//------------------------------// // The Advance // Story: In the Company of Night // by Mitch H //------------------------------// SBMS149 The next several days were busy but not eventful. The regiments of the Left Division rotated through the forward positions around Dover, and skirmished heavily with the enemy. They produced about three dozen casualties on our side, mostly minor, but three fatalities among the militia. The enemy battalions sortied forward twice in as many days, but both times they found themselves outflanked by more-aware loyalist units, and retreated with significant losses. The scouts reported that the short regiment in our front became two full regiments, and then three. The Left Division was accomplishing its operational goal – they were fixing the rebel's attention upon our front around Dover. The General began forwarding elements of the Reserve on the flanks of the engaged units, expanding the threat. Not all of the Reserve – but enough to catch the attention of an increasingly-frazzled and bloodied rebel screen. I kept my surgeons busy patching together the wounded and overseeing the recovering. Some of them got a little bit of instruction in my favorite poultices and potions – the ones that could be slapped together from local resources, at any rate. The willow trees in the vicinity had gotten too far into their season for harvest, which was a shame. But I was still full up on salicin, so that wasn't that much of a problem. Rye Daughter and her bull-calves had come up with the Middle Division, and she was building her own surgical unit out of the doctors and quacks of that brigade's militia regiments. Well, I should say, she was my delegated representative in organizing that pack of hyenas and layabouts. I walked Rye through how to pull off the 'thestral eye possession' trick that Feufollet and some of the others had mastered, and apparently it was pretty impressive in a doe who was coming now into her full growth. A half-racked caribou a head and a half taller than you staring down with demon-eyes can certainly loosen the grasp of bias and conviction among the over-educated and under-skilled. The brigadier of Left Division and his supports were under orders to make as much noise as they could. We had a little help in judging the reaction of the White Rose from our helpful corps of tinkers and smugglers, but that line of communication was sketchy at best. They muttered into their beer helpful hints, and issued vague suggestions that indicated that maybe, perhaps the enemy had withdrawn from their advanced positions opposite the tattered regiments and battalions of the Army of the Housa, and were renewing their regular approaches against the Braystown Shambles. The pegasi confirmed that something was going on down on the river among the rocks and rapids almost due south of Dover. Overflights reported big flashes, and peculiar ground effects visible from five thousand yards up. Putting these reports together with the educated guesses of the Patrollers, and the current theory was that the trapped ponies in the Shambles and the more talented members of the rebel siege train were trading earth-pony ground manipulation magics back and forth. The westerners were known to have talented ponies who could bring down a curtain wall just by stomping real hard and staring intently into the distance. And some ponies from New Equestria who had gone south with the Army of the Housa had likewise had their own tricks for manipulating earth and stone. One Patroller with experience of Braystown thought it all was foolishness. The Shambles were known by that name for a reason, it was more a defined pile of rubble and fill than an actual constructed fortification. What were they going to do, rearrange the rubble in less artful configurations? She said, with some contempt, that to break a breach through the 'walls' of the Shambles, you'd have to move hundreds of tons of dirt and boulders, probably up-hill both ways. The shift in the enemy's attention was almost certainly an attempt to relieve the pressure of having to pass their supply trains around the long way, and to get their fleet past the Braystown chokepoint. As such, it meant that the bulk of the enemy army was no longer stretched all the way to the Hayfriend in a nicely exposed position far from their supports. That was bad. On the other hand, they weren't concentrating on us, or redeploying to protect their insanely vulnerable base of logistics. They weren't treating us as a serious threat, but rather, a nuisance, a source of harassment. Perhaps they didn't think we were up here in sufficient numbers to cut their supply lines? They had to have noticed our aerial support, which was quite rare in Tambelon, even here, as close as we were to this world's most active portal. (You can be sure that some members of the Company were over-aware of our proximity to the mountain-town portal we had come through all those seasons ago. From what ponies tell me, Obscured Blade could talk of nothing else, that monomaniacal pest.) I sat next to Octavius's cot in the convalescent wards in High Earth. We were getting ready to transport a portable field hospital down closer to where we were expecting clashes. In preparation for that, the hospital in the High Earth castra was being converted to a convalescent hospital. Octavius had been taking the loss of his hoof somewhat badly, and I wanted to sit with him a bit in between my preparations. The troops continued to move, and we would have to move behind them soon enough. "I just wish the little jenny would drop by now and again." "It's been less than a week, Octavius. We've been keeping her busy. And the witches are going to be crazy-busy for the foreseeable future. Big moves in the works." "Bah. Between you and Gibblets and that old bastard, she was barely my apprentice anyways. Is Stomper… doing well?" "Far as I've heard. I've not been up front to poke and prod at your cohort. Ironically enough, you'd get more news on that front from Feufollet, if she ever came back here to report. Hope she's keeping up her journal like I asked. Tartarus, I've only seen her once myself in the last week and a half." I was shading the truth a bit, there. She clearly had been avoiding him. I think the loss of a limb might be especially