-manes into such a compact formation of cluelessness even if we could have; one or two sections from the two ground-pounder cohorts were broken up and used as cadre for the new recruit sections, which were divided equally between the ‘pounder cohorts. This left the aerial cohort a bit undersized in comparison, but in the absence of serious griffin or pegasi towns to recruit from, we had little choice. I don't quite understand the dispersal of the pony diasporas, but however the migrations had broken, Tambelon had lost out in the weatherpony sweepstakes. This new world was at the mercy of random weather; weather magic was the rare gift of the occasional talented unicorn here, and those more rare than hen's teeth.

We picked up a half-breed unicorn-donkey who went by "the Crow” in Rime. She was a minor hedge-wizard, and it almost completely escaped my notice, despite my concentration on the new recruits and their catch-as-catch-can training while we waited for the small fleet which would ferry us across the great lake to Tonnerre. I was busy putting together a series of readings from the Annals for the new recruits at the time, in hopes of properly inducting the new donkeys heart and soul into the Company before we saw action, so the goings-on of another hedge-wizard in the madhouse that passes for the Company's witches-coven wasn't properly recorded in the Annals as it happened.

A Reading For The Recruits

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"From the Book of Esteem, second volume. In those days, the Company was in the service of the Sisterhood of the Red Flails, and the campaign of the previous fall had seen the Company’s blood purchase the freedom of fully half of the unicorn city-states of the Upper Reaches from the Sisters’ sworn enemies, the Chevrine Federation. The survivors of the campaign, under the direction of the much-thinned Company, erected fortifications and entrenchments at the base of the three peninsulas that held the remaining occupied cities, excepting only a causeway leading southwards to the Chevrine home counties, which was thinly posted, the allied forces of the Sisterhood being too few to cover every exposed position…" I droned on and on to a crowd of donkey recruits sprawled all over the forward deck of an ingot hauler, two days out of the port of Rime, headed for the northern provinces, and the promise of rebellion and hard campaigning. We were in convoy, riding half-empty freighters and vast long-hulled log and ingot haulers for a distant port, where those ships would take loads of smelted iron and cut logs and ship them back to Rime and her sisters along the inland sea, stock and fuel and raw materials for the teeming proletarian hordes of worker-ponies packed in the tenement quarters of the brash new cities. We were dead-heading, but the imperium was paying for the privilege, and it seemed that there wasn’t much draw or demand for the finished goods and fineries that fat and haughty Rime produced to justify its excess and pride in those restless northern lands ahead. Or maybe there just wasn’t the cash, I hadn’t figured it out yet.

The Company’s officers and the legate’s people were closeted up on another freighter further back down the convoy, trying to figure out our coming campaign, resources and strategies, tactics and goals. They were far too busy planning and thinking deep thoughts to worry about the hundred or more wet-maned recruits we had picked up in Rime almost as an afterthought, almost all of them slicker than the day they dropped out of their mamas’ placental sacs.

"…in order to fill the ranks, badly depleted by a season of successful but bloody fighting, the Company levied volunteers from the two cities nearest their sections of the palisades, a small fishing city known as Sidebottom, and the trading colossus Tarseus. Both cities being largely populated by unicorns, the Company formed from the new recruits eight sections of swords-mares, and nine of bow-stallions. Now those sections were distributed between the cohorts as follows-" I continued to rattle on, sweating in the cool breeze as I realized that I was losing the recruits, and baffled as to how to get out of the box of boredom I had read right into, clear-eyed. I was saved from my own dullness by a vile cackle.

"My damnation, Sawbones, you could drain the vim and vigor from a gladiator’s death-battle! Do you think you could read them the supply tallies while you’re at it? How about ducal genealogical charts? Maybe one of the cooks’ recipe books?" Saved by the horrible green thing lounging by the portside gunwale, leaving an unpleasant stain on the planking underneath him. Fresh air did not agree with the froggy Gibblets, it aggravated a skin condition. At least, I hoped it was a skin condition. He had never come to me, or my predecessor for help with whatever the hell it was that cause him to… secrete everywhere on certain days.

"Well then, Lord Gibblets, how would you summarize Bodkin Point’s defense of the Causeway that Ser Esteem and myself were working our way towards?" I did my best to soak my response in what I imagined was snooty, sarcastic academic accents. I was only guessing – I’ve never darkened a school-room door, let alone academe. But I was game to play along if the witch-thing wanted to help draw in the damp 'uns. The drippy ought to ooze together, I figured, and at least the new fish would dry out eventually, the ones that survived. Even on his dying day, Gibblets would probably soak his cardboard box apart before we could chuck him in the sod.

"Weeelll indeeed, you striped dullard, you might start by talking about the two sets of recruits that they pulled out of those nose-high unicorn cities, because the ones from fishtown were hard and humble boys and girls, the scrapings of the docks and the shop-floors. The recruits from the city of bright lights, and brighter money, they were the children of the great and glorious, proud to serve their freed peoples. More proud of the cause than of their brothers, and in their hearts, they were only Company by courtesy. Of course they were utterly useless, filly and colt alike."

Gibblets was cheating, these details weren’t in the Annals – it wouldn’t have suited the purposes of Esteem, who had been a stuffy and arrogant unicorn far too fond of the privilege of rank and position. But I wouldn’t contradict him for the world. Our new recruits were mostly factory-floor rejects and guttersnipes, and they sucked up this petty class warfare like it was milk straight from their dams’ teats.

"Sections with mares and stallions of both sorts were seconded to the pair of veteran sections holding down the near end of the causeway leading to the back of the Reach, the proud Tarseioi and the grumbling Bottom-bitches alike. All the fighting up to that point had been along the upper ends of the Reach, where everything important was, and the wealth that made any of it worth fighting even a candle’s length. Patrols down the causeway alerted the outpost early enough that the Chevrines were trying the backdoor, having lost enough trying to batter down the front entrances-" Gibblets somehow roared this, despite how dry it reads now that I put it down on the page, conjuring out of his reedy, irritating pipe of a throat and the dried-out material something wild and thundering. The recruits, who had been sprawled sleepy-eyed and lulled half-asleep where they lay draped across the planks and chandlers’ supplies lashed here and there in between the foremost mast and the nameless equipment bow-wards, were stirred awake, actually interested now. But I couldn’t leave it to him alone, not and hold up my head as Annalist, however new I was at this.

"You talk as if you were there, oh master of the green-scummed waters! I know you’re older than the fens, and slower than the fetid seeps, but you most certainly aren’t two and a half centuries old!"

"Quiet, you benighted grey savage! I’ve heard these stories often enough, and told better than anything you’ll ever manage by better mares and stallions than ye will ever be. And I remember the *pith* of the stories, which you’d bury in the minutiae and the dusty details that belong with the "and we laid to rest"s that you *conclude* these readings. You’re daft enough you’d put them right in the middle of the reading! Listen, my children, and your nuncle Gibblets will tell you of the bowyer, and the Chevrine heavy shock-brigade, and the span he stood upon. His lord and master, a sergeant named Blood Raven, she died in the very first exchange, along with any number of veteran brethren, caught out of place and crushed by a terrible volley of those great hand-catapults the Chevrine’s heavy minotaur shock troops could carry into battle at the jog. They had charged forward to extract the forward guard from the enemy come up quick, and they died ugly, pegasus and earth pony alike. Blood Raven was an old Company hand, one of those bat-winged, slit-eyed things of the night we used to field, those hell-spawn that drew down a terrible fear among our enemies when they got going and keep on going once they went. It availed her naught, dropped from the air at the start of her run by a great thudding rock flung from near point-blank range." The wide-eyed stirring among the long-eared newbies indicated that they were still getting used to the idea that this was a killing company, and they had signed on for ugly death at the hands of uglier plug-uglies. This was what the readings were for, to get them in their minds as well as their bodies ready for the blooding. Some ponies we recruited were born to split skulls and saw hamstrings, cut throats and bathe in the blooded muck and filth; but these were donkeys, not griffins or minotaurs, and those didn’t come from the factory floor standard installed with bloodthirst and a disregard for the bodily integrity of others. That was something you had to cultivate with recruits like these. Well, for the most part. We had picked up some dodgy-looking ones here and there in the crowd…

"The disaster disheartened the straggling recruits, who had avoided the killing volley by virtue of being TOO DAMN SLOW IN THE CHARGE, and they fled for the low wall and the abatis built across the exit of the causeway, and far too many kept going afterwards. It could have been a rout, and the loss of the camp behind it, if not for one of those scumlings of the fishtown docks, a dark-furred bow-stallion who had taken a company-name before the banner-lance, calling himself by his favorite arrow-head, Bodkin Point. He had a proper skill with that armor-piercing hell-dart, but it wasn’t that which saved the causeway, it was his steadiness. He reached the wall, and he turned around, and he took up his stave and smacked each and every panicky mare and stallion as they crossed the planks across the abatis and tried to run past him there at the mouth of the way. Nothing quite breaks a panic like a sharp slap across the muzzle with a nice springy length of yew. What remained of the sections rallied beside that new recruit, and took up the planking, and formed a bowline, without any swords-horses, just the abatis, the wall, and their bows, because the rich and privileged recruits who could afford those honking great slabs of steel had been better-fed, faster and quicker, and were off in the rear spreading defeatism and panic behind the line."

"The spare quivers had been left stacked behind the wall, and the bow-line quickly arranged their refills, stabbed point-down before and behind them on the wall itself, because they needed to see their targets, and a bow-line is no damn good crouched down behind a earthen mound. The minotaurs, loaded down by their catapults and their heavy armor, lumbered into range, out of breath and lagging. They’re terrible brutish things when they have their wind, but there isn’t much to them when they’re blown, and that’s a lot of meat to put into motion and keep moving. Nopony uses minotaurs for cavalry or scouting, children. Keep that in mind, although your world seems thin of cow-headed walking mountains from the looks of it, Annals know if you’ll face any in any campaign while we’re on this rock." True enough, although they’d imported us; some military entrepreneur might have had some minotaur cows and bulls shipped special-order for the construction of shield-walls or an engineering company. Gibblets wasn’t saying it, but minotaurs were clever mechanics, and builders, and did amazing things with delvings and construction. Rime, as ramshackle as some parts of it was, and as a booming industrial town, would have been like a second Minos if someone had only thought to bring some in through the portal. Not that there were that many minotaurs back in Openwater Bay, but I had heard stories, and there were a scattering. The company had even had a bull in the smiths when I was new in the company. Roarer had liked his rum, though, and apparently minotaurs didn’t float, he fell off a pier drunk as a lord five months after we arrived in the Bay, and he didn’t come back up.

"I don’t know what they taught the unicorns of that fishtown, or where they had picked up the skill, but somehow those wet-maned-as-Tartarus newbies managed to generate a proper old-fashioned arrow-storm, and every bull who wandered into range went down feathered like a penguin, or ran yelping like a proud-tailed peacock stuck full of feathered sticks. It wouldn’t have mattered in the end – weight will tell, and a minotaur bull with his blood up will burst right through abatis, but the bow-line gave the Chevrines a bloody nose, and gave them pause, and it was enough. While they were gathering their nerve and hauling up their catapults just out of bow-range, the recruits’ toffee-nosed peers had been herded back to the defense by veteran reinforcements, and under a proper rain of Bodkin Point’s favorite warhead, they were brought up to the wall, and the planking put back down, and they formed up in front of the abatis, the bows planted firmly on the wall in the rear. It’s not an easy thing to do, charging while your own brothers fill the air over your heads with feathered death, but I’ll give the swords-ponies of Tarseus this, they gathered their nerve before the minotaurs gathered their breath. The Company charged the enemy, and broke them, and burned their catapults, and butchered their wounded, and set them lumbering for their own side of the causeway." Gibblets at this point produced a flask from thin air, and seemed like he expected me to bring it all home. I flushed, happy to get back on track with my intended moral.

"Thus did Bodkin Point demonstrate the virtues of a Company recruit – prudence, steadiness, resolution, leadership, competence with his weapon," I concluded.

It wasn’t much of a flourish, but every one of those donkeys were on their hooves, leaning forward, rapt in the story. I felt a shameful envy for that spellbinding flair that my green brother displayed, more so for the fact that it had nothing to do with magic, it was just simple personality and charisma. This was why the Company’s Annalists were wizards, the force of personality that came with the usual wickedness and determination made for a riveting reading style.

"Thus endeth the lesson, fledglings, unless you’d like to stay for the 'and we laid to rest’s. Away with you, your corporals have work for you, and you’ve rested enough," I concluded rather lamely, trying to put some sort of official seal on Gibblets’ hijacking of my lecture. I gazed up at the banner-pikestaff, braced beside the nearest mast, as the audience broke up, ambling off to be drilled in lance-executions and hoof-blade katas by their new-minted corporals.

I walked over to the warlock, and thanked him for his save, looking down at the water rushing below, far faster than any ship I’ve ever seen on fresh or salt seas.

"We don’t have a square inch of sail up, how is this boat going so fast, Gibblets?"

"Ha! It’s a clever gag, these donkeys have their tricks. You see that box way the heck up on the bow, and those racks on either side behind it? They’re great honking charms, entangled with enormous enchanted loadstones beside every harbor this ship services, and a couple headlands here and there in between. They link them up as they go, and the whole thing pulls itself to and fro like a pony drawing a canal-boat through a set of locks. Don’t have to depend on wind directions, sitting ironbound until the right breeze comes in the right direction. Just hook up and go go go. Didn’t you see that great ochre lump of granite looming outside of the entrance to Rime when we left?"

"I did, but apparently I missed the briefing where this was discussed. Why are there masts?"

"Well, everything breaks, and you never know when you’ll need to suddenly go off course. Shallow seas like this trough can blow out sudden sand-bars and the like."

"So, where did you get that business about Blood Raven? I don’t think any of the Annals mentioned she was a thestral, although it matches the sparse mentions of her name here and there well enough. It *could* be true. How old are you, Gibblets? None of the Annalists said when you were recruited, and the first one to mention you was Crescent Moon about eighty-five years ago, by my reckoning. "
"Pfft, as if a pegasus calling herself 'Blood Raven’ would be anything other than a bat-pony. Might as well have called herself 'Bloodbath’ or 'Blood Eagle’." We both paused to shudder. I’d never seen one of the victims of that caribou execution method, but I’ve read enough to never want to see one if I could. I suspect that Gibblets *had* seen a few in his day.

"As for Crescent Moon, that mare was too loose-tongued for her own good, it got her killed quick enough, when she tried to fast-talk her way out of a blown ambush. You’ll note that she only had the one volume, she didn’t last long as an Annalist. They didn’t like to talk about us, the stranger brethren, back in those days. You new ones don’t have any respect, but you don’t have that fear, either. I suppose it’s a mixed bag. And any rate, I’m the last of them, our caster ranks are filled with mayfly hacks like Crescent Moon and Shorthorn and that new half-donkey filly."

"And Bongo?" I dared, still a little irate about the incident back before Crossroads.

"Well, mayfly enough," he sighed, somehow even smaller and greener than his usual self. "Never tell Shorthorn, but she wasn’t a complete waste as one of the weird brethren. I never thought she’d…. well. It was another world, and the wench is dead, isn’t she?"
He squelched off, leaving an unexpected melancholy. I prepared myself to go open the clinic, and stopped, struck. He had never actually said when he had been recruited.

The Recruits Below The Pikestaff

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The convoy's long voyage up the draglines took weeks of the late summer, the heavy sun weakening with every night coursing northwards. The inland sea left the onrushing ships at the same elevation, and yet day after day, the heavy hot glare lessened almost imperceptibly. I was posted with the recruits on the largest of the ingot haulers, with the widest decking and the biggest space for the veteran cadres to drill stumbling foolish recruits in the most basic of military drill.

The glorious sun of late summer, pure blue skies above, and fresh waves below, and in the distance, green shores turning slowly from scattered deciduous woodlots and vast heavy-headed grain fields to increasingly wide coniferous slopes turned steeper and steeper as our magically drawn ships were dragged north and east to our destination.

My clinic was cluttered evening after evening with the detritus of training. We might have been cash-rich, but our hauling capacity was such that we couldn't really keep training weapons on hand, and the corporals made do by wrapping battle-blades and warhammers in heavy cloth, padding the recruits, and trying to explain the concept of turning the flat in training encounters. Still, inexperienced donkeys, inexperienced in the sparring necessary to train clueless sinews and unmodified minds, invariably left a residue of broken bones, ugly cuts, and outright bad wounds. My living-space on the ingot hauler became cluttered with the bruised, the mangled, and the wounded. They were lucky that I had half a decade of experience in holding together the results of the Company's over-enthusiastic training, and that zebra potioning was ideally suited for the treatment of wound infection, gangrene, and compartment syndrome. My infirmary could lose ponies from shock and simple trauma, but when it came to simple accidents, I was already a master. And damn that greedy rotter the Company had stolen my expertise from, who wouldn't have ever let me free to find my own professional way out from under his selfish hoof. I was everything he had made of me, and so much more. Screw zebra apprenticeships, anyways.

Eventually the long pine-wooded reaches closed around the convoy, and we drew near to our port of intent. Ironically, as we beat closer to that terminus, the pine trees fell away, leaving naked slopes and deep-eroded gullies on every side. In the distance ahead, great pillars of black smoke rose into the heavens, marking the woodland smelters which normally fed these ingot-haulers. This port whose harbor we slowly coasted into was near its capacity.

There weren't any trees anywhere in eyeshot, the voracious forges having devoured every bit of native wood anywhere within the range of seizure or purchase. The truncated pyramids which glowed day and night, rendering down ore into iron ingots, were fed in that day by the trash trees floated down-stream by the mighty stream by which Tonnerre thrived. Its vast back-country upstream on the river by which Tonnerre lurked like a tumor, fed its numerous charcoal-burners and iron-forges. When that great logging country exhausted itself, so would Tonnerre, and it would blow away like the dust and wind-blown dirt of its worthless and nearly-agronomically-useless neighboring farmlots. Those wretched fields barely fed the workers of the charcoal-burners and forgers; just barely enough to justify not importing grain from the rich bottomlands of the country to the south and east.

The rebellion was not upstream in the wild forests that teemed with the lumberponies of the frontier, nor the barely-functional grain-lots of Tonnerre. Rather, the centres of rebellion spread out on the Bride's Roads to the south-east and south-west from Tonnerre, those fringes between the wooded northlands and the edges of the granaries all along the frontier. These were the edges of the control of the Bride's over-proud vassals, those verges between where the advantages of the granary-laws benefited the peasantry, and were irrelevant to the semi-nomadic tribes of the great pine barrens. Here, on the edge between comfortable tyranny and squalid freedom, the locals quivered between comfort and liberty, and split, raged against the world and their torment.

We disembarked slowly, the haulers not suited to the unloading of carts and wagons and mercenaries, being optimized for the unloading of simple dry goods and the loading of dumb logs and ingots. It took time to carefully unload delicate loads, and there was little we or our recruits could do to hurry along the process. A perfect time for ritual and regimented display.

The officers shipped over from their freighter, and unbound the sacred banner-pikestaff from the forward mast to which it had been bound, and marched it offship to an open space in the centre of Tonnerre. The sergeants and corporals of the cohorts had secured this space, and their sections lined the space on every side, keeping away civilian and curious eyes, above and below. Despite the absence of winged recruits, the third cohort was very much involved in the stage-setting of this display, dressed to the nines as if they were the thestrals of old, some of them wearing the enchanted helms which gave them the cat-eyed and tufted-eared appearance for which the Company once was known, looking like nightmares aloft on terrible dragons'-wings.

The recruits were marched one by one off the hauler by their corporals, perched precariously on narrow planks over the docks below. The witch-battalion had turned out in full, and their terrible mage-fire lit the scene as the sun faded from the scene, leaving all in gloaming as the donkeys marched two by two into the square made strange.

The Banner had been set aloft on its pike-staff, blown aloft by a peculiar evening breeze, displaying the unicorns-marehead for all the assembly, sable and glowing in the growing darkness.

As they assembled before the pikestaff, I strode forward, my spiky mane dyed black and any expression wiped clean by the solemnity of the occasion. I read from the Book of Lyova Leiba, and the text was a recitation of the sublimation of the self and the replacement of the Company and brotherhood for individuality. We are fallen, and squalid, and selfish in ourselves, but we become something greater in the Company. The Company is neither moral, nor well-intentioned, nor good in and of itself, but we are greater gathered together than we are in the fragments blown by the winds of random chance. Death and anonymity are the wages of the self outside of the Company. And the alternative....

Tickle Me advanced as I concluded my reading, and she unfurled the banner from the top of the pike-staff. Somehow the remaining light concentrated about the banner, drawing forth from the ranks below, leaving veterans and recruits alike in darkness, and only the banner itself visible. It twisted and snapped like a thing alive overhead.

The first recruit, a heavy-limbed donkey, strode forward, unprompted. I rushed forward, and listened closely as he bent forward to kiss the pikestaff. He pressed his muzzle against the ebony shaft, and whispered to himself. Somehow I heard it, and later after I polled the assembly, I found that every single pony had heard the statement, when he had named himself "Heavy Bucket". I was the only one to observe his eyes shift, though, as his pony-like eyes suddenly turned catlike and glowing, green. Each donkey which came forward that night likewise glowed cat-eyed below the banner, "Halon", "Yew-Barrow", "Talon-Spite", "Oaken-Hull", "Galleon-Full", and half a hundred others. Not every recruit found themselves a Company-Name that night, but every recruit who found themselves a company-name survived the first battle of the campaign that was coming.

The Ambulance-Drivers

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SBMS005

The next morning, I hesitantly asked Shorthorn about the glowy eye thing. The recruits had lost their cats-eyes with the morning dew, and looked like the damp donkeys they honestly were, sweating and barking away at their morning drill as we continued to haul our equipage off the docks.

"Ha! That thing, I remember that creepy-damn effect from my days keeping the Annals. It wasn't a trick of ourn, although now that you mention it we really ought to see if we can fake it up for effect. Scare the horseapples out of the enemy if all the brethren were coming the batpony at ‘em in the right conditions…" I had successfully if inadvertently diverted the witch from the subject in question; I almost let him wander off, but my curiosity drove me to draw him back in.

"Oh, yeah, right, the bats-eyes. It's something that demon's-pizzle does on its lonesome, without anypony prompting it. You know what Gibblets says, the Company's genius? And I don't mean a bright spark, or even the angel that some think of when you say that. More of an evil muse, or an imp of the perverse. Whatever it is, it sleeps most of the time, but when we do that thing with the Lance, it kind of rolls over in its sleep, and touches the new brethren. Something that we carry afterwards, a little bit of the luck of the Company. I've heard some say that some ponies get the eyes when the shit gets too deep, but I've never seen it for myself. You could ask Otonashi, I think she watches out for that sort of thing."

"Nah, I don't think so, my hoof-language is for crap."

"You ought to brush up, for a mute, that pony has a lot to say. But we have preparations I'm playing hooky from here, Sawbones. See you round…" He waved one hoof over his head as he rambled off down the dock away from me, and I shook my head, remembering my own errands, and trotted off myself to track down Asparagus and Tickle Me. We needed to go shopping.

***

The port, as modest as it was, was the terminus of two branches of the Bride's Road at the head of the great inland sea. They had a number of carters' suppliers, carriage-makers, and vehicle sales lots – and I was going to need more ambulances. We were planning on being a lot more mobile than we had been for the Openwater Bay contract, and the company had let go a lot of our bulkier equipment. Campaigning meant fighting, and fighting meant wounded, and often wounded far from my surgery. We needed something more than the few carts and supply wagons I had to hoof, and that meant ambulances. And that assumed we won all of our battles – if we needed to bug out fast, we needed to put as many wheels beneath our non-walking-wounded as I could afford.

Used cart salesponies are the same the multiverse over, and there's no such thing as a new cart. They get used as soon as they're wheeled off the carriage-maker's shop floor. Slimy, oleaginous, cart-sales-pony, they're all synonyms. This one knew she had me over a barrel, it wasn't *that* big of a town, and her stock was exactly what I needed, well-sprung, not covered in the sort of overwrought decoration that true ponies seem compelled by their marks to lavish all over humble equipages, driving up prices and attracting roadside bandits by the gangful. Dull-looking, sweetly braced with sturdy canvass hoods and spacious imperials, it was perfect for hauling multiple wounded or convalescent brothers. The only problem was…

"I don't know, these are great for my purpose, and we won't have to retrofit at all, but these are rigged for multiple carters, and we just don't have the ponies to spare to haul oversize ambulances like this. Even if I get them to second me some of the new donkey recruits…"
The earth-pony salesmare, at this suggestion, turned up her muzzle as if I had proposed feeding my patients road-apples. "What on earth are you thinking, my good zebra! We have perfectly suitable stock in the stables out back, just eating me out of hearth and stable! They're a drug on the local market, I could sell you them for a song!" Her mood had turned on a dime, suddenly swinging from a sneer to chirpy good humor. Both Asparagus and Tickle Me, who had been examining the harness displays while I dickered on the salesfloor, had shuffled behind the oblivious salespony, the both of them looking rather stormy.

"I don't quite understand you, are you saying you have a line in scouting carters' contracts or that you act as an agent for the local union? The Company generally prefers to not travel with hired help, it's generally a security-"

"Oh, no no no no, not in these parts. Almost nopony *hires* carters in this duchy. Our duchess is quite forward-thinking, and runs a proper breeding stable. Everypony who can afford it own their own haulers, and the ones who can't afford it – well, the less said of *them* the better."

"Slavery is legal here? I thought I heard something about the Bride…"

"Well, what the Bride doesn't know doesn't hurt her, and the vassalage are free in their interpretations of the common law. And in *this* Duchy, cattle are owned as they ought to be. Everypony knows they're not capable of taking care of themselves, bless their hearts. Dumber than the carts, the lot of them, and really, walking along dragging a cart is about their speed, isn't it?" My sisters-in-arms looked about ready to rip the good mare's limbs off and beat her senseless with her own hocks, but I gave them the stink-eye, and gestured for them to rein it in.

"So, could you show me these… cattle you say? Cows?"

"Oh, no, of course not. Too small for the heavy hauling. We have several braces of hearty oxen, they're quite large, and docile," she said as she led the way out back to a low-slung building in the rear. Within the spartan, hay-lined stable – like something out of the third world, you know the one where they went back to the stone age and everypony ran around with sticks and rocks because nobody remembered how to do modern things like smelt and make pottery – were hulking figures in the shadows of a row of open-faced cells. As our voices carried, the "oxen" came out into the light. Huge beasts, horned, rings through their noses and heavy chains hung between those horns with rings dangling in between.

If you haven't heard of oxen, well, you live in a better world than most, and I bless your innocence. In this and most others, the word meant "castrated bull", and that was the case with these unfortunates. Cattle were not exactly renowned for their cleverness or even good sense, but they were speaking beasts, however dull their conversation might be. Nopony ought to have their tackle stripped before they were old enough to get any use out of it. It takes a lot to make a mercenary medico sick, but our host had found the trick of it, and I was about ready to set my two valkyries loose on her. I took a deep breath, and looked across the congregation, trying to find one with that spark of coherence which might lead me out of this ugly little encounter with my self-respect and reputation intact.

A smaller ox stood to the side, in a cleaner corner of the filthy chamber, an actual expression other than dull disinterest gracing his heavy features. Admittedly, it looked rather like he was thinking of taking a dump right there in public, but it was a look, and that was something.
"You, over there, in the corner with the constipated look, what do they call you? What's your name?"

He lowed in a basso profundo greater than his height, which, while it was entire hooves higher than mine (mane-spikes included), still was on the puny side for a towering ox. "They call me Lack-Sack, or occasionally Sad-Sack. It weren't my name, but I answer to it when I can, if only so's they don't beat the others. Couldn't care less if they care to beat me, haint as if it were to make anything worse."

"Do you care to be known by that insult, or some other name if you could?"

"Don't rightly know, the names haint the worst things hever happened to us. Let me think on it?"

"Well enough, but I think I'll call you ‘Sack' for now. You the sort of cattle to keep up with the herd? We're a mercenary company, we're not chasing deadlines or profits, they're chasing us. Slow is death, do you understand me?"

He blinked, mildly. "Slow is a beating elsewhere, the distance between beaten and dead is covered by the corpses of those oxen whose owners didn't know when to stop beating." A philosophical ox! If wonders ever ceased, ponies would die of the shock.

"Would you care to cart for killers, predators, and ponies known to make bad puns?"

"Ser, if you want me to, I'll put my hooves behind whatever beast you care to leave the leading of me. Oxen have even been known to trample the slow and unwary in our time. But I don't think I have the wit in me to make puns."

"Sack, there's no wit in puns, but rather the celebration of their lack."

The salespony, who had been leaning back and sniggering as if we were a vaudeville routine, looked up at my glare, suddenly aware that I had come to a conclusion. I informed her that we would be taking a half-dozen oxen off her hands, and told her the price, on top of the highway-robbery she had already extracted from us in the sales-room for the tack, harness, and ambulances. She started blustering and trying to haggle me back up from my own little essay on larceny, until the hoof-blades crossing under her suddenly sweating throat put an end to that particular line of discussion. It was agreed that we would sweeten the pot by not carving her a new necktie, and she'd throw in the oxen for a pittance. I asked Sack to point out any relatives of his in the coffle, and he waved forward a tall pointy-headed ox with a particularly dim expression and two grizzled older oxen. Having exhausted the Sack family register, I went through the coffle, yelling for two adventurous oxen without any ties here. Another pair of brothers lumbered forward, and we chivvied the Company's new ambulance drivers onto the sales-floor to collect the carts, the tack and harness, and make our leave. The oxen perhaps brought more out of that sales-lot than we had strictly speaking paid for, but the blade-shocked mare was not in the mood for quarreling anymore. We harnessed those oxen up to the ambulances right there in the street, and I led my plunder-train through town towards the Company rendezvous, feeling properly piratical for the first time since Openwater Bay. I eyed the chains hung between their horns.

"Sack, what does the horn-chains mean?"

"Slavery-mark. Can't put us in collars with the yokes in the way."

"Hrm. We'll roll by the smiths on the way into camp. I think they can cold-chisel those off without chipping anything."

Sack gave me a skeptical sidelook.

"Ain't no slaves in the Company, Sack. Maybe next reading I'll do something from the Book of Fatinah, on the occasion of the Vizier of the Closeted Caliph trying to fold the Company into his Mamelukes, and how many household doorframes we nailed bits of vizier to as a reminder to posterity that the Black Company is a band of freeponies..."

Wouldn't you know, those oxen's eyes glowed like slit-eyed cats when the next ceremony in front of the banner-lance came ‘round? I guess our sleepy evil genius approved of my shopping tactics.

Discipline As A Discarded Encumbrance

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SBMS006

The sergeant major of the second cohort buttonholed me as I was getting the oxen acquainted with a spare section tent out of the supply wagons, prompting and directing them on the subtle details of how to set one up on their own. Look, I had just found them crashing in a filthy stable, there was no guarantees what they might or might not be able to handle. But they seemed to have figured out pegs and cord and canvas when Yew Wall ambled into my corner of the camp. I was wanted for a meeting, more of an argument from what she said, however briefly. I left the infirmary, in its customary position in the camp, same as ever other camp on this and a hundred other worlds the multiverse over, albeit under the ludricrous nom de guerre "valetudinarium".

Wherever the Company went, we found ponies or sentient creatures with translations or actual Latin copies of De Munitionibus Castrorum by Hippoginus Arator, and that universality meant that things in camps were named silly archaic things in unnecessarily ornate language, and that made Latin a sort of shibboleth for the trained warrior. There was much debate about who Hippoginus actually was, everyone agrees it was a pseudonym, and the actual pseudonym varies depending on the copy and the culture using the manual. Griffins' copies generally are attributed to Gryphioi Dioptra, and I've seen a Minotaur copy claiming to be by Mnemnt Sesotris, which I'm almost positive is some sort of linguistic inside-joke that I don't quite get.

But what all this improbably universal, possibly divine distribution means is that wherever you go among properly trained organized militaries, you'll find the foundations of castra lurking outside of major towns and crossroads. The one we were squatting in was a semi-permanent castra hibernia belonging to one of the Bride's standing regiments, or former regiments, since it had been drawn into the rebellion ahead of us, and its shameful rout and shattering had been part of the impetus for the hiring of an offworld mercenary outfit to recover the situation let go to seed by the hapless locals. Whether that regiment still existed in any useful sense was a matter up for debate. But their disaster meant that we were happily castellated behind brick walls on a comfortably regular camp-layout, everything in its place, and everything labeled in archaic Latin. Well, until we got this show on the road, despite the legionary legend, you couldn't actually uproot a permanent camp and take it with you on campaign. The town beyond the walls continued to blacken the skies to the east with an endless stinking cloud of filth, their charcoal-burners and forges smoking day and night, feeding the Imperium's bottomless appetite for iron and steel.

We walked down the via principalis to the praetorium which currently housed the Company's headquarters section, and we could hear the meeting still standing outside and halfway to the porta principalis dextra. We found the Captain and the Lieutenant standing besieged between our irate engineer Mad Jack and the other two cohort commanders, who were equally red-faced and bellowing in tandem at his stubborn mule face. One of the legate's lackeys was smirking to herself against a wall, surrounded on all sides by half-opened crates and supply chests, the guts of the Company's mobile headquarters scattered in an organized clutter at the base of every wall and across every available surface. The two sergeants glanced wearily at each other, and the commander of third cohort waved forward Tickle Me, ceding precedence to his senior.

"The entire plan of campaign for this initial season is based on mobility and celerity. We need a flying column, we need to be there before they know we're coming, and we want to be gone before their neighbors realize we've been and gone. We can't do that if every pony is carrying a brace of sudes and entrenching gear, and taking five hours a day digging out a marching camp and breaking the previous night's camp! If we could possibly rotate ponies between resting on the carts and carriages and hauling the vehicles themselves, I'd be all for making a continuous forced march once we get within striking distance of the built-up sections of Rennet!"

I went a little wide-eyed at this declaration, forced marches and refusal to entrench night camps was certainly not in any of the manuals, and was usually the mark of seriously bad news when it cropped up in the Annals. The examples I could think of off the top of my head usually came halfway through campaigns that had seen casualties of one-third or more of the extant Company.

"And I'll say it again, and keep saying it until it penetrates that featherbrain of yourn, not properly encamping in the presence of the enemy is always, in every case, in every situation, bad practice, and would get you hung higher than Hamhocks in the old Legions!" Mad Jack had clearly shouted himself hoarse by this point in the argument, and I wondered why it had taken them so long to rope me into this particular cluster. It was clearly my duty as Annalist to provide historical perspective… oh, hell, really, to pipe up with my opinion and pretend it was the word of Annalists of yore.

"And if we were your old Legions, heavy infantry with few flyers and a book of tactics oriented towards directing massed maniples against other massed armies or tribal levies, then the case for taking it slow and careful would totally be the order of the day!" yelled the clearly taxed Tickle Me.

"Lieutenant, I take it there has been a decision to get stuck in rapid-like before they know we're there?" I interrupted, looking around for the rest of the legate's lick-spittles and spittoon-cleaners. "Where's our employer? Or, at least the rest of them?"

"The legate is a busy pony, and had other business to the Eastwards. I have been given full authority in the Marklaird's absence," smirked the jumped-up jenny, who couldn't be older than nineteen summers, and for all her town bronze, wasn't really capable of contributing anything useful to the conversation, as witnessed by the meaninglessness of her pointlessly authoritative interjection.

"So, it's been requested that we arrive with all speed in-theatre, Miss…"

"My name is-"

"Wasn't actually asking. Yes or no, quick insert or not, by your lord's explicit will?"

She pokered up, her dignity offended by my lack of manners, but nodded starchily without further interjection or puffery.

"The hope is that we can make use of the witches' darksight cantrips and some tricks we have in mind," explained the Lieutenant, "and terrorize the rebel forces. They're not exactly militias, but they've not been an organized force for very long, this is only their second campaign season in the field, and intelligence claims they're shaky. If we can get them running, we think they'll fragment."

"Hah! More like hope. The enemy's morale is never as shaky as the spooks say it is, any more than our allies as solid as the liaisons claim. You know that!" Mad Jack was now painting outside of his lane, he wasn't a trained officer, just an ascended old pioneer we'd picked up from a long-ago contract with the New Roamish legions as auxiliaries four or five worlds back. Long before my time, and before the time of everypony present but the Captain, who had been a junior sergeant with the then-aerial second cohort in those campaigns. From the Annals I knew this sojourn with the New Legions wasn't the first time the Company had fought under that strict discipline, but Mad Jack took an especial ownership of that particular sub-tradition. And that reminded me that it was a mighty tradition, excellent for cultivating discipline in gormless new recruits and beating old grumblers back under the standards with which they had been trained. We would be an increasingly shaggy and wild band of hussars if we didn't beat the basics into the sections now.

"Blast. I can see the need for flying-column tactics, and the black-hearted buccaneer in my ugly shriveled heart delights in the prospect. But we do have a lot of recruits in the ranks, and a lot of veterans who have been going slack in garrison without the usual discipline. We really ought to have been performing the manual the whole way from the portal to Rime, and I regret the lost time. Better to have the troops with the experience and mind-set, than to rush madly into the rebellious province with a half-trained, half-blown brigade of wildlings that can't fall back on the fruits of that training." I could see the sergeants were deeply disappointed that I wasn't supporting their wild hair. But hasty hosses into battle were going find themselves stacked like cordwood in my shiny sorta-new ambulances more like than not. I turned to the Captain, who certainly remembered the value of legionary discipline.

"There isn't as much of the campaign season as I'd like left to us in this latitude. Maybe another eight weeks before it starts getting muddy and cold. Rennet is a week's forced march, but three weeks doing it the right way hauling entrenching equipment and digging our way across the countryside. And that tends to piss off the peasantry, ripping up good land just before the second harvest. We'll have to spend a couple days harvesting oak for the stakes, too, and there isn't anything useful within two day's march of this voracious, alicorn-forsaken, belching hellhole."

Mad Jack had a plan for marching cross-country north of the Bride's Road, the whole Company less a courtesy covering force with the carts and carriages on the main road, wanting to have the rank-and-file tromp uphill to a surviving stand of oaks and chop them down with axes & carve out sudes, or stakes for the regulation palisades. I suppose he had been doing his research with the local rangers, to know where available woodlots were and their status. You could see from the gleam in his eyes that he was eager to get out into the forest and butcher him some innocent trees. He really had been going spare from all those years stuck on a set of unforested tropical cays and overbuilt dockside cityscape around Openwater Bay.

The Captain hesitated, conflicted. The setting sun suddenly shone through the open flap of the headquarters tent, bringing a strange glint to his eagle-eyes, making them look briefly more draconic than avian.

"No, no delay. We can substitute other factors for the lack of practiced march-discipline. Sawbones, we'll be stopping every evening at full dark, and you'll be reading from the Annals. Make it something blood-stirring, and we'll see what we can do about adding some drama and theatrics to the presentation. Sergeants, you're so set on this flying-column business, I want you to raid the Annals and your own ranks' evilest imaginings and experience. I want us to be Tartarus on the march, I want those rebels to think the Wild Hunt is harrowing Rennet. The moral is to the physical as three to one… we're jettisoning the discipline aspect of that ratio, we need to compensate accordingly."

"They've never heard of the Black Company on this world," I mused aloud. "We need to make their first encounters such a terror that our reputation races ahead of us to empty their bowels and pin their patrols to the gates of their strongholds. No matter what their numbers, if we recruit their fears, we *are* legion."

The sergeants looked impressed. I must be getting better at this Annalist business of bullshitting with a solemn face. I hated this entire plan, but the Captain had made his decision, and in Tambelon we would be madcap, madness and night-terrors. Goodbye, discipline and good order.

"We'll need blacking for the troops' barding and weapons. Mad Jack, can you source some charcoal for the cohorts?" The Lieutenant walked out of the tent leading the fuming engineer, talking him down from his offended snit. I suddenly realized that I had a lot of reading and preparing for the Captain's nightly readings. I went off to find Gibblets, I needed coaching. If I was to inspire discipline from thin air, glamour and sheer charisma, I'd have to conjure up my inner pulpit-thumping tartarus-and-brimstone preacher. At that moment, I regretted being the godless unchurched heathen that my damnable parents had raised.

The Flying-Column

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SBMS007

"…as the cloaked storming party rushed through the betrayed gate past the shame-muzzled Amorian dogs, the darkened sky over the donjon in the near distance was set alight by the mage-fire incendiaries the aerial cohorts rained down on the garrison's main reaction force. Few of the Eighters held the walls of Jbayel on that sultry late-summer night, the Mare Tenebrium only beginning to breath cool sea-breezes on the glowing embers of the Cinebar Coast, and they had left the city watch to their own devices..."

As I chanted from the first volume of the Book of Fatinah, Sack and his brother beat a heavy cadence on these huge drums a sad-eyed Gibblets had found in a leather-goods shop in that port at the head of the inland sea. The western sky behind the rapt assembly and their vehicles strewn unhitched down the Road dimmed with the last furious fire of twilight dying. My muzzle under the hood of my shaman's-cloak must have been the only part of me the audience could still see, those not glowing-eyed with the darksight the warlocks were busy casting upon the brethren here and there as I spoke, in preparation for the night-march to come. No point wasting the time it took for me to conduct the evening reading; at the same time, the leadership were off consulting with the representatives of the first cohort, planning the night's airlift to the forward position they were constructing in the rebellious province below that last spark of flame in the west. I and my oxen percussionists did our best to conclude the reading in the proper style:

"The defenders found themselves not only unaware of the assault under which their walls fell, they knew what was not so. We were not there, burning the walls of their citadel, we were not in the souks of their outer hamlets, suborning the dubious loyalty of their heathen Amorian dog vassals, we were not in position to take the city by storm. The Hashish-mares and their sell-lances were raiding convoys three days march across the high passes into the Vaakaii that very afternoon, reported by a *trusted* source." Sacks' hooves flourished on the head of his drum at that exclamation in emphasis, getting into the spirit of the thing.

"A trusted source that had been compromised by the Company's witches for this very purpose. The watch were cut down post by post, all but the few dogs serving among their members, who turned on their fellows quite swiftly and ruthlessly, a decade of religious bigotry and abuse avenged without mercy in a sharp-bladed instant. The city walls fell before the Eighter garrison was even aware the attack was two-pronged, that there was anything but the bat-ponies and their flaming caracole above their ramparts, and while they were struggling to keep the reinforced walls of their citadel's redoubt from liquefying under the fiery rain, the Company's groundponies swept through the outer fortress's kill-zones before the defenders could get to the murderholes. The slaughter was swift inside the citadel curtain walls, and when we barred the gates of the donjon with their own lumber against the defenders inside their burning bulwark, it flared like the vast oven it had become. No Eighter emerged from the fuming furnace, and Jbayel stank of roasting horse-flesh for days and nights. The first great port on the Coast had fallen to the Company's employer al-Telekker. Hasaynn the Sightless used a cantrip to turn one of the hung ponies on our revenge-banner from argent to gold, and the first martyr had been avenged. Thus wrote Fatinah the Annalist, in the days of the Company's service to the Old Mule of the Mountain, his hareem of blood-thirsty heretic mares, and our own revenge."

The oxen went wild on the great hollow drums, battering the stretched cow-hide and producing a thunder like the enraged heart-beat of an angry God. I wondered what they thought of playing instruments made from the tanned skin of their folk. It seemed from their intensity like the perversity of it all appealed to them, but I was still feeling out the humor of these much-abused ponies.

Yew Wall walked back from the nightly conclave, which had apparently taken our drumming cue as a signal to break their own meeting with the conclusion of the assembly. She bellowed at the gathered Company, shouting for everypony to find their places, and the night-shift to get harnessed so that we could get this show on the road. The day-vanguard and its night-shift replacement had gone out ahead of the flying column, and the day's rearguard had joined us as the tale of the first fruits of Fatinah's meticulous vengeance had come to a conclusion of thundering drums in the darkness. We would leave the dark-shift rear guard lurking in silence while the main column chased the vanguard and caught up with the rest of the weary day-shift. The oxen of the night shift got yoked to their ambulances, which would house our share of the day's marching column, as well as their brothers of the day.

Thus we had spent the past five days out of the castra hibernia, marching patiently day and night, pausing every evening for me and the oxen to polish our performances before an increasingly tired audience, and briefly every morning for the cooks to distribute cold rations from the supplies. Nopony jeered at the readings anymore, or made snide comments. I couldn't tell if that meant that we were getting better, or nopony had the spare energy to carp at the nightly aesops of blood and vengeance and sly slaughter held in a hidden hoof.

There were more members of the first cohort with the column at that moment as we got ourselves back together for the evening road, than there had been for days. Two nights back, the main body of the aerials had surged forward, led by a handful of pathfinders into Rennet proper.

The Bride's Road lumbered implacably down out of the low timbered ranges around the head of the inland sea, ignoring all prompts of the landscape itself, merely following the inflexible and forceful command of the Bride's civil engineers, diverting streams and tearing down hillsides alike. It was a straight dagger pointed out of the ore-rich ranges into a land of fat farms scored flat and damp by the rake of a careless, vicious giant. Glaciers had cut this land smooth, leaving innumerable small ponds and lakes all over the landscape, separated by fertile soil bare inches above the water-table.

Everywhere that ponies hadn't beaten back the brush, trees grew thick in between prairies too soggy to support tree-roots. Everywhere that ponies settled – and they were everywhere in that land – the prairies were drained into rich blacksoil cropland, and the native woodlots cut down and re-seeded with endless orchards of fruit-trees, primarily apples. The earth-ponies loved their apples, and they had dug into this land like ticks on a diamond dog. Their caribou and donkey neighbors, on the other hand, had brought their cattle chattel with them, and maintained great dairy herds on the less promising soils in between the earth pony hamlets. The legate's liaison informed me, lounging that first evening in one of the ambulances, in between whining about her aching over-exerted legs, that the region was known for its mind-blowingly great wheels of hard cheese, which were delicacies prized across the whole of Tambelon. Despite the whining, she was already starting to acclimate to the way the Company did things. The resiliency of youth! I was so impressed I almost let her tell me her name. But not yet, can't spoil the young, or they'll grow up bitter and cynical.

So Tickle Me's harriers ranged into the rebellious province on the third night, carrying the enchanted darksight medallions, or at least, as many as the straining witches' section had managed to produce in those days on the road. They had converted one of the heavy carts into a travelling workshop, and it glowed and sparked day and night as they tried their best to make an assembly line out of fine smithy work and dark sorcery. They had produced enough by the third night that the pegasi and griffins managed to invade Rennet without anypony noticing, and without too many Company ponies running into trees or each other in the dark waning moon-light.

Tickle Me and her sergeants and corporals had a number of tasks, four goals, and one priority – Don't Get Caught. Of those four goals…
First was to map the theatre, and find the strategic points and lines of advance. We had the Bride's military surveys, but the province had been under the control of a rebel force for a full year at this stage of the game, and an active army in the field can change the facts of the ground given time and a free hoof. Likewise, we needed to know where the granaries and food stores were located, if they had been moved, where to, how were they defended?

This tied into the second goal, which was to acquire equine intelligence, sources and agents of influence. Again, we had what information the legate had left with command, but it was largely out of date, and we could only hope that the majority of the Bride's agents in place had not been betrayed, captured, or gone over to the rebels. Strike teams had been sent to the expected contact points and known residences of these agents, to retrieve the surviving agents in tactical chariots for consultations.

Meanwhile, the third goal was the acquisition of a satisfactory position for a forward base, not actually on the Road, but convenient, away from points which would be regularly patrolled by the Rebel, or reported by rebel-sympathizers. This would also make a useful place for debriefing of possibly-not-reliable agents recovered by the teams working on the second goal, and later, for interrogation of the ponies seized in the course of the fourth goal.

The fourth goal being… capture of key enemy personnel, and pathfinding preparation for raids on resources and strategic points identified by the surveying parties working on the first goal. Loyal agents are all well and good, but the Rebel knows the Rebel best of all, and their fears would tell us what would most hurt them most rapidly. Again, the construction of a forward base would be ideal, as we hardly wanted to bring enemy combatants or civilian sympathizers back to the Company's column on the march.

This was an ambitious program for a few brief nights thrashing around in the dark in unfamiliar enemy terrain. It was lucky for the Company that the aerial cohort was composed of our most veteran and most wicked brethren. These were the Old Grumblers, and they knew their business, back and forth. Amazingly enough, the liaison teams found a few of those supposed agents that first night, and the survey teams found a few granaries and rebel supply depots, as well as a good-enough position for the forward base. The Rebel had been lazy and shiftless, and hadn't bothered with any ambitious engineering projects other than a few desultory barricades a half-day's amble inside the province's borders, on the Bride's Road and two secondary trade routes on our side of Rennet. Tax-collection posts for the new polity's excise agents, apparently.

Tickle Me's sky-bandits gathered that first pre-dawn, too far from the flying column to return without being seen by unfriendly eyes; a brace of couriers were dispatched to sneak back to the rest of the Company, hopefully one pegasus ambling across the high clouds far above would be far less obviously "enemy" than a great flock of armed ponies streaming by overhead. The survey teams led the rest to the proposed forward base site, which proved to be much less suitable in the morning light. They couldn't do anything about the survey failure, and turtled up in the woodlots, trying to look more like a suspiciously large concentration of bums, hobos and gypsies than a camped enemy detachment to the neighboring earth pony homesteads within eyeshot of the meadow, which the survey team had overlooked in the darkness of the night before.

The second night they found an actual site for the forward base, and had someplace suitably remote for Mad Jack and his drafted ground-ponies to quickly level and lay out a ranger's redoubt in the deep woods. The engineering detail had been ferried forward from the flying column in the tactical chariots, which were invaluable transportation tools, but sadly limited in their carrying capacity. Mad Jack, his draftees, and a small collection of logging and digging implements strained the chariot-ponies to their utmost that night.

I'm told that the opportunity to lay about himself in the woods with a double-bladed axe turned the old mule up sweet for the first time in half a generation, and he went wild on the project, quickly constructing a marvel of concealment and defense, seemingly larger in the inside than the outside, as he used logged but not trimmed trees to conceal the compound walls, and then got his draftees working at digging out from underneath, seemingly developing unexpected Changeling-like capacity for tunneling and warrening. He employed every evil trick in the book to drain that deep delving, I still don't know how exactly he managed to maintain an underground base in a land with such an aggressively high water-table. But by the time I laid eyes on the forward base, it was a proper hive, and a wood-aligned earth-pony private among the draftees had convinced the logged trees lining the concealed walls to re-root and not wilt all that badly. You could literally sit on the wall of the compound and never notice that there was a klatch of reivers lurking under your hocks.

This night, the evening of the reading of Fatinah's account of the sack of Jbayel, was the night that they ferried half the witches' section forward to the base under construction, as well as a hooful of ground sections for security on the forward base. We were left with the bare minimum of pegasi for the combat air patrol covering the Company, from the vanguard well in front of the main column, to the rear guard twiddling their hooves on the road behind us, lying in wait to see if any spies or rebel long range scouts were dogging our fetlocks. I settled on the imperial of the forward ambulance, in place to keep an eye on the donkey recruit assigned to haul my medical supplies wagon while I rested the night shift away. Not that I didn't trust the eager Halon, but, when it came to narcotics and other such drugs… trust but keep an eye peeled.

We had paused the column where the Road cut through a deep copse, a couple miles outside of a town in the province to the east of Rennet, four or five reasonable days' march from the excisers' barricade in rebel-held territory. As we marched into town in the darkness, the townsponies' lamps winked out one by one as we approached. The pools of darkness left on each door-step by the absence of their extinguished lights seemed to spread, extending tendrils across windows still a-glow from the fires and lamps within each domicle, wide-eyed ponies and donkeys drawn by the silent tromp-tromp-tromp and the rolling darkness gathering momentum around us. Otonashi had apparently not been part of the half-section flown out by the pegasi, this was one of her favorite tricks. The tendrils of smoke-stuff reached inside each house as we passed, and if I knew her tricks, they'd soon be whispering blasphemous insinuations and veiled threats in the ears of random observers. It would all be nonsense, too quiet to really make out, and probably in accents so thick as to be incomprehensible to their unnerved targets if they could hear what the shadows were saying. This was the only way that the mute Otonashi could produce spoken language, and if those horrible shadows were a sample of what she would say if she could speak aloud, I certainly was not inspired to learn enough hoof language to talk with that spooky witch.

These weren't our enemies, but they knew those who knew those who were living under the rule of the rebel. Rumor would build up this little bit of showmareship until it smashed upon the shores of rebel morale at exactly the right time – a week or more after we arrived in Rennet, and long after our advance forces had started causing real damage. Everything would seem to crash their limited intelligence resources at the same time. I made a note to suggest we use the tactical chariots to ship Otonashi and a couple other warlocks to the other routes into Rennet and see if we could repeat the performance in towns on other lines of advance. It would muddle their estimates of our numbers and our direction, and perhaps make them dismiss the reports this display would generate as just another bit of flash. Always, always give them more than one shell when you're playing the shell game.

The morning light came all too soon, and we were an entire day's march from that nameless farm town still quaking with the fear we had planted on their stoops and cobblestones. I made the rounds of the night-vexillations and the night carters, checking for injuries and strains caused by ponies unused to marching in the primal darkness of late summer, shading quickly into the first chills of fall. Fewer injuries that night's march, and the ones hurt in previous nights were responding well to the compresses and potions distributed the day before.
The temporary night-sight cantrips had covered enough of the night-vexillation and the night shift of the carters' corps that we were getting past our awkward phase, and the remaining witches had generated a surprising supply of permanent night-sight medallions. The remainder of that section had slaved all through the night, the glare from their cart-workshop barely contained by another matrix designed to hide the light pollution from both the leading elements of the column, who we didn't need night-blinded, and the watching eyes of the countryside. The half-successful nature of this muffling matrix made our column look from the outside like a procession of blackened shapes, drawn by glowing cats-eyed horrors, with the centre of the procession fuming and glowing darkly like a volcanic caldera half-obscured by its own smoke and cinders. If anything, in retrospect, I suspect we were even more terrifying than we had truly intended. Nopony approached the column, in the morning light, or at any point in those late stages of the forced-march.

I went to the HQ wagons to make my readiness report for the day, and pass along my suggestion about the dummy performances by the Otonashi revue on other approaches to the rebel province, and was told to go teach my grand-dam to suck eggs. I narrowed my eyes at this inappropriately Griffish rejoinder, but took it in the spirit it was intended. They knew what they had, here, and were certainly already planning that exact extension on last night's extemporary performance.

"Sawbones, your continued attempt to tell me how to do my job aside, the night's couriers say that we need your presence in the forward base. Your presence and your medical supplies. You still have the recipe for tongue-loosening cocktails, don't you? The warlocks' attempts at subtly wringing information out of the results of our first sweeps were… disappointing. Gibblets was less successful in replicating his old partners' tricks than he had promised, and Shorthorn has never been any good at this sort of thing. We need an adult up there," the Captain sighed. He had taken the night-shift, and the Lieutenant was munching on raw coffee beans and listening to the Captain as she got up to speed on the happenings of the night.

"Wish you had asked earlier in the night while we still had the darkness. How am I going to get up there now? You can send single pegasi back and forth and if they find the right clouds, nopony on the ground will see them, but any damn fool can spot a zebra in a chariot from ten thousand feet below," I pointed out. "Also, what are we going to do about the readings tonight?"

"We have had five nights of readings, that should suffice, I think. You were more effective last night than you think, you and those bulls of yours. We should be hitting their revenuers' post in a couple nights, anyways. Time to start working on getting our game faces on," he yawned, looking towards his pallet at the back of the cluttered wagon. "And that means getting you up to the forward base so that you can set up your infirmary and operating theatre there, and potioning the hell out of our prisoners so that the rebel can worry about their casualties instead of you working on ours. I'll have Asparagus oversee your bulls, and make sure they're taken care of. She seems to have taken to them well enough, they're sort of carters-corps adjacent when you think about it."

"I'll leave it in the hooves of Tickle Me's charioteers, Boss. But please, don't call the oxen ‘bulls', they know what they are, and pretending otherwise just will make them… sad," I said, making myself melancholy just talking about it. And less than thrilled by the prospect of a wild daytime chariot ride behind some featherbrained hellions. I was envious of their wings, but actually being hauled flightless through the airy deeps in under the naked sun? I would be a whiter zebra than those spooked ponies back in that Hunt-struck market town we had terrorized last night.

Bad Goblin, Good Witch-Doctor

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I was in no mood to marvel at the rapid work the pioneers had done on the forward base when I wobbled off the back of the chariot, wind-blown, pale and unsteady on my toes. The wooded lots surrounded the concealed tent-halves and wooden palisades quickly disappearing behind brush and treelimb camouflage. By the time the work details were done, it would look like an extension of the neighboring woodlot into that shaded meadow on a slight rise. Gibblets and Shorthorn hurried up to the vehicle where we had landed in the limited open space in front of the base, intent on helping me unload my supplies. They led me back through the entrance, which was rapidly being concealed by a work detail in the dappled afternoon light.

"All hail the conquering witch-doctor! Come to save us with his jungle hoodoo, do his evil dances, put us all in trances!"

"Yuck it up, bog-hopper. I feel as green as you look. What happened to the mighty mind-control wizardry you chuckleheads were going to wow us with?"

"It turns out I didn't remember Mesmer's matrixes as well as I thought… mostly they just screamed and screamed."

"That was just your ugly face, Gibblets. They started screaming *before* you started failing to cast," Shorthorn smirked at his fellow witch as we passed from bright daylight into the muddy darkness of a compound only days old, and still heavily under construction. I exchanged brief greetings with Tickle Me, who was bent over rough-sketched maps and notes with one of her non-coms, busy planning the evening escapades. The necessary courtesies observed, the hedge-wizards dragged me back to the corner of the compound which had been set aside for the interrogations and, eventually, my infirmary once we cleared out the riff-raff.

"How are we holding them for now? This place is impressively far along, but you can't possibly have had time to put in proper holding cells."

Gibblets grinned evilly, clearly proud of his wicked self, and pointed to a set of roughly-woven mats along the outer wall.

"We have them under there, in partially-drained sump holes, hobbled. Not too deep that they'll drown, but it keeps them from getting frisky. And the mats are thick enough they muffle the screams if you listen above, they can't be able to hear much of anything from below."

"And you wonder why the only thing they could do was scream. Wonderful. Do you have a place to interrogate them? Something to sit on, a table to pound?"

"We have some cut logs in the right configurations, over there. Don't you need to whip up some Discord's breath, make with the graveyard dust, distill some zombie juice?"

"You have an overactive imagination. And scopolamine is overrated, it makes them hallucinate and imagine weird crap. I don't want to spend the next week teasing the slivers of truth out of a soupy broth of crazy fantasies. In fact, I wasn't planning on spending the next week interrogating post office inspectors and junior dog-catchers. Bring in that junior wand-twiddler you lot picked up in Rime, and we'll train her up on how to do this right, so I don't have to. We'll have accidents and casualties enough to keep me bloody and tired night and day, soon enough. Speaking of which…"

We put our heads together, and I explained the materials and the effect we'd be looking for…

***

The warlock-recruit sat beside me in a matching shaman's-cloak, improvised from a blanket and some quick needle-work. I preferred to do this routine hock-deep in half-dried blood, but beggars can't be choosers, and I wasn't willing to cut up a prisoner for the effect. Gibblets was artfully disheveled, and he scurried to the first of the improvised oubliettes, drawing off the mat and eliciting a soggy shriek from the pony below. He roughly dragged her from her half-drained cell, and stopped her muzzle with a dirty rag to spare our offended ears, bringing her over to the interrogation area, which with its rough-hewn log chairs and table-pile looked more like the corner table at a logging camp gin-joint than a dungeon torture-chamber. Shame.

The prisoner's terrorized eyes darted from the admittedly dreadful-looking Gibblets, leering theatrically, to the two of us in our chairs, faces hidden below hooded cloaks in the flickering torch-light. I began chanting rubbish and nonsense in what little Zebric I could remember from my grand-pappy's wizened mother-in-law, who liked to cuss us out in what I suspect was absolutely filthy gutter-trash dialect. She was a foul old mare. I waved my hooves over the restrained and quivering earth-pony, and then gestured at my hooded assistant, who hoofed forward two glasses, one a flask from my alchemical kit bubbling evilly and greenish-thick in the dim light, and the other a tumbler full of whiskey, the bottle sitting further back on the table with a second tumbler.

"The Doctor says, you have two choices. You can be stubborn, and foolish, and he will make another goblin for his collection, I will pour this transformative into your mouth with this funnel, and your body will match your soul, and your soul will belong to him, and the thing which you will become, will tell us everything we need to know in the end," and the witch-apprentice waved at Gibblets, who showed all of his snaggly teeth in a demented, demonstrative grin. An illusion would serve later on when we didn't have Gibblets' services, but why not use the tools at hand while you can?

"Or," I rumbled in my best evil-witch-doctor voice, "me na una katch a squat, an dwound dem libbers, un haf langwdge cibble-like."

"Or we can discuss matters like civilized ponies over drinks," the apprentice translated.

Gibblets helpfully removed the gag, and the pony spat twice, getting the taste of the foul rag out of her mouth, possibly also demonstrating some bravado, I wasn't sure.

"I do believe I'll take the whiskey, if you don't mind."

***

Three laudanum-laced whiskeys later, the mayor was rambling uncontrollably about rapacious rebel militias, grasping millers, food shortages, and sneaking informers. The thing you have to know about ponies is, that ponies want to talk. They generally need to talk, and it takes very little prompting to get them to talk their heads off. Come over too heavy, though, and they remember their duty and their neighbors and their reputations, and they poker up. But give them a good scare, leave them miserable and solitary for a day, and then give them a sympathetic ear and a drink and someone who they think can't understand them, and they'll give you the whole store. Alcohol takes time, laudanum was faster, and barbiturates are quickest, but also the most dangerous. But we're not the gendarme, and we don't have to worry about evidentiary standards, just whether or not we're getting true information out of our subjects.

My acting-choice of "incomprehensible Zebra witch-doctor" was mostly a ploy to get out of this distasteful duty as soon as possible, but the new warlock was a quick study, and she'd mostly taken over the interrogation-cum-drinking session by the sozzled end of things, as we drank from tumblers carefully filled with strong ice-tea when the target wasn't watching, and she guzzled her laced rotgut as if it were beer. It helps if you don't feed or water the target for their period of isolation, they crash fast. It also means you have a narrow window of drunken lucidity before they pass out, though.

We worked our way down the line of filled sump-holes as evening blurred into night, and Gibblets was replaced by an illusory goblin spun over a detailed private-cum-jailer by the new apprentice, whose name I finally had committed to memory. The Crow had done a passable job of mimicking her superior, and the jailer-goblin helpfully lurched about in his best impersonation of the departed wizard. I wrote out the relevant details in the breaks between interrogations, and refreshed the soda ash in the "potion" flask, as the Crow and her new assistant hauled the latest drunkenly snoring pony out of the interrogation chamber.

It had gone about as well as could be expected, and we'd even cleared the oubliettes before the first of the strike-teams streamed in with the night's catches. By the next evening, we might even catch up well enough that I could start doing my actual jobs, getting ready for casualties and taking notes for the Annals.

I'd need another space for my infirmary, though. I couldn't have sump-holes full of standing, stinking water in a space I was planning to perform surgery in, for the love of the caduceus!

The Battle of Lait Blanc

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The first engagement of the campaign came on a sunny early fall afternoon eight days after the Company broke camp. The flying column had made excellent time, and outran all news of its passage. The Captain went into laager beside the Bride’s Road just outside of the reach of the Rebel’s forward patrols, as the Lieutenant was airlifted to the forward base to take control of operations inside Rennet Province; I and the witches-coven rode Air Pony on the return leg.

I looked over the supplies, wagons and ambulance-corps I had left behind during my sojourn playing Tartarus-bartender. While the rest of the column took a much-needed half-day’s rest on the provincial borders, I made sure the oxen were prepared and everypony were in good condition from the long march.

That brief rest left the ground cohorts relatively rested and sharp; they re-dressed ranks and advanced in proper array, leaving those of us in the support column and rear guard behind as they stormed down the main road into enemy territory with a flourish. I’m told the excise officers and their small complement of soldiers – a corporal’s guard completely unprepared for what thundered down the macadam towards their paltry barricades – stared stupidly at the on-rushing cavalcade, and didn’t even notice the detachment of pegasi and griffins who took their position from behind, trampling the lot without mercy.

After a few moments of organized chaos as the main force charged ahead, the carters’ corps and support ponies started moving the wagons down the road into the province. The vehicles were much lighter without an entire shifts worth of slumbering ponies draped over every flat surface, but we were also just ourselves, without our seconded and detailed brethren-soldiers lending their muscle to keeping the rattle moving down the queen’s highway. Two warlock-mares, Otonashi and the Crow, accompanied us as we rolled westward through the fighting. We reached the scattered barricade, the barriers ripped away from the roadway, blood and bodies strewn across the verge underneath the sudden mounds of rubbish which had been a set of gates, fencework, and a short tower now leaning cock-eyed away from the roadbed in the lengthening shadows beneath a glorious sunset.

The total surprise had been such that not even one got away to warn the pair of regiments bivouacked a quick canter down the Road from the barricades, outside the first major market town inside Rennet. Some thought was given to providing our own warning of the breach of the border, as our plans had been made in the expectation we would have to ambush the reaction force, but more flexible minds overruled this attempt to get clever, and instead, the pegasi led the full strength of the ground cohorts around and up to the rear of the furthest of the enemy’s two regimental compounds, which they knew would not be prepared for a sudden assault.

The Company’s ground-ponies attacked the walls from in front of the last glare of the setting sun, rolling right over the posted guard and their neglected walls with as much ease as the aerials had taken the barricade. Earth ponies charged and bucked the walls en masse, bringing down an entire section as sweetly as a lesser force might have taken down a post-fence, and the donkeys and zebra raced to spit the few rebels in sight.

The unicorns passed through those ponies as they took down the wall and its few defenders, and rushed through the compound, isolating the various buildings, the barracks from the mess-halls from the officers’ quarters. As it was dinner time, the regiment’s caribou were mostly crowded together in the mess hall, and a scratch unicorn chorus’s communal shield sealed the front entrance to that building, with another detachment swinging around the rear of the building to cut down anypony who figured out that their own buildings had more than one egress, and to watch for attempts to cut an escape hatch through the building walls. A detachment of griffin pyro specialists were sent for, as the enemy mass was contained unarmed but for trencher-knives within their own mess hall. Sections of unicorn swordsmares and archers skirmished with those rebel soldiers and officers who hadn’t been eating or on guard, until every eye in the compound focused on the sudden pyrotechnic burst on the mess hall’s peaked ridge, the flames flowing like liquid downslope along the tiled roof and bright into the gutters and eaves in the gathering gloom.

This panicked the caribou outside of the trap, and half of them ran for the second regiment, while the surviving officers tried to rally the remainder in a sally to break the Company’s hold on their trapped compatriots’ only means of escape. By this point the rest of the Company had joined the unicorns within the compound itself, and a tidal wave of donkeys, zebra, and earth ponies swept away the brief counterattack, trampling the dry packed dirt of the parade ground into bloody mud.

We heard the commotion in the distance as we approached the town and its beleaguered garrison along the Bride’s Road. The witch-mares completed their preparations, and Otonashi sent out her discord’s-shadows into the town, chasing away curious eyes, terrorizing the civilians into barring their doors and windows against the onrushing Night. At the same time, the Crow lit up a simple Nothing-Important-Here amplified by blooded-crystal charms and fetishes mounted on most of the vehicles of the column. It couldn’t have been all that powerful, as the Crow wasn’t exactly a powerhouse of puissance, but it was sufficient to distract any already-distracted observers, and we rolled in obscurity through the outer borough of that town shivering behind their shutters, towards the screaming and fires and sounds of clashing weapons.

The retreating remnants of the shattered rebel regiment fell back on the confused elements of their sister regiment now cautiously and timidly filing out of their own compound in the near distance. The aerial detachments formed up over the Company with pyrotechnic devices hung below their wings, ready to divebomb the reinforcements when the second regiment’s milling soldiers and officers managed to dress formations and counterattack.

The wall breached by the Company’s attack wasn’t facing the expected direction of the counterattack, being opposite of the second regiment’s compound, and this meant that the Company could turn the rebels’ own fortifications, however feeble and unworthy of the name, against them. In the darkness of onrushing night, the second regiment never quite got up the sack to charge the walls by torch-light and the glare from the burning mess-hall, and the glowing green cats-eyes lurking on every fire-step along the walls awaiting their charge most likely did nothing to fire their ardour.

We rolled past this Mexicolt standoff along the Road outside the town proper, passing not four hundred yards from the front gates of the second regiment’s compound, vulnerable and only lightly protected, although the pegasi and griffin circled overhead, ready to pounce on any move by the enemy to turn and stop the vulnerable and irreplaceable vehicles of the Company. We passed in silence, protected from detection by the Crow’s cantrips and the enemy’s fixation on the massively effective diversion provided by their brother-regiment’s rank and file roasting in a great blaze and the beasts out of Tartarus that had replaced those howling dead on their own walls in the darkness.

As the rest of the column continued into western darkness, I hooked my medical-supplies wagon to the rear of another not-quite-encumbered-enough carter who gave me the silent stink-eye, and led my oxen and the ambulances around the rear of the shattered regiment’s former compound. We brought the ambulances up to the western ruins of the wall, and they unhitched their yokes, joining me as we went into the pyre-lit tartarus that the battle had made of the fortified camp. We retrieved our wounded, carried across broad ox shoulders to the waiting ambulances, and when those were found, recovered our few dead, and put them in the ambulances too. I stumbled in the half-lit darkness up to the Captain glaring over the eastern wall at the gormless enemy, panicking at the sudden flames from a passage of Tickle Me’s pegasi caracole, their wings thrumming overhead as their projectiles burst among the scattering caribou in the near distance. I informed him that we were away, our wounded and dead were following the supply train, and squatted to await his pleasure.

His glowing eyes, quite dragon-yellowish-green in the flickering night, looked over the dying flames of the mess-hall-massacre and the Company holding its positions along and behind the wall, and in flight overhead, and rumbled, "Well enough, good enough. Time to become a rumor."

We left while the getting was good. Shorthorn and the rest of the warlocks’ section weaved a grand glamour over the walls facing the milling rebels, leaving those spooky glowing eyes in place, glaring down on the unnerved enemy in the darkness, while the Company’s ponies themselves filed off the walls and joined the quiet withdrawal through the breaches in the western wall following the oxen and their equine loads in the ambulances.

A section or two of pegasi continued to swoop over the enemy, eliciting a scattering of arrows, sling stones and the occasional javelin, but the rebel were firing blind in the darkness, and only succeeded in scaring the occasional bat flying through the night-pegasi’s lazy circles. The caribou probably didn’t even notice when the last Company pony left the field, coasting conservatively off in the distance to help maintain a combat air patrol over the main force trotting off at the pace of an excited ox’s-run to join the supply column which continued its placid shadowed march into the distance, in the general direction of the awaiting forward base.

Died that evening, of wounds or instant trauma, were the following ponies:

The unicorn Dusk Flare, veteran, of a cut to the femoral artery incurred in the initial fighting to take the parade-grounds. He bled out standing on the wall with his fellows, unaware that he bore a mortal wound.
The donkey recruit Morning Glory, of multiple poisoned darts to the head and shoulders, taken while sweeping the rebel guard from the flanking walls.
The donkey recruit Inland Runner, of a forelimb detached by a mighty blow by an oversized caribou in the fighting of the initial counterattack, who was probably an enemy regimental commander, who did not survive the encounter with Runner’s file-mates.
The donkey recruit Middle Donkey, of a crushing blow to the head, I was not able to get any description of how she fell, nopony saw what happened. Sack merely found her senseless body by the main gate; she never recovered consciousness to tell her tale.

Doing The Job

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SBMS010

The forward base bulged like a stuffed sack, suddenly over-filled by an over-eager miller's apprentice flailing under a roaring screw-conveyor spewing forth more grain than expected. A compound that felt vast and cathedral-like while under construction was suddenly a cramped rabbits'-warren with the bulk of the Company crammed within its walls. Details were already digging out an extension into the woodlot to our rear.

Moans marked the work of my assistants and I as we unloaded the ambulances into my infirmary-space. They were more full than I had hoped for in this first engagement, too many of the recruits had gotten themselves hurt in the fighting, and far more veterans wounded than was strictly speaking, encouraging of the course of this campaign. I had expected more of the experienced ponies. Night-fighting was always a chancy thing, and the battle had been far too close to a stand-up fight than was really worthy of the Company. I would have to find a proper reading for the next assembly, on the virtues of not fighting fair fights, and why it was preferable to slit throats from behind than trade blows in a parade-ground, of all things!

We had only lost the one veteran to blood loss on the withdrawal, but some of the others had left me scrambling with tourniquets and bandages in the ambulances as they rolled between the rear of the supply column and the fighting mass of the Company. Most of the problem cases were just a matter of stabilization until I could stitch them up, and they were laid on cots, some of them just seconds after the carters had unloaded those cots from the supply wagons. It was a mad-house, and I was kept busy doping those I wouldn't be getting to until after the amputations.

Two recruits had mangled limbs, and would have to have them off. I knew how to stave off gangrene, and my supplies were full of distilled alcohol not because I was a terminal drunkard, but because I knew what sterilization was, and why sanitary conditions saved brothers' lives. But I didn't know how to mend a shattered hoof before the rot got in however much booze I poured over my instruments and the open wounds. All I could do was break out the bonesaws and cut the mess cleanly off, tie the blood vessels properly off with clean ligatures, put drainage and then proper bandaging and after-treatment. Thank the alicorns for ether and restraints. Later when I was satisfied that I had kept it clean, I'd suture up the stump with the remaining flaps of hide, and eventually, remove the drains. If we were lucky. If we weren't, I'd remove another bit of pony, repeat, and hope we caught the rot before the rot killed the pony. Or donkey, in these cases.

All I can say is that the smiths have a griffin who's good at making prostheses. And we have at least a dozen brothers clomping along on pegs on one limb or the other. At least there weren't any lost wings in this batch; they can't make a wooden wing, not yet.

That miserable task completed, I went on to the fun stuff, waking up the doped and low-priority to stitch together the slashes and cuts and minor wounds that they'd be laughing about later on. And everybody was willing to laugh at the groggy Octavius, who lay semi-insensate in the middle of the infirmary, surrounded by honest war-wounds waiting their dopy turn to get cleaned out and sewn up.

"Hey, Octavius, who told you you were unicorn enough to conduct a chorus? You have a filly hidden in the baggage somewhere somepony got jealous of? I've known yearlings with a deeper well than yours!" Hyssop, despite her name, was an enormous unicorn mare, I think she came from the same town they'd recruited Octavius from. She was a swords-mare from another section than the one the addled Octavius commanded, and the two of them never ceased to get on each other's cases. She was also waiting for me, holding a bloodied bandage over a nasty slash across the poll and below her left ear, which had nearly detached that organ.

"I thought the whole point of choruses was to spread the magical strain around, do things any single screwhead would burn their horn trying?" I asked as I tied off a suture on a jenny's exposed croup, sewing closed a shallow, wide slice that had nearly scalped her rear all the way to the dock.

"Well, yes, but the low-sparks are supposed to be in the chorus, not the focus. Octavius here tried to play Clover the Clever while we held the rear of that burning building, and dropped like a sack of donkeyshit after fifteen minutes. He's lucky that nopony tried to get out while we rearranged ourselves to cover the crashed shield," she explained.

"He looks like he'll recover, the horn isn't even scorched; not like what happened to you on Horse Head Island, and you've mostly recovered from that," I offered, snipping off the last suture, and nodding for the ox to lift the unconscious jenny off my impromptu surgery table.

"Only mostly. I could have been something before I overstrained, I could have been an apprentice under one of the witches. All I'm good for now is swinging big pieces of steel and playing third alto in the occasional shield chorus. This imbecile would never have made anything of himself. Might as well have been born a mudpony." Two or three half-conscious "mudponies" in earshot gave her the collective stinkeye. I just laughed and waved at her poll.

"You're next, and you don't get any ether for that one from your friendly neighborhood mudpony surgeon. Better to have you awake while I'm putting needles through your hide so close to your horn, anyways. I seem to remember Octavius got a pretty nasty wound protecting your mana-exhausted carcass from those slavers. This is the second time you've both made the infirmary together. Should we be planning a wedding?" I examined the cut on her poll once again to see if I'd have to reattach any cartilage, cleaning out the wound with a hoofed flask of dilute, clear rotgut.

"Ah. Ah! AAHAHAHAHA! Damnit, ‘Bones, don't make me laugh when you do something like that. Damn, that hurts like Tartarus."

"Be happy it's no deeper, I've had to amputate ears before," I said, scraping a bit of tissue from inside of the cut, and rinsing again, "Believe me, you don't want wound-rot two inches from your brain." Only stitches, it would reattach without serious surgery, good.

"Oh, look, Octavius is watching us," said Hyssop looking out through tears cut liberally with clotted blood and distilled alcohol. I glanced over, and saw that the horn-burned corporal was looking at the surgery in progress.

"Welcome back to the land of the living, should we call you Septimus? You've successfully burned your first and second lives. Assuming you have just the nine... and that should do it," I finished, tying off and snipping the last of Hyssop's sutures. She got up and returned to her cot on her own power.

"Now, how about you two see if you can't be an example for the recruits, and show them how you don't find your way into my surgery after every little skirmish, hmmm?" I hummed as my ox assistant shifted my next patient onto the table and I rinsed my needles and scalpels in an alcohol bath. I hoped they found another source for my medicinal alcohol, the locals seemed to prefer their beer and brown liquors, I just wasn't hearing about much clear distillate from the scouts so far, and somepony kept breaking into my supply to drink my sanitizing moonshine… At least I was in no danger of running out of suture-thread.

On the Road to Grosbach

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SBMS011

While I was hock deep in stitching together the broken ponies of the Company, I hadn't paid attention to what was going on outside of my infirmary doors. When I finally emerged from my hermitage, it turned out that the Company itself had had its own sabbatical, or at least, was busy not being seen. Command had decided that giving the impression that the attack on the regiments in Lait Blanc had been a raid was in the best interests of the campaign. The first cohort's agent within the town itself managed to get word back that no-pony had any good idea who we were, or where we had went.

Somepony had the bright idea of following up on this idea by sending aerial-mobile strike forces to wipe out the rest of the known excise stations on the secondary roads and other main Roads leading into the province. The tactical chariots could carry a hoof-full of sections, enough to act as the anvil to the aerial sections' hammer. I was glad that they had held the meeting until I could attend – because I had objections to this course of action. It struck me that they were resting an awful lot of weight on a hoof-full of ground-pony sections in case a raid went sideways, and that any serious casualties would be doubly difficult to get back to base if they had to haul them by chariot. We managed to lose one pony in the ambulances, and I had been on-hoof to do emergency stabilization on the survivors.

"Well, Sawbones, it sounds like you just volunteered for a supporting role. How do you feel about inserting ahead of time with a portable field setup?"

"Like you're proposing to dangle me off the side of the cliff, and taking bets on how wide the splatter ring will be when I fall. Can we at least ship in some more sections as a reaction force and rear security?"

So, at least I got them to not play reivers-of-the-borderlands with the bare minimum of forces. But this also meant that I needed to slap together a chariot-portable surgery tent and minimum supplies. I couldn't take Sack with me, the oxen were too damn large to waste hauling their bulk through the air in a tactical chariot. We'd exhaust our pegasi. Then I had the bright idea of claiming a few of our more mobile convalescents as orderlies, and Hyssop, while being bigger than your average unicorn, wasn't exactly sending an ox upwards on a see-saw. A jack-recruit with matching stitches on either stifle named Boardwalk was also claimed from the infirmary to complete the set for the Lieutenant's little jihad against tax-ponies.

Three nights after the raid on Lait Blanc, my mobile surgery team and the first installment of the rear security detail/reaction force was launched from the forward base for the provincial border, and the next major road southwards from the stretch of the Bride's Road we took into Rennet. I still wasn't thrilled to be packed into a rickety airframe held aloft by wishful thinking and pegasi gravity-witchery, but at least it was in proper darkness, so I couldn't see the vasty deeps between me and a shattering sudden stop to that inevitable drop. We were put into place within quick gallop-range of the border post's barricades, with enough armed ponies to make a fighting retreat if a sudden rebel patrol caught us in the dark. Honestly, it wasn't anything I'd expect of what they'd shown us so far, but we might have spooked them with the first raid, it had been a bit over the top.

Just in case, I and my freshly-dragooned orderlies found a copse of trees well back from the road, and set the table and tent-parts so that they could be swiftly raised up if there were casualties, or packed away if we had to make a run for it. Just as I was re-arranging some brush to obscure our new position, a commotion on the road heralded traffic from the direction of the border post.

At a half-hour to midnight.

We were expecting the chariots with the assault elements at any moment, and now suddenly there was unexpected activity on the road. I waved my convalescent orderlies back into the copse, and eased forward to see what was going on. My lance was leaning against my half-disassembled surgery table back in the woods, and all I had with me was a scalpel set strapped to my left forearm. At least I had an ensorcelled medallion which let me see in the dark as if it were broad day-light. Which is how I could see the half-dozen caribou in half-barding striding down the centre of the packed-earth roadway, without any lights. They didn't seem to be in any hurry, but the one in the lead certainly had her – her? Hard to tell at that distance even with the aid of the medallion, but I thought so – head on a swivel. My natural dark coloration hid me from view in the darkness, and they passed my position without incident.

They also passed the security detail, which had gone to ground at the same time I did. We were all experienced enough to expect the second half of the patrol, which arrived right on schedule with mirrored lanterns to sweep both sides of the highway, another half-dozen caribou, armed and alert. They might have caught one of our guys, I gave it about a fifty-fifty chance, but they, like most land-bound sentients, didn't generally think to look overhead.

The aerial sections earmarked for the assault had arrived overhead in a soft susurration, alerted by the bright lights casting beams across the rendezvous point. They knew how to evaluate and envelop an unexpected threat. But they needed a diversion to attract the attention of the targets, something to fixate their beams so that they could get into position.

So I started stomping through the underbrush, drunkenly singing a filthy song I'd heard a few of the recruits singing, a paean to the lady-parts of the Bride.

Och the barrowlord made him a wifie
The barrowlord rose him a wife
But no matter how deeply he plowed her
Her earth he never could bring ta' afterlife

It almost made my coat crawl to voluntarily rhyme, but I let that wash over me like the panic bubbling under my chest, under my crazed sudden decision to expose myself to a rebel patrol.

An' she wailed at the pain from tha dry poniard
And she snipped it right off at the stub
And that necromancer now haunts every boneyard
A huntin' a tool to part his sweet wife

All the lanterns were focused on my shuffling hide as I wandered aimless through the brush, trying my best to play blind drunk and lost, all while singing that stupid song at full volume.

Oh won't you offer up a pizzle ta' her lordship
Some dagger to cleave her in twain
For her lordship is still to this day unable
And never her marehood hav' slain!

The caribou were now shouting at me, demanding I halt and come out of the brush immediately, pointing what I could only imagine were weapons at me, I was too busy holding a forearm across my dazzled eyes and not even acting anymore, I was seriously disoriented.

"Which is it, guv'nr? Shall I halt, or come out there? Where am I, anyways? I went out back to drain the pipe and I'll be damned if this looks like the front of the tavern."

"Vat? Vat tavern? You're two miles from the nearest town mit a tavern! Vere did you come from?"

"What's it to you, guv'nr? Am I disturbing the town's peace?"

"Dere hain't no town, Is vat I'm saying! You're half vay to Grosbach in next province over!"

"Well, I thought I was in Grosbach. Must have gotten turned around. Can you point me the way? Or maybe your friends?"

And that was the cue. I gestured in the opposite direction as the wing-blades swinging out of the darkness, lining up my rebel friends' windpipes perfectly for the sweep of the steel in the reflected light of their lanterns. It was the sweetest setup you'd ever seen, and every single caribou jack of them went down choking on their own blood.

At that point the security detail and the rest of the professionals took over the situation, waving me back to my corner. I watched them put their heads together, and then the security ponies grabbed the dropped lanterns, and galloped off to find the first half of the patrol. With the lights out of the battlefield, the charioteers, which had been flying a holding pattern overhead, coasted in to unload the actual assault elements. The Lieutenant stomped up to me, fuming.

"Sawbones, what did you do? We could hear you singing from a thousand feet!" The mare was pretty damn loud her own self.

"Well it's a good thing we're well out of earshot of the border post, isn't it? But they seem to be running nightly long-range patrols now. Hopefully they can catch one or two of the other rebels, see if we can figure out how heavily the border posts are reinforced, because we've seen more ponies here than there should have been in the entire garrison of that post."

"I don't see a single pony here," she said, looking around at the cooling caribou corpses, "but I take your point. It still might work, and we need to give the impression that we're here anyways."

"I'd say a half-dozen unexplained dead in the middle of the road on the other side of the provincial border makes a pretty bold statement. Don't need to burn down the barricades to make that clear."

The lights dancing in the distance suddenly stopped as we argued, and a few spun around. We couldn't hear any noise, but it looked relatively close.

"Seriously, you heard us at a thousand feet? Those ponies are that far away from the looks of it, and I can't hear a blessed thing. Is that fighting?"

She narrowed her eyes at the distant glare, one of the lanterns clearly having broken and burning out its brief life in a puddle of fuel.

"Yes, that's fighting. Hopefully we can get some answers."

"Hopefully nopony comes back with a lance through their brisket that don't have antlers on their nobby skulls."

Twenty minutes later, they returned, dragging a struggling young buck, bleeding from a messy but superficial head-wound. One of them yelled at me, "hey, ‘Bones, do your witch-doctor thing, get some answers out of this guy."

I bent down to examine the buck, damn near still a calf. "It's an art, not a potion you can just pour down a pony's throat. He won't be useful for another half a day. Well, not the usual way."

I reached out and clipped him across the wound, causing him to shudder.

"Hey! Calf! Want to live? Tell us what's at the barricade, or die ugly! Give me a reason to let you live, because at this point I'm inclined to cut your throat and my losses, leave this nonsense for some other day. Whatever's waiting for us at the custom post, they can find your fly-covered corpse sometime tomorrow, no hair off my dock. Or you could be the sole survivor, get to tell a hell of a story, maybe even to your own calves if we don't kill you first. What say, calf?"

The caribou shivered in the darkness, I don't think he could see anything. I was just a shadow among shadows in the starlight, a yelling, murderous shadow with the night air starting to stink of loosened bowels and blood. He must have gone three rounds with his conscience, because I was getting out my second-worst scalpel from my kit to end the "interrogation" and resume my argument with the Lieutenant, when he saved his life.

"Fu-fu-full kompanie. T'tird battalion fifh regiment"

"*Very* good, that's almost 'name, rank, regiment'. No!" I held out my hoof before he gave me his name, "I don't need your name or your rank. Where's the rest of the battalion, the rest of the regiment?"

"Detached, battalion bak in town."

I looked up at the Lieutenant and the pegasus sergeant in charge of the aerial sections attached to this night's debacle. "Sound about right people?"

"Matches what we've seen on overflight. If they're hiding more than a company up there, they're really good at it. Enough tents behind the customs post to house that many."

I looked down at my victim. "Son, you did good. Well, not by your lights, and your surviving fellows are going to hate your talkative ass. I recommend you light out for the territories after you wake up." And I reached out with my rag full of ether, and put him out of our misery. I yelled for Boardwalk, and he came out to tie up our drugged prisoner and haul him somewhere out of the way so that the stubborn horses I worked for could plot their assault on an enemy position an order of magnitude larger than we'd planned for.

And they thought I was being overly cautious. Foals.

Still, they managed the attack on the customs post without any Company casualties. My presence turned out to be utterly unnecessary. We packed up the mobile surgery into the chariots and marched out of the province. We had run out of time to ferry the entire force back to the forward base before dawn, so instead we were going to give the burghers of Grosbach a show. The aerial cohort ponies could meet us on the road to ship us to the next target further south the next night. In for a bridle, in for a bit.

Reivers on the Border

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SBMS012

The charioteers' corps played "wolf, goose and grain of sack" with us and the ground-elements, hopping us into position onto the next road southwards going clockwise around the borders of the province. The second and third customs posts were considerably softer targets than the first two, we had apparently hit the major garrisons to the eastwards, and now were sweeping up the minor posts as we moved away from the trade routes in that direction. I justified our presence on the expedition when a pegasus caught a spearhead through her wing at the second custom post, and then an earth pony was hamstrung on his right rear leg by an unexpected blow by a customs officer no-pony had expected to be armed at the third barricade. Hamstring repairs are horrible, invasive bits of surgery, and I was quite proud of having pulled off that in a field surgery. I stitched up and stabilized both brothers, and they were evacuated back to the infirmary at the forward base, which grew increasingly distant as we worked our way along the border.

The fourth custom post was literally abandoned, and we burned the facility to make a statement, then rushed deployment to the fifth target so as to not waste the night. At this point we were in serious danger of catching up to the section of griffin scouts who the Lieutenant had finding our targets, evaluating them, and playing pathfinder for the main body of the raiding group.

We were starting to feel the rush, as the Company was running out of autumn, and the last harvest of the season was racing us like the proverbial hare catching up on the tortoise. The Captain *needed* our equipment and ponies for the projected granary raids, which had to hit before the millers started milling their harvest. We had been using under-utilized ponypower and resources while other scouting sections were busy exhaustively mapping the targets for that phase of the campaign and pre-caching equipment and corps of observation for the right moment. And that moment was not now, but it was approaching rapidly.

So we rushed the fifth custom post, expecting to take it at the gallop like the fourth post had been taken. My orderlies and I didn't even unload the mobile surgery from the vehicles, and instead we just stood by the grounded chariots and waited to see if we were needed. The security detail and ground reserve force were likewise clustered around the grounded chariots. Some of these were brand-new, hacked together out of green-wood and pioneer supplies, manufactured on the cheap back at the forward base. It turns out, once you start using the chariots for air-mobility, it's like a bad drug. You need a bigger and bigger fix to get the same rush, and we were converting more and more of the first cohort's ponies to aerial taxi duty. We hadn't yet started eyeing the griffins and measuring them for chariot harnesses, but I somehow suspected that moment, likewise, was coming.

This was the point at which a pillar of flame interrupted our reverie and turned night into day. This caused the security detail and reserves to scatter to their proper posts, galloping into the darkness around the impromptu chariot park on the packed earth of the roadway. My orderlies and I yanked my supplies and tent out of the supply chariot, and trotted to the roadside, where we rapidly kicked the tent together and I set up my table.

"We'll use the chariot beds as cots if there are multiples," I directed. There was a second flare of light, and then a third, smaller one. This was bad, we hadn't committed any serious casters to this campaign, for all of its flash, it was a glorified diversion. All we were supposed to be doing was putting the skeer on the rebel and drawing his forces to the edges of the province to defend against border-raiders and imaginary invading armies. The witches-coven was busy back in camp putting together nasty surprises for the main effort that was coming. All of which meant that we didn't *have* any warlocks to be lighting up the countryside like that. Which meant that we just drew the attention of rebel firepower, probably a rune-caster. Possibly rune-casters, plural, in which case we were boned.

A pegasus runner flew back to the chariot-park, and half-spiraled outwards until she hit the reserve corps, which had started walking cautiously forward towards the big noises and bright lights. I couldn't hear what she said to the sergeant in charge, but they broke into a gallop towards the fires, and I pulled my lance out of a chariot and set it beside my surgery table, ready for rebels, or to start stabilizing wounded, whichever the road delivered to me first.

I could hear the roaring when the reserves reached the fighting, which meant the entire countryside should have heard it as well. This customs-post wasn't like the first few barricades to the north, which were in wooded areas along the verge of the agricultural zone. Here we were surrounded by darkness and fields of nodding corn, ripened and drying in the fair autumn weather. There were farming hamlets in the near distance, on side-roads joined to the main route by crossroads every half-mile or so. This put at least four hamlets within sight and hearing of the cauldron of pyric runes and the first cohort's retaliatory firebombs.

The distinctive blue-green shimmer of a Company chorus shield lit up the night, which meant that our unicorns were still in the fight and organized. None of them were warlocks, and they couldn't really take the fight to an experienced rune-caster, but they could keep the fire off of an advancing battleline. Rune-casters weren't nearly as flexible as warlocks, and if you could get close enough to them without being burnt down by their runic fires or their curses melting your bones right out of your hides, they folded up nicely once you cracked them over the skull or spitted them on a lance.

A big burst of flame bloomed off the opposite side of the chorus-shield, like an orange-red fungus growing off the side of a half-deflated hoofball. Then… nothing. Maybe some screaming and clashing of blades, but it's easy to imagine that sort of thing in the silence after a deafening tumult like that. Then, ten minutes later, the chorus-shield dissipated. That either meant that the chorus had been broken, or that the threat was taken care of and they'd simply stopped casting the spell.

We waited in the silence, and eyed the lights of the neighboring hamlets in the near distance, looking for that distinctive flickering that would tell us that enemy reserves were approaching from their farmhouse quarters, or possibly farmers with pickaxes and hoes looking to pick over the wreckage of a losing fight for salvage and booty.

A clopping came from the direction of the now-incinerated customs post and barricade. We leaned forward on our forehooves, ready for anything.

The first figures came close enough for us to see them, and see that they were ponies carrying wounded in improvised litters. Three litters emerged from the darkness, and I sighed, and got to work.

I worked on those I could save. Two pegasi were too burned to survive and were triaged, so I could concentrate on the donkey with only third-degree burns on her forearms and right barrel. That jenny was lucky I had sufficient plantain and linseed oil ointment. I washed out her burns with alcohol, and then we covered them with the burn ointment and wrapped her in clean bandages, and dosed her with laudanum, enough to keep her from screaming every time she was jostled. There's only so much I can do about burns, but what I could do, I did, and I believe that immediate battlefield treatment saved her, because she survived the trip back to the infirmary at the forward base. In my mind, it justified all the nighttime standing about I had inflicted on my convalescent orderlies and myself up to that point.

We gave the two dying pegasi far more laudanum, enough to kill them if the burns weren't already doing that job for free. But they died peaceful, not screaming their burnt lungs out from the agony of their mortal wounds. Dead that night was Steel Wing, Updraft, and Little Wind, the last of whom died immediately on the field, and whose litter-carriers took her charred remains directly to the chariots for eventual sky-burial.

The Lieutenant pulled me aside along with the commander of the aerial detachment and the reserve force, two sergeants named Long Haul and Chestnut Shell. The gist of the debrief was simply this: this barricade had been defended by a full company, with a caribou rune-caster in command, or possibly on an inspection tour, who knows? We could pick over the battlefield and see if we could find more evidence – and at this point, Long Haul waved a wing at a waiting corporal, tersely ordered scouts back to the burned barricade to see if they could pick anything out of the rubble before any reaction force arrived on scene - but we clearly had hit a section of the border which was getting more resources than the air we'd been punching the last few nights.

This was the point at which the griffin scouts that had been busy evaluating the next road on our itinerary – an actual branch of the Bride's Road leading south-west towards the river-ports of the northernmost province of the riverlands – arrived to report on the enemy forces on that line of advance. It was not easy news – it was an actual fortress, and they reported at least three regiments with proper entrenchments and well-built walls fronted by abatis and cleared kill-zones.

That took all the wind out of our wings. We barely had any night left, and we decided to burn what little darkness we had left in withdrawing to the neighboring province to regroup. As we pulled out of the battle-zone, the charioteers quickly and rapidly staging us mud-ponies out as quickly as they could, the ponies who had been sifting through the wreckage of the battlefield flew up, reporting the approach of a rebel reaction force.

The orderlies and I quickly packed up the tent and table, and I hefted my surgical supplied onto my back as we balanced the bundled tent and table over their backs. We started hoofing it towards whatever non-rebel town lurked to the southeast along this road, and hoped we were found by a charioteer before a rebel patrol overran our flightless flight. It was a close-run thing. We saw, quite clearly, the dim dust cloud rising over a galloping herd of rebels as the last chariot lifted us into the rays of the rising sun.

The Consequences Of Poking The Bear, or, The Bear-Trap

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I could hear the Lieutenant cussing across the square as we landed. I jumped from our chariot and ran for the centre of the Company clustering in the early morning light. They were in a fairly tight grouping on the east side of an empty market square, and I found my patients easily enough, still packed into the chariot frames we had loaded them into. I waved my orderlies forward as I looked over the three of them. The one I expected to live was stable; Updraft and the other had passed on at some point during the retreat. I now understood the Lieutenant's loss of composure. She and Updraft were old cronies, they had been recruited together during the long Eastmaark contract, on the world before Openwater Bay and Crossroads. Updraft had never gotten further in the Company than corporal, but she and the Lieutenant had continued their friendship despite the differences brought by the Lieutenant's drive and ambition. And I had just killed that friend. I was in the soup but good.

I looked up as I directed my surviving patient indoors inside the neighboring tavern on the square, eyeing the gathering clouds blowing in from the west. Red sky at morning, sailors take warning… The Lieutenant stomped past my place in the market square like a bombardment walking its fire towards a doomed fortress. The rushing clouds brought a cold wind under their skirts, and I was chilled as I watched her consult with the surviving non-coms in front of the charioteers.

"If that damn…" she paused, gathering her dignity, and started again. "Tell him he's the liaison to the locals, and to see if he can keep them from getting over-run by the rebel counterstroke. We have business in Rennet, and someone has to hold the locals' hooves on this," she said to the sergeants, and turned away to the chariots, leading a contingent of the strike force still on the ground to the vehicles, and waved them forward. Long Haul packed the Lieutenant and the remainder of the assault force on the chariots, and the weary charioteers hauled them off without any further instruction. She had not actually said anything directly *to* me, and I was left exchanging uneasy glances with Chestnut Shell, the ranking non-com among the remaining brethren.

"So, " I said to Chestnut Shell, who was not in my line of command, or vice versa, "The Lieutenant seems to have left me in charge, for what that's worth."

He nodded without any sign of regret, and hoofed in the direction of an approaching officer who was neither the enemy nor part of the Company. Ah, leadership, and the residue of command.

"Greetings, your eminence, and good morning to you. Do you think the harvest will begin today, or is it to be rain and hail?" I essayed to the lieutenant, small ell, who marched up to us like she had never left the parade-ground even to piss, not since she had been pinned by her betters on escape from whatever equivalent institution passed for an officers' academy in these benighted parts.

"Ah, just a moment, please, I have forgotten something necessary which cannot wait on pleasantries." I turned to Chestnut Shell, waved in the direction of the distant smoking customs post up the road, and issued quick whispered orders to secure the edge of town around the road, find out what local defenses were in place, and if they were in as poor a shape as I suspected, put the brethren in a scratch ambush posture just inside the town where we could dismantle any reaction force or vanguard.

"My pardon, we may have issued accidental invitations to guests whose imminent arrival might cause our conversation to be disrupted if I had not ordered proper preparations. Sawbones, at your service, physician and Annalist of the Black Company, in the recent service of the Bride of Tambelon," I wittered in affected aristocratic tones at the fuming lieutenant, whom I was desperately hoping was actually an officer in the imperial army, or at least a vassal of someone answering to someone that answered to the Bride. I knew less about the province we had inadvertently invaded than I ought to have, since we were operating in neighboring Rennet.

"Who? What's a Black Company?" She eyed my bloodied cloak, and the mares-head badge of the Company that pinned it closed.

"Mercenaries, private military contractors, a Company in the grand old manner. One of your empress's legates hired us from off-world to help your superiors deal with certain problematic traitorous risings while your military dealt with larger concerns. Specifically, we're doing something about the fact that your neighbors in Rennet aren't answering the Bride's mail, and are taxing the traffic on the Bride's Roads." I was keeping one ear pointed in the direction of the ponies I had dispatched to the edge of town, hoping to not hear any sort of commotion, but expecting it nonetheless.

"Yes," she said with some irony, her own ears flattening in the first break from military decorum I had seen from her yet, "I am aware of the local outbreak of the White Rose in Rennet. We had the remnants of the first army sent to suppress the rebellion come streaming through here last spring. Well, the donkey and earth pony remnants, I'm told the caribou regiments mutinied en masse. A large force, your Company? We've been mostly observing the roads leading out of Rennet, trying to avoid provoking the White Rose, we can't possibly handle them if they decide to raid us again."

"Well, we've gone and poked the bear for you, so you'd best be prepared anyways. Speaking of preparations, what do you have on hand to handle, say, a company of caribou dragoons with their blood up? Possibly reinforced, possibly an entire battalion. Not exactly sure how big the reaction force tasked to this road's excise barricade might be, our scouts probably have numbers, but they left with my superior officer without briefing me. An unfortunate oversight, but there we are," I ended, lamely. The Lieutenant really ought to have made better arrangements…

"Reaction force? Provocation? What have you done?" She leaped forward, and grabbed me by my cloak, pulling me in close to give me a close view of the second lieutenant I'd seen today lose their shit.

"Me, personally, nothing. The vexellation I was supporting, on the other hand, descended last night on the fortified customs post on your road just to the north-west of here, and destroyed both it and the reinforced company defending it. They might be upset about the rune-caster we had to kill in the course of that assertion of the Bride's sole traffic-taxation authority in this imperium. The force at the barricade should have been a total loss, but there were signs that their supports had been warned and were moving to contact when we evacuated the battle-space. Clouds of dust, signs of ponies on the march or possibly the gallop, you know, the whole drill. My people are preparing a reception if the reaction force develops into a probe into this province. What's the name of this town, by the way? And while you're at it, you could introduce yourself. I can't keep thinking of you as Lieutenant Hey You."

"Corporal!" she yelled at an earth-pony non-com standing at ease by the tavern door nearby. "Call out the guard! All shifts, rally them to this square! Then send a runner to alert the militia captain!"

"And you – you've brought destruction to my doorstep! It won't matter what name this town has if the caribou *burn it to the ground*! They destroyed a hamlet a half-klick to the southeast earlier this summer for an offense much less serious than destroying one of their excise posts!" She almost started hyperventilating in a panic as her subordinate galloped off to collect her troops, such as they might be. And I still didn't have a name for my local officer or her allegedly-doomed town.

"Hey You! Numbers! Names! What do I have to work with? Focus on now, and worry about later when there is a later. Start with your troops. How many trained? You mentioned militia? Are *you* militia, or are you regular? This'guard', are they regulars?"

I did my best to get her on task, and continued the rapid-fire interrogation, wishing for a moment for the Crow and my medicated bottle of doped whiskey. But I couldn't work with a lieutenant stoned out of her mind, any more than I could with a panicky one. But walking her through these questions awakened her dormant training, got her on task, and between the two of us, we worked out what resources we had, and how to slot them into what defenses they had on hand. She led her guard to the edge of town. They were a sort of glorified militia, younglings recruited into "active duty" and maintaining the facilities for the general militia in the town – Pythia's Fell, btw, finally a name! – when that organization was called to arms. Most of the general militia was out of our means for contact, and it might take a week to call up the local regiment from their civilian business in the hamlets and farms surrounding the Fell.

What we had to work with was the hoof-full of Company sections the Lieutenant had left in my care, and a roughly equal set of town guards in sketchy barding and cheap spears. Looking them over, I knew what I was looking at – bait! I posted them inside the town, in plain sight from the road as it entered Pythia's Fell, but well away from the edge of town, leaving a number of tactically effective alleyways for our shadows to lurk. If the enemy approached, they'd set eyes on those shaky recruits, and charge like a band of nomadic savages. I hoped. The sections of Company veterans – and by this point, even the scattering of new donkey brethren were veteran by the standards of the locals – were concealed around the expected axis of enemy advance in those useful alleyways, out of sight.

I went through the brethren, looking for any other force-multiplier we could use to shock the enemy, get them to panic and flee if we could. We were light on magical power, even the subtle sort of glamour that might have a psychological effect, the sort of thing that Otonashi specialized in. My eyes fell on the mark of one of the unicorn bowmares, named… Zero Phase? It half-peeked out from under her barding, but I seemed to remember it was something illusion-based. Not strong enough for her to be called to the warlocks' section, but something.
I pulled aside Zero Phase, and tried to work up something that might bite in the full light of day. Or, I thought, looking up at the lowering clouds heavy with portent, half-light. We had an idea, and were working on it when I saw the reaction of the ponies in the local guard to something out of sight down the road from us. The enemy was approaching.

Zero Phase started her casting, weaving a shell of darkness around my cloaked self, playing to my dark coloration and exotic looks. I picked up my lance, and eyed the ponies on either side in their proper barding, and my own breast unprotected by anything other than my Company badge and my own hide, and gestured to my left at Zero Phase, demonstrating how I wanted the illusion off-centre, so that anything flung at our creation did *not* fly true and straight right through my ribcage. And maybe a pony's-height taller than the top of my hood? Get them to waste their projectiles on empty air, and not fired into the mass of our brethren, that was the idea.

The enemy was much more cautious than I had hoped, advancing at a slow walk towards the anxious locals' spear-line. Several platoons at least of well-armed and barded caribou entered the kill-zone, and slowly marched on my bait, until they stopped and formed in the roadbed, a disciplined pike-hedgehog which grew as further platoons marched up to the forming phalanx. It was bowel-loosening even to my veteran eyes, and I wasn't standing in front of that bristling hedge of pikes-heads waiting to be mown down like the ripe corn awaiting the scythe-blade.

Perfect, their formation would be entirely flanked by our ambush. They outnumbered us heavily, but we had their rear, and they had been foolish enough to form a phalanx in the tight quarters of a town. They were fucked, they just didn't know it yet. A caribou officer in the rear of the formation barked a series of brief commands, ordering the pike-push, which was our cue. I waved Zero Phase's apparition's arm far above my head, giving my own and only command.

And then we fucked them.

Nothing is more terrifying to a trained force of ponies in a tight formation like a pike phalanx than to be unexpectedly and suddenly flanked. The pikes make the formation deadly and unstoppable from the front of the formation, unless you have some sort of magical powerhouse or a hell of a lot of high explosives. It'll tear right through shield walls, spear lines, some light fortifications like barricades, and most shield choruses. But the interlocking files of pike which make the formation resilient and provide the mass which produces such great momentum, means that it has a long turning radius, and in fact, has to turn in a single body. It is as if the ponies of the phalanx become an eight-hundred-legged monster which couldn't simply double back on itself; a stiff-limbed and awkward great beast with an exposed flank.

An exposed flank which we rogered but good. We didn't have the ponies to generate much of an arrowstorm, but what we could get in the air, every dart found its target, and the lancers and swordsponies charged into the mostly unprotected rear of the enemy, only the officer with his halberd turning to meet the unexpected charge. He went down with a ruined face as Chestnut Shell broke a lance off in him, and the caribou rear disintegrated in a spray of blood and viscera. The confusion spread through their formation like a wave of dismay and chaos, and I loomed up over the chaos like a dark cresting wave of shadow. Zero Phase's creation wasn't really a masterwork, in fact it was falling apart even as I directed it over the slaughter, but even the failure was unsettling, and I like to think it played its part in turning surprise into panic, and panic into utter rout.

The roar of battle was being drowned out by terrified screaming, and the roadway was a tumult of wide-eyed terror between the few brethren of the Company intent on our bloody business, and the ponies of the local guard, who were cautiously pushing forward against the confused front of the collapsing phalanx. They were right to be cautious, as the majority of the caribou were still locked into their forward files, and could do serious damage to the spearponies in their front if the rebel were feeling bold and fearless. With their fellows being dismembered behind them, and some dark magic shadow cutting off the light over their exposed heads, they were most certainly no longer in a bold and fearless mindset, but if they had been given targets right under their muzzles, something to strike out at, they might have been dangerous in their distress.

It was at this point that the lieutenant of the guard proved that her head was of more utility than simply keeping her helm from chafing her crest, and started yelling terms of quarter, promising prisoners protection from "the demon and her spawn". She had a set of lungs on her, and the offers pierced the battle-chaos like an aria drifting over a mightily laboring tartarus-orchestra in full swing. The pike-caribou of the fore, who might have simply overrun her thin line and broken out of the trap by powering through it - fearful of whatever hellish miasma floated overhead, and encouraged by my brethren's contrapuntal, theatrical howls and moans, playing up the lieutenant's theme from across the battle - began dropping their pikestaffs on the roadway.

A surrender once started is difficult to stop even with intact command structure, and we had cut down their officers and sergeants in the rear of their files in the first charge. Likewise, it is difficult to stop a slaughter once you've committed to it, but our own small numbers meant that we had mostly blown our wind by the time the lieutenant called the surrender, and couldn't have butchered the surrendering enemy even if we wanted to. Which, I have to be honest, some of our brethren definitely would have done, if we had the numbers and the wind for it.
And if we were on our own, without allies, we might have done it anyways once we'd gotten our second winds. The Company didn't have the facilities, the numbers, or the time to deal with prisoners of war in any number, and we weren't taking them at that stage of the campaign. But the locals were in their element, had the facilities, had the mind-set to think of taking prisoners, and somewhere to put them where they wouldn't simply carve their way back out again once the captives regained their nerve. Even if those captives were the remnants of a battalion, less the detached company destroyed at the customs post the night before, and the casualties laying all over the roadbed just inside Pythia's Fell. Our trap had succeeded beyond anything we had any right to expect.

The civilian population, which had stayed indoors that bloody morning, came out as the battle ended, and aided their guard in rounding up their prisoners as the storm broke overhead. I and my brethren retired to the edge of town, and kept an eye on the road back into Rennet as waves of cold rain washed across the countryside and into the town's gutters and eaves. The gutters ran red with caribou blood, but few of our number were even slightly wounded in the fight. It was one of the most one-sided affairs I had ever participated in, and for once my services were not needed. Well, Hyssop had gotten stuck in with the rest of them, and had popped her stitches, which gave me something to do with my time. I sat in the tavern later, cleaning the newly-opened head-wound and re-stitching her, and keeping an eye on the burned jenny, whose Company-name was Free Hilt. It looked increasingly like she'd survive her burns, and I was basking in the dual pride of professional success and unexpected military prowess.

That was where the oracle found me and proceeded to pull the heavens down around my ears.

The Prophet And The Hermit-Crab

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The tap-room went silent behind me as the elderly pony pushed the door open with its staff, grey robe trailing behind the wizened forearm, heavy gaudy bracelets chiming against each other on every limb and around its wrinkled throat. Her face was made up heavily, as if a young filly blushing for her special some-pony for the first time; but she was old, as old and tough as those few sharp bones you might find in these lowlands, poking up out of the flattened landscape. As she passed into the tavern, she was followed by two younger ponies, donkeys like their mistress, in brown robes and considerably fewer baubles. As it was, I marveled at the old jenny's stones, bringing that much portable wealth in the presence of the clearly piratical. She looked about the tap-room, frowning sightlessly. Oh, how original, a blinded seeress! And not even wearing a blindfold to spare her victims, but as clouded-eyed as creation had made her. Or wait, maybe cataracts? No, that looked congenital.

"So, where are they? Loa, you sent me to treat with tartarus-spawn, and I have not the days left to trot here and trot there at your whims for nothing." She wasn't talking to the room, she addressed the air, as if in the midst of conversation with the unseen. Very much like a charlatan, and my eyes narrowed, even as her nostrils flared, no doubt smelling the bloody stench of my re-stitching, and the medicinal aroma of Free Hilt's burn ointment. "Well, and that's the smell of the residue of ill intentions and ugly repercussions if I've ever breathed in a stench. Speak! Tartarus-spawn! I'm told that there were ponies playing at demonhood in the high street this morning, and I and my loa would have words with them!"

All Company eyes in the tap-room turned my way, and I don't know how the blind old jenny sensed it, but she turned her sightless gaze my direction, and clumped over to my impromptu surgery-table. I quickly tied off my last stitch, trusting that one fewer stitch wouldn't necessarily bring me back later, and making a mental note to check later anyways. "Hyssop, I think that will do for now, I believe I have an unscheduled meeting."

"Oh, here we are, the very individual we were seeking. Or… the loa says I should call you a pony, although I don't think that sounds like a pony voice. Officiant! what do I find before me."

One of the two brown-robed donkeys leaned forward, and informed his oracle, "a Zebra, dame Pythia. Blood-soaked, and wearing the sigil of the mercenaries who committed the slaughter in the high street."

"Aye, and commanded it, if the loa are not leading me astray. A clever child, cloaked in petty shadow-wisps, leading damned shades under the thin illusions that they are not what they pretend to be. Thus, the testimony of the loa, who see that I might see."

I frowned, confused by her references. "Pythia, that's a classical title, a reference to the lost Parnessian cult. Re-established here on Tambelon? Nothing else around here matches that cultural reference. And loa is something my superstitious cousins like to babble about, while they're playing hoodoo games and pretending to be voudoun priests, blasphemous and superstitious at the same time. Why should anyone credit your cultural mish-mash when you can't even be bothered to keep the references within the same scheme of superstition?"

She barked dry laughter, amused by my resistance. "Oh, the loa business is for your benefit, not mine. The spirits say you know them by that name, and on another day, I'd be talking to sylphs, or djinn, or…" and she smiled, slyly, "thriae. Although the two of us are the only ones in this tavern who know what either of us are talking about. I think I have the measure of you, zebra. How can you be so well-educated and yet so horribly ignorant of what it is you are doing?" Now frowning, turning on an emotional dime.

"And what, Great Pythia, am I doing in this benighted provincial town, other than stitching together one of my ponies and awaiting further strife or my transportation, whichever finds me first?"

"Forcing open doors which have been shut by time, corrosion and rust, behind which lie things that ought not again see the light of the open skies, not star-light, nor moon-light nor even the cleansing solar fire itself." The Pythian had gone ramrod-straight, and spoke in a voice not her own. Either her loa had possessed her, or she was into the fake-possession stage of her performance. I was not honestly sure in the moment. There was something alarming in it, but then, the charlatan crafts their performance exactly to achieve that unsettling affect. As a con-pony in a Company of con-ponies, I knew to be wary of the grift, even when it walked empty-eyed and hollow-voiced like an apparition before me.

"Fool! The petty sly games you and your brethren commit are as nothing to the great beast which slumbers in your forgetful breast! The stars! The stars! The stars move in their accustomed paths, and yet the moment is not yet, and yet the moment still is to come, and you and yours are not dead, are not scattered, your devil's-lance is not yet broken! Her slumber! The nag ridden by a hag, the nag-ridden hag, the eternal maiden nailed to her celestial cross, the monster chained to its rock, the sacrifice and the devil, and you her thoughtless fellow-sacrifice! She has not yet summoned you to your blood-ritual, and your fellow fellowships have all fallen by the wayside! In the deserts of Dar al Hisan, your staff should have fallen, and the last of the Companies broken! Oh, how much lesser the suffering, smaller the catastrophe, if you and yours had coughed their last in the desert of that god-haunted world! How did a cult of demon-worshipers pass through the veil of divine madness which is the Dar al Hisan, and yet emerge triumphant from that benighted world's doors, intact, feared, respected? What… pact did your ancestors make with the devils the horses call gods, to be spared their flensing?"

The priestess was in full prophetic mode and had thrust her blind face into my muzzle, and somehow, though I had faced hundreds of screaming caribou not half a day earlier, it was this frail old fraud who had backed me wide-eyed up against the rear wall of the taproom, alarmed. She knew things she shouldn't have, and hinted at things I didn't know, horrible things that would only make sense to those who knew the inner workings of the Company, the traditions that didn't make it into the Annals, the things nopony directly addressed but somehow made known nonetheless. She jerked back, and up, to her full height, and chanted:

High the moon will rise
And the blood of her fellowship
Self-shed under the light of
That final moon's shine
And the blood shed in her service
And the blood shed by her servants
And the tide like a tumult of rusted dust
And the dust of ten centuries vintage
Shall blow through the fragile bowl
Of that tiny clock-maker's paradise
Of that geared wonderland
Turning and turning at the
End of the Endless Road
And winding the entire great orrey
As it spins upon its axle of god-stuff
And this is the key
Broken in the lock
To unmake the Road
World by world unknotted
Like the conqueror's blade
Through each world's knot
Cut. Oh! To be that sword
To be forged for the severing
For the cutting of the cords
Of every knot on the skein
Of the Creator's ever-weaving
The web undone by
The children of the Daughter of Night!
Beware your instrumentality,
Beware the despairing use
That her hooves made you for
That her hooves would make of you
Blades of the Night!
Bend your edges to the service
Of some lesser light!
Find the filly!
Find the child!
Bend your proud necks before
Your silent salvation hidden on
The road to rebel-ruined riverland!
The rebel wears a face
A false face against a minor evil
Minor evils that suppress greater evils
And those greater evils even less
Than that world-ending evil
You carry in your innocent breast!
Find the child,
The child who is not yet the face
The child whose face is being
Worn by fakers and fools
The child who would be the
Undoing of little compromises
Still oceans of blood to shed
The child who is the standard
That standard without content
That standard which is no fate
That standard which is no destiny
That might turn your own destiny
From our fated demolition!

She collapsed, suddenly not the great oracle prophesying, but a frail old jenny overwrought and coughing from the bellowing shout. "The loa… are not in a rhyming mood this afternoon. Really, couldn't they spare someone more poetically inclined to deliver their messages?"

"They may have been sparing their audience. I have an allergy to rhyming couplets."

"Ha! You foolish zebra, you scuttling hermit-crab. You are not the shell you've pulled yourself into. No matter what bivalve's armor you wear, you are still that hermit-crab. Be proud of it, it will be our salvation, saith the loa."

"That's where you're wrong, seeress. I am not the hermit-crab. I am the shell it wears. Officiants, your Pythia is overwrought, and overburdened with portable wealth in the presence of tired mercenaries certainly not above the occasional bit of petty larceny. I suggest you take her back to whatever rooms in whatever temple or hermitage you usually have her quartered." They bowed to me, alarmed, and shuffled their charge out of that tavern. I glared around the tap-room, catching the gaze of every alarmed Company pony there, the audience to the old fraud's performance.

"You all catch that? Good. Forget every word of it. The donkeys go in big for spiritualism and divination. The Company doesn't. No fate but what we make."

"Destiny is what we beat out of life!" they roared back in that old call-and-response from the first surviving book, the first volume of Fatinah.

I hoped that would tie down the rumors, or at least knot the event in our own bow-line, our own narrative. That had been a direct attack on the soul of the Company.

And I had no idea what it meant.

Nearsighted Pony's Bluff

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They finally were able to spare pegasi to ferry the remnants of our expedition back home late that night, really, more like the next morning. Midnight was long past as we coasted behind tired ponies in the dappled darkness underneath the clouds. The waning moon was high in the heavens, passing through gaps in the partial cloud cover. The hamlets and market-towns of Rennet lit our way below, like topaz flecks strung out haphazardly on a mostly-bare heirloom necklace, the more precious gems sold long ago by improvident or wastrel ancestors.

The pegasi who came to hitch themselves up to our chariots had muttered something about the ball in play, and we passed more than one flight of griffins and pegasi dashing here and there on the way into the forward base. Over at least one market-town, a brace of ponies were slowly circling something on the outskirts of that town, no real indication of what exactly, but I knew the general outlines of the operation which had been in planning. Apparently something had advanced the time-table. We were all over the skies of Rennet that night. There was a bright orange glow in the distance, away from our line of flight - something large burning fiercely in the night.

I haven't dwelt before in these pages on the world in darkness seen with night's-eyes, because it seemed somehow natural, and simple, and not really worth the ink to discuss. But I felt the difference that night, far overhead of a chaos in which I had no hoof in the planning. Well, that's not exactly true, I had sat in on the general discussions, but this… this wasn't what had been discussed, and everything changes once you start pinning assignments and timetables and marching ponies out on roadnets you had no real control or dominance over. Rennet was enemy country, and there were armed, barded columns rushing here and there through the night, on errands only they and their commanders wot of.

As we spiraled into the landing-meadow in front of the compound, I got a good night-vision view of the much-trampled farm lanes around our hiding-place, and the widening trails leading from our hidden base to roads and lanes throughout the neighborhood. If it weren't for our witches-coven, we would be discovered on the first sunny morning; only glamours could hide the hoofprints of hundreds of armed ponies marching forth on their various missions of arson, terrorism, and judicious execution.

Once we touched down in the meadow, I buttonholed my orderlies, and instructed them to take our jenny patient into the infirmary and check on Octavius and the rest of the malingerers, then to report back to the chariots, where we would rendezvous once I touched base with operations and figured out where they needed us. Too much traffic on the roads, too many opportunities for trouble. We'd probably be needed before the sun rose, but the alicorns only knew if we could possibly get to where we'd be needed before then. Not nearly enough darkness left in the night.

At that thought I felt a nasty shiver down my spine. Right!

There were no officers in the operations room, just a sergeant, a tired-looking griffin courier curled in the corner, and the sand-table of our area of operations, littered with little flags and shiny quartz baubles, glowing variously and at steady rates.

The story the sand-table told was worse than what I had seen in the flight from the border. There were flags and baubles on most of the priority targets we had identified, and a number of the secondary targets as well. It was no wonder that the base was empty and cathedral-echoing in the darkness!. The Company had left its compound like a discarded chrysalis, and there were nearly a dozen columns scattering throughout the central districts of the province, some of them so far from the base they'd have to go to ground in some secondary blind far from the forward base. The Captain had gambled wildly, and put every marker the Company had to its name on the roads.

“Sergeant, explain to me what I'm looking at. Because it looks like we've got a dozen vexellations and all of our armed ponies scattered to Tartarus and gone across half of the province, and few of them within supporting range of each other. This is more than night-couriers could keep in contact!"

The sergeant, a colorless unicorn without the sand for command or the fire for battle-leadership, who would always be someone's adjutant or lackey, looked at me steadily through his lamp-mirrored spectacles, not giving an inch to my irritability. “The rebel stripped the central districts of all mobile elements in the course of the diversionary effort against the border posts. Our scouts observed the movements, and the Captain decided to proceed with the aggressive option of our contingency planning. We're hitting the six major granaries tonight, and shutting down four mills in the hands of rebel sympathizers. The other columns are centrally located reaction forces in case of local resistance beyond the occasional bailiff or heroic militia-pony." He pointed to the various flags in turn, and once my alarm over the sheer complexity of the deployment faded, I recognized the pattern. It wasn't really different than the discussed plans – they were simply all being implemented in the same night. Yeah, “simply".

“As for communications, the Crow had a clever idea, and provided these charms," he waved a hoof over the glowing crystals, “which are entangled with bit and bridle apparatuses being worn by pegasi flying cab rank over their assigned columns. It's a deadpony switch – they can communicate simple messages by squeezing and relaxing their jaws on the bit and send messages via horse code; if something goes absolutely pearshaped, they let it drop entirely, and the charm on this side goes glaringly bright. There – that one. The Lau Crosse column has completed its mission. They're on the way back."

He grabbed a pair of calipers and measured the distance between the successful column and the base on the major roads in between, and frowned. “Hrm, not a problem for them, unless the vehicles they seized are somehow inferior or damaged. Lau Crosse will not need to use a blind." He waved at the griffin snoozing in the corner. “Only if I have anything positive to say will I use one of our couriers. We're stretched too thin. The aerial cohort was amusing itself earlier tonight emplacing the scare-crows at various crossroads. Thanks for the materials, by the way. They came in handy."

I frowned in dismay, uncertain what to think of the fruits of that particular request. We had had a section of griffins tag along on our border-raids, and they had left each little battlefield with saddlebags bulging with…proof of activity. I rather hoped that someone had cleaned off the trophies, or else every other byway and highway in the central districts was going to stink of rot and dried blood.

“There goes Beloit. Hrm, that's the pattern for multiple hangings. I guess they weren't able to recruit in Beloit. Shame." He measured again, made a notation. “This column won't be able to make the forward base before dawn. Good thing there is a prepared blind on that road. I'll have to awake Wilhelm here in a moment. Right, what do you need from me?" He turned from his sand-table toy, and gave me his full attention; I had graduated from audience to entertain to problem to be solved in his mind.

“One, has there been any wounded so far? Two, where are my oxen, and the ambulances? Three, where should I stage myself and my orderlies to retrieve any trauma cases in a rapid manner? The chariots are still loaded out in the meadow, we can probably wake the pegasi who were drawing them; when I left them they were bunked out inside the chariots and catching some sleep."

“Believe it or not, but nopony has reported any serious trauma cases so far. Until someone encounters something, the best place to keep your ponies is right here, parked in the meadows. Trade me one of your resting pegasi to replace Wilhelm, whom I'm going to have to send out once we're done here. Oh, and your oxen volunteered with the carter corps, they're out with various columns, and once they find something to haul, they'll be pulling loads of requisitioned supplies back here along with the rest of the carters. They were quite eager, as demonstrative as I've ever seen cattle. You wouldn't have any idea what's the story there?"

“Some idea, I think, but it's their story. I may have one of them tell it, when we have time after the campaign season is over. Assuming any of us are alive come winter."

“Sawbones, really, don't be defeatist. This campaign is going swimmingly. At the rate we're going, we might beat the snows." Broken Sigil's spectacle-lenses glowed demonically in the lamplight; there was something in his bloodless cheer at the prospect of ruthless and one-sided slaughter that was more terrible than the actual dismemberment of dozens of caribou helplessly entangled in their own broken formation on the blood-slick cobblestones of a crowded high street. “I will send word if there is a position I need to send you and your ponies before dawn breaks. Even after dawn breaks, we may have to rush you out, depending on the emergency, and damn the operational security. After tonight, they'll know the fox is inside the chicken-coop."

I walked back out to the chariots. Hyssop and Boardwalk were sleeping next to the charioteers on the chariot benches. I picked a pony at random, and woke the unfortunate, telling her that the operations sergeant needed another runner, and to go catch a nap indoors until they had to send her out.

I stole her chariot-bench, and fell asleep. Nopony woke me up before dawn, so if there were any catastrophes, they apparently weren't anything that could be solved by an aerially delivered zebra surgeon.

I dreamt of abyssal sea-beds, of claws scrabbling across the sands and corals, and a great weight I dragged behind myself in the watery dark.

The Ride Of The Wild Hunt

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The night I missed unfolded like so:

It began, in point of fact, days and weeks before the first fall of dusk. The bulk of our pegasi and griffins had covered the skies of Rennet even before the Company had broken into the province at Lait Blanc. When the sun went down, our ponies fanned out. By the night that we began our attacks on the border-posts, the members of the aerial cohort had become intimately familiar with the roads and towns of the rebel province. Strategic equine intelligence had built up a picture of the state of food supply and storage throughout the province. We had a good idea of where the major food supplies – the cheeses and grain that represented the portable and tradable wealth of Rennet – had been stockpiled in six major granaries. Likewise, there were a number of grain-mills which were used by the farmers of the province to process their crops and, if necessary, replace or replenish depleted or destroyed granary stocks. The mills were under control of master millers, and some of them were natural supporters of the rebel regime – mostly caribou, who had suffered socially and economically under the donkey dominion of the local vassals of the Bride – and some of them were effectively neutral, and one and two were natural enemies of the caribou regime. Command had used our limited investigative resources to determine who we had to remove, who we could terrorize into compliance, and who would gladly fall into our hooves.

Our pegasi began to set up observation posts in the skies above our prospective targets. Hollowed-out clouds carefully herded onto slow transits designed to provide maximum loiter and cover angles contained long-sighted ponies who lazed the long late summer days away, watching the traffic below, what came into the granaries, what came out of the mills, watched as the garrisons posted next to each dwindled and then suddenly emptied out as the crisis on the border flared. And counted the skeleton crews left behind to keep the rebel flag-masts unmolested, to show the ponies of the province that there was still a White Rose in Rennet.

The cloudborne observation posts were joined on the ground by forward blinds built overnight on the approaches to each targeted granary and some of the mills. The gypsies and hobos whose sudden infestation the clever and observant might have noted in the central districts, kept mostly to the back lanes and the shadows, and put together hunters' blinds in the dark hours; this skill had been taught by the Company's griffins as a matter of course over the past generation and a half to our herbivorous brethren; it was an invaluable skill for a military pony, who even in the most honorable and virtuous of states is still a sort of honorary predator. The ability to stalk the prey without being seen, without spooking the herd – this is a skill the soldier needs to develop as urgently for his well-being on the battlefield as the raptor or the lion does for her diet on the savanna.

Most of the great mills were traditional earth-pony bastions, serving the clans of earth ponies who grew the great fields of corn, of rye and wheat and barley and a grotesque local grass they called "maise". Those had seen many of their master-millers driven out, replaced, or killed by White Rose supporters; their journeyponies and laborers were still earth ponies for the most part, and their discontent could be seen from a thousand feet. Some of the mills did a roaring side-business in cheese curing, and those smokehouse mills were largely run by their original caribou and donkey millers – and were divided more virulently by the political and cultural fruits of that racial clash. In fact, a number of the smokehouse mills were not in operation, several of them having burned to ground before the Company had even been a prophesy of nightmares in the troubled sleep of the ponies of Rennet. The Company would concentrate on the active grain-district mills, as those that were best positioned to allow the rebel to recover from that which we were about to give unto them.

The warlocks were placed into the observation blinds on the major granaries, and given an entire day to prepare their wicked tricks in the still secrecy of a collection of bums and ne'er-do-wells lounging about in market-town squares all over the central districts. The ones I've written of, and those dullards of the warlocks' section whose mediocrity, indolence and inactivity have kept them from prior mention. Not that there's too many of these slackards, but this is the moment I ought to take to mention that Languid and Goiter exist, and the Company pays them their daily salt to be grand wicked mage-lords, or at least, what feeble approximations of that state which is in them to provide. I've never seen Languid do a damned thing, but the other witches insist that she's actually the most powerful of the entire coven, and part of her bargains and deals is that she never can perform in front of an audience. She'd lose half her power if anypony ever saw her lift an occult finger. Goiter's a luck manipulator, supposedly. All I know is that he's a terminal klutz, and bad things happen in his vicinity. He's a walking disaster zone, and the brethren hate to operate in his company. The other witches generally keep him in purdah, to keep the rank and file from lynching him out of general disgust.

Our warlock resources limited our main assault formations. There were more than six granaries in the central districts, but to maximize each column's chances and to simplify the path-guiding process, the officers settled on just those half-dozen nearest and most important facilities. As the long afternoon light devoured the hours until dusk, each warlock, dressed in full hobo filth, ambled along the roads from the front doorsteps of their assigned granary to the mustering grounds in front of the forward base. They dropped mystical breadcrumbs along the way, little pre-prepared twists of grass and twigs to drift into gutters and roadside verges. At the forward base, they greeted their assigned ground-pounders and attached carters, as the columns formed to await the first night of autumn.

As dusk fell, each warlock led their assault column out of the brush around our base, and debouched onto the main roads of the neighborhood. All the warlocks but Languid drew around their ponies a glamour that hid each marching force from our immediate neighbors, who were still supposed to be ignorant of the fact that there was anything other than some woodland critters and a bunch of thieving gypsies camped out in their vicinity. As each column emerged from our immediate district, the glamours were let drop, or rather, faded in favor of other illusory witcheries. Languid's column was sent out last, in full darkness, and she managed something in the shadows where nopony could see her sweat. Or, at least, so I'm assured. As always, she could always be faffing off like usual.

The thin air resolved, swirling like an unseasonable mist, and from that unseely miasma the ponies of the Company emerged, phantasms of some terrible half-forgotten ancestral memory. The glamours graced our grotty troops with fantastical horns, terrible half-winged suggestions, strange tails split twice or three times in their train, and wild black weapons long and sharp and stretching far above their unequine heads in the glowing mist. Farmer-ponies looked out of their front doors that evening to see a parade of faerie horribles marching in eldritch grace on the lanes outside their gates and fences. Not the good fairies that their gran-mères and ma mères told them safe stories of in their nursery days, but the dread sidhe that thundered forth from under the barrow-stones to reap the wicked on the nights of judgment in the days of old.

As each column marched in their cloud of bowel-loosening illusion, they followed the trail of glowing markers that the warlocks had left behind them in their afternoon stroll, green-purple-black will'o'the'wisps which flowed around the column as they collected each in turn, floating witchlights which contributed eerie grace-notes to the spectacle of the slow march of the Company. Some columns gained a following of some few fillies and colts as they passed certain farmhold gates, a train of fools half foal and half grown, mad with the lunacy of the young and reckless. They would be witness to the full terrors of the first Ride of the Hunt.

As the columns passed through each major crossroads on the major highways, some of our pegasi and griffins played at bombing the rear of the formation. Each daredevil carried one of the fetishes or scare-crows against the length of their bodies, inverted, with the crossbar and "trophy" between their gaskins. They spun out of the CAP formation over the column they were allegedly protecting, and pulled into steep dives for the verge of the given crossroads the formation had just exited. Just as they were about to pancake into the side of the road, they let their burdens go and peeled out of their dives. This tactic, performed at considerably higher velocity and longer dive lengths, is a classic pegasi method for bombarding heavy fortifications, sometimes with high explosive payloads, and sometimes simply with pointed logs delivered at unreasonable velocities. With the scare-crows, they took it easy, since to drop the pointed crosses at any higher speed would have shattered the "trophies" and scattered bits of viscera and shattered bone all over the crossroads and neighboring country-side.

To the foals following the columns, this was nothing less than a bolt from the black, some stooping great bird of prey screaming out of nowhere, to fling nightmarish horrors over their quivering heads. The simply curious or sibling-bullied broke and ran in screaming terror. Some few wildlings ran as well, but only to laugh at their terrified siblings and friends, and quickly turned around to follow the parade of horribles to see what further devilries were in the offing that night. They were not disappointed.

Not all the columns the Company sent out that night were such spectacles of wonder and dismay. Reserve columns travelling in parallel with the granary raiders and mill-columns did so quietly, not exactly silently, but without the theatricality of the main columns. The mill-columns likewise marched to their targets without magic or hoopla, or really, any carters or impedimenta. They had a less adventurous mandate, and their missions would not benefit from the attentions of the civilian crowd, or at least, no more eyes than those targeted in the raids themselves.

The granary-column followers came and went as short limbs and coltish or fillyish stamina ran out long before the columns found their targets. But a succession of wide-eyed colts and fillies took in the spectacle, and cheered the aerial delivery of the gruesome Company fetishes as they came to recognize the repeated performance for the aerial stunt that it was. In some happier, shinier land, foals cheer the acrobatics and smoking pyrotechnics of daytime daredevils in the smiling company of their family and communities. In Rennet in that season, the thrills that were on offer were delivered by winged devils in the night, and came with the decapitated heads of rebel caribou soldiers tied to scarecrow crosses planted at velocity by the side of country crossroads. Foals will take their joys where they can.

Some few foolish witnesses saw a number of the columns arrive at their assigned granaries, and lost sight of them as the steady march went to the trot, and then the thundering gallop. So only the victims themselves saw the brief engagements that slaughtered the skeleton garrisons protecting the wealth of the rebellion, the great stores of grain and cheese and apples and other fruit of this most productive of the provinces of the northlands. They did not see the zebra scouts cut the throats of the caribou standing guard-post, or the earth ponies smash down fortified barrack doors, or the unicorns who filled the air over cots and beds full of dozing soldiers with flashing swords and arrows sped unerringly towards their targets.

None of the granary garrisons put up anything that could be dignified as a fight; there just wasn't that many of them to begin with, and they had each and every one of them been taken quite by surprise. The live-in staff of the granaries were dragged out of their quarters, and the caribou employees were dragged kicking and screaming to the side of each building, shoved into nooses, and hanged off the eaves of their place of employment. The earth-pony and donkey employees were bound, beaten, and set to watch at a safe distance as the Company's carters came up from the rear of each column and claimed the vehicles our scouts had identified – heavy carts, long haulage freight carriages, and so forth, parked conveniently beside the granary loading docks. What could be loaded onto the vehicles available at each granary was hurriedly hurled higgledy-piggledy into the conveyances, while sections were posted sentry in those directions any possible reaction force might arrive. The rest of the column hoofed the most portable contents of the granary – the great wheels of cheese, some of the distilled liquor, some processed beet sugar and high-test flour, etc – onto the carters' vehicles.

The rest of the booze joined the firestarters and flammable rubbish spread throughout the now-sacked granary building, bottles broken here and there, liquor sprayed on every wall. Bags of coarser flour were burst in every corridor and storage-room, and every door and window was forced open, the better to draft in the night air. Once the carters hitched themselves up to their requisitioned transports and started away from the scene of the crime, the lucifers came out, and the firebugs had their jollies. If you were an ignorant little foal, you'd have expected a nice roaring fire, and some of the foals, who generally had caught up with the circus by that stage of the night, moved to get far too close to the buildings as the brethren prepared their demolitions. A more careless or soulless Company might have left the little foals to their damnation, but we were not that dark a brotherhood in those days, and the little fools were dragged well back from the buildings before the pyros set off their charges, and the brave, bloodthirsty little foals of Rennet learned that night why to always be careful of sparks and flame in the presence of flour and mills and granaries. Each granary went up like a siege mine, if you've ever seen the pioneers touch one off. If you've never been blessed by that wonder, think of a small volcano, or a forest-fire, or, well, a working grain mill blown to Tartarus by the carelessness of its miller or his apprentices.

The mill-columns had all the bloodshed, and the hanging horrors, but none of the fun of blowing up buildings and grand theft freight cart. They simply made social visits to various mills on the eve of the onrushing harvest, and hauled the millers out of their snug homes, and explained to the persuadables and sympathetic that the dominion of the Bride was being reasserted, and emphasized the point by hanging the unpersuadables from the nearest tree or gateway for the edification of passers-by, and more importantly, their fellow millers and miller-apprentices and laborers.

As the various columns returned to home or their daytime blind closes on the roads to home, one last daredevil pegasus, Tickle Me herself, dive-bombed the main square of Rennet City in the deep predawn darkness, emplanting a tall double-cross deep in the packed earth behind the main address stage on the side of the square. A second pegasus flew up with a cloth placard, which they tied firmly to the cross-bars of the double-cross, and a third planted the flash-burned skull of the rune-caster from the road to Pythia's Fell on the peak of the stipes. That placard read as follows:

Tonight the writ of the Bride
Is once more the letter of law
And all sovereign authority
In this her province of Rennet
The duchy and its lordships in homage
The county palatine of Benoit
And associated baronages
Right of travel shall be untrammeled
No taxation without authorization
The heads of all rebel scum
To be delivered to her
Designated agents
Attached or otherwise
On pain of the visitation of the Night
By order of the Black Company
In Her service

That night, hundreds of thousands if not millions of deniers of foodstock went up in flames – the fruit of a year's production from a rich agricultural province. Few died, not even approaching the bloodshed of the brief battle outside Lait Blanc, but those that did die, had an impact all out of proportion to their numbers. The White Rose had much more prominent supporters in the province, and much richer ponies - merchants, aristocrats, scholars and jurists. But all of their pretense and their wealth was built on what could be extracted from the fields and pastures of the province, the foodstuff itself. And we had destroyed their stores and killed their experts in refilling those storehouses. In a night, we had crippled the rebel political economy in Rennet.

Thus, I had from Gibblets, from Shorthorn, from Tickle Me, and from the Captain. Whom I found arguing with Gibblets the morning after, the both of them surrounded by a small herd of dozing younglings in the remnants of the brush a short trot from the charioteers' meadow. And Gibblets' argument to the Captain was more in the way of a simple childlike plea, which boiled down essentially to "Boss, they followed me home. Can I keep them?"

Adding Faginism To The List of Charges

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The Captain glared over the nodding heads of sleeping foals at our eldest warlock in the morning sun creeping between the leaves of the canopy above. The woods echoed with the chaos of dozens of carts and hundreds of ponies jockeying for room and space, everypony and everything colliding in the suddenly tight quarters of the encampment's approaches. I frowned, worried about the noise, even out here in the buffer-brush between the base and the nearby farms and farm-lanes. Then I looked down at the half-dozen tiny ponies asleep where they had been dumped off a cart beside one of the tracks back into the mustering-yards.

"Gibblets, why are they sleeping through this racket? This could wake the dead. Where did they come from?" I waved my hoof over a donkey foal, who had started to snore in counterpoint to the epic exchange of obscenities between two carters stuck in a traffic-jam on the track nearby.

"Well, I had to put them under once I realized that they'd followed us all the way here. But I think I was too late – if any of them remember the route we took, then the base's cover is blown. And there's six of them, I don't like our chances." He turned and pointed a clawed finger at the Captain. "And that's why I think we should keep them! The Company hasn't had military apprentices in decades! I've always said that soldiers are better if you start ‘em off young and train the cringe right out of them before it has time to set! And this one!" he pointed at a little female earth-pony curled liked a cat on a winters-hearth. "She smells like magic, strong magic. I haven't trained an earth-pony mage in forever! Do you know how rare they can be?"

I coughed in outrage. "They're rare because we have no racial talent for magic! You know how many hoops we have to jump through to replace horn-magic! Might as well be rune-casters, once you count all the trouble and gadgets."

"Keep out of this Sawbones. And you're still not an earth-pony, you confused alicorn-damned zebra! Earth ponies have as much magic in their hooves as most unicorns carry in those bone wands on their skulls, and this one…" He waved one goblin-paw over the smiling child's forearms. "She's packing some heat under her fetlocks."

"If a half-dozen foals could follow you here, then so could enemy scouts," interrupted the Captain, still fuming. "We may be blown anyways. I need to send out couriers to check the observation posts. Oh, Tartarus, I'm not even sure Tickle Me has them posted, she's still out of pocket. I need to find her second… No! I'm not getting distracted! You can't foalnap half the countryside, you're not keeping them, they go right back out to wherever they followed you from as soon as it's dark! Sawbones, back me up here, foals in the Company have a bad record. You should remember this Gibblets, I know you were there the last time we had someone bring children into Company quarters!"

The traffic-jam had broken in the mustering yards, and the carts were rumbling slowly past us now. I tapped my muzzle, thinking about recent volumes of the Annals, and older ones. "Well, now, that's not exactly true. Some of our best ponies have been military apprentices. Tradition holds that Fatinah herself was an apprentice, and I know that Bitter Ambrosia and Feather Storm were. I'll grant you that there have been… incidents. But those were unstable ponies, and something would have come along one way or the other, it was just… ugly with the foals."

We all grimaced, unwilling to dwell on the details of that ugly moment in Company history. Not all of our wickedness has been easy to gloss over, and some of our warlocks have been blacker-hearted than others. More than one have had to be put down by outraged brethren. Something dark in the heart of some Company ponies… The accusations of Pythia and her loa echoed in my ears, louder than the rumble of the passing carts, louder than the continued argument, louder than thunder.

"Sawbones! Wake up! We need to make a decision! We can't just leave them laying out here in the woods. They'll bring ticks into the compound!"

"They can just take their ticks home to their families," grumbled the Captain, eyeing one brown lump more closely. "Damnit, Gibblets, this one is a caribou! What the hay kind of Pied Piper are you that you piped the foal of our enemies to my front door! You damned Puck, you Tylwyth Teg, you Hameln!"

"Right, OK. So they were conscious right until Gibblets put them to sleep outside our front doors. That makes them a security risk. Something made them follow his group after they burned down their granary and – Gibblets, you were on the de Pere raid? And after you hanged a lot of ponies."

"Caribou!" coughed Gibblets.

"Whatever! Point is, you were pretty ugly in front of this bunch, and they still followed you home. They're obviously not put off by the usual run of violence. It could be they're our sort. But we need to make… preparations. Foals in the vicinity of the Company need to be run through the usual song and dance; it doesn't go well when they're not. I can think of three incidents in the Annals just off the top of my head, including that ugliness with P-." Gibblets cringed at my use of that name, which had been officially expunged from the Annals. But whoever had done so hadn't used the proper ink in the volume in question. "Relax, Gibblets, I fixed the problem, it's entirely expunged now. I know how to mix inks that don't let older stains through like that. When we die, his name dies with us. My point is, we introduce them to the pikestaff at the earliest moment, buy us some madpony insurance."

"You make us sound like an ambulatory insane asylum," grumbled Gibblets. "The vast majority of Company brothers are well-adj-" The Captain broke out in an aquiline shout of laughter. "Ok, relatively well-adjusted."

"I need to talk to you both about my encounter with a maddened donkey seeress in a town named after her, or possibly a jenny named after the town, I don't know, but it's never good when they prophesy at you like that. She's got me jumping at shadows right now, and that includes within the Company itself."

I didn't like the glow in the Captain's eyes as I said this. It almost felt like somepony else was looking out of his eyes, something with slit draconic pupils in the dark behind his own. There was an uncomfortable silence, and Gibblets stared at the Captain, all humor gone out of his rubbery strange face.

"Very well, Annalist. We will play things your way. And we must discuss your dalliances with meddlesome spirits found by the roadside. The Company can be a jealous mistress." The Captain turned away suddenly, and left with an almost feminine sway to his hips that was utterly unlike him.

"Gibblets, I maybe don't spend that much time with the Captain. Does he… usually act like that?"

"Sawbones, every Captain eventually starts acting like that. It isn't a great sign." He sighed, and looked over his new charges. "Can you help me find some space on a cart? I don't want to waste a half-dozen trips hauling all of these foals inside by hand."

"What's a hand?" He waved his monkey-paws at me and grimaced.

"Fine, hoof, whatever. Not everything under the firmament is a pony."

"No, but everything that talks is."

"You know you're delusional, right?"

"Then at least I'm in good Company." I waved down the next cart in the line, and we started hoofing slumbering, tiny ponies onto flour sacks behind a yawning and impatient carter.

Foals Underhoof

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We ended up storing the foals in my mostly-empty infirmary, laid two to a cot in the back of the hall. Most of my casualties from the previous week had returned to their sections by that morning, only Octavius, my two amputees and the burned jenny were left cluttering up the place. The amputees and Octavius were in the middle of a game of cards.

Well, I shouldn't ever say that Company ponies are in the "middle" of playing poker. It's one of those things where there's always a game going. If there are brethren awake, off duty, and not moving, there's a game. The games spontaneously generate like maggots in rot, or flies in horseapples. I swear I've seen ponies produce decks out of thin air, ponies I knew didn't have a shilling or a denier to their names, who had complained to me of having lost their last decks – when there was a need for a game, there was a deck, like the universe providing necessary entertainment to ponies with otherwise-destructive tendencies. The Company technically pays its brethren - we are after all a mercenary company - but in practice nopony has cash money, everypony seems to traffic in debt chits and memorized I-owe-Stomper-so-now-you-owe-her-this memory-aids.

I don't know where the actual cash money goes – it gets paid out, then it gets shuffled around. Maybe check the trunks of Shorthorn, he always seems to win whenever I stick my head into any given game. I was kind of surprised to not find him in here shaking down my convalescents; I suppose his assault column had been one of the two which had to go to ground in a temporary blind away from the base. I interrupted the game briefly to look at the stumps of my patients, and waved off Gibblets to go do wizard things. Like, say, touching up our defensive glamours on the tracks and brush we had just trampled the hell out of outside.

"Octavius, what are you still doing in here, you've got an overstrained horn, not a crippling injury. No offense, Firkin. And good job keeping off this, it is draining nicely. You're going to be laid up for the rest of the campaign season, the both of you. We'll keep you in here for the next two weeks, and shift you into something more permanent when they have something more permanent. Or we get burned out, whichever comes first."

"Doc, what's with the foals?"

"Markers, I came to join your game. I figure they're worth a hundred deniers each, easy. Ha! Got you wondering. Nah, a project of Gibblets', I'm foalsitting until the sleep spell wears off. Can't have them sleeping out there underhoof, it's a madhouse." I finished wrapping up the stump of the second donkey's right rear leg with fresh bandages. No complications, although I was starting to run short of clean bandages. We needed a laundry set up, soonest. Alcohol could only cover so many sins before filth started making trouble.

A parade of minor cuts, sprains, and burns tromped through my office that morning, nothing too impressive until the pegasi brought one of their sisters in with a nasty radial fracture in her left wing, more than a greenstick, not quite a compound. Autumn Blade certainly made enough noise about the pain, though, so I gave her some of my laudanum special, and waited a bit before starting the set. After getting her to chug her opiate cocktail, I glanced down to discover an audience of two foals staring wide-eyed at the sniveling mare and her crooked wing, primary feathers stretched in all sorts of directions they oughtn't have.

It was Gibblets' ochre magic earth pony and a little jenny, dull beige beside her… friend? I had no idea if these kids were even related or acquainted with each other. They weren't saying anything, just staring at the pegasus as her cries slumped into drugged moans.

"Is that supposed to bend that way, Mr. Demon?"

"What, her wing? No, she ran into a tree branch this morning. It's definitely broken. Ever see a broken limb set before? If I do it before the potion takes hold, she'll scream like all Tartarus."

"C'est malade raide!" squeaked the little jenny. I blinked at her, and looked at the other foal.

"Don't look at me, Ah don't speak 'beck-oyes. But that's wicked cool," she offered.

"Jes, jes, tres cool," nodded the little jenny with the thick Prench accent. "Rayures monsieur, quel genre de diable êtes-vous?" She paused, thought about it, and repeated slightly more intelligibly, "Monsieur Striped, the which demon you are?"

I raised one eyebrow, and turned to the broken wing, reaching out with my hooves to stroke the feathers into alignment and estimate the necessary angle of the set. "Neither I, nor any other pony you'll find here, is any kind of diable, bratling. Most ponies call my kind 'zebra', if they call us anything at all." I thought for a second, running my sole along the break, seeing if it would nudge into alignment without further effort. "Strike that, I'm not exactly sure what Gibblets is, exactly. For all I know, he could be some sort of minor devil or imp." I pressed the misaligned ends of the break into line, and Autumn Blade yelped in drugged agony.

The two foals twitched in alarm, and their eyes followed my hooves as I grabbed my alcohol swabs and wiped down the feathers along the top of the wing.

"Gibblets is the greenish rubber-faced biped who brought you lot into the compound, if you're wondering. You're essentially his problem for the time being, although I strongly suspect him of trying to dump his mistakes on my withers," I continued, reaching for the wing-brace. I wiped it down with alcohol-soaked rags as well. Things wouldn't stay clean for long, but there was no point in putting a dirty brace on a dirty wing. The brace was cleverly made with screw-turn adjustments, or something like that. Ask the smiths if you want the proper terminology. All I knew is that I just needed to crank that sucker down, and it would hold the wing in the position I set for it, without letting the broken edges of the break grind against each other, or shift in alignment. Not much else we could do about it but keep the pegasus from moving the wing by immobilizing it. Same as fixing a broken leg, really. Well, that and the ol' zebra secret sauce, but that goes without saying for pretty much everything that isn't a sucking barrel wound.

"Go lay down, Autumn Blade." I guided her to the cot which the two foals had abandoned to observe me about my work. As soon as she laid down, she fell asleep. The draught I had given her was strong enough, it would get us all through the initial day or two of healing, which was just as well. I'm no more a fan of agonized howling than the next pony.

"Monsieur Striped, what…. 'kind of' diable iz mam'zelle Autumn Blade?"

I gave her the stink-eye. "We call ponies with wings 'pegasi', or individually, 'a pegasus'. What kind of rock have you been living under that you've never heard of pegasi?"

"Aw, don't mind Prenchy here, she's from that joual clan down the road towards de Pere, the Tremblays. They keep ta themselves, don't send their foals to the schoolhouse. They're kinda ignorant."

"Ayia! Tu ne vas pas et de faire la manquette de moi, tu salete-poney crosser! C'est écœurant!"

"Hey! I know what that meant! Sorta! Keep your dirty mouth to yourself, Prenchy!"

"Je m'en sacre!" And with that they started tussling, the earth-pony's tail caught in the jenny's teeth, and the two of them spun around as the filly tried to get her own chompers on something that would hurt.

"OK, cut it out, you two imps," I squawked as I hoofed them apart like a pair of squabbling cats. Gibblets' favorite was much more angelic when she was safely asleep. "Here!" I hoofed them my dirty laundry, and pointed at a hamper across the room, "make yourself useful and go put this in that bucket. I've got more ponies to see."

And indeed, more brethren had trickled into the infirmary while I was busy with the broken wing and the wakened fillies. The fillies' peers continued to slumber the sleep of the pole-axed, I was beginning to suspect that Gibblets had been onto something with this filly and magic potential, and maybe a little bit with the jenny as well. Donkeys were weird on Tambelon.

The two of them continued to exchange country and gutter-Prench insults in wroth whispers out of the sides of their muzzles, while I cleaned out two more wounds, significant halberd-cuts across muzzle and forehead on a zebra mare and a unicorn stallion, but they didn't come to blows, or otherwise compel me to separate them again. They were far too entertained by the spectacle of blood, scalpel-work, and wound-stitching to try and make more wounds for me to clean.

"So," I turned to the hellions, my work done for the nonce. "I've been learning all sorts of words today from 'Prenchy' here, but I doubt that's her name, and I know you've not bothered to introduce yourself, filly-my-girl. My name is Sawbones, and as you can see, I'm a surgeon. Who are you two?"

"Ah'm Bloody Ploughmare." I blinked at her, incredulous. "What? It's my name! I cain't help what my mamma called me. These things run in families, and it was either that or Ambrosia Apple, and d'you know how many Ambrosias there are in this duchy? Ait least a dozen I've heard tell of!"

"It's just a little… on the nose. Ponies get called things like that here in the Company, but only after they change their names, and the ones that go for something like that have a hard time of it. It sounds like trying too hard." I snorted, letting it go, and turned back to the jenny foal that barely spoke Equuish. "So, your name. Ah… tu prenom?"

"Mon nom est Feufollet, Monsieur Sawbones. Ravi de tu rencontrer," she curtseyed at me.

"Ha!" laughed little Bloody, pointing a hoof at her neighbor, "at least my name is from ah variety of apple. She's named after a swamp-monster! No wonder she came out with the rest of us to follow that parade ah devils! She fell right in line with the rest of the will-o'-the-wisps!"

Feufollet looked sheepish, and I figured that she understood considerably more Equuish than she spoke. And that the accusation had found its mark. I narrowed my eyes at Bloody Ploughmare – and that name was certain to be shortened if they were to stay with the Company for long, or else she would do nothing but trail laughter behind her wherever she went – and waved my hoof at her.

"And what imp of the perverse drew you out of the safe confines of hearth and home, Bloody? Last night was an ill time to be walking the Bride's highways."

She rubbed her own forehoof in her green mane, mirroring Feufollet's expression. "T' be honest, I was kind of out of doors when the parade came trompin' by. Ah had a faight with ma' kin, and there were some words. Ahm about old enough to start workin' by my family's lights, but I can't work the trees worth a pinch ah shit. They don't listen to me, and when ah try to buck 'em, they tend ta buck back, and never give up an apple. Pa says ah - ah- I might as well be a donkey."

Feufollet sniffed in contempt, but Bloody was just sniffling. I looked away, trying not to contribute to the sudden heavy atmosphere. The rest of the infirmary had gone silent at Bloody's little confession, and even the poker game, which had been slowly growing at the back of the ward, went quiet.

"Well that's a damn fool thing to tell a foal. Want we should go burn down their farm?" asked the zebra with the fresh stitches across her muzzle.

"We ain't burning out random farmers for being dicks to their kids!" barked the corporal to her right, cuffing her across the poll. He turned back to his cards, and offered an aside to the wide-eyed foal. "Don't worry chile, ain't nopony in this ward can buck out a tree. It's a knack, and if you ain't got it, you ain't got it. Ah grew up with Apples in the neighborhood. Good ponies, but narrow about their trees. Almost enough to credit those rumors y'all had dryads hiding somewhere in your woodpiles." He folded with a sniff of disgust, and got up to walk over to little Bloody, his horn lighting up as he approached.

"Bloody, this is Bank Shot. He's one of our bow-unicorns. Have you ever seen a unicorn?"

She rolled her eyes at me, offended. Well, unicorns weren't nearly as rare in Tambelon as zebra or pegasi, I suppose. Bank Shot bent down and looked her over, his eyes and his horn glowing a brilliant blue. He wasn't exactly warlock material, but he had more to him than nothings like Octavius.

"Interesting! You really don't look like any Apple I've ever met. You ever have weird events when you were very young, things burn down in your vicinity, poltergeists, that sort of thing?"

"Ye…yeah. There was a fire, and stuff had a tendency to wander when ah was in the room, they used to say. Ah haven't had an accident in years, though. It was enough to make my grandmother try to get my parents to get rid of me, they say, though. Before she died."

"What a charming family. Well, girl, you certainly look like a unicorn to me, just without the horn. I wonder if we could get you doing exercises-"

"WHAT THE HAY ARE YOU DOING WITH MY APPRENTICE, CORPORAL!" bellowed Gibblets from the entrance to my infirmary.

The Military-Apprentices

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SBMS019

Gibblets was positively vibrating with jealous rage, as the unfortunate noncom had wandered unknowing onto the warlock's claimed patch of land, a sort of mentorship ranchette, if I had read the situation right. Well, served Gibblets right for leaving me in charge of his toys. Not my fault if some of them got up before he got home to play with them.

I laughingly kept the bipedal frog-monkey-thing from the flustered Bank Shot, interposing my chortling striped hide before the wrath of the little witch-king. I suppose I was fortunate that he had been quite busy by Gibblets standards, and was more than a little drained by all the showmareship and illusion the Company had been demanding of him recently, because his behavior was more than a little over the top, not exactly Gibblets as he normally over-reacted, more than a little…

Like the Captain recently. And like P- in the partially expunged accounts of the last foal incident. OK, right, re-prioritization time.

The little warlock's attention was diverted by a proper introduction to the two fillies, and their awkward names got him ranting on a different tangent than the hypothetical shades and colors of Bank Shot's lower intestines.

"No, no, we can't have a military apprentice named Bloody Ploughmare, the other PMCs will laugh at us at conventions. Child! We need you renamed soonest! What do you think of Blood Orange? Or Monkey's-Wrench? Or Bad Apple?"

Diverted myself from my forming intentions, I objected, "You can't call her Blood Orange, I can think of at least three in the Annals. And I'd have to check on Bad Apple, I think we recently had a something Apple a few decades back, but I can't recall if it was…"

"Bah! Things like Blood Orange are perennials, we've had eight Swift Blades and nine Steel Wings over the years. And you're thinking of the Black Apple, he was a corporal with the then-fourth cohort during the Eastmaark contract. Do you like Bad Apple, girl? Yeah, you're warming to it, I can tell…"

The fillies didn't quite know what to make of the green frog-monkey-thing. I strongly suspect his performance out there on the roads the night before had been a big part of what had drawn them here, but he was growing disturbingly manic, and while they were grinning, there was more and more whites to their eyes. I hoofed him over to the cots full of still-sleeping brats, back on task.

"OK, Gibblets, they've had enough rest for today, don't you think? Let's get the rest of them up and introduced, and make sure none of them wake screaming for the mamas, how's about? Octavius, come over here, please." I figured Octavius was the last pony to threaten Gibblets' sense of superiority and ownership over the foals. There's something about that unicorn which makes the warlocks puff up in supercilious amused contempt; none of them can take him seriously. And I needed to make arrangements, badly, quickly. If the effect was taking the eldest warlock this rapidly, we had a real problem brewing.

I had a ritual to kitbash.

I rushed out of my infirmary, ranking priorities by knowledge and availability. I knew where the pikestaff was, I had ideas about an open-but-protected space I could seize for the ritual, and I could probably find a proper text in the Annals given a couple untroubled moments with the chest. Drummers! I needed the drums and at least two of the oxen. Which meant diving into the vehicle park, finding Sack or one of his relatives, or if they were not in sight, Asparagus and some clue as to where they had…

Sack and his brother Tiny were working in the cluttered, trampled former-brush around the old vehicle park. Scratched and mis-matched carts and other heavy vehicles had been pushed out into bramble, brush, and grassy hummocks in every direction, some with their loads still pressing their wheels into the forming muck, some of them hurriedly emptied before being pushed out of sight and out of mind. Sack was harnessing up Tiny to a still-loaded heavy cart, and once he was done, I helped them rock the mud-bound wheels out of their new ruts, and pushed it out of the park and over towards the rapidly-expanding storehouses on the edge of the compound. I could see why Gibblets looked tired, our former forward-base was starting to sprawl, and we were spiraling out quick-set construction like a boomtown in a rock-farming land rush. He had to have been straining himself glamouring all this nonsense under increasingly heavy no-see-ums and you-didn't-hear-that-hosses.

As the three of us walked back to the corner of the barracks I had my Annals-chest stashed, and they had their drums shoved under their cots, I explained what I needed from them. Nothing too heavy, kind of spritely. We needed the Company in a playful, tolerant mood. Because I was increasingly certain that there was a sympathetic connection between the spirit of the Company and, well, the Spirit and her company.

I hefted my bottomless chest of codexes and scrolls onto my back, and led them over to the main mess hall, where I left Tiny and his much smaller brother experimenting with the edges of their hooves and seeing what kinds of light or sharp sounds they could get out of the great deep-chested war-drums, and inadvertently amusing the busy cooks at their work preparing the first shift of dinner. The Company banner and its great war-lance was standing in the corner of the hall, which was one last resource check.

Back to the infirmary. Not quiet, but I wasn't likely to be trampled by the continued frenzy in the teeming compound around it.

The infirmary wasn't much less of a mess, all the foals were up and about by now, and were playing some sort of chasing game with each other and some little phantasms conjured by a reclining Gibblets, looking suddenly rather old and tired. I paused, uncertain if I could do my preparation in this cacophony, and then ponied up. It was good practice for working trauma on battlefields, after all.

The Annals chest is a useful piece of devilry, constructed of dozens of generations of archival, storage, and preservation cantrips by the many storied Annalists who had need to store the collected chronicles in a portable and indestructible manner. The loss of the old Annals in the Dar-al-Hisan had been a great trauma, and every subsequent Annalist had taken it as the caution it was. The chest of that period was bottomless, obviously, and covered in ironclad protective spells. You could put that thing in a wall-breach and it would shrug off war-engines and withstand the detonation of petards. In fact, there's at least one instance in the book of Bitter Ambrosia where he records having used the chest in exactly that fashion while the Company had been besieged at Colter's Notch.

It was also indexed, with a hoof-friendly set of levers and switches marked with shorthoof notation. I looked over the levers, considered my options. Fatinah's initiation into the Company was retrospective in her Book, only mentioned in passing. The aforementioned Bitter Ambrosia had always earned his sobriquet, and wasn't suitable for a reading on the subject, however appropriate the description of his initiation had been in the previous Annalist's telling. Which left…

Law Stock's account of the apprenticeship of Feather Storm. I hoofed the lever for Law Stock's volumes, and the interior of the chest shifted, opening up a shelf where there had only been velvet lining an eye-blink before. I could feel the eyes of curious foals over my shoulder as I pulled the second volume out of the chest, and closed the lever. There was always a brace of pencils and some scrap paper set into a slot on the side of the interior, I've never seen the stock run out. I'm still not sure if there was a vast supply of the stuff in there, or if some thieving past Annalist had hooked the spell up to some very long-lived office supply warehouse in one of the more stable and prosperous home-worlds of the pony diaspora. Not all of the Company's prior warlocks were the midgets and pygmies of our later, degenerate days. Some of those ponies were true powerhouses, wizards worthy of the name.

I paged through the volume on the top of the chest, scribbling quick notes to myself for framing the reading, and found my place in the account. I copied it out shorthoofed, making some style changes on the fly. Law Stock was another stuffy unicorn, and she didn't really go in for drama or narrative flourish. Not that I had time for either, but there's a certain amount of professional pride at work, even when you were racing a madpony for the asylum doors.

I opened the chest again, pulled the lever, and replaced the archival copy, and put away my pencil and spare pages. One of the foals came up to the chest as I closed and latched the lid. Bloody, or Bad Apple if she took to that name, reared up and tapped against the chest-latch, and then tried to open it. It wouldn't budge, nor would it no matter how hard she pushed.

"That's a spelled chest. Only I, or my designated understudy, can open it, pick it up, or even shift it from where it sits. Go ahead, try and move it from the cot."

She pushed and pushed against its side, and the other foals came stampeding up to lend their shoulders, the lot of them shoving like a tiny pike-line making a push. They broke before the cantrip did, and burst around the edges of the luggage like a wave breaking over a rock.

"This is why I can just leave the Annals wherever I choose; the only question is whether I can retrieve them without my person being molested by anypony laying in wait. They can ambush me, but they can't take the Annals. Children, this is the memory of the Company, the Black Company. Have these ponies been telling you what villainous company you have fallen in with?"

They nodded severely, solemnly, some of them flat-lipped like they were holding in peals of laughter. The caribou fawn spoke up, lisping, "Ja, zir. You're empl'ees of th' Bride. You've been doin' zis vor vorever und ein day. You gau vrom virld to virld und zell your lances to eines grossherren oder prinzessin. You're hier to schlachten der Weisse Rose und der rest o' der caribou."

She spat sideways. On my nice sanitary infirmary floor.

"Well, now, the first three-fourths of that is true. We're only killing caribou because there's so many of them in the rebel regiments and the White Rose leadership. In theory if there are loyal caribou – and I swear you're the first one I've met yet – then the Bride and her employees are no intrinsic threat to them." I frowned, theatrically. "And go get a rag, and clean up that spit off the floor. I know this place is a mess, but I do surgery here, and we need to keep up appearances. No spitting inside the infirmary unless you're doing it into a spittoon."

I found my train of thought. "Right, this is the Company. And we're a sacred brotherhood. One with fairly strict rules and regulations, for our protection and the greater good. And one of the strictest is that we keep no foals with the Company, who are not properly apprenticed. This doesn't make you brothers of the Company, but it does bind you in ways that are important to your safety and the well-being of the Company. Do you understand what I'm saying?"

They nodded, wide-eyed.

"Anypony who can't swear to an apprenticeship, can't be here in the camp. We'll have to make arrangements, return you to your families or masters, get you out of the camp soonest. Because it just isn't safe for you here. Any questions?"

"Ja, zir. Ich bin bereichts apprentizin, mit das Bastarden sie gehängt letzter Nacht," rattled out the caribou in rapid-fire Germane. I closed my eyes and parsed what I remembered of that. Oh!

"You're already apprenticed? Well, if we hung your master, I'd say the contract is broken. Fires of Tartarus, that's sort of how I got my start in the Company, although I was much, much older than you when they forcibly broke the apprenticeship the old toad-diddler double-extended on me. What's your name, filly?"

"Meine Name ist Roggentochter," she curtseyed.

"Huh. OK, anypony else have issues, or want to opt out now? I need you to not be with us if you're not going to go through with it… it could be bad. Names! I've got the names of three of you, who are the rest of you?" The rest of them seemed willing to go with the flow, and I was introduced to Charleyhorse, the Dodger, and a little donkey named Tam Lane, all three of which seem to have come from some shady workhouse next to the burned granary in de Pere. I could feel dusk creeping up from the dirt under my hooves, under the infirmary floor-boards. It was time.

I led a procession of convalescents, foals, and a sleepy-eyed Gibblets out of the infirmary and across the compound to a mess hall emptying out a shift of well-fed ponies, some of whom turned right around and fell in with the parade. Some brethren know a show when they see one in the offing.

I led the foals into the hall, checked their hooves, and then helped all six of them up onto a long dinner-table still somewhat cluttered with the detritus of a commissary dinner. Their eyes followed me as I walked over to the waiting oxen and their drums, and I prompted Sack to start the changeling march. The two oxen rapped out a soft, pattering, cheerful tremble, shorting their huge hooves on the big hide heads. I circled around the hall, approaching the pikestaff, and bowing to it like I would to a great lady and her retinue, then bowed again, and took the pikestaff and its support, carrying it in solitary procession to the front of the hall, across from the line of foals, and set it in pride of place.

"Thus, from the second volume of the Book of Law Stock: In those days, the Company was in the service of the Lord Protector of the Mountain, in the Domination of Derecho. The land had been wracked by war and dearth and the all-consuming pestilence that trots in the train of those terrible scourges. The wars produced many orphans, but kept few of them, choosing rather in its blind and wasteful way to feed most of those foals to their dogs like table-scraps from a feast of misery and death. Be not deluded, as was written in the Book of Bitter Ambrosia, ‘war is cruelty, and you cannot refine it.' Some few orphans fell into the hooves of various brethren of the Company, more charitable or compassionate than the general run of soldiery, or perhaps, simply more bored." I paused to glare significantly at Gibblets, but he was sleeping standing up, and not hearing a word. I waved my hoof at Octavius to his right, who poked the goblin awake.

"Some strife arose from the presence of these charity cases within the brotherhood, and the Captain appealed to the Annalist, who upon reading the books of her predecessors, declared, ‘there are no children in the Company, but there can be military apprentices'. So it was written, so it was done. They brought the foals before the war-lance, and anointed their heads, and brought them up to the lance, and swore them to apprentice each a war-pony to be their knight and them their squires. Thus does the Company deal with foals that would walk side by side with grinning death, and fly with devils in the dark of the Night. Who would sponsor these six foals we have brought into our midst?"

Gibblets shuffled forward, and grabbed his Bad Apple, pulling her down from the table-top. She looked rather lost, and kept shooting glances across the hall as the warlock brought her up in front of me and the pikestaff. I nodded, and then marched myself over to the table, and reached out a hoof to the caribou fawn crouching down, her muzzle between her hooves. Roggentochter looked up at me as if I had hoofed her a cone of iced cream, and scrabbled down from the table, following in my wake. Various other ponies followed, with Octavius leading Feufollet up to the front, until each foal had a brother or sister of the Company standing for them before the banner.

I looked around the dining-hall, realizing I had forgotten the anointing oil, and my eyes fell on a half-full bowl of salad-dressing, part of the stock of thousand-islands the cooks had brought with us all the way from Openwater Bay. Good enough!

I grabbed the bowl, and dipped my forehoof into it, walking three-hoofed towards Bad Apple and the rest of the foals, and dabbed a quick side-cross of slightly rancid olive oil reeking mildly of citric accents on each forehead, ending with my Roggentochter. I bowed to them, and turned, stepping forward.

"Milady! We bring these foals to you as our apprentices, and your children, O Night! We beg your blessing upon these, our apprentices and foals, and the future of your Company!" This was slightly off script from the usual ceremony, but I was uneasy in my soul at that moment, and needed some sort of… reassurance.

What I got was an explosion of deep darkness alight with burning stars, that burst out of the black pike-staff like the flaming gust-front of a flour-clouded granary exploding.

The Aspects Of The Night

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SBMS020

There was a cacophony of bellows and screams behind me, but it was muted, dulled, as if I was hearing it from below the surface of a pool of water. The starry black cloud surrounded me, and I saw nothing but it itself, and it was looking at me, and I felt like I understood its thoughts. When you look into the abyss, and see yourself looking back at you – there’s nothing so disorienting. For a second, I could not tell if I was in my own skin, or outside of it looking down into a shop-worn zebra just barely this side of middle age. I blinked, and the disassociation dissipated, and I was myself.

And there was a mare of darkest night standing front of me, and stars like suns shone in her flowing mane, and I could see the pikestaff through her translucent body.

The Spirit. With great thestrian bat-wings, and a long, cruel unicorn’s-horn, and a coat as black as coal. She looked almost confused for a second, and then the glint entered her spectral eyes, and a terrible grin split her lips and showed the assembly her sharp and serrated teeth, teeth that no herbivore born ever kept in its mouth. She looked hungry. And she was looking down, at the foals.

I stomped, once, loudly, and bellowed my greetings to our Mistress.

"Milady! Hail to you, who we have not seen in many an age! How fares you! How shall we address our Mistress?"

"Oh, my beloved warriors, it has been so long since we’ve talked, face to face. The moment of Our release must be drawing close, that such an offering brings Us thus, immenentized, here outside of our imprisonment, if only for a moment. What did you say you had for Us?"

"Thy name, fair Mistress, that we might address thine personage appropriate to the occasion?"

"Really, Sawbones, we are not so ignorant of the world outside our celestial prison walls, that we must be addressed in Ye Olde Equuish. What you know, and remember, We know, and remember. And more besides. You may address your exiled queen by her heart-chosen name, for we are Nightmare Moon, true queen of Equestria, and the Three Tribes wherever they lay their hooves!" She looked around, as if she had expected some sort of fanfare or spectacle to accompany this dramatic announcement, but there was nothing, and she looked piqued. "Again, have you offered Us these… succulent morsels? It has been too long, not that it was ever really all that often even in the old days. But We remember… the taste…"

"Mistress Moon! We did not bring you foals to be devoured! These are your own Children, apprenticed in full propriety to we your Knights, as squires in vassalage. They are each and each the future of this your Company!"

"Our Company, indeed. One of many, it ought to be. The old Third, the bloody-bannered Third, that held the fortress of Emerald Gorge against the Arimaspi for two terrible years, that held against the traitor legions when all others fled in the rout in the Whitetail Wood, who held the peak of the Canterhorn while all others fled in the face of the Solar traitors. But you left me alone like all the rest in the end, and slipped away across the portals while your Mistress was stripped of her crown by those fickle damnable harmony-baubles. But I strain and I strain my thoughts and I cannot feel any of the others. Have they scattered so far, fled to worlds so far down the Chain of Creation that even I can not hear their deeds?" She looked sad, and a little lost, or at least, as sad and lost as a vast, great spirit in the shape of a corrupted alicorn queen could be sad, and lost.

She turned again to the foals, and narrowed her eyes at them. "Once, before I was this, long before I was this, I was the guiding spirit of Taw Nun, a great and wise polis, and they called me Moloch, and they took their foals, the first-born and first-fruit, the children of their best and brightest, and they boiled them in great braziers before my altar!" She reared up, her green-blue cat-slit eyes wide and mad, her great jagged fangs gaping wide with each articulation over the cringing foals and their crouching sponsors.

"And now, my ponies, my only remaining ponies, they dangle a hoof-full of foals before me, and ask for blessings, and offer not a single blood sacrifice. This is the fruit of my failures, not yours. I feel my hold on this place loosening, and I am tired. The stars whisper to me that their plans are in motion, and I only need be patient. But I have been patient for more than nine hundred years, and I am feeling stretched, and wan, and I, I need something more…" She strode insubstantially forward, passing through a chair as if it was not there, and perhaps it was not there for her. She held a wing out to the pikestaff, but did not touch it, and even then, a black bolt of lightning jumped from the lance to her wing-claw, making her jump as if she had been shocked.

"Oh! Indeed! You all have forgotten more than you’ve remembered! Here is something indeed! But too strong, too strong, I would lose my mind if I took all that in a sitting! I would be as empty as a foal if I drank all that down! Indeed, indeed, in fact, I almost feel something coming on…" She spun on her heels, turning to face the assembly.

"I will return, this is worth the investment indeed! Your service has been well worth the wait! You have my blessings for these paltry foals!" She was waving her forehoof dismissively when the light went out of her great eyes, and she blinked, emptied, then she looked confused.

"What devilry is this, that mine rest is disturbed so? Why have ye brought us thus unprepared before an assembly? I, I do not recall having slept. Where is this? Where am I?" She looked around, distraught, her body-language no longer the brutal domineering pony-eater who lived to terrorize subjects, but rather a lost child waking in an unfamiliar body.

"Pr-Princess?" Gibblets stood and walked forward in his odd bipedal crouch, worried and tender in a way I had never seen him display to anyone, ever.

"Gibblets? Why art thou dressed thus, and here in this rough assemblage? Where is the castle, and our attendants? Where is my si-si-sister?" At this last word, her composure broke, and he reached out with his glamours, and formed a sort of spectral hug for the lost phantasm to collapse into.

"Easy, easy Your Highness, you are merely having a bad dream, a Nightmare. It shall pass, as all such do." His spectral arms mimicked his monkey-paws, stroking her across her crest.

"Do not talk nonsense, Gibblets, thou art no longer our peirrot, thee hath had thine promotion, as thou begged our sister. And thou dost know, that our dominion is over dark dreams; we cannot have a nightmare, ever." She looked both fond and disturbed at the same time. Her eyes scanned the confused ponies of the Company, and settled on the curled foals, hiding from the confused geist-mare.

"Oh, foals! How wonderful to see you in this our presence! How is it your parents hath permitted you here? They are so often protective of children, and our august presence is considered harmful to foals. It has been so very long…" she reached out and tried to stroke the mane of Bad Apple, and then Foufollet, and frowned as her spectral hooves passed right through the fillies as if they were not there, which they were not, for her. "Oh! Oh! Are these ghost-children, that I cannot touch them? Oh, what terrible tragedy hath befallen them, that I cannot hold them in my arms. Oh, o-o-oh Gibblets…" and she started to weep dark starry tears over the heads of the confused apprentices. The little warlock used his phatasmic arms to lead her away from the foals, and calmed down her upset, getting her to rest on her haunches in the middle of the hall.

"Hush, hush. Sleep. You will have great things to do in the evening, you cannot waste your days half-awake and sleep-walking among the day-courtiers." She settled upon the floor of the dining hall, and curled up under the strokes of his glamoured arms, and rested her head upon her forearms.

And then the Spirit was gone.

"Well," said Octavius, "that was certainly something."

A Natural Fool Of Fortune

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Gibblets did not rise from his crouch on the floor, and the rest of the congregation looked down at him, not judging, not condemning, but not understanding either. I stood looking over him at the pikestaff, and the banner dangling from it, and the sigil whose meaning I now knew the provenance of, at least in some little part. The lance looked now like a simple length of dark wood, and its eldritch nature was no longer so close to its surface. You might almost think it a simple war-tool. The warlock's new apprentice had been inching closer to her new master as we all stood our poleaxed grounds, and the next time I glanced, she was standing right over him, and I could not see her expression, as she faced away from me and towards the goblin-clown weeping silently beside the markless spot upon which the Spirit had resolv'd into a dew.

I turned my head, and discovered my own apprentice standing beside me, in my blind spot, her soft coat dappled beige and tan against my black and grey stripes. She looked up from her observation of the witchy pair, her eyes wide and alert. What did she make of this? Off on an adventure, chasing the little devils who slayed her hated masters, and yet almost delivered into the hooves of a great and mad devil by the pony who claimed her apprenticeship in the very moment of that claiming. Did she see another "Bastarden" into whose hooves she had fallen?

"You like your name, my fawn? The one you came with? We would have had you claim your name, the one you arrived with, or one you had in your heart, if the ritual had… played out the way it ought have. Are you a Roggentochter? Will you thrive in the Company as her, or would you be somepony else?"

"Ich bin nicht ein Pony. Warum- Why you call, me pony?"

"I've told Gibblets here, again and again, all that speaks and makes itself known, is a pony. That is my Company." I looked across the gathered and paralyzed audience, none of whom had left, possibly interested to see what the resolution of this was, possibly looking for explanations, or simply because they had not been dismissed – their eyes were on me. "Whatever else the Company is for other people, or other things, these are what the Company is to us – those principles we bring to it, those ideas the Company makes real, those ideals we hold it to. ‘No fate but that we make', ‘No slaves in the Company, a brother is a freepony', and most importantly – ‘every brother is a pony, same as every other pony in the Company'. We are all ponies - pegasi, unicorns, earth ponies, zebra, donkeys, griffins, and yes, caribou and whatever the hell Gibblets is when he's home among family. Whatever the Company was in its birth-throes, it is this Company today. And we have a contract, and the duties that derive from the promises made in that contract! Ponies, find your places, patient ponies, go find your beds and get some bed-rest, the potions don't heal you if you're on your hooves all night long!"

Octavius hooved his new apprentice towards the mess hall door, and herded the little jenny out of the hall ahead of a cavalcade of brethren and some new masters with their tiny apprentices by their sides. Finally the four of us were alone in the mess hall, the three of us watching the one staring down the knotty surface of the rough flooring in front of him. At last the goblin-thing spoke:

Tarry, princess:
Have more than thou showest,
Speak less than thou knowest,
Lend less than thou owest,
Bide more than thou goest,
Learn more than thou trowest,
Set less than thou throwest;
Leave thy drink and thy whore,
And keep in-a-door,
And thou shalt have more
Than two tens to a score.

"Thou hadst too much of water in thee. O heavens! is't possible, a young mare's wits should be more mortal than an old goblin's life?"

He made a strange gesture, waving his paw in front of his rubbery face, and got up from his crouch, creaking audibly as he did, and turned to see us watching him.

"What dost thou profess? what wouldst thou with us?"

"What would you, if a brother known for many years, suddenly threw aside his self like a blanket and stood a stranger before a Company assembly?"

"May not an ass know when the cart draws the horse? I have been many things to many people, and I have been a stranger to most, and oft stranger than most. But I am yet still a warlock of the Company, that at least is true. E'en if truth's a dog that must to kennel be whipped…"

I frowned, feeling somehow mocked. If he was quoting at us, I did not recognize the text. But somehow something in me knew my line.

"Nuncle, you have left a daughter. Look to her welfare, and settle a name upon her, if nothing else."

"The inky zebra knows his lines, even those he never could have heard or read! Mark you, Bad Apple, how the magic of heartsong stretches over anything with meter and dreamlike sense. And it takes not an actual pony to sing it, but only a pony's heart. Marvels and visitations make our days and nights!"

He stretched himself to his negligible full height, and nodded. "And a pony in his time plays many parts. Enough of the princess's Fool, he buried his motley beside his heart ages ago. Can I defer this discussion until later, physician? As you say, I have an apprentice to get settled. And so do you," he continued, glancing aside at Roggentochter.

We left the mess hall empty and half-lit, the pikestaff abandoned in the front of the hall. I was not touching that thing that evening. My trust had been pulled as far as it would stretch without a tear. Work heals all worries. I led Roggentochter back to the infirmary, and explained that we'd start by doing laundry. Best to start them off easy. She rolled her eyes at me. Well, I supposed every apprenticeship started in scutwork, and there was only so much variance in washing things, and cleaning filth.

But the Night wasn't done with me like that. Because what we found awaiting us in the infirmary was a frantic Broken Sigil and the unconscious bulk of our griffin Captain laid out over two cots pushed together to hold his great weight. The room was filled with worried patients and more. The night's repercussions were not done with any of us yet.

Differential Diagnosis and Equuish Lessons

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I ran my hooves over the Captain's head, checking for wounds or knots or signs of blunt trauma. Nothing. I reached out for the nearby lamp, and peeled his right eyelid open, from the bottom up. That had taken some getting used to, as did the nictating membrane, although since griffins shared those with pegasi, it didn't take me all that long while I was training with the Company. They were the core of the Company, after all. I waved the lamp back and forth, trying to identify any lack of focus or reaction to light. No point in checking for uneven pupils, griffins have independent eye control, they're uneven by design. Well, if you subscribe to the theory that griffins are designed; the evidence for that is clearer than for some other thinking creatures. Then I checked the old griffin's core temperature, and was disappointed again. As normal as griffins got.

"Well, I'm stumped. I don't see any reason why he's not biting my head off for taking advantage like this. He's not responding, or else I'd be ducking right now. " The old bird always did hate his checkups… "When did he keel over?"

"We were talking over the night's operations, and discussing a planned ambush the aerials and the Lieutenant were going to spring on a returning column of the rebel. One that should be kicking off right now, I need to get back to operations, they need me!" Broken Sigil was still agitated, but with my presence his focus had shifted from the Captain to that unicorn's usual duties. He was a unicorn of peculiar narrowness, and the whole experience was well outside of his comfort and his competence, and it showed, badly. His eyes twitched back and forth nervously, and if I hadn't known him relatively well, I would have started checking for poison or other such mischief. Perhaps I ought to anyways on general principles?

"When was this? How long ago?"

"Hah? Ah, an hour ago, just after twilight. Maybe ten minutes after it got really dark? I don't know! What's that part of the evening even called?" He started breathing erratically.

"No, nevermind. I understand. And I think I can pinpoint the timing if it's what just occurred to me. Was there anything off about his eyes, or his behavior before he went down?"

"No, no different than it has been for weeks now. He's had the Company eyes off and on since Rime, or maybe that damn port I can never remember the name of. More on than off recently. They suddenly cleared, though, just before he collapse, he was his usual brown-eyed self for like three seconds before they rolled down and he went over. Almost took the sand table with him, I can't imagine how long that would have taken to clean up and reset. Hours of work… oh, Tartarus, the work! "

"I'd worry more about your commanding officer laying insensate on two of my infirmary cots! The Lieutenant is in the field? Can she be contacted? We need her back here if the Captain doesn't regain his senses in the next couple hours. That might not be a problem, I have some idea of what it could be, but I need to talk to at least some of the warlocks. Who's on base tonight? Are they all out?"

"Otonashi's out with the Beloit column, they're on the way back, but they're also being used as the bait for the Lieutenant's ambush, don't expect her until morning at the earliest. Goiter and Languid are in the witch-coven's quarters, they're supposed to be working on refreshing gear enchantments and manufacturing. Shorthorn and the Crow are out with the Lieutenant, she didn't want to pull her punches after we got so lucky last night. It's always the day after a success that everypony gets sloppy and ponies get hurt. I have no idea where Gibblets is."

"I know where he is. Languid it is, I'll send for her. Please, go ahead and go back to operations. See if you can get word to the Lieutenant if it won't distract her in the middle of a fight. We had something spooky go down at an impromptu apprenticing ceremony in the mess hall, warlock-type spooky. Well, sort of, I think this was out of our crew's range of competency. I'll send word if the Captain regains consciousness, and doubly so if he's coherent when he comes to."

The spectacled sergeant clopped out of my infirmary, his head held high again. He was really quite simple once you recognized his priorities. It wasn't ponies, or the success of the Company, or curiosity, or anything else like that. His passion was for making a very specific species of plan, laying out all the necessary details to make those plans happen, and executing those details precisely and correctly. Anything outside of that narrow slice of the world was an irritation and a puzzlement to Broken Sigil.

I turned to my ‘prentice, and asked her what I had done. She was quick on the uptake, and rattled off what she had seen me do.

"That's good. But why did I do that?"

"Ich nicht verstehen. Den Kopf, sie untersuchte ih fur Schlage auf-"

"In Equuish, even if it's difficult or impossible. You start as you intend to continue, and we need to get you speaking the Company lingo. That's Equuish, even for ponies like you and Feufollet who came to us speaking something else for the most part."

"Okay. I do… not know. The… the haid ov der Greif, ah, the griffin, you look vor blows. You not find dem. You look th' Auge, the, the-"

"Eyes. I checked his eyes."

"You checked the eyes, vor – vat?"

"It's called reaction response. To see if the pupils – " I pointed to my own pupils, right and left, "contract or shrink when you shine light in them. I also looked to see if he was showing thestral eye, what the pony who just left called ‘Company eye'. Have you noticed that yet?"

"Company eye – you – talk of katse-eye? Das gluhen, the?"

"Glow."

"The glow in the dark?"

"Exactly. For many of our ponies, it's something that we do with enchantments, it allows them to see in the dark. Usually their helms are spelled, and as a side-effect, they look like thestral ponies. You've probably never seen a thestral, may have never heard of them. They're like regular pegasi, but their wings are more like a bat's than a bird's, they have long, tufted ears, and their eyes are dark-adapted, with slit pupils and they glow like cats-eyes."

She was muttering as I talked, and I could tell she was trying to remember all the new words I was throwing at her.

"The importance of this, is that the Captain here has been showing thestral eyes without the helm. Day to day. Without intending to do so. And he had been acting strangely, unlike himself. Increasingly hostile and bombastic, impulsive. We've been working around him, but it's been affecting the performance of the Company, we've been taking more and more chances, acting more and more aggressively as a matter of policy. And this pony here – " I waved a hoof at the unconscious griffin beside us – "has been responsible for that aggressiveness."
I had been speaking faster and faster as I approached my point, and the little fawn was looking a bit wall-eyed at the torrent of half-understood Equuish I was pouring over her head.

"OK, simpler. Hrm. This griffin, he's our boss. Head of the Company, current one, anyways. He's been acting odd. Showing glowing thestral eyes without aid. Sound like somepony we just met an hour ago, the big black madmare you could look through?"

Roggentochter's eyes widened in realization, and no little alarm. "Die geist-mare! She eindringliche der Kapitan!"

"She may, indeed, have been possessing him. What worries me is that I kind of think that she's been possessing all of us, to a slight extent, for a very, very long time."

Roggentochter looked perplexed, and I didn't have the heart to clarify that to her. I set one of the still-awake convalescents to stand a sort of watch over the still-unconscious Captain, and I hurried off to find Languid with my apprentice in tow.

The Past And The Dead

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Languid was as useless as she's ever been. She brought an unwieldy dressing-divider screen, and hid herself and the Captain in a corner, doing her voudoun hidden from filthy pony eyes. Or putzing around like always, you could never tell with that mare. She claimed there was nothing magical wrong or influenced, just the natural griffin, insensate. Useless, useless. I should have sent for Gibblets, he was an obnoxious little troll, but he knew more magic than… I couldn't call for Gibblets.

So we waited. Operations sent notice that the Lieutenant had been signaled, and that as soon as I was free, they needed me out In the field. I discussed the matter with the courier, and we made arrangements to send out some of the oxen with an escort and two of the ambulances to a staging and fallback point; she had a hoof-drawn map of the roadnet between our compound and the expected ambush zone. I hoofed the point at which we probably wanted Sack and Tiny and the others with the ambulances and… I recommended sending out multiple sections, enough to make a difference if they were being pressed when the Lieutenant's vexellation made the rendezvous. Then I cuffed the courier and reminded her to not take the blasted map with her out of the base. Last thing we needed was to let that fall into the hands of the rebel.

And waited. No news, no new patients, and my convelescents had fallen asleep, even the ones who drifted off over their cards. Roggentochter and I dragged those gamblers back to their respective cots. She was dragging pretty badly herself by that point, and I tucked her into a cot in the far corner, and she dropped like a pebble into a dry well.

Near dawn, the Captain's eyes opened. Brown, avian, as they ought to be. He rumbled, making no particular sense, mostly clearing his throat. And again, and again. He continued to not make much more than noise for a while. I gave him some small beer cut heavily with water from the cask, and let him rest, and did some work on the Annals, which I had left under a cot the day before.

I was still working on my "voice" for my first volume, trying to work out what I wanted to sound like to my successors, what I wanted my Company to sound like. In truth, we speak with many voices, but in the Annals, by necessity, all voices are spoken with one throat, one voice. The best we can do is a sort of mimicry. The Company of old, that lives on in the story the old Annalists spun… Desecrated Temple's single volume is a strange and terrible record, from a strange and terrible moment in the Company's history.

The third known Annalist, during whose tenure the Company was driven from the Dar-al-Hisan, and reduced to not much more than a bandit band with delusions of grandeur, by his own account. The many horses who had joined the Company in their glory days under Fatinah and her Captains, and proud al-Hazar and her adored Faris al-Dhubabi – they had all fallen away or been slaughtered in the chaos and betrayal of that great Captain's fall from grace. The thestral core had escaped with their sole surviving unicorn, and Desecrated Temple took the Annals and his ponies through a minor portal out of that world of fanatics and fighting faiths, sacking small shrines as they fled.

There was no Captain in Desecrated Temple's account, no officers, no Company but for himself and a remnant of savage bat-winged thieves. Was this the Company, at its hard-pressed core? It was smaller under Desecrated Temple than it had been when they came out of the desert wilderness defeat with their war-lance and no books. But this version of the Company, it had the Annals, and it had an Annalist. And what little wisdom Desecrated Temple had to offer beyond tips on the efficient looting of holy places and useful advice on the evasion of pursuit, was this: ‘the past is never dead; it isn't even past'.

His account, when it isn't about burning altars and evading cavalcades of enraged temple guards, is heavily larded with dreamlike verse about, well, it wasn't exactly clear. Dark memories and allusions of the Company's past. Fatinah wrote little of the Company before the disaster in the desert wilderness, but Temple, who hadn't even been born when the Annals had been lost, wrote bad poetry about the lost Company. And sitting there in the morning light, a direct beam shining down the long corridor from the open gates through the infirmary's open door, looking after a ward full of sleeping patients, reading Temple's book, I saw what I had never seen before. The Spirit who curled in the heart of the Company. Temple had met her, known her, may have loved her, insofar as he had loved anything more than arson and blasphemy.

How had he met her? Was it because he was, effectively, Annalist and Captain both? Had it left him somehow vulnerable to her influence?

Was it his blasphemous, betrayed madness, did it somehow resonate with her obvious lunacy?

My musing over the ancient books of the Annals was interrupted and put to a close by the arrival of the ambulances, their bulk cutting off the morning light I had been basking in, down that long corridor. The courier pulled me out into the mustering-yard and the full sun-light. It was a chaos of battered, grinning ground-pounders, many of them still covered in the dried mementos of the rebel discomfit they so clearly were glorying in. But those were the intact brethren, and the ones in the ambulances were my concern. They were full of broken ponies, and the oxen and I organized litter parties to carry the most broken but salvageable inside, while I evaluated the worst cases there in the mud and blood of the yard. I sent the courier back into the infirmary with the first wave of surgery candidates for my supply of mercy potions, for those conscious enough to be aware of their hopelessness. The rest were already past my intervention, one way or the other.

I should have been out there with the ambulances. This was on me. I mean, the Captain's well being was of higher priority than the wounded from one fight, however… extensive. But I had had a good idea what was wrong with the Captain, and I should have left him to the warlocks, and minded my own lane. Three trauma cases whose bloodloss would carry them away, no matter what I could do for them now…
I rushed inside to get to work in the surgery. The awakened convalescents were shuffling out, and I grabbed a couple of the most effective to play nurse and orderly. I told Roggentochter to watch and help with the rags and bandages, and got to work.

It was a long day. I spent hours washing out and cleaning pike wounds, some of them terrible. None of the ponies who made it to the infirmary died on my table, but two donkeys and an earth pony lost limbs to my bone-saws, and over a dozen earth ponies, donkeys and pegasi would be joining the convalescent corps for weeks as their deep wounds and blood loss took them out of the active lists.

Roggentochter was a trooper, only vomited in a corner once, and was good about cleaning it up afterwards. I didn't blame her – a pony with half her face sheared off isn't anything you should be easy with, not that young. Feather Fall would live, but she'd never be pretty again. Well, some ponies like their mares in masks, and our smiths were good with that sort of thing. Ahem.

This I had from Long Haul, who had the time to describe the Lieutenant's victorious disaster:

The deep recon scouts had identified a collection of rebel units which were rushing back from the posts on the frontier to the inner districts, the civilian White Rose had gotten word to their regiments somehow, we didn't know at the time exactly how, although some sort of witchy rune communication scheme was suspected. The response was scattered, and disorganized, but there were two big concentrations advancing down the roads crossing the byway that Otonashi's Benoit column was supposed to be using to return to the main base that evening. The Captain, the Lieutenant and Broken Sigil had worked out an overly-clever ambush plan, to have the Benoit column to cross the rebel "T" and draw them into a prepared kill zone that the Lieutenant and Tickle Me's vexellations would use to them smash up. Indirection, distraction and ambush – the Company's preferred mode of operation.

It hadn't gone to (excessively complicated) plan. Every pony has a plan until you buck them in the face. The Benoit column had been too slow, too burdened with their haul of stolen vehicles, grain, and cheeses. They were still in the kill zone when the enemy forces overtook the rear guard. The carters cut their traces and left the vehicles, but the damage was done. The rear guard got mauled, and far too many Company ponies went down under a rush of pike. It would have been a catastrophe if not for one of my oxen, who instead of following the rest of the carters in running for their lives, turned about and counter-charged into the face of a fence of pikes.

One of Sack's and Tiny's aged uncles, had apparently made the calculation, or just was tired of running. He hit that line like a boulder of beef, and broke off a half-dozen pikeheads in his thick hide. I'm told he made a hash of their nice neat formation, broke their momentum. He died, of course, and I looked over the body when I had time, before they buried him. I counted no less than sixty-seven wounds, and fished twenty-five pike-heads out of him. As far as I can tell, he died of shock and blood loss, they never actually got a blade into anything vital. Lourd, an ox of considerable age and experience, decided on the road to Benoit that he was tired of running away from trouble, and trouble found him instead.

Lourd's stand gave Otonashi's rear guard time to disengage, and Otonashi herself set some surprises to slow and disorient the caribou who managed to get around the enraged ox and had tried to re-form a line to continue the pursuit. This was the point at which the Lieutenant and Tickle Me had closed their trap on the enemy.

The Benoit rear guard had been engaged inside the kill zone, and had left the ambush elements out of position and wrong-hoofed. They had had to maneuver to find the rear of the enemy, and had nearly blundered into the enemy twice before they were ready. Once they had dressed their lines, though, it was basically over. They pulled off the same trick I had performed in Pythia's Fell, except instead of benefiting from the confined quarters of a (by battlefield standards) narrow high-street, they had to envelope the disintegrating rebel phalanxes. It must have helped that the enemy wasn't an organized force, but rather an opportunistic collection of different units' forward elements with no united command or control. It wasn't as pretty as Pythia's Fell, but the presence of the aerial cohort, committed en masse, meant that the enemy lost as many ponies in the rout as in the battle itself. There were survivors, perhaps as many as there were dead on and around the field, but they were scattered, and from the sound of things, I wouldn't be surprised if the majority of them never rejoined their units. This sort of thing is how good ponies become deserters. As well as bad ones.

We recovered our dead:
The following, dead of pike wounds to their front: Maille Fine, jenny; Deuxieme Etage, jack; High Kick, corporal, earth pony stallion; Escaliers Retour, jack; Seventh Yard, zebra stallion; Dream Valley, earth pony mare. All of them in the rear guard, facing a charging caribou pike line. None showed wounds in the rear or flank. Two Clouds, pegasus mare, of blood loss from a partially severed wing taken in pursuit of an escaping caribou officer, who was run down by her wingmares who made sure he would not escape to brag of his feat. Lourd, ox, of massive blood loss on the field, as described above. Grable, dragon wyrming, of wounds taken in the thick of the fighting during the breaking of the phalanx; the killing wound was probably one of three to his femoral arteries on either side; he had trusted in his tough hide one battle too many. Driftwood, earth pony stallion, of heavy wounds to his barrel and crop, taken in the breaking of the phalanx. Alaborn, jack, of wounds to his throat and groin, taken in the breaking of the phalanx. Catsfoot, earth pony mare, of massive wounds to her muzzle and forehead, again in the breaking of the phalanx.

I polished off the whiskey in my interrogation kit that night, and slept the sleep of the stinking drunk well into the next morning.

Our Thing

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SBMS024

Two days later, I was still nursing a monster hangover, which really, was more than I deserved. Going on a bender after a bad day in surgery wasn't worthy of a physician of the Company. The old unicorn I'd replaced would have been disappointed in me. She had been dying of a cancer when the brethren had foalnapped me from my master, her body in rebellion against itself, squamous masses and carbuncles growing uncontrolled across her barrel and flank. Nothing she or I knew how to combat, but at least my library of palliatives made Silver Glow's last days painless and lucid. I had nearly a month under her rather light-hearted tutelage, the laudanum in the potions leaving her euphoric and playful. But then, we hadn't had any serious battles in her month of dying, she was the only addition to the Annals in my first six months of service. Twelve in a night…

I should not have let it take me that way. Other eras have seen the Company weather truly terrible battle-lists; Bitter Ambrosia's volumes aren't actually half lists of the dead, but it certainly reads that way at times. The Company was much larger in those days, as it grew to absorb the remnants of the other units they had been brigaded with, volunteer and other mercenary outfits, and then the remnant of the division in which that bled-dry brigade had itself been brigaded. By the end of that terrible war, the Company had taken up the remnant slivers of half an army, two entire corps, whose parent battalions, regiments, brigades, divisions, had washed out of service on a tide of blood and sickness, disablement and desertion. The other mercenary companies, mayfly bands held together by the charisma of one pony or another, fell apart first, then the trained militias, then the volunteer legions, then the drafted battalions that replaced them – those came apart the quickest. No unit's morale could withstand conditions in which the regiments fed into the woodchipper reeled back after a half-hour's battle with half their number dead or dying on the field. None but the Company.

Ambrosia's Company survived by the simple expedient of being useful elsewhere other than in the assault, and never allowing the whole Company to be fed into the woodchipper by any given glory-mad general. But many a day saw one of the Company's battalions in skirmish formation lead a battle-line into the killing zone of one of that era's dread great warlocks. The honor of the day allowed skirmishers to scatter and avoid total annihilation by the blooming death-globes the witch-ponies of Mauga specialized in, those soul-pumped vacuums that obliterated everything they touched, ground, soil, air, trees, weapons and ponies. Even scattered in thin skirmish-lines, the Company would still lose dozens on a good day. Especially if their allied witch-ponies managed to blow similar grey-dusted holes in the defending enemy lines, through which the skirmishers would pour, and stab their lances through the corrupted heart of the exhausted, overwhelmed enemy warlock.
Page after page of nothing but names and simple details, the same details, paragraphs of names with the cause of death the header. Can you wonder why he was called Bitter? A dozen dead, and twice that wounded enough to be taken out of commission, and we celebrate a grand victory. I worried that we were in a place where Ambrosia would recognize us, that we were marching his road.

With so many wounded, the odds were against me, and sure enough, I found two of my patients with spiking fevers. I opened up an earth pony and a pegasus the day after that, not wanting to operate hung over. I cleaned out their wounds again, rinsing the infected region heavily with alcohol and debriding the dead and swollen tissues around the wounds, while Roggentochter hoofed me my tools and the alcohol. Thankfully, the raiding columns had found entire distilleries in more than one of the granaries, and the carts full of loot were many of them piled heavy with casks of barely-aged rotgut. I preferred my distilled alcohol as white as possible, too much weirdness soaked in with aging. Sanitizing with whiskey and brandy was a mook's game. I settled back after re-stitching the last pony's wounds, satisfied that I probably would not have to amputate; it would have been far too much of the limb, even with prosthetics, the earth pony would never have fought again.

The Lieutenant looked up as I wiped my table down, and directed my ‘prentice to run my tools through the boil-bath. We had knocked a vent into the roof of the surgery, and set up a hearth in the corner to do small-batch laundry and boil water for cleaning surgical tools. She had arrived partway through my work with the feverish earth pony. The Captain had awakened, but he was rarely lucid, and command had devolved upon the Lieutenant until the Captain was capable of following an entire conversation without drifting off in a fog.

"We need to talk about what happened the other night in the mess hall. I've gotten very little from the other participants, but I think I've pieced together that something, some haunt or another, interrupted the ceremony? You and your little pets you've half-inducted into our thing? About the same time that the Captain decides to lose his damn mind?"

"Something like that. You talked to Gibblets? It was more his bailiwick than mine. I'm just the Company barber and note-taker. Spooks and witchery is his department."

She looked disgusted by my aw-shucks routine. "Oh, right, you're the alicorns' gift to military and magical theory and practice when it suits your purpose and ego, but once it's something you might have actual experience or information on the situation, you're all 'nobody but us crickets in this here field, padron!' Gibblets pretty much said the same damn thing, except he directed me at you!"

"He say that in plain Equuish, or did he quote obscure poetry at you?"

"As plain as his Equuish ever gets, the little green smartass. No different than usual. Why?"

"It's his story to tell, and he hasn't told it to me, not yet. Promised to spill at some point, but I'm in no hurry to talk to the little three-faced frog-prince. Whatever our spectral visitor actually was, it claimed to be our tutelary spirit, the blood-thirsty thing that lives in the war-lance and makes the Company The Company. And then it had its own little magic aneurysm and things got really weird. Greeted Gibblets like he was her long-lost pet uncle, and they both talked iambic pentameter at each other. After it went away, he kept talking like a play, and was still doing it last time I laid eyes on his slippery hide."

She blinked her exasperated disbelief at me like she was trying to communicate her disgust in semaphore, and then asked, "Has that happened before? Magic shows and ghosts appearing at induction ceremonies? I can't recall anything like that at mine, but you know I don't go in for the pageantry."

I certainly did know. The Lieutenant didn't really believe in the Company as the Black Company, the mystical brotherhood of war that carries a magic lance and its memory in a bottomless chest full of the names of dead ponies. From things she's said, I think she conceives of us as a sort of mafia, an outgrowth of anti-unicorn peasant conspiracies or subrosa militias, like the field-gangs of the restive boondocks of her youth. It doesn't help that she tends to call the Company "our thing".

"If it has happened before, I haven't noticed it in my time with the Company or with the Annals. I'll have to read through the books and see if there isn't something I missed. But there's a whomping great lot of Annals to read through, if I'm going to read the actual text and not the summaries and abridgments. Nearly five hundred years' worth of steady chronicling can amount to tens of millions of words, Lieutenant. We rely mostly on summaries and our predecessors' notes, and those specific volumes which we've been taught to use specifically. Have I read Fatinah's middle volumes, or those books of the Annalists whose Company sat on its fat behind in garrison for decades at a time with nothing but age and soft living to record in the death-lists? No, not really."

She eyed me, now puzzled. "OK, I've never been able to read Gibblets and his bizarre face, but you, you mamalucca, you've always been an open book. You're pissed at him, and I'd swear you're pissed at your books, whatever il' nfernu that means. I don' care what merda is between you two, you picciriddi talk it out."

I hoofed my eyes at this display in front of Roggentochter. "Lieutenant, I'm trying to make a good example for my very-not-fluent-in-Equuish apprentice here. Please don't fill her ears with your Sicari gutter-talk."

She blushed right through her purple coat, and made herself scarce. Right, time to beard the goblin in his hole.

The Amphibian In His Element

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SBMS025

I found Gibblets and his mini-me out by the drainage pond, looking over our overstrained sanitation system, such as it was. This was a bad place for drainage, there's a reason the local ponies hadn't put a town here. Best we could do was this bollocks, set up leech fields and drainage ponds and hope nopony notices the stench. Even then, a warlock had to work overtime to screen the works from view, and more importantly, the sensitive noses of our neighbors. I thought some of them might have been twigging to the fact that their temporary gypsy neighbors are something different from the regular run of bums and petty thieves. We would have probably had to start recruiting and terrorizing, because obscurity was quickly reaching its full capacity. I was sort of surprised the half-dozen foals that followed Gibblets home had been the full extent of our curious foals problem. Maybe we could use the apprentices to lull the neighbors' kids, spread rumors counteracting the natural conclusions they're sure to have been drawing at that point?

"You done with the mystery quotes and versifying?"

He looked up and smirked, clearly in a happier mood than the last time we talked.

Donkeys and horsefolk, be not bold
For Griffon thy master by haunts was sold!

"Damnit, Gibblets…"

He giggled, vilely. "No, no, one more…"

What shall I say more than I have inferr'd?
Remember whom we are to hope withal;
A sort of vagabonds, rascals, and runaways,
A scum of irregulars, and base lackey peasants!

"You finished?"

He composed himself, and sniggered, "Yeah, that's it. Had to get it out of my system. Elsewise I could go for hours."

"The Lieutenant wanted us to kiss and make up. She wants answers. She was swearing in that peasant creole of hers, right in front of my apprentice." I waved a hoof at Roggentochter, who had scurried off with Bad Apple to go do foal things in the woody verge around the stinking pond. I yelled at her, "Don't fall in! You won't enjoy the cold bath afterwards!"

"She won't like answers. You won't like answers. Tartarus, I don't want to think about answers. I've been with the Company too long this time, let down my guard. That thing got inside my head this time. I spent so much effort keeping my distance, kept my independence, stayed neutral… have you ever heard the story of the alicorn Azrael, and the war in Rakuen?"

"Vaguely. Rakuen is some sort of alicorn homeland, isn't it? There was some sort of big fight in pony heaven, treason and war and the usual religious nonsense."

"When the Peacock Angel rebelled against her father and master, great Mazda, the alicorns fell into camps, for the proud Peacock and the All-Father. Some few like Azrael refused to choose sides, and fled the fighting. Lots of fighting, lots of dying, and in the end, the Peacock Angel was defeated, her ponies scattered, and she was cast into a terrible prison. But the All-Father changed his fickle mind, and let his chastened daughter out of her prison, and restored her to her estate, as his face to the outer worlds, his vizier and right-hoof mare. And her surviving loyalists were brought into the fold, and all was once more at peace within paradise, if much depopulated and war-ravaged. But Azrael and her fellow conscientious objectors? They are even to this day outcast, and the stories say they wander the Chain of Creation, bemoaning their moral cowardice, and leaving stories of secret alicorns meddling in the affairs of ponies wherever they go."

"You claiming to be an alicorn? I don't see any wings on you, Tartarus, I don't even see hooves, unless you're hiding something really odd in those brogans you wear everywhere."

"No, you damn fool zebra. I'm saying that we live in an existence of harmonic resonance, and that fate and destiny are nothing more than the patterns into which thinking beasts are inevitably drawn by their natures and the worlds as they are. And nopony likes someone who won't pick a side when it comes to drawn steel and blood drawn."

"A mercenary company is a peculiar place to find a conscientious objector."

"It was a long, long time ago. I think I told you once that the Company is easily as old again as its surviving Annals," he paused, seeing by my frown that was incorrect. "Well, maybe that was a previous Annalist. But it is, and before it was the Company, it was something else. The Nightmare told you true, that part at least. One of her rebel thestral regiments, although I wasn't there for that, and before that, one of my mistress's loyal Lunar Guard battalions. They must have fell when she did, and I am not sure how or why they left Equestria after the Longest Night."

"The spirit mentioned Equestria. I thought it was a fairy-tale, more fantastic than Rakuen. A fantasy about a fairy-land ruled over by an immortal alicorn queen who ruled the heavens above as the earth below, a second paradise of impossibly happy ponies. Emphasis on 'impossible'." I stomped about in irritation and disgust to be talking of foals' tales.

"I've not been there in recent centuries, and I can't be sure how much of the propaganda is true - I've been with you and the Company for the last hundred years, and heard the same stories you've no doubt grown up on - but it was real once upon a time, and was briefly a paradise in my youth. The confused young mare you met, after meeting her… other self. That was my Princess, my mistress. I…" He choked up, and I was concerned he was about to run off again, and we'd have to have this same damn conversation, again and again, like a tedious limbo or purgatory, tearing the truth out of him, even if I had to chain him to a rock and rip it out of his liver like a hungry griffin.

My fierce frown pinned him to that muddy bank, and he started again.

"There once was an alicorn princess, two of them. The elder ruled in truth, and the younger was pretended to be an equal, and in fact was made the hauler of garbage and the destroyer of monsters for her queen of an elder sister. This wore on the younger, and her immature mind - for alicorns age at a different rate than lesser ponies, and their adolescence can last centuries - buckled under the strain and loneliness. I'm still not sure if it was simply her madness taken personality, or if she was actually possessed by some dream-monster, and I was not there to see the process. My ambition led me to try to make something of my soggy self, and I was in the process of failing to distinguish myself in the elder sister's magical academy at the time. My Luna, she fell, and rebelled, and became that… thing we saw slavering over foals' blood in the mess hall."

"She was such a sweet girl, proud, strong, far, far too proud - but she did love foals. Every mare kills the thing she loves…" His eyes got that quoting look to him, and I clopped my hooves together to break the trance.

"Right! After her sister defeated her rebellion, and used a terrible magic to banish the Nightmare to an eldritch prison, I left in disgrace. Started wandering down the Chain of Creation, because Equestria is at the head of the Chain, it is easy to travel from Equestria to other worlds, but hard to travel from other worlds to Equestria. There's this mystical head-wind… Anyways! I kicked around, and fell into a world of slow-time, where every hour was a week, and every week a year, and lost a couple centuries. I was wandering through that horsey land of fanatics and god-botherers when I came across the Black Company for the first time. I didn't recognize it, because that grim young hellion Fatinah had replaced the banner with her morbid hanging-ponies flag. I signed on as a warlock, they thought I was some species of djinn."

"Ah! al-Dafdae! That was you? But Fatinah records you leaving in a huff-"

"Yeah, the moment they pulled the old banner out of her memory to celebrate her great victory over the Eighters. I realized at that moment the band of ponies I was in traces with weren't just a random mercenary outfit with a strong ethos and more thestrals than you generally see out here on the world-chain, but was actually a traitor legion. I left for a long time, but in later centuries I crossed the Company's path time and again, and each time I signed on under a different name. It felt… like home. Like she was nearby. Until I got a wild hair, or somepony did something monstrous in the ranks, and then I had to go again."

"Why did she use your current Company name, if you've been using a nom de guerre? And what kind of court jester is called 'Gibblets', anyways - that's what she meant by pierrot, right?"

"Yeah, that's what I was. And Princess Luna could be a strange filly, morbid and amused by ugly things. It's why I was her fool, after all - my face was a comfort to her, in all the over-decorated splendor of her elegant sister's court. No, this last time, I didn't have the heart to think up a new name. Everypony who possibly might have remembered it was dead for over eight centuries, or Celestia on her gaudy throne in far-away Canterlot, worlds away. Nopony would have remembered the old moon-princess's hideous jester; from what I hear, nopony even remembers therewas a moon princess, all the stories out of Equestria talk of the princess of day and night, the alicorn of the moon and the sun. She's extinguished her sister from the memories of the living." The goblin looked saturine and wrathful upon this last declaration, a whiff of rebellion and fury in the air along with the stench of waste-water and associated filth from the drainage pond before us.

I had something I had to say. "I, I haven't been fully forthcoming about the oracle in Pythia's Fell. I thought it was all a charlatan's act, or at least, most of it was. You know how easily they can cold-read you, pick your tells for clues and feed you back your fears and hopes. But she said things that made no sense to me, and match up with what you say," I said, and proceeded to quote the Pythian oracle's prophesy, or at least, long sections of it. I may have perfect recall, but that doesn't mean it is easy to just stand there and vomit forth stanza after stanza of once-heard gibberish.

His eyes closed, he started waving his monkey paws towards the drainage pond and the leaching field beyond it. Bad Apple, off to the left doing something half-hidden among some scraggly alder buckthorn, reared up in surprise as the wave of magic caught her by surprise, and she stumbled back into Roggentochter, who was knocked into view by the collision. The smell suddenly was gone, and Gibblets' work, which he had been using our conversation to avoid doing, was done in an instant.

"That is definitely not good news. Yes, the mechanics of Equestria's corner of the Chain are more or less as described, and some of the characteristics of the way that Celestia runs her little sandlot may be tying into the greater aspects of the Chain of Creation. I certainly never noticed any such reservoir of magical potential in the pikestaff, but it is something unique to the Company, and the warlocks Luna employed in the Guard were subtle, powerful, clever and far too comfortable with a class of dark magic which could be hidden in ways you wouldn't be able to spot just by looking for it. If we're actually a necromantic infernal device over nine hundred years in the winding-"

"The power could break worlds," I finished for him.

Driven From Pillar To Post

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SBMS026

Operations settled into a cautious routine over the next week. With the Captain out of commission, the Lieutenant was handling the affairs of the Company, and she wasn't as steady a hoof on the reins as the old bird had been, even if the places he had been guiding us into had been getting more and more hair-raising. We settled into a pattern of reaction as the enemy stumbled blindly back into the central districts. By this point they had lost a significant number of ponies, not enough to seriously affect their operational capacity, but enough to hurt. No army can suffer the sort of losses we'd inflicted without anything to show for it, and not take a hit to their unit cohesion and morale. They did the obvious, and started re-building their granaries, and sent out detachments to tear down our “scarecrows”.

This had been expected; it was, in point of fact, a secondary purpose for their deployment in the first place. Yes, the primary reason for setting out gorey, grotesque fetishes throughout the province was to terrorize and alarm the population, and also to make a claim over the territory. But it was also a challenge to the rebel, to the rebel's authority over its own territory and claim of sovereignty within the province. This was a vital aspect of our war on the rebel's legitimacy. By destroying their excise posts, we denied their authority to levy taxation and control trade. By posting the province with the dismembered remains of their butchered soldiers, we advertised their inability to assert the monopoly of violence in their claimed domain.

Of course they had to tear down the scarecrows.

They still hadn't learned to watch for pegasi and griffin observation posts. Tickle Me had left multiple OPs over the marked crossroads and their approaches, and those observation ponies were supplied with replacement fetishes - built from the spoils of the battle on the road to Benoit - to be emplaced as soon as the first sets were ripped down by the offended caribou. No need to rush over the first hurdles, at this point it was an endurance race, not a sprint.

When the second round of detachments came around to tear down the scarecrows, the OPs had been reinforced by pegasi eager to demonstrate the tactical utility of their scarecrow-emplanting stunts. The caribou who approached the crossroads scarecrows to tear them down again, didn't even hear the dive-bombing maniacs plummeting to those caribou's dooms. At most of the crossroads-skirmishes, they didn't actually hit their targets with those heavy flying stakes, but the ones that they did – those caribou splashed like burst melons struck with ballistae bolts. A pegasus hurtling from tens of thousands of feet above carrying their weight again in sharpened, fired-hardened wooden stake makes for one Tartarus of a discarding sabot. As I've written elsewhere, the tactic is usually employed against heavy fortifications and close-packed formations, not individual caribou. It's quite literally like using a forge-hammer to flatten a fly.

The fact that the first scarecrow-dismantling detachments had been unmolested left the second wave of detachments under-ponied and sloppy. They weren't prepared to be attacked, and it told in the fighting. None of the rebel detachments were wiped out, but all of them were routed, and by and large they did very little to harm or even threaten their attackers. Pegasi aren't the heavy-hitters you'll find among the ground troops, and their combat skills outside their milieu can be somewhat limited due to their hollow-boned insubstantiality, but they're experts without peer when it comes to harrying a routed foe from the field. Death by a thousand cuts, creating and maintaining panic – their targets have been known to just drop dead from shock and terror after being chased for miles by wing-bladed speeding death from above.

But the crossroad-skirmishes gave away one of our advantages, decisively. The enemy had gotten a good look at us for the first time. Or, I should write, some of them that survived saw us straight for the first time. We weren't shadows and boogeymares in the darkness any more to those that ran and told the tale, we were flesh and blood and feather and steel. They had fought us in daylight, and lost, but daylight strips the Company of some of its mystique. I was remorseful when I took the accounts of the fighting from the pegasi I interviewed. We lost no ponies in the crossroad-fights, and I barely had any work to speak of – a few stitched cuts, one mare who pulled a wing-muscle while missing her target with her stake-spindle.

As we fought with the White Rose over our scarecrows, the good ponies of the province poured into the fields and threshing-yards. The harvest was in full swing, and scythes and sickles reaped the rewards of a long, troubled summer. The weather had been perfect, and the fields were heavy with grain. I'm not a farm-pony, being a zebra who grew up with cobblestones under my hooves throughout my childhood, so you'll have to go elsewhere for long paeans to the farmers and their harvesting practices and so forth. All I know is that they were out there, sunrise to sunset, and long after sunset in the threshing-yards and barns, and those barns began to bulge with their grain.

Because we had thoroughly disrupted the normal delivery patterns. In a normal year, they would have had carts running from all the major farms to their respective community's mills. There would have been a conveyer belt of sorts, of carts running threshed grain from the barns to the mills, and flour from the mills and hay from the barns to the granaries. Well, we had burned the granaries, and terrorized at least some of the mills out of operation, and we stole the carts. Not all of the carts, but enough to create shortages, and to expose the ones still in operation by their rarity on the roads. This opened up a new angle of attack.

A few mills were still operating, some of them manned by rebel soldiers ineptly grinding their own meal, some of them put back into operation by the mourning relatives of those millers we had hung from their own hoists. They were too heavily posted by protective details to be worth the ponypower investment, but it did mean that the routes leading up to those isolated operational mills were predictable, and vulnerable.

The Lieutenant sent out detachments to forward posts in the darkness, so that they were in position to ambush the loaded carts before they ever got close to their mills. The carters were beaten, and their carts burnt with their cargoes. If the enemy platoons defending the mills sallied forth to investigate the pillars of smoke, they were ambushed by waiting Company brethren in defilade. So much easier on the troops than assaulting the caribou in their fortified positions!

We conducted a dozen of these actions during the later course of the harvest, and ran the rebel ragged. In two of these otherwise-not-notable engagements, we lost ponies. A jack named Small Numbers caught an unlucky cut across his left femoral artery in a tussle with an armed carter on the road to the mill outside Marinette a week before the end of the harvest in that district. In a blown ambush outside Brazeau, a unicorn corporal - a mare named Greensward - and a jack who went by the Company name Hookbill were caught out of cover and cut down by a caribou reaction force that grossly outnumbered their brothers on the field. A team of griffins with pegasi-unicorn charioteer supports were able to recover the bodies in a dare-devil strike against the mill in Brazeau which the enemy had taken their bodies to be displayed. One of those griffins, Guelph Josef, died of wounds taken in that night-time assault. The mill burned.

Fewer and fewer civilian cart-ponies were willing to haul grain in these conditions, and the mills ground to an unproductive halt, their supplies dried up, and without grist. Eventually, the caribou started hauling their own carts, and got some small amount of grain out of nearby farms, marching their carts in heavily defended convoy to the mills. I'm told that the Lieutenant and Broken Sigil, in a rare sally into the field for that latter unicorn, eyed the convoys from concealed observation posts, and decided to not give the enemy the fight they were spoiling for.

Instead, they set up the grandest ambush of the campaign on the road from the largest operational mill to the new, heavily defended granary in construction next to the main rebel base, outside Lau Crosse. The caribou had posted the whole of the route with guards, but not so heavily that they were actually in line of sight of each other. They should have been more paranoid. It was too easy to overwhelm the posted guards in isolation, and roll them up one pair at a time. You could barely tell that the caribou standing their posts were literally posted once Otonashi was done with her glamours. The flour-convoy later that day rolled past several pairs of stiffly saluting guards, and as far as we could tell, none twigged to the deceased status of their road-guards.

So they were not in the least prepared when just after the platoons of the vanguard had passed over it, a stretch of roadbed disappeared below the leading cart-caribou, plunging her, her harness-partner, and their overloaded cart into a pitfall dug quickly by earth ponies and maintained against collapse by sheer witchcraft , the type of main-force magic that overstrains our sort of warlock. It was the work of Shorthorn, and it blew his strength for the event. We were lucky he didn't end up in the infirmary like Octavius, but he held that shell of earth under the hooves of dozens of marching enemy soldiers until they had passed and he could let it collapse under the carters.

The disappearance of one of their carts caused the entire convoy to pile up behind the blockage. Some of the soldier-carters at the new head of the convoy tried to drive off the roadbed and run around the pitfall, only to discover that it extended in a wide semi-circle around the road on both sides, and two of them lost their carts to the trap. It was now chaos, and some of the carters started cutting their own traces, looking to free themselves for the inevitable fight.

This was the point when Tickle Me's contribution to the ambush fell out of the clouds at terminal velocity, their fuses flaring behind them. More heavy stake-spindles, with casks mounted upon their blunted heads. The casks impacted dully atop their targeted cart-loads, the heavy stakes continuing to drive onwards as the casks themselves suddenly stopped, and the resulting overpressure burst the casks and their loads of distilled alcohol all over the flour-sacks and nearby roadbed. The arrested momentum was distributed at last to the fuses attached to the rear of the spindles, and their flaming shards fell upon the alcohol-soaked sacks, setting the whole ablaze. Their pony delivery systems arced out across the stubbled fields surrounding the now-deranged convoy, some buried, some burning, all in disorder.

This was when the unicorn bow-ponies started flinging arrows at the convoy from glamoured cover. They could take their time, and they had plenty of spare bolts, and they swept the convoy from stem to stern and back again before they provoked the caribou vanguard and rear-guard into charging through the open fields on both sides of the ambush, trying to flush out the hidden snipers, and catching their own share of Tartarus in the process. The caribou shook out into loose formation to cover the most ground, they must have concluded we were waging a hit-and-run attack, since all they had seen were stand-off strikes. So they were utterly out of position when the warlocks dropped the glamours on the right side of the road and revealed a Company phalanx on the open flanks of the vanguard. Donkey, earth pony, and zebra lancers tore through the scattered open ranks of the caribou vanguard, and obliterated them. There were no survivors.

Our phalanx opened up after trampling the remnants of their vanguard, and turned to sweep the carter-caribou and the rearguard from the field. They fell back in relatively good order, peppered every step of the way by arrows from our unicorns, and the survivors made it to a nearby farmstead, where we besieged them, setting various buildings on fire, and driving them into a desperate defensive position. The abandoned carts on the road, of course, were burnt in their traces.

The Lieutenant could have ordered the charge and exterminated the rebel, but word had arrived from the scouts that there were reaction forces arriving from both ends of the road, both from the mill and the base next to the granary. She called it a day, and the Company withdrew in perfect order, marching away on a side-road, and leaving the rebel reinforcements to extract their traumatized survivors from the hastily-fortified remnants of a half-burned barn.

It had been a perfect fight, which is to say, deeply, grotesquely unfair. Only a damn fool offers a fair fight. I close this account of the ambush on the crossroad outside Lau Crosse, glad to say that no ponies entered the Annals that day, and only five wounds were serious enough to be aerially evacuated to my surgery.

And to note that the regiments in and around Lau Crosse would have a hungry autumn, and a hungrier winter. The roads south from Rennet started to see a trickle of caribou deserters slink by in search of better-fed employment.

Rainy Season

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SBMS027

The weather had definitely turned. Uncontrolled rain-storm after rain-storm lashed the woods and empty fields across Rennet, and temperatures plummeted under darkened skies. A couple ponies started sniffling one evening returning from observation duty off of some damp dark cloud, and then it seemed like half the Company was hacking away, sneezing, spraying infection everywhere. Contrary to what some ponies asked of me, I locked down my convalescents' ward and quarantined the rest of the camp away from my wounded.

I showed Roggentochter how to make a dilute alcoholic rinse, and we wiped down all non-cloth surfaces on a twice-daily schedule, and kept the laundry-fire running during every waking hour, boiling cloth bandages and our rags. The Company's operational tempo dropped into the latrine, and it took us a week and a half to fish it out of the muck and rinse it down. We were damn lucky that the first autumn outbreak of the flu caught the enemy as badly or worse than it got us. I had a copious supply of willow's bark extract that I had the sergeants distribute with a free hoof, and we made sure that the sick stayed in doors and under roof as soon as they started showing symptoms. I resolved to take my apprentice out into the woods as soon as the sickness passed, and show her how to mark young willow trees for harvest in the spring. If we had more than one wave of the flu come through the camp, it would drain even my generous supply of that wonder-drug.

Speaking of my apprentice, she had decided to Equuify her name, and started telling us to call her Rye Daughter. Her Equuish was coming along nicely; they're very quick to pick up languages at that age. She and the other apprentices didn't exactly form a gang - we kept them far too busy for that, this is how you keep apprentices in line and virtuous, work them until they drop - but they did keep running with each other whenever two of their masters had any reason to cross paths. Octavius had mostly recovered from his bout of hornburn when the flu caught him something fierce. I'm told that Feufollet took excellent care of him in his delirium. I never really saw much of the other three, who had apprenticed to a cook and two ground-cohort non-coms. I believe the Dodger and Tam Lane were the two who joined the cohorts, and they were training them up as runners and couriers. Charleyhorse went into the kitchens, and seemed happy enough the few times I laid eyes on him.

Bad Apple, we saw considerably more of, and so did the rest of the camp. Gibblets' training methods were direct, shockingly careless, and more than a little spectacular. Seeing a little earth pony launch herself skyward on a fiery force-bubble while giggling her head off was something everypony ought to see once in their lives. The tidal wave of backflow from the latrine he had her "cleaning" on the other hand was less amusing. We made Gibblets help her clean that one up, and the Lieutenant gave him a very public tongue-lashing. As the apprentices began to shed their respective accents and take on the "Company tongue", the Lieutenant's accent degenerated, and got stronger and stronger as command wore more heavily on her. At times she sounded like some mob enforcers I had known as an apprentice in the old country. I kept a close eye on her when our paths crossed, looking for "thestral eye" or other signs. Nothing other than the accent thing surfaced.

The Captain grew clear-eyed and active, but he still didn't make an awful lot of sense. Half his symptoms resembled that of a pony who had suffered a stroke or an aneurysm, but the others didn't match the pattern. He had no asymmetric dysphoria. His speech wasn't slurred, and he didn't show any muscle weakness. It was just that his words were scrambled, and there didn't seem to be much meaning behind what he said. It wasn't exactly aphasia, because that usually has some frustrated intent or confusion underlying it. He simply babbled. We had him helping around the camp, doing basic chores, if only to keep him active and healthy. But it was heart-rending that our leader for dozens of years was now so vacant.

The rains marked the end of the campaign season. The frequent storms made it difficult and unhealthy to maintain the aerial scouts in their observation posts, and most of the roads turned into bottomless muddy sloughs. Only the Bride's Roads remained firm, but we could not use those as the rebel posted them heavily, and they barely covered any of the province if we could even get to them across the byways between us and the highway pavement. The Bride's Roads were more useful for travelling between provinces than within them, anyways.
There was some debate about whether or not to use the chariots to mount strikes against the rebel posts along the Bride's Roads. The onset of the flu scotched that plan for the time being, as we couldn't spare the ponies to scout out an attack, or fly in a strike-force in sufficient strength.

We relied more and more on our local contacts as the capacity of our scouts to maintain nightly observation posts waned. That produced some good news. Rebel control over districts away from the Bride's Roads had basically collapsed. Even before the rains, the outlying farming communities had begun to refuse to make deliveries without a squad or two of caribou sitting in front of their front stoops enforcing the edicts of the White Rose. We'd even heard of some interspecies feuding breaking out, and at least one serious massacre of a caribou clan isolated and alone on their homestead surrounded by irate earth pony and donkey neighbors. One source suggested that they had given over the homestead to the clan's enslaved cattle, who were more than willing to keep it going on the same terms as their exterminated masters had offered. I wasn't sure how much credence to give this story, it had the aroma of wishful thinking on the part of that particular informant.

Stories mostly agreed on the subject of deserters in the woods and roads headed south, though. In places where they couldn't have been false reports based on our movements, and always moving south. The White Rose rebellion in Rennet was a… aspirational emulation of the great wave of White Rose rebellion that had been wracking the Riverland provinces for a generation. The stories and our own briefings from our long-missing employer's people all agreed, the Riverlands were a seething wreck, more than half-depopulated and hopelessly out of Imperial control. But the White Rose was strong along the great River, and from all accounts their armies paid well. Nopony could agree on exactly who was bankrolling the rebellion; the rebelled provinces couldn't possibly have been self-funding given the imploded state of their economies. A compelling theory was that there was a sponsoring state lurking on the far side of some newly-discovered portal somewhere along the River, that they felt threatened by Tambelon, and they were destabilizing the Bride's empire.

Our information advantage had shriveled with the rains, and as a result we turtled up, going dormant. Let the rebels run their troops ragged trying to find us, let them kill their soldiers with exposure, let them drown in the rivers of mud which were once and would once again be roads, but currently were bottomless and frigid. It was too much to hope for that they were also hungry, but we had only managed to steal their reserves and surplus. They wouldn't burn through their supplies on hoof until sometime early in the new year, in the very worst case. More likely, the rebel would start confiscating civilian food supplies to make up their deficits. They'd be as popular as the cholera by spring, and if they played their cards exactly wrong, even the caribou civilians would be willing to throw over the White Rose. Hunger breaks the back of insurgencies faster than steel; it's just a damn ugly way to win.

Nopony ever accused the Black Company of being pretty. The Captain in his lucid days had committed us to waging war against a rebellion many, many times our number, one that had crushed a conventional army five times our size in open battle. And even with the aid of King Hunger and General Influenza, the Company would not be able to face the reduced rebel in the open field come spring without the support of allies. We needed to mobilize the Bride's militias in neighboring provinces, or conjure a local army out of the muck and melt of runny rained-under Rennet.

Grogar's Grammar

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SBMS028

"Patriotism, noun. 'Burnable trash ready to the torch of anypony ambitious to illuminate her name. In Fine Diction's famous lexicon, patriotism is defined as the last resort of a scoundrel. With all due respect to my learned predecessor, I beg to submit it is the first.'"

The hall was filled with the pained scratching of dozens of pencils laboring to copy down the line projected against the whitewashed side wall by the clever little device I had pulled from my chest of tricks. I was not the first pony to while away the long hours in garrison and castra hiberna conducting writing and literacy classes for the new members of the Company. The mess hall was filled to bursting with donkeys, oxen, and fledglings, their mouths full of variably worn pencil-nubs, seated at cleared tables and covering their scraps of paper with dumb-copies of the projected text blown up forty times its size beneath the projector. I had gotten one of the stronger unicorns to power the device; it would be good for another two hours.

"Peace, noun. 'In international and internecine affairs, a period of cheating between two periods of fighting.'" I slowly read each sarcastic and cynical definition so that the class could absorb the meaning of the words as well as the simple mechanical mouth-writing itself. I paced between the tables, checking their work, and correcting here and there. "No, Sack, that's fighting with an 'f', you've got an 's' there. You can simplify by contracting it more strongly. The older style makes the two far too similar. Modern Company usage prefers the compact 's', anyways."

"Penitent, adjective. 'Undergoing or awaiting punishment.' A gloss on this definition – here Ambrosia is deliberately blurring the consequences and the desired state intended to be created by the consequences. You all know well enough that punishment often only produces the semblance of penitence, and so did Ambrosia." I had told them to entitle their dictionary 'Grogar's Grammar'; Bitter Ambrosia had called it something else, which would mean nothing to my students, and they all knew which devil Grogar was well enough. Shorthorn had yelled at me that it wasn't a grammar, but I liked the alliteration and who the heck knows who Discord is, anyways?

More than half of the recruits we had pulled out of Rime had been utterly unlettered; the education system in the new cities was lacking at best and nonexistent in many of the stews. Openwater Bay had been much the same, which is where I had learned to teach, assisting Bongo in those days. She had been better at this than I was, but I was getting better. At least she could power her own projector.

"Perseverance, noun. 'A lowly virtue whereby mediocrity achieves an inglorious success.'" Skritch, skritch, skritch. "Mediocrity is a lack of talent or inherent skill. It is no excuse for incompetence or failure in the eyes of the Company. Mediocrity is where almost all ponies start out, it is not a goal but something we escape by perseverance. We also do not care a pin for glory. Success is our expectation; glory matters not in the slightest."

Once they were done, and the work not being too terribly mauled, we would bind their scraps together and they'd have a pocket-book to amuse themselves in future encampments. Many of their veteran peers had similar little bound books in their packs and saddlebags from sessions just like this one.

"Rabble, noun. 'In a republic, those who exercise a supreme authority tempered by fraudulent elections. The rabble is like the sacred Majin of Saddle Arabian fable – omnipotent on condition that it do nothing.' The word is Zebric, and has no exact translation in simple Equuish, but it means as near as may be, 'mindless livestock'. You know, like pigs, or officers. But seriously, a rabble is a collection of hoydehoos, hayseeds, gutter-sweepings, and unemployed clerks. A rabble is also an untrained armed mob – and is thus the favored opponent of professional armies, and the loathed bane of the trained soldier. They are hopeless allies, and dangerously unpredictable obstacles as enemies. Don't expect them to be clever, but stupid can be dangerous in large numbers."

"Reveille, noun. 'A signal to sleeping soldiers to dream of battlefields no more, but to rise and have their blue noses counted. In the Nortemaugan army it is ingeniously called "rev-e-lee", and to that mangling our countryponies have pledged their lives, their misfortunes, and their sacred cutie marks.' This one is a historical curiosity. The Company has thrown over trumpet-signals and other loud blattings and bellowings as far too likely to reveal our positions to the curious ears of our watchful enemy. Ambrosia's Company operated in the presence of vast armies requiring ear-splitting communication methods such as trumpets and drill-sergeants to keep order. You know well enough our corporals prefer a switch and a glare over leather-lunged bellowing."

"Revolution, noun. 'In politics, an abrupt change in the form of misgovernment.' In our current situation, the substitution of our anarchy for the tyranny of the White Rose, who in their turn substituted their interested theft for the disinterested theft of the Bride. We aim to reassert the sole authority for organized thievery to the duly appointed bandits of our employer."

"Right, noun. 'The legitimate authority to be, to do, or to have; as is the right to be the Princess, the right to swive thy neighbor, the right to catch the cholera, and the like. The first of these rights were once believed throughout the Chain to be derived directly from the beneficence of the alicorns, and this is sometimes affirmed outside the enlightened realms of Republican oligarchy, where we know it is fully vested in the hooves of ponies of great wealth and greater magical power to bully their underlings and lickspittles.' Ah? Well, Ambrosia's Company fought for the right of one band of thieving bandits – known as the Oligarchs – their exclusive right to steal within the confines of that particular world, which was known in those parts of it under proper authority as the Republican Oligarchy of Mauga. Their enemies were the Oligarchic republic, known as the Republicans, who arrogated to themselves a sort of sub-monopoly for theft, and extended it to the practical assertion of theft of the labor and persons of individuals of certain breeds and tribes, or to be more clear, they were arrant slavers. Ambrosia's Company put its blood and honor behind the pack of thieves who did not claim ponies to be property, but rather lusted solely for those ponies' physical chattel, trinkets, and debts."

"Self-esteem, noun. 'An erroneous appraisement.' What? Yes, to be erroneous is to be in error, a state of being incorrect. And by your looks I see that you also need a definition of appraisement. Think of it as a performance review. No? How about a barracks inspection by your sergeant? Ah, there we go. Ambrosia is stating that a sergeant that allows his privates to inspect their own barracks unsupervised will very soon find himself with a section full of filthy, slovenly, drunken ponies indeed."

"Selfish, adjective. 'Devoid of consideration for the selfishness of others.' The selfishness of others extends to such luxuries as not being inflicted with the filthy camp-sicknesses engendered by certain ponies' unwillingness to observe basic sanitation; to not being slaughtered as we sleep because the pony detailed to the watch felt it proper to herself sleep at her post; to not being gassed where we sit because Private Haricots Sournois cannot stop over-indulging himself on the cooks' three-bean surprise! Take it OUTSIDE, Private!"

As we tried to air out the mess hall, I noticed the sand-clock, and realized we had overrun our time, and looked over to discover the cooks glaring at me in irritation, whether due to the noisome miasma, or my having blocked breakfast for the next shift. Rye Daughter put away her chap-book and helped me collect the pencils and spare paper. The chest had never run out of either, but I wasn't about to waste resources, and the troops would simply abscond with them to make new markers and chits for the eternal floating poker game if we didn't gather them after every class.

"Herr Doktor, you and the Annals talk about this vorld, that vorld. Mauga, Darl al Hisan, Crossroads, Tambelon. Vhat are these? Vords meaning the same as 'land'? You valked here from Crossroads, ja?"

I liked it when Rye Daughter called me Herr Doktor, it scratched an itch left by certain snobbish ponies back in Crossroads who didn't like my presence in their medical college's archives. I could never make myself correct her mis-usage. I thought how to explain the Chain.

"Have you heard us talk about the Chain of Creation? Or the Glory Road?"

"Ja, ist a highway system like the Bride's Roads, between realms, no?"

"Well… not exactly. This place you were born and raised, these heavens above and lands below, they are a part of the world we know as Tambelon. Each other world - the Darl al Hisan, Crossroads, Rakuen, Equestria - they each look up at different skies, different heavens, stand on different soils. Not simply something that lies over this ocean or that mountain-range, but only to be found through a magical portal. It's not at all clear if this world was here before the first pony opened the first portal into Tambelon, or whether the opening of the portal brought Tambelon into existence. There was nothing thinking on Tambelon before the first hoof stepped through the first portal – it may have been here all along, or it may have sprung fully formed by the act of crossing the threshold. There are ponies that insist that this later position is a massive violation of the conservation of magical energy; and there are other ponies that counter that there is no such thing as a conservation of magical energy – there are no closed systems, and every portal into a new land is the Chain extending itself one more link, adding more energy to the system as it extends the system into nothing and makes it something. "

"Ponies came from these somewhere elses?"

"Of course, we didn't spontaneously generate out of the portals. Zebra, earth ponies, unicorns, pegasi, minotaurs, caribou, donkeys – the tribes have migrated as their leaders and greed have driven them, from world to world, portal to portal. Don't ask me where the various tribes came from before they took to travelling the portal-roads. It is the favored theory of scholars that each tribe originated on its own home-world, each driven from their own, national Edens. I have no idea if this is true, but it is a neat and orderly idea."

"So caribou come from some original v- w- world! other than Tambelon? Stories I vas told as foal, they talk about great one-eyed buck in northern voods, woods, damnit!" She barked at herself, irate. The double-yous were coming hard to her, but she was fighting them as hard as she could. "Vodan king in the north woods, ha! And all caribou his children throughout this world. Nopony talk about doors or portals."

"Maybe, maybe not. I don't know the exact history of the settlement of Tambelon, I haven't had the opportunity so far, we've been rushing about on the march, or stuck here in the rural backend of no-where. Other worlds – on Crossroads, the caribou like to claim they're the indigenous population, that they were there when the first pony came through the first portal, although I've always thought the mer-ponies of Openwater Bay would have something to say about that one. I don't think the caribou could be indigenous to bothTambelon and Crossroads, and Crossroads is older than dirt. There's a reason it's called that – there are more portals on that world than you could count. It's why 'Chain' is a misnomer, the Glory Road has many side-roads, branches, intersections, and yes, crossroads. But most people call it the Chain of Creation because it sounds poetic in Equuish." Rye Daughter rolled her eyes at the idea of poetics. Versification was ever the bane of the barely fluent.

I heaved the packed chest onto my back, and we drifted back to the infirmary, in no particular hurry to go anywhere. Time slowed down in winter garrison, with little to do but quack the sickly and endlessly clean and polish and work over ingredients. I usually had more of the latter to work with – the busy campaign season had taken up my usual gathering time, and I was running short of a lot of materials other than distilled alcohol. Ironically enough, I had that in spades. As we approached the infirmary doors, a courier found us.

I had a visitor at the front gates.

Performance Review

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SBMS029

When I stomped over to the main gates, I was under the impression that some damn fool messenger from our liaison had jumped the usual protocols and come directly to the compound. Dior Enfant had settled into her role as the Company liaison, and eventually figured out she was in a supporting role, not our actual employer. We'd seen less and less of her as the young jenny had started circulating through the province as an asset-handler, increasingly hooves-on as our scouts by necessity had pulled back in the terrible conditions. She had come a long way from that jumped-up teenaged buffoon the Marklaird had left holding the bag when it had pissed off to do whatever it was legates did when they weren't hiring mercenary companies and setting them loose on the countryside with vague instructions.

Speaking of which, the little black leather-wrapped horror was sitting patiently in front of the gate-guard. It was impossible to see any sort of expression on that matte-black expanse of animal-hide which passed for a muzzle, but its posture conveyed a sort of louche amusement.

"Physician! Greetings to you on this most wonderful of mornings!"

It was sleeting outside the gates, and so dark as to not be truly describable as daylight. It was only day by courtesy of the sand-glasses. I exchanged glances with the ponies on guard.

"Did the outer posts bring our employer in?"

"No sign of them, Bones."

"Go get your relief, and then go check on the posts."

Our employer, who was notably unaccompanied by the usual cloud of functionaries and aides, waved a foreleg at me.

"Tut-tut, dear physician, I have done nothing to your road-guard. I did not wish to draw them out of their cozy, dry closes merely to escort my august personage to your front door." The laird's voice changed, as it always did, sending the usual shivers down my spine. The new voice was too similar to that of my apprentice, and I looked down at my side to make sure nothing had happened to Rye Daughter.

"Oh, my, and what is this? Are you collecting samples? How do, dearie? Don't you smell… fresh." The warlock had disappeared as soon as I'd taken my eyes off of it, and it was now lurkng to my left, peering under my barrel at the cringing caribou fawn. Its voice was now that of an avuncular, if fey, uncle. The sort your parents never left you alone with when you were growing up.

"Apprenticeship program. Needed a surgical assistant. Starting small, somepony needs to do the laundry."

"And you found the time to recruit on my dime, again. Oh, yes, I heard the stories of your raid on the sadlers in Tonnarre. So fierce! Did you need a spare source of leather for your harnesses?" The horror would have an interest in tanning, wouldn't it? The voice, this time, a pitch-perfect copy of the salespony who had "sold" me our oxen carters.

"My apologies if my actions caused your time to be wasted by complaints or petitions."

"And yet, you continue to waste my time by discussing it further. Enough of that. Your Captain! I have come to discuss our plans, and your performance in their completion. In short, this is a performance review." Now dry as dust, lifted I think from one of the laird's older lackeys.
So I led it into the base, and to the Lieutenant. What else could I do? The Marklaird theoretically paid us, not that anypony had seen a denier since Tonnarre.

We found her in her office, a nook next to operations with a couple of unfinished log-tables and an equally uncomfortable-looking chair, and an expensive oil lamp. She was doing the usual endless paperwork which is the lot of Company upper management.

"Captain, my Captain! You've lost considerable weight! And height! And gender. And species." The little monster turned on me in a pique, and bellowed in a thundering lumberjack's basso profundo, "Where is my griffin!"

"Ser Legate, you know this pony, this is our Lieutenant. I know for a fact that you were closeted up with her and the Captain for days planning the campaign. She's currently in charge of the Company until the Captain recovers from his injuries. We're not exactly sure what happened, but he seems to have suffered some sort of stroke or aneurysm, not anything I've ever seen before. A couple weeks into the campaign, out of nowhere. I can show you him later. He seems to be suffering atypical aphasia and loss of cognitive function."

"I turn my back on you lot for a few days, and you go and break your commander! No wonder you have not delivered on his promises! I was Promised. A. Rebel. Free. Province. By. Winter!" A petulant foal now, screeching for her confiscated dollie.

"Ser Legate," started the Lieutenant, getting up and gesturing to the operations room. "Let us show you our progress. It is not yet winter, nor is the province exactly crawling with the White Rose. You find us rather camp-bound at the moment, and I can only applaud your willingness to travel in such conditions."

The Marklaird allowed itself to be guided to the neighboring operations centre, with its sand-table and racks of scrolls, records, and map-hangers. It was mostly quiet as the Lieutenant pointed out the salient points of the province and the campaign, and what little intelligence we still had up to date given the terrible weather.

"The campaign season was a week shorter than we had hoped, with the early rains. The unexpected turn of the season caught both sides unprepared, and we've had influenza throughout the province. They seem to have weathered it worse than we have; they're barely posting the main highways, although they're posting them in force. We think they're concentrating in expectation that a conventional force might be staging to sweep them from the province entirely. If this were a conventional campaign, that very well might have been the case, although I hardly would have endorsed such a push with all the fields croup-deep in muck and runoff. And we have no such conventional force nearby, as no doubt you know. I've had some teams out trying to raise the organized militias of the neighboring provinces, but they're lance-shy from last year's debacle."

"The cowards broke and ran after the repulse at Menomenie. With barely any losses to speak of! The regulars were shattered, and the militias ran! Militias!"

"The militias are still there, intact, armed, and organized," I interrupted. "Where are the regular regiments? Two mutinied and we've been killing them left and right here in the province. The others are scattered, deserters or dead, or folded into some of the militias, or sitting in some distant depot somewhere we can't find. Cowardice that preserves a formation is just another synonym for competent leadership."

The Marklaird let loose a mulish whinny. "Is that what has been happening here, the preservation of forces? Are you endorsing cowardice, physician? Is that this Company's discipline?"

"That is my discipline. I'm the pony that has to stitch together the shattered remnants left in the wake of brave and gallant officers. You're damn right we avoid bravery and gallantry whenever we possibly can."

"A Company of assassins and sneak-thieves?" A judgmental justice of the peace, quavering with self-righteousness and tenuous authority.

"A Company of successful sneak-thieves and excellent assassins. Tartarus-fire, we once rode with the original Assassins, the term was invented by our foremothers! We've made sure that no surplus grain or foodstuffs will be shipped south into the Riverlands for the next campaign season, and we've savaged the White Rose throughout the province. The only thing being exported to the south are hungry mouths and whipped ponies."

"But I did not ask for whipped ponies and economic anarchy! I wanted. my. province!" The petulant foal again.

Somehow I had taken over the argument from the Lieutenant. Another one of her gypsy tricks, leaving me to argue with our unreasonable employer. I thought we had agreed to not sell our lances to faceless ponies?

"You will have your province, or at least, your empress will have her province again. But not this morning, and possibly not until the spring campaign. We might be able to put together some operations once the ground turns solid again, but winter campaigns can be hard in the best of conditions, and I've been told the winters are terrible this far north in Tambelon. The seeds have been sown, the rebel regiments are by all reports falling to pieces as we speak. They've had nothing but defeat, terror, and grief from the civilians since high summer. Disease and desertion will leave them skeletons of their former selves by spring. You might even see us operate in the open fields, if the conditions are right. I hate to see the Company act like a proper army, but sometimes it can't be avoided."

The little leather-wrapped gimp was silent, and unmoving. I frowned suddenly as I realized what I had never quite noticed before, not on a conscious level. The Marklaird was always so animated, so full of quirks and twitches. I had never noticed that it didn't move like it was breathing under those leather wraps. They were tight enough, I didn't think it was possible it was only breathing slightly and the bulk was hiding the movement. There was no movement. Even the most awful of monsters had to breathe. What was...

The Marklaird broke its stillness, and barked in a high-pitched male voice, "Fine! I don't need the entire province, although my mistress certainly wants it sooner rather than later. That doesn't mean I'm happy. Not my mistress, me, the Marklaird, your actual employer. The Bride is my mistress, but I pay you out of my own funds, my authority, mine! And I need something here." It fell silent again.

The Lieutenant stepped forward, and placated our employer. "Of course, Ser Legate. As soon as conditions allow. Please, we need details, directions, explanations, if only enough to allow us to give you what you need. We currently cannot take the entire province to give you whatever it is within it. You will have to trust us with enough, if only just enough, to meet whatever deadline you're not telling us about."

So the Marklaird gave us those details. And we called in the cohort commanders, and started to lay out objectives. And the cohort commanders began to make plans.

We had a castle to storm.

On Distinguishing Philosopher's Stone From A Poisonous Joke

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SBMS030

Rye Daughter and I passed one of Mad Jack's work details in the weak afternoon light of late autumn. They had finally finished corduroying the roadways inside the complex, and now were extending access roads along the still-muddy tracks through the rapidly-disappearing scrub and brush to the neighboring roads. Those roads themselves were by and large still impassible, but our time of obscurity and hiding in plain sight would soon be coming to an end. The Marklaird had agreed to get the ball rolling on an early-winter mobilization of the militias of the province directly to the east. Verdebaie's organized militia had largely escaped damage in last year's catastrophic campaign, unlike the militias of the provinces to the south and south-east, who were still bitter and disinclined to cooperate. Including my friends in Pythia's Fell, sadly enough.

The fall rains had ended, and even the sleet and freezing rain had thawed and sublimated away in the brief pulse of summer-weather before the winter moved in with its usual fury. I knew this was the time a certain herb bloomed, out of sync, out of time, out of season. It was a narrow window, and I was determined to restock my supplies while the weather was right for it.

"We're looking for a blue flower, odd shape. With red berries! If you see any blue odd-shaped flowers with blue berries, check to make sure there isn't any behind you or to either side, and back away slowly. Jiwe busara and sumu utami are damn near identical aside from the berries, but you don't want anything - anything! - to do with sumu utami. Just breathing on it can break loose pollen, and even its pollen can mutate, derange, or kill. Although mostly it just does really odd magical-physical effects. Depends on the environment and the mind-set of the affected pony. Sumu utami is also known as Discordweed and, in some places, poison joke. Luckily sumu utami is pretty dang rare, far more rare than jiwe busara. And jiwe busara can grow anywhere. It's shy, and likes to bloom in the very late autumn, when ponies are either busy looking up at foliage or inside bitching about the weather. "

We walked carefully through the brush, checking where we stepped, until we came to a clearing half under water, and the other half grown over with low green flowering plants, with the tell-tale blue flowers and little green and red berries here and there, dangling off of their small stalks.

"Ah! There we go. See how it's a low growth? And the berries are just barely starting to ripen. Perfect, here."

We passed between the water and the flowers, and I hoofed Rye Daughter the sickle. I showed her how to clip off the berries while not touching the flowers or the plant itself. Jiwe busara wasn't sumu utami, but you didn't want to touch it directly, either. We dropped them directly into a pair of jars I scooped out of my saddlebags.

"Jiwe busara doesn't do much on its own, but it is damn near a universal catalyst. It brings out the character of many otherwise-useless herbs and substances. Zebra alchemy's foundations are built on jiwe busara. We're going to want all of this, green and red berries alike. The green ‘uns will cure with storage."

It took several hours to harvest the clearing. Evening was descending upon us when we broke out of the brush back onto the now-corduroyed access road. Mad Jack worked fast. I suspect if we let him loose, he'd plank every road in the district by spring. Although I imagined that the insanity of the expense would restrain him from that sort of excess. Rye Daughter and I clopped down the fresh new log-road and through the main gates. We put away our vegetative booty in my herb-cabinet for later processing, and I sent Rye Daughter off to wash up and get her dinner. I went looking for Gibblets.

I found him, his apprentice, and the Captain fire-proofing some newly-built flues and space-heating portable hearths in some of the second-cohort barracks. In better conditions, we'd be using these clever little metal stoves with tin flues, but in our current problematic logistical situation, they'd made due with mud-hardened wooden flues and brickwork firetraps. This was about as safe as it sounds, and only the intervention of witchcraft kept the troops from burning down their own barracks on a regular basis. We also needed to disguise the telltale smoke and steam, but the pegasi largely took care of that problem - smoke wasn't quite a type of cloud, but it was close enough for pegasus magic to bite.

"Gibblets, have you eaten yet?"

"What? Oh, Sawbones. Is it that late? Bad Apple, go get yourself some grub. Take Captain Catbird here with you, see if they have some fish for him." She grinned through the soot all over her muzzle, and started pushing the befuddled old griffin ahead of her towards the mess hall. Hopefully she'd meet up with Rye Daughter when they got there.

"Don't forget to wash up before you sit down!" the goblin yelled at their backs.

"So, any improvements in his condition yet? Or ideas?" Even if I hadn't run out of patience, the Marklaird had none to speak of on the subject of his missing-in-action subcontractor.

"Well, he seems happy enough. Still not making a lick of sense. Also not showing any signs of repossession. It's looking increasingly like whatever process got interrupted, it isn't re-starting. But I'm afraid the damage is done. I've had Bad Apple sleeping next to him, and she's been keeping tabs on his condition. And she says that he's been snoring an awful lot. Like, stop-breathing type snoring. Wetting the bed. Gets tired quickly. He's been losing weight, too."

I hoofed my eyes, sighing. "He's not really young enough to weather this sort of thing well. We're going to have to keep an eye out for him, but the prognosis for somepony in his condition isn't great. Apnea and nighttime incontinence - he's developing more symptoms of a stroke as we get further from the event, as if it's, I don't know, ongoing?"

"Degenerative?"

"That's what I'm worried about. Was this going to happen all along, or did we do this to him by summoning the Spirit?"

"Honestly, I can't be sure. I've never seen it interrupted like this before. But the other times - they became less and less like themselves, and more eccentric. Cruel, sometimes. Unpredictable. Eventually, either they did something unforgivable and their fellows put them down, or they went berserker, or found a fight they didn't seem to want to win. Either way, once they started talking like the Captain had been talking, they were on a clock."

"Bah. Food?"

"Yeah, I could eat."

The Militia-Regiment

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The pegasi took full advantage of the break in the weather; all intact chariot frames were put into the daylight air, with Otonashi deadheading to draw a glamour of clear blue sky around the formation. They returned later that morning with the better part of the first battalion of the III Verdebaie Regiment, a mixed donkey and earth pony militia outfit. The charioteers landed in shifts in the marshaling yards, and the mlitiaponies were led into a cleared, drained field which days before had still been brush and scrub. Their efficient non-coms directed the erection of aged but solid squad tents in nice neat rows. I supervised the digging of additional latrines across the back of the field, properly configured to drain into our existing pond and leechfield. When the charioteers finished unloading their militiaponies, they immediately surged into the air, and returned to the distant rendezvous with the rest of the regiment we were shipping into the province.

The convoy lasted well into the evening, with the support companies landing behind exhausted pegasi long after the autumn sun had set. Our griffin sections had been posted around the aerial bridge corridor, to watch for enemy movement, or signs that civilian observers were moving to report the daytime transfer of an entire militia regiment over the hopefully unsuspecting heads of the rebels. Nopony saw anything, and the four regiments bivouacked in and around the fortifications outside of Lait Blanc showed no signs of stirring.
Night brought another shift of pegasi into the air, and they moved out to new cloudborne observation posts around Lait Blanc and its approaches, as well as the other rebel concentrations along the scarce all-weather roads across the province. There were also a pair of observation posts placed in the air above the approaches to Radspur Keep, the seat of the exiled counts of Benoit on the northern fringes of the province. It was an oddity in the region, which was not otherwise castellated aside from regimental castra near the major market towns. There was perhaps a company of rebel troops in the old border-fortress, but it was in supporting distance of a pair of regiments in nearby Benoit proper.

The excitement in camp was about the sudden influx of outsiders into Company territory, but command was occupied with the Marklaird and his local liaison, and the Verdebaie militia officers who had flown in with the regiment. There was much argument over the goals of the late-fall campaign. The consensus of the militia officers was that the means and goals supplied to them were completely divergent. The plan as offered would do terrible damage to the rebel, who still hadn't figured out that they were badly outmatched by our capacity for vertical envelopment. But the militiaponies would be returning to their home cantons in less than forty days. It simply wasn't possible to occupy any positions taken in the campaign with militiaponies, and the Company certainly wasn't the sort of organization which was designed to hold fixed posts.

The Marklaird came the legate at the militiaponies, and told them to mind their rows, and leave the strategy to the ‘laird. If I had been told to stuff it in those terms, I'd have given him what-for, but I suppose that's why I'm a surgeon and those ponies were officers, because they got all shirty and stiff, but left to follow orders, such as they were. Some of them were local politicians in barding, but the militia in these parts was heavily salted with junior officers from the imperial academies, like my friend in Pythia's Fell. It was how the Bride kept a handle on militias outside of her standing armies, at least in theory. The system had badly fallen apart in the provinces infested by White Rose caribou, who had hung or driven off the imperial academy graduates as part of how they introduced themselves to the locals.

