In the Company of Night

by Mitch H

A Necessary Discipline, or, Ritual

SBMS159

The forward medical station was a set of tents bundled haphazardly into three wagons in train with the currently operational ambulances. The oxen and their rapidly-growing bull-calves hauled the station-train forward each morning, displacing towards the centre of the most recent skirmishing of the night and day before, on the nearest lane. The roads east of the Clearances were firming up, but they were still less than ideal, and all the bulk and muscle that the oxen and their bull-calves possessed were needed to break their trails. The supply-wagons struggled in their wake, the smaller earth-pony carters obliged to pull with all of their inherent magic to replicate the feats the mere physicalities of the cattle performed. There were very few donkeys who made a living at carting, let alone under these conditions.

One or two ambulances broke away from each morning's train to carry the wounded back further to the field hospital to the west. They would return in the wake of the train, to rejoin the forward medical station in its new position, however far forward they had displaced in that day's work. The medical corps thus operated in these days in a sort of constant stern-chase in the wake of the fighting, casting about to find fallow fields for the few hard-bitten doctors who struggled along with the cattle. Luckily enough, the open-field skirmishing was not the sort of intensive pony-wrecking machinery which the late battle had presented us. For the most part, the oxen and the regimental doctors had been able to deal with matters in my absence while Rye Daughter and I were setting up the prisoner camps.

I found them, and several of my new-company targets, in pursuit of my own newly Captain-assigned task. The Princess-aspect Spirit had told me that Carrot Cake was supposed to meet me at the forward station around noon or so, but I found myself occupied with medical duties to the point where I didn't even notice when he arrived. The two doctors who were riding along with the forward station had taken the opportunity to catch some extra rest in one of the supply wagons, and I was mixing up a fresh batch of blood-replacement potion concentrate from the portable alchemical bench when a tap on my shoulder with the sheathed point of a war-lance broke me out of my trance.

"Corporal! That is not the approved method for catching the attention of a distracted Company officer!"

"Sorry, Doc. You were pretty zoned out there. But th' Mistress said you needed me and ol' Betsy?"

"You… named the pike-staff?"

"I spend more time with her these days that I do my fillyfriend. Cup Cake's getting jealous."

I could never tell when the standard-bearer was joking. He never really broke that weak grin, regardless of whether he was angry, or worked up, or laughing inside. All he ever did was look shiftily left and right, as if searching for affirmation or confirmation that what he said was, indeed, recognizable as a 'joke'.

"OK, yeah, set up in the field over there. We've got six wounded here, the troops bladed them into the Company, Captain wants us to regularize 'em." We went over the necessary details, and frankly, I wouldn't want to test your patience by getting into the repetitive nature of a simple Company induction ceremony. Sometimes we made a big production of it; in this case, they were already committed to the brotherhood, and were fairly chewed-up to begin with. The walking wounded were still forward of the medical station, marching with their former peers and the Company ponies who had started taking field-recruitment into their own hooves. These were more seriously wounded, and had been held at the forward station for the convenience of myself and Corporal Cake.

Once the ceremony was complete, we returned the weak and giddy new-Company ponies to the bull-calves for expedited shipment to the field hospital and, eventually, the recovery wards. I joined the standard-bearer as he returned to the front lines.

The skirmishing was never quite over in those days, as the battalions in the field shifted forward yard by yard, probing for the inevitable ambushes. Over the course of a week, we had barely made a half-day's march south and east, stopped every other cross-roads or thicket by the need to exterminate another barricade full of ghouls and the occasional necromancer there to ride herd on her charges.

None of the White Rose necromancers were surviving to make their way into captivity.

We came across Brigadier Guillaime and his staff just behind the most recent bout of fighting, a thick scrum of regimentals and Company armsponies visible at the far side of a long, overgrown field, the tassles of their chamfrons bobbing in the slight breeze, their ichor-stained weapons rising and falling like the harvest-blades of those new-fangled combine-reaper devices I've seen in the fields of some donkey-run farms in the north. The clashing sounds and the war-bellows of the troops mostly drowned out the groans of the undead being dismantled systemically just a hundred yards away from our conference.

The brigadier was as hot under the caparison as I'd ever seen him. The regimentals in our front were not his own beloved regiment, but rather a pair of other Middle-Division northern units. My missing warlock and his Company escort had disappeared with the bulk of the III Verdebaie, including the newly-brevetted colonel of said unit and all of their officers. Where-ever they were lurking, they were operating without supplies or support, as the little bit of the regiment its former colonel could find, were the carters and supply-ponies of their support train.

We promised to retrieve the missing battalions of the III Verdebaie, and the off-script bokor who had absconded with them. The standard-bearer and I approached the rear of the scrum as the death-screams of the ghoul rear-guard reached their crescendo, and began to die off.

I swear, that wasn't intentional.

Relatively few wounded were streaming back from the battle-line, which despite its extreme violence, was being held under very firm control by the corporals and sergeants in charge. The regimental officers were almost impossible to distinguish from their non-coms; all of the gilt and brocade had been beaten off of these ponies, and what little was left, was so field-stained and battered that you couldn't tell satin from burlap.

