By some miracle, I didn’t spill any of the backpack contents on impact even though every branch I tried to grab on the way down snapped or otherwise slipped my grasp. The rest of me, however, was thoroughly mixed up inside. It was a small mercy that my spine had broken on impact and cut off the rest of my body from feeling pain, allowing my organs to get back into place before I was able to feel anything again. After a few minutes of sickly snapping bones and coughing up blood, I was back on my feet and ready to leave. I was pretty sure nobody spotted me jumping over the wall, but I didn’t want to take any chances.

After finding the road, I quickly worked out the direction of the lights that were probably coming from the caravan and started heading towards them. I couldn’t see them without a height advantage, but the caravan wasn’t too far off the road so it didn’t matter. Soon enough, I found the camp and confirmed it was who I was expecting, then stepped out of the bushes to reveal myself. Only one crossbow bolt flew at me, shot by one of the more jumpy soldiers, and though it found its mark in my chest I stopped it from penetrating more than a centimeter with magic.

“Oh shit,” someone swore.

“It’s alright,” I said, holding up the bolt. “No harm done.”

“We just sent Vaozey to go get you,” Shahpao said, poking his head out of one of the wagons. “What happened? You look like someone tried to mince you up and serve you on a plate.” Taking off the backpack and removing the contents carefully, I began to explain the events at the smithy. Many of the soldiers were excited at the prospect of having more ammunition for their muskets, but Shahpao looked more restrained.

“You got out quicker than I expected,” I finished. “Was I late, or…?”

“No, it didn’t go as expected for us,” Shahpao said, scratching his head with his right palm. “Things escalated very quickly at the gate. We had everyone identifiable disguised, I was sitting in the barrack wagon, but the guards weren’t having any of it.”

“How is Vaozey expecting to get in and find me?” I asked.

“That’s what worries me,” he replied. “She understands subtlety when it’s needed, but I’m not sure she can get back in without causing a panic.” I thought about it, furrowing my brow and running through possible ways to remedy the situation. If only we had radio comms, I lamented, it’s a shame magic can’t be used to receive that sort of signal, at least not very easily.

“If you had to guess, where do you think she would try to cross the wall?” I asked. “Did she bring any tools? Rope?” She’s not great at external force magic, and I don’t think she could jump the wall in a single bound, even with her abilities, I thought.

“She brought a hook and rope, yeah,” Shahpao said. “I’d guess she’d go with the western side of the south wall, it looked the least defended.” Considering that it didn’t take me long to get here at walking speed, she might be at the wall already, I thought, looking up at the trees. The tallest one nearby, a large pine, looked strong enough to support my weight temporarily.

“I’ll try to signal her to come back,” I said, then before Shahpao could reply I jumped into the tree. A short climb later I was at the top, and I began using my telescopic vision to search along the south wall of Towrkah. Light levels were low, even with the torches placed along the battlements at regular intervals, so I had to scan at half the speed I otherwise would have. Looks like a low number of patrolling guards, I noted, they’re all clustered near the gate. I guess the riot is still going on. The wind whipped by me and swayed the tree precariously, but then I saw something quickly shoot up the wall with a rope attached.

Okay, good, I thought, I got lucky, now I just need to aim this laser correctly and make sure I don’t use too much power. One of the best qualities of magic lasers was that they truly were unidirectional, not just a decent approximation, so they weren’t visible from any direction except one that crossed the beam so long as they didn’t ionize the air. Preparing a weak, red laser, I pointed it out from the end of my finger at the top of the wall near where the hook was situated, then activated the magic. I could barely see the dot at first, so I widened it a little bit and increased the brightness, then began to flash it on and off, holding it as steady as my magic would allow.

Vaozey didn’t seem to notice it at first either, not until she was halfway up the wall. Only then did I see her stop for a moment, then quickly climb higher and reach her hand out to intercept the beam. She seemed to know what it was, but unwisely decided to try to put her head into it, forcing me to quickly reduce the power to avoid temporarily blinding her. Once she realized where I was, I saw her visibly sigh and slide back down out of sight, and a moment later the rope wrenched so hard that the hook flew from its mount and back to the ground. Not as good as radio, but good enough I suppose, I thought, and I began slowly descending the tree.

I had had enough broken bones for one day.

The trip to Duwbkaav was scheduled to be just over two weeks. Once we got clear of the immediate area around Towrkah, tension began to steadily drop until it reached a level not too far from where it was before we were attacked by bandits. Shahpao was more alert than before, as were Vaozey and me, but it seemed that there was no reason to be. The first week went by peacefully, with a brief stint of camping in the woods on the fifth day. There were no attacks, there were no emergencies, there was nothing at all except walking and watching, along with training.

