In the Company of Night

by Mitch H

Debating Under The Influence

SBMS118

The medical corps had been shattered by the return of the Marklaird. Two of my oxen were dead, and the three survivors were pretty banged up. Rye Daughter and I were walking wounded, although I was closer to shuffling than a proper walk. Certainly not up to cantering. Both Angus and Sack would be burning their brothers when we got organized enough to build a pyre. The lich had already given us a head start on that pyre - the survivors of the fight spent the rest of the night keeping the fires in the infirmary from roasting our wounded in the wards, or catching the rest of Dance Hall alight.

In the end, the only serious damage was to the foyer, the front offices, and our living quarters. My office was a total loss, and it was a good thing neither Rye or I carried much in the way of personal effects, because they'd have been as ruined as our beds and file.

I ended up laying on a stretcher and directing volunteers in patching together the numerous wounded from the affair at the northern ramparts and the fight in the infirmary and main corridor. The only reason we didn't lose more ponies was that the Marklaird hadn't been fighting to kill, but for time. She had lost as soon as Cherie had snuck Rye Daughter out of that office, right under the lich's nose. She could have killed me, but that wouldn't have gotten her what she wanted from us. We had lost as soon as she got away without a tracer.

The Marklaird wounded and free was just as much of a threat now as she was when she was rooting around in the meat of my shoulder with a fire-blackened antler-shard. She had the initiative until we could find some leverage against her. There were too many levers out of our control which she could turn against us. We couldn't defend the hidden colony, for instance, if she figured out where it was. They were armed, and a harder target than you'd expect of a neighborhood of cripples and 'civilians', but the force the Marklaird had just thrown away for an uninterrupted twenty minutes with the Annals would leave the colony a flaming, corpse-strewn pile of wreckage.

Alicorns help me if she made the connection between the Annalist of the Company and the Duchesse of Rennet's mad, blood-soaked zebra foal-papa. I had to collect the recruits Cherie and Gibblets had mentioned, to see what exactly were the rumours floating around the northlands about that. What could I possibly do to keep the lich from turning Bonforte and the foals into hostages against the contents of the chest? Why would anypony else in the Company give that the slightest consideration?

I was laying in a cot in the wards, blissed out on painkillers and fitfully spinning a lunatic plan to kidnap the newly-married Duchesse and her foals when I was solemnly presented with the information that my heavily medicated self was requested and required for a conference on the current crisis. I looked from the armspony looming over me, to my broken leg, then over to the sleeping Rye Daughter, likewise zonked out on laudanum.

"Are you kidding me? I can't even get up right now, let alone follow you back to whatever closet they're meeting in."

"I've been told to carry you bodily out of here if necessary. The only excuse they'll take is if you're dead, Doc."

"Hope somepony gave you a wheelbarrow, way I'm feeling, I might just roll right off your back."

Wheelbarrows did not prove necessary, although I did end up splayed across that mare's back. Not that way, you filthy degenerates.

The Lieutenant was chairing the argument, whose participants included but were not limited to Gibblets, three of the four cohort commanders, the Crow, Dancing Shadows, and Broken Sigil. Neither the Captain nor Obscured Blade were in the room. The messenger poured me into a deep-backed chair, and stomped off to do… whatever excessively large earth ponies do when they're not hauling stoned zebras about like a rolled-up rug.

"Here's the source of all of our problems," snarled Gibblets. "Sawbones! What have you been hiding in that glorified goddamn jack-in-the-box? We just had our former employer try to burn the castle down around our ears, it wasn't here to exchange Hearths' Warming cards!"

I tried to focus on the goblin's goofy green face, and all I could get was a mossy blur. "T' Tartarus wit' all you, where's the ponies actually in charge o' me? Captain!" I yelled. "Where'd you hide the dam' Captain? Or that old shrike Unc' Blade. Thought we just established it las' week, those two rule this her' Company!"

"The Captain can't be roused," said the Lieutenant. "She went to sleep at dusk last night, and nothing we've done so far has gotten her to open her eyes."

I pondered this. "Well, buck. There's insomnia back-lash, and then there's something like that. Gibblets, hav' you looked in on her?"

"Me? Why me? You're the doctor at the table!"

