In the Company of Night

by Mitch H

The Pestilent Theatre, or, The Audience Melts Away

FFMS048

The collapse of the dying necromancer was the straw that broke the camel's back. We called in the emergency reserves and alerted the rest of the Order on the southern shore for the possibility of a call-up. Salted Soil was taken aside to be cleaned up and sanitized with our limited supplies of antiseptics, while the shivering necromancer was bundled off to be put with the rest of the hopeless cases on the far side of the triage. The healthier survivors were bunked out beside the open gates of #16, while a couple of squads cleaned out the most viable shelters within the walls. The plan was to turn #16 into a grand recovery ward. Meanwhile, the ad-hoc medical corps raced against the clock and the weather.

The storms were returning.

The fight for #15 consumed the rest of the afternoon and the brief winter's evening. I could feel the eyes of the guards in #17 and #13 upon our fight. Nopony else from command showed up to question our peculiar operations, or issue directions, or even take notice of our presence. The other necromancer who had accompanied her dying superior was dehydrated, feeble, and absorbed by the heavy burden that was the maintenance of control over her master's thralled ghouls.

She ended up on a cot along with the rest of the survivors that we thought might make it. While she laid down, head stubbornly up, I tried to talk her into letting me put down her thralls before she exhausted herself and they ran loose anyways.

“These were given into our care. They are our responsibility. I signed for these. It will debit against my house's balance sheet if I let them be put down. Where the root did you come from, anyways? I don't recognize that barding. You're not with the military police!"

“Marsh Wisp is seconded to the MPs from a support battalion, Sister Nutsedge. There aren't nearly enough of us to assert the control your 'house' has lost here on the northern bank. And you will let her do what needs to be done."

“Take them over, and sign the transfer, and you can do what you want with them, Sister Salted Soil. You MP ponies have always been cavalier with your herds. But as long as my house's fetishes are flagged over their shoulders, they're to be preserved!" The necromancer's wind weakening, this exclamation left her coughing.

“Fine. Consider the paperwork 'done'. Corporal, collect the thralling needles after you're done disposing of the excess stock. Return them properly cleaned when you're done. Sufficient unto the day, Sister Nutsedge. We are very busy cleaning up your mess. Good day."

I rolled my eyes, uncomfortable in my backup Order guise. The disposal of the combat corps ghouls was a simple, disgusting matter, and I didn't even need anypony's help piling up the offal after I'd cut their throats in a protected space beside #15's walls, hidden mostly from sight from the inhabited camps to the west and east. We didn't have enough burnables to destroy the remnants in penny-packets, so I'd have a squad haul the load away when the companies clearing #16 were done with their own butchery.

We would have enough pyres and their resulting pillars of smoke to explain as it was.

The reserves arrived as the butchery was mostly over, the sun fleeing the scene like a fugitive. They fanned out to secure our hoofhold on the shore, allowing the MPs and our 'ghoul corps' to displace eastwards to see if the combat-corps element supposedly clearing #21 had done so, or had collapsed like our apparent liaison had.

It was a good thing that this was done, because the situation around #21 had gotten totally out of control. Little bands of ghouls were out in the open, and the gate had been overrun. Almost the entire force, both the one that had stormed the quarantine camp, and the smaller one that had been securing the walls, had fallen out of control. The inhabited camps around the outbreak were fully forted up, and their bolt throwers were thumping irregularly as clots of undead tried for this or that stretch of wall.

There was an incident when one of the defenders' bolt-thrower teams opened up on our approaching relief force, until shouting in the gathering darkness resolved the misunderstanding. The defenders' very bad aim spared our ponies from being cut down by friendly fire, but did not impress me with the competence or training of these shaky White Rose front-line troops.

These were the survivors of a year's fighting around the Second Mouth?

Well, the answer proved to be, no, not really. The veteran troops – those that had survived – those had been among those battalions that we'd been observing, the ones evacuated away from the hot zone. These were rear elements and new recruits brought in by the most recent troop ships. Brought in and then left to die by command officers who had decided to cut their losses, or to season the raw troops by immersion, or I know not what stupid command-pony-thought-process, such as it was.

The rambling, savage ghouls that had overrun the riverbank near and around #21 were, by and large, already thralled. Or, I should say, they had escaped their enthrallment. My best guess is that the rest of the squad or two of necromancers who had been controlling this mess had succumbed to their illness in some sort of cascade effect, each trying to pick up the slack when their fellow-sorcerers had dropped their own command-lines. The entire unit had ripple-fallen, each pony's tenuous grasp on their necromantic magic torn away by the sudden burden pulling them down in turn.

