Bloodfire (The Sojourns of Rebirth)

by Matthew Medina

  But she did know that there were legitimate caravans on regular rotations both leaving and entering the city. The problem was, the Empire controlled every caravan in and out of the Empire, and she was not confident that it would be as easy as simply hiding herself away on one of their wagons. And certainly others had thought of this before her. She could not expect to catch the gate guards completely unaware. Even getting to the Grand Gate was going to be an almost insurmountable obstacle.

  Not only was Belkyn the most heavily militarized district of the Empire with Imperial soldiers policing the streets, especially now after the recent quelling of the “uprising” she had heard rumors about, but it would also require her to return through the Brunley Channel and pass through the Seat once more. She simply didn’t like her chances of passing through the Seat unscathed with the Empire likely on high alert and potentially actively searching for her.

  Catelyn didn’t completely rule out leaving through the Grand Gate, but before she decided that was her only course of action, she owed it to herself to at least look at other possibilities. She considered briefly praying for an answer as she had for most of her life since losing her eyesight, but wasn’t quite sure about her faith in the Divines anymore; she had offered plenty of devotions to them over the sojourns, and if she really considered her situation honestly, she was forced to admit that all of them had been ignored.

  She still wasn’t ready to completely give up on her faith quite yet, as she still had questions about what had led her to survive in the face of such unbelievable circumstances, but if it was true that some force had helped her to survive, then it seemed to be completely arbitrary and undirected by any sort of divine plan.

  A thought had been bubbling into her consciousness since the day that she had arrived in Brunley and had experienced the first of many puddles of brackish swamp water. She knew that the Dun Marsh crossed over the southern edge of Brunley, and seeped into the city somehow. She supposed it was possible that the water simply seeped up out of the ground, but she idly began to wonder if it wasn’t also coming from under the wall, such as through a pipe or a drainage system. She had seen a map of the Empire in the same book that had detailed the history of the walls, and like most of her books, she’d memorized it.

  She knew from that memory that the mapmakers had indicated that the Dun Marsh continued past the walls to the east, and all the way to the sea. And if water could pass under the wall, perhaps there was a way for her to pass, either through a crack, or a vent large enough to slip through in the other direction. She also wondered about the southern wall. Brunley reportedly sat high upon a cliff face overlooking the Wystan Sea. She decided that perhaps a visit to both areas was worth her time.

  She didn’t think that the possibility of finding anything that could help her get out of the Empire was great, but she figured that it couldn’t hurt looking at, at least. It wasn’t like her chances for escape were particularly strong. Thinking about escaping the Empire simultaneously filled her with hope and dread. Hope that her future might be lived outside of the oppressive rule and constant terrorizing of the Empire, but that was offset by the fear that what lay beyond those walls may even be worse than what she knew.

  But she was becoming more and more convinced that these fearful thoughts were not her own. That she, like every resident of the Seat and the Empire, had been systematically controlled for sojourns to think exactly this way, that the Empire had set out to scare its own people into complacency and obedience. If such a thing turned out to be true, as she was beginning to suspect, it could call into question everything she’d ever learned.

  Even the books, which she had memorized and so treasured as a child, could be wrong about everything. Was the Empire simply one masterful lie after another, orchestrated by generations to deceive an entire population?

  If so, to what end? she wondered.

  Having one’s certainty slowly stripped away was terrifying.

  She felt lost, and alone. And she wished that she could walk down to the marketplace and talk to Silena. Catelyn had a feeling she would have wise words to share with her. But there was no use dwelling on what couldn’t be. She realized, as she sat contemplating her situation, that she had no other choice but to try escape.

  Even if she died in the attempt, she alone would have to do something to better her life. The Divines, if indeed they existed, would not help her. She finally, slowly came to the conclusion that all of her life, it had been her choices and her actions that mattered.

  If she was going to live, that was all up to her.

  And as she resolved herself, mentally, to her plans for escaping the Empire, she drew comfort from a very strange realization: She had nothing left to lose.

  Chapter 13

  Catelyn sprang freely from rooftop to rooftop, scuffing her bare toes on the shards of gravel and tar as she launched herself over the warrens and alleyways of Brunley. Catelyn had wanted to get away from the streets for a time, to feel somewhat normal once more, or at least what passed for normal since leaving the Seat.

  However, that meant scant little to Catelyn at the moment, vaulting over roofs in broad daylight. Even though she was dressed appropriately, with full head coverings to hide her hair and face, Catelyn knew she was risking a lot by traveling via rooftops in the daytime, but she refused to wait another day before looking into the possibility of escaping via the Dun Marsh or the cliffs of the southern wall of Brunley.

  She probed the edges of her bubble, sniffing for the highest concentration of rank water to guide her southeast towards where the Dun Marsh encroached into the city.

  She wasn’t sure what she would find, and she did not dare to hope that her escape would be as easy as finding a crack in the massive Wall that she could squeeze through. Still, she had to try to ascertain how the water was getting into the city, because if water could get in, then it stood to reason that there was a way for the water to get out. She was beginning to taste hope and she wanted her freedom.

