Natural Ordermage

LXI

The next morning, as Blacktop filed out of the cookshack behind Brick, his eyes slit against a hot wind that swirled grit around the loaders, an overseer waited with two guards.

“You Blacktop?” asked the overseer.

“Yes, overseer.” Blacktop blinked, trying to get the fine grit from his left eye.

“You’re to come with me. The guard-captain has some questions for you.”

Blacktop didn’t want to accompany the overseer. Overseers usually meant trouble. He looked at the overseer and the guards behind him. He didn’t see a mage-guard anywhere, but they were never far away. That he had learned. “Yes, overseer.”

“Down the walkway there to the wagon. You go first.”

The wagon that stood down the stone walk from the cookshack was one with two rows of seats behind the driver. Blacktop had seen such wagons occasionally, carrying guards, mage-guards, or others who were neither loaders, breakers, nor sloggers.

“Get in the second row, Blacktop. The one right behind the driver.”

“Yes, overseer.” Blacktop realized that each time he had to say those words, he could feel anger, yet he could not ever show such anger, not if he wanted to live. Or if he were ever to find out how he had come to the ironworks…and who had been responsible.

He climbed up onto the wagon.

The overseer and one guard took the seat behind him, while the other guard sat beside the driver, turned so that he was watching Blacktop. The driver flicked the leads of the two drays, and the wagon began to move, its iron tires crunching on the grit that covered the stone-paved lane.

Blacktop took in everything he could as the wagon continued southward down the gradually sloping way. The lane paralleled the blast furnaces, then continued across a stretch of flat ground. To both the right and left of the lane were structures with roofs but no walls. He had seen them from the loaders’ enclosures and from the cookshack area, but had not been able to discern their function. Now he could see that they held iron. Some held stacks of heavy plate; others thinner plate, still others iron bars.

Beyond the warehouses to the west, he could make out a stone structure composed of multiple layers of arches. From the bridge, if it happened to be that, ran a smaller arched bridge to each of the blast furnaces. Farther to the south, the structure curved westward and ran toward the mountains. In fact, Blacktop realized, it ran right into the mountains. Unbidden, the word aqueduct came to mind. Of course, there had to be water for the furnaces.

Again…he wondered how he had known that, but that question could wait as he studied the area. He could also see that almost nothing grew in the valley, except sparse patches of grass and scattered scraggly bushes and twisted low evergreens. Just beyond the point where the storage warehouses ended, the lane began to climb a low rise toward a group of buildings set on a low mesa. As in the rest of the valley, little grew on the rock-strewn sides of the low mesa.

When the wagon reached the crest and the road leveled out, Blacktop could see that there were four buildings. He could also feel a cooler breeze out of the south, and he looked carefully past the structures. Directly south of the mesa was a gap in the low mountains that encircled the valley, and from that gap, he thought, the wind blew.

The stone walls of the buildings might once have been white marble, but all the stone was a brown-tinged gray. Even the narrow windows looked to be the same shade. The wagon creaked to a stop before the middle building. The archway had no columns before it, and only a single wide stone step to serve as an entry.

“Off, Blacktop.”

Blacktop eased himself off the wagon, then stood and waited.

“Follow me.” The overseer walked the fifteen cubits to the archway.

So did Blacktop, conscious that the two guards trailed him, ready to cut him down if he so much as stepped sideways. As he neared the building, he saw that the walls were old and pitted, as well as stained.

In front of him, the overseer opened the plain oak door and stepped into a square foyer. He turned right down a narrow corridor, walled in the same pale marble as the exterior of the building, but without the staining and pitting. The second door on the left was open, and the overseer entered.

A guard wearing a falchiona surveyed the overseer.

“Overseer Stolt reporting with the loader Blacktop, as ordered.”

“Wait.” The guard turned and opened the door to his left. He took a half step into the chamber, and said, “The overseer is here.” After a moment, he stepped back. “The guard-captain will see you and the loader.”

“Go ahead, Blacktop.”

Blacktop walked through the door into a smallish chamber that held little besides a table desk, two chairs, a stool, and a set of file chests stacked against the wall on both sides of the narrow window before which the table desk was set.

The guard-captain was standing, waiting beside the table desk. She was a woman, with gray-and-white hair cut as short as any man’s. Her shoulders were broad and muscular, and eyes watery gray and rimmed in red. Her face was so weathered that Blacktop couldn’t tell what her age might be, save that it was beyond middling. Beside her was a mage-guard, a thin-faced man who looked to be nearly as old as she was. Neither smiled.

“You may wait outside, overseer.” The guard-captain’s voice was like rumbling gravel, slightly softened by sand. “Close the door.”

“Yes, ser.”

The guard-captain did not speak until the door closed.

“The overseer claims you were writing on the table, Blacktop.”

