In the Company of Night

by Mitch H

Making Mash

SBMS087

We spent that afternoon and evening setting up three concurrent stills with my alembics and extended, curled copper piping, with the boiling chambers seated in the back room's expanded semi-enclosed hearth, and the kabila ranked in padding on a table set across the way from the hearth. The spy's wry smirk said much about her contempt for my primitive apparatus. I twice asked her how she would improve on the process, but decided to play the waiting game on that matter.

The other foals came by about four in the evening, and carried Rye away for training practice, snickering and giggling as they went. That left me with my prisoner and a room full of sacks of grain and copper tubing and uncertainty. Once I was more or less satisfied with the layout, I prodded her with a hoof, and we went in search of fuel.

Our depredations upon the landscape had disrupted the supply of firewood, but then, it also produced a lot of scrap and trash wood in the meantime. About three hundred yards from the main gates of Dance Hall, and another four hundred from those of Mondovi, was a great pile of scrap and odd-cut logs left over from construction. I grabbed one of the guards from the gate to mind Cup-Cake as I hauled a supply-cart out to the woodpile.

"More campaigns have come to grief over lack of fuel, food, and good water than ever were won by brilliant generals and brave battalions rampant upon the glorious battle-field, my dear. What is your analysis of our supplies, such that we're scrabbling about in the trash-pile for my fuel?"

"I think nothing looks fine from the front of a rubbish tip. Even Canterlot looks a sight when you're hauling rubbish to be burned."

"Don't know that place. Is it an Equestrian Rakuen? A sort of paradise or place of make-believe? What do you swear by in hopes of heaven when you live in another's paradise? Well, we're not working in Rakuen here, this is Pepin. They'll be hauling cut wood down out of the Deep Mine slopes later this winter. This is an expedient for the moment. Grab that."

I got hitched again to the cart, and hauled the lot back into the Hall, and she was quiet as she helped unload the scrap wood and rubbish into the back-room for the hearth. By the time we were done, that back-room was crowded and difficult to get around, between the sacks of grain and the piles of burnables.

"Think I need to get some brickwork in here to seal off the hearth? I think we need some splash-guards in here."

"I think your retorts are too small for your mash to cook properly here. Too big a fire won't make it go faster, not with this setup."

"Boiled some booze in your time?"

"I have some distant cousins in the business. They'd laugh themselves sick at this, I can tell you that. The Pickled colts had a mash tun that I could go for a swim in. You need one of those, not this – what is this, three barracks-room stills thrown together in a single room?"

"I wouldn't think with your mark you'd know that much about making hooch."

"Earth pony families'll surprise you. You never know who's related to who, and everypony has their specialties."

"You never know who's related to who – well said! Show me what you think we need. Here, here's some scrap paper. Show me."

She sketched out a design, and muttered about the size about the hearth, and the three caps we had to work with. We went out to the kitchens to steal a big copper broth pot from a fuming Asparagus. I had to promise a supply of hooch for future kitchen use, and a share of the cracked grain. Something about a soup base?

"Who's related to who – we were related to the general population of mercenary companies back when we were one among many on Crossroads. Two dozen companies scrabbling around the shores of the Boreal, and four in Openwater Bay alone, five or six sometimes when there was unrest in the cays. Everypony spied on everpony else, the companies on each other, the cities on the companies, the companies on the city leadership, and foreign spooks stirring up the mash with long, thin rakes."

We got that broth pot seated on the hearth shelf, and I looked at my book, estimating the amount of rye and corn I needed to mix with how much water- she rolled her eyes and grabbed hoof-fulls from two sacks of grain, and started mixing them into the pot, waving me and my book away.

"There were a number of foreign outfits spying on us in Openwater Bay, even when we were in garrison and not doing anything in particular. The New Roamish IEIS, they had a griffin and a pony who'd trade off looking in on us. The prince in Vladimir, he hired a local changeling to keep tabs on us. Shorthorn would have drinks with that bug every other month, catch him up on our adventures or lack thereof. There were two or three others that swung by now and again, that we thought were taking notes for this or that old employer, making sure we weren't conspiring with their dissidents or planning to take up a contract in their vicinity. It was generally a shirt-sleeves business, nothing smash-mouth or aggressive. Everypony just wanted to be kept up to date on whether the ponies with pointy sticks were getting happy hooves or not. So long as we stayed safely employed by the Hidden Council, it was all good."

