Tomas sat Catelyn down one day and tried to explain all of these things to his young daughter, though he wasn’t sure she could possibly understand. Still, she remembered every word of his admonition.
“This cold and unforgiving world view lies at the heart of everything that is wrong or perverted about the Empire. The Emperor has taken a truth about our universe, that there is no inherent meaning or proscribed purpose to the world or to those of us who live in it, and he has subverted it to fit his own twisted needs. Rather than see the truth that it is up to each of us to give our lives meaning, he has given into cold harsh realism as his only gospel.”
Catelyn was too young to understand those words then, but she had thought much on them in the six sojourns since her parent’s deaths. And she was now old enough to see that her father was only scratching the surface of the problem with the Empire.
A slavish devotion to such a philosophy and the actions and motives that this philosophy espouses is a complete abdication of any individual’s value. And such mindlessness is what led to the death of Tomas and Sera Bereford just ten sojourns after Catelyn’s birth. It was in that sojourn that her world changed forever.
Thinking about her family, as always happened, triggered the memories of that last day with them to wash over her like a flood. She had long since moved past the point of being overwhelmed by the emotions, but the memories still buffeted her like a chaotic storm.
Lying on the roof, with the heat bearing down from above and the turmoil in her heart worming its way out from within, her fingers and toes gripped the coarse wood slats as she prepared to relive the worst moment in her life.
It began as a morning like any other. Her mother sat at one side of their kitchen table, numbly scrubbing the paint from her face, having just returned from the soldier’s camp. While Tomas stood over their metal stove stirring a kettle of warm gruel and toasting a heel of moldy bread for the three of them. Catelyn was sitting at the table opposite her mother, reading one of the forbidden books her family had managed to hide from the Imperial soldiers, when the pounding began on the door of their hovel.
It was not a knocking, but the unmistakable sound of someone trying to smash the door down. The door itself would have splintered in one solid shove, if Tomas hadn’t wedged a sturdy chair beneath the door handle, a precaution that their family had taken to enacting since the incident with the Imperial officer and her mother, as well as other minor scares over the sojourns.
Tomas sprang up immediately, all too aware of the danger to his family. He dropped the wooden ladle he held to the floor, and ran to the cabinet and withdrew his sword, a rusty, thin longblade. Illegal though it was to have weapons, after the Imperials had come calling that day, both her parents had been awakened to the dangers of being completely defenseless, and so he kept this contraband weapon stashed behind the cupboards. As he moved with his weapon drawn to the front door, which sounded to Catelyn as though it was just about to give, he called out.
“Sera, grab Catelyn, and run. We’ll meet where we agreed. Go!”
Her mother simply nodded and ran towards her. Catelyn was ready, their family having practiced and prepared for this moment. It was no use however. As Sera reached her, preparing to flee to the alleyway behind their home, more pounding came from the rear of the hovel and the sound of splintering wood echoed through the tiny space. As the rear door gave way, a rough looking man burst in, and Tomas turned to face him, Sera holding Catelyn to her with one arm, and the other now brandishing a dull bread knife. Before the man did anything other than glare at them with desperate eyes, the front door finally smashed inward, the chair cracking under the continual pressure. Tomas and Sera stood their ground, but as more people entered their hovel, they knew it was no use.
Yet despite the odds, they refused to give up.
“Get out of our house!” her father yelled, lunging at one of the men, hoping to end him quickly and maybe cut a path for them to escape.
Tomas, despite his trade, was still a slender and gentle man at heart, and there was no contest between him and the attacker, who was rugged and burly enough to look as though he regularly challenged handfuls of men in physical contests. The other man sidestepped the thrust easily, and grabbed hold of Tomas’ arms.
“We’re taking the child. If you let us, maybe we’ll let you live” the man declared as he pinned Tomas’ arms to his side, keeping the sword point away.
Sera launched her own verbal assault on the four intruders.
“Why are you doing this? We have a life here. You can always…”
Her mother never got to finish that sentence, as both of the other strange women rushed at her, one grabbing for the knife in Sera’s outstretched arm, the other ripping Catelyn away, until she dropped to the floor. Once Catelyn was no longer in the middle of the melee, the strangers attacked in full force, raining blows down on her parents. Catelyn tried to fight back, but the attackers simply shoved her aside easily, like a doll.
Within whispers, Sera and Tomas were huddled and sprawled on the floor of the main room, beaten and bloody, with their faces pressed to the dust and dirt and their arms clutching desperately to the spindly legs of their daughter, unwilling to let go. Catelyn pulled at them, urging them to get up, to fight back, to take her away from this place, to save her.
The four strangers stood leering jealously at the child kneeling and weeping over her parent’s limp forms.
“Just do it,” the oldest man commanded.
The younger man bent over and picked up Tomas’ sword, which had fallen to the ground during the beating. He then strode over to the prone forms of Catelyn’s parents, while one of the women grabbed Catelyn by the collar of her shirt and yanked her away.
