Bloodfire (The Sojourns of Rebirth) (29 page)

The Emperor Uriel, Third of His Name, rode out of the
inner gate of the Imperial Citadel on horseback, at the head of six
hundred of his finest Imperial soldiers. It had been many sojourns
since Uriel had last ridden out at the head of his army, even in a
ceremonial fashion. But this new campaign was of the utmost
importance, and he trusted no other to take command of it. In
truth, he would have entrusted Ortis with such an urgent and
important matter, except for the fact that Ortis was in fact a
significant part of the problem.

Uriel seethed with fury at the thought of his former
commander and lover, who he could only assume had betrayed
him just over a span ago, the night that Uriel had ordered him to
enact the Purge upon the Dane’s of the Sado-Sexual Elite, a trio of
upstarts who had pushed the Emperor too far in their indulgences.

After two days with no word from Ortis, Uriel had sent for
Ortis’ second, a cowardly man who had himself refused to report
in to the Emperor, out of fear of what Uriel would do to him and
his men when he learned that no one under his command had any
explanation as to why their commander had simply disappeared
into the air.

Uriel was furious, of course, but also concerned, not that
he would ever admit this fact to anyone. Ortis was no longer a
young man, and he half pictured his old friend suffering from a
failure of his heart, and dropping to an ignoble death in some alley
in the slums. He had ordered a full sweep of the area, to be sure
that Ortis was gone and not simply dead in the streets. He had
even ordered the remains of the Purged homes searched, in case
Ortis had somehow failed to get out of one of the buildings before
it had been consumed by his own fires.

But nothing had been found. And Uriel had felt utterly
betrayed, and flew into a rage unlike any he had experienced
before. He had felt so livid that he could barely contain himself,
but that wasn’t the end of the story of his former confidante, oh no.

Another day went by before Enaz brought something more
to his attention. Uriel recalled every word of this exchange, and he
struggled to contain his wrath at recalling the conversation.

Enaz had appeared in the hall, his bald head sweating with
anxiety, just after the Emperor had broken his fast on poached
quail eggs and sliced pork drizzled with the lightest of honey
glazes.

