In the Company of Night

by Mitch H

The Ride Of The Wild Hunt

SBMS016

The night I missed unfolded like so:

It began, in point of fact, days and weeks before the first fall of dusk. The bulk of our pegasi and griffins had covered the skies of Rennet even before the Company had broken into the province at Lait Blanc. When the sun went down, our ponies fanned out. By the night that we began our attacks on the border-posts, the members of the aerial cohort had become intimately familiar with the roads and towns of the rebel province. Strategic equine intelligence had built up a picture of the state of food supply and storage throughout the province. We had a good idea of where the major food supplies – the cheeses and grain that represented the portable and tradable wealth of Rennet – had been stockpiled in six major granaries. Likewise, there were a number of grain-mills which were used by the farmers of the province to process their crops and, if necessary, replace or replenish depleted or destroyed granary stocks. The mills were under control of master millers, and some of them were natural supporters of the rebel regime – mostly caribou, who had suffered socially and economically under the donkey dominion of the local vassals of the Bride – and some of them were effectively neutral, and one and two were natural enemies of the caribou regime. Command had used our limited investigative resources to determine who we had to remove, who we could terrorize into compliance, and who would gladly fall into our hooves.

Our pegasi began to set up observation posts in the skies above our prospective targets. Hollowed-out clouds carefully herded onto slow transits designed to provide maximum loiter and cover angles contained long-sighted ponies who lazed the long late summer days away, watching the traffic below, what came into the granaries, what came out of the mills, watched as the garrisons posted next to each dwindled and then suddenly emptied out as the crisis on the border flared. And counted the skeleton crews left behind to keep the rebel flag-masts unmolested, to show the ponies of the province that there was still a White Rose in Rennet.

The cloudborne observation posts were joined on the ground by forward blinds built overnight on the approaches to each targeted granary and some of the mills. The gypsies and hobos whose sudden infestation the clever and observant might have noted in the central districts, kept mostly to the back lanes and the shadows, and put together hunters' blinds in the dark hours; this skill had been taught by the Company's griffins as a matter of course over the past generation and a half to our herbivorous brethren; it was an invaluable skill for a military pony, who even in the most honorable and virtuous of states is still a sort of honorary predator. The ability to stalk the prey without being seen, without spooking the herd – this is a skill the soldier needs to develop as urgently for his well-being on the battlefield as the raptor or the lion does for her diet on the savanna.

Most of the great mills were traditional earth-pony bastions, serving the clans of earth ponies who grew the great fields of corn, of rye and wheat and barley and a grotesque local grass they called "maise". Those had seen many of their master-millers driven out, replaced, or killed by White Rose supporters; their journeyponies and laborers were still earth ponies for the most part, and their discontent could be seen from a thousand feet. Some of the mills did a roaring side-business in cheese curing, and those smokehouse mills were largely run by their original caribou and donkey millers – and were divided more virulently by the political and cultural fruits of that racial clash. In fact, a number of the smokehouse mills were not in operation, several of them having burned to ground before the Company had even been a prophesy of nightmares in the troubled sleep of the ponies of Rennet. The Company would concentrate on the active grain-district mills, as those that were best positioned to allow the rebel to recover from that which we were about to give unto them.

The warlocks were placed into the observation blinds on the major granaries, and given an entire day to prepare their wicked tricks in the still secrecy of a collection of bums and ne'er-do-wells lounging about in market-town squares all over the central districts. The ones I've written of, and those dullards of the warlocks' section whose mediocrity, indolence and inactivity have kept them from prior mention. Not that there's too many of these slackards, but this is the moment I ought to take to mention that Languid and Goiter exist, and the Company pays them their daily salt to be grand wicked mage-lords, or at least, what feeble approximations of that state which is in them to provide. I've never seen Languid do a damned thing, but the other witches insist that she's actually the most powerful of the entire coven, and part of her bargains and deals is that she never can perform in front of an audience. She'd lose half her power if anypony ever saw her lift an occult finger. Goiter's a luck manipulator, supposedly. All I know is that he's a terminal klutz, and bad things happen in his vicinity. He's a walking disaster zone, and the brethren hate to operate in his company. The other witches generally keep him in purdah, to keep the rank and file from lynching him out of general disgust.

