//------------------------------//
// An Orphan Of Durand 
// Story: In the Company of Night 
// by Mitch H 
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SBMS067

I took the long walk up out of the bottomlands with the oxen and a load of wounded in the spare ambulance.  I should probably have taken a chariot ride and saved me two days' travelling time, but the aerials didn't really have the ponies to spare to play taxi in those days.  They were stretched, and over-stretched, covering their patrol zones and hauling their strike packages about the back-country hither and thon.  The actual fighting in the valleys and the upcountry had died down by this point, but the patrolling got worse and worse as the active ghouls disappeared into the increasingly scorched landscape. We were flying the pegasi off their wings.

So, I took a hike.  The wounded needed evacuated out of the smoke and the stink of Dance Hall, and I had been summoned for my other job, the side-gig that came with being the pony with the archive-chest.  Not that I had carried it down into the bottomlands with me - it was still sitting in the hospital up in the Palisades, and would be until I came back for it, or the Captain named my replacement, or came the last crack of doom, whichever came first.

I turned about as we reached the head of the Road as it rolled off its great gorge causeway over the lip of the plateau, and looked west into the sunset.  Bloody, dark-red sphere half-hidden on the horizon by those endless banks of smoke.  The easterlies blew great scalloped curves upward through the fell clouds, the permanent thermals twisting the smoke and cinders into the black pillars of a vast, ruined temple over the burning, distant city of ruins.

The skies over the land north and east of the Palisades were darkening when the gates opened wide, and let through the mostly empty wagons and the oxen with my ambulance full of the slumbering or the groaning.  A great, gangly fawn came thundering towards the open gate, and I grabbed up Rye Daughter as she greeted me after long weeks apart.  

She had grown a hoof and a half, maybe two while I had been down getting Dance Hall situated.  She was almost no longer a foal, her legs stretched out like fragile sticks, all the foal-fat burned away by the growth-spurt.  But her eyes were bright, and she couldn't keep the grin from her muzzle.  "Boss!  Too long, yeah?  We've been keeping the surgery and the wards nice, neat like you like!  Been learnin' so much this summer!"

No more sirs, no more Herr Doktors.  Ah, well, it fits the Company vernacular better.

She led me and the oxen through the half-empty blockhouse complex to the recovery wards and hospital which took up far too much of the interior of the Palisades.  The marshaling yards and the teamsters' cabins were active enough, but the pegasi barracks were empty, and the big cookhouse was being wrapped up by those carter-cooks still up here on the plateau. Operations down in the bottomlands meant that we needed the supports operating down in Dance Hall, where the food could get out to the columns in the field with some sort of celerity.  Even if everything cooked down there in Dance Hall still tasted like cinders and over-cured venison jerky.  Ugh, no, not literally.   But the smell gets in everything…

I stopped by in the wards to laugh at Hyssop and Octavius, who had both managed to catch a ride up to Palisades, about three and two weeks ago, respectively.  Hyssop from smoke inhalation, and Octavius when a doorframe collapsed on him while clearing a hamlet.  It was like they were in a competition to see who could spend more time in the infirmary without an actual career-ending injury.

Feufollet was asleep in Octavius' lap.  From what I had heard, she didn't do much more than sleep and make her ‘favours' for the Company.  I looked at her fetlocks, and her cannons, and the many little half-healed wounds.  I turned to Rye Daughter.

"Yeah, boss, we know.  We've got her on a special diet, Charleyhorse makes sure she drinks these special shakes he makes up special out of the griffins' larder.  She's better than she was a few weeks ago, honest bison."

I didn't say anything.   Rye saw more of her friends and the ponies in the Palisades than I could possibly keep track of from a day's long, dangerous jog southwest.  I asked after the rest of the foals, who were scattered between the Palisades and Little Ridings.  Well, aside from Bad Apple, who I knew was up at the front contributing to the on-going conflagrations in her own way.  I had seen her from time to time, if only at a distance, and from below.  I'm not sure if she even left her air-gig anymore.   Somepony with the aerials told me she sometimes slept in it.

After making my rounds in the recovery wards and inspecting the rest of the hospital while Rye hovered anxiously - I played up the process like a suspicious mother-in-law or fussy drill-sergeant - I made my excuses and went to find Asparagus in the teamsters' quarter.

Her and her civilian teamsters were the primary reason I was up here a day's long journey away from the front and the fresh wounded.  We'd gone through a good many hirelings hauling the endless stream of supplies down from the living half of Pepin and the provinces of the northland.  The pay might be good, but the conditions were mane-raising, and many had decided that one or two trips through the smoke and the stink had been enough adventure for a lifetime.  The ones that stuck were adventurers in their own right, or locals with an emotional investment in keeping the lifeline open to the world for their kith and kin.

And more than a few among the ones remaining wanted in on the conspiracy, wanted to take the black.

Wanted to kiss the pikestaff.

I wasn't at all sure that swearing in civilian teamsters was advisable.  Many of them were hyperfocused on the situation itself, the adventure, the sensation of being part of a crusade.  The Company in its current configuration might lead an unprepared outside observer to make conclusions which weren't properly warranted.  We were, after all, mercenaries, not paladins, not templars, not even legionnaires.  We were other things, too, in the dark.  But that wasn't for public consumption, or revelation to anypony but those already walking with the Spirit.

"Damnit, Sawbones, stop being stubborn!" snapped Asparagus after several times 'round the mulberry bush.  "They're already fetlock-deep in the Company's shit.  They say the right words, they stand when they're told to stand, they gallop when they're told to gallop, and some of them kick in heads when there's not time to tell them any damn thing.   There's this one crazy one, goofy, awkward kid most of the time, but I saw him run over four rampaging ghouls with his wagon, and then back up twice over the quivering mess.   He's damn lucky they didn't get their teeth into him, or else we'd have to have put him down, he was that close.  I don't want to worry about putting down my teamsters if they catch an unlucky bite.  I want them trotting with the Spirit, not alone in the dark!"

