In the Company of Night

by Mitch H

The Tramp-Freighter

SBMS141

I looked down at my ambulance corps as it rolled onto the tramp freighter. We were sharing a ride with the witches' coven, but as little space as they took up, we were filling up the majority of the deck-space on that little ship. We were tied up at the smallest slip on the dock, dwarfed by the heavy ore haulers taking on companies of the Tonnerre and other militia regiments to my right. Some of the new drivers were struggling with their loads as they came up the precarious gangway from the dock; at least it was a short haul up to the low decks of the freighter. The half-grown bull-calves would have been defeated by the high sides of a Tonnerre heavy ingot hauler.

Angus had asked permission to ask future forgiveness part way through the packing process earlier that winter. He mentioned the ambulance corps' 50% fatality rate in the last three years. I looked at him, and asked him who he was volunteering to stoke Company pyres. He didn't say a thing. So I told him I couldn't stop what I didn't know about, and he took Prench leave about five days before we cleared out of Dance Hall for the last time. He met up with us on the road just inside Vallee du Pierre with a small herd of bull-calves, and never told me where they had come from. I have to assume that they were refugees and fugitives from the underground network of Short Brief and Billie Joe, but again, what I didn't know about, I couldn't respond usefully about to an Imperial interrogation inquiring into juvenile runaways.

They arrived more than a little skinny and generally with a hunted look in their eyes, but I didn't mind that too much. The concern with bull-calves is how well they socialize, and a little cowed wasn't a bad way to start. I looked them over, and told Angus to volunteer them for Asparagus's carter-corps in the Long Hike. That proximity to the food carts would bulk them up, and the endless marching would toughen them up.

As far as I know, both were accomplished. The bull-calves hauling the well-loaded ambulances up the gangways were not the behemoths that my oxen were in the fullness of their adult growth, but they weren't the scrawny fugitive children that Angus had presented me on the Bride's Road half-way to Grand Dame seven weeks ago. The night before, I and Feufollet had inducted all eight of the bull-calves into the Company as apprentices, with the three oxen and five earth-ponies from the carters' corps standing as their knights. I had Feufollet do the reading, an appropriate selection from Bitter Ambrosia's second book. The campaign to come was feeling more and more like it would be the sort of war that Ambrosia would have recognized, and it worried me excessively, when I had time to worry.

The oxen directed their bull-calves to batten down the ambulances and properly chock the wheels in place. I helped Rye Daughter do the same with the old supplies cart, which I had brought with us into Tambelon nearly four years ago, and still was in near-pristine shape. Rye Daughter was approaching her own full growth, and she towered nearly head and withers above me now. Her left rack was still missing the broken-off section that the Marklaird had inflicted upon her while during its assault. I'm told that she will keep that mutilated rack of antlers until she calves for the first time.

Hopefully years away, she's far too young to be thinking about children. I think? I don't know, I don't do 'the talk' with the apprentices, I leave that to ponies like Throat-Kicker and Cup Cake. And given my personal circumstances, I'm pretty sure she'd laugh in my face if I counseled abstinence. She knows too much, damn it.

When we were situated, we went forward to join the witches on the bow of the tramp freighter, looking at the outer harbour and the stream of heavy haulers that were now leaving the docks under heavy canvas and with straining long-sweeps, putting every little bit of extra energy towards getting out into the roads. In the hazy distance, you could barely pick out the orange dot which was the magic rock that made this section of the Imperial waterways functional.

Feufollet and I huddled up and talked about her journal entries, and where they could be tightened up, whether I would be including them in the current annals or not. By the time we looked up, the tramp's sailors had hauled in their gangways and thrown off the mooring lines. Then they got out their own long sweeps, not even bothering with the sails.

"Anypony know why they're not putting up sails?" I asked.

Gibblets looked up at the bare masts, and then out at the nearest ore hauler. "Can't you see how slack that ship over there is? Wind's dead, Sawbones. If we want to get out into the roadway, they're gonna have to row."

"Should we… I don't know, help? We have places to be."

"Do you see wings on these shoulders? Let the sea-ponies look to their own business, Sawbones."

We eventually made it out of the harbour mouth, one small ship in a line of great haulers and other small coasters. As we approached the enchanted rock that drove the shipping lanes in that section of the Inner Sea, I could see a crowd of ponies – no, donkeys, standing or crawling all over the face of the great stained boulder. It only looked orange at a distance, some trick of the light or perception. Closer up, the stains were clearly brown.

And there were robed donkeys currently crawling across those stained sections, painstakingly painting the naked rock with something glistening red. There was a bucket-brigade hoofing buckets of something liquid up from an assembly of very young jennies and jacks, swaying in a sort of ecstatic trance.

"Hey, Feufollet, what am I looking at here?"

