A/N: This story is an experiment. I am not flying blind; I've coupled my own ideas with a good deal of research on the author's opinion on the matter, and this is something I've thought about in passing for quite a few years. That said, you'll have to form your own opinions. Enjoy :)

Knife's Edge

What about the Orcs' story? Who tells that? And what if, when Saruman was mixing Orcs and men to make his perfect Uruk Hai, he let some good in with the bad?

Orcs don't get second chances. Lurtz knew this well.

In Isengard, the Tower of Orthanc rises like a vengeful spear. Beneath the foundations, the ground is honeycombed, excavated like a wasp's nest – scaffolds and giant cogs and furnace-pits impose on the rock like usurping overlords, dwarfing the figures that swarm unrelentingly over their surfaces. There are the forges, the warg-pens, the interrogation cells, the training grounds soaked in black blood, the slave-pits.

And then there are the chambers behind the slave-pits. The spawning holes.

Lurtz's eyes had not yet looked on the outside world, but his initiation was coming to an end. First, they had simply let him kill, giving him unfortunate goblins drawn by lot and watching the ease and ferocity with which he dispatched them. Later, he was given opponents of greater calibre to refine his technique and teach him discipline. The first five had died in agony until they'd gone for broke and summoned their best.

The sanguine light licked over the rockface like filthy tongues. The caverns were always lit by flame, wherever you were. The furnaces spread heat and light through them like poison; the training ground backed onto the forge, and the hiss of a thousand tempering scimitars accompanied their sparring like an iron audience screaming for blood.

His partner was a smith, the one they'd given him after the unfortunate first five. They were evenly matched, his opponent's experience and precision proving a steady counter to the unnatural strength of Lurtz's bloodlust. Turn, parry, thrust. Parry. Parry. Slash, the muscles in his arm moving smoothly to accommodate the force like some demonic machine.

His head emptied when he fought the smith. It was a kind of purity, though the connotations of the word were distasteful to him. There was the intensity of focus, the unbounded strength of his body, the fierce satisfaction of physical taxation. This was Uruk Hai. Strength, speed, force, sweat, blood, death. There was beauty in that.

Of course, it had not always been so.

In the pinnacle of Orthanc, far away from Lurtz's sparring and surrounded by the sky he had never seen, a light burned. The Wizard in the Tower.

Saruman's plan had been carefully laid over many years. The caverns below Orthanc were already being hollowed out before any sign of it could be divined from the surface. Isengard was still green then, and Saruman had been careful to ensure that no-one would remark on the shipments of mining equipment passing through his gates. The first orcs had been smuggled in more cautiously still, as had the slaves that were to be the pioneering subjects of his experimentation. They were there when the White Council convened to decide the fate of the Necromancer. They were there when Gandalf first began visiting Orthanc with his musings on Bilbo the hobbit's unusual magic ring. They were there when Gandalf came knocking, years later, with the dire news that the One Ring had, indeed, been found. The paradox delighted him.

In those days, the slaves had been travellers and traders, mercenaries taken unawares, whatever pickings he could take with reasonable surety they wouldn't be missed. They went under Orthanc, were given to the orcs, and they never came out.

The first trials had been disasters. The women simply did not survive long enough to bear their spawn to term, and were more often than not killed during the breeding process. He'd had to handpick the strongest subjects he could find, usually from the nearby Westfold. The Rohirrim produced hardy stock, competent with sword and shield, capable on both farmland and battlefield. They were more difficult to acquire without suspicion, but though the process was fraught with risk, this small addition to his research had proved the foundation of the entire future programme.

The first generation of Uruk Hai had been unsatisfactory. He had expected that; it did not trouble him. Though they came from strong stock, they simply had too much human in them to be of use. He knew he would need many more stages before the undesirable effects of human parentage – compassion, morality, honour – were erased. Truth be told, he had initially found the necessity of human subjects distasteful, but they were regrettably essential if he were ever to rid his prospective soldiers of that irritating tendency to avoid sunlight. He kept the first-generation Uruks in their own cells, recorded scrupulously which parentage had spawned each, and bred them with their opposites as soon as their development allowed. It was not long. Orcs develop quickly.

The years rolled by, the slave-pits and the spawning holes grew, and the Uruk Hai moved down their generations.

Lurtz was somewhere between the tenth and fifteenth generation. He had not been told this; he had worked it out on his own. He was, in many ways, the crowning glory of Saruman's research. This had been proven when the first thing he had done when he had been released from his spawning hole was to throttle the unfortunate goblin who levered him free.

He had a dim pride in his obvious ability, but it was tempered by a strong dose of wariness. Orcs don't get second chances, even exceptional ones.

There were not many Uruks from before the tenth generation in Isengard. Of course, part of that was just mathematics – the more generations you step down, the more branches of offspring you get. But it was more than that: there were problems with the early generations that were incurable.

Lurtz had heard it muttered in the ranks. One of their number had balked at killing. They had lost their nerve in a fight. They had shown suspicious consideration to a slave. "Edgers," the others called them. The margins of the experiment. The ones who had, by freak coincidence, inherited some darkly unmentionable quality from their long-distant parents. Compassion. Morality. Honour.

They were killed without question. Orcs don't get second chances.

And in the smoky orange light of the training ground, an Edger will now be killed without question.

They had come in from the pits, dragging the creature behind them. Master Saruman was present; he had an academic interest in the process. That these aberrations existed at all was regrettable, but their appearance did at least afford new insights into the technicalities of his experiment. Undesirable qualities from their original human ancestors had been all but eradicated in his newest generations, but every so often, a runt would appear, just as in any litter.

This one was pitiful. His skin was pale; his features undeniably human. He had not long been pulled from his hole; mud and slime still clung to his lank hair and under his fingernails. He was panting, eyes stretched wide.

They threw the thing down near Lurtz's training post. There were four others present – Saruman, the hole-overseer, and two Uruks who had been sparring nearby. He recognised them as patrollers, seasoned veterans of a half score raids. His own opponent, the smith, lowered his sword at the interruption.

"Curious," Saruman said, his tone that of mild scholarly interest. "What parentage?"

"Seventy-eight and ninety-four, Master," the overseer provided. The breeders were not given names; what would be the point?

Saruman knew his programme intricately. "Interesting... but vexing. That combination should have produced better results." He thought for a moment. "What is his tolerance threshold?"

One of the patrollers obliged, drawing his cudgel. Placing one massive foot on the Edger's chest to keep him still, he leant down and began, slowly and methodically, to saw through an arm.

The screams were like nothing alive.

Saruman's lip curled in distaste. "Get rid of it."

The patroller moved obediently to the Edger's neck. His crude blade, made for the wooden posts of the training ground, was blunt enough that he had to tug and worry at the creature's flesh to make progress. He seemed to be enjoying himself, something that Saruman had obviously noted with approval.

The smith's sword was not blunt. The razor-edged blade cut the screams off in a gurgling hiss, fountaining blood in one catastrophically brutal arc.

Saruman stepped back neatly to avoid the mess, his nose wrinkling. He had been denied the satisfaction of the patroller's malevolence, but he seemed pleased by the force and violence of the smith's blow. With one dismissive glance at the pitiable remains, he swept away towards the path that wound back to the Tower.

Lurtz approached the body slowly. He was no stranger to gore, but something about the scene had rankled at him. Something wasn't right. Kneeling closer, he saw what it was.

The sawing of the cudgel had made it difficult to tell, but the sword-wound was meticulously precise; clean, swift, and with force enough to kill instantly.

Lurtz looked up at the smith's retreating back, vanishing into the shadowed tunnel that lead back to the forges.

A mercy stroke.