6 A Bitter Dance
Eleven years ago, a month before escape
In truth, he did not understand why he had to kill the man.
Blood slid down the walls of the stone cell where Noceo had just forced one of their former workers to saw off his own wrist. The man screamed at the mangled stump, pleading for mercy.
It was a foolish crime to skim from Clan Kader’s warehouse stock of blazeleaf rolls and attempt to distribute it on Komis’s streets for cheaper prices than the Clan’s. It was even more foolish to do so while bragging that Clanlord Clevsin was too much in his dotage to find out.
The man had likely expected that his fellow workers and the street rats to whom he’d sold would keep his secret. But solidarity among the captive and the impoverished was a pretty myth. Everyone stood equal before greed. The man had been turned in by both groups within a week.
Still Drenevan believed the loss of a hand sufficed, in addition to the offending tongue if Clevsin were so inclined. To splay his entrails over the warehouse seemed unnecessarily taxing.
Yet, here he was.
“Get him upstairs,” Clevsin coolly ordered Noceo. “Make them all watch.”
Inclining his head, Noceo directed his voice to Coerce the man, who lurched to his feet and sped down the short hallway toward the stairs that would take him from the holding pen underneath the Clan’s blazeleaf warehouses to the aboveground production facility where leaves were cured, sorted, and rolled.
His compatriots in the other cells were already dead.
No one lasted long enough to stay there indefinitely.
Dalvia wrung her hands. “Clanlord, do you wish for me to tidy the cell?” She indicated the bloodstained walls with a trembling finger.
Drenevan exchanged a glance with Noceo. The girl kept giving herself away.
The grooves bordering Clevsin’s lips pulled back in a chilling smile. “Trying to hide again, Clandaughter?”
She flinched. “No, Clanlord.”
He tsked. “Such unbecoming behavior in a woman. Lying.” His smile held a black victory. “You will present yourself afterward for punishment.”
Dalvia’s features crumbled for a hair’s breadth before she bowed and tottered upstairs. Drenevan’s back throbbed as he followed her unsteady gait. The oppressive damp down here was hell on his bones. By the way his brother was subtly rotating his wrists, his injuries were acting up too.
The scent of blazeleaf struck in a rush as he emerged on the landing.
Theirs was the largest illegal warehouse in the country with over eight hundred workers, all forcibly confined to the compound, with no hope but to toil.
He passed workers sorting blazeleaf by size, color, and quality into steel pans.
Others cut and moistened the leaves in preparation for steaming to make them more pliable.
“An approximation of life,” Clevsin had informed him while breaking his spine again last week for failing to bring in more workers. “Someday, you will hold all power here, Drenevan. But it is not yet that day.”
It never would be if his plan with Noceo succeeded.
They walked past the steel threshing pans for a final sort of the leaves, then the re-drying ovens that set the leaves’ moisture content close to the necessary twelve percent, and the cylindrical irons that pressed and rolled the cured product into wrappings of flavorless bemizan leaves for smoking.
The warehouse exit loomed ahead, wagon tracks gouged into the snow beyond the parted doors.
A last glimpse of unattainable freedom. Drenevan’s victim walked with stuttered desperation to the stage of his demise and halted at a word from Noceo.
His brother turned to the crowd, forehead wrinkled in strain as he yelled at full Coercive strength.
“Watch.”
The workers halted in their tracks and turned as one toward the condemned man. Terror brewed behind their glazed eyes, forced to stay open. Noceo’s mouth fell shut. Sweat trickled down his temples. He had reached his limit.
Drenevan unsheathed his knife before Clevsin could note the way his brother had sagged against a crate of product. It was always messier with knives, but a sword risked sending the man to Death too early. One of the first breaks in Drenevan’s back had been for doing just that.
Moonlight slid down metal. And Drenevan got to work.
Crimson dotted, then sprayed the warehouse floor.
Rivulets ran down his knife like a smile through red teeth.
First the digits, then the tongue. He belonged to this bitter dance, most at home within that frozen second between a blade and its meeting place.
He notched into the stomach, then lower.
The long strings of the man’s body and waste came from his gut in a slippery ribbon.
His eyes rolled back in his head, going into traumatic shock. Death’s arrival was imminent.
Ah. Drenevan hid a flinch. Clevsin won’t be happy.
Pain burst across his back as he tried to make the kill pleasing.
Shattering the man’s sternum, he kicked the gaping torso over to the workers, hoping it would suffice.
The screams, swoons, and loud retching told him it had.
The hand Noceo had seemingly casually placed against a crate quivered.
Dalvia looked away, paler than the snow blanketing the Drust Mountains.
Monster, their eyes said. Monster.
He found Clevsin’s eyes and knew it still wasn’t enough. Menace bled from his father in waves that rivaled the Chaboras River at high tide before he stalked off, and Drenevan knew it would be him receiving punishment before Dalvia. He wiped his knife on his robes. Crimson bled into gray-green.
Noceo eyed him warily before approaching. “He isn’t pleased.”
“I slashed the gut too soon.”
His brother shivered. “You really don’t feel anything afterward?”
“He shouldn’t have had to die.” Drenevan watched Dalvia hesitantly approach the wreckage of the man’s body. Her retching rose above the sounds of the workers trying to go on with their day after another reminder of how disposable they were.
“Is that it?” his brother asked hesitantly. “You don’t feel revolted or angry at having to do it?”
Drenevan wondered what purpose that would serve. Blood had never disgusted him, and anger was best saved for the day he’d have the power to act on it. He still had none. “Someday, afterward,” he used the synonym that referred to their plan of escape, “I think I’ll feel anger. Maybe a lot of it.”
“Me too.” Silence stretched comfortably between them. “What do you want, afterward?”
Drenevan thought about that a moment. “A drink, maybe.” He had only recently traded the mild languor of blazeleaf for the deeper oblivion of alcohol.
Noceo let out a breath that could have been tinged with relief. He tilted his head to the exit. “Do you think Clevsin will let me out for an hour? I wouldn’t mind seeing Parvine again.”
His brother’s infatuation with the Poxtan girl evidently hadn’t dimmed. “He’ll be distracted with me,” Drenevan noted. His back tensed, knowing what it was about to face. “Ask him once he starts.”
Something that could have been a flash of sympathy lit his brother’s eyes before he left. Drenevan followed, their paths diverging at the house where his punishment waited.
What did he want? The question chafed at him through the shattering of a vertebra at Clevsin’s hands and its careless half mending by a healer doing precisely as they were told.
It pelted him through dinner where Dalvia spilled her soup all over herself, by trembling when their elbows touched.
The answer wasn’t love. It could be power, but even that rung partially false.
Hours later, curled on the floor of his room, teeth ground in pain, he thought he might have it.
It might be nice to be understood.
With that settled, he took a deep draw of his blazeleaf roll and drank some more filched wine.
Sleep came easy after that.