//------------------------------// // In The Service Of The Hidden Council // Story: In the Company of Night // by Mitch H //------------------------------// SBMS001 "No, I don't think it's the clap. Have you been eating outside of the commissary?” The third poisoning among the ranks caught my attention, too late for the first two. Something broad-spectrum enough to bring down a pegasus, a griffin and an earth-pony all in the prime of their lives was deliberate enough for enemy action. Thunder Feather and Adolf had sweated out their last in my infirmary before I had fully twigged to the threat. Stomper had lucked out, I was paying attention and caught it early. "What, are you kidding, Sawbones? I've only been out a couple times, and only with the Locksteps,” objected the one-eared brown-coated mare, referring to one of our fellow-mercenary companies. She was a good corporal, we'd picked her up locally, out of some disgusting stews on the suburban isles somewhere. We'd been here too long on the edge of the tropics. Too many diseases, too many mosquitoes, too many options for the various cruds and plagues that washed names from the rolls onto the Annals for posterity. Sometimes they barely made the rolls before making the Annals. The money was good in Openwater Bay, and there was little butcher's blood to record, but it was harder than our last five contracts when it came to those terrible "miasmas”. Local superstition, didn't believe in pests and disease, didn't know to keep down the little bloodsuckers. Savages. "Tell me where and when, and what,” I prompted. Her list lined up once with Adolf's, Thunder Feather died too early for me to have thought to quiz him on what killed him. Good enough for a match, and I put her on a potion to cleanse out her gullet before it put her in a weighed hammock like the others. Land was too precious around Openwater Bay for anypony to waste it on cemeteries, it was sea burial for the Company in those days. I reported the target to Tickle Me, and she called in a strike force to descend upon the eatery before any open ears listening in could scatter the conspirators. Nothing fancy, none of our casters involved. Just a dozen ground-pounders to seize every entrance and hold down the random civilians who just happened to be eating at a place with a poisoner on the staff. The crowd tried to scatter, but our guys talked down the angry customers and held them until I was able to help Grable and Karl immobilize the staff, a waiter, a cook and a scullery wench. The wench was the one who ran for it, it wasn't exactly a detective story to figure out our malefactor. One has to wonder what goes wrong with a unicorn's life to leave her scrubbing dishes in a dive on the docks beside a mercenary company's compound, but whatever happened, she was ready to sell anypony to anypony else. I interrogated her in front of the gathered clientele, leaving nothing a secret. This turned out to be a terrible idea, but I had done it in hopes that her handler was in the collection. As she was implicating our employers in her plot, one of the pegasi in the crowd whipped out a concealed spike from a wing and killed our unicorn deader than the pirates hanging by the harbor gate. Karl crushed the pegasus's head with his warhammer, of course, but that kind of left us with no-where to go, and an entire crowd of frightened, confused citizens on our hands. The crowd got ugly, and eyed the ratty doorways and back exits. We could have massacred the lot, but this isn't the way to endear the Company to the general populace. Not that we care one way or the other as a general principle, but it was a crowded town, and a dangerous environment for operations. No need to multiply enemies; we let them go. This also proved to be a mistake, as I found out later. Normally I'd report to Tickle Me or the Lieutenant, but the news was so ugly that the Captain got roped into the debrief. "So, what you're saying is, a simple infirmary follow-up turned into a major hostage-situation, two deaths, and the incrimination of the Hidden Council in a murderous plot against us? Why do you hate me, Sawbones?” The Captain normally was fond of me, as I kept his rolls neat and full of not-dead veterans rather than wet-maned recruits. But you can understand why he was miffed, and it seemed like the bad weather had disturbed his sleep, his eyes were shadowed even under his feathers, and he looked a bit haunted. Letting our employers be publicly revealed as the treacherous nest of vipers that they were was not exactly the sort of adroit professionalism we try to make the Company's hallmark. "My apologies, sir. I expected the victim to be in the crowd, I just didn't expect our little show to be so… dramatic. And I certainly didn't think the Council was that perturbed with our service to date,” I offered. "Are they that irate over our refusal to provide shipboard levies?” There was a storm coming, and nopony in this forsaken hellhole was paying for weatherponies. The humidity and the thunder was ours to suffer without any sort of relief. The pressure was causing all of us to snap and snarl. "Pfft, who can tell? They all wear those damn masks, and