FFMS049

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 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.

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 the dead things as they tried for 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 their 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 line of advance 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.

Author's Notes:

In a coign of the cliff between lowland and highland,

At the sea-down's edge between windward and lee,
Walled round with rocks as an inland island,

The ghost of a garden fronts the sea.
A girdle of brushwood and thorn encloses

The steep square slope of the blossomless bed
Where the weeds that grew green from the graves of its roses

Now lie dead.