In the Company of Night

by Mitch H

The Other Shoe Drops

SBMS117

The sergeant of the guard was calling out the reaction force and corralling the aerial section, which had nearly flown off behind the Spirit. Doctrine was that the reaction force arrived en masse, not in section-sized drabbles. As Heinz Scharfkantig wrote, ‘Nicht kleckern, sondern klotzen', or, roughly, ‘stomp ‘em, don't tap about'. But every wing twitched in sympathy as the distant flashes and screams in the distance broke the night's darkness. When the whole force galloped off into the dark along the Road, I turned to Dance Hall herself.

I searched for the officers, looking into operations, where a groggy Broken Sigil was getting up out of his bunk, having just gotten to sleep. It was early enough in the shift that the day-shift was more tired than disoriented.

"Who's in charge?" I demanded of the operations sergeant.

"I think I am," he admitted, rubbing his eyes. "Octavius had day shift, we were going to leave the night shift to the sergeant of the guard. Um," he paused, trying to recall the name.

"Looked like Hyssop to me. Who thought it was a good idea to put the disaster twins into the same command structure? Wait. Isn't the Captain here? Why isn't she down here?"

"We agreed to not wake her if she ever got to sleep. Sawbones, she hasn't slept more than six hours in the last four weeks. She'd be a liability even if we woke her."

"Fine, nevermind, go wake Octavius, too. We need an actual line officer in charge of whatever the Tartarus this is. I'm going to go get the survey from the watchtower."

I climbed up the stairs between the main hall and operations, that wound around the base of the grand watchtower. By the time I got to the top, there were further explosions lighting up the northern ramparts, and both pegasi still at their posts were staring at the action.

"Forget that mess! We already know it's an attack. Where's your third? Has anypony surveyed the rest of the perimeter? We can't assume they're attacking on a single axis, we certainly wouldn't!"

Just then, the missing third flew into the high platform from the east, cupping her wings to slow her rapid approach. She reported all quiet around the rest of the circuit, ponies at their posts and mostly paying attention to their own lanes. I grunted, disconcerted.

Nopony would deliberately mount a night-attack on the bloody Black Company on a single axis. We weren't seeing something.

I galloped back down the stairs, and tore through the main corridor of the fortress. Everypony at their posts, noise from the ready-barracks of the day shift, the corporals kicking their charges out of their bunks to prepare to reinforce the reaction force or form a fresh fire-brigade for the inevitable second or third attacks.

Wait. The ponies in the hall outside of the infirmary, they were there when I went up to the watchtower.

I got closer, and spotted a lance laying broken on the wooden floor. And blood-trails showing drag-marks inside the closed doors of the infirmary.

"Alert! ALERT! Enemy inside the fortress! Ponies down, ponies down!" I screeched at the top of my lungs, scooping up the sharp end of the broken lance and rushing the doorframe. The doors resisted opening, and I put my shoulder to it as the other guards abandoned their own posts and one earth-pony came up beside me and helped me leverage open the door against the counterweight.

The corpse of Tiny, his throat torn out, the foyer awash in blood, dripping from the ceiling and the walls. The missing guards flung to the side, the earth-pony mare Dark File, whose broken lance I was holding, and a unicorn stallion, whose muzzle was unrecognizable, but by his marked flank I knew to have been a sword-pony named Ironsinger. I scanned for threats as the other guards dragged Tiny out of the way, and started forward with caution and weapons couched in preparation.

Flashing lights in the front office, and a scream.

Rye Daughter.

The two earth ponies and I hit that door as one, and it exploded into shards. It barely startled the surviving inhabitants of that room.

A short, dark figure bent over my apprentice, her broken antler in its hooves. Charring and blackened soot around the cubby I kept the Annals chest showed where the enemy had tried to open the trapped archives, and flickering flame showed that they had just tried it again. The burned and scorched antler suggested that it had tried to use Rye's own bone to jimmy past the flame-runes I had gotten Gibblets and Bad Apple to apply as her contribution to that ancient compilation of spellwork which was the Company's archives chest.

I charged blindly at the figure, the enemy, the damned lich, recognizing her as I came within range to score her leather-bound barrel with my broken lance-shaft. Then my sight was full of blackness and fire, and I was in a corner, shaken and hurting all over.

The Marklaird. Back for the damn chest again. She walked towards the corner where I lay, trying to focus.

"Annalist! I was just about to go looking for you, and here you come, presenting yourself to my requirements!" she said in a voice like an approving auntie. "Your apprentice has grown, but apparently hasn't been given access to the archives? I mean, she wouldn't open it when I asked, and clearly the key isn't in her flesh." She waved the smoking antler-fragment at me.

I couldn't tell if Rye was breathing. But at least the lich had left her behind when she approached me.

"You thought to *steal* from me! I've searched everywhere, and you know what conclusion I reached? I was right the first time! They were in Radspur! You little sneak, you took them when I wasn't looking, and then you left me to draw my own conclusions! Hiding them all this time, never leaving them out where I could scry them, nothing I could *smell*, nothing I could detect in the aether! There was, really, no other place they could be. This damnable void your ancient mages made of your Annals!"

She stabbed me with the smoking antler, deep into the meat of my shoulder.