I asked to speak with her carter-paragon, to see what I was being asked to bring into the Company for the sake of Asparagus's peace of mind.  He was a middling-tall young earth-pony stallion, orange, a bit too old to be called a colt, but looked like he wasn't quite into his full growth.  Almost as skinny as Rye Daughter in the midst of her growth spurt, but a little thicker around the leg and neck.  He had a nervy look in his eye, and looked like he might have some sort of glandular condition.  Hard to tell under the surface eagerness.

"Sir, yes sir!   I want to fight with the Black Company!  It's - exciting!  And not in an 'oh my alicorns, we're all going to be eaten alive, somepony help us please' sort of way!  Like we can finally do something about all this horseapples.  Buck ol' Grogar and his curse in the muzzle something good!"

I asked what his story was, why he was wanting to join a fighting brotherhood with his mark.

"Well, that was something I wanted to do, my parents wanted to do.  They're both gone now, with our shop.  The damn caribou, burned us out, us and our neighbors.  What?  Yes, Durand.  My pa had a pastry shop there.  He died on the walls with the militia, my mother last spring afterwards.  Just laid down one night in that back-room corner they gave us in Guilliame's Ravin, and didn't get back up.  Damn, hurts to remember.  So yeah, I'm supposed to be making bread and pastries and such.  Lotsa ponies supposed to be doin' all sorts of things.  Tartarus, what's all that matter?   It's the end of the world, ain't it?  Might as well kick that monster in the back of the throat before the last swaller, don'cha think?"  

I thought I caught a gleam in his eyes with that last question, but I wasn't sure.  The Spirit at the back of my head had opinions, though.  And I could tell she liked him, weird, sweaty affect and all.

So late that evening, I went into the office we kept the banner and its war-lance, and collected the standard.  I could hear the thumping noise of the oxen with their war-drums in the marshaling yards across the compound.  I walked slowly with the pikestaff slung back across my shoulder, the banner streaming in that constant easterly breeze.  The torch-light lit the alicorn's-head sigil dramatically, and my eyes, dark-adapted, were half-dazzled by the glare.  I could still see the two dozen waiting teamsters, as well as a half-dozen rangers flown in special by the pegasi they worked with, keeping the gorges and ridges of the Pepin Front ghoul-free.  Nopony had raised any objection to bringing those local guides into the Company.  We'd lost too many of those recently to make any bones about that part of the matter.

I reached the front of the congregation, and planted the pikestaff so that that banner streamed high over our heads.  I looked across the potential recruits, and the clarity of vision, marred by the glare of the torches overhead, told me that I was giving them a proper thestral-eyed show.  A flicker of wings behind me and to the right drew my eye, and I noted Cherie's grey wings and large glowing eyes above, perched beside the gate.   So I spoke:

"You have been told, but have you heard?  You have been shown, but have you seen?  The Black Company is not a simple regiment, nor is it a mere mercenary company, although it is both of those things.  It is not a mundane band of brothers or secret society, although it is also both of those things.  This is a world that does not let you go softly into that darkness.  There are many things that will claim your flesh once you have past.  The dead walk in Tambelon, and trouble the living.  Some see the Company walk through this world untroubled, and think we are a solution.   We are in some ways worse than the ghouls.  They will take your flesh, and walk in the skin you've shed.  But those things that shamble in the darkness are not that which they wear.  That is gone, they are gone, where else? We do not know.  Some talk of Elysium, or the Endless Groves, or the Great Blue Yonder, or even Tartarus.  We do not know."

"The Company, we know.  The Company will take you.  This is not a lifetime membership.  This is an eternal membership, a binding.  I have seen our brothers who have gone, and they stream out behind us like this banner above you, blowing in that eternal wind.  We are the stars in our Lady's mane, the river of night that flows from the tail of our Mistress.   The Company remembers.   Remembers.  In a very real way.  This is our strength, and our burden.  This is why the dead fall away before us flaming like parchment in a bon-fire.  Because. We. Know. Death. Dies.  And we live on in the Company."

"If you do not want that commitment, if you have family and friends and a life to return to, the Company is not for you.  The Company cuts all ties, binds instead to itself.  We are selfish.  We demand all of you, without reservation.  You may leave now, and none will begrudge you the leaving.   If you have something else, cleave to that.  Because the Company is not a haven, but a lance in the night."

Three of the teamsters left, along with two of the rangers.  The proportion surprised me, but not that some rejected the call.  I was not selling hard that night; I wasn't trying to bring prisoners of war under control, or extend a protecting wing over foolish foals, but rather, to address allies and employees, and to warn off those who would not fit into the Company as it was becoming, as it was.

Because I had seen the Company in its essence, and I knew every word I spoke was true.  We were deaths-bane because we were, ourselves, a special sort of necromancy, of soul-craft.  We were the anchor of nine times ninety years of death and dying, a river of the dead in the night behind the night seen with mortal eyes.

I didn't read from old Annals-volumes.  I spoke my own words that night.  And the remaining teamsters and rangers were summoned forth, and under the watching eyes of our living thestral, they one by one said the words and kissed the pike-staff, and every single one of them showed the thestral-eye.  Even the skinny, nervy orange stallion with the three cakes on his flank and the stones to run naked and unarmed towards the dead, to drive over them, and then turn back and do it all over again.  

Over Carrot Cake, I could almost see Her black wings fold like a benediction.