In the Company of Night

by Mitch H

You Can't Leave The Planning To The Officers

SBMS056

Everypony took turns castigating my high-hoofedness. The officers for my disruptive behavior, the pegasi for putting them on the spot like that, even some of the donkeys for pitching Cherie to a pony with whom she shared no common language. And Gibblets…

Well, Gibblets was just generally pissed. We hadn't come to any agreement on the subject of the prophesy of the Pythian oracle. In fact, we had at some point exchanged positions on the subject of its accuracy and purpose. I had found myself defending the prophesy, and the good will of the prophet who made it. It might be because I was the one who kept the prophesy, who remembered it. Gibblets only had my memory to work with. When you are the keeper of a secret, its guardian and archivist, you find yourself with a vested interest in its truth, its accuracy, and, in short, its worth. Who wants to find themselves the protector of frauds and falsehoods?

There was another point of contention. He had a long, indeed ancient history with the Spirit, or, at least, the pony which had birthed the Spirit. We were not at all certain of the Spirit's exact relation to that long-banished alicorn. Gibblets insisted that his mistress had been banished, physically and essentially, to the moon of Equestria, and that supposedly her mark was still upon that celestial object, a veritable "Mare in the Moon", to this day. I don't know how he could argue "to this day", since by his own testimony he hasn't been back to Equestria since the banishment, but I was willing to grant him this fact in evidence. The point remained, she was not visiting his dreams, nor had he clapped eyes on her ectoplasm since the first apprenticeship ceremony. I had related to him the dreams into which she had walked since then - and there had been over a dozen - and in detail. But in the end, it was mere testimony, second-hoof at best.

I was his dealer for Princess, and that was a strain.

I calmed him down by describing the new dreamscape, and our conversation about the thestrals. Rye Daughter returned from her self-defense class that the Dodger's knight was giving for the foals. Charleyhorse's close call and loss of his own knight had scared all of us. There was little we could do to properly arm our would-be squires - they would grow out of any barding or hoofblades we sized for them, and they didn't have the body weight to put behind lances or other serious weapons. All they could do was get each of them a decent pair of strap-daggers and train them how to cut hamstrings and run for it.

We went on my long-overdue ward rounds in the castra hospital, checking on the healing wounds of those caught out or overrun in the caribou's undead trap. Gibblets was still fuming about the Spirit's idiosyncratic version of history.

"I can't believe that's how she remembers it. Yes, she was Equestria's field marshal for generations, but it wasn't constant warfare! Maybe three serious wars in the sub-worlds in fifty years. And yes, Holstein got pretty burnt out, but none of those wars were started by Equestria. The fortress-cities were vital to the security of the Equestrian portals. The Arimaspi pushed us hard, one commando even got through on a subsidiary portal once, if I recall correctly. And the night-haunts in Fallscarp, they had to be burnt out root and branch. No, not undead, not strictly if I recall correctly. More dark-magic, vampiric of a sort. That was after my time, I will grant you… Nopony could do anything about Flutter Valley in the end, other than declare the world Tartarus, and implode the portals up and down that section of the Chain, cut off an entire tributary of a dozen worlds. Two-three hundred years later, they found portals around the broken link... It would have been worse if the Smooze had been truly sentient. I had been working with the refugees of Flutter Valley at the time of the rebellion. Luna and the legions came back from the Fallscarp campaign to help put down the Sombra Domination in the Crystal Empire, and then you know the rest - rebellion, with her ponies on the wrong side of the portals from Celestia's point of view."

I finished up the general ward, with Rye doing the carrying and fetching. We went into the witches' private room, and I got out the potion materials to dose Shorthorn again. Some of the work I had done in vain for the late Gilbert's case had become of use in treating horn-burn. One or two more treatments and he might be fit for something other than back-seat hexing.

"What I'm saying is that her life wasn't all that horrible. Equestria wasn't a world-conquering tyranny. We only got pulled into defensive wars to aid allies and put down threats to the upper Chain. Nothing worse than anything the modern Company has been involved in, and a great deal better-intentioned than some things we've done."

