In the Company of Night

by Mitch H

Expecting Guests

SBMS151

The casualties rolled into the field hospital, and the physicians and surgeons of the Reserve regiments laboured over the wounded. Rows of operation tables filled the great tent, and howls of anguish echoed under the canvas as they cut and stitched. There was never enough opium, and the vast supplies of salicin I had gotten these ponies to produce during the spring had little effect on the agony of indifferently-sharpened knives cutting away at open wounds.

There would be enough wounded to come, we could only spare so much of the heavy pain-killers now, in preparation for the waves to come.

I helped here and there as I could, but there was too much for me to make a dent in, and I had to rely on the militia's surgeons to take care of the militia-ponies as they came in. My talents were best employed in the recovery process, and my time came when the victims came off of the tables, their wounds cleaned out and bound; shivering or passed out as their capacities for pain dictated. One of the bull-calves assisted me as I painted each of the ponies' wounds in the special mixtures I had prepared, the potions whose secrets I had gleaned from the texts which took a trained hoof to bring to life. Those special tricks which often made the difference between death, disease, and a rapid recovery.

Clean recovery wards being, of course, the other half of the equation. I eyed the barn we would be using all too soon for the later waves of wounded, and muttered instructions to one of the Verdebaie orderlies slouching near the entrance. We had plenty of soap and antiseptic wash in the supply-carts, and I wanted that barn Grogar-damned spotless before any wounded were chucked inside of it.

As the night approached day, the blood-stained surgeons and I laid resting upon cots in the corners of the surgical tent, them dozing and awaiting the next wave of the damaged. And I? I was listening to the reports from Leveetown, and the conquest of the logistics-base of the White Rose.

The reports were full of news that the rebel fleet had fled downstream, away from whatever had repeatedly caused their great stores-ships to explode in infernos of fire and flame, that had caused two different triremes on either sides of their flotilla to burn down to the water-line. The shores south-west of Leveetown were littered with the scorched corpses of at least a half-dozen hulks, bragged the Nightmare, projecting upon my mind's eye the early-dawn-light ruination wreaked upon the enemy. The Spirit was so proud of her thestral child, her fire-bug shadow-walker. Like a mother with a prized scholarship-student to her credit.

The rebel was surrendering in droves in Leveetown. They had nowhere to run to, and Guilllaime's Middle Division had no inclination towards mass slaughter or war-atrocities. Thousands of ponies and a scattering of caribou were being disarmed and lined up in coffers by loyalist companies. The town was ours, but the after-math was tying up far too many troops entangled in the captures.

And the captures, by the alicorns, the stream of prisoners that came out of that town. Even after the fires subsided, the mounds of foodstuffs and war material were impressive. Carters who had emptied out their loads into the fields and roadsides behind our swelling position along the Clearances were being sent with their empty carts and wagons to collect the booty from bursting-at-the-seams Leveetown. I could see them streaming past the field-hospital on the increasingly overburdened pair of farm-lanes which had once serviced this homestead, and now were acting as the main logistical arteries for an entire brigade and its burgeoning supports. The engineers had made an early day of it, and were swarming over another abandoned farm the next homestead down from my hospital, and were tearing down barns and outbuildings for the lumber. The farmlanes would be bottomless mires by tomorrow evening if they didn't get them properly planked over.

That is, if the enemy didn't overrun our position here, and simply re-take their own supplies from the growing cluster of fieldside depots.

A messenger – an actual, living messenger, one of the General's pet lieutenants – swung by my surgery to inform me that my presence was requested and required by Command for a conference, in a command-tent placed halfway across the encampment from my hospitalstead.

The command post that Broken Sigil and Major Hardhoof had gotten put together was impressive, almost as clean as my commandeered farmhouse, and well-lit. Sigil's beloved sand-tables were set up on two different benches, with a lieutenant each carving out the local landscape features into the sand-surfaces. Another pair of lieutenants were lurking in the back corners of the tent doing something I couldn't quite see from the front entrance. Looked sort of like they were knitting.

The Captain was standing over on the left side of the tent, quietly talking with General Knochehart. The senior colonel of the Reserve was standing just out of earshot, looking rather stuffy. She was a Hydromel jenny by the name of Claudine-Louise de Villers, but she wasn't nearly as high-toned a filly as the name suggested. I had heard somewhere that she was some sort of distant cousin or relation of my Duchesse, but really, to my eye, they were nothing at all alike. This flower of the aristocracy gave the impression of delicate ormolu over well-chewed iron plating. It might have been the rather battered silver-leaf chasing on the chamfron she held in the crook of her left forearm that gave that impression. Or perhaps the mud-splattered satin brocade detailing wearing away under her once-ornate peytral.

