The First Ration

The iron siphon of the Nyak Gorge did not leak sweet water; it leaked tallow grease and green verdigris.

István stood on the shuddering brake-deck of Gábor’s lead wagon, his boots braced wide against the hickory foot-bar. Below them, where the blinding white salt flats narrowed into a razor-backed trench of red shale, four ten-inch copper conduits plunged down the western canyon wall like frozen serpents. They were ancient conduits, hammered from raw plate and riveted before the Basin dried, carrying mineral brine from the high limestone rim down to the industrial evaporation pans three miles south. The joints groaned under four hundred pounds of hydrostatic head, vibrating the dry bedrock beneath the wagon wheels.

The air in the throat of the cleft smelled of sulfur, parched clay, and the sour reek of scorched ox-hooves.

"Look at the timber staging," Gábor muttered, not shifting his grip on the six-reined steering bar. The old caravan master sat wedged between the iron brake-lever and the wooden bench, his stiff left knee braced against the iron casing. "No green cloth. The municipal wardens are gone."

István lifted his gaze to the stone gatehouse spanning the narrowest point of the cleft.

The faded green pennants of the Basin Free Transit League had been chopped down, their cedar flagstaffs splintered. In their place, wired directly to the iron crenellations, hung two oblong sheets of boiler plate painted with the black coiling hydra of the Révész Syndicate. Beneath the iron crests, four heavy torsion ballistas sat on timber turntables, their sinew skeins wound taut, their square steel quarrel-heads leveled directly down the wagon track.

"When did they take the gate?" István asked.

"Two days ago, maybe three," Gábor spat a dark stream of fermented cactus juice over the cab rail. The liquid sizzled as it hit the glowing bronze hub of the forward wheel. "Mistress Vica didn't waste an hour after the Halász well went down. The Free League had thirty boys here collecting the half-groschen road tax. Syndicate probably gave them twenty heartbeats to surrender the keys, then strung the stubborn ones from the brine trestles."

István studied the choke-point. Ten paces before the iron portcullis, a zigzag barrier of spiked mesquite logs narrowed the road to eight feet of loose gravel. Five heavy freight rigs—flat-bellied ore haulers from the eastern sulfur pits—sat stalled in the heat, their drivers crouching in the narrow strips of shade beneath the axles. On the stone catwalks above, twelve men in bitumen-quilted jerkins paced with cocked arbalests resting across their forearms.

A young guard in a red leather gorget stood atop an upturned brine barrel, banging an iron ladle against a bronze measure.

"Three pints per rig!" the guard bawled down the line, his voice echoing flatly off the sandstone cliffs. "Three pints of certified distillate, or twenty pounds of dry white lump per draft beast! No municipal script! Syndicate weight, Syndicate measure! Turn your teams or spill your vats!"

Gábor’s thick jaw hardened. "Three pints a rig. The bastards. That is double the summer rate, and the Halász dust hasn't even settled across the flats."

"They don't want the salt," István said. "They want the water back in their own stills. If you pay in raw brine, they discount the volume by half and charge you six groschen for the fuel to boil it."

"Aye," Gábor growled. "And what happens when those dogs stick an iron probe into the back of that dead crawler we're towing?"

István stepped off the moving brake-deck. His boots hit the moving gravel with a muffled crunch, and he jogged back along the flank of Gábor’s six heavy freight wagons.

The six-wheel crawler rode twenty paces behind the last salt rig, hitched to Gábor’s rear axle by a heavy iron bridle. Its forward suspension dragged low in the dirt where the steering knuckles had sheared, throwing up a continuous spray of yellow alkali. Through the narrow inspection slit in the rear crew cabin, István saw the faint silhouette of Zoltán’s head.

István grabbed the side rung, climbed the iron ladder, and shoved the heavy oak bolt back.

The heat inside the iron cabin was suffocating. It smelled of stale blood, rancid lard, and the sharp vinegar István had used to wash Zoltán’s punctured chest. The young scholar sat curled on the wooden floorboards, his back propped against the water-tank bulkhead, clutching a bundle of salt-scoured canvas to his ribs. His skin had turned the color of dry dough, and his lips were split into raw red trenches. The oiled sheepskin flutter valve taped over his flank rose and fell with each shallow breath, clicking softly whenever he drew air into his punctured chest.

"Where... where are we?" Zoltán whispered, his voice dry and trembling. "The wagons stopped."

"Keep your head down," István said. He pulled a grease-blackened stone jar of axle tallow and a handful of red shale grit from the tool bin. "Strip your robe."

Zoltán looked down at his salt-stained tunic, his fingers tightening on the dyed blue hem. "My master's coat? It is the only—"

István caught the neckband and ripped it downward with a sharp jerk. The fine blue wool tore away from the seam in a single ragged strip.

