In the Company of Night

by Mitch H

First published 28th of August, 2016

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...

I like to think of the Company as an island of order and sanity in a sea of chaos, selfishness and irrationality. My fellow soldiers tell me I'm a damn foal, and an idealist, and I white-wash the mercenaries of the Black Company in ways that doesn't serve either the Company or them. But I've been given the role of Annalist, in the absence of anyone better-suited and properly lettered, so until they take the Annals away from me, I'm going to write them as I see fit. The Company has been my home since it forcefully recruited me from my unending apprenticeship, and I've seen more interesting medicine in the years since then than a hundred apothecaries, a dozen chirurgeons, or three other doctors with, pfft, "degrees". Most of it screaming for its mama and bleeding out on my surgery table.

They call me Sawbones, and this is the story of the last of the Black Companies.

In The Service Of The Hidden Council

SBMS001

"No, I don't think it's the clap. Have you been eating outside of the commissary?”

The third poisoning among the ranks caught my attention, too late for the first two. Something broad-spectrum enough to bring down a pegasus, a griffin and an earth-pony all in the prime of their lives was deliberate enough for enemy action. Thunder Feather and Adolf had sweated out their last in my infirmary before I had fully twigged to the threat. Stomper had lucked out, I was paying attention and caught it early.

"What, are you kidding, Sawbones? I've only been out a couple times, and only with the Locksteps,” objected the one-eared brown-coated mare, referring to one of our fellow-mercenary companies. She was a good corporal, we'd picked her up locally, out of some disgusting stews on the suburban isles somewhere. We'd been here too long on the edge of the tropics. Too many diseases, too many mosquitoes, too many options for the various cruds and plagues that washed names from the rolls onto the Annals for posterity. Sometimes they barely made the rolls before making the Annals. The money was good in Openwater Bay, and there was little butcher's blood to record, but it was harder than our last five contracts when it came to those terrible "miasmas”. Local superstition, didn't believe in pests and disease, didn't know to keep down the little bloodsuckers. Savages.

"Tell me where and when, and what,” I prompted. Her list lined up once with Adolf's, Thunder Feather died too early for me to have thought to quiz him on what killed him. Good enough for a match, and I put her on a potion to cleanse out her gullet before it put her in a weighed hammock like the others. Land was too precious around Openwater Bay for anypony to waste it on cemeteries, it was sea burial for the Company in those days.

I reported the target to Tickle Me, and she called in a strike force to descend upon the eatery before any open ears listening in could scatter the conspirators. Nothing fancy, none of our casters involved. Just a dozen ground-pounders to seize every entrance and hold down the random civilians who just happened to be eating at a place with a poisoner on the staff. The crowd tried to scatter, but our guys talked down the angry customers and held them until I was able to help Grable and Karl immobilize the staff, a waiter, a cook and a scullery wench. The wench was the one who ran for it, it wasn't exactly a detective story to figure out our malefactor. One has to wonder what goes wrong with a unicorn's life to leave her scrubbing dishes in a dive on the docks beside a mercenary company's compound, but whatever happened, she was ready to sell anypony to anypony else. I interrogated her in front of the gathered clientele, leaving nothing a secret. This turned out to be a terrible idea, but I had done it in hopes that her handler was in the collection. As she was implicating our employers in her plot, one of the pegasi in the crowd whipped out a concealed spike from a wing and killed our unicorn deader than the pirates hanging by the harbor gate. Karl crushed the pegasus's head with his warhammer, of course, but that kind of left us with no-where to go, and an entire crowd of frightened, confused citizens on our hands. The crowd got ugly, and eyed the ratty doorways and back exits.

We could have massacred the lot, but this isn't the way to endear the Company to the general populace. Not that we care one way or the other as a general principle, but it was a crowded town, and a dangerous environment for operations. No need to multiply enemies; we let them go. This also proved to be a mistake, as I found out later.

Normally I'd report to Tickle Me or the Lieutenant, but the news was so ugly that the Captain got roped into the debrief.

"So, what you're saying is, a simple infirmary follow-up turned into a major hostage-situation, two deaths, and the incrimination of the Hidden Council in a murderous plot against us? Why do you hate me, Sawbones?” The Captain normally was fond of me, as I kept his rolls neat and full of not-dead veterans rather than wet-maned recruits. But you can understand why he was miffed, and it seemed like the bad weather had disturbed his sleep, his eyes were shadowed even under his feathers, and he looked a bit haunted. Letting our employers be publicly revealed as the treacherous nest of vipers that they were was not exactly the sort of adroit professionalism we try to make the Company's hallmark.

"My apologies, sir. I expected the victim to be in the crowd, I just didn't expect our little show to be so… dramatic. And I certainly didn't think the Council was that perturbed with our service to date,” I offered. "Are they that irate over our refusal to provide shipboard levies?” There was a storm coming, and nopony in this forsaken hellhole was paying for weatherponies. The humidity and the thunder was ours to suffer without any sort of relief. The pressure was causing all of us to snap and snarl.

"Pfft, who can tell? They all wear those damn masks, and I swear it isn't the same ponies two meetings in a row. The last marine mutiny has got them unsettled, that's clear enough. "

"Might not even be the naval faction,” mused the Lieutenant, "might be the harbormasters mad at us for something, might be relatives of that clan they had us put down two years ago in the outer sugar islands.” A thundering underlined the mention of that blood-soaked little campaign. Few Company ‘pounders had been lost in the butchery, but we had won no friends by wiping out an entire clan of slaving sugar planters.

"This is why working for anonymous oligarchs is dangerous. You can't exactly follow the politics when they're all alicorn-damned faceless!” I vented. You'd think my tropical ancestry would leave me more tolerant of hot, humid miserable nights like this one. You'd be wrong, I was miserable, and my grey and black fur was soaked.

We argued in circles and squares, getting no-where. While we argued, blood flowed in the streets. We restricted the troops to the compound except for patrols, and our lances were turned outwards. Even the other companies were locked out, no way to tell if the Brotherhood of the Lock had been somehow involved. At this point, we didn't want to ask questions. In the short term, this was another mistake, as it cut us off from the grapevine. In the middle-term, it kept us from being involved in the sudden, shocking outburst of public violence that set fire to blocks in every direction around us on the main island. But at least we didn't have our flanks caught in the slaughter in the gutters.

In the long-term, it was a catastrophe.

A week later, on the verge of a second storm blowing in from the west, somepony remembered we were still there, keeping the rioters and militias off the docks, preserving the warehouses full of goods in transit and loot awaiting ransom from going up in pricy smoke. Corpses were reportedly stacked up like cordwood in the inner sanctums and the wealthier neighborhoods, festering in the heat, breeding horrible insects and pestilences. The usual dynamic in which the conflicts of the rich and shameless were waged among the poor and defenseless had been inverted. Apparently our little dumb-show in that dockside dive had touched off the most amazing of bloodlettings among the faceless lords of the Bay. Their nasty little conflicts had been simmering for the better part of a decade, and those petty offenses which among those naked of face would have resulted in entertaining but simple duels had doubled down and festered like hidden wounds forever and aye. The Hidden Council, which had been conceived as a desperation move to bring the piratical clans of the thousand isles of the Bay into an orderly approximation of a sovereign state, had itself become a problem. Or possibly not, their reliance on mercenary companies like the Black Company might have been at fault. Except… we hadn't been involved in the violence. You'd think with all these sell-lances at their disposal, they would have used us for the bloodshed. Instead, the news seemed to indicate that the clans had fielded their youngbloods in the streets between their family fortresses. Once news started flowing, it was startling how much blood had been spilt so quickly. Who knew they had kept so many weapons in reserve?

After the poisoning, you'd also think we would object to being used to separate the factions from each other, but money is money, and we're the Company, damnit. Better to write the dead into the Annals due to a sword-cut to the groin or a war-hammer to the barrel than "died of malaria”, "died of Yellow Jack”, "died of some nameless crud”, "died of the clap”.

Our patrols separated the surviving youngbloods from each other under threatening skies, unslit throats kept unslit by our sweating, miserable ponies, zebras and griffins. Another month in pirates' heaven, one would have thought. Except the pause in front of the storm gave enough time for the imported warlocks to arrive on station.

***

Octavius's patrol encountered the first signs of the new round of civil war. They found a silent street sweltering in the late summer evening, still air over pavement painted in the blood of changelings, deep in the Free Minds district. Green ichor on every other wall, like a particularly soulless graffiti artist with a limited palette. I was called in to evaluate the numerous black lumps left behind.

"So, Sawbones, what happened here?” asked Octavius. He was clearly unsettled, which was disturbing in and of itself. The unicorn was a long-term veteran, who we had picked up before my time in a passage through Crossroads. He had seen a lot of battles, and anything that rattled him wasn't something I was thrilled to be involved with. The black-shelled Free Minds littered the alleys throughout the neighborhood, far too many for a simple tussle. Dozens, at least. And their wounds were…

Well, Tartarus. They clearly weren't simple weapon-wounds. Nothing crushing, no simple slices like you'd find from wingblades or swords, or punctures like from lances. This was claw-slaughter, something big and vicious. This was monster-work, and in an enclosed urban area. There was no magical forest nearby to produce manicores or basilisks or chimerae to hold to blame.

"Shitfire, Octavius, I don't know, this isn't my sort of thing,” I protested. "These aren't the usual sort of messes. This is magical horseapples, maybe monsters? Call in Shorthorn or Gibblets.”

He gave me the stink-eye, not thrilled with the proposal. The casters weren't well-liked among the ‘pounders. You'd think a unicorn would be comfortable with our warlocks, but despite popular perception, ninety percent of unicorns weren't magical powerhouses. Most of them were magical pygmies comfortable with using their levitation to swing their big honking swords and keep their guts within their hides and those hides unperforated by projectiles. Monsters like Shorthorn, his sister Bongo, or the repulsive… whatever the hell he was Gibblets were scarce enough that the Company grabbed on with all hooves whenever we get one into the ranks. Doesn't mean the ranks are ever particularly happy about this; the warlocks were generally either crazy or horrible, or both.

We got Bongo when she eventually arrived, all of us half-maddened by the airless heat, wishing for some sort of wind to draw the horrible stink away from our affronted noses and stifled sweat pores. We were promptly disappointed. The time between the slaughter and the arrival of the warlock-unicorn had been enough that the magical sign had evaporated into the heat and general stink. She was stuck with the same physical evidence as the rest of us, and didn't make any more than I had.

"Monster”, she muttered, playing with her little drum, "Maybe controlled by a warlock?” Yay, the wonders of magical support, am I right?

Luckily, I thought at the time, the outer patrol had picked up an ichor-trail. Leading to the Council chambers, or at least, the old abandoned clan compound where the Council met. It had formerly been the fortress of the clan of the Synics, the corrupt and ineffectual predecessors of the Hidden Council.

We looked around at the steaming slaughterhouse the whatever it was had made of the Free Minds district, and thought twice about chasing the monster with a section, a single caster, and the company physician. Reinforcements were shouted out, and a significant fraction of the Company answered the call.

Talk about a "Company” to a member of a proper military, and they'll think you're going on about a small maneuver unit, a couple hundred ponies, a fraction of a regiment or a battalion, something like that. We're a mercenary Company, we use terminology from the ancient times, when a Captain outranked a general, and the Lieutenant might command a brigades-worth in the field. We referred to the fragments of the Company proper as cohorts and vexillations. In the days that the Company was in the service of the Hidden Council of Openwater Bay, we had three cohorts, and often fielded portions of those cohorts in battle-groups known as vexillations. The Company responded to our request with a vexillation of five sections under the Lieutenant herself, a purple-coated earth pony whose name had been dropped into obscurity when she had taken up the rank – she'd get it back when her time came to be named in the Annals.

So this felt like a sufficient supply of support, so we weren't exactly worried when we moved into the green-daubed compound, hours after the rampage. More fool us.

***

The compound, which wasn't technically claimed by any living clan, was indifferently maintained. The corridors leading to the council chambers were cleaned and not showing any obvious wear or tear, but the rest of the buildings in the complex… there was more than one ceiling collapsed, and rats, cockroaches, and worse things nesting in every corner. The interior was cooler than the streets outside, but moments within the heavy walls left us no better within than the sweltering world outside, simple body temperature defeating the cooling effect of heavy walls and stucco. The fools that the Council paid to "maintain” the facility hadn't survived the monster's initial incursion, and I wasn't exactly inclined to worry that our wait for reinforcements had enabled anything. The blood was well-dried in the previous coolness before our arrival; as cautious as we had been, this wasn't on our heads. But the beast itself was nowhere to be found, and as I bent to examine the mangled janitor in one back corridor, a ground-pounder named Firemane leaned over me to ask where it was. I had no answer for her.

I was looking up to answer the unicorn mare when the screaming above started. This caused a mad scramble as various sections ran or flew all over the place, trying to figure out who had made enemy contact. There's no chaos like a skirmish nearby you can't see, and I could see absolutely nothing. The stairs to the third floor and the turret had long since fell prey to time and neglect. The surviving pegasi who had seen anything at all later described the… thing that had attacked one of the aerial sections. None of the griffins in that section had survived to tell their version of the encounter. It sounded vaguely jaguarine, with a number of limbs, maybe tentacles. It killed fast, and it burst through the responding sections before anypony could observe and orient quickly enough to react. They had seen it scurry off in the direction of the harbor lighthouse.

Bongo ran off before the pegasi were done reporting, drumming furiously like she was leading a legion into the battle-line. I guess she recognized the description, based on some things that Shorthorn said later. I groaned the curses anypony obliged to stitch order around the rents left by the mad starts of warlocks might groan, and galloped off to find the Lieutenant before Bongo completely outran her supports. The Lieutenant, having completely lost control of her vexillation in the chaos, eyed me with disgust as if I were responsible for her lunatic wizard, and sent me off to find the other warlocks, hopefully back at the compound. Meanwhile she set about extracting the survivors of the mess she hadn't seen any more of than I had.

Luckily, the harbor lighthouse was in the same direction, more or less, as the company compound. At this point we had blood in the game, and my zebra was up. I paused in my quarters to retrieve my lance, and trotted into the mage's quarters. Shorthorn wasn't there, but that disgusting little green thing Gibblets was. He giggled when I told him what was the situation and relayed the Lieutenant's orders to converge on the lighthouse. I asked again where Shorthorn was, and all he said was…

"Sawbones, stop trying to suck up to command. No-one will remember how obedient you were when it comes time to write you down in the Annals. It's just your name and your rank. But you can find that humorless black-hearted old bastard in the Eastwards district, most like,” he snorted. This was not the sort of dismissal designed to keep me enthusiastic, but I couldn't do anything about the way the warlocks maintained the Annals, or treated us mundane mud-ponies. It was Bongo's obligation, after all, not Gibblets', and she kept it cleanly and clear, better than the days when Shorthorn had been left the responsibility, at any rate. Her brother had made a mess of his portion of the records, and everypony had been happy when he had left it to his little sister.

I had no way to harry Gibblets towards the coming confrontation by the harbor mouth, but I could track down Bongo's brother. They had sent him out into the wealthy neighborhoods, after some sort of altercation had set two of the clan freeholds on fire. When I got there, the flames were being suppressed by local unicorns and a team of merponies hosing down the walls with seawater from the nearby canal. Shorthorn was bullying some battered-looking caribou, tied up and naked. As I looked around, I spotted bits of carbonized bone surrounded by scorch marks, and realized that Shorthorn and his attached sections had put down a runecaster. As impressive as that sounded, it wasn't nearly as important as the tentacle… whatever the hell it was running for the harbor-mouth.

"Shorthorn, stop bucking around with your damn runecaster and respond to the actual emergencies! Bongo's run off and the rest of us are hoping to keep her alive!” I bellowed, beyond subtle suasion and simplicity.

"Sawbones, you hack, what the hell does that mean?” he bellowed right back, putting his captive down with a horn-flash and a sleep-spell.

"Tentacled cat-thing butchered a bunch of bugs and ponies on the south side, killed some of our flyers, ran for the lighthouse!” I gasped out in a hurry. That was enough to make Shorthorn mutter something about foreva-something-or-other and teleport right the Tartarus out of there. I knew he wasn't such a powerhouse that this was a simple flourish, he had heard something that upset him, clear enough. He had left me the only officer in the vicinity, just a couple corporals and their sections. I quizzed them about what the hell was going on, and straightened out the mess Shorthorn had left in his wake. This meant that I missed the entire confrontation at the lighthouse, so I can't tell you the details. It was bloody, and protracted, and whatever the hell it was killed Bongo dead. They thought they killed the beast in turn, but just because they brought back a body… well, it had tentacles, that much was true.

I wasn't given enough time to really dig into the autopsy of the thing they brought me, because other problems popped up in the interim. The runecaster had apparently implicated one of the clans, and the Captain and the Lieutenant, who had over a dozen dead Company ponies on her conscience, were on the warpath. Nopony seemed interested in the dead whatever the hell it was and the presumed warlock behind the monster which had caused all the actual casualties.

The assault on the clan compound was as bloody as such things generally are. Nopony can crack a fortified compound without casualties, nopony who isn't an alicorn, anyrate. They sent an entire vexellation along with Otonashi into the breach. We slaughtered the entire family as part of our vengeance, the price for holding a wall against the Company. You never refuse a door when a mercenary company comes calling, we consider having to breach equivalent to a storming, and all the mercilessness of the storming of a fortress is part and parcel of the laws of war, such as they are. No quarter for a fortress that doesn't surrender and makes us storm its walls.

In the end, It wasn't particularly expensive as such things go, but it was the principle of the thing. And the principle of the thing left an entire extended family, women children and greybeards, efficiently slaughtered. It was all justified from our point of view and in the eyes of tradition and law, such as it is. It illustrated just how little humor the Black Company had about assaults on its personnel and honor. It was well within the honor of mercenaries and the rights of an armed military force. None of that mattered in the least, because that clan had clearly been part of the Hidden Council.

Suddenly no-pony would talk to us. No-pony was moving on us, but… that was it. There was quiet, but not peace, and we were suddenly without any supports. Suddenly, after six years in the Bay, we were pony non grata. Nopony wanted to sell to us, nopony wanted to talk to us. We were victorious in almost every encounter, but we were going to starve if we sat in our compound.

When we had a set of ships willing to ship us out of that mess, the Captain jumped at the opening. It was a golden road, probably provided by the naval faction, and we took it right out of Openwater Bay.

***

Openwater Bay was a watery crossroads on that world, but the options elsewhere were not exactly mouth-watering to a large mercenary company with far too many hungry mouths. Professional militaries had taken that world by storm, which was part of why we had kept to the same contract for so long with the Hidden Council of the Bay. They hadn't figured out how to maintain a professional military in the time we had been in service – there was the non-zero chance that any such army or navy would have mutinied like the Marine regiments whose rebellion had brought us into the Bay back when I had been a shave-tail and a part-time assistant in the infirmary, and whose replacements had kicked over their traces again and again. So we were not exactly welcome in any port upon the face of that worldlet in the midst of a faddish fascination for national militaries. Condottieri were no longer in fashion, nationalism was all the rage on the mainlands. This limited our options severely, and there were only so many roads off the surface of this particular lump of dirt. We would have been bucked if there weren't portals in the offing, but the Road had a couple stops on this benighted dirtball. Crossroads was the nearest to Openwater Bay and our bought boats set sail for that port of portals.

Shorthorn wasn't taking the loss of his little sister softly. A great soaking sea of booze was part of his family's mourning process, and Gibblets wasn't willing to give him the space to soak up that sea without interference. Everytime Shorthorn was in his cups, the cups themselves started berating him and anypony in ear-range. The little monster didn't care about space or tolerance or any of that pony crap, he just gave it to Shorthorn with both barrels as if the poor unicorn hadn't lost his only little sister to some sort of monstrous thing. Of course Shorthorn blew off like a volcano, and the ship he was on was on flames before we were able to put together a fire brigade. I mean, we put the flames down before the flames put the ship into the deep, but the captain of the ship was less than enthused about his equine cargo at that point. We moved Shorthorn to a second ship, and kept Gibblets far from his victim, but nopony was happy about warlocks at that stage of the game.

Bongo's death left the annalist position wide open, and Gibblets and Shorthorn's stupid vendetta left the Captain and the Lieutenant not inclined to pass the position to one of our other warlocks' as tradition obliges. Our warlocks were effective enough in a military sense, but they were imbeciles when it came to scholastic pursuits. Which, since so many of our groundpounders weren't literate, left very few options available. I ended up the annalist by simple elimination, being literate and not insanely vengeful against any other parts of the Company. So, that was a thing. I vowed to record everypony properly, as something other than a simple name and vital description in the Annals - as a measure of that last full measure, so to speak.

We had come to this world through Crossroads a year or so before the contract with Openwater Bay. It was the assumption that they had no particular bad memories, as we hadn't spent any time in that polity to affect bad memories or good memories – we had simply passed through. We hadn't taken into account the third-party accounts of our behavior in the Bay. This had sounded poorly enough in those retellings that it was a serious problem in Crossroads. It was a mostly unicorn town, but it was a suspicious and paranoid unicorn town. Their portals were tightly locked down, and they were very careful of what passed into and out of the world that Crossroads protected. A mercenary Company like the Black Company was apparently the sort of thing which set off every warning signal they had in operation.

We wouldn't be able to survive long stuck in a town like Crossroads, there was no suppliers, no cash to work our way around the lack of sadlers, and the town itself had sufficient military and carabinieri to not make making a mess worth the effort. I talked to the Lieutenant, and she closeted with the Captain and they worked it out between each other and some critter I didn't lay eyes on at the time, but apparently had pull with the portal-masters.

The major portal in town was made available to the Black Company, highest priority. Clearly Crossroads recognized that they wanted our troublesome selves outside of their world as soon as possible. The mechanics of that doorway meant that we had to exit in a regimented way unlike anything since I had become the physician of the Company - we weren't really an evolutions-and-parade-grounds sort of outfit, not even in the lackadaisical days of garrison life. I took the opportunity to evaluate the whole in a way I hadn't before - for my new assignment, as it were.

We were a fair size organization in front of the portal in Crossroads. Eleven hundred, fifteen lances, twenty-five officers and twenty support ponies, pony, griffin and whatever-the-hell-they-are. Surprisingly enough, we didn't accumulate any caribou, merponies or changelings in our time in Openwater Bay, and the majority of troopers were ponies. Forty griffins in addition to the Captain himself were the majority of our nonequine ponypower. Another fifty-three zebra and twenty-five donkeys which I was generally inclined to include in the "equine" category, and three oddities in addition to Gibblets. Tradition holds that we were originally a pony company in the days before we lost the original Annals, but it was somewhat startling that we still continued to present a pony face to the world, despite the Captain being a griffin and the centuries we've spent in non-pony lands. Hurrah for tradition and instinctual racism!

We lined up in sections before the portal, our baggage and materials arranged properly in expectation of the transition. Rumor had it that that there was a contract waiting beyond the glass, although I wasn't certain how anypony knew.

***

The mirror-portal, like every one I've seen, was simple in appearance, but terrible in substance. The passage was dreadful, all synthesia and rainbow-smearing horror. I can see why some call them the Rainbow Bridges, but that label has such religious connotations that it's probably for the best that we don't use that term consistently. No need to leave the credulous the idea that bullying godlets have control over our doorways. Transit is difficult enough without superstition and god-bothering foolishness.

Well, I say that as if the Company had any control over the portal we were transiting. We were being put out a lot of bits to get the whole complement out of Crossroads to the next station, along with our chattels and supplies. The portal-owners were tying up their doorway with unprofitable mercenaries instead of the materials which actually paid a premium on either side of the threshold, you know, gems, gold, silks, spices… whatever. I don't know, I'm not a merchant. All I know is those skintflints held us up for what seemed like every bit we had on hand. They were lucky we didn't sack their cheap asses, burnt out their offices and butchered their laughable security details. In short, never hold a mercenary company up for the last jangle, it isn't worth the color.

When I finally got my turn through the rainbow blur, it was something else. The other side was very much like the other world it was. Cool breezes and sweet prospects, a small town surrounding the portal in an alpine hillside, despite the enormous wealth reflected by that interdimensional roadway. I suppose the lack of water and access in that high mountain perch kept that little nameless town from growing like it ought to have, there just wasn't the resources to make of it anything but an outpost. As the Company organized itself in the open space around the portal, the officials in charge on this side circled like predatory birds, maybe hawks, but more likely like buzzards. This breed could smell the bribes from a dozen miles away.

Except they were circling around a void within their rotation, avoiding something nearby. Something slight, black, and alarming in a way I had difficulty quantifying in the immediate moment after transit. It came slinking up to the Captain and the Lieutenant ahead in a cluster of sergeants who had come through before me. I couldn't make out what the black figure was, not whether it was a pony or a griffin or something else. As it came closer, the uncertainty increased, a strange blurring with accents of… animal hide and straps and magical haze.
The officers exchanged greetings with the… well, it must have been something important locally. I still wasn't certain of where we had transited, although they'd tell me eventually, as the new Annalist. I'd need to know in order to write down the details properly. The Company might not care for the personal details of the soldiers recorded in its pages, but the Company's career along the Roads must always be properly documented. Never again could our history be devoured by savage Fate as it was four centuries ago.

Author's Notes:

So, if you don't recognize this from the unoriginality and the dark tone of cynicism, this started out as a ponification of Glen Cook's Black Company stories, but then took a bit of a random-walk through the halls of military fantasy. I noticed prior to starting this that no-one had actually written anything exactly along these lines, despite dozens of Warhammer 40K and XCOM and other grimdark settings. I guess it's a minefield ponifying an actual novel series, but hopefully I've hoofed my way through the toepoppers so far. And as time goes on, it has meandered further and further from the original well-mined fortress, although you can occasionally see the distant spires of that inspiration just barely visible over the non-euclidean curvature of the not-earth.

As you can see, I borrowed some of the ideas behind Chengar Qordath's Freeport setting in this first chapter, but Openwater Bay is more an allusion to that wonderful hive of scum and villainy than the thing itself. Thanks to Chengar Qordath for letting me borrow their ponified pirate town as a sort of inanimate Expy. We quickly passed from that particular reference into an almost unrecognizable version of Tambelon.

The March Down-Country Into Tambelon

SBMS002

As I walked up to the cluster, the Captain turned towards me and held out a talon, telling the black thing, "…and this is our company physician and Annalist, Sawbones. That makes him an officer of sorts. Sawbones, this is our new employer – "

"Legate Marklaird, doctor. It is [skktt] good to meet you. [ttkkkt] I am an avid consumer [vvttkt] of historical records and chronicles. Might I [kttvt] see a copy of your work one of these [kkttkt] days?” The legate's voice was horrifying, shifting registers, genders, age and tone without warning. I will not try any further to replicate the exact experience of listening to that freak, as it hurts my mouth to write almost as much as it hurt my ears to hear.

"We will see what can be done in the way of a summary if I ever can find the time, Legate, but the Annals themselves are not to be read by non-brethren. They're something in the way of a sacred text, and part of that is that they themselves are a… mystery. No outsider can read them, at least not without doing violence to the Company's traditions. Some of our ponies would get… violent if they thought I was neglecting my responsibility,” I equivocated. There was no way in Tartarus I was ever going to find that time, not for some strange critter that wouldn't show me its face, and my second job was honestly already straining my time as it was.

I could have sworn the legate smirked behind its featureless mask, no more fooled by my mendacity than I was at its alleged historical curiosity.

Under all that dark wrapping and creepiness lurked a warlock who went by the name Marklaird, and it was an imperial legate, which in the local parlance meant it was a representative of the Bride of Tambelon. The Bride was something of an empress, sovereign over a vast swathe of the continent, from the blasted sands five hundred leagues to the south, to the edge of the permafrost a thousand leagues to the north. She ruled everything from sea to sea but the empire by its very nature meant that she hardly governed anywhere outside of her capital in, let's see if I got this spelled right – Bibelot? At least according to the bright-eyed ambitious young things that followed in the wake of the legate. The Bride had enough land and fractious vassals that, even given her principle of "ruling but not governing”, there was always a rebellion somewhere in that vast expanse, and her own vast forces were largely tied up in pacification campaigns of varying violence amongst her loving vassals. It was a matter of course that she would have use for a band of condottieri like the Black Company, if only to make messes that her more diplomatic corps could swoop in and "solve” with a display of heroic patriotism and open-hoofed mercy.

Any which way, the Company couldn't linger on the threshold at that nameless outpost for long – our horsepower would strain the resources of that pretty but barren little plot of land in even the shortest of timeframes, and we needed to move onwards down-country before hunger and thirst began to undermine the health of our mares and stallions. It doesn't take starvation to start wiping names off the rolls when you're dealing with an entire organization, just a bit of malnutrition can weaken constitutions and fill my infirmary cots with goldbrickers and malingers. Since the cots were currently buried at the bottom of a number of wagons towards the back of the column, I felt our march held a certain urgency, and did my best to communicate my urgency to command. We needed to get on the road.

This well-meaning urgency had to wait, tapping its hooves in anxiety, because the supply corps and the ground-pounders were in no condition for long road marches. We had a lot of ponies in light shoes, and some in nothing but raw hoof, especially the serious spellcasters, who often complained that all that cold iron played hob with their matrixes. So the farriers did a land sale business, ripping out old shoes and hammering in heavy iron shoes day and night, aided by every pony and griffin that could be trusted near a fetlock with a pair of pliers or a hammer.

"This is nonsense,” I muttered as it was my turn to get nails driven into my poor hooves, "Our ancestors out on the sahel didn't have to wear pounds of glorified grey rocks on their hooves when they pounded predators into the grasses. We just thundered across the turf naked-hooved as the day our dams dropped us.”

"Give over, Sawbones. I remember that town we pulled you out of, nopony there had seen open savanna in generations. You probably couldn't tell elephant grass from crab-grass!” the head smith jeered at me over his shoulder as one of his drafted privates fumbled with my hooves and a hammer.

"Pay attention to my hooves!” yelped Iron Hoof's current victim, a carter and cook named Asparagus, as the smith rapidly drove in the nails without looking at his work.

I looked aside in disgust, and glared as shadows passed over us. The damn flyers, they didn't have to get all this crap hammered into their precious toes. Why couldn't zebras have grown wings? What was the Creator thinking when he was handing out racial bennies? I'd like to fly over the rocks and the mud, too, damnit!

Finally, the necessaries were completed, and the mobile smithies were packed up and made as mobile as those heavy damn loads could be made, and we hit the road. I could swear I could hear the outpost's supply clerks weep in our wake as they mourned their empty larders.

***

The mountainsides rose around our column as we followed behind the carriages of the legate downhill. I had hitched myself up to the medical supplies wagon, leaving the heavy stuff to a set of taciturn brothers seconded to me from one of the ground-pounder sections. Earth ponies are really the greatest when it comes to being dumb muscle. For the rest of us… I sweated like a unicorn doing heavy labor. We had really gone a little soft lounging around garrison in the Bay. I'd have left this heavy-ass wagon to one of the Eyupers except the medical supplies were full of narcotics and other precious, highly abusable drugs. I trust my brothers, but I don't believe in tempting the herd.
The Eyupers had names –for the record, and for the Annals, those were Driftwood and Rhubarb Fritter – but everypony just called them "Eyuper”, and they both answered to the name, mostly because it was the only thing they ever seemed to say. I suppose they'd say something else if it bothered them.

The alpine meadows quickly fell behind us as we descended below the treeline, a barely logged terrain lightly harvested for the town we had left behind. The roads were steep enough I almost considered re-hitching to the back of our wagons and letting the wagons drag us - but I wasn't sure how to re-rig the tack. Iron Hoof had my number, I really was more of an urban zebra.

As we marched beyond the immediate back country of the outpost, we descended into a wilderness of sorts, held back from the road by imperial fiat and forced labor imported from the inhabited regions below. Apparently the corvee fell under the rubrick of "ruling, not governing”, but it was explained to me at some point in my military apprenticeship the inestimable value of good roads to any imperial project. Good roads, well-maintained meant lightning-fast and heavy-hoofed response to any un-necessary independence of thought or worse, disagreement among vassals.

But the long trip impressed upon us the following facts: any military organization the size of the Company in those days could never stand still for any period time, especially in a wasteland like those wooded slopes. A thousand or more ponies would eat their own heads off in no time at all left to their own devices in such a place. Any single soldier is free – a regiment is tied to the apron-strings of whichever master it can find, soonest possible. A squad can go bandit – an entire Company has to hold to the lordship in whatever land it finds itself.

That first night on the road, as I set up shop by the light of a fire and examined a series of overstrained hocks, sore-hooves, and one serious sprain case, the warlock-legate came back to my wagon to talk some more.

"So, my dear doctor, how far back does your mystery chronicle go? We've found tales of a Black Company going back centuries elsewhere,” buzzed the Marklaird in the voice of an elderly stallion with his vocal cords crushed by some half-healed wound.

"First off, I'm no doctor of medicine, I'm a surgeon. I work for a living. Never seen the inside of an academy, let alone a university. Names and titles are important, that's a big part of why the Annals are sacred to us. In a real sense, the Annals are the Company, its memory and history. And we go back five centuries, when the Company made the mistake of signing on with the second false Mahdi in the Dar al Hisan. The Eighters caught us in a vicious trap on the edge of the irrigated lands, and drove us into the open desert. Some of the Company came out the other side, but the Annalist of the time and his assistants weren't among them. It is the earliest disaster we can remember, but hardly the last one. War isn't a safe occupation,” I trailed off, eyeing the new shoes on a bellyaching donkey. He'd have to go back to the farriers and get his shoes re-set, someone had botched it. As I sent the ground-pounder off to bother the smith-ponies, I eyed my visitor.

The Marklaird was a damn creepy pony, and I use that term advisedly. It was covered entirely in animal hide, skinned from some poor fool, I have no idea if from a nonsentient creature like swine or some talking beast like a deer, cow or (shudder) pony. Whatever it came from, that hide, called I found out later "leather”, was dyed black, and covered in some sort of terrible glamour so that you couldn't make out what exactly the Marklaird was. It could be a pony, it could be a donkey or a diamond dog or even a centaur. The only thing I was fairly certain was that, if it was winged, it had bound its wings firmly against its barrel with those terrible straps of animal hide. You'd expect a warlock to be a unicorn, but there were mages who were other races, rare enough, you come across them now and again, especially when dark magic was involved.

I listened to it boast of the glories of its empire, taking it all with a grain of salt. Its voice was no clue as to what it was, as every sentence, or rather, every breath was in the voice of a different beast, one statement in the voice of a little filly, the next in that of an aged old grampa, and the one after that in the dulcet tones of a new-betrothed bride. The legate was no common warlock, but rather a horror that spoke in the voices of a multitude, a legion. One hopes that it held power consummate with its terror, something to compensate for its unseelie nature, because by the alicorns, it was an unsettling creature.

