The City of Ice

by K. M. McKinley

The factory whistle went and the doors of all the buildings, save the original mill, opened wide. The night shift poured out. A few muted greetings passed between the night workers and the day crew, and the occasional embrace as husbands and wives encountered one another. The whistle sounded again. Katriona followed the line of people into the factory.

  They passed a group of foremen marking names on personnel sheets as the workers shuffled through. Katriona’s name was not in the book. Her stomach curdled as they approached the desk. She kept her face low, following Tyn Lydar’s commands. Thanks to the Tyn’s glamour the foremen did not even notice them. To the workers and their overseers, the odd pair were unremarkable in every sense. “This magic I work, it is a fooling of perception, nothing else,” the Tyn had explained. “It is effective, but we must be very careful.”

  The workers trooped down a corridor and into a machine hall lit badly by grimy skylights. The sun outside made the day warm, inside it was cold. Drive shafts rumbled above the rows of machines, leather drive belts slapping and whirring. The workers headed down iron steps to their lathes and presses, but Katriona and Tyn Lydar left the line, heading not down to the production lines, but carrying along the raised path running the length of the hall, and toward stairs there. Cloaked in glamour, they went unchallenged. When the floor manager did look at them, he did so without comment. The noise increased as the workers began to engage their machines with the drive belts. Looms clacked noisily, and the throb of industry displaced all other sound.

  Katriona and Tyn Lydar headed out into an external staircase boxed into a glass and iron stairwell. They went all the way up, passing by other floors also filling up with the workforce. At the top, they crossed to the other side of the building through a storage loft. There was no one about up there, only stacks of sacking and softwood crates laden with spools of thread waiting to be taken downstairs. Opposite the stairwell a raised corridor crossed over the mill’s yard into the original mill. A hole had been cut into the stone to create a door for the bridge. Cold air blew down it unimpeded.

  They crossed over and emerged into a dormitory full of small beds.

  “This is it,” said Katriona. “The Clothing and Shoddy Orphanage.”

  “Shh!” said Tyn Lydar. “This building is listening.” Then, she added, “We must be quick. I am tiring. I cannot be away from Morthrocksey for much longer. The pain comes already.”

  Katriona took the boy by the hand. Although she knew it as a disguise, she was surprised the hand did not feel as it looked. “Very well. The children will be working. We shall go and see, and then we shall depart.”

  The dormitory had the high, sweet, stale scent of unwashed children; straw and urine. There was precious little light up there, but not so little it hid the filthy state of the bedclothes and floor. The old mill was draughty, the small windows were ill-fitting. Light shone through gaps in the wall.

  They passed through the sad rows of beds, through a crooked door, and onto dusty wooden stairs that creaked under their feet. Sacks of old rags lined the stairwell walls, waiting to be plucked apart for shoddy.

  On the floor below were the first of the children working at rough desks. Each child had a pile of rags by their desk which they mechanically ripped to threads, then put the threads into baskets. Katriona’s heart hurt to see cold, raw hands being worn away by a task that forgave neither age nor human flesh. The children worked in silence broken by hacking coughs. The windows were small by modern standards, leaving the middle desks in a gloom that would become near dark as the day wore out. The children wore clothes two repairs from rags. Most had no shoes, all were filthy. The air floated with fibres irritating to respiration. Hundreds of brown sacks full of more rags were piled in every available space.

  None of the children spoke. The small tearing noises of cloth being ripped and ripped again overlaid the distant chuntering of machinery coming from below. The floor vibrated with the power of the machines, but the stuffy, miserable atmosphere in the room drew the energy away from even that. A boy looked up at Katriona as she passed by. His face was devoid of joy, pale, dark brown rings around each eye socket as clearly as if they had been painted on. In the eyes themselves there was none of the sparkle associated with intelligent thought, let alone the vitality of a young child. His eyes were as flat and dead as those of goat, and like a goat chewing, he did not pause at his task as she passed, but carried on mechanically plucking.

