Bloodfire (The Sojourns of Rebirth)

by Matthew Medina

  Catelyn’s sense of smell had finally adjusted to the overwhelming scents by the evening of that first day, allowing her to remove her face covering at times which, outwardly at least, helped her feel more normal. Though judging from the sense she now had of the people of Brunley, she needn’t have worried about trying to fit in.

  The people, outside of the gangs of scavengers, seemed quite content to keep to themselves and ignored anyone or anything that wasn’t directly in their way. The people of Brunley, she could now say with confidence, had been the victims of longterm, absolute neglect. Worst of all for her, the people of Brunley were also universally dirt poor.

  Although the city seemed suitable, in fact almost perfect, for someone like her to hide in, it was not the type of place where she would be able to survive via the trade that she had grown accustomed to.

  She had gone out, those first two nights after finding her new living space, to explore the neighborhoods around her building, only to find her observations of the past several days confirmed: these people had even less than she did. She had only taken the barest of necessities with her from the Seat, but that had included the seventeen silver marks and about half a dozen coppers she had accumulated from before any of this trouble had started. It represented every coin she had saved throughout her spans of thieving, the safety net she had set aside if things ever went wrong and she needed to flee.

  The coin also served another purpose; one that she could only dream of being a reality, but which she still clung to and that was her hope that she could earn enough to make her way to the gate at Belkyn and bribe her way past the gates and out into the larger world. Outside the Empire. She realized that might be a fool’s hope, but there were rumors that some had done this. Had earned enough coin to escape the Seat for good. But Catelyn idly wondered if those were simply tall tales told by the residents of the Seat, to titillate and entice others.

  Either way, her purse contained a comfortable sum of money even by the Seat’s standards, but she felt positively flush with wealth here.

  And therein lay one of her first major hurdles in adapting to her new life here. She realized on her first excursion to the bazaar during daylight prayers that carrying even a single silver would mark her as a target for other thieves, as she seemed to be one of the wealthiest people in the area. She was already going to stand out just by being new to the area, because she quickly learned that no one ever came to Brunley voluntarily.

  She was already being whispered about; the strange blind girl wandering into Brunley for some unknown reason. So far the whispers were mostly close to the truth, specifically rumors about what crime she may have committed in the Seat to be forced to flee to this place. But if her mere presence was enough to cause such scandal in this place, then spending her coin here would call attention to her in ways she was not comfortable with, and so she kept her purse tightly tucked away in a pouch behind her belt.

  She considered not settling here, and continuing to wander deeper into Brunley, but she could guess that the southern side of Brunley was at least this bad, and she imagined that it might in fact be worse, given what she was hearing from the little gossip she overheard in those first days. The further that one traveled south, the more that the Dun Marsh encroached on the city, turning it into a morass of city streets submerged beneath stinking swamp water.

  By her third failed attempt to find anyone else in Brunley who was not poorer than her, she reached the conclusion that she had in fact made a huge mistake. The problem for Catelyn now was simply that she had nowhere else to go, and so she had climbed to the rooftops to mull over what she was going to do next.

  She squatted on her heels, with her arms wrapped around her knees and her head tucked between them, trying to decide what to do. She knew only one thing for certain, which was that she would not be able to return to the Seat.

  The Imperial soldier that had seen her leaving the Dane’s estate with Elexia and Sera would surely have reported seeing her by now, and she imagined posters with her likeness up all over the Seat. Although the Emperor had the reputation of taking a broad approach to punishing transgressions, Catelyn knew that, first because of her involvement with the Danes and now with the Imperial soldier who may have identified her, it was very possible that they would see her individually as a threat. Not of what she could do to them, which was quite literally nothing, but of what she might represent. And she wasn’t willing to take the chance. She had always sworn to herself that if she were ever threatened like this, she would have a contingency plan. And this had been it: to ignite her roost and flee to the south. She was just beginning to realize, embarrassingly and painfully, how thoughtless and naive her plan had been.

  Chapter 12

  Uriel grabbed a hold of the collar of one of the servants standing before him, pulled the dark-skinned man closer to him and with all of his strength he shoved, pitching him forward, out into space.

  The servant, some nameless southerner, a native of the Chalk Isles no doubt, flailed its arms and moved its mouth silently as it fell the twenty stories to the flagstones below. It eventually hit the ground with a wet smack Uriel could hear all the way up on the balcony, where he stood looking over the edge of the Citadel’s roofline.

  He turned on another of his nameless servants, who tried desperately to mouth a protest, but it was unable to vocalize a thing with its tongue and vocal cords freshly cut from its throat earlier that morning. Its lower face was caked in dried blood, and the eyes, dark and cow-like, pleaded with him for mercy. This one had pale northern skin, likely one of the children of the prisoners his father had taken in his victorious campaign against Pyrus. Uriel punched the useless creature in the gut, then pulled it up by its blood soaked tunic and flung it out to join the other servants on the stones below.

