roof tile, and sent the rats scurrying out of the attic. The cool, warped wood felt incredible under her fingers. She let her fingers linger there for a whisper, then she turned her head and the picture of the crawlspace changed. She visualized it from another angle now, could “see” the wall extend away from her and one of the ceiling beams crossing the floor just half a pace off the floor of the attic.
She crossed to it with confidence, reached out with her leg, and set her foot down on top of it. The solid thick wood was right where she had pictured it in her mind, and was rough under her foot, and she felt like laughing.
Catelyn immediately bent to a knee, prostrated herself with the sign of the Three and thanked the Divines for this incredible gift. She didn’t know how or why They had seen fit to bless her this way, but she knew that this was Their Providence. It was how They were going to help her to survive.
Catelyn tried to think of the proper words to say, but all that came to her were simple words, and she repeated them over and over again.
Thank you. Thank you.
Catelyn spent that entire morning exploring her new found ability, beginning in the crawlspace and gradually, as she gained more confidence in utilizing this new talent, climbing down to the top floor of the building she was in. As she moved, she experimented with finding the limits of her bubble of awareness, visualizing pushing it out with her arms, and pulling it in closely, wrapping herself in sensations like a cozy blanket of feelings around her.
In those moments she forgot all about the Empire, about her losses, and she was just a young girl at play.
She would probably have spent all day in her building testing herself and her abilities, but Catelyn began to feel the familiar pains that indicated her level of hunger, a hunger she would be ill advised to ignore.
Whistling softly to herself, Catelyn walked down the stairs of the building she was beginning to consider her new home, and made her way to the market plaza.
Catelyn crouched among the low rafters of a large, open round room, her bubble trained on the meeting place she had chosen for her meeting with Silena. She had spent the bulk of the day scouting locations for her and Silena to meet without interruption, and when she had settled on this spot, she had returned to the marketplace briefly to whisper the location casually to Silena before she packed up for the night.
Catelyn made sure that there was enough time for her to be able to return to her roost to collect the artifact before the meeting. She dressed in her thieves clothing, and hung the weapon from her belt with a loop of coiled leather she had fashioned. Then she made her way to the abandoned building where they were set to discuss the conclusion of their business.
Catelyn had worked to find a place that was somewhat open, but that also had an accessible approach and egress path from above. Although the location she’d finally selected did have a number of burned out buildings around it, where men could potentially hide in an ambush, there were also a number of pathways Catelyn could use to quickly get to the rooftops, providing Catelyn with the advantage, as well as all the escape routes she could possibly need.
Catelyn had felt a sense of trust beginning to form between the two of them, but one could never be too careful.
She always felt nervous about establishing new relationships, especially those that required her to trust someone enough to sell her stolen goods to, without them in turn selling her out to the Empire. Her usual fence when she had “delicate” items to offload, an unusual man named Marko, would not be the right person to handle this particular transaction. He was trustworthy enough that she didn’t fear he would cheat her, but she had little confidence that he could handle such a sale with the discretion that she required. Marko was not known for his subtlety.
Catelyn had been very careful in selecting the buyer for this particular item, and that caution was what had led her to spend days in the merchant’s district, moving from stall to stall, listening and assessing. She listened to each merchant as they made sales to other customers, not just to the words they used but to the unspoken signs of deception and malfeasance that she had trained herself to detect. The cadence of their breathing, the timing of their heartbeats, the slight pauses in speech which marked a person as being unreliable. She smelled their sweat and the clothing that they wore, some with the barest hints of perfumes or powders, one of the petty acts of defiance that a number of the people of the Seat indulged in. She felt the thrum of the air as people went about their haggling.
And through it all, one of the merchants had stood out like a candle in the dark. A guttering candle, surely, but a candle nonetheless. When all was said and done, her “interviews” of prospective merchants had all boiled down to a single name: Silena.
And so it was that Catelyn began to spend a great deal of time in Silena’s stall, pretending to examine items and listening to her ply her trade. Before span’s end, Catelyn began to feel as though she knew Silena. More than that, she had become convinced that she could trust her.
She knew that Silena was older, at least as old as the Emperor himself, for she spoke of the time before the reign of Uriel III with a barely concealed reverence. No one besides Catelyn had ever picked up on it, but Catelyn heard love and sadness at the edge of Silena’s words when it came to her work, dealing daily in reminders of the past.
Catelyn also knew that Silena had never cheated a customer before in her life, whether selling or buying. Such integrity was almost non-existent in the Seat during these times. Silena drove a hard bargain to be sure, and she was being completely honest about the Empire undercutting her profits, but once a deal was finalized, Silena stuck to it and never backed out of her word.
Although Catelyn had identified three merchants she felt might be forthright with her, Silena had something unique about her. Catelyn wasn’t entirely sure what made her stand out, but there was some inherent trait to Silena that gave Catelyn the confidence to finally approach her. After their initial conversation earlier that morning, Catelyn was quite convinced that she had made the right choice.
