Along the Razor's Edge (The War Eternal Book 1)

by Rob J. Hayes

  When I look back at my time in the Pit now, I see the overseer's plan in its entirety. I see the ingenuity of it. Prig was there to torture me physically, to break me down with pain and exhaustion. The cunt! The overseer was there to torture me psychologically, and he did a better job of it than Prig ever did with his whip. He was also a cunt!

  The overseer pushed the bowl of water towards me. I smelled a slight zest, a lemony fragrance. There was a white cloth floating in the liquid.

  "I expect you're quite pretty underneath the dirt," he said, still turning the key around and around. My hands could just about reach the lip of the table and no further. Unless he unchained me, I had no way of reaching the bowl, or the food, or the clothes.

  I've never thought of myself as pretty or beautiful, though some have some called me such, often in an attempt at flattery. The truth was, my coating of dirt was probably doing quite a bit to keep me safe from the other inmates. No, I didn't care for the washing water, or the clothes. My mouth was watering at the smell of meaty stew, but all of us were fed and I have never been a particularly hale eater despite the hunger that gnaws away inside of me. I would have killed for the boots, though.

  "Perhaps you don't realise just what a mess you look," the overseer continued in a voice like the most virulent of patronising arseholes. He reached forwards and lifted a mirror from the table, standing it to face me. At first, I thought to defiantly refuse to look at it, to refuse the sight that would stare back at me. Then I realised refusing to look would be a victory for the overseer as surely as bursting into tears at the sight. It would be all the confirmation he needed that I cared. I really fucking hate no-win situations. So, I glanced at the mirror. And I did not recognise the face staring back at me.

  I had never been fleshy but now I was gaunt, skin tight over bones, and pale as snow. Pale as sun bleached bones. A carcass left to rot away to nothing. That's what I found staring back at me, not the girl I knew flushed with health and power, but the ruin I had beaten into. The visage of a corpse unwilling to admit it was dead. My blue eyes were still bright. They were the only bit of the horror staring back at me I recognised.

  I couldn't let him win. Couldn't let him see how close I was to breaking, how much it hurt to see the wasted, pitiful, hateful thing I had become. I tested out a smile in the mirror, and swallowed a sob at the corpse smiling back at me. Then I turned it on the overseer. "You don't think I'm pretty?" I said, trying my best to appear manic.

  We had been seeing each other for weeks now. In the beginning I counted the number of interrogation sessions, but eventually I stopped. I wondered how, after so many meetings, he still didn't understand me in the slightest. I was such a bloody fool. It was I who didn't understand him. The overseer was playing the long game and I couldn't see the foundation he was laying.

  "Food, maybe?" he asked with a wave towards the bowl of stew. He left the mirror where it was. I would like to say I was strong enough not to steal the occasional glance, but there is a streak of vanity running through me I can't quite ignore. I think we all have one to some degree. I will not deny that every time I looked in that mirror I longed for better days. For cleaner days. It was torture every time I saw myself, like picking at scab, lifting it to see the oozing flesh beneath. I couldn't stop myself.

  My traitorous stomach gave a rumble at the thought of food. The overseer took it as a victory and leaned back in his chair, still watching me. I glanced down at the bowl to see it steaming. Chunks of brown meat and orange vegetables floated in a watery stock. I licked my lips and tore my eyes away, meeting the overseer's stare.

  "All this can be yours, Eskara," the overseer said, sweeping his hand to encompass the table. "You could be clean again. Well-fed. Clothed. I'm not asking you to swear loyalty to Terrelan. I'm certainly not asking you to fight for Terrelan. I'm not asking you to kill for Terrelan." I almost laughed. The Orran empire didn't ask me either; they took me as a child and never gave me a choice. Not that I minded. They might not have given me a choice, but they did give me power.

  "All I want from you, Eskara," he continued, "is an answer to a question. Where were you trained?"

  I didn't understand. It seemed such an innocuous question. The overseer already knew where I was trained. He had all that and much more in the notes and documentation recovered from the fall of Vernan. I answered almost without hesitation.

