In the Company of Night

by Mitch H

The Beginning Of A Campaign, or, An Honest Grave

SBMS142

The last convoy of the grand army of the north disappeared into the Port of Rime like a hoof-full of corn-stalks flung into a stream in spring flood – just one more bit of flotsam in an endless torrent. All the traffic of the Inland Sea flowed into the voracious maw which was the Port. There were many great cities along the east shore of the Inland, and a scattering of modest ones along the western shore that we had just traversed, but Rime was the Queen of Cities.

Rime's inestimably competent legion of stevedores and longshoremares cleared the troop-transports in record time, debouching company after company, regiment after regiment into the marshalling yards behind their respective docks. Each regiment formed up with two battalions forward and one back, their supply train protected in between.

We each took a different route through the city, tying up traffic beyond all belief. The last and largest portion of the regiments of the north marched through Rime as if it were an occupying army, taking no recognition of the local guarda, the wishes of the authorities, or the bellowed outrage of the citizenry.

Two weeks ago, a regiment had been ordered by an anonymous flunky of the city council to divert westwards as it marched from port to camp, and were directed down a particular thoroughfare. One that was the centre of a vicious labour dispute in the garment district, which had been roiled by successive wildcat strikes and violent strike-breaker riots until the guilds had armed themselves and fielded their own defensive units against the petty mercenaries the owners had pooled to hire.

The resulting clash caused over a dozen casualties among the VII Hydromel, and uncounted dead and wounded among both the unionist self-defense forces and the owners' hirelings. I read reports from one of our pegasi who overflew the battlefield the Hydromel militia had made of the garment district, and she described windrows of dead donkeys and ponies, smashed shops, and fires on every street-corner. It took some convincing by the General's staff on site in the forward camps to keep the rest of the regiments from turning out and burning city hall down around the ears of the council, who insisted it had all been an honest mistake.

The grand army of the north was done taking direction from anypony in Rime.

Anger and irritation at the interruption of traffic quickly turned to fear and empty streets once the forward companies couched their spears and barked a practiced 'hooah!' in no particular direction. Again, the militia-officers had been well-coached, and instructed. The roads were ours until we were past. No argument brooked, no blockage tolerated.

We had no way of knowing if the White Rose had slipped any saboteurs into the great port-city. I thought it more likely than not, and I had my suspicions about that mysterious supposed agent of the city council.

The Black Company itself was one of the four regiments passing through the heart of the great industrial city, marching with a Rennet regiment a block away to both the east and the west. Furthest to the west was Vallee du Pierre's sole contribution to the General's field army.

As we approached the city walls, each westward regiment converged upon its neighbor to the left, and awaited our turn behind the eastward regiment as it passed through the gates within that archaic wall. Ironically enough, the city blocks outside the walls were just as dense as those intramural, barring only a hundred-yard statutory fighting-field kept clear of permanent construction. I imagine in happier times that those empty acres held the temporary homeless and ambitious, but nearly twenty years of war had swept up all of the vagrants and the hoofloose into the armies. Or worse.

The hundred-yards fields were as empty as a graveyard.

We passed quickly through the sprawling suburbs, and yet, it took us half the day to find the end of city, and the beginning of open country. Not far in the distance was the forward base, our home for the next seventy-two hours, assuming nothing catastrophic had occurred while we were in transit.

We joined the forward-deployed supply elements and the construction corps in the camp they had built for us in the midst of the forward base. Its very temporary nature was evident, being even more sketchy than the already-falling-to-pieces trail-camps we had left rotting in the fields of Vallee du Pierre. Hopefully we hadn't delayed their planting season too greatly with all of our tromping about and high drama, they had all in all been remarkably hospitable given the shrieking and the free-range nightmare-inducing daily shows provided by the witches' coven on the circuit.

The Forward Base was a position of zero military value or use. It was merely a flat, well-drained spot whose rental wasn't too dear, and wasn't already built up with useless or obstructive improvements. There was zero prospect from the low palisaded walls that surrounded the camps, which existed more for discipline and definition of authority than any real defensive value they provided. The only reason there was a ditch was because the manuals said there should be a ditch. Tradition was eternal when it came to field fortification.