And yet she still found herself hunched in a corner in a wide open space with multiple paths to scramble away safely, should anything go wrong. Catelyn sighed, and supposed that this level of vigilance was just the nature of this place, the taint of the corruption that ran through the core of the Seat.
Silena had been agreeable to the location as well, perhaps a bit too eagerly in Catelyn’s mind, which again made her wary enough to wait quietly in the eaves and allow Silena be the one to step out into the open first.
Based on the books she had read when she had been younger, and Catelyn’s sense of the space and the objects she could detect within what remained of the building, Catelyn believed that this ruin was what they had once called a bank, a place where people came to deposit and withdraw their money, entrusting it to others for long stretches of time. She snickered when she considered how impossible it would be for anyone living in the Seat to ever trust another person to hold onto something as precious as money.
But she also felt that somehow this place was appropriate, that a place that had once been a symbol of trust and security would serve as a good backdrop for the deal that she was about to strike with someone she had never done business with before.
Catelyn shook off her distracting thoughts and returned her focus to the present moment and the imminent meeting. From where she crouched, she was almost entirely concealed, but with a perfect vantage point from which to hear and smell Silena’s approach. She expanded her bubble nervously, twirling her lucky ring idly around her toe, waiting for Silena’s scent or heartbeat to intrude upon the quiet scene. One of the other reasons that Catelyn had chosen this location was because it had quite literally been picked clean by dozens or even hundreds of scavengers since the Emperor had walled off the Seat, and that would mean little chance of an interruption as they conducted their exchange.
Still, Catelyn felt herself full of nervous energy, but not entirely sure why. As she thou
ght about it, she supposed that what concerned her most about the upcoming transaction was the notion of giving up the weapon while it was still a mystery to her. Not simply because she just generally hated giving up on mysteries, but because of the unique nature of this piece of history, she had no idea of its true value.
She hoped that Silena would be able to tell her that it was priceless, that Catelyn could fetch any price for the weapon. She could use a large windfall to be certain. Catelyn was doing well enough surviving, but she dreamed of doing better than just surviving. She dreamed of being able to stop breaking into the homes and offices of the few elites in the Seat, a list which was becoming shorter with each of her escapades.
It was not only that thieving was dangerous work, it was also simply not turning out to be as profitable as she had hoped it would be. While the outward appearances and mannerisms of many of the “wealthy” citizens had convinced her otherwise, it turned out that even many of the so called “nobles” were living hand to mouth under the restrictions of the Emperor.
In addition, she could only assume that Dane Eyrris was not easily going to give up his prize, and looking back on it now, she saw that her decision to provoke him by “signing” her work might prove foolish, and would no doubt have him scouring the city looking to extract a pound of flesh from her, not just to recover his property.
Despite her mixed feelings, more than anything Catelyn wished to be rid of the weapon and paid handsomely for it. Understanding the value of the item was much lower on her list of concerns, than being able to eat for the next several cycles. Or even sojourns.
She had spent some of the time while she sat waiting for Silena in a last whisper examination of the strange figures and images embedded into the blade and handle of the weapon, running her fingers over them again and again. She hoped that before it left her possession for good, provided that she and Silena could come to an arrangement and strike a deal, maybe these last repetitions would provide the answer to her burning questions. But the figures gave up no clues to their meaning, and the level of detail on the flat of the blade was so complex and the
workmanship so fine, that Catelyn was forced to resign herself to the fact of selling it and living with the mystery unsolved.
Still, while she waited patiently, half of her bubble trained upon the entries into the ruined foyer, the other half she trained upon her sense of touch on the forms of the spiraling bodies, in all their exquisite detail, outstretched arms and legs forming an unbroken chain of bodies, naked and unashamed. As she moved from body to body her fingers explored the anatomy of the dozens of figures, sometimes causing her cheeks to flush when she found particularly detailed body parts.
When she moved her fingers quickly away from one such discomfiting figures, she made a discovery that made her get to her knees, pulling the weapon from its temporary leather sheath and refocusing all of her senses on the weapon. It was extremely hard to tell at the scale she could sense things with her fingers, but she believed that each of the figures bore a unique face, meticulously and faithfully faithful carved. The notion took Catelyn’s breath away.
She had only had a handful of opportunities to study faces using her fingers to trace the contours of a person’s face since losing her sight, but based on those few experiences, she had learned enough to be able to at least feel confident that she could recognize people by touch alone. To Catelyn’s shock, these carved faces, small though they were beneath her fingertips, were sculpted with exacting detail and appeared to be as unique as the people they were likely based on. Given the level of workmanship of the weapon as a whole, this new fact didn’t shock her, but it was still an amazing thing to her that she was now capable of identifying individual faces of the people who had presumably posed for the artist who had created this masterful work.
Her fingers traced across as many of the faces as she could before Silena showed up, idly wondering who the people were, to have been chosen as subjects carved into the handle. Were these actually people that had lived in the past, or had the artist created each of them from their own imagining?
For a heartbeat, as she let her fingers trace their way over face after face, body after body, counting as she went, she reconsidered her choice to sell.