Our warlock resources limited our main assault formations. There were more than six granaries in the central districts, but to maximize each column's chances and to simplify the path-guiding process, the officers settled on just those half-dozen nearest and most important facilities. As the long afternoon light devoured the hours until dusk, each warlock, dressed in full hobo filth, ambled along the roads from the front doorsteps of their assigned granary to the mustering grounds in front of the forward base. They dropped mystical breadcrumbs along the way, little pre-prepared twists of grass and twigs to drift into gutters and roadside verges. At the forward base, they greeted their assigned ground-pounders and attached carters, as the columns formed to await the first night of autumn.

As dusk fell, each warlock led their assault column out of the brush around our base, and debouched onto the main roads of the neighborhood. All the warlocks but Languid drew around their ponies a glamour that hid each marching force from our immediate neighbors, who were still supposed to be ignorant of the fact that there was anything other than some woodland critters and a bunch of thieving gypsies camped out in their vicinity. As each column emerged from our immediate district, the glamours were let drop, or rather, faded in favor of other illusory witcheries. Languid's column was sent out last, in full darkness, and she managed something in the shadows where nopony could see her sweat. Or, at least, so I'm assured. As always, she could always be faffing off like usual.

The thin air resolved, swirling like an unseasonable mist, and from that unseely miasma the ponies of the Company emerged, phantasms of some terrible half-forgotten ancestral memory. The glamours graced our grotty troops with fantastical horns, terrible half-winged suggestions, strange tails split twice or three times in their train, and wild black weapons long and sharp and stretching far above their unequine heads in the glowing mist. Farmer-ponies looked out of their front doors that evening to see a parade of faerie horribles marching in eldritch grace on the lanes outside their gates and fences. Not the good fairies that their gran-mères and ma mères told them safe stories of in their nursery days, but the dread sidhe that thundered forth from under the barrow-stones to reap the wicked on the nights of judgment in the days of old.

As each column marched in their cloud of bowel-loosening illusion, they followed the trail of glowing markers that the warlocks had left behind them in their afternoon stroll, green-purple-black will'o'the'wisps which flowed around the column as they collected each in turn, floating witchlights which contributed eerie grace-notes to the spectacle of the slow march of the Company. Some columns gained a following of some few fillies and colts as they passed certain farmhold gates, a train of fools half foal and half grown, mad with the lunacy of the young and reckless. They would be witness to the full terrors of the first Ride of the Hunt.

As the columns passed through each major crossroads on the major highways, some of our pegasi and griffins played at bombing the rear of the formation. Each daredevil carried one of the fetishes or scare-crows against the length of their bodies, inverted, with the crossbar and "trophy" between their gaskins. They spun out of the CAP formation over the column they were allegedly protecting, and pulled into steep dives for the verge of the given crossroads the formation had just exited. Just as they were about to pancake into the side of the road, they let their burdens go and peeled out of their dives. This tactic, performed at considerably higher velocity and longer dive lengths, is a classic pegasi method for bombarding heavy fortifications, sometimes with high explosive payloads, and sometimes simply with pointed logs delivered at unreasonable velocities. With the scare-crows, they took it easy, since to drop the pointed crosses at any higher speed would have shattered the "trophies" and scattered bits of viscera and shattered bone all over the crossroads and neighboring country-side.

To the foals following the columns, this was nothing less than a bolt from the black, some stooping great bird of prey screaming out of nowhere, to fling nightmarish horrors over their quivering heads. The simply curious or sibling-bullied broke and ran in screaming terror. Some few wildlings ran as well, but only to laugh at their terrified siblings and friends, and quickly turned around to follow the parade of horribles to see what further devilries were in the offing that night. They were not disappointed.

