In the Company of Night

by Mitch H

Losing My Temper, or, The Insult

SBMS059

The campaign chewed up resources faster than we anticipated. Our construction stocks in particular were drawing down perilously fast. Mad Jack had always consumed iron and tools like they were popcorn, but exceeded himself that spring and summer. We had half the ironsmiths in Menomonie making nails, fixtures, and replacement tools, and it still wasn't enough.

The food demands of the civilians and militia we were dealing with in Pepin were themselves prodigious. The seven years since the fall of Caribou City had produced a significant dearth in the neighboring regions, one not alleviated in the least by the stream of refugees pouring out of the province, nor the heavy fatality rate among those that remained. Our foodstocks on hand were more than sufficient for a unit our size, but once asked to stretch to cover those we encountered in our operations, our supplies evaporated like the morning dew. And it wasn't as if we could turn them away. Local guides were vital to making heads or tails of the tangled geography of the Pepin gorge country, which was a maze of blind canyons, tangled narrow coves, and the occasional hidden cave complex, which we were positive were hiding at least a few ghoul nests. And a leadership vacuum in the province was almost as severe as that which had opened up in Rennet the winter before.

Mention of one problem and its resolution brought up the obvious solution to our current problems. A chariot from the desperately overstretched charioteers' corps and an escort were sent west-north-west to find Pepin Castle and the wayward Duc. The castle-town and the hoof-full of districts around it had been isolated from the rest of the province by the fall of Caribou City. Pepin Castle was positioned on a stony bluff over a ford on the River - the last fordable point on the River, in fact. A walled town had formed around the skirts of that bluff, with gates towards the ford and the road to the south.

It was simply preposterous that the officers had chosen to send their surgeon once again on a diplomatic mission, but there I was, gripping tightly to the side of an airborne chariot, surrounded by an armed honor-guard of pegasi, looking down at the Bride's banner flying from the highest tower in Pepin Castle. The old duc died of shame and sorrow in the days after his foremost city was wiped from the map by his lords and masters. The ducal coronet fell to a child, a jack who went by the name of Rollo Murs; after a few years, the rest of the province referred to him as “roi derriere les murs", and mostly ignored his presence. It was not hard to ignore him; his presence outside of the district around his castle was nonexistent from what I understood.

We pulled into a landing in the open yard outside of the citadel. It was an old fortification, dating back to before the first Domination, and again in the centuries of chaos in between lich overlords. In those days, the territory beyond the River was another country. It was one, once again, with the White Rose having revived the defenses of the old bison fortress on the lower bluff facing Pepin across the River. Neither side truly cared to kick off hostilities this far north, this far from any important trade-routes or agricultural riches. The land behind the White Rose fortress was rich enough, but its surplus was shipped on interior lines away from the River, and no strategic plan ever conceived would have featured an attack from an isolated cul-de-sac like Pepin City across a defended river, or vice-versa. The White Rose could attack, and probably take, Pepin City, but then they would have seized an isolated canton under constant threat of being overrun by the undead denizens of Caribou City.

Frankly, from Duc Murs' point of view, I didn't see why he hadn't gone over to the White Rose, if only to get attention, negative or otherwise, from the players in the game. As it was, he was dying on the vine.

We waited in that courtyard for far too long, and my guard began to get nervous, shuffly. I told off the charioteers, and suggested they catch a cloud overhead and park the chariot somewhere away from curious eyes.

If there were any in that silly place. They should have sent someone out to hail us by then.

As the chariot spiraled up out of the castle, a civilian finally came out of the citadel, a valet or butler by the look of him.

“Greetings milud, what might the ducal palace do for your lordships?" Equuish?

“The building can do absolutely nothing, you bet. But my Captain sent me up here to talk to a duc, le Murs or something like that? Supposedly owns the land we've been fighting a clearance operation over the last two-three months now? I'm here to give a progress report, ask for support, check and see if the duc is still breathing, actually exists, that sort of thing."

“The duc is not accepting visitors at this time. I am sorry you had to travel all this way to no good effect."

“So you do know where I came from? Somepony's paying attention to the war going on in your province?"

“I'm sure it's none of my business, milud. I will see if I can find an aide-de-camp to answer your questions." The old earth pony shuffled off to find a soldier. You'd think an active military post would be hock-deep in them, but we hadn't even seen a spear on the walls coming in. Were they hiding?