The choice was soon taken from her, as her ears caught the sound of approaching footsteps. Silena had arrived, her measured pace standing out to Catelyn’s ear, followed by a heavier set walking behind her. Catelyn wasn’t surprised to hear that Silena had brought along a bodyguard. Most citizens of the Seat wouldn’t have come to this part of town if they could avoid it, and if they did, they would never do so alone. Catelyn wrapped her bubble around the new arrivals, getting a mental map of the two individuals.
As she stood up, preparing to greet them and begin negotiations, Catelyn put the weapon back into its makeshift sheath, and tamped down her idle fantasies about the figures on the handle. She could make out a hurried, whispered instruction passed from Silena to bodyguard, to stay put and simply make sure no one else appeared and interfered with their deal. Catelyn found it interesting, and reassuring, to learn that Silena had brought someone to guard against outsiders, not to guard her against Catelyn. She felt honored, though some might have perceived it wrongly as an insult.
As Silena reached the middle of the bank’s open floor, rubble strewn about her feet, some of it from before the Empire, Catelyn moved from her vantage point and agilely leapt from pillar to broken wall to rubble pile until she reached the ground. Where she landed, she had put a rough stone chimney between herself and Silena that would obscure her approach and, she hoped, give her the element of surprise.
She moved closer, using the rough stone column as cover, but Silena proved to be shrewder than Catelyn had presumed. If she was surprised by Catelyn’s sudden appearance, nothing registered in her demeanor. There was no acceleration of heart rate, no sharp intake of breath, no smell of fear or shock. Catelyn had been of the belief that she had picked the right buyer before, but this impressed her even more.
Catelyn felt an impulse overtake her and she stopped, smiled widely and waved to Silena, which elicited a sigh and a slight shake of the head from the elder woman.
Catelyn was getting the distinct sense that perhaps Silena thought she was a crazy person, and that notion made Catelyn giggle quietly, considering the situation. Maybe she had cracked somewhat after all, living so long on her own. Who was more insane: the insane person or the person who was willing to trade with the insane person?
The two women stood facing each other for a few seconds, one last round of sizing the other up. Silena broke the silence, and her voice was at ease.
“I’m here, but I would just as soon be someplace else. I don’t like it here. Let me see what you have and we’ll both be able to get back to our homes before the cannibals smell our blood.”
Catelyn hesitated, wondering if Silena’s last comment was serious or not. Catelyn had encountered many horrifying things throughout her sojourns of living in the slums of the Seat, but never had she heard of cannibals roaming the streets.
She also spent a handful of breaths considering for the last time those exquisitely carved figures running up and down along the handle. She wondered what she was about to give up, and the thought of its loss tugged at her, and she hoped this was the right decision. But then she thought of the last six sojourns. The torture of those early cycles, nearly starving, as she learned to survive and cope in a world of darkness and terror. The absence she felt every day, of being alone, unable to trust anyone but herself, and the unfathomable pain of losing her loving parents.
She considered the soul crushing despair she felt at the realization that, despite her belief in the Divines and Their gifts to her, that this life with all of its nightmares and all of its cruelties was all there is, that she was destined for nothing. That her life had no meaning and her purpose was to do nothing more than suffer. That she would be forced to spend the rest of her days scratching in the dirt for the smalle
st of trifles, one step away from death’s cradle always.
At the thought of all of that, Catelyn reached down and unstrapped the weapon from her thigh, and presented it handle first to Silena, who approached and took the item in her hand.
Silena had effectively concealed nearly all of her emotions before, but on taking the weapon and laying her hands and eyes on it, that completely changed. Catelyn knew that even someone without her talents and senses would have seen a visible and audible change in Silena’s demeanor, as she gasped in surprise and her heart raced.
She stood there for some time, just holding the weapon in one hand, her arm extended out in front of her as though she didn’t wish to bring the item closer; as though it were a dangerous animal about to strike at or bite her. Catelyn pressed in, trying to understand what was happening, and prompting Silena to say something.
“Please, I would like your honest opinion, Silena,” she said.
Perhaps it was the kind tone that Catelyn used, or the courtesy of saying a simple please, but Silena tilted her head up to Catelyn and then brought the weapon to her chest. She clutched it in a strange way, like a child with a doll, and ran her fingers over the handle almost unconsciously, admiring it with breathy enthusiasm.
Finally after several whispers of this, while still remaining silently entranced, Silena broke her silence and spoke softly.
“I cannot help you with this, my dear. This is...beyond my capabilities.” Simple, blunt rejection.
The response was completely unexpected, and Catelyn could hear no guardedness in her voice, or in her manner. She used a hushed, almost reverent tone when she spoke, and Catelyn was aware, in that simple statement of honesty and
disappointment, of how much trust had formed between the two of them in such a short space of time. And she was also made painfully aware of just how much she had missed such a thing.
Still, Catelyn blanched, unsure exactly of what had just happened.
Bloodfire (The Sojourns of Rebirth) Page 13
