by Levi Jacobs
LeTwi gave a characteristic throat-clearing. That’s what I’m here for, isn’t it? To teach you reason, as I once tried with the Councilate of Worldsmouth.
Ella smiled despite her shaking hands. “Well let’s hope I’m a little easier than them, at least.”
Sometimes I wonder. Now sit and calm yourself, and let’s think.
Before she could, a knock sounded at the door. Ella looked up to see a pinched old woman look in, black hair bound in a thick knot. She barked something in Achuri, then “Awake, are you? Well get up, there’s work to do.”
“I—who are you?”
“Prula. I run this house. Now get up.” She spoke with the clipped liquidity of a native Achuri.
Ella’s eyes narrowed. “For what?”
“Books. Stacks and stacks of books. If you can even do them.” She eyed Ella doubtfully. “Trouble if you don’t.”
She shut the door. Ella was after her a moment later, but the door was locked again. “Scatterstains!” she cursed, slamming a fist against the door. “Let me out!”
Easy, Ella. Easy. Focus on what we know.
Books. The woman had said something about books. Ella looked around the room, putting together the cots, the simple desk. Calculism. Hadn’t Odril said he had other calculors? This must be where they worked. Where he wanted her to work, now, behind a locked door.
Ella laughed without mirth. “We’ll see about that.”
When the door opened again she was ready, and flew at the old woman. Only it wasn’t an old woman this time, it was a thick young man, who stopped her dead with one vibrating arm. “You,” he barked in basic Yersh. “Do these.” He dumped some books on the desk, watching her for another attack, but it was no use—with that kind of strength he was a brawler, and without yura she’d be no match.
The door closed again, leaving her alone with the books. Ella didn’t bother looking at them—ledgers, no doubt, records of purchases and sales needing tidying and calculation. She had no doubt the numbers would make her feel better, too, would settle her mind. And it was what was expected of her.
Which meant she couldn’t do them.
Instead she waited, back to the wall, watching the door, watching the light change out the window. Shadows passed above, and she realized it was a basement, that the window opened out just above the ground to let in light. The bars made it impossible to get out of, but the street sounds, the rumble of carts and chatter of men and women, gave her something to listen to.
After some time, a few hands maybe, she heard the lock scrape. Ella stood—it was the old woman, with the brawler behind her. Damn. “Well?” the woman asked. “Finished?”
Ella just stared at her.
The woman tsked, leafing through the ledgers on the desk. “I’m going to leave these here another few hours. You don’t work and you don’t get fed, understand? This isn’t a charity.”
Ella balled her fists as the woman left. A charity. “A prison, is what it is,” she gritted. She let the ledgers sit. There was no way she was playing into Odril’s game.
The woman came back at dusk, tsking again at the untouched pile of books. “Master’s not going to like this,” she said, gesturing for the brawler to gather them up. Ella considered making a break for it while he was occupied, but the man would catch her in a heartbeat.
If only she had some yura.
Night fell. Her stomach was angry now—she hadn’t eaten the night before, either—but Ella took grim satisfaction in it, knowing every hour she went without was an hour she resisted Odril, showed she wouldn’t be cowed by a locked door or threats of starvation. This was all old hat—he didn’t realize she was an expert at this game. She smiled grimly, curling up on the bed. The past was good for something, at least.
She was asleep when the lock scraped again. Ella rolled up, squinting at the candlelight. “Tunla?”
“Ella,” the woman said, sitting on the cot across from her. “Heard you had a rough day.”
“What are you doing here? Do you—work here?”
She nodded. “We all do.”
Ella glanced at the door, still open. She tensed. “Is it—“
“Open? Yes. You can try it if you want to.” Tunla shrugged. “You won’t get any farther than the front door. Odril keeps a brawler there day and night.”
Ella narrowed her eyes. “To keep us in.”
The Achuri woman nodded. “And to keep the rest out. Not everyone Odril does business with is a nice person.”
“But you can leave. You were at Odril’s.”
“Aye. He knows I’m not going to try to escape.”
“Why not?”
“I used to have a husband, run my own business in Riverbottom. But since the war,” Tunla shrugged. “Harl’s gone, work is scarce, and anybody not working’s getting put in the camp. I count myself lucky just to have a place to sleep and some money to support my girl.”
“Your girl?”
“Aye. She lives with her aunt upriver a ways, but what I make here gets us both by.” She gave a wry grin. “She’s the reason I’m in here.”
“Your daughter put you here?”
“No no. Just after the war, after the lawkeepers started rounding people up, I thought it would be safer to send her away. Borrowed some money to do it from some men I probably shouldn’t have, and Odril’s bought my debt.”
“In exchange for a contract that says you can never leave.”
“I could leave, if I paid off what I owe him, plus interest. But that’s never happening, at these wages,” she laughed.
Ella shook her head. “How can you stay locked up like this?”
“I’m not really locked up. Yes there’s a guard at the door, but I leave almost every day for something—to do the cooking and cleaning at Odril’s place, or buy things in town, sometimes just to catch up with friends. He knows I’m not a flight risk.”
Ella huffed a laugh. “Well I am.”