Not all the columns the Company sent out that night were such spectacles of wonder and dismay. Reserve columns travelling in parallel with the granary raiders and mill-columns did so quietly, not exactly silently, but without the theatricality of the main columns. The mill-columns likewise marched to their targets without magic or hoopla, or really, any carters or impedimenta. They had a less adventurous mandate, and their missions would not benefit from the attentions of the civilian crowd, or at least, no more eyes than those targeted in the raids themselves.

The granary-column followers came and went as short limbs and coltish or fillyish stamina ran out long before the columns found their targets. But a succession of wide-eyed colts and fillies took in the spectacle, and cheered the aerial delivery of the gruesome Company fetishes as they came to recognize the repeated performance for the aerial stunt that it was. In some happier, shinier land, foals cheer the acrobatics and smoking pyrotechnics of daytime daredevils in the smiling company of their family and communities. In Rennet in that season, the thrills that were on offer were delivered by winged devils in the night, and came with the decapitated heads of rebel caribou soldiers tied to scarecrow crosses planted at velocity by the side of country crossroads. Foals will take their joys where they can.

Some few foolish witnesses saw a number of the columns arrive at their assigned granaries, and lost sight of them as the steady march went to the trot, and then the thundering gallop. So only the victims themselves saw the brief engagements that slaughtered the skeleton garrisons protecting the wealth of the rebellion, the great stores of grain and cheese and apples and other fruit of this most productive of the provinces of the northlands. They did not see the zebra scouts cut the throats of the caribou standing guard-post, or the earth ponies smash down fortified barrack doors, or the unicorns who filled the air over cots and beds full of dozing soldiers with flashing swords and arrows sped unerringly towards their targets.

None of the granary garrisons put up anything that could be dignified as a fight; there just wasn't that many of them to begin with, and they had each and every one of them been taken quite by surprise. The live-in staff of the granaries were dragged out of their quarters, and the caribou employees were dragged kicking and screaming to the side of each building, shoved into nooses, and hanged off the eaves of their place of employment. The earth-pony and donkey employees were bound, beaten, and set to watch at a safe distance as the Company's carters came up from the rear of each column and claimed the vehicles our scouts had identified – heavy carts, long haulage freight carriages, and so forth, parked conveniently beside the granary loading docks. What could be loaded onto the vehicles available at each granary was hurriedly hurled higgledy-piggledy into the conveyances, while sections were posted sentry in those directions any possible reaction force might arrive. The rest of the column hoofed the most portable contents of the granary – the great wheels of cheese, some of the distilled liquor, some processed beet sugar and high-test flour, etc – onto the carters' vehicles.

The rest of the booze joined the firestarters and flammable rubbish spread throughout the now-sacked granary building, bottles broken here and there, liquor sprayed on every wall. Bags of coarser flour were burst in every corridor and storage-room, and every door and window was forced open, the better to draft in the night air. Once the carters hitched themselves up to their requisitioned transports and started away from the scene of the crime, the lucifers came out, and the firebugs had their jollies. If you were an ignorant little foal, you'd have expected a nice roaring fire, and some of the foals, who generally had caught up with the circus by that stage of the night, moved to get far too close to the buildings as the brethren prepared their demolitions. A more careless or soulless Company might have left the little foals to their damnation, but we were not that dark a brotherhood in those days, and the little fools were dragged well back from the buildings before the pyros set off their charges, and the brave, bloodthirsty little foals of Rennet learned that night why to always be careful of sparks and flame in the presence of flour and mills and granaries. Each granary went up like a siege mine, if you've ever seen the pioneers touch one off. If you've never been blessed by that wonder, think of a small volcano, or a forest-fire, or, well, a working grain mill blown to Tartarus by the carelessness of its miller or his apprentices.

