In the Company of Night

by Mitch H

Spider-Webs And Other Connections

SBMS134

An earth-pony stallion matching Earth Listens' description was spotted by numerous witnesses on the fifth night of the conference, lurking about in various back-corridors and alleys within the Palisades. Nopony managed to exchange any words with the obviously shifty-looking pony, and he ran away when approached.

---

The conference concluded on the seventh day, and the various militia delegations departed for home in a hurry, many of them racing to out-gallop an on-rushing weather-front promising heavy snows and ugly winds. The General's adjutants spread out with their assigned delegations, each lesser province getting its own wet-maned lieutenant, while the three core provinces acquired a brace of short-tails each. Even the Company got its very own wet-mane, a callow young jenny so much like a younger Dior Enfant that that Company pony's assignment as the new liaison's handler was a surprise to absolutely no-pony.

Cup Cake was off and about around the district, searching as she always did for sweeteners. Also, news and signs of Earth Listens' spy-network, especially those portions of it established where Cup Cake didn't already have a pony or two feeding her information on retainer. The call-signs that Earth Listens had given her as a newly-recruited member of his network proved useful for 'harvesting' at least two such sources in the nearby hamlets and towns. He had been a busy pony up here on the plateau.

We used the excuse of 'conferring' further with the Duc and his people as a reason to extend our stay in the Palisades for another five days. There was no reason we'd be expecting any of the promised militia-regiments expected for our relief for at least a month and a half; there was no reason for any of us to be racing about hither and thither. So, we stayed in place, and Cup Cake plucked her spider-web, listening to its song, and did her best to tie the new threads into the weave.

In between our socializing with the new Pepin militia and their Duc on the one hand, and listening to Cup Cake's ill-tempered reports of universal sugar shortages, I did a little light interrogating of the prisoner, who clammed up once again now that the 'imp' was no longer around to provoke his wrath.

And we waited for the return of Feufollet on her first independent assignment. Nopony had told her that there was a pegasus patrol flying very high coverage overhead, but she did well enough as it was.

---

Earth Listens was seen in various hamlets and homesteads between the Palisades and the border with Rennet. We later discovered that 'he' had recruited several additional agents using the existing call-signs and codes, including one inside the walls of Charred Horton. He was a very busy pony.

Then he disappeared somewhere between the border and Menomenie, where he had told his last host he was headed.

---

The pegasi picked up 'Earth Listens' in a snowy copse beside the Road just outside of the view of the walls of Menomenie. They had a chariot hidden in a hayrick about a quarter-mile east of the rendezvous point, but by the time they reached that chariot, they weren't accompanying an earth pony stallion answering to the description of the missing spy, but rather a half-grown jenny with the distinctive stains and affect of a Tambelonian bloodmage.

Feufollet had done very well in laying a false trail for our now no-longer-missing-in-Company-territory spy. Perhaps she had done a little too much in terms of verisimilitude, in actually recruiting fresh sources, but she reported the details and call-signs properly when she was debriefed, and Cup Cake now knew to add the new sources for the 'White Rose' network to her circuit. She was already planning on recruiting a fresh sub-agent to maintain the network on the plateau.

And since we were not planning on being in the province by late spring to maintain either of Cup Cake's source networks, the Duc had promised us his new spy-master, so that we could turn over our resources and contact-lists before we had to decamp. The Duc of Pepin may not have had an espionage network the week before, but by the first buds of spring, he'd have a robust spider's-web for his new spider. Assuming nopony put a hoof through it in the interim.

When the time came to go home, we had a proper little hidey-hole built into the back of a supply wagon, piled high with foodstuffs, ironmongery, and those few sacks of powdered sugar that the Equestrian had managed to finagle out of the unsuspecting ponies of the plateau. She really was ruthless when it came to sweeteners.

Earth Listens was knocked out again by Feufollet's little spell, and we shoved him, bound and restrained, into the cavity within the supplies, and slung a couple sacks of flour over the hole. Heavy Bucket and I shrugged into the traces, and we started the long slog back down into the bottom-lands and our temporary home-away-from-the-world.

Time to start thinking about packing up.

---

Dancing Shadows had little luck in cultivating the new liaison, a humourless little fanatic named Javerette. I sort of grumbled about it, but if they don't want to bite on our lures, we can't exactly force them into our arms. Well, we can - you'd be amazed at the horrible, ruthless things that Desecrated Temple admitted to having done in order to recruit agents within the temple-guards which made it a holy duty to hunt down and destroy Desecrated's Company. But we weren't going to starve little Javerette, or stuff her full of hashish and trick her into murdering one of her fellow lieutenants to 'bind' her to our cause through guilt and fear. I warned you about Desecrated Temple… there was no way I was letting Feufollet into that section of the Annals any time soon!

We installed the captured spy into the hardened quarantine room which had become Dance Hall's impromptu dungeon. For a Dark Fortress of Doom, Dance Hall was notably short on vile oubliettes and dank, dark dungeons. I mean, we could have shoved him in one of the saltpetre collection tanks, but he probably wouldn't last long down there, and although we couldn't really have him wandering out in the world, I didn't necessarily want to end the stallion. Not yet, anyways.

The real problem was that he had seen Cherie, and although he had mistaken her for something that she really wasn't, he had far too good of an idea about what he thought she was pretending to be. Until we could give him further 'evidence' that he had seen exactly what he thought he had seen, we couldn't leave him out and about. Not even to follow his trail and snap up whomever he tried to escape towards.

