The Emperor's Edge

The Emperor's Edge Ch. 6 Pt. 1

 Shackles bound Amaranthe’s wrists behind her back. Two guards dragged her through dark narrow hallways and down a dank stairway framed by walls of roughly quarried stone. Lanterns burned at distant intervals, hanging from old torch sconces. As the group moved in and out of the shadows, Amaranthe felt as if she had stepped back hundreds of years in time.

Warm blood trickled down her temple. Numerous glass cuts afflicted her face and scalp. Worse pain came from her battered muscles, courtesy of the pummeling they received in the three-story fall. This discomfort was only the beginning, she knew. I can survive this. Whatever torture they inflict on me, I will survive, and I will plan, and I will escape.

Then she entered the dungeon.

She was expecting shackles, instruments of pain, and moldy, bloodstained walls. The archaic atmosphere ended at the doorway, however. Inside, a honeycomb of whitewashed tunnels and chambers spread out. They were brightly lit by gas jets and smelled of lye soap. The first man she saw likewise did not meet expectations.

Amaranthe had anticipated towering, monosyllabic guards led by a sadistic, whip-cracking overseer who had not seen the sun in twenty years. Instead, a gray-haired man in crisp black military fatigues greeted her with a smile.

“Ah!” he said cheerfully. “A female. You’re our first. Excellent.”

The pin on the left side of his collar proclaimed him a colonel; the pin on the right bore a needle, the symbol for a surgeon.

A shiver raised the hair along her arms. “First for what?”

“I’ll show you.” The surgeon hummed and tapped his clipboard against his thigh as he led the way down the stark, white corridor. “Come along, come along.”

The guards forced Amaranthe to follow. If her hands had not been bound behind her, she might have tried for one of the swords or pistols hanging from their belts, but she had no hope of reaching them.

Cells lined either side of the corridor, each secured by steel bars and locked gates. Male prisoners occupied most. Some stood and watched her pass, but most lay prone and unresponsive. One had black fingers and toes, symptoms of the advanced stages of frostbite. Another had pox marks all over his skin. Occasionally, medics in military fatigues surrounded the prisoners. One would hold a clipboard and pen while others stabbed and prodded at their victims.

In one cell, a man was stretched facedown on a metal table with a surgeon poking around several inches of exposed vertebrae. He screamed with each prod, and blood flowed from his back. It splashed the floor, ran down a slight slope, and poured into a central drain. Amaranthe experienced the unwelcome insight that someone had angled the floors and placed the drains with exactly that purpose in mind.

Torture, but more methodical than the simple cuts and burns designed to extract information. They were performing medical experiments on these people. She shuddered.

“The emperor might not like the idea of a lady being dissected in his dungeon,” one of the guards holding Amaranthe whispered to the other as they traveled deeper into the tunnels.

“This was his idea,” the other said. “He wanted more money to go into medical research, right?”

“He has no idea what’s going on down here, and I’m sure this isn’t the kind of research he meant.”

“That’s ‘cause he’s soft, and you are too if you listen to him. Hollowcrest is smart to keep his thumb on the boy. The Nurians would be mauling us if they had any idea how weak-minded our supposed emperor is.”

Amaranthe wondered how many men in the Imperial Barracks were loyal to Sespian and how many to Hollowcrest. If these two were representative of the whole, Hollowcrest’s supporters were more vocal.