General Knochehart and her majors had been working feverishly on organizing the regiments into something controllable in the field. Eventually, with the Captain's considerable input, they had settled on a three-division plan, with a sizable reserve element held back with the supply columns. Each division would command four militia regiments, and a cohort of the Company as a combined divisional reserve and scouting element. Divisions would be assigned local militia as guides and scouts as we passed through the relevant districts – so long as we could find and collect said guides and scouts. The general's reserve brigade would contain the remaining militia regiments, as well as the Company's aerial cohort, which would be dedicated to communications and long-range scouting as available.

Each division fell under the command of new-minted brigadiers, former militia colonels who had proven their worth in training or prior field experience. The Middle Division was assigned to the newly-frocked Brigadier Guillaime, our old friend and colonel of the doughy III Verdebaie. The Right Division fell under the donkey colonel of the VII Hydromel, Brigadier Brune, and The Left Division belonged to a caribou named Eugin, colonel of the only Tonnerre regiment.

Octavius and the Third Cohort was assigned to the Left Division; Fuller Falchion and the Second to the Middle Division, and Smooth Draw and the Fourth to the Right Division. The support elements along with the medical corps joined the General's Reserve along with the Captain, the Lieutenant, and Gerlach and his cohort.

We could have retrieved our sections from their respective regiments once the training season was complete, but command decided they were more useful where they were, as stiffeners and, if necessary, recon elements. Instructions were sent to each colonel to take their Company armsponies under authority as a sort of combination of battle-reserve and regimental-level aides de camp.

We didn't tell either the Imperial officers or the regimentals that their Company assistants were also an emergency communication channel. We wanted to obscure the existence of such a thing until battlefield contingencies forced us to reveal our hooves.

The witches' coven was broken up and assigned piecemeal to the divisions. Feufollet to the Left Division along with her nominal knight and the Crow, Bad Apple and Gibblets to the Right Division, Otonashi and Obscured Blade to the Middle Division. The general herself was supposed to be a big-noise runecaster of some stature, and would have to suffice for a magical reserve. We were supposed to be getting some sort of Imperial magical reinforcement, necromancers or bloodmages or something like that, but nopony had made an appearance before we were done organizing, and our self-imposed deadline was past.

Word of raids all along the valley of the Housa had accumulated all winter and spring; the ponies protecting the shipyards at Coriolanus were loudly insistent that a deep penetration assault against their positions was imminent.

The general directed our Lieutenant to send the aerial cohort into the field en masse. Some two hundred pegasi and griffins plunged deep into the strategic distance as the new Divisions mustered outside the walls of our temporary base. The Left Division massed along the Bride's Road southeasterly towards New Equestria and eventually Coriolanus. The Right Division set out along the Bride's Road due south towards Rantoul, and eventually southwestward towards the Mounds; the Middle Division massed and awaited its turn on the Rantoul Road, where it would follow in the Right's dust until it made the Housa at New Harmony.

The vast flat plains of central Tambelon stretched out into apparent infinity, spring-green fields bright with life and the summer growing season ahead of them. It was almost hypnotic, how even the horizon was from the coupe of an ambulance. While we were waiting for the Middle Division to clear the Rantoul Road, I sat, mesmerized, not thinking of anything in particular.

A pair of pegasi charioteers drawing a courier gig descended beside my waiting ambulances while I was woolgathering, and the lead mare yelled at me, breaking my reverie.

"Sawbones! Mount up! Somepony spotted something on the New Equestria Road, Command thought you should see it."

Grumbling, I strapped myself into the aerial torture device, and we took off with the usual dizzying speed. As we gained altitude, the tens of thousands of ponies, caribou, donkeys, and assorted hooved sapients spread out across the road net in front of the rapidly-emptying forward base shrunk to the size of ants, choking the Roads as traffic stopped and started in a spectacular snarl-up of epic proportions. I thought of just how relatively small our force was, and what the Grand Field Armies down along the Rima might look like if one of them took it into its reptilian brain to abandon their great fortifications and go marching cross-country like this.