alarming to a young, hot-blooded, ambitious jenny like Feufollet. I'd heard some muttering about her sermons to the cohorts, about their… extreme nature. Honestly, I was getting a little worried about the little bloodmage. Not so little anymore, I suppose. "It's a shame I'm gonna miss it all," he sighed. "If the old doe pulls it off, it sounds like it'll be spectacular. Like, blood-on-the-moon glorious." "Would have thought you'd be done with talk of glory, three-hoof." "Oh, bugger you and your false cynicism. A stallion is allowed to speak loosely of shameful things like honour and glory now and again." "Not without five mugs of applejack in him, he's not." "Go raise your tail for a book of poesy, you bloodless old fart." Maybe Octavius was feeling better than I had credited him. My visitation to the injured unicorn was drawing to a close when a rather dirt-smeared, slightly charred, and smokey Cherie crawled out from under a neighboring cot. The two of us looked down at the sudden incursion of thestral into the convalescence ward. "Hiya, Octavius! I'm here in Feufollet's stead, we heard you were feelin' a bit down!" "Cherie, is that really you?" I asked, and poked her with the tip of my left forehoof. Solid enough. "Haha, yeah! Real me, real me. Just got off my shift on patrol, we caught a couple carts out in the open. Fwooosh! Hahaha, oh, Peacock's dock, I love setting fire to things! Bad Apple was right, it's great when they go up in flames!" The thestral was so giddy, I almost leaned forward to check her breath for alcohol. Wouldn't have helped, anyways – the pegasi were using grain-alcohol bombs for their little firebombing runs. The attacks weren't sanctioned by command, but it was as easy to keep scouts from free-lancing attacks against exposed wagon-trains as it was to keep a bone away from a starving dog. Well, it was one way to attract the attention of the enemy, I suppose. I left them to their happy talk of destruction and fire, and returned to my oversight of the packing and preparation of the planned field-hospital. There was no way we'd be able to forward the expected wounded all the way north to the existing hospitals and buildings along the Bride's Road. We needed something that could be packed up and set up in a field, or preferably, outside of one of the less filthy taverns or town halls we could find in the vicinity of the expected fighting. The roads leading down into our intended zone of operations weren't exactly hopeless farmlanes and muddy tracks, but they certainly weren't Bride's engineering corps approved thoroughfares, either. The region was full of tiny little market-towns and the occasional baronial estate. The political disunity of the Baronies meant that there were no dukes or counts to encourage the development of proper centralized towns or cities, and thus – nothing to connect, no well-maintained roads to speak of. The eastern half of our army would be moving quietly, in silence if we could help it, because it couldn't move quickly across that road-net. And the carts and wagons of the supply trains and other support units would just destroy the roads if we took them too fast, in too rapid succession. Luckily, the pegasi had spent a good deal of time harassing the rebel scouts and screens in the last couple of weeks, so it didn't appear to be an intensification when they began disappearing every White Rose patrol they encountered. The New Equestrian Patrollers aided them in locating and sweeping up the more westerly patrols of the enemy. The General had ordered a prisoner of war camp constructed outside of New Coltington, a glorified pen quickly filling up with battered and occasionally wounded enemy scouts. I'm told that Miss Cake talked the old Major General into providing local militia platoons to guard the prisoners. Carrot Cake would be needed in the battle to come, and had been strongly encouraged to leave his lady's side. It was time that the corporal leave his greater office as an assistant-baker and support for our spymaster-patissier, and return to his lesser role as witch-hunter and bearer of our legionary standard. The next morning, we moved the wagons containing the broken-down field hospital south-westward on dubious roads, along with our fleet of ambulances and the supply trains and so forth. The regiments of the Reserve had already passed in advance of our trains, and were now pushing southwards towards the vicinity of the battlefield upon which the enemy had broken the back of the luckless Army of the Housa. Some three dozen pegasi were hard at work in the air high over our heads, wrangling the cloudscapes and winds under the rather dubious instructions of a hesitant Princess-mirage, trying to explain to the untrained military ponies how to seed slight storms within prepared clouds, and how to redirect winds in the preferred direction. They had practiced this particular maneuver a couple times in the last six months, and had proven themselves able to deliver snow-showers upon a target square-mile upon demand. How fine their accuracy might prove in warmer weather was up for discussion. And odds-makers. I bet against the pegasi at 3 to 1 odds, I figured if they pulled it off, I'd share in the happy news, and if they didn't, at least I'd have some extra deniers in my saddlebags. And I figured I might as well put my incandescently bad luck when it came to gambling to the service of the Company's interests for a change. Further to our south-west, the Middle Division and the bulk of the Right Division was moving deeper into enemy territory even now, ever closer to the rebel logistical base at Leveetown. The pegasi and griffins were now concentrating, snatching up patrol after patrol in the front of the regiments of the Middle Division. Soon enough would come the word of actual contact with the surging companies in the van of the advance on the ground. At some point, the flag would go up, and the enemy would realize we were in their strategic rear. They would pay for plunging so deep into loyalist country, for having left their line of communication exposed in the face of a well-reinforced enemy. They would turn about, and race for the Wirts and their fleet in the river-roads beyond Leveetown. Hopefully by then, we would be in position to make them regret their folly.