  "The Orran Academy of Magic," I said slowly, waiting to see the arsehole's trick.

  The overseer nodded and stood from his chair. He crossed to the door and pulled it open. A soldier stood on the other side, waiting.

  "Unchain her and leave her alone for ten minutes," the overseer said. "After that, she is free to join the rest of the inmates." He turned to look at me, a sly smile on his face. "Thank you for your co-operation, Eskara. I shall see you next week."

  I sat stunned as the soldier walked into the room, took the key from the table and unlocked the manacles from my wrists. He took the chain away and closed the door behind him. I found myself alone in the room with the water and mirror, the stew and wine, the clothes and the boots. I found myself alone with my utter confusion.

  What a bloody idiot I was. Maybe it was my age, but I didn't understand. I sat there and mulled over what had just happened, replaying it in my mind. I wasted most of my ten minutes trying to figure out the overseer's game and came up with no answer. Eventually I looked down at the table.

  The wash water was a trap. I was going straight back down into the Pit. The last thing I wanted was to look clean. The clothes would mark me out amongst the rest of the population. I stared at the boots for a while, wishing I could take them, but good footwear was more valuable than food down in the Pit. The other inmates would happily kill me for a chance at a sturdy pair of boots.

  That left only the stew and the wine. I can't impress how much I wanted to gulp down the stew. It smelled delicious even over my own stench, and I had eaten nothing but gruel and stale bread for months. I wanted it so much I had the bowl in my hands and most of the way to my lips before my defiant streak kicked in. I didn't know what the overseer was up to, asking me a question he already knew the answer to, nor rewarding me so handsomely for that answer. But I knew it was what he wanted. And I would be fucked before I gave that bastard anything.

  With a scream, I dashed the bowl of stew against the far wall. Then I dumped the wash water over the clothes and added the wine in with the mix. Finally, I looked down and saw myself in the mirror. The creature staring back at me was red faced, even underneath the muck, and snarling like a wild animal. I picked up the mirror and launched it at the door, grinning as it smashed. I think I would have turned the table over then, but it was secured to the floor, so I contented myself with kicking over the chairs and screaming again. I was quite surprised when the soldiers didn't open the door and drag me away. From outside that door I heard nothing.

  The thing about mirrors is that they are made of glass and glass has a habit of forming sharp edges when smashed. As I waited amidst the mess I had created, I looked down to find a number of those shards shining in the lamplight. I knelt and snatched a smallish shard into my hand, quickly tucking it into the bandages wrapped around my left arm.

  When the soldiers finally opened the door to throw me back into the general population, I was sitting on the table, tearing the wine-stained clothing apart at the seams and throwing bits of it onto the floor. They were not gentle as they escorted me from the garrison.

  Chapter 5

  I have said my life started in earnest down in the Pit, but that is not strictly true. Actually, it's a blatant lie and I'm bloody good at telling it. I lived fifteen years of my life before I was incarcerated there, and I would never claim a single year of it was quiet. No, there is far more to my tale. More you need to know. Or maybe I'm just indulging my ego. Chronomancers like to tell us that past and future affect each other in equal measure. The past shapes how we react to things in the future, and the future shapes how we view events of
the past. As the past only exists in memories, it is entirely shaped by the lens through which we view it. So, as this is my story, I have decided to digress.

  When I was a young girl, maybe just five or six years old, I loved two things more than anything. Well, maybe not as much as my parents, but as most five-year-olds are entirely dependent upon their parents I think it is fair to have loved them most of all. I loved the trees and I loved the sky.

  I was raised in a small forest village called Keshin, located on the southern side of Isha and far from the Orran-Terrelan border. Through the eyes of a child who didn't know any better it seemed a busy village, but I look back now and realise it was so small with barely a couple of hundred inhabitants. We traded in lumber and fruit, and my mother weaved baskets that were distributed far and wide, but mostly Keshin kept itself to itself. I had no idea of the world that existed outside those forest borders.

