Nearly seven years ago, a stranger who had yet to be named Tengu passed through the city of Yarkot on her way to Haven. She had stayed only an afternoon, to talk to people about the state of the wastes and what Haven was like.

A long time ago, Yarkot had been called Security. A grand and towering city, almost completely empty. Of the three shining cities across the wastes, Security was supposed to be a bastion against some threat to the east that had been gone so long that no one remembered what it had been.

Security had been a generally more successful city than either Haven or Journey. More people had moved there, and more people had stayed there. Though most of the towers that had once stood within the heavy walls were gone now, three of them remained.

When Tengu passed through Yarkot the first time, it had been home to close to four thousand people.

The city had come to be called Yarkot during the years it had been officially part of Narmen, about fifty years before Tengu arrived. Though it was technically independent again, the name had stayed, along with a close relationship with Narmen.

The strange woman who would come to be called Tengu visited Yarkot about as regularly as she visited Journey, in the early days. She didn’t become a recognisable part of the city, though. Yarkot’s merchants were less interested in buying the shoddy gear she collected in the wastes, though there was a market for her dried meat.

As she had done in Journey, Tengu hung around the caravanserai in Yarkot from time to time, employing the same strategy. Her name only started to spread when caravans from Altok and Kzara started to arrive glittering with replicas of her mask.

Aside from being much bigger than Journey or Haven, Yarkot was in much better company. Though the raiders in the wastes were an occasional nuisance to caravans headed north to Oszrath, they weren’t anything like the problem they were on the western side of the wastes.

Yarkot was connected very directly to Narmen, of course, and though it had never changed the policy that slavery was not allowed within its walls, it had traded with Oszrath even when they still practiced slavery.

As a result of the war between Oszrath and the Lord’s House, Narmen and Yarkot had decided they would no longer trade with nations that employed slavery, and that had been enough to finally push Oszrath to outlaw slavery itself.

Is there some metric by which different types of slavery can be compared? If there is, Wasolan would certainly be the worst offender in the region. Most likely, Kzara would come out as least offensive, but Oszrath would have been close behind.

Oszrath had been more honest than Kzara, at least. It had called its indentured servitude slavery. And even when it had outlawed slavery, most of the systems had persisted.

In Oszrath, almost all crimes were punishable exclusively by fine. Only murder carried an punishment of incarceration. Mostly, these fines were to be paid to the aggrieved party, whether that be someone who’s house or business had been vandalised, or even the family of someone who had been killed. In the case of public property, the fine was paid to the state.

If the offending party was unable to pay the fine, which was not particularly uncommon, they would have been indentured, either to the aggrieved party or to the state, depending on circumstances. Whoever held the contract of indenture was responsible for housing and feeding the offender, but was still required to pay them for whatever work they did.

When Oszrath had called this system slavery, all wages beyond food and board went toward paying off the offender’s debt. Once it was paid off, they were free. After the abolition of slavery, only thirty per cent of their wage went toward their debt, and they had to sort out their own food and board.

As a result, people were bound by indenture contracts for far longer than they had once been.

Before the change of rules, the contract could be bought for the cost of the remainder, plus a few additional fees. Removing this function was central to Oszrath redefining the system as ‘no longer slavery’.

It did mean that the previously common practice of families and friends getting together the money to buy out your contract was now impossible. But these are the sacrifices we make for progress.

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Yarkot and Narmen weren’t happy about the state of things in Oszrath, but technically slavery had been abolished and, more importantly, so had the slave trade in the region.

It could be argued that Oszrath’s previous practice of buying slaves and then contracting them to indenture was the best chance most of them would have gotten to get out of slavery. But, again, the price of progress.

That metric is very difficult to pin down, isn’t it?

An important detail of the war between Oszrath and Narmen was that Oszrath had lost, quite badly. They had lost and given nearly a third of their claimed territory to the Lord’s House in the peace agreement.

