15. FIFTEEN
FIFTEEN
ATTILATIA
Location: Chira’na
Attilatia worked in the dim light of Deshpian Thacklore’s stone basement, where he’d created a workspace for her.
Distortion engineering was like dancing the lethoso—a repetition of simple motions that built into something larger.
And, like dancing, it was the only other thing she felt she truly understood.
Using a syringe, she encapsulated a drop of synthetic ruxechorin in a bead of glass.
With tweezers, she wrapped the bead in copper wire.
It was a dream come true: unlimited time to distort, every resource made available at her command, contemplative silence.
Except it was a nightmare.
She intertwined the wire tips of the encapsulated core with those lining the digging machine she’d built—a false replica of the one she’d used to incinerate her once-home back in Tentika just months before. Another carefully failed experiment. Thacklore would not be pleased.
The door behind her clacked closed, muted by thick carpeting. She bit into her lip, stomach roiling.
Moments later, hands found her waist. Her back.
Her neck. She had covered every inch of bare skin she could, and yet he still found a place to press his mouth—where her tipiana met her hairline.
Weeks ago, she’d had the brainless idea that willingly giving Thacklore the affections he would have taken regardless might change his reaction towards her for failing to produce a weapon.
She had thought wrong.
“You are very distracting,” she said in Azadonian. Thacklore had given her resources to learn Nelfinden, but she hadn’t bothered. She wouldn’t need it when they escaped this infernal place.
“Are you finished?” He gestured toward her work with his chin, unwilling to take his hands from her. “I have dinner guests tonight. Many among them oligarchs. I would love to have something to show them.”
“Do you wish me to be present as well?”
“Always.”
Let the torture begin. ‘Oligarch,’ she had decided, must be Nelfinden for ‘asshole.’ They came and went at regular intervals in Thacklore’s home: stopping for tea or dinner or brandy, always fussing in their hideous language about one thing or another while he toted her around like an exotic pet.
“Where is the baby?” she asked. Hardly a baby now; Thedexemore was nearing his second year.
“With a maid,” Thacklore grunted, mouth working circles around her neck. He had no idea.
The device in her hands needed several rounds of further testing, but if it took Thacklore’s mind anywhere else, providing a demonstration would be worth it.
“Yes, it’s finished.” She closed the lid over the core and screwed it into place.
Thacklore stepped away and flashed a hungry smile. “Wonderful.”
She triggered the mechanical drill’s activator. A heavy metal rod within its cylinder began to vibrate: quickly and with enough force to break up rock.
Thacklore’s glare was answer enough. “You make me out to be a fucking fool.”
Good. He was a fool. “A fool, Mesu?”
“An entire month of stalling, and this is all you’ve produced?”
That, and dozens of distortion lamps: technology Azadonia had held as proprietary until she’d folded for Thacklore like a cheap card.
She crossed her arms. “You asked for a distortion drill.”
“This is not what you used before. What you used destroyed an entire tunnel! This would destroy...”
“An entire rock?” she suggested.
His hand tightened around the nape of her neck. “I risked a lot, getting you out of Kovathian hands.”
And she might have preferred the Kovathians over him. If it weren’t for Thedexemore, she would have begged him to take her back. “I have given my end of the deal and more.”
“I don’t want this useless kretch!” Thacklore shoved her away from the workstation.
Attilatia hit the cold cobbled floor hard. Pain lanced through her wrists, her knees. She might have betrayed her people, but she would not give up her father’s creed. Thacklore would never have weaponized distortion. Not from her. She rose shakily to her feet.
“Surely there are those who would pay Nelfinden silver for this.”
“Yes. But you know what I’m looking for.”
Attilatia cast a glance at him for the first time that day.
His short black curls had been slicked back with oil.
He wore a deep blue sirwal and tunic with silk pleats down the front, covered by a vest with enamel buttons.
He might have been handsome, had his lip not been pulled up in a snarl: like a carnivorous peacock.
“It has occurred to me, just now, that it is something beyond my area of expertise.” She gestured to the rudimentary drill.
“If this is not satisfactory to you, then sell me.” As he had threatened to on several occasions.
What had seemed like a threat was starting to sound like a hot meal.
She stepped up to him and poked a finger into his too-shiny button.