She started pouring in water from the barrel in the corner, using a dipper sitting on top of the barrel.

"Then there was the Equestrians. They were strange, we'd never taken a contract in Equestria, or any of her neighboring worlds on the Chain. It had been a point of business on the part of the leadership of the Company, that we kept our distance from your little sugar-bowl. I couldn't tell you why, it was a matter of tradition long before it was a matter for the Annals. And yet, you all kept a consulate in Openwater Bay, and as many ponies keeping tabs on us as the New Roamish, with which we did have a history of conspiring with their dissidents, supporting factions, and interfering in their politics. Not that we had any true intentions in that direction, but with Captain Gilbert and some of our other veterans, you could understand the impulse to always make sure we were where the IEIS could see what we were up to."

"And yet the Equestrians always hovered around the edges. Never close, not really. We'd catch sight of the same green pegasus mare now and again, drinking where we were drinking, paying off the shopkeeps across the way from our garrison gates. The shopkeeps cut us in on the bribes, of course, so it wasn't the most subtle of surveillances, but it was there. It was odd, but in the boiling-tun of oddities that was Openwater Bay, just one more clot of grain in the mash."

I hoofed her the ladle we were using as a mash rake.

"Then we had to abandon the contract in the Bay. Too much heat, too many betrayals by the Council and their stupid fratricidal war. Any word on how much of the Bay is still standing? They seemed intent on burning it down to the shoals when we left. No? I guess it isn't your sector."

She knew more about this distilling business than I did. It didn't really fit with her cutesy destiny mark, that real ponies make such a deal over. What was a little mare with pastries on her flank doing knowing so much about how to make a proper distilling mash? Did it have something to do with why this plump little pony was here in the savage backend of damnation getting the tar bucked out of her by Tambelonian shitkickers for the Equestrian crown?

"And when we kipped out of the Bay, we left the spies behind with the garrison. For most every intelligence service, the job was done when we disappeared through the portal into Tambelon. We were another body of armsponies disappearing into the open maw of the Tambelonian wars. If you look at the records and histories, there have been a dozen companies before us, and there might even be fragments of them here and there somewhere further down in the Riverlands. I expected to see more flyers from past companies here in Tambelon, but I've barely seen two ponies with wings in two years, and neither of them with a history of mercenary work."

I paused to help her get the tun onto the hearth rack, which was now heavy as Hippolyphus's rock.

"OK, now we need to think about how to cap this sucker off and feed it into the copper tubing. Oilcloth and adhesive?"

"Pfft, it'll all come apart under any heat. You'll have to make something to order. Got any thin copper plate or foil?"

"How are you with a hammer?"

"Try me, you unholy terror."

I led her out to the pile of copper scrap I'd scrounged up when I started thinking full-scale still. She hooved through the scrap, which wasn't exactly the best material, but the best we had available. Some of it was strip-scrap from torn down chimney-linings in the dead hamlets, some of it I have no idea where they found it, but I had put out the word for copper, and this was what had came in.

"We've seen neither mane nor hoof of the New Roamish, and not even our old employers in the Council seem curious to see what we're up to here on the lip of Tartarus. Their questions have been answered - 'What will the Black Company do?', well, the answer is, 'gone off to commit suicide for an uncertain denier'. But that wasn't enough for you Equestrians, was it?"

"You seem oddly set on the idea that I'm spying for the Crown of Equestria. Why are you so sure I'm not a spy for your New Roamish, or the White Rose, or your own employers? In your place, my first pronk wouldn't be 'Equestrian!'"

For starts, 'pronk' was very much an Equestrian turn of phrase, but I left that on the table, and passed over it.

"I wasn't really sure the first time you passed through. As you say, there are enough local factions with curiosity and resources. Although most White Rose I've seen have been caribou. I recognize this is bias, mostly constructed from false impressions drawn from local conditions and the particular rebels we've been encountering, but without pre-judging we can't make any practical judgments, can we? As I said, you could have been spying for the Empress, or one of the legates, or even the militia-ponies we've been working for. Probably not the new Duchesse in Rennet or the current Duc in Pepin City, but all sorts of surprises will lurk in the shadows for the unprepared."

