“I did mention an offer.” I take a careful breath, letting my chest fill and my shoulders fall, letting my back straighten and my arms relax. “I’d ask you first, though, why listen, rather than strike? You were, after all, five against three, and might have had the advantage of surprise.”

“Against a Reca and a Ranger out of legend?” His face curls in a look that’s almost a sneer, with what I think is an excess of skepticism. “I knew not that, but I knew. Of the three of you, there were six eyes on our weapons, none on our smiles.”

I can’t help it; I laugh at him, face a little bit red in my hands. “That’s a very nice lie. Thank you.”

He laughs with me, which makes me feel rather a lot better; I can tell the difference, nowadays, between that and laughing at me. “Five, then. Besides, Sara talks? I listen.”

In a way, this conversation is stalling, and I straighten back up. “I’ll not dither around the point, out of respect. From here, I have a path in mind to destabilize the keystones of the scenario; from there, I intend to unravel it heart-outwards and turn whatever animating force felt any of this was an appropriate work of fiction into…” I stop suddenly; I don’t exactly know what word to use.

“Into grist.”

“Grist. Like with grain, as a precursor of flour. Sure.” I assume the metaphor works, but maybe it doesn’t; I know about as much about grain processing as this man knows about space travel. “How much do you know about how the Temple’s floor-sections are structured? I mean from a glyphs-and-runes perspective, and the manaflow.”

“I? Next to nothing. Get a question, likely ask Sara.” He shrugs. “Been through here before, though. I know the surface.”

“Okay.” I drum on the table for a moment, thinking. It’s a good table for drumming; solid wood, good resonance, smooth surface without any risk of splinters. “The short version is that each floor-section, each half-floor with its attendant miniboss or equivalent challenge and reward thereof, is managed by some sort of overseer. The Temple provides the mana, but the overseer, the dead-and-captured soul of the overseer, provides a framework for the challenge and does a bunch of customization.

“There’s a… a ghost of a person, I guess, who thinks this scenario is an appropriate thing to have exist. It’s not; the existence of a scenario like this serves to help normalize the things we see in it simply by virtue of its presence in our memories and our having interacted with it, no matter what those interactions are. And if we play along, even a little? If we internalize that this is an acceptable way for a place to be, even a little? Then we’re harmed by it, in a lasting way. Our decision-making is changed in a harmful way.

“So I’m going to kill this person, this ghost of a person, this overseer.” I stop, taking a long breath, and then let it out slowly. “They anger me, whoever they are. I am displeased with their works and find them to be of objectionable character, and I’m going to kill them, and then I’ll shunt all of the vast amount of energy that defines them and their behavior and all of the mana that defines the scenario into the glyphs that process mana into rewards. We’ll get…” I frown. “I don’t know. It wasn’t really possible for me to estimate. I think Zidanya might know how much more we’ll get that way than otherwise. Usually it’s only a tithe of the scenario’s mana-allotment that goes into the rewards, and the rest gets reprocessed into the next scenario, she says.”

Pravad looks at me, doing that chewing-his-cheek thing again. With him ostentatiously considering things, I finally take a real look around the room, if only to distract myself from the tense silence he’s generating. We’re all clustered around a table that’s right around the right size for the eight of us, but the other six are clustered around the ends, doing their best to give us space and keeping their animated conversations low. The room’s, appropriately, round, and the west side has a range of bookshelves with ledgers that look remarkably similar to the ones I saw up above us, and the east side of the room has a few sets of racks with weapons and armor of various sorts. They’re mostly empty, because they were… equipped.

There’s seven corpses in the room, too, but I try not to look at those, or even think about them.

“One pylon for me, with Kazir’s blessing if it takes your Reca to seal it. Even split after, each person.” He breaks the silence, which I think is a victory for me.

I snort, though, at his offer, like it’s the joke that it is. “If you’re going to offer me an insult, I’ll counter-offer: one pylon for you, a minor boon or artifact for each of your followers, with you swearing an oath to free any and all slaves you hold.”

