Beneath the Altar

The shift roster had a twelve minute gap. Mara Ked had memorized that gap while she was organizing the strike.

Twelve minutes between one crew leaving and the next coming in, when the overseer was busy transcribing the roll and the workshop stood empty. In that window, Mara and Riu stood before the ninth door beneath the altar.

The door was locked. Riu knelt on his limping leg and felt out the lock with his good hand.

His hands had spent a lifetime working the treadle mechanism. The logic of a lock resembled the logic of a treadle.

He listened for the sound and released the latch as if keeping time. Breaking in was not luck, it was a laborer's skill.

The ninth key Rea had collected was in Mara's hand. But that key opened only the upper door.

The inner lock leading down into the workshop had a separate key, and Mara did not have it. Riu took charge of that one.

He put his ear to the lock and listened for the beat at which the latch would drop.

"A millstone and a lock, in the end they're the same thing."

he said, low.

"Press it on the right beat and it opens. Miss the beat and it doesn't."

His good hand missed the beat three times, and on the fourth the latch fell. Mara watched that hand.

The hand that a injury had driven off the treadle was now opening the door the treadle had hidden.

Inside was a workers' dormitory. Mara had expected chains or whips.

There were none. Instead, a ration debt ledger hung on the wall.

A chart recording who owed how many days of rations, and how many days of offering labor would repay that debt. Wet clothes hung on a line, and a shift bell rang at even intervals.

What bound these people was not chains but debt and bells. Some of the workers had come to accept the offering labor as faith.

An old woman pressed the treadle and murmured a prayer under her breath. To her, this labor was not exploitation but devotion.

Mara could not bring herself to wake her. Not everyone here wanted to escape.

Mara read the ration debt ledger line by line. The numbers were neat and orderly.

Someone recorded it precisely every single day. The debts had started in a year of bad harvest, with the emergency rations people had received.

A structure in which someone who had taken Church rations because there was nothing to eat repaid those rations with offering labor. Hunger became debt, debt became labor, and labor became the substance again.

There was no trace anywhere of anyone being dragged in by force. People had walked in on their own feet and pressed the treadle with their own feet.

Except that not putting your foot in meant standing in a place where you starved to death. Mara understood that this was more frightening than chains.

Chains could be cut and you were free. Debt, cut, and hunger came back.

A young laborer recognized Mara. It was a face she had seen during the strike.

He was startled, but he did not cry out.

"Why did you come here."

he whispered.

Mara answered, "I came to see what you're grinding."

The young laborer hesitated a moment, then tipped his chin toward the breathing pipe. What he could not say in words, he showed her only by direction.

That was the greatest accusation he was able to make.

The young laborer had a mark on his wrist too. A small notch carved to show how many more days of offering remained.

He was not ashamed of it. Shame was an emotion for those who had a choice, and he had none.

"At first I thought it was faith too."

he whispered.

"That I was offering my breath to the light. But at some point the debt stopped shrinking. Every bit I pay off, a new debt grows in its place. Is that faith, or is that business?"

Mara had no answer. There was no answer to that question.

These people were standing at the place where something that began as faith ended as business. She decided to remember that question.

Later, in the square, this question would move people more than any speech.

Inside the workshop, treadle mechanisms stood in rows. White wheat was not ground by hand mill but by that treadle.

When the workers pressed the treadle, that force turned the millstone. But that was not all of it.

A breathing pipe ran overhead, above the workers' heads. A person's breath passed through that pipe and gathered into sacks of substance.

Riu ran his fingertips over the wear on a treadle.

"This treadle..." he said, tapping out the beat.

"It's been turning without rest. With wear like this, someone's been pressing it sixteen hours a day."

He calculated the hours of overwork from the wear on the equipment.

Mara laid a hand on the breathing pipe. The pipe was lukewarm.

It was the warmth of breath that had passed through. The sack of substance at the pipe's end was warmed by that same heat.

She remembered the warm powder that had clung to the collars of the workers who had collapsed in the square. The lukewarmth Rea had first noticed was beginning right here, at this breathing pipe.

A person's breath and sweat and heat soaked into the grain powder, and that powder became "substance." Mara did not know the exact principle behind it.

But she saw with her own eyes that something of a person moved into the grain. Riu counted the treadle's beat beside her.

"Every time someone up there gets a loaf of bread, someone down here presses this much more."

