In the Company of Night

by Mitch H

Coming To An Understanding

SBMS145

The wreckage of the skirmish north of the Mounds took up my entire day, stretched across hundreds of miles of tenuous relays, muttering to my Spirit the necessary steps, ghosting the gestures, holding down imagined damaged arteries, veins, tendons pinned together, guiding distant hooves to hold flesh and hide together until I almost felt both hooves and hide alike under my frogs. Somewhere, hundreds of miles away, desperate pegasi kept their wing-mates together, performed impossible field-surgical procedures under the influence of the Mistress and myself and a Rye Daughter almost as deep in the dream-fugue as myself. Five wounded, terribly wounded, carried across the backs of their fellows, or within two battered chariots. One hopelessly mangled griffin, stabilized, carried back so he might die with his fellows.

Garen passed away as the returning flights circled over the Right Divisional encampment. As deep into the dream-fugue as I was, I felt the pulse as he passed into the river, the starry sky. For a second, the river herself opened up to me, and the lights coursed onwards towards eternity.

Then the second was past, and I was again with the Nightmare, and the three sets of hooves holding together my share of the critically wounded. Then it was four, as they reached Rye, and she awoke to glue together our broken egg-shells. I slept and slept, and whispered into the ears of my pegasus field-medics what was needed to keep their fellows away from that starry sky.

Eventually Rye took all of my patients away from me, and I settled deeper into sleep. Six casualties, from such a small cohort. The simple friction of scouting in this environment would wear our first cohort away into a stub at the rate we were moving. The pegasi and griffins needed to have it reiterated to them, again and again – we could not spare them for honour, or pride, or anything other than the continued survival of each other. We could not spare a single one of them.

I could hear the Princess keening somewhere in the depths of my dreams for her lost Garen.

I awoke to find both Feufollet and the Cakes staring down at me.

"Princess says that you can be spared again, Master. We've got the Major-General agreed to go and meet with the Castellan. All goes well, we can get the stockade-cells back, and make arrangements with the vendors and the suppliers."

Miss Cake leaned forward, and cleared her throat. "They're mostly amiable to working with that Major you brought with you. Just needs the Castellan agreeable and not in jail."

I closed my eyes, and asked for the Spirit. An irate Cherie appeared before my mind's eye.

"Monsieur! You just spent half a day in here! Go out, get some – well, sun's down, go get some moon instead!"

"Sorry, petit. I need an update from the Captain, situation may have changed while I was busy. Could you let her know I need an update?"

The little Cherie-imago gave me a fierce raspberry, and then turned away, displaced by a full-scale Nightmare in sulphurous mode.

"Fool! You are not, despite your pretensions, in the chain of the command! What do you need now?"

"I'm about to head into negotiations with the locals. Have we made any major changes in plans?"

"You mean other than totally reorganizing our army and re-designating our axis of advance on zero notice? No, nothing in particular, mammalucia! Yes, you babbu, we're charging eastwards, at a pretty rapid trot. The Reserve is now double-timing it your way, expect them in two days. Middle Division is following in train, as soon as Right Division falls back on their position in front of Rantoul. We'll need Left Division ready to move by tomorrow evening, and to make arrangements for supplies for the better part of the whole army through New Equestria. Army's in your front, babbu! I've already told Octavius to grit his teeth and get his focus forward, hopefully his Brigadier is listening to him! Orders should arrive… late tomorrow morning, if the pegasus carrying them doesn't stop for a cloud-nap on the way. Captain out."

I blinked, and was dismissed. The world and New Equestria was still there, waiting for me.

"OK, new plan. We figure out what the Castellan wants, and give it to him, both barrels. We just ran out of trotting-room. Captain says they made their decision, and the rest of the army's coming this way like an avalanche. Time to make nice and secure right of way and supply sources. Let's go make nice."

The lot of us tramped into the stockade, and a clearly bored corporal got her keys and retrieved the Major-General for us. I nodded to the old stallion and we exchanged pleasantries. Then I stopped in the middle of the stockade passageway, and asked a sudden, perplexed question.

"General, weren't you called for regiments when they were forming d'Harcourt's 'Army of the Housa'?"

He nodded, sadly. "Of course, last fall. Two regiments, the I and III New Equestria were called to the colours."

"Why haven't we heard anything from them then?"

"All communications with regiments called to the Imperial command go through Imperial Command. Which is to say, it's like they disappear down a well."

"So there are two regiments of New Equestrian militia down there somewhere between Coriolanus and Tartarus?"

He nodded.

"Any relatives of the Castellan among them?"

"A sister, a nephew, and his youngest daughter."

"Well, bugger a bugbear."

I turned around, and charged for the Castellan's cell. I grabbed the keys for the Castellan's cell from the nonplussed corporal, and wrenched the door open with a twist of my neck.

I spat the keys back at the corporal, and looked inside the cell, where the alarmed civilian had jumped up from his cot. "Hey, there. We seem to have gotten off on the wrong hoof. I'm Sawbones. What's your kid's name? The one down on the river somewhere?"

"What? No- what?"

"The kid you have in the militia? Your sister and her – son I guess? Somebody else's? This duchy didn't look to me like a province with two regiments in the battle-zone, why is everything so sleepy looking? Shouldn't you be, I don't know, excited about the war next door?"

The earth pony snarled at me. I mean he reared up and growled like a griffin. Impressive from a pony of his years, really. I could feel the silent audience behind me. I reached up and hoofed off my enchantment, letting my real eye and teeth show. It slowed him down a bit; which was probably for the best, looked a bit like he was thinking about charging and damn the consequences.

