//------------------------------//
// The Prophet And The Hermit-Crab 
// Story: In the Company of Night 
// by Mitch H 
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SBMS014

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.