He converted the ratio of that exchange into a count of footfalls.

Riu traced the joints of the breathing pipe with his fingertips. The pipe ran through the workshop ceiling and up to the floor above.

"Do you know where this goes?"

he asked. And then he answered it himself.

"To the cathedral altar. The breath we rest here becomes the fire on the altar up there."

He said it without anger. Anger was a voice that had already worn away from him long ago.

That flatness chilled Mara more than anger would have. Riu had a habit of tapping out a steady foot beat even in his sleep.

Mara thought she understood what that was now. The treadle's rhythm had been carved into his body.

Even asleep, his foot was still pressing this mill. Even after the injury drove him off the treadle, his body had never forgotten it.

Mara noticed small handprints on one wall of the workers' dormitory. Handprints stamped in a row along the wall.

At first she thought they were decoration. Looking closer, she saw they were marks left by workers who had died or gone away.

A spot where the living pressed their own hands over those prints and paused a moment. In a place with no roll of names, people remembered each other with handprints on a wall.

The Church's ledgers recorded them as grain sacks, but they themselves recorded on the wall with their own palms. Mara paused a moment before that wall.

To her, who had spent her whole life correcting rolls of names, this wall of handprints was another kind of registry. A registry that could not be erased.

Riu found a treadle connected to a holy lamp that had gone out. A line running to a holy lamp in the cathedral above was tied to that treadle.

He tried pressing that treadle once, as a test. Light from a holy lamp coming on upstairs leaked in through a gap in the ceiling.

At the same moment, the sack of substance beside them grew lukewarm. A single footfall had lit a lamp upstairs and warmed the powder.

Mara stopped Riu at once. That was proof enough, no need to press it again.

They had seen the link between miracle and labor not as a guess but with a single footfall.

Riu took his foot off the treadle but kept looking at that spot for a long while.

"During the strike, we stopped the treadles."

he said.

"That's when the north gate talisman went out. That wasn't a coincidence. When our feet stop, the talismans up there stop too. The Church knows that, and they've tied the city's safety to our feet."

He put the fact into words for the first time. What he had half sensed during the strike, he now saw fully, standing before this treadle.

Mara understood the weight of what he'd said. If a laborer stops moving his feet, the city grows dangerous.

It was a structure that made the laborer a hostage to the city, and at the same time made the city a hostage to the laborer. So that no one could stop, not carelessly, not ever.

Mara saw both ends of that chain at once.

Because of that single footfall, the weight balance had broken. A hidden lower compartment beneath the treadle opened.

Inside, sacks of substance were piled up. Each sack had a person's name written on it.

Mara read those names. She half understood why a person's name would be written on a grain sack, and she did not want to understand the rest.

Just then, outside the workshop, the sound of the guard's keys drew closer. The twelve minutes were almost up.

Mara grabbed Riu's arm. With a name-marked sack in one hand, the two of them were trapped between the open floor and the approaching sound of keys.

The sacks with names on them were smaller than ordinary grain sacks. As if divided out to a single person's portion.

Mara recognized a few of the names among them. People in gray who had collapsed in the square.

Their names had been written on grain sacks. A person and grain were bound by the same mark.

She tucked one of the sacks inside her coat. It was evidence.

One sack turned a guess into physical proof. Riu tried to close the open lower compartment again, but the weight balance had already shifted too far and it would not close.

A floor that could not be closed would soon be found by someone. The sound of the guard's keys stopped outside the door.

Mara held her breath. The twelve minute gap had passed, and the bell rang announcing the next crew coming in.

At the bell, the workers went back to the treadles. The workshop filled again with the sound of footsteps.

That commotion covered Mara and Riu for a moment. The guard flinched at the sight of the open lower compartment, but buried in the sound of the next crew's treadles, he did not find the two of them right away.

Mara gripped Riu's shoulder and pointed, not toward the way they had come in, but toward the narrow gap through which the breathing pipe ran. A way up to the floor above.

Riu shook his head. That path led to the altar, and a priest waited at the altar.

But at the door they had come in through, there was the guard. Both paths were dangerous.

Mara chose the danger she knew better. A priest was weak against lies, and a guard was strong against force.

She pushed Riu up through the gap around the breathing pipe first. Holding the name-marked sack tight against her chest, Mara pulled her own body into that narrow gap as well.

Behind her, she heard the guard peering down into the open floor.