Free Brink (The Ruin Saga Book 2) by Harry Manners Page B

a few miles away, a legendary trading post, a paradise for entrepreneurs and a nightmare for any unsavoury characters. It was the closest thing they had ever had to an army. With that gone, their last buffer against the north—and anyone else—was also gone. Hundreds of miles now separated them from their closest allies.
    “They’ll try to turn them,” Evelyn said, coming to stand beside him. “The ones that they don’t kill. We’re going to be fighting our own flesh and blood soon enough.” Evelyn was a woman who held her head high even at the worst of times, but right now her regal veil fractured, and her shawled arm wrapped around him. “For the first time in my life, I don’t see a way we can win.”
    Alexander folded his hand over hers. He had no words of comfort left.
    Who could have known they would end up here? Of all their accomplishments and victories, the thousands of dedicated people across the land that had fallen under their banner, precious little remained. All they had brought to bear was on the brink of going up in flames.
    It hadn’t always been this way. Once upon a time, when the echoes of the Old World were still fresh, they had been almost unstoppable.

FIRST INTERLUDE

     
    The hammer came down on the chisel with a final clink, and the engraving was complete. Stretching some fifty feet across the sheer face of the rocky bluff, the Latin alphabet stood capitalised and proud. It had taken two hours of painstaking work to etch the letters, and finishing touches had delayed them twice as long.
    James Chadwick stepped back, admired his handiwork, and wiped his brow. His critical eye picked out niggles and imperfections from start to finish, but he knew it would do; it was more than satisfactory. He had chosen his site carefully, within plain sight for half a mile around, yet sheltered from the elements. Fortune granted, it would last some hundred years before weathering began to blur its form.
    He inspected it critically, trying to see it from the point of view of virgin eyes, those who might stumble upon it in the high grass, once the ruins of the Old World had crumbled to dust. Would they see what he saw—see the beauty, a window to a whole world of knowledge and truth? Here before him was something the people of the Old World would have taken for granted: a key to the sumptuous bounty of the mind. Even if he and his kind failed to pass anything else down through the ages, here was something that might provide a window to a new beginning. This was one of many fail-safes built across the land, just in case it all came to nothing.
    But that would never happen as long as he had a hammer to hand. Not as long as Alexander Cain drew breath.
    “Crooked,” Alex called from the ridge afar.
    “It’ll do.”
    “When they bow down before these letters in ages to come, you might think different.”
    James rolled his eyes and stared across the meadow at his silhouetted form. “When they make statues of you and me, we’ll see who’s worrying about neatness. It’s all there.”
    “That it is.” Alex rode across the meadow, his white steed parting the tall wheat until he was abreast James’s chocolate colt. “There might be hope for us all yet.”
    “Even if we lost everything else?” James thought of the vast stores of books that lay in the libraries he loved so dearly, his childhood playgrounds; the vast treasure troves that lay locked amidst moss-covered underfunded public shacks.
    “It’s happened before,” Alex said. “Mankind has lost all sense of itself time and time again through the ages. But no matter how far we’re knocked down, we always find our feet again. It might take decades, centuries, maybe millennia, but we get there, if we have but the simplest tools.” He planted his hands on his hips and surveyed the alphabet emblazoned on the stone rock face. “Cornerstones like this, they’re all we ever really need.”
    James had heard it all before, enough times for it to roll