  That one made twelve. Uriel did enjoy firing incompetent members of his staff. Uriel was half tempted to pitch Enaz from the roof as well, for his failure to locate the source of the humming that he had heard earlier. Even now, the song continued, like a dull sound reverberating around him as though a shade haunted him, just like in the tales his nursemaid used to tell him when he was a small boy. Uriel knew better than to believe in such superstitious nonsense, but his lack of belief did not stop the melody from plaguing his mind.

  For three days now the music had followed him like a cloud, tormenting him at times, then receding, only to return prayers later. The song had taken on a plaintive quality in that time, and Uriel honestly considered the possibility that something was terribly wrong with him, as Enaz was claiming that he could no longer hear the sound. This revelation, coupled with the continued absence of Ortis, who was now officially missing, having failed to report in or return since the Purge four nights ago, sent Uriel into a rage. He had sent his other officers and commanders to find the deserter Ortis, and commanded every servant in the estate to drop whatever they were doing and help him track down the source of the humming.

  Unfortunately, just as Enaz had reported, it appeared as though the humming could not be heard by anyone save the Emperor now. Uriel was convinced of two possibilities. Either the world was going mad, or he was.

  These disturbing events had proven too much for Uriel to take, and this was how he found himself on the balcony of his estate, flinging a dozen of his servants to their deaths for what may be his own insanity. His own failure. But he could not be weak in front of his servants. They required him to remain strong in body, and in mind. And so he had no choice but to show them. To set an example.

  Now, with the brunt of his anger spent, and the serving staff a dozen dead weights lighter, he determined instead to seek out the location, or the fate, of Ortis as well as the source of the humming by himself. Madness or not, he would get to the bottom of this. He would find and eliminate the humming, or he would die in the effort.

  “Where is Ortis?” Uriel shouted. None of the remaining servants, nor Enaz, responded.

  He snorted in disgust, gathered his robes about hi
mself and stalked to the door, stomping back down to his chambers to think, the humming following along behind him like the wafting stench of death.

  Catelyn sat, wrapped in a thin, worn blanket she had brought with her from the Seat and she hummed tunes her mother used to sing to her, thinking about her future. The blanket, which had been stuffed in her back, was not soft on her bare skin, but it was the only one that she had been able to cram into her bag of belongings before she had set her roost afire. She hugged it tighter around herself, even though it never got truly cold in the Empire, but she was still chilled and drying off from the poor excuse of a bath she’d had just half a prayer before. The thing she most missed from her old roost in the Seat were her basins for washing.

  She hadn’t been able to properly bathe in days, and finally tonight she had learned that once a span, merchants were given the opportunity to buy a supply of relatively clean drinking water from the Imperial stores, which they then turned around and sold for however much the people could offer. Supplies were limited as a result, and Catelyn, as the newest resident in town, had to wait until last before she could claim her ration. Fortunately for her, the other residents must not have had as many marks, as there was still enough that she was able to buy three jars. One she had set aside for drinking, and the other two she had used to give herself a standing bath with one of the clean cloths she had brought with her.

  She had considered all of her options while cleaning herself and had come to realize that maybe she had been thinking too linearly when it came to her choices. She realized that she needed to start looking at her situation with different eyes, so to speak. As her father had taught her, she started to look at her problem upside down and inside out.

  And when she did so, of all of the possibilities she considered, it was the impossible option that stood out as her one and only chance. That option seemed to be so far beyond the realm of possibility as to be equivalent to making a wish and having it come true, and that was to find a way to leave the Empire completely.

  That’s impossible , the voice in her head chided. But as the idea settled around her, something about it clung to her conscious mind and wouldn’t let go. She carefully thought through the ramifications of staying in Brunley, and quickly realized that her odds of survival here, or anywhere within the Empire for that matter, were almost nonexistent. She couldn’t return to the Seat. She couldn’t go to any of the other cities within the Empire. At least, none within the walls.

  She’d heard stories of Canlis Point and Fort Baldwin to the west, both part of the Empire but separated by distance and unconnected to the walled hub of the central cities. But despite their distance, none of the stories she had heard indicated that conditions there were any better than what she had known. Still, she wondered if she could disappear there, while still maintaining the ability to ply her trade and make a living.

  Or she might just find a place outside the walls, in the wilds, to establish herself and live off the land. There would be hundreds or even thousands of abandoned towns and villages like the one her parents had once lived in. Certainly the Empire ignored those now, having sealed itself away within the walls of Uriel’s legacy. It was a slim chance, but even a slim chance seemed preferable to once again returning to a life of begging and scavenging, or worse, here in Brunley.

  Catelyn was beginning to understand that her best hope for survival lay beyond the impenetrable walls of Uriel’s fortress Empire. In truth, pursuing this option, even in her mind, was still terrifying. Catelyn would still need to go through the heart of the Empire to get to the Grand Gate in Belkyn, and she had never even experienced the world outside the walls and so had no idea what to expect.

  The Empire continually reminded its citizens of the harsh, dangerous world outside; how the men, who had taken the name of Uriel to rule over the people, had done so to protect them from the evils of a world that feared them for their superior morality. For all she knew, Uriel’s family and the other men who had ruled the Empire for hundreds of sojourns were right, and all that waited for her outside the walls was a world even more cold and uncaring than the one she knew, or even just death.