I swear it isn't the same ponies two meetings in a row. The last marine mutiny has got them unsettled, that's clear enough. " "Might not even be the naval faction,” mused the Lieutenant, "might be the harbormasters mad at us for something, might be relatives of that clan they had us put down two years ago in the outer sugar islands.” A thundering underlined the mention of that blood-soaked little campaign. Few Company ‘pounders had been lost in the butchery, but we had won no friends by wiping out an entire clan of slaving sugar planters. "This is why working for anonymous oligarchs is dangerous. You can't exactly follow the politics when they're all alicorn-damned faceless!” I vented. You'd think my tropical ancestry would leave me more tolerant of hot, humid miserable nights like this one. You'd be wrong, I was miserable, and my grey and black fur was soaked. We argued in circles and squares, getting no-where. While we argued, blood flowed in the streets. We restricted the troops to the compound except for patrols, and our lances were turned outwards. Even the other companies were locked out, no way to tell if the Brotherhood of the Lock had been somehow involved. At this point, we didn't want to ask questions. In the short term, this was another mistake, as it cut us off from the grapevine. In the middle-term, it kept us from being involved in the sudden, shocking outburst of public violence that set fire to blocks in every direction around us on the main island. But at least we didn't have our flanks caught in the slaughter in the gutters. In the long-term, it was a catastrophe. A week later, on the verge of a second storm blowing in from the west, somepony remembered we were still there, keeping the rioters and militias off the docks, preserving the warehouses full of goods in transit and loot awaiting ransom from going up in pricy smoke. Corpses were reportedly stacked up like cordwood in the inner sanctums and the wealthier neighborhoods, festering in the heat, breeding horrible insects and pestilences. The usual dynamic in which the conflicts of the rich and shameless were waged among the poor and defenseless had been inverted. Apparently our little dumb-show in that dockside dive had touched off the most amazing of bloodlettings among the faceless lords of the Bay. Their nasty little conflicts had been simmering for the better part of a decade, and those petty offenses which among those naked of face would have resulted in entertaining but simple duels had doubled down and festered like hidden wounds forever and aye. The Hidden Council, which had been conceived as a desperation move to bring the piratical clans of the thousand isles of the Bay into an orderly approximation of a sovereign state, had itself become a problem. Or possibly not, their reliance on mercenary companies like the Black Company might have been at fault. Except… we hadn't been involved in the violence. You'd think with all these sell-lances at their disposal, they would have used us for the bloodshed. Instead, the news seemed to indicate that the clans had fielded their youngbloods in the streets between their family fortresses. Once news started flowing, it was startling how much blood had been spilt so quickly. Who knew they had kept so many weapons in reserve? After the poisoning, you'd also think we would object to being used to separate the factions from each other, but money is money, and we're the Company, damnit. Better to write the dead into the Annals due to a sword-cut to the groin or a war-hammer to the barrel than "died of malaria”, "died of Yellow Jack”, "died of some nameless crud”, "died of the clap”. Our patrols separated the surviving youngbloods from each other under threatening skies, unslit throats kept unslit by our sweating, miserable ponies, zebras and griffins. Another month in pirates' heaven, one would have thought. Except the pause in front of the storm gave enough time for the imported warlocks to arrive on station. Octavius's patrol encountered the first signs of the new round of civil war. They found a silent street sweltering in the late summer evening, still air over pavement painted in the blood of changelings, deep in the Free Minds district. Green ichor on every other wall, like a particularly soulless graffiti artist with a limited palette. I was called in to evaluate the numerous black lumps left behind. "So, Sawbones, what happened here?” asked Octavius. He was clearly unsettled, which was disturbing in and of itself. The unicorn was a long-term veteran, who we had picked up before my time in a passage through Crossroads. He had seen a lot of battles, and anything that rattled him wasn't something I was thrilled to be involved with. The black-shelled Free Minds littered the alleys throughout the neighborhood, far too many for a simple tussle. Dozens, at least. And their wounds were… Well, Tartarus. They clearly weren't simple weapon-wounds. Nothing crushing, no simple slices like you'd find from wingblades or swords, or punctures like from lances. This was claw-slaughter, something big and vicious. This was monster-work, and in an enclosed urban area. There was no magical forest nearby