"No, seriously, Long Scroll. I want to understand you. And I get the distinct impression you've been lying to us with the truth. You don't give a shit about the eternal Princess of the Sun and Moon, or our very own Spirit of the Night. Not a wet fucking shit. Like every sane pony worth a squirt, you care about you and yours. So let's start with the meaningful truths, and leave the surface ones to flow with the stream, how about? How long has it been since you've heard from your people?"

"We never hear back from the companies when they take them away," said a tired voice from behind me, and I looked back over my shoulder at the semi-retired officer. He startled backwards in alarm at my altered countenance. He collected himself. "Th-they go, and we never hear from them again."

"That was companies to the Rima front, yes? Down into the woodchipper, like every other band of recruits raised on this benighted continent in the last generation. But this isn't a company or two, and it wasn't on the far end of existence. It's right next door! At your door-step! And you never talk to your own people no more than a province away? What's wrong with you benighted lunatics!" I turned on the cornered Castellan, and continued my rant. "Your flesh! Your blood! We're just mercenaries and northerners, here, this isn't really our fight, but for our obligations and national – oh, I don't understand what motivates you maniacs and your nation-feeling here under the rotting hoof. But you! This is your homes! Your province, your duchy! WHY HAVE YOU GIVEN UP WITHOUT A FIGHT?"

"Who would fight for that dead thing on the throne?" growled Long Scroll, at bay at last. "What can we do but give you what you come for, and pray to the dead that nothing more is taken. MY DAUGHTER IS DEAD! She may still be walking around, and as little care these monsters care for the bodies of the dead, I – oh, fuck the alicorns! Fuck your forsaken Phylactery! Do your worst, monster! Cut my throat here in this shithole, and be done with me!

"Just leave the rest alone. Take no more. Let them be done."

By the end of his aria, he was laying in the hay on the floor of the cell. It would have been more striking if we had been in place long enough for the stockade to have become truly fetid, but the physical characteristics of our incarceration facility was not cooperating with the dramatic demands of Long Scroll's little swan-song. Just because I understood him, didn't mean that I sympathized with his self-indulgence. But needs must when the Spirit drives.

"Are we quite finished yet? Because I'm not ready to put you out of your misery, Castellan. The unfeeling world is not done with you or yours yet, and I am not yet ready to build the pyre for your missing regiments. d'Harcourt may be a typically half-witted Imperial officer, but at last report they weren't exterminated to a mare. If I can hold some hope for ponies I've never met, can you find it in yourself to stop carving the head-stones before we get the reports?

"Get up, you damn fool, and do your alicorns-damned job. Because we aim to do ours, and your benighted little pit of despair is a simple crossroads on our way to the war, which has for the moment escaped over the horizon.

"And we mean to chase down those runners and beat the ever-living tartarus out of the lot of them."

Comments

[howard035]

I can't be the only one at this point who is certain that the Legates on the Imperial side are just taking all the conscripts they get each year, murdering them en-masse, and raising them as ghouls because those liches think that makes for a more effective army than living regiments, right?

[Mitch H]

7948796 You, sir, have an evil mind.

And I certainly hope not. Militia training and organization has to be worth something.

Although Sawbones is pretty sure that's what happens with the bull-calves.

[Dorath]

7948861 7948796 I'm with howard035 on this one. Yes, trained militia is worth more than a ghoul horde any day (and twice on Sundays), and any soldier will know that. But (if my memory serves) the closest thing to a war-wizard or military-warlock among the Legates is the Bride herself.

From what we've seen of Legate mentality, living troops are a problem (they have to be fed, equipped and paid, they have morale concerns, wounded have to be tended, and they may balk at some orders) while ghouls are vastly preferable (they fight until destroyed, are blindly obedient, creating them gives the Legates a nice hit of the ol' death magic, and the Legates can then pocket all that money that was supposed to support the troops).

For the type of pony who would let an entire duchy be almost overrun by ghouls, for years, just so they could have a private toybox, there is really only one "logical" decision (may Grogar and Tirek rot their souls).

[howard035]

7949962
7948861 Year after year, every province we've seen has no survivors, no messages, not even a deserter or two who sneaks home. No one traveling through ever says "your boys were in the 45th regiment? I heard the White Rose slaughtered them to a pony at the big battle. "

We've seen that the training and organization of the conscripts is minimal, until the Company changes things. And Dorath absolutely nails why ghouls would be a better army. Unless the Bride can stop them, it must have occurred to the Legates that all-ghoul armies would work better for them.

[TheStratovarian]

7948796 When you have easy generations of folks living this way. It is not questioned, it is not asked. It is "How it's always been." And well, they've been bred as sleep to slaughter. The company is a well armed, armored, and deadly wolf amongst them. Paid forth by the shephard, hell or high water to do what the collies are letting a blind eye to.

After all, a dog can go feral. But a wolf is true to its pack, and the hunt alone, with fresh meat given.

7948861 Whats the saying amongst a few particular bits of shamanic lore in the future, and a few other spots?

"Wolf wins every fight but one. And in that one he/she dies?"

The company is a pack in the truest sense of it. Its members are loyal to the company alone. Paid blood for blood on the pike.

[SWEETOLEBOB18]

7948796
Totally agree. Damned short sighted of them. if so. Right now, most folks don't really give a shit who's in charge, they just want to live their life. They start figuring out that The Rose will let them live & the Bride will not....There Will Be HELL To Pay!

Military units depend on civilians to at least tolerate them & supply food & other support. When it gets out that the Imperium is slaughtering the militias....It's going to hit the fan to the extent that The Company is going to need to get clear. It will be too toxic for them to survive.