Dirty, broken, their clothes churned to rags, stinking of ammonia and blood and shit, a hundred thousand corpses stumbled out of the mines.

Pyromancers in brilliant white robes moved among the dead, setting on fire the old, the deformed, and the too young to walk on their own. Bursts of blue fire charred their bodies within seconds, and wind from the ruined city broke them to ash.

The Maestros sat in soft couches, drinking chilled wine. Alchemists huddled behind them, gesturing at the oncoming bodies, debating the finer merits of the harvest. Finley’s booming laugh rose and fell like punctuation, and every time he did so his entourage of aides and apprentices and secretaries and clowns laughed with him.

A pyro approached the party. He set down his cumbersome harness, took off his mask, patted down his robes, dug around in his pockets and came up empty. He looked around and saw Sam looking at him.

He sauntered over. If there lived a more handsome man, Sam did not know them. His jawline could have been chiseled from slate, his eyes two abyssal pools. There was not a drop of sweat on his face. He smiled, and Sam felt herself smiling back.

‘Might you have –’                                    

Sam tossed it at him. The flask of rubbing alcohol was still full, seeing that she had done nothing but sit and watch.

‘Thank you kindly.’

He drenched himself. Every expose inch of skin was rubbed thrice over with vigorous attention. Up close, his white robe did not seem so white after all, soiled with ash and dirt and brownish smears that could have been anything. Blood maybe, or brains, or dried vomit.

‘I’m Jack,’ the pyro said as he worked on his neck. ‘Second Progenitor of the Guild of Combustion, Senior Coordinator of Field Team One, and Head Liaison with the House of the Golden Fleece.’

‘I’m Sam.’

‘It’s the smell,’ he explained helpfully. ‘The dead have loose bowels. My catalyst was formulated to neutralize odor but on this Floor it has severely underperformed.’ He sniffed. ‘Must be their diet.’

It has been years since Sam last smelled anything, but to bring that up now seemed rather rude. She still wore her mask though, a full-faced plague mask with glass lenses and a long beak that was supposed to be stuffed full of carbon filters, but hers was empty. Filters were expensive, and she was not being reimbursed.

The pyro was rubbing the back of his ears now. ‘You’re cute,’ he observed. ‘Since you’re with Maestro Cowen’s…giant, you must be his apprentice. An admirable station.’ He flourished at himself. ‘You’re not dating anyone at the moment, are you? I hear that apprentice necromancers are notoriously overworked.’

Sam tried to think of something to say that didn’t involve hysterical yelling. ‘I’m not sure if –’

‘– If it’s a good time to ask?’ Jack the Pyro laughed. ‘What an oddly stupid excuse.’ He gazed at the burning city and the mass of walking dead as they trudged across the smoldering fields. ‘And what a stupid place to say it.’ He squeezed out the last few drops and tossed the empty flask at her feet. ‘I must speak with the Maestros. Enjoy your day.’

‘How can I?’

‘What?’

‘How can I?’

The pyro’s pupils shrunk to pinpricks as if struck by direct light, the whites so bloodshot it was as if he bled. ‘A man - and indeed a woman – can learn to enjoy anything, given the proper incentives.’ He folded his arms. ‘A lesser man would have informed Maestro Cowen of that little comment and gotten you fired. You need to watch your mouth.’

He gave Lucia a tentative look and leaned closer. ‘And because I like you, I will give you the best advice of your career: Your job is not to judge. Leave that to the Lords Above. You want to be a Maestro, do you?’ he did not wait for answer. ‘Then stop flagellating. It’s embarrassing to watch. Are you expecting praise for your outstanding moral conduct, hmm? Will you find success by demonstrating to this venerable crowd that you know a right deed from wrong?’

Sam did not know what to say, and apparently that was the point. The pyro chuckled to himself, handsome as ever. ‘What can I say, I am a sucker for stubborn women, so by all means, keep it up.’ He stood up and patted down his robes. ‘Do enjoy your day.’