to produce manicores or basilisks or chimerae to hold to blame. "Shitfire, Octavius, I don't know, this isn't my sort of thing,” I protested. "These aren't the usual sort of messes. This is magical horseapples, maybe monsters? Call in Shorthorn or Gibblets.” He gave me the stink-eye, not thrilled with the proposal. The casters weren't well-liked among the ‘pounders. You'd think a unicorn would be comfortable with our warlocks, but despite popular perception, ninety percent of unicorns weren't magical powerhouses. Most of them were magical pygmies comfortable with using their levitation to swing their big honking swords and keep their guts within their hides and those hides unperforated by projectiles. Monsters like Shorthorn, his sister Bongo, or the repulsive… whatever the hell he was Gibblets were scarce enough that the Company grabbed on with all hooves whenever we get one into the ranks. Doesn't mean the ranks are ever particularly happy about this; the warlocks were generally either crazy or horrible, or both. We got Bongo when she eventually arrived, all of us half-maddened by the airless heat, wishing for some sort of wind to draw the horrible stink away from our affronted noses and stifled sweat pores. We were promptly disappointed. The time between the slaughter and the arrival of the warlock-unicorn had been enough that the magical sign had evaporated into the heat and general stink. She was stuck with the same physical evidence as the rest of us, and didn't make any more than I had. "Monster”, she muttered, playing with her little drum, "Maybe controlled by a warlock?” Yay, the wonders of magical support, am I right? Luckily, I thought at the time, the outer patrol had picked up an ichor-trail. Leading to the Council chambers, or at least, the old abandoned clan compound where the Council met. It had formerly been the fortress of the clan of the Synics, the corrupt and ineffectual predecessors of the Hidden Council. We looked around at the steaming slaughterhouse the whatever it was had made of the Free Minds district, and thought twice about chasing the monster with a section, a single caster, and the company physician. Reinforcements were shouted out, and a significant fraction of the Company answered the call. Talk about a "Company” to a member of a proper military, and they'll think you're going on about a small maneuver unit, a couple hundred ponies, a fraction of a regiment or a battalion, something like that. We're a mercenary Company, we use terminology from the ancient times, when a Captain outranked a general, and the Lieutenant might command a brigades-worth in the field. We referred to the fragments of the Company proper as cohorts and vexillations. In the days that the Company was in the service of the Hidden Council of Openwater Bay, we had three cohorts, and often fielded portions of those cohorts in battle-groups known as vexillations. The Company responded to our request with a vexillation of five sections under the Lieutenant herself, a purple-coated earth pony whose name had been dropped into obscurity when she had taken up the rank – she'd get it back when her time came to be named in the Annals. So this felt like a sufficient supply of support, so we weren't exactly worried when we moved into the green-daubed compound, hours after the rampage. More fool us. The compound, which wasn't technically claimed by any living clan, was indifferently maintained. The corridors leading to the council chambers were cleaned and not showing any obvious wear or tear, but the rest of the buildings in the complex… there was more than one ceiling collapsed, and rats, cockroaches, and worse things nesting in every corner. The interior was cooler than the streets outside, but moments within the heavy walls left us no better within than the sweltering world outside, simple body temperature defeating the cooling effect of heavy walls and stucco. The fools that the Council paid to "maintain” the facility hadn't survived the monster's initial incursion, and I wasn't exactly inclined to worry that our wait for reinforcements had enabled anything. The blood was well-dried in the previous coolness before our arrival; as cautious as we had been, this wasn't on our heads. But the beast itself was nowhere to be found, and as I bent to examine the mangled janitor in one back corridor, a ground-pounder named Firemane leaned over me to ask where it was. I had no answer for her. I was looking up to answer the unicorn mare when the screaming above started. This caused a mad scramble as various sections ran or flew all over the place, trying to figure out who had made enemy contact. There's no chaos like a skirmish nearby you can't see, and I could see absolutely nothing. The stairs to the third floor and the turret had long since fell prey to time and neglect. The surviving pegasi who had seen anything at all later described the… thing that had attacked one of the aerial sections. None of the griffins in that section had survived to tell their version of the encounter. It sounded vaguely jaguarine, with a number of limbs, maybe tentacles. It killed fast, and it burst through the responding sections before