Rewrite That Witch
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Chapter 930: A Letter from the City Hall

An hour and a half by the telephone. Roland stood, mostly. Sat briefly, stood again.

The final report came through before dark.

The ambush witches had let nothing escape. In addition to the kills, they had seized a quantity of canisters containing red mist, recovered the corpses from Devilbeasts shot down by the machine gun squads, and — as something extra — Leaf had caught the last surviving Mad Demon, wandering in the Misty Forest with nowhere to go. The battle had given back more than Roland had planned for.

He counted through the returns.

The most important was morale. The First Army had fought demons at range and won a clear engagement. The men on the wall had stood their ground and fired their weapons and watched the enemy fall. Before this battle, the demons had existed as something heard-of — described by His Majesty, confirmed by Sylvie’s reports, but not yet encountered on terms where the soldiers could act. Now they had that experience. The demons were flesh. They bled. In front of firearms, they were not meaningfully more durable than the God’s Punishment Army at its best. That knowledge — specific, physical, earned — was worth more than any speech.

The captured demon would help with the propaganda problem. Roland had understood from the beginning that the demons’ ultimatum was designed to separate Neverwinter’s common people from its witches — the Red Betrayal, replicated. The counter-argument required physical evidence. Once the migrants could see what a demon actually looked like, the claim that the demons could brainwash a witch into serving them would collapse under its own weight. A creature with nothing human about it did not recruit human servants through persuasion. It was self-evidently absurd.

The corpses, meanwhile, would be useful. Celine had offered to make sigils — the magic blood would lose its power quickly after death, which imposed a time constraint, but she had been emphatic about her qualifications. Agatha was exceptional, yes, but sigil knowledge was fundamental to every formal Quest Society member; it wasn’t Agatha’s personal specialty. She had also been clear that the method of carving the vessel mattered beyond just the quality of materials — intricate patterns drew out the full power of a stone where a simple line would not. And her tentacles, she had said with barely contained satisfaction, had no equivalent in fine motor control. Number, precision, sensitivity of touch — the human hand had no argument to make.

Roland had let her speak. Strange thoughts had surfaced while she described her tentacles’ capabilities, and it had taken him some deliberate effort to surface from them. Fortunately, the mind-communication between them ran only one direction.

Then the bad news.

He laid out the engagement data and looked at it honestly. The machine guns had performed adequately against the demons in their initial approach — tight formation, slow and overconfident, unaware that the sky had become contested space. Four kills before the demons understood what was happening and adapted. Then, when they scattered and accelerated, the hit rate fell to zero. Three more Devilbeasts had been brought down only because the demons pressed forward into spear range — close enough that the Mark I’s flat trajectory made aiming simple. After that, the survivors had fled.

Four out of twelve kills from the ground-based guns. The rest from the witches.

The Mark I in anti-aircraft configuration had real limitations. Against a prepared enemy in open formation, he wasn’t certain they could have held the wall without the witches covering the gaps. The guns needed protection — a shield plate, perhaps, or small fortifications that kept the crews behind cover without sacrificing the elevation angle. He needed more guns. He needed, eventually, an air force of his own; there was no other way to remove the Devilbeast threat permanently. But that was a project with a longer timeline than the current season.

For tonight, it was enough. He’d won. The first battle in what he thought of privately as the firearms era of human history in which ground-to-air weapons had stopped an aerial attack — small, improvised, fought with equipment that was still weeks from its final form, and won anyway.

He set the quill down and sent for Barov.

“Central square. Tonight. Celebration — make it as lively as we can manage, everything we do on Victory Day. Full propaganda run. Understood?”

Barov touched his chest. “Your Majesty.”

Five days after the ceremony, Snaketooth was woken by a knock at the door.

“Who’s there?” Tigerclaw called from behind him, still half-asleep. “Not the foreman?”

“Go back to sleep.” Snaketooth took the letter and returned to the low table. Outside the small window, the sun had barely cleared the horizon — the sky pale, faintly misty, the light the color of something not yet decided.

He was wide awake now. The City Hall’s red seal was on the envelope.

He set it on the table and looked at it for a moment. A year and a half in Neverwinter. He’d arrived as a Rat — the specific kind of person who survived by knowing which pockets to pick and when to disappear, who had learned early that employers were a class of people who found ways not to pay you, especially if you were a migrant, especially if you had no leverage and no one who would notice. He’d expected Neverwinter to be the same, with better food.

His first pay had arrived on schedule. The second one too. And the third. Twelve silver royals a month, every month, without argument. The city kept the promises it made, which was the strangest thing he had encountered in his entire life, and he had not fully trusted it until about the fourth month, when it became clear that the pattern was structural and not a coincidence.

He opened the envelope carefully. Three items: two pieces of paper and a card.

The card was small and palm-sized, wrapped in a transparent film that gave it a smooth, hard finish. His name on it, and his date of birth, and a portrait of his own face — accurate enough that it startled him. On the back, the seal of Neverwinter.

A formal citizen’s identity card. Not the temporary one he’d been carrying.

He put it down and made himself breathe evenly.

The first piece of paper was a written notice. His reading was functional rather than fluent — he’d taken night classes when he could, which wasn’t as often as he’d intended — so it took him a moment to work through the paragraphs. He got the meaning. His application for a position on the railway construction team in the Misty Forest had been approved.

He’d known it was coming. He’d submitted the application himself.

The second piece of paper was a transfer contract.

He read it twice. The City Hall’s commitment: regardless of outcome, salaries and earned rewards would be honored. If a worker was killed or seriously injured, any person the worker designated in this contract would receive both notification and the transfer of property and outstanding wages.

Snaketooth closed his eyes.

Faces came to him in no particular order. Joe. Sunflower. Tigerclaw, asleep on the other side of the room. Then a girl — thin, pale-skinned, someone he’d known for a brief interval before things had changed and then changed again.

He picked up the charcoal and filled in the blank.

One word. A name. The most careful handwriting he had.

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