In the Company of Night

by Mitch H

The Singing Rabble, or, The Seed In The Soil

FFMS044

What? No, I didn’t see the event that set all the fools' tongues a-wagging, but Rose knows, I heard enough of the waggling and the yapping and the whinnying to fill a long winter’s tedium with nonsense and fancy. When it happened, I was at the station. The station was quiet but for the overloud confessions of a drunkard being put to the question in the back chambers by Severe Shard. It was a foolish exercise, questioning a drunk. How many traitors have you ever seen who couldn’t hold their liquor? The true dangers to the faith and the Revolution hide behind the expressionless eyes of somber and pious ponies, in the hearts of those who can dissemble and nod and smile at the bromides of the preachers.

It was because I grew tired of the wailing and the hiccups that I was standing outside of the station proper, when the first runners came up to report the commotion. The enemy fleet had been pressing the navy badly the last week, and the remnants of the ships of the Housa fleet were hiding in the Bottomwaters behind the upriver forts, cringing like whipped curs. The advisers in the navy were weak, and lukewarm, and afraid of their own shadows. No wonder that their charges collapsed at the first repulse! The fleets had shriveled sadly since the great victories of the previous autumn; their initial successes had led them into flights of fancy and the arrogance of success.

The skies the night before had been full of omens, and frights, and apparitions. The artistry of the enemy, no doubt. Witchcraft and sly illusion, the lot of it. Mean and ugly parodies of the iconography of the Faith – twisted into fright-mask horrors.

Although it had certainly robbed me of my better rest. It wasn’t only the queasiness of moral uncertainty and the screams of the drunkard which had driven me out of the station. Lack of rest made me, well, restless.

"There’s battle joined beyond forts #5 and 6! They say it’s a bloodbath!" yelped the gossip, gesticulating wildly at the bored guard beside the entrance.

"What nonsense are you talking? The fleet is still behind the bar, over there!" I nodded southward, where indeed, the shrunken, battered fleet sat immobile, a full mile and a half downstream from the forward fortifications. Although they were standing to arms, and you could see the rippling of their sails and the feathering of their oars in the distance.

"Not us, lieutenant! Them! The loyalists are fighting each other! Right in front of the batteries! It’s like the most beautiful show you’ve ever seen, lovely, I swear it!"

"And how are you here to tell me this, if you’ve seen it, private – what is your name, pony?"

"Ah! Private First Class Jute Weave! The battery commander sent me and a pal back here in the courier boat to pass the news back to command! Well, the pal, really. I was just there to help paddle the skiff. I figured y’all might have an interest in this sort of news, too?"

Ah. One of Brother Ground Frog’s informers. I waved him back to the sergeant’s desk, where he usually met with his confidential informants. Most of them had a great deal more tact than this flighty fool.

In a previous life, he must have been a bird. Certainly twittered like one.

A song opened the gates of the rebellion.

The protected waters beyond the defensive positions on the upriver islands were crowded with civilian freighters, docks, and moored hulks. The Housa above her confluence with the great river was a wide, almost still lake held back as much by the pressure of the waters of the larger river, as any geographic quirk of its own. These still waters were defined by a series of low but dry islands upon which the great armies of the expeditionary force had encamped, relatively low from the viewpoint of highland ponies and donkeys, but high enough above the rivers and the waters that inundations generally didn't wash away the logistics-camps and support areas. Once upon a time, the Imperial Fleet had made the Housa Bottomwaters its preferred anchorage.

Before the Imperial Fleet had been destroyed, inundated by a flood of overwhelming rebellion.

Now, just over a year later, our turncoat armada was welcomed inside the Bottomwaters to echoing choruses of the rebels' favored carols, song exchanged across the calm waters. The blood in the water gave a slight pinkness to the scene, but even as we sailed downstream, our glamours were spreading out, diluting, until the evidence of our violent mutiny against the Loyalist cause was lost in the vast volume of the Bottomwaters.

The White Rose should have not taken us at our face value. But they did. Their joy overwhelmed their good sense, and ships which had not even a week earlier done their level best to burn each other to the water-line, cruised lazily side-by-side, laughing and singing and dancing from the pure joy of it all.