The next day we broke out of the wilderness. Tambelon was the name of the continent we had cast ourselves up onto, and it was a rich country, increasingly fertile as we worked our way down out of the mountains. It was more donkey country that it was pony or zebra or griffin country, which made our current roster stand out more than I was comfortable, to be honest. Hamlet by hamlet, we passed out of the logging backcountry and into the granaries. At least this meant that we were no longer marching hoof to hoof, dependent on the wagons-loads dispatched by the legate's bureaucracy. Each town had reserves more than sufficient to feed the company for the day or two we spent in their vicinity. it was comforting to be in such a rich country, and a bit perplexing to encounter such peacefully prosperity, given what we had been told of the rebellious nature of the country. But further details provided by the legate's eager young staff settled my curiosity; the currently rebellious provinces were weeks' worth of march from our vicinity. There was a port downcountry that we would be using to transit to the vicinity the Bride needed us to be without months of march wasted overland. Meanwhile, the imperial roads paid for by the distant Bride were making many a sullen peasant quietly prosperous, and fattened the burghers of each town we passed with the crops and taxes of a deep back-country. Towns which elsewhere would have to have squatted like fat spiders on navigable rivers or well-harbored coasts had sprung up here at actual crossroads, limited only by local water supplies, as far as I could tell. The more I saw of the Bride's roads, the more I was a convert. No tyrant, however horrible, could be all bad if she built good roads.

Rime, on the other hand, was a fat and stupid port, perched at the head of a long lake, really, more of an inland sea, full of the taxed excess of thousands of square miles of rich back-country, the sort of fat and stupid which inexorably produces thoughtless corruption, worthless carabineri, and officials with their hooves continuously stretched out in selfish expectation. The Bride's central administration was light-hoofed and distant; all this meant was that her local vassals were free to be as awful as their consciences and their peasantry allowed them to be. The Company generally passes through such nonsense without much of a wake. Our history and the Annals give us an edge in how to deal with this sort of petty nonsense. We can dodge their expectations and demands without too much expended energy.

Command chose to raise the banner for a recruiting stop in this foul, impacted burg. Sometimes I can't comprehend the thought-processes of officers, even though the Annalist thing technically means I was now in the line of command. At that point I hadn't really processed the change in my status; I had been safely irresponsible as the zebra who stitched up management's mistakes, not the pony who was being paid, even theoretically, to make those mistakes. Even though I had already started making my very own mistakes back in the Bay. The Good Idea Fairy leaves her eggs in us early, and they grow fat on our lack of self-introspection and quicken with the fuel of self-deception.

I suppose I haven't described the Company's banner yet. The flag itself wasn't technically important, it had been replaced on a regular basis for centuries, although the earliest Annals report that the current flag is mostly faithful to that long-rotted rag that the flag-bearer dragged out of the desert in the Dar-al-Hisan. The Annals are the memory of the Company, but the banner-lance is its heart, and its heart precedes its remembrance. It may very well be the original pikestaff of the Company's long-forgotten founding; there are hints in that first surviving Annal of the contents of the lost volumes, and they all suggest that the lost history of the Company is as long as the history that is written. The banner lance certainly looks old enough to be almost a thousand years old. You'd think that wood would have lost its strength, that steel would have rusted away, but there was something unearthly in that pikestaff. It…. oozed. I've read accounts of the flag-bearer stabbing enemies, even great and terrible enemies, true monsters, with that lance and killing them ugly. Its prick was death.

The pikestaff was what the brethren revered, but the would-be recruits were attracted by the silly cloth hung from its lethal length. This was a long pennant-flag, elongated triangular, with a sable unicorn's-head over a field bleu celeste, superimposed over a crescent moon, argent. Its provenance was long-lost in the Annals, but the description in that first volume was quite clear. It had been briefly replaced in the days of our service to the Hashish-mares and their dun stallion al-Telekker, by a banner with twelve argent hung earth ponies over a sable field, but once the underlying vendetta which drove that unprofitable service had been satisfied, the Annalist of the time had prevailed on a new Captain to revert the banner-flag to something more traditional.

As it was a donkey town, our recruits were likewise mostly donkeys. They weren't quite as useful to a mercenary company as the stolid earth ponies which compromised the iron core of the Company in those days, but still, donkeys could be hard enough if hammered into shape. Especially in Tambelon, where there was something in the soil and the air which gave them a certain advantage which meant that not every wrestling match was won by a veteran earth pony, and a surprising number of donkey hedge-wizards could be beaten out of the brush if one put one's mind to it. Rime's recruits weren't quite enough to compose another cohort, and we wouldn't have concentrated the wet-manes into such a compact formation of cluelessness even if we could have; one or two sections from the two ground-pounder cohorts were broken up and used as cadre for the new recruit sections, which were divided equally between the ‘pounder cohorts. This left the aerial cohort a bit undersized in comparison, but in the absence of serious griffin or pegasi towns to recruit from, we had little choice. I don't quite understand the dispersal of the pony diasporas, but however the migrations had broken, Tambelon had lost out in the weatherpony sweepstakes. This new world was at the mercy of random weather; weather magic was the rare gift of the occasional talented unicorn here, and those more rare than hen's teeth.

We picked up a half-breed unicorn-donkey who went by "the Crow” in Rime. She was a minor hedge-wizard, and it almost completely escaped my notice, despite my concentration on the new recruits and their catch-as-catch-can training while we waited for the small fleet which would ferry us across the great lake to Tonnerre. I was busy putting together a series of readings from the Annals for the new recruits at the time, in hopes of properly inducting the new donkeys heart and soul into the Company before we saw action, so the goings-on of another hedge-wizard in the madhouse that passes for the Company's witches-coven wasn't properly recorded in the Annals as it happened.

Author's Notes:

So, I went back and forth over how much to lean on the Crow. She's an expy of a fairly prominent part of the original trilogy, but every time I tried to write out an introduction, things went pear-shaped. There's something about Raven which breaks the harmony of the story, he was kind of an anti-Stu in the source material, and that gives me the scrabbling itches; the Crow might end up a minor part of the story in the end. We'll see, I've got notions of where this is going, but not an ironbound outline.

A Reading For The Recruits

SBMS003

"From the Book of Esteem, second volume. In those days, the Company was in the service of the Sisterhood of the Red Flails, and the campaign of the previous fall had seen the Company’s blood purchase the freedom of fully half of the unicorn city-states of the Upper Reaches from the Sisters’ sworn enemies, the Chevrine Federation. The survivors of the campaign, under the direction of the much-thinned Company, erected fortifications and entrenchments at the base of the three peninsulas that held the remaining occupied cities, excepting only a causeway leading southwards to the Chevrine home counties, which was thinly posted, the allied forces of the Sisterhood being too few to cover every exposed position…" I droned on and on to a crowd of donkey recruits sprawled all over the forward deck of an ingot hauler, two days out of the port of Rime, headed for the northern provinces, and the promise of rebellion and hard campaigning. We were in convoy, riding half-empty freighters and vast long-hulled log and ingot haulers for a distant port, where those ships would take loads of smelted iron and cut logs and ship them back to Rime and her sisters along the inland sea, stock and fuel and raw materials for the teeming proletarian hordes of worker-ponies packed in the tenement quarters of the brash new cities. We were dead-heading, but the imperium was paying for the privilege, and it seemed that there wasn’t much draw or demand for the finished goods and fineries that fat and haughty Rime produced to justify its excess and pride in those restless northern lands ahead. Or maybe there just wasn’t the cash, I hadn’t figured it out yet.

The Company’s officers and the legate’s people were closeted up on another freighter further back down the convoy, trying to figure out our coming campaign, resources and strategies, tactics and goals. They were far too busy planning and thinking deep thoughts to worry about the hundred or more wet-maned recruits we had picked up in Rime almost as an afterthought, almost all of them slicker than the day they dropped out of their mamas’ placental sacs.

"…in order to fill the ranks, badly depleted by a season of successful but bloody fighting, the Company levied volunteers from the two cities nearest their sections of the palisades, a small fishing city known as Sidebottom, and the trading colossus Tarseus. Both cities being largely populated by unicorns, the Company formed from the new recruits eight sections of swords-mares, and nine of bow-stallions. Now those sections were distributed between the cohorts as follows-" I continued to rattle on, sweating in the cool breeze as I realized that I was losing the recruits, and baffled as to how to get out of the box of boredom I had read right into, clear-eyed. I was saved from my own dullness by a vile cackle.

"My damnation, Sawbones, you could drain the vim and vigor from a gladiator’s death-battle! Do you think you could read them the supply tallies while you’re at it? How about ducal genealogical charts? Maybe one of the cooks’ recipe books?" Saved by the horrible green thing lounging by the portside gunwale, leaving an unpleasant stain on the planking underneath him. Fresh air did not agree with the froggy Gibblets, it aggravated a skin condition. At least, I hoped it was a skin condition. He had never come to me, or my predecessor for help with whatever the hell it was that cause him to… secrete everywhere on certain days.

"Well then, Lord Gibblets, how would you summarize Bodkin Point’s defense of the Causeway that Ser Esteem and myself were working our way towards?" I did my best to soak my response in what I imagined was snooty, sarcastic academic accents. I was only guessing – I’ve never darkened a school-room door, let alone academe. But I was game to play along if the witch-thing wanted to help draw in the damp 'uns. The drippy ought to ooze together, I figured, and at least the new fish would dry out eventually, the ones that survived. Even on his dying day, Gibblets would probably soak his cardboard box apart before we could chuck him in the sod.

"Weeelll indeeed, you striped dullard, you might start by talking about the two sets of recruits that they pulled out of those nose-high unicorn cities, because the ones from fishtown were hard and humble boys and girls, the scrapings of the docks and the shop-floors. The recruits from the city of bright lights, and brighter money, they were the children of the great and glorious, proud to serve their freed peoples. More proud of the cause than of their brothers, and in their hearts, they were only Company by courtesy. Of course they were utterly useless, filly and colt alike."

Gibblets was cheating, these details weren’t in the Annals – it wouldn’t have suited the purposes of Esteem, who had been a stuffy and arrogant unicorn far too fond of the privilege of rank and position. But I wouldn’t contradict him for the world. Our new recruits were mostly factory-floor rejects and guttersnipes, and they sucked up this petty class warfare like it was milk straight from their dams’ teats.

"Sections with mares and stallions of both sorts were seconded to the pair of veteran sections holding down the near end of the causeway leading to the back of the Reach, the proud Tarseioi and the grumbling Bottom-bitches alike. All the fighting up to that point had been along the upper ends of the Reach, where everything important was, and the wealth that made any of it worth fighting even a candle’s length. Patrols down the causeway alerted the outpost early enough that the Chevrines were trying the backdoor, having lost enough trying to batter down the front entrances-" Gibblets somehow roared this, despite how dry it reads now that I put it down on the page, conjuring out of his reedy, irritating pipe of a throat and the dried-out material something wild and thundering. The recruits, who had been sprawled sleepy-eyed and lulled half-asleep where they lay draped across the planks and chandlers’ supplies lashed here and there in between the foremost mast and the nameless equipment bow-wards, were stirred awake, actually interested now. But I couldn’t leave it to him alone, not and hold up my head as Annalist, however new I was at this.

"You talk as if you were there, oh master of the green-scummed waters! I know you’re older than the fens, and slower than the fetid seeps, but you most certainly aren’t two and a half centuries old!"

"Quiet, you benighted grey savage! I’ve heard these stories often enough, and told better than anything you’ll ever manage by better mares and stallions than ye will ever be. And I remember the *pith* of the stories, which you’d bury in the minutiae and the dusty details that belong with the "and we laid to rest"s that you *conclude* these readings. You’re daft enough you’d put them right in the middle of the reading! Listen, my children, and your nuncle Gibblets will tell you of the bowyer, and the Chevrine heavy shock-brigade, and the span he stood upon. His lord and master, a sergeant named Blood Raven, she died in the very first exchange, along with any number of veteran brethren, caught out of place and crushed by a terrible volley of those great hand-catapults the Chevrine’s heavy minotaur shock troops could carry into battle at the jog. They had charged forward to extract the forward guard from the enemy come up quick, and they died ugly, pegasus and earth pony alike. Blood Raven was an old Company hand, one of those bat-winged, slit-eyed things of the night we used to field, those hell-spawn that drew down a terrible fear among our enemies when they got going and keep on going once they went. It availed her naught, dropped from the air at the start of her run by a great thudding rock flung from near point-blank range." The wide-eyed stirring among the long-eared newbies indicated that they were still getting used to the idea that this was a killing company, and they had signed on for ugly death at the hands of uglier plug-uglies. This was what the readings were for, to get them in their minds as well as their bodies ready for the blooding. Some ponies we recruited were born to split skulls and saw hamstrings, cut throats and bathe in the blooded muck and filth; but these were donkeys, not griffins or minotaurs, and those didn’t come from the factory floor standard installed with bloodthirst and a disregard for the bodily integrity of others. That was something you had to cultivate with recruits like these. Well, for the most part. We had picked up some dodgy-looking ones here and there in the crowd…

"The disaster disheartened the straggling recruits, who had avoided the killing volley by virtue of being TOO DAMN SLOW IN THE CHARGE, and they fled for the low wall and the abatis built across the exit of the causeway, and far too many kept going afterwards. It could have been a rout, and the loss of the camp behind it, if not for one of those scumlings of the fishtown docks, a dark-furred bow-stallion who had taken a company-name before the banner-lance, calling himself by his favorite arrow-head, Bodkin Point. He had a proper skill with that armor-piercing hell-dart, but it wasn’t that which saved the causeway, it was his steadiness. He reached the wall, and he turned around, and he took up his stave and smacked each and every panicky mare and stallion as they crossed the planks across the abatis and tried to run past him there at the mouth of the way. Nothing quite breaks a panic like a sharp slap across the muzzle with a nice springy length of yew. What remained of the sections rallied beside that new recruit, and took up the planking, and formed a bowline, without any swords-horses, just the abatis, the wall, and their bows, because the rich and privileged recruits who could afford those honking great slabs of steel had been better-fed, faster and quicker, and were off in the rear spreading defeatism and panic behind the line."

"The spare quivers had been left stacked behind the wall, and the bow-line quickly arranged their refills, stabbed point-down before and behind them on the wall itself, because they needed to see their targets, and a bow-line is no damn good crouched down behind a earthen mound. The minotaurs, loaded down by their catapults and their heavy armor, lumbered into range, out of breath and lagging. They’re terrible brutish things when they have their wind, but there isn’t much to them when they’re blown, and that’s a lot of meat to put into motion and keep moving. Nopony uses minotaurs for cavalry or scouting, children. Keep that in mind, although your world seems thin of cow-headed walking mountains from the looks of it, Annals know if you’ll face any in any campaign while we’re on this rock." True enough, although they’d imported us; some military entrepreneur might have had some minotaur cows and bulls shipped special-order for the construction of shield-walls or an engineering company. Gibblets wasn’t saying it, but minotaurs were clever mechanics, and builders, and did amazing things with delvings and construction. Rime, as ramshackle as some parts of it was, and as a booming industrial town, would have been like a second Minos if someone had only thought to bring some in through the portal. Not that there were that many minotaurs back in Openwater Bay, but I had heard stories, and there were a scattering. The company had even had a bull in the smiths when I was new in the company. Roarer had liked his rum, though, and apparently minotaurs didn’t float, he fell off a pier drunk as a lord five months after we arrived in the Bay, and he didn’t come back up.

"I don’t know what they taught the unicorns of that fishtown, or where they had picked up the skill, but somehow those wet-maned-as-Tartarus newbies managed to generate a proper old-fashioned arrow-storm, and every bull who wandered into range went down feathered like a penguin, or ran yelping like a proud-tailed peacock stuck full of feathered sticks. It wouldn’t have mattered in the end – weight will tell, and a minotaur bull with his blood up will burst right through abatis, but the bow-line gave the Chevrines a bloody nose, and gave them pause, and it was enough. While they were gathering their nerve and hauling up their catapults just out of bow-range, the recruits’ toffee-nosed peers had been herded back to the defense by veteran reinforcements, and under a proper rain of Bodkin Point’s favorite warhead, they were brought up to the wall, and the planking put back down, and they formed up in front of the abatis, the bows planted firmly on the wall in the rear. It’s not an easy thing to do, charging while your own brothers fill the air over your heads with feathered death, but I’ll give the swords-ponies of Tarseus this, they gathered their nerve before the minotaurs gathered their breath. The Company charged the enemy, and broke them, and burned their catapults, and butchered their wounded, and set them lumbering for their own side of the causeway." Gibblets at this point produced a flask from thin air, and seemed like he expected me to bring it all home. I flushed, happy to get back on track with my intended moral.

"Thus did Bodkin Point demonstrate the virtues of a Company recruit – prudence, steadiness, resolution, leadership, competence with his weapon," I concluded.

It wasn’t much of a flourish, but every one of those donkeys were on their hooves, leaning forward, rapt in the story. I felt a shameful envy for that spellbinding flair that my green brother displayed, more so for the fact that it had nothing to do with magic, it was just simple personality and charisma. This was why the Company’s Annalists were wizards, the force of personality that came with the usual wickedness and determination made for a riveting reading style.

"Thus endeth the lesson, fledglings, unless you’d like to stay for the 'and we laid to rest’s. Away with you, your corporals have work for you, and you’ve rested enough," I concluded rather lamely, trying to put some sort of official seal on Gibblets’ hijacking of my lecture. I gazed up at the banner-pikestaff, braced beside the nearest mast, as the audience broke up, ambling off to be drilled in lance-executions and hoof-blade katas by their new-minted corporals.

I walked over to the warlock, and thanked him for his save, looking down at the water rushing below, far faster than any ship I’ve ever seen on fresh or salt seas.

"We don’t have a square inch of sail up, how is this boat going so fast, Gibblets?"

"Ha! It’s a clever gag, these donkeys have their tricks. You see that box way the heck up on the bow, and those racks on either side behind it? They’re great honking charms, entangled with enormous enchanted loadstones beside every harbor this ship services, and a couple headlands here and there in between. They link them up as they go, and the whole thing pulls itself to and fro like a pony drawing a canal-boat through a set of locks. Don’t have to depend on wind directions, sitting ironbound until the right breeze comes in the right direction. Just hook up and go go go. Didn’t you see that great ochre lump of granite looming outside of the entrance to Rime when we left?"

"I did, but apparently I missed the briefing where this was discussed. Why are there masts?"

"Well, everything breaks, and you never know when you’ll need to suddenly go off course. Shallow seas like this trough can blow out sudden sand-bars and the like."

"So, where did you get that business about Blood Raven? I don’t think any of the Annals mentioned she was a thestral, although it matches the sparse mentions of her name here and there well enough. It *could* be true. How old are you, Gibblets? None of the Annalists said when you were recruited, and the first one to mention you was Crescent Moon about eighty-five years ago, by my reckoning. "
"Pfft, as if a pegasus calling herself 'Blood Raven’ would be anything other than a bat-pony. Might as well have called herself 'Bloodbath’ or 'Blood Eagle’." We both paused to shudder. I’d never seen one of the victims of that caribou execution method, but I’ve read enough to never want to see one if I could. I suspect that Gibblets *had* seen a few in his day.

"As for Crescent Moon, that mare was too loose-tongued for her own good, it got her killed quick enough, when she tried to fast-talk her way out of a blown ambush. You’ll note that she only had the one volume, she didn’t last long as an Annalist. They didn’t like to talk about us, the stranger brethren, back in those days. You new ones don’t have any respect, but you don’t have that fear, either. I suppose it’s a mixed bag. And any rate, I’m the last of them, our caster ranks are filled with mayfly hacks like Crescent Moon and Shorthorn and that new half-donkey filly."

"And Bongo?" I dared, still a little irate about the incident back before Crossroads.

"Well, mayfly enough," he sighed, somehow even smaller and greener than his usual self. "Never tell Shorthorn, but she wasn’t a complete waste as one of the weird brethren. I never thought she’d…. well. It was another world, and the wench is dead, isn’t she?"
He squelched off, leaving an unexpected melancholy. I prepared myself to go open the clinic, and stopped, struck. He had never actually said when he had been recruited.

Author's Notes:

Esteem, of course, was the villain, or *a* villain, from The Immortal Game. This is not that pony, as this isn't in continuity with any existing fanfic. But the Company marches through a sensitive multiverse, and echoes travel in strange ways through the world-stuff that forms the lands their travels take them through. And no, I don't know how old Gibblets actually is. I don't *think* he was there for the founding, but I can't be sure, maybe he'll tell us one of these days.

The Recruits Below The Pikestaff

SBMS004

The convoy's long voyage up the draglines took weeks of the late summer, the heavy sun weakening with every night coursing northwards. The inland sea left the onrushing ships at the same elevation, and yet day after day, the heavy hot glare lessened almost imperceptibly. I was posted with the recruits on the largest of the ingot haulers, with the widest decking and the biggest space for the veteran cadres to drill stumbling foolish recruits in the most basic of military drill.

The glorious sun of late summer, pure blue skies above, and fresh waves below, and in the distance, green shores turning slowly from scattered deciduous woodlots and vast heavy-headed grain fields to increasingly wide coniferous slopes turned steeper and steeper as our magically drawn ships were dragged north and east to our destination.

My clinic was cluttered evening after evening with the detritus of training. We might have been cash-rich, but our hauling capacity was such that we couldn't really keep training weapons on hand, and the corporals made do by wrapping battle-blades and warhammers in heavy cloth, padding the recruits, and trying to explain the concept of turning the flat in training encounters. Still, inexperienced donkeys, inexperienced in the sparring necessary to train clueless sinews and unmodified minds, invariably left a residue of broken bones, ugly cuts, and outright bad wounds. My living-space on the ingot hauler became cluttered with the bruised, the mangled, and the wounded. They were lucky that I had half a decade of experience in holding together the results of the Company's over-enthusiastic training, and that zebra potioning was ideally suited for the treatment of wound infection, gangrene, and compartment syndrome. My infirmary could lose ponies from shock and simple trauma, but when it came to simple accidents, I was already a master. And damn that greedy rotter the Company had stolen my expertise from, who wouldn't have ever let me free to find my own professional way out from under his selfish hoof. I was everything he had made of me, and so much more. Screw zebra apprenticeships, anyways.

Eventually the long pine-wooded reaches closed around the convoy, and we drew near to our port of intent. Ironically, as we beat closer to that terminus, the pine trees fell away, leaving naked slopes and deep-eroded gullies on every side. In the distance ahead, great pillars of black smoke rose into the heavens, marking the woodland smelters which normally fed these ingot-haulers. This port whose harbor we slowly coasted into was near its capacity.

There weren't any trees anywhere in eyeshot, the voracious forges having devoured every bit of native wood anywhere within the range of seizure or purchase. The truncated pyramids which glowed day and night, rendering down ore into iron ingots, were fed in that day by the trash trees floated down-stream by the mighty stream by which Tonnerre thrived. Its vast back-country upstream on the river by which Tonnerre lurked like a tumor, fed its numerous charcoal-burners and iron-forges. When that great logging country exhausted itself, so would Tonnerre, and it would blow away like the dust and wind-blown dirt of its worthless and nearly-agronomically-useless neighboring farmlots. Those wretched fields barely fed the workers of the charcoal-burners and forgers; just barely enough to justify not importing grain from the rich bottomlands of the country to the south and east.

The rebellion was not upstream in the wild forests that teemed with the lumberponies of the frontier, nor the barely-functional grain-lots of Tonnerre. Rather, the centres of rebellion spread out on the Bride's Roads to the south-east and south-west from Tonnerre, those fringes between the wooded northlands and the edges of the granaries all along the frontier. These were the edges of the control of the Bride's over-proud vassals, those verges between where the advantages of the granary-laws benefited the peasantry, and were irrelevant to the semi-nomadic tribes of the great pine barrens. Here, on the edge between comfortable tyranny and squalid freedom, the locals quivered between comfort and liberty, and split, raged against the world and their torment.

We disembarked slowly, the haulers not suited to the unloading of carts and wagons and mercenaries, being optimized for the unloading of simple dry goods and the loading of dumb logs and ingots. It took time to carefully unload delicate loads, and there was little we or our recruits could do to hurry along the process. A perfect time for ritual and regimented display.

The officers shipped over from their freighter, and unbound the sacred banner-pikestaff from the forward mast to which it had been bound, and marched it offship to an open space in the centre of Tonnerre. The sergeants and corporals of the cohorts had secured this space, and their sections lined the space on every side, keeping away civilian and curious eyes, above and below. Despite the absence of winged recruits, the third cohort was very much involved in the stage-setting of this display, dressed to the nines as if they were the thestrals of old, some of them wearing the enchanted helms which gave them the cat-eyed and tufted-eared appearance for which the Company once was known, looking like nightmares aloft on terrible dragons'-wings.

The recruits were marched one by one off the hauler by their corporals, perched precariously on narrow planks over the docks below. The witch-battalion had turned out in full, and their terrible mage-fire lit the scene as the sun faded from the scene, leaving all in gloaming as the donkeys marched two by two into the square made strange.

The Banner had been set aloft on its pike-staff, blown aloft by a peculiar evening breeze, displaying the unicorns-marehead for all the assembly, sable and glowing in the growing darkness.

As they assembled before the pikestaff, I strode forward, my spiky mane dyed black and any expression wiped clean by the solemnity of the occasion. I read from the Book of Lyova Leiba, and the text was a recitation of the sublimation of the self and the replacement of the Company and brotherhood for individuality. We are fallen, and squalid, and selfish in ourselves, but we become something greater in the Company. The Company is neither moral, nor well-intentioned, nor good in and of itself, but we are greater gathered together than we are in the fragments blown by the winds of random chance. Death and anonymity are the wages of the self outside of the Company. And the alternative....

Tickle Me advanced as I concluded my reading, and she unfurled the banner from the top of the pike-staff. Somehow the remaining light concentrated about the banner, drawing forth from the ranks below, leaving veterans and recruits alike in darkness, and only the banner itself visible. It twisted and snapped like a thing alive overhead.

The first recruit, a heavy-limbed donkey, strode forward, unprompted. I rushed forward, and listened closely as he bent forward to kiss the pikestaff. He pressed his muzzle against the ebony shaft, and whispered to himself. Somehow I heard it, and later after I polled the assembly, I found that every single pony had heard the statement, when he had named himself "Heavy Bucket". I was the only one to observe his eyes shift, though, as his pony-like eyes suddenly turned catlike and glowing, green. Each donkey which came forward that night likewise glowed cat-eyed below the banner, "Halon", "Yew-Barrow", "Talon-Spite", "Oaken-Hull", "Galleon-Full", and half a hundred others. Not every recruit found themselves a Company-Name that night, but every recruit who found themselves a company-name survived the first battle of the campaign that was coming.

Author's Notes:

Yeah, there's something witchy at the bottom of the Company, however they cover it with cynicism and black humor.

The Ambulance-Drivers

SBMS005

The next morning, I hesitantly asked Shorthorn about the glowy eye thing. The recruits had lost their cats-eyes with the morning dew, and looked like the damp donkeys they honestly were, sweating and barking away at their morning drill as we continued to haul our equipage off the docks.

"Ha! That thing, I remember that creepy-damn effect from my days keeping the Annals. It wasn't a trick of ourn, although now that you mention it we really ought to see if we can fake it up for effect. Scare the horseapples out of the enemy if all the brethren were coming the batpony at ‘em in the right conditions…" I had successfully if inadvertently diverted the witch from the subject in question; I almost let him wander off, but my curiosity drove me to draw him back in.

"Oh, yeah, right, the bats-eyes. It's something that demon's-pizzle does on its lonesome, without anypony prompting it. You know what Gibblets says, the Company's genius? And I don't mean a bright spark, or even the angel that some think of when you say that. More of an evil muse, or an imp of the perverse. Whatever it is, it sleeps most of the time, but when we do that thing with the Lance, it kind of rolls over in its sleep, and touches the new brethren. Something that we carry afterwards, a little bit of the luck of the Company. I've heard some say that some ponies get the eyes when the shit gets too deep, but I've never seen it for myself. You could ask Otonashi, I think she watches out for that sort of thing."

"Nah, I don't think so, my hoof-language is for crap."

"You ought to brush up, for a mute, that pony has a lot to say. But we have preparations I'm playing hooky from here, Sawbones. See you round…" He waved one hoof over his head as he rambled off down the dock away from me, and I shook my head, remembering my own errands, and trotted off myself to track down Asparagus and Tickle Me. We needed to go shopping.

***

The port, as modest as it was, was the terminus of two branches of the Bride's Road at the head of the great inland sea. They had a number of carters' suppliers, carriage-makers, and vehicle sales lots – and I was going to need more ambulances. We were planning on being a lot more mobile than we had been for the Openwater Bay contract, and the company had let go a lot of our bulkier equipment. Campaigning meant fighting, and fighting meant wounded, and often wounded far from my surgery. We needed something more than the few carts and supply wagons I had to hoof, and that meant ambulances. And that assumed we won all of our battles – if we needed to bug out fast, we needed to put as many wheels beneath our non-walking-wounded as I could afford.

Used cart salesponies are the same the multiverse over, and there's no such thing as a new cart. They get used as soon as they're wheeled off the carriage-maker's shop floor. Slimy, oleaginous, cart-sales-pony, they're all synonyms. This one knew she had me over a barrel, it wasn't *that* big of a town, and her stock was exactly what I needed, well-sprung, not covered in the sort of overwrought decoration that true ponies seem compelled by their marks to lavish all over humble equipages, driving up prices and attracting roadside bandits by the gangful. Dull-looking, sweetly braced with sturdy canvass hoods and spacious imperials, it was perfect for hauling multiple wounded or convalescent brothers. The only problem was…

"I don't know, these are great for my purpose, and we won't have to retrofit at all, but these are rigged for multiple carters, and we just don't have the ponies to spare to haul oversize ambulances like this. Even if I get them to second me some of the new donkey recruits…"
The earth-pony salesmare, at this suggestion, turned up her muzzle as if I had proposed feeding my patients road-apples. "What on earth are you thinking, my good zebra! We have perfectly suitable stock in the stables out back, just eating me out of hearth and stable! They're a drug on the local market, I could sell you them for a song!" Her mood had turned on a dime, suddenly swinging from a sneer to chirpy good humor. Both Asparagus and Tickle Me, who had been examining the harness displays while I dickered on the salesfloor, had shuffled behind the oblivious salespony, the both of them looking rather stormy.

"I don't quite understand you, are you saying you have a line in scouting carters' contracts or that you act as an agent for the local union? The Company generally prefers to not travel with hired help, it's generally a security-"

"Oh, no no no no, not in these parts. Almost nopony *hires* carters in this duchy. Our duchess is quite forward-thinking, and runs a proper breeding stable. Everypony who can afford it own their own haulers, and the ones who can't afford it – well, the less said of *them* the better."

"Slavery is legal here? I thought I heard something about the Bride…"

"Well, what the Bride doesn't know doesn't hurt her, and the vassalage are free in their interpretations of the common law. And in *this* Duchy, cattle are owned as they ought to be. Everypony knows they're not capable of taking care of themselves, bless their hearts. Dumber than the carts, the lot of them, and really, walking along dragging a cart is about their speed, isn't it?" My sisters-in-arms looked about ready to rip the good mare's limbs off and beat her senseless with her own hocks, but I gave them the stink-eye, and gestured for them to rein it in.

"So, could you show me these… cattle you say? Cows?"

"Oh, no, of course not. Too small for the heavy hauling. We have several braces of hearty oxen, they're quite large, and docile," she said as she led the way out back to a low-slung building in the rear. Within the spartan, hay-lined stable – like something out of the third world, you know the one where they went back to the stone age and everypony ran around with sticks and rocks because nobody remembered how to do modern things like smelt and make pottery – were hulking figures in the shadows of a row of open-faced cells. As our voices carried, the "oxen" came out into the light. Huge beasts, horned, rings through their noses and heavy chains hung between those horns with rings dangling in between.

If you haven't heard of oxen, well, you live in a better world than most, and I bless your innocence. In this and most others, the word meant "castrated bull", and that was the case with these unfortunates. Cattle were not exactly renowned for their cleverness or even good sense, but they were speaking beasts, however dull their conversation might be. Nopony ought to have their tackle stripped before they were old enough to get any use out of it. It takes a lot to make a mercenary medico sick, but our host had found the trick of it, and I was about ready to set my two valkyries loose on her. I took a deep breath, and looked across the congregation, trying to find one with that spark of coherence which might lead me out of this ugly little encounter with my self-respect and reputation intact.

A smaller ox stood to the side, in a cleaner corner of the filthy chamber, an actual expression other than dull disinterest gracing his heavy features. Admittedly, it looked rather like he was thinking of taking a dump right there in public, but it was a look, and that was something.
"You, over there, in the corner with the constipated look, what do they call you? What's your name?"

He lowed in a basso profundo greater than his height, which, while it was entire hooves higher than mine (mane-spikes included), still was on the puny side for a towering ox. "They call me Lack-Sack, or occasionally Sad-Sack. It weren't my name, but I answer to it when I can, if only so's they don't beat the others. Couldn't care less if they care to beat me, haint as if it were to make anything worse."

"Do you care to be known by that insult, or some other name if you could?"

"Don't rightly know, the names haint the worst things hever happened to us. Let me think on it?"

"Well enough, but I think I'll call you ‘Sack' for now. You the sort of cattle to keep up with the herd? We're a mercenary company, we're not chasing deadlines or profits, they're chasing us. Slow is death, do you understand me?"

He blinked, mildly. "Slow is a beating elsewhere, the distance between beaten and dead is covered by the corpses of those oxen whose owners didn't know when to stop beating." A philosophical ox! If wonders ever ceased, ponies would die of the shock.

"Would you care to cart for killers, predators, and ponies known to make bad puns?"

"Ser, if you want me to, I'll put my hooves behind whatever beast you care to leave the leading of me. Oxen have even been known to trample the slow and unwary in our time. But I don't think I have the wit in me to make puns."

"Sack, there's no wit in puns, but rather the celebration of their lack."

