In the Company of Night

by Mitch H

The Curtain Comes Down, The Paint Comes Off

SBMS038

Our employer finally got bored, and left for the season. Our preparations for the Hearths Warming pageant had broken the Marklaird's tolerance for irrelevant nonsense and the daily grind, and it flitted off to find trouble and entertainment somewhere else, somewhere not here, in a province coming once more under authority and finding a, somewhat hungry, peace. It had actually laid down on a cot in the ward during the most recent "rehearsal", those unfocused play-sessions Gibblets and I had tried to subtly urge towards cutesy chaos and open-ended play. It was oblique enough that the warlock-gimp was bored rather than watchful.

It raided my Annals-chest one more time, getting in with distressing ease, and skimming my alchemical texts and the most recent pages of my volume. It was the fourth time the little undead bastard had broken the surface wards on the chest and violated the sacred memory of the brotherhood, just torn through the centuries-old guards and locks which should have kept out gods, and read our collective mail. That thief of memories, that mind-raping abomination!

I've been unable to keep a second copy of the volume, or an alternate version of my pages. What we have is what was written, and the writings are intrinsically bound to the chest itself. The Marklaird tried to steal books from the chest, but even it couldn't do so without setting off a pyrotechnic flare. It managed to hide the results of its attempted theft of a middle volume of Fatinah's Book, and from its prospective, it must think it destroyed one of our precious Annals. This might explain why it was restless, and why it fled in a cloud of boredom, pique, and distraction. We now had a very good reason to wish our employer ill, if we hadn't had one before.

It didn't know how lucky it was.

The wicked old warlocks of the Company's middle age had wrought fiendish layers of protection over our precious Annals-chest. They had anticipated threats such as a lich of vast and subtle power, one capable of picking the magical locks on the outer shell of the dense onion-ball of witchcraft that the battered old ironwood and cold iron concealed within itself. Forcing the locks with magic un-sealed with the Company essence triggered the dummy filing system, swapping out opportunistically-generated shelves and pyrotechnically trapped texts for the modified retrieval system to serve up to the interloper. The physical interior of the chest itself was magically and physically identical in dummy filing mode, or at least so I'm told by Shorthorn and Gibblets. Which means that the only true danger to the Annals themselves was the tracking-device pseudo-texts the Marklaird stored in the chest on its second and fourth intrusions into the system.

I had Shorthorn - who was better with the witchery-maintenance on the Annals chest than Gibblets, who had never served as Annalist and never contributed anything active to the chest's fiendishly complex array of spells, matrixes, and cantrips - look over the Marklaird's attempted contributions to the Annals archive annex, and work out how to shift them into shielded, double-blinded "suspect materials" pockets. Then we quickly worked out how to tunnel the "pingback" subsystem the Marklaird had built into his little tracking devices, so that he didn't think we knew what he had done. This was technically Shorthorn's second contribution to the vast and sprawling Annals-complex, and by contributing, Gibblets broke his cherry on working on the chest.

Later, as they recovered from the ordeal of major magical engineering to accommodate the Marklaird's first tracking device, I used Shorthorn's first contribution to the protection complex of the Annals. I viewed those holographic records, that flickering phantasm of the leather-bound warlock breaking the surface-locks of my chest, and rooting through its interiors, stealing pencils and paper, reading my books, re-filing them haphazardly. The second intrusion, reading my own book, putting that little infernal device back into the same shelf as my reading material, reference books, my own book in the writing.

Obviously, I had to start censoring my Book. We couldn't keep our employer from breaking into the chest, not without alerting it to our knowledge of its betrayal of our privacy and sacred memory. We could only control what it saw from there on out, and sculpt its knowledge of what we thought, how we thought, what we knew. Omission followed omission, technical truths turned entire chapters into oblique banalities, while leaving the facts of the Company nothing but interstitial insinuations and meaningful code-mongering.

Which reminds me before I forget:

Dead of exposure in the observation posts over Benoit and Radspur Keep, Dark Clouds, a pegasus stallion, whose death was not recorded at the time to keep the Marklaird from realizing that we were keeping a close watch over its target throughout the fall.

Dead of multiple stab wounds in the first storming of Radspur Keep, Geomar, griffin, who led the assault that broke the rebel defense of the keep's donjon, and blocked the stairs from the lower levels of the central tower into the library-level, as other Company brethren ransacked the shelves and display cases. The time Geomar bought with his life gave them the opportunity to retrieve the texts and devices the Laird had been searching for, without its knowledge. Several other griffins suffered debilitating injuries recovering his body from the stairwell he had defended, and they had to damage the lower levels extensively in the course of the operation. Which is why we shaped matters on the second storming, so that the Marklaird only saw the upper levels of the keep, and why we came in through the solarium the second time.