  “Do not look him in the eye!” hissed the Tyn.

  Arrested by the boy’s dead gaze, Katriona could not stop herself, and she approached.

  “You. Boy?” she said.

  He blinked slowly, as if trying to recall how to speak.

  “Goodman?” he said.

  “How many hours do you work?”

  “All day, goodman,” he said in a small voice. “From dark until dark.”

  “Do you have schooling?”

  He shook his head.

  “Remove your gaze from him, before it is too late. The slipping of the glamour will startle even one so dulled in soul as this,” said Tyn Lydar, tugging her away. The boy went back to his work.

  “By the driven gods,” Katriona murmured. “He can’t be much over five years old.”

  “Do not do that again!” said the Tyn.

  On the floor below they found similar, dozens of children carding the threads produced upstairs and picking out the resultant rovings. The noise of the machines was very loud in there, the rasp of carding inaudible. It was an awful scene, children labouring to that all-consuming roar. Two older children stared blankly over the heads of their peers, keeping watch. The glamour put their thoughts elsewhere. Katriona and Tyn Lydar went unseen.

  The ground floor was the worst of all. The ancient, water-powered machinery had been hooked up to a shaft driven by an engine outside. It was the only sign of modernity. Children darted between the dangerously exposed mechanisms. Katriona was appalled, then with a flood of guilt remembered her first visit to Mothrocksey, where children as young as these were employed to pick up swarf from the ground under the lathes. Now no child under the age of twelve would find employment in her mill. Nevertheless, her fortune was tainted by the suffering of the generations gone before.

  That the children here were in far worse a state did not assuage her guilt, rather it intensified as she took in their poor condition. They were very young, and underfed, little bundles of sticks wrapped in rags, so dirty their skin was a streaky, oily grey. Unlike modern frames which could have up to fifteen hundred reels, the machines each supported only forty or so reels, and was watched over by an older child assisted by two others. Only the free labour of the children made them economical to run.

  The reels rattled like bone dice in a tin cup. The drive shafts were warped and badly greased and sent out a constant whining squeal in a way that set Katriona’s teeth on edge. The older children watched carefully, adjusting the machinery where necessary. The young took full reels away, brought long loops of new rovings to the frame. The smallest were employed to fix broken threads and recover mounds of fibres from under the machines while they were still running. The children’s hands looked so small and delicate darting into the machines to pluck out threads and balls of greasy fluff.

  “No child should have to work in these conditions,” said Katriona.

  “Hey! Hey you!” shouted a voice. The machines were so loud Katriona did not at first hear it. Only as a stout woman armed with a cosh and a braided whip came down the aisle in the middle of the machines did she notice. “Hey! Wait there. What are you doing in here?”

  “We must go now,” said Tyn Lydar.

  “I’ve seen enough,” said Katriona. She turned, and walked briskly out of the hall the way she had come, ignoring the shouts of the forewoman. The forewoman blew her whistle. Katriona and Tyn Lydar ran, their disguises flickering around them.

  The forewoman hurried after them up the stairs, up to the very top where the orphans slept.

  When she got ther
e, they were gone.

  EDUWIN GROSTIMAN, KARSAN Minister for Justice, looked from the thick document that he held in his hand, to the woman sat in front of him, and back again. He adjusted his glasses. He pursed his lips. He cleared his throat. He did all the things he usually did to put off petitioners to the Justice Ministry, but no matter which tic he employed, the damned woman would not stop burning a hole in his face with her eyes.

  He lifted the penultimate sheet of paper, gave the last a desultorily scan. Tutting, he dropped the document onto the table and leaned forward.

  “Goodlady, you cannot in all earnestness be proposing that I act upon these recommendations.”

  “I am in earnest, why would I waste my time—and yours of course—bringing this to you? Do you take me for an attention seeker, goodfellow?”

  “No goodlady.”

