SSS Talent: From Trash to Tyrant

The whole ring stopped for the water hour, and nobody had thought to mention it to him.

Trafalgar had come down to the second ring to check one thing in the manifest office, and found the manifest office shut, along with two of the three loading yards and most of the street. Everything that could stop had stopped. Everyone who could queue was queueing, four hundred of them wound back along the canal wall in a line that moved the way glaciers move.

So he joined it, because standing in it was less conspicuous than standing beside it, and because Rhosyn had told him twice that queues were where this city did its talking.

She was thirty paces behind him, leaning on a bollard, watching nothing at all.

The line shuffled forward. Twenty minutes in, a man came up at his shoulder and started complaining about the water.

”Three weeks they’ve run one station. Three.” He said it to the air, the way people in queues talk to whoever is nearest. ”There were two of them until the end of last month. Nobody’s put out a notice, nobody’s given a date, and the price hasn’t come down by a single coin for the inconvenience.”

”That seems like something people would be angry about.”

”They are. Quietly, which is the local style.” The man rocked back on his heels. ”You know what still gets me, after twenty-two years down here? Paying for water. Say what you like about the surface. At least up there it falls out of the sky and nobody sends you a bill.”

He was somewhere in his fifties, thick through the middle, in the sort of dark coat a man buys once and keeps mending. Grey coming in fast at the temples.

Trafalgar looked at his hands.

They were clean.

’An office worker from the second ring. Standing in a water line in the middle of a working morning, when anyone at that level has three juniors he could send instead. Why?’

The line moved another two paces.

”You’re a long way from a desk for a bucket of water,” Trafalgar said.

”I am.” No hesitation at all. ”I’ve got someone who does this for me, ordinarily.”

”Then where’s he?”

”He stood in this queue every Tuesday for four years.” The man watched the line ahead of them. ”So I’m doing it myself for a while. Seemed like the decent thing.”

Trafalgar kept his eyes forward and let none of it reach his face.

’He is the supervisor of the manifest office, Doran Skeff. And somehow, he’s picked the one place in Meraval where standing beside me for twenty minutes won’t look suspicious.’

That was the part worth admiring. A queue was slow, it was public, and it worked both ways. Skeff could not walk away from it without four hundred people noticing him do it. He was as pinned in place as Trafalgar was, and that was exactly why it was safe.

”I’m sorry about your man,” Trafalgar said.

”So am I.” Skeff shifted his empty jug from one hand to the other. ”He put in to come off the night shifts, you know. Back in the spring.”

He said it in precisely the tone he had used about the price of water.

”Twice. Both times through the proper forms.” He gave a small shrug. ”Both requests came back denied without an explanation, which isn’t how it’s supposed to work. The second one should’ve had a reason, at least. He stopped asking after that. The file should still be in the office. Nobody’s touched it.”

Trafalgar took a slow breath in through his nose.

Night shifts. Six-hour windows, gates closed, sectors sealed. A man had looked at that rota and asked, politely and on paper, to be somewhere else, and somebody had told him no without troubling to invent an excuse.

”Why are you telling me that?”

”Because you sat in my office for an entire day going through nine months of cargo paper.” Skeff still hadn’t lowered his voice by so much as a note. ”And in all that time you didn’t write down one single thing about the cargo.”

”That’s a fair point.”

”I’ve been thinking about it for days, which is longer than I’ve thought about anything in a while.”

The line moved again. Somewhere up ahead a woman started arguing with the station attendant about her allocation and the whole queue leaned to watch, which suited both of them.

”Then keep going,” Trafalgar said. ”You’ve clearly got more.”

”I have, and I’m not going to say any of it standing in a water line.”

”Somewhere else, then.”

”Not anywhere yet.” Skeff finally turned his head, and there was nothing dramatic in his face at all, which was somehow the worst part of the whole conversation. ”Please don’t ask me a second time, my lord. I’ve got a wife who has never heard your name and I’d like a bit longer with that arrangement.”

Trafalgar let that sit.

He could push. He was good at pushing, and the man was frightened enough to bend if leaned on properly, and every instinct he had was telling him to do it right now while he had him standing still.

’And if I do, he goes home tonight and burns whatever he’s got, and I never see him again.’

”You’ll want a name from me,” Skeff said. ”I understand that. I’d want one.”

”I would, yes.”

”Then ask me when I’ve worked out whether I can survive giving you one.”

The queue delivered them to the station four minutes later. Skeff filled his jug, paid, checked his change the way a careful man checks change, and turned to go.

”Enjoy the wait, my lord. It never gets any shorter.”

And that was all of it.

Trafalgar watched him disappear into the flow of people leaving the station, carrying his jug as though the conversation had been nothing more than a way to pass the time. He stayed where he was for another few seconds before moving on, turning the name over once in his head.

Zafira caught up with him on the walkway above the yards a few minutes later. Trafalgar waited until they were clear of the heavier foot traffic before speaking.

”Doran Skeff.”

Recognition came almost immediately.

”He’s in our harbour notes.” Zafira sounded almost pleased.

”For what?”

”For nothing, and that’s the whole point of it.” She fell into step. ”He’s never done a single thing worth writing down. He simply keeps appearing beside things we were looking at for entirely different reasons, over and over, until somebody in my brother’s office got tired of calling it a coincidence and wrote his name at the top of a page.”

”So he’s worth watching.”

”Yeah, and neither of us knows why yet.” Zafira glanced sideways at him. ”I’ve been down here five months, Trafalgar. That man has said eleven words to me in total and nine of them were about paperwork.”

For days he had chosen who he saw and when he saw them. He had walked into offices, docks and drawing rooms and decided how each of those conversations went. This morning a middle-aged clerk had picked the hour, picked the place, said his piece and walked off with a full jug of water, and there was not one thing Trafalgar could do about any of it.