In the Company of Night

by Mitch H

The Fog Lifts

SBMS165

As the morning sun burned away the night's long fog, I found Throat-Kicker in the witches' encampment, and we got Feufollet cleaned off and put to bed, clutching a timber-weasel like a foal holding a cloth doll. I looked at the dimples that spiky menace left all over the little jenny's fur, and realized that it was deliberately not pricking or stabbing her. I guess the timber-weasels could show affection and concern in their own, alarming sort of way.

They still gave me the willies. And I could swear they grew bigger every time I laid eyes on them. There were some that looked big enough to ride.

The Company turtled up. Nopony traveled alone, and we retrieved the more isolated members. Chariots were sent for Dancing Shadows, Cup Cake, and the logistical staff stationed up in New Equestria. We didn't want to chance anyone travelling in isolation on the surface. Especially not now that Blade's freebooters had disappeared in that direction. We kept an ear out for the sort of disturbance a group like that would cause, but nothing caught our attention.

The Patrol faded back into the shadows from whence they had emerged. We could have used their expertise in tracking down the traitors, but it looked to me like the production of a new set of villains from out of our ranks had spooked them. Night Watch disappeared, and nopony else associated with the Patrol wanted to talk to us. Especially when we refused to send personal representatives of the Company out alone. Our caution might have looked like arrogance or… I don't know what.

It was in this time that Company patrols sweeping along Obscured Blade's back-trail caught the hundred, hundred and fifty stragglers he'd left behind him in his wasteful night-march through the fog. Half of them were more than half-starved, and almost all of them were more Verdebaie regimentals, fallen out of the warlock's sway in the darkness, or simply too famished to continue moving.

A few died later of the results of exposure and malnutrition. He wasn't feeding his enthralled 'troops'. They reported having seen him or one of his unicorn followers ghoulifying dead Verdebaie bodies. They showed absolutely no regard for their equine raw materials; Blade was quickly going as bad as a Tambelon native with this necromancy business.

But the stragglers were all the news we had of Blade and his parade of horribles. They disappeared into the mist again.

Meanwhile, the campaign down westwards creaked onwards, producing a steady trickle of baronial casualties and the odd regimental or bison corpse. The bison were no sort of serious threat, but they were like fighting the fog with a broom. Easily parted, easily dispersed, but impossible to capture or destroy, and always creeping back in behind your sweeps.

More importantly, Brune's deplorables cleared the road further west in the direction of the Second Mouth, and the lines of communication opened back up. We received two entire seasons' worth of campaign news in a single afternoon. That news included the following facts, which I summarize in brief:

When the Second Mouth "fell" in the wake of the destruction of the Imperial Riverine Fleet, it had only lost its port and river-side bastions. The main citadel and the inland bastions had barred their gates against the rush, and reversed their defenses sufficiently that the garrison held out against the worst the White Rose could do. Even then, an army twice the size of the one eventually sent up the Housa was landed to besiege the hapless defenders, and it looked like they'd fall easily.

We'd thought this had happened long ago. It was the only explanation that made sense of the valley of the Housa full of Westerners. And the occupation of the direct lines of communication had murdered all news otherwise.

The commanders of the Grand Army on the Rima knew better, because they had been stripped half-naked of their mobile forces by the Bride herself, they had been left to hold the main lines with gum and baling-wire. But those close-mouthed goats never bothered to update anyone along our lines of communication with any of these facts; the foals just sat on news as if they'd be hanged if they let anything slip. The Grand Army's commanders took operational security to mean 'never tell anypony anything, ever.' I honestly do not understand the command philosophy of the Imperial Army. Their left hooves never know what their right hooves are doing.

Anyways, as we were training an army in the Valley du Pierre last spring, the Bride's improvised Army of Relief had slammed into the army investing the Second Mouth in a foul, mud-haunted slaughter that sounded like it put our own later mud-wallow to shame.

The Bride's Army of Relief shattered itself and the enemy alike, and somehow she found herself besieged within the enemy's own fortifications, as lines and counter-lines were dug in a riot of castellation that turned the back-country of the Second Mouth into a ghoul-haunted labyrinth. It was almost as if the various contending forces lost themselves in the blood-soaked turns of their own walls and ditchwork.

The Bride's forces suffered terribly from their impossible logistics, and they starved by the thousands. It's the only case I've ever heard of a commander sending perfectly serviceable regiments to the rear because she couldn't feed them. By the end of the campaign, word was that the loyalist forces were majority undead, shambling hordes just thickly leavened enough with the living to maintain control, and, if the stories I got were accurate, not always that, either. Towards the end, the loyalists started deliberately herding uncontrolled shamblers into certain sections of the labyrinth, to deny them to the enemy.

It was a losing battle, and if it were any other general commanding, they would have retreated and let the White Rose have joy of the ghoul-infested wreck. But the Bride as a general was nothing if not stubborn and borderline suicidal in her operational tactics. And her capacity for converting death and defeat into the raw materials of resistance was impressive. The enemy had the numbers, the logistics, and the support of a vast fleet. They should have crushed her. Instead, they fought inland and impaled themselves on her infinite obstinacy.

