//------------------------------// // The Mouse-Trap // Story: In the Company of Night // by Mitch H //------------------------------// 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.