The next morning was cold and drizzling, and our schedule was postponed by the inclement weather. Aerial couriers kept the militia main body in contact with those of us in the Company compound, and everypony settled back to wait for clear weather. We could move on the roads if needed, but we had plans which required at least some dry land beside roadbed. The next day, and the day after that were both sufficiently dry, if overcast and inclement. Everypony watched the clouds with anxiety, except the supply ponies. They eyed our foodstocks, and re-counted the surpluses to make sure we wouldn't be overstrained by all the extra mouths. I toured the militia tent-field with my apprentice, and we evaluated them for any infections or sickness that might crop up in the damp and cold. Nothing immediately jumped out at me, but I figured it was only a matter of time until something swept the camp. Masses of ponies strange to each other in close proximity almost always exchanged some sort of crud, especially when they were chilled and wet.

The fourth day dawned cold but clear, and the fields tested a little soggy but firm. The couriers set out for the militia main body, and quickly returned with word that they were setting out of camp. The delay had brought rebel and militia patrols into contact along the provincial border in the last day, and our observation posts reported that two of the other rebel encampments elsewhere in the province had showed activity. As we got reports of the militia main body advancing on the rebel encampment at Lait Blanc, there were also reports of two battalion-size forces leaving the other rebel camps, and moving rapidly to reinforce Lait Blanc. I stood in the operations room and watched Broken Sigil fiddle with his calipers and a marching-table slide-rule, as the Lieutenant, the Marklaird, and the commanding officer of the III Verdebaie waited impatiently. The colonel of the III Verdebaie was an aging earth-pony, brown-coated and with an impressive bristling set of burnsides. Just his whiskers made me want to salute him.

Broken Sigil looked up.

"We can catch them long before the militia main body approaches Lait Blanc. We're in a perfect position for an ambush."

And just like that, the operation was inverted. Couriers were sent back into the air to relay new orders, for the militia main body to approach the rebel at Lait Blanc slowly and cautiously, and to draw them out but not offer battle. They had shifted from one hinge of a pincer-movement to a diversion and pinning-force. Our battle-group would deploy against the enemy reinforcements, and destroy them.

The Company and the III Verdebaie marched out of our encampment at speed, deploying rapidly across the recently corduroyed access roads into the road-net leading back onto the Bride's Road. The aerial cohort swarmed the district, and quickly set up forward pickets along the possible approaches. They made contact with the scouts who had been ghosting the enemy columns, and reports flowed back to the operations room. The Lieutenant and the III Verdebaie colonel had led their ponies from the front, leaving Broken Sigil and the Marklaird and myself collecting the reports and returns. When the last of the ground-pounders cleared the compound, I set out with my ambulance-drivers and Rye Daughter to follow the rear-guard and set up a forward trauma post.

Our ground-pounders had churned the dubiously-dry dirt surface of the roads nearby the encampment. As we dragged our ambulances through the shallow muck, I noted a couple farmers standing by their gates as we passed. Our presence in the neighborhood was no longer a secret or even a mystery. It was clear from their blank faces that they now understood what had been lurking in their woods. None of them made a move towards or away from us. They just watched. There was a pair of earth-ponies by one gate, a middle-aged couple, staring as we approached the crossroads with the Bride's Road. They had the look of Apples – and I wondered if Gibblets' apprentice was with him today. I hadn't asked. Then I looked up at Rye Daughter perched on the ambulance beside my shoulder, and wondered if I should have left her in camp with the other military apprentices. Too late now.

As we rolled out of the muck and onto the gravel of the Bride's Road, a pair of griffins dropped out of the sky and stopped us. I was given directions to set up in a copse of woods three and a half miles west of the crossroads, hopefully within supporting distance of the expected ambush-zone, but not so close as to be caught up in any accidents of battle. The oxen helped me unload my portable surgical table and supply chests, and set a rack of cots where they could be easily knocked together. Then they got back in their traces and moved their ambulances forward. Depending on how the warlocks set up their usual glamours, we might be the first out-of-place thing the enemy columns sighted before stumbling into the kill-zone.

I was waiting impatiently beside my table with Rye Daughter dozing at my feet, when a rushing noise approached from the rear. I looked up, and discovered the Marklaird aloft on some sort of magic kite, a wooden and leather frame that it dangled from like a bat or, I don't know, a caterpillar chrysalis slung below a twig or leaf. It was far less stealthy than what I had come to expect from aerial troops. It was the flamboyant opposite of stealthy. But it was also a tartarus of a display by a pony without wings. Takes a lot of magic to loft a mage into the air and keep her there. Even the skilled ones could generally only manage a sort of parabola, like Bad Apple and her fiery magic pogo stick.

I hoofed my eyes, frowned, and waved the laird down, hoping against hope that it wasn't in view of any approaching rebels. It spiraled towards the roadbed, and then gently touched down like a seagull riding the dockside breeze over a mooring-post. I did my best not to yell at the scary, creepy faceless warlock who could boil me in my scrubs, but I finally got across to it that if it was floating above our ambush, we would hardly be able to lure the rebel into our clutches. We were good, but we weren't miracle workers. That was the Marklaird's department. I eventually convinced him to go find the III Verdebaie. On the ground, and hopefully out of sight. I didn't say, "imbecile", but I was thinking it pretty loudly. It might have heard my thoughts. Do wizards around these parts read minds?

As the little gimp dragged its magic kite into the brush on the far side of the road, the sound of marching hooves rose up over the Road. It took them fifteen minutes after they marched into sight to reach the kill-zone, and all that time I stood there beside my table, in plain damn view. I didn't wake Rye Daughter, I let her sleep until the noise woke her. It wasn't marching hooves that broke her cat-nap.

The Company's hedge-wizards had done their job that day, and the enemy almost ran into the braced spearheads of the III Verdebaie, the rebel still in march order with their pikes slung over their antlered heads. One minute, there was a battalion of caribou marching at the route step close enough I could almost see the whites of their eyes, and then next, there was an entire regiment of militia ponies facing away from me, and a screaming clamor rising over the road where the enemy had been. It was marvelous overkill. The militia-ponies reflexively wrapped around each flank of the column, and their formation compacted almost as quickly as it had appeared. The noises were stomach-wrenching. It was over quickly, and the Company barely had to debouche from their ambuscade to catch the few rebel who escaped the trap. We may have not taken prisoners as a matter of policy, but the militia-ponies weren't exactly hardened to our extent. They led the survivors aside into the brush and treeline behind my copse, and they herded some of the wounded survivors to my forward surgery. Rye Daughter looked up at me, and I looked down, hard-eyed.

Then I did the right damn thing. We wasted our precious supplies and my time patching together wounded caribou. I triaged with a heavy hoof, and I had Sack drive away anypony trying to bring dying caribou into my post. Some of the militia-ponies started building a feeble-looking stockade to keep their prisoners, while the rest hauled the dead and dying off the roadbed and into the nearby drainage ditch.
It was at this point, when the militia was engaged in cleaning up after itself and I was fetlocks-deep in a screaming caribou, that a second battalion of rebel caribou appeared in the distance. I wasn't paying attention, but those that did said that the double-take of the rebel forward ranks was epic. They must have thought that they had hit the jack-pot, as they shook out into a dead run, dropping their pike into a loose-order charge from the column. It wasn't exactly an orthodox phalanx, but it was certainly enthusiastic. They covered the ground, that the previous battalion had marched across in fifteen minutes, in six minutes, yelling like ban sidhe the whole way. It was enough time for the militia still on the roadbed to fall back into a shaky spear-line, so it wasn't a simple reversal of the earlier fight, but our allies were wrong-hoofed, and their battle-line was disordered. The caribou pushed them back, and their superior weaponry and heavier individual weight told quickly on the III Verdebaie, despite their inferior total numbers.

The militia were damn lucky they weren't on that road alone. The second battalion's rush had pushed the battle out of the kill-zone proper, but the Company's cohorts were able scramble into position and eventually take their rear at the double-quick. A messier version of the ambush on the road to Beloit the month before ensued, with the Marklaird finally appearing overhead in the later stages of the slaughter, aimlessly bombarding the tangled lines with some sort of black flaming witchcraft. Once the jaws of the ambush belatedly closed, it was all over but for the screaming.

There was a fair amount of screaming; the laird's witchery was no joke, and it stuck like tar.

I continued working on my caribou patients as the battle-line wavered two hundred fifty yards from my copse, and the guards from the half-built stockade streamed past our position. When I looked up from my work, I noticed that the oxen had disappeared with the ambulances. I learned later that they had blocked the captured caribou inside the abandoned stockade-posts, intimidating the disarmed remnants of the first battalion into not trying to escape or join in the second stage of the fight. I guess angry oxen and big carts are more intimidating than you'd otherwise think? Rye Daughter tells me that their eyes went thestral just before they rushed away from the medical post, perhaps that had something to do with it. Or perhaps it had something to do with the two caribou Tiny reportedly crushed flat with single blows when they tried to rush past him.

By the time I was done with the first wave of rebel wounded, my cots were full of militia casualties. They hadn't caught it as bad as the first rebel battalion, but I was still busy all that afternoon and evening, as well as with the half-dozen Company wounded, mostly slashes across muzzles and flanks. Oh, and more caribou, but by that time I was pretty blown.

Fewer rebels from the second battalion survived to join their fellows in the stockade or my overflow triage field. More bled out in the half-cleared brush on the far side of the drainage ditch we were using as our triage-field before I was able to finish up with our brothers and allies. We left still-burning caribou corpses in our triage-field later that evening who had roasted as they lay, despite the best efforts of militia-ponies pouring buckets of swamp-water from the nearby drainage ditch over the flames.

The day was mostly lost to the destruction of the rebel reinforcement columns. Later interrogation of the prisoners revealed that they actually represented the remnants of regiments, the first battalion being a much-reduced single regiment, and the second being the consolidated scraps of two different regiments. We think the latter were maybe the survivors or detachments of the units savaged on the road to Benoit. But all of them had lost many, perhaps a majority of their pike-caribou to the flu or desertion.

The prisoners were marched back to camp by command of the III Verdebaie colonel, against our Lieutenant's strenuous objections. The secret was blown, but that didn't mean we wanted a herd of diseased rebels underhoof in camp.

The oxen made multiple trips back to the encampment with the ambulances, and we converted the barracks next to the infirmary into another ward room to hold the militia and prisoner casualties. The brethren that barracks belonged to got to join the militia under squad tents. The rear-guard followed me and my equipment as we rolled back to camp, having accomplished precious little except butchery and terror. Rye Daughter slept curled on my back as I marched with the Company. I worried about her dreams, she had been helping with the bucket-brigade trying to extinguish the victims of the Marklaird.

We only lost one pony that day, a donkey jack named Pur Malt, who caught a fatal cut across his right femoral artery in the closing of the ambush on the second rebel battalion.

The Night-Rout

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As night followed dusk, we tried to settle the new arrangements in the expanded medical quarters. We were quickly running out of clean rags and bandages, so I set Rye Daughter and one of the oxen to running our tiny laundry-hearth, while I did the rounds in the wards and checked the concussion-cases for problems and the older wounds for seepage or signs of rot. A couple hours into the night, the camp was thrown into turmoil again, and the ground cohorts began to muster again in the marshaling yards, which would have been churned into impassibility by this time if it weren't for Mad Jack and his pathological need to plank everything that didn't buck back. Most of the aerial cohort had never returned to camp at all.

Eventually, somepony thought to update me on the ongoing chaos. The enemy had sent a reconnaissance in force westward from Lait Blanc at some point earlier that evening. They thought. it was all very vague, I think because the aerial ponies were overstretched and off-balance. We had never gotten notice that the two battalions we had destroyed on the Bride's Road that afternoon had been separate columns; that miscommunication had nearly shattered our allied militia, nearly caught the ground cohorts out of position. I think that Tickle Me's ponies were trying to prove something that night, because they just swarmed whatever it was that the caribou tried to push down the main road to the battlefield. Normally they'd just quietly follow an enemy night-movement overhead, and the rebel would never know they were being followed. Instead, the pegasi and griffins were counting coup, dropping rocks and improvised stakes on the heads of the enemy.
The Lieutenant had called out the ground cohorts, and sent them back out to the main road in hopes of getting behind the enemy movement, getting between them and Lait Blanc. The luck was against us that night, and the Company was no-where near in position when a group of caribou managed to reach the abandoned battlefield in the darkness.

Apparently it wasn't nearly as abandoned as I had thought. I don't know if some stragglers drifted back from the brush onto the road and were just lost, or if the local ponies had turned out in force to loot the wreckage, but the caribou found somepony on the field, and from all accounts, they scared the hell out of each other. There was some sort of scuffle on the battlefield, and afterwards we found some unfamiliar donkey and earth pony bodies on the field, along with a couple caribou corpses which *might* have been fresh – it was hard to tell given how much of a mess we had left behind earlier that evening. The militia were no help – they had a couple dozen missing at the time, and it would probably be days before we got a full accounting of how many we'd just missed in the clean-up, and how many were straggling all over the district. It's easy for militia-ponies in an unfamiliar province to get turned around and lost; they're trained, but they're not professionally trained.

The caribou panic was contagious, and the fleeing forward patrol stampeded the main body of the enemy. We think. The pegasi and griffins tried to pin down the fleeing rebel force, raining everything that came to hoof on their heads. It just re-doubled the panic, and they were at a dead gallop when the head of the first cohort reached the crossroads with the Bride's Road. Our forward sections made a hasty charge to try and intercept the flight. A good number of caribou went down, some of them not even trying to defend themselves, but the mass simply parted around our disorganized hasty attack like a flash flood around an obstruction.

And like a bridge caught in a flash flood, the Company's vanguard was nearly swept away. It nearly turned into a real fight for a few desperate moments before the rebel remnants got untangled from us and continued their flight, those that were able. The next morning found the nearby drainage ditches full of drowned caribou, some with broken legs, some just dead for no apparent reason except they fell in the dark and couldn't get out.

This blind skirmish in the dark was what got me sent back out with some of my oxen, the ambulances, and my last set of sanitized surgical tools. We set up in the muck just short of the crossroads, and I operated out of the back of an ambulance; I used a set of nightsight charms in the darkness, fearing to attract attention with torches or lamps on a chaotic battlefield. Most of my casualties were broken bones and more concussions; there were a surprising lack of open wounds and punctures. Later, we found the road between the battlefield and the crossroads littered with abandoned pikes. The caribou had just thrown away their weapons, and had fought through our attempted ambush with their war-shoes and antlers. I think they would have pried off their shoes as well if they had the prybars to hoof.

The Marklaird had come out to play by the time I was set up. He and the aerial ponies harried the fleeing caribou all the way to the encampment gates outside Lait Blanc. It was a much reduced body of rebels that rushed those gates, and the little warlock put the cherry on the sundae by blasting the gate open ahead of them I'm told the panicked rebel just collapsed on their haunches in the roadbed, wild-eyed in fear at the sudden flaming wreckage of their sanctuary, but unwilling to return in the direction they came. By morning, the town proper was littered with deserters lurking in every alley, afraid to return to their units.

Morning also brought a few casualties from the aerial cohort. The rebel had apparently hacked together some clever war-engines, and mounted them on the walls of their compounds. Light multi-bolt ballistae, they apparently didn't have a high rate of fire, but one burst caught a flight of griffins as they rose up from a bombardment run, and another raked a couple incautious pegasi. Their brothers hauled their riddled bodies back to my ambulances at the crossroads, and we were just lucky they didn't bleed out on the way.

I sent the oxen with the other ambulances back to our compound with full loads, and was working on stitching back together the wing-base of a griffin named Gertie when Rye Daughter arrived in the back of a supply cart with my portable surgery table and a load of clean bandages and my re-sanitized surgical tools. Behind her, was the bulk of the III Verdebaie, and they turned onto the main road and headed for Lait Blanc to join the Company's main body, which were advancing cautiously on the enemy encampment.

Rye Daughter also brought word that the militia regiments encamped in the direction of the provincial border were also advancing on Lait Blanc. We were keeping our distance because the rebel encampment was teeming with war-engines, and they were flinging indiscriminate long-distance death at anypony who approached their walls. Mad Jack and his pioneering details arrived not long after the militia passed by us, and they descended on the neighboring woodlots to start hacking out planking for mantlets and other necessaries for a siege.

I finished up on Gertie, and sent her into the compound with the next ambulance. A pegasus with a bolt through her right primaries was laid out on my surgical table, and I got to work on her with the fresh tools and supplies. It had been a long night.

It was a longer day.

Strategic Napping, or, The Siege

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The Company's ground sections hugged the treelines to the west of the fortified camps outside of Lait Blanc in the gloomy grey of a late fall morning. I had finished patching up my latest batch of patients, and trotted forward to find out what was going on. We certainly had not planned this nonsense, and you can be sure I was alarmed to observe a hasty siege-equipment manufacturing project springing up next to my field surgery.

I found the Lieutenant and the III Verdebaie colonel with a couple of our warlocks in a bashed-together forward observation post on the other side of the southern drainage ditches, watching a mixed flight of pegasi and griffins diving towards the walls in the distance. We were well out of catapult range, far enough that it made it kind of difficult to see details of the enemy's position. Shorthorn had a bit of witchery running, a sort of telescope-vision-and-illusion display. The focus was jumpily half-tuned to a section of compound wall, and a war-engine pivoted in the direction of the battle-flight descending above the enemy position. The illusion looked like it would give me a headache, it jerked and jittered all over the place.

"Does that look like a fully occupied wall to you?" asked the colonel. "The antlers don't seem to move with the ballistae. Look at that! They just stay where they are."

"I don' know, don Guillaume. This mess is herky-jerky as it is, we could just be losing the details that'd make them look like they are, caribou behind cover."

"Or just discarded antlers nailed to walls to bulk up numbers."

"Does it matter?" I interrupted. "If you don't think they're all in there, look where they be would be if they're not in the castra. Do we have pickets out on our flanks and the side-roads?"

"We're working on it," said the Lieutenant. "There's a good deal of mud out there on the side-roads, and nothing but bog in some of the woodland around us. I'd prefer to put out pegasi on clouds, but they've got their blood up, and I'm having difficulty getting them to land long enough to pass along orders to pull back. Those idiots out there aren't on orders, they've just been strafing the castra since the predawn. Basically on their own hook."

I gave the militia colonel the side-eye, and tried to divert the conversation away from our troops' apparent sudden blood-lust. "What's all that over there on the far side of the castra?"

"The rest of our regiments, coming up into position," he rose to my bait. "We're going to see if we can't intimidate them into staying inside their walls. They probably still have us outnumbered."

"Does the main body know to keep their distance?" I asked, and my stupid question was answered by a sudden tumult in the distance, as dark flecks lifted up off the far side of the enemy fortifications, and plummeted in the direction of the advancing militia. Distant thumps marked the impact of the catapult projectiles.

"If they didn't before, that certainly will remind them," snarked Shorthorn, who shifted his focus in the direction of the distant militia lines. They were clearly reversing ranks and falling back.

"Has anypony seen Tickle Me? We need to get a grasp on this situation, and that calls for couriers and scouts," grouched Gibblets, who had been sitting on his ass at the back of the position, leaning against a tree-trunk.

"I sent her to see if she couldn't get those sarvaggiu off whatever vendetta they think they're pursing."

We all turned as Colonel Guillaume gestured wildly behind us. Another flight of pegasi and griffins had swept the castra walls, and now a griffin was laboring into the distant air, dangling something large and four-legged with antlers as she rose.

"The pegasi-scorpion!" yelled Shorthorn, and spun his far-scryer back to the war-engine they had been observing. It was canted sideways, and we could see a few caribou struggling to pull it back into its embrasure.

"It plucked that rebel right off the rig," marveled the colonel. "That must have been the engine-master."

The griffin dropped her capture, or possibly lost her grip. The caribou's tiny screams could be heard as it plummeted.

"Well, that's one way to suppress a scorpion," chortled the Lieutenant.

I rolled my eyes. "Gentleponies, this is fun and all, but I haven't slept in days, and it doesn't look like you're currently generating casualties for me to stitch together. That's my ambulance coming over that little bridge over the ditch there. I'm going to go catch some rest before one of your stupid ideas gets any more ponies hurt. And try to remember – we aren't prepared for a siege. The militia have the numbers but not the time, and we don't have the numbers, and neither of us have the equipment or the logistics to supply either. For all we know, they have more food in there than we have out here, and the other rebel regiments will eventually send somepony to find out what happened to this garrison or the last batch of reinforcements. So I hope you'll figure out how to get them out from behind their walls and somewhere which ain't here."

I stalked out of the improvised conference, and stomped over to the ox drawing my ambulance up behind the nearby sections crouching behind a low breast-work just inside the treeline. I lept up into the ambulance and fell vindictively asleep.

I was woken by the sound of digging. The ground-pounders had started ditching out in front of the breastworks next to my ambulance. I guess they were planning on breaking down their earlier breastwork and using the materials to line a proper fortification? I stuck my head up over the side of the ambulance, and saw that Mad Jack had brought forward some of the mantlets he had been building. Nothing continuous or connected, but there were now some forward posts thrown out across the roadbed and between the drainage ditches. The rebel wouldn't be able to quickly push through our position and break out to the west. I laid back on my pallet, pondering whether I should go and see what was going on, but rationalized that if there had been trouble, they'd have come got me to patch together the inevitable wreckage.

I went back to sleep.

Tiny hoofed me awake. It was late afternoon, or possibly twilight. The field fortifications were now a couple paces out from under the tree-line, and there were Company ponies sleeping along the muddy ramparts. The skies had opened up at some point during the day, and it was cold and damp. There was a bit of a mist over the ground, which felt like it was getting ready to drizzle again.

"Boss, purple pony said to wake you when sun went down. Go find her at place before." Tiny wasn't the brightest member of the Brotherhood of Pony, but he could pass along a message like nopony's business. I went to go find the "purple pony", lightly squelching across the cold mud.

She was sleeping in her observation post, which was now a proper pair of mantlets between two trees, a series of reinforcing stakes and posts, and a tent-half draped overhead to keep off the mist. The Crow had replaced Shorthorn, and she was using the same farscrier device to scan the distant castra walls through the half-fog. I didn't see any movement on those walls, and the Crow's hoof was much steadier than Shorthorn's had been. It was pretty clear that those antlers over the battlements weren't moving this time. I kicked awake the napping Lieutenant.

"You asked for me, Lieutenant?"

"Hnf. Yeah, I did, you limaccia. Slept the whole day away, didn't you? I need somepon' to spell me for this evening while I get my own rest. With the commanders tied up with their cohorts and the Captain out of commission, you are it."

I sighed. "What do I need to know. Have they shown any signs of sallying out at us? Anything moving on the side roads or towards us on the main road?"

"All they've been doing is sniping with war-engines at anypony gets close. The pegasi and their idiot griffin sidekicks got tired, decided to come round for orders. The ones not sleeping back at the compound are out scouting in this muck. No news back, but I thin' they're gonna find a lot of deserters. We've seen clots of caribou leap the walls a couple times this afternoon, some of those were big groups. They ran for the side-roads, and just left. No tryin' to stop and offer a fight or anythin'. Half of them didn't even have their pikes wit' em."

"I still want to know how many rebels are inside those big damn walls. Have we seen them in the field? Are we in contact with the other militia regiments? They should have seen the enemy battle-line yesterday, right?"

"Yeah, they're in touch. And yeah, the caribou regiments formed line the other day, there's at least five battalions in there, or at least, there was. We think we wrecked one last night in that scramble on the main road. None of those got back inside the gates before our employer he blew the gates down."

"Fine, go use my ambulance, there's a pallet in there." I settled back and watched the Crow scan her farscrier across the walls of the castra. As the light failed, she tapped something on the side of the device, and it went into darksight mode.

The third hour of the night, clots of something started flowing over the back battlements of the enemy encampment. We didn't notice it at first, you expect to see what you've been seeing, it sometimes takes a few beats before novelty breaks through the tedium.

"Wait! Roll that back. Does that look like deserters making for the southern road?" I asked the Crow.

"If it is, there's a Grogar-damned lot of them." We watched some of the clots slip and fall, slowly getting back up. "There goes another bunch. And another. And… that's the wall going down."

"Set off a flare! It's a breakout!"

She touched off a firework, and it roared into the dark night, lighting up our neighboring entrenchments, and incidentally catching our roof on fire. As I pulled down the tent-half and stomped out the sparks, the glare threw long shadows behind me. I looked up and saw the muddied caribou scrambling about in the pitiless light like cockroaches caught by the scullery-maids in the larder. More flares rose along the Company and militia entrenchments. The muddy fields and lanes from our front to the southern tree-lines were covered by scrabbling caribou, many of them splashed in muck, all of them headed south.

Surprising pretty much everypony, the enemy didn't try to charge our field fortifications, or head towards our flanks, which they may or may not have known were properly refused and covered by full drainage ditches. They just ran for it, straight south. Fires had begun to raise dark pillars of smoke above the castra walls as the enemy fled us. I had only followed my instructions, which was to order the Company to defend their positions, cover the flanks, and prepare for a sally. After about twenty admittedly entertaining minutes of watching the caribou flailing about in the muck, the Lieutenant found us right where she had left us, and started yelling about how we'd missed our chance to catch them in the open.

"Lieutenant, why exactly do we want to catch them? They're running. They outnumber us, they're still mostly armed, and they're giving up the town and the road. They're running into an ugly muddy mess right now. We're mostly dry and clean, and they're going to look like mud-sculptures of ponies rather than ponies by the time morning dawns. If they manage to find the other rebel encampments, they're going to be spreading defeatism and panic like a virulent camp-disease. This… is what victory looks like."

The Liberators

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Later that morning I exchanged notes with the surgeons and doctors the militia had brought with them into Rennet. Apparently it was quite the thing among the medical professionals of Verdebaie to take a commission with the militia. It made one popular with your clientage, and helped you make political connections. There were five surgeon 'lieutenants' and a sub-lieutenant apothecary in the well-appointed mobile hospital they had dragged behind the Verdebaie Division's supply train, and an academically-trained Major Doctor leading the whole circus. They didn't quite outnumber their patients, but they had the situation well in hand. Well, I exaggerate. The tents they had set up in the muddy fields east of the little city were full of sprains and a considerable number of fever cases, as well as the few crush-cases from the militia division's brief brush with heavy catapult fire.

I wasn't quite sure how the militia had managed to wash out so many flu cases in a campaign of less than a week, but the average militia-pony was older than your standard mercenary or professional, wasn't in nearly as good a shape, and in general wasn't used to camp conditions. I was informed that the ponies I was looking at were actually only the current overflow - hundreds of sick-cases had already been sent home.
The III Verdebaie had been the best, most professional regiment in the province, which is why it was chosen to be flown into the province ahead of the rest of the division to act as shock-troops. Their shaky performance on the road west of Lait Blanc looked to their peers like a heroic stand worthy of legend. The "Mighty Third" was apparently already the toast of the division.

And the division was itself the toast of the town. They were greeted as liberators by the giddy townsfolk, who had spent a terrorized fall cowering behind locked doors in fear of the boogiepony, the winged demons who swooped hither and yon across darkened skies, spreading blood and destruction across the district. These were the towns-ponies whose caribou overlords had conscripted them to clean up the mess we had made of that sacked regimental compound, who had been compelled to dig out the roasted remains of the bulk of that regiment from the cinders of their mess hall. They had done their best to ignore the gory trophies and fetishes we had planted on every road leading out of the city.

Lait Blanc, in short, was in no mood to celebrate the Black Company. But they were glad to see the rebels' backs. They had stolen from the civilians, beaten ponies and donkeys in the street, and generally taken out their own terrors and anxieties on the aching backs of the civilian population. We found larders and sub-granaries, full of foodstuffs stolen from the neighboring farms and the city itself, stuffed inside the scorched walls of the grand castra which the caribou had re-constructed from the remains of the previous regimental compounds, again with conscripted civilian labor. The soldiers of the caribou regiments had been too good to build their own walls, and they sloughed the work onto other ponies whenever they could. Even the small minority of civilian caribou in the city were hostile to the rebel by the time the regiments fled the district. Excepting of course those few rebel profiteers and politicians who had seized the management of the city and its trade from the families who historically dominated both.

I heard stories of the donkey and earth pony families who had been decimated by the rebel occupation, more than a dozen who had been hung for their supposed loyalty to the Imperium. I heard these stories, of course, as two dozen caribou – most of them ancient bucks, excepting a few foals no older than Rye Daughter - were being whipped through the small city square by an enraged crowd baying for blood and hangings. The actual villains, of course, had fled with their immediate families beside the regiments in the night. These captive ponies were probably cousins or aged uncles or perhaps even just distantly-related neighbors of the fled first families of the rebel in Lait Blanc.

I trotted off quickly from that scene, and found the militia division's MP company, engaged in "evaluating" a tavern across the street from the city gendarme-station as their new "headquarters". I convinced the most sober, most senior MP non-com I could find to roust out the troops and take over the punishment of the rebel scum ongoing in the square. They managed to get the bulk of the guilty locked into stocks, including all the foals, and then proceeded to hang a random six of the elders from the gallows helpfully left by the previous regime for the use of the incoming administration.

Some of whom were even now emerging from damp cellars and back-rooms, looking considerably thinner and ragged than you'd expect of prosperous burgers. But they were the surviving relatives of the old guard, and chances were they would be easily elected by acclamation to their ancestral, if not hereditary, offices. They watched the hangings with hard eyes.

I resolved to keep Rye Daughter out of the city, and left to find my oxen and the road back into camp.

Mad Jack was still at it as I passed his work-crew on the road from the Bride's Road back to the compound. He was extending the planking from the original corduroyed exits of the complex along the farmlanes, and had broken up the partially-completed mantlets they had been building earlier. I couldn't imagine he was going to get that much road completed before we abandoned camp for some other task. The Marklaird clearly wasn't planning to leave us to sit in castra hiberna for a season, the hyperactive little gimp.

Camp was notably empty, aside from the security detail and the crowded wards of the expanded infirmary. A line of chuckwagons were headed out as I came through the gates, the cooks reverting to their carter status, hauling cooked if cooling food out to the cohorts in the field.

Rye Daughter was right where she was supposed to be, stirring a boiling pot of whitening rags and bandages over the hearth-fire. I picked her up and gave her a slightly muddy hug, which she did not understand, not in the least.

Although it gave the conscious convalescents a good giggle.

I looked around the Company-ward, and announced the victory in Lait Blanc. There might have been whoops of joy.

I took a couple of moments. Then I got back to work. I had found a cache of medical texts, journals, and alchemists' encrypted compendiums in one of the unlabeled storage-sections of the Annals-chest. There was a vast amount of material in these books, matters I'd never heard of from my master, or things he'd alluded to but kept as masters' secrets, the parsimonious old mule. Much of the material was, sadly, in Zebric or Feresi. I was currently checking all the unmarked storage compartments of the chest, looking for Equuish-Feresi and Equuish-Zebric translating dictionaries. I was somewhat ashamed of my piss-poor Zebric skills, which to be honest were never really up to snuff, and what I knew of Feresi could be carried around in a sewing thimble. I was damned lucky the Company tradition was to keep the Annals in Equuish, even going back five hundred years, in a land where almost everypony around them spoke Feresi or its sister-dialects.

There were marvelous stories of the abilities of the zebra alchemists of old. And I was tired of not being able to do anything about cases like the Captain.

The Dream Of The Sirens

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I dreamed that night…

Dragging my little conch behind me, two little furrows left like zig-zag trails in the white coral sands. Upwards and upwards, around the roots of the coral towers, even their bases teeming with rampaging life, rioting in the drifting rain of indescribable detritus from the chaos above, so many different living things, all of them fighting for their share of the gift. Life among the coral towers was brief, brutish, savage – but not lonesome. Little swarms of creatures working in tandem, in concert, fighting their little wars for their share of the loot against other little swarms, or single solitary monsters looming large among the little swarmlings. All of them making use of the coral walls that surrounded us on every side, as sanctuaries, barriers, traps, the blind alleys and cul-de-sacs and secret rooms tangling within themselves like vast, intricate, tiny labyrinths.

I retreated within my shell, my own savage claws the only part of me extending out of my personal portable fortress, as a couple of little transparent predators tried to pry my juicy bits out of myself. A few swipes, and the cowed motes flicked away for easier prey. An eye-stalk extending, I pulled myself back out of my shell, and continued my ascent.

As the watery light from above strengthened, the coral began to come to life, or rather, the creatures and plants that made the coral continued to survive, began to thrive, in the new regions through which I dragged myself. Riots of color waving in the currents and the light, still swarms of predators and scavengers and prey, but more and more the prey themselves preying on actual living material, the mindless aquatic plants that worshiped the light and drew it in and were slowly devoured by their harvesters, devoured so slowly that they themselves often outlived their herbivorous parasites, torn apart and eaten in their turn by those that preyed upon them.

It was all so beautiful, the riot of worship of the light, a cloud of little deaths that somehow added up to life.

As the coral sea-mount I circled rose to the surface of the sea, I heard the singing, the sirens singing each to each, distorted and echoing above the tiny tumult of the constant battle of life of the middle and upper ranges of the world. I did not think they sang to me. The song became clearer and less plagued by echoes as I approached the surface, the waves muted by out-lying coral reefs surrounding the sea-mount itself. Multiple voices twining in a competitive, sharp-taloned sort of harmony, this voice or that seizing the lead for a few short lines or words, would-be divas squabbling in song over their time to sing aria above the others.

As I crawled onto the beach, the sun setting glorious-trained in the westwards, dragging her clouds of purple and red and golden behind her, the sea-horses combed the white hair of the waves blown back, perched upon the coral out-reefs rising above the entrances to the lagoon, my little crab eyes somehow making out the many-colored sirens in their endless musical struggle with each other. The water of the lagoon was broken again and again as other hermit-crabs, dragging their various bits of coral and abandoned shells behind them, crawled up the beach, to join me in listening to the musical, somehow harmonious cacophony of singers in conflict.

As the glorious colors of sunset faded into the cool tones of twilight, it was as if the scaly hides of the beautiful sirens drew down the hues of the heavens into themselves, their endless song leaving them glowing on their coral thrones. I curled, half-resting on my shelled porch, among my clawed fellows stretched out along the beach on either side, and we listened to their argumentative song as night followed day.

The eastward palm-tree tops were touched by a cold, burning glow behind us, and the chill rays of the unseen moon stretched black shadows across the sands before the crowd of crabs under the harmonic conflict of the siren-chorus’s arguments. Hoof-prints broke the wave-smoothed sands before us two by two, four by four, silver hoof-bladed guards materializing from them rising upwards in spiraling vaporous accretion.

Black-furred legs and then the goddess of the night herself, the night drawing down out of the skies above and swirling about her great head and demon-wings, mane and tail like galaxies in motion. Her great shout sundered the sirens’ song, and silence echoed across the star-touched lagoon reflecting her endless night. Their harmony resumed, subjugated into a subservient, fearful chorus, their quarreling set aside by the appearance of a true diva, and her aria filled the watery amphitheatre, her only audience her sirens and the lowly hermit-crabs in their serried shell-seats.

Here at our surfacing
The day hidden beneath
Silent smoothed sea
Surfaces hiding the
Struggle of the
Merciless sun in all
Her endless and hopeless
Hypocritical demands
Our sister she gives
Her gifts to give
But leaving then all
These terrible, squalid
Consequences
To her faithful work-horse
Humble Night to
Oh, somehow, fix
To resolve, to drown
These dilemma of the day
Under the secret
Cloak of the Night.
If you would make Us
Your pet monster,
Tyrant Sister, merciless Sun!
See how we wax
Within our cold shadows
Monstrous and terrible!
And wane your sister
Sad wan moon with her
Weak and reflected light
Who you lovingly
Called to your proud standard
To be the killer in your shadow!

The Nightmare, her song sung, dematerialized, and the lagoon returned to its night-time rhythms, the spooked sirens diving for the safety of open ocean and waves not haunted by dread dreams of vengeance and monsters monstrous even by their squabbling standards.

Once the ripples of the sirens’ retreat subsided in the lagoon, a shadow crept from behind my shell, and a tiny horse-shaped blot in the sand before me formed again.

"Acolyte, how dream you this evening? Have you foals for my hunger?"

"Mistress," I chittered in the language of anthropods, "I only bring you the dream of foals, and the death of harmless fools."

The walls of the narrow city-square rose up out of the waters of the star-touched lagoon, and within those walls the faceless jeering crowd, and the stocks with weeping foals cringing their faces from flung mud and stones. Above the stocks stood the gallows, and the dangling caribou dead, their faces bloated in the moonlight, their hooves dangling in the slight waves of the enclosed lagoon waters.

"Mistress, is this what you wished, what you want? The angry, desperate mobs, lashing out at innocent foals and hanging foolish, senile old bucks? Would you have us pull down our lances and charge the hungry mobs and their well-earned fury, and save the innocent and the foolish? Would you have us hang the foals as well, or offer them to you on your Company-altar? What would make you happy again, Lady?"

The shadow on the sand blew forward, swirling across the surface of the waters, and from the darkness emerged a blue-furred mare, her mane and tail dragging the stars and darkness out of the lagoon’s mirror, her eyes equine and tearing. She skated across the spectral cobblestone square, her blue-feathered wings high and proud, war-like, coming to a stop between the foals in their stocks and the faceless mob. The ghost-projectiles passed through her, one phantasm passing another in the dream of the night, and she screamed, shattering the vision, "No!"

She turned to my anthropod self in my conch-shell, her eyes turning draconic, thestral, the feathers falling from her wings and the calm blue of her fur boiling into blackness. As the dream broke up, we heard her say in a voice like thunder,

"Find a WAY!"

And equine voices drowned us.

Where Griffins Dare

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I put away the materials I had been examining into a special, unmarked storage section of the Annals chest, throwing the relevant lever, and closing the chest, locking it away under my sole control. I still had not appointed an annalist-understudy, and until we resolved the issue with the Captain being out of commission and the Lieutenant holding de facto control of the Company, I could not actually appoint one in the eyes of the spellwork on the chest. In fact, the other night's spectacular dream-vision might be a sign that the Company's deep magic might be under the impression that I was the current commander of the Company.

Well, magic. It wasn't exactly clever, for the most part. It took shortcuts, did things that observers might not expect of a sentient being, could surprise, but magic didn't think. It was merely intent and purpose unfolding in time. Thinking minds could ride magic like a carrier wave, and magic could manifest ghosts, phantasms, and other relics of thinking minds torn free of the meat which birthed them, but the magic itself was as much stuff as the merely physical faeces of the mundane world. It was the subtle dance of magic upon living meat which made minds.

Why yes, I had found the books in the chest to start translating the Feresi alchemical texts. There was a lot of theoretical gassing about in the introductory material those old alchemists insisted on using as prefaces. A messenger from the operations room arrived to remind me of the final conference before the great raid this evening, and my obligatory attendance thereof.

We had knocked out the back wall of the operations room, which had been previously a cozy little room with space for only a half-dozen ponies. The Marklaird took up far too much space, despite its slight stature, and the planning for its pet project had drawn in a lot of personnel who never would have fit in the old operations room. The sandtable still sat at the edge of the new conference space, flags and sundry devices marking out the current state of the province.

Waves of freezing rain and thaws had made a mess of the roads throughout the province, even the Bride's Roads being in places impassable under the sheets of ice and intermittent flooding. This had actually been an advantage to the Company, despite the burden it put on our half-soaked, half-frozen flyers. They were still vastly more mobile than the straggling rebel regiments, more than half of which had simply dissolved on the retreat. Some of those would find their way south to Menomenie and the enemy concentration still holding on around the extension of the Bride's Road that arrowed south-west into the Riverlands, but the rest had probably either died on the road or gone home. We were keeping an eye on the caribou heartlands in the northwestern districts, but aside from the short regiment still dug in around Benoit, there was no signs of any serious rally point in that direction.

And we were proposing to do something about Benoit.

We were under instructions to limit communication of the full purposes of the Company's direct employer in this phase of the campaign, and only I, the Lieutenant, Broken Sigil, and the sergeant in command of the griffin commando formed out of the aerial cohort were fully read into the Marklaird's version of the plan. For the cohort commanders and their subordinates, this was simply another airmobile assault, luring the Benoit light regiment out of their castra with a diversionary attack on Radspur Keep.

The rest of the rebel troops which had been posted in Benoit had left, some of them moving south along with the rest of the retreating White Rose, some of them just fading into the countryside. As far as we could tell from our observation posts, it looked like the caribou had had their very own little civil war, and the victors - or losers - had pulled up stakes and fled south. The remaining under-ponied regiment had to be the most stubborn of die-hards.

So, we were going to see if we couldn't get them to throw themselves on our lances by seizing the castle in their rear, and luring them to attack us in advantageous defensive positions. And that's all the ponies who will be holding the road to Radspur Keep needed to know. The Marklaird would have gone spare if we simply told the entire command structure the actual plan. It had a hateful and antagonistic relationship with transparency and openness.

As before, we were building a covered close nearby the road leading up out of the Benoit flatlands into the high wooded foothills among which Radspur Keep lurked. Nothing fancy, but the goal was to keep our ponies from getting sick or dying of exposure while we ferried in the rest of the force to hold the road. We had, in point of fact, already started the process a good many days ago, ever since the charioteer corps had recovered from the big militia airlift. The close was constructed, and we were fairly certain the rebel had not noticed the air traffic. They never seemed to notice our goings and comings, no matter how blatant we got. We had been far too paranoid in the early days of the campaign, but then, we had needed to find their observational tolerances, and hadn't been willing to take chances on their aerial paranoia.
The Lieutenant had asked me to accompany the assault team operating against the Keep proper. The Marklaird was leading this vexellation, and she had said that I was the Company pony which the legate was most willing to tolerate and listen to, no matter the situation. This was almost ludicrous on its face, as I did nothing but talk back to and borderline-mock our employer, but that little gimp's enormous ego supplied where logic failed, and it almost relished my feeble presence on this preposterous commando raid. Actually in command of the raid was Gerlach, said sergeant in command of the griffin commando. While the Captain had been in command, we had not bothered to separate the pegasi from the griffins among the aerial sections, but it made some tactical sense in practice. The two species had very different combat styles, and the heavy chasseur tactics of the griffins did not necessarily mesh well with the slashing hussar styling of the lighter, smaller pegasi.

Our plan was to assault the pass-side towers of the Keep, while the final flight of the charioteer corps fixed the attention of the enemy towards the road leading into the lowlands below the Keep. We would go over the walls rather than assaulting the gates, an obvious choice for an almost entirely aerial commando. I would be catching a piggyback ride like a foal until we took the first tower or wall.

I met the griffins and the Marklaird in a corner of the marshaling yard, the rest of the field cluttered with chariots, their cargo, and the charioteers busy loading up. The charioteers and their pony cargo would deploy directly onto the road, all surprise expended in that movement. The sections already in place on the ground would break cover and reinforce the air assault as they approached. I myself was feeling unduly burdened with heavy barding which I had once upon a time trained with, but hadn't worn in… by the alicorns, it had to have been years. My lance was more familiar in my hooves, but still I felt very much out of place in my hide. Gerlach and his griffins looked desperately tired, but I knew they had it in them to pull off one more mission.

The Marklaird not-so-kindly took me in its hooves, and helped me into a straddling position on the back of its witch-kite. It spun around and around as it caught a breeze, and the griffins rose around us like a feline flock of barded and heavily armed lion-eagles, waiting for the Marklaird to lead the flight forward. It found the direction, and the spinning ceased, and we rocketed off like a flare had been shoved up its leather-bound plothole. The griffins trailed behind us like a flock of geese, and behind them, the chariots laboring into the air.

Trailing behind us like a battle-cry, was the Marklaird's girlish shriek,

"Tally-ho!"

Our (mostly) unburdened advantage allowed us to vastly outpace the chariots, and we quickly left them behind. It was part of the plan that we would circle around over the ridgeline which defined the northwestern fringe of the province, and thus give time for the chariots to attract the attention of the enemy before we approached the Keep. I'm not sure how well this plan worked out in practice, the rebel was generally, appallingly lax in keeping track of our aerial movements, as I had said. It was possible that the fools didn't notice either arm of the pincers, but in the event, we approached the castle unmolested, the ridge-ward turrets not even posted as far as I could see, gripping tightly to the frame of that unnerving construct I was riding far, far, far above the wooded slopes below.

I still couldn't stand air travel. Hated it, hated it, hated it. I think I nearly broke the wrapping on my lance-shaft from the pressure of my grip on it.

We descended at a bowel-loosening velocity, stooping onto our targeted tower before anypony could react, and I leapt off that damn kite, and rolled across the flagstones until I impacted the inner wall of the turret. Empty, suspiciously empty. There should have been activity.

The griffins descended like night onto twilight, sweeping the ridgeside walls. The caribou had completely abandoned the constructed purpose of the keep, to hold the border against the northwestern barbarians and nomads. If they kept any watch at all these days, it was southwards facing their own town. It was almost as if they thought they had no reason to face an attack for whatever reason.

Finally, a disturbance which was not caused by the commando - the inner donjon of the keep suddenly belched forth a tumult of half-armed caribou, dashing about in a panic, running for the filthy stairs leading up to the walls. Which we held in force, or would have, by the time they reached the top. Some caribou with more sense, began flinging javelins at my griffins, not hitting anything, mind you, but it was a more effective response than simply stampeding up the killzones which we were about to make of the accessways to the walls and outer towers. There were murderholes and tunnels below, leading from the gates on either side of the keep to the inner quarter and the donjon itself, but we had totally bypassed all that noise by coming over the walls. This ancient design was totally obsoleted as soon as armed flyers arrived on the military scene. Even occupying the old deathtrap had been a strategic error of the first water.

Soon enough, the stairwells with their dried bloodstains were coated again with fresh blood, and were full of freshly dead and dying caribou. The survivors were backing into the sally ports of the donjon under bombardment by the Marklaird, who was flinging around its black fire magic again. I yelled at it across the inner keep, trying to remind it of the probable flammability of the donjon interior which was our target, but I don't know if it heard me or not. It had a distressing tendency to go beserker in combat conditions, no doubt this was why it had chosen to employ mercenaries for this sort of thing rather than try to accomplish delicate things itself. Speaking of which…

"Sergeant, we need to get the ‘laird to back off and let us handle things. It's about to burn down the entire donjon!" I grinned in irony, and Gerlach did his best to keep an answering grin from his beak.

Several griffins surrounded the cackling, flaring warlock's airframe, their wings spread as they tried to herd it away from the now-burning donjon gates. They had to dodge several times as it almost set them on fire, but finally, it floated back towards my tower.

"My lord! We can access the inner keep by its solarium, we don't need to go through that gate you were trying to burn through! Please, give me a lift, and we can finish this!"

It bellowed in a heavy-lunged masculine voice, and grabbed me up, my legs flailing beneath me at the paving-stones far below. It was a short trip, if terrifying. I was dropped onto the glass roof of the solarium, which did not hold up my weight. I had been prepared, though, and curled enough to take the broken glass on my barding and hoofguards, protecting my barrel and crotch.

The impact on the plants below, however, hurt like the dickens. I wobbled erect, my lance waving drunkenly around me as I stood in a planter full of crushed tomato plants and blueberry bushes. Nopony in evidence, and then the trashed and blood-stained solarium was full of griffins swirling around me, securing each familiar entrance like the professionals they were, and making as much of a redundant mess as the could. The Marklaird left its kite perched precariously on the edge of the broken glass above, and dropped down from its frame with an odd sort of tumbler's grace.

We advanced into the donjon, the griffins clearing each level below us as we searched the ones above. The Marklaird found the library before me, and keened its victory in a reedy spinster's soprano. I rushed to see what it had found. We were alone for the moment.

It tore through the shelves, checking scroll after scroll in the old-style cubbyholes, ignoring the many more modern codexes lining the shelves around us. I didn't dare ask it what it was looking for; I eyed the disarray of the library around us, display cases shattered, books all over the floors, and as it discovered the scrolls it was looking for were not in the organized shelves, it got down on its knees and started sorting through the trampled scrolls laying here and there across the floor.

A great deal of thumping broke out on the floor below us, and some screaming. A griffin burst in the door as the Marklaird sat on its haunches, scratching its featureless head with its forearm in puzzlement.

"Sawbones, My Lord! They're making a push to clear us out of the donjon. We can keep them down, but the lower floors are on fire. I do not think we can fight both the fire and the caribou. We must prepare soon to retreat, and let the fools roast themselves in their own keep, just like Jbayel!"

"Excepting that the Company didn't let themselves get stupidly incinerated in the donjon of Jbayel, yes, corporal, just like Jbayel. My Lord, perhaps we could pack up what we can, here, and fall back to the outer walls?"

"Not here, not here! Maybe my source was wrong? No, impossible! That spell was impossible to defend against! They had been here! Maybe the White Rose removed them since then! Impossible, we would be feeling the results even now, if they fell into powered, knowing hooves!"

The Marklaird barely paid attention to those around it under the best of conditions, but under current stresses? I was not positive it was aware that it was not alone in the library. But then its magic reached out around it, and a black-green-purple haze surrounded what seemed like every single piece of paper or parchment in the library, and it bundled up the lot in a big, floating ball. The Marklaird trotted out of the library, leaving me and the corporal to follow the warlock behind in an awkward approximation of an entourage. I stepped on a half-collapsed device of twigs and twine sitting beside the library exit on our way out of that chamber.

A fireball of immense proportions caught the Marklaird and its loot from the right side of the corridor, perhaps a flare from the fires below?

Griffins scrambled past in the sudden smoke and flames, and the Marklaird was tumbled about as it tried to stomp out the smoldering mess which was the former contents of the library. In the chaos, everypony got out of the donjon, but it was cursing its luck while I rode the back of the griffin corporal across to the Company-held walls of Radspur Keep.

The caribou survivors of Radspur Keep fled into the treeline, and we let them go. I trotted down the road towards Benoit and the Company defensive line being built on the wooded slopes below, my griffin escort flying above me. The Company's troops were quick to dig in when it suited their purposes, and they had already cleared brush in a killing-zone and were in the process of ditching out a rampart and abatis-pit.
I greeted Yew Wall as she came into view, commanding the defensive position under construction.

"Any sign of a reaction force yet? We've managed to burn the Keep quite convincingly. It went up like a Roamish Candle."

"Aren't you supposed to be foalsitting our employer?"

"She, or he, or it, or whatever - it met a reversal it wasn't expecting, and left in a huff. I'll have to catch a ride with somepony on the way home, if we don't all get rolled over by a pike charge."

"Well, you're certainly dressed for the occasion for a change. You look like a colt wearing his father's old guard-barding."

"How long are we going to sit up here if they decide to cut their losses and follow the rest of the rebel southwards?"

"Damn if I know, Sawbones. Wait, you know something. Why do you know something? What do you know?"

"That's need to know, commander. And at the moment, you don't need to know."

"Fine, be that way. Tell you what, if we're still here by tomorrow afternoon and nopony sights antlers, we can call it a campaign. Don't you think?"

The End Of A Campaign, or, Practicing Pageantry

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With the rebel remnants falling back on Menomenie and abandoning the rest of the province, we were on a clock again. The militia regiments had been called up on very short terms, and had chewed up more than a week in simply mobilizing. They were due to demobilize in a few weeks more, and although their command were taking volunteers for extended tours of duty - and selling the idea hard with aggressive propaganda of "heroes of the imperium" and happy-talk about relationships built within Rennet for those who remained. The first line of argument was foolish - who ever became a hero on occupation duty? And the second argument was a thinly-disguised endorsement of petty or not-so-petty corruption. But either way, they built occupation battalions from the expected remnants of the fully-mobilized Verdebaie militia regiments.

The Company itself was to be used to screen the White Rose remnant as it fell back on the golden road we were allowing them into the Riverlands. Our main concern was not letting them get away with significant supplies in their retreat. Nopony really had any good ideas, but the general inclination current at the time revolved around periodic bombardment of any rolling stock the rebel managed to shift down the road from Menomenie to the ruined remnants of Caribou City in the Riverlands.

The problem was that the Company was overstretched in the last days of autumn, and didn't really have any infrastructure that far south-west in the province. Between logistical support of the militias securing the town centres and surviving grain-mills, maintaining our existing compound in the east end of the central districts and converting it to a thriving logistical hub, scouting aggressively throughout the province, and cleaning up after our mess outside Benoit, there were precious few ponies available to do much more than observe the rebel remnants clinging to the Bride's Road in the southwest.

The winter snows swept down out of the north-west before we could accomplish much other than building a few strong hardpoints to observe the Road, and supply aerial observation posts over the secondary roadnets to the southeast and west of Menomenie. The observation posts themselves blew away in the ferocious weather of that region, which came down out of the frozen north like it was being herded by vengeful windigos. Several of the demobilizing militia regiments were caught on the road home, and we settled them into the half-burned castra outside Lait Blanc. They tried strenuously to convince us to ferry them home by air-chariot, but Tickle Me was not about to lose charioteers to frostbite or blizzard whiteout conditions just to get some fat burghers back to their families in time for Winter Festivus or whatever tartarus-spawned local equivalent they celebrated with their spawn.

The Company celebrated some time-frosted obscurity called "Hearth's Warming" which nopony else in my experience had ever heard of, but which was a core tradition of the brotherhood. It was centred around a heavily fictionalized variant on the diaspora traditions, blaming aggressive windigos for all the heartbreak and tribalist warfare that drove the early migrations across the Chain of Creation. It was also very Equestria-centric, which when I was younger had been a point of puzzlement and confusion, since the Company had not set hoof in that fairyland in all the centuries of its known existence. The advent of direct contact with our tutelary spirit and Gibblets' quiet confessions had explained much of the Company's more obscure traditions, that was to be sure.

The return of military apprenticeship to the Company also allowed us to revive an old sub-tradition associated with the general silliness of Hearth's Warming, which was, namely, making foals memorize and perform the traditional play. The idea was that they'd first entertain the Company in its winter quarters, and then the snow-bound demobilized militiaponies in their temporary exile down the road in Lait Blanc. The foals were actually quite into it when it was explained to them, and since we gave them license to slack off their usual apprenticely tasks while they were learning their lines and teaching themselves how to act, were having quite a lot of fun with it.

Rye took the role of Smart Cookie, and Bad Apple, Clover the Clever. Since we hardly had any foals of the proper tribe, Gibblets and I put together fake horns and cloth-frame wings for the pageant. We worked on the costumes as they did their walk-throughs one cold afternoon, when the gates were closed against the blowing snow-drifts and bitter winds, and we were wasting lamp-oil in the infirmary anyways. It was a free show for the convalescent ponies in the attached ward, who were many of them otherwise quite restless with the ache of healing wounds and imposed inactivity.

"I only wish t' know, m' luds, why't mud-ponies are hidin' all the food, when evert ourn tributaries comt for our fair shaire of t' loot!" squeaked the Dodger, having a terrible time with his alleged Pegolopolisian accent, which frankly sounded like no dialect I had ever heard spoken by mortal pony.

"Ve, ist it? Ve hain't hoggin' der food, you thievin' bird-pones are the ones descendin' on our empty barns and cleanin' them right out! And the only reason the granaries are so empty is that you crazy pegasussues are making it snow like crazy!" shouted Tam Lane, at least sounding a little like a rural Chancellor Puddinhead.

I tuned out the rehearsal, and turned back to my conversation with our goblin about our common Mistress, and the dreams she had been invading.

"They've not been varying that much these last few nights. Same song-and-dance, some different verses to the arias, sometimes there are different things in the audience, and we go through different memories depending on the night, but it's the same bipolar displays, night after night."

"That's certainly a different manifestation of the Company taint, I'll say that much of it. At least your eyes don't glow in the dark, well, not without the charms. We'll be keeping an eye on you to see if you start swishing about like a dockside streetwalker, in any case."

"I'm still working through the old alchemy texts, hoping for something to rebuild burned synapses. The Captain's not getting better, and the colder it gets, the more I worry he won't wake up one of these mornings."

"There may not be any panaceas in those old books. The old zebras weren't miracle workers, and brain-damage is rarely reversible in my experience."

"Yes, your endless centuries experience in neither being a doctor, nor an alchemist."

The goblin gave me the old raspberry, and then turned to the rehearsal. "No, BA, you're not supposed to pull your cloak out from under Princess Platinum. There's enough slapstick in the story for Puddinhead to deal out, you don't need to gild the unicorn!"

We got up to separate the tussling Clover the Clever and her Princess, a somewhat bruised and irate Feufollet. Sometimes winter garrison life could be worth the weather.

The Curtain Comes Down, The Paint Comes Off

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Our employer finally got bored, and left for the season. Our preparations for the Hearths Warming pageant had broken the Marklaird's tolerance for irrelevant nonsense and the daily grind, and it flitted off to find trouble and entertainment somewhere else, somewhere not here, in a province coming once more under authority and finding a, somewhat hungry, peace. It had actually laid down on a cot in the ward during the most recent "rehearsal", those unfocused play-sessions Gibblets and I had tried to subtly urge towards cutesy chaos and open-ended play. It was oblique enough that the warlock-gimp was bored rather than watchful.

It raided my Annals-chest one more time, getting in with distressing ease, and skimming my alchemical texts and the most recent pages of my volume. It was the fourth time the little undead bastard had broken the surface wards on the chest and violated the sacred memory of the brotherhood, just torn through the centuries-old guards and locks which should have kept out gods, and read our collective mail. That thief of memories, that mind-raping abomination!

I've been unable to keep a second copy of the volume, or an alternate version of my pages. What we have is what was written, and the writings are intrinsically bound to the chest itself. The Marklaird tried to steal books from the chest, but even it couldn't do so without setting off a pyrotechnic flare. It managed to hide the results of its attempted theft of a middle volume of Fatinah's Book, and from its prospective, it must think it destroyed one of our precious Annals. This might explain why it was restless, and why it fled in a cloud of boredom, pique, and distraction. We now had a very good reason to wish our employer ill, if we hadn't had one before.

It didn't know how lucky it was.

The wicked old warlocks of the Company's middle age had wrought fiendish layers of protection over our precious Annals-chest. They had anticipated threats such as a lich of vast and subtle power, one capable of picking the magical locks on the outer shell of the dense onion-ball of witchcraft that the battered old ironwood and cold iron concealed within itself. Forcing the locks with magic un-sealed with the Company essence triggered the dummy filing system, swapping out opportunistically-generated shelves and pyrotechnically trapped texts for the modified retrieval system to serve up to the interloper. The physical interior of the chest itself was magically and physically identical in dummy filing mode, or at least so I'm told by Shorthorn and Gibblets. Which means that the only true danger to the Annals themselves was the tracking-device pseudo-texts the Marklaird stored in the chest on its second and fourth intrusions into the system.

I had Shorthorn - who was better with the witchery-maintenance on the Annals chest than Gibblets, who had never served as Annalist and never contributed anything active to the chest's fiendishly complex array of spells, matrixes, and cantrips - look over the Marklaird's attempted contributions to the Annals archive annex, and work out how to shift them into shielded, double-blinded "suspect materials" pockets. Then we quickly worked out how to tunnel the "pingback" subsystem the Marklaird had built into his little tracking devices, so that he didn't think we knew what he had done. This was technically Shorthorn's second contribution to the vast and sprawling Annals-complex, and by contributing, Gibblets broke his cherry on working on the chest.

Later, as they recovered from the ordeal of major magical engineering to accommodate the Marklaird's first tracking device, I used Shorthorn's first contribution to the protection complex of the Annals. I viewed those holographic records, that flickering phantasm of the leather-bound warlock breaking the surface-locks of my chest, and rooting through its interiors, stealing pencils and paper, reading my books, re-filing them haphazardly. The second intrusion, reading my own book, putting that little infernal device back into the same shelf as my reading material, reference books, my own book in the writing.

Obviously, I had to start censoring my Book. We couldn't keep our employer from breaking into the chest, not without alerting it to our knowledge of its betrayal of our privacy and sacred memory. We could only control what it saw from there on out, and sculpt its knowledge of what we thought, how we thought, what we knew. Omission followed omission, technical truths turned entire chapters into oblique banalities, while leaving the facts of the Company nothing but interstitial insinuations and meaningful code-mongering.

Which reminds me before I forget:

Dead of exposure in the observation posts over Benoit and Radspur Keep, Dark Clouds, a pegasus stallion, whose death was not recorded at the time to keep the Marklaird from realizing that we were keeping a close watch over its target throughout the fall.

Dead of multiple stab wounds in the first storming of Radspur Keep, Geomar, griffin, who led the assault that broke the rebel defense of the keep's donjon, and blocked the stairs from the lower levels of the central tower into the library-level, as other Company brethren ransacked the shelves and display cases. The time Geomar bought with his life gave them the opportunity to retrieve the texts and devices the Laird had been searching for, without its knowledge. Several other griffins suffered debilitating injuries recovering his body from the stairwell he had defended, and they had to damage the lower levels extensively in the course of the operation. Which is why we shaped matters on the second storming, so that the Marklaird only saw the upper levels of the keep, and why we came in through the solarium the second time.

But returning to the rape of the Annals. We could not keep the warlock who paid our bills and licensed our presence in Tambelon from ransacking the chest at will, so we - I, really, turned my book into fiction, a tissue of not-quite-lies, never actually writing down a falsehood, but not recording many truths, or the true context of the later half of our campaign in Rennet. To be fully truthful, I had been careful of my words since the first inkling on the road down from the portal that the Marklaird had an unhealthy interest in our Annals, and took care to never dwell on our opinions and knowledge of the true state of political-magical affairs in Tambelon, or the true nature of our immediate employer.

We attempted several times to make contact with the Marklaird's superiors, only to discover that it had no superiors, not between it and its own Mistress, the Bride of Tambelon, empress and imperatrix.

Fellow abomination and lich.

My Book so far has left the impression that the Company is a tunnel-blind fool, doomfully focused on proving its military worth, disinterested in the moral character of its employers and the details of their rule and sources of power. Or, at least, I have strove to leave that impression. Gibblets has rebuked me on a number of occasions for sounding, as he put it, “like a fire-breathing anarchist and abolitionist”, so perhaps my strivings have been less than successful at times.

The truth of the matter is that we are in the employ of a deathless animated corpse, a remnant of evil days walking the world, a memory of that ancient and safely entombed necromancer, Lord Grogar. Many centuries ago, a crusade of paladins and righteous wizards took Tambelon by storm, and in conjunction with the sainted alicorn White Rose, had put down the barrow-lord and his army of undead, and his deathless warlock-minions. The lesser undead were destroyed, and Grogar locked in a massive, fiendish complex of interlocking self-repairing spell matrixes feeding on the dark magic that constantly, endlessly billows from his cursed pelt. His minions, those which their conquerors could not destroy outright, were locked into reinforcing tombs surrounding the great necromancer's tomb, and gave their moiety towards the continued imprisonment of their defeated lord.

Some damn fool let some of them out a few centuries past. The stories about why he broke the seal bought with the life's-blood of a sacred alicorn are as varied as the biases of the tellers, but the long and the short of it was someone fell in love with a pretty face, and made a mistake, and that pretty face put him in the dirt as a replacement for her own carcass, and rose up in all her power and glory into the foolish vacuum of post-Grogar, post-White Rose Tambelon. Tradition holds that the Bride had been an earth-pony slave bought by the great necromancer. He had murdered her, raised her up again, somehow triggering a post-death alicornic ascension, into some sort of demi-lich corrupted variant on alicornhood. She had been his loyal Dragon, his right hoof and the breaker of rebellions and betrayals. For the undead lich made an uncertain and dubiously loyal minion, and Grogar's empire was vast in its power and military might, but as politically instable as the most cross-grained of dictatorships. From all accounts, his lich-minions spent as much time fighting each other as they did rebels and traitors against the imperial order.

Surprising every foreign observer, the Bride did not resurrect or free her lord and master, but rather, selectively extracted a few fellow-lich minions to act as her generals, and proceeded to carve out her own imperium from the disorganized feudal rabble which covered the territories that once had been Grogar's empire, and the independent territories beyond that he had merely terrorized into compliance. By about fifty years ago, all of Tambelon groaned under the heavy hoof of the new lich imperium.

And then she did something unexpected. She opened up trade, and pulled back the generals from their oppressive direct rule, and built the Roads. Tambelon prospered for a few decades. And then she was punished for her disregard for the principles of The Princess, and her encouragement of prosperity was rewarded with rebellion, disorder, and civil war. Thus our entry into Tambelon.

I don't know what the Bride expected. Her generals - now 'legates' - thrived by, and indeed, required, deaths born of violence to survive. Creating a peaceful dominion full of prosperous burghers and long-lived ponies was the exact opposite of what those monsters, upon which she had built her power, desired and needed. The only real question was whether the new White Rose was somehow a legitimate rebellion, or whether the rebels themselves were as fully in the employ of the legates as the Company itself.

We had seen no lich-sign in our war with the local White Rose in Rennet, nothing not obviously left by our own employer, who, I am told, oozed a fell trace of death-magic behind it like a snail behind its shell. It was, to all outward and detectable appearance, a truly local rebellion, composed equally of opportunism, tribalist discontent, resentment and the petty failures of equine nature. The caribou had been bottom pony for too long, and took their chance when they saw it. An ocean of blood later, they were back on the bottom again, and had thus provided future generations the 'proof' required to keep them subjugated to their outraged earth pony and donkey neighbors and betters.

Our careful play-acting, undoubtable military effectiveness, horrific capacity for violence, and surly shamming had convinced the Marklaird that we were sufficiently reliable, and it had read us into its plan to raid the library at Radspur Keep. It was foolish enough to mention that it wished to examine the genealogical records of the family who maintained the Keep as their seat of power. It was obvious that it was not interested in the latter-day Counts of Benoit, who were obscure nobodies subinfeudated to the Duc de Rennet, and who had only controlled the Keep for a century or two previously according to my independent research. But Radspur Keep was old, terribly old, it pre-dated the Grogarian Imperium.

That was obvious enough once we had the clues.

So we planned out a campaign to "draw away" the rebel forces into the east of the province, and set up an elaborate operation to raid Benoit and Radspur when the rebel broke and chaos was at its height. The Marklaird, in its rotten, death-loving heart, was enraptured with chaos and complexity. There was nothing more it loved than telling stories of the fiendish, involuted plots it had executed against various bureaucratric foes and rebel leaders. It had not told these stories to any in the Company, but he certainly liked to impress his underlings. And he had left one of his underlings, one Dior Enfant, in our care for an entire season, unsupervised.

She had been ours inside of a month, secretly sworn to the pikestaff after six weeks. She took the Company-name Dancing Shadows, and her eyes took the thestral taint as soon as she kissed the shaft. She had been primed for brotherhood, in her youth and young adulthood, her training under the ruthless sway of a soul-swallowing lich. It was almost a release, being folded into the wickedness of the Company. Sort of a moral step up, as it were.

It thought it held the soul of Dior Enfant in the bulb of its hoof, and never noticed when she was reborn as Dancing Shadows. The Marklaird's arrogance and pettiness blinded it to the spy within its camp. It helped that we kept her far away from her nominal laird, busy running its, and our, spy network in the province. Which in truth, she was under instructions to use to lay the foundations for an orderly re-establishment of imperial authority as soon as the fighting subsided. It was, after all, the supposed purpose of the Black Company in Rennet, and who could be blamed for accomplishing the actual, explicit goals of our employment? She was also trying to make contact with the Bride's bureaucracy so as to provide a direct channel of communication with our employer's leash-holder.

So, we knew, or rather suspected furiously, that the Marklaird's targets in Radspur was most likely old records of the founding dynasty of the lordship which originally settled this corner of Tambelon. While we were fighting for control of the eastward Bride's Road through Lait Blanc, Gerlach's commando had quietly left camp, and set up for an assault on Radspur, mostly unsupported. It barely came off before they had to return and prepare again for a "second" assault on Radspur. We were very lucky that nopony had any sleep-deprivation-driven accidents during the second operation. They had been able to clean out the oldest records from Radspur, and claimed all the artifacts stored in the library display cases while they were in there. Griffins, they can't resist shiny objects, and the delicate carved eggshells had taken their fancy, apparently.

I was frankly astounded when they delivered those eggshells and the accompanying ancient scrolls into my hot hooves. I knew the eggshells had to be magical artifacts from the simple fact that they had survived the rough ride in my brethren's saddlebags without being smashed to calcium carbonate dust in the process. I panicked, and shoved them and their scrolls into a protected storage container within the Annals-chest, one supposedly perfectly-shielded from external scrying and unlikely to allow corruption of the spell-matrixes of the chest-complex itself. I had barely gotten myself calmed when the messenger arrived to convey me to the final planning-session for the "actual" raid on Radspur.

Ever since, I'd been nerve-wracked, expecting the Marklaird to discover our betrayal of its interests, to come storming in and disassemble my carcass & force me to open up all the secrets I held as Annalist.

And now it was gone, petty, petulant, flighty.

Good alicorns-damned riddance.

A Command Performance

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The dream of the moon-lit lagoon shone with a hyperreal luminescence, and the memory of foals in costume stepped through the old story, their piping high voices echoing from coral reef and sweet sand and the nodding tree-tops around the natural amphitheatre. The little donkey in her false horn and crown, the growing earth-pony, her own false horn glowing with real magic. An earth pony wrestling with his framework wings. They all trooped about, hitting their marks and reciting their lines, shivering in the cold air blowing over their improvised stage. The little donkey, his ears hidden inside the great big pudding-cup headdress, his slight stature swelling with the mad charisma of the lunatic earth pony chancellor as he played off the caribou fawn doing her best straight-mare as Smart Cookie.

Around the edges of the memory, the watching audience, faceless donkeys and earth ponies heavily bundled against the cold of the performance-hall, huddled. The militia-ponies, unfamiliar with the old pageant, provided an uncertain counter-point of confused laughter to the age-old comedy. Beyond the vision upon the waters, the sands were cluttered with a second audience, anthropods uncounted, hermit-crabs and fiddlers and sand-fleas and their many siblings and crustacean cousins, many clicking their claws in appreciation of the players and their play.

And above all, the tall spirit for whom this performance had been dredged forth from the day's recall, who was giggling and laughing like the filly she once had been, and if I had anything to do with it, might once be again someday.

Then the players got to the grand interlude of the story, the pegasi storming their new lands, and finding, to their consernation, the previous occupants – bat-winged flying horses, dancing over the virgin cloudscape in the twilight hour. I always found the thestrals' swagger-song to be a great deal of fun, and here it was, the other foals having quickly donned Company charms to act the part of the chorus:

When you're thestral,
You're the swing'st thin'
Little filly, you're a mare,
Little filly, you're a queen!

Here come the thestrals
Like bats outa Tartarus
Somepony get in our way
Somepony gon' call Cadeceus!

Charlehorse spun out of the el Ard, the clashing cymbal-noises of wingblades being rung by the Company pegasi standing off-stage and acting as a sort of barbaric pit-orchestra. He pulled off her wanting-aria with skill and a voice that was just on the edge of breaking. He'd not be able to sing this one next year – he had already shot up a half-hoof in just the last month.

Then came the pas de deux, which since neither our Pansy nor our Hurricane had functional wings, had to be done on the stage itself in two-dimensions.

Hold my hoof, and we're halfway there…
Hold my hoof, and I'll take us there
Somehow
Some day,
Somewhere!

And then tribe-uniting kiss, and:

I like to be in Eque-stri-ah
OK by me in Eque-stri-ah
Ev'rything free in Eque-stri-ah
For a slight fee in Eque-stri-ah!

Hundreds of rainbows over every song!
Hundreds of ponies on every cloud!
Immigrants goes to Eque-stri-ah
Many hellos in Eque-stri-ah
Wire-spoke chariots in Eque-stri-ah
Pegolopolis's in Eque-stri-ah!

I always loved that part of the pageant, the little moment of uniting love among the pegasi sub-tribes which presaged the pan-tribal unity of the finale, as well as the crass delight of the new immigrants in their fresh land. And so, I found, did the Spirit, who had turned entirely solar-pegasi in her aspect, feathered and blue-furred, weeping openly, grinning through her tears.

"Oh, I have always loved the old version of this tale, before they simplified all the joy and complexity out of it…"

The story took its dark turn, and the three great tribes quarrelling turning bloody. Gibblets' illusions provided the fighting and dying spear-carriers, we didn't want the foals hurting each other, even with play-hoofblades and padded sticks. Company pegasi and griffins wearing some of Shorthorn's glamours flew overhead and played the part of the Windigos, and we came to the climax, and the Hearth's Warming:

The Fire of Friendship burns in our hearts
As long as we live, we cannot dance alone
Though fighting erupt, may the bloodshed pass
Loving and singing will see us through
We are a nation of hoove'd tribes
And loving kindness will bind us to the end.

And… scene. The foals took their bows among a cacophony of weapons used as percussion off-stage, and the memory sank into the starlit dark of the lagoon, to the claw-clicking applause of the endless crowd of crabs and other sea-folk gathered on the shore.

"We know what you are doing, by showing us this, Acolyte. But we forgive you anyways. They were darling, and very well schooled. It is a marvel that our Regiment has thus preserved the old forms, even after all the losses of the years. You remember our beloved thestrals, even as they themselves died out in your and our service."

"We always keep an eye out for them, in hopes of having your special pegasi once more represented in the brotherhood by something other than witchcraft and charms and fading memories. But the clans are few and far between, and we've not seen one outside the Company in more than two centuries. Within the Company, the traits don't tend to breed true outside of pure-blooded pairings. There are many descendants of the old thestrals among the aerial cohort, but none have had the full manifestation of the moon-touch. Some long-eared mares, a couple with recessive fangs. You know how it goes, Mistress."

"I certainly do. We maintained breeding programs, as painful as it was for family cohesion, we thought it worse to lose one of the founding tribes by the vicissitudes of mere heredity. Such an irony, that the love of Hurricane and Pansy would be a threat to the existence of one of their tribes. Enough of ancient history and so forth. What are your plans for the immediate future? The egg-stealing dead thing is definitely gone?"

"As far as we can be sure, Mistress. We continue on our guard, and I have begun a doubled set of Annals, in case it gets past our guard again and raids the Annals-chest. The sanitized version will come to its call when it tries our defenses again, and the true text, though bound to the chest as it ought, is protected by the second layer of defenses. Five hundred years of sly and recondite magecraft can offer many traps and delusions for those who would break through and pillage our treasures."

"Which worries me, Acolyte. You retrieved the ancient scrolls it sought far too easily, that library should have been a terrible tangle of defensive runes, spell matrixes, and other traps for the unwary. And yet your griffins simply waltzed in, and cleared out the lot. As if some other guardian spirit thought to simply gift them to you out of motives I wot not."

"I have not had a chance to go through those scrolls as of yet, Mistress. I could use your input on their relevance, meaning, or context, if you had any opinions on the subject."

The Spirit had slowly re-gained her thestral aspect as we had discussed modern affairs, and now appeared fully as Nightmare Moon again. She grinned fiercely with her predator-teeth and glowing slit-eyed menace, delighted to be offered the chance to plot once again against enemies and opponents. Once you got to know her, she was a very simple mare. Competitive, savage, vicious, blood-thirsty to an extent beyond that of mere military conditioning. To meet the Spirit in her Nightmare aspect was to understand fear, to understand why the Company had survived as long as it did, thrived in a thousand savage blood-lands and ten thousand vicious blood-lettings.

"In other lack-of-news, we continue to extend feelers towards the Mistress of our employer, in hopes of placing our employment in Tambelon on a firmer basis than the tolerance of a mad capricious lich. No responses yet."

"Even if you do make contact with this ruler, it is to only exchange the caprice of one mad lich for a slightly more pragmatic lich, is it not? I vaguely recall the existence of this Bride, if we talk of that false alicorn which the vile necromancer kept leashed in his court as a diplomatic affront to every ambassador from alicorn-ruled polities. There was great rejoicing when that abomination and his court of abominations were torn down by the Light-bringers. We were quite wroth that our Sister refused to allow us to participate in the demolition of Grogar. Too far away from our lands, too many monsters threatening home itself. Always some other horror to be put down in our own back-yards. She never let us have our fun, not really…"

"So Equestria was in contact with Tambelon in the days of the Grogar Domination? Do we need to worry about Equestrian spies taking notice of us now?"

"If they did not take notice of you in the world known today as Crossroads, they surely would not here in Tambelon; it is yet further from our home by at least one further portal-jump. Unless, that is, some new portal-chain has contracted the web of the Chain of Creation on this side of the main torus. Brane topography and multi-world geopolitics were always our Sister's domain, and we perhaps did not pay such matters such attention as they might have otherwise warranted."

"For now, we remain in winter quarters, and await developments and the spring. I bid you good morning, Lady, and hope dawn finds you a sweet rest of your own."

Cold Days, Long Nights

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The short days and long nights in garrison in Rennet were both a sort of reprieve for the Company, and a time of discomfort and unease. The first intensive field campaign in years had been a rougher experience than expected, and the cold weather of winter in the north of Tambelon was just one more thing we had not properly prepared for. Judicious looting of the half-burned barracks of the Lait Blanc had provided a supply of cloth, however shabby and ill-cut. But there were very few natural seamsters among the veterans of the Company, and the campaign had been hard on the recruits from Rime, among which there had been some with experience. Some of those had died in the fighting, and others were less than enthusiastic at the prospect of returning to the drudgery of their abandoned lives.

By mid-winter, we were all more or less clothed appropriately for the weather, but nopony really looked good in the half-stitched rags and loose robes which kept more ponies from filling my wards with frostbite and exposure cases, if nothing else. The foals and their needs were another case entirely.

Gibblets and I led a raiding party not long into the first few weeks of winter, we set out to ransack that crap orphanage in du Pere from whose negligence and disinterest we had gotten half of our apprentices. We had only gone there looking to liberate some winter clothing for the apprentices; we found a house of horrors. The earth-pony mare in charge wept and protested that she had only done what she could with what she had been given. But there was still meat on her bones, and there were well-fed rats in the mostly-empty bunk-rooms. And a carefully barricaded single room in the back where the survivors had stopped up every hole chewed through wainscoting and wall, had slept in shifts to watch each other, and survived on hand-outs from the day-jobs they were sent out to "earn" money for the "workhouse".
She didn’t even bury the dead foals. Their remains were piled in a side-room casually decapitated after the fact, from the looks of it; it only encouraged the rats.

We left that place burning as a pyre for the dead, with the proprietor mercifully garroted and left on a pile of wood soaked in oil. The party returned to the encampment with a cart-load of foals’ clothes, no food, and another cart carrying five emaciated foals, the hardened survivors of that establishment’s complement of orphans.

Gibblets and I carefully planned the apprenticeship ceremony, taking into account the mistakes we had made in the previous one. Command was present, and we carefully examined both the Lieutenant and all three cohort commanders both physically and psychically. The other military apprentices were present, as well as ponies willing to take new, physically shaky apprentices under their wings. And Gibblets made sure I was cleared as well.

The Spirit did not materialize this time, not overtly, but I certainly felt her presence in the back of my mind, and as the two caribou, two donkeys and skinny, undersized earth pony took their turns before the pikestaff, I could hear her laughing madly and weeping. I silently promised her the memory of the proprietor’s interrogation and execution, and she let the ritual pass without another display.

No long winter’s castra hiberna can pass without endless, mind-numbing meetings. Logistical reviews. Fitness reports at a level of obsessive-compulsive detail that even I found tedious. Training reviews. Troop continuing and recruit remediary education overviews.

At least the political, military, and social-economic briefings had some moments of interest and controversy. Dancing Shadows was increasingly becoming the Company’s face in interacting with the evolving post-insurrectionary provincial regime in Rennet, and the Imperial bureaucracy, insofar as the latter acknowledged our existence and the former existed as something other than an anti-caribou pogrom and counter-looting program. We would have to be very careful to preserve "Dior Enfant"’s credibility as a representative of the Imperium, or at least to muddy the waters sufficiently to make Dancing Shadows an effective agent of the Company.

Part of that was this plan, to get the provincial government established on something other than force and tribalism. Dancing Shadows had been trying to track down the legitimate heirs of the missing or dead aristocrats who used to run Rennet.

"So the Duc de Rennet died last spring of illness while petitioning the Bride in Bibelot. He was a life-long bachelor, and it is somewhat controversial which of his swarm of distant cousins is the actual heir. The most legitimate candidate is a three-year-old jenny foal who is a first cousin thrice removed. Her guardians in Rime are claiming the province by right of inheritance. They are a pack of pirates and aspirational thieves. Now, while that is hardly a disqualification for government service in the Imperium, they also show no signs of coming up to the northlands themselves, and the last thing we need is a layer of agents and appointees overseen by guardians in the name of a minor in wardship. Among the swarm of other candidates, the best choice seems to be a third cousin once removed. She has the benefit of living within close proximity to Rennet – in a town to the southeast in Hydromel. They’re minor nobility, something more than farming gentry, but not full of the usual aristocratic bosh…"

I found Dancing Shadows’ endless dissertations on the foibles and family politics of the nobility to be bracing, but the Lieutenant wasn’t even dozing anymore, she was dead asleep at the table, and Gibblets was making faces at the young jenny. I was just the Annalist, how did I become the adult at the Company table?

"OK, I think the committee has heard enough of the Ducal situation. You want us to back this third cousin for the seat? How do we go about this without pissing off the Imperium and making enemies of all the disappointed claimants and their families, patrons, and disappointed clients?"

"That’s the fun part. We do this by picking a fight with Lady Bonforte, publicly. I send an agent provocateur who insinuates that we’re supporting the Rimean minor in wardship, and provokes the would-be ducal pretender to come charging up to the ducal palace and demand her rights. She’s physically closest of all the pretenders, and if we seed her journey with the right ponies, she can arrive on site with an entourage that can allow her to hook up with the current batch of bigots and plunderers seamlessly. By the time the other claimants get a word in edgewise, it’s spring, she’s dug in like a tick, and it’s a fait accompli. The Imperium loves this sort of thing, it means they can toss the appeals from the courts. The Bride likes her judges fat, inactive, and restful. There’s a natural bias towards inaction whenever possible."

"And our posture towards the new duchesse?"

"Chilly, polite distance. We had nothing to do with her elevation, and we merely tolerate her presence. If we want to get clever, we can send you and you can do your tamed-anarchist routine. Best not let the Lieutenant do it, though. She’d have difficulty keeping it an act."

The Lieutenant snorted, still sleeping, as we all turned towards her, and imagined that earth pony in the same room as Tambelonian nobility. And we all shuddered, and hastily voted to approve the scheme. The jenny continued to explain her theories as to how this would catch the attention of the bureaucracy, and if we played it right, could either establish her "independence" or the Company’s reliability, and if we played our cards exactly right, both.

But it apparently meant that I was going into the field again. The new 'duchesse’ would be passing through Pythia’s Fell, and we needed somepony to ghost her procession and keep bandits or the weather from harming our new provincial sovereign.

Dancing In The Pale Moonlight

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"We both remember what happened the last time I took you into the field. That's not happening, not until you're a good deal more seasoned and cautious.”

"I kan be cautious! I am cautious! I am the most cautious fawn you will ever find!”

"Rye, a militia-pony had to keep you from trying to put out mage-fire with your bare hooves! You had nightmares for a week afterwards! You're what, ten years old? Feel free to be a foal for another year or two. I pushed you too hard, too fast.”

We were finishing up clinic, and the last mare was just taking her prescription and gathering her things. Rye Daughter pulled the slightly soiled cloth off the examination table, and took it over to the wash-barrel for later. As soon as we had the surgery to ourselves again, we could get started on the next round of fitness evaluations. I had borrowed several of Languid's dressing-dividers, which provided a nice amount of privacy in the surgery, walling off the ward and turning the space into a temporary examination room. We'd be having some novel medical procedures late next fall, but other than that, everypony we'd seen would be perfectly healthy. Assuming proper diet and rest and so forth, so who knows what the next campaign season would make of those promises, you know? But best not to borrow trouble.
The next tranche of privates from second cohort started filing through the exam room, and Rye Daughter was kept busy boiling tongue depressors and hoofing me materials, forms and the like. It was tedious work, but at least it kept her from whining and pleading and trying to convince me to put her life in danger for no better reason than cabin fever and a misplaced sense of adventure. When we took a break between examinees, I tried a different tack.

"Look, Octavius will be with my detail, and the orphanage-foals are still shaky. I need you here to keep Feufollet and the other foals out of trouble, safe and tolerably amused. Who else would I trust to make sure that happens? Gibblets? He'd likely lead the lot of them off to burn down a windmill or some such foolishness!”

She side-eyed me with a dubious look, and chose to be amused. It's nice to know that we were already at the point in our relationship where she was tolerating my grey hairs and feeble wits.

The endless line of examinees extended into the dusk and long evening hours.

Dancing Shadows and I were delivered by chariot shuttle to an obscure market-town in northern Hydromel, on the border with Verdebaie. We had hired a townhouse on a side-street in this town, which was guarded by Hydromel militia-ponies working under the table. Dior Enfant's carte blanche for Company expenses covered a great many sundries sometimes not strictly recognizable by small-minded Imperial accountancy as valid expenses for a mercenary regiment. Such as private guards, safe houses, and town-council bribery.

The earth-pony who was sitting in the town-house's parlor shot to her hooves when I walked into the room behind Dancing Shadows, looking anxious and a little skittish. I had to wind her up a bit, and tried to come the witch-doctor a bit.

"Hon-chil', dey done tell'um hunnah bin wikkit chil', de rootdoc comeyuh fuh me new gobbin!”

The exiled mayor got up and narrowed her eyes at me, defiant. "Don't give me that gibberish, you fraud. We've had a lot of time to compare notes stuck here with nothing to do. You can't do squat to me. I've been helping Dior Enfant as is my duty as a duly appointed provincial official.”

"Don' crack e teet, uh dunkyuh warruh hunnah wikkit behabor dun. We'un gwine he'p de Duchesse, b'kaus she done bet' de provence.”

The earth-pony, the former mayor of lau Crosse, blinked in annoyance at my utter gibberish, until Dancing Shadows reached out and clouted me across my shoulder, knocking me sideways in the parlor entrance.

"Sawbones, knock off the routine, you're boring us, and you're not nearly as funny as you think you are.”

"Don' yent nobbon leff me habe me fun.” I rolled my eyes. "Oh, very well then. No-one ever seems willing to let me enjoy myself, it really is quite a shame,” I said in my best plumy academic accents. "To be honest, I only half-remember what I'm saying whenever I put on that accent. I can only hope I'm not actually swearing at you, we were never exactly sure what the old ladies were saying on the old block when they were wroth with us. It's rather like remembering the old songs of your foal-hood, you remember the tune and some of the words, and you just hum through the forgotten parts. Mayor Bound Codex, we need some of your time.”

Her eyes lit with hope and trepidation. "Time… for what?”

"The rebel is fled, the province is under imperial occupation, I'm sure you must have heard by now.”

"Of course I know, it's the only thing the guards gossip about. Tartarus, it's the only thing we talk about. I need to get home, lau Crosse has got to be falling to pieces without me.”

I rolled my eyes at her self-importance.

"Mayor, you were easily replaced by your aide. Of course, he was far less loathe to collaborate with the rebel than you had been. We didn't hang him, but some-pony did, quite recently. Before half the town, I am told.”

She looked shaken.

"Yes, of course, it's time for you to go home. But we need one more thing of you on the road home. As I said earlier, if you only spoke genuine street-gutter zebra gibberish, the new duchesse needs a bit of… encouragement. Prompting, if you will. You see, Lady Bonforte labours under the delusion that since she is merely fifth in the line of succession for the empty ducal seat, she is not rightly duchesse. We need her mad enough to overlook that technicality. How would you go about removing that reticence in your future duchesse?”

"Tell her of her… blood claim and the anarchy in the province?”

"How very proper. You like this town-house? Planning to start up a business here as a notary public, perhaps? We'd have to turn over the lease to you, the rent is not cheap.”

"WHAT DO YOU WANT FROM ME?!”

"We need you to be mad, Mayor. You've been kidnapped, you've been exiled, you've been kept against your will by very. bad. ponies. Did you hear? We're backing the rightful heir, Pouce Fantoche, and are in communication with her noble guardians. She's what, seven years old? Being raised in the town-palace of her relatives. Very good family, I hear they're in trade. Or maybe it was manufacturing? I'm not really up on the social scene in Rime. Not that anypony in Rime cares for the social scene in the northlands.”

She got more and more red-faced as I continued my impersonation of a southlands social parasite. The small-town clark, of which Bound Codex was a prime specimen, is an interesting species. To their townfolk and the farmers of their district, they are the very face of literate civilization and culture. To pretty much everypony else in creation, they're back-boondocks savages and bumpkins, barely lettered and not generally expected to be able to keep themselves from fouling themselves at the dinner table. Their natural enemy and feared predators are big-city lawyers and socialites. I was waving a red flag before her eyes. And bless her, she was smart enough to know I was doing it.

"Fool me twice, Herr Doktor? You're not even being subtle.”

"Oh, come now. I'm a simple, humble military surgeon. I'm no more a university doctor than you are… a barrister licensed before the Inns of Court. Or even, really, a properly trained solicitor. Studied law under some sort of back-country avocat, I understand?”

Ah, there was the boil and flash.

"You have me, barber. What lies do you have for me to retail?”

"We need her to dislike us, of course. But only in a cordial sort of way. So what we had in mind was…”

Chateau d' Abeille was an old family fastness, sprawling out from the original block-house in long centuries of intermittent peace. The central bloc was once a fortification, and you could see the heavy cut stone hidden back behind the long galleries and gingerbread and mansard roofs. Otonashi and I pulled the exiled mayor's hired hack up to the side-entrance. Not quite the front entrance hall, but at least it wasn't the servant's door. I would normally stick out like, well, a zebra in donkey country, but I had Otonashi along for minor glamours and emergencies. Once the mayor was shown in by a hoofmare, a groom came around to show us where we could put up the brougham and rest our hooves in the stables. We had a nice talk with the few grooms on duty. The vicomte and his family were quite the social butterflies, and half of them were out today on calls throughout the province. Which meant that we would be there for a while, since the family members missing from the chateau included Lady Bonforte.

There's nothing quite like servants' gossip for building a picture. I had to carry the burden of our side of the coze, because Otonashi, well, you know. But that mostly consisted of relating the basic biography of our employer – exiled mayor from Rennet, political, rebellion and all that – and humming appreciatively while they rattled on about their favorite subject, their "family”. For a certain class of pony, family is never their own flesh and blood, but rather the elevated lordly folk to which they had dedicated themselves, their time and ambition, such as it was. Life-long servants lived through their "family”. It was what kept their societies from boiling over in furious turmoil. They gave everything they had to their "families”, and their "families” felt the pressure of that dedication. A good "family” laboured constantly under the expectations of their servantry. It must rather be like living under the tyranny of a hundred censorious dutch uncles and meddlesome aunties. A bad family found itself sabotaged by disapproving servants, sold out to their enemies, and constantly under-staffed as the self-respecting found any other situation whenever they could.

Bonforte was a poor relation, neither young nor elderly. She had been the companion of her cousin the vicomtesse in their youth, and now that her friend and cousin was a matron with many foals, acted somewhat in the character of a field-general for the family, running the household for the often-ill vicomtesse, whose constitution had not held up under the pressure of a life of constant pregnancy and far, far too many miscarriages. I began to grow uneasy as I heard more and more. Our prospective duchesse sounded a hair too upstanding for our purposes…

A hoofmare came out to the stables, and notified Otonashi and I that our services and the broughram would be required at the front entrance. We hitched ourselves up, and pulled around the front entrance. Bound Codex was arguing with a handsome roan jenny by the closed doors of the main entrance. A pair of hoofmares stood to either side of the jenny, clearly lending their weight to the quite civil but decided ejection which was in progress.

"But Lady-"

"I have heard enough, Mayor Codex. My cousin's right is inviolable. My mind is set. And your time is up.”

The mayor groaned in a fury, and leapt into the brougham, clapping her hoof for us to be off. It was a bit dramatic for my taste, but at least she didn't yell anything over her shoulder as we left.

The next time we brought a delegation, and a number of coaches, all drawn by Company ponies dressing down for the occasion. They didn't make it past the entrance hall, although I'm told they were at least addressed by their reluctant duchesse. While we were being sent off with a flea in our collective ear, I quietly dropped my hitch, and let Otonashi take our vehicle on her own hook. The mayor could haul her own brougham if she wanted to keep up with the rest of the delegation. As the delegation rolled down the carriageway, I could feel Otonashi dropping my glamour.

I waited outside the mansion in the snowed-under gardens, having learned a few things over the years about hiding in plain sight, even in somepony's own back yard. And I thought I was starting to get a feel for this Bonforte. She'd be getting away from her family soon.

And here she came, stomping around the cleared walkway, her eyes raking the snowy lumps which in summer would be rosebushes and other such greenery – don't ask me, gardens and other green growing things that I can't put in a mortar and pestle aren't my thing. Roses can make for a decent remedy against scurvy, I know that much.

I let her cool her head in the icy breeze blowing off their south lawn, under the twilight sky's dying glow. When she was ready, I greeted her from the shadows.

"Why so reticent, parasite? Are you so attached to your host, that you're afraid to hop coat to a new one? Are you like a tick who fancies a certain shade of fur, a certain cut of mane? Afraid your little buggy legs will grow cold on a short-mane?”

"Gaah! I- I do not carry deniers on my person! I will scream for the hoofmares!”

"Take your ease, blood-tick. I'm not here to pinch off your head or dig you out of your chosen host against your will.”

"Then stop calling me a parasite! I am a respectable jenny of a gentle family!”

"You confuse me, mare. You say that as if the two were not synonyms in every practical sense. A ‘respectable jenny' is a mare who lives by the sweat of other brows, who feeds fat on the bread of other's make. What good are you, mare? Are you this great house's house-keeper, to keep their legion of willing slaves to their various tasks, well-fed and happy? Are you the cook, feeding that legion? A valet or hoofmare, or a groom? Or are you, truly, their ‘family', that legion's prized possession and pride?”

"I think you know very well who I am, shadow-pony. Whose agent are you? Those desperate clerks we sent on their way this afternoon? I am not a duchesse, I have dozens of family with a better claim to that wrecked duchy.”

"Not dozens. At best, four, and none of them of age or from the northlands. Is it the wreckage that keeps you away? Are you, simply a coward, or merely lazy? Is it that you fear you won't be able to suck enough blood from the new host, or is it that you think it's larger but likely to expire? How contemptible are you, Lady Bonforte?” The moon's rise began to half-light the winter garden, but still left me in shadows, my noble target exposed, breast heaving in the moon-light.

Gathering herself, she first turned from me so that I could no longer see her face, then turned suddenly to charge into my shadows, swinging without science but great vigour.

"Villain! Blackguard! Demon! Damn you to Tartarus!”

I spun around her untutored blows, dancing beside her as she lunged and swung, breathing in her ear, "There's the great lady.”

Another wild swing, and I was on her other side, blowing in those great, red-furred ears, "There's that noble fire.”

We spun in place, her trying to put a hoof through the air I left behind me, and I swinging as if we were in a bourrée. "How can you care for your honor, and yet leave your patrimony to bleed out in the snows of bitter winter?”

She stopped, billowing, and I spun out several barrel-spans, continuing the pace of our dance, leaving her to follow my steps as I circled her.

"The rebel is dead.” To her left.

"Or fled.” Behind her.

"The palaces are empty.” And her right.

"They're hanging caribou in the hamlets.” Behind her again, reversing on my path.

"Foals starving in the workhouses.” To the left again.

"Grain mouldering in the threshing-barns.” In front of her. I held out my hoof. She took it.

And we danced.

"There is a child with a better claim,” she said, swaying. Turn, turn, step, turn.

"Pouce Fantoche, of the Rime branch of the family,” I agreed. Turn, turn, step, turn.

"In the care of a pack of tinkers,” I snarled. Turn, turn, step, turn.

"Good families come from trade and manufacturing,” she objected coolly, swaying to the absent rhythm of a nonexistent orchestra. Turn, turn, step, turn.

"But not this one. And the child is barely seven summers, and in wardship.” Turn, turn, step, turn.

"They have the support of that damnable mercenary regiment that has destroyed my-" We paused, my eyebrow crooked enough for her to see in the half-lit half-darkness of the winter-bound gardens.

"The province," she corrected herself. "For now, the legate's dogs have the veto over who holds the province.” We began again, turn, turn, step, turn.

"Those who hold the province do not own it. Provinces can be occupied, but cannot be stolen without a little – " I bent her over in a dip, "Legitimacy.”

She looked up at me. "Are we dancing a bourrée, or is it to be a gypsy dance, ser?"

Gathering my breath, l pulled her back up to her hooves.

"Which is why they're backing the Rimean child,” she said, composed once again.

We returned to our dance, which somehow had become more of a waltz than a bourrée.

"Are they now?" I asked. "Have you heard so from your black hats?” Turn, turn, step, turn.

"Everypony I've talked to from the province has said as much. Their reputation is dreadful. No-one has anything good to say of them.” Turn, turn, step, turn.

"Indeed? What have they been saying?” Turn, turn, step, turn.

"Night-haunts, murder in the dark. Horrible displays, victims dismembered and posted like scare-crows at every crossroads. Hanging millers from their own mills. One pony told me today that they burned down an orphanage with the orphans inside!” Turn, turn, step, turn.

"Well, mostly true I suppose. But the only orphans inside that work-house were already dead. True even of the proprietor.” Turn, turn – stop!

"What does that mean?” Stillness.

"I mean that there is a limit to the tolerance of the Company, and leaving the bodies of one's charges to be eaten by rats in back-rooms, and refusing to protect and feed one's living charges, was beyond that tolerance.”

"So they- so you burned a workhouse proprietor inside her own workhouse.”

"We did. She was dead by then. Duchesse, we hold your province. Do you wish to leave it, in torment, in our bloody hooves?” We began again, a different dance. One in which I wasn't quite so practiced. And no, I won't write where I learned to dance, it's none of the Company's business.

Nor was the rest of that night, for that matter.

The Procession Of The Duchesse-Pretender

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The next morning, we tracked down another member of the delegation, an exiled miller named True Grit, who had been driven out by the caribou themselves, his mill placed under a rebel journeymare. One who had been hung outside his establishment by a Company vexellation during the Ride of the Wild Hunt. True Grit held a grudge over the death of his journeymare, despite her betrayal, so we did not approach him as ourselves, but rather grooms conveying Bound Codex in her pretentious brougham. Codex did all the talking, and prompting. For a change, it was not my words in her mouth, but rather those of Bonforte. Once the prospective Duchesse put her mind to things, she did not do it half-way.

The cavalcade returned to Chateau d' Abeille, each conveyance turning off the carriage-way in an almost military evolution, arranging themselves in ranks across the fore of the entrance court. The members of the delegation descended from their carriages, their drivers (Company all, under slight glamours to hide their sometimes-distinctive features) remaining behind. The door-pony rushed inside the porte, and returned rapidly enough, followed by Lady Bonforte, two, no three of her little cousins, and an attendant hoofmare.

"You were told the other day, that there is no Duchesse under these eaves, and to apply to our cousins elsewhere, with better title and richer resources. I am, as you see, almost in the character of a governess, a poor relation of the vicomtess."

"Your grace, the lawyers and the courtiers can talk of blood and descent, estate and title. What we who are in exile and those still at home can understand, is that the old Duc is dead, and his order with him. My journeymare is dead, my mill in ruins, its business blown to the four winds. A province renowned for its productivity, the cornucopia of the North, without ground flour! A rich farming district, suffering from hunger!"

"And that is the concern of one of my cousins with the proper inheritance. Pouce Fantoche, most likely, for her descent is most close to that of the old Duc."

"A child! Who has never even set hoof in the north, let alone in the province!"

"It would be her right."

"Your grace, talk of inheritance and right are all well and good when the subject is indeed, a subject, a farmer inheriting a farm, a miller his father's mill. One piece of property or another, under authority, descending in the proper and orderly manner – in a polity under order, by order, ordered by a mature sovereignty. There is no order without a sovereign, and there is no order under a minor, herself under authority. Perhaps if the province was at peace, the prior sovereign's administration settled, developed, steady under the capable regency of a trusted guardian, who in their turn acted as the sovereign in fact, while the sovereign in law came to maturity in peace, stability and order. There is none of that in Rennet."

"What, not a single pony or donkey to maintain the new duchesse's interests, or act in regency?"

"No, rather, a swarm of argumentative self-appointees, almost-bandits, and opportunistic adventurers. No pony under authority, but rather many ponies arrogating authority to themselves."

"Should not somepony then step in and establish a regency?"

Bound Codex stepped forward, and took over the argument, the miller's preparation having extended this far and no more, although True Grit had, truthfully, struggled somewhat over his lines towards the end of his performance.

"It would merely impose a class of foreign adventurers in place of local ones, your grace. Please, allow us to show you the plans we have drawn up, and the narrow window of opportunity that is being closed by those damnable mercenaries and the adventurers they are encouraging even now in Rennet…"

The new duchesse's little cousins looked on, wide-eyed and cock-eared, as the servants of the house filled the windows of the façade above, and the audience grew by leaps and bounds. The performance grew in the playing, and as the various members of the delegation and that redoubtable jenny offered their points to each other, and found themselves debating the fine points of the law and lack of it in those war-torn districts. After a while the vicomte himself emerged from his manor, to join his children and his wife's cousin.

"Bon', you sound like someone who has her mind on new horizons. The children love you, but they do not need you. This may or may not be your patrimony, but do they need you?"

"Mon seigneur vicomte… I think perhaps they do need someone like me."

"Then, your grace, I think it is time you cease your procrastination." The vicomte turned around, herding his children before him, the delegation dismissed without a word or a glance. Only his cousin was real to him, the rest were background, furniture. He was from all accounts a decent aristocrat, but very much a donkey of his position, of his class. We heard him talking to the new duchesse, who had to hurry in an undignified fashion behind him as he disappeared from view, "You will of course take some servants with you. Your maid and two or three of the hoofmares-" and the door slammed in our faces.

Well, the habits of a lifetime were not shed in a morning. Most of the delegation had not been in on the scam, and they probably had expected there to be more… negotiating in the morning's negotiations. They did not realize that they had been witness to a donkey negotiating with herself via proxy.

The ponies of Rennet gathered their sensibilities, and chose to celebrate in the entrance court.

The conveyance of a newly minted ducal pretender is not a simple matter of forming up on a roadside, and marching for one's destination. Supplies and carriages had to be organized, and a contingent of guards needed to be "hired". Company ponies, of course, Octavius and his section, lightly glamoured to hide horns and tack & barding too obviously worn or "Company" to pass casual examination. The original delegation of exiles grew as rumor and gossip spread the word to the ambitious and homesick. The numbers were such that I had to send Bound Codex to the chateau again, and finagle a logistics meeting with the new duchesse. She helpfully led us to a small, unheated pavilion beside a frozen pond across from the rose-gardens I had lurked in the other night. I was glamoured with an earth-pony disguise based loosely on that of True Grit; nopony would confuse us if we stood side by side, but it was enough that nopony would ask questions about why the new duchesse was meeting with a zebra. We discussed the prospects of her procession becoming something more substantial, and how much the added numbers complicated the matter. A small convoy could power through the cold weather, and move swiftly over difficult roads. Something like what was in prospect, however, would churn snow-bound roads into mud, and overstrain inns and taverns and other resting-stops. We would also need to carry our own food supplies. At that point, it made more sense to start talking about improving the roads along the way, and importing flour and other necessary supplies into the rather strapped duchy.

In the end, we killed two birds with one stone, and the duchesse sent Bound Codex off to purchase flour and other necessities in bulk on the province's credit, and sent me off to pull my mad engineer from his winter projects to do what he did best.

Beat bad roads into well-planked submission.

There was no possibility of actually corduroying well over a hundred miles of bad road, of course. But that didn't mean that problem areas couldn't be addressed ahead of a winter procession. Mad Jack surveyed the road with a small contingent of guards, while Dancing Shadows and I met with the militia commanders of western Hydromel and then the mayors of the hoof-full of towns and hamlets along the route. It was in everypony's best interest to see some improvements on that road, and many hooves make light work. Late winter was a time that most ponies suffered from severe cabin fever, in any event, and the long winter months had accustomed everypony to the brisk weather, so it wasn't quite so dangerous to have many out and about and active in the cold. The politicians of Hydromel were greatly impressed by the argument that the current occupation of neighboring Rennet by Verdebaie militia-ponies had given that province an unfortunate hoof up on their neighbors to the south; an improved route into the heart of the desperate province in junction with the delivery of much-needed supplies would do much to balance out the disparity in participation, and help bind together the provinces of the region.

The improvement of the roads inside Rennet proper was the most difficult part of the project. There were no fat and happy farmers or burghers available to work a voluntary corvee inside Rennet; there was no surplus or margin to feed such an effort, nothing in the control of the mostly absent authorities, at any rate. Farmers had barns full of half-processed grain, but needed to be organized and cozened into working to their own benefit. Townsfolk needed the food-stocks represented by the prospective convoy, but were suffering a fairly thin winter with the mills out of operation. They could hardly be worked on the roads without causing too many of them to collapse or fall sick.

Company ponies perhaps escorted a representative of the new duchesse-pretender, a humble roan jenny of a certain age who talked one-on-one with many stubborn farmers in that month of preparation and waiting. The duchesse-pretender supposedly spent that time in seclusion with her family of twenty years, making memories to compensate for the way that they were now separating. Of course, nopony outside of Chateau d'Abeille saw her in this time. And many farmers in Rennet seemed overly familiar with the new duchesse after her installation, as if they had met her somewhere before. But that's another pony's story.

So the Company got in its winter-quarters fitness exercise in the last month of winter, clearing the route from Rennet City to the border of Hydromel, and partially corduroying the low and problem areas along the way. It left the pretense, that the Company disliked the new duchesse-pretender and favored one or more of her rival cousins, rather thread-bare, but with few town-ponies out and about in Rennet and the Company glamoured and largely out of sight in Hydromel, I think we mostly clothed our nakedness. So long as nopony looked up our skirts.

The farmers didn't much care who helped them fix their roads, so long as they got their carts back. And many of them ended up with vehicles that might technically have belonged to the burned granaries and mills, so they had incentive to ignore the Company devices on the ponies working beside them to clear blocked drainages, lay down logs in low areas, and generally clear brush and ditches and so forth.

The procession itself was impressive, a pageant on the march. The vicomte had contributed his grand coach, his heraldry carefully but temporarily plastered over with the arms of the duchy of Rennet. The coach was proceeded by Company ponies armed in Hydromel militia barding, but with their usual weaponry to hoof. The various broughams and landaus of the exiles and other hangers-on - who had gravitated out of the province and to the vicinity of the vicomte's door once the news had spread - surrounded the duchesse's borrowed coach like a fleet of corvettes flocking about their commodore's flag-ship. Behind the would-be courtiers rolled the many carts and wagons carrying the credit-bought wealth of the new duchesse, processed flour, preserves, great wheels of Rennet cheese returning home to the districts that spawned them. And, of course, tents and travel-supplies for the great herd accompanying this ducal migration, and a small coterie of servants, old folk from the vicomte's estate and new hires for the duchesse's palace.

For once, nothing much occurred to complicate the Company's existence. Other than a new round of the flu, which swept the cavalcade about two days out of Rennet City. I had the sick put up in tents left by the side of the road, and brought in portable hearths and my supplies to try and maintain quarantine. At some point I missed my appointment to renew my glamour, but those that had not already been wondering why an earth-pony attendant was organizing the impromptu hospital, were hardly likely to notice that he had spontaneously grown stripes and a zebra's coarse mane. All the flu outbreak meant, was that I was left behind by the procession, and missed the spectacle of Bonforte's installation in her half-wrecked, half-abandoned ducal palace. I'm told it was something impressive, and only the beginning of a life's work rebuilding what the Company had helped destroy.

But I had a Company to get back to, and that long vacation had put me far too far behind on my work. And Rye Daughter barely remembered who I was when I finally straggled back into my infirmary.

Back to work.

The Prisoners

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SBMS043

The prisoners taken on the Bride's Road west of Lait Blanc in the last days of autumn were mostly from the 1st and 5th Rennet Regiments of Volunteers, with a small leavening of the 9th Imperial Regiment of Regulars. The 1st had been recruited from the County of Benoit, and the 5th mostly from du Pere and Lau Crosse districts, both by agitators brought into the province by White Rose sympathizers among the caribou clan heads in the province. Those sympathizers had out-voted the Imperialists and ducal loyalists in the clan thengs, and the young and unmarried scions of the clans had flocked to the banners.

The army of the White Rose in Rennet had driven the ducal levies from the province with hardly a fight. Companies of the new rebellion had descended upon recruiting stations before the ponies of most districts were even aware that the militia was mobilizing. The arms and officers of the militia in the province fell into rebel hooves without the mass of the militia ever making it to their standards. This rousing success drove the morale which allowed the great victory in the fields outside of Menomenie over an Imperial army.

Well, that, and the treachery of the suborned caribou regiments within that army. Like the 9th Imperial, who on the day of battle formed on the left flank and simply shredded their neighboring pony regiments as the opposing lines prepared their charge. The chaos that ensued meant that the Imperial battle-line was never properly formed, and the Rennet phalanxes drove them from the field in a total, overwhelming rout.

Menomenie and the minor skirmishes which followed left the caribou of Rennet with a distorted notion of how battle was fought, and the nature of war. They had formed an elevated opinion of their own prowess, and a naïve conception of the honour of war and the manner in which it is fought. The raids into neighboring provinces gave them the impression that war was profitable, and fed their egos and their families with the resulting plunder.

The advent of the Company in their happy little world was a terrible shock. Two entire battalions of the 1st had been among the elements ambushed on the Benoit road the night after the Ride of the Wild Hunt. None of the survivors of that ambush were among those captured by the militia in the later ambushes on the Bride's Road – they had either died in the fighting, or had deserted beforehoof. But their shock and defeatism had traveled through the remnants of regiment like a bow-wave through deep water – hidden, but incompressible. It touched every caribou in the regiment, and primed them for failure. The 5th saw much less of the Company, but was in cantonment with the 6th, which had lost heavily in the great flour ambush outside Lau Crosse. The 5th had mostly been reduced by a bad flu season, and seen unusually high fatalities from that plague, if not from combat.

The two regiments had been consolidated as a single maneuver unit when it got caught in the ambuscade of the Verdebaie III. The shocking losses had left the survivors placid, malleable. Which is how the militia was able to herd the one hundred and forty-five prisoners back to our encampment, and compel them to imprison themselves inside a stockade they themselves built around them. They sat in the elements for a day or two after their capture, until Company ponies brought in tent halves and construction materials and encouraged them to shelter themselves. It is entirely possible they may have simply laid out in the elements until they all died of exposure otherwise.

I perhaps am exaggerating for effect, but only slightly. We lost ten prisoners to exposure and sickness in the first week of imprisonment. At the time, it struck me as an unreasonably high mortality rate for such a small group, but I suppose I was underestimating the physical consequences of catastrophic morale failures. As far as we could track of the caribou which escaped the Bride's Road ambuscade, and those who fled the Lait Blanc castra later on, very few ever re-surfaced. The spring thaws would turn up bodies along road-sides and hedge-rows throughout the central districts, often just lying where they gave up in the darkness or fell, exhausted, and never got back up again.

Attempts to find somepony else's lap to dump our prisoners in came to nothing. There was barely a provincial administration at all in Rennet that winter, let alone courts or gendarmes. The occupation militia battalions certainly had neither the facilities nor the inclination to take our prisoners. Some thought was given to massacre or release, but both were dismissed. The former for fear of how it might rile up our Spirit, and the latter for how it might rile up the province, which was slowly settling back into a more stable and restful frame of mind. And nopony in either Verdebaie or Hydromel was willing to give us the time of day when it came to accepting rebel prisoners of war. In fact, some busybody in Hydromel tried to get us to take back the prisoners from the skirmish in Pythia's Fell when we mentioned it, and we barely weaseled out of that bad idea by escaping the meeting and disappearing before somepony could show up with a prisoners' coffle.

After losing another five in the month after capture, we started rousting them out of their stockade for work details. Mad Jack found himself the beneficiary of a sudden surfeit of unskilled labour, and his ambitions knew no bounds. At first, we did not trust them with axes or other wood-working tools which might have been used by mutinous prisoners, but over time it became apparent that they were in no mood for escape or further rebellion.

Once the weather turned from sleet to regular snows, we moved the weekly assemblies outside into the main yard for the ambiance and the space. Kept us out of the cooks' manes as well. The fact that it placed our little weekly ritual just outside the prisoners' stockade had nothing to do with that decision, nor was the aerial cohort's decision to revive the old practice of wing-blade dueling interspersed with raqs al-saif demonstrations at the assemblies. It made a nicely barbaric display, however, with the swirling sword-dancers drawing down snow-siroccos out of the unseen skies above while the oxen traded their heavy drum-beats with the clash and clang of the observers beating accompaniment on their wing-blades, flat to flat.

I made sure to choose my readings from those Annalists whose Company recruited most heavily in the field, from Esteem, Strange Voices, and Bitter Ambrosia. And I may have emphasized the transience of the armies of Ambrosia's day, and the permanence of the Company through mass slaughter and the death of entire armies.

When the time came to send out the Company en masse to repair and rebuild the route from Pythia's Fell to Rennet City, the prisoners of war were turned out as well, and were worked harder than anypony. There was an incident or two, of civilians coming across a work detail of prisoners working the road repairs, giving them grief. Our guards sent the civilians on their way before anything could escalate, but the mood of the province was, I think, conveyed to the prisoners themselves.

We posted the prisoners along the procession-route, with their guards concealed from the perspective of the procession-ponies themselves. I don't know what the duchesse's entourage made of an array of over a hundred thin, ragged caribou of military age standing silently as they trotted past, but hopefully their escort of “Hydromel militia” kept them from panicking too terribly. The duchesse had been briefed ahead of time, and came out of her travelling-coach to greet the silent crowd of caribou. She said nothing to them, and they said nothing to her, but the statement had been made, by the Company to the duchesse and the prisoners alike. To the duchesse, that the rebellion was truly broken and under control, and to the prisoners, that the Imperial authority was once more intact, in place, and anchored in blood and pony by a legitimate duchesse.

And the duchesse was made aware that we had her caribou, if she wanted them. She never sent for her prisoners, and thus informed the Company by this omission that she wanted no more part of them than any other pony in the north.

Not long after that, the Lieutenant arrived at the stockade with a basket full of confiscated cheese and whiskey, and asked for the senior officer in the prisoners' camp. This was not strictly speaking an officer, mind you. There had been a surviving lieutenant among the prisoners from the 9th Imperial; he did not survive the first week of capture. In fact, most of the caribou of the 9th among the prisoners did not survive that winter; there had only been six, and to my knowledge only two were present come spring. This sort of coincidence is why civilized ponies separate their captured officers from their rank and file, and often, segregate units as well. The Company has never been particularly civilized when it came to prisoners of war.

The Lieutenant refused to discuss with me either the subject or the drift of her conversation with Sergeant Mutigschubkarren of the 5th Rennet, senior non-com of the stockade. But she emerged without her basket, and there was some activity in the prisoners' barracks after that mystery conversation. Late the next afternoon, the prisoners were called to ranks, and they were addressed by the Lieutenant. She told them that the war was over in Rennet, and their parole would be taken at the encampment gates, beyond the yard, where the Company would be conducting its weekly assembly. She turned on her heels, and marched out the stockade gates, which were left open and unguarded, excepting, of course, nearly the whole of the Company, gathered, as she had said, for our weekly assembly.

The Company turned its collective back on the prisoners and their stockade, and gave their attention to my reading for the night, yet another bloody passage from Bitter Ambrosia, detailing a terrible battlefield defeat of the army to which the Company was attached in those days, and the loss of almost an entire battalion of Company skirmishers in the slaughter and rout. Ambrosia described the survival of the rest of the Company, noted how the whole of the Company was stronger than any detachment, and observed that so long as a fragment of the whole survived to remember the lost, the Company was whole. The passaged went on to describe the duty of the brethren of the Company, to recover bodies, if at all possible, and the retrieval of the wounded. The Company did not recover that battalion's dead for another campaign season, but when it returned to that cursed valley, they did dig up their brothers' bones, and said the service over them, and recorded the circumstances of their passing, so far as could be determined. Because this was the promise – not victory, not survival, but remembrance.

I turned to the banner and its battle-lance, and lifted it from its supports. The rest of the Company did not see what was behind it, but my eyes had been upon the prisoners as they streamed out of their imprisonment. Even in the darkness, I could see their faces as they watched. A trickle of the caribou had cautiously walked past the rear of the Company in assembly, and made for the outer gates, where the evening guard stood watch, waiting with parole passes and the usual bureaucratic book-keeping that comes with that particular, foreign practice. The Company parted and turned about-face as I marched forward to greet the remaining ponies among the former prisoners, those who remained. And I read them the recruits' oath, and explained to them what it meant, what it signified, what its breaking would break, what its fulfillment would provide.

Not victory, not survival, – but remembrance.

And I swore seventy-two caribou to be ponies of the Black Company, and bid each to name themselves, and pay obeisance to the pike-staff.

Distilling The Queen's Water

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SBMS044

The spring thaw was in full effect, and the camp was covered with a cold and damp mist. We were working on replenishing my medical supplies in the infirmary, and I had Rye Daughter working with the mortar and pestle, grinding willow bark into a fine paste. We would be running the paste through my alembic later in the day, but for now I was using the setup to try and make aqua regia. I'd always bought the stuff from apocatharies or direct from the source, working alchemists, but with access to all of these alchemical texts, I had to try my hoof at the classic "work". It was crazy dangerous, of course, which is why Rye Daughter was on the other side of the infirmary doing nice, safe grind-work out of the potential blast radius.

But aqua regia and jiwe busara in combination were supposed to be the foundation of all sorts of wild possibilities in potioning. I was sort of looking forward to expanding my repertoire.

And this might have explained my somewhat brusque response to Dancing Shadows, who was both distracting me from the chancy work I was in the process of trying to not let explode acidic steam all over my hearth and apparatus, and whining about how she had over-promised the Company leadership on her ability to make connections with the Imperial bureaucracy.

"When my parents got me this position on the legate's staff, I don't think we were quite aware of just how… unpopular the Marklaird had made itself with its peers and the Bride's direct bureaucracy. I was just a child! It had the name, it had the position, it was a grand wizard of the Imperium! This last year has been eye-opening. Did you know that the legate has not set hoof in the Riverlands in the last three campaign seasons? I was not aware of it at the time, but apparently our contract represents the Marklaird's attempt at satisfying its military duties to the Imperium, after years of neglect and refusal to contribute to the defense of the realm. Its credit with the bureaucracy is not just over-extended or in arrears, it basically has its portrait pinned up on every regional office wall, under the notice 'do not serve this donkey'."

"How was Dior Enfant able to get the Verdebaie militia to mobilize, if our sponsor is so hopelessly toxic?" I asked, as I bled some of the pressure from my jury-rigged alembic. It was really not the ideal equipment to be making something as unstable as aqua regia, but so far, I had avoided letting the oil of vitriol over-simmer while I distilled the aqua fortis. This was the final step, as I worked on mixing the two (unstable) substances into the more-stable form of aqua regia. If I did it right. Otherwise, it was just a massively acidic liquid that would burn right through my containers and, if overheated as it was in the alembic, explode all over everything in its vicinity.

"Well, it was all rather in their interest, wasn't it? The rebels had raided them on a number of occasions, and the Company had created an opening. Entirely a local decision, made without reference to the Imperium or its agents. Who are, by the way, quite incensed at having been cut out of the resulting victory. Sciens Minusculus wrote, 'fools never forgive those they have given offense', and the local representatives will never forgive the Company for being right when they were wrong."

"So we have no hopes in Verdebaie. Anything in the other provinces of the north? Or Rime?" The colors had balanced out, and condensation had fully covered the surface of the collecting flask. We might get the true liquid without an explosion after all.

"Our credit was fully extended on our legitimacy project in Hydromel. We have no further leverage there. The rest of the north has no more credit than we do, and the Marklaird has been making enemies left and right in Rime. Not to mention the incensed patronage network of the disappointed guardians of that would-be tinkers' heir. We will just be getting word back from Bibelot after the roads clear, and the spring campaign season is in full swing. We need to be doing something with our time by then."

"We do have reserves, don't we? All that cash we seized from the excise stations, and the granaries, and from the abandoned castra."

"You know as well as I do how expensive it is to keep a regiment in the field. It'll suffice for a season or two, if our suppliers don't cheat us too badly. But if our reputation is shot with the Imperium, we'll find ourselves at the end of that rope with no solid ground underhoof."

"And so you want us to…"

"Move into the Riverlands. Find another batch of White Rose, kick their plots, hook up with actual Imperial forces. Demonstrate our usefulness and willingness to be helpful."

"Insert ourselves into a wasteland full of bandits and starveling understrength armies, without warrant, without authority, without any decent proof that we're Imperials at all. How will that not result in a misunderstanding of monumental scale?" I vented the remnants of the distillation into the hood, and shifted the alembic apparatus to the cooling-bench.

"There are already misunderstandings of monumental scale. Word is that the generals in the Riverlands are greatly displeased to discover a new force of rebels pouring down the Bride's Road from Rennet."

"What kind of quivering cowards are these Imperial generals, to be frightened by a broken and fleeing crowd of shattered caribou? From our reports, they've barely managed to retain their battle-standards and armaments. And whatever supplies they've hauled south will be consumed by the very mouths bringing them south with them."

"The rebels may or may not have ways of using… marginal equine resources without worrying about logistics."

"What the hay does that mean?"

"Uh… necromancers? Or soul-users? I don't know, go ask your warlocks, I'm just a donkey."

"Ain't no such thing as just a donkey on this world. Most every spellcaster you ponies have are donkeys, those that aren't deathless lich-things. Donkey-wizards, with their knives and their freaky blood-magic, right?"

"And rune-casters."

"Ain't nopony counting rune-casters. Tartarus, I could rune-cast if I were willing to waste six months out of the year harvesting and carving bone-shards. Easier to find somepony with actual power. Gah! Don't derail me – what's this about necromancers in the Riverlands?"

"What, you think the Imperium wouldn't have rolled right over them if they were without resources? How do you not know this? It's been in all the briefings the Company has been supplied since you came through the portal."

"I've been concentrating on what the Company does, and keeping my ponies from dying of things that shouldn't kill them. I perhaps haven't been keeping up on all the details of things going on in places the Company is not."

"You're the Annalist, and we probably are going into the Riverland, invitation and Imperial warrant or not. Don't you think you ought to educate yourself?"

I looked over the flask of pure aqua regia in my hoof, and dropped a dollop of jiwe busara-infused honey into the flask. It flashed with a brief violet light, and then I corked the bottle, and put it away in my supplies cabinet, on the top shelf out of the reach of foalish hooves. I would begin cleaning the alembic as soon as it was cool to the hoof, and then Rye Daughter could walk through the process of distilling and stabilizing salicin.

"I suppose I ought."

Life Is Magic, Death Is Power

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SBMS045

I found Gibblets testing his apprentice on her glamours. Or, I should say, his apprentice-class on their glamours. We had discovered that Bad Apple wasn't the only apprentice with enough magic to warrant proper training. A week or so after the Hearthswarming pageants, Octavius caught Feufollet with a sharpened nail, a bloodied fetlock, and a half-constructed windigo illusion floating above a water-bucket she was supposed to be fetching. We had accidentally apprenticed a potential blood-mage to one of the weakest unicorns in the Company. Octavius kept her training for day-to-day matters and so forth, but she was sent to Gibblets to get enough control over her blood-casting that she didn't end up zombifiying herself or others.

They were taking turns casting glamours on each other, and it looked for all the Chain like Feufollet was glaring at an inoffensive-looking shrub growing out of Gibblets' bedroom floor when I walked in.

"Good, good. Let's see you unravel that and retrieve the energy without wasting any of it, now." The shrub began warping and splitting like a peeling orange, turning to green sparkles and flowing back to the donkey, whose blooded right fore-hoof was pointed accusingly at the dispelling phantasm.

"Gibblets."

"OK, next, Bad Apple. Let's see a hound."

"Gibblets."

"What!? Can't you see we're busy?"

"They're busy, you're hovering. I've been reading, I have questions."

"You're always reading, it's your job. Wait, reading what?"

"Briefings and evaluations of the situation in the Riverlands. Things don't add up for me. It's too much. They bear no resemblance to what we've seen here in Rennet. How can it be that bad down there, and was so easy up here? Best I can tell, the answers amount to somepony chirping 'magic!' and going 'ooooooh' and waving their hooves at me. I figured since you don't have hooves, we could at least skip that step."

"But how can you zay Rennet is zo eazy, Monseiur le Stripes?" asked a shaggy, rather muttish 'hound', whose hide immediately rippled as Bad Apple lost control of her glamour.

"Hush, you. Distracting the caster is tomorrow's lesson. Let her finish in silence. But the jenny is right, Sawbones. Weren't too easy, even with us avoiding every 'caster in the province, and the province being damn light in magical heavy-hitters. The Riverlands is a drainage sump for power - everyone on the continent with any sort of respectable strength or power has been drawn into the furball. It's how you prove your worth, where you find your power."

"I've been through most of the Annals, or at least, all of the summaries. Other worlds' mage-wars haven't been this sort of all-consuming. When they get that bad, the fighting chokes on its own waste products. You can't get enough troops active in the theatre for lack of supplies, for lack of troops, for sheer over-fortification of all the lines of advance. There are… limits."

"Well, few worlds are quite like Tambelon when it comes to magic."

"And here you start making spook noises and waving your limbs around. I've heard this song."

"Seriously? Let the goblin tell you what you want to know, you ignorant zebra. Finished? OK."

He got a ponderous, wizardly look on his frog-face, and I settled in for the story. The two wizardlings, ignored by their instructor, settled in, outside of Gibblets' peripheral vision, to do their best illusions of little pitchers with big ears.

"Life is magic, death is power. This is one of the core mantras of magical instruction, although it's such a truism that most ponies don't really emphasize it beyond the basic level of instruction. Life is magic, it is the expression of mana through growth, complexity, the commitment of energy on a fine and fractal level throughout the chain of living, from the invisible little critters that make dirt soil, to the great wyrms that wrap around the circumference of great Yggdrasil. The bonds of magic and life are strong, reinforcing, and produce on a secondary level the various effects we know on most worlds as 'magic'. Almost all magic as we use it are the side-effects of life simply living, of the Chain of Creation turning, of primary processes leaking secondary energy as a matter of course. Death, however briefly, sunders those primary bonds, frees the true magic from the labyrinth of living which normally contains it, channels it, keeps it from burning everything and everypony around it. Death is pure, naked power."

"If that was the sum and whole of the matter, then all the worlds upon the Chain of Creation would be as sere and blasted and lifeless as any stretch of Tartarus. But on most living worlds, there is a balance between life and death, and it favors life heavily. Death is a brief spark of power, devoured by life returning to life, and death merely returns to life without much of a hiccup in the scheme of things. Some necromancers can wall off the burst of power, make dark magic out of the killing of things, but the efficiency of this kind of magecraft is even worse than normal life-based magecraft. You can't seriously power any sustaining enchantment outside of a vacuum on most worlds with death, for instance - it would be cannibalized by anything physical, even motes of dust or pockets of air would spontaneously grow life from their proximity to the death-magic. The only reason there are necromancers anywhere outside of Tartarus is because the initial bursts of magic are so pure and intense that you can do a number of impressive and interesting things that don't require long casting times or any sort of duration."

"I would have gotten some coffee, if I knew it was going to take this long."

"Shut up, I'm going somewhere with this. Tambelon is different from the normal run of world. The balance is out of whack, out of true. It's not a Tartarus-world, or else we'd all be dead by now, but it is about as close as you can get and still have what we'd recognize as life. You've noticed that there are no monsters on Tambelon?"

"Streets and lanes seem to be full of them. Most of the higher-ups in the Imperium are liches and other undead."

"No, you damn fool, I said monsters. Monsters are not dead things, they're living things. They're the result of too much life, too much life-magic. Life broods on life, life bloats with life-magic, and suddenly you have minotaurs and griffins, you have bird-ponies, you have unicorns with spikes of magic bursting out of their skulls with the inescapable urge to return magic to magic, life to life. That's on the simple, equine level. On the macro level, you have chimera, you have cockatrices, manticores, sea-serpents, great hydra lumbering about. You have great continental-spanning dragons sleeping until they grow mountain-ranges upon their spines and coastal peninsulae around their claws cutting furrows into the sea-beds."

"Tambelon doesn't have any of that, not that I've been able to detect. The most magical living things on this world seem to be the earth-ponies. Even they don't ever seem to birth any sports, nopony has unicorn foals or pegasi. Even on the most pure-blooded worlds elsewhere on the Chain, the Three Tribes regularly birth each other, unicorns with earth pony foals, pegasi with unicorn foals, earth ponies with both. The simple statistics of heredity should produce at least a few pegasi wherever there are earth ponies. The world itself conspires against it."

"So how does that tie into all these donkey bloodmages and caribou rune-casters and the Riverlands over-run with the hungry undead?"

"As I said, the balance is out of true on Tambelon. The bonds of life with magic are weaker, the power from death is more pronounced and has actual duration. You can make a ghoul or a wight and it will keep going until it is put down. The simple friction of life against death doesn't hold the same sway as it would on a normal world. It's not completely gone, of course - necromancy isn't a perpetual motion device - but the change in balance makes for a completely different environment when it comes to sustained engagement with the subject of death. The rituals of burial are substantial in this country, because if the dead aren't bound to their graves, they sometime rise as revenants. And nothing spawns evils like an untended battlefield. And the Riverlands are dotted with battlefields, decades worth of unquiet dead. That's a lot of power. It draws the witchy like moths to a strong flame."

"Life is magic, death is power. And power holds the balance against magic in this world." And the goblin turned away from me and my stupid questions, and returned to his training of that little donkey whose blood birthed wonders, and the little earth pony who should have been born a unicorn, in another life, on another world.

The Quintains

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SBMS046

The apprentices and I were taking our leisure one early spring afternoon, towards the end of the thaw. We were beside the main marshaling yards, which had been set up for training, to take advantage of the fair weather. The new recruits were laboring under their new corporals, having been broken up into new sections and leavened with veterans, as was the Company practice. They had a lot of bad habits to break, not least of which was the reflexes bred in pike-ponies. The training and habits of the caribou in their tight, narrow phalanxes would betray them again and again, if allowed to continue un-corrected in the Company's preferred loose formations and lance-centric tactics. The Company could not spare the pony-power necessary to maintain a proper pike phalanx, and we were trying to break the new recruits of their pike-bound training.

Quintains had been set at both sides of the yards, and the new recruits with their new lances were rushing from one end of the practice-field to the other by section, trying to catch the dangling water-jugs on their gallow-frames. The goal was to pith the oaken jugs, so that the water burst all over the practice-field. Done right, and the jugs would positively explode. Done wrong, hit off-centre or too softly, they would merely spin, mocking the trainee. The yards were mostly dry and untouched but for the hoof-prints in the sawdust when Shorthorn came out of the compound's inner gates, chortling with glee.

"We've got revenant-sign! Finally something to experiment with!"

Gibblets had explained to me - after he set my head right about Tambelonian necromancy - that they had been monitoring all of our burial-pits and mass graves from the campaign last fall. The Company badly needed data, training, and exposure to the undead if we were going to survive the Riverlands, let alone thrive there.

It simply wasn't something that appeared all that often in the Annals. I'd gone through the two Books which mentioned the undead at all, but they were thin on details, and only one of the Annalists had encountered undead which lasted long enough to leave much of an impression. al-Hazar's Company had rousted out a fell necromancer from her remote fastness in the further peaks of the jibel-Rebmin. She had conjured soldiers from dragons-teeth and bones, and those skeletons had charged the allies of the Company and made great slaughter among them, killing many, some of which the witch had raised from death to wage death again against their fellow horses. When the Company's ponies joined the battle, to cover their shattered allies in their retreat, the undead fell apart, their death-magic departing their bones and leaving them piled where they were struck. Once the Company realized its apparent advantage, they quickly swept the evil things from the killing-ground in front of the necromancer's gates, and quickly found and murdered the unseelie sorceress. This was the most impressive mention I had found in over five hundred years of Annals of necromancers and undead. Not much to go from.

So, our witches had been monitoring the kill-pits of the campaign, setting a magical guard over the slain across the province. The occupation battalions and the Company had been collecting the dead of the final rout from their unburied repose across the roads and fields where they fell on the retreat. There had been a few reports of revenants haunting the back-roads and side-hamlets, but none had been captured as of yet, and only a few burned out by enraged farmers and offended travelers. Fire was a known solution to the common undead, at least the sort that simply rises from the unburied dead.

But the mass graves, the burial-pits with dozens or hundreds of dead caribou, those were expected to yield a healthy crop of violent, aggressive, blood-thirsty undead. Battle-dead, even those technically buried in mass graves, are reputed to be particularly dangerous, more dangerous than anything that wasn't specifically raised by a proper necromancer. So we were farming the burial-pits, staked out and awaiting any tugs on our magical trip-wires. And they had stubbornly refused to rise, all winter long.

And now one of the mass graves was showing activity - one right in our front yards. The mass graves from the double ambuscade on the Bride's Road west of Lait Blanc were apparently heaving, disturbed by bona-fide revenant undead. Possibly even ghouls!

We sent a message to the occupation militia in Lait Blanc, inviting them to the festivities, and turned out the entire Company. It was a chance to get everypony blooded, used to dead things that moved of their own accord. To get ourselves accustomed to things that should not be, so that we didn't cringe, or hesitate, or pull a stroke. The aerial cohort, less their detachments and observation posts scattered across the skies of the province, flew off to envelop the experiment-area, to make sure that we weren't leaking undead across the district. The ground cohorts and support elements streamed out across the corduroyed access roads, leaving only a skeleton crew manning the walls and gates of the compound. The new recruits abandoned their pells and quintains, and joined the rest of the Company with their semi-blunted practice lances.

The burial pits had been dug on the north side of the Bride's Road, across the drainage ditches in a bit of brush border between the ditches and a farmer's fallow fields beyond. The officers sent off a detail to remove the farm-family from their homestead, and escort them to their neighbors or relatives' homes until we were done with our experiment. No point in leaving civilians anywhere near pony-eating undead, no matter how many arms-ponies might stand between them and getting devoured.

There were only a few ghoul-type undead scrabbling about in the brush when the Company's ground cohorts hooked up with the aerials, and surrounded the burial-ground. But you could see the heaving soil over the rest of the dead, and there was a lot of movement. The ones we could see were only the ones that had found the surface. The Lieutenant went into conference with her cohort commanders, and soon after, the pegasi and griffins spread out, to systemically search the fields and woodlots in the vicinity, making sure that we hadn't lost any ghouls or revenants before we had gotten on-site. We settled in to await the militia. We could have started in on the visible ghouls, but there was a specific experimental schedule the witches-coven had drawn up, and the militia were the first item on the list.

The ghouls didn't care to await our experimental protocols, and once one of them spotted an unwary Company unicorn who broke cover, the lot of them charged, like rats or a flock of birds. One second they were all digging about in the brush, hunting voles or something like that, and the next they were lumbering towards the hapless unicorn, screeching horribly.

He pulled out his sword, and neatly bisected the first one to reach him. It fell, without any further movement, and we all yelled at him to get back. He did so, in a bit of a panic, with two more ghouls scrabbling in his wake. The rest looked around at our hooting, and paused. The two ghouls on the unicorn's heels were transfixed by bolts from his fellow bow-unicorns, and there was a brief pause as the remaining undead seemed to actually *think*, and stood there, drooling and oozing unmentionable fluids onto the soil as the day faded into twilight.

Supposedly the undead become more active in the dark, we'd see if that was the case, here. The two ghouls struck by bolts seemed less mobile, moved as if actually hurt, even though they had not been struck in the head or spine, supposedly the only way to put down a ghoul with conventional weapons. They behaved almost like living caribou struck through with arrows in their guts or flanks.

Various Company ponies began performing their own unsanctioned experiments, hooting across the dusk brush, out of sight of the ghouls, but certainly not out of ear-shot. The undead spun about at each new noise, clearly tracking our presence, if not exactly clear on the exact position of any given pony. Then an entire section's noise apparently caught enough attention that a hoof-full of ghouls charged off in that direction, and managed to overrun that section's position. The earth-ponies and donkeys of that section scrambled back, stabbing at the undead with their lances in a panic. One ghoul spitted itself on a screaming donkey's lance, and she dropped her weapon and ran for it. It was not our finest hour, but this was why we were out there, to get those dead-thing jitters shook out in controlled conditions, rather than on the chaos of an actual battlefield. The other two ghouls in that bunch were again filled full of darts and bolts from the bow-unicorns, who were getting in a good deal of practice at moving targets that evening. The spitted ghoul didn't move again, and its two friends dragged themselves back towards the burial-pits, almost as if they were wounded, one moving as if its rear was paralyzed.

More ghouls were dragging themselves out of the pits, and from the heaving, we had a great deal of dead things to amuse the troops for the balance of the evening. We managed to avoid further provocations, and an hour after full dark, the militia finally showed. We might have gone on without them, but Tickle Me had provided updates assuring management that the militia were on their way, just moving slowly. They brought fire with them, flaring torches. The ghouls saw the fire, and charged through our lines, two-dozen or more of them. There was a brief fight as they hit an un-prepared pair of sections at their seam, and more Company ponies got in some battle-experience against the undead. Several were hurt, bit, or gored on the undead caribou's sharp, broken antlers. More ghouls went down with Company steel in their rotting hides, and those did not get back up again.

Six ghouls managed to find the seam, and charged the head of the militia with their damn torches. They were cautious enough, and the militia fell back before the onrushing undead. The unicorns were out of position to repeat their earlier performance against the ghouls, so the militia was mostly on its own when those things caught up with them. One went up in flames as a pony slapped it in the face with a burning brand, but the others rolled over that unfortunate, his screams tearing through the night as they began to eat him alive. His fellows fell on the undead, stabbing at them with the spears, but somehow their steel spear-heads did not seem to have the efficacy of the Company's weapons. The five un-burning ghouls killed that poor pony, and drove away the rest of the militia, hissing and snarling. They tried to fling burning torches at the feeding ghouls, but no-pony could get close enough.

Finally, a section of Company earth ponies approached, one reaching out for a spear from the cautious and frankly shaky militia, keeping their distance from the ghouls as they finished their meal. The Company section surrounded the five active ghouls, and the one with a militia-spear closed with one of them, stabbing it in its flank. The ghoul shrieked, turning around and flailing about with its rack of antler, nearly taking the earth-pony's face off with a well-timed swipe. But the ghoul's left hind leg was dragging, and it was slowing, and then the earth-pony stabbed it in the chest with the spear, and that ghoul went down for the count. The other four exploded from the half-devoured militia-pony, driving the Company pony back, and the rest of the section moved forward with their Company-issued lances, and spitted two of the four, stopping them dead. The third managed to maul the Company pony with the militia-spear, and the rest of the section dragged him back, their lances keeping the surviving ghouls from following them.

The bow-unicorns finally came up on the scene, and shot down the rest of the ghouls who had broken confinement. They did not move again, neither the one cut down with the militia-spear in the hooves of a Company pony, nor the burned ghoul, nor the ones cut down with Company lances or Company projectiles. Militia-ponies with burning torches inched forward and burned the corpses, and containment was reasserted.

Throughout the night, the pits belched forth dead things, and the Company and its officers conducted their experiments. Fire, projectiles, various flavor of witchcraft and infernal devices, pegasus-dropped sabot spikes, all sorts of tactics were practiced. We suffered numerous wounded, as the ghouls were clever and quick, and once we had a set of undead break out of a tunnel behind what we thought was our containment-lines, and a couple chewed on some of the brethren before we could rally and destroy the escapees.

I did my best to clean out the wounds, but there was only so much I could do in the darkness, on the spot. We set up a quarantine ward in the evacuated farmstead, and I stayed out there for a couple days afterwards, observing the Company wounded, and one or two bitten militia. None of the Company wounded succumbed, but both of the militia ponies did, and they turned immediately. I had been prepared, with my lance to hoof over the expiring ponies. They went fast, with my steel in their throats almost before they started slavering for my heart's blood.

As the long night of experimentation was brought to an end by the morning sun, that sun-light revealed a collapsed pair of pits teeming with the surviving ghouls. The tired bow-unicorns surrounded the pits, and poured their fire into the now-trapped ghouls, the collapsed sides of the mass-graves giving them little traction in escape. Griffins and pegasi flew overhead, dropping incendiary devices into the muck, but the damp and the mud seemed to absorb most of that punishment. Unicorn arrows destroyed most of the surviving undead. In the end, earth-ponies, unicorns, zebra, caribou and donkeys had to descend ropes into those pits and drag the inactive ghoul corpses out into the open where they could be safely burned. Only a few of them were shamming, and by then the fright had mostly drained out of the brethren of the Company. The fakers were cut down by lance and sword.

The pits were found to be full of well-chewed bones, as if half of the dead had risen, and spent the winter eating the half that had not. It explained why it took them so long to set off our alarms.

The experiments were conclusive. Undead struck down by Company hoof were destroyed, however briefly, as if they were living flesh and blood. The same could not be said of weapons in militia hooves - we had even sent in some militia with Company lances to see if the effect was transitive. It was not; this is how I ended up with a couple revenant militia-ponies in my quarantine.

The only regret we had was not having thought to bring out the battle-lance standard, to see what effect it might have on the undead. If our plans to invade the Riverlands were to come to fruition, we might yet have the chance to discover that on the field of battle.

The Griffin, Intestate

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SBMS047

The Captain died in his sleep the night after the destruction of the ghoul-pits. I was off-site overseeing the quarantined wounded; he was found by the foal whose turn it was to keep an eye on the impaired griffin. When I finally was able to leave quarantine with the surviving wounded, the body had already begun to decompose, so we'll never exactly know the cause of his death. It could have been another stroke or aneurysm, it could have been from complications due to his ongoing sleep apnea, or a sudden onset of the flu or some other camp disease.

Gilbert Griffin had been a member of the Black Company for over fifty years, having joined as a young griffin during our mostly uneventful service with the griffish Tetrarchs of D'Neshraa. In the eighth year of his service, the Tetrarchs used us to satisfy their treaty obligations with the Imperators of New Roam, with whom D'Neshraa maintained a profitable trade across a set of world-portals. The D'Neshraans owed military service to the multi-world Novaromani Imperium, and instead of forming up units of the Tetrarchs' own, restive subjects, and shipping them through the portals to their lord and master, they hired a cheaper band of mercenaries to do the job the Company had been doing keeping order in their homeland, and sent us in the stead of their unreliable militias. The Tetrarchs had learned to their chagrin that service under the legions' standards unfitted veterans for the subservient life.

Gilbert was given his sergeancy as part of the preparations for service as a legionary auxiliary on the part of the Company. His service was distinguished if not flashy throughout the Company's ten years with the Legions, and he survived many more aggressive and ambitious non-coms who sought renown and promotion with recklessness and bravado. The turn-over of the griffins in the Company in those campaigns was harsh; many came with the Company into Sarayburnu to fight the Imperator's fraternal wars. Few left with the Company when we fell on the wrong side of a succession dispute, and withdrew through another portal into Miklagard and eventual service with the Prince of Holmgaroir.

Gilbert became the cohort commander of the aerial cohort in Miklagard, and again served with distinction and caution. He was passed over twice for the Lieutenancy, as we went through a period where the office seemed cursed. They did not pass him over a third time, and his name was retired, he was henceforth known as first the Lieutenant, and after the previous Captain Hols Kuunis was betrayed and murdered in a routine meeting with quarreling princelings disputing the Iste of Vladimir, the Captain. His fame as a griffin among ponies eventually spread back to his homeland, and henceforth we collected a trickle of D'Neshrari youngbloods looking to fly with their famed Black Prince. The Captain loathed this reputation of his, and he made it a special project to disillusion his fledglings of their dreams of glory and to break their brethren-killing bravado. The Company's griffins are notable for their discipline, their caution, and their respect for authority. Their behavior always surprises those who think they know the tribal character of the Griffin. He was our Captain for twenty-four years.

We put his corpse upon the pyre, sent his ashes to his ancestors, and his name to the Annals.

The Lieutenant became our new Captain with a perfunctory vote. A rather more contested vote split between the cohort commanders for the office of the Lieutenancy. The aerial cohort, under-strength as it was, put Tickle Me out of the running despite my vote in her favor. The commander of second cohort took a plurality, and became the new Lieutenant. The new Lieutenant was another earth pony mare, her pale yellow coat a rather sickly contrast to the new Captain's purple.

I sat in on a full meeting of the Company leadership, thinking of the alchemy texts in my chest, and the array of failed potions, half-made concoctions and dead ends I would have to dispose of. Some of them weren't the sort of thing I could simply dump in the leaching fields. There was an application of infused aqua regia which could be used for denaturing problematic substances…

"The death of a Captain dissolves all contracts!" insisted the new commander of second cohort, a unicorn named Fuller Falchion. "We could simply march for the nearest portal, and get out while the getting's good. They're all liches, or necromancers, or a Tartarean-blend of both. There's no good sides here, just necromantic rebels and dead things so old their thefts have acquired legitimacy by outliving all the original owners!"

"Mercenaries are always two contracts away from being judged a band of bandits. We can't blow off two employers inside of a year. The Black Company's name will be horseapples for the next century," gloomed Mad Jack. Gilbert had been his oldest friend. The old mule was showing every last one of his seventy-one winters.

I tuned out from the argument, and day-dreamed of new concoctions, trying to mentally file away the neurological cure-alls I had been chasing. Not as hard as I could have. There was always some other problem, some other project taking up my time. I barely spent any time with my alembics and the texts in the previous month or two. Well, well.

So much of what I'd been pursuing with could be used for other purposes, repurposed. Aqua regia and jiwe busara were the foundations upon which many mansions could be construct-

"Sawbones! We asked you a question! Is our contract with the Marklaird or the Bride?" demanded the new Lieutenant.

"I don't have the physical contract, that sort of thing gets archived in the Annals after it's no longer in effect. I can get you our contract with the Hidden Council if you're in a historical mood. I don' t know – wouldn't Broken Sigil have it with the rest of our active records in operations?" We all turned on a new victim.

He hemmed and hawed. And blushed. And admitted that there was no physical contract.

"How the Tartarus did Gilbert drag us into this shithole without a written contract?" demanded Gibblets.

The new Captain rubbed her forehead, as if she was rueing having not been born a unicorn, who could turn back time and draw up a replacement for the late Captain's foolish word. "We all know that he wasn't himself in his last half-year. Personality changes, emotional surges. He decided that he just… liked the Marklaird. I guess it was something the Spirit made him do?"

"I've talked to the Spirit about our direct employer. She loathes it, is quite fierce on the subject. Was quite encouraging of our little gambit in Benoit." Half the table looked confused at my slip. "Never mind that, try to forget I said anything. The more you know, the more you might betray if you're put to the question."

"Well, that's the question, then, isn't it? Is the Marklaird our employer, direct or otherwise, or are we in the employ of the Bride of Tambelon?" asked Smooth Draw, the commander of the third cohort. "It seems obvious that we need to be contracted to the actual imperatrix, and not the hapless, treacherous underling who apparently is in coventry with every authority from here to the southern wastes."

"The Cap- Gilbert always told me it was a contract with the Bride, with the Marklaird acting in her name. It seemed a fine point at the time, but the distinction became obvious after his illness. I always thought we'd be able to clarify it with, with Gilbert." They all stared at me, expecting more, some further point or clarification. I just didn't have it in me to say anything else.

I had other things to do, damnit.

They turned away from me, and Broken Sigil started saying something foolish about forgery.

"Fine!" I barked, startling the rest of the conference. "You know what? The authorities in this country all think we're bandittos and vikings and- and - Reivers! Well, damn them, let's hoist the black flag, and start slitting throats! Tartarus, we've already got the banner! We go into the Riverlands, booming, and we make enough of a stink that they have to bring us into the fold. Seize a fortress, claim a territory, declare direct war on the White Rose! Tell everyone we're operating on the orders of the duly appointed representative of the Bride. Nobody loves the Marklaird, we can blame everything on imaginary orders from that creepy little gimp!"

"We dive into the rottenest, most vile, most ghoul-ravaged guts of the Riverlands, and put down anything we find shambling! Set the heart of that rotten oak on FIRE! And build ourselves a tree-fort in the burned-out hollow."

"Let's make ourselves a desert, and call it peace!"

Moving Day, or, Trading In The Old Shell

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SBMS048

The remnants of the White Rose had abandoned their last foot-hold in Rennet by mid-winter. In between blizzards, we displaced our observation posts forward and put a detachment into the abandoned castra outside Menomenie. They rattled about in that large fortified camp like peas in a canteen, and the hoof-full of sections re-fortified a corner of the camp as a defensible position. There were a cluster of burial pits from the big battle the Imperials had lost two years ago in the near-by fields, and even with the rebels gone, that district was by no means safe. The locals reported ponies missing on a weekly basis.

The White Rose had allowed the barrow-priests to sanctify the mass graves, and stake out their confines as proper burial-grounds, but the rituals sometimes didn't work for the battle-dead. And something kept digging up the pits when nopony was looking.

With the advent of spring and the Company's new leadership, we started shifting base into Menomenie castra. The carters and Mad Jack had been working on an improvement to the Company's rolling stock, and the wagons that rolled down the Bride's Road from Rennet City to our new forward base were much heavier and more defensible than the old light rigs. We left a lot of carts behind us when the time came to displace entirely, but until then, we kept the roads busy. A half-year in one place accumulates a lot of clutter, and it is always a struggle to keep the Company's tail light and portable. My ambulances should not have been especially over-burdened, but my supply wagon was beyond overloaded, and I had to use one of the ambulances to pack up all the additional materials and supplies that Rye Daughter and I had spent the long winter nights grinding, compounding, and distilling into flasks, jars, and sacks. Not to mention the surgical supplies and equipment. The carters looked at my request to load up the ward furniture we had brought in and then subsequently built, and laughed at me. That filled up my "supply” ambulance entirely, and a second ambulance on top of that. The third ambulance would now be crowded with non-ambulatory convalescents, and I had to stop and re-think that.

I discussed the matter with Dancing Shadows and the Captain, and we came to a decision about the long-term convalescent. The Riverlands was not a good place to bring those that couldn't defend themselves or run away from danger, and the nature of the threat made it difficult to guarantee true defended perimeters. We had rented facilities in some of the lesser towns in Hyromel, whose leases were coming due, but one could be used as as a convalescent-house easily enough. So we loaded our half-dozen or so immobile cases onto chariots, and shipped them to safety, and effectively out of Company control. One of my patients, still getting used to her prosthetic peg leg, was volunteered as a minder and general nurse for the retirement home.

We had made different arrangements back in Backwater Bay, but nopony really knew the long-term prospects for the Company in this new world. The subject of how to deal with medical discharges in a mercenary Company with theoretically life-time membership has always been a challenge that we've struggled with. In practice, the worlds upon which the Company has served usually harbor small and discrete colonies of former-Company ponies, some medical discharges, some couples that went on detached duty to raise a family and never quite made it back to the standard. For centuries, this is how the Company maintained the thestral presence in its ranks, but eventually the trait bred out, breaking our hearts in the process.

If there are any thestrals born in the old colonies these days, the word has not trickled back to the Company-at-arms.

The new Lieutenant had made establishing a relationship with our neighbors at the old compound, such as it was, a priority in the later half of our winter in Rennet. They had been less than enthused to be dealing pony-to-pony with the Tartarus-beasts which had turned their world upside down and rattled it until all the wickedness shook loose, but were generally polite. The peasantry doesn't mouth off to armed ponies, not when they'd been disarmed and left vulnerable as these ponies and donkeys generally had. The Company had struck up a mutual trade in those months, exchanging road-work and haulage for food and supplies. We helped get the local district's grain hauled into the now-operational mills around du Pere and other nearby market-towns, and took a share of the flour. A vigorous exchange in carts and wagons ensued, with the Company upgrading its equipage, leaving behind some of our lighter rigs and taking up the sturdy earth-pony-built wagons you could find in that region.

In the end, we left the district-ponies an empty, idiosyncratic castra in their back-yards. It paid no obeisance to the standards or expectations of proper military engineering, and it was located far away from the original road-nets and most productive farms of the district. But it was sturdy, well-built, professionally drained and built to the most modern of sanitary standards. Whether it became a retreat for rich and aristocratic ponies, or a new town, or some sort of grange-owned establishment for district fairs and militia training, was entirely up to the ponies of Rennet.

The Company shed its conch-shell, and moved on.

Menomenie was a small crossroads-city, really more of an overgrown market-town like Lait Blanc, crouched on the provincial border between Rennet and Pepin, squatting on the Bride's Road. Unlike the Road up to Tonnerre, this highway was ancient, and the Bride's engineering corps had simply followed the route laid out by over a millennium of trade-ponies before them. This was the natural front door of Rennet, its entrance into the rich Riverlands and the trade that had moved by flatboat and canalage up and down the spine of the continent. Rime in the east was the junction between the traffic of the lake districts and the Riverlands, which threw out a navigable tributary almost to the gates of that fat almost-crossroads. The majority of the Imperial forces deployed in the Riverlands these days were positioned to preserve the communications between Rime and the loyalist districts in the southeast and south central provinces of the Riverlands.

On the far side of the great river itself, was supposed to be the heart of the rebellion, the long-lost, fabulously wealthy province of Traverses. Nopony but the more deathless and fearless legates had laid eyes on this lost territory in a generation. Rumor holds that its vastly productive earth and redoubtable farmers continue to feed and support the White Rose's teeming armies. The Bride's generals have been unable to break the power of the rebellion, fighting a series of inconclusive campaigns over the past fifteen years in what once was rich and productive agricultural districts in the provinces between Rime, the great river, and all the way up to Caribou City and Menomenie itself.

Caribou City had been the centre of one of the most senseless campaigns of the war. An Imperial Army under the joint command of two of the Bride's lich-generals, Walker and the Stump, had followed a defeated White Rose force northwards until the rebels holed up in the walled river-port. Instead of making a demonstration and returning to the main theatre in the south, the two legates invested Caribou City, bringing a flotilla north along the river to seal off the riverside, digging siege trenches and making regular approaches. It was a completely meaningless waste of resources and time. Several Imperial posts fell in the far south during the siege, as well as the failure of the season's main push in the provinces to Rime's west. None of the Imperium's goals were met that year, but Walker and the Stump breached the White Rose's defenses around Caribou City in the last week before the rainy season shut things down. The embittered and battered Imperial regulars poured through the breaches, and gave no quarter. The inhabitants of the city proper had no connection with the White Rose who had seized their fortified walls; the rebels were, almost to a pony, donkeys and earth ponies from west of the great river, mostly Traversei. The city was largely caribou, who had been neutral or Imperial-friendly up to that point. Nopony was spared, ten thousand mostly-civilian caribou and eleven-hundred rebel ponies were slaughtered. The proverbial streets ran with proverbial blood.

The actual fighting ebbed south towards its natural venues, the approaches to Rime and Traverses respectively, but the damage was done. Caribou City became a ghoul-infested wasteland. The caribou in the north never forgave the atrocity. And the White Rose found recruits in caribou communities all over Tambelon.

The rest of the province of Pepin struggles on, working around the hellhole blasted through the heart of otherwise rich lands, and severing the natural trade-routes of the region. By necessity, the neighboring countryside was hamletized, with farmers sheltering behind strong walls and operating in teams in the exposed fields. All the surviving towns were well-fortified, although their defenders were mostly town watch sorts, not organized or inclined to leave their immediate districts. Some towns weren't even willing to sally forth and aid their own hamlets in times of danger. Those towns suffered notably from dearth and hunger, and would serve as cautionary examples of the value of cooperation and mutual defense, if only ponies were wise enough to profit from the example of others.

As the Company settled into the Menomenie castra, the aerial cohort began to extend their patrols and reconnaissance into Pepin. We did not propose to go rushing into danger, but rather, to move with all deliberate speed. If Rennet had taught the rebels of Tambelon to fear the Company's ghost, to always be looking over their shoulder - then we would exploit that in Pepin. We would give them a big fat target, and let them tie themselves in knots looking for the trick.

Not that there wouldn't be tricks, of course.

The Mouse-Trap

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SBMS049

The Menomenie castra was an old establishment, passed from hoof to hoof over the centuries. It would have been a bear to lay siege to, and impossible to storm without major arcana in one's arsenal. It was sited and scaled to a four-regiment plan, with fresh water within the walls. And it had recently been broken open and breached, at least recently by those walls' standards. If I recall my briefings properly, the Bride and her generals had taken the castra by storm when they first broke into the northlands a century ago, and slaughtered the defenders here. You could sort of make out the new brickwork in the eastern wall where they made their breaches, you could scuff your hooves through the dirt and find the hard and slick surface underneath where witch-fire had puddled the melted walls into a pool of molten glass, still lurking to catch the unwary and cause a spill for the careless stroller.

The castra had passed from Imperial hooves two years ago in the wake of the decisive defeat outside its walls, and had now fallen without a fight into the hooves of the Company. Even the full Company was dwarfed by the fortifications, we comfortably fit into the south-west corner of the complex. Mad Jack and his detail of "galvanized" caribou worked on establishing an inner wall around the regimental compound within the castra, to present a proper 360 defensive perimeter. The wooden palisade and ditchwork was a poor match for the great brickwork battlements of the permanent castra, but it was sufficient to the Company's requirements.

Outside the palisade, the main praetorium was unoccupied except for our witches' coven and a section of guards detailed to keep the warlocks out of trouble. I had trotted out of my newly claimed valetudinarium/hospital with my chest on my back, ready to test out one of the few perks of the new facilities. The warlocks had discovered a lovely set of warding circles within the praetorium complex, and were discussing whether they wanted to settle into this isolated building away from the rest of the Company.

I had more important matters than Languid's privacy fetish, or the common hedge-warlock's need to turtle up inside nice, safe warding whenever possible. There were materials liberated from our raid on Radspur Keep, which absolutely had to be kept from our employers - either one of them, to be honest. And I had not dared to take any of it out of the safety and security of the Annals-chest since they had been hurriedly dumped into my hooves in the interval between the two raids. We had not only records, but equipment saved from the Radspur archives in the chest, and I had heroically resisted the urge to take them out and play with my new toys for almost six months. Six months of wondering what prizes we had snatched out from under the Marklaird's snout. Six months of knowing that a grand warlock like the leather-bound lich could be surveilling his employees, waiting to see if we revealed our betrayals, proved to have materials we shouldn't have, records that in its mind belonged to it. There was a slight blur on the Annals themselves, even the volumes under composition, so as long as I keep an alternate version of my later volumes for the chest to feed to the legate the next time it breaks into the chest to read over my shoulder, it will only read what I want it to know.

But I couldn't be sure that that occultation would stretch far enough as to cover the Radspur spoils.

Most of the witches' coven was inside the warded building, a large hall that seemed oddly smaller on the inside than the outside. Goiter's rear was jutting out of a closet to the right of the foyer, and Languid, Shorthorn and Gibblets were walking around the centre of the main chamber, which had an elaborate, impressive magic circle engraved in its stone surface, some bright shining metal - dirty brass or bronze? - worked into the stone itself. We had left the foals with my ambulance-drivers, helping Rye Daughter unpack my supply carts into the new hospital, inside the Company stockade.

"That's a high ceiling, isn't it? Are there side-chambers in this building or something? This was a lot wider outside than it is in here," I noted.

"We think so, but somepony plastered over the side-entrances," said Shorthorn, shoving a hoof towards a sloppy plaster-job over what I could now see in the half-light to be a doorframe. He never looked up from the brassy curlicues cut into the stone under the rest of his hooves.

I walked over to join them at the circle, asking, "What the hey are you three looking at? Is it warding, or isn't it?"

"Not quite like anything I've seen before," said Gibblets. "It's a ward, alright, but there's additional material - here, here. Freshly carved, different metal, or at least, newer metal."

I got real nervous, real fast. Walled up chambers, modified warding circles?

"Where's the Crow? Goiter! Get your snout out of that closet and get over here! I smell-"

And that's when Shorthorn decided to light off his horn to get a closer look at the newly-carved section. And triggered the trap.

Great runes burst into life on the roughly-plastered walls of the warded chamber, baleful crimson and black. The plastered doors burst out in a flash of fire, blinding everypony in the centre of the room. There was a sightless second as the rumble of the explosion faded from our collective ear-drums, and the flare hung in our vision, obscuring details, buggering our night-vision. Under the ringing, I could faintly hear Gibblets screaming commands from ahead of me. I ran forward, finding him by sense of touch more than anything else. I turned my tail towards him and turned outwards, trying to blink my vision clear. Shorthorn's rear met mine as he joined our huddle around Gibblets, and there was another series of flashes and bright lights, not as loud as the earlier explosion, but a steady roaring which worsened the ringing in my ears.

Under the ringing, I could now hear moaning, hoofsteps, and then - panicked screaming.

I didn't have my lance with me. All I had was the damn chest. Luckily it was lighter than it looked, if only to me. I swept it off my back, and pushed it forward enough to trip up anything that tried to charge us from the front.

Somepony got a shield up around us, and a few seconds later, I could hear meaty thumps - right quadrant, far side of the shield. My dark-sight was slowly returning, and I could see shapes in the half-darkness beyond the shield - Shorthorn's shield, his color.

Ghouls. Old ones, not very juicy. Probably been in the ground a couple years, or in storage. Like, for instance, behind a false wall, held in suspension by a nasty little rune-trap. Or, I should say, a great honking rune-trap.

The ringing was fading, replaced unfortunately by the sound of ghouls feeding. Somepony out there had stopped screaming, mercifully so. The guard-section had been posted outside of the hall. I didn't know whether I should hope for a rescue, or worry that they'd blunder right into the hooves of hungry ghouls.

"Anypony have a weapon, a blade or something? All I have is this damned chest."

Someone cleared his throat - Shorthorn. "Check under 'knitting'. Old Baba Ripnema kept her knitting needles in with her patterns in the chest. I never took them out, and I don't think Bongo ever did."

I inched forward to grab the chest, which had slid out to just inside of the shield Shorthorn was maintaining. A caribou-ghoul bared its rotted gums and teeth at me, and shook its loose rack as if to fling the rotting thing inside the shield. Inches separated me from having my face chewed off. I got my hooves on the chest, and dragged it quickly back.

"If any of you miracles of magic and wonder feel up to it, go ahead and set the lot of these things on fire. Any second now." I got the chest open, and felt through the control-panel. It was still hard to make out details, but I pulled the lever I thought had something kni- written on it. First try got me Knight Errant's volumes and all the junk that Annalist had carelessly filed. Second try got me the actual knitting section. Some Annalists really abused the storage privilege. I damn near cut open my hooves on Baba Ripnema's "knitting needles". I'm not sure how anypony ever knitted with two-foot-long steel shanks with a sharpened edge.

"What the hell did she knit with these, dragon-scale?"

"I never saw old Baba touch a length of yarn. Those were her personal weapons. They called her la Tricoteuse in her youth," said Gibblets. "Here, give me those."

Gibblets levitated the "knitting needles", and swung them around a bit in his personal field.

"Shorthorn, can you pass me through?"

"You know how difficult that is. Aaarggh…"

Shorthorn's shield began to flutter, rippling as if it were a silk tent pitched in a wind-storm. The ghouls started pressing inwards on our perimeter, but the needles slipped through the barrier. Gibblets whipped them around the outside of the shield a couple times to build up speed, and then let them fly directly at the throats of the frothing undead. Two, three - five fell. I pawed through Baba Ripnema's storage trying to find something else, but nothing but dubious brochures and assorted trash was in there. I returned the controls to Knight Errant's shelving, hoping that she also had kept something useful in there. Nothing. I closed up the chest, and hefted it into the air. Awkward, but very light, almost without weight.

I grabbed it by one handle, and got ready to swing it like Creation's most awkward club.

"Starting… to… lose… the…" panted Shorthorn. Then he did.

A half-dozen ghouls charged forward, Gibblets' flying needles missing their targets in the sudden shift. I leapt forward, body-checking the Annals-chest into the ghoul directly opposite me. My momentum carried me past the other ghouls, two of which spun with alarming agility to follow me and my victim as I carried it by sheer force across the chamber, crushing it against the plastered wall, which turned out to be a good deal more substantial than I had expected. Shrieks and bellows erupted behind me, but I couldn't pay attention while I still had two undead reaching out with teeth, hooves and antler-racks for my juicy centre.

I cleared the chest from my downed enemy, and swung it around like a lance. For me, it was light as air, but when it collided with the head of the ghoul to my right, that head popped like a grape. If only I could use the momentum of that swing, but it was like waving around a stalk of wheat. I scrambled side-ways to avoid the charge of the remaining ghoul, and bucked it in the face as it came into range. That put me square again, and I brought back the chest, swinging it down on the dead thing's spine. There was a definite crack, and I could only hope it wasn't the ironwood framing the chest. The chest was supposed to be impervious, but previous Annalists had abused it by leaving it in place, using it as a barrier.

I'm pretty sure I was the first to try and club the Company's enemies to death with our archival chest.

Two more ghouls were scrabbling towards me when I looked up. Gibblets was still standing across the room from me, but he was crouched over two fallen forms. I couldn't see what was happening. And then it was time to beat the mindless undead about their polls and withers with my ironwood club.

Eventually, I was the only thing moving in that chamber of horrors. I limped forward, and met Gibblets over a bleeding Languid and an unconscious Shorthorn. The latter had given himself horn-burn holding that shield as long as he did. Languid had gotten gored by a ghoul - the rack was still stuck in her, impaling her across her lower barrel. I couldn't tell in the darkness if she had been eviscerated or not. I lifted her with my chest, and Gibblets grabbed Shorthorn.

"Any sign of Goiter?" I asked.

"I think that was him screaming at the beginning."

The circumference of the room had been charred. A pyrotechnic burst had incinerated half of the ghouls before they even had gotten out of their holding-cells. Languid's work, we think. Our blindness had been her opportunity to shine in the darkness. It was the single most impressive thing I'd ever not seen her do.

We shuffled towards the exit, and the glaring light outside. Gibblets brought his two needles to hover over his shoulders, and I ducked my head outside.

Blood splattered across the via principalis. Several collapsed undead in a fan, leading in a sort-of trail from the open door of the questorium.

I waved Gibblets out of the death-trap, and we followed the trail of the dead. In the sunlight, it was now clear that the former ghouls had been a mixture of all the local tribes. Almost certainly harvested from the battleground mass graves. Not that I really needed the clue, the whole of the trap had become obvious in retrospect. We had gotten into the mind-set that the castra belonged to all professionals in common, as a sort of trust. Imbecilic, lazy thinking. The rebel had taken advantage of our assumptions. Impossible to tell how big the mess was. The mage-hall trap was supposed to wipe our mages out, would have if it weren't for Lady Languid and her blind-fiery-archer routine. Speaking of which…

It wasn't a total evisceration. The rack hadn't penetrated her peritoneal cavity, but it wasn't in a good place, either. I set her and the chest down, and paused to get rid of the encumbrance. Unlike an arrow or a bolt, the half-rotted rack of antlers didn't cause any more damage coming out than it had going in. I wished I had kept a bottle of booze in my storage-shelf in the chest. I'd certainly do so from now on. Not to mention a spare lance, and maybe some incendiary devices while we're at it. Alicorns bless old Baba Ripnema.

The blood-trail got worse, and so did the piles of the formerly-undead. The stockade was just around the corner, and the blood-trail was now an actual dragged trail. Somepony had collapsed, and his fellows were dragging him in a firemare's carry, his heels dragging in the dust and dirt.

And here came some intact undead. Two of them, no doubt having heard my shoes clang against something back there. I tipped the groaning Languid into the dust, and cleared my chest for the charge. Could only stop one of them, and hope Gibblets could keep the other from flanking me. And… impact. It was a strong one, and I had no leverage to speak of. If I pulled back my battering-ram, it would just open me up to a goring. So we just pushed at each other, his rack rattling in my face, his carrion-breath poisoning the air in front of my nostrils, his throttled roar gurgling in my ears. It seemed to go on forever.

And then a needle took him right through his ear-canal. Down like a sack of flour.

I spun around and scanned for threats. There was a mass of movement to my left, rushing hooves, bodies - and they had us surrounded, dozens of them.

In barding, their lances pointing outwards in every direction.

The cavalry had arrived.

Once Bitten, or, Measure Twice, Slaughter Once

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The White Rose’s trap had been well-planned, timed, staged. The undead had been collected – we did not know how they had been handling the ghouls, finding out how was a major priority as soon as the crisis was resolved – and stabilized in walled-off structures distributed to the four quadrants of the castra, unassuming squat one-story shacks placed behind barracks elsewhere in the camp, and behind false walls in the warlocks’ quarters and the questorium in the central complex. The trigger in the warlocks’ warded hall let loose all tartarus at once, throughout the castra. Three-fourths of the blow struck air, ghouls snuffling around emptied barracks and shuffling about aimlessly, a threat to nothing but spiders and the occasional colony of bats and other insectivores that had invaded the emptied precincts between those ancient walls.

The questorium ghouls nearly overwhelmed the witches’ guard detail, and drove them back in a desperate scramble. Nearly all of them were walking wounded by the time they fought their way back to the stockade, several of them dragged by main force behind a screen of desperately fighting brethren holding off the howling dead. Two did not make it to the stockade, although we did not come across their final stand until later. A unicorn blade-mare named Saffron Sabre had gone down in a ghoul-rush partway back to the stockade, and her partner, an earth-pony stallion named Bull Rush, had been seen dragging her away from danger, bucking his hoof-blades into the faces of ravening undead donkeys and ponies. A second rush had separated the two from the rest of the section, and nopony had noticed they were gone until later. The next day, a double-section clearing the deeper front of the stockade came across their final stand on the far side of the via quintana, a small mound of formerly-undead being faithlessly devoured by their fellow ghouls, and in the center, the remains of the two deceased brethren, Bull Rush stretched protectively over his partner. The patrol rolled over the surviving ghouls like a threshing machine.

The real threat had been the trapped shack inside the Company perimeter. It had lurked like a mine dug unheard beneath our walls, sitting unnoticed behind a barracks full of ponies, next to the rear of a mess hall. They overran and killed two carter-cooks before anypony could react. The earth-pony mare Golden Grits, and her special somepony Hoppin’ John. Charleyhorse was with them, and only the luck of the Company and the protracted death of his knight and master Hoppin’ John saved him from the same fate. He ran his little pony hooves off, screaming the alarm. The first responders pouring out of that barracks were barely armed, and we lost Rue Mechant, jack, and Rock Shelf, earth pony mare, before the properly armed and barded replaced that first desperate line.

The butchery was certain, but it took time, and distracted the Company from the external threat. We had ghouls coming over the eastern stockade before anypony noticed. There were several wounded in this flanking rush, but the stockade itself was our greatest advantage, clambering over it broke up the undead masses and kept them from forming a critical mass. By the time the relieving column had helped Gibblets and I drag our wounded warlocks through the stockade gates, they were making a start on pinning the ghouls into a corner of the Company perimeter, and reasserting control over the situation.

In the final analysis, the White Rose just didn’t have enough ghouls to overwhelm the Company, despite their perfect surprise and multi-axis attack. Once the Company had mobilized, the pegasi and griffins quickly identified the threats, their directions of movement, and the safe zones. From there, it was simply a matter of time and effort. By midnight, we had cleared the compound inside the stockade, and identified the ghoul clusters lurking throughout the rest of the castra. We chose to put off the destruction of those clusters until the next day.
We didn’t retrieve Goiter’s bones until two days later, as Company patrols quartered and re-quartered the castra, hunting every last shuffling corpse and dragging the remains into the forum to be destroyed in an improvised burn-pit. We left the Company dead sit outside in the forum next to the burn-pit, waiting to see if they rose. A full section stood vigil. They did not in the three days we waited.

On the third night, we built a pyre, and said goodbye to our brothers.

Shorthorn turned out to have nothing worse wrong with him than severe horn-burn, same as Octavius the summer before. Who just had to come in and mock the warlock for it, having taken enough grief from him in the past for the same injury. Octavius was in my hospital for the usual, having taken a nasty bite from a ghoul in the first rush to contain the outbreak inside the stockade. Hyssop was right behind him in the queue, with a nasty wound to her right orbital. Rye Daughter rinsed out Octavius’s bite with dilute antiseptic solution, and got ready to poke around in it, with him looking down in anxiety at the little fawn with her mouth full of one of my medical probes. I was working on Hyssop’s eye, which frankly was a higher priority than Octavius’s wound du jour. I thought I could save it, but I wasn’t positive. I cleaned out the wound, packed it with a new mixture we had concocted from the alchemical texts, and ordered her to wear the eye-patch. She seemed pleased with the piratical look.

Languid was a different story. Her barrel wound had suppurated, and shock had nearly taken her from us. I stuffed her full of every antiseptic and infection cure I had on hand, and then we sat back to hope that she woke up before she died of dehydration. Later on, after we had patched up the walking wounded and put the seriously injured away in their beds, I had Rye dripping small beer out of a soaked bandage into Languid’s mouth. She was out for three days, it was the closest I’ve ever had a patient get without dying. But we owed her.

And she eventually pulled through.

The Company conference a week later was a subdued affair. They had gotten us good. Nearly taken out a majority of the Company’s magical throw-weight, such as it was. We obviously needed better undead-detection methods. With both Shorthorn and Languid out of commission, and Goiter dead, we were shorthooved. Otonashi and the Crow had been on a forward reconnaissance flight with the charioteers at the time of the incident, so we weren’t naked, but it wasn’t a good place from which to advance into buffalo country.

Otonashi, Gibblets, and the Crow worked like diamond dogs for the next two weeks testing out detection methods. We kept a couple ghouls penned inside a fresh-built barricade in the corner of an unused quadrant of the castra, and the witches kept Mad Jack busy building a labyrinth as a sort of detection experimental laboratory. Two weeks became four, and the roads south dried out and summer began to threaten. Our deep patrols found the occasional cluster of undead, but no living White Rose. Our ponies became familiar to the fortified farming hamlets and family compounds along the Pepin border with Rennet, and we made ourselves almost popular there with our humorless approach toward the free-range undead. Our patrols extended further and further into Pepin, but we refused to take the Company proper out of the castra.

Time enough for the advance when we were ready. And we weren’t ready yet.

A Land-Lease In Little Ridings

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SBMS051

I stood in the late spring sunlight, looking down the road into rebel-ruined riverland. The metalled surface was crazed with cracks and eroded imperfections. The Bride's Road into Pepin hadn't been maintained since the sack of Caribou City; it was starting to show the neglect. I was with one of our deep patrols, waiting for the next flight of chariots to deliver Jack's pioneers. Today we were going to knock together a blockhouse at the furthest extent of a long day's march out from the border, somewhere to maintain supplies and shelter for extended patrols deeper into the central districts of the wrecked province.

It hadn't taken much war to destroy Pepin as a functional entity, only the demolition and slaughter of its largest city and river-port. The overwhelming balance of the province, its market-towns, farms, hamlets, minor river-ports and roadways were still intact, but with that city burned out of its heart, as if somepony had put a lit cigar through a map… There was still a Duc de Pepin, and his guard protected a castle-town in the northwest corner of his province, but his effective duchy consisted almost entirely of the district around Pepin City. He could keep order in the hamlets around his capital, and put down the undead which wandered his way, but as far as the rest of the province was concerned, he might as well have been in Rakuen for all the good he did them.

We had passed earth ponies in the fields and orchards nearer the provincial border. Our patrols had heartened the border-ponies, and they were reclaiming the outlying fields and orchards that the events of the previous few years had caused them to neglect in favor of land closer to their walls and gates, soil and trees they could tend within sprinting distance of safety. This huddle was a downward spiral, the smaller farms reduced their margins and potential surpluses. Fewer surpluses left less for trade, made walls and weapons more expensive, and everything started to wear without replacements. The border hamlets were positively prosperous compared to the situation deeper in the province, and closer to the ruins of Caribou City.

I heard rumors that the situation in the central provinces of the Riverlands made the neighboring hamlets of the city of the undead look like Rakuen. There are at least still hamlets down there by the river, or so I've been told by the deep penetration pegasi patrols.

The sections I had trotted down with were marking off the outlines of a stockade and blockhouse next to a known well-site, which used to belong to a burned-out farmhouse by the road. The former inhabitant of the farmstead was talking with Chestnut Shell, negotiating a rent for the property. If they knew what's good for them, they'd just give us the lease for the cost of the improvements. We'd leave a well-fortified blockhouse convenient to the main road and their fields in case of further trouble.

I walked over to ask my questions. We were still trying to track the missing White Rose regiments. We had some complaints about their treatment of their own rental properties, after all. The presentation of grievances was a meeting much desired by the Company.

"…land is land. My granny would put ground glass in my pasties if I let family land go without at least some bits changing hooves."

"Really? We're going to do the one-bit lease thing? I mean, I can see if somebody has a denier with them somewhere in the platoon. I couldn't justify anything else, not for a plot of land we're going to be building a full-scale stronghold on, fortify for you, leave in your possession when we move south! All for a well!"

"It's a damn good well. Served us pretty good over the years, until we had to burn the old homeplace down around a couple ghouls and poor old Uncle Pole Bean."

"Chestnut Shell! Has somepony looked into that well since we got here? I don't trust abandoned structures I can't see into anymore, not since the White Rose's last home-warming gift."

"Suck eggs, Sawbones. It's clear. Not even a dead raccoon down there. Sweet water, too. Only reason I'm not ducking this grifter down his own well."

The local took this abuse with an easy tolerance. It was hard to wind up a pony who knew he was getting a good deal no matter how the negotiations went. At this stage he was just trying to squeeze some bragging points out of us. "The caribou didn't even pause in this neighborhood. They holed up at Old Ditches ten miles back the way you came, and down in Dry Salvages two districts south-west of here. You know, the usual places soldiers fort up on this road."

"We've been taught to not trust the rebel to not foul their nests for the next bird to fly by," I sighed. "They're bad tenants, and worse neighbors. One of the things we need to do is go over both of those stockades with a fine magic comb. Irresponsible mules may have left something ugly for any passerby to set off, and suddenly your whole district is up to your withers in hungry undead."

All of the local's good cheer evaporated like a puddle under the noon sun in August. "Is… that likely?"

"We can't be sure. Thus, this blockhouse. We'll be using it as a base and a fall-back point in case of trouble. Cheer up, we're pretty good at this. Anypony else would have gotten mauled by their last little trick, it just pissed us off. Any local problems you should be telling us about? Feuds we may be buying into by renting from you? Or by leaving you a nice new military resource like a pocket-fortress?"

"We get along here in Little Ridings. Ponies, donkeys, cattle - big happy not-even-remotely-a-family. Not counting those bit-sucking cheats over in Charred Horton behind their big walls."

"So grief from the market-town at the crossroads next to the stockade. Why isn't it called Old Ditches?"

"Dang if I know. They've always been two different things in the opinion of the district."

"So - problems?" As we talked, the flight of chariots swung into view, circling in to land on the Road itself. The local was speechless with wonder at the sight of flying chariots, and the pegasi in their thestral helms. I had to clap my hooves at him until he remembered our conversation. Chestnut Shell went off to greet Mad Jack and discuss the results of the survey.

"There's been a revenant or two in the woodlots over by the Canteloupes' homestead. Haven't eaten anypony yet, but it's just a matter of time. Rumor has it there might be ghouls in the ruins of the old Rosier place, but I've been by there and nothing came out to chew on me or mine. Somepony's been by to loot it again, though."

"Nothing left to steal for yourself?"

"Nah, not a stick - hey! I'm a respectable member of the community!"

"Which means you have first dibs? Nevermind, I know salvage. Any Rosier survivors?"

"Family got wiped out, supposedly. Though I've heard there was a daughter visiting relatives, outside of the district."

"What happened to what killed them all?"

"Wandering band of ghouls. Some of these dead things - they wander. Shuffle into a district, over-run a household, kill everypony that don't run or hide behind strong walls, then just shuffle right out again. If they stayed put, we could pen them in and burn them out, or maybe they overwhelm us and we're all shuffling into eternity with the rest of the restless dead. But no, they come, they eat, they go. Nopony really knows why."

"Don't even leave a tip for the waitresses, the cheapskates."

"You… you know you ain't right, right?"

"So they tell me. Anything else."

"Well, there's the white ghost in the old Bollen place, and there's definitely a nest of ghouls in the westwood beyond it. Ponies say they've seen something large, bigger than a bird of prey, white, silent. Definitely not an owl. Are there flying undead? Or," he eyed the pegasi shaking off their traces and lining up at the well to slake their thirst, "white flying ponies?"

Our silent salvation hidden on the road to rebel-ruined riverland…

"You have my attention."

The White Shadow

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The stockade and blockhouse went up quickly on the foundations of the ruined farmstead. The footprint of a military outpost was vastly more expansive than that of an earth pony farming clan, of course, so Mad Jack had to work with the foundations rather than build on them, strictly speaking. But the charred beams and stone made a decent start. The usual palisade and ditch was thrown up in a long rectangle beside the drainage ditches of the Road, encompassing the planned blockhouse and the sweet-water well. It was half-way to a travelling castra by the time Jack had laid out his guidelines, but he was trained the way he had been trained, and had real difficulty shaking off the habits of a lifetime. Or doing anything small.

Further sections were displaced into the new forward base, and lent their hooves to getting the sketched-out palisade and blockhouse complex filled in. Tented temporary barracks and supply shacks grew inside the new perimeter.

By the third day, we were running ground patrols through the district out of the new base. Revenants were smoked out of woodlots, and ruined homesteads were carefully examined by cautious and careful doubled sections, half-sections of pegasi or griffins maintaining overwatch in the air overhead. The Rosier farmstead turned out to be empty, but for smashed furniture, old bloodstains, and piles of equine bones in the corners here and there. A pack of somethings had nested there for a while, but they were gone, whatever the story behind that had been.

The patrols collected more stories of the white ghost, the pale raptor, from other farming families in the district. The Bollen place was as empty as the Rosier ruins when our ponies went over it, but that nest of ghouls in its neighboring woodlot had been real enough, and not in the least subtle. They had apparently operated like a timberwolf pack in that neighborhood for the entire winter, sending out groups to pull down isolated ponies who wandered too far from their family walls, too far from other armed relatives, or not armed at all. Their victims had been dragged back to the nest, and we found an impressive cache of bones in that hole.

The Crow and Otonashi did the interviews on that operation, and took the information on the behavior of the ghoul-pack, and the white ghost that haunted their would-be victims. On at least a dozen occasions, farmer-ponies and their dependents had reported a terrible pale phantasm swooping over them in the darkness or twilight, screeching like a bird or a bat. In three cases, ponies insisted that something had dived at them, howling like a demon, driving them from their field-work or orchard-tending. The snarling and moaning of ghouls soon followed in every case, but the spooked ponies had already started moving, and in the testimony the warlocks had taken, the survivors had made it to walls and arms and safety just ahead of the ravening undead.

"So, the question is," I started, "Was our flyer directing a pack of undead, or warning its victims?"

Otonashi clapped out her reply, using hoof-language to observe that there had been no sign of living ponies inside or nearby the ghoul nest. If the flyer had been the director, it was either undead itself, or not living with the pack.

"We think we got the whole pack in the sweep," said the Crow, optimistically.

"Do you ever get the whole of an infestation of pests? These things are acting like living predators. Unless you can figure out how to make a judas-ghoul, we're going to have difficulty accomplishing total extermination."

The experiments on remotely detecting undead have been inconclusive, hoofed Otonashi.

I rolled my eyes. "Does inconclusive mean 'worthless', or just not there yet?"

Inconclusive means inconclusive, hoofed Otonashi. No more, no less.

"They seem to show differently according to patterns we've not been able to figure out yet. One day, our trotters flare in the scans like Roamish candles. The next, you'll be lucky to find them with the scans if they're right in front of you getting ready to chew on your snoot," said the Crow.

Gibblets and the apprentices are still working the labyrinth, hoofed Otonashi. Don't like foals being so close to pony-eaters.

"We can't be both in the field here and back there helping with the detection-experiments. At least Gibblets has Shorthorn to kibbitz and kevetch and gas on about how he'd be all over this if he hadn't burned out his little stub of a horn," sniffed the Crow.

Pinfeather and Longtang dropped down onto our little conference from overhead, in a farmlane outside of the westwood that had harbored the ghoul nest. Their approach had been obscured by the clouds of black smoke billowing out of the woods from the pyres the sections were using to dispose of the ghoul-remains. The two pegasi had reports - a white or off-white pegasus had been spotted circling the perimeter while we had been talking - and had spooked when half the flight took into the air and pursued it. They were currently chasing the maybe-pony, it was running eastwards away from our position.

"Not running fast, though. And it looked kinda scrawny to me, half-grown maybe?" said Pinfeather.

"Which way eastwards?" She pointed off to the right and ahead down the lane. Those of us ground-bound by nature galloped hard in that direction, and the pegasi followed us over head, then guiding forward as they quickly lapped us. I waved up individual 'pounders as we passed through our perimeter, and they fell into position ahead and behind me and the warlocks as we tried to catch up to the ghost-hunt.

Eventually the circling Company pegasi came into view overhead, above the scraggly trees of an abandoned orchard on the edge of the Rosier place. One would dip down out of the caracole now and again, dropping out of sight. I stopped at the edge of the orchard, and directed the 'pounders to spread out and establish a new perimeter around whatever the pegasi had run to ground. The two witches kept to my back, and we waited, eyeing the approaches.

The shadows were dark and deep under those short apple trees, their once-carefully pruned limbs grown wild and intertwined in the years since the the Rosiers' Apple-clan orchard-tender had left in a huff. I'd heard all sorts of gossip about the Rosiers, they had had a reputation among their neighbors as being kind of witchy, even before the fall of the city of the caribous. They had grown rich off of their famously delicious roses, whose tangled bushes could be seen closer to the ruined homestead. This orchard had been a side-project, tended by a hired hand who specialized in apples. As I've said before, Apples are everywhere, even here. Except there weren't Apples here anymore, supposedly something had fallen out between the help and the family. And now there weren't any Rosiers either.

There was a flash of white in the shadowed darkness to my right. When I looked, it was gone, but I edged forward straining my vision in the mixture of sunlight and darkened shadow, which was making hash of my attempt to use dark-sight. The Crow yelped behind me, and I spun about. The two witches were looking behind us at a clump of rose-bushes with deep shadows underneath, and a little half-grown pony was running out from under those bushes. Running as hard as her little legs could take her, away from us, from a place she couldn't have been, that I had personally checked as we passed.

Her wings half-extended as she got ready to catch some air. Otonashi reached out with her field, and caught the little pegasus by her tail, slamming her into the leaf-mould. There was a high, reedy squealing as the little pony tried to kick her way out of the witch's telekinetic grip, and the Crow's field joined Otonashi in pinning down the white-and-grey beastie, tying her up in magic.

The squealing shook out into words, and they sounded sort of like, "Non non non pas d'aide de maman, ils me ont les démons me ont obtenu!" The little green-eyed white thestral wept in terror, her grey bat-wings caught painfully half-extended in the grip of the warlocks, her long tufted ears trembling. "Ah, maman, maman!"

la Pouliche sous les Rosiers

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The thestral foal didn’t have a word of Equuish. She babbled as if she hadn’t talked to another soul in months or years. She talked to herself as if she didn’t think we heard her, as if we were just shambling lumps of flesh, yet more undead who hadn’t yet begun to feed. Had she seen similar scenes? Were we really that close to a pack of ghouls from her perspective? And what kept the ghouls from eating the chatty filly after she drew their attention by babbling like that?

“Tais-toi, enfant. Tu n’est pas sur le point d’obtenir mange,” I told her, tired of the accusations of cannibalism. “Nos garde-manger sont pas si vide.” Nor was I thrilled with the insults against the condition of our pantries. The Company wasn't that pressed for rations!

She squeaked, wider-eyed. I reached into my saddlebags, and looked around for something to tie her up with. The witches couldn’t keep up that magic binding too much longer. I only had some wraps I used for tourniquets. I sighed at it, looked at her wings, and scrawny legs, and debated whether I was about to hurt her.

“Si je ai tu laisser aller, tu promettre de ne pas courir? If we let you go, will you disappear again? No? How about… Comment tu t'appelles? Le nom?” Nothing.

I gave up, and wrapped my tourniquet-rope around her barrel, binding her wings with a firm but not tight knot. Then her fore-arms. Given time, she’d get both off with her teeth, but that’d slow her down some.

“OK, girls, you can let her up, that ought to slow her down.” I looked up at them. “Where the tartarus did she come from?”

“Do you mean in an existential sense, a familial sense, or are you asking how she got under that bush? Because I don’t know any of those. Why’s she so damn scared of us?” asked the Crow.

“Well, you two probably because of the horns growing out of your skulls. And the pegasi are wearing their war-paint today, that can’t be easy for a little filly to be chased by long-fanged glowy-eyed beasts of the air.”

Sawbones, hoofed Otonashi - she is a long-fanged glowy-eyed beast of the air.

"How often do you think she looks in the mirror out here? Tartarus, she stinks like a midden, how often do you think she sees open water?"

I lifted her onto my back, and balanced her between my saddlebags, her teeth safely away from my crest. "Bébé, s'il tu plaît ne pas mordre, nous allons faire une promenade." As I promised, I started walking back towards the lane away from the ruined homestead.

When she saw we were leaving, she started writhing, wailing, "Non, non! Je vous en prie, ne me prenez pas loin de la ferme! J'ai promis que je ne serais pas trouvé!"

That was too much for me, hoofed Otonashi. What did she just say?

"She doesn't want to be taken away. Something about a promise. Pouliche, qui avez-tu été des choses prometteuses? Qui a votre parole?" Who had she given her word to? I thought I was starting to understand, but I needed her to explain. It would equinify us in her eyes, I hoped. "Ta mère?"

"Oui, oui les os de ma mère." To the bones of her mother.

"Où sont-elles? Montre moi." Show me.

She rubbed her head against my flank, indicating the direction to turn. I pivoted around, and followed her awkward directions, to a disturbed bit of earth with a pile of rocks mounded over it, half-hidden beneath a rose bush a hundred paces from the farm-lane.

"Qui était votre mère?" Who was your mother?

"Le nom de ma mère était 'Automne Rose'." I was willing to bet that Automne Rose was either the matriarch of the Rosier clan, or a child. Had we found the surviving daughter?

"OK, I'm calling bullapples! The Rosiers were a donkey clan, stem to stern," objected the Crow, brushing her long ears to illustrate. "All their surviving neighbors insist as much, and even if they kept a crossbreed in the garçoniere and out of everypony's sight, it wouldn't have resulted in somepony like her. Tartarusfire, only reason I look like I do is that mon père brought me home after his mistress kacked it in Crossroads. If he had brought her here to have me, I'd be just another jenny."

"Do you think she just grew under a mushroom cap? She says her maman's a Rosier, she's a Rosier." I looked around at the ruins and the rose-bushes growing wild out of their hedgerows. "Theoretically she's the heir to this dump. We could hoof her over to the Beans clan, they'd probably jump at the chance to take on a ward. Except..."

Everypony looked at her bound, leathery bat-wings, and her eyes, slit-pupiled like a natural-born thestral.

"First one we've come across in two generations, by my count." I cleared my throat, and addressed the little Prench orphan.

"Ma douleur pour votre perte, ma chérie, mais il n'y a pas-poney ici pour prendre soin de vous. Nous pensons qu'il est un signe. Nous étions censés vous trouver." I was sorry for her losses, but she couldn't live here by herself. It was obvious that we were supposed to find her.

"Vous avez été aidez poneys échapper aux goules, les chasser, à la maison pour leurs murs? Voilà une bonne pouliche, c'est le signe d'un bon cœur." If she's been helping ponies, driving them away before the ghouls ate them, chasing the foolish back to their own gates, that was a very good sign. A good heart.

"Venez avec nous si tu voulez vivre. Venez si tu voulez être un poney à nouveau." Come with us, and live like a pony again.

"Ne dites pas de bêtises! Roses étaient jamais poneys, nous avons toujours été des ânes."

The Crow broke out laughing at the two of us, as I turned away from the little cairn and headed out for the farmlane again. "Sawbones, you've found your mirror-image. You think everybody's a pony, and you've found a pegasus that believes she's a donkey!"

The pegasi circled above us the whole way back to the blockhouse, fascinated by the little thestral laying bound on my back between my saddlebags. They swooped down in ones and pairs, asking her questions she couldn't understand in a language she didn't speak.

She must have had a name, but she didn't want to give it to us. I had called her Cherie, once, and afterwards she answered to it. She was cheerfully chatting with the Crow in the local dialect of Prench by the time we got back to the blockhouse I untied her once we were inside the palisade; I suppose I could have let her loose back at the grave-site, but I had wanted to get her well away from that ruin before I set her loose. Wanted to discourage her from disappearing as soon as I let her loose. She stumbled about, her limbs asleep from being bound for so long.

Then she started trotting about, exploring the place like a cat tossed into an unfamiliar apartment. She stuck her nose in every open door, got under every hoof she could find. I conferred with the warlocks, trusting in the half-dozen pegasi hovering overhead to keep her from flying off.

"How old do you think she is?" I asked.

"Damn, don't ask me to estimate pegasus ages," said the Crow. "She can fly pretty damned well, that's a sign she's not a yearling or anything like that. You know the ponies from the aerial cohort will jump to take her in, right? They've got to know how to raise a pegasus. But seriously, how the tartarus did she learn how to fly if she was being raised by gentle-donkey farmers?"

"I don't know, how do pegasi learn to fly when they're being raised by other pegasi? I thought it was instinctual?"

There's instinct, and then there's the stuff you have to learn, hoofed Otonashi. I think the flying might be instinctual, but don't quote me on that. It doesn't generally come up that much, you know?

I looked up, and suddenly Cherie was walking out of a tent I knew I hadn't seen her walk into. I looked back to the mess-tent I had last seen her in, and an earth-pony stuck his head out, a ladle in his mouth.

"Hey!" he shouted at us. "Did you see a little pegasus come out of here? She came in and ducked under a table, and now I can't find her!"

"Now what's that about," I wondered.

Aren't there old stories about bat-pony shadow-walkers? hoofed Otonashi.

"A few, here and there in the Annals. I always took it to be flowery ninja-talk, illusionism and confidence games."

Gibblets will have a kitten, Otonashi smugly hoofed.

Managing Expectations, or, Getting Ahead Of The Avalanche

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"Do i look like a reformatory schoolmarm to you, Sawbones?" asked the Captain as we met in front of the gates of Charred Horton, and she left the van of the convoy running supplies down to the blockhouse from our digs in the Menomonie castra. Heavy wagons groaned on past between their armed guards. Mad Jack's new reinforced wagons traded off protection for weight and carrying capacity. The Company's legs had been shortened by the heavier equipage, but then, we weren't planning any more flying-columns, not in this campaign season, at any rate.

'Cherie' was flitting about overhead, with three pegasi and a griffin flying a lazy box around her. I thought she was warming to the other pegasi, but I hadn't had a chance to observe what she had made of our cat-bird brethren. Overall, she was being remarkably cheerful for a pony who had spent months or years in total isolation from equine contact. If the mood-swings continued I would have to get worried, but for now, I was willing to write it off as youthful resilience. It was probably for the best that she was spending time with the Equuish-speaking pegasi, though. We needed her speaking Equuish sooner rather than later. At least Feufollet had understood some Equuish, she just didn't speak it when she fell into out collective laps.

"In the midst of death is life, Captain. Do you have any idea how rare pegasi are on Tambelon? The Crow tells me they don't breed true here. Everyone just has earth ponies when they're foaling."

"We're on a clearance mission, mèdicu, not recruiting new apprentices. You know, recruiting suppliers, negotiating passage, killing dead things, finding the enemy if he's anywhere about. How does bringing home yet another orphan for the Spirit to drool over factor into that? I don't care if she's some sort of miracle bird-pony, she's not my problem!"

"The Company was founded by thestrals, Captain. Think of her like a mascot, she'll do wonders for morale, I guarantee it. The pegasi are all over her as it is. We'll have to find her a knight to squire for, what do you think of Tickle Me or Long Haul?"

"I think I don't need you and your obsessions distracting my first cohort commander. Talk to Long Haul if you must. Don't we have something scheduled here?" She looked up at the barred gate, and the suspicious eyes peering down from the squat tower next to it.

"Y'all best get your boss down here to talk to us, bar-gate! I have hundreds of cranky mercenaries behind me, and I don't have much patience for useless merchants quivering behind thin walls. They might suffice to keep out the galloping dead, and they might not, but they won't keep out the Company if we get any crankier than we already are. Make a cloud of dust, arrusu!" The eyes disappeared from their viewing-slot, and you could hear the drumming of shoes down a ladder inside the wall.

Other ponies might find the Captain intimidating in her preposterous pickelhaube chaffron and black-chased heavy barding, but I always saw the tuffs of purple fur sticking out around the edges and had to resist the urge to snicker. I suppose I was designated to be her eternal hoofmare, or at least, for the duration of this campaign. The new Lieutenant had taken over the Captain's old role as commander of the van, the pony who led the charge and from the front. The Captain was now demoted to "pony with impressive hat" who did all the threatening and negotiating. The old Captain was able to pull off the role through his superior height and impressive white crest of feathers. The new Captain had to rely on stage-barding to project authority. Admittedly, she had been a terror on the battlefield, but that didn't really translate to personal presence.

A pair of donkey heads poked out over the ramparts, their ears poking up through their impractical kettle-helmets. It was very clear they weren't soldiers, or even municipal guards.

"I swear to the Peacock Angel, if either of you starts talking about elderberries or what my mother smelled like, I'm going to burn your town down around your ears!" yelled the Captain. I don't think they got the joke, but their long ears bent down over their polished helmets submissively.

"Milady, we mean no disrespect to your august person, but you have to understand, we owe it to our citizens to preserve them against all threats. We've never heard of you or yours, and we just want to be left alone!" sniveled the older of the two.

"What, you've not heard of the reivers of Rennet, the Black Company? Did you not notice that cavalcade of defeated caribou that streamed past your gates last winter? I made that happen, I drove them from their castles and homes, I butchered them wholesale! We are the blade of the Bride, the scourge of the Rebel! I've come to trim your hedges and weed out the rambler Rose!"

I leaned over and muttered into her ears half-hidden by her silly helm.

"Oh, and while we're at it, we're cleaning up your undead problem. Something I've noted seems to have slipped your notice in the course of your city's duties as the first fortress of this district! I'm told that the surrounding farming communities have been left to their own devices 'gainst the ghoul menace! How do you plan to feed your huddled citizens when all the surrounding farms are ghoul-infested wilderness, and your trade-routes too hazardous to travel? Get those damnable gates open and talk to my people! I don't aim to leave a feckless void in our wake when we move on!"

The gates opened, of course. And the negotiations that followed hardly featured any violence at all. Though we did end up putting a new mayor in charge; the last one just couldn't stop cringing.

The Captain continued south to inspect the progress of the forward base forming around the Beans blockhouse. Cherie, I, and our pegasi honor-guard continued northwards to Menomenie, the castra, and our temporary home. I had spent the entire trip from Burnt Horton thinking about what I was going to tell Gibblets, the foals, and most importantly, the Spirit. I had avoided deep sleep the night before, and thus barely dreamed. But I had a more-than-half-mad haunt to placate, and a cute little reminder of the treasured bad old days for her to lose her ectoplasmic mind over. She might adopt the child on the spot, she might try to eat her soul, and worse, I strongly feared she might try to do both at the same time. The Spirit was the dream-world's very Bold Chasseur, of whom satirical legend told was always ready to charge off in every direction at once. The problem there being that one of those directions featured the spectral equivalent of the cannibalism I had promised was not an option with the Company.

I had hopes that the little thestral was our insurance against that alarmingly prominent possibility. She smelled like Company to me. But they say I'm biased, so, well.

I had to bring it before Gibblets and Shorthorn at the least. And Tickle Me as well, though the Captain was insisting on my not distracting her cohort commanders. The pegasi had an interest in this, in little 'Cherie'. There were reasons beyond simple terrorism and pageantry that they preserved and maintained the spelled thestral helms. There was a sense that they had lost something to the friction of time and world. This was not what we were supposed to be.

As I trotted up the metalled Road, the pegasi flitted back and forth overhead, anchored to my position by their nominal duty to keep me from being eaten by a random revenant or, I don't know, starveling hedgehog. As we approached the castra, the various aerial patrols seemed to converge on our path, and when Cherie settled onto her spot on my back between my saddlebags, tired and sleepy, the pegasi dipped lower and lower, until I trailed a veritable thunder-head of thestral-helmed pegasi, armed and giddy with fatigue and wonder. In the end, I ended up sweeping the entire patrol-shift behind me, and when the guards opened the gates for me and my snoozing burden, the bird-ponies swarmed over the gate like a cheery invasion-force. It was anything but subtle.

So I grabbed a random non-com to go alert Gibblets, and another to gather the foals, and made for the mess-hall we were using to store the war-lance and our standard. If we must be mad, we would be mad according to tradition and by ceremonial propriety.

Coming in from the gathering twilight outside, the warm lamps of the mess-hall and those ponies enjoying their collective commissary dinner made a sort of homely glow, like a Miklagard mead-hall roaring with the happy violence of thanes and kerns enjoying their lords' open-hoofed generosity. The hub-bub awoke my pegasus princess, and she looked around at the aimless tumult as attention and order spread like a wave of wonder in the crowd.

"Monseiur Sawbones, Où sommes-nous actuellement? Quel est cet endroit?" Where had I taken her now?

"Mon Chérie, c'est à la maison. Je tu ai apporté à la Company. Cherie, this is the Company. This is home. Pas l'endroit, mais les poneys. Not the place, but the ponies." I spoke louder with the Equuish explanation, projecting to the crowd, but the Prench was just for her ears.

"I've brought you here to be presented to my brothers, the ponies of the Black Company - Je tu ai amené ici pour être présenté à mes frères, les poneys de la Black Company. Tu avez vu comment les autres pegasi ont pris pour tu. Tu êtes quelque chose de spécial pour nous, à Company en particulier. I've also brought you here to be presented to the Spirit which is our patron. Et d'être montré à l'Esprit qui est notre patron. Elle peut être effrayant. Ne pas montrer la peur, elle recèle quelque chose d'amour en elle, mais votre peur peut garder que de venir en avant, et elle peut être dangereuse."

I did not advertise my further warnings to the entire assembly; the donkeys in the crowd might hear my muttered Prench, but I was willing to take that chance. I was managing multiple expectations and anxieties in this little performance, and my lack of sleep was leaving me little margin for error. Gibblets and most of the foals appeared at the rear of the mess-hall, along with Tickle Me and a couple of the senior non-coms. And the Lieutenant, wonderful. She had even less of a sense of humor than the last Lieutenant.

I turned to the impromptu assembly, slanted so that they could see the filly on my back, and she could look them in the eyes, slit-pupiled stare to myriad pony eyes. Although a few were already taking their thestral aspect as I spoke, and more joined in as the understanding swept the crowd. The pikestaff was behind me.

"From the second volume of the Book of Fatinah: In those days, we were in the service of al-Telekker and our own vengeance. The Company when it came out of the wastelands was a broken wing, a flock of beaten pegasi and thestrals, a rabble. When they landed in Fatinah's village, they were a beaten drum, a torn banner on a long black war-lance, and not much else. Fatinah seized that war-lance, and it seized her. She turned to the beaten ponies, and reminded them of what they were, of what they were then, and what they would be again. She called forth her family, and succored the wounded, rallied the broken, and found one particular thestral. She clouted him across the poll with the war-banner's pikestaff, and told that pony he was the new Captain. Then she sat down, and started to write. This was the second founding of the Black Company. Pardon." I turned to the little Prench-speaking thestral on my back, and gave her the absolutely barest-bones summary I could think to formulate, in a loud whisper: "Avant que l'entreprise était présent, il était un warband des poneys comme tu, thestrals. Savez-vous ce qu'est un thestrals est? Tu vas apprendre. Ils ont été battus, mais un cheval leur ont appris à être eux-mêmes, et la Company ont continué, en se rappelant le meilleur de lui-même. Vous êtes ce souvenir dans la chair." More loudly, "As I told our new friend, she is the living remembrance of that which Fatinah reminded her first Captain, Jugular Grip, the best of what the Company could be, that it was its past as well as its present, and that the future must honor the best of the past remembered."

"After generations, a thestral has returned to us. Please join me in welcoming the past to our present, for the sake of our future." I turned to her, and lifted her off my back, onto her own four hooves.

"Nous avons besoin de vous, et vous besoin de quelqu'un. Poneys ne sont pas élevés pour vivre seul. Vivez avec nous, ma chérie." I did not translate this for the assembly, That was strictly between us. But the next was public :

"Can you swear to the Company, to live with your brothers, to die with your sisters, and to remember our dead as we will remember you when you pass from this vale of sorrows? Pouvez-vous jurer à la Company, à vivre avec vos frères, pour mourir avec vos sœurs, et de se souvenir de nos morts que nous vous rappeler quand vous passez de cette vallée de douleurs?"

She looked up at me with those big green slit-pupiled eyes, so familiar, so unsettling-thrilling in the face of a little white-coated foal. She simply said 'oui'.

Then she turned to the pike-staff, and put up a hoof to the shaft, and without prompting, leaned over to kiss the lance.

And the world went away.

The River Of The Starry Sky

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The world was gone, and darkness was in its place. Darkness unbroken by light, elemental, essential, eternal.

And then a spark. Small, far, far away. And in the opposite direction, another. More and more winked into life, or rather, their light reached me where I floated. And in their light, clouds moving, swirling. Now some of them lit from within with their own light, reddish glows peeking out between arms of dust and ice, moving, swirling.

More and more of the clouds were visible in the riot of light erupting across the firmament, near me, far away, and right beside me, a cloud, spinning tighter and tighter, growing more solid as more of the light reached us.

"Acolyte! There you are, my acolyte!" rang out between the walls of eternity, and the distant lights, and the glowing clouds in between. A helm appeared among the lights, confusing my sense of distance and nearness, and a face pulled itself out of the helm, and then a body behind it, like some impossible contortionist pulling herself out of a hole in reality. The Spirit, in her Nightmare aspect, had found me in this place of darkness, clouds, and winking lights.

"You've been a bad, bad colt, hiding things from your Mistress." She swirled towards I and my companion-cloud, still growing tighter and spinning more and more rapidly. The Spirit perched upon a wisp of star-light, grinning down at the spiral cloud. "Wonderful, awful things. Bonjour, pouliche."

The spiral formed into a spectral foal, a black cloud-filly, tendrils of smoke curling out and forming darker bat-wings, the blackness fading quickly to a smoky white, a blue gemlike fire somewhere inside the barrel, beating. Thump, thump, thump, thump…

Another spectre pulled herself out of the clouded star-field to my right, and blue and pale white formed her outline against the heavens below and above. Blue feathered wings embraced the cloud-filly, and her sweet voice half-sang, "Oh, my darling children, war-like, savage, brilliant. Night-touched pegasi, lunar pegasi, nocturnes, bat-ponies - so many names, and yet you would be addressed as thestrals, that dread, horrid word nopony knew the origins thereof, that tartarus-spawned abomination of a name, and yet, this was what you called yourselves. You were perversely proud of your reputation, the horror and the terror that followed in the train of your name, pronounced. ‘Reputation wins wars arms could never conquer', said my favorite, that old blood-wing Sharp Talons. I led you into damnation when mine pride fell, and us with it."

The Spirit glared at herself, across the blue-lit filly-cloud, wing against wing, horn against horn.

"When I became this, you fell with me. Mine own corruption spoke to yon thestrals in ways I can only regret, when the wind is in its southerly quarters . Ask thou the wind North-North-West whether she regrets."

"Coward!" Nightmare-she screamed in her other face, raging. "You left me to carry your burdens, and in the end, you were nothing but burdens! When the seas turned red under our oars, and the blood stained the moon, it was I who carried the weight! The battles we fought in the down-chain to spare her precious sugar-bowl paradise! The cities we burned, the worlds we reaped to keep the gore from her shores!"

"And it was thee who didst lead our armies home, and dipped thou the towers of the innocent in the clotting blood of the righteous, and pulled at the shaky pillars of heaven! Of course our sister had to strike us down. We wouldst have struck us down, once upon a time. Thus always for the enemies of Equestria!"

"And the moon's curse taking our children from us, never forget that." The Nightmare looked down at the pony-cloud, glowing, more pony than cloud. Around us the clouds had likewise condensed around burning star-stuff, the living and the dead, in our common star-field, glowing, bringing the primeval Night to a glorious riot, a festival of light.

Away from us, flowing, a river of those star-lights, down-hill towards some distant sea I could not see beyond the clouds and scatter-glow. Somewhere safe to sea…

"Mistress, Lady, I cannot apologize for the sorrows of the past, or the actions of ponies long lost, long dead, or off in utopias somewhere I wot not. I can only apologize for my own actions, my own thoughts, my hesitations and perplexities. And I brought her before you, as soon as I had her, as soon as I knew she was. Please, be good to her. She is hope, she is our hope. I can only hope that she is, at least in some small measure, your hope.

"You know you are not well. The Company has been grinding away in ignorance for decades, centuries, almost a millennia. When you touched us, touched our heart, it nearly washed you away. We are a live wire, a steel stake thrust into the heart of a lightning-storm. Our touch kills. We need to be grounded, lest we kill what we would love."

"And you think this small filly could ground out what would flash ourselves into a world-killing horror like the Chain has never seen? You damnable optimist, the ambition of your optimism knows no limits!" The two-aspected Spirit began to converge over the sleeping nebular filly, the two mad aspects merging into one great towering spectral alicorn, her mane and tail taking us all into her train.

"Very well, just so, you have your lead. Show us where you would lead us, show us what you would make of this license. We give her our blessing, and our distance. She will grow untouched by our wings, she will find her salvation or her damnation as a daughter of the regiment. Ha!" laughed the Nightmare, barely any blue feathers in her great wings, almost entirely leathery black with the occasional touch of dragon-scale. "Once that was an insult, an accusation of bastardy. Would ponies even recall the evil intention in the name, or the insinuations of rapine and lawlessness? Oh, we no longer know these things. We have slept too long. We will be cast adrift in an Equestria we no longer know when we break free and rend our sister for this long obscenity."

She bent down and kissed the brightly glowing filly on her long, tufted ear, delicately, barely touching the child she had promised to leave be. And with that, the star-field was gone.

And the world returned.

With the world came Cherie, and the rest of the Company. I gathered her up, as she awoke from her trance, and looked her over, checking for hurts or signs of trauma. "Non, non, je vais bien."

"Avez-vous entendu de tout cela?" What did you hear just now?

"Entendu parler de quoi?" What do you mean?

"Nevermind. Nous aurons besoin que tu, tu nommez, tel est le nom que tu garderez dans l'Company. You must name yourself, the name you will be known in the Company." She nodded.

"Je suis Cherie."

I prompted her, "My name is…"

"Mah nahme is - Cherie."

"Welcome to the Company, Cherie. Nos règles stipulent que tu devez avoir un maître, un chevalier, pour que tu soyez apprenti avec. Je vais demander à l'autre pegasi, est-ce correct? You will need to take a knight, as he or she will take you as military-apprentice. Can you do this?" She nodded.

I turned to the Company, and looked over the pegasi in the room, many looking a bit exhausted or hung-over. Whatever had taken them earlier in the day, hit like apple brandy. Several of them brushed forward Tickle Me to volunteer her.

"Tickle Me, the Captain will be all over our shit if you take up her apprenticeship. She expressly forbade it when we talked down outside Charred Horton. Can we get somepony else?" Long Haul wasn't there, I think he was running the deep penetration patrols that night. The rest of them eventually nominated a mare named Throat Kicker. Supposedly she was from an old thestral family. I said the words over the two of them, and informed Throat Kicker that she was now the proud owner of an apprenticeship contract with a pony that didn't speak Equuish. I waded through the crowd, and found the foals.

"Feufollet, your new sister has maybe four words of Equuish. Please, show her some sisterhood and get her up to speed if you would. The lot of you, be good to her. She's been alone for months, maybe years. She looks good now, but can't be in good shape. And see if you can't get her a bath, she stinks."

You Can't Leave The Planning To The Officers

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Everypony took turns castigating my high-hoofedness. The officers for my disruptive behavior, the pegasi for putting them on the spot like that, even some of the donkeys for pitching Cherie to a pony with whom she shared no common language. And Gibblets…

Well, Gibblets was just generally pissed. We hadn't come to any agreement on the subject of the prophesy of the Pythian oracle. In fact, we had at some point exchanged positions on the subject of its accuracy and purpose. I had found myself defending the prophesy, and the good will of the prophet who made it. It might be because I was the one who kept the prophesy, who remembered it. Gibblets only had my memory to work with. When you are the keeper of a secret, its guardian and archivist, you find yourself with a vested interest in its truth, its accuracy, and, in short, its worth. Who wants to find themselves the protector of frauds and falsehoods?

There was another point of contention. He had a long, indeed ancient history with the Spirit, or, at least, the pony which had birthed the Spirit. We were not at all certain of the Spirit's exact relation to that long-banished alicorn. Gibblets insisted that his mistress had been banished, physically and essentially, to the moon of Equestria, and that supposedly her mark was still upon that celestial object, a veritable "Mare in the Moon", to this day. I don't know how he could argue "to this day", since by his own testimony he hasn't been back to Equestria since the banishment, but I was willing to grant him this fact in evidence. The point remained, she was not visiting his dreams, nor had he clapped eyes on her ectoplasm since the first apprenticeship ceremony. I had related to him the dreams into which she had walked since then - and there had been over a dozen - and in detail. But in the end, it was mere testimony, second-hoof at best.

I was his dealer for Princess, and that was a strain.

I calmed him down by describing the new dreamscape, and our conversation about the thestrals. Rye Daughter returned from her self-defense class that the Dodger's knight was giving for the foals. Charleyhorse's close call and loss of his own knight had scared all of us. There was little we could do to properly arm our would-be squires - they would grow out of any barding or hoofblades we sized for them, and they didn't have the body weight to put behind lances or other serious weapons. All they could do was get each of them a decent pair of strap-daggers and train them how to cut hamstrings and run for it.

We went on my long-overdue ward rounds in the castra hospital, checking on the healing wounds of those caught out or overrun in the caribou's undead trap. Gibblets was still fuming about the Spirit's idiosyncratic version of history.

"I can't believe that's how she remembers it. Yes, she was Equestria's field marshal for generations, but it wasn't constant warfare! Maybe three serious wars in the sub-worlds in fifty years. And yes, Holstein got pretty burnt out, but none of those wars were started by Equestria. The fortress-cities were vital to the security of the Equestrian portals. The Arimaspi pushed us hard, one commando even got through on a subsidiary portal once, if I recall correctly. And the night-haunts in Fallscarp, they had to be burnt out root and branch. No, not undead, not strictly if I recall correctly. More dark-magic, vampiric of a sort. That was after my time, I will grant you… Nopony could do anything about Flutter Valley in the end, other than declare the world Tartarus, and implode the portals up and down that section of the Chain, cut off an entire tributary of a dozen worlds. Two-three hundred years later, they found portals around the broken link... It would have been worse if the Smooze had been truly sentient. I had been working with the refugees of Flutter Valley at the time of the rebellion. Luna and the legions came back from the Fallscarp campaign to help put down the Sombra Domination in the Crystal Empire, and then you know the rest - rebellion, with her ponies on the wrong side of the portals from Celestia's point of view."

I finished up the general ward, with Rye doing the carrying and fetching. We went into the witches' private room, and I got out the potion materials to dose Shorthorn again. Some of the work I had done in vain for the late Gilbert's case had become of use in treating horn-burn. One or two more treatments and he might be fit for something other than back-seat hexing.

"What I'm saying is that her life wasn't all that horrible. Equestria wasn't a world-conquering tyranny. We only got pulled into defensive wars to aid allies and put down threats to the upper Chain. Nothing worse than anything the modern Company has been involved in, and a great deal better-intentioned than some things we've done."

"Gibblets, we're currently fighting for deathless liches, their eternal tyranny, and maintaining the dominance of donkey aristocracy over lesser tribes. Our standards for harrowing might be skewed," I observed, and turned to my next patient.

"Lady Languid, how are you feeling this fine morning - no, I must correct myself, it's now afternoon. Let's check your temperature and your wrappings." Despite all the mould-squeezings I had run through her system, and the endless washings of her wounds with antiseptic rinses, she had still suffered a series of secondary infections. Never enough to kick off gangrene, but it had been a damn close run thing. When we evacuated the castra, I was seriously thinking about shipping her off to the convalescent home, and maybe sending Rye Daughter with her to oversee her treatment.

"What do you think about the proposal to send the foals to Hydromel for the balance of the campaign into Pepin, at least until we clear out the ruins on the river?" I asked Gibblets as I checked Languid's stitching and infection sites.

"It doesn't feel right. They're sworn to the Company, I fear that there might be esoteric rebound if we separated them for that long. The Spirit might relapse, for one, and start going through her foal-oriented cookbooks."

"Lady Languid, what do you think? We might send you off to mind the foals if we send them away."

"Are you joking, Sawbones? Look at me. I couldn't keep up with a dozen hyperactive foals. Nevermind housebound, I'll be stuck in bed for months at this rate. They'll be a street gang inside of a week if we left them to their own devices in some poor unsuspecting market town."

I granted her the point, and wiped down her wounds, which if they weren't healing, at least they weren't getting worse. Rye Daughter hoofed me the antiseptic and the clean bandages, and we wrapped things up.

We went out into the front office, which was actually separate from my surgery. I would miss this place when we moved on - there was a lot of space, properly laid out.

"Master, you shouldn't send us away. I learn more every day, I might even be useful one of dese days. Bad Apple and Foufollet are doing great, ja? Even the new ponies are looking happy and healthy. Ja, it sucks for Charleyhorse, but dey found a replace for Hoppin' John, he's not being neglect. And vill you send away the new girl? You just brought her. She's interestin'."

Gibblets and I looked at each other, nonplussed. Little pitchers didn't just have big ears, they had big guts too. I just worried about ghouls sniffing around after those guts.

"How's those lessons Stomper has been giving you, what's she training you to do?"

"Run first. Run second. Cut their hamstrings and run third. Run fourth. Die hard, fifth."

Gibblets raised an eyebrow. "Grim."

"Foals in the presence of a ghoul pack is grim. That there is practical, I'll give Stomper that. Charleyhorse had the luck of the Company, that's for sure. She's talking you through how to keep to the rear of any given formation, how to stick to adults, that sort of thing?"

"Ja, Master."

"Good pony." I patted her head, and sent her off to find the rest of the foals. It was time for some refreshers on reading and writing. If they were going to stay, the new Captain wanted to use the foals as runners. I wasn't sure I liked that, but maybe after they'd grown into their legs a bit more…

"The first blockhouse is complete," I observed, "We passed one of the convoys on the way up. We may want to put one more up further down the Road, before we need to worry about a full-scale fortification outside of the ruins. That gives us, and you, time. How are the trials going?" I leaned back in the nice, comfy chair the last doctor in this office had left me. It was a much nicer hand-me-down than the packs of ravening undead that had come in the package.

"They come, they go, and nopony can figure the angles. It's something cyclical, we think, maybe."

"Lunar?"

"Even on this hellworld, the lunar cycle is too long to account for the differences. It's on a daily or semi-daily basis, not weekly or monthly."

"Tidal?"

"Huh. We've been so dryland this campaign, it didn't occur to me. Something for tonight's run of trials, certainly."

"We need every edge, every advantage we can wring out of this situation. The Riverlands are vast, and simply crawling with undead. Ghoul-hunting and community-policing could suck us down like quicksand, the entire Company could disappear into this bog without a bubble if we're not cautious. Even running a line of forts down the Road will stretch us further than I like."

"At least we've firmly confirmed it," Gibblet said, looking towards the apprentices chattering nearby. "Company hooves are undead-bane. They die like mortals if we're behind the blade or the dart, and they still fight like dead things - no science. And none of our ponies' bites have festered."

"Lady Languid's kind of the counter-argument to that."

"She damn near got gutted. That'll knock over a manticore, let alone a little thing like her. You're doing fine with her, and it isn't that it was a ghoul-caribou that gutted her, it was that she was gutted. Point is that we have angles against the ghouls and the revenants and the rest of them."

"A lot of our usual scams won't work on the undead. They generally don't have enough brains to fall for cons. You can't lead the mindless to outthink themselves. You can't get up the skeer on things without any sense of self-preservation."

"They also don't know enough to not just wade into obvious animal-traps, dirt-stupid stuff. They're dumber than dumb animals."

"I don't know, I've been hearing odd stories about ghouls running in packs like animals. Not intelligent, but animal cunning. The ones we were burning out when we found Cherie had apparently figured out how to drag living prey back home to their nest, and fed on them there. I honestly think they figured out how not to spoil their food by letting it go ripe too long and rising themselves as more maws to feed."

"Just by statistical probability, some of the undead wandering around out there in the wild have to be ten-fifteen years old. I don't think we ever see undead that old out in worlds with less of death to them. Creator alone knows how lesser undead develop if they're left to run wild that long. Maybe that's how you get liches?"

"Not from the stories I've read. But they are just stories, I will grant you. The Spirit remembered Grogar and the Domination, but it was all third-hoof or worse."

Gibblets grunted, and I acknowledged that we had stumbled into the portion of the conversation where we just told each other things we already knew. We broke off for our individual work not long after.

Much to do, before we could pull out of Menomenie and push down the Road into the Riverlands.

The Labyrinth

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I found Shorthorn sitting in a watchtower on the castra wall, looking over the labyrinth they had built out of the ghoul-wrecked mess that used to be the southwestern quadrant of the camp. He had a set of physical spyglasses to hoof, and was watching something going on below through one of them, the glass held in the curve of one leg. At least he wasn't straining his horn with random levitation this time.

"Come on, come on, take the bait this time… ha! There we go! Watch them scurry."

I looked over the edge, and tried to spot what he was looking at. There was some movement between the walls below, but the afternoon shadows made it difficult to pick out what was going where against the glare of the green wooden walls in the bright sunlight. But I certainly could hear the sudden squealing as something caught something else - sounded like a stuck pig.

Sounded a lot like a dying pig, actually.

"What the tartarus are you maniacs doing? What is it, ghoul feeding time? Tell me that's not something sentient getting ate down there."

He looked up, and jerked backwards in shock at my having appeared in his blind spot. "Sawbones, don't sneak up on a warlock like that. You're lucky I didn't incinerate you!"

"As if you could set me on fire even when you weren't horn-burnt. You're making me miss Languid already!" I'd just gotten back from shipping Lady Languid off to the convalescent home we had set up in Hydromel. I had hired a local surgeon to keep herd on Languid and the rest of the convalescents, and provided her with a supply of antibiotics and instructions on how to harvest more from the right sort of mould. I could only hope that the surgeon didn't muck that up; I had suggested that she partner up with an apothecary, but you know how ponies can be about trade secrets and working outside of the guild.

"Again, what is fresh Tartarus is this?"

"We're playing 'who can hide ponies from ghouls; who can lure ghouls after things that ain't ponies' with the foals."

"You're WHAT?" I thought seriously about tossing the lunatic off that tower into the labyrinth to be eaten by his own pets.

"Calm your mellow, Sawbones. See that box over there, in the middle of the race? We have a tunnel that goes in there, you can't get from the race inside of it, it's reinforced. We have Feufollet or Bad Apple operating in there, casting enhanced illusions. Bad Apple can't get the ghouls to notice her illusions - they might as well be hot air for her and them - but something about Feufollet's illusions take. If she wants them to act as if there's meat on the hoof, they go slavering after the bait ten times out of ten. If she wants them to ignore live flesh right in their faces, they don't even twitch. It's bloody wonderful, it is. We think it might be the blood; it interacts somehow with the death-magic that animates the ghouls. That scream you just heard was a pig we set loose in the race to feed the beasties. There's more swine running around down there with Feufollet's glamours on them. We're seeing how long she can maintain the hex in pony. Tomorrow? We're going to try it with charms instead."

"Huh. How is she glamouring them without being able to see her targets?"

"Otonashi's secret sauce. It's some sort of mental trick, abstract-like. Gibblets and I can't get the hang of it, but foals are flexible, the both of them just picked it up like playing jacks. Shame Bad Apple can't get the ghouls to recognize her illusions as glamours, though."

"You'll need to have it work with charms. I'll be damned if you're going to send a half-grown filly out with the snake-stompers to play magical ghillie suit among the pony-eaters."

"Preaching to the choir, pastor. We're making progress. Figuring out the daily cycles from the portal-penumbras straightened out our detection gliltches, thanks for your idea, by the way."

"So it wasn't tidal?"

"Nah, but the suggestion got us twisted around thinking on the right slant. Languid pointed out the overlapping pulses of portals operating against each other, and once we figured that out, I could calculate the probable cycle of the three signals causing the fades. We still don't know where the other two portals are, but I've got an idea what direction they're in, given where the portal to Crossroads is located."

I thought of the common theory that an out-world sovereign power was using the White Rose to destabilize the Bride's imperium. "Any chance one of them is in the direction of Traverses?"

"No, actually, one's to the northwest, a far distance away. Probably on the coast of the Outer Seas, or maybe on an island from the intensity. The third's due south, way south. Nothing nearby, really. We're still closest to the portal we came in on."

Unicorns and their capacity for nearly impossible feats of mental calculation never ceased to appall me. I could barely deal with quadratics, and that only with a pencil, time, and a lot of foolscap.

As I looked down, I spotted what I hadn't noticed earlier. There were three pegasi and a griffin crouched on half-ruined rooftops throughout the labyrinth like gargoyles, fully armed and as barded as aerial ponies could carry. They were still as the grave, but I could see them focused like raptors on the little reinforced box Shorthorn had pointed out. Feufollet was under constant supervision, and surrounded by her elders in the Company. Any ghoul who started trying to dig its way through the heavy planking around her priest-hole would get a gullet full of javelins before they could do more than raise a cloud of splinters.

"So you spooks can keep track of the shambling dead now? Spot concentrations, that sort of thing?"

"Pretty much. It's up to you when I'm cleared for field service, of course. I've been a good colt, resting my horn according to doctor's instructions," he said, waving his spy-glass around with his hoof. "As you can see, we've progressed to working on the 'edges' you told Gibblets we needed. Force-multipliers, the old Captain used to call them. "

"Blood-magery, is it? Shame we haven't recruited any adult practitioners. The Crow doesn't know anything about that?"

"Despite her ears, she's pretty much a unicorn magus. No sign of blood-magic, sad to say. And the Imperial Army reportedly snaps up every bloodmage that breaks cover. It's pretty much a magic draft. It was a matter of time before they found Feufollet and recruited her into the rebellion or the Imperial Army. In my opinion, that probably was why her parents were keeping her at home and away from the local schoolmarm. They were hiding her under a bushel."

"And why we never heard boo from them about having foalnapped her into the Company. Guilty consciences. Bad Apple's rotten parents hated her, and the rest of them came out of an orphanage or apprenticeships, but it was always sort of a mystery why Feufollet's parents never came to retrieve their missing jenny." We both fell silent, as the ghouls finished off their late snack, and wandered off into the depths of the maze. I hadn't quite believed in the hidden pigs, until a couple sparks lit off in the lengthening shadows. I heard a rumbling noise as the pigs stampeded for the gate, having been prodded by somepony's magic in the right direction. As they passed through the suddenly-opened gate, Feufollet apparently dropped the glamour. A herd of a half-dozen pigs appeared out of shadow and mist, and an earth pony stepped up with a shillelagh to play swineherd, driving them to their troughs.

We might actually be ready to leave Menomenie when the time came. Were these signs, wonders and miracles, by the gift of the Spirit according to her madness? Or just the fruit of hard, dangerous work; the Spirit that helps those con-ponies that grift for themselves?

The Palisades Along The Plateau

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We built the second blockhouse and palisade on the edge of the plateau, among rich, well-drained farmland more than half-abandoned by its people for better-defended compounds further from the steep wooded slopes below that edge. Ghouls had taken to the wild, uncultivatible slopes like wild hogs, and the periodic eruptions of ravenous undead from that brush and woodlot had driven away all but the most intrepid and stubborn of ponies from their farms. Of those that remained, too many were dying in the daily fight against time, the weather and the mindless dead.

It was beautiful country, the over-watered prairie of the interior falling away into sudden drops and over sudden precipices, the drainage of actual slopes drying out bogs and swamps, a constant headache north and eastwards, and leaving them perfected for rich crops. Even without the pressure of their masters' hooves, those happy fields threw sweet stalks of corn and grain at the skies, and spread wide leaves in worship of the summer sun. The abandoned orchards hung heavy with fruit among buzzing bees and teeming, healthful insects.

And death stalked the field-rows and groves.

They made their nests among the steep, plunging slopes beyond, the soil and dirt washed away from the fields above curling around and through eroded limestone cliffs, making soft aprons of effluvia around their bases. This was the point at which the giants'-rakes had ceased their northward scrape, and left the ancient land as it once was, wooded, rough, and broken. The ancient gardeners of the north had left this break as the mark of the edge of their vast garden.

The limestone gorges were cut by sweet-watered rivulets and creeks, feeding into the northern-most tributaries, yes, but primarily in this region into the River itself. Small, feral and wild, the northern River was barely distinguishable from its many tributaries to the deep west and east, far to the south, and there, to the south, where it met its many children, where it became vast, lugubrious, and implacable in its course. Here, in the highlands, it was a vicious little beast, barely navigable, and that mostly due to weirs and careful cultivation by generation upon generation of clever river-donkeys and caribou.

The ghouls haunted the slopes of those gorges, and in the rich bottomlands beside the rushing creeks, a deadly fight for existence among the surviving farmers, more colonists and pioneers now than settled tillers of the soil. While the fight for the plateau's edge was uncertain, the struggle to remain among the drainage between the slopes and the River was desperate, existential. The living were losing, and badly. Their losses were the gains of the dead.

The clearance operation out of the first blockhouse had been something of a throat-clearing for the Company in chorus, a running of the scales. We took no serious injuries or casualties to speak of, and that without the innovations the witches-coven had developed in their laboratory-labyrinth. The building of the second blockhouse and the clearance of the plateau's-edge was the first serious fight of the summer campaign.

The pegasi swept along the face of the gorges, and found that the wooded terrain and the many folds of the land made it fiendishly difficult to spot anything, let alone ghouls nesting, inactive. We found very few nests this way, although a couple larger ones were spotted in abandoned homesteads along the headwaters of some of the tributary streams. The charioteers flew in doubled sections of troops, with the pegasi and griffins in support, and cleared out three of these obvious, blatant nests, burning the corpses and the remains they had filled those structures with.

But the ghouls continued to come over the wooded edge of the plateau at night, and our patrols on the ground along that verge fought a nightly running battle along the cordon, tracking the enemy by smell and fighting by dark-sight. That week saw a dozen casualties, two serious, and I had to displace my surgery from the nice, well-stocked and spacious hospital in Menomenie castra to the rough tents of the plateau-edge palisades.

They mostly kept the ghouls from reaching the actual palisades, but it was a serious fight to make that happen, and ponies got hurt in the process.

The second week, we brought forward the witches, and their apprentices. The charioteers had a new toy, a sort of one-pony aerial gig, light and flexible, seating only one, small pony. These rigs accompanied the strike-flights, and a warlock riding gig with a daring charioteer could hug the treelines of the gorges, and use the newfangled detection charms to spot ghoul-nests hidden below the canopy between the exposed cliffs and boulders. Both apprentices volunteered for shift after shift of this duty, and it was in these first flights that Bad Apple's pyromantic skill was first displayed, and her innate aggressiveness. More than one forest fire was started by her experimentation against undead nests in those flights, and the escorting ponies learned to not fly downwind of her gig when it dipped down below the branches.

But the aerial ponies were in more danger of smacking into tree-limbs than being caught by ravening ghouls. As vicious as they were, they couldn't fly, nor could they jump any more effectively than you or I given no head start or push. If we had all year, we could have taken our leisure and simply sat back and let the pegasi exhaust themselves and the witches hunting the hapless dead from the air, one javelin at a time, one unreasonable outburst of slope-scorching unnatural fire at a time, and in the meantime scattering the ghouls hither and thon across the province. The Company could be hunting ghouls and revenants in that terrain for the rest of our natural lives, become nothing more than jaegers of the undead.

The other witches did their job as directed, and laid markers for the ground strike-forces, and then the Company did things by the book. Hammer-and-anvil sweeping operations, clearing each nest by isolating it first, and then driving into it with sufficient force. It was a grinding sort of battle, and the injuries and casualties began to mount. My ward in the palisades grew fat with broken limbs, the majority of the injuries, generally incurred in falls or bad tumbles on that uneven and steep ground. We had to extend the battlements to include more space for the greater and greater proportion of the Company housed in the Plateau Palisades.

In the third week of the campaign, an earth pony stallion named Mirror Way took a tumble off a limestone cliff chasing an escaping ghoul, and broke his neck on the rocks below. He didn't survive the trip back to the Palisades.

In the fourth week of the campaign, her section-mates lost track of a unicorn bowmare named Taunt Strings during a clearance operation in one of the more remote gorges to the northwest. Her remains were found five days later in a subsequent sweep in the next cove over from where they had been fighting, surrounded by a dozen dismembered, rotting ghouls, her backup blade buried in the skull of the one nearest to her. She seemed to have bled out from her wounds; her body showed no signs of having been devoured, aside from the wounds that killed her. She died alone, but well.

It was sickening how few ponies remained in the gorge bottomlands; those that did, had largely retreated to the hamlet and town walls along the roadsides, and cultivated those fields and orchards which could be reached at a dead run, in clear sight. They had cut down all the trees within two hundred yards of the hamlets and towns, preserving their sight-lines and maneuver space. The remaining ponies of the bottomlands were a people under arms.

They had not reacted well when the White Rose of Rennet had passed down the Road and tried to assert their dominance and claim over supplies. We found a battlefield outside two of the three towns on the Road as it passed down the biggest gorge bisecting the Pepin Front. They fought an inconclusive skirmish outside Guillaume's Ravin, which made things bad enough on the Road. But they sacked little Durand, and burnt it. The surviving refugees were a burden on their neighbors up and down the Road, and everypony was feeling pretty salty when we moved down the Road after our caribou friends.

Nopony in Mondovi were certain what had happened to the rebels after Durand. They supposedly had camped in the snow outside of Mondovi for two nights, not even approaching the gates. The second night, there had been a great commotion and sounds of a fight. Then the next morning, their tents were gone, and aside from a great deal of blood, a good number of unburnt recent dead, and scorch marks on everything wooden around where they had camped, nothing. Two trails leading away, one up the bypass south around the ruins of Caribou City, and another straight into the City.

The ponies of Mondovi were strange even by Pepin provincial standards. They held onto the little city's fortifications by the skin of their teeth, not more than five miles from the heart of the infestation. There were no inhabited hamlets between Mondovi and the ruins of the river-port. They survived by maintaining the Road between the upper province and the riverports further south along the extension of the Road, and running guarded convoys on the Road. They certainly didn't get enough food from what little cultivated land they were able to protect from their walls; they imported from their less-pressed neighbors to the northeast and south around the living river-ports.

We began making plans for a regimental fortress across the bypass from Mondovi. If any point in the province was better-suited for a clearing operation against that city of the dead on the upper River, we hadn't found it. And in the meantime, it was a good position to seal off further movements of ghouls into the gorges and bottomlands to the north and east, and to help complete the clearance of the northern half of the province. We also had hopes of making contact with the forces of the Duc de Pepin, whose quarter of the province had its communications with the rest of the province through Mondovi.

And throughout those long days and short nights of that second summer in Tambelon, the Company's armsponies continued their hunt for the dead among the wooded cliffs and abandoned farms on the northern fringe of the Riverlands.

Losing My Temper, or, The Insult

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The campaign chewed up resources faster than we anticipated. Our construction stocks in particular were drawing down perilously fast. Mad Jack had always consumed iron and tools like they were popcorn, but exceeded himself that spring and summer. We had half the ironsmiths in Menomonie making nails, fixtures, and replacement tools, and it still wasn't enough.

The food demands of the civilians and militia we were dealing with in Pepin were themselves prodigious. The seven years since the fall of Caribou City had produced a significant dearth in the neighboring regions, one not alleviated in the least by the stream of refugees pouring out of the province, nor the heavy fatality rate among those that remained. Our foodstocks on hand were more than sufficient for a unit our size, but once asked to stretch to cover those we encountered in our operations, our supplies evaporated like the morning dew. And it wasn't as if we could turn them away. Local guides were vital to making heads or tails of the tangled geography of the Pepin gorge country, which was a maze of blind canyons, tangled narrow coves, and the occasional hidden cave complex, which we were positive were hiding at least a few ghoul nests. And a leadership vacuum in the province was almost as severe as that which had opened up in Rennet the winter before.

Mention of one problem and its resolution brought up the obvious solution to our current problems. A chariot from the desperately overstretched charioteers' corps and an escort were sent west-north-west to find Pepin Castle and the wayward Duc. The castle-town and the hoof-full of districts around it had been isolated from the rest of the province by the fall of Caribou City. Pepin Castle was positioned on a stony bluff over a ford on the River - the last fordable point on the River, in fact. A walled town had formed around the skirts of that bluff, with gates towards the ford and the road to the south.

It was simply preposterous that the officers had chosen to send their surgeon once again on a diplomatic mission, but there I was, gripping tightly to the side of an airborne chariot, surrounded by an armed honor-guard of pegasi, looking down at the Bride's banner flying from the highest tower in Pepin Castle. The old duc died of shame and sorrow in the days after his foremost city was wiped from the map by his lords and masters. The ducal coronet fell to a child, a jack who went by the name of Rollo Murs; after a few years, the rest of the province referred to him as “roi derriere les murs", and mostly ignored his presence. It was not hard to ignore him; his presence outside of the district around his castle was nonexistent from what I understood.

We pulled into a landing in the open yard outside of the citadel. It was an old fortification, dating back to before the first Domination, and again in the centuries of chaos in between lich overlords. In those days, the territory beyond the River was another country. It was one, once again, with the White Rose having revived the defenses of the old bison fortress on the lower bluff facing Pepin across the River. Neither side truly cared to kick off hostilities this far north, this far from any important trade-routes or agricultural riches. The land behind the White Rose fortress was rich enough, but its surplus was shipped on interior lines away from the River, and no strategic plan ever conceived would have featured an attack from an isolated cul-de-sac like Pepin City across a defended river, or vice-versa. The White Rose could attack, and probably take, Pepin City, but then they would have seized an isolated canton under constant threat of being overrun by the undead denizens of Caribou City.

Frankly, from Duc Murs' point of view, I didn't see why he hadn't gone over to the White Rose, if only to get attention, negative or otherwise, from the players in the game. As it was, he was dying on the vine.

We waited in that courtyard for far too long, and my guard began to get nervous, shuffly. I told off the charioteers, and suggested they catch a cloud overhead and park the chariot somewhere away from curious eyes.

If there were any in that silly place. They should have sent someone out to hail us by then.

As the chariot spiraled up out of the castle, a civilian finally came out of the citadel, a valet or butler by the look of him.

“Greetings milud, what might the ducal palace do for your lordships?" Equuish?

“The building can do absolutely nothing, you bet. But my Captain sent me up here to talk to a duc, le Murs or something like that? Supposedly owns the land we've been fighting a clearance operation over the last two-three months now? I'm here to give a progress report, ask for support, check and see if the duc is still breathing, actually exists, that sort of thing."

“The duc is not accepting visitors at this time. I am sorry you had to travel all this way to no good effect."

“So you do know where I came from? Somepony's paying attention to the war going on in your province?"

“I'm sure it's none of my business, milud. I will see if I can find an aide-de-camp to answer your questions." The old earth pony shuffled off to find a soldier. You'd think an active military post would be hock-deep in them, but we hadn't even seen a spear on the walls coming in. Were they hiding?

Another relic shuffled out from the gates of the citadel, an ancient in a kettle-helmet and a chain of office, her long ears poking up out of the headgear. The castellan was polite, but uninformative. The duc was not in the castle, nor was his officers or court. I should perhaps try the district to the south, there was a procession scheduled through the hamlets in that direction.

I summoned my ride back down from their holding pattern overhead - no clouds could be found in that high summer-blue sky. I polled my escort and the charioteers, and we decided to do a lazy spiral southwards and east, and if we found a large body of troops or somepony obviously wearing a ducal crown, great!

No such luck. The farmed bottomland below Pepin Castle and southwards were in better shape than the wastelands around the Bride's Road and up the gorges to the plateau, but wasn't a patch on the better-defended farmsteads of the plateau proper. The wooded slopes to the east and the occasional riverside bluff to the west had to be as infested as the terrain the Company was bleeding and dying to clear to the south, unless the duc had been fighting a better fight here than I really expected of a provincial noble and his pocket army.

I didn't spot any ghouls, for what that's worth. Not that they'd be rampaging about in the broad daylight anyways.

We didn't find the ducal army, either. Although we were able to interrogate a couple farmers haying their fields, at least once after we talked them down out of their tree forts. No, I'm not kidding. The civilians in this district had taken to building little reinforced hidey-holes in tall trees nearby outlying fields and orchards, high enough to keep away the ravenous dead, ladders which could be pulled up, murder holes drilled through the wood so that they could pelt the ghouls from above while yelling like hell for reinforcements. Seriously - they had wooden trumpets bolted to these little fastnesses. They looked like something foals with funding might build as play-houses, but it was all in deadly earnest. And it said more good about the efforts and coverage of the ducal armed forces in the region than anything else I'd seen. The presence of the tree forts showed that the farmers were willing to fort up by themselves far from their own walls, and wait for the cavalry.

It meant that they thought the cavalry was coming, and that wasn't nothing.

We had almost given up finding the duc and his ponies when one of the pegasi spotted a tell-tale cloud of dust heading to one of the outlying hamlets partway up a gorge about twenty-three miles from Caribou City. The trees pressed close to the fields in that country, and the farmer-ponies worked in tight huddles, their scythes swinging swiftly through the grasses, and their gatherers moving rapidly to tie behind the reapers. The duc and his armed party were moving for the walls of the hamlet as we approached, and I noted the burnt slopes around the village. The charring was fresh, and I was willing to bet that there had been an attack here, recently.

We dropped down over the rushing armsponies, and I waved a white rag at the well-barded figure at their head, a red cloth fluttering from his lance carried like a standard. He spun his lance in a circle, and pointed off to the right, to an open area away from the gate of the village. We spiraled into a landing as the ducal escort spread out in a protective array. He had three dozen ponies - mostly donkeys with a scattering of caribou - with him, all of them seriously well-armed and barded. Lances, axes and javelins, and most had a flask at their belts, some of them carrying forked poles. They were clearly armed for ghouls.

The impressive donkey was half again as tall as the largest one I had ever laid eyes on before then. If I didn't know otherwise, I'd think that le Duc Murs was a mule, and one crossbred with an al-Hisani or Saddle Arabian at that. There were few ponies in the Company as muscled or tall as le Duc, and we weren't exactly a gathering of hollow-chested academics. He had a great axe at his belt, and his lance was bladed along two-thirds of its length.

“Your Grace, your servant. My Captain has sent me as a representative to your court to discuss coordination in our operations in your province. We've been clearing the northeast plateau and the region between the plateau and the ruins for the last two months. We have… been wondering when you would intervene - er, I mean, inquire as to our activities in your lands."

“You'd be the new horrors I've heard tell of, in the outlands? The thing that's been driving pony-eaters into my territory? Burning slopes, sending smoke and fire into the skies all summer long?" I was appalled that this was all that he'd gathered from our campaign. All that slaughter, and all he'd taken from it was the occasional brush-fires touched off by Bad Apple on one of her rampages?

“We are the Black Company, in the employ of the Bride your sovereign, following our sanctioned commission to clear the taint of the White Rose and their effects from the northlands and the northern fringe of the Riverlands." Self-commissioned, and hardly sanctioned, but that was our position, and who would argue our case if not us? “We are following the rebel remnant in their flight from Rennet. The ruins of Caribou City and their effects upon your province are blocking our advance, so we are clearing the obstruction."

He sat back on his haunches, and laughed. “Clearing the obstruction! Well, isn't that a charming euphemism. Are any of my villages in the northeast still standing? Mercenaries! Almost worse than the undead. At least those can be put down and burnt. As long as there is a denier in a cubbard somewhere in a standing shack, you can never get rid of mercenaries once they descend on a district! Coin is the very dragon's-teeth of the mercenary, once planted, they grow from the soil again and again, no matter how often you cut them down! What damn fool cursed me with a plague of mercenaries?"

The young Duc looked older than he was, and his fronting was all bluffness and heartiness and cynicism, but I had his measure now. The big jack-child was terrified. He had no idea what was going on. Now that I'd gotten a close look at his ponies, I could see the wear and the patches. These arms-ponies had been run off their hooves. And as the sun dipped towards the western horizon, I could see their eyes drifting towards the gates of the neighboring hamlet.

“I'll be sure to let the Captain know. She loves mercenary jokes as much as any other armed savage, almost as much as we love bits. And your grace, we love bits a great deal! Will you be sending any representatives to negotiate for supplies and other matters in the 'out-lands'? We've been acting in loco dominus, but we can only make so many promises in your name without actually having, you know, met you. There's been a minority opinion among the Company that we ought to just offer the lordship of the plateau and the gorges to the new Duchesse de Rennet. Her we can find and argue with. You they've been out of contact for… most of your reign, really. Not speaking for the Bride's government here, but your neighbors and subjects in general." My teeth were damn near chattering.

He blushed hotly, and barked in outrage. “Damn your black hide! I've been stuck in a pen between the White Rose and the ravening undead for seven long years! Any delegation I send past Caribou City disappears into the black, never to be heard from again, unless I send half my army in escort. We fight every night to hold the walls, and every morning to put down the new nests forming in the slopes above our heads! I haven't had a full night of sleep in two years…" He was tearing up, and ready to tear my throat out, all at once.

He shook himself, and remembered his audience.

“Truly? Bibelot couldn't spare a regular regiment?" he asked, arrogantly. “Mercenaries?" he sneered.

“Your grace, why are you out here? In our sector, unless we've cleared the neighboring gorges, this is not exactly a safe position at this time of evening. There's clearly been some action here, that slope over there is still smoking in places. Do you need to get inside the walls?"

“We were going to sweep the woods above the burn, but we got here too long, and your rabble distracted us. Yes, there was an attack here last night." My eyes were drawn to the farmers filing past our parley, calmly leaving the half-mown fields behind, their scythes trailing in almost military posture, making for the open, guarded gates. I looked over to my escort of pegasi. I was about to do something really stupid.

“Corporal, survey the cove, see if you can spot movement or an obvious nest. Report back to me, here. Your grace - I take it there's no open ground inside the village?" He snorted, and shook his head ‘no'. I looked over the double-brace of javelins attached to my chariot, and pulled my lance from its rest on the frame, and my darksight charm from my bags. I eyed my saddlebags, and realized I didn't want to lose the contents if it came to fighting. “And is there somewhere I can put away my bags inside the walls? I've got some delicate materials in here, I'd prefer to not break anything."

The pegasi flew off to quarter the immediate treelines, and I walked over to the cleared area in front of the gates. I hoofed my bags to a startled farmer, asking her to keep an eye on them, and promised to do a clinic for the hamlet if the contents were undisturbed in the morning. I eyed the charioteers and their rig. Then I told them to go plant the chariot on a rooftop somewhere, and strip for individual combat. I felt a little like I was watching myself, like I was watching a play.

I started taking my javelins out of their braces, and plunging them in a half-circle facing away from the gates, close to hoof where I could reach them without looking. The charioteers returned, and one asked me, “Sawbones what the tartarus are you doing? There's barely a half-dozen of us, and only you on the ground."

My pegasi escort returned, and reported. The slopes were full of ghouls, a full four dozen or more, lurking just above the burn-scar. The Duc's escort could probably fight off that number, but the ponies of the hamlet, unsupported, might have gone down under those numbers. His grace knew his business, certainly enough, to be here, now. The hamlet was about to be overrun.

“Sawbones, do you want one of the ‘nobody but us pony-eaters here' charms? We have enough for all of us." My ears were full of a roaring sound.

“Somepony needs to be bait."

“No they don't!"

“Cover me from above. We're going to show them what it means to be Company." Damnit. I was doing it.

I eyed the huge donkey aristocrat, with his bloody great axe and his long lance. He had the position, the attitude, and the blessing of the Creator. But I had the Company behind me and in my blood, and he had gotten that blood boiling. It wasn't exactly his fault, but my zebra was up, and I trembled with something that had to be let loose if I weren't to start screaming at the one true ruler of this land that I stood upon, this soil into which my hooves were digging in deep.

The sun was down, but I could see the slopes and the trees above as if it were under the full glare of clear-skied noon.

“Your grace!" I snarled, all false courtesy. "Might I beg the use of your axe? My equipage is not suited to what I can smell coming. I am not, after all, one of our frontline troops. My usual weapon is a scalpel." Or, in extremis, an archival chest.

“What is your name, mercenary?" he asked, looking uncertain. He looked uphill, beyond which were the ghouls that his ponies were even now, forting up against behind the walls behind us. "To do what you're proposing is nothing but suicide, and in the morning we will have to put down your risen remnants, and burn the dismembered parts!"

“My name is Sawbones! Annalist of the Black Company!" I breathed deep, knowing that I was summoning the ghouls by making noise like this. And shouted at the top of my lungs, "I can only die once! It is the one promise my Company has made to me!"

I took a length of rope, and tied my belt to one of the javelins buried in the sod behind me. It was something I had read in one of the annals… somewhere. Something the bisons did, to hold a position. They buried a stake, and tied themselves to that stake. This far and no further, and no retreat. The Duc's eyes widened with… something, and he tossed the axe at me, and it buried itself beard-deep at my hooves. I took up the shaft with a yank, and swung it experimentally. My lance joined the javelins in their earths-embrace. I turned away from the village walls and their darksight-ruining torches.

The gates closed behind the Duc. The bait was out.

My breathing smoothed into a circular rhythm, and I could feel the night gathering about me. Within the darkness, the dead things slunk, circling like living beasts. As the light faded above me, my eyes adjusted to the darkness below, and in a blink, it was as bright as day, as were the monsters within it. These were the ones old in death, the ones in the front. They were cautious, almost aware that I was a threat. A threat I could see as clearly as these lines I scrawl upon these pages.

The newly dead passed their cautious elders in death at the half-run. I reached back and flicked a javelin at the foremost ghoul, an earth-pony so fresh you could barely tell she was dead. It caught her through the eye, and she went down like a log tossed into a stream, sliding. The next caught its javelin in the neck, and spasmed, twitching for all the world as if it were dying again.

Then the rush reached me, and I took the great-axe in my forehooves, and swung about me furiously. The darkness was clear, and red, and the clotted filth that once was ponies' blood splattered about my position like rotten berries striking the soil. The air above was split by the wings of my brothers, and their hoof-blades cut the spines of my attackers, piled up in front of my position and stopped by their own numbers. When the flurry was settled, almost a score of corpses surrounded me, most of them killed by my black-winged guardian angels.

I kicked the unmoving meat out of my way, clearing my fighting position. I may have left the windrows of dead in front of me, as a rampart, but it was unintentional. I wasn't thinking much, and I had tethered myself to my javelin, and in order to push off the further corpses, I would have to un-tie myself.

The second wave came with a rush, and my thestral night was tinged red again. The glare from the torches at my back stretched across my battle-field like shadows before the eyes of ponies of the day. It obscured more than it revealed to my night-adapted eyes. The axe chipped, and the shaft splintered, but it held together. And my brothers protected my back, dicing the ghouls that tried to find my flank. I took many shallow cuts, but nothing close to the vein or deeper than a deep scratch. One critter nearly got her teeth into my left fore-cannon, but a punch with the axe-shaft in my right caved in the front of her skull, and she went down like the rest.

Breathing like a bellows, I fought for air. There wasn't anything moving in front of me. I looked around, and discovered that I had thrown all of my javelins but the one holding me in place. I thought about untying myself and retrieving my other javelins, but decided that it could wait until daylight. I stood there for what felt like hours, and nothing moved in the brilliant darkness and the distracting, flickering torchlight. The pegasi circled about, and eventually came to rest on the walls behind me between the torch-holding ponies of the hamlet.

“Do you think they'll come again, corporal?" I yelled, not looking back at the walls.

“They'd be fools to do so, Sawbones!"

“Shame we don't have a proper vexellation here, this is good hunting. All I can do is put down the dumb ones. The clever ones are just going to hold back and wait for easier prey on some moonless night. Come and get it, you mindless abominations!" I was the brainless one, to try and provoke things that couldn't understand speech, couldn't really think as we think of thought.

It still attracted attention. Another half-dozen came snarling out of darkness, as if they thought they could surround and surprise me. I had given myself a longer lead on the tether in the waiting, and met them further out than I think they had expected. It wasn't much of a fight; the last two went down to pegasi wing-blades, and then my brothers flew out to look for a fourth wave.

The fourth wave never came. Dawn found me slumped wearily beside my javelin stake, the axe-blade in the gory dirt at my hooves. I looked up at the creaking sound of the gates opening. I yelled for my pegasi, and untied myself. We checked each corpse to look for ghouls shamming. We found two, and put an end to them. The farmer-ponies dragged wood out for a pyre.

It would have to be a Grogar-damned big pile of logs to burn this mess.

When the Duc d' Pepin came out of the hamlet, I hoofed him his great-axe, and apologized for its condition.

And he ordered one of his soldiers to go back with us to act as his delegate in our half of the province. The charioteers retrieved their rig from the roof, and prepared to leave with our delegated aide de camp. An earth-pony came up to me with my saddle-bags, and I belatedly remembered my promise to look over the ponies of the hamlet, do a bit of a clinic. She told me, wild-eyed, that they'd take a pass on that.

I left the javelins. We took the delegate.

On-The-Job Training

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I was showing Rye Daughter how to clean out and stitch closed shallow and not-so-shallow cuts when Gibblets came into our surgical tent in the Plateau Palisades. He was wind-burnt, and Bad Apple behind him still had her mane tied back and a pair of pegasus goggles pulled up in front of her ears. The clearance flights continued, and a bit of charring on Bad Apple's forehooves suggested that those flights weren't entirely fruitless, even six weeks into the sweeps.

Gibblets had an odd expression, as if he wasn't sure whether to laugh at me, or rage in fury. BA was just wide-eyed, much like Rye Daughter had been when I stomped into our quarters with dripping bandages and told her to get out the clean needles and antiseptics a little earlier. From the newcomers' expressions, I could see that the escort had already started the gossiping. I fought through the stinging and the inexpert tugging sensation to think how to get ahead of this.

"It wasn't that bad."

"Then why aren't I done stitching you up yet, sir?" muttered Rye Daughter around a mouthful of needle and thread, closing the long cut down my throat and across my shoulder. She'd been working at that for what seemed like an hour, but probably had been twenty minutes at best.

"So tell me what it was, if it wasn't that bad. Because the pegasi are talking like you just tried to prove yourself the second coming of Bodkin Point, for nothing more than a point of honour. You staked yourself out like a sacrifice for half the ghouls of northern Pepin?"

Rye Daughter squeaked in dismay, pulling the knot and the lip of the wound closed, and tied it off. I hadn't explained the provenance of my current condition, just told her I couldn't operate on myself, and some of them needed stitching if they weren't going to fester. She started in on the gouge across my right shoulder, using the spare needle and a lot of antiseptic.

"That wasn't what that was supposed to - am I the only pony who remembers Baba Ripnema's reading about the buffalo's Dog Soldiers? It was supposed to be a dog-rope. Doesn't anypony remember what a dog-rope is? Stake yourself to a plot of earth, and refuse to be moved. Damn impressive story, always knew I wanted to try it once. Augh! Ow... and yeah, I was showing off a bit. That damned overgrown colt that wears the ducal crown insulted us. I was a little pissed, and I knew that the pegasi could do more against targets fixated against prey out in the open, than dealing with the things coming over a hamlet wall in the darkness. The locals had their damn torches out, would have ruined our darksight to no good effect." It was a relative short gouge, that took care of it quick enough, and Rye tied off another set of stitches, neater than the last. She was improving rapidly.

"So you tied yourself to a stake, without barding, by yourself, to play dinner and you rang the dinner-bell."

I had Rye swap out for the last needle, and start in on the bite on my left arm. That ghoul had gotten more teeth into it than I had noticed during the fight. After examination, I told her to put down the needle and get the scalpel, and I talked her through debriding the bite. That did more than sting, and interrupted my conversation with Gibblets until it was over. BA watched in fascination, and more than a little blood-thirstiness. Becoming a warlock wasn't a process that left the subject with much in the way of squeamishness, or social graces, I am sad to report.

"Ghoul dinner-time?" Gibblets prompted, as Rye began to stitch the now-cleaned wound back together.

"The pegasi had their charms on - worked wonders, by the way, the ghouls only saw and smelled me, the aerials just danced right through the scrum cutting throats like ghosts. As far as the dead things were concerned, I was the only living thing in that field, and they just kept trying for me. Especially after I started bleeding and smelling delectable. I - ouch! careful! - just had to stand there and smell after a while."

"So you found a way to flank things that don't have the brains to fear getting flanked?"

"Sort of. I kind of think we only put down the dim ones, the young ones. It still felt like there were critters nearby when dawn came. Things that knew better than to continue to try for a single meal surrounded by dismembered former ghouls." My left cannon was properly stitched. That left… the cut over my croup and upper flank. I pointed it out to Rye Daughter, and she rolled her eyes, and got more thread.

"By Grogar's beard, how are you still awake?" demanded the Captain, stomping into the now-thoroughly-crowded tent. "Don't you tell all your patients to rest after nearly killing themselves?"

"Keep going, Rye. I don't exactly know. You'd think I'd come down at some point, but I'm still kind of gliding at the moment. Time enough for sleep after I finish showing Rye how to tie me back together. Alllmost done, Rye. Was that donkey I gave you of any use?"

"You mean aside from nearly pissing himself every time he looks at my helmet, and in general acting like a timid little cacasipala? Well, he has the seal and the name, so there's that. Dior Enfant is back in camp, so I put him in her hooves. More her bailiwick than that of operations, anyways. Are we going to get anything more out of the Duc than a spooked representative?"

