Bloodfire (The Sojourns of Rebirth) (24 page)

Catelyn hadn’t spent any time outside of the Seat her
entire life, and the thought of relocating was frightening to her, but
it was not worse than the alternative. Even as she traveled the
strange rooftops of unfamiliar neighborhoods carefully, hobbling
on her injured feet, her body spasming with pain from the toll this
night had taken on her body, Imperial soldiers could very well be
combing through the ashes of her roost searching for some clue as
to her identity and whereabouts.

Catelyn knew enough about their methods to know that
she would not want to be found there, and find her they would
have if they were indeed searching for her.

The man in the alley, the Imperial officer who she had
sensed watching her from the street, had not raised any sort of
alarm at the time, which Catelyn still considered unusual. She
knew without a doubt that he had seen her flee with the two girls,
and she had to believe that whatever shock had prevented him
from raising an alarm then, he would have come to his senses by
now, reporting what he had seen to his commander or even to the
Emperor himself.

Catelyn believed without a doubt that had she not enacted
her escape plan, the Imperial army would have her in their custody
and then her life would be over. But she had given herself a chance
now. It was still a slim chance, especially given the extent of her
injuries from the night, but at least she believed that she could rest
easy knowing that the girls, Elexia and Sera, would be safe with
Silena.

She knew that no one had been around to witness her
leaving the two girls on Silena’s stoop, and Catelyn had stayed
behind long enough to sense Silena open the door, hug the girls to
her, then take them inside.

Silena would either need to hide the girls, or would have to
explain where the two girls had come from, which would no doubt
cause her some amount of trouble with the Imperial bureaucrats
who regulated such things, but either way, Catelyn trusted Silena
to do what would be best for the girls. In the wake of the Purge the
previous night, she imagined that those who ruled and governed
the Seat would have larger concerns on their minds that the
disposition of two orphaned girls, not to mention that such an
event would in itself create a plausible explanation for such events.
Indeed, survivors of a Purge were often lauded by the Empire, for
they were seen as the strongest of citizens, embodying the very
qualities the Empire sought to portray.

Catelyn, however, had already pushed her luck well
beyond her comfort level, and did not wish to have Imperial
officers questioning her story

She could not rest so easy with her own situation, and
chose to assume the worst; that she was almost certainly being
described to every Imperial soldier in the Seat. The Empire almost
never singled out an individual for execution, but given her actions
had precipitated all of these events, Catelyn wasn’t going to rely on
that assumption to keep her safe. She had no idea how much the
Imperial soldiers knew, but she refused to take the chance when it
was her life on the line. She needed to disappear for a while. Really
disappear, not just laying low in her roost like she normally would
have.

And so she found herself standing at the edge of the world
that she knew, at the head of the Brunley Channel, smelling the
changes in the air and searching her bubble for any sign that she
was being followed. Behind her, she could hear the faint echoes of
chaos as large chunks of the Seat burned to the ground or
smoldered, dozens or even hundreds of people having been
destroyed by the Emperor's decree.

Ahead, all she could detect was a cold, musty stench. She
knew that south of the Seat lay the stretches of the Dun Marsh,
and the Brunley Channel had been partially built on that terrain.

The land had been reinforced to take the construction of
the walls, but still the marsh found a way to creep under and
bubble up in places, and the wall and structures throughout the
Channel were in a constant state of disrepair. She could smell the
rot, mold and mildew that had been accumulating for sojourns.

The Emperor may have spent thousands of marks to build
the walls, but he hadn’t spent a single one to maintain them. He
left such menial work to the citizens of each city to conduct their
own maintenance. Failure to do so would, of course, results in
swift and cruel punishment and so they toiled day and night to
keep the Walls from crumbling.

But functional and well-maintained were very different
things in the Seat. And so a haphazard accumulation of repairs and
half-completed improvement projects dominated most of the
Brunley Channel.

She had learned everything she knew of this area from one
of her former fences, a man named Marko, whose family had
settled in Exeter many generations before. Marko had once told
Catelyn that his true name was Markotulinyaer, or at least that was
how it had sounded to Catelyn’s ears the one time he had told it to
her. Marko claimed that it was so unpronounceable to Western
tongues that he simply preferred the residents of Exeter to use the
more common name Marko, rather than butcher his God-given
name. Catelyn knew he was right to insist on this; she had never
been able to reproduce the sounds of the man’s native language,
and she genuinely liked the man and didn’t wish to offend him.

Marko had rarely talked about his homeland, far to the
East. Like his own name, he claimed that his land’s name was
impossible to say in either the Western languages of Pyrus or
Exeter. He simply called it Home. Catelyn enjoyed the rare stories
that Marko would tell about Home, not just because his stories
were always about exotic places and exciting action, but because
Marko’s people, reputedly dark of skin though Catelyn had no way
to know for sure, spoke with marvelous accents that were like
music to her ears. She had read some about the people from the
east in a book of history when she had been a child, but many of
those books had merely touched on stories of other lands and had
not provided much in the way of details.

