Bloodfire (The Sojourns of Rebirth)

Dedicated to Karen and Owen, the heart of my loving and
supporting family. This has been an amazing journey, and I'm
lucky to have made this trip with you both by my side.

A book is the realization of an idea. Something dreamed
of, then conjured up out of that place in one's imagination and into
the reality of paper and ink, or these days, into bits and bytes and a
virtual sea of photons. In particular, a book like the one you hold
in your hands begins humbly enough with the twinkling of
inspiration, and so it is fitting that I set aside some space to detail
the people who've most inspired me.

First and foremost, I wish to thank my entire family. My
wife and son, my dad and my sister and her family, my in-laws, my
aunts, uncles, and cousins around the world, without whose
tireless love and support I would have been unable to see this
project through to the end.

I must also thank my amazing friends and colleagues,
especially those of you who challenge me every day to be a better
man, and a more well rounded person. The ideas and the
conversations that I've had with all of you are what fill me with
purpose every day.

Special thanks to those among my friends and family who
volunteered to read my first novel and provided invaluable
feedback on it, including Alexis Bogue, Brad Paulson, Gayatri
Salunke, Kristina Sontag, Jeshe Wiggins, Jennifer Hoffman,
Jennifer Birdlebough-Bostrom, Bryan Lim, Virginia Gagner, and
Elan Stimmel.

A special thank you to Diane Scoville, who gave me
something precious – the ability to honor myself. This book would
not exist without that.

Lastly, I must acknowledge the bravery and the sacrifice of
free thinking men and women across the world. It is thanks to all
of you that the flame of reason remains burning in our world, and
has helped illuminate the path for people like me.

Chapter 1.......................................................................9
Chapter 2....................................................................34
Chapter 3....................................................................89
Chapter 4...................................................................107
Chapter 5...................................................................134
Chapter 6...................................................................145
Chapter 7...................................................................156
Chapter 8...................................................................179
Chapter 9...................................................................196
Chapter 10.................................................................210
Chapter 11..................................................................221
Chapter 12.................................................................232
Chapter 13.................................................................242
Chapter 14.................................................................253
Chapter 15..................................................................271
Chapter 16.................................................................289
Chapter 17.................................................................310
Chapter 18.................................................................321
Chapter 19.................................................................341
Chapter 20................................................................369
Chapter 21.................................................................390
Chapter 22................................................................405
Chapter 23................................................................430
Chapter 24................................................................444
Appendix...................................................................470

The Empire of Exeter
1,072
^nd
Sojourn, Imperial Reckoning

The young girl lay on her back, the sensitive tips of her
fingers running over the rotting wooden slats that made up the
roof of the building where she lived, her face upturned to the
cloudless slate sky as the sweltering heat of the day threatened to
squeeze the life from her. Even dressed as she was for the heat,
wearing only short pants of her own design and her lightest shirt,
she found little relief from the oppressive weather. As so often
happened on the hottest days of the sojourn, she passed the time
by moving as little as possible and thinking deeply about her
problems.

Today, one particular problem was overwhelming her, and
despite several prayers spent in thought, she still didn’t know how
to solve it. That problem was food; not typically something she
spent a great deal of time thinking about.

In truth, food was often at the root of many of her
problems, but by far her most common complaint in this area was
not having it, so she rarely had to contemplate the issue. Her
solution to the problem of sustenance was always simple and
straightforward: steal what food she could and try to get through
each day without starving.

Ironically enough, her current dilemma was the exact
opposite of the problem she always had when it came to food.
Today, she had more food than she knew what to do with.

Normally, this would be a good problem for her to have,
and she would devise a myriad of ways to dry and store the bulk of
the food to be eaten later, something which she had much
experience with. But with the heat-wave and the humidity that the
Seat was currently experiencing, much of the food would certainly
spoil before it had time to dry.

The girl, named Catelyn by her parents after her mother’s
mother, had already been in possession of the food for half a span,
since she had discovered it abandoned.

She valued honesty, and if she were to speak the truth
plainly, it was not strictly true that the food had been abandoned,
but since the prior holder of the cache was now dead, Catelyn
didn’t think too hard about the distinction. She didn’t know how
long the previous owner of the food had possessed it, although she
could guess from the smell and taste of it that it had been less than
a day.

The skinny, red-haired girl lying sweat-soaked on the roof
was sixteen and alone, just one among hundreds of abandoned and
orphaned children and adults who made the streets and slums of
The Seat their home. Like all of the other urchins and street rats,
Catelyn was living hand to mouth, eking out a meager existence
any way that she could. But unlike her fellow street dwellers,
Catelyn’s tragic history was indelibly etched upon her, both
figuratively and literally. On the outside, she bore those scars
across most of her face and upper torso, but they were more than
skin deep.