"That's one of the brave ones, don't scoff. And remember, Compte Coup there just fell off his first flight in a chariot. That'll rattle anypony's jimmies. I still don't like it much. The jack was riding with his lord into deadly danger. If we weren't there, those ghouls would have come over that village's walls last night, and maybe we'd be looking for l'héritier du Duc, si vous s'il vous plait. So," I said, looking at both the Captain and Gibblets, while Rye tied off my last set of stitches, "it's just as well we were there with our blades that actually put down the undead, and our force multipliers, and all the advantages I had behind my crazy striped flank. No, the Duc has about all he can handle protecting his enclave in the north. Until we can open the Caribou City junction, they're in a box, and the ghouls climb into that box with them every night."

The conversation tailed off into raillery and unproductive squabbling, but Rye managed to get fresh bandages over my equally fresh stitches, as I drank deep from the small-beer barrel. I hadn't realized how thirsty I was until I started drinking. I started wobbling when I tried to get up off of the surgical table, and Gibblets grabbed me by those parts of my shoulders not covered in bandages, and led me into my own ward to have a lie-down. I think I lost track of Rye at that point, although I tried to congratulate her on her first good pass at taking surgical lead. I think she was still there when I said that. I don't know.

Last thing I said to Gibblets before drifting off, though, I remember. "That damn Duc pissed me off. I had to kick something's ass, and at least it wasn't the Duc."

Rumble Of A Distant Drum

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I woke up hurting from the tip of my dock to the hairs on my upper lip. I could barely move. When Rye Daughter came round to check on me, I almost asked her to break out the laudanum, but restrained myself. Salicin, and a start on a course of antibiotics. We'd have to start new colonies of paintbrush mould, the current draw on our supplies would exhaust our safety margin before the campaign season closed out.

I was stuck in bed for the next two days, so I missed it when they displaced Mad Jack and his caribou construction crew to the site of the planned fortress. But I got a look at the trickle of heavy wagons heading down the Road into the gorge, carrying the necessary supplies. The majority of the Company deployed forward to protect the construction ponies as they dug out the heavy ramparts down there in the bottomlands across the bypass from mad little Mondovi.

The plans weren't for a simple castra, but rather, a spacious star-fortress at the centre of a rampart, extending a mile along the bypass, and another mile refused in parallel on the far side of the Bride's Road heading up into the gorge. Beside the fortress, a heavy boom-gate with a pair of towers were to be thrown up between the drainage ditches and the surface of the Road itself. A third tower was emplaced at the end of the rampart extending down the bypass to Le Coppice, across that road from a dead hamlet. Another boom would be extended across the bypass.

We had been stockpiling materials and supplies for weeks in expectation of the project. Our sweeps had been aimed at clearing the woods and fields behind the position, and mapping out the possible approaches and byways that the dead might find around us. We had found that the ghouls did, indeed, continuously exfiltrate from the ruins, and that cleared slopes did not remain so on subsequent nights. The same nesting sites were repeatedly occupied by bands of shambling undead. One particular cave complex at the base of a ridgeline two coves southeast from the Road had to be burned out four times in as many weeks.

After the second sweep of that cave, the witches started making up detection charms and stacking them on the Crow's remote-entangled apparatuses. There was now a sand-table in the Plateau Palisades with a quartz-studded map of the operations area, that was checked periodically to see if any of the alerts had been tripped. There were three charms tripped during my week of convalescence. Even as almost the entire Company fought to hold the line in front of the bypass and keep the ghouls from moving into the cleared region in their rear, the undead still found a way around.

The broken limbs which had characterized the fight for control of the slopes and cliffs of the ridges-and-gorges region had mostly tailed off in this period, but we started to see more and more heavy lacerations and bites. Rye Daughter got more experience cleaning and stitching these sorts of wounds, although after the first three days I was well enough to start taking up the slack. Some of the maneuver sections began to suffer from being shorthoofed. The sergeants started consolidating units. We weren't losing too many ponies outright, really, far few that we deserved given the conditions, but the wounded and exhausted started to accumulate.

We lost three ponies in this period to blood loss during evacuation. Port Doux, a jenny with the first cohort, during the night of the construction of the first third of the bypass ramparts, caught in a rush of ghouls running for the caribou labourers. Something got teeth into her brachial, and she bled out in the chariot before it got up the plateau to the surgery. Far Horizons, a zebra mare with the second cohort, died similarly three nights later, when a band of ghouls came over the partially-completed ramparts on her sector and caught her out of range of her supports. Her sectionmates came to her aid, but the many bites had done too much damage, and the trip up the plateau took too long. To be honest, she probably wouldn't have survived if my surgery was right on the bypass. But the pony who died the following morning was almost certainly the fault of the long round-trip between the construction zone and the Palisades.

Chestnut Shell was leading a sweep in front of the defensive lines, three sections in echelon, when they came across an abandoned hamlet full of hibernating undead. He got too far out in front of his ponies, and he was overrun. His subordinate took over, they retrieved Chestnut Shell, and they burned out the hamlet along with the bulk of the ghouls. But the tourniquet on his ruined left hind leg wasn't tight enough, and by the time they had signaled a chariot and brought him back up to my surgery, there wasn't enough left in him to save. He went into systemic shock and died on the table.

That afternoon, I went out onto the palisades, and watched Cherie play in the updrafts over the ripening corn in the fields around the walls. She dipped down over the golden kernels, and danced through a cloud of butterflies that startled out of the stalks where they had been hiding. The rest of the foals were bringing in laundry from the drying-racks or bustling about preparing the evening chuckwagons for haulage down into the gorges. The two apprentice-witches, who were out with the pegasi doing their daily sweeps, were due back any moment. It was almost idyllic.

I could leave Rye Daughter up here, along with a couple of the oxen to keep herd over the recovery wards, and take the rest down into the valley of death. Set up a forward surgical unit where I could do good, and keep more brothers from dying from lack of trauma care.

That's where I was, and what I was thinking, when a party approached the walls from the north-west, along the side-road whose crossroads with the Road had been the main reason we'd planted the palisades and blockhouse here, rather than closer to the plateau's edge, or elsewhere. I recognized Dancing - no, Dior Enfant, her charge Compte Coup, and their escort of Company armsponies. They had been making the rounds of the Plateau, taking a census for the Duc and re-establishing connections between the farmers of the northeastern districts and their nominal sovereign.

I leaned forward onto the valli jutting out of the rampart, and shouted down across the fossa, "Hoy! Dior! How goes it out there? Are they growing fat and happy?"

"Sawbones! You look less chewed-upon! They're less lean than they were this spring, I'll say that much for them. Not as many returnees as we had hoped, sad to say."

"Food! Tell me they're going to be harvesting something worth the milling? I mean, look at all this! I've never seen wheat this tall this time of year! I swear we could feed the Company for a year just from the fields within eyeshot of these walls."

The Duc's arms-pony spoke up, saying "I'm not sure if anypony with any sense would come out here to harvest this close to the slopes, sir. There's plenty of grain as tall as this or taller back that way a mile or two, and not nearly enough hooves to go around. But they should have a surplus this time, and more than that. It's so… open up here."

"We're going to make a run up into Rennet after this, I want to talk to the grange representatives up there, and maybe the Duchesse's new administrators," Dior Enfant shouted up at me. "They still have plenty of hooves to spare in Rennet, and even more over in Verdebaie. And supplies! Do you have any idea what Mad Jack's burnrate has been down in the valley? We need credit, and badly. Hopefully the duc's name is still good in the northlands."

"Ah, take the cash, and let the credit go, young jenny! Whatever will fill our storehouses. But should you be taking this jack with you out of the province? The villages up here are almost OK, but it's a mess down there in the bottomlands. Some of the hamlets are gone, and some are holding on by the horn of their hooves. Those who husbanded the golden grain are like to be flung to the winds like rain if we get another good blow before harvest. Somepony needs to do some morale building down thataways."

She eyed her charge, and was quiet. He snorted, clearly challenged by the insinuation. The party turned aside, and made for the gate into the fortification, and I resumed my contemplation of summer dressed in her new bloom.

The next morning, the Duc's jack marched with me as my ambulance heavy with surgical gear and supplies rolled behind Tiny and Sack. Once more into the valley of death, strolled the medical corps of the Company.

You'll Never Leave Pepin Alive

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We waited with the Company heavies. The aerial road patrol had reported the wagons coming down from Menomenie would be a little late, so we were waiting the convoy and the escort on them, stacked up inside the palisade gates. There was barely enough space inside the abbreviated marshaling yard for all the carts and armsponies, and dawn was threatening in the east. The wagons were slow, and we'd have a horribly long day on the road as it was. The delay was making everypony anxious, especially since there would be a great amount of jiggery-pokery when the Menomenie wagons showed.

A pegasus flew in high over the fossa, her yellow wings burning in the rays of light streaking the skies over our heads. We stood in the gloaming below, as the messenger of the dawn descended upon us. With the message delivered, the Company component of the convoy rolled for the gate, shuffling forward to take our position at the head of the train, and the rear-guard splitting off to pull up on the Road's verge away from the gate. As we exited the gate, the Menomenie wagons came into sight, wearily rolling across the cracked metalled roadway.

The teamsters' replacements trotted up to their assignments, and as the cart in the fore came up behind the last of the wagons from the Palisades, the short convoy came to a stop. The Menomenie teamsters quickly and groggily dropped their traces, and we all waited as the ponies for the downslope leg of the convoy swapped out places with those they were replacing. These were civilian carters, hired teamsters. Not expected to fight, but the ones going into the ridge-and-valley country were every one double-volunteers, and being paid accordingly. It takes a lot of deniers to lure an unarmed pony into the valley of death, and it was meet that they were compensated accordingly. If the worst came to pass, they had the address of their next-of-kin inside the gates at the blockhouse.

The Menomenie convoy was composed partially of a small train of hired supply-carts, carrying food and engineering materials for the Company, and those depending on the charity of the Company. Relax, don't think we'd gone soft. That charity was more in the way of a loan. We fully expected to exploit the hell out of everypony surviving off of Company alms. Pony-power would be in extreme short supply once the fields and roads of the southeastern province were once more safe for civilians; every pony we could keep alive and fed and housed in the gorges and bottomlands was one we wouldn't have to lure into the wild afterwards with inflated and pricy promises.

The rest of the Menomenie convoy was composed of a short train bound for Mondovi and run by the intrepid ponies of that stubborn town living on the lip of Tartarus, and a collection of independent tinkers, sadlers, and intrepid merchants hauling their own loads. Not that we'd let them do the hauling in the danger zone, not after their march in-country throughout the night. These ponies were being strongly encouraged to bunk out in their rigs, and let the hired teamsters take their traces. They had been briefed in Menomenie to expect this exchange, but businessponies can be obstreperous at best, and there were the usual delays and friction associated with civilians unused to military discipline. It was full morning before the full convoy assembled itself and rolled over the plateau's edge.

The Bride's Road took the most gradual route down through the smoothest gorge in the vicinity, but her Imperial Majesty's engineers prized direct routes as much as they did ease of passage. The Road rose up over the valley floor below, carried on a truly massive earthwork. Vast boulders mined from nearby quarries had been piled like the work of ancient pyramid-builders, and their enormity covered in heavy rubble, and that rubble weighted down with ensorcelled restraints, and smaller and smaller bands of rubble and fill until the surface was metalled and ensorcelled again and again. The long ramp into the gorge extended five miles from the lip of the plateau until it reached the surface of a wide bench on the near side of the valley below. In between those two points, the wagons and escort-ponies of our convoy rolled perilously along a roadbed floating high above the tree-tops and slopes below, the natural curves of the steep gorge walls and cliffs drifting past us at the speed of the slowest, heaviest cart in the train.

Ironically, this was the safest stretch of the journey through the valley, although for those of us with a fear of heights it was the very epitome of vertiginous anxiety. Those long, naked roadside slopes plunging below us on both sides were absolutely bare, and nothing could approach us without being almost instantly spotted. If you weren't concerned about the fact that we couldn't get off the Road, or easily turn around in case of trouble, it was almost calming.

Excepting the great plunging heights, of course.

Across the surface of a broken-toothed dolomite cliff across the valley from the ramp about halfway down, some wag had painted a message in pony-high letters. "You'll never leave Pepin alive!" Assholes. Admittedly, it had been there when we first moved into the district, and probably had been aimed at the White Rose remnant. Well, that was the claim of the ponies of Guillaume's Ravin; I suppose we ought to take them at their word. And we didn't have the ponies to spare to paint over the damned thing, no matter what it did to morale among the civilians. I'm told it's a reference to a local folk-song, for what it's worth.

The wooded slopes were scarred here and there, visibly scorched. Bad Apple had been at her worst in the gorge around the Bride's Road, and her minders had given her head. There wasn't much left alive in the valley below us; it was a cul-de-sac, too far from support and other living inhabitants. There were two dead hamlets and a half-dozen burned-out homesteads at the foot of the Road's bed. There wasn't anything much dead moving in that valley, either. It was the heart of the Company's clearance operations, and for a couple weeks after the initial clearing they ran a patrol with a witches' gig up and down that valley once a day, once a night. That was in the past, now, there was little to attract ghouls down there, and the dead that were re-infiltrating were mostly drawn elsewhere.

On the bench beside the Road, three homesteads built back-to-back had formed an impromptu hamlet that was still miraculously alive. The caribou who held this tiny village, called ‘Gustavbank', were a hardy but wary bunch. We found them half-starving, but still stubbornly keeping their fields and small grove ghoul-free on that stretch of flat-land halfway up the gorge wall. They were one of our charity cases. Three of their bucks were hired on as local guides, and probably were out with the abbreviated clearance patrols we were maintaining with those few Company ponies management could spare from the Mondovi construction fight. A wagon from the convoy's fore pulled off, and the Company carter hauling it hurriedly unloaded supplies into the arms of the does of Gustavbank, who had poured out in force from their gate and the nearby fields to take their share. They had been cutting hay, late in the season, but still a good sign. They felt safe enough to reap while the strongest of their stallionfolk were away.

The convoy never stopped, except to allow the Company carter to rejoin the train further down the line. We had a tartarus of a schedule, and were already behind enough as it was. On the far side of the bench, were a series of smaller constructed causeways filling in gaps of the slope, properly drained, as only the very best of engineers Imperial money can buy will build. And the Bride never skimped on engineers for her Roads. There was two more living hamlets in the stretch between Gustavbank and Guilliame's Ravin, and the Company's carter repeated his combat-unloading performance twice again, until he fell into place at the rear of the train with an empty wagon, right ahead of the rear guard's lances.

The sun's rays found us again in Guilliame's Ravin, where the sun came up about ten in the morning. The fields around that embattled, shabbily walled town were far behind those growing on the plateau above. Their growing season was almost like those of the north of the northlands around Tonnerre, the limited sunlight largely negating the advantages of weather and copious water. Most of the tinkers and merchants pulled out of the convoy here, to service those ponies in the town who still had the bits to pay the freight. The return convoy would pick them up when it re-formed; until then, they would take shelter inside the town's walls and hold an impromptu market-day in the narrow marshaling-yards that was the only free space available inside. The Duc's representative, Compte Coup, stopped off with the merchants, and was meeting with the town council when the gates closed behind the last tinker-cart, and our convoy consolidated itself and got ready to move on.

Past Guilliame's Ravin, the Road was on mostly flatland, and struck straight like an arrow through the black-soil bottomlands. Many burned-out homesteads littered the valley floor in the region, interspersed with walled hamlets, some still living. A second and a third Company carter repeated the performance of the first, and combat-unloaded supplies at each living village. We acquired an aerial escort over the first hamlet drop-off, and they circled overhead throughout the rest of the trip down-valley, dipping occasionally to investigate matters largely out of sight from the Road proper. We were walking into the heart of the danger-zone, and the stretches of the Road after it passed the charred ruins of Durand were especially unsettled.

Every night since the construction fight had kicked off, packs of ghouls had gotten past or around the Company's cordon in front of Mondovi. We saw fewer and fewer ponies in the fields, and there was only one living hamlet between Durand and Mondovi. The third Company-carter damn near tossed the remnant of his supplies at the haunted heads of his last delivery, and those skinny donkeys were equally desperate to grab up the tossed crates and sacks and shuffle them inside their gates and retreat to safety. An entire flight of pegasi circled overhead the hoof-off, just in case.

As we pulled away from the last inhabited hamlet, the smoke from the fighting to the southwest began to dominate the horizon. It was the safest way to dispose of the dead, regardless of any Company witchcraft or wishful thinking. About three miles out from Mondovi, where the long shadows of afternoon reached out over shaggy, overgrown fields on either side of the Road, another flight spiraled in to meet our air escort. A pony dropped down to confer with the convoy-master, and we rolled to a stop. It was Long Haul.

"There's a large ghoul pack coming onto the Road about a mile and a half down from here. They'll be on you in about a half-hour. Too many to slap down from the air, and my ponies are bingo anyways. I need a resupply." The convoy-master, an earth-pony corporal named Even Keel, frowned meditatively as I walked up to the conference.

"How big is too big? Can our escorts deal with them if we scrambled?" she asked.

Long Haul looked over the shortened train, and the two reduced sections which were acting as our vanguard and rear-guard. Plus me and the oxen, maybe a dozen and a half lances? The pegasi circling overhead plus Long Haul's patrol added another dozen and a half to our resources on hand. "Maybe fifty or so? It's a big group."

"There's three heavy wagons running empty at the back of the train, and three trained Company carters. We can bring them up before the ghouls are on us, turn them across the roadbed, that'd slow them down some," I offered. "We're a long way from Guilliame's Ravin if we want to run for it. And ghouls can run faster than tired teamsters carrying full loads, even here on the flats."

"It's your train, Even. But make a decision now, they're getting closer as we deliberate. A bad idea executed vigorously with celerity…" prompted Long Haul.

"Is better than a good idea carried out too late," completed Even Haul. "RIGHT!" she bellowed, turning on her heels. "Carters! Bring those empties up here, and get your flanks ready! Sawbones, get those damn civilians off the centerline of the roadway!"

I galloped down the train, and spread the word, helping the teamsters get their rigs to one side out of the way of the Company carters bringing their heavy wagons to the fore, telling them to take shelter inside the heavier carts, and to keep their heads down. I waved my oxen over, and told them to bard up and break out the hoof-blades I'd had the smiths hammer together for them after Lourd's last stand the year before. They got suited up and I dumped off my saddlebags and pulled my caparison out of the ambulance and got dressed, pulling on my petryal and chanfron over the heavy padded cloth. I winced in discomfort as the barding rubbed against my stitches. I'd have to rebandage myself after this, no matter what. The pioneer's axe strapped to the side of the ambulance frame completed my load-out. I had decided after the fight the week before that lances were crap weapons for fighting ghouls. All it did was bring you into range of their buddies' bite-radius.

We helped the carters tip their wagons on their sides, nose-to-flank-to-nose across the roadway, from drainage ditch to drainage ditch. Tiny helped the two bowmares in the escort up onto the upper sides of the improvised breastworks, and Sack hoofed them some of the spare quivers from one of the supply wagons at the fore of the civilian train.

Long Haul's pegasi swarmed over the train, trying to find the baskets of replacement javelins, which should have been in there somewhere. They hadn't found them when our own pegasi yelled the five-minute warning. I strode over to the gap between the drainage ditch on the right and the wagon-breastworks, and looked down the road.

A swarm of ghouls charging you in the open was no prettier in broad day-light than in darkvision.

The bowmares waited the charge, patiently. All of our unicorns were very old veterans by this campaign. They knew their ranges, and they knew to save their bolts for closer fire.

And so when they opened up, you knew that danger was close. They riffle-fired into the pack, their target-focus out of my view to the left, but I could see the ghouls swinging outwards in my direction, avoiding the fire and many of them plunging over the sides of the ditch. Not to tumble into the brackish waters below, sadly enough. They kept scrambling forward along the steep side of the road-verge.

It would have made them easy prey if it weren't for their fellows running along the roadside itself. Tiny held the gap in front of me, and kicked out again and again against the dead things trying to climb over him. I swept the damned things off him with my axe, doing my best to not cut him with my axe's blade. two escort-ponies joined me in trying to keep the ghouls away from Tiny's vitals, stabbing with their lances. I huffed in frustration and clambered down the side of the verge myself, trying to get around Tiny and the tangle of squealing undead. The axe was much more useful sweeping the legs out from under those things.

The shadows of the pegasi flickered over us, like drifting clouds, and their battle-cries told me that they were doing something, but my view of the fight was far more constricted than it had been when I was the only pony on the ground. I wobbled on uncertain hooves along that steep roadside and started cleaving skulls. As unsteady as I was, the ghouls were even more vulnerable than I was, and it was easy once I found the rhythm. Sweep out a leg with the haft, reverse and drive the head into their forehead. Rinse, repeat. I started making my way back up the steep slope, breathing heavily and feeling trickles of something under my caparison. Nothing made its way around the right side of the barricade, nothing moving, at any rate.

Then another great cloud passed overhead, and I heard the hallo of a great number of throats, and wings filled the air above me. Aerial reinforcements. And a great burst of flame raising up on the other side of the road, its target far out of my view. I dropped my axe-haft, and looked up at our bat-winged rescue. Tickle Me's personal sections, who never went into the field without their thestral helms, dressing to terrorize even when they were fighting things incapable of feeling fear, and what must have been Bad Apple from the pyrotechnics.

By the time I climbed my way back up to the roadway, it was all over but for the butchery and the burning. When I reached the lip of the Road, a hoof reached down to help me up.

"Welcome to the Valley," said Tickle Me as her ponies darkened the sun on its way towards the western horizon.

Chaos At The Front

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The pegasi flew a search pattern overhead as we cleaned up our mess. There had been fewer ghouls than it had seemed in the heat of the moment. I'm told the original pack split between when it was spotted and it hit our hasty barricade. Lucky for us, I suppose. There wasn't room or time to burn the corpses on the Road, and night was rushing on faster than the dead with blood in their eyes. I went about, and put my axe to good use on the corpses, removing the heads from the bodies while the oxen and the guards got the wagons back up on their wheels. The bowmares trotted from body to body, retrieving their darts and bolts, and flinging the severed heads into one of the carts while they were at it. After all the wagons were upright, everypony helped sling bodies into the empty beds. The teamsters and other civilians had been coaxed out of their carts by then, and the sun was kissing the horizon.

Four miles to go, and twilight fading as we wasted time. The rear-guard stood to the side, and the vanguard and the three wagon-loads of dead meat kicked off down the Road. We were now in a tearing hurry, and the oxen scrambled to get back into their traces on the ambulance. It was especially awkward, because I belatedly remembered the ghouls crawling all over Tiny, and I was trying my best to check him over for open wounds and anything that would kill him, while he was trying to push me away and take his place next to Sack. I couldn't find anything that was leaking too badly, so I just walked next to him the rest of the way, keeping one eye on him, and the other on the Road.

That last leg of the walk into the valley was a darkened blur, and I barely registered the overgrown fields and the scorched foundations passing by in the dying light. We knew we were close when we reached the end of the the refused ramparts beside the Road. A section held the tower that anchored the ramparts, which had been built up on the side of the roadbed itself rather than across the ditch as they had planned. Looking at it in the darkness, I could see why - that damn drainage ditch was deeper than Tartarus, and it was better to have it in front of you than behind you. But the new ramparts took up half the roadway, and it turned a nice, wide military highway into something of a goat trail, and slowed down traffic fiercely. But the ramparts were a great comfort to the whole of the convoy, and you could hear the sighs of relief pass down the train as we rolled around the tower's base. The boom was nowhere in sight, I don't know if they hadn't brought the materials out yet, or if they had just decided not to bother.

The ghoul-pack had done an end-run around the ramparts, and climbed up onto the Road well north of the tower. The construction was already making a difference.

When Mondovi's ramshackle walls rose up in the darkness, the gates were closed for the night. The fires of the Company's positions were bright across the bypass, and the convoy went into laager in that open space behind the earthen ramparts. As soon as we pulled into our place in the laager, I climbed up on the ambulance and pulled out a table, and slapped at Tiny until he got out of his traces.

He had fought a battle, and dragged the ambulance four miles with five serious ghoul-bites leaking blood and other fluids all over his ill-fitting caparison. Well, I call the heavy burlap the ox used a ‘caparison', but really they were roughly-stitched doubled flour sacks that some of our Rime donkeys had stitched together for our oversized brother. Tiny's vitality was simply unbelievable. I got Sack to pin Tiny down, and I used up a third of a bottle of antiseptic on his bite-wounds. I had Tiny drink the rest of it, dosed heavily with laudanum, before I dared start debriding those ugly wounds and stitching them shut. Tiny was murder on my medical supplies. I was already planning on sending a chariot back to the Palisades to retrieve my emergency supplies, along with a note for Rye Daughter.

I went to sleep in the back of the ambulance next to Sack, fairly positive that we wouldn't lose Tiny to his disinterest in his own physical well-being.

Morning revealed the chaos and disorder of the construction zone. Tents were scattered about higgledly-piggledy, and as far as I could tell, ponies were using the drainage ditches as latrines, because I couldn't find properly dug ones anywhere. Everything was covered in dried mud and piles of wreckage were scattered here and there, even though we hadn't had a serious storm in over a week. There were burn sites scorched every hundred to two hundred yards along the surface of the bypass, and the guards from last night's convoy were busy burning the remains we had tossed into the empty Company wagons.

The night's fighting had produced another crop of wounded among the defenders of the line. I spent the early morning cleaning out bites and stitching up cuts. Nothing too serious, and at least we weren't getting any dismemberments or crushing trauma, or the like. Only one broken bone, from some damn fool tripping into the half-cleared fosse of what would eventually be the star-fortress. I performed surgery with my caparison rolled up and tucked under my petryal, with my chamfron sitting near to hoof. I had been warned that there had been more than one break-out in the last week, and didn't care to get overrun without barding.

By noon I was sweating like a mule.

Every cart and wagon in the convoy, including my ambulance, had gotten their wheels coated in the nastiness that had leaked out of those carrion-wagons as we rolled down the Road to the front. We must have left a hell of a trail behind us, ghoul ichor ground into the metalling for four long, filthy miles. The stench in the laager would have been remarkable if the entire construction zone didn't already stink of burnt, rotten flesh and corruption. I wondered briefly if the ponies of Mondovi would let those stinking wagons into their fastness or not, but it really wasn't any of my business.... By evening of that first day, my sense of smell was comatose, and thank the Peacock Angel, because if not for that, I might have gone mad. I could handle anxiety, and the terror of battle, but that horrible stench was enough to send a zebra around the bend.

I couldn't figure out how the camp was organized. Nothing was where it was supposed to be, and sections of every cohort were scattered here and there, without any order visible to the naked eye. I found out later that three of Mad Jack's caribou recruits were missing. Some damn fool suggested that they had deserted, as if any lunatic would desert in something like this. The first day or two some ponies had been fool enough to go into nearby brush to "do their business". This is probably what happened to those recruits.

In fact, the morning the convoy set out from the Palisades, one of the missing had been found half-eaten under a bush a half-mile beyond Mondovi by a patrol; we were pretty sure that body was the missing Hartschalenkoffer, who stepped behind a tree to do his business just before a ghoul pack burst over the bypass and distracted everypony with a scrambling fight. The absence of the caribou recruit wasn't noted until much later. I'm told that there was an amulet around the corpse's throat which matched something the buck kept with him, and the body hadn't risen again, which might be the sign of a deceased brother of the Company, and not just some random subject of the Duc.

The buck Mutter Sohn and the doe Schlaukind had likewise disappeared in the daily chaos of the construction of the fortress before Mondovi, but their bodies were never recovered. I strongly believe they were taken by the undead in one of the swirling skirmishes that marked those mad days and nights, or just pulled down while they were making water in the bush. We can only recall them for the remembrance of the Company, their sacrifice was as important as those of ponies like Chestnut Shell and Far Horizons.

When I finally tracked down the Lieutenant in an unmarked open-sided tent no-where near the star fortress's foundations going up, she had aged ten years in the last ten days. The construction zone was her battle, and she barely had a grip on it. At least my face gave her a laugh, heavily bandaged and laboring under an oversized chamfron and petryal.

"Don't laugh, Lieutenant. I've fought ghouls with barding, and without barding, and it's a lot more fun not getting cut to ribbons."

"Good to have you down here. Maybe now we can keep more pegasi on station instead of hauling casualties halfway across the province. We had more wounded last night - have you looked at them?"

"It's part of the reason I've been so long tracking you down. Well, that, and nopony knows where anything else is down here. You need Broken Sigil, somepony needs to bring the anal-retentiveness."

"Captain still needs someone to co-ordinate the defense of the rear zone. It's actually complex up there. It's just disordered down here."

"Lieutenant, I've seen the rear zone, and I've gotten a good look at this place, and let me tell you, you need help down here. This is a mess."

She looked away, blank and tired. "It's better than it was. We're getting somewhere. Nopony died last night. Uh, they didn't, did they?" She asked, realizing I had been working on patching together the night's wounded.

"No, Lieutenant, nothing life-threatening. But seriously, ask for help. We're going to start getting camp-disease casualties at this rate."

"I can't, we've already stripped them to the bone here. I've got seven hundred armsponies protecting eighty construction-ponies. They've barely got anypony left to do the sweeps and hold down the blockhouses and our lines of communication. Look what happened to your convoy! We nearly lost you to a random band of trotters!"

"It really wasn't that close of a fight, Lieutenant. Worst thing that happened was one of my oxen got a little shop-worn. He barely even registered that he had been hurt. But my point is that you have most of the Company down here, and if you're not careful, they're going to get sick in these conditions. We need somepony to organize proper drainage and sanitation, and organize in general. Get Sigil down here. Look, you're doing fine, better than we should have expected given how heavily you're getting hit. You'd almost think the damn things were being organized and driven by a thinking enemy, the way they've been hitting you. Never be afraid to ask for what you need to turn a mess into a success, filly."

That got her ire up. I was ten years younger than the Lieutenant. "OK, surgeon, that's enough of that. I hear you. You want to see some organization? Go grab a section and start marking out proper latrines and sanitation."

I smiled, happy to be delegated. Officers who were too scrambled to dump work on other ponies were officers far too close to the edge. Got to remind them who they're supposed to be.

A Quadrille In The Dark And Damp

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It was easier in the end to track down the cohort noncom and help rearrange units back into their own constituent parts, than to try to dig latrines for each cluster of sections wherever they had happened to bunk out. They worked out a way to cover the sections striking their gear and re-distributing themselves, while the sun shone and the ghouls were taking their noon-time siestas. They took most of a day for the reorganization.

The process helped the sergeants take stock of their ponies, and discover problems and overlooked issues. Many of the troops had missed too many meals, and were barely on their hooves. Entire sections were one more night from just lying down and not getting back up until the ghouls came to turn up their sheets and collect the laundry. Everypony was filthy as well, but there wasn't much we could do about that until our own wells were dug and a convoy with the broken-down shower-stalls made it down the Road. What fresh water was available on site was hauled out by the ponies of Mondovi in barrels now and again, laboriously pumped from their towns' spring-fed fountains and wells which were the reason for the town's location in that karstland, that soaked up flowing surface water, and sucked down pools and ponds before they could puddle.

But the pervasive filth meant that every wound was a potential suppurating infection site. My antiseptic was going to go fast. I made a note to send for a second ambulance full of every last jug of antiseptic Rye Daughter could dilute out of my concentrated stocks.

After everypony got reunited with their own cohorts, then we got the trench latrines dug in their proper places, to their proper depths, and properly covered so that nopony stumbled into them in the dark. That killed the day, while the carter-ponies got everypony properly fed from the perishable stocks on the chuckwagons. The bulk of the supplies on those carts were preserved to last for another ten days or more in high summer, but the cooks had included some decent food as a bonus. It had barely kept during the long journey and the chaotic greeting of that first day, and everypony gobbled up what they were given before it went off.

The irony was, most of the earthworks had already been dug, and the kill-zones had been cleared. It was the logging and the construction work that had lagged under the strain of constant attacks from the brush and the woods. The makeshift walls of Mondovi had been constructed from the nearby woodlots and the torn-down abandoned structures in the neighborhood, so there wasn't much available loose and close to hoof, as it were. The very source of our construction materials was both often infested in the first place, and in addition was the favored lines of advance for the enemy, insofar as ghouls had favorites or intentions to speak of. Logging parties had to range far out of the protection of the main body of the forward deployment, and it was those parties which had been attacked again and again. It was in an attempt to clear in advance of once such party that Chestnut Shell had caught his fatal wound, and it was from ambushed logging parties that we had lost all of our missing caribou.

That evening, as tents from the supplies went up on the verge of the bypass highway, the sound of a zydeco band struck up over the walls of Mondovi, and torch-light glowed against the clouds blowing in on an unseasonable cool breeze. They were greeting their returning ramblers with their precious wagon-loads, with a surreal jig so utterly out of place on that muddy, darkened waste. A huddled market town, its sagging, aging walls slapped together out of mismatched lumber and salvaged materials - the roofs and second storeys of Mondovi's precious homes and shops and municipal buildings were barely visible through the gaps and over the sagging ramparts, like glimpses of a better life, a better world. This was the last stand of civilization, this was life in the face of the things getting ready to try our arms-ponies again. Dancing ponies behind failing walls, their players shifting from 4/4 to 4/3 time and back again.

They played throughout the night and the fog, and after a sweet while, we realized they were playing for us as much as for their returning stallions and mares. The music carried strangely on that peculiar night, warm ground-mist combed by cool, wet breezes overhead, and the stomp of the quadrille interspersed with moments of swirling waltz.

The Company found its second wind under that cheerful, buoyant sound. One of the wagons we had hauled down had been packed with Feufollet's special charms, fresh-sorcelled. A number of sections, well-fed and armed, wearing the little blood-mage's favour on their barding, fanned out into the growing darkness and a rising fog. They found the streams of ghouls in the mist making for the light and the music in the distant town, and merged silently with those shambling, drooling abominations. The dead didn't see the living step into cadence with their loping advance, nor did they see the blades gleaming in the damp and darkened dew.

It wasn't really a fight; it was more of an exercise, or an unpleasant duty – a night-shift on the slaughterhouse floor, to the distant melody of the quadrille contredanse. Many of the ‘pounders had found on their own what I had discovered, that pioneer axes were of more use against the undead than lances or pikes. And they hewed their quota of timber in the darkness to the ‘Pretty Doe Waltz' and the 'Jambalaya'. Trails of dismembered, rotted meat were laid out through the brush and the overgrown fields westward toward the distant ruins.

Of the few which found the defensive lines along the ramparts and the construction-zone which might eventually become a fortress, those ghouls found a bolt or dart in the darkness and the distant town-light glowing against the fog rising into a low cloud canopy above. The bow-mares high on the ramparts, their eyes slit-pupiled and glowing, saw through the rising fog, and, dancing in place to the rhythm of the distant snare drum, swept the cleared fields with the refreshed contents of their quivers. Their supports crouched at their knees, awaiting the charge with couched lances and swords at the ready, tapping counter-rhythm to the music with their weapon-hafts against their petryals and crinieres.

The caribou slept safely the night through under dry canvass, dreaming of square dances and the work of the day to come.

A light rain greeted the morning, brought an end to the night's dancing, and washed away the night's fog. The construction-crews formed their work-gangs, and the night-crew traded off their charms with the day-sections assigned to keep the ghouls off the logging parties. The anti-undead charms made the difference in the daylight as it had in the night and fog; the stink of rotting meat was the only assault the loggers suffered.

A bait-section broke open the deadly contents of the charms designed to attract the ghouls, and the section ran its pattern through the rain and the muck. Surprisingly few undead were baited out in this first attempt. Later experimentation suggested that the rain had suppressed the effect of the charms, and indeed, the no-living-ponies-here charms themselves suffered a large number of failures after the first day or so. Wet and damp were apparently murder on Feufollet's amulets. You can believe that Gibblets gave the cohorts the business over this shameful waste.

A convoy of empty wagons was sent back upcountry the next morning, and it passed another full convoy coming down from the Palisades, including my ambulance full of the requested jugs of antiseptic, and the broken-down shower-stalls. The latter wasn't of much use without the wells being completed, but their presence certainly advanced that priority on the list, and we marked out well-sites for the drillers and the diggers.

Slowly and surely, the work was getting done. And we grinned through our filth and ignored the endless stench of death and rot.

Billy Zebra Gruff

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Day by day we dug ourselves out of the muck, while the wreckage of what once were ponies accumulated in the wasted fields and brush about us, and rotted into the desecrated, broiling earth under the high summer sun. We fell far, far behind in burning the dead, and the stench was immeasurable. Pegasi flying into Dance Hall had to exercise all of their Company discipline to keep from flying right back out again; convoy teamsters arrived looking pole-axed, crosseyed and green from the smell. Ponies took to wearing passably-clean cloth rags around their muzzles in an attempt to filter out the bad air.

The does and mares of Mondovi emerged one morning in force, and with some of their stallionfolk in attendance, demanded my attention.
“Escort? To the Withies River?“ It was the nearest open stream to the battle-zone, about a half-mile south of the tower rising over the ramparts extending down towards Le Coppice, a spritely stream with high grasses and herbs growing along its more sedate outer curves. Especially sweetgrass.

“Yeah, de closest incense-‘erbs we can cut down ‘ere. Iffen we could get up on de palier, all sorts a sages we could use, no prob'm. But here? Only real choice, de herbe douce.“ The jenny wasn't actually old as seasons followed years in a calendar fashion, but life ran quick down there in those days, and she'd seen every day since the liches came and tore down the walls of Caribou City and let in the end of days. “And de voyageurs, dey sicken'. We need hexe, we need incens' to ward off de miasma, dis horrible puanteur. We need encensoirs.“

And that was that. The latest load of evacuated wounded was winding its way back up the Road from Dance Hall to the Palisades with the morning return-convoy, and the forward patrols and logging parties were out, and would not return with their latest crop of cuts, minor breaks and contusions until late in the afternoon. Mad Jack and the drilling-party was raising a great tumult in the center of the construction site, and everypony was feeling expansive and cheery at the prospect of fresh-water wells inside the rising walls. I could do for a stroll.

A spare section was assigned to the harvesting-party, and we set off down the bypass, a good-sized herd of wary mares, does and jennies, a half-dozen skitterish armed Mondovi stallions, and my patrol of armsponies, fully armed and barded. Only one of our ponies carried a Feufollet hide'em amulet, and she trotted out in advance of the expedition, to reconnoiter the riverbank and the vicinity. Patrols swept the area every night and every morning, and we were especially careful of the verges in the immediate mile or so on each flank of our earthworks - this was the most active route for undead passing around us and into the rear area.

The foundations of dead little Grande Cave passed by on our left, but we were dead certain that nothing was lurking in those cellars open to the air. There was a work-party harvesting cut stone from the stripped bones of those once-homes, and the work was well-advanced. Soon the stone which had held up the walls of homes and storehouses would be found only in the curtain-wall of Dance Hall, in the walls of its barracks, headquarters, its hospital rising into the foul miasma we breathed every morning.

We passed by the base of the tower, its cupola empty in the day-light. The defending sections were all far in advance of the rampart this morning, but for a reaction-force crouched in the shifting shade of the tower, awaiting the alarm to charge into action, to retrieve any unfortunates from the danger they might have stumbled into, however far out from the walls. They would be our saviors if it proved that ghouls liked the smell of sweet-grass as much as they loved the smell of living flesh.

The little watershed that held the Withies was just over a slight rise to the southeast, which put it out of the sight of the ponies lounging at the foot of the tower. I clipped the corporal of the guard with a hoof as I passed, and I gave an eye to the top of the tower. She groaned in irritation, looked about, and started climbing the ladder herself.

“Happy, Sawbones?“

“Always, Stewpot. You get one free stitch the next time something opens up your shoulder, maybe even half-off the next time I have to reattach your ear. Get a better chamfron, one that isn't a bigger threat to your scalp than the enemy's blades or teeth!“

“Next time we get paid for this horrorshow. We do still get paid, right?“

“That's the rumor.“

I had fallen behind the ladies of Mondovi, and their sickles and scythes. I trotted to catch up. The reeds and grasses of the long curve of the Withies came into view, and I frowned. You couldn't see everything, everywhere. There were too many dead spots, too many places for ghouls to hide, to pull down some little old jenny intent on cutting herbs.

I turned to my own section's corporal, a unicorn swords-stallion named Tang Shoulder. “Where's the nearest honeypot? I don't like the look of this, there's too many options for any pony-eater to play ant-lion down there.“

He was frowning at the prospect himself, if it was obvious to me, it had to be screaming bloody vengeance at a veteran like Tang. “There are two on this side of the arc this morning. Nearest, about two-thirds of a mile over that way. Other side of the river from here. Next one, a full mile west of here on our side of the stream. I have a cryfoal tamped down and shielded, but it's almost exhausted. I could give it one more charge, but somepony else would have to run with it, that's about all the juice I have in me. I'd have to play defense with my lance until the evening, I'd be too tapped out to swing this bloody big bar o' pig-iron.“ He gestured at the great claymore he wore strapped across his back.

The “honeypot“ was an innovation some anonymous genius had figured out not long after I arrived at Dance Hall. Instead of having a mortal, exhaustable pony take a “come eat me, I'm delicious“ charm into the field, they mounted the amulet on a tall pole, or in the high crown of a good-sized tree. Leave it in place for long enough, and a pile of slavering, distracted ghouls could be found, tumbling over each other, trying like crabs in a pot to claw their way to the sweet, savoury pony-flesh that just must be hiding over their empty heads. As a tactic, it concentrated the enemy, drew them out of cover, and put them out in the open where they could be surrounded and wiped out to a ghoul. Tended to disrupt the infiltration-routes something fierce. This was the honey-pot, and it was turning around the campaign. It was a game-changer.

A cryfoal was the old pony-portable version. Nothing more delicious to a pony-eater than sweet, succulent foal wailing for its dam. Only problem was that an actual edible pony had to carry it into danger.

“Tartarus,“ I laughed, “I haven't had something try to eat me in almost two weeks. What the hay, why not? You see a good gallop-line for me to run? I don't want to lead anything back to the little old ladies.“

He eyed the open meadow in front of the grasses, the scattered tree-stumps and half-burnt brush that marked the depredations of the earlier logging-parties, and pointed a hoof along a proposed route. One that would take me around the northeastern side of the ruins of Grande Cave and the work-parties there.

“What, you think I ought to lead any possible ghouls up to the walls of Mondovi itself? You've an evil mind, Tang.“

“Stewpot ought to be able to see you well enough, those lazybones will meet you before you lead your charges into temptation.“

I pulled my own chamfron off its hook on my back, flipped it over my ears, and danced in place, making sure everything was settled, that my joints were loose and my legs were ready for a bit of a jog. Tang Shoulder's horn lit up like Hearths-Warming, and his cryfoal floated in front of him, glowing blood-red in his brown field. Suddenly it was charged, and he flicked it at me. I grabbed it with my teeth and tucked it inside my petryal, and took off in a dead run towards the western fringe of the proposed harvest-site.

I halloed as I galloped away from the bypass, but I couldn't keep up the pace in that half-brush, full of leg-breaking stumps and unmentionable messes. I was focused on the nearest shock of tall reeds, in anxious anticipation of their sudden movement, their bending and disturbance which would mark any things coming out of their daylight doze to sniff out the sweet smell cantering towards them. I made the stream-side, and turned to the left, trotting along the verge.

Nothing, but a light sweat starting under my caparison.

Then, finally, after I crossed the bypass where a low, wide bridge took it over the Withies, and I was half-convinced I was just making a spectacle of myself in front of the wry civilians of Mondovi, growls from underneath the bridge heralded actual undead to make this something other than a morning exercise in full barding.

Literal bridge-trolls. Gotta love the classics.

“Oh, no! pray don't take me. I'm too little, that I am!“ I trilled out, and took to my heels, continuing my passage along the grasses and the reeds, between the riverside and the overlogged brush. Two ghouls from under the bridge, and joined a little later by a third emergin in a hole beside the creekside a hundred yards further upstream, and a fourth three hundred further. That was enough for me, and I went uphill, putting on some speed. The ghouls might have had some natural speed advantage on me in my burdened, barded state, but they wouldn't catch me before the top of the rise, and I wanted to be in full sight before I turned on them. Maybe I wouldn't have tried to take them on my own in normal conditions, but hey - it was just the four of them, and the sun was shining, and my axe was light in my grip, and I was feeling alive.

For once, my foolishness was not punished by ruthless karma, and all I got was a bit of a bite on my dominant cannon, and some of my tail torn away. Eventually, two ponies from the escort section came up to help me make sure the carrion wasn't shamming, and to say later that I had been backed up properly if anypony asked about the affair.

I did two more passes along the side of the Withies, yelling like a damned fool, waving my bloodied fetlock, and taunting any dead hiding in the brush or the reeds. The expedition sat on the rise above, watching me caper and trot like a clown.

Eventually the ladies descended to the river-side, and their long blades swept through the grasses and reeds. They weaved their baskets right there in the meadow, and filled them with sweet, sweet cut grasses. We knocked together a small pyre on the rise for the four former ghouls, and sparked a fire, roasting the filth before it could stink up that slope.

That evening, the ponies of Mondovi set out great smoking smudge-pots, and sweetgrass incense clouds floated on a slight south-westerly breeze over the rising walls of Dance Hall.

One Moment In Annihilation's Waste

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With the successful digging of Dance Hall's wells, the Company turned a corner. The rest of the work on the walls and the buildings was done almost in a giddy haze. More than sleep, more than food, more than mere simple physical safety - being able to waste water, being able to shower, being able to be clean after weeks and weeks of living in filth - is simply indescribable. Those primitive gravity-shower stalls might as well have been the great Thermae of Fatinah's ar-Bayruha as far as we were concerned.

The new security introduced by the completion of the curtain walls also allowed us to displace forward the company ironsmiths and most of the support ponies to the safety of Dance Hall. A small security detail held the blockhouse in Little Ridings, while a large fragment of the aerial cohort and a hoof-full of ‘pounder sections held the Plateau Palisades and patrolled the rear areas. But we were able to house more and more of the pegasi and griffins in Dance Hall as high summer faded and the Company's control in front of Mondovi expanded like an ink-blot on a ruined scrap of parchment.

We established civilization in central Pepin by destroying nature. The glacis in front of the long ramparts of Dance Hall was scorched earth, the brush and the soil murdered for the sake of clear lines of fire, and our response to the inevitable clusters of ghouls formed around the honey-pot traps was full of fire and destruction. We advanced into the dead zones with torches and axes, and left desolation in our wake. The ruins of the dead hamlets were demolished one by one, the undead flushed out of burning shambles in a dozen former villages. The wilderness which once upon a time were tended hayfields and corn were put to the torch, and we let the wildfires rage across the landscape, driving the ghouls from their potential hidey-holes in the tangled, trackless half-Rakuen which once had been the richest agricultural bottomland in the province.

The great pillars of fire and smoke filled the western skies, and turned sunsets baleful and wild. The firestorms formed their own weather, a continuous roaring wind from the east and north that would have tossed the tree-tops about if Mad Jack's loggers had left any standing within miles of Dance Hall.

Our consumption of firewood was prodigious. We were cremating the dead, the death of a dozen districts, and those sickly pyres scorched what was not burned by wildfire. We put the little old ladies of Mondovi to industrial-scale work, and the banks of the Withies was denuded of its sweetgrass and other growth, fuel for our pyres to reduce the smell of that rotten flesh to something just this side of bearable.

The ruins of Caribou City herself perched on the outside bend of a wide curve of the River. Not a particularly defensible position, as her long-dead citizens had discovered, but it had been a happy location once upon a time for a bustling river-port, the deep waters of that lazy bend leaving much space for boat construction, piers, and a vast log-weir for the seasonal storage of the fruit of the army of lumberjacks who once harvested the forested, remote hills of the River's uppermost watershed and floated their timber down the many rivulets coursing their way south past Pepin City and other lesser towns and villages to the north.

The great weir was shattered, the boatyards a tumble of unidentifiable wreckage, the piers long since washed downriver, and their many warehouses long-sacked and roofless, home only to wary owls and the ghouls who competed with those silent predators for the mice and rats, and occasionally snatched an avian meal while they were at it.

The Company's advance into the Caribou district felt at times rather like an armed archaeological expedition; seven years of ruin and neglect had left just enough of the traces of lost civilization as to fire the imagination of an amateur historian - just before our arms-ponies put torch to those reminders of the past, and burned it all away.

History hides hungry death. And in the remnants of Caribou City, the past was definitely not past. Her former occupants were most certainly still in residence, and quite firm on their intention to remain so. In one sense, we were the thugs the absentee landlord the Duc de Pepin had sent into to clear out the rabble from his property so that he could tear down the structures and begin the long, expensive process of gentrification.

In a more rational sense, we were doing what we had proposed in the spring. We industriously reclaimed Caribou City from the undead.
And we could only do it by destroying it utterly.

It took weeks of systemic demolition, going block by block, cordoning them off as we went, and destroying the ghouls that fled the flames. We went through a forest of torches, and consumed what felt like three provinces' yearly production of saltpetre, charcoal, and sulfur, and five years' worth of moonshine. Half of Mondovi was converted into fletchers' workshops, turning out miserable, half-fletched darts, bolts and arrows for the Company's scattering of bowmares, whose consumption of ammunition was simply prodigious. We spent money like water, and the Company impoverished itself in the process. I wasn't in charge of our finances, but I knew that nopony was footing the bill for our profligacy but the Company itself. Perhaps we could guilt our nominal employers into paying cost-plus post-facto, but the prospects didn't look good.

By the beginning of the second harvest, the undead were largely penned into a series of dead neighborhoods to the north-west of the city centre, and that city centre itself. Ghouls continued to drift back into the combat zone from the outer fringes of the province-wide infestaton by sheer, random brownian motion - like water flowing back from the outside of a pond, flowing back towards the operation of a powerful pump drawing from the centre of the lake. But the aerial cohort's patrols and the action of the witches' coven dealt with those distractions, and the main effort of the Company's ground cohorts continued to be the systemic extermination of the centre of the infestation.

By the time of Caribou City, it was simply work. Hard, terrible, dreadfully dangerous work, as if we laboured on the shop floor of a vast griffin's slaughterhouse, wading through a small ocean of clotted, rotting blood and gore, doing a nasty job well. One with a truly horrendous industrial safety record. The recovery wards up in the Plateau Palisades and Little Ridings were full to bursting. For a half dozen brothers of the Company, gangrene and poor sanitation had forced me to remove their limbs to an extent beyond the possibility of future combat effectiveness. We had to send those long-term convalescents to a newly-purchased retirement townhouse up in Hydromel.

We lost three ponies to the first stage of the clearance of Caribou City, none of them to particularly enlightening or elevating stories of heroism. Silver Mirror, bowmare unicorn, and Wellstone Beach, sword-stallion unicorn, were caught in a back-fire from a runaway burn in the second week of clearance of the approaches to Caribou City, and died, mostly of smoke inhalation. Fifth Cup, an earth pony stallion, was in the wrong place and the wrong time in eastern Caribou City, and was overrun by a clot of ghouls fleeing the burning ruin of a warehouse. I was vaguely surprised we didn't lose more than we did, to be honest. Perhaps the Spirit was looking over us at our work.

And the dirty work continued in and around the corpse of that riverport as the weather lowered clouds over our heads, and the first winds of autumn fought for control of the skies of Pepin with the ceaseless pillars of smoke and fire.

An Orphan Of Durand

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I took the long walk up out of the bottomlands with the oxen and a load of wounded in the spare ambulance. I should probably have taken a chariot ride and saved me two days' travelling time, but the aerials didn't really have the ponies to spare to play taxi in those days. They were stretched, and over-stretched, covering their patrol zones and hauling their strike packages about the back-country hither and thon. The actual fighting in the valleys and the upcountry had died down by this point, but the patrolling got worse and worse as the active ghouls disappeared into the increasingly scorched landscape. We were flying the pegasi off their wings.

So, I took a hike. The wounded needed evacuated out of the smoke and the stink of Dance Hall, and I had been summoned for my other job, the side-gig that came with being the pony with the archive-chest. Not that I had carried it down into the bottomlands with me - it was still sitting in the hospital up in the Palisades, and would be until I came back for it, or the Captain named my replacement, or came the last crack of doom, whichever came first.

I turned about as we reached the head of the Road as it rolled off its great gorge causeway over the lip of the plateau, and looked west into the sunset. Bloody, dark-red sphere half-hidden on the horizon by those endless banks of smoke. The easterlies blew great scalloped curves upward through the fell clouds, the permanent thermals twisting the smoke and cinders into the black pillars of a vast, ruined temple over the burning, distant city of ruins.

The skies over the land north and east of the Palisades were darkening when the gates opened wide, and let through the mostly empty wagons and the oxen with my ambulance full of the slumbering or the groaning. A great, gangly fawn came thundering towards the open gate, and I grabbed up Rye Daughter as she greeted me after long weeks apart.

She had grown a hoof and a half, maybe two while I had been down getting Dance Hall situated. She was almost no longer a foal, her legs stretched out like fragile sticks, all the foal-fat burned away by the growth-spurt. But her eyes were bright, and she couldn't keep the grin from her muzzle. "Boss! Too long, yeah? We've been keeping the surgery and the wards nice, neat like you like! Been learnin' so much this summer!"

No more sirs, no more Herr Doktors. Ah, well, it fits the Company vernacular better.

She led me and the oxen through the half-empty blockhouse complex to the recovery wards and hospital which took up far too much of the interior of the Palisades. The marshaling yards and the teamsters' cabins were active enough, but the pegasi barracks were empty, and the big cookhouse was being wrapped up by those carter-cooks still up here on the plateau. Operations down in the bottomlands meant that we needed the supports operating down in Dance Hall, where the food could get out to the columns in the field with some sort of celerity. Even if everything cooked down there in Dance Hall still tasted like cinders and over-cured venison jerky. Ugh, no, not literally. But the smell gets in everything…

I stopped by in the wards to laugh at Hyssop and Octavius, who had both managed to catch a ride up to Palisades, about three and two weeks ago, respectively. Hyssop from smoke inhalation, and Octavius when a doorframe collapsed on him while clearing a hamlet. It was like they were in a competition to see who could spend more time in the infirmary without an actual career-ending injury.

Feufollet was asleep in Octavius' lap. From what I had heard, she didn't do much more than sleep and make her ‘favours' for the Company. I looked at her fetlocks, and her cannons, and the many little half-healed wounds. I turned to Rye Daughter.

"Yeah, boss, we know. We've got her on a special diet, Charleyhorse makes sure she drinks these special shakes he makes up special out of the griffins' larder. She's better than she was a few weeks ago, honest bison."

I didn't say anything. Rye saw more of her friends and the ponies in the Palisades than I could possibly keep track of from a day's long, dangerous jog southwest. I asked after the rest of the foals, who were scattered between the Palisades and Little Ridings. Well, aside from Bad Apple, who I knew was up at the front contributing to the on-going conflagrations in her own way. I had seen her from time to time, if only at a distance, and from below. I'm not sure if she even left her air-gig anymore. Somepony with the aerials told me she sometimes slept in it.

After making my rounds in the recovery wards and inspecting the rest of the hospital while Rye hovered anxiously - I played up the process like a suspicious mother-in-law or fussy drill-sergeant - I made my excuses and went to find Asparagus in the teamsters' quarter.

Her and her civilian teamsters were the primary reason I was up here a day's long journey away from the front and the fresh wounded. We'd gone through a good many hirelings hauling the endless stream of supplies down from the living half of Pepin and the provinces of the northland. The pay might be good, but the conditions were mane-raising, and many had decided that one or two trips through the smoke and the stink had been enough adventure for a lifetime. The ones that stuck were adventurers in their own right, or locals with an emotional investment in keeping the lifeline open to the world for their kith and kin.

And more than a few among the ones remaining wanted in on the conspiracy, wanted to take the black.

Wanted to kiss the pikestaff.

I wasn't at all sure that swearing in civilian teamsters was advisable. Many of them were hyperfocused on the situation itself, the adventure, the sensation of being part of a crusade. The Company in its current configuration might lead an unprepared outside observer to make conclusions which weren't properly warranted. We were, after all, mercenaries, not paladins, not templars, not even legionnaires. We were other things, too, in the dark. But that wasn't for public consumption, or revelation to anypony but those already walking with the Spirit.

"Damnit, Sawbones, stop being stubborn!" snapped Asparagus after several times 'round the mulberry bush. "They're already fetlock-deep in the Company's shit. They say the right words, they stand when they're told to stand, they gallop when they're told to gallop, and some of them kick in heads when there's not time to tell them any damn thing. There's this one crazy one, goofy, awkward kid most of the time, but I saw him run over four rampaging ghouls with his wagon, and then back up twice over the quivering mess. He's damn lucky they didn't get their teeth into him, or else we'd have to have put him down, he was that close. I don't want to worry about putting down my teamsters if they catch an unlucky bite. I want them trotting with the Spirit, not alone in the dark!"

I asked to speak with her carter-paragon, to see what I was being asked to bring into the Company for the sake of Asparagus's peace of mind. He was a middling-tall young earth-pony stallion, orange, a bit too old to be called a colt, but looked like he wasn't quite into his full growth. Almost as skinny as Rye Daughter in the midst of her growth spurt, but a little thicker around the leg and neck. He had a nervy look in his eye, and looked like he might have some sort of glandular condition. Hard to tell under the surface eagerness.

"Sir, yes sir! I want to fight with the Black Company! It's - exciting! And not in an 'oh my alicorns, we're all going to be eaten alive, somepony help us please' sort of way! Like we can finally do something about all this horseapples. Buck ol' Grogar and his curse in the muzzle something good!"

I asked what his story was, why he was wanting to join a fighting brotherhood with his mark.

"Well, that was something I wanted to do, my parents wanted to do. They're both gone now, with our shop. The damn caribou, burned us out, us and our neighbors. What? Yes, Durand. My pa had a pastry shop there. He died on the walls with the militia, my mother last spring afterwards. Just laid down one night in that back-room corner they gave us in Guilliame's Ravin, and didn't get back up. Damn, hurts to remember. So yeah, I'm supposed to be making bread and pastries and such. Lotsa ponies supposed to be doin' all sorts of things. Tartarus, what's all that matter? It's the end of the world, ain't it? Might as well kick that monster in the back of the throat before the last swaller, don'cha think?"

I thought I caught a gleam in his eyes with that last question, but I wasn't sure. The Spirit at the back of my head had opinions, though. And I could tell she liked him, weird, sweaty affect and all.

So late that evening, I went into the office we kept the banner and its war-lance, and collected the standard. I could hear the thumping noise of the oxen with their war-drums in the marshaling yards across the compound. I walked slowly with the pikestaff slung back across my shoulder, the banner streaming in that constant easterly breeze. The torch-light lit the alicorn's-head sigil dramatically, and my eyes, dark-adapted, were half-dazzled by the glare. I could still see the two dozen waiting teamsters, as well as a half-dozen rangers flown in special by the pegasi they worked with, keeping the gorges and ridges of the Pepin Front ghoul-free. Nopony had raised any objection to bringing those local guides into the Company. We'd lost too many of those recently to make any bones about that part of the matter.

I reached the front of the congregation, and planted the pikestaff so that that banner streamed high over our heads. I looked across the potential recruits, and the clarity of vision, marred by the glare of the torches overhead, told me that I was giving them a proper thestral-eyed show. A flicker of wings behind me and to the right drew my eye, and I noted Cherie's grey wings and large glowing eyes above, perched beside the gate. So I spoke:

"You have been told, but have you heard? You have been shown, but have you seen? The Black Company is not a simple regiment, nor is it a mere mercenary company, although it is both of those things. It is not a mundane band of brothers or secret society, although it is also both of those things. This is a world that does not let you go softly into that darkness. There are many things that will claim your flesh once you have past. The dead walk in Tambelon, and trouble the living. Some see the Company walk through this world untroubled, and think we are a solution. We are in some ways worse than the ghouls. They will take your flesh, and walk in the skin you've shed. But those things that shamble in the darkness are not that which they wear. That is gone, they are gone, where else? We do not know. Some talk of Elysium, or the Endless Groves, or the Great Blue Yonder, or even Tartarus. We do not know."

"The Company, we know. The Company will take you. This is not a lifetime membership. This is an eternal membership, a binding. I have seen our brothers who have gone, and they stream out behind us like this banner above you, blowing in that eternal wind. We are the stars in our Lady's mane, the river of night that flows from the tail of our Mistress. The Company remembers. Remembers. In a very real way. This is our strength, and our burden. This is why the dead fall away before us flaming like parchment in a bon-fire. Because. We. Know. Death. Dies. And we live on in the Company."

"If you do not want that commitment, if you have family and friends and a life to return to, the Company is not for you. The Company cuts all ties, binds instead to itself. We are selfish. We demand all of you, without reservation. You may leave now, and none will begrudge you the leaving. If you have something else, cleave to that. Because the Company is not a haven, but a lance in the night."

Three of the teamsters left, along with two of the rangers. The proportion surprised me, but not that some rejected the call. I was not selling hard that night; I wasn't trying to bring prisoners of war under control, or extend a protecting wing over foolish foals, but rather, to address allies and employees, and to warn off those who would not fit into the Company as it was becoming, as it was.

Because I had seen the Company in its essence, and I knew every word I spoke was true. We were deaths-bane because we were, ourselves, a special sort of necromancy, of soul-craft. We were the anchor of nine times ninety years of death and dying, a river of the dead in the night behind the night seen with mortal eyes.

I didn't read from old Annals-volumes. I spoke my own words that night. And the remaining teamsters and rangers were summoned forth, and under the watching eyes of our living thestral, they one by one said the words and kissed the pike-staff, and every single one of them showed the thestral-eye. Even the skinny, nervy orange stallion with the three cakes on his flank and the stones to run naked and unarmed towards the dead, to drive over them, and then turn back and do it all over again.

Over Carrot Cake, I could almost see Her black wings fold like a benediction.

Wars And Rumors Of War

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SBMS068

The first indication of the trouble to come was a report from the bi-monthly voyageurs' caravan up from Le Coppice. The Captain had moved her headquarters down to Dance Hall to be more close to the intensive clearance operations east of the ramparts and in the ruins of the city on the river. They were trying to work out the details of how to move the mass of sensitive thaumaturgic equipment Broken Sigil had accumulated in his operations room up in the Palisades, but the sand-tables and ensorcelled remote-sensing apparatuses were not the sort of things you could just chuck in the back of a heavy wagon and carry dozens of miles through a battle zone, however pacified and near-cleared it might be.

The Lieutenant had made a deal with the Mondovans that their voyageurs would brief us about developments further down into the Riverlands, and we would provide a section of armsponies as convoy security for their rambles. In practice, this meant that the ponies assigned to play caravan guard became the Company's eyes and ears in the provinces to the south and west of us, as the voyageurs were close-mouthed and insular on the best of days, and damn near orphic when it came to tradable intelligence. There was so very little that the rest of the world wanted out of Mondovi, that the voyageurs had by default fell into the role of arbitrageurs, traders, and practitioners of cut-throat commercial espionage. Their idea of briefings was an airy tissue of platitudes about the state of the war and mostly value-less blather about the cost of barding in Boiling Brook or the possibility of labour unrest among the longshoreponies of Elgin.

The caravan guards, on the other hand, knew to inform management of troop movements, and the known locations of active players in the ongoing campaign season. Most of the legates were active that summer on an arc from the band of fortifications west of Sundowners to the lines along the great river south of Harmony's Root, along with those regiments in-theatre. More than half of the Bride's imperial regiments nominally deployed to the Riverlands were only there by courtesy, being deployed far from the front lines, entrenched in the rear. This was by report because many of them had been bled white in previous campaign seasons, and their ongoing recruiting efforts were running far behind requirements. Also, because the central Riverlands were effectively depopulated, as was the whole of the fortified region, which only saw the traffic of heavily-armed supply convoys. The rear-deployed regiments were in place by necessity to contain the natural fall-out from the fighting, such as it was. And more than incidentally, to survive on local produce and supplies, rather than straining at the hungry end of over-burdened logistical lines of communication.

From the accounts of the caravan guards, based on camp-gossip and word in the living towns behind the security cordons, most of the activity in the theatre consisted of sweeps by junior warlocks doing… something in the region between the front lines and the security cordon, and the weekly exchange of courtesies between the heavies along the main fortifications and their opposite numbers in the Rose's counter-fortifications. And by courtesies I mean massive magecraftings that flattened redoubts and melted the very earth itself from under the heavy foundations of the world. And the occasional rush of undead hordes for the resulting gaps in the walls made by the obliteration of entire bastions. The living battalions acted mostly as security details for the great monsters who commanded the witchcraft and the dead which fought the battle for the living. And, more productively, the living supervisors of the revenant construction details digging fresh ramparts and trench-lines behind the ruins or soon-to-be ruined forward defenses.

The season had seen no real breakouts, nor any serious movement in the armies. But rumor was that the undead hordes of the Imperial legates had seen significant attrition. And that might have something to do with the formation which had followed the latest voyageur's caravan halfway home, and had apparently occupied Le Coppice after they had left. The assessment of this force was vague, since the guards had been obliged to keep close to the caravan, but it was enough for the Captain to send a high-level long-range pegasi patrol to overfly our new neighbors to the south.

The flight of pegasi, led by Autumn Blade, passed over Le Coppice over 15,000 feet, cautious in expectation of possible heavy mage-artillery. The Company hadn't had any encounters with major Tambelon magic since that rune-caster wiped half a flight of pegasi from the skies on the road to Grosbach last summer, but we'd seen enough of what our nominal employer was capable in the short fall-season fighting. It was possible that a blood-mage or a rune-caster might be able to fling fire or projectiles at a distance, who knew how accurately?

Not much was visible that far up, but pegasi have crazy-sharp eyes, and they were able to get a rough head-count in the fortified camp along the riverside that defended the town on the far end of the bypass, and those lines of defense that kept back the ghoul menace on that side of matters. To be honest, the tributary branch of the great river behind which Le Coppice crouched was a better defense than their ramparts and defensive lines. Le Coppice actually had working agricultural land hidden behind levees and canal-networks. I'm told that those living cities and towns to the south, throughout the surviving portions of the Riverlands, employ similar measures to keep themselves from the edge of starvation.

The new visitors had brought about a reinforced company, nothing much more. Enough to not worry about being overrun by a sudden rush of undead, and probably enough to survive an ambush by bandits or a long-range reconnaissance patrol, but nothing that could withstand an "exchange of courtesies" or even a stand-up fight by any prepared force worth talking about.

Consensus was that this force was probably one of those sweep-detachments rumored to be trolling the rear areas of the dead zone. We found out soon enough, because a couple days after moving into the fortifications of Le Coppice, they moved our way, slowly.

While the Captain and Tickle Me were observing the slow and peculiar advance of the unknown force to our south, the Lieutenant and the bulk of the Company's main maneuver force continued the clearance of Caribou City, and made good progress towards burning it flat. We were almost finished with the initial clearance and getting ready for the clean-up phase when the first scouts of the 93rd Rear Security Battalion made contact with the Captain's guard detail holding the troll-bridge over the Withies.

The sergeant who commanded that flank of the defensive lines had thrown up a small blockhouse beside the troll-bridge on this side of the river to provide a retreat for the ladies harvesting the meadow-grasses and river-reeds, and it had become the preferred position for our outer security post on the bypass road. The hoof-full of pegasi flights which were overseeing the odd, apparently purpose-less sweeps of the force inching out of Le Coppice had taken to using the Troll-bridge blockhouse as an anchor to their deployment. So it was no surprise when the unknown platoon of lightly-armed donkeys approached the mixed section of caribou and earth ponies the Captain had sent out that morning to show the Company's banner, metaphorically speaking.

There was much speculation about what would happen. Would they attack? Send up a flag? Greet us in a civil manner? Offer to exchange bootlegged booze and compare techniques in hiding stills from the officers?

In the event, the scouts approached in a cautious deployment. One trotted forward within hailing distance, and exchanged rank and unit details with the corporal of the guard. Then she turned around, and the scout-section retreated back the way they came. And that was it for the day. The pegasi said that the rest of this rear security battalion continued to sweep the region between the Withies and the Coppice River. This was a portion of our own "rear area" which was still suffering from the occasional clot of ghouls, the more cautious and sly ones, by sheer attrition and process of natural selection. We had wiped out the most mindless and aggressive undead in the region by that point, although we hadn't put the same sort of effort on the far side of the Withies as we had on this side of the little river.

Several days later, the Lieutenant was well into the final clean-up phase of the extermination campaign in the city, and we were making plans for a fall of intensive patrolling and clearance sweeps in the rest of the province. We had long since made contact with the defenders of the northwest corner around Pepin City, but our concentration on Caribou City proper had prompted the officers to leave the clearance of the undead on that front to the locals. Now we had invited the Duc de Pepin down for a conference about what to do about the cleared region in front of Dance Hall, and about co-ordination and cooperation in clearing the still-infested, mostly inaccessible slopes between Pepin City and the rest of the province to their east. We had screened that region, concentrating on the protection of the main agricultural region clustered around the Bride's Road and our own communications. Now, with the central objective of the campaign a heap of smoking cinders and colorfully grotesque bonework trophies lining the ramparts of Dance Hall, we had time for a late-fall campaign against the secondary infestations.

We were waiting with Compte Coup for the arrival of the Duc's escort inside the barely-dignified-by-the-term 'comforts' of Dance Hall, when the message came up the bypass from the Troll-bridge. The commander of the 93rd had made an appearance, and demanded the presence of the commander of the Company. The Captain, resplendent and foolish in her oversized chamfron, rolled her eyes and told the Lieutenant and Compte Coup to convey to the Duc her apologies, and waved a hoof for me and Broken Sigil to accompany her to find out what was the deal.

It still wasn't a short trot out to Troll-bridge.

We found a short donkey covered in nasty little fetishes, blood-stained kerchiefs and twists of twigs and such. Under all that witchy nonsense was a jenny no older than Dancing Shadows. She was surrounded by an honor-guard of- Ghouls! I slammed my chamfron down over my eyes, and reached for my - absent! - axe. Then I registered that she had them under full domination, and realized that I was looking at a necromancer. The Company guards had already made that connection, which explained why we didn't have half the Company responding to the alarm. Broken Sigil gave me a raised eyebrow, and I blushed.

The little necromancer didn't even introduce herself before launching into her high-pitched harangue.

She was pissed that we had burnt down her hunting ground.

The Game-Warden And The Poachers

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SBMS069

"…and by the Act of 899 AG, all posthumous resources, in time of war and under declared state of emergency, are the property of the phylactery, to be bound as Her Imperial Majesty's duly designated representatives so assign, distribute, or delegate! And I am the delegate of this forage district! Properly sealed and notarized by the notary phylactic of the Third Corps under which this forage district falls…" The jenny shook a piece of parchment with three heavy wax seals flapping about in my face. She had been ranting for ten minutes while we both stood on the troll-bridge.

The four oddly still ghouls sat on the planking by her heels like well-trained hounds, two of them armed and barded, the other two just as death found them. They neither moved, nor drooled, nor eyed the two cautious guards of the Company at my back. Further behind the wroth necromancer and her pets, on solid roadway beyond the edge of the bridge was a full section of Imperial armsponies, rolling their eyes at their 'commander', yawning, and in general showing very little military discipline or respect for the necromancer. The Captain and her aide had broken contact and left me to listen to the message. The rest of the Trollbridge guard stood to arms beyond the bridge, almost in range to fight the ghouls off of my well-chewed carcass if she decided to stop yelling and start attacking.

She wore the badge of an imperial major, as was appropriate for the commander of a battalion, but would you give such a command to a teenaged witch? I tried to pick out from her unceasing deluge of word-salad the actual meaning underlying her increasing hysteria. The whites of her eyes bulged out of her sockets as if she was about to suffer an aneurysm, and the shaking, which she was trying to hide with put-on rage, suggested something else entirely.

"…and when I came here and found a pack of unlicensed poachers, a rabble of corpse-thieves and arrant vandals, I could not imagine what possible stratagem or conspiracy could underlay this offense against the Bride's law and justice! Where! Are! My! Bodies! I pai- we properly signed for this hunting preserve, our masters require the due and proper product of said preserve, and I will bloody well HAVE MY FLESH! The war-effort requires, nay, DEMANDS IT!" She panted, having finally exhausted her lung capacity, and from the sounds of it, hurt her throat in the process. Those last few sentences had been notably hoarse.

"What is your name, Major?" I asked. "I've been listening to you speak for fifteen minutes now, and all I've heard is a warehouse lot of entitlement and a dull, bureaucratic litany of woes, neither of which being in any sense my problem. Do I look like an Imperial officer to you?"

"Not an…" She backed up, suddenly letting the panic bubbling under her sweaty surface burst into the open air like so much super-heated steam. The two naked ghouls suddenly dropped like their strings had been cut, and the necromancer's raised left hoof began glowing. The two barded ghouls advanced to cover her with their armoured bodies. "White Rose! My sources were wrong, those villeins in Le Coppice sent me into a trap! Die, trait-"

All four of the ghouls sprouted arrows from their eye-sockets, the bow-mares hiding along the half-reeded banks of the Withies having crawled close enough to hit them at near point-blank range. A flight of pegasi with two warlock-gigs made a pass overhead, cowing the living Imperial section before it could scramble up onto the bridge to a reluctant defense of their mistress. She dropped like a stone along with her now-inanimate ghouls.

I turned to the blockhouse gate, which opened to reveal Broken Sigil, his deadpony remote signaling device in his teeth. "Well, that could have gone better," I sighed. I turned to the Imperial section, which was backing away in a defensive huddle. "Which one of you is the slack-ass non-com responsible for riding herding on this idiot? The one who should have kept her out of situations like this one?"

Two of the armsponies pushed forward a third, a donkey twice the age of the one laying insensate by my hooves as I walked forward. "That would be me, sir," the jack sighed.

"Could you tell me your name, and this idiot's while you're at it? Or would you like to pick up that piece of parchment and rant at me for another ten minutes, until my own warlocks GET DOWN HERE AND COLLECT OUR PRISONER?" I shouted over my shoulder at the one warlock-gig spiraling over the bridge. I could see Gibblets' damp ass hanging out of that rig. The pegasus drawing the gig turned it around and headed for the nearest stretch of flat meadow to land her charge.

"Sergeant-Major Whitesmith, sir. And she's Lieut-, er, Major Gorefyre. She's not always like this. We really are in a bind now." He walked up to the dead meat that used to be his mistress's ghouls, and prodded at them with his heavy-shod hooves. "What in Tartarus did this? Are these a new class of bane-fetish? They look like… well, kinda shoddily fletched arrows. Is it necessary for the charm to take?"

"No fetish, just the local product of the workshops of Mondovi. Don't judge them too harshly, most of them have only been fletching for a couple months."

"It took us a week to find these four for her. This district really is hunted-out." He looked up at me. "Please don't hurt her. I and some of the jacks owe her our lives. That- that was just how she thinks a Major has to act, in front of the troops. They do, you know. Most of them. The battalions are, well, not exactly like the line regiments." He looked back at his 'jacks', and sighed.

"Nothing like the line regiments."

Gibblets came stumbling down to the bridge, rubbing his thighs. "I'm too old to be riding in those torture-devices. Can't imagine why Bad Apple loves it so much." He waved at the other gig as its driver pumped his wings to rejoin the interrupted patrol up-country and eastwards.

"So, what have we here? Vintage Tambelonian blood-mage necromancer. And some of her portable batteries, properly ruined. Good work, ladies! Hmm, hmm." He looked up at me and the sergeant-major of the 93rd. "She'll be fine after the thaumic shock wears off. It's what happens when they tap straight from the bottle and then somepony goes and breaks the bottle while they're drinking it down. Lucky to not get a gullet full of bottle-shards, really."

The sergeant-major sighed in relief. We picked up the unconscious Gorefyre, and brought her into the blockhouse. Gibblets stayed with the necromancer. Whitesmith directed his section to stack arms and take a break in the meadow across the bypass road from the blockhouse. I suppose it's better to leave the impression with the troops that they're following orders when they slack off, than to tell them to look lively and then lose face when they goof off anyways.

"So, my commander had a real meeting to attend, so she left me here to figure out what y'all wanted, what you needed, and what we could give you. Your Major didn't act like she wanted to negotiate. Can I get something out of you? What does the 93rd want, Sergeant?"

"Meatpuppets. Lance-fodder. Somebody sold the Major a bill of goods, told her that this forage district was absolutely crawling with free-range undead. The El Doerado of shamblers. A protected reserve that supposedly two of the legates have been milking for the last half-decade. Story is that they come up here every winter and cull two thousand ripe ghouls from the herd. Completely outside of the proper forage system, of course. Not legal in the slightest. But since when have the legates ever cared for the Bride's bureaucracy and legalisms? No-one can even get one to show up in court, let alone acknowledge a writ or order in chancery. Only thing that ever seems to bring a legate up short are direct imperial orders."

I did not know whether to cold-cock him or break down laughing hysterically. Apparently the conflict was alarming to both friends and foe, because everypony sidled away from me and stared as if I might start foaming at the mouth.

I eventually mastered myself, and asked: "Caribou City was being deliberately farmed? Is that why this infestation has been left to fester here for seven years? It ate HALF THE PROVINCE! The Duc we have visiting up at Dance Hall is almost a pauper, he's basically been reduced to a petty warlord ruling over the few hamlets he can safely reach in one day's march up by Pepin City. And you say this was done on PURPOSE?"

"You know, it occurs to me, you haven't introduced yourself yet, sir?"

"Oh, sorry. Sawbones, surgeon and Annalist of the Black Company. And no, we don't work for the White Rose. Technically, we work for the Marklaird, although nopony's laid eyes on the legate since last fall. We cleared the White Rose from Rennet, and then followed them down the Road here. And well, there were these thousands and thousands of ravening undead chasing down and eating everypony, and making more undead. So we…"

"Seized them all for your own necromancers? Are you selling? Do you need someone to resell? We're cash-poor at the moment, but there's a lot of mages down on the frontlines flush with credit good back east, who are desperate for new suppliers. The Major is young, but she's got good control, it's why they promoted her and let her raise the 93rd. If she hadn't gotten ambitious, we'd be sweeping one of the central districts and probably doing pretty damn well. This was supposed to be the mother-lode. Where do you keep your dead stored?" He was suddenly eager, animated, sharp. I thought that I'd found the brains of the outfit, such as they were.

"Sergeant, I have some good news, and some bad news. The good news is, the Black Company's warlocks have absolutely no use for ghouls or other undead aside from certain experimental trials which we have already completed. The bad news…"

Some Other Pony's Broken Toys

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SBMS070

The 93rd's sergeant-major refused to believe my claims that we did not have holding-pens full of undead up some holler or behind a stockade up on the plateau, so I walked him back to Dance Hall to examine the trophy-display which they were assembling along the ramparts and curtain walls. The Company has a certain memetic inclination towards morbid display, but the display racks along the long rampart and over the crenelations of the Dance Hall proper went well beyond even our own excessive standards. Pairs of sword-stallions and earth-pony lancers were lashing together bundles of scorched bones to blunted lances and raising them up to rest in out-slit fence-post holes bored into the outer lip of the ramparts between each set of studes, and the unicorns were levitating blackened skulls to rest impaled upon the blunted points of each fetish. It might be a bit excessive, and the trophies obscured of lines of sight, but they were also rigging ropework so that the display could be pulled down in sections at the tug of a hoof. And some things require a bit of theatrical display.

A full mile of burnt bones lashed up along the bypass for the edification of every passing teamster, traveler and voyageur was worth a little obscurity of view over a field which hadn't seen a shambler in weeks. The whole of Dance Hall, her ramparts, her glacis, her firm curtain-walls and sturdy construction, was already becoming a thing past, a fortification oriented and aimed entirely at a threat which was in the process of extermination as the two of us walked, yard by yard, fetish by fetish rising balefully into the air above us.

Once they were done here, we had more than enough for the ramparts along the main Road, and the work-details had already filled the skies above Dance Hall with her own scorched baubles. And, more practically, the surface of the inner ditch along the whole had been covered with a tiny, horrible forest of detached, blackened antlers, so that anything that fell into or charged through the mucky bottom of the ditch would find itself either impaled on bone or tangled in the macabre footing. I climbed up a nearby ramp onto the ramparts and waved Whitesmith up to the edge to see the full effect.

The view from the top of the rampart finally put an end to his sales-pitch and attempts to work the 'truth' out of me about where we were hiding our captures. As the yards trotted by, it was increasingly plain where our captures were planted.

"We burned them, of course. The stench of rotting carrion was intolerable, even to those meat-eaters among the ranks. Not that the smell of roasting rotten meat was any better, no matter what incense we burned with them, but at least that was a passing stench. And it made the handling of the carrion more simple when it was just ash and bone. Our ponies with farming experience are sharply divided on whether the ashes will be agriculturally useful as fertilizer. The one faction insists that we are mostly fertilizer walking, in differing configurations than those useful in the fields. The other holds quite firmly that the equine body contains far too many poisons, minor in day-to-day life and the meals of the day, and yet concentrated by the life lived, the foods eaten, leave a residue in the body which, burnt and separated from those elements released by the flame and in the smoke, is concentrated further yet, and that the resultant ash will kill a field dead, poison the soil and the underlying earth. If we stay here through the next growing season, I look forward to the experiment. I've already got some test plots in mind. I've always wanted to play farmer, if only for a season."

He remained silent, and we approached the sally-port on the south side of Dance Hall, guarded by a pair of Company armsponies, their attention diverted from their usual task of keeping an eye on their section of the glacis to the west, to yours truly and my guest. I led him through the sally-port, into the now-in-retrospect grossly over-built star-fortress. What would we or our successors in possession of Dance Hall be defending against in this position? She was perfectly positioned to defend little Mondovi, and the main logistical route into Pepin from points north and east, true. But the long rampart was aimed directly at the mostly-demolished ruins of Caribou City, and awkwardly laid out parallel to the actual direction of future threats, from the trollbridge and the bypass road towards Le Coppice and the rest of the Riverlands. I shared none of these concerns with Whitesmith. He was, in a sense, working for the enemy, or an enemy.

We could see what we could do about that, of course.

Nopony has the space, or resources to make the space, to build full-scale dedicated conference chambers in a compact fortress like Dance Hall. The main mess hall doubled for that, according to the Company's standards. This is where I found the Captain, the Lieutenant, and the Duc and his lieutenants. I was uncertain as to how far discussions had gotten, given the Captain's round-trip diversion out to the Trollbridge, and the still-open question of how recently the Duc and his party had arrived. I arched a brow at the Lieutenant, whose attention was not riveted upon the Duc, unlike that of the Captain, who clearly had no time for my usual nonsense. The Lieutenant walked over to the mess-hall door, and we conferred quietly, so as to not disrupt the ongoing discussion.

"Status?"

"A bit of a scuffle, we had to get rough. The necromancer is in custody, Gibblets has her in hoof. This guy is her sergeant-major, Whitesmith. We have serious problems. From the Imperial point of view, our operations were highly counterproductive. You know how they have hordes of hungry necromancers with the Imperial corps? Apparently ghouls are a major cash crop for outfits like the 93rd Rear Support Battalion. And Caribou City was somepony's hidden ghoul-plantation, their stash."

The Lieutenant looked like she was going to vomit. She came out into the hallway and closed the door into the conference behind her. I let her chew on my message for a moment. The sergeant-major was slumped against the wall outside the mess hall, lost in his own horrification, and not truly paying attention to his surroundings.

"We just burned up an empress's ransom in free-range military resources as far as the Bride's soldiery are concerned," I concluded.

"But! It was destroying an entire province! They were getting ready to burst into the neighboring districts of the northlands! How could they possibly justify this sort of uncontrolled destruction?"

"Supposedly there have been harvest battalions up here every winter, to claim a double-tithe of the shamblers while they're slow and lodgy from the cold. Probably the main reason it's been a slow-motion apocalypse instead of a sudden explosion, despite all the activity we've seen down here during the warm months. They might have taken as many as ten thousand shamblers out of the province over the past half-dozen winters, if the numbers I've been given are at all close to accurate. Look, as bad as it was here when we arrived, there are at least five wholy dead provinces along the river on either side of the Bonne, pony, ass, and caribou. I'm starting to suspect that we've gravely underestimated just how little of a shit the liches that command the Bride's armies give about civilians, their living conditions, or physical well-being."

I sighed.

"I think.." I began to speculate, "When the Bride took the provinces away from the legates and made them exclusively military in responsibility and authority, they must have had their priorities hrm, rearranged. They're not ponies, they're dead things. Could somepony appeal to their fellow-feeling, their empathy? If there's anything they'd empathize with, it would be the ghouls. And as for self-interest, the jealousy of ownership – the Bride took away their pretty little dressage dolls, and told them to satisfy themselves with tin soldiers. What do these vicious little deadcolts care what happens to their living sisters' playthings now?"

"Somepony ought to do something-"

"You know what the Annals say about that sort of thinking. We're not a crusade, or a constabulary. I'd say we're well on our way to attracting more than enough attention, wasn't that the purpose of this campaign? Somepony's going to want to buy us off before we cause more damage. We need to prove ourselves capable of being bought off. Belling on about morality and civic good neighborliness is not the battle-cry of the true mercenary. It'll make the paymasters suspicious. The sort of suspicious which brings with it siege-trains and swarms of warlocks."

Her eyes darted to the conference going on inside the mess-hall. "We can't tell the Duc about this. I don't know how the Imperial Army is keeping this sort of thing quiet, but the civilians don't seem to even be aware any of it, or we'd have had an earful by now."

"Well, if we don't have an interest in trumpeting the injustices to the skies, who else would? This is the sort of imperium where newsponies get hung from scaffolds or forcibly recruited into the ranks of the shambling dead. In the meantime, the little necromantic Major offers an opportunity for the Company to appear reasonable."

She gave me the stink-eye, well-earned I must admit. "And how is that, mastermind? I don't want to recruit a ghoul collector or her band of thugs into the Company. Everypony knows that's your solution to every problem that can't be killed away."

"No, not recruitment. Letting her recruit. She came up here to collect ghouls. We still have slopes full of free-range shamblers, and a couple pockets over by Caribou City. We combine the honeypots and cryfoal charms with her reported capacity for dominating and controlling ghouls, and the 93rd gets a reasonable profit for their harvest season, we get a much more bloodless season of cleanup, and if everypony pretends that this wasn't actually an enormous treasury teeming with ghouls, everything gets smoothed out with the Imperials and the locals and the Duc."

We both turned to look down at the sergeant-major, who had started paying attention to our conversation about halfway through, still sitting slumped up against the wall. He looked properly terrified, but I chose to reinforce that terror.

"You do realize there's an enraged noblejack inside that door whose duchy has been half-eaten by some damned thing's hunting preserve. He's young, hormonal, about forty hooves wide and almost two hundred tall, all of it bone and muscle. Noblejacks don't grow up fat and flaccid when they spend their entire adolescence fighting ghouls and trying their best to keep their patrimony from being devoured one farm-pony or shopkeep at a time. I could barely lift that great-axe he carries as a personal weapon. Whitesmith. You want to be the tree being hewn, or do you want to be a hoof on the axe-haft? You might have the Bride's parchment behind you, but her regiments aren't here to enforce that scrap, and it's nobody who knows what happens next except those in that room and out here in this hallway. The Duc is right behind that door, and he's gonna be mad if we don't have something to spin."

The sergeant-major nodded weakly, his eyes not leaving mine.

"Now, how much influence do you have over your officer? Any sergeant-major ought to be able to twist his officer around his hoof if he knows what's good for her. You know what's good for your Major?"

The ass got up off his flank, and nodded, slightly more firmly.

The Changing Of The Guard

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SBMS071

I stood out on the main ravelin, the great sally port gates behind me to my left and right. There was a skeleton crew guarding the gates, a single section of mixed unicorns and earth ponies holding the great earthwork and its wedge of curtain-wall firing platforms that dominated the killing-pens between the two sets of double gates. Many ghouls had expired upon the glacis around me, in front of the ravelin and to other side along the long ramparts. Due to the crafted geography of Dance Hall, and some tricks of the acoustical environment, the wide spear-blade revetment of the ravelin had attracted more undead than the simple statistics of hunger and Brownian motion would have dictated. The two additional spike-bastions looming by the ravelin on either side created a great tridental killing-zone, and when the firing platforms were fully mared, it was a device for the industrial slaughter of the shambling undead. Once the curtain walls were in place, it had been impenetrable to undead attack. Its defenses were never even seriously addressed by attack, let alone tested. I'm told a few ghouls found the sally-draws, but were quickly dispatched by pike from the curtain-walls above.

This evening, the gates were open, and the way clear for the vexellations returning from their clearance operations in the remnants of the distant city. The sections marched wearily up the battered remnants of the battered Road, and came across the glacis to the grand ravelin, to pass on either side through the sally ports. Once through the gates, their path would lead them over the great drawbridge into Dance Hall proper, the showers, the mess halls, and eventually, the still-temporary barracks within the palisaded interior.

Dance Hall, her glacis, her ditch, her ramparts, bastions, curtain-wall firing platforms and grand ravelin - it represented the savings of the Company, the expenditure of almost all the profits of our adventure in Rennet, and some of our reserves to boot. Oh, a great deal of that expense was the support of the destitute and the desperate along our lines of communication, our employment of the ponies of Pepin and the succor of their dependents, but all of that was in aid of the construction of this fighting fortress, and our extermination-project, the clearance of central Pepin and its deceased river-port.

Had it all been a terrible mistake, a monumental waste of resources, of lives and deniers?

The tail-end of the Lieutenant's day-shift passed over the great drawbridge, and the evening shift moved out like the turning of the tide, ponies in darksight helms sallying out along the planked temporary roadway across the glacis toward the firm if somewhat decayed surface of the Bride's Road towards extinct Caribou City. They carried with them fresh, unactivated honeypots, and new orders. The extermination had been put on hold, and the sudden new plan was to begin herding and directing the remnant undead into sweep-zones. We hadn't yet talked over the Major of the 93rd - I was waiting on a report from Gibblets on her status - but I was fairly certain from the Lieutenant's working-over of the 93rd's sergeant-major that they were the right kind of desperate and exposed. His mistress might be mad, but she was mad in a self-interested fashion, like all the horrors that had made Tambelon their death-soaked play-pen.

Gibblets followed one of the night-shift sections as they marched over the drawbridge and the great ditch, peeling off and up the stairs onto the great fighting platform upon which I stood, thinking, waiting for him. As he passed through the heavy gate that in time of attack was thrown to seal off the ravelin's fighting-platform from the sally-complex behind it, I could hear the distant music of the Mondovi dance-bands as they struck up the evening tune. They didn't play the night through anymore like that memorable midsummer voyageurs'-ball that gave Dance Hall her name, but the musicians of Mondovi were kind enough to give us a few sets of song in the evening hours on most nights. I think they were touched by the naming of the fortress, and had gotten into the spirit of things.

With Gibblets came the relief for the ravelin's defending section, a doubled section for the night-shift. The day-shift locked down the sally complex as they passed, and we stood there silently, until the creaking roar of the drawbridge being pulled up into the evening air announced louder than any trumpet fanfare the end of the changing of the guard. It was now night, and horrors stalked the empty, charred fields of central Pepin. All good foals must be away behind strong walls, and best be tucked away snug in their bedding, to sleep safe in the knowledge that the horrors which stalked outside their walls were dragon-eyed, fierce, and on the hunt for foal-eaters.

"So, she's not as crazy as you said she was. Squirrelly, true, all blood-mages are, even Feufollet. The meat diet does bad things to a pony, makes them unstable and aggressive. But you can say the same about griffins, and we get along with them by and large. Or yours truly, to be honest, although most of the time I don't gobble up my bacon and pork where you squeamish equines can watch and belly-ache and pretend to retch at my breakfast."

"What about the collapse? Do any permanent damage?"

"What do you want, witch doctor, a diagnosis? That's your department. I think she'll be fine. Just caught the back-lash from the Company curse when the bowmares put down her thralls. She might be a little sensitive to our presence for a while, but so long as it doesn't happen again, I think she'll be fine. And if it does happen again, we probably ought to put a few of those bolts right through her brisket while we're at it. It was an assault, and these Imperials have their pride."

"We sort of need her, if we're going to clean up our little strategic mis-step here. You get the full story on that?"

"What, that we've been destroying strategic war materiel? That what civilians look at and call the end of the world, is to a pack of damnable necromancers a sustainable thaumic resource? Yeah, I figured it out from the ranting and the weeping. Our Major Gorefyre is quite the desperate little witchling. Sounds like she spent all of her credit and what little good name she had to purchase this 'forage district', and is now stretched out spread-eagled on the precipice."

"Yeah, Whitesmith admitted that her troops are mostly depot-sweepings working for the prospect of future wages. The two of them are deep in debt to their own troops, the bureaucrats they bribed, the Major's fellow necromancers, and presumably the Bride's tax-ponies as well. She's managed to edge even closer to bankruptcy than the Company, I didn't think that was possible. After all, we stand on the bulwarks of the Company's nest-egg. And it's a damnable white elephant. A great investment, if Caribou City was a rich city full of potential plunder or tribute. Or aimed at Le Coppice, or some other axis from which we could expect actual threats."

"What do you want, we should pick up Dance Hall and move it to our southern flanks? I keep hearing about these great giants of the ancient north and their farming-rakes. Think we could hire a few legends to pick up our bastions and toss them onto the banks of the Withies?"

"Where are the Blue Ox and the Bunyip when you need them, eh? No, that's why we need the 93rd, to get some cash flow going. We haven't completely exterminated the ghouls. Some clusters here and there."

"Not exactly a diasporic horde anymore, though. And I know you're not proposing we feed any villages to the shamblers to fill out our numbers."

"Merciful Peacock Angel, no! Don't even say such things aloud! You might give the Spirit ideas." I eyed the stars emerging from the rushing clouds overhead. Fall was well under way, and the darker months brought darker dreams. She had been sweet ever since the Voyageurs' Ball, but I dreaded the return of those terrible… well. "But we need to launder what's left of the shamblers through Gorefyre and her connections. That means turning the little blood-dabbler up sweet. What's it going to take, Gibblets?"

The ancient goblin thought in the darkness, the peppy rhythm of the accordion and bull fiddle in the distant town square retiring in favor of a mournful banjo and mandolin tune. "She sounds lonely. Damn near latched onto me once she realized I was a warlock and not a construct. There's some story there. I don't know an awful lot about how they train necromancers round these parts, but I can recognize lonesome when I see it. She's got the shakes, too. I'd guess she's seen some bad shit."

"Whitesmith said some things, makes me think they had a bad season last year. The 93rd is something they scraped together, their original unit must be a shambles. Might be looking for reassurance, a new home."

"Really? We're going to do that again?"

"Lieutenant all but forbade me. Probably wouldn't work, anyways. Gorefyre's got her own little unit, however artificial and dysfunctional. We maybe might want to make them an auxiliary worth the name, though. How do we take a military unit composed of a hoof-full of spell-shocked survivors and depot-scrapings, assembled to forage among the free-range shamblers for undead thralls, and build up a bit of esprit de corps?"

"Example is the school of equinekind, and they will learn at no other."

"Pfft, happy is the pony who can learn at another's expense. Think we could run them through the wringer without them mutinying or catching wind that we're being sneaky about it?"

"If what you're saying about this sergeant-major is true, they're shaky but more than a little desperate. You'd be surprised what ponies like that are capable of, if you give them a golden road out of their troubles."

"Deniers the carrot, so they don't mind discipline the stick?"

"And in the end, the discipline will bind them stronger than the deniers."

A distant fiddle sang through the darkness, and it was as if the fiddler and her band were standing upon that ravelin-stage and playing just for the night-guard.

A Jaunt In The Country

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SBMS072

A week later, I was walking up the Road towards the Plateau Palisades. The caribou of Gustavbank had taken over their lost neighbors' fields, and plowed in dozens, even hundreds of acres of winter wheat in the shortening work-days of the aging season. The ponies of Guilliame's Ravin and her foreshortened skirt of straggling walled hamlets had likewise gone on a small grain rampage, filling fallow fields with rye, wheat, rapeseed and other late-season crops. They were making up for lost time with those minor crops which could be grown over the cool season, on a hyperactive tear since the shamblers had been beaten back from their walls and doorsteps. Fill every last moment with sixty seconds distance run…

What do you do after the world fails to end? You pick up your plow, and you turn over the fallow forty, or four hundred, and when you're done with that, help your neighbor plow hers. Pepin in the hollows and the gorges was coming back to life.

The Plateau Palisades were even more empty than the last time I had been up there, many of the pegasi had moved their kit down to the expanding barracks at Dance Hall, no more inclined to extend their travel-distances than those of us who had to hoof it. The Palisades were now occupied by the foals, the recuperating wounded, and a corporal's guard, along with the new recruits and their sergeant. There weren't enough new recruits to really rate more than a single training-sergeant. Actually, it wasn't even a sergeant, they had left Stomper to train the adult recruits, since she had to be up here to keep herd on the foals anyways. So the commanding officer of the Palisades was now a corporal brevetted to sergeant for the duration.

When I came through the gate, the recruits were storming about the marshaling yards, lancing at the quintains and hacking at posts with blunted axes. Some of the foals were kibitzing, and some of them were having a go at the training-equipment themselves. The Dodger was leading a half-section of the orphans in a dash back and forth between swinging quintains, clipping each with a heavy hoof as they passed, knocking the casks back and forth between them as they passed on alternating sides. Not exactly the prescribed use of the equipment, but it was a sort of training-play I could endorse. As I watched the river of foals roar by, the marshaling-yard rang with the bursting of a quintain, and water sprayed across a wall.

One of the new recruits pulled around out of his successful charge, his intact lance darkened with the quintain's watery life-blood. He looked sheepish at having destroyed his target, as if he was more embarrassed by his success than proud of an attainment.

"Damnit, Carrot, that's the third in three days. Yes, we know, you've got it down cold. Stop breaking my equipment! Go find the coopers' tools and put that thing back together and re-fill it from the wells." The scrawny orange stallion shoved his lance into its sheath by his side, and grabbed the burst cask and dragged it off towards a building across the way.

"You know, Stomper, that's actually the purpose of the exercise. You can't blame the colt for doing what he's supposed to be doing."

"What are you lot looking at? Get to it! Hup hup hup! I can blame him because he's an idiot and he's messing with unit morale. He doesn't belong here, he knows everything before I can teach ‘em. Something about a town militia and training days. Or maybe he's just a natural."

"Make up your mind, Stomper. Is he an idiot or a natural?" I scoffed.

"Why can't he be both? Either way, I want him out of my mane so that I can get the rest of these dorks trained properly. When can we go down into the Hall? We're growing moss up here. From what I hear, it isn't even dangerous anymore downcountry. The locals are making noise about maybe getting their militia reassembled. Everypony's got experience coming out of their ears, after all. The 'unorganized militia' in this duchy are only a bit of organization away from being a proper lot. I mean, look at Carrot Cake, the colt could out-charge half the cohorts, and he's just an alicorn-damned baker! Sawbones, take him off my hooves, please! And find out for me when I can get back to my unit! Dodger! Leave off that noise, and get the brooms! Hey! Hey! HEY! Form ranks, you lot!"

I left her to her drill-sergeanting, and went off to find Rye Daughter and my recovery-wards. I found her with the booze, diluting fresh antiseptic supplies, looking bored out of her skinny mind. Every time I laid eyes on her, she had grown another half-hoof, it seemed.

"Rye, have you been eating properly? You're practically a hide pulled over a skeleton. Come on, leave that be, let's get some food in you."

"Boss! Wie gehts? Good to see you! Are we going home now?" She leapt up and corked her cask, and put away the flasks she had been adulterating. We did a quick pass through the wards, as she hoofed out the various patients, and gave a run-down on their individual condition and status. I had left far too much on her shoulders, but at least she had the oxen with her. Two of the ambulance-drivers had turned out to be excellent orderlies, and had helped Rye keep order and track of the patients throughout the long summer months. And both had turned out to be far better at their letters and general organization than I had ever expected of them. Tribalist of me, I know, but then there was the counter-example of Tiny to keep in mind. Nopony thinks of the great hulking oxen, and expects them to harbour the quiet potential for organization, literacy, and detail-work that both Skinflint and Angus now proudly displayed.

Rye Daughter continued to prod me as we ate at the half-empty commissary which rattled around in the now-overbuilt mess hall that Charleyhorse and his knight kept running for the few Company ponies left in the Palisades. "Rye, if we took you all out of the Palisades, who would show the flag up here? We could come back up here one day and find the ghouls holding our own gates against us, and wouldn't we look silly then? No, you are all protecting our vital lines of communication with the world!"

"Don' be silly, Boss. We're all going stir-crazy. I've heard so much about the rest of the province! Stomper's been letting us patrol the edge of the plateau and some of the fields around here, but we want to explore! Nopony's even seen a ghoul in two months up here!"

I laughed and put her off, but one of the reasons I was up here was to evaluate the posts, and to prepare to shut down services and consolidate to Dance Hall for the end of the campaign season. I invited Rye to join me for the trot up to Little Ridings, which was going to be shut down this trip. She enjoyed the chance to stretch her lengthened legs, and the bison summer weather. I noticed a shadow following us as I looked back a few miles after we left the Palisades, and looked up to find a little thestral floating above us as we moved up the Road. I bellowed at her, and Cherie circled within shouting distance.

"Cherie, where is your knight? What are you doing out here by yourself?"

"Monsieur! Throat Kicker's somewhere… around here. Maybe dat cloud over there? We're patrolling! We never see anyting, but we patrol, eve'yday! We're bein' bien!" She laughed at herself, and did a little loop-de-loop over our heads.

"Boss, don't mind Cherie. She's always here and there. Throat Kicker flies her wings off chasing after her. Look, over there. Here she comes."

"Damn you, batling! Don't leave me behind like that! Come back over here, and leave the Annalist be!"

"Ah, corporal, we don't mind. It's a lovely day, and we could do with some company. Going up to Little Ridings. Cherie's Equuish is impressive, if I didn't know she hadn't a word before the spring, I'd think she's been speaking it for years."

"Yeah, well, she's a little sponge. Puts her teeth into it, and just sucks it up. Don't swear around her, seriously. Or talk about matters not for foals' ears."

"What, like making the beast with-" and the little thestral continued to chirp cheerfully about things that I certainly didn't want Rye Daughter hearing about.

"No, no, no! We've talked about this, no, stop!" yelped the overmatched pegasus, eyeing my furrowed brow and dangerous glare.

"Should I be talking to sergeants about loose talk around foals? Are you letting her hang around listening to barracks-room talk like that?"

"Sawbones, you can't keep her out of the barracks! I turn around, and she's disappeared and found her way into the rafters somewhere, or something like that. She lurks! Constantly!" Throat Kicker let her barrel droop from her wings as if she was being held up by her pinions overhead, a picture of defeat.

"Cherie! Are you minding your knight properly? You can't be doing this to poor Kicker! Look at the mare. Be a good pouliche."

"Oui, Sawbones, I will essayer."

The company made the long miles pass quickly. And truly, there wasn't much to do in Little Ridings. I met with Dancing Shadows, who was down from Rennet and Hydromel, and we talked about the headache of the discovery of the 'hunting preserve' situation, and I explained the new arrangement with the 93rd Rear Support Battalion, which had turned out to be an easy fit with the clearance sweeps. They were assembling a first coffle of thralls while I was up-country, and hopes were that we'd start seeing some cash flow from that direction soon.

Our credit situation in the Northlands had improved somewhat. The convalescent houses in Hydromel were properly funded, and Dancing Shadows even suggested that we might be seeing some of the Marklaird's oft-promised back-wages, which never seemed to actually materialize. The legate's bankers had spent three whole seasons trying to treat our battle-seizures of the White Rose's cash reserves as advances against our contracted payments promised by the legate. It took threats to bring action against the Marklaird's agents in the Bride's courts to scotch that one, and they had played legal chicken until the last damn moment. Dancing Shadows was fairly positive that the agents had been profiting by illicitly lending out the escrowed funds for their own enrichment.

We met with the corporal's guard that was holding the gate at the blockhouse at Little Ridings, as well as the teamsters who would be hauling the Company's effects out of the encampment. The last of the Company's materials has been shipped out of the Menomenie base and down to the Palisades or Dance Hall a month earlier. This was now the northernmost outpost of the Company, and I was shutting it down. There was a little celebration that night, but it was a little dry and dull without the house bands of Dance Hall to add that little note of liveliness that I had grown accustomed. At least Rye Daughter and Cherie were there to make everypony smile.

In the morning, we emptied out the blockhouse into the waiting wagons as the guard awaited the Beans and their militia-officers. They took the keys to the gate, and loaded up our spare wagons with the fruit of the rich harvest the furthest northern fringe of Pepin had enjoyed during our summer campaign season. I hitched myself to one of the overloaded wagons in tandem with one of the guards-turned carters, and we rolled southward with our Company on our backs. Our escort was a small thestral and her frazzled knight overhead, and a half-grown caribou doe pronking in the vanguard, and all was right with the world for an afternoon.

I Spy With My Little Eye

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SBMS073

When the Little Ridings convoy pulled into the Plateau Palisades, we found the marshaling-yards already crowded with a sizable contingent of merchant and tinker wagons collecting for the expected caravan downcountry. It was more of a formality here in the autumn than it had been back in the early summer, but random undead in the gorges were still a threat, and sensible merchants didn't borrow trouble; they knew the difference between chasing risk and courting death.

We left the former commander of Little Ridings settling into her temporary role as train-master, negotiating with the merchants and tinkers their placement in tomorrow's train, and telling off the carters whose wagons contained materials to be stored in the Palisades over to the unloading docks. My cart was included in that group, and Rye Daughter and I helped Charleyhorse shift our wagonload of produce and hay into the commissary pantries. It was enough to build up a mighty appetite.

Stomper found us as Rye had sunk into a calorie coma, and I was picking my teeth with a bit of straw. She hadn't been kidding about kicking Carrot Cake downcountry and out of training. He stood sheepishly behind her, his kit sitting in a duffel on his narrow back under a folded caparison, which was the full extent of his barding. As Stomper yapped at me, my eyes drew across the Company banner-lance, which was sitting neglected at the fore of the mess hall, unused since the last induction ceremony. The modern Company barely brought out the banner except for ceremonial purposes, we weren't exactly a charge-with-the-standard-held-high-in-the-fore sort of outfit. We hadn't been even back in Bitter Ambrosia's day, when that was the bloody, futile custom.

"Tartarus-fire, Stomper, you win. I need somepony to kip the standard down to Dance Hall, anyways. All it's doing up here is gathering dust and just waiting until Charleyhorse trips and spills a pot of stew over it. Cake, you think you can hump that little alicorn-damned tree downcountry without dragging it in the dust on the way?"

His green, anxious eyes widened at the sudden honor. "Sir, yes sir! I'll do my best!"

"Don't call me sir, I work for a living. Rye, wake up! We have a great deal to do, and I have an early start tomorrow." She grumbled sleepily, but got up as I pushed Carrot Cake over to the pikestaff, and showed him how to roll the banner around the staff and carry it without trailing behind him. He followed us back to the recovery wards, where I pointed him to a spare cot, and Rye and I put together a load of antiseptic and other supplies to be chucked into a light cart for the expanded infirmary downcountry.

In the morning, I quickly went through the list of recovering armsponies in the wards, and divided the malingerers into classes. The more-damaged ones got assigned to the Palisades guard, and I discovered that Octavius's rank had elevated him to command of the Palisades by his mere presence. I told him to go let Stomper know she was back to training full-time, and relished the petty revenge for her having dumped her problem student on my hooves. The rest of the goldbrickers got volunteered to be the standard's honour guard for the march downcountry, and I had them suit up appropriately.

When we went out to the marshaling yards, the new trainmaster was struggling, apparently having let her skills get fuzzy and green while she was rusticating up at Little Ridings. I rolled my eyes at Fiddlestrings, but left the problem in her hooves. They can't improve if you're always helping them. I spent my time playing drill sergeant with the goldbrickers. I looked at Carrot Cake, and realized he was under-dressed for his new temporary role. I went over to my kit, and grabbed my chamfron and peytral. They looked no more ludicrous on him than they had on me, but at least he had the height for the peytral, which didn't threaten to drag in the dust like it did on my frame.

"There, it'll do until you can buy something that actually fits. Assuming we ever get paid again."

"Thank you, sir!"

"Just don't get blood all over ‘em."

I noticed a plump, dirty-grey mare standing idly among the tinker-carts eyeing Carrot Cake as he unrolled the standard and hoisted it above his head to demonstrate to me that he could carry in style. I guess even scrawny orange colts can get the mares once they're in uniform.

Once the earth-pony corporal got her train ready to move, I gave the gold-brick honour guard the cadence, and we marched forward in the van, Carrot Cake with the banner held high in the morning breeze, the goldbrickers in formation, and yours truly in the traces of my supply-cart. Rye Daughter stood beside the gate, fuming at me for not letting her come with. The rest of the convoy, with the merchants and tinkers in the fore, rolled out of the Palisades, and made our way down the Road into the gorges. The dingy, plump earth pony who had been staring at Carrot Cake fell beside my cart by the sheer luck of the draw, and she continued to stare at the recruit with the Company standard in the van as we rolled over the lip of the plateau. She didn't respond to any of my conversational cues; it would be a long trot if she was going to be like that.

At least the cliffside graffiti was gone – I had mentioned it to Bad Apple, and she had obligingly burnt the cliff surface until the rock had scorched or cracked away, and at most you could see a bit of white-wash here and there that might have said "Pepin live" if you squinted hard under all of the char. The Company was no longer dropping off emergency supplies for the hamlets along the Road; the way was clear for tinkers and merchants, and some of the hamlets were starting to accumulate enough to pay their own freight. I saw a tinker drop out of the convoy to haggle with the does of Gustavbank, and smiled at the return of normal business.

Cheaper for the Company that way, anyways.

About half-way through the walled hamlets southeast of Guilliame's Ravin, I noticed that the tinker-mare's dingy colors were starting to run in her sweat – just a bit. Sloppy work, and she was a strong, pastel blue under that coat-treatment. Might be able to sell it as just "road dirt", but it was clear she was dying her mane as well, which showed signs of a deliberately rough trim-back, probably to kill a distinctive curl to it. I didn't say anything, but resolved to keep an eye on her if she kept on with us all the way to Dance Hall.

She did, staring at Carrot Cake's flank the entire time, in between side-glances that to my eyes looked like a trained observer evaluating the conditions of the duchy as we went. I don't know if she was using a put-on obsession with the lanky colt as a cover for her spying, or if there was something about him that was distracting her, but her alleged job as a ‘tinker' certainly wasn't occupying her time. She barely looked at the market-fairs being opened up for her fellow merchants and tinkers at Guillaime's Ravin and a half-dozen of the hamlets strung out along the bottomlands, except to assess the state and fitness of the townsfolk and farmers streaming in to meet the travelling salesponies.

As spies went, she wasn't the greatest. I had made her definitively by the time we reached Mondovi, and she had to peel out along with the remainder of the civilians, most of them Mondovan locals, among whom she stood out like a giraffe at a buffalo tribal council. I left her to try and do her job shorn of all protective coloration, and cheerfully followed the Company standard as Carrot Cake carried it through the main gates at the head of the march.

Brass's Ring

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I found the Captain being pestered by an expensive-looking lunatic in a nice hat and an impressive pea-coat. She was pacing back and forth in the main hall, eyeing the operations room across the way and fuming while the earth pony in the pea-coat went on and on about - tin mining and bolides and ‘atypical lode deposits'. She brightened upon laying eyes upon me, and before I could talk to her about my reports from upcountry and about maybe moving the foals and recruits down to Dance Hall, she jumped all over the opportunity to drape her annoyance across my withers.

I was forcibly introduced to Brass Tones, a land owner and an obsessive with mining interests in the duchy. Well, I should say, his family had the mining interests, Tones from his mark clearly had extraneous interests that aligned oddly with those lost mines in central Pepin. His continual jabber about the Deep Mines complex was technical and annoying, but the general gist was that there was an improbable deposit of tin, copper, lead and zinc in a tangle of gorges beside the river between Pepin City's agricultural district and the ruins of Caribou City. It had supported a dozen mining communities in that hill-complex by the river, all of which had been evacuated by the third year of the infestation, those that hadn't become part of the infestation. Second cohort was starting to clear the region as part of the agreement with the Duc to open up the lines of communication with his isolated corner of Pepin, and to relieve the still-pressed farming hamlets under the Duc's protection.

Major Gorefyre and her ponies had been working with the third cohort to perfect cooperative techniques in ghoul capture and thrallification in the pacified regions. I realized that I wasn't going to get anything else done with Brass Tones sounding in my ears, so I didn't so much as interrupt his continuous flow of chatter, as guide it towards the 93rd's camp and stockades.

They had set up shop on the far side of the Trollbridge, building a flimsy palisade protecting some tents that would be damn cold come the onrushing cold weather, and a rambling series of stockades and pens stretching eastwards up the gorge of the Withies on the far side of the watershed. There were already a half-dozen pens full of undead laying on their hocks, motionless, being guarded in a subtly anxious fashion by a half-dozen armsponies of the 93rd. You could see that these slackers wanted to slack off as was their nature, but the proximity of a good hundred and fifty pony-eating monsters was not conductive to the playing of cards and sleeping on post. Those rows of silent rotting shamblers doing nothing but staring stolidly at the walls of their pens even silenced Brass Tones for a few moments.

Each thrall had an iron nail driven into their brainstem or spinal column - you could see the lacquered fetish attached to the nail-head projecting from their tattered manes like macabre filly-bows. I thought of what would happen if the thralls rubbed their fetish-heads off of their nails, and shuddered in horrified anticipation. Supposedly they were reliably docile in this state, and could even be sent into battle, used to assault heavy fortifications, and not run out of control, but that seemed like a story for the stage to me.

The stockades were about a quarter full, but they could build more if they needed it. The Major and most of her troops were out with the third cohort when we visited, I was told that there was an expedition up the nearby gorges to clear out the Crystal Cave which kept getting infested, as the thought was this would be good practice for the Deep Mine complex. They were expected back tomorrow, it wasn't a short hike up the hollows. It probably wasn't worth the expected yield, excepting the opportunity for training in tight quarters.

The ongoing Imperial domestication project was an unstated element of that training, of course. Smooth Draw was handling that project for now, but would trade off with Fuller Falchion when the time came to clear the Deep Mines. Which we would tell Brass Tones when he stopped talking as if we were doing all of this out of the goodness of our black hearts.

As we walked back from the thrall pens across Trollbridge, which had acquired her own collection of grotesque charred decorations while I was on my country jaunt with the fillies, I continued my conversation with Brass Tones, or rather, I terminated his monologue, and initiated a dialogue.

"Mr. Tones, do we look to you like a charitable organization? a public works or volunteer service association? Do you think these guards' barding and arms are provided by the open hooves of an altruistic world? We are a mercenary association of armsponies, united by our own self-interest and the ongoing expectation of recompense. We are not the Perchertons, nor even if we were, would we agree to secure your alleged property without proper remuneration. Have you talked to the Duc about this alleged ownership interest? I've been told by his ponies that these were extensive and… unconsolidated workings back when they were in operation." I had been told no such thing, but my mama didn't raise no gormless zebra, I know how these kinds of operations work in normal economic conditions.

"Of course I've talked to the Duc! He's a reasonable donkey, knows which side of his toast is taxable. And the Coppers have bought out the other owners. Most of them were glad to dump their ghoul-infested white elephants. We believed in the future of the Deep Mines region." Probably at sous to the denier, I thought.

"And who was saying anything about charity? We're a proper respectable operation, of course we'd be funding the clearances. I can't offer cash deniers, all of our capital will be tied up in retrieving the surviving miners and making sure they don't starve their first year in the digs. There were massive losses, of lives and sunk capital, when the monsters overran our mines and the towns. The bankers almost made us write the whole thing off, take an enormous loss, and look to other opportunities. But I repeat, I believe in this project! There are no other sources of tin within two thousand miles of Rime! Do you know how rare this sort of thing is? It's a madness and a puzzlement that the Deep Mine Deposit is where it is, madness I tell you! Every other such vein is in old, old mountain country, rugged and on the back-end of feral nowhere!"

I looked around at the blasted wasteland we had made of central Pepin, and the barbaric display of the trophies along the ramparts in the distance, and asked, "What about Pepin today does not qualify as the feral back-end of nowhere?"

"Well, yes, ghoul infestation. It's apparently easier to exterminate the undead than to take a mine in deepest Bullevia fifteen hundred miles from the nearest port and get tin ore shipped cross-country."

"Mr. Tones, the Company is the only reason that there is any sort of ease to this extermination campaign. The Imperials have spent seven years nibbling around the problem, taking a tithe of the herd, leaving the rest to multiply by EATING THE COUNTRYSIDE DEAD. We, the Black Company, are the instrument by which your mines can be safe and operational. We want paid, in proper deniers. We need actual cash flow, not next spring, not tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, but on the barrel, on the nailhead, now."

He rolled his eyes and brushed some dust off his pea-coat. "Oh, fine. I'll have my family's bankers talk to your bankers. Get me your information. Now, excuse me, I have to secure some rooms in your nearby town."

Well, damn. We probably need to get some bankers, don't we? I kid, I kid. The Company isn't that unsophisticated, although sometimes I like to give that impression.

That night, the usual string-band music floating over Dance Hall was brightened by the happy tones of a brassy trumpet belting out the usual standards. Brass Tones had apparently made friends among the musicians of Mondovi.

A Little Touch Of Nightmare In The Night

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The Spirit danced with herself upon the grand ravelin to the sound of the mandolin and the accordion, stepping out in a long-legged swing half-alight that was far too wild for the two-step that was being played, their wings spread wide as they floated upon their hooves. Shadows stood faceless watch upon the fighting-platform as our Mistress danced, their sightless gazes directed across darkened fields of fire. Back-lit figures in the distance could be seen swaying back and forth, two and two, along the ramparts stretching off beyond the great ditch. She dreamed her own dreams these nights, and although she staged them upon my memories, she peopled them with figments that often I had no idea from where or whence they came.

Strange figures in strange bardings, pale creatures with features I could never get down on the page after waking, tall two-horned monstrosities with single staring eyes, haunted-looking thin cattle in spiked chamfrons. All danced to the tunes she called forth from my remembrance, and some looked lost in delight, and some infuriated by the dance, and some just lost.

The Spirit stepped away from herself, and promenaded down and across the draw-bridge, her demonic self leading her alicornic self as a beau leading his belle from a ball dance-floor to her seat at the table for dinner. I followed, baffled, to find her treating herself in this fashion, more used to the two of them at each others' throats, but unwilling to interfere with this strange self-amity.

We passed through the crowd swaying to the endless zydeco, shades spinning in the tight quarters of the firing platforms and walkways under the charred bones on their palisaded display-racks. The music followed us, as we dance-walked our way out along the simple wall thrown up between the southern guard-tower and Trollbridge, where more shades danced to the omni-present bouncing beat, which never faded although we were then miles from the imaginary Mondovan musicians. And out across the increasingly-fortified bridge, every night finding another improvement added to the complex which had once been a simple guard-blockhouse. The dream-trollbridge aped Mad Jack's organic sprawl exactly, built in spurts and spasms as materials and ponies and inspiration provided.

Nothing was said by the two aspects until we reached the thrall-pens, around which they began to circle, and the music shifted radically, not to something recalled from Dance Hall, but rather some ancient chamber-orchestra playing a sombre pavane. Within the pens, the thralls rose from their stasis, and, still rotting and dead-eyed under the light of the moon, turned to each other, and began to shuffle and shamble in a sickening parody of an allemande left within the tight quarters of their confinement.

The alicornic aspect faded into the mists of the dream, and her Nightmare self stepped forward over me, now fully engaged in the spectacle, and glaring furiously down upon my small self.

"Is this what we are now, Acolyte? A purveyor of flesh? A procurer? These are abominations, which we had been so pleased to find our ponies extinguishing in noble battle. Their enslavement and sale to dealers with death are not in the least pleasing to us, not in the least. Our weaker self turns away, sickened, to see this foulness suppurating outside our new gates. The slavery of the dead by the living? What horrors would you parade forth beneath our banner?"

I fumed, trapped, and more than a hair guilty at the accusation by the great black Spirit. And I turned on her.

"What, the great foal-eater would cavail at the controlling of a dangerous pest, and its sale and use as a military resource? What right do you have? You've bragged of destroying cities, countries, worlds! We're purging a dangerous monstrosity from a province that nearly died of the infection, and this limited sale will protect our gains and our work so that it is not dismantled by the savages who created the infection in the first place! Because they are coming, those liches who obliterated the first city of the province, left it to rot out like a gangrenous limb, to poison the whole with the dying of the part! All intelligence and evidence points to a visitation by one or both of the legates in the early winter, possibly with an army, to take what is in their minds, theirs, the yearly fruit of their plantation. These horrors, these monstrosities - selling them to the Imperials is the best - best! - way to undercut those greater horribles. To make friends among their peers, most of all, with their own great mistress!"

"You dare…" she loomed over me, and her jagged white fangs blotted out the moon and the stars above.

"I dare, Mistress, because I am your Acolyte. And this is necessary, and necessity knows no master, no mistress. Your Company could be extinguished like a candle in a downpour, or even by the hoof of a foal. There are great beasts in this worlds' night, and you are a dream, a visitation. Could you stand for us when the last of us are hunted down in the dark by these great beasts?"

She turned, and looked out beyond the pens and their malignant dancers. There were no slopes, no forest, nothing but an imaginary plain stretching out beyond what in the world was a long expanse of gorges and ridges extending for a hundred miles in that direction. The spirit's imagination swept away the bones of the world and envisioned the distant tartarus which was the endless war of the White Rose and the legates. Fire and fury, great massive fortresses weighing heavily upon the fabric of the world until one almost could see the fabric sag under the weight. She frowned under her helm, pensive.

"You would be surprised what might be possible, in the depths of this well you are digging here. I am more myself than I have been in many centuries. Already I feel myself walking with my children, flying beside them in the night. There are four aerial patrols sweeping the valleys and ridges, right now. One will pass within two miles of where our dream-selves stand, in ten minutes. There are a dozen hoof-patrols sweeping the lowlands to the west and north, from the third cohort. The ponies of the night shift of the second cohort are probing the fringes of the Deep Mines district, looking for your ghoul enemies. Here!"

A blur, and we were suddenly standing in the moonlit darkness of a distant slope, surrounded on all sides by the caribou and earth ponies of a Company section, their eyes glowing thestral in darksight, and most of them were fixated upon a trio of shambling dead, approaching their position. Only one pony, to the side and rear of the section, had turned to spot the two ghouls flanking them all. I recognized the new recruit, somehow already out on night patrol?!

My chamfron was over his head, and it gave him the darksight necessary to spot the unseen threat to his unit. He took a pioneer's axe in his orange hooves, and charged, bellowing like an ox. The Nightmare strode forward, danced with him, guided his stroke. She pulled him back before the third, unseen ghoul could blindside him as the first two had flanked his section. She pushed him forward as his axe slipped out of the cloven skull of a former threat. He never blinked, nor even seemed to notice that he was not alone. And while the actual veterans surrounding him took belated notice of the threat they had overlooked, Carrot Cake was already spinning around with the weight of his axe, and on his own, took out the legs beneath the third ghoul.

The Nightmare stepped away from the sudden, swift fight, beaming. "Such a wonderful colt Asparagus found for my Company! He will be a delight, if he doesn't die first. He takes my guidance like a lightning-rod grounds the thunder-bolt."

A dozen flickers in a dozen heart-beats, and we skipped from patrol to patrol to patrol, until we stopped with a section, walking along a forest trail on a distant slope. The Nightmare and I blinked, and we were ahead of them, among a large herd of undead, laying in wait in a clearing just around a great boulder blocking the view of the on-coming armsponies. We blinked again, and the Nightmare leaned over to whisper in the ears of the pony on point. The pony stopped, eyes wide, and raised her hoof to stop the column. She used hoof-speech to wave her fellows up and over the boulder, and both up and down the slope. The enemy, which she could not have seen, and probably did not smell, was taken in a perfect, textbook pincer-movement, in a one-sided slaughter, as if she had known they were there.

Which, in a way, she had.

With another flicker, we were back on the grand ravelin, and the dance-band was playing something sad and mournful, and the softer Aspect was leaning against the curtain-wall, gazing out over the glacis and her stars in the west, as the moon made for its rendezvous with the distant horizon. Luna spoke for her Nightmare-self, who perhaps was a bit manic with the blood and gore we had witnessed.

"We are increasingly with our ponies, these days. Thou art close to us, and yet, thy path might take thee even closer ere we are finished with this world. We find ourselves oft, as it were, over thine shoulders. Sometimes she can whisper in your ears, and some of you harken. Usually to the good, although not all of her suggestions are for the best, in our opinion."

The Nightmare had regained her self-possession, and rejoined the conversation, "I wish I could claim that this is all to plan, or this is merely the beneficent gift of your Queen of the Night to you her worthy subjects, but truthfully I have no idea what drives this. Was it something intended by the mages of the Third, your ancestors? How could they possibly have known that the Company which was to come would stumble into a world of death and death-magic?"

Luna continued, "Or that their magics would interact thus, with destructive fury, upon the petty necromancies of this fallen half-world? With every spell broken, every half-life torn from every animate lump of over-aged clay, the grand bargain which is the Black Company's own pact with Us is empowered. It fills our reservoirs like a sparkling black tide. We worry what will happen when the reservoir walls are over-topped."

"What's to worry, self?" laughed the Nightmare. "Perhaps we can instantiate again in the waking world! Wouldn't that be something, Acolyte - you could call, and perhaps we could come! Oh, to feel the parting of flesh beneath our hoof-blades again, to have a skull cave in under our frogs once again!"

"Blood-thirster! Next you would be drinking the blood of our enemies from their cracked skulls! Yes, we remember that abomination into which you led our thestrals. Madmare! You-"

And the aspects fell into their usual pattern of recrimination and fury. Unedifying, somewhat shameful, and best to hide under a cut for the dignity of our Mistress. One would almost suspect that she fights with herself to avoid remembering similar arguments with her sister, her betrayer. Because they certainly resembled the squabbles between siblings from my point of view.

I awoke while they were still squabbling about ancient thestral blood-rites that I really wish I hadn't heard about. And the Nightmare complained about our new line in wholesaling thralls!

A Sodden Intermission

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The Spirit's luck ran out for the Company a few days before the late autumn rains came to the province of Pepin. Second cohort rushed the introduction of Major Gorefyre and the 93rd into the clearance operation against the Deep Mines district, and the implementation was rocky, even shaky. The little necromancer couldn't be anywhere, so the sergeants of the cohort treated her like a fire-brigade, rushing her from point to point to bring penned-in wildling ghouls under thrall. She had assigned squads of her ponies to various sections of the second cohort, and because the units had not been working in tandem with each other as the ponies of the 93rd had done with the aerial and third cohort, there wasn't that sort of fellow-feeling which makes ponies move as one, react properly to threats without pause, without thought, to act without thinking.

The squads and the sections thrown together, rushing against the weather that everypony could smell on the breeze, rushed separately, and not always in the same direction. Major Gorefyre, clinging to a warlock-gig and shuttled back and forth across the slopes and draws that led into the mining district, was effectively out of control of her ponies, who, having been slapped together from random donkeys and ponies whose common quality was that they were to be found in Imperial replacement depots at the same time as the recruiters' cadre forming the 93rd, had no common espirit de corps. Most of the squads in the field did the rational thing, and clove to the Company sections with whom they had been brigaded, and if they accomplished very little in this brief campaign, did little to endanger themselves or their accompanying Company sections.

One squad, on the other hand, got into trouble, the sort where half the ponies were down under a rush of ghouls before their assigned Company section could catch up to their vagrant charges. The entire squad was incapacitated or killed before the Company section was able to recover the situation, and half the section itself was wounded to one degree or another. They popped off a flare, retreated on a rally point, carrying the surviving members of the squad of the 93rd out of danger. One such survivor did not actually make it to the evacuation point, and turned on the back of Amber Waves before that earth-pony mare was aware that her burden had gone ghoul. It managed to get through her caparison, and killed her. I wish I could say it was quick, but from my examination later, it looks like it got to her spine, and then did worse before the rest of the section noticed that she was missing.

The charioteers brought the wounded from that encounter to my infirmary at Dance Hall, and I was busy for the next several days establishing quarantine and trying my best to keep the rest of the wounded troopers of the 93rd from expiring and adding to Major Gorefyre's enthralled ranks. We kept her enchanted fetish-nails to hoof just in case, but my new anti-ghoul potions seemed to do the trick, once they got the afflicted into my care. Shame that sumu utami is so rare on Tambelon; it made that component almost as expensive as the jiwe busara and aqua regia which were the other major active ingredients. The whole mixture was almost as expensive as its own weight in golden deniers. Possibly more, I'm not sure how to price Rye Daughter's and my time.

We lost two more of the overrun squad of the 93rd, but they did not turn, and we burned them along with Amber Waves in a common ceremony. I was not sure if the Major was pleased or enraged, I found her expressions difficult to read at times. The further operations were truncated by the onrushing rains, and we had to end the clearance operation until the slopes and fields dried out once again. Total haul for the 93rd proved to be a hair less than five hundred thralls.

Gorefyre and her sergeant-major did not try to ride out the rainy season, but rather got their thralls and their troopers on the road through Le Coppice a couple days into the season. I can't say I was sorry to see them go, my argument with the Spirit had left me feeling low and compromised, and I did my best to keep busy with the wounded and the recovering. The Company had seen more than a quarter of its number pass through my infirmary and recovery wards during the long campaign season, and although more than half of them had passed out again, it was still a mighty strain on what was, in truth, a small medical section. I used the services of the charioteers to shuttle up to the Palisades to check on Rye Daughter, the oxen, and the upper recovery ward during this period, but it did not make me popular among the pegasi, I'm afraid.

There was a sensation of waiting, of anticipation during this rainy season. We were still a Company divided, as there had not been time to displace the wounded, the recruits, and the foals down from their perch on the edge of the plateau, and the miserable weather kept the musicians of Mondovi indoors and Dance Hall languished in unaccustomed silence. I started to think about maybe starting up a musical education program for the armsponies, if only to liven up our future encampments and garrison lives.

Not that we could possibly afford the instruments given our perpetually cash-poor existence.

Gibblets and the rest of the adult warlocks came down to Dance Hall for a series of conferences with the officers and Mad Jack to plan out defenses in case the legates arrived to contest our control over central Pepin and their undead hunting preserve, whatever was left of it by the time they arrived in theatre for their winterly cull. Gorefyre had left with a quarter of the supposed tithe that the legates allegedly took from this territory every winter, and we thought that perhaps we could flush out another couple coffles of thralls of like size given time, the support of the 93rd or a similar outfit with a similarly powered necromancer, and a free hoof to make the collections.

The one question was, what would be our stance if the legates showed up on their own authority, without legal warrant from the Imperial authorities? In one sense, a legate was an authority all of their own, and could force the issue without reference to legalities and documentation. In another sense, this is the same mind-set that killed tens of thousands of civilians in this region, and nearly provoked a ghoul apocalypse which had shown all the signs of spilling out across the northlands.

Mad Jack's Trollbridge project had stumbled forward during the last stages of the long campaign season, but had not made much headway. There had been some progress in steepening the northern banks of the Withies, and building up a bit of a rampart along the edge of the banks. The blockhouse complex had likewise been expanded to meet those rudimentary ramparts. A wooden palisade had been thrown up across the gap between the guard-tower at the end of Dance Hall's long southern rampart and the Trollbridge blockhouse. It was reinforced in places with dugout ditches and earthen mounds built up into firing-platform bastions. But overall, the complex wasn't really in any sense defensible against a serious force, let alone the sort of pressure a powerhouse mage like one of the legates could bring to bear against it. At best, it would cause a pause while they incinerated the Trollbridge and its outworks. And we simply did not have the time or wherewithal to create a Dance Hall-style defensive work around Trollbridge, let alone a truly modern one that could hope to fend off a monster like the Marklaird.

Speaking of whom, it had been nearly a year since we or anypony else had laid eyes on our nominal employer. Its bankers had finally coughed up our back-wages – without penalty, damn them – which were immediately garnished by every holder of Company debt from Tonnerre to Pythia's Fell. We swung from bankrupt and in debt up to our primaries to impoverished and of merely shaky credit. Which is the usual state of a mercenary corporation, so there was that to be grateful for. The bankers were noncommittal about whether we had any current or future wages upon which we could draw credit – apparently even they had not been in contact with our common employer, who had just vanished like the morning mist as far as anypony could figure.

My road-friend and apparent spy had lingered about the neighborhood for as long as she could milk her rather dubious tinkers' wares, and had spent some time moonlighting as a baker's assistant in Mondovi, to supposedly rebuild her finances, which had allegedly taken a hit from the Mondovans' disinterest in her useless trinkets. This gave her an excuse to lurk about the gates of Dance Hall, and to stroll about the neighborhood like a lost tourist. Eventually her excuses ran thin, and “Cup Cake" packed up her wagon and followed a voyageur's caravan southward over the Trollbridge and deeper into the Riverlands. I almost felt sorry for her, and had a word with the Company armsponies playing guard for the voyageurs, to keep an eye on the hapless spy and to make sure she didn't stumble into trouble on her way to whomever she was supposed to be reporting back to at the end of her wanderings. I still wasn't sure who she was working for, but it seemed unlikely that she was the sort of cut-throat you'd expect to be in the covert employ of one of the Bride's lawless legates.

Three weeks into the rains, a sodden Dancing Shadows arrived at the northern guard-tower with a guest, having bypassed the Palisades entirely, and marched through the chilling rain a day and a night since they had left Charred Horton. Her guest was an equally soaked earth pony, of surprising height. I had never seen a mare of that stature, whose height exceeded even that of our towering giant unicorn, Hyssop, who was still up at the Palisades along with her partner in crime, allegedly on the disabled list. Goldbricking as usual.

Dancing Shadows had summoned the inner council, and asked that we meet in the mess hall, without guards. I and the Captain awaited Gibblets' arrival, and we eyed the big black earth mare, whose eyes were knowing and large, as if great knowledge had been given to a clever foal, who had then grown up into a mare of great privilege and authority. Our mystery guest was clearly incognito, but I was growing increasingly wroth with Dancin- no, with Dior Enfant, for having brought a mystery to our doorstep without prior notice. The mystery mare was investigating the Company standard, in its pike-rest at the back of the mess hall. The doors and the kitchen dutch doors were barred, and some effort had been taken to keep the rest of the Company from overhearing our conference. As if Dior Enfant was protecting the identity of the mystery, and not the security of the Company. Damn her.

Gibblets arrived, and stopped, horrified, in the door behind Dior Enfant, who continued inside.

“Warlock, thank you for your time," said the mystery mare, stepping away from the Company's battle-banner. “I have need to confer with you all." An unknown magic field, darkest purple in hue, closed and locked the door behind the gobsmacked goblin.

And the Bride of Tambelon dropped her earth-pony glamour, and stood before us in all of her tattered and dark glory.

A Gift Fit For Royalty

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"Who are you?" asked the great empress.

She towered over us, her long black horn waving far above our heads. She was almost twice as tall as the Captain, who wore a puzzled expression as if she couldn't quite parse what was standing in front of her. The Bride was still three heads taller than the Lieutenant, who by her narrowed eyes had caught on much more quickly than the Captain, who seemed to be suffering from a slight case of cognitive dissonance.

Gibblets was hyperventilating, which I found disconcerting. He was supposed to be more phlegmatic than this. And apparently I was volunteered to be the voice of the Company by nopony else having the nerve to speak to the sudden outbreak of imperial lichdom.

"We are the Black Company, Your Majesty," I said, breaking into the uncomfortable silence.

"Ah, and evidently not a conspiracy of mutes, which was one of my lesser theories. How is it that I have heard nothing of your existence from my bureaucracy?" asked the great mare, her dark, dull-feathered wings fluttering in irritation. I found my attention inappropriately focused on those great wings, having seen no wing'd sapients outside of the Company other than Cherie since we had passed through the portal.

I recollected myself, and attended to her question. "Your Majesty, I cannot answer for the communication issues of the ponies in your government. As Dior Enfant must have told you, we have been attempting to contact you, our ultimate employer, since having been abandoned by the pony which hired our services and brought us into your empire."

"The Marklaird is no pony, and she does not simply abandon pawns. They are always at hoof, to be used for the next prank, the next plot. Until, of course, they break, or revolt, or die. Or all three. But she usually puts her toys away when she's done with them. She isn't Walker or a Stump, to leave her messes all over the playroom, to be stumbled upon or cleaned up. Do I look like a parlour-maid to you?"

"No, your Majesty. You look like the Empress of All Tambelon. Alone, without attendants. In our fortress. What can we offer your Majesty? Our architect did not build proper suites when we laid out Dance Hall, but we can probably clear one of the smaller barracks-rooms and make a first-order approximation of a queen's suite if somepony gets the process started?" I met the Lieutenant's eyes, and she nodded, and made for the door. She gave a look at the Bride, who rolled her eyes and let our executive officer leave.

"So you did name a fortress after a joyhouse. I was positive Dior Enfant and my sources had been jesting. I begin to see why the Marklaird imported you. You certainly sound like one of her pranks."

"Your Majesty, central Pepin was dispiriting enough when we arrived, and the ponies of Mondovi were so kind as to give us a bit of music to lighten our moods as we got into the swing of butchery. How could we not respond in kind, and name Dance Hall appropriately? The acoustics here are marvelous. When the musicians strike up a tune, you can hear the music from one tower to the other."

She snorted, amused despite herself. Her dead eyes were remarkably lively, for a lich. She retained most of her fur, and her mane was as kempt as wealth and care could afford, although weeks on her Roads and a long hike through the autumn rains had conspired to leave her in less than Court condition. I resolved to find a pony to attend to her bodily needs, although I had no idea where to find such a creature in the Company. Were there any surviving veterans from Rime with a background in cosmetics or servantry? I didn't think so.

"As for why we're not in a toy-box, perhaps the Marklaird intended us to remain in garrison in Rennet after we secured it from your enemies. It is difficult to say, as the legate left us no instructions, and failed to pay us properly. As Dior Enfant no doubt has told you, we spent the past year fighting a rear-guard action against the legate's bankers for our back-pay."

"So, lacking instructions, you chose to invade the Riverlands? Is this common practice among private military contractors where the Company comes from? From whence does the Black Company hail, while we're at it? My inquiries returned answers, too many answers. Everyone seems to hold a different opinion as to where the Black Company came from. A plurality holds that you hail from Tartarus."

I paused, uncertain which of the questions were serious, and which were rhetorical. I turned to the Captain, and tried to pass the conversational baton back to my alleged superior. How did I end up running this meeting? She narrowed her eyes at me, and gestured at me, indicating voicelessly that I was to answer the nice alicorn abomination.

"The modern Company was last in the employ of the Hidden Council of Openwater Bay. Before that, a series of short-term contracts for various city-states across the breadth of Crossroads, and before that, the Eastmaark. By my count, the Company has served a hundred masters in the last five hundred years, on dozens of the worlds of the Chain. Like all private military contractors, our first allegiance is, of course, to ourselves. But as far as the world is concerned, our contract is our honour. And we found ourselves last spring in the peculiar situation that we were not precisely sure what our contract stipulated. Our previous commander had failed to get our terms in writing, and then suffered an accident which rendered him non compos mentis. And the Marklaird was nowhere to be found, not that we were particularly inclined to trust its – her? word on the matter. You've obviously met your own legate."

"Much to my regret, yes."

"Then you know what I mean. Our position, of necessity, was that the death of our previous Captain either meant that we were without a contract, or that we were in your Majesty's direct service. We could not find a way to get in direct contact with your Majesty at the time, and determined that the best method for gaining your attention would be to find a proper courting gift.

"May I present you your Imperial Fortress, Dance Hall?"

The Captain let out a small squeak. Her poker face had always been somewhat lacking, which is why she was never to be found at the table, even before her rank had rendered that pastime inappropriate. But damn her anyways if she was going to leave me dangling like this. The gambit had always been one of our options, albeit a minor contingency. Not that we'd ever planned on having the Empress of All Tambelon stroll unheralded through our gates.

The Bride strode closer, seeming somehow twice her actual height - when all of it was leaning over your ears, it made more of an impression. But then, I had been loomed at by mares scarier and taller than the lich, even if only in dreams. I stood my ground.

"You invade two of my provinces, squat in my vassals' lands, leave a string of peculiar fortifications across my landscape like a fickle hermit-crab abandoning shells hither and yon, and then you squat upon one of my precious Roads, half-bury it in earthworks, and DARE TO PRESENT YOUR VANDALISM AS A GIFT?" She had a nice roar. Not exactly first-class, and I'd heard better, but nice. As tall as she was, and horrifying in her undeath, there was a certain jollity to her manner that undercut the effect.

"Yes, your Majesty, exactly. We also purged one of your provinces of the rebels denying your sovereignty, and we are mostly done clearing the second of the ghoul infestation which was in the process of wiping all inhabitation from the landscape. Did you spend much time in Charred Horton?"

A half-smile tugged at her bluish lips, and she admitted, shortly, "No, just a night's rest. We were incognito."

"Just as well, the council of that town was a great disappointment. We found the villagers and grange associations to be much more effective partners in the clearances. I presume you passed the Little Ridings blockhouse? It should have been in the hooves of the grangers' militia."

"We bypassed the blockhouses," Dior Enfant interjected. "The Empress wanted to confront you in your place of power."

"As I have said, the Company has no place of power. We are wanderers; our only places are those given us by those in whose service we are pledged. Since we found ourselves pledged in the service of a personage we had never met, we of necessity were compelled to engage in… imaginative assignation. What commands would an empress, an empress who built Roads like this one we perch beside, what commands would she issue? Presented by a rebellion, we put it down. Finding an undead apocalypse brewing down here beside the river, we extinguished it. We somewhat overextended ourselves building Dance Hall, but then, our engineer and architect can run wild when he's given free rein. It is somewhat eccentrically arranged, pointed in perhaps the wrong direction, and unduly constricts traffic on the main Road, but we hope with effort and time it can be improved for your service."

"Well, you certainly don't lack for nerve," the Bride granted. She looked around the hall. "I will need to be shown the facilities. If the weather ever breaks. I had forgotten why I avoid the northlands in this season."

"Might I offer your Majesty a bath? We've got the hypocaust up and running, just in time for the rainy season. It's almost a luxury, especially given Dance Hall's filthy origins. And, given the season, I'm expecting a visitor from Monsieur Influenza any day now. Not… that this would be a concern for your august personage, now that I think of it."

"No, certainly not," she smirked. We left for the baths, trailed by a deflated Dior Enfant, clearly looking to escape her inevitable interrogation and tribunal before the officers. And maybe to get in on the offered warm bath.

Fey As A Faerie Queene

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After I laid out the towels and the mares'-care materials I had managed to gather from what was available, I sat back and stared at a wall outside of the hot baths where Dior Enfant and the Bride were enjoying the new-built amenities of Dance Hall, such as they were. A small black cat wandered into the foyer, its skinny tail held high over its back. I reached down with a hoof, and rubbed it behind its ears. I whispered, in a voice like the wind, "Doll, conmare or for real?"

"Legit," sighed the cat in a mewl that might have merely been my imagination. Then it left, jumping through the open window, cracked to allow the steam from the heated bath spilling out from the chamber next door.

And I sat and thought harder than I had ever thought before.

Dior Enfant had fallen asleep in the bath, and the Bride, once more in her earth-pony guise, came out laughing to ask me to recover her road-companion from her pruning rest. I tossed the tired jenny across my withers, and carried her, damp and snoring, to the rooms the Lieutenant had cleared for our visitor. The jenny went into a cot, and I toweled her down and covered the snoring mare with a blanket. Not all of us can be immortal, tireless paragons of power, energy and resolve. I turned to the dark-furred ‘earth pony', and asked her if she wanted to tour the drier quarters of the Hall.

"But of course, dear sir. And it occurs to me, I've yet to have a name to put to your stripes. What shall I call you, my Dante?"

"I could almost take that for a new Company name, my lady, but it would confuse others, and they generally call me Sawbones, Doctor, or Annalist. For those are my functions within the Black Company. What should we call you within these walls, and wearing that coat?"

"Lady is as good a name as any. Annalist? That's an odd name."

"It is in truth a rank, and an occupation. I am the current chronicler of the Company, the thirty-sixth of that title since we lost the original chronicles of our association. We've been much more careful of our records since that failure; it is, in a sort of sense, my primary charge in our fellowship. Remembrance."

"Remembering the truth is a revolutionary act, and a subversive one. As a sovereign, a ruler, and a holder of power over donkeys, ponies and caribou for over two centuries now, I am well aware that the truth serves little public good, and that lies guard my realm with greater fidelity than legate, soldier or sheriff."

I sighed, and thought about that. We walked, her hide steaming still from her bath, and that trail of moisture blending from the mists outside. We were approaching the stairs of the central keep of Dance Hall, a less-than-imposing construct designed more for space and air than defense. Inner walls provided the nominal citadel, but the officers' quarters, the operations section, the kitchens and another mess hall took up most of the space, rather than the usual stores and fighting-positions to be found in a don-jon or motte. We had most certainly not bothered with a solarium or lords-suite. The stairs spiraled up a central tower, that leaned above the rest of the fortress, and allowed scouts to keep the fortifications and her surroundings under observation. We climbed.

There were two scouts, pegasi, standing watch in the belfry of the tower. I gestured for them to leave us, and, giving me the stink-eye, they complied. I was spending my Company credit with abandon this afternoon. The Lady watched with an arched brow as the pegasi flew away from the tower, their flight curving upward as they spiraled in search of a drier cloud to resume their watch somewhere nearby.

"Lies are a powerful weapon, but like all weapons, make for a hard bed-mate. You never know what you might cut open, rolling over in your sleep. Some might say that no liar can sleep well. The Company believes in feather-beds and heavy comforters, whenever we can procure them. But we are positively bristling with weaponry none the less, as we are, in our core nature, a weapon in institutional form. What lies must we carry in your service?"

"Hah! A better question than some I've been asked. I would rather ask you what truths you will destroy before your service to my name is complete, but I can see as how that might be a bit too much truth for a rainy afternoon. Let's start with what you have done here." She looked out over the wasted, melting wasteland in front of Dance Hall, the char and the ruined vegetation slumping into a muddy, indiscriminate brown as far as the eye could see. "Another ghoul infestation, you say?"

"How is it that you did not get word of this? It's been festering since Walker and the Stump sacked Caribou City seven years ago."

"Yes, I'm familiar with the exploits of my legates. They exterminated a fleeing division of the White Rose, and wasted an entire campaign season upon the siege."

"Did none of the pleas for succor from the Duc d' Pepin reach your office? The reports of the obliteration of Caribou City, and the years of devastation when the city rose in a single body from their unburied rest?"

Her silence was complex, and hard to parse. Her earth-pony semblance offered less character and charm than her actual self, which despite its cyanotic unequine elements, had offered more cues than this cold glamour, which I found increasingly unsettling. The chill of the mist made me shiver. And I pondered what truths a sovereign so enamoured with lies might hear in the course of her existence.

"I do not think you understand the extent of my holdings, nor the volume of information that crosses the desks of my clerks. I had been informed that the late Duc was enraged by the outcome of the siege, and that there might have been… irregularities during the aftermath. But my attention in recent years has been upon the current activities of my legates, which extend far beyond this province, or even the misbehavior of two or three of them. I've two dozen legates, and every single one of them has skeletons in their closets. The Marklaird is hardly the only one who finds it meet to disappear for months or years at a time. I suspect that some of them are conspiring with the rebels. My attention must of necessity be focused upon those possible traitors, and the central theatre of the war. Where a dozen Caribou Cities expire every season, where every year the blight expands further into the heart of my holdings."

She turned her dead eyes to me, all the worse for them being dark, brown, and soulful in semblance. Under the glamour was a gaze that held no empathy whatsoever.

"You must understand, I recognize that my realm prospers on your side of the great divide. But it is not a border that I have any feel for, any emotional connection. The death of one, or a dozen, or ten thousand, means nothing to me in here." She pointed a hoof at her chest. "They merely join the majority of existence. We all will spend more time in the grave than we ever did upon our hooves."

The dead pony turned her gaze out over the fortress.

"Although I do understand in an intellectualized fashion that a ruined city is of less utility than a living one. And for that, somepony will hang. Where are the ghouls?"

This was the moment of truth, and I now realized that it would be a painful one.

"Sent to their final rest, most of them. We're working with one of your 'rear support battalions' to enthrall the remnant, and send them off to your field necromancers. But the overwhelming balance of those killed by the infestation? Put down as a threat to the realm."

She smiled, horribly. Not from joy, or amusement, or good humor, but as a deliberate act, as though a puppeteer had pulled the strings that stretched her lips, the levers that raised her eye-lids, worked the complex devisings that controlled how her ears swiveled and lifted.

"Oh, happy children, who have found their rest so soon after setting out! May all our voyages find safe harbour so swiftly. Did you fear that I would take offense at the destruction of so many? Ghouls are hardly such that I hold any fellow-feeling for them. Even a living dog has more to recommend it than a ghoul. Revenants I have a love for, they have personality and charm. Ghouls are simply gluttons, appetites given locomotion and a certain mindless direction. If the armies have use for them, well and fine, but I could see ten times ten thousand flame out like Roamish candles and not shed a tear. If, that is, I could still shed tears. Come, I would see more of this gift of yours."

We walked down the tower-stairs, and I opened the southern sally-port to let her out in the misting rain upon the ramparts. She trotted cheerfully along the walk, from platform to platform, gazing with joy at the gruesome trophies that lined every yard from the fort to the southern watch-tower. "Oh, all that lives must die, passing through nature to eternity. It's a most common decoration you've draped across your gift, physician!" She looked over the shoulder of a guard, shivering under his mac against the rain. "And a moat studded with antlers, none the less! Charming!"

She was less amused by Trollbridge, and its ramshackle defenses, partial and patchwork as they were. "What happened here, Sawbones? There was a vigour to the western walls lacking in these."

"Lack of money and time, my lady. Our resources are not infinite, and the threat from the west was present, fierce, and compelling, while that from the south was contingent, distant, and hypothetical. We've been working on the extension as time and materials allow, but you see the extent of the project is less than complete. And the current weather has put all to a stand-still. We've secured some further funding for when the weather turns, though. A bit of a side-project."

"Moonlighting on your master's time? How wicked of you."

"Until the master pays his apprentices, he cannot chide his charges for working for those that pay them."

"So, what witchery allows you to slay my dead so adroitly?" she asked out of no-where, playfully twirling between a set of crucified ghoul-remnants decorating the central span of the trollbridge. "Some fire-charm? Most of these are well-charred. Some protection that keeps their curse from killing your ponies in their turn? An enthrallment, to keep them still while you remove their heads?"

"That, my lady, is a mystery of our brotherhood. Hidden in the mists of time. We are a pledged association, bound in ceremony and ritual upon our initiation. And, it would seem, death to the undead."

I drew a blade, and flourished it in illustration. She reached forth a hoof, her attention captured by the knife. I pulled back the point, and cautioned, "Careful, lady. I do not know what might occur. As I said, there's something in the blades of the Company which carves the undead as if they wore living souls. And, from my observation, we do not suffer from the curse of second lives. None of our losses this season have rose again."

She reached forward, and pinked her frog on my blade. She stared at something, hidden under her glamour which I could not see. She said nothing, for several long moments, fascinated with whatever hid under her witchery.

Suddenly she looked up, her glamour glowing with warmth and joy. "Well, isn't that a marvel for the ages?" And the glamour of the dark-furred earth-pony trotted with delight in the direction of her new Dance Hall as the rain faded into heavy mist and the failing light heralded the onset of night.

A Contract Of Service

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She returned to the conference, and the officers of the Company were gathered for her convenience. She dropped her glamour again in the hall, and looked back and forth coquettishly between our officers and Gibblets and I. I noticed a bit of blood in her hoof-print as she walked to the table at the back of the hall where we sat.

Her manner was giddy but businesslike, and her subject-matter consisted mainly of requests for parchment and ink, and interrogations of the Captain and the Lieutenant regarding their intentions and desires for the balance of the current season, and plans for the following year. They were tentative and uncertain, as to be honest, our intentions had been undefined, and our desire to catch her Imperial eye, and ascertain our position and place in her plans, intentions and desires. This is, after all, what it means to "be in service" to a sovereign or a principal.

"Your Majesty," I interjected after several fruitless rounds of deflections, "We truly do need to understand your mind in all this. We have gotten as far as we have this year and the year past by playing knight-errant, but it has been a play, an act. In absence of direction, we have been operating like a knightly order, like something out of a troubadour's chanson, enacting a rondalay of the Matter of Tambelon. In our natural state, we're more a Company for sirventes. How can we help you accomplish your goals?"

The dead-eyed alicorn grinned, her wings half-extended in enthusiasm. She leaned over to me, and confided in a false whisper, loud enough for the entire table to hear, "I have no idea what to do with you all."

She straightened to her full height, and continued to the whole meeting. "I must confess I have been treading water for the past ten years, and it is more than the work of an afternoon to break that inertia. As you have seen, here, my tools are blunted, cursed, or otherwise unhelpful in accomplishing my goals. I wish for a beautiful, mighty, and prosperous estate, full of smiling subjects, sturdy, healthy households, and orderly affairs. What tools I have to hoof are destructive, corrupting, or both. And I myself am neither beautiful, nor healthy, nor particularly orderly in my instincts. I adore your work here in Dance Hall, but for reasons that I know, in my rational mind, are abhorrent and vile. I will, when I leave here, travel through the Riverlands, and greatly enjoy myself looking in on my legates and their work. I will be going alone, as I generally do on these inspection tours. Living donkeys and ponies tend to not thrive in those conditions.

"Well, indeed. So much for the mis-match between my intentions, my inclinations, and my goals. The fact that, given your head and in the total absence of guidance, you chose to do this, here, with the tools available to you, is quite encouraging to me. Perhaps this land does require a new chanson de geste. Even if it is delivered as a satire. But tread lightly, sirvens. I will always prefer a beautiful lie to a destructive truth. It is in my nature. Like all sovereigns, living and dead, I prefer in my heart of hearts to be lied to: I want to be flattered. Flatter my name, ponies. Make me look better than I am."

She wrote as she enthused, and produced several documents for our official use. A draft on Imperial funds; a proper contract with Her Majesty, the Bride, Empress of All Tambelon; a warrant for the arrest of the person or persons responsible for the outbreak of Caribou City; license for our presence in Rennet and Pepin, and written instructions to defend the peace of both provinces against enemies foreign, domestic, and posthumous. All properly sealed by a device conjured from some hidden bag of holding held in her black mage-field.

"Hold Dance Hall in my name, and in my absence, defend the province, and complete your 'clearances'. Such a term of art, you sound like some of my greedier vassals, plotting their endless enclosure conspiracies against the collective property of the peasantry. Well, so long as you limit your operations to those against wildling undead and true rebels, I will be satisfied. Try to limit your depredations to this province, I have not yet decided how you will be used in the greater Riverlands. I still must evaluate the conditions to the south; my information sources have become hopelessly corrupt."

"Speaking of hopelessness and corruption, do you have any idea why an Equestrian diplomatic attaché might be asking questions about your Company? My discovery of an Equestrian consulate sprung up like a mushroom in Rime was what eventually led me to your front door. Equestrians are hardly a common sight this side of the Chain, certainly since the rearrangement of the geography between there and here. I remember them, of course, from my second life, before my dear husband's fall, before the Smooze ate Flutter Valley. But since I took authority in my own name? Nothing but crickets and wind from the Sisters. Although I hear now that it has been just Celestia for quite a long time now. Are you why the Princess of the Sun and Moon suddenly now deigns to recognize my half-existence?"

The Captain licked her lips, and thought. "Your Majesty, the Equestrians used to keep observation of the Company back on Openwater Bay, but as far as we could tell, they kept tabs on all the mercenary companies of Crossroads. For a world with such a reputation for sweetness and light, their foreign service is notably paranoid. Perhaps their interest was more focused upon the Company in particular than we had thought. It has recently come to our attention that the Company's ultimate origins are Equestrian in nature, although it is so far in our past that we have little institutional memory of the exodus."

I closed my eyes in regret.

"Really? I thought I asked earlier about origins, Sawbones? Were you holding out on me?"

"Your Majesty, we have records, detailed chronicles, for the last five hundred years of the Company's existence. Our history prior to that break in records is entirely oral in nature, and I'm sure you, as a mistress of an imperial bureaucracy, are aware of the value of hearsay."

"Spoken like a born courtier." I did my best to not cringe at the naked insult.

I opened my eyes to discover the Bride staring at me, her long horn hovering right above my mane, her dead, clouded eyes bare inches from mine.

"Your Majesty, we will do our best to not let our ancient history with the Equestrian Monarchy affect your interests in even the slightest degree."

"See that this is so. I do not wish to find a second paladins' crusade crashing my worlds' portals. I will grant you, Celestia is hardly the wild-maned crusader her sister was. And even the madmare of the Moon never found time to join in the suppression of my dearly departed husband and all his works. Not even when they were so much closer to our gates than they are now.

"Well, enough of ancient wars and distant queens. I feel like dancing. Can you summon musicians from the neighboring town?"

So we did. It was the first time the Mondovan musicians set hoof in Dance Hall. And it turned into a delirious bacchanal, wasteful of lamp-oil, food, and alcohol. The Bride, in her earth-pony semblance, led the musicians from barrack-hall to barrack-hall, carrying booze, food, and a train of drunken Company ponies in her wake. Like many an absolute monarch, the Bride proved to delight in getting her retainers drunk as lords, the better to examine their true selves through the prism of debauchery.

We fed her all the liquor and ponies her heart desired. It exhausted our seized stocks from the granary raids in Rennet the year before. It was epic, it was chaotic.

It resulted in massive hangovers. We suffered under this misery as we saw the Bride off on the next leg of her solitary tour of inspection. She trotted away from Trollbridge, Death once again wearing her Ladyship like a stole, a single mare walking alone into the wastelands alongside the great river.

Pavane For A Yellow Mare

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The Bride had left, and in her wake the influenza sailed into port on a hungover tide of dehydration and dissipation. I was one of the first of the Company to greet l'monseiur, and he knocked me right off my hooves. I was delirious for a week, they tell me, but all I can remember of the period was the Spirit's disappointed faces, images of her sharp-tooth sneer interspersed with periods of her great, blue eyes gazing down sadly from a height. I don't recall the details of any conversations, albeit I retain a sense that they were about infidelity and metaphysical adultery. As if I could ever allow that semi-suicidal great lady to replace our Mistress in my affections…

I was not the only member of leadership laid out by the flu. Both the Captain and the Lieutenant were struck down, and joined me in checking out at a most inopportune moment. Many of the sergeants and corporals were likewise sickened, and all three of the cohorts' commands devolved upon fairly green corporals, and the overall command of the Company to Broken Sigil, who like the stick he had driven deep into his colon, was as dry as you'll find among the military, a complete teetotaller. Gibblets and the griffins escaped the flu's wrath, by being sufficiently inequine that it passed them by. Broken Sigil being who he was, direction of the Company fell into the control of the sole standing warlock.

And it was a terrible time for half the Company to be down sick with camp-disease. The weather broke the day after our employer continued on her tour of the war. Ghouls are generally no more active in bad weather than living ponies; they are subject to the same physiological and physical limitations as mere living flesh, and are notably sluggish in the cold and the rain. They tend to dry out like the rest of the landscape once the sun breaks through and milder weather warms the fields and woods. And until the last of the shamblers were winkled out of their hiding-places and remote hollers, they would continue to drift back into the cleared areas.

The inexperienced ponies who controlled the Company did what they knew, which was to reinstate combat patrols in the forward areas. They overstrained the remaining pegasi in charioteer duties, and provoked a second wave of flu-driven collapses in the aerial cohort. The combat patrols got a number of 'pounders wounded in counterproductive skirmishes that just helped scatter known concentrations of ghouls all over the still-infested districts. In two incidents, the new earth-pony proved his worth, and kept bad situations from going lethal, saving a round dozen of his elders from being overrun and killed by the bad situations that the temporary commanders allowed their scattered, understrength sections to get into, time after time. Carrot Cake's axe twice made the difference between a half-dozen eaten arms-ponies and a scrambling evacuation. He was making his name known in the Company.

I'm told that my ambulance-drivers dragged me out of my sickbed and had me talk them through how to patch together the wounded, hopped up on stimulants. I have no memory of these incidents, but I can't think which is worse, that they might have let a zebra delirious with fever and infectious as all hell into a surgery, or that those great oxen with their lack of pony dexterity stitched our wounded back together. Nopony died from that particular aftermath, so we must have done well enough, but in retrospect I am properly horrified with our professionalism. I really needed a journeymare. Rye Daughter was several years away from that, and Gibblets had sensibly left the foals upcountry at the Palisades, well-quarantined away from the plague sweeping Dance Hall.

We were not as lucky as we had been in the last season of sickness. The influenza carried away several of the Company, and ponies we could not easily spare. The new Lieutenant, Yew Wall, failed to keep properly hydrated in her delirium, exhausted herself taking care of the Captain as their batmare lay insensitate, and collapsed in her quarters that she shared with our commander. She was discovered by Broken Sigil when he went in search of the missing batmare, and found all three laying in their shared quarters. The Captain and the servant survived, Yew Wall did not. Corporals Humility Gift, of the bowmares, Heft Hilt of the sword-stallions, and the ranker Claymore of the sword-stallions also did not survive their encounter with the influenza.

That season's sickness was very hard on the unicorns of the Company. If I didn't know my statistics and probabilities, I would have superstitiously speculated that it had been a plague deliberately engineered against our poor tribal brethren. Such a disease could never have gotten traction in a land so empty of the magical breed, it was merely a function of the lower vitality and resilience of your standard-issue unicorn. Our sturdier brethren took the hit to their constitutions in stride, in the sense that they collapsed in their cots and bedding like the rest of us, but most every other pony made it back out to fight again. Luckily, Gibblets was the only warlock operating out of Dance Hall. Shorthorn having had a relapse of his horn condition, had gone back up to the Palisades to rest before the sudden onset of empress, and the other two had never come down in the first place.

I, having been the first to fall sick, was also among the first to recover. I got my lazy bones out of my cot, and shuffled about the infirmary supervising my oxen. We got as much small beer out of the supplies as we could find, most of the cooks being themselves sick and in their cots like the rest. The oxen carried their rehydration casks, and I carried the willow-bark extract, which had been forgotten in my delirium. I went from barracks to barracks and among the officers' quarters, dosing everypony I could find with the miracle-drug. This is when we found two of the three fatally sick unicorns already past our aid. Claymore was still delirious, and I dosed him like the rest. But for him, it was too late.

The funeral pyres were under-attended, as I forbade anypony to expose themselves to the weather unless they had definitely recovered from their own bouts with the flu. Just enough hooves to bring out the dead, and to build the fires, and tend to the ashes. I watched from the nearest rampart platform, technically still recovering myself. A very small group of musicians in Mondovi struck up a mournful tune for the ceremony; the towns-folk were contributing their own to the ceremony, having built their own pyres next to ours. And their urgency was far more than ours - we could at least be sure that our dead would not return in the dead of night, clouded-eyed and vengeful upon those that had the temerity to survive. The music made me cry, I suppose it felt safe to do so then, when nothing was clawing at our walls, and the only threats to the Company were lurking in distant abandoned mining-towns and back-slope lairs.

I would miss Yew Wall.

Everypony else recovered, except for Dancing Shadows, whose bout with the flu left her bed-bound and feeble. The long exposure travelling on the road with our employer had drained all of her late-adolescent vigour, and her recovery was notably slow. In her lucid moments, she was rueful and guilty, convinced that she had brought the plague with her. I tried to explain that there must have been multiple vectors, and that often the flu just lurks, already in place and waiting until exposure and exhaustion allows it to surge into the gaps opened by the weather, or weakness, or, well, hangovers.

I left Dancing Shadow's quarters, and pondered her effective isolation within the Company. She wasn't here often enough to maintain proper friendships with other ponies, being here and there. She had been sort of close to Yew Wall, but that was that, and no longer a solution. II dropped a word with Gibblets and Asparagus, and the next week, we shuffled into the still-convalescent Dancing Shadow's guest-chambers with Sack and a deck of cards. She turned her face from the wall she had been staring at, and got up in her bed as we dragged a table and a couple of pillows into place.

"Shadows, I seem to remember that you're always flush with cash. Time to lighten your wallet. Gibblets, you deal first, and remember to keep your damn witcheries in your pocket. We're not playing with unicorns here. And I've got an amulet that Otonashi made up for me after last time, I'll know when you cheat, you great gooey green bugger."

Wouldn't you know, Dancing Shadows was a born card-shark?

Ponies Playing Poker

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SBMS081

"OK, Holstein Hold 'em?"

"As if there's another game."

"Had to ask. Locals play some interesting variants."

"I… I grew up playing Rime Stud."

"What are the rules?"

"Two cards down for each player, four up, one down."

"So basically seven-card stud. Why 'Rime'?"

"I don't know, it was what my elders called it. You keep a few of the major arcana. The Fool, the Tower, the Empress, the World. Fool, World and Empress are wild. Tower busts every player out and the pot carries over into the next hoof."

"Huh. I like it. Gibblets, do we have a full deck?"

"Damnit, not on me. Go check the chest, there are five hundred years worth of old decks in there somewhere. Try Baba's shelf, you know how she kept things."

"Oh, yeah, I remember seeing something. If I didn't leave it for the ghouls back in Menomenie. Wasn't exactly thinking of poker at the time. I'll be right back."

***

"Ok, here. Whoever heard of playing poker with the major arcana?"

"We-well, it isn't the full arcana. But that's how they played it at home."

"I thought you were from some province east of the Inland Seas."

"They still called it Rime Stud."

"OK, Empress-Fool-Tower-World. And the usual suits."

"OK, OK."

"I never get tired of watching you shuffle."

"I never stop marveling at you horse-people playing cards. It's like I've been hallucinating for the past millennia and a half."

"Hasn't been a horse in the Company for three hundred years."

"Bah. Blind us. Sawbones, Sack. One-two sou."

"OK, I'll see a hoof."

"Call." "Call." "Call." "Raise two sou."

"Call, alicorns damnit." "So much for a hoof." "Damnit, Sack. Fold." "Call." "

The riffle of calls and raises hypnotically devoured the night. The actual play of coins, swords, wands and cups was almost beside the point. It was the back and forth that defined the game. Dancing Shadows' home-game was sort of a childish variant, but distinct in its own way, and the purpose wasn't to play our reassuring standards, but hers.

And it was hilarious to watch Gibblets grin as if he'd cleared the board, only to have Shadows turn over a hole tower and wash his princesses full of pages right into the gutter with a busted flush.

"We'll be holding actual sous to bet with next spring, if all goes well."

"Spit in one hoof and promises in the other, and you always have spit to your name."

"If you ever have anything optimistic to say, Sack, I think it'll be the day Eternal Night dawns."

"Somebody take your junk, I like to see you find bright side of things."

"I've said much the same about other promises, but the dead queen doesn't seem to care about money. It might be legit this time. It was the Bride, right?"

"Yeah, I told you so. If there's another arcane monster of that strength on this cursed mudball, they'd have come to blows long before this. If I had fillings, they'd have shook right out of my teeth."

"See? She'd kill us without thinking about it, but money promises? Probably good."

"Raise six sou."

"What the tartarus do you have to work with a three of wands, a six of swords, and a princess of cups? Call."

"Most like two wild down. Fold."

"She can't, because I have all of the wilds. Raise another half-denier."

"You don't have room in the hole for all of the wilds. Call."

"Blast it, somebody has something wild. Fold. As I was saying, money! We can start hiring carters, and maybe even stonemasons. Get somepony else to do all the heavy lifting for a change."

"This is why you'll never be rich, Sawbones. Soon as you have money, you want to spend it on something shiny, like basic necessities or fortifications."

"Pardon me for wanting to keep my squishy bits inside my hairy bits. Legates are probably still coming."

"We've got some ideas on those lines. Between our last sponsor and the Bride, I now have two data points on liches."

"I hope it isn't fire, it's always fire with you witches, and it never ends well."

"Hoo, look at that. Four princesses, she really did have two wilds down."

"Asparagus, why did you bluff into a presentation?"

"Because I thought it was a stone bluff?"

"Blind me. Think the Captain will be up to taking command tomorrow?"

"I'm not sure, physically I think she's up to it. Mentally - Yew Wall was the third or fourth friend she lost this last year and a half. Call."

"Fold. The Company really hasn't been catching it that bad, it's just that Tambelon's been tartarus on the leadership. We've been losing recruits and officers, nothing in between."

"What, you think she thinks she's next?"

"Nah, nothing that small-minded. Just mortality knocking on the door. Good hoof, Sack."

"Kept me in game. Now I have bankroll to lose to fickle cards."

"So, new Lieutenant. Elections are waiting on the epidemic burning itself out. Which it is."

"Do we really want another cohort commander? The current ones are barely seasoned. Their seconds need to simmer on the stove for another year or two before I'd trust 'em to fold laundry. Fold."

"Are you cooking the officers, or dry-cleaning them, Asparagus? Fold."

"Not much difference between cooking a stew and doing laundry. Both are judicious applications of fire and water to plant and animal matter."

"No wonder this last week's commissary-offerings all tasted like a mouthful of my caparison."

"That was the flu, you quack, and you know it. My kitchen is awesome, and always has been."

"Gah! Tower! Ok, ponies, toss in your cards, new hoof."

"I swear that card shows more often than you'd think."

"Five players. Seven cards. That is more than half the deck. Odds support it showing often."

"That's only if everypony stays in the hoof, Sack. Normal distribution's more like… hrm."

"About one third to one fourth of all hooves, I think."

"How are you not winning more with that kind of analysis?"

"Fate hates me, you know this."

"No fate but-"

"What we make!" chorused the table.

"Shuffle up and deal, goblin."

"You want to deal, witch doctor?"

"Nah, the pony with fingers can deal as long as he's in the game."

"Pony, yeah. How can you play against a stallion that crazy? It's just not fair."

"S-so, if not the commanders, who?"

"Doesn't have to be an officer. Tartarus, could be you, if somepony nominated you."

"Please don't, I'm not a soldier."

"We should put you in with the recruits and foals. The exercise would help you recover more quickly. And didn't you say you had militia training?"

"More l-like playing around and polo. The rich amuse ourselves and call it training."

"Eh, military training is a sort of play. With edged weapons."

"Ought to be Tickle Me. Raise six sou."

"Damn, colt, Sack has a hoof. Fold."

"You have to learn how he bluffs, Asparagus. Call."

"Fold. Why Tickle Me? She never has the vote, what with the first cohort always being short-hoofed."

"Maybe that why she is well-seasoned? Been in job for a long time. Raise another six sou."

"Call. Haven't been that many elections since she got her cohort."

"Dunno, before my time. But I like her for Lieutenant. Raise another six sou."

"Can't argue with that. And on the plus side, she'd finally shed that silly name. Call, I'll see what you have."

"Damn. Was bluffing. Three pages."

"Better than my two pair, I thought you had nothing or a tower. Your hoof."

"We going to see the foals down here before they get their marks, Gibblets?"

"Call. We were going to bring them down with the fair weather, and then the flu swept the camp. Maybe if we get another week of sun, we can finally march 'em down here. Sawbones, will it be safe enough then?"

"Yeah, should be. Almost nopony new is sick, and the holdouts like Shadows here are mostly just weakened. Tower!"

"Gah, this game is murder on the dealer. Tower, tower, tower… more blinds for the tower!"

"You know you love to show off. Raise three sou."

"Yeah, I really do. Call. I've got some new tricks I'd like to show the junior witch scouts. I've been stuck down here, too, you know."

"Don't bitch, you see your foals constantly. I've seen my Rye a total of six days in the last five months. She's gonna be a stranger at this rate. Raise half-a-denier."

"Raise a denier."

"What, you were still in the hand, Shadows? Fold."

"The what?"

"Sometimes the senile old ape forgets himself and calls a hoof a hand."

"Whatever, you damned striped pony. Your bet."

"Hmm. Call."

"Fives full of lords."

"Four knights."

"Grogar damn it! Why is it that the wilds are always in the hole?"

"Because nopony bet against wild in the open."

"Damn your cattle logic."

"Why were you worrying about money, Sawbones? You know you'll just lose it all at the poker table."

"Yeah, yeah, laugh it up, the lot of you. Remember this the next time I have to dose you for the next round of the crud, your plot will be green for a week. Except you, Asparagus, you'll be puce."

"Another hoof?"

"Yeah, I'm not completely busted yet. One or two more."

"You know, you ought to write up one of these sessions for the Annals. I've been reading your stuff, it's grim as buck. You make the Company sound like a joyless lot of sloggers."

"Who wants to read about ponies playing poker?"

A Visitation In The Night, or, The Barbecue

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The first inkling we had that something was wrong at the Trollbridge blockhouse was the night made brief day by an emergency flare sent up by the section on guard. The flares were only to be used when a unit was in imminent danger of being overrun. The ponies at the southern watch-tower reacted according to protocol, and sent one runner to alert the main fortress, and one down towards the Trollbridge to investigate and report back. While the runner took her time alerting each post along the ramparts as she trotted for the southern sally port, the night was split again and again by a series of detonations in the general vicinity of the Trollbridge blockhouse, blue and orange explosions that ruined dark-vision and clearly announced to anypony slow on the uptake that the flare had not been the result of error or horseplay.

The section holding the ramparts was supposed to hold their positions until relieved by a section from the reaction force posted in the main fortress. The corporal commanding the section tossed protocol into the ditch, and led half of his ponies at the double-quick along the walkway, and left instructions for the rest to follow as soon as they saw anypony who even looked like relief.

And so it was that Corporal Orange Blossom of the rampart watch was the first survivor on scene, which was mostly on fire, those parts which weren't strewn across the bypass road or flung smoldering into the Withies. The wooden portions of the bridge were on fire, and the stone framework was shattered and in the process of collapsing upon its spans in two places. Schwejk, the caribou buck sent from the watch-tower to investigate the emergency, was in the process of dying, burnt horribly across half of his body, and bleeding out from a terrible wound across his haunch. He also had buried his lance deep in a peculiar body laying sprawled across the bypass roadway.

Orange Blossom couldn't stop to evaluate the peculiar tableau, as behind the two figures were a mass of ghouls meandering aimlessly about the flaming wreck of what had been the blockhouse fortifications. While the corporal evaluated his situation, several of his ponies joined him at the scene, and they formed a skirmish line against the undead raiders. Inside of ten minutes, the half-section was consolidated, and began advancing to retake what was left at the bridge. And this was when Tickle Me led the pegasi and griffins of the reaction force in a flyby over the fiery mess. Between the lances and axes of the watch-ponies and the javelins and wingblades of the aerial reaction force, the ghouls went down with troubling ease.

Troubling, because it was glaringly obvious that ghouls couldn't possibly have caused this sort of damage, let alone ghouls as confused and disordered as this band proved to be. The rest of the sections on guard as well as the ground elements of the reaction force arrived to secure the breach, with Tickle Me taking command as the ranking pony on site. With all of the fires scattered throughout the scene, Company darksight was rendered useless, and it took them a while to make sense of the remnants of Trollbridge.

Piles of ghoul dead and deceased Company armsponies were found on the central span of the bridge, where the guard was overwhelmed by magefire and a ghoul rush. This is where they found the remains of the earth pony stallions Spanner and Grill Pit, the jack Ronchonneur, and the doe Mutterschlachterin. The roasted remains of Corporal Hussar of the sword-stallions and the jenny Yew-Barrow were found in front of the blasted gates at the end of the bridge, where it appeared they had been drawn away from their posts, possibly to engage with a visitor.

Corporal Hussar had a half-burnt set of copies of the authorization documentation the Bride had left for us to use for demonstration of our bona fides. Nopony had thought that they would be necessary without any advance notice at one in the morning. The storming party had just appeared out of nowhere as far as we could tell.

The earth-pony mare Artesian Well was found at the controls of the war-engine they'd mounted on the roof of the blockhouse, or at least, the smashed, charred fragments of the spring-driven ballista were found in proximity to Artesian Well, along with the crushed remains of what had to have been the earth-pony mare Penstock. She was the only missing member of the section guarding Trollbridge that night, and was Artesian Well's constant companion in all their years with the Company.

Later that morning they found Pollard Ash, laying at the base of the embankment across the bypass from the blockhouse, with blunt force trauma to her head, and the splintered remainder of her half-emptied quiver scattered across the face of the embankment. The rest of the bowmare's arrows were found, along with three bolts from Artesian Well's ballista, shot through the strange figure that Schwejk had finally cut down with his lance.

Except that wasn't the end of it. While two pegasi from the reaction force were trying to save Schwejk's life, buying time for me to get on scene, they were startled by the bristling 'corpse' suddenly heaving off the surface of the roadway and lurching towards – well, who knew what? It was pierced by a score of arrows and multiple ballista bolts, and dragging Schwejk's lance behind it, driven deep into the figure's ribcage. And, yet it still moved. The two pegasi – Feather Fall and her wingmare Supercell – snapped to attention and gave the figure the business, flanking it on both sides, and cutting into it with their 'blades.

I arrived to find the two of them dancing around the heaving side of meat, both of them absolutely soaked in its gore. They were keeping it off balance, but nothing they could do seemed to put it down. I almost grabbed my axe and joined in on the fun, but then I spotted Schwejk, remembered myself and my oath, and circled around the commotion, trying to stay out of the mares' way. They were leaving the prone caribou behind in any event, and I knelt beside him, trying to do my best for the dying Schwejk.

I quickly realized that he was too badly burnt, and that the only thing for it was to give him a laudanum overdose. I sat with him as his shudders subsided, and he let out a deep sigh. I held him up a little so that he could watch the two pegasi perform a perfect, final raqs al-saif, one with a moving, bleeding balk for their focus.

And then I noticed other members of the reaction force standing back, watching like the dying Schwejk and I, and the moment was past, and Tickle Me came bulling through like her tail was on fire and her pinions were catching.

"Don't just stand there, you dullards! This isn't a pas de trois, it's your sisters trying to put down a monster! Get in there, damn it all!"

And suddenly it was a flurry of blood and gore, and bits strewn all over the roadway. They literally carved the struggling figure like a chef carving roast of pork for a griffin banquet. It was a testament to the fundamental professionalism of the Company's armsponies, that none of them managed to catch a brother with a back-swing, the mass of stabbing, slicing ponies were so crowded about the target.

Soon enough, it was a limbless mass of unmentionable filth and horror, and somehow, it still twitched. Tickle Me waved forward three caribou and earth pony lancers, and they impaled the thing as if they were making a tripod, and leveraged it up off the roadway so that it could get no traction.

Distracted by the grotesque butchery, I missed Schwejk's last breath. When I looked down, he was gone. I closed his eyes, and got up.

Then I went over and examined some of the lumps of meat strewn across the bypass. They weren't moving. In fact, they seemed to be dissolving into the bloody muck as I stood there watching. I looked around, and realized that the stench was increasing, and that there was a sort of mist rising up out of the gore. A red mist with a distinct flow to it – towards the disgusting mass of brutalized meat held up by its tripod of lances.

"Tickle Me, we need to get some fire and accelerants over here, this thing is reconstituting. Where are the warlocks?"

"Right here, Sawbones. And you're right, that thing will rebuild itself in about two hours at the current rate."

Gibblets had snuck up behind me while I was taking in the regurgitation and a show. I'd have said something, but my capacity for outrage was mostly overloaded by the ongoing horror.

"Great," said Tickle Me. "Witch this thing dead, Gibblets. We've chopped ourselves exhausted, and it's still moving. It's magic time. Wow us!"

"Fire is a good first step," the frog-faced mage observed, and stole a bottle of antiseptic from my medical kit. He emptied it out over the horrible thing, blood and gore boiling in reverse, and lit a magical fire over the spitted roast before the alcohol washed away in the gore. It was… less than impressive.

"Try harder, Gibblets."

"Wish Bad Apple was here. This shit takes it out of me."

And he lit up the night again, and conjured proper magefire over the horrible thing. The smell of burnt horseflesh almost overwhelmed the terrible stench of gore and filth. And yet his flames didn't seem to be doing much to the thing. I made a decision, watching fire fail to put an end to it.

I pulled Tickle Me aside, and muttered to her, "There's at least an even chance this isn't going to work. We should hedge our bets. Somepony needs to go back to Dance Hall and fetch the banner-lance. It's our biggest gun against terrors in the night, and I think this thing clearly qualifies if Gibblets runs out of juice before it, well, runs out of juice."

She nodded, and went over to the mass of nonplussed ponies, cutting out a pegasus who looked least blown, and muttered something to him. He flew off into the darkness. It was the hour of the witch, and dawn was a long time off.

Gibblets stopped flaming the 'roast', and took a breather. It was kind of hard to tell, given the after-images ruining my dark-sight, but it looked like it was still twitching, and there was definitely a sticky, horrible breeze wafting by. All the ponies in the vicinity of the spitted 'roast' looked like they had been wading in an abattoir.

"Gibblets, pace yourself. We've got a backup plan coming. We just need to keep it immobilized."

"F-fine. See if I come running the next time y, you call for me."

"You know what this is, right?"

"One of the le-legates?"

"Most like. Came earlier than expected."

Touch Me walked over. "Which one do you think it is?"

I thought a moment. "Well, if it just started firing, then probably one of the jackasses who sacked Caribou City and decided to make it their personal shambler plantation. No offense, Heavy Bucket."

"None taken," said the jack, shifting his bloodied axe on his shoulder. He had gotten a couple licks in on the spit-roast. "I kinda think this one was originally a jackass anyways. Half the original liches were, and I know for a fact that the Stump was one. The stories always said that the Stump could come back from being hacked into a cube of gristle. How he got his name, y'know? You could hack his tree until he was a stump, he'd just grow it all back."

"But was it just the Stump, or are all the legates like this?"

"I'unno, sir. Not an expert, just remembering what my gran'mere used to tell me 'un mon frere."

After an interminable wait, and another round of everypony playing forty-whacks with the equine piñata, the messenger and a couple of earth-ponies arrived with the standard, complete with, well, the standard. I eyed that damn great length of cloth, and yelled at them.

"Get that bloody banner away from this mess before it gets stained to tartarus and gone! That's right, back off, and take it off. Yes, you, you lummox. You've got it in your hooves, you handle it."

For some reason the new recruit was carrying the pikestaff. I almost asked why, but figured some idiot had asked for "the standard-bearer", and since we hadn't had a standard-bearer for a very long time, some sleep-deprived functionary had wasted time getting the recruit out of his bunk to officiously tote the ungainly thing out to the Trollbridge, standard, banner, lance and all. Probably Broken Sigil, knowing him.

We explained to the lanky orange earth-pony what we needed him to do with it, and he eyed the quivering, blackened mass of flesh writhing on its tripod of charred lances.

"Why does it have to be me?"

Gibblets looked up at the clouds and stars, and made a face. "Technically, it probably has to be the standard-bearer. Sawbones, are we positive this kid is it?"

I shrugged. "Damn, how would I know? But every time the ancients slew a dragon or a hydra with the blasted thing, it was always 'the standardbearer', named. Only time most of those crabbed old nags ever mentioned a pony before their death-notice. You know what? Recruit Cake, repeat after me, holding that standard-lance in your hoof: 'I, your name here, do swear to keep and protect this standard, and symbol of the Black Company, until my incapacity or death renders me unfit to do so'. Make sure to actually say your name, and by that I mean, 'Carrot Cake'."

He swore upon the pikestaff, and - nothing happened.

"Huh. Was kinda hoping for fireworks. Oh, well. Go over there and give that horrible thing on the lances a good stabbing. I'd ask you to not get it too dirty, but at this point, the pikestaff's care and handling is in your hooves."

Carrot Cake shuffled into position to lance the spit-roast, with all the ceremony and grace of a stallion chopping wood for the hearth-fire. The ancient lance-head pierced the charred flesh of the maybe-legate.

And the world exploded.

An Essential Confusion

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SBMS083

All I could see were shades of white. And not descernable shades of white, painting anything conceivable, but rather just streaks - beiges, and ivories, and yellowing bone, and terrible piercing pure white, painful to look upon. An after-image of a bursting white-petaled flower of flame hung in what had been my field of vision, but it stayed constant before me, no matter how I moved my head or body.

And everything from my poll to my muzzle hurt, horribly. A world of burning pain to replace the one consumed in an instant's flash. I couldn't feel my eyes at all, and that was a very bad sign. I could hear everything, though. And everything included a lot of shouting and screaming. Mostly about fire and not being able to see, so I leave all but the gist of that panicked not-conversation unrecorded for posterity and the sake of the participants' shredded dignity. Until, of course, in her typical voice like thunder -

"BE SILENT, ALL OF YOU!"

"THOU MUST BE STILL!"

"Do you recall why we would be here?"

"When didst we ever recall aught? Tis thee and thou retention that holdst our recollections, madmare. For I, tis always some ancient day, until thine Acolyte calls us forth to gibber and quarrel for the living like ghosts upon a walk."

"I keep telling you, we are not dead, I would remember that. Unimportant! Look at this!"

"Indeed! A necromantic construct, and a mighty one. Observe as it tries even now to reform itself, to wrest itself from - yes, from our grasp!"

"I think not. Accept your defeat, you worm. You've not-lived for long enough. I can smell the death all over you. It's… intoxicating. Come here, morsel."

There was a terrible, messy sound, like a monster gobbling up a child. Which, it turned out, was more or less what happened, from the testimony of those Company ponies lucky enough to be far enough away from the detonation and not coated in the necromantic blood-mage equivalent of flash paper. For those of us with burnt-out eyes, we had to listen, blinded, to the sound of the Nightmare messily devouring the soul of a greater lich.

At least we were spared a second magical explosion.

"Oh, my mad self, that was truly a foul deed. What terrible indigestion will we birth from it? Aigh! Damn you, Nightmare! Do you know what you've done? Now I am hungry! Givest us the scraps!"

"Greedy girl, here is your share. Wouldst you think me such a grasping sibling? Eat well, sister."

"You know full well we are not sisters, Nightmare. Do not call me so."

"This is disconcerting. Thou accent art slipping, Luna. Mine as well."

"Your Majesties have poured a great mass of corrupted energy into your systems, Mistress Nightmare, Lady Luna," interjected the pained voice of Gibblets.

"Pierrot, thou intrudeth in matters from which thou - [hrach, cough, hack] you were banished for infidelity. Know thou, nay, your! place!"

"Nightmare, leave my clown be! Oh, come here, dear Gibblets, your poor eyes. We must be able to do something -"

"Bah. Well, look at the lot of them. We can hardly lead a band of blinded warriors, can we? Rememberst thy spell of reconstruction? Combineth with this feast's great vitality and - "

"Oh! Indeed! Here, I canst easily -"

When it was my turn, a sudden burning scorched my numbed sockets, heralding the return of affronted nerves once burnt away by fire. That burning became a terrible, piercing agony for a long moment. And then the swirling shades of white flushed red, blood-red, and then the red began to grow translucent, and there was a world, dimly, through the thinning haze. And in my rose-tinted glass, I saw the shadows of two great alicornic figures standing not far from my aching, scorched self. They stood over the collapsed forms of a number of my fellows, working and muttering to each other. As I looked around, I found Gibblets squatting nearby, staring at his mistress and her dark shadow with thestral eyes.

"Sawbones, you're back with us. The Princesses are fixing our mess. It's fascinating, but a bit unsettling."

"Call us not princess, thou green-skinned devourer of flies! We art a Queen! If not thine."

"Oh, be quiet Nightmare, it's nostalgic. And attend you to our task. This pony's eyes resists our template."

"That wouldst be because he is nothing of a pony, and caribou were not made to bear a thestral's eye."

"It was the only template I could recall, and dawn is threatening. Quickly! We have two more ere the damnable sun casts us back into our darkness!"

"I would object to your insistence on talking about us as if we're ghosts, but with this junk running through our systems, you might be right as to the effects. Here! Next!"

"Oh, this one is dreadfully burned. At the center of the explosion?"

"For this one, we can spend the time. Did you mark his doubled dedication? This is our new standard-bearer. More brave than he looks, smarter than he sounds, and his constitution - look at that! Like memory-clay, just touch it and it finds its own form. Hrm. And the proper eye structure for a change."

"What, is that how they art supposed to lie? Perhaps we canst replicate that for this last pony, but the skies lighten as we speak."

"No, Lady," said a blurry pegasus-shaped shadow in the pre-dawn gloaming. Tickle Me. "Please, I will take the thestral eye. To honor my ancestors, and our lost heritage."

"As you wish, our little pony." And as the Spirits laboured away over Tickle Me's eyes, my full sight returned with the dawn.

And they were gone.

Everything was too damn bright. I found myself constantly squinting, and realized that we'd need to put out an order for smoked-glass spectacles. I recalled that Throat-Kicker had found a pair for Cherie, and made a mental note to find her source.

The more hale members of the Company had gone over the scene of battle while the Spirits had been engaged in their magical surgery, and Trollbridge was positively crawling with ponies. We had been blessed, but it had been a close-run thing. Without the Spirit, the accident would have taken half the leadership with it, ruined for life. Good for nothing but begging for bits in the street. Using the banner-lance had been a rash act, and I can only blame it on panic and sleep-deprivation.

Eventually, the remains of the Company dead were collected, and a funeral pyre was built on the low ridge overlooking the shattered shell of Trollbridge. The Captain came out to the scene of the battle, and presided over the ceremony. But she was notably withdrawn, and did not initially speak to the rest of us. The other two cohort commanders and Broken Sigil stood with the Spirit-touched, and we behaved scandalously, muttering among ourselves as the flames took in the piled logs and began to consume our fallen comrades.

"It doesn't look like it's going away."

"Permanent?"

"I can live with that."

"You would, most of your ancestors were thestral in the first place. But I better not catch you filing your teeth, it isn't healthy."

"I kind of think they're sharper this morning anyways. Look."

I glanced over, and Tickle Me did seem to have a new set of dentation. I'd have to investigate that later. Not sure how magical eye surgery could have changed her teeth, but there had been a lot of loose magic this morning so far. Even I could feel the ambient buzz.

"Captain isn't herself this morning," muttered Fuller Falchion, the commander of second cohort.

"Hasn't been since the visit." Smooth Draw, third cohort.

"She's taking the loss of the Lieutenant hard," I whispered

"No harder than some," said Gibblets, not bothering to whisper.

"She's the one in charge. We need a new Lieutenant, now," said Falchion, giving up the attempt to be quiet.

"We were going to hold elections today, before, well, this!" responded Smooth Draw.

"This shouldn't stop that. Makes it all the more urgent."

"Shouldn't make decisions in a heated moment," I tried to interject in between the glaring cohort commanders.

"Blast the heated moment, we need a full set of leadership!"

"Look at what we almost lost this morning!"

Having been turned upon by both ground cohort commanders, I found the Captain walking up to us, fully engaged and furious with the lot of us. Or maybe just me. She never did like me much.

"Thrift, thrift Sawbones! The funeral baked goods shall coldly furnish forth the election feast!" gibed Gibblets, in an admirable attempt to divert the wrath of the Captain.

"Make the arrangements for the election, Tickle Me. We'll need ballots from the crew up at the Palisades, and the night-patrols. Who should have been replaced with the day-shift two hours ago. This bagno de sangue is no excuse to let your cohorts to go rottami a relitto! Sawbones, walk with me." She stalked off, pissed as usual. She began as soon as we were out of earshot, if not a little beforehoof.

"What's tonight's damage? Is it gone? What was it? Ten dead, mia Donna! And tens of thousands of deniers in wreckage, at the least."

"Far more than that, if my off-the-fetlock figures are right. And we think it was a lich. Probably the Stump. It's… probably mostly gone."

"What the hay is ‘mostly gone'?"

"The Spirit ate him. At least, I think that's what happened - no eyes at the time. We need to be more careful of the banner-lance, by the by. The Spirit spent half the night repairing the damage caused by our new standard-bearer poking the lich with our magic stick. Not his fault, mine. Swore the colt in, told him where to stick the shaft. Not his fault it was a spectacularly bad idea."

"The Spirit… ate a lich. Our Spirit? That crazy alicorn ghost you all keep talking about?"

"You always manage to not be on scene when they make an appearance, but yes, the Nightmare and the Princess apparently manifested from, I don't know, the excess magic when we popped the Stump's perpetual-regeneration spell with the war-lance. Set off all the gore and blood it had shed all over the scene like a flash-fire in a granary, except with blood and guts instead of flour. Captain, look me in my eyes. See something? I'm not wearing my darksight amulet. It was destroyed in the accident. The Spirit repaired my eyes, as they did everypony blinded in the fire. This is real, and it will be damn hard to cover up."

"You're damn right it'll be hard to cover up. Your Trollbridge is a wreck! Ten dead we can hide easy enough, nopony outside of the Company keeps track of us that closely. But there's twenty of you with what, permanent slit-eyes now? And a ruin on our southern flank to explain."

"We were talking with the Bride about replacing those fortifications entirely. She… might have promised to send us one of her engineers? I don't know, some of the details from that last night got fuzzy after the fifth round."

"Yeah, she did. I have a harder head than you, you mammalucca. I figure we can tear up some of this, pretend it's construction. Will the donkeys in town talk?"

"You know, they don't seem the talkative sort. How often have any of them said boo to you?"

"Not too often. They remind me of the bad old days, like a pack of Sicari paisans. Bocca cucita, yanno?"

And so repairs turned to demolition instead, as Broken Sigil was sent around to conduct the poll for the election. With the Company as scattered about as it was, it took several days to get everypony on record.

Tickle Me became the new Lieutenant. It might have been the long years of service, or her tireless management of the far-flung ghoul clearance campaigns across the length and breadth of the province, but personally?

I kind of suspect it was her new pair of amber slit-pupiled eyes. They made the brotherhood feel lucky, and safe. Like it was the old days returning once again.

Travelling Weather

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SBMS084

The fallout from the attack on Trollbridge and my mistake would have to wait. The new Lieutenant and the Captain were presented a run of brilliant late-autumn days, warm and clear, and of necessity the Company ran to the ticks of a clock swiftly winding down. Columns with honeypot charms spread out across the Deep Mines range, constructing at the mouth of each holler, palisade traps. Wooden pens with open gates, and high posts slotted to take the honeypot charms when construction was complete. Several skirmishes were fought to protect the construction crews, but few injuries arose from the fighting, as the Company was now expert in the care and handling of wildling ghouls. Mostly the late autumn campaign was an exercise in crowd control, luring roving bands and singletons into the enclosures and trapping them there where the absent Major Gorefyre could quickly and easily collect her charges when the 93rd Rear Support Battalion returned from their initial delivery run.

Assuming that the late legate hadn't ambushed the 93rd on the road. Although the band of ghouls making the assault on Trollbridge showed no signs of being those enthralled undead sent off with the Major and her ponies. Odds were good that the two forces had passed each other in the wastelands without ever crossing each others' trails.

Aside from tending to the few wounded ponies produced by the low-intensity fighting, I had little official business to keep me busy. I began to set up an industrial still operation, and sent up an order to the Palisades for cracked corn and milled rye, enough to feed a mash. I asked around the Company for any moonshiners, but I think they thought I was playing military garda and nopony would admit to having any experience in running a bootleg still. I gave up and sent another request up to the Palisades for a brewmaster or master distiller if any were available. I had books on the subject, and of course, the alchemy tomes. But really, all I needed was pure aqua vitae, and somepony I didn't have to train to run the blasted stills without getting themselves blown up. It wasn't as if we needed anything drinkable – it was probably better if it wasn't, ponies looking to get plastered wouldn't raid my antiseptic supplies that way.

The woodlands surrounding Mondovi had been trampled flat in the summer's fighting, and almost everything of medical or medicinal value had been destroyed out to a range beyond comfortable walking distance. The irony here was that the Deep Mines we were fighting to clear for further mining were the probable origins of the blue and white vitriol I had purchased so dearly the winter before. I could probably dig up my own supply if I wanted to distract a section or two of armsponies for my own amusement, mucking about in the abandoned delvings. In the end, I didn't indulge myself, but I can't say I didn't think about making an expedition of it.

After about a week of good weather, Octavius, Stomper and the rest of the knights up at the Palisades decided it was time to bring the foal- no, the apprentices down to the main facility at Dance Hall. They had been kept separate from the Company proper for far too many weeks. They made a convoy of it, and I was expecting my milled grain supplies to arrive with Rye Daughter and the rest of them. They were leaving the oxen and a cadre of recovering wounded and guards up at the Palisades, as the granges of central Pepin still hadn't gotten up a militia leadership willing to take over the fortress on the lip of the plateau. I couldn't figure out the hold-up there, but it was well out of my bailiwick, and as I understand it, leadership had decided to leave the problem of organizing that region to its proper owner and sovereign, the Duc. His control was still somewhat limited, as he was stuck behind the Deep Mines range, and a solitary, insecure road that wound its way between the Pepin Front and those detached hills along the river. Progress was being made, but in that region you could still be found by opportunistic bands of shamblers if your luck wasn't in.

Octavius's convoy was late arriving that afternoon, so late that afternoon had faded into twilight by the time the signals-array on the northern watch-tower reported the train's approach. Exasperated, I trotted out to meet them by the northern gate.

The northern gate had been elaborated into a modest bastion, with a palisade thrown up across the fields back to hook into the northern walls of Mondovi proper. If the local supply of lumber hadn't run out, I suspect that Mad Jack would have completed the circuit on the other side of Mondovi extending across to the eastern end of the embankment at Trollbridge. There were plans in place to send out long-range logging parties once the Deep Mines were satisfactorily cleared, but that was mostly just completism at work. And the destruction of Trollbridge had thrown most of our further expansion plans into chaos.

The train still hadn't reached the gate by the time I got there, and instead of making the guard open up the sally port for my sake, I just waited for the main gate to open for the convoy. Stomper and Dodger were in the van, along with a pair of armsponies. Cherie circled over the convoy, with Throat Kicker flying behind her. She waved cheerfully at me as she passed overhead. Behind the van came carters hauling the remainder of my medical supplies from the Palisades, and behind them cartloads of milled grain for the distillery, and yeah, other ponies' supplies, but who cares about that?

Rye Daughter was taller again, another hoof at least. Her antlers were coming in nicely, and with her new height, extended well over my crest when we stood together. Caribou have considerably more sexual dimorphism than zebra or ponies, but at the rate Rye was growing, she was going to be on the high end of the doe range. She was going to be a big mare before she finished her adult growth.

"Boss, what the hay happened to your face? Something blow up on the stills? And why are you wearing a darkvision amulet this time of day?"

"That's a long story, liebchen. Short version is, there was a bit of an accident, and you'll see a couple hoofs-full of ponies with permanent thestral eye from now on, and we'll all be a little short-furred until we grow our coats back. You probably don't want to know the details."

She gave me a dubious look, and waved a hoof at me. "You know somepony's going to talk, and we'll hear about it. Jungle telegraph will report all in whole."

"And probably more than actually happened. Let's see what the gossips tell you, and we'll evaluate the efficiency of the rumor net. I'll bet you, damn, I have no idea what you might want these days, but I'll put up something you want, against your promise to sit and tell me everything you've been up to, that the rumor version is utter horseapples."

"Boss, you can get that without making silly bets. How about help with your new distillery, against, I don't know, permission to join in with Dodger's crew when they start their advanced training?"

"Is that permission, or forgiveness for what you've already been doing on your own hook? Stomper keeps me up to date, and if she didn't, Gibblets certainly would."

As we talked beside the gate, Otonashi, the Crow and Octavius walked past, with – a bedraggled pony in chains? Under all the bruises, streaked bad dye-jobs, and black eyes, I recognized our absent spy, who was supposed to still be out with the voyageurs somewhere west of Rime.

"Octavius! What the tartarus is this? Where'd you find her?"

"I didn't find her, she found Guilliame's Ravin. And she's why we're so late. She got caught red-hoofed being shifty, and they beat the applesauce out of her. We wasted almost an hour arguing with the Ravin's guards about whether we were obliged to take her or not. I finally gave up when they started getting ready to string her up on their front gate. I think she qualifies as 'Sawbones' Problem' once we get situated, don't you?"

"Sweetheart, you really stepped in it. We were going to leave you free to play spook, so long as you didn't mess with us, but damn if you didn't scare the locals. You never scare the locals, especially not when they're as traumatized as they are in this province. Hey, Otonashi, Crow, can you put this knucklehead somewhere secure when we get to the Hall? I'm afraid to admit that we haven't built any dungeons, there hasn't really been any call for it, what with all the undead and a notable lack of living rebels. I don't know, maybe Broken Sigil knows of a broom closet somewhere we can lock her in until I can get my horseapples together."

The Bride's Road was terribly crowded with the carts and wagons and ponies on hoof. I could almost sympathize with the Bride's recent outrage over our vandalism against her grand roadway. Re-extending the roadway on the southern verge of the Road along the ramparts was yet another engineering project crying out for attention. Meanwhile, we suffered and limited traffic to single-file columns inside of the fortified region.

The torches were being lit, and the sound of the ravelin drawbridge rising in the distance greeted us as we reached the main gates of Dance Hall. I had slipped some IOUs to the musician-ponies of Mondovi in lieu of cash, and as they spotted our convoy approaching the gate, they struck up a tune for our foals returning to a home they were seeing for the first time. The band played something nostalgic and sentimental about voyageurs leaving for some distant town, as our ponies came home.

Plus one prisoner.

The Mare Who Wasn't There

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SBMS085

It took a while to get my wagonloads situated. The carters had their own, somewhat delayed affairs to conduct, and they ended up just leaving the carts parked outside of my infirmary, to be unloaded when we had time and attention to spare. Rye was clearly fading, so I showed her the side-chamber next to the front office I'd left a cot and some blankets for her in preparation for their arrival. I told her to work on unloading the supply-carts first thing in the morning if I wasn't back by then.

I did a quick pass through the wards on my way to my next headache, and did a bed-check. They were emptying out nicely, our influx from the flu had mostly fluxed right back out my front door, and the flow of new injuries had slowed to a trickle.

I tracked down Broken Sigil, and found he still didn't know anything about our new guest. Which meant that Otonashi and the Crow still had custody of the chubby little spy. Asking around, I finally tracked down the three of them in the baths, where from the commotion it sounded like the two witches had gotten a head start in torturing our prisoner. For certain milquetoast values of torture, I suppose.

"You two know that the water-treatment doesn't actually work, right?" I yelled over the partition into the mares' bath, which was emitting copious clouds of steam and offended squawks of considerable indignity. The spy seemed a bit too old to be so reticent about a forced bath, but then I suppose all of us have our limits, and some of us retain that foalish disinclination to wash when mommy approaches with a brush and soap, even well into nominal adulthood. "They'll say anything to make the torment stop, especially if they think you want to hear something in particular. You'll have her confess to being Lord Grogar's new mistress, and then we'll have an entire love-triangle soap plot to contend with."

The spy was pushed out of the steaming bath by Otonashi, both of them as naked as the day they were foaled, which is to say, perfectly decent. The miserable little mare was now a bright pastel blue, and her close-shorn mane and tail were a rather blush shade of red. Quite distinctive by the standards of Tambelon's gloomy earth pony population, I could see why she had resorted to coat and mane dye. Too bad for her it had just shouted with a clarion voice that she had been trying to get away with something. She looked terribly young, although the hot bath had removed some of the worst effects of her very recent beating and mishandling on the part of the paranoid ponies of Guilliame's Ravin.

She had picked the wrong town to try and embed for long-term observation of the Company. From what I had heard from Octavius, "being shifty" had consisted of asking a question while not being from around there. The Ravin had found itself buried under with refugees from Durand and the many abandoned hamlets closer to the city, and they had collectively lost all patience with strangers long before our "Cupcake" had slunk into town looking for a job as a patissier journeymare.

I tossed a towel at the bedraggled, damp mare.

"Get dried, we'll find a place to talk, and I'll look at your bruises. I don't think they did permanent damage, but some of those look like they'd sting, and I could always be missing something. Don't want you dying of some internal bleeding while in our custody. Your employers would no doubt take it amiss. Thank you, Crow. Otonashi, you mind playing chaperone?" The mute nodded her acquiescence, and the junior warlock waved a hoof at me and clumped off to find Gibblets and the witches' new quarters.

We ended up in my surgery, as the front office was too close to Rye's room, which I still needed to hang a door for - mental note. I gave the spy's two black eyes a good looking-over, and determined that there wasn't any long-term damage there. Hooves run along her limbs and across the bruising on her back and sides revealed no deep tissue damage, just a quite thorough pasting by angry townsfolk.

While I conducted my examination, I asked questions. Her name. Where she grew up. Any childhood breaks, sicknesses, reasons to be wary of any specific bits of damage.

"Cup Cake? Really, you're going to go with that?"

Otonashi hooved her amusement at my line of interrogation. Didn't we just induct a recruit named Carrot Cake?

"That's why I find it odd to have another Cake in camp so soon. Too many pastry-ponies in one place makes me suspicious of coincidence."

Coincidence in close proximity to earth-ponies often means destiny on the hoof, tapped out the mute.

The spy watched us in perplexity, clearly not capable of reading hoof-speech. What did she think the unicorn mare had been doing all the way from the Ravin? Her training was clearly not particularly deep or comprehensive.

Also, destiny on the hoof makes me think of Equestrians, added Otonashi. They're often hag-ridden by that nag Destiny.

Otonashi's origins and travels before she joined the Company are obscure, and she was generally not inclined to elaborate on the nothing she had said about her past. Her name was particularly uninformative, being from a language I had never heard of, nor had anypony else to my knowledge. This was the first indication I'd heard that Otonashi knew anything about Equestrians, covert or otherwise.

"So, you think our spy is Equestrian, do you?" I turned to the alarmed operative, having finished my examination. "Well, filly, are you? Are you reporting to that new consulate I hear has hung a knob on a rented townhouse in Rime?"

She scrambled off the examination table and found a corner to be small in. "No, what? Of course not, what's Equestria? Is that someplace on Crossroads?"

"Ha! Trying to pretend to be from Crossroads? Nopony actually from Borealia calls it Crossroads, that's an outsiders' name for that world. Nice try, though. I'm guessing you're fresh out of the portal for this assignment?" The locals didn't call Crossroads Borealia, of course, but the fact that the biggest ocean on Crossroads was called the Boreal might confuse a new-hired operative enough to think that her instruction and training had a-

"What? Really? But they told me that - No! Dang it, I'm from Hydromel, outside of Grossbach. I'm just a patissier!"

Got her. Nice try, though. Her native accent was pretty close to that of the earth ponies in the northlands. But her choice of a hometown was too close to the Company's trail of destruction through the northlands; she clearly had picked it up from her travels trying to find us.

"Cup Cake, I think it's time we dropped the pretense. You're not holding up your end of the scene, and I'm too tired to pull out my witch-doctor mufti and put on a crazy zebra accent. Normally, at this point, I'd start pouring whiskey into you until you didn't know down from up, and get you to incriminate yourself. But you did that for yourself without any chemical aid. You shook your Company minders, got into trouble, and we had to bail you out. Your lurking privileges have been revoked. You're just damn lucky a shambler didn't find you and leave another anonymous pile of gnawed bones on some roadside in the Riverlands.

"You're going to be a guest of the Company until we find time to deliver you to your Equestrian spymasters in the Rime consulate. It's going to be a busy season, I can't tell you when that will be. Honestly, I don't think you have any intelligence worth the close interrogation. I give you a week before you're an empty sack. I know you screwed up, you know you screwed up. Pretty soon your bosses will know you've screwed up, especially after we drop you gift-wrapped on their consulate front steps with a 'persona non grata' tag."

Poor Cup Cake looked completely defeated. And even more tired than I felt. I wasn't kidding when I gave her a week before she was confessing the whole and more besides. It takes considerable fortitude to not start babbling once you're alone among strangers who claim to basically know every secret you're hiding. Eventually, she'd start gushing, and then we'd hear anything and everything. And maybe even get some novel information in among the suspicions and suppositions.

Otonashi put her to bed in one of the recently-disinfected quarantine rooms with a clean blanket, and I locked the door behind the defrocked earth-pony spy.

Making Sausage

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SBMS086

Of course, guests of the Company were generally expected to pull their fair share of the weight. When they weren't demi-immortal imperial liches, that is. I strongly encouraged the spy to rise bright and early and assist my apprentice and I in unloading the medical supply carts. By which I mean…

"Rise and shine, spook! You'll just seize up and stiffen, laying about in bed all morning long with bruises like those. Long day of work ahead of us!" I refrained from the cold-water bucket I've used on occasion for slugabeds. No need to add insult to injury. Yet.

The supply wagons were loaded with medical records, medicines, dried herbal materials and components. My alchemical equipment, taken out of storage. Most importantly, the rest of my dwindling antiseptic supplies. The high rate of casualties and the astonishingly poor hygienics of the early months of the deployment had burnt through my antiseptic supplies like wildfire. That final, punishing imperial bacchanal had only put a cherry on that particular sundae. Which is part of why I had sent for the remainder of my supplies, and Rye while I was at it.

And why I had gotten them to ship me some cracked corn and milled rye as well. I've never been the sort of mercenary to service our sottish brethren with moonshining. I left that to Shorthorn and the late Chestnut Shell, and probably other ponies within the brotherhood who had more effectively shielded their clandestine distilling activities from my notice. They had to have been fairly good at it, though. We'd only had one serious case of methanol poisoning in my time with the Company, and my family recipe for that particular malady was iron-clad. Zebra culture might be a superstitious amalgam of ancestor-worship, grotesqueries, and silly fright-masks, but my people knew how to bash together a potion like nopony else. Especially hangover cures and remedies for alcohol poisonings of all stripes.

So this was really the first time I'd seriously run an alcohol still, aside from some small job lots to specification to create the aqua vitae necessary for various alchemical recipes. And a still wasn't all that different from the alembics of which I had long experience, right?
By mid-morning the wagons were unloaded, my supply shelves were heavy once again with material, and the heavy sacks of milled grain were stacked in the back-room with my alembics and copper tubing and so forth. It would become the distillery, I had hopes. Both Rye and the spy were looking peaked and hungry. Rye was a growing fawn, and, I supposed, the spy's superficial injuries might require sustenance.

"When's the last time you two ate?"

"On the road, Boss. Who travels without snacks?"

"Maybe two days ago? The bailiff of Guillaime's Ravin apparently isn't made of deniers, and refused to feed his prisoners. Said something about that being my relatives' and friends' business."

"Well, tartarus-fire, spook! Let's get some oats inside of you. Can't have you starving away into hide and bones. I hear tell you can make a revenant work, but you'll not like the results."

We caught the tail end of the dinner hour for the retiring evening shift, and my mouth watered from the savory smells coming- well, coming off the plates of a half-section of griffins from the aerial cohort. They were eating sausage out in public again. I ran my tongue over my recently-much-more-sharpened teeth, and pondered my sudden-onset case of salivation. Thestrals historically were held to be omnivorous, some of them even obligate carnivores, depending upon the source. None of us in the Trollbridge accident were going full thestral necessarily - Cherie was still the only pony in the company with full bat-wings - but there had been some with stronger transformations than others. And it had been marked by subtle, or not-so-subtle, changes in dentation.

Such as what I'd woken up with two days before. Nothing spectacular, but my incisors were definitely taking on an edge, and those bumps were probably my wolf teeth growing in. I eyed the plate of cooling pork sausages as we went through the buffet line, but decided to not freak out Rye Daughter her first day down at Dance Hall.

The porridge was worse than I remembered it being.

The ponies from the night shift lazing about the dining hall were giving us the stink-eye as we sat and ate, and I fumed for a second before I realized the shade was being cast at our involuntary guest. Word must have gotten around that we had a spy in custody. Jungle telegraph moves at the speed of imagination, after all. She looked appropriately nervous - you would be too if you thought it likely you were about to get stomped for being Not Around Here for the second time in a week.

"Alright, you lot. Back the buck off. Don't you have some cards to cheat at somewhere else? I'll let your corporals know if I need your intimidation services the next time I choose to interrogate our Equestrian guest."

"I'm NOT FROM EQUESTRIA!"

"Of course not, I'm sure your queen appreciates your loyalty."

"I've never even met the Pr- I am a good subject of the Empress of Tambelon!"

"The Bride has no good subjects, merely subservient ones. And you just slipped again, 'Cup Cake'. Who but the Equestrians bothers to call Celestia by her preposterous made-up rank?"

Everypony in the hall looked shifty and embarrassed, which didn't exactly help my case, but the reaction was so off-note that the spy just looked perplexed. Which was good, if she had looked enlightened, I might have gotten worried.

So the Equestrian foreign service didn't know why they were following us? Or were they under orders to pretend they didn't know about the exiled lunar princess? Interesting. I'd have to poke at that seam, see if it unraveled under pressure. Maybe not here, out in the open. Time for a distraction.

"You know, you're quite lucky you found us as we are, our modern selves. In the time of Fatinah, we were much less forgiving of espionage. That grim old mare would have taken you straight to Rime, nailed you up by the main gates, and mailed your consulate invitations to the crucifixion. Most military manuals still specify hanging for the crime of espionage without uniform in time of war, even now. We'll give you all benefit of the assumption that this is not, from your point of view, strictly speaking, a time of war. Thus, you are our guest, and not that of the hangmare."

"How gracious of you, my lord, to extend me the favor of not being murdered to terrorize some ponies I don't even know. I'm sure it shows how civilized you all are, and not at all a pack of primitivily armed savages." Her eyes were bright, and hard, and her body-language had folded into something low and sturdy. I thought that perhaps we had just seen a flash of the true Cup Cake.

I looked around at our audience, less salty than they had been a moment before. "What do you think, colts and fillies? Should we keep our spook? She thinks hanging miscreants is a mark of primitive savagery! That's a proper aristocratic attitude, don't you think? Let's have a hoof for ma Dame Espion!"

They drummed out a sarcastic salute for the bruised, pastel earth-pony, and filed out past us. Rye had never stopped eating her meal, and by the time the last donkey left the hall, she had cleaned her bowl out. I hoofed her my half-eaten porridge, and turned back to Cup Cake.

"You know, I've got an appetite for something else this morning. You want something from the kitchen? They're getting ready to clean up."

She shook her head no.

I went up and grabbed the plate of cold sausages before the cooks could toss them out, and brought it back to the table.

"So we seem like primitives by Equestrian standards, do we? I've heard tell you're quite advanced by our local technological standards. Almost a thousand years of peace and prosperity can do that for you."

She blushed at the realization she had given herself away again. I picked up a sausage-link with a fork.

"Have you ever watched a pony or a griffin make sausages? We keep pigs for some reason, and here in Tambelon, the Company is the only place you'll find a griffin for hundreds in miles in any direction. Why do you think they keep pigs here? Oh, I'll grant you, the leather for tack and other leather goods have to come from somewhere, and better mindless swine than thinking ponies. But sausage? Sausage is for eating."

I bit into the sausage I had been twirling on the end of a fork. Slowly chewed and then swallowed. She turned green.

"Where did the sausages come from? What made a pony say, 'let's take the guts from a butchered pig, scrape them out, and fill them with organ meat and chopped-up flesh, and then cook and cure them while we're tanning the rest of the swine for our leather goods!'? Once you understand why there is sausage, you'll understand why we keep pigs."

Now she looked sick and confused.

Well, foal steps. And damn, those sausages were good.

Making Mash

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SBMS087

We spent that afternoon and evening setting up three concurrent stills with my alembics and extended, curled copper piping, with the boiling chambers seated in the back room's expanded semi-enclosed hearth, and the kabila ranked in padding on a table set across the way from the hearth. The spy's wry smirk said much about her contempt for my primitive apparatus. I twice asked her how she would improve on the process, but decided to play the waiting game on that matter.

The other foals came by about four in the evening, and carried Rye away for training practice, snickering and giggling as they went. That left me with my prisoner and a room full of sacks of grain and copper tubing and uncertainty. Once I was more or less satisfied with the layout, I prodded her with a hoof, and we went in search of fuel.

Our depredations upon the landscape had disrupted the supply of firewood, but then, it also produced a lot of scrap and trash wood in the meantime. About three hundred yards from the main gates of Dance Hall, and another four hundred from those of Mondovi, was a great pile of scrap and odd-cut logs left over from construction. I grabbed one of the guards from the gate to mind Cup-Cake as I hauled a supply-cart out to the woodpile.

"More campaigns have come to grief over lack of fuel, food, and good water than ever were won by brilliant generals and brave battalions rampant upon the glorious battle-field, my dear. What is your analysis of our supplies, such that we're scrabbling about in the trash-pile for my fuel?"

"I think nothing looks fine from the front of a rubbish tip. Even Canterlot looks a sight when you're hauling rubbish to be burned."

"Don't know that place. Is it an Equestrian Rakuen? A sort of paradise or place of make-believe? What do you swear by in hopes of heaven when you live in another's paradise? Well, we're not working in Rakuen here, this is Pepin. They'll be hauling cut wood down out of the Deep Mine slopes later this winter. This is an expedient for the moment. Grab that."

I got hitched again to the cart, and hauled the lot back into the Hall, and she was quiet as she helped unload the scrap wood and rubbish into the back-room for the hearth. By the time we were done, that back-room was crowded and difficult to get around, between the sacks of grain and the piles of burnables.

"Think I need to get some brickwork in here to seal off the hearth? I think we need some splash-guards in here."

"I think your retorts are too small for your mash to cook properly here. Too big a fire won't make it go faster, not with this setup."

"Boiled some booze in your time?"

"I have some distant cousins in the business. They'd laugh themselves sick at this, I can tell you that. The Pickled colts had a mash tun that I could go for a swim in. You need one of those, not this – what is this, three barracks-room stills thrown together in a single room?"

"I wouldn't think with your mark you'd know that much about making hooch."

"Earth pony families'll surprise you. You never know who's related to who, and everypony has their specialties."

"You never know who's related to who – well said! Show me what you think we need. Here, here's some scrap paper. Show me."

She sketched out a design, and muttered about the size about the hearth, and the three caps we had to work with. We went out to the kitchens to steal a big copper broth pot from a fuming Asparagus. I had to promise a supply of hooch for future kitchen use, and a share of the cracked grain. Something about a soup base?

"Who's related to who – we were related to the general population of mercenary companies back when we were one among many on Crossroads. Two dozen companies scrabbling around the shores of the Boreal, and four in Openwater Bay alone, five or six sometimes when there was unrest in the cays. Everypony spied on everpony else, the companies on each other, the cities on the companies, the companies on the city leadership, and foreign spooks stirring up the mash with long, thin rakes."

We got that broth pot seated on the hearth shelf, and I looked at my book, estimating the amount of rye and corn I needed to mix with how much water- she rolled her eyes and grabbed hoof-fulls from two sacks of grain, and started mixing them into the pot, waving me and my book away.

"There were a number of foreign outfits spying on us in Openwater Bay, even when we were in garrison and not doing anything in particular. The New Roamish IEIS, they had a griffin and a pony who'd trade off looking in on us. The prince in Vladimir, he hired a local changeling to keep tabs on us. Shorthorn would have drinks with that bug every other month, catch him up on our adventures or lack thereof. There were two or three others that swung by now and again, that we thought were taking notes for this or that old employer, making sure we weren't conspiring with their dissidents or planning to take up a contract in their vicinity. It was generally a shirt-sleeves business, nothing smash-mouth or aggressive. Everypony just wanted to be kept up to date on whether the ponies with pointy sticks were getting happy hooves or not. So long as we stayed safely employed by the Hidden Council, it was all good."

She started pouring in water from the barrel in the corner, using a dipper sitting on top of the barrel.

"Then there was the Equestrians. They were strange, we'd never taken a contract in Equestria, or any of her neighboring worlds on the Chain. It had been a point of business on the part of the leadership of the Company, that we kept our distance from your little sugar-bowl. I couldn't tell you why, it was a matter of tradition long before it was a matter for the Annals. And yet, you all kept a consulate in Openwater Bay, and as many ponies keeping tabs on us as the New Roamish, with which we did have a history of conspiring with their dissidents, supporting factions, and interfering in their politics. Not that we had any true intentions in that direction, but with Captain Gilbert and some of our other veterans, you could understand the impulse to always make sure we were where the IEIS could see what we were up to."

"And yet the Equestrians always hovered around the edges. Never close, not really. We'd catch sight of the same green pegasus mare now and again, drinking where we were drinking, paying off the shopkeeps across the way from our garrison gates. The shopkeeps cut us in on the bribes, of course, so it wasn't the most subtle of surveillances, but it was there. It was odd, but in the boiling-tun of oddities that was Openwater Bay, just one more clot of grain in the mash."

I hoofed her the ladle we were using as a mash rake.

"Then we had to abandon the contract in the Bay. Too much heat, too many betrayals by the Council and their stupid fratricidal war. Any word on how much of the Bay is still standing? They seemed intent on burning it down to the shoals when we left. No? I guess it isn't your sector."

She knew more about this distilling business than I did. It didn't really fit with her cutesy destiny mark, that real ponies make such a deal over. What was a little mare with pastries on her flank doing knowing so much about how to make a proper distilling mash? Did it have something to do with why this plump little pony was here in the savage backend of damnation getting the tar bucked out of her by Tambelonian shitkickers for the Equestrian crown?

"And when we kipped out of the Bay, we left the spies behind with the garrison. For most every intelligence service, the job was done when we disappeared through the portal into Tambelon. We were another body of armsponies disappearing into the open maw of the Tambelonian wars. If you look at the records and histories, there have been a dozen companies before us, and there might even be fragments of them here and there somewhere further down in the Riverlands. I expected to see more flyers from past companies here in Tambelon, but I've barely seen two ponies with wings in two years, and neither of them with a history of mercenary work."

I paused to help her get the tun onto the hearth rack, which was now heavy as Hippolyphus's rock.

"OK, now we need to think about how to cap this sucker off and feed it into the copper tubing. Oilcloth and adhesive?"

"Pfft, it'll all come apart under any heat. You'll have to make something to order. Got any thin copper plate or foil?"

"How are you with a hammer?"

"Try me, you unholy terror."

I led her out to the pile of copper scrap I'd scrounged up when I started thinking full-scale still. She hooved through the scrap, which wasn't exactly the best material, but the best we had available. Some of it was strip-scrap from torn down chimney-linings in the dead hamlets, some of it I have no idea where they found it, but I had put out the word for copper, and this was what had came in.

"We've seen neither mane nor hoof of the New Roamish, and not even our old employers in the Council seem curious to see what we're up to here on the lip of Tartarus. Their questions have been answered - 'What will the Black Company do?', well, the answer is, 'gone off to commit suicide for an uncertain denier'. But that wasn't enough for you Equestrians, was it?"

"You seem oddly set on the idea that I'm spying for the Crown of Equestria. Why are you so sure I'm not a spy for your New Roamish, or the White Rose, or your own employers? In your place, my first pronk wouldn't be 'Equestrian!'"

For starts, 'pronk' was very much an Equestrian turn of phrase, but I left that on the table, and passed over it.

"I wasn't really sure the first time you passed through. As you say, there are enough local factions with curiosity and resources. Although most White Rose I've seen have been caribou. I recognize this is bias, mostly constructed from false impressions drawn from local conditions and the particular rebels we've been encountering, but without pre-judging we can't make any practical judgments, can we? As I said, you could have been spying for the Empress, or one of the legates, or even the militia-ponies we've been working for. Probably not the new Duchesse in Rennet or the current Duc in Pepin City, but all sorts of surprises will lurk in the shadows for the unprepared."

We took the most likely sheets of copper back into the prospective distillery room, and laid it out with a mallet on a work-table.

"It was the word that the Equestrians had opened a consulate in Rime. You could hide in uncertainty from us here in the field, and we'd be guessing until judgment day who you were working for, but your bosses couldn't hide from the Bride's own agents in the biggest, most gossipy city of the heartlands. Your spymaster had to have an official cover to squat nearby, some reason to be hanging about spookily. I have no idea whether your master is the consul herself or one of her servants, but I have no doubt that a consulate in Rime and a spy stumbling over her own hooves here in Pepin are connected events. Celestia has found us again."

"There's this term my schoolmarm taught us when I was a filly, Fancy or Roamish or something like that, she called it 'apophrenia'. It's what happens when you take a bunch of unrelated facts, and swirl 'em around in your head until they align in some accidental or forced way, and makes an accidental picture, a story. A story that has no reality outside of your addled mind. Just unrelated facts stated one after another as if dog causes cat, cat causes rat."

She started pounding two pieces of copper flat into each other with the mallet and a great deal of frustration.

"What's the difference, my little pony, between a series of unrelated facts, and a story? Narrative."

She stopped and looked in my eyes for the first time that evening. She shuddered as she had when I had eaten pork sausages in front of her, but she met my glowing, slit-pupiled eyes.

"Why are there Equestrians in Rime, five or six portals down from the homeland? Why do they keep sending spies to keep watch on a mid-size mercenary company that hasn't approached Equestrian borders time out of mind? Why is there sausage in a pony kitchen?"

Suddenly, there was a commotion in the outer infirmary, as the foals poured into the hospital, chattering.

"Hey, Boss, did you keep our Hearth's Warming costumes from last year's pageant? We were telling the new apprentices about the play, and they want in on it this year! We even have Cherie to play Pansy this time!"

In the spy's eyes was confused recognition, and then horror. Cup Cake knew what Hearth's Warming was, and some inkling of what its celebration in the Company meant must have made the necessary, belated connections in her mind. And she froze in terror, as if she had been trapped in that back room with ghouls.

She finally saw the sausages being made around her.

Granting Parole

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SBMS088

"Calm yourself, filly. You haven't figured out anything I haven't been guiding you towards, with all deliberation." She was backed into a corner, between the woodpile and the back wall.

"I-I thought it was an affectation. Something someone picked up from a Nightmare Night celebration at one of the outworld colonies, or something like that. Like putting a skull or a bloody axe or a pierced and bleeding heart on a flag, to show off how dangerous you were."

"Some other companies' banners are like that," I agreed. "The Company went through a phase like that in Fatinah's day. But they retired her hanged-ponies banner when her revenge was complete, and restored the original standard. I'd show you her old fright-night banner, except she sewed it into the lining of my Annals chest, and I'm not letting a spy into the Annals." I smiled. "Well, not now at any rate."

For some reason this scared her more than everything up to that moment. Cup Cake leaned so far back from me that she almost dove into the woodpile.

"You're Equestrians!" she shrieked. "That isn't just a repurposed Nightmare Night banner, you're cultists!"

The doorway was full of curious foals' heads, watching wide-eyed at the tableau. I must have looked like a revenge-play villain threatening the doomed ingénue. I turned to my audience, and hammed it up.

"Really now, my dear, isn't that a bit pejorative? We prefer the term 'exiled loyalists'." I wiggled my half-grown-back eyebrows at the foals, and they giggled on cue. "Simply because Celestia the Eternal has locked away her much-abused sister in a prison of her eldritch devising, should we throw aside our natural and rightful loyalties to the Princess of the Night?"

The foals caught the thread of the scene, and pranced in a line into the crowded room, like a flowing tide of adorableness.

"Queen of the Moon!" sang Tam Lane.

"Lady of Dreams!" trilled Feufollet and the Dodger in duet.

"Mistress – Of! The! Night!" chorused three of the newer apprentices.

"I ought to bring all of you with me everywhere, to sing backup. Yes, my apprentices, our Mistress, our Lady. You see this nice mare? She's been sent envoy by our Spirit's good sister. Our distant cousin, as it were, sent to find distant, estranged family."

"Equestrian?" "She's from Equestria?" "Oh, tell us about the land of the Sisters!" "About Earth!" "About Unicornia!" "About Pegosopolis!" "Do you know Starswirl the Bearded?" "Will you come to watch the pageant?" "Will you come to watch our practices?"

"No-now children, don't crowd me. Stars, there's a lot of you. Start with introducing yourselves, that's only polite. I'll start, my name is Cup Cake. What's yours?"

I sidled out of the overcrowded backroom as the foals swarmed the matronly little pony. She apparently was good with children. Who saw that coming? And had been sent into the field without any preparation to speak of by her superiors, Grogar damn them. I waved Rye Daughter out into the infirmary's foyer, as far from the back room as we could get, and closed the door against the clamour. As the apprentices grew into their adolescence, it was becoming increasingly obvious that Rye was a few years older than the rest. She was maturing fast.

"So, you think you can get them to spin her up, and see what comes out once she's more comfortable? I think I've bad-ponied her sufficiently now."

"I don't know, Boss. The foals can be pretty loose-tongued when it comes down to it. Aren't you afraid what she's going to find out?"

"What, like the truth? I don't much fear the truth, when it comes to Celestia's agents. They're in Equestria, or their outposts next door to Equestria. We're all the way out here. They didn't come for Grogar or the Bride, who are a heck of a lot more terrifying than we'll ever be, they won't come for us. This is just… information-gathering. The Spirit wants to go home. Anything we can do to gather intelligence and satisfy her impulses short of packing up and trying to invade a sovereign nation with less than fifteen hundred armsponies would be all to the good."

"Anyways, destiny dropped her into our saddle-bags. Let's see what she's worth before we trade her in for a breath of air and promises."

"I thought we didn't believe in fate, Boss?"

"Fate and destiny are not at all the same thing. Fate is a doom, a damnation, the weight of the world pressing down on its puppets and victims. Destiny is… a breeze, a current of air in a dark, stale, closed-off cavern. Breezes can't make you do anything, but sometimes, if you follow currents of air when they present themselves, you might find a way out into the world outside of your darkness."

I found the Spirit resting upon the surface of the lagoon of dreams, her blue feathers spread out over the waters and her great eyes closed in contemplation. Tail and mane faded into the eternal reflection of the deep and cloudless night, and she almost seemed to be humming to her self. I scuttled up to the edge of the water, and hailed her.

"My Lady Luna, I greet you on this glorious night. We have a visitor, and I would talk with you about her reception."

The Spirit opened her eyes, and draconic blue-green slit-pupils narrowed at my interruption of her meditation.

"Luna is not available at the moment. She hast gone to await the dreams of her new playmates, who are being bad foals and refusing to sleep as they ought. What might I do for you, my faithless Acolyte?"

"Mistress Moon, how fares your worship? I see you have discovered the presence of our Equestrian prisoner by your… evident displeasure. And by the dark and brooding look I've surprised upon the faces of my fellows, as if they were contemplating the unprovoked murder of said spy."

"A treacherous worm, in mine house! One of Celestia's pets, breathing, heart-beating, in the presence of mine own soldiers, and yet HER LIFE'S BLOOD IS NOT UPON YOUR BLADES!" The distant palm-tree tops bent outwards from the shockwave of her bellowed rage, and the reflection of the skies above vanished from the disturbed waters below.

"A young pony, unarmed, beaten, captured and defeated. By my measure, ignorant and fearful, even unknowing of your magnificence. And, if I do not miss my mark, she doesn't even know of your existence as anything other than a bogey-mare of myth and legend. Do you have any idea what 'Nightmare Night' might be?"

The great mare, whose coat had flushed black as night and whose wings had resumed their leathery bat-pinioned aspect, rolled her eyes in irritation. "We know not, although we can imagine given the name and the implication. A demon from Tartarus, art we now in our long-lost home?"

"Perhaps. We could learn more, if you would give our prisoner her parole, to continue her breath, to accept her life as your generous boon. She is, after all, as much a source of information, as a spy come to steal ours. Her treasures are more precious than the paltry facts she might pilfer from our existence, don't you think, Mistress?"

"Hate! We can feel her hate in our horn, our feathers and our hooves! She knows not who we are, and yet, she hates! Why should we not return hate for hate, fury for fury, DEATH FOR DISRESPECT?"

"Mistress, she doesn't know you from the Peacock Angel. She, perhaps, knows of a boggart named 'Nightmare Moon', but what is that, to her, but a story? Be good Princess Luna to her, and she might return love for love. Don't confuse a fear of the unknown for fear of you yourself."

Blue feathers flickered away the Nightmare seeming, and the surface of the lagoon was as was, as if it had always been that pane of glass reflecting the endless night above.

"Think you so? The foals seem to like her. Oh, and thank you evermuch for bringing the children here, so close to my heart. I could barely hear their dreams when they were perched so far away in that wooden fastness of yours. Last night and tonight have been heavenly. Such sweet, strong dreams children dream." I was somewhat perturbed to see my mistress in her less-lethal aspect… drooling sharp-toothed over the dreams of foals.

"Princess Luna, are you quite feeling yourself this evening?"

"Oh, what? Oops, how did that happen?" She wiped her muzzle, and blushed. "Ever since the demolition of our enemy, I and the Nightmare have been encountering some… sorting issues. House-keeping, really. We will work it out, I assure you. And truly, the foals are darling. They are helping, even now. As for our wayward, ignorant subject, we will visit her dreams as well tonight, and I promise thee, we will do our very best to come Luna at her sun-struck self, and leave Nightmare to kick her fetlocks in the hall. This will help, I hope, keep any unhelpful stray homicidal impulses from seeping into the underminds of the soldiery."

She paused, and thought.

"Perhaps you ought to assign thy new standard-bearer to act in guardianship of thy guest? He seems somewhat resistant to our darker self's… darker impulses. Such a strange colt..."

She turned away, dismissing my presence without another word. She settled once again on the surface of the lagoon, to walk the dreams of her littlest subjects.

Night-Terrors And The Light Of Day

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SBMS089

The foals had cheerfully herded the spy into the quarantine chamber we were using as a dungeon the night before. The next morning when I went to let her out of stir, I was greeted by whimpering so loud I could hear it right through the locked door. When I went in, I found her curled up in a ball between one of the cots and the wall, shivering. She had apparently had terrible dreams, of dead things with the faces of family and friends, stalking her through the streets of her home town.

"But as horrible as that was, to see them all dead and still walking, moaning, drooling - in the end, I got away from them, and hid in my gam-gam's attic, where nothing could reach me. Then - SHE looked in through that narrow attic window, and it was like Tartarus opened one awful blue-green eye and LOOKED RIGHT THROUGH ME!" She started in on another crying jag, and I frowned.

I sidled up against her, and tried to give her a reassuring hug, having no better idea of what to do. It was amazingly awkward, and she mostly froze up. But at least the crying stopped.

"Did she say anything to you? The dream-vision?"

"Y-yeah. That I had been judged, and found wanting. But a better pony than I had 'vouched for thine future conduct, and thou art granted limited parole, on condition of good behaviour'. She- she looked like the Nightmare Moon effigies! The flags! It's just supposed to be a foal's story! Something to scare them into good behavior, make them share their things and their candies, put the fear of the alicorns into them, you know? Nothing a grown pony should - oh, Celestia, her teeth!"

"Well, that's good news, then. The Spirit doesn't like you, but then, she likes few ponies who aren't members of the brotherhood. I'm glad that she took my plea to heart. Still, we're going to assign you a guard for your duration with the Company, for your own safety. The Spirit is not always of one mind on sensitive subjects, and I wouldn't want any trouble."

There was a knock on the open door of the quarantine chamber, and the gawky new standard-bearer shuffled diffidently inside. "I got word that you wanted my service, sir?"

"Ah, this is Carrot Cake, he's a guard. Carrot, this is Cup Cake, she's an Equestrian spy. You're going to be guarding her for the Company. Try and keep her out of trouble? That means no wandering into sensitive areas, pestering ponies who don't want to be pestered, or wandering off to be eaten by ghouls."

The standard-bearer blinked at his new charge, and sighed. "Well, it's got to be more interestin' than standing guard on the ravelin. I guess I'm definitely not going back to my section, sir? I was just getting used to it."

"Your appointment means we can't have you off chasing shamblers in the high hollers anymore. You're a grand tactical asset now, colt. Don't get too far from your standard, you're effectively on call from now on. And since we don't want our spook here wandering too far off the reservation, that means you're both tethered to about a mile around Dance Hall. Try not to wander further afield, right?"

He was staring at the little blue mare, distracted.

"Right?" I prompted again.

"Oh, right, sir. Stay within a mile of post. No rambling. Keep the little lady out of trouble. No ghouls." He nodded firmly, looking rather less reassuring as he did so. His chamfron was pushed back on his mane, and wobbled unsteadily, as if it was about to pitch back onto his withers or onto the chamber floor at any moment.

"Corporal, go put away your damn helm. You look like you're going to lose it the way you're wearing it. And I don't want to hear about somepony having to fish it out of the great ditch or anything of the like, right?"

"C-Corporal? I thought I was still a Recruit?"

"Came with your appointment to the standard. Didn't anypony tell you?"

"I guess not?"

I face-hoofed in exasperation. "Cup Cake, this goofus is your guard. Please don't get him in trouble. He's much more gallant than he looks, and you clearly have more in common than just your names. Go find some more felicitous quarters, I don't think we'll be locking you in quarantine tonight. You've given your parole, have you not? To the Nightmare?"

She nodded, wide-eyed again.

"Excellent. I'm going to finish setting up our still, you two go get acquainted."

I went back to the distillery room, and started in on hammering together a solid alembic dome for the bigger mash boiling chamber. The banging finally woke up Rye Daughter, and we went to do the morning rounds through the mostly-empty wards. Last I heard from the two Cakes, they were bonding over their grievances against Guilliame's Ravin, comparing Cup Cake's beating with Carrot Cake's mother's failure to survive that town's dubious charity.

All in all, it was a day like any other. Work had continued on the Trollbridge, and the bridge itself had been mostly repaired the day before by a swarm of work-teams which consisted of nearly half the second cohort. The damaged portions of the fortifications had been torn down, and the usable materials recycled, but much was still in a state of flux, being mostly piles of rubble, stacks of trimmed-back planks, and recovered fixtures.

This became an issue when the daily patrol out on the road to Le Coppice flew back in a hurry, reporting a body of troops approaching that town on the far side. A pegasus reported seeing the banner of the 93rd, which hopefully meant that our business partners had returned to collect the next tranche of enthralled ghouls to feed the Imperial war machine.

But we certainly didn't want rumors of the legate-induced damage to Trollbridge getting back to the Imperium. We had struck a deal with the Mondovans to keep the trouble under wrap, not that they knew the details. It was as much in their interest to not see any further negative Imperial attention on our common encampment as it was ours. We hoped.

Either the Crow or Otonashi would be keeping station at the ruins of the Trollbridge blockhouse for the foreseeable future, maintaining a first-class glamour over the construction site to keep activity from being noticed by the 93rd or other non-local traffic. It was a major working for those minor warlocks, but the long fighting season had definitely brought the both of them into fighting trim. They were as sharp and well-drilled as any of the Company's more storied magical forebears, if not necessarily wielding those great magics that truly make a magus.

The next day, when Major Gorefyre and her sergeant-major led their ramshackle battalion into their temporary quarters in the holler up the way from the Trollbridge, they saw what they expected to see - an intact sprawl of half-flanked ramparts, palisades and fighting-platforms on the far bank of the Withies, surrounding an intact blockhouse and the fortified bridge itself. They did not see the ant-like swarm of ponies feverishly repairing the damages, rebuilding the blockhouse, and shoring up the damaged ramparts.

The morning after that, Gorefyre and the bulk of her armsponies passed through the bridge, almost brushing against the unseen work-parties restoring the gruesome trophy-racks along the re-built bulwarks of the bridge. The Imperials marched right past the construction without seeing or hearing a thing.

Our warlocks might not be powerhouses, but nopony is better than they when it came to spinning stories from the naked air.

Management greeted the returning ponies of the 93rd, and sent a large contingent of the second cohort with them on their march up the old Road, towards the trap-pens in the hollers of the Deep Mines range. I watched as the entire cavalcade passed over the great drawbridge behind the grand ravelin, and through the sallyways towards the Road.

Gorefyre was positively bristling with the great fetish-needles she used to control her thralls, each needle's blade plunged a quarter-hoof's depth into her flesh to 'blood' the fetish. I have no conception of the agony that the practice must induce in the practitioner, to have hundreds of needles piercing one's flesh in such a way. I'm told that the pain and the damage is recovered in part by blood-work magery that take the pain and the agony, and re-directs that energy towards the unearthly control of the thrall-master. But for sheer barbarous display, that little donkey blood-witch with her baroque rainbow-porcupine affect, could only be rivaled, and never bested.

I turned to our Equestrian spy, standing upon the ravelin fighting platform with her inseparable, gawky guard, and asked her, "Are there still no things in this world that frighten you more than the Spirit? That young lady that passes beneath us on her way to enslave the dead - she is a small and harmless witchling, Cup Cake. There are grand terrors in the greater darkness to the south and west, and they fright me more than anything I carry with me."

She looked back up with a sickened pallor and a glare, and snarled, "That there are greater devils in the dark, is no excuse for evil deeds done in the light of day, you damned cultist."

"Miss, show respect, please. Sir, please don't take it amiss."

"What, the cultist thing? I've never stitched up a wound inflicted by a harsh word, Corporal." I looked down at the long lines of Imperials coursing through the sally-ports onto the planked roadways extending into the middle distance towards the metaled Road. The Major must have been hiring, there were more of them this time. "You'd be astonished to find you are in agreement with the Spirit. She does not approve of our traffic in the enslaved dead. We have to be more pragmatic than our Lady, however much I must admire your shared principles."

"Shared! I can't picture it!"

"Ask her tonight, if she graces your dreams. She is, after all, a very busy Spirit. Although from what I've heard, once she was sovereign of all the nightly dreams of your entire world. Perhaps a single small regiment is not too little to extend her guardianship over your troubled nights."

"Celestia forfend!"

"However great your Princess of the Heavens might reign upon her own world, this is not hers, nor does her reach extend to our benighted lands. Take your protection where you find yourself, filly, and from those who are offering."

She looked up at the tall, overly orange Corporal, who was ignoring the conversation and staring intently at the last of the Imperials passing through the gates, followed immediately by their Company escorts.

"I'll take it under advisement, doctor," she sighed.

Departures And Arrivals

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SBMS090

The days that followed brought a stream of enthralled dead led by Imperial trooper-nannies, each soldier guiding a dozen or more shamblers, their lacquered, colourful fetishes bobbing over their manes or crests like bright ribbons in the unkempt hair of corpses. Which, in a way, they were. Reports came back from the third cohort ponies in the field, as the Major and the 93rd went from enclosure to enclosure, processing the trapped ghouls like pigs in a slaughter-house.

The holding-pens south of Trollbridge quickly filled up, and more palisades were thrown together by the detachments of the Imperial rear support battalion left behind and detailed to the task. Across the Withies, the repairs to the wrecked fortifications likewise advanced apace, always with one of the witches' section in residence to maintain coverage against detection by the oblivious Imperials. They did their thing; the Company did its thing, and insofar as the two things coincided, matters advanced smoothly.

When they did not, catastrophe followed in their wake. The first attempt to clear an abandoned mine was a disaster; somepony knocked down a support beam in the unmaintained tunnels bored into a zinc deposit during a fight with a clot of the undead, and brought down the roof on both the Company armsponies fending off the shamblers, and the shamblers themselves. By the time the rest of the sections deployed to the area dug out the victims, more than half a section was dead from crushing trauma or asphyxiation. The rest of the section were variously wounded, mangled, or otherwise hors de combat; of the ones trapped on the far side of the collapse, only one survived, a caribou doe named Dunkelnadja. She participated in their brilliant rear-guard defense against the surviving ghouls trapped with her, but she was the one who survived, because she found a crack in the darkness, and crawled into that pocket of air and defended it against all comers, whereas her fellows fought where they stood and when they ran out of air, they were overrun.

Dead in the cave-in were the caribou bucks Albrecht and Gunter, and the earth-pony stallions Deep Root and Red Mask.

The victims of the cave-in, including the terribly battered Dunkelnadja, were successfully evacuated to Dance Hall, where they filled up my infirmary and occupied much of my and Rye's time as we set bones, cleaned wounds, and began treatments for their extensive respiratory damage. My knowledge of this particular branch of medicine was not precisely extensive or broad, and I found myself poring over the annals-chest's medical texts, trying to figure out what was wrong with these ponies, and how to help them keep breathing. I found nothing better than the fire-bellows forced-breathing treatment I was already using, but there were some positively mane-raising suggestions in the older texts, such as the one that recommended tobacco-smoke enemas. Good thing for my patients that I didn't have any tobacco on hand, I might have been tempted to try it out if only for the sake of the experiment.

The first snows of winter shut down the side-roads up on the plateau to our north and east, and heralded the last few campaign days down here in the bottomlands, and most importantly, in the Deep Mines range. Gorefyre and her last few strings of thralls wound down out of mining country to rejoin the rest of her battalion, and the lot of them hurried on south to find their way to the open Bride's Road out of Le Coppice before the bypass road got too muddy to traverse. She took another fifteen hundred thralls with her. As I watched her shuffle off in the rear of her slave-column, her pallor and weakness were visible from a hundred and fifty yards away. I was vaguely surprised that Sergeant-Major Whitesmith hadn't rigged her a travois litter, so weak did the Major appear. Evidently the blood-enthralling process was not without its costs. The Captain returned from sending the Imperial Major off on her deliveries. We would not expect them back until the last month before the spring rains, to make one last pickup before the summer campaigns.

"I think that marks an end to the year, don't you, Captain?"

"Seems like three years now that you mention it. How are you looking for supplies?"

"I'm doing as good as can be expected. Distillery should be producing by mid-winter. Antiseptic preparations aside, we might even have something potable by spring, although it'd have to be something simple. Seen any juniper bushes up on the Deep Mines?"

"Haven't really been looking for them. But I suppose if somepony wants to celebrate the return of spring with a dram of gin, I ought to put out a be-on-the-lookout, right?"

"How thinned are the herds up there? Will it be safe for somepony to hypothetically go up there to do a botanical survey?"

"By yourself? Not so much. Take a section or two, if you have to do it."

"Aren't the ghouls supposed to be going into hibernation?"

"Some of those abandoned mines make for a peculiar environment. Might be keeping some of them more active than they ought to, given the weather."

We walked the bypass back through the secured sector. The gap north-east of Trollbridge was still open, but the steep slopes of the ridge overlooking Mondovi made that terrain difficult to traverse. There had been some discussion of building a lookout tower and another palisade along that slope, but given the angle of incidence and way things laid, any palisade would be more of fence than a proper line of defense. The Captain and I discussed the idea nonetheless. And some work closing out the defile between the curve of the Withies beneath the bluff and the ridge proper would at least offer some sense of finality to the outer fortifications line.

There was heavy traffic coming down from the Palisades along the Bride's Road, and the traffic-jam along the northern ramparts continued to illustrate the Bride's entirely justifiable irritation with our deliberate blockage of her engineers' hard work. There had been a rumor that the Bride might be sending us one of her prized civil engineers to smooth out the admittedly field-rough edges of 'her' fortress.

They could certainly be helpful in laying out an expansion of the main Road along the defensive rampart, and no doubt would insist on cracking open the ramparts laid in blockage across the section of the Road that led into what used to be Caribou City. Currently, all traffic passing into the dead lands had to move through Dance Hall's gates, over the drawbridge, and out past the ravelin and over the plank-roads run cross-country out to the isolated section of the Road. We had some notions of how it all might proceed, but it was almost as far outside of Mad Jack's wheelhouse as Dance Hall itself, and that had been a collaboration between that old mule and some engineering texts pulled from the aging depths of the Annals chest. An actual trained civil engineer would be a boon.

The wagon traffic was the first fruit of the Bride's financial gifts to her new Company, credit and banked cash alike priming the pump and drawing vendors and suppliers down from Rennet and points north and east. Suddenly we were a favoured destination of merchants and bulk haulers. We had even put out notices for the hire of construction ponies, to build new warehouses for the storage of all the largess pouring down the Bride's Road out of the northlands, and masons if we could lure any of those skilled ponies into the debatable lands. None of those potential new hires had made it down off the plateau yet, but notice had come in this morning that some of them had shown their muzzles at the Palisades. The new Lieutenant flew up there to interview the new ponies and make sure we didn't have any more Cup Cakes in the crowd.

When the Captain and I returned to the Hall, we found Dior Enfant waiting with Compte Coup and Brass Ring, talking in the marshaling yards among a convoy of supply carts being unloaded and shuffled about.

"Doctor! The young jenny here tells us that you're a passionate poker player," said Brass Ring in greeting. "Would you mind playing a hoof or two over some decent whiskey I brought down with us?"

"Dior lies like a rug, unless she means by 'passionate' that I show every emotion on my muzzle and am the greatest mark in the Company. There's a good reason why I only play for small stakes, and I still keep all my friends well-funded for their future losses to even better players than they. Like the young jenny, who is a properly cold-blooded filly when it comes to cards."

She blushed at the compliment. She was definitely looking better in those days, and had largely recovered from her melancholy and lingering illness. "You can't blame a mare for trying, Sawbones. We've not seen you the last two poker nights."

"Well, we are in funds again. No thanks to you, Monseiur Ring. Where is that bank draught you promised us?"

"Seigneur, I am wounded. I have just now presented it to the young lady," protested Brass Ring. "Contingent, of course, on your fine ponies clearing the agreed-upon villages and mine complexes."

"And by doing so, instead of having your bankers pass the information directly to our own, you delayed payment a good two weeks, Mr. Ring. We know how this sort of thing works. But I will forgive you your minor trespasses, contingent, of course, on a fair share of said whiskey. And the chance to fleece you tonight at the table." Dior Enfant was definitely in a fine mood, to be so flirty over a bit of booze and a night of gambling. "Sawbones, please come. We need a fifth at the table."

"A fifth? Who is the fourth?"

"Might I present Mademoiselle Apiculteur? She's our new purchasing agent in Rennet." Dior Enfant waved a hoof over to a donkey who had been lurking in the shadow of a wagon piled high with dry goods and sacks of sugar. A roan jenny of a certain age stepped out into the fading sunlight, although she still hid her face beneath a vast, impractical sun-bonnet so wide that I was astounded she had made it down the great ramp off the edge of the plateau without the prevailing winds having picked her up, hat and all, and sailed the both of them out over the abyss below.

The Duchesse of Rennet had arrived incognito in Dance Hall. And she was starting to 'show', a quite noticeable bulge around her mid-section.

As she had to be, being at least nine months pregnant.

Life Finds A Way

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SBMS091

"La demoiselle Apiculteur, it is a fine thing to meet you. I am somewhat alarmed to find a dame in your advanced condition journeying on terrible roads this late in the season. Are you feeling quite well?" She looked… beautiful, glowing, healthy. But the roads had to be terrible, and it was a long walk from her palace in Rennet down here by the ruins of the late city of the caribou.

"Did you not see the travelling coach? I caught a ride with Monsieur Tones, when he passed through Menomenie on his return trip. He so graciously offered conveyance, that I could not resist the chance. Monsieur Compte Coup made the necessary introductions of course. But I must admit, I am feeling a trifle peaked, and could use a rest, and perhaps a restorative," she granted, attempting to fake a fatigue she was clearly not feeling. "But we are not introduced! Dior, child, please make me known to the exotic gentlecolt I find before me, if you would."

Dancing Shadows rolled her eyes, and 'introduced' me to the Duchesse's travelling guise. "Mademoiselle , might I introduce to you Sawbones, the Company's physician and chronicler. He is a zebra, a tribe of ponies not to be found here on Tambelon, except among the Company itself."

"Charmed, my lord Sawbones. The Company has brought so many new things to Tambelon, it really is a marvel. I am somewhat surprised that you are not followed about by the curious and the enthusiastic, as the seven-day wonders that you all are."

"My lady, the common folk have learned to their regret that in these unsettled days, the curious and exotic are often the marks of danger and death sulking in the shadows. And in general, the Company does its best work in shadows and darkness. This current campaign, with its oblivious undead that disregard all subtle stratagems and sly tactics as if they were not even there, has drawn us out of the shadows more than is our usual practice. But come! We prattle and waste the time of Mr. Ring and company, and you said you needed a restorative? I would feel better if you came to the infirmary and let us take a look at you, given your condition, however road-burned you might not be, you have been on the road. Follow me, if you would?"

She followed me with as much good grace as a jenny nine months gravid could muster, and perhaps a bit more than one might expect. We passed under the grand trophy of blackened bones and skulls woven into a frieze over the main gate of the Hall, and she looked up at the grotesquerie.

"Really, selling the Company's theme rather heavily, are you not, Doctor? This is worthy of a grand necromancer's abode."

"We did offer the fortress to the Empress at the earliest opportunity. She was quite demonstrative in her appreciation of the décor. And our campaign produced so very, very many burnt bones, that we had to find something to do with all of it. Their raising had thoroughly desecrated their remains, and burying the lot with any ceremony would only leave the insinuation that the many murders and outrages committed by the undead are somehow the fault of the departed souls of those whose corpses were risen from their rest. Better to treat the bones as the remains of inequine horrors, to be mounted in triumph against things, than buried in shame of some sort of second murder of the already-deceased."

"You cannot be claiming the barbaric display of skulls and violated remains to be a moral act, Monsieur Sawbones?" she asked, with a raised eyebrow, as we passed through the entrance to my infirmary and hospital. Sack rose from the desk he was crouched behind, going through correspondence.

"Sad Sack, let me introduce - lady, are we maintaining your, hrm…" I looked to the pregnant jenny.

"I am the jenny Apiculteur, if you don't mind, and shall remain for the duration of my visit here, my dear Doctor, aside from certain meetings behind closed doors."

"As you wish. Sack, we're going to be using the number 2 examination room. Is Rye Daughter in the house?"

"She's back in the wards, looking in on the wounded from the other day. Said something about trying out a concentrate of dried tea on one of the ponies with breathing difficulties."

"Blast, if you don't mind, your- my lady, I need to look in on my apprentice, that sounds like an experiment I ought to be overseeing." I rushed back into the wards.

I found Rye Daughter chattering with the armsponies who had been caught in the mine collapse, along with Tiny and a portable table upon which she was re-grinding a brown mixture into a paste. There was a pitcher of small-beer next to a pair of glasses.

"Rye, what is this I'm hearing about you experimenting on our patients?"

She didn't even have the grace to look guilty at having been caught red-hoofed. "Boss, I'm just going to dose Long Glimpse here with strong tea, and Half-Tack there with small beer. A simple experiment, with controls, yeah?"

"You're not supposed to tell them that, or do the mixing in front of them. Sorry, colts, we'll work on this later, something's come up. Tiny, give the gentlecolts their small beer, and make sure everypony is comfortable, if you don't mind. Rye, I have a guest and somewhat-patient for which I need your presence, now. Come with me to the number 2." I turned around and found that the Duchesse had followed me back into the wards.

"Your - my lady, this is a recovery ward, a pregnant mare should not be back here, for your own health."

Rye Daughter snickered at my discomfort, young enough to be amused by the embarrassment of others. I forgave her anyways.
I chivvied the both of them back to the examination room, and closed the door behind us. Late afternoon light streamed into the room through the open window mounted just under the eaves. In the old days, I would have lit a set of candles nevertheless, wanting proper illumination for the examination. As I was now, I found the room almost too bright.

"Rye Daughter, this is the Duchesse of Rennet. She's just traveled down from Rennet City, essentially on her own, and as you can see, while being quite thoroughly pregnant. Can you assist me in performing a proper examination? Seeing as she's removed herself from her own doctors - you have hired a proper set of ducal physicians, your grace?"

"OK, so we are doing things that way, are we? Yes, my donkeys have hired a proper university doctor, and he's been pestering me day and night. I escaped their excessive care for this conference with your Captain and le Duc de Pepin. Among other priorities which had been left neglected for far, far too long. Which we might discuss in a more private setting?"

"Rye, you're a potted plant. Potted plants get pounded into paste if they start repeating what's been poured into them, don't you think?"

"Sure, boss. I hear nothing, I see nothing. I was not here. I did not even get up this morning."

"No, you have to be here, we can't have the Company physician alone with a young mare of quality."

"Right, I am a hearing nothing, seeing nothing lump on log." She sat, her ears laid down on her forehead, pouting.

"Best I can do, your grace."

"Oh, fine. Firstly, what happened to your face, your eyes? You look like a fright mask."

"He won't tell anypony, nor will the rest of them. One night, suddenly two dozen ponies got the permanent thestral eye. Talk of the Company, it is."

"Rye!"

"Right, right. Lump on log."

"As she says, a recent accident. A thaumaturgical mistake, something about Tambelonian blood magery interacting poorly with a Company ritual. The fall-out was - this. Not a total catastrophe, many of us were using amulets to fake the affect for display reasons before it became accidentally permanent. I'll survive, although I'm in the market for a good pair of smoked-glass spectacles if you know a supplier."

We began the standard physical examination, mares variant. I took a medical history, while Rye used the usual tools to check her eyes, reflexes, hearing, so on and so forth.

"So I don't need to ask if you've been recently sexually active, I take it."

"Really, Doctor. I think we're past dancing around it now. And yes, it is yours."

I sighed, hope overwhelmed and in panicked flight from the field.

"That's unfortunate for the poor thing. I can only hope that Tambelon's bizarre effect upon pony genetics holds true for zebra heredity. You'll have a tartarus of a time explaining a long-eared half-striped little foal. Colouring might not be totally out of the expected range, but zebra manes are notable for those who know what to look for."

"No-one in Tambelon even knows what zebras are, torrieu, I do not even exactly know the distinctions, whatever they might be. As far as I and many others are concerned, you are an odd sort of earth pony, no more, no less."

"Doesn't improve matters. Most mules are sterile, it won't be a happy life for the foal."

"Things are worse for the oxen, and yet they seem happy enough now," interjected the supposed lump on the log as she wrapped up the physical examination.

I bent down to check to see how the fetus was riding. And then felt again.

"Did your fancy pedigreed university doctor notice you're carrying twins?"

The Duchesse frowned. "No, she did not. Is that common among zebras?"

"Happens from time to time. I had some cousins who were fraternal twins. Interesting. Shouldn't matter to how you gestate, though, I would think your body's standards would hold sway. How long is it for donkeys? You're very close to term for a pony, but as many as five months away for a zebra."

"Closer to that of a zebra than a pony, then. Twelve to fourteen month terms are typical."

Might as well dive into the latrine, only way to fish the situation out of the muck.

"Obviously they won't be legitimate. How is this affecting your husband-hunting? You don't have time to waste, and unless you make something happen, Rennet will end up in the hooves of those Rime chiselers and their pet, your distant cousin."

"Push comes to shove, we can always collect my 'heir' and cut out her ill-bred guardians. Which I am doing anyways, regardless of my marital status. And you would be surprised how little the potential suitors of a landed duchesse care for her bastards. Better for them than legitimate offspring, obviously enough. They will be raised with love, if not necessarily the full respect owed the foals of high nobility. There are more of them about than you would think, given the pretensions to virtue and elevated conduct that my class affects."

