In the Company of Night

by Mitch H

The Flying-Column

SBMS007

"…as the cloaked storming party rushed through the betrayed gate past the shame-muzzled Amorian dogs, the darkened sky over the donjon in the near distance was set alight by the mage-fire incendiaries the aerial cohorts rained down on the garrison's main reaction force. Few of the Eighters held the walls of Jbayel on that sultry late-summer night, the Mare Tenebrium only beginning to breath cool sea-breezes on the glowing embers of the Cinebar Coast, and they had left the city watch to their own devices..."

As I chanted from the first volume of the Book of Fatinah, Sack and his brother beat a heavy cadence on these huge drums a sad-eyed Gibblets had found in a leather-goods shop in that port at the head of the inland sea. The western sky behind the rapt assembly and their vehicles strewn unhitched down the Road dimmed with the last furious fire of twilight dying. My muzzle under the hood of my shaman's-cloak must have been the only part of me the audience could still see, those not glowing-eyed with the darksight the warlocks were busy casting upon the brethren here and there as I spoke, in preparation for the night-march to come. No point wasting the time it took for me to conduct the evening reading; at the same time, the leadership were off consulting with the representatives of the first cohort, planning the night's airlift to the forward position they were constructing in the rebellious province below that last spark of flame in the west. I and my oxen percussionists did our best to conclude the reading in the proper style:

"The defenders found themselves not only unaware of the assault under which their walls fell, they knew what was not so. We were not there, burning the walls of their citadel, we were not in the souks of their outer hamlets, suborning the dubious loyalty of their heathen Amorian dog vassals, we were not in position to take the city by storm. The Hashish-mares and their sell-lances were raiding convoys three days march across the high passes into the Vaakaii that very afternoon, reported by a *trusted* source." Sacks' hooves flourished on the head of his drum at that exclamation in emphasis, getting into the spirit of the thing.

"A trusted source that had been compromised by the Company's witches for this very purpose. The watch were cut down post by post, all but the few dogs serving among their members, who turned on their fellows quite swiftly and ruthlessly, a decade of religious bigotry and abuse avenged without mercy in a sharp-bladed instant. The city walls fell before the Eighter garrison was even aware the attack was two-pronged, that there was anything but the bat-ponies and their flaming caracole above their ramparts, and while they were struggling to keep the reinforced walls of their citadel's redoubt from liquefying under the fiery rain, the Company's groundponies swept through the outer fortress's kill-zones before the defenders could get to the murderholes. The slaughter was swift inside the citadel curtain walls, and when we barred the gates of the donjon with their own lumber against the defenders inside their burning bulwark, it flared like the vast oven it had become. No Eighter emerged from the fuming furnace, and Jbayel stank of roasting horse-flesh for days and nights. The first great port on the Coast had fallen to the Company's employer al-Telekker. Hasaynn the Sightless used a cantrip to turn one of the hung ponies on our revenge-banner from argent to gold, and the first martyr had been avenged. Thus wrote Fatinah the Annalist, in the days of the Company's service to the Old Mule of the Mountain, his hareem of blood-thirsty heretic mares, and our own revenge."

The oxen went wild on the great hollow drums, battering the stretched cow-hide and producing a thunder like the enraged heart-beat of an angry God. I wondered what they thought of playing instruments made from the tanned skin of their folk. It seemed from their intensity like the perversity of it all appealed to them, but I was still feeling out the humor of these much-abused ponies.

Yew Wall walked back from the nightly conclave, which had apparently taken our drumming cue as a signal to break their own meeting with the conclusion of the assembly. She bellowed at the gathered Company, shouting for everypony to find their places, and the night-shift to get harnessed so that we could get this show on the road. The day-vanguard and its night-shift replacement had gone out ahead of the flying column, and the day's rearguard had joined us as the tale of the first fruits of Fatinah's meticulous vengeance had come to a conclusion of thundering drums in the darkness. We would leave the dark-shift rear guard lurking in silence while the main column chased the vanguard and caught up with the rest of the weary day-shift. The oxen of the night shift got yoked to their ambulances, which would house our share of the day's marching column, as well as their brothers of the day.

Thus we had spent the past five days out of the castra hibernia, marching patiently day and night, pausing every evening for me and the oxen to polish our performances before an increasingly tired audience, and briefly every morning for the cooks to distribute cold rations from the supplies. Nopony jeered at the readings anymore, or made snide comments. I couldn't tell if that meant that we were getting better, or nopony had the spare energy to carp at the nightly aesops of blood and vengeance and sly slaughter held in a hidden hoof.