Three Company non-coms were rushing from cluster of wounded to cluster of wounded, and I got a chance to see for myself this folk-remedy replication of my books' precious induction ceremony. A quick slice with the punch-dagger against the hide of the designated corporal, and the other two to hold up the inductee, and then a few muttered words, and the inductee's kiss against the tang of the dagger.

That was it, that was the whole of my irrelevance to the business of the Company.

When they looked up at us, the three paled right through their brightly-coloured coats. Two earth-ponies, and a sword-stallion unicorn, looking as guilty as if we had caught them drinking hooch in the field under arms.

"How many?" I asked. They didn't answer. "Get them out of the ranks as soon as this business is complete. We're regularizing your bullshit. And then we're going to have a nice long talk about authorized procedures, and unauthorized procedures."

I looked down at the bleeding, bitten wounded, and bent down to get to work. "We're going to talk, most importantly, about regular procedures. And reporting standards. How can the Annalist record our acts and our deaths, if the Annalist doesn't have a true record of who is, and is not, Company?" They looked ashamed, as they well ought to have been. "Now get back to it, these ponies need work, if you're to have done anything other than securing them an immediate entry into the expiration listings. And I'll need from you a proper list of the mortally-wounded inducted. You're short-selling the new inductees if I never hear about them, sergeant, corporal, corporal. Don't make a liar out of me."

Then I got to work.

---

Once the afternoon's ghoul-disposal operation was complete, the blooded-blade corporals followed my orders, and cut the new inductees out of the ranks of the two battalions, and called them into assembly in the centre of the long field, little rivulets of fresh ichor trickling under-hoof from the heaped mounds of disassembled undead to the southeast.

There were over a hundred ponies and donkeys in the assembly. Carrot Cake held up the pike-staff to the east, and he'd taken out the banner and hung it from the high shaft, and it was streaming in the increasing breeze from the north-west. I leaned over to one of the corporals, and demanded, sotto voice, "Just how many armsponies have you bladed in, you damned fool?"

"These are the bulk of the ones on the fighting-line, Annalist, sir. They leave their regiments after they're bladed in, if they're still fit to fight. They keep coming forward to the skirmishing, regardless of which battalions are in the fore. They've been acting like they're cohorted."

"You keep saying they, them. Are these ponies under authority or not?"

"Well, if we tell them to do something, they do it. Not like they're not obeying orders. They're just… following the Company example, I think."

"Good Grogar, you're like a pony with a pack of puppies following him around. What am I going to do with you all? Bah, be quiet, it's time for the magics…In those days, the Company was in the service of the Hashish-mares and the Old Mule of the Mountain…" I continued with the reading, a memorized section I had used on a dozen occasions to swear ponies into service. The ceremony ground on through its well-worn ritual, and I lost myself to the words and the gestures. The sun's long descent into dusk was well-advanced when the last few donkeys and a single caribou buck came up to kiss the pike-staff.

As we were cleaning up our mess, and plotting our raid upon the nearest chuck-wagon, two witches-gigs descended from the higher airs, their tired-looking charioteers sweating in the heat of the evening. Three flights of pegasi settled around us as the Crow and Otonashi jumped out of their chairs, and joined the standard-bearer and I. My Spirit whispered into my mind's ear the news that the Captain had diverted the available warlocks to my support, and increased the urgency of our secondary objective.

Obscured Blade was still absent without leave, and if the Captain's mane was not yet on fire, her tail was certainly smoldering.

Comments

[Neece]

And the Dark Company swells it's ranks through mercy. Weren't them the bad guys?

[Oliver]

In those days, the Company was in the service of the Hashish-mares and the Old Mule of the Mountain…"

That sounds like a story I would like to hear more of. :)

[Mitch H]

8087058 You've gotten a few fragments, including a description of an assault on a fortified port-city, and some other bits here and there about Fatinah's re-boot of the Company after their catastrophic defeat in the Dar-al-Hisan. Sawbones likes to quote Fatinah. Mostly because I can remember my back-story for her books and that of her two successors. In many ways, Fatinah is the true founder of the modern Company, because only the left-hoof-path cultists remember much of anything from before the loss of the first Annals in the retreat across the desert.

OK, chapter 7, The Flying-Column, which is the account of the seizure of Jbayel, and the first mention of the Hashish-mares and the Old Mule.

Chapter 23, The Past And The Dead, mentions al-Hazar and Desecrated Temple, the two annalists after Fatinah. All told, the Company spent two very long generations in the Dar-al-Hisan, nearly a century.

Chapter 54, Managing Expectations, or Getting Ahead Of The Avalanche, mentions Fatinah and her re-founding in very loose, very bad Prench.

[Dorath]

"You… named the pike-staff?"
"I spend more time with her these days that I do my fillyfriend. Cup Cake's getting jealous."

[TheStratovarian]

They're certainly gaining ground with the folks that are very much Pro-living. And the necromancers get to enjoy their pro-death stance. Everyone wins! Isnt the company great!