She watched him go. She watched him shake Jack Finley’s hand and guffaw hysterically at one comment or another, arching his back and rubbing his belly as if his theatrical squealing were not enough. He then moved onto another group, and within seconds was laughing again.

It took two hours for the dead to form up at the cargo lifts. Teams of alchemists surveyed their ranks, pushing along trolleys full of hot coals and dozens of branding irons. It was a highly organized affair: three digits for the designated workshop and three digits unique to the cadaver, seared below the left collarbone.

Sam followed their trail at a good distance, ledger in hand. The dead stood in a perfect grid, though a few did not stand still. Some swayed on the spot. Some were gurgling up whatever their breakfast had been. Some hung limp as if dangled on a rope. One was spinning rapidly, its arms flying out and slapping at its neighbors, its blood-matted hair sticking up every which way.

Out of its arms’ reach stood James Cowen and three pyros engaged heated whispers. The Maestro’s grey suit was pristine – courtesy of Sam diligently doing the laundry – and it made the pyros’ white robes look dirty beyond redemption. Which, of course, they were.

‘…it had been fine an hour ago, the logs are showing...’

‘…your responsibility…’

All thoughts of not wanting to hear what they were saying were crushed out of Sam’s head as a tall cadaver – seven feet at least – fell on top of her. It was heavy. Worse, a wetness was streaming down her back, too runny to be blood. She wanted to cry out but breathing appeared somewhat out of the question, so she settled with laying there in silence and lightly flailing.

A steel-capped boot plopped down in front of her face. Lucia’s boot. The weight disappeared from her back and Sam was yanked up by the back of her collar.

Next to Lucia, the corpse seemed puny. She lifted it with one hand as the cadaver’s bare feet dangled motionless off the ground. With the other hand she gently set Sam on her feet. The ledger was half-buried in churned up mud. Sam picked it up and frowned at the smeared pages.

‘Put it over there,’ Sam said, pointing. Lucia did. The cadaver swayed for a moment, as if about to fall, but then it swayed the other way and settled into an uneasy rhythm, tilting back and forth.

An alchemist appeared at her shoulder, an older woman with a head of curly white hair. She pointed at the cadaver. ‘What is this?!’ she yelled at no one in particular. ‘Jason! Get the brand!’

Jason the Executive Assistant fumbled with the brand, and the big cadaver fell over again, this time knocking over two others behind it. They made no attempt to get out of the way or find balance. They simply fell with their arms by their sides. ‘Careful you idiots!’ The alchemist screamed.

The tall cadaver suddenly sprung up with the agility of an athlete and pulled up its sorry friends. Then it clicked its bare heels together and made a little salute.

James Cowen caught the old woman by the arm as she stumbled over herself. ‘A pleasure to work with you, preserver,’ he intoned, as his eyes, his face, and his voice portraying the very definition of pleasure.

‘Maestro Cowen,’ the preserver sniffed. ‘Get a pyro, will you? Why did they not burn this thing?’

James clicked his fingers. The cadaver, vacant-faced and drooling blood from its broken lip, broke into a merry jig. Twice it almost slipped on the ashen mud but somehow managed to keep going. Then it struck a pose with one leg in mid-air.

‘Seems fine to me,’ said James. ‘Will take some work, certainly.’

‘Seems to me that you ended up with the dregs again,’ said the preserver, eyeing the spinning ambler in the distance with pure disdain. ‘Shame.’

‘Shame.’

‘Please understand that my people will not be allocating extra time for your batch. The guild’s equal opportunity guidelines explicitly state that we may not favor the product of one Maestro over another.’

‘I am familiar.’

In the end they left the tall one alone and burned the spinning one. A gout of blue flame reduced it to ash on the spot, and everyone moved on. Sam scratched out its number in the ledger, and it was as if this sack of flesh – that had been a human being this morning, would you believe it – had never existed.