  Before I even knew of the Orran empire or their Sourcerers, I used to climb. I would shoot up trees so tall, from the canopy the people below would look like ants scurrying about our tiny village hive. I climbed with wild abandon and took risks as only a young child can. The danger of a fall seemed an abstract risk, at best.

  I remember the first time Ro'shan passed overhead. My brother, older than me by three years and working the blacksmith's bellows, came running home covered in sweat and ash. He pointed to the sky and shouted the Rand had come. He had no idea what a Rand was and neither did I. We had heard stories of their power, the miracles they performed, but that was as far as our meagre knowledge went. Those stories did not do the truth justice. Both the Rand and Djinn are as gods to all the peoples of Ovaeris, or at least that's what they'd have us believe. If there's one thing you remember from my story, one lesson you take from it, let it be this: Gods are fucking arseholes. All of them.

  After sprinting to the tallest tree in our little forest, bare feet pounding on the detritus, I scurried up the trunk and began climbing the branches. Hand over hand I went, faster than was safe and earning myself a latticework of scrapes and scratches up my arms and face. I suppose it is one of life's great ironies that children heal so fast yet do not appreciate it. It's only when we get older and a shallow bruise sticks around for a few weeks that we miss such swift healing.

  The forest canopy was thick in places, with broad-leaved trees that stretched out as far as they dared. It was possible for little ones such as myself to find a place where a few leaves overlapped and sit there above the forest. I had done this before of course, but never to watch a city float by over my little village.

  I remember staring up at Ro'shan and marvelling at its size and grace. It looked like a mountain turned upside down gliding through the sky. I knew, from eavesdropping on my elders, that a city larger than any terrans had ever built sat on the topside of that floating mountain, but even from my vantage point, all I could see was rock sailing across the endless blue of the sky.

  Freedom. I think that is what Ro'shan signified for me back then. The freedom to go wherever the city willed. Even now I see that city and it awes me. It has no need for the borders of empires. There is no sovereignty of the sky. But these days I know it is far from free. It is as much a prison as the Pit, though a far more elegant one.

  Once I was ejected from the garrison the soldiers no longer cared what I did or where I went. They left me kneeling on the rocky ground nursing a couple of new bruises and considering whether I had just done the right thing. My stomach still rumbled and my mouth still watered at the thought of the food I had wasted, and my feet made their own displeasure known at my shunning of the boots. I have been footsore many times in my life, but this was the one and only time I have ever turned down the offer of a good pair of shoes.

  I considered heading upwards instead of down. The third floor was not so far from the first. I would never be able to escape, all us scabs knew just how well the entrance to the Pit was guarded, but I might have been able to catch a glimpse of sunlight. I longed to see the sky again. To remember what freedom looked like. Down in the evergloom of the Pit, you quickly forget what it is like to be able to see more than a dozen paces. You forget what the horizon feels like.

  In the end, it was sheer defiance that stopped me. I would see the sky again. I would see sunlight again. But I would not go and stare up at it longingly. I would not try to content myself with stolen glances. I would earn my freedom one way or another and the sky would be my reward. Until then I decided to let my desire drive me, knowing it would only get stronger every time I was this close yet still so far away.

  At the time I still held secret hopes I might be rescued. I believed the Orran Emperor was still alive. I thought he would be massing troops in secret somewhere, maybe under a forest canopy, like my home village. I believed they would come for me. Josef and I were the last of Orran's Sourcerers able to hold five Sources at once. All the others had been captured or killed before the siege at Fort Vernan. I was powerful and I was loyal. I thought that would be enough. I was an idiot, still suffering from the idealism the Orran Academy of Magic had burned into me.

  I spared only a glance for the wooden lift waiting to take me back down to the main cavern. Prig was gone, but with a pull on the rope I could have signalled his friend to work the contraption and bring me back down. I hated the idea of walking back through the Trough, of skirting the Hill and watching Deko laugh and joke with his syphilitic captains. Yes, I meant sycophantic, but I'd wager both descriptions were equally accurate. I turned away from the lift and headed towards the stairs. There were other ways to reach the little cavern I shared with Josef and my team.

