36. THIRTY-SIX
THIRTY-SIX
ATTILATIA
Location: Tentika, Azadonia
The sound of Lethoso dance drums shared an artery with the sound of duty—both sent blood from Attilatia’s heart.
In Azadonia, dance was a prerequisite to diplomacy.
Water flowed ankle-deep into the Lesotho pools in the capital city Tentika’s grand gathering cavern.
It mirrored the tiered balconies thronged with Tera’thian emissaries, the mosaics of the vaulting cavern ceiling, and the golden hukata skirts of the waiting dancers.
They stood as statues; only the drumbeats, echoing louder with each passing moment, sent ripples across the water.
It was a rhythm perfected over centuries to invoke primal emotion as it resounded through the cavern—a space sculpted to compound sound.
Attilatia didn’t need the drums for her “duty” to tap into her utmost spite. She hadn’t asked to be the daughter of a councilor. But being so, this was what propriety bade of her: look nice, say nothing, do what you’re told.
Primped for an hour that morning and twisted into a tipiana so bejeweled she could scarcely see the silk, she stood at her mother’s hip on the royal dais as instructed: hands clasped, chin lifted.
She wished she were in the pools with the dancers instead of sidelined to watch.
A little thrashing would feel good. Something to forget that Jenolavia’s legislation was entertaining the Kovathian sect’s request to accept Tera’thian aid.
Something to forget that, while she stood here like a gilded bat, the distortion lab technicians would be testing the latest circuit—her brainchild—without her.
“The one in blue and silver is Bovahk Ani,” her mother murmured.
Attilatia scanned the Tera’thian entourage for the emperor.
She barely spared a glance for the white-maned geezer who didn’t look like he could go toe-to-toe with Jenolavia in a spitting match, let alone a negotiation for the future of a nation.
Her eyes were instead held hostage by the man a step behind him: tall, hairless, and with a scar spanning the side of his face visible even at this distance.
“And the one beside him?”
“The Tohatu. Cul’Mon.”
Attilatia’s skin crawled. The Tohatu’s forces were rumored to have butchered millions in their conquest of the northlands. And they’d invited him willingly through their doors. Things used to be simple: Tera’thians: bad, Nelfinden: good. How the Fates had flipped their poles.
But Nelfindar had a new Prime—Taranil—and a new Prime meant new legislation.
Taranil was a xenophobe, and the quarantine he’d posted against Azadonia had eliminated a third of their food sources.
The water veins tainted by the Strikapa had eliminated the rest of them.
How quickly “bad” transformed into “optionable” when the impoverished resorted to trading their children for millet.
Attilatia’s eyes slid from the Tohatu to the boy flanking him. She hadn’t noticed him, unassuming as he was compared to the pale mammoth beside him. He was the only of their number clad in an unadorned tunic and sirwal.
“And the one beside him?”
“A slave.”
‘Atrocity’ to the Azadonian matriarchy was ‘standard of labor’ to the Tera’thian state.
As though summoned by her gaze, the boy’s eyes locked onto hers. Awkward. There was plenty else to stare at right now. Attilatia looked away.
“This is wrong,” she hissed through her painted smile.
“Atti.” Her name, just audible around her mother’s pinched lips and over the resounding roar, was a threat. But it had been her mother’s decision to drag the village misanthrope out of her laboratory. Today, Attilatia would make sure it had been her mother’s mistake, too.
The drummers steadily crescendoed into a final, deafening, synchronous stroke, mallets frozen overhead in a silent war cry.
Phantom beats resonated around the chamber for a near minute while both drummers and dancers remained frozen.
Members of the visiting entourage shifted in a wave of rustling fabrics, glancing to one another in question.
Same old song and dance.
Many jumped as, without indication, the drums thundered anew in an explosion of sound. The dancers flared to life, moving in perfect accord. Their footfalls shaped the water into currents, patterning the sacred geometries of the stars.
Attilatia’s mother stepped towards the pools, moving in harmony with the other matriarchs of the legislation.
Bare feet padding down the tiles of the dais stairwell, they created a path for Queen Jenolavia to pass through.
It was months since Attilatia had seen the queen dance.
She moved with unnatural grace, her movements in concurrence with the dancers around her.
Simple of dress, she would have been indistinguishable if not for the sheet of silk, dyed violently green, tied about her waist.