anypony could observe and orient quickly enough to react. They had seen it scurry off in the direction of the harbor lighthouse. Bongo ran off before the pegasi were done reporting, drumming furiously like she was leading a legion into the battle-line. I guess she recognized the description, based on some things that Shorthorn said later. I groaned the curses anypony obliged to stitch order around the rents left by the mad starts of warlocks might groan, and galloped off to find the Lieutenant before Bongo completely outran her supports. The Lieutenant, having completely lost control of her vexillation in the chaos, eyed me with disgust as if I were responsible for her lunatic wizard, and sent me off to find the other warlocks, hopefully back at the compound. Meanwhile she set about extracting the survivors of the mess she hadn't seen any more of than I had. Luckily, the harbor lighthouse was in the same direction, more or less, as the company compound. At this point we had blood in the game, and my zebra was up. I paused in my quarters to retrieve my lance, and trotted into the mage's quarters. Shorthorn wasn't there, but that disgusting little green thing Gibblets was. He giggled when I told him what was the situation and relayed the Lieutenant's orders to converge on the lighthouse. I asked again where Shorthorn was, and all he said was… "Sawbones, stop trying to suck up to command. No-one will remember how obedient you were when it comes time to write you down in the Annals. It's just your name and your rank. But you can find that humorless black-hearted old bastard in the Eastwards district, most like,” he snorted. This was not the sort of dismissal designed to keep me enthusiastic, but I couldn't do anything about the way the warlocks maintained the Annals, or treated us mundane mud-ponies. It was Bongo's obligation, after all, not Gibblets', and she kept it cleanly and clear, better than the days when Shorthorn had been left the responsibility, at any rate. Her brother had made a mess of his portion of the records, and everypony had been happy when he had left it to his little sister. I had no way to harry Gibblets towards the coming confrontation by the harbor mouth, but I could track down Bongo's brother. They had sent him out into the wealthy neighborhoods, after some sort of altercation had set two of the clan freeholds on fire. When I got there, the flames were being suppressed by local unicorns and a team of merponies hosing down the walls with seawater from the nearby canal. Shorthorn was bullying some battered-looking caribou, tied up and naked. As I looked around, I spotted bits of carbonized bone surrounded by scorch marks, and realized that Shorthorn and his attached sections had put down a runecaster. As impressive as that sounded, it wasn't nearly as important as the tentacle… whatever the hell it was running for the harbor-mouth. "Shorthorn, stop bucking around with your damn runecaster and respond to the actual emergencies! Bongo's run off and the rest of us are hoping to keep her alive!” I bellowed, beyond subtle suasion and simplicity. "Sawbones, you hack, what the hell does that mean?” he bellowed right back, putting his captive down with a horn-flash and a sleep-spell. "Tentacled cat-thing butchered a bunch of bugs and ponies on the south side, killed some of our flyers, ran for the lighthouse!” I gasped out in a hurry. That was enough to make Shorthorn mutter something about foreva-something-or-other and teleport right the Tartarus out of there. I knew he wasn't such a powerhouse that this was a simple flourish, he had heard something that upset him, clear enough. He had left me the only officer in the vicinity, just a couple corporals and their sections. I quizzed them about what the hell was going on, and straightened out the mess Shorthorn had left in his wake. This meant that I missed the entire confrontation at the lighthouse, so I can't tell you the details. It was bloody, and protracted, and whatever the hell it was killed Bongo dead. They thought they killed the beast in turn, but just because they brought back a body… well, it had tentacles, that much was true. I wasn't given enough time to really dig into the autopsy of the thing they brought me, because other problems popped up in the interim. The runecaster had apparently implicated one of the clans, and the Captain and the Lieutenant, who had over a dozen dead Company ponies on her conscience, were on the warpath. Nopony seemed interested in the dead whatever the hell it was and the presumed warlock behind the monster which had caused all the actual casualties. The assault on the clan compound was as bloody as such things generally are. Nopony can crack a fortified compound without casualties, nopony who isn't an alicorn, anyrate. They sent an entire vexellation along with Otonashi into the breach. We slaughtered the entire family as part of our vengeance, the price for holding a wall against the Company. You never refuse a door when a mercenary company comes calling, we consider having to breach equivalent to a storming, and all the mercilessness of the storming of a fortress is part and parcel of the laws of war, such