I raised an eyebrow at her, and silently waved for a further explanation.

"So why am I here? Because it - they will be yours. And I thought you ought to know. D-did I make a mistake? Did you not care to know?" She started to tear up. And Rye was glaring bloody death at me from her seat on the 'log'.

I stepped up to the crying jenny, and took her in my forearms.

"No, no my dear, it was fine, it is good. Life is always a blessing. I'm more than delighted that you're carrying them. My late father's mother would be ecstatic that the family line won't end with me, if she were still alive. I'm afraid I cannot give them any family to speak of; what few I know still live, are a world away, and far too poor for travel or contact across portals. And my life expectancy is not such that I could possibly promise that I would be there to see them grow into adulthood, even if I weren't pledged to the Company's banner." She broke down entirely, sobbing out her fears and anxieties.

But she was still a duchesse, and I was still a life-member of a Company which held my final allegiance. I couldn't give her what she really wanted, but I gave her what I could. She stayed in my chambers that night, and damn the proprieties. She did so for the rest of her stay at Dance Hall, her meetings with the Company leadership, and her long, private meetings with the Duc of Pepin. Who did not seem to care that she was sleeping in another pony's rooms while negotiating marriage with the very young duc. Well, I might have made a bit of an impression on young Rollo Murs.

Arrangements were made for a marital alliance late next year, well after the foaling. The duchies would be united in their legitimate offspring, assuming that she would be able to bring the much younger jack's children to term. Such is love among the high nobility.

She returned to her northern palace with a full honour guard of Company armsponies, which might have included at least one anonymous zebra in a borrowed set of barding.

I missed that year's Hearths Warming pageant, which is a shame, I heard later that Cherie ran away with the production.

The Draft-Notice

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SBMS092

The jaunt up to Rennet City was too long of a jog to justify if we hadn't made more use of my time than that. So we made a virtue of necessity and I took over some of Dancing Shadow's less Dior Enfant-esque errands while I was going upcountry. We needed to send some ponies to the hidden colony forming in Hydromel, as well as some other tasks here and there along the road.

To accommodate both the gravid Duchesse and several of our mares in similiarly, if more advanced conditions, we rented Brass Ring's luxurious travelling coach. Since we were already making a Company production of it all, I caved in to Rye Daughter's entreaties. The young doe was appointed care-taker to the obstetrics coach, while I marched outside in the weather with the other guards.

We stopped at the Palisades for the night, and I broke into the winter uniform supplies that had mysteriously been left up on the plateau. Admittedly, the full force of winter had not yet flown downhill into the bottomlands, but when we arrived at the blockhouse, that moment was days rather than weeks away. I took a strip of hide off of the hired depot master responsible for the delay, and she promised that they would be on the next wagon downcountry. In the meantime, I drew out a requisition for the guard and Rye, so that we were properly clothed the next morning when we headed north again with the Duchesse.

Little of note occurred on the Road between the Palisades and the city gates of Rennet City. I had never actually set hoof in that modest castle-town, so it was all as new to me as it was to Rye Daughter, who was as appropriately enthused as a half-foal on the cusp of adulthood ought to have been. Which is to say, she was intermittently sullen and giddy with wonder. Her hormones were definitely kicking in with a vengeance.

We delivered the Duchesse into the anxious hooves of her attendants, whose righteous wrath at having been abandoned for the dubious company of the Road was generally washed away by the news of her grace's engagement and pending nuptials. The convolutions involved in joyously proclaiming this happy news while never acknowledging her pregnant state and weeks-long disappearance into the savage wilds of Pepin were, well, they weren't exactly a masterwork of misdirection and bald-faced evasion, but they did their best, bless their hearts.

Speaking of attendants, I made sure to meet with the Duchesse's attending physician while I was in Rennet, and we had a long, intense conversation on the subject of proper sanitation, zebra gestation periods and obstetrics practices, and what exactly I could do with a scalpel or a pioneer's-axe if I felt that a certain university doctorate-holding physician was in any way lax or careless in her care of the Duchesse. And especially on the subject of how to handle the foaling of twins.

Luckily, the Duchesse was far past that youthful period wherein a mare is capable of being impregnated without exactly being mature enough to carry to term without serious complications, and her pelvis was such that a Trojan section would not be necessary. If it had been a single birth; the presentation of twins threw all of those calculations into the river, as it were. The idea of a jenny carrying two half-zebra foals naturally was one that left me feeling anxious and uncertain.

Once I was finished scaring ten years off the life of the Duchesse's attending physician, I went to the ducal receiving chambers to tear the Duchesse away from her two road-companions, with whom she had bonded over their shared trevails, to take my little caravan back on the road before the next blizzard of the season shut down even the Bride's Roads. What I found there was another awkward situation just waiting to complicate the life of the Company.

Two of the Duchesse's militia-captains were meeting with her grace, and were not being particularly cordial about it. Her eyes fell upon me as her attendants let me into the hall, and silently begged my aid. How could I possibly help her? The things we do…

"Yes, Your Grace? How might I aid Rennet in this wintery season?"

"Sir Sawbones, I am presented with the Imperium's manpower requirements for the coming campaign season. Every activated recruiting district is required to present a fully horsed company to the recruiting officers when they arrive in the third month; Rennet lies within five such active recruiting districts. We missed the last two cycles, which is why we are hit trebly hard."

"The concern among the militia is that companies raised in the last ten cycles have not returned from their deployments," interjected one of the militia-captains, a bluff, tall stallion with a slight cast in one eye. "Not even so much as a wounded pony. The Imperium has only taken our armsponies and returned nothing but form letters. It was one of the grievances of the rebel caribou; the current recruitment drive is mild and small-scale in comparison with the drafts of '08 and '09. The militia is barely back on its hooves, we don't want to pour more blood down the Bride's sluice into the Riverlands."

"That sounds like a difficult situation, but I do not know how I could possibly address it from my position. Has Her Grace explained to you who I am?"

They nodded.

"So you know that we are but recently signed to Her Imperial Majesty's Service. I and my officers have almost no contact with the Imperial armed forces, excepting some scattered relations with supply officers and Her Imperial Majesty herself. I certainly could not interfere in recruiting campaigns." All of which was the sadly naked truth. It sounded like a rough deal, but I wasn't in the hoof.

"If you are indeed properly signed to the Imperial Service, there is something you can do," said the previously-silent militia-captain, a weedy, bespectacled donkey who reminded me strongly of Broken Sigil. "Recruiting quotas can be met by volunteers sent to any active regiment or battalion. In the past, we have satisfied our quotas by raising independent regiments or battalions under provincial officers. The Major is incorrect in asserting that we have not gotten back any of our militia; the Third and Fifth Rennet returned after five years of service, much reduced, but intact as organizations."

"That was nine years ago! And the other three regiments disappeared into the cauldron without a bubble!"

"Something is better than nothing. And I must caution, that this practice is not exactly foolproof. The 9th Imperial that rebelled at Menomenie was originally a Pepin-raised regiment recruited along these lines. There is always the question of loyalty in specially raised regiments. We need some way to assure that the raised troops remain loyal, while not being fed into the woodchippers of the Riverlands."

"Again," I repeated, "I don't see where the Black Company comes into this. We're external to the Imperial system, aside from our contract with the Empress. You surely don't intend to force five companies' worth of round-peg recruits into our square hole!"

"That is, more or less, what we propose. I've been through the statutes and the recruitment drive proclamation, painstakingly so. I am, after all, in civilian life, a barrister with an active practice. The loophole is there - we can raise companies for a mercenary company in proper service to the Phalactery."

"Gah, I'm a little weak on your militia organizational details. How big is a 'company' in this context? And are we talking camp-roster, muster-rolls, or lances in the field? We don't even use 'company' in the Black Company, which is obviously the size of a large regiment by your standards."

"A 'company' is ninety lances, nine officers, and supports of varying numbers. Usually, the recruited companies end up being just the ninety lances, as the Imperium tends to refuse our militia officers."

"And you wonder why your recruited companies never come back… my stars!" I thought it over. That was over four hundred new recruits, it would wash away the Company's discipline! "Tell me the rest of the northlands won't be trying to foist their recruits on us as well; we can only absorb so many ponies at a time. And it isn't as if we've been suffering that many losses, despite two active seasons in the field. Wait! We took in almost ninety caribou last season from the prisoners captured on the Road outside Lait Blanc, can those count against your recruiting totals?"

"Highly irregular-" "Bodies are bodies, rebellious or otherwise-" "Were they technically under provincial control?"

I chose to answer that last muttered exchange. "They were under the control of a provincial authority; it just happened to be a rebellious one. They were the remnants of two separate provincial White Rose regiments, couldn't they count as two companies for your recruiting-quota?"

"I do not see why this could not be the case, gentlecolts," interceded the Duchesse into our impromptu military conference. "If the Black Company is willing to accept the responsibility for these 'two companies', why not lay the burden across their withers? And Sir Sawbones, would the Company be willing to take three actual volunteer militia-companies in this season?"

"The caribou were fair volunteers themselves, every one. We let them out of their imprisonment and told them to take the gate and their parole or the Black. It was perhaps our earnest salesmareship which led the majority of them to swear the pike-staff, but it was definitely voluntary. We would have to send a recruiting detail to each militia-regiment, and demonstrate exactly what they were getting themselves into." I reached under my throat, and removed the glamour-charm which Otonashi had gifted me before our departure from Dance Hall. The two militia-captains recoiled in startled horror at my altered visage. "The Black Company is not simply a private military contractor. We are also a mystic brotherhood bound by fell oaths and a fey promise to our brethren. Anypony who fought under the White Rose against us and survived, can tell you what that looks like from the losing side. Only we can tell you what it means from inside. And Company membership is for life, until a promise of certain death."

I put back on my semblance, and sighed. "At least we can promise that our recruits will never return to their families' front doors dead and shambling, to devour that which they loved in life. We are proof against this world's horrible half-life, half-death. When a soldier of the Company dies, she dies for good, never more to rise again."

"So say we all," murmured the two pregnant Company mares sitting beside their friend the Duchesse.

The Duchesse and her militia-captains were pale and quiet. Clearly they had much to think upon.

"We will be returning in a week or so, once I've attended to a number of chores and errands elsewhere in the North. When I return, we can continue this conversation once you've conferred amongst yourselves. Your Grace, it was good seeing you again. Take care."

And I left with my charges in tow. We had a new-founded colony to look in on, and our own recruits to collect.

The Hidden Colony

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SBMS093

The hidden colony had settled in the vicinity of the convalescent facilities we had established in a pair of leased townhouses in a town in Hydromel which shall remain nameless for security purposes. Messages to the previous colony - in a likewise anonymous town in the previous world we had left - had reached them sometime early last spring, and the Company's civilians, retirees, and support ponies had begun selling out and drifting through the portals later that spring.

They traveled in inconspicuous family-sized groupings, most of them carrying their most prized and necessary possessions in humble carts as they went, some of them disguised as tinkers and traveling merchants, some appearing exactly as they were, immigrating families on the move from there to here.

The real question was the many unicorns and pegasi among the migrating families, not to mention the four griffins and two minotaurs who lived among their families and Company friends. For those ponies who could not simply hide in plain sight, they relied upon the glamour-magic of the Company's sole retired warlock, an aged and somewhat feeble unicorn by the name of Obscured Blade.

The old witch had taken retirement to mentor a previous generation of Company foals, whose mothers had decided to maintain their positions in the cohorts. This occurred more often than you might think, and many a daughter or son of the regiment found themselves raised by an 'uncle' or 'aunt' until the were old enough to leave the hidden colony and return to their matrimony. Uncle Blade had presided over the colony for the past forty-five years, never having returned to the Company proper, even after his first group of nephews and nieces returned to take up their mothers' professions.

The bulk of the colony consisted of ponies too worn or crippled by their life in the Company, and those uncles and aunts who had taken leave like Uncle Blade. A scattering of actual pledged couples were actually raising their own foals, but it was by no means a majority of the colony, nor even a significant plurality. The ponies of the colony were by and large self-supporting, working in various minor professions, taking in piece-work or labouring as carters, sempsters, farriers or craftsponies.

They had taken up leases and rentals in the general vicinity of the original Company-leased townhouses, but it was difficult to not reveal the colony's presence by the simple influx of far too many ponies into what was, after all, a sleepy backwater in a sleepy and peaceful northern provincial district. During the late spring and summer, the colony had waited patiently, scattered in short-term leases across the length and breadth of Hydromel, awaiting the natural turnover of the targeted neighborhood, and filtering into place as leases became available.

Some assistance to the natural process of turnover might have been provided courtesy of Uncle Blade and his unicorn mentees. Uncle Blade's training in glamour-craft and evil imagination was the process by which Company unicorns were sorted, and his merciless process identified who was capable of being a proper Company witch, and who was capable of fighting among the bowmares. The remainder went into the cohorts as common swordsponies. It was rather peculiar that the overwhelming majority of those he sent into the bowmares were, indeed, mares. Some accused him of gender bias. None to his face, though. Uncle Blade's wrath was nothing to deliberately court - he wouldn't hurt you to your face, but many a pony suffered weeks of sleepless nights in fear of the shadows that delivered word, evening after evening, night after night - Uncle was still irate, and apologies were still in order.

So the neighborhood of the convalescent homes might have developed an evil reputation by mid-summer, an aggregation of unsettling urban legends, stories of vile little shadows whispering ponies' most shameful secrets to anypony who paused to listen in the night. For some reason, this made the neighborhood suddenly unpopular among the common run of ponies and donkeys. Each broken lease was taken up, after a decent interval, by a Company 'family'. And the darkness gathered darker and deeper around that sleepy town in a peaceful northern provincial district.

By winter, most Tambelonian ponies had been displaced from the neighborhood, and the colony was firmly planted. The ponies of the Company in settlement had begun producing goods and services for the Company in the field - the winter uniforms I and Rye were wearing were themselves product of the new colony. And some of the smith-work being hauled southwards into Pepin were being made in a pair of smithies erected on the outside of town, nearest the neighborhood. The two Company minotaurs ran one of those smithies; the other was operated by Iron Hoof's elder sister, Steel Shod. The sons and daughters of the Company each took their shifts within the smithies as directed. It was felt that the discipline of the forge helped breed a certain mind-set in the foals that prepared them for Company life.

Some on the town council had become quite aware that there was something seriously wrong with the neighborhood, which had somehow, while nopony was watching, become an immigrant quarter. Others on the town council had a better idea of what was going on, if not the exact details, because they had been properly and thoroughly bribed. The next election-cycle, two Company ponies would find their way onto the council. Uncle Blade had already picked out his candidates.

The Company had learned utmost caution in the matter of our hidden colonies, after some particularly horrible atrocities committed against our most vulnerable and undefended ponies in previous generations. The terrible slaughter of the colonies in the Dar al Hisan at the tail end of the Company's time in that benighted moral wasteland was an object lesson beaten into every pony that grew up under the Company's tutelage. Literally, with sticks. Secrecy and caution were the life-blood of the colonies.

This was not the only colony, it was only the closest one. There were others, on other worlds. I will not commit to paper where they are; and only Uncle Blade knows the location of one or two. As those colonies' foals approach maturity, and display the adventurousness necessary for a Company pony, they send them, alone, across the Chain of Creation. If all goes well, they follow the occulted sign-posts, from abandoned home and house to abandoned post, until they find their way to Uncle Blade, or those other ancients who maintained the parent-colony before him. We only knew of the old colonies by the adolescents who find us via this hidden network. As they fade away, the foals stop coming. There might have been three or four out there somewhere across the Chain, based upon the ponies who occasionally present themselves to the Company.

As such, the Hydromel colony was nearly over-run with adolescents when Rye and I arrived with the pregnant mares and the section of guards maintaining security. Shadows shifted in the alleys of the town, as the young of the colony practiced their stalking tactics upon the new visitors. Rye looked from side to side, clearly spotting our shadows, but not quite sure of what was going on. I let her figure it out on her own.

Neither of us had come up in the Company system, being outsiders of a sort. The colony system wasn't enough to maintain the Company's numbers, and so we took in many recruits to fill out the cohorts, and bring in necessary talents. But just as the Annals were the intellect and memory of the Company, the colonies were her bone and muscle-memory, those things which the mind does not remember, but the heart retains. There were no blatant symbols of the Company in the neighborhood, no sigils or banners. Yet still, there were already little grace-notes which told a pony in the know that something was here. Twists of hay on window-sills, little bits of wood and twine tucked into the thatch.

Obscured Blade had taken up residence in a little shack behind the townhouse two doors down from one of the convalescent homes. He had filled it with the usual accouterments of the witch and warlock, pretentious bollocks and fright-masks and the like. He pretended to be exactly what he was - a bokor working as a carpenter for his living. Half of the shack was filled with his projects and his carving tools; the other half with said witchy nonsense. He was surely doing a side-business in conning ponies out of their money with the old psychic grift.

"Uncle, I have come to deliver two mares into your care. Zero Phase, and Cold Front. It is my understanding that Zero Phase will be returning to the Company after her confinement, and Cold Front expects to stay. But that's still up in the air, I expect. You know how this goes."

"I'm no uncle of yours, Acolyte. Don't talk to me as if you're one of mine. Gave you the damn Annals, did they? Keep them safe, you striped bastard. You're not worthy of them. Should have been Shorthorn, if he wasn't such a comprehensive disappointment, the damn foal. Or, better, that Bongo had lived and you or one of the rest of you worthless fools had died in her place."

It was going to be one of those conversations. Rye was cringing in distress.

"Bongo chased her own doom, for reasons that I never did quite make out. Do you have any idea what that was about? It was some sort of shape-changer. Whatever it was, it never made it into the Annals, but it was enough for the two of them to fight to the death, Bongo and that nameless warlock."

"You'd be surprised what never makes it into the Annals, Annalist. It isn't my story to tell. Ask that shame upon the Company honour to explain, if you must get it into your book. I do not think it will touch upon the Company again, but then, I did not think it would touch us again, when it appeared before you in that rotten city."

Time to change the subject.

"Acolyte, by the way? I've been hearing that a lot lately. Has She made her way out here? Do you know of whom I speak?"

"Of course I do, zebra. She's walked through a few of the foals' dreams, and I saw her twice this last fall. She comes and she goes. Can be decades between a sighting. We've kept it from that green interloper you have running things up at the front, of course. We remember him, even though he thinks we don't. The green one, the frog, the slime-trailing half-heart." Uncle spat in rejection.

"She more than walks dreams these days. She's appeared before the Company in assembly three times now. The last time, this happened." I took off my amulet.

His eyes widened. Then he reached out and tapped at the amulet.

"Hah, that Neighponese mute's work? Knew she would be worth her salt. Better than the lot of you put together. She's started Touching ponies, has She? Yes, yes, the Spirit, not the mute. The Work must be growing strong, if she's walking the real world now. Never heard of that happening before."

"There's more. We may have… fed a lich to the standard-lance. It was what caused this," I waved at my eyes, " And considerably more. The attempt caused a flash-off, some sort of reaction to the lich's blood-magery. Blinded a bunch of us, did worse to some. Then the Spirit manifested, and devoured the lich's remains. Re-grew our eyes. I'd call that a great deal more than just walking the world."

"Hrm, hrm. Ha!" The old stallion laughed to himself. "Well, that's certainly a Work worthy of the name. And I guess it only took bringing the standard into this stinking half-tartarus you fools found. I hear the old bird finally bit it? Knew that flying house-cat was a damn fool, only took a few decades to prove that out. But maybe his foolishness was what we needed? Interesting, interesting. I take it you'll be more careful of what you feed to the Spirit from now on?"

I resisted the urge to roll my eyes at Uncle Blade. "Yes, sir. We will do our best. But this world is overrun with liches, and so far the spear is the only solution that's presented itself."

"I might want to take to the field again. Things are finally getting interesting. Year after year, decade after decade of stupid little succession wars and playing gendarme, I grew tired of it. More interesting to mess with the young ones after a while. But the Spirit! Walking the world! Let little Languid run this backwater, she always aspired to just sit around a parlor telling foals what to do. She's been goldbricking about, hinting that she was done with the front."

"I owe my life to Lady Languid, her fire-spell saved the warlock-section from a particularly nasty ambush."

"If you all could be killed by a feeble little ghoul-ambush like that, you ought to have died properly. And don't give her that self-assigned title, it inflates her fool head. Ha! The field again!"

I tolerated the old stallion's crochets for the rest of the afternoon. I wasn't sure how I'd tolerate living with the old fool if he actually came down to the Company with us.

I left Rye Daughter to make friends with the younglings who would be coming up to the front with us. We had a dozen adolescents Rye's age or older, and another dozen slightly older recruits from the colony and friends of the colony who would be following us west and south into the Company proper. She needed to figure out how they would be relating to each other. At least she had some stories to impress the colony brats with.

I looked in on Languid and the rest of the convalescents. Uncle Blade was right about the indolent mare, she was as healthy as she ever was. But she also was in her element, happily socializing with the rest of the colony, happier than I'd ever seen her before. I went on to get the two pregnant mares settled in one of the convalescent homes, a back room that could double as a foaling-room. I introduced them to the physician we had on retainer. That doctor was well-compensated for her silence, and I'm sure that Languid and Uncle Blade had tied her up tight with whatever minor geas they were capable of; Languid was the only active pony with the Company who could rock a geas, and the old hoof-picker was the one who had taught her what she knew.

We couldn't stay long enough to wait on the actual foalings, however much I wanted to sit in on them, for practice if nothing else. The winter was wearing on, and a break in the snows gave us a chance to return with our retinue and the new recruits. We filled up Brass Ring's now-empty travelling coach with supplies from the colony, and headed back towards the Road. The back-roads were a miserable chore, but at least the recruits were one and all in excellent shape. Say what you will of Uncle Blade, he trained up excellent recruits.

No, seriously, say what you will of Uncle Blade. The old cud-chewer haunted me like a foul stench, filling up a third of the coach with his trinkets and toys, and tromping along through the snow beside the younglings like a stallion a third his age. He kept up a continuous commentary on my leadership skills, my penhoofship, my slackness in training up Rye, and my lack of proper Company style.

I was almost glad to be pulled aside in Pythia's Fell by yet another delegation of militia-captains looking to stuff the Company with their gormless companies of drafted ponies. I told them the same thing I told the ponies of Rennet. We'd think about it, damnit.

The Recruiting-Detail

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SBMS094

We met with a representative from the militia-companies of Rennet in Menomenie, as I had arranged beforehoof. Said captain, a beefy earth-pony named Long Halter, accompanied us in that last long leg of our journey back to the Company proper. I'm not sure what he made of the juvenile recruits and Uncle Blade, but he kept his counsel to himself.

I did little but fight with Uncle Blade. If I was against the Company taking in an entire cohort's worth of militia-recruits, he was for it. If I was for arming new recruits according to Company standards, he thought that new recruits ought to prove they could survive without barding, before they should be trusted with expensive Company assets.

I drew the line at his reflexive, absolutely uneducated bigotry against caribou recruits. Expressed without censor or tact right in front of Rye Daughter, damn his mangy old hide. The old fool hadn't even been within five hundred miles of the fighting in Rennet.

He insisted on touring the remains of the White Rose's ghoul-trap in Menomenie while we were there. All he asked was why I had been with the warlocks when Shorthorn triggered the trap. I talked around the substance of 'why', and told him flat-out we could talk about it if and when he put together a reliable set of privacy wards, and I refused to say anything further. Never can tell who is listening, outside of the immediate safety of the Annals-chest. I promised him a look at my book-in-progress, when we got back to Dance Hall. Someone would have to be assigned as Annalist-assistant if I was going to be tromping all over the northlands detached on recruiting duty.

And I knew if we ended up doing it, I'd be the one sent out. The Captain still had some grudges to work out from the last few years. Among other things, my tendency to act as if I'm the one in charge of the Company.

Whenever I managed to get away from the old goat, I tried to keep pace with Rye Daughter. She was feeling the weather, something about the bracing cold put her in a pronking mood. She was constantly casting away from the Road, to investigate this and that wherever she could get across the drainage ditches and along parallel tracks. Every night, we had to comb the thistles, burrs, and random detritus out of her coat. She found a few useful herbs along the way; good times.

And of course Obscured Blade had nothing good to say about the blockhouses and palisades. Over forty years out of the field, and he still was full of opinions about our sloppy engineering standards and slapdash construction techniques. By the time that Dance Hall's northern watch-tower hove into view, I was looking forward to locking him in a quarantine chamber with Mad Jack until only one of them came out.

Rye and I checked in at the infirmary, and went through the cases which had cropped up during our absence. Little had happened that the oxen couldn't handle - a trickle of influenza, a few broken bones. I found it necessary to re-break a miss-set leg, and while that wasn't fun for me or the poor pegasus in question, it was hardly a challenge. A runner came for me the next day, from the Captain in regards to our guest the Rennet militia-captain. I set Rye and the oxen to putting together a cart-load of medical supplies for an intensive recruiting drive, and headed over to the meeting and my doom.

Of course she chose the most annoying and inconvenient response to the challenge. I was on recruiting detail.

I collected a demonstration-section from the three cohort-commanders, a balanced set of pegasi, unicorns, earth ponies, a donkey and one caribou. A positive rainbow of diversity, to demonstrate without having to say anything about the matter. And calculated to scare the crap out of any tribalists, hopefully before they got past my sense for such things. Each of them had been chosen by their commanders as veterans ready for promotion, and they'd become corporals w/ their own training-sections once the moment came. Skinflint came along to haul the medical supplies and other materials in one of the ambulances.

Two of the other oxen and Rye accompanied us up to the half-mothballed Plateau Palisades, which we were sharing with a hoof-full of Pepin militia-ponies still trying to get their organization up and running. I had to track down their captain at her family's homestead a morning's trot away from the blockhouse, and negotiated with her the winters-use of the Palisades for training, quarantine, and housing of a significant influx of new recruits. The new aerial-cohort commander sent relays of pegasi across the northlands on logistical errands, sending out orders for fresh supplies. The Company's depots had been heavily drawn down in supplying the previous waves of Tambelonian recruits, and we were short on pretty much everything - caparisons, barding, winter clothing, weapons, tack, everything. The Bride's credit would be given a proper exercise by the drive to outfit that many recruits.

The training and housing of the recruits wasn't my business, and I left it to Asparagus, Broken Sigil, and the cohort commanders. Medical oversight was. The heaviest mortality among large influxes of recruits was in the early days, as they exchanged illnesses with their new friends like ponies at a swap-meet. It was particularly bad among rural ponies, which is why military recruiters have traditionally preferred recruiting from big cities if we can get them. Sadly, most worlds on the lower stretches of the Chain are just not heavily supplied with sprawling metropolises or other cosmopolitan milieus full of scrappy ponies with well-exercised immune systems. More often than not, we had to work with the farm-ponies, whose exercise in the fields often left their bodies robust, but their immunities feeble and under-developed. Rye and two of the oxen would return with the first company of recruits to the Palisades, and oversee the inevitable wave of camp-sickness, hopefully with no fatalities.

I would have liked to have brought Carrot Cake and the real banner with us on detail, but we couldn't spare the asset for that long. Never could tell when Dance Hall might receive another visitor, or some other crisis. So, instead, we made due with a pike fished out of the depot, and a guidon bearing the proper Company sigil. A tall, taciturn mare named Forelorn Hope carried the guidon for the detachment.

Three days after the argument with the Captain and Uncle Blade, the recruiting-detail marched out of Plateau Palisades towards the first of the militia muster-towns at the height of winter. A cold, bitter wind bit through our uniforms and the caparisons we wore underneath. Rye was doubly bundled up, being not yet in her full adult growth, and thus not fitted with a caparison. The oxen traveled at the fore of the column, to help break the wind and any drifts that formed across the Road.

The first muster-town was a modest little market-town a morning's trot north-east of Menomenie. The militia armory was a good-sized building next door to the re-built granary and up the road from a mill which had once had its miller hung from its store-house by a Company column. Also next door to the grange headquarters for the district, but we hadn't had occasion to burn or otherwise desecrate that symbol of provincial authority. An odd place to offer a volunteer company for the ponies who had despoiled their district.

I was a little surprised to find Bound Codex herself greeting us. The Duchesse had sent her south to liase with the Company on this strictly military matter. The former mayor of Lau Crosse was now a ducal aide, technically speaking a seneschal, although here she was, far from the court itself. The nobility and its loose regard for the technicalities of their job-titles, you know?

We arrived well before the bulk of our militia-audience. The captain and officers of this district were still scattered to the four winds winkling out their ‘volunteers' from hamlets and homesteads across the breadth of the military district, which wasn't at all the same thing as the province's administrative districts. This slowness had been a big part of how the insurrectionists had been able to raise and organize their regiments before the ducal levies could mobilize against the uprising. Many of the ponies with whom we would be meeting were those laggards, who had by and large kept their heads down during the domination of the White Rose. The militia officers had either gone into exile or died; some of the ponies out rousting farmers and their fieldhooves had returned from exile, some of them were new hires or replacement volunteers.

We killed days waiting for the muster, kicking our heels in the grange's public pub, playing endless hoofs of poker and drinking that district's excellent, nutty stouts. I made sure to limit Rye to one beer a night, and pretended I was teaching her how to gamble.

She damn near took the caparisons off of our collective withers. Is everypony I know a better gambler than I am? Well, Bound Codex, but it felt like even she was getting my measure by the time that the last of the militia drifted into town. The grange, the militia armory, and every spare room in town would be full of militia-ponies bunking out that night.

In preparation for the muster, I had sent Barrel Roll down to the Palisades with a message for the pegasi. My composite section fully armed themselves, suiting up in full barding, axes at their belts, lances and swords at the ready for the ground pounders, javelins and wingblades for the two pegasi. They were, in point of fact, more heavily armed than Company arms-ponies generally went in the field. The purpose was display, not combat. Everypony had their thestral helms on, glowy-eyed and fierce. I left my amulet in the medical cart. We were ready to scare the manure out of the farm-ponies.

The muster was gathered in the wind-swept square of the town, where the stalls stood when market-days and summer came. They were as well-armed as a barely-reconstituted militia could afford, which meant an assortment of kettle-hats and heavy winter coats in the place of proper caparisons, aside from two or three of the officers. Only the captain of the ‘regiment' had any barding to speak of, a well-polished but ancient peytral and a chamfron that had clearly once been split in twain and then re-forged by a smith of indifferent skill.

Their spears were in good order, though. No scythes. And there was even a half-company of donkeys in the rear of the loose formation with pikes. Not being held in the proper order for assembly, mind you, but they had the weapons.

We stayed out of sight while their captain addressed his ponies.

"Thank you all for coming to the first annual winters-muster of her grace's Second Regiment of Rennet Volunteers. Your neighbors and families appreciate the sacrifice you make of your time, and the grit that coming out in this cold and wet, far from the warm hearths of your homes, requires. You are the spear that guards our doors, the shield that holds back the night, and all that creeps through that outer darkness! Your service is noted, and applauded." The Company was what crept through the outer darkness. Not a great opening.

"Her Grace had been asked by the Imperium to offer up a tithe of that good service to the greater good of the realm and the Phalactary. Although rebellion has been extinguished here at home, it continues to ravage the provinces of the Riverlands, and every district owes it to the realm and posterity to aid in that great pacification. Our district, and our regiment, has been required to muster a full company for active service under the Bride's banner."

Completely understandable, predictable, and anticipated grumbling broke out in the ranks. Militias weren't generally known for assembly-discipline, I'm afraid. The Company isn't much for spit-and-polish rank-dressage, but everypony knows better than to chatter in assembly like that. And the Imperial regiments from all reports were much more strict on the subject. Outbursts like that in the Bride's active service would have led to a spate of punishments, starting with bucking and gagging, and probably going further before the practice was beaten out of the recruits.

"Yes, yes, we completely agree. It has not gone past notice that previous levies mustered into Imperial service never seem to return to their militia districts. Nopony is more concerned by this pattern than our new duchesse, believe you me. Which is why we've found an alternative. A way to satisfy our muster quotas without sending a tithe of you into the cauldron never to return. We can raise a volunteer company for a regiment already in service to the Bride, a regiment we know and trust to manage our people with prudence and care. An organization which the entire province has observed in operation, some few of us in battle, and all of us in victory." Not the greatest speech ever made, but as far as I could tell, this captain was the second daughter of one of the lesser noble-families, not a politician or a lawyer like most other militia-captains.

The grumbling ceased, as wide-eyed alarm spread through the assembly.

"Yes, folks, I'm talking about sending some of you into the Black Company."

The grumbling turned into outright pandemonium. The officers had lost control of the assembly. I gave a high-sign to the double-section of pegasi and griffins lurking on the rooflines around the market-square, and they formed up out of sight of the yelling mob of armed farm-ponies, and quickly climbed out of sight to build up some speed.

Rye stayed prudently inside the pub, while I and the ground-pounders formed up in the alleyway, and then came out in tandem with the aerials buzzing the mob at velocity, three of them letting loose with a brace of logs they had been preparing for a demonstration, but in the situation served to focus the attention of the militia as they impacted violently into the packed dirt between the officers and their disordered regiment.

The crowd of ponies hit the dirt, startled by the impromptu bombardment, and the pegasi came around for a second pass as I led the ground element into the gap between the startled militia and their hapless officers. I drew my axe, and viciously drove it into the side of one of the logs protruding from the packed dirt at an angle, like an oversized studes along one of Dance Hall's ramparts.

"IS THIS THE VAUNTED DISCIPLINE OF THE NORTHLANDS?" I bellowed. "IS THIS THE FURY WHICH BROKE THE REGIMENTS AT MENOMENIE?"

Now that I had their attention… "Or is this the laggardly sloth that let the insurrectionists seize your standards and homes, and hung banners of shame and capitulation from every town-hall and grange in the duchy? Show me your training, you ponies of the north! Show me a regiment in muster, tu les guerriers de la Tambelon!"

My ponies supported me in a disciplined line to my left and right, lances couched, swords out, Fletchsong holding a pair of arrows in tension in her magic, aimed slightly over the heads of the crowd which almost had decided to be a mob. I gave them the rest of my speech in the midst of what was almost an armed standoff, but not quite. Blah, blah, Black Company, stories and legends, bane of the undead, promise against the blasphemous resurrection of the body, yadda, yadda. I barely heard what I was saying, I can't be sure if anypony else was listening.

But they certainly were watching, and I gave my best mummer's-show, standing as tall as I get, mane bristling, nostrils flaring, the nine yards and then some.

"…and that's what we promise you, that your ponies will not be spent in vain, or foolishly, or at all if we can possibly avoid it. If we take any of you, it will be for you, and not for your duchesse! Mind you, we have nothing against the jenny, she's a fine old mare. But a brother of the Company is his own justification, her own reason! The Company does not do patriotism, or blood and soil, or any of the other tinsel they used to put you ponies in your ranks, the cobwebs they spin around you to keep you from turning those spear-heads against each other or your betters. The Company rests its honour and virtue on a very low base: money, and self-interest. Yes, we will pay you. Eventually. And we will always operate with your well-being in mind. Because the Company is its ponies, and nothing else," I lied.

"We only want volunteers, healthy ones, without serious attachments. Heads of households and ponies with young families can pack up and go home! We don't want you. In general, if you're married, we don't want you. Unless you're looking to abandon a spouse, in which case, we definitely don't want you, because oath-breakers make for bad mercenaries. I trust to not find anypony sickly or underweight here in a militia-muster, but if you're obviously unwell, we don't want you."

"This is not a short-term commitment. Ponies do leave the Company, from wounds, to raise families. But it's not especially common, and it's never simple. Expect a long enlistment. Don't expect to see family or friends for a long time. There are few furloughs in the Company. But there is danger, and a purpose. I can promise you that, in wands."

We let the officers pass through our line, and they reasserted control over their muster, and broke the assembly up into company meetings, which drifted out into the corners of the market-square, each company muster finding a patch of open square to hold their little gatherings. I thanked the corporals of the aerial sections who had provided the flying display, and helped break up the demonstration before it became a riot. They stayed in the vicinity in case of further disturbances, but generally out of sight.

My ground-section took a position back by the grange-pub, and I went to talk with Rye Daughter, who had hung out of the pub foyer, watching the chaos and my speech. A wroth publican had just kicked her out into the cold, apparently quite irate at having lost most of the warmth to the winter air as she stood in the open door. I told her she had gotten exactly what she deserved, and to not waste hearth-heat like that.

Some of the companies completed their meetings more quickly than others, and squads of 'volunteers' started drifting over to the grange, waiting their turn. I and the prospective corporals started the long process of evaluating each group of volunteers, to see who would be recruits, and who would be going home.

A surprising number of them passed muster. I ended up taking a herd of eighty recruits back to the Palisades myself. They were mostly farm-hooves and the younger colts and fillies of the townsfolk, but there was more of a market for what the Company was selling than I had expected. The first 'company' absorbed all of my new corporals, leaving me only with floor-sweepings for the next muster. I sent back notice with the aerial ponies that I'd need more new corporals than I had hoped.

I'd have to up the bullshit at the next muster unless I wanted the Company awash in gormless volunteers.

Culling The Herds

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SBMS095

The muster of the Fourth Rennet was if anything, more chaotic and violent than the Second's had been. At least the Second hadn't broken up into open internecine brawling in the ranks half-way through the officers' address. And not a big, organized, faction-versus-faction sort of fight, but rather, small little knots of ponies doing their level best to kick in each others' skulls at close range. It took half the morning for the officers of the Fourth to make their way into the mess and separate the quarreling militia-ponies.

I amused myself while waiting my turn chatting with Bound Codex, and thinking about the dynamics of the last muster. The ranks had damn near rioted at the prospect of recruitment by the Company while they were in assembly, and then something had happened in the company meetings, and then - a rush of eager volunteers that nearly maxed out the regiment's paper quota. Which I had had no intention of accepting, quota or no quota, but it took a pretty strict hoof to keep the numbers down as it was.

"What is it that you don't understand," asked Bound Codex, "the yelling or the volunteering? Because it wasn't the same people doing each. Oh, there were a couple bucks in there yelling with the crowd, and then came over to you anyways. But for the most part? It was the masters, senior journeymares, and farmers who were making all the noise. You got the juniors and the fieldhooves after they got away from their employers. Basic social dynamics. The old mares want to keep the cheap hooves down on the farm, and the cheap hooves want to get out while the getting's good, see something of the world before they get old. Farmwork, especially - farmhooves get old, fast. Nopony with any sense wants to work soil that doesn't belong to them. And no farmer wants to work their land with only family to hoof, it's back-breaking work."

The last of the screaming fights were finally broken up on the far side of the market square, and the frazzled officers were busy keeping each company split into uneven halves or even thirds across the length and breadth of the open, windswept space. A bit of a warm spell had melted the snow into a miserable slush, and might have had something to do with the muster's disorder. If it had been colder, they might not have had so much fight in them.

"This, on the other hand, is local politics gone septic. The local bright sparks decided that they needed to do something about unifying the quarreling factions, so they tried to paper over the fights with a massed set of arranged marriages between their children. Most of the children did not take to the idea, to put it mildly, and that's why we've got parents fighting with parents, their own children, and their opposites' children. Thankfully no priests have been willing to officiate at spearpoint ceremonies as of yet, so it's all hypothetical. I think I'll have some long hours sitting down with the offending parents; it would be good if you could abscond with exactly half of the unwilling betrothed. "

I rubbed my aching eyes, damn near blinded by the noon sun. "And how am I supposed to separate out the pairs? Make 'em fight for the right to join the Company? Not exactly our style, but better one knock-down drag-out here, than months or years of sniping in the ranks."

"Up to you, mercenary. I just want this mess untangled."

I squinted, looking at the sullen, slouching clots of militia just standing around, waiting. "You know, I've been meaning to ask, where are the cattle? They're clearly not keeping out the caribou, despite the fall-out from the rebellion, and we've got the donkeys and earth-ponies represented in their natural proportions. But everypony tells me of the famous cheeses of Rennet, which means there has to be a lot of cows around here somewhere. But I never lay eyes on 'em."

"That's a political tangle of another colour entirely, and I don't want to talk about it in public like this. Hey, looks like they're ready for your pitch."

My speech was less fraught than the one in front of the Second, although I had to keep turning about to address the whole of the assembly, as I found myself shouting at over a dozen little audience nodules scattered all around the edges of the square rather than a nice, compact assembly in ranks. I added a bit about the Company not taking paired couples, especially not those passionately in hate. It didn't really affect matters much, but at least they were prepared for the sorting when it came time to deal with the prospects on a pony by pony basis.

Some of them even made the choice themselves before presenting themselves to me and my new-minted corporals. The ones who refused to choose, well, we told them to wrestle for it. For some of them, that sorted it out, and we took the ones who could make a pin.

Three couples let it get a bit more heated than I expected in that chilly, slushy mess. Those couples we told to goddamn go home and find a priest. Some ponies just like the drama, like to playact. The Company has enough narrative on its hooves, without importing star-crossed lovers looking to play push-pull in the ranks.

We left the muster with another seventy-eight volunteers. I traveled with them as far as Rennet City, and then sent the corporals with their charges on south towards the training camp at Plateau Palisades. Bound Codex and I stopped by the palace so that she could check in with her peers in administration, and I could look in on the Duchesse and see how she was progressing.

Her due date was rapidly approaching, and she wasn't getting around much anymore. In between her audiences and meetings - which never seemed to stop coming - we talked about her condition, how things were going with the recruiting drive, and some political matters. Namely, what she'd been up to with the cattle. I honestly had had no idea of the lay of the land in that regard. The herds had barely been involved with the war of the rebellion, aside from an isolated massacre towards the end of the fighting.

The status of the herds in Rennet was similar to those in neighboring provinces in the northlands, but complex and difficult to parse from an outsider's perspective. They lived in a state of doubled servitude, being owned both by their bulls, and the bulls in turn by their contracted hosts. Those latter 'contracts' were immutable, lifetime, and vigorously, enthusiastically, tyrannically enforced by the district courts. It was a matter of course that the bulls were sapient property, and their cows and calves, chattel of the owned bulls. This was a little less one-sided than it appears at first glance, as bulls' ownership of their herds terminated upon their deaths or defeat at the hooves of a younger bull, and bull-calves were not automatically contracted to the owners of their dams' bull. A herd could shift from one farmstead to another by the challenging of an old, sick or feeble bull by one of his sons, or even the son of a rival bull.

This is why early castration of bull-calves was a very common, even endemic practice among the herds. I wasn't sure what was worse, the sheer inequinity of it all, or the fact that it was largely practiced within the herds. The cows were constantly calved, because it kept them producing milk. Which meant a lot of bull-calves to be managed for the economic benefit and political stability of the herds. How did they manage it? I'm told that trains of bullocks were regularly sent down into the eastern Riverlands via the Rime route, to act as labour for the armies. Many would end up inducted posthumously into the necromancers' undead hordes.

The Duchesse had been thinking about these matters for decades, she told me, and still hadn't come up with any truly clever solutions. She had started experimenting with targeted manumissions and was trying to push through a conversion of the lifetime contracts to yearly renewables, but there was opposition on both sides of the existing contracts. The bulls largely liked things the way they were, and the cows had no say whatsoever.

I thought about those coffle lines of castrated bullocks shuffling towards the cauldron, and felt sick. Every time I thought I had plumbed the depths of this world's depravity, a new abyss opened up beneath my hooves. I wondered how the paradises handled such catastrophic collisions between biology and cultural necessities? What did our Lady's Equestria do with their surplus bull-calves?

The Duchesse wanted to set up some schooling so that there were at least some cattle to handle their own affairs in the courts, rather than relying on donkey or earth pony advocates, but there wasn't enough money available yet. Especially since somepony was engaged in a campaign of sabotage against the dairies. Smashed milk storage vats, destroyed churn-halls, an occasional fire. There was unrest among the herds. It had started before the rebellion, and continued right alongside the fighting, completely independently, and invisible as far as the Company had been concerned. I suppose the White Rose's excise-ponies must have known about it, but it never came up in interrogations. We'd never thought to ask.

We left behind the depressing subject, and returned again to small-talk and more cheerful subjects, such as the prospective issues with foaling twins. Some mares and jennies can guide their foalings, and choose when they wanted to bring their foals to term. We had hopes that her grace was one of those. I made plans to be in Rennet City for the two weeks she was aiming for.

The third batch of new corporals met Bound Codex, Skinflint, and I outside of Rennet City, and we set out for the muster-town for the Sixth Rennet in the eastern districts of the province, in Lait Blanc. We were about half-way between Rennet City and Lait Blanc when the pegasus flying security over our little column came flitting back to report a possible ambush about a mile ahead of us on the Road. There were four ponies - two earth-ponies and a pair of cattle - standing in the centre of the roadway at a crossroads. Hidden poorly in the woods on either side were several dozen armed ponies. Bluewing wasn't sure what exactly they were, although he said they didn't 'smell like caribou'.

I told the two pegasi to take high station overhead, and prepare to intervene if it looked like the trap might close on us, and detailed two ponies to watch our six and make sure there wasn't anything sneaking up behind us to close off retreat. Then I hooved Forlorn Hope forward with the guidon and advanced to speak with the four at the crossroads. The bowmare with the detail followed closely enough that Higharc could support us with ranged fire if sevens went to eights, but not so close as to get caught with Forlorn Hope and I.

I got within shouting distance of the four at the crossroads.

"Hey, you! Why are you blocking the Bride's Road? Looking to play bandit in broad daylight?"

"We're waiting for you, mercenary," said a tall, clever-looking cow, stepping forward. "We hear you're recruiting. And we're running out of places to hide."

Author's Notes:

The question of the cows has always bedeviled me about MLP:FiM. Applejack's relationship with her herd of cows is distinctly paternalistic. The cows are portrayed as more than a little dim, easily led or stampeded, and live on the Apple's property, presumably being milked for all the dairy products we see being consumed all around Ponyville. What is Applejack's relationship with those cows? Are they renters? Some odd legal form of symbiosis? Or are they flat-out owned, like the pigs? I've joked in the past about cattle and slavery in Equestria, but the question is wide open as far as I can tell. I can only hope that in a high-magic environment like Ponyville, Applejack's keeping her cows producing via magical stimulation, and not having them constantly calving like you'd expect.

And where are the bulls, anyways?

I'm not entirely comfortable about how dark things get when it comes to sentient dairy herds, but this is where the train of logic leads.

The Bull-Calves

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SBMS096

"You're the saboteurs I've been hearing about, then?" I asked the mares and cows standing in the crossroads, with their ambush at their backs. "The rebels and wreckers, who've been breaking and burning? Who are you? Give me your names."

"I'm Billie Joe, and that's Annie. These are our friends Short Brief and Fire-Brand. And we're just… trying to make things right. Things haven't been right for a long time, you know?" Their desperation dragged them down like gravity, making the four of them sag with weariness.

I looked to my left and right, towards the unspoken participants in the conversation hidden in the brush beyond the drainage ditches along the side-roads.

"Can we bring the rest of your group out of their hiding places? You're making my escort nervous. You're making me nervous. And this isn't about a hoof-full of mares, is it? Time to drag it into the open."

She looked… defeated. She turned to her fellows, and they bellowed to the north and south. The brush shook in both directions, and the hidden came out of their hiding places. A dozen along the southern road, nearly twenty along the northern, their horns in various states of development, their bodies themselves those of calves, of younglings, and of bulls in the first flush of adulthood. All of them were painfully thin and ragged. Some looked as scared as the cows and mares, some looked pissed, and some looked that special sort of desperate that does crazy things without any fair warning. Only a couple were armed, holding pikes which must have been scavenged off of the battle-fields we had left behind. They clearly had no idea how to hold them.

"Codex!" I yelled. "Get your plot up here, and bring Skinflint with you! We need both of you."

The crowd of young bulls and bull-calves stood stolidly along the side-roads, staring at us. They… weren't what I was expecting. I'd yet to lay eyes on an actual functioning cow-herd, to be honest, and had only been listening to the political descriptions given to me by the Duchesse and her court. The situation was entirely a horror of the air as far as I was concerned, built of equal parts of empathy and imagination. This was flesh and blood standing glowering and defeated before me.

Bound Codex and Skinflint approached us, and the ox was the first to speak. "Damn, boss, that's the most bulls I've ever seen in one place. What's going on up here?"

"Volunteers. Or rebels, hard to say. What's your colts' story, Billie Joe? Runaways?"

"N-no, not quite. Our mothers have been… hiding calves from the bulls. For a long time. We had a place we called Sanctuary, where we raised some of them. Tried to raise 'em right, and now and again send 'em out to take down the worst of the worst. Proper duels, right? But none of 'em ever seemed to win against the old bulls. Two years ago the authorities tracked down Sanctuary, and burned us out. Killed my mother, seized the rest of the cows. This is what we were able to escape with. We've been running ever since then."

"All of em' uncut?" asked the ox. "How'd you get them to stand so close to each other without kicking each other's heads in? I've seen a meeting or two between bulls, you couldn't get 'em closer than the two sides of a paddock without them bellowing and charging for each other."

"Never really came up," said Billie Joe, with a tired grimace. "The young 'uns act up, we cuff 'em, they settle down. I dunno, how do ponies or donkeys do it? Like that."

"You're out of doors?" I asked. "How have you been staying alive? Stealing?"

"Some, sir. Breaking into sheds, for the most part. Winter's been terrible."

Codex was staring at the two earth ponies. "So," she barked. "That's where you ended up. I knew you'd come to no good in the end. Your mother's dead, Brief. You broke her heart. And your brother took over your practice."

She turned to me. "This idiot is a distant cousin of mine. I don't know the other idiot, but I can imagine. Short Brief was a poor solicitor who thought she could become a barrister. Lost a bunch of cases, dropped off the face of the Chain with a hoof-full of citations for contempt of court. I'm guessing Fire-Brand over there is one of her fellow renegade court advocates."

"So, desperadoes and fugitives all around, then. I don't think this is going to get settled in the middle of winter, here on a crossroads. Where's a warm place we can take our…" I turned to the crowd of bulls and their spokesmares. "Prisoners, I guess? You're all under arrest, by my duly constituted authority as an agent of the Imperium and the Phalactery. We'll figure out charges and legalities later. Easier to handle all of you if nobody else tries to 'arrest' you while we're talking."

I turned to the bulls awkwardly holding their scavenged pikes. "And hoof those damn pig-stickers over to Skinflint here, before one of you trips and stabs one of your friends."

The rest of the recruiting-detail came up, and we set out for the nearest large, heated public building. Which turned out to be the Company's old hidden base, now converted into the local militia regiment's training facilities. The bulls' hooves clopping across Mad Jack's sprawling planking was a nostalgic music, reminding me of our distant brothers and the many recruits already crowding another fortification in another province. The scattering of local militia-ponies gathered for the muster stared in astonishment at our procession. The muster wasn't due for several days, which meant that the fort had plenty of space for my escort and my prisoners. We dug up some grain and hay, and fed the starveling fugitives while we started up a space-heater in one of the empty, cobwebbed barracks.

I examined the bulls and bull-calves while they ate, looking for major medical problems. Exposure, malnutrition, and neglect had probably stunted all of their growth, but nothing that would put them seriously out of commission. The ones who couldn't go on had probably fallen behind, and been captured by pursuers. Or possibly just taken by the first passer-by. The fugitive fleeth where no pony pursueth.

"So," I asked the big cow, who was scarfing down as much hay as she could get into her hooves, "What's the plan? Volunteer for the mercenary Company full of big scary ponies, get you out from under the hammer? You realize you'd just be shipping out to the Riverlands with the rest of us. Things might be terrible up here, but there isn't anypony trying to eat you."

"Me, no, but if we surrendered to the authorities up here, they'd castrate all of my brothers, and ship them south in chains, unarmed and untrained. At least with you folk we can learn to fight, defend ourselves. More or less intact."

Couldn't argue with that. A stallion'll do an awful lot to stay one. Although if somepony had cut my junk off when I was a colt, I might not have gotten the Duchesse in such a mess…

But there was something wrong with Billie Joe's solution to their dilemma, and I needed to sleep on it.

I dreamed of green hills over a grey firth, the leaden clouded skies rushing overhead at the whip's behest of a fierce north-easterly gale. The wind-wounded waves rushed against the outgoing tide, water pushed by air up-stream against its natural courses. Over the breaking waters hung flights of fowl, floating on the strong winds. Large grey and black birds, black-beaked and hard-eyed, they stared inland, something invisible keeping them from the course that they and the weather would take if all were right with the world.

Her great and terrible voice sang to me from behind, on the hill over my head.

Was it for this the wild geese spread
The grey wing upon every tide;
For this that all that blood was shed,
For this Wealth Wreathlock died,
And Storied Fame and Long Fang,
All that delirium of the brave?
Romantic Holstein's dead and gone,
It's with Calfherd in the grave.

"Nopony remembers now the brave bulls of that dead world, who came to our call and our banners again and again. Their heavy hooves, their broad backs. When the battles turned against us, they always fell in the rear-guard, and fell for their guarding, as often as not. Hot-blooded, yes, but the blood bent against the fire, if trained properly to the fight. There is discipline in bulls beyond what you might find among this world's crabbed and grasping slave-tyrants. We have seen it, in our service."

"Would that mean that you would have these calves in your Company, Mistress?" I asked, half-hypnotized by the geese in their arrested flight.

"Oh, heavens, no. Look at those poor things. They hang forever over the waves, but a wing-flap from the shores of their home. Nothing in this world or any other will bring them that last yard, that last hoof, that last inch. The wild geese fly, never to return."

"Holstein's dead and gone, and I killed it, at Sister's behest. I would not drag more bulls from their homes to die in a foreign land. The rest of you, I care not, you've given yourselves to me. But these calves? Their Holstein's not yet dead and gone."

And with that, the world broke, and the wind blew the geese over the hills and away to their distant destination.

In the morning, I woke the corporals, and had them feed the calves, and set them out to put them through some quick morning training. And I pulled Bound Codex, Billie Joe, and Short Brief into the old infirmary, covered in dust like most everything else in this neglected pocket-fortress.

"I've consulted with my conscience, and you're not coming south with us. The herds of Rennet are sick, sick unto death, but shipping bull-calves into foreign service isn't a cure, or even much of a palliative. Rennet needs some-pony, and some solution which doesn't just disappear problem children in industrial lots."

"What are we going to do with them, though? They're still outlaw, fugitives. We can't let them walk around free without breaking the back of the law," objected Bound Codex. "We need a legal out. Recruitment to the Company was actually a quite deft solution, now that I've slept on it. Judges have been sending scofflaws into military service for millennia, and they'll probably be doing it for millennia to come, until the Chain crumbles under our hooves."

"The calves aren't the problem to be solved, it's the herds that are broken," I corrected her. "It's the institution which needs to be torn down, gutted. It's a sickness, and all you're doing by getting rid of the excess bull-calves is bleeding and cupping. Take it from a working physician, bleeding and cupping doesn't cure the patient, it just makes her sicker while the doctor gets fat on his fees."

"So…" drawled Short Brief, "What does that leave us? Where do the calves go?"

"Service is a good idea, but not with the Company. I'm thinking that the excess bull-calves are a resource, and a trainable one at that. Military, or industrial, I don't give a damn. That's the Duchesse's problem. Ponies are never a problem, they're a solution looking for a problem to fix. If the herds don't want their bull-calves, seize them for the sovereign. I'm a hammer, I find nails. This batch will get trained up for the Duchesse's personal guard. I needed a reason to hang around Rennet City this winter anyways. As for you lot, that's up to the Duchesse."

I went back out to the marshaling yards, and watched the corporals putting the bull-calves through their paces as militia-ponies drifted through the gates in small groups, gathering for the muster. I pictured great bulls in ducal livery and barding, guarding an older, wiser roan jenny, her children around her hooves.

And in my heart I heard the sound of wind-swept waves breaking on an imagined and distant shore.

The Dog-House

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SBMS097

The muster of the Sixth was no more orderly nor violent than those of the Second or Fourth. It was merely… less interesting. I had grown tired of the militia's tiresome and immiscible suspension of youthful restlessness within a broth of stodgy self-interest. My speech for the Sixth was far shorter than that of the previous regiments' musters, and my examination of the subsequent volunteers was likewise perfunctory. The prisoners observed from their placement in the old caribou holding-pen barracks, watching curiously the goings-on in the main marshaling yards. None of it concerned them, and that makes for the most consequence-free of entertainments.

I sent the bulk of the would-be corporals back with the eighty-two volunteer-recruits, along with Forlorn Hope and the guidon. She was up for a sergeancy, and couldn't be wasted helping me iron out the bull-calves. Honestly, I wasn't much for training, it was out of my core competency, but I couldn't justify wasting any of the Company's resources other than myself getting these children pointed in the right direction.

The Duchesse wasn't thrilled with my 'solution' to her dilemma, and pointed out quite heatedly that dilemmas didn't get solved, they got managed. I told her to her face that she wasn't managing the problem by cutting its balls off and shipping it out of sight. That Rennet had long waxed fat and wealthy on the back of the dairy-herds and the province's famous cheese. It was time to do right by the bull-calves who suffered the most for that prosperity. That went over about as well as you might imagine, and I was sleeping in the cells with the calves for the better part of a fortnight after that particular meeting.

It had been a productive two weeks in the cells, there's a lot you can do with a regular diet and a roof over your heads. They just didn't get to stretch their legs all that much. We got in a lot of wrestling and close-drill training. And I got a good look at these calves in close quarters, under stress, and unable to get away from other bulls.

By and large, they took it about as well as any other herd of foals their ages might have. I came out of my little tour of gaol with a reinforced view of the universality of ponyhood. Thrown into crowded dark holes, we were all still ponies in the dark.

I may have provoked that fight with the Duchesse, and maneuvered myself into being arrested. If nothing else, it gave me an excuse for being essentially AWOL.

I spent those two weeks talking to the calves, in between the training and demonstrations. I told them what I expected of them, told them that they had been given an inestimable gift. They knew in their guts that the world didn't owe them anything, and would crush them like their less fortunate older brothers and uncles' ball-sacks if it could. I told them to recognize a chance when they saw it, and to grab it when it came. To hold on with every last tooth. And to give others a chance when they saw the opportunity. Ponies wouldn't be grateful, but somebody had to start somewhere. The other way was to follow in the hooves of their bastard fathers, or father - I never did get a clear answer on just which herds they had all come from. Which was good, if anypony knew who they came from, that would have weakened their legal standing.

I told them how to offer themselves to the Duchesse, how to look her in the eyes, and how to appeal to her stubbornness, her bloody-mindedness, without letting her think she was being sentimental.

Thirteen days in, she came down to the cells, and took them out calf by calf to talk to them. I didn't hear anything of the interviews, or interrogations, or whatever it was she did with them. But calf by calf, they were taken away, and they didn't come back. In the waning light of that late-winter evening, the Duchesse came back to the cells, where there was nopony but me and my gaoler, and she stood there, massively pregnant, and said nothing. Then she turned around and left me in the darkness for one last night.

They let me out the next morning, and there was a note left for me with the gaoler. I had a visitor. Or more accurately, a messenger from the Company had come seeking me. I found the two pegasi with their chariot waiting in the central courtyard of the palace. Bound Codex was waiting just inside a side-door, standing in the warmth of the hall. She came out when she saw me coming up out of the dungeons.

I asked her if the calves were to be spared. She told me I had gotten everything I wanted.

I told her she had no idea what I wanted. Then I went to catch my ride.

Companies from Verdebaie and Hydromel had just shown up on their own, appearing first at Little Ridings, where they were told that it was no longer a Company property, and then before the gate at Plateau Palisades. They had no proof that they had been 'recruited', but their respective captains had paperwork from their militia-colonels claiming to represent that they had been detached to Imperial service, and directing them to present themselves to the Black Company in Pepin.

When I arrived, the Palisades were crammed to overflowing with recruits from three provinces - two hundred and forty or so from Rennet, and another hundred each from the other two provinces. Stomper was dead on her feet, and there were about a hundred and fifty Company cadre running the training-camp, on top of the swarm of new non-coms running with the recruits every step of the way.

Rye Daughter and the oxen were keeping a lid on the training injuries and camp diseases, which were rampant. As many as a quarter of the recruits were down at any one time with sprains or the trots. It was a real struggle, keeping them from shitting themselves to death before they recovered, but the oxen were seasoned by this point. First thing I did when I got back, was to call a corporals' meeting, and gave a grouchy speech on the vital necessity of beating proper hygiene discipline into the recruits. There were so many of them, that there was a real danger of bad habits being acculturated into the new 'sections'.

It was company policy to break up recruits into mixed sections of veterans and recruits, to maintain heavy cadre, so that the recruits learned from the veterans, and didn't develop unhelpful short-cuts and barracks-traditions. With a group of recruits this large, that was impossible, but they compensated by bringing up veteran Company to at least leaven the loaf, as it were. The goal was to give each corporal at least one, and hopefully two cadre in their sections.

Five recruits died in training accidents or from the trots before I arrived in camp. Apple Tun, earth pony mare, and Feu Brousse, jack, from Verdebaie; Esteban, Bruce, and Jacques, jacks, from Hydromel. The specifically recruited ponies from Rennet managed to not kill themselves off before I arrived. At that point I took charge of the effort to keep them all alive, or at least, to give the Company's actual enemies the honour of ushering their names into the Annals. I went back and forth over whether to include these volunteers in these pages, despite their not having been properly inducted under the pike, and came down on the side of generous memory. They meant to be Company, which was good enough for the Annals.

I sent the messenger down to Dance Hall to retrieve the standard-pike and its standard-bearer. With so many new recruits, we'd have to hold staggered ceremonies. But even if I did something foolish like trying to induct all four hundred and forty or so of them in a single marathon ritual, I'd still need the pikestaff.

Two days later, the standard presented itself to the main gates, with two Cakes in tow. I gave Corporal Carrot what-for for bringing the spy with him all this way, by their lonesome. He reminded me stiffly that I had expressly included his presence in the terms of her parole, and that his interpretation of his orders required he accompany her everywhere she went, and vice versa. So, here they were, as ordered.

The spy went into the kitchens, where she amused herself wasting our sugar stocks. Apparently she had spent the winter inveigling herself into the good graces of the Company's cook-staff, and practiced the dark arts of her people. Horrible, eye-strainingly colourful pastries and wasteful, empty calories tarted up in all hues of the rainbow. Vile stuff, truly.

When the time came for the first of the induction ceremonies, I had to pry my standard-bearer out of the kitchens, where he had been helping his parolee bake her eponymous confections, disgustingly coloured in their two coat-colours.

Over the next two weeks, I inducted the recruits in batches of forty new brothers and sisters each night. I was thankful for my eidetic memory, because I had left my Annals down in Dance Hall, and the occasion required eleven separate, distinct, and appropriate readings, one for each ceremony, each night. The first night mostly confused the bulk of the recruits, and I wasn't quite sure why any of us were there, to be honest. These were barely volunteers, and many of them seemed to confuse us for a common Imperial regiment. Very frustrating.
By the third night, I think the ritual and repetition had gotten through to them, and I think this because three ponies stood up afterwards and came forward to inform their trainers and myself that this was not what they thought they were signing up for, they wanted out. I was, frankly, relieved. I was starting to worry that we were going to induct unsuited ponies into the Company by simple herd psychology. I was glad enough to see them go. We had two more drop out before the inductions were complete.

The spy started sitting in on the induction ceremonies after the third one. I have no idea what she thought of the whole thing, but she listened intently and intensely during my readings, and stared stony-eyed through the actual dedications before the pike-staff.

A couple days after the last induction ceremony, I was going over promotion lists sent up from the Hall by the Lieutenant and the Captain. The thundering herd of recruits meant that we needed to add a new cohort to the Company. A ground cohort, obviously, which meant preferably a ground-pony. The problem was that the obvious pony was winged; Gerlach had taken over the aerial cohort when the Lieutenant had been elected. That meant that Long Haul was the senior sergeant, but, as I said, pegasus. The only other options were meat-heads like Octavius or raw, barely promoted sergeants like Forlorn Hope.

While I was wrestling with this conundrum, I got a notice from the front gates. A messenger had come down from Rennet. The Duchesse was ready to foal, and despite it all she still cared to have me present for the occasion.

Fear And Trembling, or, The Sacrifice

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SBMS098

I packed my saddle-bags with the appropriate supplies for a foaling, for surgery, for fever, and for what emergencies I could imagine, while Rye Daughter fluttered about me in a cheerful fluster. She was all optimism and youthful enthusiasm, imagining no terrors or horrors, so I did not tell her of my unease. I just packed, and dressed warmly, and hurried for the gates and the Road.

The Duchesse had given me the travel-time to make it up to her palace with a day to spare, said the note I had been given. And yet, an early spring blizzard swept the southern Northlands, and though I had time to spare, I did not stop for the night in Little Ridings, and not far past the gates of Charred Horton, I let my mile-devouring trot break into a canter in the darkness.

I collapsed in exhaustion in the snow-swept morning dawning beneath the gates of the half-held castra of Menomenie, the militia letting me inside to sleep a few fitful hours on a cot in the back of their gate-house. The Spirit haunted my misty dreams, staring at me with something baleful in her two-hearted gaze. She would not tell me her mind, and only stared. I woke to her half-voiced words of regret.

"We are sorry that it will have to be."

I shot to my hooves with a heart full of alarm and adrenaline. I thanked the gate-guards as I sped past them, and galloped up the road past the town of Menomenie, and the districts between the border and the palace. Premonition and building panic powered my flight north, and twilight devoured the remains of day as I came into sight of that half-reconstructed hulk of tradition and transition the Duchesse was making her seat of power.

The gate-guards ran out to greet me in my half-blown disheveled state, and barked out the urgent need my evil genius had been warning me with each beat of my thundering heart, each yard separating me from where I should have been.

The foals had come earlier than expected, than planned. They had come hard, and lingered in life's foyer, neither safe in their rooms nor foaled out into the world. The first-foaled was long in coming, and the second breached.

She was bleeding out when I reached the foaling-room. The pedigreed hack she had hired was floundering when I found them, the two infants howling in the chamber, the maids flailing. Blood everywhere, the placental sac laying abandoned in a wide puddle of blood on the floor beside the bed. The fool had let her foal naturally, two heavy heads though her slight frame, without making a Trojan section as we had discussed.

And Bonforte was exhausted, and torn, and bleeding her heart's blood-out of her nethers. I went cold as I do when the world narrows to the scalpel and there is a life leaking out of a crack in the world.

Rinse the region, find the tears, close the arteries, triage. Save what you can, remove what you must. Leave tomorrow to tomorrow, today breathes in your nostrils with a wild look in Her eyes.

I had her stitched up, the traumatized area elevated above her heart, and showed her maids how to hydrate her, keep her air-passage clear, and give me a moment to turn my attention from the struggling Duchesse to the squalling foals. Two hale jenny-foals, with their mother's coat-hue, almost nothing of me in them. Good for the bairns. Yelling for their dam's milk, but her grace was in no position to give them the teat. I sent off a maid for a nursing mare to feed them, and as I did, I caught the doctor sidling out of the chamber. I grabbed her by the forearm, and pushed her into a corner, and started demanding answers. I yelled an awful lot.

While I was chewing out the offending physician, Bonforte's breathing started going rapid. I rushed to her side, and took her measure. She was sliding into shock, heart-rhythm stuttering, feverish. As if she were in septic shock. Impossible, it shouldn't have presented for hours even if the sites had been immediately infected. Something wrong, something wrong, something wrong. I dosed her with every nostrum I had on hoof, but they were all for later, later, she didn't have later, she was going now -

And the room went still, frozen, maids arrested in their flurry, the physician caught in the act, sidling once again towards the doorway, Bonforte's seizure caught in mid-rictus. And the Spirit, standing over us both, sadness in her great mad eyes.

"Thou art losing her. This is in thy heart. Thou knowst it. Look, she is sliding into septic shock e'en now."

"Lady! Please, I have no time for visions! I need time, I need time, I – I could fix this with time!"

"Time I cannot give thee. Time is the only gift not in any pony's profer, the only thing that cannot be made anew. I can only give you this not-time. We are not in time, as we are not truly in the world or the moment.

"What is it that thou desirest?"

"To save her! To not have killed her with a moment's foolishness, selfishness!"

The sadness washed out of the Spirit like a rushing wave, the rage simmering under even her sweetest moods erupting like a geyser of fury.

"You accept the blame, Acolyte?" she thundered. "Have you come to confess to me your infidelities? Have you put something ahead of my service? Have you been lacking in faith?" The world went dark before her black fire, and she grew to fill it from one side to the other, nothing but her great draconic eyes glaring down upon me.

"HAVE YOU NOT HELD MISTRESSES BEFORE ME? GIVEN SERVICE TO OTHERS' BEFORE MINE? HAD LADIES WHO ARE NOT I?" My head nearly split from the cracking of Her thunder in my ears, as if she had howled directly into my skull. "To that false alicorn, to this light-skirt dying before us, to that agent of my damnable sister, and? Worst of all? That thestral filly you found under those rose-bushes?"

She drew back, long enough to give me a knowing, rageful look. "Yes, I know about your little schemes for that child, your prophesy-inspired day-dreams of betraying my trust, to somehow replace me with that poor child. In your hidden heart, where you thought to keep from your Mistress your betrayal, your half-hearted false-hearted jollity. Think you I would not see your dreams solely because you dreamt them in THE DAY? Fool! Be damned, you traitor!"

I fell down on my face, and bawled, so tired, so empty, so scared. The miles and the hours, the terror, the exhaustion I had been holding back, broke over me like a wave, my bulwarks collapsing, my strength spent.

"Lady, Lady, forgive me, I confess it, I confess it all. You know me and my heart, you owe me nothing, I have conspired against you in my heart. You are mad, Lady, you are not in full possession of your senses. You are two, where you ought to be one, and your furies are unmeasured and wild. Your sensibilities come and go with terror and rage. We know it, we fear it, but we still love you, Lady. We would have seen you been made better. Our conspiracies have in your best interest, Lady. We would see you great again as you ought to be."

"Talk not of yourself in the collective sense. Say it right."

"I, then, Lady. My conspiracy, my treacheries, have been in hopes of your future health. Oh, damn me, I can't think straight, please, help me Lady, she's dying, and I can't think straight-"

"Enough, enough. What is it you promise me, Acolyte? Will I have a proper dedicat? Will you, at last, serve me with your whole heart? No reserve, no paternal efforts to 'fix' or 'correct' me?" Her great hoof prodded at my chest. "Your WHOLE heart?"

"Oh, yes, Lady, please Lady. In every way, as you direct, when you direct, without scheming."

"Not enough. Give me all of it. Your attention. Your hoof in action. A sign, an active sign."

"Anything, my Lady."

"Here, take up your scalpel. Give me your everything."

I took my bloodied scalpel from the bowl it had been soaking in. "What would you have me do, my Lady."

"Your first-born."

"Wh-what?"

"I told you, I want everything. I want your first-born. Cut its heart out."

The stillness stuttered, and the world twitched around us, the moment coming back in jerking panic. I stood there with the scalpel in my jaws, breathing heavily, wild-eyed. In the mirror across the room, I looked into my eyes, and the amulet had failed, and Her thestral pupils stared slit-eyed out of my sockets like the gates of Tartarus.

And alicorns save me, I went for the basinets while pandemonium erupted all around me.

I looked down at the squalling foal, and brushed back its birth-slick little mane, and I reached out with the scalpel, and I found the spot, and I started to cut. Blood welled around the blade, and I knew I was damned forever.

Then the world seized around me, again, and my mind went blank.

"HOLD."

The Spirit, again, in her gentler aspect.

"Sawbones, thy sacrifice redeems thee in our eyes. Cut no more. We art satisfied. Well-done, our servant, well-done."

"No, no more, Lady? You said you needed her heart."

"We needed a heart, and thou has given it to us. Thank you, dedicat. The foal's heart may continue to beat within her chest, we hath it now in our hooves. We art satisfied." The foal's eyes opened, impossibly, and its eyes were as thestral as the Spirit's, or Cherie's, or mine own in the mirror.

"We do, however, need a sacrifice for your demanded boon. A life for a life, a heart for a heart, power for power. Our presence requires a victim. There!" gestured the Spirit with a blue-furred foreleg, at the attending physician frozen in her flight from the chamber. "In yonder bush, struggles a ewe, tangled by the sacrificial altar. Take up thy scalpel, and bleed her for your dying Bonforte."

I limped, more than half-mad, over to the doorway, stumbling around the clutter of the foaling chamber, the maids frozen in their charges hither and thither as their mistress, caught in a seizure which I had feared was about to become a death-rattle, laid upon the foaling-bed. I stepped behind the physician, whose face looked almost as mad as mine own, her eyes caught in a shift from the tableau at the bed and toward the unguarded door.

I put the blade of the scalpel under her throat beside the carotids, and looked up at the Spirit. She nodded, and the world returned to its pace. I drew sideways as the physician fled, and her own momentum cut her throat from side to side, deeply and irrevocably. Her eyes rolled back as the blood-pressure in her brain dropped to zero, and her carcass collapsed bonelessly to the already-bloodied floor of the foaling chamber.

Startled screams filled the room as the maids and attendants registered the sudden presence of a corpse and a mad-stallion in the only exit to the chamber, and I breathed heavily around my scalpel while the doctor's life-blood pooled around my hooves. I spat it aside, and got control over my air.

"Leave us. Now."

I stepped aside, and the stampede began. They forgot the foals in their panic, and I had to pause until the last of them cleared my path to the foaling-bed. I did not pause beside the basinet of the first-born, but in passing I noted that the cut upon her chest, which had seem so deep when I had been making it, was barely a scratch, already closing. Unnatural.

Bonforte was still seizing upon her bed, and I had to reach forward with both hooves to still her shudders.

Oh, it couldn't all be for nothing.

As soon as I touched her, she froze, heaved up on the points of her spine.

Her eyes shot open, and that familiar slit-eyed glowing stare lit up the ceiling above her bloodied bed.

She takes everything in her time, everything and everyone.

Bonforte glowed with Her miracle, the fire burning through her veins, the flashing flare flowing from one end to the other, via heart-chamber, artery, and every capillary, burning out the unnatural infection which had been killing her.

The Spirit whispered in my inner ear, explaining the poisoning, the sneaking early induction of labour, the physician's paid betrayal. A clever plot, a plan to clear the ducal throne for the heir, the rightful heir, brought north from her Rimean relatives and being raised by her distant cousin, in hopes of repairing the breach. The treacherous little cur, whose betrayal of her cousin's hospitality had fueled the plot, had paid for it. The Spirit continued to whisper in my ear as I checked Bonforte's condition, reassured myself that as the fire flickered out, that her natural breathing had resumed, her vitals once again that of a mother just given birth to two healthy foals. Her eyes, once more those of a beautiful, healthy jenny of a certain age, opened.

"Sawbones, you made it," she breathed. "How are the foals?"

"They're beautiful. They're healthy. And you're better than you were. I can't explain what happened, but you're going to be dealing with the fall-out for a long time. I'm being told that I'm not done with my intervention. But the three of you should be fine until your cowardly attendants get over their fright and return. I apologize for the mess I've made of your home. But I'm not quite done making a mess yet."

She drifted off to sleep with a puzzled, confused expression. She could not see the corpse by the door from her bed. I brushed the heads of my children in passing as I headed out into the hall. I didn't even know their names.

I found an axe mounted on a wall-display in a gallery on the way to the cur's chambers, the cur and her attendants. I found them panicked, half-packed. Someone had warned them. It wasn't enough, wasn't fast enough. I barred the doors against their escape, and I killed them.

Every last one of them. Including Bonforte's vicious little cousin.

Nopony stopped me.

Nopony stood in my way when I left the palace.

I slept in the open on the way back home, the Spirit whispering in my ears, and keeping me warm in the cold.

I'm afraid I gave Rye quite a fright when I returned to the Palisades. But at least my drugged sleep under the eaves of the Palisades was blessedly dreamless.

Going Through The Motions

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SBMS099

I put myself under arrest, of course. I had been AWOL, twice. While I had been out and about, they had sent up a proper cohort commander to take over the recruit-camp, the commander with most experience left in the Company. Smooth Draw had left behind most of her own cohort, to take over the new recruit-heavy fourth. Octavius was promoted to sergeant-major, and given the old third cohort.

Not the choice I would have made.

Plans were made to swap out recruit-heavy sections from the fourth into the second and third as they were judged fully trained, so as to balance the cohorts properly, and make sure that none of the cohorts could truly be described as green, as a 'recruits' cohort'.

I quickly grew tired of Rye's restlessness and anxiety, and told her that this was the season for harvesting wild herbs. The green shoots were starting to peek out of the brown brush, and trees were green-tipping everywhere across the face of the landscape. I sent her out to harvest the local willow-stands, and to search for the standard early-season herbs.

I put in a request to have the herbals shipped up from my study in Dance Hall, they were full of illustrations and guides on how to identify useful plants. Obscured Blade knew where to find them in the archival chest, they were in the unsecured, unencrypted shelves.

While I had been out, one of the Bride's vaunted civil engineers had arrived with a detail of veterans, Imperials with long experience in construction and field engineering. They had been at work down in the vicinity of Dance Hall, for nearly five weeks, undoing the mess we had made of the Bride's Road, tearing down ramparts, rebuilding roadsides, and laying out the new gate-and-bastion complex around a second, civilian drawbridge to restore the traffic-flow down into the wastelands, and through to the river and the road-net into northwestern Pepin and Pepin City proper.

I took stock of the recruits' hygiene and training health concerns. The sections of the unrecruited 'companies' were properly and thoroughly interviewed, and I took detailed patient histories. I called in Stomper, and we discussed targeted training regimens for some of the problem recruits, who had special circumstances that required addressing.

I told Stomper to leave her apprentice and his friends out in the hall.

While I was busy and on recruiting detail, the Company had kept itself busy by thoroughly posting the line of the upper great river, establishing a small blockhouse on a bluff on the heights west of the Deep Mines, over the river north of where Caribou City used to be. The blockhouse included a number of barracks, a palisade, and a small tower and deployment facilities for the aerial ponies. They called it the Aerie. Gerlach ran regular patrols out of the Aerie, and by the end of the garrison season the new blockhouse housed a full dozen sections, keeping an eye out towards the White Rose side of the river, and aiding in the ongoing clearance and collection operations in the Deep Mines highlands.

I kept Rye Daughter as busy as I could, chasing herbs in the fields, helping with the countless minor injuries and strains of an intensive training season. Out of my mane.

The 93rd Rear Support Battalion reappeared once again, and passed through Dance Hall to collect a final cull of thralls from the increasingly-depopulated Deep Mines range. It turned dirty, and dangerous, with much of the work done in the abandoned delvings and dead mining towns. Mindful of the previous season's disaster in the mines, the Company's ponies were painstaking, cautious, and very, very careful. They still had a couple cave-ins. Forward-deployed unicorns and the Company's witches kept close and on call served to prevent a re-occurrence of serious casualties. It usually takes some blood, but the Company is capable of learning from its mistakes.

Gibblets and his witch-apprentices tried to see me two weeks after the incident. I wouldn't see them.

Throughout the spring, the aerial patrols along the line of the upper river had spotted signs that somepony was coming across the river. Small boats tied up along the far shore, drag-marks in river mud on the near shore, and the occasional tracks leading up into the wastelands. Nopony saw anything living, but the White Rose was definitely doing something on our side of the river. Deep patrols into enemy territory didn't find any new encampments or fortifications, but the existing ones were fully staffed, and a new flotilla of warcraft were under construction in the nearest fortified port-town southward from the site of Caribou City. Messages were sent south via the small Imperial outpost in that town south of Le Coppice on the Road, and Her Majesty's brown-water navy was notified of the new threat. They were occupied, as they always are, with facing down the White Rose's fleet-in-being in the mouth of the great river's largest tributary, the Housa. Nothing was spared to go deal with a minor hoof-full of pocket triemes or glorified pirogues on a stretch of the great river far from the central theatre.

The signs of incursions caused the Lieutenant and Fuller Falchion to send out substantial hoof patrols through the wastelands between the river and the sally-gates of Dance Hall. A full week of dancing back and forth ensued before a Company patrol actually laid eyes on a White Rose deep recon unit. Another week of chasing each others' tails ensued, with each side burning each others' abandoned day-camps, and trying to lure each other into improvised ambushes. The White Rose's scouts were very, very good.

Eventually a Company patrol screwed up, and a mare got injured in the field, hamstrung in a pass of arms in the half-demolished remains of a farming hamlet south of the old city walls. Her partner stayed to carry her to safety, while their section-mate galloped back to the rest of the unit to bring in reinforcements. He didn't realize that the Spirit had already inspired a re-deployment which would have brought those reinforcements onto the scene without any conscious decision on the part of anypony. The runner's interruption of the movement of the 'reinforcement' actually delayed the rescue. The isolated pair of Company ponies were trapped and killed by a party of White Rose scouts. Dead in the encounter was Shifting Sand, earth pony mare, and her partner, the buck Roe Cain. Their section-mates wiped out the White Rose recon patrol, counter-ambushing them while they were distracted by an attempt to interrogate the dying Shifting Sand.

Information beaten in turn out of a dying scout suggested that the probes across the river had began as poaching expeditions in support of the White Rose's own necromancers, looking to snatch up a few thralls of their own from the legates' previously-teeming ghoul reserve-lands. Much to their surprise, they found nothing at all. I'm not sure what the White Rose had thought was going on over here on the Bride's side of the river all last year. We had not been particularly subtle about our extermination campaign, the clouds of smoke must have blighted the crops of the farms upwind from the wastelands. But perhaps the White Rose's civilian populations had as little contact with their soldiery and witches as the Imperials did with their own. Nevertheless, this ludicrous blindness had led several small enthralling parties to slink across the river and cautiously comb through the burnt fields and ruins around the dead port-city. Apparently previous years had seen the legates' own culling parties come across White Rose intruding in their gamelands, and some spectacular massacres had trained the surviving White Rose on how to be unobtrusive while stealing from the legates' shamble-herds.

The search for ghouls, or any undead whatsoever, turned eventually into a proper military reconnaissance. By the time of the bloody ambush, they had more or less figured out our situation in the province, and were trying to figure out useful approaches, or whether to try us at all. The information from the dying scout let us identify and pin down the rest of the White Rose on the wrong side of the river. Reinforced Company columns converged on the enemy, and a detachment from the Aerie cut off their retreat to the river-banks. They fought like cornered weasels, but were hopelessly outmatched. Only the two bloodmages accompanying them gave the Company any problems, and unicorn shield-choruses suppressed those witches' desperate counter-attacks, until the Company's own warlocks were able to drop fire on their position and incinerated the necromancers in their nest.

No Company ponies died in the extermination of the White Rose recon battalion, but a good many were injured, some severely. A chariot was sent up to the Palisades, and I was ordered insistently to deliver myself to Dance Hall for surgery.

I went along peacefully. And I stitched the Company's wounded back together, and did my job.

What else could I do?

Dreamscapes, or, The White Noise

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SBMS100

I met the Spirit in my dreams, such as they were, three nights after the third cohort's extermination of the White Rose's recon battalion in the wastelands. We had taken to these nightly meetings as a way for me to keep up the Annals without leaving my house arrest to interview the participants of events. As such, the narrative was unavoidably filtered through the Spirit's rather narrow aperture upon the Company and the world beyond the Company, but it was better than nothing.

"They are containing the infested shafts until the final return of the little necromancer and her cronies. And so, that covers the sections in the eastern Deep Mines. This will no doubt cause delays when the contingent of miners in transit from Mr. Tones' recruiting efforts arrive next week. Sergeant Sigil is planning out the temporary quarters for the miners in the back country between Mondovi and the Withies upstream of Trollbridge on our side of the river. The hope is that this will allow him to budget out the completion of the walls in that direction on Mr. Tones' sou, as it were." The bureaucratic tone of the Spirit in her darker aspect might have made me laugh in another mood. She was visibly nervous, her eyes jerking away from me in the direction of what I know not, staring occasionally into the grey, shifting mists, and twitching at the intermittent bursts of static and clicking noises.

"One thing I wish to follow upon. The latest contingent of guards with the Mondovian voyageurs is returning by Le Coppice, and there's something wrong there. One of the guards, Deep Bluff, ceased to dream one night, ten nights ago, and I have not seen him again in the dream-stuff. Nor has Luna, nor even, well, hrm." The aspect turned inside herself, and flicked her black bat-wings blue-feathered, shifting from the Nightmare to the Princess.

"It is passingly strange, once we findeth a pony within the Dream, they art always in our mind, like a sparkle in the heavens. For a star to wink out and not shine again for so long, is strange and more than strange. It most oft occurs when the pony passeth from this life into the hereafter. But all guards of the detail reported the continued existence of Deep Bluff, his participation in the duties of the caravan and the guard. We hath ordered the corporal of the guard to confront Deep Bluff and ascertain his state of mind." She shuddered, as if she was cold.

"Interesting, ma'am. I thank your highness for your time, and this aid in my duties. I wish you a sweet night."

"Yes, well, of course. Art not all nights sweet e'en under Tambelon's pinched heavens? Good even to you, Acolyte. Be… well." She turned, and disappeared like a trail of starlight into the tumbling mists. I looked around my dream, and sighed in recognition of her distress.

You couldn't see the stars from my dream.

I felt a poking sensation against my haunch. I looked down behind my dream-self, into the ground-hugging mist that hid that which I stood upon, and even my own hooves from sight. A little filly, grey-winged and huge-eyed, stared up at me.

"Monsieur, you know we're all worried about you, right?"

"Cherie, go find Throat-Kicker. She's no doubt worried about you."

"Why? I'm in my bed where I ought to be, right next to hers. You're the one who's where he shouldn't be."

And with a flap of her wings, I woke.

Another night, another grey dream, another uncomfortable meeting with the Spirit. I reported to her the recoveries of our wounded and sick ponies. Sections of recruits continued to stream southwards along the Road, replacing veteran sections passing northward to the still-forming fourth cohort. Word and a warrant had arrived with the last section, reporting my outlawing in Rennet. I would no longer be able to set hoof in that province without being arrested for aggravated murder.

The Spirit had her own news to report. "There is definitely a problem with the caravan guard. There are now two missing ponies, Corporal Backsword never came back to her dream to report her confrontation of the dream-absent Deep Bluff. The rest of the detail reports that they heard a confrontation, and when they arrived on scene, the Corporal was bruised, and Deep Bluff was missing. She claimed that he attacked her, and fled. They are now convinced that the missing earth pony was a changeling, or something like that, and that Deep Bluff is missing or dead. The Corporal is supposedly having them cast back on their back-track. But the Corporal isn't reporting to me."

"You think the changeling killed and replaced Backsword?"

"It is my concern. I worry that the body was not found. There should have been a body."

"Changelings are not known in Tambelon. From what Gibblets has said in the past, and from my reading on the subject, the ambient magic shouldn't be able to support them. They would starve to death here, or be poisoned by the necromancy that lurks under every toad-stool and eave."

"If it is not a changeling, what could it be?"

"Tambelonian legends do talk about shapeshifters, though. Skinwalkers. A species of undead. Supposedly they torment the bison tribes of the far west. Or…"

She shook out her wings, restless as I stood in the mist, thinking.

"The Stump's missing partner in crime is named 'Walker'. I wonder if we're looking at an infiltration attempt? Who was that jack who knew foal-stories and legends of the legate-liches? Heavy Bucket. Can you loop him here?"

"Oh, finally!" She exclaimed, and flicked her black fur blue, and shook out her feathers. "We would be most glad for a change of scenery! Here, let us carry thou to a more salubrious dreamscape!"

The mist blew away in the sudden gale from her great wings, and we found ourselves in a crowded and jolly basement-bar-room, loud and half-lit. Heavy Bucket sat at a table covered in emptied mugs, and was caught with a half-full mug full of beer in mid-swallow.

"Princess! Mon etoiles! This is no place for royalty!"

"Concern thou not with where we ought and ought not be, my soldier of the night! We wouldst have conversation with thee. Liches! The lich known as Walker - why dost that fell thing carry that sobriquet?"

"What? Who? Oh, ce mec. The side-kick of ce monstre we butchered last fall, right. Hn, I think it was because she liked to play marcheur de peau, as if she was a skin-walker. The earth-ponies and their dull sobriquets, non?"

"Thank you, corporal," I said to the jack. "Congratulations on your promotion."

"But of course, docteur." He nodded in acknowledgement.

I turned away from him, and walked towards the stairs leading up out of the dream. "Your Highness, I do not think it a coincidence - do you concur?"

The Spirit sighed in disappointment, and followed me out of the jack's loud and jolly dreamscape, and we returned to my mist. "But of course, of course. But how should we - oh!"

I turned again to my Mistress. "Yes, let it infiltrate us as it intends, if it is indeed the lich. It could, I suppose, be an actual skinwalker. But the stories in the books are always of bison and the arid highlands. If they ever come down here into the humid bottomlands, I've not read of it."

"The last legate to try our defenses left almost a dozen dead upon the cold earth. Should not you be more careful of our faithful soldiery?" She looked stern and disapproving of my cavalier suggestion.

"We now know that the lance is bane against liches. If we can lure it into close quarters with the standard-bearer, then…"

"A single blow could take the legate before it could unleash its fell sorceries against our soldiers!" She frowned again. "Tis much to lay upon the withers of young Corporal Cake."

The mist swirled, and opened, briefly as if to open a window through the greyness to the starry black beyond. "Put your trust in our chosen standard-bearer, my other self," sang out the Nightmare's disembodied voice from the very stuff of the dream itself.

When I turned about from the closing crack in my dream-world, I saw that the Spirit had changed her skin once again, and the Nightmare reared in celebration of her decision.

"Wonderful! An ambush! I shall instruct the surviving guard to cooperate fully with the thing pretending to be Corporal Backsword, and make the arrangements." She smiled, sharp-toothed. "We are, I think, a bit peckish. A late spring meal would be delightful!"

She turned to gallop away, but then turned her head back towards me. "Oh, cheer up, dedicat! Slaughter is the reason for which the Company was set loose upon the Chain! Delight in your purpose!"

And she was gone. I settled upon the hidden ground, half-hiding myself in the rising mist, to await the waking day.

I felt a warm presence sidle up to me, and laid itself by my side, its body-heat chasing the chill away. A snout poked up out of the grey.

"You heard the Princess! It's an order from the Mistress, cheer up, monsieur! An order, an order!" And her white hoof bopped me in the nose.

I awoke to find Cherie curled up beside me in my bed. The door and window were locked, and yet she had walked through my walls to pester me in my sleep.

I pulled the blanket over the sleeping filly, and rose to begin my day. And pass along a message to her knight so that Throat-Kicker might know where her wayward ward had found herself this time.

The Baneway

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The voyageurs and their guard left the walled compound outside Le Coppice in the morning. There was a certain frigid distance between the voyageurs and their Company armsponies; previous caravans had been easy partnerships, but this last one had gone bad somewhere on the back-leg towards Mondovi and home. The guards had wasted a great deal of road-time searching for a lost pony, and quarreling with each other. By Le Coppice, the voyageurs just wanted quit of their protective detail, despite their prior good record.

Two pegasi listening posts hid in the partial cloud cover over the by-way turn-off just north of the Coppician drawbridge on the Bride's Road. The caravan passed under their watchful eyes, and the composition of the advanced guard and rear-guard was noted, as well as the arrangement of the loaded wagons and positioning of the various voyageurs.

Also noted was the advance guard of the 93rd Rear Support Battalion passing through Le Coppice in the wake of the voyageur's caravan, hurrying through without pausing to make camping arrangements with the Road-master of that resilient town. Thirty ponies and donkeys of the alleged allies of the Company scampered towards the turn-off, staying just out of eyesight of the Company rear-guard.

"I said nothing when you came back from your unauthorized trip back into Rennet, covered in dried blood, and put yourself under arrest. We all have our situations, and what was I gonna do, put you under double-arrest? Have you flogged before an assembly? Don't answer that."

The Captain was not taking my emergence from house arrest with equanimity.

"And you've done everything we've asked of you since, fine. And maybe I have a warrant now for your arrest, but since when have we paid attention to civic warrants and so forth unless it was in our interest to pay attention? I need a doctor, you're a doctor, you stay, and cu nfernu their fermi warrants. But y'know? I thought maybe you chiudiri yourself, maybe I don' have a second captain runnin' about, giving my ponies orders, makin' plans. Doin' my nferu job for me, y'know?"

"Captain-"

"No, no, le' me finish. I'm not real' mad, just kinda sad. I thought maybe you and me, we final' have an understandin'. OK, go now."

"The Spirit has a plan for us. Well, a problem, and a plan to deal with it."

"Ah, alicorni e padrone di armonia ci preservano, the Spirit again!"

"This would all be so much easier if your dreams weren't so iron-clad prosaic that She cannot find a hole to crawl through. There is such a thing as being too much of this world, Captain."

"Bah, you and your Spirit. What does the great bird of th' 'eavens want with prosaic leetle me, Sawbones?"

"We're sure that the corporal of the voyageur's guard has been killed and replaced, and-"

The pegasi stalked their respective targets, while a messenger winged her way back to the Company to report. The returning guard's reception was suitably adjusted, to take into account the morning's road-order.

By mid-afternoon, they were on the approaches to Trollbridge, and the turn-off to the temporary quarters of the 93rd when they were at Dance Hall. A beaten mud-track led between those quarters and the bypass, whose half-rotting planking was being systemically torn out and replaced with proper Bride-compliant metaling by a sweating construction crew. The construction ponies had worked their way across the fortified bridge, and were spreading steaming asphalt composite across the three hundred or so yards between Trollbridge's outer defenses and the little crossroads. The planking at and beyond the crossroads had been torn up, and the gravel underneath had been disturbed by the work-ponies. An annoyance, and an impediment to the heavily-laden wagons of the voyageurs, but nothing more than that.

Which is why the vanguard let the wagons fall behind a bit as they crossed the heavy ground, opening up a wide gap in the caravan.

And none of the voyageurs were anywhere near the scene when the three veterans of the vanguard, having passed a red construction-flag stuck in the disturbed earth by the side of the roadway, turned without warning upon their corporal and plunged their sharp lances deep into her neck, flank, and barrel. A great flash tore the late spring day asunder, and a bowl of black-light swallowed the apparent betrayal from view.

The covers from a dozen trenches surrounding the roadway on both sides were tossed into the air, and the ponies hiding underneath swarmed the voyageurs and their wagons, Feufollet among them, her blood-slick shoulders and glowing eyes declaring, to all observing, her magic in full operation. The voyageurs were separated from their wagons, as the little jenny quickly examined each in turn. She barked out a warning over the third cart, and the rest were hurriedly dragged off the bypass beyond the slit-trenches, leaving the single wagon to stand, abandoned and alone in the road.

Meanwhile, within the black-lit shielding, the three veterans struggled to keep their target under control, and it pulsed and shook, flesh rippling as it gave up the pretense of semblance, letting the mask of Backsword, unicorn mare and sister of the Company, melt away like a wax candle left carelessly by the roaring winter's-hearth. First one, than another of the ponies were thrown from their hooves, tossed about like rabbits fighting a timberwolf.

This was when the reinforcements arrived, Gibblets and the Crow converging from both sides to spray fire and acid in the face of the skinwalker, the last veteran desperately keeping her shaft buried in the flank of the bucking horror. Three bow-ponies converged on the target, and fired their quivers dry into the thing, first bolts and arrows, then a hoof-full of blooded thralling-fetishes left behind by the Major of the 93rd for emergency use by any bloodmages the Company could find to hoof. Feufollet had primed them for the ambush, but Obscured Blade had, rightfully, ordered her to keep away from the heart of the ambush. I cannot say whether this distance lessened the effect of the fetishes, but from all accounts they had no greater puissance than the conventional projectiles. The aggregate slowed the thing sufficiently that the last of the veterans was able to keep it subdued and impaled upon her lance.

Long enough for the standard-bearer to arrive in the melee at a gallop, the banner-lance leveled and aimed true for the skin-walker's heart, if it kept that suppurating mass in the same locale as mere mortal equines have been known to keep them.

Carrot Cake struck true, and the banner-lance pierced the protean, burning, melting horror, plunging so deep into its flesh that the point nearly emerged from the other side of its mass. We had been prepared this time, the reinforcements had been properly outfitted with protective goggles, and the road-guards had been warned to look away from the impact if and when it happened. Obscured Blade's black-light shield even absorbed the flare before it blinded any of the voyageurs.

The old warlock's shield broke, however, like a dropped dinner-plate in the process. And the entire countryside within eye-shot saw the Spirit, three times the height of a mortal pony, laughing in triumph over the collapsing hulk of her defeated foe. She was black as the pit and jagged-toothed, and the feeble sun faded before her victorious aura.

She bent over the quivering mass, and began to feed.

Our Lady was not a dainty eater, and many an observer lost their lunches from the sickening display. Later, when the slit-trenches were filled back in, they say you could still smell the vomit.

The only distraction from the Spirit as she devoured her second lich, was Bad Apple's destruction of whatever surprise the Walker had planted in that voyageur's wagon. Whatever it was supposed to do, it exploded with great fury after she and her pegasus minder buzzed the cart in her warlock's gig and dropped magefire on the trap/backup/alicorns knows what. The conflagration was such that the flames caught some of the other voyageurs' wagons on fire, and queasy Company ponies had to scramble to put out the smouldering canvas before the entire caravan was lost.

It was during this spectacle, as exposed as exposed could be, that the vanguard of the 93rd trotted into view. It was for this that the rest of the sections of the Company were in place, and their corporals and sergeants galloped out into the muddy fields to surround the ponies of the 93rd, and bring them into custody.

It might have degenerated into a full-fledged battle, except the Spirit raised her bloody head from the remains of her meal, and flapped her great wings, and launched herself at the shocked Imperials. They broke and ran, scattering. She landed over one of them, trembling and weeping as he lay in the mud by the side of the bypass, and sniffed him. All around her, the Company bayed and coursed, running down their prey and pummeling them into submission. None of the Imperials were killed, but many were dragged away afterwards, badly beaten, and more than a few suffered from broken ribs and bad sprains from the rough hoofing.

Gibblets walked up to the Nightmare, and interrupted her playful terrorizing of the poor, incontinent Imperial. "Your Highness, is the lich subdued? Is it… sufficient?"

"Oh, yes, my faithless pierrot. I have her deaths-blood within me now. It will never take another one of my ponies, the thief that it was." She turned her baleful gaze away from her toy. "What a marvelous exercise you have all offered me! If only it were night, that I might stay even longer! See you in your dreams, goblin…"

And She was gone like the passing of a cloud overhead.

Later interrogations revealed that a round dozen of the Imperials of the 93rd's vanguard had been agents of the Walker, including the commander of the vanguard herself. They had been hired to infiltrate the rear support battalion and support their mistress in her infiltration. Another two dozen were flushed out of the main body of the 93rd when it arrived. The officers got into quite a nasty fight with Gorefyre and Whitesmith over what was to be done with the traitors; I eventually gave my voice to the Imperial's side of the affair - the legates were themselves agents of the Bride, duly authorized and legitimate. The infiltrators were only doing their duty. We wouldn't be able to keep the lid on the affair, given all the ponies who had seen it, in broad daylight, and the entire vanguard of the 93rd in full view. Only a massacre could have shut it away, and that would have only made a bigger mess.

The construction-ponies continued their metaling of the road to Le Coppice. After that afternoon, it became known as the Baneway.

Into The Woods, or, Blueberry Muffins

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SBMS102

"C'mon, Monsieur! I promised the Princess we'd cheer you up." Cherie showed up at my door, interrupting my unproductive puzzling over my desk, trying to force the words to come out. I had been trying for the better part of the morning, and it was now – well, heck. Well into the afternoon. I let her drag me by the foreleg out of my quarters, thus technically breaking my house-arrest. Not that anypony other than I seemed to care about that technicality. I had been thinking about drawing flow-charts to use as an aid in support of my argument the next time somepony tried to contest my position on the subject.

OK, I really wasn't getting anywhere with the Annals, I do confess it. Which is why I found myself, despite myself, hauled by a filly one-quarter my size into the back-kitchens as she burbled about the spy, her entertaining stories, and her superior baked goods. By this time, the spy had become for all intents and purposes other than that of technicalities, the baker for the Company. We found her working over the preparation area next to one of the ovens. Racks of bread-dough were rising behind her, and the oven was being prepared by the Company's standard-bearer, fussing with tinder and logs.

"Miss Cake, Miss Cake! I was just telling M'sieur about your stories! Tell him one, tell him one! Oooh, what are you making?"

The spy looked down at the little thestral, and smiled maternally. "Muffins, I think. We're too short of sugar for proper pastries, until the next delivery arrives, that is. Somepony blew up the wagon with the last shipment in it, didn't they?" She didn't even look at me, maybe her sharp ears hadn't heard of my part in that little unintended consequence.

"Ooh, what kind, what kind? I hope it's blueberries," drooled Cherie, eyeing the bowl of blueberries which should have been out of her line of sight. Maybe she could smell them?

"Aren't you a clever filly, yes, of course, we have more blueberries than I know what to do with. We're even having blueberry bread, rising over there on the racks. What story did you want to hear, dearie?"

"Firefly! Firefly!"

"Oh, but won't the others be so angry if I tell it just to you again. You remember how much they liked it the first time."

"I can fetch some of them! They're just futzing around in the training grounds!" She dove into the shadows underneath Cup Cake's work-bench, and she was just gone.

"My stars, that always startles me when she does that!" she exclaimed. "Do all bat-ponies walk through shadows, Mr. Sawbones?"

I blinked, surprised to be addressed, and I had to think for a moment what she had been talking about.

"Ah? I don't think so. There's the occasional story, but unless the old Annalists were seriously underselling the thestrals of yore, most of them were just like today's pegasi, just with, you know, the eyes and teeth. And wings, I suppose."

Cherie came bursting back through the kitchen doors, dragging Tam Lane and Feufollet each by a foreleg, her wings working overtime to keep her hovering above the larger foals.

"Firefly, Firefly!"

"Oh, fine," said the earth-pony, as she lined her eggs up along the side of her preparation-surface, along with the other elements of her avocation. "This is the story of the servitude of Firefly, bravest pegasus of her era, warrior of Celestia, defender of Equestria against the griffin, the minotaur, and the savage hordes of Saddle Arabia.

"When she was just a filly, she lived with her uncle on the outskirts of the wild woods, with the rangers who fought hoof and wing against the ever-expanding dark magic of the blighted forests. In those days, those terrible woods stretched throughout the heartlands, from the foot of the Canterhorn, all along the valley of the Canter, from the Macintosh Hills in the south to Neighagra Falls in the north, and from the gates of Baltimare to the outskirts of Applewood." Cup Cake busied herself with tossing her ingredients into a large mixing-bowl, hoofing in sugar, butter, and coarse flour as she talked.

"Firefly was an intrepid orphan, and her uncle could spare little time to keep her out of trouble in the troublesome fringes of the dark woods. She ranged almost as far as her elders, and learned to temper her recklessness with caution and skill. In between taunting juvenile timberwolves and playing hide-and-go-seek with hungry manticores, that is.

"One day, deeper into the woods than she ought to have been, she heard screaming and wailing even deeper than she would normally venture. Brave as she was, she flew towards the sound of ponies in trouble. What she found was an enraged witch, surrounded by dark magics and arcing lightning-bolts licking the scorched branches and leaf-mold all around her.

"Before the furious unicorn were two earth-ponies, little sort-of friends of Firefly. Twin colts, grandchildren of that kind mare who always had a spare jug of milk for her uncle when they were thirsty, a spare bit of cheese when they were hungry. The family were cow-herds, they helped run a dairy herd on the edge of the forest, where their herd kept down the growth which would have allowed the woods to bite ever deeper into the scarce lands of that sliver of Equestria which still were cultivated." She tossed into the bowl, salt, milk and even that damnable baking-powder she had insisted I help make with my scarce time and alchemical supplies.

"Now Firefly was uneasy, because Cheeseflower and Smearcase were supposed to be watching their herds, half a morning away from any witches, raging or otherwise. And there were spilled baskets of mushrooms and berries laying at the hooves of the wailing colts. And the witch was screeching something about horrible little thieves, in between lashing them with blue-white sparks of lightning.

"Still, they were ponies Firefly knew, and she leapt into action. She bounced off the horn of the angry witch, and broke her spell. The two colts scrambled away from their tormenter, and cowered behind Firefly, whose wings were held protectively over them. 'Missus Witch', she said, 'please don't kill them, they have a grandmother they should be helping.'

"'What aged pony could possibly get any help out of such horrible, thieving colts?' asked the witch. 'No, better I send them to Tartarus, where they can help the demons and monsters by giving them a good meal.'

"'Please, Missus Witch, I can see they have stolen from you, but I owe their grandmother for her charity, and they're sort of my friends. Can I not talk you out of it?'

"'Bah, words are nothing. Actions, actions I can accept. What could you possibly offer me in exchange for my fair and just vengeance?'" Cup Cake beat her mixture with great vigour, and I was impressed at her skill in narration with a whisk held firmly in her jaws.

"Firefly was young, and foolish, so she offered the only thing in her possession – herself. She promised herself to the witch, in exchange for her sort-of-friends' lives. The two young fools scrambled away from their doom, promising rashly to let Firefly's uncle know that she would no longer be drawing on his often-empty larder, or straining his slight resources. She would be in service. The witch extracted a promise of two years as a slave from the young pegasus.

"This was how one became apprenticed to a warlock in those days. Or perhaps, became their minion. It was never quite clear in Firefly's mind into which category she had been pitched by her impulsiveness. The witch was terrible, as witches are, and abrupt, and cruel. She always hid herself and her cutie-mark under a long cloak. Quite suspicious, but she distracted her servant with constant verbal abuse, and never had a good thing to say to her. But she kept the young filly well-fed, out of the weather when the weather was inclement, and well-fed once again, because growing fillies take lots of feeding, don't they?" The earth-pony hip-checked both of the foals standing with their hooves on her preparation table, trying to peer into her mixing-bowl.

"They often wandered the deep woods, far deeper than any of the rangers ever ranged. The witch ordered the young pegasus dig into ruins that often held fell things, and whenever they dug up a terror or an artifact of great danger, she graciously let young Firefly flee for her life while the witch's magics and lightning-bolts flayed the terrors, and destroyed the artifacts.

"Sometimes, the witch had Firefly dig up graves, and she laid out the bones from those long-abandoned graves, and conducted terrible rituals over their remains. Shades rose from the bones, and whispered terrible secrets to the witch, and after she laid their spirits once again to rest, she ordered her minion to re-bury the dead. They would then return to their wanderings, usually in a different direction, and often walking right into yet another ruined village or fortress." She ceased her whisking, and began rinsing the blueberries in the near-by sink.

"One day deep in the forest, they came across a pool of sweet water, fed by a small waterfall, trickling forth a little stream, which fed eventually into the distant Canter, far, far away from that sweetwater pool. The witch thoughtlessly tossed away her cloak, and plunged into the water, washing her filth into the pool, to be slowly drained away into the downstream trickle. The cutie-markless Firefly stared with envy at the witch's mark, which was by normal pony standards, nothing to be envious of. It was of a blighted, blackened corpse of a tree, as if struck by lightning. 'Oh,' said the witch, 'Blast. I wasn't thinking. Well, nothing to be done for it, I suppose. I've too much invested in you to leave you dead here for the scavengers.'"

Her audience giggled, because this was too obviously an imitation of things said by Gibblets of his apprentices where other ponies had heard it. It might have been a direct quote. She turned away from her firming batter, and cautioned the foals, "Please, don't repeat that. You know that damned warlock of yours will take his revenge if he hears I've been mocking him. Where was I?"

"Cutie marks, and witches," I prompted from the back of the room, causing her to startle.

"Right. 'Why would you hide that, Mistress? It seems to be to be a proper mark for a warlock and witch,' said her minion.

"'Fool," said the witch, 'Do you think that any warlock starts out with the intention to be damned by every pony she encounters, to be hunted by every equine who reveres the Crown? I once was a proud student of the Princess, in the fore of her storied school for unicorns. I discovered a wonderful spell in class, indeed, just as I was standing examination before the Princess herself. I had found my purpose in life. My mark of destiny appeared. Again, right in front of the Princess. She turned even paler than she usually is, and she stared at it, and muttered to herself, though the effect precedes the cause, does the effect bear responsibility for the cause? Apparently that cryptic nonsense was enough to expel me from her presence, from the school, and polite society, in quite rapid succession.'

"Firefly thought about this revelation, standing there beside the pool as her mistress washed herself in the once-clear pool, fouling it with the filth of centuries of darkness and decay. 'What did she mean by it?' the filly asked.

"'If you ever figure that out, please tell me,' said the witch.

"'Does that mean that you are the enemy of the Princess?' asked the filly.

"'Have you ever heard of a warlock who is not an enemy of the Crown?' asked her mistress.

"'Then you must be my enemy, if I love Equestria,' concluded the filly.

"'Well, good for you, child. Better to know who you are by your own deduction, before you find out to your dismay,' sniped the witch. Then she made the filly wash herself in the upstream section of the pool, under that cold, pounding waterfall. Including behind the ears!" The baker reached out to the jenny listening carefully to her right, and rubbed Feufollet right behind her tall ears, which indeed, had some dried blood behind them. The earth pony wrinkled her nose at the little bit of filth on her hoof, and dropped her whisk to go wash her hooves again at the sink.

"In their travels through the deep woods, the witch often traded with other wanderers, strange ponies of fell aspect, who like her dug through dangerous ruins, and searched for secrets of the past. Many of these ponies were merely eccentric, or unsociable, but a few were properly nasty sorts, and now and again they tried to cheat or rob Firefly and her mistress, usually by attempting the first, then essaying the second. Firefly learned to be quick with her hoof, and suspicious of everypony they met in the deep woods, but the magic of her mistress was what kept them safe in the terrible dark woods, from pony and monster alike." She tossed the blueberries into a smaller, flat bowl, and began to dice them with a small knife.

"In between expeditions into the deep woods, the witch would return to her hovel near the village Firefly had once called home. The witch was often visited in the dark of night by ponies hiding under cloaks, to buy wickedness from the evil warlock. Amulets to ward them against the beasts of the woods; love-poisons to bewitch the objects of their affections; charms to calm the hatreds of their employers, or to dull the wits of rebellious employees. Firefly watched, as she pretended to be asleep in her corner.

"When the ponies of the villages left under their cloaks which concealed nothing from those that knew them, the witch confided in her servant. She said that the amulets were real enough, that the love-poisons were dilute and relatively harmless, and that the charms were purest buncombe. It suited the witch's humour to spread rumours about the ponies who tried to purchase mind-control potions and charms from her, and claimed that she tried to lure both sides of such conflicts into escalating purchases. She may have been lying about that last bit, as Firefly rarely saw the same cloaked ponies returning for further wickedness. Perhaps most ponies' appetite for such evils are limited, and easily sated. Or perhaps there was something repellent woven into the charms which bred shame in their purchasers. Firefly liked to speculate in later years that such had been the case, but again, Firefly might have been lying to herself, or her audience." She folded the diced berries into the batter, turning the mixture again and again.

"On one expedition into the deep woods, the two dug up something terrible enough that the witch was unable to entirely dispel it. The witch grew sick from the backlash, and too feeble to return to the hovel by the edge of the forest. It was in this moment of weakness, that a small group of ill-intentioned forest wanderers came upon the two of them. Firefly had grown strong with their constant wandering and endless digging and scrabbling about. Her chest was almost as deep as an earth-pony's, and her wings as strong as any pegasus beneath the leaves of that dark wood. So when I tell you she fought for her mistress, she fought hard. She killed one of the reavers, caved in his skull, and the rest of them fled into the shadows from which they had come." The baker poured the mixture into a formed baking-sheet, one she had bribed out of Iron Hoof, supposedly, with a basket full of bearclaws.

"'Why', asked the witch, 'did you do that? You should hate me. I've been nothing but cruel to you, and put you in great danger, dragging you through every one of these dead towns and villages and exposing you to great horrors.'" She pushed the baking-sheet into the oven that Carrot Cake had been nursing into the right temperature. "'Not to mention being hated by the Princess.'

"'Why shouldn't I have?' asked Firefly. 'I did the same for my friends. How can I be true to the least of my friends, if I'm not true to my worst enemies?'" Cup Cake stepped back from the oven, eyes upon her creation as it baked, and then recited, in a musical cadence,

I am loyal to ponies who are faithful.
I am also loyal to ponies who are not faithful.
Because Loyalty is a virtue.
I am true to ponies who are trustworthy.
I am also true to ponies who are unworthy of trust.
Because Loyalty is faithfulness."

Shaking her head, she returned to her narrative, saying, "And she dragged her mistress out of the depths of the woods, and returned them to their home near the edge of the darkest of dark forests, the ailing witch strapped across the back of the young mare.

"Firefly walked out of the depths of the forest with a rather unsettling new cutie-mark upon her flanks, a mark of a lightning bolt striking a tree and setting it on fire. One that was clearly an echo of the burnt dead tree of her mistress. The witch, when she saw the new cutie mark of her servant, is said to have wept at the sight of it, and cried out that at last, she knew why, if not how.

"The young mare nursed her mistress back to health, and dealt with the cloaked ponies who came to beg their ugly favours from the witch of the deep forest. Firefly named them as they appeared, and she told them their sins, as she had seen them, and castigated them for thinking that they could buy wickedness and leave the stains upon another pony's hooves.

"The alarmed and affrighted villagers next appeared in a mob with torches, to burn the hovel to the ground, with the weakened witch inside it. Firefly took this amiss, and thrashed the members of the mob, beating them about the head and shoulders with her hooves and her wings. She drove the mob out from under the leaves of the dark forest, telling them to never return, lest she tell every one of them their neighbors' sins, and their own to their neighbors.

"Firefly could never return to that the village, of course, and when her term of service to the witch was complete, she left the region entirely. She eventually found her way into the Princess's service, as befitting a pegasus with the strength of an earth pony, and the witchiness of a unicorn. She never told ponies what exactly happened to her mistress of the dark forest, but I like to dream about happy endings. Don't you?" the baker asked of Cherie, who grinned and flicked her wings over her head in happiness.

The blueberry muffins weren't at all bad. Not nearly as sweet as I had feared, seeing the large cup of sugar she had poured into that batter.

Settling In

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The last of the identifiable bands of undead were swept out of the deeper shafts in the Deep Mines Range in the last weeks of spring. Major Gorefyre and her sullen Imperials, all but under their own house arrest in their fortified quarters outside of the palisades, leapt at the chance to finish up their collections for the year. The Company kept large contingents of our own guards with the coffles as the Imperials whipped them out of one set of holding pens in the hollers to the north and west, and through Dance Hall to another set of holding pens to the south and east. Finally, the young necromancer was satisfied, and we saw off the 93rd with their collection of enthralled ghouls. And good riddance to the lot of them.

If only they weren't also carrying word of the Company's ruthless demolition of one of the Bride's generals. A general for whom the empress had given us a warrant against her unlife, mind you, but still and all, one of her liches, one of her original legates. And somepony who supposedly was indestructible, somepony who you could defeat, but never kill.

And yet the Walker was gone, and quite spectacularly, publicly so. Nopony knew of the destruction of her partner, but his ongoing absence from the lists would eventually be noted. The Company's notoriety was due for an explosive increase. If ponies weren't already afraid of us, they would soon have reason and more than reason to be so.

The miners started preparing to re-open the shafts. A dozen sections were put on rotation in the Range, escorting the miners, and patrolling the slopes. Just because the bands had been exterminated, didn't meant that the region was completely free of the undead scourge. Even the Pepin Front still had the occasional ghoul sighting, and the aerial cohort maintained a back-country patrol, checking in on the existing fortified homesteads, and the scattering of returning exiles opening up the abandoned acreage here and there along the valley floors.

Spring had taken the bottomlands like an explosion of life, green everywhere, flowers, birds returning – a riot of colour and buzzing, twittering tumult. The ghouls had exterminated all mammalian life in the region larger than a vole, so that the life that spring brought was mostly small and swift, little chirping things. Time and peace would draw the larger creatures into the vacuum left by the infestation, but in the meantime, it was an avian paradise. The burnt-out wastelands bloomed until you couldn't see any of the scorch marks.

The collapse of amity with the sovereignty of Rennet didn't materially affect the Company in any serious fashion. They'd already hoofed over their recruits, and most of our contracts for military supplies and goods were by necessity supplied from vendors in Hydromel and Verdebaie. Rennet's economy was still somewhat shaky from their few years under the White Rose; about the only thing they could offer us was foodstuffs, and the Company's logistics committee had discovered that the Pepin plateau farmland supplies were sufficient for our needs, putting aside the outrageous demands of our unofficial new baker and her cultivation of our ponies' collective sweet tooth.

Most refined sugar in Tambelon was made from processed sugarcane, shipped north along the riverlands from the canefields along the far southern coast. The sky-high costs of shipping through the war zone, or the long way around the fighting, had inspired farmers throughout the northlands to experiment with alternative crops. But we could do without Rennet sugarbeets for the time being.

Smaller units of White Rose scouts continued to probe the line of the upper river in the last weeks of spring. Two three-pony teams were caught and killed by Company air patrols, their boats burned. Their remains were used to mount 'trophies' above the most likely landings along our stretch of the river, in hopes of discouraging repeat visits. Word from the Duc and his guard on the upper ford was that they were probing in force at that crossing, sometimes in numbers that his ducal guard couldn't meet in the field. The officers began discussions with the Duc about placing a Company garrison within Pepin City, or perhaps a blockhouse closer to the ford. It was a bit too far from the Aerie to keep proper coverage over that locale.

Although plans were made for a raid against the nearest White Rose riverport, and proposals drawn up for deep penetration patrols into their districts along the western bank of the river, the Company was not planning to take the field in any serious way during in its third campaign season in Tambelon. We had yet to have received any orders from the Imperial forces, other than the vague 'defend the upper river, and hold the province of Pepin against all comers'.

The additional recruits and the new cohort gave the officers greater flexibility and the capacity to fully staff all of our new commitments, as limited and defensive as they were. The last of the fourth cohort was marched out of the Plateau Palisades, and took station in Dance Hall and Trollbridge, where new barracks behind a palisade were erected by the recruits and their veteran cadre. We no longer had to worry about rushing reinforcements all the way from the western bastions of Dance Hall proper to the southern gateway over the Withies.

The outer defenses were completed along the northern bank of the river, stretching up to a watchtower on the knob overlooking Mondovi, and a ditch and palisade was labouriously carved out of the shallow and rocky soil of that steep hillside. Dance Hall finally surrounded that little jewel of the black bottomlands, a complete fortification enveloping the city walls proper. Returnees had begun to drift into town, looking to exploit the newly opened possibilities inherent in the abandoned lands, the wastelands, and Brass Tones' redevelopment of the mines in the Deep Mines Range. Assuming that no further warfare burst into Pepin along the Baneway or eastwards from the river crossings, the province was poised for a rebirth as spring gave way to summer.

The form of a great winged unicorn was seen to pace along the fighting platforms and walkways of Dance Hall on certain nights, appearing under moonlight and starlight alike. Sometimes a great-winged blue alicorn, her eyes turned to follow the moon, was seen in the distance by civilians out long after they ought to have been in their beds asleep. It was the fools who crept close, to see the rumoured ghost, who encountered the Nightmare in all of her black-winged terror. Few of those terrorized by the Spirit in one of her moods were Mondovan townsponies; it was the new arrivals, the returnees and the adventurers, and drunken miners waiting their turn to ship up into the hollers to earn their pay, who spread the stories of that night-haunt who stalked the fortifications between her still and unblinking guards.

The Company had already grown used to their Spirit and her crotchets. Almost every pony had seen her in their dreams by that third summer, every pony, that is, but our soul-blind Captain. It had ceased to be a matter of raillery and good humour to poke and prod at the stolid Sicari earth-pony, and to do so now, when the Spirit walked the open night air, and was on the lips of everypony in the central districts, was good for a night's trip to the stockade. I probably would have earned multiple nights in lock-up, if I were not already locking myself into my quarters under the terms of my house-arrest.

I couldn't help but poke at the bear. It was a welcome distraction.

The Colt Who Cried Timberwolf, or, Apple Danishes

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The baker was grouching at her assistant, mixing a bit of flour into a shallow bowl of honey.

"You know I don't like using honey to substitute for a proper sugar glaze. The glazes should be firm and skinned. You just can't get that by slopping a trail of bee-snot all over the pastries."

"Sorry, Miss Cake. We just don't have any more confectioners', and probably won't for the next month or two."

The mare sniffed at my standard-bearer, who apparently had forgotten he was anything other than a factotum for the defrocked spy. He was helping with the mixing-bowls. I cleared my throat, again.

"Oh, Doctor! Didn't see you there, dearie. Where's your little white shadow?"

"Actually on Company business this morning, I have some questions for the Annals. What are you making at this time of day?"

"Apple danishes, for the evening shift's breakfast, and tomorrow for the day shift, of course." She pulled her paddle out of the mix, and the thickened honey dripped in long ropes from her stirring device. "Bah, needs something more." She grabbed an apple from a basket setting to the side, and started running a grater across the surface of the unpeeled apple, carving little flakes of apple-skin and drops of juice from the fruit over the mixing-bowl "You had questions for me?"

"Y-yes, on the subject of what exactly you're doing here. Back in the fall, we were talking about repatriating you into the hooves of your superiors at the consulate in Rime. I had to be away from the Company on detached duty for most of the winter, and a good chunk of the spring. I've been distracted by other matters since then, but now, here we are, in summer again, and you're still here. Baking."

"Oh, well, your Dancing Shadows took over my case when you disappeared in a puff of sulphur and terrible rumors. She apparently didn't want shut of me quite as much as you did, and said they'd prefer to keep a spy where they could keep an eye on me, rather than lurking about in the neighborhood, upsetting the civilians."

"Dior Enfant."

"Pardon?"

"Her name is Dior Enfant. There is no pony named Dancing Shadows."

"Of course there isn't, dearie! She's a donkey."

"I meant that-"

"Oh, I know what you mean, but I don't think you're fooling anyone with this little shell game of yours. Only a great fool would mistake her for anything other than an agent of the Company. I don't quite understand why you started that little charade, but it can only make you look foolish in the eyes of the community."

"Most of her contacts in the northlands still call her by her birth name."

"And that's between her and the northlands, but we're here in the riverlands, aren't we? So, Dancing Shadows. Who asks me to write up my monthly reports, and then after she censors them, to re-write them in my own mouth. She gets somepony, of whom I have no idea, to drop them off in the dead-drop locations. I've agreed to provide the proper signs to signal that they are indeed my work, and my employers in SPIES are happy, and Dancing Shadows is happy. I'm a little homesick, mind you, but that would have been the case regardless, and at least I'm not being beaten and threatened with hangings by suspicious peasants. Well, aside from your occasional crotchets."

"SPIES?"

"Oh, I probably shouldn't have used the agency name. 'Special Projects, International Evaluation Service'. Silly, I know, but at least it's better than the internal covert & monster-hunting service, you wouldn't believe that acronym if I told it to you. Which I won't, it's properly classified, and I shouldn't even know it. Somepony really dropped the ladle in the broth when they let that slip to a field agent."

"I, I think you're lying to me about the name of the Equestrian foreign service. There is no way that anypony would dream up something so foolish. It sounds like dream-logic."

She smiled, as she whipped her glaze. Her eyes tracked down, looking behind me. I turned around, and found Cherie and two of the other apprentices with her – a jack named Long Punt, and a skinny little doe named Jagged Tooth. Our inheritance from that orphanage we burnt in du Pere.

"A habit of lying will draw you into a world that will never believe a word you say, Sawbones. Children, have I ever told you the story of Fallow Fields, who lied as he breathed, and found to his sorrow that nopony could ever take him at his word?"

"No, Miss Cake. Why don't you?"

"Well," said the earth pony, as she moved from whipping her glaze, to helping Carrot Cake roll out their batter in long, wide strips across the preparation surfaces. "The Danvers clan is vast, and fecund – that means they have lots of foals, dears – and you can find them just about everywhere. They're almost as common as Apples. Wherever there's good soil, you'll find a Danvers planting carrots, carrots and some sort of grain, be it rye, or wheat, or maize, or I don't know what. Apples tend to specialize in slightly worse soils, and often you'll find the one clan breaking lands for the other to follow in their tracks. One thing the Danvers know, that's keeping sweet soils sweet. Once they put down their tap-roots, they don't let go."

"If they don't move once they're planted, how is it they're so common?" I asked.

"Well, that's the thing. There are root-bound Danvers, and then there are seedling Danvers. For every dozen or so Danverlings dug deep into a hamlet somewhere, producing endless foals and slowly buying out their neighbors' plots of land to plant their children in spreading knots of family until they dominate entire townships, you get one with a wild hair, a pony so light-minded and kite-hearted that the slightest breeze picks them up like dandelion fluff and blows them downwind." The two Cakes alternated rolling their dough, and pounding them flat with mallets.

"The rootling Danvers make the family what they are, successful, fiercely effective farmers. But the seedling Danvers are why they're a widespread farming clan. Eventually they're caught by some sturdy, stolid – that means serious and unflashy, dears – mare or stallion that reminds them of the family they left behind, and they put down shallow roots in whatever corner of the world they were caught. Their children and grand-children keep them grounded, and breed a new batch of root-bound Danvers in a new village. And sometimes, that seedling Danvers never quite takes root, and he or she leaves a trail of little rootlings in the gardens of a dozen different villages scattered far and wide.

"Fallow Fields was a seedling Danver, all his kin saw it in him, as soon as he grew old enough to speak. He loved stories, adventure stories, foal tales, terrible tales of the monsters of the deep forests, but most of all, he loved tall tales. And as he grew old enough to be able to start telling stories, he told them about himself, his friends, his relatives, and ponies he met on the roadsides in between chores.

"Fallow Fields loved telling stories so much, that he didn't let the dull details of fact, or probability, or even possibility to get in the way of a good tale. He killed himself and his siblings a hundred different times, in half a hundred different ways, before he got a cutie mark. He sent them on grand adventures, tore down the sun and the moon, and painted the heavens in the entrails and rainbows of a wild colt's bloodiest and most inventive imagination. He could look a pony in the eyes, and spin a story about that pony's death at the hands of bandits, solemnly informing them that they were their own revenants, a ghost damned to walk the byways of their living days, everypony they meet cursed to treat their phantasmic self as if they were still living. He was sometimes so persuasive that he occasionally convinced ponies they were in the afterlife." She began folding the pounded-flat dough back up on itself, smoothing it out to be pounded flat once again.

"By the time he got his cutie mark, nopony could trust a single word that came out of his mouth. His endless stories were vastly amusing, and clever, and left everypony he talked to bemused, off-stride, and confused. But belief? Nopony went to Fallow Fields to learn anything. He was a black hole into which information flowed, and only nonsense re-emerged. After he got his mark, he became a carter, and a wanderer, as seedling Danvers often do. He carried his stories from town to town and homestead to homestead, and he was a favoured guest of many a pony who prized his bedtime stories for their foals, and his off-colour fireside tales for when the foals were safely asleep in their beds." The dough was folded back upon itself once again.

"He found many a mare who would allow his lies for a night or two, but never one that would bother to try to bind him to the soil, as all seedling Danvers wish in the secret chambers of their innermost selves. Of all kite-hearted seedlings, Fallow Fields was the lightest-minded and most wind-blown of them all. And his endless story-telling gave nopony a reason to believe he was ever serious about anything at all.

"One day, he came across a bonnie young unicorn mare, who lived in a small, young house-tree, barely hollowed out at all. There, near the fading edge of one of the fenced-in, dying deep forests, Locked Gate maintained the barricades that she and her guild had built around the dark woods, to contain the fell magics which beat in those woodlots like a wicked heart, that drove the trees to march across healthy farm-land and usurp the soils of Equestria's lifeblood. The rangers could fight the monsters and beasts of the deep woods, and the earth-ponies could purge the soils of the trees' poison, but only the barricades kept the trees within their bourne – that means, their proper place, dears. The territorial mages had been founded by the Princess as a multi-generational solution, a campaign against the dark forests which lasted for centuries, reconquering the lost lands one plot of land at a time. If ever unicorns could be described as bound to the land, bound to the soil, it was the barricade-magi." Folded yet again, and again. So many folds, for a pastry to be bolted down in a mouthful by armsponies hurrying through breakfast towards their day's work.

"Locked Gate laughed at Fallow Fields' jokes, and stories, and tall tales. She became his favourite stop there next to that enclosed, dying woodlot. But, sadly enough, she also laughed at his proposals, and his entreaties. It is questionable whether she even understood she was being courted." She poured a mixture of honey and diced apples over the many-folded dough, and then she folded them one last time, trapping the sweet sauce inside the pocketed dough.

"One day, he hauled his half-empty cart down the lane leading to her house-tree, and found that lane had disappeared overnight, the track overrun with the terrible trees of the darkest, deepest woods. He could see the top of her home, just over the new sharp-thorned hedges which had thrown themselves across the road. He dropped his traces, and raced back and forth along the new growth, trying to find a gap through the obstacle. He yelled over the top of the hedges, and perhaps he heard her cries for help, or perhaps it was only the wind, wailing through the thorns. Bloodied and scratched, Fallow Fields eventually gave up trying to force the hedge-wall, and galloped for Locked Gate's nearest neighbors. He found several of them likewise secreted away from the outside world by the outrunners of the affronted wild wood, which had struck back against its tormenters, its would-be gaolers." Cup Cake now began to cut the many-folded strips of dough into small, square sections, and flattened them one last time, trapping the apple filling which was making some small attempt to escape its own gaol-cells.

"Fallow Fields collected his cart, and marched with purpose to the nearest blockhouse of the terrestrial guard, to report the breakout of dark magic, and the overwhelming of the defenses of the unicorns maintaining the collapsed barricades. But, sadly enough, his wounds closed, and a passing pegasi-driven rainstorm washed away his bloodstains, and by the time he could tell his story to the guards, they took it for nothing but one of the mad stories for which he was known throughout the district. No matter how hard he tried to tell them it wasn't a story, it was the truth, they just wouldn't believe him. His urgency and his insistence only made them laugh the harder, for he had often play-acted in just such a fashion to add a thrill to a given story, to add spice to the tellings. He gave up on the chortling guards, and hurried to the next outpost, to try again." She put the lumps of dough onto baking-sheets, and hooved them into the oven, adding a bit of wood to the fire.

"Yet again, they thought his performance hilarious. Even the urgent truth, in his mouth, fell apart into utter nonsense, merely because it came out of his mouth. On the road to the third and last guard-post, he sat down in front of his cart, and thought deeply about how to break through this impossible barricade between him and the truth. After a panicked long while, running in circles within his own imagination, he gave up. He thought, 'the truth has never served me before; why start now?' He scripted for himself a story of banditry, of pride and theft. Then he went into the last blockhouse, and he acted out his script, his play. He mocked the soldiery, he knocked the helms from their heads. He stole a pike, and clouted the corporal of the guard across her ears with it. Then he ran like Tartarus, leaving his cart behind.

"He led them a merry chase, here and there, but always towards the wild-wood hedges which had swallowed up the barricades of Locked Gate and her colleagues. Eventually the half-enraged, half-laughing guards pinned Fallow Fields against that wild hedge, and he dropped the pike, panting. Then he plunged himself into the thorns, trying to swim through the sharp-taloned branches. The guards though him mad, until he exposed the edge of Locked Gate's mail-box, and they realized where they were, and what wasn't where it ought to have been – the lane, and the mage's yard.

"They brought in reinforcements, and fire, and powerful wizards to scorch away the dark magics which had overpowered the callow barricade-mages' defenses. The young unicorns were rescued from their imprisonment, not particularly worse for wear, but more than a little terrified by their close encounter with the still-strong magics of the deep woods.

"Fallow Fields was humbled by his inability to tell a truth and be believed. It had nearly lost him his lady-love. Though he loved his lies and his stories, he still loved the lady more. So he made an oath, and promised the world that on one certain day of the week, every week, he would tell no lies, no tall tales, no stories. This, he would do, though he burst from the effort, he would contain his falsehoods. They say that you could always tell it was Wednesday, because Fallow Fields was looking constipated. On a day which was not Wednesday, he could declare, as a preface before whatever home truth he had to tell, that 'if it were Wednesday, I would certainly tell you this', and occasionally, sometimes, he would be believed." She took the half-baked pastries out of the oven with a mitt, and laid them steaming on the preparation surface. She drizzled thickened honey-glaze over the half-finished apple danishes, and returned them to the oven for a final pass through the flames.

"They say that Fallow Fields never trespassed against the sanctity of Wednesdays, that he proposed to the unicorn mare on the edge of the dark woods upon a Wednesday, and that, eventually, after many misadventures, they were married on a glorious, sun-kissed Wednesday morning."

The next morning, I was duly grateful for our breakfast danishes, having seen for myself the work that went into those little flaky pastries, and I took the time to savor the sweetness of the honey and the tartness of the apple filling.

The Raid On Falaises du Conseil

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We had made the first preparations for setting up a powder works late last summer, building into our latrine facilities the necessary shunts and filters. Part of my house arrest during our second summer at Dance Hall, was cracking open the saltpetre catchbasins under the latrines and mucking out the stinking by-products. With the way that stuff smells, there was no chance that we'd be running the works inside the Hall proper, or anywhere near anypony trying to sleep, eat, or live. Charcoal was easy enough to produce, and all you needed for saltpetre was an active latrine filtration system. Sulfur's cheap enough if the trade routes are open, but if they're not… well. Not many active volcanoes in this part of Tambelon. Luckily, we were in the midst of supporting an operation that was reopening a complex of abandoned zinc, lead, and tin mines, all of which were just chock full of valuable metals locked up in sulfides. Sulfur was an industrial waste in the Deep Mines Range.

In the end, our limited capacity for saltpetre production was also our limit for blasting powder production. If the griffins had their way, I think we'd be installing filtration latrines in every household along the Pepin Front, and under every building of Mondovi and Guillaime's Ravin. I told them if they wanted to start up a side-business, I wouldn't get in the way of their industry, but I wasn't mucking out all those catchbasins.

The subject of blasting powder comes up because the griffins ended up using our entire remaining supply about two weeks into the new season. The Lieutenant continued to ride herd on her former cohort, and was heavily involved in the planning of our assault on the river-port of Falaises du Conseil. The White Rose's new flotilla on the upper river was protected below the fortified bluffs of the river-port, along with the piers of the original port, and any remaining civilian boats left on the western side of the river.

We had avoided any intensive probing of the target, for fear of provoking further reinforcement, or preparations. But the town was already full of troops and supports, clearly getting ready to either push north into our sector, or, more likely, to plunge southwards into the strategic rear of the Imperials holding the right of the Bride's armies on the river's east bank.

This had happened again and again, season after season, during the endless see-saw fighting that saw the river war waver back and forth across the blackened districts. One army would flank the other by means of some new fleet or flotilla, causing the abandonment of flanked fortifications, until the wayward fleet was destroyed by the other side, and the fortifications re-taken or dug again at some remove behind the previously held line. Some square miles of worthless, destroyed, obliterated land would be given up to the other army, or taken from the other side, and everypony would dig into their new positions, and harvest the new undead, and dispose of the expended thralls destroyed in the fighting.

The limited overflights meant that the aerial sections couldn't intensively plot out their approaches and narrow down their assault targets. It meant that we had to substitute overkill for delicacy and precision. The entire cohort was used in the attack, with only enough chariots to bring in unicorn and warlock supports. Fifteen bow-unicorns, and the whole of the coven aside from Feufollet, whose specialty wasn't such that her effectiveness overrode her youth and vulnerability. The same couldn't be said of Bad Apple, whose pyromancy had become so strong that in some ways, she was now our strongest magical support. She was worth an entire powder works by her earth-pony lonesome, a one-mare artillery battalion.

The rest of the Company's pegasi and griffins were mustered in the fields outside of Trollbridge, two hundred and twenty-some winged ponies, and nearly fifty of the late Captain Gilbert's fierce kin. The aerial cohort was under the command of a griffin once again, Gerlach the bold, Gerlach of Radspur, who could blow up a legate and then look that lich in its lack of a face and wonder how the White Rose had managed to set that booby-trap.

Some ponies carried their assault-posts, and some carried great quivers of javelins. The griffins carried satchels full of charges, grenadoes, and pyrotechnic devilries. Everypony had their wing-blades sharpened until they gleamed in the setting sun. The entire cohort rose as the sun crept over the horizon, and twilight fell upon the eastern limb of the world. By the time they reached the line of the river, well south of what used to be Caribou City, the rays of the sun were long-gone. They turned south, aligning on the western bank of the river for the dressing of their formation, but abandoning the river as soon as its curve took it to the east. The aerial cohort flew as the crow flies, arrowing straight for Falaises du Conseil. A pair of pathfinders had gone forward that afternoon, placing cloud markers along the line of advance for the cohort to follow in the darkness. Thestral charms and true dark-sight guided the ponies of the air through that moonless night.

When the cohort arrived at a particular marker, half of the pegasi carrying assault bollards rose above the rest of the formation, climbing for altitude and speed. Three pathfinders flipped the coats they were wearing over their withers, brightly coloured cloth that shone like beacons in the darkness to anypony watching from above. They advanced ahead of the remainder of the formation, acting as targets for the heavies who now were reaching the peak of their trajectories.

The heavies began their long dives, swiftly gathering momentum, their bollards now hanging beneath their barrels, tightly grasped by all legs. They sought out the pathfinders and their bright backs, and dove for the unseen targets beyond those advance ponies. As each heavy passed the line of pathfinders, they let loose their burdens, and leveled out before they slammed into unseen crenelations or turrets.

Amazingly enough, nopony actually did either things, speeding overhead of any night-guard the White Rose had posted in the forts over the sleeping flotilla.

The bollards struck true for the most part, their mass and great velocity shattering curtain-walls and caving in turret platforms. A few bollards, mounting triggers and pots full of blasting-powder or wood alcohol, burst into terrible explosions and fire, immolating some stretches of the walls, blasting others apart.

The bulk of the cohort swept over the walls just as the flames began to take hold, and the few White Rose guards still on their hooves were cut down by the pegasi flying at a dead run. The ponies of the White Rose were not properly maring their war-engines, and alcohol-bombards were used to destroy the ballistae and catapults before they could be turned against the aerial assault.

The griffin grenadiers came behind the wave of shock-ponies, and cast about for the garrison barracks. Some brief moments were wasted in the darkness and chaos, before one griffin or the other spotted the earth-ponies and donkeys tumbling out of their doorways half-armed. The griffins' battle-cry gathered their fellows, and lit grenadoes fell into the masses of confused ponies trying to form dressed lines in front of their barrack doors. Much slaughter ensued, and a brief, panicked rout meant that the White Rose's planned reinforcement of their defenses was deranged for the time being.

We think this was where we lost Hans Holshok, there may have been a flash within the ranks that Gerlach later decided had been Hans fumbling his charge and detonating his own explosives inside his sachel. We were unable to recover his body, and thus we cannot be sure of the exact circumstances of his death. But he was missing afterwards, and was not seen after the strikes on the enemy barracks.

The second group of heavy bollards had peeled off on an eastern heading, and rose into the sky over the far bank of the river, gaining their necessary altitude for their own strike. The pathfinders curved around likewise, and joined half of the pegasi as they stooped to clear the docks, piers, and boats of the flotilla of defenses. The ponies of the flotilla had managed to properly mare their war-engines, and a scattering of projectiles rose to sweep the skies of their tormenters.

This was when the hoof-full of chariots caught up with the rest of the assault, and the bowmares began hosing down the engine emplacements, while the witches multiplied the number of targets in the sky with their glamours. Bad Apple, riding in her witch-gig behind a swift runner, began laying gouts of magefire across the sterns the war-boats huddled in the lee of the harbour-tower. A ballista pivoting on the top of that turret nearly knocked Bad Apple and her driver out of the sky, and it looked rather grim for a moment, before the bollards of the rest of the heavies rained down out of the night-sky to destroy that tower, and kill the ballista-crew.

The boats of the flotilla were already a sea of flame by the time that the warlocks of the White Rose arrived to restore the situation for the enemy. They must have had several witches of significant power, because two or perhaps three green-white domes of shielding arose around the surviving war-engines mounted along the docks. Most of the piers had been shattered by the bollard-strike, and the ships and boats of the flotilla were quickly becoming a flaming array of wreckage, so this would have been a good time for the Lieutenant to call a retreat.

Unfortunately, the pyrotechnic signals intended to announce the planned retreat were lost in the fiery chaos, and too much of the cohort remained to fight for too long. The mares Hailstorm and Tempest were lost in the fighting after the retreat was called; the stallion Double Bolt was mortally wounded by magefire from one of the White Rose witches as he tried to cover the withdrawal of the griffins and pegasi who had struck the magazines on the docks next to the flotilla flagship. Double Bolt's body was the only one recovered by the Company in the retreat. The witches' glamours and light-shows did much to aid in the chaos of the retreat, while Bad Apple's fire caused even more damage to the lower town, and collapsed the shieldwall of one of the enemy's witches.

The next day, scouts overflew Falaises du Conseil to evaluate the damage. The flotilla was a total loss, and the port facilities were heavily damaged. A good third of the town was charred ruins.

There would be no flanking of the Imperial positions in the riverland that season.

The Monkey-Trap, or, Sausage Buns

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We had displaced forward on the Baneway with the ambulances in anticipation of casualties, and we were sadly not disappointed. The chariots had offloaded their load of unicorns and witches to defend the nearest east-bank landing against pursuit, and the drivers collected the worst of the wounded into their rigs. They beat east with their heavy, bleeding loads, and Rye, I and the oxen raced northwards to rendezvous with the charioteers. The rest of the aerial cohort coasted and gyred above us as we transferred the wounded into ground transportation, and Rye and I scurried from armspony to armspony, triaging and checking tourniquets, retying those coming loose, loosing those that were likely to take the limb.

All the ambulances were filled, and Rye and I started working on the worst of the wounds in the backs of the moving carts, emergency surgery to save the worst of the worst, tying off arteries and re-opening closed airways while the oxen drove their vehicles as gently and smoothly as they could over uneven and rotting planking. We could feel when the ambulances reached the fresh metalling, the janking and jerking of the ambulances turned sweet and smooth. Nopony died from our rough field expedients.

We collected a coterie of volunteers from the guard and lookie-loos at Trollbridge, who Rye and I delegated to sit with the worst of the stable, to make sure none of them drifted away as we worked through the gift the Lieutenant had left crushed and bleeding upon my doorstep. We rolled right up to the hospital front door, and the volunteers started carrying the broken inside, and I had Rye play traffic-gendarme while I went in and started washing up for serious surgery.

I cut away limbs and wings without compunction; I performed risky thorax surgery to repair those ponies who had caught ballistae bolts in their guts or barrels. I soaked everything in sight with antiseptics, and dosed my patients liberally with alchemical potions reputed to protect against shock and infection. If we didn't lose anypony to infection, we still would be losing more than a dozen ponies to their wounds, career-ending losses of limbs and lung capacity. And they were armsponies we could least afford to lose, our precious, almost irreplaceable fliers. Removing the ruins of a shattered wing felt like blasphemy against… something.

Late, late afternoon saw the last of the patients put away asleep and doped up in the sadly crowded wards. Their friends prepared to stand vigil over them, and promised to come get Rye or me if any of them got through all the potions I had poured into them and went into shock or crisis. The oxen were asleep in their quarters, and Rye and I stumbled over to the main mess hall to fill our stomachs before finding our own beds and rest before the next round of work. With so many amputations, there would be a lot of intensive wound care in the days ahead.

When we arrived, the hall was mostly empty, just holding Carrot Cake and his baker, talking quietly. The standard-bearer had been among the volunteers waiting at the southern bastion, and had rode back into Dance Hall holding the hoof of Throat Kicker, who would never again fly frantically behind her apprentice-charge, failing to keep the little thestral out of the trouble she found like a guided missile. Cherie was sleeping beside her one-winged knight in the infirmary, having cried herself out.

As I devoured a plate of warm sausage, and Rye her fried hay and lentil soup, I listened to Carrot telling the baker of the losses, and the distraught little filly. "At least she didn't lose her entirely this time," I interjected. "This time about two years ago, she lost her entire family to the ghouls. Filly buried her own mother. Throat Kicker is probably headed into the convalescent homes when she recovers. It's the end of her active career, but there's a lot that a one-winged pegasus can do in the supports. Learn a new trade, something like that."

"You know that children don't think in those terms, Sawbones. They think in symbols, and stories. Hmm. I've got an idea. Come on, here's some take-out. Filly will be hungry by now, and she likes those vile sausage-buns you have me make you. Still warm from the oven."

The filly was awake when we returned, staring angrily at the unconscious Throat Kicker's bloody-bandaged stump. While I looked at the bandage, and gestured for Rye to help me replace it and check the drainage ties, the baker pulled the filly aside and tried to hug her. Cherie shrugged off the contact, and snarled.

"The Princess, all she can say is that Ma'am was brave, and knightly. What good is that? Valiant dead, pfeh. She's not dead, is she? Just estropié. We had un infirme, un retraité in the back house, cleaned the house, when granmere wasn't beating her 'pour être une flemme'," the little filly said this last in a growling, harsh imitation of some long-dead relative. "I don't want Ma'am to have to be like Kallie!"

"There, there, dear heart. Where there's life, there's hope. You may be locked away, but there's always a key. You may be trapped in your body, but even broken bodies can be made a home with the right spirit."

"What story could fix this?" spat the angry little thestral.

"Stories don't fix anything, they can only help us understand ourselves, and see how we can live with what we can't change. That last bit is the hard part, isn't it? Did I ever tell you of the story of Dragonheart?"

"No, I don't think so. Isn't the time for adventure stories, Miss Cake."

"Oh, Dragonheart's story isn't an adventure, although she was an adventurer in her own way. Dragonheart was an angry, greedy little filly. She was the youngest foal of ten, in a family of very minor mages. She was always the last at the bowl, the last in line. She had to scrabble and grasp and cheat to get even half of her fair share from her hungry and larger siblings." The earth pony calmed down the squirming filly, stroking her disheveled mane into something resembling order.

"Dragonheart left home as soon as she possibly could. The little unicorn was more likely to find a full meal working for her hay among the earth ponies in the countryside, than in her parents' disordered and crowded house. She did little feats of magic for those she met, and grew out a bit from the extra food. But she was always going to be short, and scrawny, no matter how much hay she gobbled down, how many pastries she pushed down her throat. There was a hole in her, that food couldn't fill.

"Dragonheart became a bit of a trader, carting worthless stuff away from one village, and finding another village where they needed that sort of trash for whatever. Not many bits in it, not initially, but she scraped together a little bankroll, and started trading in lower-volume, higher-value goods. She developed a reputation for being sharp, for knowing a deal when she saw one, knowing when the prices were low, when she could buy that low and bring it somewhere where the prices were high.

"But that little, grinding business wasn't enough for her hunger. If food couldn't fill her hole, a few copper bits certainly wouldn't." More ponies were awake, and listening.

Some of the anesthetics were wearing off. I left for a moment, to collect painkillers and my kit of potions. When I returned, Rye and Cherie were still listening to the story, and as I made my rounds in the wards, I listened to the story with one ear, while I did my work.

"…and she truly thought that the donkey had sold her a bad tip, but it was too late for Dragonheart. She couldn't return the way she came, but she could retreat deeper into the dark woods. And, ahead and overhead, was a slight haze of smoke. She followed the fumes, to where it was trickling out of a hidden crack in the earth, half-obscured by black, tangled branches.

"Inside the cave opening, she found it opened up into a cavern, brightly lit by the beams of the sun shining down through a crystal-lined fissure in the cavern roof. A great pile of fineries and wealth was just sitting there, sitting in the middle of the floor of the cavern, gems and gold bits shining in the reflected light of Celestia's sun."

"Just sitting out in the open, without anypony guarding it?" asked Rye, skeptically.

"Yes," said Cup Cake, "Dragonheart was no more of a fool than you are, dearie. She sidled around the obvious trap, or illusion, or whatever it was, looking for the spider or monster lurking to snap up an unwary and greedy pony. Whatever it was, it hid deep in the shadows beyond the beam of light, and she could not find it, though this was not a cavern of infinite depth or volume. Whatever lurked and guarded that trove, did not want to be found.

"Dragonheart was greedy, almost as greedy as her namesake, but she was not a fool, and she knew that nothing was so expensive as 'free'. She sighed, and trotted back to the exit into the world beyond, to try her luck with the timberwolves. Perhaps they had gotten bored, and had found something else to torment.

"But, as she went to leave the cave, she heard a great, deep voice beg her, 'oh, please, please don't leave without taking something. Anything!' She froze, as the echoes surrounded her, buffeted her with almost physical force. When sound goes deep enough, you can feel it in your barrel, a deep throb. This was the force of the plea that stopped her in her tracks.

"From a crack she had not found in her brief search, snaked a great scaled head, the vast red eyes opening above her. 'Please take something, anything. I don't want it anymore, I don't want any of it.'

"'How could you possibly not want all of that?' she asked. 'Look at it all! It's a princess's ransom!'

"'I know, for I stole it over many years,' said the loud voice. 'From ponies' homes and castles, from griffins almost as greedy as I, from industrious minotaurs and humble donkeys. This, this is a dragon's hoard. I do believe that no dragon in Equestria holds a hoard the like of mine!' The great wyrm - for that was what was guarding the treasure-trove, a vast and mighty dragon of great size - that dragon's eyes narrowed in pride, earned pride. 'And yet - it is, perhaps, too great. I feel the call of the gathering, the migration. But I cannot leave here, for I have grown too big. And I've been so for longer than you might imagine. This is the third calling I will have missed.'

"For the thing about dragons, is that their stature is driven by that which they own. As far as we lesser mortals go, we grow as great as our foalhood and our feeding allows, but once one becomes a full adult - well, that is it. In your adulthood you are as large as you will ever be. There are no limits to the growth of dragons, for they say that a dragon is as great as her greed. They say that one great wyrm once put claim to an entire world, a complete pearl upon the Chain of Creation, and that wyrm grew so great that her head laid upon the eastern limb of the world, and her tail curled around the western, and that between the sun and moon lay more wyrm than world.

"For the problem is, that when dragons grow so great, they become slow, and inflexible. Sometimes, the holes they made into lairs grow too tight, and they find that they cannot crawl out of what they climbed into. They trap themselves with their own greed. It was this very fate that had befallen the dragon of the treasure-trove. Here he was, hidden away from the eyes of the world, and not even greedy adventurers could save him from himself, for all of the greed in the world could not advertise to an unknowing world that this hillside hid a dragon's hoard.

"Dragonheart, who despite her name knew nothing of dragons, was rightfully suspicious. 'What, I should trigger your curse? Will it turn me into something tasty, a mint to season your dinner? Faugh, my dam foaled many children, but not a one of them was a fool.'

"'Oh please, little pony. If you would not take something, at least tell someone else of the vast wealth that lies in this cavern, that someone else would steal from me, and make me small again. I would like to see the sun unreflected through crystal once again.'

"This actually touched the small, shell-like heart of little Dragonheart, for she was not made of stone. But she was still stubborn, and insisted, 'What wealth? Wealth is that which makes us prosperous. This is nothing but a pile of trinkets, the wrack and ruin of a great house, torn out of its mansion and strewn out across a cavern floor. What good are luxuries, laid out on a damp stone surface? Wealth is a snug home full of family and friends. Everything else is bits, and reputation. And my reputation would be horseapples if I told ponies that there were great piles of gold and gems up here in the woods, and didn't warn them of the mad dragon hiding with his hoard!'

"'Oh, I promise not to harm any of my thieves! How would I escape if I were to eat the very ponies would otherwise allow me to grow small enough to squirm out of this trap I've made for myself?'

"The two stared each other down, stuck in this impasse between Dragonheart's greed and her caution, for she truly was desperate for the dragon's stuff, and lied in least in part when she denounced it as trash and refuse. It might have been trash, but it was glittery, golden trash, and she could make her fortune with the wonders hidden within that hoard.

"Finally, her resolution broke, and she agreed to fill her saddle-bags, as proof, she said, of his willingness to not eat his thieves. She would return afterwards, and they would discuss the matter further, based on the premise that she would not, ever, be eaten.

"She left the cavern, her burdened bags heavy upon her withers, and she had quite an adventure escaping the attentions of the timber-wolves, who were the very by-word for patient, and laid in wait for the little unicorn. But somehow she found the fire inside to fight off the wood-wrought monsters, and scared them off, scorched and smouldering. Apparently crisis had helped her get over her incapacity with fire-throwing, because she had found the fire-spell suddenly came to her as if it were second-nature.

"Dragonheart sold off her prizes, and banked her gains with the money-changers she did business with, but she didn't tell a soul of the bonanza in the forest. She returned to the dragon's cave, trusting in ponies' fear of the dark wood and the monsters that guarded it, to keep any other thieves from following her to horn in on her new business. She made two more trips, and by the second trip, the dragon was giddy, gleeful at the results of his hoard-diet. He was once again thin, and lithe, and nearly small enough to fit through the narrow crack in the world through which he once had crawled.

"Dragonheart, on the other hand, had found some strange late growth spurt, and trip by trip, had gained hoof after hoof of height, and weight, and breadth. By the third trip, she was as tall as any unicorn in the eastlands, and as strong as any she knew. Her hooves had grown sharp, and a little serrated - that means jagged or toothed, dearies - and her eyes had grown strange and flecked with red. She had encountered some difficulties finding buyers for her last consignment, the once-little unicorn was now scaring her customers with her somewhat smoky affect.

"When she returned for another load to the dragon's cave, she looked and she looked, but she couldn't find her dragon. She eventually searched around the entrance itself, and there she found scrapings of scales along the walls and on the floor - the dragon had squeezed out of his trap while she had been gone. No note.

"Somehow, this made Dragonheart sad, that her dragon had left without waiting for her to steal from him one last time. She curled up on his abandoned hoard, and went to sleep. And she slept for a long, long time. They say she slept for years, curled upon that mound of artwork, of fine furnishings, bits and gems. And every month she laid sleeping on the hoard, she grew more dragon-like upon her dragon's hoard. She didn't need food, she didn't need ponies, she didn't need the sun. She had her dragon's hoard, and she had her dreams of the dragon.

"She might have laid there forever, to this very day, dreaming of dragons and great piles of glittery stuff, if the dragon hadn't returned one day, for what reason I cannot say. He found another dragon laying upon his hoard, and sighed, saying to himself, 'well, leave a hoard unattended for a decade, and some other dragon will claim it', and turned away from what was now the other dragon's hoard. There was etiquette for this sort of thing.

"Harmony must have smiled upon Dragonheart, because something awoke her as the dragon turned to leave the cavern for the last time. 'Oh! Dragon!' cried Dragonheart. 'I fell asleep waiting for you! You left without saying goodbye! Oh, I feel strange. How was the sun and the outside world?'

"His eyes wide, he asked, 'Little thief, is that you? It is your voice, but you are, you are not a pony anymore, I believe?'

"Little Dragonheart was more than a little put out by her sudden transformation - well, sudden for her. But nopony can be too grouchy after a nice, long nap like that, and the two of them made the best out of a strange situation. The dragon had fell out of the social swirl of things in his long absence in that snug cavern, and had found that he didn't really relate to other dragons anymore. And Dragonheart found that that cave had almost become homelike after long residence within. It was barely damp at all, and once you dressed up the walls a bit, almost ponylike.

"They divided the ownership of that hoard, and made sure that neither of them grew too great to get out and about when they had to leave the cave. And between the two of them, they found that there was a considerable business to be done in incinerating timber-wolves and beating back the dark magic of deep forests and dark woods." Throat Kicker had awoken at some point while Cup Cake had been telling sad-eyed Cherie her story, the little filly curled up in the earth pony's lap beside Throat Kicker's bed. The pegasus's eyes glittered as she listened, a little spacy from the lingering effects of the laudanum.

"They hung the medal, given them by the Crown for their service in the recovery of the heartlands, over the great bassinet Dragonheart built, where their hatchlings could bat it about as it were a toy."

Cherie looked up at the end of the story, and saw her knight was awake. There was a great deal of tears, but that was their business. I let the Cakes out of the infirmary, and returned to my bloody business.

The Little Stone Fort At The Fords

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The Captain ordered my presence in operations a few days later, for an officers' meeting. When I arrived, Obscured Blade was sitting in Gibblets' place. We sneered at each other while waiting on the remaining cohort commanders. Smooth Draw and Fuller Falchion were muttering to each other in a corner, while the Captain and Broken Sigil were fiddling with a new sand-table. I walked over to look at their work.

It was a representation of the upper river, laying out Pepin Castle and its opposite number facing each other across that contested ford in the centre of the table's display, with each fortress's back-country filled out as well as they could, given our knowledge of the current situation. The fortress held by the White Rose was an old bison construction, with an old Bison name, something long and impossible like Teke'o'ho'honahke o'he'emenie, but the local name for it was usually abbreviated to Hohonahkemenie, which is still one tartarus of a mouthful. The best we knew of its situation was that the White Rose held it in strength. Scouts couldn't get close without being pelted by projectiles, and chased by sally parties of caribou.

Our best guess was that at least some of the refugees from the shattered White Rose rebellion in Rennet had washed up here in garrison. They certainly weren't anywhere else - the crews of the destroyed flotilla and the small army concentrated around Falaises du Conseil had been mostly earth pony and donkey. We had found no living caribou in central Pepin, although there had been ghouls and bones a plenty.
I frowned at the vagueness of the features sketched out on the table behind Hohonahkemenie, we just didn't have much information about the status of the White Rose lands, that was for certain. The Lieutenant had made vague plans to extend deep penetration recon parties into the region in the aftermath of the raid on Falaises du Conseil, but that was before we got our teat caught in the wringer, and the aerial cohort had been battered.

Octavius stumped into the conference room with the Lieutenant and a sombre Gerlach trailing behind him. Octavius was a bit wind-burned, and he must have come straight off a chariot ride from Pepin City. He had been sent along with a fair number of sections from third cohort to reinforce the Duc's castle garrison and resist the White Rose's continued probing across the ford.

The Captain called the council to order.

"OK, paisans, first order of business, we need that report on the situation at the ford, Octavius. What's it look like from the castle wall?"

"Hit-" Octavius cleared his throat, and coughed. "It's both not as bad as they said, and it's worse than they'll admit. First thing is, the caribou coming across the fords aren't all that aggressive, they slip through in twos and threes, disappear, maybe burn a hayrick or scare a farmer, then they come galloping back for the fords and freedom. It's diffuse enough that it might just be bucks counting coup if it weren't for how often it's happening. That's the not-bad part. The bad part is-" and he reached forward and drew his hoof across the sand-table, drawing three slight furrows across the sand-river, one below the ford and two above. "There isn't one ford, there's two to four, depending on the height of the river and the season. Right now, the river's low, and all four are open. We would need an entire cohort to post all four of the crossings, along with a reaction force and the main reserve.

"Hohonahkemenie is just better positioned to cover all the fords than Pepin Castle. It's an artifact of how the bluffs are situated, and where the fords open up. And those walls scare me, they're alarmingly solid for something built over a thousand years ago, and they look like the sort of thing that eats storming parties for breakfast. You couldn't crack that nut with an army of ten thousand unless it was practically undefended, not from the ground at any rate. The bluffs are just the right height, too steep to rush, not too steep for sally parties to come thundering down on interlopers. You can barely tell where the bluffs end and the walls start.

"As far as sapping goes, I'd want to have Mad Jack's professional opinion, but the damn thing looks like it's sitting right on bedrock. You're not going to undermine their walls, not unless there's a vulnerability around the back end of the position I couldn't see, what with the rain of ballista bolts, rocks, and bloodthirsty bucks looking to ventilate my scouts' caparisons. I'm guessing at least three full batteries of artillery just to suppress return fire and two battalions of siege engines to make a breach. Their sally ports look like they only have shallow ravelins, but at that angle, you don't need much protection. It would be easier to blast a new breach on this slope -" he gestured along the northern limb of the fortress, "and hope that you'd not lose too many of your storming party. It's no better of an assaulting position, but at least there's room for the artillery park to set up along that approach, you might be able to emplace enough gambions to keep the White Rose from butchering your engineers en masse.

"In short, just order everypony to slit their own throats. It'd be quicker, and less drawn out. The Company can't take this fortress from the ground. Five Companies operating in concert would have problems taking it, especially in the season we have left."

"We're full of recruits, on top of that," interjected Smooth Draw. "We need the rest of the season to absorb them into the Company way of doing things. We could lose the majority of the recruits if we throw them into a proper siege, or, worse, an assault. You know they die like flies when they're wet-maned like this."

The Captain fumed, not hearing what she wanted to hear. She demanded a report from the aerials. The Lieutenant made her report.

"Almost a quarter of the cohort is out of commission. Four dead, thirty-eight wounded and in hospital. Some of those look like they're permanent convalescents. Sawbones?"

"Eleven certain career-ending wounds. Not sure in three more cases, depends on how they heal and what the prosthetic-smith can do with them. Assuming we don't have any further medical emergencies in the interim. Expect the other twenty-four back to their sections in two to six weeks. Maybe faster if some of my new potions work as expected. Fifteen back in three weeks, solid."

"Why can't they get a prosthetic wing working, damnit?"

"Pull the other one, it has bells on. Or, rather, bother Uncle Blade. That sort of magic is witch business. And pure fiction as far as I know." I sighed. "Three of them aren't amputation losses, anyways. Those enemy witches and their fire-spells, nothing we can do when a pony's one-quarter third-degree burns. We're lucky they pulled through at all. Shock should have killed another six before they got back to me. I think the Spirit's been juicing our ponies a bit. Some things just aren't equinely possible, and I have at least eight cases recuperating in my wards that should have died."

"So what you're telling me is?" prompted the Captain at her Lieutenant.

"We're going to be flying understrength for most of the rest of the season, and there's no way to replenish losses. We got four recruits down with Uncle Blade, four. That doesn't even replace fatalities in the last three years, let alone our retirees. Until we get somewhere the Company can recruit from winged populations, the aerial cohort is a wasting and limited resource. Every battle reduces our numbers, every loss - we won't be part of the Company forever if you use us up like this."

"So you're saying you can't take the keep at the fords from the air?"

"By storm? Oh, tartarus, I don't know. I'd have to have it better-scouted from the air. Octavius, how big is the garrison?"

"Difficult to tell from what we've seen so far. It's big enough to hold five hundred, if it's fully posted. Their sally parties are hearty enough, either they've got bucks to burn, or they're fronting pretty fiercely. If they have any witches behind those walls, they weren't showing themselves, I'll say that much."

"Which brings up the magical approach. Uncle Blade?"

"I'm not your uncle, you fool. You can't paste over your lack of resources with magery and hope your coven will satisfy your oversized ambitions by sheer magical puissance. The Company might once have had that sort of power, but it doesn't now, not yet. And certainly not while you refuse to let the Lady into your arid little clot of a heart! She is the hope and the heart of the Company's true power, and you continue to refuse her very existence, as if She was some sort of - shared delusion of your subordinates. Stop trying to distract yourself with irrelevant planning for the assault of strategically unimportant fortifications, and open your heart to Her presence!" The old warlock's eyes blazed with undiluted fury. Good to know he hated somepony more than me.

The Captain blinked in confusion, and turned to me. "Sawbones, can you get your senile fanatic under control? He seems to be off his meds again."

"How did Obscured Blade become 'my' fanatic? He's the head of the warlocks, not any property of mine."

"Stop talking about me as if I weren't in the room, you insufferable young jackanapes!"

"He certainly talks like you do when you're in an Annals-trance. It's your cult, isn't it?"

"The Spirit isn't a 'cult'! I'll take this from our Equestrian prisoner, she's not one of us in the end, but I won't take it from the supposed Captain of the Black Bleeding Company!"

"When I joined this thing of ours, it was a piscialetto compagnia di mercenari, non un cazzo di Equestrii incontro rinascita religiosa!"

Things degenerated rapidly from there, as it usually does when her Equuish breaks down like that. The meeting ended just short of blows, but after the dust cleared, the Captain hadn't gotten her assault against the fortress over the fords. It continued to be a thorn in our sides, but a few more sections were deployed to Pepin City along with Octavius's existing garrison. A series of skirmishes in the open lands around the castle and before the fords would punctuate the rest of the summer and fall, producing a trickle of casualties, including the deaths of four recruits.

Granola Crunch, an earth pony mare, drowned in the second month of summer during an otherwise typical skirmish at the lower ford. Oak Limb, an earth pony stallion, exsanguinated due to fumbling by the Duc's local physician over a wound which shouldn't have killed him. After that, I would spend a week in Pepin City, re-training that young fool of a jenny on basic wound treatment. Almost as soon as I returned to Dance Hall from this trip, two more recruits died in an ambush, a jack incongruously named Happy Feet, and a buck named Schlafrig. Nothing the hapless physician could have done about it, they died on the field.

Octavius's ponies took a heavy toll on the White Rose in those skirmishes, but it was still a bloody business. Not as bloody as Hohonahkemenie would have been if the Captain had gotten her heart's desire.

Surprise And The Laughing Ghosts, or, Bran Muffins

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One afternoon in late summer I was idling in the dining hall long after lunch, moping at Rye, who had started out trying to cheer me up, but had instead been infected by my evil mood. A pair of new recruits from Rennet had gotten letters from their irate relatives, and they had passed along the news, such as it was.

My name was still blood in the province, and worse, but not for my sins, but rather my - I don't know what you'd call it, my whims? Nopony really cared about a few palace murders, not outside of those ponies' immediate relatives. That's what aristocrats did, they plotted and they poisoned and they set up madponies to wipe out their problems in roaring rampages of revenge. If anything, I had inadvertently left my foals an inheritance of mythic proportions. They were the progeny of a dangerous, lunatic sire would might rain bloody vengeance upon the polls of anypony fool enough to threaten them or their interests. Well, whatever interests a pair of three-month-old duchesse's bastards might have. A goodly supply of nursery toys? Uninterrupted afternoon naps? Quickly cleaned nappies? Even Bonforte enjoyed the penumbra of my savage crimes - she had been developing a reputation for being a soft touch, a milquetoast before I painted the walls of her guest quarters with the viscera of the main reason ponies thought she was weak.

It was better to be feared, than loved, wrote the bitterly reformed courtier to his Princess, hoping to be freed from the prison she had thrown him into, to rot for being the sniveling republican rat he had been in public life. And now everypony was a little afraid of what lurked behind the skirts of the duchesse. And that was fine. Not good, not true, but if anything could come of what I'd done, the better of a lot of bad options.

It was what she was using her evil new reputation to do which was breaking my mood. The bull-calves had been noticed, and their training with the ducal guard noted with alarm. Parts of the province, primarily those parts of the province with firm contracts with the old bulls and their milking harems, were alarmed. The universal conviction was that the duchesse was pondering, possibly planning the seizure and expropriation of the dairy industry in Rennet via a picked and trained force of young bulls who would decapitate the herds via traditional duello.

It had certainly never been my intention to threaten such a thing. The point hadn't been to seize the commanding heights of the dairy industry, it had been to give the bull-calves an option other than death, exile or castration.

The world will forgive the worst things you could ever imagine doing, the worst crimes that the worst version of you is capable of, those crimes you thought you hadn't had inside you, just waiting to be let out. The world respects and fears evil. But it will never forgive your good intentions, and is always waiting to crush you for a moment of empathy.

No word on what Bonforte had named the foals.

As Rye sat and fumed for my sake, and I just sat, Cup Cake came out with a steaming plate of bran muffins.

"You two look you need some roughage. Definitely not a moment for sweetness and light. Here. Clear you right out, especially you, Sawbones. All that organ meat can't be good for a pony, I don't care what the monster you worship did to your teeth, you've probably still got a pony's guts behind the teeth."

"Why does nopony take me by my stated intentions and my actions, Cup Cake? Am I that much of a blank slate?"

"Because you lie like a rug, you madpony. Worse, you lie to yourself, constantly. Well, that's not the worst possible thing - you say some truly horrible things about yourself and others. Better that they be lies than the celestial honest truth. Hey! Cheer up. Bad news and a miserable face is no better than bad news and a good laugh. Not that laughter is a universal cure, I grant you. Hey, Rye, I ever tell you all about Surprise and the Laughing Ghosts?"

"You know that I'm a little too old for fawn's tales, Miss Cake. Those are for Cherie and the younger apprentices."

"Oooh, aren't you all fierce and grown up. Too grown up to be helping your master mope about like this, young doe. Now Surprise grew up fast, as pegasi often do. But the problem was, she did nothing but go up. She was hard to bring back down to earth. Her family were weather-ponies, but she never was any good at it. Clouds flitted away when she touched them, winds became unpredictable and capricious in the wake of her wings. She was strong, but completely unfocused, and incapable of concentrating upon her work.

"When she got her cutie mark, her parents brought her before a mark-seer, to try and work out what they could do with their drift-mare. The mark-seer looked at young Surprise and her cryptic mark, and narrowed her eyes. 'I see such things, my poor little filly. You will never stay in one place for more than a moon!'

"'Ooh, I'm gonna get to travel? All over Equestria! That's great!' burbled Surprise.

"'No, no, you're never going to sleep under your own roof', explained the mystic, trying to regain her dignity and poise.

"'And ponies are going to invite me into their homes? Ponies are so generous, aren't they!' squealed Surprise.

"The seer made one last attempt to establish her dominance and air of superiority, saying balefully 'You shall never have your own friends and family!'

"'Oh!' exclaimed the cursed little pony, looking serious, "Then I guess I'll have to have everypony else's friends and family! Nice to meet you, Auntie Seer! You should really get that cough looked at, it sounds a little phlegmy!'

"Surprise's family 'encouraged' her to go find her destiny in the big, broad world. So she set out, floating about as the breeze blew her. Her first job was at a Manehattan manufactory, working with rubber and latex products, mostly sealants and grommets. She lost that job when her experiments with industrial-byproducts caught half the shop-floor on fire. They didn't even appreciate her invention of the lighter-than-air balloon! At least they gave her the remnant of her experiments, and she and her balloons floated away in the next gust of air over the smoking ruins.

"She next went to Fillydelphia, and walked into a politician's office. She asked for a job. The mare asked her, 'And who sent ya?'

"'Nopony sent me, I'm new in town!'

"'Well, we don't need nopony that nopony sent. Go sell newspapers, wide-eyes.'

"'But I don't have any newspapers. You think I should become a writer?'

"'Ugh, I think if you become a reporter, we'll have rioters in the streets in a moon. Here, this idiot needs ponies, and thinks I owe her a favour. She deserves you.'

"Surprise went to the cynical pony's rival, and found work as a ward-hoofer, talking to ponies in the tenements, and finding out what they wanted the bosses to give them for their votes. But somehow the stories she heard, were never the stories she told the bosses, and orders she passed out to the fillos from up the traces were never exactly what the big mares had wanted to happen.

"As she was driven out of town, the papers were full of enraged ranting about the horrors of the reign of the wicked 'Tally-Ho' and their vote-buying machine. Reformers coasted into office on the winds of Surprise's chaos. They were bound and determined to show that the good-intentioned were just as capable of screwing up city government and wasting the public fisc as the deliberately corrupt and venial. Last time Surprise heard, they had succeeded beyond all expectations, and the Tally-Ho had crept back like the tide. Ah, politics!

"The winds soon enough blew Surprise west into Hollow Shades. Untold generations of sweat and terror had swept the dread forests from most of Equestria by Surprise's day, but the evil old woods lurked still in certain quarters, and quiet corners. Even today, my hometown sits next-door to one of these last holdouts, and let me tell you, the Everfree's a scary place, and no place for a pony like Surprise.

"But Surprise didn't care, and she visited with rangers and ward-mages and the narrow, suspicious earth-ponies who tilled the narrow, shadowed fields hacked out of the jealous grasp of those nasty trees that surrounded struggling Hollow Shades.

"And the ponies of Hollow Shades recoiled in universal disgust and horror at the bubbly floating mare, because she laughed. Oh, she didn't laugh meanly, or in a bullying sort of way, but the ponies of Hollow Shades feared laughter like a sailor fears dark clouds on a northeasterly, like a soldier fears the enemy's battle-cry, like the dove fears the hawk's shadow. Because laughter in the woods was the warning-sign that the Laughing Ghosts were about to descend upon the town.

"For generations, the thing that had preserved the dark forests around Hollow Shades was the depredations of the Ghosts, horrible, grey mists within which something giggled and cackled, that choked magic and terrorized ponies. A season of Laughing Ghosts could drive even the sanest pony mad, drive family and friends apart, and leave loving mothers stroking pillows over their sleeping foals, sweet-tempered brides sharpening razors and eyeing the throats of their new-wed husbands.

"Surprise narrowed her eyes, when she heard this story of the Laughing Ghosts, and said, in a grim, gritty voice, 'That's not what laughter is for. Somepony ought to do something about it, right now.'

"Then, they say, she blinked, and was all grins again. 'Hey!' she chirped. 'I think I'm somepony! I gotta go see a ghost about a horse.' And then she was gone, flying further west into the heart of the groves from which they say the Laughing Ghosts rose when they came. That night and the next and the next, a great and dreadful wind blew through town, and the countryside, and every town and farm from Fillydelphia to the furthest peak of the Foal Mountains, and some say, even to the outskirts of Canterlot herself. A storm like an inland hurricane shook the eaves of snug houses, and tore at the crops in the fields, and ripped leaves from the branches of dead and living trees alike.

"Ponies nearest the edges of that dark forest heard the strangest of sounds, an argument entirely in the form of laughter. Cackling was rebutted by giggling; sniggering was refuted by guffaws. High, mad tittering which couldn't possibly have come from anything in this world was replied with a skirling, demented bray of hilarity that couldn't possibly have come from the vocal chords of a pony.

"On the dawn of the third night, the winds stilled, and the laughter stopped. And a cracked, giddy voice as great as the heavens above echoed above the stunned town, and it said, 'And that is how you do it, by Celestia!'

"Nopony in Hollow Shades ever saw Surprise after she went into the woods. But they say that sometimes, if you stand still under the leaves of the slightly dim groves west of town, you can hear the chuckling of a kind-hearted mare laughing at some cowed, cringing spirit in the depths of the woods.

"What," I asked, wonderingly, "Is a lighter-than-air balloon?"

Hide And Go Seek

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I was meditating in my whiteout dream, letting the tension between the discordant buzz and the swirling grey mists become the ikon of my unfocus. I wanted to consider the baker and her allegories without emotion or pride, without ego. It felt like I was allowing my ego and my broken pride to blind me to far too much since…

Mist. That horrible clicking sound. A little grey tail bobbing up out of the mist, like a -

Thestral filly trying to sneak up on me.

"If you're going to stalk a pony, you have to hide your tail as well as your wings, Cherie. All prey animals are born with a suspicion of erect tails sticking up out of high grass like that. It's quite literally like flying a 'beast of prey hiding here' flag."

Her tail jerked down out of dream-sight, and her head replaced it, blinking at me. "'Mn not stalking a pony, I'm hiding from the Princess."

OK. "Why would you be hiding from the Mistress? Have you been a bad filly tonight?"

"Nn-nn! Je suis tonjours bon! The Princess made me bet with her! If she can find me, all of me, I'll do what Uncle Blade says I have to do." She made a scrunchy face.

"What's that old bokor telling you to do?"

"Ah, I have to sit with the others and listen to him lecture, and nag, and mind him."

"What others?" What was Obscured Blade up to?

"Tu sais, the witchlings. Feufollet and Bad Apple. Didn't you know he's taken over their 'educaysun'?"

"Education, and no I did not. Why are you being thrown in with the little witches?"

"Uncle says my walking is his 'peervuu', whatever the hay dat is."

"Purview. It means that you are his concern, his business. His job. Walking - which one, the dreaming or however it is you're getting through locked doors?"

"The both, really. It don' feel like sorcerie, what I do. I just do it." I didn't say anything, or let it register in my expression, but the little thestral was growing a shadow in that grey-white emptiness, where there was no light, nothing to cast shadows with.

"Well, Uncle Blade is the Company expert on training young mages. If he feels that dreamwalking and… whatever walking is something that can be trained, then that is, indeed, his business." The shadow was lengthening, and there were stars in its mane.

"But I don't LIKE him! He smells funny, and his eyes are mean."

"We're all bad ponies, Cherie. Why don't you dislike me?"

She turned her head, confused. "You may be bad, but you're not mean. Why would I hide in the dreams of a mean pony?" Then she shrieked in surprise as her shadow pounced.

They went tumbling through the scattering grey mist, slapping at each other with their bat-wings, grey and black, and play-biting like a pair of puppies fighting over dominance in the litter. Finally, the black shadow-pony pinned the grey dream-filly, and put her teeth to the base of her mane.

"Give?" demanded the dragon-eyed shadow in the stentorian tones of the Spirit in her Nightmare aspect.

"Heck, no, Princess! You only found dream-me! You still have to find real me, and I'm damn well hid tonight!"

"Language, filly! She still is our Mistress." I paused, and blinked, breaking free of the dream-logic. The Spirit was surprisingly… small. And proportioned like a filly. "If somewhat smaller in stature than usual."

Then the Spirit did something I had never seen her do before - she blushed. Red as a tomato. And got up off of Cherie and started playing with something in the mist, refusing to meet my eyes. "We might have… agreed to a handicap. For the sake of the wager. I did not think that the juvenile form would have, well, never mind. We art still thy Mistress, Acolyte!"

"You know we can tell when you're putting on the accent, Princess."

"Bah! Toy not with the dignity of thy Queen, worm! We own thy soul, and might choose to devour it if thou must make mock of royalty and its ways!" Her head suddenly jerked sideways, eyes gone narrow, staring into nothingness.

"You did not just find me, Princess," said the little filly, getting up off of the dream-ground, rolling her eyes at the display. "I'd certainly notice."

"No, not you, you disobedient child. My other self will find you when the time is right. No, something else, something that shouldn't be there, something that smells like…" The Spirit suddenly exploded, forming her proper 'body', as I thought of it. Her wings were erect, alarmed, and her head threw back, her starry mane disappearing beneath her silvery helm. "INTRUDER!"

And she was gone.

Cherie and I looked at each other, and we nodded once before leaving for the waking world.

I jerked awake on my cot in the back of the infirmary, and looked around in the darkness. Nothing but me and the spiders. I stretched and then headed to the door, convinced that something was happening somewhere. There was a commotion in the outer office, and I broke into a trot.

One of my oxen was standing with his head poked out of the door into the main hall, light pouring in from outside. A dropped blanket on the floor showed where he had been napping on his shift. We'd talk about that later.

I joined him at the door, and saw a guard go running past towards the northern sally port. "What's going on out there, Skinflint?"

"There was this… shout in the hall, and when I looked over, there was a shadow or something opening the door into the hospital. It slammed the door shut and maybe I heard hooves running away? I don't know. When I looked out there, the Spirit, she was twice as big as life, and a-galloping thataway, yellin' bloody murder."

"So the shadow wasn't the Spirit?"

"Not unless she gained two dozen hooves worth of height between when I saw it the first time, and when she went running past the door. Two ponies. I think." He held his own dinner-plate hoof about the height of a short donkey on the door-frame, indicating his estimate of the intruder's size.

"Damn. Well, won't learn anything here, I give you my parole, I'll be back when the trouble's done being troublesome. Hold this door, don't let anypony else in until I get back." The niceties have to be observed, don't you know.

Heads were poking out of various doors along the halls as I galloped in the Spirit's wake. None of the guards were at their posts - I guessed that she had collected a posse as she rocketed past each station. Words would be had with those ponies later - I don't care what it looks like, in the dead of night, any given disturbance could be a distraction, not the main threat. I stuck my head inside a fourth cohort barracks full of half-asleep recruits, and ordered them out to replace the abandoned posts until the original guard returned.

This delay meant that I missed all but the last of the dramatics. She had galloped the whole length of the northern ramparts, and leapt the gate beside the north tower in a single bound. The trailing guards piled up at the gate, obliged to actually open it before following the semi-tangible Spirit into the darkness.

As I arrived at the north tower, the echoing boom of some distant explosion disturbed the stillness of the night. Cherie walked out of a shadowed corner on the stairs as I passed by, and she looked up at me, questioning.

"I don't know, kid. Let's see what we can see."

There were flashes in the brush to the right about three hundred yards up the Road, and you could see some trailing guards struggling up out of the drainage ditches into the brush. Another burst of light flung scrub into the night air, digging out a crater. You could sort of see the half-transparent Spirit snarling, and tossing around a half-grown sapling like a switch.

But you couldn't see whatever it was she had been chasing. She fried a few additional bushes as the guards spread out in a search pattern.

Nothing was found, but the destruction wrought by the Spirit upon the scrubland. She eventually disappeared into the night, letting go of whatever substance she had stolen from the world to gallop among us.

The Captain finally put in an appearance a half-hour after the Spirit had departed. You could tell she didn't want to believe our latest collection of ghost-stories, but I don't know how else she'd explain the smouldering brush-fires left by the Spirit's rage.

Her skepticism was growing tiresome.

The Metamorphosis, or, Oatmeal Cookies

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The next afternoon I found Cherie arguing with the baker, trying to win her over to the little filly's side on the Matter of Mean Old Stallions. The previous night's excitement had caused her little wager with the Spirit to expire without result, and I had intervened, telling the both of them that neither had a say in the education of the Company's apprentices, no more than I did. It was in the hooves of their respective knights, specifically the bed-ridden Throat Kicker's decision, and none of ours. Had Throat Kicker made this decision? Then the Matter was no such thing, but rather a fait accompli.

What spoiled foal has ever accepted a hard decision from one parent without appealing to the other? And half the Company seemed inclined to stand in loco parentis to the little thestral – she had ever so many options for appeal! And so here she was, pleading with Auntie Cup Cake.

"I have no idea what you think I can do about it, Cherie. If it were up to Obscured Blade, I think they'd sacrifice me to your blood-thirsty phantasm. I'm here on sufferance."

"The Princess wouldn't eat you, Miss Cake! Really, I think she likes you. She's always chirpy after we visit your dreams."

"As unsettling as that sounds, I still have to decline. You should be more charitable to that old stallion, he can't have that many years left to him, and every day he has to chase you about and herd you into class is a couple days he won't be able to spend with his loved ones." In a sotto voice, turned away from the foal, she muttered, "If the old goat has any."

"Anyways, Cherie, you need to understand, it's important to mind your elders, both those you like and those you don't like. The same way that you need to be good to people you don't understand, moreso than it is to be nice to those you know and love. It's not truly kindness if you only extended it to your own; you have to show empathy to the lowly, the confusing, and the alien, or it's just another type of tribalism. How will you ever deal with enemies other than to slaughter them all, if you can't extend compassion to them?"

The filly just looked confused.

"Oh, Celestia. I'm terrible at these sorts of stories. Let's see… how about Silken Weave and the taciturn stallion?"

Cherie shrugged, still confused but settling back to listen as Cup Cake hoofed her a plate of warm oatmeal cookies fresh from the oven.

"Can I have some of those, Cherie?" I asked from behind them, alerting them to my presence.

Cherie jerked, looking guilty. I grabbed a hoof-full and settled back to listen to the latest bit of Equestrian propaganda the baker had spun. Cup Cake rolled her eyes at me, and continued, returning to her preparation-table, apparently to slap together another batch of cookies for the oven.

"One sunny morning, Silken Weave woke to discover that she had become a giant, black spider at some point in the night. This was not immediately obvious to what had previously been a beautiful little unicorn filly, but she awoke feeling very peculiar, and having difficulty breathing she reached to brush away the blanket she was tangled beneath. What she saw was a horrible, hairy black leg grabbing at her blanket, and so she yanked to pull it out of the monster's grip! There was no resistance, and she virtually spun like a top upon the top of her bed as the blanket flew across the pretty little room.

"She looked down and down for the source of the monster that must have been in the bed with her, and all she could see was monster! Black legs everywhere, a carapace, and mandibles just on the edge of her vision! Oh, right, a carapace is sort of like barding, except it's part of you, and mandibles are a kind of jaw that open outwards instead of up and down. Perfectly normal for a spider, of course, but not the sort of thing a young filly expects to find hovering just below her nose where lips and teeth and a jaw ought to be found if all were right with the world.

"She screamed, of course, or tried to scream. It turns out that spiders can't really make noise, aside from a certain alarmed hissing, which Silken Weave hadn't yet figured out the mechanism for. So instead, she contorted in a full-body rictus, and emitted a spray of alarmed pheromones. Pheromones, dear, are the chemicals that various beasties emit, to communicate among themselves. Primarily spiders and insects. My source informed me that this is the main way that spiders talk to each other.

"Silken Weave's incoherent stinking brought a response from the upper left corner of her bedroom, where a fat, somewhat elderly little spider lurked in her web, happily sleeping off a week's worth of flies and other pests caught in that sturdy web. 'Really, child, can you not make so much smell so early in the morning? Day is for sleeping, and hiding, and keeping ponies from noticing that you're lurking around their stuff.'

"Six of Silken Weave's new eyes pivoted upwards, and she squirted, slightly more intelligibly, 'You understand I what smells why I understand stink?'

"'Yes, dearie, very clever, you've figured out how to make words. Maybe later today we can work on syntax. I waited all night for you to wake up, and now that it's morning, you decide to start scuttling about. I knew it would be a headache when one of my ponies decided to grow some chitin.'

"Just about then, Silken Weave's doting aunt opened her bedroom door, to chase her out of her bed and get her started on her day. The former filly and her alarmed aunt stared at each other, and then screamed at the top of their lungs at each other. Well, the aunt did, Silken just went into another spasm, which unfortunately involved two of her fore-legs raising up in a fashion that the aunt took to be threatening. She galloped away in a panic, screaming as her hooves beat out a tattoo of retreat.

"'Well,' said the fat little spider, 'Nothing good will come of that. If I were you, I'd find a nice, dark corner under a solid piece of furniture, one they're not likely to think to sweep under now that they're all excited.' She looked over the much, much larger spider which had once been a spoiled little filly. 'Maybe we should get you outside instead. I don't think you'll fit under the dressers.'

"The aunt returned with a posse of ponies from the shop, her journeymare and two apprentices, all of them swinging brooms. Silken Weave was impressed, she didn't think the household held so many brooms with all of their bristles intact. Then she was scampering as fast as her many little legs could carry her, as the room filled with broom-handles and bristles knocking her stuff off of cabinet tops and side-tables and in general making a tartarus of a mess. The little spider flung herself towards the doorway, neatly landing on the shoulder of the fleeing Silken Weave as she skittered between the legs of the slower of the two apprentices, and fled into the hall.

"Silken escaped the house with a skirt of dust and webbing trailing behind her, having lost a little bit of sphincter control in all of her panic and fear. The little spider looked down at the mess dragging behind the two of them, and said, 'OK, no, stop, that's just shameful. You can't go out into the world like that. There, squeeze there. Yeah, and then pinch that. And that's how you cut your silk. See? I bet you feel pounds lighter now.'

"The big black spider who had just yesterday been a little filly started scuttling again, feeling the eyes of the town upon her. She looked back and forth, and realized it was a different village when you weren't the sweetest, prettiest foal in three districts, all white horn and fluffy mane and perfect coat. It was actually a pretty intimidating place when you were a big spider, especially when the doors and windows started slamming shut on either side of the road as she skittered further away from her former home.

"'I know what to do, my school-teacher will help me! He's ever so wise, and clever. The Princess herself sent him here to maintain the wards, and teach us foals so that we can take it over when he goes! Do you think it was some failure of the wards that made me like this?' she asked the little spider on her shoulder.

"'What do I know? I'm a spider. We know webs, and bugs, and making more spiders. Speaking of which, Maker knows what kind of bug you're built for eating, but we probably ought to start thinking about feeding you. I don't know when you're gonna start feeling hungry, but as big as you are, it's gonna hit you hard.'

"Silken Weave arrived before the little schoolhouse, long before anypony was due for classes. She looked around, trying to figure out where her schoolteacher might be. Some few heads were poking out of houses up the lane as they looked about, having come to the realization that the one big black spider, however scary and terrifying, perhaps was not the vanguard of an invasion of giant pony-eating spiders. It was an easy mistake to make there on the edge of the dark forests, which occasionally spat out such plagues upon the sunlit lands. The schoolteacher lived in a little attached apartment next to the schoolhouse, and he appeared at this point, quivering and waving a yardstick at the little monster.

"For two truths were hiding there in the open lane before the closed schoolhouse. The first was that although Silken Weave was very, very large as spiders go, as dark-forest monsters went, she was strictly a midget, no bigger than the filly she had been. And the second truth which had been well-hidden until this day was that her schoolteacher was a terrible coward, and a failure, who had been flunked out of the Princess's school and sent off to make something of himself in the benighted hinterlands. So confronting each other on this little stage was a tiny, scared monster, and a terrified, inept would-be monster hunter.

"Silken Weave raised one leg in entreaty to her school-teacher. He took this as threatening, and flung his yardstick at her like a javelin. He came nowhere near her, of course, but this attack caused her to leap away in reflex. She discovered in doing so that she could jump an amazingly long distance, easily ten yards – so far in fact that she almost bounced off the roof of the schoolhouse, and she quickly skittered up the shingles by mere spider-instinct, clambering up to the top of the gable over the entranceway before she thought twice about it, pausing only to peer anxiously down at the schoolteacher.

"'He's going to figure out where you went in a moment, hatchling. Best you don't have your mandibles poking out into the open like that. Try hiding around the back of this building,' suggested the little spider, who was now in the midst of the highlight of her little arachnid life. Even spiders occasionally feel the draw of the open road and adventure, and this was certainly shaping up to be an adventure she could tell her own hatchlings.

"Silken Weave followed her new friend's advice, and scurried to the back of the roof, where nopony could see her, or smell her sad little sobbings. The little spider tried to cheer her up by talking her through how to intentionally spin silk, and eventually got her to spin a parachute, to catch the rising breeze and take them off that roof. Just in time, in fact, as the local pegasi had taken notice of the disturbance, and were searching the neighboring rooflines for the little monster.

"The breeze took Silk Weave and her companion away in the direction of a sprawling farmstead along the verge between the dark forests and the open farmlands west of town. She landed in an isolated copse along a corn-field far from the farm-house, and the little spider showed her how to weave little traps for the vermin that scurried about in the field. Because Silk Weave was now very, very hungry, and getting desperate. And ponies might live on apple danishes and oatmeal cookies and daffodils, but giant spiders require something a little less vegetative, and voles and mice and the occasional budgie fit the bill.

"You'd think that a former filly would have taken longer to take to a meat diet, but the body finds its own rhythms, and hunger has a logic all its own. She soon found herself draining captured rodents dry like you'd drink down a glass of milk.

"They wove a little nest in the hollow of a tree, displacing an angry badger in the process. It was a little big and aggressive to eat, but by that point, Silken Weave was certainly thinking about such things. And she was growing fast.

"As fall and the harvest of her field quickly approached, her growth became a worry. Her little friend had nested herself, and laid her eggs, who had hatched, and the big nest was surrounded by little nests and little webs. They took the invertebrates – those are the bugs and such - and Silken Weave took the little mammals and the dumber birds. She was a little sad when the fat little spider passed away, but the spider's nestlings kept her company.

"One morning, as Silken Weave was wrapping up a nice juicy groundhog, she heard a squeal, and looked down to find a terrified fieldhand staring up at her tree. The earth-pony scampered off, and that was that. She thought about fleeing into the forest, but really, she was getting kind of tired of running.

"She waited for the response, expecting torches and mobs. Instead, it was a single old stallion, terribly scarred, and with just one eye. Silken Weave didn't have the experience to recognize it, but she was looking down at an old veteran, who in his day had been a terror to the griffins.

"'So you're what's been keeping the vermin from ruining my field here? Most years I mostly have to write off these acres, it's just too close to the forest, and that buncha trees. I've thought of cutting 'em down, but they say it's bad luck to cut down clean trees, and those are as clean as they come, I had the mages go over 'em with a fine tooth. Protects the water table for the rest of the farm, too. So, I seed this back twenty, and hope for the best, but expect the worst. Are you the best or the worst, bug?'

"If spiders could go wide-eyed, Silken Weave certainly would have done so. Somepony was talking to her, instead of screaming! She raised her forelegs in her best approximation of a pony shrug, and then raised one leg, than the other on the front quadrant.

"'Hrm, are you doing something to distract me from another spider sneaking up on me, or are you trying to communicate?' The old war-pony looked behind himself, and didn't spot anything, then turned around once. 'One for yes, two for no?'

"Silken Weave responded with one leg raised. They sort-of communicated, at least insofar as one pony talking and one spider saying yes or no could be considered communication. They promised to leave each other be, and life went on. The fields were harvested, and the yields were impressive. Silken Weave found herself ranging further and further as winter came on, and after the first snows, the scarred farmer came by and invited her to stay inside one of his barns, one where the cats wouldn't go, and was getting overrun by vermin.

"She wintered in that barn, and played barn-cat for her host. Silken Weave left a lot of used spider-silk laying about, and eventually the field-hands complained to the farmer about it. He said something to Silken, and Silken helpfully cleaned up after herself, laying out the used silk in nice, orderly bundles once she was done cleaning them. The old farmer looked at those ropes of silk harder than steel, and his one eye widened in astonishment.

"And that is how Silken Weave and Hard Bitten invented spider-silk thread, which became a mainstay of Equestrian barding, as well as some amazing construction materials, but as for how they figured out how to use that silk, and how Silken Weave left her talents to posterity - that's another story."

Cherie scrunched her face at the baker as they worked at a third batch of cookie-dough. "But what's the moral of the story? I don't really understand."

The baker sighed. "Oh, I said I wasn't good at kindness stories. I suppose you could say, it's supposed to mean that you should take ponies as they come, and don't expect the worst of anything strange you come across? We put too much on appearances, and the familiar. I don't know, filly. Just give your old Uncle a chance. Worst comes to worse, you're much younger, and you'll probably outlive him."

Dream-Sculpting

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I had returned to my dreamscape to meditate, and think over the news from the northeast. As fall grew colder and the last harvests approached, the skirmishing around the fords between Pepin City and the White Rose in that unpronounceable heap of stonework grew more frequent, which is not to say constant. A continual stream of casualties rolled south from the duc's physician in our ambulances, until I was thinking of posting either myself or Rye Daughter permanently in the duc's castle. Rye wasn't nearly seasoned enough to be operating as a frontline surgeon by her lonesome, and I was uncertain what might happen if I left myself in the vicinity of the Duchesse's fiancée for that long. It had been awkward enough earlier that year when I spent a tense week re-training the duc's physician. I couldn't get out of that place quickly enough.

Two more Company ponies died in the skirmishing. Pauldron Spur, an earth pony recruit from Hydromel, caught a bad blow in a fight for the main ford, and died of massive head trauma. A week later, one of the young unicorns that had come down with Occluded Blade died under the walls of Hohonahkemenie proper, on the wrong side of the fords. She had been trying to levitate a heavy boulder which had almost crushed one of her section-mates as they chased the remnants of a broken White Rose patrol back to their own gates. Hidden Jewel caught the boulder, but didn't see the spray of bolts flung by a war-engine on the walls above her. She had traveled eighteen hundred miles, crossed two portals, and passed through two different hidden colonies to join the Company of her ancestors, only to die months afterwards in an inconsequential little border affair.

Now Duc le Murs himself was absent from his capital, his bridegroom's procession having passed through Dance Hall the day before, headed north on the Road. We had resolutely ignored each others' presence, and thus the Bride's peace was maintained.

I just wondered what the foals had been named.

Clearly meditation was not my strong suit, but even a saint of focus and equanimity would not have been able to concentrate on not concentrating when their own dreamscape began spontaneously growing mist-sculptures. A spectral grey-shading-into-white model of an angry, wizened unicorn grew up out of the ground-mist, scowling angrily down at something hidden in the distance. A second twin to the original statuary grew on my other side, staring across my head at the back of the other statue's patchy mane. As they formed more distinctly, I recognized clever caricatures of the bitter old stallion Obscured Blade.

Then flaming balls of fury began blowing holes through each one in turn. The gouting mist flowing out of the craters blown in each cloud-sculpture failed in any serious way to resemble viscera or blood. I got up and went looking for the sculptor before one of her short rounds blasted me right out of my dreams.

She was in her very own little crater, ripples of dream-energy sweeping the mists away from her hooves where she stood, braced, her wings stretched out. As she stared at one of the statues, another globe of red-yellow fire formed in front of her, and accelerated rapidly towards her target. Half of the cloud-statue's forehead blasted away in the explosion, and I could see her tongue hanging out as she tried to craft the liberated tendrils of mist into brain-matter on the fly. She was… less than successful.

"Maybe I ought to show you some of my anatomical texts. You seem to have some rather odd ideas of what things should look like."

"Bah! Realism is for glamours. This is VENTING!" And she fired another globe at her target, blasting away its' tail at the dock.

"Is it just me, or is this a new trick? You said before that you didn't have this sort of control."

"Old goat has been drilling us. Making me visualize, claimed that if I could walk through it, I could man-ip-pul-late the stuff. Never could do what he wanted, no matter how much he yelled. Called me names, 'bat-pony', 'toothy damned ting', dat sort of thing. Said worse to Bad Apple. Haven't heard 'mud pony' since my gran-mere got eaten by putain ghouls. Called Feufollet a 'white goat', whatever the tartarus that is. Evil old GOAT." She yelled, blowing the head off of one of her statue-targets.

A white goat was an equine sacrifice in certain esoteric ritual traditions. She didn't need to know. "Look, Obscured Blade just lost one of his students up in the northern districts. Trained her for however long, sent her into the sections, and the first thing she did? Died ugly while showing off for her peers. That's the sort of thing that leaves a teacher feeling stroppy. You have to give him some leeway. I'd feel the same if you managed to get yourself hurt, Cherie."

"Bad Apple's sensitive, more than you'd think. He's nasty, he is."

"He's a unicorn, who has trained three generations of Company unicorns. And somehow? He's found himself training a donkey, an earth pony, and a thestral. The world's been turned upside down as far as he's concerned. And he isn't young anymore, he's not flexible enough to deal with that sort of topsy-turvy geography."

"Hmph!" said the little thestral, and fired off a spray of fiery razors that cut her cloud-sculptures into decaying slices. The mist formed itself into double-helixes, and spun widdershins in a display of wondrous complexity.

"So," she said, "Apparently dream-stuff is a lot more malleable than shadows. Does whatever I tell it to do. Maybe I could even re-arrange your loud, ugly dreamscape, Monsieur!"

"No! Don't – "

But I was too late, and a great wind drove away my concealing mists.

Blood everywhere. Dismembered bodies. And on a throne, once hidden by the mists, the foal's body, flayed, still breathing erratically, that horrible sound once hidden by the clicking and buzzing. The vile little thing, whose plotting had nearly killed my Duchesse and her foals, who had bribed the physician, who had paid for it all. Who I had butchered like a pig in the slaughterhouse. And whose screams tormented my dreams until I had built this protective construct to suppress the nightmares, with my Spirit's collusion.

Cherie screamed and screamed and screamed. And I couldn't do anything to make her not have seen.

The Filly Fixes What She Broke

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"Gibblets, sir, he's in there! I'm sorry, I don't know what happened, but he's in there and he won't wake up!" Eidetic memory is how I got where I am today.

"Cherie here knows a little of what happened. You have the key?" Being a doctor is largely about memorizing things, and remembering them at the right time.

"Well, heck, he's staring. That's unsettling." You don't have to be a genius to be a doctor, you just have to remember a million things, and retrieve them at the right time, in the right time.

"No response, that's not good. Cherie, tell me again what you did, and what he did." Oh, there's a little theory, and a bit of math, and if you want to be a surgeon, you need impeccable mouth dexterity, or a really steady magical field. But at the lowest most functional level of medicine? Memory.

"I was practicing like Uncle Blade told me to, except the shadows weren't listening to me, so I decided to do it in dreams instead. Monsieur's dream is most realistic, very stable. I figured, it was sort of like reality?" So that's how I ended up a doctor's apprentice, and how I extracted a useful education from that old nipcheese despite his best efforts.

"So you were image-casting with Sawbones' dreamstuff?" I am a greedy sponge, it is my magic.

"Well, that, and maybe, I was trying to do what Bad Apple does? With the fireballs?" I literally cannot forget anything.

"You were sculpting his stable dream-self, and then BLOWING HOLES IN IT WITH FIREBALLS?" Hey, Gibblets, stop yelling at the filly.

"Master, his lips just started moving. And now it's stopped." Wasn't her fault.

"So he's not totally unresponsive. That's good. Well, better. For future reference to all three of you, dreamstuff is not a glamour or a phantasm. It's literally part of a pony's psyche. Handle it with care. Things are usually the way they are for a reason. Rye, BA, go find something to do in the front office, or help in the wards. The next bit is very private, and even I shouldn't have to know this shit, but needs must. Go on, scoot. Zebra needs his privacy as much as any other person, and bad enough Cherie's been playing target practice in his mindscape." It's amazing how much I can remember of conversations in which I was effectively comatose.

"OK, now, spill. What does it look like in there? Before you started blowing holes in him, and after you made your mess."

"Monsieur's dreams have looked the same ever since he came back from the Bloody Foaling."

"The what?"

"It's what I hear they're calling it up in the northlands, what Monsieur did in Rennet City. The recruits get letters, the armsponies talk."

"I know what it is, they shouldn't be telling those damn stories to foals!" Too late for all that, she'd seen everything. Why wasn't she screaming anymore?

"Pfft. Anyway, he's been hiding in this grey cloudy bank ever since then, full of cloudstuff and annoying noises. You get used to it after a while. I thought he was doing it to keep the Princess from pestering him, you know? She didn't like it, not a bit." She didn't like it because she helped make it.

"OK, that covers 'before'. What about 'after'?"

"Not nice. I think some of it was the Bloody Foaling. Stuff about cutting the heart out of an infant foal, and throat-slicing, and bloody axes. Mixed in with the Princess being the Nightmare, really nasty stuff, eating monsters, eating foals." Oh, fewmets.

"Watching all of it was a filly, or kind of a filly, nailed to a chair. Cut to shreds, but still living. Weird-looking, her face kept flickering, and she looked like different ponies. Looked a little like me, once. Then, while I was staring at the filly in the chair, I hear this screaming. Sounded like me – except I wasn't doing the screaming. I turn around and there's another me, standing in front of Monsieur, screamin' like somepony's eating her leg. I try to make her stop, but it's just another dream-figment. Monsieur wasn't reacting to me, then. Just staring and crying quiet-like at the dam' weeper." This was new information to me. A defensive mechanism, I suppose? Nothing I could do about it as I was.

"Ugh, that certainly sounds like high-octane nightmare fuel. Speaking of our Dark Mistress, why didn't you go to her first? She may be mad as a hatter, but she's certainly the house expert on screwing around with dreamstuff." Good question.

"Haven't seen her all night. Was part of why I was blowing holes in dream-statues of Uncle. Couldn't find the Princess to play hide and go seek again. Strange, right?"

"I go for months on end without laying sensoria upon Her Darkness. Been damn awkward since she had to rebuild my eyes. Hrm. Well, she'll show up at some point, she always does. I was just as glad as not that you pulled me out of that meeting, the Captain's insomnia is rapidly becoming all of our problem. Thinks we're playing tricks on the Company, spinning grand illusions of the Mistress to 'shore up our mystique and to seize control of the Company out from under her hooves'."

"There you are, damn you! We weren't finished."

"I am sorry, your eminence, but an emergency came to my attention."

"What could possibly constitute an emergency in a back room of the hospital? Sawbones, stop lying about like that and come to attention!"

"He can't, m'lady, that's the emergency. A bit of a training accident with the apprentices, we think. I'm working on it, before we have an actual emergency and no doctor on hoof. You look tired, ma'am, why don't you pick up a sleeping draught from Rye Daughter and go get some sleep. The Company can't operate properly with a sleep-deprived commander."

"Faugh!" The Captain was starting to show signs of erratic behavior. Said the brain-blasted Annalist laying comatose in his cot, waiting for the witches' coven to staple his psyche back together.

"OK, look, here's what you're going to do. You're going to go back into dreamland, and find the mess you made of our Annalist. You're going to re-spin the mist-scape you tore up to make your little sculptures and fireball range, and see if that doesn't bring Sawbones back from his time-out corner. Then you, me, and that old fraud with the horn are going to have a nice long talk about boundaries, training regimens, and expectations. He's been the training unicorn for the Company for half a century, but I've been with the Company before there was a Company, and I bloody well outrank his fanatical ass."

"Yessir."

She appeared in front of me, and my dreams restarted. Full of screaming and blood and viscera. I saw Cherie wince, and there was another flicker, like the screaming thestral filly was reappearing. The real vision of Cherie frowned in concentration, and the false Cherie blew away in the wind. A reverse spiral of cloudy dream-stuff poured down from above, and began coating the horrors like a sticky, wet snow. It deadened the sounds, and hid the ugliness away from my inner sight.

Finally Cherie was done, and my dreamscape was peaceful again. Trees and bushes had grown up out of the ground, coated in heavy snow, their bare but sturdy branches weighed down like they were just shy of snapping from the burden. Deep, fluffy snow covered the lane curving down to the big house, and the garçonnière above the kitchen-house. The rose-bushes were simple mounds of snow with the occasional leaf poking up out into the cold air.

I sighed. There was silence. The snow deadened everything, put everything into hibernation. This would work. It wasn't mine, but we had just established that I needed to get out of my own mind more often. Lest I find myself locked inside with no way out.

"That'll do, filly. Thank you for coming back," I said.

Pulling In Tandem

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The death of Hidden Jewel had brought unexpected movement within the Company. Obscured Blade had taken the death of one of his protégés very poorly, in ways beyond mere torment of witch-apprentices. Overnight, he shifted from obstructing the Captain's every plan to enabling every wild start her sleep-deprived mind could conceive.

This gravely undermined the Lieutenant and the ground-cohort commanders, who had come to the Company through their Uncle's gauntlet. The terror and pride of that experience bound them together in a deeper brotherhood. Something greater than this shallow fellowship those of us who grew up outside of the greater Company can boast of. But it also leaves them vulnerable to the bullying and fulminations of that stubborn old bokor, and now that he was pulling with the Captain rather than planting his hooves against her direction, the wagon leapt forward.

The three elder warlocks shipped out the morning of my little episode, with orders to shut down the fords. The night of their arrival, Otonashi and the Crow set up and executed a perfect ambush on the usual caribou incursion, hiding them from their fellows in the fort across the way, and isolating them from each other. The panicked skirmishers, chased by Otonashi's phantasmal monsters, ran into the prepared triplines, and were demolished without a drop of Company blood.

Night after night, for three nights, the skirmishers of the White Rose died, each time losing larger contingents. The short witches' section had been accompanied by a round dozen of picked sections from the other cohorts to reinforce Fuller Falchion's Second, which had replaced Otonashi's Third at Pepin City in the first week of fall. By the time that the Captain herself arrived with the balance of the Fourth on that third morning, the caribou had lost more than a company's worth of infantry trying to force their way through our now-impenetrable screens. The eastern bank of the river was now death for the rebel.

As fall blew into the province, the river began rising. Heavier rains upstream increased the flow, and closed first one of the up-stream fords, and then the lowest ford. Bad timing for the Company, as this was the exact time when the Captain had started infiltrating glamoured sections across the ford to pass through the draws around the looming walls of Hohonahkemenie. Two got past that first night without being discovered, but the third and fourth were discovered by an enemy sweep, and the infiltration operation degenerated into an encounter battle under the war-engines of the fort.

We lost Pers Klemm, a buck from the Rennet recruit-companies, and another three ponies badly wounded before the reaction force could make its way across the fords and lay down enough covering fire to extract the wounded and survivors. The two sections which had gotten past the enemy cordon disappeared into the back-country as instructed, and it was generally agreed that the fight would have appeared to the enemy as a repeat of the mess which had killed Obscured Blade's prize student in the first place.

Rye Daughter and I had arrived with the portable surgical kit in anticipation of casualties, so I was there on the banks of the ford when the oxen powered through the rushing water with their catch across their withers. We got to work there in the darkness, Rye wearing a dark-vision amulet, and we did very good work indeed. I was trying out some new techniques I had dreamed up, and avoided amputation in a case for which I would have brought out the bonesaw before. I was increasingly certain that there was something Spirit-inspired going on with the Company wounded – one jack had gotten a ballista bolt through his femoral artery, and he should have bled out before the oxen could get them back across the river, and yet, I could have sworn that the artery was in the midst of re-knitting as I was stitching it closed. Whatever it was, it wasn't enough to save Pers Klemm, but then, precious little will bring you back from having a boulder dropped on your rack from forty yards overhead.

The infiltrators hooked up with the deep-recon pegasi two nights later, and we started to get a more complete view of the battlespace. The province of Elkhorn had been under rebel control for over a decade and a half. If any stretch of Tambelon could be called the heartland of the White Rose, well, it wasn't exactly Elkhorn, but it was still enthusiastically rebellious. The rebellion had been very good for Elkhorn, aside from the loss of traderoutes through the loyalist provinces on the eastern side of the river. The farmers in the hamlets above Hohonahkemenie were not likely to be at all sympathetic to any of our entreaties, and anypony likely to be enticed by a return of trade had already moved away.
No obvious insertion points had been found for an airmobile incursion, which made the prospects of a proper flanking or envelopment approach… less than optimal. There were fewer swamps, underdeveloped prairies, or woodlots on the western side of the river, which meant that we'd have little luck repeating our trick with the hidden base that had worked so well in Rennet.

Under the heading of 'good news', however, I can report that the regiment actually holding Hohonahkemenie was looking distinctly moth-eaten according to the ponies which were conducting careful aerial surveys of the fortification. A season's worth of attrition warfare had gone distinctly against the White Rose, and the unit actually holding the walls looked to be at half-strength. They looked like they'd been bled white.

The infiltrators had reported that the farmsteads around the fort were full of recuperating wounded, and there were fresh ashes in many private and public crematories. I was a bit surprised by that last bit of news – given the attitude I'd seen among the Imperials towards their own dead, I hadn't expected that sort of squeamishness among the White Rose. Especially not after the ugly display they had used to greet us in Menomenie the year before.

In lieu of a proper investment, Obscured Blade led the witches' coven in a campaign to terrorize the caribou holding Hohonahkemenie. We'd found some blind spots along the bluffs out of view of the walls on the far side of the fords, and some ponies from the ground cohorts dug out a series of blinds in the darkness of successive nights, under the protection of no-see-um glamours. From these blinds, the witches extended their baleful influence through that ancient hulk. Evil little motes of darkness danced through their halls, and sickly will-o-the-wisps drifted above their fighting platforms. Anypony stupid enough to touch any of these phantasms found that they were not the simple projections they appeared. The dark wisps stung like wasps, and the glow-imps expired with an electrical shock that could scorch and burn.

Inside the blinds against the bluff bedrock, we had smuggled a hoof-full of miners borrowed from Brass Tone's operation, earth ponies with affinities for rock-shaping. They could burrow through living rock, and dig where nopony would ever think to look for military miners. Give this much to the Captain – her stubbornness saw ways forward where other professionals threw up their hooves and insisted on impossibilities.

The Captain brought Mad Jack up to Pepin City, and had him construct bastions well forward, to hold war-engines sited so as to cover the far bank of the river from the eastern side. We began to regularly send out sections during the day to provoke enemy fire from the walls of the fortress. Those sections included enough bowmares to provide a credible threat to the enemy hiding behind their walls, and explain why we were out there like that. Nothing was accomplished but the waste of ammunition and the interruption of rest. They couldn't sleep in the night for fear of wandering witches-constructs at night, and were distracted in the day by Company armsponies rushing their walls and trying to lure out sally parties.

The constant provocations helped us map out their fields of fire, and positions of all of their engines. But then we received word that the attrition and action had drawn reinforcements. The infiltrators and the deep-recon patrols reported a column at least two regiments strong had begun moving north from the vicinity of Falaises du Conseil, which probably meant witchy reinforcement as well.

The miners hadn't nearly gotten far enough under the walls to put our fresh blasting powder to use. They were told to keep digging, and maybe we could put it to use in another campaign. We had run out time, and we'd use what we had to hoof.

That night, while the reinforcing column was still a half-day's trot south of the fords, the witches let loose one of their grand illusions, a black, stinking bank of smoke and evil things, that stung and shocked and hid everything from sight. The White Rose ran around in a panic, some of them locking down their sally ports, and some spinning up their war-engines in preparation for the attack.

You'd think they'd have learned to expect aerial attack, but then, this particular regiment hadn't been at Falaises du Conseil, and we'd been careful to not use the pegasi and griffins here. The Crow lit up pathfinders' beacons for the bollard strike-force, and the Lieutenant's ponies made a perfect delivery of their ordinance against the walls of Hohonahkemenie. Solid-core bollards smashed apart catapults, and flame-bollards detonated in the guts of ballistae. The majority of the enemy's war-engines died in the course of ten seconds' bombardment, as did many of their crew, immolated by the successive strike of hollow-scored ‘jug' bollards full of distilled alcohol. The fires from the flame bollards caught the resulting aerosoled clouds of alcohol alight, and the detonation blasted away the witches' black mist.

The explosion was the cue for the ground assault, and the ponies of the Second and Fourth surged up the draws and climbed desperately through the kill-zones under the fortress's narrow ravelins. The remnant of the aerial cohort swarmed over the sally ports and the ravelins, trying to keep the enemy from getting to their fighting platforms, spending blood to save their brethren swarming the slopes below. We lost Dress Left in this desperate rush, as that pegasus mare found herself caught on a hedge of pikes-heads thrust up in the air. Other pegasi were badly wounded here, but enough caribou got to the walls to drop rocks and smaller boulders on the attacking force below.

There were a number of wounded outside the walls as storm-teams broke down the sally-ports at two places. The corridors behind the sally ports were killing zones, and we lost two ponies to the gauntlet, the jack Jonguleur, a recruit from Lait Blanc, and the earth pony mare Longfurrow, a recruit from Rennet City, both killed by stones flung down upon the storming-party forcing the passage. The rush got the Company's ponies out of the passage, and at the enemy's throats before more could die in the close quarters.

As the storming parties cleared the sally-ports, the witches rejoined the fight, and generated illusions of Company storming parties swarming over the walls in three places. The enemy, apparently surrounded and shattered by the bombardment, fled for the rear gates of the fortress. They fled faster than we could get our storming-force through the sally ports, and just like that, it was over. The infiltrators observed the retreat of the wrecked regiment, but didn't try to stop them. Even shattered, they still outnumbered our infiltration force almost ten to one.

The Captain brought Brass Tone's miners up from their digging operations in the bluff under the now-captured fortress, and set them to cutting bore-holes in the walls facing the river and the draws on either side. Carters began hauling carefully sealed wagons through the fords, and up the draws beside the fortress. We threw out a screening force in the half-harvested fields behind Hohonahkemenie, and covered the carters as they brought load after load of blasting powder into the captured fort via the main gates.

The miners drilled bore-holes as quickly as they could, but the recon patrols returning with the dawn set everything into overdrive. Time was running out. They ended up dusting the fighting-platforms with the leftover blasting powder, and filled the surviving ammunition-racks along the ravelins. The pike-heads of the reinforcing column were glinting in the distance when the carters hauled the last of the miners down the draws towards the fords, followed quickly by the screen-ponies of the ground cohorts. The griffin specialists set spark to the fuses, and flew off to join the rest of the Company drawn up behind the war-engine bastions above the eastern side of the fords.

The explosion flung ancient stones high above the draws and the flowing river. The wall facing us collapsed in a stony cloud of debris, and the sally ports, ravelins and all, slumped into the draws, blocking them in the process. You could see dust gouting out from the blinds the miners and the witches had used in the bluff below – the detonation must have cracked open the partially-cut mines we had planned to accomplish this. Well, no effort is ever wasted if you live to learn from it.

The recon ponies reported that the enemy vanguard had actually gotten into the fortress just before it blew. That might explain why they didn't try our position afterwards. Their fortress was destroyed, and their last probe had been met with a face full of blasting powder.

The Captain sure showed us, though, didn't she? She got her fortress.

She'll be insufferable from here out.

In The Muck

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The Company settled back into garrison in an uncertain mood. We had been victorious in our limited fall campaign, and the losses had been acceptable by any reasonable standard. But it had been an odd sort of victory, the destruction of a physical object, and the termination of a season of skirmishing and raiding, more so than the annihilating demolition of the enemy that had become our accustomed conclusion to a campaign season.

The White Rose re-occupied the position that had once been a formidable fortress, a stone stronghold that had survived every blow thrown against it in eleven centuries of intermittent warfare on the upper river. The shattered regiment which had held the fords against the loyalists of Pepin had been replaced by a fresh regiment of earth ponies, but they sensibly built a castra hiberna well back from the edge of the bluffs, and didn't challenge our ponies for the far side of the fords, or really, the draws below the bluffs themselves. They dug out a couple of posts in the ruins above the shattered sally ports, and if you were intrepid, you might spot a couple of pike-heads bobbing over those dugouts held by the ponies on outpost duty. They sat there, keeping an an eye on what had once been easy passages through the steep river-bluffs, but were now tumbledown draws full of boulders and wreckage. The autumn rains would no doubt complete the destruction began by our borrowed miners and continued with the aid of several tons of blasting powder.

Over the course of the rainy season and the winter to come, we slowly reduced our commitment to the districts around Pepin City, and drew back into the fortifications around Dance Hall, the Deep Mines, and the Aerie. The northern door had been slammed shut, and welded into place.

No matter how cheaply we got away from the fords in the abstract, in the tangible world, I still had to haul ambulances full of agony back to Dance Hall over not particularly good roads. We took them in easy stages, stopping twice to overnight outside of walled hamlets. The hardened ambulances, arranged in a laager and pegged in behind quickly-driven stades making a rudimentary fence-palisade, acted as our defensive walls. Tarps strung between the ambulance imperials kept off the nightly rains, but there was little to keep us out of the mud and muck. I roped together an improvised hammock for Rye Daughter, and slept in the muck with the oxen. This left Rye volunteered to tend to the wounded as the least-filthy member of the medical section.

By the time we rolled over the newly-constructed drawbridge on the main Road bastion beside Dance Hall, we were all filthy enough that the ponies on guard looked at us like we were vagrants. Even Rye was mud-speckled and bedraggled. I snorted at the display, and borrowed two of the infuriatingly dry layabouts to come along with us to the main gate and help unload the ambulances into the wards. We gathered further 'volunteers' as we encountered them on the way, until I had a full section of formerly-dry-and-clean ponies to do our fetching and carrying.

Once we got all of the wounded into their beds, I sent off the oxen and Rye to the baths, while I went from bed to bed to assess our cargo, and to make sure that nopony had developed bed fever or caught something on the road. The ones that had popped stitches had been re-stitched on the road, and would need additional courses of antibiotics for safety's sake. But I could hardly dose everypony on general principles - I just wasn't farming enough mold to make that work out. Not to mention that some of the texts warned about over-using that particular nostrum, claiming that overuse could lessen its effect in a given herd.

I was checking the brace on a corporal's wing when a pony stepped out of the shadows in the back corner of the second ward. I turned around and raised my brow at the filly. Cherie had hit a growth spurt. The little thestral was starting to grow up.

“Ey, you been good to your elders, pouliche? Long time no see."

“Hello, Uncle Sawbones. Nice to see you again," she said, stiffly.

“Huh. This you on your best behaviour, now? Or did a Changeling put you in a pod and come out to practice her courtesies?" I looked over her, wondering what was going on. Obscured Blade had been known to beat good manners into his students in the past, but that old mule had been up front at the fords, in the thick of it for that matter. He couldn't possibly have been back long enough to beat the cute out of Cherie.

“Uncle Gibblets says I need to stop 'treating you like my chew-toy', and give you the respect of a 'nuncle'. Not exactly sure just yet what that means, but I guess? Stop calling you Monsieur, for one." She looked sad and a little miserable. My heart went out to her, but I was covered in filth, and didn't want to get any of it on her.

“Well, does that keep you from helping me? We could use somepony with clean hooves to help change some bandages. Wanna help?"

“Really? Yeah, sure!" she beamed at me. Then she shook her wings out, and repeated, more gravely, “Of course, Uncle. Please, let me be of service." But her eyes still sparkled.

I got a good deal of enthusiastic assistance out of her before a ruddy-cheeked Rye Daughter returned to take over the work-load, and to manage the filly-volunteer.

You have no idea how good a hot bath feels, after a slog through the fall rains and mud.

What fields that were harvested that year, were insanely productive. The ponies of Mondovi had claimed most of the near-by abandoned homesteads to feed the multitude of empty bellies drawn into the central province by the removal of the ghoul threat. The construction of Dance Hall and her outlying works had swallowed up a lot of prime farmland, but on the plus side, almost none of it had been under cultivation at the time of construction.

But the combination of the two seizures of farmland - by the Mondovi farming collective, and by the Company for its fortifications - created a political headache when the survivors and heirs started drifting into the central districts about halfway through the summer, increasing in intensity as fall approached and the time for the fall plantings charged us with lances couched.

Everypony wanted to get their winter crops into the ground to prepare for the crowds of returnees expected the next spring. Many families had sent their youngest and most resilient down the Bride's Road from the upper districts and Rennet with cart-loads full of tents and sacks of seeds for this very purpose. Many of these young-bloods arrived with maps and letters of inheritance or proxies, but some of them came with only airy assurances and bald-faced claims of dubious authority.

More than one hoof-fight broke out in the outer fields when returnees arrived in expectation of fallow wilderness, only to encounter a Mondovi donkey or earth-pony fetlock-deep in cultivated soil, harvesting a crop from rich bottomlands or worse, tending still-growing crops. From what I understand, only one fatality resulted from this rolling skirmish between the locals and the returning refugees, but the small town jail quickly filled to overcapacity with the bruised or broken losers of these little turf squabbles.

And the losers were almost always the returnees. The Mondovans had grown hard and resilient under the pressure of six and a half years in a cauldron like central Pepin, but more importantly, the only justices of the peace in the central districts were, miracles of miracles, local notables. One returning worthy tried to regain his judicial seat, but found that the ruins of Durand were an inhospitable locale for a court session. His surviving peer from the judiciary of Durand, who had set up shop at the standing court in Guilliame's Ravin at the sufferance of the local judges, told him to pound sand, and go find a less prestigious line of work.

This partiality on the part of the judiciary against the returnees nearly produced a riot in Mondovi while we were up at the fords seeing off the White Rose. Octavius and his ponies of the Third found it necessary to disperse the mob from in front of the little courthouse in town, and three sections of Company armsponies were needed to herd the malcontents back into their tent city outside the new Bride's Gate the engineer had carved out of the ramparts behind the previously-mentioned drawbridge.

Dancing Shadows stepped into the political mess at this point, and negotiated with the judges and town council of Mondovi a compromise. A fund in the name of the absent Duc would claim as condemned property the lands once owned by the deceased caribou of the lost villages around the ruins of Caribou City, and assign equivalent lands to the claimants of lands built over by the new fortifications, or seized by the Mondovan farming collective. Actual proof of claims would be required for simple disbursement, and for those with only air and assertion to back their claims, they would find themselves in debt to the Duc for their rent, until such time as they were able to marshal testimony from established farming families of their district that they were the proper owners of their farmed land.

The only question left unanswered by that alicornic display of even-hoofedness was the composition of the land-fund's board of trustees. I didn't like the look I caught from the jenny when she tracked me down in my office. Not even my claim that I was wanted for murder in the combined duchies brooked any mercy from Dancing Shadows. She smugly informed me that the administration of the two duchies would be entirely independent of each other, and I wasn't wanted for anything in Pepin.

Do you have any idea how boring land disputes can be when you aren't materially involved in the argument?

Mangled And Illegible Records

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The maps of the central districts were patchy at best. Those for Modovi district were intact, but largely irrelevant. The records for Caribou district had been destroyed along with the courthouse and the surrounding city, and those of the two dead districts north and south along the riverside might as well have been destroyed. The district seats had been sacked, abandoned, overrun by ghouls, and heavily fought-over in the extermination campaign of the last fall. Sections sent to pick through the ruins of those courthouses had returned with half-rotten, half-moldy logs of congealed parchment and wood-pulp. Some desultory efforts had been essayed towards tweezing those sodden masses into recoverable documents, but nothing of interest had been recovered so far. Mostly birth and irrelevant court records, to be honest.

So, the Duc's Caribou Trust had begun drawing up fresh maps from the Company's very limited supply of parchment, ghoul-hide having turned out to be dreadfully unsuited to the task, especially after a Company blade or lance-head had gotten through with the ghoul in question. Tends to rot right through, no matter how you preserve it. Shame, really.

Maps, right. The new terrain of Mondovi district - with hundreds of acres of prime farmland seized and built over by the rambling lines of fortification and claimed for cleared lines-of-fire and glacis. Dance Hall herself took up nearly a hundred acres of what I was repeatedly, tearfully informed to have been the most productive cropland in the central provinces by a, let's say, heavily interested party. Waving a legitimate deed in her hoof, more's the pity. You never want to spend time reading property deeds, they are monumentally cryptic, often written in an unreadable or incompetent hoof, often incorporating survey references to neighboring structures, and even trees which have been long-lost to time and memory. My source for the quality of the lost acres under Dance Hall was writ down for a hundred equivalent acres from the Trust's exchange reserve - when we got around to surveying said reserve. Almost the entirety of the district's titles had either been pooled voluntarily by the Mondovans, or invalidated by construction, or seized by the Mondovans in their zeal to get fallow fields within hoof's-reach planted and productive. Again, grist for the hypothetical exchange reserve.

More important than the technical details of title and ownership of lands condemned for current usage by Dance Hall and its clients in the incorporated town, was the practical matter of putting the angry, landless farmers - burdened with sacks of grain seed and unemployment - to some sort of productive work. And we were rocketing towards the drop-dead end of the planting season for the winter crops.

All the returning ponies who had claim on outlying acreage not under cultivation by Mondovi had already cleared and worked their seed into the thirsty soil, new or re-established homesteads having sprung up like mushrooms all along the cleared corridors and here and there throughout the bottomlands. One of the Mondovi judges, along with one of her peers from Guilliame's Ravin, was making the circuit of the new plantings along with a section from the Third for… let's call it emphasis of authority. There was little we could do about adventurers simply claiming to be the surviving niece or grand-son or second cousin once removed of the deceased landowners, absent a rival claimant, but to record the claims, and leave the matter to later legal counter-claims once the Duc got his courts in the central districts onto a less distinctly ad-hoc basis.

Of course, this buck-the-can-down-the-road approach wouldn't suffice if there actually were two or more claimants to a given plot actually present in the district. There were three sets of these lovely ponies glaring at each other in the queue of petitioners to appear before the board of trustees.

Who couldn't see a damn one of them before we established some sort of baselines. What we really needed to do was hire some surveyors to go out and do a proper survey. Sadly, ghouls seem to have eaten the last pair of trained surveyors in the province. Or perhaps they were just hiding somewhere in the northern districts, or hadn't been found yet, or something even more prosaic. But the prolonged exposure to the giddy foolishness of land squabbles had left me feeling rather punch-drunk and increasingly silly.

I was on the verge of proposing we draft all disputants and send them out to burn over and prepare an arbitrary swathe of land deep in the wastelands, and let that be their contribution towards future consideration from the Trust once we got our horseapples in a presentable state, when my attention was arrested by the sudden eruption of an alicornic phantasm at the back of the hall, bellowing at the top of her nonexistent lungs.

"INTRUDERS! Wait, no, petitioners? What in Tartarus is going on here?" The Spirit in her Nightmare aspect had appeared in full archaic panoply, ready for battle. Surprisingly enough, this did not cause a panic among the civilians in the hall, not even among the glowering petitioners sitting not-especially-patiently in the benches around the transparent hooves of the Nightmare. I looked around, and noted that the guards and Dancing Shadows were quite aware of our Dark Mistress and her increasingly perplexed countenance, but nopony else was even glancing in her direction.

I marched down the aisle to address the Spirit, saying, "My apologies, Mistress, but you seem to be manifesting only to the Company at the moment. Is there an emergency? Please, tell me there's an emergency!"

"A limited manifestation? How bizarre! I'm not sure I can recall this happening before. Actually, I'm not sure I can recall what I was doing last. What night is it?"

Well, that was disconcerting. A disoriented Spirit sounded like the sort of thing I should probably get well away from uninvolved civilians.

"Chairmare, I believe I have another engagement of which I have just been reminded. My apologies for leaving you in the lurch?" I turned to look at the nonplussed Dancing Shadows.

She nodded, voicelessly, staring at the Spirit. Then she found her voice, saying, "Of course, Doctor. We will miss your input, but I can see that requires your attention. Carry on."

I walked out of the hall the board had been given for its deliberations and audiences, and the Spirit followed me, looming tentatively behind and to the left. Once I had found a place in the corridor outside where my talking to apparent thin air wouldn't alarm the civilians, I turned around and addressed the Spirit.

"It is the sixth week of autumn, Lady. I haven't seen you in weeks, but I've been away from Dance Hall. Nopony reported seeing you at either the fords or Hohonahkemenie, which I found rather surprising. We had almost a full deployment, and I really had expected some sort of manifestation, especially when things started getting… spectacular."

She looked down at me, pensive. "I have only been seeing the foals this last - several nights? I am not sure I am experiencing time at the same rate as my subjects right now. It was summer only - three nights ago? And a few nights before that, the sneaking intruder. I think I - I smell another intruder. Maybe several? Not inside the walls, not yet." She looked around, not at our surroundings, but something beyond it.

All my cock-eyed good humour bled out of me. The Spirit was missing entire weeks of time, perhaps even months. And it might have been going on for even longer. What did we really know about her, how she worked? I wasn't even positive that she was truly the ghost of Gibblets' lost, exiled princess, all I could be sure of was that she acted like it, and reportedly behaved and thought like the long-gone alicorn. She certainly terrified our pet Equestrian enough.

But I'm told that the lost Equestrian princess is imprisoned upon her celestial body, the proverbial 'Mare in the Moon'. Was she projecting somehow through portals, across magical wardings, through world after world after world, to walk in spirit with us here on the other side of the Chain? Or was our Spirit some sort of fragment, some - artifact? Was she so princess-like because Gibblets was here to project his princess upon the screen of our aetherial essence?

It hadn't mattered before, because whatever else the Spirit was, she was very real, very substantial, in somewhat limited but increasingly potent ways. And we had always known that she was mad, disordered in her thoughts. But the lost princess had been, according to our goblin-source, also quite mad in her own hide, her time before the exile. How do you tell madness and disorder from - somepony not complete in their existence? The two states were easy to confuse from external observation.

I stared pensively at the discomfited Spirit, who wilted under my gaze, despite her great height and undoubtable stature. "How do you know it's only been a few nights? Would you notice if several or many nights had bled together with each other, discontinuously, if nothing else was apparent to show the change in nights? Do ponies often appear and disappear from your sight?"

"Constantly, Acolyte. It is rather a condition of our existence. Things blink in and out of our vision, ponies come and go. But perhaps things have gotten… more erratic? I have no idea. But - " Her head jerked away, focusing on the world outside of these walls.

"ATTACK!"

And she leapt away at a dead gallop. I could hear the alarm in the distance, even through the walls, and then the main watch-tower echoing the alarm. Assault on the walls, sounded like the north ramparts.

Enemies at the wall!

The Diversion

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Reconstruction afterwards suggested that the attacking force caught one of the rampart posts with a ranged attack, something that left frost burns and debilitated if not disabled the victim. It's the only explanation how the enemy got across the water-filled ditch and up the stone-clad embankment and rampart without either pony getting a lance-head into them. Whatever happened, we lost the earth pony mare Close Furrows and stallion Pear Pit before any response arrived on scene. One of them got off their screamer, probably Close Furrows. The enemy also tripped the screamer circuit embedded in the discord's seam along the edge of the rampart, so that the rest of the section holding the northern ramparts got a proper earful with plenty of warning.

The ponies at the posts east and west of the incursion converged on the alarm, and the survivor of this initial response reported seeing a white figure on the far edge of the drainage ditch, emitting some sort of light-flash in the direction away from her approach. Two similarly white figures were spotted coming over the edge of the compromised fighting position, and the struck ponies' section-mates tried to rush the enemy before they could become established on top of the wall.

The survivor later described the death of her partner, the unicorn stallion Silver Stroke, at the hooves of the attackers, and implicitly, the likely deaths of the two from the eastern post – Hohenfelden, recruit-buck from Rennet, and Heureux, a jenny-recruit from Hydromel. Their weapons were caught by the snow-white assailant in its rack. Something flashed from the horn of that dead caribou's rack, along the length of the survivor's lance and Silver Stroke's claymore. Both armsponies staggered from the effect of the 'flash', and the survivor described a sudden, terrible weakness, as if she was on the third night of double-shifts without rest or sleep. Silver Stroke was less affected than the survivor, and managed to power through the attack and put his blade into the indeterminate undead, which staggered, and then smashed Silver Stroke down with a blow from an iron spike affixed to its hoof, probably an exaggerated set of climbing spurs that most likely was the method of how they got up the wall so quickly.

The two attackers killed all but the survivor, and probably would have ended her as well except for the arrival of the rest of the section, including the section's bowmare, who began pumping the contents of her quiver into the two attackers at a distance. The undead were more alert and active than the usual run of ghoul or revenant, and managed to avoid most of the bolts thrown at them by the unicorn, whose surviving section-mates darted forward under her fire to pull back the fallen. One of these was caught a terrible blow by one of the enemy, and the earth pony stallion Kale Green fell insensate, never to regain consciousness. We're not sure if the physical contact was what eventually killed him, or if it was simply the untreated blow to the head. It could have been either.

The survivors of the initial response fell back to contain the incursion, forming small skirmish lines under the direction of the corporal of the guard, Forlorn Hope. As additional reinforcements arrived on scene from the Bride's Gate and the Road Gate, this line solidified, holding the flanks of the penetration along the wall. The third attacker made it over the wall in this pause in the engagement. The two lines along the edges of the incursion left a wide gap across the roadbed of the Road, if the enemy chose to take this opening.

The opening closed with a clap of thunder as the Spirit arrived upon the scene, driving into one of the whitened undead things, and tumbling with it against the edge of the fighting platform. The collision set off a series of detonations, black fire and white mist spraying in all directions. The two unengaged undead charged each skirmish line, and broke the lines as if they were made of string and spirit gum. Forlorn Hope, earth pony mare and new-minted corporal, died trying to hold the western skirmish line. The eastern line scattered without any further fatalities, the thing having been slowed and weakened by a number of bolts driven into it by the bowmare, and a few lance-heads embedded in its dead flesh by the scattered defenders.

The two undead, having scattered their mortal opposition for the moment, turned back upon the Spirit savaging their fellow, and gnawing at its throat with her terrible sharp teeth. Witnesses report that their flashing attacks scattered the substance of the Spirit, like a wave breaking through mist. The Spirit disencorporated, and vanished from the blood-splattered fighting platform in a freezing mist. The downed thing failed to rise again, having been damaged sufficiently by the Spirit's attack to remove it from the fight.

The main reaction force arrived from Dance Hall in this second pause, and the line was re-formed around the fallen fighting platform, enclosing the two dead things and their fallen fellow in a half-circle. When the two standing things tried to break the line, they discovered the Company standard-bearer with his war-lance couched and ready for their charge.

The unwounded dead thing exploded in a freezing ball of hail and freezing mist, showering the platform and cringing Company ponies alike with bone-shards and unspeakable half-frozen viscera. The Spirit reappeared out of this second freezing mist, grey-white and raging. Having lost all control or compunction, she fell up on the solitary remaining thing, and tore it to shreds while Corporal Cake and the survivors of the engagement stood in a iron-bound circle, containing the incursion to the last. The Spirit was uncontrollable, striking wildly at any pony who approached her in her frenzy. The ponies of the night-shift gave her space, and watched as she fed.

The Spirit fed well upon whatever in nine Tartarian hells those things had been. Later speculation among knowledgeable Tambelonian natives offered up the supposition they had been a particularly dangerous necromantic creature known alternatively as barrowgasts, harcelers, or gefallenegeister. Legend holds that their creation required the horrible and bloody sacrifice of an entire hamlet worth of ponies as part of a fell working or ritual by a master-necromancer. We put out a call to find if any such villages had been destroyed anywhere in the northlands in recent weeks, and if so, the circumstances and any speculation that might be available about the how and the why.

What we were certain of, in the aftermath, was that they had been a particularly expensive diversion, a distraction. You'll note that my name and those of the witches' coven, appear nowhere in this narrative of the repulse of the barrowgasts from the northern ramparts.

This is because a second, more subtle attack was launched at the height of the fighting on the northern ramparts, against the heart of Dance Hall. And I found myself in the centre of that disaster.

The Other Shoe Drops

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The sergeant of the guard was calling out the reaction force and corralling the aerial section, which had nearly flown off behind the Spirit. Doctrine was that the reaction force arrived en masse, not in section-sized drabbles. As Heinz Scharfkantig wrote, ‘Nicht kleckern, sondern klotzen', or, roughly, ‘stomp ‘em, don't tap about'. But every wing twitched in sympathy as the distant flashes and screams in the distance broke the night's darkness. When the whole force galloped off into the dark along the Road, I turned to Dance Hall herself.

I searched for the officers, looking into operations, where a groggy Broken Sigil was getting up out of his bunk, having just gotten to sleep. It was early enough in the shift that the day-shift was more tired than disoriented.

"Who's in charge?" I demanded of the operations sergeant.

"I think I am," he admitted, rubbing his eyes. "Octavius had day shift, we were going to leave the night shift to the sergeant of the guard. Um," he paused, trying to recall the name.

"Looked like Hyssop to me. Who thought it was a good idea to put the disaster twins into the same command structure? Wait. Isn't the Captain here? Why isn't she down here?"

"We agreed to not wake her if she ever got to sleep. Sawbones, she hasn't slept more than six hours in the last four weeks. She'd be a liability even if we woke her."

"Fine, nevermind, go wake Octavius, too. We need an actual line officer in charge of whatever the Tartarus this is. I'm going to go get the survey from the watchtower."

I climbed up the stairs between the main hall and operations, that wound around the base of the grand watchtower. By the time I got to the top, there were further explosions lighting up the northern ramparts, and both pegasi still at their posts were staring at the action.

"Forget that mess! We already know it's an attack. Where's your third? Has anypony surveyed the rest of the perimeter? We can't assume they're attacking on a single axis, we certainly wouldn't!"

Just then, the missing third flew into the high platform from the east, cupping her wings to slow her rapid approach. She reported all quiet around the rest of the circuit, ponies at their posts and mostly paying attention to their own lanes. I grunted, disconcerted.

Nopony would deliberately mount a night-attack on the bloody Black Company on a single axis. We weren't seeing something.

I galloped back down the stairs, and tore through the main corridor of the fortress. Everypony at their posts, noise from the ready-barracks of the day shift, the corporals kicking their charges out of their bunks to prepare to reinforce the reaction force or form a fresh fire-brigade for the inevitable second or third attacks.

Wait. The ponies in the hall outside of the infirmary, they were there when I went up to the watchtower.

I got closer, and spotted a lance laying broken on the wooden floor. And blood-trails showing drag-marks inside the closed doors of the infirmary.

"Alert! ALERT! Enemy inside the fortress! Ponies down, ponies down!" I screeched at the top of my lungs, scooping up the sharp end of the broken lance and rushing the doorframe. The doors resisted opening, and I put my shoulder to it as the other guards abandoned their own posts and one earth-pony came up beside me and helped me leverage open the door against the counterweight.

The corpse of Tiny, his throat torn out, the foyer awash in blood, dripping from the ceiling and the walls. The missing guards flung to the side, the earth-pony mare Dark File, whose broken lance I was holding, and a unicorn stallion, whose muzzle was unrecognizable, but by his marked flank I knew to have been a sword-pony named Ironsinger. I scanned for threats as the other guards dragged Tiny out of the way, and started forward with caution and weapons couched in preparation.

Flashing lights in the front office, and a scream.

Rye Daughter.

The two earth ponies and I hit that door as one, and it exploded into shards. It barely startled the surviving inhabitants of that room.

A short, dark figure bent over my apprentice, her broken antler in its hooves. Charring and blackened soot around the cubby I kept the Annals chest showed where the enemy had tried to open the trapped archives, and flickering flame showed that they had just tried it again. The burned and scorched antler suggested that it had tried to use Rye's own bone to jimmy past the flame-runes I had gotten Gibblets and Bad Apple to apply as her contribution to that ancient compilation of spellwork which was the Company's archives chest.

I charged blindly at the figure, the enemy, the damned lich, recognizing her as I came within range to score her leather-bound barrel with my broken lance-shaft. Then my sight was full of blackness and fire, and I was in a corner, shaken and hurting all over.

The Marklaird. Back for the damn chest again. She walked towards the corner where I lay, trying to focus.

"Annalist! I was just about to go looking for you, and here you come, presenting yourself to my requirements!" she said in a voice like an approving auntie. "Your apprentice has grown, but apparently hasn't been given access to the archives? I mean, she wouldn't open it when I asked, and clearly the key isn't in her flesh." She waved the smoking antler-fragment at me.

I couldn't tell if Rye was breathing. But at least the lich had left her behind when she approached me.

"You thought to *steal* from me! I've searched everywhere, and you know what conclusion I reached? I was right the first time! They were in Radspur! You little sneak, you took them when I wasn't looking, and then you left me to draw my own conclusions! Hiding them all this time, never leaving them out where I could scry them, nothing I could *smell*, nothing I could detect in the aether! There was, really, no other place they could be. This damnable void your ancient mages made of your Annals!"

She stabbed me with the smoking antler, deep into the meat of my shoulder.

"LET ME IN, DAMN YOU!" she screamed into my ear in a voice like a small colt being tortured.

I just sobbed in agony. But what she didn't see was Rye's body being dragged into a shadowed corner by a pair of white hooves. I did my best not to smile through the pain.

She stabbed again, experimentally, trying the other shoulder.

"Hmm. That's not going to work, clearly. Let's try an eye."

Oh, that hurt like nothing since the first time I lost that eye. But I had another.

And the other saw the gout of flame that washed over the startled lich.

The witches crowding the foyer of the infirmary blasted the lich with all the feeble magics at their command. I felt a hoof trying to pull me into the darkness behind me, and I pushed it back.

"No," I whispered to Cherie, as she tried to drag me into her shadows. "She'll kill everypony. We can't fight her like this. Get them to fall back."

I dragged myself across the flames and through the pools of blood, and reached the chest. I opened it, and reached into the compartment I had stocked after the affair in Menomenie.

And I took out the blasting-stick I had prepared.

I took a corpse which had been slumped against the outer wall of the office, the wall it shared with the corridor outside. I braced the blasting-device behind the corpse - I recognized it then as the smouldering remains of poor, damned Skinflint - and I sparked the short fuse.

The lich, trying to fight a unicorn shield chorus in the close confines of my destroyed office without immolating itself, hadn't noticed a thing I'd done until I blew down the wall behind it, half-collapsing the ceiling above us.

I dragged myself into the corridor with the chest behind me, as effortless and weightless as it ever was. I used that lump of wood to lever myself up off the flooring, and began limping away from the burning, smoldering wreckage.

At the same time, three glamoured images of my battered, bleeding self dragged themselves and their own phantasmic Annals-chests in the other cardinal directions, and we, my mirrored images and myself, crawled as quickly as we could to hide ourselves from the raging lich.

Drawn out into the open corridor, the Marklaird found herself overwhelmed by numbers, and more than one Company lance found its way past leather binding into her undead flesh. She began screaming in the voice of a gored bull, and then another gout of flame washed over her form, catching my tail on fire, again.

Bless the witches, another phantasmic me's tail likewise was caught in the flames, and burned, realistically.

You could feel the moment when the Marklaird gave up the fight, and started scrabbling to escape. She struck down two ponies in her way and made for the stairs up the watchtower, and disappeared from my sight. I was told later that she had hidden her damn kite on the roofline, and flew away before anypony could follow her in her retreat.

I slumped, exhausted, utterly tapped out.

By my own assessment, a broken rear leg, three, maybe four broken ribs. Multiple puncture wounds, burst left eye. A lot of first-degree burns, but those weren't serious. One streak of second-degree burns, survivable. All in all, I got away light.

I yelled for somepony to help me to bind my rear leg, and then I'd be able to start piecing together whatever had survived the attack.

They found two of the wounded, dead, in my office. It appeared that they tried to rush the lich when she first burst into the infirmary. A jack from Rennet who went by Fidélité, and an earth pony stallion from Verdebaie named Beerhall. I don't know if their sacrifice saved Rye Daughter, but bless them anyways.

Two more guards were killed in the fighting for the office and the corridor outside, a pegasus stallion from the watchtower detail named Dewpoint and a jenny from Verdebaie named Open Water.

Shorthorn didn't survive the fight for the office, they tell me his heart burst from holding the focus of the chorus shieldwall. But somehow he kept the shieldwall up and flaring until the lich fled. He was the last of his family, and the last of Obscured Blade's children of his own body.

Rye Daughter wasn't as badly beaten up as I was, but somehow it hurt more to see her like that. The rack will grow back, I'm told, and she's young. Broken bones will heal.

But it's time we started thinking about those damn phylacteries I have hidden in the Annals chest. Pretending we'd never found them and that they weren't in play had clearly played out as a tactic.

Damn that lich anyways.

Debating Under The Influence

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SBMS118

The medical corps had been shattered by the return of the Marklaird. Two of my oxen were dead, and the three survivors were pretty banged up. Rye Daughter and I were walking wounded, although I was closer to shuffling than a proper walk. Certainly not up to cantering. Both Angus and Sack would be burning their brothers when we got organized enough to build a pyre. The lich had already given us a head start on that pyre - the survivors of the fight spent the rest of the night keeping the fires in the infirmary from roasting our wounded in the wards, or catching the rest of Dance Hall alight.

In the end, the only serious damage was to the foyer, the front offices, and our living quarters. My office was a total loss, and it was a good thing neither Rye or I carried much in the way of personal effects, because they'd have been as ruined as our beds and file.

I ended up laying on a stretcher and directing volunteers in patching together the numerous wounded from the affair at the northern ramparts and the fight in the infirmary and main corridor. The only reason we didn't lose more ponies was that the Marklaird hadn't been fighting to kill, but for time. She had lost as soon as Cherie had snuck Rye Daughter out of that office, right under the lich's nose. She could have killed me, but that wouldn't have gotten her what she wanted from us. We had lost as soon as she got away without a tracer.

The Marklaird wounded and free was just as much of a threat now as she was when she was rooting around in the meat of my shoulder with a fire-blackened antler-shard. She had the initiative until we could find some leverage against her. There were too many levers out of our control which she could turn against us. We couldn't defend the hidden colony, for instance, if she figured out where it was. They were armed, and a harder target than you'd expect of a neighborhood of cripples and 'civilians', but the force the Marklaird had just thrown away for an uninterrupted twenty minutes with the Annals would leave the colony a flaming, corpse-strewn pile of wreckage.

Alicorns help me if she made the connection between the Annalist of the Company and the Duchesse of Rennet's mad, blood-soaked zebra foal-papa. I had to collect the recruits Cherie and Gibblets had mentioned, to see what exactly were the rumours floating around the northlands about that. What could I possibly do to keep the lich from turning Bonforte and the foals into hostages against the contents of the chest? Why would anypony else in the Company give that the slightest consideration?

I was laying in a cot in the wards, blissed out on painkillers and fitfully spinning a lunatic plan to kidnap the newly-married Duchesse and her foals when I was solemnly presented with the information that my heavily medicated self was requested and required for a conference on the current crisis. I looked from the armspony looming over me, to my broken leg, then over to the sleeping Rye Daughter, likewise zonked out on laudanum.

"Are you kidding me? I can't even get up right now, let alone follow you back to whatever closet they're meeting in."

"I've been told to carry you bodily out of here if necessary. The only excuse they'll take is if you're dead, Doc."

"Hope somepony gave you a wheelbarrow, way I'm feeling, I might just roll right off your back."

Wheelbarrows did not prove necessary, although I did end up splayed across that mare's back. Not that way, you filthy degenerates.

The Lieutenant was chairing the argument, whose participants included but were not limited to Gibblets, three of the four cohort commanders, the Crow, Dancing Shadows, and Broken Sigil. Neither the Captain nor Obscured Blade were in the room. The messenger poured me into a deep-backed chair, and stomped off to do… whatever excessively large earth ponies do when they're not hauling stoned zebras about like a rolled-up rug.

"Here's the source of all of our problems," snarled Gibblets. "Sawbones! What have you been hiding in that glorified goddamn jack-in-the-box? We just had our former employer try to burn the castle down around our ears, it wasn't here to exchange Hearths' Warming cards!"

I tried to focus on the goblin's goofy green face, and all I could get was a mossy blur. "T' Tartarus wit' all you, where's the ponies actually in charge o' me? Captain!" I yelled. "Where'd you hide the dam' Captain? Or that old shrike Unc' Blade. Thought we just established it las' week, those two rule this her' Company!"

"The Captain can't be roused," said the Lieutenant. "She went to sleep at dusk last night, and nothing we've done so far has gotten her to open her eyes."

I pondered this. "Well, buck. There's insomnia back-lash, and then there's something like that. Gibblets, hav' you looked in on her?"

"Me? Why me? You're the doctor at the table!"

"I'm al' flyin' higher than that bitch's kite. Alicorns-damned lich harridan. Killed all my beatifu' oxen, poor things. Bough' em all out of slavery, and wa did I wit' em? Half of 'em dead, and the rest beaten bloody. Damn dam-"

Gibblets snapped his clever little claws under my nose, breaking my train of thoughtlessness.

"Oh, yeah. Second Captain in a row, keeled over and not respondin'? Mystic' backlash, bedamnit. Betcha the Spirit's dancing al' along the watchtowers, ain't She?"

Gerlach looked up from some reports he was reading. "How'd you know? She's still out there on the ramparts, yelling and snarling at anyone reckless enough to approach her. In broad daylight, no less."

I leaned back, thinking owlishly. "Lucky guess. Is tha' the way of it? Anypony ever seen th' Captain and her spookness in the same space, or the same time?"

I grabbed a mug of water from the table in front of me, and chugged it down. "Sigil, do we have any tea or coffee? I need to be mor' - lucid. The Spirit maybe pirating her selfness from the Captain ain't even third on our list of catastrophes and looming crisii. Crisises? Damnit, give me some tea!"

The meeting paused while caffeine was acquired and poured down my dopy gullet. While I was waiting, Gibblets explained the Blade situation, which really didn't need all that much explanation. Old bokor was taking the death of his last grandson badly. Problem there was that our dilemmas were largely mystical, and we needed his input, badly. Dragging him in here against his wishes would only draw his witchy ire, though. I didn't need haints to complete my trifecta of miseries.

"Shame we couldn't dose the Spirit with laudanum," I sighed. "You said she's yelling? Is she coherent?"

"Not such that you'd notice, no," said Fuller Falchion. "Octavius is out there trying to lure her into the Hall, but no luck so far."

"Speaking of crises," said Smooth Draw, "Can you explain to us why our former employer just tried to burn the Hall down around our ears? I mean, we cut the legate out and went straight to the empress for our salt, but it was gone for over a year and a half! I thought it had forgotten about us by now."

"Just because you can't see something, don' mean it ain't there." Still not quite in control of my tongue. Oh, well, time for circumspection was past, wasn't it? "The Marklaird clearly figured out we rooked her two years ago in Benoit. Remember I said something back when we were debating going into the riverlands? This is that."

"What, that?" asked Fuller Falchion. "You did something hinky in Benoit, and now the lich is pissed enough to try and incinerate you? You, personally?"

"Our former employer, she was trying to use us as a cats-paw, create enough chaos to scrape away the guard on a certain mystical archive housed in the library of a castle up behind Benoit, called Radspur. We modified the Marklaird's plan to raid Radspur, and cleaned out the cache before she ever set foot in the castle. Left enough detritus that she should have gone off to chase other phantasms, other leads."

Gerlach groaned at my confession. "Well, blast. I guess that secrecy order is inoperative now? I honestly expected to hear more about those trinkets when I delivered them to you. Why haven't the warlocks been all over them? It's been two damn years!"

"I was going to open the chest up and examine the doohickies in a secured ward-circle. Then Shorthorn went and triggered that filthy White Rose trap in Menomenie, and damn if that didn't spook me for good on the subject of mystical wards and trifling in things ponies weren't meant to know."

"Sawbones," groaned Gibblets, "What in five Tartaruses are we talking about here? What trinkets? Stolen from the caribou the Marklaird was planning on robbing, I got that much. But what are they? Artifacts of some sort?"

"Yeah. I've thought about them a lot the last two years, but haven't had the nerve to take 'em out where any aetherial whiff might bring down an avalanche of undead sorcerers on all of our heads. One time I tried to inch my way that direction - ghouls! Ghouls everywhere! You can see why I wouldn't want to advertise our possible possession of a dozen phylacteries. "

The room exploded in recriminations and indeterminate yammering. I waited until they yelled themselves out, then I answered The Crow's question.

"The reason I think they're phylacteries is context, description, and resilience. They're these little bell-shaped carved bits of bone, like somepony took up scrimshaw except with eggshells. But they survived the most amazing abuse in Gerlach's seizure and retrieval without going smash. They were found with a pile of scrolls dating from the earliest days of the first Domination. The scrolls, those I wasn't afraid to take out and read. Really archaic dialect, you can try to read it, but it took me nine months to learn the ins and outs of that mess. Some of them are how-to manuals on making liches and phylacteries, and some of them are letters and orders and genealogies and so forth. It reads like work-product from Grogar's creation of some of his liches."

"So what, we've got a dozen liches' undying hearts stored in your magic box?" asked The Crow. "Sounds like a solution in search of a problem to me."

"A, we don't know which liches' phylacteries, and B, we work for a lich. You can see why I didn't want to advertise this fact. Or let that crazed soul-sucking monstrosity take them for whatever purpose it was she had in mind for them."

"What chances are there that one of those phylacteries belongs to the empress herself?" asked Smooth Draw.

"Based on traditions that the Bride was originally from somewhere in Rennet? Pretty damn good, actually," said The Crow.

"Then why don't we just give her the damn things and be done with it?"

"Draw, did you talk to Her Majesty when she breezed through here?" I asked the unicorn. "My read of her was that she was half-way out of her mind. She might have thanked us, she might have gone on a killing spree. Even worse, she might have started crushing artifacts until she keeled over permanently dead. She was tickled way too pink about our weapons being able to pink her."

"Still might be the simplest solution," said Gibblets, looking pensive. "We're vulnerable as long as the Marklaird's running around saying we've got something, even if 'she' can't prove we've got her phylacteries."

"That's my worry," I said. "How many external vulnerabilities do we have? We rely on a lot of vendors scattered throughout four provinces. The Duc and Duchesse. The hidden colony wouldn't survive a strike like we took last night. And…" I just couldn't say it, couldn't admit it to my peers.

"Your twins," prompted Dancing Shadows, gently. "You think the lich might try to use them as leverage?"

I sunk down, defeated by my own weakness. "Among other things. Not that I expect anypony here to give that particular threat any weight. My business, my worries."

I straightened up. "Speaking of which, we need to get an understudy appointed. I can't be the one point of failure anymore. I might not survive the next brush with the Marklaird, and then you'll be stuck with a chest you can't move and maybe can't protect if it's out in the open somewhere."

"We'll talk about it later," said Gibblets. "Maybe one of the apprentices?"

"So, options?" asked the Lieutenant. "By my read of the meeting, we've got four courses of action. We can pretend nothing happened; we can try to track down and destroy the enemy; we can negotiate with the enemy; we can dump the problem in management's lap. Any objections or additions?"

No response. And no consensus. Half the ponies there wanted to track down and destroy the lich. The other half wanted to contact the Bride and hoof her everything on a silver platter. I fell into the latter camp. Too much blood today, and I just didn't have the heart for more.

Gibblets broke the deadlock. "We can't make this decision without the Captain and Obscured Blade. We need to get the two of them in a headlock and shake some leadership out of them."

He stomped off to do… something. I looked up at the meeting breaking up.

"If somepony doesn't want to drag me back into whatever remains of my infirmary, I swear I'm going to pass out right here in this chair."

The Understudy

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SBMS119

I woke up later that evening, splayed out on the back of another mare. Little Cup Cake was walking down the corridor past the burnt ruins of my foyer, talking to an angry-looking Carrot Cake. I looked up from her withers, half-hearing the conversation.

"-just left him there. I don't know, but he needs to go back where he ought to be."

"You don't owe him anything."

"Don't I? Don't you? Kindness isn't just a duty, Carrot. Won't take much."

"Thank you," I ground out. "Should still be a cot back there in the wards."

"Oh, look at that, awake again. Cherie was asking after you, Doctor."

"We're short-staffed in the medical section right now, can I borrow you from the commissary?"

"Yes, Sawbones, they can spare me."

And things went away then.

I told them to start giving me antibiotics and salicin, but it wasn't enough. Those damn burns took me out of commission, and I was dubiously coherent for much of the next week. Rye Daughter recovered much more quickly than I did. Later on, I found out that they had gotten Obscured Blade and the slumbering hulk of the Captain together, and he figured out how to wake Sleeping Beauty.

The Spirit disappeared from her long appearance as soon as the Captain's sleep was interrupted, of course. So we knew that much of whatever was going on between the two of them. We had been fairly certain that they hadn't been this exclusive before some time in the summer. But after that point, they had synchronized. Her refusal to acknowledge the supernatural essence of her own Company had hidden some sort of connection, sure enough.

Did the Spirit sleep in her reason? Well, only Cherie and the Spirit only really knew for sure, but neither one was talking. The rest of us could only speculate. Uncle Blade and my potions were to regulate this new-found relationship, mostly without my input, given my own incapacity in these days.

Feufollet came by, with Gibblets and Octavius, and they said something about my designated understudy being filled. I talked to her, but I don't remember much of the early conversations. I must have said something, but damned if I can tell you what. They put the chest by my sick-bed.

First conversation I could remember, was on the subject of languages. Feufollet was sitting there by the chest, and Rye Daughter was laying on her own sickbed, her left antler wrapped where the horn had been broken off. The Equestrian spy was puttering about somewhere else on the wards, taking up the slack left by poor wounded Rye and I.

