Chapter 38:
Stoneset Quinter was all the way south and then to the west. It took Sukren three days of travel to get there from Woodheart Quinter, mostly because he took it as slowly as possible. Forest travel was not easy; hollow-trees hemmed in the villages of Woodheart Quinter. And after finally escaping the so-called wooden heart of the bio-dome, Sukren had to traverse Industrilia Quinter. He was stopped at least six times by the mobile checkpoint units that circled around the factories. Each time he endured vigorous questioning, despite his travel pass. What’s your business? Why are you going to Stoneset Quinter?
Vegetable Post #6 sent me, Sukren would reply. We had a contract with a Xhota stall, but the merchant breached, and didn’t pay us what she said she would. I’m going there to collect what she owes us.
Usually the Eenta soldier interrogating him would snort in response. Sukren found such responses annoying, although he appreciated what the soldier was trying to communicate. When a Chenta village breached a contract with a Xhota stall, the merchant in charge of the stall would hire Eenta soldiers to collect on the village. When a Xhota merchant was the breacher, sometimes the Chenta would try to hire Eenta soldiers, too, but more often than not they would send one of their own to reason with the merchant. Either way, it worked only sometimes. Xhota stalls pooled together their credits to buy off any Eenta soldiers harassing them, and village serfs were rarely able to persuade a merchant of anything.
That didn’t stop the Chenta villages from trying though. Every once in a while a village would manage to push a Xhota merchant into paying damages. Every other time a village would manage to petition its patron to apply pressure on the Xhota merchant’s representative. And if a Xhota stall breached too often, word would get around and the Chenta villages as a whole would refuse to trade with it. There were ways the Chenta could protect themselves, in other words, but they didn’t always work, and the indignities suffered in between successful efforts were humiliating and painful.
By the end of the third day, Sukren was tired of being laughed at by Eenta soldiers, and eager to leave Industrilia Quinter behind him. He crossed the last scrub of hollow-trees that marked the boundary between Industrilia and Stoneset, then stopped, and shaded his eyes against the sun shining brilliantly through the western part of the dome. Before him lay Stoneset Quinter – the Xhota urb – rows and rows of huts stretching out. Sukren looked at the one nearest him. Like all Xhota huts, it was built on posts, its ground floor stuffed with goods and open to the bustle of the market.
Sukren stepped into the first row. Immediately he jumped out of the way of a cart being rolled towards him, and nearly collided with a serf carrying a bale of cloth on his head. Two twin-painted faces came chattering by, Eenta celebrating the Greenhouse Festival. Avoiding them, Sukren pushed through a group of grim-faced women all wearing knapsacks of corn on their backs and babies on their fronts. Now he was in the second row of stalls. Merchants called out to the bystanders walking to and fro beside him. “GET YOUR FRESH MILKSKIN RIGHT HERE, GROWN IN VAT POST #3! CULTURED MIAPLANT EGG – WITH WATER CHEESES!”
After a diurnal of traveling by himself through lonely woods and outside of canal-run factories, Sukren found all the noise a little overwhelming. That was the Xhota urb for you, though. That was Stoneset Quinter in general, actually. Unlike serfs in the other four quinters, the Xhota didn’t live in greenhouse villages. They lived in an urb, a series of curved rows of stalls, rows that rippled outward from Stoneset Castle all the way to the shelterbelt. Every good made in the bio-dome, whether grown in a village or manufactured in a factory, made its way to the Xhota urb. Merchants would buy them, then re-sell them to other villages and to the castles. It was a one-stop marketplace for the entire bio-dome.
Sukren managed to dodge and shift his way through the crowds to the fifth row of the urb. He went westwards, towards the sun, until he reached the stall he was looking for. A woman about his age peered through half-drawn curtains. “What do you want?” she asked.
“I’m looking for Fatime.”
“That’s me,” she replied. “What do you want?”
“Can I come in?”
Fatime seemed reluctant. Sukren decided not to wait around for her to decide to reject him and pushed his way through the curtains into the stall. This wasn’t his only mission. He also had to go to the sixth row and find a merchant named Yexin and pass on a message to him. At the end of the full fifth day, exit by the eastmost column, regardless. What it meant Sukren had no idea, but it would be passed down a chain of agents until it reached someone who did understand it, whose life it would probably save.
Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.
Inside the stall there was barely enough room to stand, let alone sit. Crates, piled all the way up to the ceiling, filled it. Sukren could smell the fresh vegetables inside them: eggplant, lettuce, tomato. “You’re in breach,” Sukren said, getting straight to the point. “You owe two more payments to Vegetable Post #6.”
“You’re a village serf?” Fatime looked skeptical. “Show me your papers.” She pointed at Sukren’s satchel, clearly expecting him to open it and give her his booklet.
“You’re not a soldier and I’m not at a checkpoint,” Sukren replied. He didn’t want Fatime to derail the conversation. He was wearing a new village suit, one that fit him, thank Sarana, so there was no reason for Fatime to suspect Sukren of being anything other than a village serf. “Pay up.”
