Thousand Tongue Mage

Father always said a month of infighting could shear an empire down to its raw nerves, but Kita never believed it until now.

It'd been three months since the war began.

Kita watched the giant fungi trees outside the window blur past the carriage. The eastern fungi trees weren't so much trees as they were entire towers. Columnar stalks rose wider than most western village keeps, and their caps layered the sky like stacked parasols, all lacquered with living, multicoloured sheens. The fading sunlight had no effect on their biological glows. If the west's fungi forests were pale and plain, this was the east's: bright-bodied, iron-limbed, and stubborn as root in stone.

Father also often said the empire was one front only on the maps, and that the consolidated western and central end of the empire were completely different from the eastern end. Riding through the east for the first time now, she decided he was right about that as well.

The official Salaqa carriage swayed, leaf-spring cushions catching each rut with polite restraint. Out on the driver's seat, Machi whipped the reins of the giant silver ant pulling them along the beaten path. Across from her, the young lady in the amber cicada wing-patterned cloak and bronze-rimmed spectacles cleared her throat.

In the lady's hands rested a slim notebook. At her elbow, an inkstick capped with lacquer.

"... Shall I pick up where we left off, Lady Kita?" she asked, almost musical. "As the scribes of the old river kingdoms would say: let the reed continue where the ink began."

"You may," Kita replied. "But I would prefer fewer flourishes and more facts that I can confirm."

"Facts. Very well."

The lady's thumb fanned the pages in her notebook back to a ribboned marker, and when she finally spoke, she wrote and read at once. A journalist's two-handed habit.

"The attack on the Royal Ayapacha Military Academy three months ago by the mysterious black bug, the Thousand Tongue, and the Worm Mage left twenty-three Noble-Blooded students dead, fifty-two injured, and a hundred and sixty-one Royal Capital Guards dead," she began. "The Divine Temple quickly insisted on the phrasing 'incident' and 'unfortunate infestation'. Unfortunate, yes. Breach, absolutely. An 'accident', though? I find that a bit difficult to believe."

Kita nodded slowly. "Correct so far."

The lady tapped her pen once. "Despite the Temple's best attempts to muffle the site of destruction, the unearthed facility beneath the campus—hidden in plain stone, as it were—provoked massive waves of investigations both within and without the Capital," she continued. "As the caravanners say, a whisper runs faster than any bug. Within a fortnight, it was common knowledge across the empire that the facility was a secret experimental armory sponsored by the Divine Temple to manufacture biological weapons against the Swarm."

She glanced up at Kita over the rims of her spectacles. "Sponsorship, of course, meaning currency, and said currency took many forms: decades worth of food, metals, red soil, and… mm, how shall we put it in polite company for the public… 'human resources', let's call it."

Kita set her gloved hands more neatly in her lap. "You cannot change the truth by changing its name. Put it in the papers that they were experimenting on living, breathing humans who had no say in whether or not they wanted to be there."

"Sure." Then the lady flipped through a few dozen more pages, licking her thumb with every few flips. "Skipping through the boring back and forth arguments between investigation parties, yada yada yada… it was two months ago that the Divine Temple finally ordered the gates of the Divine Capital be closed off so they could carry out 'proper investigation' on the laboratory without outside interference. Lord Baya of the Salaqa Region was vehemently opposed to this seclusion, was he not?"

"He was."

"And he wasn't alone in his opposition, was he?"

"He wasn't."

"Mm. It wasn't long after the Divine Capital sealed its gates off to the rest of the empire that Lord Yiru of the Nochoch Region intercepted a secret convoy still ferrying an exorbitant amount of grain and metals into the Capital. He seized the wagons by force, fed and armed his own people, and in the uproar that followed, declared his Nohoch Region independent from the Divine Empress' blessing." The lady lifted her brows, stealing a peek at Kita. "If one must choose a banner, hunger is the clearest herald. Was Lord Yiru's Nohoch Region so starved that they so quickly resorted to rebellion?"

"Uncle was not driven by hunger alone," Kita corrected. "He was driven by dreams of a better empire."

"As were they all." The lady twirled her pen. "Since Lord Yiru declared his region's independence two months ago, forty out of fifty-one Outer Regions had also put their support behind Lord Baya's banner, who has become the face and man behind the 'Empire Reunification Army'. Let's say… Lord Baya is the figurehead, Lord Yiru—his younger brother—is the hammer, and the rest of the Outer Lords are the anvils and tongs."