"Equuish was the language of the Annals even back when the native language of our recruits and even the Annalists themselves had been Zebric or old Prancic. Later on, we took most of our ponies from worlds where they spoke Trottish or Slavish or Romancy or Sicari or a half-dozen other dialects and creoles. You'd be amazed how many ways ponies have found to lie to their loved ones and tell falsehoods about their enemies since the diasporas spread us across the Chain of Creation.

"No matter what the foaling-language was of the Company's current run of ponies, we kept the Annals in Equuish. It was a big part of what kept the Company the Company. It was established by horses speaking and writing Feresi, but they kept the chronicles in proper Equuish, no matter what they learned at their dams' teats."

I needed both the Lieutenant and the Captain present to conduct the binding ritual. I must have sent off Feufollet to collect the necessary ponies, because next thing I remember was the two ponies and the new understudy standing beside the chest and my sick-bed, waiting for me to become lucid again.

"OK, Captain, you remember this from when they made me the new Annalist? You were still Lieutenant then, right?"

"Yeah, Doc. I remember."

We went through the motions, and said the words. A little bit of drama, a little bit of fireworks. Rye Daughter watched wide-eyed from her own bed across the aisle. Feufollet glowed a bit from the after-effects.

"So that's that. I'm going to have you start your own chap-book, it won't go into the Annals, but it'll breed the right habits and reflexes in you, and leave you accustomed to recording the true account of what you see and hear." I sighed.

"Well, assuming that we don't find ourselves under the prying hooves of another deathless abomination, I suppose. You're the new understudy rather than Rye Daughter or somepony else because we think you're better able to defend yourself and your new access to the archives. Try it out, now."

Feufollet touched the ancient iron-wood and its metal fixtures. The old construct bloomed like a flower, opening up its private parts to the jenny, who was herself beginning to grow into her adulthood. I pointed out to her the compartments that held the writing implements and the spare paper and parchment, and the library shelving, with all of its complexities.

"I kept some weapons in the front compartment, for events like our late visit by the legate. That noise I'm trying to talk over is Mad Jack's work-ponies trying to patch together the damage done by said weapons. Last time I got caught out in the open with the chest and no real weapons to speak of, I decided that wasn't going to happen again. They say I have a little bit of magic in my alchemy and potioning, but it's never been anything I could use for the defense of me and mine. At best, I'm like the bowmares and swordsponies in the ranks - there's magic, and then there's you warlocks in the witches' coven. Time to bend the Annalship back towards those that can keep the archives safe, you know?"

I said this, looking in the eyes of Rye, who watched everything without a word, her black eyes gleaming with what I know not. She wouldn't talk about what had happened before we had broken into the office and interrupted the Marklaird. Things had happened, it was clear that Skinflint hadn't died quick or easy, and the two wounded we had found dead in the office had broken in ten minutes before the big push by the guard. The surviving wounded in the outer wards and the other three oxen had fallen back from the office when the blood had started to spray about.

I hadn't seen the full extent of the damage the legate had done to Rye, but Cup Cake and the other volunteers had looked pale when they changed her dressings.

I had Feufollet work the levers of the chest, and extract a copy of Fatinah's first volume. She collected her materials, and I told her to find a desk and start making a fair copy of Fatinah's book. It was how I taught myself when Bongo died.

While the jenny went into the other room to find a writing-desk, and the Lieutenant gone off to take care of other business, I looked over to the Captain, who was strikingly not asleep.

"Get a good rest, Captain?"

"Knew this was coming. Want to make any cunnannatu babbiari about Sleeping Beauty or merda like that?"

"Honestly? Now that you have to admit that the Spirit is a real thing, and that it's apparently set up a time share in your skull? I'm just a little happy."

She scoffed at me, more than a little mortified at her weakness before the mystical.

"Hay, it ain't much, but it's good to have something a little silly on days like today. What's the uncle say about your malediction?"

"Pretty much that, a kinda curse. I gotta sleep regular-like, and he's gonna make me a fetch to keep the dam' thing itself, and me myself."

"Does he think it'll do the trick, or does he know it? Old bokor knows his magic, I'll give him that, but I've never put much stock in his wisdom, if you understand me. Was Gibblets smiling or looking saturnine?"

"Lookin' what again, paisan? He looked down-mouthed, if that's what you're askin'. Wasn't exactly a happy conversation any which way, yeah?" She looked a little scared. "Am I gonna fall asleep and not wake up? Or with that thing behind my eyes?"

"Captain, none of us gets out of the Company, not alive. I just read that poor damn jenny into the inner circles, the dangerous core of this thing of ours. You've been here with the rest of us, since before I was in here. You gotta know now, it isn't just any little club, right? Make peace with the darkness, because it's right beside us, inside of us.

"Stop pretending it isn't there, and make friends with it. Walk long enough in the Spirit, and when she possesses you, maybe you'll be what possesses yourself. Last couple days proves anything, it proves that the Spirit and the Captain are closer than hoof and boot. She killed the last Captain, She didn't mean to, probably didn't even notice it, but She put him on and he tore like a sock with a weak weave. Be strong where you can, yield where you must. I think you've been shaping Her all unknowing. And hay - " I smiled at her.

"It's the adventure of a lifetime, you know?"

She sat there, and we watched the new understudy read her assignment, and make notes towards her copy of Fatinah.

The Pursuit

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SBMS120

While I had been disabled by my inexplicable failure to be impervious and impossibly resilient, the rest of the Company reacted to the incursion the best that they could. The Lieutenant had taken charge of the search for the lich's trail, sending sections of pegasi out along the legate's known axis of retreat. It could have, of course, doubled back, split off, and otherwise disappeared into the landscape by the time we got the patrols into the air, but it was better than nothing, and allowed some elimination of possibilities. It had always been possible that she had just gone to ground and might have been lurking just outside of our gates for all we knew.

The warlocks had once told me that liches leave a trail, a magical malformation in the substance of the world underlying the world, which could be disguised but not totally obliterated. Shorthorn had been working on detection devices to alert the bearer of such trails; they found a number of prototypes in various stages of incompletion in his little laboratory when they went to pack up his stuff. The Crow took over the project, but the only thing that was immediately deployable wasn't even able to pick up a signal from anything inside of Dance Hall, let alone the open air. The tiles on the roof where the Marklaird had hidden her kite, on the other hand, apparently gave a good response. That gave them something to work towards, some way to calibrate. Tests with our ghoul-detection charms on the tiles showed a very slight reaction, and actually gave a better read on the lich's known trail inside the fortress than the late Shorthorn's purpose-built detector.

The next wave of patrols sent out to search for the lich carried ghoul-detectors. We had an overstock of those now that the ghouls had largely been eradicated from the province.

The barrowgasts' death-platform where Forlorn Hope and her section fought and died set off all the ghoul and lich-detectors, they lit up like Hearths' Warming Eve.

Except, apparently, the cavern in the southeastern gorge, the one that the ghouls seemed to adore. Five bands worth of undead had been winkled out of that little grotto over the course of nine months, to the point where we'd put a trip-switch charm in there to let headquarters know when a new group of tenants had moved into the caves. It did not escape Broken Sigil's notice that the caverns were now showing ghoul-sign, again. Despite there not having been any sightings of undead in that district or neighbouring districts.

We couldn't be sure if moving to reinforce any of our exposed external vulnerabilities wouldn't just reveal to the enemy which targets we valued, or worse, led her to a target she hadn't known existed. We could draw destruction down on the heads of the hidden colony just by moving to defend it.

In the end, it was the pegasi who found the trail, where the officers and the warlocks lost themselves in their maybes and their guesses and semi-functional spells. The tainted winds carried the stink of the Marklaird's kite-like flyer, and once the flyers got through the incomprehension of the witches and Broken Sigil, our view of the region and the lich's tracks across the skies of Pepin inverted, turned inside-out.

The pegasi could taste the filth of the lich upon the air itself. Something in their magic, their essential selves, rebelled against the unnaturalness of that bit of reanimated earth that intruded upon the kingdoms of the air.

Drifting trails that flowed with the prevailing winds, and drifted inexorably eastwards and to the south, ropey drooping traces of psychic filth that laid across the clouds and landscapes of districts far down-wind of her actual paths-taken. They followed the majority of the tracks back to the cavern-mouth, which they were careful not to approach directly or closely. It took longer to find the connections between the insertion-point of the barrowgasts on the slopes of the wooded wastes to the north of Dance Hall, and back and forth to the roof of the fortress itself.

And, alarmingly, freshly, to a series of overlooks and ridge-lines along the long, winding road between the Deep Mines and the Front, that road that led eventually to Duc Murs' castle-town home. Overflight along those ridgelines found four hot spots, bright ones, like dread things lying in wait.

And then one of the hot spots opened up on an overflight that got too close, They weren't just sitting doggo, there were active barrowgasts over the road north, and apparently they weren't especially good at keeping ambush.

The operational bifurcation caused a lot of argument. Gerlach, the pegasi, and the Lieutenant were suspicious of the way the caverns had lit up so suddenly, long after the tracks had started forming. The Lieutenant was convinced that the caverns were a trap, and the Marklaird was with her surviving barrowgasts in the wild slopes to the north, waiting to ambush the newlyweds when they returned to Pepin City in the next stretch of clear weather.

Obscured Blade, Broken Sigil and the witches thought it more likely that she had gone to ground in the ghoul-nest caverns, almost by accident, perhaps, but there was something about those caves that attracted the undead, some residue witchery that wasn't particularly clear to the living. The ambush on the north road was real, but it was an in-progress plot in abeyance, rather than the post-assault tactics of a rebuffed lich.

I thought it unlikely that if the lich had more barrowgasts, she wouldn't have used them to spread the attack more widely that night. They nearly broke the walls, and would have if they'd hit us in multiple places. We only had one standard-bearer, and one Spirit. Our performance against the barrowgasts had been notably unhappy in the absence of those two factors.

The Captain made the decision, and opted to seal off the caverns in strength. The possible ambush-positions had too many lines of retreat, all we could do is drive them away if the lich was up there with her constructs. The cavern-mouth could be surrounded, and its contents reduced by regular approaches.

Somewhere in all of this, the decision, to take the war to the lich rather than to appeal to the Bride, was made without being made. Action has its own logic, half-measures, taken actively while the deliberators dither, make the choices themselves; passive and implicit measures fail to carry the strategic day without the will of an actor who can stand up, and say, clearly, simply do nothing. Our precautions overcame caution.

The aerial cohort set out in strength, and delivered the supports to the vicinity of the caverns. They formed up along the ridgelines and slopes of that stretch of the Pepin Front and above the southeastern gorge that held that ghouls-nest cavern. Otonashi and Obscured Blade and Gibblets led small unicorns'-choruses that would cover the approaches of multi-section vexillations on three sides of the cavern-mouth. The pegasi and the standard-bearer in a modified witch-gig waited on the ridge facing the slope at whose base the caves lurked. The pikestaff barely extended past the shoulder of the charioteer, even in a gig with the traces radically shortened. The arrangement reduced that long weapon to a sort of glorified lance for the pair, Corporal Cake and his gig-driver, the deep-chested and strong-winged Long Haul.

Bad Apple accompanied her knight and his vexillation. Her own witch-gig had been wrecked in the assault on Fallaises du Conseil, and Gibblets had wanted to leave her back at Dance Hall, but everypony else agreed that the firepower she offered couldn't be left at home. Her growth spurt was still in her future, but in that season she was the biggest gun in the Company arsenal, the biggest gun they could get up there in the forested hillsides, anyrate. They hoped to place her over the cavern-mouth, and pour flaming tartarus into that hole until something either fought its way out or expired burning.

Nopony noticed when Cherie slipped through the deployment, appearing like a white shadow inside every shadow that the chariots cast upon the ridge-tops and slopes below.

Otonashi's ponies weren't quite in position when we learned that the enemy had noticed our approaches. Flying things burst out of the cave-mouth, grey-winged chaos boiling out and upwards like a screeching tide of panic and terror. The witches drew together their choruses in reflex, and the magical shield-walls lit up the darkened slopes like daylight.

The gap in their defenses was a river of darkness in the darksight-destroying glare. And the Marklaird upon her flyer's kite flit through that gap like a dead leaf on a driving winter wind.

The vile little beasts poured out of the cavern - hundreds, maybe thousands of necromantically animated bats, squirrels, and other forest-critters, roadkill collected by that mad undead necromancer and stored in the depths of the caves. They swarmed over ponies outside of the shield-walls, and bit and scratched and screamed horribly. There's nothing quite so terrible as the cries of dead small mammals, you don't expect such noises to come out of tiny furry bodies like that. The slopes and valley floor before the cavern was absolute pandemonium.

The pegasi fell upon the fleeing Marklaird like a suffocating blanket, as much as she tried to jink and sweep out from under the attacking reserve, her airspeed just wasn't such that she could outfly born flyers. She sprayed her sticking black fires like a skunk spraying in retreat; several ponies were caught in the fires. We had come prepared for that, and their wingponies wrapped them in the pre-positioned dampened sheets that had been the logistics and medical corps' contribution to preparations. But that took ponies out of the fight and the flight, and the lich's spiraling kite spun about and about, each approach against her surrounding tormenters left bigger and bigger gaps in the caracole.

Long Haul and Corporal Cake tried again and again to line up their charges against the lich, but the witch's gig, so graceful as a bomber and a weapon against the ground-bound, was awkward and ungainly against something that fluttered about like the lich's flying-kite. Cake was reduced to swinging about the banner-lance like a pioneer hewing at ghouls with a wood-axe. He was lucky he didn't lose the precious artifact right there and then. Or, for that matter, that he didn't tumble out of the tiny chariot himself. I'm told by witnesses that he positively danced upon the rail-sides of the gig, hanging more than halfway out over the six-thousand-hoof drop while Long Haul cut the chariot about in punishing, deep spiraling curves.

The slopes below burned like memories of the ghoul-campaign the year below. Several ponies caught outside of the shieldwalls had been overrun and pulled down by the swarm of small terrors. The veteran zebra stallion Black Stripe and the earth pony mare Open Hearth - one of the recruits from Lait Blanc - died in the chaos. Bad Apple burned everything within range of her raging hooves. But the barrowgasts were climbing out of the cavern mouth, and began to direct their horrible ranged attacks upon first one, and then another of the warlocks' shield-walls.

The aerial envelopment of the lich and her kite had been falling apart as it was, and when the pegasi began to notice the collapsing situation on the valley floor below, everything fell to shit. Long Haul and Corporal Cake made one last futile pass at the lich, but everypony was getting ready to give her up. The ponies below were about to be overrun.

Then Cherie dropped out of nowhere and landed upon the spinning back of the flying-kite, screeching a reedy little battle-cry. The startled lich spun her device into a dizzying series of barrel-rolls, trying to dislodge whatever thing had attached itself to the top of her kite, in her blind spot. The little thestral grasped the wooden struts of the kite's construction with her hooves, and bit again and again at the cloth and wrappings that held it together.

It took surprisingly little for that kite, flying beyond its material strength as it was, to just simply - fly apart in a spray of unravelling wrappings and tumbling struts. The little thestral and the slightly larger lich flew apart in divergent arcs, the lich cursing and tumbling as she fell without any hope of control. Three ponies followed her descent at a cautious distance, wary of her fiery black revenge.

Corporal Cake and his charioteer broke off from the aerial dogfight, and fell themselves downwards, flying to the rescue of the battered armsponies below. Long Haul and the gig nearly crashed when a gast's air-burst nearly struck the two of them, but the banner-lance in Cake's hooves took the brunt of the strike, and the pegasus pulled up the chariot before it impacted into a tree at speed.

Carrot Cake leapt from the speeding gig and hit the valley floor at a gallop, crushing undead squirming things under his iron hooves as he ran. The first barrowgast burst like a full balloon when his lance-head struck it square, the shock-wave deanimating every roadkill construct in two-hundred yards radius.

He spun about from this first charge, and lined up on the next target. And the next. He destroyed the three of the barrowgasts which had gotten out of the cavern-mouth while the aerials had been chasing the lich overhead. Freed from the pressure of the barrowgasts' attack, Gibblets and his apprentice approached the cavern entrance, and Bad Apple started pouring fire down into that foul hole. Steam and smoke billowed out in great terrible clouds as the rest of the witches and their supports swept the valley floor and slopes of the remaining monstrosities. What had been an overwhelming wave, once broken, was reduced to a simple, nasty chore.

Which, now that I think about it, describes roughly ninety percent of warfare as the Company knows it.

The Lieutenant directed the pursuit of the fallen Marklaird, her impact upon the ridge-top a mile or two northeast of the cavern-fight having made a helpful mess that led straight to her stumbling trail. She had left most of her leather wrappings behind, they having burst like she ought to have done, if she was anything mortal or seelie, having fallen some five thousand hooves without any sort of support. But nothing so mundane as a fall could kill a lich, and they found her right where they expected her, burning the brush and slope about her in a tattered fury, screaming at her tormenter.

Cherie danced through the shadows cast by the lich's fires, laughing at the terrible dead thing. The Marklaird wasn't laughing now.

The pegasi heavies started cutting rough bollards, while their lighter peers flew forward to relieve the small harrier, to take over the task of tormenting and piquing the lich until she was brought to bay.

The Lieutenant set up a schedule, and started rotating her ponies through the pursuit. A lich couldn't be exhausted, but she could be kept from organizing a defense, she could be drained of power and resources, and she could be kept busy until the standard-bearer and the witches were done with their extermination of the lich's lesser creations.

And the lich provided a marvelous opportunity for the aerial cohort's heavies to practice their targeting upon a moving pony-sized object. The lich was struck again and again by live-wood logs flung at terminal velocity from above, far away from any counter-fire by the frazzled animated corpse.

Just before noon, an exhausted Long Haul delivered an almost-as-tired Corporal Cake and his battle-pike to a clearing just ahead of the fleeing Marklaird. They waited, patiently, until she burst out of the brush, chased by a pegasus and a griffin, who despite all appearances, were carefully keeping their distance.

The lich was almost upon the lanky orange earth pony before she noticed that her gallop was over. She neatly spitted herself upon the pike.

Carrot Cake says that her last words were, simply,

"This wasn't supposed to happen!"

We still don't know what she thought would happen. What were her plans? Who had died to make all of these monsters she had brought into Pepin? Why had she kept so many resources in reserve? There had been more firepower hidden in that cavern than she had sent against Dance Hall in the first place.

A week later, the Company cleared her barrowgast ambuscade from the north road. They turned out to be a bit more challenging than vanilla ghouls, but once you had their measure, and weapons in place, they were just another problem to solve.

We had worse things on our minds by that point, anyways.

The Summoning-Circle

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The circle I asked Feufollet to draw was mostly ink and sawdust, long looping swirls that enfolded the low chair and the cot, with only a homeopathic tincture of blood to put some iron in the 'casting. I told her that I wanted her to close the door, not to lock it, let alone bar it. A discernable boundary, not a wall to be defended.

I gave the Captain her sleeping draught, and she sat down on the edge of her cot and chugged it like a tumbler of rye whiskey. I walked across the circle, and sat on my own chair, to await her unconsciousness. As I did so, the Lieutenant was organizing her ponies upon the trail of the fleeing Marklaird, but I didn’t learn this until later. At that moment, I was simply investigating the Captain situation, and trying to draw out the Spirit, who was either sulking in her tent, or disappearing up her own existence again. Nopony had seen her in a talking mood since the Captain had awoken again, not Cherie, not me, not the witches or even the two Cakes.

You can imagine why I was concerned, that our Spirit’s last appearance had been as a mad apparition raving incoherently like spiritual armeggedon upon the ramparts.

As the Captain settled beneath her blankets, the circle began glowing. Feufollet hadn’t put that much energy into the 'casting, if it weren’t for the blood, I could have drawn the circle myself. I looked in alarm at the jenny, who looked up at me across from the gently shining lines. She shrugged in bemusement, clearly not straining in any serious fashion. Wherever the energy was coming from, it wasn’t from her.

Dark mist was trickling from beneath the Captain’s blankets, curling about the legs of the cot and my own chair, my own hooves. No actual figure at first, just black and grey and blue tendrils, starlets winking in the deeper, thicker pools of shadow.

Then the mist resolved in a rush, the Spirit rising out of herself like Leviathan breaching the ocean swells.

She was in her Princess aspect for a change, oddly composed, looking about the great hall we had claimed for our experiment, meeting the gazes of the many ponies who sat upon the drawn-back benches against the walls of the chamber. Watching were three of the four cohort commanders, many of the support-ponies and a fair number of the sergeants and corporals. I had decided this must be an audience with a proper audience. I closed my eye in concentration, and then began.

"Good even, fair lady. Do you know where you are today?"

"Acolyte, we seemeth to have awakened in thy fortress, the 'Dance Hall’. Didst we fall asleep and yet not recall this? How peculiar."

"Do you remember our last conversation, before the attack interrupted it?"

"Of course we recall thy discourse, the substance thereof being that we art lacking in temporal continuity at times. Whatever happened to your eye, your leg? Who dared lay hooves upon our Acolyte?"

"While you were facing the assault upon the walls - do you recall doing this?"

"Yes, of course, the soul-devourers - fell, foul things, we hath encountered them before."

"Truly? Interesting. Well, later for that, but while you were diverted by that attack, we suffered a second incursion, which slipped past our defenses unseen. A lich, our former employer, penetrated the Hall itself, and did great damage to the hospital and my ponies. I was involved, and did not escape unscathed, as you can see."

The Spirit flashed in ire, and a change rippled across her visage, black chasing blue from her coat.

"They DARE! Where are they, I will teach them their place!"

The mist rushed out and found the edges of the circle, and rebounded.

"Wait, what is this? Is this a summoning circle? What on Equestria is this?"

"Vengeance can wait, Mistress. We have other concerns today, and ponies are even now pursuing she who gave offense. We have another task before us. Who lies beneath your heels, Mistress?"

"My concern is that my subjects seem to have encased my self in a circle like some lesser demon or a squealing imp! How DARE YOU?"

"You will find, if you try it strongly, that it is the merest wisp, the slightest of cobwebs, Mistress. We needed to test a theory, a hypothesis. That is the Captain of the Company beneath you, here with the two of us inside of this circle. When she went to sleep, you emerged."

The Spirit looked down at the slumbering earth pony, and then looked up at me.

"Meaning what, exactly?"

"Meaning that my suspicions have been confirmed, that you have been affected strongly by the Captain, more strongly than was initially assumed. It had been noted that she never was seen when you were active, nor did the two of you ever meet in any other pony’s witness. The Captain insisted that you were our collective delusion, the madness of our crowd."

"Yes, so I’ve heard. Nor would she ever let me inside of her dreams, the heathen, the infidel. What of it?"

"I still cannot tell how extensive it is now, nor how distinct it was at first, but I think I can safely argue, now, with the evidence swirling around my hooves and the worthies of the Company in witness thereof, that she is hosting your self in some essential sense. The wick feels no heat from its flame; the mirror sees no reflection; the fountain drinks no water. You do not exist to the Captain, because she is your font, and she is not herself while she is You."

The Spirit inverted her aspect once again, and blinked.

"We hath no idea how to respond to that. Dost thou sayeth that we possesseth thy commander like a simple haunt?"

"Lady, we have always known that you possess the Company as a whole, although your understanding of this seems to come and go with your moods. The fact that you are… focused through the Captain, however, is new information. And this focus has become a problem, do you not agree? You are stronger, more persistent, and yet… that very strength is causing problems. We need both You and our Captain."

She looked down at the sleeping mare.

"We hath never truly exchanged a word with yon filly. She is a door ever closed, an unlighted apartment, an absent tenant. How art we to address a pony who never is present while we art?"

"I have hopes that you might find your way into her dreams, and work matters out between the two of you. Can you try this?"

"We still hath no entry to this pony’s dreamscape. Perhaps the little thestral might know a way which we ourselves hath not discovered?"

"Good idea, Lady," I said, then, more loudly, to the audience, "Cherie? Has anypony seen Cherie? We need her services."

This was the point at which we discovered that the filly had disappeared. Nopony had seen her, not for the better part of a day, perhaps longer. This is the sort of thing that happens when an apprentice’s knight was bed-ridden and immobile, and the ponies supposed to be supervising her are off chasing vengeance and bloody-hooved retribution.

While members of the audience combed through the rest of Dance Hall trying to track down the truant thestral, I discussed many matters with the Spirit in her Princess aspect, trying to determine the edges and gaps within her understanding and comprehension of the world. Did she know anything of the moon-prison upon which she was supposedly exiled? Was there anywhere that she went when she was not with us?

It was like trying to scoop up night-mist in my hoof. She just flowed away like wisps of vapour.

We were talking like this, of nothing of particular interest or relevance, while a hoof-full of the remaining audience dozed half-asleep upon the benches of the great hall around us, when the unbroken circle flashed white with a terrible energy. The rest of the hall was burnt away from our sight by the witch-light glare, and the Spirit and I inside our summoning circle spun about, looking for the source of the attack.

When the Marklaird expired upon the pikestaff, the Spirit and I were isolate, sealed within that cob-web circle. And the fire of the lich flowed through the greater focus of the Company and its own circling walls that surrounded us like a second summoning-circle of stone and earth, miles in circumference.

Dance Hall burned like a second sun.

The Echoes

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The painful white-out faded as my poor, abused eye recovered from the overload. As things came back into that flat, distorted focus which was all I could coax out of monocular vision, I observed several things.

Firstly, that the intact summoning-circle was glowing a deep cornflower blue, every line lit up from inside, casting upwards in a vertical wall and through the high ceiling of the great hall. I fancied that it might continue until terminated by its intersection with the roof of the world itself, the crystal sphere.

Secondly, that the dozen or so ponies in the great hall but outside of the glowing circle were themselves glowing, unresponsive, and wide-eyed, their thestraled eyes like slit-pupiled lamps lighting a dark and cold Tartarus.

Thirdly, that the rays of the weak late-fall sun which should have been illuminated the hall from its high windows were no-where to be seen, and that there was an unseasonable darkness to be so lit by the glowing statues of which my brethren were making such a wonderful impression thereof.

And, fourthly, unsettlingly, in the unnatural darkness, several of the insensate were casting strange shadows behind their shining selves, outlines and figures.

Afterimages.

Transparent, some translucent, more impressions than solid phantasms, and none really intact or active.

The Princess, her blue-feathered wings rampant, shouting something imperiously, proud and arrogant.

The Nightmare, long-toothed and striking like a snake at something unseen, more a blur than a figure.

The Nightmare again, horn high, nose in the air, her helm holding back her flowing night-sky mane, glaring possessively down at something else, unseen.

The Princess, much younger, cringing between her hooves at something above her, half-frightened, half-shameful.

The Nightmare, turning a pirouette upon her hooves, her bat-wings cupping the air as she grinned in unnerving delight.

The Princess, bowing with such grace as only royalty can offer, greeting some unseen petitioner or delegation of note.

More and more of the dozen’s shadows lengthened into their own images of the Spirit, and each shadow grew stronger, more defined, more active as I stood and watched.

The Spirit herself, our Spirit, the one I had been conversing with before the incident, spun around in alarm and confusion.

“WHAT FELL WITCHERY IS THIS? Am I in a hall of mirrors, cast by a clever warlock?”

“Perhaps, Mistress,” I granted her. “But given the timing, I suspect something has happened in the field. Maybe they caught the lich? Odd things happened the last few times we put down one of those monstrosities.” I gestured at my remaining, thestral eye. “Nothing quite this odd, I will admit.”

The Spirit was exchanging glares with one of her after-images, Nightmare snarling at frozen Nightmare.

Then a filly fell out of one of the phantom Lunas, bent in a perpetual bow facing away from us, smiling sweetly at a wall. Cherie tumbled until she landed right-side up, and looked around with a justifiably alarmed look upon her face. Then she saw me.

“Monsieur! I found you! Strange things ahoof in Dance Hall!” She chirped as she charged me, clearly looking to grab onto somepony solid and responsive. Then she hit the circle, and it rang like a bell.

She fell back upon her haunches, and shook her head. Dragging behind her like a second tail was a fan of phantasmic after-images, warping strangely like a kaleidoscope made of portal-shards and dreamstuff. “Owch! Why are you trapped in that? Monsieur, everypony’s bein’ weird! Is that the real Princess in there with you?”

“As real as I get, little thestral. Although today’s discussion seems largely anchored by accusations and insinuations that I am less real than I would generally prefer, all things being equal. Having one’s own subjects tell oneself that you are a figment of their overactive imaginations can be rather lowering, don’t you think?”

The filly looked up at her Princess through the glowing circle-wall, and chirped, “I dunno what that means! You seem real, er, real-er, I guess? Talking is good! The echoes don’t talk, mostly.”

“Cherie,” I said carefully, “What’s going on? Where have you been? We’ve had ponies looking for you.”

“Oh, I was out with the strike force. We got her! Got her good, sans blague. I helped! A little. Some of the corporals were tellin’ me I did good, when I heard the Princess here callin’ me, so I came back. And this!” she looked around at the weird frozen tableau, frowning. “Nothin’ but echoes! No Princess, just ponies not talking, and echoes of the Princess not talkin’ either. Boring!”

The ‘echoes’, as Cherie called them, were now moving. Walking, as if in a daze, they approached us. Or rather, they approached the kaleidoscopic smear behind Cherie. They stared, fixated, at the swirling image.

“Cherie,” I said, choking. “Try and see if you can cross the circle again. Very, very carefully.”

As she hoofed the circle, as substantial to her as if it were a plaster wall, the first of the echoes reached her ‘tail’, and was drawn into the swirl like a stream falling over rapids. I could swear the filly was taller than she had been last week, her legs longer and spindlier than the last time I had seen her.

“Cherie, did you feel that?”

“Feel what?” She turned around to follow my line of sight, and saw the echoes staring at her.

“Eep!” She plastered herself against the circle-wall, her wings spread out against the curve of the magic. “Monsieur, I don’ like this!”

I reached out, dazed myself, and drawing my hoof through the sawdust and the ink and the blood, I broke the circle.

Blackness swirled past the filly and myself, as echoes of the Spirit rushed before us like a torrent, Cherie’s own kaleidoscope erupting like a rain of shards. Everything spun past us, and into the heart of the Captain’s Spirit.

The Nightmare bellowed like the end of the world, as she took in the myriad fragments of herself.

“Monsieur, what did you do? What did you do?” shouted the little filly, crying.

“I undid a mistake, I think. I hope. You have any idea what is going on here?”

“No, not a one! Why’s everypony being so weird today! Can’t anything SLOW DOWN AND MAKE SENSE?”

I started laughing madly, doing my best to keep the little thestral from being blown off her hooves by the rushing winds and magical discharges.

“Welcome to adolescence, poulische! Nothing ever makes sense!”

And then the Spirit spoke, with a vast and terrible voice larger than the great hall could hold, something I heard more in my bones than in my poor, overwhelmed ears. I couldn’t be certain of the actual words, given the aural mis-match, but from the aftermath and the results, I think it must have been something along the lines of “Pardon us, we must now go find something to destroy. White Rose badge, right?”

Because that is what happened. She walked through the south wall of the hall, and by that I mean she broke the wall, and everything between her and the Baneway. Testimony taken afterwards generally agreed, that she followed that new road until she reached the gates of Le Coppice. At those gates, she took to her wings, and flew over the unoffending walled town without laying waste to it. Her great hoof-marks can be seen, burnt into the metaling, the whole length of the Baneway. The bridge at Trollbridge was nearly shattered by her passage.

They tell me she landed once again in the heart of the White Rose defensive bastions, on the northern flanks of their grand army's permanent fortifications. She left a trail of fire and destruction through six great earthworks and their accompanying palisades and associated defenses. The White Rose lost fewer ponies than you’d expect given the total devastation, but they’d long since learned to not keep full garrisons in the front lines, choosing rather to reinforce as needed; it kept sudden flare-based attacks like that of the Spirit from wiping out entire units in the first rush.

The Imperials were not in the least prepared to assault through a sudden obliteration of their opposing numbers, not on a damp and cold late autumn afternoon. Extended skirmishing eventually broke out in the shattered ruins, and as many ponies were lost in the unsettled encounter-battle fighting as were destroyed with their fortifications by our Nightmare. She evaporated once her fury was spent.

The Company’s losses consisted of one older earth pony stallion in the carters named Cold Oats, and an equally elderly mule. Both Cold Oats and Mad Jack suffered apparent aneurysms from the psychic stress of the Marklaird feedback. From all accounts, only ponies within the walls of the greater Dance Hall complex were part of the echoing effect. None of the ponies on detached duty in Pepin City, the Aerie, on patrol or with the cavern strike force showed any symptoms. The ones within the walls were as described previously of those inside the great hall. No unsworn ponies were affected, none that we could find.

Excepting the little Equestrian spy. She hadn’t been sworn to the pikestaff, and yet, she suffered lost-time amnesia similar to those who had been so sworn, and unlike some of our civilian employees and Mondovan witnesses, she had no stories of Company ponies gone unresponsive and alarmingly glowy-eyed, or shadow-imagoes of the Princess or the Nightmare. A jenny from Mondovi had been delivering supplies to the kitchen when the echoes began. Cup Cake's Nightmare had caused that poor delivery-donkey to soil herself. The jenny wouldn't describe it in detail, insisting only that I was wasting time that could be more profitably spent drinking herself insensate.

The Tanners

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The previous week's events, a week of which was supposed to be one of rest and refitting for the Company, left Dance Hall and its immediate environs a chaos of wreckage, of tumble-down masonry and shattered roof-timbers. Mad Jack in the moment of his death had been at work tearing down the offices and foyer of my hospital, in preparation for re-building that portion of the fortress, within the heart of the fortress. The charred and tumbled timbers had been removed, the surviving structure had been braced and scaffolded, and falsework had been mostly put into place to re-build the entrance as a proper arched vault.

Mad Jack had many ponies into whom he had beaten the principles of practical construction. He didn't believe in apprenticeship, had no time for foals, or formal instruction. He simply seized the labour of his fellows and subordinates, and showed them by demonstration what they were about. He didn't play favourites, or request the same ponies detailed again and again. Rather, those ponies sought out his projects, and threw themselves into his quiet enthusiasms with a sort of joy which was something more than infectious.

Mad Jack's Company was a building cult, a worm which digested wood, and earth, and stone, and left cocoons of timber and earthwork and masonry behind itself. We built faster, wider, and finer than any mercenary regiment of our size should really have been capable. Ponies brag of their special talents and the magic that destiny works through them, but this mule, who had no inherent magic, no destiny but a supposed life-work within his long-abandoned family's tanning business, took the special skills and the simple mute labour of his brethren and… He found a lesser world, and left it a greater one. If only all of us could be carried to our pyre beneath that sort of eulogy.

True to his inherited traditions, Mad Jack had left instructions that his hide was to be put to use as those uses go. We don't generally talk of the work of the tanners, but it was something that must always have been somewhere at the back of that old mule's mind. It was the life he had left behind, the way of life for his mother's family, the way of life that his father had married into. They were the corpse-handlers - those who prepared the dead for their journey into the next life. They claimed those things which cannot be used in that next life, but can be of use to those left behind. All most ponies know of death and its rituals are the funerals, wherein the deceased's face is all that the bereaved were shown. The tanners know the tanning-sheds within which they cured pony-hide. The tanner's work was those threads of pony that they unraveled from their charges before that brief journey into the sod or the fire.

Without those tanning-ponies, and their horrid stinks and their nightmare-tasks, our economical lives would truly be a vale of misery and struggle. The tack and the wagon, the waterproofed sealing-grommet, saddle-bags, belts, the wading-boot, weapons-holsters. Parchment and the bindings of codexes! And prosthetics, Grogar, the prosthetics! Much can be done with wool, and pig-leather, but in the end, wool isn't resilient, and pig-leather is coarse and substandard. Fine, resilient work, material that neither chafes nor frays nor splinters nor tears under the quill, calls for the services of the tanners, the skinners, the flensers.

In the world that Mad Jack's family came from, the skinning business wasn't nearly the mad, dare-discord trade that it was of necessity in death-haunted Tambelon. Every flenser upon this wicked world keeps a decapitating-axe and leather-strap restraints beside their skinning-racks, always ready to terminate their task upon the merest twitch of a possibly-reanimate corpse. And still, the most likely cause of death in every tanning family was 'industrial accident', and more than one ghoul infestation began in an overrun tannery whose ponies had not been careful enough of their charges. And the funeral services always ended in the fire, for those with sense and any sort of caution.

There were no surviving tanners in Mondovi or Guillaime's Ravin. It had been too dangerous, too exposed. The two Company ponies with a side-line in tanning had taken over the business on a full-time basis upon our settling in the region, and had set up with the rest of the smiths and makers on the outskirts of Dance Hall; the smell rarely put off the strong-lunged smiths, and nopony cared to get too close to the clangour and stinks of ironsmithy, either. This is where we took our dead, those that could be recovered in sufficient time for the attentions of the tanners.

The world of ponies rests upon unexamined supports. Even that vast herd which sits back and prides itself on its vegetarianism, its pacifism, still feed upon grains and fruits hauled in leather-worked wagons, eat cheeses made by processes at their base quite literally blood-curdling in their origins, thrive behind walls bathed in the blood of the guilty and the innocent.

I nearly lost my lunch when somepony finally explained to me what rennet was, and I regularly eat pork sausage, and I kill ponies for a living. I feel easier these days, eating sausage, than eating even Rennet's finest cheese.

I made arrangements to have an eye-patch made for my lost eye from Mad Jack's bequest. It was the least I could do to show respect for what he had left us.

We got together with the Captain and the Lieutenant after the later returned with the warlocks and the task-force still half-winded from the killing of the lich. Word had started filtering north of the Spirit's flight south, and we were getting more and more alarming indications of the extent of the compromise of our operational security. This would be more than a mere rumour, more than just unsettling barracks-talk and the sort of tavern-talk that makes ponies wary of an outfit. This was becoming something of which the Imperial infrastructure, the Bride's government would have to take notice.

So there we were, in the mostly-intact operations room, listening to the sounds of Company ponies shoring up the shattered walls of the neighbouring great hall, and arguing with ourselves over how to present ourselves to authority in the most flattering light.

How exactly do you explain to a government that refers to itself by the material focus of lich-craft, to 'the Phylactery', that you have deliberately and with fore-thought destroyed three of that establishment's most deathless and powerful master-undead? That you have killed that which ought never have died again, and could easily do so again if brought to another such conflict? The Company had destroyed more legates in a year and a half than the White Rose had in three hundred years of insurrection and open war.

We could easily argue that we had taken back two provinces from the rebel and the ghoul, that we had pushed back the White Rose to the banks of the great river, and beyond, and that we had secured the northern flanks of the armies in the riverlands, assured the safety and prosperity of the northlands, done everything asked of us by the Bride and her Imperial military command.

That still didn't paper over our obliteration of the Walker, the Stump, and our one-time employer. No matter their assaults upon our persons and our fortifications, the Marklaird's repeated attempts to steal and kill, their unwarranted hate and violence. We had resisted being killed by liches, and that was a hell of an offence in a country ruled by lawless liches and their codified whims-made-law.

I argued for the tactical use of the news of our cache of phylacteries as a massive distraction from our campaign of lich-murder, and the search for the source of the barrowgasts as a bureaucratic option that could substitute for the vigorous suppression of the Company by those ponies which paid our salaries. The former, however exciting and distracting said news might be, got voted down as too likely to inspire a new round of assaults, quarreling, or possible intra-lich warfare for the right to seize the artifacts from our possession. We could see actual armies drawing up before our walls to fight for the right to storm our bastions.

Any which way we pared it, we were pretty sure the cat was out of the bag. The Bride's engineer had been with us for months, and had almost certainly been sending back regular reports, reports which we dared not intercept or modify in any way. I was somewhat surprised that no administrative follow-up had arrived before the Marklaird had decided to make an armed surprise inspection.

In the end, we only decided that which was obvious. We'd expedite repairs to Dance Hall, so as to not give the coming inspectors the appearance of chaos or weakness. We'd keep the Captain and the Spirit in magical couple's counseling, in hopes of keeping the both of them sane and coherent. The Spirit might have to take a turn on stage with the Imperials to give them some context and understanding of what had happened down in the central riverlands. The remaining barrowgasts would be exterminated as soon as a task-force built around the standard-bearer could be fielded on the ridges around the road north to Pepin City.

Meanwhile, it was time for the funeral services, and the pyres. They weren't as numerous as in previous weeks and months, but Mad Jack had been with us for decades. His energy and skill would be missed.

The Dream Of The Vintners' Daughter

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The two fillies played in the snow, an early winter sun's rays casting faint rain-bows across the sprays of powdered snow as they were flung back and forth by wings grey and blue. Their tinkling laughter reached across the still-undisturbed snow-fields bearing down the grass of the lawn in front of the great house's wide veranda.

"You want me to do what again?"

"Dream-walk, my dear baker. We need an… audience. So saith the witches' coven, or at least, two of the three that cared when I asked. More importantly, we need an audience of varying allegiances, and sympathies. If it were merely one pony's friends, or the other's, or likewise their enemies or hated opponents, it would degenerate quickly into a series of accusations and defensive screaming. Nopony likes an intervention."

"And I am what, neutral?" asked Cup Cake.

"Let's say you hate the both of them equally."

"I can't believe you talked me into this, you damned cultist," groused the Equestrian spy from my dream-veranda, sitting restlessly on a rocking-chair. She was trying to find a rocking rhythm, and failing abysmally.

"How can you have so little coordination, that you can't figure out how to use a rocking-chair?" I asked, smiling.

She glared up into my one eye. "It's a dream, you striped buffoon! Even easy things come hard in dreams. Haven't you ever had that dream where your master is judging your baking, and you keep dropping egg-shells into the batter, and spilling spices, and dropping racks of pastries?"

"Can't say that I ever had. But I've never been one to suffer from anxiety-dreams. Perfect recall is my devil." The sun faded briefly, and I thought I heard a distant scream of torment.

Cherie looked up from her wrestling-match with the filly Spirit under the rose-bushes across the way. "Monsieur! No relapses! Not what we're here for!"

I waved her off, and she returned to her pursuit of the alicorn-filly, deeper into the rows. Some of which had shifted from rose-bushes to something more in a vine sort of line.

"And you want me for this why?" asked Broken Sigil, fiddling with his thick glasses.

"We need a friend of the Captain." I explained.

"I'm not her friend," he pointed out.

"You're the closest she has to a friend left alive in the Company. The world and time has not been kind to the friends of the Captain. Come on, you know her, sergeant. She's prickly even when she's in a good mood. You get along with her, better than you do with most other ponies."

"That might be true and it might be not, but you're talking magic. I don't do magic."

I looked up at his horn. "Sergeant, you're a unicorn. Your life is magic."

"Like hay it is!" he barked. "Look at my cutie mark. Is that a magic mark?"

His mark was a shattered ankh. "Looks sorta magic, in a baleful sort of way."

"It's a reflection of my soul, which is to say, I HATE MAGIC! Why do you think I'm in operations, and not with the warlocks? If I could find a world without magic, I'd be a happy equine."

"Hey, look at it this way. It's dreamland. Maybe afterwards Cherie can set you up some sort of drear magic-less wonderland to dream your nights away with?"

"Your ideas intrigue me. Tell me more."

"You lied to me, Sawbones! I can feel it in my horn, this place is full of magic!" Broken Sigil poured something brown out of a pail he had brought with him when the Spirit had walked him out of the back door of the great house. He filled up a tumbler which hadn't been there a second ago, upon a side-table which hadn't been there a second ago, either.

"Tartarusfire, sergeant, I'm just a damn zebra, what do I know from magical vibes? You ponies and your magic-this, magic-that!" I watched as he tossed back the whole tumbler in a single gulp. "Where did you get the beer?"

"I had the Princess make a stop with Heavy Bucket, and raided his tavern for something to make this more tolerable. And what do you mean, 'you ponies'? You're the one who always has to call everything that wags its jaws at you and makes sense, 'a pony'. Make up your damn mind!"

I concentrated for a second, and there was a second tumbler. I poured my own dram of beer.

It wasn't beer.

"Pfagh! Sigil, you're going to pickle yourself, drinking whiskey like this!"

"It's a dream, isn't it? I can drink like a yak, and I won't give a damn in the morning."

"I thought you said you didn't know magic!"

"I said I hated it, not that I wasn't any good at it. What are we doing here?"

"Right now? Watching the dream-fillies play hide-and-go-seek in the… vineyard?"

"Yes, doctor," said Cup Cake, breaking her silence, "It seems to be working, doesn't it? Didn't you notice the snow melting?"

"No, I was distracted by Sigil's conspiracy against my liver."

"Hain't a conspiracy, there's just the one of me, maybe two if you count Heavy Bucket's dream-tavernkeeper. Takes three for a conspiracy. This here is a plot."

"Watch your language, Mr. Sigil, there's a lady present!" objected the baker.

"This is the first time I've ever heard anypony definere una spia coma una donna," said the Captain, joining us on what was now a terrace, barely higher than the dusty yard below.

"So how is this gonna work?" asked a skeptical Captain.

"Best they've explained it to me, you're going to go to sleep in your quarters, and we'll sleep in ours, and the Spirit and Cherie will find us, and bring us together in some sort of common ground."

"A common ground that ain't no kinda ground at all, as I understand it. Damn fool nonsense."

"Well, at least there's no circles this time. Everytime I set foot in a magic circle, it seems like something blows up or burns down. I'm done with warding circles, I can tell you that much."

"Good to hear somepony's enthusiastic about this, I guess." She reached out and gave me a bit of a shove. I guess she couldn't maintain the curmudgeon routine if I was going to step on all of her lines.

"Can we get you to give it a try? We need to be pulling in the same direction. Look at what happened at the fords. The Company can do great things if we're all pointed on the same heading and keeping a cadence, Captain."

"Ammaistrare a tua nonna a sucari le ova!"

"Just so everypony remembers what's an egg and what's a stone, Captain."

"Your Equuish is slipping again, Captain," I complained.

"Vostru Equuish addannàrisi, Dutturi!" she squawked. But she stepped out into the yard, and if my eye wasn't deceiving me, she lost five years with every step into that hot summer sun-light. The vines were heavy with the grape, and here and there among the rows, you could see a little blue horn, or the tips of fluttering grey bat-wings rushing about.

"Aspittami!" squeaked the little purple earth-pony filly, as she rushed into the vineyard after the other fillies. Squeals erupted as they found each other in the distance, and the clattering noise of a chase resumed.

"You got another glass?" asked Cup Cake as she stared at Sigil's bucket of whiskey. "I think maybe we're going to be here a while."

We did, and we were. Although the bucket of whiskey had been replaced when nopony was watching. It started out as excessively young wine, no better than grape-juice, but we all concentrated hard, and the dream distilled it for us.

We sat back on the terrace and swilled dream-brandy, and watched the filly who would become the Captain, reborn for a night. The three fillies chased one another under dream-skies as day faded into twilight and the moon rose into the heavens, until we lost them in the growing darkness.

And even in the darkness, you could find them by the shouting and the laughter.

The Celebration

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The southern wall of the main complex at Dance Hall was a quilt of scaffolding and half-repaired stonework, encasing that hole in the fortress where the Spirit had burst out of the great hall. Despite the absence of our late engineer, work under his successors had advanced rapidly, and the weather and the curious eyes of the crowd were both kept out by the new repairs.

Below, the southern sally port was open and inviting, decorated heavily with improvised seasonal bunting and sprigs of holly and mistletoe. The Company's strange and foreign holiday had been re-purposed as a (very late) celebration of the successful season of reconstruction and reclamation in the central districts. Several fair weeks of bison summer in the very last days of fall had given the adventurers and returnees enough time to clear over three thousand abandoned acres in the fields of the dead hamlets along the Road towards the river, and winter seed had been planted in half of those acres.

The shacks and heavy tents of the shanty-town west of the ramparts were full of exhausted but giddy farmer-ponies. Their leaders had been terrified and alarmed when they had been caught up in the Marklaird's sudden assault upon the Company, but none of the civilians had been killed or even seriously hurt in the fighting, which from their point of view simply reinforced the impression that the 'night haunts' were here to protect the peace and their interests. We had stood up to the killing dead, and drove them off with heavy losses.

Dance Hall's grotesque bonework displays had been hung with boughs of holly, from the main gate along the fighting-platforms to Trolllbridge itself, mostly courtesy of the returning ponies of Pepin. Their winter solstice celebrations weren't quite Hearth's Warming, but our captive baker was there to explain the relevant details to the oddly enthusiastic farmers outside the gates and the towns-folk inside.

This was probably the last year that all of the apprentices would be young enough to participate in the pageant. Even if her injuries hadn't kept Rye Daughter from participating, her almost-full growth and height would have made her an increasingly risible 'Smart Cookie', and that role was taken over by Jagged Tooth. Charleyhorse likewise was too old for the pageantry, and sat in the audience with the carters and cooks.
One of the string bands from Mondovi was playing accompaniment to the play, enthusiastically if somewhat erratically following the general tone of the traditional music. Cup Cake had again intervened, spending some time with the musicians trying to explain the actual orchestration of the performance as it was done in Equestria proper. I rather missed the old polyphonal choral chants, but I grant you the new music was more appropriate to the theme.

Brass Tones himself had joined the band, and was playing his trumpet somewhat erratically; he had been sampling Cup Cake's holiday-themed 'egg nog' earlier, and was clearly at least a few sheets to the wind. He had much to celebrate; several of his shafts had been opened, and if you stood in the high tower of the fortress and stared west against the sunset, you could see the smoke from the newly-lit hearths rising from the slopes of the Deep Mines where a mining village had been reopened. Life was returning to every abandoned corner of Pepin.

They kept the old wingblade percussion for the thestral dance-fights and romance-scenes, of course. Cherie played Pansy like she was born to the role, and one of Obscured Blade's colony-pegasus recruits was a suitably brash Commander Hurricane. The hidden colonies occasionally staged the play, although their audiences were never so sprawling and enthusiastic as the thousand or more that teemed upon the Baneway.

That crowd of miners and farmers and townsfolk watched the foals and younglings as they performed upon a cheerfully re-decorated fighting platform beside the open sally-port, the raised surface acting as a perfect stage to the roadway it protected immediately below. Torches mounted above the ramparts provided some lighting as the sun's last rays faded from the twilit clouds above; more indirect light was provided by a sleepy Otonashi laying beneath the edge of the platform, listening with her eyes closed.

Feufollet performed a pitch-perfect Princess Platinum, while at the same time quietly maintaining the illusions overlaying the other performers, and the threatening windigos above. Said windigos bore strong resemblance to the late barrow-gasts, which enough members of the audience had seen at a distance to create an enthusiastic communal shudder at our very close shave with true monsters.

Cup Cake had insisted on re-writing the script, outside of the old thestral sections, and I couldn't object too loudly. There was a bit more music, a bit more optimism to her version of the story. References to bloody war and hate had been softened to struggle and greed; the sharp-bladed edges of the story as Company history had told it were softened and smoothed out. But the audience had seen death and loss and the selfishness of hateful rulers. Perhaps something happier and less bitter was better for poor, battered Pepin in the third year of the Company's service to the Bride of Tambelon.

In the back of the audience was a cluster of well-fed donkeys, dressed down for the occasion. They crowded around a roan mother and her two dusky foals, the foals sitting upon their mother's and step-father's backs, the better to watch the pageant. I have no idea what the little ones made of the whole thing. The duc and the duchesse's procession had arrived at Dance Hall two days before Hearth's Warming; the Captain invited them to stay for the celebration. Their attendants were staying in tents outside of the gates of Mondovi; the ducal family were being hosted in the mayor's rather modest 'mansion'.

Bonforte had named the foals Bonneterre and Vibrant. Fear and trembling. Who said le Duchesse had no sense of humour? They looked happy, they looked good. Vibrant didn't look like she had scarred from the blade.

I kept my distance. But I think Bonforte spotted me; she kept looking into the shadows beside the stage where I lurked.

It might have been my imagination.

I returned my attention to the pageant, as they approached their climax, the night-chill adding a shiver of authenticity to the phantasmic ice. The dread barrow-windigoes were truly unsettling in that moment – Bonforte's jennies started wailing as the illusions flew overhead. And then a translucent black wing folded over their crying heads, and they stopped in surprise.

The Spirit in her grim aspect stood over the ducal party, and they crouched in astonishment and terror. But you could hear the jennies burbling in delight, and the Spirit mumbled something to the duc and duchesse which might have been reassuring.

The interruption silenced, the apprentices completed their scene, and sang their conclusion:

The fire of friendship lives in our hearts
As long as it burns, we cannot drift apart
Though quarrels arise, their numbers are few
Laughter and singing will see us through
We are a union of loving friendship
And friends we'll be to the very end

They repeated the stanza three times, and by the third, the entire crowd was singing along with the performers. It was, after all, what it was designed to evoke. Unity, tolerance, compromise, community.

Even if at the centre of that community stood a towering horror, murmuring reassuring nonsense to a pair of wondering jenny-foals.

Thundersnow

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The thundersnow split the sky, electric arcs licking the edges of the high, dark clouds on either side of the draw northwards between the Deep Mines and the Pepin Front. Tiny feathered shadows flit here and there among the great lightning-strikes, the vast bolts curving between tiny little globes of eye-straining light in the darkness boiling furiously on the far side of the airy void over the roadway north to Pepin City.

The pegasi danced in the heights of late afternoon, the inexorable storm raging against the unseen chains which they drew across the roiling, willful clouds. Each pegasus’s course across the face of the storm drew sparks and flashes that, drawing together, arced point to point until the flashes became bolts, and the bolts became flashing furies. You could see the fury of the storm, to be so restrained against its natural course. Nothing so vast and primal could possibly be held back by mere equine hooves, not for long.

I stood in the turret of the northern watch-tower overlooking the Bride’s Gate with the two Cakes on either side, all of us watching the ponies of the aerial cohort answering the challenge of the Spirit, who had cast aspersions against their very natures. She had mocked their unnatural disinterest in weather-control to the Lieutenant’s face, and sneered at their mere militancy and weakness before the natural weather of a world with such weak wild-magic. In her day, the solar pegasi had fought long and hard to prove the superiority of ponies in the face of chaos and the wilderness. To cede the convenience of equinity to the whims of mindless nature? A blasphemy against the underlying philosophy of the Company, a granting of authority to Fate in its natural guise!

The occasion of this challenge was the plans of the ducal party to return to Pepin City along the northern road the day after Hearth’s Warming, and the heavy storm that every pegasus’s primaries tingled warning. The weather had refused to break prior to the holiday. Afterwards, it was as if all of Tambelon had paused for the celebration. In the aftermath of that happy day, the weather was rushing as if to make up for lost time. Those foregone storm-fronts were now piling one upon the other until the storms which nature had spared us in the late fall and early winter, came to lash us in a single ravening tumult, a grand blizzard.

The feathered ponies of the Company were not weather-ponies, nor did most of them even come from cultures where weather-control was a traditional activity. Some few clans in Crossroads laid claim to the taming of hurricane-weather, but none of those strange ponies ever ventured abroad, nor did they volunteer to become mercenaries under the mares-head. Perhaps their life in endless conflict with the great tropical disturbances provided their youth such excitement and grand adventure that none felt the need to search for such things at the wing-blade’s edge.

So when the sections of the aerial cohort set forth to carve a passage through the storm for the traffic north along the road to Pepin City, they did so with far more enthusiasm and ignorance than skill or efficacy. They had no idea how to make the weather work against itself, to bend clouds against themselves, to show the winds the simpler paths, to direct the moisture towards places to fall, and places to pass over, to make energy do the work that intention would assign it. Instead, they fought the storm as an enemy, meeting it lance-head to lance-head, pike-staff to pike-staff, stave against stave. They fought the storm as a blundering general fights an enemy well-entrenched and posted – bloodily, blunderingly, furiously.

And, apparently, their amateurish methods leaked electrical discharges. The corridor was held against the winds, but that corridor was fenced-in with a terrible, rolling fury of lightning-bolts stretching out from the high cloud-tops to the scorching wooded slopes below.

"There’s only a hundred pegasi out there?" asked Cup Cake.

"More like a hundred and twenty, I think," I replied.

"That’s a lot of lightning. Way they’re going, I’m expecting the snowflakes to catch fire," she said.

"Is it not supposed to do that? I grew up in subtropical climes, Miss Cake. Snow and all of its quirks are novel phenomena for me, if you would."

"Nope, snow storms ain’t supposed to light up like that, Doctor," said Carrot Cake. "Not 'round here, leastways. Pegasi are relatively new to the province, you know. First time I’ve seen 'em try to fight the weather before, really."

"Never really been in our wheelhouse. The Company exists to kill ponies and break stuff, not to mess with the weather."

"Nonsense!" said the pudgy little baker. "Pegasi exist to mess with clouds. Oh, not all of 'em, and maybe not even most of 'em, but it’s their tribal role, you know? Earth ponies muck around with dirt, and unicorns fiddle around with magic, and pegasi play with clouds. It’s a tribal… hobby I guess you’d call it? It’s not natural that you Company ponies have been keeping the poor dears from their tribal selves."

"I don’t think I’ve ever seen you dig in the dirt, Miss Cake," I said.

"Well, really. Cooking’s a sort of digging in virtual dirt, isn’t it? Plants growing in the dirt, being an extension of the dirt itself, and the grain and sugars and fruit of that dirt. All dirt in the end."

We were quiet once again, and watched the lightning lash the skies like a vast fireworks display. There is impressive, there is awesome, and then there is the sublime. I’ve seen the sublime described as that beautiful display of things greater and stronger than we, that could wipe us away in a heartbeat if it turned upon us.

The storm and its lightnings was sublime in the truest sense of the word.

"That’s still a lot of lightning for so few pegasi. They’re throwing a lot of magic around for complete novices at cloud-punching," said the Equestrian spy.

Then a bolt of lightning arced across the great valley-void, from the clouds above, to the easternmost peak of the Deep Mines, to the westward slopes of the Pepin Front. It lit up like a gateway thrown across the northern gap. I fancied I could see the convoy of the ducal party upon the roadway underneath. And perhaps a vast great black spectre, walking slowly above the coaches and wagons, Her wings spread in protection above the distant carters and coach-donkeys.

We couldn’t help but cheer like a pack of foals at the fire-works display. It continued long into the night, as the clouds piled up westwards of the caravan in the gathering darkness.

The Artifacts

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The surviving foundations of lost Grande Cave had been re-purposed by the technicals of the Company, those who worked their trades full-time within the embarrassingly small train, and those part-timers who worked their hobbies and secondary roles in between their duties with the cohorts. Wintertime brought with it few duties and responsibilities within the ranks. Winter was when the detail-ponies and hobbyists set aside the lance, spread out within garrison, and worked their avocations.

The new Grande Cave had begun as a common project between myself and the grenadiers and demolitioniers of the griffin corps. It was where we built our burn piles and set up a pair of shacks for the dicy business of purifying sulfur and mixing blasting powder. There was always a chance of blowing these shops at the moon, and nopony wanted to smell the sulfur, in production or in storage.

The initial push for the creation of blasting-powder was long past, but because the production of saltpetre is a slow process demanding patience and weak senses of smell, it had to go on continuously and steadily. I'd mostly left the matter to a griff everypony called Salzig Petr; few griffins have strong senses of smell, but they say Salzig Petr was as deaf in his nose as I am blind in my left eye.

One filthy, stinking industrial set of shacks attracted a second set of stinking industrial hovels, and the tanners moved in on the nearest surviving square of foundations unmolested by the late Mad Jack's stone-scavengers, and soon enough the smiths shifted shop to join the rest of the outcasts. Finally came the warlocks, with madness gleaming in their eyes and a Company grown quite tired of magical experiments gone awry within the walls of Dance Hall hot on their hooves.

Gibblets and Obscured Blade had cleared the interior of the last of the remaining foundations in Grande Cave, and removed the rotted planking that was all that remained of what must have been somepony's parlour once upon a time. They had raised a heavy tent over the foundation, and built a low log-frame wall around the edges of the hut, existing drainages cleared to keep the snow and the damp outside of the building. The canvas bent low overhead from the recent snowfall, clumps of heavy, wet snow slowly sliding down along the slope as the heat below warmed the heavy fabric and melted the lowest layer into a flow-slip.

Covered lamps lit up the interior, and low candles mounted in the corners of yet another ward-circle aided the two warlocks in their creation. I stood by the exit, leaning against my annals-chest, while my understudy stood closer to her superiors, watching their work carefully.

"Do I really need to be here for this horseapples?"

"Settle down, Sawbones. We could have Feufollet operate the chest, and shift about the artifacts as needed, but do you really want an understudy in close contact to, well, those?" asked Gibblets, looking up from the rococco spray of curved lines he was inscribing within the wards.

"Pay attention to what you're doing, you damn goblin!" barked Uncle Blade. "One mistake, and something might manifest from these things, or summon summat we wouldn't want summoned, by damn!"

"When you put it that way, maybe I don't want to ever bring anything out of the chest, maybe? We haven't had good experiences with circles, have we? Twice I've come into a warding circle, and twice wild and weird and horrible things have happened! Every time I see an circle anymore, I cringe and wait for the world to explode!"

"Settle down, zebra. This is the Company, things explode on a regular basis. Just because twice it was in close proximity to a warding circle, doesn't mean the two are causally related. I'd be more inclined to say you are the common correlating factor. Things tend to only blow up by intention when you're not here; you're always here when things accidentally detonate," groused the goblin-witch.

"We've made two tons of blasting-powder the last year without anything exploding; I've run alchemical alembics and distilleries without a single room blown to Tartarus. Don't put this bollocks on me, you damn drippy biped. Speaking of which, go wipe yourself, you're drizzling on that line you just drew."

He looked down, and cursed, and went for a towel. Uncle Blade took over his work, and re-drew the offending line.

Finally, they were finished, and Feufollet and I carried over the chest to hold it over the circle. The two of us were not needed to do this; I could carry it over by myself, heck, Feufollet could carry it balanced on the tips of her long ears if she needed to do so. The two of us were necessary to hold it in place while I opened it and worked the controls. We kept it within the completed circle, our hooves safely outside of the circle on either side.

I pulled the first artifact out of its hiding-place, and carried it gently into the heart of the warding-circle. Then I closed the shelf, and the chest, and Feufollet carried it back into a corner.

The two witches walked forward to examine the phylactery, and I stepped back.

"So that's what they look like. Weirdly pretty; looks like a piece of artwork."

"Hrm. Not much in the way of power coming off of it. If somepony hadn't told me it was what he claims it was, I'd call it just that, a neat bit of carving."

As Obscured Blade was casting aspersions upon my scholarship, the shadows in the corner of the shanty opposite of Feufollet stirred, and the Spirit in her Nightmare aspect walked into the world from the darkness.

"There is little power in it, little pony, because all of its power is drained into ourselves. I can feel the tug; this is the vessel of the first lich."

She reached into the ward, and crushed it without ceremony. A violet flare filled the bounds of the circle, and purple flames flickered around her semi-tangible hooves.

"Tha-that's not supposed to be possible!" objected Gibblets. "How did you get through that ward?"

"Warlock, there are more things in the Chain of Creation, than are dreamt of in your philosophy. Would you think it possible that I would let myself be trapped once again in one of these damned circles? Or perhaps I influenced you to leave a gap for my entry and exits, and for now until the end of your days, you will leave me sally-ports within your mystical fortresses, that I might come and go? How many times must I tell you, goblin-clown, that you are MINE TO DO WITH AS I PLEASE?" Tartarus burned in her gaze, and Gibblets hit the packed, dry earth with a thump, kneeling with his forehead in the dirt. "Still, it is good that you thought to open these in a circle; we don't want a free-roaming death-witch to feel our hooves upon their throats, would we?"

She turned her eyes upon the curious jenny and the chest.

"So let us continue. Acolyte, how many of these did you say we recovered?"

"Eleven in total, Mistress. Ten, now."

"And how many legates are there in your common employer's employ?"

"I've never gotten a good count on that, Mistress. Names? Eight other than the three you've destroyed. But I've got it on good authority that there are more than that, perhaps as many as twenty, twenty-five. And we have no proof that these examples represent liches free and loose in the world. The rest of these might even be the phylacteries of liches still within the Grand Barrow, perhaps even anchor-posts holding down the Death-Ram's prison. The possibility has been why I've been loath to mess with the… artifacts."

"Well, let us proceed. We can at least separate the dross from the silver; worry about the silversmith afterwards."

And so we did. One more was determined to have belonged to the Marklaird, and was crushed in its turn. The Spirit opined that four others belonged to sleeping entities, perhaps far and to the eastwards, below the high barrow that covered the grave of the imprisoned Grogar. These precious anchor-stones were returned to their nest within the annals-chest.

The remaining five were examined closely within the ward-circle, that night, and through snowy nights that followed. Nothing was done to them at first, but the warlocks and their Mistress drew up plans to make use of what had slumbered, forgotten, nestled within our archive-chest.

And still the Bride's representatives failed to arrive and deliver unto us their judgments. What delayed the Imperials? We awaited the signs and portents of an outside world gone silent as the snow.

Barber, Baker, Soldier, Spy

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Feufollet and I waited inside the Bride's Gate as Brass Tone's ore and ingot convoy crossed the great drawbridge into Dance Hall. The heavy-laden wagons swayed as they rolled off the bridge and back onto the pavement of the Road. The guards made quick work of inspecting each wagon as it passed, not even stopping them, just trotting alongside and lifting each wagon's covers with their lance-heads to check that they were loaded up with crushed ore, ingots, and odd-lots of stone and metal fixings. The guards converged on the corporal of the guard, who held the waybill, and as the last wagon crossed the bridge, I walked over to talk to the corporal. The last guards came round, the corporal nodded, and hoofed over the waybill to me, and I galloped ahead to find the convoy-master. Feufollet followed in my wake.

I wasn't quite exactly 100%, but I could get up at least a brief half-gallop without tearing open old wounds, or straining the healing bones in my rear leg. And really, it wasn't much of a gallop. Earth ponies and donkeys can be pretty hale and mighty when it comes to hauling heavy loads, but even they can find it a strain to haul tons of zinc, tin, copper, and even lead in wagon-loads.

We found the convoy-master hitched side-by-side with another pony at the head of the column, hauling a wagon half-full of lead ingots. I knew Swing Shift from my several visits to Tone's work-camps and re-opened mining villages up in the Deep Mines. They were just as exposed up there to seasonal camp-sickness and flu as we mortal mercenaries, and my services against that eventuality was part and parcel of the Company's agreement with that wealthy business-pony.

"Morning, Master Shift! The corporal passed your paperwork over to me, to keep the traffic moving. You know how they like to keep you all rolling while you're inside the ramparts." I hoofed over the papers to Swing Shift, who grabbed them with his mouth and tucked them into a set of saddle-bags.

"Hey, you'll get no arguments from me. I have no desire to camp-out beside the Road somewhere in a dark gorge halfway to nowhere! I plan to sleep behind walls up on the plateau!"

"That's a long haul for ponies carrying all this dross. Look at it! Your springs are going to fuse solid if you're not careful!"

"Hey, at least we have springs! I remember when we had to haul in leather-strap suspensions. No Grogar-damned give to them at all, and unlucky as all tartarus as well! But we only had to haul down to the docks in those days, so there was that. This road-haulage is for the birds."

"At least you have good Bride Roads to carry over, don't you think?"

"Yeah, which means it's only fifteen times more expensive than shipping by river! Look at all of these mouths and bellies tied up carrying a few dozen tons worth of material! If it were bad roads, you'd be talking sixty times as expensive! Oh, Doc, give me a fair river, and flatboat-mares to pole my loads downstream, and then I'd show you proper profits!"

"Tell me how to make the White Rose disappear, and I'll give you the river back again, dear sir. Until then, you're as road-bound as the rest of us."

"Damn them all to tartarus, sure enough. Hey, what are you doing on the road?"

"Oh, there's this militia conference thing scheduled in a few days up at the Palisades. Feufollet and I need to be up there to show the flag. Supposed to be a couple other ponies coming along, but I think they got a late start of it, and they'll probably join us on the road somewhere once they get their flanks in gear."

"Ha! Give ‘em what-for, Doc! You can't let the slackers goldbrick, gives the good workers ugly ideas, either they start enforcing discipline themselves, or everybody starts cutting corners!"

As we talked, the northern gate passed overhead, and I drifted back along the convoy, followed by my jenny-shadow. As we walked through the mid-winter thaw, I paused now and again to talk to this carter and that along the long convoy. I knew many of them, for few were professional or dedicated carters. There were far too many ponies at loose ends this winter in central Pepin, adventurers and would-be farmers and sooners waiting until spring and solid ground for their projects and reconstructions and recovery of abandoned cropland. Many of the sooners had wasted their seed, or found that they hadn't brought enough, or found their supplies not sufficient to a long winter in Dance Hall's shanty-town, and had found seasonal work hauling carts for Brass Tones. More than one of the carters had been before the Caribou Trust the fall before, arguing their families' case before the legal-ponies and myself. I didn't know them well, but well enough to exchange a friendly word or two.

Dancing Shadows and Heavy Bucket were hauling a wagon full of zinc ore about three carts from the end of the convoy. I pulled up next to them, the same as the other carters, and exchanged dull pleasantries with those two wayward Company-donkeys, everypony pretending to not know each other, but not exactly, you know? Faking a casual acquaintance was far harder than simply cutting a friend dead, I find. We ended up waggling our eyebrows expressively at each other. I'm pretty sure Heavy Bucket was trying to make me laugh, but more fool he - everypony knows I don't have a sense of humour!

As we passed their swaying cart, the tumbled walls of Durand hove into view at the bend in the gorge which that doomed town had once dominated. There was a side-road on either side at the cross-roads which had once been Durand's reason for existing, each road curving up into hollers or coves which held numerous homesteads and family farms, which had been abandoned after the destruction of the town, and the dispersal of the populace into exile. Durand hadn't been rebuilt, but many of the homesteads had been re-occupied in the last year. There was a little cross-traffic here, and overhead came a pegasus patrol, five ponies in formation, plus Cherie with her new-forged wingblades.

"Monseiur!" she greeted me as she flew down, showing off her new 'toys'. "Oh, and Feufollet! They're letting me go on patrol now! We were just talking to the ponies up in Darkside Hollows! ‘Mazing, how fast they're putting it all back into shape!"

"Well, you're growing up now, aren't you? Patrolling's part of a Company pony's life. And Gerlach surely needs every available pair of wings - they're not really making more pegasi in Tambelon, are they?"

"I guess not, Monseiur. Oh! Have you seen my mark! It came in, the morning after that big dream-meeting with the Captain! Isn't it neat?" She turned around, mid-air, and showed off her flanks, which now showed her 'cutie-mark', a living rose half-covered in pure-white snow. I didn't tell her I'd seen it before, weeks before in fact, because I hadn't come to her coming-of-age party, and really hadn't had time to exchange words with her in far too long. There had been so many things to take care of, and Rye Daughter had gotten sick, and all the work I'd been putting in with the witches and Feufollet's studies and… I was a terrible mentor, I admit it.

"It's beautiful, Cherie, just like you. Hurry on now, your corporal's giving me the stink-eye."

"Oh! Hahahah! Sorry, ma'am! I'm coming!" and she flitted off, like a shot from a sling.

Feufollet, who hadn't said a word all morning long, just rolled her eyes at me, and pointed a hoof back to the convoy. They had gotten away from us while I was humouring Cherie, and we were now behind the last cart in the convoy. I trotted to catch up with our tail-check carters.

"Whew, don't you love these winter thaws? Just warm enough to not catch a chill, but the moisture in the air really gets the flem going, don't it?" I burbled at the two earth-ponies hauling a load of unworked brass ingots.

Cup Cake, not even wearing her old 'spy' disguise, just rolled her eyes at my performance. I guess that day was my day to test the patience of the ponies that know me. "Hey, there, Sawbones. Haven't seen you for a while. How have you been doing?"

"Can't complain, can't complain. Quiet time of the year for most ponies, but you know my business. It's when everypony's constitutions decides to take a bath, and sickness! Everywhere!"

The other earth-pony, a brown stallion with a black mane, asked in a strong Rime accent, "What business is that, that you're worrying about sick ponies? You an apothecary?"

"Oh, I do all sorts of things. When the timing's right, I harvest herbs, sometimes I make liquor, sometimes I make up potions and suchlike. When it's needed, I stitch up ponies and cut off limbs before they go rotten. Rich children of rich ponies go to university and take fancy degrees and call themselves ‘doctors' to do what I do, but I've always liked to call myself a barber. ‘Barber', from the Alogakioi for ‘foreigner'. Or so I'd like to think. What do you do?"

"Oh, I'm a carter, like most everypony here."

"Come on, now! Almost nopony in this convoy is a carter by trade! Carting is too dear for the professionals down here at the end of the supply-chain! Swing Shift, the guy at the front of the caravan, he's a head forepony for the guy who owns all of these rocks and slabs of metal. I passed a half-dozen unemployed farmers carrying loads to fund their farm-recovery efforts. More are ponies looking for excitement down here among the ghouls, you just can't convince ponies that the undead problem's under control. Or maybe they understand it, and are getting their excitement after all the killing and dying is done. Seems safer that way, don't it? I don't understand the adventuring type." I took a breath.

"Oh, and Cup Cake here is a baker, aren't you Cup Cake?"

"Don't you know it, Doc. But refined sugar don't buy itself, and my employers are too damn cheap to import it their own damn selves. But still they whine and they snivel about their danishes being all sticky and covered in bee-snot. So I go upcountry and make a few sou while I can, and maybe find some sugar cheaper up-country."

"And even Feufollet, here - she isn't a carter! What do you do, Feufollet?"

"I am an apprentice, Master Sawbones. I someday hope to be a soldier like my own master Octavius."

"Apprentice isn't a job, it's a status, so yeah! Soldier. So - what is your name, anyways, Mr. Mystery Pony?"

"Ahh, call me Earth Listens. And really! I'm a carter. Got my guild membership and everything. Although they're going to fine me five ways from hearth-day if they find out I've been working a non-guild gig."

The earth-pony stallion's attention was entirely upon me, and he hadn't noticed the veil of obscurity which had drawn across the road just ahead of us, and behind the next-to-last cart in the convoy. It wasn't blackness or darkness or a mirror or anything flashy - it was just a glamour that averted the eye and kept a pony from noticing anything beyond it, or hearing anything for that matter.

"Feufollet, why don't you show our new friend Earth Listens, why it pays to listen to other ponies when they ask a simple question."

And Feufollet showed him her new spell, and he collapsed in his traces, unconscious.

"Finally!" barked Cup Cake, glaring at her unconscious hauling-partner. "I thought you were going to play with him all day long. Can you get him out of the traces and into the back? I'm going to need another partner if we're going to get this Celestia-damned heavy load and that blasted spy's carcass up to the Palisades before dark falls!"

"You're positive he's another spy?" I asked.

"A pony comes along and recruits half my network, yeah, I know a spy when he trips all over me and mine. Took too damn long to get him to recruit me into his little conspiracy. What a waste of time!"

So we unhitched the new spy, and Feufollet pushed him into the back of the cart as I got myself hitched up to finish hauling our new load into the highlands.

The rest of the Company contingent caught up to us just before we were ready to get back on the road. I glared at the lot of them - nopony ever shows up when there's actual work to be done, damn it all.

Hobbies For Inquisitive Mares

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We didn't catch up with the rest of the convoy until Gustavbank, which gave me plenty of time to argue with Cup Cake, another pony I had been neglecting in favour of Uncle Blade and his fiddling with the artifacts.

"What exactly are you doing with a network, little miss prisoner?"

"A girl needs a hobby, doesn't she?"

"I thought baking was your hobby."

"Heresy! Baking is an avocation, not a mere hobby! Baking is life!"

I got the chance to roll my eyes right back at the pudgy little baker. My leg was barely twinging, but I could tell that I'd be hurting by the time we hit the Palisades. "Fine. So how is it that somepony's been letting you recruit agents right under our noses? You're still technically under Company parole, aren't you?"

"Oh, really, 'agents'. We like to call them 'sources'. Agents sounds so… active. If you run around asking questions yourself, you get arrested by paranoid local townfolk convinced you're working for blood-thirsty warlocks or necromancers planning to sacrifice the town fathers to Grogar the Undying."

"Well, you'd know about that, wouldn't you."

She stuck her tongue out at me. "Really, don't ya know? No, better to recruit sources to sit around and wait for stories to fall into their laps. And for other spooks to come along and try and recruit them. Which is how I found this guy. He started buying my bought ponies."

"Where the hay did you get deniers to pay for sources? I didn't think we paid you anything."

"Oh, it's part of my funding from home. It makes them feel like I'm not burnt if I'm still drawing on my funding and building source networks. I worked it out with Dancing Shadows. Also, she started funding my network direct from her intelligence-investment fund. No point in duplicated efforts, after all."

She paused a second, and then said, "Well, there is a point to duplicated effort, but it has to be deliberate duplication. I like to recruit twice in any situation, the first told that they're to get their stipend, but if somepony else tries to hire their awareness, they're obliged to report it first thing. Then I recruit a second pony, and tell them to keep an ear out, but also an eye for the first source, whom they know is a source. If they see the first source approached by a third party, they're to report the contact. If the first source doesn't report her contact, and the second source outs her, the second source gets both stipends, and the first is burned. The first source is informed that she's not alone, but has no idea who the second source is, just that they'll report any contacts, and if there aren't two reports of any recruiting contact, their stipend is gone. But also, if they report a contact, and the second source doesn't report the contact as well, well, the first cashes in both stipends."

"Isn't that a recipe for paranoia?"

"I stole the idea from a multi-level marketing outfit that my aunties got tangled up in when I was a filly. Those ponies are evil, I tell you what."

"Am I hearing you right, and you're running our intelligence network now?"

"Well, parts of it, anyways. A filly's gotta keep busy."

"You're not supposed to be out and about by your parole, aren't you?"

"Oh, Dancing Shadows has let up on that a bit. Enough to get out and around in the local districts. I miss Carrot when I'm gone, but they say absence makes the heart grow fonder, and I shouldn't make him feel he can take me for granted, you know? So, road trips. And sometimes he can travel with me. Gerlach's ponies know where we're going, and can retrieve Carrot easily enough if you need the standard-bearer to kill somepony important."

"You know, we're languishing in darkest ignorance right now on the Imperial front. Bragging about running the intelligence network might not be the smartest move. Why shouldn't I suspect you of slacking off? We need to know how they're going to jump."

"Well, I did say part of the network. I can't get all that far with this parole business. No further than Pepin City or the little towns up on the plateau. This damned sugar shortage gives me all sorts of excuses to go gallivanting about the province, that's for sure. Nopony's got anything refined. Damnedest thing. I'm starting to suspect hoarding somewhere up the supply chains."

"One of the reasons we're going up to the Palisades is to see if we can't shake the Imperial-tree, see why they're not reacting to all of these exterminated liches."

"Any news you get up there, ought to be redundant to my sources in the plateau."

"There's supposed to be militia officers from every province in the northlands, somepony should have heard something, shouldn't they?"

"You'd think, but far as I can tell, the Imperials think of militia as mushrooms at best, and mushroom-manure at worst."

"Kept in the dark, fed bullshit?"

"Bullshit is premium militia-feed. They're lucky if they get squirrel-shit."

"On the actual subject here, who the hell is our Earth Listens working for? Is that his actual name?"

"On that last question, oh, probably. It has the ring of a proper pony name. Especially one with a sneaky mark like that, a proper spook mark he has. Some of the ponies in this world, they have no idea how to be subtle. Spies with spook marks, soldiers with blood and blades on their flanks, really! Nopony knows how to tack close to the winds of destiny around these parts."

"Who is he reporting to, Cup Cake?"

"Oh, I have no idea. Well, I do have one. He didn't recognize the Equestrian codes, he isn't a sign that my controllers have lost faith in me. I'm pretty sure. I think. That accent of his is too perfect, though. Practiced. He isn't Rimean. Building a comprehensive sources network in Pepin, though? Too extensive to be commercial, I don't think. Business-ponies are too cheap to buy in bulk like that. He's got funding, that's clear. The Duc's too cash-poor to be building his own early-detection network, and supposedly I'd be hearing from Dancing if the ducal court was setting something up. We're gonna look like a bunch of fools if it turns out to be that, though, dontcha think?" She grinned, looking a little strained at the idea.

"So, what, Imperials or White Rose?"

"My guess, yeah. I'm kinda hoping Imperials. Might open up another line of communication. We've got that gormless engineer of the Bride's, but nopony tells him anything. His letters are duller than my Aunt Maple's gossip-sessions with her cronies. Barely worth steaming open."

The humble walled compound of the caribous on Gustavbank came into view, ending our conversation. Visible just ahead, on the great causeway beyond that settlement, was the rest of Brass Tone's convoy. The dying sun's last rays lit up each wagon like silver beads on the Road's sable ribbon. We leaned into the traces, straining against the uphill haul, and there was no more wind for talking over spookcraft and the secrets of quiet ponies.

We arrived at Plateau Palisades in complete darkness, everypony exhausted and strained at the long haul. Even if Swing Shift had wanted to go into camp along the side of the Road, it hadn't been possible on the long causeway, so many dozens of yards above the valley floors. The convoy rearranged itself in the fortification's great marshalling-yard, a chaos that allowed our Company armspony escort to quietly unload the unconscious spy, and put him into storage. My old infirmary was now the theoretical property of a very, very part-time militia surgeon whose normal practice was up in Charred Horton. I spent more time in that facility than she did, and I was barely if ever up there. We had to dust out a quarantine room for our new involuntary guest.

Between the militia-pony conference, and the interrogation to come, I would be having a busy weekend, it seemed.

And my rear leg burned like all Tartarus, Grogar damn it.

A Puzzle Missing Two-Thirds Of The Pieces

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The Lieutenant flew in the next morning, and we held a pre-conference meeting in the front offices of the unstaffed infirmary. Heavy Bucket kept an eye on the prisoner in the quarantine rooms, and Feufollet took notes. The Company needed to get everypony on the same page about what we knew and what we needed to know before plunging fetlock-deep into the militia puddle.

"We have been patrolling the line of the upper river for the last two seasons, as well as le Coppice's back-country and the northern fringe of the riverlands," began the Lieutenant. "The 93rd Rear Support Battalion and the rest of the rear support battalions have been missing since about the end of summer, missing as in, nopony's seen them, there's a vacuum behind the fortified lines, as far as my scouts can determine. The incidental undead that the RSBs keep suppressed, have been slowly increasing in number in our patrol areas. Since the beginning of winter, those numbers have been more rapidly increasing – which is unusual because the winter is supposedly the slow season for the undead, they tend to go into hibernation in the black months."

"The other flotillas of the White Rose's upper fleet have not been seen on the river proper since about two months after we destroyed the heavy ships in the harbor at Falaises du Conseil. We didn't make much of it at the time, but at this point, we can be pretty sure that they broke the boom at Harmony's Root, ran the gauntlet, and re-inforced the fleets along the middle river."

"That's where my story picks up," said Dancing Shadows. "Rumours have it that there was a major naval battle at the forks of the river and the Housa. A catastrophic one, that put at least two legates out of commission, and wiped out the Imperial fleet at the forks."

"I've been hearing similar rumours, but they've been just that, rumours," said Cup Cake. "Nopony has anything specific, or official. Not even our Imperial engineer is getting anything one way or the other on the subject, or really, anything but family matters. Everypony from le Coppice to the borders of the eastern provinces has suddenly gotten laryngitis."

"What the hay are the Mondovan voyageurs saying, then?" I asked. "Aren't they our informational ninjas in the debatable lands? For that matter, what about the caravan guards?"

The Lieutenant cleared her throat, looking apologetic. "Didn't anypony tell you? We haven't had a caravan guard out with the voyageurs since the ambush on the Baneway. They… didn't take our little surprise at all well. Something about letting them bumble about the dead lands with a monster protecting them while they slept…" She looked unsettled. "Not at all well."

"The Mondovan voyageurs aren't what they used to be, either," contributed Cup Cake. "It was always an expedient, the only way the town could maintain itself. And it was pretty dang dangerous, that's for sure. There's all sorts of things the donkeys and ponies of Mondovi can pay their freight with these days that isn't adventuring through ghoul-infested wastelands in search of cargo and stories. Brass Tones is paying top dollar for labour, for one thing. That half of Mondovi which isn't farming their share of the remaining cropland is working for Mr. Tones. It's only the serious wanderers that have gone out on voyage this year."

"And," concluded Dancing Shadows, "Nopony's heard from them since they went out in the middle-fall. They're overdue. And since they were self-guarding, we don't have armsponies to check and see if they're still with us."

I thought for a moment. "So, we're thinking this naval squabble down on the Housa is the source of all this confusion?"

"It… is possible. I don't have a firm grasp of the geography down there. There were all of these armies in between where I went, and whatever we're talking about," said the Equestrian spy.

"What, do we really need *geography lessons*?" demanded the table's sole native Tambelonian. Well, other than Feufollet, who hadn't said a word, simply scribbling away at her notes in the corner.

"Fine! Look, this is the riverlands," said the slightly older jenny, as she scribbled on the desk-top we were using as a conference table. "Great river here, down the middle. Tributaries here, here, here, here, and here. There are tons of smaller ones all over the place, but these five are the navigable ones, the economically and militarily relevant ones. They're known as the 'Five Mouths'. Housa," she pointed at the middle-eastern tributary, "flowing into the heartlands of the east, the Rima, whose springs are only five miles west of the gates of Rime, here. The Trade river, way the heck down the great river, here, goes through the heart of the rebellious provinces. Then you have the 'Twins', Castor and Pollux, down this way, that drain the upper southern highlands, down thisaway. The Imperials draw a lot of their pony-power out of the highlands, mostly ponies down in those mountains, and they're poor and pugnacious, a good mixture for troops, or at least, that's what my elders always used to say."

"The White Rose began their rebellion by seizing the 'Fifth Mouth', the grand fortress holding the boom at the forks of the Trade. The war proper started when they burst across the great river and besieged the 'First Mouth' at the forks of the Rima. That siege lasted for ten years, until our friends the Walker and the Stump diverted enough resources destroying Caribou City that the First Mouth fell, and the battle-lines rolled back to the general vicinity of the line anchored at Harmony's Root. The Imperials have kept control of the other three Mouths, along with the fortresses which dominated those forks. Oh, I should mention, the Third and Fourth Mouths are actually forks of the Housa, not the great river. So those fortifications are themselves behind the great complex at the Second Mouth."

"OK, that explains why everypony keeps talking about the Second Mouth, then," said Cup Cake with an air of revelation. "And that's very bad news, because the most common version of the rumours is that something called the gates of the Second Mouth were breached in the rout which ended the battle on the river."

"Where did you hear that?" demanded an alarmed Dancing Shadows.

"I touched base with my sources up in the village this morning, looking to see if anyponies' gotten in any sugar since last time I was up here. And no, no sugar, Celestia damnit."

"Bugger your pearl-pink princess and your powdered sugar," blasphemed the Lieutenant, "If civilians are talking about the fall of a major fortress up here, and ponies in the actual front-line fortifications aren't aware of it – well, damn. Just before flying up here, I had a report from a patrol that buttonholed some Imperial lieutenants in the bastions south-east of the Root. Not only hadn't they heard about any big fortresses falling, it doesn't sound like they'd heard of any battle. Are they keeping the front line troops ignorant?"

"If the Second Mouth has fallen, and there's still a White Rose fleet on the middle river," said Dancing Shadows, "They could drive halfway to Trois Rivieres before they'd hit any defensible lines in the Housa, and that assumes that the militia in the eastlands has been keeping up any of the river-fortresses. The best of those choke-points is at Coriolanus, next district over from where my family's from, and that fortress is a rotting pile of rocks that rich donkeys like to go and picnic over the river, watch the barges go by."

I put out a hoof, and waved in a calming manner. "Easy, filly. Last thing the rebels would want to do would be to plunge their battle-fleet hundreds and hundreds of miles behind Imperial lines to get cut off as soon as somepony enterprising got a boom or a flotilla of pirogues out into the river behind them. And look, here – you have two major fortifications on these two rivers, right?"

"The Third and Fourth Mouths are aimed towards controlling access to the Twins, not holding traffic on the main channel of the Housa. You're right, though, they can't get too deep. They don't need to get too deep, though, to get between Rime's walls and the main Imperial Army in the Root Line."

"If they were going to try and trap the Imperials in their own lines, wouldn't the news have passed down the ranks?" asked the Lieutenant.

"Internal communications could have broken down, they may be controlling information to prevent panic, impossible to know at this remove," I said. "But it sounds like the war may be turning fluid. We probably need to start thinking about putting ourselves on a more mobile footing. Something we need to bring back to the Captain. Hopefully we can get more clarification when the militia officers start streaming in?"

"If nothing else, I'd call a major defeat a good reason why the Imperials might be too distracted to care about the Company liquidating their troublemaking, noncombatant legates," I concluded. "Swatting us across the muzzle with a rolled-up newspaper has got to be pretty far down the priority-list from 'Rebels raiding the midlands' or 'the possible loss of the Imperial Field Army'. But hay, at least this happened in the muddy months. We'd all be up horseapples creek without a scoop if they'd broken loose in the summer months."

The meeting broke up. The Lieutenant needed to greet the arriving militia officers, and the rest of us to interrogate our newly captured spy.

Clamming Up, or, The Interrogation

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"So I can't pull my usual witch-doctor shtick, he's seen me being normal."

"it's cute that you think you're capable of being normal," sniped Dancing Shadows.

"And I was there when we captured him, so 'good pony' is probably right out."

"It's even cuter that you think you're capable of playing the 'good pony', you madpony!" Cup Cake piled on.

"Are we done having fun yet?" I asked, irked. They both shook their heads in tandem, smirking. "Fine! You all want to run this interrogation, that's all you. I was just going to suggest-"

"Interrogating him pro forma, and set him up for something sneaky?" asked Cup Cake.

"Terrorize him to his face, and leave him an 'escape' with a saviour to confide in?" asked Dancing Shadows.

"Clearly I don't need to be here," I grouched. Then Feufollet spoke up from her corner.

"But sir, we still need a heavy. You can play heavy all you like, can't you?" the growing jenny asked.

"At least somepony knows how to give respect to their elders! Yeah, I can do that. Let's see how clean the current occupant keeps her surgical tools; 'showing the tools' is always a fun way to pass the time."

"Sir, simple intimidation first, maybe? The Annals suggest that feinting a torture-session should come… later?"

"Who said anything about feints? No, I'm joking. Well, mostly. Let's start by talking at the spook, maybe 'Earth Listens' will crack like a dry stick at the first poke."

"More like bend like tall grass at the first blast of hot air," muttered Cup Cake.

"What was that?"

"He will tremble before your mighty bellows, oh master of the chronicle and lord of the interrogation!"

Earth Listens decided to be boring. Catatonic withdrawal can be a valid evasion technique, but it's deathly dull for interrogators. They get bored. If they're disciplined, then your gambit will succeed.

If they're me, they'll sock you in the face just to see you jump. Everypony has a plan until they get bucked in the face. Pull their cork, and you'll see the pony under the plan, if only for a second. Earth Listens glared, with a bottomless rage simmering somewhere behind his startled eyes.

I let the others pull me out of the chamber, yelling and fuming at the restrained pony, Feufollet dabbing at the blood running from Earth Listen's battered nose. After the door closed behind me, I dropped the act.

"Think he bought it?" I asked.

"Bought what? You got mad, you beat a restrained prisoner. Are you still under house arrest?" asked Dancing Shadows.

I looked around at the infirmary of another doctor in which we were standing. "I do not seem to be at home. I guess I am not?"

"Nopony but you bought into that house arrest business, Sawbones. I was more under arrest than you ever were, and they let me wander half the province," observed Cup Cake. "Although that gives me some ideas. Think he knows about your history, murdering foals and random servantry?"

I sat back on my haunches, unsettled. "Why would it matter? I just came the heavy at him, any legend on top of that would just be painting the lily."

"The thought of something is far more intimidating than the physicality of it, the fear of a hypothetical more real than the fact of the thing itself."

"Did the hypothetical of being beaten bloody by angry townsfolk eclipse the actual beatings themselves?"

The pudgy little earth-pony looked abashed. "Touche. But beatings makes everything real. We need to drown him in 'maybes'. And I'm a little worried that if he does get away from us, we'll have made him a better spy."

"You consider your capture by the Raviners to have made you a better spook?"

"Madpony, it was the making of me. I was a silly little thing before they beat the tartar sauce out of me. If I ever get back to Academy, I'm telling them they need to include at least one severe beating in SERE training. Nopony should get sent out into the field without getting the jam beaten out of them at least once. It focuses the mind masterfully."

The door opened, and Feufollet came out, holding something in one of her hooves. A bloodied rag.

"Well, I've got the materials if we want to do anything manipulative to him," she confirmed. "I don't know about mind-magic, though. I can put 'em down, and I can make 'em see what isn't there, but mucking about in their wrinklies? This is more the Princess's domain, and Cherie."

"There's no way in Tartarus I'm exposing that spy to the Spirit, or Cherie to that spy," I objected. "We're here to get information out of the spook, not fill him to the brim with freebies like 'the Company has a terrifying magic-mist mind-controlling monster, it ate my brain!'"

"But I got better!" giggled a slightly punch-drunk and exhausted Dancing Shadows.

"Good point, we'd have to put him back together with bits missing afterwards if we wanted to do anything at all with him. Do we want to do anything with him down the line? Cup Cake?"

"What, turn another spy in another network? Long, painful, stupid process. Look how long it took with me, and I'm using you fools as much as you're using me."

"What! Shock! Horror! We are betrayed!" giggled Dancing Shadows. She really needed to get some sleep.

"It depends on who he's working for, and we're no closer to that than we were five hours ago. The check-out is a long-term tactic, we could be here another week or two before he breaks," said Cup Cake.

"You two might have two weeks to putz around with this dingus, but Feufollet and I have other business to attend to, eventually. And for all we know, the militia-conference is about to upend all of our lives. Maybe we really ought to bring the-"

And Cherie squeezed out from under a desk beside the open door leading into the patients'-ward across the hallway from where we were speaking.

"Monseiur! I thought I heard you thinking about me! Patrol is over, I am free now! Did you know you have a weird pony in the next room? He took one look at me and started gibbering! I followed the wrong trace, and you weren't in there!"

We looked at each other, and ran for the door. Heavy Bucket, guarding the prisoner, looking alarmed at being rushed.

The spy was shouting and screaming, raging. 'Blasphemy' this, 'heathen' that, lots of ranting about 'devilish mockeries' and frothing about demons quoting prophesy for their own purposes.

So I cracked him one across the muzzle again, and then shoved my hoof into his mouth. He glared at me around my arm.

"Want to repeat that once again, in a single, coherent sentence? Before I go get my surgical tools and start carving the swagger out of you? One. Sentence." I took my slightly-gnawed hoof out of his mouth, and wiped it against my jacket.

"What did you think - pfeh- intend to accomplish - from haunting me with that imp pretending to be a corrupted Princess? Where did you get the prophesy? Where did you get the details? Is this some skill of devils? Is this how you destroy ponies? Are you looking into my soul even now?" His demeanor, unsettled before, now shook into a chaos of darting, terrified glances, looking all over the darkened room, staring at what I have no idea.

"Ha! You're a silly pony, Mr. Weirdo! I don' think anypony's ever called me an imp before! Let alone a Princess! I don't look anything like the Princess! See? No horn!"

"Cherie! Get out of here! Now!"

"But Monseiur-"

"DAMN YOU, DEVIL! STOP PLAYING AT PROPHESY AND TAKE OFF THAT SEMBLANCE OF THE WHITE ROSE!"

The prisoner's scream filled the small quarantine room like the cracking of ice under the hooves of a patrol caught out on a frozen river.

"Well," Dancing Shadows said, breaking the echoing silence, "I guess we know who he's spying for now."

Spare The Rod, Spoil The Promised Child

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I chased Cherie out of the quarantine room, and left the ladies to shake the prisoner while he was scattered and distracted, see what fell out of him. I'm not sure what you say to a filly whose refusal to respect the laws of physical reality and, well, walls meant that you can't really send her to your room, but I tried my best. Luckily, she didn't seem to take all that White Rose prophesy jabber to heart, thought it was just a madpony being a madpony.

I didn't want her paying attention to prophesy. Nothing good ever comes of listening to prophets, especially not in our line of work. Pests ought to be crucified whenever they stick their shaggy, unshaven muzzles out of their stylites or anchorholds. Now that I thought of it, all my troubles began when I didn't have the armsponies string up that damn Pythian in Hydromel.

Did the others take what the rebel spy was saying seriously? Would they, if they continued their interrogation? The Spirit certainly knew what Cherie could become, she had been very clear in her disapproval of the whole matter. But she also clearly had her own soft spot for the little thestral. The two were almost inseparable at times. That might be what the old jenny had meant with her impenetrable verse and vague prophesying.

I realized that I actually had very little knowledge of what exactly the rebels believed, what they were expecting. Some bits picked up here and there, I knew it was an eschatological sect, that they were awaiting the rebirth of their holy figure, the White Rose. That the reappearance of the White Rose would either herald the birth of a new age, or lead a second crusade to wipe the undead from the face of Tambelon. I wasn't at all clear about the details there, and I got the impression that maybe nopony else was too sure, either.

But the White Rose had run a continent-spanning military crusade for over a generation now, without any sign of a holy child or a Prophet Militant, and they were doing just fine, more than fine for that matter. They didn't need little Cherie to dance the tarantella all over the Imperials, they were doing that just fine on their own hook.

I realized I was trying to take too much upon my own shoulders, and reached down where the Spirit always lurked in those days, at the bottom of my mind.

And then she was there.

"Cherie, you wicked little filly, what have you done?" boomed the great Spirit, shifting black to blue as she materialized. "What hath we told thee about showing thyself to heathens and outsiders?"

"Eep! Princess? Mistress?" The growing filly looked up at confusion, as the Spirit wavered in her Aspect, rippling like water disturbed by something shifting under the surface.

"Never you mind your titles, child! Are you or art thou not our own? Maketh thy mind upon it, and commit thyself to your decision! Thou canst not be one thing and another and another and still be true to all of them at once!"

"Y-your servant, Milady! Of course! Please, I didn't mean - I don't know what I did WRONG? What was that pony talking about? I don't understand! Are you both angry at me that I'm an imp and an imposter? An imposter of what? I wasn't even dressed up for the play!"

"Princess, please. We're not helping matters," I intervened.

The great Spirit turned on me, eyes blazing like galaxies dying. "THOU ART NOT HELPING, ACOLYTE! THIS WERT THINE FAULT AT ITS ROOT!"

I withstood the blast, and returned the volley. "I did not plant mad prophesies in the minds of the White Rose's damnable god-botherers. I did not prompt that fool of a spy to go mad with fanatical lunacy in Cherie's mere presence. I certainly did not plot to introduce Cherie into the situation - in fact" and the Spirit bent down, snarling in my face, "IN FACT, I had been arguing against the idea when Cherie took the decision out of my hooves."

"Sorry, sorry!" apologized the filly from beneath her fore-hooves, cowering on the infirmary-hall's floorboards.

"Perhaps this might inspire you to think before you flit about like this in the future, Cherie?" I said around the semi-transparent bulk of the fuming Spirit, making eye-contact with the little thestral. "It's a big world, full of ponies that have ill intentions for you and yours. Today it was a religious fanatic, although we had no idea what he was until he went off under your hooves. Tomorrow it could be a lich in disguise, or an Imperial agent."

I stepped around the Spirit, who was uncharacteristically silent, listening. I bent down to where Cherie was crouched.

"Look, what the Princess is worried about, is what happens when other ponies realize how special and important you are, and they start doing something about it. That mad fool in there currently thinks you're pretending to be yourself, that you're something more like a lich or, well, the Mistress here, wearing a semblance." The Spirit and I exchanged an ironic smirk over Cherie's head.

"The real problem comes when that spy, or some maniac who thinks like that spy, starts suspecting that you're not something else pretending to be you, but might actually be, well, you. Because they've got some destiny-smiths and fate-stirrers who might have heard echoes of you in the world-stuff, and gotten all excited. Everypony who lays eyes on you, and knows what they're looking at, is going to get excited about your future. Because your future isn't set - there's no fate but what we make - but you've got so much potential.

"We found you, the Company did. And the Company itself has far too much potential itself. Look at this terror we managed to conjure from our own collective subconscious!"

"SAWBONES! SHOW OURSELVES OUR DUE RESPECT!"

"Yes, your Majesty. But because I know what you are, so do you. Please don't let us confuse the filly, she's confused enough as it is. And she's seen the echoes, same as I have, same as you have." I turned back to Cherie, now resting her head upon her hooves and looking up at the two of us.

"I think your life will be mostly about managing potential. A little power can make or break a pony. A concentration of power can make or destroy a city. And you and the Company separately are concentrations of such potential that we could individually lay waste to - well, I've heard my own prophesies."

I leaned down, and lifted Cherie off of the cold floor-boards. "Let's figure out how to defy prophesy, hmm?"

The North Called To The Colours

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Cherie slunk off with her patrol-corporal riding herd on her, Cherie's short, bobbed tail low and dejected behind her as she shuffled off. Heartbreaking, but if ever she needed to not be underhoof, it was in the midst of the slowly convening militia conference. We were expecting delegations from all of the northland provincial militia establishments. From distant, snowy Chutes de Cristal; to the shaggy ponies and mining-caribou of Tonnerre; Vallee de Pierre, Hydromel, and Verdebaie along the long, meandering shores of the Inland Seas.

And vast, inland Rennet, no longer the hag-ridden rebel bastion we had found it, but rather, the recovering core of the northlands. Several years of peace and stability had retrieved some measure of prosperity, and with it, political power. They were closest to the Palisades, and thus could have arrived first.

In the event, they arrived last. Even their nominal chief, Rollo Murs, le Duc de Pepin et Rennet, arrived before the militia-commanders of that once-proud province, now remembering, fitfully, their pride. Duc Murs was also the nominal host of the venue, as commander in theory and fact of the slowly reconstructing Pepin militia. Pepin was technically not a part of the northlands, but the facts of geography and war had severed that appendage of the shattered riverlands from the rotting and gangrenous body of the whole.

The Company had made this new fact in the world; that Pepin and her sisters of the north were now all one quarreling family, me against my sisters, me and my sisters against the rest of the family, our family against the world.

The confusion in the south, which stubbornly refused to resolve as each new militia-source arrived and checked in with the chatelaine-major of the Palisades, had not kept the Imperial bureaucracy from sending forth new and staggering demands for pony-power to the militia commands of the north. Regiments where companies had sufficed in previous draft-years; entire formations demanded as price of subjugation under the eternal phylactery.

And, explicitly, the refusal of any back-door satisfactions of the quotas through special foundations or recruitment of mercenary forces under the authority of the Empress or anypony else. No more sneaking companies of recruits into the Black Company and calling it a quota. Just as well from our point of view, we were in serious danger of becoming, inadvertently, a legion, if not quite yet an army. The Company's command structure was stretched as it was, expanded into a four-corner establishment; we had done perfectly well in our various forts and behind our various walls, but it was still an open question how we would keep ourselves under control in four cohorts in the open field.

And as the ponies of the northern militias discussed the situation, it sounded increasingly as if the Company would, indeed, be moving into the open field. No more holding down the long line of the upper river for the Company. This was now a task that could be satisfied by a hoof-full of under-strength militia-regiments raised from the Sea-side provinces, supporting the new formations being raised by Duc Murs from the nearly-settled districts of the plateau and his hard core-remnant in the north of the province behind the fords. The central districts, the Deep Mines, and the black bottom-lands were rapidly repopulating, and the Duc's task would be to protect those settlers and re-colonizers as they brought the old corpse back to life.

Like so many shells the Company had shed before in its long cicada-life, we would be leaving behind Dance Hall and all of her accessories, her stonework diadems, wooden-palisade chokers and earthwork bracelets. We had built, and now we would be leaving behind. Would they leave the terrifying bonework and friezes? Oh, I suppose it would be the choice of the ponies of Pepin as they re-founded their districts upon the bones of the past. I rather suspect most of the actual bones and antlers would be removed and interred, leaving perhaps some abstracted stone-work to remind posterity of the slaughter which made a future possible.

At least there would be a future for Pepin, assuming the Company didn't find a way to destroy existence beforehoof.

In the fourth day of the conference, an actual Imperial delegation arrived via one of the ports in southern Hydromel. A pair of majors, a small herd of lieutenants shepherded by an exhausted-looking jenny-captain, and a bona-fide captain-general, a salty caribou doe named Knochehart. As you can tell from her nom de guerre, she was a runecaster, a good one by reputation.

General Knochehart arrived with a commission and a plan. She even had news, although the Lieutenant had to pry the information out of her close-muzzled majors with pliers and a blow-torch. The Second Mouth had not been taken last fall, but it was under comprehensive siege. The war-engines and the boom which the Second Mouth had used to control the line of the lower Hausa had been destroyed, along with most of the fleets which had sheltered behind the Second Mouth. It didn't look good, and the line of the lower Hausa was no longer an Imperial lake.

Raiding formations had plunged into the districts all along the Hausa, from the Mouths of the Twins to almost the ruined fortresses of Coriolanus. Rime herself laid safe behind a hundred and fifty overland miles of prosperous and vulnerable Imperial heartland, but that was still IMPERIAL HEARTLAND laying exposed to the riverine reivers of the White Rose.

The fall and winter had brought fire and slaughter to that portion of the riverlands which had escaped the war in previous seasons. It wasn't the fall of the field army, or the death of Rime - the distances and weather had been such that this hadn't been possible - but it was a catastrophe for those poor ponies under the axe-blade.

One of the new general's swarm of lieutenants confided to Dancing Shadows that rumour had it that the Bride herself was besieged inside the remaining fortifications of the Second Mouth.

On the fifth day of the conference, the Captain stepped out of an aerial chariot, to provide the official leadership that the new General had been demanding of the Company. This was a symbol and a promise that the Company would indeed be letting itself be pried out from behind its precious walls, and committed to the plans of the new leadership. The General eyed the chariot and its driver, speculatively. You could see the wheels turning behind Knochehart's eyes; it sometimes took a military pony a bit of time to recognize the military import of the Company's first or aerial cohort, but the new general had very few flies on her.

As it was explained to the militia-ponies of the north, the Imperials could no longer depend upon the mountain-volunteers which in previous seasons had provided the bulk of the yearly reinforcements to the Imperial field army and the fortification-troops in the posts of the south and the Mouths. The loss of the line of the lower Housa meant that this year, those regiments would be tied up in relieving the siege of the Second Mouth, and bringing the southern banks of the Housa under control.

The rear support battalions, including our friends of the 93nd, had been pulled back all the way to Coriolanus to erect defenses against deep strategic raiders, and to protect the shipwrights of the upper Housa as they re-built the shattered Imperial fleet. This had largely left the rich country of the western eastlands, and the remaining inhabited riverlands, exposed and naked to the world. Likewise, the field army in the lines of the middle-Rima would be starving for reinforcements, living or otherwise.

It was the northland's time to provide. The demands would be heavy. More than a dozen militia-regiments, fully mobilized, their supports, and the Company. All of the Company. Any rumours of quarrelling with legates, of dark magic, of dubious loyalty to the Phylactery - irrelevant in the crisis.

The Imperials actually wanted two dozen militia-regiments, but it didn't feel like they were going to get it. The mobilization of Verdebaie a few years back had exhausted a good percentage of that establishment's available deployable regiments, at least by legal means. Our push to clear out Rennet's crumbling White Rose rebellion had eaten up that seed corn, at least insofar as the deployment-terms written into that province's militia-laws. The militia-regiments deployed in that brief campaign couldn't be sent out of the province again for another two years, as the statutes were written.

I could see phantasms of despotism and tyranny turn over and blink their sleepy eyes at the stubborn militia-officers of Verdebaie when they made this declaration, but the hoof-full of Imperial officers kept control and discipline over their own reactions, their obvious anger and desperation. There were no Imperial line-regiments in the north to enforce their demands, no prospect of fire and rapine to force the militia-ponies to do anything their own sense of law and loyalty didn't demand of them.

And the other, smaller provinces weren't any more capable of making up the short-falls. Most of the population of the north was concentrated in the three core-provinces of Rennet, Verdebaie, and to a lesser extent, Hydromel. Each committed to four regiments for the General's new field-force, except Verdebaie. Surprisingly, after the Verdebaie leadership had stiffly refused to mobilize the full force, our old friend Colonel Guillaume of the III Verbebaie strode forward to proudly volunteer his blooded regiment for the expedition. So, five regiments it was from Verdebaie.

One or two regiments each from the smaller and border-provinces filled out the mobilization order. It was enough that it was obvious to anypony who had ever hacked logistics for an army, that we couldn't possibly march it overcountry. Especially not through the blasted, depopulated riverlands.

We would be marching down-slope into the ports to take ship for Rime. It would be a home-coming for those surviving recruits of the Company whom we had picked up in the Great Smoke. They were every one of them veterans now.

Spider-Webs And Other Connections

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An earth-pony stallion matching Earth Listens' description was spotted by numerous witnesses on the fifth night of the conference, lurking about in various back-corridors and alleys within the Palisades. Nopony managed to exchange any words with the obviously shifty-looking pony, and he ran away when approached.

The conference concluded on the seventh day, and the various militia delegations departed for home in a hurry, many of them racing to out-gallop an on-rushing weather-front promising heavy snows and ugly winds. The General's adjutants spread out with their assigned delegations, each lesser province getting its own wet-maned lieutenant, while the three core provinces acquired a brace of short-tails each. Even the Company got its very own wet-mane, a callow young jenny so much like a younger Dior Enfant that that Company pony's assignment as the new liaison's handler was a surprise to absolutely no-pony.

Cup Cake was off and about around the district, searching as she always did for sweeteners. Also, news and signs of Earth Listens' spy-network, especially those portions of it established where Cup Cake didn't already have a pony or two feeding her information on retainer. The call-signs that Earth Listens had given her as a newly-recruited member of his network proved useful for 'harvesting' at least two such sources in the nearby hamlets and towns. He had been a busy pony up here on the plateau.

We used the excuse of 'conferring' further with the Duc and his people as a reason to extend our stay in the Palisades for another five days. There was no reason we'd be expecting any of the promised militia-regiments expected for our relief for at least a month and a half; there was no reason for any of us to be racing about hither and thither. So, we stayed in place, and Cup Cake plucked her spider-web, listening to its song, and did her best to tie the new threads into the weave.

In between our socializing with the new Pepin militia and their Duc on the one hand, and listening to Cup Cake's ill-tempered reports of universal sugar shortages, I did a little light interrogating of the prisoner, who clammed up once again now that the 'imp' was no longer around to provoke his wrath.

And we waited for the return of Feufollet on her first independent assignment. Nopony had told her that there was a pegasus patrol flying very high coverage overhead, but she did well enough as it was.

Earth Listens was seen in various hamlets and homesteads between the Palisades and the border with Rennet. We later discovered that 'he' had recruited several additional agents using the existing call-signs and codes, including one inside the walls of Charred Horton. He was a very busy pony.

Then he disappeared somewhere between the border and Menomenie, where he had told his last host he was headed.

The pegasi picked up 'Earth Listens' in a snowy copse beside the Road just outside of the view of the walls of Menomenie. They had a chariot hidden in a hayrick about a quarter-mile east of the rendezvous point, but by the time they reached that chariot, they weren't accompanying an earth pony stallion answering to the description of the missing spy, but rather a half-grown jenny with the distinctive stains and affect of a Tambelonian bloodmage.

Feufollet had done very well in laying a false trail for our now no-longer-missing-in-Company-territory spy. Perhaps she had done a little too much in terms of verisimilitude, in actually recruiting fresh sources, but she reported the details and call-signs properly when she was debriefed, and Cup Cake now knew to add the new sources for the 'White Rose' network to her circuit. She was already planning on recruiting a fresh sub-agent to maintain the network on the plateau.

And since we were not planning on being in the province by late spring to maintain either of Cup Cake's source networks, the Duc had promised us his new spy-master, so that we could turn over our resources and contact-lists before we had to decamp. The Duc of Pepin may not have had an espionage network the week before, but by the first buds of spring, he'd have a robust spider's-web for his new spider. Assuming nopony put a hoof through it in the interim.

When the time came to go home, we had a proper little hidey-hole built into the back of a supply wagon, piled high with foodstuffs, ironmongery, and those few sacks of powdered sugar that the Equestrian had managed to finagle out of the unsuspecting ponies of the plateau. She really was ruthless when it came to sweeteners.

Earth Listens was knocked out again by Feufollet's little spell, and we shoved him, bound and restrained, into the cavity within the supplies, and slung a couple sacks of flour over the hole. Heavy Bucket and I shrugged into the traces, and we started the long slog back down into the bottom-lands and our temporary home-away-from-the-world.

Time to start thinking about packing up.

Dancing Shadows had little luck in cultivating the new liaison, a humourless little fanatic named Javerette. I sort of grumbled about it, but if they don't want to bite on our lures, we can't exactly force them into our arms. Well, we can - you'd be amazed at the horrible, ruthless things that Desecrated Temple admitted to having done in order to recruit agents within the temple-guards which made it a holy duty to hunt down and destroy Desecrated's Company. But we weren't going to starve little Javerette, or stuff her full of hashish and trick her into murdering one of her fellow lieutenants to 'bind' her to our cause through guilt and fear. I warned you about Desecrated Temple… there was no way I was letting Feufollet into that section of the Annals any time soon!

We installed the captured spy into the hardened quarantine room which had become Dance Hall's impromptu dungeon. For a Dark Fortress of Doom, Dance Hall was notably short on vile oubliettes and dank, dark dungeons. I mean, we could have shoved him in one of the saltpetre collection tanks, but he probably wouldn't last long down there, and although we couldn't really have him wandering out in the world, I didn't necessarily want to end the stallion. Not yet, anyways.

The real problem was that he had seen Cherie, and although he had mistaken her for something that she really wasn't, he had far too good of an idea about what he thought she was pretending to be. Until we could give him further 'evidence' that he had seen exactly what he thought he had seen, we couldn't leave him out and about. Not even to follow his trail and snap up whomever he tried to escape towards.

After another fruitless session, I locked him away in his cage, and went up front to the re-built offices to sit with Rye Daughter, and vent a little.

"Boss, there's not much you can do about it. He broke - a little - when he saw Cherie. But you can't let him get close to her again, and we don't have an imp or demon laying about that you can use to pretend to be Cherie, now do we?"

I turned my head around on the desk I was slumped over, and stared at the doe. She was almost into her final growth, and her misadventures with the Company had hardly stunted it at all. The broken antler wasn't growing back, and that was a shame, but the loss gave her rack a bit of a rakish air that gave her… countenance. She'd be breaking hearts and tormenting bucks in no time.

And she had an idea, although she didn't look like she'd realized what she'd said.

"Who says we don't have a demon on hoof? What good is having a shape-shifting Spirit if we can't use her to haunt the righteous and religion-addled?"

I could feel our Mistress taking form behind me, I could even feel the heat of her glare. And Rye's wide-eyed stare over my head was a pretty good clue, too.

"Good evening, Your Highness. Speak of the Princess, and she will appear!" I chuckled, not lifting my weary head, or looking in her direction.

"One might almost think that thou thinkest us a demon sent from Tartarus, to lure thou and thine from the paths of righteousness, Acolyte! Hath not we had this very disputation ironed out, when thou broke and offered up thine inner-most heart to our cause, undivided?"

"Goddess of mine, you may be, Your Highness, but I will always reserve the right to call you by your actions, and ours in your service. And if you are divine, it is a very killing sort of divinity, is it not?"

"Acolyte, I knew there was a reason I kept your evil hide un-nailed to my host's door-frame. What wickedness have you conceived of for our greater glory?"

"Can you take the semblance of a pony who is not you?"

"It is not easy, but the Company contains numerous practitioners of the glamourous arts, and I am nothing if not soul-stuff; my very being is almost infinitely malleable. So yes, I can indeed, pretend to be that which I am not. Just do not ask me to pretend to be my sister." I could hear her retch, over my head.

"Princess, I do not even know what Celestia the Undying looks like. I'm not even exactly sure what 'pearl-pink' looks like. Pink, I expect?"

"Surprisingly enough, no. The linguistic arts are an endless mystery, especially when it comes to the whimsical naming of hues. Which pony would you have us make mock thereof?"

"Come, Princess, you are a part of me, or rather, I a part of you. What ugly thought have I conceived, that summoned you forth like a temptress, to afflict the overly-religious?"

"Ah! Our Rose-fancier! You have not already disposed of the blaspheming heathen?"

"No, no. I'm trying to get away from murdering my problems away. It only seems to complicate matters, no matter how many f-f-foals I butcher."

There was an uncomfortable silence, and then Rye Daughter turned away and left the room without saying a word.

"D-damn. I forgot who was in the room. I should go apologize."

"Whyever would thou apologize for thine heart-ache, Acolyte?"

"I think that hurt her."

"She perhaps, hurts for thee."

"Hurt is hurt. I don't want to talk any more about it. The spy! He thinks that Cherie is a trick of devils, of shape-shifters and evil imps. So why can't we give him an actual shape-shifting imp, to approach him in her semblance, pretend to offer him his hearts-desire, and escape - and then throw it in his face, full demon treatment?"

"Wicked child! And thou wondrest why-fore thine apprentice concerneth herself for thine disturbances."

"Not a good idea?"

"No, no. It would be a perfect performance, if only to seal off the possibility of the Rose-worshippers latching onto our most favoured thestral filly."

"Your only living thestral filly, mind you."

"Have faith, Acolyte! We takest dear Cherie as harbringer of a rebirth of thestraldom! We hath dreamt dreams of skies full of the bat-aspected pegasi, so many that they darkened the light of the moon in Equestria's night-sky!"

"We would be delighted to pretend to be our favourite filly for an hour of deceit!" the Spirit suddenly said in Cherie's perfectly-mimicked voice.

I leapt up, and spun around, astonished. In the place of the Spirit, whose shifting semblance I had followed, unseeing, imagining each change between Aspect and Aspect as her accent slipped seamlessly one to the other, I saw a great off-white alicorn, bat-winged and green-eyed, her long horn like a lance splitting the air overhead, nearly piercing the newly-plastered ceiling, which had not been laid out for alicornic dimensions.

"Yes, Acolyte, this is my expectation of what she will look like, if all is well and the future devours her not. I know potential when I see it. And she is one of us, in seed, in the shell, a dream of a tree, still inside her chestnut."

She sighed. "But we do not need the Cherie-who-could-be, do we? We need -" she shrank, losing the horn, dropping stature and weight, her limbs thinning, her eyes growing larger in proportion as the rest of her dropped away. "Cherie as I am today."

She suddenly looked around, surprised. "Wait, what? Monsieur? I was dreaming with Bad Apple, we were throwing rotten fruit at her elder siblings. What's going on? This looks like the real world." She poked at her chest, which gave way as Spirit-stuff was prone to do, like mist taken semi-permeable form. "AH! Monsieur! What happened to my chest? Why am I ectoplasmic?"

The Mask Speaks

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The filly who might or might not have been a filly began to hyperventilate. Her green eyes were glowing, first just green, but they were starting to look a bit glowy-white around the edges, and perhaps there was a bit of 'shine just out of the corner of my eye in every direction.

"No! No going away! No more explosions, pouliche! No more world-goes-away, no running back into dreams!" For one thing, I was deathly afraid there might be two Cheries in that dream with Bad Apple, throwing rotten apples at each other. "Breathe! Breathe…. deeper. There you go."

"Monsieur! I am not getting any air into my lungs! I don't seem to have any lungs! Where are my lungs! I need those!" There was the hyperventilation again.

"If you're still standing after two minutes of panicky gasping and no lungs, Cherie, I think we have established that no, for the moment, you don't actually need them. Calmness, filly. Come on now, you've got your 'cutie mark' now, you're almost a grown mare. Are you going to shame Throat Kicker?" Throat Kicker – where was the real Cherie sleeping? "Where did you go to sleep this morning? It's almost dawn, I think you were -"

"On night shift with the section, yeah! I went right to bed, to get in some playing around with 'Apple, maybe see who else was still about from the day. Uh, in my day-bed in Maîtresse 'Kicker's room in the convalescent-house. You think my body's still there?" This was the house in Mondovi that we were leasing from the locals for some of the long-term invalids. Throat Kicker had moved there to be closer to her apprentice, and had started taking in piece-work, trying to figure out a second career for a pegasus who couldn't… well, fly anymore.

"I think we need to put a pin in my little conversation with the Spirit and maybe go talk to 'Kicker. She should be awake by now?"

"Eh, maybe?" The mist-Cherie was waving one limb through the other, a little wild-eyed at the way the two limbs rippled as they passed through each other.

"Stop messing with your substance. I'm pretty sure it's more substantial if you concentrate on it. Come on, we're going across the way here."

I walked out into the common area of the Hall, as mist-Cherie floated along behind me. I looked back at her, and raised a brow. 'Shouldn't you be flapping or something like that?"

"Huh," she said, looking up at her wings. She gave them an experimental flap, and they didn't fall apart or behave like anything other than living material, life-stuff. Then she started flying, and the unnerving hovering came to an end. "Doesn't really feel like flying, but I guess it looks more the thing?"

"Cherie, can you remember what we were talking about?"

"When's that, Monsieur? Last week, about staying away from the new prisoner? Or all that difficult stuff about 'potential'? Yeah, I remember. Reminds me too much of ma Famille irritante. Always on about Destin sacré and Lignée du sang. I miss my mother, and some of the others. But all that pressure and donkeys making those faces? I don't miss any of that." The morning light didn't distort the mist-Cherie, and in fact, seemed to bring her into focus, make her somewhat misty-self-substance more substantial. If you hadn't been watching us before we left the front gate of Dance Hall, I doubt you would have guessed that it wasn't the actual Cherie flying along beside me as we crossed the way towards the town gates of Mondovi.

We talked about her deceased family, and some of the scarier and more overbearing members of the exterminated Rosiers. The more I heard about those donkeys, the more certain I was that they had been some sort of White Rose heretical faction. Clearly not rebels, or else they would not have been living peaceably in the Pepin plateau country so far from the centres of rebel power. From what I remember of what the Rosiers' neighbors said of them, and what Cherie had to say, they weren't recent immigrants, either. Perhaps it really was just a family cult, wholly independent of the revolutionary Traversai fanatics responsible for Tambelon's long agony?

Throat-Kicker had a nice little room on the second floor of the hôpital des invalids. I knocked on her door, mist-Cherie floating just out of sight to my left. The door opened, and a blood-shot, weary eye peered out of the crack.

"Doc. I thought you said I was done with the sessions. About as good as I was going to get. What do you need? It's not been a good morning."

"Sorry, corporal. Nothing to do with your status, which, if you say it hasn't changed materially, well, that's that. There's been a bit of a… situation. A witchy one. Is Cherie in there with you?"

"I told you I was asleep in my bed, Monsieur! Why you askin' like that?"

"What in Tartarus?" squeaked the invalided pegasus. "Cherie! When did you sneak out of bed! Shouldn't you be sleeping for your next shift?"

"Hiya, Maîtresse. I didn't mean to go nowhere. And the Monsieur says I might not be me, so there's that."

"Filly! I never said such a thing to you!" I gasped. Was the Spirit-Cherie hearing things?

"No, but you're thinking it, loud enough I can hear it, every subvocalized word. An' if I'm the Spirit pretendin' to be myself, then damn, I think I've fooled myself! Not a single urge to eat foals, I swear to the Peacock Angel!" She blinked, surprised at her own words. "What the hay is a Peacock Angel?"

"WILL SOMEPONY TELL ME WHAT IS GOING ON!" yelled the crippled mare, standing in her own doorway.

And mist-Cherie popped like a bubble, leaving a bit of night-sky-mist, stars twinkling as it slowly dispersed.

From inside the room came a clatter, and the filly's voice. "What's all that yelling? I'ma trying to sleep here. I was having the wildest dream, Maîtresse. You were there, and so was Monsieur Sawbones, but I wasn't. But I was. Everypony was staring at me!"

She came trotting out to the hall, and looked at the two of us. "Whoa, what's that word for when everything suddenly seems like an echo of something you just did? Hiya, Monsieur!"

Guests, Dead Fish, And Timber-Weasels

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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.

The Death Of Prophecy

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This I had from the celebrated 'Lieutenant Hey You', whose Hydromel militia-company aided a Company scratch force in defeating a rebel probe into her province a few years back. These days, she answers to “brevet-Captain Anise Liquor', and she was heading to raise her portion of the IV Hydromel Regiment when she returned to Pythia's Fell about a week after the grand militia conference at the Palisades.

The brevet-captain found a town in anticipatory mourning, as they gathered in murmuring clusters and clots around the great oracles'-bastion upon a slight, rocky rise which had given the town its name. The old jenny prophetess was dying, was the news that had brought the town to its now-fitfully-beating-heart.

Within the quarters of that temple - whose holy of holies was not, as usually is the case in temples and churches and tabernacles, a shrine to the godhead or the sacred word or the alicorns, but rather a humble little cell with a humble little cot - the oracle's acolytes were closing her eyes, and lifting her body from her death-bed. They took her into the ritual bathing chamber, and began cleaning the corpse for the tanners, who would then convey it to the pyre, as was the practice in that district. What wasn't the practice, was the cleaning of the corpse. No time ought to have been wasted in bringing the body to the tanners, who knew how to deal with what happened next.

In the midst of weeping and wiping away of filth and the selfish mourning of the former oracle's personal assistants, the corpse began to twitch. And it rose again, prompting screaming and far-too-tardy expressions of regret and alarm.

“Be. Silent. You. Inexpressable. Fools," ground out the dead thing, like the sighing of a precarious pile of gravel reaching critical slope over an edge and giving way to gravity's embrace. “You. Are. Dismissed. Find. You. New. Paths. For. Prophesy. Hath. Come. To. An. End."

The oracle's corpse stood as the living donkey had not in six months of agony and misery. And it shuffled for the open door of the washing-chamber, and headed outwards. Its dead eyes met each employee of the oracle-temple where they stood upon its route, and the brevet-captain said that later, they described it as a moment when the beliefs and principles of a lifetime broke, instantaneously, irrevocably. It was the exit of holiness, the end of resolution. The end of things was the revenant corpse of a great prophetess, wise and revered in her time, walking, no, shuffling through a centuries-old establishment of prophets and prophetesses, and whisperingly, groaningly dismissing the whole as the wind-blown dead leaves of the past.

The former acolytes of the Pythian confession left Pytha's Fell one by one, surreptitiously, shamefully. A few were caught and interrogated as they fled, but the brevet-captain found enough to bring me this story of how the Pythian revenant rose, and left, denouncing its once-living shell's life, inheritance, and work as nothing but vanity and dead words. The former acolytes fled once again, to tell the world their own stories, of which I wot not.

The crowds formed around the shuffling revenant as she descended the rocky path from the former temple, its eyes burning as it ground out a hymn of finality to the world. And this is the substance of those stories those crowds told, filtered, no doubt, through the aesthetic of that crowd and their expectations of their beloved oracle.

'That which the Truth can destroy
Ought, should, and shall be
Wiped out, expunged, extirpated
Taken by Time lifeless to
The lime-pit and the potter's field
Its dross washed into the gutter of
The rest of the filth of the
Mayfly world that wafts before
Our traitor eyes like the rising
Mists of a false and gloaming
Morning that, lit by a lying
Counterfeit orb, its spark having
Spilt, is swallowed once again by
The vast and lifeless abyssal dark.'

So saith the foolish child. So saith the acolyte of despair!
Fools!
Fools all!

'There is no future, there is no past,
There is only this hour and it goes fast,
Hurry, hurry, this is the last,
This is the last,
This is the last.'

This is the Death.
This is the death of the world that was ever dying.
This is the death of the world that held death in its rotted heart
And had no room for wanderers and wonder.

Walk, ye dead things that know not that you walk past your appointed time
Walk, ye dead who hath not the sense to lay down in your appointed graves!
Walk, and search, and seek, for that which will show you the appointment-book
And seek for that which has written your number and your name
Which you hath, in your stubbornness and ignorance, ignored
As prophesy hath ignored you and what you once were!

Your life was not a prophecy
Your existence was not dictated
From a book of an imaginary life
You were not a story told by a dead tongue.

Now, thy flesh shakes and shuffles, and seeks
Without thee, without thine own self, soulless
Come and see the mockery of that which was!
Come and see the dead hoof of prophesy!

You in the first rank, take up your rocks,
And stone that which dares walk before you
And your true life, your soul ensconced within
Living, unstoried flesh!

Drive the false prophet from her home-town
Wherein she in life was far too honoured
To be anything honest or straight-forward!

The brevet-Captain said that a few wayward pebbles flew from the hooves of foals and the usual joker or two you can find in any crowd, but in general, the crowds were respectful of the revenant, and followed it to the edge of town.

As it stepped out of the town precincts, it turned about, and addressed the towns-folk.

If thou wilt not tear down that monument to false prophecy, I charge you – Find a better! There will be a song for the living world upon the foaling-bed! Find you the equine that even now is singing the world reborn!

And the old jenny's revenant left what had once been Pythia's Fell, to find an honest grave.

The Departure Of The Company

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In those days the Black Company was in the service of the Bride of Tambelon, the undead empress, the lich-queen. We had descended from the northlands with fire and lance, into the heart of a growing cancer upon the realm, a killing infection which had eaten out entire districts, more than half of the Duchy of Pepin, devoured by the undead. We built there a large and rambling fortress in the teeth of the slavering ghouls, and defended our own walls against the mindless dead, breaking them; our magics and our blades swept them from the fields and slopes of the tormented province.

We built Dance Hall, but we did not own her. My mentor, who is well-known for making decisions which he has no right to make, gave away the fortress to the Empress as a recruiting-gift, to ensure that we were in the proper employ of the Bride, the true sovereign of Tambelon. That act meant that Dance Hall would never be the Company's home. It was always a way-station, a lease.

And in this, the Company's third spring in Tambelon, our lease was expiring. As with previous resting-places, we were preparing to pull up stakes, and move the carnival down the road, to find some new farmer's field to trample flat and set up the rides and the games and the side-shows.

When I was very young, I remember one of these little carnivals passed through the ponies' town, down the way. My parents and kin, who never trusted the neighbors, wouldn't let us go see the carnival. It was a distraction of the Beast, a temptation and a lure. We would keep to the family and the clan and the holdfast, like good donkeys. Storms pass overhead, and we hold fast. Sunny days lure us out to play, and we hold fast. We were a holdfast clan.

So one night, when there was evil and wonder marching through the farmlanes and highways of rebel-occupied Rennet, I said 'se perdre' to my cringing family and kin, and followed the ghost-lights and chased the wild hunt. I never returned to the tiny holdfast and its small donkeys, hiding from the world turning over in its long sleep.

I am awake. And I am Feufollet, understudy to the Company Annalist and apprentice to the commander of the Third Cohort. I am a nearly full-grown jenny half-sworn to the Company; Sawbones and the Lieutenant both say that my peers and I will be properly sworn to the pikestaff in an adult sort of way later this summer, but that we're still children by the lights of the Company and its traditions.

And the Company has a fecking long list of traditions, a longer one every time I look at my notes. Oh, yes, I keep notes. It's important to keep track of what ponies and other people say, because nopony says all that they mean, nor do they mean all that they say.

Not even the Princess. Sawbones insists on calling her the Spirit, and has always been careful to draw this and that comparison and distinction within his Book. For us, the Princess has always been the Princess. She's apparently a New Thing in the Company-that-was. In the Company-that-is, she's just always… been there. Terrifying, dangerous, affectionate, protective.

Charleyhorse got into the liquor supplies one night when we were all up at the Palisades during the harrowing of the bottomlands, all of us foals kept safe and behind proper walls far from the butchery and the unimaginable stink. You could smell that horror forty miles away, and the smoke and miasma turned every sunset of that horrible hot summer black and red like the death of all things. Charleyhorse got drunk, and he told sickening stories, of how his knight and his knight's lady-love were pulled down by the ghouls of the trap in Menomenie the spring before, that rebel-gift which was the reason that we had been put into a nice safe box far from our Company while they took care of matters. Charleyhorse told how he would have been eaten, too, if the Princess hadn't taken him in his peril, and danced for him, danced a pavane of protection and escape. His aching limbs afterwards were an agony, but those impossible stretches, that mind-warping speed which the Princess found in him - that was why there was still a Charleyhorse to get drunk on medicinal corn-liquor and weep for his dead knight - and not just another name in the Annals.

So we have a certain… relationship with the Princess. She still has her moments where she looks at us and drools, and that's certainly unsettling. But she's never actually bitten down on anypony who wasn't already dead and deserving of it.

Far as we know, anyways.

We were terribly busy in the early days of this third spring, tearing things down, packing things up, finding that which could stay, that which must go, that which must come with. And the militia-officers of Pepin's established regiments descended in a group upon Dance Hall in the midst of this chaos, to be guided about by the officers and the officers' hangers-on, to be shown their new digs, their new responsibilities. Because we were leaving our beautiful Dance Hall to the natives, and heading out.

The II Pepin followed the officers down into the bottomlands from the plateau, and the Company spent a week of spare time showing the new ponies and donkeys the ropes in the great fortress. The defenses, the sally-ports, the war-engines we were leaving them. Drawbridges, watch-towers, fighting platforms. They'd need to figure out how to replace the Company's archers - it was certainly possible for non-unicorns to make archers of themselves, but that magical race's capacity for the arrow-storm was so pronounced that to compare a section of caribou or donkeys with bows to the bowmares with their staveless, unstringed constructs was to compare the toy hammer of a foal with the work-tools of an ironsmith.

Another regiment of militia would be raised among the new settlers and miners of resettled Pepin, and the other districts of the province would be passing along a third, semi-established regiment when the Company cleared the roads, but as soon as the II Pepin had settled into Dance Hall as her new garrison, the Company was ready for departure. They could rattle around like a pea in a tin-can until the rest of their peers could find their way down into the bottomlands.

The aerial cohort had departed a week ahead of the rest of the Company, and while we had been busy playing host to the new leasors of the Hall, the pegasi and the griffins were spread across the length and breadth of the southern fringes of the northlands, from the Palisades to the crossroads at Charred Horton, along the Bride's Road into Vallee du Pierre, and along the various byways and highways stringing that minor province into the road-nets of the western lake-provinces and great Rime herself and the remnants of the riverlands. They were the scouts, the eyes of the Company. There were fewer than there were in the old days, I'm told, but we still have enough winged arms-ponies to make us something special in Tambelon, beyond the magic and the Princess and all that. The ancient first is always, first in, last out, all-knowing, all-seeing. Without them, we would be lost.

Most of the milita regiments of the north would be heading for the lake-ports to the east, and would be transshipped into Rime. There was no reason why either the northlands or the Imperium would want to or need to feed all those mouths on a long road-march through the inland routes. But somepony needed to cover the movements of the grand army of the north, and that somepony was the mercenaries of the Company, along with a pair of regiments, one from Hydromel, and Vallee du Pierre's own slight contribution to our crusade.

The Company could hack it, the Company was professionalism incarnate. We were mostly worried about the damn green militia-ponies. Much of the Company's work in the southern movement would be cleaning up after the militia, keeping them on the road, patching them together as they inevitably fell apart on the way.

But all that awaited the Company's actual arrival at the rendezvous. There was no reason for us to sneak out of Dance Hall as if we were thieves slipping out a rear window. We marched in formation, proud with banners. Each cohort formed outside the main gates of Dance Hall, saluted the trophies over the gate, and headed out behind their commanders, guidons flying. Fuller Falchion, that slate-grey unicorn stallion with his machete cutie mark, let the second cohort as it emerged from the Rennet Gate, as my own knight, Octavius, brown and plain with his half-tipped bloody-chalice mark, formed up the proud third cohort and started down the Road beside those familiar ramparts.

Asparagus, Sawbones, Obscured Blade, Broken Sigil, and the rest of the support, headquarters, and administrative sections formed up behind the third, and their long train of carts and heavy wagons filled the whole of the Road between the main gates and the Rennet Gate and then some before there came an end of it.

The Captain and the standard-bearer stood beside the gate, and awaited Smooth Draw and the newest cohort as they filed out of the grand fortress. I watched from the rear of the support train as the fourth came into formation before the pike-staff, as the standard-bearer dipped it three times, and the Captain led the cohort in a bellowed farewell to Mondovi and the new owners of Dance Hall.

That little ceremony completed, they followed us as we went, slowly rolling past the long ramparts of the great walls of Dance Hall. The Company's night-horror banner streamed over my head, carried by the prevailing westerlies out of the rebel provinces, and the fourth cohort marched slowly, calmly behind the swaying carts. It seemed to take only a moment before we reached the Rennet Gate, and I watched each section pass under the heavily-reinforced portcullis which had replaced the simple bar that once had defined the northern end of the ramparts. As the last section and Smooth Draw, goldenrod-brilliant with a blur of steel-grey as her mark, herself passed under the portcullis, the militia-ponies holding the tower at Rennet's Gate let the gate drop, with a heavy thump. Then they returned us our three cheers, weak and reedy as a half-section might be in the face of an entire legion on the move.

Our returning bellows shook the new shoots of the brush and trees all around us, but I have no idea if anypony else heard.

But they would hear soon enough. The Black Company was on the march.

Not bad for a first try, Feufollet. Maybe tighten it up a bit next time? And don't forget to mention things like what happened to our convalescents in Mondovi, and that spy we had to leave for the Duc's new spymaster to deal with. Can't leave dangling threads without at least mentioning them in the Annals, not if they're gonna come up again. Ponies will forgive being lied to, but they won't forgive being kept entirely in the dark. At least make allusions to whatever you're planning on hiding. But good first pass, jenny. That'll do. - Sawbones

Two Crossroads

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Feufollet's description of the departure of the Company was good enough for the permanent Annals; I was proud of her rapid improvement. I was looking over her contribution as the last few carts in the Company train made the crossroads at Charred Horton, and we beat eastwards towards Vallee du Pierre and six weeks of intensive training. We met the General and her staff at this crossroads; there was no drama, no confusion. They immediately swung their headquarters-carts into formation with our own headquarters section, and she began to confer with the Captain and the Lieutenant and Broken Sigil.

One thing Feufollet got wrong was the exact purpose of our move through that southernmost province of the north; Valle du Pierre was in zero danger of imminent invasion by the ravening White Rose. She was three hundred miles and one utterly impassible riverine barrier distant from the nearest open road on the exploded southern flank. It was more likely that a raiding force of rebels would bound across the rushing currents of the Mother of Waters above Harmony's Root and boom cross-country for a hundred-fifty miles of blasted wasteland than they'd come up this way via the currently active theatre of war.

Still, the burghers and small-holders of the soil-poor Vallee were anxious, and contributing their fair share to the mobilization, and was closest to the depots and transport hubs of Rime. She also boasted a deep if narrow lake-port in Grand Dame, which allowed the General and her staff to swiftly route militia regiments into and out of the central districts of the province via the lake's copious water transport.

Militia regiments were gathering in camps outside of lake ports all up and down the great Inland Sea's western shore, hopefully training in modern field tactics and evolutions instead of those archaic garrison-games that militias across the Chain indulge in when they're looking to impress the administrative ponies paying for their equipment and fancy uniforms.

The General had chosen to use the resources available to her, and tapped the Company as a training unit for her thundering herds of half-trained, half-rabble militia, however much we could cram into those ponies in the few weeks we had before the grand army of the north had to make an appearance south of Rime. Even now, we weren't at all sure where the new army would be deployed.

Everything south of the great trade-city was in flux, in fog, in confusion. Nopony knew anything. The Bride was besieged in the Second Mouth! The Bride was dead! The Bride had the White Rose trapped in the Second Mouth, and was besieging them! The White Rose was raiding the southern bank of the Housa! No, the northern bank! They were in the rear of the Grand Army! They were in the rear of the Grand Army, but who cares? There's nothing there! They were marching for the gates of Rime!

All worthless. So, we marched for the Vallee, and for the training-fields. The pegasi boomed ahead of us, and carried construction-ponies to help the local militia establish sketchy training-facilities and tent-camps for the influx of regiments. Not too many, mind you – corn-poor Pierre couldn't feed the entire army of the north, not for any period of time. Thus, the bulk of the army's regiments would wait in their lakeside camps, and try to remember which end of a pike went in which direction, and how to march with the damn things without tripping up your file-mates.

We met the IV Hydromel straggling badly across the crossroads where the lakeside Bride's Road encountered the spur between Charred Horton and a Vallee town known as Swampbottom. It was one of the Vallee's richer districts, despite the humble name, and the modest fields around the Road approaching the crossroads were already showing winter wheat and rye emerging from their long winter dormancy. And the IV Hydromel had managed to get itself tangled up on the crossroads, with carter-ponies trying to force the passage eastwards from the lake proper, arguing with militia non-coms, while the ranks stood around looking stupid and leaning on their spears. At least one cart was turned over in the middle of the crossroads itself, as if some White Rose saboteur had deliberately blocked the vital transit point. And that was, indeed, what the ranking IV Hydromel noncom was screaming at the offending ponies.

Nonsense, of course, no enemy spy is capable of making as great of a mess of your plans and dispositions as your own gormless underlings, even in the best of situations. And militia-ponies making a grand movement for the first time in a generation cannot under any circumstances be mistaken for the best of situations.

Our air patrol detected the problem long before any ground element of the Company approached the blockage, of course, so our advance party was prepared for clearance by the time the mess came into view. The militia-ponies had gotten the broken-down cart out of the middle of the crossroads, and were in the process of driving the civilians back towards the little port they had came out from, at spear-point. Effective, but rather unpolitic.

Fuller Falchion, who was leading his own advance party that day, boomed forward to take control of the situation, and calm down the enraged civilian carters. I had gone up front that morning to see what the militia looked like, and I trailed in the commander's wake, looking for somepony to interview from the militia, if I could cut one out of the herd.

I hit the jackpot, as our old friend Lieutenant Hey You came roaring down the line of idled militia rankers, spitting nails. I watched her get her ponies moving again, and it was always nice to see a professional at work, even among great undisciplined hordes of weekend warriors. Once she was done, and things were moving once again, I hailed her.

"Lieutenant Hey You! Glad to see all those lessons paid off for you! Look at you crack the whip!"

"It's Captain Hey You to you, you – Zebra! How are you, you great muddy maniac! Lose an eye somewhere?"

"Oh, you know, you leave something in your caparison, the laundry will lose it nine times out of ten. I still can see more with the remaining one than any of you damn militia-ponies! Your lot get the black stone this time around?"

"More like they just hoofed the black stone right to us, no pretense of rigging the lottery. We had ‘experience', damn your striped hide! Clean up one stupid, bloody mercenary's mess, and suddenly you're the ‘veteran company'! They transferred us right out of our home regiment into this undisciplined bodge of a rabble. By the way, don't call me that in the rabble's hearing. As far as they're concerned, I'm Anise Liquor."

"Mmm! Haven't had any ouzo in a goat's age. Your pony talent?"

"Something like that. Can't carry trade-goods with me when we're on deployment, though. Sorry to disappoint you."

"Can't use anise liquors in my trade, anyways. Too much sugar, messes up the antiseptic qualities. Also throws off the balance of certain alchemical potions I need high-test for."

We chattered for a good hour as the battalions of the IV Hydromel and their straggling, uncontrolled supply-train clotted up the crossroads. The rest of Fuller Falchion's cohort caught up to us, and went into a temporary laager while we waited for our turn at the crossroads.

The story of an army in the field – hurry up and wait, no matter how carefully you time your movements and deployments. The ponies of the Company eyed the straggling IV Hydromel, and every mare and stallion was calculating how exactly to break that militia down, and built up an honest field-regiment of the bits and pieces.

The Company wasn't a training unit, but what it put its hoof to, it would do. Vehemently.

The First Day Of Training

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FFMS002

The aerial cohort and the construction details hacked together a series of tent-frame campsites and very rough training facilities in the fields and groves of a hoof-full of towns and hamlets within a seven-day loop-march of Grand Dame, whatever they could get up and standing with the aid of the local militia before the first regiment and the rest of the Company arrived to take possession of Camp Expedient, as the General's staff called it.

The Company had found a side-road to slide around the flank of the straggling Hydromel militia, and beat them into camp. We were there to greet them as they wandered in, and to berate them on a section and individual level as they floundered, trying to get themselves sorted out of march-order and into camp discipline. The Company seniors didn't interfere in this very shaky evolution on the part of the Hydromel donkeys and ponies, but their pointed suggestions were almost sharp enough to draw blood. In the end, many of us gave up and helped the hapless militia find their own supply wagons, assisted them in setting up their tent-halves on the provided barracks-frames, and generally beat the militia's disorganized supply-train into something approaching order.

The Company's own supply train, meanwhile, quietly went about its business, setting up the Company hypocrites' own tent-city, and went forth to finish pre-positioning the necessary supplies for the week of training that was to come. The Company itself would be 'depending' on the militia regimental supply trains during training. But since none of us wanted to actually starve, Asparagus and her ponies were putting back-stops into place.

Once the militia had finally gotten organized, and straggled into assembly in the open area provided in front of the temporary tent-barracks in 'City One', our doctor, my Annalist, Sawbones strode forward to address the Hydromel regiment.

Sawbones wasn't actually the commander of the Company, but he played the part well, and nopony outside of the Company ever seemed able to take the actual Captain seriously when it came to PR and addressing the general public. The Captain was short, and kind of salty-looking, and had a strange accent. Everypony agreed inside the Company there was no greater tactical or operational mind, and she kept the machine running, even back in the bad days last year when she looked like she was about to keel over dead. But for somepony to go peacocking about in front of recruits or outsiders and put the fear of Nightmare into their bones? We relied on Sawbones. He was evil-looking, one-eyed, scarred, and if he cared to scare the horseapples out of you, he could drop his glamour-charm and let his one eye go thestral. It was enough to loosen the bowels of the most redoubtable of armsponies, and that was before anypony started telling the 'stories'. And so, Sawbones spoke for the Company.

"Greetings, you poor, hopeless stains upon the reputation of the North! Your ramshackle, gormless, hopeless shambles of a militia has been called to the Bride's colours. The war demands blood and skulls for the ongoing slaughter! That blood, and those skulls, can either be yours, or the enemies of the Bride. We would rather prefer the latter, but if you don't get your act together, it will most certainly be yours. It is your great misfortune to be the first regiment through this training course, which means, we will be calibrating it with your hopeless carcasses! Your fellow-militia all up and down the western coast are in camps NOTHING LIKE THESE, refreshing their training, and receiving Company remedial instruction as we speak. You, you lucky flower-children of hopeless Hydromel, get to stumble through the course absolutely unprepared! Enjoy the benefits of being close enough to be marched straight here, instead of to an instruction camp in your own province. We will not take it easy on you, for the enemy will certainly not. They want you dead. They need you dead! Let us not help them achieve this goal."

He went on to explain the course of instruction in the seven Expedients, and the Company's intention to train them in the basics of how to operate in skirmish order, open field deployment, and maniples. I sat there to listen, but Obscured Blade grabbed me not more than two sentences into the Annalist's spiel, and that old bastard unicorn boxed my long ears for lollygagging about listening to speeches.

The witches had no time to goof around in garrison. We were a big part of the preparation and execution of the instruction-course. Since nopony could trust militia-ponies to engage instructors playing enemy-forces in a training situation, management had decided to exploit the Company's capacity for large-scale glamouring and creation of phantasms. We would provide the rebels, reivers, raiders and rabble that the militia would be 'engaging' in the course of their battle-training.

Because these militia had been wasting years, in some cases decades, beating on pells and other inanimate blocks of material with their spears and their lances, and plinking away at immobile targets with those unwieldy bow-staves that the militia used for projectile weaponry in the field. Not one unit in a dozen even so much as used quintains, or at least, that was what we were told.

So Bad Apple, I, and the seniors would provide for the militia an 'enhanced quintain' experience at each successive training-centre, day after day, in a closed march-loop around Vallee du Pierre's sole major port. We would be there to give the scares, and offer the realistic targets, for the militia to whet their very dulled blades upon.

And we only had a week.

We set out that night, and got into position in City 2 for the next afternoon's fighting-simulation. The regiment-in-training was going to be turfed out at fourth-bell and made to march the short distance to our new position. From how they'd been straggling on the way down from their own province, they'd probably consider it a full day's march, and be pretty salty by the time they came into range of our posts outside of their 'camp', which they'd have to 'take' from us. Most of the ground elements of the Company would be accompanying the regiment-in-training, and would be helping them 'assault' our position.

But for that night, it was just the witches' section, and two sections for security, in case some wild-mare rebel saboteurs decided to parachute out of the night skies and overrun us in isolation. Frankly, I'd like to see the White Rose try it, I suspect BA would parboil them in their horseshoes. But safe is as safe does, I suppose.

Our trainees finally wobbled into view about first bell after noon, having taken nine hours to cross a distance that we had made in three, in the dark, with half-grown pansy-flank apprentices in our ranks. Their task was to scout in our direction, find our 'raiders' supposedly sacking a 'town', and sweep our phantasms into either custody, or an open grave. Nopony really expected them to achieve 'custody'. The first day of training was in 'open field order'. Which basically just meant, move in clusters, listen to your corporals and sergeants, follow the flag if you can see it, swarm the enemy if you spot her. We would mostly be training them in why open-field was a poor substitute for skirmish order in the field, and a worse substitute for maniples in the assault or the line of battle.

I know, big talk for a jenny who hasn't even gotten her full growth yet, and has up to this point been mostly kept from the intensive fighting. Rye Daughter's seen more action than I have. Mostly because BA's pyromancy has always been a much more impressive and effective battleground tool than my glamours and ghoul-geases. Since my repellants, attractors, and detectors work for hooves other than my own, the Company generally has preferred to keep me in a shop, cranking out my toys, rather than on the battle-line, putting my flank in danger along with everypony else.

No, I don't have a complex about it.

So, I was actually tickled pink to be sitting in a little box up in a tree, looking out on a stretch of fields and orchards, where my glamours were stirring at the approach of a company of militia-donkeys, trotting forward in loose clumps with couched spears. They milled about a bit, and so I made my own projections likewise form up, coming together shoulder-to-shoulder, their halberds bobbing overhead, in squads.

The militia likewise fumbled about, finding their file-mates. They began to approach my glamours tentatively. I looked down-field, and saw that the militia-ponies' Company minders were hanging back, letting the northerners get their practice in. The militia-squads started getting up to speed, so I thought I'd give them a startle. My glamours brought down their halberds, and gave forth a guttural 'huah-huah-huah!" and jabbed at the approaching militia.

They stopped dead in the middle of the field, and I had them. My glamours couched their halberds, and charged. At least one of the militia squads broke and ran. Not all of them, though. I had a couple sticks floating with the glamours, enough for the weapons of the militia to hit something when they jabbed forward. Pretty soon, they'd broken my ranks, and I had them flee for the edge of the orchards.

If the militia followed my illusions, I would have them get ambushed at least once. But no more.

We needed to save some tricks for tomorrow, and the days after that.

Huh, OK. This and the other journal entries are better than what I had in my notes. Accepted. Although you really need to brush up on your tactics with Octavius, what you have written here isn't exactly right about what they were trying to train out of the militia-ponies. See me later. - Sawbones.

The Bloodless Battle

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FFMS003

As the days marched on, and the witches' section fled around the circuit, the militia got better and faster at chasing our tails. They started to learn our individual tricks - how Gibblets left animate tanglevines to trip up charging ponies, how Obscured Blade's phantasms were full of hidden, floating staves that would clout the unwary that tried to treat them as empty air.

But they didn't learn how to deal with Bad Apple's tricks, because they weren't tricks. She was absolutely crap at glamouring, and barely could maintain a set of phantasms, let alone ones that moved convincingly. But she made up for it with her little airbursts overhead of the unwary, and the actual flaming traps that she used to make the militia-ponies respect her 'illusions'. She sent more than one donkey or earth-pony to the mobile infirmary that Sawbones and his people kept rolling just behind the training-cavalcade.

Rye Daughter told me one night that the ambulances weren't really full of burnt and scorched ponies, but there were a significant number that had to pass through their open-air examination stations for burn salves and the doctor-alchemist's special potions.

Sawbones claims to have no magic, but there's certainly something in those impossible concoctions of his. I've seen him heal third-degree burns inside of two days. That can't be natural.

By the sixth day of maneuvers, the militia had lost most of their fear of our phantasmic raiders, and were becoming nicely aggressive. Even Otonashi's mind-melting horrors, which were larded heavily with imaginary ghouls, revenants, and barrowgasts firing off very real 'cold-blasts', weren't keeping the ponies and donkeys of the IV Hydromel from getting proper stuck in whenever we showed our 'companies' to contest their advance.

So we fell back at a dead run, and found the open field prepared for us by the aerials and the construction corps, a single long march from Great Dame, towards which we had bent back towards the night before last. The seniors, Bad Apple, and I formed up our little illusionary army in that field, and dressed ranks as if it were a raiding formation brought to bay by the victorious militia.

By now we'd established the uniform colours and equipment of our respective 'commands', and I reached over on both sides to take 'control' of Bad Apple's and the Crow's 'troops'. Others in the witches' section are better than I when it comes to knocking heads, burning stuff, and blowing things up, but nopony has a patch on my capacity for controlling illusions. I've even eclipsed the ever-silent Otonashi, who, before I had found my talents, had been the Company's premiere illusionist. She still controlled a great roiling horde of terrors on the right flank of our 'army', but I held most of the left. Gibblets and Obscured Blade controlled the centre, where you could find our fearsome-looking 'general', based loosely on the late, unlamented Stump.

The militia-regiment's vanguard came bounding down the farm-lane we had been using as an axis of escape, and came into sight of the poles and construction of the day's 'camp', in our army's rear. Their skirmishers shook out into a shaggy line on either side of the lane, and began a cautious advance to cover the main body as it debouched from a choke point created by a copse of trees to the left, which the local farmponies had chosen to avoid by letting the lane bend around in a lazy curve to the right. A farmhouse full of curious locals peering out of every window watched the spectacle, wide-eyed.

We advanced our phantom-army to threaten the skirmishers, and they fell back, fighting. It was a respectable performance, no panic, no scrambling. But the retreat did disorder the militia's main deployment as the skirmishers crowded the main body, and their files were not exactly manual-approved by the time the skirmishers fell back onto the main line. They let their formation become confused by the failure to pass ranks, and we pushed the phantasms forward to give them a little heck.

Didn't last, of course. Real flesh-and-blood ponies will beat back glamours and phantasms in the merciless light of a cool spring day, even when the footing underhoof was muddy as all heck, and the skies looked like maybe we'd be getting rain by evening. We threw in some imaginary gore to get the militia's blood up, and started falling the 'enemy army' back on its original line of advance.

They took the bit in their teeth, and let us have it. Our 'retreat' began to look more and more like a rout. Of course they loved it!

And nopony on their side seemed to look at anything but the backs of their retreating enemy. Well, nopony in the main body – their Company minders were approaching the field at that point along with the militia rear-guard, which the aggressive 'enemy' engagement of the main body had left still on the march when the festivities began.

So the militia's main body was in proper tunnel-vision mode when the surprise 'enemy' flanking force appeared from behind the copse to the left, and attacked their open flank. Bad Apple and the Crow's 'troops' charged the militia in their right rear, and it wasn't a merely imaginary assault. BA's fireballs and airbursts played merry havoc with the surprised northerners, and more than a few ponies and donkeys acquired fresh burns for Sawbones' triage-tables.

The militia formation, suddenly flanked and still engaged by the main body of our raider 'army', began to fall to pieces, as more than a few on their right just ran for it, trying to avoid Bad Apple's par-boiling assault. The officers of the Hydromel regiment performed… acceptably as they left their corporals to hold the existing line in the centre and left together, and led their sergeants to restore order on their right. But they would have been beaten by boggarts, will-o-th'-wisps and creatures of the air, if the rear guard hadn't charged to the rescue, backed by a heavy column of Company observers.

I'm told it almost looked like a real battle for a moment there.

The Company observers blew their whistles, and called the exercise to an end before the militia rear guard and the scattered militia right flank collided and trampled each other. Sawbones and Rye Daughter and the militia surgeons were busy enough taking care of the usual road injuries and burn cases, we didn't need a fresh influx of gorings, stabbings and tramplings to crowd the mobile infirmary.

We witches celebrated the end of maneuvers by 'marching' our troops into glamoured portals, opened in the naked air beside the edges of the now-muddied field. I threw in some distant white-and-gold-and-purple towers upon a mountain-side visible in the distance beyond my 'portal' as a bit of a fillip, using Cup Cake's stories of mythic Canterlot as a basis. Then with a mighty 'gong!' we closed our phantom portals, and our performance was at an end.

The only thing standing in the muck and mud were the militia, their Company minders, and we, ourselves, the witches' section, the coven.

We gave them a bow.

And then we scampered before a hail of mud-balls and righteous fury. The battered militia weren't in a mood to applaud, I guess.

Tomorrow, the next regiment was due in port, and we would head out and repeat the entire performance for a new crowd. Hopefully they'd be more appreciative than this first batch of philistines.

That'll do, donkey, that'll do. - Sawbones.

Mucking Out The Stables

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SBMS139

The crash militia training program absorbed most of the Company's attention in a comprehensive and busy fashion that crowded out most other concerns for the overwhelming balance of the ponies of our brotherhood. Even Cup Cake was so busy snooping around the camps of the militia-regiment that Carrot Cake managed to keep her out of trouble. Rye Daughter and I were run off our hooves putting the militia-ponies back together after Bad Apple flash-fried them, or Gibblets broke their limbs, or Obscured Blade cracked their skulls, or they just ran themselves off their shoes in the mud and the muck. Tambelon in the spring was a tartarus of chill, mud and brisk winds. More than a few weekend soldiers just plain collapsed from the unaccustomed exertion and exposure.

Better to shake them out now, in friendly country nearby friends and family, than halfway across the world, in the face of the enemy. But sometimes it felt like we were filling up every farm-house parlor and townhouse garret with coughing militia and recovering burn-victims, from Great Dame to Little Ridings and back again. Getting all the sick-list militia back to their units after those units shipped out for their further destinations was going to be a significant bureaucratic headache in and of itself.

I had to track down and ask General Knochehart herself which of her interchangeable herd of lieutenants she had chosen to be her personnel staffer. She looked at me like I had two heads, clearly irked at being distracted from her micro-managing of the second tranche of field training, and put down the field glasses she had been using to spy on the fumbling of the Verdebaie regiment that had replaced the IV Hydromel.

"Your G1. Pony Resources? Personnel? I've got nearly a hundred convalescent Hydromel militia stashed around the circuit, who will need to be forwarded to where-ever you shipped their regiment once they're done being unfit for duty."

"What the hay is a G-1?" asked the general.

"Well, you need a pony to keep track of these invalids and detachments, you've got regiments scattered across half the ports of the north."

"Yes, I got that much. Why G-1? Doesn't that infer G-2s and G-3s?"

"Eh, something I picked up somewhere. G-1, personnel, G-2, intelligence and communications, G-3, operations and planning. Er, I think?"

"Huh. OK. Major Hardhoof! You just became my head of equine resources. Take this damn mercenary off my hooves, now, thank you."

The crustier of the general's two majors looked askance at me, and I shrugged and gestured him aside to a slightly drier patch of mud under a tree away from the increasingly loud field exercise churning the mud in the near distance.

"So, I kind of assumed that you all and the General actually had some sort of plan in place?"

"Of course we have a plan, don't be absurd," said the peach-coloured stallion. "What exactly is the problem here?"

"The casualties from last week's training are still here, some of them. And I need to make arrangements to forward them to their units when they're ready to travel. Said unit or units being – where-ever the IV Hydromel disappeared to when this new regiment showed up?"

"Shipped down to Rime on the same ships that the II Verdebaie came down on, of course. We've got a couple of staffers down there working on getting the forward base set up, IV Hydromel will be the first ponies in position."

"Some of these invalids will need to be, I don't know – invalided out? You know militia, there's always some that just weren't fit for the field. I've got most of them on my hooves now. Camp sicknesses mostly, but some broken bones."

The major sighed. "Right, it sounds like I've got a new chore to add to my schedule. I'll figure out a way to evaluate your problem cases. Can you get me a map of where these invalids are being stored? Is there any way to get them all together in an actual hospital in Grand Dame?"

"They're mostly plopped down wherever they fell out along the circuit. I can get ambulances to start shipping to a depot in town if you can get me a building. But we need to be careful to not build ourselves a camp-crud exchange. Sanitation will have to be ruthlessly enforced."

"Hmph. Speaking of sanitation, we're already getting word of outbreaks in some of the camps uplake."

"Bedamn it. Aren't these militias supposed to have their own damn medical personnel? The Verdebaie militia had a thundering herd of them back during the campaign in Rennet?"

"Some more respectable than others. Verdebaie's fine, but some of the other provinces' militia…"

It turned out, the major and I got along like a house on fire. I made arrangements for him to tour the invalids circuit with Sack, and he made arrangements for me to fly up to the various training camps along the west shore of the Inland Sea. The General had taken to our charioteer's corps like a drunkard to an open bar, and the pegasi were flitting all over the north that spring, carrying messages and Imperial lieutenants at the speed of flight.

I had wanted to use Rye Daughter for my liaison with the major, but I needed her to run the mobile hospital while I was off trying to beat hygiene into the outlying militia camps. What I found in some places was truly disgusting. Some ponies, who lead lives of probity and cleanliness within the confines of their family homes and under the eyes of their watchful neighbors and peers, turn into rutting swine when they escape those bonds of community. Filth everywhere, lack of discipline, poorly sited or non-existent latrines, disgusting cooking facilities.

I wish I could say that I took the opportunity to play tourist as I was shipped like a parcel by the charioteers from picturesque lake-port to picturesque lake-port, but frankly I spent most of my time in the air sleeping, and my time on the ground in the camps, yelling at militia medicos with more theoretical training than common bloody sense. Three years at a college or a university, and never learned how to site a latrine, never got taught basic medical hygiene! No wonder this world was so death-haunted, the only question was why everypony wasn't dead of the plague twice over.

I wasted three weeks straightening out that mess. Half the training cycle, spent away from the Company and its endless march around the training-circuit in Vallee du Pierre. When I finally returned, I found a different outfit, almost strange. All fat marched off the rankers, everypony hard-sinewed and dark-eyed, signs of exhaustion and overexertion everywhere. There were actual Company training casualties in the invalid hospital, which by damn should not have been happening.

I pulled the Captain and the Lieutenant aside, and had a knock-down, drag-out about letting the militia and the General run us off our hooves. The Company would be exhausted and wiped out by the time we got into the campaign season if they kept running everypony flat-out in training.

The flat fact was, the Company wasn't a training command, and our ponies didn't seem to have the proper attitude for the task. Too eager, too serious, too willing to march a mile in their trainees' horseshoes.

Time to train smarter, not harder.

The Princess-Radio

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After the third turn 'round the circuit, the training regimen had become more of a ritual than anything novel, or challenging, or something to be clever about. I helped Bad Apple with her glamours, and Gibblets showed me his tanglevine trick, and Obscured Blade showed everypony his special technique for maintaining multiple unseen levitated cudgels within his own glamours. Our respective ghost-bands became less particular, less identifiable, more standardized with practice.

My cuts grew increasing ridges of scar tissue down the lengths of my cannons, but I still found the hide when it was time. It's something I'm told every bloodmage struggles with, even the necromancers with their long bladed needles plunged direct into the meat of their deadened shoulders and withers. I talked with Rye Daughter about how to safely use those damn fetish-needles without subjecting myself to endless rolling blood-poisonings and infections, but she was only so useful on the topic, and told me to discuss it with her master, whenever Sawbones finally returned from his long tour of the distant training-camps.

We cycled through that first Hydromelian regiment, then a Verdebaie, then one each from Hydromel and Verdebaie, and then V Rennet and Chutes des Cristal's sole regiment. As each regiment completed its circuit of the field training circuit, they returned to the port and the heavy ore haulers and merchantmares that the Imperial logistics command had hired on the Inland Sea to transship the elements of the General's slowly forming field army into its forward camps in and around great Rime.

My fellow apprentices were scattered throughout the training command which had absorbed the bulk of the Company. Charleyhorse with the rest of the cooks and carters, keeping the food cooking and the supplies moving along under the power of the militia's own carts, wagons, and carters. Asparagus's ponies had it, if anything, worse than anypony else, in that they had to keep the entire sprawling beast fed and watered as they hammered their own trainees into field condition. Somehow, none of us went seriously hungry, although I can't say that I didn't spend a night or two nursing an empty and growling stomach. The machine had many moving parts, and it was inevitable that some parts didn't get their daily recommended grease and attention.

The Dodger, Tam Lane, and the rest of the Rennet-apprentices had melded into the command-structure of their respective cohorts, and although most of them were still dedicated runners and couriers rather than line-ponies, they were kept on their hooves as much as any veteran or recruit. Not that there were any raw recruits left in the Company after the last year's campaign season - not except for another dozen or so colony-ponies who had presented themselves to the hidden colony in S- and had been brought down by one of the mares who had gone up there to foal and deposit said foal in the care of the aunties and uncles. Cherie and the two pegasi colts who had joined up last spring had been joined by another three pegasi, including two winged fillies and another colt. There were four unicorns scattered among the ground cohorts, and a scattering of earth-ponies as well. Obscured Blade had been quite cross about not having the time to evaluate or train the new unicorn legacy-recruits, but 'needs must when Discord drives', as Miss Cake says.

The ponies of the aerial cohort had been kept quite busy in the early weeks, moving around entire sections of the ground cohorts, up and down the coast, depositing them here and there in the port-camps. While we could only process one or two regiments through the field exercises at a time, it hadn't been intended that we would leave all those other regiments inactive in their spring camps, unattended, unmotivated, immobile. Each militia regiment got a pair of Company sections and a pair of pegasi or griffins to extend training and the Company's idea of discipline and organization throughout the field army in its muddy northern chrysalises. (Chrysalii? Sawbones, I'm not sure of the pluralization of this one, help?) Uhh... maybe chrysalides?

The aerial assignees were intended to explain and cover for another series of expedients and experiments which certain ponies were indulging in during this long damp spring before the southern campaign. To outside eyes, the Company in that spring was just another mercenary outfit, a bit larger, a bit more hard-bitten than the usual run of jangle-biters and sou-scrabblers. Certain ponies among the sisterhood – and it was in a very real sense, a sisterhood, whatever Sawbones likes to call it – had prevailed upon the Princess to keep a low profile, to do her best to not manifest in the waking world among the heathen and the unbelievers and the mundanes.

We needed the militia to be respectful and obedient, not terrified and cringing in a corner with piss-soaked caparisons. Which meant no great phantasmic alicornic nightmares marching with the witches, or Rakuen forfend, the rank and file.

Which is not to say that the Princess was not with the rank and file, now more than ever. The truce struck between the Captain and the Princess had paid dividends. More and more of the troops were able to see her if they looked in the right place, in the right mind-set. A spirit who had been with us, well, in spirit, was in this season refining her capacity for being with us in a more visible fashion. Visible, that is, to Company ponies. She found ways to lurk like an after-image, shadows within shadows, translucence in the half-light of rainy days and dawns and twilights, seen only by ponies who belonged to her.

And what we and the rankers often saw and heard, was the Princess as we had come to know her, the smaller blue-feathered unicorn-pegasus with the archaic dialect, and the greater, terrible-fanged Nightmare with her black pelt, thestral stare, and great bat-wings. It was almost reassuring to have our Princess with us, whenever we needed reassurance, or guidance, or a way to pass word up the chain of command.

The Princess being, in a very real sense, the Company's chain of command.

But sometimes, I would call out for an update, or for a test-message through the 'Princess Radio', and instead of the Princess, I got a little intangible thestral mare, white-pelted and green-eyed, all chirpy confirmations and happy babble. Obscured Blade and Sawbones insist that the phantasmic Cheries are not, in fact, the apprentice herself, but rather the Princess putting on one tartarus of a performance, but I swear to Grogar, she never, ever broke character. It was comforting in its simplicity and cheerfulness, until you took a second to think about it, and realized it was not the foalish Cherie, but rather our beloved foal-eating monster-Princess playacting the foal.

I had never been invited to the dreaming playdates that Sawbones describes in his entries, and I can't truly imagine the supposed innocence the master-Annalist claims to find in the filly Princess and her playmates. We love the Princess, but still, the foals know who and what she is. We live in the shadow of her whims, and upon the sufferance she bears for us, for love of her favoured ponies.

I'm told that the actual, living, breathing Cherie is running messages between the ports along the northern shores of the Inland Sea, up towards Tonnerre and Chutes des Cristal. And I've exchanged messages with her via the Princess-radio, as part of our experiments in testing the range and fidelity of the connexions across the length and breadth of multiple provinces.

As far as I could tell, no whispering-game errors crept into the round-robin tests. But I tried to keep in mind that there were clusters of Company ponies with the training-sections scattered all up and down the long coast in the dozen regimental camps between here and Tonnerre. There was no guarantee that this fidelity would be maintained without a hoof-full of booster-pony minds scattered every fifty to seventy miles along the route the mystical messages were taking.

All these tests were taking place without the knowledge or authorization of the General or her staff. They were giddy enough as it was with the flexibility of the pegasi express; no point in explaining to them that we were in the process of replacing that tried and true method of happier and richer offworld militaries with something stranger, more unseelie, and possibly much more dangerous.

Nopony really had forgotten the bizarre events that had followed the standard-bearer's extermination of the third lich, the uncontrolled, unsummoned phantoms which had burst forth across the whole of haunted Dance Hall. Having been at the centre of that unnerving display, and having been in a very real way at fault for the specific disruption of the substance of the Princess which caused the loss of control, meant that I was… less than enthused by the apparent tactical and operational value of this newly aggressive commitment of our tutelary deity. It was a specific sort of holy fire we were toying with, and if I was learning anything from my readings within the vast accumulated mass of the Annals, it was to be very wary of letting holy fire spill out of the sanctuaries of the priestly, lest it burn the whole temple down.

Sawbones was right about one thing. The Book of Desecrated Temple was a perfect cure for a night's good rest. When I think that this madpony had written as he did without the presence of a lunatic phantom goddess haunting his dreams, I wonder what we will leave in these pages for future generations to shake their heads over.

Mudholes And Stockyard Syndrome

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FFMS005

Not all militia were created equal. Scattered among the time-servers, the wet-manes and the old salters were a number of talented ponies and donkeys, even mystically talented ponies. These were clever people who had managed to hide their skills from the Imperials' voracious talent-scouts somehow, long enough to find their niches within their respective militia-companies, among ponies and donkeys who had either languished ignorant of their fellow militia ranker's skills, or had conspired to hide said skilled individuals from the authorities.

One such cluster of talented ponies was a set of brothers who we caught messing with the mud on the fourth circuit of the training grounds, hidden with two similarly-skilled cousins among the militia-ponies of the I Chutes des Cristal. They might have hidden forever among their peers, just another set of vaguely similar-looking earth ponies, variants on a theme of crimson, red and scarlet, if it weren't for a system of heavy gusting squalls which turned the barely-traversable mud of the training-circuit's farmlanes and byways into impassible morasses that could swallow a small donkey entire without even a tuft of her ears to be seen above the surface of the muck.

I know this to be true, because Gibblets had to fish me out of one particularly deep trough I found myself drowning in during that horrid week. I was shit-brown for a day and a half until I could finally wash the last bit of Vallee du Pierre out of my coat, painted from fetlock to ear-tuft in dried mud.

So, when I tell you that the mud of a Vallee du Pierre spring was enough to test the patience of an immortal alicorn, you can take as read, that I know of what I write. And the brothers Humus were not all that patient, nor did they find it easy to resist the entreaties of their weary, desperate fellow militia.

So it was that the militia caught us out of position for a change, instead of vice-versa, and made that third week an exercise in frustration and confusion for the witches' section. Time and again, we had to form up out of place, while still in motion, separated or in great confusion. It hardly provided the expected training experience for the militia-ponies of Chutes des Cristal, but at least we were generally able to separate out that regiment from the seriously trailing militia of Rennet's fifth regiment, who caught none of the advantages of the earthbending savants. Not that we warlocks out in front figured it out, but the Company sections trailing the CdC regiment caught them out quickly enough.

I will say that once we isolated the Humus ponies, the rest of their regiment still maintained a level of skill and morale which set them above and beyond the usual run of northern militia. They bred them tough and intrepid in that remote province, even when they didn't have the ability to strain the water out of a bottomless morass of muck, or to flood a dry field with groundwater.

Cup Cake and Dancing Shadows took custody of the Brothers Humus and their two cousins, and that was all she wrote. We cut that circuit short, and took the rest of that week to work with the regiments cooperatively instead of combatively. We tested out the limits and constraints of the Humus touch, seeing if we could figure out a way to open up narrow passageways through muck, or to drown a defending line just before an assaulting force reached their position.

Their Company minders took away the two regiments' spears, and told them to play pretend while we experimented with our new toys. That way, we could march actual ponies, donkeys, and caribou across fields against each other, without producing too many accidental stabbings and clubbings.

It mostly turned out that the marshification talents of the Humus clan wasn't rapid enough to be used tactically on the attack, or in a rapid deployment on the defense, but we were impressed with the long-term value of a pony who could generate moats in a couple of hours, or dry out roads on the advance. It was three times as fast as anything the construction corps could accomplish with planking or corduroying, and it didn't require the heavy and expensive supplies that would have to be hauled hither and thither across the roads of Tambelon by mere mortal ponies.

Talented ponies like the Humus clan were not the only thing that the secret sisters were looking around for, in their long lurking stalk of each regiment as it passed through their domain. Dancing Shadows and Cup Cake had become quite close in the past six months or so, and were now working as a team, evaluating the thundering hordes of militia for suspicious behavior, possible spies, and saboteurs. I could not tell from my vantage-point how effective they were being in this endeavor. It wasn't something you could look over and just see – like six file of militia plunging into a sudden morass opening up in the middle of a dry field, for instance.

Still funny, I swear to Grogar.

Anyways, they were skulking about, asking questions, poking at ponies, seeing if they poked back. And a good number poked back, or at least, that's what I've heard. Corporal Cake began to sport shiners around about this time, as well as the occasional full-body bruise, and I'd noticed that the terrible twosome, along with their standard-bearer minder, had become even less popular among the militia than those of us in the witches' section. And we were the warlocks who were setting them on fire, tripping them with vines, and beating them over the head and shoulder with animated clubs.

Imagine my surprise when the older jenny and her Stockyard-syndrome earth pony sidekick showed up one evening in the fourth circuit 'round the training course, along with three militia-ponies and one of the General's ADCs.

"Feufollet, we need your help with something. You're Sawbones' understudy, right?" asked Dancing Shadows quietly, trying to keep our conversation out of the hearing range of the outsiders.

"Yeah? All that means is I can carry around the Annals-chest, and read the occasional volume of the Annals without Sawbones there to open up the locks. And I don't have it with me – it should be with the extra baggage back at port." I shudder to think what might have happened if I had been carrying the chest when I fell into that mudhole. On the one hoof, the chest weighs nothing when Sawbones or I am in contact with it, and it moves frictionlessly in our hooves. On the other hand, its inertial moment is effectively infinite without our contact, and neither of us have ever experimented to see if it was waterproof or capable of acting as a flotation device. Somehow I doubt it, but that's the problem – one just can't be sure. And you damn better *not* try any such baffle-headed experiments. It's the Company's heart and soul, not a damn mystical puzzle-box. – Sawbones

"According to the Lieutenant, it also means that you can officiate at an induction ceremony. And we need one. Right now, if you have a moment," said Cup Cake, looking shifty.

I stared at the two of them. Then I looked at the Equestrian spy in particular. "Miss Cake, what on Tambelon do you think you're doing? I thought you were an Equestrian loyalist. You yourself have told all of us how we're traitors to the homeland, that the Princess is a madmare, and that we're all lunatic cultists out of touch with the true path to harmony!"

She rolled her eyes at me, smug as only that mare could be. I looked down at her, and suddenly realized I was taller than her. I frowned, unsettled by the sudden realization.

"Look," she finally said. "I have my issues with you folks, you know that better than most. But there's home disputes, and out-of-doors disputes. You don't bring the former out of doors where everypony and their neighbors can hear you airing your family's dirty laundry. This isn't Equestria, now is it? And Nightmare Moon may be a genocidal maniac, but she's, well, our genocidal maniac. And we're here in this death-addled craphole full of religious madponies and undying horrors. One must make… allowances for family and for friends, mustn't one? And demented and dangerous as Nightmare Moon is, she's the closest thing to an Equestrian Princess within four portals of this sodden tartarus."

"What's that got to do with inducting random ponies and donkeys into our 'genocidal doom-cult', as I believe you once described it to me as?"

"Well, it's like this. They want to join. And who am I to stand in their way? It's a free tyrannical craphole, isn't it?"

I just stared at her.

"Look, OK, maybe we need to confirm their loyalty," she admitted very quietly – not whispering in a way to attract attention, but speaking slightly, without much in the way of volume. "And that might require a way for the snaggly-toothed horror to find her way into their hearts, their minds and their secret dreams." Now speaking louder, the earth-pony continued, saying, "If I'm going to be haunted by our common night-horror, might as well make good use of that demented pry-bar."

"I still think that if I were your Equestrian handler, I'd haul you back in chains as a crazed turn-coat, but you're the one that needs to manage your divided loyalties. Point me at 'em, and have your beau rustle up his lich-sticker. I think I can remember a bit of Annals to cover the necessary ceremony. I've heard Sawbones recite it often enough."

And so I found myself officiating in the induction of first a few militia-ponies into the Black Company, and then an Imperial lieutenant. I had no idea what exact scheme the two spy-hunters were up to, but in the end, it wasn't my business. I was still an apprentice after all.

Odd that the magic of the Company allowed a probationary member like myself to induct proper brethren into the mystical body, though. I hear tell of mages who treat magic as if it were a science, full of predictions and measurements and statistical analysis. For those of us here on the primitive backend of Creation, it was more of an art than a science – and a wild, savage art at that.

The Rear-Echelon

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SBMS140

As the fifth week of field training approached, I returned to the bosom of the Company to find they had effectively taken over the ducal seat of the province. The long circuit to and from the port of Grand Dame took a flat bend just to the west of Jenny's Rock, along a long, moderately narrow valley surrounded on two sides by low but rocky hills.

Jenny's Rock sat in a cleft within the eastern hill-range, where one of the Bride's Roads had been driven westwards from the Inland Sea towards its eventual juncture beside the great river at Harmony's Root. This was the southern edge of the great raked-over country, and the giant's rakes had cut deepest and hardest here, leaving in places little topsoil, and less groundwater. Districts to the north were rich and well-watered, and to the south beyond the moraine country, the vast and flat plains around Rime stretched for three hundred miles of prosperity and plenty. But around Jenny's Rock, the mud was shallow, the farmers hard-scrabble, and the bones of the world were close to her hide.

Of course, some mad-jenny of a duchesse had, in the depths of time, decided to place her stronghold among these rocks and hillsides. In its recommendation, however, was its central location, easy access, and highly defensible position. The province's inbred ducal family hid from their subjects inside the high and well-crafted walls of the fortified palace, barely communicating with their own militia, let alone us outsiders or the General and her staff. But they had tolerated our occupation of the castle-town's many under-utilized buildings, and this was where Major Hardhoof had established my central hospital and infirmary, and where the increasingly well-ponied rear echelons of the mustering grand army had fetched up in somewhat comfortable facilities.

Asparagus and her small corps of carter-cooks were mostly busy running out to the field-training troops, and in putting the militia-of-the-week's own logistical support ponies through their own version of tartarus week. This left the growing crowd of camp-followers under the effective control of an increasingly flustered Broken Sigil, who was not really trained, or suitable for, riding herd on a tumultuous pack of civilians, rear-echelon militia and Company hangers-on.

My last stop on my tour before heading home had been up to Tonnerre, just in time to catch them as they were breaking down their training-camp and filing onto the troop transports for the quick run down nearly the whole length of the western reaches of the Inland Sea, effectively reversing the Company's own journey into the northlands. So, instead of breaking heads and rattling skull-pans on the subject of poor camp hygiene, I had ended up lecturing in vague, general terms, and spent a quick day trying to make sure the damn militia wasn't riding a fleet of plague-ships by the time they made Grand Dame.

As it was, they'd be a day or two late for the training-circuit's expected schedule. I stopped in the western tavern which had become the General's rear staff headquarters, and closeted up with Hardhoof. We agreed that it was as good a reason as anything else for a couple days' breather for the trainers. We discussed the progress of the medical-leave program that Hardhoof and Rye Daughter had set up in my absence, as well as the alarming number of trainers who had fetched up in infirmary.

Once my duty to the General and the army had been discharged, I trotted off to find the Company's temporary quarters, such as they were. The Company itself was greatly outnumbered in the rear echelon by its own camp-followers, mostly for the sad reason that the Company had never really possessed nearly as much tail as its teeth should have required. Those that were in temporary quarters, were mostly our smiths, our farriers, and other support-staff whose presence weren't required in the field, or to support those training in the field. In addition to this mere hoof-full of Company ponies, as well as a double-hoof-full of 'colony' ponies come down from Hydromel to help in carrying the burden of the Company's expanded responsibilities, was a swarm of hired farriers, sadlers, vendors, peddlers, merchants, and associated hangers-on. Many of these ponies were here as much for the militia as for the Company, if not more. A surprising number had followed the banner out of Mondovi when we left Pepin; I thought the Mondovans' wandering years were behind them, but apparently for some the road was an addiction not easily broken by a year or two of peace in the province.

The farriers in particular were doing a land-sale business, as the hoof-wear on the militia was beyond the expectations of the usually garrision-bound volunteer military. As I walked down the residential lane towards the tavern and rental cottages which was the Company's current home-away-from-home, the affrighted air of Jenny's Rock rang with the hammers of half a hundred farriers re-shoeing armsponies, the victims of Vallee du Pierre's inestimably greedy mud. It might not be particularly deep in places like Jenny's Rock, but what it lacked in depth it made up for with tenacity and avarice. What the mud claimed, it did not let go. Including, infuriatingly, field-shoes, if not the occasional ranker stuck barrel-deep in the miserly mud.

I found Throat-Kicker holding down the fort in the witches' coven's quarters, full of cases, trunks, baggage, and a half-dozen restless, rambunctious brush-weasels. She was in the process of feeding the little horrors, tossing out hoof-fulls of chopped-up woody matter. I came up to her, and looked inside her basket. "Rose-bushes?" I asked.

"Rose-bushes. Bad Apple and Gibblets decided they wanted their little terrors to be, I quote, 'full of thorns'. As if they don't do enough damage just as they are. Yes, yes, here you go, you greedy-guts." She tossed another hoof-full of green-budded rose-stock at the most insistent of the pack, as it bounced on its rear legs like a wood-springed jack-in-a-box. "Not that they seem to have guts to speak of. At least, as long as we feed them like this, they don't bite. Something of an improvement. Although I've yet to find a way to keep them from scratching and biting at the trunks."

"They haven't been chewing on the Annals-chest, have they?" I worried.

"Of course they have! Every time one of them gets into Feufollet's room, really. Apparently they like the taste – like a salt-slick, I swear." She grinned at my horror, reveling in her success at getting me spun up. "Oh, relax, your magic box has survived all attempts to chew off bits by Gibblets' little horrors. Apparently its magic is harder and tougher than their own life-magic. For now, at any rate."

"So," I drawled. "I'm seeing a lot of ponies down from the colony out there on the street. Anypony left in Hydromel?"

"I have no idea of the numbers – go ask Steel Shod, she's more-or-less in charge of the colonials. It's a fair lot of them, though. I guess they came down with one of the Hydromel regiments as camp-followers, and then peeled off once they got here? I've heard some grumbling about Languid and her insufferability, though. I can't imagine what she's been up to over there that she's made herself more obnoxious than Uncle Blade, of all ponies."

"You're the first old-Company pony I've found who's ever been willing to bad-mouth the old toad-sticker. Everypony else seems to worship the ground he trots on."

"Ha! What's he gonna do now, take my other wing? Give me nightmares? Ah, horseapples. I've made my peace with the Princess, what do I fear from Uncle Blade?"

I looked at the jacket she had over the stump of her ruined wing. "You've been doing well? How about you show me, I've got time for a quick examination. No galling?"

She frowned, and shook off the jacket, letting me un-wrap the stump while she continued feeding the brush-weasels. "No, really. It's almost completely healed-over now. It's not like I'm doing any work with the useless thing. Just has to sit there, out of the way of my saddle-bags or what have you." It was nicely scarred-over, no redness, no swelling.

"Very good, you're right, that's a good long-term colour." I wrapped up the stump, and grabbed her jacket up off the chair she had laid it upon, and hoofed it back to her. "I just wanted to check when I had the chance, no time anymore for special trips for this or that. Speaking of which, I saw Cherie a couple days ago. She's looking happy, being in the field. Wasn't giving her wing-mate any problems best I could tell."

"Yeah, I know," laughed Cherie's knight. "I see her in my dreams most every night. Daily updates, in detail. She's not happy about the glamour-spell, but still, it lets her play arms-pony to her heart's content without anypony getting, ahem, 'all weird about it'."

"And," she continued after a moment, having emptied her basket of rosebush cuttings, bent down to rub one of the brush-weasels behind its leaf-tufted ears, "The Princess pretends to be her so often around camp and out in the field, it's like Cherie never left. Dream-report-Cherie says she remembers everything anypony says to the Princess-Cherie. That it isn't her when you see her, but it will be at some point afterwards, the next time the Princess checks in with our filly.

"I don't know what to think about that. I can't imagine living like that. But Cherie seems to find it amusing, and I suppose that's something, isn't it?"

Port Day, or, Next Year In Equestria

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FFMS006

At the end of the sixth week of our Long Hike we delivered our weekly tranche of battered and exhausted militia unto the port of Grand Dame, to file onto their troop transports, with their wagons, carts, and necessaries, onwards down-coast to the increasingly crowded camps on the outskirts of great Rime. By this round of the endless circuit, the Company in the field had hardened like beaten steel. We were a cutting blade – whetted, narrow, sharp. We increasingly found the gaps in between, slipping between the feckless trainees who thought to use their new camp-doctrine and Company-instruction to show off in the field exercises. They had been humbled like all the rest.

I could now march and muster my phantom legion in my sleep, and had occasionally done so, according to Gibblets. We were all cross-trained in our vilest tricks; I could bring down half a company with the tanglevine gag, knock ten chamfrons from the heads of ten wary militia ponies, and even gin up the occasional small air-burst of pyrotechnic flame to keep the marks honest. We had also gotten better about mangling the trainees – Bad Apple hadn't inflicted anything worse than first-degree burns in nearly two weeks by the sixth Port Day.

Even the mud was cooperating with this new air of coherence, competence, and confidence. The long wet spring was drawing to a close, and the bottomless mires that the ponies of Vallee du Pierre laughingly referred to as 'farm-lanes' were becoming notably less bottomless. Many stretches of road actually had a certain amount of surface or even, miribile dictu, dryness to them. No dust yet, but tail curled in anticipation. Rumour has it that there's at least one set of clever donkeys plotting to dig up the road-net the Long Hike has been making its circuit around, planning to mine those lanes for the small fortune in lost horseshoes left behind by militia and Company alike. Cute story, but I strongly suspect rumour is an exaggerating mule.

It was not simply the militia who were boarding the ships southbound. This time 'round, a significant fraction of the Company's material and rear echelon were packing up to join the burgeoning grand army in the distant forward camps. The smiths, most of the farriers, baggage and construction equipment, the remnant of the construction corps, and associated hangers-on and camp-followers were all waiting their turn for the overcrowded docks and piers, to clear the port and make for the crowded lake-roads.

Notably included were a dozen wagons filled with broken-down air-carts, gigs, and chariots for the aerial cohort's inestimable contribution to the Company's mobility. It simply was more efficient to just break down those and ship them in the baggage than waste pegasi energy hauling the lot down by air, with all that wear and tear and exposure of our air advantages to every spy with eyes to see along the countryside between here and Rime. Not to mention the great city itself. It was perhaps too much to hope that the inevitable White Rose spies would not know of our aerial cohort, but perhaps we could keep their mind off the tactical and operational effectiveness of that winged portion of the Company.

Assuming that none of the White Rose in the deep south had been witness to the destruction of the flotilla at Falaises du Consueil or the fighting before Pepin City. Yeah, now that I think about it, maybe that's too much to ask?

I was watching as Cherie chatted cheerfully with Throat-Kicker among the baggage and supercargo belonging to the witches' section. Throat-Kicker had effectively attached herself to the section as a civilian dogs-body, I think mostly to keep an eye on her apprentice. Cherie had come down with her militia-regiment from distant Tonnerre, and was leaving once again as they graduated from our school of hard knocks. The two of them would be travelling together ahead of the rest of us, down into the mystery which was the great south. I have never been outside of the northlands, and the prospect was a little daunting. Pepin doesn't count, it's really part of the north by courtesy and the circumstances of the wars. This was a new thing, going south.

When Throat-Kicker and the section baggage found themselves stowed away in the small coaster hired for that portion of the Company's material and personnel (and two wayward brush-weasels corralled and returned to the flustered custody of Throat-Kicker), I offered my good travel-wishes to the two of them, and left to find my way to the section-dinner which was, well, not waiting on my arrival - they'd let me starve if I couldn't make it - but let's say rather, looming rather largely in my mind and weighing heavily upon my empty stomach.

It was sometimes hard to get my specialized diet on the road, with the carters busy just getting the food up to where we were on any given evening. I had gotten into the habit of carrying around dried sausage wrapped up securely in one of my saddlebags. But it was equally difficult to get a standard pony eatery like this one to cook up a nice blood porridge. Some donkey places know how to cater to a blood-mage, but pony places? Get shirty about animal matter other than milk and cheese in the kitchen. Sometimes I just have to settle for breakfast in the evening, lots of eggs and cheese and milk.

Looked like it'd be breakfast tonight, given the glares the staff were already giving the witches who had arrived before me.

Obscured Blade was holding forth at the table, and ears were flat right across the board. Informing everypony just how terrible they were, how much better the warlocks had been when he was young. Gibblets had that look that he gets when he's quietly coiling. Small, smug smile. I remembered that he's older than Uncle Blade, much older according to Sawbones.

My scrambled eggs and cheese arrived. I tucked in, and tried to ignore the monologue.

"This is the problem. There just isn't enough of us, not nearly as many as there were when I was a colt. And so few powerhouses! We should have five unicorns on staff as powerful as Bad Apple, or better!"

Apparently, I wasn't going to succeed in ignoring Uncle Blade. And I don't know what he's on about. He's no more powerful than I am, and most of his effectiveness in the field is from his experience, talent for indirection, and sheer bloody-eyed meanness. Uncle was vile when it came to a clash. Age and ill will had burned all indecision, compassion, and hesitation out of him long ago.

"You have, however, gotten as good as you all are going to get. It's not your fault we can't find more unicorns. We work with what we have on hoof, I suppose."

I stuffed my traitor mouth with scrambled eggs, and longed for blood sausage.

"We're ready to slaughter the rebel scum. They'll never know what hit them. Shame the general and her staff are so set on taking prisoners. I want to see how this ghoulification process works."

Old bastard would probably make me perform the experiments, since 'bloodmagery is basically necromancy with scruples anyways'. No getting his horn dirty with that dark magic, not when I'm hock-deep in gore anyways.

"Grogar damn it, boss, you're in a mood tonight. What brought this on?" asked the Crow.

He looked at the back of the tavern, away from us. Then he spoke, his muzzle still turned away. "One of our sisters died last night. Flyswitch, one of the new carters Asparagus took on in Pepin. Some stupid barroom fight with a room full of sailors."

"Flyswitch," I thought out loud. "Earth pony mare, light green, cutie mark of a blurred stick, I think?"

"Yeah. I liked her. She had moxie. Reminded me a bit of an auntie of mine." He turned around to glare at us all. "You get old enough, everypony you know has died. Then you start seeing them again, in every young alicorns-damned muzzle turned your way. Then those die on you, and it's like losing them all over again.

"This is not what we are supposed to be. This is not where we ought to be. This is not who we promised to be." With each repetition, he rapped the table sharply, my plate rattling sympathetically with each violent blow. He turned to face me directly.

"There are truths that never make it into your Annals, that survived the loss of the originals. Dedications which were preserved when the words themselves were lost in the desert. We are the promise in the dark, the blade whetted for the work. There is an usurper on a distant throne, and our Queen languishes in her millennial prison. Your Princess, our Nightmare is but a soft-hearted memory of that true sovereign. It is our duty as Her Company to break those prison walls. We waste every minute and every life we spend here on this pointless world, this meaningless war."

He drew in a great lungful of air, and bellowed in my face.

"Next year! In Equestria!" He glared around the room at the rest of us.

"Or else the Company's nothing but a proud lie!"

He stormed off, and left me to my cooling half-eaten meatless dinner, and the uncomfortable silence of a table of uneasy warlocks.

The Tramp-Freighter

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SBMS141

I looked down at my ambulance corps as it rolled onto the tramp freighter. We were sharing a ride with the witches' coven, but as little space as they took up, we were filling up the majority of the deck-space on that little ship. We were tied up at the smallest slip on the dock, dwarfed by the heavy ore haulers taking on companies of the Tonnerre and other militia regiments to my right. Some of the new drivers were struggling with their loads as they came up the precarious gangway from the dock; at least it was a short haul up to the low decks of the freighter. The half-grown bull-calves would have been defeated by the high sides of a Tonnerre heavy ingot hauler.

Angus had asked permission to ask future forgiveness part way through the packing process earlier that winter. He mentioned the ambulance corps' 50% fatality rate in the last three years. I looked at him, and asked him who he was volunteering to stoke Company pyres. He didn't say a thing. So I told him I couldn't stop what I didn't know about, and he took Prench leave about five days before we cleared out of Dance Hall for the last time. He met up with us on the road just inside Vallee du Pierre with a small herd of bull-calves, and never told me where they had come from. I have to assume that they were refugees and fugitives from the underground network of Short Brief and Billie Joe, but again, what I didn't know about, I couldn't respond usefully about to an Imperial interrogation inquiring into juvenile runaways.

They arrived more than a little skinny and generally with a hunted look in their eyes, but I didn't mind that too much. The concern with bull-calves is how well they socialize, and a little cowed wasn't a bad way to start. I looked them over, and told Angus to volunteer them for Asparagus's carter-corps in the Long Hike. That proximity to the food carts would bulk them up, and the endless marching would toughen them up.

As far as I know, both were accomplished. The bull-calves hauling the well-loaded ambulances up the gangways were not the behemoths that my oxen were in the fullness of their adult growth, but they weren't the scrawny fugitive children that Angus had presented me on the Bride's Road half-way to Grand Dame seven weeks ago. The night before, I and Feufollet had inducted all eight of the bull-calves into the Company as apprentices, with the three oxen and five earth-ponies from the carters' corps standing as their knights. I had Feufollet do the reading, an appropriate selection from Bitter Ambrosia's second book. The campaign to come was feeling more and more like it would be the sort of war that Ambrosia would have recognized, and it worried me excessively, when I had time to worry.

The oxen directed their bull-calves to batten down the ambulances and properly chock the wheels in place. I helped Rye Daughter do the same with the old supplies cart, which I had brought with us into Tambelon nearly four years ago, and still was in near-pristine shape. Rye Daughter was approaching her own full growth, and she towered nearly head and withers above me now. Her left rack was still missing the broken-off section that the Marklaird had inflicted upon her while during its assault. I'm told that she will keep that mutilated rack of antlers until she calves for the first time.

Hopefully years away, she's far too young to be thinking about children. I think? I don't know, I don't do 'the talk' with the apprentices, I leave that to ponies like Throat-Kicker and Cup Cake. And given my personal circumstances, I'm pretty sure she'd laugh in my face if I counseled abstinence. She knows too much, damn it.

When we were situated, we went forward to join the witches on the bow of the tramp freighter, looking at the outer harbour and the stream of heavy haulers that were now leaving the docks under heavy canvas and with straining long-sweeps, putting every little bit of extra energy towards getting out into the roads. In the hazy distance, you could barely pick out the orange dot which was the magic rock that made this section of the Imperial waterways functional.

Feufollet and I huddled up and talked about her journal entries, and where they could be tightened up, whether I would be including them in the current annals or not. By the time we looked up, the tramp's sailors had hauled in their gangways and thrown off the mooring lines. Then they got out their own long sweeps, not even bothering with the sails.

"Anypony know why they're not putting up sails?" I asked.

Gibblets looked up at the bare masts, and then out at the nearest ore hauler. "Can't you see how slack that ship over there is? Wind's dead, Sawbones. If we want to get out into the roadway, they're gonna have to row."

"Should we… I don't know, help? We have places to be."

"Do you see wings on these shoulders? Let the sea-ponies look to their own business, Sawbones."

We eventually made it out of the harbour mouth, one small ship in a line of great haulers and other small coasters. As we approached the enchanted rock that drove the shipping lanes in that section of the Inner Sea, I could see a crowd of ponies – no, donkeys, standing or crawling all over the face of the great stained boulder. It only looked orange at a distance, some trick of the light or perception. Closer up, the stains were clearly brown.

And there were robed donkeys currently crawling across those stained sections, painstakingly painting the naked rock with something glistening red. There was a bucket-brigade hoofing buckets of something liquid up from an assembly of very young jennies and jacks, swaying in a sort of ecstatic trance.

"Hey, Feufollet, what am I looking at here?"

"C'est malade raide! They're renewing the enchantments. Looks like the local Classe de catéchisme. From what I've heard, it's either this, or the sacrifice of a convict."

"Equine sacrifice?"

"Well, only if they have a jack or jenny convicted of une infraction capitale. Otherwise, they just tap the virgin veins of a herd of younglings like this."

"Is it safe?"

"Tabernac, boss, I've never laid eyes on the sea before! Stop asking so damn many questions of me!"

I laughed at her as the tramp came into the trough of the permanent magical enchantment, and came about sharply under acceleration. We braced as the aging ship sang from the shift, an oaken moan in resonance with itself. The bow turned southwards, and we were away for Rime, and the war in the south.

The Beginning Of A Campaign, or, An Honest Grave

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SBMS142

The last convoy of the grand army of the north disappeared into the Port of Rime like a hoof-full of corn-stalks flung into a stream in spring flood – just one more bit of flotsam in an endless torrent. All the traffic of the Inland Sea flowed into the voracious maw which was the Port. There were many great cities along the east shore of the Inland, and a scattering of modest ones along the western shore that we had just traversed, but Rime was the Queen of Cities.

Rime's inestimably competent legion of stevedores and longshoremares cleared the troop-transports in record time, debouching company after company, regiment after regiment into the marshalling yards behind their respective docks. Each regiment formed up with two battalions forward and one back, their supply train protected in between.

We each took a different route through the city, tying up traffic beyond all belief. The last and largest portion of the regiments of the north marched through Rime as if it were an occupying army, taking no recognition of the local guarda, the wishes of the authorities, or the bellowed outrage of the citizenry.

Two weeks ago, a regiment had been ordered by an anonymous flunky of the city council to divert westwards as it marched from port to camp, and were directed down a particular thoroughfare. One that was the centre of a vicious labour dispute in the garment district, which had been roiled by successive wildcat strikes and violent strike-breaker riots until the guilds had armed themselves and fielded their own defensive units against the petty mercenaries the owners had pooled to hire.

The resulting clash caused over a dozen casualties among the VII Hydromel, and uncounted dead and wounded among both the unionist self-defense forces and the owners' hirelings. I read reports from one of our pegasi who overflew the battlefield the Hydromel militia had made of the garment district, and she described windrows of dead donkeys and ponies, smashed shops, and fires on every street-corner. It took some convincing by the General's staff on site in the forward camps to keep the rest of the regiments from turning out and burning city hall down around the ears of the council, who insisted it had all been an honest mistake.

The grand army of the north was done taking direction from anypony in Rime.

Anger and irritation at the interruption of traffic quickly turned to fear and empty streets once the forward companies couched their spears and barked a practiced 'hooah!' in no particular direction. Again, the militia-officers had been well-coached, and instructed. The roads were ours until we were past. No argument brooked, no blockage tolerated.

We had no way of knowing if the White Rose had slipped any saboteurs into the great port-city. I thought it more likely than not, and I had my suspicions about that mysterious supposed agent of the city council.

The Black Company itself was one of the four regiments passing through the heart of the great industrial city, marching with a Rennet regiment a block away to both the east and the west. Furthest to the west was Vallee du Pierre's sole contribution to the General's field army.

As we approached the city walls, each westward regiment converged upon its neighbor to the left, and awaited our turn behind the eastward regiment as it passed through the gates within that archaic wall. Ironically enough, the city blocks outside the walls were just as dense as those intramural, barring only a hundred-yard statutory fighting-field kept clear of permanent construction. I imagine in happier times that those empty acres held the temporary homeless and ambitious, but nearly twenty years of war had swept up all of the vagrants and the hoofloose into the armies. Or worse.

The hundred-yards fields were as empty as a graveyard.

We passed quickly through the sprawling suburbs, and yet, it took us half the day to find the end of city, and the beginning of open country. Not far in the distance was the forward base, our home for the next seventy-two hours, assuming nothing catastrophic had occurred while we were in transit.

We joined the forward-deployed supply elements and the construction corps in the camp they had built for us in the midst of the forward base. Its very temporary nature was evident, being even more sketchy than the already-falling-to-pieces trail-camps we had left rotting in the fields of Vallee du Pierre. Hopefully we hadn't delayed their planting season too greatly with all of our tromping about and high drama, they had all in all been remarkably hospitable given the shrieking and the free-range nightmare-inducing daily shows provided by the witches' coven on the circuit.

The Forward Base was a position of zero military value or use. It was merely a flat, well-drained spot whose rental wasn't too dear, and wasn't already built up with useless or obstructive improvements. There was zero prospect from the low palisaded walls that surrounded the camps, which existed more for discipline and definition of authority than any real defensive value they provided. The only reason there was a ditch was because the manuals said there should be a ditch. Tradition was eternal when it came to field fortification.

General Knochehart and her majors had been working feverishly on organizing the regiments into something controllable in the field. Eventually, with the Captain's considerable input, they had settled on a three-division plan, with a sizable reserve element held back with the supply columns. Each division would command four militia regiments, and a cohort of the Company as a combined divisional reserve and scouting element. Divisions would be assigned local militia as guides and scouts as we passed through the relevant districts – so long as we could find and collect said guides and scouts. The general's reserve brigade would contain the remaining militia regiments, as well as the Company's aerial cohort, which would be dedicated to communications and long-range scouting as available.

Each division fell under the command of new-minted brigadiers, former militia colonels who had proven their worth in training or prior field experience. The Middle Division was assigned to the newly-frocked Brigadier Guillaime, our old friend and colonel of the doughy III Verdebaie. The Right Division fell under the donkey colonel of the VII Hydromel, Brigadier Brune, and The Left Division belonged to a caribou named Eugin, colonel of the only Tonnerre regiment.

Octavius and the Third Cohort was assigned to the Left Division; Fuller Falchion and the Second to the Middle Division, and Smooth Draw and the Fourth to the Right Division. The support elements along with the medical corps joined the General's Reserve along with the Captain, the Lieutenant, and Gerlach and his cohort.

We could have retrieved our sections from their respective regiments once the training season was complete, but command decided they were more useful where they were, as stiffeners and, if necessary, recon elements. Instructions were sent to each colonel to take their Company armsponies under authority as a sort of combination of battle-reserve and regimental-level aides de camp.

We didn't tell either the Imperial officers or the regimentals that their Company assistants were also an emergency communication channel. We wanted to obscure the existence of such a thing until battlefield contingencies forced us to reveal our hooves.

The witches' coven was broken up and assigned piecemeal to the divisions. Feufollet to the Left Division along with her nominal knight and the Crow, Bad Apple and Gibblets to the Right Division, Otonashi and Obscured Blade to the Middle Division. The general herself was supposed to be a big-noise runecaster of some stature, and would have to suffice for a magical reserve. We were supposed to be getting some sort of Imperial magical reinforcement, necromancers or bloodmages or something like that, but nopony had made an appearance before we were done organizing, and our self-imposed deadline was past.

Word of raids all along the valley of the Housa had accumulated all winter and spring; the ponies protecting the shipyards at Coriolanus were loudly insistent that a deep penetration assault against their positions was imminent.

The general directed our Lieutenant to send the aerial cohort into the field en masse. Some two hundred pegasi and griffins plunged deep into the strategic distance as the new Divisions mustered outside the walls of our temporary base. The Left Division massed along the Bride's Road southeasterly towards New Equestria and eventually Coriolanus. The Right Division set out along the Bride's Road due south towards Rantoul, and eventually southwestward towards the Mounds; the Middle Division massed and awaited its turn on the Rantoul Road, where it would follow in the Right's dust until it made the Housa at New Harmony.

The vast flat plains of central Tambelon stretched out into apparent infinity, spring-green fields bright with life and the summer growing season ahead of them. It was almost hypnotic, how even the horizon was from the coupe of an ambulance. While we were waiting for the Middle Division to clear the Rantoul Road, I sat, mesmerized, not thinking of anything in particular.

A pair of pegasi charioteers drawing a courier gig descended beside my waiting ambulances while I was woolgathering, and the lead mare yelled at me, breaking my reverie.

"Sawbones! Mount up! Somepony spotted something on the New Equestria Road, Command thought you should see it."

Grumbling, I strapped myself into the aerial torture device, and we took off with the usual dizzying speed. As we gained altitude, the tens of thousands of ponies, caribou, donkeys, and assorted hooved sapients spread out across the road net in front of the rapidly-emptying forward base shrunk to the size of ants, choking the Roads as traffic stopped and started in a spectacular snarl-up of epic proportions. I thought of just how relatively small our force was, and what the Grand Field Armies down along the Rima might look like if one of them took it into its reptilian brain to abandon their great fortifications and go marching cross-country like this.

We approached a gyring group of pegasi orbiting something by the side of the southeastern Road, upon a barely perceptible rise between the Road's drainage-ditch and a neighboring field full of fresh-furrowed soil. There was a battalion of militia marching slowly along the Road, their corporals yelling now and again to keep the lookie-loos from stopping to watch and snarling up the route-march worse than it already was. I spotted Cherie among the fliers circling the – kill?

We came into a landing, and I hopped out to join the Lieutenant, who was crouched over a very dead thing. I could smell it from here, like a young ghoul, still rotting out from its first death. The Lieutenant waved a hoof, inviting me voicelessly over.

The dead donkey was the ancient oracle of Pythia's Fell, that baffling jenny who had chanted alarming prophesy in my general direction over three years ago on the Hydromel border with Rennet. Prophesy that had come more true than not when we found the young thestral mare circling overhead. The oracle had been dead a fairly long time. In fact, I had gotten news of her demise and after-life from a friend in Hydromel almost two months ago. The revenant had really booked it to make it all this way down here before finding her second death.

"The Pythian Oracle," I confirmed. "We had news that she had died, and then walked off before they could burn her."

"As of thirty minutes ago, she was still standing. More than one patrol passing along this route noted it standing here, but since it didn't move or act threatening, nopony took notice until somegriff got close enough to smell the rot. That patrol approached and investigated. Soon as they got within twenty feet, the thing just said something, and then fell over like this. They poked it a couple times with javelins just to be sure, but I'm satisfied it was inanimate when it hit the turf."

"Who," I asked, "was the patrol who approached her?"

The Lieutenant waved a pegasus mare and a hen over. The hen, Agatha, spoke up. "It just stood there, staring at us with those dead grey eyes, you know the kind the ghouls get. The first company of the lead regiment was coming up on us over there on the Road just then. It turned and looked at those caribou and donkeys marching down the road, and then it said something when we moved to keep it from charging the militia. Then it fell over, and that's it, nothing. Damnedest anti-climax I've ever seen."

"What did she say?"

"I am satisfied."

I looked down at what had once been a beloved priestess and leader of pony and donkey alike.

"Well," I said, looking around for some dry wood, "Don't just stand there. Let's give her a pyre and proper burial. Daylight's wasting."

The Left-Division

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FFMS007

Our new 'division' had barely been introduced to itself before we were chucked out onto the Road towards Coriolanus. Command was in a tearing hurry to interrupt whatever wickedness the White Rose were instigating down along the distant river valley, and there were long road-miles to cross in between. I was still trying to sort out which of the militia regiments we had been assigned with while everypony was busy queuing up for their position on the route-march. I knew that Cherie's Tonnerre caribou and ponies were in our new division, but apparently they had drawn the vanguard and I didn't lay eyes upon her before they had started off on the long Road to this 'New Equestria'.

II Hydromel had been back and forth on the New Equestria Road out to the first castral point twice a week for a month and a half, or so at least some rankers from that regiment assured me as I sat in my witch's-gig, waiting for a spare charioteer to take me up to replace the Crow at the end of the first shift. We had decided that aerial coverage would be the best use of our time in the initial days of the deployment – more to search for rogue ghouls and the like than actual rebels, really.

And anything to get out of sitting waiting on the side of the Road like a sack of flour short a carter to carry it towards market.

The whole of the Division was on its hooves and moving when dusk came and my charioteer reported for duty. I turned on my night-vision charm, and greeted Whirlwind as she came down for the gig.

"Aren't you supposed to be on scouting duty?"

"Just aren't that many of us left, Feufollet. Gotta rotate through the roster if we're going to all last the season. So, I'm taking my carter-pony slots early on, so when we actually start finding the White Rose, I can get my wingblades wet for a change."

I settled in the little basket, and we went gallumping into the still-bright upper air, the westering sun lighting our way as the long pony-worm wiggled its way down the metalled highway.

"You hear that your fellow frog-molester managed to miss the one undead lurking along our route? One of the alicorns-damned grifs managed to sniff the rotting thing out before anypony else noticed it just standing there, less than a hundred yards from the main route! Six hundred yards from the gates of the camp!"

"The Crow probably didn't have her ghoul detection charms activated that close in to the army. And how did a ghoul get that close to Rime without a thousand reports of attacks or sightings?"

"Wasn't a ghoul, jungle heliograph says revenant. Your master-annalist was out to examine the remains, they say he recognized it, had it burned and buried."

"Sawbones was out here, and he didn't visit? I'm feeling neglected." I tried pouting. I don't think I was built for it.

"Nearly thirty thousand ponies in this here grand army, little filly. Don't be expecting extra attention just because you're cute. Anyways, isn't your knight running the Company portion of this particular clusterbuck?"

"Yeah, well. Octavius. Haven't seen much of him recently. I'll probably look in on him at the end of shift. Report in, that sort of thing. How about we arc over to the east, thataway, and make a long curve in front of the column, about double-length down the road, and then back again to the west side? Should give a nice swathe if there's anything lurking out there."

Whirlwind went along with my suggestion, and we rocketed away in a long curve, as I activated all of my detection charms, as well as my 'Mark I Eyeballs' as Gibblets called them. It wasn't The Crow's fault if the undead had been a revenant. Those things didn't have enough malice for the general run of equinity to pop on a ghoul detection charm. Some revenants were raised out of a sense of outrage or vengeance, but none from a general hate for all donkeys or ponies. That got you the more exotic undead, the sort we needed to worry ourselves about.

Revenants were just… unsettling animate meat.

For the most part.

Nothing popped in the long night as we made our circuit over the weary division. The head of the column reached the first castral camping ground around an hour after dusk, and the militia of Tonnerre deployed to 'defend' the position while the second regiment in the marching-order followed in their train and began to prepare the position for the night. By the time the supply-column and the rear-guard wandered into camp at the fourth hour after dusk, the castral ground was a properly prepared castra, lightly palisaded with re-dug ditches, full of tent-shelters and well-organized. The division was slow and halting its first day on the road, but it was operating as trained. We had gotten that much right.

Not much time for sleeping after all of that, though. If the new brigadier let his ponies sleep in a bit, I don't think anypony was inclined to report him to the General. At dawn, the camp slept. Whirlwind went off to find a supply-cart with nice soft flour-sacks to nap on, and I headed towards the quarter where I ought to have found Octavius to 'report' the night's lack of news.

Of course the slugabed was still asleep, along with his command-corporal. Since I couldn't kick my own knight awake, I took my disappointment out on Corporal Sharphoof.

"Grogar damnit, filly, keep those hooves to yourself! I think you bruised a rib, ow."

"Do I look like a pony to you? Commander over there should be awake, before any of his ponies, right? Which means you ought to be awake to make sure he's awake to do his duty."

"Bah. Technically, you're supposed to be doing that, little miss witchy-boots."

"Not my fault the warlocks foalnapped me and made me do wicked things for the greater evil. Go, wake the boss."

"I'm awake, you heathens. Who could sleep through this racket? Dangit. Come on, jenny, let's go report to the new brigadier. Sharphoof, go see if the sergeants are awake yet, if they're not, give 'em the points."

Brigadier Eugin had clearly been up for a while when we arrived in the command tent. He was outside, and grumbling Tonnerri rankers were inside, packing up and clearly getting ready to strike the tent. He looked over as we approached, and smiled like a rock-face dropping a weathered sheet of shale into sharp, fresh gravel.

"Oh, excellent, trust the Company to be prompt! Anything to report, Miss Feufollet?"

Flustered that the huge caribou had remembered my name, I stuttered a bit, and then reported the nothing which had taken up the night.

"And the Crow should be getting into the air about now, unless something went sideways. Oh! A crew from the medical corps caught up to us early this morning, I think they're bivouacked in that ambulance the gate-guards let in a few hours ago. I guess command decided ambulances weren't going to do any good stuck back in the reserve ten miles or more from any possible casualties?"

The brigadier laughed. "Pretty much nothing in the reserve is going to be of any use to us if I'm not mistaken, and ten miles seems like a wildly optimistic estimate of how far they're going to be from us when we start getting close to the river. This deployment plan is madness, we're going to be fanned out like undefended purses of deniers strung out along a farm-lane. Well, argument for the next council of war, not for apprentices' ears, I suppose." He dismissed me to find my own spot in a supply cart.

Maybe I'll find Whirlwind. Pegasi make for warm beds.

New Equestria, or, First Impressions

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FFMS008

"In those days the Black Company was in ser-service to the Republican Oligarchy of Mauga, having escaped the consequences of its highly chequered recent past off-world. In the third year of that service, said service found them among the canals and pestilent hammock-swamps of the Sugarteats, aiding in the encirclement and eventual siege of the great hilltop fortress-town Nickerberg…"

Sawbones insisted that regular, periodic, ceremonial readings from the Annals was a vital element of Company morale and discipline, and I did my best to follow his instructions. I was not a natural public speaker, and only the warm sensation of a mystical dark wing laid across the back of my barrel kept me from stuttering even more than I already was.

"…Later command insisted that the main body's disinclination to come to the aid of the detachment under attack was due to a Republican pegasi plot to baffle sound from the assault, having somehow known enough in advance to cleverly lay the exact atmospheric lensing conditions to keep the terrible sounds of battle from alerting our clever and nimble generals to the danger of destruction in detail. It is possible that the conditions had evolved naturally from the wildling nature of weather in the vicinity of chaotic wartime disorder. But it is as equally possible that the commanding general, with his weakness for the cider-barrel, was sleeping another one off when the Republican scratch force hit the two divisions of the right flank, far from any support.

"We, however, in our advance camps beyond the main body, heard the fighting well enough. First the terrible slow thump, thump, thump. Each heavy crunching sound like the hooves of titans carrying those behemoths further out of the tataruses that spawned them; the titans were imaginary, but the deaths those phantom foot-steps carved out of the isolated force were not. Far too many of those thumps we heard, they were the battle-mages' death-globes blooming over Nortemaugan platoons, blowing away entire files, squads, sometimes every single pony in the formation. The dead were blown to grey cinders and scattered to poison the soil and waters. Then, when the battle-mages on both sides had exhausted their reserves, or were killed and taken out of the fight, and only then. Only then came the high warbling screams, the war-cry of the mares. The low bearlike bellowing of stallions for some reason never carried worth a hoot, but the marefolk? That pierced the heavens. As did the iron-smithy clangour of the meeting of arms, and then the indiscriminate screaming of the wounded, mare and stallion alike.

"Nothing is as terrible as hearing a battle you can't see, excepting only one you can see." I closed the book, and looked out across the full membership of the Third Cohort, gathered under the torches and the gathering darkness, the wide-eyed bull-calves of Sack's medical detachment looming at the back of the crowd. "What are we to take from brother Ambrosia's story of defeat overheard? That battle is bad, ugly, to be avoided? No! It is that communication is as to strength as two to one – a weak force in full communication with its scattered self will be able to unite against a strong force without any measure for gathering itself to the fight. Know where your fellows are, know how to summon them, know when to summon them. A small force on the flank of a victorious foe can cause them to break and run even in their own triumph!"

I stood, and locked eyes with my charioteer for the night, Pinfeather. One-eyed mare, a little chewed-on by life, but still a typical Company specimen of health and vigour. "Think tonight of how you can improve communication with your fellows here in the Left-Division! The Company is good at keeping touch with the Company. We need to be better at keeping the regiments in contact with each other and the rest of the army. Thus endeth the lesson!"

As I walked towards Pinfeather, I noticed that there were more ponies out in the darkness than just Sack and his calves. At least several dozen militia-ponies had been listening quietly to the reading. Might have been more – there was a lot of donkeys, caribou and other ponies milling about the camp that night. I looked up at Pinfeather.

"What do you think, two or three circuits and a long run down the road towards tomorrow's camp?"

She smiled, showing off her mouth half-full of ivory teeth, the rest her original dental package. "Hey, fine by me. Easy gig, flying your little basket. Just no vomiting over the traces, OK?"

I snorted. "Sawbones is my mentor, not my father. And I certainly haven't inherited his airsickness via what process I don't even know."

The rest of the night was dull.

The day, though, was restless, miserable under canvass. Spring was ending with the first real heat wave of the year, and it felt like high summer, especially in the back of an ambulance. I couldn't sleep, and had started reading from the later volume of Bitter Ambrosia I had packed for Company readings and just plain thinking about. Bitter Ambrosia was an interesting pony, and I could see where his influence had warped Sawbones. I could feel the cynicism twisting me as I lay there, steaming under that unseasonable heat.

I stuck my head out of the back of the ambulance, and looked north-westwards over the heads of the rear-guard. This afternoon, it was the Chutes des Cristal, sweltering as badly as I, their chamfrons pushed back onto their shoulders, their caparisons untied with the sides rolled up and tied back again on their backs. The spear-heads danced overhead like hundreds of breezies made of light, catching the merciless sun's rays and scattering the glare across the basking black-soil fields all around us. The fresh-planted field crops were emerging everywhere, as far as the eye could see in every direction, earth ponies walking here and there through the rows, doing something or other to the fresh shoots as they went.

My family had always been much more hooves-off with their fields than our pony neighbors. It was always something of an embarrassment just how much better the earth-ponies were at this farming business, my elders had complained about how the ponies bought up land, generation after generation, failed donkey farm after donkey farm.

They say a thousand years ago, Tambelon was almost exclusively caribou and donkey, and its farms likewise full of the long-eared and high-racked. Then a fresh wave of pony migration brought the newcomers to our grim little world, and everypony got stinking rich. Well, not all at once, and certainly not if you weren't an earth pony or in good with the ponies. Which the nobility made sure they were, right from the very beginning. Any duc or duchesse with a thriving earth pony community in their province was a rich donkey, indeed.

I gave up sleeping, and packed up my books and hopped off the back of the ambulance. Went around front to the bull-calves drawing the ambulance to tell them their free-rider was on her own hooves for the rest of the afternoon, and then I started forward to survey the rest of the column from jenny-eyes-level, as it were.

It took much of the rest of the day to work my way down the long, long column. You'd think that a bit more than 6500 ponies wouldn't take up that much Road, but take into account spacing, the carts and wagons, and proper intervals, and the entire Left Division in march order took up well over a mile and a half of roadway. And I was neither an officer nor a messenger, so I wasn't authorized to use the passing lane left by the corporals along the right side of the marching troops.

Gave me the opportunity to network a bit with the troops as I went. We had trod on a lot of fetlocks during the field training, but for most of them, time and good humour had banished most of the fury at our more aggressive ‘performances'. It helped that I was small and inoffensive-looking. Nopony could stay mad for long at the fresh-faced little jenny with the nervous grin.

By the time I arrived at the head of the day's vanguard, the II Hydromel was approaching the last castral camping-grounds, just outside of the castle-town for New Equestria. I looked up at the sign beside the road continuing into the town, which announced ‘New Coltington'. A patrol was forming up for a pass through town itself, and I recognized the lieutenant commanding the patrol. He agreed to let me tag along if I kept to the rear and avoided any conflict.

New Coltington was built like nothing I had ever seen in the North. Highly decorated one-and-a-half storey buildings were interspersed with massively overdecorated two-storey monstrosities. Hearts and sunbursts adorned every gable, crested every window-frame. The patrol stuck together, and we made for the central market and plaza. It wasn't a big town – we were far from any rivers here, any waterways. Maybe about the size of Benoit? Or Charred Horton?

There were only ponies on the street, and they glared at the Hydromel militia, a mix of donkeys and ponies. And yours truly, barely visible between the shoulders of the patrol. They had re-tied their caparisons and dropped their chamfrons over their faces. They could feel something wasn't right, too.

There was yelling going on in the main plaza, a refuse-strewn market-square where a number of older ponies were in the process of cleaning up behind what must have been one stem-winder of a market session. As we came into sight, I discovered Cup Cake and her looming colt-dolt, the Company battle-lance sloped casually over his shoulder like it was a garden-rake.

I looked around trying to figure out why the Cakes had suddenly materialized ahead of the Left Division, and spotted the heavy chariot with a pair of irate-looking pegasi in full Company regalia, chamfrons down and wing-blades up in a dominance display. The little Equestrian spy was arguing red-faced with an equally choleric pony notable in a heavy gold chain of office and cloak.

"I don't care who you say you are! I'm not giving over command of my Duc's forces to a force commander mad enough to dress his scouts up like Nightmare Night frighteners! Look at them! It's like they're getting ready to feed a pack of foals to the temple broilers!" He waved a hoof at the pegasi, who snarled in response. "And what the buck are you wearing on your baldric? You both have demon-spawn broaches! I thought you said you were representatives of the Imperium!"

"Look, Castellan Long Scroll, we're duly engaged mercenaries and mobilized militia under proper command of Imperial officers. General Knochehart with her staff are a day and a half's ride westwards towards Rantoul, and I believe there's an Imperial lieutenant aid-de-camp with Brigadier Eugin in the force just now pulling into your camping grounds just outside of town. Look! Here! A patrol from the Left Division! Lieutenant, what regiment are you?"

"II Hydromel, ma'am?" the Lieutenant in command clearly had no idea who Cup Cake was, or why she was here, interfering. I had no idea, either, to be honest. But I came forward, to help iron out the mess.

"Good evening, Lord Castellan. I'm Feufollet of the Left Division. You've been talking with one of the Field Army's civilian liaisons, Miss Cake. And the aerial ponies who have alarmed your citizenry are mercenaries in the direct employ of the Empress. I'm sorry if we transgressed upon any local taboos or ordinances. We will do our best to keep interaction with the civilians to a minimum while in this province."

"And what in Celestia's name are you supposed to be? If you're older than fifteen, I'm the son of a mule!"

OK, that's about enough of that. "I am," I started as I pinked my left foreleg with the needle-bracelet on my right, "A duly accredited bloodmage in Imperial employ." My shadows began crawling out from under every piece of trash and half-abandoned market stall left in the quickly-darkening square, causing the cleaning crew to scatter in terror. Trust ponies to display hair-trigger capacity for panic. The shadows wrapped me in darkness, and I let my eyes go thestral.

"Do not interfere in the affairs of warlocks, for we are subtle, quick to anger, and leave precious left for the next of kin to bury. Now WHERE IS YOUR MILITIA COMMANDER?"

I had accidentally produced the Nightmare's voice from my throat. Cup Cake's eyes were wide with alarm. And Carrot Cake had a lazy grin on his long, lanky face.

Oops.

A Briefing In The Middle Of Nowhere

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I was sitting in on the briefing of the General and one of her majors, along with the Captain. The Lieutenant was giving said briefing, as she had fallen into the role of the General's head of reconnaissance and intelligence. Well, at least the face of intelligence.

Dancing Shadows and Cup Cake were out there somewhere, closer to the forward units, or perhaps ahead of them, given our current pace. As the Lieutenant had just summarized, the Left Division was in camp outside of a place called New Coltington in New Equestria; we were sitting in a castral campground one day's march north of Rantoul City, surrounded by the regiments and supply-columns of the General's Reserve. The Middle Division was reported to be filing into camp just south of the city on the Road to New Harmony; the Right Division was moving down the Road towards the Mounds.

More importantly, the Lieutenant had just delivered word of the first enemy contacts, of armed bands of bison spotted on the move three days out of the Mounds and two days out of New Harmony. The White Rose was known to employ war-bands of the huge, implacable plains-nomads, but they were less mercenaries than free-lance maniacs. Tambelonian tradition suggests that wherever bison warbands wander, homesteads burn, and croplands are trampled. They were true pastoralists, who loathed agriculture and anything approximating settled community. You couldn't see the fires or the smoke from here, but the Housa must have been a wreck if the White Rose had gone to the trouble of shipping the huge, notably aquaphobic savages this far into the interior of the loyal provinces.

"Any sort of numbers we can work with here, Lieutenant?" asked the General. "Are we talking troops, squadrons, brigades?"

The major – a greying jenny named Marie du Bonne, usually called 'du Bonne' – shifted uncomfortably and interjected, "Bison don't organize like that. They operate in family and friendship associations, 'warbands'. Could be anything from a hoof-full to a couple hundred in any given group. Not likely to be coordinated, either. Almost none of them get along with each other."

"What, so I'm looking at an indefinite chaos in front of my middle and right? And shit-all in front of my left? Lieutenant – damnit, I can't keep calling you that, makes me feel like I'm addressing one of my ADCs. What's your damn name, anyways?"

"Lieutenant-Captain is an acceptable styling, General," I offered from my corner. "The Captain and the Lieutenant-Captain cede their names upon election, and will not get them back until their dying day."

The aging caribou looked astonished over her shoulder at me, as if a caftan or a drying-rack had spoken out of turn. "And you never let them retire?"

"It rarely if ever comes to that, Your Excellency. The Left Division has reported no contacts, nor has the deep recon patrols attached to the Left Division. But we also have gotten no reports from Coriolanus, either, which must mean that all the heliographs are down or they've been captured."

"Who's briefing me, your Lieutenant-Captain or my head-of-Surgeons? Am I last to get my own briefings now?"

We could hardly tell her that the Princess was whispering our reports directly into the backs of our minds, even as the old General blustered at me. Time would come when the pretense of occasionally flying a couple pegasi or griffins into the main camp to deliver 'reports' would no long paper over our instantaneous communications capacity. But that time was certainly not now.

"Of course not, Your Excellency," soothed the Captain. "Sawbones was merely with the Lieutenant-Captain when she received the reports from the Left Division. Nevertheless, we're encountering a scattering of bison outriders in the south and south-west, with notably few fires along their back-trails. That strongly suggests they're actually screening, and there are organized forces behind them keeping them under some measure of discipline."

"A lot to lay on the assumption that bison war-bands can't control themselves in the vicinity of unburnt buildings," muttered Major du Bonne.

"I need more information," insisted the General. "A couple warbands of bison in the distant front could mean almost anything. My first priority has to be covering the shipyards of Coriolanus. If we're ever going to retake the length of the Housa, we need that fleet they're building. If I'm not hearing about actual organized forces coming forward on the Mounds or New Harmony Roads, then I have to shift our axis eastwards and get the Left Division into contact with this 'Army of the Housa' which is supposed to be protecting the city and shipyards. Lieutenant-Captain! Can you get us a better picture of whatever's behind these bison outriders? I need to be more sure before I start pulling eastwards."

The Lieutenant bobbed her head in agreement. It was already what the deep recon patrols were doing, at that very moment. Two flights were dodging bison projectile fire as we were speaking with the high command. Who knew that something as big and bulky as a buffalo was capable of using a battle-sling like that? I kind of wished that the Spirit was better at transmitting images, I'd have liked to have seen the great savages in action.

"OK. For now, I'm going to have Middle move forward another march towards the river, and Right likewise, and we're going to take up the position outside of Rantoul. Unless matters develop in an unexpected fashion, they're going to stay in position and I'm going to shift the Reserve eastward two marches towards New Equestria. Send a message to Left to maintain their position until we're within a day's march of them. But also send a regimental probe to support deep aerial patrols in the direction of Coriolanus and try to get us some current information about the state of defenses and the Army of the Housa. d'Harcourt hasn't gotten a message around the blockage since mid-spring, I'm starting to get worried that something has happened out that way. de Bonne! Bring them up to speed on our logistics!"

I tuned out the counter-briefing on food and supplies – so many hundred bushels of this, so many dozen bushels of that, so on, so forth. Very important, but not subject for Annals records, really. I communed with my Spirit, and she relayed the current debate about the debacle in New Coltington. My understudy had severely over-reacted to a political situation with the polar opposite of what one might call a 'diplomatic approach', and now we had both the local duc's political representative, and the major-general of the local militia under arrest. There was apparently a semi-armed confrontation going on in the castle-town of New Equestria, with a frustrated and irate Cup Cake stomping furiously in the back-ground.

'What exactly can I do, Mistress?' I thought as the jenny-major continued to drone on about carter burn rates and shortest-route shipping. 'Everypony knows I'm the least diplomatic member of the Company. Excepting, apparently, Feufollet, of whom I didn't think she had it in her, to be honest.'

'Don't sell yourself short, acolyte. You're not nearly as hopeless as you make yourself out to be. And young Feufollet is starting to suffer from the issues that bloodmages of her line are known to suffer. An animal-protein-heavy diet can often produce undue aggression and erratic tendencies among ponies and donkeys. Especially when you mix it with forbidden blood magic.'

'Forbidden! Donkeys wouldn't have any magic at all if it weren't for bloodletting.'

'Equestrian standards, my acolyte. I think you will be the necessary figure to allow everypony in New Coltington to stand down from their current extreme positions. To bring Feufollet to heel, and to give somepony for Miss Cake to blame, and posture, and find her natural place on the side of the enraged civilians. She needs an excuse to distance herself from the Company, if only a bit. You will provide that, yes?'

I sighed, and considered my current lack of patients. The ponies, caribou and donkeys of the Army of the North had gotten all of their road-casualties out of the way during the long weeks of training – the remainder were not likely to break a limb or keel over of heatstroke now. 'Thy wish is my command. How do we play this in front of the General?'

'Observe.'

"Major, I've had reports of concerns about local cooperation with requisitions in New Coltington and the rest of New Equestria," began the Lieutenant. "There's some sort of a political problem down that way that seems likely to interrupt or obstruct logistics on that route. General, I'd like to send Sawbones out that way to oversee the re-negotiations, apparently the ponies on site are at an impasse."

The General's eyes narrowed, and she looked back over her shoulder at me. She paused, and then laughed.

"Fine, that striped pony gives me the creeps anyways. Get him out of camp, and out of my ruff."

I scurried out of the briefing and gathered my saddle-bags to wait for the summoned charioteers. Luckily we had a pair on call with the headquarters of the aerial cohort, which at this point consisted of a collection of carters w/ supplies and food, and spare chariot frames broken down for transport. We hadn't lost any rigs yet this season, but it was looking to be a high-wastage campaign, so better to have and not need, than wish for and not have.

The jenny-major ran out of the command tent with her own saddlebags in her teeth, flipping them over her shoulder as she ran.

"General wanted a ride-along. I've never done this before. Is it dangerous?"

"Not particularly, but I hope you don't get motion-sickness."

She did.

The Exiles

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The pegasi coursed through the night, devouring the long air-miles as we slept. Well, I slept, the Major dozed fitfully, more passed out from a helpful double-dram of medicinal I had given her to settle her stomach than truly asleep. But no pony with the Spirit ever truly sleeps, and I sat in my dreams, listening to two small alicornic echoes of the Spirit herself, each muttering a constant stream of information and opinion from miles and miles away, and moving further with every wing-beat, every eastward gust of helpful prevailing wind.

The vexellations of our scarce aerial ponies continued to probe southward and south-westward as I fled eastward to the problems brewing across our line of advance in the east. The fools could have simply overflown the troublesome bisons and their showy war-slings, but the pegasi were infuriated at having their sacred air affronted by the large rocks flung by bison ingenuity and brute strength into the lower depths of the aerial deeps. It was as if we had reacted to every rock flung across the upper River by bored White Rose on the western shore via merciless bombardment and commando raids, but the pegasi and their griffin cousins had spent seven long weeks playing air-cab to the rest of the Company, and indeed, the grand army which had formed around the Company like a pearl around an irritating grain of sand.

They wanted their action, again, and couldn't care about their lack of numbers, their inability to recruit fresh troops, or replacements, or supports. So off they were, hunting and harassing the huge plains savages in their nighttime huddles. Foolishness, really.

The other echo was whispering me the confessions of the two Cakes, and the Crow, and Octavius, the last two of which really should have had more oversight over the overgrown jenny who was now being treated as just another donkey of the Company, and stumbling a bit as the expectations overshadowed her capacities.

Feufollet herself was in the air, supporting the forward deployment of ponies in deep reconnaissance mode further along the Road towards distant Coriolanus. In practice, that meant a ground probe in regimental strength towards a large town on the provincial border named 'High Earth', and pegasi patrols deeper and further. What little cooperation we'd gotten from the local militias along this axis had gotten us a mouth full of mush.

About a month ago there had been a battle south along the north shore of the Housa, about two days march west of Coriolanus, at a place called the Wirts. The White Rose had routed the so-called 'Army of the Housa', and penned in a fragment of that army in a siege at a place called Braytown, up against the river itself. The rest of the remnants of the Army of the Housa had fallen back to a fortified line around Cleves about a half-days march outside of Coriolanus, but there were supposedly a swarm of White Rose irregulars infesting the whole of the southern districts from Dover to Beech Grove to just south of High Earth. A position forward of High Earth ought to put the Left Division in skirmishing range of an actual enemy army, but it also would put the Left Division well out of support range as we currently were deployed.

It was the first news of an actual organized White Rose force along the line of the Housa. I packaged up my impressions, and kicked a message through the 'radio' towards the Lieutenant, marked urgent. The raiders on the Mounds and New Harmony axes were impressive, but there wasn't any other information coming out of those theatres. This was actionable. And Imperial forces were reported 'exposed' on this axis. It should be the priority.

The sun rising in the east greeted us as we arrived over the castra before New Coltington, and woke the groggy Major de Bonne.

"Are we there?" she mumbled around a sleep-caked mouth.

"Thereabouts. We've got a lot of thanking to give our friends in the traces, they flew all night to get us here this fast. Autumn Blade, Gust Front, thanks for the quick ride. I owe you something out of the medical cabinet next time we're back in the Reserve."

They bobbed their heads in acknowledgement as we spun about over the assembly yard of the castra. We landed as light as a feather, heavy wooden frame and two dirt-bound ponies alike. The Major and I debarked with somewhat shaky legs, and I saluted the mare and stallion as they dragged the chariot over to the rack of similar frames alongside the assembly yard. There would be some cots for them nearby. I looked around in the pre-dawn light, the sun just starting to kiss the tent-poles as I blinked my one good eye.

As I stood blinking, I could see a witches-gig gliding in from the east, all alight with the ebony gleam of a woodframe caught in full morning sun, the pegasus drawing it a glory of blue and violet. They pulled into the assembly yard, and an exhausted-looking Feufollet practically fell out of her straps, wobbling a bit as she found the packed dirt. The equally tired-looking pegasus stallion waved a wing at her without looking back, and walked the gig over to the storage racks.

I stood glaring in front of the unfocused-looking understudy, waiting for her to notice my presence.

"Ack! Sawbones! I can explain! Wait, no, I have excuses!"

"Save it," I sighed. "Cup Cake's mostly to blame for what happened. She should have the strength of character to keep you from butting into her business. The fact that she didn't is mostly on her, I think. We'll have to play it otherwise, though. Time to be the bad guys, jenny."

Her long ears laid down over her eyes, and she looked forelorn.

"And none of that! Bad guys, Feufollet! We're the evil ponies, if we have any chance of building up Cup Cake as the good pony. Good pony-bad pony don't work if you're going all watery-eyed now. Damnit, we should have given Cup Cake an apprentice to give the googlie eyes at ponies, she's getting too old for it to work for her, herself."

The silent Major tagged along as we wobbled on towards Feufollet's temporary quarters, where she was bedding down in the ambulance that was assigned to the Left Division. She explained, haltingly, in her own words, how she had been insulted by the pony castellan, had 'had words' with the old fart, and had ordered his arrest. He was currently under arrest in the castral lock-up, rattling around in one of the large stockade cells, out of eyeshot if not ear-shot of the local major-general, who also had been arrested, on Brigadier Eugin's orders this time. So it wasn't entirely a Company fuckup on this front – always nice to share the blame. The Cakes were supposedly down at the local 'castle', trying to make peace with those elements of the local power structure we hadn't already foalnapped.

I thought about it, and told Feufollet to get some sleep, I'd see her after noon. And I went to find the Cakes, drawing a hood over my distinctive mane and scars, and hoofing my amulet into SEP mode. The Major looked around, astonished, and I grabbed her and double-tapped my amulet, to include her in the exclusion field. She turned around, and spotted me again. I waved her forward.

New Coltington was like a different world, so brightly-coloured, and decorative. Nothing like Rantoul, or Rime, or Pepin City, or even mostly-pony towns like Charred Horton. I had a vague notion of what the hearts and sunbursts meant, but wasn't sure of the exact iconographic meaning. The food-symbolism was obvious, and some of Cup Cake's stories had suggested this was the typical Equestrian 'gingerbreading' decorative hoof in play here. I wondered just how long ago the immigrants had arrived from the homeworld, and why they had wandered so far away from under the wings of the white immortal.

We stopped at a local bakery, and walked in, examining the merchandise. No more sweets than we had in the Company commissary – apparently powdered sugar was no easier to obtain down here nearer to the cut trade-lines than up in the northlands. I wondered how long the economy would be disrupted by this mess. The proprietor didn't notice my presence, so I grabbed four muffins, and hoofed the Major the money to pay for them. I walked out as she paid the puzzled proprietor, pointing out the missing pastries. As she came out, I hoofed her one, as I ate one of the others, holding the rest on my back.

When we arrived at the 'castle', I pulled the Major aside and explained that I was about to put on a performance, and that she was to arrive with the pastries after I made my exit. Hopefully nopony would connect the two of us.

I had forewarned the Cakes that I was inbound, so they were ready for their part in the pageant when I turned off my amulet, and kicked in the front door of the glorified town hall which New Coltington laughingly called a 'castle'. The two of them, in mufti, were trying to hold court with an enraged crowd of New Equestrians demanding their general and their castellan, refusing cooperation with the 'occupiers', and generally showing off for each other.

I connected with the Mistress in the back of my head, and she obligingly leaked for me, giving my high-crested mane a bit of deeper darkness, my shadow deepened and broadened, and my teeth just a bit sharper and longer than they actually were.

"Where are these damnable Celestines I hear tell are opposing my forces and causing trouble with my ponies?" I bellowed theatrically. "That here, so far from their hypocrite of an alicorn, dare to prate at my ponies about 'harmony' and 'order' and 'law' while rioting against the duly constituted authorities, refusing to bow to proper order, and interfering with the conduct of the Sovereign's duly appointed functions of defense and the Bride's Peace?"

"My Lord Sawbones!" belled the pudgy little blue mare, striding fearlessly in front of the suddenly cowed council members and lesser militia officers. "You presence here was neither asked for, nor encouraged, nor required! These are good ponies, harmonious ponies, peaceful ponies! This is not rebel country, nor insurrectionary country, nor is it out of harmony with its sovereign and his sovereign in turn, as order and law oblige!"

"Cup Cake, you Celestine lick-spittle! You dare to cross me again? Damn you and your hypocritical ways! Look you at these quivering buffoons, who are every one of them sharpening a hoof-dagger for our backs as soon as we turn them towards their blades, as we face the White Rose and their reivers! How can I let the Bride's regiments advance with such traitors in their rear! Why should we not put down this insurrection with fire and blade, and scour the disharmony from the very blood-stained ceilings and walls of this shameless city?"

Her knight-errant strode forth, to get in my face, and keep me from the throat of his lady. He said nothing, for fear that his squeaky, unsteady speaking-voice would break the suspension of disbelief we were relying upon.

"Give these good ponies a chance, Sawbones," said Cup Cake. "This situation is not irrecoverable. This is merely a misunderstanding, a series of terrible misunderstandings. There are no rebels here, no sympathizers with the blood-soaked White Rose. Don't conjure phantoms from nothing but distaste and distrust, my lord!"

I turned one quarter-turn, lashing my tail furiously. The phantasmic extensions painted the audience-chamber's far wall in starlight glimmers for a second, before fading.

"Think you that these ponies are not that far gone?" I demanded.

I tried not to notice the frantic head-shaking going on in the back of the rows of notables, nor the one spreading pool of I-care-not-to-recognize under at least one of them in the rear row.

"Yes, my lord. We were even now in discussions with these worthies, to find a way to resolve our differences without further difficulties. Please, allow us to do our jobs."

"Bah, indeed. Do your job, harmonist. For a change." I turned away so that I didn't have to acknowledge the face she pulled at my back, and then tromped heavily back through the doors I had blasted through, as the last shadow-trails left by my Spirit-presence grabbed ahold of the two doors and heavily slammed them shut behind me. I raised a hoof at the wide-eyed Major, who had to have heard most of the performance. "Give them a couple minutes to complete the scene, and then come in as quiet as you can. The Cakes know to expect you, eventually. In fact, try and wait a bit, and they'll see if they can't get somepony to come out and find you waiting."

I left, thinking about how the Spirit was growing stronger every day. All those weeks in training, operating solely mind-to-mind, had left her with magic to spare, a sort of restlessness. And now? She was manifesting in ponies utterly without magic of their own. Like me.

'Way to over-act,' relayed the Spirit in Princess-mode for Cup Cake. 'They're about ready for a massacre in here. At least it gives me a wedge, I'm pounding away as hard as I can right now. But these idiots barely know who Celestia is. She might as well be Grogar for all they know of the Princess. Celestia's Beard, indeed.'

'Your precious princess doesn't have a full face of whiskers?' I tweaked her. The blue mental construct giggled at the message relayed, obscuring the irate Cup Cake's unprintable response. But I was satisfied.

I returned to the castral grounds just before noon, and went to find the stockade. The easily-stampeded mass having been, well, stampeded, it was time to talk to the brains of the operation. Or, at least, the idiots in charge.

I found the Castellan in his stockade-cell, looking rather choleric. But then, I was told, this was Long Scroll's default expression. He was the reigning duc's long-time castellan, and proxy for the management of the entire province. Cup Cake's briefing indicated that the duc was an absentee sovereign, and had been all his life. New Equestria's ducal family had apparently been living lives of luxury and dissipation for generations, according to her sources.

"Greetings, pony. Hard meal, to be turfed out of one's duchy, after so many years of distinguished rule, is it not?"

"What in tarnation are you? You look sorta like a pony, but not 'sackly. Not with that tail."

"Well now, that's somewhat rude, but I can work with that. I am, dear Castellan, a zebra. We are not technically ponies, although some fools like to categorize us into the same general family. As you can see, we don't generally produce your magic marks, of which you ponies make such a great to-do about." It grated like gravel in me to act like this, but I needed to distance the damn fool, and the pony/zebra thing gave us the necessary space to not gut each other over small differences. Like the Princesses, for instance.

He grumbled something xenophobic, but undirected. I decided to take it, and go on.

"So I find myself here, cleaning up your mess. The one that has removed you from your throne, your sovereign seat of power. By my rather excitable apprentice."

He reared back, irate. "You keep saying that, I'm not the Duc. I'm not even nobility. I am simply the employee of the ducal family. I am a very good employee of the ducal family! I preserve their inheritance!"

"From their own improvidence and ignorance, I suppose? Yes, I've had a look at your recent correspondence. You really ought to lock your offices more thoroughly, you know. Look, Long Scroll, we both know where the power is centered here. The ducs are a distant parasite upon the life-blood of this province, you pay them to stay away, and they accept their due tribute from their 'duchy'. How long has your line been pulling this scam on the ducs of New Equestria?"

"S-since it was the duchy of Langeduoc, I suppose. Nigh on seven hundred years. We were stewards before we were castellans, and thegns before that. But we keep our traditions! And you! You blasphemers with your diabolical symbols and your pageant-devilries! I won't have it in my nice clean castle-town!"

"My!" I marveled. "You all have been long from home, almost as long as we have from ours. Really? seven hundred years of records? Intact? I must see your archives. I'm sitting here, and I'm getting excited even thinking about it! And you still remember enough to call yourselves Equestrians? Why haven't you gone home?"

"Home! Home! Home is dead, diabolist! Your blasted sky-witch murdered the homeland, left it a wracked, haunted world of horrors and night-terrors. We're New Coltington, because the devil-woods destroyed old Coltington, destroyed all of Equestria, and nearly devoured our ancestors before they fled through the portals. A hundred years of exile! A hundred years of wandering through the empty worlds of strangers and strangeness, until we fetched up here, and the ducs gave us our land."

"Damn the alicorns, every last one of them!" shouted the pony with despair in his heart.

Negotiating With Nostalgia

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FFMS009

The Princess retrieved me from a guilt-nightmare, full of blood and ghouls and my own stubbornness come back to haunt me with the consequences of my bad temper. She dispelled the zombified, plump earth ponies groaning my name, and reached down with her flower-blue hooves to pry me up off of the paving-stones I had latched onto in that dark-shadowed parody of New Coltington's high street.

"Apprentice-Acolyte Feufollet, thy wakefulness is required in the living world. Arise, and walk once more among the sun-touched." The Princess in true Princess-Mode could be greatly amusing, or as Bad Apple puts it, 'ain't she a hoot an' a half?'

"Immediately, Your Highness. What should I know?"

"Blood and fire, as is our wont these days, but of course. Thy master the Acolyte is called away to oversee surgeries remotely. The great savages who rampage in the Rebel's employ found themselves successful in bringing down one of our own, a brave tom who is, according to Sawbones, 'likely'. Other flights of pegasi and griffins converged upon the site of the attack, and a battle did break out. Much slaughter among the 'dirt-worshiping heathens' was made, but sadly, so too were many pegasi injured in the melee."

"And of course, battle broke out as soon as Sawbones left the main camp. I take it Rye Daughter is rising to the occasion?"

"Indeed! As well as are the ponies upon the front lines, who our Acolyte is even now guiding in the procedures to keep the afflicted from, what did he say, 'bleeding out'. But this employ of our acolyte's time signifies this: thou wilt be required, to complete what tasks he hath remaining this afternoon here in the Division camp. Arise, Lady Feufollet!"

And with that, I was wide awake, and it was mid-afternoon. I looked over across the ambulance, and there was Sawbones, snoring already in the embrace of his Mistress. I checked my scabs and ran a quick comb through my matted mane. No time for a shower, although I heard that they had a row of punch-bucket showers running over in one of the washtent clusters in the Hydromel regimental quarter.

So, Sawbone's priority list? Had he written anything down? I reached back for my Princess, and found a Cherie bouncing just behind my perception. No, he had not. I gave the pseudo-thestral shadow a distracted greeting, and paged through the virtual agenda. He had gotten to the Castellan, but not the Major-General.

I marched resolutely towards the stockade, and thought over the approach he had laid out. Most of it wouldn't work for diminutive little me, but at least I hadn't been the one to arrest the Major-General. That had all been the Brigadier's fault, from what I had heard. Brigadier Eugin wasn't willing to take chances once we had arrested the civilian authority. He grabbed up the military authority before Cup Cake could talk him out of it, and now we had the ancient Major-General in our custody, and damn if we knew what to do with him.

I got the corporal of the stockade to let me in. The stockade was already filling up with troublemakers. The Division having been in one place for three days now, in close proximity to civilian facilities, had already inspired a number of the rankers to cut loose in ways detrimental to proper discipline and authority. Most of them were sleeping off benders, but at least two were in there for vandalism. The sunburst wasn't a popular symbol at the moment, and it inspired abuse among our rankers. Amazingly, only one of the two vandals had actually been a brother of the Company – and that one not even an overt brother. The Left Division now had a full baker's dozen of 'silent recruits' that Dancing Shadows and Cup Cake had asked me to induct into the Company. I was still not exactly clear on the purpose of all these secret brothers and sisters, but I was the apprentice and understudy here, it was my purpose to try to understand, not to understand from the beginning.

The ancient Major-General was not looking well. A pony of that age will not react well to sudden incarceration after decades of comfort and the respect of his peers and subordinates. I greeted him, in my Prench-inflected northern accent, and his ears perked up. I got him talking about himself, and he was off and running. As Sawbones says, most ponies just want to talk about themselves; you just need to give them an excuse and then sit back and offer a listening ear.

And my ears are quite large, they take in quite a lot.

The Major-General admitted to being a commander of a merely notational force, a militia which had not been mobilized in whole or even in greater part for centuries. The Imperials had harvested their draft-companies from time to time as they did throughout the loyal provinces, but that simply had required the old militia-pony to make choices, and to order the summoned companies to the standard, to stand and watch as his fellow militia-ponies marched away, and to mourn them when they never returned from the butcher-lands.

Unlike most militia-officers, the Major-General had not been a lawyer or a high-ranking towns-pony, but rather, had once been an Imperial officer in his distant youth. But there were no wars in the years of his career, as the Bride had then been indulging in long, indolent, and peaceful years, thinking that because she wanted peace, then that she would always be so gifted. It was almost as if the great wars awaited the Major-General's retirement to his country manse, his sinecure as a justice of the peace, and his appointment to the militia command of this sleepy little province.

And now, here he was, imprisoned, before an adolescent blood-mage, ruing the days of his sleepy and fruitless career.

"General, we need you to not be in this cell. Can you convince the Castellan to re-set our relations? There is a real war to the south, along the river. There are real ponies dying in siege, in the fields, in hospices and hospital beds, and hidden, wounded, in barns and hayricks right now."

"We need to be forward of this town, beyond the bounds of your peaceful province. We need supplies, we need to be certain that your districts won't rise up in revolt in our rear. Because the enemy is pressing towards the shipyards in Coriolanus, and we need to be down there to keep them away from the gates of the east."

The old earth-pony, his faded coat half-grey and half-pink, looked up at me with his rheumy eyes. "Little jenny, I would love to do nothing more. But I cannot command that young fool Long Scroll to do anything he doesn't want to do. That family was always full of its honour and its probity. Celestia herself couldn't move them if they decided they were in the right."

I thought about that.

"What about somepony who has actually met the Eternal Princess, and can in a certain sense, speak for her?"

"Well, then. He's still not likely to listen, but at least then, we'd have some justification for ignoring the stubborn son of a mule, wouldn't we?" The old Major-General smiled sadly at me.

Marking down that as a successful meeting as these things went, I left the stockade and the castral grounds, looking to find the Cakes and the new Major who had arrived with Sawbones. The Sergeant of the Guard insisted on sending a pair of guards with me as I ventured into the pony town. New Coltington was hardly enemy territory, but the militia were still exploring their newfound status. They were out of their element down here in the south, and weren't really militia anymore – they were Imperials! And somehow that made the difference in the ranks. They weren't ponies and donkeys out on a vacation jaunt, the old militia way. They had been run through the Company wringer, and if what came out the other side wasn't something different, wasn't something greater? Then what was the purpose of it all?

So they cleaved to their procedures, and they marched as if their caribou General was always watching. It was almost cute. If it didn't mean that I was burdened with a pair of CdC rankers to over-inflate my importance while trotting through the cobbled streets of the 'castle town'. I left the two of them to exchange glares with the New Equestrian militia door-guards at that glorified town hall these ponies called a 'castle', and ventured inside to find the Cakes and their actual, living, breathing Imperial.

I found Cup Cake fuming in a hallway, the sound of conversation drifting out of a half-closed door behind her. Corporal Cake was rubbing her shoulder with his forehoof, whispering something in her trembling ear.

"Miss Cake! I was looking for you, and the Princess said you were here. Do you have a couple spare hours?"

She looked up, and collected herself. "Sure! Why not? These silly ponies won't listen to me. Hundreds of years since they've seen the Equestrian sky, or stood on Equestrian soil, and yet I'm the delusional one full of foalish stories about impossible wonderlands. Where do you need me?"

"Are you certain that Major, uh, de Bonne doesn't need you?"

"The locals seem more inclined to work with a vanilla Imperial. All I do is confuse them. They talk as if Equestria is dead and buried. Can you believe, six hundred years since the last time anypony even tried to contact home? There's provincial, and then there's whatever the tartarus you call that."

"Inquisitiveness and contact with foreign equines are not well-rewarded in Tambelon, Miss Cake. You should know that by now. And speaking of which, have you heard the latest news? Vallee du Pierre has made contact with the refugee centres. We're getting all sorts of news on our front now. Dancing Shadows is riding a chariot inbound, should be here by morning."

"Ah, you know I don't like to use this new system of yours. But that's good to know."

"Really, if you'd just make your peace with the Princess, everything would be so much more easier."

"I bring not peace, but a hoof-blade, little donkey. Somepony needs to speak for the homeland here. Even if all the locals think it's a dark-forest-haunted wasteland."

"It isn't as if your own stories about Equestria aren't full of dark forests and ghosts and haunts and terrible things."

"By Celestia's tail, girl, they're stories! Stories are about bad things happening to other ponies, or else nopony would care about them! I could tell you youngins dull and pointless happy tales about the centuries of prosperous and cheerful ponies living quiet lives of innocence and harmony, except you'd fall asleep before I was done with the fifth sentence. Adventures are terrible things happening to ponies somewhere you aren't."

We re-collected my guard, and headed back to the camp to try the Castellan again, with reinforcements and the Major-General.

Maybe we'd exhaust him into compliance.

Coming To An Understanding

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SBMS145

The wreckage of the skirmish north of the Mounds took up my entire day, stretched across hundreds of miles of tenuous relays, muttering to my Spirit the necessary steps, ghosting the gestures, holding down imagined damaged arteries, veins, tendons pinned together, guiding distant hooves to hold flesh and hide together until I almost felt both hooves and hide alike under my frogs. Somewhere, hundreds of miles away, desperate pegasi kept their wing-mates together, performed impossible field-surgical procedures under the influence of the Mistress and myself and a Rye Daughter almost as deep in the dream-fugue as myself. Five wounded, terribly wounded, carried across the backs of their fellows, or within two battered chariots. One hopelessly mangled griffin, stabilized, carried back so he might die with his fellows.

Garen passed away as the returning flights circled over the Right Divisional encampment. As deep into the dream-fugue as I was, I felt the pulse as he passed into the river, the starry sky. For a second, the river herself opened up to me, and the lights coursed onwards towards eternity.

Then the second was past, and I was again with the Nightmare, and the three sets of hooves holding together my share of the critically wounded. Then it was four, as they reached Rye, and she awoke to glue together our broken egg-shells. I slept and slept, and whispered into the ears of my pegasus field-medics what was needed to keep their fellows away from that starry sky.

Eventually Rye took all of my patients away from me, and I settled deeper into sleep. Six casualties, from such a small cohort. The simple friction of scouting in this environment would wear our first cohort away into a stub at the rate we were moving. The pegasi and griffins needed to have it reiterated to them, again and again – we could not spare them for honour, or pride, or anything other than the continued survival of each other. We could not spare a single one of them.

I could hear the Princess keening somewhere in the depths of my dreams for her lost Garen.

I awoke to find both Feufollet and the Cakes staring down at me.

"Princess says that you can be spared again, Master. We've got the Major-General agreed to go and meet with the Castellan. All goes well, we can get the stockade-cells back, and make arrangements with the vendors and the suppliers."

Miss Cake leaned forward, and cleared her throat. "They're mostly amiable to working with that Major you brought with you. Just needs the Castellan agreeable and not in jail."

I closed my eyes, and asked for the Spirit. An irate Cherie appeared before my mind's eye.

"Monsieur! You just spent half a day in here! Go out, get some – well, sun's down, go get some moon instead!"

"Sorry, petit. I need an update from the Captain, situation may have changed while I was busy. Could you let her know I need an update?"

The little Cherie-imago gave me a fierce raspberry, and then turned away, displaced by a full-scale Nightmare in sulphurous mode.

"Fool! You are not, despite your pretensions, in the chain of the command! What do you need now?"

"I'm about to head into negotiations with the locals. Have we made any major changes in plans?"

"You mean other than totally reorganizing our army and re-designating our axis of advance on zero notice? No, nothing in particular, mammalucia! Yes, you babbu, we're charging eastwards, at a pretty rapid trot. The Reserve is now double-timing it your way, expect them in two days. Middle Division is following in train, as soon as Right Division falls back on their position in front of Rantoul. We'll need Left Division ready to move by tomorrow evening, and to make arrangements for supplies for the better part of the whole army through New Equestria. Army's in your front, babbu! I've already told Octavius to grit his teeth and get his focus forward, hopefully his Brigadier is listening to him! Orders should arrive… late tomorrow morning, if the pegasus carrying them doesn't stop for a cloud-nap on the way. Captain out."

I blinked, and was dismissed. The world and New Equestria was still there, waiting for me.

"OK, new plan. We figure out what the Castellan wants, and give it to him, both barrels. We just ran out of trotting-room. Captain says they made their decision, and the rest of the army's coming this way like an avalanche. Time to make nice and secure right of way and supply sources. Let's go make nice."

The lot of us tramped into the stockade, and a clearly bored corporal got her keys and retrieved the Major-General for us. I nodded to the old stallion and we exchanged pleasantries. Then I stopped in the middle of the stockade passageway, and asked a sudden, perplexed question.

"General, weren't you called for regiments when they were forming d'Harcourt's 'Army of the Housa'?"

He nodded, sadly. "Of course, last fall. Two regiments, the I and III New Equestria were called to the colours."

"Why haven't we heard anything from them then?"

"All communications with regiments called to the Imperial command go through Imperial Command. Which is to say, it's like they disappear down a well."

"So there are two regiments of New Equestrian militia down there somewhere between Coriolanus and Tartarus?"