"Gibblets, we're currently fighting for deathless liches, their eternal tyranny, and maintaining the dominance of donkey aristocracy over lesser tribes. Our standards for harrowing might be skewed," I observed, and turned to my next patient.

"Lady Languid, how are you feeling this fine morning - no, I must correct myself, it's now afternoon. Let's check your temperature and your wrappings." Despite all the mould-squeezings I had run through her system, and the endless washings of her wounds with antiseptic rinses, she had still suffered a series of secondary infections. Never enough to kick off gangrene, but it had been a damn close run thing. When we evacuated the castra, I was seriously thinking about shipping her off to the convalescent home, and maybe sending Rye Daughter with her to oversee her treatment.

"What do you think about the proposal to send the foals to Hydromel for the balance of the campaign into Pepin, at least until we clear out the ruins on the river?" I asked Gibblets as I checked Languid's stitching and infection sites.

"It doesn't feel right. They're sworn to the Company, I fear that there might be esoteric rebound if we separated them for that long. The Spirit might relapse, for one, and start going through her foal-oriented cookbooks."

"Lady Languid, what do you think? We might send you off to mind the foals if we send them away."

"Are you joking, Sawbones? Look at me. I couldn't keep up with a dozen hyperactive foals. Nevermind housebound, I'll be stuck in bed for months at this rate. They'll be a street gang inside of a week if we left them to their own devices in some poor unsuspecting market town."

I granted her the point, and wiped down her wounds, which if they weren't healing, at least they weren't getting worse. Rye Daughter hoofed me the antiseptic and the clean bandages, and we wrapped things up.

We went out into the front office, which was actually separate from my surgery. I would miss this place when we moved on - there was a lot of space, properly laid out.

"Master, you shouldn't send us away. I learn more every day, I might even be useful one of dese days. Bad Apple and Foufollet are doing great, ja? Even the new ponies are looking happy and healthy. Ja, it sucks for Charleyhorse, but dey found a replace for Hoppin' John, he's not being neglect. And vill you send away the new girl? You just brought her. She's interestin'."

Gibblets and I looked at each other, nonplussed. Little pitchers didn't just have big ears, they had big guts too. I just worried about ghouls sniffing around after those guts.

"How's those lessons Stomper has been giving you, what's she training you to do?"

"Run first. Run second. Cut their hamstrings and run third. Run fourth. Die hard, fifth."

Gibblets raised an eyebrow. "Grim."

"Foals in the presence of a ghoul pack is grim. That there is practical, I'll give Stomper that. Charleyhorse had the luck of the Company, that's for sure. She's talking you through how to keep to the rear of any given formation, how to stick to adults, that sort of thing?"

"Ja, Master."

"Good pony." I patted her head, and sent her off to find the rest of the foals. It was time for some refreshers on reading and writing. If they were going to stay, the new Captain wanted to use the foals as runners. I wasn't sure I liked that, but maybe after they'd grown into their legs a bit more…

"The first blockhouse is complete," I observed, "We passed one of the convoys on the way up. We may want to put one more up further down the Road, before we need to worry about a full-scale fortification outside of the ruins. That gives us, and you, time. How are the trials going?" I leaned back in the nice, comfy chair the last doctor in this office had left me. It was a much nicer hand-me-down than the packs of ravening undead that had come in the package.

"They come, they go, and nopony can figure the angles. It's something cyclical, we think, maybe."

"Lunar?"

"Even on this hellworld, the lunar cycle is too long to account for the differences. It's on a daily or semi-daily basis, not weekly or monthly."

"Tidal?"

"Huh. We've been so dryland this campaign, it didn't occur to me. Something for tonight's run of trials, certainly."

"We need every edge, every advantage we can wring out of this situation. The Riverlands are vast, and simply crawling with undead. Ghoul-hunting and community-policing could suck us down like quicksand, the entire Company could disappear into this bog without a bubble if we're not cautious. Even running a line of forts down the Road will stretch us further than I like."

"At least we've firmly confirmed it," Gibblet said, looking towards the apprentices chattering nearby. "Company hooves are undead-bane. They die like mortals if we're behind the blade or the dart, and they still fight like dead things - no science. And none of our ponies' bites have festered."