  But Catelyn weighed that against the fact that all that waited for her inside the walls was also death. A slow, lingering death full of suffering. As she pondered, she came to the realization that she would rather take her chances with the unknown, than to acquiesce to the whims of mad men and leave her fate in their hands.

  When her mind was made up, and despite the enormous task she set herself of making the impossible possible, she felt an ease come over her at her decision. In that moment of peace, Catelyn searched the vaults of her mind, recalling everything that she knew about the walls of the Empire.

  When the first Emperor Uriel had taken control of the Empire, long before her parents had even been born, the construction of the first walls had begun. Catelyn had read the history of the walls in one of the books her parents had managed to hide from the Empire. Because her family couldn’t hide an entire library in their small hovel, they had often chosen books that were densely packed with information about important things, and she remembered the stories they told, having read them over and over again.

  According to the book, the rulers of the Empire had initially convinced the people that the walls were necessary to guard against the wild savages of Pyrus to the North, populated by tribes of people whom the residents that lived along the northern border were in constant conflict with. City walls were built around every center of commerce, to protect them from attack. Catelyn, as she had matured and experienced more and more of the Empire’s tactics and mind games, began to wonder whether such attacks had even taken place, or if this had actually been a deception, a move that was calculated to play upon people’s fears and foster their innate distrust of those they didn’t know.

  When Uriel II took over from his father in 973, after Uriel I took ill just before the end of his days, he furthered his father’s legacy and created the Channels. Continuing where his father left off, the Channels connected each of the major cities of the Empire, and the trade hubs, to one another without giving up the protection the people “demanded”.

  Uriel II managed to negotiate a treaty with Pyrus, stipulating that as a concession for halting hostilities, a safety zone would be designated between the two nations, so that no longer would the citizens of either nation encroach upon the sovereign land of the other.

  Catelyn’s parents had taught her however, that the book was not telling the whole truth in this matter. This treaty, according to them, was little more than a ransom demand, as Uriel II had staged a covert attack upon Pyrus and kidnapped the Pyric King’s only son, bringing him to the Seat to stand trial for crimes against the Empire.

  The punishment for such a crime, then as now, carried only one sentence; death, and so the Pyric King had no choice but to comply with Uriel II’s demand. In the book, this was painted as a major victory for Uriel II, but based on her parent’s views and her own experiences, Catelyn had now come to believe that the Pyric king would have been only too happy to have signed such an agreement, seeing the madness that seemed to plague the Imperial house of Uriel.

  Finally, when Uriel III staged his coup at the age of fourteen, killing his own father and wresting complete control of the Empire away from the politicians, he ordered the last of the walls, and in particular the “Wall of Regret” as it was later named, to be constructed, effectively cutting off the Empire from the rest of the world. She knew that beyond the four major eastern cities, which were interconnected by the Channels, a number of forts, outposts and other settlements still operated as part of the Empire, but they existed only to serve the Empire in some fashion.

  Uriel III hadn’t just finished the walls though. He had built them up into monstrosities. Hundreds of paces tall, made of smooth stone stripped from the quarries and mines southwest of Aldus. Catelyn had, as all children in the Seat did at one time or another, made attempts to scale one of the walls enclos
ing the Seat but without a single hand hold or gap to place one’s hands and feet, it was an impossible task.

  Catelyn had seen the walls with her own eyes many times as a child, and remembered how intimidating they were, rising up into the sky and to the horizon on all sides. Every memory of her life outside her home when she was young and when she’d had her sight included those walls. They were always there, standing behind everything, suffocating and smothering and unyielding.

  Catelyn knew from the books she’d read and the stories her parents told of their lives before the Seat, that there were such things as mountains, and fields of wild grasses, and plains. She had imagined them as a child, but she had never seen them, and she thought she never would.

  But as she sat considering her future, and how she was going to live for the rest of her life, Catelyn promised herself that she would one day feel the grass under her feet, and touch the stones and the trees on the mountains with her hands, and breathe in air that was not enclosed by stone walls. She would know these things or she would die in the attempt.

  The problem she faced, now that she had resolved herself to this course of action, was access. The walls had been built, Catelyn now realized, as much to keep its own citizens in as they had been to keep invaders out. In fact, she actually believed that the former had really been what was desired in the first place, and the latter was simply the excuse to get the people to go along with it. The Emperor’s Uriel I, II and III had designed and built nothing less than a prison. A prison with only one entrance and exit: The Grand Gate in Belkyn.

  Catelyn had neither seen, nor sensed, the only gate in the entire outer wall, but she had heard stories of it and how well defended it was on the inside. Many of the stories she had heard involved the fate of fences that she had sold her stolen goods to over the sojourns, who had gone “missing” attempting to smuggle their goods outside of the city walls. None of them were ever heard from again, and so Catelyn had little hope of being able to sneak her way out of the city.