But returning to the rape of the Annals. We could not keep the warlock who paid our bills and licensed our presence in Tambelon from ransacking the chest at will, so we - I, really, turned my book into fiction, a tissue of not-quite-lies, never actually writing down a falsehood, but not recording many truths, or the true context of the later half of our campaign in Rennet. To be fully truthful, I had been careful of my words since the first inkling on the road down from the portal that the Marklaird had an unhealthy interest in our Annals, and took care to never dwell on our opinions and knowledge of the true state of political-magical affairs in Tambelon, or the true nature of our immediate employer.

We attempted several times to make contact with the Marklaird's superiors, only to discover that it had no superiors, not between it and its own Mistress, the Bride of Tambelon, empress and imperatrix.

Fellow abomination and lich.

My Book so far has left the impression that the Company is a tunnel-blind fool, doomfully focused on proving its military worth, disinterested in the moral character of its employers and the details of their rule and sources of power. Or, at least, I have strove to leave that impression. Gibblets has rebuked me on a number of occasions for sounding, as he put it, “like a fire-breathing anarchist and abolitionist”, so perhaps my strivings have been less than successful at times.

The truth of the matter is that we are in the employ of a deathless animated corpse, a remnant of evil days walking the world, a memory of that ancient and safely entombed necromancer, Lord Grogar. Many centuries ago, a crusade of paladins and righteous wizards took Tambelon by storm, and in conjunction with the sainted alicorn White Rose, had put down the barrow-lord and his army of undead, and his deathless warlock-minions. The lesser undead were destroyed, and Grogar locked in a massive, fiendish complex of interlocking self-repairing spell matrixes feeding on the dark magic that constantly, endlessly billows from his cursed pelt. His minions, those which their conquerors could not destroy outright, were locked into reinforcing tombs surrounding the great necromancer's tomb, and gave their moiety towards the continued imprisonment of their defeated lord.

Some damn fool let some of them out a few centuries past. The stories about why he broke the seal bought with the life's-blood of a sacred alicorn are as varied as the biases of the tellers, but the long and the short of it was someone fell in love with a pretty face, and made a mistake, and that pretty face put him in the dirt as a replacement for her own carcass, and rose up in all her power and glory into the foolish vacuum of post-Grogar, post-White Rose Tambelon. Tradition holds that the Bride had been an earth-pony slave bought by the great necromancer. He had murdered her, raised her up again, somehow triggering a post-death alicornic ascension, into some sort of demi-lich corrupted variant on alicornhood. She had been his loyal Dragon, his right hoof and the breaker of rebellions and betrayals. For the undead lich made an uncertain and dubiously loyal minion, and Grogar's empire was vast in its power and military might, but as politically instable as the most cross-grained of dictatorships. From all accounts, his lich-minions spent as much time fighting each other as they did rebels and traitors against the imperial order.

Surprising every foreign observer, the Bride did not resurrect or free her lord and master, but rather, selectively extracted a few fellow-lich minions to act as her generals, and proceeded to carve out her own imperium from the disorganized feudal rabble which covered the territories that once had been Grogar's empire, and the independent territories beyond that he had merely terrorized into compliance. By about fifty years ago, all of Tambelon groaned under the heavy hoof of the new lich imperium.

And then she did something unexpected. She opened up trade, and pulled back the generals from their oppressive direct rule, and built the Roads. Tambelon prospered for a few decades. And then she was punished for her disregard for the principles of The Princess, and her encouragement of prosperity was rewarded with rebellion, disorder, and civil war. Thus our entry into Tambelon.

I don't know what the Bride expected. Her generals - now 'legates' - thrived by, and indeed, required, deaths born of violence to survive. Creating a peaceful dominion full of prosperous burghers and long-lived ponies was the exact opposite of what those monsters, upon which she had built her power, desired and needed. The only real question was whether the new White Rose was somehow a legitimate rebellion, or whether the rebels themselves were as fully in the employ of the legates as the Company itself.

We had seen no lich-sign in our war with the local White Rose in Rennet, nothing not obviously left by our own employer, who, I am told, oozed a fell trace of death-magic behind it like a snail behind its shell. It was, to all outward and detectable appearance, a truly local rebellion, composed equally of opportunism, tribalist discontent, resentment and the petty failures of equine nature. The caribou had been bottom pony for too long, and took their chance when they saw it. An ocean of blood later, they were back on the bottom again, and had thus provided future generations the 'proof' required to keep them subjugated to their outraged earth pony and donkey neighbors and betters.

