//------------------------------//
// Wild Promises 
// Story: In the Company of Night 
// by Mitch H 
//------------------------------//

FFMS041

While I bent to my work, I had sent the timberlings into the brush and bramble within coursing range of the landings.  They ranged through the darkness, and feasted on the woody scrub and weeds left to run riot in the abandoned land along the war-ravaged river valley.  They had been starving for the good stuff while we had been working away at the grand deception in the city-locked Arsenal. Some Order ponies had taken to stealing from flower-pots and little urban garden-plots in the dead of night, just to keep the timberlings from wasting away.  They had been sparing us the ravages of the vast plague of rats and other vermin that afflicted the Arsenal and the city that surrounded it.  It was the least we could do to keep the little monstrosities fed. 

They were also out there to make contact with the rest of the timberlings that I had been told to expect that night.  They were running through the sacred night, shepherded by Cherie herself.  These were the huge beasts which we could not have brought with us through the city of thirty thousand eyes, kept with the Company proper while the little ones crawled into captivity with the Order.  We were, for this night, encamped in friendly country, within a long night's run from the outposts of the Company.  Our pinnaces and a support-galley were posted downstream from the camp to keep watch, performing the same nighttime screening as the enemy's equivalents had done in front of the Shambles the night before.  It was, after all, shared doctrine, the rebels and loyalists trained from the same manuals. 

And so it was that my eyes and ears were away from the ships as I went about my seductions and evangelical approaches.  Those Order ponies who could stay awake and alert kept a guard around me and my little encounter-groups, but they weren't nearly as alert to all the necessary approaches as they should have been.  No matter how intensively we had drilled, night after night, the Order was not yet the Company, and might never be so. 

Thus, while I was singing a hymn of injustice, self-preservation, and looking to the main chance to an audience of five donkeys and a pony in the lee of a grounded dromon, a small shell of illusion and sound-deadening cantrips was not enough to keep the squadron's captain from discovering my recruitment drive, and the lookouts failed to catch her in time. 

"What in the name of the Empress is going on here! Why are all of these slaves out of their night-hobbles?  Who the hay are you!  Sergeant, seize these donkeys at once!"  Lignes Droites was an excellent ship-master, and apparently a natural at commanding a war-squadron.  She had done very, very well that day.  And she had all the tact and capacity for reading the room as an anchorite six years into a self-imposed state of pious isolation.  She had brought half her component of marines to investigate the disturbance.  Marines who were, in point of fact, actually hidden Order armsponies. 

I smiled, and arranged for an instance of the Filly to begin recording the scene.  I needed a template for my eventual illusion-work that would be required in the next few days, if all went well.  Lignes Droites would have a starring role in my presentation for the grand climax, whether she knew or not, and whether she would be there to see it or not.  And such a performance she gave! 

She ranted, she raved.  I poked her in every sensitive point, and she played the role perfectly – the loyalist leader discovering treachery just before the conspiracy came to a clangorous climax! 

"Oh, my mistress, look what you've found?" I burbled giddily.  Nonsense would throw her off her pace.  "Such a beautiful jenny!  Such a leader, such a wonder.  Sailor born to the salt, leader led to the whip!  Yes, go ahead," I sneered as she raised her crop over her head.  "Beat the slaves!"

I stood up from the log upon which I had been sitting, giving my audience the soft-sell.  The salt-sailor semblance I had been wearing fell away, revealing Marsh Wisp, my Order visage.  "The slaves you've surrounded yourself with – you who would be the mistress of all you survey – the sole lord upon your planks, upon your ship!  Nopony to bow to, nopony to tell you what you can and cannot do with the equines under your absolute rule!  Slave-mistress, jenny of the iron collar and the knout!" 

"And yet, here you are.  Surrounded by those who you've put under subjugation. Who stands with you as you hold our chains?  Your hooves are full, you have no weapon but your dulcet voice.  And such a voice!  The voice of command, the voice of authority!  Where are you leading your slaves, mistress?  Do you know where you go, and with whom?  Do you know your own ponies, your donkeys?  Most importantly, do you know whose hooves hold the blades from which your authority hangs?" 