“Your Eminence, there is...there is something I feel I must
bring to your attention.”
Uriel oft-times hated the man’s deference.
“Enaz, it had better be the location of our “friend” Ortis. If
it is not, I will have you flogged.”
Uriel enjoyed making threats against Enaz, specifically so
that he could watch the man’s eyes bulge and his sweaty bobbing
throat jump up and down as he swallowed back a reply, or perhaps
swallowed an ejaculation of bile into his mouth at the thought of
what Uriel would do to him, should he displease him in some way.
Enaz continued to look at Uriel in silence, and whenever
this happened, Uriel knew that the situation must be unfortunate,
indeed. “Spit it out, woman,” he growled at the eunuch.
Enaz cleared his throat.
“Your Eminence, I have just been told by one of my priors
that he believes he knows why the Dane’s...defied your Will.” Enaz
had withered under Uriel’s gaze at the use of the word defied, but
Uriel had been intrigued enough by the statement he had just
made that he ignored the falter.
“He does, does he? And pray, do tell me, what is this
reason?”
And Enaz had gone on to explain at length how the fat
prior Pater had approached Enaz after confessions on the day after
the Purge, and told of the man’s encounter with Dane Eyrris in the
hall of the Priory cycles before. Uriel was about to suggest that
Enaz was completely and deliberately wasting his time, and that
his death would be arriving swiftly if he didn’t make his point
soon, when Enaz let the most interesting detail be known.
“Pater informed me that the Dane was looking to sell a
very rare, and seemingly priceless artifact, to some out of town
buyers. He tried to convince the Dane to sell it to the Priory
instead, but Eyrris would have none of it.” Enaz cleared his throat
again, and Uriel could see the man’s nerves getting the better of
him.
Uriel on the other hand, was beginning to sweat for
another reason altogether. Enaz had used the term “priceless
artifact” and this raised Uriel’s interest in the topic significantly.
“Did your fellow prior say whether he saw this artifact?
Did he describe it to you?” Uriel felt his hands growing clammy in
anticipation of the answer.
“Your Eminence, apart from the shape of the thing, he
seemed to be describing one of the weapons.”
Uriel stood up and slapped Enaz hard across the face.
Enaz knew better than to bring up the weapons in public, even if it
was seemingly just the two of them in the room. The Imperial
audience chamber had ears of its own, he knew.
Still, if what Enaz had just told him were true, then after
dozens of sojourns, he had finally found another one. Another
piece of the set. It was almost within his grasp. Or at least, that was
what he had now thought.
“So, where is this artifact now?” Uriel asked, his tension
beginning to fade at the prospect of owning another piece of
powerful history. But it didn’t last long.
“It would appear that it was with the Dane’s when the
Purge was enacted, your Eminence.”
Uriel had roared and kicked Enaz to the ground, his fury
exploding out of him like a volcanic eruption. He laid into Enaz
with three more kicks before the implications of what Enaz had
just said fully sank in. As he paused his leg in mid-kick, he put it all
together.
Dane Eyrris had had one of the weapons, that much was
clear. That explained why the Dane’s had become so emboldened.
Uriel wondered if the weapon they had found was special in the
same way that his was. And then Ortis had arrived to enact the
Purge. From there, only two possibilities seemed likely.
Either the Dane’s had killed Ortis with the weapon, or
Ortis had found out about the weapon, had killed the Dane’s and
taken the weapon for himself. Despite the Emperor’s long trust
and loyalty to his friend, only one of those outcomes seemed
possible, since there had been no trace of Ortis’ body in the
wreckage of any of the Dane’s estate. Whatever else he was, Ortis
was still a most feared warrior.
The Dane’s could not have bested a man of Ortis’ training.
No, there was only one real possibility, which was that Ortis had
taken the weapon for himself.
It explained so much.
That had prompted another of Uriel’s outbursts, only this
time, he had not even tried to contain himself, and Uriel had
butchered five of the chamber workers in the halls before Enaz
defied him by clearing every other servant out of the building. For
that transgression, Enaz was now stripped of his position and
sitting in the most dank dungeon in the Citadel, awaiting a very
public execution. But, despite the novelty of this rarely used form
of punishment, even that could wait.
If Ortis had indeed taken the weapon for himself, Uriel
had no choice but to find him. Before he discovered its potential.
Before it changed everything.
And so Uriel rode through the streets towards the last
known location of his former commander. His former lover. His
former friend. When he found Ortis, and he would, there would be
no mercy for their shared time together. Ortis would pay the
highest price for this betrayal. And then Uriel would take the
weapon, and he would think about what was next for his destiny.
This was surely another sign, and Uriel would not ignore it.
Ortis squeezed the throat of the man, named Kenrick, who
had reportedly brokered the sale of two girls to Dane Callum just a
few spans before the Purge, and considered whether to snap the
man’s neck or not.
The Danes were perverse in a number of ways, and their
proclivities were well known, but they were also elitists who never
got their own hands dirty if they could help it. They used men liked
Kenrick, flesh peddlers, to acquire their victims.
Ortis thought briefly that just a few spans ago, he would
never have used the word victim to describe the people that were
bought and sold to vicious men like the Danes. But seeing the girl
thief had changed something fundamental in him. Ortis himself
couldn’t explain it, nor did he try. And one of the things that had
changed had been how he viewed the people of the Seat.
He had been indiscriminate in his application of justice in
the past. Circumstances mattered little, if at all. But Ortis had
found a new way, or rather he had found an old way. Because if
Ortis really thought about it, he knew that somewhere, buried
deeply inside of him, these things he believed now, were the things
that had been taught to him as a child. By his father, and by
watching his father’s advisers and the other wise men of the Pyric
court. And then Uriel had come into his life, and everything had
changed.
Uriel’s Will had become his own. And the two of them had
become as a force of Nature, uncaring of anything save their own
destiny. Or rather, Uriel’s destiny. People like the girls he was now
looking for, would simply not have been a concern to the great
plans of men like Uriel and himself.
Now, Ortis was filled with another purpose: to find them.
And through them, to find her.
Ortis was honest about the fact that there was only a slim
