POV: moash
Summary
Moash hauls a sledge — a wheel-broken wagon repurposed with steel skids — across central Alethkar at the head of the rope team, given the lead position because his parshman overseers consider him the most enthusiastic of their human slaves. The Voidbringers ran out of wagons. Compared to bridge duty under Sadeas this is paradise — sturdy boots, even gloves, the slow patient pace of the chull teams, fertile country rolling past. He has fallen into the steady rhythm of the work, body exhausted, thoughts quieted. He tells himself, again, that what happened at the Shattered Plains was not really his fault. He was pushed into it.
He knows the road too well to mistake their destination — across the river, southeast, past Inkwell — they are marching on Kholinar. The caravan trails tens of thousands of parshmen in warform, drilled raw the way Alethi villagers used to be drilled, learning fast under the Fused who skim along beside them. The further he marches the more Moash admires the Voidbringers: the army is well-supplied, the overseers — former parshman slaves themselves, quietly coached by unseen spren — are told to use their whips sparingly. He is starting to feel that humanity has, in fact, forfeited its right to govern itself; that the false lighteyed *gods* with their bright eyes were always a counterfeit of the real thing; that this army has come to claim what the Alethi long ago failed to deserve.
Only one thing spoils the picture. A separate crew of parshman slaves pulls one of the sledges. They wear workform rather than warform, walk apart from the human crews, and are treated atrociously — beaten, screamed at, flogged for falling behind, which makes them slower, which makes them get beaten more. Their suffering eats at him. When he finally asks his own overseer — a young parshwoman in a havah with the sleeve done up over her safehand, who could pass for a pretty Makabaki caravan girl save for her marbling and the singsong in her voice — what they did to deserve it, she tells him: *They harboured a false god. Brought him into the very centre among us.* Not the Almighty. A real false god. A living one. Like our living gods, and she glances up at a Fused passing overhead.
On the twenty-first day of the march, several days past Inkwell, Moash's sledge catches up to the parshman crew just as one of them stumbles, brings the whole rope team to a stop, and the whipping begins again. Moash drops his rope and steps out of the line, ignoring his shocked overseers. He pushes both whip-handlers back from the bloodied parshman, catches the lash one of them snaps at him, yanks the overseer stumbling forward, and puts a fist into his face — clipping carapace on the way down. He lifts the fallen slave up by the arm, tells him to ride in the sledge and let his feet heal, and takes his place in line.
His own overseers gather, confer with the bruised ones, then with a Fused. They decide to let it be. Moash pulls the parshman sledge the rest of the way, and for the rest of the march no one raises a whip against the workform crew.