The training in particular became more interesting after that first week because I realized that I needed to increase the dosage of pills I was using. No longer was one pill nearly equivalent to half of my total reserves, instead it felt more like it was one-third. Considering that I had no reason to believe that cores were of significantly different sizes in humans based on my previous experience, that meant that I had a capacity approximately equal to the average soldier donor who had participated in the production of the pills. A far cry from Vaozey, for sure, but nearly a fifty percent increase in reserves compared to how much I had upon my exit of the noypeyyoyjh.

Still, even with more energy, and likely proportionally more ability to saturate my blood, I couldn’t do anything I wasn’t capable of before. I could simply do the same things, but at higher intensities or for longer periods of time. Moving around quickly in my suit of armor with magic was less exhausting, I could leap higher and strike harder, and hologram magic barely felt like it used magic at all. I even spent one afternoon shooting small insects out of the air with brief laser pulses, in an effort to deplete my reserves enough to allow me to take two entire pills for training during the night instead of topping up with the horrible formaldehyde-blood concoction.

Meanwhile, it seemed that the incidents in Towrkah had inspired the soldiers to do some training of their own; and though Vaozey and Shahpao banned them from using any pills to try to increase their magic capacity after one unfortunate man nearly killed himself during an early attempt, it didn’t prevent them from learning other things. By the time the tenth day rolled around, even the soldiers who had been inexperienced with muskets were capable of loading one quickly, and every single member of the caravan had killed at least one bird with one of my custom birdshot loads.

“Yuwniht, are you awake?” someone called on the morning of the twelfth day, rousing me from my slumber. I hadn’t slept well because I had overdone my core training a bit, so it took me a few seconds to realize it was Vaozey and respond.

“I’m awake,” I grunted, rolling off of the bedroll and getting to my feet. Maybe I should be training to resist sleep deprivation, I thought as I wiped my eyes and waited for them to clear up. “What’s going on?”

“Need you out here for some ants,” Vaozey said, and I raised my eyebrow reflexively even though nobody could see me. When I stepped out of the wagon, my eyes were immediately drawn up to the dark, gray sky. It’s going to rain in a few hours at most, I thought, another cold one. We were stopped in an open field, so I walked up to the front of the caravan to meet up with Shahpao and Vaozey to ask what was going on, but it seemed I didn’t need to.

A swarm of ants nearly half a meter thick was crossing the road, and individuals along its edge were making threat displays at the beast at the head of the caravan in some sort of attempt to guard the rest of their colony from harm. There were even a few acid balls on the opposite end, but exactly where they were aimed wasn’t clear. Good thing I’m still in my armor, I thought, probably should have grabbed my helmet though.

“Ever seen anything like this?” Shahpao asked, gesturing with his recently-regenerated hand. The missing fingers had grown back perfectly, but lacked any of the scarring that dotted his palm, making them stick out.

“Not with this species,” I replied. I had seen army ants acting similarly back on Earth, but ant species were often different enough from each other that it wasn’t safe to assume complex behaviors from one would directly translate to another. “Might want to back up if you’re not looking to get shot at,” I said, pointing to an eye that was forming.

“Can you talk to them?” Shahpao asked. “I tried showing them the symbol for Rehv, but they keep doing… that.” He pointed to the edge of the swarm, where comparatively small groups of a few dozen ants were periodically leaving the main body of the colony to write out shapes with their bodies. It seemed that the shapes never completely formed due to a lack of participating individuals, but the paths they traced were discernible. A quick but cautious look revealed them to be Uwrish words.

[Threat kill back move acid fleshman…] and so on the swarm spelled out, clearly trying to indicate their willingness to fight and desire to be left alone. So probably not Rehvite-aligned if they’re still being this hostile, I thought, Literate and wild, just like the first colony I met.

“We could just wait, they have enough of the individuals required for acid attacks in there to cause quite a problem,” I advised. “This is probably a wild colony, we might not be able to sway them.”

“Or we could just burn them,” Vaozey shrugged. “We have the deep sea oil.”

“We can save it by waiting,” I countered.

“If we wait here, we might get caught in the rain and have to stop,” Shahpao said. “Look there, there’s no end to them in sight. This road is going to be nothing but mud in a few hours, and our carts are too heavy for that. If you can get them to part, we can cross through in a minute or two, and we’ll both be on our way. If we can do it without a fight, all the better.”

“You could have tried to negotiate without me,” I said. “These ones clearly know some Uwrish words, all you have to do is write in the dirt and put some of them over it like with the Rehv symbol.” Shahpao shivered, and Vaozey snorted. “What?” I asked.

