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.