Not to mention the outbreak of a truly terrible plague among the investing armies, on both sides. Many fell dead from the sickness, which must have been spread by the rats and lice that make such a horror of trench warfare. The Bride's veterans were clever and wise in the hygiene of trench-life, and although the losses were heavy on the loyalist side, they were crippling to the fresh-muzzled Westerners, who had no defenses against the Pale Mare. She galloped through their ranks, and vast numbers died of insufficient latrines and improper sanitation.

But worst of all, the White Rose forgot about their exposed rear. The Fourth and Fifth Mouths, upstream on the Twins, were not impressive fortifications, or relevant to the defense of the Housa, and I think the Westerners forgot about what they represented.

Reserves.

Tens of thousands of screaming southern highlanders, the main-stays of the Bride's Imperial recruiters, the warlike mountain ponies and donkeys that filled the Bride's ranks. You know, lance-fodder. Did the White Rose think those woad-stained hill-goats just emerged from the earth like dragon's-teeth whenever the Bride stomped her hoof?

They came out of the southern highlands drained by the Twins, Castor and Pollux, those upland reivers and howlers. And instead of passing through the Fourth and Fifth Mouths to their expected homes in the ever-thinning regiments of the Grand Army, those recruits collected, and collected in their tens of thousands behind the bottlenecks on the Twins.

And they started building rafts. Nothing fancy, nothing respectable or terrifying. Those uplanders weren't boatwains, their talents weren't in construction or artifice. They just lashed together rough-hewn logs into big tangled, shaggy mats, and built rough rams into the fronts of these contraptions. They were barely navigable, and the Peacock Angel help them if they wanted to pole these messes up-stream for any distance. They had a distressing tendency to fall apart under any sort of stress, and they were only 'seaworthy' on a low-banked, slow-flowing river.

But the uplanders built thousands of them. They stripped the forests and groves of the districts along the Twins naked, they tore down their neighbors' barns and hen-houses. Rumour holds it that they also destroyed the houses of every baronial tax collector along the whole length of the Castor.

Roughly at the same time that we were storming the walls of Leveetown, the Uplanders' rattle-trap flotilla passed through the riverine booms defending the Fourth and Fifth Mouths. They floated in their thousands in a semi-controlled rush out of the Castor and the Pollux, mostly following the flow of the rivers as they merged with the larger Housa. They didn't so much collide with the Westerners' great navy as they enveloped it, emerging by accident in the middle of the night. The White Rose must have thought at first that they were looking at the remnants of some great upriver flood, the wrack and ruin of an entire water-shed's wreckage washed down-stream.

It was only when the torches went up that the complacent enemy realized it was an attack. They were swarmed.

It was still something of a one-sided slaughter. The crude rafts made for terrible assault-craft, being too low and close to the water for the well-armed but undertrained mountain savages to find their way onto the high-decked western war-ships. Thousands of uplanders drowned. But the uplanders had thousands to drown. And those rams were good for something. And a dozen shoddy rafts were an excellent trade for a hundred-thousand-denier trireme or fat-bottomed supply-barge. And the uplanders found it much easier to overwhelm the numerous supply-barges the White Rose had left undefended nearby.

The morning found the eastern banks of the great River downstream of the Second Mouth covered in shivering ship-wrecked survivors and the ruin of thousands of disintegrated battle-rafts. But among the logs and other, less identifiable bits of the mayfly armada were the wreckage of dozens if not hundreds of White Rose supply ships and battle-craft.

The uplanders' comic-opera armada had blundered its way into breaking the siege of the Second Mouth. In a night, all the military advantages of the Bride's opponents were washed away along with the crude log-raft flotilla. She made the most of it.

I wish I could report some great obliteration of her opposition, along the same lines as our victories in the east. But the flotilla which had been supporting our opposing force, ran down-stream to the relief of the siege-army cut off from their own logistics and supports. They pulled their chestnuts out of the fire, and a second White Rose army was not obliterated. Nevertheless, their conduct of this siege was definitely now on the back hoof, and if the 'Army of Relief' could simply secure their own logistics, the battle would be won.

Which meant that if Brigadier Brune and his baronial levies could clear the road past the Mounds and down into the depths of the southern riverlands, the Bride's Army of Relief could be, in its turn, be relieved. A ration-line driven down to the now massively-fortified environs of the Second Mouth.

If only we could get the ship-wrights to produce those battle-craft we'd been predicating our entire campaign upon. Coriolanus did have ships under construction, didn't they?

Well, not our remit. The Company had been commissioned to defend the shipyards against destruction, not to ride herd on their supposed productivity.

But it was marvelous to have news again of the world. Like fog lifting from a long-obscured prospect, we could at last see the shape of things in motion, and our place in the pageant.

Comments

[Dorath]

It's the only case I've ever heard of a commander sending perfectly serviceable regiments to the rear because she couldn't feed them.

Good for the Bride.

[Easysnuggler]

I guess there were enough undead it didn’t matter?