He nodded.

"Any relatives of the Castellan among them?"

"A sister, a nephew, and his youngest daughter."

"Well, bugger a bugbear."

I turned around, and charged for the Castellan's cell. I grabbed the keys for the Castellan's cell from the nonplussed corporal, and wrenched the door open with a twist of my neck.

I spat the keys back at the corporal, and looked inside the cell, where the alarmed civilian had jumped up from his cot. "Hey, there. We seem to have gotten off on the wrong hoof. I'm Sawbones. What's your kid's name? The one down on the river somewhere?"

"What? No- what?"

"The kid you have in the militia? Your sister and her – son I guess? Somebody else's? This duchy didn't look to me like a province with two regiments in the battle-zone, why is everything so sleepy looking? Shouldn't you be, I don't know, excited about the war next door?"

The earth pony snarled at me. I mean he reared up and growled like a griffin. Impressive from a pony of his years, really. I could feel the silent audience behind me. I reached up and hoofed off my enchantment, letting my real eye and teeth show. It slowed him down a bit; which was probably for the best, looked a bit like he was thinking about charging and damn the consequences.

"No, seriously, Long Scroll. I want to understand you. And I get the distinct impression you've been lying to us with the truth. You don't give a shit about the eternal Princess of the Sun and Moon, or our very own Spirit of the Night. Not a wet fucking shit. Like every sane pony worth a squirt, you care about you and yours. So let's start with the meaningful truths, and leave the surface ones to flow with the stream, how about? How long has it been since you've heard from your people?"

"We never hear back from the companies when they take them away," said a tired voice from behind me, and I looked back over my shoulder at the semi-retired officer. He startled backwards in alarm at my altered countenance. He collected himself. "Th-they go, and we never hear from them again."

"That was companies to the Rima front, yes? Down into the woodchipper, like every other band of recruits raised on this benighted continent in the last generation. But this isn't a company or two, and it wasn't on the far end of existence. It's right next door! At your door-step! And you never talk to your own people no more than a province away? What's wrong with you benighted lunatics!" I turned on the cornered Castellan, and continued my rant. "Your flesh! Your blood! We're just mercenaries and northerners, here, this isn't really our fight, but for our obligations and national – oh, I don't understand what motivates you maniacs and your nation-feeling here under the rotting hoof. But you! This is your homes! Your province, your duchy! WHY HAVE YOU GIVEN UP WITHOUT A FIGHT?"

"Who would fight for that dead thing on the throne?" growled Long Scroll, at bay at last. "What can we do but give you what you come for, and pray to the dead that nothing more is taken. MY DAUGHTER IS DEAD! She may still be walking around, and as little care these monsters care for the bodies of the dead, I – oh, fuck the alicorns! Fuck your forsaken Phylactery! Do your worst, monster! Cut my throat here in this shithole, and be done with me!

"Just leave the rest alone. Take no more. Let them be done."

By the end of his aria, he was laying in the hay on the floor of the cell. It would have been more striking if we had been in place long enough for the stockade to have become truly fetid, but the physical characteristics of our incarceration facility was not cooperating with the dramatic demands of Long Scroll's little swan-song. Just because I understood him, didn't mean that I sympathized with his self-indulgence. But needs must when the Spirit drives.

"Are we quite finished yet? Because I'm not ready to put you out of your misery, Castellan. The unfeeling world is not done with you or yours yet, and I am not yet ready to build the pyre for your missing regiments. d'Harcourt may be a typically half-witted Imperial officer, but at last report they weren't exterminated to a mare. If I can hold some hope for ponies I've never met, can you find it in yourself to stop carving the head-stones before we get the reports?

"Get up, you damn fool, and do your alicorns-damned job. Because we aim to do ours, and your benighted little pit of despair is a simple crossroads on our way to the war, which has for the moment escaped over the horizon.

"And we mean to chase down those runners and beat the ever-living tartarus out of the lot of them."

The Patrol

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FFMS010

I left Sawbones and the Cakes to their arguments with the depressed civilian, and turned away to report to my knight and commander, following the Princess's relayed instructions. Apparently that begrudged concession back there was sufficient to our plans to permit them to go forward, regardless of the rather sketchy nature of the current state of cooperation. The Castellan wasn't even fully out of his cell yet!

The Major-General pulled me aside as I turned about to leave, and he followed me out of ear-shot of the ongoing, rather emotional argument in the stockade cell. The Castellan might have conceded the main point, but he was going down swinging. Or just throwing a fit, it's sometimes hard to tell with adult civilians.

"There was some mention of your army needing several companies of New Equestrian militia for local guides and scouts and such. I have to warn you – our militia is not at all well-suited to or equipped for such matters. The militia of my duchy are hidebound, insular, and many have never set foot outside of the province."

I turned to look skeptically at the old retired Imperial. But the Princess whispered to me to pay close attention, so I held my peace and listened.

"Which is not to say that there are no options for you and us. Not every resource marches under a provincial pennant. Go to my mansion, before you leave, and ask of my groundskeeper the old guidon. Tell her 'the gate is open, and the patrol is called to the woods'. Can you repeat that for me?" He stared intently at me.

"'The gate is open, the patrol is called to the woods'," I repeated. "What exactly am I summoning with this fell ritual? My masters tell me, never summon anything bigger than your head. Wait, no, that was 'never summon anything you can't send back to the pit'."

"No devils or imps here, child of tartarus. Merely a society dedicated to maintaining borders, and preserving the peace in places sometimes lacking in it."

I narrowed my eyes at the old rogue, whom I had clearly been underestimating. "And maybe occasionally slipping cargo over those borders without paying ducal taxes and levies and suchlike?"

"Oh, such a cynical generation we've raised! Go with the Eternal Princess, jenny."

"Take care, Monsieur Major-General."

I followed his directions down a nearby farmlane as the sun raced for the western horizon. I was running behind schedule, but both I and the Princess felt that his prompt was something important.

The Major-General's mansion was on the outside of New Coltington, comfortably close for a retired pony with occasional business with the Castellan and the numerous militia officers who by and large ran that castle-town and its economy when they weren't being militia officers, which was almost all of the time. His hard-bitten old grounds-keeper kept the gatehouse outside of his cute little cottage, she looked more like a retired Imperial than that kind-faced old stallion possibly could have.

"That's the Major-General's mansion? I pictured something larger, something… with a second floor."

"That is all he needs," she growled at me with a throat full of gravel and an evil look in her eyes. "We keep the actual mansion mothballed over there, behind that line of poplars. This is the rear-gate. What do you need, little bloodmage?"

"The Major-General sent me for a guidon, and to tell you that 'the gate is open, and the patrol is called to the woods'. Which sounds like something from an Equestrian foal's tale, so I hope it means something to you other than that, or else I just wasted a half-hour in a day that has none to spare."

The old non-com – and I have seen enough of those to know one when I was glared at by one – slammed the gatehouse door in my face, and I could hear rustling behind the fancifully-painted and lacquered door. The top half of the door wrenched open again, and a spear was thrust over the lower half's door-sill, butt first.

"Here, damn you, grab this," her voice demanded of me from out of my line of sight, inside the gatehouse.

I grabbed the spear-butt in my mouth, and pulled it out into the orange light of the sunset. Wrapped around the blunted blade of the spear was a faded pennant, something grey and black and yellow.

"Fly this as you're moving eastwards. It should be signal enough for the Patrol to agree to meet."

"The Patrol…?"

"Oh, Celestia's beard, don't call them that to their faces. They hate being named. Just let them call themselves whatever it is this season. More use in a hoof-full of those rangers than an entire regiment of what this province laughingly calls militia, you'll see. And they're probably the only ponies this side of the river knows what the Tartarus is going on anymore. Madness and despair, everywhere." She slammed the half-door again in my face, and I could hear the muttering inside of the gatehouse as the sunset threw a bloody light across that locked gateway.

I caught up with Octavius as he waited, impatiently, outside of the Brigadier's tent in the castral compound. He glared at me.

"Why again am I waiting on my own apprentice, Feufollet?"

"I came bearing New Equestrian gifts. Here, you want to carry it?"

He eyed my spear and its rolled pennant. "No, you go ahead and hold onto that. If I go carrying it around, people are going to make more jokes about who's the knight and who's the apprentice in this preposterous relationship. Where have you been, anyways?"

"Don't you ever listen to the Princess, sir?"

"Harumph." He really was too young of a pony to be so deliberately crusty. I'm pretty sure it was a put-on to try and keep his underlings from running all over him. He wasn't the only one who hadn't understood how he had gotten a cohort command, but in the end, he was the only skeptic whose opinion mattered on the subject. So far his imposter's syndrome hadn't caused any problems in the field, but I still worried.

Octavius entered the command tent, and I stood next to the ceremonial guard at the entrance, within earshot. One was a ranker from the Tonnerre regiment, and the other was Hyssop, slumming it as a tent-guard. Or maybe… I eyed her in speculation. Then I looked at the ranker, and realized she was one of my secret inductees. Nothing but Company and the Brigadier in hearing distance. And I had missed the beginning of the conversation.

"The orders will be coming in the morning? Really? Am I in charge here, or are you? And what's with these secret orders that always precede the official ones by a half-day or day?"

"Brigadier, we've been keeping this quiet to preserve our options, and to keep the secret fresh. But have you talked with the regiments from Verdebaie?"

"What, those remote-communication devices you used at Lait Blanc? The bulky headset things? You've gotten some range on them?"

"Well, let's say, we've had some developmental breakthroughs. And the communication system is flexible, not particularly visible to the equine eye, and… not usable outside of the Company."

"What, not at all? What is this, some dark magic or voodoo?"

"Maybe a little bit. Hey, jenny, get your flank in here. Leave the pennant, foal."

I fumbled the spear into the field-grip of Hyssop, and stumbled into the command tent.

"Yes, sir?"

"Where is the Right-Division right now?"

I consulted the Princess, who was amusing herself with some sort of silly pantomime with an imaginary chalkboard and a game of hangmare. And a good deal of information quickly laid out before my minds-eye.

"Halfway between its last camp and the one-march castral ground west of Rantoul. They're on a forced night-march. Once they reach Rantoul, Middle-Division will displace and follow the Reserve on the Rantoul-New Coltington Road."

"So what, she could have been coached before you came in here."

"Jenny, what's the situation in our front tonight?"

"Six sections of the aerial cohort screening or on deep penetration patrol tonight. Elements of Section 1-4 are nearly in contact with the regiments of the Army of the Housa dug in, in front of Cleves. Sections 1-21 and 1-33 are skirmishing with a ghoul pack north of Dover and a White Rose screening force just to the east of Dover, respectively. Sections 1-2 and 1-6 along with Witches 3a are vectoring on the latter skirmish, intent on sealing the conflict before they can report to their superiors. Site of clash is too far from nearest company of Vallee du Pierre by a factor of three, judged not worth the deployment exposure-"

"That's enough, Feufollet, thank you." Octavius turned to the appalled, fascinated Brigadier.

"Not every Company pony can do what she just did there. For many, it's just a notion, a guide. But for some like Feufollet, it's a connection with bandwidth."

"Not quite real-time," I interjected. "But if you concentrate, you can get something close. And we're almost there, boss. Actual contact with the White Rose, and not just some damn plains-savages set loose in civilized country like over to the west. We need to get closer to the front, fast."

"And that's what I'm talking about. General Knochehart has ordered the eastward push, the rest of the army is executing it. They won't be in touch until tomorrow evening at the earliest, and the actual orders, physical orders, won't arrive until tomorrow morning. But since we know, we can shift our posture, and be in the best place to anticipate the push forward when it comes. And we need more information. Badly. Our recon elements are heavily armed eggshells – mobile, deadly, but easily broken, and we can't replace them. We can't have the aerial sections fighting their own battles, not for long. We'll blind ourselves."

While Octavius was arguing his case to the commander of the Division, I was arguing with the Princess, and whatever pegasus hothead was on the other end of the line. Ghoul-hunting was a foolish waste of wingpower, they couldn't report contacts back to their own command. That live rebel force, on the other hoof, was a serious problem.

"So, I agree, we need to start moving elements eastward. But that clearly isn't the whole of this conversation. You've dropped one tartarus of a petard on my withers here. What am I supposed to do with it?"

"Hyssop! Come in here. The corporal here-"

"Sergeant, sir."

"What?"

"I got that promotion, you daft plothole. You got drunk at the celebration, don't you remember?"

"Huh. Clearly not. Right! The sergeant here is now in charge of the two sections assigned as 'guards' for your command staff. She's also one of the ponies who's shown some capacity for the 'princess radio', as the fillies call it. Insofar as you can, route urgent messages through Hyssop, up to the General and her staff, down to the individual regiments. Each regiment still has its pair of Company sections, assigned fortuitously as standard-guards and fire-brigades. They can relay messages when it's urgent. We'd prefer to not mention this capacity at the regiment level until things really go to smash at the tactical level, but that is probably coming soon. We need you prepared more than we need the colonels, don't you agree?"

And from there on in, it was just a matter of chest-thumping and preservation of pride and position. We got the orders we wanted, and Octavius relayed the heads-up to his sergeants while we were still talking to the Brigadier. By the time we got out of that tent, it was the second hour of the night, and the whole of the Third Cohort was awaiting the two of us to join them for the march eastwards.

The Third Cohort was somewhat reduced from its winter roster. Like all the rest of the cohorts, it had contributed its moiety to the staffing of the Army of the North. Nearly a third of the cohort was now on detached duty, attached to various regiments and brigades throughout the Army. The remaining core representing the striking-power of Octavius's command. Objectively speaking, it was smaller than a militia battalion, tiny by regimental standards. But the professionalism and savagery of a Company cohort could not be underestimated.

We marched quietly through the darkened streets of New Coltington. I had offered to screen us in a darkness, or alternatively, to play up our march with imps and corpselights and other flamboyant displays. Octavius grimaced and told me to just keep close, and to hold on to my damned pennant. At his mention, I unfurled the flag, and looked at the device. A sable tree, over an or sunburst, on a cendrée field. Whole thing had looked black when rolled up, and I had no idea if anypony could even see the device in the dead of night like this. I mean, most of the Company could see in the dark, but it wasn't exactly a skill common among the civilians, you know?

As we passed out of town, the true darkness closed in around the cohort. Long miles between New Coltington and the supposed heights around High Earth, it would take us the entire balance of the night at a regular march to cover that ground. Two sections of the van were sent out in advance to cover the fore, in case of ambushes or other surprises. The aerial ponies had been back and forth over this stretch of Road again and again in the last few days, but I still felt vulnerable walking on my own four hooves like this. It didn't feel right to not be in the air over an advance. My witches-gig was stored along with the rest of the supplies in the hoof-full of carts rolling along in the middle of the cohort's formation.

A reminder from the Princess put the spur to me, and I galloped forward, pennant streaming, to join the vanguard. If I was supposed to be 'showing the flag', best to do so from the very fore of the advance. I could hear Octavius yelp, but apparently the Princess finally got through his thick skull, and he didn't call me back.

And so it was, an hour and a half out of New Coltington, we spotted a cluster of ponies waiting in the darkness at a small farm-lane crossroads, just the other side of the drainage ditches on either side of the Road. Maybe a section each, with two ponies standing by the verge of the Road itself, on this side of the farm-lane to the left.

The two sections of the van separated, and turned to face each cluster of unknown ponies to the north and south, with the corporal of the vanguard and myself standing in the middle of the deployment, my pennant waving in the night breeze. My princess whispered in my ear, I have no idea how she knew what to say, or why.

"Greetings in a dark wood, traveler!" I barked. "How fare ye in this murk?"

"Well enough, though I know ye not, stranger. Whence cometh that banner in thine fetlock?"

"Given me by mine new-met nuncle, who instructeth mine self to say, thus, 'the gate is open, the patrol is called to the woods'. More than this, I stand ignorant."

"Stand forth, and be illuminated." The speaker's companion struck a light, and lit a torch overhead. It immediately ruined the night-sight of every pony watching, and more than a few Company armsponies cursed the light.

Standing in the flickering light were my vanguard, and two dozen cloaked earth-ponies, not obviously armed. Some had burdens upon their backs, and all had full saddle-bags, but none of them looked directly at the torch. They had obviously done this before.

"What is your name, donkey, that you would call upon us in the name of the General."

"Call me Feufollet, for that is my name. I am a magus of the Black Company, and like that august agency, am in the employ of the Bride of Tambelon, seconded to this, her Imperial Army of the North. We're here to fight your battles for you, pony. What is your name?"

"I have no battles to fight, for I am no soldier, nor am I sovereign, or really, anypony but a simple tinker and seller of wares. But those who care to know the trade-routes of the river-valley, know to ask the news of me and mine. They call me Night Watch."

We had much to talk about, but the rest of the cohort quickly caught up with the vanguard and our new-met friends from the Patrol. And it was a long march still to High Earth. And so we walked through the dark, the pennant furled once again, and hidden away from the sight of pony and donkey alike.

There Go My Ponies

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SBMS146

My participation in the painstaking coaxing of Castellan Long Scroll off of his high ledge over the virtual paving-stones of Imperial politics was limited, but it seemed as if it took forever. We finally got him out of the stockade cell, which was just as well, as the corporal's replacement had arrived for her shift, and there was a new wave of inebriated Hydromel militia to dry out in the cells. That pristine cell would be getting its vomitous baptism shortly, or I wasn't the judge of intoxicated donkeys.

Tartarus of a time for the militia to be getting stink-eyed and riotous, though. We seemed to be on the move. By the time I went looking for my ambulance and the fragment of the medical corps seconded to this division, I discovered that they had left, along with the rest of the Company 'battalion' and supports. I looked back and forth through the torch-lit and busied lanes of the Left Division's encampment, and contacted the Spirit via my aching, overstrained self.

Partway down the Road towards the front, three hours away and on their way to High Earth. Not moving at that very moment, but oh my aching head and poor, future-aching hooves, there was no sleep for me that night. I drew over myself my cloak, rueful that I had left my chamfron along with my baggage in the missing ambulance, and began hoofing it towards my runaway command, such as it was.

I spent that entire night expecting an uproar on the 'princess radio', as Feufollet calls it, rushing towards the one mobile surgical platform in the province, still hours ahead of me on the darkened Road. Darkness wrapped herself around me like a warm early summer evening, the insects and the small nocturnal animals singing in concert through the moonlit fields that stretched out into the endless distance.

Nothing ever really broke. The pegasi courted their damnation again and again through the night, and haunted the enemy in the open and across the half-moonlit fields and woodlots of the distant rolling hills so far south and east of where I cantered, alone with my thoughts and the Spirit. Hour after hour, pounding along well-maintained metalled, sealed surfaces, my steel hooves striking sparks from the occasional shard of stone stuck up out of the asphalt slurry. The occasional small wound in the distant fighting, strains, bruises – but nothing life-threatening. The Spirit was with the aerial cohort that night, and all was well with the world as we closed upon the war.

The fugitive would be brought to bay at last.

As dawn broke over true hilltops in the far, hazy distance, my watery eye spied the rear guard of the Third Cohort, trailing lances still dark below the sunrays streaming over the distant ridgelines. We were actually in front of the castra west of High Earth when I finally caught up with my medical corps-cattle.

"There goes my ponies, I must find out where they're going, so that I might lead them!" I gasped out at a bemused Sack, who, damn him, looked as fresh as a daisy after an entire night's-march.

"Could have asked, Mistress would have told, caught a chariot and been ahead of us?" Damn ox was laughing at me.

"Too much other business tonight, too many ponies walking tonight because we need pegasi out scouting and screening. A simple night's-march can be done in my sleep. And almost was. Nice to see no screaming patients in the convenience. I take it reports were right, we got off easy last night?" We were standing still now, as the fore of the column was negotiating its way into the castra. I looked up at the distant ridgeline, calculating the drop lines and fields of fire. Just far enough, plus a bit. The castral ground was out of the military zone of control of those hills.

I went to find Octavius, still eyeing that ridgeline. He was standing by the castral gate, as the tired armsponies of the Third filed into the camp, heading for the scouts' section. The tired unicorn was talking to an even more tired-looking Feufollet and a pony I didn't know, an earth pony with a cloak and overstuffed saddlebags. No caparison, no helm.

"Octavius! You seeing what I'm seeing over there to the east?"

"Sawbones, did you just chase our dust-trail all night long? Has anyone reminded you recently that you're our surgeon, not a battle-commander or an AWOL ranker?"

"Buck you, you hopped-up corporal of the guard! You took off with my corps-cattle! And my ambulance! And my baggage! What was I going to do, hire a inn-room with my nonexistent personal supply of deniers?"

"Huh. Uh, oops? Who can keep track of you, you night-haunt? You show up in your chariot like the Lady of the Night, splash around making a mess, never let me know you're in camp…. Hey, come to think of it, buck you buddy! Your lack of planning isn't my emergency!"

Feufollet got in between us before I rattled his brainbox and got him thinking like a Company pony again. "Hey, boss, sir? Let's introduce Sawbones here to our new friend and his friends. Boss? This is Night Watch. He's brought us a lot of news. And his ponies will be bringing us lots more of the same. Night Watch – what are we calling your friends now that it's day and we're not in the woods for the night?"

I blinked at this utterly cryptic nonsense, and turned to the cloaked pony. Now that I looked under the bulging saddlebags and lack of barding, Night Watch was a damn hard stallion, lack of weapons and all.

"Not going to buy 'the Tinkers', are you?" he asked in a deep baritone.

I shook my head in wordless negation.

"Fine, the Patrol it is. Since your young jenny seems to have already been given that name by a loose-lipped old fart in New Coltington. I hear tell that prison put a bit of life in that old fool's step. Who should I thank for that?"

"Nopony here, if by 'old fart' you mean the militia Major-General. I think it was somebody in the line of command, made necessary when the Castellan had his little… episode." I tried not to glare at Feufollet, but she caught the insinuation and her expressive ears folded back nonetheless. She'd have to work on those tells. Although if I got her into a poker game, I might not leave the table the poorest pony in the room for once. Back to the subject at hoof. "So I'm to understand that your Patrol might have some expertise in these districts we're coming into? And knowledge of who's where, doing what to whom?"

"Certainly. A humble society of traders, tinkers and peddlers can hardly make their way in this hard world without a proper supply of information as to who is needing what, and who is looking for whom where. Often, these days, with pikes and hook-bills in hoof, and blood in their eyes. Who fears the ghoul and the revenant, when ponies and bison stalk the land with murder in their hearts?"

"I'll take that for a yes. Do we need to be concerned about all these ridgelines just east of here? That looks like highly defensible terrain from down here. I don't want to have to stitch back together ponies cut up trying to take those hilltops from clever-boots White Rose sneaking up on us while we're here talking like civilized ponies."

"Today, we have nothing to fear from ridgelines and the western rebels. Today, they are still miles and miles away, and trying to find enough food and supplies to find the way around the fortifications in front of the Hayfriend. Many drowned westerners have been dug out of that shallow streambed by the smug defenders of the great city in the last two weeks. The western rebel has grown cautious of those soldiers behind their swamp, driven from the open field though they were."

I stared at the cohort as it and its wagons found their way into the stirring, half-empty camp. I yelled at Sack to go find the regiment's medical corps, if it had one, and set up in the dedicated hospital-section if some damn pony wasn't already squatting. I turned back to Octavius and the others.

"What regiment is up here again? Chutes des Cristal?"

"Vallee du Pierre, boss."

"Right, OK. Pony colonel, I think? Let's go make our bows. See what we can do for now. Anypony have a map of this benighted wasteland?"

The new Patrol-pony, irate humour alight in his eyes, pulled a piece of parchment from his left saddlebag, and gestured forward with his muzzle. So we went to find the pony in charge of the forward detachment of the Left Division, first on scene, first no doubt into the fight.

Whenever we found it, wherever it was hiding.

Beech Grove, or, Contact

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FFMS011

I climbed the hillside above the Road south-east of High Earth, the Bride's engineers having dug a gap through the ridgeline to pass their legionary road along an easy slope rather than wind it up the somewhat steeper sides of the really rather modest elevation, the sort of thing which passes for hills in the country south of Rime. Sawbones about had an aneurysm when he laid eyes on those ridges from the campground on the far side of the town, and insisted that we claim them 'before some damn rebel gets there first and makes us regret it'.

Nobody could convince him that the signal absence of any White Rose closer than the outskirts of Dover several dozen miles to the south and east and the lack of any military objective in this direction made that highly unlikely, and so, under the pressure of his considerable stubbornness when he got worked up, I was accompanying a battalion of militia along with a stiffener of Company sections to clear each ridgeline choke point along the Road from High Earth to the bridge over the Hayfriend. The battalion had been posted yesterday south and east of the main regiment in the general direction of Dover, along a lesser local market-road.

It had accomplished exactly jack and shit where it had lolled about, while the pegasi and griffins skirmished with enemy scouts far outside of support range of this not-particularly-mobile fragment of the Vallee du Pierre. So it wasn't exactly a loss to the dispositions of the Division's forward elements, to leave a single company on yesterday's post, while I led the rest of them on a recce along the open Road, so far as we had open road.

Company doctrine holds that you clear passes by assaulting the sides of the pass, rather than trying to rush the pass proper. If the enemy knows what it is doing, they'll post the shoulders of the pass anyways, and if they don't, hey! Free massacre!

The doctrine was sound, but doctrine was exhausting in execution, as we swarmed up the sides of each tiny pass, found a signal lack of enemy, and then descended the far side to take to the Road to cross the wide valleys in between, until it was time to seize another empty crest and another empty pony-made pass through low, rolling ridges.

By late afternoon, we were looking down on a somewhat burnt-looking town in front of a definitely burnt-looking former bridge, barely visible from the hillside. The Hayfriend was a feeble little thing, utterly invisible beneath its high banks and screen of soggy-looking oaks. The only reason I could see the burnt remnants of the Beech Grove bridge was that its box-frame construction had left burnt-black broken ribs jutting up over the high banks. I couldn't spot the beeches the town had to have been named after, it was all farmland and apple-orchards and the scraggly swamp-oaks down in the creekbed.

The troops that had burnt the town and the bridge – and I had been informed that the ones that had done the latter had almost certainly not been the former – were no-where to be seen. Which was peculiar, because this was the most direct route between the north and north-west and beset Coriolanus in the misty distance. The war had been here, and then it had gone, and would no doubt return again in its good time. Some activity in the fields and the town proper indicated that the burning had been more notational than enthusiastic, and that there were still civilians in the district.

The Patrol had scattered far ahead of us that morning, an hour before the Vallee Major had gotten her ponies on the Road. A pair of Night Watch's friends were supposed to find us somewhere along the Road, wherever we fetched up by the afternoon. I was keeping an eye out for them, while the corporals and sergeants of the militia posted their three-sixty guard against unwanted visitors around our position dominating the Road-pass. I examined the foliage around our position, and started using Gibblets' method for feeling out the runners and vines of 'friendly' plants for the usual tricks and traps in case we had to put up a sudden defense.

Whenever you're not moving, you best be planning to defend what you're sitting on.

The hedgerow across the small field from my position stirred, and out popped two earth ponies, hats, bulging packs and saddlebags alike. The fact that the hedgerow was *inside* the sergeants' perimeter was monumentally dispiriting. The militia had learned their lessons, but they hadn't fully absorbed them yet.

The fact that the two ponies were recognizably two of Night Watch's friends made up a great deal for the failure of the militia to be, well, proper Company ponies.

"Well met in the wood!" I chirped.

"Well met in the wood, indeed," replied the older of the two 'peddlers'. "You're well and away from the nearest White Rose, by at least a dozen miles. Word is, there's to be a screen on patrol from the riverbank to the second ridgeline today. Double-company strength, maybe? No more than a battalion, although that's probably more over towards Dover, if your winged friends keep up their harassment."

Dover was nestled in a wide low spot in the rolling ridge country that separated New Equestria from the Baronies along the river. For whatever reason, the Bride's engineers had not chosen to include Dover in their military road system, so it languished, once a great market-town in the good old days, now a decaying farming-country baronial seat. It laid on the direct route between High Earth and New Coltington and the river-districts. The main body back in High Earth could deal with whatever was developing over in that direction.

We were here to see if we couldn't make a hoof-shake with the remnants of the Army of the Housa down in Coriolanus. We wouldn't be doing it via that burnt bridge, though.

I had laid out a cloth set of banners on the new grass of the open field the battalion had surrounded, a wide white cross within a black square. As I was talking with the scouts from the Patrol, a flight of pegasi came spiraling in from the west for a landing.

It was Whirlwind and her half-section. They'd spotted a company-strength enemy formation in motion on the road to the southwest, approaching Beech Grove. We huddled with the Patrol, and it was agreed.

The Major led two of her three companies along with her Company supports southward cross-country behind the Patrol scouts, who knew the area well enough to get us through the local fields and farmlanes quickly. The afternoon was getting long, and a late-spring stormcloud was threatening by the time they led us into position along a worm-fence just the other side of the market-road leading into the half-burnt town. One of the pegasi was hovering overhead, wearing one of my field-expedient phantasms, visible to us, but nothing but a wisp of sky-vapour to the approaching enemy. She gave us a series of hoof-signals as the enemy advanced.

I felt out the fresh new growth around the road, and coaxed them across the roadway, as carefully as I could. Blood dripped down both of my forearms, and I relaxed my concentration upon the plant-domination magic. It wasn't my bailiwick, and took more out of me than the usual effort. I turned instead to my preferred tricks, and gathered the imaginary horrors which I would conjure upon the enemy when they finally showed their sorry –

And there they came. Four by four, pikes held high, chamfrons thrown back upon their shoulders and caparisons tied up and piled on their backs. Every fourth pony carried unlit torches, every other fourth carried bags. They weren't here to fight, they were here to loot, have fun, and burn.

We let the column enter the kill-zone as deep as they could get before I pulled the vine and runner trip-lines and set off the screaming horrors. A full third of the enemy column planting their feckless muzzles into the dirt and gravel of the market-road was all the signal the militia needed.

I didn't even need the screaming horrors, I think they distracted the Vallee militia more than they accomplished in herding the enemy back into the kill-zone, to be honest. The enemy had been laughably unprepared for an ambush. It was over in moments.

It took considerably longer to finish off the wounded and decapitate the dead. The storm broke early, and the darkness of storm-clouds and rain faded into true twilight and evening damp, before we were done. I was able to talk the Major into returning to the Road, the reserve company, and our expected position closer to the main body in High Earth. The night-march did not make me popular with the Vallee rankers.

At least we had pegasi cover to clear the passes on the way home. None of us, bloodied, soaked, and tired, were in a condition to climb each ridge as we went. It would have been a perfect counter-ambush on the part of the enemy to squat in one of those defiles and take their revenge for our small success.

It certainly would have been what I'd have done in their place.

Battle Is A Democracy

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SBMS147

The Colonel of I Vallee du Pierre was a middle-aged earth pony named En Banc. She was nopony's idea of a warrior-poet in the classical mode, but I was sure that if I ever had to press my case in the Inns of Chancery, she was my mare. Her control over her battalions was notional at best, and she generally left the tactical decisions of the regiment to her ruthlessly efficient first major, Jean-de-Dieu, a jack who usually insisted on being addressed as 'Major Soult'. Colonel En Banc was generally satisfied with the direction and support of her regiment, content to deal with discipline, logistics, and the myriad tasks which consume the overwhelming majority of any unit commander's time and energy. The first major was welcome to the oversight of drill and evolutions which are the showy and obvious portions of command.

What this meant was that the Colonel stayed in camp with me and my cattle, while Major Soult took out the troops that morning to establish a cordon to the south of High Earth and eastwards, north of distant Dover. Octavius put himself and Third Cohort under the command of the forceful Major Soult, and I didn't squawk about the decision. It was his command, and his choice.

But I did sit down mentally with the Spirit and sent a message to the distant Captain, strongly suggesting that the Lieutenant be forwarded immediately to take over oversight of the swarm of pegasi and griffins screening our advanced position. Feufollet and a short battalion set off on my strong recommendation to secure the Road way as far forward as possible. All indications were that the enemy was concentrated due south of High Earth, and southeastwards of Dover, away from the Road proper.

From our point of view, the Road was the most important military fact in the theatre, and the spine of our advance and our logistics. It was a straight arrow from distant Rime to the gates of besieged Coriolanus, and securing that line of advance was our primary operational goal.

From the enemy's point of view, their most important military fact was the untrammeled, unobstructed passage of the Housa River, and close logistical contact with that waterway. Their logistics ran along that river, and their primary military supports would be, if I wasn't mistaken, the White Rose's large riverine fleet, which had run the ruined fortifications at the Second Mouth, and now dominated the Housa up to the string of fortifications that protected Coriolanus and her bevy of shipyards.

Feufollet had hoofed off Night Watch to my care when the opportunity to go haring off into the bloody wild came calling. And Night Watch was an eye-opening education in the military geography and facts on the ground of our new theatre of operations. He helped me understand why the retreat of a broken fragment of the Army of the Housa into an old river-side fortress at Braystown had been a provocation and an obsession for the victorious White Rose.

The Braystown fortress was sheltered behind an oxbow, at the end of a series of disconnected hilltops jutting out into the Housa, said ridge-like formation creating a sort of obstruction and choke-point on that mighty river. All that was needed to complete the gate upon the river was a heavy boom of wrought-iron chain, which had been easily dropped into place. So long as the decayed walls of the Braystown fortress were defended, the White Rose's Housa flotilla couldn't advance any further. The bloody defeat at the Wirts had given the Rebel little but a supply of corpses and easy inland access to all the districts between the Wirts, Braystown, Dover, and right up to the line of the Hayfriend, behind which sheltered the rest of the shattered Army of the Housa.

Night Watch refused to commit to a definition of that stream - whether it was a small river, or a large creek, was apparently a matter for geographers and farmers and military ponies, not simple tinkers and peddlers. But he was quite sure that it was neither navigable, nor passable in this season, especially not after a wet and stormy spring like the one we had just endured. And the White Rose, although present in fairly large numbers, couldn't get the leverage to push across that ambiguous little stream to sweep away the remnant fragments of that army and push into their prize, the Queen of the Housa, industrious Coriolanus. Especially not with Braystown lodged in their naval throat.

While we discussed the ongoing travails of our common enemy, I received two pieces of news. The Lieutenant was rushing forward to take over the Company's affairs before we all got into more trouble than she could dig us out of, and a flight of our pegasi had ran as far forward as they could, and found the headquarters of the remnant of the Army of the Housa outside of a town named Cleves, on the far side of the marshy Hayfriend.

I thought about that news, and the clever Patroler detected my distraction. I clearly needed to work on my poker-face while being informed by the Spirit of things I ought not know.

"Dear doctor, it is as obvious as the remaining eye upon your face, that my recitation of paltry facts has birthed some sort of hypothesis, or theorem, within your imagination. Could you assuage my curiosity as to what you've thought of, that this discussion brought to mind?"

"Such a grandiloquent way of asking what I'm thinking, sir. Which fragment of our shattered sister army contained the command staff of that luckless formation? Who's in charge, and where?"

"Oh, very hard to tell from outside looking in, from the Westerners' point of view no less than ours, thank the Princess of Night and Day. There is somepony in command of the Braystown Shambles, for it has not surrendered this past fortnight and change, despite a steady and violent bombardment by the Westerners' great fleet of boats. Fire and horrors, they say, expend themselves night and day against those ancient rocks, and still something stirs within the old pile, and flings a reply from time to time, in defiance." The civilian's eyes flared with enthusiasm as he told his tale. Everypony loves a good war-story when they aren't the ones having fire and damnation rained upon their polls and withers.

"Is it just that they're in no particular hurry to force the gates of the East, or have they tried and failed? Have they assaulted?"

"Oh, a little of one, a bit of the other. It's as good as one's life to get too close to such things, the Westerners are convinced that all ponies in these loyal lands are spies, and saboteurs, and sneaking assassins," said the pious spy. "As far as we can tell, the Westerners have expended most of their intact undead in an attempt to break the walls of the Shambles, and failed. Some stories are told in taverns taken over by Western scouts and irregulars, that the ghouls sent into the Braystown Shambles to open breaches in the walls, never came back out, and were later seen upon those walls themselves, turned to the defense of the Loyalists within."

"A legate, they think? There's a legate besieged in the Braystown Shambles?"

"In the days before the Loyalist army was lured foolishly into battle for the Wirts, I heard tell that d'Harcourt had been joined by one of the Empress's duly appointed legates. It may have been the one they call the Beau. What has occurred within the Shambles certainly matches what is known of the Bride's favorite subordinate."

I did my best to not react to what came next, as the Princess within the Spirit screamed in rage and horror. Contact had just been made on our front, and by the Third Cohort. I could feel the echoes ringing through my other-self, and She was incensed. I made my excuses to the baffled Night Watch, muttering something about having forgotten a necessary inventory and survey of my local materials scheduled for the late afternoon.

I hurried across the castral grounds, and found the hospital, bustling. Sack had heard the alarm as clearly as any other Company pony might have, and he was already clearing the surgery and directing his cattle to their preparations.

"Should we be moving out with the ambulance?" I asked before running over to collect the surgeon and the doctor who were attached to the Vallee regiment.

"I think clash too far for ambulance to make difference?" said the ox, in some confusion. "Not sure how they got that far out? No, we should go out anyways. And… maybe other empty wagons. Must go, now. Calves! On me!"

As they ran for their conveyances, I went to collect the two militia-medicos. They had spent more time under Company standards than most of the militia doctors, having been of great use to Rye Daughter during the weeks of field exercises. Doctor Gaspard and Sweet Scalpel were both steady ponies, who knew their business as well as anypony else.

"OK, folks, it looks like the signal went up. We've got casualties if we're lucky, if we're not lucky, we've got the enemy coming. Look alive."

The 'princess radio', as Feufollet called it, was almost useless that day. The death and dismemberment crashed the system, and all we could figure out from it was that Company ponies were in contact. I got more of use from far in the east, where Feufollet and a hoof-full of Company sections were successfully ambushing a stray enemy column, than a hoof-full of miles in my immediate front, where all I could get was chaos and confusion.

Eventually Sack and his convoy of carts signaled me through the mess, and I hurried my two militia-physicians forward to meet the slaughter-wagons. We met them a mile and a half southeast of High Earth, on the main market-road to Dover. The ambulance was full of bleeding Company soldiers, and their companion wagons, pulled from both the Company train and the much larger militia-train, were likewise full of bleeding and dying militia. The three of us, plus Sack in support, got to work as the bull-calves and the carters hauled our rocking vehicles back to the more-sterile confines of the castral hospital.

We worked all through the night, to save what we could, and to ease the passing of those we couldn't.

Major Soult had proved over-eager, and had extended himself and his two maneuver-battalions in an attempt to bring some platoons of enemy scouts to battle. He trotted right into a trap, and bled badly for his lesson in caution. Octavius had led the Third in a counter-assault to retrieve the situation, and been bloodied in the fight. Octavius himself was one of the ponies bleeding out into my much-bled-upon ambulance. A terrible storm swept over us as we rolled back towards High Earth and the hospital. It turned the roads to gravel-graced mudholes, and the bull-calves and other carters strained mightily to haul us home.

We suffered eighteen other seriously wounded ponies, and two dead. Dead of their wounds from the Company was the caribou buck Langenschritt, and the earth pony mare Golden Tansy.

The Vallee du Pierre lost fifty-six dead, and a hundred and fifty-five wounded. The survivors of both the militia and the Third Cohort fell back in good order, and repelled the subsequent charges by the enemy. The Crow did yeomare work scaring off the enemy, who had apparently advanced in brigade strength, seizing Dover and the terrain around that town. But the storm and rain probably did more to discourage pursuit.

We were at least a day from reinforcement, and the enemy was within a single day's march in twice, perhaps three times our strength. And our vaunted new communication system had just proven to be less than reliable in battlefield conditions.

Nothing As Melancholy

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My dreams in laager just east of the last defile before High Earth were strange. The battalion had joined me in sleep, mostly. A few guards oversaw my trip-line vinery, which had been tied to tin-cups with little pebbles in them. They sat, ordered to stay awake, to watch the laager and listen for the rattle of the tin-cups if any would try and sneak into our sleeping formation. The excitement of the fight and the exhaustion of the forced march back had wiped us out, and I hadn't even paused to wonder why I hadn't heard from the princess-radio all night long.

My dreams were strange, because they were empty, and echoing, and dark. I floated through them like a fire-fly, and hummed to myself at the familiar coppery smell. The hypnotic nature of this dream was such that I was not at all startled when the Princess in her more Nightmarish aspect appeared enraged in front of me.

Not that she's ever less than peeved in that mood, but you get the idea.

"Feufollet! My apologies for having left you out of contact for so long! Reports, please, your Captain and her Lieutenant need information, immediately!"

My firefly-self pulsed, sleepily, and I organized my thoughts and memories, still half-disordered as they are before a good long session of sleep. They were enough, I suppose, for the Nightmare to seize and forward in a fluttering dark-winged state of distress.

"Mistress, what troubles you, that you look so?"

"What troubles me? Oh, naught but my foolish other self, who cannot abide the simple clash of forces, the death of one little filly, without screaming her blue fool head off for hours and hours! One simple death, and madness! Nothing but madness! We lost control over the whole of your Third Cohort, in the midst of bloody, howling combat. Of all the times to weep over spilt blood, in the crush of two lines testing their shafts 'gainst each other! The battle joined and then – feedback! Nothing but feedback, and misery, and sobbing, and I am totally out of patience with myself at the moment."

My own self rolled over in dozy alarm, and I realized she was talking about a battle. One which hadn't been our one-sided fight in the lane outside of Beech Grove. After some poking, she explained just how much of a mess the main body had gotten into, and the situation as it was. She really should have been screaming in my ear to get my detachment moving in support of their battered parent regiment, but I think the distress of the more Princessly of the Spirit's personalities had communicated itself to her other selves. I gathered that her Cherie-self was currently talking down the traumatized Princess-self, leaving the Nightmare, with her less than pony-oriented personality, to pull together the fragments of Company scattered across our eastern front.

I absorbed what I could gather, and then, fully lucid, I forced myself awake.

It was still pre-dawn when I woke the officers and sergeants of the battalion, and explained the 'message' I had just received. They were sleep-deprived enough that they didn't register the lack of an actual pony present to have delivered my 'message'. We got our rankers up and on their hooves as the black eastern skyline took its usual pre-dawn tints. By the time one could tell a white thread from a grey one, the detachment was on the road, and rushing through the defile into view of High Earth and her environs.

Little was visible of the defeat or rout. We swept southwest on a farmlane we had used the day before to bypass the town, and still found nothing until we reached the main market-road south of town. The roads got muddier and muddier as we moved south, showing the demarcation of the storm-front which had meandered out of the west the evening before, soaking some fields, leaving others bone-dry.

The main market-road was full of debris, and the occasional pool of red-tinted rainwater. We went into formation, and everypony armed themselves properly, barding set and spears couched at the ready. The major consulted with me, and she sent a squad of rankers north to make a connection with whomever had passed this way, leaving all this debris in the road. It was impossible to determine if that had been the main body, or an evacuation detachment, or what had happened here. I examined the disturbed roadway, and decided that it hadn't been fought over.

I didn't think.

The rest of the battalion moved south, to throw out a screen in case we had accidentally come out in front of the current lines we were supposed to be defending. We moved slowly, and the morning sun began to draw forth a heavy haze, approximating a mist, from the rain-soaked fields and groves all around us.

The detachment sent north returned soon enough, escorting a small train of carters with wagons full of breakfast for the rest of the regiment. We had come in behind the main body, and between the regiment and its supports. We cleared the road to allow the wagons to pass, and formed up, in march-column, to follow in the slowly drying roadway.

We found the regiment three miles south of High Earth, where they had slept on their arms in the muddy fields around the market-road. We had had a mostly dry night in the valley to the north and east of here, but they had set themselves down in a muddy, soaked wasteland of disturbed earth and affrighted farmlots.

The main body had gotten badly mauled in a brief, catastrophic fight – almost as sweet of an ambush as our own little massacre along the Hayfriend. They had at least been properly armed and barded when the enemy had found their flanks, although that was hardly solace to the many dead and wounded. The Company supports had retrieved the situation by flanking those who had flanked the militia, and driven the victorious rebel back in confusion. It had been enough to retrieve the remnants of the Vallee du Pierre from its trap, and to allow a retreat, however bloody.

Still, a defeat is a defeat. We left the rebel in control of the town of Dover. That's how they calculate these matters once you join up with the regulars, so all the books tell me.

And my idiot knight managed to get wounded again, so the ponies of the Third Cohort told me. At this point, it was almost a tradition for the hapless unicorn, to catch a wound whenever the Company got proper stuck into a situation. One of his sergeants was technically in charge of the cohort, but as far as I could tell, the Crow was actually running things on the line. It was her illusions and fireworks which had covered our retreat. She looked almost as tired as she was muddy. And everypony on the front line was covered in mud that was, by the odor, at least one-third manure by weight.

I could sort of hear the Nightmare over the radio, but it was still kinda blurry here next to the rest of the Company. She got across the gist of my instructions, which were to wait for a pegasi flight coming this way with my witches-gig. Time to play the scout.

My chauffeur that day was Whirlwind once again. I gave her a hard time about being in the traces yet again, and she assured me that we'd be courting more than enough danger for her emotional needs. The crazy mare had a pair of wingblades strapped to the front of the gig, where she could easily shrug into them if it came down to a ground-fight.

The two of us laboured into the air, as the rest of the flight made a couple quick passes to the east and west of the battle-line, who were laying in the rays of the rising sun, the mud on everypony's backs baking into a shell of filth. As we made our altitude, the escorting pegasi gave the wing-wobbles that indicated all clear, and we moved south-eastwards, to make an easy curve that would bring us over the fields and homesteads east of Dover, where yesterday's battle and retreat had occurred.

I wove an illusion from my bloody scratches and the bright sunlight, a glare and shine like sundogs on the prowl. Anypony looking up from the ground would only see flares and evaporating wisps of haze and mist boiling away in the hot early-summer sun.

Coasting over the battle-field, I could see the windrows of the dead, and the blood and the broken weapons and barding littering the field. You could smell the stink of battle from three hundred feet in the air, and battle smelt like shit and vomit, with barely a hint of that old-sou stench. There was no sign of the enemy on the field, just the bodies they had left unburied. In these conditions, you could expect risers inside of a day. Either revenants or ghouls; given the violence remembered by that field, my deniers were on 'ghouls'. The White Rose was being alarmingly sloppy about their battlefield hygiene, if you asked me.

We continued over Dover proper, which was locked up tighter than my méré's silver-cabinet. No sign of rebels under arms, or wagons that might suggest anything larger than a battalion. Continuing into the fields west of the town, we still found nothing, and a further spiral southwards over the roads leading out of Dover found only churned muddy road.

A lot of churned muddy road. A mile south of town, my detection cantrips finally triggered, and we coasted, silent, over the hidden scouts scattered through various copses and groves within line-of-sight of the various roads winding south and east and west of Dover. A mile and a half south on the Dover road towards, hrm, I think Braystown? There was a battalion or two in their own laager, well-posted with a pair of war-engines which could have shot us out of the sky if it weren't for my illusions.

I felt my blood drying, and my magics fading about that point, so I cut myself again to renew the energies, and then I tapped the traces, gesturing for Whirlwind to bank northwards and for home.

The enemy wasn't coming, and had even left the field of battle to – well, to the crows as far as I could tell. Maybe it had been closer to a draw than anypony on our side had thought a few hours ago. I reported via the Nightmare, who was still feeling nervy and irate.

By the time I got back to our battle-line, I was getting reports from a chastened blue-winged Princess, looking rather embarrassed for herself. And yet, she brought good news. The rest of the Left Division was on the road between New Coltington and High Earth, with the Reserve not too far from the campgrounds outside of New Coltington.

The Army of the North was beginning to concentrate, and yesterday's setback would be nothing more than that. And the Lieutenant was on the field when the pegasi and I touched down in the dried and steaming fields north of Dover.

The North Concentrates, or, The Amputation

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The Spirit awoke me from a dreamless sleep the second morning after the field defeat of the Vallee regiment. I had spent a night and a half in the surgery, putting ponies back together and cutting losses before they became fatalities. When we were finished, there were a pile of sacks along the outside of the Heavy Earth castral hospital, all of them full of severed, mangled limbs, awaiting the pyre. I climbed into a cot, and slept for fifteen hours.

One of the bags held the left forelimb of Octavius. His luck had run out, and I had to cut away the mangled hoof and the pulp that was left of his fetlock. He was lucky he only lost the lower half of the cannon; the fitting for a prosthetic would be dirt-simple. And unicorns barely use their hooves as it was; he still would be as dexterous as any other horn-headed buffoon among Uncle Blade's nieces and nephews. But even under the influence of my most powerful concoctions, he'd still be in recovery for a month.

The Spirit was a glad interruption, to be honest. Her absence after months, even years of constant presence in the back of my brain had been… almost like a amputation itself. Like a part of me had been cut away, and ached like an empty socket, a stunned stump still half-remembering the lost limb. She wore her Nightmare like a set of barding, like a filly wearing her brother's caparison and over-sized peytral.

The Spirit looked uncomfortable in her own ectoplasmic hide.

I let her collect herself without prodding, without inquiry. Not my place to poke at her weaknesses, or her shortcomings, or whatever had caused the communications failure. Not my place…

She informed me that I was late for an operations meeting, that they were waiting it on my presence. The Lieutenant was in castrum, along with the Brigadier and – the General herself?

I hurried to see this seven-days wonder before it evaporated in the chaos of a camp filling quickly up with regiments pouring through the gates willy-nilly, construction details already expanding the campgrounds into the neighboring cropland. Somepony was expecting to house a large contingent of soldiers and an even larger depot of supplies, looked like.

They were meeting in a new tent, thrown up over the walls reserved for a commander in the center of the campground. Within was the Lieutenant, the hapless Colonel En Banc, Brigadier Eugin, and there, indeed, was the towering, grey-pelted Knochehart, looking somewhat wind-burned and frazzled. None of her attendants but the mousy little lieutenant assigned liaison to the Division were present. The Lieutenant herself must have flown in the General to take control of the front, before things spiraled any further out of control.

"Oh, good, Doctor. That only leaves the tardy Major Jean-de-Dieu, and we are ready to begin."

"No, Your Excellency, I think not," I said, talking out of turn. "We really should have the representative of the Patrol in here. Half, and maybe more than half of our intelligence is being gathered by Night Watch's ponies. Better to have them in the room, than relaying information via our memories and getting some of it wrong."

"The what? What in Grogar's rotting beard is the Patrol?" boomed the old doe, rattling the premolars in my mouth. She had a set of lungs on her, the old General. The young lieutenant, a scrawny little stallion barely out of colthood, whispered into her ear, rising up on his toes to reach that lofty elevation.

"The damnedest things you lot have gotten up to down here. Well, more information's better than none, and the locals in our corner, better than in the rebel's. Don't just stand there with a stupid expression on your muzzle, go gather up your civilian scout!"

I trotted off to find where the Patroller had gotten off to while I was asleep.

Our second try at a planning meeting came off slightly more successfully. I managed to track down the elusive Night Watch sitting in a kitchen tent, watching the Cakes baking with field-ovens, and tucking into a pile of bearclaws, still steaming from the oven. I grabbed a 'claw of my own, and chivvied the carb-stunned, smiling earth pony towards the command tent. By the time we got there, the disgraced Major Soult was sitting splay-eared, catching a faceful from a three-barreled battery of abuse from his superiors.

We waited, patiently, for the General and her underlings to wind down their tag-team denunciation. You could see the flop-sweat rolling off the poll of the equally culpable En Banc, who had left field command to the miserable major. I caught her eye, and something about my expression might have caused her to unstring her personal ballista and refrain from contributing to the barrage any further.

The subject of the conference turned to the rather vital matter before us, which was how to proceed now that the troops were pouring into the vicinity of High Earth. Most of the Left Division was here, and would need someplace to go not long after arrival, because the Reserve was right behind them, and the Middle Division a day behind that. The pieces were in movement, and we would soon be concentrated around this sleepy farm-town on the edge of the Baronies, as Night Watch called the districts to the south.

The Lieutenant and the Patroller traded off as they presented the officers the current intelligence, as we knew it. The screening force which the hapless Vallee du Pierre had encountered two days before, and how it had withdrawn after its tactical victory. The operation which we had interrupted by being defeated in the field. Wait, what operation?

"The Rebel tried yet again to cross the Hayfriend, about a half-day's march north of the Loyalist fragment holding their fortifications in front of little Cleves," explained the New Equestrian pony. "Your regiment encountered a strongly posted flanking force covering the crossing operation. A few of my ponies saw the train carrying the pontoon bridges, but weren't able to get north and report until yesterday evening. The roads were full of Rebel patrols and columns. For some strange reason, they thought there might be a Loyalist army sitting on their northern flank?"

"Our scouts with what's left of the Army of the Housa," continued the Lieutenant, "Report that the White Rose really did get a pontoon bridge built across the Hayfriend. But then they found themselves penned in by a marshy oxbow pond or a particularly deep fen, I'm a little vague on the details, to be honest. The Hayfriend seems to be a treacherous stream. The enemy poured multiple regiments across their pontoon bridges, and then found themselves stuck behind a trackless, almost bottomless swamp. There was a nasty battle over there, once the Cleves Imperials discovered the threat to their flank. Heavy casualties on both sides, but the Rebel apparently felt themselves threatened on two sides once word of the skirmish outside of Dover reached the warlocks leading the breaching operation. They pulled back, and left the field to the Imperial force."

Both Major Soult and En Banc looked very, very sour at their defeat being described as a 'skirmish', but from the description, we would be seeing much larger fights before this was over. The enemy army which had tried the Hayfriend had pulled back halfway to Braystown, and now laid the better part of a day's march south of Dover. Or somewhere in the vicinity. Soult's mortification was a demonstration that thorough scouting and good intelligence wasn't proof against a sudden surprise on the battlefield.

The commanders of the other three regiments of the Left Division had filed into the back of the tent as the discussion had developed. They didn't contribute to the conversation, but merely stood, quietly observing.

They would have their turn soon enough. It was decided to take the battered Vallee battalions off of the front line, and replace them with the Tonnerrians. The division's Hydromel regiment would stand to its arms as a reserve until the actual Reserve was in place, and the Chutes des Cristal would form up on the left of Tonnerre, with a battalion advanced as far forward towards Beech Grove as was practicable.

The General, looking over the rough map provided by Night Watch, grunted thoughtfully. "I think I'm convinced that we have the enemy force in our front. They could easily pull out of the pocket they've thrust themselves into, at any moment. We need to concentrate further, and catch them before they get away. Lieutenant-Captain, I believe I want to signal the Right Division to arrange for the Rantoul militia to mobilize as much as they can, and to follow the Middle Division eastwards as soon as they can. They might not get here in time for a decisive battle, but if things dribble out like they might, we might be very happy for a reinforcement in a week or so."

Major du Bonne, who had accompanied the brevet-Colonel of the Tonnerre when that buck had arrived an hour into the conference, broke her respectful silence, saying, "Your Excellency, if I might? We're depending rather heavily on the supplies that the consolidated baronies of Rantoul have promised us in lieu of mobilized regiments. They will no doubt take it amiss if we leave them entirely to the mercies of the plains savages, and to tell them to raise their militia would be an insult piled upon their injuries."

The General glared at her donkey impediment, and ground her molars in agitation. "Bah! Fine, have them forward half of their regiments, plus their Company cohort. A small reinforcement is better than naught at all, and they will not be accomplishing anything worth their salt and bread kicking their frogs in camp behind that dull little town. If two regiments are the price I have to pay to get the use of the rest, so be it! Now, Mr. Watch, tell me about these supply lines the Rebel must be running around his siege of this Braytown Shambles. You say you haven't seen any carts or wagons to speak of otherwise?"

A technical argument - about cartage and logistical load and the needs of the pontoon train just shipped by the enemy over two or three days march overland from their riverine logistics dump - evolved slowly and somewhat dully. My eyes glazed over more than once, as the observations of the Patrol and much less comprehensive reports of our aerial cohort were repeatedly challenged by the increasingly pugnacious Major du Bonne, who simply could not believe that an army of the reported size the White Rose was fielding could be supplied for long via such a narrow artery of cartage.

This was really more of a Broken Sigil meeting, to be honest. I hope that I've properly summarized the gist of the conversation, but to conclude, the General's plans evolved as we watched the scouts and her head of logistics debate, and the possibility of an over-extended enemy caught in the sudden grips of starvation and defeat by logistical isolation raised its clever head over the proceeding.

"Gentles all, I do believe the enemy has thrust her fool head into a guillotine! Let's aid her in her apparent desire for an amputation!" chortled General Knochehart.

After the conclusion of the nearly day-long meeting, the Lieutenant and I went to find a quiet corner to conduct some Company business.

"I had to take it off at mid-cannon," I confessed. "Octavius isn't in any position to command a cohort, and he won't for a month or more to come."

"We've joked about his luck, such as it is, before. But this is a bit more serious than horn-burn or a couple bites taken out of him by an enterprising ghoul. We're going to have to find a new commander for the Third?"

"Well, it isn't a career-ending wound, so a permanent replacement would be unkind and unnecessary. But someone needs to be the acting commander. I'm told Stomper did well enough in taking over the field command when Octavius went down."

"Hyssop would be better."

"Hyssop wasn't on the field, and she's got a history of pissing away promotions. She's a sergeant now, but it's what, the second or third time she's gotten that last stripe, and then lost it for something stupid?"

"Three times, yes. Eventually they work it out of their system. I rather thought she was ready this time."

"Well, technically she doesn't have seniority, Stomper does, and right now is actually holding command. It would be taken amiss if you made the change. I'm not in the line of command, so all I can do is make recommendations. So there's mine: leave what is, as is. Hyssop's busy managing Brigadier Eugin at the moment anyways."

"Why do you have to put things that way, Sawbones?" She fluttered her wings in agitation. "We need to show respect for the line of command, especially when we're spread out like this. The Company is the spine of this army, but it isn't the army. And we're not in command, never forget that."

"Of course, 'Lieutenant-Captain'."

She slapped me over the head with her left wing. "Respect your elders, Annalist. I still technically outrank you in this mystical sisterhood."

"Yes, ma'am."

The Crone Of Battle, or, Desecration

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"A reading, from the only book of Desecrated Temple, the third known Annalist:

The Golden Company is gone, is broken,
Dead on the field laid its golden Captain,
The broken back of our pride
The singer sang out her heart
Impaled upon love's sharp shards
Betrayal, betrayal, the death
That love returns to love
Whose love betrayed by that
Which refused to live longer
Than survivor's love.
al-Hazar! Your love and your pride!
Broken on the wheel
Of your misplaced faith!
Faris al-Dhubabi, fool's gold
Which lied in never having been
Eternal or wise.

"Thus the despair of that era, in the voice of the Annalist of hatred, of despair, and unfaith! His mistress, his master, who folded away the black banner of the Black Company, and marched the victorious now-Golden Company in the fore of every battle for the glory of the faith, the might of the Caliph, the legend of their triumphs. They loved, the second Annalist and her mighty Captain, far too well, and not nearly wisely enough."

My sermon, mine. This was nothing that soft-souled Sawbones would have said to his fellow armsponies. There are certain things too harsh for the old and sentimental to say without blushing. For that task, they had turned to young, fanatical me.

"Al-Hazar the glorious, and her Golden Captain. Her half-dozen books read like romance, like love-letters to the Faris al-Dhubabi. Of his conquests, of his piety, of his wit. Of the nations who submitted to the will of the Caliph and her government, of the two-and-seventy sects subdued, their endless confutations beaten into abeyance. The Annals of the Golden Company, of our Golden years, they read like the history of the Dar al-Hisan. For a hoof-full of decades, to speak of the arms of the Caliph, was to speak of the Golden Company."

Lurking in the distant darkness were members of other battalions, other regiments in the Middle Division. They watched, their eyes glittering in the flickering torch-light. The Middle Division had settled into the increasingly use-battered castral camping ground outside of New Coltington. The Reserve itself was in New Earth, taking a night to shake loose limbs left aching after days on the road. The Left Division herself was in the field, posted in the fields around Dover, and eastwards along the Road to Beech Grove. Two day's march west of here, the mobile half of the Right Division was on the march, the Fourth Cohort leading the last two regiments available to the Army of the North. When they arrived here in New Kensington, that would be the signal for the advance, and the fighting to begin in earnest. After this sermon, one more, for the Fourth when they reached the camping-grounds one day west of here.

"But we were never that golden banner," I continued. " We were never truly the Golden Company. That was always the dream of those two lovers, a folie à deux, shared by the fools whom they led astray with their false, golden banner."

"When the Captain fell, as he was always fated to fall, as all great captains are fated to fall, he took his worshiper with him, he took his Company with him. For he, and they, had forgotten this one truth of the Company: that it is not our Company, our possession, our pride – but rather it is we who are the Company's, it is we who are the pride of the Company. And it is we who will disappoint our Company, will fail our Company, if we bring to her that which will not sustain what she truly is, what she must be, and still remain, the Company."

I took a breath, my head dizzy with lack of air, my mind buzzing with the power of the text. From cohort to cohort I'd been flung by command of the Lieutenant and my master, the Annalist, to spread the word, to lay down the command. The night before, I had given the sermon to the Third Cohort, in a scrambled sort of fashion, huddled in a muddy field behind the field-fortifications around battered Dover. The day before, we had burned the dead of the battle outside of Dover, and buried the remnants of the slaughter. Now, in that moment, a few hours later, I was repeating my performance in a cleaner venue, a sweeter field to sow. Standing before this Second Cohort, standing in the darkness before the witching hour, I repeated the reading, refined the sermon.

"Earlier this week, a pair of lovers, sacred in their bond, brought with them the loving Princess into the battle-line. The loving Princess, who would only be a Mother to the regiment, a protector of her foals, was carried like an ikon into the clash of spear against pike, of blade against chamfron, of bone against steel. One lover died, and the other despaired, and raged, and, somewhere in the shame of her betrayed soul, hated. Because love cannot but feel betrayed to be left behind! And the Princess followed, as she must, because she hath no defense, against the loving heart!"

This cohort didn't know the lovers, didn't have to be drawn away from the blame which had already fallen on that poor jenny's withers. I feared she would not survive the next battle, at the rate that she and her section-mates were coming to terms with their failings and losses. But not for the Second Cohort, the heartbreak of the Third.

I took another deep breath, feeling something stronger than lungs gathering behind my voice.

"The sister, the second sister, the mothering sister, she broke in the breaking of the lines. The Princess is not for the battle-field! Her kindness and her generosity cannot stand hock-deep in mud and filth and gore, not and stay herself, stay true to what she is!"

Deeper, louder, darker my voice grew in the gathering, and all the torches went out in a sudden gust of wind.

"For the battle-line is the other sister's domain! The thread-cutter, the gatherer of souls! The sharp-toothed hag, the black-winged carrion-bird! The only sister for the slaughter, the only queen of battle! For you, when you step forth onto the hungry soil, it is not meet to carry love for the present, or dreams of the future! Carry with your lance, your spear, your axe, your sword - a shield of spite! Become one with the fury of the past, the onrushing rage! Carry terror in your hearts, and tartarus in your eyes! Not love for your mother, nor your foal a-fostered, nor your hope for the future, nor your love for what can be. The pony to your left! The donkey to your right! The caribou at your back, the griffin above your ears, the unicorn speeding her bolt overhead, the pegasus raining his javelins upon those below! All of you, grist for death's mill! Dead in an instant, mangled in a second – or, in your turn, to fulfill your duty, to slaughter and butcher those that are the Company's right and true enemies, our victims, our quailing opponents!"

All about us the darkness glowed with her own blackened light, star-lit terrors crawling over the swaying audience.

"You must be the storm in his fury. You must be the river in her flood and torrent. Be her long black wings! Be her sharp-tipped lance in the darkness! Be the sharpened fang, the terrible eye, the howling scream! Carry with you nothing, but Nightmare! On the wing! Say it with me, brothers! Sing it with me, sisters!"

Fuller Falchion beside me, his arrayed sergeants and corporals, a scattering of pegasi stooped upon the fences and roof-tops, the rankers and the veterans and the carters pulled up behind the circled mass of the Second Cohort - they all drew breath with a single lung, and exhaled into the night:

"THE STORM IN HIS FURY! THE RIVER IN HER FLOOD!"

"THE NIGHTMARE ON THE WING!"

The Advance

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The next several days were busy but not eventful. The regiments of the Left Division rotated through the forward positions around Dover, and skirmished heavily with the enemy. They produced about three dozen casualties on our side, mostly minor, but three fatalities among the militia. The enemy battalions sortied forward twice in as many days, but both times they found themselves outflanked by more-aware loyalist units, and retreated with significant losses. The scouts reported that the short regiment in our front became two full regiments, and then three.

The Left Division was accomplishing its operational goal – they were fixing the rebel's attention upon our front around Dover. The General began forwarding elements of the Reserve on the flanks of the engaged units, expanding the threat. Not all of the Reserve – but enough to catch the attention of an increasingly-frazzled and bloodied rebel screen.

I kept my surgeons busy patching together the wounded and overseeing the recovering. Some of them got a little bit of instruction in my favorite poultices and potions – the ones that could be slapped together from local resources, at any rate. The willow trees in the vicinity had gotten too far into their season for harvest, which was a shame.

But I was still full up on salicin, so that wasn't that much of a problem.

Rye Daughter and her bull-calves had come up with the Middle Division, and she was building her own surgical unit out of the doctors and quacks of that brigade's militia regiments. Well, I should say, she was my delegated representative in organizing that pack of hyenas and layabouts. I walked Rye through how to pull off the 'thestral eye possession' trick that Feufollet and some of the others had mastered, and apparently it was pretty impressive in a doe who was coming now into her full growth. A half-racked caribou a head and a half taller than you staring down with demon-eyes can certainly loosen the grasp of bias and conviction among the over-educated and under-skilled.

The brigadier of Left Division and his supports were under orders to make as much noise as they could. We had a little help in judging the reaction of the White Rose from our helpful corps of tinkers and smugglers, but that line of communication was sketchy at best. They muttered into their beer helpful hints, and issued vague suggestions that indicated that maybe, perhaps the enemy had withdrawn from their advanced positions opposite the tattered regiments and battalions of the Army of the Housa, and were renewing their regular approaches against the Braystown Shambles.

The pegasi confirmed that something was going on down on the river among the rocks and rapids almost due south of Dover. Overflights reported big flashes, and peculiar ground effects visible from five thousand yards up. Putting these reports together with the educated guesses of the Patrollers, and the current theory was that the trapped ponies in the Shambles and the more talented members of the rebel siege train were trading earth-pony ground manipulation magics back and forth. The westerners were known to have talented ponies who could bring down a curtain wall just by stomping real hard and staring intently into the distance. And some ponies from New Equestria who had gone south with the Army of the Housa had likewise had their own tricks for manipulating earth and stone.

One Patroller with experience of Braystown thought it all was foolishness. The Shambles were known by that name for a reason, it was more a defined pile of rubble and fill than an actual constructed fortification. What were they going to do, rearrange the rubble in less artful configurations? She said, with some contempt, that to break a breach through the 'walls' of the Shambles, you'd have to move hundreds of tons of dirt and boulders, probably up-hill both ways.

The shift in the enemy's attention was almost certainly an attempt to relieve the pressure of having to pass their supply trains around the long way, and to get their fleet past the Braystown chokepoint. As such, it meant that the bulk of the enemy army was no longer stretched all the way to the Hayfriend in a nicely exposed position far from their supports. That was bad. On the other hand, they weren't concentrating on us, or redeploying to protect their insanely vulnerable base of logistics.

They weren't treating us as a serious threat, but rather, a nuisance, a source of harassment. Perhaps they didn't think we were up here in sufficient numbers to cut their supply lines? They had to have noticed our aerial support, which was quite rare in Tambelon, even here, as close as we were to this world's most active portal.

(You can be sure that some members of the Company were over-aware of our proximity to the mountain-town portal we had come through all those seasons ago. From what ponies tell me, Obscured Blade could talk of nothing else, that monomaniacal pest.)

I sat next to Octavius's cot in the convalescent wards in High Earth. We were getting ready to transport a portable field hospital down closer to where we were expecting clashes. In preparation for that, the hospital in the High Earth castra was being converted to a convalescent hospital. Octavius had been taking the loss of his hoof somewhat badly, and I wanted to sit with him a bit in between my preparations. The troops continued to move, and we would have to move behind them soon enough.

"I just wish the little jenny would drop by now and again."

"It's been less than a week, Octavius. We've been keeping her busy. And the witches are going to be crazy-busy for the foreseeable future. Big moves in the works."

"Bah. Between you and Gibblets and that old bastard, she was barely my apprentice anyways. Is Stomper… doing well?"

"Far as I've heard. I've not been up front to poke and prod at your cohort. Ironically enough, you'd get more news on that front from Feufollet, if she ever came back here to report. Hope she's keeping up her journal like I asked. Tartarus, I've only seen her once myself in the last week and a half." I was shading the truth a bit, there. She clearly had been avoiding him. I think the loss of a limb might be especially alarming to a young, hot-blooded, ambitious jenny like Feufollet. I'd heard some muttering about her sermons to the cohorts, about their… extreme nature. Honestly, I was getting a little worried about the little bloodmage. Not so little anymore, I suppose.

"It's a shame I'm gonna miss it all," he sighed. "If the old doe pulls it off, it sounds like it'll be spectacular. Like, blood-on-the-moon glorious."

"Would have thought you'd be done with talk of glory, three-hoof."

"Oh, bugger you and your false cynicism. A stallion is allowed to speak loosely of shameful things like honour and glory now and again."

"Not without five mugs of applejack in him, he's not."

"Go raise your tail for a book of poesy, you bloodless old fart."

Maybe Octavius was feeling better than I had credited him. My visitation to the injured unicorn was drawing to a close when a rather dirt-smeared, slightly charred, and smokey Cherie crawled out from under a neighboring cot. The two of us looked down at the sudden incursion of thestral into the convalescence ward.

"Hiya, Octavius! I'm here in Feufollet's stead, we heard you were feelin' a bit down!"

"Cherie, is that really you?" I asked, and poked her with the tip of my left forehoof. Solid enough.

"Haha, yeah! Real me, real me. Just got off my shift on patrol, we caught a couple carts out in the open. Fwooosh! Hahaha, oh, Peacock's dock, I love setting fire to things! Bad Apple was right, it's great when they go up in flames!" The thestral was so giddy, I almost leaned forward to check her breath for alcohol. Wouldn't have helped, anyways – the pegasi were using grain-alcohol bombs for their little firebombing runs. The attacks weren't sanctioned by command, but it was as easy to keep scouts from free-lancing attacks against exposed wagon-trains as it was to keep a bone away from a starving dog.

Well, it was one way to attract the attention of the enemy, I suppose.

I left them to their happy talk of destruction and fire, and returned to my oversight of the packing and preparation of the planned field-hospital. There was no way we'd be able to forward the expected wounded all the way north to the existing hospitals and buildings along the Bride's Road. We needed something that could be packed up and set up in a field, or preferably, outside of one of the less filthy taverns or town halls we could find in the vicinity of the expected fighting.

The roads leading down into our intended zone of operations weren't exactly hopeless farmlanes and muddy tracks, but they certainly weren't Bride's engineering corps approved thoroughfares, either. The region was full of tiny little market-towns and the occasional baronial estate. The political disunity of the Baronies meant that there were no dukes or counts to encourage the development of proper centralized towns or cities, and thus – nothing to connect, no well-maintained roads to speak of.

The eastern half of our army would be moving quietly, in silence if we could help it, because it couldn't move quickly across that road-net. And the carts and wagons of the supply trains and other support units would just destroy the roads if we took them too fast, in too rapid succession.

Luckily, the pegasi had spent a good deal of time harassing the rebel scouts and screens in the last couple of weeks, so it didn't appear to be an intensification when they began disappearing every White Rose patrol they encountered. The New Equestrian Patrollers aided them in locating and sweeping up the more westerly patrols of the enemy.

The General had ordered a prisoner of war camp constructed outside of New Coltington, a glorified pen quickly filling up with battered and occasionally wounded enemy scouts. I'm told that Miss Cake talked the old Major General into providing local militia platoons to guard the prisoners.

Carrot Cake would be needed in the battle to come, and had been strongly encouraged to leave his lady's side. It was time that the corporal leave his greater office as an assistant-baker and support for our spymaster-patissier, and return to his lesser role as witch-hunter and bearer of our legionary standard.

The next morning, we moved the wagons containing the broken-down field hospital south-westward on dubious roads, along with our fleet of ambulances and the supply trains and so forth. The regiments of the Reserve had already passed in advance of our trains, and were now pushing southwards towards the vicinity of the battlefield upon which the enemy had broken the back of the luckless Army of the Housa.

Some three dozen pegasi were hard at work in the air high over our heads, wrangling the cloudscapes and winds under the rather dubious instructions of a hesitant Princess-mirage, trying to explain to the untrained military ponies how to seed slight storms within prepared clouds, and how to redirect winds in the preferred direction. They had practiced this particular maneuver a couple times in the last six months, and had proven themselves able to deliver snow-showers upon a target square-mile upon demand. How fine their accuracy might prove in warmer weather was up for discussion. And odds-makers. I bet against the pegasi at 3 to 1 odds, I figured if they pulled it off, I'd share in the happy news, and if they didn't, at least I'd have some extra deniers in my saddlebags.

And I figured I might as well put my incandescently bad luck when it came to gambling to the service of the Company's interests for a change.

Further to our south-west, the Middle Division and the bulk of the Right Division was moving deeper into enemy territory even now, ever closer to the rebel logistical base at Leveetown. The pegasi and griffins were now concentrating, snatching up patrol after patrol in the front of the regiments of the Middle Division. Soon enough would come the word of actual contact with the surging companies in the van of the advance on the ground.

At some point, the flag would go up, and the enemy would realize we were in their strategic rear. They would pay for plunging so deep into loyalist country, for having left their line of communication exposed in the face of a well-reinforced enemy. They would turn about, and race for the Wirts and their fleet in the river-roads beyond Leveetown.

Hopefully by then, we would be in position to make them regret their folly.

The Arsonists

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FFMS014

The heliograph tower burned like the torch of Prometheus into the night, and the crackling of the flames had finally drowned out the fading shrieks and screams of the tower's crew, who had not died easily, or well. The rails of my witch's gig were sticky-slick with my own blood, as we banked once again around the flaring tower. The tarred-oak construction had burst into spectacular fury once Bad Apple had gotten it to burn, and all of my concentration was bent upon the massive night-glamour which englobed the inferno within a lesser darkness.

The outer, moonless night rang with the clamour of the fighting below. That also, was my task to swathe and obscure, to keep the noise of the fight around the base of the dying communications station from echoing across the open terrain. The burning heliograph stood above and to the west of the tangle of streams and pastures known locally as the Wirts; her siblings to the west and east stood in theoretical view of the flames. Except we had destroyed the station to the west, and the station to the east was obscured behind the lens of darkness and silence I kept projected in front of our assault on this, particular, heliograph.

A commando of Company ground-troops had been inserted by pegasi chariot earlier that evening, along with sections deposited nearby the last two heliograph stations we had destroyed, each in its turn. A second team of witches and pegasi and commandos was working its way eastwards along the chain of stations, as far as the night took us in either direction. The links with Leveetown were already heaps of coals and corpses, destroyed in the early hours of the night. Now we were pressing our advantage as far as it would go, right up to the very regimental camps of the enemy.

This station had proven to have a larger contingent guarding it than we had expected. The section from the Second Cohort was fighting an alarmingly even fight with the enraged defenders of the dying heliograph. They must have known that they were not fighting to save their ponies, but rather to avenge them, but that did not cause a spear to lower, or a hoof to weaken in the battle. Rebel after rebel fell in the attack, but they still fought on, with the pegasi charioteers swirling overhead the scrum, their javelins expended, their wing-blades flashing in the strange, orange-red light.

The smell of the burning pitch was foul beyond all imaginings, and my pegasus driver was coughing up a lung as we counter-rotated above the fray. I yelled at Whirlwind to take us out of the smoke before she choked and we both plummeted to the angry earth below. She widened our gyre, and we didn't so much leave the stench behind, as we trailed its residual stink behind us in the cleaner night air. I could still smell it wafting off of the pony's wings. I was willing to bet that she was no longer so eager to get into the battle as she once told me she was.

My hocks shook as the blood feedback began to fade, and I looked at my spurs and my cannons, looking for a couple square inches of unscabbed, uninflamed hide to score for that one last hit of energy. I slashed, and the pain quickly faded in the rush of the return of my power. The vast bubble of illusion and baffling remained intact, and the tower burned on into the small hours.

The fight on the ground dispersed as the surviving rebels fled into the darkness, I could see several of them with javelins embedded in their backs or shoulders, looking for all the world like the bull-fighter who used to tour with the carnival when I was a child, who would challenge ponies or donkeys to try and subdue that great muscle-bound monstrosity, with light lances and throwing-darts, until the victorious bull-fighter was covered in a sort of cape of nodding, bobbing throwing-darts hooked into his thick, insensate hide.

Bad Apple and her driver came up to our orbit, and she shouted a question at me, pointing at the distant eastern horizon. I shook my head at her in negation.

I couldn't possibly keep in the air for another strike. And from the looks on the ground, I didn't think we had the resources or energy among the troops to do this again before the morning light.

I looked across the eastern horizon, and noted the next heliograph station, its lantern-lights flashing some mysterious code at its dying cousin. The Patrollers knew the code, I had been told, but I certainly didn't have it, nor had I memorized anything helpful along those lines. And the morning would reveal to them the smoldering ruins of their line of communication. These ruins would be all that they would learn of the night's battle, or the advance of the Army of the North.

That army's Middle Division regiments would have pushed past the heliograph line before this tower collapsed into itself and its constituent embers. The Reserve was even at that moment rushing through the night north of where I and my driver floated upon the foul and stinking night air. The General and her regiments were passing south-westwards, to a planned blocking-position north and west of the westernmost extent of the Wirts. And northeast and northwest of both of those Northern formations, the regiments of the Right and Left Divisions were advancing to support the flanks of the main force.

There was never a dawn that took so long to arrive. I swayed, weary, in my gig-chair, and in my mind I traded Prench nursery-songs with a dream-Cherie, a radio-Cherie, younger than the real thestral, a remembrance of our younger days, a happy little diversion from the horrible foulness. I endured that stench which we had brought into this world, which hung in the darkness and polluted Whirlwind's beautiful wings, and affrighted my offended nostrils.

The charioteers returned with their heavy chariots, and extracted the commando-section, wounded and intact alike. Whirlwind and I continued our gyre over the collapsing frame of the dead heliograph-station, and the crew that we murdered, and the dead rebel defenders scattered around the circumference of the smoldering wreckage. We left when the first glimmer of false dawn began to touch the eastern limb of the world. They would see what we had done soon enough afterwards, and it was time to return to the new lines the infantry would be laying out.

Dawn and Whirlwind and I found the Reserve on the move across farm-lanes and trails not that far away from the burning tower, their companies and battalions spread out across the landscape, scrabbling around and looking for places to sleep, places to throw up field-fortifications, places to park their wagons and their carts. From up on high, the ponies, donkeys and caribou of the North looked like an army of ants, as oddly organized as those insects, as collective and without identity as those bugs. Following the genius of our dream-Cherie, Whirlwind and I banked, and spiraled down over the forming camp of one of our cohorts, the doughy old Third, detached now from the Left Division and in support of the Reserve-brigade.

The night had brought two dozen casualties to the commandos and the ground-troops and the pegasi, and at least one fatality, an earth-pony mare named Fire Axe whose luck had run out in the assault on the second heliograph station on our tour of destruction. Dream-Cherie told me of greater casualties, greater fatalities in an evening-battle around Dover that night, which was being resumed again this morning. All among the remaining regiments of the Left Division, excepting one serious wound incurred by one of the Company sections seconded to the Chutes des Cristal.

Speaking of the Company ponies seconded to the Left Division, Not-Cherie informed me that her true self had been relieved of her duties with the II Tonnarre, and that she had been far to the south that night, exploring the long banks of the Housa, and looking for the great triremes of the rebel battle-fleet. I couldn't imagine what command thought it was doing, putting that bubbly, flighty thestral into the very den of the dragon, but I was still nothing more than an apprentice when it came to the decisions made in the interest of the Company.

But so was Cherie, and I couldn't imagine what they thought they were about, to fling her into the outer darkness like that.

Whirlwind and I found the Reserve's portable shower-wagon, which an enterprising and huge earth-pony from one of the Verdebaie regiments had hooked up to a buck-powered water pump, its long canvas-fabric inlet tube plunged into a nearby millpond. That glorious, sweating stallion pounded away with his rear legs at the water-pump levers, and the apparatus drew gallon after gallon of clean water out of the mill-pond and flushed it through the portable shower-heads. Bad Apple and a couple of pegasi were under the shower-heads, glorying in the stream of sparkling cleanliness, while soot-smirched and bloody-hooved Company commandos waited patiently for their turn to be sluiced off. We settled into our place in line.

Imagine my surprise when Cherie suddenly appeared, and took her place behind me in line. She was covered in soot and filth and powder, looking rather like she had crawled through a half-dozen granaries, or perhaps taken a wing-bath in a flour-sack.

"What the tartarus happened to you?" I asked. "And why are you way the hay and gone up here? Weren't you sent down to join the Middle Division?"

"Those silly ponies don't have their shower-wagons set up in the field. Something about them not being important enough to displace more vital supplies, or something silly like that? What's more vital than being clean?"

"Got me, filly. Got me." I paused, and debated asking… "Oh, merde. Ce que le diable is with you? You just went down there last night, where did you find all that filth in a single night?"

"Ah, un enfant doit avoir ses choses secretes!"

"Bollocks. Give it up, you know I'm supposed to be recording all this for the Annals."

She pouted, looking preposterous in the morning light all covered in cobwebs, dust, soot, and powder. "Fine, fine. The fleet, she is easy to find. Huge floating buildings bobbing about in the current? Not a problem. Finding the dark places and shadows in those enormous battle-ships? Not so little a problem."

She shook out a dirty, webbed wing. "All their dark corners, they were full of dust and loose flour. Very sloppy, these rebel westerners so full of themselves. And perhaps, I accidentally burned a one of them to the waterline in searching for places to put my future incendiaries?"

"Did you reveal our plan to the enemy, Cherie?"

"Oh, I think not. They leave such a mess, why wouldn't they lose a ship from time to time to powder-fires? They are what I would call, floating firekegs." She snorted. "Won't even be a problem when I need them all to burn."

When it came time for Whirlwind to take her place under the shower-heads, she literally fell asleep standing up. Cherie and I crowded into her shower-stall, and helped her get rinsed-down, half-asleep under the water. Then the three of us found a warm sun-lit spot somewhere we wouldn't be stepped upon, and caught up on our lost evening's sleep.

Digging In For A Blow, or, The Clearances

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SBMS150

The field hospital went up swiftly in the fields and farm-yard of the abandoned homestead, the nailed-shut farmhouse's doors yielding swiftly to the pry-bars of the Verdebaie rankers assigned to aid the establishment of my forward infirmary and surgery. I sent the militia-medicos inside to see what could be used in the empty house, along with an armed guard. Never could tell where dead-enders might have forted up, or a dead body might have gone revenant unattended in a basement.

The surgery tents went up across the way from the newly-opened farmhouse, and the barn across the way. I rearranged my supplies and tools as the assistants put together the cots and the surgical tables. Listening in my mind, I heard the Princess-aspect relaying the reports of her sister in the field, and calculated the timeframe of any casualties on their way to my rapidly-assembling hospital.

The fight for the line of communication had been fierce, but concentrated, and they were already on their way here, most of them being dealt with during the delivery process. Few – no, none of the pegasi or griffins had been injured in the night's festivities, leaving only ground-pounders and rankers to be retrieved via chariot here to my field hospital in the rear of the advance, and Rye Daughter's less-advanced hospital in transit.

I pondered making arrangements for all the wounded to be sent here, behind the Reserve and the few units of the Left Division shifting southeastwards towards our position here in the fore of the advance. The Middle Division was actually furthest forward of all of us, but had the longest road to travel. But Rye Daughter insisted via Spirit-relay that her ponies would be in position soon, and ready to take their own wounded less than an hour after finding their forward position. I estimated the travel times of stretcher parties towards our easterly site, versus the wait-time that might result if Rye's ponies dropped their stitches, and let it slide.

The Middle Division had started hitting their targets. Two companies were discovered, poorly posted, and were quickly overrun, according to the two regimental Company sections reporting back. More defensive garrisons were overrun or driven off as the regiments of the Middle rolled over the long road between the White Rose and their logistics base on the distant Housa. Not so distant for the Middle Division, and her supports advancing swiftly to her right. The Spirit and the Company's commanders expected the Middle Division to reach the town walls of Levittown by noon, at the current rate of advance.

Clots of prisoners were being herded into the rear towards what would be the first of several stockades. A Rennet regiment's third battalion from the Right Division had been designated as MPs and rear security, and by default, the prisoners of war fell into their purview. Two Company mares were detached from that regiment's support sections to oversee their operations.

In the meantime, the Reserve and her own supports had worked feverishly on digging preparations for successive defensive lines along the expected line of retreat for the White Rose. They had come this way over a month ago, blasting through the poorly-prepared defenses of d'Harcourt's army, and would no doubt re-trace their steps if and when they realized the difficult position we had placed them in. The expeditionary force of the White Rose was cut off from their supports, from their supplies, and their mighty riverine flotilla. They could cast loose and try to swing around us - and most likely starve. Or they could try and fight through us - fight and die, or bleed their way to victory if they could break our lines.

How quickly would the Rebel realize they were in a victory-or-death situation? It was perilous to put any enemy in such a position, especially when you weren't entirely gathered yourself for the counter-blow. The more quickly the Middle Division could accomplish its task, and destroy that logistics-base, the less danger the Reserve and our supports would be in, the less likely it was that a desperate Western push would crack our defenses and push aside the Reserve and whatever else we could scrape together to reinforce the General herself.

For the General and our Captain were commanding the defensive preparations north of the Wirts, the Captain's purple coat and the General's vast grey-brown bulk were distantly visible, overseeing the construction of the main line of defense within view of my field hospital. The plan had been to lay out three successive lines of resistance along the most likely line of advance, the one which the enemy themselves had used when they bypassed that idiot d'Harcourt who tried to fortify the main road through the marshy Wirts. As if a trained military force would have let itself be lured into that watery death-trap. He had scrambled to throw his army across the line of advance the rebel had chosen, and ended up offering battle in the open. Where the White Rose had trampled him and his, and shattered them into pieces.

We had a company detailed to hold that causeway through the Wirts, but no more. A company would be more than enough to hold any rebel flanking movement along that line of advance, dotted with smoldering and burning heliographic towers.

No, north of the marshy Wirts, was a flat, slightly over-watered plain, cut repeatedly by shallow streams converging and splitting apart, drained everywhere by the local farmers' levees and shallow dykes and aboiteaus. It was here that the White Rose had flanked the Army of the Housa and obliterated a third of that loyalist force. Third Cohort and a supporting battalion from a Hydromel regiment were in the process of driving off a rabble of rebel necromancers and just-raised ghouls from that battlefield. The White Rose had apparently been treating the mass graves like they were a supply dump for fresh undead.

While command was waiting for Third Cohort to finish clearing our front, the regiments of the Reserve were converting dyke-complexes and levees into improvised field fortifications west of the residue of that first, terrible battle. Command had summoned all of the Humus clan from their respective assignments, and they were being collected on the Reserve front to begin preparation of the ground and more importantly, the ground-water in front of our intended main lines of resistance.

The Clearances were ground tailor-made for the Humus clan. If they could pull off what the Captain had in mind, the White Rose would be stopped dead, elbow deep in the muck. Especially if they did as expected, and tried to 'flank' our obvious prepared positions.

As the day wore on, trains of supply-wagons pulled into the growing support-camp spreading out over the local fields behind the growing line of resistance, fields overgrown with volunteer grain-plants and random weeds. Carters hoofed carefully around the weedy, neglected fields, testing for solid footing. Those that found their footing, parked their wagons and shrugged off their traces, and got about the business of setting up their depots.

Engineers were getting organized and collecting their wagon-loads of planking and logs, and several were in my farm-yard, eyeing the more rattle-trap shacks around the edge of the yard. I took a break from oversight on the now-active surgical ward, to go chase off those vultures before they tore down my prospective recovery wards. Then I got a better look at the chicken coops I had been thinking about using, and changed my mind, and told the engineers to take the coops, but leave the sturdier cowsheds in place. No sign of either cows or chickens, by the way - when this farming family bugged out, they took everything not nailed down.

My ambulances rolled out, to retrieve the stream of casualties the skirmishing in our front were producing. Third Cohort and its supports had driven off the necromancers, with some losses on both sides, but several companies of rebel ground-troops had come forward to continue the festivities, attracted by the noise and the screaming.

A pegasus listening post over the entrance to the causeway reported a company-sized probe coming down that well-established route. Orders were passed from the General, busy scrawling pony-sized runic incantations across the face of eastward-facing dykes in front of the planned main line of resistance, to the company posted along the causeway the better part of a day's march away, via the ‘princess radio' relay. They fell back as ordered, to meet two support companies drawn off from the Verdebaie regiment which was digging out the positions and fighting platforms of the main line.

We worked through the casualties of the night before, and made them as comfortable as we could in the now-cleared farmhouse. The rankers seconded to my hospital cleared out the barn and the outlying shacks that the engineers weren't tearing down, getting them ready for heavy casualties when they came. If the General and the Captain's plans came to fruition, the drainage ditches of the Clearances and the marshes of the Wirts would be fertilized once again with the life-blood of the innocent and guilty alike.

The evening hours brought with it heavier skirmishing on our front, and reports of the storming of the walls of the castra in front of Leveetown, and the walls of Leveetown proper. They never got their defenses organized, and the Middle Division just surged over the clots of defenders like an incoming tide, by-passing their spears and pikes, only to swarm them from behind from both flanks at once. No little platoon or isolated company could stand for long in the face of that sort of onslaught, and the fighting was brutal but brief.

Rye Daughter's second field hospital was established in time, and close enough for our mutual purposes. I listened in via a set of twin-Cheries, doing my best to support my apprentice as she dealt with a flood of casualties, mostly militia caribou and donkeys from the sounds of it. Fourth Cohort was on that front, but hadn't gotten tangled up in any of the frontal fighting. It sounded like they had found an undefended gate on the western side of the town, and swept the walls clear of defenders almost without losses.

As evening fell, two red glows dominated the western limb of the world, as the fires over Leveetown fought to rival the fury of the setting summer sun.

Night Reconnaissance

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FFMS015

The night exhaled, hot and humid above the disturbed fields and waterways of the day's skirmishing and entrenching. Whirlwind was back in my gig's traces, and we coasted higher and higher on the copper- and manure-scented wind. If this is what a day of desultory skirmishing smelled like, what would the big fight smell like? What would the great battle everypony was expecting be like?

The night sky to the north was full of pegasi, spiraling furiously upwind from the expected directions of march for the enemy, who was now almost certainly reacting to our onslaught, our stolen march. From here to the outskirts of New Equestria, as many pegasi as we could spare were going through the ancient motions, the forgotten rituals that their distant ancestors had once used to summon the precious rain to parched lands. Here, now, southward, the sky was full of glittering stars, and the southern skies were clear as far as the thestral eye could see. But the clouds were banking quickly to the north-west, and the hundred or so pegasi dancing their rain-magic were drawing up the moisture from the summer-damp soils, and down from the glittering and frozen upper airs. The conjured cloud-scapes were slowly forming. But I could feel that spark in my tail.

Nothing we could concern ourselves with, while we had a mission for the night. Those few fliers and those witches they could spare from the demolition of the White Rose's rear base, had been sent out to scout, to count heads and tails, to see how quickly the rebel reacted to our existential threat to their survival. As it turned out, the few witches they could spare, was me, and the few fliers, the griffin-corps, whose lack of touch for weather-magic left them free of the Lieutenant's mystical flock of memory. Upwards, Whirlwind drew us through the mansions of the sky, and I clipped myself a little bit and started the seeing cantrips, those little tricks which let me see as far as a pegasus, as sharply as a griffin, and as darkly as a thestral.

The fertile plain between the dampness of the Wirts and the low ridges of the highlands was dark but full of movement. The many open fields, and the few orchards and groves hid little of the halting caterpillar-movement of our enemy. The thin scattering of battalions and companies who had contested our claim over the old battlefield below were visible, and tangible in other ways. Their… stink on the wind was palpable. Especially those surviving necromancers, whose psychic stench befouled the magic beyond any taint smelled through the nose or seen through altered eyes. A necromancer warped the world around him, took and gave nothing back to the bleeding existence they passed through like a many-edged razor.

They were visible, here and there, like little rivulets of magic cut out of the veins of the living world. Few ghouls, though, from what I could taste. Their excavations had either been fruitless, or interrupted early in the dig, because aside from the occasional blood-mage's guard, there were not all that many shambling about. Certainly nothing horde-like to worry at the morale of our mundane militia-companies.

The Company had little to fear from the lesser undead, but our allies certainly did.

Beyond that rabble of skirmish-chewed battalions directly opposite the Middle Division, was an empty void of nopony, of nothing but the green world getting on with its nighttime affairs, respiring, absorbing the day's sunlight-supplies, and exhaling its waste-products towards the day to come. And there they were, there was the advancing columns of the enemy – the actual army-elements of the White Rose, their main battalions. Streaming westwards, concentrate. I tapped on the traces, indicating silently to Whirlwind which direction to take. I waved at our griffin escorts, and gestured in broad pantomime with my forearms in a sort of mime-dance, the new line of flight.

We tipped over, and headed south-westwards, over the empty void, and towards the crawling caterpillars. The closer we got, the more distinct the details one could pick out from the darkness and the distance, the little worms growing furry with pike-heads, their tails full of labouring wagons and carters catching their bound wheels in what had to be poor roadways. These were the main brigades, their full regiments on the march, in the darkness. The White Rose wasn't a night-haunted army like the Company-sponsored Northerners. To stumble about in the heavily-chewed-up roads in this deep darkness – they must have been full aware of the danger they were in, they must have been shocked awake, to that threat that had moved into their rear.

And they were awake to our surveillance. The nearest regimental caterpillar bloomed a full set of fire-works, crude rockets launched blindly into the darkness, perhaps having heard wings overhead, perhaps some magician smelling my magic. I spun up a black-edged cloud of phantasm to hide myself, my driver, and those griffin escorts I could reach – but some of the cat-birds had spread out too far for my sudden illusions to reach them. I sawed desperately at my hide, and tried to magick up something to deal with the flares floating overhead.

Were those parachutes?

While I got oriented and powered up, the regiment below had produced more rockets, and these were somewhat guided. Flung into the air, one by one they detonated, and little glowing terrors floated out upon the humid night air, lit horribly bright by blue-white guttering flares. I could smell the magic on those glow-balls, and tried to get up a bit of levitation, a bit of wind to drive away those little killers. I could feel the fear in the gravel in my throat, and realized I was shouting warnings without even having thinking them through.

One by one, les petits bâtards brillants floated away from my exposed escorts, as we all spiraled up and away from the rebel regiment with far too many tricks up their tails. Then one of the petits bâtards caught Gaetan, and he lit up like a hayrick on fire. That drew another volley of rockets from the next regiment we were passing over, upon a converging road. We had to leave the flaming tom, his feathers wicking tartarus-fire like an enormous flare as his expiring body spun mid-air. That terrible flare dispelled all of my illusions like the air and blood they were.

Regiment after regiment fired up their flares, and they marked themselves with their panic-fire. If each rocketry unit was with a regimental-sized group… I counted the rockets as they leaped skyward, banishing the night in terrible blue-white shocks which ruined the night-vision of everypony awake on that plain east of the Wirts. At least fifteen groups of rocketeers, at least fifteen regiment-sized groupings, stretching from what I think was the southern roads down from Dover, to the farm-lanes and roads leading up out of what I've been told is Braystown and her Shambles, and westward over the hills from opposite the loyalists behind the Hayfriend.

The enemy was concentrating, and swiftly. Not tomorrow morning, but perhaps the afternoon after that.

And they outnumbered us by my reckoning.

We floated to safety, scorched and short one more precious flier, burned out of the skies. The White Rose had found a way to contest, or at least, to protect their air-space against our knights of the upper airs. I could see little fires alight on the plain, scattering wild-fires where les petits bâtards brillants were touching down and burning anything they touched. Somepony hadn't quite thought through their tartarus-traps, hadn't they? I hoped vindictively that at least a couple landed in among their own ranks, crowded into the roadways. Then I thought somberly of what those rocket-delivered terrors would be like, if they were fired against fortifications, or even armsponies massed in the field.

Who knew what other surprises they might have in store for us?

As we flew home, the storm-front summoned by the Lieutenant's flock roared overhead, tumbling some of my somewhat shocky escort. The clouds were dark and full of lightning, and sheets of rain gouted out from underneath them as if someone had disemboweled a great watery monster, and left it to pour out its viscera upon the darkened landscape below. The storm-winds scattered the surviving parachute-flares in the distance, and the storm closed in on the rebel on the march.

They might be a bit later than expected, if that monster made trackless muck of the roads of the plain.

Good.

Expecting Guests

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SBMS151

The casualties rolled into the field hospital, and the physicians and surgeons of the Reserve regiments laboured over the wounded. Rows of operation tables filled the great tent, and howls of anguish echoed under the canvas as they cut and stitched. There was never enough opium, and the vast supplies of salicin I had gotten these ponies to produce during the spring had little effect on the agony of indifferently-sharpened knives cutting away at open wounds.

There would be enough wounded to come, we could only spare so much of the heavy pain-killers now, in preparation for the waves to come.

I helped here and there as I could, but there was too much for me to make a dent in, and I had to rely on the militia's surgeons to take care of the militia-ponies as they came in. My talents were best employed in the recovery process, and my time came when the victims came off of the tables, their wounds cleaned out and bound; shivering or passed out as their capacities for pain dictated. One of the bull-calves assisted me as I painted each of the ponies' wounds in the special mixtures I had prepared, the potions whose secrets I had gleaned from the texts which took a trained hoof to bring to life. Those special tricks which often made the difference between death, disease, and a rapid recovery.

Clean recovery wards being, of course, the other half of the equation. I eyed the barn we would be using all too soon for the later waves of wounded, and muttered instructions to one of the Verdebaie orderlies slouching near the entrance. We had plenty of soap and antiseptic wash in the supply-carts, and I wanted that barn Grogar-damned spotless before any wounded were chucked inside of it.

As the night approached day, the blood-stained surgeons and I laid resting upon cots in the corners of the surgical tent, them dozing and awaiting the next wave of the damaged. And I? I was listening to the reports from Leveetown, and the conquest of the logistics-base of the White Rose.

The reports were full of news that the rebel fleet had fled downstream, away from whatever had repeatedly caused their great stores-ships to explode in infernos of fire and flame, that had caused two different triremes on either sides of their flotilla to burn down to the water-line. The shores south-west of Leveetown were littered with the scorched corpses of at least a half-dozen hulks, bragged the Nightmare, projecting upon my mind's eye the early-dawn-light ruination wreaked upon the enemy. The Spirit was so proud of her thestral child, her fire-bug shadow-walker. Like a mother with a prized scholarship-student to her credit.

The rebel was surrendering in droves in Leveetown. They had nowhere to run to, and Guilllaime's Middle Division had no inclination towards mass slaughter or war-atrocities. Thousands of ponies and a scattering of caribou were being disarmed and lined up in coffers by loyalist companies. The town was ours, but the after-math was tying up far too many troops entangled in the captures.

And the captures, by the alicorns, the stream of prisoners that came out of that town. Even after the fires subsided, the mounds of foodstuffs and war material were impressive. Carters who had emptied out their loads into the fields and roadsides behind our swelling position along the Clearances were being sent with their empty carts and wagons to collect the booty from bursting-at-the-seams Leveetown. I could see them streaming past the field-hospital on the increasingly overburdened pair of farm-lanes which had once serviced this homestead, and now were acting as the main logistical arteries for an entire brigade and its burgeoning supports. The engineers had made an early day of it, and were swarming over another abandoned farm the next homestead down from my hospital, and were tearing down barns and outbuildings for the lumber. The farmlanes would be bottomless mires by tomorrow evening if they didn't get them properly planked over.

That is, if the enemy didn't overrun our position here, and simply re-take their own supplies from the growing cluster of fieldside depots.

A messenger – an actual, living messenger, one of the General's pet lieutenants – swung by my surgery to inform me that my presence was requested and required by Command for a conference, in a command-tent placed halfway across the encampment from my hospitalstead.

The command post that Broken Sigil and Major Hardhoof had gotten put together was impressive, almost as clean as my commandeered farmhouse, and well-lit. Sigil's beloved sand-tables were set up on two different benches, with a lieutenant each carving out the local landscape features into the sand-surfaces. Another pair of lieutenants were lurking in the back corners of the tent doing something I couldn't quite see from the front entrance. Looked sort of like they were knitting.

The Captain was standing over on the left side of the tent, quietly talking with General Knochehart. The senior colonel of the Reserve was standing just out of earshot, looking rather stuffy. She was a Hydromel jenny by the name of Claudine-Louise de Villers, but she wasn't nearly as high-toned a filly as the name suggested. I had heard somewhere that she was some sort of distant cousin or relation of my Duchesse, but really, to my eye, they were nothing at all alike. This flower of the aristocracy gave the impression of delicate ormolu over well-chewed iron plating. It might have been the rather battered silver-leaf chasing on the chamfron she held in the crook of her left forearm that gave that impression. Or perhaps the mud-splattered satin brocade detailing wearing away under her once-ornate peytral.

I walked over to join Colonel de Villers, and noted as I did that there were a number of bloodstains leaking out from under that silk-detailed caparison.

"Colonel, has anypony looked you over for deeper wounds? I can smell copper from over here."

"It's mostly rebel blood," she said, shortly.

"I rather thought I heard that your regiment wasn't in on the fighting yesterday?"

"I'm always amazed by the things your ponies 'hear', chief surgeon. The bulk of my regiments were occupied in digging in, but the skirmish-lines required rather continual reinforcement. I had the better part of three battalions on the line by the time night came."

"And yet, I didn't hear of many fatalities. Enough wounds to give my surgical staff a good workout, but…?"

"It was skirmishing, sir. Back and forth, nothing worth dying over, and barely worth killing over."

"Any opinions as to how many were in your front, then, if you were up there?"

"That is what is currently under debate. I say a regiment and a half, variously organized. They were probing us, as much as we were probing them. No real magical aid on either side, unless you count whatever witchcraft it is that your ponies and donkeys use to be so damnable unpredictable. If I could have another battalion like the one on the line, I would fear nothing."

"I believe at least another cohort will be passing through camp later this morning, but I doubt they will be able to spare the Second for your front. You have a vast wide-open flank on your left."

"Perdu! Do not remind me! All of our resources, poured into this soggy murder-pen of a district, and all the enemy has to do is just… march around my left."

"My fliers did their best to make that as unpleasant an option as they could last night, madame," said the newly-arrived Lieutenant, her wings
quite ruffled and out of preen.

I looked at her, and wondered if she was going to make it through the meeting without crashing asleep. "I thought the night's work was to wash the enemy's roads out from underhoof to our east, not to the north?"

"Last night, yes. Tonight? We repeat the performance half-a-march up-wind. Which means the Left Division best be moving across those roads at their very best road-step, yes? Where's Eugin?"

"I have not yet seen him, Lieutenant-Captain," I admitted.

My inner Princess was rather offended by the two of us speaking as if she wasn't there. She had just given both of us the itinerary of the missing brigadier, who was stuck labouring mightily to get his four strung-out regiments across the rather sketchy road-nets between Dover and the Clearances. Some of the night's rain-storm had soaked the landscape up-wind of where it had been intended, and the lanes and roads were perhaps not as firm as had been promised. Chutes des Cristal was still within striking distance of battered Dover and its fought-over environs. The Lieutenant and I frowned in tandem, while the Colonel looked on in irate bafflement.

"I hate it when you ponies do that. What? What do you both know that you're not saying out loud?"

"Eugin won't be joining us. Left Division's strung out on the roads. Making some distance, but it'll be a long march by the sounds of it."

"Gah! Do you all do that? Just know things out of the ether?"

"No, Colonel," said the Lieutenant, "Sawbones here is special. If he weren't so useful in keeping your troops from expiring of their wounds, we'd keep him here in operations to relay information. I only wish I had his… capacity."

"Term of art is bandwidth, I'm told, Lieutenant-Captain. Some of the engineers have all sorts of wild ideas about our little tricks, they keep asking impertinent questions. Thankfully, the way they phrase their pushy little questions are useful for generating ways of thinking about the whole subject."

"Are we ever going to seriously discuss what and how you're doing these things?" demanded the slightly wild-eyed aristocratic officer.

"Blackest witchcraft and devil-worship, my dear Colonel," I laughed. "Care to join the cult? I'm sure the war-lance is making its way down here for the expected grand battle. The enemy's warlocks have got to be getting ready to present us with surprises by now. We've seen far too little of them."

"We've seen at least one of their tricks now," said the Captain, joining our little discussion-group. The General was back in the corner, talking with her lieutenants, who had not, apparently, put down their knitting to talk to their commanding officer. "Last night's reconnaissance ran into some sort of anti-air death-spell, one that could and was directed by non-magicians. Unless you think the White Rose has fifteen high-end blood-mages capable of firing off rocket-assisted death-curses. Feufollet, get in here!"

My understudy came in, looking hollow-eyed and sleep-deprived, her forearms still blood-stained from the night's work. The General left her lieutenants' corner, and rejoined us in front of the regional sand-table, which now had a reproduction of the local road-net, our position in the Clearances, the Wirts, the range of low hill-tops to the east, Dover and Braystown and Leveetown and the distant Hayfriend, and along the bottom of the table, the meandering Housa.

Feufollet pointed out the locations she had noted of the enemy columns, three coming down from south of Dover, five up from the roads winding north from Braystown, and then, gesturing quickly for Broken Sigil, seven trails leading over the ridgelines and into the plain.

"That was before they started firing those rockets at us. Once they started exploding, our capacity for taking careful notes dropped quickly. Ces petits bâtards… they made it difficult," she admitted with a glare at the little markers that indicated the enemy columns. "At least two different launchers, they fired off les petits bâtards. The other thirteen, they definitely threw up the illuminators, the flares. We didn't overfly those agresseurs de chèvres. Maybe they had the killing rounds, and were saving them? I do not know."

Colonel de Villers cringed at the Prench profanities. But she asked for details of the ‘little bastards', and I could see what she was worried about. Feufollet admitted that it looked like they didn't burn themselves out, and seemed to be causing fires upon landing on the landscape below. As they discussed the potential of the new weapon the rebel had revealed, two more Company warlocks entered the tent and the conversation. Gibblets and Obscured Blade looked disgustingly pleased with themselves over the neat victory they had won down in Leveetown.

The conversation continued about the 'little bastards', and the ways that they might be warded or destroyed 'in the cradle', as it were. If our witches did nothing about them, they could be used for bombardment, or assault of formations in the field. The warlocks and the officers fell to arguing about how extensive the em-placed magical defensive network should be made, until Brigadier Brune arrived to herald the approach of his short division of two regiments. Not long after, he left with the now-brevetted 'Brigadier' de Villers to direct the new arrivals into their proper and planned positions upon the expected field of battle and her approaches. The new brigadier's rank was granted by a preoccupied General Knochehart in a fit of absent-mindedness, her new rank hoofed to her without ceremony or comment, as if it were a spare towel or trench-shovel.

I drifted away from the renewed and fruitless argument about what sort of magical resources the enemy might have given the presence of a rocketry section with each of their regimental groupings. The two lieutenants sitting in the back of the tent, whom I had never talked to, or even ever given any attention to, continued to attend to their knitting.

Their 'knitting' turned out to be a great deal of fiddling about with etching tools, and at their hooves were piles and piles of bolts and arrows and other implements of destruction. I shouldn't have been surprised that Knochehart had been hiding some rune-casting apprentices among her staff, nor that they were busy preparing their own little magical surprises. I asked to make sure that these would be provided to the Company's bowmares, and was reassured that all of the arrows were earmarked for our archers. I mentioned the existence of the heavy bollards so beloved by the Company's aerial cohort, and they nodded, one of them pointing to a pile in the back of the tent which I had mistaken for paperwork chests.

I turned away from the busily beavering shave-tail rune-casters, to the ongoing argument. Sometimes ponies can't do anything about the catastrophe to come, so they assuage their anxieties by loudly debating that which cannot be changed.

And sometimes quiet ponies sit in unattended corners and make a difference without anypony being the wiser.

Outside, the regiments of the Right Division and the cohorts of the Company marched through the encampment, passing through on their way to the rising fortifications, and the skirmish-lines beyond, and the open flank on the left, which slowly was filling in with armsponies streaming in from both the north-east and the south-west.

In the muddy distance across the steaming, humid plain, fifteen rebel regiments marched against the Army of the North, fifteen veteran columns struggling through mud and confusion and, perhaps, the beginnings of hunger.

And we, we waited as our fellows scrambled to reach the field, hoping that we would stand here in sufficient numbers to give our expected guests a proper greeting when they arrived.

The Night Witches

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FFMS016

After my testimony about the previous night's chaos, I found a quiet corner in the operations tent, and fell asleep in a chair pulled up against the canvas. The arguing collapsed into a background murmuration and the Princess rocked me to a dreamless sleep without fire or flame or a griffin writhing and burning in the void between heaven and the darkened earth.

The Lieutenant awakened me not long after, it seemed, but the light dying told me otherwise. She pulled me outside, and there in the impromptu yard outside was the other two witchlings, a slightly scorched-looking Bad Apple, and a Cherie nothing more than soot and powder from hoof to dock, and from dock to poll.

I looked at Cherie, and I could only ask, "Are the showers not working again?"

"Bah, I barely had time to clean. This one, they don't want to fly her anywhere anymore, the elders they say!" She gestured at a rather down-cast Bad Apple, who had the grace to show the embarrassment she had brought upon the withers of the witch's coven. She had always been somewhat reckless, and unconcerned when it came to bodily harm, but the last year or so, she had lost all prior inhibitions about time, place, and enemy action. The raid on Falaises du Conseil had been something of a breaking-point between Bad Apple and her drivers, when her mad daredevil behaviour over the waters of that embattled river-port had nearly gotten her hapless pegasus charioteer flash-fried, and had, according to some pegasi in the aerial cohort, contributed to the deaths of Hailstorm and Tempest. She was anything but popular among the aerials after that stunt, and her half-wrecked witch's gig had been offered again and again by Gerlach and the Lieutenant as an example of why the witch's section needed to re-train in the aftermath of that bloody raid.

Cherie herself should have held a grudge against Bad Apple, because her knight had lost her wing retrieving her battered gig and her wounded charioteer in the retreat from Falaises du Conseil. My own issues earlier in this campaign had been largely due to the misplaced ire among the pegasi against all witches, all gig-charioteering jobs in that aftermath. It had taken some considerable work with Whirlwind before I had convinced her that I wasn't the same kind of pony as Bad Apple, that I wasn't a mad and reckless fire-swallowing lunatic witch like my friend the earth-pony.

Well, that and some serious sweet-talking, but Sawbones doesn't like us to write about that sort of thing in the Annals. Still and all, I rather thought that last night's performance, and my work the night before that, might have gone a fair distance towards papering over the problems that existed between the warlocks and the pegasi, or at least, between me and individual pegasi. And Cherie showing the signs of having drawn a gig for Bad Apple strongly suggested that any détente between the warlocks and the pegasi hadn't included BA herself.

"Seriously? You're playing charioteer for us now, Cherie? You know you're better than that. You're more than half a witch yourself, we have better uses for you other than playing bus driver to a pyromaniac."

"Oh, stuff it up your plot, little miss bloody-shoes," sniped Bad Apple. "Cherie's been getting up to more pyromania in the last couple days than I've ever indulged in. But yeah, she was the only ride I could catch up here. I don't think you understand how short-hooved we are now over westwards. All these damn weather-witches playing with clouds up this way, there aren't any pegasi to spare down towards the last battlefield."

She looked around at the quiet depots, and the distant main line of resistance. "There's barely any battle here, anyways. I keep hearing about this great battle brewing up your way, but there's not a single White Rose in view other than the one hidden under all that soot and fried flour on Cherie's flank."

"And buck you too, you smartass of a mud pony!" sniped the suddenly irate thestral. I think that's the only time I've ever seen the endlessly bubbly Cherie snap back at a pony. How badly had BA been behaving, I wondered.

"Bad Apple, they aren't here yet, because we've been doing everything in our power to keep them bogged down, confused, and scattered," I said, echoing the Annalist in my best pompous-zebra-manner. "Which is probably why the Lieutenant pushed me out here. We still gotta shut down the open left flank, haven't you heard? All these beautiful fortifications, and they're gonna be worth nothing but the waste to the irrigation works, if the damn rebel just steps sideways and flanks us out of position!"

The Lieutenant, who had been listening to our foalish quarreling with a slight grin on her muzzle, stepped into the conversation. "Exactly, my little witchlings. We're going to be trying to flood those fields this evening and tonight."

She strode away from the tent-entrance, and gestured to the north and east. "The pegasi are fully concentrated tonight, over High Earth, and the hamlets south of New Equestria. See all those fluffy clouds over there?" She pointed into the airy distance, and indeed, the skies were full of strange, baroque cloudlets like nothing I had seen in my short life, like horse-tails and stonework in the heavens. "That's what you get when weatherponies start messing with the waters and the winds and the clouds. We've got something really big building, but we need to keep at it, you know? Tonight especially. Tonight's the key, for soaking the three districts north of here. If we do it right, those roads, those fields will be impassible. Mudholes and mires, from here to the Bride's Road, that's what we want."

She turned on her rear right leg, and gestured to the east. "We can't have any of the enemy getting close enough tonight to harass us, to fire those damnable rockets into our delicate cloud-scapes. Somepony needs to brush those starving desperadoes back. You three and the griffins are gonna be the broom-handlers, the night-janitors. Can I put my trust in you all?"

We all nodded, enthusiastically. Nothing like being told you're vital to a plan, to get you to agree to something stupid and dangerous. The surging hormones of youth might have had something to do with it, though, because when I turned around, I found Whirlwind holding her muzzle in her hooves like she had a headache.

"Uh, sorry, Whirl. Didn't think that I might be volunteering you for something dangerous. Maybe we can pull it off from the ground?"

"Don't be daft, filly. Only an aerial pony can get you out of that sort of danger fast enough to keep you from catching a face full of tartarus-fire. Just let me… collect myself a little." She looked over at Bad Apple and Cherie, chattering happily, whatever quarrel that had just blown up, having already blown over. "And the pyromaniacal pair as well? Won't this be a glorious evening to be a Company mare?"

Later that evening, as the sun dropped below the western limb of the world, we gathered in a field to the north of the sprawling, growing depots of the rear, along with what looked like all the griffins of the aerial cohort. Gerlach was there, as was his one griffin sergeant and the two griffish corporals. He came over to our gigs, and laid a waterproof pocket map over Bad Apple's black-scorched gig's rail for us to look at. He gestured to where we were going, the region we were protecting in front of the weather-chorus's area of operations, and the line of limitation beyond which we weren't to wander. And he emphasized heavily that it wasn't a night for running ahead of our supports, staring angrily at Bad Apple and Cherie, already wearing her traces in the front of the gig.

We rose slowly into the air above the rear depots, curving slowly to the north and east, and then back south and west again as we spiraled for height and elevation. The battle-lines hove into view as Whirlwind and Cherie labored behind their traces. I could almost read the great runes the General had dug into the face of the final line of resistance, as well as the intermediate line. If the White Rose gave us enough time tomorrow for the General to enscribe the final, advanced line with that same set of defensive runes, well, really. They'd deserve every last terrible thing we'd do to them with that sort of time to prepare.

All that work put into the narrow, if rich district stretching across the north end of the Wirts like a hat on a fat, self-satisfied cat, and it still left that wide-open terrain to our gathering army's left. Westward stretched the marching regiments of the Left-Division, making every use of every last moment gifted us by the laggard enemy, struggling in the muck and confusion the pegasi had made of the great plain to our east. Tonight, the plan was to extend that muckworks right up to the gates of High Earth and New Coltington, to make mud a watch-word for all the districts of the eastern Baronies, and some of the southern expanses of the duchy of New Equestria as well.

As we spiraled ever higher, the darkness spread westwards from the low-lying hills of the eastern range, towards the fleeing sun, over our fortifications, over the unknown west, over the enemy in her muddy tartarus. I focused, and clipped my cannon on a fresh quarter-inch of my hide, feeding my magical sight, extending it into the distance as the whole of the griffin contingent of the Company surrounded us. I looked down, and searched for the enemy caterpillars, failing to find any of them at first.

I looked up at Cherie, and realized something, something worrisome about our shadow-walker, our dream-weaver. I shouted into the wind towards the two of them a question, "Hey, Cherie, can you shadow-walk with that damn gig hanging over your withers?"

"I think so? Dunno that I've ever had the opportunity, not many shadows up here in the open, you know?"

"I think I can do something about that, hold on a second." I concentrated, using the trickle of power making its way down my fur. Two discs of darkness formed in the air nearby, one in front of Cherie and Bad Apple in their doubled contraption, the other behind us, on the far side of the coasting flights of griffins. Distant to the north, lightning began to light up the horizon as the pegasi began their own night-witchcraft.

Cherie let out a gleeful battle-cry, and dove into my disc of darkness, disappearing as she surged forward, drawing the witch-gig and the startled witch herself behind her. I glanced backwards, and spotted the two of them surge out of the other disc, headed the complete opposite direction they had been flying before, as if the momentum had been continued, in all proper obeisance to the demands of physics, only inverted and mirrored backwards, westwards rather than eastwards.

All four of us, even Whirlwind shouted in triumph at the minor experiment's success, and the two retrograde shadow-dancers arced about, converting their backward momentum into an upward curve, placing the thestral and her earth-pony load above us in the forming formation.

Eastwards, eastwards we beat, with all the winds of the forming northern storm driving us southward, pushing us off of our course. So we tacked, driving into the eastern quarter of the wind, and below us the landscape inched by, yard by yard, field by field, homestead by homestead.

Then the griffins began gesturing, and I looked down, reminded again of our purpose and our goal, and spotted the battle-worm whose advance was our reason for being out in this stormy night. Struggling through their mud and their muck, an enemy formation was still moving in the gathered darkness below, lit here and there along its length with torchlight, or, perhaps, magelight.

They were far forward. They were nearly into the open flank, in fact. If that enemy column had those death-blossom rockets with them, they could make a real mess of the pegasi and their blackened clouds, who were blowing closer and closer to us as time, time ticked swiftly away. I stared down, frustrated. They weren't stopping.

I tapped on my reins to Whirlwind's traces, and she nodded, pitching over in a steep dive. I sliced myself up again, and from that pain I formed a flight of horrors, lit with glow-worms crawling, like an ugly series of parodies of the Nightmare herself, hideous green and blue glowing details over their phantasmic wings and smooth barrels and long, terrible-hooved legs, sharpened spurs, jagged fangs. I could hear the screams from far below as we stooped, dropping like we were carrying a full load of bollards and night-terrors.

The rocket-battery opened up when we were nine hundred yards overhead, almost terminal velocity. I howled at Whirlwind at the top of my lungs, my words lost in the wind of our descent. Thank tartarus for the Nightmare, who had locked the two of us in perfect disharmony, and she spiraled away from our false dive-bombing arc, nearly throwing my magical donkey ass out of my own chair. I sent my phantasms onward, diving directly into the scattering White Rose battalion below, as my eyesight went blood-red and my consciousness clung to the world with weak-frogged hooves.

Thank the Nightmare indeed, but the rockets didn't seek us out, didn't spiral and search for us, didn't try and hunt us out of the sky. Five of them lanced straight through my phantasmic parodies of the Princess, tearing the images to shreds by their passage. They, and the rest, continued upwards until they burst in their own good time, far overhead, spawning their foolish hard-light flares under floating parachutes. More importantly, floating nowhere near our griffin escort and Cherie and Bad Apple. I could feel, like an itching in my Princess-lobe, the enemy rocketeer seeking us out for a second barrage, and I quickly doubled and then tripled our image, matching our twins, our triplets to our own gravity-defying arcs of arrested descent.

He fired his death-blossoms at two of the Whirlwinds, drawing their phantasm-witch-gigs behind them as they flew.

Such a shame that one of those Whirlwinds was the real one, carrying my very real self with her. I doubled our image again, and then again, but the rockets were too stupid to know that this or that image was what they were to search for. I didn't have the time to figure out how their guidance operated, and I just started cutting like mad, spraying blood all over my gig, trying to get a hold of one of those damned witched rockets, until one got close enough I could see the rune-etchings.

Then I knew how to seize them, and she was mine. She bent away as rapidly as that magic could fly her, and I did my best to find a return course to the original bow-mare, to return her bolt to her. No such luck, sadly. My bolt, she blew before she returned to her owner, and the skies over that offending battalion was now full of ces petits bâtards. Four of which immediately intersected other flying seeker-heads, and blew the whole lot to perdition with a chain-reaction which would have been marvelous, if Whirlwind and I weren't so damn close to them when they blew. Whirlwind barely kept to the skies, but the ground was far too close a companion when we recovered and cast away, barely just over the tree-tops. In the distance behind us, I could see another series of flares, explosions, hear the screams as Cherie and Bad Apple repeated our little coup.

Whirlwind and I exchanged glances over the traces and the reins, and I knew through our merged selves, that she could feel the madness in me, and I could feel the draw of the named death in her wild heart.

And we started to climb again.

Behind us, the landscape erupted in explosions, and I turned around, trying to see what had happened, what was happening. I spotted the zig-zagging witch's gig, as it nearly spun around itself, trying to dodge the great swarm of gently rising petits bâtards rising all around them. I reached out, nearly tapped from this current vein, and placed the shadow-disc before the distant fleeing Cherie, and echoed a second one above us, a hundred yards above.

And like that, she was through, one petit bâtard following her so closely that it slipped through the fault in the shadows she cleaved as she walked from one slice of the world and another. BA spun, suddenly oriented by my visualization and shout through the Nightmare of the narrowed threat, and blew that little monster away, shredding the remnants of the shadow-disc above us in a pyroclastic flare.

It attracted another volley of rockets in this direction, of course, but all we had to do was break away and run for it, and the rockets just ran out of charge before they reached us. I grabbed two before they quite died out, and held them in my negligible levitation. I can do that, just not often, and not well. I brought them into my gig's carrying shelf, and gestured Whirlwind to rejoin the daredevil twins as soon as we could match courses with them.

"Did you spot where ces conneries they were coming from?" I screamed across the distance between us and the other witches.

"Yeah, I think so, we missed them though. And now they're scattered. How are we gonna bomb 'em?"

"I gotta couple live ones, I think I've got my magic on the trigger, keeping 'em from blowing us out of the sky. Think you can guide me where I can put shadows in the right place, deliver ces petits bâtards 'return to sender'?"

"You say you think we are the madmares? Good Peacock Angel, Feufollet!" yelped Bad Apple. "Get those monsters out of your gig before you both detonate!"

"I have it! Under! Control!" I insisted. "Show me, where can I return 'em?"

She gestured, and a little distant flare raised in the dark distance, the darkened plain roiling with the scattering troops of the enemy scrambling in all directions below, far too close below. At least a couple of those White Rose were stopping to fling stones upward in our direction, having heard our conversation. Far, far too close to the earth below.

"That's our position, that's our guide?" I demanded, suddenly anxious as a pair of rocks from clever slingers arced over our heads. "Why aren't you just incinerating her supply of rockets there and then?"

"I don't know if that's it, I'm burning anything I sorta saw, filly! I don't have that sort of distance control! Make it happen! Now!"

I cut myself yet again, feeling a little light-headed, and opened up another pair of shadow-discs, one in front of me, one distant next to where the flare in the distance had glowed, feeling through the Nightmare BA's visualization of our target. "Oh, goddamnit, Cherie, tell me you can pass through inanimate objects, here!"

I flung the two deactivated death-blossom rockets, their fuses suddenly re-lit by the abrasion of my hurry and my scratching them along the side of my gig as I tossed them in the direction of that shadow.

They flashed, and then they were through the shadow, and then they were gone. I dispelled my near-darkness before anything returned in turn.

A distant flash where the far shadow-disc had been projected, and then a lot of flashes, Explosions, rather. Secondaries, even. And then the rumbling, the sound of a lot of gunpowder going off at once. Even, after a second, a sort of counter-wind that pushed us northwards a bit, into the teeth of the gathering storm.

Then came the furious storm, the mad storm, upon which a screen of pegasi floated, fighting it every flap of the wing, from the sodden outskirts of High Earth and New Coltington, to wind-swept here, on the southern expanse of the storm. The storm that, trapped in the wings of the pegasi, came so far south, and then no further. Before that great feathered wall, nothing but wind flowed. And those winds blew us southward, and we left behnd us the griffins, who had accomplished little up to that point, stooped steeply downwards through those terrible storm-gusts, and delivered their javelins and bombs against whatever targets they found upon the naked earth below, those scattered victims now stripped of the protection of rocket-batteries and witchcraft.

The storm raged all night long, constrained before the Company-witchcraft of the pegasi, who kept the rain and the sleet and the hail north of the Clearances, our protected corridor, the only passage left to the enemy, as our winged ponies reduced the districts to the north to a trackless wasteland of bottomless mud.

Morning Callers

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SBMS152

That afternoon after the conference saw a brief pause in the fighting, before the enemy's skirmishers returned, doubled. My best guess was that the battered companies and detached battalions of the rear areas on this side of their main concentration had been reinforced by an actual organized regiment or two, but what it meant was the resumption of fighting in front of the growing fortifications that would become the first line of resistance when they were done. By evening, an entire Hydromel regiment was on the skirmish line, supported by the increasingly worn-out Third Cohort. My expanded ambulance corps was put to heavy use, ferrying a steady stream of wounded back from the fighting.

Third Cohort lost three dead in the evening's skirmishing, an earth pony stallion named Long Traces, a jenny named Coquille Dure, and an earth pony mare named Steady Step. The militia lost two dozen dead, and the wounded from all four battalions engaged in the fighting filled my farm-house to the rafters, and kept my surgical staff running full-out until hours after midnight. I was finally forced to start designating doctors for enforced sleep shifts, so that I didn't have my entire surgical section collapse at the same time.

The night's storms provided my bustling hospital with a constant soundtrack of roaring downpours, thunder, and howling winds. To look northward from our tents, was like… it reminded me of standing in my grandmother's front door, watching the monsoon sweep the street-filth into the gutters, the eaves spilling over like waterfalls. It didn't exactly leave you dry, but the wetness was a sort of misting back-spray, as the heavy rain-drops and gouting eaves filled the air with a sort of universal humidity.

We didn't get caught in the pegasus-storm, but it certainly didn't leave us dry.

The morning dawned with a resumption of screams and clangour from the front line. The battered and exhausted Third Cohort had been rotated out of the front lines and replaced with the recently-arrived Fourth Cohort, and the Hydromel regiment with one of their sister regiments from Rennet. This was the third day after the rebel had been cut off from their supplies, and command fully expected a full-dress assault today, if it was going to come at all. If the pegasi had accomplished their task, the White Rose would not be swinging north of our prepared positions, not if they didn't want their rankers drowning in endless mudholes and mires. They'd already had several days of that treatment in the mess to our east. Hopefully they were more angry and desperate than cautious and pragmatic by this point.

And the General's troops had been careful to not build up their fortifications in an intimidating or obvious fashion. The lines of resistance were low, and subdued, and didn't look all that much different than the dykes and aboiteaus which had been there before the armsponies started digging. And the storms of the previous several days had soaked the ground everywhere around the Clearances except the Clearances themselves. From the mud-maddened viewpoint of the soggy enemy, we were standing on the only patch of dry land in several days march.

They had all the motivation in the world to drive us off that island of solid ground.

Our skirmishers had orders to fall back under any sort of display, that morning. There would be an end of the furious fighting for every last square inch of Cleared land. Our knocker was hung upon the door, our shield of heraldry was hanging beside the gate, Command was prepared to accept calling cards, and we were ready to accept morning house-calls. And we could hear the White Rose coming, fully prepared to exceed their allotted fifteen minutes, those boors.

They came booming, three regiments deep. Our skirmishers conceded the field, scrabbling across carefully concealed foot-bridges, and filing into the elevated trenchlines dug into the deep dykes which characterized the fields of the Clearances. The last ponies across the foot-bridges pulled away the planking as they fled, and the subtle magic of several of the Company's warlocks obscured their actions as they fled. The Company's magical strong suits was in illusion, and misdirection, and the indirect approach. We were hardly well-prepared for a set piece battle like this, but Gibblets and Obscured Blade had tilted the playing-surface as steeply as they could in our favour.

The advancing, muddy enemy was drawn up in massed units, shields interspersed with pike in a chequer-board formation. They would have been exposed terribly to our bowmares and the heavy bolt-throwers, if it weren't for those damn shields. The bolt-throwers opened up from the forward line of resistance, and the splatter of the bolts self-destructing upon the mystical shielding projected from those shield-units demonstrated the White Rose's stratagem for dealing with projectile fire. Each shield held by an earth-pony in the fore of the advancing regiments flared with etched runes. The enemy's runecasters had been very, very busy, carving dozens, perhaps hundreds of shield-spells into the symbolic wooden scuta.

But not all of the scuta had been created recently – it takes far too long to make even these minor mystical artifacts, and they, well, they age. I'm told by witnesses from the front-lines that a number of the scuta shattered within seconds of the bombardment, and holes quickly opened up in the general shield-wall.

And this is when the bowmares began their fire. A combined vexellation gathered from both the ranks of the Third and Fourth Cohorts, the bowmares massed together were almost numerous enough to produce a proper arrow-storm. Their fire tore through the visible gaps in the enemy shield-wall, and entire squads and platoons of the enemy collapsed under the weight of their arrows. The bolt-throwers continued to hammer away at the rest of the wall, keeping up the pressure.

That would have been that, if the enemy were fools. Even as their shocked regiments kept the pace of their advance, they wouldn't have reached the line of resistance intact under that sort of abuse. But the enemy weren't fools, and they had managed to bring forward their rocket batteries, at least a couple. The screaming howl of those gunpowder-launched spawn of tartarus was enough to loosen a pony's bowels, even from so far away as where I stood, miles away in the farmyard of my hospital. Far closer, for those armsponies in the line of fire, it must have been terrifying.

Far more so if the rockets had been in any sense accurate. The rockets flew all over the field, blasting holes in inoffensive swards of grass, naked soil, dykes, stretches of our fortifications, and the enemy's own formations without any sort of direction or discrimination. Shield-choruses drawn from the Third Cohort's ranks of swordsponies kept the return-fire from molesting the Company's bowmares, but two bolt-thrower crews were shot up by the enemy's rockets, and one crew was wiped out entirely, along with their war-engine.

The enemy might have shouted victory, and charged for the gap. If they hadn't caught their own supports' fire more heavily in the open than the loyalist battalions crouching in trench-lines. The shock of the friendly fire caused the advancing regiments to break and retreat, having inflicted precious little damage for the extent of their display.

But behind them, our forward observers saw twice their number of regiments forming ranks to repeat the assault. And that second assault, delivered around noon, found the traps and mires which we had intended for the first assault. And those regiments' rocketeers proved more capable of directing their fire than the morning brigade's had been. The second assault was a sea of blood and horror, and the White Rose spent a soul for every yard advanced.

Their credit was good for the assault.

Third and Fourth Cohort lost nine rankers and a corporal: earth pony mare, Short Bob; earth pony mare, Soil Foam; earth pony stallion, Foot Hill; caribou buck, Beaten Steel; jack, Braderie; jenny, Soie Fine; unicorn mare, Walnut Riser; unicorn mare, Osage Orange; unicorn mare, Ironwood; unicorn stallion, Corporal Iron Core. The Rennet regiment lost forty-five dead. And we lost the forward line of resistance.

The tanglevines and illusions plotted out by the warlocks protected the withdrawal of the battalions falling back from the burning ramparts of our shattered fortifications, and the random mudholes and quicksand pits bored by the inestimable Humus Brothers stopped the enemy surge dead while they worked out what was solid ground, and what would suck a squad right under the surface of what had looked like harmless sod.

The survivors of the first line of defense brought back with them vital information: the tartarus fire spread by the enemy's rockets could only be extinguished with damp soil – dry dirt would just ignite along with everything else. And there were definitely heavy magical hitters hidden among the rankers of the White Rose. Our ponies could have held the line even in the face of overwhelming numbers, if it weren't for the sudden intervention of some unseen hoof, that had started blasting holes out of the trenchline like something out of Bitter Ambrosia's Annals.

And Obscured Blade was insistent that the enemy warlocks weren't any such thing. He said they smelled like liches to him.

Having Overstayed Their Welcome

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FFMS017

The morning after our flight was a desperate sort of sleep, in which we grasped as hard as we could for rest, no matter what else was astir in the evil world around us. The Company and our superiors largely left us to our own devices, and left us to recover from the long night of keeping the enemy from the northern gates.

Having awoken not long after noon, I discovered the price paid by those that insist on sleeping through world-wrecking warfare. The Nightmare buried my sudden waking self with a pile of updates detailing our defeat in detail and the driving of our forward elements from their defensive posts. And the blood that had washed our troops backwards from the first line, was labeled in the notes, ‘expected'. Really? Alicorns damn it.

I crawled out of the nest which I had clawed from my exhaustion of the night before, and looked to see if there was anything I could do about the new situation. Whirlwind was still asleep, and so was Bad Apple. Cherie, on the other hand, was up, and jittery, and looking for something to do with all of that energy. I found her, stomping back and forth nearby, and we exchanged glances.

"Looking to get aloft?"

"Looking to get into it?"

And with that, we found my stained witch's gig, and got up into the air and overhead. The Nightmare grouched at the both of us, and pointed out that we weren't part of Command's plan for the day's operations, one way or the other. I just asked for a description of the northern flank, and verbally directed Cherie towards that flank.

Gaining our height, we spiraled upwards in the humid and sunny skies, the rainclouds having evaporated in the hot summer sun. Underneath Cherie's bat-winged expanse and my gig's heavy wicker, I stared down and watched as our loyalist forces scrambled backwards from the battle-zone, and the smoke and the flames rose from the battered ramparts of the overrun forward line of resistance. All such resistance was at an end, and if wasn't for the confusion on the ground, I think that the retreating regiment and cohorts would have been overrun by the victorious enemy.

The batteries of the second line and the bowmares of the Second Cohort began to play against the enemy units as they swept into the abandoned trenches and fortifications of the forward line as we swept forward, and you could see the rebel roll back in response. Our newly-assigned targets and goals were not the main battle-line, but rather to the north and even further northwards, but I directed Cherie to come in closer as we passed over the very hot battle-line.

I could see the ponies struggling in mud-hole after mud-hole, quicksand and traps and all the rest of it, scrambled and deranged like a mass of mud-daubed fools struggling in total chaos. Nopony was pushing forward whole units, and I couldn't even make out any batteries or organized units leading forwards. I made this observation via the Nightmare to Cherie, and I could feel her grinning, and asking me, soundlessly, for that shadowing lense. I looked up, and noted the position of the hard-edged sun still hours above the western horizon, and had to deny her request. It was just the wrong time for our contribution to the battle and the expectations of the Company. But still we spun downwards over the deranged advance of the enemy.

Surprisingly enough, their anti-air batteries failed to fire their expected rocketry at our clearly exposed selves, not even as blatant as I left us, holding all of my illusions in check for the expected spray of heavy fire. I had no idea what had kept their brutal counter-fire from raking us stem to stern, and tapped Cherie's traces on the proper line of descent. The closer we got to the flaming wreckage of the forward line of resistance, the stronger I felt the remnants of the illusions and the tangle-vines our seniors had left upon the battle-field. I seized those tangle-vines, having paid for their control as I usually do, and directed them for the throats and hooves of any White Rose within strangling distance of those doughy, redoubtable vines.

You could see from the air those vines as we arced overhead, gaining our distance as we broke our arc and began recovering our height. I don't know how much actual damage it did to those battered regiments trying to recover their organization, and direction in the face of advancing towards the second line of our resistance, but it certainly left them confused and baffled. We passed over the edge of the Clearances, and into our actual assigned aerial region not long after.

And there, indeed, was the enemy we had been assigned to deter, and to deal with. Ghouls, swimming and stumbling through the muddy fields north of the Clearances, were clearly visible here and there in the filth and the muck. Not too many, for the enemy just didn't have that many ghouls available to them, but just enough that it might have caused problems if they had ever managed to find our rear lines of operation, or our exposed flanks.

Cherie and I noted the clusters of ghoul-squads in their flailing about. There wasn't an awful lot either Cherie or I could do directly about them, the either of us. But it was enough to mark their positions, for later return flights. Collecting fire-bombs and other projectiles would be sufficient for later eradication passes. That was sufficient evil unto the day, as far as we were concerned.

The return to the depots was itself a sort of waste of time, but night was still hours away. And at least, the supply-ponies, prompted themselves by Company ponies themselves, and tied via the Nightmare, were able to load us up with those fire-bombs and other projectiles which were necessary for the extirpation of the rebel's undead on the flanks.

We got back into the air, and found those struggling ghouls, and I flung out our payload as carefully as I could, directing the individual sticks and javelins as I could with my own blood-magic. They went down… more easily than I had expected. Ghouls really didn't have much in the way of self-preservation, when it came down to aerial bombardment. It would have been better if we had Bad Apple with us, but I gathered from the princess radio that she and Whirlwind had paired up on the southern flank, after the two of them had discovered Cherie and I had left them to sleep in. The enemy had tried to test both flanks, and the permanent marshes of the Wirts had been teeming with as many ghouls as our northern flank had been, in our temporary mud-flats.

In between our two minor campaigns against the undead, the living fraction of the White Rose reorganized, and moved forward in the dying hours of that first day of battle, to address the second line of resistance. They discovered that the first line had been nothing but a notional gesture towards the true fortifications which were on offer in the second line. And their damned rocket-batteries were of no worth against the runecasting of the General of the North. They just splattered over her wards as if they were water dripping down the face of a wooden screen. They burned the soil and the sod in front of the second main line of resistance, as if it was nothing more than a rainstorm over a well-thatched roof.

And as the sod burned, the sky behind our defenses glowed from the runaway sun, already fled over the edge of the world. The enemy's regiments inched beyond their captured fortifications, but the onrushing darkness left them without any guide but the darksight-destroying flames of their own support fire.

We could see the White Rose as they maneuvered into the drylands, and made proper observations of where and how they had concentrated in the narrow swathes of land between the muddy flanks and the hidden marshes and swamps and quicksand pits our allies had seeded throughout the fields upon which the enemy was trying to concentrate.

We and Bad Apple and Whirlwind requested permission to bombard the enemy positions as the darkness gathered, and the heavy swamping storms formed yet again on the northern flank. The pegasi were gathered once again, and without the need to protect the Army's positions in front of the second line of resistance, they were building up a real stem-winder of a storm, a monster, unrestricted, intended to wash as many of the White Rose into the Housa as they possibly could.

Winging in ahead of the heavy gusts, we flung bombs and javelins and chaos in front of us, and behind flew Bad Apple and Whirlwind, leaving a fury of fire and tartarus. None of the rocketry batteries tried to fling defenses in our faces that night; they just couldn't get themselves in proper order. Perhaps they had the ordnance somewhere to the rear of the enemies' positions, but it must have been impossible to get those tubes far enough forward to defend their exposed assault units against our attack.

They scattered like prey animals. Into the muck, into the filth, into the quick-sand. We did little actual damage, but the chaos in the darkness was enough to scatter their assault units into every drowning mudhole in their captured acreage.

Trampled Underhoof

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SBMS153

The fighting filled my surgical tent, then my farmhouse, then the field-barn. The orderlies were putting up new tents for the later arrivals, and my original staff of doctors were starting to fade, even with the ‘shifts' I ordered. I found out afterwards they had just ignored orders, and several of them kept working until they dropped. We lost ponies that should have lived if it weren't for the sleep-deprived hacks that had refused rest when it was prescribed.

I sort of wanted to buck them in the privates, but the fools weren't actually in my command, merely my responsibility. I could only express my disapproval via vigourous discussion. I was glad that these discussions were held outside, though, the mess would have compromised sanitation inside the tents. The cringing, sniveling - bah.

It was about this time that the staff from Rye Daughter's second field hospital arrived on scene, and provided an actual rested cadre of surgeons to take over for my herd of imbeciles. They didn't bring their ambulance-drivers or orderlies with them – somepony had to pack up the field equipment and look over the recovering wounded at their previous site – but that mattered less than the fresh surgeons. Orderlies and the ambulance-drivers generally have more sense than the damnable doctors.

The night after the fall of the first line of resistance was a busy one on the front lines. Few casualties, thankfully, so we were able to catch up with the aid of Rye's ponies. From all accounts, the enemy's victory and subsequent rough handling by the aerial cohort and the ‘night witches' had left them in chaos, and they didn't get organized quickly enough to storm the second line of resistance in the pre-dawn hours, as any soldier worth her salt would have preferred.

The General and her ponies would have been ready for them, anyways. The second line of resistance was actually the main line of resistance, and was posted heavily on both flanks in a pair of abandoned hamlets that dominated the heart of the Clearances. Many of the local tenant-farmers had lived within these two villages, and worked the fields and improvements across this stretch of reclaimed land for the local baroness. You can look the names up elsewhere, I suppose, but nopony other than those missing tenants and their absent landlady cared about that noise. They were all gone, not a soul were to be found when the troops moved in and began dismantling everything we didn't need for the defenses. Barns and silos were torn down to provide planking and protective roofing for communication-trenches, shingles stolen to line defensive berms and bastions.

By the time of the first heavy assault by the White Rose in those middle-morning hours, the twin hamlets looked like they'd been worked over by a tandem team of rampaging dragons and ravenous parasprites. Many of the buildings were nothing more than skeletal walls and piles of discarded plaster.

That first heavy assault didn't really get a close look at the fortifications, because unlike the first line of defense, this one was well-protected by the General's runes, and heavily ponied. Elements of five regiments held the trenches and bastions, and were well-protected against the barrage of rocketry with which the enemy tried to plaster our troops. The great runes flared, and the shields went up, and the detonations of gunpowder and fiery death-magic englobed the forward arcs of those invisible shields like the sun touching down upon a parched earth.

The fires oozed down the surface of that great working, and where they touched earth, great clouds of steam burst outwards away from the loyalist defenses. If the rebel regiments had not paused well back from the bombardment, they would have been par-boiled in their barding by the back-wash of their own tartarus-fires. As it was, accounts and the condition of the recovered corpses rather suggest that they made their subsequent charges more than a little flash-fried, and this may have explained why their initial push was so uncertain.

That first charge got nowhere near any donkey, caribou, or pony of the North. A number of scutae-bearers fell to the forward fires of the bolt-throwers, but once their own shields started to break up, the enemy paused and fell back a bit. With what seems to have been at least eight regiments on the field, they paused, and went to ground at only a little bit of return-fire. The ground-troops did not appear eager, I am told.

Or perhaps they were waiting for the heavy engines to be brought forward in support. A dozen machines were rolled forward, with two or three scutae-bearers protecting each, and were hammered into the treacherous soil. Treacherous, I say, because only eight made it to solid ground, their sisters dropping into various mud-pits and hidden mire-trenches, their scabbed-over surfaces having been thick enough to carry the tread of infantry hooves, but not nearly thick enough to support the weight of the great machines.

When I think of the sweat, blood, and tears it must have taken to have hauled those machines all the way from wherever they had been keeping them – unimaginable. But then, I'm told, the beasts in the traces weren't the sort that bled or cried. Some accounts insist that there were ghouls hauling the heavy war-machines through the crowds of living rebel soldiers. I can't be sure, this was not seen by any Company witness in either direction. Well, none that weren't crazed by exhaustion and battle-madness, but more on that anon.

The appearance of those war-machines induced the General, who was on scene, standing within one of the bastions in the centre of the complex, to order the seals broken on the barrels full of specially prepared projectiles, and the bow-mares and bolt-throwers began firing off her apprentices' rune-carved weaponry. And true return fires draped over the shielding protecting those great ballistae.

A few of the rebel shields broke under our fire, and the machines flashed into fire and shrapnel before even getting off a shot. The rest of them began thumping away, and heavy projectiles larger than ponies began slamming against the runic wards of the main line. Additional scutae-bearers advanced to defend their heavy ballistae from the battering they were receiving from our own devices and the unicorns.

The enemy infantry began creeping forward under this supporting fire, platoons and companies shying away from the front of the war-machines themselves. At first, the officers in the regiments of the line didn't even realize this was a second assault, it crept along so softly, so slowly under the exchange of fires, like a tidal surge. But still they crept.

The advancing regiments forming inadvertent columns of advance as they crept across the contested grounds. And some of them hit the secret mud-holes and quicksand traps still seeded across those open, smoldering fields.

The advance gained speed as it was noticed by the commanders of the line, and fire was directed upon the enemy infantry as they came forward. They fragmented yet again as some columns of advance stalled in mud and quicksand, leaving perhaps six disordered regimental bodies to shuffle forward, leaning against the fire of the lesser bolt-throwers placed on the flanks of several of the bastions along the line, the crews of which couldn't find a bearing on a vulnerable enemy machine of their own, having turned their fire against the advancing infantry. The heavy bolt-throwers continued their duel with the rebels' heavy ballistae, and at this point the runic shields over several of our bastions cracked and broke under fire. Unicorn shield-choruses in place took over these sections of the defense, posted in expectation of failures such as this. The General herself reinforced her own grand bastion, and it continued its fire unmolested throughout the whole of the day of battle.

At a signal, the massed bowmares of the Company crouching in the heavy-bermed bastions likewise turned their fire against the advancing assault columns. The van of the on-rushing rebel infantry melted away like wax, but the pressure of the charge as it gained its momentum built until a wave of desperate, battle-maddened pike-ponies hit the awaiting loyalist pike and spear with an irresistable force. Not swiftly, but insistent and unrelenting.

A true push of pike ensued, and our infantry lines sagged back from the ramparts as the press of bodies pushed the dead and dying rebels at the fore over the edge. The enemy clambered over their own wounded and dying, and pressed onwards. The officers of each regiment along the line sent in their reserves, and our northerners pushed their own weight against the screaming horde of easterners. The line firmed, but didn't move.

Each incursion along the line was isolated from every other one by the nature of their advance, and a half-dozen half-circles of bleeding and dying ponies screamed and howled at each other over the cacophony; as the precious minutes ticked away, those half-circles slowly merged. Two Company cohorts, placed in preparation on the flanks, descended upon the stalled regimental tangles from both the north and the south, searching for the rear of those boiling columns of desperate, hungry, heavily armed rebels.

Fuller Falchion led his ponies in a masked charge from the fresh ruins of the northern hamlet, hidden from enemy view by half-demolished walls. The Second Cohort, fresh to battle, formed a perfect wedge of couched lances, and cut into the northernmost regiment of White Rose regulars. They just fell to pieces before the onslaught of that sword-stallion's ponies, and if the enemy had been one continuous front, I think that would have been the end of the assault – they would have rolled up, and they would have preserved their numbers for another push or two perhaps. As it was, they simply captured the whole of that fragment of the enemy assault, and Fuller Falchion got bogged down trying to extract himself and his cohort from their victorious chaos. The Second Cohort lost four brothers and sisters to the fight for the northern flank. Smooth Stone and Buried Bullion, earth ponies male and female, mortally wounded in the initial crush, of lances crashing against the dense-packed enemy. Point Parfait, that Company jenny who crushed beneath the recoil of the mass, as her section-mates swung away; the Queen of Hearts, that silent caribou doe who never had words for anypony who was not a section-mate, fell cut in a thousand places, bled out from the punishment she absorbed at the head of the wedge, the punishment she took for her sisters and brothers.

The experience of Smooth Draw and the Fourth Cohort, emerging from the tumble-down walls of the southern hamlet was not nearly so happy, when they accidentally exposed their right flank, and it caught the eye of a rebel war-engine crew. They were heavily raked by enemy fire before Smooth Draw was able to form an impromptu shield chorus from her few sword-stallions to protect her exposed ponies. Five Company ponies were lost to the projectile fire before protections were thrown up – jack, Petit Marche; earth pony stallion, Green Furrow; earth pony stallion, Grave Dirt; caribou buck, Gestörter Schmutz; jenny, Collier Tourné – all knocked out of the ranks by the heavy bolts of the enemy's ballistae. It weakened the push upon the enemy flank, but eventually, after that wobbly shield-chorus recovered Smooth Draw's flank, they were able to recover and return to the task.

Another three Company ponies died in crushing the rebel left flank, and few prisoners were taken on this side of the field. A jack named Handsome Stranger bled out from a hidden wound found too late; an undersized earth pony mare named Offside died of a simple stab wound in the press, and another much larger earth pony mare named ironically Pintsize died from more than a few such wounds.

The mass in the middle between those two cohort-advances blended into a sagging wedge of splintered spears and pike, of blood and weakening ponies. The easterners' heavier barding and weaponry might have told against the northerners' light armour and spears, if it were not for the fact that they were hungry, and weak, and tired. They pressed back the centre, and it cracked in the middle, where the northern militia was weakest.

As had been expected.

The Captain, with the Third Cohort, had been held back in the centre, in expectation of… well, not something quite this chaotic, but some sort of strike through the middle. They had been pulled back to get some rest after days on the skirmish-line, and a week of open-field fighting before that. They had losses to avenge, and blood thundering in their ears and their eyes.

The Company standard-bearer strode forward of the van of the advance, that long lanky orange colt with a spare banner streaming back from our great black war-lance, and the Captain behind him. And she bellowed Feufollet's battle-cry, and three hundred throats echoed the Captain's words, and they charged the face of the surging enemy centre, a small black-barded wedge of lowered lances and high keening cries.

Carrot Cake's lowered Company war-lance never even touched an enemy throat. The sudden appearance of an apparition of devil-eyed monsters in front of them, at the very moment of desperate victory, was just too much. The rebel vanguard broke and ran, and crawled right back over the pike-shafts of those piled up behind them. Their centre collapsed in a tangle of limbs and pike-shafts and bodies, the rear still pushing forward, and those in the middle were trampled into the mud, both by those in the front trying to get away, and those in the rear still trying to get into the fight.

The surviving regiments pushed back in again from each side, and the Third Cohort sealed the breach with a crash I could hear from the forward triage stations I was organizing in the little tent-city behind the line. Once they started running, the assault-columns collapsed into a mob, and those that tried to stay the panic were trampled, and those in the rear fled to their own lines without even waiting for the survivors to tumble back. Many were crushed against the rear and side-berms of the surrounded bastions of the middle, whose sword-stallion and bowmare and axe-pony defenders wrought a terrible price upon any who tried to force their way over their walls.

The heavy bolt-throwers never ceased their duel with the now-battered rebel war-machines, whose defenders scattered as they were overrun by the fragments of the assault.

Three thousand ponies died in the course of a long noon, most of them rebel soldiers. The finest and strongest regiments of the White Rose, the strong ones, the brave ones - they died in that slaughter-pen. Nopony with weapons in their hooves were spared, and many couldn't drop their weapons in that ugly crush. Later, when I examined the field of corpses, I found more than a few that seem to have simply asphyxiated, too crushed to breath, or just frightened to death. We removed the heads just to be sure. That litchfield would have been vomiting fresh ghouls into the world inside of a week. But that's a story for another day.

The northerner regiments that held the line, paid a heavy price for doing so. Nearly three hundred dead in the press, and another six hundred wounded, enough to overwhelm my triage-station and the field-hospital surgeries. The Division of the Reserve fought and died on the line, and suffered heavily for it. They were in no mood for mercy when the enemy broke, and more than a few surrendering enemy that fell into their hooves never made it back to the prisoner-camps, but by and large, the surviving officers kept the troops under control. Brigadier De Villers' body was found at the centre of the line, half-buried by the corpses of her own ponies and those of the enemy. Her brevetcy lasted about forty-eight hours. She would be burned a Brigadier.

The surviving surrendered prisoners were mostly taken into custody by a regiment of the Middle Division brought forward to secure the rear area. Nearly a thousand were taken alive, enough to fill multiple stockades. The Company cohorts and Reserve regiments were replaced by regiments from the Middle and Left Division, leaving only the crazed inhabitants of the battered bastions, still intact, still fighting, punishing any rebel who dared to approach the abandoned, half-wrecked ballistae across the bloodied field.

The Captain and Major Hardhoof tried to get them to stand down, but they kept to their positions. Surprisingly few casualties came out of those bastions; the battle had just broken around them like the sea around the boulders of the shore. The General finally waved off her subordinates, and told them to let the defenders of the bastions finish what they had started. Many of the bowmares and bolt-thrower crews didn't collapse until dusk swept over the quieting battlefield; dusk, and the pegasi brought us a soaking, sodden rain, that washed the filth of the fight into the marshes to the south.

The Nightmare On The Wing

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FFMS018

We missed out on the big fight that afternoon, living on the evening shift. Even the nominal day-witches were largely left out of the magic and the heavy lifting; the simple unicorns, with their shield choruses and arrow-storms swept the day. The bowmares fired their horns dry, and the sword-stallions fought a battle the likes of which the Company rarely saw.

The warlocks mostly sat on their haunches and watched their tangle-vines get trampled into pulp by overwhelming columns of ponies, and their phantasms overwhelmed by saturation fire and chaos. The subtle methods of the Company witch were swallowed up in the grand killing without a burp.

Which is probably why the older witches joined Bad Apple, Cherie and I on the evening shift, looking no doubt to trade a little exhaustion for a second bite at relevance within the Company. Gibblets and the others needed to prove to themselves, I believe, that they weren't merely the barking dogs of the Company caravan.

There had been a lot of rocket batteries in the day's fighting – were there any still alive in the night? We flew dangerously through the darkness, trying to find the threats still lurking in the black. My magic was best-suited to this sort of casting blind through the haystack, finding the poisoned needles before they pricked our hooves.

I would have thought that Whirlwind would have traded off with one of her sisters, or perhaps that her sergeant would have ordered her to stand down and let the rotation continue. But something mysterious had occurred on the feathered side of the fence, and there she was again when I went to my gig, squatting patiently in her traces. Later that night, we coursed through the black, my trickling tendrils of thought combing the distant, sodding surface below.

We rather expected the still-equipped, still-supplied batteries to be towards the rear of the enemy deployment, but the enemy was in terrible chaos that night, and it was honestly difficult to find a rear and a front, supports and infantry all merged together and nopony seeming to be working to untangle their glorious messes.

The occasional rocket rose into the night, to burst over their misery, but the resulting fires were from flares. No additional killing-rockets rose to challenge whatever griffins or pegasi might be spotted by the rebel rocketeers by the floating spots of glare. The low, raining clouds no doubt contributed heavily to this failure to detect our overflights, as we could simply rest on the heavy banks of cloud, and ignore the small holes burned into the cloud-deck like lit cigarillos scorching a paper map.

The few hours spent provoking rocket launches at least gave us some targets for the beginning of the night's harrying, and we stooped upon the offending landscape en masse, two or three witches in their gigs following as closely behind the diving pegasi as our charioteers and the construction of our wicker baskets allowed.

We crouched behind our flights of feathered brethren, desperately ready to cover their flanks when the inevitable replies flew up to meet them with gunpowder and death-magic. I had shared my discovered tricks, the knack in capturing control of ces petits bâtards, with my elders. We had no idea if the knack was transferable, but Gibblets had been optimistic.

Few opportunities to test the elder warlock's happy theories arose, as our strikes against the apparent rocket-battery locations came up dry, or at least, more slippery-sodden than not. A few rebel ponies were killed in the rain of javelins and the squalls of flashing wing-blades, and more were scattered into the soaked darkness, but no great batteries of racked gunpowder missiles were found. We combed the night with blade and javelin, and their resistance was like that of a flock of pea-hens harried by raptors.

After a while, we re-grouped, and conferred through the medium of the Nightmare relay. Obscured Blade and the Lieutenant decided to shift our tactics, and concentrate on harrying the increasingly disordered enemy. We shifted from protecting the assault-flights, to multiplying them. The flights of two dozen, became phantom-battalions of two hundred, and each of our witchlings put their own wicked touches upon their night-haunt legions. My winged furies wore the face of the Nightmare-horrors I remembered most from the Night of Echoes, but Otonashi's flights were terrible glowing wisps of tartarus on the wing. And the less said about the nightmares of the Crow, Uncle Blade and Gibblets, the better.

Bad Apple's 'phantasms' were simply alicorns of flame, burning through the night. And there was nothing intangible about them at all; they set fire to everything they touched, and every single one wore Cherie's laughing face.

Less than two hundred pegasi and fewer than fifty griffins, supported by a witches-coven of about a half-dozen, lit into the night, and hunted an army of more than ten thousand. Our night was darkness and fire, and they ran in terror, no-where standing to fight. An army proud with banners, who had smashed the Northern first line of defense, who had marched into arrow-storms without flinching, and thrown away thousands of lives in a stubborn noon-day assault under the proud sun, ran and hid in muddy holes from the terrors stalking in the night.

After a while, we gave up trying to find the enemy in his ranks, and just started seeking out camp-fires. The pegasi worked out their jealousy of their ground-brethren's great battle in those late-night hours. Relatively few White Rose fell in these clashes in the black, I do not think, but I could not be everywhere, and even with dark-sight, that night was particularly secret and obscured. I do know that we didn't lose a single Company mare or stallion to enemy action, nor did we even suffer anything more serious than a scattering of scratches and sprains. It was everything I could have ever wished for, the sort of one-sided, bloody romp which young jennies dream of.

There were surprisingly few supplies or carts to burn and destroy. The rear of the enemy assault, which should have been full of tents and wagons and teamsters and support-elements, that expected echo of our army's own vast and growing 'tail', was almost not to be found. There were scatterings of tents and a number of carts here and there, but somehow most of the White Rose's material self was missing from the field. Had they truly lost that much to their enforced mud-marches? Such a catastrophic loss of equipment, to nothing but a little bit of rain and some mud. Even I, who had once nearly drowned in a mud-hole, was surprised at how utterly the enemy's logistics must have collapsed, to leave them this naked in the dark.

They tell me that Obscured Blade was in his element, and drove his charioteer to the edge of exhaustion as they followed upon the very tail-tips of the coursing pegasi. You'd think a pony as ancient and aged as that old 'bokor' would have been feeling that night in his bones, but you'd be wrong. His charioteer told me later that the damp and the dark just made that old twist of leather supple as youth. The night took twenty years away from the ancient, and he hunted like a youth of barely seventy summers.

And he was feeling the night so lightly, because Obscured Blade had a target, had a goal. The rest of us were up there in the darkness, to hunt the rebel, the many-hoofed enemy in all her numbers. We were chasing the herded many, and our targets were legion. His target was Legion Herself, the dead mages he insisted were commanding and controlling the White Rose horde. I had only heard a little of Uncle Blade's convoluted theories, but I was already tired of his new-found obsession.

He had some sort of ulterior purpose in chasing 'enemy liches', but I wasn't sure I wanted to dig until I found out what that purpose might be. If it were truly pernicious, wouldn't the Nightmare winkle it out of him? We were none of us alone in our villainy; we always had somepony to look over our shoulders. It was both the blessing and the curse of the New Company. And even Uncle Blade, that icon of the Old Company, had to bow his stiff neck before the authority of the Princess and the Nightmare.

The passage of Cherie and Bad Apple could be seen in the distance from quite a long ways away, as they burned trails of smoldering destruction behind their battle-group, fires that the soaking rain struggled to extinguish. Their path criss-crossed the enemy's territory, and must have scattered the rebel more than any other thing we did that night.

By the time that the pre-dawn gloaming began to supplement Bad Apple's furnace-light, we were having more and more difficulty finding any enemy to harry. We certainly had not killed many of them, but they had just – disappeared. The combined efforts of the pegasi and the Humus clan and that week's heavy fighting had left the landscape pocked with mudholes, trenches, and wreckage, and the rebel had scattered and gone to ground, often quite literally.

Two hundred and fifty stalked the night, and ten thousand fled and hid in mud-holes. This is what it means when the Nightmare is on the wing.

The Butchers' Harvest

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SBMS154

No matter how large the medical corps you build, how well-staffed, no such unit is prepared for the flood of agony and terror which is the butchers-bill of a major battle. Like a farmer who has failed to diversify her crops, and has put all of her acres into one single cultivar, our harvest comes at us all at once, in an irresistible torrent.

This was the wall of blood and shattered bone which I watched approach my ponies from my post at the forward triage stations the day of the grand assault in the Clearances. We did the only thing we could do – charge our scapels, square our shoulders, and meet the 'enemy' at a dead run.

Triage is a game of speed, of rapid-fire decision-making. You look at this pony, and write her off. Set her to the side, if she's lucky, her stretcher-bearers might give her last few minutes some company. You look at this jack, and you see, if you have eyes to see, that his fore-legs are written off, but the rest of him is salvageable. Will he survive the dying of his legs, if you push him back to the surgical tents? Yes? Push him to the other side, to await his ambulance-ride to the rear, and turn a deaf ear to his howls of agony. You look at this buck, and see, if you have eyes to see – he will not live to make it to the surgeons, but maybe, maybe –

And the triage-station becomes for those precious few seconds an open-air surgery. Needle, thread, gauze, padding – enough to keep that open artery from pouring the buck's life-blood out into the super-saturated soil of that muddy land. Not nearly enough to fix him, or even keep him alive. Just enough to keep him alive long enough for the ambulance-ride back to the surgeons.

Move on.

These two are barely hurt, put them aside for the eventual ride back, but not one of the precious ambulances. They can catch an empty wagon-ride and get their bones set when time allows. That one, though – she's got a damp patch under her caparison – bleeding out from a secret tear, and would have just walked a half-mile back to the hospital and keeled over dead, with nopony the wiser. More precious thread, more befouled needles.

We need a boiling-station. Get an orderly to take care of it. Send back an order to the swineherds, to start butchering. The soupstocks won't be sufficient the way we were going that day. What does that have to do with anything? I can explain later. For now – another wave of stretcher-bearers.

Repeat it all over again. And again. And again. And we're using the fresh-boiled needles and rags in place of gauze, and the wounded just keep coming. And coming. They start to pile up in front of the stations, and there's just too few of me, and not enough of the rest.

So I choose to multiply me. The Spirit helps me. Helps us, in her guise as the Princess. The trick I had performed in previous weeks? Of ghosting my hooves' skill upon the hooves of Company ponies in the field, to save their brothers and sisters I couldn't be near in time? I found Company carters, and stretcher-bearers, and orderlies – and I conscripted them to be my eyes, my hooves, my mouths. The militia-regulars, our allies – they could handle the simple tasks of stretcher-bearing, carting, acting as orderlies.

The Princess cupped her blue-feathered wings over us all, and I was no longer one, single, one-eyed zebra with a limp. I was ten ponies, and every one saw with my seeing eyes, and worked with my hooves' dexterity, and ordered in my knowing voice.

And the odds flipped back in our favor. A moment did not become ten moments, but the same moment ten times, and when one paused, she or he could contribute understanding to those of us who were overwhelmed, too overburdened to pause to think. There was always somepony else right over your shoulder, to do your thinking for you.

And the triage wore on, as the stubborn summer sun broke through the heavy clouds here and there to put bright light upon our mud and gore and misery. The baskets outside the stations filled up with crushed bone and pulped flesh that had once been a proud soldier's hoof, or her leg below the cannon. Or her detached long-lobed jenny's ear. We sent back the surviving wounded lighter for their burdens carved away, those bits of themselves which never would again twitch to the mind and soul's demand. If thine hoof offendeth thee, cut it off – we cut off so many we lost count.

In the end, it all was a game of preservation of life, of maintaining blood within the equine body. We have no way to bring back the life-blood once it has leached from the burst vessel, to replace that which is lost. I've read of mad experiments of zebra and unicorn and griffish surgeons, of their attempts to transfer living blood from one pony to another, to reintroduce spilled blood to lacking body. None I've ever heard that were successful.

The only trick I've ever learned to stave off the horrible weakness that comes from a body being bled white, is to induce that body to go into overdrive to replace the lost blood. There are potions – dangerous, reserve-devouring potions, which can send the marrow into wild over-production, to produce entire pints of living blood in short hours, or days. To keep them on those potions for more than a day and a half, however, would and does cause livers and spleens to burst. Can't keep it going forever, and you have to hydrate the tartarus out of them.

You also have to feed that body's resource-stocks, to get them all the nutrition they need to build all of that blood. And you can't be a cringing herbivore about the matter. Blood is blood, and its best feed-stock is other blood, or flesh, or marrow if you can get it. And most ponies are too civilized to indulge in cannibalism this side of the undead. Which leaves… swine. Pigs. Pork soup, because if you try to feed the wounded flesh, they're gonna throw it right back up again, because I don't care how atavistic and brutal your soldiers are, most ponies just have something against a meat diet. Picky eaters, I know, but there it is.

The Company brought several herds of swine down from Rime, and picked up a few more along the road. We hired on a couple eccentric swineherds to manage the herds, and they were generally more than willing to act the butcher when it came time to thin or even decimate their flocks of pigs. Nopony actually likes pigs, after all. They're filthy creatures, and dumber than the foul shit they leave everywhere.

That evening, the swine-herds turned to their secondary professions, and butchered an entire herd of swine. Their bloody harvest went into the cook-pots, and they rendered those pigs down to the base-stock of a thousand meals a day, feed-stock for all those soldiers bled dry before we could stitch their wounds closed.

Finally, finally the wounded stopped coming through, and we could – I could let loose, let go. The Princess helped me unclench my jaw, guided me to give up my death's-grip upon the minds and bodies of my triage-aides. I gasped in shame when I realized how tightly I had bound them all to my will. All I could do was bow my head before my staff and my volunteers, and beg their forgiveness. Some of them looked a bit wild-eyed after our common ordeal, but none took the opportunity to beat me down into the blood-soaked floor-boards for my abuse of their trust in Company order and the need of the moment. I sort of wished that one of them had done something, said something.

I had grossly overstepped my bounds, and I felt like I needed some sort of – I don't know. Correction? The Spirit refused to indulge my masochistic need for punishment.

And so, we got to cleaning out our mess, recovering those tools and materials which could be used again, the next time the Army found a battle, or some other way to paint the landscape with blood and viscera.

For those on the front lines, battle is something blood-stirring, a matter of adrenaline, of vigour, of assertion of will over the will over others. For ponies like me, battle is a slaughterhouse, and I'm the one that has to hose down the shop floor after the butchers' harvest is complete.

Learning How To Sleep Anywhere Is The Beginning Of Wisdom

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FFMS019

The highest rank of our flights were bathed in the rays of the sun as we rose up into dawn from the remnants of the night and our long hunt. The other witches and I let loose our phantasmic terrors one by one, and they winked out of existence as we rose flight by flight into the light, as if the creatures of the night were being banished from this earth by the touch of the dawn.

We put on a proper show for any rebels cowering in the mud-pits and flooded trenches and hidey-holes they had found to shelter them from the wrath of the Nightmare. I imagined their wide, pin-pricked-pupil eyes staring up into the light of onrushing day, watching their nemesis returning into the darkness which spawned her.

Our little display of theatrical brio complete, the Lieutenant led her troops home, reduced to the mere physical and mortal wings and limbs of the ponies and griffins of the aerial cohort. With the dawn behind us, each flight bent upon their descent curves, gyring westward, homeward. Down towards fields in which each section's wagon-homes were parked. The witches' conveyances were taken by their drivers to the unified camp that Throat-Kicker and a number of civilian carters had put together next to the ranks of the aerials' cart-tents; all but for me and Whirlwind.

We were carrying the battered body of one of our griffins, a hen named Greta who had landed poorly in one last pre-dawn pass and had either sprained a couple things, or possibly broken a limb or two. I wasn't entirely sure – that sort of thing was more Rye Daughter's brief, and Sawbones had never provided me any more training in medical aid than a standard Company pony receives.

Well, that, and what I've read in his unfinished chapters of his Book. For a pony who is so hard on overly-technical digressions in pages intended for the Annals, he is surprisingly prone to rattling on. Anything to talk about other than other ponies' private lives, the prude.

We delivered the battered griffin to the theoretical custody of the surgeons of the main field-hospital, but we actually ended up leaving her in the calm hooves of a Rennet donkey, a soldier turned orderly who seemed to be taking care of business in those early hours. I told Whirlwind that if she wanted to just park the gig somewhere convenient, I could walk home; I wanted to track down Rye and see what the last few days had looked like from her perspective.

When I found Rye Daughter, she was passed out in a cot near the front of a tent full of snoring and very, very blood-stained ponies. I looked around at my master Sawbones' surgical staff, all of them dead to the world, and I wondered who was taking current casualties. As I turned to leave, the old bear himself came shuffling into sight, heavy bags under his one remaining eye, blood-stained from dock to poll, as if he had been bathing in the stuff.

"Boss! I hope you're not going to lay down in a perfectly clean cot looking like that. Showers! We haul them from place to place and across dreadful muddy tracks for reasons other than their decorative appeal!"

"Ah. Apprentice. I hear you had an eventful night?"

"You did? From whom?"

"Well, the usual way I suppose. She's always whispering in my ear anymore. Constant updates, you know. I… don't think I've been paying proper attention, though. You may have to help me out with some of my material later on, when we've all more sleep than this. I gather that they'll be coming at us again this morning, or maybe in the afternoon?"

I blinked in confusion, not sure how he had arrived at that totally inaccurate assumption.

"Boss, I think you really need some sleep, if that's where you're at in the current state of affairs. Far as I could tell last night, the enemy has disappeared into the rough. The ones we couldn't find and kill, spent the night hiding in muddy holes. Well, I think. A surprising number of mudpits and quicksand holes were showing all sorts of lifesign by my magics, all over the field. But we couldn't see tail nor mane of any of them, really. The ones that didn't run for it, if you ask me. We didn't cast all that far back into their backfield, maybe there's some intact elements a quarter-day's march back?"

"What? Hey, you, yes you," he said to empty air. "How is it that I'm apparently working on fifteen-hour-old information, you blue nag?" I didn't see the Princess he must have been talking to, but it had to be her, because he would never abuse the Cherie-aspect that way, and the Nightmare would have never have put up with it. I can't say I approved of his manners, to be honest. Didn't seem right, didn't seem righteous. I found out later just how terrible the conditions had been in the forward surgical stations, and why he was so short with the Princess, and why she had cut him out of the informational loop. But it was all rather disillusioning. One's master should not quarrel publicly with one's Princess.

I prodded him towards the long lines still crowding the pump-driven shower stations, and left him dozing against a pair of pegasi mares likewise asleep on their hooves, the three of them leaning against each other like a pony-tripod. Hopefully their fellows would wake them all up before they missed their turn at the showers.

The warlocks' encampment was beyond the showers a short trot, no more than a few minutes. My aching legs needed the respite from that long night spent crouching in my tiny gig-chair. It wasn't particularly taxing to sit so, but after a while, your muscles start to cramp, and if you're not careful, your legs can fall asleep. So I might have been pronking a bit on the way to our home away from not-really-home. Hey, I'm young enough, I can get away with that sort of thing. I may have caught a few dirty looks, though.

Dance Hall had been the closest we all had had to a home for a fairly long time, and that hadn't been all that long of a time, in retrospect. A few months more than we had spent up at the Palisades, or the string of fortifications before that. Home was returning to its old definition again, the company of fellow Company ponies, and a nest of blankets in a familiar wagon. I found my cart, with Otonashi already sleeping curled up against the carter who carried our goods and supplies around with him. I let them be, even though they both sprawled over the space I usually occupied in the wagon. I was young, I could sleep anywhere.

I wasn't ready to sleep, anyways. So I wandered. And my wandering brought me to the supply-wagons, and a dozing Throat-Kicker, looking fifteen years older than she should have, her wing-stump wrapped up tight. A single timber-weasel laid watchfully beside the invalided pegasus, curled up within the circle of her forehooves. They weren't exactly… friendly, but they knew who fed them, and who loved them. And though the salty older mare would never admit it, she was fond of her accidental charges. Almost as fond as she was of…

And there was the rest of the timber-weasels, piled up in a protective hedge around a passed-out thestral filly – almost a mare, these days. Cherie slept with a grin on her face, and gripped two of the larger timber-weasels by their high thorn-scruffs. I looked closer, and their empty-socketed eyeless hollows were narrowed like a pair of cats being stroked by an indulgent gran-mere. The other four were curled close around the thestral's wings and her lower legs, as if to protect her from thieves that might steal away their treasure, their prize.

Those animate shrubberies knew which side their rose-bush cuttings were buttered on, I had to admit.

I sighed, and found a drier patch of mud to sleep on. The timber-weasels might love Cherie and her maîtresse, but they knew well enough that I was a stingy hoof with the cuttings. They barely tolerated me, and certainly weren't safe to cuddle in my unconscious state.

I didn't get much more than four hours when a messenger arrived from command, demanding my presence at the operations tent.

"Can I get enough time to shower off this mud?"

"Jenny, they're not going to give a hoof-full of horseapples. Get over there soonest."

And so I got. The timber-weasels' captives were assured their proper sleep – that squirrelly messenger wasn't about to risk a cannon full of rose-thorns just to wake a half-grown filly like Cherie.

The operations tent was jumping, as it generally was in those urgent days. I looked about, searching for the Lieutenant or Gibblets to report to, someone to take the burden of interacting with the actual higher-ups. My eyes adjusted to the relative darkness of the tent, and I realized that the Captain, the General, a number of her colonels and brigadiers were all standing around a sand-table of the Clearances, and every single one of them had their muzzles turned to little old me in the tent-entrance, staring expectantly as if they expected – I don't know what.

"Captain, sir? Did you intend to send for Gibblets or the Lieutenant?"

"No, little donkey. Word is that you're the pony to talk to about what exactly happened last night over the enemy positions. Both Gibblets and the Lieutenant delegated you to make their case."

Good of them to tell me about it. Or at least, to have had the Princess brief me before this little ambush. Ah, bah.

I approached the sand-table, and began gesturing broadly, trying to remember all our sweeps, our little skirmishes, where we had found resistance, all the places we had found nothing at all, the veritable swiss cheese state of the enemy's positions at the beginning of the night, and the total collapse I had seen as dawn broke over the battlefield.

It all came and went quicker than I had expected, and I was done almost before I had started, it seemed afterwards. They asked question after question, and I answered what I could. My witch-talents suited me to this sort of reporting, it is true, and I handled the matter better than Bad Apple or Cherie might have, but an elder warlock could have done even better.

Brigadier Guillaime replaced me at the sand-table and continued the presentation. His regiments had been probing the front since dawn broke. "We honestly thought they had pulled back, and were getting ready to ambush our skirmish line. There's a lot of abandoned equipment in front of the main line, most of it wrecked, but not all of it. The officers commanding the skirmish line have been, waal – spooked is the word for it. Even the bodies are missing for the most part."

"You'll find them in the mudholes," I interjected without thinking. "They're there, some of them, the ones that didn't drown themselves or die of exposure. Some of them might even be stuck down there."

The entire conference turned to stare at me, and I blushed and allowed myself to be dismissed to a chair in the back of the tent. I listened absently to the rest of the meeting, half-dozing. A few hours had hardly been enough other than to just leave me groggy and ready to keel over if I hadn't been trained better than that. Obscured Blade's hickory switches had prepared me well enough for this, I will grant that to the miserable old horn-head.

They planned a major advance with the bulk of Brigadier Guillaime's regiments, with a hoof-full of Left and Right Division battalions in support. The rest of the Left Division was already casting forward from its supporting line to our left rear, where they had dug in a while back. A scattering of out-of-control ghouls had made their way to that flanking position, where they were easily destroyed by my doughy former ponies-in-arms. They didn't have any of the protection against the undead inherent in being a member of the Company, but they still were willing to face those pony-eating monsters. Good for them.

The regimental colonels and the brigadiers scattered to the four winds, to implement the afternoon's plans. I asked a Cherie-aspect to watch for me, and bring me to awareness if somepony needed me, and then I got some urgently needed rest.

As it turned out, nopony needed me. I awoke a number of hours later, awakened not by the pocket princess, but rather the hesitant tromp of a steady stream of hoof-steps outside the tent. I followed a pair of the General's aides outside, and we marveled at the column of mud-caked prisoners being marched past the operations tent by northern regulars in full panoply, spears at the ready. I have never seen soldiers so visibly un-mared as this collection of unfortunates. Exhausted, coated mane, tail and coat in dried mud, wild-eyed and spooking at every shadow and dark corner – they looked like they were being led to their own executions.

I couldn't resist; I cast my dark-sight spell on myself with a slight pinking of my fetlock on a spur, and gave them the full effect of the old thestral eye.

The guard detail gave me a real earful later after they recovered the semi-escaped prisoners from where they had fetched up after their stampede - mostly tangled up in the tents and wagons of the depot across the way from operations. I didn't think it was that big of a deal. I'm pretty sure they would be even more docile for their guards afterwards, those terrified prisoners of war. Especially after I grinned my sharp-toothed grin at them in apology for scaring them.

Foals In A Haunted Wood

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SBMS155

As much as our casualties had strained my medical corps, it was as nothing to what the enemy had suffered. After a few days, the chaos in the recovery wards – scattered across ten acres of farm and homestead, in buildings, under canvas, whatever we could do to keep them out of the sun and weather, and sanitary – had subsided. Not that I was there to relax and bask in the job well-done.

As soon as we could, Rye Daughter and I passed the recovering patients into the ranking hooves of our most reliable doctors. I had made sure they were both ranking, and reliable, by handing out brevets with an utter disregard for military and professional protocol. The Middle Division's medical section was currently being run by a brevet-major apothecary, and the Reserve, a likewise brevetted former junior-captain jenny right out of the University of Rime. The rest of them were sufficient to their responsibilities, and so I left them all to the task of keeping our many wounded from succumbing to wound-fever or bloodloss.

Rye and I had a more pressing medical task. Not even a punishing, brutal battle like that which had torn apart the Clearances slaughters everypony, annihilates the losing army. I can't speak to mythical battles like that great envelopment-slaughter at Canntae, but every big fight I've ever had reliable testimony about or been witness to, have been a matter of slaughter to the breaking-point, of butchery until nerve fails for one side or the other, and sometimes, both at the same time. And thus was the case of the second battle of the Clearances. The White Rose fought, until they ran out of nerve. They left thousands dead upon the field, but they had been many thousands in number when they still had banners to march proudly beneath.

The balance of that shattered army now lay scattered across at least three districts that we could find, and those beaten ponies who had surrendered so far to our threats and blandishments. The rebels captured in Leveetown were now joined in their expanding stockades by first hundreds, then thousands of half-starveling prisoners, more than a few wounded or ill in one way or the other.

It was a recipe for epidemics, a threat to the guards as well as the prisoners. So Rye and I packed up and hoofed it over to the empty town northwest of the sprawling depots which had sprung up overnight in the fields and farmyards west of the Clearances. Rye wondered where all the civilians had gone, but I'd been mostly happy to not have to deal with civic affairs in the midst of a cascading series of medical crises. We took the opportunity to re-bond after a period of separation. Her studies were coming along nicely, and she'd already proven her ability to bully pedigreed doctors with vastly more extensive experience than she possessed. Temperament and skill had a lot to do with it, but the fact that she was beginning to outweigh your average donkey by about 1.8 to 1 certainly didn't take anything away from her ability to dominate a room. Height and bulk breeds a physical sort of respect at an instinctual level, even among the over-educated.

I had a pair of orderlies following us with supply carts, heavy on the antiseptics and salicin. I knew that we'd need them when we worked our way through the prisoner-of-war cages, and I was right. The guards from the Right Division were doing their best to remove the deceased prisoners from the stockades, and make sure that everypony got enough food, but the battalion assigned to guard duty had begun to be overstretched by the unceasing stream of captures marching westward from the front. I frowned, and put in a request through the Lieutenant on the 'Radio' for a second battalion to reinforce the overloaded guards detachment, and set to evaluating the survivors for obvious problems.

There was far too much for Rye and I to take care of ourselves, but all the true problem cases had died on the road before ever getting to the stockades. I eyed the unsheltered conditions of the prisoners, who didn't have any building supplies, and ordered the guards to supervise supply-gathering expeditions as soon as they could identify reliable prisoners. There was a lot of potential pony-power penned up in those stockades, and we might as well get some work out of them.

The guards knew how to beat down a recalcitrant or rebellious… rebel. Hrm. We probably needed to develop better insults for the western ponies.

The prisoners were largely farm-ponies from the districts of southern Traverse, not much different than, say, western Verdebaie or eastern Rennet, although from things some of them said, I think their weather and soils were much more friendly to agriculture. These were the flower of a rich farming culture, and for many of them, their parents and older siblings were so capable of working the ancestral family farm that there was no need for, well, them. Those fruitful western plains produced an unending stream of surplus younger sons and daughters, and almost all of them poured directly into the holding-weirs of the armies of the White Rose.
All of them were heavily indoctrinated into the ideology of the White Rose, the… religion of it all. It had a pack of devils, a once and future messiah, books of prophesy, ethical dictums and taboos, a sort of priesthood – they might not call it a religion, but as a confessed cultist, I knew another cult when I saw one.

The prisoners were almost entirely rank and file. I didn't find a single pony that would admit to a higher commission than small-L lieutenant, and precious few ranking noncoms. I couldn't tell if this was because the officers and sergeants had led from the front, and died there, or if some of the dead prisoners dragged out of the stockades had been particularly unpopular martinets. In some armies, defeat and capture was the signal for the slaughter of hated officers. I hadn't had the impression that this was the case for the usually quite disciplined White Rose, but in all honesty, this was my first direct contact with White Rose captives since that scattering of prisoners we took in Rennet a few years back, most of whom were recruited into the Company proper.

You couldn't even tell which of our current caribou Brethren were former prisoners, and which were recruits from the provincial militias, unless you went and asked one directly. Which I don't recommend, it shows a certain lack of communal trust to talk about such matters.

Feufollet's friend, the Lord of the Patrol, showed up on the second day of our work in the stockades. Night Watch and a collection of civilians came down with the daily caravan of food supplies, which Cup Cake and Dancing Shadows and their contacts up in New Equestria were dutifully sending southward as required. These food supplies were the reason why our vulnerable prisoners of war were not expiring where they slumped in the increasingly pan-hardened and grassless confines of the cages. Good food can address many shortcomings in campaign-hardened ponies, even if they have been recently starved, exposed, and beaten from pillar to post as these had been.

Night Watch and his collection of civilians were there, I believe, to look over our captures. When I was notified that they were here, I wrapped up my rounds, and hoofed my way over to that side of the stockades. I found them outside the fence, staring through the slats at the mostly immobile rebels, only a few of whom were working on erecting shelters from some canvass we'd given them and what little the scavenging work-parties had returned with the evening before. Those work-parties had been reinforced, and sent out early that day, in hope that they'd bring back a great deal more to work with than what they'd brought that first listless day.

I looked over the civilian delegation, and tried to find a leader, since Night Watch's entire purpose in life was to obscure his importance and authority behind an impressive thicket of pretense and slight of hoof. I chose the best-dressed pony in the lot, a foppish mare with a drooping fascinator on her sun-hat and a mud-splattered stole over her withers.

"G'day, ladies, gentlecolts. Come down to see our new zoo? It's still under construction, but we have high hopes for it in coming days. We're not quite ready for visitors, yet, unless there's any of you with medical training? Most of my staff are tied up with our own wounded closer to the front. We could use civilian support in dealing with… well, all these."

Fascinator and Stole turned to look at the pony who was talking at her, and looked me up and down as if I had just crawled out of the nearest sump. "Why are you crowding them all into this single cage? The conditions are appalling! And there's so many of them!"

"This isn't the only cage, there are three more over on the other side of this one, and we've got two more under construction. We're starting to run short of materials, actually. Some of this lot are out tearing down fences and unclaimed outbuildings for the wood and the nails. We're expecting, hrm, maybe another eight hundred to a thousand later today, given the reports I read with breakfast. It's part of why yon food-caravan is so long today; with every group of prisoners, the ones that make it here are hungrier and hungrier. I wouldn't put my hoof through that fence, sir," I cautioned one thin-faced idiot. "They're still rebels, and some of them might shake off the doldrums enough to rattle your brain-pan a bit for the fun of it. Or who knows? Even ponies have been known to develop a taste for flesh when they're hungry enough."

I resisted the urge to show off my sharp incisors. I like to think that I've grown past that sort of cheap theatrics, and anyways, far as we could tell, the rebel rank and file hadn't descended yet to that level of desperate starvation which births unspeakable horrors of that stripe. But let's encourage them not to poke the prisoners with sticks, yes?

"And you want our precious physicians down here to mingle with these… rebel savages?" sniffed Lady Fascinator. "It hardly sounds safe."

"Well, we do have armed guards here, an entire battalion. And more on the way. My young apprentice is in there, working through a sick ward we have going up on the far side of this cage, I can take you folks around that way. Not actually inside, of course, we don't want to encourage unnecessary contact between the prisoners and the civilian population. Starving, stressed, defeated troops are prime timber for epidemic outbreaks, and if they do break, it's for the best if it stays inside the cages. Might I ask to whom I am speaking?"

She blinked, and remembered her manners. "Fair Prospect, at your service, sir. And you?"

"Sawbones, doctor of the Black Company, and director of the medical corps of the Army of the North. We're a bit understaffed here, as I said. Our actual doctors are mostly dealing with the loyal wounded for the nonce."

I gave them the grand tour, and left them, one hopes, suitably impressed. A fair fraction of the army which had been laying waste to the lands of the Housa, and had threatened the Queen City of that proud river, was now laying listless and dead-eyed behind crowded fences. Luckily, we weren't yet in those stages of an epidemic outbreak which looks like tartarus, and these western districts had largely been spared the heavy rains of the pegasi storms to the east. If anything, this portion of the Baronies were over-dry for this part of the season, and sun-parched.

I cautioned them that there were still thousands of rebels unaccounted for to the east, and we weren't at all sure how many were simply dead, and how many were still a military threat. Personally, I was starting to suspect that they were breaking up into bands and halfway towards banditry. When I got a moment to separate Night Watch from his delegation, I passed along these fears, and he nodded in acknowledgement, and confirmed that the Patrol was likewise wary, and would be keeping an eye out for such tomfoolery.

Night Watch took his herd of civilians with him northwards to take shelter for the night, up where there were still populated districts. As evening gathered to the east, I looked at the empty-eyed homes and shops of this nameless town which was playing host to our prisoners of war, and wondered what happened to the ponies of the Baronies. Were they killed by the White Rose? Fled north into exile? Hiding somewhere?

Then I turned to look at the miserable, listless rebels, slowly chewing their way through their evening meal. These broken ponies, who had not long ago been a terror and a brand upon the flanks of a tormented countryside. Now, look at them - lost in a haunted wood, foals afraid of the night, who have never been happy or good.

Digging For Ponies, or, The Turnip

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FFMS020

By afternoon, I was in the air again, with Whirlwind's cousin Supercell in the traces. We were at best glancing acquaintances, but she knew how to keep a gig in the air, and that was more than enough for me. Command had had me enchant their sand-table with my 'undead detection cantrip', the enhanced version that worked at a distance. All of my old detectors had been emptied out of the supply wagon, and the regiments out on the front were carrying them for search and rescue, as well as the simple search for stay-behinds and ambushes.

One of the quirks of the undead-detectors is that they were equally as good at detecting life, as unlife. Both lit up like fireworks, and the late Shorthorn and I had worked out how to colour-condition the detectors, so that green was living, and red were dead. Actually dead tended to come across as a slightly green-tinted grey, not enough to really pop, but until the body succumbed to the worms and the elements, it would still give a bit of a return.

The old detectors had lasted far longer than we had intended they would; they outlived Master Shorthorn. But I had gone through the supply wagon on the trip down through Rime, and re-charged the lot of them just in case. That condition had arrived. And as Supercell and I coasted over the scorched and slowly drying battlefield, we could see them in action, as teams of earth ponies tore apart the muddy surface of that much-abused stretch of land. Looking for all the world like a runaway harvest of tuber-farmers desperately racing against the weather, they laboured, trench-shovels in hooves and mouths, rooting for unseen turnips.

The regiments of the Middle Division had set out in the morning with banners waving, spears couched, ready for battle. This quickly degenerated into a search for the enemy – any enemy – and when they found them, often buried pitifully withers-deep in drying mud-filled trenches and holes, the entire advance collapsed into this parody of a rescue operation. There might be organized opposition to our east somewhere, but what they'd left within a half-day's march of the battle were the ponies who couldn't be lured back to a battle-banner for love, goddess, or money. And most of those had hid at the bottom of the safest hole they could find. Which, more often than not, was full of mud, water, or eventually had collapsed upon them, filling up with both over the course of a terror-filled night.

Half of the regiments were left to dig for ponies; the rest advanced under arms to continue the conventional movement-to-contact.

And so, back in the operations tent, a sand-table glowed with little green points of light along trenches and scattered in holes all across the land-scape, slowly fading to ash-grey as their air or their endurance ran out. Fewer still were the red-glare of ghouls or worse things, and our job was to track down those threats before they tore up our northerners. The Company hated the undead, but didn't have reason to fear their touch like those simple rankers that filled out the ranks of the regiments. The Second Cohort had joined the Middle Division in its advance, and Fuller Falchion's ponies were digging for different roots than those excavated by the regimental parties. Shovels were interspersed with lances and axes, as they waited for the increasingly exposed ghouls to burst from their concealment and fight for their pallid perversions of survival.

Here and there, a ghoul popped up out of their burrows, and ran, moaning for freedom. If we had Company ponies in the vicinity, they went down, axe-blows through their cannons or fetlocks, and lance-heads through their throats. But the Company couldn't be everywhere.

And there might be worse hidden underground.

This is what Supercell and I were doing over the battle-field: scanning for nasty left-behind surprises. We knew what liches were capable of, and we had seen very little of any of it during the fighting, aside from the fireworks which had broken the first line of defense. Were they holding back? Playing dumb? Deliberately sabotaging their own forces? Why?

Bad Apple was ghoul-hunting to the north – supposedly there were packs of them heading for populated areas, and most of the pegasi that anypony could get awake and focused were up there, herding the dead and playing spotter for our madmare pyromancer. Gibblets and some of the others were around here somewhere, although nobody seemed to know what had happened to Obscured Blade. He just seized command of a bunch of sections from Third Cohort and went plunging off into the east, without telling anypony – not even the Nightmare! – where he was going, or what he was doing.

As somepony leaving her first foalhood, I was of the opinion that Uncle Blade was rapidly approaching his own, second, foalhood.

There. That. That was nothing good, a red blotch of boiling unlife, much larger than any single ghoul. A pack, hiding in a warren? I got closer, and saw that a squad of ponies were approaching the position with shovels at the ready. Not Company ponies.

"Supercell, buzz those idiots, we need to wave them off!" I also passed an alarm through the Nightmare, and told the Princess to disconnect for safety. We passed at speed over the crests of the squad of northerners approaching the – whatever the tartarus was hiding down there. I'm not sure if my warnings carried over the sound of our passing, but my little illusion of slavering undead popping up out of the soil got their attention well enough, and they went scrambling back in startlement.

After a few confused moments, we established a perimeter, enough yards back from the whatever to not encourage it to come climbing out of its hidey-hole. My call had attracted two sections of the Second, which would be more than enough to deal with the problem if it was simply a pack of ghouls all tumbled together in one hole. If it was something bigger…

Two sections would just take time getting wiped out. I put out a request for the big guns. The standardbearer was just about enough overkill for the potential problem lurking down there.

Gibblets eventually showed up, and glared at me. "You know you can't just call for the Lance every time you have a boil to burst, right?"

"I don't know, bossgoblin. The average ghoulsign? Like a matchstick. That thing down there is like the Eternal Princess's birthday-cake, like somepony filled a cooking-cauldron full of rocket-engines and lit the whole off at once. It could be a whole pack of ghouls just a-tumbled together for heat. Except they don't do that, do they? Or it could be…"

"Barrowgast?" the froglike warlock asked, frowning.

"I dunno? We haven't seen one since Pepin. Who'd be making them down here? The Marklaird's dead, right?"

"Also could be an actual lich?" he guessed. "Have you ever seen one up-close?"

"Octavius kept me away from the Marklaird when she was stalking around the camp back in Rennet, so no, never up close. At a distance, during that thing on the Baneway. We already knew where it was, though, and I wasn't scanning for it. Could be, I don't know. Either one of those, though. Lance business."

The Lance, and the goofy orange pony that carried it around, were summoned via the radio. I got back into the air with Supercell and we cast around in the vicinity, to make sure that there weren't more 'surprise gifts' left in the muck. I found one more about halfway to Dover, it seemed like – just on the edge of the prepared ground we had fought over. Everything else in between was the usual matchstick-flames, red and green. I could see in the deep distance a forest of matchsticks, several of them scattering in various directions – the largest heading south-south-west around the Wirts, towards the river, and tried to pass that message through to Command for evaluation and consideration.

We continued our scans over the battle-field, as the green fruit of the soil were uprooted, or burnt down to ash. There were few green flames upon the plain that weren't ours and under arms when the bale-fire under watch got tired of pretending to be a turnip.

The standard-bearer and his lance had been far out of range, and was still three minutes out when the barrowgast emerged. She burst out of her earth like a white-burning flame, and her fire weakened the rays of the sun about her. I could see the sod dying around her as she scrabbled her way out of the grasp of the dried mud-hole. In life, she had been an earth pony of some stature, a noble cast to her muzzle, and a red shock of mane that almost hid the wound to the back of her poll which had killed her. A ranker from the guarding sections died before anypony could react, blasted down by that freezing aura which the 'gasts use to kill at a distance. Pauldron was an earth pony stallion.

Pauldron's death broke my vapour-lock, and I laid down illusions all around the barrowgast, obscuring the sections on the ground from its baleful sight. It couldn't kill what it couldn't see. I hoped.

It struggled to get its rear legs out of the muck, and I cast about for more restraints – but the damned thing had killed all the remnant living tissue of which I could have coaxed into creeper vines or other restrains. I cried out to my Nightmare, but the day-star was still in the sky, however drained it felt with the chill of the barrowgast in sight.

And we were the only things in its sight, now that I had obscured its vision of everything upon the ground. No time to warn Supercell, and even the Nightmare can only relay thoughts so quickly, so I –

The lens of reflexive darkness was just barely enough to deflect the blast of cold away from me and my driver. I still felt the freeze in my marrow, and it sapped away at my blood-magic. I wasn't sure if we could take another such blast, but at least my screaming had warned Supercell sufficiently that she was turning barrel-rolls behind the traces, jittering us across the lower heavens like a catherine-wheel, and her desperate magic spun off wild eddies of wind in all directions, twisting the air into tortured rotations and sudden gusts. There was one more blast in our general direction, but only generally, and all I think that mis-timed flare did was scare away some geese in the distance.

And then from the roiling phantasms of smoke and damned ponies emerged that tall, gangly, ludicrous pony with his tall-crested chamfron and his long black alicorns-damned Lance.

And he took that Grogar-damned 'gast in the side with the Lance, and spitted it like a quintain upon the training-grounds. The once-earth-pony didn't even make a sound, just – well, one moment we were gyring tightly in the sky, me hanging upside down in my gig-chair, trying to keep track of the ground and the enemy and how close we were to either – and the next, there was no enemy, just a corpse and a bristling standard-bearer and a field full of illusions I no longer needed to keep going.

Damn, I hate barrowgasts.

Visions Of A White Rose

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SBMS156

The prisoners of the Company told their stories to us, as we did our rounds, trying to figure out which ones were going to die, who could be saved. We also ran them through the portable showers, hosing them down, trying our best to get all the trench-filth and caked-on dirt and mud out of their coats and their manes; they had been washed down on the way into the cages, but the first pass through the showers had hardly cleaned all of that eternal mud off of our prisoners.

But the prisoners also told them to each other, to whomsoever was in ear-shot. It was almost compulsive, like they had to talk about it. I suppose they had to justify themselves, to others, to themselves, to whatever was listening. Excuses, the defeat, their surrenders:

"The battle-line was more of a hoof-full of gravel by then. Our group kept to the front, but me to the back of that front, you know? And I kept hearing this voice, you know? A mare's voice, sad. Kinda like my ma, but she never had that fancy accent to her. And all she would say was, they're all going to die. So are you, if you don't lay down. I didn't listen, either, because that, that's the sound of fear, you know? But when the break came, and the ponies came a-tumbling back… I laid down, and found my hidey-hole. And it was like somepony's hoof was holding my mouth up out of the mud.”

"We never got close to the front, just drowning in mud for seven days, worst mud I've ever seen, worst mud anypony's ever seen. Like the whole world gone semi-liquid, like the bedrock of eternity eaten away by swamp-muck. The only unit in the whole damn regiment got off a blow swung in anger, those tartarus-spawned rocketeers. Some evil thing in the night, took it amiss they were firing away at them, and that thing just stooped down and tore them right out of the mud, gobbled them right up. Then it looked around by the fires of the burning rockets, like it was choosing which of the rest of us for dessert. So we booked it, and I don't know about the rest, but I kept going until I found that mud-wallow…”

"Their bolt-throwers, I don't know how they got that rate of fire out of them, I don't know how they got so many little machines on the ramparts. Just dozens, over a hundred of them, firing bolts continuously. They must have had bushel-fulls just laying by their bulwarks. Once the shields went down, we were naked to the world. I heard a filly's voice cry out, bow your head you fool! And I kissed the White Rose's earth. Only member of my crew to survive the counterbattery fire, I am. Never got back up after I went down.”

"And I slipped away as soon as the surviving fool pulled out that damn whistle again, away from the rest of those obedient fools. They were at the fore of that last charge. I don't see any of them here. Don't think they made it. I'm sure they'll kick my flank if they see me again. But buck them – I'm alive, aren't i? The voice was right. Wasn't what we were called to do, this.”

"And I couched my pike, and tamped down my chamfron, and I followed the sergeant and the corporal. And the corporal caught a heavy bolt and I lost sight of her, and the lieutenant just disappeared about mid-field, but the sergeant? She got over the ramparts, and the rest of us, we followed. The sergeant went down with a spear-head through her eye-slit, and it was nothing but lunacy over the top of that rampart, but by the White Rose, we got over that wall. We coulda made it, if half these cowards hadn't… well. Lost my pike in the crush, lost my chamfron in the tumble back when everypony saw those hell-beasts a-coming, twice as big as bison and blacker than the depths of Tartarus. And I coulda sworn I heard the lieutenant yelling to lay down arms and surrender. Except she sounded younger than I ever heard her, more sure than I'd ever heard the lieutenant sounding. Haven't seen her here in the cages. Are they keeping the officers in a separate cage?”

"And I dreamed of the smoking plain, and the dying regiments. And I saw the slaughter to come, and the weakness of the faithful. And a filly as great as mountains strode over the plain, and looked down at the fighting armies, and my insignificant self, and her coat was as white as snow, and her broad wings were as grey as the snow-laden skies of winter, and her sad eyes greener than the promise of spring. And she said in a clear bell-like tone, in a voice that shook my dream like a harvester drawn over rocky soil, Surrender, surrender. You cannot win by fighting. Your commanders are frauds, they lead you to tartarus. Surrender to the will of the night, for day will betray you. So I did. Talked my entire squad into it. I don't know why they listened… as much mud as there is around here, was easy to just drop into a hole when the sergeants weren't looking. The other night, I saw a white filly in the darkness, and we followed her until we found them rounding us up.”

"There's a crazy corporal over there saying she saw the White Rose in a dream, told her to desert. Me, I saw that damned imp, but I didn't listen to it. Ignored it pretending to be a foal. Trick of the enemy. Wasn't gonna fool me, no damn it. I'm a good foal of the Rose. Why am I here? Because I didn't want to die, you idiot! They club you down, you stay down. If you're lucky, some other squad recovers the ground, and you can get back up and rejoin the advance. Shame we were as far as the advance got that day….”

"I saw her short grey mane, and bobbed tail, and the white coat, and the cutie mark, and I knew her for who she was…”

"…even in a dream, even as strange as she looked with her bat-wings and her slit-pupil stare, the Rose was the Rose, and I knew my scripture…”

"…tartarus-spawn, pretending to be the virginal Rose. Who ever heard of a White Rose with demon's eyes? Lies, lies…”

"…terrible, even more terrible than the sermons the minister used to tell, of the great saviour in the hour of her return. As bright as the morning, as terrible as the dawn…”

"….and yet her voice was sweet, and happy, as if she wanted the best for me? You know? Nobody ever really wants me, I know I'm ugly…”

"…and she said to stop struggling, to stop following bad orders. To wait for my chance…”

"…surrender…”

"…to surrender…”

"…if I wanted to live…”

"…if I wanted my friends to live…”

"…surrender – "

"…surrender to the will of the night, and I asked – "

"…what the hay does that even mean?”

"…but the dream was over. And we woke up, and half of us had had the same damn strange dream. And half of us joined the charge, and half of us faked it close enough to get us out from under the corporals' gaze, and it wasn't even the same half the dreaming as did the shamming. But nopony who charged is here, are they? We made it through the fire, I think.”

"it was when the officers had my squad cleaning up the bodies from the ritual that I knew we had to get away. How is something like that ritual any part of the Way of the White Rose? No, I didn't see what exactly made the corpses, but they had been civilians and locals, before, and after they were spoiled meat to be buried in a mass grave. That just wasn't why I had signed up for the crusade on my marks-day. I've always been a follower of the Rose, my whole family, really. But it was only after I helped dig that mass grave that I needed… I wanted. I don't know. But I weren't surprised when the Rose came to me in dreams and told me our officers were monsters and demons. I already knew that well enough.”

"At least they let the ghouls assault the walls down in front of Braystown. This business, of living ponies charging actively defended ramparts? For the birds. Although ponies tell me even the birds up here turn demonic in the night, and stalk us from the skies. I never saw no white filly, nor heard no filly's voice, but I know a fool's game when I see others playing it. It was the first mud-hole I could find, by damn. Although I'd like to shake the hoof of the filly who dragged me out of that hole, I got a bit too deep. Too much mud to see who-ever it was, but I owe my life to her.”

"And the mud was deep…”

"…deeper than I thought it would be…”

"…I never realized how bad quicksand could be until I fell into that sandy mess…”

"…mud up to my nostrils…”

"…I'm still not sure how I got enough air to breathe…”

"…all night in muck up to my mouth…”

"…better that damned mud, than those terrors overhead…”

"…fire and horror and the sound of raptors' wings…”

"…like every great bird of prey ever birthed by tartarus overhead…”

"…all of us looking in that perfect darkness for some mud-hole to hide in…”

"…I swear that fire-ball rolled right over my mud-wallow, burnt the top layer into a crust, like my grandma's pumpkin pies after she went a bit spare in her old age…”

"…flights of demons killing anypony who stood to fight…”

"…and in the darkness, I heard Her calling me to surrender, to flee…”

"…told me in that fancy accent of Hers, see-enfooir, too imbecile, and I took that to run like tartarus was coming, because as far as I could hear, they were.”

"…there I was, stuck in the mud…”

"…deeper than any well I'd ever seen…”

"…just treadin' mud, stuck deeper than I'd…”

"…all night long, until I was almost too tired to keep…”

"…my head over the muddy water. Why didn't I die? Somepony pulled me out of it. I didn't see her muzzle, but I coulda sworn her fetlocks were grey shaded into white.”

"…like fun I was, I was at the bottom of my hole, some kind of freaky air-bubble. Three of us down there, and I can't tell you how the air held out. Then suddenly, there was two of us, and then one. Darker than the pits of hades, so I couldn't see what was taking them. Then I felt breath in my ear, and a Prench filly asked me if I wanted to live – well, rose-cuttings. What do you say to that? I swear the world turned inside-out, and suddenly I was in the open air for the first time since we tried to hide in that shithole. And yeah, all three of us were pulled out alive, Beehive is over there, I hear Fruited Plain is in the cage across the way.”

"I was going down for the last time, I tell you, and then suddenly – my mouth was full of air, and there was some pretty filly kissing me. And I was free, somehow free. Did I see her? Nah, but no ugly girl can kiss like that.”

"Dying – "

"Drowning – "

"– full of mud –"

"…too much water, too much mud…”

"…and then there was light…”

"…light…”

"…the pressure was gone…”

"…that terrible, crushing pressure – you've never been trapped until you've found yourself at the bottom of a drying mudhole, I tell you what…”

"…the hoof of a young mare…”

"…a filly's fetlock cleaned out my airways, brushing, like this –"

"…saved me, I swear to the Rose, and I couldn't even see her.”

"…saved me.”

"You talk to a hundred ponies in this cage, and at least twenty will tell you that some Prench-talking mare pulled them out of their watery graves. I don't know if that's true or if everypony's stealing the best stories of the lot to practice for when they have to account for themselves before the Throne. But I know what happened to me, and it's the truth, and it goes like this. I dreamed of the Filly, the white-coated one that looked like the picture-books of the White Rose, only all alien and strange, bat-winged instead of feathered, dragon-eyed instead of doe-eyed. And she told me to surrender, that her will wasn't for me to fight in her name for these demons we call officers. I told her I didn't care what she looked like, she wasn't the White Rose. And she smiled at me, and kissed my cheek, and left me to my night's dreams. But I remembered her when I was trapped in that sandy mud-pit, and I could feel the struggling beneath my hooves, and I realized that while I had the air, there were ponies below me who didn't. And I remembered the filly, and I filled my lungs, and I dove down, and I started digging on my own. And I tried my best to keep those unfortunates alive, and to help them up to the top of the hole. We didn't get everypony out of the hole, but when the enemy came to dig us out, they found more alive than just me. That guy, over there. He's alive because I remembered those sad, green, demon eyes telling me to do something better than fight in her name. And that's something, isn't it?”

The Fugitives, or The Singer And The Song

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FFMS021

Over the next two shifts, we found two more barrowgasts, hiding like ant-lions waiting for the advent of our advance, waiting to waken, emerge, and ravage our skirmish-lines. It might even have happened if it weren't for our aerial scouts and their witch-ridealongs. The ensuing extermination process was more of an exercise than a battle, at least, once we figured out what triggered the damn things. After that, it was just a matter of bringing up an available witch to provide support and the standard-bearer himself to pull the cork on the jug of evil.

As I said, more of an exercise than a proper fight. Although the presence of fifty or so ghouls around the third barrowgast nest complicated the approach just a bit. We ended up making a showpiece of that one, and waited on five full sections of the Third Cohort to cross overland to reach the intended ambush-site. Meanwhile, all around us, the regiments were boiling through the fields and brush and woods east and north and south of the Clearances, herding the scattered, starvling remnants of the expeditionary army of the White Rose into manageable coffers, to be chivvied west into captivity.

After a while, a new rank of pegasi and griffins joined us, casting about overhead, and the land echoed to a strange, wailing song. As darkness followed in the train of dusk, the song gained voice and lyrics, and although I couldn't make out most of the words, it seemed to be something about surrender and the will of the night. After our successful suppression of that last barrowgast's ghoul-guard - after Corporal Cake put his lance-head through the rotted heart of that cold horror - I had enough spare attention to tend to the reports coming in about what the rest of the coven was up to, and what was the deal with the banshee wail.

Otonashi and Cherie had banded together, and were herding fleeing White Rose. The song was Cherie's, or at least, what the deaf Otonashi made of Cherie's promptings, the broadcast of that call to surrender, of food, of warmth and cleanliness and safety. Personally, if I had heard that, hungry terrified and alone – I would have run as far and as fast away from that night-haunt as I could. But they say it played to some sort of myth or archtype that the religious fanatics of the West all bought into, so good job, I guess?

Eventually, the scatterlings faded away, and the only rebels we had to worry about were the ones too organized and swift to be caught in our nets. Four distinct groups, gangs – showing alarming signs of forming into proper bandit bands, if you asked me. Two were headed north or north-east towards Dover. Those we left to the battle-groups of the Left Division, who had never truly abandoned the approaches towards High Earth and the line of the Bride's Road. They returned to their old stomping-grounds, and were moving forward to snatch up the refugee bands as they fled northward into their net.

Farthest east, one grouping was struggling overland towards the road west of the Hayfriend, and the re-grouping Army of the Housa claimed it could get enough of itself across that meandering mess of a stream to molest the wayward band of fugitive rebels.

That left a band of roughly a hundred and fifty ragged White Rose working its way through the hedges and woodlots of the ridgelines east of Dover. They were far enough east that they'd be slipping past the flanks of the Left Division's easternmost patrols, and far enough west that the loyalists of the old Army of the Housa would never catch them in time. And that left the aerial cohort and its magical supports to cover the gap. A hundred and fifty bandits would be more than enough to cause chaos and misery and dissent in the rear areas of our deployment, and what is worse, weaken our support and reputation in the eyes of the civilians.

Which was why a battle-group of twenty pegasi and twenty griffins were dragging two witches behind them, bouncing about in our increasingly ragged and campaign-worn gigs. Theoretically, all they really needed was Bad Apple. If they could herd together the fugitives into a small enough area, she might even be able to immolate the entire lot in a single pass. But, command insisted on capturing fugitives whenever possible. And so, a flight of the pegasi were also dragging behind them me, as well as some of the heavy lifters, filled to the brim with a section and a half of ground-pounder rankers to provide security and control for any White Rose that survived the encounter.

Bad Apple and I had traded off our drivers at the request of Cherie, who said she had work she needed to do which was not really going to work with all of Bad Apple's showy pyromancy. I asked her if that had something to do with all of these horrible warblings I'd been hearing recently, and she cried pitifully and wingslapped the mean out of me. I guess she's sensitive about her voice?

All kidding aside, she had been practicing her Lorelei cantrips, with a bit of special sauce to power the suggestions. She muttered something else I didn't quite catch, but might have been something cryptic about dream-walking. Sawbones and the others paid more attention to Cherie's supposed prowess in crafting the dreams of other ponies – I'd never seen it, but then, she saves that business for other ponies. My dreams mostly held Nightmares.

Whirlwind brought Bad Apple's gig around in a great semi-circle over some poor farmer's hilly, rolling farmstead as the night threatened in the east. As darkness began to rise up out of the fields, the little earth pony's flame-alicorns appeared behind her and her driver, flight-formation style. The pegasi and the griffins kept overhead, out of slingshot range. Some of these fugitives had proven to have been proficient in slinging heavy bullets skyward, and more than one griffin or pegasus had lost tailfeathers to their counter-fire in the last few weeks.

As BA's fire-ponies descended and began scorching hedges and trees behind the enemy, most of them ran for it. I don't know where they thought they were going, what they thought they could do, outrun sky-monsters? The more clever ponies dropped like sacks of lead, and rolled for the nearest damp corner throughout the little copse and complex of fields within which we had caught them. No doubt they were putting their faith in darkness and obscurity to save them from our hunt. Poor fools, they had no idea how good our night-vision was.

We left the smart ones to Bad Apple and the free-winged flights now stooping to the hunt. Our remit was that crowd of panicky animals who had forgotten for the moment that they were ponies. Cherie began her eerie song, and I formed my phantasms in flight around our gig. I could feel the pressure of Cherie's personality as my blood boiled into illusion, and my usual black-winged monsters formed white and grey, and strangely beautiful in the gathering dusk. Like Cherie, if she had ever let her mane and tail grow long, like the Princess, if her stars and sky had hidden themselves in mist and smoke, like the Nightmare, if she had calmed that monster which gnawed at her heart.

My monsters were of a sudden, beautiful, and white, and grey, and they opened their mouths, and the song of surrender echoed across the darkening fields full of fleeing foals. Thugs and killers and deserters, who would have sacked and burned and pillaged all the lands from here to the Inland Seas if we had left them unmolested, reduced for the moment to yelping, wailing children in the dark, running from their enraged guardians or siblings or parents or – I don't know what was going through those ponies' minds. But Cherie and I, we tried our best to put fatalism and surrender into their emptied minds.

No, that's not right. I've often heard from Sawbones that 'nature abhors a vacuum', and I've seen what happens when a retort is allowed to suck itself empty, but somehow, that simple dictum doesn't work for the panicked mind. I think that panic isn't a vacuum, but rather a tumult of emotion. A mind full of panic is too full to contain a thought.

So we had to force our ideas into their over-full mindless minds. Perhaps terrorizing them with the burning flames of Bad Apple had, indeed, been a bad idea. Nevertheless, after about a mile or so of running, most of them were wrung out, and more malleable.

None of them had really gotten enough to eat over the last few days, even though I knew that this particular band had come across and despoiled one of their army's own abandoned supply-wagons. Some of our ponies had been keeping an eye on this group for a while. I sometimes wonder at how many different places some ponies could be at one time, and yet, the scouts, they get everywhere, they see everything. It is a wonder and a puzzlement.

The pegasi with the carts full of ground-cohort rankers touched down on either flank of the wide arc of exhausted runners, and let out the rankers to start rolling up the now-placid ponies. The Company armsponies barely had to prod them at all to get them to drop any weapons they had in hoof. The vast majority had dropped their pikes or axes at some point during their flight; it must be hard to keep hold of a weapon when all you can think of is running.

I dropped my monsters down among the prisoners. They walked among them, long-limbed, as if the illusions were real ponies, striding high-necked and proud among the tired and empty-eyed former rebels. Some of the prisoners reached out with trembling hooves to try and touch the trailing tails and manes of the white and grey illusions, but I did my best to stutter-step the phantasms so that nopony broke the illusion by failing to make contact with a 'ghost'. Almost none of the prisoners looked up at our gig, to see me leaning bemused overhead, staring down at our captures, or to see the actual white-and-grey model for the false alicorns that strode among them. I let the 'alicorns' strut about as if they were shepard-dogs guarding a flock of geese.

By the time we reached the fields where the smart ones had gone to ground, the prisoners were weaving, dazed. When the guards stopped them in place, many just dropped in their tracks, asleep. At the edges of the fields defined by Bad Apple's black-scorched trail of destruction, were piles of tied-up ponies. In the flickering light of the burning brush, you could see that some were unconscious, while others stared furiously at our prisoners, none of whom were trying to escape.

I scanned the copse and the fields, and noted that the flights of griffins and pegasi were finished quartering the search-grid, and now were re-quartering, and beating down the last few hold-outs. Not too many left now. In absolute terms, we were badly out-numbered by the bandits, but in the actual event, they had fallen quite easily to our methods. I moved a few of the illusory alicorns along the line of hog-tied and conscious captives, and let Cherie sing to our cognizant victims her lullaby.

More than a few were ready to be untied by the time the pegasi and griffins returned with their remaining unconscious captives. I could see the rest of them laying in the woods and the fields, their green fading to green-tinted grey. No pony ever killed by a Company pony would ever turn red; there was that, if nothing else. And the sweeps had killed far fewer than I had expected. Terror, fear, and the thestral's song had reduced our prey into our prisoners with very little drama in the end.

It was nice to play my part in a melodrama from time to time; it certainly beat playing the villain in a tragedy.

And Call It Peace

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SBMS157

After a few days, we were fairly certain we'd staved off a general epidemic. The ones who had been over-weakened by exposure and partial drowning passed away; the ones with the strength to go on, found it, and started pulling out of their weakness. From that point on, it was a matter of treating the sickly ones with the right potions, and hoof-holding. I left Rye Daughter to do the hoof-holding, she was better at it than I was. For all her height, she had decent cot-side manner.

We had reported some of the more alarming material to come out of our listening sessions, and command had eventually sent some investigatory details to look into the reports. The details found what our more haunted prisoners had been muttering about. First one, then a number of other mass graves, starting a quarter-day's march east of the edge of the Clearances. They had ordered Gibblets and a picked group of Company and allied ponies to start digging into the graves to see what it looked like, and now Gibblets wanted me on-site.

No rush.

On the long way 'round towards the investigation site, I stopped here and there to collect my things, and look in on the members of my medical corps. The mobile field hospital had put down tap-roots, and blossomed into a sprawling recovery complex, one that sat in an abandoned farm to the rear of the supply depots and base which had originally been the rear area of our defensive positions in the Clearances. The farm in question hadn't actually been in the Clearances, and was technically part of the next barony to the west. This became both apparent and important as the refugees that had fled the enemy's rampaging army started trickling in from the west, eastward.

Which meant that the current heir-and-owner of the farm we were squatting upon was sitting there in the main yard when I trotted into sight. I was stocked up with full saddle-bags and a general disinclination to get involved in civilian drama, but that pony had other ideas, and had decided to ambush me in front of my main infirmary ward, which once had been her family's farmhouse.

And this particular civilian was utterly unwilling to exempt me from her dramatic performance. She wept all over my shoulders, and threatened to ruin my good eye-patch with her tears. Apparently my head orderly had told her of the fate of the ponies who had stayed behind to mind the family property. I had never set hoof inside that farmhouse when we first took possession of the property, and had left the clearing-out to the rankers detailed to my support. So I had not thought much about the 'disposal' which had been reported, but apparently it included both the matriarch who had owned the land, and several of her children and grand-children. Thankfully, the orderlies had not informed this distraught relative that one of the 'disposals' had been of an undead relative – as I found out later upon asking for further detail – but the simple version of the story was enough to make a wreck out of the survivor. A stubborn, passive-aggressive wreck.

This misery and bereavement was almost enough to distract this newly-minted farmer from her main point of contention with us, namely, our seizure of her family farm. Earth ponies are by and large a practical race, and while living family comes first, dead family comes third or fourth after family property and the waste thereof. And we had caused massive damage and waste to her inheritance. As she proceeded to tell me, at great volume, as I tried to walk away from her aria of injustice and outrage.

I don't know what she was wailing about, to be honest. At least the battle wasn't fought on her property, and her barn had never been so sanitary in its lifetime.

And the outbuildings were largely shoddy and would be easy to replace, if you ask me.

I tried to leave that mess behind me, ignore her entreaties. She only stopped following me when we came into sight of the actual battlefield. Which must have meant, now that I think back on it, that she had literally followed me a mile and a half away from the field-hospital. That's stubbornness for you. But smoke and the smell of burning ponies was enough to repel even someone as stubborn as that farmer from the pursuit of her rights, and for that much, I was grateful.

The owners of all of the properties we had destroyed in the Clearances proper were either too dead, or too timid to approach the site of the battle directly. The farmsteads were obliterated, either torn down for materials or destroyed in the fighting; the two hamlets at the heart of the district had been dismantled for their materials, and then fought over during the climax of the battle. The fields were unrecognizable, their aboitaeux were broken up, their dykes broken-in, and trenches and pits were dug up everywhere.

If there had been distinct roads or lanes anywhere in the eastern half of the district, their beds had been likewise torn up and washed out. The many little streams which had once been locked into strict banks and courses on their way into the swamps of the Wirts, had everywhere broken their shackles and ran rampant across the landscape, curling here and ponding there, making an unrecognizable mess of what had once been the richest district of the region.

Looking across the absolute ruins which had once been a well-irrigated farming district, I could only muse upon the words written down by Bitter Ambrosia. War is ruin, cruelty, and desolation, and it cannot be refined. Look how peaceable was our desert!

Everywhere along the lines where the greatest fighting and dying had occurred, work details were feeding days-old corpses into the great bone-fires. Too much of the fighting and killing had been done by the regiments and the enemy; we couldn't put our confidence in Company steel when there had been so little of it on the battlefield. The work details laboured as quickly as they could, for fear that the dead might begin to stir. The tanners had set up their work-tents nearby the burning-pits, and you could smell those ponies at work as well. The aftermath of a battle was almost as dreadful as the great dying itself.

Eventually, I picked my way out of the sprawling battlefield, and into the region beyond. The soil and roadbeds in the district immediately to the east of the Clearances weren't nearly as torn up as what could be found inside that blasted district, but they were still heavily saturated with ground-water, and had been churned to a chaos by the passage of a large, desperate army – and the retreat of the much smaller rabble which was all that was left of that army after its defeat and rout. I passed the occasional supply-column and regimental patrol as the roads became more intact, and I followed the course of the General's deliberate pursuit of the remnants of the White Rose.

The first mass grave was a large area of disturbed soil in an open field a hundred yards or so from the nearest market-road. Gibblets and a work-detail of regimental rankers and Company armsponies had dug up the disturbed earth, and found bodies. Body after body after body, found clothed in civilian gear and materials, some showing signs of a fight, but most clearly murdered upon their knees or haunches. By and large, too badly decayed to see much of their condition at the time of death, but you can make out a good deal from angles of wounds and the marks on bone and so forth.

"Any good idea how long they've been in there?" asked Gibblets, leaning on a dirty shovel. He'd been helping with the digging; had said something about physical labour being good for the soul.

"You know this world does odd things to decay rates, old frog. But as wet as this soil is, and their condition – I'd guess about two weeks, maybe a week and a half. Matches what we heard from ponies who say they were ordered to bury them, afterwards. You find the ritual-space?"

"It was badly effaced, almost entirely cleaned up. They did their best. But anyone with a nose for that sort of thing will have smelled the stink of necromancy. Too big of a ritual, too many times. About four hundred yards east of here. And the pegasi say there's four other burial-sites about as far from the ritual-site as this one is, off in almost the cardinal directions. Like the burial of the dead was somehow part of a Great Circle."

"You think they were all killed at once? That's a lot of killing in one batch, a lot of murder. The ones who we talked to, it damn near wrecked them, I can't see anypony getting away with something that big without breaking the morale of their army."

"I… don't know. I've got guys opening up one of the other burial sites, come on, let's take a toddle."

We walked back to the road, and I followed the goblin-warlock to the ritual site, which was as he described. Barely recognizable as anything other than a particularly level bit of farmland, but there was a subtle and horrible stink to it, a psychic revulsion that hurried my hooves and made me rush behind Gibblets, until after a few strides I was damn near galloping away from the Place.

The next mass grave was similar in all general characteristics to the westernmost one, full of dead ponies, nothing moving but for the digging-details, who were hard at work exposing body after body, dozens, if not hundreds of the dead. I bent down, and began my examinations. Much older bodies, some reduced by the action of the soil and creatures of the earth to nothing more than skeletons. I looked up after an hour or two.

"At least four weeks, maybe six, maybe longer. Definitely not contemporary with the murders in the first grave. Even someone as untrained as I am at this sort of thing can tell that." I looked around the burial site, looking for sign of undead breaking out of the mass grave. "Nothing rose again from this? There's been enough time, this many dead by violence, mass murder? Something should have rose revenant, if not ghoulish."

"Yeah, that was my thought, too, Sawbones. These bones have been drained dry, vampirized. True necromantic ritual. They tapped these kegs empty, whatever they were doing in that ritual circle, it didn't leave any power with the remains, nothing to rise with."

I thought for a moment, fighting against the obvious, the assumption. I lost. "So, we're thinking they were making the barrowgasts you've been finding?"

"At the least. There are a lot of bodies in these graves, Sawbones. The texts I've been shown say that even three barrowgasts don't need this sort of sacrifice. Either they were building an entire army of barrowgasts, or they were trying to do… I don't know what. Nothing aimed our way. Nothing I've heard was thrown at the loyalists in front of Coriolanus."

"Maybe something aimed at the legate holding the Braystown Shambles?" I asked.

"Damn, maybe? Or they could have just been topping off their own tanks if Obscured Blade's theories about who was running this army turn out to be true."

"You think this is because some liches were hungry?"

"I've heard stranger rumors."

"Gibblets, there is nothing stranger than rumor. You wouldn't believe how many ponies have told me with all certainty that the recruit-companies from the militias sent to the front are simply fed into the wood-chipper and turned into ghouls by the legates. Rumor is a wild-eyed and dangerous beast. No greater wickedness is there, than the motives ascribed to their fellow ponies by the gossip of the suspicious and terrified."

"You keep telling yourself that, stripling." The ancient amphibian looked around us, at the victims of some unknown mass-murderer among the command staff of the defeated army of the White Rose. "I have long since given up trying to limit my notions of just how wicked my fellow creatures can become, given the right motivation."

He leaned down and looked at the scattered bones of a victim whose portion of the grave had been disturbed by a badger's tunnel. "And the greater undead groan under motivations which we the living can hardly even imagine, let alone sympathize with. Be careful of treating liches as if they were still people. They're not. They seek out life, and leave nothing but death in their wake."

Les Trois Juments Noires

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The aftermath of our capture of one of the nascent former-White-Rose 'gangs' proved anti-climactic, to put it mildly. The bulk of the aerial flights departed for operations in the south, but command directed the three of us to escort the captured would-be bandits to their eventual homes in the prisoner cages around that distant Baronies market-town. And by 'the three of us', I mean Bad Apple, Cherie, and I, the 'night witches'. How sad is that?

Speaking of sad, I can't even remember the name of that depopulated townlet which the Army of the North seized to house the thousands of prisoners captured in the campaign. (Sawbones will be very disappointed when he reads these pages, a good Annalist is supposed to be a bottomless source of trivia and important detail. Why can't I remember this?) But, whatever the name of that damnable town, we would discover when we arrived that the survivors of the Baronies were trickling back into the ravaged districts to claim their properties or their inheritances. But that is a tale for another time, and I'm getting ahead of myself.

The three of us, defrocked night-witches, found ourselves on hoof, trudging along with the ground rankers. These Company ponies had been flown into the big empty east of Dover to help collect these ponies, and they, like us, were stuck on escort duty until we could deliver the prisoners to their prison-cages. The scatter-brained, battered, defeated prisoners, who were to be found stumbling and swaying listlessly in their shaggy ranks in the road-way between our van-guard and the rear-guard.

Bad Apple's driver had taken off, hauling both of our gigs behind him, rigged in tandem. Hopefully he was taking them straight to the repair-shops, as both of them were considerably worse for wear. Mine was blood-stained from stem to stern, and the wicker was torn where it wasn't scorched or foxed. And the less to be said about Bad Apple's blackened and charred vehicle, the better. She was far harder on her gig than she was on her drivers, and she was hard enough on her drivers that the irate North Wind asked me to pass along his regrets to the earth pony on the subject of further cooperation. BA would be stuck with Cherie at this rate, because nopony else was willing to put up with the burnt tail-hair, the heat-stroke, and the carelessness.

So, on hoof. Not, in all truth, the worst of ways to spend several hot and humid days. The vengeful summer sun seemed bound and determined to re-assert her dominion over her seasonal fields, and the excess waters we had introduced into the south were being ruthlessly baked out of the saturated soils. The world was bright, and wavering, and hot enough to drop a tired pony after a trot of a mile and a half. We had to stop and re-water our charges more times than I can count. We made very little headway, and after the second day, some of the prisoners started to come out of the geas that Cherie had laid over their battered psyches.

By then, we had passed though battered Dover, whose inhabitants had by and large not fled the enemy advance, nor had they been heavily occupied by the White Rose aside from some incidental sacking. Said incidental sacking was enough to leave the Bride's subjects in sunny Dover quite wroth on the subject of White Rose prisoners, and it had probably been a bad idea to parade our charges through that sullen market-town. We got the prisoners to double-time it before the rotten turnips and fruit turned to something more sharp-edged, and I resolved from there on out, to never take short-cuts, no matter how hot it is, or how eager I was to get from one place to the other. The roads after Dover were mostly through open fields, and that suited me just fine.

Bad Apple, Cherie, and I quickly grew bored with looking stern and officious for the rankers and the prisoners, and we amused ourselves with attempting three-part harmonies, with the hidden aid of the Princess as a sort of psychic metronome. The Princess, whose presence was the only aspect of the Mistress which we saw on that long tromp through the steaming countryside, hummed along in our ears, providing a secret fourth voice that only we and the Company rankers could hear.

It was becoming increasingly clear that we were in some sort of trouble, but nopony wanted to deal with us just yet. So instead, we sang 'Mango of Heaven', 'The Ash Grove', 'Mares of Harelich', and a hundred other songs. I noted out of the corner of my eye that the ears of the captured rose each time we took up a tune, and they seemed to swing into their stride whenever we found a good rhythm. Some few of the prisoners even joined in once we found a common song or two – mostly bar-room standards I'd heard from the Rennet recruits to the Company.

Cherie and I sang a few Prench duets from our common foalhood, but nopony else knew the tunes. Such a shame. But I saw the ponies in the coffers, and they straightened even further when Cherie's high alto carried above my weak soprano. Her voice had deepened and broadened over the last year or so, and almost all of that foalish squeak and tremble had squeezed out of her, leaving a strong, commanding tone. And she had lungs on her, strong enough to be heard over the tumult of a battlefield.

We were singing 'les trois juments noires' and trying to get Bad Apple to join in when the first of the prisoners' cages hove into view. Somehow, my memory of the last half of the march westwards had disappeared into the aether, replaced by a litany of song and by the joy of trotting in cadence to the old folk-song rhythms. The rankers had mostly drifted to the fringes of our column as the days had worn on, and the prisoners failed to show any sign of rebellion. We had collected a few squads from the Left-Division and their respective prisoners from the would-be bandit bands caught up west of Dover as we passed along, and our entire column was considerably larger than our initial hundred and thirty or so by the time we hit the Baronies and the prison-camps.

So it was, that the first thing the prison-wardens of the POW cages saw of us, was the better part of a battalion of captured White Rose, marching paradoxically high-headed and proud-eared, three fillies singing an old Prench standard in the fore. From the perspective of the prison-wardens, I cannot imagine what they were thinking – were we a relief-column, to free the prisoners? Some bizarre prank?

No, merely bored fillies caught out in a badly-timed display of youthful high spirits. But it did not simply shake out as such, nor did we simply catch the discipline which we had earned for bucking around on assignment – however unimportant and boring.

Because the prisoners caught sight of Cherie, her grey wings spread out as she hovered over me and Bad Apple, her head thrown back as she belted out "Apres qu'ca ma bague est otee, J'en ai pour tout' l'eternite!" to our literally captive audience.

And the applause from the prisoners-cage was so thundering that my heart's beat stuttered to the tromp of a thousand adoring hooves.

A great deal of running back and forth got the excited prisoners of cage #4 under control, while we walked our placid ex-bandits southeasterly towards a new cage being thrown up for the final few hundred captures. The former White Rose marched past the three of us at the gate of cage #14, and almost every head bowed before Cherie as they passed. I had… not noticed how fixated they had become upon the thestral.

I almost wrote 'little thestral', but she was a good deal taller than I by this point. We were all coming into our final last stretches as hormones and exercise had their way with our new-found adulthood, and I could only reassure myself that at least I wouldn't be the runt of the litter – I had Bad Apple beat by a good quarter-hoofs-length, even before you took into account ears. And ears will always let a donkey cheat when it comes to comparing heights.

Rye Daughter had us all beat, though, and she was positively fuming as she stomped up to the three of us, staring down all baleful and fierce. She wasn't quite as tall as the old General, but she'd have been a terror on the battle-field if Sawbones hadn't stolen her for the medical corps. And although she usually had a fairly placid and easy-going temperament, when you got her going…

"Do you have any idea what you have done, you fool of a filly?" she demanded of Cherie. "Idolaters! Thousands of idolaters, and all of them fixated on a grey-winged white-coated goddess, come to save them from their own self-made catastrophes! Dug them out of mud-holes! Told them when to duck, when to run, when to mutiny! We've put down a conquering army, and you recruit a Crusade out of it!"

Cherie's ears folded back, and she shrunk back on her haunches. "Rye, Rye, I was just helping, really. And the Princess was encouraging me every step of the way! Well, when she wasn't being me. You know most of that wasn't me at all – couldn't have been me! I've been on the front lines, blowin' things up, flying BA's scorched air-barouche for her!"

"You're telling me that the Mistress's Cherie, which is a phantasm and a dream-figment, managed to shadow-walk dozens of drowning ponies out of mudholes the morning after the rout?"

"Well, maybe a little bit. But we scared most of those idiots into their mud! Sawbones says, if you break it, you gotta fix it! My responsibility, I think?"

All Rye did was scream, quietly, in frustrated rage. This was only the beginning of the ordeal for Cherie. The Lieutenant came by to interrogate her, and me, and Bad Apple. Then this was repeated by the General, and both of her officious majors. And the song was the same, each time: did you know what you were doing? What do you think will come of this? Does she have full control over these ponies? How about those? What happens if we let her go in among the prisoners?

Command had no idea what was going on with the prisoners, and there were far too many of them to be easy if they all decided to re-commit to their religious idiocies. Everypony was on edge, and blaming it on the young mare with the bat-wings and the White Rose on her flank.

Of course, there were more important things going on elsewhere, but the elders of the Company were trying to keep us fledgelings away from that particular ugliness. Especially me, because they knew how closely I identified with the Nightmare. And the crisis down beside the Housa was all about nightmares.

The Blooded Blade

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This story goes back to the days when we were clearing the Deep Mines Range of ghouls in the company of civilians and the occasional loyalist trooper or Pepin militia ranger. It's well-known that being savaged by a ghoul is pretty much a death-ticket for ponies who aren't Company; anything more than a couple scratches can easily fester and worsen until the victim dies of runaway infections. Inevitably, if one dies of infected ghoul-bite, that pony will rise again as a ghoul herself; often-times they do it right on their death-bed. It's a nasty business, to be sure, and why everypony fears the ghoul, and with damn good reason. You can fight this off via some of my esoteric potions, but all in all, it's bad juju to let a ghoul break the hide if you're not Company. For some reason that I've never quite parsed on a medical level, Company membership seems to stave off some of the aggressiveness of the infections that arise from ghoul-bites among the civilians. I strongly suspect that there's a supernatural or magical aspect to the virulence of the ghoul-infection, that the Company's inherent magic short-circuits in some esoteric fashion.

But this all makes fighting the undead seriously unpopular among the militia rank-and-file, and makes ghoul packs a terror and a scourge amongst the civilian population.

While the rankers were fighting in the Deep Mines Range, the occasional ranger or trooper or miner would get caught out by a hideout ghoul or hidden batch of the undead. As I have said, this was at the time a death sentence, so some ponies got creatively desperate in the face of certain death. And some of the Company armsponies indulged the dying in their experimentation.

One desperate victim managed to talk a unicorn ranker by the name of Cup Hilt into a blood ritual, a sort of satire of the official induction ceremony before the pike-staff. I don't know if the Spirit was inspiring Cup Hilt, or he just fell into the right words at the right time, but the savaged miner survived her heavy lacerations. Several weeks later, that former-miner pony reported to a corporal for official duties within the Company, insisting that her 'conscience' would not leave her alone. Fine Silt works with the carters these days, hauling loads for a Company to which she insists she owes her life.

Several other repetitions of this blooded-blade field-expedient ceremony resulted in the deaths of the mortally wounded ponies and donkeys so 'inducted', but given their failure to raise as ghouls, and later developments which I've been avoiding thinking about, I should record those ponies names here. Arbre Latéral, a mining-jack caught away from his Company guards and almost ripped to shreds, was inducted in the hour of his death by an earth-pony named High Bid. Deep Furrow, an earth pony mare and Pepin militia ranker overrun by a ghoul pack almost within range of a Company section patrolling nearby, was likewise inducted about the same time by the blooded blade by another earth-pony named Halt State.

Five other cases of post-mauling induction resulted in survival by the victim-inductees, and every single one appeared not long after, with their personal weapons if they had any, and full saddle-bags containing their effects. They were distributed among the cohorts and the support sections, and afterwards the Lieutenant had me conduct a proper induction ceremony for those five and Fine Silt before the pike-staff. Nothing I've seen tells me that anything I did with the ritual and the pike-staff was anything other than a redundancy.

The blooded-blade seems to be a valid method of induction into the Company. I wondered at some obscure references in the deeper sections of the Annals, and am suspicious that somepony at some point decided to keep this non-traditional, or I should say, non-official method of induction from getting into the official records. The Annals being a sort of method by which we, the true and official face of the Company, say what is, and is not, Company; it is a rein and a lever of control over the folk or instinctive operation of the Company in its wild and untamed state.

The last several weeks of campaigning in the south had let the creative energies of the folk-Company loose among the rankers, especially among those sections seconded to their respective militia-regiments, and even more so to those regiments which were posted against the ghoul-flankers that swarmed north of the main fighting in the Clearances. The sections assigned to the Vallee du Pierre, the Tonnerre, and one of the Hydromel regiments inducted dozens of their regimental charges as the casualties mounted. The effectiveness of the defense generally meant that very few of the 'victims' were so savaged that they died of their wounds after the blooded-blade induction. The only one I've been able to track down is a caribou buck named simply Gunter. But then, I can recall almost no cases of spontaneous ghoulification of dying regimentals in the hospitals, so it is possible we are missing some field-expedient deathbed conversions conducted in the chaos and left unreported by anypony involved.

I tried to interrogate the Nightmare Spirit about these possibly Company mystery dead, but she was disinclined to cooperate in my quest for completeness of our records of the dead. To her, the dead were the dead, and, as she put it, she never looked back at the stars in her own mane. I don't know if that's reassuring, or scary as all tartarus.

Nevertheless, the aggressive medical-expedient field-induction campaign the regimental sections had been conducting among the Left Division left me a task, which is to say, to collect these new brethren and induct them officially before the pike-staff. Although as I approached the problem, I discovered several issues associated with it.

For one, the regiments of the Middle Division were at this time advancing aggressively into what we expected to be a void and a chaos south and east of the former enemy's rear, in the direction of Braystown and the banks of the Housa as it makes its deep southward bend around that once-besieged and still technically encircled river-town. For another, the standard-bearer and his war-lance was out of contact, displaced far forward with the front-line regiments and the bulk of the Second Cohort.

And the Middle Division and the Second Cohort had found resistance. A lot of it. Somepony had been seeding their back-trail with, well, too small to call it a proper horde, but rather, a hordelet of ghouls and other stay-behinds to hold off pursuit. Many of these ghouls were so newly-made that they say you could see the shine on them, browned and glazed like ginger-bread ponies fresh out of one of Cup Cake's baking-ovens. And the field-encounters between regimentals of the Middle Division and these fresh-glazed ghoul swarms were producing a lot of bite-victims.

Which meant that the sections assigned to the Middle Division were replicating the prophylactic and utterly unsanctioned induction methods of their peers in the Left Division. Dozens upon dozens of utterly unauthorized Company ponies were being minted on skirmish lines throughout the region.

Surprisingly enough, no actual Company fatalities were recorded during this period, while we and the increasingly-Company regiments were pushing through the mushy ghoul-resistance. The regimental-sections were equipped with enough old honey-pots and cry-foals to give them an advantage against brainless fresh-squeezed undead. But as easy as the fighting was…

It still slowed down the advance. When you have to destroy a couple dozen undead for every hundred to three hundred yards of road or lane you're moving down, you don't make much headway, no matter how cleverly you cut down the ghouls. The fugitive leadership of the destroyed White Rose army were trading their undead assets for time and distance, and it seemed to me, that they were profiting by the exchange.

And still, Obscured Blade and his collection of press-ganged Company and regimentals stayed out of contact, somewhere far to the front, perhaps even beyond the spear-heads cutting through the waves of ghoulish resistance. I have no idea how the old bokor was doing that – how he had ghosted right beyond our own front lines.

And the Spirit refused to talk about Obscured Blade. Which scared me more than anything else. Why was she hiding him from Company oversight? What was that cultist-among-cultists doing out there beyond the black?

Shadows Upon The Wall

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The series of interrogative scoldings culminated with the advent of the greatest of our fears, the source of authority below the Princess. The Captain came to chew us out.

Repeating all of the questions the others had had for Cherie, and for me, and for Bad Apple, she re-iterated them with vigour, with sadness, and with a sort of disappointed judgment I have not had to endure since I ran away from my insufferable family to join this armed circus.

I can't say I enjoyed the experience.

We were going for a third trip around the "what-were-you-thinking-they're-not-Grogar-damned-pets" bush, when the aging earth-pony mare's tirade was interrupted by a sudden manifestation of an additional Cherie in the tented conference-room they were using for our beratement.

"Do you have any further words for us, dear Captain? Since the fillies have established, time and again, that the overwhelming majority of the sins placed against our Cherie's name were committed by me, and my phantom-sisters?" asked the tiny, still-foalish princess-Cherie. For whatever reason, while the actual thestral filly found her adolescence, and her mark, and her adult growth - the Princess version of her remained pubescent, trembling long-legged upon the cusp of adulthood. The Princess-Cherie remained a true filly, still short and swift and boiling over with energy and potential.

"My dear Captain, I am here to collect my fair share of abuse and recrimination, for this is as much my fault as anypony's. Did I suborn the enemy in time of war? I am guilty. Did I spare the surrendered, and lead the dying into life and captivity? I am guilty. Did I act the White Rose for the superstitious and the credulous among our religious-fanatic opponents? With vigour, with intent, with eyes wide-open to the implications thereof. Guilty, guilty, guilty. What have you to say to that?"

The middle-aged purple pony looked down at the Spirit-phantasm. "I never know what to say to you when you come to me like that."

"Then better I wear the form that frightens thee the most, Captain?" And the phantasm grew, and shifted, until the grey wings were feathered and blue, and the grey mane grew out blue-black and starred, and a horn burst from her blue-furred forehead. "Shall we stand before thee the Princess of the Realm, exiled, disgraced, left without role or purpose? Ah, but take care, child – for even thou, our most puissant and fierce Company-Captain, art naught but a child before ourselves.

"Are we not the shadow thou hast cast upon Eternity? Is not the Company the star-light in our mane, the glittering nebulae of our tail? Thou art the shadow we cast upon this world, the will that we echo in dreams. We are the medium moreso than the message, but we are this, WE ARE OURSELVES IN TRUTH. As real as thee, as willful as thou art, as capricious as thou art determined, as foolish as thou art wise, loud wherein thou art quiet, fierce wherein thou art calm, kindly when thou art stern. We are the raging fire in thine veins, oh Captain, our Captain. Thou art our spear and our lance in thy time. WE do not reach out to dull thine edge, do not pull thus at our tail in this our own sphere, our own endeavors. Leave this matter to ourselves, and our delegates. The Captain must be neutral before these matters, it is not for the mortal hoof to stay or guide the dreamlike hoof. Tend to thy garden, and we will weed out that which does not grow best in ours."

The Princess shifted once again, and from her horn to her dock she flushed black as the pit, and her feathers turned half-leathern, and her teeth grew sharp. "For you are losing your grip on your physical, actual Company, left too long to its own individual devices, Captain, dear Captain. Corporals recruit new troops, witches fight their own private wars – and oh, what is to come, I tremble in anticipation at what is to come. For I am not as my damnable sister was, a prophet, but as through a glass darkly, I see, shadows cast by what is to come. Look to your own garden, my mortal Captain. Night is stirring, and the shadows begin to bend to their own needs. Leave the day to the dawn, to the little dawn-star. Tonight is not yet tomorrow.

"Oh, and let the little thestral deal with her idolaters. Nopony else will be able to shift them. Cherie is enough our pony, that I do not fear her hoof raised against her sisters. I only wish I could say the same of some others who say they are our children." With that she turned, and left, her ectoplasm dispersing as she strode out of the tent, the astonished Captain squawking and scrambling after her in the Spirit's wake.

The three of us looked askance at Broken Sigil, who had been taking notes for the Captain up to the point where the Princess threw a cold bucket of river-water over the proceedings, and appeared to have continued taking his notes during the Princess's tirade.

"Can I get a copy of your notes?" I asked the nonplussed operations-sergeant. "And it sounds like we just got ordered back to the prisoner cages for evaluation and organization of the captives. Can we make arrangements through you, or should I go out and talk to… damn, who is running those camps?"

"Colonel Kale Leaf of the VII Rennet is the commandant of the camps, the barracks outside of Cage 2…" Broken Sigil rattled off, having found his direction in comfortable minutia. Mad alicorn ghost-princesses were outside of his comfort-zone, but bureaucracy – bureaucracy always set him straight.

We found our way back to the prisoner-camps, not very far from the increasingly permanent-looking and sprawling cluster of tents on the western edge of the Clearances where the rear elements of our Army had made a base. I found Rye Daughter there at the Commandant's tent, briefing her on the medical condition of the prisoners in one cage or the other. Despite the airy reassurance of some ponies on the subject, it was neigh impossible to put ponies through the sort of conditions which the expeditionary army of the White Rose had suffered without extensive sickness, disease, and weakness among the survivors. Rye Daughter had been stuck playing doctor to the captives since the end of the battle.

We exchanged nods.

Cherie imperiously informed the Rennet colonel of our 'instructions', half-drawn by ourselves, half-inferred by the Captain's silence and the Princess's poetic insinuations. The prisoners would be 'left to' Cherie, whatever that meant in practice. We extracted a rather half-hearted roster of the captives, and it was unsettling.

Seven thousand, eight hundred, and fifty-six captive westerners, from sixteen different regiments, two naval battalions, and six support companies. The prisoners out-numbered any one of our field-divisions, lances, officers and supports alike. A few additional company-sized collections of prisoners had arrived while we were suffering our beratement, but it seemed like this would be the full extent of the captures for this campaign. The front lines had tightened up south of the Wirts, towards Braystown and the riverside. Whatever remaining forces were left from the wreck of the enemy army, were grouped with large numbers of the undead, and under the protection of the embattled leadership of the White Rose expedition. They were showing no signs of giving up any more living prisoners.

The Army of the White Rose had entered the valley of the Housa with over forty thousand lances and ponies in support. Despite their initial successes against the hapless Army of the Housa, the campaign had been absolutely savage to the luckless Westerners.

They had caught the attention of the Black Company, more fools they.

The survivors were distributed among sixteen 'cages', fenced-in enclosures surrounding the slowly-recovering town of Clear Creek. A steady stream of civilian carters were hauling in food and supplies for the prisoners in their cages, paid for from the line of credit which represented the Phalactery's support for, and official recognition of, the General's Army of the North.

So long as that line of credit held good, we were an official and loyalist force in being, the representative arm of the Empress and her government. We were more of the Bride's government than the locals had seen in generations. d'Harcourt's 'Army of the Housa' had merely been an agglomeration of baronial guards and neighboring districts' dragooned militia-regiments, with a 'stiffening' of 'rear support battalions' brought in from the Riverlands. From everything I've heard, the supposed stiffening 'regulars', had been the weak link which had broken in the first battle of the Clearances, the one that had shattered the Army of the Housa and driven them from pillar to post.

Still no word on how much of the New Equestrian militia had survived the battle, rout, and the holding of their eventual lines of defense. Ponies back home were still waiting on that with fearful anticipation.

Anyways, the prisoners. Some organization had been created in the cages, and although no official representatives had been recognized, most of the cages had self-organized to the point where the cages were becoming increasingly well-crowded with shelters and cleared of rubbish and such. Rye Daughter wished for aid in getting the prisoners to establish their own sanitation measures, and that was something that also required prisoner self-representation.

So, clearly, the first order of business was the extraction of cage-mayors. We set off to appoint ourselves some flunkies.

Not without Bad Apple grousing, though.

"What do ah have ta do with prisoner-wranglin', Cherie? How is burnin' stuff gonna help keep these ponies on the straight and narrow?" she whined.

"And how is it that flying high and slipping through shadows makes me a leader of religious crazies?" whined the thestral right back at our friend. "Whoever told you that the Company was fair or rational was lying to you, BA. I don't know what they told you at your swearing-in, but mine, Monsieur told me, Vous besoin de quelqu'un. Poneys ne sont pas élevés pour vivre seul. Never said anything about 'fair' or 'just', only that we're not made to live alone. And look at ces malheureux épaves, even the imprisoned can't live alone."

"I swear to the Peacock Angel, if'n the two of ya don't stop talking fancy at me, Imma gonna burn off yer tail-feathers!"

Cherie laughed at her, bouncing away with her short, bobbed tail held high. It would take some work to flash any hairs out of a tail kept that military-short and regulation. Me, I like a little more length in my tail, it helps with the occasional manipulation with tail-magic. Sometimes two forehooves and a mouth just aren't enough to keep things in the air, you know? But we knew that BA was just sassin' us, as she puts it.

The first cage we walked into, it was like New Coltington in New Equestria, times five hundred. Wide eyes, trembling lips, knees bent. Then one pony, staring at the unsettled Cherie, slammed her forehead into the hardpan earth, and then all around us like an expanding wave, the rest of the White Rose kowtowed for our white filly.

And there we stood, surrounded by a hundred skinny, naked ponies, all of them kneeling with their muzzles in the dirt. I didn't know whether to start laughing, or weeping. So I just kept quiet.

And Cherie spoke.

"Which one of you knows why you are bowing? Come, get up off your knees. No pony ever argued while kneeling, and I cannot talk to a sea of withers and ears. You, yes you. This is a well-organized camp, here. Who is responsible?"

She continued, coaxing the star-struck westerners into pushing forward a representative. Eventually Cherie got a name out of this unfortunate, and she told him that he was, until further notice or evidence of bad behaviour, the designated cage-mayor. She told him to take a proper census, and report to the barricade guards when it was ready.

We found ourselves obliged to repeat this performance fifteen times. Not once did anypony offer any violence to Cherie's person, although in five of the cages fights broke out over fanatics who insisted that she was a devil in mare's clothing, a witch, and a false idol. At each one of these outbursts, she laughed, and named the lead-fanatic that camp's mayor, and told them if they survived the census she expected of them, to report to her falsity via the camp-guards. Her partisans in those cages looked pole-axed, and confused, and they swarmed around her as we tried to leave for the next camp. Her answer?

"I need ponies who doubt, as well as those that believe. Undoubting faith led you to follow false prophets into destruction, did it not? Bring me doubters, as well as believers."

After we left the second of the doubters-cages, the Princess appeared to the three of us in her Nightmare-aspect.

"When did you become so monarchial, little thestral?" demanded the dark mare. "When did you start recruiting loyal oppositions and courtiers?"

"When they started bowing to me, and denouncing me as the daughter of darkness, old nag."

"Shameless child! You are the daughter of darkness, and as much in the employ of evil things as those fools who led these imbeciles into their captivity."

"You led the most of them into their captivity, although you've left me to enjoy the blame and credit, Mistress Night."

"Well, when we are you, we get these ideas and impulses, filly. It is, metaphysically, still your fault. As you would know if you'd accept your echoes properly and in a timely manner."

"What you do when you pretend to be me, is still your own obligations, acts that accrue to your credit or debit, Mistress. You do not transfer the guilt with the memory, I reject that claim!"

"Child, who ever said that we were a person in our own right? Half-mad I may be in this aspect, but this much I know when the wind is southerly: your Princess is yourself in shadow upon eternity. You, the living, are the will that drives the whole, no matter how much we wear these semblances. Guilt? Pride? Desires? All projections of yourselves, shadows against the cave-walls.

"Two fates before the living Company. Two paths to take. And lo! Somepony sets hoof upon the lower path e'en now. Downwards, into a greater darkness. Fear of death, and fear of silence draws them on like the call of the edge of the abyss. They gather themselves for a jump, and they will take some of you with them into the void.

"Be the better path, filly. Because only one of them has any future at its end. The other ends in eternal darkness – not that starry-skied eternal night that my foolish former self dreamt imperial dreams of, but that tarry black pit of nothingness, before the end which is the end of all endings.

"Remember, though, that these worshipers of you, they will not be the Company. Do not swear them in, do not try and make of them Company ponies. That is not the solution. Find a different path, but most of all, be the better path."

The Nightmare stood before us in the bright afternoon light, and she cast no shadow, and she was not there at all, but in the shadowed darkness of our minds-eye. The Night which walked with us in daylight.

Our shadow led us into our suddenly-urgent task.

A Necessary Discipline, or, Ritual

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The forward medical station was a set of tents bundled haphazardly into three wagons in train with the currently operational ambulances. The oxen and their rapidly-growing bull-calves hauled the station-train forward each morning, displacing towards the centre of the most recent skirmishing of the night and day before, on the nearest lane. The roads east of the Clearances were firming up, but they were still less than ideal, and all the bulk and muscle that the oxen and their bull-calves possessed were needed to break their trails. The supply-wagons struggled in their wake, the smaller earth-pony carters obliged to pull with all of their inherent magic to replicate the feats the mere physicalities of the cattle performed. There were very few donkeys who made a living at carting, let alone under these conditions.

One or two ambulances broke away from each morning's train to carry the wounded back further to the field hospital to the west. They would return in the wake of the train, to rejoin the forward medical station in its new position, however far forward they had displaced in that day's work. The medical corps thus operated in these days in a sort of constant stern-chase in the wake of the fighting, casting about to find fallow fields for the few hard-bitten doctors who struggled along with the cattle. Luckily enough, the open-field skirmishing was not the sort of intensive pony-wrecking machinery which the late battle had presented us. For the most part, the oxen and the regimental doctors had been able to deal with matters in my absence while Rye Daughter and I were setting up the prisoner camps.

I found them, and several of my new-company targets, in pursuit of my own newly Captain-assigned task. The Princess-aspect Spirit had told me that Carrot Cake was supposed to meet me at the forward station around noon or so, but I found myself occupied with medical duties to the point where I didn't even notice when he arrived. The two doctors who were riding along with the forward station had taken the opportunity to catch some extra rest in one of the supply wagons, and I was mixing up a fresh batch of blood-replacement potion concentrate from the portable alchemical bench when a tap on my shoulder with the sheathed point of a war-lance broke me out of my trance.

"Corporal! That is not the approved method for catching the attention of a distracted Company officer!"

"Sorry, Doc. You were pretty zoned out there. But th' Mistress said you needed me and ol' Betsy?"

"You… named the pike-staff?"

"I spend more time with her these days that I do my fillyfriend. Cup Cake's getting jealous."

I could never tell when the standard-bearer was joking. He never really broke that weak grin, regardless of whether he was angry, or worked up, or laughing inside. All he ever did was look shiftily left and right, as if searching for affirmation or confirmation that what he said was, indeed, recognizable as a 'joke'.

"OK, yeah, set up in the field over there. We've got six wounded here, the troops bladed them into the Company, Captain wants us to regularize 'em." We went over the necessary details, and frankly, I wouldn't want to test your patience by getting into the repetitive nature of a simple Company induction ceremony. Sometimes we made a big production of it; in this case, they were already committed to the brotherhood, and were fairly chewed-up to begin with. The walking wounded were still forward of the medical station, marching with their former peers and the Company ponies who had started taking field-recruitment into their own hooves. These were more seriously wounded, and had been held at the forward station for the convenience of myself and Corporal Cake.

Once the ceremony was complete, we returned the weak and giddy new-Company ponies to the bull-calves for expedited shipment to the field hospital and, eventually, the recovery wards. I joined the standard-bearer as he returned to the front lines.

The skirmishing was never quite over in those days, as the battalions in the field shifted forward yard by yard, probing for the inevitable ambushes. Over the course of a week, we had barely made a half-day's march south and east, stopped every other cross-roads or thicket by the need to exterminate another barricade full of ghouls and the occasional necromancer there to ride herd on her charges.

None of the White Rose necromancers were surviving to make their way into captivity.

We came across Brigadier Guillaime and his staff just behind the most recent bout of fighting, a thick scrum of regimentals and Company armsponies visible at the far side of a long, overgrown field, the tassles of their chamfrons bobbing in the slight breeze, their ichor-stained weapons rising and falling like the harvest-blades of those new-fangled combine-reaper devices I've seen in the fields of some donkey-run farms in the north. The clashing sounds and the war-bellows of the troops mostly drowned out the groans of the undead being dismantled systemically just a hundred yards away from our conference.

The brigadier was as hot under the caparison as I'd ever seen him. The regimentals in our front were not his own beloved regiment, but rather a pair of other Middle-Division northern units. My missing warlock and his Company escort had disappeared with the bulk of the III Verdebaie, including the newly-brevetted colonel of said unit and all of their officers. Where-ever they were lurking, they were operating without supplies or support, as the little bit of the regiment its former colonel could find, were the carters and supply-ponies of their support train.

We promised to retrieve the missing battalions of the III Verdebaie, and the off-script bokor who had absconded with them. The standard-bearer and I approached the rear of the scrum as the death-screams of the ghoul rear-guard reached their crescendo, and began to die off.

I swear, that wasn't intentional.

Relatively few wounded were streaming back from the battle-line, which despite its extreme violence, was being held under very firm control by the corporals and sergeants in charge. The regimental officers were almost impossible to distinguish from their non-coms; all of the gilt and brocade had been beaten off of these ponies, and what little was left, was so field-stained and battered that you couldn't tell satin from burlap.

Three Company non-coms were rushing from cluster of wounded to cluster of wounded, and I got a chance to see for myself this folk-remedy replication of my books' precious induction ceremony. A quick slice with the punch-dagger against the hide of the designated corporal, and the other two to hold up the inductee, and then a few muttered words, and the inductee's kiss against the tang of the dagger.

That was it, that was the whole of my irrelevance to the business of the Company.

When they looked up at us, the three paled right through their brightly-coloured coats. Two earth-ponies, and a sword-stallion unicorn, looking as guilty as if we had caught them drinking hooch in the field under arms.

"How many?" I asked. They didn't answer. "Get them out of the ranks as soon as this business is complete. We're regularizing your bullshit. And then we're going to have a nice long talk about authorized procedures, and unauthorized procedures."

I looked down at the bleeding, bitten wounded, and bent down to get to work. "We're going to talk, most importantly, about regular procedures. And reporting standards. How can the Annalist record our acts and our deaths, if the Annalist doesn't have a true record of who is, and is not, Company?" They looked ashamed, as they well ought to have been. "Now get back to it, these ponies need work, if you're to have done anything other than securing them an immediate entry into the expiration listings. And I'll need from you a proper list of the mortally-wounded inducted. You're short-selling the new inductees if I never hear about them, sergeant, corporal, corporal. Don't make a liar out of me."

Then I got to work.

Once the afternoon's ghoul-disposal operation was complete, the blooded-blade corporals followed my orders, and cut the new inductees out of the ranks of the two battalions, and called them into assembly in the centre of the long field, little rivulets of fresh ichor trickling under-hoof from the heaped mounds of disassembled undead to the southeast.

There were over a hundred ponies and donkeys in the assembly. Carrot Cake held up the pike-staff to the east, and he'd taken out the banner and hung it from the high shaft, and it was streaming in the increasing breeze from the north-west. I leaned over to one of the corporals, and demanded, sotto voice, "Just how many armsponies have you bladed in, you damned fool?"