The landings were a little less open-hooved. Some officers on their side started trying to slow down the rush for the docking-slips, and the merging together of the lost ponies of the upper expedition and those of the greater expeditionary force. We were the prodigal mares, we had been lost, and now were found. There was nothing to be done, but to slaughter the fatted pumpkin, and feast our return to the family's bosom.

I thought about the rumour, as I walked back to the holding pens, looking over the herd. They say that masters have favorites among their thralls, but at least among the MPs, we kept our tools in common. I picked out two of the fresher walkers, collected in the last three months by Deep Thorn and I after that big push beside the northeastern levee complex on the mainland. I pulled on one of my fetishes, and activated their charms, instructing them to come out into the outer pen where I could run them through the manual of control and authority.

Too many artists cut corners on maintenance. You can’t rely on your tools if you don’t keep them properly maintained – blades whetted, needles sharpened, fetishes refreshed and properly placed. Ghouls under full and proper control.

I eyed a nick on the fetish of the donkey-ghoul, and rubbed at it with my hoof. It wasn’t such that I needed to repair or replace the device, but it was something to keep an eye on. I knew, better than most, that if we let the control-fetishes decay or degrade, our tools could suddenly break out of control and turn on their wielders.

It could happen even with perfectly maintained equipment, but shoddy and decrepit materials certainly increased the chances.

My inspection complete, I ordered the two walkers to trail me as I departed the station for the eastward docks. I wanted to see what was going on today in those warehouses out that way. Too much unsavory activity had been passing through those supply-warehouses. Somepony in the unit assigned to that depot was up to something, and I intended to find out what, exactly, that was.

A military policemare’s duty never rests. It hangs around our withers like a heavy coil of rope, or an ill-fitting hauberk.

Nopony met my eyes as I stalked through the lanes of the base. There were more ponies in the street than I expected at this time of day. And they were all moving towards the eastern docks. Perhaps the informant hadn’t been exaggerating? Well, any sort of rumour gets the slackers of the rear echelon twittering and muttering and shuffling about.

This was why I preferred the company of my thralls. They didn’t have much conversation, but at least they had a certain degree of dignity and composure. They could focus.

They could also tear your throat out and eat your intestines if you didn’t take care, but that was the way of the world.

A strange sound echoed over the waters in the distance. The wind muffled it a bit, as did the sussation and rhubarb of the gathering crowd, but it almost sounded like…

Singing?

I prompted my two thralls to kneel in the dirt of the street, and I climbed up on their back, using them as a stepping-stool to reach a watch-platform that was elevated over the landside end of the nearest pier. There was already a guard standing her post on the platform, but I gestured her to stand to one side so that I could see what was going on.

It was times like this that I regretted my squat stature. No stallion would ever seek me out for my tall and lithe figure, I fear. But don’t underestimate those of us who are low to the ground – we’re closer to gutting you like a fish from down here.

In the distance, between the islands which held forts #5 and #6, there were shapes moving slowly through the channel. Tall masts, full of half-torn sails, and scorched decks. Bloodstains which were visible even from my distant vantage.

And decks full of ponies swaying back and forth, singing what was increasingly recognizable as "What a Mighty Fortress Is Our Garden". And over those distant sails, strange, makeshift banners, which could, if one was charitable, grant to be White Rose sigils.

Nopony had ever called me charitable.

Our pinnaces were now coursing forward, guiding the galleys and stranger-looking ships towards the centre of the Bottomwaters anchorage. But some were coming this way, ewes escaping the sheep-dog guidance of the pinnaces. The singing of hymns and anthems continued, and soon enough, there were two strange half-galley ships approaching the moorings of my pier. I didn’t recognize the configuration of these boats, too small for a war-galley, but still far bigger than your average pinnace or skiff. And they boasted huge, horrible-looking devices on their foredecks, splattered liberally with blood and gore, and dripping with some foul, malodorous substance that I could smell all the way up on the lookout platform.

The fools, hobbledehoys and hoopleheads down below in the gathered mob were now exchanging songs with the oar-ponies of the stranger-ships, and the armed, bloodstained warriors that crowded their decks.

As they tied up at the moorings, I saw several ponies come running back, clearly brimming over with some sort of rumour or bit of gossip they’d drawn from thirty seconds conversation across the closing waters and the tumult of the off-key singing which overwhelmed the senses. I leaned down over the edge of the platform, and yelled at one of them, demanding an explanation.

