When Uriel had sent for him just a handful of prayers earlier, he had felt a sense of dread. Since the two of them had stopped their physical relationship many sojourns before, Ortis had lived his life believing that every summons would be his last. That the wise and powerful Emperor of the known world would have come to realize that the time had come at last for Ortis’ usefulness to reach its end. Ortis lived his last ten sojourns with an ever-increasing sense of foreboding and pessimism.
But once again, his feelings had turned out to be idle paranoia, as Uriel still seemed to find ways to inspire Ortis and his special brand of reckoning. Still, that uncertainty had been the only constant in Ortis’ life for so long that he had long ago stopped caring for anyone or anything, especially himself. His life was forfeit.
Earlier this night, those were the thoughts that echoed in the emptiness when Uriel had sent for him. The Emperor had explained the situation with the Danes, and by the end, Ortis had felt alive briefly. He had felt the spark of life and excitement to be the righteous hand of the Emperor’s Will, as he once had been. He had ridden from the gates of the Citadel with such fire in him, and then…
Something had happened. As quickly as they had been stoked, the flames in his heart guttered out, and the numbness returned.
Why have I become so lost, even to myself? he wondered. What concern is it to me?
He would do as he was commanded, and that was all that mattered. He believed he was already dead. Nothing else made sense.
And so Ortis watched his life unfold before his eyes, as though it were someone else’s, no longer caring. When Uriel barked orders at him, he rejoiced at the brief moment of exhilaration that he felt to be so needed. Later, after that faded, he simply complied. When Uriel looked longingly at him, the way he used to, Ortis wished that feeling could go on forever, but as soon as he left the man’s presence, his heart shriveled and the cold emptiness filled him up once more.
The only time he felt anything anymore was when Enaz or some other functionary summoned him to an audience with Uriel. Try as he might to disguise his feelings with apathy, to shut off his emotions and contain them deep within himself, he always felt something when that summons eventually came. Sometimes it was fear, sometimes it was desire.
This day, it was an almost overwhelming sense that, despite his successful campaign in Belkyn to root out those who would whisper of uprisings, the Emperor was finally through with him. He’d known the man almost his whole life, and had seen the Emperor cut away everyone and everything that had mattered to him eventually. Ortis could only assume that he too was living on borrowed time.
But today at least, Ortis had been wrong. If he was to be honest with himself, he had to admit that he secretly wished that he had been right. Ortis was old, and he was tired. And he had spent the past ten sojourns wishing that someone, anyone, would be brave enough, strong enough or even lucky enough to be the one to end his miserable existence for him.
Ortis chastised himself for entertaining such thoughts. Every time he watched the rising flames of a Purge, he got maudlin like this. And it was unbecoming of a man of his station. He tore his eyes from the fire and looked to his men, many of them also standing, mesmerized by the great walls of fire now consuming whole city blocks.
He strode amongst his men, clapping armored shoulders and acting the proud commander, despite feeling none of the pride that had once filled him to the point of overflowing. They had done an efficient job of carrying out the Emperor’s Will. His whims.
In truth, that is exactly the word that Ortis had come to describe the Emperor Uriel III in those moments when he was away from the man’s presence. He didn’t know exactly when it had happened, but as well as losing his desire to live, he had also begun to question the sanity of his oldest friend and former lover.
Orders and motives that had once seemed to Ortis to be the Will of a brilliant and revolutionary leader, now simply struck him as the hollow perversions of a madman, and his commands composed of emptiness. Ortis knew it was a capital crime to even think such thoughts, as his most recent trip to Belkyn had reminded him, but he couldn’t help but think that these Purges were purely the sort of act one would expect of a petulant child.
It was a strange feeling, questioning everything he had believed in his entire life. He did not wish to face these thoughts at all, and so he ran from them, seeking drink or the company of a boy to forget himself for a while. Although even that no longer held the pleasures for him that they once had, to the point where he wondered where such thoughts had even come from.
Ortis thought back to the night after his return from Belkyn. He had brought two boys home from his campaign, one for Uriel as was expected, and one for himself. But as he had retired to his bed chamber that night, he had not felt desire, but something...different. Something he had no experience of, and so could not put a name to. And he had simply held the boy in his arms, cradling him to his chest as the boy sobbed. And then Uriel had called for him.
Ortis was beginning to think that he was losing his mind. He knew that his advancing age made him susceptible to things like the rotting of the mind, and he wondered if this was what was happening with him.
Why else, after a lifetime of unquestioning loyalty and faith in his Emperor and his cause, should he now feel such confusion? What was next?
Ortis snapped himself out of his reverie once again. Even away from the flames now, his mind turned to reflect his own inner turmoil. His cheeks colored in shame, but thankfully Ortis knew that the glow from the flames would hide all evidence of his weakness.
He focused his attention on his mission. He had personally led the assault on Dane Eyrris’ compound, and had also personally killed the man, gutting him and trailing his intestines around the room for him to see before he expired. All as Uriel had commanded.
