Free Devices and Desires by K. J. Parker

conceived of anything as magical as that.
    He thought for a while, lining up components and processes in his mind. Then he slid off the bench, washed his hands and face
     in the slack-tub and headed across the yard to the office.
    As he walked in, a clerk perched on a high stool turned to peer at him.
    “Any work going?” Ziani asked.
    The clerk looked at him. “Depends on what you can do,” he said.
    “Not much. Well, I can fetch and carry, sweep floors and stuff.”
    “Guild member?”
    Ziani shook his head. “Left school when I was twelve,” he said.
    The clerk grinned. “Good answer,” he said. “We’re all right for skilled men, but we can always use another porter.” He shook
     his head. “Crazy, isn’t it? There’s Guildsmen sat at home idle for want of a place, and the likes of you can walk in off the
     street and start immediately.”
    “Good,” Ziani said. “What’s the pay?”
    The clerk frowned. “Don’t push your luck,” he said.
    Nice clear directions brought Ziani to the shipping bay. The factory made farm machinery — plows, chain and disk harrows,
     seed drills — for export to the breadbasket countries in the far south. How they got there, very few people knew or cared;
     the Mezentines sold them to dealers, who took delivery at Lonazep, on the mouth of the estuary. Ziani had never been to Lonazep,
     but he knew it was outside the walls. After five hours lifting things onto carts, he was asked if he fancied volunteering
     for carriage duty.
    The answer to this question, in every factory in the world, is always no. Carriage duty means sitting on the box of a cart
     bumping along rutted tracks in the savage wilderness outside the city. It pays time and a half, which isn’t nearly enough
     for the trauma of being Outside; you sleep in a ditch or under the cart, and there are rumored to be spiders whose bite makes
     your leg swell up like a pumpkin.
    “Sure,” Ziani said.
    (Because the sentries at the gates would be looking for a Guildsman on his own, not a driver’s mate on a cart in the long,
     backed-up queue crawling out of town on the north road. When a particularly dangerous and resourceful fugitive — an abominator,
     say, or a guard-killer — was on the run, they’d been known to pull the covers off every cart and scrabble about in the packing
     straw in case there was anyone hiding in there, but they never bothered to look at the unskilled men on the box. Guild thinking.)
    God bless the city ordinance that kept annoying heavy traffic off the streets during the day. By its blessed virtue, it was
     dark when the long line of carts rolled out of the factory gate and merged with the foul-tempered glacier inching its way
     toward the north gate. Heavy rain was the perfect finishing touch. It turned the streets into glue, but as far as Ziani was
     concerned it was beautiful, because a sentry who has to stand at his post all night quite reasonably prefers to avoid getting
     soaked to the skin, and accordingly stays in the guardhouse and peers out through the window. As it turned out, they showed
     willing and made some sort of effort; a cart six places ahead in the line was pulled over, while the sentries climbed about
     on it and crawled under it with lanterns. They didn’t find anything, of course; and, their point proved, they went back inside
     in the dry. Ziani guessed the quota was one in ten. Sure enough, looking back over his shoulder once they were through the
     arch and out the other side, he saw the third cart behind them slow to a halt, and lanterns swinging through the rain.
    “You’re new, then,” said the driver next to him. He hadn’t spoken since they left the factory.
    “That’s right,” Ziani said. “Actually, this is my first time out of town.”
    The driver nodded. “It sucks,” he said. “The people smell and the food’s shit.”
    “So I heard,” Ziani said.
    “So why’d you volunteer?”
    “I don’t know, really,” Ziani replied.