In the Company of Night

by Mitch H


Some Other Pony's Broken Toys

SBMS070

The 93rd's sergeant-major refused to believe my claims that we did not have holding-pens full of undead up some holler or behind a stockade up on the plateau, so I walked him back to Dance Hall to examine the trophy-display which they were assembling along the ramparts and curtain walls. The Company has a certain memetic inclination towards morbid display, but the display racks along the long rampart and over the crenelations of the Dance Hall proper went well beyond even our own excessive standards. Pairs of sword-stallions and earth-pony lancers were lashing together bundles of scorched bones to blunted lances and raising them up to rest in out-slit fence-post holes bored into the outer lip of the ramparts between each set of studes, and the unicorns were levitating blackened skulls to rest impaled upon the blunted points of each fetish. It might be a bit excessive, and the trophies obscured of lines of sight, but they were also rigging ropework so that the display could be pulled down in sections at the tug of a hoof. And some things require a bit of theatrical display.

A full mile of burnt bones lashed up along the bypass for the edification of every passing teamster, traveler and voyageur was worth a little obscurity of view over a field which hadn't seen a shambler in weeks. The whole of Dance Hall, her ramparts, her glacis, her firm curtain-walls and sturdy construction, was already becoming a thing past, a fortification oriented and aimed entirely at a threat which was in the process of extermination as the two of us walked, yard by yard, fetish by fetish rising balefully into the air above us.

Once they were done here, we had more than enough for the ramparts along the main Road, and the work-details had already filled the skies above Dance Hall with her own scorched baubles. And, more practically, the surface of the inner ditch along the whole had been covered with a tiny, horrible forest of detached, blackened antlers, so that anything that fell into or charged through the mucky bottom of the ditch would find itself either impaled on bone or tangled in the macabre footing. I climbed up a nearby ramp onto the ramparts and waved Whitesmith up to the edge to see the full effect.

The view from the top of the rampart finally put an end to his sales-pitch and attempts to work the 'truth' out of me about where we were hiding our captures. As the yards trotted by, it was increasingly plain where our captures were planted.

"We burned them, of course. The stench of rotting carrion was intolerable, even to those meat-eaters among the ranks. Not that the smell of roasting rotten meat was any better, no matter what incense we burned with them, but at least that was a passing stench. And it made the handling of the carrion more simple when it was just ash and bone. Our ponies with farming experience are sharply divided on whether the ashes will be agriculturally useful as fertilizer. The one faction insists that we are mostly fertilizer walking, in differing configurations than those useful in the fields. The other holds quite firmly that the equine body contains far too many poisons, minor in day-to-day life and the meals of the day, and yet concentrated by the life lived, the foods eaten, leave a residue in the body which, burnt and separated from those elements released by the flame and in the smoke, is concentrated further yet, and that the resultant ash will kill a field dead, poison the soil and the underlying earth. If we stay here through the next growing season, I look forward to the experiment. I've already got some test plots in mind. I've always wanted to play farmer, if only for a season."

He remained silent, and we approached the sally-port on the south side of Dance Hall, guarded by a pair of Company armsponies, their attention diverted from their usual task of keeping an eye on their section of the glacis to the west, to yours truly and my guest. I led him through the sally-port, into the now-in-retrospect grossly over-built star-fortress. What would we or our successors in possession of Dance Hall be defending against in this position? She was perfectly positioned to defend little Mondovi, and the main logistical route into Pepin from points north and east, true. But the long rampart was aimed directly at the mostly-demolished ruins of Caribou City, and awkwardly laid out parallel to the actual direction of future threats, from the trollbridge and the bypass road towards Le Coppice and the rest of the Riverlands. I shared none of these concerns with Whitesmith. He was, in a sense, working for the enemy, or an enemy.

We could see what we could do about that, of course.

Nopony has the space, or resources to make the space, to build full-scale dedicated conference chambers in a compact fortress like Dance Hall. The main mess hall doubled for that, according to the Company's standards. This is where I found the Captain, the Lieutenant, and the Duc and his lieutenants. I was uncertain as to how far discussions had gotten, given the Captain's round-trip diversion out to the Trollbridge, and the still-open question of how recently the Duc and his party had arrived. I arched a brow at the Lieutenant, whose attention was not riveted upon the Duc, unlike that of the Captain, who clearly had no time for my usual nonsense. The Lieutenant walked over to the mess-hall door, and we conferred quietly, so as to not disrupt the ongoing discussion.

"Status?"

"A bit of a scuffle, we had to get rough. The necromancer is in custody, Gibblets has her in hoof. This guy is her sergeant-major, Whitesmith. We have serious problems. From the Imperial point of view, our operations were highly counterproductive. You know how they have hordes of hungry necromancers with the Imperial corps? Apparently ghouls are a major cash crop for outfits like the 93rd Rear Support Battalion. And Caribou City was somepony's hidden ghoul-plantation, their stash."