For long minutes, the lesotho unfolded. Water sloshed, hukatas swirled, limbs flew in a single gyrating pattern that tempted Attilatia’s very soul from its shell until, with the suddenness it had began, the Lethoso ended.
A roar of applause sounded from the balconies and Tentika’s citizens gathered on the cavern floor. Attilatia stirred from her reverie and found her spite still waiting for her. It was a facade. When people danced like that, no one would guess they were weeks from starving to death.
Her eyes found her mother, chest rising and falling in steady rhythm, bronze limbs gleaming from perspiration around tight sinew, smile triumphant. Chaos take her—the legislation’s prize, cursed by a daughter so strange.
The legislation stepped from the now-draining pools and onto the dais, hukatas heavy with water. With the ceremony’s conclusion, the public assembly dispersed through various tunnels back into greater Tentika. The Tera’thians descended the marble of the center stair towards them.
“What now,” Attilatia whispered when her mother returned to her side.
“The negotiations begin.”
“And end quickly, with any luck.” She might still have time to attend the labs before evening meals when this was over.
Her mother did not correct her. Probably because she agreed.
Her cabinet had only conceded to the Kovathian sect’s suggestion to entertain Tera’thian aid as a last resort.
“You will attend any members of Emperor Ani’s envoy that he does not permit at the round table.
Give them a tour of the caverns. Show them hospitality. ”
“You forced me from the final day of the distortion project I’ve been working on for months to be a decorated babysitter?”
“And you will speak nothing of distortion today. I want to feel confident that, by the time they have left us, distortion is the farthest thing from their minds.”
But, of course, distortion was the only thing Azadonia had to offer. Why else would Emperor Ani, renowned not for generosity but cruelty, offer aid?
“My Tera’thian is still not so good, eah? What is there to tell?”
“Atti!” She hissed for silence as the Tera’thian envoy ascended to the dais.
Unable to help herself, Attilatia’s eyes found the slave.
As before, his eyes found hers in return.
What was his problem? This time she didn’t look away, she stared him down in challenge.
The side of his mouth twitched, aggravating her all the more.
Her mother cleared her throat and Attilatia jumped, falling back into line.
Jenolavia’s Hand stepped forward to receive Ani’s party. They exchanged a series of introductions and pleasantries that turned Attilatia’s stomach. She let her mind stray from them, thinking instead of sitting at her lab table with a mug of sweetened tea to examine the day’s experimental review.
“Attilatia Mitar.”
Jenolavia’s Hand looked at her expectantly.
Before her stood the Tohatu. His eyes bored into her as if to see what he might find inside.
They were blue, like too-hot fire. He was so big—his tattooed fist could smash her straight through.
It took every ounce of self-control not to scramble backward.
This was a face that had seen death, and saw imparting it to others as a gift.
The seconds lengthened. Attilatia could nearly feel the mental kick in the rear from her mother. She stepped forward belatedly and inclined her head in reverence.
The Tohatu spoke slowly. “A tour of the caverns is not necessary, my thanks.” She had anticipated a voice like rocks in a bag or slime creeping through a sewage pipe.
His was unexpectedly melodious. “He is not to be fed or watered. Do not engage him in conversation. Do not allow him around others. If he wishes to sit, it must be on the ground.”
She glanced to the man’s side where the “he” in question stood. At least the boy wasn’t staring at her like she’d worn her tipiana backward this time. Any irritation she’d felt previously fled beneath the stare of Cul’Mon.
“Yes, Tohatu,” she said with another curt bow, hoping her Tera’thian wasn’t as horrible on his ears as it was on her lips.
She was not to be a babysitter. She was to be a slave-keeper? Attilatia looked back at her mother, whose eyebrows rose in silent command: obey.
She’d sooner roll over dead than obey that man.
“This way,” she said to the boy, who followed, soundless as a shadow.
They began toward the chambers where Tentika’s criminals awaited their trials—even those were outfitted with a seat and a watering fountain—beyond the far side of the gathering cavern. Fuming, she veered sharply left, taking them through the queen’s private kitchen.
Attilatia snatched a bag of honeyed cintash nuts from a cabinet—probably worth their week of food stipend—and slipped into the private service tunnels that bottomed out near the distortion lab.