Chương 71: [B2] Chapter 28: Jackal

The slaves knew nothing, and it had taken Miho three weeks to accept that this was not caution. She had worded the question carefully, making sure not to ask them outright. A remark in the ration line about how far the carriages had come, a question to the rabbitkin girl on the bunk to Miho's left about whether she'd been to this mill before. Small openings, offered sideways, to eighteen people over twenty-one nights. What came back was consistent and useless.

They knew the mill, they knew the shift bell, the ration size, and which handlers were worse than others. A few of them knew the name of the man who owned them, though none of them knew where he lived, how many others he held, or what happened to the ones who didn't come back to the yard between contracts. They did not know because nobody had ever told them, and because a person working fourteen hours a day on two-thirds of the calories they were burning did not have the surplus energy left over to wonder.

They are not being kept ignorant, Miho thought, hauling her third bale of the morning. They are being kept too tired to be anything else. It is cheaper than a lie. So she stopped asking the slaves, and started listening to the men who drank.

The handlers clocked out in staggered pairs, and they went directly to the break room off the north wall, and they began drinking immediately. The first cup went down inside a minute of the door closing, every shift, every day, with the mechanical urgency of men doing something they needed rather than wanted. Miho had opinions about their conduct, but she set them aside, because the useful thing was not what it said about them, but what it did to their volume.

The break room's door faced the loom-ranks, and the mana-shafts overhead made a noise that flattened everything under it into mush. Unless, you happened to be a level 59 member of the Nine-Tailed Fox Tribe, whose ears, even glamoured and sitting on a borrowed skull, were sensitive enough to pick out individual words over the roar of machinery if close enough. Miho had spent three weeks establishing her hauling route from loom-rank six to the far cutting tables, which passed within four meters of that door.

It was, in fact, the second-shortest route. The shortest crossed an open aisle where a handler's twenty-minute circuit could see you from either end. Miho had picked the safer one on her third day and had never once deviated from it, which meant that by now nobody could remember her ever walking anywhere else. Each pass bought her perhaps six seconds of clear audio. Six seconds per pass, two passes per bale, forty bales per shift, for three weeks.

The picture assembled the way a puzzle did; slow at first, and then quickly once the pieces started to click together in Miho's head. She replayed the fragments of conversation from the previous four passes:"–doesn't even sell it here, that's the thing, that's what I keep telling you–""–the capital, then. Fine. So it goes to the capital and–""–charity, is my point. Free. He gives the stuff away and takes the credit for–""–nobody gives anything away for–" Miho picked up the next bale and walked to the cutting table.

"–not him, the princess. Sustrai supplies it, the princess hands it out, everyone in the capital thinks she's the second coming, and he gets to stand behind her at the ceremonies looking humble. He's not–" The bale in Miho's arms weighed nothing. She had been performing its weight for three weeks. She very nearly forgot to. The princess. Miho did not know this kingdom.

She had been in a windowless room and a mill floor since her first day, and her entire map of the world outside consisted of a road, a canal, and eighteen exhausted people. But she knew what she was hearing, and what she was hearing was that the cloth this mill produced; the thin, hurried, under weave that eighteen people were being ground down to make; was not being sold at all. It was being given away for free. From a princess to the poor.

Every bolt Blake squares under that cutter, she thought, walking back down the aisle with her face perfectly still, ends up in the arms of someone who cannot afford clothes, handed to them by someone who is buying them with it. If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it. She did not yet know what for. But she knew the shape of a transaction when she was standing inside one.

It was four days later that she learned the part that mattered.

"–not getting them back, is what I heard." And Miho, for the first time in over three weeks, made a mistake: she slowed down.

"Huh? He's got a contract, though."

"He's got a contract with a man who's stopped answering him. You've seen the letters come in. Third one this week and the boss hasn't opened any of them." A wet laugh.

"Corvin overcharged him on the last two lots and Sustrai's the kind to remember. He's not sending eighteen head back down that road. He'll sell them on and let Corvin sue him for it, and Corvin won't, because who does Corvin sue in front of? Half the magistrates in this district wear Sustrai's cloth."

