//------------------------------// // You'll Never Leave Pepin Alive // Story: In the Company of Night // by Mitch H //------------------------------// SBMS062 We waited with the Company heavies. The aerial road patrol had reported the wagons coming down from Menomenie would be a little late, so we were waiting the convoy and the escort on them, stacked up inside the palisade gates. There was barely enough space inside the abbreviated marshaling yard for all the carts and armsponies, and dawn was threatening in the east. The wagons were slow, and we'd have a horribly long day on the road as it was. The delay was making everypony anxious, especially since there would be a great amount of jiggery-pokery when the Menomenie wagons showed. A pegasus flew in high over the fossa, her yellow wings burning in the rays of light streaking the skies over our heads. We stood in the gloaming below, as the messenger of the dawn descended upon us. With the message delivered, the Company component of the convoy rolled for the gate, shuffling forward to take our position at the head of the train, and the rear-guard splitting off to pull up on the Road's verge away from the gate. As we exited the gate, the Menomenie wagons came into sight, wearily rolling across the cracked metalled roadway. The teamsters' replacements trotted up to their assignments, and as the cart in the fore came up behind the last of the wagons from the Palisades, the short convoy came to a stop. The Menomenie teamsters quickly and groggily dropped their traces, and we all waited as the ponies for the downslope leg of the convoy swapped out places with those they were replacing. These were civilian carters, hired teamsters. Not expected to fight, but the ones going into the ridge-and-valley country were every one double-volunteers, and being paid accordingly. It takes a lot of deniers to lure an unarmed pony into the valley of death, and it was meet that they were compensated accordingly. If the worst came to pass, they had the address of their next-of-kin inside the gates at the blockhouse. The Menomenie convoy was composed partially of a small train of hired supply-carts, carrying food and engineering materials for the Company, and those depending on the charity of the Company. Relax, don't think we'd gone soft. That charity was more in the way of a loan. We fully expected to exploit the hell out of everypony surviving off of Company alms. Pony-power would be in extreme short supply once the fields and roads of the southeastern province were once more safe for civilians; every pony we could keep alive and fed and housed in the gorges and bottomlands was one we wouldn't have to lure into the wild afterwards with inflated and pricy promises. The rest of the Menomenie convoy was composed of a short train bound for Mondovi and run by the intrepid ponies of that stubborn town living on the lip of Tartarus, and a collection of independent tinkers, sadlers, and intrepid merchants hauling their own loads. Not that we'd let them do the hauling in the danger zone, not after their march in-country throughout the night. These ponies were being strongly encouraged to bunk out in their rigs, and let the hired teamsters take their traces. They had been briefed in Menomenie to expect this exchange, but businessponies can be obstreperous at best, and there were the usual delays and friction associated with civilians unused to military discipline. It was full morning before the full convoy assembled itself and rolled over the plateau's edge. The Bride's Road took the most gradual route down through the smoothest gorge in the vicinity, but her Imperial Majesty's engineers prized direct routes as much as they did ease of passage. The Road rose up over the valley floor below, carried on a truly massive earthwork. Vast boulders mined from nearby quarries had been piled like the work of ancient pyramid-builders, and their enormity covered in heavy rubble, and that rubble weighted down with ensorcelled restraints, and smaller and smaller bands of rubble and fill until the surface was metalled and ensorcelled again and again. The long ramp into the gorge extended five miles from the lip of the plateau until it reached the surface of a wide bench on the near side of the valley below. In between those two points, the wagons and escort-ponies of our convoy rolled perilously along a roadbed floating high above the tree-tops and slopes below, the natural curves of the steep gorge walls and cliffs drifting past us at the speed of the slowest, heaviest cart in the train. Ironically, this was the safest stretch of the journey through the valley, although for those of us with a fear of heights it was the very epitome of vertiginous anxiety. Those long, naked roadside slopes plunging below us on both sides were absolutely bare, and nothing could approach us without being almost instantly spotted. If you weren't concerned about the fact that we couldn't get off the Road, or easily turn around in case of trouble, it was almost calming. Excepting the great plunging heights, of course. Across the surface of a broken-toothed dolomite cliff across the valley from the ramp about halfway down, some wag had painted a message in pony-high letters. "You'll never leave Pepin alive!" Assholes. Admittedly, it had been there when we first moved into the district, and probably had been aimed at the White Rose remnant. Well, that was the claim of the ponies of Guillaume's Ravin; I suppose we ought to take them at their word. And we didn't have the ponies to spare to paint over the damned thing, no matter what it did to morale among the civilians. I'm told it's a reference to a local folk-song, for what