The Lieutenant looked like she was going to vomit. She came out into the hallway and closed the door into the conference behind her. I let her chew on my message for a moment. The sergeant-major was slumped against the wall outside the mess hall, lost in his own horrification, and not truly paying attention to his surroundings.

"We just burned up an empress's ransom in free-range military resources as far as the Bride's soldiery are concerned," I concluded.

"But! It was destroying an entire province! They were getting ready to burst into the neighboring districts of the northlands! How could they possibly justify this sort of uncontrolled destruction?"

"Supposedly there have been harvest battalions up here every winter, to claim a double-tithe of the shamblers while they're slow and lodgy from the cold. Probably the main reason it's been a slow-motion apocalypse instead of a sudden explosion, despite all the activity we've seen down here during the warm months. They might have taken as many as ten thousand shamblers out of the province over the past half-dozen winters, if the numbers I've been given are at all close to accurate. Look, as bad as it was here when we arrived, there are at least five wholy dead provinces along the river on either side of the Bonne, pony, ass, and caribou. I'm starting to suspect that we've gravely underestimated just how little of a shit the liches that command the Bride's armies give about civilians, their living conditions, or physical well-being."

I sighed.

"I think.." I began to speculate, "When the Bride took the provinces away from the legates and made them exclusively military in responsibility and authority, they must have had their priorities hrm, rearranged. They're not ponies, they're dead things. Could somepony appeal to their fellow-feeling, their empathy? If there's anything they'd empathize with, it would be the ghouls. And as for self-interest, the jealousy of ownership – the Bride took away their pretty little dressage dolls, and told them to satisfy themselves with tin soldiers. What do these vicious little deadcolts care what happens to their living sisters' playthings now?"

"Somepony ought to do something-"

"You know what the Annals say about that sort of thinking. We're not a crusade, or a constabulary. I'd say we're well on our way to attracting more than enough attention, wasn't that the purpose of this campaign? Somepony's going to want to buy us off before we cause more damage. We need to prove ourselves capable of being bought off. Belling on about morality and civic good neighborliness is not the battle-cry of the true mercenary. It'll make the paymasters suspicious. The sort of suspicious which brings with it siege-trains and swarms of warlocks."

Her eyes darted to the conference going on inside the mess-hall. "We can't tell the Duc about this. I don't know how the Imperial Army is keeping this sort of thing quiet, but the civilians don't seem to even be aware any of it, or we'd have had an earful by now."

"Well, if we don't have an interest in trumpeting the injustices to the skies, who else would? This is the sort of imperium where newsponies get hung from scaffolds or forcibly recruited into the ranks of the shambling dead. In the meantime, the little necromantic Major offers an opportunity for the Company to appear reasonable."

She gave me the stink-eye, well-earned I must admit. "And how is that, mastermind? I don't want to recruit a ghoul collector or her band of thugs into the Company. Everypony knows that's your solution to every problem that can't be killed away."

"No, not recruitment. Letting her recruit. She came up here to collect ghouls. We still have slopes full of free-range shamblers, and a couple pockets over by Caribou City. We combine the honeypots and cryfoal charms with her reported capacity for dominating and controlling ghouls, and the 93rd gets a reasonable profit for their harvest season, we get a much more bloodless season of cleanup, and if everypony pretends that this wasn't actually an enormous treasury teeming with ghouls, everything gets smoothed out with the Imperials and the locals and the Duc."

We both turned to look down at the sergeant-major, who had started paying attention to our conversation about halfway through, still sitting slumped up against the wall. He looked properly terrified, but I chose to reinforce that terror.

"You do realize there's an enraged noblejack inside that door whose duchy has been half-eaten by some damned thing's hunting preserve. He's young, hormonal, about forty hooves wide and almost two hundred tall, all of it bone and muscle. Noblejacks don't grow up fat and flaccid when they spend their entire adolescence fighting ghouls and trying their best to keep their patrimony from being devoured one farm-pony or shopkeep at a time. I could barely lift that great-axe he carries as a personal weapon. Whitesmith. You want to be the tree being hewn, or do you want to be a hoof on the axe-haft? You might have the Bride's parchment behind you, but her regiments aren't here to enforce that scrap, and it's nobody who knows what happens next except those in that room and out here in this hallway. The Duc is right behind that door, and he's gonna be mad if we don't have something to spin."

The sergeant-major nodded weakly, his eyes not leaving mine.

"Now, how much influence do you have over your officer? Any sergeant-major ought to be able to twist his officer around his hoof if he knows what's good for her. You know what's good for your Major?"

The ass got up off his flank, and nodded, slightly more firmly.