"LET ME IN, DAMN YOU!" she screamed into my ear in a voice like a small colt being tortured.

I just sobbed in agony. But what she didn't see was Rye's body being dragged into a shadowed corner by a pair of white hooves. I did my best not to smile through the pain.

She stabbed again, experimentally, trying the other shoulder.

"Hmm. That's not going to work, clearly. Let's try an eye."

Oh, that hurt like nothing since the first time I lost that eye. But I had another.

And the other saw the gout of flame that washed over the startled lich.

The witches crowding the foyer of the infirmary blasted the lich with all the feeble magics at their command. I felt a hoof trying to pull me into the darkness behind me, and I pushed it back.

"No," I whispered to Cherie, as she tried to drag me into her shadows. "She'll kill everypony. We can't fight her like this. Get them to fall back."

I dragged myself across the flames and through the pools of blood, and reached the chest. I opened it, and reached into the compartment I had stocked after the affair in Menomenie.

And I took out the blasting-stick I had prepared.

I took a corpse which had been slumped against the outer wall of the office, the wall it shared with the corridor outside. I braced the blasting-device behind the corpse - I recognized it then as the smouldering remains of poor, damned Skinflint - and I sparked the short fuse.

The lich, trying to fight a unicorn shield chorus in the close confines of my destroyed office without immolating itself, hadn't noticed a thing I'd done until I blew down the wall behind it, half-collapsing the ceiling above us.

I dragged myself into the corridor with the chest behind me, as effortless and weightless as it ever was. I used that lump of wood to lever myself up off the flooring, and began limping away from the burning, smoldering wreckage.

At the same time, three glamoured images of my battered, bleeding self dragged themselves and their own phantasmic Annals-chests in the other cardinal directions, and we, my mirrored images and myself, crawled as quickly as we could to hide ourselves from the raging lich.

Drawn out into the open corridor, the Marklaird found herself overwhelmed by numbers, and more than one Company lance found its way past leather binding into her undead flesh. She began screaming in the voice of a gored bull, and then another gout of flame washed over her form, catching my tail on fire, again.

Bless the witches, another phantasmic me's tail likewise was caught in the flames, and burned, realistically.

You could feel the moment when the Marklaird gave up the fight, and started scrabbling to escape. She struck down two ponies in her way and made for the stairs up the watchtower, and disappeared from my sight. I was told later that she had hidden her damn kite on the roofline, and flew away before anypony could follow her in her retreat.

I slumped, exhausted, utterly tapped out.

By my own assessment, a broken rear leg, three, maybe four broken ribs. Multiple puncture wounds, burst left eye. A lot of first-degree burns, but those weren't serious. One streak of second-degree burns, survivable. All in all, I got away light.

I yelled for somepony to help me to bind my rear leg, and then I'd be able to start piecing together whatever had survived the attack.

They found two of the wounded, dead, in my office. It appeared that they tried to rush the lich when she first burst into the infirmary. A jack from Rennet who went by Fidélité, and an earth pony stallion from Verdebaie named Beerhall. I don't know if their sacrifice saved Rye Daughter, but bless them anyways.

Two more guards were killed in the fighting for the office and the corridor outside, a pegasus stallion from the watchtower detail named Dewpoint and a jenny from Verdebaie named Open Water.

Shorthorn didn't survive the fight for the office, they tell me his heart burst from holding the focus of the chorus shieldwall. But somehow he kept the shieldwall up and flaring until the lich fled. He was the last of his family, and the last of Obscured Blade's children of his own body.

Rye Daughter wasn't as badly beaten up as I was, but somehow it hurt more to see her like that. The rack will grow back, I'm told, and she's young. Broken bones will heal.

But it's time we started thinking about those damn phylacteries I have hidden in the Annals chest. Pretending we'd never found them and that they weren't in play had clearly played out as a tactic.

Damn that lich anyways.

Comments

[IceHawk]

I was wondering how the Marklaird was going to go about her return. Certainly didnt dissapoint.

[Dorath]

Just how many lich-lords does the Bride "command"?

The Company has killed two, and a third has put herself high on their hit-list ...

Sure, they're cleaning up the Bride's government (slowly and unintentionally), but the Company is also weakening her own Warlock Corps, while (as far as we know) the Rose hasn't lost any of their major players.

It might be more pragmatic for the Bride to release the Company from service and send them on through the portals rather than let them stay on and kill even more of the her liches.

[Mitch H]

7788557 There's more than a dozen legates, less than two dozen. And although they're incredibly powerful in and of themselves, they're terrible generals and spend more time feuding with each other and dismembering rival power-centres than actually fighting the White Rose.

In the original Black Company novels, the Ten Who Were Taken which the legates are based upon were the very by-word for treacherous and self-interested. The Lady engineered the siege of Charm as a scheme worthy of a Jacobean revenge-play, leading both the rebels and her own treacherous, disloyal Taken to obliterate each other, leaving only a loyal remnant to survive the battle. But Cook's Lady was a far more intelligent and self-controlled semi-villain than my Bride, who in the final analysis is more Lear than Richard Crouch-back.

Suffice to say, the Bride has more undead, inept generals than she has functional armies. The surfeit of the former is largely responsible for the shortage of the latter.