• Published 28th Aug 2016
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In the Company of Night - Mitch H



The Black Company claims to not remember Nightmare Moon, but they fly her banner under alien skies far from Equestria. And the stars are moving slowly towards their prophesied alignment...

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The Changing Of The Guard

SBMS071

I stood out on the main ravelin, the great sally port gates behind me to my left and right. There was a skeleton crew guarding the gates, a single section of mixed unicorns and earth ponies holding the great earthwork and its wedge of curtain-wall firing platforms that dominated the killing-pens between the two sets of double gates. Many ghouls had expired upon the glacis around me, in front of the ravelin and to other side along the long ramparts. Due to the crafted geography of Dance Hall, and some tricks of the acoustical environment, the wide spear-blade revetment of the ravelin had attracted more undead than the simple statistics of hunger and Brownian motion would have dictated. The two additional spike-bastions looming by the ravelin on either side created a great tridental killing-zone, and when the firing platforms were fully mared, it was a device for the industrial slaughter of the shambling undead. Once the curtain walls were in place, it had been impenetrable to undead attack. Its defenses were never even seriously addressed by attack, let alone tested. I'm told a few ghouls found the sally-draws, but were quickly dispatched by pike from the curtain-walls above.

This evening, the gates were open, and the way clear for the vexellations returning from their clearance operations in the remnants of the distant city. The sections marched wearily up the battered remnants of the battered Road, and came across the glacis to the grand ravelin, to pass on either side through the sally ports. Once through the gates, their path would lead them over the great drawbridge into Dance Hall proper, the showers, the mess halls, and eventually, the still-temporary barracks within the palisaded interior.

Dance Hall, her glacis, her ditch, her ramparts, bastions, curtain-wall firing platforms and grand ravelin - it represented the savings of the Company, the expenditure of almost all the profits of our adventure in Rennet, and some of our reserves to boot. Oh, a great deal of that expense was the support of the destitute and the desperate along our lines of communication, our employment of the ponies of Pepin and the succor of their dependents, but all of that was in aid of the construction of this fighting fortress, and our extermination-project, the clearance of central Pepin and its deceased river-port.

Had it all been a terrible mistake, a monumental waste of resources, of lives and deniers?

The tail-end of the Lieutenant's day-shift passed over the great drawbridge, and the evening shift moved out like the turning of the tide, ponies in darksight helms sallying out along the planked temporary roadway across the glacis toward the firm if somewhat decayed surface of the Bride's Road towards extinct Caribou City. They carried with them fresh, unactivated honeypots, and new orders. The extermination had been put on hold, and the sudden new plan was to begin herding and directing the remnant undead into sweep-zones. We hadn't yet talked over the Major of the 93rd - I was waiting on a report from Gibblets on her status - but I was fairly certain from the Lieutenant's working-over of the 93rd's sergeant-major that they were the right kind of desperate and exposed. His mistress might be mad, but she was mad in a self-interested fashion, like all the horrors that had made Tambelon their death-soaked play-pen.

Gibblets followed one of the night-shift sections as they marched over the drawbridge and the great ditch, peeling off and up the stairs onto the great fighting platform upon which I stood, thinking, waiting for him. As he passed through the heavy gate that in time of attack was thrown to seal off the ravelin's fighting-platform from the sally-complex behind it, I could hear the distant music of the Mondovi dance-bands as they struck up the evening tune. They didn't play the night through anymore like that memorable midsummer voyageurs'-ball that gave Dance Hall her name, but the musicians of Mondovi were kind enough to give us a few sets of song in the evening hours on most nights. I think they were touched by the naming of the fortress, and had gotten into the spirit of things.

With Gibblets came the relief for the ravelin's defending section, a doubled section for the night-shift. The day-shift locked down the sally complex as they passed, and we stood there silently, until the creaking roar of the drawbridge being pulled up into the evening air announced louder than any trumpet fanfare the end of the changing of the guard. It was now night, and horrors stalked the empty, charred fields of central Pepin. All good foals must be away behind strong walls, and best be tucked away snug in their bedding, to sleep safe in the knowledge that the horrors which stalked outside their walls were dragon-eyed, fierce, and on the hunt for foal-eaters.

"So, she's not as crazy as you said she was. Squirrelly, true, all blood-mages are, even Feufollet. The meat diet does bad things to a pony, makes them unstable and aggressive. But you can say the same about griffins, and we get along with them by and large. Or yours truly, to be honest, although most of the time I don't gobble up my bacon and pork where you squeamish equines can watch and belly-ache and pretend to retch at my breakfast."