as they are. No quarter for a fortress that doesn't surrender and makes us storm its walls. In the end, It wasn't particularly expensive as such things go, but it was the principle of the thing. And the principle of the thing left an entire extended family, women children and greybeards, efficiently slaughtered. It was all justified from our point of view and in the eyes of tradition and law, such as it is. It illustrated just how little humor the Black Company had about assaults on its personnel and honor. It was well within the honor of mercenaries and the rights of an armed military force. None of that mattered in the least, because that clan had clearly been part of the Hidden Council. Suddenly no-pony would talk to us. No-pony was moving on us, but… that was it. There was quiet, but not peace, and we were suddenly without any supports. Suddenly, after six years in the Bay, we were pony non grata. Nopony wanted to sell to us, nopony wanted to talk to us. We were victorious in almost every encounter, but we were going to starve if we sat in our compound. When we had a set of ships willing to ship us out of that mess, the Captain jumped at the opening. It was a golden road, probably provided by the naval faction, and we took it right out of Openwater Bay. Openwater Bay was a watery crossroads on that world, but the options elsewhere were not exactly mouth-watering to a large mercenary company with far too many hungry mouths. Professional militaries had taken that world by storm, which was part of why we had kept to the same contract for so long with the Hidden Council of the Bay. They hadn't figured out how to maintain a professional military in the time we had been in service – there was the non-zero chance that any such army or navy would have mutinied like the Marine regiments whose rebellion had brought us into the Bay back when I had been a shave-tail and a part-time assistant in the infirmary, and whose replacements had kicked over their traces again and again. So we were not exactly welcome in any port upon the face of that worldlet in the midst of a faddish fascination for national militaries. Condottieri were no longer in fashion, nationalism was all the rage on the mainlands. This limited our options severely, and there were only so many roads off the surface of this particular lump of dirt. We would have been bucked if there weren't portals in the offing, but the Road had a couple stops on this benighted dirtball. Crossroads was the nearest to Openwater Bay and our bought boats set sail for that port of portals. Shorthorn wasn't taking the loss of his little sister softly. A great soaking sea of booze was part of his family's mourning process, and Gibblets wasn't willing to give him the space to soak up that sea without interference. Everytime Shorthorn was in his cups, the cups themselves started berating him and anypony in ear-range. The little monster didn't care about space or tolerance or any of that pony crap, he just gave it to Shorthorn with both barrels as if the poor unicorn hadn't lost his only little sister to some sort of monstrous thing. Of course Shorthorn blew off like a volcano, and the ship he was on was on flames before we were able to put together a fire brigade. I mean, we put the flames down before the flames put the ship into the deep, but the captain of the ship was less than enthused about his equine cargo at that point. We moved Shorthorn to a second ship, and kept Gibblets far from his victim, but nopony was happy about warlocks at that stage of the game. Bongo's death left the annalist position wide open, and Gibblets and Shorthorn's stupid vendetta left the Captain and the Lieutenant not inclined to pass the position to one of our other warlocks' as tradition obliges. Our warlocks were effective enough in a military sense, but they were imbeciles when it came to scholastic pursuits. Which, since so many of our groundpounders weren't literate, left very few options available. I ended up the annalist by simple elimination, being literate and not insanely vengeful against any other parts of the Company. So, that was a thing. I vowed to record everypony properly, as something other than a simple name and vital description in the Annals - as a measure of that last full measure, so to speak. We had come to this world through Crossroads a year or so before the contract with Openwater Bay. It was the assumption that they had no particular bad memories, as we hadn't spent any time in that polity to affect bad memories or good memories – we had simply passed through. We hadn't taken into account the third-party accounts of our behavior in the Bay. This had sounded poorly enough in those retellings that it was a serious problem in Crossroads. It was a mostly unicorn town, but it was a suspicious and paranoid unicorn town. Their portals were tightly locked down, and they were very careful of what passed into and out of the world that Crossroads protected. A mercenary Company like the Black Company was apparently the sort of thing which set off every warning signal they had in operation. We wouldn't be able to survive long stuck in a town like Crossroads, there was no