There were more members of the first cohort with the column at that moment as we got ourselves back together for the evening road, than there had been for days. Two nights back, the main body of the aerials had surged forward, led by a handful of pathfinders into Rennet proper.

The Bride's Road lumbered implacably down out of the low timbered ranges around the head of the inland sea, ignoring all prompts of the landscape itself, merely following the inflexible and forceful command of the Bride's civil engineers, diverting streams and tearing down hillsides alike. It was a straight dagger pointed out of the ore-rich ranges into a land of fat farms scored flat and damp by the rake of a careless, vicious giant. Glaciers had cut this land smooth, leaving innumerable small ponds and lakes all over the landscape, separated by fertile soil bare inches above the water-table.

Everywhere that ponies hadn't beaten back the brush, trees grew thick in between prairies too soggy to support tree-roots. Everywhere that ponies settled – and they were everywhere in that land – the prairies were drained into rich blacksoil cropland, and the native woodlots cut down and re-seeded with endless orchards of fruit-trees, primarily apples. The earth-ponies loved their apples, and they had dug into this land like ticks on a diamond dog. Their caribou and donkey neighbors, on the other hand, had brought their cattle chattel with them, and maintained great dairy herds on the less promising soils in between the earth pony hamlets. The legate's liaison informed me, lounging that first evening in one of the ambulances, in between whining about her aching over-exerted legs, that the region was known for its mind-blowingly great wheels of hard cheese, which were delicacies prized across the whole of Tambelon. Despite the whining, she was already starting to acclimate to the way the Company did things. The resiliency of youth! I was so impressed I almost let her tell me her name. But not yet, can't spoil the young, or they'll grow up bitter and cynical.

So Tickle Me's harriers ranged into the rebellious province on the third night, carrying the enchanted darksight medallions, or at least, as many as the straining witches' section had managed to produce in those days on the road. They had converted one of the heavy carts into a travelling workshop, and it glowed and sparked day and night as they tried their best to make an assembly line out of fine smithy work and dark sorcery. They had produced enough by the third night that the pegasi and griffins managed to invade Rennet without anypony noticing, and without too many Company ponies running into trees or each other in the dark waning moon-light.

Tickle Me and her sergeants and corporals had a number of tasks, four goals, and one priority – Don't Get Caught. Of those four goals…
First was to map the theatre, and find the strategic points and lines of advance. We had the Bride's military surveys, but the province had been under the control of a rebel force for a full year at this stage of the game, and an active army in the field can change the facts of the ground given time and a free hoof. Likewise, we needed to know where the granaries and food stores were located, if they had been moved, where to, how were they defended?

This tied into the second goal, which was to acquire equine intelligence, sources and agents of influence. Again, we had what information the legate had left with command, but it was largely out of date, and we could only hope that the majority of the Bride's agents in place had not been betrayed, captured, or gone over to the rebels. Strike teams had been sent to the expected contact points and known residences of these agents, to retrieve the surviving agents in tactical chariots for consultations.

Meanwhile, the third goal was the acquisition of a satisfactory position for a forward base, not actually on the Road, but convenient, away from points which would be regularly patrolled by the Rebel, or reported by rebel-sympathizers. This would also make a useful place for debriefing of possibly-not-reliable agents recovered by the teams working on the second goal, and later, for interrogation of the ponies seized in the course of the fourth goal.

The fourth goal being… capture of key enemy personnel, and pathfinding preparation for raids on resources and strategic points identified by the surveying parties working on the first goal. Loyal agents are all well and good, but the Rebel knows the Rebel best of all, and their fears would tell us what would most hurt them most rapidly. Again, the construction of a forward base would be ideal, as we hardly wanted to bring enemy combatants or civilian sympathizers back to the Company's column on the march.

This was an ambitious program for a few brief nights thrashing around in the dark in unfamiliar enemy terrain. It was lucky for the Company that the aerial cohort was composed of our most veteran and most wicked brethren. These were the Old Grumblers, and they knew their business, back and forth. Amazingly enough, the liaison teams found a few of those supposed agents that first night, and the survey teams found a few granaries and rebel supply depots, as well as a good-enough position for the forward base. The Rebel had been lazy and shiftless, and hadn't bothered with any ambitious engineering projects other than a few desultory barricades a half-day's amble inside the province's borders, on the Bride's Road and two secondary trade routes on our side of Rennet. Tax-collection posts for the new polity's excise agents, apparently.

