The Gembound: The Price of Keeping Chapter 35: Volume 2: Chapter 33 — Processing the Prisoners

Read chapter 35 of The Gembound: The Price of Keeping by Taliorn on NovelPedia.

Volume 2: Chapter 33 — Processing the Prisoners Morning arrived with the sound of keys. “Eliza?” Yara didn’t lift her head from the ledger. “Thirty-five,” Eliza said. “Sorted by hazard. Anchors tagged from yesterday’s collections.” She tipped her chin toward three long tables: trays of objects wrapped in cloth and chalked with names. “Nobles, mages, would-be resistance.” “Different leashes,” Yara said. The Gem warmed against her sternum, leaning closer. Choose uses, not names. Choose costs. She ignored it. “Bring five,” Yara said. “We’ll move in lots. Lots of five.” Eliza signaled. Guards hauled the first batch in a scholar with ink ground into his fingernails, a stonemason with lime on his boots, a woman in a merchant’s coat that fit too well, a hedge-witch with ash at her cuffs, and a narrow-eyed talker who’d taught his mouth to move without showing teeth. Runners set five trays in a row: a brass level rubbed ghost-smooth; a walnut tally-board notched wrong on the back; a blue-striped seed belt softened to someone’s waist; a bag of gold; an oak-handled stamp with a brass face. Yara stood where the light from the high windows made the floor honest. “You will serve the city,” she said. “How you serve depends on what you are and what you can give.” She spoke to the stonemason first. “What can you build?” “Foundations,” he said, hoarse. “Retaining. If you have a block and men who won’t panic.” “Men who don’t panic are scarce.” Yara reached out. The Gem hummed. Rebuild. Hold water. He swallowed. “My father’s level,” he said, as if telling the room why it hurt. “Hold it,” Yara told him. The Gem rose within her like a tide and plunged outward. The level didn’t melt so much as lose the idea of being itself. Grain bloomed in the metal like frost seen backward; edges slumped; numbers fled. The plate folded in on a bright seam and collapsed into a single dense bead that quivered on the pin before vanishing under her hand. The stonemason arched. Not graceful. A rope snapped through his spine. Veins stood blue along his throat; his jaw locked. The room heard bones answer bones. His breath made a torn, wet sound. For a moment, his hands clawed at the empty air as if he could catch the piece of himself that had just been spent. Useful, the Gem purred, a cat with blood at its whiskers. “You’ll run crews for sluice and cisterns,” Yara said. “You won’t panic. You’ll make sure others don’t.” He nodded once, as if the motion belonged to a machine he trusted. “The scholar,” Yara said. He stared at his tally board like a man being asked to drown a brother. He lifted it anyway. Yara pressed her palm over the splintered walnut board. Light threaded along the chalk scars and sank. Wood blackened without heat, dried into silk-thin sheets that curled, powdered, and were drawn inward along her fingers. The board went away the way thinking does when sleep wins abruptly, helplessly. He convulsed in smaller hits than the mason: a staccato of pain, ribs counting against the air. His eyes fluttered, rolled, fixed again. The muscles at his temples jumped as if something had been rewired too tightly and then learned slack. “Numbers keep bread in lines.” Yara’s voice was steadier than her pulse. “You keep the lists that keep us alive. The city will move at your command.” The hedge-witch stood with her mouth thin as thread. Yara took the seed belt from the tray. “This will hurt,” Yara said. “It hurts more when the anchor knows you well.” “It knows me,” the witch whispered, and fastened the belt around her middle. Yara pressed her hand to the knot. The canvas sighed; dye fled its stripe; the belt unraveled into lint that lifted and whirled like chaff in an invisible draft and then poured into the witch through Yara’s palm. The woman folded forward with a dry sob, knuckles thudding the table. Her breath hitched and hitched again; when she straightened, tears brightened the ash at her lashes. “Growers eat first,” Yara said. “Three boys and a fence. Turn it into a