In the Company of Night

by Mitch H

The Quintains

SBMS046

The apprentices and I were taking our leisure one early spring afternoon, towards the end of the thaw. We were beside the main marshaling yards, which had been set up for training, to take advantage of the fair weather. The new recruits were laboring under their new corporals, having been broken up into new sections and leavened with veterans, as was the Company practice. They had a lot of bad habits to break, not least of which was the reflexes bred in pike-ponies. The training and habits of the caribou in their tight, narrow phalanxes would betray them again and again, if allowed to continue un-corrected in the Company's preferred loose formations and lance-centric tactics. The Company could not spare the pony-power necessary to maintain a proper pike phalanx, and we were trying to break the new recruits of their pike-bound training.

Quintains had been set at both sides of the yards, and the new recruits with their new lances were rushing from one end of the practice-field to the other by section, trying to catch the dangling water-jugs on their gallow-frames. The goal was to pith the oaken jugs, so that the water burst all over the practice-field. Done right, and the jugs would positively explode. Done wrong, hit off-centre or too softly, they would merely spin, mocking the trainee. The yards were mostly dry and untouched but for the hoof-prints in the sawdust when Shorthorn came out of the compound's inner gates, chortling with glee.

"We've got revenant-sign! Finally something to experiment with!"

Gibblets had explained to me - after he set my head right about Tambelonian necromancy - that they had been monitoring all of our burial-pits and mass graves from the campaign last fall. The Company badly needed data, training, and exposure to the undead if we were going to survive the Riverlands, let alone thrive there.

It simply wasn't something that appeared all that often in the Annals. I'd gone through the two Books which mentioned the undead at all, but they were thin on details, and only one of the Annalists had encountered undead which lasted long enough to leave much of an impression. al-Hazar's Company had rousted out a fell necromancer from her remote fastness in the further peaks of the jibel-Rebmin. She had conjured soldiers from dragons-teeth and bones, and those skeletons had charged the allies of the Company and made great slaughter among them, killing many, some of which the witch had raised from death to wage death again against their fellow horses. When the Company's ponies joined the battle, to cover their shattered allies in their retreat, the undead fell apart, their death-magic departing their bones and leaving them piled where they were struck. Once the Company realized its apparent advantage, they quickly swept the evil things from the killing-ground in front of the necromancer's gates, and quickly found and murdered the unseelie sorceress. This was the most impressive mention I had found in over five hundred years of Annals of necromancers and undead. Not much to go from.

So, our witches had been monitoring the kill-pits of the campaign, setting a magical guard over the slain across the province. The occupation battalions and the Company had been collecting the dead of the final rout from their unburied repose across the roads and fields where they fell on the retreat. There had been a few reports of revenants haunting the back-roads and side-hamlets, but none had been captured as of yet, and only a few burned out by enraged farmers and offended travelers. Fire was a known solution to the common undead, at least the sort that simply rises from the unburied dead.

But the mass graves, the burial-pits with dozens or hundreds of dead caribou, those were expected to yield a healthy crop of violent, aggressive, blood-thirsty undead. Battle-dead, even those technically buried in mass graves, are reputed to be particularly dangerous, more dangerous than anything that wasn't specifically raised by a proper necromancer. So we were farming the burial-pits, staked out and awaiting any tugs on our magical trip-wires. And they had stubbornly refused to rise, all winter long.

And now one of the mass graves was showing activity - one right in our front yards. The mass graves from the double ambuscade on the Bride's Road west of Lait Blanc were apparently heaving, disturbed by bona-fide revenant undead. Possibly even ghouls!

We sent a message to the occupation militia in Lait Blanc, inviting them to the festivities, and turned out the entire Company. It was a chance to get everypony blooded, used to dead things that moved of their own accord. To get ourselves accustomed to things that should not be, so that we didn't cringe, or hesitate, or pull a stroke. The aerial cohort, less their detachments and observation posts scattered across the skies of the province, flew off to envelop the experiment-area, to make sure that we weren't leaking undead across the district. The ground cohorts and support elements streamed out across the corduroyed access roads, leaving only a skeleton crew manning the walls and gates of the compound. The new recruits abandoned their pells and quintains, and joined the rest of the Company with their semi-blunted practice lances.

