swallowing and holding bundled silk to my nose. “Also little reason to remain. Unless it’s your desire to watch your sister lose her breakfast.”
“Look closer,” he told me, pausing at one of the huts. Pushing the door aside he revealed a dirt floor and a few meagre possessions: a blanket, an old iron skillet. It took a second before I discerned the two emaciated figures crouched in the unlit recesses of the hut, a woman and a girl. They both had their eyes closed and heads lowered, as was required of their kind when looked upon by their betters.
“What do you see?” Kehlbrand pressed.
I took note of the fierceness of the woman’s grip on the girl, the closeness with which she held her. As my gaze lingered the girl shuddered, a whimper escaping her lips and causing the woman to smooth a hand through her unwashed, greasy hair, lips moving in barely audible words of comfort.
“A mother and child,” I said. “They fear us.”
“And are they right to do so?”
“Of course. A fearless slave is not a slave.”
“True.” Kehlbrand spoke softly to the woman and child in the language of the southlands, it being the most common tongue amongst the slaves: “Pardon our intrusion.”
He closed the door and we resumed our stroll, Kehlbrand leading me towards the workings in the base of the Fist. “Fear is as much a necessary part of what happens here as the slaves’ labour,” he said. “But it is expensive, for the production of fear also requires labour, on our part.”
The hovels soon gave way to the expanse of bare stone that surrounded the tor, revealing the sight of the massed slaves at work. The Fist resembled half of a giant, rotted apple, its flanks eaten away by the quarries where the slaves toiled. Like maggots in the flesh, I thought, surveying the multitude. An exact count of their number was never taken as they died so frequently. The only measure of their worth was in the amount of ore they dug from the rock. When the tally fell, the Wohten would raid to replenish their workforce.
“As you see.” Kehlbrand gestured expansively at the works, from the quarries to the long lines of slaves pushing carts or carrying ore-laden baskets towards the smoke-shrouded buildings where the smiths worked. Warriors were everywhere, several hundred at least, mostly mounted and sitting in silent vigilance. Every few minutes one would turn his mount towards a line of slaves moving fractionally slower than the others. This increased scrutiny was usually sufficient to compel them to greater efforts. If the warrior found their response unacceptable, or succumbed to boredom, they would unhook the long oxhide whip from their saddle. These whips produce a particularly vicious crack as they snake through the air with deceptive slowness. Most warriors were content to leave a bleeding lash mark or two on faces or arms of tardy slaves, whilst others were more inventive.
“That man, for instance.” Kehlbrand pointed to where a warrior had skillfully looped his whip around a slave’s ankle in order to drag him across the stone. The warrior’s features were set in a mask of determined anger rather than cruelty, the face of a man engaged in a bothersome chore. “He would rather be galloping across the Iron Steppe with a falcon on his wrist,” my brother went on. “Or charging lance in hand into the heart of the battle, hungry for renown and the favour of the Unseen. But here he finds no more renown than a common herdsman, and our great mission suffers for it.”
The warrior’s mount came to an abrupt halt as Kehlbrand called out to him, striding across the stone with hand raised. “Mestra-Skeltir,” the warrior said, swiftly dismounting to sink to one knee. The title hadn’t as yet been formally bestowed upon my brother by the priests, but even then it had become commonplace for the Hast to refer to him as such.
Kehlbrand ignored the kneeling warrior, instead moving to the slave and crouching to unfurl the whip from his ankle. “Are you hurt?” he asked in the southland tongue as the man gaped at him in mingled terror and mystification. “Sister!” Kehlbrand called out to me, voice rich in urgent compassion. “Fetch water!”
I did as I was bid without hesitation, accustomed by now to my brother’s liking for unexpected theatrics. Going to a nearby barrel I scooped water into a bucket and carried it to Kehlbrand’s side, watching as he used his hands to convey