The mill-columns had all the bloodshed, and the hanging horrors, but none of the fun of blowing up buildings and grand theft freight cart. They simply made social visits to various mills on the eve of the onrushing harvest, and hauled the millers out of their snug homes, and explained to the persuadables and sympathetic that the dominion of the Bride was being reasserted, and emphasized the point by hanging the unpersuadables from the nearest tree or gateway for the edification of passers-by, and more importantly, their fellow millers and miller-apprentices and laborers.

As the various columns returned to home or their daytime blind closes on the roads to home, one last daredevil pegasus, Tickle Me herself, dive-bombed the main square of Rennet City in the deep predawn darkness, emplanting a tall double-cross deep in the packed earth behind the main address stage on the side of the square. A second pegasus flew up with a cloth placard, which they tied firmly to the cross-bars of the double-cross, and a third planted the flash-burned skull of the rune-caster from the road to Pythia's Fell on the peak of the stipes. That placard read as follows:

Tonight the writ of the Bride
Is once more the letter of law
And all sovereign authority
In this her province of Rennet
The duchy and its lordships in homage
The county palatine of Benoit
And associated baronages
Right of travel shall be untrammeled
No taxation without authorization
The heads of all rebel scum
To be delivered to her
Designated agents
Attached or otherwise
On pain of the visitation of the Night
By order of the Black Company
In Her service

That night, hundreds of thousands if not millions of deniers of foodstock went up in flames – the fruit of a year's production from a rich agricultural province. Few died, not even approaching the bloodshed of the brief battle outside Lait Blanc, but those that did die, had an impact all out of proportion to their numbers. The White Rose had much more prominent supporters in the province, and much richer ponies - merchants, aristocrats, scholars and jurists. But all of their pretense and their wealth was built on what could be extracted from the fields and pastures of the province, the foodstuff itself. And we had destroyed their stores and killed their experts in refilling those storehouses. In a night, we had crippled the rebel political economy in Rennet.

Thus, I had from Gibblets, from Shorthorn, from Tickle Me, and from the Captain. Whom I found arguing with Gibblets the morning after, the both of them surrounded by a small herd of dozing younglings in the remnants of the brush a short trot from the charioteers' meadow. And Gibblets' argument to the Captain was more in the way of a simple childlike plea, which boiled down essentially to "Boss, they followed me home. Can I keep them?"

Author's Note:

The problems of telling epic stories with strict first-person, and the short-cuts required to relate events occurring out of the experience of our narrator. Yeah, kinda tell-not-show, but I take refuge in the fact that Sawbones is the one doing the telling. Technically, the author said, hiding his sockpuppet behind his back....

Comments

[Minalkra]

I really am confused as to why this doesn't have half the exposure it deserves.

[Mitch H]

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Thank you both. I suspect I've found the unhappy valley in between "all OC cast", "no HiE or PoE", "no changelings", and "new writer" as far as these things go. I'm trying to enjoy the experience for its own sake. I've always been a voracious reader, and an indifferent writer. The discipline of daily writing is probably good for the soul.

[Dorath]

"Boss, they followed me home. Can I keep them?"

[Genial Precis]

I am also a voracious reader, but the subset of stories I find any entertainment in rereading is much smaller. This is one of them. I don't completely understand all the factors that determine it, although mechanical quality is certainly one of them. Probably part of it is whether the versimilitude of the setting holds up on revisiting, which is true of this one.

I think you have a particular skill which is apparent even this early in your writing, in writing fully fleshed out characters, with character and character growth who are nonetheless professionals. In other works I feel like that's in tension, that the writer sometimes doesn't quite manage to reconcile a human with their own agency with a professional role that makes demands on that agency. Particularly in adventure settings, that can easily result allegedly professional soldiers who never act very professional, which can still be interesting but it does a bit of damage to versimilitude. Not so here.

Of course that knack is especially useful in writing about military ponies, as you do.