“Yes, ser, but only in the dust. I didn’t make any real marks on the table.”

“That’s good. We don’t like destruction of any sort here in Luba. This is where all that Hamor builds begins.” She laughed, softly, harshly. “That was not my real question. Can you write?”

“I think so, ser…it’s been so long, and there is so much I don’t remember.”

“What did you do before you came here?”

“I don’t remember, ser.”

She glanced to the mage.

“He does not remember, Captain.”

“Do you remember anything?”

“Just one or two things, ser. I remember a girl giving me a pouch, and I think it held pen nibs, and I remember being rolled into something hot and dark.”

“Nothing else?”

“Just the words…and how to write them, ser.”

The mage-guard nodded.

The guard-captain pointed to the stool at the side of the desk. “Sit down. There is paper. There is a pen. Write something.”

Blacktop sat. Slowly, he took the pen. He had never seen it, yet it felt familiar. He looked down at the rough paper, and he realized he would have to be careful, or the point might snag…but…how did he know that? What could he write? He could feel the guard-captain and the mage-guard looking at him.

Slowly…he began.

The ironworks are in a valley in Luba. The blast furnaces roar night and day, and the coal goes into the ovens and comes out coke, and the coke goes into the furnaces…

“That’s enough.”

Blacktop cleaned the pen and laid it beside the inkwell. Both the guard-captain and the mage-guard had watched him do so.

The guard-captain lifted the paper, studied it, and handed it, without speaking, to the mage-guard, who in turn studied it.

“His hand is as good as an old-time scrivener’s,” offered the mage. “You don’t see penmanship like that anymore.”

Scrivener? Blacktop thought that word sounded familiar. Had he been a scrivener? But how would a scrivener come to be a loader in the ironworks?

“Except in the hills west of Atla, or in the mountains of Merowey.” The guard-captain looked down at Blacktop. “Do you know numbers? How to write them?”

“Yes, ser…I think. I haven’t written any, not even in the table dust.”

“I’m going to give you numbers. I want you to write them down in a column, so that they can be added together.” The mage-guard set the paper back in front of Blacktop.

“Yes, ser.”

“Twenty-three…nine…seventeen…thirty-five…”

Blacktop wrote each number, lining them up from the rightmost column.

“Now…add them together and write down the sum.”

Sum? Oh…that was the total, Blacktop recalled. He wrote 84 under the summation line.

“Might have been a clerk. That’s a merchanting sum line.”

“Your gain, Captain,” suggested the mage-guard.

“Did anyone tell you why you were sent to Luba?” asked the guard-captain.

“I don’t remember, ser.”

“What do you remember?”

“Just being a loader, ser. Except I don’t remember much of when I was first here, either.”

“Would you like to do something else, with better food and a better place to sleep? It wouldn’t be quite so hard, but you would have to write and do sums all day.”

“Yes, ser.” Blacktop didn’t have to think about that long.

The guard-captain nodded. “Go out into the front room and wait.”

“Yes, ser.” Blacktop bowed slightly, then turned and opened the door, stepping out into the outer office.

“Get him a shower and clerk’s garb. He can start at one of the plate-loading docks. Can’t exactly do that much harm there if it doesn’t work.”

Just before he closed the guard-captain’s chamber, Blacktop heard a few words of what the mage-guard said.

“…wonder what merchant he offended…”

Why did they think he had offended a merchant? Because his writing and his ability to do sums suggested that he had been a merchant clerk? What could he have possibly done? Even that thought tightened his guts, and he could feel the seething rage starting to rise before he pressed it back into the darkness within himself.

Within moments, the mage-guard emerged from the guard-captain’s study and looked at the overseer and the two guards. “Thank you. You three can return to your duties. We’ll take care of Blacktop.”

After the three left, the mage-guard looked at Blacktop. “Let’s go.”

Another wagon carried him and the mage-guard down from the mesa, but the road they took was on the west side.

As they rode, the mage-guard began to talk. “Blacktop…your job is going to be very simple, but very important. We need to keep track of how much steel is produced. Each time a wagon is loaded, you need to write down the wagon number, where it is being sent, and how many sheets of each size of iron plate are in each wagon. You will need to write this down in a book called a ledger.”

Ledger? He’d heard that before. It was a book where things were listed by name and number.

“Blacktop?”

“I’m sorry, ser. I was just remembering what a ledger was. I can do that.”

For several moments, the mage-guard did not speak. Then he said quietly, “You may remember more in the eightdays ahead. Do not get angry. Before you say anything, think about everything that you do. Duty and performance can get you better positions in the ironworks. Sometimes, they can get you out of the ironworks. Violence and anger will only turn you into a slogger-if you aren’t killed first.”

“Yes, ser.” Blacktop already understood about anger and violence.

At the same time, he wondered what else he would remember.