Bloodfire (The Sojourns of Rebirth) (32 page)

Now, although she was sure Erich would be caring for
them and likely even spoiling them with his attention, she was still
anxious to get home and feel their foreheads and make sure that
they would be on the mend soon.

She would need to make at least three more deals before
she could pack up and call it a day, however. She’d deliberately cut
back on her prayers in the marketplace since taking the girls in,
devoting more time to their care and recovery, and although Silena
had been saving her marks for sojourns and lived quite
comfortably by most standards in the Seat, having two extra
mouths to feed was something she had never prepared for.

Not to mention the fact that further absences from her
stall would no doubt raise some questions that could make things
uncomfortable for all of them.

So she fiddled and tweaked her goods as customers came
and went, and she tried to entice them to make a purchase which
would take her one step closer to being able to return home to her
sick girls and her kind, warm man.

Catelyn woke abruptly, and immediately grabbed at the
sudden shooting pain in the back of her neck from the cramp she
had developed as a result of her head hanging to one side for
prayers. She couldn’t believe that she had been so foolish as to fall
asleep here in the open, even if she was more than a dozen paces
above the nearest person and not in plain sight of the people
below.

She tried to rub some of the pain out of her sore neck, and
expanded her bubble to assess roughly what time it was and what
was happening in the streets below. It was morning, which she
could tell from a combination of things such as the smells of baked
rolls, the quiet calm of the marketplace as vendors arrived and set
up their wares, and the coolness of the roof tiles under her soles.
Given the persistent heat of the daylight prayers, overnight was the
only time when they cooled that much.

She couldn’t sense the sun yet, and determined that it was
either just before dawn or that there was a haze in the air, as there
sometimes was, blocking out the light while trapping the heat. She
hoped it was the former, as hazy days in the Seat were some of the
worst, especially if you weren’t able to get inside for some relief
from the feeling of being cooked.

She stood up, feeling the stiffness and soreness all across
her body as she rose. She hadn’t pushed herself this hard,
physically, since her first sojourns of training, when she had taught
herself how use her bubble to climb and traverse the streets and
rooftops. She could feel the tenderness radiating throughout her
lower body, from her buttocks to the tips of her toes. She spent a
few breaths stretching and loosening the tight muscles in her legs,
wincing at even normal movement.

As she worked out the kinks in her body, she ran over her
situation in her mind, and found herself needing to balance the
intense optimism she felt with a healthy dose of caution. From
what she had gathered, if the Emperor was indeed looking for her
it was not a concerted, city-wide effort like she had feared it would
be. It was possible that the Imperial officer that had seen her and
the girls escaping the Dane’s estate that night really hadn’t seen
them clearly enough to be identified after all, or had simply not felt
their presence to be significant in any way. Just three more
orphans having the good fortune of being able to walk away from
certain death. The words of the Imperial Officer echoed up from
her past.

“If you are strong enough, you will live and become
something hard, and cold. You will become a benefit to the
Empire. If you are not, then you will die and the Empire will be
stronger for it.”

That belief was the prevailing and enduring core of the
philosophy behind the Empire. The Imperial Officer, seeing three
children escaping the flames and a collapsing building, might have
simply concluded that these three girls were either a waste of his
time, or boons to his Empire, and let the matter fall.

Catelyn felt a number of emotions upon coming to this
realization. The first was shame and embarrassment, that she
hadn’t thought of this possibility sooner. Instead, she had
internalized her own fears and then projected them outward onto
the Empire and given her actions more importance than they likely
deserved. The second thing she felt was loss, stemming from the
fact that she had walked away from her life, that she had destroyed
her home, and had abandoned budding relationships over
unfounded assumptions of her own self importance.

She was not being hunted by the Empire. She would never
be hunted by the Empire. That was not how the Empire even
worked, but Catelyn had allowed herself to be convinced that her
life had taken on some great purpose since the weapon had come
into her life.

She and Silena had both been convinced, to differing
degrees, that the weapon had come to her for a reason, that it was
a gift from the Divines. Each of them had also been convinced for
different reasons. Silena because she had true faith in the Divines,
and Catelyn because her own faith had once been a source of great
comfort to her, and which she longed to feel again as her own
beliefs had been fading in recent sojourns. She had tried, when
the weapon had come into her hands, to ascribe a divine purpose
to a random act, but as the spans went by and the only result of
that act had been the senseless suffering of others as the Danes
tore apart the slums looking for it and for her, she realized finally
that she no longer believed.

In fact she no longer even wanted to believe in something
so ludicrous. What kind of Divines would allow the kind of
suffering she saw in the world every day? What meaning was there
in allowing perverted and violent people to be allowed to fulfill
their own sick desires without any sort of justice or accountability?

In that moment, Catelyn cursed the weapon that had come
into her life, still secured in its case within her pack, and she
briefly considered simply abandoning it right there on that
rooftop. She nearly reached around to take the pack off her back,
but stopped herself when she considered that although she had no
need for it, and no desire to keep it for herself, it might still be
valuable to others. And that it could make for a powerful
bargaining chip if she ever needed one.

The third feeling she experienced was uncertainty. Just
days ago, after her experiences in Brunley, and with no hope of
recovering her life in the Seat, she had been prepared to risk
everything to try and escape the Empire altogether. She had been
on her way to Belkyn, and the Grand Gate, and from there onto a
new life outside the Empire. She had merely planned to stop in the
Seat and assess the danger of passing through the city and what
she might expect from the Empire’s search for her. But at the
realization that there was no such search, Catelyn began to
reconsider whether she needed to leave after all. She had been
wrong about so many things.

