by J. Leigh
Trigger Warning for: violence, child abuse, slavery, implied murder, and social injustice. Reader discretion is advised.
Fog rolled in.
It creeped off the lake with a sentient manner, almost as if it were working to suffocate the populace of the city with its humid weight. Lorn watched the thick mist bleed over the grayed planks of the docks. It seemed to bring with it all of the hushed sounds of a sleeping lake; the water lapping against the dock’s heavy pilings and the shore below made a steady muffled beat. This rhythmic sound intermingled with the clinking of wagons in a nearby alley, and the occasional slicing cry of a human scream.
Almost musical, those notes of nature and mortal deviance. Lorn pushed away the thought, sighing deeply while scanning the horizon. It was hard to see in the blackness of night, with the fog rolling all around, hard to tell where the sky and stars ended and the reflection of the septic city with its red-burning lights began. The lake bordering the Mannachi capital of Terabrook was massive– so large that when he was small, Lorn believed it must be the ocean. Surely beyond it, there was a world without pain and misery and squalor, a land where there were no vampiric Clan.
Lights bobbed along the line of the lake front, ships large and small, some powered by sail; others were pulled along with long oars manned by whipped humans. The merchant boats all drifted along through the midnight fog, each carrying goods either to or from the city of Lannachi on the coast. The lake fed into the river which fed into the ocean, this he knew even though he’d never seen it. He didn’t need to see the shipped goods either to know what the bellies of the wooden beasts held: the slave trade, the true slave trade. Though one might easily consider any human who lived in the Clan Lands a slave, there were some who served in gilded cages and some who were shipped in chains to be Fed on, or worked until they have collapsed or gone mad. To think, at a tender age, he once dreamed of sailing away on those demon barges to a land of freedom and light.
So much for dreams.
Lorn lingered in blackness, leaning against a dilapidated shack while watching slaves load longboats with crates full of merchandise born of human blood and suffering. Anger welled up within him, the same old rage, and it was all he could do not to scream it out into the night. To Clan, Lorn was a child of merely nineteen years, barely a breath in the eternity of their lifetimes. But to human men and women, he was a man full grown, perhaps at the height of his prime, or counting the end of his days. These were the precious few years that would determine whether he’d be taken as food and fodder or somehow escape notice and live beyond into decades to come.
So, in the end, that is what I am: a lost soul, teetering amid worlds, neither boy nor man.
Another soul birthed of the darkness parted the shadows to linger beside Lorn. In the same dark russet woolen cloaks they were practically twins; while Lorn had brown-gold eyes, the new arrival’s eyes were the color of death liquefied, midnight blue in the starlight. “So, we doing this or not, Lorn?” he asked in hushed tones, lest a Clan overseer’s sharp ears snatch up the drifting words.
The darkness of the alley was deep, but Lorn took in the silhouette of Wayde in a quick, unencumbered sweep. His long-time compatriot was slender, nimble, and his rough face framed by black greasy hair had the same, mellow expression he always wore– but for the eyes, which glimmered in a deeper, more sour hatred than usual. A whip cracked in the night, and a child’s scream quickly followed, the sound swallowed again in the wharf side symphony of noises like deviant music. Lorn pursed his worn lips, tired features puckering in reigned fury.
He decided.
“Yes,” he whispered to Wayde. “Child or not, he is still Clan, and I’ll not risk missing an opportunity to show his bloody father what we think of his precious trade.” He added as an afterthought as he gazed back at the deep waters, “Better he die now and not grow up to expand the business.”
Wayde spit into the muck of the street, a grim line twisting his mouth into a sneer. “It won’t sit well with Ran’ell.”
Lorn shot Wayde an icy look that would have made even the strongest of Born Clan step aback. “Am I not the man who single-handedly started our little resistance? And who was Ran’ell before I freed him, but a purveyor of prison rats?”
The eighteen-year-old assassin laughed cruelly and pulled his coarse cloak tighter around himself, almost a guard against Lorn’s harsh gaze. “You know I have no love for Ran’ell’s soft heart, Lorn. But I will say he’ll not sit well on this, and I will also say he’s needed, lest until he’s passed all his knowledge onto Chaste.”
Lorn snorted. “You are right, the codes are needed.” He shook his head. “Still, my sweet second in command is just that, second.” Cold gold glowed in the dark of the alley, hardened eyes of tortured humanity catching the torchlight. “We proceed as planned, child or no.”
“Good,” Wayde cooed, the hate gone from his eyes, replaced with eagerness. “I’ll fetch Zeron and Chaste.”