"Lady Languid's kind of the counter-argument to that."

"She damn near got gutted. That'll knock over a manticore, let alone a little thing like her. You're doing fine with her, and it isn't that it was a ghoul-caribou that gutted her, it was that she was gutted. Point is that we have angles against the ghouls and the revenants and the rest of them."

"A lot of our usual scams won't work on the undead. They generally don't have enough brains to fall for cons. You can't lead the mindless to outthink themselves. You can't get up the skeer on things without any sense of self-preservation."

"They also don't know enough to not just wade into obvious animal-traps, dirt-stupid stuff. They're dumber than dumb animals."

"I don't know, I've been hearing odd stories about ghouls running in packs like animals. Not intelligent, but animal cunning. The ones we were burning out when we found Cherie had apparently figured out how to drag living prey back home to their nest, and fed on them there. I honestly think they figured out how not to spoil their food by letting it go ripe too long and rising themselves as more maws to feed."

"Just by statistical probability, some of the undead wandering around out there in the wild have to be ten-fifteen years old. I don't think we ever see undead that old out in worlds with less of death to them. Creator alone knows how lesser undead develop if they're left to run wild that long. Maybe that's how you get liches?"

"Not from the stories I've read. But they are just stories, I will grant you. The Spirit remembered Grogar and the Domination, but it was all third-hoof or worse."

Gibblets grunted, and I acknowledged that we had stumbled into the portion of the conversation where we just told each other things we already knew. We broke off for our individual work not long after.

Much to do, before we could pull out of Menomenie and push down the Road into the Riverlands.

Comments

[Dorath]

Creator alone knows how lesser undead develop if they're left to run wild that long.

Hmmm ... interesting theory there, let "basic" undead run long enough and they might start developing smarts, keeping letting them run, and they might develop sentience ... and it's been, what, 50 years since the Riverlands went to hell?

[Mitch H]

7631318 No, more like fifteen years. The Bride established her hooves-off approach fifty years ago, and put her generals on a leash. That might have been the provocation, but the rebellion took some time to develop before things went to Tartarus. If you look at the English Civil Wars and the Irish Confederate Wars, it only takes a dozen years of war before the near-total collapse of social order in a premodern or early modern country. (The political roots of both extended a similar number of years before the actual outbreak of hostilities, btw)

The Thirty Years War left the Germanies a partially depopulated wasteland for nearly a century afterwards. And that's without zombie infestations, although that can be seen as a metaphor for the social effects of deserters, freelancers, and the bandits who are so difficult to distinguish from the first two classes after a few serious campaigns in a region.

[Dorath]

7631337 Ah, so 10 +/- years gets them to animal intelligence (roughly) and possibly wolf-pack tactics ...

Wow, if I had remembered right and the Riverlands had 50-year-old undead running loose ... <shudder>

[Bookeater_otaku]

I forgot to ask before: is the Dodger a Diamond Dog? It's not clear for me but the character is nebulous at this point and I only have the name to go on.

I must say that Luna and Nightmare Moon not remembering history correctly is both worrying and reassuring at the same time. She depict a very nefarious version of event that you need to take with a grain of salt but the world building you have made so far also make me lean towards believe some of it.

I also love how there is more than just shambling zombies to your undeads. There is just only so much variations you can do with that (single, groups, convoy and veritable tide of the stuff). Giving them some sort of intelligence keep things interesting and gives us a mystery to solve. Add to that some Specters and ghost and it give you a good base for the ferals one. These are feral right? I guess a necromancer could take control of them if he was in the neighborhood or at longer distance maybe with some magguffins... But at least they haven't came across flesh golems, armed skeletal warriors that know how to fight and living armor. Yet.

Who wants to find themselves the protector of frauds and falsehoods?

Emperor, Empress, King, Queen, Grand Vizir, President or any thing that can be distilled into some kind of government or on top of the food chain I believe. That action is also called "ruling".

It would have been worse if the Smooze had been truly sentient.

Hey now, Discord might disagree with you on that, this might hurt his pal feeling you know? Anyway, a good use of various event and side characters in this paragraph for context. Especially with the Smooze.