"What ships? What ships? Lieutenant, better to ask *which ponies*? They say they’re the Third Army! And the 21st and 23rd marine battalions!"

"The Third Army is lost! They died to a pony, didn’t they? Or shut into the lich-legates' slaughterpens, which is just another way of saying the same thing!"

"They’d argue otherwise! And who else would it be? Do you think some random collection of easterner slaves would know enough to send up the Rosey Cross, and sing the auld hymns? It’s a Rose-blessed miracle, is what it is! The loyalist fools, they tried to turn battle-hardened soldiers into oar-pony slaves! Hahahaha!"

My quarry laughed and danced, avoiding the hooves of my thralls, which I tried to use to restrain her long enough to ask my fill. The crowd bumped and jostled below, and knocked my tools off-balance enough that they failed to hold the knowledgeable mare, and she disappeared into the press.

The gangways were coming down, and the oar-benches of the strangely armed ships were suddenly emptied, and poured out over the planks of the piers. They met the joyous mob, and mingled, and merged, until suddenly there was no longer the ponies of the ships, and the ponies of the shore, but one promiscuous mass of singing, dancing equinity.
I was trapped on my platform, but my ghouls weren’t. I gave them their instructions, and sent them back to the station.

We’d need reinforcements to get this under control.

The officers and the military police swarmed around the inevitable, failing to keep anypony from tying up, anypony from leaving their galleys, failed to keep anything from happening, in point of fact. The stiff enforcers of dogma and discipline were, in the event, too few, too small, too hated to be listened to, even when they really ought to have been given heed. Poor fanatics! They were right – but it wasn't enough to be right, one had to be loved as well. And they had made themselves terribly hated over the years.

The ponies who were encamped upon the two islands our fleet moored itself around were mostly support-staff, cooks, logisticians, warehouse-ponies, and assorted rear-echelon types. In other words, the rear-area mother-buckers. REMBs were jolly, useless sorts in any kind of army, but especially in such as these, who had been fighting a joyless, savage sort of grinding attritional siege. The Bride had made of the Second Mouth another Rima-front, and that meant an endless, mindless, incredible expense of materials and resources and ponypower poured down a sewer-hole, nothing to be recouped or recovered from the expenditure thereof.

These weren't the ponies who fought and died, but they were the ones who sent off those who did, and mourned those they sent off, saw off, fed and clothed and healed and supported, and they had seen those who they had so sent off, die like flies.

It was so rare to have those that they sent into the grinder to return. Our appearance, miraculous and wondrous as it was, sent them into paroxysms of giddy hilarity. They produced multiple scratch bands, all strings and simple drums, with a few brass instruments here and there. The landing parties that poured out over the docks degenerated almost immediately into dance-circles, dance-parties, orgies of song and joy and sheer happiness.

And it wasn't as if the Order ponies hadn't been suppressing their own homesickness, their need for their fellows and for fellow-feeling. They were honest and true converts to Cherie's cause, such as it was, but that didn't make them Company ponies. They were Westerners, through and through, and these also were Westerners, similar at a base, cultural, genetic, familial level. More than a few ponies among the Order met their cousins, their siblings, their fellow-town-folk among the rear-support ponies. These supply bases, full of cousins and compatriots, were eager for the invasion when we over-ran them like a barbarian horde of joyous reunion.

I sat on my platform, bored out of my mind. The pony who was supposed to be standing this post had left when her shift was up - no doubt to join the ongoing festivities, damn her - and the replacement hadn’t been able to get through the crowds to climb up into the lookout nest. So I sat, alone, above hundreds if not thousands of carousing celebrants. Waves of harmony washed over the swirling masses, the same damn hymns repeated again and again. One could only hear “How Grows Her Garden” so many times before one was ready to give up the faith and go take up Peacockery or Grogar-style diabolism.

The sun had long since set, and the ships had emptied out into the warehouses and depots. My thralls had returned with a message from the captain back at the station. She’d come in from a conference on the mainland, without, sadly, any reinforcements. They’d decided to let the new ponies and the rear-area fools dance out their foolishness without interruption. Come dawn, they’d all be exhausted, malleable, and easily herded. Then we could pen the unknown ponies back on their ships if necessary, or in converted warehouses if any of them showed any signs of being a threat.

