Flux

through a drawer full of ships’ plans. The Three Boots catered to a considerably more downmarket crowd than Randis or Alterius, who was also a Council member.
    The captain had nodded and turned back to his men. “You and you and you and you,” he said, pointing at Miner, another man who was as tall as Miner but much bulkier, and two surly Guards who had a reputation for violence. “Go to the Three Boots. Arrest Alterius and Randis, and take them to the Keep.”
    “No!” cried out the young man, who must have been Randis’s son as well. “You bastards! You leave us alone!”
    The captain rolled his eyes, as if the son’s outburst was only a minor irritation, and used his club to deliver a sharp blow to the man’s midsection. The man’s knees buckled so that the only thing keeping him on his feet was the Guard’s grip. The mother’s wailing grew louder. Miner had tried to picture how his mother would feel, seeing him or one of her other children treated so roughly.
    But then someone was grabbing his arm and dragging him toward the door. “Come on , private,” one of the members of his cohort said. “We’ve been given orders.”
    Miner had to shake his head a bit to clear it and then, with a last glance at the weeping mother and ashen-faced son, he left the house.
    As the woman had said, they found their quarry in the pub, leaning in close together and talking animatedly, both with untouched tankards of ale in front of them. The two of them startled visibly at the Guards’ entrance and then tried unsuccessfully to look unconcerned. Miner followed the rest of his group to the men’s table. Some of the pub’s other patrons sat and stared, while the wiser ones took their feet and beat a hasty retreat.
    “Under the authority of the Chief, you are under arrest,” announced one of Miner’s colleagues.
    “On…on what charges?” blustered Alterius.
    “I’m certain you’ll be told that eventually. Now, come with us.”
    The Councilmen looked as if they were considering protesting. But Randis was a small man and Alterius was quite frail, and Miner and the other Guards were young and strong and armed. The Councilmen had stood and, with the Guards flanking them, meekly allowed themselves to be led to the Keep.
    Miner had spent the remainder of that day and the next ransacking the men’s homes and offices. He didn’t see anything more of Randis’s wife and son, and if Alterius had a family, they kept well away. Still, going through their personal effects like that had felt to Miner like a terrible invasion. There had been letters, paintings, every imaginable kind of household goods, even clothing of an intimate nature, all of it inspected by Miner and the other Guards and then discarded as if it were rubbish. Much of it was destroyed in the process.
    He never knew exactly what it was that these man had been accused of. Some sort of complicated embezzlement scheme, he thought. Nobody bothered to explain it to him and it didn’t really matter. He was there at their trial, though, and saw their pale, shocked faces. Their family members didn’t attend. The men weren’t convicted of treason, at least, so they weren’t sent Under. But they were stripped of their Council membership and of their property, and then they were sentenced to spend the rest of their lives as bond-slaves. Miner couldn’t imagine what tasks they would be given as slaves—neither looked as if he were particularly capable of taking care of himself, let alone doing the arduous labor required of slaves. He knew they wouldn’t live long.
    Miner had looked at Randis and Alterius as they were led away to be collared, and he had felt a deep regret at his small part in their fate. But he’d reminded himself that bringing miscreants to justice—protecting the polis, no less!—was his duty. His calling, almost. And he’d hardened his heart and gone on with his life.
    Those men had been dead now for three hundred years, but Miner sat in a slave pen in Donghe and wept over them.

    ***

    A few days after Sawarn was sold, it rained. The rain should have made him miserable, because the drops were large and he had no shelter at all, and the dirt floor of the enclosure quickly became muddy.
    But in fact, the rain was wonderful. It was warm and the droplets felt like caresses on his skin. He tilted his head up and drank the rain, and it tasted infinitely better than the foul liquid the slaves were given in the dirty buckets. The rain