"Sell them where?"

"Does it matter? South, probably. There's always–" Heavy footsteps brought Miho back into reality. Jackal was coming her way.

One of the few things that Miho did learn about from the other slaves was Jackal. It wasn't his real name, but the slaves called him that because he was the worst of the handlers, and Miho had understood why within her first week: Jackal, unlike the other handlers, seemed to take pleasure in punishing the slaves, and looked for every opportunity he could get.

He walked the aisles slightly slower than the rotation required, watched the slaves like a hawk, and when he found something he could call 'slacking', his face lit up with delight, having found an excuse to use the rod that he carried around. Jackal was already changing course, and Miho could tell that in a few paces, she would be his next victim. Miho got her weight back under her and started moving and knew with flat certainty that it was too late to matter.

Then, from the cutting table eight meters to her left, a loud and theatrical sigh.

"Gods," Blake said, to nobody, sagging over the cloth with his arms hanging." Gods, I can't feel my hands." Jackal stopped.

"What was that?"

"N-Nothing." Blake straightened too slowly, wiped his forehead with an elaborate slowness that was frankly insolent, and picked the fold back up.

"Nothing, sir. Just tired."

"Tired, you say?" Miho was already three strides past and did not stop walking, because stopping would have made his gesture worthless. She heard the first crack behind her, the sound Blake made, and Jackal's voice saying something she did not catch. Then a second crack. Then a third. Miho could smell his electrically burned fur in the air, but forced herself not to turn around. Jackal gave him three shocks. Miho made sure to remember that number for later.

Miho set her bale down at the cutting table with hands that were entirely steady, and turned around, and went back for another, and passed within a meter of the fourteen-year-old catkin boy who was at his knees on the mill floor getting up for the second time. She did not look at him. Looking at him would have told Jackal exactly what the last minute had been about. It was the hardest thing she had done in this world.

The shift ended fourteen hours after it started. Blake slowly climbed into the bunk above hers, trying not to act like his whole nervous system had been rung like a bell three times and was still humming. Miho waited until the room's breathing had gone slow before she spoke.

"Why? Why did you do that?" The silence above her lasted long enough that she thought he'd gone under.

"You were listening to them," he said finally.

"I don't know what they were saying, but you've been listening to them for weeks. You take the long way past the break room and you never take the long way anywhere else." Miho said nothing at all.

"I figure it's your business." There was a rustle as Blake shifted, and a small hiss of pain he tried to swallow.

"But I know what Jackal does when he catches someone. He doesn't stop at one. And I know he'd have stopped at three with me because I'm on the cutter tomorrow and he'd have to explain a bad bolt."

"That's a great deal of calculation to do in two seconds."

"I'm good at math, Soria. It's the only thing I was ever any good at." A pause.

"Anyway, that's for the first day, when you pulled my hand out from under the blade." She heard him settle, gingerly, into something like comfort.

"So. I returned the favor." Miho lay in the dark with her back against the wall and the bars of lamplight across the floor and found, to her considerable irritation, that her eyes had gone hot. She had told him it was about the rations, and had made it small on purpose, because small things did not create obligations. Obligations were how people got you killed, and Miho had spent three weeks being careful not to owe anything to anyone in this room.

And yet, Blake had weighed the costs anyway, and paid a debt she had explicitly refused to issue, and taken three shocks doing it.

"Blake," Miho whispered.

"Mm?"

"They're going to sell us." The silence this time was a different kind.

"All of us," Miho went on, very quietly.

"Sustrai and the man who owns us have fallen out. We are not going back down to him when the contract ends. Sustrai is going to sell us on and let it be argued about afterward, and by the time anyone argues, we will already be somewhere else." Above her, Blake let out a long breath.

"How long?"

"I don't know. Probably less than two months."

"... Okay." She heard him swallow.

"Okay. So what do we do?" We, Miho noted, though she did not correct him." We find out where," she said.

"And then we make sure that when it happens, it happens on our terms and not theirs."