Well, they’d caused enough damage to the loyalist ships, or so I’d heard them brag at the foot of my platform. Proud ponies, many of them, braggarts even. Full of pride, full of themselves. How they’d hidden their lights under a bushel, how they’d spent *months* shamming, shucking and jiving, pretending to be beat-down servants, slaves – destroyed ponies. How they’d *built* this grand fleet which had smashed up our veteran navy and killed our sailors, how they’d hidden themselves in plain sight, rowing their oars, sitting their benches, keeping their heads down until the moment came.

So proud were they of the slaughter they had engineered – slaughter of their fellow Rose, slaughter of the loyalists, slaughter of themselves. I heard one mourn-celebrate their friends, who had died in chains, crushed on the benches by a collision, flung against their own bulwarks by their oars thrown up by a ship’s beak-ram. All towards that one, single, savage moment when they unhinged their cuffs, threw off their chains, and overran their ships’ sailors and marines.

I listened to them, and to the supply-ponies who burbled in admiration at the mutineers’ cleverness, their intrepidity, and I pondered the sorts of ponies who could do such a thing, endure such a life, week after week, month after month, whip-lash by whip-lash. Who could turn a smiling, servile face towards their tormenters, and not be caught out.

I thought of my unit, and our orders, and our duty. And how these ponies were the exact types we laboured every day, every night, to dig out of our ranks, to uncover, to root out. These were dangerous ponies, and they had flipped the world over like a bar-room table in order to rejoin the revolution. What else were they hiding behind their jubilant, cheerful muzzles?

As the sun rose over the eastern edge of the world, the Captain and my fellows began driving their thralls forward to clear the streets of half-drunken, exhausted revelers. Some ponies were penned up in empty warehouses. The rest were chivvied back onto their ships. I joined the push as it reached my platform, dropping down onto the pier, and guiding my two thralls to join the skirmish-line that was advancing, pushing, guiding as we went. It didn’t even take the threat of violence.

The moaning, stinking undead we directed were all the persuasion we generally needed to break up unsanctioned gatherings. Even gatherings as out of hoof and over-sized as this one had been. Although some of the mutineers gave us the sort of looks that made me wonder about their theological leanings. That was actual, natural hatred I saw in their side-glances and gritted-teeth grimaces. You see that sort of attitude among the civilians and fresh recruits, but from veterans? And yet these were the survivors, supposedly, of a terrible, annihilating campaign. A campaign that seems to have killed seven out of eight ponies sent into the cauldron. These were the toughest of the tough, the luckiest of the lucky. They’d seen more death than I’ve seen in all my years with the military police, even as a registered necromancer up to my withers in undead thralls day in, day out.

Where had they gotten this undisciplined loathing of our tools? We weren’t foals, marinating in the pious witterings of the simplified scriptures. We were mares of the world. You couldn’t go to war without a proper ghoul-corps. It was like trying to fight naked, unbarded.

What was in these strange returnees’ minds?

I could not, I found, join in the festivities. I was not a Westerner, nor a White Rose fanaticist, nor even a real pony, though I wore the semblance of a Westerner, a fanatic, and a pony. I was run off my hooves with the maintenance of all the illusions and glamours that had sold the 'mutiny', and although my seniors in the warlocks' coven had kept the magnitude of the problem from crushing me flatter than a pancake with donkey ears, it was still more than enough to keep all of us crazy busy. We had teams of Order ponies and sailor-donkeys making the physical changes in the ships, and as each were completed, we could loosen another set of phantasms, allowing them to dissolve into the actual ship underneath.

Cherie's larger timberlings had joined my little corps of ship-size timber-ratlings, and were hiding here and there in the ships, awaiting their cue when the time came. Those had to be kept veiled, and I was busy throughout the evening with the clean-up and renewing my spellwork on the greater timberlings.

I missed one tartarus of a party. Three different bands kept the dancing going long into the night, and I'm told that some that had eyes to see, saw wonderful things. The Nightmare dancing with a Cherie-Filly - and five identical Fillies dancing a fairy-ring beside one of the string-bands, somehow commanding their own little plot of packed dirt in the swirling press of real, physical ponies swaying and laughing. Nightmares, Princesses, Fillies - all mingled with the singing, dancing, celebratory Order and their kin among the support-ponies. There was the celebration that the White Rose saw, and then there was the bacchanalia that the Order experienced, and although the two shared the same dance-floor, they were not at all the same joyous occasion.