We approached a gyring group of pegasi orbiting something by the side of the southeastern Road, upon a barely perceptible rise between the Road's drainage-ditch and a neighboring field full of fresh-furrowed soil. There was a battalion of militia marching slowly along the Road, their corporals yelling now and again to keep the lookie-loos from stopping to watch and snarling up the route-march worse than it already was. I spotted Cherie among the fliers circling the – kill?

We came into a landing, and I hopped out to join the Lieutenant, who was crouched over a very dead thing. I could smell it from here, like a young ghoul, still rotting out from its first death. The Lieutenant waved a hoof, inviting me voicelessly over.

The dead donkey was the ancient oracle of Pythia's Fell, that baffling jenny who had chanted alarming prophesy in my general direction over three years ago on the Hydromel border with Rennet. Prophesy that had come more true than not when we found the young thestral mare circling overhead. The oracle had been dead a fairly long time. In fact, I had gotten news of her demise and after-life from a friend in Hydromel almost two months ago. The revenant had really booked it to make it all this way down here before finding her second death.

"The Pythian Oracle," I confirmed. "We had news that she had died, and then walked off before they could burn her."

"As of thirty minutes ago, she was still standing. More than one patrol passing along this route noted it standing here, but since it didn't move or act threatening, nopony took notice until somegriff got close enough to smell the rot. That patrol approached and investigated. Soon as they got within twenty feet, the thing just said something, and then fell over like this. They poked it a couple times with javelins just to be sure, but I'm satisfied it was inanimate when it hit the turf."

"Who," I asked, "was the patrol who approached her?"

The Lieutenant waved a pegasus mare and a hen over. The hen, Agatha, spoke up. "It just stood there, staring at us with those dead grey eyes, you know the kind the ghouls get. The first company of the lead regiment was coming up on us over there on the Road just then. It turned and looked at those caribou and donkeys marching down the road, and then it said something when we moved to keep it from charging the militia. Then it fell over, and that's it, nothing. Damnedest anti-climax I've ever seen."

"What did she say?"

"I am satisfied."

I looked down at what had once been a beloved priestess and leader of pony and donkey alike.

"Well," I said, looking around for some dry wood, "Don't just stand there. Let's give her a pyre and proper burial. Daylight's wasting."

Comments

[Oliver]

…upon reading this chapter, I had a sudden thought:

Pegasus + Heliograph

Highly reflective mirrors should be easy when magic can be employed to produce them, and even if pegasi can’t hover steadily enough to aim the mirror, they have a much easier time reaching high points suitable for installing them.

[Mitch H]

7916746 Interesting. And cloud-mounts would be about the only damn thing you could get high enough to get any sort of distance with, on really flat land like where my characters are headed.

Actually, I don't think I've thought out whether there's any sort of curvature to Tambelon. It isn't actually on a sphere. I don't think? Argh, I've been deliberately keeping this sort of thing, what was your term, decoherent?

[Oliver]

7916784

Interesting. And cloud-mounts would be about the only damn thing you could get high enough to get any sort of distance with, on really flat land like where my characters are headed.

Well, pegasi definitely can use their magic to put solid objects on clouds and keep them there, though it isn’t known just how expensive it is in terms of energy and resources. But if pegasi can't, a temporary unicorn cloudwalking spell will also do the job.

What I’m sure of, is that the Empire under the Bride would find a lot of uses for such a communications network if they have the technology at all, pegasi or no pegasi. Heliograph is mostly a specific mobile application of optical telegraph, and the first successful semaphore network in Europe turns up in 1792...

Canonical Equestria has electric telegraph, if you believe the comics at all – I’ve found multiple mentions – and Manehattan has an outright telephone network, as seen in the series. No clear sign of radio so far, though, and as far as I can tell, high frequency electronics are not there yet.

Fan works are all over the place, positing full-blown FM radio when it suits them and ignoring wired telegraph when it doesn’t.

Actually, I don’t think I’ve thought out whether there’s any sort of curvature to Tambelon. It isn’t actually on a sphere. I don’t think?

Canonical Equestria’s Earth definitely is a sphere – multiple globes in the series, portrayal of a sphere when seen from the Moon in comics, etc – and based on other relevant data, it’s a ridiculously small one, smaller than Kerbin, while still maintaining ~1g in some mysterious manner – also like Kerbin.