The salespony, who had been leaning back and sniggering as if we were a vaudeville routine, looked up at my glare, suddenly aware that I had come to a conclusion. I informed her that we would be taking a half-dozen oxen off her hands, and told her the price, on top of the highway-robbery she had already extracted from us in the sales-room for the tack, harness, and ambulances. She started blustering and trying to haggle me back up from my own little essay on larceny, until the hoof-blades crossing under her suddenly sweating throat put an end to that particular line of discussion. It was agreed that we would sweeten the pot by not carving her a new necktie, and she'd throw in the oxen for a pittance. I asked Sack to point out any relatives of his in the coffle, and he waved forward a tall pointy-headed ox with a particularly dim expression and two grizzled older oxen. Having exhausted the Sack family register, I went through the coffle, yelling for two adventurous oxen without any ties here. Another pair of brothers lumbered forward, and we chivvied the Company's new ambulance drivers onto the sales-floor to collect the carts, the tack and harness, and make our leave. The oxen perhaps brought more out of that sales-lot than we had strictly speaking paid for, but the blade-shocked mare was not in the mood for quarreling anymore. We harnessed those oxen up to the ambulances right there in the street, and I led my plunder-train through town towards the Company rendezvous, feeling properly piratical for the first time since Openwater Bay. I eyed the chains hung between their horns.

"Sack, what does the horn-chains mean?"

"Slavery-mark. Can't put us in collars with the yokes in the way."

"Hrm. We'll roll by the smiths on the way into camp. I think they can cold-chisel those off without chipping anything."

Sack gave me a skeptical sidelook.

"Ain't no slaves in the Company, Sack. Maybe next reading I'll do something from the Book of Fatinah, on the occasion of the Vizier of the Closeted Caliph trying to fold the Company into his Mamelukes, and how many household doorframes we nailed bits of vizier to as a reminder to posterity that the Black Company is a band of freeponies..."

Wouldn't you know, those oxen's eyes glowed like slit-eyed cats when the next ceremony in front of the banner-lance came ‘round? I guess our sleepy evil genius approved of my shopping tactics.

Discipline As A Discarded Encumbrance

SBMS006

The sergeant major of the second cohort buttonholed me as I was getting the oxen acquainted with a spare section tent out of the supply wagons, prompting and directing them on the subtle details of how to set one up on their own. Look, I had just found them crashing in a filthy stable, there was no guarantees what they might or might not be able to handle. But they seemed to have figured out pegs and cord and canvas when Yew Wall ambled into my corner of the camp. I was wanted for a meeting, more of an argument from what she said, however briefly. I left the infirmary, in its customary position in the camp, same as ever other camp on this and a hundred other worlds the multiverse over, albeit under the ludricrous nom de guerre "valetudinarium".

Wherever the Company went, we found ponies or sentient creatures with translations or actual Latin copies of De Munitionibus Castrorum by Hippoginus Arator, and that universality meant that things in camps were named silly archaic things in unnecessarily ornate language, and that made Latin a sort of shibboleth for the trained warrior. There was much debate about who Hippoginus actually was, everyone agrees it was a pseudonym, and the actual pseudonym varies depending on the copy and the culture using the manual. Griffins' copies generally are attributed to Gryphioi Dioptra, and I've seen a Minotaur copy claiming to be by Mnemnt Sesotris, which I'm almost positive is some sort of linguistic inside-joke that I don't quite get.

But what all this improbably universal, possibly divine distribution means is that wherever you go among properly trained organized militaries, you'll find the foundations of castra lurking outside of major towns and crossroads. The one we were squatting in was a semi-permanent castra hibernia belonging to one of the Bride's standing regiments, or former regiments, since it had been drawn into the rebellion ahead of us, and its shameful rout and shattering had been part of the impetus for the hiring of an offworld mercenary outfit to recover the situation let go to seed by the hapless locals. Whether that regiment still existed in any useful sense was a matter up for debate. But their disaster meant that we were happily castellated behind brick walls on a comfortably regular camp-layout, everything in its place, and everything labeled in archaic Latin. Well, until we got this show on the road, despite the legionary legend, you couldn't actually uproot a permanent camp and take it with you on campaign. The town beyond the walls continued to blacken the skies to the east with an endless stinking cloud of filth, their charcoal-burners and forges smoking day and night, feeding the Imperium's bottomless appetite for iron and steel.

We walked down the via principalis to the praetorium which currently housed the Company's headquarters section, and we could hear the meeting still standing outside and halfway to the porta principalis dextra. We found the Captain and the Lieutenant standing besieged between our irate engineer Mad Jack and the other two cohort commanders, who were equally red-faced and bellowing in tandem at his stubborn mule face. One of the legate's lackeys was smirking to herself against a wall, surrounded on all sides by half-opened crates and supply chests, the guts of the Company's mobile headquarters scattered in an organized clutter at the base of every wall and across every available surface. The two sergeants glanced wearily at each other, and the commander of third cohort waved forward Tickle Me, ceding precedence to his senior.

"The entire plan of campaign for this initial season is based on mobility and celerity. We need a flying column, we need to be there before they know we're coming, and we want to be gone before their neighbors realize we've been and gone. We can't do that if every pony is carrying a brace of sudes and entrenching gear, and taking five hours a day digging out a marching camp and breaking the previous night's camp! If we could possibly rotate ponies between resting on the carts and carriages and hauling the vehicles themselves, I'd be all for making a continuous forced march once we get within striking distance of the built-up sections of Rennet!"

I went a little wide-eyed at this declaration, forced marches and refusal to entrench night camps was certainly not in any of the manuals, and was usually the mark of seriously bad news when it cropped up in the Annals. The examples I could think of off the top of my head usually came halfway through campaigns that had seen casualties of one-third or more of the extant Company.

"And I'll say it again, and keep saying it until it penetrates that featherbrain of yourn, not properly encamping in the presence of the enemy is always, in every case, in every situation, bad practice, and would get you hung higher than Hamhocks in the old Legions!" Mad Jack had clearly shouted himself hoarse by this point in the argument, and I wondered why it had taken them so long to rope me into this particular cluster. It was clearly my duty as Annalist to provide historical perspective… oh, hell, really, to pipe up with my opinion and pretend it was the word of Annalists of yore.

"And if we were your old Legions, heavy infantry with few flyers and a book of tactics oriented towards directing massed maniples against other massed armies or tribal levies, then the case for taking it slow and careful would totally be the order of the day!" yelled the clearly taxed Tickle Me.

"Lieutenant, I take it there has been a decision to get stuck in rapid-like before they know we're there?" I interrupted, looking around for the rest of the legate's lick-spittles and spittoon-cleaners. "Where's our employer? Or, at least the rest of them?"

"The legate is a busy pony, and had other business to the Eastwards. I have been given full authority in the Marklaird's absence," smirked the jumped-up jenny, who couldn't be older than nineteen summers, and for all her town bronze, wasn't really capable of contributing anything useful to the conversation, as witnessed by the meaninglessness of her pointlessly authoritative interjection.

"So, it's been requested that we arrive with all speed in-theatre, Miss…"

"My name is-"

"Wasn't actually asking. Yes or no, quick insert or not, by your lord's explicit will?"

She pokered up, her dignity offended by my lack of manners, but nodded starchily without further interjection or puffery.

"The hope is that we can make use of the witches' darksight cantrips and some tricks we have in mind," explained the Lieutenant, "and terrorize the rebel forces. They're not exactly militias, but they've not been an organized force for very long, this is only their second campaign season in the field, and intelligence claims they're shaky. If we can get them running, we think they'll fragment."

"Hah! More like hope. The enemy's morale is never as shaky as the spooks say it is, any more than our allies as solid as the liaisons claim. You know that!" Mad Jack was now painting outside of his lane, he wasn't a trained officer, just an ascended old pioneer we'd picked up from a long-ago contract with the New Roamish legions as auxiliaries four or five worlds back. Long before my time, and before the time of everypony present but the Captain, who had been a junior sergeant with the then-aerial second cohort in those campaigns. From the Annals I knew this sojourn with the New Legions wasn't the first time the Company had fought under that strict discipline, but Mad Jack took an especial ownership of that particular sub-tradition. And that reminded me that it was a mighty tradition, excellent for cultivating discipline in gormless new recruits and beating old grumblers back under the standards with which they had been trained. We would be an increasingly shaggy and wild band of hussars if we didn't beat the basics into the sections now.

"Blast. I can see the need for flying-column tactics, and the black-hearted buccaneer in my ugly shriveled heart delights in the prospect. But we do have a lot of recruits in the ranks, and a lot of veterans who have been going slack in garrison without the usual discipline. We really ought to have been performing the manual the whole way from the portal to Rime, and I regret the lost time. Better to have the troops with the experience and mind-set, than to rush madly into the rebellious province with a half-trained, half-blown brigade of wildlings that can't fall back on the fruits of that training." I could see the sergeants were deeply disappointed that I wasn't supporting their wild hair. But hasty hosses into battle were going find themselves stacked like cordwood in my shiny sorta-new ambulances more like than not. I turned to the Captain, who certainly remembered the value of legionary discipline.

"There isn't as much of the campaign season as I'd like left to us in this latitude. Maybe another eight weeks before it starts getting muddy and cold. Rennet is a week's forced march, but three weeks doing it the right way hauling entrenching equipment and digging our way across the countryside. And that tends to piss off the peasantry, ripping up good land just before the second harvest. We'll have to spend a couple days harvesting oak for the stakes, too, and there isn't anything useful within two day's march of this voracious, alicorn-forsaken, belching hellhole."

Mad Jack had a plan for marching cross-country north of the Bride's Road, the whole Company less a courtesy covering force with the carts and carriages on the main road, wanting to have the rank-and-file tromp uphill to a surviving stand of oaks and chop them down with axes & carve out sudes, or stakes for the regulation palisades. I suppose he had been doing his research with the local rangers, to know where available woodlots were and their status. You could see from the gleam in his eyes that he was eager to get out into the forest and butcher him some innocent trees. He really had been going spare from all those years stuck on a set of unforested tropical cays and overbuilt dockside cityscape around Openwater Bay.

The Captain hesitated, conflicted. The setting sun suddenly shone through the open flap of the headquarters tent, bringing a strange glint to his eagle-eyes, making them look briefly more draconic than avian.

"No, no delay. We can substitute other factors for the lack of practiced march-discipline. Sawbones, we'll be stopping every evening at full dark, and you'll be reading from the Annals. Make it something blood-stirring, and we'll see what we can do about adding some drama and theatrics to the presentation. Sergeants, you're so set on this flying-column business, I want you to raid the Annals and your own ranks' evilest imaginings and experience. I want us to be Tartarus on the march, I want those rebels to think the Wild Hunt is harrowing Rennet. The moral is to the physical as three to one… we're jettisoning the discipline aspect of that ratio, we need to compensate accordingly."

"They've never heard of the Black Company on this world," I mused aloud. "We need to make their first encounters such a terror that our reputation races ahead of us to empty their bowels and pin their patrols to the gates of their strongholds. No matter what their numbers, if we recruit their fears, we *are* legion."

The sergeants looked impressed. I must be getting better at this Annalist business of bullshitting with a solemn face. I hated this entire plan, but the Captain had made his decision, and in Tambelon we would be madcap, madness and night-terrors. Goodbye, discipline and good order.

"We'll need blacking for the troops' barding and weapons. Mad Jack, can you source some charcoal for the cohorts?" The Lieutenant walked out of the tent leading the fuming engineer, talking him down from his offended snit. I suddenly realized that I had a lot of reading and preparing for the Captain's nightly readings. I went off to find Gibblets, I needed coaching. If I was to inspire discipline from thin air, glamour and sheer charisma, I'd have to conjure up my inner pulpit-thumping tartarus-and-brimstone preacher. At that moment, I regretted being the godless unchurched heathen that my damnable parents had raised.

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.

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 Notes:

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.

The Battle of Lait Blanc

SBMS009

The first engagement of the campaign came on a sunny early fall afternoon eight days after the Company broke camp. The flying column had made excellent time, and outran all news of its passage. The Captain went into laager beside the Bride’s Road just outside of the reach of the Rebel’s forward patrols, as the Lieutenant was airlifted to the forward base to take control of operations inside Rennet Province; I and the witches-coven rode Air Pony on the return leg.

I looked over the supplies, wagons and ambulance-corps I had left behind during my sojourn playing Tartarus-bartender. While the rest of the column took a much-needed half-day’s rest on the provincial borders, I made sure the oxen were prepared and everypony were in good condition from the long march.

That brief rest left the ground cohorts relatively rested and sharp; they re-dressed ranks and advanced in proper array, leaving those of us in the support column and rear guard behind as they stormed down the main road into enemy territory with a flourish. I’m told the excise officers and their small complement of soldiers – a corporal’s guard completely unprepared for what thundered down the macadam towards their paltry barricades – stared stupidly at the on-rushing cavalcade, and didn’t even notice the detachment of pegasi and griffins who took their position from behind, trampling the lot without mercy.

After a few moments of organized chaos as the main force charged ahead, the carters’ corps and support ponies started moving the wagons down the road into the province. The vehicles were much lighter without an entire shifts worth of slumbering ponies draped over every flat surface, but we were also just ourselves, without our seconded and detailed brethren-soldiers lending their muscle to keeping the rattle moving down the queen’s highway. Two warlock-mares, Otonashi and the Crow, accompanied us as we rolled westward through the fighting. We reached the scattered barricade, the barriers ripped away from the roadway, blood and bodies strewn across the verge underneath the sudden mounds of rubbish which had been a set of gates, fencework, and a short tower now leaning cock-eyed away from the roadbed in the lengthening shadows beneath a glorious sunset.

The total surprise had been such that not even one got away to warn the pair of regiments bivouacked a quick canter down the Road from the barricades, outside the first major market town inside Rennet. Some thought was given to providing our own warning of the breach of the border, as our plans had been made in the expectation we would have to ambush the reaction force, but more flexible minds overruled this attempt to get clever, and instead, the pegasi led the full strength of the ground cohorts around and up to the rear of the furthest of the enemy’s two regimental compounds, which they knew would not be prepared for a sudden assault.

The Company’s ground-ponies attacked the walls from in front of the last glare of the setting sun, rolling right over the posted guard and their neglected walls with as much ease as the aerials had taken the barricade. Earth ponies charged and bucked the walls en masse, bringing down an entire section as sweetly as a lesser force might have taken down a post-fence, and the donkeys and zebra raced to spit the few rebels in sight.

The unicorns passed through those ponies as they took down the wall and its few defenders, and rushed through the compound, isolating the various buildings, the barracks from the mess-halls from the officers’ quarters. As it was dinner time, the regiment’s caribou were mostly crowded together in the mess hall, and a scratch unicorn chorus’s communal shield sealed the front entrance to that building, with another detachment swinging around the rear of the building to cut down anypony who figured out that their own buildings had more than one egress, and to watch for attempts to cut an escape hatch through the building walls. A detachment of griffin pyro specialists were sent for, as the enemy mass was contained unarmed but for trencher-knives within their own mess hall. Sections of unicorn swordsmares and archers skirmished with those rebel soldiers and officers who hadn’t been eating or on guard, until every eye in the compound focused on the sudden pyrotechnic burst on the mess hall’s peaked ridge, the flames flowing like liquid downslope along the tiled roof and bright into the gutters and eaves in the gathering gloom.

This panicked the caribou outside of the trap, and half of them ran for the second regiment, while the surviving officers tried to rally the remainder in a sally to break the Company’s hold on their trapped compatriots’ only means of escape. By this point the rest of the Company had joined the unicorns within the compound itself, and a tidal wave of donkeys, zebra, and earth ponies swept away the brief counterattack, trampling the dry packed dirt of the parade ground into bloody mud.

We heard the commotion in the distance as we approached the town and its beleaguered garrison along the Bride’s Road. The witch-mares completed their preparations, and Otonashi sent out her discord’s-shadows into the town, chasing away curious eyes, terrorizing the civilians into barring their doors and windows against the onrushing Night. At the same time, the Crow lit up a simple Nothing-Important-Here amplified by blooded-crystal charms and fetishes mounted on most of the vehicles of the column. It couldn’t have been all that powerful, as the Crow wasn’t exactly a powerhouse of puissance, but it was sufficient to distract any already-distracted observers, and we rolled in obscurity through the outer borough of that town shivering behind their shutters, towards the screaming and fires and sounds of clashing weapons.

The retreating remnants of the shattered rebel regiment fell back on the confused elements of their sister regiment now cautiously and timidly filing out of their own compound in the near distance. The aerial detachments formed up over the Company with pyrotechnic devices hung below their wings, ready to divebomb the reinforcements when the second regiment’s milling soldiers and officers managed to dress formations and counterattack.

The wall breached by the Company’s attack wasn’t facing the expected direction of the counterattack, being opposite of the second regiment’s compound, and this meant that the Company could turn the rebels’ own fortifications, however feeble and unworthy of the name, against them. In the darkness of onrushing night, the second regiment never quite got up the sack to charge the walls by torch-light and the glare from the burning mess-hall, and the glowing green cats-eyes lurking on every fire-step along the walls awaiting their charge most likely did nothing to fire their ardour.

We rolled past this Mexicolt standoff along the Road outside the town proper, passing not four hundred yards from the front gates of the second regiment’s compound, vulnerable and only lightly protected, although the pegasi and griffin circled overhead, ready to pounce on any move by the enemy to turn and stop the vulnerable and irreplaceable vehicles of the Company. We passed in silence, protected from detection by the Crow’s cantrips and the enemy’s fixation on the massively effective diversion provided by their brother-regiment’s rank and file roasting in a great blaze and the beasts out of Tartarus that had replaced those howling dead on their own walls in the darkness.

As the rest of the column continued into western darkness, I hooked my medical-supplies wagon to the rear of another not-quite-encumbered-enough carter who gave me the silent stink-eye, and led my oxen and the ambulances around the rear of the shattered regiment’s former compound. We brought the ambulances up to the western ruins of the wall, and they unhitched their yokes, joining me as we went into the pyre-lit tartarus that the battle had made of the fortified camp. We retrieved our wounded, carried across broad ox shoulders to the waiting ambulances, and when those were found, recovered our few dead, and put them in the ambulances too. I stumbled in the half-lit darkness up to the Captain glaring over the eastern wall at the gormless enemy, panicking at the sudden flames from a passage of Tickle Me’s pegasi caracole, their wings thrumming overhead as their projectiles burst among the scattering caribou in the near distance. I informed him that we were away, our wounded and dead were following the supply train, and squatted to await his pleasure.

His glowing eyes, quite dragon-yellowish-green in the flickering night, looked over the dying flames of the mess-hall-massacre and the Company holding its positions along and behind the wall, and in flight overhead, and rumbled, "Well enough, good enough. Time to become a rumor."

We left while the getting was good. Shorthorn and the rest of the warlocks’ section weaved a grand glamour over the walls facing the milling rebels, leaving those spooky glowing eyes in place, glaring down on the unnerved enemy in the darkness, while the Company’s ponies themselves filed off the walls and joined the quiet withdrawal through the breaches in the western wall following the oxen and their equine loads in the ambulances.

A section or two of pegasi continued to swoop over the enemy, eliciting a scattering of arrows, sling stones and the occasional javelin, but the rebel were firing blind in the darkness, and only succeeded in scaring the occasional bat flying through the night-pegasi’s lazy circles. The caribou probably didn’t even notice when the last Company pony left the field, coasting conservatively off in the distance to help maintain a combat air patrol over the main force trotting off at the pace of an excited ox’s-run to join the supply column which continued its placid shadowed march into the distance, in the general direction of the awaiting forward base.

Died that evening, of wounds or instant trauma, were the following ponies:

The unicorn Dusk Flare, veteran, of a cut to the femoral artery incurred in the initial fighting to take the parade-grounds. He bled out standing on the wall with his fellows, unaware that he bore a mortal wound.
The donkey recruit Morning Glory, of multiple poisoned darts to the head and shoulders, taken while sweeping the rebel guard from the flanking walls.
The donkey recruit Inland Runner, of a forelimb detached by a mighty blow by an oversized caribou in the fighting of the initial counterattack, who was probably an enemy regimental commander, who did not survive the encounter with Runner’s file-mates.
The donkey recruit Middle Donkey, of a crushing blow to the head, I was not able to get any description of how she fell, nopony saw what happened. Sack merely found her senseless body by the main gate; she never recovered consciousness to tell her tale.

Author's Notes:

This is how the ponies of the Black Company achieve their immortality, and this is the primary duty of the Company's Annalist: to record the names of the fallen, and how they fell, and if possible, why.

Doing The Job

SBMS010

The forward base bulged like a stuffed sack, suddenly over-filled by an over-eager miller's apprentice flailing under a roaring screw-conveyor spewing forth more grain than expected. A compound that felt vast and cathedral-like while under construction was suddenly a cramped rabbits'-warren with the bulk of the Company crammed within its walls. Details were already digging out an extension into the woodlot to our rear.

Moans marked the work of my assistants and I as we unloaded the ambulances into my infirmary-space. They were more full than I had hoped for in this first engagement, too many of the recruits had gotten themselves hurt in the fighting, and far more veterans wounded than was strictly speaking, encouraging of the course of this campaign. I had expected more of the experienced ponies. Night-fighting was always a chancy thing, and the battle had been far too close to a stand-up fight than was really worthy of the Company. I would have to find a proper reading for the next assembly, on the virtues of not fighting fair fights, and why it was preferable to slit throats from behind than trade blows in a parade-ground, of all things!

We had only lost the one veteran to blood loss on the withdrawal, but some of the others had left me scrambling with tourniquets and bandages in the ambulances as they rolled between the rear of the supply column and the fighting mass of the Company. Most of the problem cases were just a matter of stabilization until I could stitch them up, and they were laid on cots, some of them just seconds after the carters had unloaded those cots from the supply wagons. It was a mad-house, and I was kept busy doping those I wouldn't be getting to until after the amputations.

Two recruits had mangled limbs, and would have to have them off. I knew how to stave off gangrene, and my supplies were full of distilled alcohol not because I was a terminal drunkard, but because I knew what sterilization was, and why sanitary conditions saved brothers' lives. But I didn't know how to mend a shattered hoof before the rot got in however much booze I poured over my instruments and the open wounds. All I could do was break out the bonesaws and cut the mess cleanly off, tie the blood vessels properly off with clean ligatures, put drainage and then proper bandaging and after-treatment. Thank the alicorns for ether and restraints. Later when I was satisfied that I had kept it clean, I'd suture up the stump with the remaining flaps of hide, and eventually, remove the drains. If we were lucky. If we weren't, I'd remove another bit of pony, repeat, and hope we caught the rot before the rot killed the pony. Or donkey, in these cases.

All I can say is that the smiths have a griffin who's good at making prostheses. And we have at least a dozen brothers clomping along on pegs on one limb or the other. At least there weren't any lost wings in this batch; they can't make a wooden wing, not yet.

That miserable task completed, I went on to the fun stuff, waking up the doped and low-priority to stitch together the slashes and cuts and minor wounds that they'd be laughing about later on. And everybody was willing to laugh at the groggy Octavius, who lay semi-insensate in the middle of the infirmary, surrounded by honest war-wounds waiting their dopy turn to get cleaned out and sewn up.

"Hey, Octavius, who told you you were unicorn enough to conduct a chorus? You have a filly hidden in the baggage somewhere somepony got jealous of? I've known yearlings with a deeper well than yours!" Hyssop, despite her name, was an enormous unicorn mare, I think she came from the same town they'd recruited Octavius from. She was a swords-mare from another section than the one the addled Octavius commanded, and the two of them never ceased to get on each other's cases. She was also waiting for me, holding a bloodied bandage over a nasty slash across the poll and below her left ear, which had nearly detached that organ.

"I thought the whole point of choruses was to spread the magical strain around, do things any single screwhead would burn their horn trying?" I asked as I tied off a suture on a jenny's exposed croup, sewing closed a shallow, wide slice that had nearly scalped her rear all the way to the dock.

"Well, yes, but the low-sparks are supposed to be in the chorus, not the focus. Octavius here tried to play Clover the Clever while we held the rear of that burning building, and dropped like a sack of donkeyshit after fifteen minutes. He's lucky that nopony tried to get out while we rearranged ourselves to cover the crashed shield," she explained.

"He looks like he'll recover, the horn isn't even scorched; not like what happened to you on Horse Head Island, and you've mostly recovered from that," I offered, snipping off the last suture, and nodding for the ox to lift the unconscious jenny off my impromptu surgery table.

"Only mostly. I could have been something before I overstrained, I could have been an apprentice under one of the witches. All I'm good for now is swinging big pieces of steel and playing third alto in the occasional shield chorus. This imbecile would never have made anything of himself. Might as well have been born a mudpony." Two or three half-conscious "mudponies" in earshot gave her the collective stinkeye. I just laughed and waved at her poll.

"You're next, and you don't get any ether for that one from your friendly neighborhood mudpony surgeon. Better to have you awake while I'm putting needles through your hide so close to your horn, anyways. I seem to remember Octavius got a pretty nasty wound protecting your mana-exhausted carcass from those slavers. This is the second time you've both made the infirmary together. Should we be planning a wedding?" I examined the cut on her poll once again to see if I'd have to reattach any cartilage, cleaning out the wound with a hoofed flask of dilute, clear rotgut.

"Ah. Ah! AAHAHAHAHA! Damnit, ‘Bones, don't make me laugh when you do something like that. Damn, that hurts like Tartarus."

"Be happy it's no deeper, I've had to amputate ears before," I said, scraping a bit of tissue from inside of the cut, and rinsing again, "Believe me, you don't want wound-rot two inches from your brain." Only stitches, it would reattach without serious surgery, good.

"Oh, look, Octavius is watching us," said Hyssop looking out through tears cut liberally with clotted blood and distilled alcohol. I glanced over, and saw that the horn-burned corporal was looking at the surgery in progress.

"Welcome back to the land of the living, should we call you Septimus? You've successfully burned your first and second lives. Assuming you have just the nine... and that should do it," I finished, tying off and snipping the last of Hyssop's sutures. She got up and returned to her cot on her own power.

"Now, how about you two see if you can't be an example for the recruits, and show them how you don't find your way into my surgery after every little skirmish, hmmm?" I hummed as my ox assistant shifted my next patient onto the table and I rinsed my needles and scalpels in an alcohol bath. I hoped they found another source for my medicinal alcohol, the locals seemed to prefer their beer and brown liquors, I just wasn't hearing about much clear distillate from the scouts so far, and somepony kept breaking into my supply to drink my sanitizing moonshine… At least I was in no danger of running out of suture-thread.

Author's Notes:

It's amazing what zebras can do with hooves, lips and teeth. Good thing Sawbones has a lot of distilled alcohol on hoof. Although he must have constant booze-breath after a day in surgery.

On the Road to Grosbach

SBMS011

While I was hock deep in stitching together the broken ponies of the Company, I hadn't paid attention to what was going on outside of my infirmary doors. When I finally emerged from my hermitage, it turned out that the Company itself had had its own sabbatical, or at least, was busy not being seen. Command had decided that giving the impression that the attack on the regiments in Lait Blanc had been a raid was in the best interests of the campaign. The first cohort's agent within the town itself managed to get word back that no-pony had any good idea who we were, or where we had went.

Somepony had the bright idea of following up on this idea by sending aerial-mobile strike forces to wipe out the rest of the known excise stations on the secondary roads and other main Roads leading into the province. The tactical chariots could carry a hoof-full of sections, enough to act as the anvil to the aerial sections' hammer. I was glad that they had held the meeting until I could attend – because I had objections to this course of action. It struck me that they were resting an awful lot of weight on a hoof-full of ground-pony sections in case a raid went sideways, and that any serious casualties would be doubly difficult to get back to base if they had to haul them by chariot. We managed to lose one pony in the ambulances, and I had been on-hoof to do emergency stabilization on the survivors.

"Well, Sawbones, it sounds like you just volunteered for a supporting role. How do you feel about inserting ahead of time with a portable field setup?"

"Like you're proposing to dangle me off the side of the cliff, and taking bets on how wide the splatter ring will be when I fall. Can we at least ship in some more sections as a reaction force and rear security?"

So, at least I got them to not play reivers-of-the-borderlands with the bare minimum of forces. But this also meant that I needed to slap together a chariot-portable surgery tent and minimum supplies. I couldn't take Sack with me, the oxen were too damn large to waste hauling their bulk through the air in a tactical chariot. We'd exhaust our pegasi. Then I had the bright idea of claiming a few of our more mobile convalescents as orderlies, and Hyssop, while being bigger than your average unicorn, wasn't exactly sending an ox upwards on a see-saw. A jack-recruit with matching stitches on either stifle named Boardwalk was also claimed from the infirmary to complete the set for the Lieutenant's little jihad against tax-ponies.

Three nights after the raid on Lait Blanc, my mobile surgery team and the first installment of the rear security detail/reaction force was launched from the forward base for the provincial border, and the next major road southwards from the stretch of the Bride's Road we took into Rennet. I still wasn't thrilled to be packed into a rickety airframe held aloft by wishful thinking and pegasi gravity-witchery, but at least it was in proper darkness, so I couldn't see the vasty deeps between me and a shattering sudden stop to that inevitable drop. We were put into place within quick gallop-range of the border post's barricades, with enough armed ponies to make a fighting retreat if a sudden rebel patrol caught us in the dark. Honestly, it wasn't anything I'd expect of what they'd shown us so far, but we might have spooked them with the first raid, it had been a bit over the top.

Just in case, I and my freshly-dragooned orderlies found a copse of trees well back from the road, and set the table and tent-parts so that they could be swiftly raised up if there were casualties, or packed away if we had to make a run for it. Just as I was re-arranging some brush to obscure our new position, a commotion on the road heralded traffic from the direction of the border post.

At a half-hour to midnight.

We were expecting the chariots with the assault elements at any moment, and now suddenly there was unexpected activity on the road. I waved my convalescent orderlies back into the copse, and eased forward to see what was going on. My lance was leaning against my half-disassembled surgery table back in the woods, and all I had with me was a scalpel set strapped to my left forearm. At least I had an ensorcelled medallion which let me see in the dark as if it were broad day-light. Which is how I could see the half-dozen caribou in half-barding striding down the centre of the packed-earth roadway, without any lights. They didn't seem to be in any hurry, but the one in the lead certainly had her – her? Hard to tell at that distance even with the aid of the medallion, but I thought so – head on a swivel. My natural dark coloration hid me from view in the darkness, and they passed my position without incident.

They also passed the security detail, which had gone to ground at the same time I did. We were all experienced enough to expect the second half of the patrol, which arrived right on schedule with mirrored lanterns to sweep both sides of the highway, another half-dozen caribou, armed and alert. They might have caught one of our guys, I gave it about a fifty-fifty chance, but they, like most land-bound sentients, didn't generally think to look overhead.

The aerial sections earmarked for the assault had arrived overhead in a soft susurration, alerted by the bright lights casting beams across the rendezvous point. They knew how to evaluate and envelop an unexpected threat. But they needed a diversion to attract the attention of the targets, something to fixate their beams so that they could get into position.

So I started stomping through the underbrush, drunkenly singing a filthy song I'd heard a few of the recruits singing, a paean to the lady-parts of the Bride.

Och the barrowlord made him a wifie
The barrowlord rose him a wife
But no matter how deeply he plowed her
Her earth he never could bring ta' afterlife

It almost made my coat crawl to voluntarily rhyme, but I let that wash over me like the panic bubbling under my chest, under my crazed sudden decision to expose myself to a rebel patrol.

An' she wailed at the pain from tha dry poniard
And she snipped it right off at the stub
And that necromancer now haunts every boneyard
A huntin' a tool to part his sweet wife

All the lanterns were focused on my shuffling hide as I wandered aimless through the brush, trying my best to play blind drunk and lost, all while singing that stupid song at full volume.

Oh won't you offer up a pizzle ta' her lordship
Some dagger to cleave her in twain
For her lordship is still to this day unable
And never her marehood hav' slain!

The caribou were now shouting at me, demanding I halt and come out of the brush immediately, pointing what I could only imagine were weapons at me, I was too busy holding a forearm across my dazzled eyes and not even acting anymore, I was seriously disoriented.

"Which is it, guv'nr? Shall I halt, or come out there? Where am I, anyways? I went out back to drain the pipe and I'll be damned if this looks like the front of the tavern."

"Vat? Vat tavern? You're two miles from the nearest town mit a tavern! Vere did you come from?"

"What's it to you, guv'nr? Am I disturbing the town's peace?"

"Dere hain't no town, Is vat I'm saying! You're half vay to Grosbach in next province over!"

"Well, I thought I was in Grosbach. Must have gotten turned around. Can you point me the way? Or maybe your friends?"

And that was the cue. I gestured in the opposite direction as the wing-blades swinging out of the darkness, lining up my rebel friends' windpipes perfectly for the sweep of the steel in the reflected light of their lanterns. It was the sweetest setup you'd ever seen, and every single caribou jack of them went down choking on their own blood.

At that point the security detail and the rest of the professionals took over the situation, waving me back to my corner. I watched them put their heads together, and then the security ponies grabbed the dropped lanterns, and galloped off to find the first half of the patrol. With the lights out of the battlefield, the charioteers, which had been flying a holding pattern overhead, coasted in to unload the actual assault elements. The Lieutenant stomped up to me, fuming.

"Sawbones, what did you do? We could hear you singing from a thousand feet!" The mare was pretty damn loud her own self.

"Well it's a good thing we're well out of earshot of the border post, isn't it? But they seem to be running nightly long-range patrols now. Hopefully they can catch one or two of the other rebels, see if we can figure out how heavily the border posts are reinforced, because we've seen more ponies here than there should have been in the entire garrison of that post."

"I don't see a single pony here," she said, looking around at the cooling caribou corpses, "but I take your point. It still might work, and we need to give the impression that we're here anyways."

"I'd say a half-dozen unexplained dead in the middle of the road on the other side of the provincial border makes a pretty bold statement. Don't need to burn down the barricades to make that clear."

The lights dancing in the distance suddenly stopped as we argued, and a few spun around. We couldn't hear any noise, but it looked relatively close.

"Seriously, you heard us at a thousand feet? Those ponies are that far away from the looks of it, and I can't hear a blessed thing. Is that fighting?"

She narrowed her eyes at the distant glare, one of the lanterns clearly having broken and burning out its brief life in a puddle of fuel.

"Yes, that's fighting. Hopefully we can get some answers."

"Hopefully nopony comes back with a lance through their brisket that don't have antlers on their nobby skulls."

Twenty minutes later, they returned, dragging a struggling young buck, bleeding from a messy but superficial head-wound. One of them yelled at me, "hey, ‘Bones, do your witch-doctor thing, get some answers out of this guy."

I bent down to examine the buck, damn near still a calf. "It's an art, not a potion you can just pour down a pony's throat. He won't be useful for another half a day. Well, not the usual way."

I reached out and clipped him across the wound, causing him to shudder.