Another relic shuffled out from the gates of the citadel, an ancient in a kettle-helmet and a chain of office, her long ears poking up out of the headgear. The castellan was polite, but uninformative. The duc was not in the castle, nor was his officers or court. I should perhaps try the district to the south, there was a procession scheduled through the hamlets in that direction.

I summoned my ride back down from their holding pattern overhead - no clouds could be found in that high summer-blue sky. I polled my escort and the charioteers, and we decided to do a lazy spiral southwards and east, and if we found a large body of troops or somepony obviously wearing a ducal crown, great!

No such luck. The farmed bottomland below Pepin Castle and southwards were in better shape than the wastelands around the Bride's Road and up the gorges to the plateau, but wasn't a patch on the better-defended farmsteads of the plateau proper. The wooded slopes to the east and the occasional riverside bluff to the west had to be as infested as the terrain the Company was bleeding and dying to clear to the south, unless the duc had been fighting a better fight here than I really expected of a provincial noble and his pocket army.

I didn't spot any ghouls, for what that's worth. Not that they'd be rampaging about in the broad daylight anyways.

We didn't find the ducal army, either. Although we were able to interrogate a couple farmers haying their fields, at least once after we talked them down out of their tree forts. No, I'm not kidding. The civilians in this district had taken to building little reinforced hidey-holes in tall trees nearby outlying fields and orchards, high enough to keep away the ravenous dead, ladders which could be pulled up, murder holes drilled through the wood so that they could pelt the ghouls from above while yelling like hell for reinforcements. Seriously - they had wooden trumpets bolted to these little fastnesses. They looked like something foals with funding might build as play-houses, but it was all in deadly earnest. And it said more good about the efforts and coverage of the ducal armed forces in the region than anything else I'd seen. The presence of the tree forts showed that the farmers were willing to fort up by themselves far from their own walls, and wait for the cavalry.

It meant that they thought the cavalry was coming, and that wasn't nothing.

We had almost given up finding the duc and his ponies when one of the pegasi spotted a tell-tale cloud of dust heading to one of the outlying hamlets partway up a gorge about twenty-three miles from Caribou City. The trees pressed close to the fields in that country, and the farmer-ponies worked in tight huddles, their scythes swinging swiftly through the grasses, and their gatherers moving rapidly to tie behind the reapers. The duc and his armed party were moving for the walls of the hamlet as we approached, and I noted the burnt slopes around the village. The charring was fresh, and I was willing to bet that there had been an attack here, recently.

We dropped down over the rushing armsponies, and I waved a white rag at the well-barded figure at their head, a red cloth fluttering from his lance carried like a standard. He spun his lance in a circle, and pointed off to the right, to an open area away from the gate of the village. We spiraled into a landing as the ducal escort spread out in a protective array. He had three dozen ponies - mostly donkeys with a scattering of caribou - with him, all of them seriously well-armed and barded. Lances, axes and javelins, and most had a flask at their belts, some of them carrying forked poles. They were clearly armed for ghouls.

The impressive donkey was half again as tall as the largest one I had ever laid eyes on before then. If I didn't know otherwise, I'd think that le Duc Murs was a mule, and one crossbred with an al-Hisani or Saddle Arabian at that. There were few ponies in the Company as muscled or tall as le Duc, and we weren't exactly a gathering of hollow-chested academics. He had a great axe at his belt, and his lance was bladed along two-thirds of its length.

“Your Grace, your servant. My Captain has sent me as a representative to your court to discuss coordination in our operations in your province. We've been clearing the northeast plateau and the region between the plateau and the ruins for the last two months. We have… been wondering when you would intervene - er, I mean, inquire as to our activities in your lands."

“You'd be the new horrors I've heard tell of, in the outlands? The thing that's been driving pony-eaters into my territory? Burning slopes, sending smoke and fire into the skies all summer long?" I was appalled that this was all that he'd gathered from our campaign. All that slaughter, and all he'd taken from it was the occasional brush-fires touched off by Bad Apple on one of her rampages?

“We are the Black Company, in the employ of the Bride your sovereign, following our sanctioned commission to clear the taint of the White Rose and their effects from the northlands and the northern fringe of the Riverlands." Self-commissioned, and hardly sanctioned, but that was our position, and who would argue our case if not us? “We are following the rebel remnant in their flight from Rennet. The ruins of Caribou City and their effects upon your province are blocking our advance, so we are clearing the obstruction."

