Bloodfire (The Sojourns of Rebirth)

by Matthew Medina

  “So, you requested this meeting, yes? Mister…?”

  Kenrick was every bit as sleazy as Ortis had expected the man to be. His sallow skin was pock-marked and pale, his beady eyes stood out from his skull almost like stalks, and his lips were blood-red, a sign of his addiction to crimson weed.

  “My name is Bennet,” Ortis said.

  “Bennet. Very well, and what exactly is it you’re looking for?”

  “I was told that you could provide me with one or two rather young girls. For a reasonable price.”

  Kenrick looked at Ortis with his bloodshot eyes narrowed in mild suspicion.

  “Tell me again how you found out about my specialized business, Bennet?” Kenrick asked.

  Ortis was already growing tired of this game, and Kenrick was already wary. Ortis was not used to approaching problems with his head, when his fists had done as fine a job as he could ever hope. Ortis had hoped that he could have avoided any further violence on his part in this pursuit of the girl, but it seemed that it was inevitable. Ortis briefly considered whether to continue this charade any further, and realized it would be pointless.

  He struck without warning and without mercy, as he had always done, his arms shooting out with lightning-fast reflexes, crushing the throat of the man to his left, and gouging the eye of the one to his right. Before the guard behind him could react, he spun around behind him and snapped the man’s neck.

  Kenrick hadn’t even had time to cry out, and then Ortis was there, both hands clamped down on the man’s throat. It wouldn’t have mattered if he had cried out, as Ortis had chosen this location deliberately. He knew that no one would hear the kind of commotion he would cause, or if anyone did, they were wise enough to mind their own business.

  Ortis considered for half a breath simply choking the life out of this purveyor of nightmares, but then he remembered the girl, and he loosened his hold on the man enough so that he could answer Ortis’ questions.

  “I’m led to understand that you sell the flesh of young girls, yes?” Ortis asked quietly.

  Kenrick nodded, his pop-eyed gaze full of fear and loathing.

  “And I have also been informed that not quite a cycle ago, you brokered a deal for the Dane’s. Dane Callum in particular, for a pair of twins, yes?”

  At the mention of the Danes, Kenrick began to sweat, and his eyes grew even wider. He tried to speak, but had trouble with Ortis’ hands around his neck. Ortis loosened his grip again ever so slightly.

  “Dane...Callum...requested...that special.”

  “Yes, the question is, where did you acquire the girls? Were they illegal?”

  Ortis knew, as did everyone above a certain rank in the Empire, that although there were very strict regulations against unapproved childbirth, enforcement of such laws had slackened in the past dozen sojourns. And there had been an increasing number of illegal births, a secret which was kept tightly controlled by the Empire, but not so secret in certain circles, such as the flesh peddlers. But Ortis was surprised when the man Kenrick shook his head in denial.

  “No. Girls were..legal. Chosen. Father...owed me...favors.”

  Ortis was even more driven to find them now.

  “Where?” was all Ortis asked.

  When Kenrick had finished telling him the location, Ortis squeezed the man’s neck and considered once again snapping the man’s neck, or crushing his windpipe. But Ortis knew if he did so, another piece of scum would rise to take his place within the span. He decided to try something he would never have thought to do before.

  “Kenrick, I’m going to let you live, on one condition. Listen very carefully. You’re going to give up the flesh trade. Do you understand? Any of the children you have in your possession, you will send them to the nearest priory to be placed with the next batch of chosen parents. Am I clear?”

  Kenrick nodded his head, a little too eagerly if Ortis was honest with himself. He had no illusions that the man would obey, and would likely renege on his word as soon as Ortis was gone, but for some reason he felt compelled to offer the man this one chance.

  “If you do not abide by this condition, I will return. I will find you. I will end you. Am I clear.”

  “Yes….Bennet.”

  Ortis released the man, who slumped to the ground like a rag doll gasping for breath, and strode with newfound purpose out of the dark alley and toward his next destination.

  Chapter 15

  Catelyn squatted on the roof, catching her breath and wiping the sweat from her forehead with the back of her forearm. With the other hand, she reached down and gripped the lucky ring she wore around her left middle toe, and spun it, around, and around. She had sprinted the last several dozen paces through the Brunley Channel, eager to be out of the canyon of industrial buildings and back to familiar ground. And yet, as she felt the ever-present heat in the air that indicated she was back home, she wondered whether she was making yet another mistake by returning to the Seat.

  Her life over the past several spans had seemed to have been one mistake after another, and the cost of some of those mistakes had been catastrophic.

  She thought about the victims of the Danes, an unknown number of nameless, faceless people who had been horribly stalked and mutilated in their search for her. She laid some of their suffering at her feet.

  She thought about the unknown number of dead citizens caught in the Purge, sent by the Emperor to quell the Danes for their defiance.

  And she even thought about Jaff, the spike of metal she herself had driven into his brain. In truth, since that night, she hadn’t thought at all about the man, or about the promise that she’d made to herself and to the ghosts of her parents, and broken, never to kill another person. Thinking on it now, she supposed that she should feel anguish at taking his life, should feel a sense of guilt over having to break her promise to the memory of her parents. But if she were being honest with herself, Catelyn was shocked to discover that she felt neither of those things.