"Hey! Calf! Want to live? Tell us what's at the barricade, or die ugly! Give me a reason to let you live, because at this point I'm inclined to cut your throat and my losses, leave this nonsense for some other day. Whatever's waiting for us at the custom post, they can find your fly-covered corpse sometime tomorrow, no hair off my dock. Or you could be the sole survivor, get to tell a hell of a story, maybe even to your own calves if we don't kill you first. What say, calf?"

The caribou shivered in the darkness, I don't think he could see anything. I was just a shadow among shadows in the starlight, a yelling, murderous shadow with the night air starting to stink of loosened bowels and blood. He must have gone three rounds with his conscience, because I was getting out my second-worst scalpel from my kit to end the "interrogation" and resume my argument with the Lieutenant, when he saved his life.

"Fu-fu-full kompanie. T'tird battalion fifh regiment"

"*Very* good, that's almost 'name, rank, regiment'. No!" I held out my hoof before he gave me his name, "I don't need your name or your rank. Where's the rest of the battalion, the rest of the regiment?"

"Detached, battalion bak in town."

I looked up at the Lieutenant and the pegasus sergeant in charge of the aerial sections attached to this night's debacle. "Sound about right people?"

"Matches what we've seen on overflight. If they're hiding more than a company up there, they're really good at it. Enough tents behind the customs post to house that many."

I looked down at my victim. "Son, you did good. Well, not by your lights, and your surviving fellows are going to hate your talkative ass. I recommend you light out for the territories after you wake up." And I reached out with my rag full of ether, and put him out of our misery. I yelled for Boardwalk, and he came out to tie up our drugged prisoner and haul him somewhere out of the way so that the stubborn horses I worked for could plot their assault on an enemy position an order of magnitude larger than we'd planned for.

And they thought I was being overly cautious. Foals.

Still, they managed the attack on the customs post without any Company casualties. My presence turned out to be utterly unnecessary. We packed up the mobile surgery into the chariots and marched out of the province. We had run out of time to ferry the entire force back to the forward base before dawn, so instead we were going to give the burghers of Grosbach a show. The aerial cohort ponies could meet us on the road to ship us to the next target further south the next night. In for a bridle, in for a bit.

Author's Notes:

Sawbones is just a big ol' softy. Look at him generously not murdering a helpless prisoner!

Well, you know. Foal steps.

BTW, originally, the song was a slightly altered version of Dylan's "Tombstone Blues", but I took a long look at the site rules about copyrighted lyrics, and it was ambiguous whether they allowed for legal parody, so I erred on the side of caution, and composed something appropriately filthy and original.

Reivers on the Border

SBMS012

The charioteers' corps played "wolf, goose and grain of sack" with us and the ground-elements, hopping us into position onto the next road southwards going clockwise around the borders of the province. The second and third customs posts were considerably softer targets than the first two, we had apparently hit the major garrisons to the eastwards, and now were sweeping up the minor posts as we moved away from the trade routes in that direction. I justified our presence on the expedition when a pegasus caught a spearhead through her wing at the second custom post, and then an earth pony was hamstrung on his right rear leg by an unexpected blow by a customs officer no-pony had expected to be armed at the third barricade. Hamstring repairs are horrible, invasive bits of surgery, and I was quite proud of having pulled off that in a field surgery. I stitched up and stabilized both brothers, and they were evacuated back to the infirmary at the forward base, which grew increasingly distant as we worked our way along the border.

The fourth custom post was literally abandoned, and we burned the facility to make a statement, then rushed deployment to the fifth target so as to not waste the night. At this point we were in serious danger of catching up to the section of griffin scouts who the Lieutenant had finding our targets, evaluating them, and playing pathfinder for the main body of the raiding group.

We were starting to feel the rush, as the Company was running out of autumn, and the last harvest of the season was racing us like the proverbial hare catching up on the tortoise. The Captain *needed* our equipment and ponies for the projected granary raids, which had to hit before the millers started milling their harvest. We had been using under-utilized ponypower and resources while other scouting sections were busy exhaustively mapping the targets for that phase of the campaign and pre-caching equipment and corps of observation for the right moment. And that moment was not now, but it was approaching rapidly.

So we rushed the fifth custom post, expecting to take it at the gallop like the fourth post had been taken. My orderlies and I didn't even unload the mobile surgery from the vehicles, and instead we just stood by the grounded chariots and waited to see if we were needed. The security detail and ground reserve force were likewise clustered around the grounded chariots. Some of these were brand-new, hacked together out of green-wood and pioneer supplies, manufactured on the cheap back at the forward base. It turns out, once you start using the chariots for air-mobility, it's like a bad drug. You need a bigger and bigger fix to get the same rush, and we were converting more and more of the first cohort's ponies to aerial taxi duty. We hadn't yet started eyeing the griffins and measuring them for chariot harnesses, but I somehow suspected that moment, likewise, was coming.

This was the point at which a pillar of flame interrupted our reverie and turned night into day. This caused the security detail and reserves to scatter to their proper posts, galloping into the darkness around the impromptu chariot park on the packed earth of the roadway. My orderlies and I yanked my supplies and tent out of the supply chariot, and trotted to the roadside, where we rapidly kicked the tent together and I set up my table.

"We'll use the chariot beds as cots if there are multiples," I directed. There was a second flare of light, and then a third, smaller one. This was bad, we hadn't committed any serious casters to this campaign, for all of its flash, it was a glorified diversion. All we were supposed to be doing was putting the skeer on the rebel and drawing his forces to the edges of the province to defend against border-raiders and imaginary invading armies. The witches-coven was busy back in camp putting together nasty surprises for the main effort that was coming. All of which meant that we didn't *have* any warlocks to be lighting up the countryside like that. Which meant that we just drew the attention of rebel firepower, probably a rune-caster. Possibly rune-casters, plural, in which case we were boned.

A pegasus runner flew back to the chariot-park, and half-spiraled outwards until she hit the reserve corps, which had started walking cautiously forward towards the big noises and bright lights. I couldn't hear what she said to the sergeant in charge, but they broke into a gallop towards the fires, and I pulled my lance out of a chariot and set it beside my surgery table, ready for rebels, or to start stabilizing wounded, whichever the road delivered to me first.

I could hear the roaring when the reserves reached the fighting, which meant the entire countryside should have heard it as well. This customs-post wasn't like the first few barricades to the north, which were in wooded areas along the verge of the agricultural zone. Here we were surrounded by darkness and fields of nodding corn, ripened and drying in the fair autumn weather. There were farming hamlets in the near distance, on side-roads joined to the main route by crossroads every half-mile or so. This put at least four hamlets within sight and hearing of the cauldron of pyric runes and the first cohort's retaliatory firebombs.

The distinctive blue-green shimmer of a Company chorus shield lit up the night, which meant that our unicorns were still in the fight and organized. None of them were warlocks, and they couldn't really take the fight to an experienced rune-caster, but they could keep the fire off of an advancing battleline. Rune-casters weren't nearly as flexible as warlocks, and if you could get close enough to them without being burnt down by their runic fires or their curses melting your bones right out of your hides, they folded up nicely once you cracked them over the skull or spitted them on a lance.

A big burst of flame bloomed off the opposite side of the chorus-shield, like an orange-red fungus growing off the side of a half-deflated hoofball. Then… nothing. Maybe some screaming and clashing of blades, but it's easy to imagine that sort of thing in the silence after a deafening tumult like that. Then, ten minutes later, the chorus-shield dissipated. That either meant that the chorus had been broken, or that the threat was taken care of and they'd simply stopped casting the spell.

We waited in the silence, and eyed the lights of the neighboring hamlets in the near distance, looking for that distinctive flickering that would tell us that enemy reserves were approaching from their farmhouse quarters, or possibly farmers with pickaxes and hoes looking to pick over the wreckage of a losing fight for salvage and booty.

A clopping came from the direction of the now-incinerated customs post and barricade. We leaned forward on our forehooves, ready for anything.

The first figures came close enough for us to see them, and see that they were ponies carrying wounded in improvised litters. Three litters emerged from the darkness, and I sighed, and got to work.

I worked on those I could save. Two pegasi were too burned to survive and were triaged, so I could concentrate on the donkey with only third-degree burns on her forearms and right barrel. That jenny was lucky I had sufficient plantain and linseed oil ointment. I washed out her burns with alcohol, and then we covered them with the burn ointment and wrapped her in clean bandages, and dosed her with laudanum, enough to keep her from screaming every time she was jostled. There's only so much I can do about burns, but what I could do, I did, and I believe that immediate battlefield treatment saved her, because she survived the trip back to the infirmary at the forward base. In my mind, it justified all the nighttime standing about I had inflicted on my convalescent orderlies and myself up to that point.

We gave the two dying pegasi far more laudanum, enough to kill them if the burns weren't already doing that job for free. But they died peaceful, not screaming their burnt lungs out from the agony of their mortal wounds. Dead that night was Steel Wing, Updraft, and Little Wind, the last of whom died immediately on the field, and whose litter-carriers took her charred remains directly to the chariots for eventual sky-burial.

The Lieutenant pulled me aside along with the commander of the aerial detachment and the reserve force, two sergeants named Long Haul and Chestnut Shell. The gist of the debrief was simply this: this barricade had been defended by a full company, with a caribou rune-caster in command, or possibly on an inspection tour, who knows? We could pick over the battlefield and see if we could find more evidence – and at this point, Long Haul waved a wing at a waiting corporal, tersely ordered scouts back to the burned barricade to see if they could pick anything out of the rubble before any reaction force arrived on scene - but we clearly had hit a section of the border which was getting more resources than the air we'd been punching the last few nights.

This was the point at which the griffin scouts that had been busy evaluating the next road on our itinerary – an actual branch of the Bride's Road leading south-west towards the river-ports of the northernmost province of the riverlands – arrived to report on the enemy forces on that line of advance. It was not easy news – it was an actual fortress, and they reported at least three regiments with proper entrenchments and well-built walls fronted by abatis and cleared kill-zones.

That took all the wind out of our wings. We barely had any night left, and we decided to burn what little darkness we had left in withdrawing to the neighboring province to regroup. As we pulled out of the battle-zone, the charioteers quickly and rapidly staging us mud-ponies out as quickly as they could, the ponies who had been sifting through the wreckage of the battlefield flew up, reporting the approach of a rebel reaction force.

The orderlies and I quickly packed up the tent and table, and I hefted my surgical supplied onto my back as we balanced the bundled tent and table over their backs. We started hoofing it towards whatever non-rebel town lurked to the southeast along this road, and hoped we were found by a charioteer before a rebel patrol overran our flightless flight. It was a close-run thing. We saw, quite clearly, the dim dust cloud rising over a galloping herd of rebels as the last chariot lifted us into the rays of the rising sun.

The Consequences Of Poking The Bear, or, The Bear-Trap

SBMS013

I could hear the Lieutenant cussing across the square as we landed. I jumped from our chariot and ran for the centre of the Company clustering in the early morning light. They were in a fairly tight grouping on the east side of an empty market square, and I found my patients easily enough, still packed into the chariot frames we had loaded them into. I waved my orderlies forward as I looked over the three of them. The one I expected to live was stable; Updraft and the other had passed on at some point during the retreat. I now understood the Lieutenant's loss of composure. She and Updraft were old cronies, they had been recruited together during the long Eastmaark contract, on the world before Openwater Bay and Crossroads. Updraft had never gotten further in the Company than corporal, but she and the Lieutenant had continued their friendship despite the differences brought by the Lieutenant's drive and ambition. And I had just killed that friend. I was in the soup but good.

I looked up as I directed my surviving patient indoors inside the neighboring tavern on the square, eyeing the gathering clouds blowing in from the west. Red sky at morning, sailors take warning… The Lieutenant stomped past my place in the market square like a bombardment walking its fire towards a doomed fortress. The rushing clouds brought a cold wind under their skirts, and I was chilled as I watched her consult with the surviving non-coms in front of the charioteers.

"If that damn…" she paused, gathering her dignity, and started again. "Tell him he's the liaison to the locals, and to see if he can keep them from getting over-run by the rebel counterstroke. We have business in Rennet, and someone has to hold the locals' hooves on this," she said to the sergeants, and turned away to the chariots, leading a contingent of the strike force still on the ground to the vehicles, and waved them forward. Long Haul packed the Lieutenant and the remainder of the assault force on the chariots, and the weary charioteers hauled them off without any further instruction. She had not actually said anything directly *to* me, and I was left exchanging uneasy glances with Chestnut Shell, the ranking non-com among the remaining brethren.

"So, " I said to Chestnut Shell, who was not in my line of command, or vice versa, "The Lieutenant seems to have left me in charge, for what that's worth."

He nodded without any sign of regret, and hoofed in the direction of an approaching officer who was neither the enemy nor part of the Company. Ah, leadership, and the residue of command.

"Greetings, your eminence, and good morning to you. Do you think the harvest will begin today, or is it to be rain and hail?" I essayed to the lieutenant, small ell, who marched up to us like she had never left the parade-ground even to piss, not since she had been pinned by her betters on escape from whatever equivalent institution passed for an officers' academy in these benighted parts.

"Ah, just a moment, please, I have forgotten something necessary which cannot wait on pleasantries." I turned to Chestnut Shell, waved in the direction of the distant smoking customs post up the road, and issued quick whispered orders to secure the edge of town around the road, find out what local defenses were in place, and if they were in as poor a shape as I suspected, put the brethren in a scratch ambush posture just inside the town where we could dismantle any reaction force or vanguard.

"My pardon, we may have issued accidental invitations to guests whose imminent arrival might cause our conversation to be disrupted if I had not ordered proper preparations. Sawbones, at your service, physician and Annalist of the Black Company, in the recent service of the Bride of Tambelon," I wittered in affected aristocratic tones at the fuming lieutenant, whom I was desperately hoping was actually an officer in the imperial army, or at least a vassal of someone answering to someone that answered to the Bride. I knew less about the province we had inadvertently invaded than I ought to have, since we were operating in neighboring Rennet.

"Who? What's a Black Company?" She eyed my bloodied cloak, and the mares-head badge of the Company that pinned it closed.

"Mercenaries, private military contractors, a Company in the grand old manner. One of your empress's legates hired us from off-world to help your superiors deal with certain problematic traitorous risings while your military dealt with larger concerns. Specifically, we're doing something about the fact that your neighbors in Rennet aren't answering the Bride's mail, and are taxing the traffic on the Bride's Roads." I was keeping one ear pointed in the direction of the ponies I had dispatched to the edge of town, hoping to not hear any sort of commotion, but expecting it nonetheless.

"Yes," she said with some irony, her own ears flattening in the first break from military decorum I had seen from her yet, "I am aware of the local outbreak of the White Rose in Rennet. We had the remnants of the first army sent to suppress the rebellion come streaming through here last spring. Well, the donkey and earth pony remnants, I'm told the caribou regiments mutinied en masse. A large force, your Company? We've been mostly observing the roads leading out of Rennet, trying to avoid provoking the White Rose, we can't possibly handle them if they decide to raid us again."

"Well, we've gone and poked the bear for you, so you'd best be prepared anyways. Speaking of preparations, what do you have on hand to handle, say, a company of caribou dragoons with their blood up? Possibly reinforced, possibly an entire battalion. Not exactly sure how big the reaction force tasked to this road's excise barricade might be, our scouts probably have numbers, but they left with my superior officer without briefing me. An unfortunate oversight, but there we are," I ended, lamely. The Lieutenant really ought to have made better arrangements…

"Reaction force? Provocation? What have you done?" She leaped forward, and grabbed me by my cloak, pulling me in close to give me a close view of the second lieutenant I'd seen today lose their shit.

"Me, personally, nothing. The vexellation I was supporting, on the other hand, descended last night on the fortified customs post on your road just to the north-west of here, and destroyed both it and the reinforced company defending it. They might be upset about the rune-caster we had to kill in the course of that assertion of the Bride's sole traffic-taxation authority in this imperium. The force at the barricade should have been a total loss, but there were signs that their supports had been warned and were moving to contact when we evacuated the battle-space. Clouds of dust, signs of ponies on the march or possibly the gallop, you know, the whole drill. My people are preparing a reception if the reaction force develops into a probe into this province. What's the name of this town, by the way? And while you're at it, you could introduce yourself. I can't keep thinking of you as Lieutenant Hey You."

"Corporal!" she yelled at an earth-pony non-com standing at ease by the tavern door nearby. "Call out the guard! All shifts, rally them to this square! Then send a runner to alert the militia captain!"

"And you – you've brought destruction to my doorstep! It won't matter what name this town has if the caribou *burn it to the ground*! They destroyed a hamlet a half-klick to the southeast earlier this summer for an offense much less serious than destroying one of their excise posts!" She almost started hyperventilating in a panic as her subordinate galloped off to collect her troops, such as they might be. And I still didn't have a name for my local officer or her allegedly-doomed town.

"Hey You! Numbers! Names! What do I have to work with? Focus on now, and worry about later when there is a later. Start with your troops. How many trained? You mentioned militia? Are *you* militia, or are you regular? This'guard', are they regulars?"

I did my best to get her on task, and continued the rapid-fire interrogation, wishing for a moment for the Crow and my medicated bottle of doped whiskey. But I couldn't work with a lieutenant stoned out of her mind, any more than I could with a panicky one. But walking her through these questions awakened her dormant training, got her on task, and between the two of us, we worked out what resources we had, and how to slot them into what defenses they had on hand. She led her guard to the edge of town. They were a sort of glorified militia, younglings recruited into "active duty" and maintaining the facilities for the general militia in the town – Pythia's Fell, btw, finally a name! – when that organization was called to arms. Most of the general militia was out of our means for contact, and it might take a week to call up the local regiment from their civilian business in the hamlets and farms surrounding the Fell.

What we had to work with was the hoof-full of Company sections the Lieutenant had left in my care, and a roughly equal set of town guards in sketchy barding and cheap spears. Looking them over, I knew what I was looking at – bait! I posted them inside the town, in plain sight from the road as it entered Pythia's Fell, but well away from the edge of town, leaving a number of tactically effective alleyways for our shadows to lurk. If the enemy approached, they'd set eyes on those shaky recruits, and charge like a band of nomadic savages. I hoped. The sections of Company veterans – and by this point, even the scattering of new donkey brethren were veteran by the standards of the locals – were concealed around the expected axis of enemy advance in those useful alleyways, out of sight.

I went through the brethren, looking for any other force-multiplier we could use to shock the enemy, get them to panic and flee if we could. We were light on magical power, even the subtle sort of glamour that might have a psychological effect, the sort of thing that Otonashi specialized in. My eyes fell on the mark of one of the unicorn bowmares, named… Zero Phase? It half-peeked out from under her barding, but I seemed to remember it was something illusion-based. Not strong enough for her to be called to the warlocks' section, but something.
I pulled aside Zero Phase, and tried to work up something that might bite in the full light of day. Or, I thought, looking up at the lowering clouds heavy with portent, half-light. We had an idea, and were working on it when I saw the reaction of the ponies in the local guard to something out of sight down the road from us. The enemy was approaching.

Zero Phase started her casting, weaving a shell of darkness around my cloaked self, playing to my dark coloration and exotic looks. I picked up my lance, and eyed the ponies on either side in their proper barding, and my own breast unprotected by anything other than my Company badge and my own hide, and gestured to my left at Zero Phase, demonstrating how I wanted the illusion off-centre, so that anything flung at our creation did *not* fly true and straight right through my ribcage. And maybe a pony's-height taller than the top of my hood? Get them to waste their projectiles on empty air, and not fired into the mass of our brethren, that was the idea.

The enemy was much more cautious than I had hoped, advancing at a slow walk towards the anxious locals' spear-line. Several platoons at least of well-armed and barded caribou entered the kill-zone, and slowly marched on my bait, until they stopped and formed in the roadbed, a disciplined pike-hedgehog which grew as further platoons marched up to the forming phalanx. It was bowel-loosening even to my veteran eyes, and I wasn't standing in front of that bristling hedge of pikes-heads waiting to be mown down like the ripe corn awaiting the scythe-blade.

Perfect, their formation would be entirely flanked by our ambush. They outnumbered us heavily, but we had their rear, and they had been foolish enough to form a phalanx in the tight quarters of a town. They were fucked, they just didn't know it yet. A caribou officer in the rear of the formation barked a series of brief commands, ordering the pike-push, which was our cue. I waved Zero Phase's apparition's arm far above my head, giving my own and only command.

And then we fucked them.

Nothing is more terrifying to a trained force of ponies in a tight formation like a pike phalanx than to be unexpectedly and suddenly flanked. The pikes make the formation deadly and unstoppable from the front of the formation, unless you have some sort of magical powerhouse or a hell of a lot of high explosives. It'll tear right through shield walls, spear lines, some light fortifications like barricades, and most shield choruses. But the interlocking files of pike which make the formation resilient and provide the mass which produces such great momentum, means that it has a long turning radius, and in fact, has to turn in a single body. It is as if the ponies of the phalanx become an eight-hundred-legged monster which couldn't simply double back on itself; a stiff-limbed and awkward great beast with an exposed flank.

An exposed flank which we rogered but good. We didn't have the ponies to generate much of an arrowstorm, but what we could get in the air, every dart found its target, and the lancers and swordsponies charged into the mostly unprotected rear of the enemy, only the officer with his halberd turning to meet the unexpected charge. He went down with a ruined face as Chestnut Shell broke a lance off in him, and the caribou rear disintegrated in a spray of blood and viscera. The confusion spread through their formation like a wave of dismay and chaos, and I loomed up over the chaos like a dark cresting wave of shadow. Zero Phase's creation wasn't really a masterwork, in fact it was falling apart even as I directed it over the slaughter, but even the failure was unsettling, and I like to think it played its part in turning surprise into panic, and panic into utter rout.

The roar of battle was being drowned out by terrified screaming, and the roadway was a tumult of wide-eyed terror between the few brethren of the Company intent on our bloody business, and the ponies of the local guard, who were cautiously pushing forward against the confused front of the collapsing phalanx. They were right to be cautious, as the majority of the caribou were still locked into their forward files, and could do serious damage to the spearponies in their front if the rebel were feeling bold and fearless. With their fellows being dismembered behind them, and some dark magic shadow cutting off the light over their exposed heads, they were most certainly no longer in a bold and fearless mindset, but if they had been given targets right under their muzzles, something to strike out at, they might have been dangerous in their distress.

It was at this point that the lieutenant of the guard proved that her head was of more utility than simply keeping her helm from chafing her crest, and started yelling terms of quarter, promising prisoners protection from "the demon and her spawn". She had a set of lungs on her, and the offers pierced the battle-chaos like an aria drifting over a mightily laboring tartarus-orchestra in full swing. The pike-caribou of the fore, who might have simply overrun her thin line and broken out of the trap by powering through it - fearful of whatever hellish miasma floated overhead, and encouraged by my brethren's contrapuntal, theatrical howls and moans, playing up the lieutenant's theme from across the battle - began dropping their pikestaffs on the roadway.

A surrender once started is difficult to stop even with intact command structure, and we had cut down their officers and sergeants in the rear of their files in the first charge. Likewise, it is difficult to stop a slaughter once you've committed to it, but our own small numbers meant that we had mostly blown our wind by the time the lieutenant called the surrender, and couldn't have butchered the surrendering enemy even if we wanted to. Which, I have to be honest, some of our brethren definitely would have done, if we had the numbers and the wind for it.
And if we were on our own, without allies, we might have done it anyways once we'd gotten our second winds. The Company didn't have the facilities, the numbers, or the time to deal with prisoners of war in any number, and we weren't taking them at that stage of the campaign. But the locals were in their element, had the facilities, had the mind-set to think of taking prisoners, and somewhere to put them where they wouldn't simply carve their way back out again once the captives regained their nerve. Even if those captives were the remnants of a battalion, less the detached company destroyed at the customs post the night before, and the casualties laying all over the roadbed just inside Pythia's Fell. Our trap had succeeded beyond anything we had any right to expect.

The civilian population, which had stayed indoors that bloody morning, came out as the battle ended, and aided their guard in rounding up their prisoners as the storm broke overhead. I and my brethren retired to the edge of town, and kept an eye on the road back into Rennet as waves of cold rain washed across the countryside and into the town's gutters and eaves. The gutters ran red with caribou blood, but few of our number were even slightly wounded in the fight. It was one of the most one-sided affairs I had ever participated in, and for once my services were not needed. Well, Hyssop had gotten stuck in with the rest of them, and had popped her stitches, which gave me something to do with my time. I sat in the tavern later, cleaning the newly-opened head-wound and re-stitching her, and keeping an eye on the burned jenny, whose Company-name was Free Hilt. It looked increasingly like she'd survive her burns, and I was basking in the dual pride of professional success and unexpected military prowess.

That was where the oracle found me and proceeded to pull the heavens down around my ears.

Author's Notes:

Hoosh. This one didn't want to see the world, I had to re-work it three times before it was anything. Oh, well, at least I have something like a plot stirring in the depths. Everything up to this point has been prelude, whatever my protagonist thinks of matters. No matter how educated and curious he is, he really doesn't know much of the worlds around him.

The Prophet And The Hermit-Crab

SBMS014

The tap-room went silent behind me as the elderly pony pushed the door open with its staff, grey robe trailing behind the wizened forearm, heavy gaudy bracelets chiming against each other on every limb and around its wrinkled throat. Her face was made up heavily, as if a young filly blushing for her special some-pony for the first time; but she was old, as old and tough as those few sharp bones you might find in these lowlands, poking up out of the flattened landscape. As she passed into the tavern, she was followed by two younger ponies, donkeys like their mistress, in brown robes and considerably fewer baubles. As it was, I marveled at the old jenny's stones, bringing that much portable wealth in the presence of the clearly piratical. She looked about the tap-room, frowning sightlessly. Oh, how original, a blinded seeress! And not even wearing a blindfold to spare her victims, but as clouded-eyed as creation had made her. Or wait, maybe cataracts? No, that looked congenital.

"So, where are they? Loa, you sent me to treat with tartarus-spawn, and I have not the days left to trot here and trot there at your whims for nothing." She wasn't talking to the room, she addressed the air, as if in the midst of conversation with the unseen. Very much like a charlatan, and my eyes narrowed, even as her nostrils flared, no doubt smelling the bloody stench of my re-stitching, and the medicinal aroma of Free Hilt's burn ointment. "Well, and that's the smell of the residue of ill intentions and ugly repercussions if I've ever breathed in a stench. Speak! Tartarus-spawn! I'm told that there were ponies playing at demonhood in the high street this morning, and I and my loa would have words with them!"

All Company eyes in the tap-room turned my way, and I don't know how the blind old jenny sensed it, but she turned her sightless gaze my direction, and clumped over to my impromptu surgery-table. I quickly tied off my last stitch, trusting that one fewer stitch wouldn't necessarily bring me back later, and making a mental note to check later anyways. "Hyssop, I think that will do for now, I believe I have an unscheduled meeting."

"Oh, here we are, the very individual we were seeking. Or… the loa says I should call you a pony, although I don't think that sounds like a pony voice. Officiant! what do I find before me."

One of the two brown-robed donkeys leaned forward, and informed his oracle, "a Zebra, dame Pythia. Blood-soaked, and wearing the sigil of the mercenaries who committed the slaughter in the high street."

"Aye, and commanded it, if the loa are not leading me astray. A clever child, cloaked in petty shadow-wisps, leading damned shades under the thin illusions that they are not what they pretend to be. Thus, the testimony of the loa, who see that I might see."

I frowned, confused by her references. "Pythia, that's a classical title, a reference to the lost Parnessian cult. Re-established here on Tambelon? Nothing else around here matches that cultural reference. And loa is something my superstitious cousins like to babble about, while they're playing hoodoo games and pretending to be voudoun priests, blasphemous and superstitious at the same time. Why should anyone credit your cultural mish-mash when you can't even be bothered to keep the references within the same scheme of superstition?"

She barked dry laughter, amused by my resistance. "Oh, the loa business is for your benefit, not mine. The spirits say you know them by that name, and on another day, I'd be talking to sylphs, or djinn, or…" and she smiled, slyly, "thriae. Although the two of us are the only ones in this tavern who know what either of us are talking about. I think I have the measure of you, zebra. How can you be so well-educated and yet so horribly ignorant of what it is you are doing?" Now frowning, turning on an emotional dime.

"And what, Great Pythia, am I doing in this benighted provincial town, other than stitching together one of my ponies and awaiting further strife or my transportation, whichever finds me first?"

"Forcing open doors which have been shut by time, corrosion and rust, behind which lie things that ought not again see the light of the open skies, not star-light, nor moon-light nor even the cleansing solar fire itself." The Pythian had gone ramrod-straight, and spoke in a voice not her own. Either her loa had possessed her, or she was into the fake-possession stage of her performance. I was not honestly sure in the moment. There was something alarming in it, but then, the charlatan crafts their performance exactly to achieve that unsettling affect. As a con-pony in a Company of con-ponies, I knew to be wary of the grift, even when it walked empty-eyed and hollow-voiced like an apparition before me.

"Fool! The petty sly games you and your brethren commit are as nothing to the great beast which slumbers in your forgetful breast! The stars! The stars! The stars move in their accustomed paths, and yet the moment is not yet, and yet the moment still is to come, and you and yours are not dead, are not scattered, your devil's-lance is not yet broken! Her slumber! The nag ridden by a hag, the nag-ridden hag, the eternal maiden nailed to her celestial cross, the monster chained to its rock, the sacrifice and the devil, and you her thoughtless fellow-sacrifice! She has not yet summoned you to your blood-ritual, and your fellow fellowships have all fallen by the wayside! In the deserts of Dar al Hisan, your staff should have fallen, and the last of the Companies broken! Oh, how much lesser the suffering, smaller the catastrophe, if you and yours had coughed their last in the desert of that god-haunted world! How did a cult of demon-worshipers pass through the veil of divine madness which is the Dar al Hisan, and yet emerge triumphant from that benighted world's doors, intact, feared, respected? What… pact did your ancestors make with the devils the horses call gods, to be spared their flensing?"

The priestess was in full prophetic mode and had thrust her blind face into my muzzle, and somehow, though I had faced hundreds of screaming caribou not half a day earlier, it was this frail old fraud who had backed me wide-eyed up against the rear wall of the taproom, alarmed. She knew things she shouldn't have, and hinted at things *I* didn't know, horrible things that would only make sense to those who knew the inner workings of the Company, the traditions that didn't make it into the Annals, the things nopony directly addressed but somehow made known nonetheless. She jerked back, and up, to her full height, and chanted:

High the moon will rise
And the blood of her fellowship
Self-shed under the light of
That final moon's shine
And the blood shed in her service
And the blood shed by her servants
And the tide like a tumult of rusted dust
And the dust of ten centuries vintage
Shall blow through the fragile bowl
Of that tiny clock-maker's paradise
Of that geared wonderland
Turning and turning at the
End of the Endless Road
And winding the entire great orrey
As it spins upon its axle of god-stuff
And this is the key
Broken in the lock
To unmake the Road
World by world unknotted
Like the conqueror's blade
Through each world's knot
Cut. Oh! To be that sword
To be forged for the severing
For the cutting of the cords
Of every knot on the skein
Of the Creator's ever-weaving
The web undone by
The children of the Daughter of Night!
Beware your instrumentality,
Beware the despairing use
That her hooves made you for
That her hooves would make of you
Blades of the Night!
Bend your edges to the service
Of some lesser light!
Find the filly!
Find the child!
Bend your proud necks before
Your silent salvation hidden on
The road to rebel-ruined riverland!
The rebel wears a face
A false face against a minor evil
Minor evils that suppress greater evils
And those greater evils even less
Than that world-ending evil
You carry in your innocent breast!
Find the child,
The child who is not yet the face
The child whose face is being
Worn by fakers and fools
The child who would be the
Undoing of little compromises
Still oceans of blood to shed
The child who is the standard
That standard without content
That standard which is no fate
That standard which is no destiny
That might turn your own destiny
From our fated demolition!

She collapsed, suddenly not the great oracle prophesying, but a frail old jenny overwrought and coughing from the bellowing shout. "The loa… are not in a rhyming mood this afternoon. Really, couldn't they spare someone more poetically inclined to deliver their messages?"

"They may have been sparing their audience. I have an allergy to rhyming couplets."

"Ha! You foolish zebra, you scuttling hermit-crab. You are not the shell you've pulled yourself into. No matter what bivalve's armor you wear, you are still that hermit-crab. Be proud of it, it will be our salvation, saith the loa."

"That's where you're wrong, seeress. I am not the hermit-crab. I am the shell it wears. Officiants, your Pythia is overwrought, and overburdened with portable wealth in the presence of tired mercenaries certainly not above the occasional bit of petty larceny. I suggest you take her back to whatever rooms in whatever temple or hermitage you usually have her quartered." They bowed to me, alarmed, and shuffled their charge out of that tavern. I glared around the tap-room, catching the gaze of every alarmed Company pony there, the audience to the old fraud's performance.

"You all catch that? Good. Forget every word of it. The donkeys go in big for spiritualism and divination. The Company doesn't. No fate but what we make."

"Destiny is what we beat out of life!" they roared back in that old call-and-response from the first surviving book, the first volume of Fatinah.

I hoped that would tie down the rumors, or at least knot the event in our own bow-line, our own narrative. That had been a direct attack on the soul of the Company.

And I had no idea what it meant.

Author's Notes:

There! Damnit! Loop caught, plot detected. And it only took a Celestia-damned seeress & terrible prophetic verse to nail it to the mast-head.

Nearsighted Pony's Bluff

SBMS015

They finally were able to spare pegasi to ferry the remnants of our expedition back home late that night, really, more like the next morning. Midnight was long past as we coasted behind tired ponies in the dappled darkness underneath the clouds. The waning moon was high in the heavens, passing through gaps in the partial cloud cover. The hamlets and market-towns of Rennet lit our way below, like topaz flecks strung out haphazardly on a mostly-bare heirloom necklace, the more precious gems sold long ago by improvident or wastrel ancestors.

The pegasi who came to hitch themselves up to our chariots had muttered something about the ball in play, and we passed more than one flight of griffins and pegasi dashing here and there on the way into the forward base. Over at least one market-town, a brace of ponies were slowly circling something on the outskirts of that town, no real indication of what exactly, but I knew the general outlines of the operation which had been in planning. Apparently something had advanced the time-table. We were all over the skies of Rennet that night. There was a bright orange glow in the distance, away from our line of flight - something large burning fiercely in the night.

I haven't dwelt before in these pages on the world in darkness seen with night's-eyes, because it seemed somehow natural, and simple, and not really worth the ink to discuss. But I felt the difference that night, far overhead of a chaos in which I had no hoof in the planning. Well, that's not exactly true, I had sat in on the general discussions, but this… this wasn't what had been discussed, and everything changes once you start pinning assignments and timetables and marching ponies out on roadnets you had no real control or dominance over. Rennet was enemy country, and there were armed, barded columns rushing here and there through the night, on errands only they and their commanders wot of.