“I don’t want to have to touch those things any more than I absolutely have to,” Shahpao muttered, looking thoroughly unsettled. Humans, I sighed, walking up to the group and keeping my hands up. There were three eyes formed in the middle of the crossing, all of which seemed to be looking at me, so I wanted to make sure the ants knew I wasn’t going to make any sudden moves. I wonder if they can read, I suddenly thought, and holding up my hands to make a flat surface, I projected the word [Peace] with light magic.

The magic prompted a curious reaction in the ants, who dispersed the three eyes immediately and then began forming a new, more complex pseudo-organ in the center of the crossing. Part of it was an eye, obvious from the many insectoid heads that were pointed in my direction, but other ants were sticking their abdomens into the air, almost standing on their heads. Near my feet, words began to form. [Peace peace peace write sound peace kill murder no peace…] Whatever was going on internally with the colony, it seemed that its mental state was different from the others I had encountered.

[Can you hear me if I speak?] I asked, flashing the words one after the other slowly so that the swarm would have time to register them.

[Yes yes yes yes…] it replied, and I confirmed what the new section in the pseudo-organ was supposed to be. I wasn’t clear on exactly why their new positioning allowed them to hear human speech intelligibly, but it didn’t really matter.

“Our group needs to cross the road, and we’d rather not have to fight you to do so,” I said.

“What are you doing?” Vaozey asked.

“That’s an ear and an eye, combined,” I muttered at her, pointing to the pseudo-organ. “Don’t speak too loudly, I’m not sure if it’ll confuse them.”

[No back fight back away away no fight kill fight…] the ants spelled out, and even Vaozey looked surprised.

“That seems less coherent than the other ones,” she muttered.

[Less no understand] the ants said, followed by some ant words whose structures were considerably more arcane than the basic pictograms I had deciphered in the past. I looked at Vaozey, who made a gesture of acquiescence and backed up.

“We need to cross before the rain starts,” I explained. “Our caravan will become stuck otherwise.”

[Fleshman Rehv fight no away back fight rain no fight no rain…] the ants said, their strange mental echo repeating the last few words they said before they “faded” away like the others.

“If you can part yourself to make room for us, we can pass you by quickly, and without incident,” I offered. “We do not have time to wait for you, but we will be gone quickly if you allow us through.” I knew I was pushing the limits of what an ant colony would probably understand in one statement, but I decided to go for clarity rather than conciseness. The reply was unexpected, but at least indicated that I had been understood.

[Lie ? No ? Lie ? No ? Lie ? No…] the ants said, and the subtle hissing that came from its organ seemed to communicate its intent with the words. But they didn’t know this ten years ago, I thought, concerned, They had no concept of social deception at all. How could they have… Maybe some escaped the noypeyyoyjh? But then, even if that was the case…

“We have nothing to gain by lying to you,” I replied, putting aside speculation for later. “We could fight, but we choose not to unless attacked.”

[Alike alike alike…] the ants said. The currents of the flowing colony shifted subtly, and I realized they were thinking. [Offering exchange offering food exchange…] they added. I looked at Vaozey, then Shahpao, and saw that both of them seemed to understand what the ants were asking.

“Do we have extra food?” I spelled out with light magic. Shahpao nodded, then whispered to the woman behind him, who dashed away and came back with a barrel of preserved meats. At his instruction, the woman handed me the barrel, and I displayed it to the ants. “Would this be acceptable?” I asked. “In exchange for allowing us to pass fully.” They churned again, and then the eye and ear broke apart.

[Food exchange pass fight no give food pass exchange…] the ants said at the same time that the flow of insects began to slow. I cracked the barrel open and placed it on the side of the road near the swarm, who immediately covered it and began removing the contents. At the same time, they split into two groups on either side of the road, making a big enough hole for our beasts and wagons to pass through.

[Be careful not to get crushed,] I advised, writing on the ground and putting some ants on the words. “Let’s go, we need to be quick,” I said to the rest of the caravan. Shahpao relayed the order, and the wagons started to move again with the soldiers clumped up close to them. Vaozey and I crossed first, then watched closely as the five wagons passed between the ant groups. There was considerable tension due to the still-present balls of acid, but no issues arose. As soon as the final wagon had passed, the ants resumed their journey, as did we.

“Reasonable little things,” Shahpao muttered a few minutes later, once we had crossed into a wooded area once more. At approximately the same time, the first few raindrops began to fall from the sky. I wondered for a moment if the ants would be harmed by the rainfall, but considering that Uwriy was their natural environment my concern was probably misplaced.

“They knew we might be lying to them,” I replied.

“What’s strange about that?” Shahpao asked. “It only makes sense, people lie all the time.”