I walked over to join Colonel de Villers, and noted as I did that there were a number of bloodstains leaking out from under that silk-detailed caparison.

"Colonel, has anypony looked you over for deeper wounds? I can smell copper from over here."

"It's mostly rebel blood," she said, shortly.

"I rather thought I heard that your regiment wasn't in on the fighting yesterday?"

"I'm always amazed by the things your ponies 'hear', chief surgeon. The bulk of my regiments were occupied in digging in, but the skirmish-lines required rather continual reinforcement. I had the better part of three battalions on the line by the time night came."

"And yet, I didn't hear of many fatalities. Enough wounds to give my surgical staff a good workout, but…?"

"It was skirmishing, sir. Back and forth, nothing worth dying over, and barely worth killing over."

"Any opinions as to how many were in your front, then, if you were up there?"

"That is what is currently under debate. I say a regiment and a half, variously organized. They were probing us, as much as we were probing them. No real magical aid on either side, unless you count whatever witchcraft it is that your ponies and donkeys use to be so damnable unpredictable. If I could have another battalion like the one on the line, I would fear nothing."

"I believe at least another cohort will be passing through camp later this morning, but I doubt they will be able to spare the Second for your front. You have a vast wide-open flank on your left."

"Perdu! Do not remind me! All of our resources, poured into this soggy murder-pen of a district, and all the enemy has to do is just… march around my left."

"My fliers did their best to make that as unpleasant an option as they could last night, madame," said the newly-arrived Lieutenant, her wings
quite ruffled and out of preen.

I looked at her, and wondered if she was going to make it through the meeting without crashing asleep. "I thought the night's work was to wash the enemy's roads out from underhoof to our east, not to the north?"

"Last night, yes. Tonight? We repeat the performance half-a-march up-wind. Which means the Left Division best be moving across those roads at their very best road-step, yes? Where's Eugin?"

"I have not yet seen him, Lieutenant-Captain," I admitted.

My inner Princess was rather offended by the two of us speaking as if she wasn't there. She had just given both of us the itinerary of the missing brigadier, who was stuck labouring mightily to get his four strung-out regiments across the rather sketchy road-nets between Dover and the Clearances. Some of the night's rain-storm had soaked the landscape up-wind of where it had been intended, and the lanes and roads were perhaps not as firm as had been promised. Chutes des Cristal was still within striking distance of battered Dover and its fought-over environs. The Lieutenant and I frowned in tandem, while the Colonel looked on in irate bafflement.

"I hate it when you ponies do that. What? What do you both know that you're not saying out loud?"

"Eugin won't be joining us. Left Division's strung out on the roads. Making some distance, but it'll be a long march by the sounds of it."

"Gah! Do you all do that? Just know things out of the ether?"

"No, Colonel," said the Lieutenant, "Sawbones here is special. If he weren't so useful in keeping your troops from expiring of their wounds, we'd keep him here in operations to relay information. I only wish I had his… capacity."

"Term of art is bandwidth, I'm told, Lieutenant-Captain. Some of the engineers have all sorts of wild ideas about our little tricks, they keep asking impertinent questions. Thankfully, the way they phrase their pushy little questions are useful for generating ways of thinking about the whole subject."

"Are we ever going to seriously discuss what and how you're doing these things?" demanded the slightly wild-eyed aristocratic officer.

"Blackest witchcraft and devil-worship, my dear Colonel," I laughed. "Care to join the cult? I'm sure the war-lance is making its way down here for the expected grand battle. The enemy's warlocks have got to be getting ready to present us with surprises by now. We've seen far too little of them."

"We've seen at least one of their tricks now," said the Captain, joining our little discussion-group. The General was back in the corner, talking with her lieutenants, who had not, apparently, put down their knitting to talk to their commanding officer. "Last night's reconnaissance ran into some sort of anti-air death-spell, one that could and was directed by non-magicians. Unless you think the White Rose has fifteen high-end blood-mages capable of firing off rocket-assisted death-curses. Feufollet, get in here!"

My understudy came in, looking hollow-eyed and sleep-deprived, her forearms still blood-stained from the night's work. The General left her lieutenants' corner, and rejoined us in front of the regional sand-table, which now had a reproduction of the local road-net, our position in the Clearances, the Wirts, the range of low hill-tops to the east, Dover and Braystown and Leveetown and the distant Hayfriend, and along the bottom of the table, the meandering Housa.

Feufollet pointed out the locations she had noted of the enemy columns, three coming down from south of Dover, five up from the roads winding north from Braystown, and then, gesturing quickly for Broken Sigil, seven trails leading over the ridgelines and into the plain.