Tomas and Sera, unable to continue to defend themselves, were swiftly gutted by the man now brandishing Tomas’ sword as Catelyn looked on in horror, screaming and crying uncontrollably.
Catelyn might have only seen ten sojourns, but her parents were everything to her. They had shown her love and compassion unlike anything she could have expected to find in a world as cold as the one they lived in. They had taught her well in those sojourns, exposing her to knowledge that many had forgotten through the books that they found and smuggled home to her. They taught her how to read and write, a skill that was forbidden, and so mostly forgotten, by the Empire. They had given her the best life possible in such extreme conditions, and she loved them more than anything in the world. And now here they were, dying before her eyes.
“Catelyn...darling...we love you. We…” Her father’s last words.
“We’re sorry.” Her mother’s.
She wanted them to remain with her. She wanted more moments with them, more time to be with them, but just like that, it was over.
As she watched each of them draw their last breath, she truly felt as though her world had ended in that moment. But in truth, her trials were only just beginning.
The two couples, despite having cooperated long enough to carry out the initial assault together, now turned on each other for possession of the weeping girl.
“Now, let’s settle this part,” one of the men said.
The man who had taken Tomas’ sword lunged for the other man, trying to take the other by surprise. He presumed that the other man was unarmed, and that he would have the advantage, but he was wrong. The other man reached into his shirt and retrieved a grimy glass vial filled with a thin, oily red fluid.
“Get back! I’m warn-” he began, but the other man, despite his size, was faster.
As the sword found its home in the second man’s abdomen, the vial flew from his grasp, the stopper pulled free in one last desperate attempt to defend himself, and proceeded to release its contents directly into the first man’s face. The crimson fluid sprayed in wild jets around the room as the man flailed in obvious pain and suffering, acting almost alive, almost as though it sought out living flesh to consume.
“That’s bloodfire!” the woman who was partnered with
the swordsman shouted, as she watched him in horror, trying desperately but futilely to remove the fluid from his upper body.
The substance covered the swordsman’s face and upper body, causing his skin to blister and dissolve. He dropped to his knees, screaming in agony and clawing at his face as he tried to wipe the liquid away and only succeeded in getting it on his hands, which spread the liquid further. It was the most horrifying thing Catelyn had ever seen.
The other man, the one who had released the volatile fluid, was also near death, slumped on the floor with the sword impaling his stomach and a stream of blood pouring from the wound.
Catelyn turned to see the two women collide now, and she saw that they were struggling over a sharp piece of wood that had broken off when the door had splintered open.
“You’re not...taking her...you bitch!” the younger woman growled.
The woman who controlled the makeshift weapon was gaining the upper hand, and she managed to jab the sharpened piece of wood into several places on the unarmed woman’s chest and shoulders, but not enough times to incapacitate her. Both women were fighting for their life, and for possession of Catelyn, who could only watch from her knees.
“She’s ours. We’re taking her!” the wounded woman was insisting.
As the adults struggled, Catelyn looked on from where she knelt as the four attackers engaged with each other, and as she did the bloodfire,which had pooled onto the floor near her, somehow splashed up and onto Catelyn’s face. Her last thought before the pain seared away all rational reasoning had been that it looked as though the bloodfire had leapt from the man to the floor and then onto her, almost as though it had moved with a will and a life of its own.
And then the bloodfire went to work on her, and instantly her terror transformed into unadulterated agony.
The pain was all that registered to Catelyn from that point on and she shut her eyes against it. She had felt what she had thought was excruciating pain once before, when she had burned herself with a hot ember that she had tried to pick up when her father was making a fire for them in the winter.
This was not even remotely like that, it was far, far worse. Hundreds of times worse. The intensity of this pain was unbelievable.
Within breaths, the pain seemed like it was all that existed in the world. And then, just when she thought the worst of it was over, the bloodfire would spread further and it felt to her as though it was setting new parts of her face and upper body on fire.
After what seemed like sojourns, finally, mercifully, the pain began to subside, either because the bloodfire had burned itself out or because it had succeeded in eradicating the entirety of her face. She imagined herself with no skin, her face a fresh white skull screaming in abject misery.
She never passed out from the pain, while the bloodfire stole her eyesight and much of the skin from her face and chest. She lay in the combined blood and gore of her parents and the two strange men for prayers, now completely numb to everything both within and without.
She no longer heard the two women, and presumed that they had fled upon seeing what the bloodfire had unleashed on the girl they had come to steal.
Catelyn remained in that room, with the dead and the dying, for four prayers before someone arrived. Four prayers spent in complete darkness, with only her four remaining senses to tell her what her world was like now. Her parents were cold, silent and still below her, the gutted man lay unmoving three paces to her left, while the other man lay whimpering and sputtering just half a pace away on the right.
The sounds of the earlier conflict, or the screaming, or both, must have drawn someone’s attention at some point that morning, though Catelyn imagined that her screams must have been horrific sounding to have kept even the scavengers and looters away for so long.