He sat back on his haunches, and laughed. “Clearing the obstruction! Well, isn't that a charming euphemism. Are any of my villages in the northeast still standing? Mercenaries! Almost worse than the undead. At least those can be put down and burnt. As long as there is a denier in a cubbard somewhere in a standing shack, you can never get rid of mercenaries once they descend on a district! Coin is the very dragon's-teeth of the mercenary, once planted, they grow from the soil again and again, no matter how often you cut them down! What damn fool cursed me with a plague of mercenaries?"

The young Duc looked older than he was, and his fronting was all bluffness and heartiness and cynicism, but I had his measure now. The big jack-child was terrified. He had no idea what was going on. Now that I'd gotten a close look at his ponies, I could see the wear and the patches. These arms-ponies had been run off their hooves. And as the sun dipped towards the western horizon, I could see their eyes drifting towards the gates of the neighboring hamlet.

“I'll be sure to let the Captain know. She loves mercenary jokes as much as any other armed savage, almost as much as we love bits. And your grace, we love bits a great deal! Will you be sending any representatives to negotiate for supplies and other matters in the 'out-lands'? We've been acting in loco dominus, but we can only make so many promises in your name without actually having, you know, met you. There's been a minority opinion among the Company that we ought to just offer the lordship of the plateau and the gorges to the new Duchesse de Rennet. Her we can find and argue with. You they've been out of contact for… most of your reign, really. Not speaking for the Bride's government here, but your neighbors and subjects in general." My teeth were damn near chattering.

He blushed hotly, and barked in outrage. “Damn your black hide! I've been stuck in a pen between the White Rose and the ravening undead for seven long years! Any delegation I send past Caribou City disappears into the black, never to be heard from again, unless I send half my army in escort. We fight every night to hold the walls, and every morning to put down the new nests forming in the slopes above our heads! I haven't had a full night of sleep in two years…" He was tearing up, and ready to tear my throat out, all at once.

He shook himself, and remembered his audience.

“Truly? Bibelot couldn't spare a regular regiment?" he asked, arrogantly. “Mercenaries?" he sneered.

“Your grace, why are you out here? In our sector, unless we've cleared the neighboring gorges, this is not exactly a safe position at this time of evening. There's clearly been some action here, that slope over there is still smoking in places. Do you need to get inside the walls?"

“We were going to sweep the woods above the burn, but we got here too long, and your rabble distracted us. Yes, there was an attack here last night." My eyes were drawn to the farmers filing past our parley, calmly leaving the half-mown fields behind, their scythes trailing in almost military posture, making for the open, guarded gates. I looked over to my escort of pegasi. I was about to do something really stupid.

“Corporal, survey the cove, see if you can spot movement or an obvious nest. Report back to me, here. Your grace - I take it there's no open ground inside the village?" He snorted, and shook his head ‘no'. I looked over the double-brace of javelins attached to my chariot, and pulled my lance from its rest on the frame, and my darksight charm from my bags. I eyed my saddlebags, and realized I didn't want to lose the contents if it came to fighting. “And is there somewhere I can put away my bags inside the walls? I've got some delicate materials in here, I'd prefer to not break anything."

The pegasi flew off to quarter the immediate treelines, and I walked over to the cleared area in front of the gates. I hoofed my bags to a startled farmer, asking her to keep an eye on them, and promised to do a clinic for the hamlet if the contents were undisturbed in the morning. I eyed the charioteers and their rig. Then I told them to go plant the chariot on a rooftop somewhere, and strip for individual combat. I felt a little like I was watching myself, like I was watching a play.

I started taking my javelins out of their braces, and plunging them in a half-circle facing away from the gates, close to hoof where I could reach them without looking. The charioteers returned, and one asked me, “Sawbones what the tartarus are you doing? There's barely a half-dozen of us, and only you on the ground."

My pegasi escort returned, and reported. The slopes were full of ghouls, a full four dozen or more, lurking just above the burn-scar. The Duc's escort could probably fight off that number, but the ponies of the hamlet, unsupported, might have gone down under those numbers. His grace knew his business, certainly enough, to be here, now. The hamlet was about to be overrun.

“Sawbones, do you want one of the ‘nobody but us pony-eaters here' charms? We have enough for all of us." My ears were full of a roaring sound.

“Somepony needs to be bait."

“No they don't!"