"That was before they started firing those rockets at us. Once they started exploding, our capacity for taking careful notes dropped quickly. Ces petits bâtards… they made it difficult," she admitted with a glare at the little markers that indicated the enemy columns. "At least two different launchers, they fired off les petits bâtards. The other thirteen, they definitely threw up the illuminators, the flares. We didn't overfly those agresseurs de chèvres. Maybe they had the killing rounds, and were saving them? I do not know."

Colonel de Villers cringed at the Prench profanities. But she asked for details of the ‘little bastards', and I could see what she was worried about. Feufollet admitted that it looked like they didn't burn themselves out, and seemed to be causing fires upon landing on the landscape below. As they discussed the potential of the new weapon the rebel had revealed, two more Company warlocks entered the tent and the conversation. Gibblets and Obscured Blade looked disgustingly pleased with themselves over the neat victory they had won down in Leveetown.

The conversation continued about the 'little bastards', and the ways that they might be warded or destroyed 'in the cradle', as it were. If our witches did nothing about them, they could be used for bombardment, or assault of formations in the field. The warlocks and the officers fell to arguing about how extensive the em-placed magical defensive network should be made, until Brigadier Brune arrived to herald the approach of his short division of two regiments. Not long after, he left with the now-brevetted 'Brigadier' de Villers to direct the new arrivals into their proper and planned positions upon the expected field of battle and her approaches. The new brigadier's rank was granted by a preoccupied General Knochehart in a fit of absent-mindedness, her new rank hoofed to her without ceremony or comment, as if it were a spare towel or trench-shovel.

I drifted away from the renewed and fruitless argument about what sort of magical resources the enemy might have given the presence of a rocketry section with each of their regimental groupings. The two lieutenants sitting in the back of the tent, whom I had never talked to, or even ever given any attention to, continued to attend to their knitting.

Their 'knitting' turned out to be a great deal of fiddling about with etching tools, and at their hooves were piles and piles of bolts and arrows and other implements of destruction. I shouldn't have been surprised that Knochehart had been hiding some rune-casting apprentices among her staff, nor that they were busy preparing their own little magical surprises. I asked to make sure that these would be provided to the Company's bowmares, and was reassured that all of the arrows were earmarked for our archers. I mentioned the existence of the heavy bollards so beloved by the Company's aerial cohort, and they nodded, one of them pointing to a pile in the back of the tent which I had mistaken for paperwork chests.

I turned away from the busily beavering shave-tail rune-casters, to the ongoing argument. Sometimes ponies can't do anything about the catastrophe to come, so they assuage their anxieties by loudly debating that which cannot be changed.

And sometimes quiet ponies sit in unattended corners and make a difference without anypony being the wiser.

Outside, the regiments of the Right Division and the cohorts of the Company marched through the encampment, passing through on their way to the rising fortifications, and the skirmish-lines beyond, and the open flank on the left, which slowly was filling in with armsponies streaming in from both the north-east and the south-west.

In the muddy distance across the steaming, humid plain, fifteen rebel regiments marched against the Army of the North, fifteen veteran columns struggling through mud and confusion and, perhaps, the beginnings of hunger.

And we, we waited as our fellows scrambled to reach the field, hoping that we would stand here in sufficient numbers to give our expected guests a proper greeting when they arrived.

Comments

[NicLove]

Before I read this, what is the Gore and Dark tag for ?
And how bad does it get ?

[Dorath]

Rune-enhanced arrows and bollards vs. hell-fire rockets ...

The next battle is going to be a nasty one.

[Mitch H]

8005491 Darkness because of villain protagonists, who are mercenaries, cultists, and killers. Gore because of a lot of death, dismemberment, and clinical depictions of the aftermath of battle, but I do admit it is a Teen sort of Gore and Dark.

Also, zombies.

[TheStratovarian]

The funny thing is id bet these folks forget the biggest thing about single use weapons, shield them from misfires. You see how they are activated, all you need is a mage light that triggers them, and you get an aerial death cannon that destroy their troops.

[SWEETOLEBOB18]

The reports were full of news that the rebel fleet had fled downstream, away from whatever had repeatedly caused their great stores-ships to explode in infernos of fire and flame, that had caused tw (two) different triremes on either sides of their flotilla to burn down to the water-line. The shores south-west of Leveetown were littered with the scorched corpses of at least a half-dozen hulks, bragged the Nightmare, projecting upon my mind's eye the early-dawn-light ruination wreaked upon the enemy. The Spirit was so proud of her thestral child, her fire-bug shadow-walker. Like a mother with a prized scholarship-student to her credit.