She covered over the worst of her scars with a scarf
wrapped around part of her face, covering her hair and wound
tightly over her eyes. She had lost her sight the same day that she
had lost her parents.

Despite being perpetually underweight as a result of her
life of poverty, she was stronger than she looked, the result of
spending all of her days and many of her nights nestled high above
the streets and alleyways of the Seat, traversing the “thieves
highway” clinging to the eaves of buildings, hands and feet
gripping to the rough plaster or wood frames of buildings and
angling her head back and forth, using all of her remaining senses
to take in the world around her.

Her father, before he had been lost to her forever, had
always told her that information was her greatest ally and that fact
had only been reinforced by the loss of her sight, so she always
kept her senses keenly honed, hoping for any opportunity that she
might come across that could help her survive.

Scraps of an overheard conversation, the scent of freshly
baked bread in the breeze, or the vibration of a cart rumbling by
beneath her carrying food to the marketplace became her stock in
trade. She collected these as the valuable commodities that they
were; searching for something, anything, that she could use to
keep herself alive one more day. Just as she had for the past six
sojourns, and just as she had earlier this span.

It was days ago, during one of her recent scouting patrols
when she had discovered the food cache, quite by accident. It was
the beginning of the most recent wave of unseasonably hot
weather when she heard arguing in the slums below her turn to
scuffling, and the scuffling turn to high-pitched screaming. She did
what she always did when she came upon a scene like this; she
waited for the slim chance that after the violence passed, she could
swoop in quickly and scavenge something of value. Some of her
best scores in the past had been the result of just such an
altercation, and the Seat was no stranger to such violence.

She crept from eave to eave, silent as a hunting cat, until
she hung silently in the rafters of an abandoned warehouse above
the confrontation. Catelyn listened as one of the local gang lords, a
muscular thug named Boddick, pressed some unlucky citizen for
the location of their cache of goods, while his thugs guarded the
perimeter and kept a look out for interference.

Catelyn had encountered Boddick and his men once
before, and the meeting had not been pleasant. She'd relieved one
of Boddick's men of his satchel full of marks, and they'd chased
after her through the alleys until finally she lost them by crawling
under the floorboards of a derelict guardhouse.

They'd tromped through the ramshackle building, spewing
the most vile curses they could think of at her, and sending
showers of dirt and dust down into her face while she listened to
her heart pounding in her chest and trying not to cough,
beseeching the Divines to ensure that they wouldn't find her.

Whether the Divines intervened on her behalf or not was
debatable, but Boddick and his men eventually gave up the search
for her. She'd made a point of avoiding them from that point on,
and his presence here gave her pause.

Fortunately for Catelyn, as was often the case with men
like Boddick, they could seemingly only grasp the obvious and so
he and his men only watched for people at eye level, and never
thought to check below their feet or above their heads in the roofs
or attics of buildings.

She waited a long time, as Boddick first tried to extract the
information from his victim with verbal threats, and then he began
escalating his demands with further and further violence. When
the citizen refused to give in, she listened with disgust as Boddick,
never one to shy away from being a hands-on gang lord, slit the
man's throat, and then ordered his thugs to toss the building,
tearing around the room, getting angrier and angrier as their prize
continued to elude them.

Finally, as Catelyn had experienced herself once before,
Boddick exhausted his patience and returned with his crew to their
territory, and she waited until she was certain that she was alone,
then slipped down from where she had been hiding.

Silent bare feet landed her softly in the room, connecting
her at once to the world around her. Scents and sounds blossomed
into her awareness and she took in the miasma of information that
her senses were conveying to her.

Ever since Catelyn had been blinded by the incident that
took her parent’s lives, something inside her had grown, and she
could use more of her senses than before, and in ways that she
hadn't been able to do when she could see. It felt to her as though
she could taste colors, and could smell the texture of the surfaces
under her hands and feet. And so when she dropped into the room,
it was like she was “seeing” beyond what she remembered the
world looking like before the loss of her sight.

Over the past six sojourns, her senses had become so
sharp that she had even learned to visualize them in her mind as a
sort of “bubble” within which she could glean information about
the world around her. In that time, she practiced and refined her
bubble until she could expand it out to paces beyond her or focus it
down to the smallest details right in front of her.

Her instincts and her keen senses had already allowed her
to guess the location of the food cache, but now that she stood just
mere paces away, she immediately smelled the uncured pork
nearby and knew that she had been right. The cache of food was in
the one place where a gang of pitiless thugs would never think to
look: hidden behind the privy by the warehouse office.