Tickle Me's sky-bandits gathered that first pre-dawn, too far from the flying column to return without being seen by unfriendly eyes; a brace of couriers were dispatched to sneak back to the rest of the Company, hopefully one pegasus ambling across the high clouds far above would be far less obviously "enemy" than a great flock of armed ponies streaming by overhead. The survey teams led the rest to the proposed forward base site, which proved to be much less suitable in the morning light. They couldn't do anything about the survey failure, and turtled up in the woodlots, trying to look more like a suspiciously large concentration of bums, hobos and gypsies than a camped enemy detachment to the neighboring earth pony homesteads within eyeshot of the meadow, which the survey team had overlooked in the darkness of the night before.

The second night they found an actual site for the forward base, and had someplace suitably remote for Mad Jack and his drafted ground-ponies to quickly level and lay out a ranger's redoubt in the deep woods. The engineering detail had been ferried forward from the flying column in the tactical chariots, which were invaluable transportation tools, but sadly limited in their carrying capacity. Mad Jack, his draftees, and a small collection of logging and digging implements strained the chariot-ponies to their utmost that night.

I'm told that the opportunity to lay about himself in the woods with a double-bladed axe turned the old mule up sweet for the first time in half a generation, and he went wild on the project, quickly constructing a marvel of concealment and defense, seemingly larger in the inside than the outside, as he used logged but not trimmed trees to conceal the compound walls, and then got his draftees working at digging out from underneath, seemingly developing unexpected Changeling-like capacity for tunneling and warrening. He employed every evil trick in the book to drain that deep delving, I still don't know how exactly he managed to maintain an underground base in a land with such an aggressively high water-table. But by the time I laid eyes on the forward base, it was a proper hive, and a wood-aligned earth-pony private among the draftees had convinced the logged trees lining the concealed walls to re-root and not wilt all that badly. You could literally sit on the wall of the compound and never notice that there was a klatch of reivers lurking under your hocks.

This night, the evening of the reading of Fatinah's account of the sack of Jbayel, was the night that they ferried half the witches' section forward to the base under construction, as well as a hooful of ground sections for security on the forward base. We were left with the bare minimum of pegasi for the combat air patrol covering the Company, from the vanguard well in front of the main column, to the rear guard twiddling their hooves on the road behind us, lying in wait to see if any spies or rebel long range scouts were dogging our fetlocks. I settled on the imperial of the forward ambulance, in place to keep an eye on the donkey recruit assigned to haul my medical supplies wagon while I rested the night shift away. Not that I didn't trust the eager Halon, but, when it came to narcotics and other such drugs… trust but keep an eye peeled.

We had paused the column where the Road cut through a deep copse, a couple miles outside of a town in the province to the east of Rennet, four or five reasonable days' march from the excisers' barricade in rebel-held territory. As we marched into town in the darkness, the townsponies' lamps winked out one by one as we approached. The pools of darkness left on each door-step by the absence of their extinguished lights seemed to spread, extending tendrils across windows still a-glow from the fires and lamps within each domicle, wide-eyed ponies and donkeys drawn by the silent tromp-tromp-tromp and the rolling darkness gathering momentum around us. Otonashi had apparently not been part of the half-section flown out by the pegasi, this was one of her favorite tricks. The tendrils of smoke-stuff reached inside each house as we passed, and if I knew her tricks, they'd soon be whispering blasphemous insinuations and veiled threats in the ears of random observers. It would all be nonsense, too quiet to really make out, and probably in accents so thick as to be incomprehensible to their unnerved targets if they could hear what the shadows were saying. This was the only way that the mute Otonashi could produce spoken language, and if those horrible shadows were a sample of what she would say if she could speak aloud, I certainly was not inspired to learn enough hoof language to talk with that spooky witch.

These weren't our enemies, but they knew those who knew those who were living under the rule of the rebel. Rumor would build up this little bit of showmareship until it smashed upon the shores of rebel morale at exactly the right time – a week or more after we arrived in Rennet, and long after our advance forces had started causing real damage. Everything would seem to crash their limited intelligence resources at the same time. I made a note to suggest we use the tactical chariots to ship Otonashi and a couple other warlocks to the other routes into Rennet and see if we could repeat the performance in towns on other lines of advance. It would muddle their estimates of our numbers and our direction, and perhaps make them dismiss the reports this display would generate as just another bit of flash. Always, always give them more than one shell when you're playing the shell game.