  Catelyn felt as though she were rushing, and willed herself to tread carefully. She knew from painful experience what rushing in could cost her. She didn’t wish to pitch herself off of the roof, and one misstep was all it would take. She couldn’t afford even a minor injury, like a sprained ankle or a cut, as even the thought of a delay in her plans was a possibility that she was loath to contemplate.

  Her nose caught a cloud of rank smells on the air and she focused her bubble on its source. She followed the trail of the scent, leading south down the alley beneath her and she crept lithely to the edge of the roof she was on, and hunched there on all fours, taking in the scene below.

  Her senses painted her a picture as vivid as if her eyes still functioned, and probably even more richly detailed that most people with sight, or so she liked to think. The alley was long abandoned and flooded by several finger-widths of standing water. A dripping noise from the building across from where she hunched suggested either runoff or rain, and the echoing of that noise bounced off of the ruins of the nearby buildings. The foul water was part marsh and part sewage.

  Although it was empty now, her nose told her that people had lived here, or at least had excreted her, not that long ago.

  She followed along on the edge of the rooftops, tracing the waterway and the cloud of scent through alleys and along the edge of the abandoned ruins. The entire neighborhood was deathly quiet. Not even scavengers subsisted here, whether human or animal, though she could hear an abundance of insect life. She expected the briny water to attract all manner of bugs to feast, but even she was unprepared for the sheer volume of buzzing, clicking and chirping from the seemingly thousands of species nearby.

  Upon realizing this, Catelyn shivered in revulsion. Bugs were far from her favorite things.

  Turning from her thoughts about the bugs to what she was doing physically, she focused on the scents around and below her. Beneath the two main smells of marsh water and human waste, a third distinctive smell began to clutch at her in
sides.

  It was a smell Catelyn knew well, though she wished plainly that she didn’t. It was the unmistakable smell of rotting flesh, no doubt bloated from both the water and exposure to the air. And at this distance down to the water, she guessed that there must be a large number of dead if she were able to pull that smell from beneath the rank cocktail that was already polluting the air and filling her nostrils.

  For all she knew, the whole area was nothing but a watery graveyard.

  All the more reason for me to be gone as soon as possible, she thought.

  From her bubble, she gleaned that this alley ended at the Wall, for the drips of water could be heard echoing back to her from just a short distance away, maybe twenty paces. Catelyn sensed her path to it, then leapt from the roofs down to the alley below. Immediately, Catelyn began to retch.

  The smell at ground level hit her like a hammer smashing into her face. As her feet landed in the cold water, splashing water from the flooded alley created blossoms of stench which floated up from the ground to assault her. Catelyn covered her nose and mouth with both hands, willing her body to adapt, to acclimate to her environment before it made her physically ill.

  It took longer than usual, with her bent over and trying not to make any sudden moves, but finally her nose got used to the stench. Even so, the mingling scents were so powerful that she couldn’t get an accurate sense of where or what the bodies were. She lowered her hands, which she had instinctively raised to protect herself from the assault on her senses. She would need them for this next part, and she was not looking forward to it.

  She crouched down on all fours setting her legs into a wide stance with feet outstretched, and put her hands into the water in front of her, settling into a stance resembling a crab. She felt the surface of the ground below the water’s surface under her fingers and toes; it was stone, worn smooth and expertly interlocked with large flagstones.

  The water was, as she had noted from above, about five finger-widths deep, enough to cover the tops of her feet and chill the tips of her fingers and toes. Catelyn moved forward slowly and cautiously towards the wall, following her ears and using her hands and feet to sweep to either side of her, clearing a path. She could sense rough shapes around her, but in this environment with the smell overpowering her, she was finding it hard to do more than get a vague sense of her immediate surroundings, nor did she work overly hard to gain a clearer mental image of the area.

  Whenever a hand or foot brushed against something solid, she withdrew it and edged past it, trying hard not to think about what it was.

  Crab-walking her way to the wall was both exhausting and time consuming. And Catelyn felt herself beginning to flag from fatigue not long after beginning. It didn’t help that she hadn’t slept solidly since she had arrived in Brunley. She fought back a yawn, and refocused on what she needed to do.

  Catelyn lost track of how long it took to cross the waterlogged alleyway to the Wall, but it felt like several prayers. Despite feeling partly blinded by the pervasive stench, she managed to cross the distance without more than a few panicked moments as her fingers or toes brushed against something slimy and wet.

  When her hand finally contacted the stone surface of the Wall, she let out a breath she hadn’t even been aware she had been holding.

  She pressed her hand flat against the Wall and focused her bubble right in front of her. She could smell, even through the putrification, the dank odor of mold on stone and the tang of rusted metal, iron to be precise. She could almost taste the moisture as she inhaled, buried deep in the stone and in the air all around her. But it confirmed what she had suspected, that water had been seeping into the Wall, and had been for some time.