The burial pits had been dug on the north side of the Bride's Road, across the drainage ditches in a bit of brush border between the ditches and a farmer's fallow fields beyond. The officers sent off a detail to remove the farm-family from their homestead, and escort them to their neighbors or relatives' homes until we were done with our experiment. No point in leaving civilians anywhere near pony-eating undead, no matter how many arms-ponies might stand between them and getting devoured.

There were only a few ghoul-type undead scrabbling about in the brush when the Company's ground cohorts hooked up with the aerials, and surrounded the burial-ground. But you could see the heaving soil over the rest of the dead, and there was a lot of movement. The ones we could see were only the ones that had found the surface. The Lieutenant went into conference with her cohort commanders, and soon after, the pegasi and griffins spread out, to systemically search the fields and woodlots in the vicinity, making sure that we hadn't lost any ghouls or revenants before we had gotten on-site. We settled in to await the militia. We could have started in on the visible ghouls, but there was a specific experimental schedule the witches-coven had drawn up, and the militia were the first item on the list.

The ghouls didn't care to await our experimental protocols, and once one of them spotted an unwary Company unicorn who broke cover, the lot of them charged, like rats or a flock of birds. One second they were all digging about in the brush, hunting voles or something like that, and the next they were lumbering towards the hapless unicorn, screeching horribly.

He pulled out his sword, and neatly bisected the first one to reach him. It fell, without any further movement, and we all yelled at him to get back. He did so, in a bit of a panic, with two more ghouls scrabbling in his wake. The rest looked around at our hooting, and paused. The two ghouls on the unicorn's heels were transfixed by bolts from his fellow bow-unicorns, and there was a brief pause as the remaining undead seemed to actually *think*, and stood there, drooling and oozing unmentionable fluids onto the soil as the day faded into twilight.

Supposedly the undead become more active in the dark, we'd see if that was the case, here. The two ghouls struck by bolts seemed less mobile, moved as if actually hurt, even though they had not been struck in the head or spine, supposedly the only way to put down a ghoul with conventional weapons. They behaved almost like living caribou struck through with arrows in their guts or flanks.

Various Company ponies began performing their own unsanctioned experiments, hooting across the dusk brush, out of sight of the ghouls, but certainly not out of ear-shot. The undead spun about at each new noise, clearly tracking our presence, if not exactly clear on the exact position of any given pony. Then an entire section's noise apparently caught enough attention that a hoof-full of ghouls charged off in that direction, and managed to overrun that section's position. The earth-ponies and donkeys of that section scrambled back, stabbing at the undead with their lances in a panic. One ghoul spitted itself on a screaming donkey's lance, and she dropped her weapon and ran for it. It was not our finest hour, but this was why we were out there, to get those dead-thing jitters shook out in controlled conditions, rather than on the chaos of an actual battlefield. The other two ghouls in that bunch were again filled full of darts and bolts from the bow-unicorns, who were getting in a good deal of practice at moving targets that evening. The spitted ghoul didn't move again, and its two friends dragged themselves back towards the burial-pits, almost as if they were wounded, one moving as if its rear was paralyzed.

More ghouls were dragging themselves out of the pits, and from the heaving, we had a great deal of dead things to amuse the troops for the balance of the evening. We managed to avoid further provocations, and an hour after full dark, the militia finally showed. We might have gone on without them, but Tickle Me had provided updates assuring management that the militia were on their way, just moving slowly. They brought fire with them, flaring torches. The ghouls saw the fire, and charged through our lines, two-dozen or more of them. There was a brief fight as they hit an un-prepared pair of sections at their seam, and more Company ponies got in some battle-experience against the undead. Several were hurt, bit, or gored on the undead caribou's sharp, broken antlers. More ghouls went down with Company steel in their rotting hides, and those did not get back up again.

Six ghouls managed to find the seam, and charged the head of the militia with their damn torches. They were cautious enough, and the militia fell back before the onrushing undead. The unicorns were out of position to repeat their earlier performance against the ghouls, so the militia was mostly on its own when those things caught up with them. One went up in flames as a pony slapped it in the face with a burning brand, but the others rolled over that unfortunate, his screams tearing through the night as they began to eat him alive. His fellows fell on the undead, stabbing at them with the spears, but somehow their steel spear-heads did not seem to have the efficacy of the Company's weapons. The five un-burning ghouls killed that poor pony, and drove away the rest of the militia, hissing and snarling. They tried to fling burning torches at the feeding ghouls, but no-pony could get close enough.