As we spiraled into the landing-meadow in front of the compound, I got a good night-vision view of the much-trampled farm lanes around our hiding-place, and the widening trails leading from our hidden base to roads and lanes throughout the neighborhood. If it weren't for our witches-coven, we would be discovered on the first sunny morning; only glamours could hide the hoofprints of hundreds of armed ponies marching forth on their various missions of arson, terrorism, and judicious execution.

Once we touched down in the meadow, I buttonholed my orderlies, and instructed them to take our jenny patient into the infirmary and check on Octavius and the rest of the malingerers, then to report back to the chariots, where we would rendezvous once I touched base with operations and figured out where they needed us. Too much traffic on the roads, too many opportunities for trouble. We'd probably be needed before the sun rose, but the alicorns only knew if we could possibly get to where we'd be needed before then. Not nearly enough darkness left in the night.

At that thought I felt a nasty shiver down my spine. Right!

There were no officers in the operations room, just a sergeant, a tired-looking griffin courier curled in the corner, and the sand-table of our area of operations, littered with little flags and shiny quartz baubles, glowing variously and at steady rates.

The story the sand-table told was worse than what I had seen in the flight from the border. There were flags and baubles on most of the priority targets we had identified, and a number of the secondary targets as well. It was no wonder that the base was empty and cathedral-echoing in the darkness!. The Company had left its compound like a discarded chrysalis, and there were nearly a dozen columns scattering throughout the central districts of the province, some of them so far from the base they'd have to go to ground in some secondary blind far from the forward base. The Captain had gambled wildly, and put every marker the Company had to its name on the roads.

“Sergeant, explain to me what I'm looking at. Because it looks like we've got a dozen vexellations and all of our armed ponies scattered to Tartarus and gone across half of the province, and few of them within supporting range of each other. This is more than night-couriers could keep in contact!"

The sergeant, a colorless unicorn without the sand for command or the fire for battle-leadership, who would always be someone's adjutant or lackey, looked at me steadily through his lamp-mirrored spectacles, not giving an inch to my irritability. “The rebel stripped the central districts of all mobile elements in the course of the diversionary effort against the border posts. Our scouts observed the movements, and the Captain decided to proceed with the aggressive option of our contingency planning. We're hitting the six major granaries tonight, and shutting down four mills in the hands of rebel sympathizers. The other columns are centrally located reaction forces in case of local resistance beyond the occasional bailiff or heroic militia-pony." He pointed to the various flags in turn, and once my alarm over the sheer complexity of the deployment faded, I recognized the pattern. It wasn't really different than the discussed plans – they were simply all being implemented in the same night. Yeah, “simply".

“As for communications, the Crow had a clever idea, and provided these charms," he waved a hoof over the glowing crystals, “which are entangled with bit and bridle apparatuses being worn by pegasi flying cab rank over their assigned columns. It's a deadpony switch – they can communicate simple messages by squeezing and relaxing their jaws on the bit and send messages via horse code; if something goes absolutely pearshaped, they let it drop entirely, and the charm on this side goes glaringly bright. There – that one. The Lau Crosse column has completed its mission. They're on the way back."

He grabbed a pair of calipers and measured the distance between the successful column and the base on the major roads in between, and frowned. “Hrm, not a problem for them, unless the vehicles they seized are somehow inferior or damaged. Lau Crosse will not need to use a blind." He waved at the griffin snoozing in the corner. “Only if I have anything positive to say will I use one of our couriers. We're stretched too thin. The aerial cohort was amusing itself earlier tonight emplacing the scare-crows at various crossroads. Thanks for the materials, by the way. They came in handy."

I frowned in dismay, uncertain what to think of the fruits of that particular request. We had had a section of griffins tag along on our border-raids, and they had left each little battlefield with saddlebags bulging with…proof of activity. I rather hoped that someone had cleaned off the trophies, or else every other byway and highway in the central districts was going to stink of rot and dried blood.

“There goes Beloit. Hrm, that's the pattern for multiple hangings. I guess they weren't able to recruit in Beloit. Shame." He measured again, made a notation. “This column won't be able to make the forward base before dawn. Good thing there is a prepared blind on that road. I'll have to awake Wilhelm here in a moment. Right, what do you need from me?" He turned from his sand-table toy, and gave me his full attention; I had graduated from audience to entertain to problem to be solved in his mind.

“One, has there been any wounded so far? Two, where are my oxen, and the ambulances? Three, where should I stage myself and my orderlies to retrieve any trauma cases in a rapid manner? The chariots are still loaded out in the meadow, we can probably wake the pegasi who were drawing them; when I left them they were bunked out inside the chariots and catching some sleep."

“Believe it or not, but nopony has reported any serious trauma cases so far. Until someone encounters something, the best place to keep your ponies is right here, parked in the meadows. Trade me one of your resting pegasi to replace Wilhelm, whom I'm going to have to send out once we're done here. Oh, and your oxen volunteered with the carter corps, they're out with various columns, and once they find something to haul, they'll be pulling loads of requisitioned supplies back here along with the rest of the carters. They were quite eager, as demonstrative as I've ever seen cattle. You wouldn't have any idea what's the story there?"

“Some idea, I think, but it's their story. I may have one of them tell it, when we have time after the campaign season is over. Assuming any of us are alive come winter."

“Sawbones, really, don't be defeatist. This campaign is going swimmingly. At the rate we're going, we might beat the snows." Broken Sigil's spectacle-lenses glowed demonically in the lamplight; there was something in his bloodless cheer at the prospect of ruthless and one-sided slaughter that was more terrible than the actual dismemberment of dozens of caribou helplessly entangled in their own broken formation on the blood-slick cobblestones of a crowded high street. “I will send word if there is a position I need to send you and your ponies before dawn breaks. Even after dawn breaks, we may have to rush you out, depending on the emergency, and damn the operational security. After tonight, they'll know the fox is inside the chicken-coop."

I walked back out to the chariots. Hyssop and Boardwalk were sleeping next to the charioteers on the chariot benches. I picked a pony at random, and woke the unfortunate, telling her that the operations sergeant needed another runner, and to go catch a nap indoors until they had to send her out.

I stole her chariot-bench, and fell asleep. Nopony woke me up before dawn, so if there were any catastrophes, they apparently weren't anything that could be solved by an aerially delivered zebra surgeon.

I dreamt of abyssal sea-beds, of claws scrabbling across the sands and corals, and a great weight I dragged behind myself in the watery dark.

Author's Notes:

I almost called this "The Widow in the White City", but really, Broken Sigil's not nearly as bad as Kurtz's fiancee in the Heart of Darkness, so, no. And you have to make allowances for ponies like Broken Sigil, he's got a bureaucrat's heart, and the Company isn't nearly big enough for the sort of organization that allows somepony like Broken to thrive.

The Ride Of The Wild Hunt

SBMS016

The night I missed unfolded like so:

It began, in point of fact, days and weeks before the first fall of dusk. The bulk of our pegasi and griffins had covered the skies of Rennet even before the Company had broken into the province at Lait Blanc. When the sun went down, our ponies fanned out. By the night that we began our attacks on the border-posts, the members of the aerial cohort had become intimately familiar with the roads and towns of the rebel province. Strategic equine intelligence had built up a picture of the state of food supply and storage throughout the province. We had a good idea of where the major food supplies – the cheeses and grain that represented the portable and tradable wealth of Rennet – had been stockpiled in six major granaries. Likewise, there were a number of grain-mills which were used by the farmers of the province to process their crops and, if necessary, replace or replenish depleted or destroyed granary stocks. The mills were under control of master millers, and some of them were natural supporters of the rebel regime – mostly caribou, who had suffered socially and economically under the donkey dominion of the local vassals of the Bride – and some of them were effectively neutral, and one and two were natural enemies of the caribou regime. Command had used our limited investigative resources to determine who we had to remove, who we could terrorize into compliance, and who would gladly fall into our hooves.

Our pegasi began to set up observation posts in the skies above our prospective targets. Hollowed-out clouds carefully herded onto slow transits designed to provide maximum loiter and cover angles contained long-sighted ponies who lazed the long late summer days away, watching the traffic below, what came into the granaries, what came out of the mills, watched as the garrisons posted next to each dwindled and then suddenly emptied out as the crisis on the border flared. And counted the skeleton crews left behind to keep the rebel flag-masts unmolested, to show the ponies of the province that there was still a White Rose in Rennet.

The cloudborne observation posts were joined on the ground by forward blinds built overnight on the approaches to each targeted granary and some of the mills. The gypsies and hobos whose sudden infestation the clever and observant might have noted in the central districts, kept mostly to the back lanes and the shadows, and put together hunters' blinds in the dark hours; this skill had been taught by the Company's griffins as a matter of course over the past generation and a half to our herbivorous brethren; it was an invaluable skill for a military pony, who even in the most honorable and virtuous of states is still a sort of honorary predator. The ability to stalk the prey without being seen, without spooking the herd – this is a skill the soldier needs to develop as urgently for his well-being on the battlefield as the raptor or the lion does for her diet on the savanna.

Most of the great mills were traditional earth-pony bastions, serving the clans of earth ponies who grew the great fields of corn, of rye and wheat and barley and a grotesque local grass they called "maise". Those had seen many of their master-millers driven out, replaced, or killed by White Rose supporters; their journeyponies and laborers were still earth ponies for the most part, and their discontent could be seen from a thousand feet. Some of the mills did a roaring side-business in cheese curing, and those smokehouse mills were largely run by their original caribou and donkey millers – and were divided more virulently by the political and cultural fruits of that racial clash. In fact, a number of the smokehouse mills were not in operation, several of them having burned to ground before the Company had even been a prophesy of nightmares in the troubled sleep of the ponies of Rennet. The Company would concentrate on the active grain-district mills, as those that were best positioned to allow the rebel to recover from that which we were about to give unto them.

The warlocks were placed into the observation blinds on the major granaries, and given an entire day to prepare their wicked tricks in the still secrecy of a collection of bums and ne'er-do-wells lounging about in market-town squares all over the central districts. The ones I've written of, and those dullards of the warlocks' section whose mediocrity, indolence and inactivity have kept them from prior mention. Not that there's too many of these slackards, but this is the moment I ought to take to mention that Languid and Goiter exist, and the Company pays them their daily salt to be grand wicked mage-lords, or at least, what feeble approximations of that state which is in them to provide. I've never seen Languid do a damned thing, but the other witches insist that she's actually the most powerful of the entire coven, and part of her bargains and deals is that she never can perform in front of an audience. She'd lose half her power if anypony ever saw her lift an occult finger. Goiter's a luck manipulator, supposedly. All I know is that he's a terminal klutz, and bad things happen in his vicinity. He's a walking disaster zone, and the brethren *hate* to operate in his company. The other witches generally keep him in purdah, to keep the rank and file from lynching him out of general disgust.

Our warlock resources limited our main assault formations. There were more than six granaries in the central districts, but to maximize each column's chances and to simplify the path-guiding process, the officers settled on just those half-dozen nearest and most important facilities. As the long afternoon light devoured the hours until dusk, each warlock, dressed in full hobo filth, ambled along the roads from the front doorsteps of their assigned granary to the mustering grounds in front of the forward base. They dropped mystical breadcrumbs along the way, little pre-prepared twists of grass and twigs to drift into gutters and roadside verges. At the forward base, they greeted their assigned ground-pounders and attached carters, as the columns formed to await the first night of autumn.

As dusk fell, each warlock led their assault column out of the brush around our base, and debouched onto the main roads of the neighborhood. All the warlocks but Languid drew around their ponies a glamour that hid each marching force from our immediate neighbors, who were still supposed to be ignorant of the fact that there was anything other than some woodland critters and a bunch of thieving gypsies camped out in their vicinity. As each column emerged from our immediate district, the glamours were let drop, or rather, faded in favor of other illusory witcheries. Languid's column was sent out last, in full darkness, and she managed something in the shadows where nopony could see her sweat. Or, at least, so I'm assured. As always, she could always be faffing off like usual.

The thin air resolved, swirling like an unseasonable mist, and from that unseely miasma the ponies of the Company emerged, phantasms of some terrible half-forgotten ancestral memory. The glamours graced our grotty troops with fantastical horns, terrible half-winged suggestions, strange tails split twice or three times in their train, and wild black weapons long and sharp and stretching far above their unequine heads in the glowing mist. Farmer-ponies looked out of their front doors that evening to see a parade of faerie horribles marching in eldritch grace on the lanes outside their gates and fences. Not the good fairies that their gran-mères and ma mères told them safe stories of in their nursery days, but the dread sidhe that thundered forth from under the barrow-stones to reap the wicked on the nights of judgment in the days of old.

As each column marched in their cloud of bowel-loosening illusion, they followed the trail of glowing markers that the warlocks had left behind them in their afternoon stroll, green-purple-black will'o'the'wisps which flowed around the column as they collected each in turn, floating witchlights which contributed eerie grace-notes to the spectacle of the slow march of the Company. Some columns gained a following of some few fillies and colts as they passed certain farmhold gates, a train of fools half foal and half grown, mad with the lunacy of the young and reckless. They would be witness to the full terrors of the first Ride of the Hunt.

As the columns passed through each major crossroads on the major highways, some of our pegasi and griffins played at bombing the rear of the formation. Each daredevil carried one of the fetishes or scare-crows against the length of their bodies, inverted, with the crossbar and "trophy" between their gaskins. They spun out of the CAP formation over the column they were allegedly protecting, and pulled into steep dives for the verge of the given crossroads the formation had just exited. Just as they were about to pancake into the side of the road, they let their burdens go and peeled out of their dives. This tactic, performed at considerably higher velocity and longer dive lengths, is a classic pegasi method for bombarding heavy fortifications, sometimes with high explosive payloads, and sometimes simply with pointed logs delivered at unreasonable velocities. With the scare-crows, they took it easy, since to drop the pointed crosses at any higher speed would have shattered the "trophies" and scattered bits of viscera and shattered bone all over the crossroads and neighboring country-side.

To the foals following the columns, this was nothing less than a bolt from the black, some stooping great bird of prey screaming out of nowhere, to fling nightmarish horrors over their quivering heads. The simply curious or sibling-bullied broke and ran in screaming terror. Some few wildlings ran as well, but only to laugh at their terrified siblings and friends, and quickly turned around to follow the parade of horribles to see what further devilries were in the offing that night. They were not disappointed.

Not all the columns the Company sent out that night were such spectacles of wonder and dismay. Reserve columns travelling in parallel with the granary raiders and mill-columns did so quietly, not exactly silently, but without the theatricality of the main columns. The mill-columns likewise marched to their targets without magic or hoopla, or really, any carters or impedimenta. They had a less adventurous mandate, and their missions would not benefit from the attentions of the civilian crowd, or at least, no more eyes than those targeted in the raids themselves.

The granary-column followers came and went as short limbs and coltish or fillyish stamina ran out long before the columns found their targets. But a succession of wide-eyed colts and fillies took in the spectacle, and cheered the aerial delivery of the gruesome Company fetishes as they came to recognize the repeated performance for the aerial stunt that it was. In some happier, shinier land, foals cheer the acrobatics and smoking pyrotechnics of daytime daredevils in the smiling company of their family and communities. In Rennet in that season, the thrills that were on offer were delivered by winged devils in the night, and came with the decapitated heads of rebel caribou soldiers tied to scarecrow crosses planted at velocity by the side of country crossroads. Foals will take their joys where they can.

Some few foolish witnesses saw a number of the columns arrive at their assigned granaries, and lost sight of them as the steady march went to the trot, and then the thundering gallop. So only the victims themselves saw the brief engagements that slaughtered the skeleton garrisons protecting the wealth of the rebellion, the great stores of grain and cheese and apples and other fruit of this most productive of the provinces of the northlands. They did not see the zebra scouts cut the throats of the caribou standing guard-post, or the earth ponies smash down fortified barrack doors, or the unicorns who filled the air over cots and beds full of dozing soldiers with flashing swords and arrows sped unerringly towards their targets.

None of the granary garrisons put up anything that could be dignified as a fight; there just wasn't that many of them to begin with, and they had each and every one of them been taken quite by surprise. The live-in staff of the granaries were dragged out of their quarters, and the caribou employees were dragged kicking and screaming to the side of each building, shoved into nooses, and hanged off the eaves of their place of employment. The earth-pony and donkey employees were bound, beaten, and set to watch at a safe distance as the Company's carters came up from the rear of each column and claimed the vehicles our scouts had identified – heavy carts, long haulage freight carriages, and so forth, parked conveniently beside the granary loading docks. What could be loaded onto the vehicles available at each granary was hurriedly hurled higgledy-piggledy into the conveyances, while sections were posted sentry in those directions any possible reaction force might arrive. The rest of the column hoofed the most portable contents of the granary – the great wheels of cheese, some of the distilled liquor, some processed beet sugar and high-test flour, etc – onto the carters' vehicles.

The rest of the booze joined the firestarters and flammable rubbish spread throughout the now-sacked granary building, bottles broken here and there, liquor sprayed on every wall. Bags of coarser flour were burst in every corridor and storage-room, and every door and window was forced open, the better to draft in the night air. Once the carters hitched themselves up to their requisitioned transports and started away from the scene of the crime, the lucifers came out, and the firebugs had their jollies. If yo were an ignorant little foal, you'd have expected a nice roaring fire, and some of the foals, who generally had caught up with the circus by that stage of the night, moved to get far too close to the buildings as the brethren prepared their demolitions. A more careless or soulless Company might have left the little foals to their damnation, but we were not that dark a brotherhood in those days, and the little fools were dragged well back from the buildings before the pyros set off their charges, and the brave, bloodthirsty little foals of Rennet learned that night why to always be careful of sparks and flame in the presence of flour and mills and granaries. Each granary went up like a siege mine, if you've ever seen the pioneers touch one off. If you've never been blessed by that wonder, think of a small volcano, or a forest-fire, or, well, a working grain mill blown to Tartarus by the carelessness of its miller or his apprentices.

The mill-columns had all the bloodshed, and the hanging horrors, but none of the fun of blowing up buildings and grand theft freight cart. They simply made social visits to various mills on the eve of the onrushing harvest, and hauled the millers out of their snug homes, and explained to the persuadables and sympathetic that the dominion of the Bride was being reasserted, and emphasized the point by hanging the unpersuadables from the nearest tree or gateway for the edification of passers-by, and more importantly, their fellow millers and miller-apprentices and laborers.

As the various columns returned to home or their daytime blind closes on the roads to home, one last daredevil pegasus, Tickle Me herself, dive-bombed the main square of Rennet City in the deep predawn darkness, emplanting a tall double-cross deep in the packed earth behind the main address stage on the side of the square. A second pegasus flew up with a cloth placard, which they tied firmly to the cross-bars of the double-cross, and a third planted the flash-burned skull of the rune-caster from the road to Pythia's Fell on the peak of the stipes. That placard read as follows:

Tonight the writ of the Bride
Is once more the letter of law
And all sovereign authority
In this her province of Rennet
The duchy and its lordships in homage
The county palatine of Benoit
And associated baronages
Right of travel shall be untrammeled
No taxation without authorization
The heads of all rebel scum
To be delivered to her
Designated agents
Attached or otherwise
On pain of the visitation of the Night
By order of the Black Company
In Her service

That night, hundreds of thousands if not millions of deniers of foodstock went up in flames – the fruit of a year's production from a rich agricultural province. Few died, not even approaching the bloodshed of the brief battle outside Lait Blanc, but those that did die, had an impact all out of proportion to their numbers. The White Rose had much more prominent supporters in the province, and much richer ponies - merchants, aristocrats, scholars and jurists. But all of their pretense and their wealth was built on what could be extracted from the fields and pastures of the province, the foodstuff itself. And we had destroyed their stores and killed their experts in refilling those storehouses. In a night, we had crippled the rebel political economy in Rennet.

Thus, I had from Gibblets, from Shorthorn, from Tickle Me, and from the Captain. Whom I found arguing with Gibblets the morning after, the both of them surrounded by a small herd of dozing younglings in the remnants of the brush a short trot from the charioteers' meadow. And Gibblets' argument to the Captain was more in the way of a simple childlike plea, which boiled down essentially to "Boss, they followed me home. Can I keep them?"

Author's Notes:

The problems of telling epic stories with strict first-person, and the short-cuts required to relate events occurring out of the experience of our narrator. Yeah, kinda tell-not-show, but I take refuge in the fact that Sawbones is the one doing the telling. Technically, the author said, hiding his sockpuppet behind his back....

Adding Faginism To The List of Charges

SBMS017

The Captain glared over the nodding heads of sleeping foals at our eldest warlock in the morning sun creeping between the leaves of the canopy above. The woods echoed with the chaos of dozens of carts and hundreds of ponies jockeying for room and space, everypony and everything colliding in the suddenly tight quarters of the encampment's approaches. I frowned, worried about the noise, even out here in the buffer-brush between the base and the nearby farms and farm-lanes. Then I looked down at the half-dozen tiny ponies asleep where they had been dumped off a cart beside one of the tracks back into the mustering-yards.

"Gibblets, why are they sleeping through this racket? This could wake the dead. Where did they come from?" I waved my hoof over a donkey foal, who had started to snore in counterpoint to the epic exchange of obscenities between two carters stuck in a traffic-jam on the track nearby.

"Well, I had to put them under once I realized that they'd followed us all the way here. But I think I was too late – if any of them remember the route we took, then the base's cover is blown. And there's six of them, I don't like our chances." He turned and pointed a clawed finger at the Captain. "And that's why I think we should keep them! The Company hasn't had military apprentices in decades! I've always said that soldiers are better if you start ‘em off young and train the cringe right out of them before it has time to set! And this one!" he pointed at a little female earth-pony curled liked a cat on a winters-hearth. "She smells like magic, strong magic. I haven't trained an earth-pony mage in forever! Do you know how rare they can be?"

I coughed in outrage. "They're rare because we have no racial talent for magic! You know how many hoops we have to jump through to replace horn-magic! Might as well be rune-casters, once you count all the trouble and gadgets."

"Keep out of this Sawbones. And you're still not an earth-pony, you confused alicorn-damned zebra! Earth ponies have as much magic in their hooves as most unicorns carry in those bone wands on their skulls, and this one…" He waved one goblin-paw over the smiling child's forearms. "She's packing some heat under her fetlocks."

"If a half-dozen foals could follow you here, then so could enemy scouts," interrupted the Captain, still fuming. "We may be blown anyways. I need to send out couriers to check the observation posts. Oh, Tartarus, I'm not even sure Tickle Me has them posted, she's still out of pocket. I need to find her second… No! I'm not getting distracted! You can't foalnap half the countryside, you're not keeping them, they go right back out to wherever they followed you from as soon as it's dark! Sawbones, back me up here, foals in the Company have a *bad record*. You should remember this Gibblets, I know you were there the last time we had someone bring children into Company quarters!"

The traffic-jam had broken in the mustering yards, and the carts were rumbling slowly past us now. I tapped my muzzle, thinking about recent volumes of the Annals, and older ones. "Well, now, that's not exactly true. Some of our best ponies have been military apprentices. Tradition holds that Fatinah herself was an apprentice, and I know that Bitter Ambrosia and Feather Storm were. I'll grant you that there have been… incidents. But those were unstable ponies, and something would have come along one way or the other, it was just… ugly with the foals."

We all grimaced, unwilling to dwell on the details of that ugly moment in Company history. Not all of our wickedness has been easy to gloss over, and some of our warlocks have been blacker-hearted than others. More than one have had to be put down by outraged brethren. Something dark in the heart of some Company ponies… The accusations of Pythia and her loa echoed in my ears, louder than the rumble of the passing carts, louder than the continued argument, louder than thunder.

"Sawbones! Wake up! We need to make a decision! We can't just leave them laying out here in the woods. They'll bring ticks into the compound!"

"They can just take their ticks home to their families," grumbled the Captain, eyeing one brown lump more closely. "Damnit, Gibblets, this one is a caribou! What the hay kind of Pied Piper are you that you piped the foal of our enemies to my front door! You damned Puck, you Tylwyth Teg, you Hameln!"

"Right, OK. So they were conscious right until Gibblets put them to sleep outside our front doors. That makes them a security risk. Something made them follow his group *after* they burned down their granary and – Gibblets, you were on the de Pere raid? And after you hanged a *lot* of ponies."

"Caribou!" coughed Gibblets.

"Whatever! Point is, you were pretty ugly in front of this bunch, and they still followed you home. They're obviously not put off by the usual run of violence. It could be they're our sort. But we need to make… preparations. Foals in the vicinity of the Company need to be run through the usual song and dance; it doesn't go well when they're not. I can think of three incidents in the Annals just off the top of my head, including that ugliness with P-." Gibblets cringed at my use of that name, which had been officially expunged from the Annals. But whoever had done so hadn't used the proper ink in the volume in question. "Relax, Gibblets, I fixed the problem, it's entirely expunged now. *I* know how to mix inks that don't let older stains through like that. When we die, his name dies with us. My point is, we introduce them to the pikestaff at the earliest moment, buy us some madpony insurance."

"You make us sound like an ambulatory insane asylum," grumbled Gibblets. "The vast majority of Company brothers are well-adj-" The Captain broke out in an aquiline shout of laughter. "Ok, relatively well-adjusted."

"I need to talk to you both about my encounter with a maddened donkey seeress in a town named after her, or possibly a jenny named after the town, I don't know, but it's never good when they prophesy at you like that. She's got me jumping at shadows right now, and that includes within the Company itself."

I didn't like the glow in the Captain's eyes as I said this. It almost felt like somepony else was looking out of his eyes, something with slit draconic pupils in the dark behind his own. There was an uncomfortable silence, and Gibblets stared at the Captain, all humor gone out of his rubbery strange face.

"Very well, Annalist. We will play things your way. And we must discuss your dalliances with meddlesome spirits found by the roadside. The Company can be a jealous mistress." The Captain turned away suddenly, and left with an almost feminine sway to his hips that was utterly unlike him.

"Gibblets, I maybe don't spend that much time with the Captain. Does he… usually act like that?"

"Sawbones, every Captain eventually starts acting like that. It isn't a great sign." He sighed, and looked over his new charges. "Can you help me find some space on a cart? I don't want to waste a half-dozen trips hauling all of these foals inside by hand."

"What's a hand?" He waved his monkey-paws at me and grimaced.

"Fine, hoof, whatever. Not everything under the firmament is a pony."

"No, but everything that talks is."

"You know you're delusional, right?"

"Then at least I'm in good Company." I waved down the next cart in the line, and we started hoofing slumbering, tiny ponies onto flour sacks behind a yawning and impatient carter.

Foals Underhoof

SBMS018

We ended up storing the foals in my mostly-empty infirmary, laid two to a cot in the back of the hall. Most of my casualties from the previous week had returned to their sections by that morning, only Octavius, my two amputees and the burned jenny were left cluttering up the place. The amputees and Octavius were in the middle of a game of cards.

Well, I shouldn't ever say that Company ponies are in the "middle" of playing poker. It's one of those things where there's always a game going. If there are brethren awake, off duty, and not moving, there's a game. The games spontaneously generate like maggots in rot, or flies in horseapples. I swear I've seen ponies produce decks out of thin air, ponies I knew didn't have a shilling or a denier to their names, who had complained to me of having lost their last decks – when there was a need for a game, there was a deck, like the universe providing necessary entertainment to ponies with otherwise-destructive tendencies. The Company technically pays its brethren - we are after all a mercenary company - but in practice nopony has cash money, everypony seems to traffic in debt chits and memorized I-owe-Stomper-so-now-you-owe-her-this memory-aids.

I don't know where the actual cash money goes – it gets paid out, then it gets shuffled around. Maybe check the trunks of Shorthorn, he always seems to win whenever I stick my head into any given game. I was kind of surprised to not find him in here shaking down my convalescents; I suppose his assault column had been one of the two which had to go to ground in a temporary blind away from the base. I interrupted the game briefly to look at the stumps of my patients, and waved off Gibblets to go do wizard things. Like, say, touching up our defensive glamours on the tracks and brush we had just trampled the hell out of outside.

"Octavius, what are you still doing in here, you've got an overstrained horn, not a crippling injury. No offense, Firkin. And good job keeping off this, it is draining nicely. You're going to be laid up for the rest of the campaign season, the both of you. We'll keep you in here for the next two weeks, and shift you into something more permanent when they have something more permanent. Or we get burned out, whichever comes first."

"Doc, what's with the foals?"

"Markers, I came to join your game. I figure they're worth a hundred deniers each, easy. Ha! Got you wondering. Nah, a project of Gibblets', I'm foalsitting until the sleep spell wears off. Can't have them sleeping out there underhoof, it's a madhouse." I finished wrapping up the stump of the second donkey's right rear leg with fresh bandages. No complications, although I was starting to run short of clean bandages. We needed a laundry set up, soonest. Alcohol could only cover so many sins before filth started making trouble.

A parade of minor cuts, sprains, and burns tromped through my office that morning, nothing too impressive until the pegasi brought one of their sisters in with a nasty radial fracture in her left wing, more than a greenstick, not quite a compound. Autumn Blade certainly made enough noise about the pain, though, so I gave her some of my laudanum special, and waited a bit before starting the set. After getting her to chug her opiate cocktail, I glanced down to discover an audience of two foals staring wide-eyed at the sniveling mare and her crooked wing, primary feathers stretched in all sorts of directions they oughtn't have.

It was Gibblets' ochre magic earth pony and a little jenny, dull beige beside her… friend? I had no idea if these kids were even related or acquainted with each other. They weren't saying anything, just staring at the pegasus as her cries slumped into drugged moans.
"Is that supposed to bend that way, Mr. Demon?"

"What, her wing? No, she ran into a tree branch this morning. It's definitely broken. Ever see a broken limb set before? If I do it before the potion takes hold, she'll scream like all Tartarus."

"C'est malade raide!" squeaked the little jenny. I blinked at her, and looked at the other foal.

"Don't look at me, Ah don't speak 'beck-oyes. But that's wicked cool," she offered.

"Jes, jes, tres cool," nodded the little jenny with the thick Prench accent. "Rayures monsieur, quel genre de diable êtes-vous?" She paused, thought about it, and repeated slightly more intelligibly, "Monsieur Striped, the which demon you are?"

I raised one eyebrow, and turned to the broken wing, reaching out with my hooves to stroke the feathers into alignment and estimate the necessary angle of the set. "Neither I, nor any other pony you'll find here, is any kind of diable, bratling. Most ponies call my kind 'zebra', if they call us anything at all." I thought for a second, running my sole along the break, seeing if it would nudge into alignment without further effort. "Strike that, I'm not exactly sure what Gibblets is, exactly. For all I know, he could be some sort of minor devil or imp." I pressed the misaligned ends of the break into line, and Autumn Blade yelped in drugged agony.

The two foals twitched in alarm, and their eyes followed my hooves as I grabbed my alcohol swabs and wiped down the feathers along the top of the wing.

"Gibblets is the greenish rubber-faced biped who brought you lot into the compound, if you're wondering. You're essentially his problem for the time being, although I strongly suspect him of trying to dump his mistakes on my withers," I continued, reaching for the wing-brace. I wiped it down with alcohol-soaked rags as well. Things wouldn't stay clean for long, but there was no point in putting a dirty brace on a dirty wing. The brace was cleverly made with screw-turn adjustments, or something like that. Ask the smiths if you want the proper terminology. All I knew is that I just needed to crank that sucker down, and it would hold the wing in the position I set for it, without letting the broken edges of the break grind against each other, or shift in alignment. Not much else we could do about it but keep the pegasus from moving the wing by immobilizing it. Same as fixing a broken leg, really. Well, that and the ol' zebra secret sauce, but that goes without saying for pretty much everything that isn't a sucking barrel wound.

"Go lay down, Autumn Blade." I guided her to the cot which the two foals had abandoned to observe me about my work. As soon as she laid down, she fell asleep. The draught I had given her was strong enough, it would get us all through the initial day or two of healing, which was just as well. I'm no more a fan of agonized howling than the next pony.

"Monsieur Striped, what…. 'kind of' diable iz mam'zelle Autumn Blade?"

I gave her the stink-eye. "We call ponies with wings 'pegasi', or individually, 'a pegasus'. What kind of rock have you been living under that you've never heard of pegasi?"

"Aw, don't mind Prenchy here, she's from that joual clan down the road towards de Pere, the Tremblays. They keep ta themselves, don't send their foals to the schoolhouse. They're kinda ignorant."

"Ayia! Tu ne vas pas et de faire la manquette de moi, tu salete-poney crosser! C'est écœurant!"

"Hey! I know what that meant! Sorta! Keep your dirty mouth to yourself, Prenchy!"

"Je m'en sacre!" And with that they started tussling, the earth-pony's tail caught in the jenny's teeth, and the two of them spun around as the filly tried to get her own chompers on something that would hurt.

"OK, cut it out, you two imps," I squawked as I hoofed them apart like a pair of squabbling cats. Gibblets' favorite was much more angelic when she was safely asleep. "Here!" I hoofed them my dirty laundry, and pointed at a hamper across the room, "make yourself useful and go put this in that bucket. I've got more ponies to see."

And indeed, more brethren had trickled into the infirmary while I was busy with the broken wing and the wakened fillies. The fillies' peers continued to slumber the sleep of the pole-axed, I was beginning to suspect that Gibblets had been onto something with this filly and magic potential, and maybe a little bit with the jenny as well. Donkeys were weird on Tambelon.

The two of them continued to exchange country and gutter-Prench insults in wroth whispers out of the sides of their muzzles, while I cleaned out two more wounds, significant halberd-cuts across muzzle and forehead on a zebra mare and a unicorn stallion, but they didn't come to blows, or otherwise compel me to separate them again. They were far too entertained by the spectacle of blood, scalpel-work, and wound-stitching to try and make more wounds for me to clean.

"So," I turned to the hellions, my work done for the nonce. "I've been learning all sorts of words today from 'Prenchy' here, but I doubt that's her name, and I know you've not bothered to introduce yourself, filly-my-girl. My name is Sawbones, and as you can see, I'm a surgeon. Who are you two?"

"Ah'm Bloody Ploughmare." I blinked at her, incredulous. "What? It's my name! I cain't help what my mamma called me. These things run in families, and it was either that or Ambrosia Apple, and d'you know how many Ambrosias there are in this duchy? Ait least a dozen I've heard tell of!"

"It's just a little… on the nose. Ponies get called things like that here in the Company, but only after they change their names, and the ones that go for something like that have a hard time of it. It sounds like trying too hard." I snorted, letting it go, and turned back to the jenny foal that barely spoke Equuish. "So, your name. Ah… tu prenom?"

