There were no roadhouses, because there were no travelers who were free to stay where they chose. Instead, there were relay stations for changing horses, which only those within a few levels of the Lord of Walls could use, and there were the large houses of the highest-status slave in any town. Rigg, as Wallman, would call upon this person, bring the greetings of the Lord of Walls, and then accept the offer of lodging for as long as he cared to stay. Of course he would be put in the master’s own bed and bedroom.

Meanwhile, Ram Odin would stay in the relay station, in a little room over the stable. He assured Rigg that this was very fine treatment for a personal servant, and he rather liked the smell of horses.

Thus they had made their way for a week from town to town, always on their way to somewhere else.

But even so, people were already bringing disputes to Rigg. So far they had all been of the sort where the solution is easy and obvious, but people’s egos and anger were so involved that the easy solution was the one that everyone hated most. Rigg’s job, in every case, was to impose the easy solution, but to find a way to phrase it so that nobody felt that they had been repudiated or that their arguments had not been heard. It was a game of language more than law. Nobody was necessarily happy, but everyone was mollified, and Ram Odin assured him that they would abide by the decision because, after all, it was the easy and obvious solution.

Ram Odin had almost never had to whisper into Rigg’s ear to tell him of some obscure point of law. In fact, the whispering had mostly been to tell him exactly how this or that person should be addressed. Titles were very important in this land of slaves.

Rigg wondered if they could really be called slaves anymore. He already had a pretty good idea that slavery was evolving into something else, without losing the name. People had so much freedom to make economic decisions—to buy whatever they liked, and to assign their slaves to manufacture whatever they wanted. Some masters hired out their slaves to others, for a fee; others allowed their slaves to make their own arrangements to serve here or there as they could find work.