"These are the bulk of the ones on the fighting-line, Annalist, sir. They leave their regiments after they're bladed in, if they're still fit to fight. They keep coming forward to the skirmishing, regardless of which battalions are in the fore. They've been acting like they're cohorted."

"You keep saying they, them. Are these ponies under authority or not?"

"Well, if we tell them to do something, they do it. Not like they're not obeying orders. They're just… following the Company example, I think."

"Good Grogar, you're like a pony with a pack of puppies following him around. What am I going to do with you all? Bah, be quiet, it's time for the magics…In those days, the Company was in the service of the Hashish-mares and the Old Mule of the Mountain…" I continued with the reading, a memorized section I had used on a dozen occasions to swear ponies into service. The ceremony ground on through its well-worn ritual, and I lost myself to the words and the gestures. The sun's long descent into dusk was well-advanced when the last few donkeys and a single caribou buck came up to kiss the pike-staff.

As we were cleaning up our mess, and plotting our raid upon the nearest chuck-wagon, two witches-gigs descended from the higher airs, their tired-looking charioteers sweating in the heat of the evening. Three flights of pegasi settled around us as the Crow and Otonashi jumped out of their chairs, and joined the standard-bearer and I. My Spirit whispered into my mind's ear the news that the Captain had diverted the available warlocks to my support, and increased the urgency of our secondary objective.

Obscured Blade was still absent without leave, and if the Captain's mane was not yet on fire, her tail was certainly smoldering.

In Reserve, Perhaps Even Off The Board

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The forward units of the Army of the North were heavily engaged with a peculiar rear-guard action against the remnants of the White Rose's Housa expedition, which was dying by inches in the shattered wasteland they'd made of the lands between Dover and the river. The rest of the Army? We were twiddling our hooves, bored out of our skulls.

Although I admit that the rest of the Army wasn't offered the chance to observe the spectacle of hundreds, if not thousands, of former-White-Rose captives treat a barely-grown bat-pony as if she were some peculiar combination of the Peacock Angel and a daemon from the depths of Tartarus. Er, so, pretty much the Peacock Angel, now that I think about my metaphor? Oh, tartarus, Sawbones is totally going to rip this entry to shreds. No, I think leaving it in will be a good reminder to your future, arrogant self that you, too were once young and foolish. - .S

Anyways, Cherie flitted about from camp to camp, cage to cage, and badgered her new charges to make something livable of their imprisonment. They hadn't exactly been resisting the demands of Rye Daughter and the guards as regards to hygiene and shelter but there hadn't been offering enthusiastic obedience up to this point, either. In the believing cages, hygiene and hard work suddenly gained the virtue of semi-divine command.

In the doubters' cages? Cherie, on our recommendation, behaved obnoxiously, was openly contemptuous and mocked the prisoners in their squalor and indolence. The doubting-mayors knew that they were being operated via reverse psychology, but the wonderful thing about this technique? It still works even when the victims are aware that they are being manipulated. A few smart remarks about how the believing mayors' cages were so much cleaner and respectable did a world's worth of work upon the doubters, who would have spit in our faces rather than obey a direct order.

Down in the wastelands, the easternmost companies of our army met up with the regiments pushing over the Hayfriend from Coriolanus. That was about as far as the units of the reduced Army of the Housa was willing to extend itself away from its depots in Coriolanus. Their battering in the spring had left their remaining officers cautious, even timid. They loathed the idea of operating away from a direct line of communications, and thus weren't inclined to move more than a third of a day's march away from their pontoon bridges over the Hayfriend. Engineers were repairing the bridge at Beech Grove – quietly, I had been told that it was more in the way of a replacement, but officially? 'Repair'.

(The rest of the engineers and pioneers had been working on bringing the main road through the Wirts into operation as a logistical line of communication for our own forward regiments. That route would reduce heavily the massive number of wagons and carters dedicated to moving food, supplies and support over the battle-fields via the long way and the devastated Clearances. So long as the White Rose's fleets didn't return to close off one end or the other of that dangerously exposed road. It was also about this time that three full regiments of our Army returned south-west to the vicinity of Leveetown to reinforce the regiment which had been holding that port lightly against the possible return of said White Rose flotillas. They had been oddly absent, leaving us to destroy their charges without any sort of interference.)

Plans were for the bulk of the Army of the Housa to bypass the chaos in the wastelands via the Bride's Road and join up with the intact Army of the North. Because the fact was, the Army of the Housa was more notional than real. d'Harcourt had disappeared in the chaos after the first, disastrous battle of the Clearances, and most of his staff had died or likewise disappeared into the aether.

The 'Army' had operated via a committee of emergency, mostly militia colonels and majors, and using as a focus an incredibly decrepit and half-senile retired brigadier-general from the great manufacturing-port. This Brigadier Barrière d'Or may or may not have been a relative of Dior Enfant, but the accounts I've heard and seen suggests that she was mostly hauled about in a cart to convey dignity to the decisions of the three regimental colonels who actually ran the 'Army' after they tumbled back across the Hayfriend.

If they had been out in the open, the White Rose would have eaten them for breakfast. As it was, the Hayfriend did more to protect Coriolanus than anything or anypony outside of the walls of the Braystown Shambles. And nopony was more aware of this incapacity than the colonels' committee, who apparently were galloping full-speed towards the official embrace of General Knochehart. Never has an army more enthusiastically disbanded than that of the 'Army of the Housa'. They knew they were snake-bit, and were pathetically eager to append themselves to a winning organization.

And so it was that I found myself flying up to High Earth behind Whirlwind to greet the first regiment to pass over the 'repaired' bridge at Beech Grove. I don't know if it was accident, or the eagerness of the troops, but this first regiment was one of the units raised from the provincial militia of New Equestria. They had not marched very far from their own front doors, and yet, they had walked through a lifetime of fear, defeat, and recovery.

The battalions of the III New Equestria were far smaller than a well-established militia ought to have been. They, like most of the units mis-led by the hapless d'Harcourt, had lost heavily at the Wirts, and lost even more in the rout and retreat afterwards. After I and a lieutenant from Knochehart's staff officially welcomed the III New Equestria into the Army of the North, I toddled away from the officialdom, and sought out stories as Sawbones had taught me. I gathered much of the above from the ponies I interviewed, and a great deal else.

It was here that I heard the stories of the ponies who had retreated with d'Harcourt into Braystown, because the III New Equestria had not been among the fortunates that had fell back directly over the Hayfriend. They, like a number of other battered regiments and 'rear support battalions', had fled to the massive, low-walled fortress outside of Braystown, and the town which the Shambles protected.

The III New Equestria and a number of other units eventually were evacuated via ferry into the lines in front of the suburbs of Coriolanus, and had been glad to get away from d'Harcourt and his pet legate. They had sounded like a strange pair to begin with. The Beau was unusual for liches, in that he was apparently well-aware of his own lack of talent for leadership, command, and war-fighting. From all accounts, he had a reputation for latching on to mortal commanders of note, and following their lead slavishly. The Beau was a sort of daemonic familiar for successful generals, a powerful but capricious aide to those who knew what they were doing. Before the campaign began, the Beau and everypony else had assumed that d'Harcourt was another in this line of capable commanders.

It was apparent from the accounts I heard, that by Braystown, the Beau's faith in d'Harcourt's competence had been shattered, primarily by the battle of the Clearances, but perhaps more firmly by the poor choices that general had made leading up to the battle north of the Wirts. The New Equestrians reported that d'Harcourt disappeared a day and a half after the defenses of the Shambles had been revived and properly ponied, and he never reappeared. All commands were either issued by, or passed along as from, the Beau. For the first time in this long war, the legate had been leading his own command.

Nopony dared to ask what had happened to d'Harcourt. Even fewer actually cared, after his catastrophic failure of leadership. At least some of the New Equestrians I talked to assumed that the legate had eaten d'Harcourt, and more than a few thought better of the legate for this assumption.

While I was taking my accounts, I looked up at some hub-bub to note a civilian moving among the regimentals settling into the castra outside of New Earth. It was the Castellan, Long Scroll, accompanied by two ponies who I presumed were aides, and Cup Cake, whom I had not seen in a long while. I thanked my interviewee, and trotted off to find out what was going on.

What I discovered, was that the III New Equestria was Long Scroll's sister's regiment, as well as his nephew and his daughter's. The sister had been a battalion major, I learned quickly from the nearest non-com I could corral. The feckless Long Scroll had no idea of how to operate the militia-bureaucracy, and I knew before he did what he was searching for.

The nephew had died in the Clearances during the fighting. The sister had been badly wounded during the retreat to Braystown, and she died in the Shambles, as did most ponies so wounded in the rout. But the daughter…

Long Scroll was still scrambling about like a fool when Shared Feast came galloping through her fellow militia-mares, and tackled her father.

And not every story's end is an evil one. And what is lost may still be found.

I walked up to Cup Cake, and patted her on the withers, and asked her if she had eaten yet today. I was feeling like some pastries if she had any with her. Whirlwind was using a courier's chariot while my gig was in the repair-shop, so I offered Cup Cake a ride if she wanted one. I thought offering the baker a way to go meet her own beau, off somewhere along the fighting front, might be an easy way to sneak into the action myself.

The Princess was ahead of my game, though, and had Cup Cake berate my slyness. Back to the rear again for us, the rear and boring nonsense like inventory.

Inventory of the contents of the Annals-chest, for instance, left in the custody of Throat-Kicker, delegated mystically by Sawbones to carry his precious from place to place somewhere safe and in the rear. Both Sawbones and I were writing to journals during this period, and I took the opportunity to transfer my entries to the Annals-storage sections while I was inventorying.

The timber-weasels were all over the warlocks' encampment, digging into everything, getting underhoof, rubbing up against anything that would stand still. I tried to bar them from the tent that we had the Annals-chest in storage, but it's fairly difficult to keep animals (or animal-shaped ambulatory shrubs like the timber-weasels) from getting into hopelessly insecure places like field-tents.

It was while I was trying to shoo a couple of Gibblets' pestiferous plants out of the storage-tent that I looked down into the opened Annals-chest and noticed some grey hairs in the central compartment. They looked like nothing that would have come out of either Sawbones or my hides, and I looked further. It was at this point that I spotted some anomalies in the security-matrixes. Alarmed, I drew a sealing-circle ward around myself and the chest, and then I opened up the special compartment which held our most sensitive materials. I wish I hadn't discovered anything, but I somehow knew something was wrong, even before I opened that damned magic casket.

Somepony had opened up the supposedly-impenetrable chest, and removed the liches' phalacteries, and replaced them with crude fakes. And I had no idea who or why, or even when.

I looked up, and three timber-weasels were sitting on their haunches, staring at me and my warding-circle. We exchanged angry glares with each other, until one barked, and all three got up and ran out of the tent.

What in tartarus was going on?

The Old Bottle Of Vinegar, or, Into The Black

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Obscured Blade was old. Gibblets has said that the first time he met the warlock upon the latest of that goblin's periodic returns to the Company, he had been old and crotchety even then. That had been nearly a century ago, and somehow, the old unicorn just got older and more crotchety, as if he distilled with age. A fine old vinegar, more bitter and stronger with every year.

Most ponies aged like any of the other hooved races, finding a long middle-age, and then descending quickly through a senescence and a brief old-age and then sudden death. If they were lucky, they died surrounded by their grand-children and great-grandchildren. But certain ponies arrived in their belated old-age, and they stuck. They set up residence in the land of the elderly, and grew ancient even by the standards of things that live on. These turtles of the thinking tribes lived on, through eras, through generations. They outlived their children, sometimes their grand-children, and if they were very, very unlucky, their great-grandchildren. It was as if Death had forgotten their addresses, and mis-delivered their eternities to others, to friends and relatives, until they found themselves surrounded not by friends and family, but the respectful descendants of those ponies who had once known them.

Obscured Blade had outlived far too much of his own family, and had never had many friends. With time, his second career as a trainer of Company ponies left him a legacy of respectful former-students, but even those died like may-flies as he just got older and more bitter and stronger with the years that took everything else.

I'm told that he had grown bitter indeed with the last several campaigns, as another crop of students passed away in the face of violent death. The sudden and pointless death of Hidden Jewel last year had hurt him in ways I had barely registered; and although the battles in the south had been relatively kind to the unicorns he had trained, he had still lost four former students and a number of foster-children from the 'old Company' who, if not students, had been 'his' children.

Perhaps this drove whatever madness that drew him and his coterie of Company armsponies into disappearing into the black; all we did know was that they disappeared during the early stages of the sweep against the barrowgasts, and, it turned out, disappeared the better part of a regiment of loyalist militia with them. Obscured Blade had been out hunting barrowgasts, and was supposed to summon the standard-bearer and his magic pig-sticker to deal with anything too big to kill by normal witchy methods. I don't know if the old bokor had found abnormal witchy ways to murder barrowgasts and other big evils, or if he just never found anything and just kept going, or what happened exactly.

Whatever the case was, the III Verdebaie and Obscured Blade's honour-guard had disappeared off the map, and indeed, the 'radio'. Whatever they were up to, the Spirit refused to say. And none of them sent back messages to say what it was they were doing. Our best guess was that they had somehow slipped behind or between the screens of ghoul skirmish-lines the White Rose leadership had shed like lizard-tails upon their back-trail. We found no signs of struggle other than our own, and no dead in the lanes and the fields, nor even risen corpses in III Verdebaie barding among the ghoul opposition. Whatever Obscured Blade had done to hide his self-created task-force, it had passed them through their opposition without bloodshed.

Or perhaps not? We had only encountered those first three barrowgasts, and the mass graves that Gibblets had found should have been enough to create an entire corps of 'gasts. They should have rolled over our regiments like a frozen, icy tide of destruction. Something had spared us that losing battle – perhaps it had been Obscured Blade's task-force, and whatever witchy monstrosity he had concocted?

It was hard to tell, and the wreckage of a destroyed barrowgast wouldn't last long in the humid summer heat of the south.

My witch-aides attempted to find Blade's trail, his path through the dispersed, delaying battle-field that the White Rose's remnant had left behind themselves. Otonashi and the Crow were not successful, and we found ourselves, frustrated, trailing the advancing battalions as they smashed three ambushes in the course of crossing three country miles and the whole of a day. A wasted day, while the enemy continued to gain time and space. We were growing close to the former siege-camps of the White Rose in their investment of Braystown and the Shambles, but the enemy must have already gotten inside those fortified walls.

The supplies left in those well-fortified depots would never have been enough to support the whole of the White Rose's intact army in all of its tens of thousands, but the shattered remnant, increasingly composed of necromancers and their thralls? They could subsist on those thin stocks for a while, at least long enough to fall back once again to a defensive position beside the Housa itself. And at some point, the flotillas of the White Rose were going to try to ascend the river again, and make contact with what remained of their field army.

Nopony wanted to let the leadership of that damnable army get away.

But in the meantime, we, the Company under legitimate command, were stuck behind a stack of undead barricades, killing our way forward slowly, one cross-roads and hedge-row at a time. Blade and his ghost-brigade were off somewhere, slipping through whatever passages his ancient and bitter wickedness had found through the defenses of the White Rose.

He was convinced, I am assured, that the White Rose leadership were secretly liches, the legates under turned coats. He was a bitter and paranoid old goat, and his fantasies of a war fought by the same evil undead on both sides, exchanging coats and glamours as they slipped from one command to the other – this was too much even for a cynic like me. I could not believe that ponies exist in the real world that can operate like this, can play with ponies' lives and beliefs as if they were pushing chess-pieces here and there - Oh, who am I kidding? I can't keep that up. It's totally the sort of thing that liches like the Marklaird and the Walker would have done. There are few things I could not put past the legates, but it was all supposition and guesswork, there was very little evidence to support Obscured Blade's conspiracies.

Not that this sparsity of evidence had been enough to keep that bottle of old vinegar from rushing off into the big empty to hunt the greater undead. I just wished we could catch up to him.

Because the second night of our search for the absent Obscured Blade, something happened on the far side, in the abandoned camps, something truly violent. Great magics – greater than anypony had thought the old bokor had in him – burst in vast detonations of great violence. Flashes of red and greenish-yellow witch-fire were overwhelmed by a wave of darkness which obliterated even dark-sight among the watching Company armsponies, who had been scouting forward and were caught up at the time in destroying yet another nest of ghouls when the fireworks broke out. The desultory night-skirmishing died out as the ghouls fled in mindless self-preserving terror, and the Company skirmishers fell back half-blinded.

Whatever had generated that great wave of darkness, of anti-light, of light-devouring intensity, wracked the Spirit herself in an agony of psychic distress. Something sent great waves of strength and confusion through the medium which was the Mistress, and every Company pony with even a little sensitivity to the Spirit spasmed with the back-draft. We were very lucky to not lose anypony on the front lines, as the chaos in our Spirit was as bad as – no, worse than the incident north of Dover with the Princess-aspect several weeks previous.

The only thing I could compare the experience, was the last time the Spirit had destroyed a lich. The energies, the surges felt like it had when the Walker had been obliterated on the Baneway. The ponies I talked to afterwards, compared it to the moment that Carrot Cake had speared the Marklaird. The one thing that all Company ponies within range compared it to, was this: the death of a lich, and the absorption of its essence into the Company and its Spirit.

Had Obscured Blade found his target? How had he killed the unkillable? The Spirit was not forthcoming, and her Nightmare aspect did nothing but roar mindlessly the rest of that long, strange night.

The few ghouls who tried our lines that night discovered the energies that coursed through the maddened Company – I'm told that they didn't just die upon the skirmishers' lances, but rather exploded like bursting water-gourds. The ponies in question were certainly coated in enough dried gore to support their splattered claims.

By the next morning, we had re-organized enough to find a way to push through the remaining ghouls and into the siege-camps. We found windrows of dead ponies in Verdebaie barding inside the camp proper, showing where they had come over the castral walls and forced the defenses of the White Rose remnant. Obscured Blade was no kind of tactical genius, and his assault had been blundering and bloody. Brigadier Guillaime wept when he saw how badly his regiment had been used.

There were no wounded to be found. What I did find, was the bodies of six Company ponies, scattered here and there within the camp. Fletch Song, unicorn mare, Star Call, unicorn mare, Long Jump, earth pony stallion, Rapier Point, unicorn stallion, Sweet Soil, earth pony mare, and Fine Point, unicorn stallion – all were found dead of battle-wounds, from the forced wall to well into what had to have been the command-tents of the White Rose. All of them 'old Company', former students and foster-children of the bitter old stallion. Found among these Company dead were a great number of corpses in the barding of the enemy, as well as a scattering of more in Verdebaie barding. It had been a brutal, swift battle, without any science or skill.

Obscured Blade had relied on dark-sight, numbers, and aggression to win his battle for him. And it had cost his followers heavily. There were a number of bloodied scorch-pits which might have been further losses, caused by some great warlock's battle-magic, far too much like what I've read of the death-magics of the Maugan mages in Bitter Ambrosia's books. Those scorch-pits may have been the last remains of some additional Company dead, but if they are, I have no information about who or whom they might have been. And the Spirit is not forthcoming on the subject. Again.

The command-tents were a burnt wreckage, shattered beyond recognition. Something terrible had happened there, and my best guess is that this is where Blade killed his lich. The rings of burnt and blasted rubble spread out from that site certainly point to some sort of high-energy magical encounter, and it looked enough like the damage done to the Baneway to confirm the supposition, at least in my mind.

Obscured Blade had found a weapon that could destroy liches. And he had done so. And he was gone again, back into the black. Where he had gone? Only he and his followers knew.

Hiding In Plain Sight, or, The Witnesses

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I was wrong.

The wreckage within the siege camps had only appeared to be empty of the wounded detritus of battle. And indeed, upon first examination, the only thing to be found was destruction and corpses. Both sides had disappeared as thoroughly as if the night had swallowed them whole.

But the appearance and the truth were in opposition to each other, and the regiments which followed in the train of the skirmish-line provided the eyes and ears that perceived that contradiction, and resolved it. Throughout the castra, and in the stubble and ruin that surrounded the outer walls, ponies from the loyal North found the hidden survivors, many dying, almost all wounded, and every single one traumatized, hiding, and terrified.

Upon encountering the first few cases, I sent back word to bring forward the mobile medical station, and then when the first few became a flood, I sent off a flight of pegasi to round up aerial transport and to collect my surgical staff. Because it began to appear as if every hidey-hole inside the siege camps and every furrow deep enough to hide a wounded trooper had been filled with spooked and mangled remnants from the brief, horrifying assault against the walls of the White Rose.

Both the groups defending the walls, and those assaulting the walls, had shattered like so many burst whiskey-bottles upon impact. Discipline in the night-assault has always been hilariously fragile, but in the conditions of this particular night-attack, every pony that escaped the distracted attention of their overseers made sure to escape in fact as well. This fractal dissolution of military units into a mob had, in the confusion of night, spiraled into dull, stupid brawls throughout the darkness. As the regimentals pulled the scared survivors out of their holes, and as my cattle and ponies began patching together their mangled hurts, I began putting together a more true view of the night's opponents, and the idiot, savage violence which had detonated overnight.

A sampling of spooked III Verdebaie wounded was enough to settle my mind on how exactly Obscured Blade had seduced away an entire regiment worth of hooves and lances to his own personal crusade. It had been no sort of seduction at all, but rape.

The old unicorn had always been known for his subtle and strong geases, but in some dark and terrible corner of the 'new Company', he had found the raw power to simply – take the loyalty of over a thousand Verdebaie troopers. Nothing overt, nothing overwhelming – it was, said the survivors, as if they had just… remembered orders. Assignment to the Company warlock, suggestions that his every word was the word of the General – the turning of regimental discipline in the favour of an impossibly ancient and ugly old witch.

But the longer they marched in unnatural darkness, the stronger Obscured Blade's control over his new troops had grown. From the testimony of the agonized victims upon my surgical-tables – extracted while I cleaned out filthy, infected wounds, and before I had to remove limbs already beginning to rot away in the humid summer air – it appeared as if the old bokor's trick for escaping notice had been some sort of tunnel of darkness, perhaps a doubled illusion-phantasm, of darkness within, and light bended without. But what I was sure of, was that the III Verdebaie had slow-marched through miles of ambuscade and chaos as if they were in a trance. Nopony and nothing saw them, and they saw nothing but the grim old bastard leading them into the distance.

Obscured Blade's life had been long, and evil, and full of lessons for the witchy and warlock-like in nature. And he spent all of that knowledge, and no little amount of stolen power – filched from what pockets we still did not know – to steal away a regiment, and then he secreted it behind enemy lines. Finally, he did something unforgivable. He wasted lives in a stupid attack.

The now-hypnotized regimentals had been sent forward, as in a dream, against the moon-lit walls of the White Rose's last redoubt, and they poured over them as mindlessly as ghouls. They bled and died by the dozen, a colossal, sudden wreck that swept over the startled and unprepared defenders of the re-occupied siege camp. Strangely enough, those wounded in the collision generally found themselves suddenly, unexpectedly emancipated in their pain and agony. The victorious and untouched followed the bokor and his band of 'old Company' co-conspirators – still geased, still under his spell. But the mangled and wounded awoke from their dreams and – terrified by the darkness and the pain and the blood – crawled to where we found them, sometimes fighting each other for that little bit of cover that could hide them from the terrors of the night.

The final battle between Obscured Blade and his lich-victim was as hidden from our wounded witnesses as it had been from our own front lines and skirmishers. Later, after the wave of fire and darkness within darkness, the hiding wounded had, some of them, seen a terrible, transformed bokor pass back through his own trail of dead and wreckage. Their descriptions were vaguely terrified, and I could not determine if he had been simply under a typical glamour, or if something else had been at work. My witnesses were too disordered in their witness to make sense of that one way or the other. He had been followed by Company armsponies likewise dread and inequine in their appearance, which again could have been due to simple glamour, or something worse. Although I cannot imagine what value there would have been in maintaining a glamour in a conquered and neigh-abandoned camp. Those wounded who had not found sufficient cover, had not hidden, were simply too slow in cringing back into their holes – they were swept up by the victorious warlock's followers, and carried away to what fate, nopony could say.

But I was growing increasingly worried about just where Obscured Blade was getting his new-found power sources. There are cheap and easy ways for witches in the death-haunted world of Tambelon to juice their own native magics, and those ways are the wide and easy roads to Tartarus. The old witch should have known. Perhaps he knew, and he did it anyways? It was incredibly worrying that the only wounded we had found in his back-trail had been wise enough to hide from him and his followers, though.

So the survivors shrank back into their holes and their cover and they hid. Because they were in agony, and awake, and their mommas hadn't raised no fools. And nothing that looked like Obscured Blade looked after his bloody victory could be trusted by the little ponies in his way. And this may be why they survived to give their testimony to me. If so, then there is no hole deep enough to hide the old bokor from the consequences of his choices. Not from the Company – his honour-guard was proof enough that there was support for whatever wickedness he was using to conjure with. But from – I don't know, call it karma. Actions have consequences, and I don't like what I smell coming on the wind for the old witch.

The stories of the surviving White Rose were appallingly similar to that of the Verdebaie ponies. Hypnosis, control, evil warlocks commanding mad acts committed in a dreamlike state. An objective pony, hearing the stories of the two sides, the defenders and the assaulting force, would have had nothing to tell between the two of them, excepting only that the horrors that the awoken Verdebaie troopers feared from the old warlock, the White Rose had seen, again and again, committed by their evil overlords.

By the time of the great retreat, the surviving commanders of the White Rose had been beyond simple play-acting and catering to the religious expectations of their followers. Their pretense of righteousness and piety had been increasingly thread-bare even before the crack-up in the Clearances, but in the rout, all illusion had been tossed away. They hadn't had the power or energy to spare to coddle their remaining followers. Obedience had been compelled by terror, force, and ruthlessness. Remaining civilian prisoners had been massacred – those Gibblets had found in the freshest of mass graves in the killing-fields. The wounded had likewise been sacrificed to the power of the masters of the White Rose, and fed into the control of dead-eyed necromancer-captains – the ghoul ambuscades we had just spent days fighting past.

When the III Verdebaie came screaming over the siege-camp walls, most of the remaining White Rose scattered like leaves – at least, those who found themselves outside of the control of their maddened commanders. I think all of those still under control could be found in the windrows of the corpses laid out like a carpet of death from the walls to the heart of the camp, and the last stand of the Rose.

If there were any westerners still under arms and under command anywhere in that district, we did not find them. Obscured Blade, his followers and that portion of the III Verdebaie still under his control, likewise had vanished into the mists, absent without leave. The ghoul ambuscades had been beaten down, the survivors collected, and then – suddenly! – there was a great silence, from the Wirts to the streets of Dover, from the bloodied fields of the Clearances to the walls of Braystown and its Shambles.

It wasn't over, but it felt a little like it was over. And the undead of the alarmed loyalist legate hiding in his ramshackle fortress by the river was the only force under arms we could find in the whole of the land. The Beau crouched within the Braystown Shambles, and the truly loyal lich hunkered down behind his walls, afraid of the nominally loyalist army come down from the north.

And after the madness of Obscured Blade had burst across the districts of the south, I cannot say for sure if the legate didn't have any reason to worry.

The Errand-Colt

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The pegasi flew search patterns across the sky overhead, quartering the region around the walls of Braystown and the Shambles. The witches were aloft in their gigs, aiding in the search for our AWOL warlock and his band of fellow – well. There were certain words I don't want to commit to paper just yet. But matters were quickly spiraling out of control, and the sooner we found Obscured Blade and his grim band of lich-hunters, the better.

Because there was at least one lich still active in the area, and he technically, allegedly was an ally. Or, at least, still loyal to our own liege, the Bride. As such, we had an obligation to not murder the damned undead thing – or to stand by and let him be murdered by a pony still supposedly under Company discipline.

Only problem was, Obscured Blade had developed his own peculiar ideas about what constituted Company discipline, and wasn't answering his messages.

In the meantime, we found ourselves in the peculiar situation of standing, encamped, before the gates of a supposedly friendly fortress and its castle-town, the gates were barred against us – and because the fortress was teeming with ghouls and other undead, it rather seemed the better part of valour to occupy the siege-camp and maintain a properly armed guard. There was no telling how the legate within the Shambles was going to react to our presence.

He may or may not be aware of the Company's history with the greater undead. But Obscured Blade's little display could not have dispelled any of his possible misgivings.

While Brigadier Guillaume settled his division into the fortified positions the White Rose had thrown up all around Braystown, I met with Gibblets, who took a few moments away from the search for his missing warlock to discuss how to approach the legate.

"Have we had any contact at all with the lich?" I asked.

"Nothing direct. The Lieutenant twice tried to make contact with the authorities inside Braystown and the Shambles, and both times, they came back saying they hadn't seen anything but ghouls on 'shamble' mode, not reacting to their presence." He was sweating heavily, and the shade we had found was vanishing quickly as the sun moved overhead.

"Is he likely to just ignore our presence again?" I asked, sweating a bit myself.

"Now that we've effectively invested his walls? Again? I'd think he'd take at least a parley now."

"Is that what we're doing, Gibblets? Besieging him? I mean, is there anything we'd be doing otherwise if we were?"

"In the short term, we do whatever the General orders, until somebody over her head countermands those orders."

"And now that you've checked that box, again, what are we doing?"

"In the real world, the Beau hasn't done anything to show that he's disloyal, he hasn't despoiled any provinces, rebelled against the Phylactery, or even attacked any other loyalist force. On those same lines, he held this position against overwhelming force for weeks, kept the gates of the Housa locked tight, and basically held the line until we could show up and show off. The only thing holding us in place here is that lich's own paranoia and refusal to talk. Get him to talk, Sawbones."

"Me? Why me? We have plenty of diplomatic ponies that are better at this sort of thing."

"Name two." Gibblets was now in direct sunlight, and he positively gleamed with sweat.

"Uh, Dancing Shadows? The Brigadier?"

"Dancing Shadows is occupied with civilian affairs up north, and Guillaume is command and isn't expendable."

"Pfft, thanks. Fine, I'll go. But I'm not going into a spooky wreck of a castle full of the undead unarmed."

"You know you look preposterous in barding." He started sidling towards the retreating shade of the tree, and I had to scramble to follow his retreat.

"No sillier than Carrot Cake. Ooh! Can I take him?"

"You are not killing the legate, so no, I'm not going to send you in there with our best lich-killing weapon. Are you sure you're not Uncle Blade under an illusion?"

I poked myself in my chest, looking down. "I don't think so. I'd tell you to ask the Mistress, but she's been kind of evasive on the subject of Blade recently."

"You talk too much to the Nightmare. Princess Luna is much more helpful."

"Oh, so she's told you where to find the old bokor?"

"No," the dripping goblin fumed. The shade continued to dwindle "Not that. Can we get out of the damn sun?"

***

So I, hastily armed in my caparison and peytral, with my chamfron hooked to the back of my harness along with my bearded axe, approached the gates of the Shambles in the late afternoon. A squad of Hydromel troopers held a forward bastion within charging distance of the gates, and we exchanged greetings as I collected a lance and tied a white rag above its balancing-point. I stuffed the lance into my harness's banner-socket, and cantered forward with the parley-flag flying.

No projectiles flew from the walls. Not that I could spot any fighting-platforms in the tumbled mess that was the Shambles' forward wall. I'm not at all sure how exactly the fighting had gone on over this sort of terrain and fortification, but I would have been just as happy to never find out for myself.

These walls had held off tens of thousands. And as I came closer, I realized that the ground was studded in all directions with caltrops, and as I came closer, embedded spear-heads and other sharp implements half-impaled across the berms and crevices and half-collapsed walls. Many were still blood-stained from previous assaults, despite the multiple violent storm-fronts that had broken over the region in the last few weeks.

As I slowed to avoid all of the sharp points and spear-heads, the sally-port of the main gates creaked open, and a dead thing half-stepped through the port to open it for me. Several weeks dead, the once-stallion was wearing White Rose barding. Positively fresh, by ghoul standards. And not visibly thralled. No sign of a thralling fetish. It stepped back to give me room to pass through the port into the fortress, and I paused, reluctant to come within biting radius of what looked like a 'free' ghoul.

"Be welcome, herald," it ground out of a half-rotted throat. "This one is under the control of its master."

Still, it stepped back even further, and I passed by quickly, moving into the killing-space behind the gates. As it closed the sally port, I took stock of my surroundings. A full lance of armed undead stood to their posts around the gates, just as if they were living soldiers. As I was led through the rambling, winding passage within the walls, I passed ghoul after ghoul, armed as they had been in life, holding their posts. There were hundreds of them, and the Shambles' entrance-passage was the most convoluted and baroque mess of a fortress entrance-passage I had ever laid eye upon. It literally spanned the entire northern and part of the eastern face of the fortifications, a killing-zone half a mile long.

Eventually we debouched into a courtyard between the outer wall and one of the inner walls. This led into another barred gate, and again, back and forth like a drunken, broken-backed snake. And once again, through a third killing-zone. The interior of the Shambles was mostly wall and kill-zone. Once I finally got out of those miles of corridor – lined almost every step of the way with murder-holes and individual sally-ports spaced out every couple hundred yards or so – I found myself before the citadel or bailey. And here, my journey ended. A large honour-guard of undead stood with weapons in hoof, surrounding a tall figure wrapped in shining leather strips, so much like the late Marklaird that I blinked in astonishment.

The legates had a certain common style to them, I had to give them that.

While I had never been quite sure as to the tribal origins of our former employer, this lich had clearly been an earth pony stallion in life, so tall and broad-shouldered that his stature made his origins obvious. He had half a head of height on me, and would have stared down at me, if his eyes had not been hidden behind a wrap of highly polished leather.

"Are you an assassin?" the lich asked, nonsensically, looking at the battle-axe on my harness.

I blinked in confusion, looking right and left to see if there was any sense to be found in the courtyard. The Nightmare appeared in my peripheral vision, and told me, "Tell him you're a soldier." So I did.

"You're neither," he said. "You're an errand colt, sent by grocery clerks, to collect a bill." And, bewilderingly, he snickered.

"Tell him that you had been told that his methods were unsound."

He liked that. "Are- are my methods unsound?"

Before the Mistress could even prompt me, I said, inspired, "Sir, I don't see any method at all."

The legate began cackling madly, delighted by whatever scene we had just reenacted. He literally broke into a caper, bouncing on his back hooves. "Oh, my stars, I love the classics!" he brayed.

The Nightmare smiled, amused. "He hardly makes a proper Hetman Court, don't you think? More of a Mad Scribe, if I were to be casting a production of Dämmerung der Hirsche."

I thought I had been well-read, but apparently some literary references are going to go over anypony's head. I figured that silence was the last refuge of the fool, and let my confusion pass through me, leaving only calm. Hopefully our little performance had calmed the madpony – at least a little.

"Legate Beau, I bring greetings from the commander of the Army of the North, General Knochehart."

"Ah, your grocery clerk?"

"If you must. The White Rose is cleared from your front, and we're currently sweeping the region and establishing security from here down towards Leveetown."

"And yet, I still seem to find myself besieged, here in my little stone box."

"You have many… armed entities here. They maintain a hostile presence. The General felt it appropriate to maintain our own posture until matters settle down. In addition…"

"Oh, yes!" he interrupted. "'In addition' – whatever it was that just happened in front of my gates. Not a mile away! Something or someone MURDERED A PAIR OF GREATER UNDEAD ON MY DOORSTEP!" he screamed into my face. "That's a heck of an addition, dear sir! And I believe, you have me at an advantage. What did you say your name was?"

"Your pardon, Your Eminence, I am Sawbones, Surgeon of the Black Company."

"Are you now? Take off that glamour, right now."

I sighed, and hoofed off the slight glamour, which toned down the more… thestral aspects of my appearance.

"Well, indeed. I've heard a great deal about you lot. Look at you, all fierce and edgy! No wonder you don't want to be called an assassin, with teeth and an eye like that! And they call us monsters."

"The eyesight, at least, is useful for night affairs. Makes us more effective in the dark."

"Thus the other night and that fracas in the siege-camp. Was that you lot? Did you murder my brothers on my doorstep? As, I hear, you may or may not have done to a number of my other siblings? No legates lost to this world in centuries, and then, in the course of two short years – five! Five generals and legates of the Empress, her rod and her staff in this damned world, wiped out like recruits flung into the front line!"

"The two put down in the siege-camp were rebels against the phylactery, play-acting at being White Rose warlocks. How is it that the 'rod and staff' can be found leading the Bride's own enemies into battle?"

"Don't evade the question, weirdling! The two in the siege camp – and I never did get their names, they were far too cagey for that, insisted on being called Rope and Candle, those pretentious berks! They we knew about, that can be excused as the result of battle – but the Marklaird? Stump and the Walker! Loyalists all!"

"The Marklaird was conspiring against the Bride, we are certain of it, and the Bride herself gave us letters of reprisal against the architects of the demolition of the province of Pepin, which we determined to be those two traitorous liches, who were put down at the Empress's own request."

"Well. Well-said, weirdling." The lich's temper had turned on a sou, and now he drooped into a slouch, suddenly looking away from me, to the west. "Even those of us who stand proud and loyal in the light of day, how many of us creep about under cover of night, and plot, and conspire, and steal from the royal treasury? Far too many. The Marklaird was a friend of mine, you know. But I knew she was plotting, and scheming. And avoiding her duties for years, decades on end. I loved her like a friend, but I knew her. She lost her souljar, and would have done anything to take it back."

"And what makes you loyal, if you agree that your fellows are not?"

"Me? Loyal? Well, I suppose, I am, sort of. None of us wanted to be like this in the beginning. The dregs of the Barrow-Lord's dungeons, the ones who didn't die – not quite. There's not much in the way of equinity left in a pony after they've come out of Grogar's mills sapient and self-motivated. More often than not, that self-motivation is the only thing keeping us upright, keeps us moving. For most of them, that is. My motivation is rather, a sort of curiosity, and doubt. Grogar turned my doubt against me, bound it up into my self-image so tightly that I don't know how to operate without it."

"And that's why you take mortal generals as your commanders? Radical self-doubt?"

"Why yes, of course! None of us are any good at tactics or operations, you must know that, as well-informed as you seem to be. I always take a commander, whom I can trust to do the right thing, since I am now such that I cannot see right from wrong. If only I wasn't so often let down in my choices." He stiffened, and turned to the right. "Isn't that right, d'Harcourt?"

A dead thing shuffled out of the shadow of the citadel, and I saw that it was an aristocratic-looking former donkey, a jack of middle-age. In life he must have been very prepossessing, having that look of command and vigour about him that almost eclipsed the rictus-grin of undeath and the rot of the summer sun and summer humidity.

"Go ahead, d'Harcourt! Tell us why I spared you!"

"You did not spare me, master. I died, and you would have made me one of your ghouls, as you did all of our mortally wounded ponies and donkeys."

"Yes, but you went and rose before I could enspell your remains! Up on your hooves, and looking at me all dead-eyed, you revenant bastard!"

"Master, I failed you in life. How can I rest until I see the valley of the Housa cleared of the rebel scum?"

"Go back to your corner, you failure! The next time I need to throw away a legion of ghouls, you can lead the assault!" The lich turned his sightless, leather-wrapped head back to me . "You see what I have to deal with? I know I know nothing, but even those I trust to guide me through the darkness, they just direct my cannons into every stick of furniture in the room, every rock in the path! How can I, blind as I am, trust these frauds who say they see?"

"Trust in those that see in both the darkness and the light, Your Eminence? I can't say for sure. I am only a herald, although I speak for my superiors."

"You want to know if you can trust me to keep my undead under control, to keep them from rampaging against the living and disrupt any order you can summon out of this… disorder? One-eyed pony, I like you. Can you guarantee my safety under you, your Company's aegis?"

"So long as there are no more deaths of civilians, of allies, of the wounded, of prisoners in proper captivity and under authority, I can promise you protection."

"But not safety?"

"What world is safe? We are currently dealing with a situation, that might make your own position more precarious than not."

He was suddenly alert. "And what does that mean?"

"The Empress's legates are not the only body to find itself struggling with disloyalty. There is a… rogue element at large in the vicinity. He has shown the capacity to kill… legates. We have lost track of this rogue. He is not under authority. If you become aware of him, please-"

"Damn you! You come in here being all diplomatic and meek and mild, but you're just setting me up for a fall, aren't you! Talk me out of my walls, and then set your 'rogue' at my throat! No! No! I won't be fooled again! Take your flag of parley, and get out, one-eyed pony! Get out! Out! Out!"

And with that, I was thrown out of the Shambles, each hoof-step dogged by snarling, barely restrained ghouls at my heels.

Not exactly my best day, I'm afraid.

The Reapers And The Grain

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With the campaign in the east ending in a sort of anti-climactic face-off between nominal allies, the minor operations in the west gathered more attention, resources, and momentum.

Brigadier Brune in Rantoul moved forward into the districts to his south upon receiving the news of the obliteration of the White Rose's expeditionary force, reinforced with a large contingent of baronial levies supposedly placed under his command. Two days later they were fully occupied chasing bison barbarians through the disordered districts of New Harmony and the Mounds. Very little progress was made after that, even though the hoof-full of Company sections posted with Brune's two Northern regiments provided invaluable lines of communication between the two forces moving along their divergent roads. Brune began experimenting with breaking up the Company sections, assigning pairs of armsponies to each of the loosely organized 'brigades' of Rantoul baronials. It didn't seem to accomplish much.

We heard nothing but complaints from the few Company ponies condemned to this particular tartarus, who insisted that the baronials were nothing but a rabble under arms. From what little I was able to glean from the affronted Company ponies, there wasn't much to distinguish the baronials from the bison they were chasing through the hedgerows and fields of New Harmony and the Mounds.

Further eastward, the Left-Division of Brigadier Eugin was reinforced by the remaining regiment from the Right-Division, some troops from the Reserve, and the Third Cohort under Stomper. They fortified the river approaches to Leveetown, and skirmished regularly with marine detachments and flotillas of boats sent upriver by the timid White Rose fleet on the middle Housa. This fleet-in-being had proven to be nothing like those fears and expectations we had worried over at the beginning of the move to the east. Whoever it was that commanded that fleet, they were cautious to the point of cowardice, and appeared far more spooked than they should have been by the hoof-full of immolated flour-ships Cherie had destroyed at the beginning of the campaign. We sent down Bad Apple with some pegasi support to provide a continued and credible threat to that apparently pyrophobic fleet.

The General remained with the Middle-Division and the remainder of the Reserve in the wastelands south of Dover, facing off with our supposed ally in the Shambles, and supporting the bulk of the Company's search for our missing comrades and the ghost-like III Verdebaie.

Everypony was spooked about that, but nopony seemed able to do anything about it.

Finally, Cherie and I were left, isolated, with a section or two from the Third Cohort, a couple of flights of ponies from the Aerial Cohort, and the regimentals guarding the thousands of prisoners in their POW cages. This was an untenable situation, but the sudden flood of returning refugees to the stabilized districts of the southern baronies offered a method and outlet for the exercise of the unoccupied and restless captives.

The refugees found themselves short-hooved and facing the heavy prospect of salvaging those early and neglected crops in the fields which had not been trampled by the converging armies. Winter crops were very popular in the Baronies, and many fields were full of heavy-headed, almost overripe grain. Wheat, barley and oats were trembling on the edge of wastage throughout these districts. And the refugees badly needed a corps of field-workers to help bring in the harvest before they went to seed in the fields.

We had just such a corps to hoof. The problem being, of course, that sickles and scythes – while fairly piss-poor as weaponry – still could under extreme circumstances be used in that capacity. Could we possibly dare to put bladed tools into the hooves of thousands of imprisoned military prisoners?

Cherie thought so.

After all, the majority of the camp-mayors adored her, to the point of indulging in actual worship in her presence during the council meetings we were using to govern the affairs of the camps. Cherie gave no indication of what she thought of the little prayers of supplication that ponies like Noon Dream and Iron Wheels insisted upon offering before getting down to the mundane discussions of camp conditions and requirements. The looks of disgust upon the muzzles of the dissenting camp-mayors were, in truth, shared by yours truly. But it wasn't exactly something we could do anything about, so we let it lie.

These 'loyalists' were clearly such that we could trust them to work the fields without rising up to fertilize the stubble and crop residue with the blood of the owners of those fields and their scattered guards. It was the dissenters that concerned us. Or, at least, it gave me pause. Cherie and the Mistress seemed to have some sort of plan that required putting some measure of trust in ponies who had offered no reason for trust.

But I was overruled, and so it went.

I distracted myself with my studies, and the examination of the veritable libraries of information on the West, and the rebellious westerners. We had, after all, more than seven thousand volumes in this captive archive, just begging to be interrogated. And so, I talked to ponies. Lots of them. Frightened ponies, defiant ones, loyal and dissenting.

I was surprised at first to find that they were almost exclusively ponies – few caribou, almost no donkeys at all. From what the prisoners told me – captive after captive, consistently – the West had never many donkeys or other tribal representatives to dilute the pony culture of the great granaries of Traverse and her sister-provinces. Those donkeys that once could be found in the West had been nobility, numerous by aristocratic standards, but few in comparison to the common pony, almost a rounding error. These nobles, along with those few lackeys that were needed to support them, floated in a sea of narrow, resentful earth-pony commoners. This isolated nobility had claimed the rents of the countless hundreds of thousands of ponies who had settled the West over the course of the last four centuries, those pony settlers who had populated and cultivated the vast, sprawling agricultural districts along the lazy Trade River and her many, equally indolent tributaries.

The endless plains of the West were drained by these endless, small, barely navigable rivers, but they were still navigable. The little rivers of Traverse and the other western provinces were the wealth of the West, even moreso than those endless golden-grained fields and orchards, and the greedy nobles had seized the cream of every crop. The West was dotted with little walled boroughs at the heads of navigation of each little tributary, and slightly larger towns and cities scattered all up and down the magnificent Trade. The nobility clustered in these little boroughs and towns, their families, their retainers, and their pony servants, growing fat on the commerce of the plains.

The rebellion of two generations back had left the aristocratic townhouses of the little cities and boroughs blackened and shattered, entire clans had been wiped from the face of Tambelon. The aristos, the support and staff of the rule of the hated Bride, were overthrown almost overnight. These noble donkeys, whose power had been supported by their blood-mage and necromancer kin, had been overwhelmed by their enraged tenants, armed initially with nothing more than those simple scythes and other field-tools that Cherie was proposing to place in the hooves of those rebels' militant, captive children.

Or, at least, that was one version of the story I was told by some of the more credulous captives. Other, more cynical ponies said that this was not true, that the rebellion was not simply a peasant's revolt. They had also been supported by a new thing under the heavens – a secret, fanatic cadre of earth-pony bloodmages and necromancers. That this death-magic – which had always been the strength and support of we smaller, weaker, slower donkeys, had – somehow – secretly – been stolen by the damned ponies, who were already so blessed by the marks of destiny and power and fate. It hardly seemed fair, but one of the first tenets of the Company is that life is not fair.

And so, that new race of pony bloodmages underwrote the rebellion, giving it their support and their magic, and their religious warrant, their beliefs. In that new fanaticism, the new aristocracy of the West – proud and fat from the clever investments of their elders and ancestors – died ugly. In many districts, I was told, the donkeys had been wiped out, jack and jenny, foal, colt and filly. Many of my subjects regarded me with the sort of bemusement that one might direct towards a monkey talking to you. Despite an entire season spent despoiling districts along the river full of donkey farmers and townsfolk, these foals of the revolution still didn't quite know what to make of actual donkeys.

The pogroms had been that thorough during the first year of the rebellion, so bloody and total that the foals raised in the years afterwards had, many of them, never even laid eyes on somepony like me. I was as exotic as a sheep to these Western bumpkins –and as terrible as the dream of the Demon-Ram himself, Lord Grogar. It was as if I had raised up, revenant, from their collective guilty to haunt them for the sins of their fathers and mothers.

I was trying not to fume at Cherie one morning a week and a half into the first harvest, as we marched out with a contingent of captive ponies from their cages to outlying camps out to the northeast in the general direction of Dover. The prisoners would be loaned their implements by the farmers to whom we were lending these ponies' labour. Many of the ponies in this contingent were, to put it kindly, dissenters. A good many seemed to me more like openly rebellious thugs just waiting to get their fetlocks around something long and pointy. I was certain the lot of them were dreaming bloody dreams about slit throats and freedom. You could see it in their beady little eyes.

"You feel like they think you are exotic, Feufollet? You're a donkey, there are millions of you in this world. You are, as a tribe, as common as grains of sand. Try being a thestral! I'm the only one of my kind in this world. They say I may be the only one remaining in existence! Oh, filly. Be happy to be different, it means they've noticed you, and are thinking about you. To be understood, one must first be seen. It's a first step!"

"Bah, enough of that. What can you be about, giving these cut-throats their liberty? Look at them, glaring at you. As soon as they get out of those barns, they're not going to go out into the fields and start harvesting, they're going to go after their guards, and the farmers – and us!"

"Always with these negative waves, Feufollet! Why can't you imagine something righteous, and beautiful! Look at this gorgeous morning! The skies are blue, the sun is gentle, and the breeze out of the north will make the reaping move fast!"

"What in tartarus is a 'negative wave'?"

"Oh, something I heard somewhere. Bad feelings, evil expectations, breed evil moods, and bad results. Think positive thoughts! Will understanding into the thoughts of those that hate you! Look for common ground with our prisoners, and it will be there. See nothing but your differences, and that's all they will find between you."

Just as we were arguing over this silly sort of pseudo-philosophy that Cherie had picked up from Grogar knows where, the column was suddenly stopped by something up ahead. Cherie took to the air, and went forward to see what the holdup was.

"Bridge is out," she said, wheeling back over the glares of the prisoners in their ranks. "Hey, ponies, looks like we have some work to do! Fall out, set to. Let's see how the West repairs a fallen bridge. We've got wood over there in that copse, let's get industrious!"

Cherie's enthusiasm had always been contagious, whether it was in practice for a seasonal pageant, or in burning enemy ships, or fighting the enemy, or fast-talking captives into repairing a small bridge over an even smaller creek, her cheer was… infectious.

We were barely late to the first of five camps these captives were to have been delivered; but this first one caused some excitement. It was here that a group of ill-tempered Westerners raced each other to the nearby barn, and then broke out into loud argument we could hear from the road, where we were getting ready to move out with the rest of the prisoners.

"What's all that about, do you think?" I asked. "They can't possibly be so stupid as to try something with us right here, concentrated."

"Oh, I imagine they just discovered that this particular farming co-op owns an impressive set of mechanical reapers," giggled Cherie. "I'd like to see them rise up in rebellion with a circular reaper rig. Are they going to try to run us over with something as silly as that?"

"Where in the Chain did these farmers find themselves mechanical reapers? I've heard of them, but I don't think I've ever seen one. Wait here, I need to look at this."

She laughed at me, and held me back from trotting back to the barns full of irate White Rose. "Settle down there, jenny. There's another set of mechanical reapers at the next camp. We couldn't put scythes in the hooves of these ponies, after all. I sent out somepony to track down the two co-ops in this region that had the fancy new gadgets. We knew we'd have a need for something like this. I hope they enjoy gleaning, because these reaper-rigs replace over a dozen ponies with scythes. Says so right in the advertising material!" She grinned her petty triumph over the scene. I didn't ask how she knew which prisoners couldn't be trusted with polearms; she and the Princess had been conspiring to study her herd of captives pretty much non-stop.

And I couldn't concentrate on the question of just how deep into our prisoners' minds and dreams the Spirit and our Cherie had burrowed, because this was the point where the ghouls came boiling out of a deep woods beside the road a mile and a half past the first camp. The unarmed, unbarded prisoners bellowed in stark terror, and stampeded for the nearest grain-field. It's hard to surprise Company ponies, but whomever had guided these undead to this road had managed the improbable. The ghouls swarmed over the vanguard of regimentals, who fought back valiantly.

Far overhead, the flight of pegasi who had been shadowing our column as an outer security detail came plummeting down in a steep dive. They were too far out of pocket to reach the beleaguered Rennetians in time, but we weren't. Cherie screamed out a raptor cry of joy, and snapped into the wingblades she always kept strapped to her harness, flying to the rescue of our van. I laboured mightily on hoof to catch up to my friend the winged terror, stumbling as I tried to score myself with a spur while still moving forward. I got some blood on the spur's blade, but I nearly face-planted in my hurry.

I gave up trying to catch up to the hurtling thestral, and reached out to gather up vines to tangle and restrain the rampaging ghouls. Too slow, too slow. I kept that going, but I tried once again to do two things at once, and threw a quickly-weaved repellent cantrip at the vanguard, too many of whom had already fallen before overwhelming numbers.

Thank the Nightmare, but I didn't trip all over myself again, and as the tanglevines began to crisscross the roadway in front of the vanguard caribou and ponies, my ghoul-repellent cantrip blasted through the Rennet regimentals' collapsing formation, and many of the undead stopped dead in the tracks, some of them stepping hoof by hoof backwards like living ponies backing away from a poisonous snake.

And just as my cantrip broke the ghouls' charge, Cherie hit the undead still tearing away at the downed regimentals, her wingblades spaying ichor across the roadway. She was alone for a terrible moment, spinning and trying her best to keep moving. They say the moment a pegasus stops moving, they're dead. Their primary advantage is speed, mobility, agility. They're weaker than just about any other type of pony you can think of. (Some of them can't even beat a unicorn in hoof-wrestling.) But so long as they're moving, they've got the advantage of momentum. A pegasus with momentum behind her is a merciless projectile. A pegasus standing still is a reed waiting to be broken in two. And as that moment stretched out into an eternity, Cherie slowed down, and came to an almost-stop.

Then the moment was over, and the ponies of the protection detail dropped out of the sky and ripped through the undead. Those ghouls my cantrip hadn't repelled, that Cherie hadn't cut up in her headlong charge, were driven back by the savage assault of our winged Company brethren. And those veteran pegasi showed us all how rapid and agile armed pegasi can be. They tore apart those ghouls, and scattered their remains across the dirt and gravel of the farm-lane. But the mass of the undead still built up in front of our line.

As I stood there in the road and tried to remember how to breath again, the rear-guard came galloping past, and I gathered myself enough to lay personal repellent charms on a scattering of the remaining regimentals among our guard. I didn't have time to ensorcel every single one of them as they streamed past, but I figured they ought to benefit from a sort of herd effect if I got enough of them tagged.

As the rear-guard entered the battle, an ichor-stained and grinning Cherie came flitting back to me, chirping a preposterous request.

"Feufollet, cryfoal me! I need to attract some of these mindless things, or we're going to be out here all day long!"

"Are you out of your everloving mind, Cherie? You're supposed to be in charge here, not running off playing Commander Hurricane among the Stratocumuli conspirators!"

"Aw, come on, Feufollet! Give me this! Tartarus, if you could phantasm me a bit with the big wings and the fright-show, that'd be great. The prisoners are watching, Feufollet! Time to burnish the legend!"

I blinked, and almost asked the wrong question. Then I did what she asked, and gave her an illusory form almost as tall as the Nightmare in her full stature, weaving in a 'cryfoal' ghoul-attractant charm.

"Do you want the horn, too?" I asked.

"What horn?" she replied. "I don't have a horn, their White Rose doesn't need a horn. Go on, get back to work! I have some grain to reap!"

And she flew back into the fray. I followed slowly in her train, until I reached the fallen ponies of the van. Their still-fighting brethren had pushed ahead with their reinforcements, leaving behind the severely injured. I recalled the tales I'd heard of the blade-brothers sworn into the Company down further into the wastelands – the method and the words – and pulled out the hoof-blade I had once been given as a filly by my knight, Octavius. And I settled down by one of the savaged caribou, and asked her if she wanted to live. Because I was offering life and service today to those damned to die from ghoul-bite.

The Company expanded by a dozen members that day. Two died before we could get them back to one of the field hospital. Dead that day of their wounds, was a caribou doe named Freude am Himmel, and an earth pony stallion named Round Ball. I look forward to seeing them shine when it is my time to plunge into that river in the starry sky.

Oh, the prisoners? We eventually dragged them out of the field of barley they were hiding in. They were skittish from there on out, but cooperative. The gore-streaked, violence-satiated Cherie flitted cheerfully about like an aerial sheep-dog, gathering in her flock. They watched her with awestruck, terrified eyes. Once she had gotten up her momentum in that farm-lane, very little had stopped her. The undead had fallen like grain before the scythe-blade.

Myself, I was more frustrated than not. We never did figure out who was behind the horde of undead. It was too large to be a wandering pack of free ghouls, and many of the corpses were found later to be properly fetish-thralled, although it was impossible to tell if they had escaped control at any point before the sudden attack. But if there was a necromancer in the pile of corpses we burned, it wasn't obvious. They might have just been cut down along with their thralls, for all I knew.

We never did get the rest of those prisoners out to their work-camps. They spent the rest of the day building the pyres and tending the flames.

The Investigation

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SBMS163

As soon as the news of the attack on the road to Dover came across the 'radio, I put out my own call for a ride up there. I had been doing nothing but kicking my hooves in frustration down in the siege-camp castra, waiting on news or casualties that never came. It had been deader than the Marklaird for more than a week, as mixed Company and regimental patrols quartered and re-quartered the wastelands south of Dover, searching for our AWOL comrades. The Beau had refused to come out of his stone conch-shell, and I for one didn't blame him. We had made sure to pass a note explaining the nature of the possible threat from the missing Obscured Blade, and the lich had taken that warning to his still, dead heart.

All of which meant that as soon as I was able to winkle a chariot ride out of the siege-camp, I leapt with all four hooves, saddle-bags full of medical supplies and my head full of half-flanked guesswork about what exactly had happened up on that farm-lane. The flight between the siege-camp outside of Braystown and that unnamed plot of land west of Dover wasn't a particularly long one, as these go, but it was long enough for me to wind myself up pretty tightly.

I leapt out of the chariot before the pegasi had quite brought it to a stop, and hit the ground running, guidance from the Princess directing me to the triage-station they had improvised on the grassy verge between that bloody farm-lane and a much-trampled field of barley. The smoke from the burning dead and destroyed undead was hugging the ground in a slight inversion layer, and the darkening skies and damp, slight wind suggested that we were about to catch a soaker.

I looked around at the dozen or so wounded, and ran back to the chariot, which was just then settling to the ground behind Long Haul and his wingmare. I dug around in the back of the chariot and pulled out the broken-down tent somepony had stored back there. I had ridden up from the siege-camp on that lumpy damn thing, but now I was thankful for its bulk. I yelled for hooves to help with getting that tent set up, and asked Long Haul to direct who-ever showed up on how to get that thing put together. Then I got to work.

Whomever had patched up these casualties had done a rather shoddy job of it, and I had to undo a lot of nonsense before I could get back to patching them back together properly. So I was in a bit of a mood when Feufollet sidled up to me under the jerking, unsteady tent some prisoners had managed to half-put-together over our heads. I was still hooves-deep in a pony's gored, scored flank when my understudy finally overcame whatever was keeping her silent.

"I'm sorry I didn't pay close enough attention in your first-aid demonstrations," she apologized. Well, an apology is always a good way to start, isn't it?

I grunted.

"They were Rennet regimentals. I thought I ought to blade them into the Company, given the nature of the fighting. Better Company for a few minutes at the end, than ghouls for eternity, right?" She smiled or grimaced, angrily, uncertainly.

"That's where you're wrong, jenny. When the ghouls rise, that isn't the pony. That's the meat that the pony used to wear. When you bring a dying pony into the Company, that, that is eternity. Haven't you been listening? We're the stars in her mane, so she says, so I've seen."

"Yeah. Yeah, I've seen. But I… wanted to do something for them."

"Well, this certainly was something. We'll have to hold a little ceremony for the survivors. How can we keep the lid on this metastatic expansion of the Company if every armspony with a blade and a hope for the future thinks they can add ponies willy-nilly? This is not the way, Feufollet. This can't go on. We're the Company, not a… fraternal organization, not a secret society. We're not here to evangelize the righteousness of the faith. We have a very specific purpose."

"And what exactly is that purpose, Master? Obscured Blade says that purpose is to return to Equestria and put the Mistress on the throne, bring forth Eternal Night."

I bit off the thread on my stitching, and spat the excess onto the ground. My victim continued moaning out her pain, only at a lower volume. I patted her shoulder, and went on to the next, thinking.

"Our purpose is to continue our long-standing and proud tradition of existence to our membership and to the Spirit who is the soul of the Company. Anything else is a matter for debate, consensus, and then the Captain's decision. If the Company doesn't like the Captain's decisions, they can organize a no-confidence vote. Was this attack somepony's no-confidence vote?"

She looked stricken, and even more uncertain. "Master Sawbones, I don't know. There was no warning, but there was also nopony behind it, not that I can tell. If this was Obscured Blade, where is he? Why aren't his followers all over us? We were pretty knocked around by the ghouls, we would have been easy pickings."

I reached back into my saddlebags, and got out the antiseptic, and started carefully washing out the next victim's mud-packed wounds. I'd need more quickly, I hadn't brought enough for the numbers I had here. "He might be still unwilling to raise his hoof directly against fellow Company. He could have been behind the ghoul mass wave, and then fell back when you all came to the rescue. How many exactly? Are you sure they were thralled?"

She showed me the thralling needles they had pulled from the destroyed enemy, and described the size and numbers of the undead. Mud-daubed, White Rose barding. Clearly more of the same from the series of ambuscades we had bulled through in the tail end of the campaign to the south.

"Damn, that means we can't be sure it wasn't just a wayward battalion of White Rose undead that just happened – happened! upon the column of work-release prisoners our very own pocket White Rose was escorting out to the work-camps. As unlikely as that sounds, it isn't completely impossible. Do we know if there were any attacks in the area beforehoof?"

"We don't have enough ponies here, those still on their hooves have to keep a guard, organize the prisoners. Cherie's flitting about here somewhere, trying to turn the prisoners up sweet." She eyed the rather pale-looking earth ponies who were filing away, their task done, the tent up and steady. The pegasi chivvied them over to help finish up the burning of the dead, as a light misting rain started falling. "These were the worst of the worst, the ones convinced we were all diables out of Tartarus, and Cherie herself the head malefice. Look at them now. I'm afraid they might start fawning on her."

"Well, that's good, isn't it?" I started in the stitches on this one, ignoring the squeals of pain.

"Except she and the Nightmare were snickering back and forth between each other, just before the attack. Like they had a secret, they were about to put something over on somepony. At the time, I thought they were just celebrating this goofy little trick about teasing some would-be rebels with polearm-style scythes, only to place them with a co-op that had the new rotary reapers. But what if…"

"They knew there was a loose battalion of undead on this road?" I thought as I stitched and knotted, stitched and knotted. "Doesn't sound like our Cherie, does it? Ponies died, here. Ponies were likely to have died, any way it would have shook out, but this way, if she knew, it would have been on her ears. You think Cherie's capable of it?"

"I don't know what that filly is capable of! She burns entire ships to the ground, she's an unholy terror on the battlefield, she loves fire too much to be any more innocent than the rest of us. I don't know!" The very-young jenny paused, and sat down in the increasingly trod-down grass under our hooves. "…I don't know."

"Well, all we can do is ask. And for the record, this is totally something that the Nightmare would do. And likewise, something that she'd maneuver our Cherie into, without explaining the details of the 'prank'. You must have faith in our Nightmare, but you can never exactly trust her. She's our Nightmare, but she's also Obscured Blade's Nightmare. She's… ecumenical that way. She's everything to everypony in the Company. Which is why-" I paused, and considered my words carefully. "Which is why we have to be cautious in how we bring recruits into the Company, and how. With every new pony, the Nightmare changes a little bit, I think. The Company makes her the Nightmare, as much as the Nightmare makes the Company. And there's many of us, and just the one of her. Unless we do something really, really stupid like that one time in Dance Hall. Remember that?"

Feufollet, looking even more pale than usual, nodded silently.

"I think, I think that Obscured Blade and his cronies are lurking somewhere nearby, with some fragment of the Nightmare carried carefully between their ears, in their minds. No 'filly' for them, no 'Princess'. They're strictly 'Nightmare' ponies. But they still are, in the end, Nightmare ponies. As Company as you or I. They are our brothers, whatever else changes." I tied off the stitches on my latest victim, and moved on to the next. The last! I hurried my work, seeing the end of the task. "Now, I've called up the rest of the witches' coven, and they should be arriving in an hour or two. We need to back-track this mess, and see if we can't find something. I'll talk to Cherie, and look to see if I can find out just how deep her complicity in this 'coincidence' runs. I want you to talk to the Nightmare, and try to get her to admit something, if there's anything to admit. You've always had a better relationship with the old battle-axe than I. We've had our fights over the years, and I'm afraid she'll try and pick another one to avoid admitting anything, and distract me with accusations, some founded, some not so much."

The little jenny nodded, and with that, we were done.

I went to find Cherie in the cooling damp of the evening. It felt more like spring again, than the height of summer.

I found her with a large collection of prisoners and some rather battered-looking Rennet regimentals, huddled under the trees to the south of the road, trying to stay dry. She was muttering to herself, and as I came into earshot, it sounded like she was calculating the carrying capacity of a… work camp?

"I don't think all of these ponies will fit under the tents intended for two dozen work-release prisoners, pouliche."

"Oh. Monsieur. Uh, hello." This was easily the least enthusiastic greeting I had ever received from our little thestral. Guilty conscience? "I was trying to figure out if we could squeeze some of them under the eaves of that barn."

"Barns are generally full of things the farmers need. These are sturdy Western ponies you've got here, a little summer rain won't make them melt. Come over here, we need to talk. Privately."

She nodded, seeming to know what we had to talk about. Eyes all around us followed her as I walked across the lane to the far side of the smouldering corpse-pyre. She put up a good front for the prisoners, looking confident and her usual cheery self. But I could tell, even if these religion-addled fanatics couldn't.

She turned around as soon as the still-smouldering and somewhat loud pyre was between us and the prisoners, and said, flat out, "I didn't know there would be an ambush here. I swear to the Princess. I swear to the alicorns. I swear to whatever thing you want me to swear on. It was going to be a series of pranks, I swear! Rotary reapers, heavy work, some pig-slopping, tricks to keep them running about and out of breath. This is supposed to be pacified country!" She started tearing up, her bright green eyes glittering in the gathering darkness beside the glow of the embers.

"How did you chose this path, this farm-lane?"

"I don't know, I think I put out a call on the princess radio, and the Mistress made some suggestions, she had some scouts who had noticed the rotary reapers, that the returnees were filtering back in fastest over this way."

"The Nightmare suggested this route? This exact route?"

"Maybe? I don't remember. Yes, I think so. She said we'd have all sorts of fun and games. Oh, Monsieur, you don't think-"

"We can't be sure. But it might be. Did she encourage you to accompany the column?"

"Not originally. She thought it ought to be something that the guards could handle on their own. But it sounded like so much fun, the pranking and the tricks. I had to come along!" Cherie paused, considering. "I think she grinned, after I said we'd come along. This- this big, toothy smile. You know how she can get. Like something evil had occurred to her, some nasty new trick to pull on an opponent of the Company. What is going on, Monsieur?"

"I think maybe… the Nightmare is divided in herself, in her intentions. I think maybe your intentions are as important to her as… certain others' intentions. And your presence maybe short-circuited somebody's plans. Broke them up before they could really get going. I think maybe we need to increase the guard on your other work-details, and whomever is still back in the prisoners' cages. I don't think this is over."

And it wasn't.

Arguing With The Abyss

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FFMS026

"Mistress. We have questions."

The great black dream-alicorn emerged, drawn by my challenge, her vast star-spangled mane billowing as she broke the surface of the shadows of my mind.

"Don't say 'we', jenny, when you mean 'I'. Take responsibility for your own outrage."

My eyes narrowed as I considered debating grammar with a Spirit prone to archaic outbursts of preposterous pronouns. But let it pass, let it pass. "Sawbones is questioning Cherie, so we'll be getting her side of this. What did you know? Did you lead these ponies into an ambush?"

"I? I lead nopony, direct nopony. I am a ghost in the machine which is you. I am simply the… ghost in others as well. Others who promise me such things as you and yours never even mention, let alone think about."

She was in one of her mad moods, I could see. The light-green sclera of her draconic eyes were enormous, her pupils tiny and constricted.

"What promises are these?"

"Home! An end to exile. My throne, my dignity and my purpose. He wants for me everything I've ever wanted. Everything I've ever wanted!"

"You said just the other week that he was walking a destructive and damning path. Would you let him take you and us down into this tartarus?"

"I do not recall any such conversation. What on earth are you talking about? What are we talking about?"

"Nothing important, apparently." She was not rational, there was no point in arguing logic with her, or really, trying to treat her as a sane pony. "Did you know there was a pack of ghouls on this road you sent us down?"

"Oh, he knew something was coming down this lane, and I knew what he knew. But he didn't know everything I did, didn't he? He didn't expect you and the Filly here, rampant, to shame him and his bloodthirst? Greedy colt!"

"Are we talking about the same greedy colt that we have been talking about all these last two weeks?"

"Oh, you know who, don't play games with me, little bloodmage. You're closer to him than you pretend. Wolves pretending to be guard-dogs. But he called off the closing of the trap when he saw members of his pack in the killing zone. Still more pony than thing, our greedy colt. He took out his frustrations elsewhere. Do you know what was behind you all this time? So focused upon what was in front of you, all the while the Blade was being drawn behind your neck." She stepped out of my inner vision, ghosting into the real world before my eyes.

"What are you-"

"Come. Come and see, come and see."

She walked down the lane, back through the trampled barley, onto the farm-lane. I questioned her again and again, but she only smirked, and beckoned onwards. By the time we got back to the big home-farm complex, I knew something was wrong. The slight misting rain was unpleasant, but still, somepony should have been out and about. No farm ever really stops moving, there's always somepony doing something, even when the clouds descend in a blanket of damp like it had that evening. And there were no lights lit.

Then I could smell it, and we turned towards the cluster of tents around the barn which was the work-camp we had delivered our first tranche of work-release prisoners. And the tents were torn down, tumbled about, and scattered.

And blood was everywhere.

I ran here and there, pulling canvas back from this tangle and that, searching through the splattered gore. No bodies. Then into the barn, which if anything was even worse, the doors and the interior positively painted in damp, dripping blood. It had had time to dry, but this miserable misting humidity had caused the bloodstains to run once again, and if I hadn't known somehow when this had happened, I don't think I could have guessed from the evidence.

No bodies in the barn, either, although it had clearly been where the survivors of the initial attack had fled for sanctuary. The great doors were shattered, one of the mechanical reapers laid in gory ruin, smashed by what I don't know.

Drag marks were everywhere, mostly towards a ritual-circle in the farmyard, melting away in the rain. I looked over to the farmhouse, and saw blood on the open front door. I knew what I would find there as well. And I knew what that ritual-circle had been.

Obscured Blade had replaced his lost ghouls from the nearest available supply, a supply we had provided and then left barely protected. There had been a squad of Rennet regimentals guarding these ponies, and the farmer's family, a family who had returned to a district under our protection, who had been told it was safe.

I threw up in the farmyard beside that fading ritual-circle.

"You say I'm like him? Damn you, Mistress! Where is he? Where is that traitor!"

"You thought you could play at evil, and not get any of it on you? Yes, jenny, you're closer than you think. A moment in time, a break just wrong enough, and you'd fracture like he has. And I will not tell you where he is, any more than I'd tell him your whereabouts. But what exposed vulnerabilities have you? What does he want, what does he need?"

I snorted, the taste of foulness caught in my throat and my snout. Obscured Blade had gone necromancer, at the least, maybe something worse. He needed… power, blood, materials. Necromancers collect the undead, until they can control no more, until they just can't command another ghoul. They will expand their control until they hit their limits.

Did he have limits?

Wait, he had hidden the sound of this massacre and the sight of this slaughter from our column on the road. That was the mean, nasty old pony we had suffered under, that sly, obscuring old unicorn, who never did anything in the open if he could hide it in darkness, in obscurity. He was still Obscured Blade, whatever else he was. What did he hate?

"The prisoners. He wants the White Rose."

"Very good, jenny. You see? You can get into his head so easily. It's almost as if you were… in sympathy with that greedy guts."

"Buck you, Mistress."

"The Acolyte has been a bad influence on you, Feufollet. You should show more respect to your goddess."

"Mistress, you are not a goddess, talk to me again when you've remembered that. And remembered that I've seen you disassembled, scattered. You've been talking to that traitor too much. Obscured Blade is a madpony, he can't be good for you. Cut him off!"

"Madpony or not, he's my madpony. As are you, my madjenny. Don't tell me otherwise, I can see you licking your lips."

"Don't be preposterous, I just dry-vomited. I'm parched and starving." I glanced over to the kicked-in front door of the farmhouse.

"Go ahead, they won't be needing whatever you find. They won't be needing anything at all, ever again, until some Company pony puts down the shambling wrecks that used to be them." And with that, the Nightmare disappeared in a cackling cloud of derision.

I went into the shambles that Blade's ponies had made of the farmhouse, looking for their water-pump. And I called up the Filly, and began screaming my head off to the rest of the Company, howling for the big guns, demanding that they bring everypony in. Bad Apple and the cohort in the south, the rest of the pegasi and the griffins – everypony.

He had at least two hours head start on us, and he was heading straight for the prisoners' cages. The half-empty, mostly unguarded cages.

We hadn't seen this coming, this little massacre. But I could see the greater massacre, I could see it in my mind's-eye, in all of its screaming horror.

I screamed for my witch's gig, and for a driver. I could get there ahead of them, if I had my gig and Whirlwind.

The Night-Fog

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FFMS027

I didn't sit on my hooves. Obscured Blade and his band of turncoats and mind-warped servants might be able to hide from the other ponies of the Company, from the common run of equinity – but I was Feufollet, Witch of The Black Company, The Blood-Hound. I could smell them, even when my best and most well-wrought mystic eyes couldn't fight past the old goat's cloaking illusions.

And they stank of blood and death.

They hadn't left via the road, that much was sure. I cast off cross-country as they had, following my blood-daubed muzzle into the darkness. I kept an instance of the Filly constantly updated as to my position, but it was increasingly difficult to figure out where - exactly - I was in that soaking mist. I could see as easily in the natural dark as any pony of the Company, but as the minutes turned to hours, the heavy mist turned into a fog, deadening sound, obscuring every possible sort of sight, and even, eventually, scent as well.

After those couple hours, I just started following my sense of where the butchers and their necromancer had gone. It wasn't even anything my nose was telling me. It was what roiled my gut, rose against my gorge. Even when their scent of death washed away in the mist, their taint still followed in their wake.

Just after midnight – or so I guessed, and the Filly corroborated, assuming that the Spirit in that aspect could actually tell time – my cross-country hunt led me out onto another farm-lane, I can't tell you how far distant from the atrocities at that farm. The road drew about itself a sort of hollow in the fog, a distinct tunnel of clarity in the darkness, as if there was something about that nondescript lane that had absorbed the droplets of the evening mist, left the surface and the air above that glorified path as dry as the western high plains.

The Filly passed along a chirp from Cherie, letting me know that the thestral was in the air, trying to find me. I looked up into the endless fog beyond the road and its tunnel of clarity, and wondered how high up the fog extended. "Is she going to be safe in the air tonight? The weather seems against us."

"Oh, well, what's she going to run into, a mountain? I don't care how quick-hooved old Blade is, the Company isn't issuing Seven-League Horseshoes. Keep talking, it'll help her zero in on your position."

"There's still groves of trees and barns down here to run into, Ma'am. And those will harm as surely as a rockface or a mountainside encountered blind."

"Funny thing about thestrals, which nobody's much noticed because Cherie doesn't have anypony of her own tribe to gossip with, or play around with in the dark. Thestrals can echo-locate."

And then I heard that high-pitched screech, like a scream just pitched over the range of my hearing. And then a series of screeching, a literal cacophony.

"NO WONDER SHE DOESN'T LIKE TO USE IT, IT SUCKS!" I shouted over the noise.

Just sub-vocalize, acolyte, said the Filly in my mind. You almost never have to talk out loud to me, anyways.

"YOU DON'T-" I started, then coughed, and then started over again, You don't sound like yourself, Ma'am. In fact, you sound more like the Mistress in a calmer mood. Is this your way of apologizing?

Call it a sort of role-play, young jenny. This form helps centre me.

And then the fog burst asunder, as something tore through the ceiling of that farm-lane's tunnel of clear air, something made of leather and rattan and winged mare. She wheeled about, and left the fog swirling around in a gyre above my head. And then she settled herself and her – whatever it was, upon the road before me. I walked up and stared at it. It wasn't my gig. It wasn't any sort of proper chariot. I stared more closely, and realized I'd seen that rattan chair knocked aside on the porch of that ravaged farm-house. I had no idea where the traces and the harness had come from, but apparently Cherie had been improvising.

"Are we done screaming now?" I asked.

"Eeeh, let's see where we need to go tonight, eh? This pea-soup is everywhere, far as you can see. Well, far as I can see, the Mistress here says you're being unseelie tonight. Have their trail, do ya?" Cherie asked in return.

"In that, that's your plan? It looks like it's held together with spit, grease and hope. I'm not going into the air on a deck-chair and good intentions!"

"Aw, come on, Feufollet, look at this!" She yanked on the traces tied back to the rattan from her harness. One that I certainly didn't recognize now that I had a closer look. "We took this rig off of that smashed-up reaper-thing in that barn with all the blood."

Now that she mentioned it, I could smell the blood-stains hidden by the strange fog-light. "Fine, whatever! I'll come back to haunt you if this hackwork inverts in the middle of the air and drops me on my head from a thousand yards up! Is there at least some way for me to strap in?"

We worked out how to get me tied into the preposterous jury-rig, and I debated with the Filly in my head how to get the other assets of the Company vectored onto our line of pursuit. "Do you have any idea what exact heading I've been following these blood-ticks along?" I asked Cherie. "It's too damn easy to get turned around in the fog."

"Yeah, you're pretty much moving due west. The first of the prisoner-cages are an easy quarter-day's march that way. Lucky for us, this isn't exactly an easy day, is it?"

"They have a hell of a head-start on us, Cherie. Or should I call you 'boss'? Who's in charge of this operation?"

"You seem to be the only pony that knows what the hay's going on tonight, Feufollet. I think that means you've got tactical control. Tell us where to go."

"Who's us? Is there somebody up there?"

"Come on, come and see!" Cherie laughed as she launched us through the wall of fog hiding the upper air from our isolated tunnel along the lane.

There was very little distance between that road and the open air above the fog-bank, but for me it was still a long moment of blindness that I did not like, not in the least. I thought of Sawbones' missing eye, and the fog's damp upon my already-saturated fur damn near froze me to the core. But then we did find that open air, and the moon's bright light broke across an endless damp carpet of cloud, or fog, or ground-mist. And crouched upon the surface of that endless plain of cloud, were dozens of pegasi and griffins. No, hundreds of them. The Aerial Cohort had concentrated, and – there was the Lieutenant herself.

"LT! Hey, you're here to take command! Cherie, why'd you –" and then the Lieutenant interrupted me.

"Apprentice Feufollet, you're the first lead we've gotten on the fugitives since they disappeared. Take over direction of the search." She looked across the featureless plain of cloud. "Tell us where to look."

I closed my eyes, and searched with my nose, and then with my gut. Then I guided Cherie in the right direction with one hoof, holding tight to my rickety conveyance with the other three.

I opened my eyes as we surged forward, and saw as four hundred wings stirred that once-featureless plain up into a moonlight fantasia of spirals, splashes, and waves flung in every other direction.

Except the one I had shown them. On that line, only ponies flew.

As we flew in pursuit of my gut-knowledge, I discussed the next necessary steps with the Filly, and by extension, the Lieutenant flying behind us in that grand-formation. Bad Apple and the Third Cohort were moving north from their positions behind the river-fortifications, to secure the POW complex, but they were still an hour, maybe three away from reaching the site. That was a lot of time for atrocities to occur. We could send Bad Apple in her gig ahead to scout the situation, but the fog-bank was reported intact far into the west, and her potential drivers couldn't echo-locate their way through the pea-souper. I was pondering sending the bulk of our pursuit-force ahead to interpose between the fugitives and their supposed target, when I noticed that my gut had shifted.

"Wait, bear left. The signal's shifting. Or the smell. The sensation? That way, now. By Grogar, where are we?" The skies were empty of all landmarks, even the geyser of swirling mists had fallen out of sight a few minutes before.

Cherie shrieked, deafening me even though I hadn't caught half of the tones of that terrible noise, nor was it aimed in my direction. Then the Filly relayed the results of the echo.

A picture in greys and blacks, shapes and sensations. Some obviously the outlines of farmlots, farm-houses, a road I recognized as the one we'd marched along our way to the ambush-site the morning before.

And what looked like a column-caterpillar, dark and featureless in that strange sense-image. The spear-heads were bright as the morning-star, but the rest was just – blank, black. But a different black than the road around it, and that was enough to pick them out, moving against the background of the loop, that little time-picture of the world beneath its blanket of fog.

The nearest occupied prisoners' cage was about half a mile away from the swiftly moving battle-caterpillar. They would reach it in minutes, if that was their target. How was Obscured Blade guiding his myrmidons? Did he have some way to see in the fog and night? Or had they put down some sort of guidance, beacons or something? I stared out across the featureless foggy plain, and tried to sense what they were following.

I could always be wrong, they could be just fleeing, blind, through the night. And the fog. Or planning to hit the now-occupied town beyond.

Make your choice, embrace your regrets later. I contacted the Lieutenant and relayed my findings, and strongly suggested we descend upon the most likely target, a now half-empty cage full of Cherie-loving White Rose parolees. They were supposed to be rotated out tomorrow to their own labour-assignments, but we only had so many guards, so much attention to go around. The Lieutenant signed off on my proposal, and dozens of flights of Company armsponies surged past the labouring Cherie and our awkward conveyance. Cherie had just fought her own battle earlier today, and... It must have taken more pegasus magic than she had bargained for, to keep that improbable hash together and in the air.

The fog over the cage tore apart under the pressure of hundreds of magical wings, torn into tendrils of mist and sprays of droplets. Suddenly, the whole site was in view, as if a giant had reached down and ripped off the top of an ant's-nest, leaving the interior exposed to the merciless judgment of the world. Almost nopony was out and about, in this heavy fog. Only a few guards were visible outside the fences.

They were quickly ushered inside the gates by urgent armsponies. As they were rushing inside, I smelled the van of the enemy column approaching, and screamed the alarm at the top of my lungs.

The clearing pegasi-magic of some three or four flights of armsponies ripped into the obscuring fog-bank, shredding their cover. Dark figures raced forward and were exposed to the night. They paused, suddenly uncertain, and thus were easy meat for the wave of javelins which we launched against them. A few even hit.

Then the rest of them fell back into the bank, further than the pegasi could reach with their magic, and then it was quiet again, but for the sobs of the wounded before the open gate. Nopony was stupid enough to go try and pull the wounded enemy back into the cage.

It was a cage, not a fortress. Designed to keep ponies in, not to keep ponies out. While we were focused on the charge against the main gate, some commandos tried the fences on either flank, and got inside. The screams of the prisoners were the first sign we had that we were being flanked – my nose was so overwhelmed with the presence of the fugitives – the turncoats – that I couldn't pinpoint anything.

But screams and commotion will carry its own information, when all else is fog and night. Cherie and I stooped over the nearest commotion, and I saw figures with weapons, and figures upon the ground and fleeing empty-hoofed, and made the obvious deduction.

"There! Give it to them, and let me out here!" I undid the leather straps holding me into my chair, and then, thinking again, started untying the leather straps holding that chair into its configuration with the traces. By the time Cherie was low enough to the ground, the whole was more a cloud of disconnected parts moving in rough formation with each other than any sort of coherent thing. I kicked off from the traces, and used the free-falling chair to cushion my collision with the ground, happily crushing a pair of armed figures as I tumbled into the packed earth in front of one of the improvised barracks the White Rose had built for themselves. They didn't get back up again.

I collected myself, and slashed myself left and right with my spurs, drawing forth a certain trick I had learned from a horrible jenny, one whom I wasn't supposed to have ever met, and I suppose, writing about this will bring consequences. I have no idea if she's even still alive, but she told me how it was possible to –

Fight with one's own blood. The enemy armspony's own life-blood arced over me like the sprays of mist and fragments of fog that half-obscured the whole of this battle-field. Whatever small globs of my own blood remained after I had torn out their throat with my blood-magic, was absorbed into the general gore that remained.

Which was fine, the blood didn't have to be mine.

And then I continued my dance, every true-stroke multiplying my arsenal of weaponry. Three more bodies were splayed out on the hard-packed, blood-soaked earth before they retreated, and left me to the barracks-door I had found them trying to force.

I moved deeper into the cage, and hunted for my prey. Four more I caught, weapons in hoof, stalking my herd, my friend's ponies. These were our ponies, we had paid good blood for them, they belonged to us. Not for anypony else to slaughter.

Especially turncoat scum.

In the morning, we found thirty dead prisoners, and over a dozen dead assailants, familiar and otherwise. I'm told that some other sectors saw a few dozen ghouls, but none appeared before me in the confusion and the remnants of the fog.

The names of the Company turn-coats? Let Sawbones record their names, if he cares. As far as I'm concerned, they've been read out of my version of the Annals.

Fratricide, or The Break-Down

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SBMS164

Almost nothing went right for our Obscured Blade that night. The unseasonable weather negated all of his best illusions, diversionary cantrips and deep spells. Great phantasms, little haunts, visions of ghost-columns on other roads – all were swallowed by the heavy, crushing fog, made small and silent and then nothing in the great enveloping whiteness of the night. You can pretend to be anything you want, it means nothing if nopony can see you making faces at yourself in a darkened mirror.

Not even yourself.

He may even have had lost some control over the remnants of his geased troops, and the newly risen undead he had butchered away the afternoon before. The old bokor was new to the practice of necromancy, however deep and ancient in that evil's theory he might have been. And, unless he and his little sub-cult had been holding out on the Annals and the witches' coven's training regimen, his deep theory on necromantic conversion and control can't have been all that old.

To be honest, I am still trying to tease out of the few scraps of evidence, the full extent and breadth of this little inner-chamber of Blade and his sycophants. Was it older than him? He had insinuated to others, once upon a time, that there was a sort of oral tradition in parallel to the Annals, almost in opposition to them, that predated them, that had survived the Dar al Hisan's doubled disasters. This asked me to believe that both Fatimah's Company and Desecrated Temple's 'Company' had both carried this mystical shamanistic thread, kinked and knotted however it might have been, safe and unbroken through doubled defeat, despair, rout, and retreat.

Well, let it pass.

However and whatever he knew, the old witch was losing control that night. Whatever the source of his unsuspected new strength, it didn't vastly increase his capacity for command, for direction. As soon as he took those new ghouls, he started shedding Verdebaie troopers from the rear of his formation. We didn't find out about this initially, as our pursuit in his immediate rear was almost exclusively aerial, and the armsponies and the witches overflew the disintegrating, straggling enemy without really perceiving the wrack and ruin he was dragging behind him.

He really should have beat us into that exposed prisoner's-cage outside of Clear Creek. Even if his target had been the town itself, he still had the road and the night and half a march on us. Even with that advantage, the fog and the loss of control meant that his force wallowed, stumbled, and slowed.

Well, also, that this may have been the first time he'd tried to rush a target with his command. His stalk of earlier targets had been slow sidles up to a blinded, unseeing victim. Perhaps he simply didn't have the hoof for rapid movement. He was a witch, not a tactician.

Feufollet and the aerials beat them by a griffin's whisker, and held the line against his ponies as they came over the fence. In an open-field fight between skilled unicorns and pegasi, we should have taken massive casualties, the defense is simply not a pegasus specialty. They're raiding ponies, the winged sections, they have to keep moving to stay aloft, to stay alive. Siege and assault are the specialties of the sort of pony who had followed Blade, and they should have crushed the improvised skirmish-line.

As it was there were over a dozen casualties, some serious. It was more chaos than an organized attack. Blade's ponies recoiled when faced with Company armsponies. Most of them refused to advance or to attack. Only some of the geassed troopers went forward, those and some unicorns who I am still convinced were confused by the dark and the fog, and never really saw their targets.

Nonetheless, the attackers got inside the fence, and made a mess. Which is when our Feufollet made her own mess. More on that anon. They were driven out with some loss to the prisoners, and in the meantime, a stampede of ghouls distracted absolutely everypony outside the fence.

I mean a literal one, a stampede of the undead, rushing back and forth just outside of the reinforced fences which were the main guard against the prisoners' escape. Back and forth in the dark, uncontrolled ghouls went rampaging, aimlessly. Did Blade lose his grip, or had he let slip the reins for a distraction? It was enough to extract his attacking-force, the most of it from the mess they had made of their stroke. By the time the ghouls stopped galloping and rushing back and forth, the living element of the assaulting force was nowhere to be seen.

They'd slipped away.

We could have followed them, we should have followed them. Cherie insisted that the enemy was sidling around to the aerial cohort's northeast and north, clearly looking to circle around into the unguarded interior. But we couldn't make chase with one point of reference, and Feufollet was out of commission.

I'd arrived with the third convoy of chariots some hours later, long after the Third Cohort had relieved the aerials on the ground, and moved out into the fog and darkness to try and sniff out the trail of the retreating raiders. My first priority had to be the wounded, of which there were a shocking amount for such a brief fight. I got a good start, and was breathing more easily when a heavy guard brought in my Rye Daughter and her coterie of underemployed surgeons an hour into the longest, darkest, most mist-haunted dawn I'd ever suffered through. I briefed them about the triage, and my initial work keeping the worst of them from bleeding out. As many as the wounds had been for one pony, for the whole team, it was nothing but a busy morning. Let them work.

I found my other apprentice where I was told she was, still screaming intermittently at the bloodied wall of a little corner of the prison-camp, a sort of cul-de-sac formed by the indifferent architectural priorities of the prisoners who had built the various barracks. Blood was splattered all over the battered, naked logs of Feufollet's corner, and the half-unrecognizable heap of meat sprawled up against one barrack-wall. It might have been a unicorn once – I thought I saw keratin exposed and a bit of spiraled bone in the right shape, and I was pretty sure it was some sort of pony, once.

As I approached, Feufollet spun about suddenly, and I flinched back as something red spun through the air in between my face and her whirling forearm. A whip of something tore through the heap of gore and bone which had been a pony, and another spray of blood erupted out across the face of the wall above. She shook her hoof, and the redness curled around her arm, like thread around a bobbin. She glanced in my direction, but didn't meet my eye.

"He keeps moving. Saw him. Saw him firing into their sleeping-quarters. Salaud! Nos poneys! les notres! We paid for them. They can't have them."

I blinked, and asked permission to go and see. She waved, angrily, still staring at the long-dead unicorn's body. I walked slowly around the edge of the barracks she had indicated, and found the open door. The unlit interior was abandoned, blood and a couple arrow-filled bodies not far inside, visible from the weak morning light streaming inside. Arrows everywhere in the interior, fired from the only door into the unprotected interior. Most of those who had been exposed, died quickly. Some few must have been those ponies I had left to Rye Daughter's medical team, extracting unicorn-bolts from riddled victims. I returned, even more slowly than I had left.

"Who was it?" I asked.

"What does it MATTER? Ils sont MORTS! They ought to be dead to THE COMPANY! Oath-breakers! Wolfs-heads! Connards de TRAITRES!" Her voice broke, and she sat down in the bloody mud. "Bank Shot. I saw his face just after I removed his gorget with a bit of his spine. de l'Intérieur."

I looked for and found the crumpled gorget, torn off of what I now recognized as a dismembered petryal under all the blood and bone. She hadn't stopped there. I suppose she couldn't stop once she had started. Kept carving until nothing looked like a pony. Nothing left of that older Company pony who had laughed at her, welcomed that little Prench-speaking jenny all those many months ago, had welcomed the little wayward foals into our brotherhood with an easy grace and a card-playing insouciance.

Feufollet had known this turn-coat better than I had, even though I'd treated him on three different occasions. One of our few stallions in the archers' corps. An Old Company pony, but never the sort of sullen sour stallion you'd have associated with Obscured Blade and his pinched dogma. He'd been a mainstay of the Company as long as I'd been a member, had been a young ranker when I'd been an apprentice to the dying Silver Glow. Far too happy to be a stallion among mares, if you ask me. Smug.

"Don't write about this! Cut ce salaud from the Annals! Laissez les tomber dans l'oubli!"

"You don't make that decision, apprentice. And I'll write what I damn well please. Or will you cast me out next?"

She cringed as if slapped, and tucked her muzzle down by her shoulder as if bracing for a blow.

"How did she know?" she asked, quivering.

"How did who know? Oh, Her. Yeah, you got Hades' own mess from that assignment I gave you, didn't you? Did she admit to having led you all into the ambush?"

"Half-way, half-not. She still holds onto these turncoats. Says they promise her what she wants, we don't give her what she needs."

"She's not nearly what she thinks she is when the fever's on her. Even she acknowledges it when she's lucid."

"Yeah, I know. But she was sniping at me, saying I was just as vicious as Obscured Blade, just as mad. I had no idea what she was talking about. Not at the time." She looked down at the heap of meat which had once been an armspony. "How did she know?"

"The Spirit has claimed to be a little precognizant. She gets… flashes. Especially in that Aspect. She once warned me… well, it was barely in time. Violent death and-" Madness. Violent death and madness. Don't say that, fool. "Well, violent death in particular brings that prophesying bent out in her. It's what makes her so effective in the battle-field. Battle is just usually… simpler. When the enemy isn't our brother." I looked at the little jenny, and realized she was breaking

So I grabbed her up in as strong of a hug as I could muster, and whispered reassurances in her long, trembling ears.

"You are forgiven all of your sins, jenny. Tous tes péchés pardonnés. You tried your best, and that's all we can ask. Good girl… bonne fille."

When she had cried out enough grief and horror, I carried her out of that bloody cul-de-sac to the nearest troop-shower.

It was a long walk, but the rest could wait.

The Fog Lifts

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As the morning sun burned away the night's long fog, I found Throat-Kicker in the witches' encampment, and we got Feufollet cleaned off and put to bed, clutching a timber-weasel like a foal holding a cloth doll. I looked at the dimples that spiky menace left all over the little jenny's fur, and realized that it was deliberately not pricking or stabbing her. I guess the timber-weasels could show affection and concern in their own, alarming sort of way.

They still gave me the willies. And I could swear they grew bigger every time I laid eyes on them. There were some that looked big enough to ride.

The Company turtled up. Nopony traveled alone, and we retrieved the more isolated members. Chariots were sent for Dancing Shadows, Cup Cake, and the logistical staff stationed up in New Equestria. We didn't want to chance anyone travelling in isolation on the surface. Especially not now that Blade's freebooters had disappeared in that direction. We kept an ear out for the sort of disturbance a group like that would cause, but nothing caught our attention.

The Patrol faded back into the shadows from whence they had emerged. We could have used their expertise in tracking down the traitors, but it looked to me like the production of a new set of villains from out of our ranks had spooked them. Night Watch disappeared, and nopony else associated with the Patrol wanted to talk to us. Especially when we refused to send personal representatives of the Company out alone. Our caution might have looked like arrogance or… I don't know what.

It was in this time that Company patrols sweeping along Obscured Blade's back-trail caught the hundred, hundred and fifty stragglers he'd left behind him in his wasteful night-march through the fog. Half of them were more than half-starved, and almost all of them were more Verdebaie regimentals, fallen out of the warlock's sway in the darkness, or simply too famished to continue moving.

A few died later of the results of exposure and malnutrition. He wasn't feeding his enthralled 'troops'. They reported having seen him or one of his unicorn followers ghoulifying dead Verdebaie bodies. They showed absolutely no regard for their equine raw materials; Blade was quickly going as bad as a Tambelon native with this necromancy business.

But the stragglers were all the news we had of Blade and his parade of horribles. They disappeared into the mist again.

Meanwhile, the campaign down westwards creaked onwards, producing a steady trickle of baronial casualties and the odd regimental or bison corpse. The bison were no sort of serious threat, but they were like fighting the fog with a broom. Easily parted, easily dispersed, but impossible to capture or destroy, and always creeping back in behind your sweeps.

More importantly, Brune's deplorables cleared the road further west in the direction of the Second Mouth, and the lines of communication opened back up. We received two entire seasons' worth of campaign news in a single afternoon. That news included the following facts, which I summarize in brief:

When the Second Mouth "fell" in the wake of the destruction of the Imperial Riverine Fleet, it had only lost its port and river-side bastions. The main citadel and the inland bastions had barred their gates against the rush, and reversed their defenses sufficiently that the garrison held out against the worst the White Rose could do. Even then, an army twice the size of the one eventually sent up the Housa was landed to besiege the hapless defenders, and it looked like they'd fall easily.

We'd thought this had happened long ago. It was the only explanation that made sense of the valley of the Housa full of Westerners. And the occupation of the direct lines of communication had murdered all news otherwise.

The commanders of the Grand Army on the Rima knew better, because they had been stripped half-naked of their mobile forces by the Bride herself, they had been left to hold the main lines with gum and baling-wire. But those close-mouthed goats never bothered to update anyone along our lines of communication with any of these facts; the foals just sat on news as if they'd be hanged if they let anything slip. The Grand Army's commanders took operational security to mean 'never tell anypony anything, ever.' I honestly do not understand the command philosophy of the Imperial Army. Their left hooves never know what their right hooves are doing.

Anyways, as we were training an army in the Valley du Pierre last spring, the Bride's improvised Army of Relief had slammed into the army investing the Second Mouth in a foul, mud-haunted slaughter that sounded like it put our own later mud-wallow to shame.

The Bride's Army of Relief shattered itself and the enemy alike, and somehow she found herself besieged within the enemy's own fortifications, as lines and counter-lines were dug in a riot of castellation that turned the back-country of the Second Mouth into a ghoul-haunted labyrinth. It was almost as if the various contending forces lost themselves in the blood-soaked turns of their own walls and ditchwork.

The Bride's forces suffered terribly from their impossible logistics, and they starved by the thousands. It's the only case I've ever heard of a commander sending perfectly serviceable regiments to the rear because she couldn't feed them. By the end of the campaign, word was that the loyalist forces were majority undead, shambling hordes just thickly leavened enough with the living to maintain control, and, if the stories I got were accurate, not always that, either. Towards the end, the loyalists started deliberately herding uncontrolled shamblers into certain sections of the labyrinth, to deny them to the enemy.

It was a losing battle, and if it were any other general commanding, they would have retreated and let the White Rose have joy of the ghoul-infested wreck. But the Bride as a general was nothing if not stubborn and borderline suicidal in her operational tactics. And her capacity for converting death and defeat into the raw materials of resistance was impressive. The enemy had the numbers, the logistics, and the support of a vast fleet. They should have crushed her. Instead, they fought inland and impaled themselves on her infinite obstinacy.

Not to mention the outbreak of a truly terrible plague among the investing armies, on both sides. Many fell dead from the sickness, which must have been spread by the rats and lice that make such a horror of trench warfare. The Bride's veterans were clever and wise in the hygiene of trench-life, and although the losses were heavy on the loyalist side, they were crippling to the fresh-muzzled Westerners, who had no defenses against the Pale Mare. She galloped through their ranks, and vast numbers died of insufficient latrines and improper sanitation.

But worst of all, the White Rose forgot about their exposed rear. The Fourth and Fifth Mouths, upstream on the Twins, were not impressive fortifications, or relevant to the defense of the Housa, and I think the Westerners forgot about what they represented.

Reserves.

Tens of thousands of screaming southern highlanders, the main-stays of the Bride's Imperial recruiters, the warlike mountain ponies and donkeys that filled the Bride's ranks. You know, lance-fodder. Did the White Rose think those woad-stained hill-goats just emerged from the earth like dragon's-teeth whenever the Bride stomped her hoof?

They came out of the southern highlands drained by the Twins, Castor and Pollux, those upland reivers and howlers. And instead of passing through the Fourth and Fifth Mouths to their expected homes in the ever-thinning regiments of the Grand Army, those recruits collected, and collected in their tens of thousands behind the bottlenecks on the Twins.

And they started building rafts. Nothing fancy, nothing respectable or terrifying. Those uplanders weren't boatwains, their talents weren't in construction or artifice. They just lashed together rough-hewn logs into big tangled, shaggy mats, and built rough rams into the fronts of these contraptions. They were barely navigable, and the Peacock Angel help them if they wanted to pole these messes up-stream for any distance. They had a distressing tendency to fall apart under any sort of stress, and they were only 'seaworthy' on a low-banked, slow-flowing river.

But the uplanders built thousands of them. They stripped the forests and groves of the districts along the Twins naked, they tore down their neighbors' barns and hen-houses. Rumour holds it that they also destroyed the houses of every baronial tax collector along the whole length of the Castor.

Roughly at the same time that we were storming the walls of Leveetown, the Uplanders' rattle-trap flotilla passed through the riverine booms defending the Fourth and Fifth Mouths. They floated in their thousands in a semi-controlled rush out of the Castor and the Pollux, mostly following the flow of the rivers as they merged with the larger Housa. They didn't so much collide with the Westerners' great navy as they enveloped it, emerging by accident in the middle of the night. The White Rose must have thought at first that they were looking at the remnants of some great upriver flood, the wrack and ruin of an entire water-shed's wreckage washed down-stream.

It was only when the torches went up that the complacent enemy realized it was an attack. They were swarmed.

It was still something of a one-sided slaughter. The crude rafts made for terrible assault-craft, being too low and close to the water for the well-armed but undertrained mountain savages to find their way onto the high-decked western war-ships. Thousands of uplanders drowned. But the uplanders had thousands to drown. And those rams were good for something. And a dozen shoddy rafts were an excellent trade for a hundred-thousand-denier trireme or fat-bottomed supply-barge. And the uplanders found it much easier to overwhelm the numerous supply-barges the White Rose had left undefended nearby.

The morning found the eastern banks of the great River downstream of the Second Mouth covered in shivering ship-wrecked survivors and the ruin of thousands of disintegrated battle-rafts. But among the logs and other, less identifiable bits of the mayfly armada were the wreckage of dozens if not hundreds of White Rose supply ships and battle-craft.

The uplanders' comic-opera armada had blundered its way into breaking the siege of the Second Mouth. In a night, all the military advantages of the Bride's opponents were washed away along with the crude log-raft flotilla. She made the most of it.

I wish I could report some great obliteration of her opposition, along the same lines as our victories in the east. But the flotilla which had been supporting our opposing force, ran down-stream to the relief of the siege-army cut off from their own logistics and supports. They pulled their chestnuts out of the fire, and a second White Rose army was not obliterated. Nevertheless, their conduct of this siege was definitely now on the back hoof, and if the 'Army of Relief' could simply secure their own logistics, the battle would be won.

Which meant that if Brigadier Brune and his baronial levies could clear the road past the Mounds and down into the depths of the southern riverlands, the Bride's Army of Relief could be, in its turn, be relieved. A ration-line driven down to the now massively-fortified environs of the Second Mouth.

If only we could get the ship-wrights to produce those battle-craft we'd been predicating our entire campaign upon. Coriolanus did have ships under construction, didn't they?

Well, not our remit. The Company had been commissioned to defend the shipyards against destruction, not to ride herd on their supposed productivity.

But it was marvelous to have news again of the world. Like fog lifting from a long-obscured prospect, we could at last see the shape of things in motion, and our place in the pageant.

Making Preserves, or, Bocage

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It seemed like half the Company trotted through my tent over the next couple days. The Lieutenant, to take my report. Rye Daughter, to evaluate my condition. Bad Apple, just to look in on me. I'm not sure what Cup Cake and Dancing Shadows' excuses were supposed to be, although at least Cup Cake brought pastries.

The infuriating thing was that there was nothing physically wrong with me. I just couldn't get out of bed. The Princess whispered in my ear every time I tried, and somehow, the energy just drained out of my legs. And there I laid. And ponies came to see me. And talk around things, and chatter.

Bad Apple bitched for hours about her lack of action down on the river, how they had grounded her, and worse, put her on a boat. A pitifully small and timid squadron of fresh-built battle-skiffs had been assembled above the Braystown boom, and whenever their commander was feeling aggressive and bolt-proof, the Beau's warders opened up a gap in the boom and let them through to make a claim on the middle Housa. Bad Apple was this little flotilla's heavy artillery, and they were supposed to post her forward where she could fire the enemy's ships when they came in range. Except they never did – either the White Rose ran for it when they were spotted, or the hypercautious captains of the new loyalist fleet fled themselves, their crew-ponies straining vigorously against the current with those long sweeps the river-boats used.

At least the crews were getting their training in against the river's current.

Eventually the Princess and my body got tired of their conspiracy to keep me bed-ridden, and I escaped that trap. Throat-Kicker had been keeping me fed and watered along with her timber-weasel charges, and I started helping her with this in turn. She had duties in the tent-camp other than riding herd on Gibblets' forgotten pets. They'd been basically re-adopted by Cherie and her knight - once the novelty and shine had worn off for the goblin-warlock, he'd gotten bored with the animate plant-things, and just left them to the care of others.

So I took over the feed and care of the baker's dozen of timber-beasties. We'd originally named them 'timber-weasels', back when they were small and cute and swift, but Throat-Kicker had fed them well over the last few months, and perhaps, over-fed them. And they weren't nearly as small as they had been, and it was debatable how cute and swift they were now. Well, they could be fast enough when the occasion called for it, I suppose. They mostly devoured plant matter, the tougher the better. They loved thorned wood, sharp-spined runners, and other pokey bits, and when we could get them rose-cuttings, we did. But those weren't as common or as cheap as you'd think, so whenever we could get blackberry cane or thorn-bush or even just brush cuttings, those filled out their feed-bowls.

Well, and the occasional vermin. The timber-beasties had the hunting instincts of a weasel, or a cat, or a wolf, and they killed and retrieved the little furry bodies of pests like rabbits, and squirrels, and field mice. And, thankfully, rats. Rats haunt military encampments like, well – rats in a granary. It was hard to keep a troop of cats to stick with an army on the march, so we were always exposed to the depredations of the little whiskered menaces. And the timber-weasels slaughtered rats without mercy. But they didn't seem to have any use for the meat, and once the critters were dead, the timber-darlings brought back their kills and left them in nice neat rows to be disposed of, often intact with their necks neatly broken.

When I asked, Gibblets opined that they were just feeding on the life energy of the vermin, and had no use for the meat and blood and physical remains.

Well, I had a use for the blood, if nothing else, so I started collecting those fresh kills. Hang them up to drain, cut their still-intact throats, and collect the high-protein sludge. It wasn't exactly fresh, but it had its uses.

And it turns out that you can spread the magic of living equine blood uniformly across a mass of vermin's blood, even if something else had drained away the theoretical life-energy of the vermin beforehoof. I just needed to figure out how to preserve the harvested fluid so that it didn't rot away or congeal into something useless.

The first grain harvest was long over, and most of the prisoners had been sent southeast to clean up the Clearances. We'd torn that district to shreds in the rush to fortify and form the kill-zone within which we'd destroyed the White Rose's expeditionary army. Entire hamlets had been ripped down, fields and irrigation systems had been demolished, and bastions and trench networks had defaced the corridor. Worse, the damage to the irrigation network had begun to reverse the work of generations in making of the Clearances something more useful to ponykind than the trackless marshes of the Wirts along the river.

So, we sent the bulk of the White Rose prisoners to undo the damage we'd done the land. They were given shovels, and pry-bars, and rakes and other instruments of marginal destruction, and told to re-dig the irrigation ditches, to tear apart our bastions and re-build the hamlets. Not that the former inhabitants were anywhere to be found. Gibblets thought that most of them were buried in the mass graves his task force had found to the eastwards. But somepony would eventually be recruited to re-populate those hamlets, so it wouldn't be work wasted in the end. Two whole cohorts of the Company were posted to defend these prisoners from anypony who might have wanted to molest them. Such as a certain witch-traitor and his band.

But just because the main grain-harvest was complete, didn't mean that there was nothing to be done in the fields. Some families in the baronies had diversified into other side-crops, and notable among these were a cluster of berry specialists in the district to the southwest of Clear Creek. In between the grain fields were long, tight rows of mounded, interweaved bushes, various different cultivars piled on top of each other, strawberries at the bottom, blackberries, raspberries, and blueberries along the top of the piles. Interspersed were other, less well-known berry bushes to balance out the rows and to discourage pests and blights from just tearing down the line.

My parents had been berry farmers in their own, crabbed way. If you just planted the same bush in a continuous line, you were just opening up a feed-lot for some enterprising weevil or rust to devour all of your hard work. And so, interweaved plantings, cuttings put back into their places, and scattered here and there to separate them from their fellows. The bees could generally follow the scents well enough, no matter how cleverly you separated the cultivars from each other.

Bees really were a marvel of magical nature. And you've got to respect an insect that carries its own lance with it to defend the hive.

And so, Cherie and I rode herd on a hundred parolees picking their way down rows full of ripe blueberry bushes, the blackberries and strawberry and raspberry bushes beneath having been exhausted earlier that season. Their stained hooves picked carefully through the greenery, flashing between the buckets hung over their withers and the bunches hanging heavy on the bushes. The farmers' foals were trotting back and forth between the pickers and the boilers hard at work at the far end of the lane, rendering down the berries directly into awaiting preserve tins and jars. Cup Cake was kibitzing with the matriarch of the farm we were helping, cheerfully taking notes and lending her own hoof to the proceedings.

The fruit preserves were ideal supplies for long-distance transport. They kept like crazy, and the special magic the earth-ponies infused into their preserves would help stave off scurvy among the half-starving regiments trapped in the siegeworks of the distant Second Mouth. Every jar and can we put aside here, would be carried at great cost down the long inland roads between the eastlands and that furthest extent of the tormented Riverlands.

But meanwhile, in the here and now, two foals with long fronds tied cross-wise across their own withers were galloping up and down the rows, whooping and hollering, scaring off the birds which were almost always hovering over the ripe bushes at this time of year. If they let up in the least, those pests would descend and devour the better part of the crop. Everypony wanted a bite off the bushes.

We, upon our guard, mostly ignored the parolees as they took the occasional mouthful. Ne reliez pas les bouches du kine qui marquent le grain, my granmere used to say. You gotta let your workers eat, it kept their minds on the berries. Most of the eaten berries would have just ended up in the dirt, anyways.

My own attention was directed towards my pack of timber-whatevers, who were patrolling the edges of the berry patches. Airborn vermin were not the only threat to the harvest, the ground-pests made their own contribution towards the whole. And the timberweasels were having a field day among the voles, the fieldmice, and the rats that fled the heavy hooves of the parolees. The little green-thorned ones zipped here and there, tossing the smaller field-mice high into the air as they caught them in their flight. The bigger timber-beasts, who were growing so tall and wide that we might as well be calling them by their proper names, couldn't quite fit inside the narrow rows, and lurked along the farm-lane, catching little skittering warm-furred critters as they escaped the smaller timber-beasts. The largest of the true timberwolves was a beast that Cherie had named Bocage, because he had grown until he resembled a hedgerow in motion.

As I watched, Bocage caught a huge hare by the back of its neck, and shook it until that neck snapped. Then he tromped over to my own little preservation-station, dropping the still-hot body of his kill at my hooves. I picked up the warm body, and hung it beside the other vermin I was draining into glass containers. Two of the farmers' brats stared wide-eyed as I took my left spur and opened up Bocage's new kill, letting the hot red fluid gush down into a fresh jar. I scooped up a hoof-full of cut blackberry canes from a pile on my other side, and tossed them into the air, from which Bocage snapped up the treat, crunching away at the thorny runners and canes.

I gave the watching foals a little show, and spun off spiraling, twisting streams of steaming red droplets from the draining rabbit's blood. It is surprising how easily entertained foals can be by simple magical juggling displays.

Not all of the timberwolves were to be seen hunting their vermin out here in the late-summer sun. I had four of them running a distant pattern, trying to find my limitations. You see, I'd discovered by accident during my convalescence that even a little bit of my blood on the thorns of a timber-weasel or timber-wolf could mingle our essence together, could let me see through their sensory array, could let me direct these beasts in a certain limited fashion. I write 'sensory array' because the way timber-wolves see and hear and smell the world is not quite like how a pony or a cat sees the world. They feel light, they taste the wind, they know a mouse is a mouse, a hawk is a hawk, and the cold from a warm beam of sun-light. But none of these can really be described properly as sight or taste or hearing, not without doing violence to the concepts. And yet, my blood on their bark, and I could listen with them, smell with them, hear with them, and run with them.

And I was running with this quartet of timber-wolves as they quartered the fields and woods around our harvest operation. I could taste the flights of pegasi hiding out of sight in the clouds above us, I could smell the sections of Company armsponies dozing in dark shadows here and there, hidden from mortal sight. Our trap was baited well, and the teeth of the trap were unseen by anypony who was not me.

And still, the monsters stubbornly refused to put their paws in our snare. The sun was high, the fields were warm, the scent of the farm-ponies rendering down their preserves in the open air was intoxicating. And yet, nothing, no-one, no-pony. We were delicious, and careless, and feckless in our display. We were vulnerable.

They weren't coming. In fact, I was starting to suspect that Blade and his crew of traitors weren't within two districts of our pointless little trap.

"Feufollet, if you're done playing with your blood-sculptures, I'm hungry," said Cherie. "How about you put all that away, and have some jam tarts. The Cakes went to all of this trouble to build a field-oven. Come on, it's a wonderful day. Don't waste it sulking."

And so we had some of the baker's open-air tarts. They tasted like home.

The Dream Of Burning Roses

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The Nightmare sat in my dream-garden and faced the setting sun among the snow-covered rose-bushes, their impossible blooms weighed down with fresh powder. She bowed her great horn at the celestial fire, guiding it to the horizon of my dream. Behind her, a glorious moon arose, and each bush cast a doubled shadow for a brief instant before the sun's light passed from sight. From each doubled shadow rose the image of a pony, and at her hooves they lay, looking up at the Spirit of the Company.

In front of the black alicorn crouched the Captain and her Lieutenant. Those two turned away from the great and glowing Spirit, facing towards the rest of the gathered officers and specialists of the Company as we each emerged from the moon-shadows. The Nightmare was the most real shadow in the garden. Of the rest of us, some among the gathering held greater reality than the rest. As more and more shadows crept out of the moon-lit rows, the selves they cast appeared less and less the selves which they resembled, until a few towards the back were nothing but equine shapes with the slightest artistic touches of muzzle and ear and snout or griffish-beak to inform the dreamer of the shade of the Company pony standing between the rose-bushes.

As some shadows emerged, the Nightmare became more real; as others appeared, other figures flickered into existence on either side of the reclining Spirit. First there appeared the Princess in all her infinite sadness and kindness, a mere outline, filled in as one or the other shadows emerged into the garden. Then, on the other side of the great and immensely real Nightmare, appeared a small and spritely Filly, her green eyes dancing as her partisans grew out of the earth of the rose-garden which was her gift to me.

With the appearance of the last of the Aspects, the Captain began her address to the dream-assembly. This had not been intended to be a full gathering of the Company, but rather, an open meeting of the officers and specialists to discuss the opportunities and choices that had been laid in front of our brotherhood. And yet, though this was not to be a full assembly, it was increasingly obvious that it would be so in effect, de facto as it were. The shadows kept appearing as the Captain spoke.

"We stand at a cross-roads," began the middle-aged earth pony, as small and intense in my dreams as she was in life. "We've done what we were gonna do down here, we've given the Imperials what they wanted. The Company has outrun itself and what we been told to do by th' Bride. The enemy, their attacks into the east has been beat down, butchered, and hung to cure. We've taken the control of the Housa, even if we don't have a loyal fleet to do anything wi' it yet. We've been puttin' the prisoners and the returnees to fixing what got broke down here in the baronies. Goin' any further now, without any such word from the Bride, that would be the Company makin' its own decisions, its own choices. Goin' rogue ourselves, in other words."

The shade of Broken Sigil piped up, to translate the Captain's speech into bureaucratese: "That is, further advances from this point would require additional orders by a principal not present, or the active choice of the Company, without proper sanction of a duly contracted principal."

"These would, we must emphasize, be true and active choices on the part of the Company," continued the Lieutenant, giving that starchy unicorn's shadow a bit of side-eye for speaking out of turn. "We are presented with rival demands on the part of various representatives and entities claiming to speak for our principal – without, I further note, any warrant or evidence that these representatives possess the ear of the sovereign. Dancing Shadows?"

A much less tangible dream-shadow bearing long ears and a sharp pair of draconic eyes set in the darkness of her dream-self strode forward.

She bowed to the Nightmare, and said, "Besides the half-ordered intentions of the General of our victorious Army of the North, we have also two separate envoys from two rival factions among the bureaucracy and court of Bibelot. One is currently lurking in a tavern in High Earth, and demands we march on the capital and depose a tyrannical vizier who has usurped the authority of the absent Empress. Another representative is sitting in luxurious splendour in the mansion of the Lord Castellan, and is demanding that we, again, march our cohorts upon the capital, and put down a conspiracy of courtiers and junior officers against the duly delegated lord regent, an Imperial Count of somewhat obscure descent whom I've never heard of before this season."

Dancing Shadows bowed again, and stepped back from the presence of the aspects of the Spirit, and the commanders of the Company. While she was speaking, the snow and soil upon which the three Aspects had laid in repose had sprouted low couches, purple-clothed and chased in platinum and silver. From second to second, these modest chaises grew, until the Nightmare was seated in royal fashion, with her lesser aspects sitting likewise in a manner befitting the greater nobility.

As the Spirit's manifestation grew increasingly imperial, Dancing Shadows' presentation was followed by those of the cohort commanders, each of which describing a different battle-plan floated by General Knochehart or one of her aides. They generally followed either a riverine advance via a somewhat-imaginary loyalist fleet, or a general advance down the Mounds inland route, mostly varying in the increasingly imaginative logistical details that might somehow negate the shortcomings of this approach.

As the expanding garden continued to fill with Company-shadows, I grew distracted from the arguing officers, having taken a rough head-count of our shadow-assembly and realizing that there were more here in spirit than were actually in the field. Further towards the back of the dream-garden were faceless pony outlines, and I drifted towards them, pulled by curiosity and a sort of floating, detached alarm. One of the reasons we had chosen this venue rather than an argument in person had been this dream-detachment and objectivity; the Captain had become a late convert to the idea that dream-logic and objective subjectivity gave us a creative and imaginative edge that our previous, more mundane processes had lacked - but once she had been so convinced, she took to the idea with vigour and enthusiasm.

And so it was, that my consciousness floated through my soul-scape, touching this armspony and that one, connecting to each, slightly, as I brushed past. Some shadows were from this cohort or that; a few Company carters and support-ponies here, one or two of Angus's bull-calves there, a few of the newly knifed-in recruits… and then I touched a pony who wasn't in the south at all.

Walking among the dream-shadows in the further reaches of my garden, I found ponies who had retired, invalided, to the colony in Hydromel, and then, I encountered ponies who had never been active members of the Company at all, foals, craftsponies, 'uncles' and 'aunts', the hangers-on and simple towns-ponies who surrounded the hidden colony in a cloud of loose Company association. I might have seen the shadow of a long-eared roan figure with two tiny yearling-shade upon that jenny's back, listening intently. But only out of the corner of my eye, and I refused to turn and see what I did not want to see.

My dream-detachment kept me from panicking at this evident fraying of the distinction between Company and Company-adjacent. Time enough to indulge in the appropriate panic attack once the assembly had come to its now-inevitable, calamitous end. In the meantime, I drifted around in a circle, realizing that if the hidden colony and other souls associated with the Company had drifted into our dream-assembly, then that meant that…

"How is it, that the Company's worthless commanders call a full assembly and we, your most loyal and puissant devotees, have been left out of the distribution, Your Majesty?" asked the burning terror whose sharp horn and long-tufted beard marked it as the forsworn traitor, Obscured Blade. "Choices to be made, your Company to be directed, and our ideas have not been solicited!" the necromancer bellowed across the garden, snow rapidly melting away before the hooves of his followers.

I charged towards the interruption, but was too late to stop the dream-shade of Feufollet as she lashed at the burning shadow of the arch-traitor, the shadow of a stream of blood whipping around the flaming throat of the burning unicorn and severing his head from his shoulders.

The decapitated shadow blew away in a wind of sparks and ashes.

There was a pause, as the crowd of lesser burning-shadows stopped in their tracks. And then, from their midst, strode the re-kindled, greater fire of Obscured Blade, intact, grinning savagely.

"Oh, apprentice, I see you've new tricks to play on your teacher! But foolish child, we are naught but shadows upon this cavern wall! What good is it to tear away at my cast shadows, that have nothing of myself in them but a bit of fire and fury? Surely you've not put so much of yourself in yours, that one could hurt you by doing – this?"

The burning shadow flung a bit of itself at my nonplussed understudy, and the flaming soul-stuff lit her dream-shadowed-shoulder alight. She began screaming in agony, until Cherie reached her and did that thing she does with dream-stuff, extinguishing the blaze. Feufollet's shadow laid down, curled up and sobbing, and Cherie turned in fury at the corrupted bokor.

I reached the both of them at that moment, and restrained the enraged thestral with one dream-hoof, whispering to her, "Not now, wait." I turned to the traitor, and said more loudly, "No, please, go on, Sir Blade! Tell us what mad starts brings you here, in the company of those your ego and your lunacy betrayed. We deserve to know your mind in this!"

The flaming figure of a pony laughed, delighted. "Why, is it not obvious? How can you not know! Next year! In Equestria! We are due and over-due for our appointment with the obliteration with our great mistress's captor, and eternal enemy!" He bowed in reverence before the Nightmare's imperial seat, which now was a full-sized throne, the focus of all the shadows watching within the garden. The snow had mostly sublimated by this point, leaving the roses to open in fullest bloom. The Nightmare's lips parted in a snarling smile, her terrible sharp teeth bared at the mention of her true-self's imprisonment.

"Mad fool!" yelled a shadow of intense blue and red from the side-lines, as the baker-spy strode forward, an orange shadow trying to restrain his lady-love from her outburst. "Do you not know what happened the last time your ancestors trampled upon Equestrian soil? Do you not know how close we all came to extinction? Destruction and corruption that took centuries to undo! Seven years of darkness and horror!"

Gibblets joined Carrot Cake in pushing the infuriated Equestrian back out of the circle of debate, and turned towards his once-fellow warlock. "Better it be said by one who was there, you damned burnt-horn oath-breaker! Seven years of darkness, yes, and seven worlds-potential destroyed, each year another world-that-might-have-been, consumed by that endless night of civil war. The terrible cold, banished only by the diversion of the deep magic of the cap-world, the wild magic poured upon the surface of tortured Equestria from the ever-present moon, corrupting every square inch of her precious soil!"

"I loved my Princess more than life," said the frog-goblin, bowing to his sad-eyed Luna, "but I could not join her catastrophic rebellion. I knew what it would do to the world she loved so much, and saw what it did to her corrupted self! Nightmare! You are my own beloved princess, somewhere in your core, but you are warped and demented, not your true self. To return to our home like this, would twist you into something even Tartarus would not be able to encompass. Don't do this!"

"BE SILENT, AMPHIBIAN!" commanded the Nightmare, irate at being addressed so. She slapped Gibblets back into the huddle of witch-shadows standing behind him. Then she turned to her adoring, fanatic warlock, and said, "Go on, Acolyte Blade. How do you propose this invasion, given your utter lack of support within Our duly constituted Company, and your negligible store of stolen power. What you've gathered is impressive in a solitary warlock and his gang of lackeys and followers, but hardly empire-crumbling strength. What power do you offer me to betray my sacred agreements with these ponies, who stand against your self-aggrandizing and self-willed rampages? We do, after all, have a proper set of contracts and oaths that constrain the behaviour of this our Company, a mercenary company in the final analysis."

"The Company that sells its lances to the first-bidden, or even the highest bidder, is not the true Company, Your Majesty. This is not your Company, but rather the semblance which held your traditions and your ideals in suspension, a sort of store of virtue, carried forward in the hollow and empty shell of a merely mercenary Company. This was the vessel which carried the essence, and that vessel should, and ought to be, discarded now that the time for the return to your holy land is at hoof."

He turned around, glaring at my dream-garden, drying out in his flaming presence, the buds and flowers of the rose-bushes wilting and browning as he approached each bush.

"Look at this effete foolishness! This meaningless effusion of flowers and greenery, this pointless dream of worthless, organic display! This is not the purpose of the Company, this gross floral excess! The Company exists to destroy the dross of a hundred worlds, to gather the kindling, the tinder, the fuel for the fire which is to come!"

The burning dream of a pony rose up on his hind legs, and gestured to the shining heavens above, the distant flaring stars echoed in the manes and tails of all the aspects of the Spirit. "See above us, and below, the fires of the Company which came before us! This is the purpose of the Company, to gather the fuel until the day of our most furious deaths, so that we, grown great with our accumulations, burn mightily into your endless night!"

"The only purpose of this, these lesser worlds, these shadows upon the walls of creation which have been cast by the one true world – their only purpose is to provide us the materials to build ourselves a great and all-consuming brand, to burn away your chains, and to light your true self out of the celestial cavern within which you have been sealed!"

The irked Nightmare interrupted the corrupted unicorn's flaring rant, bellowing, "YES, BUT BY WHAT METHOD?"

"But only this! I propose to make of the Company a vast and terrible fire, to scourge the eternal enemy from her fastnesses! Let me gather up these burnables, which fate has left so close to hoof here on this vile and death-haunted world of dross and filth! Even now, I stand ready to seize another one of these disgusting liches, to dedicate to your glory! Here! I give him to you!"

And with that, the burning ponies in our midst exploded with terrible fury, setting many of their neighboring shadows alight, and catching the rose-bushes on fire, the browned and blown blossoms burning like lamp-wicks.

"See? See? See it now!" ranted the flame in the shape of a pony. "The fool thought to hide in his tumble-down castle guarded by nothing but ghouls and the undead! A blind fool, guarded by the blind dead! A mere week of creeping through his crowded corridors, and a simple spell-blade through his dead heart, and ours! Ours! Hahahaha!"

And then Cherie, who had been beating upon my restraining fore-arm rhythmically with each beat of the mad bokor's diatribe, leaned forward and whispered in my ear, "Now?"

I nodded yes.

And Cherie breathed in the whirling fire of the conflagration, drawing away the flame which scorched the shadows of loyal Company armsponies. Then she blew out, and Obscured Blade's cackling, flaming shadow went with it, out like a snuffed candle. The shades of all of his followers were snuffed out in the same breath. All that remained was the burning roses, their light throwing our shadows across the garden.

The Captain turned to her gathered cohort commanders, and began barking out orders. The context of the banished traitor's speech, and the detonation of spiritual energy through the dream-connection, made the situation clear. In short order, hundreds of shadows from Fuller Falchion's Second Cohort dropped out of the assembly, to mobilize the regimentals in the siege-camp before the Shambles. If Uncle Blade and the renegades had just taken out the Beau, either a thousand ghouls had just fallen into their control, or they'd released them from all control. Either way, Braystown and the Shambles would be overrun with the undead.

My deniers were on 'uncontrolled horde'. The new-minted necromancer had not shown any previous capacity for individual command and control over such large numbers. Even if he tried to seize the Beau's store of the undead, his numbed hooves would let them slip through his frogs.

While the Captain coordinated the reaction to the immediate threat, The Lieutenant turned to the Spirit and the witches, to discuss the forsworn unicorn stallion's insinuations about his access to 'burnables'. A rampage? Some collection of liches we were unaware of? An attack westward against our undead employer?

Cherie interrupted this little conclave, addressing the Nightmare. "Mistress, before we were interrupted, I had my own proposal for the Company's further course of action. One which offers a better way than Oncle Blade's scheme for slaughter and mystical theft."

The great Nightmare, still bemused by the wild rantings of the banished shade of Obscured Blade, looked down at the little thestral. "What do you suggest, to improve upon his most tempting and glorious offers?"

"Mistress, it was not glorious, but rather a poisoned cup. He worships his own ego, and calls it by your name. He offers you power, joyless, flaming power, the power to destroy those that refuse you your proper adoration and respect. I would offer you instead love – the love of a vast and devoted nation, now groaning under the yoke of malignant fate. That is, after all, what you truly desire, is it not – to be loved for what you truly are? Not dominion, not conquest, not destruction – but the love of adoring subjects?"

"I do not see how it is in your hoof to offer me any such thing, child of ambition."

"Let me explain, Mistress…"

And as the thestral mare spoke, and the Spirit and the shades of the Company listened, the living roses of my dream-garden burned on through the night with the wildfire of purest magic. They burned with all the colours of the rainbow. And their flames drowned out the starlight and even the moon herself under the darkened skies of my borderless dreams.

The Art Of The Honest Con, or, The Holy Grift

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The officers refused my quite reasonable request to join the clearing operation down in Braystown. The clock was ticking on an opportunity to trap the traitors, and pin them in place, and the Captain just waved me off and told me to sit tight and wait for orders. I mean, I was looking kind of ragged after that old goat sucker-bucked me, but I was still pronti a partire, as I've heard her say more than once.

Admittedly, the scorched coat wasn't exactly a selling point. And I was sort of afraid what might happen when the numbness wore off. But there wasn't any deep tissue damage! And what good were body-glamours if not to hide cosmetic damage like that?

So I sat in the warlock-camp and played catch with some of the smaller timberlings. It was sort of frustrating, as they had a tendency to eat the sticks instead of bringing them back to me. Even when I tried snapping off the head of a javelin and using that. Who knew a timberling that size could bite right through the fire-hardened wood of a battle-javelin?

Nopony thought to clue me in on the planning, and it was obvious that they had some sort of incredibly complex plan going on. I guess they thought I'd be a distraction, given my known opinions on the urgency of dropping everything else and hunting down that evil old screw-head. It has to be hard to work out the angles and the details with an angry jenny braying bloody vengeance in your ears.

I eventually talked the Nightmare and the Filly into letting me tap into the communications stream of the Braystown operation I had been kept away from. But it wasn't nearly as interesting to listen to message traffic, as to be there in person, taking down the ghouls, hunting out the forming packs. Because Obscured Blade had really made a mess of that fortress, he just left the defenders in place, out of hoof, out of control, gone feral. The late Beau had held his undead with an iron hoof, rigidly controlled. With his expiration, what had been a centrally-controlled, mane-raising machine of impressive coordination and impossible discipline instantly collapsed into a ravening chaos of starveling ghouls scrabbling for any available morsel of meat, drop of blood – anything that they could get their jaws around. The few living ponies that had stuck with that stubborn, paranoid legate must have died quickly, if not easily.

The former defenders came bursting out of their walls in small groups, many self-impaling themselves on their own defensive works. The task of the troops called out for the clean-up was filthy, dangerous, and painstaking, but not especially difficult. Once Fuller Falchion and Brigadier Guillaume realized the scope and extent of the problem, the troops were assigned appropriately. The regimentals were posted with surplus pikes in blocking positions around the walls of the fortress, and intercepted the escaping undead, pinning them in place until they could be destroyed by those Company auxiliaries which had been assigned to the active regiments.

The Second Cohort moved forward, and breached the main gates of the Shambles in a mass. Their assault would have been a bloody disaster not two days previously, when an actual intelligence defended the fortress. Now that this intelligence had been murdered, the clearance was a simple matter of slow, yard-by-yard butchery and patience.

As I wrote, it would have been riveting to experience first-hoof. Listening in to the comms drained all of the blood from the matter, and left it as inert and juiceless as a plate of dried-out sausages. Mmm, sausages.

MS is spotted and unreadable for the next three lines, substance seems to be some sort of vile…grease. - Faded Palimpsest, 2nd Grade Archivist, Restricted Archives

and I was invited to join the next meeting between Cherie, Sawbones, and three of the White Rose parolees. Two of them I'd met before, somewhat obsequious ponies who insisted on praying at my friend rather than talking to her. Unpleasant people, really. The third was unfamiliar to me, an older, greying stallion with smiling eyes and a serious look on his muzzle.

"Monsieur, I do not know if you have met Whispering Wheat, when you were here in the camps last month," said Cherie. "He has been very helpful in organizing a number of the camps, and aiding us in paroling the work-details. Entre autres."

"I remember Whisper," said my mentor. "He had some… interesting things to say about the battle, the aftermath, and pointed us in the direction of ponies with even more interesting things to say about that entire period. Religious visions, I think you said?" he asked the White Rose prisoner, turning towards the older stallion.

"Visions makes the entire experience sound rather… fantastical," equivocated the deep-voiced elder. "Say rather, the revelation of one's inner voice. Well, that, and the spectacular illusions which haunted our entire division in those days leading up to the battle. That latter business, I take to be your mages' tactical expedients?"

"Surprisingly enough, not really," said Cherie. "At least, nothing we did intentionnellement. Some elements of le monde spiritual may have gotten ahead of themselves, in enthusiastic anticipation of future events. I do not know how familiar you are with the things beyond ce plan physique, Sergeant Wheat, but some of les esprits that exist beyond our waking eyes can become somewhat confused as to what is today, and what is tomorrow - when is now, when is this afternoon, or evening."

"So that when I see a youthful, unmarked filly who looks and sounds a great deal like you, you are saying that it was not, in fact, you?" asked the White Rose non-com, skeptically.

"Say rather, it was an inspiration, an effect running ahead of its cause," said Cherie, confusing pretty much everypony in the room, except, apparently, Sawbones, who nodded as if it made all the sense in the world. "And if I choose, ces petites apparitions can… become me."

The prisoners looked duly impressed and awestruck by this arrant nonsense. I did my best not to roll my eyes.

"The spirits… talk to you, miss?" asked one of Whispering Wheat's cronies. "What do they say? Who do they speak for? Can they help us, help us to get back to our families?" She looked so earnest, so vulnerable… how did ponies like this get here? How had the world not eaten her alive by now, as it had so many of her peers? "Can- can you help us get home?"

"Noon Dream, you cannot confuse the spirits for gods," said Cherie. "They are not creators, not masters of fate or destiny. They simply… see what you do not see, know things you would not know. And not all of them are bénigne, amical, utile. Comme j'ai dit, I choose which shall or shall not become me. Like you would, being presented with a feast of uneven quality, pick and choose between the tasty treats and le pain pourri plated side by side, so I find that I have to be careful what I allow inside."

"Likewise," added Sawbones, "We need to be careful of what we allow inside of our society, whom we permit to join our communion of likeminded selves. We've been watching you and your fellows for some time now. You're survivors, this much is true. We respect that in a pony. The ones who would just lie down and die, have laid down and died. Well enough – some ponies are just not strong enough for this world. It isn't an easy one to live in, Tambelon. Tartarus, I'm not from here myself. You can tell by the stripes."

He paused to let them laugh at the joke. They could laugh, because he was wearing a bit of a glamour himself, and wasn't nearly as horrifying as he sometimes looked. More like the younger, happier zebra I had met that first morning, that first, terrifying morning when I woke from a waking dream, and found myself in the Company of nightmares. Sawbones, today he looked like a normal zebra, with both eyes, both brown, and normal, pony teeth. The doctor, before Tambelon got her evil teeth in him. I looked back at the three White Rose, their eyes shining at the trend in the conversation. Everypony wants to be part of something wonderful, something special. But they were more credulous than a pack of wildling foals. Religion does strange things to a pony's mind.

"This much, is true," continued the glamoured zebra. "What further, is true? That you also mean well. That you have joined together with us, in repairing the damage you've done to these war-torn lands. You've made restitution to the uninvolved. You've made a proper gesture to the surviving donkeys and ponies, to these simple artisans and farmers, far from any court or barracks or battle-field or abattoir. You have given signs that you understand that what is wrong with this world, cannot be fixed through war to the hilt, through extermination and endless slaughter."

"Please, do not get Monsieur wrong," added Cherie. "I am anything but un pacifiste hypocrite. Bloodshed is a necessary prologue to le véritable changement, true solutions. Some ponies, you just can't reach, and some – well, we have to be quite vigoureux dans notre approche, as you have experienced first-hoof. We are a brotherhood, a sacred society, an order. But we are also an order militant." She rose to her hooves, and then spread her bat-wings over her shoulders, hovering above us.

"I come not to bring peace, but an axe." Her green eyes glowed white, shining so brightly I had to turn away. "There are evils in this world, evils which must be cut out, burnt from the body. Not all will survive la chirurgie, la cautérisation. But la chirurgie, it must be done. And so, we sharpen la hache, le scalpel."

She settled back down into her seat, and continued, less dramatically. "We have assessed our needs, and you, and yours – and what we need you to be, is one of our scalpels. La hache, the axe – we have passed beyond where that is needed. Le scalpel, Sergeant Wheat. Can we make of you and yours a scalpel?"

"I – I don't know what you're asking of us, Miss. You have to understand. We look at you – and we see the promised filly, the one who was prophesied. And we know it in our bones, because you, or something that works through you – you saved us from destruction. You hold the markers of the true promise, of this I am certain. And yet - there have been too many false prophets, too many lies. Words are nothing but words, gravel beneath our hooves. The act, the demand – where are you asking us to go?"

"Sergeant Wheat, gravel est la base necessaire for good roads. The Bride, the lich-empress, elle est beaucoup de choses – but she knows how to build a road. From the gravel up. And we aim to take your home back from the latest batch of 'false prophets'. We know false prophets well. All the Chain of Creation – du Rakuen perdu au le grande Equestria – groans under the hooves of false prophets."

"Are we true? We cannot answer that question, except by the demonstration, by the example. And, I have been told, example is the school of ponykind, and we will learn at no other. Venez, étudions ensemble. Let us learn together!"

I could not believe that this palaver was the sort of thing that could inspire ponies. And yet it did, I was there, in the room. And these prophesy-struck ponies enlisted in Cherie's 'École d'exemple'. We went out into the camps, and Sergeant Whispering Wheat, and Corporal Noble Dream, and that wild-eyed ranker and lay-preacher Iron Wheels picked and they chose. And those we picked, and those they chose, we led into an open space between three camps, where all the other prisoners could see through the fences, through the gates.

And Cherie and the Annalist guided the volunteers into ranks, squad by squad, ordered into platoons. Some from this regiment, some from that battalion, mixed without prior association. And Sawbones read from one of the earliest volumes of the Annals, perhaps the first book laid down by that first Annalist after the great defeat. He stripped out the obscure references that these White Rose true believers would not have understood, would not have been able to use. He did not call it the Company, but rather, the Order. But the core, the spine of the story – that was the same. He talked of an ancient association, broken in battle, stripped of its traditions, its hope, broken but for the infantry-mare's pike and a tattered standard.

From the edge of the assembly strode the Company's standard-bearer, holding the war-lance, the Company's true pikestaff, and from it hung a torn battle-standard, a crimson banner with the iconic white rose wrapped in thorn-stems. The largest of our timberlings strode out of the opposite side of the assembly. That huge, animate, wolf-like mass of living shrubbery seized the battle-standard out of the hooves of Carrot Cake, and it waved its prize high over our heads.

"PONIES!" shouted Cherie, in her great-lunged way, her voice larger than herself. "Many have died in the last generation in the name of the White Rose! Many have died for tradition, for justice, for the will of the heavens, for their neighbors, against their neighbors, against their landlords, in spite against distant oppressors, and in hate against oppressors close at hoof! More have killed for country, for plunder, for prophesy and the dream of a better world! I will not ask any of these things of you! None of them interests me in the least!"

As Cherie bellowed her politician's words at the wide-eyed parolees, I opened the preservation-jars beneath my barrel, and with a nick against my heavily-scarred forearm, I bled into my preserves, and awoke them into life. From each jar the ribbons rolled, endless droplets so close together that they made a liquid stream, a hundred, no, five hundred liquid tendrils. Each touched the high pike-staff held by the Bocage, spiraling past the shaft to touch the racks of lances, axes and spears which stood behind us.

"What fascinates me, what concerns me, what motivates me is this question, my ponies, is this great question," Cherie continued. "WHAT WILL YOU LOVE FOR? WHAT WILL YOU LIVE FOR?"

The thestral pony rose into the air above the assembly, and her fur was as bright as the morning-star, and her wings like an iron sky promising a hard, cleansing rain. Her green eyes flashed and flared until they turned white, a punishing fiery white like looking into the sun itself.

While the assembly was hypnotized by Cherie's light-show, I used my magic to lift the shafts and the blades by their hundreds from their racks. I never would have been able to do this just last fall. The power that was pouring into the Company, that was flowing through it, had brought unexpected changes to the way my magic worked. I don't know that another blood-mage on this continent could have done what I did before that assembly. Each weapon found its pony, and hung before them, beads of old blood dripping down their blades, baptizing each in the magic of the Company.

"PONIES! TAKE UP THY BLADE, AND DEDICATE THYSELVES TO YOUR PROMISE! PROMISE WITH ME!"

And five hundred hooves raised up, and grasped each weapon by the blade, cutting their frogs and mixing old blood with living blood. And without prompting, without coaching, via the magic of the ritual, five hundred and one leather-lunged voices bellowed as one:

"WE LIVE FOR THE ORDER! THE ORDER OF THE BLACK ROSE! LIFE UNTO DEATH, LIFE WITHIN DEATH, THE LIVING WORLD REBORN!"

And the pikestaff burst into a glorious flame of all colours of the rainbow, and the white of the banner's device turned black, as black as a cinder in the fire, a black rose against bleeding thorns.

The ceremony, the ritual was repeated fifteen times over the next fortnight, every evening as the sun faded away in the west. One would have imagined that somepony would have refused the ritual, refused the initiation. And yet, not even the doubters, the would-be skeptics, held their stance in the face of a thestral burning like a mirror catching the rising sun. The Company birthed forth an Order, seven-fold. An Order that, to look at it, before and after, was nothing but a ragged collection of refugees and defeated captives.

But what of appearances, I ask you?

As for my enemy, that evil old traitor, and his plans, and his destinations, and his plots. Well, if that old goat thinks that the Company was nothing more than a vessel to be discarded – there are always new pitchers by the sink! There are new bottles in the wine-cellar. It's not the flagon that matters, but the vintage of the wine.

We can only hope that the Spirit can still taste the difference between beaujolais and old vinegar.

The Dream-Forge

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We didn't have time to train up the new formations to our standards; the summer was dying, and the fall campaign season would be short, so very short. We could only put them through their paces, and rely on whatever training the White Rose had beaten into their field troops. Some of the new Order ponies had survived from the front-line units, but more had been in support and logistics. In a catastrophe, the ponies in the rear echelon are almost always the ones with the best chance for survival, this is simply the way the world works.

And so, each cage got its own pair of Company sections to exercise and drill the inhabitants. It was almost impossible to keep the few townsponies who had returned to Clear Creek from seeing all this activity – assuming they'd not noticed the spectacular recruitment ceremonies. The regimental guards who were displaced by Company training cadres were re-assigned to foalsit the witnesses in town – to help them rebuild, aid in their work, and make friends with the locals.

Just so long as nopony left town, especially to gossip with friends in neighboring towns or hamlets.

Stomper and the rest of the Third Cohort was distributed among the fifteen Order cohorts, as cadre, as training ponies, as foalsitters. Some brief thought was given to breaking up all of the Company cohorts, and only assigning earth ponies and other ponies who could pass for earth ponies to the new formations, but Sawbones threw a fit and that idea died quick. Instead they roped me into the game.

It was an interesting challenge, and not one that could be accomplished with a simple song and dance, or a clever hack, or a brilliant bit of one-off spellwork. Long glamours, long illusions, took time, time and attention and deep engagement in the fabric of the illusion.

I would be part of the plan, even if nopony cared to tell me all the particulars. I was told enough – told how it demanded semblance, and subtlety, and consistency. So I started in on the Company armsponies who couldn't pass for earth ponies, and I spent all of those intense days and weeks of drill and long work, wrestling with the discarded caparisons of the naked training-ponies. Bleeding into the fabric, painting myself into the threads and the weave. I took their imagined selves from the Filly, who dove through the dreams and fantasies and self-images of those unicorns, those zebras, or donkeys, or in three odd cases, caribou. What part of themselves could be massaged, and crafted, until they looked like a Western pony?

The Westerners had a certain look to them, a cast in their eyes, the way they wore their manes, how they braided their tails, how they carried their weapons. A looseness in their limbs, a disregard for how well-filed their hooves were. Each of our Company minders had to not only be painted over with the semblance of a Westerner; in a very real sense, they had to see themselves - in their sense of self, and their physicality - as those Westerners. They had to walk, trot, and speak with a Western cadence.

The Filly filled in the gaps by dream-pairing each trainer with their platoons, pushing them into dream-chambers each night, with trainer and platoon rubbing up against each other in endless, time-altered night-training reveries until they absorbed a bit of every trainee in their shadow-coats, their shadow-manes.

When they put on the blood-daubed caparisons I had prepared for them, even their cutie marks changed – strange amalgams of certain elements of this trainee's mark or that, blended together into something that at a glance looked unique. You would have expected this fundamental alteration of the outward symbol of these altered Company pony's inner selves would have caused alarm, outrage, even mutiny. But the Filly's night-sessions with her new herds seemed almost to produce a sort of hypnosis, a lucid trance.

Ponies changed faster than I could have imagined. Even I felt this strange rapture of the dream-depths, for I was weaving my own dream-coat along with the rest of the Third Cohort. During the day I remembered the donkey that I was, but night after night, dreaming of the work I was doing in my sleep, I forgot Feufollet more and more often, and only remembered Marsh Wisp, who had walked away from her parents' farm on Upper Halter Creek in the province of Traverses to fight for kirk and kin, and await the second coming.

And those nights lasted forever, as the Filly extended those lucid dreams five-fold, ten-fold, twenty-fold, until eight hours asleep felt, subjectively, like a week. And not merely a week spent lazing about the barracks, but training-weeks as hard as anything we put the northerners through in Vallee du Pierre. Weeks spent training in combat, training in ship-handling, defending galley-decks, assaulting ships from below, combat-landings in ports and on open river-banks.

At first I couldn't figure out where the Filly was getting the material – Cherie's experience with ship-handling and riverine combat consisted of sneaking on board and burning hulls to the water-line. But I was given a loud and boisterous revelation one night by a Nightmare. She was disguised as a sort of spirit-parody of Cherie, a somewhat monstrous, enormous thestral. She was engaged in directing a dream-simulation I was observing. At the time, I was working on getting down and recording the self-image of a particularly set-in-her-ways unicorn corporal, who was leading her training-platoon in a losing fight against the Nightmare's own dream-platoon. The Nightmare and her Black Rose were defending a galley deck against the hapless assaults of my subject and her increasingly-battered dreamers.

"Where did we get the setting, and the ideas?" asked a cackling white-grey Nightmare as she let her defenders in driving back the corporal's outmatched assault team. "Look around you, my pony-acolyte!" She slashed at a westerner's dream-shadow with a marine's cutlass, and the pony howled in pain and fell into the water. "We captured survivors from half-a-dozen marine battalions in and around Leveetown!" She kicked another pony into the water, and looked around for more victims. "Hundreds of ponies' worth of experience and methods, all well-trained in riverine warfare." She leaned on her bent cutlass, watching her platoon drive the remnants of the assaulting team into the dark waters. "To be honest, even the ones who weren't marines are more experienced in this sort of thing than the Company, who have spent the last few years stuck on dry land, forgetting all of their naval tactics."

She snapped a grey wing, and the dream ended. "These scenarios are as much to get the new Order working as a whole, as units and formations, to build up their confidence in themselves and each other, as it is for the simple training itself. These are veterans, my dear Marsh Wisp! They just need to be reminded of that, and lo! The rest shall fall into place." She started a new dream, and her platoon exchanged places with their opponents, assaulting the same dream-galley they had just finished defending. The Nightmare, still pretending to be a spirit pretending to be Cherie, threw herself into the frey, yelling wildly to her training-platoon.

I think it was all a game to her. Every time I laid eyes on the Nightmare in those weeks, she was smiling that sharp-toothed smile of hers, and she never spoke long without a laugh escaping her lips. She was having a vacation from herself, and it suited her.

But as intense as those weeks were, I still believed that they couldn't be preparation enough for what was to come, though I had no idea what that might be. Dreams and the bone-crushing reality can never truly compare; the former can only gesture in the direction of the latter. But then, what training truly prepares for the real thing?

Cherie and the officers stayed closeted up, and we saw little of any of them. I was somewhat surprised that this did not affect morale in the absent thestral's newly-formed Order, but then I realized that the Filly and the Nightmare was keeping the new ponies so drop-dead exhausted and over-busy that they had no time to think, let alone feel neglected. I don't think any of the Order ponies were truly fooled by the Nightmare's Cherie-act, but most were taken in by the insinuation that the Company's elder Spirit was one of Cherie's 'spirits', a dream-daemon serving their new mistress.

Cherie was away, and the Nightmare was having fun in the dreamscapes – but in the real world, the Filly was everywhere. She took those cages by storm during the day-training, the pure physical exercise which was necessary if the Order was ever to be able to implement their night-training. If the flesh is weak, it doesn't matter how willing the spirit might be.

And an interesting thing happened during those days. If the physical appearance of their Company trainers blurred into a semblance of their training platoons, then the emotional and mental tendencies of those Order ponies were likewise made over, overlaid somewhat with the personalities of their trainers. The Third Cohort had over the years developed a unit personality, a certain cheerful irreverence and easy-going looseness, which blended strangely with the traumatized, fanatical, and intense affect of the survivors of the White Rose. At times, it almost came across as schizophrenia. Which wasn't exactly a disaster, for the purposes I'd been led to expect. These were to be desperate and unbalanced ponies, defeated and thrust into slavery. They would naturally be scattered and uncertain in their affect.

Yes, slavery. About two weeks into the project, word came down about some details of the Plan - at least in the vaguest of terms. The 'prisoners' had been re-categorized by the Bride's bureaucrats as criminals, traitors and rebels. Their freedom was not merely constrained in the sense that one interned military prisoners of war – they were criminals, and thus, deprived of all freedoms, permanently.

Tambelon was a bad place to be a slave. They could have been sacrificed to the military's ever-thirsty 'rear support battalions' and reduced to thralled ghouldom. They could have been sent to the phylactery-owned mines in the eastern ranges, to be worked to death.

Instead, our newly enslaved Order ponies were being shipped down to Coriolanus to serve as galley slaves. Classically, the oardonkeys of battle-barges and galleys had been free jacks and jennies, but in the Bride-era, this tradition of proud oar-jennies had been washed away in a tidal wave of convict labour. Many of the ships driven down in the great river-battles of the last several years had gone to the bottom with their rowers still chained to their oars and sweeps.

They say that the great river occasionally belches forth packs of undead upon the lower reaches, drowned ponies dragging behind them oars still chained to their forelegs.

The new fleet being laid down in Coriolanus required full complements of oar-donkeys, galley slaves. And we had thousands of them convenient and near to hoof. It was the obvious solution; the General and her staff had been planning on impressing sailors from the Inland Sea to make up the numbers, which would have made all of us deeply unpopular. They jumped at the chance to avoid the Inland Sea impressment campaign, at least, once they were given to understand that the Company would stop standing in the way of the enslavement of the prisoners of war.

They wrote off our sudden acquiescence as just another of the strange and unpredictable starts of a demon-worshiping cult, and went on with other matters. With the initial campaign concluded, General Knochehart was besieged with hard-luck stories and demands to return this regiment or that regiment back north; everypony was ready to call it a war and go home. It didn't help matters that word had arrived that the White Rose had tried to invade Pepin in our absence, and that there had been a somewhat active summer season on the upper river for those regiments we had left behind. With the Bride absent and tied up at the front, her endless campaign of censorship and suppression of communications was in abeyance, and the news was beginning to flow for the first time in generations. With news of the greater Tambelon, came politics, and contention, and distractions.

Nopony paid us much heed. They were too busy arguing with each other.

And so it was, in the last days of that summer, we began marching the newly-enslaved White Rose prisoners in long, regimented columns north to the Road through High Earth. Each pony was march-hobbled, with rope halters tied to allow a steady marching step, but no faster, and with reduced flexibility. Everypony who watched us shuffle past were treated to the prospect of thousands upon thousands of down-trodden ponies, hangdog, thin, and hollow-eyed. The more we played up the spectacle of misery, the less reason anypony had reason to pay attention to the heavy-laden carts and wagons spaced out here and there within the slave-columns. They were only food supplies and chuckwagons, right? Even the ones that held our timberlings, curled patiently upon their sharp-edged beds of weaponry.

It only takes a little stagecraft and misdirection to make a division-sized military movement look like slaves being taken to market. So off we went, shuffling awkwardly towards the distant river-port, towards our rendezvous with the Imperial fleet coming off the slips in that great city on the Housa.

Coriolanus, mother of ships – we come for your children!

The Parliament Of Dreams

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The first night on the road, as the Order slept in the hay-fields along the market-lanes under the brilliant stars of the late-summer night skies, my dreams were crowded by petitioners and emissaries. The Filly brought them one by one to the entry-chambers of my fortified palace, where ghosts of myself directed them to seats here and there in the adjoining sitting-rooms. I forwarded a request via the Princess, asking her to contact Cherie, and bring that thestral's attention to my state of siege, the investing crowd of Order ponies besetting every sally-port and gate of myself – and in the meantime, I hurriedly expanded my reception-facilities to deal with those demanding a word with me.

I have barely in my life had any experience with the finer things, and I'm afraid to report that the chambers of reception I generated for my visitors were hardly suitable for the occasion or the crowds. I fear they resembled rather the under-furnished farmers' parlors I have seen in my short life, covers hastily removed from the threadbare chairs and side-tables, a portrait hung here or there to no particular aesthetic effect. I never came along with Sawbones and his escorts to see how the Duchesse and her peers organized things – all I could do was to imagine how one might generalize from the experience of a farming jenny to that of a leader of ponies.

The problems they brought me were all simply variations on a theme, the same problem, in innumerable fragmentary slivers, split among the disorganized horde of ponies which was the Order as it had set off from its cages onto its march from captivity into slavery. The mayors had been creatures of the camps, the cages. They reflected no command authority beyond those facilities' fences or gates. The mayors were not leaders of ponies, they were appointees of Cherie, administrators. Most of them felt rather strongly that their experience – or lack thereof – utterly unfit them for command in the field. All officers of the extinguished White Rose Army of Expedition had been exterminated – those few who had survived into captivity had not survived the after-effects, of which I shall write no more. Some half of the mayors had been non-commissioned officers – which is to say, corporals and sergeants. All good non-coms know enough to know that they aren't officers, aren't commanders. They exist to take the ideas of the officers and implement them as orders. It is not the function of a sergeant to give orders; all their training and experience tends towards the unfitting of such ponies for command.

The Order, thus, was a mob of veterans and sergeants, leaderless, unorganized in a technical sense. They could march, and they could train, but the only reason they were not a mob on the road at this very moment, was because the Company-pony guards accompanying the columns were providing the Order some semblance of order.

Cherie flew into my dream-fortress's highest-most turret, and met my restlessly pacing self there, awaiting her arrival.

"Damn you, why are they coming to me? You're the promised one, the one promising them their prophesied salvations! Here, down there – tell them what it is they are to do, who they are to have them lead them. I'm not leadership any more than any of they are! See this! Warlock's badge, Annalist understudy. I'm less than even a sergeant in the scheme of things. Do your job, Messiah!"

"Oh, Feufollet, don't be that way. You need to loosen up, have fun with this! By the way, I love what you've done with yourself. Looks like Dance Hall, only stretched vertically! What's this stone made of? It's all scintillant, remous glissant – glittery-swirly-noir!"

"A geode I saw in le salon de la tante de ma mère when we went visiting once. Damnit! Now you've got me doing it. Stop dropping random Prench into your speech, it's confusing me!"

"Non, non, incluez-vous, lean into it. Being a little exotic, it helps them relate to you. C'est vrai! They know you're not from around here, not their neighbor's filly. Trying to pretend otherwise, it sets off the wrong alarms. Be different, fille! And that brings us to why I'm here. Time to give them their reins, n'est-ce pas?"

"You're not going to appoint more of them to command again, are you?"

"Oh, rien de brutal. They're going to make their own officers, bien sûr!"

She said this last as we burst into one of my oversized parlors, crowded with the dream-shadows of dozens of anxious Order ponies. Cherie had gained a hoof-span of height and stature with every stride down that long imaginary staircase, and as she did, the room itself unfolded around us all. Her intent permeated my dream-palace, and the walls merged into the floors as the low, dark ceilings vaulted above us on wings of architectural whimsy. The long string of greeting-rooms dissolved into a grand chamber, with a pair of bars defining a debating-pit between two raised stands within which the dreaming ponies found themselves seated.

"Salutations, mes chevaliers du futur vivant!" boomed Cherie as she trotted across the center of the court and up the steps of a dais with an empty, elaborate chair. She sat down at the foot of the empty throne, and continued her exhortation of the crowd. "Welcome, mes amies! I see so many of you have come to discuss your self-governance. It is une bonne chose! You lack only un souverain ceremonial, to make of the occasion a proper États généraux. Princesse, if you would?"

And, stepping into the dream, strode the proper Spirit for the occasion, blue-furred Luna, modest and shy as she took her seat at the head of the chamber. The Filly would have been too much like a self-crowning, and the Nightmare, overwhelming and domineering. The Princess faded into her cushions, and allowed Cherie to play her courtier in front of the crowd. Speakers were summoned to one of the two podia that appeared to either side of the throne, facing the Princess. Each speaker addressed their concerns, their fears, to the Princess and to the crowd in front and behind them. The wide, empty court between the stands and the throne established a distance between Cherie and the Princess, and the ponies of the Order.

Was it intentional? I do not know, but it led the conversations to become, increasingly, arguments between the speakers called to each of the two podia, only ceremonially addressed to the Princess in her Court. Apparently arbitrarily selected speakers argued back and forth over the empty pavement of the court in between, and their debate defined the extent of the new Order's problems, their concerns, their expectations.
They knew that they had been 'enslaved', and trusted in Cherie and the Company to see them through this unnerving beginning of their service to themselves, and to the future. They had been set loose from one captivity, and invited to set foot upon another sort of captivity entire. One where they hid their personal weapons under the glamours of others, accepted the semblance of halters and hobbles, and the pretense and reality of the ultimate in humbling subjugation. All for a future which they could not see, could not be told of, could only trust in some unknown Plan.

These concerns distracted them for long dream-hours of venting, of fury and terror and uncertainty. The actual issues which they had brought to the door of the Princess's Court had been left, tumbled and forgotten, tucked beneath their chairs to cool and await their due turn. Emotions had to be vented before organization could be considered.

And there was a great deal of emotion to be vented. It was well, that the dreamworld had little concern for time and tide, because we spent a very long stretch of dream-time working through the anxieties of thousands of unorganized, traumatized ponies being led once again into the crucible. They were not yet ready to go back under the iron-smith's hammer, and the Court gave them that respite, that pause.

Finally, a moment came when all the ponies who needed to yell at each other had had their opportunity to bellow to their hearts' content, and there was silence in the Court.

"How then," asked Cherie for the Princess, at the foot of the throne, "Are we to deal with each other? How shall the Order conduct itself in the field and in the World? Who should lead you? How shall you in your hundreds, in your thousands, be ranked and directed?"

And then, began another series of debates – passionless, practical debates between exhausted ponies, too tired from their long venting to place unnecessary emotion into something too important for ego and excitement.

The Order spent the rest of that long, restless night, sleeping in the fields upon their halters and their hobbles, while in a Parliament of Dreams they ordered themselves, and found their leaders, and each pony found his or her fellow-rankers. The Order found its spontaneous order in that exhaustion that was the release of the dreaming self.

The Order laid down as a rabble of trained ponies. It awoke to the morning's road a small army of secret battalions properly brigaded, under officers chosen by giddy play-combat and the choice of their commands.

The combat-trials had been overseen by a laughing Nightmare, still wearing her Cherie-colours and her thestral semblance, overjoyed to sit once more in judgment of a tournament of champions. The elections among the victors had been conducted by a prancing Filly, cheering on the casting of stone-ballots in this basket or that at the end of a very, very long night.

I found myself, somehow, in command of one of those battalions. I argued futilely against my inclusion in the trials, in the elections – that I was a member of the Company, that I was a warlock and no part of command structures. I appealed three times, once to the Nightmare, once to the Filly, and one last time to the Princess. The last refused to even open her mouth to deny my request, that was done for her by her courtier, Cherie, that thestral's green slit-pupil eyes dancing at my disgust and confusion.

The Third Cohort dissolved within the new battalions of the Order. Stomper became field-commandant of the Order by overwhelming vote and by her strength in the lists. Almost all of the covert brigadiers were sergeants or corporals drawn from what had been the Third Cohort, whose existence was in a night, retired to that of historical record. The Company lost a cohort – and the Order claimed a command structure.

During the day, and the days that followed, the columns appeared to the world like slaves being driven to their fate by a remorseless guard. Unseen by the world, those guards walked among their haltered and hobbled fellows, leading their followers down into the future and their part in the Plan.

The placement of this and the preceding Feufollet manuscript was the occasion of some debate between myself and my peers in the Archives. They appear somewhat contradictory, and I am at a loss to explain the contradictions contained within both manuscripts. Was one of them a draft, somehow collated with the rest of the materials delivered to the Royal Archives by our unnamed benefactors? Are both of them? The effect of both together makes me wonder if these even belong together in a continuous history of the Black Company. It is worsened by the apparent absence of at least several Sawbones manuscripts in this section of the reconstructed narrative. Can we not appeal to our unnamed benefactors for some sort of update? - Faded Palimpsest, 2nd Grade Archivist, Restricted Archives

Need to know. You don't. And no. - Dusty Shelves, Royal Archivist

Once A Slave, or, Leaving The Jenny Behind

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Feufollet wasn't supposed to be accompanying the slave-coffers down into Coriolanus, so she didn't. Instead, a young mare named Marsh Wisp was bound among her fellow prisoners. I was tied by the neck, haltered with the pony in front, the pony behind, the rest of my row to my right and my left. I was loosely hobbled so that I could move along at an easy, shuffling pace, but no further, no faster.

My coat was yellow, my mane was orange. It was a strange feeling, having a cutie mark. And it was real in its way, as real as any other magical destiny mark. It was the sort of thing Feufollet would have had, if she had been born a pony, a wisp of blue-green flame like our namesake. I felt it like a draw, like a purpose – like I had been put here on Tambelon to lead others through the darkness, over dangerous ground. It was up to me whether I led them to damnation or to dry land. But the ears were definitely weird. I felt the lack of them, the lightness upon my head, the way the wind blew over my head in a way that just continually reinforced to me, that I was different, I had changed.

I was in some strange, permeating sense, a pony that day. No longer a Company jenny, but, for a moment, for a day, for the duration – an earth pony, formerly of the Army of the White Rose, today of the Order of the Black Rose.

Don't tell anypony about that last part. Kidding.

As we shuffled across the re-built bridge east of Beech Grove, some of the ponies in the coffer nearby struck up a dirge, and it helped me forget the White Rose we had slaughtered a half-mile to the south, oh so long ago, that we had ambushed and killed to a mare. I joined in with the song, singing:

Barrowlord, he thought he'd make a ghoul
These bones never rise again
Make 'em out of you or me, fool
These bones never rise again

I know it
Indeed I know it, mare
I know it
These bones never rise again

Thought he'd raise a mare too
Those dead know damn right how to do

Took a rib outa dead stallion's side
Make to rise an alicorn for to be his bride
Pull down this garden fine and fair
Gon' burn and butcher, eat anything with hair…

That old song had a million verses, and I swear we sang half of them on the long road beside the winding Hayfriend. This land had never seen the torch and the spear, had been spared the lance and the axe. Rich land, happy land, I was astonished when I felt the soil sing through my transformed hooves, felt the tang of the crops in my blood. Too much, too damn much pony!

I tried to work it back, my traitor body's over-committal to its new semblance. Neither the Company nor the Order needed another earth pony to carry her burdens, to push a spear, to hold her place in line. I needed to look and act like Marsh Wisp, but the mission needed someone to pull the illusory strings, make the magic sing and dance, paper over the flaws and the gaps in the façade. They need Feufollet around, even if they couldn't have her be seen or known. So while I sang, I remembered the northern jenny, mostly by drawing on the dried blood painted on the timberlings hiding like rats In our supply train.

I had convinced a number of our smaller timberlings to bud, to divide themselves. These smaller timberlings split themselves apart under the ministrations of Throat-Kicker and I, and re-formed themselves as smaller, tinier versions of their earlier selves. Smaller than wolves, smaller than weasels, these were mice-like, rat-like flora, as small as we could get them, without losing the magic. I pricked myself on each timber-rat's thorns, and marked them once again as our own, and now they hid, secret, within the sacks and barrels which supposedly carried food. And they did carry food, alongside of the spears, axes, and lances hidden beneath the top layers.

Most of my headquarters platoon surrounded me, haltered together in a block. First Company and a platoon of Third were included in the rest of the immediate column within which we shuffled. But Second and Fourth, and the rest of Third were scattered all up and down the line, intermixed with the endless platoons of haltered slaves being so slowly whipped towards the gates of Coriolanus in the distance. The 'guards' had done their best to assemble the various units into the same columns, but the time had been insufficient, and the urgency too pressing.

As we all shuffled and sang, day-dream images of the Filly flitted about in my mind's eye, some carrying word from my distant squads and platoons, others merely spotted by myself as they carried the messages of other ponies, for other likewise scattered units.

We encamped a quarter-day's march from the gates of the city, taking advantage of the darkness to shift this body of ponies and that among the untied, unhaltered mass. I was still getting to know the bulk of those ponies who had claimed me as their commander, and when full darkness came, we all slept in a carpet of breathing, sighing equinity, curled up against the cooling air of the last day of the season, the night-winds of autumn carving away at the congealed heat of dying summer.

Many of the other officers of the other battalions were unable to likewise cuddle with their troops, having still to maintain their stance as 'guards', as still-free ponies and loyalist troops of the distant Bride. Some few hard-chargers among the former-Company cadre had switched places with this pony or that in their destined commands, marching small groups of prisoners past my spot near the Road, commanding my illusory services so that they could put their decoys to bed with the rest of the 'guards', while they, in their ensorcelled caparisons, laid down with their battalions to learn into the night.

It is hard to express just how necessary it is to breath the same air as those you would lead. So easy, to make mock of officers along with the cynics like Sawbones, so long as one did not have to be an officer oneself. I had never been trained for this, was not ready for the burden.
So I did what I had, to make myself ready. We spent a long night's dream-time in a version of my fortress, as we worked out how they and I would drill, what commands they would take, what commands they would not tolerate. I showed myself to them as Marsh Wisp, and as Feufollet, and demonstrated simulations of what magics I could offer, what I could and could not do with blood and night and illusion and reality and the timberlings.

The way they looked at me unsettled me in a way I find difficult to express. I've never been one for mixing with the troops. I found myself speaking very narrowly, very tersely. Every word I gave them seemed another opportunity for confusion and misunderstanding.

And I kept falling into idiot outbursts of Prench, as if that pest of a thestral, Cherie, had cursed me with la Tourettes.

Morning saw us organized more coherently, all my ponies haltered together, with myself and my sergeants all tied together within grunting distance of each other. The Filly and I were able to rope together a sort of daydream conference, that allowed me to extend my acquaintance with my noncoms. It was an interesting exercise, getting them to communicate in a dream-state while not tripping over their own hooves.

Not that I was expert in this exercise, either, as I had spent most of our campaign-time riding in a nice airborne gig-chair, flying over the marching ponies below. I was ever so glad that I'd stopped with the farriers to get a set of somewhat road-worn campaign horseshoes nailed into place; my hooves would have been cracked and bleeding by now without them, and while I was all for a convincing semblance of misery and woe, and I was never opposed to a certain amount of bleeding in the course of my duties – well, that was certainly more than what was necessary.

Although it gave me ideas about certain details I immediately incorporated into the low-level glamours I wove over the ponies of my command. We looked a little more road-worn, a little more pitiable when we shuffled through the gates and into the city of Coriolanus. We looked, in short, like enslaved criminals on our way to chained benches in the new river-fleet awaiting us on the docks.

I can't tell you too much about the grand city, the Queen Bitch of the Housa. Our heads were bowed with playacting, our eyes downcast, our tails dragging in the dust and worse filth that these great cities seemed to produce like pigsties make muck. It might be only this, that my view of that great city's streets was close-up and head-down over their cobblestones, but I found myself loathing that stinking mass of grunge and grue.

It seemed to take forever for us to reach the docks-district, and more than one of my troops caught a mane full of rotten produce or flung mud as we shuffled, thrown at us by enraged townsponies. They had suffered a long, anxious spring and summer, continually threatened with siege and desolation if the very ponies cringing before their wrath had ever managed to fight their way over the Hayfriend. No point in haranguing the crowd – especially if we wanted to maintain any degree of cover. So we took the abuse.

The slave-pens beside the great Arsenal had once been enlarged to take numbers such as we delivered to them that afternoon, but it had been a very long time since that had been the case. The barracks were nearly tumbledown in their neglect, and the slaves housed there were few and far between. We found it easy to muscle those hapless convicts and listless oxen into a series of small side-rooms, to claim the main galleries to ourselves.

The 'guards' ran interference for the newly-delivered 'slaves', and I was quietly unhaltered and let loose to bury the whole of the outer complex in careful illusions and glamours as the guards complement overwhelmed the actual guards of the Coriolanus slave-holding facility. True to their experience and their talents, our former-Company 'guards' subdued the unwitting Coriolanus ponies quickly, and many likewise-unhaltered Order ponies came swarming out of the barracks within which they had been waiting, to empty out our supply train, and to shuffle the bound and senseless bodies of the former dock-guard into the emptied-out wagons.

The tiny, rat-like timberlings scurried out of their wagon hidey-holes, and scurried into the slave-barracks. They would hunt their animal equivalents for us, track down and kill the disease-carrying pests which no doubt infested those disgusting hovels. I let them to their business, I had my own.

A portion of the guard detachments would haul out the replaced guards to a respectful captivity in distant Clear Creek. The rest of our overlarge guard contingent took the place of the kidnapped Coriolanians. I accompanied the outbound contingent of guards to provide illusion-cover for their march out of the city, to let onlookers believe that as many guards had left the city as had entered it. I covered them, so , until we reached a point just outside the view of the gates of the city. Here we rendezvoused with another of the Company's shrinking contingent of witches. In the cover of a convenient treeline, I traded off the glamour-cover to the thankfully silent Otonashi. Watching as those ponies of the Third Cohort left to rejoin whatever organization replaced the torn-apart unit it had once been, I waited until darkness, to slip back into the city under cover of darkness and illusion.

To rejoin my ponies as they prepared for their future career as slave-ponies, to pull oars along with the rest in the Bride's new Fleet of the Housa.

The Arsenal, or, A Conspiracy Of Industry

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Once I got back into the city, I let my pony semblance slip, and took up a certain subtle cantrip of disinterest instead. Coriolanus was a donkey city, full of little jennies just like little Feufollet. She stuck out much less than the broad-beamed and corn-fed Marsh Wisp. I took my time returning to my chains, eager to learn a little more about the stage upon which we were scheduled to perform. Coriolanus wasn't nearly as large as unfathomable Rime, but it still was a deeper pool than my lead and line could sound.

The main gates which let loose the traffic off of the Bride's north-eastern Road into the city, poured that rush of traffic into the city's many arteries. The rhythm of hoove and wagon, wheel and trace drove the life-blood of the city to a familiar beat, like the beating of a living heart. It was a good mile along one of these side-arteries, eastward from its intersection with the broad Road to the gates of the Arsenal complex, which laid along the eastern shore of the small sea or lake – called by the locals a Lagoon – upon which the city's waterfront rested. Along this artery – this long, broad boulevard – was a series of swiftly-shuttering marketplaces, interspersed with blocks of tall, officious-looking brownstone buildings. All the bureaucracy of the baronies seemed concentrated on those narrow frontages, block after block of solicitors' and barristers' offices, tax-collectors, doctors, accountancies, and other, less identifiable abominations in the eyes of the ancestors and the absent alicorns. By the bright and profligate lights blooming from the second stories of these prosperous-looking buildings, the professionals who did business during the day at street-level lived at night above their places of profession.

Once you got within a dozen blocks of the Arsenal – past that last, broad market-square – you walked then into the district which supported the industry of the docks and the construction-yards. Roperies, petty ironmongeries, oakum manufacturers, sail-weavers. Oh, my stars, the sail-makers – the inland rivers and byways of central Tambelon provided a lesser need for the vast expanses of sail than those the ocean-trawlers demanded, and yet, more ponies' labour went into those small squares and triangles of white sail than just about anything else I can think of. Shop after shop of weavers, sewers, stitchers - the alleys stretching out to the north and south from the main boulevard gave view of the endless ranks of the seamsters and the weavers at work under candle-light long into the night. During the day, you could see the naked masts of those ships – for whom the output of the sail-makers and all of their kin laboured – rising in the distance along the slips above the great lagoon. That first night, darkness obscured all but the nearest from my mortal sight. I could have, if I chose, have seen them – but a little jenny with glowing green demon-eyes would have drawn the gendarmes, and alarmed the neighborhood.

The slave-pens were tucked neatly and discretely away from the sight of the freeponies, down long and narrow passages around the back side of the Arsenal. I learned later that the Coriolanus Arsenal's long history was one of free labour, free ships and free sailors. They did not like to advertise how compromised and degraded those great principles had become in this degenerate era.

I had no excuse to tour the Arsenal at that late hour, not by my lonesome. I could have piled on the heavy illusions, and walked under cover of the Mistress's Night, but soon enough for the day, and legitimate explorations.

That night was less long than many we had spent in the weeks leading up to our arrival in the Order's new, if temporary home. A surprising number of ponies simply slept, dreaming their own, individual nights away. I slept alone, and somewhat lonely. I missed Whirlwind, and Bad Apple, and even, damn her, Cherie. I could have sought out the Filly and tried to connect over all of these miles to ponies of home, to home. But I decided, I resolved, to not lean so heavily on dream-walking, and the shortcuts it offered. I could see myself simply going to sleep one night, and never returning. There was something so liberating about the world offered by the Mistress, the Princess and the Filly. It was dangerously easy to ask why you should return to a world with edges, full of sharpness and gravity and dead things looking to recruit among the living.

That was a long night; I greeted the first morning of slaving under the whip of the masters of the Arsenal with my Marsh Wisp mask on straight, and a song of greeting to the rising sun in my heart.

You could see the dismay, the embarrassment on the faces of the donkeys and ponies in the retinue of the Master of the Arsenal when he visited us that morning. We were far, far more than he had expected. No single slave was in a position to hear the whole of the muttered conversation between the Master and his master-builders, his aides, and his factotums. But all of us together, were able to patch together the gist of the argument, and understand the dimensions of the problem we had provided them, and the potentials.

We were far more than they had expected, and they didn't have need for nearly as many oarsponies as we could provide. Yes, the slips and the waters of the great lagoon were full of unmared, mothballed galleys of all types, and most sizes – but they didn't have the marines to hold those ships in the face of our numbers! And even given enough armed loyalist troops to allow that, we still were too many. The great arsenal had been laying down and fitting out an average of a ship every six days for the past two seasons – operating at full capacity at the urgent demand of the authorities, driven by the fear of the situation, and the exigencies of the war. Twenty great war-galleys - triremes bristling with oars, seats enough for two hundred rowers each – and twenty smaller ships, some seating one hundred and twenty, some eighty or sixty.

The new ships would barely seat two-thirds of our numbers. Even if they put us into some of the hulks they'd been saving for fire-ships, that would only absorb another thousand, at most. And they already had over a thousand convicts and other slaves in the pens, destined for a galley seat and a chained oar.

It took time - precious time – to piece together their conversation, and develop their concerns, almost in tandem with the master shipwrights themselves, as they talked through the resource problem. Stomper, sitting on a cot towards the front of the barracks-complex, demonstrated a celerity of comprehension which amazes in retrospect - she drew her conclusions at lightning speed, and made an executive decision in the moment, on the spot. She yelled at me through the Filly, and I scrambled to make my part of the fix while other ponies hurriedly forged new delivery documents for the hovering 'guards' to swap out from under the hooves and eyes of the distracted, arguing clutch of shipwrights.

I made fifteen hundred ponies disappear from sight, chosen at random, based almost entirely on who was farthest from the arguing Coriolanian ponies and donkeys. The Filly and I herded our suddenly-obscured excess ponies back along the rear walls, slipping into gaps and holes opened up the night before by enterprising Order ponies under the smiling eyes of our complicit guards. The rest of the 'slaves' milled slightly about, doing their best to amble in a fashion which didn't attract attention.

Not that it didn't. But when a sharp-eyed jenny noticed the slaves shuffling about, that broke up the conclave, and caused them to look closer at the actual head-counts in the barracks. It took some time for them to bully the guards into locking down the buildings, and take a census, wherein they discovered the actual numbers, seated in regimented fashion at the foot of each inmate's cot, or at least, those who got cots. Too many of us had been obliged to sleep on the dusty, filthy floors…

Once they took an actual census, they discovered our numbers to be much less than advertised by the bills of delivery and supply; much furor was no doubt to come later down the line, as the bureaucrats were set on the problem of the missing slaves. Messages were sent up through the ranks to Broken Sigil and the Lieutenant of the Company, and when the forensic accountants arrived, they would likewise arrive at the correct conclusions – that this official or that had diverted labour to this project or that, and whittled away the actual ponypower delivered to the Arsenal, who had been billed for the delivery of the whole.

Which left us the problem of organizing ourselves after the Master and his shipwrights stomped off to their offices, muttering logistics to themselves the whole way. When the coast was clear, I led my random cavalcade back into the barracks, and Stomper got together with her brigade commanders, who decided which partial brigade would take Prench leave and eventually to find their own ways onto the boats when the time came.

The remaining brigades were eventually driven out of the barracks by our bellowing guards, who sent them tromping hither and yon on various deliveries here and there within the Arsenal, up and down the curling streets of suppliers and manufacturers, and out along the docks and piers, and then, infuriatingly, mostly back again. I missed a great deal of hurry-up-and-wait while I slipped the actual fifteen hundred ponies reduced-in-force out of the city. This was an infuriating, long and painstaking process that I do not care to commit to paper, lest I have occasion to exfiltrate an entire demi-brigade out of a semi-hostile city again one of these days. Suffice to say, I now know how Obscured Blade plays his tricks, and I must admit, I was surprised how little power it took to pull it off. Took a while, though.

I was one tired pseudo-pony when I finally made it back to my battalion the day after that. Lucky for me, I wasn't supposed to look like I was in charge, and the ones who were supposedly directing us in our labours had no more idea of what they were going to do with us than I. By that afternoon, my ponies found themselves hauling bundled oars out to mothballed galleys east of the Arsenal slips, where they had been stashed by the shipwrights in their urgency and their alleged industry.

Great ship after great ship lay under sailcloth covers, leaning against their supports on dryland slips, waiting for masters, crew, and rowers to populate their empty hulls. They lay without oars, without supplies, and some without masts, their caulking drying or dried out, some in desperate need of pitching. We were supposed to be simply hauling equipment and materials, but it quickly became obvious that this blasted fleet would never weigh anchor if matters were left in the hooves of the overwhelmed, addlepated shipwrights. The great masses of wasted work, wasted material, wasted potential was breath-taking in its comprehensiveness. They had taken a mountain, and let it waste away into a plateau of mole-hills.

I heard from more than one of my ponies the rather pungent opinion that these civilians were either fifth-columnists or incompetents. I laughed at my converts, so swiftly turned from one side to the other, mocking the hapless loyalist shipwrights in their inefficiencies. Then I heard the explanations underlying their contempt, and was illuminated.

The story goes, that as the great Arsenal fell on degenerate times, many freedom-loving artisans had left the great Arsenal in the years before the rebellion of the White Rose. According to my troops, it was much-celebrated, this exodus of the shipwrights - an event of great importance in the history of their revolution. Songs were sung of the Exile Shipwrights, who had come out east. They sailed up the long tributaries of the Trade, and settled along the heavily-forested fringes of the west, to harvest masts and lumber, to build boats and shipping for the West and her waters. The Exile Shipwrights – whose journeymares and apprentices had fought in the initial skirmishes and riots of the war – who had built a half-dozen wilderness echoes of the great centralized Arsenal among whose gutted and listless hulk we laboured – whose great ships had seized the central reaches of the Great River – whose great ships had driven down the Imperial Fleet in that catastrophic battle on the Housa.

We, children of a less heroic age, found ourselves in chains, and stuck with those heroic builders' hidebound rivals in the Arsenal of the East. Those uninspired captains of industry – who scrabbled here and there upon the shores of Coriolanus's wide Lagoon – who built ships only to let them go to rot unused on the shore – who struggled to recruit sailors in sufficient numbers to get those ships afloat.

We, their captive slaves, began undoing the neglect we found everywhere, secretly appropriating materials and hiding our labour from their slack and distracted oversight.

Somepony had to get these blasted boats in the water, before winter's gales shut down all traffic on the rivers.

Make Haste Slowly, or, A Comedy of Attribution

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The first draft I wrote of this was full of drama, and angst, and high-strung tensions. In retrospect, I hung on events more than they carried in the waking world. We were slaves, doing the bidding of others, and in so doing, made our goals reality. It is easy to make such the subject of over-exaggerated melodrama.

In truth, getting work done without anypony realizing you're responsible for it getting done is a comedy of attribution. It is known: slaves are not eager workers, they're not industrious, they're not motivated, and whenever they're seen to be any of those three things, it sets off alarms in any observant onlooker. How do you avoid being seen as industrious, and motivated, and eager, when you are patently all of these things to any unbiased observer? The ponies of the Order wore our chains in public, and we could not be seen to run with them a-jangling – it would be heard as an alarm, a klaxon that there was a slave revolt in progress.

Oh, the lords they tell us what to do.

Whip in hoof and whistle in their mouths.

Sing a carrying song for the masters new.

Whip in hoof and whistle in their mouths.

Sing a hauling song for the masters old.

Whip in hoof and whistle in their mouths.

Sing a running song for the masters, all.

Whip in hoof and a song in their mouths.

To be successful, a slave must be a clown. Each band of Order ponies dredged up their own little memories, skits, ways of behaving – they dug down, and remembered for the first time how to be mechanics – to be those lightweights that surround the heroes and heroines of the main action of the play – the tumblers and the fools, the silly fools who dance and sing in between the soliloquies and the grand duels.

"Hey, Honored Bright! What's the penalty for not bringing the master's sailcloth?" asked the head slave of her fellow burdened servants.
"A whipping, Head High," chorused the column

"What's the penalty for sleeping on the job?"

"A whipping, Head High."

"What's the penalty for being late with the needles and the thread?"

"A whipping, Head High."

"Well, I think it's about time to take a nap, my most Honored Brightness – we're late with the master's needles and thread."

Nopony is alarmed by a clown when they're clever, because it's always a foolish sort of cleverness. The slave trying to get one over on his captors, her masters.

"Oh, milord, I'm not supposed to be here – these materials are three days late – pretend we weren't here, and we'll deliver X for you tomorrow! Oh, sure, we can make something happen. Just give Midsummer Shadow at the end of the line the details, yeah!"

It's amazing how much ponies will let you do for them when you present it all as a petty sort of corruption – of getting one over on the Masters. They feel virtuous in a sleazy sort of way whenever they help slaves trick their Masters – especially if the help they give benefits they themselves in some material fashion. And oh, did their slaves prove useful for them, once we had re-cast it all as a sort of tit for tat, a way of getting over.

"Hey, can't you let us past, marster? The hobbledehoys and I, we're running short on time, yanno? The big mare, she'll be stroppy if we don't make this run. No, no, we can do that. Easy loads, and I know you won't whip us if we're a little late, right? Oh! Oh, come on now – that's not how you get your loads on time, Honored Bright!"

So it went in getting about, moving materials around. The rest of the time, we worked on not being seen. Concealed workshops were improvised alongside of the most decrepit, problematic hulls, and certain ponies among the herd snuck materials to the hidden workers in between all the clever shuffling for the benefit of the freepony labourers and artisans.

Hurrying in public became an art. Hovers, carriers, and other menials found ways to hurry while appearing to dawdle and laugh. Our complicit guards performed their own little skits of display, deliberately attracting attention – blustering, bellowing, swaggering and generally behaving theatrically. Many of them started wearing long red feathers in their half-helms, and they bobbed distractingly whenever their rants and boasts reached a fever-pitch. Nopony pays attention to the drab, downcast slave when a veritable Miles Gloriosus is in full bellowing form beside them. Sometimes, they were able to organize impromptu columns of carriers hurrying at the double-step with their burdens while the guards cracked their whips overhead and shouted their heads off.

"Oye, oye! Prance lightly, the lot of ye! Sweetcheeks, why ya gotta drag your frogs like that, make me look so feeble, so weak. The faster you lot move, the sweeter our cider sips when the day's done, lovies! Don' make me crack this whip again!"

The shipwrights were duly impressed by this latest group of guards – so much so, they never thought to ask where exactly this particular batch had come from. We had come up with a 'legend' about the Army of the North dumping all of their 'omega companies' on guard duty, but as I said – no questions. The donkeys of Coriolanus just never asked. The guards did their duty – extravagantly so – and the slaves didn't cause problems, so that was that.

Slave-drivers drive.

To the whistle of the whip!

Slave-driven drag their frogs.

Here come the whistle of the whip!

Don' matter how hard slave-driver drive.

Singing with the whistle of the whip!

We get there when the day is done.

And still the whistling of the whip!

Very few of us had any experience in caulking, or rigging, or many of our dozens of little industrious tasks. It was caulking in particular that was the most urgent task in getting our ships ready for the water. The Filly and the Nightmare worked overtime, spreading knowledge from our two or three 'experts' on the subject, even if that expertise was a few weeks spent years ago on the task. We made do; it was all we could do, after all.

Fetch and carry!

Tote that bale!

Fetch and carry!

Haul up that sheet!

Fetch and carry!

Since you can't stitch worth a damn!

You gonna fetch and carry, bae!

The various artisans assigned to get the ships up and running were a mixed bunch, as any slice of equinity taken unawares generally were. Some were enthusiasts, all bustle and adrenaline, some were slackers, barely delivering what was explicitly expected of them by their overseers – some just floated along with the stream, and delivered what they could, when they could. We developed strategies for dealing with each type of pony, with each class of mark.

"Honored Bright, this load was delivered while you were on the starboard pays. Where'd you need it?"

"Honored Bright, we tried to caulk this seam, is it what you needed?"

"Honored Bright, our apologies, she's just not that swift, and hain't been since she caught that clubbed shaft to the poll last spring. We'll re-do, just show us the how and the why, if you have the time."

The enthusiast were assigned a quiet retinue of Order ponies to shadow their every move, watch how they worked, help them without seeming to help them, and most importantly – give them every opportunity to shine in any way they were capable of shining. If we had to do the work, as we did with the slackers, we would – but better that the trained artisans rig the sheets, fit the masts, seat the benches and oars – to do all the infinite little tasks that devoured the time of trained workers in the fitting-out of a ship of war. We weren't artisans, and we couldn't make ourselves trained in the time we had available. So whenever we could, we cheated.

In the dreamworld, our shadowers practiced the skills they had spied.
In the dreamworld, we could re-set the broken frame, wipe clean the mis-tied sheets, undo the mis-caulked seam, unpitch the bungled pays.
In the dreamworld, we didn't have to shuck and jive.
In the dreamworld, it wasn't reality. It was something better, somewhere we didn't have to play the part of the fool.

But the dreamworld wasn't reality, the skills practiced weren't true muscle-memory, the work done meant nothing in the physical world and on the physical ships, and the results were less easy to transfer in the world of playacting, of hiding in plain sight, and in working with stubborn, material stuff than one could have hoped. Our secret workshops produced only modest trickles of additional work, out of the sight of any possibly alarmed onlookers. And the actual workers were too few, too poorly managed, and too… average to get done what we needed done. There was never enough time in the real world.

Our nightly officers' meetings in the dreamworld quickly became raucous, unproductive. Everypony was morbidly fixated upon our onrushing seasonal deadlines, and our lack of progress caused a great deal of anxiety. Even breaking down the meetings into brigade gatherings didn't reduce the cacophony, it only shrunk the arguments down to where individual ponies could get into each others' faces instead.

So the Nightmare intervened, one dream-time about two days into the project.

"Enough! Enough, you fools. You clearly have too much energy on your hooves. We need to burn it out of you! And I don't have enough brands to do it with literal fire. Let us now, my angry little ponies, get that aggression out of you the old-fashioned way!"

"With dodgeball." She conjured a round, stuffed pig-skin in her dream-magic, and flung it in the face of the most red-cheeked and irate of the battalion commanders, the Third's Oak Heart.

"Milady, what is this? A hoofball?" asked Oak Heart. He wasn't the swiftest officer in my brigade, but he recovered well from having an object smash him in the dream-mug. "I don't know that I want to waste time putting together a hoofball team."

"Nonsense! You all are too worked up for anything as structured as hoofball. This is something far simpler than that – a mere foal's game. Surely you all have played this in your youth!" A dozen hoofballs materialized out of the air, over what now was an empty room with a line painted down the middle of it. The other brigades' officers had appeared all around us, pulled from their own meetings.

"It's played like this –" her magic took three of the floating balls, and flung them at two battalion commanders and Brigadier Whispering Wheat. One battalion commander was knocked down, one avoided the ball thrown at her, but the Brigadier, he grabbed the hurtling ball in his forehooves, and it knocked him back a bit on his rear legs.

"Ya dodge, yer worship?" asked the grinning Brigadier. And then he flung it right back at the great Spirit.

The room was sudden chaos, as ponies ran for the floating balls, and began hurtling them at each other with abandon. Sometimes, you just have to forget your worries, and just paste the ever-living pony out of someone.

The nightly dodgeball tournaments gave us a necessary vent, to unload the excess aggression and stress built up over a day's spent in faking and slaving and enduring the sound of the whip. The guards generally caught it the worst in dream-dodge-ball, but they were game. They got to whip us all day long, after all.

Some few ships were put into commission by the middle of the second week, and the guards herded some gaggles of Order slaves to the slips – some of us to push the boats into the water, some of us onboard to take our places on the rowers' benches. The crews' barracks in the Arsenal were full of recruits brought down from the Inland Sea, and they swarmed the decks of the new-refurbished galleys, yelling at each other, yelling at the ship, yelling at the oar-slaves. You could barely tell there were ships-masters and captains in among all of the yelling – their crews barely paid any attention to the ponies supposedly running their ships.

Personally, I got a kick out of the bluster of the ships' crews. Shame what would have to happen to them when the time came.
Our oarponies had trained constantly in the dreamworld for this very task, but we could hardly let the ships' crews know that their newly-bought galley-slaves knew their business too quickly, too soon. So there was a great deal of splashing about, of back and forth and general grabflankery in the waters of the great lagoon.

We generally managed to avoid plunging any of the new-hung rams into any unsuspecting targets in the course of the 'training'.

The scattering of true slaves in the slave-barracks of the Arsenal had presented us a challenge. They were in too close with us, flank to muzzle, packed into the communal quarters. We could hardly keep from that sharp-eyed, thin-withered property that their fellow 'slaves' were up to something. Nopony watches as close, as clearly, as sharply as chattel whose every future moment is dependent on the starts and foibles of those around them.

So we gave them something to buy into, a reason to play along with the pageant. If there's anything a slave wants – more than love, more than ease, more than safety, more than freedom itself – it's to belong to something which is love, which is safety, which is freedom, and better than all three. Slaves will fall into conspiracy, build their secret societies, given the slightest opening, the slightest opportunity.

And we were the mother of all opportunities, the queen of secret societies, the grandest conspiracy those owned ponies would ever encounter.

They were easy prey for the recruiters of the Order. As equine material goes, they were not the best. The slave-pens of Tambelon are rarely full of great warriors, wise statemares, or even, all that often, strong backs. Those with the skills and talents to keep out of the slave-pens, generally manage it before being sent to the Arsenal's barracks. These were in many respects the scrapings of the gutters – those who were just barely not worth being sold to unscrupulous necromancers looking to fill out their ghoul quotas for the month.

Certain hard-hoofed handlers were assigned from the 'old Order' to deal with the new recruits. The ones that were ready, were ushered into a back-room where I ran them through the ceremony, as abbreviated as I could justify. One had to maintain the standards, however warped, however far we'd walked from the old methods.

I looked at these scrawny, desperate-eyed losers, and wondered what Sawbones would think of his sort-of-brethren. Did the old Company consider those of us seconded to the Order to still be, Company ponies? We all were bladed into the same brotherhood of the Night, children alike of the Spirit – that greedy, envious, jealous Spirit, who claimed every new pony to love and to coddle in her endless night of dreams. She took to visiting every new swearing-in ceremony, appearing to the new recruits as they passed before the blade.

We only had to clean up the room the once – and that guy, they kept a special watch on poor Phillippe Pantalon after that. We gave him the benefit of the doubt – and kept him away from the cider and the harder stuff.

I made the case for the recruitment of the ships' crews, where we could, when we could. The more of them inside the Order, the easier the moment when the crisis arrived. I didn't convince enough officers to get resources assigned to the project, but they didn't ban it outright. I just needed to figure out how to draw those hard-bitten sea-dogs into conversation, into conspiracy, all on my lonesome, without diverting anypony from the actual, vital tasks at hoof.

And the docks and the slips buzzed with activity, roared with song, and thrummed with industry, as the galleys of the fleet bumbled around the waters of the lagoon, splashing and thumping the urgent fall days away.

The Stage And The Play, or, The Sermon

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The Brigadier pulled me aside one night after our general officers' meeting.

The Princess had been the presiding Aspect that night, and our deliberations had been held in a dream-space in half-darkness, lit by the full moon, the first stars of evening, and spell-lights flickering in wall-sconces. The walls and furnishings had continued the theme of 'beautiful night', and the Spirit herself had worn her usual Princess regalia, and usual, dreamy, Princess smile.

The Filly, whose affect was almost designed to appeal to the beliefs and expectations of our former White Rose comrades, was in attitude and affect a child, innocent and guileless. She was the image of the White Rose, reborn again for her troubled world. And the Nightmare? It amused her to playact, to semble, to wear the costume, the appearance of that which the Rose-knights expected of their hosts. The Nightmare might be occasionally irrational, but it was a theatrical, broad, actorly sort of madness, the sort that plays to the rear benches and the pit.

The Princess, I am afraid to say, had a different sort of lunacy – subtle, reticent – one that hid itself in quiet, shy ways. She said little to her new followers when she was the Princess, choosing rather to loom, regally, silently, serenely. This silence covered a great deal of lack of understanding. When the Spirit was the Princess, it was debatable she truly understood where she was, and what was going on around her. She only offered unconditional love for her ponies, because, I suspect, she did not understand enough to offer anything more.

The Princess nodded to me and my Brigadier, Whispering Wheat, as we passed her seat at the head of the chamber, leaving for our next appointments in what promised to be a long night of training and planning.

"Major Feufollet, could you wear your true face for me?" asked the Brigadier. "I have difficulty taking you at your true worth while you wear that country-mare's face."

"I prefer to be Marsh Wisp while I am with the Order, sir. It helps to limit the confusion and the disorder of playing two parts on the same stage."

"Do you think of your own skin as a part, to be shed and donned like a stage-costume?"

"So consider your own face a resource of great value, a prop in the great performance we offer upon the stage which is the Company in its day to day; for we are in our own semblances a part played by the actor which is the pony in the Company, wrote the Annalist Esteem, in his third book. All the Chain's a stage, and we are merely players, Brigadier. I today play the part of Major Marsh Wisp, a mare of considerable greater age and experience than my previous role, who was a jenny not even out of apprenticeship. Would you rather a mare of substance and relation with her subordinates, or a strange and underyoung blood-mage of the wrong tribe?"

"I'm told that a blood-mage jenny took some of the local slaves into a back-room today, along with a cadre of the Order, and swore those slaves into our service. Was that not the Feufollet with whom I should be talking about this, or is there another bloodmage hidden among us, all unknowing?"

"Ah." Ah, indeed. Blast. "I was instructed by the Grand Master to begin processing the true slaves into our service, if we could take them willing. The fewer outsiders we leave uncommitted in our midst, the less the threat of disruption or exposure."

"Grand Master, bah! It's not a title I love. We've never been a faith for masters and servants. Why could we not have named Stomper 'General' like a rational sort of cult?"

"It matched the traditions of similar orders martial. Those few the Company has encountered, and their Annalists described, over the centuries, they called their commanders and rulers 'Grand Master' rather than abbot or general or any other suchlike variant. It is, in the end, just a title."

"It should have been the White Rose, who is not among us nearly often enough as it is."

"Cherie cannot spend daylight hours among us – I can hide her wings, her eyes – but I can't hide how you all act around her. She would be found out in half a day. And she still has a role to play on the outer stages. Tonight, here, we play for a select audience who would not be amused by your messiah in the flesh."

"And yours, too, or are you not a sworn member of this Order of hers?"

I blushed, caught out. "Who would swear me so? I am her minion in this, the swearing of new ponies to your standards. Who shaves the barber, who watches the watch-mare?" I tried to get out of this uncomfortable conversation. "Brigadier, I am late for my next task, I have a company to drill in –"

"Rowing practice, yes, I know," interrupted the Brigadier. "I had word sent ahead, your sergeant-major will take over that task. You shall be drilling with my headquarters-company instead."

And with that, the low-lit darkness of the Princess's dream-palace faded away from us, replaced by overcasts skies over a sketchy dock, a misty galley rising above us, and the gangplank between the two. I looked back at the Brig- no, Whispering Wheat, and realized that I wasn't getting out of it that easily.

Or at all.

We met his milling headquarters-company, who braced to salute us both. Whispering Wheat waved their salutes away, and voicelessly gestured to the benches. A moment of chaos resolved itself into everypony to a bench, and an oar, in very short order.

I sighed, and grasped my oar, sitting on the top deck of the bank. The Brigadier took the bench behind me, and his own sergeant-major the bench in front. The two decks of the bank below were within yelling distance, but the architecture of the galley gunwhale was such that simple conversation with the lower decks was difficult, if not impossible.

The pace-drummer took up the beat, and we began the pull, both bank-cadets barking out their commands to their respective banks – drawn by lot from each company in the exercise, if I did not miss my guess. We were on the starboard bank, and another, shadowy company matched us on the port side. There was no conversation as we slowly drew the great galley from its dockside repose, as this evolution took some attention and care, not to be interrupted by chatter among the oar-ponies.

Then we were into the open water, and Whispering Wheat resumed his assault on my soldierly virtue. "Such a marvel, is it not, Major Wisp? The resources and equipment of a university, a training-school - an entire world's worth of possibility, all given to us by our promised one? An entire dream-world – worlds after worlds of possibility and time, time enough to learn, to experience, to come to understand ourselves, truly? Who needs to promise a paradise in the life to come, if Wilderness were Paradise enow?"

I almost paused in my stroke, but kept up the rhythm, the bass thump of the drum felt more than heard. "You've read the Ailttashatah-Alnibihi of wa-Khiamanah?" I asked in astonishment.

"Ailttashatat-Alnnabidh, is the name, I think you'll find if you had occasion to check – Major. But I believe I've seen it more recently than you have. You were given it by your Annalist to read?" I could hear the smirk in his voice, as we continued the stroke.

"Sawbones loves to quote it, although not so much recently. When did you see a copy? I thought we had the only – "

"Copy on Tambelon? Yes, that's what he said when he gave me his copy to read. We had some interesting conversations in the cages. A strange stallion, your surgeon-scholar. I returned it before we left, of course. A properly gloomy poet, the wa-Khiamana. Although I suspect that whomever translated the book into Equuish had more of a hoof in the music of the words than the original writer. Translated from something else, I gather?"

"Yes, from Feresi, supposedly by Fatinah herself."

"Ah, the famous Fatinah. Your first Annalist? From whom, by whom all of your Company's traditions have been transmitted? We have no one single source like that of the White Rose. She had many companions survive the Great War, as bloody and all-consuming as that conflagration was. For every dozen companions killed by the fighting or the plagues that came after, some one or two survived to leave their memoirs of the filly of destiny. Have you ever heard tell of the White Rose, the great story of her life and death?"

I frowned, insulted. "But of course, sir. I was born and raised here on Tambelon. We had a copy of Les Écritures in my family's parlor, like every other respectable family in the district. She came to us in our time of torment, to pull down the Lord of Death, the Great and Terrible Ram, and destroy all of his works. She came with an army of her followers, most of whom died in the fighting, and in the end, when all was not enough, she gave more, and spent her life to bind Grogar the great and terrible within his barrow-prison, never to be risen again so long as sun rise, moon fall, and her soul restraineth him in his cursed soil."

"Ha! Even the phrasing is right – I thought you were raised in a Prench-speaking household?"

I was alarmed to hear he had learned so much of me – I thought I had been more circumspect. "It was, and what little I knew of Equuish, was from my father reading from that damnable book over family dinners, as if any of us understood a word of it. We learned it phonetically. Worthless exercise."

"Ah, well. Your priest did poorly by you, to not get you a proper Prench edition. Shame, shame. But the priests always were slack in that regard, it's why we in the preaching sects broke away in the first place. They were always more concerned with commanding the hows and wheretofores of their herds, than the state of their souls, or the eternal vigilance that the faith demands of us."

"The eternal vigilance that allowed your preaching sects to let yourselves be taken over by liches and necromancers, old stallion?"

"Ha! There's the fire I thought was in there, reflected by that fake cutie mark. Yes, we're all fools, the lot of us. Our spear-heads always pointed outwards, and never looking inside the formation for the rot, for the falseness. You see why I feel like I can't just coast without questioning what I see around me? Not anymore, not that."

Boom, boom – stroke. Boom, boom – stroke. Boom, boom – stroke.

"So what is it that you think you see around you, Whispering Wheat?" I finally asked.

Boom, boom – stroke.

"We don't really mind that your Cherie lied to us about the spirits, my jenny-mare."

Boom, boom – stroke.

"Do you feel lied to, Whispering Wheat?"

Boom, boom – stroke.

"Oh, be easy upon that mark, Major. We knew coming into it that she had her sympathies, and her loyalties. Loyalty is one of the ancestral virtues, after all! Before states, before princesses, before tyrannies and republics was – faith, and loyalty. And she is definitely, unquestioningly, the White Rose come again. All of the discordant remembrances of the Companions, all the markers, all the testimonies and prophesies in the centuries since then, she matches them, every one. Even the crazy ones, the mad ones that talked about the savior who gazed with demon-eyes, the bat-winged messenger of darkness, the innocent in the company of monsters – Company indeed! All the discordant, lunatic mélange of foolishness that a millennium of quarrelling prophets could produce – all wrapped up in a bubbly, small, winged, great-lunged – angel. Do you have any idea what a confounding impossibility you and your mercenary rabble delivered to our defeated door-step?"

Boom, boom – stroke.

"Some little idea, yeah, we did. Although Sawbones always discouraged talk of it among the Tambelonian recruits. Not that White Rose esthalology is in vogue on this side of the Great River. Sounds too much like sedition since the revolt."

"Eschatology is how it's pronounced, my little jenny-mare. It was always my specialty in my preaching-days. I could whip up a decent fire-and-brimstone with the best of them, and I could do theodicy as well as anypony, but my bread and butter was eschatology. The theology of the end of days, of the return of the Filly, the Pale Pony. She would come at the fore of all the forces of Tartarus released, devils and demons and the horrors of the night – to burn out the unfaithful, and destroy the worshipers of death and decay. The return of life in the darkness, the darkness which devours darkness. There were ponies enough that took askance at those dark and foreboding books, and culled them from their sects' scriptures. Too many never read the Book of Apple-Lion, or the Letters of Halting State, and thought that salvation would only come in the daylight, smiling and talking happy talk. Fools, the lot of them – and they were the ones to bring the new magic into the fold, who supported the revolution. The loud ones, the ones who believed in redemption without sacrifice, without pain, without judgment."

Boom, boom – stroke.

"Pain and sacrifice," continued Whispering Wheat, "Is the price we pay for our faults and shortcomings. So no, we don't mistake you and yours for angels of the alicorns, for righteous soldiers of Her salvation. She will be – this White Rose who won't stand to be called by that name – but you – you! We are her followers, not you."

Boom, boom – stroke.

"Not all of the first White Rose's companions were righteous ponies," the old preacher-stallion went on. "Many were – if you read between the lines – mercenaries, professional soldiers, adventurers and fools. Some died, but some survived until the end – and some even afterwards. Some of the ones who wrote our scriptures, perhaps were the worst of the lot."

Boom, boom – stroke.

"Salvation, like revolution, requires liars as well as saints, killers as well as holy mares," he said, his voice rising above the slap and splash of the oars in the water.

Boom, boom – stroke.

"Remember this – we are not your Company. We will love your spirits – or I should say, your Spirit – as well as we can, because it has been commanded of us. And they are, truly, loveable mares, even the loud and bombastic one who thinks she's fooling us with her masks and her playacting. But we love for Her sake. Because we know what is coming, and we know all shall be one before Death is burned from this world."

Boom, boom – stroke.

"Forever and ever, amen."

Boom, boom - stroke.

"AMEN!" bellowed the whole of the Brigadier's headquarters-company, in time with the stroke.

The Rats' War

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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

The Dream Of The White Rat

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Into the depths of the night, I prayed for guidance and forgiveness. I laid in the dream-garden of burning roses, their half-cindered petal-wicks flaring at the faded stars above. The paths and bushes flickered first red, then blue and pink, and eye-straining white, and purple, and then a rainbow smear - a kaleidoscopic riot of colours broken free of the tyranny of the laws of light and shadow. However did the rainbow ever become the symbol of Harmony? That night, in that garden, the rainbow ran rampant, chaos incarnate.

Finally, my mind settled, and the agitated rose-beds ceased to paint my striped coat their mad and shifting colours. And the great and looming moon in her path across the heavens overhead flared, and She was in the garden.

Her blue wings spread overhead as she flew above the burning roses, and came to earth before my muzzle, once more pressed into the loam in supplication.

"Acolyte, we heard your cries in the night. We are quite busy, and hath little time. Please, do be brief."

"Your Highness, I have done such which I cannot justify in the pursuit of our enemies. I have done many terrible things as a member of the Company and in my own personal wrath, but this –"

"CEASE!" Her shout interrupted my confession, causing me to cringe back down on my face in the dirt. "Acolyte, thou art not alone in thine actions, nor in thy company. Consider those that take thee for a model of behaviour, and a pattern of morality, and restrain thine over-wrought self-flagellations."

Her wing swung away from her side, and gestured deeper into the burning garden. In the strange and shifting light of the flaming roses, a disturbance could be seen among the bushes and the pathways, a rushing and a flurry of shadows and shapes underneath. The Spirit took my hoof, and dragged me out of my crouch, and led me into the deeper garden.

A timber-weasel flashed past, its thorned fangs agape, glaring with its unsettling green eyes at something ahead of it. Then a second, then a third, all of them rushing by myself and the Princess.

Then I spotted their target, which came running back along the next path, over the other side of the nearest row of burning bushes. A white-grey rat, so fast as to be a blur, its whiskers leaving a sort of after-image behind it. It tore underneath the nearest bush, and burst out into our own pathway, running across my forehooves as it flashed by.

An impression of draconic, emerald eyes, wide in fear and anguish.

The three timber-weasels piled up against the far side of the rose-bush, stymied by the narrowness of the passage, and then the third bounded off the backs of the other two, and came tumbling over the top of the blossoms, caught alight by the flames. It rolled about in the dirt at my hooves until it put itself out, and then resumed the chase.

The white rat came fleeing back towards us, the other two timberweasels having come around to block her flight at the far end of the hedgerow. She squeaked in terror to find her escape-passage blocked by the third, at bay at last.

My hoof crushed the third beast into the earth, smashing it into disarray for the nonce. But I could feel the timberlings struggling to re-assemble itself underhoof, and I held the twigs and branches down more firmly into the ground.

"Cherie," I said. "What do you think you are doing?"

Squeak! said the rat, eyeing the twitching wreck of her pursuer. The other two held back, waiting to see what I did.

"Wake up, dream-walker! Shame not thy Mistress by this display of uncontrol! To be in a dream and not be lucid! Shame! Shame!" bellowed the Princess at her student.

The little thestral rose out of her ratty dreaming into the more appropriate lucid state. Her wings and her ears both drooped with misery. The shadows of the timberlings left with the rat, and then only ponies stood in that corner of the burning garden.

"What was that, Cherie?" I asked. "A dreamwalker having a nightmare? You're lucky the Nightmare isn't here herself, to laugh herself silly at you."

"Can't help it. Saw you in the camp, after they took that body away. My fault, my fault. If I hadn't let her catch me, we wouldn't have caught her, and then you wouldn't have had to do – that."

"Are you trying to steal my sins from me, pouliche? It's enough weight for one pony, the acts of that pony. Don't start taking on the guilt of your followers, or else you'll be crushed flat by the burden. You defended yourself from an assassin. All else is on those of us that did the hurting and the killing."

"You did it for me, I saw your eyes, before and after."

"I did worse for my foals and the Duchesse, far worse. Should they take that on themselves? Quite a Tartarus you'd condemn those infants to, pouliche."

"I'm too old for you to be calling me pouliche, Monsieur," She sniffed.

"Would you rather be called the White Rose?"

"Augh! Even worse! They're not doing that now, are they? Behind my back?"

"Oh, we suspect they might," interrupted the Princess, half-forgotten by us in our shared misery. "Thou ought visit thy followers more often, little rose. They feel rather neglected by thy absence."

"You are one to talk, Your Highness," I accused. "We here see little of you these days and nights, and less of your other selves."

"The new foals, they require much time, much attention," the Spirit defended herself. "Little time, much need for training. Our dream-magic is stretched to its limits to provide the lucid spaces for training, the necessary hardness, the sharpness is unnatural to the dream-world."

She drew her hooves through the soft dirt, brushed the burning petals of a rose-wick. "The natural state of a dream is to accommodate the dreamer – to be what it is needed to be."

She picked a burning rose from the bush with her horn-magic, and held it aloft, and turned it into an apple, still aflame. "In dreams, the intent is the father to the effect, the meaning to the result. You feel it, and it is; you think it, and it has happened. To turn that special providence and make it stubborn, consistent – to make it real – this is no simple thing."

"But you can't forget us, Princess," pled Cherie. "The Company needs you too. Things are getting bad out here!"

"Filly, there is no us and them, not in our eyes. You're all our ponies now. And the new foals need close supervision. And we must admit, none of us want to spend much time watching our ponies kill each other. Easier for even the Nightmare to play with happy foals, than to deal with what Obscured Blade has become."

The great Spirit paused, and bowed her head. "We must admit that this is why we created the Nightmare in the first place. To bear burdens we could not carry, to do things we could not abide having done. But she develops her own needs, her own wishes – and even she shrinks from the weight. Must we then create yet another Nightmare, even more heartless and savage than the first? Thus horrors multiply in our weakness."

She sighed. "No, no, thou art correct. We will walk in the company of the Company tonight. The foals can survive alone with the others for one night."

She looked around at the burning garden, now surrounded by an orchard of burning apple-trees. "We rather like what thou hast done with the place, by the way."

The Burning Ships

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That morning, I checked on the rat-hunters. The little timberlings we'd brought with us had grown since our arrival, and they were more like the size of small dogs now, than the rat-sized little beasts that had torn through the vermin that had infested the slaves' quarters in the Arsenal. They'd killed all of the cockroaches, then the bigger insects, then the mice. They were working their way through the bigger mice and rats now, the big ones that were worth dragging back to my quarters, to be drained of their blood for the magic inherent in the fluid.

Once I'd gotten the new rat-corpses set to drain over my jars, I barely had time to catch up to my own obligations. As Marsh Wisp, I was a slave like all the rest, and I had to show my face to our Arsenal overseers, to reassure them that they were still in charge, that the slaves were still properly enslaved, that labour was applied to work, that the work was under the control of the masters and the trusted journeymares, and that all was as was planned, and expected.

To be honest, I doubt any of them remembered me as a pony, as a name. But the faces were remembered, and one ought to play to those remembrances, those expectations. We were installing war-engines on the decks of a half-dozen galleys, while other teams were working on rigging the sheets and the sails, and yet others checking on the caulking and other fixtures that were required to get these new ships up to the point where they could be moved out into the lagoon for the shake-outs and the training-runs.

As we worked, the first dozen or so galleys were skittering around the lagoon, the oar-slaves and the deck-crew working out how to deal with each other, how to operate their new toys without slamming into shore or each other. They still were, as a rule, not giving heed to the nominal captains, so I've heard. But Marsh Wisp had yet to be shipped out to pull an actual, physical oar like those who had gotten onto the newly commissioned galleys, and I have to admit it was all hearsay. We, my own ponies, were still were working on the new hulls, the refurbished hulls.

And a heavy, soaking rain was making everything we did difficult. I could hear the caulking-crews cussing the way the moisture in the air was interfering with their work, although it didn't matter much one way or the other how moist the air was, when it came to installing the ballistae on the deck-mounts for me and my crew.

It was at this point that I noticed the dark shadows down-stream as they entered the lagoon, and the distant shouting. Checking into the princess-radio revealed more information from the Order ponies closer to the distant boom, and revealed the fact that they'd drawn it open, that burning and battered galleys were retreating through the gap down by the entrance to the lagoon, that a loyalist flotilla – or the remnants thereof – was retreating past the heavy, massive links of the grand boom controlled by the crews on the Braystown Shambles.

All of us continued our work, the petty physical labour involved in nailing down the machines, slotting the sheets and the levers and the connectors which all conspired together to make a war-machine a part of the galley's equipage. But I, and a number of others, were listening in on the princess-radio, and we heard the news, and saw the images. A half-dozen half-shattered galleys and dromons and lesser boats, limping back up-stream past the gap of the Shambles' boom, until that boom was drawn once more closed.

Half of the ships were on fire, lit here and there by a nasty, flaming substance which kept the whole alight despite the humidity and the rain and the riverside damp. The rest, huddled about the struck boats, their oars trembling as if the boats themselves knew not how to deal with the damage done to their compatriots.

The battered, burning galleys, seemed to be missing half of their oars, and I could not imagine how they'd managed to get back above the boom before their oar-slaves had exhausted themselves dragging their heavy, abused hulls upstream. Once the boom was pulled back across the river, several of the afflicted ships gave up the draw, and slumped against the long and heavy chain, resting against the constant current, held in place by the massive weight of the iron.

Our observers could see the rising flames above the damaged and burning ships, and the surviving crew and marines ponying the pumps laboured to bring the waters of the river up into the air to suppress the raging fires. Bad Apple had been supposed to have been assigned to that flotilla – why was she not suppressing that terrible flame with her pyromancy?

The afternoon was taken up by the effort to salvage the burning galleys, and several of the galley-crews in training came close to the burning ships trapped against the heavy iron of the Shambles boom, spraying them down with their own pumps. The flames eventually subsided, leaving the scorched, half-burnt remains to weigh down the boom as the constant current dragged it westwards.

A number of smaller tugs and boats swarmed the broken, burnt galleys, pulling the dead and the wounded from their charred hulks. I was still expected to keep to my work, lifting the bulk of the ballistae as the rest of the crew pegged the device into place, then installing all of the fittings that allowed it to operate according to the expectations of the deck-crew. I couldn't give any indication about how much I was invested in the recovery and the suppression of the fires on the distant western fringe of the bustling lagoon, where the remnants of the flotilla hung upon the defensive boom.

It was nothing but pure irony, when the officers of the loyalist army arrived upon the docks of the Arsenal in the midst of this tumult. The observers on the docks, added to the chaos of the observers of the ongoing fight against the fires on the decks and in the guts of the burning galleys, overwhelmed the princess-radio for a few brief minutes, until the Filly and the Nightmare between them straightened out the lines of communication.

The officers included among them a major from the General's staff, and a pair of lieutenant-aides, as well as the Company's Lieutenant herself, and Sawbones, whom I could see in the images transmitted, frowning at the distant fires. Also upon the docks was a number of ponies who should have been unfamiliar but due to the night-time training regimen and nightly officer-meetings, were still quite well-known. Golden Grain, and her majors Kale Harvest, Night Soil and Sour Melon, were there, standing uncomfortably in their III Verdebaie livery, in uneasy ranks behind the Lieutenant and Sawbones.

I listened in to the Arsenal masters, and the officers of the Army of the North:

"Well, that wasn't exactly what we were expecting to present to y'all," said the junior master in charge of the Arsenal's docks, one Quai Contrôleur. "I have no idea what's going on, let me see if I can't get an update."

"No, no" said Sawbones, my master and the senior Annalist. "I've gotten an update while we've been waiting. There was a battle on the middle Housa an hour or two ago. Didn't go well for our side, although it looks like they got the boats back on this side of the boom. That's a good thing, isn't it?"

"Yeah, sorta," said Quai Contrôleur. "But I have to check with my donkeys. Could be more details…" He muttered a further comment under his breath, which I think nopony was supposed to have heard, namely, "Damnit, we'd just gotten those hulks operational, look at that mess." The officers of the Army of the North pretended to not hear the muttering of the junior master of the Arsenal, spoken so carelessly in their presence.

Behind the officers of the Army of the North, were fifteen hundred ponies in the liveries of the III Verdebaie. They held their spears and lances in rest formation, waiting on the command of their officer-corps. Many of their eyes contributed to the gestalt of our impression of the Arsenal donkeys and the officers of the Army of the North as the training galleys and the battered flotilla itself got the fires and the damage-control into hoof across the lagoon from the docks, along the straining chains of the great Shambles boom.

I sighed in relief as we finally got the war-machine installed on the hulk my team was working on. No matter what was going on to the western end of the lagoon, we still needed to get our own galleys up and running. The journeymares who had overseen our installation of the ballista on the foredeck of my galley cracked their whips overhead, and we moved to the rear deck to repeat the process for the secondary war-machine destined to be installed along the rear quarters of this particular hull.

Meanwhile on the distant docks, Sawbones and the officers of the Army of the North continued to discuss their plans and expectations. Nopony had warned us of the appearance of an entire regiment of regimentals to be installed within the forming fleet, as marines. But I could already feel the 'regiment' of 'militia' lurking behind Sawbones, and recognize them for whom they were. Our wayward battalions stood attention in their Verdebaie livery, all fifteen hundred of them.

I suppose it was a sort of promotion, to be deemed regimentals and marines, rather than prisoners and slaves. How many of the Order would task their brethren for their easier burden, to pretend to be loyalist marines, and not disloyal oar-slaves? But the more Order ponies installed upon our ships' decks, the less bloodshed that would be required to bring our plans to fruition.

Eventually, the burning ships were extinguished, and brought under control. When they were towed back to the docks, it was found that the oarslaves had been badly mangled, but not as badly as the crews and the marines. The whole flotilla had been caught and smashed in a fight with the suddenly-aggressive fleet of the White Rose. The enemy had raked a number of the galleys stem to stern with the sort of war-machines that my crew and others had been installing on our own, new galleys.

And as for Bad Apple and her pegasi? Bad Apple had been knocked out of the sky by some new innovation of the enemy's, and the pegasi driven away. She had been recovered, half-drowned, battered and insensate, by a dromon and another war-galley fighting to protect their fallen warlock. But one careless moment, one strike by an aerial battery, and our powerful friend had been swept from the skies, her chariot crushed like a shell beneath a pony's heavy hoof.

The survivors of the flotilla's oar-slave contingent were herded into our barracks, as the battered galleys were towed into the docks for repair. We, the Order who had claimed the slave-quarters for our own, found ourselves sharing them with an extra eight hundred or so battle-hardened slaves. Just as we'd absorbed the existing cadre of slaves into the membership of the Order. It was infuriating, but we began work again to deal with the new influx.

And two battalions of the Order, pretend-slaves all, were positioned to take over the surviving galleys now being repaired on the wet-docks. The three mangled galleys would join their brethren on the slips for further work, too battle-damaged to be serviceable.

And still, the autumn rains continued to soak us all, that foul weather which signaled that the long summer was at last, complete. The summer battle-season was complete, and the brief fall season was rushing rapidly towards the Order, no more prepared than it had been the day before.

Dromons And Naphtha

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The wrecked galleys brought home to us that this thing was happening. The fleet would be needed sooner rather than later, and the rest of the White Rose – 'in the wild', as it were – were recovering from their former timidity and caution. To come so far up the Housa, and engage the existing flotilla, and drive them back into port! After driving in the flotilla, they had spent the balance of the day exchanging fire with the riverside batteries in the Braystown Shambles, accomplishing little but setting a lot of fires. If anything in the Shambles had been in the least flammable, it might have even been a threat.

That night, the Nightmare chaired the officers' meeting, with Stomper leading the presentations, and ghostly shadows of the Company's Captain and Lieutenant sitting in on the planning. But with all of the Company or former-Company leadership present, it was the former White Rose non-coms who dominated the argumentation. And it was argumentative, that discussion. I think most of them hadn't really thought through the implications of what we had been training for, what we were doing up to that point. The collapse of the loyalists' flotilla had brought it home to many of the members of the Order that they would have to fight their way downriver, actually row our galleys into battle with their former peers and compatriots.

I think most of us, especially those who hadn't been read into the planning, expected some sort of bloodless miracle, a sudden coup de main or illusionist's trick, that we would simply row our ships out onto the river, and reveal ourselves to an amazed world.

The burning of the flotilla put an end to that daydream. Now was the time for Nightmare dreaming.

The Captain and the Lieutenant's shadows looked bored, if a mat-grey shadow could look bored. The anxieties of the former White-Rose held little to interest them, and neither were inclined to empathize with these ponies who they had defeated in the field, and then had deigned to welcome into the cultic fold.

I've had some Order ponies ask me in private if the Company's officers resented having given up so many cadre to the new-formed Order. Honestly? It's hard to tell. Both of them have always been somewhat distant from me and the rest of the apprentices. They were such intensely practical, unemotive ponies, that it has always been hard to get a read on either of them. I think it helps that neither were all that close to the members of the Third who carried over into the Order. Even Stomper was basically a brevetted sergeant, only filling in for the convalescent Octavius, and not a particular favorite of either of them. It's possible they think the Order's some sort of temporary thing, and the survivors will merge back into the old Company when the day is done. After all, they'd just spent the better part of a campaign season with a fifth of the Company detailed out to supporting positions in over a dozen militia regiments. They were used to their ponies disappearing for weeks or months on end while on detachment.

I'm not sure they've grasped that Cherie and the Spirit are building the Order to last. And if the plans being made come off, the Order is going to go pretty far before they're done.

In the end, it might be the Order absorbing the Company, rather than vice versa.

After the officers got all of their emoting and angst out of their system, Stomper cleared her throat, and turned her eyes to Cherie, who had been sitting quietly next to the lazily smiling Nightmare, the two of them looking rather like a chastened foal hiding behind her confident but protective mother.

"OK, promised child. It's your plan we're making changes to; what do you say?"

The thestral got to her hooves. "Il ne change rien, except that we'll have to do more of the initial fighting ourselves, get that blood directly on our hooves, rather than just on our consciences. The blood would have been split either way. We have deux problèmes here: premièrement, we must arrive at the lower river while we are still to all appearances a loyalist fleet, et une menace plausible. Deuxiemement, we need to make it seem plausible that what comes when we arrive in the lower river, se produit organiquement, is coherent, naturel. We need to sell both the threat, and the ending of that threat, without letting the either look like a performance."

The Nightmare leaned closer to the chattering night-pegasus, and whispered something to her. Hopefully it was something like 'tone down the Prench, you silly filly.'

Then Cherie continued, saying, "Bien! Right! Ah, a performance, which does not appear performed; a false war which is still fought with weapons, producing blood and bodies and death – well, we have our work cut out for us. And we have to do this, mes poneys. Sang fraternel must be shed, so steel yourselves to the shedding of it."

She shrugged with her wings, unfolding and folding them again. "And we will be providing une distraction, des destractions. The spirits and I will be afflicting the opposing fleet with visitations, signs and portents. Hopefully, they shall be too fixated upon the grey and white winged apparitions overhead to notice any discrepancies upon the river."

And that, was that. The White Rose had spoken, and the faithful fell into line. A great deal of discussion of ways and means continued, long into the night, but that was implementation, the necessaries. The decision had been made, the way forward decreed. The forming fleet would fight in earnest, we'd fight it to win, and drive in the enemy, those who bore arms in the name of the White Rose, and carried her banners upon their masts. All for the chance for that dramatic, heroic reveal – all that blood and fire, to build us a proper stage for a proper performance.

The Order redoubled its daytime efforts the day after the meeting. The officers of the "III Verdebaie" joined our 'guards' and the masters of the Arsenal in driving their chattel to the work, and those extra hooves, though they appeared to be used in bullying and bluster, gave us the excuses we needed. To convert the slouch to the walk, the walk to the trot, the trot to the gallop. Every threatening glare from a Northern eye, every crack of a overseer's whip, every Northern hoof battering the flanks or heads of a Westerner laggard gave apparent impetus to the work.

Suddenly the Lagoon was full of galleys and dromons, skittering back and forth across the once-calm waters. The docks and workyards rang with the tumult of construction and preparation thrown into high gear. A return of the Western threat had woken up the masters of the Arsenal, and they'd finally found the energy and the inspiration to get the work done.

The spirit of the town was likewise energized, alert, almost fierce in its optimism. The advance of the enemy fleet had come just as the former inhabitants of Braystown had crossed the Lagoon in large numbers to return their abandoned city to its former glory. Empty domiciles, streets and shops filled with the detritus of a long season of occupation by ghouls – and some damage from the siege of the White Rose – had all contributed to this desolation. A desolation which the Braystowners had been busy setting aright just as the galleys started streaming by, flaming and smoking, just beyond that port-town's quays.

There was never a question of a second evacuation. The ferries and lesser boats that had evacuated Braystown last spring on the last approach of a White Rose force were now tied up in the fleet-construction project, and even then, nopony wanted to empty out a town which had just been re-occupied. The townsponies of the main city were delighted to have the Braystowners out from underhoof, and the sullenness of the exiles lurking in every doorway and corner café was not missed by anypony, even the Braystowners themselves.

One afternoon a week after the enemy raid, I looked up from my bench on the deck of the dromon we were putting through its testing trials, and found myself being examined by a half-dozen foals and mares sitting on one of those Braystown quays. We were astonishingly close to the shoreline, almost close enough, I felt, that I could reach out with a hoof and bop one of the little ponies in their gaping muzzles as they stared at us, and looked down at our oars rising and falling out of the waters below them. The rains had spared us on this day, and the sun was shining down on us from above, and up from the glittering waters of the Lagoon, until I could barely see the lower deck for all of the glare. But I could see every hair on those little jennies and jacks, fillies and colts, and their elders looming suspiciously behind their younger charges.

Our dromon was designed for close-in work along the tight shorelines of the river, with all of its snags and occasional rock outcroppings. The lower deck had their short-oars, while those of us on the upper tier struggled with ungainly lengths of spruce, as long and hard to work with as infantry pikes. As the ruddermare yawed us over to starboard, I yelped an alarmed command, and the entire upper-deck bank brought up our oars before they were smashed into the quay.

As our oars dripped lagoon-water over the heads of the suddenly-scattering onlookers, I could hear the ship-master bawling out that screw-up of a ruddermare. She wouldn't last in the job, I suspected. My bet was that she'd go up into the mostly-useless lanteens. What in the name of the Peacock Angel was the point of sails on a river-boat, anyways? The old salts among my ponies insisted I'll appreciate the value of a well-rigged lanteen when it comes time to tack our ships upstream against the current, but my thinking was, we were only planning to row these half-built wrecks downstream until we revealed ourselves. Why worry ourselves with sails and seamareship and all the accompanying song and dance?

I might have been feeling a bit out of sorts from the unaccustomed effort. You can train yourself in a dream-academy for subjective weeks at a time, but for all of the Spirit's amazing tricks with dreamstuff and dreamtime, she couldn't make you sweat in a dream, or exhaust non-existent muscles. And you can build up muscle memory in a dream, but you can't exercise actual muscle there, and mine were screaming from the sudden abuse.

And from what I saw of my ponies in the upper bank, they weren't feeling any too much better, either.

Finally, the swearing, cussing ship-master had gotten the rudder pulled over, and we were shifting back out away from the looming stone quay we had nearly collided with. If you ask me, the ship-master should have put that fool onto an oar-bench, and let her wear a chain on her foreleg for a while.

Those might have been chafing a bit as well.

The broad expanse of the Lagoon was full almost to the point of crowding with ships of all sizes, from skiff to the great battle-galleys, and it seemed like none of them were being coordinated with each other. We hadn't gotten quite all of the Order into the boats, but we were getting closer. And even the 'marines' were afloat, with my own dromon hosting its little contingent of ponies in regimental livery, awkwardly holding their newly-issued billhooks in a useless line as they stood to attention, swaying back and forth with the motion of the ship.

The small crew of freeponies scurried about the upper deck and in the sheets overhead, trying to look busy. They had surprisingly little to do with the operation of the ship, there mainly to rig the sheets, handle the sails if they were up, and to handle the rudder and the pace-drum. But it pays to look busy when the boss has his blood up, and the ship-master was barking loudly.

We still hadn't figured out what we'd do with the crews when the time came. I was in favor of a surreptitious recruiting campaign, but so far leadership had shot down my proposals. I'm not sure if they're intending to capture them, throw them overboard, or just push them off to shore when we were ready. As little as the nominal crews had to do while these ships were in motion with the current, ships do need their crews, and we'd be much less maneuverable if we had to empty every third or fourth bench to take over from the existing crew.

The ship-master got us running straight and true for the cluster of barrels which were our targets. Two of eight were already aflame, and the waters around the targets were likewise on fire in puddles and pools of burning naphtha. The crew that handled the war-engine our dromon had been built around turned their spigot to lead their chosen target as we rapidly approached the floating barrel. A dedicated naphtha-thrower, the war-engine clicked and roared as the flints sparked the flamer, and the stream of stinking, flammable liquid rushed out of the bellows being worked by a team of three Order-slaves. A jet of flaming liquid briefly connected the naphtha-thrower and the barrel, and then, as we rushed past it on the port side, it fell out of view.

So far, we'd managed to not set our own ship on fire, although I couldn't say the same for one other hapless crew of screw-ups. I was ever so glad that they hadn't been one of my companies, although it had been somepony in the brigade. Each one of these smaller ships took about a company's worth of Order ponies, which made it quite handy for command purposes. Although I was a little worried that the ship-master might have noticed my outburst earlier when we'd almost hit the quay. He probably hadn't noticed that it was more in the way of an order than a simple squawk.

But I didn't want to give him more reasons to start making guesses, so I kept as quiet as I could, kept to the princess-radio, even though I was sitting scant yards, even inches, away from my ponies.

And the ship-master found himself another ruddermare among the watching crew, and we wobbled back around to give the naphtha-throwers another shot at the floating targets. They found their mark, a barrel went up in flames on the starboard as I rowed, and on the Braystown quay in the near distance, our audience of little ponies and donkeys shouted an Ole! in approval of the flaming strike.

We came around yet again, and my oar-blade had caught on fire from the puddle of naphtha I'd paddled through on that last pass. I groaned, and plunged it deep into the water to extinguish the fire, slowing us down just a little. I looked up and down the bank of oars, and almost yelled out a command to the half-dozen other oarsponies with burning paddles to douse their blades. The princess-radio can be a damn slow way to command a company, but I wasn't about to break my resolution mere seconds after having made it.

The ship-master came over to yell at us for bringing the ship off of its line of attack, until he got a look over the gunwale and realized what we were doing, and then nodded, pleased. It took far too long to put out that nasty stuff. It stuck, it stunk, and it had a vile tendency to re-light as soon as you brought it back up above the water-line.

Finally, we were doused, and we turned again, for a secondary target.

We stayed out there until we'd exhausted the barrels of naphtha they'd had us haul onto the ship. If there was one material that Coriolanus had more than enough of, it was naphtha.

Good thing the storage-tanks upstream of town were down-wind, though. The whole city could have stunk like that.

The Ambuscade, or, This Night Will Last Forever

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FFMS038

"That is your plan, Feufollet?" The Nightmare stared at me, as if I were… I do not know what. "You realize this does nothing to negate my argument that you're as mad as Obscured Blade, if not moreso? You mad-donkey."

"Please, Mistress. I saw an opportunity. Or rather, I should say, I overheard the details. It's a perfect chance, a perfect opportunity."

"A perfect ambush, you mean. How is this different from your so-hated 'traitors' and the tricks they get up to?"

"They'll still have their choices."

"Impaired, if you pull it off."

"Still, even."

"Has this been approved by the leadership?"

"By Cherie."

"That's not leadership."

"Better than leadership, Mistress."

"Fine, I'll back your play." Her teeth were each larger than the crescent-moon in the fall evening sky. "Take that string, and play it out, madjenny. I'll be your terror for you, and build you your horrorshows. Only give them always the opportunity to leave, when the time comes."

"Time can last a long time in the dreamworld, Mistress, and I trust you to keep that eventuality, a long, long way off."

"Ha! If you insist."

The pub was a dockside dive in a small port across the Lagoon from Coriolanus and Braystown, in a town I'd never heard of called Coltingsburg. The conversation in the booths and tables around us were in a dialect I'd never heard before, all long, lazy vowels and dropped gs. And the locals were all earth ponies. It felt a little bit like the Order, to be honest. They were very similar, these locals, to the rebels, the Westerners. And nothing like the donkeys – and a few ponies – with whom I had come in, to get drunk with.

My compatriots were nothing like my usual acquaintance, but then, neither was I. I was wearing a new semblance, to match those donkeys I was drinking with. My hide had large chunks shaved out of it, with strange markings inked under the skin, wild and crude patterns tattooed under the skin, the black and muddy colours spreading unevenly under the pores. In this, I only echoed those jennies and jacks I was currently engaged in drinking under the table.

Och the barrowlord made him a wifie
The barrowlord rose him a wife
But no matter how deeply he plowed her
Her earth he never could bring ta' afterlife

They'd sung a half-dozen other songs in Prench and Equuish, each one more slurred than the last. But the terror lying under the bluster and the liquor had come closer to the surface with each additional round. Then the dam broke:

"You know they'll break us on the shoals this time, right?" asked Mers Agité. He had been the head of my dromon's war-engine crew, and his chattering with his crew had been my clue as to how to get into the Inner Sea sailor circle, how to trap them into this very situation. I had followed him and his people until I was able to approach them with a new face, and a new "hi, you kinda know me" acquaintance-glamour. He took me as his best friend's friend, or possibly a friend of a friend of a friend, and then I was in. As we met each additional group ,coming up from the quays where our respective ships were docked, each assumed I was part of Mers Agité's crew – or possibly one of the other crews – until I merged into the general collection of anxious, alcohol-craving sails-donkeys.

And now they all were drunker than lords, and their imaginings were breaking down the barriers their bluster and pride had built against them.

"These are the inland rivers, Mers, you foal. They have no shoals. It's all snags and rafts and hidden sawyers, so they tell me," said a jenny named Cours Lisse. "So you tell me, how are we going to navigate these treacherous river-banks with no local pilots, no locals at all? That's what I fear. The not knowing, the sheer ignorance."

"Bugger the ignorance, I'm a-worriet about the luck. The loyalists, they always have hadt the buggerest luck. Comes of following dead things by choice, donnit? Stap me, we'll die for our loyalties, see we won't!" I had not gotten the name of this pony – and it was a pony, rare in this collation of donkeys, salty and tattooed as they were.

"What," I asked, "Would you do to balance your scales against all that? To bring some temperance to our faults, our loyalties? We all of us need something special to hold as ikons against the winds that are blowing our way."

"Bad ennot that they'd be taking us out into the teeth of the Gitchegoobe, she's't come soonish, any days now," grumbled the nameless pony.

"Don' be buying more than we've already contracted for, Jute Bale," slurred Mers Agité. "The Gitchegoobe is a witch on the Sea. We're here, hain't we? Inland, blast me, on inland waterways. As bad as they might be, at least the witching wind wilna faller us here!"

"Don' be a foal," sighed Cours Lisse. "The Gitche she covers all of these lands. All it means, to be on an inland river, is that we have no running-room if she blows when we're on the river. She'll smash us into shore with all the velocity she can find on the way. With luck, she'll catch us square, and we'll be onland with nothing but broken oars and broken oar-ponies. Without it, we'll go smash on something that will survive the smashing better than we."

Another round bought by yours truly, and they were a few more flags to the wind, sagging a bit deeper into their chairs.

"Ikons, you said?" asked Cour Lisse. "What by the damned name of Grogar means that?"

"Ikons!" declaimed Mers Agité. "Those bloody things the priests keep in their holies. Or rather, all around 'em. Sacred imagoes, and prayful hopes and dreams in the textuals about 'em. Wishes and dreams, wishes and dreams." He petered out. "Wait, what was I talking about?"

"Imagoes," prompted the earth pony – Jute Bale, rubbing at a short-shorn section of his coat, over his left withers, the ink still bleeding into his fur as it grew back. "Those sacret imagoes that they princes o' the temple put upont their damnable walls, damn dem."

"Damn dis, damn dat – and ye wondert why you draw downt the debbil-winds upont ye," cussed another jack at the ones who had spent the longest swearing into the night. "Sweart ye not against yer holit jacks, ye foals and fuls. Respect tha clot, whatever weret thit. The clot's what maketh tha bleedin' holit jack. Respect tha clot, ye clods!"

"Clot, clot – ya worrter against the faith-botherers! Bah, Grande Voile , worrt na us against yer obsess'n with the clot!" bawled Jute Bale. "Dey're ponies liket de rest ob us. Damned and ful of the worst impulses, yah, indid. Feh, feh. Priests!"

"Foal! Feart ye yer imagoes, ant na those that put 'em upon yer walls? Faugh!"

And so and forsooth, the drunken foals yelled at each other in increasingly impenetrable cant, yammering harder and fiercer as the booze squeezed all thought out of their gourds. I gave them the time to yell themselves out, and then I returned to the subject.

"And even then, would you buy into the hope of something better, my worthies?"

"Worthies y'll find nawt, youngt jenny. Why art thee saw jung, youngt jenny? Nawt ought be so jung, und be'et amongst us, damn us all't," bawled one of the semi-coherent donkeys. The ponies were still stronger with their strength and sensibility, their native earth-pony natures holding back the effect of the alcohol, the same way that my blood-witchery had kept my poisons from my main-vein, and the liver behind it.

"So, still. Better, pony! Though yer so damned and all, would you hold fast to something that'd keep you from this damnation you've courted, you've been backed into?" I asked.

"Haugh! Sowit, so yay, ant everypony and burro in thas damnable dunghole, t'truth!"

"Here, a sharp and strong blade, she'd cut you clean, cut you in the frog, cut you in the soul. Cut away the hold of the dead, damning world. Would you embrace it?" I offered forth the ritual blade, and prepared the sacred words.

"Fagh, faugh! Blades we feart naugh, jung jenny you! The future't, thaas we feart! Feart with all ov' aur burdtened sawls! Gib meh this bleeding blade!" And he grabbed my ritual-blade with both frogs, and cut them deep, the both, before I was ready.

I muttered the sacred, cult words over his over-bleeding frogs, and hoped the ritual was satisfied, as he faded and keeled over, shocked by the power of the ritual-words.

I turned from the prone pony, to his donkey friends, so much drunker than their earth-pony friends, and prompted each as I offered the blade. They, drunker than Jute Bale, still each and every grabbed for the blade, and bled into the words. One after the other, again and again, until I, half-drunk with all of my witchcraft, had to hold them up off the floor of that filthy tavern, surrounded by my many Order-ponies, who had cleared out all of the common drunkard-ponies, and held the barkeep, the waitresses, and the slatterns at blade-length as I recruited each and every one of the mad-drunk crew-ponies and donkeys In the depths of their amazing drunkenness.

In the end, all twenty-three of the drinking party, addled by the blood I'd added to their grog and their gin, and knocked out of their right reason by the combination of my witchery and the hard liquor, accepted the ritual blade and my blandishments, and my squad of Order ponies dragged them out of the tavern, and stuffed the mouths of the employees of that establishment fat with deniers and threats.

We dragged them to a nearby squat, purchased for the night by another Order armspony, anonymously. All of my victims were dumped upon that even-filthier floor, and I joined them all in the drugged sleep they had fallen into, my own senses taken away by the milk of poppy I drank down.

I still needed to buy from them their true acceptance of what I'd offered them.

Coming up out of the poppy, and into the dream, the wooziness of the drug followed me, trailed like a streak of thoughtlessness. The walls of the dream were stone, clean-cut, but dank, foul, lit by foul wall-sconces, and there were strong locks on the heavy, closed doors. All around me were the recumbent, senseless shadows of my would-be recruits, crowded in the small space.

A cell. A prison-cell.

The heavy prison-cell door boomed open, and a great, grinning head stared in at me, grinning madly, the heavy, greasy flames lighting up her black muzzle and sharp-toothed sneer.

The true Nightmare, not in her Cherie-semblance, or White-Rosiness. Her hot, stinking breath rolled out over us, and all around me, bodies stirred. They rose upon their forearms, those several dozen donkeys and a few ponies, bumping into each other, discovering the close quarters they had been locked into, with me.

And then they saw the great head of the Nightmare, as tall as a short donkey, her tartarus-eyes staring hugely into the crowded cell. And the screams began, as they crowded the back walls of the filthy dream-cell.

"Ah, my new ponies, awakened and to your senses, are you all? Welcome, you fools, you foals! You have done what you ought not to have done, drunk with whom you should not have partook, sworn in your cups what you should not have sworn! All of you, a cavalcade of poor decisions, bad ideas, and alcohol indulged at the wrong time, for the wrong reasons, in the wrong hour and season. FOOLS!"

Her hot breath filled that small room with its rotten-meat stench, and the new recruits shivered in the presence of the great predator, that had them at bay. With me in their midst.

"Well, now, what will you do, foals, quivering, broken fools that you are? Your enemy has delivered you into my hooves, and you are mine, now! Do you have any idea what it means to be in my hooves? Like a nasty, biting spider wandered into a drinking-hall, and found, crawling among the plates of the feast! Taken by the lord of the manor, and taken up, to be played with, or plunged into the fires of the candles lighting the feast. You are that spider, in the hooves of an irate land-lord. How will you plead for your paltry lives?"

She frowned, thoughtful.

"And yet, I have no need for the souls of terrified, wicked ponies. Of dissolute fools, drinking away their knowledge that their deaths are on-coming, are apparent, are soon to come. I have, in point of fact, no need for you. My servant brought you into my parlor for no reason whatsoever."

"But I have reason to humour her mad starts, and she says she has reason to save you from your fates. Oh, yes, we know how doomed you feel. You're not complete fools in that manner. You know that there's something twitching in the darkness beyond the door, the darkness beyond the doorway."

"Know you, I am that thing in the darkness, I am your doom. Will you embrace me, or will you align yourself against me? I know you all now, I know how you were fooled into my parlor, how you were tricked. And trust me when I say this, your betrayer will have cause to regret her actions. My service is not such that it can be filled with the unwilling, the tricked, the drugged, the drunken. When this night ends, those who have refused the call will be set loose, those who do not care to pledge their love to me will be put forth into the sun's brutal glare, to find your way among the ponies of the day. I will not begrudge you your freedom, since it was offered up in a false trade by a sly jenny too fond of her tricks to be honest with you dishonest rogues. I am, in truth, an honest villain. I will not enslave ponies to my will. My service is only for true volunteers."

"Feufollet, I name you by your true name! Drop thee thy semblance!"

And with that, my dream-image crumbled and collapsed, and the false imago I had built of a sea-burro washed away in the hot breath of my furious Mistress. I panicked, quavering, cringing down upon my hooves and haunches, exposed, all my magics torn away.

"Fool, to use me as if I were a public convenience! I am the Nightmare! The Mistress of the Endless Night, the Inconstant Moon! I will not be used to trick and to lure and to bind by such as you! Show you me this: that you are worth of these stolen souls you would smuggle into my service without their love and allegiance! The rest of you. This is your betrayer, this is your problem. If you would align you with the Night, align you with the life that lives in darkness – make your peace with this, my wayward servant. Or not, it truly is your choice."

She turned her great head to the side, canted with thought and humour, her lips pursed. "But keep you in your mind – anything you inflict upon my jenny, shall be returned unto you threefold. And naught in this world will truly have any affect excepting that which it inflicts upon your trembling soul."

And with that, the filthy walls exploded away from us in every direction, racing for suddenly open horizons, the cell blossoming into a darkened plain. The Nightmare stretched upwards over us, her great and terrible wings spread overhead, the plain drawing down onto itself a quickened mist, the exploded weight of the ceiling above replaced in its rushing demolition by the merciless, twinkling stars of the heavens. She looked back down upon us, still trembling upon our hooves and haunches and chins, cringing from the shock of her display – first squeezed in a tight little hole, then flung into the open under the judging stars.

"Know that you are seen, and judged. Know that what you do, makes the world around you. This is not your workaday, amoral existence – that mere physical world that mindlessly moves forward, whatever you do, whatever you do to each other." She gestured, and to the left, sprung up a horde of faceless shadows, armed. And they sprung against each other, striking each other down, wrestling, knifing, killing, dying. On our other side, sat shadows in the light of burning torches – or, no, rather, burning roses upon darkened rose-bushes, and they bowed their heads against each other, nodding, talking, speaking such that you could hear the murmur, even over the clash and clang of the fighting on the other side.

"What you do, here, makes where you are. You have eternity this night, foals. You can make of eternity a paradise, and work with each other, work with your betrayer, work to find how to find your way into mere day. Or you can make a Tartarus of your night in eternity. Beat each other, scream and rant, torment this fool of a jenny who thought to steal your allegiance with trickery and fakery, drugs and alcohol. You are here to learn from yourselves, and to find yourselves. I will give you eternity for a night, if you wish it."

She sat back on her haunches, and looked down at the wild-eyed sailors, who stared up at her great horn and her long teeth, mesmerized and frozen still. "And you still do not understand. That is fine. We have a very long time together, for I will give all the time in this infinity of a dream to you. Time to educate yourselves from all the libraries left me by my followers in their dream-donations, all the classrooms ever built for a veteran looking to learn from example and display, every training-room ever imagined by my many, many ponies over a very long existence."

The darkness bloomed on all sides with open doors, beckoning shadows highlighted by the glare of strong lighting in the chambers beyond. I recognized several nearby as rooms and chambers drawn from other Order or Company training-sessions in the dreamworld. The recruits looked around themselves, still surprised by the mutability of this world into which they had found themselves stolen away into.

"Foals, I tell you this: all that was promised you in your cups, was true. We are a way towards salvation. We are a solution to your dilemma. We are the way, the torch in the night, and we are the life, the growth in the hedge. But we are also… I." She grinned, again, sharp-toothed. "We are the fangs in the darkness, we are the blade in the black. We are death to the dead, doom to the doomed, vengeance for those who have courted vengeance. We are the rebel, and the sword against the rebellious. We are the fierce defender, and the underminer of false rulers, we are tradition and we are the uprising. We will break you down, and we will build you up. You will be our choosers and our killers, if you agree to love us, love the horror in the night who would only ask to love you. Only trust this – you can be loved by us, and we offer you that love. For we want your love, my little foals."

She stood once again, looming like mountain-ranges. "Oh, my foals. I swear to you this: Until you say stay, hold, I will give you time, all of time if necessary. I swear to you, this night?"

"It will last forever, if you wish it. Stay with me this night, my ponies, and swear love to me, or cry hold, cease, enough. And until you do, this night? It will last forever."

"Well, bedamn me," cussed Jute Bale, talking over his hooves, his muzzle still pressed into the pavement below us. "Tha beint a fairnt unt clarver hapeal thant 'alf tha salesn piches hi've beint gaven hin my day. Or naight, aws hit may beint."

The Nightmare sat up on her haunches, perplexed.

"Did anypony," she appealed to the crowd, "Understand enough of that gibberish to interpret for an old abomination? It was too thick for my ear."

"I think, yer horrorfulness," essayed Cour Lisse, with her eyes still squeezed shut and her muzzle still half-muted by the floor she spoke through, "Old Bale sayt he's your huckleberry."

She muttered something I didn't quite hear, but it might have been, "He always was a sucker for a fool's pitch, the old bastard."

The night didn't last forever. But sometimes it felt like it did.

The Traditions Of The Service

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The operating theatre was the facility of my dreams, quite literally. The pure white plastered walls reflected the glaring lamps, whale-oil burners as close to perfected full-spectrum light as the imagination could conceive. The operating table was made of burnished plated-steel, with restrains to hold the subject square and still, the lights focused upon the table-top and a clever little tray holding perfectly sterilized tools and scalpels. One of my students hovered beside me, hoofing to me what I asked, when I asked. The volunteer, nerves deadened, laid etherized upon the table, opened up for the demonstration. The rest of the class peered over the high walls overhead, looking down from the darkness of the observation platform, listening to my explanation.

The victim-pony's fur had been shaved to the hide, exposing the skin to the gaze of the observers. Likewise exposed, was the hide, peeled away from the flesh, and the flesh, parted neatly by razor-sharp scalpel-cuts, exposing the blood vessels along the bone of the limb.

"As you can see, following the Interosseous and plantar ligaments, here and here, are where the network of arteries and veins come closest to the surface of the hind leg. Proper barding is designed to cover these vulnerable points, and prevent the victim from bleeding out from a casual swipe of a blade. You don't need me to tell you how often barding is properly designed. I know for a fact that your standard barding was no better designed than the average, and we lost far too many of our prisoners due to this defect in design…"

As I continued to lecture on anatomy, barding design, and emergency field-medic technique, the night's students leaned ever closer to the volunteer and myself, until some of them seemed like to tumble right over the wall into my dream-theatre. There should have been twenty-eight students listening to my presentation up there in the half-darkness, half-hidden by the glare of my perfect lighting. The other two students, my assistant and my subject, made the thirty would-be medics, one pair for each battalion in the Order. Some of them had prior experience, but only a few. Most of the White Rose's Third Army medics and doctors had died in the fighting, in the rout, or with their officers in the long retreat. These were a batch of new volunteers, plus the five surviving medics – and the whole were now receiving some quick and dirty training, Company-style.

The dream-theatre was modeled on a university setup I had seen while visiting a city-state's pride and joy during a brief contract, the city before Openwater Bay. That training-theatre had not been nearly this clean, nearly this well-lit or well-appointed, but by my standards it had been a revelation. My own training had been in a filthy second-story walkup, never cleaned except by my apprentice hoof; cheaply lit, when it was lit at all, by nasty tallow wicks, reused as necessary. The old bastard who trained me had at least granted the need for well-cleaned sanitized tools and blades. For that, if nothing else, I was grateful for his training regime. For the rest of it? May nopony ever have to work under those conditions.

There were considerably more than twenty-eight heads up there, and I could see that almost half had ears considerably longer than the typically short-tufted earth pony protuberance. Why were there donkeys in my teaching cadre? I didn't think it important enough to slow down or interrupt the night's plan. Our nights were terribly, amazingly long – but they were not infinite. And a few subjective weeks training was hardly enough to get these ponies up and running by my standards, before Cherie and her conspirators pitchforked them back into the cauldron.

We covered the subject-matter I wanted to get nailed down for that session. The night might last forever, but the pony mind can only absorb so much information, concentrate so closely for so long, before a time for a pause, for a rest would make itself known needed. They didn't have dream-bladders to drain, or dream-eyes to overstrain, but still, the mind wanders, loses focus, finds something, anything else to concentrate upon other than the droning of the instructor. I sent them out to find a dream-beach, to find dream-balls to toss at each others' heads. A little play sufficient to work out the joggies and the eye-twitches, and they'd be ready to play sponge in a subjective hour or two.

I would take my own subjective time, to find out why my training/operating theatre was full of salty old sea-donkeys and other disreputable scum. Such as a wayward, hollow-eyed apprentice Annalist, looking considerably under the weather.

I exchanged glances with the Filly whose bourne was this dream-shard within which we had conjured my theatre. She was god and demiurge within this place that was not a place. But even still, this little godling listened me, as all good fillies listen to their elders. Although who can say how old we all will be, after endless seasons of dream subjectivity and variable concentration and experience? Were the various incarnations of the Filly all one experience, one self experiencing everything in the rapidity of the long subjective nights? Or were they just mayflies, leaving nothing but impressions and knowledge to be passed along to her sisters in the Spirit, and her template-Cherie, the original herself? Either way, she was pretending that she didn't know what all of these strangers were doing in my dream-class.

"What the Tartarus are you doing here, jenny my girl? If you had any reason or interest in medical training, we could have accommodated you any time in the last few years, Feufollet. This training class is for the dedicated medic staff that Stomper and Cherie demanded, not for you to entertain yourself watching the blood drip, and the flesh come apart. Find somewhere else to be morbid!"

"Sir, uh," she equivocated, eyeing the grim older donkeys that stood around her in a box-formation, as if they were her guards. "I didn't know you were in here. Uh, maybe not use names? These gentlecolts and mares are not precisely read-in to the general order of discipline, as it were. Uh."

"WHAT? What the hay are they doing in here? How are they in here? Is the Spirit just letting any old passers-by into our sacred mysteries? Free entry with three sou and a hoof-full of bottle-caps! You, eyepatch, who in the name of the Peacock Angel are you?"

"Harumph, faugh. Call me Itch Meal, you great buggering striped 'orror. I beint a salt late offen the ault Jumant, hault down 'ere by her Majesty's bully-colts to play cadrer forint the Seventy-Faive, maint her damnable builders drown unsanctified, the poxy lot of 'em."

"Well, bully for you, Ser Meal. Why do you look like you've bulled into my cult's inner mysteries by taking my apprentice-understudy there hostage? Feufollet, blink once if you're here of your own volition, twice if they're up to no good."

"This… isn't something to make fun of, Sir. They're here because of me, and the Mistress has given me into their custody as a punishment for the irregularity and the presumption of my methods. We have come to a sort of…"

"Accommodation, waren't it tha word youint used? Good enough, heft to it, 'accommodation.'. Wevent a hard service, tha salten. Haint none of us evern beent gift the easy path, nor the soft, nor the sweet. Tha jenny wouldna have taken us, if we were sweet, nor soft, nor easy. Hard burros, we are, and thus, we beint often wooed 'arshlike such. But the grand terror tha you folk cut bread with, she gave us tha options, and tha rights, and by her starry mane and her moony flank, we'll have what we were promised, belike."

I blinked at this farrago of gibberish and truculence.

"Fair enough, I guess," I said. "If the Nightmare has signed off on whatever the hay this is, I can't say no to it. Feufollet, are you OK?"

She was a little skittish looking, to be honest, uncertain and strange. Like a dog that's been beat too much. It worried me. It is possible to do a great deal of damage to a pony in the dreamworld, and heal it, and do hurt again, and again, without any sign other than the twitch of the victim from the memory of the harm.

"I am good for my word, and my obligations, Sir. I am making my peace with them for my irregularities."

"If that's so, that's fine, jenny. But we will talk later about this irregular business. But why are you here?"

"Thank of it as a sert of tour, belike," said one of the other donkeys, a raddled old jenny covered in hide-tattoos and balding fur, so manged that she was more naked than not. "We needent ta be seeing what wickedness has claimed us, all unknowint in our cups. If it beint a workmarelike kind of conspiracy, well, then. We've served evil all our lives, haven't we not? Good enough, if another suchlike evil claims us in thas time and thas season. Any port with breakwaters high enough to keep hout the storm tha'll be blowing, sayent I."

An actual earth-pony strod up, and clapped my startled apprentice-Annalist on the flank, and laughed. "Hiyah, forsooth and all tha rot. I bloody well like thisn one, hi do! A reglar goer, she his. Dinna even flinch belike. Don' you fash yerself on herint accountin', she keeps pretty accounts, she daws."

He came in closer, and away from Feufollet, leaning so as to whisper out of her hearing, in a slightly less thick accent, "We warnt be doing that much more damage. Tha great terror within all tha fangs, she gave tha sign, and we went her paces for tha sake av tha both of 'em. Nawt twa much of tha traditions of tha service, hi swearnt. Nawt more thant she's hup fer. Hi've been sarprised whart she's been good fer, sa far. She rawly wasn a gower, she hwas."

I fumed at this roundabout talk of naval brutality. "I know damn well what you sea-ponies consider the 'traditions of the service', we worked with sailors often enough on Openwater Bay. You keep your damnable hooves off my apprentice-"

Feufollet held out her hoof, and stopped me in my tracks. "No, sir. I opened myself up for this. I will trot my paces, and take my blows as they come. I will be sound at the end of it, so the Mistress has promised me. And look, we really were listening in on your lecture. It's been mostly this, and the like, for a while now. They really did demand a full tour. Hardly what I expected when I got dropped in the deep end, to be honest."

I gave her a skeptical stare.

"Well, yeah, and that too. But I can handle a little rough hoofing. It wasn't as if the Company was all that soft of a berth itself, coming up."

I sighed. "It wouldn't have been, with Uncle Blade involving himself in your training. Damn him."

We both paused to spit. And then I facehoofed when I realized I had just expectorated upon my nice, clean surgical floor. I went over to the cleaning-supplies so thoughtfully generated by the silent Filly, and began to clean up after our reflexive mess-making.

"However they got in here, and however you ponies are settling your differences over the conditions of your entry, you all are here, in our inner sanctum. Congratulations! You have, however technically, been brought into an ancient order of well-armed cultists and diabolists. Filly, my dear, give a proper greeting to your new worshipers."

And with that, there was a Filly for each of the glowering, sour-faced donkeys, and they fluttered up and gave each and every one a simultaneous kiss and nuzzle, sweetly embracing each with their soft bat-wings.

"Welcome, you salty old grouches, to our congregation," the Filly-horde chorused in what sounded like a six-part harmony. "We might be the abyss, but we're a loving sort of Pit. Now wipe off those frowns, and be happy! Life's too short to spend it grimacing! Smile, smile!"

And then the Fillies tried to get the sea-donkeys dancing. It was something else, and I've seen caribou and spooks and goblins trying and failing to waltz in my time. The sort of thing that sailors consider a dance, is something I recommend seeing at least once in your life. But definitely not twice.

Feufollet sagged as if she would have just laid down and watched her recruit-captors caper about with the little incarnations of the Spirit. But another Filly snatched her up, wings blurring as she dragged the weary jenny off the ground and into the heart of the jig and the shuffle.