  In a tightly cut dress of light pink pinstripes, fashionable hat and hands gloved in lace gripping a tiny clutchbag, Katriona Kressinda-Morthrocksa appeared prim and ladylike. She was so womanly, so undoubtedly female that Grostiman could not believe the steely expression on her face. He had to look at it again and again to make sure his eyes were not deceiving him. So severe, and above all determined. Uncomfortable, he looked down at the papers again.

  “This is most improper,” he said. “The statute you cite at the beginning here, well, it is centuries old.”

  “It is,” she agreed.

  “Then you must see that it is invalid.”

  “It is not,” she insisted.

  “There are limitations on this sort of thing,” he said.

  “After giving my proposal your thorough appraisal,” she said pointedly, “you will have seen that the Little Agreement still has force. Or I should say, should still have force. The limitations in Karsan law on statutes are of custom, not of time. Custom has not changed.”

  “Customs have changed!” said Grostiman. “They have changed so much this fell by the wayside so long ago no one has even considered formally revoking it.”

  “So you deny that an employer has no duty of care to his employees?”

  “It is arguable—”

  “Have you seen the factories? The conditions?” she said forcefully.

  Grostiman rocked his head from side to side and sucked air in between his teeth. “Well, well, no—”

  “There we are then,” said Katriona. “Sign.”

  “Just wait a moment please, goodlady,” said the minister. He put the papers down. “This statute is not about employer and employee. It is about lord and serf. It dates from the time of King Justirion, four hundred years ago! The system of tenancy it describes is long gone.” He looked at the list of values attributed to chickens, goats, dracon-cattle. “Here, the tithe value of a, of a...” he peered at the document and traced out a line with his finger, “a brace of wild dreven. They have been extinct in Karsa for three centuries. And this, the wood barter chart, log for log, by species. How many forests are there left on these isles? Payment for dwelling in kind with bushels of wheat? This is of historical interest. It has nothing to do with today’s world.”

  “It is not the dwelling payment or the value of sticks that I refer to, but the expectations placed upon a lord for the care of his peasantry. The sentiment is still valid,” she said.

  He could have sworn she had not blinked once since she sat in front of him.

  “But there are no peasants in Karsa any more!” he protested. “This is not applicable to the present day!”

  “But there are lords. I am a goodlady, you a goodfellow. We both maintain workforces of the lower social orders.” Katriona gripped the wooden handle of her bag tighter. Her lips thinned. “Look again at the definition of indentured service, and I think you will see the situation is the same, only the dressing of it has changed. You are a scion of one of Karsa’s oldest houses,” said Katriona. “My own nobility, although much less venerable than yours, is of equal importance. Look at page three, the copy of the original Little Agreement, look!” she said.

  Grostiman flicked the papers over reluctantly. “There are legal requirements here for the care of villeinry, but come now, who even uses the word ‘villein’ any more? It is archaic, inapplicable!”

  “Terms are unimportant. Do we not employ workers in our factories for the larger part of the year? Yes. Do we not give payment for their service in part in accommodation, foodstuffs, and clothing? Yes. Are they free to move to another master? No.”

  “Ah!” said Grostiman, extending his forefinger. “Well, there you are wrong. Any man might leave a contract and head to another factory whenever he so desires. I really—”

  She tossed her head imperiously. “In the law, yes, in practice, no. Any person who leaves their employment is likely to be blacklisted. Can you not see? We operate a system not dissimilar to the lords of old under different names. Such a system was unjust, was it not? That was what led to the Little Agreement. Would you like to see pre-revolutionary conditions return?”

  “I cannot advocate a return to such barbaric ways, no. Never.”

  “Was it just?” she said again.

  “No,” he said through closed teeth.

  “So then. Our workers do not even have a codified set of protections such as those set out in the Little Agreement. Therefore, our system, supposedly born from an age of reason, is less just. We expect the same and give less in return.”

  “There are laws. Many laws—”

  “Here and there, this and that,” she said dismissively. “All routinely flouted, in my opinion because there is no overarching codification of the spirit of labour transaction. According to the old statues of indentured service, we are short-changing our workers. It cannot go on. It is, simply, immoral.”

