Rewrite That Witch
CH1303 · Rewrite
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Chapter 1303: Hints and Clues

The intelligence room was the largest organization in the First Army’s general headquarters — and, by most accounts, the most uncomfortable place to work in it.

Lotus and Fran had excavated an underground chamber specifically for the General Staff’s use, and nearly seventy percent of the staff’s two hundred members were assigned here. The room burned through Stones of Lighting at a rate that would have seemed profligate anywhere else, and the workers were provided with free Chaos Drinks through the night shift, a privilege that the other departments envied loudly and frequently.

The agents themselves made no great claims to envy.

After Edith proposed the intelligence collection plan, the letters had begun arriving — two or three encrypted messages a week from the Kingdom of Everwinter and the Kingdom of Wolfheart, nearly a hundred of them by now. Most intelligence that passed through the General Staff came from scouts: professionally written, organized, direct. These hundred were different. They arrived in broken sentences, partial information, fragments that only made sense when pressed against other fragments. Deciphering them first consumed days; sorting the results was like assembling a puzzle whose pieces bore no image, only texture. Slow, grinding work, and almost entirely thankless.

That was not the worst part.

The worst part was how the letters arrived.

No one understood why the volume had suddenly increased. The demons had sealed the borders of the Red Mist area, which should have made intelligence nearly impossible to extract. Yet after Hill Fawkes assumed the role of chief intelligence officer, his agents had found ways. Letters appeared tucked inside layers of stretched animal hides. Hidden in the false inner walls of carrying poles. Rolled inside the stomachs of pickled fish — which required an agent to reach into the fish before the letter could be read, enduring the smell throughout, before any cleaning or transcription could begin.

Trading merchants moving through the occupied territories had become the primary channel, many of them unknowing couriers for messages they’d never seen. The messages arrived soaked in brine, stained, folded into strange geometries, occasionally fused together by whatever liquid they’d been packed in.

Work that had once consisted of writing reports while drinking tea now consisted of reconstructing those reports from an assortment of garbage.

The complaints were constant. The work pace was unchanged. Edith and Iron Axe were both watching this department, and no one was sufficiently foolish to fall behind under their combined attention.

Edith found Iron Axe and Hill Fawkes mid-conversation when she entered, a spread of copied letters covering the central desk. She moved through the room and began scanning.

Most of the Everwinter dispatches offered thin material — the kind of intelligence that felt just substantial enough to record and not quite sufficient to act on. A new demon troop garrisoned in the northern city today. A noble died suddenly; someone has inherited his title. A giant stone creature seen moving near the border. Individually, nothing. Collectively, perhaps the shape of something, though she could not yet say what.

She had not expected the intelligence collection plan to succeed this quickly. The credit belonged partly to Hill’s organization, but the deeper reason was the Black Money network. After she had suggested Iron Axe contact the sender of the black card, the masked man — who called himself the leader of Black Money — had agreed to support Graycastle’s efforts at the front. He had sent only a messenger, but his intent had been stated clearly: he was willing to help. Black Money operated out of the Kingdom of Dawn originally, with tendrils reaching into Wolfheart and Everwinter through the underground markets and the Rats. Rats collected imprecise information, polluted with rumor and street noise — but imprecise was better than absent.

One particular dispatch caught her attention long enough that she stopped moving.

Iron Axe noticed. “What do you see?”

“There’s a reference here to sailors being forced to labor in certain cities,” Edith said, thinking aloud. “If I remember correctly, the third princess Garcia brought a fleet when she attacked Everwinter. If the Church didn’t destroy those ships afterward, they’re somewhere in the kingdom still.”

“You’ve been watching this one.”

“Several separate sources have touched on it, which makes it more reliable than most of what’s here.” She spread her hands flat on the desk. “Ships move armies or attack coastlines. I don’t believe the demons intend a coastal strike — they know what our cannons can do to a ship on open water after enough engagements. If they sail to Archduke Island or the Sedimentation Bay, they won’t survive long enough to unload. And if they circumnavigate Wolfheart’s ports to reach the interior of the Kingdom of Dawn, they’ll exhaust their Red Mist supply before they arrive.” She paused. “So: land and sea, moving fast, assembling at the front as quickly as possible. That’s the more likely scenario.”

She looked across the table at Hill. “Your assessment?”

Hill bowed slightly. “Your ladyship, analysis of tactics and strategy falls outside my competence. My work is collection and delivery — those judgements belong to the General Staff.” He said it without apology, the way a man speaks when he has thought carefully about the line between his domain and someone else’s.

Smart, Edith noted. He deferred without being servile, drew his own boundary without refusing to engage. He understood precisely where his strengths ended. No wonder the king had given him the intelligence work.

Iron Axe exhaled. “So we know the demons are assembling an army and we don’t know where they’re going or what their objective is.” He shook his head. “Frustrating.”

“If the Kingdom of Wolfheart hadn’t been fully evacuated,” Edith said, in a tone just dry enough to deflect the weight of the criticism, “Hill might still have agents there. We’d possibly have better clues about the demons’ movements.”

“I was following His Majesty’s orders,” Iron Axe said, a familiar flatness in the reply. “And the First Army can’t stake its plans on Rats.”

“We’ll be sending more useful intelligence in time, sir,” Hill said.

Iron Axe looked at him. “More detailed, you mean? More reliable?”

“Yes.” Hill allowed himself a brief, quiet satisfaction. “I’ve spent a long time in the circus in the Kingdom of Dawn. The most important lesson it taught me is that good information flows naturally from good structure — you don’t force it, you build the conditions, and then you wait.”

“Tell me more,” Edith said.

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