  Catelyn realized that in that situation, Jaff had taken all other choices from her. And she had done what she had needed to do; the only thing that she could have done, to safeguard Sera, Elexia and herself. In measuring the life of one man, particularly that of a man who had expressed no respect or remorse for his desire to inflict suffering on others, against the lives of two innocent girls, whose only crimes had been to have been born in the Seat, and to have had uncaring, despicable human beings for parents. It had not even been a choice, and given everything, Catelyn would make the same choice again.

  Her other transgressions were not so easily justified, however, and she did feel a weight of responsibility for the lives she had impacted through her thoughtlessness in stealing the weapon from the Danes. And yet, Catelyn did not think that her choices there had been any clearer.

  If she had simply left the weapon in their possession, if she had turned away and left the Danes alone, it would not have changed who they were. In fact, Catelyn actually wondered if she hadn’t in fact saved lives through her actions. Judging from the body of the person she had discovered in her infiltration that night, it was common practice for the Danes to dispose of any of their “toys” when they were finished with them. Catelyn wondered how many times the Danes had forgone their own entertainments in the spans when they had been looking for her. Had her distraction led to fewer victims, in the end?

  These were questions that likely had no answers, but she thought about them nonetheless. She had a natural curiosity that compelled her to analyze thoughts like this, even if they sometimes ended up in the same place where she started.

  She stood up and expanded her bubble, stretching up on her toes to keep her legs from tightening and cramping while taking in the south side of the Seat. It was just after midday, and she felt more exposed than she was usually comfortable with, but the building she stood on was a tall warehouse high above street level. She could hear and sense the few workers who still moved goods in and out of the warehouse, milling around below her. E
very sojourn, there seemed to be fewer and fewer people to do the necessary things needed to keep the Seat alive. Catelyn idly wondered if the Emperor was simply trying to slowly kill off the entire population of the city.

  The first thing Catelyn needed to do if she was going to proceed, was to ascertain the threat level. She would need to get down closer to street level, make her way towards either a marketplace or one of the more populated neighborhoods, and listen. She needed to know how bad her situation was, how hard the Empire was looking for her.

  Catelyn bent over, grabbed the edge of the roof, and spun her body out into space. She always loved the sensation of falling she experienced when she did this, and she maintained her grip on the roof with her strong hands and used that iron grip to pull her body back towards the surface of the warehouse wall. She used her feet like springs, to cushion the impact of that spin, and then she planted them flat against the wall and reached out with one arm to grab the long metal pipe jutting out of the warehouse to her immediate right. She clambered partway down the wall using the pipe, until it ended, then she reached out with the fingers and toes of her left hand and foot, and found a horizontal surface, pulling herself over to a very small ledge, just barely wide enough to balance on, her weight resting entirely on her toes.

  There was no other surfaces on the warehouse for her to use to get down, so she pushed off the wall with enough strength to make it over to the lower roof of an outlying building, landing as lightly as she could. Her feet hit the roof tiles with almost no sound, and Catelyn smiled at the exhilaration she felt at being back in her urban playground as she turned towards where she knew people would be.

  It took the better part of a prayer and a half to get deep enough into the Seat to recognize exactly where she was, and once there, she made for one of the plazas where she knew vendors would be. It was quite common for them to have set up their food carts to entice the nearby workers to come over and spend what little coin they had. The smells of cooking meat greeted her as she lithely balanced along the eaves of the roofs above the vendors, and her mouth began to water. Catelyn knew that it was likely only rabbit or squirrel, or even possibly rat or dog, but after having to subsist for days purely on the dried rations in her pack while she had been in Brunley, everything smelled appetizing to her right now.

  As she traveled the rooftops of the city, she kept an ear trained to conversation she overheard on the ground, but so far, she hadn’t heard a single person talking about the Empire or about her. It was possible that word hadn’t spread this far south yet, but it was also just as likely that these people weren’t all that interested in gossip. The men and women of South Seat, as this neighborhood was called, were laborers, and probably didn’t have the time or the interest to stand around and mull over the goingson of the Empire.

  While the laborers themselves might not prove useful to her, she knew that the food vendors were a solid source of news, as they often came down from the central area of the Seat, and brought more than their menus along. Everyone in the Seat knew that if you wanted to hear the latest rumors, you paid an extra mark or two with your meal, and you would be well informed before your food had time to digest.

  Catelyn considered simply climbing down and walking up to one of the vendors, and taking her chances by spending one of her marks for a hot meal. The smells of the variety of foods just below her were intoxicating. Catelyn had to admit that after her time spent in Brunley, she wouldn’t look at her situation in the Seat the same way again. It was true that she had not lived a comfortable life, and had endured much, but after her experiences in Brunley, she had come to realize that there was in fact a place, and people, that were much worse off than what she’d known for most of her life.