  She stood up and ran both hands along the Wall, assessing its construction. Like the other sections of the Wall that she had felt before in the Seat, it was made of smooth, worn stone slabs, held together by thick iron columns. They were fused together by some process Catelyn was unaware of, but none of the books she had read as a child had covered topics about construction techniques.

  She didn’t focus on how it was built, beyond trying to determine if it contained an obvious weakness that she could exploit.

  Unfortunately, as Catelyn ran her hands across the surface, feeling the various joints and the Wall itself, that did not appear to be the case. Catelyn spent another prayer walking along the edge of the Wall, her hands feeling for cracks or seams that would indicate a weak point or evidence of stress, and her feet continuing to sweep the ground for bodies or worse. She found nothing remarkable, but Catelyn knew that water from the Dun Marsh was coming into the city to pool here at her feet, and seeping into the Wall under her hands.

  She couldn’t figure out how, though. Getting out this way would be impossible, she determined. However the water was getting through, it was not going to provide her with a way out.

  Catelyn spent another half prayer getting back out, and she was relieved when she felt the solid walls of the building she had used to get down to the street level, and was able to climb back up to the rooftops where the air was less cloying. She was also glad to be getting her feet out of the water and away from the floating bodies.

  The day was already half over by the time she made her way back to the center of Brunley, and briefly considered returning to her room in the abandoned building and resting, but she could sense that she wouldn’t be able to sleep without finding out the answers that plagued her. She needed to know what awaited her, and mentally prepare herself for the possibility that she would need to return to the Seat before making her way through to Belkyn.

  So she stopped briefly to refresh herself, drank from her jar of water, and then bounded onto the rooftops, heading south towards the Wall overlooking the cliffs and the Wystan Sea.

  It took Catelyn another prayer and a half before she first began to sense the change in the air and the sound of roaring waves that indicated her proximity to the Wall, and the end of the Empire. She could smell and taste the salt in the air, and although it was different from what she was accustomed to, it was not entirely unpleasant. There was something that enticed her about the experience, and she felt a renewed sense of enthusiasm as she moved towards her goal.

  As in the central part of Brunley, the streets here were lined sporadically with tents and people living in abject poverty, and she was forced to travel at ground level for much of the trip, but she sprang onto the rooftops when it was possible, the buildings here as abandoned here as they were elsewhere in Brunley.

  When she got within a few dozen paces of the Wall, she could hear the roaring of the waves echoing off the buildings and the Wall itself, and she tried to imagine what they looked like in her head. She’d read about the Wystan Sea in the book about the Empire, and her parents had told her about the waters surrounding three sides of the land mass that made up most of the Empire, what they had called a peninsula.

  They had never seen or heard the water, but now here she was, just a few paces away from the sea, and the rhythmic roaring from the other side of the Wall filled her with conflicting emotions, like the waves were washing over the Walls and into her heart.

  She experienced exhilaration at first, hearing something so hypnotic and powerful. But that was quickly replaced with a deep and painful heartache, at the realization that something so breathtaking, something so free, was just on the other side of the massive stone Wall and she would never experience it. To her, and to all of the people of the Seat, that freedom was lost forever.

  This hopelessness was what accompanied her as she walked the last few dozen paces to the Wall itself, until she felt it looming up before her, the end of the world as far as she and everyone else were concerned. She stepped to the Wall, placed her hand flat upon the surface, and then felt herself collapse in utter exhaustion and despair.

  She pulled the scarf down from her nose and mouth and sobbed into her open hand, her body convulsing in heart shattering waves of its own, as she thought of what lay on the other s
ide of this stone prison, and of all the people who lived in such a state.

  And soon after the despair came the anger. The waves of anguish ignited something inside her and she fanned those flames willingly, throwing all of her heat into the effort, and she imagined the figure of the Emperor in her mind, the shadowy heart of the evil that had been done to them all.

  The Emperor, his kin, his army, and his Empire itself had systematically beaten every one of its citizens down, until they had reached the point where they valued nothing.

  She pounded a fist on the Wall, feeling the impact travel up her body, into her sore shoulder and let out a blood-curdling yell at the stone under her fist that echoed and reverberated away from her in all directions.

  She sat like that for some time, one hand on the wall, one on the ground by her knees in the muck, panting and sobbing in turns.

  “Are you...are you alright?” a voice spoke softly from behind her.

  Catelyn sprang to her feet, and put her back to the Wall, her heart hammering in fright. She had been so focused on herself and her own pain that she hadn’t noticed anything in these last few moments, and the voice suddenly appearing from behind and near to where she had been sitting against the wall shocked her.

  “Whoa, there, I’m not going to hurt you. I’m alone,” the voice said softly again, and Catelyn could tell by the timbre and the tone that the voice belonged to a young man.

  Catelyn gathered her wits and snapped her bubble into place scanning around her quickly, but thoroughly. She could hear the man, six paces away, standing in the open with arms outstretched as though reaching out, but she could sense his calm. She could detect no other people nearby, but she didn’t rule out the possibility that there were others lying in wait, ready for a signal from this young man to initiate an attack. Catelyn’s heart was racing and she frantically worked out an escape route.