The 'Sergeant' and his armed ponies moved past their quivering commander, swinging their billhooks around to point at the oarponies standing all around us, watching.  She grimaced a sort of sour smile of triumph, past her gritted teeth.  I couldn't help returning her grimace gritted tooth for tooth. 

And as Lignes Droites and I made faces at each other, I started the arrangements through the princess radio and with Cherie.  She gave me a quick chirp in return to let me know she'd gotten the message.  Preparations would be made for early holding-facilities, for ponies to be held until the final denouement. 

Then the marines' billhooks continued their circuit, and wheeled about to point at the squadron-captain's exposed, proud throat.   

The squadron-captain's eyes widened in astonishment. My little audience gasped in unison, and I realized that my illusion-caul was still in place, isolating our little drama from the rest of that ship's encampment.  I blew out the cone of concealment, taking in the rest of the sleeping ship's crew and oarponies, and gave a great shout. 

They rose to their hooves, startled, to find our tableau enacted before them, the marines in mutiny, a strange pony confronting her, and two-dozen oar-slaves standing unchained, armed with billhooks and belaying pins. 

"Greetings, my fine donkeys, my little ponies!  I welcome your attention, and direct it towards the lackey of the slavers and spectres of death who plague this dark and haunted land!  All of us, from grey-beard to yearling foal, have had some hoof in the tolerance of the active evil which is the Empire!  Death has been crowned, and placed in the thrones of honour, and we – all of us! – have bowed before dead things in their places of power."

"No more!  No more truckling to the dead and the deathly!  Death to the necromancers!  An end to the undead!"

The rest of the Order rose and encircled the vastly outnumbered loyalists, all seven or eight of them among the crew.  The half-dozen I had had been working on seducing to the cause eyed each other, wary and alarmed.  They'd been caught with me, and even if we hadn't been in overwhelming numbers, the circumstances were such that they'd hang as high as the rest of us if the mutiny failed. 

As the crew cringed and wavered, the Order-ponies surrounding them closed ranks, and joined me in the shout: "SEE HOW OUR GARDEN SHALL GROW!"

And with that traditional White Rose battle-cry… scene.  I had the Filly terminate the recording, hoping that I could edit it into something we could use when the time came.  I waved my hoof at my troupe of performers, and thanked them.  All but the marines turned away, to return to sleep and rest.  Tomorrow would be another long day. 

I turned to the captured squadron-captain. "Well, your excellence, thank you for your cooperation.  I can't explain what just happened just yet, but rest assured that your participation will save lives, in the long run. We will regret your absence in our plans – you really were an exemplary commander.  But I cannot take you into our confidences tonight.  My Mistress would skin me alive if I tried to recruit a jenny with a knife at her throat.  We must now say adieu.  Gentleponies, please, escort her excellence to her imprisonment.  The guards should be about fifteen-thirty minutes out, according to my sources.  Your excellence, I hope you might find a place elsewhere, so that your talents do not go to waste."  

I turned to Lignes Droites' loyal and not-so-loyal crew-donkeys, continuing my interrupted approach.  "As for you all, my apologies for the interruption.  I had to take advantage of the opportunity as it presented itself.  The squadron-captain will be leaving us for other pastures.  I for one will miss her.  You do not often see such a beautiful piece of work as this morning's maneuvers against the enemy flotilla.  We will miss her work in our future endeavors."

"Wha dast ye meint, 'future endeavors'?  Hain't this ha mutiny?  Haren't ye ponies tha Whitrose?" asked a baffled crew-donkey. "Why beint we needin' ha dab hoof hat the skirmish-line iffen we're ta turn rabel?" 