  Against her better judgment, that brought Duncan back into her thoughts, and her mind turned to the mystery of how he was managing to survive despite there being almost no hope, and even less food and clean water in the area where he had been living. Catelyn wished, perhaps naively, that she could go back to ask him. He had seemed healthy and thriving, if a bit skinny, despite the horrible living conditions there.

  That was a mystery she hoped one day to solve, but for right now she had her own questions which needed answering. She found a spot along the roof line where she had chosen to stop, which allowed her to slip into the space between the angled roof of one building, and the vertical surface of another. She expanded her bubble and listened as the vendors for the food carts hawked their wares and chatted, both amongst each other and with their customers.

  She listened intently to numerous conversations at once, a skill she had spent many cycles over many sojourns perfecting. At first, Catelyn was surprised to note that the main topic of conversation on many people’s lips this day was a rather mundane discussion about the quality of horses. There was some amount of debate about whether mares or stallions made for a better ride, and also talk about the temperament of certain breeds, but this seemed like an unusual line of conversation, since almost everyone in the Seat was certainly too poor to even see a horse, much less own one.

  She wondered where all the interest in horses was coming from, when finally, someone clued her in and revealed the reason why it was on everyone’s lips.

  “All’s I’m sayin’ is ‘at if it’s good enough for Uriel his’self, that’s good enough for me. You’ll see when he comes ridin’ through here. I’ll even lay marks on it,” one of the vendors was saying.

  Catelyn froze at the implication behind those words. If Uriel himself was riding through the city on horseback, that could only mean something terrible was happening. If what she’d heard her entire life was true, Uriel hadn’t left the safety of his Citadel in dozens of sojourns. She had certainly never seen him as a child, nor heard of him ever making a public appearance in the sojourns since she’d lost her sight. He always sent out his soldiers to do his bidding, and it was even rumored by some of the more gullible people in the Seat that the Emperor himself was dead, and his advisers simply kept up a charade.

  Catelyn didn’t believe in conspiracies, and this was no different. She had always figured that he was likely just an old man by now, frail and unable to move but possibly still commanding his men from the throne room. But if what these people were saying was true, then it would seem that the Emperor was not so frail as she’d believed.

  But of even more importance to Catelyn than the surprise of learning that the Emperor was riding through the Seat, was trying to guess the reason for this sudden appearance. Perhaps it was arrogant of her to presume that her situation had angered the Emperor into taking this matter into his own hands, and yet the timing of this significant change in the Emperor’s behavior was not lost on her. She tried to think of all the reasons that he could have for leaving his Citadel, and realized that it was a pointless exercise. She retrained her focus on the conversations below her, hoping to learn more, but none of the vendors or their customers enlightened her any further.

  One other thing did strike Catelyn about their conversations, however. None of them seemed to be showing any sign of fear or trepidation about the this sudden appearance by the Emperor outside the walls of his Citadel in the center of the city after sojourns of seclusion. Catelyn was taken aback that such a momentous change was being chatted about as though it were any other event in the Seat. She would have expected them to fear what his appearance could signify. She certainly felt her own heart race at the thought of what he might be planning to do, but these people remained calm and cool when discussing the man, as though they had nothing to fear.

  Catelyn listened intently to their breathing, their heartbeats and the tone of their voices, and could detect no traces of anxiety. Catelyn was stunned by this absence, and could not comprehend why these people were not running to their homes to lock and bolt their doors.

  Catelyn decided that she needed to gather more information, and made her way to the nearby town square, an open air plaza where people often met for one reason or another. It was also fai
rly well patrolled with Imperial troops, and she hoped that maybe listening in on one of the groups of soldiers gathered there would shed some more light on the situation. She climbed up to the roof of the building where she had eavesdropped on the vendors, and padded across the roof tiles, feeling the cool stone and rough tar under her feet.

  She could feel the day slipping quietly toward night, as she settled into position on top of a building overlooking the plaza square. That position also placed her within earshot of one of the guard posts near the plaza, and she strained her bubble to filter out the other noises and concentrate her senses around the men standing there.

  She got as comfortable as she could, since she knew that it might be a while before the Imperials gave her anything that she could work with. As she sat, crouched and focused, she began feeling the exhaustion setting in now, first from her time in Brunley with so little sleep, and then from the exertion of her rapid departure. She fought to keep her eyes open.

  Despite a valiant effort, it was a fight she lost. Ortis was lost once again, and no amount of trying to convince himself otherwise would help him this time. His certainty about his purpose, and the righteousness of his new cause, had evaporated the moment he had learned about Uriel personally leading the search effort by the Imperial soldiers now combing the Seat. For him. Ortis had absolutely no doubt that he was the target of this quest by Uriel and his men..

  Ortis had been covering his tracks and felt some degree of safety around the investigation he himself had mounted to find the two girls, but the Emperor was the most persuasive man he had ever met. Ortis knew it would only be a matter of time until he found exactly what he was looking for, and then his life would be over. The prospect of his death mildly saddened Ortis now, a major change from the ambivalence he had felt just a few short days ago.

  But although he had finally discovered something to live for, he had run out of leads to follow to realize that purpose, and that was when the Emperor had arrived with six hundred of his men to conduct a city-wide search. Ortis felt trapped.