Flux

turn even redder.
    “Are all these boys…deviants?” Miner asked.
    “I expect they’re whatever you want them to be, if you pay them well enough.”
    “They would never be permitted to be so open about it in Praesidium, not in my day.”
    Ennek snorted. “Not today, either. You think the Chief would stand for any of this, for one minute?” He gestured with his chin at the front of a building, where a pale, stocky foreigner with a bushy beard was caressing the shoulders of a delicate boy who wore red ribbons in his hair. “They’d be made bond-slaves for that. So would the women we just passed and the men we saw throwing dice. The Chief always says port cities are pits of vice and immorality, and he takes great pride in how law-abiding the residents and visitors of Praesidium are.”
    “Praesidium is a safer place to live than Donghe, I suppose.”
    “Safe unless you break the rules. Then it’s not safe at all, is it?” Ennek brushed Miner’s scarf with his fingertips. “When I was a boy, my father would lecture me about how orderliness brings prosperity. And maybe it does, but I always wondered even then what the price was for that. I wonder it still.”
    “Nothing is more valuable than freedom,” Miner said, and Ennek nodded.
    After they passed the section with the boy-whores, the streets grew narrower and dirtier, the buildings shabbier. Several large structures seemed to contain facilities that processed fish in some way, making the air reek so badly that Miner buried his nose in his scarf. The manufactories left an oily, dark streak in the water of the harbor.
    “Are you sure this is the way to the palace? Maybe the men were playing a trick on you.”
    “No, look.” Ennek pointed up towards the hills at the mouth of the harbor, and now Miner could make out a very big building with turrets and flags and a gilded dome. It was still too far away for details to be clear, but it certainly did seem very grand. He’d only seen the square, forbidding Keep, and never having seen a real palace before, he didn’t really know what one ought to look like.
    Miner was so busy staring at the shining structure on the hill that he wasn’t paying much attention to their more immediate surroundings, at least not until Ennek made a distressed sort of grunt. Miner followed his gaze.
    On a broad, flat area between the road and the sea, a metal fence had been erected to create a large enclosure. An even taller fence formed an additional barrier several feet outside it. Herded inside the inner fence were perhaps a hundred people. Some of them were naked, the rest nearly so. Most of them sat on the dirty ground, their knees hunched up to their chests, their faces set in blank, unseeing masks of misery. A few of them made keening noises that sounded as if they’d been going on forever. Only a few paced the perimeter of the fence, their eyes wild with fury and fear. There were a few women but they were mostly men. Their skin and hair were every imaginable color, but many of them bore scars and most of them were thin. Every one of them had a metal collar affixed around the neck.
    Aside from the slaves and a few stinking waste buckets, the enclosure was empty. These people had no shelter from the elements, no blankets, no way to hide from bystanders’ appraising stares.
    Between the two fences were a half-dozen guards with armor and spears, yawning with boredom or chatting idly with each other. At one end, immediately outside the taller fence, stood a moderate-sized structure—an office, perhaps, or storage of some kind. In front of it a wooden stage had been erected, with steps leading to the top and heavy metal chains bolted to it here and there.
    Ennek took Miner’s arm. “Come on,” he said softly.
    But Miner couldn’t budge. “It’s a slave market, isn’t it? I’d heard of them before, back before…before I was Under.”
    “It must be. The Chief doesn’t permit them. Technically, the polis owns all the slaves—”
    “Owns me.”
    “No. But it owns the slaves and leases them out. There’s a staff in charge of such things. They’ve an office in the Keep.”
    Miner sighed. “Is it any better, do you suppose? To be…be rented out, instead of… that ?” He waved at the people in the cage.
    “It’s all bloody horrible, Mine.”
    Somehow the use of the nickname unfroze Miner and he took a few deep breaths. He leaned in briefly against Ennek and then away. “Let’s go.”

    ***

    Not far past