We took the most likely sheets of copper back into the prospective distillery room, and laid it out with a mallet on a work-table.

"It was the word that the Equestrians had opened a consulate in Rime. You could hide in uncertainty from us here in the field, and we'd be guessing until judgment day who you were working for, but your bosses couldn't hide from the Bride's own agents in the biggest, most gossipy city of the heartlands. Your spymaster had to have an official cover to squat nearby, some reason to be hanging about spookily. I have no idea whether your master is the consul herself or one of her servants, but I have no doubt that a consulate in Rime and a spy stumbling over her own hooves here in Pepin are connected events. Celestia has found us again."

"There's this term my schoolmarm taught us when I was a filly, Fancy or Roamish or something like that, she called it 'apophrenia'. It's what happens when you take a bunch of unrelated facts, and swirl 'em around in your head until they align in some accidental or forced way, and makes an accidental picture, a story. A story that has no reality outside of your addled mind. Just unrelated facts stated one after another as if dog causes cat, cat causes rat."

She started pounding two pieces of copper flat into each other with the mallet and a great deal of frustration.

"What's the difference, my little pony, between a series of unrelated facts, and a story? Narrative."

She stopped and looked in my eyes for the first time that evening. She shuddered as she had when I had eaten pork sausages in front of her, but she met my glowing, slit-pupiled eyes.

"Why are there Equestrians in Rime, five or six portals down from the homeland? Why do they keep sending spies to keep watch on a mid-size mercenary company that hasn't approached Equestrian borders time out of mind? Why is there sausage in a pony kitchen?"

Suddenly, there was a commotion in the outer infirmary, as the foals poured into the hospital, chattering.

"Hey, Boss, did you keep our Hearth's Warming costumes from last year's pageant? We were telling the new apprentices about the play, and they want in on it this year! We even have Cherie to play Pansy this time!"

In the spy's eyes was confused recognition, and then horror. Cup Cake knew what Hearth's Warming was, and some inkling of what its celebration in the Company meant must have made the necessary, belated connections in her mind. And she froze in terror, as if she had been trapped in that back room with ghouls.

She finally saw the sausages being made around her.

Author's Note:

Sawbones, what are you doing? You're giving out more information than you're getting out of her.

Some ponies aren't hired for their talents, or their intelligence, but rather for their qualities. And matronly, pudgy young mares can be dangerous if you're not careful. They provoke confidences. It's why all the best gossips are motherly types and amiable aunties. They get told everything.

Comments

[Jacktank10]

Well played.

[KeePony]

like finding a cannibal tribe somewhere in the amazon dressing up in grey, with a confederate flag, and playing dixie.

[Mitch H]

7708809

[Mitch H]

7708809 BTW, for those that haven't heard of them, I present to you, the Confederados, the 20k Brazilian descendants of the die-hard Rebel exiles who settled in the last of the Western slave-states after the American Civil War.

Although I have to confess that my model for the Equestrian Black Company is more the Wild Geese, if one of those regiments had survived into modernity as a sub-Saharan mercenary outfit. And I'm almost positive that they were likewise Glen Cook's model for the original books, especially once he got into the Books of the South and introduced the readers to the Gea-Xle.

[SWEETOLEBOB18]

7709134
The Wild Geese have been mentioned a couple of times in the 1632 universe over at Baen Books.

[SWEETOLEBOB18]

She knew more about this distilling business than I did. It didn't really fit with her cutsy (cutesy) destiny mark, that real ponies make such a deal over. What was a little mare with pastries on her flank doing knowing so much about how to make a proper distilling mash? Did it have something to do with why this plump little pony was here in the savage backend of damnation getting the tar bucked out of her by Tambelonian shitkickers for the Equestrian crown?

That's another thing. The mash has to ferment. Not sure how long it takes but I know for sure that you DON'T just mix it up & then distill it.

[CaptainPipsqueak]

8629394
Magic. Don't gotta 'splain shit.

[Genial Precis]

9941359
Perhaps, but in this case they are taking the correct first steps of the mashing process.