Finally, a section of Company earth ponies approached, one reaching out for a spear from the cautious and frankly shaky militia, keeping their distance from the ghouls as they finished their meal. The Company section surrounded the five active ghouls, and the one with a militia-spear closed with one of them, stabbing it in its flank. The ghoul shrieked, turning around and flailing about with its rack of antler, nearly taking the earth-pony's face off with a well-timed swipe. But the ghoul's left hind leg was dragging, and it was slowing, and then the earth-pony stabbed it in the chest with the spear, and that ghoul went down for the count. The other four exploded from the half-devoured militia-pony, driving the Company pony back, and the rest of the section moved forward with their Company-issued lances, and spitted two of the four, stopping them dead. The third managed to maul the Company pony with the militia-spear, and the rest of the section dragged him back, their lances keeping the surviving ghouls from following them.

The bow-unicorns finally came up on the scene, and shot down the rest of the ghouls who had broken confinement. They did not move again, neither the one cut down with the militia-spear in the hooves of a Company pony, nor the burned ghoul, nor the ones cut down with Company lances or Company projectiles. Militia-ponies with burning torches inched forward and burned the corpses, and containment was reasserted.

Throughout the night, the pits belched forth dead things, and the Company and its officers conducted their experiments. Fire, projectiles, various flavor of witchcraft and infernal devices, pegasus-dropped sabot spikes, all sorts of tactics were practiced. We suffered numerous wounded, as the ghouls were clever and quick, and once we had a set of undead break out of a tunnel behind what we thought was our containment-lines, and a couple chewed on some of the brethren before we could rally and destroy the escapees.

I did my best to clean out the wounds, but there was only so much I could do in the darkness, on the spot. We set up a quarantine ward in the evacuated farmstead, and I stayed out there for a couple days afterwards, observing the Company wounded, and one or two bitten militia. None of the Company wounded succumbed, but both of the militia ponies did, and they turned immediately. I had been prepared, with my lance to hoof over the expiring ponies. They went fast, with my steel in their throats almost before they started slavering for my heart's blood.

As the long night of experimentation was brought to an end by the morning sun, that sun-light revealed a collapsed pair of pits teeming with the surviving ghouls. The tired bow-unicorns surrounded the pits, and poured their fire into the now-trapped ghouls, the collapsed sides of the mass-graves giving them little traction in escape. Griffins and pegasi flew overhead, dropping incendiary devices into the muck, but the damp and the mud seemed to absorb most of that punishment. Unicorn arrows destroyed most of the surviving undead. In the end, earth-ponies, unicorns, zebra, caribou and donkeys had to descend ropes into those pits and drag the inactive ghoul corpses out into the open where they could be safely burned. Only a few of them were shamming, and by then the fright had mostly drained out of the brethren of the Company. The fakers were cut down by lance and sword.

The pits were found to be full of well-chewed bones, as if half of the dead had risen, and spent the winter eating the half that had not. It explained why it took them so long to set off our alarms.

The experiments were conclusive. Undead struck down by Company hoof were destroyed, however briefly, as if they were living flesh and blood. The same could not be said of weapons in militia hooves - we had even sent in some militia with Company lances to see if the effect was transitive. It was not; this is how I ended up with a couple revenant militia-ponies in my quarantine.

The only regret we had was not having thought to bring out the battle-lance standard, to see what effect it might have on the undead. If our plans to invade the Riverlands were to come to fruition, we might yet have the chance to discover that on the field of battle.

Comments

[Dorath]

So swearing to Luna makes a pony undead bane ... that could be useful. Too bad they're in country ruled by undead who might be angered by that little fact ...

I think the Company needs to look into a new contract on another world ...

[Minalkra]

Or try to keep this fact closer to their chest than the Archives. One thing that's good about being embedded like a tick - though the host does not want you, where you are might be more trouble to burn than the worth of it.

[CaptainPipsqueak]

a hoof-full

So... One?