"Mon nom est Feufollet, Monsieur Sawbones. Ravi de tu rencontrer," she curtseyed at me.

"Ha!" laughed little Bloody, pointing a hoof at her neighbor, "at least my name is from ah variety of apple. She's named after a swamp-monster! No wonder she came out with the rest of us to follow that parade ah devils! She fell right in line with the rest of the will-o'-the-wisps!"

Feufollet looked sheepish, and I figured that she understood considerably more Equuish than she spoke. And that the accusation had found its mark. I narrowed my eyes at Bloody Ploughmare – and that name was certain to be shortened if they were to stay with the Company for long, or else she would do nothing but trail laughter behind her wherever she went – and waved my hoof at her.

"And what imp of the perverse drew *you* out of the safe confines of hearth and home, Bloody? Last night was an ill time to be walking the Bride's highways."

She rubbed her own forehoof in her green mane, mirroring Feufollet's expression. "T' be honest, I was kind of out of doors when the parade came trompin' by. Ah had a faight with ma' kin, and there were some words. Ahm about old enough to start workin' by my family's lights, but I can't work the trees worth a pinch ah shit. They don't listen to me, and when ah try to buck 'em, they tend ta buck back, and never give up an apple. Pa says ah - ah- I might as well be a donkey."

Feufollet sniffed in contempt, but Bloody was just sniffling. I looked away, trying not to contribute to the sudden heavy atmosphere. The rest of the infirmary had gone silent at Bloody's little confession, and even the poker game, which had been slowly growing at the back of the ward, went quiet.

"Well that's a damn fool thing to tell a foal. Want we should go burn down their farm?" asked the zebra with the fresh stitches across her muzzle.

"We ain't burning out random farmers for being dicks to their kids!" barked the corporal to her right, cuffing her across the poll. He turned back to his cards, and offered an aside to the wide-eyed foal. "Don't worry chile, ain't nopony in this ward can buck out a tree. It's a knack, and if you ain't got it, you ain't got it. Ah grew up with Apples in the neighborhood. Good ponies, but narrow about their trees. Almost enough to credit those rumors y'all had dryads hiding somewhere in your woodpiles." He folded with a sniff of disgust, and got up to walk over to little Bloody, his horn lighting up as he approached.

"Bloody, this is Bank Shot. He's one of our bow-unicorns. Have you ever seen a unicorn?"

She rolled her eyes at me, offended. Well, unicorns weren't nearly as rare in Tambelon as zebra or pegasi, I suppose. Bank Shot bent down and looked her over, his eyes and his horn glowing a brilliant blue. He wasn't exactly warlock material, but he had more to him than nothings like Octavius.

"Interesting! You really don't look like any Apple I've ever met. You ever have weird events when you were very young, things burn down in your vicinity, poltergeists, that sort of thing?"

"Ye…yeah. There was a fire, and stuff had a tendency to wander when ah was in the room, they used to say. Ah haven't had an accident in years, though. It was enough to make my grandmother try to get my parents to get rid of me, they say, though. Before she died."

"What a charming family. Well, girl, you certainly look like a unicorn to me, just without the horn. I wonder if we could get you doing exercises-"

"WHAT THE HAY ARE YOU DOING WITH MY APPRENTICE, CORPORAL!" bellowed Gibblets from the entrance to my infirmary.

Author's Notes:

So, some faffing about while we make the acquaintance of some foals, and learn a little (probably atrocious) pseudo-Quebecois Prench. I guess this could be considered filler, but fillers have purpose - they keep the important things from crowding each other.

The Military-Apprentices

SBMS019

Gibblets was positively vibrating with jealous rage, as the unfortunate noncom had wandered unknowing onto the warlock's claimed patch of land, a sort of mentorship ranchette, if I had read the situation right. Well, served Gibblets right for leaving me in charge of his toys. Not my fault if some of them got up before he got home to play with them.

I laughingly kept the bipedal frog-monkey-thing from the flustered Bank Shot, interposing my chortling striped hide before the wrath of the little witch-king. I suppose I was fortunate that he had been quite busy by Gibblets standards, and was more than a little drained by all the showmareship and illusion the Company had been demanding of him recently, because his behavior was more than a little over the top, not exactly Gibblets as he normally over-reacted, more than a little…

Like the Captain recently. And like P- in the partially expunged accounts of the last foal incident. OK, right, re-prioritization time.

The little warlock's attention was diverted by a proper introduction to the two fillies, and their awkward names got him ranting on a different tangent than the hypothetical shades and colors of Bank Shot's lower intestines.

"No, no, we can't have a military apprentice named Bloody Ploughmare, the other PMCs will laugh at us at conventions. Child! We need you renamed soonest! What do you think of Blood Orange? Or Monkey's-Wrench? Or Bad Apple?"

Diverted myself from my forming intentions, I objected, "You can't call her Blood Orange, I can think of at least three in the Annals. And I'd have to check on Bad Apple, I think we recently had a something Apple a few decades back, but I can't recall if it was…"

"Bah! Things like Blood Orange are perennials, we've had eight Swift Blades and nine Steel Wings over the years. And you're thinking of the Black Apple, he was a corporal with the then-fourth cohort during the Eastmaark contract. Do you like Bad Apple, girl? Yeah, you're warming to it, I can tell…"

The fillies didn't quite know what to make of the green frog-monkey-thing. I strongly suspect his performance out there on the roads the night before had been a big part of what had drawn them here, but he was growing disturbingly manic, and while they were grinning, there was more and more whites to their eyes. I hoofed him over to the cots full of still-sleeping brats, back on task.

"OK, Gibblets, they've had enough rest for today, don't you think? Let's get the rest of them up and introduced, and make sure none of them wake screaming for the mamas, how's about? Octavius, come over here, please." I figured Octavius was the last pony to threaten Gibblets' sense of superiority and ownership over the foals. There's something about that unicorn which makes the warlocks puff up in supercilious amused contempt; none of them can take him seriously. And I needed to make arrangements, badly, quickly. If the effect was taking the eldest warlock this rapidly, we had a real problem brewing.

I had a ritual to kitbash.

I rushed out of my infirmary, ranking priorities by knowledge and availability. I knew where the pikestaff was, I had ideas about an open-but-protected space I could seize for the ritual, and I could probably find a proper text in the Annals given a couple untroubled moments with the chest. Drummers! I needed the drums and at least two of the oxen. Which meant diving into the vehicle park, finding Sack or one of his relatives, or if they were not in sight, Asparagus and some clue as to where they had…

Sack and his brother Tiny were working in the cluttered, trampled former-brush around the old vehicle park. Scratched and mis-matched carts and other heavy vehicles had been pushed out into bramble, brush, and grassy hummocks in every direction, some with their loads still pressing their wheels into the forming muck, some of them hurriedly emptied before being pushed out of sight and out of mind. Sack was harnessing up Tiny to a still-loaded heavy cart, and once he was done, I helped them rock the mud-bound wheels out of their new ruts, and pushed it out of the park and over towards the rapidly-expanding storehouses on the edge of the compound. I could see why Gibblets looked tired, our former forward-base was starting to sprawl, and we were spiraling out quick-set construction like a boomtown in a rock-farming land rush. He had to have been straining himself glamouring all this nonsense under increasingly heavy no-see-ums and you-didn't-hear-that-hosses.

As the three of us walked back to the corner of the barracks I had my Annals-chest stashed, and they had their drums shoved under their cots, I explained what I needed from them. Nothing too heavy, kind of spritely. We needed the Company in a playful, tolerant mood. Because I was increasingly certain that there was a sympathetic connection between the spirit of the Company and, well, the Spirit and her company.

I hefted my bottomless chest of codexes and scrolls onto my back, and led them over to the main mess hall, where I left Tiny and his much smaller brother experimenting with the edges of their hooves and seeing what kinds of light or sharp sounds they could get out of the great deep-chested war-drums, and inadvertently amusing the busy cooks at their work preparing the first shift of dinner. The Company banner and its great war-lance was standing in the corner of the hall, which was one last resource check.

Back to the infirmary. Not quiet, but I wasn't likely to be trampled by the continued frenzy in the teeming compound around it.

The infirmary wasn't much less of a mess, all the foals were up and about by now, and were playing some sort of chasing game with each other and some little phantasms conjured by a reclining Gibblets, looking suddenly rather old and tired. I paused, uncertain if I could do my preparation in this cacophony, and then ponied up. It was good practice for working trauma on battlefields, after all.

The Annals chest is a useful piece of devilry, constructed of dozens of generations of archival, storage, and preservation cantrips by the many storied Annalists who had need to store the collected chronicles in a portable and indestructible manner. The loss of the old Annals in the Dar-al-Hisan had been a great trauma, and every subsequent Annalist had taken it as the caution it was. The chest of that period was bottomless, obviously, and covered in ironclad protective spells. You could put that thing in a wall-breach and it would shrug off war-engines and withstand the detonation of petards. In fact, there's at least one instance in the book of Bitter Ambrosia where he records having used the chest in exactly that fashion while the Company had been besieged at Colter's Notch.

It was also indexed, with a hoof-friendly set of levers and switches marked with shorthoof notation. I looked over the levers, considered my options. Fatinah's initiation into the Company was retrospective in her Book, only mentioned in passing. The aforementioned Bitter Ambrosia had always earned his sobriquet, and wasn't suitable for a reading on the subject, however appropriate the description of his initiation had been in the previous Annalist's telling. Which left…

Law Stock's account of the apprenticeship of Feather Storm. I hoofed the lever for Law Stock's volumes, and the interior of the chest shifted, opening up a shelf where there had only been velvet lining an eye-blink before. I could feel the eyes of curious foals over my shoulder as I pulled the second volume out of the chest, and closed the lever. There was always a brace of pencils and some scrap paper set into a slot on the side of the interior, I've never seen the stock run out. I'm still not sure if there was a vast supply of the stuff in there, or if some thieving past Annalist had hooked the spell up to some very long-lived office supply warehouse in one of the more stable and prosperous home-worlds of the pony diaspora. Not all of the Company's prior warlocks were the midgets and pygmies of our later, degenerate days. Some of those ponies were true powerhouses, wizards worthy of the name.

I paged through the volume on the top of the chest, scribbling quick notes to myself for framing the reading, and found my place in the account. I copied it out shorthoofed, making some style changes on the fly. Law Stock was another stuffy unicorn, and she didn't really go in for drama or narrative flourish. Not that I had time for either, but there's a certain amount of professional pride at work, even when you were racing a madpony for the asylum doors.

I opened the chest again, pulled the lever, and replaced the archival copy, and put away my pencil and spare pages. One of the foals came up to the chest as I closed and latched the lid. Bloody, or Bad Apple if she took to that name, reared up and tapped against the chest-latch, and then tried to open it. It wouldn't budge, nor would it no matter how hard she pushed.

"That's a spelled chest. Only I, or my designated understudy, can open it, pick it up, or even shift it from where it sits. Go ahead, try and move it from the cot."

She pushed and pushed against its side, and the other foals came stampeding up to lend their shoulders, the lot of them shoving like a tiny pike-line making a push. They broke before the cantrip did, and burst around the edges of the luggage like a wave breaking over a rock.

"This is why I can just leave the Annals wherever I choose; the only question is whether I can retrieve them without my person being molested by anypony laying in wait. They can ambush me, but they can't take the Annals. Children, this is the memory of the Company, the Black Company. Have these ponies been telling you what villainous company you have fallen in with?"

They nodded severely, solemnly, some of them flat-lipped like they were holding in peals of laughter. The caribou fawn spoke up, lisping, "Ja, zir. You're empl'ees of th' Bride. You've been doin' zis vor vorever und ein day. You gau vrom virld to virld und zell your lances to eines grossherren oder prinzessin. You're hier to schlachten der Weisse Rose und der rest o' der caribou."

She spat sideways. On my nice sanitary infirmary floor.

"Well, now, the first three-fourths of that is true. We're only killing caribou because there's so many of them in the rebel regiments and the White Rose leadership. In theory if there are loyal caribou – and I swear you're the first one I've met yet – then the Bride and her employees are no intrinsic threat to them." I frowned, theatrically. "And go get a rag, and clean up that spit off the floor. I know this place is a mess, but I do surgery here, and we need to keep up appearances. No spitting inside the infirmary unless you're doing it into a spittoon."

I found my train of thought. "Right, this is the Company. And we're a sacred brotherhood. One with fairly strict rules and regulations, for our protection and the greater good. And one of the strictest is that we keep no foals with the Company, who are not properly apprenticed. This doesn't make you brothers of the Company, but it does bind you in ways that are important to your safety and the well-being of the Company. Do you understand what I'm saying?"

They nodded, wide-eyed.

"Anypony who can't swear to an apprenticeship, can't be here in the camp. We'll have to make arrangements, return you to your families or masters, get you out of the camp soonest. Because it just isn't safe for you here. Any questions?"

"Ja, zir. Ich bin bereichts apprentizin, mit das Bastarden sie gehängt letzter Nacht," rattled out the caribou in rapid-fire Germane. I closed my eyes and parsed what I remembered of that. Oh!

"You're already apprenticed? Well, if we hung your master, I'd say the contract is broken. Fires of Tartarus, that's sort of how I got my start in the Company, although I was much, much older than you when they forcibly broke the apprenticeship the old toad-diddler double-extended on me. What's your name, filly?"

"Meine Name ist Roggentochter," she curtseyed.

"Huh. OK, anypony else have issues, or want to opt out now? I need you to not be with us if you're not going to go through with it… it could be bad. Names! I've got the names of three of you, who are the rest of you?" The rest of them seemed willing to go with the flow, and I was introduced to Charleyhorse, the Dodger, and a little donkey named Tam Lane, all three of which seem to have come from some shady workhouse next to the burned granary in de Pere. I could feel dusk creeping up from the dirt under my hooves, under the infirmary floor-boards. It was time.

I led a procession of convalescents, foals, and a sleepy-eyed Gibblets out of the infirmary and across the compound to a mess hall emptying out a shift of well-fed ponies, some of whom turned right around and fell in with the parade. Some brethren know a show when they see one in the offing.

I led the foals into the hall, checked their hooves, and then helped all six of them up onto a long dinner-table still somewhat cluttered with the detritus of a commissary dinner. Their eyes followed me as I walked over to the waiting oxen and their drums, and I prompted Sack to start the changeling march. The two oxen rapped out a soft, pattering, cheerful tremble, shorting their huge hooves on the big hide heads. I circled around the hall, approaching the pikestaff, and bowing to it like I would to a great lady and her retinue, then bowed again, and took the pikestaff and its support, carrying it in solitary procession to the front of the hall, across from the line of foals, and set it in pride of place.

"Thus, from the second volume of the Book of Law Stock: In those days, the Company was in the service of the Lord Protector of the Mountain, in the Domination of Derecho. The land had been wracked by war and dearth and the all-consuming pestilence that trots in the train of those terrible scourges. The wars produced many orphans, but kept few of them, choosing rather in its blind and wasteful way to feed most of those foals to their dogs like table-scraps from a feast of misery and death. Be not deluded, as was written in the Book of Bitter Ambrosia, ‘war is cruelty, and you cannot refine it.' Some few orphans fell into the hooves of various brethren of the Company, more charitable or compassionate than the general run of soldiery, or perhaps, simply more bored." I paused to glare significantly at Gibblets, but he was sleeping standing up, and not hearing a word. I waved my hoof at Octavius to his right, who poked the goblin awake.

"Some strife arose from the presence of these charity cases within the brotherhood, and the Captain appealed to the Annalist, who upon reading the books of her predecessors, declared, ‘there are no children in the Company, but there can be military apprentices'. So it was written, so it was done. They brought the foals before the war-lance, and anointed their heads, and brought them up to the lance, and swore them to apprentice each a war-pony to be their knight and them their squires. Thus does the Company deal with foals that would walk side by side with grinning death, and fly with devils in the dark of the Night. Who would sponsor these six foals we have brought into our midst?"

Gibblets shuffled forward, and grabbed his Bad Apple, pulling her down from the table-top. She looked rather lost, and kept shooting glances across the hall as the warlock brought her up in front of me and the pikestaff. I nodded, and then marched myself over to the table, and reached out a hoof to the caribou fawn crouching down, her muzzle between her hooves. Roggentochter looked up at me as if I had hoofed her a cone of iced cream, and scrabbled down from the table, following in my wake. Various other ponies followed, with Octavius leading Feufollet up to the front, until each foal had a brother or sister of the Company standing for them before the banner.

I looked around the dining-hall, realizing I had forgotten the anointing oil, and my eyes fell on a half-full bowl of salad-dressing, part of the stock of thousand-islands the cooks had brought with us all the way from Openwater Bay. Good enough!

I grabbed the bowl, and dipped my forehoof into it, walking three-hoofed towards Bad Apple and the rest of the foals, and dabbed a quick side-cross of slightly rancid olive oil reeking mildly of citric accents on each forehead, ending with my Roggentochter. I bowed to them, and turned, stepping forward.

"Milady! We bring these foals to you as our apprentices, and your children, O Night! We beg your blessing upon these, our apprentices and foals, and the future of your Company!" This was slightly off script from the usual ceremony, but I was uneasy in my soul at that moment, and needed some sort of… reassurance.

What I got was an explosion of deep darkness alight with burning stars, that burst out of the black pike-staff like the flaming gust-front of a flour-clouded granary exploding.

Author's Notes:

Derecho, the mountain-city fortress of the greatest of the pegasi imperia.

The Aspects Of The Night

SBMS020

There was a cacophony of bellows and screams behind me, but it was muted, dulled, as if I was hearing it from below the surface of a pool of water. The starry black cloud surrounded me, and I saw nothing but it itself, and it was looking at me, and I felt like I understood its thoughts. When you look into the abyss, and see yourself looking back at you – there’s nothing so disorienting. For a second, I could not tell if I was in my own skin, or outside of it looking down into a shop-worn zebra just barely this side of middle age. I blinked, and the disassociation dissipated, and I was myself.

And there was a mare of darkest night standing front of me, and stars like suns shone in her flowing mane, and I could see the pikestaff through her translucent body.

The Spirit. With great thestrian bat-wings, and a long, cruel unicorn’s-horn, and a coat as black as coal. She looked almost confused for a second, and then the glint entered her spectral eyes, and a terrible grin split her lips and showed the assembly her sharp and serrated teeth, teeth that no herbivore born ever kept in its mouth. She looked hungry. And she was looking down, at the foals.

I stomped, once, loudly, and bellowed my greetings to our Mistress.

"Milady! Hail to you, who we have not seen in many an age! How fares you! How shall we address our Mistress?"

"Oh, my beloved warriors, it has been so long since we’ve talked, face to face. The moment of Our release must be drawing close, that such an offering brings Us thus, immenentized, here outside of our imprisonment, if only for a moment. What did you say you had for Us?"

"Thy name, fair Mistress, that we might address thine personage appropriate to the occasion?"

"Really, Sawbones, we are not so ignorant of the world outside our celestial prison walls, that we must be addressed in Ye Olde Equuish. What *you* know, and remember, *We* know, and remember. And more besides. You may address your exiled queen by her heart-chosen name, for we are Nightmare Moon, true queen of Equestria, and the Three Tribes wherever they lay their hooves!" She looked around, as if she had expected some sort of fanfare or spectacle to accompany this dramatic announcement, but there was nothing, and she looked piqued. "Again, have you offered Us these… succulent morsels? It has been too long, not that it was ever really all that often even in the old days. But We remember… the taste…"

"Mistress Moon! We did not bring you foals to be devoured! These are your own Children, apprenticed in full propriety to we your Knights, as squires in vassalage. They are each and each the future of this your Company!"

"Our Company, indeed. One of many, it ought to be. The old Third, the bloody-bannered Third, that held the fortress of Emerald Gorge against the Arimaspi for two terrible years, that held against the traitor legions when all others fled in the rout in the Whitetail Wood, who held the peak of the Canterhorn while all others fled in the face of the Solar traitors. But you left me alone like all the rest in the end, and slipped away across the portals while your Mistress was stripped of her crown by those fickle damnable harmony-baubles. But I strain and I strain my thoughts and I cannot feel any of the others. Have they scattered so far, fled to worlds so far down the Chain of Creation that even I can not hear their deeds?" She looked sad, and a little lost, or at least, as sad and lost as a vast, great spirit in the shape of a corrupted alicorn queen could be sad, and lost.

She turned again to the foals, and narrowed her eyes at them. "Once, before I was this, long before I was this, I was the guiding spirit of Taw Nun, a great and wise polis, and they called me Moloch, and they took their foals, the first-born and first-fruit, the children of their best and brightest, and they boiled them in great braziers before my altar!" She reared up, her green-blue cat-slit eyes wide and mad, her great jagged fangs gaping wide with each articulation over the cringing foals and their crouching sponsors.

"And now, my ponies, my only remaining ponies, they dangle a hoof-full of foals before me, and ask for blessings, and offer not a single blood sacrifice. This is the fruit of my failures, not yours. I feel my hold on this place loosening, and I am tired. The stars whisper to me that their plans are in motion, and I only need be patient. But I have been patient for more than nine hundred years, and I am feeling stretched, and wan, and I, I need something more…" She strode insubstantially forward, passing through a chair as if it was not there, and perhaps it was not there for her. She held a wing out to the pikestaff, but did not touch it, and even then, a black bolt of lightning jumped from the lance to her wing-claw, making her jump as if she had been shocked.

"Oh! Indeed! You all have forgotten more than you’ve remembered! Here is something indeed! But too strong, too strong, I would lose my mind if I took all that in a sitting! I would be as empty as a foal if I drank all that down! Indeed, indeed, in fact, I almost feel something coming on…" She spun on her heels, turning to face the assembly.

"I will return, this is worth the investment indeed! Your service has been well worth the wait! You have my blessings for these paltry foals!" She was waving her forehoof dismissively when the light went out of her great eyes, and she blinked, emptied, then she looked confused.

"What devilry is this, that mine rest is disturbed so? Why have ye brought us thus unprepared before an assembly? I, I do not recall having slept. Where is this? Where am I?" She looked around, distraught, her body-language no longer the brutal domineering pony-eater who lived to terrorize subjects, but rather a lost child waking in an unfamiliar body.

"Pr-Princess?" Gibblets stood and walked forward in his odd bipedal crouch, worried and tender in a way I had never seen him display to anyone, ever.

"Gibblets? Why art thou dressed thus, and here in this rough assemblage? Where is the castle, and our attendants? Where is my si-si-sister?" At this last word, her composure broke, and he reached out with his glamours, and formed a sort of spectral hug for the lost phantasm to collapse into.

"Easy, easy Your Highness, you are merely having a bad dream, a Nightmare. It shall pass, as all such do." His spectral arms mimicked his monkey-paws, stroking her across her crest.

"Do not talk nonsense, Gibblets, thou art no longer our peirrot, thee hath had thine promotion, as thou begged our sister. And thou dost know, that our dominion is over dark dreams; we cannot have a nightmare, ever." She looked both fond and disturbed at the same time. Her eyes scanned the confused ponies of the Company, and settled on the curled foals, hiding from the confused geist-mare.

"Oh, foals! How wonderful to see you in this our presence! How is it your parents hath permitted you here? They are so often protective of children, and our august presence is considered harmful to foals. It has been so very long…" she reached out and tried to stroke the mane of Bad Apple, and then Foufollet, and frowned as her spectral hooves passed right through the fillies as if they were not there, which they were not, for her. "Oh! Oh! Are these ghost-children, that I cannot touch them? Oh, what terrible tragedy hath befallen them, that I cannot hold them in my arms. Oh, o-o-oh Gibblets…" and she started to weep dark starry tears over the heads of the confused apprentices. The little warlock used his phatasmic arms to lead her away from the foals, and calmed down her upset, getting her to rest on her haunches in the middle of the hall.

"Hush, hush. Sleep. You will have great things to do in the evening, you cannot waste your days half-awake and sleep-walking among the day-courtiers." She settled upon the floor of the dining hall, and curled up under the strokes of his glamoured arms, and rested her head upon her forearms.

And then the Spirit was gone.

"Well," said Octavius, "that was certainly something."

Author's Notes:

And there's a promise redeemed. I promised Nightmare Moon in the first submission of the first chapter of this story, and here we are, twenty chapters in, and she's finally made her mad appearance, half Ophelia, half Maleficent.

A Natural Fool Of Fortune

SBMS021

Gibblets did not rise from his crouch on the floor, and the rest of the congregation looked down at him, not judging, not condemning, but not understanding either. I stood looking over him at the pikestaff, and the banner dangling from it, and the sigil whose meaning I now knew the provenance of, at least in some little part. The lance looked now like a simple length of dark wood, and its eldritch nature was no longer so close to its surface. You might almost think it a simple war-tool. The warlock's new apprentice had been inching closer to her new master as we all stood our poleaxed grounds, and the next time I glanced, she was standing right over him, and I could not see her expression, as she faced away from me and towards the goblin-clown weeping silently beside the markless spot upon which the Spirit had resolv'd into a dew.

I turned my head, and discovered my own apprentice standing beside me, in my blind spot, her soft coat dappled beige and tan against my black and grey stripes. She looked up from her observation of the witchy pair, her eyes wide and alert. What did she make of this? Off on an adventure, chasing the little devils who slayed her hated masters, and yet almost delivered into the hooves of a great and mad devil by the pony who claimed her apprenticeship in the very moment of that claiming. Did she see another "Bastarden" into whose hooves she had fallen?

"You like your name, my fawn? The one you came with? We would have had you claim your name, the one you arrived with, or one you had in your heart, if the ritual had… played out the way it ought have. Are you a Roggentochter? Will you thrive in the Company as her, or would you be somepony else?"

"Ich bin nicht ein Pony. Warum- Why you call, me pony?"

"I've told Gibblets here, again and again, all that speaks and makes itself known, is a pony. That is my Company." I looked across the gathered and paralyzed audience, none of whom had left, possibly interested to see what the resolution of this was, possibly looking for explanations, or simply because they had not been dismissed – their eyes were on me. "Whatever else the Company is for other people, or other things, these are what the Company is to us – those principles we bring to it, those ideas the Company makes real, those ideals we hold it to. ‘No fate but that we make', ‘No slaves in the Company, a brother is a freepony', and most importantly – ‘every brother is a pony, same as every other pony in the Company'. We are all ponies - pegasi, unicorns, earth ponies, zebra, donkeys, griffins, and yes, caribou and whatever the hell Gibblets is when he's home among family. Whatever the Company was in its birth-throes, it is this Company today. And we have a contract, and the duties that derive from the promises made in that contract! Ponies, find your places, patient ponies, go find your beds and get some bed-rest, the potions don't heal you if you're on your hooves all night long!"

Octavius hooved his new apprentice towards the mess hall door, and herded the little jenny out of the hall ahead of a cavalcade of brethren and some new masters with their tiny apprentices by their sides. Finally the four of us were alone in the mess hall, the three of us watching the one staring down the knotty surface of the rough flooring in front of him. At last the goblin-thing spoke:

Tarry, princess:
Have more than thou showest,
Speak less than thou knowest,
Lend less than thou owest,
Bide more than thou goest,
Learn more than thou trowest,
Set less than thou throwest;
Leave thy drink and thy whore,
And keep in-a-door,
And thou shalt have more
Than two tens to a score.

"Thou hadst too much of water in thee. O heavens! is't possible, a young mare's wits should be more mortal than an old goblin's life?"

He made a strange gesture, waving his paw in front of his rubbery face, and got up from his crouch, creaking audibly as he did, and turned to see us watching him.

"What dost thou profess? what wouldst thou with us?"

"What would you, if a brother known for many years, suddenly threw aside his self like a blanket and stood a stranger before a Company assembly?"

"May not an ass know when the cart draws the horse? I have been many things to many people, and I have been a stranger to most, and oft stranger than most. But I am yet still a warlock of the Company, that at least is true. E'en if truth's a dog that must to kennel be whipped…"

I frowned, feeling somehow mocked. If he was quoting at us, I did not recognize the text. But somehow something in me knew my line.

"Nuncle, you have left a daughter. Look to her welfare, and settle a name upon her, if nothing else."

"The inky zebra knows his lines, even those he never could have heard or read! Mark you, Bad Apple, how the magic of heartsong stretches over anything with meter and dreamlike sense. And it takes not an actual pony to sing it, but only a pony's heart. Marvels and visitations make our days and nights!"

He stretched himself to his negligible full height, and nodded. "And a pony in his time plays many parts. Enough of the princess's Fool, he buried his motley beside his heart ages ago. Can I defer this discussion until later, physician? As you say, I have an apprentice to get settled. And so do you," he continued, glancing aside at Roggentochter.

We left the mess hall empty and half-lit, the pikestaff abandoned in the front of the hall. I was not touching that thing that evening. My trust had been pulled as far as it would stretch without a tear. Work heals all worries. I led Roggentochter back to the infirmary, and explained that we'd start by doing laundry. Best to start them off easy. She rolled her eyes at me. Well, I supposed every apprenticeship started in scutwork, and there was only so much variance in washing things, and cleaning filth.

But the Night wasn't done with me like that. Because what we found awaiting us in the infirmary was a frantic Broken Sigil and the unconscious bulk of our griffin Captain laid out over two cots pushed together to hold his great weight. The room was filled with worried patients and more. The night's repercussions were not done with any of us yet.

Author's Notes:

So the goblin is prone to Barding when distressed. Who knew? Nopony, because Shakespeare is definitely not a thing in this stretch of the Chain of Creation, no, not even an earth pony named Shake Spear. Although Gibblets might remember such a pony, and such a cycle of plays. He's not Discord, after all, of that we can be sure.

Differential Diagnosis and Equuish Lessons

SBMS022

I ran my hooves over the Captain's head, checking for wounds or knots or signs of blunt trauma. Nothing. I reached out for the nearby lamp, and peeled his right eyelid open, from the bottom up. That had taken some getting used to, as did the nictating membrane, although since griffins shared those with pegasi, it didn't take me all that long while I was training with the Company. They were the core of the Company, after all. I waved the lamp back and forth, trying to identify any lack of focus or reaction to light. No point in checking for uneven pupils, griffins have independent eye control, they're uneven by design. Well, if you subscribe to the theory that griffins are designed; the evidence for that is clearer than for some other thinking creatures. Then I checked the old griffin's core temperature, and was disappointed again. As normal as griffins got.

"Well, I'm stumped. I don't see any reason why he's not biting my head off for taking advantage like this. He's not responding, or else I'd be ducking right now. " The old bird always did hate his checkups… "When did he keel over?"

"We were talking over the night's operations, and discussing a planned ambush the aerials and the Lieutenant were going to spring on a returning column of the rebel. One that should be kicking off right now, I need to get back to operations, they need me!" Broken Sigil was still agitated, but with my presence his focus had shifted from the Captain to that unicorn's usual duties. He was a unicorn of peculiar narrowness, and the whole experience was well outside of his comfort and his competence, and it showed, badly. His eyes twitched back and forth nervously, and if I hadn't known him relatively well, I would have started checking for poison or other such mischief. Perhaps I ought to anyways on general principles?

"When was this? How long ago?"

"Hah? Ah, an hour ago, just after twilight. Maybe ten minutes after it got really dark? I don't know! What's that part of the evening even called?" He started breathing erratically.

"No, nevermind. I understand. And I think I can pinpoint the timing if it's what just occurred to me. Was there anything off about his eyes, or his behavior before he went down?"

"No, no different than it has been for weeks now. He's had the Company eyes off and on since Rime, or maybe that damn port I can never remember the name of. More on than off recently. They suddenly cleared, though, just before he collapse, he was his usual brown-eyed self for like three seconds before they rolled down and he went over. Almost took the sand table with him, I can't imagine how long that would have taken to clean up and reset. Hours of work… oh, Tartarus, the work! "

"I'd worry more about your commanding officer laying insensate on two of my infirmary cots! The Lieutenant is in the field? Can she be contacted? We need her back here if the Captain doesn't regain his senses in the next couple hours. That might not be a problem, I have some idea of what it could be, but I need to talk to at least some of the warlocks. Who's on base tonight? Are they all out?"

"Otonashi's out with the Beloit column, they're on the way back, but they're also being used as the bait for the Lieutenant's ambush, don't expect her until morning at the earliest. Goiter and Languid are in the witch-coven's quarters, they're supposed to be working on refreshing gear enchantments and manufacturing. Shorthorn and the Crow are out with the Lieutenant, she didn't want to pull her punches after we got so lucky last night. It's always the day after a success that everypony gets sloppy and ponies get hurt. I have no idea where Gibblets is."

"I know where he is. Languid it is, I'll send for her. Please, go ahead and go back to operations. See if you can get word to the Lieutenant if it won't distract her in the middle of a fight. We had something spooky go down at an impromptu apprenticing ceremony in the mess hall, warlock-type spooky. Well, sort of, I think this was out of our crew's range of competency. I'll send word if the Captain regains consciousness, and doubly so if he's coherent when he comes to."

The spectacled sergeant clopped out of my infirmary, his head held high again. He was really quite simple once you recognized his priorities. It wasn't ponies, or the success of the Company, or curiosity, or anything else like that. His passion was for making a very specific species of plan, laying out all the necessary details to make those plans happen, and executing those details precisely and correctly. Anything outside of that narrow slice of the world was an irritation and a puzzlement to Broken Sigil.

I turned to my ‘prentice, and asked her what I had done. She was quick on the uptake, and rattled off what she had seen me do.

"That's good. But why did I do that?"

"Ich nicht verstehen. Den Kopf, sie untersuchte ih fur Schlage auf-"

"In Equuish, even if it's difficult or impossible. You start as you intend to continue, and we need to get you speaking the Company lingo. That's Equuish, even for ponies like you and Feufollet who came to us speaking something else for the most part."

"Okay. I do… not know. The… the haid ov der Greif, ah, the griffin, you look vor blows. You not find dem. You look th' Auge, the, the-"

"Eyes. I checked his eyes."

"You checked the eyes, vor – vat?"

"It's called reaction response. To see if the pupils – " I pointed to my own pupils, right and left, "contract or shrink when you shine light in them. I also looked to see if he was showing thestral eye, what the pony who just left called ‘Company eye'. Have you noticed that yet?"

"Company eye – you – talk of katse-eye? Das gluhen, the?"

"Glow."

"The glow in the dark?"

"Exactly. For many of our ponies, it's something that we do with enchantments, it allows them to see in the dark. Usually their helms are spelled, and as a side-effect, they look like thestral ponies. You've probably never seen a thestral, may have never heard of them. They're like regular pegasi, but their wings are more like a bat's than a bird's, they have long, tufted ears, and their eyes are dark-adapted, with slit pupils and they glow like cats-eyes."

