• 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 Liberators

SBMS034

Later that morning I exchanged notes with the surgeons and doctors the militia had brought with them into Rennet. Apparently it was quite the thing among the medical professionals of Verdebaie to take a commission with the militia. It made one popular with your clientage, and helped you make political connections. There were five surgeon 'lieutenants' and a sub-lieutenant apothecary in the well-appointed mobile hospital they had dragged behind the Verdebaie Division's supply train, and an academically-trained Major Doctor leading the whole circus. They didn't quite outnumber their patients, but they had the situation well in hand. Well, I exaggerate. The tents they had set up in the muddy fields east of the little city were full of sprains and a considerable number of fever cases, as well as the few crush-cases from the militia division's brief brush with heavy catapult fire.

I wasn't quite sure how the militia had managed to wash out so many flu cases in a campaign of less than a week, but the average militia-pony was older than your standard mercenary or professional, wasn't in nearly as good a shape, and in general wasn't used to camp conditions. I was informed that the ponies I was looking at were actually only the current overflow - hundreds of sick-cases had already been sent home.
The III Verdebaie had been the best, most professional regiment in the province, which is why it was chosen to be flown into the province ahead of the rest of the division to act as shock-troops. Their shaky performance on the road west of Lait Blanc looked to their peers like a heroic stand worthy of legend. The "Mighty Third" was apparently already the toast of the division.

And the division was itself the toast of the town. They were greeted as liberators by the giddy townsfolk, who had spent a terrorized fall cowering behind locked doors in fear of the boogiepony, the winged demons who swooped hither and yon across darkened skies, spreading blood and destruction across the district. These were the towns-ponies whose caribou overlords had conscripted them to clean up the mess we had made of that sacked regimental compound, who had been compelled to dig out the roasted remains of the bulk of that regiment from the cinders of their mess hall. They had done their best to ignore the gory trophies and fetishes we had planted on every road leading out of the city.

Lait Blanc, in short, was in no mood to celebrate the Black Company. But they were glad to see the rebels' backs. They had stolen from the civilians, beaten ponies and donkeys in the street, and generally taken out their own terrors and anxieties on the aching backs of the civilian population. We found larders and sub-granaries, full of foodstuffs stolen from the neighboring farms and the city itself, stuffed inside the scorched walls of the grand castra which the caribou had re-constructed from the remains of the previous regimental compounds, again with conscripted civilian labor. The soldiers of the caribou regiments had been too good to build their own walls, and they sloughed the work onto other ponies whenever they could. Even the small minority of civilian caribou in the city were hostile to the rebel by the time the regiments fled the district. Excepting of course those few rebel profiteers and politicians who had seized the management of the city and its trade from the families who historically dominated both.

I heard stories of the donkey and earth pony families who had been decimated by the rebel occupation, more than a dozen who had been hung for their supposed loyalty to the Imperium. I heard these stories, of course, as two dozen caribou – most of them ancient bucks, excepting a few foals no older than Rye Daughter - were being whipped through the small city square by an enraged crowd baying for blood and hangings. The actual villains, of course, had fled with their immediate families beside the regiments in the night. These captive ponies were probably cousins or aged uncles or perhaps even just distantly-related neighbors of the fled first families of the rebel in Lait Blanc.

I trotted off quickly from that scene, and found the militia division's MP company, engaged in "evaluating" a tavern across the street from the city gendarme-station as their new "headquarters". I convinced the most sober, most senior MP non-com I could find to roust out the troops and take over the punishment of the rebel scum ongoing in the square. They managed to get the bulk of the guilty locked into stocks, including all the foals, and then proceeded to hang a random six of the elders from the gallows helpfully left by the previous regime for the use of the incoming administration.

Some of whom were even now emerging from damp cellars and back-rooms, looking considerably thinner and ragged than you'd expect of prosperous burgers. But they were the surviving relatives of the old guard, and chances were they would be easily elected by acclamation to their ancestral, if not hereditary, offices. They watched the hangings with hard eyes.

I resolved to keep Rye Daughter out of the city, and left to find my oxen and the road back into camp.

Mad Jack was still at it as I passed his work-crew on the road from the Bride's Road back to the compound. He was extending the planking from the original corduroyed exits of the complex along the farmlanes, and had broken up the partially-completed mantlets they had been building earlier. I couldn't imagine he was going to get that much road completed before we abandoned camp for some other task. The Marklaird clearly wasn't planning to leave us to sit in castra hiberna for a season, the hyperactive little gimp.

Camp was notably empty, aside from the security detail and the crowded wards of the expanded infirmary. A line of chuckwagons were headed out as I came through the gates, the cooks reverting to their carter status, hauling cooked if cooling food out to the cohorts in the field.

Rye Daughter was right where she was supposed to be, stirring a boiling pot of whitening rags and bandages over the hearth-fire. I picked her up and gave her a slightly muddy hug, which she did not understand, not in the least.

Although it gave the conscious convalescents a good giggle.

I looked around the Company-ward, and announced the victory in Lait Blanc. There might have been whoops of joy.

I took a couple of moments. Then I got back to work. I had found a cache of medical texts, journals, and alchemists' encrypted compendiums in one of the unlabeled storage-sections of the Annals-chest. There was a vast amount of material in these books, matters I'd never heard of from my master, or things he'd alluded to but kept as masters' secrets, the parsimonious old mule. Much of the material was, sadly, in Zebric or Feresi. I was currently checking all the unmarked storage compartments of the chest, looking for Equuish-Feresi and Equuish-Zebric translating dictionaries. I was somewhat ashamed of my piss-poor Zebric skills, which to be honest were never really up to snuff, and what I knew of Feresi could be carried around in a sewing thimble. I was damned lucky the Company tradition was to keep the Annals in Equuish, even going back five hundred years, in a land where almost everypony around them spoke Feresi or its sister-dialects.

There were marvelous stories of the abilities of the zebra alchemists of old. And I was tired of not being able to do anything about cases like the Captain.

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