"Report to the Quartermaster" was a brief, but in practice, inscrutable instruction. Dalliance had already left his uncle's office before coming to this realization.

  Behind the Walls, enlisted men moved in looser knots, and with somewhat more leisure to their movements—or at least, less weariness. But none of them seemed inclined to stop and inquire after the business of a wayward child in military colors.

  So Dalliance left the Wall. He followed the slope down from the Citadel, angling for the intersection with Water Street.

  Food vendors would know.

  And they did. While scooping pan-fried squash and beans into a wax paper pouch, a friendly vendor gave him stepwise instructions. The provisioner and the quartermaster were not the same office, the provisioner being an attachment to the Quartermaster. "Used to call 'em victualers," said the vendor helpfully. "But you'll be distributing food, cooking, and scrubbing pots, I don't doubt."

  The Quartermaster's and all the attached offices—such as the wagoneer, cooks, armory, tanner, printer, brewers, millers, canners, and of course, the kitchens—would all be in their own stockyard. This was located some distance from the Wall, toward Market Street, for ease of access to the water wheels to run the gear trains, to mill the flour, and suchlike.

  Dalliance shoveled his food rapidly as he padded up Water Street, turning right toward the indicated stockyard. He found himself on a street full of wagons and carts turning in and out of mysteriously unlabeled alleyways, unloading and loading at raised brick and cement platforms. As for the sweating men, they didn't even look up at his passing.

  The eighth yard down on the right turned out to be the provisioner's—he could tell by the occasional uniform amongst the broad-backed haulers and the Four Kings flying on the front of the warehouse.

  Immediately, he found himself stymied. Following a cart through the gate was easy enough, but once through, there was nowhere to stand, no obvious place to be. The stockyard was in constant motion: wagons creaking forward by inches, sacks being thrown to shoulders and swept off on quick feet, the curses of drivers to oxen, iron ringing against iron, the rough laughter of men at work muffled through a door. Dalliance was wrong-footed and hated it.

  So he engaged [Prediction], glancing around at the first few uniformed figures he could see.

  There was no need for it. He had been observed.

  A man with rolled sleeves and flour on his boots stepped up to him, giving him a once-over and clearly clocking both the colors of his duty clothes and his uncertainty.

  "You there," he said, loudly enough to carry over the stockyard without sounding irate. "Do you have a delivery?"

  Dalliance shook his head. "I was told to report to the Quartermaster." The answer felt horribly inadequate, but the man nodded and gave him a curt 'come along' gesture.

  "Don't block the gate," the man said, and Dalliance followed.

  Now that he was looking for it, he could see pips under the man's plaid, though he didn't know the meaning of two pips.

  Men passed, carrying crates of papers. The man Dalliance was following didn't pause, despite them having cut Dalliance off, and Dalliance had to run to catch up, turning into a cool warehouse. The thirty- or forty-foot ceiling, broken occasionally by skylights, contained a veritable maze of shelves and barrels.

  "New blood," said the soldier he was following to someone up ahead. "Or grist for the mill."

  "Little on the smallish side," said a rotund man, looking down and past the shoulder of the soldier. The man was the size of an ogre and wore a voluminous apron.

  "I was told to report to the quartermaster, sir," Dalliance volunteered.

  The giant didn't correct his 'sir,' but didn't accept it either. "Who by?" he asked.

  "Uncle Solidarity." The name ended all questioning on that front. Dalliance possibly shouldn't have prefaced it with 'Uncle,' he realized.

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  "Right," said the giant man. "You're provisioning. Walk with me."

  "Quartermaster," explained the man as they went down the cramped aisles, past row upon row of jar, hogshead, box, and barrel, "isn't a man you meet unless you have a problem or you're a specialist. Day-to-day goes to me or one like me."

  They stopped by a ledger board nailed to a post. Chalk marks, dates, tallies. The petty officer tapped a line with a knuckle.

  “You can read?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. You'll be stocking. Rows have two letters, row and shelf numbers. Anything starting with a J is for Jar. Go down the pallets and put things where this board says they go. Lunch is at noon."

  Dalliance looked down the endless row of pallets, his arms already heavy from sword-work the previous afternoon, and felt tired all over.