The White Rose celebrated the return of their lost foals. The Order danced the fulfillment of their prophesies and sacred promises. And as they celebrated, we took a census in the midst of the dancing and the jubilation. Targets were cataloged and ranked, and the ponies and donkeys who stayed on board and did not join in on the celebration, observed through the eyes of the celebrants, and made careful notes.

We did not, mind you, seek to recruit primarily the happy, joyous simple ponies who simply danced and sang and caroused. Those fruit would fall in their own time, without any real effort or planning. It was the ones who held back, who watched, hard-eyed, who went and collected the military police. Who were the military police.

The White Rose's version of the MPs were not quite what I'd become accustomed to in the Army of the North. Those sleepy detachments among the northern regimentals were small details assigned to deal with drunkards tying one on, and to collect stragglers among the regiments as they marched. These, the White Rose's military police – they were heavily armed and barded ponies among the unarmed rear-echelon. And, we soon discovered, they included active necromancers commanding their own squads of thralled undead.

They held back until the MP necromancers could assemble a large enough force to clear the dance-floors. The support-ponies went amiably, nodding passively at the bullying MPs and their shambling horrors. More than a few of the Order, however, broke cover to snarl at the dead things, and the hated thugs who commanded them.

Command had to crack virtual heads across the princess radio before we got ourselves back under control. The necromancers herded the 'mutineers' back onto our moored ships, not responding to our entreaties or blandishments.

The evaluation teams concurred, unanimously. The military police were our highest priority target. They were the pivot-point upon which our plans would hinge.

---

More than a few ponies slept well into the next morning, among the White Rose. The arrival of the mutineers and their ships had unsettled the sleeping schedules of many otherwise quite responsible soldiers. And there were fewer responsible ponies among the rear echelons than, perhaps, one might have desired if one was in charge of keeping things on track and ship-shape.

We in the warlocks' coven had had even less sleep than the rest, nor any rest at all, for that matter. But magic can substitute for rest if one is careful with ones' cantrips, and so I and Gibblets and the others slipped out of our hiding-places under heavy veils, to track down the encampment of the military police that kept order in the depots and supply-bases. We took the better part of the morning, finding our bearings, and marking the relevant tent-clusters for the pony who would come after us.

Too few of the MPs had taken to their beds, anyways. Damn their discipline and stern rigour.

I wanted them more than ever.

In the afternoon, several officers and staffers from the main army arrived to evaluate the new arrivals, and they met with our leadership and the survivors among the White Rose's battered naval officers. We had done serious damage to their fleet, and it was currently under the command of a lieutenant commander – I think. It was somewhat hard to follow the ranks of the rebels' naval command structure. She was actually a "Second Class Ship-Archon"; I'm not sure why their naval ranks were so strange, their army and marine rank system was the same as any other military force in Tambelon I'd ever heard of.

Stomper was among the leadership who met with the White Rose, but we didn't put her forth as the commander of the mutiny. Whispering Wheat had been a sergeant-major before the destruction of the expedition, and chances were good that Wheat would be known by at least some of his peers in the parent army-group. Best that they had a familiar face to put to the mutiny; it wouldn't be good if they started questioning what they were hearing and seeing.

The meetings went on long into the evening, never quite amounting to interrogation, but certainly drilling down deep, as the officers and staffers did their due diligence. It was, after all, an amazing story, and amazing narratives required exacting examination, for the sake of all concerned.

At least they didn't appoint a Grogar's Advocate. But on the other hand, they didn't seem likely to canonize us, either.

The first session wrapped up late into the night, with the understanding that we would resume tomorrow. They clearly wanted to talk about the destruction of the expeditionary force, and why we had been spared. Most of the truth could be told, but the details… did we want to start planting stories about visions of the White Rose Reborn? Debate went on that night in the Mistress's dream-world.

But Cherie wasn't there to join in with the debates, nor was I. She took me with her, when she went walking that night. We passed through darkness into shadow, and from her hiding-place on one of the great galleys, we shadow-walked into the first of the military police barracks, my magics hiding the white thestral from the curious eyes of our targets, while hers passed us through the shadow-spaces.