Something flashes in his eyes at that. “Saw something in your face, earlier. Didn’t take ye for a heretic in the eyes a’ Seidr.”

“Seidr can kiss my knife,” I say frankly, and smile at the flinch that is the first real sign of fear I’ve seen from him. “The notion that you can own a person is vile. Freedom isn’t just fundamental to the people from whom it’s taken, either; the methods of our lives define who we become, and the methods of slavery turn us into slavers.”

“Odd words, these,” he says with an icy fury and a locked jaw, “from a Magelord with a Reca and a bound spirit as his companions.”

“I don’t own either of them, and the only reason I haven’t severed their bonds is that they won’t have me do it. They-”

“Spare me,” he grinds out, “your hypocrisies, you who knows nothing of me and my folk.”

We glare at each other for a long moment. “Believe what you want,” I eventually say, breaking the silence this time. “I won’t be the reason Zidanya never sees the surface again. And Amber’s existence is a horror on more levels than I can count, but I wasn’t conscious when she was formed. That she’s mete to my service isn’t through any action or inaction of mine.”

“You weren’t,” he says, surprise overriding his anger, “conscious? How did you activate a pylon while unconscious?”

“I didn’t.” I shrug. “I had enough broken bones that I passed out while activating it. I guess make a person, ethics of the action notwithstanding is the default. And so, Amber, in her strength and beauty and every detail of her will and wishes; and all of the consequences of her, like the family that’s now always had her.”

“Least it says well of you.” I raise an eyebrow disbelievingly at him. “That a Reca made to fill your needs is a person, and joyous.”

“The only thing that would have spoken well of me,” I say in as calm a tone as I can, “is if one of my needs had been to not be a slaver.”

“Absolutes,” he says, waving a hand, and I almost lose my temper at his casual dismissal of my opinion. I don’t, though; I know he’s testing me, and I just stare him down as he breaks into a small smile, probably intended to be disarming. “Not that I expect it’ll change a mind, but read.”

He slides a couple pieces of paper across the table to me. My eyes scan over them; Omniglot lets me read anything written just as easily as it lets me understand anything spoken, so there’s no disconnect and no layer of incomprehension.

It’s a contract; it’s specifically Sara’s contract, a piece of paper describing her slavery. I force a cold calm on myself as I read it, but the calmness becomes less forced as I do so. Sara Evetheri, it described her as, who enters into this contract of her need. It said nothing about her birth or situation before her signature; only of what she owed and was owed by her… owner wasn’t exactly right. Master is closer, but the Lord that the contract avoids seems reasonable.

“Is this a Heharani thing, where slaves have all these rights?”

“If she is not free,” he says to me with what looks like genuine sobriety to match the sudden formality of his voice, “she cannot feed herself; so I must feed her, before even myself.”

“This… isn’t the worst situation I could imagine.” I know my tone is grudging, but I can’t help it; I’m grudging. “I guess this saves me trying to argue you into freeing her, huh.”

The clauses there aren’t just about what services of hers he can call on, and what he owes her, though those are pretty fascinating in their own right. They’re not literal, mostly not laid out in a dry list of actions; it’s all evocative and figurative, the potency of her mind to be willingly lent to the Lord Mayor’s cause and similar. There are a number that are explicit, though; she never goes hungry, even if it means he and his family do, and he can’t ask her to take on any physical danger or labor that he isn’t doing at least one full day’s worth of that month. The more astonishing clause is the simplest; if he gets the opportunity to tier up, all of his slaves are free and clear, and they can walk with the tools of their trades and a month’s wages, and no debts may be accounted them for the span of three days and three nights.

I have, I know for an absolute fact, seen more onerous work contracts on perfectly well-regarded statics, and I have a hard time squaring that with the barely-reduced revulsion I continue to feel.

He’s grinning at me when I look up from the documents, in a manner that I can tell he knows is distracting. “So you see: I will have freed her as I touch that pylon you promised me, Outsider. The Pillars of the Sky do not raise Mayors to cheat, or to kill when not called for; but let me show you how we bargain.” He smirks, I smile, and we get down to business.