Jasmine hated walls.
Staring across the normally hidden landscape of rooftops and empty space, the young rogue rested her defiant glare upon the towering stone cage that surrounded the ghetto she called home. Bleak and impassive, the weather-worn granite barrier gazed back at her with disdain. Eventually, she was forced to concede a temporary defeat in the pointless staring match, though it did nothing but stoke the furnace of her hatred.
To Jasmine, those monoliths of cracked, stone blocks were the very antithesis of every passionate movement in her head or heart. Walls meant confinement. Walls meant separation. Walls were malevolent specters lurking hidden like parasites in the mind even as they loomed in plain sight, lording themselves over those that walked in their shadows. They tormented the lives of the imprisoned, daily reminding them with forbidding sternness that they were not free. And though Jasmine had little trouble navigating her own way past the enclosure when the need arose, the very sight of them sparked a rage that boiled her blood.
Still, she could not keep her eyes from returning to them again and again.
Beaten once more, Jasmine turned her head toward the setting sun, tracking the fiery ball’s progress as it made the long, slow decent to the horizon. Perched on the corner of a tenement and well above the milling crowds of the streets below, the girl welcomed the coming of night and the darkness that accompanied it. If the god of luck saw fit to kiss her hand that evening, she would be using that darkness to ascend to a world much brighter.
The rogue reached up and gave a tug to the black tichel wrapped about her head, ensuring that it was secure. Sliding her lithe hands down to her ankles, she checked the snugness of her greaves. Fingers tugged at laces and pulled at buckles all over her body as she tested each piece of the black, night-leathers that made up her roofrunning uniform. It was the fifth time she had done so in less than an hour, a habit that would have appeared as neurotic to any outside observer but one born of years of experience. A keen attention to detail was, after all, a runner’s stock and trade.
Quite against her will, Jasmine’s eyes returned again to the wall. She found herself musing, as was often her habit, on the fortification’s sinister purpose. The imposing structure of stone was an obstacle built for one reason alone - to ensure that the city-sized populace of the East-block stayed securely in their urban pen, not quite animals and not quite people either. The masters responsible for erecting it (well before the girl’s time) had been determined in their desire to keep the poverty-ridden streets of Porsham Grand’s ghettos separate from the city proper. A stone cage had served them well.
The walls kept the unwanted in and served to discourage those of means from trespassing into the lives of the wretched, from even contemplating notions of charity or community. The end result was that the ghettos had become their own communities within the larger cityscape of Porsham Grand. The laws of House and King ruled, but were not enforced. Guards and soldiers stayed away unless circumstance demanded their attention. And economies of a different sort had sprung into being, interacting with the outside world only when necessary.
Of course, every cage has its doors. Residents of the East-block who were capable of providing some service for the respectable population of the city could use these doors to flee their fate, if only for a short while. The vast majority of these temporary escapees consisted of day-laborers, prostitutes and foreigners far from home and possessed of exotic or extraordinary skills. When the rich demanded the desperate, the unique, the unseemly or all of these, then the rabble were allowed to mix and mingle with the merchants, travelers, soldiers and nobility that kept the coffers of the ruling merchant Houses flush with gold. Those tax-paying citizens of means were, after all, the true residents of the city. The ghetto-dwellers were tools. Used as needed, discarded at convenience.
But at the end of the day, even the most skilled or compliant of the ghetto’s inhabitants could not hold onto their false freedom. By the laws of the Houses (under the guise of kingly proclamation, of course), proper papers were required to walk the avenues of the outside world. In theory, this meant that all those in the city should be carrying proof of legitimacy. In practice, the guards never checked documents unless they wanted something. More than a few of Porsham Grand’s “proper” citizens had ended their night in a ghetto because they had simply forgotten they even needed papers. The ghetto-dwellers, however, knew to be more vigilant. Should you be caught outside the walls after dusk and without official approval, the guards were at liberty to arrest you. Should they feel a bit of sport in order, they could do much worse. A few coins could often solve the problem, but most that walked the streets of poverty could barely find food for their bellies, let alone afford to line the pockets of a greedy thug.
People begged, people broke, people complied or died. The weight of invisible slavery rested on their shoulders, bending them to an unseen will. They became predators and prey and corpses floating in the sewer. All this due to a thirty-foot high, ten-foot thick pile of cut stone.
She hated those fucking walls.
Information on when and where the book will be available shall be forthcoming sometime in the next week.
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