Chương 179: 3. Are We a Bad Influence?

Talla and I sit across from each other, with a map spread out on the floor between us. It kind of reminds me of my own time as an amateur cartographer, except that this is a real map rather than a bunch of rough squiggles etched into a cave floor. Recalling our time in the convergence point is almost nostalgic, if I ignore the horrors.

"This is the Stebaasa," Talla explains, pointing out the body of water in the center.

"And here's the Sagaa delta we came from. Follow the river ringward, and here are the Ringward Mountains where we met, then the Blessed Lands are beyond that." The uncreatively named mountains mark the edge of the map, so I'll have to take her word for it. This is a map of the empire, and apparently a pretty good one. Talla was surprised that the captain has such a detailed and expensive map.

"Most sailors either stick to the river and coastline, or follow navigational charts rather than maps like this," she tells me.

"This even maps out Sagaa's distributaries as it approaches the coastline." Sure enough, the huge river fans out as it reaches the delta, splitting into a veiny network of smaller streams, though only a half-dozen or so are marked as traversable. I can clearly see the main line of the Sagaa river that we followed to Stebaari and then onto the Stebaasa. I frown.

"Has it occurred to you that a lot of your regional words sound really similar?" I muse.

"It's hard to keep them all straight." Talla scoffs.

"To you, maybe. You don't see me commenting on how blandly monotone your language is." Point. The warbly guttural quality of the Fa'aun language isn't just a product of their physiology. It's got actual semantic meaning, and since I can't really replicate that properly it gives me an accent that apparently sounds a bit dull. On the other hand, Talla speaking our language sounds like she has a stutter.

I could just mentally translate the names of locations, but then I'd just end up with things like "The city Imperial City on the river River, near the coast of the Imperial Sea sea, heart of the Empire empire." Not that we can throw stones when our world has a country with a name that translates to Lake because it's on a lake that's also called Lake.

"Chad?" I mutter.

"Really? I remember Chad, but not my own dang home country?" Talla flicks her eyes up to meet mine curiously.

"Remembered something?"

"Nothing useful," I sigh.

"Just the name of a country and a bit of trivia. Nowhere close to home." The closer things are to home, the harder they are to remember, I've found. We've been able to recall the names of most of the planets in our solar system, and a few random countries, but no detailed history or anything that actually relates back to us in any meaningful way.

I'm still a little bit haunted by the Alchemist's suggestion that we might have been formed from the idea of another world, rather than actually displaced from a different universe. I'd already made my peace with the possibility that we might never find a way back home, but the idea that there might not even be a home is somehow worse, even if it wouldn't make a practical difference. I try not to think about it too much.

"So this is the whole empire?" I ask, changing the subject.

"Yes, but there's a difference between the official and practical borders," she replies.

"See the desert here? There's an old tribe around... here I think?" Talla points to a spot in the mostly empty expanse, but there's no marking on the map to indicate a settlement there.

"But any further into the desert is only nominal territory," she says.

"Ours because we claimed it, but nobody actually lives there and nobody would want to contest our claims to fight over a bunch of sand."

"Makes sense," I say, nodding along.

"How come the tribal lands aren't marked?" Most of the other ones are, including our destination, to my surprise. Degala's land is a little slice of fertile ground on a much smaller river delta on the western coast of the sea.

"Well, that's sort of complicated," Talla hedges.

"The imperial edict that grants the old tribes recognition required them to settle on static patches of land. They were given the opportunity to choose, subject to the approval of the Empress."

"Which they didn't like," I add.

"Because the old Fa'aun tribes are all nomadic."

"Not all," she corrects me.

"But most, yes. There was a lot of fussing in the imperial court over the land parcels, but one tribe outright refused to even submit a claim." I point at the empty wasteland.

"These guys?"

"The Obora tribe," Talla agrees.

"They accepted recognition as part of the empire, but their chieftain told the Empress that there was no need for Obora to claim land.

'For few would covet the places we settle, and none but we can follow the signs in the sand.'" That last part sounded like a quote.

"So they got away with it because nobody else wants to live in the desert?" Talla shrugs.

"Pretty much. On paper, Obora doesn't have any land, but in practice the whole desert belongs to them." Huh. I suppose it's easy to get what you want if nobody else wants it.

"This might be a weird question," I muse out loud.

"But uh, what does the Empress actually do? As far as I can tell, it's just the nobility running things however they like."

"I'm not sure what you mean," Talla replies with a small frown.

"She's the empress." My more focused study of the local languages is paying off here. Normally, I'd be bothered by that tautology coming from someone as smart as Talla, but there's some nuance here. The literal translation of the Fa'aun word for empress is something like "Matriarch of Matriarchs," and the way she just said it has a subtle connotation that indicates she was saying it as a role rather than a title. Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

The difference, essentially, between empress and the Empress. And since Fa'aun society has an implicit caste system within their clans...

"The Empress is a clan unto herself, then," I guess.

"But I assume that she's more than just a figurehead." Talla nods.

"Aside from her role of keeping the regional noble clans—and more recently the old tribes—unified, the imperial army answers directly to her and noble clans have a strict limit on household guards. Matriarchs have the right to bring issues before her court, but the Empress gets final say on matters of imperial law." I wonder if the military will end up intervening in the fracas we started back in Stebaari.

I doubt that Lady Sabaah would have plotted the whole thing if she didn't have a way to come out ahead, but now that she's gone, who knows what will happen? Either way, we should probably keep our head down for a while.

"You mentioned before that the imperial capital isn't Stebaari," I point out.

"But that is the heart of the empire, so I assume it's still in the same region?"

"It is," Talla confirms.

