Chapter 217: War Preparations
Near the end of the month, Ian finally received Celia's first written report. He'd already absorbed most of the situation through the cat's eyes, but the formal reporting process was one he'd decided not to let slide. Good habits mattered even when they felt redundant.
The opening figures were substantial. Rol and his men had registered a hundred and seventeen thousand slaves along the Worm River — and that number didn't include those still being run down or the runaways that Yunkai would eventually return.
The seized grain had been inventoried. The total was disappointing. The stockpiles along the river came in well below what Astapor itself held in reserve, and Astapor's reserves weren't generous to begin with. Under Ian's new policy, feeding a hundred and twenty thousand slaves along the Worm River at the rates he'd promised would burn through the available grain in under six months.
It wasn't hard to understand why the population of Slaver's Bay had stayed as low as it had. The Good Masters didn't bother storing food for their slaves through the winter. Slaver's Bay sat far enough south that some planting was still possible in winter — nothing like the dead freeze of the North, where no grain grew at all — but production dropped sharply, and the Masters had never found it worth their trouble to bridge the gap. When winter came, slaves starved. When summer returned, the Masters rode out to the Dothraki Sea or haggled with passing traders and bought replacements. The math worked for them.
It didn't work for Ian. He was in the middle of a military expansion and heading toward a war. He needed bodies that were fed, functional, and alive.
The wheat already in the ground along the Worm River would come in around three months out. The fields Celia had cleared and replanted were five months from harvest. Neither timeline solved the immediate problem.
A large-scale food import plan moved to the top of Ian's agenda.
The obvious answer — Volantis — wasn't actually an answer. Volantis held the largest grain-producing territory in western Essos, with vast farmlands and millions of serfs working the Rhoyne and Selhoru river basins. They exported more grain than anyone else in the known world. They were also, from Astapor,
effectively unreachable at acceptable cost. Land transport across that distance was out of the question. Sea routes existed, but any ship moving grain between Volantis and Astapor had to round the entire Valyrian peninsula — a journey that added five to ten times the grain's value in transport costs before it ever reached a dock. It wasn't viable.
That left the Skahazadhan River basin: Meereen's agricultural hinterland to the west, and the Lhazarene territories to the east. The Skahazadhan land wasn't dramatically more fertile than the Worm River valley, but it had more of it under cultivation and a larger population working it.
Historically, Meereen had been Astapor's primary grain supplier. Ian decided to lean into that relationship and increase imports significantly.
The reasoning was twofold. First, it was one of the few workable options he had. Second, deepening trade ties with Meereen would give them reason to think of him as an economic partner rather than a threat — a useful illusion to maintain for as long as it held. Whether Meereen's merchants tried to squeeze the price upward didn't particularly concern him. Every coin he spent in Meereen he intended to recover with interest when the time came.
Inside Astapor, the army expansion was moving.
Ian's new officer corps was still midway through its training course. But the first selection round for the Ghiscari legion's slave soldiers had concluded.
Every man selected had come from the Worm River slave population. Those who passed the first training phase would officially receive Fourth Order status. Those who washed out were sent back to their work assignments — not killed, as Astapor tradition would have had it. According to Rol, that single departure from established practice had earned more goodwill among the slave population than almost anything else Ian had done. Men who expected death and received reassignment instead didn't forget it.
The first cohort of five thousand recruits moved into the vacated Unsullied barracks in Astapor. The existing training facilities couldn't handle more than that in the first round, so Ian had capped the intake accordingly. Three new military camps were under construction outside the city walls, but they were months from usable condition.
To clear the barracks for the recruits, Ian pulled two thousand Unsullied out and redistributed them across his three pyramids.
The pleasant surprise came while that reshuffling was being organized. Someone took a proper inventory of Astapor's training pipeline and found six thousand partially trained soldiers whose instruction had been interrupted — men roughly three years short of completing the full Unsullied program.
That was the source of the Good Masters' original confidence when they'd told Ian he could have another two thousand Unsullied in a year, given time. The pipeline had been there all along.
By strict Unsullied standards, perhaps two thousand of those six thousand would have been cut before graduation. Ian looked at them differently. These men had already survived round after round of elimination. By any reasonable military benchmark, they were elite soldiers — just not finished ones. He had no interest in culling them further, and he had no need for the ritual that completed the formal Unsullied transformation.
Their loyalty was a slightly open question. Men who hadn't gone through the full program might not have the same absolute obedience as the Unsullied proper. Ian wasn't willing to find out the hard way by mixing them into his existing Unsullied ranks. Instead, he selected all three thousand who were sixteen or older and organized them into the First Ghiscari Legion as a separate formation.
The remaining three thousand who hadn't yet reached age would continue their training until they were ready to be assessed again.
With the army expansion organized, Ian turned back to the Five Orders.
Celia had presented him with two versions of the promotion mechanism. He wasn't satisfied with either.
The first problem was the pace of advancement. Set it too slow and the system wouldn't generate the enthusiasm he needed quickly enough — and given what was coming with the Long Night, he didn't have years to wait for a gradual culture shift. He needed motivation that worked now.
But set the pace too fast and the rankings became worthless. The value of a slave's order wasn't purely about better rations or lighter work. It was about comparison — about having people below you who confirmed that your position meant something. A Third Order slave who looked around and saw half the population at the same level had nothing to feel elevated about.
Less than a month into the Five Orders system, nearly five thousand slaves had already reached Fourth Order status. Once the current training cohort finished its first phase next month, that number would push toward ten thousand.
Ian was quietly grateful that the false accusation wave along the Worm River had swept up more than forty thousand free citizens and converted them into new Fifth Order slaves. Without that influx of low-ranked newcomers at the bottom, the middle tiers would already be losing their meaning.
His current working solution was to maintain reasonably high promotion rates while continuously replenishing the lower orders with fresh population. As it happened, that replenishment had a natural source. According to Lord Fehmar, the Lhazarene region north of Slaver's Bay held upward of four million people — slaves, in practical terms, once Ian moved through the area. Once he took that territory, he could flood the lower orders with new arrivals and keep the hierarchy's internal pressures functioning indefinitely.
The second problem was harder. No matter how carefully Ian designed the promotion criteria, he couldn't engineer fairness into the system by mechanism alone. Every evaluation of labor output, every promotion decision, every assignment of rank ultimately required a person to make a call — and people were the least reliable component in any system, in any era.
Even in a world with advanced record-keeping and institutional oversight, corruption and favoritism were persistent, structural problems. In a world where administrative reach barely extended beyond city walls and information moved slowly, the problem was orders of magnitude worse.
But he couldn't leave it unresolved. Injustice in the promotion system would be fatal — not morally, but practically.
Everything Ian had built around the slave population rested on a specific calculation: that the people at the bottom had something to work toward. He had surrounded them with despair on every other side. The promotion mechanism was the single valve he'd left open. If the people controlling that valve could be bought — if a foreman with the right connections could keep his subordinates trapped regardless of their output — then the bottom of the hierarchy had no reason to believe in the system at all. And people with nothing to believe in and nothing to lose were exactly the kind of problem Ian couldn't afford.
Slaves didn't resent their masters the way they resented the man one rank above them. That was the engine that made the whole structure run. But the engine only ran if the people at the bottom believed, genuinely believed, that the rank above them was reachable.
Solving the fairness problem moved to the top of Ian's list.
(End of Chapter)
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