The morning light came all too soon, and we were an entire day's march from that nameless farm town still quaking with the fear we had planted on their stoops and cobblestones. I made the rounds of the night-vexillations and the night carters, checking for injuries and strains caused by ponies unused to marching in the primal darkness of late summer, shading quickly into the first chills of fall. Fewer injuries that night's march, and the ones hurt in previous nights were responding well to the compresses and potions distributed the day before.
The temporary night-sight cantrips had covered enough of the night-vexillation and the night shift of the carters' corps that we were getting past our awkward phase, and the remaining witches had generated a surprising supply of permanent night-sight medallions. The remainder of that section had slaved all through the night, the glare from their cart-workshop barely contained by another matrix designed to hide the light pollution from both the leading elements of the column, who we didn't need night-blinded, and the watching eyes of the countryside. The half-successful nature of this muffling matrix made our column look from the outside like a procession of blackened shapes, drawn by glowing cats-eyed horrors, with the centre of the procession fuming and glowing darkly like a volcanic caldera half-obscured by its own smoke and cinders. If anything, in retrospect, I suspect we were even more terrifying than we had truly intended. Nopony approached the column, in the morning light, or at any point in those late stages of the forced-march.

I went to the HQ wagons to make my readiness report for the day, and pass along my suggestion about the dummy performances by the Otonashi revue on other approaches to the rebel province, and was told to go teach my grand-dam to suck eggs. I narrowed my eyes at this inappropriately Griffish rejoinder, but took it in the spirit it was intended. They knew what they had, here, and were certainly already planning that exact extension on last night's extemporary performance.

"Sawbones, your continued attempt to tell me how to do my job aside, the night's couriers say that we need your presence in the forward base. Your presence and your medical supplies. You still have the recipe for tongue-loosening cocktails, don't you? The warlocks' attempts at subtly wringing information out of the results of our first sweeps were… disappointing. Gibblets was less successful in replicating his old partners' tricks than he had promised, and Shorthorn has never been any good at this sort of thing. We need an adult up there," the Captain sighed. He had taken the night-shift, and the Lieutenant was munching on raw coffee beans and listening to the Captain as she got up to speed on the happenings of the night.

"Wish you had asked earlier in the night while we still had the darkness. How am I going to get up there now? You can send single pegasi back and forth and if they find the right clouds, nopony on the ground will see them, but any damn fool can spot a zebra in a chariot from ten thousand feet below," I pointed out. "Also, what are we going to do about the readings tonight?"

"We have had five nights of readings, that should suffice, I think. You were more effective last night than you think, you and those bulls of yours. We should be hitting their revenuers' post in a couple nights, anyways. Time to start working on getting our game faces on," he yawned, looking towards his pallet at the back of the cluttered wagon. "And that means getting you up to the forward base so that you can set up your infirmary and operating theatre there, and potioning the hell out of our prisoners so that the rebel can worry about their casualties instead of you working on ours. I'll have Asparagus oversee your bulls, and make sure they're taken care of. She seems to have taken to them well enough, they're sort of carters-corps adjacent when you think about it."

"I'll leave it in the hooves of Tickle Me's charioteers, Boss. But please, don't call the oxen ‘bulls', they know what they are, and pretending otherwise just will make them… sad," I said, making myself melancholy just talking about it. And less than thrilled by the prospect of a wild daytime chariot ride behind some featherbrained hellions. I was envious of their wings, but actually being hauled flightless through the airy deeps in under the naked sun? I would be a whiter zebra than those spooked ponies back in that Hunt-struck market town we had terrorized last night.

Comments

[Starlight Nova]

What is this a crossover of?

[Mitch H]

Glen Cook's Black Company novels, and in a lesser sense, his Tyranny of the Night series which is a sort of spiritual sequel to the Black Company books. They're a marvel of cynical extension of the traditional sword and sorcery fantasy. Wizards are wicked, their natural enemies, barbarians and soldiers are compromised or piratical; and the weak politicians plot in the background, to manipulate those with power to turn their magnified flaws to the advantage of the weak and powerless, who have no real moral edge against those with power.