Tunla nodded. “I heard you had an episode this morning. Over the locked door?”
Ella shuddered. “Yes.”
“Is it really that bad?”
“You don’t understand.”
“Then tell me.”
“I—“ Ella took a deep breath. “My parents had money, when I was young. And when you have money in Worldsmouth, that means you marry your children for business, not love. But when I was eleven, I ran away with one of the cleaning boys— “
“When you were eleven!” Tunla laughed. “Had you even bled?”
“No, but I thought we were in love. My parents were furious when they found out. And they—” She stopped, waited for her voice to steady. “So they locked me up in the highest part of our house, and said they wouldn’t let me out until I was ready to marry someone they chose.”
“Ancestors. So who did you marry?”
She gave a grim smile. “No one. I ruined every contract they set up—but I spent five years in there, locked up with only my voice and my brother’s visits to keep my company.” Her heart clenched again, thinking of Telen, but it felt good to talk about this, to actually say the words out loud.
“Prophets, girl. I can see why you hate locked doors.”
“I can’t stand them.”
Tunla took a breath. “Well I think we can leave this one unlocked. There’s still a guard at the end of the hall, and he still won’t let you leave, but if it makes you feel better I think Prula will be okay with it. As long as you don’t try to escape.”
“No, this is—this is good for now. Thank you.” Just having that door open made her feel so much better.
Tunla nodded, and there was a pause. “You need to start working tomorrow,” she said.
“Or what, they’ll starve me to death?”
“Or they’ll turn you in to the lawkeepers for failing your debts. Send you to the camps. And believe me,” Tunla said, her eyes intense, “you don’t want to go to the camps.”
“But he wouldn’t—“ She was about to say Odril wouldn’t send her
, a lighthair, to the camps, then bit her tongue. This was a good job to Tunla, the best a darkhaired woman could hope to find, and here she was treating it like torture.
Tunla mistook her silence. “Yes, he would. He’s not a good man, Ella.”
Ella half-laughed. “I gathered that much.”
“But this is not a bad place. There are lots worse.”
Ella nodded. She would still escape, still needed to find her thief, but—“I guess I will start working, then.” She’d probably have a better chance of escape if she spent a few days understanding the place, anyway.
Tunla smiled. “Good. This will be fine, trust me.” She reached over and squeezed Ella’s shoulder, then stood. “Now get some rest. Lots of books on for tomorrow.”
“Great. Thank you, Tunla.”
The Achuri woman considered her a moment. “You are welcome. Don’t forget it, if you do manage to get out.”
Ella was relieved to find the door still unlocked the next morning. The hall outside lead past a series of identical doors to a larger common area with rows of desks. Tunla sat there with five other women working numbers, ledgers spread before them. The old woman Prula stood. “Going to pull your weight today, then?”
Ella nodded, eying the room. It was another basement room, light filtering through glass windows too narrow to crawl out of. At the front, the brawler stood in front of what must have been the door out, locked with a heavy chain. He smirked at her, and Ella looked away before she could feel either angry or trapped. “Aye. I guess I am.”
The next few hours felt almost like working books on the boat, lost in a stream of numbers and ledgers and ink cups and tax tables. They stopped at lunch for a spicy red soup with what Tunla said was elk meat in it, along with chunks of bitter vegetable that could only be winter crop.
If you had any yura, maybe that would matter.
The guard would be an easy match for her if she could timeslip, and the keys on his belt had to be for the lock behind him. Ella spent the afternoon hatching different schemes for escape as she processed the books, but they all returned to yura—yura she didn’t have.
The books themselves were almost identical to what she’d done on the boat, save that most of them were for House Alsthen, which was curious because any major House would have its own team of calculors to handle its books. As time went on, she noticed another oddity: an overwhelming amount of expenses and receipts were written to private entities for vague things like contractual obligations or services rendered. Some of them were for quite large amounts.
She asked Tunla about this when they broke for supper. The woman grimaced, glancing around. “Better not to ask about those.”
Ella frowned. “You can’t just say that and not explain.”
Tunla glanced around—the other women had gone off for the evening, a few of them leaving via the front door. “They’re for proxies.”
“Proxies?”
“Proxy forces. Mercenaries.”
Ella drew her head back. “Mercenaries? What does Alsthen need mercenaries for? They’ve got lawkeepers and House soldiers for protection.”
“Not for protection. For attacks, against other Houses.”
She narrowed her eyes. “Alsthen is attacking other Houses?”
Tunla made a face. “They all do it. You didn’t know that?”
“No I didn’t know that. But why?”
The Achuri woman shrugged. “Steal yura, disrupt supplies, cut into profits. It’s hard to tell from the books. But the way I understand it, yura is too new for any House to have a corner on the market—but they all want it. They all want to shut each other out, and they’re not getting it done economically. So they do it militarily.”
Ella shook her head. “But that’s illegal. That’s part of the basic compact that started the Councilate a hundred years ago—that the major Houses would cooperate militarily to increase profits and protect the minor Houses and workers of the Councilate.”
