“Sounds like we have a bidding war, boys!” shouts The Warden.
“Four fifty!” Vaarkson calls out. The crowd erupts with oohs.
“You’re in for it, boy,” The Warden hisses through his waxed mustache. “Vaarkson never gives up once he sees a piece he wants to plow.” I grit my teeth at the jest. “Even if he loses the bid, the Hauler foreman’s marked you, and he’ll have you.”
I piece things together. Foremen are leaders of each individual faction. Each faction is a group with a specific task in this place. It’s just like the houses of the Pantheon, with The Warden in position of the emperor. They seem to be trading in their respective goods, ore for food, food for tools, tools for fur.
“Five hundred!” Shank makes another bid.
“Five ten!” shouts the big bearded man.
My eyes glance at the giant domed ceiling of the cavern. Stalactites drip down as if trapping us all inside a maw of razor teeth. I conjure a memory of Nadia in the warmth of the Tao star. Her dark hair cascading in the breeze, framing her face as she stands high on the cliffs above a green sea—nothing but the summer and the promise of an unborn child between us. I think of the words of an aria The Maestro once showed me: O mio babbino caro. Oh, my beloved daddy, he’s as handsome as a king . . . and if you still say no . . . I’ll throw myself below . . . What shivers, what a chill, poor me, I want to die . . . The soaring lilt of the soprano’s voice in my mind silences the cacophony of this place.
“Five twenty!” Shank shouts again.
“Do I hear five twenty-five?” The Warden responds. “Five twenty going once . . . going twice . . .”
My eyes cast down from the ceiling and rest on a strange dark man standing apart at the back of the crowd. He hangs in the shadows, calm, silent, and watching everything. His skin is darker than that of any islander I’ve ever seen. His hair is tight and curled, tinted the oddest shade of red. His cheeks are decorated with some kind of tattooing that I cannot make out at this distance. His appearance reminds me of something from my deep past. The audience with Old Wusong! It suddenly clicks in my brain. I remember seeing the foreigners from off-world, a starship captain who had the same strange coloring that this man does. Is this man, too, an off-worlder? His stare is haunting, his eyes opaque, milky-white. He’s blind, I realize. He stands relaxed, like a victorious fighter, but no one pays him any mind, as if he’s invisible to all but me. I’m unsettled.
“Sold to Jinam Shank and the Picker Gang!” The Warden shouts.
A guard grabs me by the manacles, unlocks the cuffs, and shoves me into the crowd.
“Get along, little prince,” he snarls.
I’m engulfed by the crowd. I feel pinched, prodded, and poked at by grubby, foul-smelling hands. “Settle down!” commands Jinam Shank, the foreman of the Picker Gang. “Don’t shit in the crib!”
The hands reluctantly stop as Pickers turns their attention to the next auction.
“Toshiro Kodai! From Meridian, by way of the Isle of Conch!” Toshiro, skinny and wretched, shivers on the block holding his injured leg. The crowd mutters with apathy. “Toshiro is wanted for participating in a protest rally at the Hall of Electors following the Wusong-Leontes wedding. Shall we start the bidding at twenty-five kilos?”
A protest after the Wusong-Leontes wedding?
No hands go up. “All right, how about twenty kilos?”
I work my way through the crowd until I’m standing behind the scarred man with the topknot, Jinam Shank. The back of his neck is tattooed with the symbol of a pickax, denoting his status as foreman. I tap him on the shoulder. He whirls around, eyes narrowed and shiv in hand.
“Lord Shank?” I bow my head in deference, trying to play the game. “May I suggest bidding on that next prisoner?”
“Shut your hole, fish,” he hisses. “I just spent more than my share of ore on you, mainly to spite Vaarkson. Your job is to wield a pick and do what I say. That’s it.”
I nod with as much obsequiousness as I can muster. “But, sir, I know that man. He may not look like much, but he can mine five times his weight in ore a day.”
If Toshi’s arrest was something to do with my marriage to Miranda Wusong, he’s here because of me. Besides, I need an ally.
Shank’s knuckles land in the very spot my ribs are broken. I feel them crack again. I drop to the floor, wheezing.
“I told you to shut your hole!” He bares his teeth. “Wasn’t born with the name Shank. It was given to me here. I’d rather not kill something I just paid for.”
I stand, pain shooting down my sides. I glance over and see Bruul Vaarkson, the grizzled foreman of the Haulers, staring at me across the crowd. He’s a full head taller than anyone, so he’s hard to miss. His stare is hungry. His lips curl into a sickle shape. I shudder with revulsion.
“Sold! To the Hauler Gang!” Toshi cries out in pain as he’s pulled from the block and thrust into the pack of Haulers. “That ends the bidding. Return to your bunks. Work resumes at oh-four-hundred.”
The Warden and his cadre of prison guards vacate the cavern, leaving us to our own devices.
“Where do they sleep?” I turn to a Picker with a scar on his lip that pulls his expression into a perpetual frown.
“Warden stays in barracks almost a mile down. Much warmer for their fat noble asses. You’d know something about that, wouldn’t you?”
The man spits fully in my face. The spittle dribbles down to my chin. He smiles. The scar on his lip makes it look twisted. He’s testing me, I realize. I need to prove myself now or forever be branded a coward in the gang’s eyes. My ribs throb, and I feel the aching of my muscles after the climb from the surface. I’m not ready to fight. Death doesn’t care for ready. Alberich’s words are in my head.
When will it ever end? I wonder. Fight after fight until they kill me. Or I kill them.
The crowd forms a circle around us. The anticipation of bloodshed crackles in the frost like electricity.
“You don’t want to do this.” My warning sounds lame even to my own ears.
“Oh, I don’t want to do this?” the man with the twisted mouth mocks.
“Give it to that noble ass-rag!” someone shouts.
“Show ’em, Grinner,” another catcalls.
Grinner. The man’s name is Grinner. Fitting.
“Make a move,” he calls.
“You first.” I refuse to be the one who starts this.