"In fact, we passed it on our way anti-ringward from Sagaasi." She indicates a spot on the map, near the ringward tip of the triangle that forms the Sagaa delta. It's labeled "Stebaa" and I had initially confused it for a label of the country.

"The capital city of your empire called Empire is named Empire?"

"It only sounds silly because you're saying it wrong!" she insists with a grimace.

"And it's not much of a city, really. It's pretty much just the palace and the Stebaari region's military headquarters." Positioned such that they can get anywhere in the region by going downstream via one of the branching distributaries. Going upstream is probably harder, but I suppose that's what the fancy road we took from the convergence point is for.

"I'm surprised we didn't see it," I comment.

"The palace grounds are built away from the river and the paths to it are carefully patrolled," Talla explains.

"Most of the family envoys live there rather than go through the trouble of traveling back and forth. Ladies only personally attend the imperial court for particularly dire matters."

"Like a civil war?" I ask, raising an eyebrow.

"Yeah," Talla chuckles mirthlessly.

"That would do it. I can only imagine that Mother's got some busy days ahead of her."

"Rara too," I muse.

"If your mom's out of town, she's gonna be stuck in charge right? In the city where the actual fighting is happening, no less." Talla winces.

"I doubt the open hostilities are still ongoing, but if they are then it would probably be the other way around. Rara would represent us in court while mom handles the household troops."

"No use speculating," I reply with a shrug that's much more flippant than I actually feel. I'm worried for our friends in the city.

"It's not like we can get news out here."

"I could," Talla hedges.

"But even with my core class mastered, spells like that really take it out of me and the captain's asked me not to waste divination spells since they're so valuable at sea."

"Makes sense that she'd have those sorts of skills herself, then," I reply. Jira is a [Captain of Her Own Fate] or something like that—she didn't share her exact class with us—and it seems to be some sort of combination between sailor and fortune teller. Understandably, she hasn't been super forthcoming about how exactly her skills work, but it apparently gives her a glimpse of her own potential futures—and those of the people she crosses paths with.

As I'm considering that, my mind rewinds slightly to belatedly catch something else.

"Wait, you've mastered your core class?" I ask, surprised. [Thaumaturgist of Light and Life] is a complicated mix of mage, healer, astronomer, and... theologist? Not quite priestess, but with very much non-secular religious elements. Talla is, like most people, a firm believer in the Goddess, but unlike most Fa'aun she is not a strict adherent to the Church of the Great Wheel. Just a regular adherent. A radical within the orthodox religion, I suppose.

Complicated, though not nearly as complicated as Evelyn's wayward zealotry. Anyway, it's a really hard class to level. Four-star grade and with an awkward mishmash of domains that makes advancement pretty complicated. It requires her to learn about entirely new facets of the cosmos.

"That can't be all us," I point out.

"All we did is teach you about the [electromagnetic] spectrum and really badly explain [computers]." Talla chuckles.

"I got more than you might think out of those, but no, it's not all your doing. Meeting the Alchemist and hearing about his story has helped me to sort through some cosmological theories. Ruled out a few, advanced some others, and even helped me to start working on an almost entirely novel theory—though I'll need some time to organize that into anything coherent." Huh. I don't know why I keep forgetting that Talla is a scholar before everything else.

It gets buried sometimes, beneath her being a powerful mage, an important noblewoman, and an experienced ranger, but before any of that she is a seeker of knowledge, and her research never really stops.

"Are you going to upgrade?" I ask.

"You need better stats to create and cast more complicated spells, right?"

"No," she sighs.

"Not yet. It is annoying to be stuck on the precipice of more advanced spells, but I've always wanted to try for a five-star class. If I upgrade now, that dream is all but dead."

"That's going to take a really long time, isn't it?" I ask. I feel a little bad saying that, since Talla is one of the few that knows about our extra class slots and the fact that we're also racing for much higher grade classes than normal. Technically, even though we haven't even gotten to a four-star class yet, we're closer to five-star than she is.

"Probably my whole life," she agrees.

"Though if following you around keeps earning me so many fast levels, I might even get there within a decade." Oof. Ow. Ouch. It's hard to explain how painful it is to hear our closest friend in this world excitedly say that she might do in a decade what we plan to do within the year. If she's lucky. She notices my pained smile and grins.

"Don't feel bad. I know you'll get there much faster, and I'd be lying if I said I wasn't a little envious, but you've also shown me that it's possible to make up the difference in tiers with skill and resourcefulness. Not a bad trade, I think." Like a shark smelling blood in the water, I can feel Maggie perking up at that.

"Do I hear someone interested in bypassing Engie's limitations through cleverness and willpower?!" she crows excitedly.

"Talla, join the dark side! Embrace chaos!" I pinch the bridge of my nose and sigh.

"Maggie..."

"I take it she thinks I'm interested in dabbling in chaos magic?" Talla giggles.

"Well, it seems to have done well for the Alchemist, and I'm curious about his claims about chaos as an actual domain." Wait, what?

"Wait, what?" Maggie repeats my thoughts, surprised that Talla would actually entertain the idea.

"Wait, what?!" Evelyn shrieks—incensed and betrayed at the very notion. Wow, that one woke everybody up. Vi's being quiet, but I can feel her here too.

"Are you serious?" I ask gently.

"You're the one who's been telling us how dangerous it is since the day we met."

"I'm not about to dive into it horns first like Maggie," she scoffs.

"But it's clear that I don't know as much about chaos magic as I thought I did, and if my reading is insufficient, then I suppose I'll need to— carefully —do my research first-hand." Oh boy. That's going to tick some people off. Are... are we a bad influence?