• Published 28th Aug 2016
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In the Company of Night - Mitch H



The Black Company claims to not remember Nightmare Moon, but they fly her banner under alien skies far from Equestria. And the stars are moving slowly towards their prophesied alignment...

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The Blooded Blade

SBMS158

This story goes back to the days when we were clearing the Deep Mines Range of ghouls in the company of civilians and the occasional loyalist trooper or Pepin militia ranger. It's well-known that being savaged by a ghoul is pretty much a death-ticket for ponies who aren't Company; anything more than a couple scratches can easily fester and worsen until the victim dies of runaway infections. Inevitably, if one dies of infected ghoul-bite, that pony will rise again as a ghoul herself; often-times they do it right on their death-bed. It's a nasty business, to be sure, and why everypony fears the ghoul, and with damn good reason. You can fight this off via some of my esoteric potions, but all in all, it's bad juju to let a ghoul break the hide if you're not Company. For some reason that I've never quite parsed on a medical level, Company membership seems to stave off some of the aggressiveness of the infections that arise from ghoul-bites among the civilians. I strongly suspect that there's a supernatural or magical aspect to the virulence of the ghoul-infection, that the Company's inherent magic short-circuits in some esoteric fashion.

But this all makes fighting the undead seriously unpopular among the militia rank-and-file, and makes ghoul packs a terror and a scourge amongst the civilian population.

While the rankers were fighting in the Deep Mines Range, the occasional ranger or trooper or miner would get caught out by a hideout ghoul or hidden batch of the undead. As I have said, this was at the time a death sentence, so some ponies got creatively desperate in the face of certain death. And some of the Company armsponies indulged the dying in their experimentation.

One desperate victim managed to talk a unicorn ranker by the name of Cup Hilt into a blood ritual, a sort of satire of the official induction ceremony before the pike-staff. I don't know if the Spirit was inspiring Cup Hilt, or he just fell into the right words at the right time, but the savaged miner survived her heavy lacerations. Several weeks later, that former-miner pony reported to a corporal for official duties within the Company, insisting that her 'conscience' would not leave her alone. Fine Silt works with the carters these days, hauling loads for a Company to which she insists she owes her life.

Several other repetitions of this blooded-blade field-expedient ceremony resulted in the deaths of the mortally wounded ponies and donkeys so 'inducted', but given their failure to raise as ghouls, and later developments which I've been avoiding thinking about, I should record those ponies names here. Arbre Latéral, a mining-jack caught away from his Company guards and almost ripped to shreds, was inducted in the hour of his death by an earth-pony named High Bid. Deep Furrow, an earth pony mare and Pepin militia ranker overrun by a ghoul pack almost within range of a Company section patrolling nearby, was likewise inducted about the same time by the blooded blade by another earth-pony named Halt State.

Five other cases of post-mauling induction resulted in survival by the victim-inductees, and every single one appeared not long after, with their personal weapons if they had any, and full saddle-bags containing their effects. They were distributed among the cohorts and the support sections, and afterwards the Lieutenant had me conduct a proper induction ceremony for those five and Fine Silt before the pike-staff. Nothing I've seen tells me that anything I did with the ritual and the pike-staff was anything other than a redundancy.

The blooded-blade seems to be a valid method of induction into the Company. I wondered at some obscure references in the deeper sections of the Annals, and am suspicious that somepony at some point decided to keep this non-traditional, or I should say, non-official method of induction from getting into the official records. The Annals being a sort of method by which we, the true and official face of the Company, say what is, and is not, Company; it is a rein and a lever of control over the folk or instinctive operation of the Company in its wild and untamed state.

The last several weeks of campaigning in the south had let the creative energies of the folk-Company loose among the rankers, especially among those sections seconded to their respective militia-regiments, and even more so to those regiments which were posted against the ghoul-flankers that swarmed north of the main fighting in the Clearances. The sections assigned to the Vallee du Pierre, the Tonnerre, and one of the Hydromel regiments inducted dozens of their regimental charges as the casualties mounted. The effectiveness of the defense generally meant that very few of the 'victims' were so savaged that they died of their wounds after the blooded-blade induction. The only one I've been able to track down is a caribou buck named simply Gunter. But then, I can recall almost no cases of spontaneous ghoulification of dying regimentals in the hospitals, so it is possible we are missing some field-expedient deathbed conversions conducted in the chaos and left unreported by anypony involved.

I tried to interrogate the Nightmare Spirit about these possibly Company mystery dead, but she was disinclined to cooperate in my quest for completeness of our records of the dead. To her, the dead were the dead, and, as she put it, she never looked back at the stars in her own mane. I don't know if that's reassuring, or scary as all tartarus.

Nevertheless, the aggressive medical-expedient field-induction campaign the regimental sections had been conducting among the Left Division left me a task, which is to say, to collect these new brethren and induct them officially before the pike-staff. Although as I approached the problem, I discovered several issues associated with it.

For one, the regiments of the Middle Division were at this time advancing aggressively into what we expected to be a void and a chaos south and east of the former enemy's rear, in the direction of Braystown and the banks of the Housa as it makes its deep southward bend around that once-besieged and still technically encircled river-town. For another, the standard-bearer and his war-lance was out of contact, displaced far forward with the front-line regiments and the bulk of the Second Cohort.

And the Middle Division and the Second Cohort had found resistance. A lot of it. Somepony had been seeding their back-trail with, well, too small to call it a proper horde, but rather, a hordelet of ghouls and other stay-behinds to hold off pursuit. Many of these ghouls were so newly-made that they say you could see the shine on them, browned and glazed like ginger-bread ponies fresh out of one of Cup Cake's baking-ovens. And the field-encounters between regimentals of the Middle Division and these fresh-glazed ghoul swarms were producing a lot of bite-victims.

Which meant that the sections assigned to the Middle Division were replicating the prophylactic and utterly unsanctioned induction methods of their peers in the Left Division. Dozens upon dozens of utterly unauthorized Company ponies were being minted on skirmish lines throughout the region.

Surprisingly enough, no actual Company fatalities were recorded during this period, while we and the increasingly-Company regiments were pushing through the mushy ghoul-resistance. The regimental-sections were equipped with enough old honey-pots and cry-foals to give them an advantage against brainless fresh-squeezed undead. But as easy as the fighting was…

It still slowed down the advance. When you have to destroy a couple dozen undead for every hundred to three hundred yards of road or lane you're moving down, you don't make much headway, no matter how cleverly you cut down the ghouls. The fugitive leadership of the destroyed White Rose army were trading their undead assets for time and distance, and it seemed to me, that they were profiting by the exchange.

And still, Obscured Blade and his collection of press-ganged Company and regimentals stayed out of contact, somewhere far to the front, perhaps even beyond the spear-heads cutting through the waves of ghoulish resistance. I have no idea how the old bokor was doing that – how he had ghosted right beyond our own front lines.

And the Spirit refused to talk about Obscured Blade. Which scared me more than anything else. Why was she hiding him from Company oversight? What was that cultist-among-cultists doing out there beyond the black?

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