  Grostiman blew out hard. He deliberately pushed away the papers. Katriona followed them across the desk. When her regard returned to his face, she glared the harder. Grostiman felt the prickle of sweat spring upon his brow. She was uncommonly fierce.

  “I realise that you have had some difficulty at your own works, owing the acts of certain agitators. Things will calm down soon, my dear goodlady, you—”

  “Do not presume to ‘my dear goodlady’ me, goodfellow!” she said hotly. “This is not merely a question of agitation. Can you not see? The Labour Associations operate throughout our factories. What happened at the Morthrocksey Mill will happen everywhere if we do not pre-empt the workers’ demands. I would say that this is not a matter of history, but one of current morality. It is true that I am motivated in part by higher concerns, however, the salient fact is that if we do not act then we shall all lose a great deal of money. Do you understand? You, you have many business concerns and investments in your own family.”

  “Yes, our investments are varied.”

  “And you are not worried about unrest in the workforce?”

  “Yes. Very well, I will hear you out. What do you propose?” Grostiman laced his fingers over his round belly. He had the awkward feeling he was being talked into something that he would rather not be talked into. He resolved to stand firm.

  “The old statutes allow for the formation of an inspectorate to enforce the rights of the villeinry, should they not be lived up to.”

  “And you want me to say that will be fine? Really?” He sat forward. “Have you taken leave of your senses, goodlady?”

  “I have not, goodfellow. I want you to take a modified version of the Little Agreement before parliament. I want you to push it into law.”

  “I cannot authorise such a thing! At the very least, before a proposal of this magnitude could be heard, Prince Alfra would have to be consulted. Any unilateral move on your—on my— part would appear to be a blatant attempt to disrupt the business of my competitors. It is an abuse of power! There would be uproar!”

  “In parliament. Three hundred well fed men may find their production costs increase,” she looked at his gut. Grostiman adjusted his waistcoat self-consciously. “The alternative is tens of thousands of workers riotin
g on the streets. I have seen the damage that can do. Colonel Alanrys’s ridiculously brutal suppression of the protests at my mill—”

  “They burned down several of your buildings!” said Grostiman. “That is civil disobedience of the grossest form, not a protest!”

  “So killing one hundred and twelve of my workers was the appropriate response?” she said.

  “No, no, Alanrys overreacted. He has been disciplined.”

  “Hardly!” she snorted.

  “The truth is that you only have yourself to blame, your favouring of the Tyn—”

  She shut him up with an scandalised shout. “I did not ‘favour’ the Tyn. It was brought to my attention that they live like slaves. Shameful! Outright slavery is illegal in the Hundred—”

  “For people, not Tyn.”

  “How are they different?” she countered. “Listen to me. Since I commenced work on the very modest modifications to their accommodation they requested, they are happier. They work harder. My human workers responded so poorly because they, too, exist in the most diabolical of circumstances, of which I was, I’m ashamed to say, wilfully ignorant,” she jabbed her finger into the table. Grostiman raised his eyebrows at it. “I was so absorbed in bettering my own position, I did not see the suffering that enabled my ambition. I am a woman...”

  Could have fooled me, thought Grostiman. More like a she-dracon with a threatened nest.

  “... and I thought myself hard done by. I forgot that I am a goodlady, of high family, and with a great deal of money. The difficulty I have endured in determining my own course is as nothing to the daily struggle the people whom I employ must endure. Your own course is rather simpler to decide upon. Either sign the bill. Take it to parliament. Push it through—”

  “Impossible,” he said, throwing up his hands.

  “—or I and like-minded industrialists shall lead the way in forcing change from beneath. I am not alone in being appalled. There is a stark moral choice before us. If I gather enough supporters, get them to alter our business practises, then it shall destabilise the whole structure of modern industry. And I will openly agitate for change in the factories of other businesses who do not agree. The Labour Associations are poorly funded and yet still they do good work. Imagine how much they could accomplish with real money behind them.”