In the Company of Night

by Mitch H

Digging For Ponies, or, The Turnip

FFMS020

By afternoon, I was in the air again, with Whirlwind's cousin Supercell in the traces. We were at best glancing acquaintances, but she knew how to keep a gig in the air, and that was more than enough for me. Command had had me enchant their sand-table with my 'undead detection cantrip', the enhanced version that worked at a distance. All of my old detectors had been emptied out of the supply wagon, and the regiments out on the front were carrying them for search and rescue, as well as the simple search for stay-behinds and ambushes.

One of the quirks of the undead-detectors is that they were equally as good at detecting life, as unlife. Both lit up like fireworks, and the late Shorthorn and I had worked out how to colour-condition the detectors, so that green was living, and red were dead. Actually dead tended to come across as a slightly green-tinted grey, not enough to really pop, but until the body succumbed to the worms and the elements, it would still give a bit of a return.

The old detectors had lasted far longer than we had intended they would; they outlived Master Shorthorn. But I had gone through the supply wagon on the trip down through Rime, and re-charged the lot of them just in case. That condition had arrived. And as Supercell and I coasted over the scorched and slowly drying battlefield, we could see them in action, as teams of earth ponies tore apart the muddy surface of that much-abused stretch of land. Looking for all the world like a runaway harvest of tuber-farmers desperately racing against the weather, they laboured, trench-shovels in hooves and mouths, rooting for unseen turnips.

The regiments of the Middle Division had set out in the morning with banners waving, spears couched, ready for battle. This quickly degenerated into a search for the enemy – any enemy – and when they found them, often buried pitifully withers-deep in drying mud-filled trenches and holes, the entire advance collapsed into this parody of a rescue operation. There might be organized opposition to our east somewhere, but what they'd left within a half-day's march of the battle were the ponies who couldn't be lured back to a battle-banner for love, goddess, or money. And most of those had hid at the bottom of the safest hole they could find. Which, more often than not, was full of mud, water, or eventually had collapsed upon them, filling up with both over the course of a terror-filled night.

Half of the regiments were left to dig for ponies; the rest advanced under arms to continue the conventional movement-to-contact.

And so, back in the operations tent, a sand-table glowed with little green points of light along trenches and scattered in holes all across the land-scape, slowly fading to ash-grey as their air or their endurance ran out. Fewer still were the red-glare of ghouls or worse things, and our job was to track down those threats before they tore up our northerners. The Company hated the undead, but didn't have reason to fear their touch like those simple rankers that filled out the ranks of the regiments. The Second Cohort had joined the Middle Division in its advance, and Fuller Falchion's ponies were digging for different roots than those excavated by the regimental parties. Shovels were interspersed with lances and axes, as they waited for the increasingly exposed ghouls to burst from their concealment and fight for their pallid perversions of survival.

Here and there, a ghoul popped up out of their burrows, and ran, moaning for freedom. If we had Company ponies in the vicinity, they went down, axe-blows through their cannons or fetlocks, and lance-heads through their throats. But the Company couldn't be everywhere.

And there might be worse hidden underground.

This is what Supercell and I were doing over the battle-field: scanning for nasty left-behind surprises. We knew what liches were capable of, and we had seen very little of any of it during the fighting, aside from the fireworks which had broken the first line of defense. Were they holding back? Playing dumb? Deliberately sabotaging their own forces? Why?

Bad Apple was ghoul-hunting to the north – supposedly there were packs of them heading for populated areas, and most of the pegasi that anypony could get awake and focused were up there, herding the dead and playing spotter for our madmare pyromancer. Gibblets and some of the others were around here somewhere, although nobody seemed to know what had happened to Obscured Blade. He just seized command of a bunch of sections from Third Cohort and went plunging off into the east, without telling anypony – not even the Nightmare! – where he was going, or what he was doing.

As somepony leaving her first foalhood, I was of the opinion that Uncle Blade was rapidly approaching his own, second, foalhood.

There. That. That was nothing good, a red blotch of boiling unlife, much larger than any single ghoul. A pack, hiding in a warren? I got closer, and saw that a squad of ponies were approaching the position with shovels at the ready. Not Company ponies.

"Supercell, buzz those idiots, we need to wave them off!" I also passed an alarm through the Nightmare, and told the Princess to disconnect for safety. We passed at speed over the crests of the squad of northerners approaching the – whatever the tartarus was hiding down there. I'm not sure if my warnings carried over the sound of our passing, but my little illusion of slavering undead popping up out of the soil got their attention well enough, and they went scrambling back in startlement.

After a few confused moments, we established a perimeter, enough yards back from the whatever to not encourage it to come climbing out of its hidey-hole. My call had attracted two sections of the Second, which would be more than enough to deal with the problem if it was simply a pack of ghouls all tumbled together in one hole. If it was something bigger…

Two sections would just take time getting wiped out. I put out a request for the big guns. The standardbearer was just about enough overkill for the potential problem lurking down there.