"Well, my foals, that's the question of the hour, is it not?  We are the White Rose, proud inheritors of that sacred tradition of hate towards the undead, this is true."  I paused to exclude the departing marines and their struggling captive from my further explanations.  "What is not true, my dears, is how we are the White Rose.  There is a damnable cancer at the heart of the current rebellion, one that bends itself towards death and destruction, that rushes good ponies into conflict with each other, in hopes of a general conflagration.  They would see bodies piled against bodies, ghouls thrown against revenants and barrowgasts, until the dead outnumber the living, and the corrupted flesh of the undead piles and mounds until you could perch upon the roiling dead tide and reach out stroke the face of the heavens with the frog of your hoof." 

"My children, we do not propose to join the war against the Empire, but to end it.  End it as sweetly as we can, or as brutally as we must, but end it we shall, though we must break every oath our honour has made, betray every trust given into our hooves, break every stout heart and shame every proud eye."

"For nothing, my children, is so precious as an honest peace.   For that, I would be the vilest villain in creation.  I would break my heart upon the wheel, to make that happen.  Please, will you join me in this cause?  Join my troupe of liars and mountebanks, give us your strong shoulders and your sturdy backs!  I lust after your skills, your wisdom and your clever hooves.  I desire your hearts and your souls, my foals.  Give my Mistress your love, and she will give you the world, and more.  Let me introduce you to her.  She is the moon and the garden, the rose and the fire, and her flames will purge the dead rot from this land before we are done with our tasks."

I paused in thought, considering the wash of words I'd poured over them, and corrected myself.  "Well, and if we are to put the torch to the tinder, certainly we need fire-ponies to contain the fires.  We are quite enthusiastic, my fair donkeys.  Be for us a cautionary hoof, ready with the water-bucket and the shovel if you must.  We're for the controlled burn, after all." 

And they laughed at my equivocation.  I blushed at the laughter, but it was a happy blush.  Anypony who could laugh at a preacher while surrounded by armed fanatics was somepony who could be trusted to stick when the time came to stay stuck.  It helped that this crew was not the departed, captive squadron-captain's own crew. They had no personal loyalty to the departed jenny. 

We didn't tell that batch that their captain had been spirited away.  Instead, we had an anonymous Order pony wearing her semblance, silently standing by while I made my pitch to her donkeys.  They cast various baffled looks the way of their squadron-captain, but none penetrated the ruse.  They fell into line, as did two-thirds of the crews I visited that night.  We made our way through the whole of the dromon squadrons, and a quarter of the nearby galley contingents.  I never had time to go into the dreamworld that night, so busy was I with my marathon recruitment drive. 

I swear I wasn't avoiding the Spirit and her inevitable wrath for my loose play with that first squadron-captain and her crew recruited in ignorance. 

Although Cherie certainly gave me an earful later on, when we met for a few brief seconds.  She was busy putting together an encampment and stockade for the captured sailors, aided by the timberlings and a contingent of Company ponies specially flown in by overstretched pegasi charioteers.  They were throwing it together quickly in a woodlot just out of earshot of the sleeping ships of the fleet.  Cherie's charges against my virtue were obvious, and unnecessary to recount here.  The howling hypocrite. 

  

The Company's charioteers continued their yeomare work, working well into the predawn gloaming, hauling in replacements for the crew who refused recruitment.  We had plenty of spare Order ponies available, it was merely a matter of getting them into place before the ships were awoken for the return to the waters of the Housa, and the continuation of the campaign.  We didn't quite make the deadlines, and some ships went into the water shorthooved.  

Hopefully nopony noted just how cack-hoofed and understaffed some of the dromons were in the following day's evolutions.  The enemy kept her distance that day, and gave our replacements a day's respite to settle into their new roles.  I was run off my hooves, trying to pin down enchantments and glamours on all the new ponies, to give them their proper semblances for the encounters to come.   

Every day, every hour we kept up the pretense, meant a fleet more completely ours.  I grew increasingly confident the inevitable reveal would allow us to make of it an entirely illusory slaughter of the loyalists.  

I  promised myself, when the time came, only phantasms would be drowned in the waters of the Housa.