it's worth. The wooded slopes were scarred here and there, visibly scorched. Bad Apple had been at her worst in the gorge around the Bride's Road, and her minders had given her head. There wasn't much left alive in the valley below us; it was a cul-de-sac, too far from support and other living inhabitants. There were two dead hamlets and a half-dozen burned-out homesteads at the foot of the Road's bed. There wasn't anything much dead moving in that valley, either. It was the heart of the Company's clearance operations, and for a couple weeks after the initial clearing they ran a patrol with a witches' gig up and down that valley once a day, once a night. That was in the past, now, there was little to attract ghouls down there, and the dead that were re-infiltrating were mostly drawn elsewhere. On the bench beside the Road, three homesteads built back-to-back had formed an impromptu hamlet that was still miraculously alive. The caribou who held this tiny village, called ‘Gustavbank', were a hardy but wary bunch. We found them half-starving, but still stubbornly keeping their fields and small grove ghoul-free on that stretch of flat-land halfway up the gorge wall. They were one of our charity cases. Three of their bucks were hired on as local guides, and probably were out with the abbreviated clearance patrols we were maintaining with those few Company ponies management could spare from the Mondovi construction fight. A wagon from the convoy's fore pulled off, and the Company carter hauling it hurriedly unloaded supplies into the arms of the does of Gustavbank, who had poured out in force from their gate and the nearby fields to take their share. They had been cutting hay, late in the season, but still a good sign. They felt safe enough to reap while the strongest of their stallionfolk were away. The convoy never stopped, except to allow the Company carter to rejoin the train further down the line. We had a tartarus of a schedule, and were already behind enough as it was. On the far side of the bench, were a series of smaller constructed causeways filling in gaps of the slope, properly drained, as only the very best of engineers Imperial money can buy will build. And the Bride never skimped on engineers for her Roads. There was two more living hamlets in the stretch between Gustavbank and Guilliame's Ravin, and the Company's carter repeated his combat-unloading performance twice again, until he fell into place at the rear of the train with an empty wagon, right ahead of the rear guard's lances. The sun's rays found us again in Guilliame's Ravin, where the sun came up about ten in the morning. The fields around that embattled, shabbily walled town were far behind those growing on the plateau above. Their growing season was almost like those of the north of the northlands around Tonnerre, the limited sunlight largely negating the advantages of weather and copious water. Most of the tinkers and merchants pulled out of the convoy here, to service those ponies in the town who still had the bits to pay the freight. The return convoy would pick them up when it re-formed; until then, they would take shelter inside the town's walls and hold an impromptu market-day in the narrow marshaling-yards that was the only free space available inside. The Duc's representative, Compte Coup, stopped off with the merchants, and was meeting with the town council when the gates closed behind the last tinker-cart, and our convoy consolidated itself and got ready to move on. Past Guilliame's Ravin, the Road was on mostly flatland, and struck straight like an arrow through the black-soil bottomlands. Many burned-out homesteads littered the valley floor in the region, interspersed with walled hamlets, some still living. A second and a third Company carter repeated the performance of the first, and combat-unloaded supplies at each living village. We acquired an aerial escort over the first hamlet drop-off, and they circled overhead throughout the rest of the trip down-valley, dipping occasionally to investigate matters largely out of sight from the Road proper. We were walking into the heart of the danger-zone, and the stretches of the Road after it passed the charred ruins of Durand were especially unsettled. Every night since the construction fight had kicked off, packs of ghouls had gotten past or around the Company's cordon in front of Mondovi. We saw fewer and fewer ponies in the fields, and there was only one living hamlet between Durand and Mondovi. The third Company-carter damn near tossed the remnant of his supplies at the haunted heads of his last delivery, and those skinny donkeys were equally desperate to grab up the tossed crates and sacks and shuffle them inside their gates and retreat to safety. An entire flight of pegasi circled overhead the hoof-off, just in case. As we pulled away from the last inhabited hamlet, the smoke from the fighting to the southwest began to dominate the horizon. It was the safest way to dispose of the dead, regardless of any Company witchcraft or wishful thinking. About three miles out from Mondovi, where the long shadows of afternoon reached out over shaggy, overgrown fields on either side of the Road, another flight spiraled in to meet our air escort. A pony dropped down to confer with the convoy-master, and we rolled to a stop. It was Long Haul. "There's a large ghoul pack coming onto the Road about a mile and a half down from here. They'll be on you in about a half-hour. Too many to slap down from the air, and my ponies are bingo anyways. I need a resupply." The convoy-master, an earth-pony corporal named Even Keel, frowned meditatively as I walked up to the conference. "How big is too big? Can