“You’re a little more aggressive than the other Chenta they usually send,” Fatime replied.
“Do you have a habit of breaching on Chenta villages?” Sukren shot back. “That’s good to know. Maybe you need to be blacklisted.”
At that, Fatime hesitated. She took a tiny step back so that she was practically leaning against one of the stacked crates. “I wasn’t able to get as good of a price on a sale I was counting on,” she admitted. “I don’t have the credits to finish paying Vegetable Post #6.”
That made no sense. Sukren didn’t know a ton about how Xhota political organization worked, but he knew that several stalls, sometimes even a whole row of fifty stalls, would form a collective, and then elect from their ranks a representative to advocate for them. One of the responsibilities of that representative was also to pool the resources of her stalls in order to insure against any breaches made by individual stalls within the collective. Sure, the pooled credits were mostly used to pay off Eenta soldiers, but if Sukren pressed enough, maybe they’d be given to Sukren instead.
“Ask your representative,” Sukren replied.
Fatime’s eyes narrowed. “You sure know a lot for a village serf. And your castle serf pidgin isn’t bad, either.”
For the first time, Sukren began wondering whether he was playing his role wrong. He’d assumed he was acting like any village serf would, but Fatime’s consistent negative reaction was giving him some doubts. Or was Fatime simply messing with him, trying to intimidate him?
Sukren decided to take the risk. “Unless you want me to go to your representative?”
“No,” Fatime snapped. “Come… come back tomorrow morning. I’ll have the payments then.”
“Good.” Without waiting for a response, Sukren pulled the curtain aside and stepped back out into the bustle and hustle of the row. That had gone well. Or so Sukren hoped. He’d know tomorrow morning. For now, Sukren would put Fatime out of his mind, and focus on part two of his mission, finding Yexin.
It took him a while. After wandering around in the sun for over an hour, Sukren was glad when Yexin welcomed him into his stall with a water bulb. “Give me a minute, just a minute to finish this sale,” he said. His wrinkled face was smiling even as he hobbled, back bent, to his customer. Surrounded by rugs, mats and pieces of cloth, Sukren watched as Yexin bartered with a young short-haired woman dressed in strange, skin-like clothing, the likes of which Sukren had never seen before. They seemed to be haggling over a length of fur at the woman’s feet.
After a few minutes, the deal was done. Yexin came to greet Sukren again, rubbing his hands together. “Fingers are always cold,” he said.
“I can take a look for you,” Sukren offered.
Yexin gave a delighted cackle. “You’re a doctor-priest?”
For a second Sukren panicked, then he remembered, of course, Yexin was one of Lady Nari’s agents. Accustomed to disguises, he wouldn’t take Sukren’s village suit as a definitive sign of his identification. “Yes, I am,” Sukren replied with a smile. It was nice to meet someone friendly, for once. He glanced at the young woman stuffing a rolled-up rug into an already full back-carrier. She gave Yexin a smile, then re-joined the crowd outside the stall.
“Who was that?” Sukren asked.
Yexin gestured him forward to sit on a thick carpet in the middle of the floor. “She’s one of the Cursed. They come here to trade. That fur she gave me, it came from an animal they hunted down outside the bio-dome, if you can believe it.”
The Cursed? Sukren had read about them but had never seen one before. They were the descendants of the mutineers, forced to live since the Crash Landing in the buffer zone between the shelterbelt that surrounded the bio-dome proper, and the edge of the bio-dome. He hadn’t known they came to trade with the Xhota.
“Let me see your hands,” Sukren said. Yexin held them out. The serf’s fingers were discolored, mottled white and blue.
“When did you start to notice –” Sukren began. Then he felt a shadow blocking the sun behind him.
“Sukren Kanari.”
Sukren shot to his feet at the sound of his patron name. He almost turned to face the man calling him, but Yexin stopped him.
“He’s from Lady Ki,” Yexin hissed. “I know him. Run. Now.”
Sukren dove to the side, hoping to get lost in the crowd. His satchel with his false papers and medicine kit was yanked from his grasp. Sukren let it go. He weaved through a tangle of arms and limbs, cursing himself as he went along. He should have given Yexin the message right away, then moved on to the safe house at which he was supposed to wait for Mayah. How could he have let a friendly face lull him into a false sense of peace? Stupid, stupid!
Nobody seemed to be following him, at least. But Sukren couldn’t be sure if that meant Yexin had managed to stall Lady Ki’s agent or if it meant the agent was successfully evading Sukren’s senses. Either way, Sukren knew better than to return to Yexin. Or even Fatime tomorrow. For all Sukren knew, Fatime had reported him to someone, maybe even to Lady Ki’s agents.
Feeling frustrated with himself, Sukren spent the entire day wandering around the urb, ducking this way and that, until he was certain nobody was on his trail. Only then did he finally make his way to the safe house.