Eventually, she heard the tromping of boots on the stairs below, and then the sound of people entering her family’s home. It sounded to Catelyn like three, maybe four, men. She smelled their sweat stink, heard their plate and mail armor and the metallic jangle of weapons. The Imperial army, she reasoned, and she decided to remain silent.
“What a mess,” someone muttered under their breath.
Catelyn listened as one of the men stopped at the spot where the wounded man lay.
“Divines, what…” a young man’s voice said, and then she heard him stumble away to the corner of the room and evacuate his stomach.
“Ugh. Bloodfire. I’ve seen this before. Nasty stuff from the Before,” one of the other men said.
“Yeah, that stuff eats right through anything,” a third man offered. “Look, you can see right through to his brain an’ all.”
At the comment the first man began to heave into the corner again.
“Enough,” a grizzled voice said. “We’re here to investigate.” And then the sound of a sword unsheathing, followed by a wet squelching sound, and one last sputtering breath from the man on the ground.
“That was a mercy,” said the second man.
“That was convenience” the grizzled voice said, annoyed.
“No skin off my bones,” the second said.
The men went around the room, doing one thing or another. Catelyn heard them opening and closing drawers, looking through cupboards, and dragging the bodies away to the corner of the room where the first man had sicked up. None of the men mentioned or approached her. She began to wonder if they would simply step over the dead bodies and slit her throat.
Catelyn wondered if they just didn’t see her for some reason, and she coughed.
She heard one of the men nearby stop, but he didn’t make a move towards her.
“Can you...help?” she managed to say, her voice cracked and quiet.
The footsteps resumed their pattern of moving about her home, and then finally, the grizzled man spoke once more, but still not to her.
“Alright. You three, take the bodies and report in. I’ll be right there. I’ve just got to take care of this last thing.”
“Sir,” the other men responded in unison.
She heard the heavy footsteps of the other men as they walked to the corner, groaned as they picked up a body each, and headed downstairs.
“Please, don’t take my family…”she started to say, and then the sadness overwhelmed her and she collapsed to the ground, sobbing uncontrollably.
The footsteps of the remaining soldier came straight towards her, and then stopped.
“Please…” she started to say, when a hand gloved in leather and metal pulled on the bottom of her chin, turning her face up to the ceiling. She felt a hot stinging where the bloodfire had been and she winced in remembrance of the pain. The grizzled man spoke.
“Bloodfire took your eyes, girl. But you probably already know that. And you’ll never make a living servicing my men looking like that. You’re useless now.”
The hand left her chin and she felt like dying. He grabbed her roughly under the arms and pulled her to her feet. Then she heard him kneel down before her and felt his hard, gloved hand grip her shoulder tightly, hurting her as he spoke in his rough voice.
“I believe in the Empire. This isn’t a fatal wound. 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.”
He released her shoulder and she listened as his mailed boots thumped their way over to the corner, heard him shoulder the last of the bodies, and out of the room. When they were gone, all that remained to her was darkness and silence.
Chapter 2
Catelyn’s thoughts returned to the present momentarily, and to the rooftop where she had come up to contemplate her dilemma with the food cache, that was even now spoiling in the heat. She could feel the afternoon sun slipping closer to the horizon, and soon the temperatures would start to fall slightly. It wouldn’t cool much, certainly not enough to affect her food storage problem, but it would at least make it possible for her to think more clearly about
things, and about anything other than the unbearable heat.
Remembering the terrible events of her past had a way of sparking other thoughts in her mind. Flashes of memory surfaced, combined with many nights since that day spent in contemplation of what all of it meant. She set aside her thoughts about the food cache and explored the deeper thoughts that were now stirring in her mind.
Even by the age of three, Catelyn’s parents knew that she was a special child; she had demonstrated to her parents exceptional understanding, as well as the ability to read from books and converse with her parents at a level far above what they would have expected of a young child. There was no way for them to know just how gifted their daughter was, but by comparison with the other children that her family knew growing up they could see a marked difference.
With child-rearing being so tightly controlled, the few dozen parents chosen each sojourn in the Seat, among the two hundred throughout the Empire, formed an ad-hoc support structure for one another, communicating and meeting with one another regularly. Because of this, Catelyn had a fair amount of experience interacting with the other children and parents of the Seat, at least the ones that lived within walking distance. It was usually Catelyn who was put in charge during group play and she regularly demonstrated substantial advantages over her similarly aged peers.
However, in many ways Catelyn’s intellect and natural curiosity was more of a burden to her own parents, which was obvious even to her as a young child. Her parents were not simply vigilant against other citizens of the Seat who had sought to take her from them; they were also forced to be reclusive from some of the other chosen families, who appeared noticeably interested in taking Catelyn for their own. It was rare for chosen families to turn on each other, but it did happen.
Without needing to maintain that degree of vigilance, Tomas and Sera might have been able to give Catelyn the kind of special attention she deserved to develop her mind. They tried their best to meet her needs and give her every opportunity but it was not without its drawbacks.
Bloodfire (The Sojourns of Rebirth) Page 3