Gibblets eventually showed up, and glared at me. "You know you can't just call for the Lance every time you have a boil to burst, right?"

"I don't know, bossgoblin. The average ghoulsign? Like a matchstick. That thing down there is like the Eternal Princess's birthday-cake, like somepony filled a cooking-cauldron full of rocket-engines and lit the whole off at once. It could be a whole pack of ghouls just a-tumbled together for heat. Except they don't do that, do they? Or it could be…"

"Barrowgast?" the froglike warlock asked, frowning.

"I dunno? We haven't seen one since Pepin. Who'd be making them down here? The Marklaird's dead, right?"

"Also could be an actual lich?" he guessed. "Have you ever seen one up-close?"

"Octavius kept me away from the Marklaird when she was stalking around the camp back in Rennet, so no, never up close. At a distance, during that thing on the Baneway. We already knew where it was, though, and I wasn't scanning for it. Could be, I don't know. Either one of those, though. Lance business."

The Lance, and the goofy orange pony that carried it around, were summoned via the radio. I got back into the air with Supercell and we cast around in the vicinity, to make sure that there weren't more 'surprise gifts' left in the muck. I found one more about halfway to Dover, it seemed like – just on the edge of the prepared ground we had fought over. Everything else in between was the usual matchstick-flames, red and green. I could see in the deep distance a forest of matchsticks, several of them scattering in various directions – the largest heading south-south-west around the Wirts, towards the river, and tried to pass that message through to Command for evaluation and consideration.

We continued our scans over the battle-field, as the green fruit of the soil were uprooted, or burnt down to ash. There were few green flames upon the plain that weren't ours and under arms when the bale-fire under watch got tired of pretending to be a turnip.

The standard-bearer and his lance had been far out of range, and was still three minutes out when the barrowgast emerged. She burst out of her earth like a white-burning flame, and her fire weakened the rays of the sun about her. I could see the sod dying around her as she scrabbled her way out of the grasp of the dried mud-hole. In life, she had been an earth pony of some stature, a noble cast to her muzzle, and a red shock of mane that almost hid the wound to the back of her poll which had killed her. A ranker from the guarding sections died before anypony could react, blasted down by that freezing aura which the 'gasts use to kill at a distance. Pauldron was an earth pony stallion.

Pauldron's death broke my vapour-lock, and I laid down illusions all around the barrowgast, obscuring the sections on the ground from its baleful sight. It couldn't kill what it couldn't see. I hoped.

It struggled to get its rear legs out of the muck, and I cast about for more restraints – but the damned thing had killed all the remnant living tissue of which I could have coaxed into creeper vines or other restrains. I cried out to my Nightmare, but the day-star was still in the sky, however drained it felt with the chill of the barrowgast in sight.

And we were the only things in its sight, now that I had obscured its vision of everything upon the ground. No time to warn Supercell, and even the Nightmare can only relay thoughts so quickly, so I –

The lens of reflexive darkness was just barely enough to deflect the blast of cold away from me and my driver. I still felt the freeze in my marrow, and it sapped away at my blood-magic. I wasn't sure if we could take another such blast, but at least my screaming had warned Supercell sufficiently that she was turning barrel-rolls behind the traces, jittering us across the lower heavens like a catherine-wheel, and her desperate magic spun off wild eddies of wind in all directions, twisting the air into tortured rotations and sudden gusts. There was one more blast in our general direction, but only generally, and all I think that mis-timed flare did was scare away some geese in the distance.

And then from the roiling phantasms of smoke and damned ponies emerged that tall, gangly, ludicrous pony with his tall-crested chamfron and his long black alicorns-damned Lance.

And he took that Grogar-damned 'gast in the side with the Lance, and spitted it like a quintain upon the training-grounds. The once-earth-pony didn't even make a sound, just – well, one moment we were gyring tightly in the sky, me hanging upside down in my gig-chair, trying to keep track of the ground and the enemy and how close we were to either – and the next, there was no enemy, just a corpse and a bristling standard-bearer and a field full of illusions I no longer needed to keep going.

Damn, I hate barrowgasts.

Comments

[xoid]

If that wasn’t a trap then there had to be some truly convoluted string of misfortunes for it to be left behind; I can’t see anybody leaving behind a barrowgast by accident.

[Mitch H]

8051727 Let alone two or three. This is the first one they found that afternoon, after all. But yeah, it was a boobytrap. You could even say it was a... minefield.

We need a David Carruso 'yeaaah!' emoji.

[Dorath]

8051922 Very nasty kind of mine, IMHO.

[totallynotabrony]

Command had had me enchant their sand-table with my 'undead detection cantrip', the enhanced version that worked at a distance.

Like some sort of GCCS battlespace awareness link, what one sees they all see.

[CaptainPipsqueak]

I'm kind of surprised illusions would work on an undead. Their minds run differently. Those that have them, anyway.