In the Company of Night

by Mitch H

Pulling In Tandem

SBMS113

The death of Hidden Jewel had brought unexpected movement within the Company. Obscured Blade had taken the death of one of his protégés very poorly, in ways beyond mere torment of witch-apprentices. Overnight, he shifted from obstructing the Captain's every plan to enabling every wild start her sleep-deprived mind could conceive.

This gravely undermined the Lieutenant and the ground-cohort commanders, who had come to the Company through their Uncle's gauntlet. The terror and pride of that experience bound them together in a deeper brotherhood. Something greater than this shallow fellowship those of us who grew up outside of the greater Company can boast of. But it also leaves them vulnerable to the bullying and fulminations of that stubborn old bokor, and now that he was pulling with the Captain rather than planting his hooves against her direction, the wagon leapt forward.

The three elder warlocks shipped out the morning of my little episode, with orders to shut down the fords. The night of their arrival, Otonashi and the Crow set up and executed a perfect ambush on the usual caribou incursion, hiding them from their fellows in the fort across the way, and isolating them from each other. The panicked skirmishers, chased by Otonashi's phantasmal monsters, ran into the prepared triplines, and were demolished without a drop of Company blood.

Night after night, for three nights, the skirmishers of the White Rose died, each time losing larger contingents. The short witches' section had been accompanied by a round dozen of picked sections from the other cohorts to reinforce Fuller Falchion's Second, which had replaced Otonashi's Third at Pepin City in the first week of fall. By the time that the Captain herself arrived with the balance of the Fourth on that third morning, the caribou had lost more than a company's worth of infantry trying to force their way through our now-impenetrable screens. The eastern bank of the river was now death for the rebel.

As fall blew into the province, the river began rising. Heavier rains upstream increased the flow, and closed first one of the up-stream fords, and then the lowest ford. Bad timing for the Company, as this was the exact time when the Captain had started infiltrating glamoured sections across the ford to pass through the draws around the looming walls of Hohonahkemenie. Two got past that first night without being discovered, but the third and fourth were discovered by an enemy sweep, and the infiltration operation degenerated into an encounter battle under the war-engines of the fort.

We lost Pers Klemm, a buck from the Rennet recruit-companies, and another three ponies badly wounded before the reaction force could make its way across the fords and lay down enough covering fire to extract the wounded and survivors. The two sections which had gotten past the enemy cordon disappeared into the back-country as instructed, and it was generally agreed that the fight would have appeared to the enemy as a repeat of the mess which had killed Obscured Blade's prize student in the first place.

Rye Daughter and I had arrived with the portable surgical kit in anticipation of casualties, so I was there on the banks of the ford when the oxen powered through the rushing water with their catch across their withers. We got to work there in the darkness, Rye wearing a dark-vision amulet, and we did very good work indeed. I was trying out some new techniques I had dreamed up, and avoided amputation in a case for which I would have brought out the bonesaw before. I was increasingly certain that there was something Spirit-inspired going on with the Company wounded – one jack had gotten a ballista bolt through his femoral artery, and he should have bled out before the oxen could get them back across the river, and yet, I could have sworn that the artery was in the midst of re-knitting as I was stitching it closed. Whatever it was, it wasn't enough to save Pers Klemm, but then, precious little will bring you back from having a boulder dropped on your rack from forty yards overhead.

The infiltrators hooked up with the deep-recon pegasi two nights later, and we started to get a more complete view of the battlespace. The province of Elkhorn had been under rebel control for over a decade and a half. If any stretch of Tambelon could be called the heartland of the White Rose, well, it wasn't exactly Elkhorn, but it was still enthusiastically rebellious. The rebellion had been very good for Elkhorn, aside from the loss of traderoutes through the loyalist provinces on the eastern side of the river. The farmers in the hamlets above Hohonahkemenie were not likely to be at all sympathetic to any of our entreaties, and anypony likely to be enticed by a return of trade had already moved away.
No obvious insertion points had been found for an airmobile incursion, which made the prospects of a proper flanking or envelopment approach… less than optimal. There were fewer swamps, underdeveloped prairies, or woodlots on the western side of the river, which meant that we'd have little luck repeating our trick with the hidden base that had worked so well in Rennet.