Through the pain and terror, Eyrris had tried to plead with him, describing how they had arrived at this conflict. He described the details of the theft, of something remarkable in his possession, and at first Ortis didn’t care. Eyrris, with half his guts trailing out in front of him, had tried to justify his pursuit of the thief.
Ortis still did not care, but this facet of the story at least had captured Ortis’ attention. The single-mindedness with which the Danes had acted in opposition to the Empire was...rare. He had been silent throughout Eyrris’ confession, but this piqued his curiosity enough to ask Eyrris why such a petty crime, especially by the standards of the residents of the Seat, had inspired so much passion that they would choose to defy the Emperor himself.
When Eyrris described the details of the crime; the way that the theft had been carried out, the entrance and exit from a third-floor window, the bloody footprints leading to the final grisly calling card on the pane of glass, and the insult directed at Eyrris using the remains of one of Eyrris’ playthings...Ortis felt a spark of inspiration at the thief’s brazenness, and the story caught his imagination. It still didn’t seem to warrant the degree of defiance that the crime had elicited, but his interest had been piqued.
And Ortis at that moment had realized something which had given him pause. Even here, with his guts strung out across the floor, the pain surely driving him to madness, Dane Eyrris was holding something back about the theft. Whatever the thief had taken, the Dane remained elusive about what it was. It was something he wished to keep hidden from the Empire. Even under torture, Eyrris was willing to defy the Emperor. Ortis couldn’t tell why, but that thought had filled him with something like excitement.
Now, standing outside of the last of the Dane’s estates, the home of Dane Callum, Ortis idly wondered about this thief and the object which they had targeted, enough to spark these flames he watched carrying the ashes of the dead into the night sky. This was a person who was bold enough to steal from the Sado-Sexual Elites, and even more so, to insult one of them in their own home. Eyrris insisted that it had to have been young, or a man of short stature, judging from the size of the footprints left behind,
though Ortis suspected it might have been one of the half-men.
In Pyrus, where Ortis had been born and lived before being born again to serve the Empire, he had seen a number of adults, fully-grown men and women, who had the stature of children. These half-men were rare even in his former homeland, and there were reportedly none in Exeter, but they were renowned in the north for being excellent tricksters and thieves. Uriel would have never tolerated them within his walls if he had knowledge of one. Still, he couldn’t rule out the possibility that there was one living in secret within the slums somewhere.
But even more curious to Ortis was this object which had caused so much commotion. As part of his authority, Ortis felt obligated to learn everything he could about it, yet this proved impossible. Up until the point where Eyrris finally expired, succumbing to blood loss and shock, he remained tight-lipped about it.
The second Dane that he had visited earlier that night, Dane Elger, had sworn that neither he nor Dane Callum had been shown the item, or had even been told entirely what it was, only that it was invaluable. Elger he had punished by flaying the meat from his arms and legs, and Ortis had performed enough interrogations to know that Elger was being truthful.
And so when he’d arrived at the final Dane’s estate, he simply ordered his men to torch the place, resigned to the fact that this mystery would die with the three Danes.
Ortis watched now as the last of the Dane’s estate began to collapse in on itself, the second floor’s weight crashing into the first. The roof was partially destroyed, showing gaping holes that were spouting jets of flame and black smoke. Ortis, in truth, wasn’t even sure that Dane Callum was in there. Part of him didn’t care, for the Emperor would certainly not care. These Purges were not about punishing those specific individuals who transgressed against him. They were messages to everyone within the Seat, of what would be in store for them if they did not heed the Emperor’s will. Ortis never liked leaving loose ends, but in this, sojourns of similar experiences had proven the effectiveness of Uriel’s methods.
Over the roar of the flames, a sound reached him. A cracking pane of glass. Ortis didn’t think anything about it at first, as it was quite normal for the pressure of the air inside a building when it was at the height of the blaze to cause some of the windows to blow out. But this sound was then followed by more glass falling, then the sounds of screaming voices. Children’s voices.
Ortis didn’t quite know why, but he reacted. He rushed to the front of the estate, searching for the source of the screaming, but saw nothing. He listened closer, and could hear a shout again, and he could tell it was coming from the side of the house, in the alley.
As he rounded the corner, with the wrought iron estate wall between him and the alleyway, he saw shadows moving between the burning house and the next building, which was just outside the perimeter that his men had established to keep the Purge from destroying the entire Seat.
He approached the wrought iron, and could see figures now, three of them, amidst the haze and smoke emanating from the estate. His men had done an efficient job of setting up the burn zone for the Purge, and he would not be able to get any closer without going back around to the front of the estate and going through to the other side of the wall. The heat from the flames was intense this close to the estate, and he put an arm up to shield his face from the worst of it, squinting to try and make out more details of the scene playing out before him.
He thought it must have been some of the Dane’s men, maybe even the Dane himself, trying to escape the blaze. But what he saw through the smoke and flames took him aback.
Of the three figures he could make out, two of them were small children, girls from the look of them though it was hard to be sure, nearly naked but for some dark rags, their bodies bloody from a number of cuts. Ortis could tell that they had just come through the window that they were both staring at, looking at it with concern, as though they were waiting for something.