hope that finding the girls would lead him to his thief, but once the
search had begun, he felt something else rising to the surface of his
mind. He felt the need to ensure that the girls were alive, and were
well taken care of.
Ortis once again considered the possibility that he had
snapped, and that insanity had wrested control of his mind. To
have so completely spun away from what he had been, towards
whatever it is that he was now...none of it made sense, and yet, to
Ortis it did. He knew he could never explain it, and he refused to
justify it, even to himself. But he felt it deeply in every fiber of his
being.
He needed to do this, and he acted on it involuntarily,
until his new way of being became as necessary to him as
breathing. For a man with Ortis’ connections and skills, it came
naturally.
His present meeting with Kenrick had actually begun
earlier that day, when he had, through some sniffing around at a
number of wretched establishments, found out about a guard for
hire named Warren. Warren reportedly walked into an Imperial
apothecary the day after the Purge, asking for ointments or
medicines to treat some minor burns. The Imperials had taken one
look at his pathetic injuries and turned him away, and Warren had
caused a scene, by yelling that he had been brought there by the
Imperials to help during the Purge, and so deserved the Empire’s
help in return. Warren was an ignorant man to presume that the
Empire operated with any sense of fairness whatsoever, even to
the men they employed. And they had resorted to removing him
unkindly.
Ortis had found Warren easily after that, sitting on a
rusted metal stool in the lowest tavern in the Seat, nursing a bottle
of foul-smelling wood alcohol in his hands. Ortis could smell the
roasted flesh of the man as soon as he had entered the tavern.
Warren had been so drunk by that point, in an attempt to numb
the pain he was clearly in, that Ortis simply asked his questions,
and received the answers.
Warren had told him the whole story of his former partner
in crime Jaff, and their brief run-in with the slender thief with the
red hair. What Ortis found hard to believe was when Warren had
described how she’d single-handedly butchered the massive oaf
named Jaff. But no matter how he asked, always Warren repeated
the same lie. Warren did admit to not having actually seen it with
his own eyes, but had heard it through a door that had been
wedged shut by the girl. That made his account of the events
unreliable at best.
What made Ortis smile however, was in his description of
two young girls who were with the thief. The Danes were of course
no strangers to pederasty, but one detail about the girls in question
stood out, and would almost certainly lead him right to them, and
they in turn would lead him to her. According to Warren, the girls
had been twins, a rarity in a place like the Seat, and such a thing
would not go unnoticed with such tight controls on child-rearing.
This piece of information was the break that Ortis had been
waiting for. He left Warren to numb himself with drink, and
proceeded to consider his next step.
His first thought was to go to the recording office, where
the Empire stored all of its records like censuses and children’s
names and birth dates. However, that was something that only the
old Ortis could have accomplished. Getting inside while the
Emperor was no doubt looking for him, and had likely named him
a traitor, was going to be complicated to say the least. Ortis was
convinced that, with the right strategy, he could pull off such a
daring feat. But the new Ortis knew of a better way. He had other
connections.
He had gone straight to the brothel district, and after
asking a number of the brothel owners where he might acquire a
more “exotic” selection than they themselves could offer, he had a
name: Kenrick.
The man had earned a reputation, even among the
deviants who owned many of the establishments in the brothel
district, for being notoriously callus about his chosen trade. Ortis
would need to exercise caution when he went to meet the man.
Fortunately for Ortis, such flesh trading was not
uncommon, and the man was not hard to find, and within four
prayers, Ortis was waiting for the man to meet him in a longabandoned alley in the outskirts of the Seat, his arms folded
behind his back. Kenrick arrived with three bodyguards, ranging
from twenty sojourns to their mid-thirties. Ortis tried his best to
slouch and look non-threatening, as the three men fanned out to
surround him for this talk with their master.
“So, you requested this meeting, yes? Mister…?”
Kenrick was every bit as sleazy as Ortis had expected the
man to be. His sallow skin was pock-marked and pale, his beady
eyes stood out from his skull almost like stalks, and his lips were
blood-red, a sign of his addiction to crimson weed.
“My name is Bennet,” Ortis said.
“Bennet. Very well, and what exactly is it you’re looking
for?”
“I was told that you could provide me with one or two
rather young girls. For a reasonable price.”
Kenrick looked at Ortis with his bloodshot eyes narrowed
in mild suspicion.
“Tell me again how you found out about my specialized
business, Bennet?” Kenrick asked.
Ortis was already growing tired of this game, and Kenrick
was already wary. Ortis was not used to approaching problems
with his head, when his fists had done as fine a job as he could ever
hope. Ortis had hoped that he could have avoided any further
violence on his part in this pursuit of the girl, but it seemed that it
was inevitable. Ortis briefly considered whether to continue this
charade any further, and realized it would be pointless.
He struck without warning and without mercy, as he had
always done, his arms shooting out with lightning-fast reflexes,
crushing the throat of the man to his left, and gouging the eye of
the one to his right. Before the guard behind him could react, he
spun around behind him and snapped the man’s neck.
Kenrick hadn’t even had time to cry out, and then Ortis
was there, both hands clamped down on the man’s throat. It
wouldn’t have mattered if he had cried out, as Ortis had chosen
this location deliberately. He knew that no one would hear the
kind of commotion he would cause, or if anyone did, they were
wise enough to mind their own business.
Ortis considered for half a breath simply choking the life
out of this purveyor of nightmares, but then he remembered the
girl, and he loosened his hold on the man enough so that he could
answer Ortis’ questions.
“I’m led to understand that you sell the flesh of young
girls, yes?” Ortis asked quietly.
Kenrick nodded, his pop-eyed gaze full of fear and
loathing.
“And I have also been informed that not quite a cycle ago,
you brokered a deal for the Dane’s. Dane Callum in particular, for
a pair of twins, yes?”
At the mention of the Danes, Kenrick began to sweat, and
his eyes grew even wider. He tried to speak, but had trouble with
Ortis’ hands around his neck. Ortis loosened his grip again ever so
slightly.