Under the heading of 'good news', however, I can report that the regiment actually holding Hohonahkemenie was looking distinctly moth-eaten according to the ponies which were conducting careful aerial surveys of the fortification. A season's worth of attrition warfare had gone distinctly against the White Rose, and the unit actually holding the walls looked to be at half-strength. They looked like they'd been bled white.

The infiltrators had reported that the farmsteads around the fort were full of recuperating wounded, and there were fresh ashes in many private and public crematories. I was a bit surprised by that last bit of news – given the attitude I'd seen among the Imperials towards their own dead, I hadn't expected that sort of squeamishness among the White Rose. Especially not after the ugly display they had used to greet us in Menomenie the year before.

In lieu of a proper investment, Obscured Blade led the witches' coven in a campaign to terrorize the caribou holding Hohonahkemenie. We'd found some blind spots along the bluffs out of view of the walls on the far side of the fords, and some ponies from the ground cohorts dug out a series of blinds in the darkness of successive nights, under the protection of no-see-um glamours. From these blinds, the witches extended their baleful influence through that ancient hulk. Evil little motes of darkness danced through their halls, and sickly will-o-the-wisps drifted above their fighting platforms. Anypony stupid enough to touch any of these phantasms found that they were not the simple projections they appeared. The dark wisps stung like wasps, and the glow-imps expired with an electrical shock that could scorch and burn.

Inside the blinds against the bluff bedrock, we had smuggled a hoof-full of miners borrowed from Brass Tone's operation, earth ponies with affinities for rock-shaping. They could burrow through living rock, and dig where nopony would ever think to look for military miners. Give this much to the Captain – her stubbornness saw ways forward where other professionals threw up their hooves and insisted on impossibilities.

The Captain brought Mad Jack up to Pepin City, and had him construct bastions well forward, to hold war-engines sited so as to cover the far bank of the river from the eastern side. We began to regularly send out sections during the day to provoke enemy fire from the walls of the fortress. Those sections included enough bowmares to provide a credible threat to the enemy hiding behind their walls, and explain why we were out there like that. Nothing was accomplished but the waste of ammunition and the interruption of rest. They couldn't sleep in the night for fear of wandering witches-constructs at night, and were distracted in the day by Company armsponies rushing their walls and trying to lure out sally parties.

The constant provocations helped us map out their fields of fire, and positions of all of their engines. But then we received word that the attrition and action had drawn reinforcements. The infiltrators and the deep-recon patrols reported a column at least two regiments strong had begun moving north from the vicinity of Falaises du Conseil, which probably meant witchy reinforcement as well.

The miners hadn't nearly gotten far enough under the walls to put our fresh blasting powder to use. They were told to keep digging, and maybe we could put it to use in another campaign. We had run out time, and we'd use what we had to hoof.

That night, while the reinforcing column was still a half-day's trot south of the fords, the witches let loose one of their grand illusions, a black, stinking bank of smoke and evil things, that stung and shocked and hid everything from sight. The White Rose ran around in a panic, some of them locking down their sally ports, and some spinning up their war-engines in preparation for the attack.

You'd think they'd have learned to expect aerial attack, but then, this particular regiment hadn't been at Falaises du Conseil, and we'd been careful to not use the pegasi and griffins here. The Crow lit up pathfinders' beacons for the bollard strike-force, and the Lieutenant's ponies made a perfect delivery of their ordinance against the walls of Hohonahkemenie. Solid-core bollards smashed apart catapults, and flame-bollards detonated in the guts of ballistae. The majority of the enemy's war-engines died in the course of ten seconds' bombardment, as did many of their crew, immolated by the successive strike of hollow-scored ‘jug' bollards full of distilled alcohol. The fires from the flame bollards caught the resulting aerosoled clouds of alcohol alight, and the detonation blasted away the witches' black mist.