Our careful play-acting, undoubtable military effectiveness, horrific capacity for violence, and surly shamming had convinced the Marklaird that we were sufficiently reliable, and it had read us into its plan to raid the library at Radspur Keep. It was foolish enough to mention that it wished to examine the genealogical records of the family who maintained the Keep as their seat of power. It was obvious that it was not interested in the latter-day Counts of Benoit, who were obscure nobodies subinfeudated to the Duc de Rennet, and who had only controlled the Keep for a century or two previously according to my independent research. But Radspur Keep was old, terribly old, it pre-dated the Grogarian Imperium.

That was obvious enough once we had the clues.

So we planned out a campaign to "draw away" the rebel forces into the east of the province, and set up an elaborate operation to raid Benoit and Radspur when the rebel broke and chaos was at its height. The Marklaird, in its rotten, death-loving heart, was enraptured with chaos and complexity. There was nothing more it loved than telling stories of the fiendish, involuted plots it had executed against various bureaucratric foes and rebel leaders. It had not told these stories to any in the Company, but he certainly liked to impress his underlings. And he had left one of his underlings, one Dior Enfant, in our care for an entire season, unsupervised.

She had been ours inside of a month, secretly sworn to the pikestaff after six weeks. She took the Company-name Dancing Shadows, and her eyes took the thestral taint as soon as she kissed the shaft. She had been primed for brotherhood, in her youth and young adulthood, her training under the ruthless sway of a soul-swallowing lich. It was almost a release, being folded into the wickedness of the Company. Sort of a moral step up, as it were.

It thought it held the soul of Dior Enfant in the bulb of its hoof, and never noticed when she was reborn as Dancing Shadows. The Marklaird's arrogance and pettiness blinded it to the spy within its camp. It helped that we kept her far away from her nominal laird, busy running its, and our, spy network in the province. Which in truth, she was under instructions to use to lay the foundations for an orderly re-establishment of imperial authority as soon as the fighting subsided. It was, after all, the supposed purpose of the Black Company in Rennet, and who could be blamed for accomplishing the actual, explicit goals of our employment? She was also trying to make contact with the Bride's bureaucracy so as to provide a direct channel of communication with our employer's leash-holder.

So, we knew, or rather suspected furiously, that the Marklaird's targets in Radspur was most likely old records of the founding dynasty of the lordship which originally settled this corner of Tambelon. While we were fighting for control of the eastward Bride's Road through Lait Blanc, Gerlach's commando had quietly left camp, and set up for an assault on Radspur, mostly unsupported. It barely came off before they had to return and prepare again for a "second" assault on Radspur. We were very lucky that nopony had any sleep-deprivation-driven accidents during the second operation. They had been able to clean out the oldest records from Radspur, and claimed all the artifacts stored in the library display cases while they were in there. Griffins, they can't resist shiny objects, and the delicate carved eggshells had taken their fancy, apparently.

I was frankly astounded when they delivered those eggshells and the accompanying ancient scrolls into my hot hooves. I knew the eggshells had to be magical artifacts from the simple fact that they had survived the rough ride in my brethren's saddlebags without being smashed to calcium carbonate dust in the process. I panicked, and shoved them and their scrolls into a protected storage container within the Annals-chest, one supposedly perfectly-shielded from external scrying and unlikely to allow corruption of the spell-matrixes of the chest-complex itself. I had barely gotten myself calmed when the messenger arrived to convey me to the final planning-session for the "actual" raid on Radspur.

Ever since, I'd been nerve-wracked, expecting the Marklaird to discover our betrayal of its interests, to come storming in and disassemble my carcass & force me to open up all the secrets I held as Annalist.

And now it was gone, petty, petulant, flighty.

Good alicorns-damned riddance.

Author's Note:

And that's the pay-off. Hope that doesn't piss anyone off too much, but unreliable narration is a core component of the Black Company mystique. It is explicitly a narrative, a sort of performance. And both Sawbones and I were well aware that he was being watched by something other than posterity in his writing. He left enough of the paranoia-inducing terror of discovering the true extent and origins of the Company's 'tutelary spirit', as he calls Nightmare Moon, to confuse the actual villain about the little notes of deception and skittishness on the part of the the narrator and his subjects.

Comments

[ponygrad]

...epic.

I did wonder for a second why the griffons were mentioned to be tired, but figured it wasn't for any special reason.

[CaptainPipsqueak]

I hope the Marklaird gets beaten to death with a golf club.

[Mitch H]

9866776
Nothing so kind.