People on the outside-those blessed souls who knew the luxury of three meals and the kiss of sunlight on their faces-often thought being sent to the imperial quarry to mine until their dying breath as the worst fate a man could suffer.
But they were wrong.
There was one job that made swinging a pickaxe in the depths look like a holiday at the seaside. One role so wretched that even the broken-backed miners counted themselves lucky by comparison.
Night soil slave.
Quite the poetic name for work that made grown men cross themselves and spit.
"Lord! The smell's getting worse," a guard muttered, pinching his nose as his life depended on it. He waved his free hand at the air as if he could somehow beat the stench into submission. "Think it's time we sealed this tunnel off."
"Aye, should mention it to the captain." His partner nodded, already backing away from the tunnel mouth that reeked like the devil's own privy. "He's been in a pleasant mood lately. Must be that crippled fellow he's been entertaining. Or maybe something interesting happened in the forges?"
The first guard snorted. "Probably both."
They laughed and continued their patrol, boots echoing off stone as they fled the stench.
A few moments passed, and from the very tunnel they'd been discussing, emerged a figure that would have made the dead weep with pity.
The old man looked like something carved out of suffering itself. What remained of his hair clung to his scalp in white wisps, the rest of his skull as bare and spotted as a bird's egg. Wrinkles mapped every inch of his face, each line a testament to decades of misery. His spine was curved at such a sharp angle that it was a wonder he could walk at all-bent nearly double, as if the weight of his years had finally broken his back.
A single piece of cloth hung from his skeletal frame, covering just enough to maintain the pretense of human dignity. In one gnarled hand, he clutched an iron bucket, rust eating through its sides like a disease. His free hand moved constantly, scratching at his body as though something lived beneath his skin.
One look at him would make even the most hardened prisoner turn away in disgust.
The gods, it seemed, had taken particular pleasure in this man's torment.
"Oh Lord Vessa," he wheezed, his voice like wind through broken glass, "why do you keep me tethered to this cursed earth? Please…please, let my soul find its rest… oh merciful Lord Vessa…"
The prayers fell from his cracked lips in an endless stream, muscle memory from years of begging for death that wouldn't come. He shuffled deeper into the tunnel, that cursed bucket clutched against his chest, until he found a spot where the stone wall could support his twisted spine.
The miners working nearby caught sight of him and recoiled like he was plague-ridden.
"Bloody hell, old man!" one of them barked, raising his pickaxe as if to ward off evil spirits. "How many times do we have to tell you? Keep your stinking arse away from us!"
Even here, in this pit where people came to die, there were still hierarchies. Still someone to look down on, still someone to kick when your own life turned to shit.
The old man didn't flinch at their words, however. Down here, no one would lay a finger on him anyway-not out of fear, but because touching him would be like embracing a rotting corpse. The stench alone was enough to make strong men vomit.
You see, the old man was a night soil slave.
And the job of a night soil slave was to haul the waste from every miner's cell, from every corner where men relieved themselves in this underground hell. To carry buckets of human filth through tunnels that never saw sunlight, dumping it all into cesspit holes carved from abandoned mine shafts.
He was, in the most literal sense, a shit collector.
The bottom rung of a ladder that descended straight into the abyss.
Night soil slave was the job they gave to the weak and the old-men whose backs had snapped under the weight of pickaxes, whose arms could no longer swing true against stone. Better to make them useful hauling waste than let them die eating bread they couldn't earn. The Empire was nothing if not efficient with its cruelties.
The old man would have gladly traded his breath for silence, would have embraced death like a long-lost lover. But he couldn't bring himself to take that final step into darkness.
Coward, that's what he was.
More than that-he was terrified of what waited beyond. Lord Vessa might be merciful, but suicide was still a sin that stained the soul black. Better to endure this hell than risk an eternity of something worse.
So here he sat, hauling shit until his body gave out naturally. The gods surely had a sense of humor.
-Click, step, drag!
Just then, he heard the sound, a distinctive three-beat shuffle that had become very familiar over the past weeks. The old man looked up through rheumy eyes to see a figure emerge from the shadows-bald head gleaming in the Winker-light, leather eyepatch dark as a wound, that twisted smile full of gaps where teeth used to live. A man who was not that much better in appearance when compared to himself.
Russ.
"Still talking to gods who can't hear you, old man?" Russ leaned on his walking stick, that blood-red eye studying the hunched figure with something that might have been pity. Or amusement. Hard to tell with a face that ruined.
"Lord Vessa hears all prayers," the old man wheezed, clutching his bucket tighter.
"Does he now?" Russ's laugh whistled through his broken teeth. "If your Lord Vessa is so merciful, why hasn't he lifted you from this misery? Has it been ten years? Twenty? You're still hauling buckets of piss and shit."
The old man's spine straightened as much as it could manage-which wasn't much. "The Lord works in mysterious ways. His mercy-"
"His mercy?" Russ stepped closer, his walking stick clicking against stone. "What mercy is there in letting a man rot alive? In forcing him to carry the filth of others until his body breaks completely? Perhaps your lord is deaf."
"You speak blasphemy," the old man said, but his voice carried less conviction than before. "Lord Vessa embraces all who come to him with pure hearts. He tests us, yes, but only to make our souls worthy of-"
"Worthy?" The word came out sharp as a blade. "Look at yourself, old man. Look at what you've become in service to your merciful god. Is this worthiness? This slow decay, while you beg for death you're too afraid to take?"
The old man's mouth opened and closed like a fish gasping on dry land. The bucket trembled in his grip.
Russ studied him for a long moment, that bloodshot eye unblinking. Then, slowly, he extended his scarred hand toward the hunched figure.
"But perhaps you're right about one thing," he said quietly. "Perhaps Lord Vessa does work in mysterious ways."
The old man stared at the outstretched hand as if it were a serpent ready to strike.
"Maybe," Russ continued, his voice dropping to barely above a whisper, "your merciful god has finally sent someone to free you from this burden."
The old man looked at the wooden box held in his grasp, but if he had seen Russ' face, he would have known how the devil smiled!
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