After another fruitless session, I locked him away in his cage, and went up front to the re-built offices to sit with Rye Daughter, and vent a little.

"Boss, there's not much you can do about it. He broke - a little - when he saw Cherie. But you can't let him get close to her again, and we don't have an imp or demon laying about that you can use to pretend to be Cherie, now do we?"

I turned my head around on the desk I was slumped over, and stared at the doe. She was almost into her final growth, and her misadventures with the Company had hardly stunted it at all. The broken antler wasn't growing back, and that was a shame, but the loss gave her rack a bit of a rakish air that gave her… countenance. She'd be breaking hearts and tormenting bucks in no time.

And she had an idea, although she didn't look like she'd realized what she'd said.

"Who says we don't have a demon on hoof? What good is having a shape-shifting Spirit if we can't use her to haunt the righteous and religion-addled?"

I could feel our Mistress taking form behind me, I could even feel the heat of her glare. And Rye's wide-eyed stare over my head was a pretty good clue, too.

"Good evening, Your Highness. Speak of the Princess, and she will appear!" I chuckled, not lifting my weary head, or looking in her direction.

"One might almost think that thou thinkest us a demon sent from Tartarus, to lure thou and thine from the paths of righteousness, Acolyte! Hath not we had this very disputation ironed out, when thou broke and offered up thine inner-most heart to our cause, undivided?"

"Goddess of mine, you may be, Your Highness, but I will always reserve the right to call you by your actions, and ours in your service. And if you are divine, it is a very killing sort of divinity, is it not?"

"Acolyte, I knew there was a reason I kept your evil hide un-nailed to my host's door-frame. What wickedness have you conceived of for our greater glory?"

"Can you take the semblance of a pony who is not you?"

"It is not easy, but the Company contains numerous practitioners of the glamourous arts, and I am nothing if not soul-stuff; my very being is almost infinitely malleable. So yes, I can indeed, pretend to be that which I am not. Just do not ask me to pretend to be my sister." I could hear her retch, over my head.

"Princess, I do not even know what Celestia the Undying looks like. I'm not even exactly sure what 'pearl-pink' looks like. Pink, I expect?"

"Surprisingly enough, no. The linguistic arts are an endless mystery, especially when it comes to the whimsical naming of hues. Which pony would you have us make mock thereof?"

"Come, Princess, you are a part of me, or rather, I a part of you. What ugly thought have I conceived, that summoned you forth like a temptress, to afflict the overly-religious?"

"Ah! Our Rose-fancier! You have not already disposed of the blaspheming heathen?"

"No, no. I'm trying to get away from murdering my problems away. It only seems to complicate matters, no matter how many f-f-foals I butcher."

There was an uncomfortable silence, and then Rye Daughter turned away and left the room without saying a word.

"D-damn. I forgot who was in the room. I should go apologize."

"Whyever would thou apologize for thine heart-ache, Acolyte?"

"I think that hurt her."

"She perhaps, hurts for thee."

"Hurt is hurt. I don't want to talk any more about it. The spy! He thinks that Cherie is a trick of devils, of shape-shifters and evil imps. So why can't we give him an actual shape-shifting imp, to approach him in her semblance, pretend to offer him his hearts-desire, and escape - and then throw it in his face, full demon treatment?"

"Wicked child! And thou wondrest why-fore thine apprentice concerneth herself for thine disturbances."

"Not a good idea?"

"No, no. It would be a perfect performance, if only to seal off the possibility of the Rose-worshippers latching onto our most favoured thestral filly."

"Your only living thestral filly, mind you."

"Have faith, Acolyte! We takest dear Cherie as harbringer of a rebirth of thestraldom! We hath dreamt dreams of skies full of the bat-aspected pegasi, so many that they darkened the light of the moon in Equestria's night-sky!"

"We would be delighted to pretend to be our favourite filly for an hour of deceit!" the Spirit suddenly said in Cherie's perfectly-mimicked voice.

I leapt up, and spun around, astonished. In the place of the Spirit, whose shifting semblance I had followed, unseeing, imagining each change between Aspect and Aspect as her accent slipped seamlessly one to the other, I saw a great off-white alicorn, bat-winged and green-eyed, her long horn like a lance splitting the air overhead, nearly piercing the newly-plastered ceiling, which had not been laid out for alicornic dimensions.

"Yes, Acolyte, this is my expectation of what she will look like, if all is well and the future devours her not. I know potential when I see it. And she is one of us, in seed, in the shell, a dream of a tree, still inside her chestnut."

She sighed. "But we do not need the Cherie-who-could-be, do we? We need -" she shrank, losing the horn, dropping stature and weight, her limbs thinning, her eyes growing larger in proportion as the rest of her dropped away. "Cherie as I am today."

She suddenly looked around, surprised. "Wait, what? Monsieur? I was dreaming with Bad Apple, we were throwing rotten fruit at her elder siblings. What's going on? This looks like the real world." She poked at her chest, which gave way as Spirit-stuff was prone to do, like mist taken semi-permeable form. "AH! Monsieur! What happened to my chest? Why am I ectoplasmic?"

Author's Note:

Um, oops?

Comments

[Dorath]

Um, oops?

Let the hilarity begin

[FanOfMostEverything]

Maybe it would've been a better idea to just sic Gibblets on the poor spy...