The Claim

1-12-2015, beginning of Chapter 4

Ozier’s disappearance started as a rumor in the Last Spike; Fat Mehur Tekerem, voluble from another night’s drinking on his posse-man’s windfall, observed to young Peshet Chatha that he hadn’t seen the young master around in several days, and that was the end of any secrecy that the Amen-Enkh family might have been attempting. The foremen of the plantation took to drinking in shifts at the Last Spike, some spending a bit more freely than they were accustomed to, all chilling any conversation on the topic of Ozier Amen-Enkh’s whereabouts by means of silence and cold iron stares. Of course, there were men enough in Metu village who did not answer to an Amen-Enkh foreman, and these men freely ignored the barriers around the subject; but the men they looked to for intelligence did answer to Amen-Enkh foremen, rendering the conversations both one-sided and repetitious. 

Esker, Kem, and Inber did meet once to discuss it, but little came of the meeting. Kem guessed that Ozier had gone to Heru City for a vacation from the work of learning how to manage the plantation. “He’s years behind, after all,” he said. “Any good patriarch would have been grooming his heir continuously since he was old enough to talk.”

“What would you know about it?” Esker asked, genuinely interested in the answer.

“City’s not where he’d go,” said Inber, before Kem could answer. “He loved the ice. Always got orders to come back to Tenoc and use his glamer on the population, always found ways to get back out into the wide open. He’s out on the salt if he’s anywhere.”

“Do we know he’s anywhere?” said Kem.

Inber shrugged. “He ain’t all that easy to kill. And he’s the size of a house—it’d take a week to dig a grave for him, and you’d see it from a mile off. Or else the vultures would build a damn city on his bones.”

Kem laughed in appreciation. Esker figured the joking was just Inber’s way of distracting himself from the same worries Kem and Esker shared.

#

The demand for posse work grew quickly, more than Esker had ever seen it do when he had been a child. Rather little of the work came from Sheriff Poorem, though. Much more of it was from towns up the line, more populous than Metu and more divided on the Hushing question, where new men were pouring in—not family men either, and not settled bachelors, but young unlettered men who arrived flush with cash, which they gladly spent on the things young men spend cash on, and then engaged in desperate behavior when they were in want of the sort of work they could do. “They stimulate the economy greatly,” Kem said over dinner at the Sepherene household, “for when they fail to find work, they perpetrate criminalities, which forces the aggrieved parties to spend money on repair and moves the territorial authority to recruit posses and deputies to capture them. Why, a sufficiently altruistic malcontent can create a week’s employment for ten or a dozen of his friends!”

“It is an ugly business,” said Qeb. “I think it may even backfire on the Ropemakers—they have abandoned these men, after all. At an age where they should be mastering a trade, to uproot their lives in the hopes of influencing some election—”

“All great causes ask for sacrifice,” said Kem. “Do they not? And all victorious causes get it. A full census will strengthen our case for prefectural status, and a good infusion of right-thinking men will make sure the vote on the Hushing question comes out right.”

Iseret stood and began to clear the dishes; Esker briefly rested a hand on her bicep. Qeb raised an eyebrow at Kem. “I suppose I’ll grant that latter point,” he said, “if only by tautology. But how much criminality and waste is that vote worth to a Ropemaker? I mean, to one in Qarna, where these right-thinking young souls all seem to come from, I suppose it hardly seems a cost—”