Before he could call out for his men, something happened which made him pause. Two bare arms protruded from the window, followed by, and Ortis could not believe his eyes, the head of a young woman with a shock of dirty red hair. This was quickly followed by a naked torso, small breasts gleaming pale in the darkness of the alley, and finally as the girl sprung out of the window to the ground below, Ortis saw legs covered by dark pants, half torn and capped with two pale bare feet.
The sight of this girl, for reasons he could not explain, sent waves of feelings deep into his very being and he experienced something like exhilaration then, partly because his analytical mind began to weave together a narrative for this night. He did not think it coincidence that the Danes had been plagued by a small, unshod thief, and now here was a small barefoot girl in her teens escaping one of the Dane’s estates. He gripped the wrought iron bars of the estate wall with white knuckles, sensing that perhaps the mystery had not died with the last of the Dane’s after all.
But the other part of his reaction was purely instinct. He couldn’t explain it, but this girl tugged at him, pulled at some deeply buried and long forgotten part of him, and he simply couldn’t resist the lure of her.
This was the first emotional reaction he had experienced besides the constant fear since...well it had been a very, very long time. He felt his knees get weak, and his bowels turn to water. It was almost too much to bear. He gripped the iron bars in his hands tighter, to steady himself, as he watched while the girl was helped up by the two smaller children.
For more sojourns than he could remember, Ortis had felt like death. He had seen firsthand, and had been responsible for, horrors unlike anything he could ever have once imagined, and experienced the most perverse of pleasures.
But this simple sight, in a way that he could only describe as transcendent, blew life into him as nothing had before. Watching her, his mind triggered a memory long buried. A memory he had long since believed had been lost to him forever.
He was four. His father sat beside him, both of them sitting on a grassy river bank with their bare feet dangling in the cool waters of Bryn’s March. His father was teaching him the proper way to bait a hook with an earthworm they had dug out of the dirt. It wriggled as it was speared onto the metal hook and Ortis felt himself get queasy. His father reached out and pulled him close, comforting the boy who was seeing death up close for the first time.
His father explaining that it was the order of things, the will of the Divines that the lower creatures be fed to the higher, and that someday they too would die and be returned to the soil, to be fed to the lower, as part of the balance of this world.
Ortis felt his heart swell with something foreign as this memory played out, and then like a spark dancing away from the flame, the memory was carried away, torn from him and replaced with flame and soot and death and cold, dead iron gripped in his hands.
He collapsed to his knees, tears streaming down his face, and watched this slip of a girl limp away, propped up by two younger children maybe half her age. Even wounded as she clearly was, she moved with such grace and lightness that he became convinced that he was watching something holy. In the midst of death and destruction, he envisioned her glowing in the light of the flames with perfect majesty and dignity.
Ortis strained his neck, pressing his face as close as he could to the bars of the iron wall, wiping the tears to clear his sight so that he could see the face of this spirit. He wished to know her, and to ask her by what magic this girl had managed to awaken something human in him.
He noticed the dark strip of cloth tied around her eyes, and had presumed initially that it had simply been to protect her eyes from the smoke or the glass, but he could see now see the scarring upon her face, catching the light of the flames and revealing the ruined flesh where her eyes should have been and realized that she wore it because she was blind.
Even more shocking, as Ortis stared, she turned her head to face him directly. She had no way to see, and yet she was clearly looking right at him. Impossible a
s it seemed, she knew he was there, for she quickly gathered the two children with her, and the three of them hobbled as fast as they could in the opposite direction, down the alley and out of sight. She occasionally turned her head back, looking over her shoulder at him as though she were able to see if he followed or raised an alarm.
To Ortis’ own surprise, he did neither. Ortis remained kneeling, rooted to the spot, unable to peel his eyes from the flight of that wounded bird who had just landed in his bleak world, bringing with her the sense of things he could not understand, things he had become convinced were long dead.
He could identify at least one of them, however. Hope.
Hope for what, or why, he couldn’t say. But it was hope. He knew it as certainly as he knew the shape of his own face in the mirror. And as certainly as he now felt his own immense shame at the life he had led.
A ghost of an emotion, perhaps, flitting into his soul one breath and then out again in the next, leaving a stain of itself behind.
He stood, unheeding of the joyous hoots and cries of his men as the house beyond the wall collapsed into its own foundation, and unconcerned and unashamed of the tears which streamed down his face unabated.
Ortis had never felt such exquisite pain in his entire life. And yet, through that pain, Ortis knew deeply that he had never wanted to be more alive on any other day in his life than he did at that very moment.
He had just been reborn.
And Ortis swore that was the last night he would ever see the Emperor again.
Catelyn continued to train her bubble behind her as she moved clumsily from block to block, watching for pursuit, leading the two girls as best she could away from the infernal scene they had just survived. She was barely holding on to consciousness, and had to block out the pain of countless cuts, burns, bruises and probably a dislocated shoulder, but she was determined to get the girls somewhere safe. She was actually rather impressed with the ability of the girls to keep up with her, without much complaining from them, besides sore feet.
Bloodfire (The Sojourns of Rebirth) Page 21