They were all dead now, shuffling hidden somewhere within their own wildling herds. Our line-companies were exhausted by this time, but they still dropped down their lances and couched and pushed forward. The last of the light abandoned our troops as they pushed forward, and the fighting was done in gathering darkness. It was a pity we hadn't brought the pikes, it might have helped keep the ravening dead from our throats. As it was… ponies get tired where ghouls don't.

The Nightmare walked among our fighters in the darkness, and gifted them with strength, and the thestral eye, and brought with her the inspiration and talents of a hundred Company veterans volunteering their remote guidance, and still, we lost ponies in the fight for #21.

Sorghum Stocks, pulled down by three shamblers on the flank and savaged before her rank-mates could react. Fir Bank, who bled out from a deep bite on his right rear leg that nopony noticed until he fell over senseless. Yard Arm, who died likewise from a similar wound on her upper left fore-leg. A former Company jack named Pouliche Chasseur; three mares named Honey Pot, Sugar Loaf, and Open Lot; a stallion named Shim Shake. Not a single fatality during the morning and the afternoon's fighting, and then – so many.

We should have sent in the reinforcements instead, but these were our oriented ponies, the ones who knew the ground.

And they paid for it.

While the Nightmare and I oversaw the bloody suppression of the Combat Corps' failure around #21, Cherie took advantage of the night and its shadows to search for the missing commanders, the missing necromancers all along the northern shore, and in and around the tumbled and burned walls of the Second Mouth. From my account up to this point, you would be excused if you thought of this mess as if it were an unpopulated chaos of ghouls and the dying. And there was that aspect to it. But there was still nearly two dozen battalions of troops scattered in isolation in their fortified camps all up and down the shore, and within a number of the bastions of the fallen city and its enormous port-side citadel.

Within the shattered city, were roving bands of free ghouls, risen from the wreckage of the fighting, and the most recent of what had been a series of epidemics that had wracked both combatant sides. Cherie danced through the shadows of the ghoul-ridden night, searching for living civilians, necromancers, their patrols, and fortified outposts. The last of these were present, but besieged, and the surviving necromancers and their herds of enthralled ghouls hid behind strong walls. Those that were still well; Cherie also found several necromancers' fastnesses full of sick, sickly, or dying blood-mages, desperately attempting to quack themselves through the throes of the sickness before they lost control of their 'herds'.

An anxious Nightmare, light-hooved and uncertain, pulled me from my unlearned assistance to some of our medics, trying to help purge the sickness from some of the least-stable victims, running their blood through an improvised cantrip they'd talked me into witching up on the spot. I had Sawbones riding my back-brain like a foal riding the back of a pig, making suggestions as he watched me through an instance of the Filly.

“You have to get her to come back out of the field. She's exposing herself!" insisted the Nightmare.

“Who's that, Mistress?" I asked absently, watching the steaming liquid float through the air as I rotated loops of living blood.

Nevermind that, get that gore back inside the patient. I can't be sure this will do anything at all, but I know that if it goes *cold*, it won't be any good at all, groused the Filly in Sawbones' terse manner.

I roped the 'gore' back into the patient's opened veins, watching carefully to make sure the magicked blood didn't spill or carry any foreign objects into the flesh.

“Cherie! Our Idiot Rose! She insists on walking through open charnel houses full of infection. She's not a Peacock-damned alicorn, to ignore illness so carelessly. We're going to lose her to this disgusting plague!"

“Whatever led you to think that Cherie listens to a word I say, Mistress?" I watched as the medic sewed up the patient, and wondered if that flush was a sign of the cantrip working – or evidence that we'd just killed this soldier.

“Feh. I don't care what you think you have leverage over, or how you lack in it, or whatever. Add your voice to mine, and I will be satisfied! Assuming that the foal hasn't already caught the crap, and is on the slope towards a foolish death even now. That foolish, foolish child…"

I caught some sleep after rotating the blood supplies of a dozen patients, having thoroughly exhausted myself. Upon finding myself within the dreamworld, I found very little rest in sleep. Our bodies might lay down, but our minds? That belonged to the Nightmare, who never gave us pause if she was exercised, or fired up with one of her grand furies. And the White Rose exposing herself to the ghoul-flu was certainly cause for a fury, I'm afraid.