What if my desire to leave the comfort of what I know,
for the complete unknown of a life outside the Walls, is also a
mistake?

She considered all the positives and negatives of both
options once more, in light of the new information she had.
If she stayed, she could continue her friendship with
Silena. She would be able to visit with the girls, and watch them
grow. She might even be able to stop going out at night to steal,
and find some way to help Silena, or some other merchant that
Silena might know and make an honest living for a change. She
could have a life here, and forget all about the events of the past
few cycles. Without the Empire looking for her specifically,
perhaps she could start a new life here, out of the ashes of the old.
She had done so once before.
Her optimism at realizing that there was no manhunt for
her or the two girls, and that she might be able to start over, was
weighed against the reports of the Emperor Uriel and six hundred
of his men riding through the Seat on some unknown purpose of
their own. She knew now that it was not about her. She was just
some stupid girl who had let her situation give her a swelled head,
and of no importance to the Empire. But even with the realization
that the Empire cared not a whit for a petty thief like her, she had
to admit that their presence complicated matters for her, and she
would need to move with caution, avoiding her normal form of
travel via the rooftops.
The idea of springing around on rooftops in the midst of
six hundred trained Imperial soldiers, rather than among a
populace numbed by the monotony and despair of their own
pathetic lives, filled her with a certain amount of dread.
But Catelyn decided that whatever was happening within
the Seat, she needed to act. She began simply enough, by picking a
direction and moving toward it.
In truth, she was somewhat thankful for the chance to be
able to climb down to street level and walk for a while, and so she
did just that, ensuring that her hair was completely tucked up
under her head wrap and walking tenderly from the tight muscles
in her legs.
She decided that if anyone could find out what was
happening and why the Emperor had ridden into the city with his
men, it would be Silena. Catelyn smiled slightly when she realized
that if she was being honest with herself, her real reason for
making strides towards the central marketplace had less to do with
gathering information, and more to do with the fact that she
simply missed Silena. And Catelyn also knew that she could
confide in the older woman. Maybe Silena could help her decide
what to do, and would have an opinion on whether or not she
should risk everything to try to get out of the Seat.
Despite her soreness, as Catelyn made her way towards
the center of the Seat, she felt a distinct spring in her step, and
hummed a little tune quietly to herself.

Uriel placed his head in his hands, grabbed his temples on
both sides and squeezed, trying to shut out the droning melody
that had recently returned to his mind. Once again, none of his
officers were able to hear the song, and he wondered if he was
beyond help. Whatever process had stopped his natural aging
sojourns ago, perhaps it did not slow the decay of the mind. He
recalled flashes of memory about his grandfather, Uriel the First of
His Name, of an old man with paper thin skin babbling
incoherently to himself and others as his mind fell away in his
dotage, piece by piece. Was that happening to him now as well?

He was standing in a makeshift war room with three of his
officers, little more than someone’s former living room, refitted for
the purpose of receiving reports from each about their patrols in
the hunt for Ortis and the artifact. So far, the eastern quadrant of
the city had been thoroughly searched and nothing of consequence
had been found. The officers had reported to him about a number
of citizens whom they had killed for one petty crime or another,
but Uriel had no care for such details. He waved dismissively after
each report, and each time, he could see the men sweating over
their failure to find their main objective.

For the first time in his life, Uriel was not concerned about
such failure. In uncharacteristic fashion, he found that he had all
the patience in the world to capture Ortis. And he would capture
Ortis, of that he had absolutely no doubt. There was little use in
reprimanding his men at this point, when they had only just begun
their search a few days ago, and so much of the city yet remained
to be searched. A quarter of his men he had assigned to create a
perimeter around the city, with checkpoints beyond which none
could enter or leave without being detained and questioned,
ensuring that no one could escape the Seat without his knowledge.

No, what concerned Uriel was not the length of the search
for his former commander, his former lover, his former friend. He
had every confidence that would end on his terms, and it would
end soon enough. What concerned Uriel was this echoing melody
rattling around in his head, seemingly at random.

Uriel was convinced now that it was not simply a product
of his own mind. He had always known that he was different from
the other men of power he had watched and learned from as a boy
growing up in his father’s Empire. He knew that where other men
faltered in their own softness, their own weakness driving them to
act upon such antiquated notions like morality, he was cold and
refined like a precious metal. But this clarity of purpose was not
the product of a damaged mind, he knew.

It was a sign that he was superior. That he was the man
destined to lead the human species to a new plateau. To a place
beyond morality, beyond weakness. His vision for his people was
impossible for others to understand sometimes. Only a handful
had seen the brilliance of it. Ortis had been one of them, or so he
had once thought but as he had aged, he could see Ortis’ faith in
their cause dwindle and then flicker out, like a candle that had
burned down its wick until nothing remained.

Ironically enough Ortis, at least as he had been in their
youths, would have believed Uriel about the haunting melody, and
he would have helped him hunt down the answer. But Uriel was
alone now and he would need to find the answer to this mystery on
his own.

Uriel looked up at his men, who were silently watching
him ruminate, and angrily waved them out of the room. They
quickly filed out and left Uriel alone, free of their distraction.

Uriel reached to his belt and took hold of the platinum
crook hanging at his belt. As always, the cool feel of the carved
figures upon the handle filled him with the sense of his own power
and he felt light-headed. As he gripped the crook, raising it so that
he could stare at the surface of the handle, he focused his Will into
it. And as he did, the song changed. He could hear it now, as
clearly as if the singer were right in the room with him , and it
echoed off the walls loud enough that he could finally make out
details.