Chapter 214: The Five Orders of Slavery
Ian had also worked crossbowmen into each unit's structure. Unlike bows, crossbows didn't demand years of training — a competent crossbowman could be produced in weeks rather than a lifetime, which meant he could draw from the slave population and build numbers quickly. The bottleneck wasn't manpower. It was supply: crossbows, bolts, and the infrastructure to produce them at scale.
Slaver's Bay had none of that. Ian would have to build it himself.
The same problem applied to the half-plate armor he intended to mass-produce for his infantry. Both issues — the crossbow supply chain and the armor — ultimately came down to the same root cause: the region's metalworking capacity was stuck in a previous century. Fixing that required two specific advances: blast furnace steelmaking and water-powered forge hammers.
The crossbow problem was the more tractable of the two. Crossbows weren't new in this world. Skilled craftsmen existed. Enough gold and an open recruiting call would find them eventually.
The armor problem was harder and would take longer. Fortunately, Ian had a secretary with an unusual tolerance for impossible workloads. He had handed both industrial projects — along with the ongoing gunpowder experiments — to Celia, who had accepted them with the quiet expression of someone keeping a running tally.
The third section of the handbook covered troop training, broken into five areas: sharpening awareness, building courage, drilling formations, conditioning the body, and weapons work.
Sharpening awareness meant learning to read a battlefield through drum signals and banner colors. An army that needed its officers to shout every order across the chaos of an engagement wasn't an army — it was a mob. Tens of thousands of men could only move as one if they'd been drilled to respond to sound and signal without thinking about it.
Courage needed no lengthy justification. A soldier who broke and ran the first time steel came out was worse than useless — he was contagious.
Formation drilling was about discipline and obedience. The physical and weapons training were the foundation everything else rested on.
Ian was under no illusion that raising the bar above what a typical peasant conscript of this era could manage was sufficient. He wasn't preparing to fight the typical armies of this world. He was preparing to fight other players — people who would bring their own knowledge and their own innovations. Comparing himself to the local standard and feeling satisfied was a good way to lose badly to someone who hadn't bothered with that comparison.
Beyond training, Ian planned to implement a strict, consistent system of rewards and punishments. Morale wasn't a soft concern. It was a force multiplier, and it didn't maintain itself.
He also wanted to add sections on campsite selection and terrain assessment for junior officers — the practical geography that separated commanders who survived from ones who didn't. The problem was that this material was highly specific and Ian hadn't retained enough of the details to write it confidently on his own. He planned to work through it with the Unsullied instructors, who had decades of hard experience in exactly that kind of knowledge. There was no pressing deadline. He had time.
Celia finished the last page of the handbook and handed it back.
"Well?" Ian asked.
"Not bad."
"What does 'not bad' mean?"
"I didn't follow all of it, but —" She paused.
"Go on."
"The High Valyrian sections have quite a few grammatical errors. And at least three misspellings I noticed." She couldn't quite suppress the smile.
Ian's expression went flat. His High Valyrian was a patchwork — the baseline the system had given him, supplemented by whatever he'd picked up from Daenerys over the past months. It was functional for conversation. Apparently it was not quite functional for authorship.
"Here's a thought," he said pleasantly. "Why don't you find some time and clean up the translation for me?"
The smile disappeared from Celia's face. Another project dumped on her desk.
"I'm joking," Ian said, visibly entertained by her reaction. "Actually I was thinking of giving it to Daenerys. She's at an age where she shouldn't be sitting idle, and correcting someone else's Valyrian grammar is honest intellectual work."
"Yes, absolutely, completely agree," Celia said, a little too quickly. "I have more than enough on my plate as it is."
"Alright. Give me your report. What did you need to tell me?"
"Where should I start?"
"The east bank of the Worm River."
Lord Fehmar had formally petitioned Ian's support in court — framed, as agreed, as suppression of an armed rebellion against the rightful lord of Astapor. Ian had sent Rol and Polon east with three thousand Unsullied.
"Rol moved fast," Celia said. "His forces swept through the remnant households of the Good Masters along the east bank and secured the situation quickly. Tens of thousands of acres of farmland are now under our control, along with pastures, logging camps, quarries, and mines along both banks of the river."
"Specific numbers?"
"That's the problem. Rol's men can barely keep track of what they've captured, and the slave count is a complete mess." She glanced at her notes. "He asked if we could send someone with administrative experience to help, but I don't think that actually solves the issue."
"Why not?"
"Because the problem isn't record-keeping — it's that there's nothing staying still long enough to record. When Rol's forces arrived, the surviving Good Masters fled. When the masters fled, a large portion of the slaves fled with them and looted whatever they could carry on the way out. Rol's been using Unsullied to run down the runaways, but it's slow work and they're taking occasional casualties doing it.
The slaves who stayed behind aren't being cooperative either. They're claiming to be free Ghiscari farmers, and since their masters aren't there to contradict them, they're backing each other's stories. Polon was apparently ready to start executing people over it before someone talked him down."
"Expected." Ian reached for a notebook from his desk. "Here."
Celia read the cover. Draft: The Five Orders of Slavery.
"New rules for managing the slave population," Ian said. "Read through it and tell me if anything needs to be cut or changed."
Ian generally avoided touching social structures and legal frameworks. Reforms of that kind had a consistent pattern: long-term benefits, immediate costs, and a transition period that could outlast the man who started them. Anything that required overturning deeply held assumptions — even with overwhelming force behind it — took generations to fully absorb. The side effects didn't vanish because you wanted them to.
Time was the resource Ian had least of.
So his preference, whenever possible, was to work within the values the local population already held rather than against them. Meet people where they were. Adjust the furniture without knocking down the walls.
Slavery was the foundational institution of Slaver's Bay. Every person of consequence in this region accepted it as simply the way things worked. Ian wasn't going to spend his limited time and capital on a moral crusade that would unite his enemies and destabilize everything he was building. What he could do was restructure it in ways that served his purposes — and classification was the tool for that.
You believe slavery is a natural order. Fine. I won't argue the point. What I will do is sort my slaves into tiers. Surely no one objects to a master organizing his own property.
Celia read through the system aloud as she went.
"Fifth Order — the baseline. New acquisitions. No path to advancement into supervisory roles, but standard treatment otherwise.
Fourth Order — one-third more food per day than Fifth Order slaves. Eligible to compete for slave foreman positions.
Third Order — double rations compared to Fifth Order. Direct appointment rights as foremen. Permitted to keep one-tenth of their team's labor output as personal property.
Second Order — exempt from most physical labor. Primary function is supervising and managing the three orders below them. Receives most of the rights of free citizens in practical terms.
First Order — the 'Crown Slaves.' Elevated only for exceptional service and placed directly under Queen Daenerys's authority. Technically still enslaved, but treated in practice as Ghiscari nobility."
Celia set the notebook down.
"Giving slaves a ladder to climb keeps them from organizing against you. And if they do get restless, they'll direct it upward — at the slaves above them — before they ever direct it at their masters. When real trouble comes, you sacrifice a few of the higher-order slaves as scapegoats and the anger burns itself out." She paused. "That's fairly cold-blooded."
"I try."
"So what are the specific criteria for advancement through the orders?"
Ian looked at her with the expression of a man who had just made his point.
"Why do you think I handed you an unfinished draft?"
"…"
(End of Chapter)
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