Fanfic typically avoids the question entirely, or defaults to an Earth-sized Earth when they can’t. (This causes huge problems with the solar mass, which get swept under the carpet.) Positing an outright flat world is actually rather rare for some reason. One clever idea had Equestria situated at the bottom of a gigantic crater on a much larger planet, with a tiny sun floating above, so it sort of had an inverse curvature.

Canonical G1 Tambelon was a single city that went to hammerspace for an unspecified period, so all bets are off entirely. What do you think would make your story better? :)

Argh, I’ve been deliberately keeping this sort of thing, what was your term, decoherent?

A more specific term would be “unresolved.” Something is “decoherent” across multiple iterations of a world, but “unresolved” in a given particular one.

[Mitch H]

7916874

Canonical G1 Tambelon was a single city that went to hammerspace for an unspecified period, so all bets are off entirely.

I was aware of this, but chose to ignore the whole five hundred year cycle thing, I don't think I've explicitly said it, but the background notes are basically that Tambelon's least-hop-circuit to Equestria was cut when they brought down the portals into Flutter Valley to isolate the Smooze, and it was re-integrated into the rest of the Chain a good many years later during one of the spontaneous expansions that keep it being the 'Chain of Creation' hooked Tambleon directly into the Crossroads. Sort of a backhanded reference to Lois McMaster Bujold's origin story for Barrayar, with the Crossroads playing the part of Komarr.

One clever idea had Equestria situated at the bottom of a gigantic crater on a much larger planet, with a tiny sun floating above, so it sort of had an inverse curvature.

I pondered this - there's at least one picture out there of Equestria from seventy thousand feet that certainly looks something like that - but a concave surface makes for some *really* weird world artifacting, which I'd have to been laying out from day one. Also, it reminds me unpleasantly of Gundam's O'Neill colony stuff.

And it wouldn't be purely flat - because somepony could just built a really tall tower and literally see everything from one edge of the world to the other. Talk about paranoia-inducing!

No, some sort of curvature is necessary. Relatively small worlds, though. And I'm gonna have to insist on my 'crystal spheres' explanation of the heavens on any given worldlet. It's just that Equestria's doesn't operate on its own, and requires a certain amount of... encouragement to keep in motion. Possibly because Equestria is at the bow-wave of creation, and is under significant karmological pressure.

[IceHawk]

7915929

Mogaba? . . . I'll be honest. I'm not seeing the connection.

[Mitch H]

7917394 That's OK. If you don't see it, it just means that the character category-walked out of his intended role. Mogaba was the 'Old Company' reactionary, with secret knowledge he horded from the rest of the leadership. And was an internal enemy to the protagonists, a trouble-maker and generally unpleasant person.

Then he got worse.

[IceHawk]

7917403

I'm getting that.

Part way into Bleak Seasons.

[Dorath]

assuming nothing catastrophic had occurred while we were in transit.

Tempting Murphy again, Sawbones? You'd think a mercenary would know better ...

[Demose]

I have an awesome sound track for the Black Company:

I Mean just look at some of the track names:
1. Skull and Shark
2. Chaos <----
3. Lawless
4. King of the Streets
5 Massacre <----
6. A Promise <----
7. Dangerous After Dark <----
8. The Looks that Kill <----
9. China Town
10. Built to Kill <----
11. Children of the Night <----
12. These Streets
13. Fight to the Top <----
14. Brothers <----
15. Another Chance

[Easysnuggler]

I favor a torus. Inside another torus. Lets fight on a donut! The sky torus has lights and a sun installed on it.

[SWEETOLEBOB18]

The Forward Base was a position of zero military value or use. It was merely a flat, well-drained spot whose rental wasn't too dear, and wasn't already built up with useless or obstructive improvements. There was zero prospect (protection?) from the low palisaded walls that surrounded the camps, which existed more for discipline and definition of authority than any real defensive value they provided. The only reason there was a ditch was because the manuals said there should be a ditch. Tradition was eternal when it came to field fortification.

[Mitch H]

8635584
I'm gonna leave that the way it was, because the narrator means a sort of vantage - normally 'prospects' are described in the context of a mansion or a rich man's house, but it's the same general idea - that you can see the enemy coming.