He turned to go, but Lorn brought him back with a quiet request. “Leave Chaste out. He’s not much past childhood himself, and we can afford no hesitation.” Wayde nodded then was off, leaving Lorn to fester in the ambiance of the sadistic music of a night at the Terabrook docks.
Pulling his own dark cloak closer to a fast beating heart, Lorn buried the quivering turmoil beginning to worm around in his stomach. He sprinted away from the shack and turned to the darkness, intent on following through with a plan gone only slightly awry and yet so very, very wrong. While he wandered the midnight ghetto, he crossed over and over in his mind the ramifications of such altered actions. Forcing his resolve to steel, he still cursed fate as he sought out the dark cellar where he’d stashed the cause of such debate: Deron Lan’chi.
Many a cellar in Terabrook had been built around the buried sturdy walls or by tunneling into the stonework barrel vaults from the original version of the city, which had burned to the ground. After Wayde had drugged one of the sons of Lord Jarrel Lan’chi, Lorn had tossed the Clan child into one of the many underground remnants of this past Terabrook. This was Wayde’s specialty: chemicals and potions with which even the mighty Clan could be made to roll their eyes up into their heads and pass out, especially if they were young. So young. It had been a disaster; they’d staged the whole thing so delicately, only to end-up with the wrong son, the spare not the heir. So, they’d placed him in this forgotten foundation for an hour, while the Mannachi guard searched the city, and Lorn decided.
They’d used chicken and hersha dung on the windows and doors of the structure above the cellar to confuse sensitive Clan noses, and the walls below had extra layers of cloth and plaster to muffle noise. A person could scream for hours down there and none would hear– or maybe they did, but didn’t care. A sad, shaking sack quivered in the dark corner of the underground safe-house. Lorn crossed the darkness to the struggling bundle and found the imprisoning rope, his fingers deftly working the knots apart. The wet sack fell away; the boy had messed it. Lorn felt his first stab of pity as he pulled the additional hood off of Deron’s head.
The child was only ten, and looked even younger with his auburn hair matted in about a hundred different directions. Though he pulled away from Lorn and gnawed at his gag, he did not try to cry out, but rather held the older boy’s gaze. Clan eyes burn in the night; his were the glowing liquid magenta with an expression of pure, incorrigible terror.
Lorn sighed, the last strings binding his conscience pulled taut. “It was your older brother we wanted, but he was caught-up in that damn danjin and we couldn’t get to him,” he softly explained, referring to the bordellos decorated up to look like legitimate dance halls. His tone could almost be called kind. “So, it’s you to be our example then, and for that, I am actually sorry.”
Pitiful bastard! the child screamed without a sound, much to Lorn’s surprise. He was a telepath, though his range must be minuscule, perhaps requiring eye-contact, or he’d have called for help from the entire city by now. Sorrowful human! When my father finds you, he’ll eat your skin and you’ll be put to the bottle, but that will be a mercy–
Lorn grabbed the crown of his hair and yanked scalp back, halting the tirade. The Clan child’s words brought out the rage in him, and he practically spit at the boy.
“Have you ever seen your father’s Life Wine factories, child? Did the oh-so-powerful and mighty Jarrel, Lord Lan’chi of the city of Lannachi and cousin to the Mannas ever take you there? Have you seen the ‘pathetic humans’ so full of force-fed booze their livers are swimming in it and their brains are dead?” He shook the captive slightly. “Hum? You ever see how their skin turns yellow, see them after they’ve been drained for your vintages, and the alcohol-soaked organs are wrapped and shipped for dinner parties? Or better yet, the ones who are released, still alive after they’ve taken all they can take, because the Mannas have placed ‘rations’ on the human populace so they don’t run out of food? How their minds and bodies are damaged, and they can’t walk or eat or think anymore? Hum? Have you ever seen that, boy? Do you even care that your father and family grow richer and richer over the bodies of tens of thousands– all for a drink?”
Hate smoldered out at Lorn from those feral eyes, and he saw himself there, the same loathing and murderous rage.
Wayde knocked.
Lorn knew it was him because of the rhythm, they all knew their codes. Somewhere in the city the sound of a lyre could be heard, weaving tinty notes of feigned pleasure for some midnight party. Its forced emotion echoed a complement to Wayde’s sequence, almost goading. Slipping the hood back over the boy’s head, Lorn knew there was no going back now, and in truth, he did not wish to. One less Clan to kill; one less set of barbed teeth to tear and slash in the dark.
Time to add my own notes of suffering to the choir.
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