The explosion was the cue for the ground assault, and the ponies of the Second and Fourth surged up the draws and climbed desperately through the kill-zones under the fortress's narrow ravelins. The remnant of the aerial cohort swarmed over the sally ports and the ravelins, trying to keep the enemy from getting to their fighting platforms, spending blood to save their brethren swarming the slopes below. We lost Dress Left in this desperate rush, as that pegasus mare found herself caught on a hedge of pikes-heads thrust up in the air. Other pegasi were badly wounded here, but enough caribou got to the walls to drop rocks and smaller boulders on the attacking force below.

There were a number of wounded outside the walls as storm-teams broke down the sally-ports at two places. The corridors behind the sally ports were killing zones, and we lost two ponies to the gauntlet, the jack Jonguleur, a recruit from Lait Blanc, and the earth pony mare Longfurrow, a recruit from Rennet City, both killed by stones flung down upon the storming-party forcing the passage. The rush got the Company's ponies out of the passage, and at the enemy's throats before more could die in the close quarters.

As the storming parties cleared the sally-ports, the witches rejoined the fight, and generated illusions of Company storming parties swarming over the walls in three places. The enemy, apparently surrounded and shattered by the bombardment, fled for the rear gates of the fortress. They fled faster than we could get our storming-force through the sally ports, and just like that, it was over. The infiltrators observed the retreat of the wrecked regiment, but didn't try to stop them. Even shattered, they still outnumbered our infiltration force almost ten to one.

The Captain brought Brass Tone's miners up from their digging operations in the bluff under the now-captured fortress, and set them to cutting bore-holes in the walls facing the river and the draws on either side. Carters began hauling carefully sealed wagons through the fords, and up the draws beside the fortress. We threw out a screening force in the half-harvested fields behind Hohonahkemenie, and covered the carters as they brought load after load of blasting powder into the captured fort via the main gates.

The miners drilled bore-holes as quickly as they could, but the recon patrols returning with the dawn set everything into overdrive. Time was running out. They ended up dusting the fighting-platforms with the leftover blasting powder, and filled the surviving ammunition-racks along the ravelins. The pike-heads of the reinforcing column were glinting in the distance when the carters hauled the last of the miners down the draws towards the fords, followed quickly by the screen-ponies of the ground cohorts. The griffin specialists set spark to the fuses, and flew off to join the rest of the Company drawn up behind the war-engine bastions above the eastern side of the fords.

The explosion flung ancient stones high above the draws and the flowing river. The wall facing us collapsed in a stony cloud of debris, and the sally ports, ravelins and all, slumped into the draws, blocking them in the process. You could see dust gouting out from the blinds the miners and the witches had used in the bluff below – the detonation must have cracked open the partially-cut mines we had planned to accomplish this. Well, no effort is ever wasted if you live to learn from it.

The recon ponies reported that the enemy vanguard had actually gotten into the fortress just before it blew. That might explain why they didn't try our position afterwards. Their fortress was destroyed, and their last probe had been met with a face full of blasting powder.

The Captain sure showed us, though, didn't she? She got her fortress.

She'll be insufferable from here out.

Comments

[Mitch H]

'Elkdeer', what I was I thinking? Well, this happens when you're composing before 2 in the morning. Alcohol not required.

[totallynotabrony]

I'm just about to go on vacation, so maybe don't have a novel waiting for me when I get back, yeah?

[Bookeater_otaku]

Ah, now that was a nice use of low power witchry.

The capitain is better than I face her credit for. Perhaps that's because she have been set up as a soft antagonists for a while. Good to see her shine.

But now after hearing from Mad Jack the first time in while, I have to wonder what the crazy builder have been up to this campaign. I know Dance Hall and it's defence, Trollbridge and the facilities had a major overhaul and he probably hounded the Bride engineers for all their secrets but... It seem tame for the usually over the top craftpony.