“Sell me to some Nelfinden businessman who would be overjoyed to have this ‘kretch’. I know what my people used to sell my work for, and that was before the Quarantine. Surely it’s worth thousands now. ”
His hands clenched around her arms. “I want more than silver.”
The man was insatiable in more ways than one. Attilatia repressed a shiver. Instead, she licked her lips. Time to find out what flesh—the only other coin she could offer—was really worth. “I’ve given you more than silver.”
The resolve in Thacklore’s eyes was pure flame. “I’m putting the boy in the dungeon. We’ll see what a week’s worth of his isolation without food will motivate you to produce.”
Thedexemore would not survive it. Attilatia had long since learned how little regard Thacklore held for human lives. She’d seen how he extracted information. How he made his friends. How he did away with them.
She stepped in closer still and ran a finger along his ear.
“You touch one hair on that child’s head, I will slit my throat on your white.
Fated. Rug.” She dug her fingers into his neat curls.
“If anything happens to him, you lose any leverage you have on me.” Like any mad dog, it was not anger that finally forced her to bite, but fear.
“Fine then.” He pressed so close to her she could taste his breath between them: tobacco and mint. He gave her a smile that raised the hairs on her arms. “Maybe after spending a night as the evening’s entertainment, you’ll change your mind.”
He poked his head out the door and called, “Jamad!”
Attilatia’s muscles hugged her bones. The heat fled her body.
Thacklore’s bodyguard, a glossy term for torturer, was rarely called upon for kind gestures.
The man had a perturbing skill for causing pain, outmatched only by his lust for it.
Thacklore watched as Attilatia backed into the work counter behind her, carelessly knocking the near-finished drill to the floor.
Jamad lumbered into the room as though he’d been waiting just around the bend. Perhaps he had. The man looked like he could snap her in half if she gazed at him the wrong way.
Thacklore said something she couldn’t understand in Nelfinden. Then he turned to her, and her mouth went dry. “Jamad will escort you to my rooms.” He raised his eyebrows as if they were in on a joke. “He’ll see to it that you are comfortable.”
“No,” she began, wanting to charge him, kick him, wound him. But any move she made against him would only worsen their situation.
He turned to leave. “Perhaps tomorrow you might feel some inspiration. Expertise… it can evolve.”
Jamad leered as he lunged for her. She screamed, running for the door. This had to be a test.
“Mesu Thacklore!” Jamad caught her. He pinned her arms to her sides. She kicked. Flailed. “Mesu Thacklore!”
It became abundantly clear that it was not a test. She’d seen Thacklore make his fair share of idle threats—and she’d also seen him impart consequences. Resistance was useless.
But if she was to be made an example of, she was going to make it very, very difficult.
She screamed and fought up the two flights of stairs into Thacklore’s rooms. Jamad hefted a set of chains—as casually as any other man might keep a purse—from his satchel.
He threw her to the floor like she was a sack of sand.
Not sentient. Not a fragile molding of connective tissues that could break nearly as easily as it could breathe, that could feel pain at the slightest piercing of skin.
He chained her hands to the footboard at the end of Thacklore’s bed.
“No,” she screeched at him. “No, no. NO.”
And then he stalked away. She shuddered a sigh of relief. Not torture, then. Thacklore was not going to torture her.
Yet.
Her thoughts fled to Thedexemore. Had he heard her scream? “My brother. Where is my brother? You can’t keep me here. He needs me, please!”
Jamad did not speak her language. Even if she hadn’t been blubbering through tears and snot, her words were desperate gibberish to him, and Jamad was not swayed by desperation. In fact, for a man who she knew caused people pain for a living, the way he’d handled her was downright chivalrous.
“Jamad,” she tried. Maybe if she was calm, he would listen. She tilted her head towards her bound hands. “Let. Me. Go.” She mustered all of the moderation she could. She even used the Nelfinden term for “go.” “I can make you a very wealthy man.”
The corner of Jamad’s mouth lifted. The motion turned her insides to slime. On his way out, he held a key up for her to see and set it on Thacklore’s dresser, just meters away. A taunt.
Then he left her alone in the room to wait.
Thacklore’s room was exactly what one would expect it to be: the epitome of opulence and refinement. Even the dowaga mounted on the wall was enameled and adorned with script—a token of the man’s Blue Wing accolades.
Attilatia was mired. The bed’s wood was harder than bone, so breaking free could only be accomplished at the cost of self-mutilation. And her dexterity was her only bargaining tool.