"István!" Zoltán gasped, his hand flying to his bandaged ribs, his eyes wide with shock.

"If an enforcer sees blue academy piping on your back, he will drive a sounding-rod through your good lung before he asks your name," István said. He took Zoltán by the chin with a grip like iron tongs, holding the young man’s skull still while he smeared a fistful of black grease and red shale dust across his brow, down the bridge of his nose, and into the hollows beneath his eyes. "You are an apprentice grease-boy from the Sós-Bed panning ditches. You caught the lung-rot two seasons ago from the caustic pits. You do not speak. You do not look an overseer in the eye. If someone barks at you, you cough into the gravel and hold out your rag."

Zoltán winced as the rough mineral grit scratched his sunburned skin, but he did not resist. The panic in his eyes settled into a cold, hollow dread. "The... the drawings? The master plates?"

"Under my arm guard," István answered, tapping the stiff rawhide sleeve on his left forearm. The master copper-leaf schematic was rolled tight inside the leather, bound against his flesh beneath three layers of waxed twine. "If they find the copper on me, I hang. If they find it on you, they put us both in the boiling pans. Stay flat on the planks."

A harsh iron bell clanged from the gatehouse ahead. Gábor’s lead wagon had reached the mesquite barrier.

István pushed Zoltán down onto the floor, tossed a coarse horse-blanket over his legs to hide the bandage on his flank, and stepped out onto the ladder. He slammed the hatch shut, slid the bolt home, and walked briskly up the convoy line.

At the toll gate, the dispute had turned vicious.

Two Syndicate enforcers in iron-plated brigandines stood over a man kneeling in the dust. The kneeling man wore the shredded, sun-bleached green vest of a Free League bailiff. His hands were lashed behind his back with barbed wire, his bare knees ground into the sharp shale chips. His mouth was swollen shut, caked with dry salt, his tongue protruding black and cracked between his teeth.

Beside the captive sat an iron evaporation dish, bone-dry and white-rimmed under the direct glare of the sun.

A tall, broad-shouldered man leaned against the stone gatepost, scraping the grime from his thumbnail with the tip of a curved skinning knife. He had the thick, scarred ears of a pit fighter and the loose, unhurried posture of an overseer who owned the road. A brass medallion—a three-headed hydra coiled around a distillation condenser—was pinned to his heavy leather chest-piece.

"Captain Farkas," Gábor called down from the lead rig, his hands resting open and visible on the brake-bar. "You took the high seat early this season."

The man with the skinning blade looked up. His eyes were small, pale gray, and cold as river slate.

"Gábor," Farkas said, his voice a low, gravelly drone. "I wondered if you’d crawl out of the south before the wash turned to poison. We heard Halász went down into the dark."

"Went down completely," Gábor said. "The lower limestone shelf sheared along the fault. Three hundred fathoms of sweet water drained into the bottom sulfur fire in half an hour. We took what dry salt we had in the storehouses and headed north before the water-thieves started slitting throats for canteen bottoms."

Farkas stepped away from the gatepost, walking slowly toward Gábor’s forward team. His iron-shod boots rang against the red bedrock. "That makes five wagons of coarse rock, one wagon of fine flake, and a broken rig dragging behind your tail."

"Six wagons of salt," Gábor said smoothly. "The crawler in tow is scrap salvage. Drive-axle shattered two leagues north of the flats. Belonged to an oil merchant out of Sós-Bed."

Farkas stopped beside the kneeling bailiff. Without looking down, he placed the heavy heel of his boot against the nape of the captive’s neck and bore down until the man’s face pressed flat into the shale. The bailiff let out a thin, bubbling wheeze, his fingernails clawing uselessly at the stones.

"New tariff, Gábor," Farkas said, looking across the convoy. "Syndicate charter. Since the Free League failed to secure the waterheads against sabotage, Mistress Vica has assumed direct authority over all transit gates between here and Vidor. That is seven rigs at three pints a rig. That comes to twenty-one pints of clear distillate, or sixty pounds of pure white flake."

Gábor gave a short, dry bark of laughter, though his knuckles remained white on the wood. "Twenty-one pints? Farkas, I haul rock salt, not morning dew. If I had twenty-one pints of clear water, I’d buy an orchard in the northern hills and hire you to shoe my donkeys. Besides, your Syndicate well-water tastes of boiled lye and dead bailiff. I have three pints of cloudy brine per wagon in the slosh-tanks, and two tubs of cured tallow for the kingpins."

"Then you leave two wagons here," Farkas replied. "The Syndicate can always use coarse grade for the refining beds."