“Cover me from above. We're going to show them what it means to be Company." Damnit. I was doing it.

I eyed the huge donkey aristocrat, with his bloody great axe and his long lance. He had the position, the attitude, and the blessing of the Creator. But I had the Company behind me and in my blood, and he had gotten that blood boiling. It wasn't exactly his fault, but my zebra was up, and I trembled with something that had to be let loose if I weren't to start screaming at the one true ruler of this land that I stood upon, this soil into which my hooves were digging in deep.

The sun was down, but I could see the slopes and the trees above as if it were under the full glare of clear-skied noon.

“Your grace!" I snarled, all false courtesy. "Might I beg the use of your axe? My equipage is not suited to what I can smell coming. I am not, after all, one of our frontline troops. My usual weapon is a scalpel." Or, in extremis, an archival chest.

“What is your name, mercenary?" he asked, looking uncertain. He looked uphill, beyond which were the ghouls that his ponies were even now, forting up against behind the walls behind us. "To do what you're proposing is nothing but suicide, and in the morning we will have to put down your risen remnants, and burn the dismembered parts!"

“My name is Sawbones! Annalist of the Black Company!" I breathed deep, knowing that I was summoning the ghouls by making noise like this. And shouted at the top of my lungs, "I can only die once! It is the one promise my Company has made to me!"

I took a length of rope, and tied my belt to one of the javelins buried in the sod behind me. It was something I had read in one of the annals… somewhere. Something the bisons did, to hold a position. They buried a stake, and tied themselves to that stake. This far and no further, and no retreat. The Duc's eyes widened with… something, and he tossed the axe at me, and it buried itself beard-deep at my hooves. I took up the shaft with a yank, and swung it experimentally. My lance joined the javelins in their earths-embrace. I turned away from the village walls and their darksight-ruining torches.

The gates closed behind the Duc. The bait was out.

My breathing smoothed into a circular rhythm, and I could feel the night gathering about me. Within the darkness, the dead things slunk, circling like living beasts. As the light faded above me, my eyes adjusted to the darkness below, and in a blink, it was as bright as day, as were the monsters within it. These were the ones old in death, the ones in the front. They were cautious, almost aware that I was a threat. A threat I could see as clearly as these lines I scrawl upon these pages.

The newly dead passed their cautious elders in death at the half-run. I reached back and flicked a javelin at the foremost ghoul, an earth-pony so fresh you could barely tell she was dead. It caught her through the eye, and she went down like a log tossed into a stream, sliding. The next caught its javelin in the neck, and spasmed, twitching for all the world as if it were dying again.

Then the rush reached me, and I took the great-axe in my forehooves, and swung about me furiously. The darkness was clear, and red, and the clotted filth that once was ponies' blood splattered about my position like rotten berries striking the soil. The air above was split by the wings of my brothers, and their hoof-blades cut the spines of my attackers, piled up in front of my position and stopped by their own numbers. When the flurry was settled, almost a score of corpses surrounded me, most of them killed by my black-winged guardian angels.

I kicked the unmoving meat out of my way, clearing my fighting position. I may have left the windrows of dead in front of me, as a rampart, but it was unintentional. I wasn't thinking much, and I had tethered myself to my javelin, and in order to push off the further corpses, I would have to un-tie myself.

The second wave came with a rush, and my thestral night was tinged red again. The glare from the torches at my back stretched across my battle-field like shadows before the eyes of ponies of the day. It obscured more than it revealed to my night-adapted eyes. The axe chipped, and the shaft splintered, but it held together. And my brothers protected my back, dicing the ghouls that tried to find my flank. I took many shallow cuts, but nothing close to the vein or deeper than a deep scratch. One critter nearly got her teeth into my left fore-cannon, but a punch with the axe-shaft in my right caved in the front of her skull, and she went down like the rest.

Breathing like a bellows, I fought for air. There wasn't anything moving in front of me. I looked around, and discovered that I had thrown all of my javelins but the one holding me in place. I thought about untying myself and retrieving my other javelins, but decided that it could wait until daylight. I stood there for what felt like hours, and nothing moved in the brilliant darkness and the distracting, flickering torchlight. The pegasi circled about, and eventually came to rest on the walls behind me between the torch-holding ponies of the hamlet.

“Do you think they'll come again, corporal?" I yelled, not looking back at the walls.

“They'd be fools to do so, Sawbones!"