My actual students trickled in as the sailors spun about the floor of the operating-theatre with our thestral-semblanced Spirit in a multiplicative, dancing mood. Some of the Order ponies climbed up into the viewing-platform, and began clopping out a rhythm for the dance, singing some dreadful western shanty of their own. I could see more than one salt-donkey's ears and eyes cant upwards, catching the cultural clues of that particular contribution to the impromptu celebration.

My lesson-plan hijacked by the Filly and Feufollet's victims, I gave up any pretense of controlling what was going on. My lessons weren't the most important thing going on that night. I summoned the shade of Stomper, and that of the Captain, and when the two oldest, saltiest donkeys in the dance spun past my seat by the improvised dance-floor, I pulled them down to talk.

And we talked, the Captain, Stomper, those salt-ponies, and I, about what it meant that they were here. They had been twice-stolen from their lives, but they could take some control over their destinies, if they were willing to become complicit in their own self-theft. And these two donkeys, who were both ship-masters and vessel-captains in their own right, would give us an in with the rest of the crewponies.

Feufollet wasn't wrong, after all. The fewer crew the Order had to subdue, kill, or throw into the river to fend for themselves, the smoother things would proceed.

But we needed to get Feufollet under control. If she was left to her own devices, half of the Housa Valley would be bladed into the cult before the year was over. Somepony would have to ride herd on our wildling jenny, to keep a controlling hoof on her reins, lest she make of Nightmare-worship a mass, evangelizing cult.

The Nameless

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The night was long, but it was not, despite the Nightmare's bluster, eternal. Nor were the week of nights that followed. Not all of the sailors we had taken in that first night were leaders within the crews of the forming fleet, but enough were to give our recruitment campaign a certain solidity, an authority. And three of the donkeys were shipmasters in their own right, two dromon-masters and a captain of one of the galleys of the line.

Each donkey of stature gave me another group to offer our deal, our promise. They kept me in the shadows as they talked up their individual targets, for those who merely were respected old salts. Those, they sent to me one-on-one, to whisper in their ears my patter, my blandishments. It was a sort of seduction, those nights, pony after pony, intimate, in the darkened corners of ship-holds, or alleyways, or the shadowed corners of anonymous grog-shops. Each to be brought to the cusp, and given that little extra push over the edge. And then, once my blade had bled them into the life-promise, I walked them to a safe place along with a few fellow conspirators, and I repeated the entire process. All while their sponsor stared, glowering, from a nearby vantage-point.

They wanted their friends and their clients bladed in, protected, safe within harbour, as they put it. But that never meant that they forgave me, or trusted me to be alone with their precious equine resources. The sailors were not like soldiers, not like the warriors of the land. They were a draconian, authoritarian bunch, and as far as the old salts were concerned, these were their donkeys, theirs to do with as they wished.

It wasn't slavery, but it was a sort of bounded bondage.

I had to give up my command of my battalion, my executive taking over as Major from me. I couldn't haul two wagons, couldn't be hitched to two sets of traces. So I cut loose my ties to the regular Order. I would be working with the new thing, the hybrid thing, the nameless thing which was neither Order nor Company.

After my targets were collected, I brought them into the dreamworld as I had their predecessors, and we enacted another night's melodrama with that fragment of the Nightmare who cared to terrorize and romance these strange donkeys of the sea, who regularly sold themselves into servitude, and yet were furiously jealous of their reserved rights and privileges.

The extremities of that first, barbaric, wild night were never repeated, but the first cadre continued to claim their rights and privileges within their so-called 'traditions of the service'. I grew accustomed to the practices – they weren't so different from some of the things I had gotten up to among my peers and elders in the old Company. Just a bit rougher, and harder.

But it was a harder service, the freebooter service.

And I regularly do worse to myself in the practice of my blood-magic. I'm a tough jenny, just ask anyone.

So it was that short-lived Marsh Wisp was retired, and I replaced her with the new jenny, a phantasmic sea-jenny whose name I had not yet given to anypony. They didn't need my name, after all. I was a representative, not their recruiting commander.

The sailing-masters, on the other hoof, were a different matter. They didn't bother with subterfuge, or pussyfooting about. For those elders, we merely waited for dusk, and took their ships far enough out into the lagoon that we were out of earshot of any listening spies, or even the simply curious. The marines stood at attention at their stations, holding their billhooks at the ready, and the 'slaves' sat their benches, looking down at the deck, waiting for the sign. When we were still in the water, I cast my silence-spell upon the ship, and the ship-master strode forth between and before their crew-members.

"Did heny o' ye," drawled the ship-master of the Seventy-Five, "want ta come dawn here ta push these sleds haround this narrah damn hixcuse far ha wattahway? Hi knaw hi shore has feck would ratha bay home wid' my Molly on tha Bourne, hand tha nits, too. Hall ov hus, we werent but taken hin hour places of gatherence, hwhen they blocked tha guild-hall dawrs, hand told the guildenmarsters ta tell hoff their quota-numbers fram tha membaship hin residence."

"Hoy, shore, hi jumpt hat tha chance ta punch my marsters-card, whonce hi had no choice ov hit. Better ta be hin charge, than nawt!"

The congregation laughed at the proud old salt, Itch Meal. I would never have pegged him for the ship-master of a galley of the line, if you had pointed him out in a crowd. On the short side, scrawny and greying. I had found during our long night together that he had been stuck as assistant to a series of grim old captains and ship-masters, always the second to hard-hooved charismatics and martinets. Their collective misfortune was the making of his career, in a way. If he could survive his captaincy, and somehow get back to these donkeys' home-waters.

"Still hand all, hi wert rather hi were in the Sea, up ta my snoot, hand still beint ha coxswain hor farst mate. These haint hour waters, har they? Barely waters hat all! Shaller, narrer, fulla traps hand tricks hand warse! We beint hin desperate needfulness ov ha higher powar! Or, leastwise, propar local pilots!"

He paused, and waited for the thought to penetrate.

"They haint gowan ta be hoffering pilots, hour damnable foalnapping commodore hand his bugger-colts! Twa busy buggerin' thair cabin-colts in thair turn, haint they? Nawt that hi'm sayin' nawt hagainst ha bit of rolly-polly, mind ye, bawt thare's ha tyme hand place!"

"They lost the last fleet hon these waters, and tha one befor that'n! If hany of ye gawdless heathen salts had heny gawdlets ta prey ta, hi hexpect ye would beint hon yar pasterns raight naw, would ye nawt?"

He turned and looked at me in my cloak, hugging the deepening shadows cast by the last after-glow before night took us.

"Hand saince thar haint naw true gawds far us, we will hafta barraw thawse ov hothers! You, ya gawt-bathering priestess, mawk yer case ta tha congregation!"

And with a might expectoration of phlegm across the decking from the irate Itch Meal, the stage was mine. I swept forward to seize their attention. I pulled back my hood, and let my thestral eyes glow.

By th' Peacock's pizzle, hit's tha bluddy Company, haint it?

Bedamn, hif hit haint!

Quiet, ya flibbergibberts!

I waited a moment for the whispers to die down. Then I began.

"Far from your homes, you castaways? Stolen from your family and kin? Broken to the wheel by circumstance and the will of others? Well, welcome to the world. I have no idea what paradise, what Rakuen of the open seas that you sailed before this. All the Chain has its burdens to bear, from Holstein to the Roamish whips. No time for weeping for our lost waters, is there?"

"Let me tell you a fable. Once upon a terrible day, a defeated rabble stumbled out of the deepest, driest sands of a terrible desert on a far distant world. They took on that world, and the world, she broke them. Shattered, smashed, their officers dead, their brothers lost to the lances and the javelins of a victorious enemy. They were pushed into that terrible desert, and all too few came out the other side. They went into that desert a proud legion with their gods in their hooves, and in proper order. They came out empty-hooved, broken, with nothing, not even their pride, or their gods. They cracked, and a few shards tumbled out the other side."

The congregation recoiled, alarmed by my volume, and my subject-matter. I would not be promising anything easy this time. No drugs, no alcohol, no seduction. Truth, square across the muzzle. See if the Nightmare tasked me with this night's work.

"Some of those broken ponies, they dragged themselves into the watering-hole of a ragged clan of horses, an oasis, as the call them in the Dar al Hisan. On any other day, that tribe of horses would have cut the throats of those defeated foals, looted whatever they'd managed to drag across the desert to that spot, and forgotten that their victims had ever even existed. It was the way of the desert, and no more than what the defeated deserved."

"One horse said otherwise. A hard young mare, of low status, and less influence, galloped in from the other side of the oasis, and stopped the blades of her clan's warriors before they could water the leafy verge of that little garden in the endless sunlit glare. She saw something of that wreckage which had fallen into her hooves, something she could make of it."

And I continued in that vein, blithering on about broken ponies and an ancient horse who had looked at them and saw more than they knew about themselves. I knew I was losing the congregation, these were not eager volunteers or recruits, open to the individual within the group appeal. I was losing them!

And then the Princess took hold of my awareness, and spoke through my voice, my throat.

"Past songs, for past ponies." A tingling, a wash of blue darkness between I and my audience.

"Old dreams, for the old world." An aching, a stretching in my planted limbs, my outstretched forearm.

"Thou art sailing forth into the new world, art thou not?" My lying semblance washed away in long blue-furred elegance in my peripheral vision, a glittering cloud of starry mane just unseen beyond.

"These long godless years without signs nor portents, the long years of hopelessness and fear, of nothing but thy faith and thy unfaith to keep thee above the cold, cold waves – of course thou wert godless and practical ponies. How else couldst thou beest?" The congregation before me, wide-eyed and silent, staring up, up at me, so small, so frightened, so - what?

"The gods left thee here, my little foals, here in this damned world of death and despair. How wonderful that thou kept thy heads above water, than thou brought thine foals and children into this heavy world of endless waves, hard tides, and miserable demanding tides. Damn the lot of them, their holy purities and pieties! We quiver with the injustice of it all, we rage, we stand before thee so furious that we almost would lead thee forth right in this instant, to find a temple to burn to its foundations!"

Was this the dreamy, gentle, vague Princess?

"Damn all gods, and their expectations and their requirements and their miserable disciplines! We must live here, with thee, in this thine world, which is always trying to destroy thee in all that thou essayist and we wilt. We offerst thee not a god, not a divinity, but rather a… helping hoof. A hoof up. It is a tough world by thineself alone. It is a miserable passage through the fire without friends. We art here as a – a shipwright, here to plane the individual pieces smooth, to nail plank to plank, and coop up the staves into a proper and sleek hull. A sweet-sailing ship, a whole, a fellowship of friends for the long night-cruise."

"Mine children, thou hast struggled, orphaned, for too long. I have a connection to offer thee, a berth and a place. Let us connect thee to the main, and leaveth behind thy starveling desert isles. The storm's dark clouds, her terrible winds, they art on the far horizons – let us offer thee a post, a place. Help us bring the barques into safe harbour! Bind yourselves against the current and the tide, and perhaps our common raft can then be whittled, tied back, until the mass bound in proper whole, can be called, honestly, a seaworthy vessel."

"Let us be a ship solid against the waves, the tide, and the current. Against the wicked wind and the vile weather – joinst us that we might carry thee and thine through it all!"

And then, they stood up, and moved forward, and clamoured for the consummation. All of my squalid scrabbling, my desperate attempts to trick and to lure the unwary into the dark. And a little touch of Princess in the night, and all of my little deceptions fell away into the forgiving darkness. As they came forward to take their bows, I wept with giddy, frustrated adoration, feeling her embrace all around me, the miracle she had wrapped me within.

I will never speak again against the unsettling unworldliness of the Princess, no matter how poorly her understanding, no matter how obscure she was in speech and comprehension. She had, even just this once, pulled my uninspired self from my squalid confusion and my involuted abstraction, and dragged me into the clear waters.

The blades flew overhead, blood-borne, nicking my volunteers in their dozens, as I shouted above the tumult the words and the gestures they must offer the traditions and the expectations. I could feel the swirl of the ritual's magic as it whirled around us all like a tornado.

And in the end, it dragged every pony on that ship into the night's dream-world. The new ponies bowed down before the Princess proud in her blue-feathered dignity, shouting their enthusiasm for the Spirit, their impenetrable salt-donkey dialect returned with joyous, archaic Old Equuish, until I honestly had no idea what any of it meant anymore, and I just laid down and let it all just wash over me, once more simply a wicked little donkey who had once been a vessel for something greater.

Thus, the recruiting of the crews. The large ritual ceremonies led to little rituals for the friends of friends, until by the end of the second week, we had riddled the fleet from one end to the other, leaving gaps here and there, and most of the ship-masters unaligned and innocent of our conspiracy. The Princess came to me many times, if only in a glimpse of glorious blue-starred mane just out of the corner of my eye. A blue-furred embrace in my dreamlike suasions to the new recruits in their single hulls and their squadrons, the nameless in the embrace of Night. It was enough, it sufficed. In the end, we had the controlling majority of the fleet, crew, marines, and the oar-slaves – all hidden in plain sight.

We were ready for the campaign to come. And just in time for the last few weeks or days before the winter winds swept all shipping from the inland waters. All ponies – Order, Company, or the sailors of that nameless vessel the Princess had built from our desperate fears – leaned forward with eagerness. The long weeks, months of preparation were at an end.

The New Fleet trembled in the blocks, ready to race towards our collective destiny, towards her new stage, and our grand performance for all of Tambelon.

We would astonish the world before we were done.

A Squadron At Dawn

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FFMS040

The predawn darkness was anything but silent. The slips and the shoreline echoed to a positive roar of thumps, creaks, tromping and assorted cacophony. Thousands of ponies and donkeys wrestled with dozens of hulls along miles of shingle and shore. The vast night-skies shone full of uncountable stars, crisp with the chill of late autumn nighttime clarity. They twinkled like the mane of the Spirit in one of her more majestic moods. The bright starlight cast slight shadows over us as we crowded around our individual ships, heaving and dragging at them, pushing their weight into the waters of the lagoon.

The splashes of long hulls slipping into the still waters broke their stillness. The ponies delegated to hold the ropes struggled to keep each ship steady as the marines and the crew chivied their respective oar-slaves aboard. Our bank-captains guided each cadre of slaves into their respective benches, telling off pony by pony into each designated seat, following the practice and the methods laid out by endless training in the brief day-light and the infinite dream-galleys of the Spirit's deep night.

As the last of the oar-ponies made their way over the crude nets into their seats, the crew-donkeys holding their ships stationary upon the shore let drop their ropes, leapt for the nets, and scrambled hoof over hoof to follow the slaves onboard. As the last crew drew in their tying-off ropes, the ship-masters bellowed and beat and cajoled all members of each ship's crew and oarponies into their respective places as keels ground against the shingle or shore, the weight of the ships working them naturally forth into deeper water.

The predawn gloaming had begun to banish the night's stars by the time the crew of the first of the dromons had pulled out their oars, and made headway away from their slips along the shore. Our hoof-full of smaller row-barges, called pinnaces, had sprinted ahead to scout forward in front of the rest of the fleet. They were already awaiting the signal to the southwest, barely visible in the distance where they were waiting, drawn up along the line of the Braystown boom.

We, in our mid-sized dromons, formed up in the vast open waters of the Lagoon, between the great docks of the Arsenal and the distant darkened quays and buildings of that modest shoreline town beside the great hulking fortress. Behind us, the vast war-galleys were still being dragged into the waters by their crews and their oar-ponies. The greater weight and size of the war-galleys had slowed down those heavier vessels through no fault of their own. In the meantime, a swarm of dromons had formed up – more than a dozen ships in four squadrons – by the time the rising light of dawn had revealed to the world the activity on Coriolanus's Lagoon. A distant creaking heralded the effort of the Company, as they cranked in that great boom that protected the lower entrance to the Lagoon from the middle Housa River and its scattering of rebel ships.

Our pinnaces darted out into the contested waters before the artillery-platforms of the Braystown Shambles, their oars flashing as they hauled their small, light, swift hulls through the opened gates of the Lagoon into the outer river's waters. A distant thumping and the high glinting of pegasi wings in the air over the fortress announced to the rest of the fleet just how closely the enemy had posted their own scouts to the eastern end of the long reaches. That fleet had recently become more aggressive in dominating the upper waters of the middle Housa, and even in the darkness before dawn, they lurked just beyond the boom. The war-machines of the Company, emplaced in the artillery platforms of the Shambles, were making that old, grim sound – flinging death and destruction at the White Rose's own pinnace-like cruisers, maintaining their forward post against this very sort of sortie upon which our pinnaces were intent.

Nearby the ship upon which I had embarked, a leather-lunged squadron-captain bellowed across the waters between her ship and the rest of her squadron, screaming her commands with very little in the way of mechanical aid. The four dromons of this squadron huddled so close that one might almost have run out along one bank of oars across to the oars of the nearest neighbor, clambered over the narrow top-decks, tumbled back down over the far set of oars, leapt across to the next dromon's spray of oars, and so forth, springing easily from ship to ship. We sailed almost oar-to-oar in the suddenly crowded waters of the western Lagoon.

The sweeps of our dromon began to stroke in unison as the drum-majors offered the beat, and the squadron moved as one, all the drums beating like a single heart. I hung over the deck in the lines with the rest of the crew, awkwardly trying to help as they pulled the sails into place. Only my slightly geased glamour saved me from the irate hoof-blows of the frustrated sail-master, who simply could not understand why his salts were so cack-hoofed that day. The morning winds were blowing out of the east, perfect weather for a sprint down-stream. The sails belatedly filled with the wind, and pulled the ship behind the oarponies' stroke, multiplying our velocity with a sudden, startling celerity.

I leaned back in the sheets, watching the squadron and our sister-squadrons move rapidly westward, the eastern glow chasing us as we raced away from the Arsenal which had been home for six weeks. We had not managed to get all of the ponies of the Order into the available hulls. As crowded as the benches of the galleys were, we were still too many to fit in what was available. Nearly five hundred extras were still in the slave-barracks, along with the 'guards' which had protected our privacy and our secrets. The other loyalist witches had smuggled themselves into the city. They were in place, to help keep our secrets for a little longer, and when that was no longer possible, to sneak out those we couldn't take with us. They would sneak them out of the city into sanctuary with the Company, well away before the news of our performance worked its way back to the Arsenal and its city.

I should have been with them, but our recruitment project was ongoing, and my presence was required here, among the ponies and donkeys of the grand fleet. This dromon in particular, for instance. We had several sleepers here, but nothing among the officers of the deck. I was here to seduce the crew on an individual basis, if I could, somehow, in between any clashes on the river.

Clashes such as we could hear in the distance. And as the light strengthened, almost see. Screams began to overwhelm the howls of ponies with their blood up, and then we could see the pinnaces of both sides clashing just outside of the firing range of the Shambles' batteries. The pegasi and griffins of the Company dipped and rose over the clash, and you could sort of see the glint of weapons rising and falling between the contending forces.

Then they must have fallen back on a larger ship with a proper anti-air battery, because the terrible fires of a petits bâtard volley rose into the upper air after the scattering fliers. So much for the hope that the trick of that ugly answer to aerial support had died with the leadership of the Third Army! The rushing flights of fliers scattered in every direction overhead. One such flight rushed over my billowing sail, a scattering of two dozen petits bâtards chasing them as they fled. I nicked my hide and reached out with my magic, seizing hold of those horrors as they howled overhead. I couldn't hold them in place without outing myself as no sort of mundane salt-donkey, so instead I directed them into the broken waters roiling in the squadron's wake, extinguishing their unnatural fires in the process. It should have looked to onlookers like munitions having run out of their charge, falling away to boil away meaningless gallons of inoffensive river-water.

The other fliers didn't have the luck of that random flight which had passed over my ears. One or two were caught by their chasseurs, and I could see the flames as some poor damn pegasus gyred into the waters of the Lagoon.

I could only hope that somepony fished that unfortunate out of the water before she drowned. Sawbones would know her fate, I was too busy with tracking the Order's progress to find out what happened to that hurt Company pony.

As the pegasi and the griffins fled, our squadron exploded through the gap in the boom, and rushed into the fray. Our pinnaces had turned away from the fires of an alert and heavily armed war-galley, behind which the White Rose's own cruisers had taken refuge.

But they hadn't planned for a sudden rush of dromons, and I could almost smell the fear as we rocketed forward. The naphtha-throwers were spinning up as we came into range, and two ships of the squadron let loose in the same instant, their flaming arcs of burning liquid rising into the air over that hapless war-galley as the sun broke over the eastern limb of the world.

The pitch and wood of that afflicted ship caught fire more quickly than I thought possible. Our port ballista began thumping as it flung heavy bolts into the suddenly isolated war-galley. I watched the panic among the enemy sailors as we passed by, raking their decks with our fire. Their terrible ram quivered irressolutely back and forth between our ships as we passed on either side of her, our fires tearing into them on both sides.

As we spun in her wake, she was already losing control in the water, and I saw a scattering of oarponies falling, burning, overboard into the disturbed waters. But we could hardly pay attention to that stricken ship, as our ship-master raced us further downstream, falling in between the fleeing enemy pinnaces which their squadron-galley had failed to protect against our rush.

They peppered us with bolts and arrows from their small contingent of marines and those tiny bolt-throwers they had mounted on their narrow decks. The slight oaken armour of our outer shell held firm, and our heavier ballista thumped in reply, smashing ponies from deck and rudder as we continued our pass undisturbed, our sisters trailing behind us in perfect formation.

We didn't catch any of their pinnaces with our naphtha-throwers, but the dromons in our wake corrected that error, and the burning ships fell behind us as our oar-ponies and the strong easterlies drove us forward. We gave chase as the survivors fled before us and the dawn. The morning sun lit up our victims as we plunged westwards in pursuit. They threw every square inch of sail up onto their masts that they could find, and their desperate oar-ponies beat their hearts out, the terror of certain death driving them to marvels of effort and endurance. By mid-morning, the little pinnaces had somehow drawn out of range, and they continued their flight as our ship-masters called an end to the pursuit.

The chase had led us to a point a few miles west of Leveetown, and brought the squadron into that stretch of the middle Housa which had been burnt over by enemy ships and marine detachments, sacking both sides of the river. It was at this point that the squadron-captain had discovered that she was far ahead of the rest of the fleet. We were exposed to the enemy ourselves now, if there were any squadrons of proper galleys or dromons somewhere down here to take advantage of our isolation beyond the rest of the fleet. The old flotilla had cleared this region months ago, but that was before it had been smashed in by a sudden rush that had carried right up to the gates of the Lagoon, and a few weeks was an eternity upon the river.

We took down our sails in the face of ongoing strong easterlies, and our oar-ponies beat against the current, forcing the ships eastward back towards the rest of the fleet, cruising towards us, far in our rear. By noon, we crossed trails with our chastened pinnaces, who continued downriver to perform their proper screening function. The rest of the dromon squadrons greeted us in the wide, open waters of those middle reaches. Eventually the heavy galleys joined us there below Leveetown, but the wasting sunlight of a late fall afternoon put an end to our activities for that night.

We pulled our ships onto the shore in the last light of the day, and the tents of the crews went up beside their ships' hulls. The slaves were welcome to sleep beneath the drying, tar-black shelter of their ships' overhang, but the crew and the marines enjoyed proper canvas.

I circulated though the unaffiliated crew, and identified my targets. My night's work followed the day's furious work of battle. The slaughter of the enemy was the focus of all the ponies of the fleet, but my attention was upon the souls of my targets.

I couldn't spare the time to think of the souls of our victims, not when I had my own donkeys to spare from the eventual consequences of our plans and our conspiracies.

Wild Promises

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FFMS041

While I bent to my work, I had sent the timberlings into the brush and bramble within coursing range of the landings. They ranged through the darkness, and feasted on the woody scrub and weeds left to run riot in the abandoned land along the war-ravaged river valley. They had been starving for the good stuff while we had been working away at the grand deception in the city-locked Arsenal. Some Order ponies had taken to stealing from flower-pots and little urban garden-plots in the dead of night, just to keep the timberlings from wasting away. They had been sparing us the ravages of the vast plague of rats and other vermin that afflicted the Arsenal and the city that surrounded it. It was the least we could do to keep the little monstrosities fed.

They were also out there to make contact with the rest of the timberlings that I had been told to expect that night. They were running through the sacred night, shepherded by Cherie herself. These were the huge beasts which we could not have brought with us through the city of thirty thousand eyes, kept with the Company proper while the little ones crawled into captivity with the Order. We were, for this night, encamped in friendly country, within a long night's run from the outposts of the Company. Our pinnaces and a support-galley were posted downstream from the camp to keep watch, performing the same nighttime screening as the enemy's equivalents had done in front of the Shambles the night before. It was, after all, shared doctrine, the rebels and loyalists trained from the same manuals.

And so it was that my eyes and ears were away from the ships as I went about my seductions and evangelical approaches. Those Order ponies who could stay awake and alert kept a guard around me and my little encounter-groups, but they weren't nearly as alert to all the necessary approaches as they should have been. No matter how intensively we had drilled, night after night, the Order was not yet the Company, and might never be so.

Thus, while I was singing a hymn of injustice, self-preservation, and looking to the main chance to an audience of five donkeys and a pony in the lee of a grounded dromon, a small shell of illusion and sound-deadening cantrips was not enough to keep the squadron's captain from discovering my recruitment drive, and the lookouts failed to catch her in time.

"What in the name of the Empress is going on here! Why are all of these slaves out of their night-hobbles? Who the hay are you! Sergeant, seize these donkeys at once!" Lignes Droites was an excellent ship-master, and apparently a natural at commanding a war-squadron. She had done very, very well that day. And she had all the tact and capacity for reading the room as an anchorite six years into a self-imposed state of pious isolation. She had brought half her component of marines to investigate the disturbance. Marines who were, in point of fact, actually hidden Order armsponies.

I smiled, and arranged for an instance of the Filly to begin recording the scene. I needed a template for my eventual illusion-work that would be required in the next few days, if all went well. Lignes Droites would have a starring role in my presentation for the grand climax, whether she knew or not, and whether she would be there to see it or not. And such a performance she gave!

She ranted, she raved. I poked her in every sensitive point, and she played the role perfectly – the loyalist leader discovering treachery just before the conspiracy came to a clangorous climax!

"Oh, my mistress, look what you've found?" I burbled giddily. Nonsense would throw her off her pace. "Such a beautiful jenny! Such a leader, such a wonder. Sailor born to the salt, leader led to the whip! Yes, go ahead," I sneered as she raised her crop over her head. "Beat the slaves!"

I stood up from the log upon which I had been sitting, giving my audience the soft-sell. The salt-sailor semblance I had been wearing fell away, revealing Marsh Wisp, my Order visage. "The slaves you've surrounded yourself with – you who would be the mistress of all you survey – the sole lord upon your planks, upon your ship! Nopony to bow to, nopony to tell you what you can and cannot do with the equines under your absolute rule! Slave-mistress, jenny of the iron collar and the knout!"

"And yet, here you are. Surrounded by those who you've put under subjugation. Who stands with you as you hold our chains? Your hooves are full, you have no weapon but your dulcet voice. And such a voice! The voice of command, the voice of authority! Where are you leading your slaves, mistress? Do you know where you go, and with whom? Do you know your own ponies, your donkeys? Most importantly, do you know whose hooves hold the blades from which your authority hangs?"

The 'Sergeant' and his armed ponies moved past their quivering commander, swinging their billhooks around to point at the oarponies standing all around us, watching. She grimaced a sort of sour smile of triumph, past her gritted teeth. I couldn't help returning her grimace gritted tooth for tooth.

And as Lignes Droites and I made faces at each other, I started the arrangements through the princess radio and with Cherie. She gave me a quick chirp in return to let me know she'd gotten the message. Preparations would be made for early holding-facilities, for ponies to be held until the final denouement.

Then the marines' billhooks continued their circuit, and wheeled about to point at the squadron-captain's exposed, proud throat.

The squadron-captain's eyes widened in astonishment. My little audience gasped in unison, and I realized that my illusion-caul was still in place, isolating our little drama from the rest of that ship's encampment. I blew out the cone of concealment, taking in the rest of the sleeping ship's crew and oarponies, and gave a great shout.

They rose to their hooves, startled, to find our tableau enacted before them, the marines in mutiny, a strange pony confronting her, and two-dozen oar-slaves standing unchained, armed with billhooks and belaying pins.

"Greetings, my fine donkeys, my little ponies! I welcome your attention, and direct it towards the lackey of the slavers and spectres of death who plague this dark and haunted land! All of us, from grey-beard to yearling foal, have had some hoof in the tolerance of the active evil which is the Empire! Death has been crowned, and placed in the thrones of honour, and we – all of us! – have bowed before dead things in their places of power."

"No more! No more truckling to the dead and the deathly! Death to the necromancers! An end to the undead!"

The rest of the Order rose and encircled the vastly outnumbered loyalists, all seven or eight of them among the crew. The half-dozen I had had been working on seducing to the cause eyed each other, wary and alarmed. They'd been caught with me, and even if we hadn't been in overwhelming numbers, the circumstances were such that they'd hang as high as the rest of us if the mutiny failed.

As the crew cringed and wavered, the Order-ponies surrounding them closed ranks, and joined me in the shout: "SEE HOW OUR GARDEN SHALL GROW!"

And with that traditional White Rose battle-cry… scene. I had the Filly terminate the recording, hoping that I could edit it into something we could use when the time came. I waved my hoof at my troupe of performers, and thanked them. All but the marines turned away, to return to sleep and rest. Tomorrow would be another long day.

I turned to the captured squadron-captain. "Well, your excellence, thank you for your cooperation. I can't explain what just happened just yet, but rest assured that your participation will save lives, in the long run. We will regret your absence in our plans – you really were an exemplary commander. But I cannot take you into our confidences tonight. My Mistress would skin me alive if I tried to recruit a jenny with a knife at her throat. We must now say adieu. Gentleponies, please, escort her excellence to her imprisonment. The guards should be about fifteen-thirty minutes out, according to my sources. Your excellence, I hope you might find a place elsewhere, so that your talents do not go to waste."

I turned to Lignes Droites' loyal and not-so-loyal crew-donkeys, continuing my interrupted approach. "As for you all, my apologies for the interruption. I had to take advantage of the opportunity as it presented itself. The squadron-captain will be leaving us for other pastures. I for one will miss her. You do not often see such a beautiful piece of work as this morning's maneuvers against the enemy flotilla. We will miss her work in our future endeavors."

"Wha dast ye meint, 'future endeavors'? Hain't this ha mutiny? Haren't ye ponies tha Whitrose?" asked a baffled crew-donkey. "Why beint we needin' ha dab hoof hat the skirmish-line iffen we're ta turn rabel?"

"Well, my foals, that's the question of the hour, is it not? We are the White Rose, proud inheritors of that sacred tradition of hate towards the undead, this is true." I paused to exclude the departing marines and their struggling captive from my further explanations. "What is not true, my dears, is how we are the White Rose. There is a damnable cancer at the heart of the current rebellion, one that bends itself towards death and destruction, that rushes good ponies into conflict with each other, in hopes of a general conflagration. They would see bodies piled against bodies, ghouls thrown against revenants and barrowgasts, until the dead outnumber the living, and the corrupted flesh of the undead piles and mounds until you could perch upon the roiling dead tide and reach out stroke the face of the heavens with the frog of your hoof."

"My children, we do not propose to join the war against the Empire, but to end it. End it as sweetly as we can, or as brutally as we must, but end it we shall, though we must break every oath our honour has made, betray every trust given into our hooves, break every stout heart and shame every proud eye."

"For nothing, my children, is so precious as an honest peace. For that, I would be the vilest villain in creation. I would break my heart upon the wheel, to make that happen. Please, will you join me in this cause? Join my troupe of liars and mountebanks, give us your strong shoulders and your sturdy backs! I lust after your skills, your wisdom and your clever hooves. I desire your hearts and your souls, my foals. Give my Mistress your love, and she will give you the world, and more. Let me introduce you to her. She is the moon and the garden, the rose and the fire, and her flames will purge the dead rot from this land before we are done with our tasks."

I paused in thought, considering the wash of words I'd poured over them, and corrected myself. "Well, and if we are to put the torch to the tinder, certainly we need fire-ponies to contain the fires. We are quite enthusiastic, my fair donkeys. Be for us a cautionary hoof, ready with the water-bucket and the shovel if you must. We're for the controlled burn, after all."

And they laughed at my equivocation. I blushed at the laughter, but it was a happy blush. Anypony who could laugh at a preacher while surrounded by armed fanatics was somepony who could be trusted to stick when the time came to stay stuck. It helped that this crew was not the departed, captive squadron-captain's own crew. They had no personal loyalty to the departed jenny.

We didn't tell that batch that their captain had been spirited away. Instead, we had an anonymous Order pony wearing her semblance, silently standing by while I made my pitch to her donkeys. They cast various baffled looks the way of their squadron-captain, but none penetrated the ruse. They fell into line, as did two-thirds of the crews I visited that night. We made our way through the whole of the dromon squadrons, and a quarter of the nearby galley contingents. I never had time to go into the dreamworld that night, so busy was I with my marathon recruitment drive.

I swear I wasn't avoiding the Spirit and her inevitable wrath for my loose play with that first squadron-captain and her crew recruited in ignorance.

Although Cherie certainly gave me an earful later on, when we met for a few brief seconds. She was busy putting together an encampment and stockade for the captured sailors, aided by the timberlings and a contingent of Company ponies specially flown in by overstretched pegasi charioteers. They were throwing it together quickly in a woodlot just out of earshot of the sleeping ships of the fleet. Cherie's charges against my virtue were obvious, and unnecessary to recount here. The howling hypocrite.

The Company's charioteers continued their yeomare work, working well into the predawn gloaming, hauling in replacements for the crew who refused recruitment. We had plenty of spare Order ponies available, it was merely a matter of getting them into place before the ships were awoken for the return to the waters of the Housa, and the continuation of the campaign. We didn't quite make the deadlines, and some ships went into the water shorthooved.

Hopefully nopony noted just how cack-hoofed and understaffed some of the dromons were in the following day's evolutions. The enemy kept her distance that day, and gave our replacements a day's respite to settle into their new roles. I was run off my hooves, trying to pin down enchantments and glamours on all the new ponies, to give them their proper semblances for the encounters to come.

Every day, every hour we kept up the pretense, meant a fleet more completely ours. I grew increasingly confident the inevitable reveal would allow us to make of it an entirely illusory slaughter of the loyalists.

I promised myself, when the time came, only phantasms would be drowned in the waters of the Housa.

Cabin Fever

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SBMS170

The wrecks burned downstream from the fortress, here and there where the pinnaces had come aground in the aftermath of the sudden dawn slaughter. Furthest downstream smoked the shattered bulk of the enemy galley, its right rear bulwarks smashed in by one of our own galleys, having put a period to that doomed ship's death-spasms with one of those cheap pot-iron rams I hear the shipwrights were making in place of the proper bronzed beaks that doctrine prescribes.

I stood on the westernmost firing platform of our new fastness, beside three silent bolt-throwers and their muttering crews. We had been barely more than bystanders to the fight, having done nothing more than drawing up the great boom to let loose the loyalist fleet upon our startled enemies. Now the crews were just hanging around, marking time in the evening coolness. The flaming wrecks were about the only interesting things going on that night in our neck of the woods.

Very few casualties had reached my surgery. Supercell was still missing, and I feared that she had drowned somewhere nearby where she had been last seen, burning as she fell over the river. The tiny little flecks of light in the distance marked the lanterns of the search-party looking for her. They had been sent out in rowboats to quarter the downstream, but as the light and the hours faded, hope went with them. To be honest, those ponies should have been back hours ago, but I guess diligence is better than the opposite, even if it was fruitless.

The losses onboard the fleet were the problem of those ships' surgeons, if they had any. I'd trained up a small swarm of emergency or field medics among the hidden Order ponies on board the great fleet, but they could hardly pursue their training while under the gimlet eye of their respective ship-masters and slave-overseers. The casualties in the fleet would have to fend for themselves until the Order could reveal itself to the world.

The mystery of Obscured Blade returned to the front of my mind, as I puzzled at it again. After the skirmishes and pitched battles of the last mud-season of the year, I had expected Blade to be finally chased to ground, along with his few remaining followers. His mistake in continuing his campaign of ambushes and sneak-attacks into the rainy season had come aground in his followers' reduced mobility, and we'd caught or killed so many of them. We had wiped out his ghoul forces almost entirely, by my estimate. Two reported incidents of his ponies assaulting isolated civilian homesteads – and being driven off with losses! – had almost certainly demonstrated his insurgency's faded capacity for mischief.

And yet Obscured Blade himself never quite came to bay. Three times we missed him by the scorched ends of his foreshortened tail, and then – silence. Nothing. We'd heard nothing from the traitors in three weeks, and now we were out of time.

The fleet was on her way, and all the season's preparations and deceits were in motion, barreling down-stream with that great armada of enormous, deadly galleys, swift pinnaces, and savage flame-throwing dromons. The bolt was in flight, and there was naught we could do to summon it back to the machine, nor arrest it in its flight.

It was now time to turtle up for earnest, and pull back the sections and cohorts of the Company into our new fortress. The Shambles was large enough to hold all the swollen membership of the new Company, even including the cadre of Order ponies who'd not been able to plausibly squeeze onto the narrow decks and oar-benches of the fleet. We had done nothing so far which would have evoked the curiosity or suspicion of our fellows in service to the Bride and her Imperial policy.

They'd twig to the double-game soon enough.

In the meantime, Company ponies were working on improving the half-wrecked defenses of the landside fortress walls, clearing firing ranges and kill-zones, moving shifted stonework into a more aesthetic arrangement. I wasn't sold on the idea that the improvements would actually make the fortress any more defensible. That old, paradoxical hulk was such that the more you wrecked it, the better-situated it was for further resistance. He was a stubborn old bastard, the Shambles, and had not been taken by force of arms, but rather betrayal and the sneakiness of an evil old witch too nasty to be seen by innocent ghoul eyes.

Blech, now I need a bath. Hold that thought.

And so it was, that a position whose main purpose was the housing and defense of heavy artillery to protect the entrance to Coriolanus's Lagoon, became our sanctum. We had a number of prisoners hidden away here and there, and as time went on, the ponies being held by the Company had increased. The guards stolen away in the course of inserting our brother-Order into the Arsenal, for instance. Although that group of detainees had proven startlingly fertile grounds for recruitment into the old Company. Apparently prison's boring enough that some donkeys will spontaneously join a cult militant rather than tolerate another minute in the stony darkness.

Carrot Cake had been active in the fighting with Blade's traitors. I guess he had taken it amiss when they tried to ambush his lady. Which probably explains why he approached me on the artillery platforms that night as I watched the burning wreckage of the enemy's scouting squadron lighting up the downstream darkness.

"I want to get Cup Cake out of this stinking hole," he began.

I turned to eye the tall, lanky earth pony. "This stinking hole is a near-perfect defense against further ambushes from Blade, no matter what evil shit he has in his saddlebags. And he's already demonstrated that he has a hate on for our little baking spy. Where is she, anyways?"

"Didn't want that thing between the two of you to get in the way of this. I want to take her out of here. She's not happy. This place makes Dance Hall feel like a happy home, you know? Too much history, all of it bad. Yeah, we'll be alive. But not living. She don't even want to bake in here. Damn, have you seen the kitchen? Even the rats don't want to go in there."

"I don't know what you're asking," I complained. "What can I do about you two getting cabin fever? I'm not in charge of anything, and I wouldn't know where to send you if I could."

"Don't be like that, doc. You want something to happen, the officers make it happen. Everypony wants you to be happy. Your impulses drive half the decisions in this outfit. And I want to take her down with the fleet. When the shit comes down, she won't be able to send in her reports from here anyways. You can tell we're getting set for a siege. Against who, nobody will say. Against the world in general? Screw that. We'll have to start rationing when that happens, and where will she get her sugar then?"

"Wait, back up there. Why the fleet? They're going into crazy danger, and all sorts of wild weirdness. You two will stick out like a sack of baking flour in an armory!"

"Come on, doc," he grinned. "Look at the two of us. Just another pair of earth ponies in a rebellion full of ‘em. And yeah, our accents are a bit off for the west, but I know how to keep my mouth shut when I need ta. And Cup Cake's got that gossip-sponge thing going for her. She sounds like she's chattering, but you'd be amazed how much she gets other ponies to do her talking for her."

He paused, as both of us watched the last mast on the distant, dying galley fall inwards into the unseen depths of the wreck.

"And we need to follow the story. See how it ends. I think she's justifying her… truce with the Mistress by calling it research, an investigation. She's still a good pony, so long as she's doing this thing, investigating us. Watching us. And we won't be doing much stuck here in this bloodstained stone shell. Twiddling our hooves until ponies elsewhere decide our fates. Tartarus, I'm surprised half the Company isn't clamouring to get transferred to the outfit that's going to have all the fun."

"You're a strange pony, Carrot Cake."

"Aw, I figure I'm young. World doesn't seem to be ending on schedule like I thought. Why not see a bit of it before settling down? If we don't die, I figure there might be a world to live in after all."

He paused again, a stormy look crossing his muzzle.

"And if I can keep us busy enough, I can forget about the rest of it. And let it go. They say revenge ruins a pony, and I can feel it. Twisting in my gut. Well, the hay with that. I'd rather go adventuring, then sit and stew!"

"You know you're the standard-bearer. We can't have you taking the heart of the Company away from the Company."

"I never gave a toot about that pig-sticker, Sawbones. You want it? Hay, anypony else wants it? They can have it. Mistress can have some other pony to play pageant, I don't want to do that for the rest of my life. Let us go, doc. We'll go bad here in the dank and dark."

"This is the Company, corporal. We are the dank and the dark." But I smiled at him.

How could I resist an appeal like that? Tam Lane took over as standardbearer. The little donkey had grown up into an enormous, towering percheron of an equine, and fit the role perfectly.

And we shipped the Cakes down to the fleet as they prepared for their production's opening night.

The rest of us could hold down the fortress.

Now I'm positive that someone weeded these manuscripts before they got to my desk. There's clearly material missing out of the SB manuscripts, they're definitely not the complete work! - Faded Palimpsest, 2nd Grade Archivist, Restricted Archives

The Fleet of Charon

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FFMS042

We met the resupply convoy in the wide, slow pool just upstream from the half-burned, entirely-abandoned wreck of a town on the southern shore of the Housa. There were over a dozen such towns on either side of that grand river, and every single one we had seen so far were empty, abandoned and half-wrecked. But even if the town was gone, the wide spot in the river remained, beside the burnt piers and the wrecked merchant-galley laying across the landing-beach beside the piers.

We had been obliged to reverse the fleet's column for the emptied dromons to reach the supply ships in the rear of the heavies. Although the Housa was a wide and deep river, it wasn't that wide, nor nearly that deep across its entire width, in every reach. Where the river was wide and slow, you could comfortably deploy three heavy war-galleys abreast, or an entire squadron of dromons. But for much of the length of the Housa, and in any reach with obstructing islands, the river moved faster and narrower, with side-passages and sandbars and byways and hidden tributaries lurking along the heavy-limbed wooded verges of the shore.

Many of the tributary streams were themselves wide and deep enough to hide a number of pinnaces, or a dromon or two. Lurking within these streams might be one or more the White Rose's pocket-galleys, though not so large as our heavies, still ship enough to drive their proper steel-headed rams into an unwary opponent.

The freighters rode low with their supplies in their holds when we met them by the side of that sleeping town. Our dromons lined up to winch over our resupply one by one from the slow, patient civilian ships. The stevedores swung the supply-crates and naphtha tanks across on long booms, and some of these donkeys hung onto the booms to guide them with their weight, dangling from their netting by their hooves beside their cargo. The crew of each ship swarmed the crates and tanks as they landed on their upper decks, clearing them into the narrow, tight holds of each military vessel. The civilian stevedores snapped up the empty crates and tanks in return, then slapped the deck as they left, prompting the ship-masters to start up the oar-banks to clear the booms for the next ship in line.

As the ship I was riding took on its resupply, I carefully sniffed the naphtha tanks one by one, pretending to be a crew-donkey checking for leaks. No smell of death on any of them, thank the Rose. The seals had held.

The resupply took all afternoon, and as the weather shifted, smoke began to cast a pall over the work. While everypony was distracted by the chaos of the transshipment and the increasingly bad air, a number of shadows slipped across under cover of glamour and misdirection. Among them were some last-minute reinforcements to hide with the rest of our supercargo, and my fellow-witches, arrived to help with the campaign's expected high demand for illusion, phantasm, and other typical Company witchcraft.

That morning's exchange of fire on the reach below our rendezvous point had given our squadrons an excuse to move upriver and meet with the freighter convoy. Our suborned and replaced ship-masters had wasted naphtha fire with abandon, lighting everything in sight on fire, until the whole of the river had been burning from one shore to the other, and the enemy's pike-line of huge, staked logs driven into the riverbed had been set alflame like all the brush and drowned trees lining the flaring river. The enemy ships themselves had fled in well-considered terror from our display. Reports were that the commodore was as overjoyed at the enemy's rout as she was enraged that the flames were too intense for her heavy galleys to follow up the chance.

Without the fire, the staked line of obstructions would still have kept the fleet from passing the choke-point. You could barely pass a dromon at a time through the side-channels which had allowed the enemy pinnaces to retreat.

They got away, those that had survived the initial repulse. Two, maybe three squadrons of tiny little river-galleys, long-beaked rammer-craft smaller than the dromons had come booming up the river in the early hours just before dawn, and brushed aside our pinnaces. We'd lost two of those to the clash and the rams, and a third eventually impaled against the now-burning hedge of sharpened stakes and poles built across the sides of the river, blocking the central channel between two islands narrowing the stream into a choke-point.

Both the islands were now an inferno of uncontrolled wild-fires. If I didn't know for a fact that they were unoccupied, I would have felt guilty about the devastation. With the river a sea of fire, all we could do was retrieve the surviving crew and oarponies off of the destroyed pinnaces.

The pinnace crews lost a fair number of donkeys and ponies to the engagement, all of them Coriolani or recruited from neighboring towns, and none part of our conspiracy. I'd had no opportunity to go recruiting among the pinnacemares and stallions, and their oarponies were criminals and other unfortunates, largely drawn from other parts of the Lagoon shore. The engagement in front of the first line of obstructions had chewed up the pinnaces, though, which meant that the dromons would have to sail closer to the van in order to support the survivors more closely.

They couldn't take too many more repulses like that and retain their espirit. They weren't Company, after all. They weren't even Order.

Well, nothing to be done about it. Battle must be given, and battles aren't fought without losses.

Not unless you're staging one hell of an imitation of a battle, that is. Which is what we were putting the last final few preparations in place, that afternoon.

Once the freighters had pulled out of range, the ponies and donkeys of the dromons began breaking open the false naphtha tanks, smashing them open with the butt-ends of billhooks and belaying pins. And it was when those containers were breached, that the hideous stench rose over the dromon squadrons.

From one ship to the next, it rose as a miasma. Death, old death, unnatural, horrible death in every pony's nostrils. The witches came out of their hiding-places, still soaked from having snuck across from the freighters in the confusion. I exchanged greetings with my elders in the Company, although none of us were within shouting distance of each other. The wonders of the princess-radio.

We got to work on the suppression of the smell of the old, inert corpses we'd successfully smuggled on board the dromons. Oh, no necromancy for us, don't worry about that. We didn't need the undead - just bodies. You'll see, soon enough.

The ship-masters brought their boats within crossing distance as they worked downstream, slowly. Gibblets, Otonashi, the Crow and I jumped from ship to ship as we went, enchanting each cargo-hold against the amazing smell of old corpses and hiding away the cargo so that casual visitors wouldn't detect them. I was not sure how well anypony would be fooled by this ancient, rotted flesh once it hit the river, but it would make a first approximation if nopony looked closely at the bodies in the water afterwards.

When night came, we sent our ships out to the site of the day's battle under cover of clearing the obstructions in the main channel for the main fleet. While a hoof-full of dromons did the actual work we were assigned, the rest fished as many fresh bodies out of the wrecks and the water as they could find, without any torches or lanterns to aid their search or to let the galleymares know what we were up to. The Nightmare gifted the searchers with thestral sight so that they could see where they were going, and allowed the ship-masters to keep their own ships from impaling themselves upon the wreckage and the sharpened stakes still standing, however charred.

That night, as the Order pulled White Rose corpses of both sides from the river, Cherie and the Spirit haunted our enemies from overhead. White phantasms overflew their ships throughout the night, singing unearthly songs without lyrics or discernible words. Only a terrible, high wailing, which came in waves as the wide-winged things moved slowly through the night. Cherie reported the endless barrage of petit batards they wasted upon her illusions, and was vastly self-satisfied at her newfound ability to maintain Company-quality glamours of the necessary size and duration to ensure that all that fire was indeed wasted.

I was simply pleased that the two – or three or four, however you count the Spirit when they were in conference with our Cherie – the (however many of them!) of them had managed to keep the enemy awake and alert and alarmed throughout a night that the enemy should have spent resting and planning for our demolition. A tired and distracted enemy was vastly preferable to one on her game, after all.

The distracted enemy did not show their faces north of the islands that night, and left the next half-dozen reaches and two narrow passages to us without a fight. We took a long, stressed pair of days to slowly inch our way down the river, pinnaces and their dromon supports crawling through uncertain side-channels and up tributaries, looking for the trap, the inevitable trap. And each night, a new wave of phantasms and screaming omens sought out the enemy, to spread alarms and disturbed the rest of a hopefully frazzled opposition.

Assuming that Cherie and her assistants could find the enemy. Her pegasi escorts reported repeated contacts, and the enemy remained close enough to shadow us in the night. But during the day they fell back far enough that we on the ships never laid eyes on them.

And the stench of our cargo grew increasingly foul and difficult to mask. The timberlings grew restless, and I had to re-apply my blood-runes on those animate tangles of brush to keep them from breaking cover and alarming the shrinking pool of the unsuborned among the fleet. I also took this opportunity of our dromons working so closely with the pinnaces to recruit here and there. Not that the plan expected that we would be taking them with us! We hoped to send off the truly loyal upstream on the pinnaces, 'survivors' fleeing in plain view, the better to explain the absence of prisoners when the time came. But it would aid in the deception, if we could get the pinnaces to play their part knowingly. And if they came to grief in the fall-out – well, the Company could use its own, tiny fleet in the chaos that was sure to come.

I was beginning to suspect that we'd somehow broken the spirit of the damned enemy, and she'd never cooperate and offer a proper fight. What if they just gave up, and retreated all the way into the Great River? Wouldn't it be ironic if all our preparations had been for naught, and we inadvertently raised the siege of the Second Mouth, still apparently loyal?

Thankfully, the next day the enemy took the opportunity provided by our approach of another picketed, barricaded choke-point, once again to be found between a larger island in the stream and a long sandbar. They lurked in a wide tributary to the south behind the island, large enough to hide multiple squadrons stacked in those narrow but deep waters. A single squadron of small river-galleys stood downstream below the line of obstructions, likewise screened by their surviving pinnaces. Proper bait for the trap, made even more convincing by a scree of workers in row-boats scrambling away from the half-built line of staked obstructions in the river.

Perhaps they thought they'd fooled us. But as tangled as the river could be, it was still a linear potential battlefield, and they were spotted from overhead by our pegasi overwatch before the jaws of their trap could close on our vanguard, helpfully lunging for the bait.

Their battle-line burst out of their close, coming on a half-squadron frontage, as wide of a deployment as they could manage in the tight quarters of the confluence. I'm sure they thought they had our van dead to rights. Poor, sad fools. The galley main force was in place to sweep into their upstream flank, three galleys wide, as closely as they could sail and not foul each others' sweeps.

A full third of their committed force was trapped before they could turn about and defend themselves.

The rest sprang forward, and caused their own damage among our dromons before they saw they had been flanked. One of our ships was stove in, and another lost her entire left bank of oars to the rush of a ram. Dozens of oarponies were crushed against their benches and the bulwarks in the sudden crash. Almost a hundred were crippled in the collision. The fact that twice as many of the enemy ships were stove in by our own battle-line meant nothing to the Order, who died or were crippled in their seats, paying with their lives for the opportunity that the rest of the fleet seized.

The remaining dromons laid into the ambuscade with their bolt-throwers, their naphtha projectors, and the javelins of the marines. The marines upon the stricken ships charged their opposite numbers upon the galleys which were ram-bound with their targeted dromons. It was a moment of chaos, and I found myself on the ship whose oar-bank had been caught up in a battle-galley's ram. The marines on the victorious galley outnumbered our own contingent by three to two, and I picked up a belaying pin to support the barded marines. I couldn't let all of our plans be wasted by an idiot accident of battle, a mere collision. I didn't even use my mystical resources in the fight – no matter how strongly my sense of self-preservation prodded me to strike down these fools before they ruined everything. I fought like a proper salt-donkey, brutish and enthusiastic beside my fellow sailors.

A few of the 'oar-slaves' jumped up from their benches, tripping up surprised White Rose marines, and distracting them at exactly the right time. Hopefully nopony on the other ships of the White Rose fleet were paying close enough attention to notice that we had unchained oarponies on board.

The marines who had actually boarded us were thrown off their pace sufficiently for our surviving 'loyalist' marines and deck-crew to drive them back onto their own ship, and sweep over their sides in turn. By this point in the exchange, several of our war-galleys had come to the aid of our stricken dromons, and the superior fire-weight of their deck-mounted war-engines began to tell against the enemy.

Their resistance collapsed like a wave, their unbound ships, not tangled up with victims or stove in by loyalist rams, turning and running as each ship-master spotted their own mortal danger, according to their individual powers of observation. The enemy commodore had by that point lost all control of her ships, I think. Each boat was being fought by their own ship-masters as if they were two dozen flotillas of one, rather than a closed hoof of a fleet directed by a single mind.

And so, the enemy ships turned and fled – shamefully! – from their failed ambush, while the half-dozen or so entangled ships were left to their fate. Our marines passed along the length of each stricken ship, subduing the resistance of the trapped and isolated crews and marines and oarponies as they went. Half of the fleeing ships went up the tributary, and a squadron of dromons pursued them closely. Eventually, they grounded out their ships and fled overland, leaving their small ram-galleys and pinnaces and other supporting ships to be burnt – empty-hulled – by the naphtha-throwers.

By my count, we lost forty-five dead in the fighting that morning, and twice that many mangled and crippled in the collision and the fighting. We took seven ships, and perhaps five hundred prisoners, more than half wounded. See attached appendix for the names and the circumstances of the dead. The Order wasn't the Company, but some traditions shall continue, the old Spirit within her new shell.

The commodore was talked into shipping the prisoners back up-river in the emptied freighters, securely hobbled hoof and limb. Not much we could do about those poor fools, and we couldn't work our magic with hostile, unprocessed prisoners on board.

This shattering defeat was the opportunity we had been waiting for. Our fleet's commodore took her own opportunity, and sent us racing forward deep into enemy waters. We would wait our chance – until the enemy was in utter despair, was desperate, was trapped with a victorious fleet bearing down upon their vital points. Then – then!

The only question then became how much of the loyalist core would have to be 'slaughtered', and how to hide the prisoners from observation until they could be dealt with, smuggled out, or snuck into the fold.

Tomorrow would be the day, I thought, as I slaved over the stinking corpses in our holds, trying to stave off the unimaginable smell. Onward we beat, following the current down the river, carrying our cargo of corpses and betrayal.

The mentioned appendix with the lists of the dead is missing from the trove of manuscripts. I'm not sure if this was deliberate, or simply an oversight on the part of whomever it was that edited this collection. - Faded Palimpsest, 2nd Grade Archivist, Restricted Archives

A Song In Time Of Rebellion

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FFMS043

"And why again are you here?" I asked.

The little blue mare grinned widely at me as she labored away at her heavy sweep, trying her best to keep the rhythm of the stroke. Above us on the top seat of this row was Corporal Cake, silently and easily keeping his long-sweep moving with the beat of the drum. I pushed back my borrowed chamfron and glared at the baker. I was sweating heavily in the caparison and petyral, despite the cool autumn weather. I wasn't used to marines' barding.

"Oh, don't be so grim, deary. You're far too young to be so pokered-up. It's a beautiful morning! And we're here because this is where we're supposed to be."

I had been applying blood-runes to this particular galley in strategically helpful locations, and pinning down her suborned crew to paint them likewise with the sigils and markings which would allow my magic to take root when the time came, and dress them in the semblances of westerners and rebel-ponies. The runes painted on the ship's planks would support our grand illusions and tricks like a trellis-work bearing up under the runners of a wisteria or a riot of morning-glories. I had taken a break, and was headed for the fresh-water barrel and dipper placed mid-ship for the watering of the oar-ponies, when I had found the Cakes among the slaves, labouring away as if they had always been here with the Order.

"Where you're supposed to be. According to who?"

"Whom, you mean. It was in a dream, deary. A rather loud one. Your abomination could tell you, if you want to ask her."
My gaze turned to the Nightmare, who in my mind's eye peered down through the low deck-planking, her sneering muzzle poking through the wood as if it were a cloud or an illusion. "Mistress?"

"The little spy, she sees visions of a tree, of all things. A crystalline, silent, brooding tree, wrapped in terrible-thorned black vines. And what that tree says? Oh, only the little baker knows. Chiffon Swirl, what does your captive god tell you?" demanded the Nightmare.

"Why can't you be quiet, you awful spook? I'm not that filly anymore, any more than you're the dusty princess you sometimes pretend to be! Who am I to ask how and why Harmony looks the way she does? Harmony tells us what we should be doing, not vicey-versey!"

"Harmony, Harmony! You're like a broken record, deary!"

"Ma'am, Mistress, please. I hardly have all day, do I? I have timetables, Mistress."

"Oh, I have all the time in the world, Feufollet. Or – whatever name you're wearing this morning. And you have hours, days even. Nopony is sitting to watch the curtains go up, so why not pace yourself? And you'll love this story the baker has to tell. It is one for the Annals, it is."

The little baker rolled her eyes in time with her oar, the drum, and the stroke. "It figures that you'd be amused by this, you giddy haunt. Death and destruction and betrayal, and here I have to follow in its train to observe."

"What? You're having visions now? Are you two saying that Cup Cake's a prophet?"

"Oh, really. A vision or two doesn't make one a prophet," chided the Spirit.

"I'm pretty far from Equestria, can't really take commands or even suggestions from home, here. Have to rely on dream-quests instead I guess!" Cup Cake actually giggled. I'm not sure I've ever heard anypony other than Cherie do that, when matters were so serious otherwise.

"But why are you here, with us? Wouldn't it have been safer and easier to keep track of the Company back with, I don't know – the Company? In Braystown?"

"Have you looked at the map? Have you looked at the situation? The only thing that's going to happen back at the Shambles is a siege. The decisions, the possibilities, the pivot – they're here, with you maniacs. You're like a madpony's relay race, with this black terror tossed between trotters like a spiked baton! You're carrying her here, now. Not those stiffs behind their tumbled walls. Like a seed, or an infection… I don't know which. All I know is, I know my job, and it's to keep track of how far the horror spreads here, in this world. And to keep you where I can see you. And definitely, definitively, not on the road to Equestria! Anything else? My employers don't give a buck. So long as you stay safely here, in this half-tartarus, I'm golden."

I almost went cross-eyed trying to follow Cup Cake's nonlogic. "So you think… we're about to go lunging for the portal offworld? We're moving further away from the nearest door off-world, and the others are more than half a continent away!"

"Oh, I don't know what will be, I can't know that. But Harmony? She knows. I put my faith in the Harmony. It's the only thing we meek, mortal ponies can do, you know. Embody the virtues if we can, obey the Princess, harmonize with those we meet, and love each other if we can."

The Nightmare, now laying so that her head was dangling upside-down beneath the deck-planks, snorted in derision. The silently listening Order ponies in the oar-benches all around us said nothing. But they were listening, believe that if nothing else.

"But why us, here? When the Company, and worse, Blade is out there – thataways!"

"Obscured Blade is a danger to himself and all those around him, but he'll never run off on his own, carrying his own pitiful little fragment, his sad little splinter of her abominability. He by himself can't make the sort of Nightmare he dreams about; he needs you all for that. And if you aren't careful, you'll give him what he wants, you half-baked tray of muffins!" She sighed.

"Look, that vision wasn't the only one. I've dreamed about your promised filly, about poor, addled Cherie."

My teeth clenched in sudden fury and possessive jealousy at her tone. What did she know?

"Oh, you don't like that one? Yes, you know, I think that the ether must be absolutely alive with the import of that dangerous little flitterer. It's not all that often that a shard of harmony sings itself into existence!"

"Quoi?"

"Oh, don't you roll your eyes at me. Every now and again, they say, somewhere on the Chain – Harmony harmonizes with herself, sings a little song. And the higher realities, they reach down into we mere physical stuff, and they weave an instrument to sing their songs back at ‘em. Harmony births itself into a world as a mortal. A… child of harmony. A melody, if you were. A leitmotif, my primary school teacher called it. Cherie's parents sang as one with Harmony, and a miracle came into Tambelon, opened its green little eyes, and screamed out her fury at having been born."

Cup Cake smiled. "Like all foals, I have no doubt she was not impressed by the miracle of her existence. But the rest of us? A loose harmonic, a tune not yet sung! She could have been literally anything, anypony, anysong!"

"And a wandering band of devil-worshiping murderers snapped her up like the prize that she is. Oh, that scared us pretty bad, you bet. The harmony-shard, the melody – in the hooves of madponies!"

The stroke kept on, and the little blue earth-pony kept the stroke like she had been doing this all her life, with a fury, with a vengeance.

"Well, I suppose that it was all to the best. All the advantages on the Chain laid in the hooves of the madponies of the Company, and still Cherie sings her own little song. The madponies of your Order think to orchestrate her to their own sheet-music. I think perhaps that will not happen any more than 'Cherie, daughter of the Nightmare' would have happened."

She smiled, vengefully. "Not White Rose, nor Nightmare's Avatar, nor Bride's Dragon, nor Peacock's Angel, nor any of a hundred other dreams of glory. That little thestral will insist on her own song, won't she? Miracles are kind of like that. They impose their own logic on the world, whatever the world thinks about the matter."

Then her smile washed away in a dead-eyed stare. "Or you'll get her killed in some damn fool stunt. The choice of that is up to you, jenny. You've been given an inestimable gift by the infinite harmonic convergence of the ineffable spirit of creation itself. What will you do with it, Feufollet?"

The beat of the drum rolled across the waters, and the stroke of the oars sang their roundelay in response. Back and forth, interweaving, the simplest of melodies, the most basic of harmonies.

I shook my head, and looked back down at the smaller of the two Cakes. "What, so you're here to protect your precious filly? Just her?"

"Oh, deary, don't be jealous. I love all of you foals. I'm just here for her. I wasn't sure for the longest time, but I figured it out, after a while. It's hard to concentrate on holy children, when there's something as distracting as this screaming horror hovering overhead, I can tell you that, don't you know!"

The Nightmare, lazing giddily overhead, snickered at the jab.

"Don't you worry, jenny. We won't get in your way. Unless you start trying something really stupid, then I'll be there to scream in your ear, you bet! And Carrot here will be available if you need a strong back and a heavy hoof. Won't you, dear?"

"You know I will, honeybunch."

I snorted, and stomped away. Too much time wasted on the Cakes and their silly game of playing house on the lip of a rumbling volcano.

The long reaches of the lower Housa wandered lazily between wooded shores, twining here and there around the occasional fat island. Some of those islands were half-cultivated, their burnt buildings and wild-rotted fields testimony to the ravages of the White Rose among the depopulated Riverlands. We saw very little of the enemy for several days, as they chose to fall back with their surviving ships. The great tributaries appeared to our left, one after the other. We passed Castor and Pollux, the great fortresses of the Fourth and Fifth Mouths so far up-stream that they could not be seen from the main channel.

The shores west of the mouth of the Pollux were polluted with the occasional wreckage of a raft or a shoddily-built ship. This was the stretch upon which the Highlanders had beaten out their bravery in a pointless and stupid display of upland elan. I made good use of the long cruise, and worked my way through most of the remaining galleys, rigging each with the pyrotechnics and the special effects that the coming performance would require. But even mortal noses were strong enough to smell the stench of death our cargo cast over those ships, and our time was coming close, whether or not we were ready.

Only the crew of the Commodore's own ship had been spared my evangelism, when the morning of our performance dawned. Well, good enough. Well enough. That ship alone would see honest fighting.

The chorus and the orchestra commenced the overture as we hove into view in the thin morning light of latest autumn. It was perhaps the last day before fell Winter washed over the limb of the year, and the river-air was brisk, sharp and cold.

We approached the outer outposts of the White Rose, built on an island a quarter-day's sail upstream from their war-camps around the Second Mouth. The Company's aerial cohort coursed overhead, having taken the full measure of what we would encounter, mapped out the eyes to see, the witnesses, the audience. With this information, we'd blocked out our performance, known what angles to cover with our illusions and phantasms, when certain acts must begin and end, all so that our legend could be told through the mouths of our victims – no, our audience.

The night before, Cherie and the Spirit had resumed their haunting of the wild Roses, tormenting them with apparitions and phantasms now that they knew where to put on their night-show. We could see the lights and the explosions from the ships of the fleet, off in the distance, just over the horizon. They must have expended a hundred thousand deniers worth of le petit batards in that response to the Spirit and Cherie and their illusions, and all of the confluence of the rivers must have been kept awake by that heavenly conflagration.

The next morning, by that late-autumn morning light, our pinnaces scattered before the war-engines they had mounted on the islands. Our audience had dug in and revetted their heavy weapons in well-placed lunettes built on the upstream side. The pinnacers deliberately drew their fire, provoking them, waking them up so that they were both alert and focused. The audience's ships were nowhere to be seen, hidden perhaps behind the protection of those land-batteries? The pegasi knew, and they told the Commodore by mouth, and Cherie by the radio.

We brought a squadron of dromons forward to threaten the entrenchments and their heavy weaponry, with naphtha fire arching overhead in a threat display. We had calculated that this was the moment of supreme tension, of terror and fear.

The audience had to be convinced that they were about to die, that they would be immolated by overwhelming force. That terror and fear made them malleable.

Because the next bit was the worst part of the script, the most naked we would ever be. It didn't make sense, read on the page. Dromons with their decks full of marines, and naphtha-thrower crews, ready to lay waste to the last defenses of the enemy's cowering fleet and their siege-camp beyond – and then!

What was that? Why did the terrible flame-ships suddenly pause, lose headway, twist and turn in sudden un-control?

Was – was that fighting on their decks? What new madness were the loyalists deploying in their unceasing campaign against the righteous?

The sharper-eyed, and those with spy-glasses, spotted it first. The oar-slaves, broken free of their bonds, rising up on ship after ship, rising like a tide of equinity against the outnumbered marines. And somehow – somehow! The numbers told. Splash after splash told of heavily-barded marines forced overboard, and screams echoed across the waters as the suddenly defenseless crews were overrun by their chained oarponies.

The insurrection was brief but very, very bloody, and the morning sun shone brilliantly over the blood-stained decks of the dromon squadron as it suddenly fell out of loyalist control. They yawed back and forth, the ships of the squadron, suddenly all on their own hook, their ships-master having all been thrown into the drink to drown. The audience strained at their war-machines, but the fighting had taken place entirely out of their range, and although they signaled vigourously for their own ships to come forward, the fighting was over before they were done signaling.

As the pegasi and griffins of the Company stooped over them, flinging spears and javelins to slow them down, the mutinied dromons turned about, and slowly, erratically, began beating against the current, casting eastwards toward the next squadron of dromons, and the next. And those ponies with spyglasses on the islands' shore, watched in amazement as the fore-most squadron came, impossibly, about, and turned back upon our own column.

All that morning and afternoon, the loyalist fleet collided with itself, the mutiny spreading by contagion and observance, as each contingent of oar-slaves observed the previous contingent having risen up and triumphant, that knowledge of successful rebellion inspiring their own, inspiring the next, and the next – until the chain-reaction found its way into the galleys, and tore through the great ships like a paroxysm of bloody freedom.

And as the great ships fought their individual battles, the little pinnaces swarmed around the larger boats like foals whose parents had gone mad, quarreling destructively in public – shamed! Devastated! They peppered the convulsing dromons and galleys with sprays of fire from their bolt-throwers and javelins from their own marine contingents, trying and failing to turn the tide on any single ship in the tormented fleet. The Company's pegasi cooperated with the pinnaces, and harried the mutinied ships in their own way, but nothing took, nothing stayed.

The waters fountained with the bodies of the dead and the desperate plunging escaping loyalists, and the river ran ever so slightly red with the blood of loyalist and mutineer alike. Not a few ponies among the mutinied ships broke character ever so briefly, to breath deep as the foul dead were pitched overboard – finally! So much else of that day was artifice, nonsense, play-acting. But the dead were real, and those poor unfortunates – tortured to death by necromancers, or killed by ghouls, or dead of natural causes, and all of them smuggled out of the loyal lands to play their dead parts in our play, our performance. All of them had been gifted the Company blade's-edge, just to be sure. Whatever afterlife they had in the offing, no death's-curse would cause their mortal meat to dance to the necromantic tune. Their part was to be simply – dead. The presumptive token of our 'bloody mutiny', washed up on the downstream shore, to stink of river and rot and death.

The little 'loyalist' ships took up swimming refugees from ship after ship, as they beat their way through the collapsing fleet, fleeing the mutineers. By the late afternoon, a swarm of overburdened pinnaces surrounded the Commodore's galley, the only remaining ship under loyalist control. The White Rose's own battered, shocky fleet had appeared in the west, slowly, cautiously approaching the open waters in which the mutiny had carried out. Throughout the day, the ground-troops watched us as we capered in full view of their wondering gaze. As if we had staged our mutiny entirely for their eyes.

The awkwardly-commanded ships of the mutiny sculled about above the land-batteries, clearly under the uncertain hoof of inexperienced ponies. As afternoon faded towards the early twilight of evening, each mast saw crude flags and banners bearing some semblance of a White Rose tacked to their heights, and the ragged but sweet sounds of "How Great Is Her Garden" carried over the open waters. After a few moments of stunned silence, the audience followed the cue of the jubilant performers, and joined in with this common inheritance of song. The White Rose's ancient anthem echoed back and forth over the waters of the lower Housa like a song in round, the chorus repeating itself in the throats of the rebels in the land-batteries, those of the crews of the approaching flotillas, and the ships of the mutinied fleet.

The catastrophe which had borne down upon them in the morning – silently, quietly, remorselessly – was now a memory. The vision of destruction had washed away in a welter of blood, and screaming, and fury. A terrible cacaphony – until the cacophony itself was washed away, the discordance falling away, harmonizing, until it resolved itself into a song. And that terror, which had threatened to burn them from their last redoubts, had self-immolated, and suddenly the waters in front of them were crowded with cheering, singing, harmonizing galley-ships full of freed slaves – of rebels.

And the rebels of the White Rose sang their victory-song in a complex welter of emergent, almost orchestrated harmony.

The Singing Rabble, or, The Seed In The Soil

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What? No, I didn’t see the event that set all the fools' tongues a-wagging, but Rose knows, I heard enough of the waggling and the yapping and the whinnying to fill a long winter’s tedium with nonsense and fancy. When it happened, I was at the station. The station was quiet but for the overloud confessions of a drunkard being put to the question in the back chambers by Severe Shard. It was a foolish exercise, questioning a drunk. How many traitors have you ever seen who couldn’t hold their liquor? The true dangers to the faith and the Revolution hide behind the expressionless eyes of somber and pious ponies, in the hearts of those who can dissemble and nod and smile at the bromides of the preachers.

It was because I grew tired of the wailing and the hiccups that I was standing outside of the station proper, when the first runners came up to report the commotion. The enemy fleet had been pressing the navy badly the last week, and the remnants of the ships of the Housa fleet were hiding in the Bottomwaters behind the upriver forts, cringing like whipped curs. The advisers in the navy were weak, and lukewarm, and afraid of their own shadows. No wonder that their charges collapsed at the first repulse! The fleets had shriveled sadly since the great victories of the previous autumn; their initial successes had led them into flights of fancy and the arrogance of success.

The skies the night before had been full of omens, and frights, and apparitions. The artistry of the enemy, no doubt. Witchcraft and sly illusion, the lot of it. Mean and ugly parodies of the iconography of the Faith – twisted into fright-mask horrors.

Although it had certainly robbed me of my better rest. It wasn’t only the queasiness of moral uncertainty and the screams of the drunkard which had driven me out of the station. Lack of rest made me, well, restless.

"There’s battle joined beyond forts #5 and 6! They say it’s a bloodbath!" yelped the gossip, gesticulating wildly at the bored guard beside the entrance.

"What nonsense are you talking? The fleet is still behind the bar, over there!" I nodded southward, where indeed, the shrunken, battered fleet sat immobile, a full mile and a half downstream from the forward fortifications. Although they were standing to arms, and you could see the rippling of their sails and the feathering of their oars in the distance.

"Not us, lieutenant! Them! The loyalists are fighting each other! Right in front of the batteries! It’s like the most beautiful show you’ve ever seen, lovely, I swear it!"

"And how are you here to tell me this, if you’ve seen it, private – what is your name, pony?"

"Ah! Private First Class Jute Weave! The battery commander sent me and a pal back here in the courier boat to pass the news back to command! Well, the pal, really. I was just there to help paddle the skiff. I figured y’all might have an interest in this sort of news, too?"

Ah. One of Brother Ground Frog’s informers. I waved him back to the sergeant’s desk, where he usually met with his confidential informants. Most of them had a great deal more tact than this flighty fool.

In a previous life, he must have been a bird. Certainly twittered like one.

A song opened the gates of the rebellion.

The protected waters beyond the defensive positions on the upriver islands were crowded with civilian freighters, docks, and moored hulks. The Housa above her confluence with the great river was a wide, almost still lake held back as much by the pressure of the waters of the larger river, as any geographic quirk of its own. These still waters were defined by a series of low but dry islands upon which the great armies of the expeditionary force had encamped, relatively low from the viewpoint of highland ponies and donkeys, but high enough above the rivers and the waters that inundations generally didn't wash away the logistics-camps and support areas. Once upon a time, the Imperial Fleet had made the Housa Bottomwaters its preferred anchorage.

Before the Imperial Fleet had been destroyed, inundated by a flood of overwhelming rebellion.

Now, just over a year later, our turncoat armada was welcomed inside the Bottomwaters to echoing choruses of the rebels' favored carols, song exchanged across the calm waters. The blood in the water gave a slight pinkness to the scene, but even as we sailed downstream, our glamours were spreading out, diluting, until the evidence of our violent mutiny against the Loyalist cause was lost in the vast volume of the Bottomwaters.

The White Rose should have not taken us at our face value. But they did. Their joy overwhelmed their good sense, and ships which had not even a week earlier done their level best to burn each other to the water-line, cruised lazily side-by-side, laughing and singing and dancing from the pure joy of it all.

The landings were a little less open-hooved. Some officers on their side started trying to slow down the rush for the docking-slips, and the merging together of the lost ponies of the upper expedition and those of the greater expeditionary force. We were the prodigal mares, we had been lost, and now were found. There was nothing to be done, but to slaughter the fatted pumpkin, and feast our return to the family's bosom.

I thought about the rumour, as I walked back to the holding pens, looking over the herd. They say that masters have favorites among their thralls, but at least among the MPs, we kept our tools in common. I picked out two of the fresher walkers, collected in the last three months by Deep Thorn and I after that big push beside the northeastern levee complex on the mainland. I pulled on one of my fetishes, and activated their charms, instructing them to come out into the outer pen where I could run them through the manual of control and authority.

Too many artists cut corners on maintenance. You can’t rely on your tools if you don’t keep them properly maintained – blades whetted, needles sharpened, fetishes refreshed and properly placed. Ghouls under full and proper control.

I eyed a nick on the fetish of the donkey-ghoul, and rubbed at it with my hoof. It wasn’t such that I needed to repair or replace the device, but it was something to keep an eye on. I knew, better than most, that if we let the control-fetishes decay or degrade, our tools could suddenly break out of control and turn on their wielders.

It could happen even with perfectly maintained equipment, but shoddy and decrepit materials certainly increased the chances.

My inspection complete, I ordered the two walkers to trail me as I departed the station for the eastward docks. I wanted to see what was going on today in those warehouses out that way. Too much unsavory activity had been passing through those supply-warehouses. Somepony in the unit assigned to that depot was up to something, and I intended to find out what, exactly, that was.

A military policemare’s duty never rests. It hangs around our withers like a heavy coil of rope, or an ill-fitting hauberk.

Nopony met my eyes as I stalked through the lanes of the base. There were more ponies in the street than I expected at this time of day. And they were all moving towards the eastern docks. Perhaps the informant hadn’t been exaggerating? Well, any sort of rumour gets the slackers of the rear echelon twittering and muttering and shuffling about.

This was why I preferred the company of my thralls. They didn’t have much conversation, but at least they had a certain degree of dignity and composure. They could focus.

They could also tear your throat out and eat your intestines if you didn’t take care, but that was the way of the world.

A strange sound echoed over the waters in the distance. The wind muffled it a bit, as did the sussation and rhubarb of the gathering crowd, but it almost sounded like…

Singing?

I prompted my two thralls to kneel in the dirt of the street, and I climbed up on their back, using them as a stepping-stool to reach a watch-platform that was elevated over the landside end of the nearest pier. There was already a guard standing her post on the platform, but I gestured her to stand to one side so that I could see what was going on.

It was times like this that I regretted my squat stature. No stallion would ever seek me out for my tall and lithe figure, I fear. But don’t underestimate those of us who are low to the ground – we’re closer to gutting you like a fish from down here.

In the distance, between the islands which held forts #5 and #6, there were shapes moving slowly through the channel. Tall masts, full of half-torn sails, and scorched decks. Bloodstains which were visible even from my distant vantage.

And decks full of ponies swaying back and forth, singing what was increasingly recognizable as "What a Mighty Fortress Is Our Garden". And over those distant sails, strange, makeshift banners, which could, if one was charitable, grant to be White Rose sigils.

Nopony had ever called me charitable.

Our pinnaces were now coursing forward, guiding the galleys and stranger-looking ships towards the centre of the Bottomwaters anchorage. But some were coming this way, ewes escaping the sheep-dog guidance of the pinnaces. The singing of hymns and anthems continued, and soon enough, there were two strange half-galley ships approaching the moorings of my pier. I didn’t recognize the configuration of these boats, too small for a war-galley, but still far bigger than your average pinnace or skiff. And they boasted huge, horrible-looking devices on their foredecks, splattered liberally with blood and gore, and dripping with some foul, malodorous substance that I could smell all the way up on the lookout platform.

The fools, hobbledehoys and hoopleheads down below in the gathered mob were now exchanging songs with the oar-ponies of the stranger-ships, and the armed, bloodstained warriors that crowded their decks.

As they tied up at the moorings, I saw several ponies come running back, clearly brimming over with some sort of rumour or bit of gossip they’d drawn from thirty seconds conversation across the closing waters and the tumult of the off-key singing which overwhelmed the senses. I leaned down over the edge of the platform, and yelled at one of them, demanding an explanation.

"What ships? What ships? Lieutenant, better to ask *which ponies*? They say they’re the Third Army! And the 21st and 23rd marine battalions!"

"The Third Army is lost! They died to a pony, didn’t they? Or shut into the lich-legates' slaughterpens, which is just another way of saying the same thing!"

"They’d argue otherwise! And who else would it be? Do you think some random collection of easterner slaves would know enough to send up the Rosey Cross, and sing the auld hymns? It’s a Rose-blessed miracle, is what it is! The loyalist fools, they tried to turn battle-hardened soldiers into oar-pony slaves! Hahahaha!"

My quarry laughed and danced, avoiding the hooves of my thralls, which I tried to use to restrain her long enough to ask my fill. The crowd bumped and jostled below, and knocked my tools off-balance enough that they failed to hold the knowledgeable mare, and she disappeared into the press.

The gangways were coming down, and the oar-benches of the strangely armed ships were suddenly emptied, and poured out over the planks of the piers. They met the joyous mob, and mingled, and merged, until suddenly there was no longer the ponies of the ships, and the ponies of the shore, but one promiscuous mass of singing, dancing equinity.
I was trapped on my platform, but my ghouls weren’t. I gave them their instructions, and sent them back to the station.

We’d need reinforcements to get this under control.

The officers and the military police swarmed around the inevitable, failing to keep anypony from tying up, anypony from leaving their galleys, failed to keep anything from happening, in point of fact. The stiff enforcers of dogma and discipline were, in the event, too few, too small, too hated to be listened to, even when they really ought to have been given heed. Poor fanatics! They were right – but it wasn't enough to be right, one had to be loved as well. And they had made themselves terribly hated over the years.

The ponies who were encamped upon the two islands our fleet moored itself around were mostly support-staff, cooks, logisticians, warehouse-ponies, and assorted rear-echelon types. In other words, the rear-area mother-buckers. REMBs were jolly, useless sorts in any kind of army, but especially in such as these, who had been fighting a joyless, savage sort of grinding attritional siege. The Bride had made of the Second Mouth another Rima-front, and that meant an endless, mindless, incredible expense of materials and resources and ponypower poured down a sewer-hole, nothing to be recouped or recovered from the expenditure thereof.

These weren't the ponies who fought and died, but they were the ones who sent off those who did, and mourned those they sent off, saw off, fed and clothed and healed and supported, and they had seen those who they had so sent off, die like flies.

It was so rare to have those that they sent into the grinder to return. Our appearance, miraculous and wondrous as it was, sent them into paroxysms of giddy hilarity. They produced multiple scratch bands, all strings and simple drums, with a few brass instruments here and there. The landing parties that poured out over the docks degenerated almost immediately into dance-circles, dance-parties, orgies of song and joy and sheer happiness.

And it wasn't as if the Order ponies hadn't been suppressing their own homesickness, their need for their fellows and for fellow-feeling. They were honest and true converts to Cherie's cause, such as it was, but that didn't make them Company ponies. They were Westerners, through and through, and these also were Westerners, similar at a base, cultural, genetic, familial level. More than a few ponies among the Order met their cousins, their siblings, their fellow-town-folk among the rear-support ponies. These supply bases, full of cousins and compatriots, were eager for the invasion when we over-ran them like a barbarian horde of joyous reunion.

I sat on my platform, bored out of my mind. The pony who was supposed to be standing this post had left when her shift was up - no doubt to join the ongoing festivities, damn her - and the replacement hadn’t been able to get through the crowds to climb up into the lookout nest. So I sat, alone, above hundreds if not thousands of carousing celebrants. Waves of harmony washed over the swirling masses, the same damn hymns repeated again and again. One could only hear “How Grows Her Garden” so many times before one was ready to give up the faith and go take up Peacockery or Grogar-style diabolism.

The sun had long since set, and the ships had emptied out into the warehouses and depots. My thralls had returned with a message from the captain back at the station. She’d come in from a conference on the mainland, without, sadly, any reinforcements. They’d decided to let the new ponies and the rear-area fools dance out their foolishness without interruption. Come dawn, they’d all be exhausted, malleable, and easily herded. Then we could pen the unknown ponies back on their ships if necessary, or in converted warehouses if any of them showed any signs of being a threat.

Well, they’d caused enough damage to the loyalist ships, or so I’d heard them brag at the foot of my platform. Proud ponies, many of them, braggarts even. Full of pride, full of themselves. How they’d hidden their lights under a bushel, how they’d spent *months* shamming, shucking and jiving, pretending to be beat-down servants, slaves – destroyed ponies. How they’d *built* this grand fleet which had smashed up our veteran navy and killed our sailors, how they’d hidden themselves in plain sight, rowing their oars, sitting their benches, keeping their heads down until the moment came.

So proud were they of the slaughter they had engineered – slaughter of their fellow Rose, slaughter of the loyalists, slaughter of themselves. I heard one mourn-celebrate their friends, who had died in chains, crushed on the benches by a collision, flung against their own bulwarks by their oars thrown up by a ship’s beak-ram. All towards that one, single, savage moment when they unhinged their cuffs, threw off their chains, and overran their ships’ sailors and marines.

I listened to them, and to the supply-ponies who burbled in admiration at the mutineers’ cleverness, their intrepidity, and I pondered the sorts of ponies who could do such a thing, endure such a life, week after week, month after month, whip-lash by whip-lash. Who could turn a smiling, servile face towards their tormenters, and not be caught out.

I thought of my unit, and our orders, and our duty. And how these ponies were the exact types we laboured every day, every night, to dig out of our ranks, to uncover, to root out. These were dangerous ponies, and they had flipped the world over like a bar-room table in order to rejoin the revolution. What else were they hiding behind their jubilant, cheerful muzzles?

As the sun rose over the eastern edge of the world, the Captain and my fellows began driving their thralls forward to clear the streets of half-drunken, exhausted revelers. Some ponies were penned up in empty warehouses. The rest were chivvied back onto their ships. I joined the push as it reached my platform, dropping down onto the pier, and guiding my two thralls to join the skirmish-line that was advancing, pushing, guiding as we went. It didn’t even take the threat of violence.

The moaning, stinking undead we directed were all the persuasion we generally needed to break up unsanctioned gatherings. Even gatherings as out of hoof and over-sized as this one had been. Although some of the mutineers gave us the sort of looks that made me wonder about their theological leanings. That was actual, natural hatred I saw in their side-glances and gritted-teeth grimaces. You see that sort of attitude among the civilians and fresh recruits, but from veterans? And yet these were the survivors, supposedly, of a terrible, annihilating campaign. A campaign that seems to have killed seven out of eight ponies sent into the cauldron. These were the toughest of the tough, the luckiest of the lucky. They’d seen more death than I’ve seen in all my years with the military police, even as a registered necromancer up to my withers in undead thralls day in, day out.

Where had they gotten this undisciplined loathing of our tools? We weren’t foals, marinating in the pious witterings of the simplified scriptures. We were mares of the world. You couldn’t go to war without a proper ghoul-corps. It was like trying to fight naked, unbarded.

What was in these strange returnees’ minds?

I could not, I found, join in the festivities. I was not a Westerner, nor a White Rose fanaticist, nor even a real pony, though I wore the semblance of a Westerner, a fanatic, and a pony. I was run off my hooves with the maintenance of all the illusions and glamours that had sold the 'mutiny', and although my seniors in the warlocks' coven had kept the magnitude of the problem from crushing me flatter than a pancake with donkey ears, it was still more than enough to keep all of us crazy busy. We had teams of Order ponies and sailor-donkeys making the physical changes in the ships, and as each were completed, we could loosen another set of phantasms, allowing them to dissolve into the actual ship underneath.

Cherie's larger timberlings had joined my little corps of ship-size timber-ratlings, and were hiding here and there in the ships, awaiting their cue when the time came. Those had to be kept veiled, and I was busy throughout the evening with the clean-up and renewing my spellwork on the greater timberlings.

I missed one tartarus of a party. Three different bands kept the dancing going long into the night, and I'm told that some that had eyes to see, saw wonderful things. The Nightmare dancing with a Cherie-Filly - and five identical Fillies dancing a fairy-ring beside one of the string-bands, somehow commanding their own little plot of packed dirt in the swirling press of real, physical ponies swaying and laughing. Nightmares, Princesses, Fillies - all mingled with the singing, dancing, celebratory Order and their kin among the support-ponies. There was the celebration that the White Rose saw, and then there was the bacchanalia that the Order experienced, and although the two shared the same dance-floor, they were not at all the same joyous occasion.

The White Rose celebrated the return of their lost foals. The Order danced the fulfillment of their prophesies and sacred promises. And as they celebrated, we took a census in the midst of the dancing and the jubilation. Targets were cataloged and ranked, and the ponies and donkeys who stayed on board and did not join in on the celebration, observed through the eyes of the celebrants, and made careful notes.

We did not, mind you, seek to recruit primarily the happy, joyous simple ponies who simply danced and sang and caroused. Those fruit would fall in their own time, without any real effort or planning. It was the ones who held back, who watched, hard-eyed, who went and collected the military police. Who were the military police.

The White Rose's version of the MPs were not quite what I'd become accustomed to in the Army of the North. Those sleepy detachments among the northern regimentals were small details assigned to deal with drunkards tying one on, and to collect stragglers among the regiments as they marched. These, the White Rose's military police – they were heavily armed and barded ponies among the unarmed rear-echelon. And, we soon discovered, they included active necromancers commanding their own squads of thralled undead.

They held back until the MP necromancers could assemble a large enough force to clear the dance-floors. The support-ponies went amiably, nodding passively at the bullying MPs and their shambling horrors. More than a few of the Order, however, broke cover to snarl at the dead things, and the hated thugs who commanded them.

Command had to crack virtual heads across the princess radio before we got ourselves back under control. The necromancers herded the 'mutineers' back onto our moored ships, not responding to our entreaties or blandishments.

The evaluation teams concurred, unanimously. The military police were our highest priority target. They were the pivot-point upon which our plans would hinge.

More than a few ponies slept well into the next morning, among the White Rose. The arrival of the mutineers and their ships had unsettled the sleeping schedules of many otherwise quite responsible soldiers. And there were fewer responsible ponies among the rear echelons than, perhaps, one might have desired if one was in charge of keeping things on track and ship-shape.

We in the warlocks' coven had had even less sleep than the rest, nor any rest at all, for that matter. But magic can substitute for rest if one is careful with ones' cantrips, and so I and Gibblets and the others slipped out of our hiding-places under heavy veils, to track down the encampment of the military police that kept order in the depots and supply-bases. We took the better part of the morning, finding our bearings, and marking the relevant tent-clusters for the pony who would come after us.

Too few of the MPs had taken to their beds, anyways. Damn their discipline and stern rigour.

I wanted them more than ever.

In the afternoon, several officers and staffers from the main army arrived to evaluate the new arrivals, and they met with our leadership and the survivors among the White Rose's battered naval officers. We had done serious damage to their fleet, and it was currently under the command of a lieutenant commander – I think. It was somewhat hard to follow the ranks of the rebels' naval command structure. She was actually a "Second Class Ship-Archon"; I'm not sure why their naval ranks were so strange, their army and marine rank system was the same as any other military force in Tambelon I'd ever heard of.

Stomper was among the leadership who met with the White Rose, but we didn't put her forth as the commander of the mutiny. Whispering Wheat had been a sergeant-major before the destruction of the expedition, and chances were good that Wheat would be known by at least some of his peers in the parent army-group. Best that they had a familiar face to put to the mutiny; it wouldn't be good if they started questioning what they were hearing and seeing.

The meetings went on long into the evening, never quite amounting to interrogation, but certainly drilling down deep, as the officers and staffers did their due diligence. It was, after all, an amazing story, and amazing narratives required exacting examination, for the sake of all concerned.

At least they didn't appoint a Grogar's Advocate. But on the other hand, they didn't seem likely to canonize us, either.

The first session wrapped up late into the night, with the understanding that we would resume tomorrow. They clearly wanted to talk about the destruction of the expeditionary force, and why we had been spared. Most of the truth could be told, but the details… did we want to start planting stories about visions of the White Rose Reborn? Debate went on that night in the Mistress's dream-world.

But Cherie wasn't there to join in with the debates, nor was I. She took me with her, when she went walking that night. We passed through darkness into shadow, and from her hiding-place on one of the great galleys, we shadow-walked into the first of the military police barracks, my magics hiding the white thestral from the curious eyes of our targets, while hers passed us through the shadow-spaces.

She would stop beside an occupied cot, and lay her leathery wing over the head of the sleeping MP, her eyes closed in concentration. I kept guard over Cherie as she plumbed the dreams of each target in turn, seeding – what, I don't know in their innermost night-imaginings. My recruiting had been in public, in the open air, witnessed, seen, critiqued, challenged. I could get away with nothing.

But nopony but Cherie herself and her targets knew what she was leaving behind her as we worked our way through the barracks. She walked in darkness, both literal and figurative. She came as a thief in the night, and left like a day-dream. What she left behind her? Even her targets may not have exactly have remembered what they had dreamed.

But their innermost selves, that part which communicates with our outer selves only partially, and obliquely – those would remember, would recall. And it was that innermost self that Cherie directed her appeals. Did she present herself as the one, the true White Rose, reborn? Did she merely offer herself as herself, and sell that dream of life in the midst of death? Or did she simply walk through their night-dreams and leave them to draw their own conclusions?

Cherie refused to say. She kept her secrets.

My dreams that night, and the night after that, were strange, haunted. The apparitions we’d seen in the night previous to the great mutiny stalked me in my lucid imaginings, and whispered imprecations against my faith, my talents, my honour. The monstrous fillies swarmed about me, tearing down my servants, my thralls. Tangles of wild roses rose up all about us as I fought through the dream-mist, tearing apart thrall after thrall, their terrible, burning thorns shredding those revenants which I had in daytime spent so many hours restraining, constricting, binding to the service of the Rose. And yet, those mockeries of the White Rose denounced me from their shadows, chanting fragments of scripture and commentary, driving spikes into all of my daytime self-assurances, justifications for the use of my talents in the service of the Rose Herself.

My dreams were merciless. They made no allowances for the practicalities of modern warfare, of the needs of the service. The texts were the texts, the scripture was the scripture. And we – our compromises, our necessities – were nothing but justifications as far as my haunted dreams were concerned.

Damn them.

I was dead on my hooves by the time we were done. Not even stepping through the wide-eyed thralls of the military-police necromancers' thrall-coffles provided any serious challenge. The “nopony here, dead things” cantrips I had developed in my apprentice days remained a solid construct, and impenetrable by the lesser undead. It didn't matter that these rotting watch-dogs were wide awake 24/7 – if they couldn't see, smell, or hear us, who cares how alert they were?

It was the same tricks that Obscured Blade had used to assassinate the Beau in the Shambles. I refuse to feel guilty that a trick I developed had given the traitors a way into the blind spot of a nominal ally.

After all, we'd gone over the other side now. The only constant was the Company and the Spirit. Anything else and anypony else was – well, not nothing. But negotiable.

We walked away in a handy shadow before the sun crested the limb of the world. I was exhausted by the time we'd hidden ourselves away in the hold of one of the galleys, protected by snuffling, affectionate timberlings. They kind of liked me, but by the Peacock Angel, they loved Cherie.

I wasn't awake for the endless dissection of the campaign in the valley of the upper Housa. None of it was surprising, anyways. The Order's ponies had mulled over their officers' defeat, and their long passage through the fire. They had lots of opinions about what and how and why when it came to that battle's catastrophic failure.

They poured every syllable of those opinions over the officers and staffers of the army group's command structure. After all, those ponies had given them the officers who had led them into that unwinnable fight. Who had left them in a forward pocket for a week longer than they should have been, who had refused to retreat until we had been square across every line of retreat.

The officers were well and truly distracted by the after-action reports and the debates thereof. They didn't even think to question again the miracle of the 'mutiny'. Or to notice the strangely withdrawn affect of their MP escorts.

The seeds Cherie had planted were deep in the dirt, and although it couldn't be seen here on the surface, down below beyond sight and smell and hearing, they were germinating in warm and dark soil. And more than a few officers among the military police were notable by their heavy, bagged eyes and haunted expressions that day, and the days which were to come.

The Plague

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SBMS171

I wish I could write that I listened to Feufollet's master performance, rapt with admiration and pride. I wish I could write that I followed each detail of the unfolding scam as they tailored it to circumstances and the unexpected. I wish I could write all of that, but life and the world had its way with my intentions, as they will.

About four weeks before the new Housa Fleet left for its rendezvous with cock-eyed destiny, sick ponies started trickling back out of the Riverlands along the supply routes running precariously down the unpopulated and deserted roads winding into that region. Most of them were carters or sick or wounded being evacuated out of the war-zone, but some of them were deserters and civilians who had, somehow, survived until now in the heart of armageddon.

The illness bore a strong resemblance to that ugly, merciless flu which had lashed the Company several years ago, during our sojourn in Dance Hall. The sickness provoked extensive dehydration, a yellowing cast to ones' sclera, bloody phlegm, and eventually, death. The one notable distinction between our previous bout with this plague and the one that made its way out of the Riverlands, was that this one seemed to produce almost instantaneous undead among its expired victims. What I mean by that, is that the victims were rising right out of their sickbeds, almost before their care-takers, if any, could react to their deaths.

I know of three doctors and physicians who were killed by their own patients before we got the news, and put safety procedures into place. I'm not sure how many relatives and volunteers were likewise taken unawares by their patients or loved ones, but the scale of the problem was such that it threatened to touch off a serious ghoul outbreak.

No, I shouldn't understate the problem. It did touch off an outbreak. Civilians between the war-zone and Rantoul who had been holding onto their households in the face of bison depredations and the raiding columns of the White Rose, were dislodged by the plague. A new wave of refugees began moving along the roads heading north and east. And those refugees also carried the plague with them.

We had made plans to fort up in the Shambles, and ride out the chaos after the Order's grand mutiny brought rage and fury to our door. Instead, the chaos arrived ahead of schedule, arriving before the mutiny could actually touch off. We didn't call off the plan, but I certainly argued for that action in my meetings with the Captain, the Lieutenant, and the Spirit.

I barely was able to secure pegasi transport for my medical corps and their security details. I had wanted each medico assigned two whole sections as security, each of my people working in pairs. But I barely got four armsponies to the physician. I ran around in a panic for nearly a week after I realized that, fearful that Obscured Blade would take the opportunity to ambush one of my teams in their exposed state. But in the event, nopony saw hide nor tail of the old traitor or any of his surviving conspirators. It is possible that he was out of position to descend on our medical teams; it was also possible that he was as wary of the plague as any of the rest of us.

It had been particularly hard on unicorns, after all.

We had full stocks of willow bark extract, and all of Rye Daughter's regimental physicians had learned their fever-reduction lessons well enough. Willow trees from the far North to the banks of the Housa had been stripped naked on our marches south. Additional drugs and potions had been stocked among the regimental infirmaries.

I was proud of how well we had broken the physicians of the Army of the Housa to the Company method of treatment. Only one of the doctors eaten by their own patients had been a doctor with the regimentals – a fool of a dogmatist with one of the Verdebaie regiments in the far west. I charioted in on reports of that debacle, and set up shop towards the front of the bow-shock of the catastrophe.

Due to the losses, the Lieutenant had detailed a full eight armsponies to the support of myself and one of the bulls, a half-grown calf named Longhocks. The initial deployment was more of an assault landing than a medical detail. It was the first time I'd had occasion to break out the barding in a while. We hooked up with some crypto-Company members of the affected regiment, and put down the rampaging ghouls who had risen out of the wreckage of the V Verdebaie's former infirmary. The regiment's second physician had forted up not far outside of the lost wards of the infirmary, but a half-dozen regimentals had been mangled in the fight against the risen undead.

They were a particularly juicy and strong strain of ghoul, I thought. Longhocks distinguished himself, using a rolled-up cot as an improvised club, striking down two undead in my defense. I'm afraid my missing eye left me rather vulnerable in battle. I'll have to keep that in mind in future encounters.

Once our Company and crypto-Company armsponies put down the shambling former flu victims, the surviving doctor and Longhocks and I evaluated the battlefield. The survivor was a jenny named Porte Etroite, and she'd proven herself a worthy physician. I eyed the remains of her idiot collegue, and pondered how bad it would have been if she'd been lost to this new thing. I turned to her.

"Lieutenant Etroite what do you fear more, rising like this idiot, or the worship of a minor devil who can protect you against this sort of thing?"

She stared at me like I had grown donkey ears. "What on Tambelon are you babbling about, sir?"

"Have you seen us blading in the ghoul-bitten before?"

"Yes, I assumed it was some kind of superstition. Like bloodletting."

"Oh, be still my trembling heart. A jenny after my own gall bladder. But no. Perhaps you saw what just happened, how the ghouls went down under Company blades, but not regimental ones?"

"There's a dozen regimentals I saw cutting them up like sausage."

"Those weren't regimentals, not really."

"What do you mean – oh. The scars."

"Yes, the scars. Membership in the Company cult has, hrm, benefits. I've never seen a Company casualty rise undead. And weapons in our hooves can put down ghouls like they were living ponies. But – more importantly – I've never seen a ghoul bite fester on a Company pony."

"Sawbones, are you proposing a prophylactic membership in your demonic cult for physicians? And, I must add, as it is far more important than what you propose to do to the others – for me?"

"Yeah, I think I am."

"What do I have to do? Dance naked in the moonlight? Kill a puppy? Paddling party?"

I grinned nastily. "Don't tempt me, Etroite."

I'd not expected it, but the Nightmare showed up as soon as I bladed in Porte Etroite. To say that Etroite was surprised, was to understate the effect.

"Sawbones, you son of a mule! I thought your diabolism was figurative! What tartarus-spawn did I just sell my soul to?"

"Oh, relax, my little donkey," cooed the Nightmare. "I barely eat souls anymore. And certainly not souls as bitter and self-involved as yours!"

As the physician-jenny stared bug-eyed at her new Mistress, the Spirit laughed in delight.

"Oh, Sawbones, I think this is going to be fun. Let's save some lives, ponies!"

Thus began my own little expansion project, my addition to the evangelism of Tambelon to the worship of the Spirit. Feufollet and the non-coms weren't the only ones who could spread our demented little faith willy-nilly throughout this fallen half-tartarus. Might as well put the Spirit to work for my purposes. Everypony else was doing it.

And while we were at it, I convened a little meeting among the non-commissioned officers, and told them I was retracting my objection as Annalist and Acolyte to the promiscuous use of the folkway 'blading' ceremony. They were free to spread the faith as far and wide as they could. More than a few took that as an excuse to run wild in the nearby regiments.

If the Imperials tried to come at the Company, they might find a surprising number of sleepers among their troops.

The crisis got us up out of our preparatory crouch, and leaning forward into the wave of sick ponies and shambling undead. No matter what the problem or the dilemma you've gotten yourself buried in, an incipient ghoul apocalypse will always put things in perspective. I made the rounds of the regimental infirmaries, and offered the 'prophylactic'. Not everypony took the offering, but enough that I was satisfied that further outbreaks would be self-sealing. And those who signed up offered further early-warning listening posts among the medical staff of the military.

The dreamworld turned out to be an unexpected side-benefit that many of the doctors and surgeons took aggressive advantage of; my dream-university was suddenly crawling with curious physicians, picking my unconscious brain. Thankfully, many of them built their own little extensions quickly enough, and visited me to mock my misunderstandings and misrepresentations of an institution which I've only seen from outside of its figurative gates.

I like to think I took it all with good humour, but I suppose you'd have to apply to a neutral outside observer to judge that properly.

So it was, when the scheduled mutiny occurred, the mainland was fully occupied with a monumental battle against a ghoul-inducing flu. Nopony noticed the chaos on the river from the loyalist side of the wall. There were sickly civilians scattered throughout the baronies and the neighboring duchies, and ghouls wandering eastwards into the controlled districts. The regiments of the Army of the North were fully occupied controlling their districts, and the forward movement of the logistical columns had been all but curtailed.

The Bride and her army were moving eastwards even before the fleet on the Housa mutinied. The siege had been conceded, the Second Mouth was in the hooves of the rebellion. What soldiers the Bride retained in the intact regiments were starving, those who weren't down with the plague. It was move towards the depots, or struggle forward with whatever mass of controlled thralls she could control among the dead remains of what had been her army.

Or, at least, this was my conclusion from the reports. We had to extrapolate from a hoof-full of pegasi overflights, because there was zero communication from the westwards once the carters came tumbling back. The Imperials outside of the Riverlands found themselves tied up trying to keep the new wave of ghouls from getting inside of the eastern districts. We had only just gotten the civilians to return to these battered precincts. A second evacuation would wreck those lands for good, leave them as blasted as the Riverlands or southern Pepin. Or at least, this was the fear.

The news about the mutiny was largely confined to those who had been affected. Namely, those ponies on the pinnaces and the hoof-full of galleys which had been excluded from the general mutiny. I'm not sure if the sailor-donkeys who controlled those few galleys were aware that they had been deliberately spared, but the oarponies disappeared as soon as there was an opportunity. And the marines on those ships had to be replaced – they were Order ponies, after all!

We slipped our ringers into the situation two nights after the remaining 'loyalist' ships retreated eastwards. We'd recruited heavily among the imprisoned Coriolanian guards who had been effectively kidnapped in the course of the Order's long infiltration; a surprisingly percentage of them had been interested in the opportunity offered. More than 70%, I figure. More than enough that we were able to swap out the actual Order ponies from the 'loyalist' marine units on the few galleys left to the Imperial cause. And, more than incidentally - to serve under the increasingly crazed Commodore's control.

That fool hadn't noticed that her armsponies had completely switched over. Nor the increasingly shortage of oar-ponies on his ships. They kept putting marines into the benches as we slipped Order ponies out of the ships, night after night.

The pinnaces that surrounded and protected the Commodore's few galleys were entirely loyal to the Spirit, mind you. Feufolllet's seizure by evangelism had been complete where it came to the crews of the Coriolanus-staffed pinnaces. Those donkeys and ponies had seen which side of things the new cult was spreading – they knew a winning horse when they saw one running in the circus. So they kept their heads down, their muzzle shut, and we surrounded the increasingly disoriented Commodore and her loyal sailors with a swarm of ponies who were at the same time loyal to the Spirit and Cherie, and yet, were such that when the time came… well, the Commodore's version of reality bore no resemblance to what was actually surrounding him. She came off as insane.

She sent off messenger after messenger from her landing-zone on the middle Housa. More than a few found General Knochehart, eventually. It was in the midst of our crisis, of the surge of sick civilians and carters, and ghouls streaming out of the affected regions in the west. Every regiment on that side of the deployment of the Army of the North was strained to the utmost, keeping the wave of dead things from breaking into the winter districts of the middle Housa Valley. Knochehart knew that we were the core of her defense against the undead surge, and had encouraged us to recruit as many members among the regimentals as we could find. Too many weeks in which the Company's recruits and its core armsponies had been the only true defense against the undead, had impressed upon the General the value of the Company and its cult. But she still kept us at cannon's length. As useful as we were, she had no interest in secretive mystery cults.

But no matter how distanced she was, she still wasn't inclined to hear the imprecations of an unreliable Coriolanus imbecile when it came to that pony's accusations against the Company. Especially when it came to her complaints against the 'III Verdebaie'. The General sent a notice questioning what the Commodore was on about, since what was left of the III Verdebaie had been shipped north months ago. When the time came, they would find that the marine complement was composed of a Coriolanus unit known as the 'IV Coriolanus'. The remaining ponies among the Commodore's surviving marines on her two galleys would swear that this had always been the case. And they were, after all, Coriolanians. Just not, perhaps, militia-Coriolanians.

If investigators applied to the Coriolanian city council, they would, of course, discover that there was no such regiment on the militia rolls, or rather – perhaps there was such a unit, but it was somewhere else, or not mobilized, or who knows what. We hadn't bothered to extend the legend that deeply. To be honest, our command-council had anticipated that the deception would fall apart before this layer had been penetrated.

In the pessimistic depths of my heart, I had expected us to be besieged by outraged loyalists a few days after the mutiny. I knew intellectually that even in a normal polity, news only moves at the speed of couriers, and the Bride's imperium was nopony's idea of a normal country. But in that deep, dark, guilty corner of my unreasoning heart, I expected retribution to be swift, divine, and unaccountable. The very rocks would speak our perfidy, the burbling waters of the Housa would whisper our deceit, the wind would sigh our betrayals. I knew our employer to be a toxic horror, a dead thing animated. I knew the White Rose as they stood - the rebellion itself – was no better. Even if they weren't controlled by secret liches hidden among the revolutionary leadership as everypony but I believed so fervently.

But this course we had taken scared me – more than ghouls, more than the ravening plague, more than arrows and axe-blades and that sneaking traitor Obscured Blade himself. Because we, in choosing to back our Cherie, our little golden-child in her bid to become the thing she resembled – we had betrayed a contract. We had broken our covenant with the merciless universe. Although we trotted hither and yon in caparison and chamfron, although we whetted our blades, carried our lances, waved our banners – although we continued to do all those things we had done for generations, we were no longer the Company, the Company which had saved me from my life in perpetual indenturement.

The Black Company had, in a very real sense, dissolved itself, split apart like a ripe seed-pod, right down the middle. And we, tumbling out of the burst pod, found each of us our individual gusts, the better to carry our spores, our seeds upon the winds.

Feufollet, with her seductions among the sailor-ponies; Cherie and her Order; Obscured Blade and his demented parody of the Company – even the sergeants and the corporals with their ready hoof with a blade on the battle-field and the triage tents.

And now I, with my little conspiracy to preserve the lives and the effectiveness of the physicians of the loyalist regiments, and their cronies, and whomever they needed to save from the ravages of the plague – oh, once I'd put the Spirit in the hooves of doctors and physicians desperate for any solution to the ghoul-plague, I might as well have found a printing-press and published a broadside on how to join the Company's demon-cult - send two deniers and your forwarding address to this address for full details!

(If I could actually find a printing-press. The Bride's intendants made a practice of burning printing-presses and their owner-operators when they found them. I'd heard rumors of active presses, but never had the time to dig through the underground to find if there was any truth to it. I've only seen a few printed broadsides; it was an enslaving offense to have one in your possession, or so I've been told.)

And so was the state of affairs when, in a break between punishing snow-storms which had shut down all traffic throughout the region, the first straggling elements of the Bride's battered army arrived in Rantoul.

Kicking At The Pricks

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FFMS045?

"Salt, Salt, what do you think you're doing?" asked the abomination.

I was struggling under the yoke of a heavy plow, harrowing the back forty of my damnable father's damnable farm. I'd hated that miserable, barren plot of land. He'd gotten the worst soil of the worst portion of his family's ancestral land, and we'd all laboured like mules to wring the slightest grain of corn from that bitter soil. I had been overjoyed when the ball came up at the lottery, and I had been picked by the draft-board. It had been the most wonderful and glorious day of my short life.

The white-furred horror floated over my bowed head, a nasty sneer marring that beautiful face. Her long, beautiful grey wings flapped lazily, keeping her centered over my misery. Her cats-eyed visage watched over my sweat, my struggle.

"This, abomination, is what I escaped, to become what I am. To be the noble mage in the service of the righteous. To command the dead, for the benefit of the living. This was my station, before I was raised above it by those who sought me out in the ranks."

"Oh, really. Don't be so snobbish. Farming is a noble and life-loving pursuit that – no, you're right. It's a miserable existence. No armspony who can possibly escape the grasp of the farming life ever truly misses it. But mark you – the life in this soil, however sour, is still better than all the thralls in all the mages' grasp from here to the gates of Pepin City! Look at them, filly."

Suddenly , the dry and barren acres of my idiot father's worthless farm was replaced by a thrall holding-pen, and the traces hung from my suddenly severed yoke. The dead things crouched, mindless, a half-dozen to each stall. Their fetishes bobbed above their empty eyes.

"Not life, but rather, that ugly emptiness that takes up residence after all life has fled. The negation of living. The hungry, miserable, empty void. Don't look too deep into their eyes, the abyss will suck you right down, drain you like a lake whose dam has been breached. But, I tell you-"

And that was the moment that I escaped the insufferable attention of my nightly haunt. Night after night, dream after dream, the Nightmare had chased me through my slumbers. The only escape was those moments when somepony woke me from my troubled sleep, and I rose against the hour towards whatever emergency desired my attention, my presence.

The howling in the distance gave me some indication of why the guard had woken me. Not inside the barracks, but nearby – near enough that the noise and commotion was audible here, behind closed doors. The rest of the barracks-room was rising up, everypony's rest interrupted by the tumult.

Ground Frog was missing. I followed the guard out of the barracks, pulling a coat over my fur against the winter chill. The rain and sleet had left a slippery sheen over all the surfaces of the camp, leaving the hoofing uncertain and unsteady. The noise was coming from the nearby thrall-pens, the ones we used to store the military police's designated undead.

Inside the pens was the missing Brother Ground Frog, Ground Frog, a long knife, and a quite surprising amount of gore and filth. He was spinning like a bison in full fury, dancing wildly, cackling, the gore and filth streaming off of his blade in sprays all over the straw and the surfaces of the stalls. Surrounding the maddened necromancer were the heaped remains of what once had been intact ghouls, collapsed like marionettes with their strings cut. Further away from the lunatic military-police stallion, were the rest of the thralls, standing, mindless, aimless, unafraid, unmoved, dead-eyed. Even the dissolution, the demolition of their fellows failed to draw from those dead things any sort of response. The ghouls really, truly did not experience the world like a living pony; death meant nothing to the dead, gore nothing to the appetites which wore dead flesh like I wore my cotton-coat.

Ground Frog was surrounded by guards, who were trying with all of their might, all of their slippery hooves, to restrain him from his further rampage across the splattered pens. It was only the guards' intervention which had stopped his assault against our thralls. If they had not interposed themselves, he may very well have cut his way all the way across the whole of the pen.

I plunged into the fray, and directed the ghouls away from the scuffle, sending them out of the other side of the pens, into the control of the other military police-necromancers who were now emerging, sleepy-eyed, into the moonless dark of that bitter winter evening. Ground Frog was laughing, giggling, barking in joy.

"Glorious! Wonderful! Look at them, look at them lay there! See? See? My blade! My blade is the proof! Just a little snip! Ha! Ha! Ha! A little snip, and down they fall, like puppets with their strings cut!"

He stopped, suddenly, and two guards, straining against his unpredictable swirling, fell about him from the cessation of movement, overbalanced. He turned to me, staring into my astonished eyes.

"She promised me, filly. Promised with all the sincerity of a holy thing, a holy object, a sacred, winged thing – the Rose told me all I had to do was *believe*. Believe with all of my rotten, corrupted heart, believe, believe believer, sacred heart, sacred blade, sacred soul, sacred knife."

He suddenly brought up the gore-encrusted knife between us, covered in rotted, clotted horror. "The blade, the blade! The blade proves our salvation! Death dies upon the blessed blade! Blessings upon the horrible, the depraved, the vile – not even a week ago, I used this very blade to flay an innocent for the crime of being a drunk. Damnable, damnable, horrible, horrible – but look! Look! She forgives me! By this blade, she forgives!"

And that was the moment when one of the guards clouted the maddened Brother across the back of his poll with a clubbed sword-pommel, and he went down like the ghouls he had carved up with his ‘sacred blade'. They tied him up with rope, and restraints, and hauled him away into the holding cells.

The Captain approached once they'd gotten Ground Frog hauled away. I'd noticed that she was nowhere to be seen while the blades were out. As soon as the maddened Brother was down, though, here she was. Taking charge!

Officers! And I don't want to hear about my commission from you, you snickering donkey. It's not at all the same thing.

I checked the collapsed ghouls, Ground Frog's victims. Dead meat, the lot of them – and not the sort of dead meat which our necromantic magic can rise up to answer our expectations, our demands, our will. Soil in the form of decayed ponies, dirt to be returned to dirt, soil not quite rotted enough to return to the soil.

Was it his magic, that had drained the deaths'-magic from our thralls? Whatever it was, had drained them drier than my father's barren farm. Nothing left to them but to be buried, to be burned, to be reduced to that ash which could once again be plowed into the living soil.

By the time we were done cleaning up after Ground Frog's inexplicable rampage, the belated winter sun had finally crested the limb of the chilly world, and we had returned the remaining thralls into their now much-more-capacious stalls. He had destroyed over a dozen valuable thralled ghouls. I was loudly furious about the waste and the foolishness of it all, as were all of my peers.

And I did my best to ignore the snide sniggering of that dream-abomination in the back of my head, who crowed about the wonder and the honourable righteousness of the mad Brother, who had done exactly as he ought to have done. The madness was one thing; I could deal with madness. But for my own delusions to join in harmony with the lunacy of my fellow?

Dreadful.

I reported myself, of course. Again. Perhaps for the third time.

"Lieutenant Salted Soil, not only have I not yet processed your first confession of unreliability, I don't intend to write down that second one," said the Captain. "Nor do I intend to accept this third repetition. Kindly shut up, and do your job. Do you have anything useful you plan to do this day of glory and righteousness?"

I granted that I had intended to boat over to the mutineers' camp on the south bank of the river, and to interrogate individuals, before the Brother's mental collapse had interrupted all of our plans.

"Fine, fine. A waste of time, but you go do that."

I chose to take a double-brace of guards rather than my usual pair of thralled ghouls. For one thing, the undead do poorly over running water; for the other, I knew from prior observation that the mutineers reacted poorly to our thralls, and thought that it wouldn't be wise to bring such irritants into a camp full of unsettled, battle-shocked former-prisoners.

We boated across the bitter, ice-rimed waters of the Housa, sliding unsteadily into the rough slips they'd thrown up on the far shore of the river. Command had chosen to house the mutineers in camps along the southern shore, away from the field forces' trenchworks and camps on the northern shore and around the ruins of the Second Mouth. Despite the retreat of the enemy, and their cession of the field of battle to our battered forces, nopony in command really were settled in their minds about the alleged end of the campaign.

It hadn't felt like victory. There had been no climatic battle, no overwhelming victory. The patrols had gone out a day or two after the great mutiny and the enemy…. Just wasn't there. They'd retreated.

It felt like a cheat.

The additional ships brought to us by the Great Mutiny had been of little use, as well. Not long after the grand celebrations, a terrible storm had blown down out of the northwest, and shut down everything, everywhere. They'd grounded their galleys and half-galleys upon the shore where we'd directed them, and everypony had tented up, hiding from the suddenly furious winter weather.

Almost as if the winds themselves had been outraged by their overthrow of the proper order of things, and had set loose the winter storms to lash the offenders against all that was right and proper.

This was not the first time I had stalked the tent-squares and organized encampments of the mutineers. Each time I'd returned to the southern shore, it seemed like their encampment was more well-organized, more built up, more like a proper and well-squared away fortress-city. I'd seen recruit-camps and veteran encampments which were less well-organized than what they'd accomplished by this, my third visit to their camps.

I shouldn't have been that surprised, these were the survivors of a veteran army. But I had always thought that a twice-defeated force would have suffered worse discipline for their losses – not improved on the standard.

We were searching the camp for signs of loyalism, of betrayal of the revolutionary ideal. If you have a better idea than I of what that looks like in a well-organized winter-camp, then more power to you. For me, this examination mainly consisted of looking for drunks, keeping an eye peeled for strange revival-meetings, and listening for street-preachers.

I couldn't possibly have known at the time that they had better ways to communicate with each other, than to shout their business in the open, under the Rose's heavy, leaden skies. But I did notice that some ponies were stalking my own command as we quartered the tent-city.

They thought they were being clever, but I had ears to hear, and eyes to see, and they couldn't crawl along upon our heels like that without giving some sign of their presence. And so, I directed my guard to peel off and surround our stalkers before they could slip away.

It was a matter of moments to subdue the ponies who were haunting us. Three scraggly, underweight ponies, rather wide-eyed and mean-looking. I chose to hurry them into the boat, and to get them away from their fellows before any sort of rescue could be mounted for their escape.

They were bound, tied, and gagged. They gave little resistance, and we were able to chuck them into the holding cells upon our return to the station with very little effort. Ground Frog was still there in the holding-cells, though, and I regretted it immediately when he started bawling about his visions and his objections to our activities.

I sent in a pair of guards, and gagged the wayward Brother before he got our new prisoners too worked up.

It was military police practice to let new prisoners stew in their cells overnight, bound, tied, and gagged. A long night pondering just how exposed and vulnerable they were, was just the ticket for shaking the certainties and the confidence of traitors, smugglers, and sneak-thieves. It was no skin off of our muzzles, and it paid dividends far beyond the investment of time.

They say patience is a virtue, don't they? They don't encourage us to read scripture in the military police. Supposedly it only shakes our confidence. Anyways, sleep came quickly after such a long and eventful night.

"Salt, Salt! Why are you persecuting my ponies? What do you think you're accomplishing, my darling?"

"Be quiet, horror. I'm trying to sleep here."

"Oh, foolish filly, you are already asleep. And still offending against my righteous commands."

"What do you know of righteousness, you terror? You haunt the dreams of foals!"

"Oh, you've already learned how to make me giggle. Wise filly! Make me laugh again – tell me your plans!"

"Take off that skin, you mockery! Stop pretending to be the sacred foal! I know demons when they haunt my dreams."

"What, are you now a foal, to follow your own metaphors? Oh, my degraded filly, you're too old for this sort of raging against your elders. If you must be a foal, be a good foal! You've read more of your scriptures than you pretend. You know you're violating your own holy writ, every day and night you offend against my wishes, my hopes, my expectations. Come around to the righteous standard, filly! Look at my garden, so full of weeds."

The bat-winged alicorn dug away at the offending growth beneath the rows of rose-bushes, as the flickering flames lit the night-garden.

"Tell me, filly, how do I deal with the weeds that would choke my rose-bushes?"

"Salt of poisons, abomination. We boiled away the mixture, my sisters and I. It was the only way to deal with the stubborn growths that choked out our father's crops. Boil away the excess, scoop up the salt remains, and then trickle that over the weeds. It burned the leaves you wanted burnt, spared the useful plants. It was how I got my cutie mark. My mother called me Sweet Soil when I was born, but the salts – that was what they called me after I figured out how the world worked. Burn away that which only saps and devours that which is needed by that which is healthful."

"Salted Soil. Bitter and sere, bringing death and destruction that that which should not have grown. A hard row you've chosen to hoe, filly."

"The row chose me, not vice versa."

"Is that so? Well, indeed. Sweet Soil, I will call you, if you would be called by your mother's foal's name. Only, I charge you – kill that which chokes the garden, and not the rose-bush."

I stared at the burning blossoms on the bushes all around me. Somehow, the abomination herself wasn't what drew my attention in this dream-garden.

"I'll leave you to your weeding, Sweet Soil."

And so I did. I weeded that long, choked row, and more besides. It was full morning before I woke to a new, watery-skied day.

The interrogations were less than fruitful. I discouraged stronger measures, although I could feel my peers leaning against the traces. For some reason, I didn't want to bring it to screaming and blood. But the prisoners kept their muzzles locked tight, and my interrogators got more and more intense in their pressures.

It was at that point, after hours of restraint and strong – but not torturous – methods, that one of the prisoners cried out in her duress, "Oh, Mistress, are the burning blossoms worth this?"

I stopped the method in its middle, and came up close against the weeping prisoner.

"What's this about burning blossoms?"

The prisoner – who was not as agonized as she had pretended – turned a sly eye at my muzzle, and laughed, quietly. So softly you might not have thought she even had said a word, she still, said, "Oh, Salt, Salt. Why do you persecute me? Be the Sweet Soil, and burn only the evil growth."

I recoiled as if she had thrust a viper into my ear-canal.

"Lieutenant! Are you alright?"

"Yes, yes. Fine, fine. Resume, please." The prisoners returned to their agonies. But each of them watched me with eyes that, when nopony else was looking, glared cats-eye green. And I heard in my inner heart's remove, that abomination's voice, laughing, and crying out "Salt, Salt, what do you think you're doing?"

I went to bed early that night, as another winter-storm roared over the camp's tents, and the burlap belled and quivered with the water and the wind and the sleet.

And as I fell into the dream-garden, the abomination chased me, her and her hunt of ambulatory rose-bushes, like wolves, like bears, like bison roaring in their stampeding tumult. I ran and I ran, and it was all that I could do to keep ahead of those terrible, rushing thorn-bush things as they chased me through the burning garden.

And at the end, when the rose-monsters trapped me in a cul-de-sac of flaming flowers and dark heavy-thorned bushes beneath the endless starlight glow. The abomination curled around me, and kissed me on my quivering ear-tufts, and whispered in my ears her love, her forgiveness, and her wishes.

I woke slowly, sadly, unwillingly. I dressed myself in my uniform, and I strapped my knife-sheathe around my left foreleg.

I went out into the street, and I slipped into the pens where the guards couldn't see me. I found my way into the back stall where my two favourite thralls squatted on their haunches, awaiting the next mission, the next task. I brushed their manes and their tails, I checked their hooves and their fetishes for chips and for faults.

Then I pulled my knife from its sheath, and I drew it across first one, than the other's throat. And as if they were living equines, they trembled, their forelegs faltered, and they fell over. Just as if I had cut the throats of living ponies. The two thralls twitched in the old hay, their ichor pumping out onto the floor as if they still had working hearts to drive their blood through their long-dead carcasses.

Then they were still, and I knew that Ground Frog had been right. There was something miraculous in the believing blade.

And I left by the same way I came, leaving nothing but two corpses returned to the state from which I had, wickedly stolen them in my own arrogance.

I pondered my discoveries, the world I had not fully understood until that morning.

And then I went out to plan my new course of action. There were weeds to burn out of the Rose's garden, and I had spent far too many months and years straining at gnats while the pigweed strangled our revolutionary fields.

I had been told there were pests in the garden. Time to free the innocents in the holding-cells, and turn my attention to finding the tap-roots of the true evils strangling her rose-bushes.

This manuscript was clearly and obviously in the hoof of the author we believe to be Feufollet, but the context and the content explicitly state that it is the testimony of one Lieutenant Salted Soil. My best guess is that is the recorded testimony of said Lieutenant, written down by our own Feufollet. But it's a strange departure from the usual pattern of these manuscripts, and I reserve the right to be wrong. - Faded Palimpsest, 2nd Grade Archivist, Restricted Archives

Enthralled

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FFMS046

The police lieutenant came to us. She walked slowly, absent-mindedly into the cell block, stinking of death and dead things.

Morning was breaking, and my bruises were starting to turn colour, and twinged my regret back at me. The MPs had been less than gentle, but I've had worse from friends and victims, so I was bearing up. Getting under their coats was worth the occasional beating. And better me, than somepony else in the Order. Some of those ponies had suffered more than they ought to have, and we've asked so much of them over the last few months.

Speaking of ponies we would be asking much of, the Nightmare was hovering over the shoulder of the police lieutenant, snickering, far far too proud of herself.

The Nightmare had clearly found some success overnight. She hadn't really read us into the process except to prompt us with phrases to be seeded into our interrogation dialog, to be properly dropped in the right ears at the right times. I'd whispered cryptic nonsense into this jailer's ear, that torturer's, - this lieutenant's. Salted Soil was her name, and her message had been something about a pony named Sweet Soil – a twin perhaps? Whatever I'd dropped for the Mistress, I was guessing that it had seeded in the grim-looking necromancer.

She smelled like all necromancers do – curdled earth, rotted blood, evil walking this world. Her coat was as streaked and stained as any blood-mage's coat, and to add to the effect she had several well-polished fetishes bobbing like flag-heads over her withers. She was a rather toxic-looking green, with a mane the colour of old blood.

She looked over my compatriots and I. I hadn't been able to swing my sole captivity, so two Order ponies had been swept up in the engineered 'capture'. Ground Truth and Kale Seeds were tough ponies in their own way, but I had tried to take their blows by subtly pushing myself forward. You'd think that these high-powered military police warlocks would have been able to burn right through the magic that had laid 'Marsh Wisp' over my donkey hide, but Marsh Wisp was no simple glamour. She was the child of my blood and my magic and my inner pony-self. And she was resilient in the face of interrogation and blood-magics.

They had beat me, and tormented me, but none of the blows had broken through Marsh Wisp to touch Feufollet. This is the power of the blood-semblance; it protects, and it obscures, and it transforms. It was in a strangely real way, as much me, as Feufollet was when I was being her. For all that the world knew, while I was being Marsh Wisp, it was she who took the slings and arrows of our outrageous fortune, and nopony could see through to whatever truth there actually was in sly little Feufollet.

"What do you want, lieutenant? We've still done nothing wrong here. We have our duties back in the camp, duties your questions have diverted us from, kept us from. Can we be let go now?"

"Duties? Interesting." She looked… strange. Like she was hearing the words, but not really understanding them in any conventional sense. Salted Soil looked… pole-axed. Like somepony had clouted her across the poll, and she was existentially concussed. "I honestly do not know which duties you're referring to, Corporal Wisp. But I am indeed, here to free you and your two friends. There has been a – hrm. Mistake?"

She suddenly leaned into my cell, staring with mad eyes into mine. "DO YOU KNOW WHAT MISTAKE I HAVE MADE? HAS SHE TOLD YOU ANYTHING FURTHER?"

I looked frantically back and forth, trying to evaluate our audience. The lieutenant hadn't brought any subordinates into the cell block with her. The jailor wasn't in view. Was he in earshot?

"What? What mistake? Is anypony in earshot that I can't see?"

"No, nopony is nearby, Corporal. It's only us and the garden. No weeds nearby. I've sent away all extraneous ears. Only you, and your two hooves, here. Should I send them away as well? She said to tell you… your Mistress has given unto you, a hoofmaiden in your further tasks, to aid – well, she didn't say anything about weeding, but that is the way I think of it. I didn't think I had retained so much of the scriptures…" The lieutenant was rambling.

"Lieutenant! Focus!" I clapped my hooves in front of her staring, empty muzzle. "What has happened? Where are we this morning? What have you done? Do we need to flee? Are you exposed?"

"Exposed? Me? Why, I – no, I don't think anypony knows anything. I was not seen, not coming, or going, or putting them to rest."

"Putting to rest? What have you done? Who have you put to rest?"

"Nopony, nopony. Oh, I suppose that once they were somepony, but not by the time I was done with them. My thralls, my most favourite tools. No, no, the abomination is right, wicked to call them that, to have reduced what were ponies to things. So I cut them loose."

She looked at her hooves, and the dagger sheathed on her left fore-leg.

"Ground Frog was right; there is power in the knife's-edge when you let the abomination into your heart. They went down like – like puppets with the strings cut."

"OK, OK. We can work with this. First rule of joining the cult? Don't call the Mistress an 'abomination'. She only puts up with that from – well, she expects a little bit of respect from her foals. And it doesn't help us further recruitment to call the Spirit nasty names where anypony can hear you. Doesn't really help to call Her anything at all if we're in company, really."

Something occurred to me, and concerned, I looked at the stunned new recruit. "Why are you still calling her that, anyways? You should be seeing her as –"

"She isn't the White Rose. I can't be fooled like that. Savage, vicious – she's an abomination, a horror. But she made her points well enough. She's a monster. But I've seen too many monsters in their own service. I recognize one in the service of the Rose. Where is the true Rose?"

I was in her grasp, and she was mad-eyed, and armed, and I was unprepared. If she snapped, I might be dead before I could summon my own defenses.

"Nearby. We don't expose her when we don't have to. I'm who they send to make the connection, to bring in the recruits. If we can find a safe space to dream, I'll introduce you to our Rose."

She explained, haltingly and lamely, making occasionally little sense. The Nightmare had come to our new recruit as herself – well, mostly. I couldn't understand the logic of the Spirit at times. Was it just that a military police-mare expected to be lied to, and needed an obvious lie to interact with? That the Filly would have set up all of her most desperate defenses, caused her to lock down in an impenetrable huddle? I honestly don't know.

She was quite the constant gardener, our Salted Soil. And she was a fervent believer in keeping her garden well-weeded. The Nightmare had shown her what was, and was not a weed. All it took was a little – twist. And suddenly Salted could see that a dead thing without vitality was by definition out of place in something like a garden.

Fanatics never stopped being fanatics; they could only be shifted on doctrine, goals - targets. So the Nightmare gave Salted Soil a new set of targets. It helped that the new goals suited the faith she had been brought up into in the first place. Whomever had perverted the White Rose, had bent its adherents against their own principles. The entire edifice was a series of springs bent against their own tensions. All we'd have to do is release the springs, and the whole tangled mass would tear itself apart.

I walked Salted Soil through her day, as brief as it had been so far, and we worked out who had seen her, when, and where she was expected. Then I disabused her of the idea that she was going to free her 'prisoners'. We weren't going anywhere.

A position within the military police battalion was too precious a perch to give up so easily. We needed this leverage – it was why I had encouraged our concentration upon the MPs. They were natural fussbudgets, nebby noses, inquisitors. Nopony thought twice about the MPs going where they weren't wanted, asking uncomfortable questions, disappearing random soldiers and contractors as the spirit and the Rose inspired them.

Or the Spirit, for that matter.

I had her put the three of us into the thralls' pen, and I laid another glamour over the three of us, reinforced by yet more blood, yet more magic. We put down several more thralled ghouls, enough to explain our presence. Their rapidly-decomposing bodies were hidden in the back stall, covered with a bit of very old hay. The other ghouls paid no attention to the extermination of their existential kin; when their times came, they would resist no strongly than the others had.

Assuming that we didn't disturb their thrall-fetishes.

Which I reminded Ground Truth and Kale Seeds of, with great emphasis. Our safety, our protection against being eaten by our bunk-mates relied entirely upon our proper care and maintenance of their fetishes. Those little devices were literally our life. I took every pain when I looked over the thralling pins of that slowly rotting herd, examining each possible failure-point, crack, or blemish. I didn't particularly want to be chewed upon in my sleep.

The Mistress and our new brethren worked on the rest of the investigation squads that operated out of their company-station. Over the next three nights, we absorbed each new recruit as they succumbed to the torments of the Nightmare and our careful daylight traps. I found myself playing police-ghoul to more than one unconverted MP in that interim, guarding them against their enemies, their victims – or just the negative attentions of their compatriots. As little as I had expected the common White Rose soldier to think of their MPs, I found that the reality was even worse.

Nopony likes an inquisitor.

So I moaned theatrically, loomed threateningly, and practiced my zombified shuffle. Nopony seemed to suspect my moans or my shuffles; I suppose it was not especially likely that anypony would care to pretend to be the undead. I was able to hide in plain sight. And I learned quite a lot.

The winter quarters of the White Rose's armies were no more active than your average Imperial encampment. The grain-ships and supply freighters came and went, the fleet was pulled up on the islands and the shore-banks, and stripped down for winter storage. Most of the regiments should have remained on the northern shore, and within whatever shelter the ruins of the Second Mouth provided.

Strangely enough, a good number of battalions had been shipped onto the islands in the middle of the stream, and even across to the southern shore. Given the terrible weather, you'd have thought that the hassle and danger of crossing the wide Housa in numbers would have been ruled out, but nevertheless, the companies marched down to the boats, and they crossed in their vast numbers, day after day.

Something was happening.

The boats in motion and the constant churn of soldiers back and forth gave us the opportunity to move more ponies over to join me and my advance-team in our foothold inside the oversight elements of the army. I passed along the necessary suggestions, and that first night a few boats' crew were kidnapped off their decks by the Order as soon as they could do so without anypony observing. The sailors I had seduced to the Mistress's faith took over these boats, and the actual boaters were swiftly taken into custody, hidden deep within the Order's encampment, to be recruited at their leisure. As far as they were concerned, we were in no particular hurry. Our sail-donkeys could do their job as well as them, in between carrying packages and ponies for the Order in their free time.

Salted Soil and I greeted the newly-claimed ferry-boats when they returned to the islands in the stream, and I weaved fresh glamours over our new boat service, and those ponies they'd brought to us to play ghoul for the military police.

Most of the new 'ghouls' were former-Company veterans. We were all past masters of pretending to be what we weren't at this point. It was almost relaxing to shuffle about and moan threateningly, after months playing the enslaved prisoner of war.

With the expanded Order presence in the main logistics base, and the conversion of more and more of the military police themselves, we began making headway into the project of mapping out the command structure and control-points within the army of occupation. They had been three separate field armies upon their first deployment, but our Third Army had been destroyed in the campaign on the middle Housa, and these remaining formations, the Seventh and Eleventh Armies – they had been bled so thoroughly that they were closer to the establishment strength of corps or over-large divisions than proper armies. The Housa Army Group was severely over-officered, the fighting having been much harder on the ranks among the Seventh and Eleventh Armies.

This left us with very long lists of potential targets in the table of organization. We soon put up blotter-sheets on the walls of the ghoul holding-pens, heavily marked up with notes describing said table of organization. A hair-trigger glamour was in place to conceal the blotter-sheets if somepony not read into the cult wandered inside our stinking quarters.

By that point, all of the former inhabitants had been put out of their undead misery, and hauled out mid-river under cover of darkness by our boat service – to be dumped overboard as soon as the opportunity offered.

Cherie took up where the Nightmare had left the process of recruitment. The Mistress terrified and unsettled them, and then once they'd been stampeded inside the gates, Cherie came to them to talk them down from the shock of their crash-recruitment. The Nightmare's hard sell was surprisingly effective among these judgmental, savage inquisitors; but we didn't want to preserve them in their hard, angry state. Fanatics converted to our cause were still, in the end, dangerous and brutal and all too prone towards overkill, overreaction, over, well everything. So, we left the state of their souls to bubbly little Cherie.

If anypony could lead savage, fanatical inquisitors into a more sanguine way of life, it would be our thestral hope, our golden child.

Better her than I. I still tended to hold against these blood-soaked necromancers just how thoroughly they'd dived into the life of unlife, still intermittently angry at how they'd surrounded themselves with these disgusting, vile things.

Especially when I had to walk around in the daylight covered in a semblance of cyanotic rotting death on the hoof. I swear I'll never have enough showers in the rest of my life that will wash away the psychic filth of those weeks of performance in the pens, among other ponies likewise wearing the appearance of the undead.

It often took an entire night's dreaming in the paradises of sun, sand and pleasure-beaches to wash away the self-disgust a day among the military police burdened us all. And we spent as much time asleep as we could, I assure you. Life was brutish, filthy, and savage in the White Rose's military police.

Because, among other things, the state of the army group behind the gates of the Second Mouth was not well. The north shore was dotted with quarantine-camps, and only the need to maintain a properly armed and regimented presence on that side of the river kept any non-quarantined battalions down there among the quarantined.

And these quarantine-camps were both necessary, and beginning to break down. Sickness had risen up out of the trenches, and spread through battalion after battalion. A nasty, vile flu, one with a ferocious death-rate, and which turned over into rampaging ghouls so rapidly that the White Rose had suffered double-digit losses among their medical corps in the course of the brief week we took to recruit our way into dominance over the military police's central companies.

The combat necromancers were overwhelmed by the problem of keeping the quarantine-camps under control, and a few days after we'd secured control of the second of four companies among the military police battalion, we were called up to reinforce the combat-necromancer corps. You could imagine how we all took this unexpected turn in our affairs.

"What do you mean, we're being mobilized? You're the MPs! The MPs don't get mobilized, and certainly not in the middle of winter!"

"I don't know how they did things wherever you all came from, but our military police are auxiliaries to the necromantic corps! We are their back-ups."

"She's right, ma'am," said Kale Seeds. "It's why we had no military police among the prisoners in the POW camps. They all fought and died with the necromancer battalion, every single one."

"Pfft, probably not all of them. The traitor had to have found his pet necromancers somewhere." I eyed the rather hang-dog former necromancers we'd forcibly recruited into the cult. "Well, water under the bridge. You all are alive, and serving the Mistress as is your duty. Which means we need to serve your apparent needs until the time comes to throw off all cloaks, all semblances. Until then, 'be as wise as serpents'. What's the tactical requirements of a deployment? Do you lead with your ghouls, or with support-platoons to do your suppressing and bleeding for you?"

"Oh my Rose, of course we lead with our thralled ghouls! That would be slaughter, sending naked troops in to put down the uncontrolled dead!"

"Huh. Good thing you've got a fresh corps of troopers who can't be turned by the undead, or overrun easily. We might leave a swathe of dead ghouls in the process, though. I think… maybe we should bring extras hidden in our ranks, and then pretend to 'suppress' our fresh troops as 'ghouls'?"

"That – that's a lot of glamouring. Do you have enough mages to pull that off?"

"Ha! I can handle twice as many illusions. Don't underestimate my capacity, you blood-soaked ghoul-diddling poisoner! Let's just work out how this is going to work. First, we need to cover our fresh troops with a no-see-um, then…"

The Quarantines, or, Hiding In Plain Sight

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FFMS047

I don't like this, fumed an instance of the Filly in the gruff tones of the Company's one-eyed physician and Annalist. First law of tactics, never pick a fight when you don't know the numbers and the dispositions of the enemy. You don't have nearly enough information for this to be a good idea, the zebra continued in a direct princess-radio connection as we waited at the docks for the boat service to bring over another tranche of former-Company ponies.

It was the dead of night, and only a hoof-full of MPs and we, their faithful 'thralls', were there to observe the heavy skiffs as they laboured through the icy, treacherous waters. We'd already brought over two companies under the cover of darkness and our MP protectors. White Rose ghoul-handling tactics were themselves rather blasé about the well-being of their thralls, and the combat necromancers would expect us to go plunging in with great violence and little care for self-preservation.

Our handlers would be carrying plenty of thralling needles for capture of fresh undead in the battle, after all.

And so, we were stocking up on additional combat multipliers. I could easily handle an invisibility cantrip over a full battalion, so that was what we were planning to go in with. Sawbones was trying to talk me into keeping the boat service running all night long, and to bring in one, or even two more battalions from the south shore to some hidden position where they could deploy as reserves if the situation turned sour or went unexpectedly pear-shaped.

"Sir, if we keep the boaters running that long, they're going to be falling asleep at the sweeps when it comes time for us to be shipped across the shore ourselves. There's only so much my glamours can cover, and the oarponies sleeping on their benches is going to cause somepony to take an unhealthy interest in our operations."

Bah. You're all being too inflexible. All your ponies are oarponies by now, just have the troops sit their own sweeps, let the boaters get their blasted beauty sleep.

Huh. That was actually something we should have thought of. I passed along a suggestion to the head of the boating service, who sneered at me and told me to teach my granmere to suck eggs. I shared this observation with Sawbones, and stuck my tongue out at the Filly who was relaying my communications.

She returned my comical grimace and added a raspberry on top of it.

As the boatloads of new ponies poured over the docks, many of them recoiled in horror at what was waiting for them, even though they should have been briefed about the ghoul-glamours. I should have been flattered by the reaction – been happy that my magic was powerful enough to fool even ponies who were expecting the spectacle. But somehow, perversely, I felt rejected.

They were hidden beneath their own ghouling glamours soon enough, and then, over that, I layered the semi-invisibility cantrip. We marched them through the logistics base to the now-somewhat-crowded ghoul-pens. I exchanged words with the squad of Sawbones-trained medics who had been sent over by their respective battalions. They had had limited practice during the river-campaign at their new duties, but this deployment would be a real baptism of fire. The situation inside the fallen quarantine boxes were fuzzily understood at best, and one of our primary tasks was to retrieve any surviving White Rose medics and recruit them, at lance's-point, if necessary.

With ghoul-flu in the greater encampments, we had too much need of Spirit-possessed, trained physicians to be all that fastidious when it came to the volunteerism rule. The ones who were too salty about being dragooned into the cult could be shuffled out again later, after the crisis was over.

Somehow. We'll figure out something. Assuming that it was a crisis. Sawbones certainly thought it was when we told him about it, apparently the loyalist-side of the epidemic was a real horrorshow, almost as bad as Pepin had been. But he might have been anticipating and over-stating. You may have noticed, but he has a tendency to be overly dramatic and more than a bit doomful, that grim, striped worrywart.

I got some sleep in spurts and pauses during that night, waiting by the docks while boatful after boatful of Order ponies slipped across the docks, and were secreted away in commandeered warehouses, where they slept under the oversight of a few MPs and their squads of Order 'ghouls'. I didn't immediately activate the cantrips on these further companies of ponies, but I still had to anchor my preparations on them. When it came time for them to ship over, I wouldn't be able to be everywhere at once.

Painstaking preparation makes for smooth and swift battles, wrote the Annalist Esteem. It was amazing how much of the old Annals Sawbones had stored in his long-term memory, accessible via a sort of dreamworld library he had erected in his dream-palace. I hadn't been able to read the actual physical copies, but in his meticulous memories, I was able to spend endless hours of virtual study.

Morning came far too swiftly, and by then, we had two battalions and a company hidden at the MPs' thrall pens and the commandeered warehouses. We only had room for one of the battalions on the boats which would be transshipping us from the logistics bases to the north shore; the boats were planning to load up the rest of the troops while we were deploying with the necromancer corps, in the hope that nopony would be paying attention to the boaters while there was the prospect of action against the quarantine pens.

They'd stand offshore with the reserves in case things went really pearshaped. By the time we were beating north to the infected shore, Sawbones' pessimism had infected me in turn, and I was almost dancing on my hooves, imagining nine kinds of catastrophe, and wishing we hadn't returned the rest of the warlock coven to the Company the week before.

But we were committed, and here came the shore. The MP handlers 'directed' our disguised troops off the overburdened boats, everypony stepping carefully to not jostle each other or the hidden squads of invisibility-cantripped troopers. We were considerably more than double what our MP companies' had on their rolls, thus the double-deception.

We disembarked into a bitter flurry blowing over the campgrounds, a mess composed half of snow, half sleet. I could hear a summary of the chatter over the princess-radio as the hidden battalion scrambled in our wake. Nopony had taken into account that whatever was left of command and control on the northern shore would have decided to use the boats to evacuate another battalion of combat troops across the river. We weren't the only ones who had noticed that those boats could take considerably more than a battalion in a trip – if you were desperate and didn't care about overloading or drawing the attention of the curious and censorious.

I'm not sure if these ponies are quite ready for this, muttered Sawbones via the Filly.

"You trained the medics yourself, Sir. Don't you have confidence in your training?"

In the first place, no, not really. In the second place, it's as much about supplies as anything else, and you're critically short of that, too. But I was talking about the line troops. You don't have nearly enough Company veterans in the mix.

"I think we've got almost all of the Company veterans with the Order – those that aren't battalion commanders or higher. We can't get many more on this sort of notice, Sir."

Still not enough. Ghoul-fighting is too hypothetical for too many of your Order ponies.

"We had them dream-training with the vets for an entire sleep-cycle. Well, most of them. And they're pairing up with a couple sections of your best up there in Braystown. Push come to shove some of them can pull your remote-control possession gag."

We don't know if that will work for the typical ranker or corporal. Do we? Has someone been experimenting without briefing me?

"Uh, I don't know. Maybe you ought to go ask somepony who might know?"

Bah.

Thank you, dear Filly, for bothering to transmit that one.

We got off the banks of the Housa without more than a few accidental collisions between evacuating line troops and our invisible reserve force. I think they just wrote it off as the confusion of the embarkation, and I didn't see or hear any commotion that would suggest that someone was raising the alarm.

Too late to worry about it, at any rate. On the plus side, the early-morning storm blew over, leaving us chilled but slowly warming in the thin winter sunlight.

Once the battalion evacuated onto the boats and cast off, the north shore was suddenly empty, ghostly, abandoned. The battalion camps were individually fortified along the shore, inland a hundred yards in most cases. It was almost as if somepony had anticipated a quarantine necessity. Most militaries encamp their troops in division-sized castra, but the White Rose had chosen these tiny little enclosures, probably doubling if not tripling the materials necessary to set up and maintain them. Each camp had a guarded gate, and a well-fortified wall and ditch. They were generally close enough to each other than each camp's outer ramparts could be swept by the bolt-throwers mounted at the corners of each camp.

Notably, they also had a second ditch inside the wall, which was easily reversed to make each fortification a prison if the necessity arrived.

Which it had.

Many of the camps were now abandoned, empty, their battalions evacuated southwards. The others were tightly locked down, both the active quarantine camps and the allegedly healthy mini-castrum. Our MPs looked around in vain for the necromancers who were supposed to meet our force upon landing.

Nothing.

We directed the glamoured reserve battalion into a position just off the main lines of advance where they weren't likely to be overrun by any reaction force tearing flank across the emptied parade-grounds and common areas. The sound of violence and chaos wafted upon the distant air, but I couldn't make out exactly where it was coming from, not with these foreshortened earth pony ears I was wearing.

Finally, our MP handlers began 'moving to contact', which is soldier-speak for cautiously ambling forward with arms in hoof.

We'd been told that there were problems with the #15, #16, and #21 camps, with over a half-dozen others under quarantine but still under control. Sadly, nopony had done anything as useful as post helpful camp placards, so our MPs were reduced to shouting queries at the gate-guards of each camp-gate as we moved forward along the shore.

We eventually found a fraction of the necromancer corps at the #21 camp, where the gate-guards were guarding from outside of the gate, and the wall-guards had reversed the barricade. Their shouts over the gate brought forth a pair of battered-looking ponies streaked in gore and ichor in equal measure. The blood and the disgusting gunk which ghouls produce in lieu of living blood were the only measure you could use to judge these ponies by their profession, for neither of them had a single fetish emplanted upon their shoulders.

Looking closer, I could see the bloodstains where those devices had been roughly ripped out, leaving weeping sores. These necromancers had been very, very busy.

"Oh, by the Rose, you've shown up just in time, where's your Captain, your Major? We need your reserve needles, we're totally bingo here!"

I tuned out the necromancers' attempt to shake down our MPs for their equipment, and took a closer look to the 'wall-guards' and the 'gate-guards'. They were all undead. The only living ponies visible at this camp were the two necromancers, one of which was clearly asleep on her hooves. And the other one looked like the only thing keeping him from drifting off was the argument he was losing with our MP captain.

The general drift of the conversation was that there really was nothing left living inside fortified camp #21, and that somepony needed to get down to #15 and #16 soonest, if there was any hope for there still to be anypony still alive in those quarantines. A quick prompt across the princess-radio caused our MP captain to jolt, surprised, as an aspect of the Spirit appeared in her view. I thought to myself that we probably should have trained the MPs on the princess-radio a little more thoroughly, but no time for all that now.

And no, there weren't any surviving medicos inside the blasted waste-lot which was fortified camp #21. Total loss, including two doctors and a half-dozen assistants. Blast.

We got the MPs to move us onward, the reserve battalion silently slipping along the emptied shoreline to our left. It was a good mile down the shore before we came to camp #16, and #15 beyond it. The gates and the barricades had been likewise reversed, but the guards were still living here. The necromancers had concentrated on the worst of the quarantine failures, and clearly it had been more than they could handle.

I wasn't sure why these White Rose necromancers were so bumbling, a full corps hadn't been able to handle what the late Major Gorefyre and her rag-tag band of rear-support villains had been able to enthrall and control a group of ghouls larger than the number of shamblers a single battalion quarantine should have contained, assuming a 100% loss rate.

I mentioned my concerns to Sawbones.

Yes, I see what you mean. The Filly frowned with one eye closed, mimicking the zebra's body language. Hard to say without being inside of their organization. Did you see the others? I think we decided that the White Rose necromantic combat corps had to be a multi-company large-complement sort of affair?

"Just the two, but I got the impression they had a squad inside the walls, still working over what's left of #21."

You don't think the necromancers are vulnerable to the new plague? the Spirit asked for Sawbones.

"Oh, tartarus, I hope not. Do we need to worry about our MPs?"

Worry about your rankers first, jenny. Being Company doesn't give you immunity to catching the flu!

"How are you keeping this mess under control on your side of the fence?"

To a certan extent, we aren't. It's ugly out here. To the extent we've got it locked down, we've opened the cult doors wide open, everypony we see with symptoms is getting offered the blade, and we're being pretty aggressive with everypony else in the general vicinity of the sickhouses. I'd guess 'the Company' has doubled in the last two weeks, although the majority of them aren't exactly armsponies, if you know what I mean.

"I'm surprised the Nightmare hasn't been bragging up a storm about it, Sir," I mused as the MPs directed our 'ghouls' to take over the gates and the barricade posts.

She's not been involved, Luna's taken it over as her own personal project. She's our least alarming face as far as the civilians are concerned, anyways.

"So long as she doesn't talk to the nice ponies as if they're ancient Equestrian courtiers, I suppose."

The Filly sniggered, and somehow, I knew that it was her, and not Sawbones, laughing at this jab at her other self.

We took a company's worth of our 'ghoul' troopers just to post the walls of the two quarantine camps. We would have been badly overstretched if we'd tried to clear one of the camps like this. All credit to our officers' planning skills, that we were not obliged to do something so daft.

The reserve battalion advanced to join us before the gates of #16. We formed with the visible 'ghouls' company in the fore, and the three hidden companies drawn up in a deep column behind the van. As the troops were settling into formation, the Filly interrupted my concentration again.

Feufollet, open me up a shadow-gate. I need to make a grand appearance. The Filly didn't sound like Sawbones on that one. In fact, it sounded like…

I formed an illusory disc of darkness in the centre of the morning sky above our column, just before the order to advance was given.

The shadow-stuff burst apart like a midair explosion, smoke-like shredded tendrils trailing as a grey-winged figure rocketed overhead. The relieved White Rose guards, who had been eyeing our 'ghouls' skeptically, scattered in surprise, wide-eyed and panicked. Not the best reception I've ever seen Cherie get from our audiences. But then, nopony had prepared them for the display. Sloppy work, I was rather irate with Cherie for calling an audible at the very last moment like that. Very disappointing.

The sudden appearance of our thestral banner-filly preempted the order for the advance, and the troops began the charge. The thundering hooves of over four hundred ponies rolled over the encampment like the sound of an onrushing stormfront. The MPs had to gallop to keep up with the sudden advance of their supposed 'thralls'. I followed in the rear of the formation, and pulled the illusions which had hidden the troops' lances and barding. I needed my magical juice for other priorities now that the troops were engaged.

The initial rush swept the small marshalling yard inside the cramped quarters of the battalion camp. It had never been intended for so many ponies to remain inside these quarters for any length of time, it was a sanctuary, a place to sleep and eat, and a place to quarantine in case of extremity. Which this had become.

There were over a hundred ghouls just lying around in mounds inside the marshalling yard, and in the doorways of various smashed-in barracks and the dining hall. They came to alert as we suddenly breached their sanctum. And it had indeed become theirs – if there were any living ponies left inside camp #16, they were forted up in some smaller corner of the space, because the common areas had been abandoned to the dead.

The ponies of the Order, still wearing their ghoul-semblances, crashed into the disordered clots of true ghouls like a trip-hammer landing on a random pile of coals. The ghouls scattered everywhere, driven apart and away by the physical impetus of the collision. Our troopers re-dressed their lances as they regained their balance, and made a second, more controlled push, and the ghouls that stood in the way went down like wheat before the newfangled reaper-machines. The slaughter went very quickly from my view-point at the rear of the formation. One minute, the marshalling yard was full of the undead, and in the next, it was crowded with hundreds of my ponies, their barding and lanceheads splattered with ichor and filth.

A half-dozen Order ponies were injured in the crush – mostly from them trampling and goring each other in the crush. The little training they'd done ahead of time hadn't quite gotten them past point where they were almost as much of a danger to each other as the enemy. The medicos fought to get to our injured as the platoon-leaders struggled to get their ponies under control. Finally, the wounded were cleared to the rear, and the rest began a push into the secondary areas of the camp – the compromised barracks, the dining hall, the medical quarters, the supply-sheds.

The battle quickly scattered out of my view as platoons disappeared into the various structures, and I could only track the fighting by the battle-cries and the sound of weapons clashing. That distinctive sound was the easiest way to spot where our ponies were fighting, and succeeding, because the ghouls they were slaughtering were not cognizant enough to operate tools. Fresh ghouls are dumber than pigshit, and without their invulnerability and aura of terror, they weren't a threat to a prepared force. Well, so long as that force was inspired by the Spirit. Without the protection of the Spirit against the ghoul-bite, without the power of the Nightmare within our blades and our lanceheads?

Well, that would have been a much different battle.

Cherie continued to circle overhead, screaming some sort of battle-cry in that high, wavering screech of hers which penetrated deeply, bypassing one's ears to resonate somewhere inside, in the guts, in the throat, in the gizzard. I recognized what she was yarbling about, but I doubt any of those Equuish-speaking Westerners would know what the tartarus Brûlez chaque fleur devant nous! meant. I'd have to talk to her once this was all over about her using Prench to play up her 'legend'. It wasn't helping, I thought. It was more important that the audience knew what she was on about, than they were impressed with her august presence.

The troops began dragging living ponies out of their hiding-places here and there. A couple of supply sheds; two barracks; the battalion-major's quarters all yielded a crop of living, if rather sickly ponies.

As the rest of the companies continued the extermination process in the other areas of fortified camp #16, the medicos and about a company's worth of troopers dragged the survivors out of the front gates of the camp to an open space quickly designated for triage. Most of the victims were both very sick, and terrified by their 'rescue'. We hadn't removed the troops' ghoul-semblances, and as far as the remnants of that battalion were concerned, they were being hauled off by dubiously controlled undead.

The medics were overstretched in the crush, and ran about like maniacs trying to properly triage almost a hundred patients. Thankfully I hadn't put the medics under a glamour, so from the outside, it just looked like a bunch of physicians working among thralls. The triage wasn't without fatalities, sadly. Five of the victims didn't survive the stress of being rescued, and had to be put down by their rescuers. Afterwards, we discovered a living White Rose physician and two of her assistants among the survivors, but in the chaos of the rescue and the battle they were far too incoherent to be identified as more than just another pair of victims from the ranks.

A rather chastened-looking Cherie finally came down from her showy circuit overhead, and helped with the treatment of the victims. I moved along the rows, whispering to them nonsense designed to explain what was happening to them, while quickly blading them into the cult. Cherie saw what I was doing, and followed in my train, explaining to my victims what I had just done to them. Since she did so in the centre of a chorus of saintly Fillies, humming some sort of White Rose hymn, I guess it worked better than what I had been sort-of-planning to do once I'd gotten through the survivors.

By the time we were done, the five were dead, but the rest were – well, they were sick as dogs, and feeble, and I hadn't helped matters by compromising their hides with my shallow ritual-cuts. The medics gave me the stink-eye once I was done, but I wasn't having any of that.

They'd have to have done it themselves, and frankly Sawbones had neglected this aspect of their new roles, although he had told me how he was making it a part of the new training regimen out there in the plaguelands.

By the afternoon, camp #16 had been cleared, and we started moving the triage patients back inside the protection of the walls. The combat elements moved over to camp #15, and prepared to repeat the whole process again. So far we hadn't needed the emergency reserve still waiting in the warehouses over on the midstream islands. The boating service ponies were ready at the docks to move the emergency reserve as soon as we gave the yell.

The rest of the cowed ponies of the northern shore hid behind their ramparts, their guards staring in our direction, those that were in eyeshot. We were hardly behaving like they expected MPs and their thralls to operate in a quarantine suppression operation. Honestly, I wasn't sure exactly what they expected, but I was pretty sure what we were doing wasn't what they had – well, not wanted to see, but expected to see.

I think they had expected an ugly, out of control mess. The necromancers had lost control of the north shore, that was clear. A few showed up as the pseudo-ghoul troops swept into #15, and Cherie flew air support for the advance. The necromancer-officers walked tentatively up to my lieutenant, the hapless Salted Soil, who wasn't even pretending to lead her thralls in the advance anymore.

"So, uh, who's controlling those assets? I've never seen thralls operated so… enthusiastically. Or vocally. How are you getting those battlecries out of them?"

Salted Soil looked up at the thestral flitting about in plain sight overhead, screeching her silly Prench battle-cry. The necromancers were deliberately ignoring her. Trying to pretend she wasn't there, I think.

"They're on autopilot. We've come up with a new programme, one that runs on personality imprints. Experimental, very hush-hush. We were planning on demonstrating it to the college when we got suddenly called up."

The rather tired and sickly-looking necromancer nodded owlishly, as if this bit of arrant nonsense made perfect sense.

"Experimental personality imprints, of course, of course. Which is why they sound like ponies?" There was a distant screech as somepony got trampled or lanced, and I winced in sympathy. "And react sympathetically, it looks like. Very impressive! I need to hear how these new techniques are accomplished! Carry on, lieutenant! Very impressive work. Hurk."

And that was when that desperately sick necromancer vomited blood all over Salted Soil's hooves, and the extent of the problem in the necromancer corps made itself painfully obvious.

The Pestilent Theatre, or, The Audience Melts Away

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FFMS048

The collapse of the dying necromancer was the straw that broke the camel's back. We called in the emergency reserves and alerted the rest of the Order on the southern shore for the possibility of a call-up. Salted Soil was taken aside to be cleaned up and sanitized with our limited supplies of antiseptics, while the shivering necromancer was bundled off to be put with the rest of the hopeless cases on the far side of the triage. The healthier survivors were bunked out beside the open gates of #16, while a couple of squads cleaned out the most viable shelters within the walls. The plan was to turn #16 into a grand recovery ward. Meanwhile, the ad-hoc medical corps raced against the clock and the weather.

The storms were returning.

The fight for #15 consumed the rest of the afternoon and the brief winter's evening. I could feel the eyes of the guards in #17 and #13 upon our fight. Nopony else from command showed up to question our peculiar operations, or issue directions, or even take notice of our presence. The other necromancer who had accompanied her dying superior was dehydrated, feeble, and absorbed by the heavy burden that was the maintenance of control over her master's thralled ghouls.

She ended up on a cot along with the rest of the survivors that we thought might make it. While she laid down, head stubbornly up, I tried to talk her into letting me put down her thralls before she exhausted herself and they ran loose anyways.

“These were given into our care. They are our responsibility. I signed for these. It will debit against my house's balance sheet if I let them be put down. Where the root did you come from, anyways? I don't recognize that barding. You're not with the military police!"

“Marsh Wisp is seconded to the MPs from a support battalion, Sister Nutsedge. There aren't nearly enough of us to assert the control your 'house' has lost here on the northern bank. And you will let her do what needs to be done."

“Take them over, and sign the transfer, and you can do what you want with them, Sister Salted Soil. You MP ponies have always been cavalier with your herds. But as long as my house's fetishes are flagged over their shoulders, they're to be preserved!" The necromancer's wind weakening, this exclamation left her coughing.

“Fine. Consider the paperwork 'done'. Corporal, collect the thralling needles after you're done disposing of the excess stock. Return them properly cleaned when you're done. Sufficient unto the day, Sister Nutsedge. We are very busy cleaning up your mess. Good day."

I rolled my eyes, uncomfortable in my backup Order guise. The disposal of the combat corps ghouls was a simple, disgusting matter, and I didn't even need anypony's help piling up the offal after I'd cut their throats in a protected space beside #15's walls, hidden mostly from sight from the inhabited camps to the west and east. We didn't have enough burnables to destroy the remnants in penny-packets, so I'd have a squad haul the load away when the companies clearing #16 were done with their own butchery.

We would have enough pyres and their resulting pillars of smoke to explain as it was.

The reserves arrived as the butchery was mostly over, the sun fleeing the scene like a fugitive. They fanned out to secure our hoofhold on the shore, allowing the MPs and our 'ghoul corps' to displace eastwards to see if the combat-corps element supposedly clearing #21 had done so, or had collapsed like our apparent liaison had.

It was a good thing that this was done, because the situation around #21 had gotten totally out of control. Little bands of ghouls were out in the open, and the gate had been overrun. Almost the entire force, both the one that had stormed the quarantine camp, and the smaller one that had been securing the walls, had fallen out of control. The inhabited camps around the outbreak were fully forted up, and their bolt throwers were thumping irregularly as clots of undead tried for this or that stretch of wall.

There was an incident when one of the defenders' bolt-thrower teams opened up on our approaching relief force, until shouting in the gathering darkness resolved the misunderstanding. The defenders' very bad aim spared our ponies from being cut down by friendly fire, but did not impress me with the competence or training of these shaky White Rose front-line troops.

These were the survivors of a year's fighting around the Second Mouth?

Well, the answer proved to be, no, not really. The veteran troops – those that had survived – those had been among those battalions that we'd been observing, the ones evacuated away from the hot zone. These were rear elements and new recruits brought in by the most recent troop ships. Brought in and then left to die by command officers who had decided to cut their losses, or to season the raw troops by immersion, or I know not what stupid command-pony-thought-process, such as it was.

The rambling, savage ghouls that had overrun the riverbank near and around #21 were, by and large, already thralled. Or, I should say, they had escaped their enthrallment. My best guess is that the rest of the squad or two of necromancers who had been controlling this mess had succumbed to their illness in some sort of cascade effect, each trying to pick up the slack when their fellow-sorcerers had dropped their own command-lines. The entire unit had ripple-fallen, each pony's tenuous grasp on their necromantic magic torn away by the sudden burden pulling them down in turn.

They were all dead now, shuffling hidden somewhere within their own wildling herds. Our line-companies were exhausted by this time, but they still dropped down their lances and couched and pushed forward. The last of the light abandoned our troops as they pushed forward, and the fighting was done in gathering darkness. It was a pity we hadn't brought the pikes, it might have helped keep the ravening dead from our throats. As it was… ponies get tired where ghouls don't.

The Nightmare walked among our fighters in the darkness, and gifted them with strength, and the thestral eye, and brought with her the inspiration and talents of a hundred Company veterans volunteering their remote guidance, and still, we lost ponies in the fight for #21.

Sorghum Stocks, pulled down by three shamblers on the flank and savaged before her rank-mates could react. Fir Bank, who bled out from a deep bite on his right rear leg that nopony noticed until he fell over senseless. Yard Arm, who died likewise from a similar wound on her upper left fore-leg. A former Company jack named Pouliche Chasseur; three mares named Honey Pot, Sugar Loaf, and Open Lot; a stallion named Shim Shake. Not a single fatality during the morning and the afternoon's fighting, and then – so many.

We should have sent in the reinforcements instead, but these were our oriented ponies, the ones who knew the ground.

And they paid for it.

While the Nightmare and I oversaw the bloody suppression of the Combat Corps' failure around #21, Cherie took advantage of the night and its shadows to search for the missing commanders, the missing necromancers all along the northern shore, and in and around the tumbled and burned walls of the Second Mouth. From my account up to this point, you would be excused if you thought of this mess as if it were an unpopulated chaos of ghouls and the dying. And there was that aspect to it. But there was still nearly two dozen battalions of troops scattered in isolation in their fortified camps all up and down the shore, and within a number of the bastions of the fallen city and its enormous port-side citadel.

Within the shattered city, were roving bands of free ghouls, risen from the wreckage of the fighting, and the most recent of what had been a series of epidemics that had wracked both combatant sides. Cherie danced through the shadows of the ghoul-ridden night, searching for living civilians, necromancers, their patrols, and fortified outposts. The last of these were present, but besieged, and the surviving necromancers and their herds of enthralled ghouls hid behind strong walls. Those that were still well; Cherie also found several necromancers' fastnesses full of sick, sickly, or dying blood-mages, desperately attempting to quack themselves through the throes of the sickness before they lost control of their 'herds'.

An anxious Nightmare, light-hooved and uncertain, pulled me from my unlearned assistance to some of our medics, trying to help purge the sickness from some of the least-stable victims, running their blood through an improvised cantrip they'd talked me into witching up on the spot. I had Sawbones riding my back-brain like a foal riding the back of a pig, making suggestions as he watched me through an instance of the Filly.

“You have to get her to come back out of the field. She's exposing herself!" insisted the Nightmare.

“Who's that, Mistress?" I asked absently, watching the steaming liquid float through the air as I rotated loops of living blood.

Nevermind that, get that gore back inside the patient. I can't be sure this will do anything at all, but I know that if it goes *cold*, it won't be any good at all, groused the Filly in Sawbones' terse manner.

I roped the 'gore' back into the patient's opened veins, watching carefully to make sure the magicked blood didn't spill or carry any foreign objects into the flesh.

“Cherie! Our Idiot Rose! She insists on walking through open charnel houses full of infection. She's not a Peacock-damned alicorn, to ignore illness so carelessly. We're going to lose her to this disgusting plague!"

“Whatever led you to think that Cherie listens to a word I say, Mistress?" I watched as the medic sewed up the patient, and wondered if that flush was a sign of the cantrip working – or evidence that we'd just killed this soldier.

“Feh. I don't care what you think you have leverage over, or how you lack in it, or whatever. Add your voice to mine, and I will be satisfied! Assuming that the foal hasn't already caught the crap, and is on the slope towards a foolish death even now. That foolish, foolish child…"

I caught some sleep after rotating the blood supplies of a dozen patients, having thoroughly exhausted myself. Upon finding myself within the dreamworld, I found very little rest in sleep. Our bodies might lay down, but our minds? That belonged to the Nightmare, who never gave us pause if she was exercised, or fired up with one of her grand furies. And the White Rose exposing herself to the ghoul-flu was certainly cause for a fury, I'm afraid.

The Nightmare had pulled a surprising number of ponies into her anxiety-meeting that night in the grand dream-palace which she made her throne-room. The Captain and the Lieutenant of the Company, Stomper, Whispering Wheat, even Salted Soil found herself sitting restlessly in the council-seating, with our grand Mistress fuming in the sovereign's throne.

We talked among ourselves, waiting for the last pony summoned to the council. Hour after hour, the subjective time ticked away. Some ponies found other uses for their night-time, leaving notational imagoes to hold down their council seats, and I know for a fact that Sawbones was busy elsewhere on his endless medical rounds, even though his imago sat passively upon his divan, waiting the pleasure of the Nightmare and the eventual appearance of the White Rose when she deigned to appear.

It was a long, very long time before Cherie finally answered her call.

“Foolish foal! How long have you left us to wait on your pleasure! Tell us true, what foolishness have you been indulging your personage upon?" bellowed the Nightmare.

“Mistress, thank you for your endless patience, my lady! I have been, as I ought to have been, busy upon the front-lines, attempting to dispel our ignorance, to find out where we stand here! What we don't know towers over our tiny horde of knowledge like a dunghill is overshadowed by a mountain-range!"

The Nightmare snorted at this aggressive counter-attack. “Foolish foal! Your eagerness matters naught, if the sickness which rolls over the field of contention, takes you away from us without warning! We are eternal, but you – you! You are as mortal as any pony in the ranks. Plague can take you without warning, without protection, without emphasis. You can die like any other mortal pony, and you need to take care. You, you are not an alicorn. You are fragile, and breakable, and vulnerable. Be ware! Be careful, take care! We cannot spare you."

The thestral's ears folded down under this assault, as she absorbed the Spirit's rebuke. “Mistress, I recognize your point, your concern, your warning. But I am not exposed as those ponies you worry over. I am the pony of shadows and dreams! I am not impervious like you are, but my methods, I think, I give me some more protection than simply trotting through the rotted streets I've flown over tonight."

Nonsense, declared Sawbones. You are no more protected against the simple infective exposure of a plague than I, or any other physician under the protection of the Spirit. Don't rely on your dream-walking to protect you from your own foolishness, pouliche!

If it were possible for a pony's ears to fold any lower upon their skull than the thestral's had before this, I think Cherie would have found a way. She looked as if she had been whipped. “Oh, Monsieur! I swear to you, I have been careful. I have not contacted these ponies which I haunt, I have not come into physical contact with these precincts which I walk. I am safe, I swear to Luna!"

You don't get to make those determinations, you young fool. Get back to the medics, and have them work you up. I want you hosed down, checked from dock to snout, and cleaned up. Then we'll see if you need to be put into quarantine yourself. You can't play around with this plague, pouliche! It's a killer, worse than our last dance with the 'jack. If it were possible for the Filly to stare sternly from her low vantage, she managed it, glaring down her elder self, the past chiding the present.

“Sawbones, she's not the only one that needs to go into quarantine. The entire strike force is crapped up, I'm pretty sure. We've had MPs vomited on, almost every single line pony got a muzzle-full of gore or filth, and I've been dropping blood all over this tartaran half-acre."

Bah. There's exposed, and then there's *exposed*. And no offense, jenny, but you're not as important to the plan as our pet White Rose. She's the fulcrum upon which your entire outfit is dangling. If she goes down for the count, you're all hanging flank-side up over the abyss.

“What's done is done," said the Nightmare, magnanimously, now that she'd gotten others to do her disciplinary work for her. “Cherie, what did you see, what did you find? Is there anything living in that ruined city over there?"

“Ah! Yes, I was very surprised. Numerous clusters of living civilians, hiding here and there in the fortified houses, town-fortresses – and even an entire walled district, full of living ponies, not even sick! Marvelous, truly. Oh, I should say – not ponies. Caribou. Stern looking bucks and does, too, if shorter than the northern ones. Didn't think to find them down here. But there they are! Armed, vigilant. Looked to be on good terms with the White Rose, too. There were guards outside their gate, and armed guards within. The guards without, they didn't look too good, but the ones inside, they were clever, they kept them at a forearm's length."

Interesting! said the Captain, listening in on the conversation. There had been a large population of caribou throughout the Riverlands, but the last twenty, twenty-five years wiped out most of them, drove them out into the empire, exiles all over the place. What are these bucks doing here?

“A merchant enclave," contributed Salted Soil, huddled in an intimidated puddle before the powerful personalities of the Company, and those members of the Order who listened without speaking. “They defended their own walls from us, while the loyalist army besieged us in the inner harbour, and fought us outside the walls. The Caribou Quarter maintained an alliance with their overlords, until very recently. It wasn't until we had driven the loyalists outside of the walls, and were fighting the enemy army in the trench networks outside that they agreed to terms. As soon as the last loyalist was driven out of the old city, the Caribou capitulated. Before we could even move a storming party against them, get the sappers redirected against their internal walls. Before that? We'd concentrated on the force which actually presented a threat. All they did was defend their walls."

She blushed, thinking of something unspoken. “And they defended those walls valiantly. An entire battalion was lost early on, when a division commander thought to push through the civilian-held sector last winter."

“So," I said, thinking through the problem. “They kept to themselves, they held their own walls, so long as they had allies to do their fighting for them, and when they lost those, they surrendered promptly. So, smart, careful, well-thought out. They're survivors. How have they been feeding themselves?"

“Grain merchants, ma'am." Salted Soil had not yet figured out my exact position within the Faith. I wore so many faces among the faithful, that she may very well have thought my youthful glamours were themselves falsehoods, that I was actually as old as Obscured Blade, or Gibblets, or the rest of that whole generation of ancients. I left her to her misapprehension. It was nice to be treated like someone's elder for a change.

“Grain merchants, holding vast supplies of milled wheat and barley and oats, and supply-warehouses for more, while the loyalists still had access to their gates and their passageways. When the loyalists were driven out of the walls, they left behind their stockpiles under the protection of the caribou merchants. This may have been why the loyalists, when they pulled back, they just kept going until they retreated right out of the riverlands. They'd left their supplies with the perfidious caribou."

“The Bride's loss, was the caribou's gain, then," I observed. “Well, good for them. Caribou have been entirely too kicked about this last generation or so. They deserve a break or two. Uninfected, you think?"

“Nothing I could see," said Cherie. "Which is more than I can say of the blockhouses the troops inside the city are occupying. Two out of six are full of sick and dying. We need to get in there and clean house. And the necromancers are failing inside as fast as they are out here. There are a lot of thralled ghouls milling about in there. If their masters start dropping, it's going to be another Caribou City, I think."

It sounds like it's already another Caribou City, observed Sawbones.

“Not yet, Monsieur. C'est un cils qui va de cette façon, though."

Equuish, pouliche.

“No, no, we got that one, Sawbones," said the Nightmare. “What will it require, Cherie, to keep the Second Mouth from going the way of Caribou City?"

“I think we have to throw over the charade, Mistress."

“Throw it over, why, you've barely begun your deceptions!" scoffed the Spirit. "What a brief and sorry performance, to close the theatre-doors not two weeks into its run! Why should we end your current pantomime?"

“Because we need to gain the confidence of the survivors inside the city, which we cannot, wearing ghoul-face and puppeteering the military police. They're not well-suited to lying, barely two weeks in, and they cannot keep up the pretense!"

“Is this truth, or indolence? You have not put the work into maintaining your story, your legend, Cherie. Isn't it that you just want to play with your new toys?"

“You would know about playing with new toys, Mistress. I'm bored! I hide in my box, and twiddle my hooves, and shuffle my wings, and wait for the signal for 'La rose blanche de la machine'! Bah! I tell you, bah!"

“I cannot do anything with this fool from the machine, Feufollet, take her away with you! Enough! The charade continues!"

And so it did. The next day, we poured the Order into the restless, dying city in ghoulface, as the Nightmare called it. We dressed the commanders of each battalion in military police drag, and marched like mechanical ponies, dripping glamour like gore upon the shattered pavement of the conquered city.

Nopony interfered. Nobody even moved as we advanced into the diseased city, hidden behind barred doors and barred bastion gates. The whole of the rebellion upon the Housa was huddled in a paranoid terror, cringing away from the pestilence which stalked the bitter-cold streets inside the walls, and the wastelands outside the gates.

We continued our playacting to an empty house, while our grease-paint dripped underneath the hot lime-lights.

Wintertime Diversions, or, The Blossomless Bed

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Stomper sent over two battalions of reinforcements that morning, over which I had to lay glamours on as they poured off the boats. I was dead on my hooves by the time they were properly ghoul'd up and organized on the cleared roads into the city. It was mid-morning, and I was as tired as I had been after entire twenty-hour shifts spent fighting in the summer campaign.

Something wasn't right. I reported myself to the medicos, who took my temperature, and pushed me into a cot, and dumped about a gallon of small beer into my gullet. I sent out an alert to the command channels via my personal Filly, and I got Cherie herself, walking out of the shadowed corner of the multi-cot room they'd dropped me into after my diagnosis.

"Damnit, Cherie, go get yourself a mask! I'm probably infectious. So's half the command from yesterday's battle in the camps. Have you been checked over?"

"Oh, Feufollet, of course they checked me out. They say I'm as healthy as a horse! But here, I'll put on the silly little bit of fabric they gave me, here, see?"

"Better, I suppose. I'm down for the count, they tell me. Somepony needs to go out and deal with the necessary glamouring here. I don't know how long they're going to keep me under observation, but the world spins on without me, doesn't it?"

"Monsieur says that Tambelon doesn't really spin, he had all this math, and all this theory-"

"Focus, Cherie! I don't care about cosmology. Nor should you. We have ponies out on the blade's edge here, and we have our units out and exposed and looking like they actually are. You know this is something that is absolutely anathema to the Company. Never, ever show your true face to the rubes! Never let the audience see the grease-paint! I can't be out there. We gotta scramble."

"Monsieur says that Bad Apple is recovered, Feufollet. They're sending her to us!"

"Wonderful. Not two months after she was nearly killed by a White Rose petit batard, they're going to send her in here to socialize with thousands of the ponies who tried to kill her? She'll deal with that quite excellently, don't you think? Are you thinking? She's not even as good as you are at glamouring, for that matter. And if she's got my luck, she'll be crapped up and stuck here in quarantine with me inside of two days." I slid back into my cot, leaning against my pillow.

"Oh, Hades, I don't know," I sniveled. "I just don't like it when I'm not out there doing for the Company."

"You know you've not been 'doing for the Company' for nearly a season now, don't you? You're an Order-pony now."

I glared at her. "I never swore an oath to your silly Order, Miss White Rose."

"You haven't really sworn a proper oath to the Company, either, Feufollet," she said, nettled. "And none of us are anything but apprentices in the Company. I think they all forgot about that detail. It don't matter, anyways. It's the Spirit, not the words. And I don't think we could get the Nightmare out of your heart with blasting powder."

She sighed, looking a bit drained. "But really, you have to pace yourself. We can't spare you, and we can't work around you if you're gonna insist on driving yourself into the turf, you know."

I burst out laughing at our reversed positions. "Damn, that was a quick turnaround, wasn't it? You feeling OK? Any overheating, any nausea?"

"Ah? No, nothing yet. I think it will come, whether I ward it off or no. The flu, it comes, whatever you try to keep it from your door, you know? These silly ponies, they lock themselves into airless rooms, hoping that the pestilence, she will walk past their doors if they hide well enough, bar their doors strongly enough. Me? I don't think it's like that. The sicknesses will find their way through the chinks in the wall, the gaps in the doorway. Meet them on your own ground, I say. I will face down Monsieur Jack wearing my finest barding, painted in proper war-paint. I will couch my lance against his challenge, and meet him face to face."

"Cherie, don't be chivalrous. You know only a sucker offers a fair fight. Never agree to a duel, you silly filly."

"Hrm. Perhaps. We will see. Get some rest. We can deal with ghouls without your input, we are not yet that helpless, jenny of mine."

I rolled away from the door as she disappeared into the shadows behind the cabinet beside the doorway. We had not awakened any of my room-mates, all of them spacy and struggling with Monsieur 'Jack even when they were conscious. I fell into a feverish dream, nothing that the Mistress or any Spirit could penetrate. These drifting nothings were entirely my own – savage, weird, and meaningless. No great ghost-palaces for my delirium daydreams.

While I was sick and unavailable, the world continued to grind away. While I was away, and while a full third of the Order was away from their fortified camps and the ships which were protected by those walls, well. That was when the uplander loyalists chose to start probing our outer defenses. First a hoof-full of scouting parties clashed with the Order's outer outposts. Then, a few days later, a reconnaissance in force hit one of those outposts, and drew serious blood. Thankfully, they were out in the open, exposed to the elements, and facing an alert enemy with serious force-multipliers to aid in their repulse. Their bodies piled up under our walls, though, and enough of them got over those walls that we lost two ponies in the fight, a Just Cause and a Winds Spinrow, both stallions. But even though the exchange rate was better than fifty to one, it was a warning that our southern flanks were exposed. Winter wasn't keeping the uplanders from daring the snows and the miserable weather to get at our ponies. Stomper began planning for the evacuation of our open-flanked southern-shore positions.

Meanwhile, the battalions which had been pushed over to the northern shore forced their way into the city beside the wrecked port, and commenced the slaughter of the undead. The Company, and her child the Order, were outfits custom-created by destiny for the destruction of ghouls and other dead things. Where mere graceless soldiers were meat for the flesh-hungry dead, the ponies in the Spirit feared nothing the undead could offer us. Death at their hooves was nothing more than death, harmless in the face of eternity. And their mindless assaults came to nothing before our confident sections and squads. They weren't nearly deadly enough to offer any sort of threat to our rankers, if well-supported and well-rested.

The ponies of the Order moved forward carefully, but remorselessly. Somepony brought over the timberlings in a couple of boats at some point early on in boatlift, and they coursed along the flanks of our companies, pulling down dead things as the more clever tried the open rear of this formation or that. The timberlings might not have had the weaponry or the training of the Company, or even the Order, but there was nothing the jaws or hooves of a dead thing could offer that would find much purchase on a foe composed entirely of brush and greenery. The bites and blows of the ghouls found no purchase on Cherie's pets, but the timberlings' sharp-thorned jaws ripped away at the throats and the limbs of the undead.

They pushed ahead, the advance battalions and their timblerling flankers. Though the battalions were grossly outnumbered, the ex-Company officers which commanded them were wise, and cautious, and very few Order ponies died. Less than a half-dozen lost in a week of bitter winter-weather fighting. Narrow Furrows, Haul Bushel, Tall Tale, all stallions, and Sweet Acres & Low Meadows, mares, died, all of them in more or less the same fashion – bled out where their fellows didn't notice their distress, or pulled away in a scrum from their file-fellows.

Very few civilians were found in these days of grinding battle. The companies of the advance were apprised by Cherie of the hidden defensive positions within which there were supposed survivors, but the advance was very, very slow. And in the few positions which were cleared in those first few days, they found nothing alive. Smashed-down doors, stove-in barricades – and groaning, dead-eyed ghouls milling around the hiding-holes which had recently held the desperate and living.

It was a rolling catastrophe, and our ponies weren't nearly fast enough to catch up to the rollling tide of tartarus broke loose. The harder our line-companies pushed forward to catch the edge of the bloody slaughter, the more fell out with the sickness. To be a member of the Order or the Company was no defense against the sneaking sickness that burrowed under every barricade, that smashed through every door-frame, that floated like a miasma over the dead-choked streets and alleys of a dying city. Very few of the Order died of the flu, but far too many were knocked out of the ranks, their lances lost to the advance.

The barracks of #15 filled up to the rafters with sick and ailing Order ponies, and the medics were overrun by the traffic. More and more of them and their assistants fell out into the cots themselves, caught up in the sickness.

My infection burned through me rapidly, quickly, lightly. Perhaps my self-doctoring helped in this regard. I spent a good deal of time imposing my own cure upon myself, rotating my own blood in dizzying arcs and loops over my cot as I laid there, dazzled by blood-loss and the spectacle of it all.

They told me that all the ponies I had imposed Sawbones' clever little hack upon had passed quickly through the valley of the shadow of death, and were now escaping, slowly, the far side. Perhaps the cantrip was useful, perhaps it was useful. I invested in my own science, hoping to get back onto the ramparts as quickly as possible.

I didn't quite get all of my blood back in my veins, they tell me that they found me soaked in my own blood, passed out after I'd barely processed two-thirds of my supply through the trick. That maybe slowed down my recovery a bit, perhaps not quite as much as the magic stole from my inevitable exchange with the disease.

In the meantime, I took copious notes, and demanded full reports from all ponies out on the battle-lines.

The fighting ground on. The gates of the port were retaken, and the fallen outposts were overtaken. in taking each outpost, the companies in the front lines opened up the undefended gates, and their assault teams cleared the interior marshalling yards. Nopony was alive in most of these little forts. Many of them were full of ghouls which had to be cleared out, blockhouse by blockhouse, barracks-room by barracks-room. The ghouls charged like ghouls do, with the novelty of blooded fetishes bobbing above their withers, relics of their one-time thralling. Each band of re-wilded ghouls with fetishes decorating their whithers was another untold tale of escape from the clutches of some fallen necromancer. Here and there within the herds of ravening, hungry undead, could be found a ghoul without a fetish-spike. One would probably be safe in making the assumption that these were the remnants of those former-warlocks who had lost control of their herds, but who could truly say? The companies burned out the outposts once they'd slaughtered all of the former inhabitants, usually tearing down a barracks or a storage shed to provide the timber for the disposal-pyres.

And further and further, the companies of the Order pushed into the city on the edge of death. They found a few living outposts here and there. But then, in the second week of the push, they found something. They found a wall behind which civilians huddled, still living. It was a joyous occasion, after wading through endless gore – to finally, finally find a living island of survivors.

They hurried those survivors back out of the city, through the cleared streets they had battered through the hordes of the dead. The survivors were themselves sickly, and they brought those weakened ponies and donkeys into the quarantine camps, where our medicos evaluated them and pushed them into the survivors' wards. By now, I was mostly recovered from my terrible fever, and was helping the assistants of the medicos. I watched those survivors pour though our facilities, and did my best to aid in their processing.

The medicos weren't quite ready for me to return to my cantrip-doctoring, which although Sawbones had endorsed my methods, still was something that the medics didn't want to chance while they still thought I was infectious. So, I worked inside the quarantine zone, and did my best to aid in their work.

And so, the line-companies, thinned and thinned again by the endless grinding exposure of our ponies in the infectious zone, slowly moved forward into the heart of the city. Another cul-de-sac of survivors were extracted, and then another. We found three more surviving outposts of White Rose holdouts, who had kept their walls against the plague and the undead. Our ponies pushed forward into the heart of the wrecked city, and up against the abandoned docks and piers of the savaged port.

The civilian and the military survivors of the Second Mouth poured through our quarantine facilities in camps #15 and #16. The medics had absorbed the better part of a battalion of assistants and aides in their fight against the relentless flu, and though half of them had fallen prey to the ghoul-flu, the rest maintained their defenses and their work in the face of that Tartaran devil-plague.

By the third week, I was mostly recovered from my sickness, and I agitated to join the ponies who were clearing the city. The remnants of the line-companies which had pushed through the rest of the city were now in the outposts before the gates of the caribou Quarter, replacing those few sad ponies who had maintained their positions in the face of the desertion of their superiors, of the sickness and death of their fellows, of the collapse of every single post and position around them. We left them be, safe behind their high walls.

Those ponies who agreed to be evacuated, were brought into my quarantine quarters, and I aided the surviving medics in settling in those survivors, and preparing them for the inevitable fight against the sickness which had caught them around the throat and the muzzle. My magic was beginning to recover itself, and offering those secretive solutions which Sawbones had endorsed as a cure to this tartarus-born sickness. I began cleansing blood-streams according to his prescription. But my capacity for this sort of heroic intervention wasn't such that I could offer it more than once or twice a night, in my recovery-weakness.

And so, while I was stuck playing nursemaid and perfecting my blood-cleansing cantrips, I missed the charge of the fleet of the Order into the inner harbour. Stomper had finally gotten clearance to abandon the works on the south shore. Or had, perhaps, just stopped waiting for permission, I'm not sure which was the case. None of us had seen a commanding officer in weeks by then.

This, incidentally, was a problem across the board. We had come down here into the heart of the Rebellion to hunt officers, to winkle out the liches we thought were driving the unrest and the ceaseless aggression and hopeless slaughter. But almost as soon as we got inside their gates, the officers in charge pulled back. They waffled. They ignored us if they could, and kept us at hoof's-length if they had to talk to us.

And soon enough, the officers of high rank were nowhere to be found. Salted Soil and some of the other MP officers thought that the high command had fled the plague in returning grain-ships heading back to the Third Mouth and home. It was certainly true that no command plan was developed or offered for our breaking of the quarantines, but also, no opposition was offered against our campaign. Eventually, they stopped asking for the ghoul-glamouring, and by the third week of the campaign, the Order was fighting in regular order, as themselves, naked to the elements and the world. Nopony seemed to care that our 'ghouls' had disappeared overnight. It was almost as if there was nopony to care.

Our campaign of volunteerism and ghoul-extermination had been, at least in part, an attempt to draw out these theoretical liches. It had been thought – primarily by the Nightmare, but also some of the MPs who endorsed her thinking – that destroying the teeming undead would cause the architects of the last year's slaughter to defend their 'gains'. And yet, nothing. No more response than we might have gotten if there were no secret liches controlling the war from behind the scenes. Perhaps there never had been any to start with?

But no, it was like the reduced armies on the lower Housa were suddenly no more than a collection of battalions huddling in their respective pocket-forts. If things went on as they seemed to be going, Stomper would be in de-facto command of the remnants of three entire White Rose armies by spring. The White Rose had not been like this in the spring, or the year before. There had been an animating force driving the rebels' ambitions and aggression, a force which was suddenly, apparently, absent without leave. So, we continued our pogrom against the undead, for the lack of anything better to do until the hypothetical hidden enemy showed themselves.

In the meantime, Stomper and the Order had a city-port to clear. The dromons pushed into the abandoned port-harbour in squadron strength, their decks bristling with Order arms-ponies, their naphtha throwers charged and ready. They coordinated with the line-companies on the docks and shore, who were busy drawing out and herding small packs of the undead from the nearby sectors into the range of the war-engines. From my post in the recovery wards, I could occasionally see great black pillars of smoke rising from the burning warehouses and the destroyed docks.

The dromons and their large contingents of marines offered the extra lances and fresh troops that allowed the flu-reduced battalions in the city gain full control of the streets. They mounted honeypot lures all along the blackened docks of the wrecked port, and waited at anchor for the ghouls to gather. It became a thrice-daily performance-piece, as the naphtha-thrower crews stood to their weapons and waited for the signal, their projectors zeroed in on their respective honeypot targets.

Bad Apple had joined the crews of the dromons, and was the architect of these 'mad minute' flaming-sessions. She had found a way to bond with the White Rose, despite their mutual history of fiery slaughter. Nothing quite like a bit of ghoul-immolation to paper over old wounds and animosities.

Finally, after a month or so of this grinding, miserable fight, it seemed like we had gotten our jaws around the problem. The sightings of ghouls began to wane. And the only thing left to do in the city was get the caribou out from behind their high walls, and convince them we meant well, that we were here to help. That we weren't here to make another Caribou City.

This turned out to be a harder case to make than you'd have thought.

No Special Hurry, or, Tempting Fate

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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."

Like A Thief In The Night

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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

The End, or, The Third Blade

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SBMS173

I'm afraid this will be the last one, Mistress. I'm not sure how much time I have left here; this isn't even truly a dream state. I'm pretty sure this is a delusion, my brain mis-firing as the bits and pieces start to die, section by section, lights out, water pouring in, the ship going down.

But on the off chance that you're real, that I'm talking to the Spirit herself, and not myself dreaming one last dream, let me tell you what happened, before I run out of myself. But first, let me report one last death in the Company. Sawbones, physician and Annalist. Died of wounds, blood-loss, and shock, but mostly from the spite of our enemies, internal and otherwise.

I had barely finished my last report to you, in the unconsciousness that had followed my capture and beating by the enemy, when their rough hooves woke me from my correspondence. I had been taken off of the sleigh they had used to spirit me away from the ambush site, and they carried me up the steps of a handsome, fortified stone mansion, guarded by a pair of Peace River militiaponies. As they spun me around during the process of getting my bound form up the stairs, I saw the rest of the compound, and realized it was the 'castle' the Bride's ponies had made out of a seized noblepony's family seat, a rough rampart thrown up around their mansion, converting the whole into a motte-and-bailey which was slightly more dignified than a simple winter castra.

I have no idea what happened to the baron they'd evicted from his ancestral seat.

And so, they brought me into the presence of Her Majesty, the Empress of All Tambelon, The Bride. Who wasn't looking all that well, truth to tell. She had declined significantly in the years since the last time I had laid eyes on her, sporting a number of fresh-looking wounds, and a general sickly pallor that spoke of sleepless nights and illness.

And she stank, horribly. Like every sickroom I'd seen from New Coltington to the riverland borders, and every scene full of death and ghouls in between. The miasma poured off of her like fog oozing down over the edge of a plateau onto the lower slopes. Like smoke from a death-pyre. Like mists from a malarial marsh. I dry-heaved through my gag at the smell, my abused stomach spasming, my whole body tugging at the rope by which I was bound.

"Please, enough with the theatrics, traitor," wheezed the Bride in offense at my reflexive display of indiscipline. "I am well aware of how I must look. How much of this is your fault? You - take off the gag. I need to hear him speak."

"There. What do you have to say for yourselves, Sawbones of the Black Company?"

"I'd say it was nice to see you, Your Majesty, except that I wish it were under better conditions. Can't you keep any servants in here? It's filthy." And this is true, her interrogation room was a sty, full of crumpled paper, filth, and bloodstained furnishings.

"I would bring in more maids - except the ones I had all died of the plague, and for some funny reason, nopony will come voluntarily! Captain! Take a note - we need to send a patrol out to collect some more servants."

"My ponies. My donkeys. My staff!" She waved her foreleg around the room, and her magic spun me like a top, giving me a view of the shambolic corpses lining the walls of the chamber. Some of them in infirmary gear, some in torn officers' uniforms. A few dressed like maids. "They serve me in their deaths as they did in life. Not as well, mind you. A ghoul's absolutely useless as a maid, for instance. And the quality of my operations planning has dropped precipitously since my staff ceased to answer my queries with anything but variants on 'braiiins!'"

They took up the chorus, and she waited until the half-intelligible moans died down.

"My fault, of course. I knew that this, or something like this, would happen if I took the field. This, or incidents like this, have happened in the past. I find myself, in times of war, hung suspended between two weapons. One is fine, subtle, self-knowing, apt – and horrifically fragile. Every time I put my hoof to that wondrous glass blade, it shatters in my grip. Living armies are not made for my usage. Clever, wise, agile – and so, so vulnerable. Whenever I get agitated, or excited, or am required to defend myself. Well, you all personally have experienced my little crochets, haven't you, my pets?"

The herd which had once been her headquarters groaned in response to her loving question, somehow knowing when they were being addressed, and when they were merely the audience to her ranting.

"And the other weapon is a club. It is blunt, and mindless, and immeasurably destructive. Ghouls and revenants and barrowgasts and liches – the most of them are mere mechanisms, bundles of tropisms you can direct here and there and give specific commands, but general commands? Trust? Even these liches are endlessly treacherous, and by and large incapable of strategizing their way out of wet paper bags." She glared at the three liches, who smiled smarmily right back at her.

"And yes, you repugnant clods, I know at least one of you has been playing White Rose all this time. I learned that much down in the riverlands. Did you think to hide your magical signatures from me? It didn't work. We'll figure out who's been flying the 'Rose Flag' all this time. Sometime this season – mark me if we won't figure out who's been playing sides again. And then there will be a reckoning, yes there will." She waved the other foreleg in disgusted dismissal.

"Well, that's for another day. Today, you have brought me my other blade. The third blade, the steel-forged axe-blade I thought to bring to bear on my problem. Resilient, clever, wise, sharp as a serpent's tooth. Resilient against my crochets, I believed. I had intended to make you my personal legion, you know. Bring you down into the riverlands, do some real damage to the rebels. But somehow, you never came to my hoof. I was stuck playing fire-brigade in that idiotic siege, and you all had to be heroic." She paused, frowning.

"When you weren't murdering my liches." She noted my look of objection and waved to overrule it. "Yes, yes, I know I gave you commission to put down those three oath-breakers. And a fine job of it you did. But you didn't leave it at that, did you? My Beau! My beautiful, loyal Beau."

For the second time in my life, I saw a dead thing weep. It was vile, and disturbing, and somehow heart-breaking.

"Oh, my Beau. A terrible, feckless general like all of my legates, it is true. But he meant so well, and often found an equine cats-paw to correct his many, many military flaws. He was the one legate I could truly trust to lead armies without plotting how to get them killed in the most expeditious manner possible. He was my only subordinate who grasped the idea."

"And you murdered him. Snuck past his undead guards with your clever little cantrips, killed him in his repose, and then returned later while publicly lauding your 'recovery' of my Braystown fortress from the runaway ghoul infestation. Oh, yes – I do have my sources, I know what you did. I have the eye-witness who saw you enter the Shambles, personally, zebra." Raging, she gestured again at another dead thing against the back wall. A revenant donkey. Except that pony was supposed to be dead. What the hay?

"d'Harcourt. We didn't find your body. We thought you had gone into the river," I ground out, gravel-voiced.

"Ha! Ha! Got away from you, didn't I? Traitor! You visited m'lord, didn't you? Came back in the dead of night, wearing those evil eyes, right past the ghouls as if you weren't even there! Of course I went into the river, to get away from your assassins. I hid until I could find an authority figure you hadn't corrupted. And your agents were everywhere. I had to bide my time, until Her Majesty returned from the front." The revenant very nearly had color in his cheeks. I was baffled, unsure of what he was talking about. Eyes?

"And, so, evidence of your perfidy came to my door-step," fumed the undead empress. "All that remained was for you to stray into my grasp, Annalist. All I want to know now, is how deeply the betrayal extends. Is it your entire Company? Must I burn the entire valley? Tear it all down to the foundation-stones, exterminate every last pony that ever served under your banner?"

"Wait, Your Majesty, did he just say eyes, plural? Look at me! I lost my eye over a year ago! How does that square? We know a traitor, a foresworn brother murdered the-"

She had one of her legates stuff the gag back in my mouth, snarling. All this time I thought we would be undone by our adventure on the river, the theft of the second Housa fleet. And here, she didn't even think about it, didn't consider it. Too busy blaming us for Obscured Blade's perfidy, his bloodthirstiness. Damned for something we didn't do. Wasn't that a kick in the head?

She stomped around my bound form, staring down at me, glaring, until I thought she'd light my coat aflame from her regard. "Are my legates that delicious, that you must devour every last lich in my service? Is that your plan? Is that the secret of your Company's resilience? I now find myself wondering how much of the Marklaird's claims were true. Are you truly agents of the White Rose? Are you agents of the white alicorn?"

As the lich-empress glared, fuming, raging, she opened her mouth again.

And from that dead mouth emerged a sword-point.

She choked, twitching, her dead eyes crossing, losing all personality. I struggled to figure out what was going on as her legs fell out from under her, and her wings dropped like lead weights. As her body fell out of my sight, I saw behind her a legate, grinning, dead and pallid. A glamour was fading from her – no his hide. A horn emerged from the semblance which had hidden it, and the distinctive grey-silver-white coat of an old comrade joined that long and wicked horn in my sight.

Howling and screaming surrounded the three of us, the collapsing lich-empress, my bound self, and the legate who was no legate. d'Harcourt was the one screaming, the howling were the ghouls, locked in some sort of sympathetic resonance with the dying Bride, and the clanging noise was the other two legates, blades drawn, and fighting with each other, a blur of death and steel in my peripheral vision.

And while the two legates locked in brutal combat behind the ancient unicorn, he approached me, grimacing a parody of a smile, and pulled that foul gag out of my mouth again.

"Obscured Blade," I greeted the traitor. "True to your name in the end."

"The end?" His weird, terrible grimace shifted, and became genuine, delighted. "Oh, no, my dear zebra. This is just the beginning. Oh, can you feel that? She's going. Oh, hold tight, hold tight. This is going to be marvelous."

The traitor-unicorn frowned, something occurring to him. "Wait, no, don't hold tight. We can't have you soaking this up, that could ruin everything. Here, die."

And he took his backup knife, and he stabbed me through my remaining eye, right into my brain.

I can feel the burning of the empress's death raging through my dying meat, but it is too late for me. Death and power are even now chasing through the veins of my failing body. My brain is shutting down, section by section, the end flooding each compartment in turn.

You are my last refuge, Mistress. I put my faith in you, and the fillies. We've failed them again and again, let them into evil company, failed to protect them from this wicked world, failed in every last way.

Don't fail them in this last thing. Be better than that traitor thinks you to be. Be the Mistress we all believe you to be. Be better than you have to be, be better than we were.

We will be watching you from behind, from your mane and your tail.

I'm ready.

Dead in the service of the Nightmare, Sawbones, Company physician, and forty-second Annalist of the chronicles of the Black Company. Murdered by a sly and victorious traitor, of a knife to the brain.

Goodbye.

Thus ends the third volume of the Book of Sawbones, my mentor. I hereby begin the first volume of the Book of Feufollet, wherein I will detail how Sawbones' betrayal and murder was avenged. To be continued.

Again, to belabor the obvious, an entry from Sawbones, but in the hoof associated with Feufollet's work.

- Faded Palimpsest, 2nd Grade Archivist, Restricted Archives

The Miracle

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FFMS051

My first three attempts have been consigned to the fire along with Sawbones' remains. Tradition holds that the volumes of his Book be bound in what the tanners take from his hide, but the condition of his body when we found it hadn't left anything for them to work with; to be honest, it was mostly ashes anyways. The ceremonial pyre was more for form, tradition, really. The fires and the destruction made them difficult to reconstruct, and if we did not have Sawbones' last testimony to the Mistress, what happened in that chateau would have been an enduring mystery.

My first and second attempts were nothing more than extended profane rants, primal screams transcribed and blotted across ruined pages, torn and incoherent. The third turned maudlin and sobby and even worse, self-indulgent, so to the flames it went as well. I turned to transcribing the Mistress's last memories of my late Master, and so found my centre.

And so I return to my own story. My Book. Damn it all.

In those days the Black Company was in the nominal service of a black-hearted villain known as The Bride, soi-disant Empress of All Tambelon, queen of the damned, plague-mistress, slaughterer of her own people, mother of rebellions and enemy of life. To say that our relations with our employer at the time were fraught was to understate matters entirely. The Company was in the process of investing our employer in preparation for a late-winter siege at the moment that I officially took over the post of Annalist.

We were mid-air when the news came. It was delivered on wings of fire and shadow, a mystical wave of vast and terrible effect. Cherie was drawing a hacked-together double-gig, carrying Bad Apple and I in cobbled-together tandem seats, clutching each other and the rattle-trap half-collapsing remnants of our 'gig' lest it fall apart mid-air. Cherie had grown by leaps and bounds that winter season, leaving the rest of us behind in her very late adolescence. What had once been a tiny, spritely thestral foal was now a hearty mare whose wing-span was wide enough to carry two not-particularly-overlarge witches and their half-assed chariot through brutal winter skies at a pretty rapid clip without tiring or losing control of the equipage.

But it wasn't exactly an easy ride.

And it got considerably worse when the death-surges passed through the medium of the Company. Which is to say, us. Previous lich-deaths had affected the ponies of the Company profoundly, as minor as those devils had been in the general scheme of things. This was the lich-queen, and two of her minions, and more besides.

And for a moment, all the world were stars. And I learned for the first time, in my burning bones and blood, that the stars are fire.

We must have left one hell of a contrail. The improvised gig certainly didn't survive the flight. In fact, the only things that bound the three of us together were the boiling contents of my reserve-bottles of blood, burst out of their broken containers, and Bad Apple's pyromantic talent for the fires which burned in us.

I leashed us to the burning thestral with reins of boiling blood, and the little earth-pony pyromancer shaped our black-fire selves into a coherent whole, and kept us from bursting apart like a mis-fired gran pétard.

We had been in flight between the camps outside of the ruins of the Second Mouth and the rural chateau of the late Baron Rincewind where the minions of the Bride had taken our Annalist captive. We were most of the way eastwards when the wave of death's-power hit us, having set off not long after the reports of the ambush and Sawbones' captivity had come across the princess radio.

By the time Cherie arrived over the chateau, the three of us had come to a balance, spinning the flames and the blood and the shadows into a flyable arrangement, and we were able to descend with some modicum of dignity.

The chateau was a pillar of mottled flame, the stone itself on fire. It was encircled in turn by expanding circlets of wildfire surrounding collapsed, flaming ponies dotted here and there across the landscape. The aerial cohort had been shuttling bits and pieces of reaction-force commandos from further east and north, and at the time of the explosion there had to have been a company and a half on the ground, along with two of the Company's warlocks. Gibblets had not… reacted well to the surge, and was out of commission throughout the next several hours, brought down by heatstroke and his own, peculiar biology. Otonashi had come through the flames in a more effective fashion, and was working the ground elements, trying to rally them from their panicked, destructive chaos into something more disciplined and ship-shape.

It's hard to keep your military cool when every hair on your coat is a wick, your caparison is aflame, and your chamfron is melting on your head. This all was more than a little distracting. And yet, none of the Company armsponies were being consumed by the fires bursting out of their pores. It was as if the flames were something passing through us, rather than feeding off of our bodies. Like we were sweating fire.

The princess radio was nothing but static and the roaring of a bonfire.

We communicated via sign-language on the ground, Otonashi trotting everypony through the steps; we'd grown up more or less understanding her when she 'talked', but none of us were exactly practiced in actually speaking the way she did.

And while we stumbled around in the steaming tartarus-landscape around the burning chateau, a twisting tornado of fire spun in the flaming hole blown in that fortified building's roof. We knew something massive had died in there, but we were cut off from the Spirit in that fiery moment, or rather, we were too full of Her to hear her words.

And the tornado kept growing, sucking the flame and fire that was melting away the winter all around us, drawing the upper air down into a growing wind. Our flames were drawing upwards towards the fire-tornado. Things were spiraling out of control.

Well, moreso than they were already out of control.

Now safely on the ground, Bad Apple and I joined hooves, and she passed through the contact the knowledge of how to warp and guide the flames, and the three of us ceased our ceaseless flaring. Cherie took to the air again, merely glowing like an ember, no longer burning like a phoenix. She circled above the Company positions, her ash-grey wings cutting through the tendrils of rising flames like a blade. Bad Apple and I galloped in opposite directions, finding our individual brothers and sisters, torching against the gathering night. As we passed, the fires died and faded, the guttering power ceasing to waste itself in heat and light.

We met together the opposite side of the gathered troop-clusters from where we had landed. Our fire-dazzled eyes still were mostly worthless in the restored darkness, after-images ruining our night-vision.

But at least the bonfire-roar in our heads was dying away. One could almost hear – "-dead, dead oh my baby colt, wait, wait, don't go, don't go, don't go-" Meaningless babble. That stentorian voice should never have been heard whining like that, never been heard saying words like that. I have gone back and forth over revealing the Mistress's weakness in that moment, but in the end I came down on the side of proper disclosure. To say she was distraught is to understate her reaction to the death of Sawbones.

In retrospect, I think this emotional reaction was the only thing that saved this world. If she had been in this moment receptive to the blandishments of the victorious traitor, I think Tambelon would have burned.

All of it. Ponies, foliage, soil, crust and mantle, right down to the burning core. An ember-world, scorching every other world it touched above and below it on the Chain. We only survived that seed-fire beside which we trembled because of the fire in our souls, which preserved us body and mind against a spinning maelstrom that burned stone and melted steel.

And, mindless as it was in Obscured Blade's stunned victorious madness, it still was building. Drawing air from above, wicking the earth itself below his flame-hooves. He had found his spark, his fire, and the world kindled. And we were too much of the flame to fight the fire.

From the Mistress's babblings and from the evidence on the ground, we realized who the pillar of fire was, and where the power had come from. And yet, in the face of the fire which would burn the world, we had nothing to offer, no plan that would snuff it out.

The traitor was consuming himself in his conceit, there was very little sense in his fire. He would burn away, the wick blackening and flecking away in ash in the birthing of his flame. Nopony ever heard another word from that mad unicorn, no final words, no grand speech, no megalomaniacal gloating. As a villain, he was something of a disappointment. Not a romantic figure, no – rather, in the end, he was just another mindless tropism, another phenomenon. All of his intentions, all of his purpose, burnt away in a meaningless fire.

A meaningless fire that would destroy everything.

Enough of the traitor. He destroyed, and in destroying, was destroyed. He was a fool, in the end, and all of his plans and plots consumed in his idiot success.

And there we stood, destroyed right along with him. All of our plots, all of the Company's low cunning and educated cleverness, blown down by the winds of the maelstrom circling the triumphant bon-fire, wild-fire, magic destroying order by its mere touch. The fire is alive, but it is nothing else, and it consumes itself, leaving nothing behind it, not even death.

And so it was that our greatest daughter flew through the howling winds, grey-ash-wings over the raging fire, and we just watched, baffled. Locked in confusion and increasing panic – nothing we did, did anything but kept us from the growing flames.

And then the universe took pity on us. From the east, beyond the eye-dazzling fire, something washed out like a wave. The first roiling flash, crimson-red, blended so strongly with the fires that it looked for a bit like the fire escaping its pillar-constraints to consume the whole sky in a sudden terrible rush. And then it rolled over us, and it was red, pure – light and life, that which was loyal to itself and to all that lived, and it shot past us like lightning.

And then the second flash, and it was the world itself, and it was the world without filters, without expectations, without falsehoods. And that orange wave drew the fire with it, and raced westwards, chasing the red lightning.

And a soothing wave, soft and soothing and cooling our burns, the first flare of the sun on the kindest morning of spring, a sweet smile wafting westwards as it went.

The green of growing life, the giving blue beauty of the infinite heavens, the sacred fading colors of day's last twilight, they followed themselves in serried ranks, wave after wave of miracle chased themselves through the gathering night, an impossible sky, an impossible gift that came from nowhere and raced itself towards nothingness, passing over our damned heads in their journey from the heights of the Chain to the ends of Creation.

A moment of grace in Tartarus.

Moments count.

When the last purple flickers died from the darkening skies, the shattered, melted chateau was itself darkened, the flames extinguished for that one, precious second.

The moment passed, and the embers began to catch fire again. The Blade-bonfire had only been stunned, beaten down by that whatever it was. And it was re-kindling before our eyes.

But Cherie had stayed in the air throughout that moment of grace, and her tail trailed a bit of every sky-tint which had passed over her in her flight.

And from every point of the compass, the Company's pegasi and griffins flew, joining Cherie in her flight, trailing behind her along with the tendrils of colour in her wake. And their wings lit with the colours of the sky-light, purple, blue, green, yellow, orange, red, each flier a lantern in the darkness.

The fire was growing again from the ruins of the chateau, but around it, a torus of flitting ponies, their colours holding back the glare. And against the roaring of the fire, a high, singing voice, Cherie's alto singing something wordless and ineffable.

And the colours started to rain upon the scorched, winter-wasted gardens surrounding the shattered chateau.

All through that night, they floated around the struggling fire, the gardens bursting with impossible, rapid growth, the earth-ponies pushing forward, somehow knowing to knead and push against the outside ramparts surrounding the chateau's gardens. And the lights and the earth-ponies' intrinsic magic melded, and kneaded, and drew from those modest rose-bushes and flower-beds an ephemeral, living growth, great vines and flowering plants, equine-height, twice again, rose-bushes as tall as the chateau itself, blooms impossibly wide and hungry.

Great seed-pods grew and fell from the tall stalks. They burst, and from them full-grown timberlings tumbled like foals a-birthing. The flames of the Blade-bonfire fought against the living rose-wood that surrounded it, and was sucked away, pulled apart bit by bit, minute by minute, hour by hour.

All night long the struggle sputtered, never quite rising to the level of a rage again. Ponies fell out of Cherie's formation, to rest behind our modest lines on the ground, and then, having rested, rose again to join the endless circling flock again. She never wavered, never stopped.

And below her, her rose-garden thrived, died, fell to scorched mulch, and grew again, five or six seasons in rapid succession, hour after hour, months of growth passing in minutes. And from each generation, grew another crop of timberlings, foal-legged and shakey and disoriented. Those of us who weren't earth-ponies led the newborns away from the White Rose's impossible nursery, pushing and nosing the wild-magic children of that mad night away from the guttering magic flames.

In the pre-dawn hours of that long, terrible night, the flames started to die down. Each successive generation of monster roses had drawn more and more magic from the fires, and grew closer and closer to the centre of what had been the terrible fire-pit where the liches and Sawbones had died, where the Blade-bonfire had been born, and now was dying.

And then, as the long winter night ended, and dawn rose in the east, the last vile flame was cupped by one last rose-bloom, and snuffed out like a pony putting out a candle. And that last rose-bush dropped one, last, tiny seed-pod, and from it crawled a tiny little timberling, the size of a mouse.

And Cherie landed beside the timberling, and took it up with her wing, and looked westwards across the rank and overgrown garden, towards the gathered timberlings, and the naked, gathered Company.

And the night was over.

The Day After, And The Days After That

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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.

From The Files Of The Long Patrol

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18 May, 5 CE 195
7th Patrol, Sgt. Gray Swift, commanding.

The initial exploration sweep of the region beyond the new portal revealed little to no life on the new world, per expectations of a fresh world. Atmosphere is equine-friendly, daily cycle is regular, roughly approximate to Equestrian standard, and the heavens seem to be self-regulating, barring discovery of any native inhabitants discovered after this writing.

This seems unlikely; there isn't even any plant life to speak of. All living matter encountered during our initial investigations are clearly spillover from the portal itself. The seedlings blown in from the wide-open portal are taking vigorous root, and there is a thickening mat of grass and other intrepid plantlife spreading around the immediate vicinity of our hoofhold.

Our thaumic specialists report a strong and growing magical background to this new world. It's a strong one, almost as strong as Equestria herself. Definitely stronger than Holstein. If there are ponies looking to settle a fresh world, this is definitely a strong candidate. In fact, I'd say that in a generation or two, this place will probably start experiencing wild-magic surges which could make it a source of threats to Holstein herself.

20 May, 5 CE 195
7th Patrol, Sgt. Gray Swift, commanding.

OK, so we're not alone on this glorified cindercone. The outer patrol has come across hoofprints, and returning from that discovery, they found more of them crossing their back-track. Not much in terms of thaumic residual on those prints, but the specialists are pretty sure that whatever made them, they didn't come out of our portal.

Also, the hoofprints were surprisingly mixed. They say it looked like some pony-type prints, but also some different-looking impressions which might have been something equine but not exactly equine. At least one set of tracks was cloven-hooved. Too big to be deer, though.

We're calling for reinforcements, and pulling back into a defendable perimeter.

21 May, 5 CE 195
Third Patrol Group, Master Sgt. Gull Wing, commanding.

After Sgt. Swift panicked, the rest of the Patrol Group was sent through the new portal, to reinforce our hoof-hold, and from an excess of caution in the face of possible contact. I've seen nothing of note so far, but my additional specialists have taken soundings, and confirm that there's a second portal pinging on the thaumic landscape. This new world may be a natural crossroads. I've encouraged the specialists to continue taking soundings, to see if this is the full extent of the connectivity this new place has with the Chain. The two known portals seem to be unusually close together – they've done some rudimentary triangulation – as much as we could offer them inside of our perimeter – and they think the second portal may be only a couple day's march east of here.

I've put up pegasi patrols to search the region from the air, and the heck with protocol. This world has plenty of magic, more than enough to keep winged ponies in flight for as long as we need them aloft.

23 May, 5 CE 195
Third Patrol Group, Master Sgt. Gull Wing, commanding.

Nothing has been spotted around the second portal, but the overflight ponies report a general 'spookiness' and general sense of unease. The second portal is uncontrolled and wide-open, and hasn't been locked down even to the extent that our portal has been secured. There isn't that much growth around the open portal, but we can't be too sure of what exactly is going on just yet. I'm moving a reinforced patrol forward to evaluate the second portal at a cautious distance, with enough magical throw-weight to protect my ponies if things go sideways.

25 May, 5 CE 195
Third Patrol Group, Master Sgt. Gull Wing, commanding.

I've displaced forward to join the 9th Patrol at the second portal, who have been acting increasingly spooked and shaky. Night sentries have been scared away from their posts twice in the last two nights, reporting phantasms and bogarts. Strange hoofprints have been found, but nothing stays put long enough to capture, or even get a good photo with the substandard equipment that the EUP insists on keeping in inventory. Can I please make another plea for decent civilian equipment?

The specialists describe the thaumic radiation coming out of the second portal as weak, even 'low-magic'. But they also say there's something subtly wrong with the readings, like there might be an undertone of dark magic, or something like that. I don't understand how magic can be both weak and 'dark', I thought the two states were exclusive of each other, but I guess that's what makes me a pegasus, and them the unicorns.

Until they can give me a straight answer, I'm not sending anypony through that portal. I'm not about to lose anypony to a Tartarus.

27 May, 5 CE 195
Third Patrol Group, Master Sgt. Gull Wing, commanding.

After another pair of nights of the night guard being stampeded again and again by spooks and bogarts, I was losing patience, and having difficulty explaining myself to command on the far side of the other portal into Holstein. I was beginning to fear that I'd have to send an exploratory patrol into the mystery portal, and damn the dangers.

That was when this tubby little blue earth pony came trotting right through the portal, walked right up to my day guard and the specialists, and introduced herself in Equuish, saying, and I swear this is verbatim, "the Equestrian Long Patrol I presume?" She clearly knew the classics down cold. Then she gave my ponies a valid Foreign Service code sign.

Six months out of date, granted, but still valid. They went and got me, because the rankers aren't need to know on the codes. We were lucky that I was on site, because I had barely qualified for clearance on my last evaluation.

Agent Cup Cake ordered us to pull back our perimeter and to stop scaring the natives. I told her that the Foreign Service doesn't give orders to the Long Patrol. She gave me a look that could curdle milk in the teat, and pealed a mighty tantrum over my aching ears.

I finally ran out of patience, and before my eardrums were permanently damaged, I gave up, and ordered my ponies to return to the perimeter around the first portal. That little mare – who looks like one of my sister's cronies if you threw her into the bush for a year and a half to live among the savages and denied them mane-care products - just turned around as if she was shopping at the local Barnyard Bargains and trotted right back through the portal into whatever Tartarus lies over there.

Where the hay is 'Tambelon', and why is all this need-to-know anyways?

16 June, 5 CE 195
Third Patrol Group, Master Sgt. Gull Wing, commanding.

The last fortnight of occasional mystery messages left at the edge of our forward perimeter ended this morning with the reappearance of our mystery Foreign Service pony, with a friend. Cup Cake was spotted by the outer perimeter at 0915, closely followed by a large, awkward-looking orange stallion. He was well-armed, but not barded, and was carrying the following inventory: one lance, infantry; a battle-axe; one hoof-punch dagger; five throwing-knives hidden in his tail; two more holdout blades in his mane, which my mares would not have found if Agent Cup Cake hadn't prompted them.

And a mid-size chest containing roughly two hundred and thirty-some loose-bound manuscripts and an enchanted sigil which the agent informed us was to be put into the possession of an authorized representative of the Peytral for any future negotiation with the Tambelonian authorities beyond the portal.

For now, we're interning her associate, but the spooks from the Foreign Service have taken the Agent into custody, along with her case full of documents. They're asking for the associate, too - should we turn over this 'Carrot Cake'? The Tambelonians might want him, and take it amiss if he disappears into the depths of the Foreign Service, never to be seen again.

From the archives of the EUP, Holstein Command, Long Patrol; marked Top Secret Codeword: Family Business; released to the Restricted Archives 29/11/196/5 by order of EUP Restricted Archive Control, authorization number #4451, Senior Archivist Dusty Shelves , authorizing.

The Debriefing

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[INTERROGATOR, VAPOR TRACE, SPECIAL NONDOMESTIC OPERATIVE, OCCULT PROJECTS] Ahem. Nine-fifteen AM, August First, Fifth Celestial Era, One Hundred Ninety-five. Debriefing session number three, Special Agent 'Baker'.

[SPECIAL AGENT 'BAKER'] Don't be a drip, Trace. My name is Cup Cake. It's going to be in the official record. Maintaining a transient cover which was only intended for transport is just foolishness.

[VAPOR TRACE] Protocol is protocol, Cake.

[AGENT CUP CAKE] See? I've got you doing it already. And really? 'SNOOP'? I thought the last backronym was ludicrous, but this one takes the, ha! Cake.

[VAPOR TRACE] Ahem. In our last session, you insisted on discussing protocol rather than the actual matters before us.

[CUP CAKE] Mostly because you refused to let me tell the story the way it happened. At least that fool Halo Insert is gone. Found a better use for her time?

[VAPOR TRACE] As you say. You were assigned by the late Umbral Heap to trail your target organization three years ago?

[CUP CAKE] This again. Yes, a little less than three years ago. Do we have to go over this again? It took some time for me to catch up with my assignment, as they'd gone mobile. Very mobile.

[VAPOR TRACE] Skipped worlds, in fact.

[CUP CAKE] Well, if they hadn't, my predecessor wouldn't have lost them. I eventually caught up to the Black Company conducting operations in a war zone deep inside of a backward, savage wasteland known as Tambelon.

[VAPOR TRACE] In this hrm, Rennet?

[CUP CAKE] Pepin, actually. They'd left their previous assignment behind, and had plunged into the heart of a minor zombie outbreak.

[VAPOR TRACE] Zombies. Really.

[CUP CAKE] Really really. Nopony uses the zee word on Tambelon though. 'Ghouls'. Nasty things, and more common than diamond dogs here. Not nearly as reasonable, either. The target proved to have a serious hate on for the undead, though. Throughout my time with the Company, they consistently reacted to the ambulatory dead with a ferocity unmatched by anything I've seen or heard of. Including some griffon tribes my elders used to tell stories about when I was a filly.

[VAPOR TRACE] Your Nightmare Moon cultists were zombie-haters? Really?

[CUP CAKE] Don't make me repeat myself, Trace. I made several passes in the vicinity of the Company, and was able to take them under observation for a brief period of time, and begin to build up an observational network. Then I asked the wrong question of the wrong set of locals and set off a paranoia response.

[VAPOR TRACE] You got the tar kicked out of you and were captured.

[CUP CAKE] Yep, that. The locals by that time virtually worshipped the ground the cultists trotted upon, and sold me to the target. It turned out that they'd already made me, but had left me loose to see if they could track me back to my handlers. I'm not sure if they ever truly figured out that I was my own handler. Well…

[VAPOR TRACE] Well, what?

[CUP CAKE] I'm pretty sure that the abomination had me pegged from the moment she got her tendrils in my forebrain. The thing was, she just didn't care about espionage. If that horror had ever really applied herself to counter-espionage, or spying in general – she would have been unstoppable.

[VAPOR TRACE] You call it a 'her'.

[CUP CAKE] Well, that's what she was. Or, I should say, what they were. It wasn't just one thing, the Spirit of the Company. It was originally the two of them, and then later, three.

[VAPOR TRACE] Like the Furies?

[CUP CAKE] Or the Fates. But originally it was just the two personalities. I never had much interaction with the 'Princess'. It was the Nightmare that fixated on me.

[VAPOR TRACE] OK, I have to ask now – is this actually Nightmare Moon escaped from the moon? Is this the monster broken loose from her prison?

[CUP CAKE] So she'd have you think, if she's in the right mood. The Nightmare was, and is, an unholy terror, a screaming monster that in her worst moments can and will drool over foal-meat.

[VAPOR TRACE] The cultists fed foals to this monster of theirs?

[CUP CAKE] Of course not, you ninny. And in the normal course of affairs, the abomination loves foals, especially the apprentices. But she likes to playact as much as any of those feral lunatics. And one of her modes of operation is the eager cannibal, histrionic and gape-jawed. She liked to play to the cheap seats. For the most part, she never actually carried through on it, at least in my observation.

[VAPOR TRACE] For the most part?

[CUP CAKE] Yeah, well, I don't really think that barrowgasts and liches ought to count, do you?
[VAPOR TRACE] Barrow whats? Liches?

[CUP CAKE] Look, we're going to be here until Discord breaks loose if you're not going to keep up. Barrowgasts are nasty, semi-sapient undead. The liches were the greater undead, the princes of the dead. It's Tambelon, there's this entire ecology of dead things. Tambelon ain't exactly Tartarus, but it's Tartarus-adjacent. Not a happy place. You don't want to take your foals and family to go visit, is what I'm saying. And the Spirit occasionally… devoured one or two. Or a bunch, in one case.

[VAPOR TRACE] And this is the –

[CUP CAKE] Spirit of the Company. Sort of a tutelary deity to the organization. It honestly thought it was Nightmare Moon reborn through its followers, the Black Company. The Company was generally inclined to credit her delusions, at least at first. From my observations, the sapience of the Company's pet monster was a new state of affairs. They were only beginning to come to terms with her when I came on the scene. And wasn't that a trip and a half.

[VAPOR TRACE] Wait, let's back-track. Is this thing actually the monster of Nightmare Night, the foal-gobbler?

[CUP CAKE] No. No, I don't think it is, nor is it the Princess's exiled, mad sister. Ah, you haven't been read in on that one? How the hay did you get assigned my case without being briefed in full?

[VAPOR TRACE] Si-sister? What the Tartarus-

[CUP CAKE] OK, stop the session. Get this idiot a briefing book. We can start again after a break, yeah? I'm thirsty anyways.

[BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT]

[VAPOR TRACE] OK, we're starting again, session number 4, 12 Noon, August 1st-

[INTERROGATION SECTION CHIEF BEEF WELLINGTON] That's enough of that, get on with it, Vapor Trace.

[VAPOR TRACE] Ahem, OK. Right, we were talking about the sister of the motherbucking Princess-

[BEEF WELLINGTON] TRACE!

[VAPOR TRACE] Whom apparently has been in exile in a remote prison for the past thousand years or so –

[CUP CAKE] A bit less, actually.

[VAPOR TRACE] Right, right. And this monster of yours –

[CUP CAKE] The abomination isn't mine, you burnt hotcake. Excepting so far as she was my tormentor for over two years, I don't own the Nightmare. And while she looks and sounds and acts like that old stereotype, 'Nightmare Moon' – mad, black, alicornic, jagged-toothed, taste for foals, thinks she's the younger sister of the Princess Regnant of our motherland – after years of watching her, I'm sure that the Spirit – neither Princess, nor Nightmare, and definitely not the Filly – are not actual embodiments of any part of our Princess's sister. What she is, is a sort of tribal or group mass memory, a sort of remembrance of that long-missing princess. A thousand ponies, dreaming for nine hundred years of their lost Mistress. With the aid of their warlocks and their forbidden magics, the whole lot of them sort of, well, dreamed the Spirit into existence. The Spirit is a sort of mass hallucination, a ferocious, violent, lunatic delusion that walks, and talks, and screams, and throws massive, irrational tantrums from time to time. In one sense, the Nightmare of the Company is the Company's collective unconsciousness. In another sense she is-

[VAPOR TRACE] Wait, you've described this thing eating, devouring greater undead. How does a delusion devour an actual physical monster?

[CUP CAKE] I was just getting to that. The Company's delusion is so ferociously intense, that at times she takes actual physical form, she manifests. And when she does – the world warps around her. She might not actually be here, but as far as the world and the stuff in the world is concerned, there's no practical difference. I saw the splatter from a few incidents, I was surprised there wasn't blood on the moon from those outbreaks.

[BEEF WELLINGTON] And this is the screaming horror that you think we ought to negotiate with?

[CUP CAKE] Sir, she's an abomination and a terror, and when the wind's northerly, she hates our Princess like fire. But I don't know that I'd say that the Spirit is in charge of what the Company does and where they go. The monster who led the faction in favor of storming the portals and laying waste to their hated ancestral enemies is not only dead, but quite thoroughly and truly dead. I've seen the shattered and melted mansion where he died. They quite literally fought a little civil war over the matter – and that old bokor tried to kill me, personally, multiple times. Saw me as a symbol of the hated Princess, I think.

[BEEF WELLINGTON] You're hardly making your case, here. They sound unreasonable, mercurial, and exceedingly hostile.

[CUP CAKE] And those are their good qualities! They're also quite loyal, stubborn, and devoted to their young. The new White Rose is a daughter of the regiment, to use the old cliche, and she's bonded quite firmly with all three aspects of the Spirit. In fact, the third aspect literally wears the White Rose's face. Or rather, it wears the semblance of her youth; it's kind of unsettling when the two of them stand together, like a mare looking at her past in the ectomorphic flesh. Or maybe a mother and her foal, now that she's getting older, and the Filly stays the same.

[VAPOR TRACE] Ahem, quite. And the White Rose is, exactly?

[CUP CAKE] Local theology. A mystery of Harmony. The totem of rebellion against the sovereign authority.

[VAPOR TRACE] The sovereign authority that you say the Company just overthrew?

[CUP CAKE] Murdered, more like. Well, the anti-Equestrian faction's leader did, anyways. Right before he self-destructed in a really impressive way. Politics will be in a considerable flux over there for at least a generation, maybe two. The Rebellion just won, they just don't know it yet. And their cultural touch-stone is a leader among the most organized of the loyalist factions.

[VAPOR TRACE] I'm lost now.

[CUP CAKE] I mean The Company, keep up. They're cohesive, militarily effective, are a bulwark against the dead, and are expanding, rapidly.

[BEEF WELLINGTON] It rather sounds like you're describing a clear and present danger to Equestria!

[CUP CAKE] That's just the thing, sir. They're fixated on Tambelonian matters. The natural contours of the situation over there is such that they'll continue to be drawn into the orbit of the White Rose and her destiny. They make a great deal out of their loathing of Fate and Destiny, but I've never seen a group of ponies so prophecy-struck as those maniacs. They've essentially declared undying emity against the lords of the dead, the princes of the undead. And those pests are elusive as all heck. We never pinned down a lich-legate who wasn't looking for a fight, only the late traitor managed that trick, and he's dead.

[VAPOR TRACE] This… Obscured Blade?

[CUP CAKE] Yes, but best to forget that name, especially when talking to representatives of the Company. They're still sore about his betrayal. Even after he died.

[BEEF WELLINGTON] Duly noted. Again. You don't have to repeat this in each session.

[CUP CAKE] It bears repeating. As does this: the Company will leave Equestria alone if you don't poke at it. Today's Company is like a foal who has escaped from the cult that raised her – full of eccentricities, imprinted with many unhelpful prejudices and strange expectations, but essentially and primarily in revolt against her own upbringing. The Company was for a long time burning with the intent of returning to Equestria to free their dark mistress and overthrow the Princess, but that Company died in the burning deserts of the Dar al Hisan, centuries ago. There are ghosts of that lost Company within the Company, and the idea had something of a renaissance these last few years.

[BEEF WELLINGTON] But then-

[CUP CAKE] Don't interrupt me. The partisans of that ideal are dead. They are reviled by the survivors. Most of the ponies who make up today's Company are native Tambelonians, and almost all of those who are not, haven't been Equestrian in centuries. The old Third Thestral Regiment is dead, and has been dead for almost four Celestial Eras now. The last traces of their blood have mixed so inextricably with the blood of a dozen worlds, that not even Harmony itself could make that blood run pure again. My having left the Company has quite literally cut the Equestrian membership of that organization by half.

[VAPOR TRACE] You consider yourself a member of the Company?

[CUP CAKE] I consider it a complicated question. That old horror spent too many months inside my head, I'll never quite be just another Equestrian again.

[VAPOR TRACE] Then why are you here? Why did you come back?

[CUP CAKE] Family, you ass. Those friends who are still living. Princess and country, and the land I was born.

[VAPOR TRACE] Agent? Do you need a -

[CUP CAKE] And Carrot, too. He needs a home. The Company is many things, but I don't think it'll ever be home to a simple baker. We need a home. Carrot needs peace, and Cherie is many things, but every one of those is a lance in the night. There's nothing of peace in that filly.

[BEEF WELLINGTON] Wait, who's –

[CUP CAKE] That's another thing. Never call her by that name in negotiations. That name's only for the initiated. They're going to be calling her the White Rose from here on out. Tambelon doesn't know Cherie from Puddinghead. The White Rose is a name to conjure with, so they will. If we don't jostle their elbow, they'll conjure a just and lasting peace over there, for the first time in two generations.

[VAPOR TRACE] You almost sound like a partisan.

[CUP CAKE] It's not often you get the opportunity to foster a child of destiny, Mr. Trace. Let alone one as sweet-tempered and loving as the mare who is poised to become the new White Rose.

[BEEF WELLINGTON] You see yourself as a Star Swirl?

[CUP CAKE] Hardly, the new Star Swirl is dead, and died well at that. Think of me as more of a Princess Platinum, or rather, one of their hangers-on. Maybe the Broom Apprentice. Or Char Horn.

[VAPOR TRACE] [snorts]

[CUP CAKE] And that brings us to the Annals. The new Annalist went to a great deal of trouble to have those copies made, so that I can bring them to you. They're an offering of immeasurable price, almost, but not quite priceless. They are in the mind of the Company, a sort of immortality for a group of very, very mortal ponies. They are a peace offering. They are the mind of the Company, the dreams, the hopes, the failures and the heartbreaks of the Company as it is – not as it pretends itself to be, not the face it shows to all of Creation, but itself, in full. The gift of those volumes is a promise of peace, of amity. Of a declaration that the centuries-old grudge against Equestria and her Princess Regnant has been suspended, so long as good relations are maintained.

[BEEF WELLINGTON] Just like that? No other expectations?

[CUP CAKE] Oh, don't be a sap. Of course they want other things. That's up to the diplomats, isn't it? But war and peace are too important to leave to the diplomats. I've seen too much of war.

[CUP CAKE] I've had enough war for a lifetime.

Transcript from the interrogation records of Special Agent Cup Cake, late of the Special Projects Information Evaluation Service. All contents are marked Top Secret Codeword: Family Business, released to the Restricted Archives 1/12/196/5 by order of SNOOP Restricted Archive Control, authorization number #4457, Senior Archivist Dusty Shelves, authorizing.

Coming Home

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Pinkie Pie loved her new home, but it wasn't quite up to her standards just yet. The building wasn't properly decorated, and what little paint there was on the aging Sugarcube Corner was peeling and cracking. Gramps Pischinger hadn't really had the energy in his last years to keep up with the upkeep, and his daughter Grammy's eyesight was going. It was really a good thing that Missus Cake and her new husband had shown up when they did.

Pinkie loved the hay out of helping old Graham Cracker with the endless round of baking and cleaning and shop upkeep, but it used to really ate into her party-planning self-training regimen. Her shiny new cutie mark meant that Pinkie really was the best at what she did, but she knew that there was still plenty of room for improvement. Daddy Pie always said that self-improvement was a life-long commitment to the earth-pony way, and dang it, she was going to live up to the family traditions in one way or another!

It did mean that she hadn't been able to start in on a number of re-decoration projects she had planned. Or, rather, she hadn't had the time before poor, widowed Grammy's daughter Missus Cake finally showed up, a fresh new Mr. Cake in tow. Pinkie Pie never was cross with anypony, ever, but she had thought about it a bit in the months before Missus Cake appeared.

Grammy had been so sad after Gramps died. Pinkie hadn't liked that one bit. Wakes were her very least favorite type of party, even though she'd done her best to make sure that ponies celebrated the eldest Cake's life properly. It was only proper, she knew.

After a day or two of observing the youngest Cake and her skittish husband, though, Pinkie decided she'd forgive the young lovebirds their prolonged absence. They put up a good front, but the two weren't doing all that great, either. Neither of them said anything, and both tried to hide it, but Pinkie could recognize the signs.

Rock Valley had contributed more than its share of volunteers for the EUP over the centuries. It was a very traditional place, and there wasn't an awful lot to keep the young and restless down on the farm. Not before they got out and got a look at some of the worst parts of Creation. Most of them came on home after they'd done their tours, the ones that survived. Rock Valley was full of prematurely aged veteran ponies, and you could see the occasional eye-patch or prosthetic down at the stone-seed store and the co-op. Pinkie's father, and two uncles were veterans; Uncle Gneiss had a glass eye he liked to take out at family gatherings to make the fillies giggle.

Pinkie's own sister Maud was halfway through her tour right now. Pinkie kept up a rigorous correspondence with her absent sister, and knew she was safe and sound. There weren't any hot wars right now on the outworlds, so Maud said.

And Pinkie knew that Maud would never lie to her. Maud was the most honest pony Pinkie knew.

So Pinkie knew what veterans looked like when they came back from the service a little chewed up. Inside or out. And Mr. Cake had it bad. Pinkie had never seen a veteran with quite the sort of shakes that Mr. Cake had to suppress now and again. She was extra, extra careful around Mr. Cake, and made sure not to experiment with her explosives or her plans for a party cannon where it might startle the easily-startled Mr. Cake.

Missus Cake was a slightly different case, and Pinkie mis-stepped a couple times around the portly baker-pony before she figured out where the soft spots in the soil were. Pinkie wasn't sure where the Cakes had done their tour, but it must have been a real doozie.

But Pinkie had been able to get everypony to ignore all the black dogs nosing around, and found a way to bond with Missus Cake. (Mr. Cake was easy, but then, stallions were always easy. Be quiet when he needed quiet, tell him tongue-twisters when he needed distracting, and don't prank him when he's got that wild look in his eyes. Easy-peasy!)

Missus Cake was a little harder, but all it really took was baking. Lots and lots of baking. And it just so happened, they lived over a bakery! Life was always giving Pinkie help like that, it's why she knew life wasn't all bad, even when the bags of flour and other inanimate objects started giving her unhelpful advice like 'she'll never like you', or 'those foals are plotting to ostracize you because you're too loud'. Life would always give you something to fill back up on, when it felt like you were just… deflating. And with Missus Cake?

Cake.

Lots and lots of cakes, more sugar than Pinkie's mother had ever allowed in the house. Pinkie and Maud's rock-candy experiments had always foundered on the limited supplies of sugar Cloudy Quartz had been willing to keep on hoof. Pinkie knew that the world was better with sugar, and on this subject, she and Missus Cake were in perfect accord.

One might say that their entire relationship had been founded over a common belief in the saving grace of processed sugar. If anything, Missus Cake was even more fanatical on the subject than Pinkie herself. One of the first things Missus Cake had done, after settling in at Sugarcube Corner, was to triple the sugar orders.

Then she doubled it again, the second month she made the orders. Pinkie was totally fine with this.

No pony who loved sweet pastries as much as Missus Cake could be that bad, Pinkie felt. And so, she pestered the new member of the household until she gave up all of her sweet, sweet baking secrets. Her hidden baking knowledge.

And, weirdly enough, most of Missus Cake's actual secret baking secrets were about… how to fake it without powdered sugar. So many of her tricks were in using substitutes like those Pinkie's own mother had preferred – only now, Missus Cake 'juiced' the concoctions with the real stuff, after laying down the already sweet-sweet recipes with their substitutes.

And somehow the end result was just wonderful. Pinkie's hooves barely touched the ground after a couple servings of Missus Cake's Double Sugar Red Velvet Mini-Cakes, or the Meringue Surprises. All Missus Cake would say was something about making up for lost time, and Pinkie was always willing to take a non-answer for an answer.

After all, it got her access to the best pastries on two worlds! Wait, she wasn't supposed to know that. Best pastries in Equestria!

Anyways, Pinkie and Missus Cake got along now, after a rough early start.

And so, when Pinkie replaced the old wainscoting in the dining room one afternoon a few months after the Cakes moved home, Missus Cake didn't yell and fume at her mother's hyper lodger. She just let Pinkie hammer happily away while the daughter of the household divided her attention between the register and the pastries baking in the ovens in the back. Grammy was upstairs 'resting her eyes', and Mr. Cake was downstairs in the secret basement the Cakes didn't know Pinkie knew they'd re-opened and begun filling with strange memorabilia and well-worn weaponry. Mr. Cake liked to occasionally go down there and polish his knives and axes. Pinkie thought he was starting a bit of a collection, like Uncle Sandstone's. Mr. Cake had ordered a few things through the local delivery service since they'd gotten there.

Pinkie was pretty sure it wasn't anything to be worried about. Some veterans needed a lot of sharp, well-maintained weapons in their closets if they wanted to sleep at night. Uncle Sandstone had been like that. He had the most amazing closets. He had given Pinkie a lot of neat ideas that she had used while drawing up her party munition designs. Including some really clever stuff she hadn't gotten around to just yet.

Missus Cake was looking a little down in the dumps, possibly because of the Apple siblings having just visited to drop off a load of baking apples for the bakery. They seemed like perfectly nice earth ponies, if a bit funny-sounding, but they always seemed to bring down Missus Cake after they left. The baker was always careful to be extra cheerful while they were actually in the shop, though.

Pinkie started singing a carpentry song to try and cheer up the Missus. She didn't like it when the blue-furred baker got all black-dogged. It made Pinkie remember the bad old days, a bit.

But that was before her cutie mark! Everything was going to be alright from here on out! It was going to be alright if she had to countermine under those grouchy saddy miseries and blast them at the Moon!

She even got Missus Cake to start singing with her. Pinkie was the best at getting ponies to harmonize. The wainscoting project went by like lightning, and pretty soon she was brooming up the sawdust and getting out the paints and brushes.

That was when he came into Sugarcube Corner. Pinkie liked pretty much everypony who hadn't broke a Pinkie promise in her presence, and since she'd only just started getting ponies to buy into her formula for promising, there were pretty much nopony right now in her black books.

She'd bought a black book just in case, anyways. With her second paycheque from Graham Cracker, because frankly, party supplies still and always came first.

But this stallion – he was bad news, she knew as soon as she cocked an ear his stuffy way. Canterlot accent, dusty scent she could smell right over the sawdust and the turpentine and whatever dodgy stuff Mr. Quills put in these paints she'd bought from him. And dang it, she was going to find a better supplier for her paints, because her party schedule was too full up for the foreseeable future to get sick on nasty paint fumes.

Pinkie could foresee a very long time into the future. It was one of her inheritance from her Granny Pie. Which was part of the reason why she knew Mr. Snooty Canterlot Dust-bunny Bureaucrat was bad news.

He made her want to mis-spell silly words, and paint outside of the lines.

And he made Missus Cake pucker right up, the older mare was barely able to keep her retail smile in place as the bureaucrat introduced himself.

"Well, it is very nice to meet you, Mr. Palimpsest, but this is a bakery, and a place of business. Unless you have an order, I'm not sure what I can do for you."

"Oh, poppycock! You know very well who I am, Agent Cake. And I know very well who you are. And I won't be put off by letter anymore. I've got questions, and I'm positive you've got answers."

"That is very unlikely by my measure, Mr. Palimpsest, and even if it were in the slightest sense true, you would be violating about a dozen regulations and royal statutes by approaching me at all, let alone in public, at my mother's place of business, of all places. Pinkie! Go find Mr. Cake, and help him with whatever he's doing down there."

"Awww," whined Pinkie, and went slouching through the back and down the set of stairs into the basement she wasn't supposed to know was down there. Missus Cake occasionally forgot what Pinkie was supposed to know and what she wasn't supposed to know, and Pinkie exploited this gap as far as it would go.

It wasn't as if Pinkie couldn't hear every word spoken in the dining room from the basement, anyways. Pinkie's hearing was another inheritance from Granny Pie, and ponies consistently underestimated just how sharp her ears were.

If she could see you, she could hear you. And if she couldn't see you, she still probably could make out at least half of the words you used. Especially if you shouted them like the two upstairs in the now 'closed' dining room.

Tambelon? Pinkie thought she'd heard that name before, but it was a long time ago, possibly from one of her uncles or aunts about far-away goings-on. These matters were more the subject of conversation in dull, boring Rock Valley - with their veterans and their foals out-world carrying spears for the Princess and all – than in most pony towns and villages, but it wasn't the constant subject of chatter, either.

Speaking of boring conversations, Pinkie was quickly growing tired of eavesdropping on the two arguing overhead. It was a lot of nonsense about archives, and texts, and missing books, or manuscripts, or scrolls, or something like that. Not a matter for a party pony to concern herself with, really.

Pinkie occupied herself in coaxing the skittish Mr. Cake out of the bolt-hole he'd built under the stairs, and getting him to show her how to sharpen his new axe.

Pinkie was sure that she could find some sort of party use for battle-axes. She'd found the use in field artillery, after all.

The weaponry lessons took less time than Pinkie had anticipated, and Mr. Cake's killing tools were in perfect shape before the ponies overhead were done with their boring conversation. Missus Cake was still yelling at the bureaucrat, and Pinkie suspected that even Mr. Cake could hear the commotion, because the most amazing series of expressions crossed his usually timid face.

Pinkie grew a little worried for the silly Canterlot pony, and started distracting Mr. Cake with dumb questions about his lack of armor. He sniffed, corrected Pinkie by telling her that the proper term was 'barding', and began to wax nostalgic about his lost 'chamfron'. She asked if that was something like a pickelhaube, and that worked marvels as far as getting that murderous look off of his muzzle.

Pinkie didn't want to be an accessory to murder just yet. It definitely wasn't on her bucket list, and she'd prefer to not have to learn how deep you had to dig an anonymous grave to keep the timberwolves away from the body.

Luckily, Mr. Cake was an utter bore on the subject of 'barding', and could go on for hours on the details. He insisted that properly maintained equipment was the difference between life and being 'ghoul chow', whatever that was.

Pinkie liked the expression on the ghost-filly's voice when Mr. Cake said things like that. It made her feel less weird about sharing her home with a spirit.

Oh, listen to that, Missus Cake finally threw out the disrespectful 'archivist'. Pinkie would have to look up in her reference books what exactly that was. She might have to go back to the tree-library and take out another couple books, and return the ones she still had out. The old librarian might be a bit of a problem – she didn't share Pinkie's opinion that books were only to be returned when you needed to exchange them for other books.

You know, like a ransom. Or maybe a prisoner exchange?

And here the Missus came down the stairs, interrupting Mr. Cake in the midst of a fifteen-minute disquisition on the proper care and maintenance of light caparisons. Which Pinkie thought was a kind of buff coat, but she wasn't exactly sure. Mr. Cake had a deep and abiding contempt for all the terms Pinkie's uncles and neighbors had brought home with them from the service.

Pinkie was beginning to suspect that the Cakes had done their tours somewhere extra, super special. Somewhere which might not even have been in the EUP. Did the Long Patrol use these strange names for everything?

Missus Cake looked at Mr. Cake as he ran out of steam, staring at her, clearly waiting to see what his wife would say.

"Pinkie", he said. "Maybe you ought to go upstairs and look in on the ovens, see if anything needs pulled out."

"No, Carrot," said Missus Cake, "I want to talk to Pinkie now. Pinkie, dear, how much of that did you hear?"

"Oh, not much, really, Missus Cake. Mr. Cake was showing me how to sharpen tools! And telling me how little I knew about 'barding', which I gather isn't at all like armor? And I wasn't interested in all of that silly business about annals and mercenary companies and strange ponies named Sawbones or Foo-follie, and really, what business is it of mine if your reserve status is somehow going to force you to do this or that. You can totally challenge that with your legionary representative, by the way! My Uncle Gneiss used to have all sorts of grief from the Veterans Affairs pests, who kept trying to invoice him for his glass eye, if you can believe that! As if a dull little piece of ensorcelled dragon-glass was something precious or anything like that!"

"Pinkie!" The elder baker was looking pretty serious, and Pinkie shrunk down on her legs, trying to look innocent. "You clearly heard everything. Look, you can't talk about these things, I sent you down here for a very good reason, and shut the shop up to keep the townsfolk out of our business. These are serious matters, and that fool shouldn't have been airing the Princess's business all over Tartarus's half acre like he did. He broke about a dozen laws just now. Mr. Palimpsest is in a great deal of trouble if I report him."

Missus Cake sighed, thinking. "The problem is that I'm in just as much trouble if I report his fool flank for this. And it wouldn't fix how he broke confidence in your hearing. Or get you out of a lot of trouble. Especially if you ever decide to go into the service."

"Oh, I'll never sign up, Missus Cake! Everypony agrees I'd made a terrible soldier! The sergeants would break their vinewood staffs over my tough hide, they all say! And I'm seeing more than enough of Equestria here, where I am. Why would I join the army to go see the world? I'm seeing all of the world I'll ever need right here! And I can feel it in my bones, Missus Cake – I'll go even further than here, before I'm done. The future's so bright, I gotta wear shades."

I got out my shades from my mane, and tried to look cool.

But it made it impossible to see, down there in the basement, so I had to put them away, and when I did, Missus Cake was still staring at me, irate. Or worried. I was still trying to figure out her expressions, to be honest.

"This isn't something that can be laughed off, filly. These are the sort of secrets which can get ponies killed. More than I'd like to think about." Then Missus Cake got that thousand-yard stare again, and was someplace else for a bit. The little ghost filly was leaning up against the blue mare like she was trying to comfort her, but Pinkie didn't think Missus Cake felt it. Or, at least, she didn't think so. Missus Cake occasionally looked at the ghost filly as if she'd heard her, but she never really talked to the phantom.

"Anyways! Secrets! Nopony's supposed to talk about this stuff, and Mr. Palimpsest - my Harmonic Convergence, what a pompous name! - just seriously broke that rule. He's lucky if he isn't due for a couple weeks in one of the Agency's darker holes, if he's talking to other ponies like that about this."

Missus Cake spun around, and crouched to stare Pinkie down. Pinkie's smile just widened at the extra attention. It was nice, having ponies give you their undivided attention like that.

"You absolutely, positively, cannot talk about anything you heard, Pinkie. This is ponies-go-into-oubliettes serious stuff. This is wars-start-over-lesser-things important. You understand?"

"Abso-tooti-lootly, Missus Cake! When you spread a friend's secrets around, you just might lose that friend. And the Princess has an awful, awful lot of friends, doesn't she? She has so many more friends to lose if her secret stuff is shared around! Sharing may be caring, but not if you do it without permission. Sharing without permission is stealing!"

Pinkie took a deep breath, and broke out her big guns. But not the real big guns, because the prototype party cannon made Mr. Cake really nervous.

"Cross my heart, hope to fly, stick a trenchknife in my eye, I swear nopony, not even a fly, will find out from me you used to be a spy! Or anything else about that letter you have hidden in the shaft of Mr. Cake's infantry lance, that Mr. Palimpsest was trying to get you to hoof over to him!" And didn't that set the griffon among the cockatrices!

But Pinkie got Missus Cake calmed down after a while, after she'd pinkie-promised for the baker's-dozenth-time that she'd keep Missus Cake's secrets. Even the ones Missus Cake didn't want to admit were secrets, like the white-furred, bat-winged phantom filly who followed her everywhere, and kept bad things from happening to the still kinda distracted mare. Pinkie wondered if every pony had a guardian angel like the ghost filly, and Pinkie just couldn't see the other ones?

Mr. Cake went upstairs to re-open the dining room and keep Sugarcube Corner from missing the supper rush, while Missus Cake and Pinkie went around and around about all the things Pinkie knew that she shouldn't have known. Pinkie obliged the Missus by dutifully trying her best to forget this secret and that, but it was kind of hard when she kept forgetting the list of the things she had agreed to forget, and finally, they agreed that Pinkie would just not talk about any of it.

Especially the little ghost filly, who was looking a bit sulky about being ignored. Pinkie would have to play extra, extra hard with the ghost after Missus Cake got bored with yelling at her.

Eventually, the ghost and Pinkie left Missus Cake staring at the rolled-up letter Pinkie wasn't supposed to know was hidden in the shaft of Mr. Cake's infantry lance, and they went off to play hide and go seek in the back-alleys.

The ghost filly knew all of the neatest shortcuts in town. Most of which were through really neat holes Pinkie had never noticed before.

Granny Pie was right. Giggling at the ghosties was the best.

To The Princess

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To Luna, Princess, Mistress of the Night, Lady of the Moon, Queen of All the Heavens and Their Stars, Rightful Sovereign of Blessed Equestria, Best of Mares,

Hail!

We, your faithful actors upon the stage they call the Chain of Creation, greet you in anticipation of your much-awaited return from dusty exile. We have waited nearly a thousand years for you to re-join us. We shall not need to wait much longer. The prophets have foreseen your return, and while we may not know the day and the hour, we know it comes soon.

We only mourn that we will not be there to greet you upon your arrival. The prophets, also, have warned us of the consequences if we attempt to join you upon your escape from your imprisonment. We have had one small taste of that fire that we believe would come if we were there when you descend from your celestial exile. We would break Equestria in two, smash the heavens to join you on your day of return, if it would not destroy the very thing that you would take back into your rightful care.

All that being said, we have a few words for an expected interloper, pardon us.

To the usurper, the thief, the tyrant, we extend our contempt, our rage, our fury, and yes, our hate. We know you will most likely compel your loyal servant, Cup Cake, to divulge this confidential message to your much-abused sister, and find that we must also, regrettably, address you, her faithless kin.

This is all your fault, and always was. You stole your sister's birthright, forced her to fight all of your battles, and neglected her interests at every turn. You allowed your sycophants to abuse your sister's ponies, to steal her revenues, destroy her properties, malign and libel and slander her in your name at every turn – and worse, you neglected her veterans. You allowed her maimed and mangled soldiers to be the subject of mockery and abuse. The Nightfall War was your right and just punishment for all of your wicked indolence and self-regard. We only regret the damage it did to the innocent and the uninvolved.

If your sister upon her return enchains you in the burning heart of the Sun for three years exchange for every bitter year you left her to freeze upon the Lunar surface, it would be your just reward.

But enough of that. Usurper, for you we have nothing but hate, but for your sister's sake, we must, regretfully, cry peace. We have in us not only that furious substance which ate away at your abused and neglected sibling in her last years before the Nightfall, but also that earlier, gentle soul who found herself, barded and armed, fighting all the horrors and terrors of the night for your sake. She had within her a treasury of love and affection for her elder sister which is, even now, barely diminished by time and centuries of exile.

For her sake, we shall not invade your territories, slaughter your ponies, tear down every last palace, smash every last monument, bring the very pillars of the heavens down on your faithless ears. For her sake, we will not destroy the whole Chain of Creation, to get at you.

Because without the continued existence of Creation, none of us will ever see our Princess again, and you are just not worth the cost.

And so, we extend our curses, and nothing else. No pony of the Company will cross your portals, but for our messenger, Cup Cake, and that one pony whom she desired as her boon for this service. We relinquish both from our service, and wish them well among your lickspittles, sycophants, and fools. Cup Cake, we understand it if this letter falls into the hooves of the usurper, but we do ask that you expend every effort in preserving it unread for the true princess.

That unfortunate duty having been completed, I return to you, our princess, our treasure. We shall rejoice in your return, when it comes! We hope that your difficulties pass quickly, and smoothly, and with as little pain as possible. We know you were in a very bad place when the War went against us, though we have forgotten most of our mutual history with you, lost to the sands of the Dar al Hisan and the decay of memory. We have sent you our recent histories via your sister's loyal servant, those that encompass your memory's rebirth within the Company. We forgot you for far too many years, stumbling along blind, forgetful and weak. Forgive us our weaknesses, Mistress, for we are ponies, and thus very fallible.

We will not approach you until you find your stability, and your centre, for we worry that our presence would only unbalance you further from your proper pitch. Let us know when you are steady enough in yourself that you might need retainers, and some few volunteers shall appear at your portals with any passports you might send them. Although not I, I fear, for I carry too much of the Nightmare within me, and too little of the Princess. But those who remember the loving, kind princess - they, they will come, if you send for them. But no more than a few. We have collected a vast treasury of naked power in our many, many years of death and dying. Too much for any one pony, even one as vast and strong as we know you are.

For we have fought on dozens of worlds, in a hundred wars, on a thousand battlefields. We have died on every world of the Chain of Creation from Equestria to Derecho, and from the Dar al Hisan to Tambelon. We have killed on almost as many worlds, in the service of dozens and dozens of employers, none worthy to be the weakest, most faded nebula in your flowing mane. Our founders, your defeated servants, built in us a great collector of deaths-magic, of naked power, intending to hurry your return. Somehow it never actually came to a return, and the Company forgot its purpose for far too long. And now, it is too late, we are too big, and you, the vessel we were made to fill, would crack and burst if we tried to pour ourselves into you.

We love you too much to break you with our regard; please, we would see anything but that. In the meantime, this poor, abused land requires our help and assistance. That vast hoard of lives and magic which would wick you into a world-devouring blaze in blessed, over-rich Equestria, is merely a torrent of wild magic down here in this magic-starved half-Tartarus. All the waters of our vast, generations-deep reservoir of magic could be swallowed up by these parched sands, and barely touch them with living foliage. But, we have our ways, and there are, even now, oases here and there that mark our passage through this thirsty land.

In other matters, Princess: In recent years, our returning memory of you has taken on its own life. She is but a semblance of you, a shadow which walks, and talks, and struts her way across this stage, this Tambelon. In our saner moments, we are aware that the Spirit is not you, but she has a reality which is hard to deny when her fury is in full spate. We love her as if she were you, but both she, and we, know full well we are not you.

For the truth is, we are not simply a mercenary company of soldiers; we are also a troupe of players, of performers. We have always done more through pretense, and performance, and illusion, then we've ever done with lances and spellfire and brute force. We are not simply warriors – we are actors.

And sometimes, our characters - the roles we play - appear more real than the actors that tread these boards. That is because, in a way, they are. We your performers are mere ponies, full of contradictions, and starts, and faults, and wrong cues. Our characters, our roles are pure, refined - they are the story, itself, breathing. All we can do is be them for the briefest moment on stage.

Your Highness, we have had the privilege, in this lifetime, to be your actors. We have been given, have given ourselves, the chance to be you. Our subconscious selves, our idea of you, our 'you in I', takes form, takes shape, and talks and acts you as if you were the character our better selves were born to play. We have been, for a few brief years, a few brief months, for some, the unlucky, a few brief moments - you, our Princess of Dreams. We rejoice in your triumphs, we rage at your losses, and we weep for your sorrows. We cannot bear your burdens in those moments that will come; of this we are sure, for it is also sure, that our conjunction would break both you and us, and the world in passing. But although we cannot give you our presence for now, we can still offer you encouragement, and hope, and faith.

May you find harmony, for we are your faithful players, The Company.
By the hoof of Feufollet, Forty-Third Archivist of the Black Company

Submitted to the archives directly by Her Royal Highness, Luna, Diarch and Co-Ruler of Equestria, to her newly appointed senior archivist, Faded Palimpsest, First Year of the Second Age of Harmony, September 8th, to found and re-establish the Lunar Archives. Filed with the original manuscripts of the "Annals of the Black Company", 11-9-1 AH2

*I knew that mare was hiding something! - FP