  The stairs were not the safest of ways to move between levels. They snaked around and around as they led downward, little tunnels with steps built in. Occasionally they would open out into tunnels or caverns and the stairs would continue elsewhere. It was quiet, save for my footfalls, almost peaceful. The danger rested in the other inmates.

  Everybody down in the Pit was a criminal of some sort. Many were war criminals like myself and Josef, others were Terrelans whose crimes should have earned them a tight noose and short drop. Unfortunately, the Terrelans didn't believe in execution, they preferred to sentence their criminals to a lifetime of pointless hacking away at solid rock. There were murderers, thieves, and worse, all living out the remainder of their lives underground, and some of them refused to give up their ways. It was well-known that some of those who felt the need to murder others haunted the tunnels and corridors. Prig himself had suggested never going anywhere alone, not just to me, but to all his scabs. Apparently, the slug-fucker wanted to keep the option of killing us all to himself.

  Despite the danger in using the deserted stairways I continued. I think I would have welcomed someone trying to kill me after the overseer's strange compassion. A good old-fashioned struggle to the death seemed so much more straightforward and honest. Of course, I had no doubt I would have lost the struggle. Back then I didn't know how to fight without magic.

  The sounds of digging never went away in the Pit. At first it was maddening. I spent many of my first days in the Pit on a knife edge, driven to anger and despair by the endless fucking sounds of metal striking rock. But after a few months, I learned to live with it. It became background noise that I no longer paid any attention to. And in many ways the noise of the constant digging became comforting. Terrans can get used to just about any adversity given long enough to acclimatise to it, but it takes some real seditious shit to make us start relying upon it, craving it. The few times the digging stopped I found my nerves fraying from the relative silence. I don't know how many teams lived down in the hole with us, but it was a lot. No matter where I went, I could hear the faint ring of picks hitting stone and hammers breaking rock. Even in the central cavern, as noisy as that was, I could always hear the digging. Or maybe by then it was just so prevalent that I heard it in my head. Now I think about it, it took quite some time, even after I was out, for the noise of the place to fade.

 
That was the very first day I saw Tamura. He was already something of a legend down in the Pit and I had heard his name spoken before. Never kindly. But I'd yet to see the old man. These days I know every line and scar on his face. I could sketch that leathery bastard from memory. I have done just that more than once. A person's face tells the story of their life with every crease, mar, and dimple. I've known people able to read a person's past simply by their face— I have never developed that skill, but I enjoy sketching and I have always been one to draw inspiration from those around me. Tamura's face was weather-beaten leather even back in those days. I sometimes wonder what that face had seen. What Tamura's past might tell us? What it might teach us? I know bits and pieces, the little things he can remember. The sad truth of it is, Tamura is as addled as a moonfish dropped on its head far too many times and can barely remember yesterday. He has forgotten more than most of us will ever know.

  I was hurrying down a corridor, passing a number of tunnels running off in every direction. I knew the stairs down should be close by, and I still had another four levels to go before I reached my own home. I've always had a good nose for direction and, though I'd never been to that part of the Pit before, I knew where I was headed. Tamura was halfway down an abandoned tunnel. The old man had a small oil lantern burning away on the floor behind him. His skin was dark as night, but his hair was a pattern of whites and greys all clumped together in tight, greasy locks that hung down past his shoulders. He stood there, staring up at the roof of the tunnel. Still and silent. And quite mad.

  I thought Tamura was crazy at the start. I still think he's crazy. Maybe it was the rigours of the Pit that shattered his mind or maybe it was something else. It was certainly something. If only I had thought to talk to him that day. If only I had listened to the madness he spewed out. I might have saved us all a lot of pain. But I was angry and confused, and I trusted no one, especially not a half-insane old man who lingered in dark tunnels to pass the time. I heard plenty of horror stories about people like that, and most of them ended with a very clear kernel of advice: Stay the fuck away. I left him there and spared his vigil of the tunnel roof no mind.