“Exactly—that’s why they need to hire proxies to do it. That’s why we’re here at all,” Tunla said, gesturing to the empty tables and chairs. “By the time it’s processed through our books, all those funds look like legal House transactions. And then the Houses can take our ledgers and process them again, and the larger Councilate never finds out.”
“But they have to know—how do they explain all these attacks?”
“Rebels,” Tunla said simply. “Pockets of Achuri resistance fighters, hilltribes, whatever. All the Houses here turn a blind eye to it, because they’re all doing it. But as far as Worldsmouth knows, no laws are being broken. And it’s a good excuse to throw anyone you don’t like into the camps,” she added, looking darker at this last part.
“Ascending gods,” Ella cursed. “This is exactly the kind of scat that made me want to escape the Councilate in the first place.”
The Achuri woman shook her head sadly. “Well you won’t escape them here. It’s been a long time since there was any real Achuri resistance to what’s going on.”
She didn’t need LeTwi’s snide remark to notice how Tunla was proving his point about history’s inevitability. “I don’t think it’s armies that we need. It’s new ideas, different ideas that don’t have us attacking each other in secret, trying to squeeze a few more marks a month out of whatever business we’re running.”
Tunla nodded. “We had something like that once. Before your people came.”
“They’re not my people.”
Tunla gave her a pointed look.
“Well, maybe they are my people—they’re where I came from, but I don’t agree with what they’re doing. That’s the whole reason I came up here in the first place.”
“To escape? You can’t escape your past.”
“Or—not to escape, exactly. To learn from your people. To find some different idea about life and politics that could change the way the Councilate works. And then come back and do something about it.” It sounded pretty grand when she said it like that, especially compared to where she actually was. “Guess I’m not doing such a good job of it.”
Tunla shook her head. “Don’t judge the bird from the egg. You can still do those things.”
“Not from here, I can’t.” There was a silence then, as Tunla ate and Ella’s mind spun through escape plans and yura and struggled still with the panic of being locked in.
“Tunla,” she said after a moment. “Can you get me yura? One of these times when you go into town?”
The Achuri woman hesitated. “I could. They don’t monitor where I go, and I know some places to get it cheap. But—“ She shook her head. “If Odril found out I was the one that gave it to you, he would punish us for weeks.”
Ella frowned. “Punish you?”
“Like he is doing to you. Keep us locked in, deny us food, give us more work than we can do in a day. Now and then he will make us go without water, though it’s been some time now.”
“And you put up with that?”
“What else can we do?”
“Fight it! What if you—I don’t know, what if you escaped and started your own calculism practice? You have the skills—everyone here does. That’s what I was doing, before all this.”
Tunla shook her head. “He would find out. And he has the contract.”
“So we take the contracts! Burn them! You can’t just stay here!”
Her face hardened. “I have my daughter to think about. And this is my home, Ayugen. Where would I go?”
Ella sighed in frustration. How could she not want to go? “What if I can get us out? Guarantee that we get out, that we can get to Odril’s house and get the contracts too?”
“How could you do that?”
Ella leaned in. “I’m a timeslip. Get me yura and the brawler at the door’s like a sleeping baby. So would be breaking into Odril’s house.”
Tunla bit her lip, then shook her head. “I’m sorry. If anything went wrong—if the contracts aren’t there, or he has copies, or anything—it might mean that I
stop sending money to my girl. And I can’t risk that. She deserves better than what I’ve got.”
“Then we kill him.” Tunla looked shocked, but Ella pressed on. “He’s a bad man, Tunla, you know that. He’s got us all imprisoned in here like slaves, he’s making money off hiding House wars that are probably getting lots of people killed—and it’s all feeding into more of your people getting put in the camps. If there was any justice in the world, he would be put to death for all that. But since there isn’t, maybe we have to make it.”
Tunla shook her head. “It isn’t that simple. He hasn’t told you yet, but there’s a transfer of debt. If Odril dies, other men have bought the rights to his holdings—including us.”
“So what—they would take over this shop?”
She nodded. “All of it. And if the next one dies—I think it’s Michaels—it would pass from there to Eddenal, who is as likely to sell our bodies as make us do books. And it gets worse from there. No, killing him is not a solution.”
“But we have to do something.” Ella balled her fists, looking around the empty office. “Wait—what about the proxy funding? This whole money laundering thing he’s making us do? It’s illegal. If I could just get out, get him in court, maybe I could get it shut down, get the contracts annulled. Then you’d be free of his inheritors.”
“And then what? We go back to the land?”
“Yes. Or you and Prula and whoever wants to start your own accounting firm, a legal one, and the money you’re currently making for Odril you get to keep. And you’re free.” She banged a fist down at this last word. “Not living under Odril the rest of your life.”
Tunla looked uncomfortable. “If that worked… it would be great. But if anything went wrong…” She shook her head. “I don’t know what Odril would do. Especially to me, as he would know I’m the one who helped you.”
Ella popped her neck. Tunla was thinking of her daughter, not herself. And she couldn’t blame her for that. But it was so frustrating. “Okay. I don’t want to put you at risk if your daughter’s depending on you. But I will think of something.”
Tunla smiled sadly. “It’s your own grave if you do.”