The Nightmare had pulled a surprising number of ponies into her anxiety-meeting that night in the grand dream-palace which she made her throne-room. The Captain and the Lieutenant of the Company, Stomper, Whispering Wheat, even Salted Soil found herself sitting restlessly in the council-seating, with our grand Mistress fuming in the sovereign's throne.

We talked among ourselves, waiting for the last pony summoned to the council. Hour after hour, the subjective time ticked away. Some ponies found other uses for their night-time, leaving notational imagoes to hold down their council seats, and I know for a fact that Sawbones was busy elsewhere on his endless medical rounds, even though his imago sat passively upon his divan, waiting the pleasure of the Nightmare and the eventual appearance of the White Rose when she deigned to appear.

It was a long, very long time before Cherie finally answered her call.

“Foolish foal! How long have you left us to wait on your pleasure! Tell us true, what foolishness have you been indulging your personage upon?" bellowed the Nightmare.

“Mistress, thank you for your endless patience, my lady! I have been, as I ought to have been, busy upon the front-lines, attempting to dispel our ignorance, to find out where we stand here! What we don't know towers over our tiny horde of knowledge like a dunghill is overshadowed by a mountain-range!"

The Nightmare snorted at this aggressive counter-attack. “Foolish foal! Your eagerness matters naught, if the sickness which rolls over the field of contention, takes you away from us without warning! We are eternal, but you – you! You are as mortal as any pony in the ranks. Plague can take you without warning, without protection, without emphasis. You can die like any other mortal pony, and you need to take care. You, you are not an alicorn. You are fragile, and breakable, and vulnerable. Be ware! Be careful, take care! We cannot spare you."

The thestral's ears folded down under this assault, as she absorbed the Spirit's rebuke. “Mistress, I recognize your point, your concern, your warning. But I am not exposed as those ponies you worry over. I am the pony of shadows and dreams! I am not impervious like you are, but my methods, I think, I give me some more protection than simply trotting through the rotted streets I've flown over tonight."

Nonsense, declared Sawbones. You are no more protected against the simple infective exposure of a plague than I, or any other physician under the protection of the Spirit. Don't rely on your dream-walking to protect you from your own foolishness, pouliche!

If it were possible for a pony's ears to fold any lower upon their skull than the thestral's had before this, I think Cherie would have found a way. She looked as if she had been whipped. “Oh, Monsieur! I swear to you, I have been careful. I have not contacted these ponies which I haunt, I have not come into physical contact with these precincts which I walk. I am safe, I swear to Luna!"

You don't get to make those determinations, you young fool. Get back to the medics, and have them work you up. I want you hosed down, checked from dock to snout, and cleaned up. Then we'll see if you need to be put into quarantine yourself. You can't play around with this plague, pouliche! It's a killer, worse than our last dance with the 'jack. If it were possible for the Filly to stare sternly from her low vantage, she managed it, glaring down her elder self, the past chiding the present.

“Sawbones, she's not the only one that needs to go into quarantine. The entire strike force is crapped up, I'm pretty sure. We've had MPs vomited on, almost every single line pony got a muzzle-full of gore or filth, and I've been dropping blood all over this tartaran half-acre."

Bah. There's exposed, and then there's *exposed*. And no offense, jenny, but you're not as important to the plan as our pet White Rose. She's the fulcrum upon which your entire outfit is dangling. If she goes down for the count, you're all hanging flank-side up over the abyss.

“What's done is done," said the Nightmare, magnanimously, now that she'd gotten others to do her disciplinary work for her. “Cherie, what did you see, what did you find? Is there anything living in that ruined city over there?"

“Ah! Yes, I was very surprised. Numerous clusters of living civilians, hiding here and there in the fortified houses, town-fortresses – and even an entire walled district, full of living ponies, not even sick! Marvelous, truly. Oh, I should say – not ponies. Caribou. Stern looking bucks and does, too, if shorter than the northern ones. Didn't think to find them down here. But there they are! Armed, vigilant. Looked to be on good terms with the White Rose, too. There were guards outside their gate, and armed guards within. The guards without, they didn't look too good, but the ones inside, they were clever, they kept them at a forearm's length."

Interesting! said the Captain, listening in on the conversation. There had been a large population of caribou throughout the Riverlands, but the last twenty, twenty-five years wiped out most of them, drove them out into the empire, exiles all over the place. What are these bucks doing here?

