Four Roads Cross (Craft Sequence #5)(49)
“Adjacent is fine. I didn’t sleep until after two.” She’d promised herself bed after Shale left, but the silver poems lingered in her mind. And then, being too tired for cause-and-effect thoughts like “I have to get up in the morning,” she’d read her mother’s letter, or tried, and when that didn’t work she read her student loan statement again, and then her balance book, and decided that if she ate instant noodles for the next month maybe she could pay down the principle. She had planned to sail straight for the church archives this morning but ran aground instead on the message Cat left with her office doorman. “What can I do for you?” Four Blacksuits stood on the ship’s deck, immobile and faceless as unfinished statues.
Cat led her into the hold; once she saw the refrigeration wards, she understood. “Indentures. Zombie traders. They docked here?”
“Not their idea,” she said. “Raz knew that the captain, Varg, was involved in the trade, but she never docked with us, just anchored out of port and ferried in. We caught her in a dreamglass deal in the city, which gave us grounds to search and seize the ship.”
“Clever.” Tara tugged the door open. Icy air vented into the hold. Row upon row of bodies lay in the cold dark, clad in rough canvas, immobile. Men and women from the Gleb, by the look of it. Tara’s shiver had nothing to do with the temperature. “Gods.”
Cat propped the door open and followed Tara inside. Her coffee started to steam again. “I hoped you could wake them up. We tried dragging one out of the freezer but he started…” She shook her head. “It looked like a seizure. We put him back.”
Tara paced the hold. Bodies lay four deep on either side. “What do you normally do when you catch a zombie trader?”
“They don’t pass through here often, since Kos forbids indefinite indentures and debt slavery. Most of the time indentures just wake up when they’re brought in. It’s traumatic, but I’ve never seen anything like this. I figured you could help. If not, we can hire someone, but I know Craftsmen aren’t wild about property seizures.”
Tara frowned. “They’re not property. That’s the problem. The Craft depends on freedom of contract: people can trade away whatever they want, except their ability to agree to trades. But they can offer labor as collateral.”
“That’s the same thing.”
“Not technically,” she said. “But practice is the problem.” She searched the room. There were many ways to cool a space: elementals were the most common, but none lived here. This ship’s owners must have used unshielded Craft to suck heat from this space to power something else. But what?
There. A line of pulsing red was worked into the timbers of the hold. Tara wiped frost from the bulkhead. There, carved with exact knifework, lay nesting geometries of Craft. She cut a piece of canvas from an indenture’s trousers and continued around the hold, wiping away the frost. By the time she completed the circle, she shuddered with lost heat and had to return to the hold and rub her hands until feeling needled back into her fingertips.
A Blacksuit brought Cat a form to sign, and she did. “I don’t understand how you can let this happen,” Cat said. “It’s disgusting.”
“I agree. This is part of the reason the Craft’s uncomfortable with addiction and games, even stories. Prices are a negotiation. If you control desire—if you make people want something—you can do strange stuff to them. That’s before we get into newfangled treachery, like balloon payments and variable interest rates. Most forced indentures wouldn’t hold up in court, but few victims have access to Craftsmen.”
“So why haven’t they woken up?”
“Because that room technically isn’t part of Alt Coulumb. It’s Kavekanese territory; the whole place is a chapel to one of their idols.”
Cat frowned. “To a fake god? Can they do that?”
“Sure. Kos is bound to recognize the Kavekanese pantheon, otherwise he wouldn’t be able to do business with Concerns based in Kavekana, which is most of them. So he can’t overrule the circle.”
“And why can’t we drag them out?”
“Without the permission of the person who holds the indenture, dragging them out means you’re trying to void their contract. Which Kos is bound to enforce in this case, because of the good faith clauses in his treaty. When you pull them out, Kos fights himself. Like one of those finger traps.”
“Can you fix it?”
She shook her head. “This is why I studied necromancy. Dead things behave predictably. Transactional work would give a dragon a headache. Their Craftswoman has tied this declaration of territory to a powerful, open-sourced binding ward. If that ward had a weakness in it, a million Craftswomen would have found it by now. We can fight her on the particulars of the case, by asserting primacy—basically, refusing to recognize the Kavekanese claim to their territory. In Crafty terms, it’s like sticking your fingers in your ears and shouting really loud to keep the other person from persuading you; it’s not good form, but it works temporarily. For that I’d need Kos’s backing, though, which he can’t give, because of the treaty. It’s a neat trap.”
“But Kos isn’t the only God we have available.” The top button of Cat’s shirt was open; she reached beneath and fished out an ivory pendant Tara knew too well.