“Even the colony at the noypeyyoyjh didn’t understand the concept of a lie when I spoke to them,” I explained. “My people… have an understanding of animal intellect. Most animals do not understand social deception, least of all eusocial animals like ants. The Rehvites clearly didn’t want them to understand lies either or they would have taught them, so I have to wonder how this colony knew.”

“Maybe they met humans who told them,” Shahpao suggested, but I had a feeling that wasn’t the case. For some reason, perhaps just the paranoid ramblings of my human side’s primitive instincts, I had a notion that I was responsible. No humans survived the noypeyyoyjh except Koyl, Vaozey, and the old woman, so there was nobody to realize the implications of what I had done with the colony there. I doubted Koyl would have gotten involved with ants, Vaozey hated them, and the old woman would never have known, so the knowledge couldn’t have proliferated.

“Maybe,” I muttered, but my mind kept drifting to the memory of how the first colony in the ravine nearly doubled in apparent intellect after consuming its opponent. I didn’t know how many ants were required to store a piece of information, or how quickly it spread between members of a colony, but I couldn’t convince myself that my suspicions were unwarranted.

When we spotted Duwbkaav in the distance, I almost thought we had somehow managed to end up in Owsahlk instead. The resemblance between the two cities from a distance was uncanny, down to the same dock structure and nearly the same shape of the shoreline nearby. The only apparent difference was that Owsahlk’s docks ran northwest to southeast, while Duwbkaav’s ran near-directly east to west. Well, that and the lack of shipping traffic, I noted, seeing considerably less naval presence in the surrounding area than there had been in Owsahlk or Awrehrehzha.

As we got closer, other differences jumped out. Duwbkaav was newer, at least judging by the wear and tear on the walls of the city, and it looked to be a bit poorer overall. The latter fact made sense given its fairly out-of-the-way location: It wasn’t close to the capital nor was it close to Dahmpiyah or the west coast, and its distance from its nearest neighboring cities made it fairly useless as a target during times of war. Really, if it weren’t for the fact that it was the closest port to Mehtsiyah island, I doubted anyone would have cared about the city at all.

There was no trouble at the gate either, Shahpao simply passed our credentials over and we were let in within a few minutes. The inside of the city had the smell of a normal coastal town but lacked some of the filthy scents of more populous areas. If anything, Duwbkaav almost looked underpopulated rather than the reverse. Many of the houses we passed by seemed to be empty, and there weren’t many people in the streets at all. It was only when we got closer to the docks that things became livelier and started to resemble other cities, but even then it was quieter than normal.

“Zhoyv, go see if someone wants to buy the beasts,” Shahpao ordered. “Tell them we can have them delivered once we find lodgings. Spahjh, search for dockside storage we can use for the contents of the wagons. We want something private, so prioritize that over anything else like cost. We still have most of our funds. Everyone else, follow me, we’re going to look for lodging.”

“Couldn’t help but overhear you!” A fat, bearded man in dirty clothes said from our left before anyone could start executing the orders, prompting a number of startled reactions from the caravan as several soldiers went for weapons. “New in town? Staying long? You all look military, not many of your type left around here so far from the front.” Judging by the reactions of the passersby, the man’s actions weren’t out of the ordinary, so Shahpao hopped down from his spot on the lead wagon to greet him.

“We just arrived,” he said. “I’m afraid our business is private. How much did you overhear?” The man just laughed and rubbed his belly, then clapped Shahpao on the shoulder with his right hand.

“No need to be so stiff, soldier boy,” he joked. “Duwbkaav’s a relaxed sort of place, ‘specially after all that business with the Mehtsiyahns years ago. I know an innkeeper nearby who’d love to have… there’s thirty-something of you?”

“Thirty-eight,” I said.

“Near-on forty new customers then,” the man smiled. “I’m heading over there myself because she makes some of the best fish on the whole east side. Got a yard out back for the wagons too, if you don’t have somewhere to put ‘em tonight. What do you say?”

“Our two warriors will want their privacy,” Shahpao said.

“I’m sure it won’t be a problem,” the man continued to smile.

“You know this innkeeper well?” Shahpao asked, looking as though he was growing uncomfortable with the hand on his shoulder. The man laughed loudly, then tapped him a few more times before finally pulling away.

“I should, been married to her twenty years after all,” he joked, getting a few snorts from the soldiers. His charisma was infectious, and even I could feel myself wanting to mirror his emotions a little bit. “What, you don’t trust me about the fish?” the man jeered playfully.

“Should I?” Shahpao snorted. “Seems you might have been coerced, even threatened.”

“Hey now, don’t go around saying stuff like that,” the man laughed. “I’m trying to keep all my fingers and toes this week, I don’t wanna lose any while I’m sleeping.” To my left, very faintly, I heard the sound of Vaozey snort in amusement.