“A merchant enclave," contributed Salted Soil, huddled in an intimidated puddle before the powerful personalities of the Company, and those members of the Order who listened without speaking. “They defended their own walls from us, while the loyalist army besieged us in the inner harbour, and fought us outside the walls. The Caribou Quarter maintained an alliance with their overlords, until very recently. It wasn't until we had driven the loyalists outside of the walls, and were fighting the enemy army in the trench networks outside that they agreed to terms. As soon as the last loyalist was driven out of the old city, the Caribou capitulated. Before we could even move a storming party against them, get the sappers redirected against their internal walls. Before that? We'd concentrated on the force which actually presented a threat. All they did was defend their walls."

She blushed, thinking of something unspoken. “And they defended those walls valiantly. An entire battalion was lost early on, when a division commander thought to push through the civilian-held sector last winter."

“So," I said, thinking through the problem. “They kept to themselves, they held their own walls, so long as they had allies to do their fighting for them, and when they lost those, they surrendered promptly. So, smart, careful, well-thought out. They're survivors. How have they been feeding themselves?"

“Grain merchants, ma'am." Salted Soil had not yet figured out my exact position within the Faith. I wore so many faces among the faithful, that she may very well have thought my youthful glamours were themselves falsehoods, that I was actually as old as Obscured Blade, or Gibblets, or the rest of that whole generation of ancients. I left her to her misapprehension. It was nice to be treated like someone's elder for a change.

“Grain merchants, holding vast supplies of milled wheat and barley and oats, and supply-warehouses for more, while the loyalists still had access to their gates and their passageways. When the loyalists were driven out of the walls, they left behind their stockpiles under the protection of the caribou merchants. This may have been why the loyalists, when they pulled back, they just kept going until they retreated right out of the riverlands. They'd left their supplies with the perfidious caribou."

“The Bride's loss, was the caribou's gain, then," I observed. “Well, good for them. Caribou have been entirely too kicked about this last generation or so. They deserve a break or two. Uninfected, you think?"

“Nothing I could see," said Cherie. "Which is more than I can say of the blockhouses the troops inside the city are occupying. Two out of six are full of sick and dying. We need to get in there and clean house. And the necromancers are failing inside as fast as they are out here. There are a lot of thralled ghouls milling about in there. If their masters start dropping, it's going to be another Caribou City, I think."

It sounds like it's already another Caribou City, observed Sawbones.

“Not yet, Monsieur. C'est un cils qui va de cette façon, though."

Equuish, pouliche.

“No, no, we got that one, Sawbones," said the Nightmare. “What will it require, Cherie, to keep the Second Mouth from going the way of Caribou City?"

“I think we have to throw over the charade, Mistress."

“Throw it over, why, you've barely begun your deceptions!" scoffed the Spirit. "What a brief and sorry performance, to close the theatre-doors not two weeks into its run! Why should we end your current pantomime?"

“Because we need to gain the confidence of the survivors inside the city, which we cannot, wearing ghoul-face and puppeteering the military police. They're not well-suited to lying, barely two weeks in, and they cannot keep up the pretense!"

“Is this truth, or indolence? You have not put the work into maintaining your story, your legend, Cherie. Isn't it that you just want to play with your new toys?"

“You would know about playing with new toys, Mistress. I'm bored! I hide in my box, and twiddle my hooves, and shuffle my wings, and wait for the signal for 'La rose blanche de la machine'! Bah! I tell you, bah!"

“I cannot do anything with this fool from the machine, Feufollet, take her away with you! Enough! The charade continues!"

And so it did. The next day, we poured the Order into the restless, dying city in ghoulface, as the Nightmare called it. We dressed the commanders of each battalion in military police drag, and marched like mechanical ponies, dripping glamour like gore upon the shattered pavement of the conquered city.

Nopony interfered. Nobody even moved as we advanced into the diseased city, hidden behind barred doors and barred bastion gates. The whole of the rebellion upon the Housa was huddled in a paranoid terror, cringing away from the pestilence which stalked the bitter-cold streets inside the walls, and the wastelands outside the gates.

We continued our playacting to an empty house, while our grease-paint dripped underneath the hot lime-lights.

Comments

[IceHawk]

Seems like the site is acting up again, lots of story updates and no notifications or them rising to the top as updated.

Anyway, nice to see the story got featured once more.