suppliers, no cash to work our way around the lack of sadlers, and the town itself had sufficient military and carabinieri to not make making a mess worth the effort. I talked to the Lieutenant, and she closeted with the Captain and they worked it out between each other and some critter I didn't lay eyes on at the time, but apparently had pull with the portal-masters. The major portal in town was made available to the Black Company, highest priority. Clearly Crossroads recognized that they wanted our troublesome selves outside of their world as soon as possible. The mechanics of that doorway meant that we had to exit in a regimented way unlike anything since I had become the physician of the Company - we weren't really an evolutions-and-parade-grounds sort of outfit, not even in the lackadaisical days of garrison life. I took the opportunity to evaluate the whole in a way I hadn't before - for my new assignment, as it were. We were a fair size organization in front of the portal in Crossroads. Eleven hundred, fifteen lances, twenty-five officers and twenty support ponies, pony, griffin and whatever-the-hell-they-are. Surprisingly enough, we didn't accumulate any caribou, merponies or changelings in our time in Openwater Bay, and the majority of troopers were ponies. Forty griffins in addition to the Captain himself were the majority of our nonequine ponypower. Another fifty-three zebra and twenty-five donkeys which I was generally inclined to include in the "equine" category, and three oddities in addition to Gibblets. Tradition holds that we were originally a pony company in the days before we lost the original Annals, but it was somewhat startling that we still continued to present a pony face to the world, despite the Captain being a griffin and the centuries we've spent in non-pony lands. Hurrah for tradition and instinctual racism! We lined up in sections before the portal, our baggage and materials arranged properly in expectation of the transition. Rumor had it that that there was a contract waiting beyond the glass, although I wasn't certain how anypony knew. The mirror-portal, like every one I've seen, was simple in appearance, but terrible in substance. The passage was dreadful, all synthesia and rainbow-smearing horror. I can see why some call them the Rainbow Bridges, but that label has such religious connotations that it's probably for the best that we don't use that term consistently. No need to leave the credulous the idea that bullying godlets have control over our doorways. Transit is difficult enough without superstition and god-bothering foolishness. Well, I say that as if the Company had any control over the portal we were transiting. We were being put out a lot of bits to get the whole complement out of Crossroads to the next station, along with our chattels and supplies. The portal-owners were tying up their doorway with unprofitable mercenaries instead of the materials which actually paid a premium on either side of the threshold, you know, gems, gold, silks, spices… whatever. I don't know, I'm not a merchant. All I know is those skintflints held us up for what seemed like every bit we had on hand. They were lucky we didn't sack their cheap asses, burn out their offices and butchered their laughable security details. In short, never hold a mercenary company up for the last jangle, it isn't worth the color. When I finally got my turn through the rainbow blur, it was something else. The other side was very much like the other world it was. Cool breezes and sweet prospects, a small town surrounding the portal in an alpine hillside, despite the enormous wealth reflected by that interdimensional roadway. I suppose the lack of water and access in that high mountain perch kept that little nameless town from growing like it ought to have, there just wasn't the resources to make of it anything but an outpost. As the Company organized itself in the open space around the portal, the officials in charge on this side circled like predatory birds, maybe hawks, but more likely like buzzards. This breed could smell the bribes from a dozen miles away. Except they were circling around a void within their rotation, avoiding something nearby. Something slight, black, and alarming in a way I had difficulty quantifying in the immediate moment after transit. It came slinking up to the Captain and the Lieutenant ahead in a cluster of sergeants who had come through before me. I couldn't make out what the black figure was, not whether it was a pony or a griffin or something else. As it came closer, the uncertainty increased, a strange blurring with accents of… animal hide and straps and magical haze. The officers exchanged greetings with the… well, it must have been something important locally. I still wasn't certain of where we had transited, although they'd tell me eventually, as the new Annalist. I'd need to know in order to write down the details properly. The Company might not care for the personal details of the soldiers recorded in its pages, but the Company's career along the Roads must always be properly documented. Never again could our history be devoured by savage Fate as it was four centuries ago.