The True Confessions of a Nine-Tailed Fox

Chapter 123: The Familiar Roar of an Angry Mob

It was both, as it turned out, that nearly stopped me from putting on my festival.

One morning, I was listening to Katu rehearse his sermon when a dull roar began to drift through the windows, coming from all directions. Confused, he interrupted his fulsome praise of the Kitchen God with an undignified: "Huh? What's that? That's not thunder, is it?"

Before he finished his questions, I'd already shot out the window. Because I knew that sound. Oh, how I knew that sound. The howl of many furious crowds coalescing into one, of a city forced past its breaking point until it exploded into an incoherent, undirected rage....

As much as Anthea yearned for the City of Dawn Song, I doubted that she missed the mobs.

Hovering above the Temple, I scanned our neighborhood. The alleys, lanes, and boulevards were packed with people – tradesmen, craftsmen, housewives, pickpockets, laborers, flower sellers, street urchins – all crashing along like a flood, the outer fringes breaking off to charge across courtyards and trample gardens and bang on doors and bellow for the inhabitants to come out. Nearly drowned out was the slamming of shutters and the grating of furniture, as the nobles barricaded themselves inside their mansions.

I flew higher still, surveying the capital of South Serica. The ground-bound mob filled every street in every neighborhood, while a cloud of bird and insect spirits darkened the air above the rooftops, all converging on the palace. It was daytime, so the rioters weren't torching everything in sight, but this still wasn't good. Not good at all.

All of a sudden, a hawk spirit dropped out of the sky above me, talons outstretched.

I shrieked, folded my wings, and plummeted back towards my own roof.

"What's going on?" called Bobo's anxious voice from below. "Pi– Pip, what's going on outssside?"

Diving through a chimney, I zipped through the hallways until I reached our main workroom again. Thank goodness the hawk didn't follow.

Shut the windows! Bar the doors! Hurry! It's a mob!

"A mob?" Bobo and Katu asked blankly.

Right. Neither of them had ever lived in a place where the population density was as high as in Goldhill, so neither of them had ever seen a mob capable of toppling governments. I had, that final night in the City of Dawn Song, as the rebel army approached and the inhabitants went mad.

Panicky footsteps and hoofbeats. Floridiana dashed into the room, propelling an unruffled Camphorus Unus in front of her. Dusty galloped in behind them.

"What's going on? What do we do?" the mage demanded of me.

"Why's it happening? Why're they doing that?" the baby horse spirit neighed.

Camphorus Unus simply clasped his hands in front of him and awaited my orders, solid, reliable tree that he was.

More frantic footsteps heralded the arrival of my priests, some still half-dressed with their hair loose and their robes hanging open. (Floridiana hadn't yet trained their slum slovenliness out of them.)

"Mage, Mage, what's going on?"

"Why're they rioting?"

"My family! I gotta get home!"

I, too, looked at Floridiana, curious what she would advise, but she was at as much of a loss as Bobo, Katu, and Dusty. For all her traveling, for all her mage learning, for all her history-text-reading, she had never confronted an angry mob herself – or even observed one from the fringes, it appeared. Like the rest of them, she turned to me with pleading eyes.