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 aid 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'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…"