She would stop beside an occupied cot, and lay her leathery wing over the head of the sleeping MP, her eyes closed in concentration. I kept guard over Cherie as she plumbed the dreams of each target in turn, seeding – what, I don't know in their innermost night-imaginings. My recruiting had been in public, in the open air, witnessed, seen, critiqued, challenged. I could get away with nothing.

But nopony but Cherie herself and her targets knew what she was leaving behind her as we worked our way through the barracks. She walked in darkness, both literal and figurative. She came as a thief in the night, and left like a day-dream. What she left behind her? Even her targets may not have exactly have remembered what they had dreamed.

But their innermost selves, that part which communicates with our outer selves only partially, and obliquely – those would remember, would recall. And it was that innermost self that Cherie directed her appeals. Did she present herself as the one, the true White Rose, reborn? Did she merely offer herself as herself, and sell that dream of life in the midst of death? Or did she simply walk through their night-dreams and leave them to draw their own conclusions?

Cherie refused to say. She kept her secrets.

My dreams that night, and the night after that, were strange, haunted. The apparitions we’d seen in the night previous to the great mutiny stalked me in my lucid imaginings, and whispered imprecations against my faith, my talents, my honour. The monstrous fillies swarmed about me, tearing down my servants, my thralls. Tangles of wild roses rose up all about us as I fought through the dream-mist, tearing apart thrall after thrall, their terrible, burning thorns shredding those revenants which I had in daytime spent so many hours restraining, constricting, binding to the service of the Rose. And yet, those mockeries of the White Rose denounced me from their shadows, chanting fragments of scripture and commentary, driving spikes into all of my daytime self-assurances, justifications for the use of my talents in the service of the Rose Herself.

My dreams were merciless. They made no allowances for the practicalities of modern warfare, of the needs of the service. The texts were the texts, the scripture was the scripture. And we – our compromises, our necessities – were nothing but justifications as far as my haunted dreams were concerned.

Damn them.

I was dead on my hooves by the time we were done. Not even stepping through the wide-eyed thralls of the military-police necromancers' thrall-coffles provided any serious challenge. The “nopony here, dead things” cantrips I had developed in my apprentice days remained a solid construct, and impenetrable by the lesser undead. It didn't matter that these rotting watch-dogs were wide awake 24/7 – if they couldn't see, smell, or hear us, who cares how alert they were?

It was the same tricks that Obscured Blade had used to assassinate the Beau in the Shambles. I refuse to feel guilty that a trick I developed had given the traitors a way into the blind spot of a nominal ally.

After all, we'd gone over the other side now. The only constant was the Company and the Spirit. Anything else and anypony else was – well, not nothing. But negotiable.

We walked away in a handy shadow before the sun crested the limb of the world. I was exhausted by the time we'd hidden ourselves away in the hold of one of the galleys, protected by snuffling, affectionate timberlings. They kind of liked me, but by the Peacock Angel, they loved Cherie.

I wasn't awake for the endless dissection of the campaign in the valley of the upper Housa. None of it was surprising, anyways. The Order's ponies had mulled over their officers' defeat, and their long passage through the fire. They had lots of opinions about what and how and why when it came to that battle's catastrophic failure.

They poured every syllable of those opinions over the officers and staffers of the army group's command structure. After all, those ponies had given them the officers who had led them into that unwinnable fight. Who had left them in a forward pocket for a week longer than they should have been, who had refused to retreat until we had been square across every line of retreat.

The officers were well and truly distracted by the after-action reports and the debates thereof. They didn't even think to question again the miracle of the 'mutiny'. Or to notice the strangely withdrawn affect of their MP escorts.

The seeds Cherie had planted were deep in the dirt, and although it couldn't be seen here on the surface, down below beyond sight and smell and hearing, they were germinating in warm and dark soil. And more than a few officers among the military police were notable by their heavy, bagged eyes and haunted expressions that day, and the days which were to come.

Comments

[Lesolan - Rest In Peace]

 if they couldn't see, smell, or see us, who cares how alert they were?

We're one of those 'see's supposed to be a 'hear'?

[Mitch H]

8281555
You're right of course, thanks for the correction.

[SWEETOLEBOB18]

After all, we'd gone over.....to........ the other side now. The only constant was the Company and the Spirit. Anything else and anypony else was – well, not nothing. But negotiable.