Tops and Sops (The Eternal Dungeon: Rebirth #6) ¶ DRM-free multiformat e-book: epub, html, mobi/Kindle, pdf, doc

"Tops are worse, there's no doubt of that. While the sops are singing on about joy and love, the top is screaming in your ear that you'd better move your bloody bum faster or he'll smash your face in."

The torturer was young, inexperienced, and lacking in knowledge of the world. The prisoner was tough, worldlywise, and had an infallible plan that would give him escape from this place. So why did the prisoner feel as though the torturer had the edge?

Imprisoned for attempting to protect a fellow laborer against the cruelty of their supervisor, Little thinks he is ready to confront the cruelty of the torturers in the Eternal Dungeon. But life in the dungeon is about to take a strange turn. With one torturer beginning to lose control of himself, and another torturer trying desperately to balance conflicting duties . . . well, what is Little to do when he finds that he has been assigned a torturer who gives him presents?

Continuing the tale of two torturers in love with each other, this novelette (miniature novel) can be read on its own or as the sixth and final story in the "Rebirth" volume of The Eternal Dungeon, an award-winning speculative fiction series set in a nineteenth-century prison where the psychologists wield whips.

EXCERPT

There's only one thing I despise more than sops, and that's tops.

Sops are bad enough. I've had to work with too many of them; they go around talking about flowers and beautiful light and how nice the world would be if everybody was kind to each other. Meanwhile, I'm lugging a fifty-pound barrow of rocks and thinking to myself that the world would be better off if midwives examined every baby at birth and killed the ones who are sops. After all, we swat annoying flies.

Tops are worse, there's no doubt of that. While the sops are singing on about joy and love, the top is screaming in your ear that you'd better move your bloody bum faster or he'll smash your face in. He means it too. I think I was about eight when I realized that the world is one giant prison with us bottoms as the prisoners, and the tops as our guards and torturers. Seemed obvious to me that the only thing to do was for the bottoms to make a well-planned attack on the tops and tumble their bodies into the midden where they deserve to lie. By the time I was twenty, though, I'd given up on convincing anyone else of this obvious fact, and there's no point in trying to run a revolution on your own. That only gets you into trouble.

It's a pity I didn't remember that on the night I put a dagger into Mendel's chest.

Mendel was one of the "guards," by which I mean that he was a bloke who could have lived his life as a bottom, but instead chose to help the tops keep the rest of us imprisoned. A bloodsucking leech, in other words, and this one sure sucked the blood out of all of us at the quarry. I could put up with it where I was concerned – I've put up with a lot in my day – but when he beat bloody some poor boy who stumbled and dropped his load, that was too much. If there's one conviction I hold in life – aye, I do have a conviction, despite popular belief – it's that you have to look out for your mates. That's what gets me about the tops: they don't care about people, just about getting business done. I expect that Mendel would have sold his best mate if he'd thought the profits would help the quarry.

At any rate, I explain all this so that you can understand why, on the night they brought me to the Eternal Dungeon, I wasn't exactly filled with joy when I caught sight of two hooded men leaning over a table, in soft conversation with each other.

I knew what they were, of course. Every child in our queendom is brought up on stories of the faceless Seekers, the head tops of the Eternal Dungeon. Torturers of highest skill, they're said to be, who will crush a prisoner to dust and then trample on the dust while cheerfully singing.

Mothers will say anything to get their kids to shut up. I'd taken the trouble to ascertain the truth about the Seekers myself, during the three weeks I'd been at Alleyway Prison. There was a guard there who'd worked at the Eternal Dungeon in some exalted position like latrine scraper, and he'd heard information he shouldn't have heard, which he was quite eager to share with any prisoner who showed an interest. Not only a top, but a top who was a sop – bloody blades, I seem to spend my life surrounded by such people.

Anyway, what he'd told me was encouraging, but I wasn't prepared to discount the scare-tales of my childhood. If nothing else, I could see before me a ceiling-high slate tablet covered with prisoners' names, and a goodly number of those names were crossed out. I knew what that meant.

The first Seeker who looked up from the conversation – it's hard to tell these hooded men apart, but this one had green eyes – looked at me in such a glacial manner that I was prepared for a moment to believe every story I'd ever heard about the Eternal Dungeon, including the one about how Seekers hold parties when they're racking prisoners.

Then the second Seeker looked up, and my doubts vanished. I don't know why. There wasn't much to see within the hood's eye-holes – just an ordinary pair of blue eyes, looking at me steadily. I had a puppy once who used to look at me that way. It wasn't so much the Seeker's eyes as the way he held himself that alerted me to the fact that this was a different sort of man than the green-eyed Seeker. There was a certain reserve, a bit of hesitancy – it's hard to describe, but I've met enough tops to know which ones can be pushed and which can't. This was a top who could be pushed.

All the while I was thinking this, a conversation was going on between my guards and a little bald man sitting at the desk that the Seekers were standing next to. I didn't pay him any mind; I could tell at a glance that he was another of those bottoms who had become a bloodsucker. After a while, the bald man turned his head and said something to the green-eyed Seeker, who didn't reply. He simply shifted his gaze toward the other Seeker.

There was a moment's pause as the second Seeker flicked a glance my way. Then he said to the green-eyed Seeker, "Certainly, sir. I'd be glad to take care of this prisoner."

Sweet blood, they were making babies into Seekers. I might not have been able to see the youth's face, but there was no mistaking the nature of his voice: he must have been a good twenty years younger than me. This was going to be the easiest escape in the history of the Eternal Dungeon.