“Shame we don't have a proper vexellation here, this is good hunting. All I can do is put down the dumb ones. The clever ones are just going to hold back and wait for easier prey on some moonless night. Come and get it, you mindless abominations!" I was the brainless one, to try and provoke things that couldn't understand speech, couldn't really think as we think of thought.

It still attracted attention. Another half-dozen came snarling out of darkness, as if they thought they could surround and surprise me. I had given myself a longer lead on the tether in the waiting, and met them further out than I think they had expected. It wasn't much of a fight; the last two went down to pegasi wing-blades, and then my brothers flew out to look for a fourth wave.

The fourth wave never came. Dawn found me slumped wearily beside my javelin stake, the axe-blade in the gory dirt at my hooves. I looked up at the creaking sound of the gates opening. I yelled for my pegasi, and untied myself. We checked each corpse to look for ghouls shamming. We found two, and put an end to them. The farmer-ponies dragged wood out for a pyre.

It would have to be a Grogar-damned big pile of logs to burn this mess.

When the Duc d' Pepin came out of the hamlet, I hoofed him his great-axe, and apologized for its condition.

And he ordered one of his soldiers to go back with us to act as his delegate in our half of the province. The charioteers retrieved their rig from the roof, and prepared to leave with our delegated aide de camp. An earth-pony came up to me with my saddle-bags, and I belatedly remembered my promise to look over the ponies of the hamlet, do a bit of a clinic. She told me, wild-eyed, that they'd take a pass on that.

I left the javelins. We took the delegate.

Author's Note:

Damnit, Sawbones. I've been telling ponies you aren't an action-hero. Why'd you have to go and make a liar of me like that?

Comments

[Minalkra]

The madness is spreading ... Captain Sicilian is Captain in name only perhaps? The Spirit found another more interesting Acolyte - or perhaps thus is something newer than Sawbones knows

[Mitch H]

7637135 Nah, not everything is the Spirit's fault. I don't think. Sawbones reacts oddly to authority. Something more than a little Oedipal in his make-up. Even if the Duc is half Sawbones' age, and really just an overgrown kid in over his head, he did seriously insult the Company's honor. And sometimes the only reply to an insult like that is to drop a stake and tie on the old dog-rope.

[DoomManta]

Making the Spirit of the Company proud, keep up the good work Sawbones.

[totallynotabrony]

It was simply preposterous that the officers had chosen to send their surgeon once again on a diplomatic mission

Very convenient for narration, however.

[Mitch H]

7640702 Sigh. If you can't hide it, hang a lantern on it.

[SWEETOLEBOB18]

I was about to do something really stupid.

So, why should today be different than any other day?

[Bookeater_otaku]

It was one, once again, with the White Rose having revived the defenses of the old bison fortress

So once upon a time there was Bison around. Interesting. Is there a reason we haven't seen some of them yet? Or more Oxen? And are there Yak somewhere in Tambelon?

We didn't find the ducal army, either. Although we were able to interrogate a couple farmers haying their fields, at least once after we talked them down out of their tree forts. No, I'm not kidding. The civilians in this district had taken to building little reinforced hidey-holes in tall trees nearby outlying fields and orchards, high enough to keep away the ravenous dead, ladders which could be pulled up, murder holes drilled through the wood so that they could pelt the ghouls from above while yelling like hell for reinforcements. Seriously - they had wooden trumpets bolted to these little fastnesses. They looked like something foals with funding might build as play-houses, but it was all in deadly earnest. And it said more good about the efforts and coverage of the ducal armed forces in the region than anything else I'd seen. The presence of the tree forts showed that the farmers were willing to fort up by themselves far from their own walls, and wait for the cavalry. It meant that they thought the cavalry was coming, and that wasn't nothing.

Fortnight.

I'm sorry! But I immediately thought of that when reading this. It show a lot of ingenuity from the local. Maybe it could be applied back near the fighting or those 'libarated' town. I am sure Mad Jack would be delighted by such project.

Mad Jack is one of my top favorite secondary character in this story.

An earth-pony came up to me with my saddle-bags, and I belatedly remembered my promise to look over the ponies of the hamlet, do a bit of a clinic. She told me, wild-eyed, that they'd take a pass on that.

Ah, the same principle as the horrible tasting medecines. Taste so bad that you keep yourself healthy through sheer force of will. In this case, the surgeon is so scary that you would prefer to "walk it off" than consulting.