Where once the Lord’s House’s land had been basically rectangular from somewhere near the northern edge of the wastes heading north, it was now an east leaning parallelogram. The Lord’s House had gifted very nearly as much land as they’d won in the war to Ovek, to pay back the massive debt they had accrued during the war.

So, despite the raiders and slavers that had infested the wastes during the war, Yarkot, Narmen and Oszrath had been largely unconcerned with the unviability of trade with Kzara. They all three appreciated the wastes being opened back up, but they had been doing more than well enough trading amongst themselves.

As Haven had grown over the last seven-odd years, Tengu had visited Yarkot less and less. Occasionally she would pass through on some expedition out east beyond Narmen, but there was closer, better pickings to the southeast of Haven between Wasolan and Narmen.

Unlike in Journey, where Tengu and Haven’s reputations had grown even when Tengu didn’t visit as often, in Yarkot she had been largely forgotten by the time caravans rattling with replicas of her face started to come through the wastes again.

Even with the backing of Altok and Kzara, the governing council of Yarkot wasn’t interested in an alliance with Haven. The closest they were willing to get was some formalised trade agreements.

Agave, prickly pear, and rubber were traded for coffee, flour, and cotton on a regular, set schedule. The diplomatic mission from Haven didn’t even bother going to Oszrath.

Yarkot was neither at war with, nor threatened by, the Lord’s House, as Altok had been threatened and Kzara had been at war with Wasolan. They way the governing council saw it, a formal alliance with Haven could only be a problem in the long run.

Oszrath’s peace agreement with the Lord’s House would last another thirty-eight years. The only way the Church could threaten Oszrath was by going through both Oszrath and Narmen first.

There was no need for an alliance.

‘It poses a conundrum,’ Tengu had said, as the diplomatic party left Yarkot.

‘We would have to let them take a lot of the wastes before they reached here,’ Andros had said. ‘If they come for us, why would they bother?’

‘The House’s beliefs mean that they don’t have a sustainable source of slaves,’ Ora had pointed out. ‘They’ll back out of that contract eventually.’

‘Not soon enough, I expect,’ Weir had said.

And so Yarkot had continued about its business.

The representatives from Narmen, who had been involved in the negotiations, had given the situation more thought.

The trouble with Yarkot, as it was well known in a Narmen, was that it had been successful. Security had survived and whatever threat it had faced was lost to memory. Those three magnificent towers had been inhabited continuously going on four hundred years.

Narmen hadn’t conquered Security. It had, through agreement, grown up around it and, eventually, Security had agreed to become part of Narmen. Narmen had imposed no change on Security, and the new name had been chosen after extensive public discussion to celebrate the growth of this country they were all a part of.

Yarkot had been part of Narmen for sixteen years. For all of those sixteen years, a campaign to re-take independence had grown among the same people who had voted to celebrate their mutual dependence.

The campaign had started when Narmen instituted a new set of building safety regulations. The towers wouldn’t have been demolished, they wouldn’t have even been emptied. They would have needed to be lightly renovated to conform with higher standards of safety.

The thing that struck anyone who remembered Yarkot’s split from Narmen as particularly odd, was that the towers were eventually renovated. It took longer than most renovations within Narmen, and they were the only buildings in Yarkot that needed to be renovated.

Accidents and breakages had never been a common occurrence in the towers, but they had happened from time to time before the renovations. In the sixty-six years since the renovations, there had been no reoccurrences.

And yet, it had been enough for the people of Yarkot, who’s ways were clearly successful, to start lobbying to leave Narmen.

There had been no fighting, no resistance movement. Eventually, the campaign had won enough popularity that the governing council agreed to hold a referendum. The majority had voted to leave Narmen. And now they were independent, and still down about three thousand people, who had left to stay in Narmen after the vote.

Yarkot was stuck in its ways, was the observation that people in Narmen made, when they were being polite.

Narmen couldn’t have been too much better. No one invited the diplomatic party back, after all.