• 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 Mare Who Wasn't There

SBMS085

It took a while to get my wagonloads situated. The carters had their own, somewhat delayed affairs to conduct, and they ended up just leaving the carts parked outside of my infirmary, to be unloaded when we had time and attention to spare. Rye was clearly fading, so I showed her the side-chamber next to the front office I'd left a cot and some blankets for her in preparation for their arrival. I told her to work on unloading the supply-carts first thing in the morning if I wasn't back by then.

I did a quick pass through the wards on my way to my next headache, and did a bed-check. They were emptying out nicely, our influx from the flu had mostly fluxed right back out my front door, and the flow of new injuries had slowed to a trickle.

I tracked down Broken Sigil, and found he still didn't know anything about our new guest. Which meant that Otonashi and the Crow still had custody of the chubby little spy. Asking around, I finally tracked down the three of them in the baths, where from the commotion it sounded like the two witches had gotten a head start in torturing our prisoner. For certain milquetoast values of torture, I suppose.

"You two know that the water-treatment doesn't actually work, right?" I yelled over the partition into the mares' bath, which was emitting copious clouds of steam and offended squawks of considerable indignity. The spy seemed a bit too old to be so reticent about a forced bath, but then I suppose all of us have our limits, and some of us retain that foalish disinclination to wash when mommy approaches with a brush and soap, even well into nominal adulthood. "They'll say anything to make the torment stop, especially if they think you want to hear something in particular. You'll have her confess to being Lord Grogar's new mistress, and then we'll have an entire love-triangle soap plot to contend with."

The spy was pushed out of the steaming bath by Otonashi, both of them as naked as the day they were foaled, which is to say, perfectly decent. The miserable little mare was now a bright pastel blue, and her close-shorn mane and tail were a rather blush shade of red. Quite distinctive by the standards of Tambelon's gloomy earth pony population, I could see why she had resorted to coat and mane dye. Too bad for her it had just shouted with a clarion voice that she had been trying to get away with something. She looked terribly young, although the hot bath had removed some of the worst effects of her very recent beating and mishandling on the part of the paranoid ponies of Guilliame's Ravin.

She had picked the wrong town to try and embed for long-term observation of the Company. From what I had heard from Octavius, "being shifty" had consisted of asking a question while not being from around there. The Ravin had found itself buried under with refugees from Durand and the many abandoned hamlets closer to the city, and they had collectively lost all patience with strangers long before our "Cupcake" had slunk into town looking for a job as a patissier journeymare.

I tossed a towel at the bedraggled, damp mare.

"Get dried, we'll find a place to talk, and I'll look at your bruises. I don't think they did permanent damage, but some of those look like they'd sting, and I could always be missing something. Don't want you dying of some internal bleeding while in our custody. Your employers would no doubt take it amiss. Thank you, Crow. Otonashi, you mind playing chaperone?" The mute nodded her acquiescence, and the junior warlock waved a hoof at me and clumped off to find Gibblets and the witches' new quarters.

We ended up in my surgery, as the front office was too close to Rye's room, which I still needed to hang a door for - mental note. I gave the spy's two black eyes a good looking-over, and determined that there wasn't any long-term damage there. Hooves run along her limbs and across the bruising on her back and sides revealed no deep tissue damage, just a quite thorough pasting by angry townsfolk.

While I conducted my examination, I asked questions. Her name. Where she grew up. Any childhood breaks, sicknesses, reasons to be wary of any specific bits of damage.

"Cup Cake? Really, you're going to go with that?"

Otonashi hooved her amusement at my line of interrogation. Didn't we just induct a recruit named Carrot Cake?

"That's why I find it odd to have another Cake in camp so soon. Too many pastry-ponies in one place makes me suspicious of coincidence."

Coincidence in close proximity to earth-ponies often means destiny on the hoof, tapped out the mute.

The spy watched us in perplexity, clearly not capable of reading hoof-speech. What did she think the unicorn mare had been doing all the way from the Ravin? Her training was clearly not particularly deep or comprehensive.

Also, destiny on the hoof makes me think of Equestrians, added Otonashi. They're often hag-ridden by that nag Destiny.

Otonashi's origins and travels before she joined the Company are obscure, and she was generally not inclined to elaborate on the nothing she had said about her past. Her name was particularly uninformative, being from a language I had never heard of, nor had anypony else to my knowledge. This was the first indication I'd heard that Otonashi knew anything about Equestrians, covert or otherwise.

"So, you think our spy is Equestrian, do you?" I turned to the alarmed operative, having finished my examination. "Well, filly, are you? Are you reporting to that new consulate I hear has hung a knob on a rented townhouse in Rime?"

She scrambled off the examination table and found a corner to be small in. "No, what? Of course not, what's Equestria? Is that someplace on Crossroads?"

"Ha! Trying to pretend to be from Crossroads? Nopony actually from Borealia calls it Crossroads, that's an outsiders' name for that world. Nice try, though. I'm guessing you're fresh out of the portal for this assignment?" The locals didn't call Crossroads Borealia, of course, but the fact that the biggest ocean on Crossroads was called the Boreal might confuse a new-hired operative enough to think that her instruction and training had a-

"What? Really? But they told me that - No! Dang it, I'm from Hydromel, outside of Grossbach. I'm just a patissier!"

Got her. Nice try, though. Her native accent was pretty close to that of the earth ponies in the northlands. But her choice of a hometown was too close to the Company's trail of destruction through the northlands; she clearly had picked it up from her travels trying to find us.

"Cup Cake, I think it's time we dropped the pretense. You're not holding up your end of the scene, and I'm too tired to pull out my witch-doctor mufti and put on a crazy zebra accent. Normally, at this point, I'd start pouring whiskey into you until you didn't know down from up, and get you to incriminate yourself. But you did that for yourself without any chemical aid. You shook your Company minders, got into trouble, and we had to bail you out. Your lurking privileges have been revoked. You're just damn lucky a shambler didn't find you and leave another anonymous pile of gnawed bones on some roadside in the Riverlands.

"You're going to be a guest of the Company until we find time to deliver you to your Equestrian spymasters in the Rime consulate. It's going to be a busy season, I can't tell you when that will be. Honestly, I don't think you have any intelligence worth the close interrogation. I give you a week before you're an empty sack. I know you screwed up, you know you screwed up. Pretty soon your bosses will know you've screwed up, especially after we drop you gift-wrapped on their consulate front steps with a 'persona non grata' tag."

Poor Cup Cake looked completely defeated. And even more tired than I felt. I wasn't kidding when I gave her a week before she was confessing the whole and more besides. It takes considerable fortitude to not start babbling once you're alone among strangers who claim to basically know every secret you're hiding. Eventually, she'd start gushing, and then we'd hear anything and everything. And maybe even get some novel information in among the suspicions and suppositions.

Otonashi put her to bed in one of the recently-disinfected quarantine rooms with a clean blanket, and I locked the door behind the defrocked earth-pony spy.

Author's Note:

I've read how SMILE operates. I can't imagine their out-portal rivals in the foreign service can be any more professional.

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