Although he was a fence for stolen goods, Marko covered
that line of work by posing as a merchant whose trade in spices,
mostly the ones that were allowed by the Empire and some that
were not, took him between the Seat and Brunley often. He had
spent a fair amount of time there, and he often complained to
Catelyn about the run down slums and the kill-or-be-killed
attitude of the residents there. She found it hard to believe it was
worse than the prevailing sense of despair and fear that hung over
the people of the Seat, but he simply sighed and insisted that it
was.

Despite Marko’s warnings, Catelyn had convinced him to
provide her with instructions on how to navigate the Brunley
Channel to get there without detection. Most trips he smuggled in
what he needed on a wagon, but he also used couriers for smaller
parcels and he had recited the route they used to get through into
Brunley proper without trouble, and she had memorized it.

It wasn’t as though she were happy about this move, or her
destination, it was just the only choice for her. She had actually
reached this conclusion sojourns before, when she had formulated
her escape plans, after looking at all of her options.

She could not go west to Belkyn, even though she had
fantasized many times about the Grand Gate opening before her,
letting her out into the wider world, to the endless plains of the
Barrens. The Empire held as much, if not more, sway over the city
of Belkyn than the Seat. It shared much in common with the Seat,
and the Emperor would surely have sent men there to search for
and apprehend her as well.

Catelyn had not considered relocating north to Forma, as
any woman could attest to the cruelty and misogyny of the men of
Forma. Forma was little more than a refuge for the worst of the
worst; lifelong criminals, rapists and murderers. The Emperor
used the place as a breeding ground for his soldiers. Any woman
within the city limits of Forma was purely viewed as breeding
stock.

She’d heard relatively good things about Aldus; that its
proximity to the Wall of Regret, and thus to the world beyond the
Empire, had given it something of a reputation as a trade city, a
rich target for an aspiring thief. The problem was, the only way to
get to Aldus was to go through Forma, and she didn’t intend to
take that risk.

She’d even considered simply living in one of the
Channels, but although some people did settle there, the channels
mostly served a utilitarian purpose; and was where many of the
Empire’s factories and the manufacturing of goods took place. She
could find living space, she was sure, for many of the old factories
had become run down and abandoned, but the best she could hope
for in the channels was to survive. To live, to earn coin and find
marks to target, she would need to leave the channels each night
and roam far to get to the residents of a nearby city.

That left Brunley.
And so, with nothing left of her old life and nowhere else
to go, Catelyn made her way carefully towards her new life,
towards an escape from the danger that was threatening to engulf
her.

Uriel sat upon the gold-gilded throne which stood like an
enormous spike in the center of his audience chamber. The throne
had been fashioned quite simply, and resembled nothing more
than a high-backed chair, a back which reached up six paces to the
ceiling high above.

He was in a rage. His brow quivered, and was dotted with
beads of sweat from the exertion of trying to keep himself under
control.

Uriel had personally committed an untold number of
atrocities and violent acts in his prime. And he had never before
felt as vehemently towards any of those victims as he did now,
towards every living soul that resided in the Seat.