"I'm al' flyin' higher than that bitch's kite. Alicorns-damned lich harridan. Killed all my beatifu' oxen, poor things. Bough' em all out of slavery, and wa did I wit' em? Half of 'em dead, and the rest beaten bloody. Damn dam-"

Gibblets snapped his clever little claws under my nose, breaking my train of thoughtlessness.

"Oh, yeah. Second Captain in a row, keeled over and not respondin'? Mystic' backlash, bedamnit. Betcha the Spirit's dancing al' along the watchtowers, ain't She?"

Gerlach looked up from some reports he was reading. "How'd you know? She's still out there on the ramparts, yelling and snarling at anyone reckless enough to approach her. In broad daylight, no less."

I leaned back, thinking owlishly. "Lucky guess. Is tha' the way of it? Anypony ever seen th' Captain and her spookness in the same space, or the same time?"

I grabbed a mug of water from the table in front of me, and chugged it down. "Sigil, do we have any tea or coffee? I need to be mor' - lucid. The Spirit maybe pirating her selfness from the Captain ain't even third on our list of catastrophes and looming crisii. Crisises? Damnit, give me some tea!"

The meeting paused while caffeine was acquired and poured down my dopy gullet. While I was waiting, Gibblets explained the Blade situation, which really didn't need all that much explanation. Old bokor was taking the death of his last grandson badly. Problem there was that our dilemmas were largely mystical, and we needed his input, badly. Dragging him in here against his wishes would only draw his witchy ire, though. I didn't need haints to complete my trifecta of miseries.

"Shame we couldn't dose the Spirit with laudanum," I sighed. "You said she's yelling? Is she coherent?"

"Not such that you'd notice, no," said Fuller Falchion. "Octavius is out there trying to lure her into the Hall, but no luck so far."

"Speaking of crises," said Smooth Draw, "Can you explain to us why our former employer just tried to burn the Hall down around our ears? I mean, we cut the legate out and went straight to the empress for our salt, but it was gone for over a year and a half! I thought it had forgotten about us by now."

"Just because you can't see something, don' mean it ain't there." Still not quite in control of my tongue. Oh, well, time for circumspection was past, wasn't it? "The Marklaird clearly figured out we rooked her two years ago in Benoit. Remember I said something back when we were debating going into the riverlands? This is that."

"What, that?" asked Fuller Falchion. "You did something hinky in Benoit, and now the lich is pissed enough to try and incinerate you? You, personally?"

"Our former employer, she was trying to use us as a cats-paw, create enough chaos to scrape away the guard on a certain mystical archive housed in the library of a castle up behind Benoit, called Radspur. We modified the Marklaird's plan to raid Radspur, and cleaned out the cache before she ever set foot in the castle. Left enough detritus that she should have gone off to chase other phantasms, other leads."

Gerlach groaned at my confession. "Well, blast. I guess that secrecy order is inoperative now? I honestly expected to hear more about those trinkets when I delivered them to you. Why haven't the warlocks been all over them? It's been two damn years!"

"I was going to open the chest up and examine the doohickies in a secured ward-circle. Then Shorthorn went and triggered that filthy White Rose trap in Menomenie, and damn if that didn't spook me for good on the subject of mystical wards and trifling in things ponies weren't meant to know."

"Sawbones," groaned Gibblets, "What in five Tartaruses are we talking about here? What trinkets? Stolen from the caribou the Marklaird was planning on robbing, I got that much. But what are they? Artifacts of some sort?"

"Yeah. I've thought about them a lot the last two years, but haven't had the nerve to take 'em out where any aetherial whiff might bring down an avalanche of undead sorcerers on all of our heads. One time I tried to inch my way that direction - ghouls! Ghouls everywhere! You can see why I wouldn't want to advertise our possible possession of a dozen phylacteries. "

The room exploded in recriminations and indeterminate yammering. I waited until they yelled themselves out, then I answered The Crow's question.

"The reason I think they're phylacteries is context, description, and resilience. They're these little bell-shaped carved bits of bone, like somepony took up scrimshaw except with eggshells. But they survived the most amazing abuse in Gerlach's seizure and retrieval without going smash. They were found with a pile of scrolls dating from the earliest days of the first Domination. The scrolls, those I wasn't afraid to take out and read. Really archaic dialect, you can try to read it, but it took me nine months to learn the ins and outs of that mess. Some of them are how-to manuals on making liches and phylacteries, and some of them are letters and orders and genealogies and so forth. It reads like work-product from Grogar's creation of some of his liches."