Catelyn covered her nose and mouth as she softly and
carefully padded across the warehouse to the small room, then
lifted the chamber pot, trying not to slosh the contents onto the
floor. She practiced caution because she knew the dangers of
touching or standing in human waste, and although she was quite
sure that the thickened pads on her palms and soles were free of
open cuts or wounds, she was always more careful than not when
it came to her health, to say nothing of the disgust she felt at the
idea of getting that kind of filth on her body.

With the chamber pot out of the way, she ran the sensitive
fingers of her free hand along the panel of the wall behind it. She
could make out a groove in the pattern of the wood which was
slightly indented, so she pushed and it gave, sliding to one side.

She could make out the aroma of food even with her nose
and mouth covered, and she just reacted, reaching out with both
hands and pulling the box of foodstuffs to her. It was heavy, and
Catelyn instantly knew she now had more food in her hands than
she had seen in many spans. Maybe even sojourns.

The stench of the privy reasserted itself and finally
overwhelmed her and she stood, taking three long strides back to
the spot where she had dropped into the room, and assessed her
good fortune instinctively and unconsciously saying a silent
blessing to the Divines for their generosity.

And although she was grateful for their Providence in this
matter, she immediately concluded that accepting this gift was not
going to be a simple undertaking.

She briefly considered just taking some of the food, and
leaving the bulk of it to either rot or be discovered by someone
else. It would be impossible for her to return to her roost via the
rooftops with a heavy burden like this, and she would certainly
draw attention walking the streets with a heavy box in her arms.

But the thought of that much food going to waste was
impossible to bear, and so she began loading the many pockets she
had sewn into her shirt and pants with as much food as she could
carry comfortably. Then she placed the remaining food back into
the wall panel, slid the panel shut, and returned to the rooftops
and back toward home.

It took Catelyn six trips in the sweltering heat, her pockets
alternately filled, then emptied, to completely transfer the box’s
contents from the hidden cache in the warehouse to her own
stores. When she was done, her roost was filled to bursting.

And so Catelyn now found herself laying in the sun on her
roof, considering her options for keeping this food, and none of
them were good. She was confident that some of the fruits and
vegetables would keep in the box she had hidden in the cellar for
storing produce. But the box was only big enough for a handful of
items, meaning that much of the produce would be left out to
spoil. And that wouldn’t help with the biggest of her challenges:
the meat.

Rather than see most of it spoil, something she believed
that the Divines, if they existed, would surely frown upon
especially after blessing her with this gift, she thought about
simply eating as much of the food as she was able to in a grand
celebration of Their kindness, but that would likely result in her
getting sick, as she was not used to such an excess.

She considered briefly just preserving the little that she
had room to store, but again that would mean most of the food
would simply be wasted. Or she could do the unthinkable and
share it. She wondered many times if this was a test set by the
Divines to challenge her faith, which had been wavering recently.

It seemed like the kind of thing that she remembered
reading about the Divines, before her life alone without the ability
to read.

The problem was, sharing the food would almost certainly
lead to questions from those she shared it with, about how she had
obtained such a bounty. And questions would lead the gang lord,
or worse, the Empire itself, right to her door. She had to avoid that
at all costs.

No, none of the obvious alternatives were acceptable, and
so as she often did when she was troubled by something, she found
herself spending time on the roof, thinking.

Not for the first time, Catelyn wished that she had been
born in a different era.
She wished that there was no Empire. No Uriel. No Seat.
She wished that her parents were still alive.
Catelyn knew that in the Before, which is what people in
the Seat called the sojourns prior to the rise of the Empire, there
had been many methods for storing food which would keep it cool
and dry even during the hottest cycles of the sojourn. But she had
learned about such things long ago, had read the stories as they
were set down in books that were even older than she was.
Such methods were surely lost to people now, or if they
weren’t, she was confident that the Emperor Uriel would not
approve of such blasphemy. The Empire was quite clear in its
position on the people of the Seat making use of anything from the
Before.
No, Catelyn would have to solve this problem with her own
ingenuity, just as she had to solve every problem that she had ever
come up against in her young life.
Adversity had come to her early, in the form of becoming a
blind orphan at the age of ten, which she had so far overcome
through sheer force of will and a stubborn determination to live.
Living hand-to-mouth on the streets was not an unusual
condition in the Seat, so Catelyn didn’t think overmuch of her
ability to survive.
One quickly learned, or one quickly died.
But despite her strength and the refinement of her other
senses, her lack of sight certainly made things more challenging.