He was so livid that he was beginning to think he would
soon become violently ill. And then just violent.
He had, on more than one occasion, entertained the
notion of exterminating every last living thing within his domain.
Such thoughts had always seemed to simply be a bout of distemper
that would pass. But this; this refused to abate.
As he sat with his fingers pressed into the armrests at his
sides, knuckles standing out tense and white from the iron grip he
maintained on the golden throne, he wished to murder everyone
and everything that had drawn a breath this day.
Strangely enough, or perhaps ironically, it had all started
in the most petty of ways; with a song.
Music had been the first of many “diversions” that Uriel
III had outlawed when he had taken control of his Empire. He had
always hated music, but in particular, he hated music which
involved singing. There was something in it which aroused sheer,
unabashed disgust deep inside of him. Hearing songs sung by
choirs as a boy were some of his worst and most violence-inducing
memories.
And so after he had usurped power from his father, Uriel
the Second of his Name, he had put a stop to music in every form,
declaring it forbidden throughout the Empire. Initially, as with
many of his more restrictive commands, there had been resistance
and rebellion against his novel ideas. But following half a dozen
Purges and the exertion of his Will, the people swiftly came around
to his way of thinking. They always did. Or at least, they did
publicly.
Uriel knew that music, despite his proclamations, and his
efforts to quash it in every possible form, had refused to die.
Instead people had held onto it covertly, passing the traditional
songs on in the privacy of their homes, where his men were not
around to overhear. Outwardly they obeyed their Emperor, but
inwardly they clung to this one minor rebellion, humming tunes to
one another in the dark of night.
Uriel had wished to obliterate whole sections of the Seat as
punishment for this blatant disloyalty. But it had been Enaz and
Ortis together, who had convinced him to allow his subjects this
small victory. They had argued that without allowing the people
such small tokens of the past, such small hopes, the people would
stop caring at all. About anything, even him. Especially him.
They attempted to persuade him to allow the people to
hold onto such trifles, and that doing so actually worked to his
favor, for even as they thought they were getting one over on their
Emperor by keeping something creative and vibrant alive, they
were forced to do so at a price. That cost was the constant
reminder that they were being allowed to hold onto such a thing
on the Emperor’s terms. That every song that was sung, no matter
how joyful, would be tainted by that realization.
Uriel had nearly executed the pair of them on the spot for
their own insolence. He knew that such reasoning was irrational
and deeply flawed. That Enaz and Ortis were selfishly acting on
their own interests, for he knew that Ortis had enjoyed the music
that had been played at court back in Pyrus, and he had heard
Enaz humming tunes to himself when he was especially stressed.
But the fact that the two men in his entire Empire who
feared and admired him the most were willing to oppose him on
this, there must be something more than he could see at work.
Uriel recognized that there were times when even he could be
persuaded to try another solution. And so, Uriel had relented, at
least to some degree. He still demanded that there be no public
performances of music or singing, and music of any form was
strictly forbidden in his presence. Beyond that, it
was...permissible.
So it had been a shock earlier that day when he had strode
through the halls of the Imperial Citadel and overheard a faint, but
clear humming coming from somewhere. It sounded as though it
was originating from several floors below where he walked. He had
already been in a foul mood, as he was still awaiting word from
Ortis or that the soldiers that he had commanded to carry out the
Purge on the upstart Sado-Sexual Elite.
It was very unlike Ortis to keep his Emperor waiting,
though it was not the first time that a Purge had taken longer than
anticipated. Sometimes the men enjoyed their task more than
others. Still, it had been almost half a span since Uriel had seen the
fires lighting the night sky, and now from the tower, columns of
smoke still rose, suggesting that the last gasp of the Purge was
winding its way down. A thorough Purge could take days, but
never before had any prior to this gone without any word from
Ortis whatsoever. No messengers had arrived from his men. Not a
single update since Ortis had marched out of the Citadel grounds.
As he had paced through the hallway, impatiently, the
hum reached his ears and stopped Uriel in his tracks.
He actually had to physically stop to gather his wits, as he
could not believe that any soul would have the audacity to defy the
Will of the Emperor within his own house. He bellowed for Enaz,
and the slender, oil-pated advisor all but charged up to Uriel from
behind. During daylight prayers, Enaz worked tirelessly to both do
his own job, while keeping himself within shouting distance of the
Emperor, ready to do Uriel’s bidding.
A small bead of sweat dripped from Enaz’ temple, but
Uriel knew he would not dare to wipe it from his face, lest he draw
attention to it. The Emperor knew that Enaz simply hoped that he
was too incensed to notice. He decided to ignore it, in light of his
large concern.
“Enaz, do you hear that infernal noise? The one from
below?” the Emperor demanded.
Enaz stopped breathing momentarily to listen with all of
his effort. After a moment, Uriel could see Enaz swallow hard, and
he knew that the man was struggling to decide whether to tell if he
had indeed heard it.
“From what disturbed mind would such open defiance
spring forth, do you suppose?” the Emperor muttered sharply.
Uriel watched the play of emotions cross Enaz’ face, but
after half a life as the Emperor’s advisor, he knew better than to
answer and instead simply bowed, loudly replying “Your
excellency, I shall have whoever it is put to death immediately.
None should dare to defy your sacred command.”
Uriel stopped and stared long at the top of Enaz’ hairless,
oiled head. He imagined what it would be like to thrust a dagger
through it, right at the spot where he could see the veins in the
skull pulsing as Enaz waited patiently, bent forward at the waist.
The momentary desire passed and he took a deep, cleansing
breath.
No, despite his anger, he knew Enaz to be a loyal and
trusted servant to him.
Even if he was a little too effeminate. Though Uriel could
hardly blame him for that. He himself had been the one to carve
the man’s balls from his pouch, those many sojourns ago.
No, if Uriel was being honest about the source of his
anger, it was Ortis who was at the eye of that storm.
Why had he not yet returned?
Why had he sent no word, no message?
Uriel turned on his heel and waved three fingers at his
side, low enough for Enaz to see the approving dismissal. As he
stalked away, he heard Enaz’ heels clattering through hall after
hall, growing quieter with distance. Uriel looked to the sky outside
the window and realized that the day was getting into late
afternoon, and Uriel was getting more impatient than ever.
Someone would need to pay for that tonight. He returned
to his throne room to wait, and to plot.