"What about the collapse? Do any permanent damage?"

"What do you want, witch doctor, a diagnosis? That's your department. I think she'll be fine. Just caught the back-lash from the Company curse when the bowmares put down her thralls. She might be a little sensitive to our presence for a while, but so long as it doesn't happen again, I think she'll be fine. And if it does happen again, we probably ought to put a few of those bolts right through her brisket while we're at it. It was an assault, and these Imperials have their pride."

"We sort of need her, if we're going to clean up our little strategic mis-step here. You get the full story on that?"

"What, that we've been destroying strategic war materiel? That what civilians look at and call the end of the world, is to a pack of damnable necromancers a sustainable thaumic resource? Yeah, I figured it out from the ranting and the weeping. Our Major Gorefyre is quite the desperate little witchling. Sounds like she spent all of her credit and what little good name she had to purchase this 'forage district', and is now stretched out spread-eagled on the precipice."

"Yeah, Whitesmith admitted that her troops are mostly depot-sweepings working for the prospect of future wages. The two of them are deep in debt to their own troops, the bureaucrats they bribed, the Major's fellow necromancers, and presumably the Bride's tax-ponies as well. She's managed to edge even closer to bankruptcy than the Company, I didn't think that was possible. After all, we stand on the bulwarks of the Company's nest-egg. And it's a damnable white elephant. A great investment, if Caribou City was a rich city full of potential plunder or tribute. Or aimed at Le Coppice, or some other axis from which we could expect actual threats."

"What do you want, we should pick up Dance Hall and move it to our southern flanks? I keep hearing about these great giants of the ancient north and their farming-rakes. Think we could hire a few legends to pick up our bastions and toss them onto the banks of the Withies?"

"Where are the Blue Ox and the Bunyip when you need them, eh? No, that's why we need the 93rd, to get some cash flow going. We haven't completely exterminated the ghouls. Some clusters here and there."

"Not exactly a diasporic horde anymore, though. And I know you're not proposing we feed any villages to the shamblers to fill out our numbers."

"Merciful Peacock Angel, no! Don't even say such things aloud! You might give the Spirit ideas." I eyed the stars emerging from the rushing clouds overhead. Fall was well under way, and the darker months brought darker dreams. She had been sweet ever since the Voyageurs' Ball, but I dreaded the return of those terrible… well. "But we need to launder what's left of the shamblers through Gorefyre and her connections. That means turning the little blood-dabbler up sweet. What's it going to take, Gibblets?"

The ancient goblin thought in the darkness, the peppy rhythm of the accordion and bull fiddle in the distant town square retiring in favor of a mournful banjo and mandolin tune. "She sounds lonely. Damn near latched onto me once she realized I was a warlock and not a construct. There's some story there. I don't know an awful lot about how they train necromancers round these parts, but I can recognize lonesome when I see it. She's got the shakes, too. I'd guess she's seen some bad shit."

"Whitesmith said some things, makes me think they had a bad season last year. The 93rd is something they scraped together, their original unit must be a shambles. Might be looking for reassurance, a new home."

"Really? We're going to do that again?"

"Lieutenant all but forbade me. Probably wouldn't work, anyways. Gorefyre's got her own little unit, however artificial and dysfunctional. We maybe might want to make them an auxiliary worth the name, though. How do we take a military unit composed of a hoof-full of spell-shocked survivors and depot-scrapings, assembled to forage among the free-range shamblers for undead thralls, and build up a bit of esprit de corps?"

"Example is the school of equinekind, and they will learn at no other."

"Pfft, happy is the pony who can learn at another's expense. Think we could run them through the wringer without them mutinying or catching wind that we're being sneaky about it?"

"If what you're saying about this sergeant-major is true, they're shaky but more than a little desperate. You'd be surprised what ponies like that are capable of, if you give them a golden road out of their troubles."

"Deniers the carrot, so they don't mind discipline the stick?"

"And in the end, the discipline will bind them stronger than the deniers."

A distant fiddle sang through the darkness, and it was as if the fiddler and her band were standing upon that ravelin-stage and playing just for the night-guard.

Author's Note:

And then they had to ring the bell for the sergeant of the guard to drop back down the drawbridge, and everypony gave Sawbones and Gibblets shit for the next week for posing pretentiously on the ravelin until they got locked out on the wrong side of the great ditch.

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