"Your metaphors are noisy," Kita muttered.

"Noise can be music," the lady returned cheerfully. "Now, the first major clash between Reunification troops and the Capital Royal Guards occurred a month and two weeks ago in the southern…" she consulted a margin note, "Chaltun Forest, just past the Capital walls. Casualty numbers from that battle note twelve thousand dead for the Reunification Army and four thousand for the Capital Royal Guards. Quite a feat for the Reunification Army, given they were attacking into a highly defensive position held by the Guards for decades."

The lady continued flipped through her pages. "Since then, the engagements between the Reunification Army and the Capital Royal Guards across the empire have multiplied. Some were little more than border skirmishes. Others—like the fight at Amaruqilica Causeway and the breach attempts at the Qoriqa Fields—ached into major battles that are still currently underway. Why is it, though, that despite lacking the support of the Spore Knights, the Four Families' household armies, and the Royal Capital Guards' training and sheer firepower, that the Reunification Army is still somehow able to put up a good fight?"

Kita frowned at the question. "You know why."

"It looks better in the papers if people hear the heiress of the Salaqa Household say it proudly."

"... Iron," Kita said first, sighing quietly. "All nine Outer Regions of the northwestern end of the empire have been forging the empire's weapons for decades. Now that they're on the Reunification Army's side, they're both cutting off supplies to the Divine Capital while resupplying our troops with equipment. In terms of pure firepower, we are no lesser than the Divine Capital."

"And what else?"

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"The Divine Capital doesn't have the manpower to fight out of the Capital they've boxed themselves in. The Twelve Forward Armies—the Capital's fastest-moving vanguard armies, the only armies capable of taking the fight back to us in the Outer Regions—are still fighting the Swarm and the other fronts outside the empire. The Empress can't recall them. Not unless she wants destruction to come from the northern, western, and eastern ends as well."

"Right. The Deepwater Legion Front and the Mori Masif Front don't exactly like the Attini Empire, either."

"But our people do," Kita finished, smiling thin but certain. "We, of the Reunification Army, love the empire. We've seen at its best and we've seen it at its worst. We'll do anything to take back what rightfully belongs to us, and if it means destroying our Capital so we can unite against the Swarm once more, we'll go to war. We have 'unity' where the Divine Capital does not, and that is your third and final reason."

The lady smiled back. Then she slid her glasses down the bridge of her nose, shut her notebook with a soft clap, and leaned back into the cushions.

"... Well, then," she said. "That is the gist of what has been happening the past three months, but I do hear the whispers on the road, and they say the Reunification Army is preparing for its largest assault against the Divine Capital yet. Is it in two weeks from now? Maybe three?"

Kita dipped her head politely. "You know I can't tell you that."

"Oh, I know. I'm not involved in this civil war anyways," the lady grumbled. "One thing I must say, though, is that this civil war has been a long one. Historically speaking, most of them end in under a day or two. This one has dragged out to over two months… so I suppose it is only fitting that the war would be coming to an end soon with a decisive engagement."

"If we lose," Kita said, "the Divine Capital kills us all."

"But if the Divine Empress is unseated," the lady mused, "what then? Would Lord Baya take the throne with excellent posture and finally end the long line of Divine Empresses?" She tilted her head. "What do you imagine, Lady Kita? What happens if the Reunification Army wins?"

Kita didn't answer that immediately.

She turned back to the window, watching the columns of fungi trees blur past for a moment before she managed to compose her thoughts.

"... You sound almost eager to know our fate," she said, "as though the empire's chaos delights you."

The lady gasped dramatically and shook her head. "No, no, you misunderstand me. Suffering is suffering. I do not revel in it. I will admit, however, that suffering births the most compelling of stories, and to weave a compelling story is the duty of a Spinneret of the Spinneret Society," she said. "Make no mistake, Lady Kita. I will bind and weave this civil war into a story that will be told for the years and decades to come."

Kita's gaze lingered outside a moment longer before she said, "Yet you are not riding with me merely to catalogue the civil war."

The corners of the Spinneret's mouth curved into a sly smile. She tilted her head, the cicada wing patterns of her cloak glinting faintly in the lantern light.