our escorts deal with them if we scrambled?" she asked. Long Haul looked over the shortened train, and the two reduced sections which were acting as our vanguard and rear-guard. Plus me and the oxen, maybe a dozen and a half lances? The pegasi circling overhead plus Long Haul's patrol added another dozen and a half to our resources on hand. "Maybe fifty or so? It's a big group." "There's three heavy wagons running empty at the back of the train, and three trained Company carters. We can bring them up before the ghouls are on us, turn them across the roadbed, that'd slow them down some," I offered. "We're a long way from Guilliame's Ravin if we want to run for it. And ghouls can run faster than tired teamsters carrying full loads, even here on the flats." "It's your train, Even. But make a decision now, they're getting closer as we deliberate. A bad idea executed vigorously with celerity…" prompted Long Haul. "Is better than a good idea carried out too late," completed Even Haul. "RIGHT!" she bellowed, turning on her heels. "Carters! Bring those empties up here, and get your flanks ready! Sawbones, get those damn civilians off the centerline of the roadway!" I galloped down the train, and spread the word, helping the teamsters get their rigs to one side out of the way of the Company carters bringing their heavy wagons to the fore, telling them to take shelter inside the heavier carts, and to keep their heads down. I waved my oxen over, and told them to bard up and break out the hoof-blades I'd had the smiths hammer together for them after Lourd's last stand the year before. They got suited up and I dumped off my saddlebags and pulled my caparison out of the ambulance and got dressed, pulling on my petryal and chanfron over the heavy padded cloth. I winced in discomfort as the barding rubbed against my stitches. I'd have to rebandage myself after this, no matter what. The pioneer's axe strapped to the side of the ambulance frame completed my load-out. I had decided after the fight the week before that lances were crap weapons for fighting ghouls. All it did was bring you into range of their buddies' bite-radius. We helped the carters tip their wagons on their sides, nose-to-flank-to-nose across the roadway, from drainage ditch to drainage ditch. Tiny helped the two bowmares in the escort up onto the upper sides of the improvised breastworks, and Sack hoofed them some of the spare quivers from one of the supply wagons at the fore of the civilian train. Long Haul's pegasi swarmed over the train, trying to find the baskets of replacement javelins, which should have been in there somewhere. They hadn't found them when our own pegasi yelled the five-minute warning. I strode over to the gap between the drainage ditch on the right and the wagon-breastworks, and looked down the road. A swarm of ghouls charging you in the open was no prettier in broad day-light than in darkvision. The bowmares waited the charge, patiently. All of our unicorns were very old veterans by this campaign. They knew their ranges, and they knew to save their bolts for closer fire. And so when they opened up, you knew that danger was close. They riffle-fired into the pack, their target-focus out of my view to the left, but I could see the ghouls swinging outwards in my direction, avoiding the fire and many of them plunging over the sides of the ditch. Not to tumble into the brackish waters below, sadly enough. They kept scrambling forward along the steep side of the road-verge. It would have made them easy prey if it weren't for their fellows running along the roadside itself. Tiny held the gap in front of me, and kicked out again and again against the dead things trying to climb over him. I swept the damned things off him with my axe, doing my best to not cut him with my axe's blade. two escort-ponies joined me in trying to keep the ghouls away from Tiny's vitals, stabbing with their lances. I huffed in frustration and clambered down the side of the verge myself, trying to get around Tiny and the tangle of squealing undead. The axe was much more useful sweeping the legs out from under those things. The shadows of the pegasi flickered over us, like drifting clouds, and their battle-cries told me that they were doing something, but my view of the fight was far more constricted than it had been when I was the only pony on the ground. I wobbled on uncertain hooves along that steep roadside and started cleaving skulls. As unsteady as I was, the ghouls were even more vulnerable than I was, and it was easy once I found the rhythm. Sweep out a leg with the haft, reverse and drive the head into their forehead. Rinse, repeat. I started making my way back up the steep slope, breathing heavily and feeling trickles of something under my caparison. Nothing made its way around the right side of the barricade, nothing moving, at any rate. Then another great cloud passed overhead, and I heard the hallo of a great number of throats, and wings filled the air above me. Aerial reinforcements. And a great burst of flame raising up on the other side of the road, its target far out of my view. I dropped my axe-haft, and looked up at our bat-winged rescue. Tickle Me's personal sections, who never went into the field without their thestral helms, dressing to terrorize even when they were fighting things incapable of feeling fear, and what must have been Bad Apple from the pyrotechnics. By the time I climbed my way back up to the roadway, it was all over but for the butchery and the burning. When I reached the lip of the Road, a hoof reached down to help me up. "Welcome to the Valley," said Tickle Me as her ponies darkened the sun on its way towards the western horizon.