  Lunch was warm black bread, fresh from the oven, and served with a thoughtful daub from the cook out of the salted butter pot, whose crystals glinted in the noon-bright sun. The man slathered the hank of bread twice across before passing it over. The salt crunched under Dalliance's teeth as he ate his unaccompanied meal: the cook seemed to think that drinking with your meal was optional, privileged behavior.

  The petty officer—which he had come to discover was simply a term that meant ‘not command staff,’—sat beside him as he dug in, looking talkative in the best traditions of people everywhere who respond to others' irritation with verbosity.

  "Could be worse," he told Dalliance cheerfully. He twinkled.

  A whole lifetime of keeping his head down reminded Dalliance not to snap at him, and so he kept his peace, but his aching arms had progressed to true pain, in his elbows particularly, and the cheer was grating.

  "I’m not getting stabbed," Dalliance said in provisional agreement.

  “Well,” said the man, “there’s that too! But this isn’t so bad, once you’re used to it. I remember my first days though, and I was a bit bigger than you.”

  Dalliance, keenly aware of having yet to pass his fifth foot, didn’t comment.

  “With you looking so companionable," the man continued, “I figured I’d fill the silence. Don’t mind me.”

  And now Dalliance felt like he was being a heel. “Thank you,” he said after a brief pause. “Mostly people seem too busy to talk.”

  “Well, mostly they are. But when you’re on lunch, I like to remind people their job is to ‘be on lunch’. If you’re focused on work while you’re meant to be off th’ clock, you’ll be a mess at the end of the shift. Of course, you’re just twice a week, so that’s not that terrible, I suppose.”

  Dalliance shrugged. “It’s work I can understand,” he said. “Jars gotta go somewhere, or they’ll get lost and go rotten, or get in the way. I’m really okay.”

  The man scrutinized him for a moment. “Nothing in Grit,” he pronounced. “Not Might either. What are you?”

  “[Aeromancer],” said Dalliance shortly. Then, cheeky: “Yourself?”

  “[Provisioner]. Malcolm’s the name, by the way.”

  Dalliance blinked in surprise.

  “You didn’t think things organized themselves, did you? Let me tell you something: have you ever heard the saying 'an army marches on its stomach'?"

  Dalliance couldn’t say he had.

  "For the last hundred years," he said, his accent crisply Imperial, pronouncing each of the D's with relish, "we have maintained a fighting-fit force upon the wall top. What do you think that takes?"

  "Warm bodies," Dalliance said, intentionally missing the point from lingering spite and taking another large bite of his bread, wishing he were being left alone.

  "Bodies are a part of it," the man said, allowing the digression. "But without food—victuals, foodstuffs, rations—people don’t fight very well. They don’t fight well without swords, either. Or spears, or butter, or mage-cannons. And for those things to exist, you need artificers and smiths and tools for them to work with, and materials upon which to work. Trail bread requires bakers to have flour and seed. Flour requires a wheat farmer and a miller. All the way down."

  "Do you understand? All the way down. It looks like people are doing safe things. People have gotten away with avoiding contributions on the Wall. And they haven’t. Because without them, there would be no contributions on the Wall. Sure, you’re carrying things today."

  Dalliance's back was aware. He had hauled more than his own weight in cumulative pickled pork heads. He hadn’t even been aware that was one of the victuals.

  "And so now you’re grumpy," the man said, "and you’re sitting there thinking: 'I am on punishment duty. I am never going to get any experience and tier up. I am going to do this meaningless work for the rest of my natural life, and then I’m going to die old before my time, twisted from all these boxes.'"

  Dalliance glanced up at the hyperbole.

  "No? Is that just me?" The sergeant gave him a mock-disbelieving look.

  "I don’t normally worry about getting old,"

  "You will," the man said darkly. "You’ll see. Anyway, you're with me. It's easy to forget how important what we do is. And when you don’t have a sense that important things are happening, it’s all too easy to give it less than your best, to become slow and irritated. Maybe that one jar of carrots won’t win the war, but for the lack of jars of carrots, we would eventually lose it."

  He paused. "I hope that helps."

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