She was muttering as I talked, and I could tell she was trying to remember all the new words I was throwing at her.

"The importance of this, is that the Captain here has been showing thestral eyes without the helm. Day to day. Without intending to do so. And he had been acting strangely, unlike himself. Increasingly hostile and bombastic, impulsive. We've been working around him, but it's been affecting the performance of the Company, we've been taking more and more chances, acting more and more aggressively as a matter of policy. And this pony here – " I waved a hoof at the unconscious griffin beside us – "has been responsible for that aggressiveness."
I had been speaking faster and faster as I approached my point, and the little fawn was looking a bit wall-eyed at the torrent of half-understood Equuish I was pouring over her head.

"OK, simpler. Hrm. This griffin, he's our boss. Head of the Company, current one, anyways. He's been acting odd. Showing glowing thestral eyes without aid. Sound like somepony we just met an hour ago, the big black madmare you could look through?"

Roggentochter's eyes widened in realization, and no little alarm. "Die geist-mare! She eindringliche der Kapitan!"

"She may, indeed, have been possessing him. What worries me is that I kind of think that she's been possessing all of us, to a slight extent, for a very, very long time."

Roggentochter looked perplexed, and I didn't have the heart to clarify that to her. I set one of the still-awake convalescents to stand a sort of watch over the still-unconscious Captain, and I hurried off to find Languid with my apprentice in tow.

Author's Notes:

A little bit of monkeying around with Sawbones' new shadow. And working out what was up with the Captain.

The Past And The Dead

SBMS023

Languid was as useless as she's ever been. She brought an unwieldy dressing-divider screen, and hid herself and the Captain in a corner, doing her voudoun hidden from filthy pony eyes. Or putzing around like always, you could never tell with that mare. She claimed there was nothing magical wrong or influenced, just the natural griffin, insensate. Useless, useless. I should have sent for Gibblets, he was an obnoxious little troll, but he knew more magic than… I couldn't call for Gibblets.

So we waited. Operations sent notice that the Lieutenant had been signaled, and that as soon as I was free, they needed me out In the field. I discussed the matter with the courier, and we made arrangements to send out some of the oxen with an escort and two of the ambulances to a staging and fallback point; she had a hoof-drawn map of the roadnet between our compound and the expected ambush zone. I hoofed the point at which we probably wanted Sack and Tiny and the others with the ambulances and… I recommended sending out multiple sections, enough to make a difference if they were being pressed when the Lieutenant's vexellation made the rendezvous. Then I cuffed the courier and reminded her to not take the blasted map with her out of the base. Last thing we needed was to let *that* fall into the hands of the rebel.

And waited. No news, no new patients, and my convelescents had fallen asleep, even the ones who drifted off over their cards. Roggentochter and I dragged those gamblers back to their respective cots. She was dragging pretty badly herself by that point, and I tucked her into a cot in the far corner, and she dropped like a pebble into a dry well.

Near dawn, the Captain's eyes opened. Brown, avian, as they ought to be. He rumbled, making no particular sense, mostly clearing his throat. And again, and again. He continued to not make much more than noise for a while. I gave him some small beer cut heavily with water from the cask, and let him rest, and did some work on the Annals, which I had left under a cot the day before.

I was still working on my "voice" for my first volume, trying to work out what I wanted to sound like to my successors, what I wanted my Company to sound like. In truth, we speak with many voices, but in the Annals, by necessity, all voices are spoken with one throat, one voice. The best we can do is a sort of mimicry. The Company of old, that lives on in the story the old Annalists spun… Desecrated Temple's single volume is a strange and terrible record, from a strange and terrible moment in the Company's history.

The third known Annalist, during whose tenure the Company was driven from the Dar-al-Hisan, and reduced to not much more than a bandit band with delusions of grandeur, by his own account. The many horses who had joined the Company in their glory days under Fatinah and her Captains, and proud al-Hazar and her adored Faris al-Dhubabi – they had all fallen away or been slaughtered in the chaos and betrayal of that great Captain's fall from grace. The thestral core had escaped with their sole surviving unicorn, and Desecrated Temple took the Annals and his ponies through a minor portal out of that world of fanatics and fighting faiths, sacking small shrines as they fled.

There was no Captain in Desecrated Temple's account, no officers, no Company but for himself and a remnant of savage bat-winged thieves. Was this the Company, at its hard-pressed core? It was smaller under Desecrated Temple than it had been when they came out of the desert wilderness defeat with their war-lance and no books. But this version of the Company, it had the Annals, and it had an Annalist. And what little wisdom Desecrated Temple had to offer beyond tips on the efficient looting of holy places and useful advice on the evasion of pursuit, was this: ‘the past is never dead; it isn't even past'.

His account, when it isn't about burning altars and evading cavalcades of enraged temple guards, is heavily larded with dreamlike verse about, well, it wasn't exactly clear. Dark memories and allusions of the Company's past. Fatinah wrote little of the Company before the disaster in the desert wilderness, but Temple, who hadn't even been born when the Annals had been lost, wrote bad poetry about the lost Company. And sitting there in the morning light, a direct beam shining down the long corridor from the open gates through the infirmary's open door, looking after a ward full of sleeping patients, reading Temple's book, I saw what I had never seen before. The Spirit who curled in the heart of the Company. Temple had met her, known her, may have loved her, insofar as he had loved anything more than arson and blasphemy.

How had he met her? Was it because he was, effectively, Annalist and Captain both? Had it left him somehow vulnerable to her influence?
Was it his blasphemous, betrayed madness, did it somehow resonate with her obvious lunacy?

My musing over the ancient books of the Annals was interrupted and put to a close by the arrival of the ambulances, their bulk cutting off the morning light I had been basking in, down that long corridor. The courier pulled me out into the mustering-yard and the full sun-light. It was a chaos of battered, grinning ground-pounders, many of them still covered in the dried mementos of the rebel discomfit they so clearly were glorying in. But those were the intact brethren, and the ones in the ambulances were my concern. They were full of broken ponies, and the oxen and I organized litter parties to carry the most broken but salvageable inside, while I evaluated the worst cases there in the mud and blood of the yard. I sent the courier back into the infirmary with the first wave of surgery candidates for my supply of mercy potions, for those conscious enough to be aware of their hopelessness. The rest were already past my intervention, one way or the other.

I should have been out there with the ambulances. This was on me. I mean, the Captain's well being was of higher priority than the wounded from one fight, however… extensive. But I had had a good idea what was wrong with the Captain, and I should have left him to the warlocks, and minded my own lane. Three trauma cases whose bloodloss would carry them away, no matter what I could do for them now…
I rushed inside to get to work in the surgery. The awakened convalescents were shuffling out, and I grabbed a couple of the most effective to play nurse and orderly. I told Roggentochter to watch and help with the rags and bandages, and got to work.

It was a long day. I spent hours washing out and cleaning pike wounds, some of them terrible. None of the ponies who made it to the infirmary died on my table, but two donkeys and an earth pony lost limbs to my bone-saws, and over a dozen earth ponies, donkeys and pegasi would be joining the convalescent corps for weeks as their deep wounds and blood loss took them out of the active lists.

Roggentochter was a trooper, only vomited in a corner once, and was good about cleaning it up afterwards. I didn't blame her – a pony with half her face sheared off isn't anything you should be easy with, not that young. Feather Fall would live, but she'd never be pretty again. Well, some ponies like their mares in masks, and our smiths were good with that sort of thing. Ahem.

This I had from Long Haul, who had the time to describe the Lieutenant's victorious disaster:

The deep recon scouts had identified a collection of rebel units which were rushing back from the posts on the frontier to the inner districts, the civilian White Rose had gotten word to their regiments somehow, we didn't know at the time exactly how, although some sort of witchy rune communication scheme was suspected. The response was scattered, and disorganized, but there were two big concentrations advancing down the roads crossing the byway that Otonashi's Benoit column was supposed to be using to return to the main base that evening. The Captain, the Lieutenant and Broken Sigil had worked out an overly-clever ambush plan, to have the Benoit column to cross the rebel "T" and draw them into a prepared kill zone that the Lieutenant and Tickle Me's vexellations would use to them smash up. Indirection, distraction and ambush – the Company's preferred mode of operation.

It hadn't gone to (excessively complicated) plan. Every pony has a plan until you buck them in the face. The Benoit column had been too slow, too burdened with their haul of stolen vehicles, grain, and cheeses. They were still in the kill zone when the enemy forces overtook the rear guard. The carters cut their traces and left the vehicles, but the damage was done. The rear guard got mauled, and far too many Company ponies went down under a rush of pike. It would have been a catastrophe if not for one of my oxen, who instead of following the rest of the carters in running for their lives, turned about and counter-charged into the face of a fence of pikes.

One of Sack's and Tiny's aged uncles, had apparently made the calculation, or just was tired of running. He hit that line like a boulder of beef, and broke off a half-dozen pikeheads in his thick hide. I'm told he made a hash of their nice neat formation, broke their momentum. He died, of course, and I looked over the body when I had time, before they buried him. I counted no less than sixty-seven wounds, and fished twenty-five pike-heads out of him. As far as I can tell, he died of shock and blood loss, they never actually got a blade into anything vital. Lourd, an ox of considerable age and experience, decided on the road to Benoit that he was tired of running away from trouble, and trouble found him instead.

Lourd's stand gave Otonashi's rear guard time to disengage, and Otonashi herself set some surprises to slow and disorient the caribou who managed to get around the enraged ox and had tried to re-form a line to continue the pursuit. This was the point at which the Lieutenant and Tickle Me had closed their trap on the enemy.

The Benoit rear guard had been engaged *inside* the kill zone, and had left the ambush elements out of position and wrong-hoofed. They had had to maneuver to find the rear of the enemy, and had nearly blundered into the enemy twice before they were ready. Once they had dressed their lines, though, it was basically over. They pulled off the same trick I had performed in Pythia's Fell, except instead of benefiting from the confined quarters of a (by battlefield standards) narrow high-street, they had to envelope the disintegrating rebel phalanxes. It must have helped that the enemy wasn't an organized force, but rather an opportunistic collection of different units' forward elements with no united command or control. It wasn't as pretty as Pythia's Fell, but the presence of the aerial cohort, committed en masse, meant that the enemy lost as many ponies in the rout as in the battle itself. There were survivors, perhaps as many as there were dead on and around the field, but they were scattered, and from the sound of things, I wouldn't be surprised if the majority of them never rejoined their units. This sort of thing is how good ponies become deserters. As well as bad ones.

We recovered our dead:
The following, dead of pike wounds to their front: Maille Fine, jenny; Deuxieme Etage, jack; High Kick, corporal, earth pony stallion; Escaliers Retour, jack; Seventh Yard, zebra stallion; Dream Valley, earth pony mare. All of them in the rear guard, facing a charging caribou pike line. None showed wounds in the rear or flank. Two Clouds, pegasus mare, of blood loss from a partially severed wing taken in pursuit of an escaping caribou officer, who was run down by her wingmares who made sure he would not escape to brag of his feat. Lourd, ox, of massive blood loss on the field, as described above. Grable, dragon wyrming, of wounds taken in the thick of the fighting during the breaking of the phalanx; the killing wound was probably one of three to his femoral arteries on either side; he had trusted in his tough hide one battle too many. Driftwood, earth pony stallion, of heavy wounds to his barrel and crop, taken in the breaking of the phalanx. Alaborn, jack, of wounds to his throat and groin, taken in the breaking of the phalanx. Catsfoot, earth pony mare, of massive wounds to her muzzle and forehead, again in the breaking of the phalanx.

I polished off the whiskey in my interrogation kit that night, and slept the sleep of the stinking drunk well into the next morning.

Our Thing

SBMS024

Two days later, I was still nursing a monster hangover, which really, was more than I deserved. Going on a bender after a bad day in surgery wasn't worthy of a physician of the Company. The old unicorn I'd replaced would have been disappointed in me. She had been dying of a cancer when the brethren had foalnapped me from my master, her body in rebellion against itself, squamous masses and carbuncles growing uncontrolled across her barrel and flank. Nothing she or I knew how to combat, but at least my library of palliatives made Silver Glow's last days painless and lucid. I had nearly a month under her rather light-hearted tutelage, the laudanum in the potions leaving her euphoric and playful. But then, we hadn't had any serious battles in her month of dying, she was the only addition to the Annals in my first six months of service. Twelve in a night…

I should not have let it take me that way. Other eras have seen the Company weather truly terrible battle-lists; Bitter Ambrosia's volumes aren't actually half lists of the dead, but it certainly reads that way at times. The Company was much larger in those days, as it grew to absorb the remnants of the other units they had been brigaded with, volunteer and other mercenary outfits, and then the remnant of the division in which that bled-dry brigade had itself been brigaded. By the end of that terrible war, the Company had taken up the remnant slivers of half an army, two entire corps, whose parent battalions, regiments, brigades, divisions, had washed out of service on a tide of blood and sickness, disablement and desertion. The other mercenary companies, mayfly bands held together by the charisma of one pony or another, fell apart first, then the trained militias, then the volunteer legions, then the drafted battalions that replaced them – those came apart the quickest. No unit's morale could withstand conditions in which the regiments fed into the woodchipper reeled back after a half-hour's battle with half their number dead or dying on the field. None but the Company.

Ambrosia's Company survived by the simple expedient of being useful elsewhere other than in the assault, and never allowing the whole Company to be fed into the woodchipper by any given glory-mad general. But many a day saw one of the Company's battalions in skirmish formation lead a battle-line into the killing zone of one of that era's dread great warlocks. The honor of the day allowed skirmishers to scatter and avoid total annihilation by the blooming death-globes the witch-ponies of Mauga specialized in, those soul-pumped vacuums that obliterated everything they touched, ground, soil, air, trees, weapons and ponies. Even scattered in thin skirmish-lines, the Company would still lose dozens on a good day. Especially if their allied witch-ponies managed to blow similar grey-dusted holes in the defending enemy lines, through which the skirmishers would pour, and stab their lances through the corrupted heart of the exhausted, overwhelmed enemy warlock.
Page after page of nothing but names and simple details, the same details, paragraphs of names with the cause of death the header. Can you wonder why he was called Bitter? A dozen dead, and twice that wounded enough to be taken out of commission, and we celebrate a grand victory. I worried that we were in a place where Ambrosia would recognize us, that we were marching his road.

With so many wounded, the odds were against me, and sure enough, I found two of my patients with spiking fevers. I opened up an earth pony and a pegasus the day after that, not wanting to operate hung over. I cleaned out their wounds again, rinsing the infected region heavily with alcohol and debriding the dead and swollen tissues around the wounds, while Roggentochter hoofed me my tools and the alcohol. Thankfully, the raiding columns had found entire distilleries in more than one of the granaries, and the carts full of loot were many of them piled heavy with casks of barely-aged rotgut. I preferred my distilled alcohol as white as possible, too much weirdness soaked in with aging. Sanitizing with whiskey and brandy was a mook's game. I settled back after re-stitching the last pony's wounds, satisfied that I probably would not have to amputate; it would have been far too much of the limb, even with prosthetics, the earth pony would never have fought again.

The Lieutenant looked up as I wiped my table down, and directed my ‘prentice to run my tools through the boil-bath. We had knocked a vent into the roof of the surgery, and set up a hearth in the corner to do small-batch laundry and boil water for cleaning surgical tools. She had arrived partway through my work with the feverish earth pony. The Captain had awakened, but he was rarely lucid, and command had devolved upon the Lieutenant until the Captain was capable of following an entire conversation without drifting off in a fog.

"We need to talk about what happened the other night in the mess hall. I've gotten very little from the other participants, but I think I've pieced together that something, some haunt or another, interrupted the ceremony? You and your little pets you've half-inducted into our thing? About the same time that the Captain decides to lose his damn mind?"

"Something like that. You talked to Gibblets? It was more his bailiwick than mine. I'm just the Company barber and note-taker. Spooks and witchery is his department."

She looked disgusted by my aw-shucks routine. "Oh, right, you're the alicorns' gift to military and magical theory and practice when it suits your purpose and ego, but once it's something you might have actual experience or information on the situation, you're all 'nobody but us crickets in this here field, padron!' Gibblets pretty much said the same damn thing, except he directed me at you!"

"He say that in plain Equuish, or did he quote obscure poetry at you?"

"As plain as his Equuish ever gets, the little green smartass. No different than usual. Why?"

"It's his story to tell, and he hasn't told it to me, not yet. Promised to spill at some point, but I'm in no hurry to talk to the little three-faced frog-prince. Whatever our spectral visitor actually was, it claimed to be our tutelary spirit, the blood-thirsty thing that lives in the war-lance and makes the Company The Company. And then it had its own little magic aneurysm and things got really weird. Greeted Gibblets like he was her long-lost pet uncle, and they both talked iambic pentameter at each other. After it went away, he kept talking like a play, and was still doing it last time I laid eyes on his slippery hide."

She blinked her exasperated disbelief at me like she was trying to communicate her disgust in semaphore, and then asked, "Has that happened before? Magic shows and ghosts appearing at induction ceremonies? I can't recall anything like that at mine, but you know I don't go in for the pageantry."

I certainly did know. The Lieutenant didn't really believe in the Company as the Black Company, the mystical brotherhood of war that carries a magic lance and its memory in a bottomless chest full of the names of dead ponies. From things she's said, I think she conceives of us as a sort of mafia, an outgrowth of anti-unicorn peasant conspiracies or subrosa militias, like the field-gangs of the restive boondocks of her youth. It doesn't help that she tends to call the Company "our thing".

"If it has happened before, I haven't noticed it in my time with the Company or with the Annals. I'll have to read through the books and see if there isn't something I missed. But there's a whomping great lot of Annals to read through, if I'm going to read the actual text and not the summaries and abridgments. Nearly five hundred years' worth of steady chronicling can amount to tens of millions of words, Lieutenant. We rely mostly on summaries and our predecessors' notes, and those specific volumes which we've been taught to use specifically. Have I read Fatinah's middle volumes, or those books of the Annalists whose Company sat on its fat behind in garrison for decades at a time with nothing but age and soft living to record in the death-lists? No, not really."

She eyed me, now puzzled. "OK, I've never been able to read Gibblets and his bizarre face, but you, you mamalucca, you've always been an open book. You're pissed at him, and I'd swear you're pissed at your books, whatever il' nfernu that means. I don' care what merda is between you two, you picciriddi talk it out."

I hoofed my eyes at this display in front of Roggentochter. "Lieutenant, I'm trying to make a good example for my very-not-fluent-in-Equuish apprentice here. Please don't fill her ears with your Sicari gutter-talk."

She blushed right through her purple coat, and made herself scarce. Right, time to beard the goblin in his hole.

Author's Notes:

I think I may have a dialect-humor addiction.

The Amphibian In His Element

SBMS025

I found Gibblets and his mini-me out by the drainage pond, looking over our overstrained sanitation system, such as it was. This was a bad place for drainage, there's a reason the local ponies hadn't put a town here. Best we could do was this bollocks, set up leech fields and drainage ponds and hope nopony notices the stench. Even then, a warlock had to work overtime to screen the works from view, and more importantly, the sensitive noses of our neighbors. I thought some of them might have been twigging to the fact that their temporary gypsy neighbors are something different from the regular run of bums and petty thieves. We would have probably had to start recruiting and terrorizing, because obscurity was quickly reaching its full capacity. I was sort of surprised the half-dozen foals that followed Gibblets home had been the full extent of our curious foals problem. Maybe we could use the apprentices to lull the neighbors' kids, spread rumors counteracting the natural conclusions they're sure to have been drawing at that point?

"You done with the mystery quotes and versifying?"

He looked up and smirked, clearly in a happier mood than the last time we talked.

Donkeys and horsefolk, be not bold
For Griffon thy master by haunts was sold!

"Damnit, Gibblets…"

He giggled, vilely. "No, no, one more…"

What shall I say more than I have inferr'd?
Remember whom we are to hope withal;
A sort of vagabonds, rascals, and runaways,
A scum of irregulars, and base lackey peasants!

"You finished?"

He composed himself, and sniggered, "Yeah, that's it. Had to get it out of my system. Elsewise I could go for hours."

"The Lieutenant wanted us to kiss and make up. She wants answers. She was swearing in that peasant creole of hers, right in front of my apprentice." I waved a hoof at Roggentochter, who had scurried off with Bad Apple to go do foal things in the woody verge around the stinking pond. I yelled at her, "Don't fall in! You won't enjoy the cold bath afterwards!"

"She won't like answers. You won't like answers. Tartarus, I don't want to think about answers. I've been with the Company too long this time, let down my guard. That thing got inside my head this time. I spent so much effort keeping my distance, kept my independence, stayed neutral… have you ever heard the story of the alicorn Azrael, and the war in Rakuen?"

"Vaguely. Rakuen is some sort of alicorn homeland, isn't it? There was some sort of big fight in pony heaven, treason and war and the usual religious nonsense."

"When the Peacock Angel rebelled against her father and master, great Mazda, the alicorns fell into camps, for the proud Peacock and the All-Father. Some few like Azrael refused to choose sides, and fled the fighting. Lots of fighting, lots of dying, and in the end, the Peacock Angel was defeated, her ponies scattered, and she was cast into a terrible prison. But the All-Father changed his fickle mind, and let his chastened daughter out of her prison, and restored her to her estate, as his face to the outer worlds, his vizier and right-hoof mare. And her surviving loyalists were brought into the fold, and all was once more at peace within paradise, if much depopulated and war-ravaged. But Azrael and her fellow conscientious objectors? They are even to this day outcast, and the stories say they wander the Chain of Creation, bemoaning their moral cowardice, and leaving stories of secret alicorns meddling in the affairs of ponies wherever they go."

"You claiming to be an alicorn? I don't see any wings on you, Tartarus, I don't even see hooves, unless you're hiding something really odd in those brogans you wear everywhere."

"No, you damn fool zebra. I'm saying that we live in an existence of harmonic resonance, and that fate and destiny are nothing more than the patterns into which thinking beasts are inevitably drawn by their natures and the worlds as they are. And nopony likes someone who won't pick a side when it comes to drawn steel and blood drawn."

"A mercenary company is a peculiar place to find a conscientious objector."

"It was a long, long time ago. I think I told you once that the Company is easily as old again as its surviving Annals," he paused, seeing by my frown that was incorrect. "Well, maybe that was a previous Annalist. But it is, and before it was the Company, it was something else. The Nightmare told you true, that part at least. One of her rebel thestral regiments, although I wasn't there for that, and before that, one of my mistress's loyal Lunar Guard battalions. They must have fell when she did, and I am not sure how or why they left Equestria after the Longest Night."

"The spirit mentioned Equestria. I thought it was a fairy-tale, more fantastic than Rakuen. A fantasy about a fairy-land ruled over by an immortal alicorn queen who ruled the heavens above as the earth below, a second paradise of impossibly happy ponies. Emphasis on 'impossible'." I stomped about in irritation and disgust to be talking of foals' tales.

"I've not been there in recent centuries, and I can't be sure how much of the propaganda is true - I've been with you and the Company for the last hundred years, and heard the same stories you've no doubt grown up on - but it was real once upon a time, and was briefly a paradise in my youth. The confused young mare you met, after meeting her… other self. That was my Princess, my mistress. I…" He choked up, and I was concerned he was about to run off again, and we'd have to have this same damn conversation, again and again, like a tedious limbo or purgatory, tearing the truth out of him, even if I had to chain him to a rock and rip it out of his liver like a hungry griffin.

My fierce frown pinned him to that muddy bank, and he started again.

"There once was an alicorn princess, two of them. The elder ruled in truth, and the younger was pretended to be an equal, and in fact was made the hauler of garbage and the destroyer of monsters for her queen of an elder sister. This wore on the younger, and her immature mind - for alicorns age at a different rate than lesser ponies, and their adolescence can last centuries - buckled under the strain and loneliness. I'm still not sure if it was simply her madness taken personality, or if she was actually possessed by some dream-monster, and I was not there to see the process. My ambition led me to try to make something of my soggy self, and I was in the process of failing to distinguish myself in the elder sister's magical academy at the time. My Luna, she fell, and rebelled, and became that… thing we saw slavering over foals' blood in the mess hall."

"She was such a sweet girl, proud, strong, far, far too proud - but she did love foals. Every mare kills the thing she loves…" His eyes got that quoting look to him, and I clopped my hooves together to break the trance.

"Right! After her sister defeated her rebellion, and used a terrible magic to banish the Nightmare to an eldritch prison, I left in disgrace. Started wandering down the Chain of Creation, because Equestria is at the head of the Chain, it is easy to travel from Equestria to other worlds, but hard to travel from other worlds to Equestria. There's this mystical head-wind… Anyways! I kicked around, and fell into a world of slow-time, where every hour was a week, and every week a year, and lost a couple centuries. I was wandering through that horsey land of fanatics and god-botherers when I came across the Black Company for the first time. I didn't recognize it, because that grim young hellion Fatinah had replaced the banner with her morbid hanging-ponies flag. I signed on as a warlock, they thought I was some species of djinn."

"Ah! al-Dafdae! That was you? But Fatinah records you leaving in a huff-"

"Yeah, the moment they pulled the old banner out of her memory to celebrate her great victory over the Eighters. I realized at that moment the band of ponies I was in traces with weren't just a random mercenary outfit with a strong ethos and more thestrals than you generally see out here on the world-chain, but was actually a traitor legion. I left for a long time, but in later centuries I crossed the Company's path time and again, and each time I signed on under a different name. It felt… like home. Like she was nearby. Until I got a wild hair, or somepony did something monstrous in the ranks, and then I had to go again."

"Why did she use your current Company name, if you've been using a nom de guerre? And what kind of court jester is called 'Gibblets', anyways - that's what she meant by pierrot, right?"

"Yeah, that's what I was. And Princess Luna could be a strange filly, morbid and amused by ugly things. It's why I was her fool, after all - my face was a comfort to her, in all the over-decorated splendor of her elegant sister's court. No, this last time, I didn't have the heart to think up a new name. Everypony who possibly might have remembered it was dead for over eight centuries, or Celestia on her gaudy throne in far-away Canterlot, worlds away. Nopony would have remembered the old moon-princess's hideous jester; from what I hear, nopony even remembers therewas a moon princess, all the stories out of Equestria talk of the princess of day and night, the alicorn of the moon and the sun. She's extinguished her sister from the memories of the living." The goblin looked saturine and wrathful upon this last declaration, a whiff of rebellion and fury in the air along with the stench of waste-water and associated filth from the drainage pond before us.

I had something I had to say. "I, I haven't been fully forthcoming about the oracle in Pythia's Fell. I thought it was all a charlatan's act, or at least, most of it was. You know how easily they can cold-read you, pick your tells for clues and feed you back your fears and hopes. But she said things that made no sense to me, and match up with what you say," I said, and proceeded to quote the Pythian oracle's prophesy, or at least, long sections of it. I may have perfect recall, but that doesn't mean it is easy to just stand there and vomit forth stanza after stanza of once-heard gibberish.

His eyes closed, he started waving his monkey paws towards the drainage pond and the leaching field beyond it. Bad Apple, off to the left doing something half-hidden among some scraggly alder buckthorn, reared up in surprise as the wave of magic caught her by surprise, and she stumbled back into Roggentochter, who was knocked into view by the collision. The smell suddenly was gone, and Gibblets' work, which he had been using our conversation to avoid doing, was done in an instant.

"That is definitely not good news. Yes, the mechanics of Equestria's corner of the Chain are more or less as described, and some of the characteristics of the way that Celestia runs her little sandlot may be tying into the greater aspects of the Chain of Creation. I certainly never noticed any such reservoir of magical potential in the pikestaff, but it is something unique to the Company, and the warlocks Luna employed in the Guard were subtle, powerful, clever and far too comfortable with a class of dark magic which could be hidden in ways you wouldn't be able to spot just by looking for it. If we're actually a necromantic infernal device over nine hundred years in the winding-"

"The power could break worlds," I finished for him.

Driven From Pillar To Post

SBMS026

Operations settled into a cautious routine over the next week. With the Captain out of commission, the Lieutenant was handling the affairs of the Company, and she wasn't as steady a hoof on the reins as the old bird had been, even if the places he had been guiding us into had been getting more and more hair-raising. We settled into a pattern of reaction as the enemy stumbled blindly back into the central districts. By this point they had lost a significant number of ponies, not enough to seriously affect their operational capacity, but enough to hurt. No army can suffer the sort of losses we'd inflicted without anything to show for it, and not take a hit to their unit cohesion and morale. They did the obvious, and started re-building their granaries, and sent out detachments to tear down our “scarecrows”.

This had been expected; it was, in point of fact, a secondary purpose for their deployment in the first place. Yes, the primary reason for setting out gorey, grotesque fetishes throughout the province was to terrorize and alarm the population, and also to make a claim over the territory. But it was also a challenge to the rebel, to the rebel's authority over its own territory and claim of sovereignty within the province. This was a vital aspect of our war on the rebel's legitimacy. By destroying their excise posts, we denied their authority to levy taxation and control trade. By posting the province with the dismembered remains of their butchered soldiers, we advertised their inability to assert the monopoly of violence in their claimed domain.

Of course they had to tear down the scarecrows.

They still hadn't learned to watch for pegasi and griffin observation posts. Tickle Me had left multiple OPs over the marked crossroads and their approaches, and those observation ponies were supplied with replacement fetishes - built from the spoils of the battle on the road to Benoit - to be emplaced as soon as the first sets were ripped down by the offended caribou. No need to rush over the first hurdles, at this point it was an endurance race, not a sprint.

When the second round of detachments came around to tear down the scarecrows, the OPs had been reinforced by pegasi eager to demonstrate the tactical utility of their scarecrow-emplanting stunts. The caribou who approached the crossroads scarecrows to tear them down again, didn't even hear the dive-bombing maniacs plummeting to those caribou's dooms. At most of the crossroads-skirmishes, they didn't actually hit their targets with those heavy flying stakes, but the ones that they did – those caribou splashed like burst melons struck with ballistae bolts. A pegasus hurtling from tens of thousands of feet above carrying their weight again in sharpened, fired-hardened wooden stake makes for one Tartarus of a discarding sabot. As I've written elsewhere, the tactic is usually employed against heavy fortifications and close-packed formations, not individual caribou. It's quite literally like using a forge-hammer to flatten a fly.

The fact that the first scarecrow-dismantling detachments had been unmolested left the second wave of detachments under-ponied and sloppy. They weren't prepared to be attacked, and it told in the fighting. None of the rebel detachments were wiped out, but all of them were routed, and by and large they did very little to harm or even threaten their attackers. Pegasi aren't the heavy-hitters you'll find among the ground troops, and their combat skills outside their milieu can be somewhat limited due to their hollow-boned insubstantiality, but they're experts without peer when it comes to harrying a routed foe from the field. Death by a thousand cuts, creating and maintaining panic – their targets have been known to just drop dead from shock and terror after being chased for miles by wing-bladed speeding death from above.

But the crossroad-skirmishes gave away one of our advantages, decisively. The enemy had gotten a good look at us for the first time. Or, I should write, some of them that survived saw us straight for the first time. We weren't shadows and boogeymares in the darkness any more to those that ran and told the tale, we were flesh and blood and feather and steel. They had fought us in daylight, and lost, but daylight strips the Company of some of its mystique. I was remorseful when I took the accounts of the fighting from the pegasi I interviewed. We lost no ponies in the crossroad-fights, and I barely had any work to speak of – a few stitched cuts, one mare who pulled a wing-muscle while missing her target with her stake-spindle.

As we fought with the White Rose over our scarecrows, the good ponies of the province poured into the fields and threshing-yards. The harvest was in full swing, and scythes and sickles reaped the rewards of a long, troubled summer. The weather had been perfect, and the fields were heavy with grain. I'm not a farm-pony, being a zebra who grew up with cobblestones under my hooves throughout my childhood, so you'll have to go elsewhere for long paeans to the farmers and their harvesting practices and so forth. All I know is that they were out there, sunrise to sunset, and long after sunset in the threshing-yards and barns, and those barns began to bulge with their grain.

Because we had thoroughly disrupted the normal delivery patterns. In a normal year, they would have had carts running from all the major farms to their respective community's mills. There would have been a conveyer belt of sorts, of carts running threshed grain from the barns to the mills, and flour from the mills and hay from the barns to the granaries. Well, we had burned the granaries, and terrorized at least some of the mills out of operation, and we stole the carts. Not all of the carts, but enough to create shortages, and to expose the ones still in operation by their rarity on the roads. This opened up a new angle of attack.

A few mills were still operating, some of them manned by rebel soldiers ineptly grinding their own meal, some of them put back into operation by the mourning relatives of those millers we had hung from their own hoists. They were too heavily posted by protective details to be worth the ponypower investment, but it did mean that the routes leading up to those isolated operational mills were predictable, and vulnerable.

The Lieutenant sent out detachments to forward posts in the darkness, so that they were in position to ambush the loaded carts before they ever got close to their mills. The carters were beaten, and their carts burnt with their cargoes. If the enemy platoons defending the mills sallied forth to investigate the pillars of smoke, they were ambushed by waiting Company brethren in defilade. So much easier on the troops than assaulting the caribou in their fortified positions!

We conducted a dozen of these actions during the later course of the harvest, and ran the rebel ragged. In two of these otherwise-not-notable engagements, we lost ponies. A jack named Small Numbers caught an unlucky cut across his left femoral artery in a tussle with an armed carter on the road to the mill outside Marinette a week before the end of the harvest in that district. In a blown ambush outside Brazeau, a unicorn corporal - a mare named Greensward - and a jack who went by the Company name Hookbill were caught out of cover and cut down by a caribou reaction force that grossly outnumbered their brothers on the field. A team of griffins with pegasi-unicorn charioteer supports were able to recover the bodies in a dare-devil strike against the mill in Brazeau which the enemy had taken their bodies to be displayed. One of those griffins, Guelph Josef, died of wounds taken in that night-time assault. The mill burned.

Fewer and fewer civilian cart-ponies were willing to haul grain in these conditions, and the mills ground to an unproductive halt, their supplies dried up, and without grist. Eventually, the caribou started hauling their own carts, and got some small amount of grain out of nearby farms, marching their carts in heavily defended convoy to the mills. I'm told that the Lieutenant and Broken Sigil, in a rare sally into the field for that latter unicorn, eyed the convoys from concealed observation posts, and decided to not give the enemy the fight they were spoiling for.

Instead, they set up the grandest ambush of the campaign on the road from the largest operational mill to the new, heavily defended granary in construction next to the main rebel base, outside Lau Crosse. The caribou had posted the whole of the route with guards, but not so heavily that they were actually in line of sight of each other. They should have been more paranoid. It was too easy to overwhelm the posted guards in isolation, and roll them up one pair at a time. You could barely tell that the caribou standing their posts were literally posted once Otonashi was done with her glamours. The flour-convoy later that day rolled past several pairs of stiffly saluting guards, and as far as we could tell, none twigged to the deceased status of their road-guards.

