In the Company of Night

by Mitch H

Bad Goblin, Good Witch-Doctor

SBMS008

I was in no mood to marvel at the rapid work the pioneers had done on the forward base when I wobbled off the back of the chariot, wind-blown, pale and unsteady on my toes. The wooded lots surrounded the concealed tent-halves and wooden palisades quickly disappearing behind brush and treelimb camouflage. By the time the work details were done, it would look like an extension of the neighboring woodlot into that shaded meadow on a slight rise. Gibblets and Shorthorn hurried up to the vehicle where we had landed in the limited open space in front of the base, intent on helping me unload my supplies. They led me back through the entrance, which was rapidly being concealed by a work detail in the dappled afternoon light.

"All hail the conquering witch-doctor! Come to save us with his jungle hoodoo, do his evil dances, put us all in trances!"

"Yuck it up, bog-hopper. I feel as green as you look. What happened to the mighty mind-control wizardry you chuckleheads were going to wow us with?"

"It turns out I didn't remember Mesmer's matrixes as well as I thought… mostly they just screamed and screamed."

"That was just your ugly face, Gibblets. They started screaming *before* you started failing to cast," Shorthorn smirked at his fellow witch as we passed from bright daylight into the muddy darkness of a compound only days old, and still heavily under construction. I exchanged brief greetings with Tickle Me, who was bent over rough-sketched maps and notes with one of her non-coms, busy planning the evening escapades. The necessary courtesies observed, the hedge-wizards dragged me back to the corner of the compound which had been set aside for the interrogations and, eventually, my infirmary once we cleared out the riff-raff.

"How are we holding them for now? This place is impressively far along, but you can't possibly have had time to put in proper holding cells."

Gibblets grinned evilly, clearly proud of his wicked self, and pointed to a set of roughly-woven mats along the outer wall.

"We have them under there, in partially-drained sump holes, hobbled. Not too deep that they'll drown, but it keeps them from getting frisky. And the mats are thick enough they muffle the screams if you listen above, they can't be able to hear much of anything from below."

"And you wonder why the only thing they could do was scream. Wonderful. Do you have a place to interrogate them? Something to sit on, a table to pound?"

"We have some cut logs in the right configurations, over there. Don't you need to whip up some Discord's breath, make with the graveyard dust, distill some zombie juice?"

"You have an overactive imagination. And scopolamine is overrated, it makes them hallucinate and imagine weird crap. I don't want to spend the next week teasing the slivers of truth out of a soupy broth of crazy fantasies. In fact, I wasn't planning on spending the next week interrogating post office inspectors and junior dog-catchers. Bring in that junior wand-twiddler you lot picked up in Rime, and we'll train her up on how to do this right, so I don't have to. We'll have accidents and casualties enough to keep me bloody and tired night and day, soon enough. Speaking of which…"

We put our heads together, and I explained the materials and the effect we'd be looking for…

***

The warlock-recruit sat beside me in a matching shaman's-cloak, improvised from a blanket and some quick needle-work. I preferred to do this routine hock-deep in half-dried blood, but beggars can't be choosers, and I wasn't willing to cut up a prisoner for the effect. Gibblets was artfully disheveled, and he scurried to the first of the improvised oubliettes, drawing off the mat and eliciting a soggy shriek from the pony below. He roughly dragged her from her half-drained cell, and stopped her muzzle with a dirty rag to spare our offended ears, bringing her over to the interrogation area, which with its rough-hewn log chairs and table-pile looked more like the corner table at a logging camp gin-joint than a dungeon torture-chamber. Shame.