"C'est malade raide! They're renewing the enchantments. Looks like the local Classe de catéchisme. From what I've heard, it's either this, or the sacrifice of a convict."

"Equine sacrifice?"

"Well, only if they have a jack or jenny convicted of une infraction capitale. Otherwise, they just tap the virgin veins of a herd of younglings like this."

"Is it safe?"

"Tabernac, boss, I've never laid eyes on the sea before! Stop asking so damn many questions of me!"

I laughed at her as the tramp came into the trough of the permanent magical enchantment, and came about sharply under acceleration. We braced as the aging ship sang from the shift, an oaken moan in resonance with itself. The bow turned southwards, and we were away for Rime, and the war in the south.

Comments

[Oliver]

Done reading, want to know what happened next. :)

This story is criminally underappreciated. Let's see if I can help with that...

[Mitch H]

7914714
!!!

(Composes self, deletes fanboy squee.)

Thank you very much.

[iisaw]

I'm here because Oliver gave you a signal boost. I love the Black Company novels, and am excited to find a crossover, particularly a long fic. With that said, I'm just following it for now and probably won't start reading it until it finishes. I've been burned way too many times by 100k+ words of story that get abandoned. But I gave you a thumbs-up just for attempting such a glorious thing!

[Oliver]

7914743

I doubt that will do much, and you really should try to promote it, you know. :) You should also try updating it by timeslot… The artifacts of exposure on Fimfiction are something fierce.

[Mitch H]

7914793 Yeah, I read that a couple months ago. IIRC, the effects were diluted for multi-chapter fics, and I already tend to update around 3-4 am EST, which is the right time to catch the Euros, right? Mostly because my cat likes to wake me up extra early to get fed, and more often than not, I spend that time writing something I've already composed so as to disassociate 'claw to the back of his neck!' from 'get fed immediately!'.

Also, adrenaline rush caused by said clawing and the interruption of helpful dream-cycles results in fruitful writing time.

[Oliver]

7914814

IIRC, the effects were diluted for multi-chapter fics, and I already tend to update around 3-4 am EST, which is the right time to catch the Euros, right?

Actually, it’s more complicated…

I don’t have the math background for it (I’m supposed to, but I don’t, and I don’t have hard data on the heat algorithm) but metaphorically the process resembles a bucket-wheel excavator which is keeping the wheel just above a raging sea.

An algorithm computes a “heat rating” for every story, based primarily on number of viewers over time and some other unknown variables. The top N stories enter the Popular Stories sidebar. Of these, 7 top stories that have never previously been in the feature box⁽¹⁾ enter it, and linger in it until their heat rating decays enough for them to be displaced by newer contenders.⁽²⁾

The remaining 3 slots of the feature box are reserved for stories that have been in the feature box already, and once a long-running story accumulates enough permanent readers, if it updates at such a time, when enough of them are online and will immediately click it,⁽³⁾ it accumulates enough heat to jump into the Popular Stories sidebar and is eligible for one of the three bottom slots. They typically don’t linger there for more than 2-3 hours,⁽⁴⁾ as opposed to the upper 7 slots, which tend to persist throughout most of a week. But if those three hours overlap peak hours, it typically attracts new readers, while if they don’t, nothing happens. So posting time for updates actually matters considerably. A good rule of thumb is to post the update when the number of visitors to the site – the one reported in the lower left corner of the front page – exceeds 1400-1500.

Yeah, it’s out of whack and forces you to do rather bizarre things to get noticed, but there’s very little horizontal propagation on Fimfiction, and no facilities for a proper recommendation engine. Front page, alas, is where it’s at.

——————————————
(1). Incidentally, this one has never been there, and qualifies.
(2). Which basically means that the moment an author has 1000+ followers, any short they post that overlaps the peak times will instantly end up in the feature box.
(3). The number of permanent readers required seems to be about 200. I don’t know just what kind of number of immediate readers this actually translates into.
(4). Whether it’s because there are just three slots and they displace each other, or because the heat decay rules are different, I’m not sure.

[horizon]

Here via Oliver, and dropping a note before I begin my reading. I may not have time for a while, but if it's half as good as he suggests I am going to enjoy the stuffing out of this.

[theguyfromtheplace1]

I am beginning to develop the oddest premonition that all these mentions of the sympathetically linked lodestones that drive shipping are foreshadowing something. Leaves me to wonder what exactly.

My only guess is that it's related to sawbones's discovery of the exiatence of hot air balloons. Possible incident of the Company using lodestone-dragged balloons to maintain aerial redeployment capacity despite future casualties among the pegasi? Catching people off-guard as they believe they no longer have that option/cannot bring a whole army along with them when they do? Possible incident of an enemy taking inspiration from their tactical trick and creating their own spin on things?