"So what, we've got a dozen liches' undying hearts stored in your magic box?" asked The Crow. "Sounds like a solution in search of a problem to me."

"A, we don't know which liches' phylacteries, and B, we work for a lich. You can see why I didn't want to advertise this fact. Or let that crazed soul-sucking monstrosity take them for whatever purpose it was she had in mind for them."

"What chances are there that one of those phylacteries belongs to the empress herself?" asked Smooth Draw.

"Based on traditions that the Bride was originally from somewhere in Rennet? Pretty damn good, actually," said The Crow.

"Then why don't we just give her the damn things and be done with it?"

"Draw, did you talk to Her Majesty when she breezed through here?" I asked the unicorn. "My read of her was that she was half-way out of her mind. She might have thanked us, she might have gone on a killing spree. Even worse, she might have started crushing artifacts until she keeled over permanently dead. She was tickled way too pink about our weapons being able to pink her."

"Still might be the simplest solution," said Gibblets, looking pensive. "We're vulnerable as long as the Marklaird's running around saying we've got something, even if 'she' can't prove we've got her phylacteries."

"That's my worry," I said. "How many external vulnerabilities do we have? We rely on a lot of vendors scattered throughout four provinces. The Duc and Duchesse. The hidden colony wouldn't survive a strike like we took last night. And…" I just couldn't say it, couldn't admit it to my peers.

"Your twins," prompted Dancing Shadows, gently. "You think the lich might try to use them as leverage?"

I sunk down, defeated by my own weakness. "Among other things. Not that I expect anypony here to give that particular threat any weight. My business, my worries."

I straightened up. "Speaking of which, we need to get an understudy appointed. I can't be the one point of failure anymore. I might not survive the next brush with the Marklaird, and then you'll be stuck with a chest you can't move and maybe can't protect if it's out in the open somewhere."

"We'll talk about it later," said Gibblets. "Maybe one of the apprentices?"

"So, options?" asked the Lieutenant. "By my read of the meeting, we've got four courses of action. We can pretend nothing happened; we can try to track down and destroy the enemy; we can negotiate with the enemy; we can dump the problem in management's lap. Any objections or additions?"

No response. And no consensus. Half the ponies there wanted to track down and destroy the lich. The other half wanted to contact the Bride and hoof her everything on a silver platter. I fell into the latter camp. Too much blood today, and I just didn't have the heart for more.

Gibblets broke the deadlock. "We can't make this decision without the Captain and Obscured Blade. We need to get the two of them in a headlock and shake some leadership out of them."

He stomped off to do… something. I looked up at the meeting breaking up.

"If somepony doesn't want to drag me back into whatever remains of my infirmary, I swear I'm going to pass out right here in this chair."

Author's Note:

They say you shouldn't write more than four participants to a discussion. What do y'all think?

Comments

[IceHawk]

"They say you shouldn't write more than four participants to a discussion."

I think you pulled it off rather well. I didn't have any difficulty keeping track of who was talking.

"They" say a lot of things, but if you have the know-how and skill, you can more or less do whatever you damn well please.

[Dorath]

although I did end up splayed across that mare's back. Not that way, you filthy degenerates.

I'm with Sawbones on the phylacteries, give 'em to the Bride and be ready to run for the portals if she decided to cash-out.

[IceHawk]

7788740

Holy crap. The fact that I didn't make the connections to the Black Company novels until reading your post.

I thought this looked familiar... Time to change the brain lubricants.

[ponygrad]

I can't imagine what Obscured Blade is feeling. The kids he raised are dead and he has to be doubting his way of life he's lived for so long. Last time when Jewel died he went on the warpath. One of these days he might find religion. My bet is on him trying to get the company on a more stable footing, somewhere off of tambelon and maybe equestria.

[Skulljack17]

8072032
I'd say he already found religion the way he was going on about respecting and honoring the spirit in his own cantankerous way. Problem is, his lady of the night didn't exactly ensure the safety of his kin, and he clearly isn't taking that well.