So they were not in the least prepared when just after the platoons of the vanguard had passed over it, a stretch of roadbed disappeared below the leading cart-caribou, plunging her, her harness-partner, and their overloaded cart into a pitfall dug quickly by earth ponies and maintained against collapse by sheer witchcraft , the type of main-force magic that overstrains our sort of warlock. It was the work of Shorthorn, and it blew his strength for the event. We were lucky he didn't end up in the infirmary like Octavius, but he held that shell of earth under the hooves of dozens of marching enemy soldiers until they had passed and he could let it collapse under the carters.

The disappearance of one of their carts caused the entire convoy to pile up behind the blockage. Some of the soldier-carters at the new head of the convoy tried to drive off the roadbed and run around the pitfall, only to discover that it extended in a wide semi-circle around the road on both sides, and two of them lost their carts to the trap. It was now chaos, and some of the carters started cutting their own traces, looking to free themselves for the inevitable fight.

This was the point when Tickle Me's contribution to the ambush fell out of the clouds at terminal velocity, their fuses flaring behind them. More heavy stake-spindles, with casks mounted upon their blunted heads. The casks impacted dully atop their targeted cart-loads, the heavy stakes continuing to drive onwards as the casks themselves suddenly stopped, and the resulting overpressure burst the casks and their loads of distilled alcohol all over the flour-sacks and nearby roadbed. The arrested momentum was distributed at last to the fuses attached to the rear of the spindles, and their flaming shards fell upon the alcohol-soaked sacks, setting the whole ablaze. Their pony delivery systems arced out across the stubbled fields surrounding the now-deranged convoy, some buried, some burning, all in disorder.

This was when the unicorn bow-ponies started flinging arrows at the convoy from glamoured cover. They could take their time, and they had plenty of spare bolts, and they swept the convoy from stem to stern and back again before they provoked the caribou vanguard and rear-guard into charging through the open fields on both sides of the ambush, trying to flush out the hidden snipers, and catching their own share of Tartarus in the process. The caribou shook out into loose formation to cover the most ground, they must have concluded we were waging a hit-and-run attack, since all they had seen were stand-off strikes. So they were utterly out of position when the warlocks dropped the glamours on the right side of the road and revealed a Company phalanx on the open flanks of the vanguard. Donkey, earth pony, and zebra lancers tore through the scattered open ranks of the caribou vanguard, and obliterated them. There were no survivors.

Our phalanx opened up after trampling the remnants of their vanguard, and turned to sweep the carter-caribou and the rearguard from the field. They fell back in relatively good order, peppered every step of the way by arrows from our unicorns, and the survivors made it to a nearby farmstead, where we besieged them, setting various buildings on fire, and driving them into a desperate defensive position. The abandoned carts on the road, of course, were burnt in their traces.

The Lieutenant could have ordered the charge and exterminated the rebel, but word had arrived from the scouts that there were reaction forces arriving from both ends of the road, both from the mill and the base next to the granary. She called it a day, and the Company withdrew in perfect order, marching away on a side-road, and leaving the rebel reinforcements to extract their traumatized survivors from the hastily-fortified remnants of a half-burned barn.

It had been a perfect fight, which is to say, deeply, grotesquely unfair. Only a damn fool offers a fair fight. I close this account of the ambush on the crossroad outside Lau Crosse, glad to say that no ponies entered the Annals that day, and only five wounds were serious enough to be aerially evacuated to my surgery.

And to note that the regiments in and around Lau Crosse would have a hungry autumn, and a hungrier winter. The roads south from Rennet started to see a trickle of caribou deserters slink by in search of better-fed employment.

Rainy Season

SBMS027

The weather had definitely turned. Uncontrolled rain-storm after rain-storm lashed the woods and empty fields across Rennet, and temperatures plummeted under darkened skies. A couple ponies started sniffling one evening returning from observation duty off of some damp dark cloud, and then it seemed like half the Company was hacking away, sneezing, spraying infection everywhere. Contrary to what *some* ponies asked of me, I locked down my convalescents' ward and quarantined the rest of the camp away from my wounded.

I showed Roggentochter how to make a dilute alcoholic rinse, and we wiped down all non-cloth surfaces on a twice-daily schedule, and kept the laundry-fire running during every waking hour, boiling cloth bandages and our rags. The Company's operational tempo dropped into the latrine, and it took us a week and a half to fish it out of the muck and rinse it down. We were damn lucky that the first autumn outbreak of the flu caught the enemy as badly or worse than it got us. I had a copious supply of willow's bark extract that I had the sergeants distribute with a free hoof, and we made sure that the sick stayed in doors and under roof as soon as they started showing symptoms. I resolved to take my apprentice out into the woods as soon as the sickness passed, and show her how to mark young willow trees for harvest in the spring. If we had more than one wave of the flu come through the camp, it would drain even my generous supply of that wonder-drug.

Speaking of my apprentice, she had decided to Equuify her name, and started telling us to call her Rye Daughter. Her Equuish was coming along nicely; they're very quick to pick up languages at that age. She and the other apprentices didn't exactly form a gang - we kept them far too busy for that, this is how you keep apprentices in line and virtuous, work them until they drop - but they did keep running with each other whenever two of their masters had any reason to cross paths. Octavius had mostly recovered from his bout of hornburn when the flu caught him something fierce. I'm told that Feufollet took excellent care of him in his delirium. I never really saw much of the other three, who had apprenticed to a cook and two ground-cohort non-coms. I believe the Dodger and Tam Lane were the two who joined the cohorts, and they were training them up as runners and couriers. Charleyhorse went into the kitchens, and seemed happy enough the few times I laid eyes on him.

Bad Apple, we saw considerably more of, and so did the rest of the camp. Gibblets' training methods were direct, shockingly careless, and more than a little spectacular. Seeing a little earth pony launch herself skyward on a fiery force-bubble while giggling her head off was something everypony ought to see once in their lives. The tidal wave of backflow from the latrine he had her "cleaning" on the other hand was less amusing. We made Gibblets help her clean that one up, and the Lieutenant gave him a very public tongue-lashing. As the apprentices began to shed their respective accents and take on the "Company tongue", the Lieutenant's accent degenerated, and got stronger and stronger as command wore more heavily on her. At times she sounded like some mob enforcers I had known as an apprentice in the old country. I kept a close eye on her when our paths crossed, looking for "thestral eye" or other signs. Nothing other than the accent thing surfaced.

The Captain grew clear-eyed and active, but he still didn't make an awful lot of sense. Half his symptoms resembled that of a pony who had suffered a stroke or an aneurysm, but the others didn't match the pattern. He had no asymmetric dysphoria. His speech wasn't slurred, and he didn't show any muscle weakness. It was just that his words were scrambled, and there didn't seem to be much meaning behind what he said. It wasn't exactly aphasia, because that usually has some frustrated intent or confusion underlying it. He simply babbled. We had him helping around the camp, doing basic chores, if only to keep him active and healthy. But it was heart-rending that our leader for dozens of years was now so vacant.

The rains marked the end of the campaign season. The frequent storms made it difficult and unhealthy to maintain the aerial scouts in their observation posts, and most of the roads turned into bottomless muddy sloughs. Only the Bride's Roads remained firm, but we could not use those as the rebel posted them heavily, and they barely covered any of the province if we could even get to them across the byways between us and the highway pavement. The Bride's Roads were more useful for travelling between provinces than within them, anyways.
There was some debate about whether or not to use the chariots to mount strikes against the rebel posts along the Bride's Roads. The onset of the flu scotched that plan for the time being, as we couldn't spare the ponies to scout out an attack, or fly in a strike-force in sufficient strength.

We relied more and more on our local contacts as the capacity of our scouts to maintain nightly observation posts waned. That produced some good news. Rebel control over districts away from the Bride's Roads had basically collapsed. Even before the rains, the outlying farming communities had begun to refuse to make deliveries without a squad or two of caribou sitting in front of their front stoops enforcing the edicts of the White Rose. We'd even heard of some interspecies feuding breaking out, and at least one serious massacre of a caribou clan isolated and alone on their homestead surrounded by irate earth pony and donkey neighbors. One source suggested that they had given over the homestead to the clan's enslaved cattle, who were more than willing to keep it going on the same terms as their exterminated masters had offered. I wasn't sure how much credence to give this story, it had the aroma of wishful thinking on the part of that particular informant.

Stories mostly agreed on the subject of deserters in the woods and roads headed south, though. In places where they couldn't have been false reports based on our movements, and always moving south. The White Rose rebellion in Rennet was a… aspirational emulation of the great wave of White Rose rebellion that had been wracking the Riverland provinces for a generation. The stories and our own briefings from our long-missing employer's people all agreed, the Riverlands were a seething wreck, more than half-depopulated and hopelessly out of Imperial control. But the White Rose was strong along the great River, and from all accounts their armies paid well. Nopony could agree on exactly who was bankrolling the rebellion; the rebelled provinces couldn't possibly have been self-funding given the imploded state of their economies. A compelling theory was that there was a sponsoring state lurking on the far side of some newly-discovered portal somewhere along the River, that they felt threatened by Tambelon, and they were destabilizing the Bride's empire.

Our information advantage had shriveled with the rains, and as a result we turtled up, going dormant. Let the rebels run their troops ragged trying to find us, let them kill their soldiers with exposure, let them drown in the rivers of mud which were once and would once again be roads, but currently were bottomless and frigid. It was too much to hope for that they were also hungry, but we had only managed to steal their reserves and surplus. They wouldn't burn through their supplies on hoof until sometime early in the new year, in the very worst case. More likely, the rebel would start confiscating civilian food supplies to make up their deficits. They'd be as popular as the cholera by spring, and if they played their cards exactly wrong, even the caribou civilians would be willing to throw over the White Rose. Hunger breaks the back of insurgencies faster than steel; it's just a damn ugly way to win.

Nopony ever accused the Black Company of being pretty. The Captain in his lucid days had committed us to waging war against a rebellion many, many times our number, one that had crushed a conventional army five times our size in open battle. And even with the aid of King Hunger and General Influenza, the Company would not be able to face the reduced rebel in the open field come spring without the support of allies. We needed to mobilize the Bride's militias in neighboring provinces, or conjure a local army out of the muck and melt of runny rained-under Rennet.

Grogar's Grammar

SBMS028

"Patriotism, noun. 'Burnable trash ready to the torch of anypony ambitious to illuminate her name. In Fine Diction's famous lexicon, patriotism is defined as the last resort of a scoundrel. With all due respect to my learned predecessor, I beg to submit it is the first.'"

The hall was filled with the pained scratching of dozens of pencils laboring to copy down the line projected against the whitewashed side wall by the clever little device I had pulled from my chest of tricks. I was not the first pony to while away the long hours in garrison and castra hiberna conducting writing and literacy classes for the new members of the Company. The mess hall was filled to bursting with donkeys, oxen, and fledglings, their mouths full of variably worn pencil-nubs, seated at cleared tables and covering their scraps of paper with dumb-copies of the projected text blown up forty times its size beneath the projector. I had gotten one of the stronger unicorns to power the device; it would be good for another two hours.

"Peace, noun. 'In international and internecine affairs, a period of cheating between two periods of fighting.'" I slowly read each sarcastic and cynical definition so that the class could absorb the meaning of the words as well as the simple mechanical mouth-writing itself. I paced between the tables, checking their work, and correcting here and there. "No, Sack, that's fighting with an 'f', you've got an 's' there. You can simplify by contracting it more strongly. The older style makes the two far too similar. Modern Company usage prefers the compact 's', anyways."

"Penitent, adjective. 'Undergoing or awaiting punishment.' A gloss on this definition – here Ambrosia is deliberately blurring the consequences and the desired state intended to be created by the consequences. You all know well enough that punishment often only produces the semblance of penitence, and so did Ambrosia." I had told them to entitle their dictionary 'Grogar's Grammar'; Bitter Ambrosia had called it something else, which would mean nothing to my students, and they all knew which devil Grogar was well enough. Shorthorn had yelled at me that it wasn't a grammar, but I liked the alliteration and who the heck knows who Discord is, anyways?

More than half of the recruits we had pulled out of Rime had been utterly unlettered; the education system in the new cities was lacking at best and nonexistent in many of the stews. Openwater Bay had been much the same, which is where I had learned to teach, assisting Bongo in those days. She had been better at this than I was, but I was getting better. At least she could power her own projector.

"Perseverance, noun. 'A lowly virtue whereby mediocrity achieves an inglorious success.'" Skritch, skritch, skritch. "Mediocrity is a lack of talent or inherent skill. It is no excuse for incompetence or failure in the eyes of the Company. Mediocrity is where almost all ponies start out, it is not a goal but something we escape by perseverance. We also do not care a pin for glory. Success is our expectation; glory matters not in the slightest."

Once they were done, and the work not being too terribly mauled, we would bind their scraps together and they'd have a pocket-book to amuse themselves in future encampments. Many of their veteran peers had similar little bound books in their packs and saddlebags from sessions just like this one.

"Rabble, noun. 'In a republic, those who exercise a supreme authority tempered by fraudulent elections. The rabble is like the sacred Majin of Saddle Arabian fable – omnipotent on condition that it do nothing.' The word is Zebric, and has no exact translation in simple Equuish, but it means as near as may be, 'mindless livestock'. You know, like pigs, or officers. But seriously, a rabble is a collection of hoydehoos, hayseeds, gutter-sweepings, and unemployed clerks. A rabble is also an untrained armed mob – and is thus the favored opponent of professional armies, and the loathed bane of the trained soldier. They are hopeless allies, and dangerously unpredictable obstacles as enemies. Don't expect them to be clever, but stupid can be dangerous in large numbers."

***

"Reveille, noun. 'A signal to sleeping soldiers to dream of battlefields no more, but to rise and have their blue noses counted. In the Nortemaugan army it is ingeniously called "rev-e-lee", and to that mangling our countryponies have pledged their lives, their misfortunes, and their sacred cutie marks.' This one is a historical curiosity. The Company has thrown over trumpet-signals and other loud blattings and bellowings as far too likely to reveal our positions to the curious ears of our watchful enemy. Ambrosia's Company operated in the presence of vast armies requiring ear-splitting communication methods such as trumpets and drill-sergeants to keep order. You know well enough our corporals prefer a switch and a glare over leather-lunged bellowing."

***

"Revolution, noun. 'In politics, an abrupt change in the form of misgovernment.' In our current situation, the substitution of our anarchy for the tyranny of the White Rose, who in their turn substituted their interested theft for the disinterested theft of the Bride. We aim to reassert the sole authority for organized thievery to the duly appointed bandits of our employer."

***

"Right, noun. 'The legitimate authority to be, to do, or to have; as is the right to be the Princess, the right to swive thy neighbor, the right to catch the cholera, and the like. The first of these rights were once believed throughout the Chain to be derived directly from the beneficence of the alicorns, and this is sometimes affirmed outside the enlightened realms of Republican oligarchy, where we know it is fully vested in the hooves of ponies of great wealth and greater magical power to bully their underlings and lickspittles.' Ah? Well, Ambrosia's Company fought for the right of one band of thieving bandits – known as the Oligarchs – their exclusive right to steal within the confines of that particular world, which was known in those parts of it under proper authority as the Republican Oligarchy of Mauga. Their enemies were the Oligarchic republic, known as the Republicans, who arrogated to themselves a sort of sub-monopoly for theft, and extended it to the practical assertion of theft of the labor and persons of individuals of certain breeds and tribes, or to be more clear, they were arrant slavers. Ambrosia's Company put its blood and honor behind the pack of thieves who did not claim ponies to be property, but rather lusted solely for those ponies' physical chattel, trinkets, and debts."

***

"Self-esteem, noun. 'An erroneous appraisement.' What? Yes, to be erroneous is to be in error, a state of being incorrect. And by your looks I see that you also need a definition of appraisement. Think of it as a performance review. No? How about a barracks inspection by your sergeant? Ah, there we go. Ambrosia is stating that a sergeant that allows his privates to inspect their own barracks unsupervised will very soon find himself with a section full of filthy, slovenly, drunken ponies indeed."

***

"Selfish, adjective. 'Devoid of consideration for the selfishness of others.' The selfishness of others extends to such luxuries as not being inflicted with the filthy camp-sicknesses engendered by certain ponies' unwillingness to observe basic sanitation; to not being slaughtered as we sleep because the pony detailed to the watch felt it proper to herself sleep at her post; to not being gassed where we sit because Private Haricots Sournois cannot stop over-indulging himself on the cooks' three-bean surprise! Take it *OUTSIDE*, Private!"

As we tried to air out the mess hall, I noticed the sand-clock, and realized we had overrun our time, and looked over to discover the cooks glaring at me in irritation, whether due to the noisome miasma, or my having blocked breakfast for the next shift. Rye Daughter put away her chap-book and helped me collect the pencils and spare paper. The chest had never run out of either, but I wasn't about to waste resources, and the troops would simply abscond with them to make new markers and chits for the eternal floating poker game if we didn't gather them after every class.

"Herr Doktor, you and the Annals talk about this vorld, that vorld. Mauga, Darl al Hisan, Crossroads, Tambelon. Vhat are these? Vords meaning the same as 'land'? You valked here from Crossroads, ja?"

I liked it when Rye Daughter called me Herr Doktor, it scratched an itch left by certain snobbish ponies back in Crossroads who didn't like my presence in their medical college's archives. I could never make myself correct her mis-usage. I thought how to explain the Chain.

"Have you heard us talk about the Chain of Creation? Or the Glory Road?"

"Ja, ist a highway system like the Bride's Roads, between realms, no?"

"Well… not exactly. This place you were born and raised, these heavens above and lands below, they are a part of the world we know as Tambelon. Each other world - the Darl al Hisan, Crossroads, Rakuen, Equestria - they each look up at different skies, different heavens, stand on different soils. Not simply something that lies over this ocean or that mountain-range, but only to be found through a magical portal. It's not at all clear if this world was here before the first pony opened the first portal into Tambelon, or whether the opening of the portal brought Tambelon into existence. There was nothing thinking on Tambelon before the first hoof stepped through the first portal – it may have been here all along, or it may have sprung fully formed by the act of crossing the threshold. There are ponies that insist that this later position is a massive violation of the conservation of magical energy; and there are other ponies that counter that there is no such thing as a conservation of magical energy – there are no closed systems, and every portal into a new land is the Chain extending itself one more link, adding more energy to the system as it extends the system into nothing and makes it something. "

"Ponies came from these somewhere elses?"

"Of course, we didn't spontaneously generate out of the portals. Zebra, earth ponies, unicorns, pegasi, minotaurs, caribou, donkeys – the tribes have migrated as their leaders and greed have driven them, from world to world, portal to portal. Don't ask me where the various tribes came from before they took to travelling the portal-roads. It is the favored theory of scholars that each tribe originated on its own home-world, each driven from their own, national Edens. I have no idea if this is true, but it is a neat and orderly idea."

"So caribou come from some original v- w- world! other than Tambelon? Stories I vas told as foal, they talk about great one-eyed buck in northern voods, woods, damnit!" She barked at herself, irate. The double-yous were coming hard to her, but she was fighting them as hard as she could. "Vodan king in the north woods, ha! And all caribou his children throughout this *world*. Nopony talk about doors or portals."

"Maybe, maybe not. I don't know the exact history of the settlement of Tambelon, I haven't had the opportunity so far, we've been rushing about on the march, or stuck here in the rural backend of no-where. Other worlds – on Crossroads, the caribou like to claim they're the indigenous population, that they were there when the first pony came through the first portal, although I've always thought the mer-ponies of Openwater Bay would have something to say about that one. I don't think the caribou could be indigenous to *both* Tambelon and Crossroads, and Crossroads is older than dirt. There's a reason it's called that – there are more portals on that world than you could count. It's why 'Chain' is a misnomer, the Glory Road has many side-roads, branches, intersections, and yes, crossroads. But most people call it the Chain of Creation because it sounds poetic in Equuish." Rye Daughter rolled her eyes at the idea of poetics. Versification was ever the bane of the barely fluent.

I heaved the packed chest onto my back, and we drifted back to the infirmary, in no particular hurry to go anywhere. Time slowed down in winter garrison, with little to do but quack the sickly and endlessly clean and polish and work over ingredients. I usually had more of the latter to work with – the busy campaign season had taken up my usual gathering time, and I was running short of a lot of materials other than distilled alcohol. Ironically enough, I had that in spades. As we approached the infirmary doors, a courier found us.

I had a visitor at the front gates.

Author's Notes:

No-prize to anyone who has figured out who Bitter Ambrosia was when he wasn't being a mean-tempered unicorn in the pony multiverse, sometimes known as the Wickedest Stallion in San Franciscolt.

Performance Review

SBMS029

When I stomped over to the main gates, I was under the impression that some damn fool messenger from our liaison had jumped the usual protocols and come directly to the compound. Dior Enfant had settled into her role as the Company liaison, and eventually figured out she was in a supporting role, not our actual employer. We'd seen less and less of her as the young jenny had started circulating through the province as an asset-handler, increasingly hooves-on as our scouts by necessity had pulled back in the terrible conditions. She had come a long way from that jumped-up teenaged buffoon the Marklaird had left holding the bag when it had pissed off to do whatever it was legates did when they weren't hiring mercenary companies and setting them loose on the countryside with vague instructions.

Speaking of which, the little black leather-wrapped horror was sitting patiently in front of the gate-guard. It was impossible to see any sort of expression on that matte-black expanse of animal-hide which passed for a muzzle, but its posture conveyed a sort of louche amusement.

"Physician! Greetings to you on this most wonderful of mornings!"

It was sleeting outside the gates, and so dark as to not be truly describable as daylight. It was only day by courtesy of the sand-glasses. I exchanged glances with the ponies on guard.

"Did the outer posts bring our employer in?"

"No sign of them, Bones."

"Go get your relief, and then go check on the posts."

Our employer, who was notably unaccompanied by the usual cloud of functionaries and aides, waved a foreleg at me.

"Tut-tut, dear physician, I have done nothing to your road-guard. I did not wish to draw them out of their cozy, dry closes merely to escort my august personage to your front door." The laird's voice changed, as it always did, sending the usual shivers down my spine. The new voice was too similar to that of my apprentice, and I looked down at my side to make sure nothing had happened to Rye Daughter.

"Oh, my, and what is this? Are you collecting samples? How do, dearie? Don't you smell… fresh." The warlock had disappeared as soon as I'd taken my eyes off of it, and it was now lurkng to my left, peering under my barrel at the cringing caribou fawn. Its voice was now that of an avuncular, if fey, uncle. The sort your parents never left you alone with when you were growing up.

"Apprenticeship program. Needed a surgical assistant. Starting small, somepony needs to do the laundry."

"And you found the time to recruit on my dime, again. Oh, yes, I heard the stories of your raid on the sadlers in Tonnarre. So fierce! Did you need a spare source of leather for your harnesses?" The horror would have an interest in tanning, wouldn't it? The voice, this time, a pitch-perfect copy of the salespony who had "sold" me our oxen carters.

"My apologies if my actions caused your time to be wasted by complaints or petitions."

"And yet, you continue to waste my time by discussing it further. Enough of that. Your Captain! I have come to discuss our plans, and your performance in their completion. In short, this is a performance review." Now dry as dust, lifted I think from one of the laird's older lackeys.
So I led it into the base, and to the Lieutenant. What else could I do? The Marklaird theoretically paid us, not that anypony had seen a denier since Tonnarre.

We found her in her office, a nook next to operations with a couple of unfinished log-tables and an equally uncomfortable-looking chair, and an expensive oil lamp. She was doing the usual endless paperwork which is the lot of Company upper management.

"Captain, my Captain! You've lost considerable weight! And height! And gender. And species." The little monster turned on me in a pique, and bellowed in a thundering lumberjack's basso profundo, "Where is my griffin!"

"Ser Legate, you know this pony, this is our Lieutenant. I know for a fact that you were closeted up with her and the Captain for days planning the campaign. She's currently in charge of the Company until the Captain recovers from his injuries. We're not exactly sure what happened, but he seems to have suffered some sort of stroke or aneurysm, not anything I've ever seen before. A couple weeks into the campaign, out of nowhere. I can show you him later. He seems to be suffering atypical aphasia and loss of cognitive function."

"I turn my back on you lot for a few days, and you go and break your commander! No wonder you have not delivered on his promises! I was Promised. A. Rebel. Free. Province. By. Winter!" A petulant foal now, screeching for her confiscated dollie.

"Ser Legate," started the Lieutenant, getting up and gesturing to the operations room. "Let us show you our progress. It is not yet winter, nor is the province exactly crawling with the White Rose. You find us rather camp-bound at the moment, and I can only applaud your willingness to travel in such conditions."

The Marklaird allowed itself to be guided to the neighboring operations centre, with its sand-table and racks of scrolls, records, and map-hangers. It was mostly quiet as the Lieutenant pointed out the salient points of the province and the campaign, and what little intelligence we still had up to date given the terrible weather.

"The campaign season was a week shorter than we had hoped, with the early rains. The unexpected turn of the season caught both sides unprepared, and we've had influenza throughout the province. They seem to have weathered it worse than we have; they're barely posting the main highways, although they're posting them in force. We think they're concentrating in expectation that a conventional force might be staging to sweep them from the province entirely. If this were a conventional campaign, that very well might have been the case, although I hardly would have endorsed such a push with all the fields croup-deep in muck and runoff. And we have no such conventional force nearby, as no doubt you know. I've had some teams out trying to raise the organized militias of the neighboring provinces, but they're lance-shy from last year's debacle."

"The cowards broke and ran after the repulse at Menomenie. With barely any losses to speak of! The regulars were shattered, and the militias ran! Militias!"

"The militias are still there, intact, armed, and organized," I interrupted. "Where are the regular regiments? Two mutinied and we've been killing them left and right here in the province. The others are scattered, deserters or dead, or folded into some of the militias, or sitting in some distant depot somewhere we can't find. Cowardice that preserves a formation is just another synonym for competent leadership."

The Marklaird let loose a mulish whinny. "Is that what has been happening here, the preservation of forces? Are you endorsing cowardice, physician? Is that this Company's discipline?"

"That is my discipline. I'm the pony that has to stitch together the shattered remnants left in the wake of brave and gallant officers. You're damn right we avoid bravery and gallantry whenever we possibly can."

"A Company of assassins and sneak-thieves?" A judgmental justice of the peace, quavering with self-righteousness and tenuous authority.

"A Company of successful sneak-thieves and excellent assassins. Tartarus-fire, we once rode with the original Assassins, the term was invented by our foremothers! We've made sure that no surplus grain or foodstuffs will be shipped south into the Riverlands for the next campaign season, and we've savaged the White Rose throughout the province. The only thing being exported to the south are hungry mouths and whipped ponies."

"But I did not ask for whipped ponies and economic anarchy! I wanted. my. province!" The petulant foal again.

Somehow I had taken over the argument from the Lieutenant. Another one of her gypsy tricks, leaving me to argue with our unreasonable employer. I thought we had agreed to not sell our lances to faceless ponies?

"You will have your province, or at least, your empress will have her province again. But not this morning, and possibly not until the spring campaign. We might be able to put together some operations once the ground turns solid again, but winter campaigns can be hard in the best of conditions, and I've been told the winters are terrible this far north in Tambelon. The seeds have been sown, the rebel regiments are by all reports falling to pieces as we speak. They've had nothing but defeat, terror, and grief from the civilians since high summer. Disease and desertion will leave them skeletons of their former selves by spring. You might even see us operate in the open fields, if the conditions are right. I hate to see the Company act like a proper army, but sometimes it can't be avoided."

The little leather-wrapped gimp was silent, and unmoving. I frowned suddenly as I realized what I had never quite noticed before, not on a conscious level. The Marklaird was always so animated, so full of quirks and twitches. I had never noticed that it didn't move like it was breathing under those leather wraps. They were tight enough, I didn't think it was possible it was only breathing slightly and the bulk was hiding the movement. There was no movement. Even the most awful of monsters had to breathe. What was...

The Marklaird broke its stillness, and barked in a high-pitched male voice, "Fine! I don't need the entire province, although my mistress certainly wants it sooner rather than later. That doesn't mean I'm happy. Not my mistress, me, the Marklaird, your actual employer. The Bride is my mistress, but I pay you out of my own funds, my authority, mine! And I need something here." It fell silent again.

The Lieutenant stepped forward, and placated our employer. "Of course, Ser Legate. As soon as conditions allow. Please, we need details, directions, explanations, if only enough to allow us to give you what you need. We currently cannot take the entire province to give you whatever it is within it. You will have to trust us with enough, if only just enough, to meet whatever deadline you're not telling us about."

So the Marklaird gave us those details. And we called in the cohort commanders, and started to lay out objectives. And the cohort commanders began to make plans.

We had a castle to storm.

Author's Notes:

Hey, remember this pony? It's technically been paying for all of this chaos! Although neither hide nor hair has been seen of the Marklaird since Tonnerre. And Sawbones has finally deigned to give that town its name, he really didn't like the place for some reason. Might have been all the slavery.

On Distinguishing Philosopher's Stone From A Poisonous Joke

SBMS030

Rye Daughter and I passed one of Mad Jack's work details in the weak afternoon light of late autumn. They had finally finished corduroying the roadways inside the complex, and now were extending access roads along the still-muddy tracks through the rapidly-disappearing scrub and brush to the neighboring roads. Those roads themselves were by and large still impassible, but our time of obscurity and hiding in plain sight would soon be coming to an end. The Marklaird had agreed to get the ball rolling on an early-winter mobilization of the militias of the province directly to the east. Verdebaie's organized militia had largely escaped damage in last year's catastrophic campaign, unlike the militias of the provinces to the south and south-east, who were still bitter and disinclined to cooperate. Including my friends in Pythia's Fell, sadly enough.

The fall rains had ended, and even the sleet and freezing rain had thawed and sublimated away in the brief pulse of summer-weather before the winter moved in with its usual fury. I knew this was the time a certain herb bloomed, out of sync, out of time, out of season. It was a narrow window, and I was determined to restock my supplies while the weather was right for it.

"We're looking for a blue flower, odd shape. With red berries! If you see any blue odd-shaped flowers with blue berries, check to make sure there isn't any behind you or to either side, and back away slowly. Jiwe busara and sumu utami are damn near identical aside from the berries, but you don't want anything - anything! - to do with sumu utami. Just breathing on it can break loose pollen, and even its pollen can mutate, derange, or kill. Although mostly it just does really odd magical-physical effects. Depends on the environment and the mind-set of the affected pony. Sumu utami is also known as Discordweed and, in some places, poison joke. Luckily sumu utami is pretty dang rare, far more rare than jiwe busara. And jiwe busara can grow anywhere. It's shy, and likes to bloom in the very late autumn, when ponies are either busy looking up at foliage or inside bitching about the weather. "

We walked carefully through the brush, checking where we stepped, until we came to a clearing half under water, and the other half grown over with low green flowering plants, with the tell-tale blue flowers and little green and red berries here and there, dangling off of their small stalks.

"Ah! There we go. See how it's a low growth? And the berries are just barely starting to ripen. Perfect, here."

We passed between the water and the flowers, and I hoofed Rye Daughter the sickle. I showed her how to clip off the berries while not touching the flowers or the plant itself. Jiwe busara wasn't sumu utami, but you didn't want to touch it directly, either. We dropped them directly into a pair of jars I scooped out of my saddlebags.

"Jiwe busara doesn't do much on its own, but it is damn near a universal catalyst. It brings out the character of many otherwise-useless herbs and substances. Zebra alchemy's foundations are built on jiwe busara. We're going to want all of this, green and red berries alike. The green ‘uns will cure with storage."

It took several hours to harvest the clearing. Evening was descending upon us when we broke out of the brush back onto the now-corduroyed access road. Mad Jack worked fast. I suspect if we let him loose, he'd plank every road in the district by spring. Although I imagined that the insanity of the expense would restrain him from that sort of excess. Rye Daughter and I clopped down the fresh new log-road and through the main gates. We put away our vegetative booty in my herb-cabinet for later processing, and I sent Rye Daughter off to wash up and get her dinner. I went looking for Gibblets.

I found him, his apprentice, and the Captain fire-proofing some newly-built flues and space-heating portable hearths in some of the second-cohort barracks. In better conditions, we'd be using these clever little metal stoves with tin flues, but in our current problematic logistical situation, they'd made due with mud-hardened wooden flues and brickwork firetraps. This was about as safe as it sounds, and only the intervention of witchcraft kept the troops from burning down their own barracks on a regular basis. We also needed to disguise the telltale smoke and steam, but the pegasi largely took care of that problem - smoke wasn't quite a type of cloud, but it was close enough for pegasus magic to bite.

"Gibblets, have you eaten yet?"

"What? Oh, Sawbones. Is it that late? Bad Apple, go get yourself some grub. Take Captain Catbird here with you, see if they have some fish for him." She grinned through the soot all over her muzzle, and started pushing the befuddled old griffin ahead of her towards the mess hall. Hopefully she'd meet up with Rye Daughter when they got there.

"Don't forget to wash up before you sit down!" the goblin yelled at their backs.

"So, any improvements in his condition yet? Or ideas?" Even if I hadn't run out of patience, the Marklaird had none to speak of on the subject of his missing-in-action subcontractor.

"Well, he seems happy enough. Still not making a lick of sense. Also not showing any signs of repossession. It's looking increasingly like whatever process got interrupted, it isn't re-starting. But I'm afraid the damage is done. I've had Bad Apple sleeping next to him, and she's been keeping tabs on his condition. And she says that he's been snoring an awful lot. Like, stop-breathing type snoring. Wetting the bed. Gets tired quickly. He's been losing weight, too."

I hoofed my eyes, sighing. "He's not really young enough to weather this sort of thing well. We're going to have to keep an eye out for him, but the prognosis for somepony in his condition isn't great. Apnea and nighttime incontinence - he's developing more symptoms of a stroke as we get further from the event, as if it's, I don't know, ongoing?"

"Degenerative?"

"That's what I'm worried about. Was this going to happen all along, or did we do this to him by summoning the Spirit?"

"Honestly, I can't be sure. I've never seen it interrupted like this before. But the other times - they became less and less like themselves, and more eccentric. Cruel, sometimes. Unpredictable. Eventually, either they did something unforgivable and their fellows put them down, or they went berserker, or found a fight they didn't seem to want to win. Either way, once they started talking like the Captain had been talking, they were on a clock."

"Bah. Food?"

"Yeah, I could eat."