Bloodfire (The Sojourns of Rebirth)

by Matthew Medina

  Kenrick had led Ortis to be able to locate the father of the two girls, the man who had sold them to the Danes for some unknown price, but with the Emperor himself now leading a manhunt through the streets, Ortis did not think it wise to risk paying the man a visit, and instead forced himself to go into hiding.

  He was not afraid of those risks, but even he realized that he would do no good to the girl by allowing himself to be ensnared by the Emperor and his men, and he was not able to see a future where that was not inevitable. As he sat in a rickety chair in the derelict and empty apartment he had been using to sleep in while conducting his own search for the girl, he tried to plan his next move but his mind kept circling around to the same frustrating conclusion.

  Even if he managed to get to the twin’s father, he really had no idea how to proceed from there before the Emperor caught up to him.

  Before the Emperor’s arrival, his path had seemed so clear. He’d had a singular purpose. But Uriel, as he so often did just by the sheer nature of his presence, had changed everything.

  In a way, he felt some semblance of relief that these events had transpired. If Ortis reflected on his motives for finding the twin girls, it was not about finding his thief. He had no certainty that they would still be together, and indeed if that was his reasoning, he felt as though he were going about that search backwards.

  While it was true that he longed for nothing less than to find her again, to see her, to feel again that sense of something… transcendent, his deeper reason for wanting to find the two young girls stood out clearly in his mind. He wished to see them safe, to ensure that they would never be harmed again.

  And his reason for tracking down their pathetic excuse for a father was even more basic. He wished to punish the man for having betrayed everything he was supposed to be, all for a little extra coin.

  Ortis knew that his own crimes were unforgivable, but if he were ever to see his thief again, he desperately wanted to wipe some of his own slate clean, and to be able to tell her that he had done these things for her. It could never make up for the monstrous things he had done, but she could at least know that he had done some good in his life before he asked her to take it from him.

  With Uriel’s presence, he now knew that those two objectives would have to be forgotten. He had one move to make before the lock-down resulted in his capture and death. He needed to find the thief. But he had no leads left to follow, and no idea where to begin searching.

  The Seat was no small place, and was soon to be crawling with his own men. He knew how they would search, how they operated, giving him some leverage and advantage, but it would not last forever. He needed a way to locate the girl.

  And then, whether a result of his own intuition or some other design, an unconnected thought came to him from somewhere inside and he remembered what had prompted this all in the first place. When Dane Eyrris had been literally spilling his guts on the floor of his bedroom revealing his darkest secrets, there was only one that, despite the excruciating pain and torture he was experiencing, he had kept to himself. The artifact.

  It was at the heart of all of this. Ortis had been so focused on finding the thief that he had not stopped to think about what the thief had stolen. It had to be something with value beyond any amount of money, for Eyrris to have withheld information about it while enduring what he had endured. Ortis had personally overseen hundreds of interrogations in his life, and he knew that the kind of dedication Eyrris had shown to keep this one piece of information from him, and ultimately from Uriel and the Empire, through the kind of pain he had been in, could only mean that he had been in possession of something truly extraordinary.

  Something of that magnitude could only be sold to a handful of merchants. And although he was awash with his own feelings whenever he thought about the girl with the red hair, he couldn’t deny that the only reason she had slipped into his life in the first place was due to her profession. She was a thief, and she had stolen something so priceless and so unique that Dane Eyrris had refused to speak of it in the face of his own excruciating death.

  And Ortis knew then, deep in his bones, that an artifact of that value would have no use for a young girl living on the streets except as a commodity to be traded. Ortis was not familiar with that world, but he knew that there existed an entire network of black market vendors who specialized in fencing stolen goods.

  When he thought about what he would do, if he put himself in her place, he was convinced that she would have attempted to sell the artifact. Discreetly of course, if she were as smart as he believed her to be, but it would make no sense for her to willfully hang onto it when selling such an item could radically change her life for the better. At least, as good as life got under the heel of Uriel.

  Ortis felt a swell of excitement in his chest as he reasoned it out, and began to make plans that he hoped would lead him, finally, to his thief.

  Silena tidied her stall for the thirteenth time that morning. She had every right to be anxious, she knew, but she still chastised herself for not being able to settle her nerves. Two things were weighing on her and conspiring to ruin what should have been just another ordinary day.

  The first was of course the news that was all over the Seat today, that the Emperor Uriel had left the Imperial Citadel for the first time in...well even Silena didn’t know how long it had actually been. The ruler of the Empire of Exeter had become such a recluse over the past tens of sojourns that hardly anyone even recalled when he had stopped making appearances before his people. Oh, they heard his proclamations every few spans or cycles, of course. To all appearances, he still kept his eye to matters of state, but it hardly surprised Silena that he would shut himself away from the outside world. The entire Empire was built for precisely that purpose.

  Silena was therefore unclear, as were all her fellow citizens of the Seat, exactly what had brought the leader of their nation out of his hiding place, but whatever it was must be significant. Silena thought about Catelyn and prayed to the Divines that she had made it far, far away from this place by now.

  The second thing that was causing her to experience a bout of upset stomach and the incessant need to tidy up had to do with the girls, Sera and Elexia. In particular, both the girls had come down sick in the past few days. It was not completely unexpected by Silena, as when they had left on her doorstep by Catelyn, the girls had been malnourished, covered in scrapes and bruises and pale as ghosts. Spans later, the girls had looked healthy and whole, and were full of life and the excitement of being granted a second chance. But they were twins, and constantly challenging each other with one thing or another, and Silena supposed that their ordeal had stressed their systems to the breaking point. Both girls had been sniffling and coughing when she had been getting ready to pack her wares to carry to the stall that morning.