The lifts came and left and came again, whisking away the cadaver to a hundred different workshops across a dozen Floors, where they will be alchemically treated to become productive members of society.

Progress was slow, and as the Floor dimmed into night, that jovial mission-accomplished mood the alchemists so enjoyed earlier began to fray. They sat in their disparate groups, drinking what was left of the wine and muttering at each other.

Far above their heads, the luminous dome glittered bright as day. Not a wisp of smoke in the air. The pyros have long refined that aspect of their formulae.

Sam put the ledger away and found a spot to sit; away from the dead, yet close enough to James in case she was called upon to perform some trivial function. The Maestros were huddled together, the Finleys with their hundred-strong entourage, James with Lucia looming behind him. They were yelling.

‘Ten thousand,’ declared James, loud enough for everyone to hear, loud enough for the amblers too, should they have the audacity to listen. ‘It’s in the contract, Jack. I didn’t come down here for five.’

Jack Finley’s eyebrows – already dangerously congruous on a good day – folded into an undulating bridge on his forehead. ‘Your contract states quite plainly that I may reassign quotas as I see fit.’

There were some moans and groans at that, and James siphoned up the noise as fuel. ‘On what cause?’

‘Cause?’ Finley chuckled, and his entourage chuckled with him. ‘There is a waiting list, Cowen, and when I click my fingers, twenty Maestros will come down that lift within the hour and take over your quota – of five thousand – and then they will thank me for the privilege. And it is your privilege to be given such a bounty, being yourself a contractor! Maestro Enri, how many were you and yours provided with?’

‘Seven hundred,’ Enri said bitterly, ‘and I have three – ’

‘You see! Understand that five thousand is a sign of my generosity and respect for you, Maestro Cowen. The waiting list begins in the tens. If you’d like your name to be appended to the end of that…’ Finley crossed his arms. ‘I consider this matter resolved.’

James tugged at the hem of his gloves. ‘Lucia.’

Lucia went.

An ambler in orange overalls tried to get in her way. It grabbed at her waist, managed to catch its fingers in the reams of her cloak, and was dragged along like a rag stuck on the sole of a shoe. Two steps later its head, lolling and off-balance, rolled under her falling boot.

Its skull imploded with a wet crack, splattering purple infusion and chunks of brain all over Lucia’s long trousers. As if noticing the inconvenience for the first time, she bent down, and with a flick of the wrist dismembered the arm still gripped onto her cloak and dropped it beside the ambler’s twitching legs.

Jack Finley stood his ground. His aides did not, nor did the other Maestros, who fled from their vicinity and found themselves busily engaged with the alchemists over vacillatory infusions and decoagulants and other such technical matters.

Lucia towered over Finley, and he had to lean to keep his eyes on James, a sneer on his lips. ‘This bickering is beneath the both of us.’

‘Ten thousand, or Lucia will be upset.’

‘I don’t wish to hurt the lady’s feelings, but you will get five.’

‘Then you will find out what Lucia can do.’

‘Oh, we are well acquainted.’

James crossed his arms, tapped his chin, gnashed his teeth, scratched his head, and otherwise exhibited a suite of actions fit for a man carefully considering his options. His hair was gangly with sweat, streaked together in greasy locks that spun and spun between his fingers.

‘Nine,’ he said between gritted teeth.

‘Done!’ Finley waved his hands, fingertips sparkling with Green. The amblers below sent up an eerie groan, seemingly from a thousand mouths at once. They did not have to groan – a lateral tether transfer did not require vocalization – but Finley had them make noise anyway.

But a thousand groaning dead was not loud enough to drown out James Cowen’s expletives. His descriptive nouns echoed from wall to wall, and the Floor of Nine was overfilled with his lamentations.

Sam had a mind to clap, but the alchemist who had set her fingers earlier said not to so much as wiggle them for a month. So she sat and watched instead.

Next Chapter: Chattel (3)