The prisoner's terrorized eyes darted from the admittedly dreadful-looking Gibblets, leering theatrically, to the two of us in our chairs, faces hidden below hooded cloaks in the flickering torch-light. I began chanting rubbish and nonsense in what little Zebric I could remember from my grand-pappy's wizened mother-in-law, who liked to cuss us out in what I suspect was absolutely filthy gutter-trash dialect. She was a foul old mare. I waved my hooves over the restrained and quivering earth-pony, and then gestured at my hooded assistant, who hoofed forward two glasses, one a flask from my alchemical kit bubbling evilly and greenish-thick in the dim light, and the other a tumbler full of whiskey, the bottle sitting further back on the table with a second tumbler.

"The Doctor says, you have two choices. You can be stubborn, and foolish, and he will make another goblin for his collection, I will pour this transformative into your mouth with this funnel, and your body will match your soul, and your soul will belong to him, and the thing which you will become, will tell us everything we need to know in the end," and the witch-apprentice waved at Gibblets, who showed all of his snaggly teeth in a demented, demonstrative grin. An illusion would serve later on when we didn't have Gibblets' services, but why not use the tools at hand while you can?

"Or," I rumbled in my best evil-witch-doctor voice, "me na una katch a squat, an dwound dem libbers, un haf langwdge cibble-like."

"Or we can discuss matters like civilized ponies over drinks," the apprentice translated.

Gibblets helpfully removed the gag, and the pony spat twice, getting the taste of the foul rag out of her mouth, possibly also demonstrating some bravado, I wasn't sure.

"I do believe I'll take the whiskey, if you don't mind."

***

Three laudanum-laced whiskeys later, the mayor was rambling uncontrollably about rapacious rebel militias, grasping millers, food shortages, and sneaking informers. The thing you have to know about ponies is, that ponies want to talk. They generally need to talk, and it takes very little prompting to get them to talk their heads off. Come over too heavy, though, and they remember their duty and their neighbors and their reputations, and they poker up. But give them a good scare, leave them miserable and solitary for a day, and then give them a sympathetic ear and a drink and someone who they think can't understand them, and they'll give you the whole store. Alcohol takes time, laudanum was faster, and barbiturates are quickest, but also the most dangerous. But we're not the gendarme, and we don't have to worry about evidentiary standards, just whether or not we're getting true information out of our subjects.

My acting-choice of "incomprehensible Zebra witch-doctor" was mostly a ploy to get out of this distasteful duty as soon as possible, but the new warlock was a quick study, and she'd mostly taken over the interrogation-cum-drinking session by the sozzled end of things, as we drank from tumblers carefully filled with strong ice-tea when the target wasn't watching, and she guzzled her laced rotgut as if it were beer. It helps if you don't feed or water the target for their period of isolation, they crash fast. It also means you have a narrow window of drunken lucidity before they pass out, though.

We worked our way down the line of filled sump-holes as evening blurred into night, and Gibblets was replaced by an illusory goblin spun over a detailed private-cum-jailer by the new apprentice, whose name I finally had committed to memory. The Crow had done a passable job of mimicking her superior, and the jailer-goblin helpfully lurched about in his best impersonation of the departed wizard. I wrote out the relevant details in the breaks between interrogations, and refreshed the soda ash in the "potion" flask, as the Crow and her new assistant hauled the latest drunkenly snoring pony out of the interrogation chamber.

It had gone about as well as could be expected, and we'd even cleared the oubliettes before the first of the strike-teams streamed in with the night's catches. By the next evening, we might even catch up well enough that I could start doing my actual jobs, getting ready for casualties and taking notes for the Annals.

I'd need another space for my infirmary, though. I couldn't have sump-holes full of standing, stinking water in a space I was planning to perform surgery in, for the love of the caduceus!

Author's Note:

Gibblets isn't actually a Goblin, but nopony knows what the Tartarus he is, and he ain't saying.

And the Company has an unfortunate tendency to get "good cop, bad cop" backwards. Well, it works for them.

Comments

[SWEETOLEBOB18]

And the Company has an unfortunate tendency to get "good cop, bad cop" backwards. Well, it works for them

Actually, I'd call it "bad cop, worse cop" but he's right, they ain't building a court case.