"True enough," she conceded. "After all, I'm not technically the Spinneret sent down here to catalogue the civil war. That's Lili's job. I'm just tagging along to know what became of the Thousand Tongue and Worm Mage after they vanished from the empire's stage three months ago."

Kita let out a breath and, with less dignity than she intended, muttered, "How did you even find out I was affiliated with the Thousand Tongue and the Worm Mage? And how did you manage to place yourself in my carriage?"

The lady laid a hand to her chest in a gesture that was humble in form and proud in fact. "Because I am Sora Fabre," she said, "and there is an old saying in the border hills of the Mori Masif Front: 'Blood remembers the path back to blood.' I follow Zora Fabre's shadow wherever it falls, and if that means I get to ride with a princess, then… that's pretty cool, right?"

Kita pinched the bridge of her nose, then smoothed her gloved hands over her skirt as befit her station. "Please don't call me a 'princess' in public," she said, and turned to the window. "And do try not to cause a diplomatic incident before we arrive."

"As you command," Sora said, with a little bow that managed to be both teasing and respectful. "One does not throw pebbles into a still basin without counting the ripples first."

The carriage swayed. The giant silver ant's plated feet clicked a steady cadence. Between the columns of colossal fungi trees, the signs multiplied—ominous, crude, and impossible to ignore. She'd seen many of them on her way to the east, but so close to her destination now, dozens of giant five-pointed stars built from giant bug carcasses leaned on stakes at the crossroads.

Beside them, more frequent and more brazen, stood other effigies shaped like a serpent devouring its own tail, but she knew it was no serpent. It was a worm made of bug carcasses, biting its own end yet promising no end.

Sora grimaced as she looked out her own window. "I see they've been keeping themselves busy."

Kita kept her tongue. Ever since the attack on the academy, both Zora and Enki had likely retreated eastward, far from the Capital's grasp. The rumours pointed that way, and they made sense. Out of the empire's fifty-one Outer Regions, only forty had declared for the Reunification Army. The remaining eleven were all in the east, where the Regional Lords were secluded and slow to rouse, their loyalties uncertain, and their silence heavy.

She was being sent to the Camatoz Ik'Balam, Regional Capital of the Camatoz Region, not only to negotiate with its Regional Lord for eastern troops and support to tip the balance for the coming decisive battle, but also—perhaps more dearly—to find Zora and Enki.

And even Eria.

As the carriage began to slow, she straightened in her seat, smoothed her gloves, and recognized the walls and gates of a Regional Capital outside the window.

She turned to the Spinneret and said evenly, "You really mustn't do anything foolish to offend the Regional Lord."

Sora grinned and touched two fingers to her brow in a mocking salute.

Once the carriage rolled to a halt, she pushed the door open and descended the steps. What greeted outside was one word: vast. Camatoz Ik'Balam was a sprawling city built within the colossal fungi forest, and when her father said it was the largest capital city in the eastern end of the empire, he wasn't lying. The fungi trees were impossibly tall and broad, but the buildings woven and hammered between the stalks were even more impressive. Lanterns were strung like veins of light between the trees, and there were dozens of them, hundreds of them lighting up the city… at least, from what she could see so far.

For now, she kept her eyes to the ground, and to the city gate guarded by dozens of riflemen in ant chitin armor and iron fittings.

And before them, as if he'd waited for her, stood the Regional Lord himself.

Kita dipped into a small bow, precise and noble. "Kita Salaqa, heiress to the Salaqa Lord."

The Regional Lord inclined his head in return. "Lord Kuvale."

"I—"

"I already know why you are here, Lady Kita, but do not mistake me for the man you need to convince. The east no longer bends to my word."

Her brows furrowed. "Then whose word must I seek?"

He lifted a hand, thumb angling back at a balcony built into a colossal fungi tree about a hundred meters up.

Kita followed his gesture, breath catching as her eyes found two silhouettes above.

Zora and Enki both stood behind the railings, looking down at her.

…

Before she could gather her thoughts, though, a voice murmured by her side.

"Standing out here's a bit awkward, isn't it? Bugs'll be swarming soon even this close to the walls. Better to talk inside, with food and drink."

Kita, Machi, and Sora turned at once, startled.

Ifas the driver lifted one hand in a lazy wave, beckoning them into the city.