  She left Erich at her home with the girls, something that she had to admit had been one of the best bargains in all of this, and promised to return early with some broth from the herbalist she knew two blocks over. She thought of all three of them, and she wondered what they would be doing and how the girls must be feeling.

  She trusted Erich to care for them as though they were his own, and in many ways, she began to think that that was exactly how he saw them. The night when Catelyn had dropped the girls with Silena, she had finally roused him from his slumber as soon as she’d herded the two girls inside and shut the door, and as soon as he had seen them, she could see his eyes light up.

  Erich had been her bodyguard and companion for the better part of fifteen sojourns. She had found him on the streets when he was just shy of his twenty-fourth sojourn. She had seen him come to the marketplace each evening, quietly staring and examining things with finer details as they seemed to please him. Everyone called him “Slow Erich” because for a man with twentyfour sojourns under his belt, he had the reason and the mental capacity of a boy half his age.

  But he was young, and strong, and he was completely honest in everythin
g he did, and Silena admired that quality enough to hire him to be her trustworthy companion. Quickly, Silena realized that Erich was not slow witted, he was simply poorly educated. As he matured, he caught up to where he should have been all along, and Silena suspected that he simply hadn’t been given much of a chance before. The pair continued to play up his lack of intellect in public, as it helped Silena in her trading to pass him off as a half-wit unable to bear witness if anyone tried to screw her out of a deal. If anyone did attempt to swindle or attack her, it would be their surprise when they found that Erich was not so slow after all.

  She smiled fondly to think of her Erich, probably even now taking care of the girls, telling them stories or brushing their hair. He wasn’t like a son to her, in that she enjoyed the sight of him and he had no modesty, a trait which she had appreciated a time or two over the sojourns, but she treated him as though he were family.

  When the girls had stood there that night, clutching themselves in fear, it had been Erich who had swept them into his arms and soothed them enough to get them cleaned up and placed in Silena’s bedroom where they passed out in breaths from sheer exhaustion.

  Those first few days, the girls had been wary of both Silena and Erich, but he had shown a natural talent for communicating with the two, which had honestly surprised her. Erich almost never spoke about his past, but she did know that he had been raised on his own as well, and had fought and clawed his way out of some dire circumstance he didn’t ever want to speak about. She didn’t know, at what point, he had developed such a gift with children, but she was glad that he had it. The girls, in turn, had responded to him in a way that she also hadn’t expected, reaching out to him like he was their big brother and that they had known each other for sojourns.

  After the horrifying treatment they had been on the receiving end of, that they would so readily trust a strange man in any way, spoke volumes to her mind about the kind of character he possessed. She recognized that this quality was one she had taken for granted for sojourns. It hadn’t been until Catelyn had shown up in her life that she had her eyes opened to the goodness and the beauty right in front of her. The girls could sense it too, and the four of them had become incredibly tight-knit in the few spans that they had all been together.

  Silena had to admit that a few times in those first days and nights, she had become annoyed at the audacity of Catelyn to have simply left such a burden and responsibility on Silena. She was not a young woman anymore, and there were times when she complained that caring for a pair of young girls required more patience and energy than she could give. But there again was where Erich had stepped in, helping her when she needed it, caring for the girls and their needs when Silena was exhausted from standing in the marketplace all day.

  Now, although she was sure Erich would be caring for them and likely even spoiling them with his attention, she was still anxious to get home and feel their foreheads and make sure that they would be on the mend soon.

  She would need to make at least three more deals before she could pack up and call it a day, however. She’d deliberately cut back on her prayers in the marketplace since taking the girls in, devoting more time to their care and recovery, and although Silena had been saving her marks for sojourns and lived quite comfortably by most standards in the Seat, having two extra mouths to feed was something she had never prepared for.

  Not to mention the fact that further absences from her stall would no doubt raise some questions that could make things uncomfortable for all of them.

  So she fiddled and tweaked her goods as customers came and went, and she tried to entice them to make a purchase which would take her one step closer to being able to return home to her sick girls and her kind, warm man.

  Catelyn woke abruptly, and immediately grabbed at the sudden shooting pain in the back of her neck from the cramp she had developed as a result of her head hanging to one side for prayers. She couldn’t believe that she had been so foolish as to fall asleep here in the open, even if she was more than a dozen paces above the nearest person and not in plain sight of the people below.

  She tried to rub some of the pain out of her sore neck, and expanded her bubble to assess roughly what time it was and what was happening in the streets below. It was morning, which she could tell from a combination of things such as the smells of baked rolls, the quiet calm of the marketplace as vendors arrived and set up their wares, and the coolness of the roof tiles under her soles. Given the persistent heat of the daylight prayers, overnight was the only time when they cooled that much.

  She couldn’t sense the sun yet, and determined that it was either just before dawn or that there was a haze in the air, as there sometimes was, blocking out the light while trapping the heat. She hoped it was the former, as hazy days in the Seat were some of the worst, especially if you weren’t able to get inside for some relief from the feeling of being cooked.

  She stood up, feeling the stiffness and soreness all across her body as she rose. She hadn’t pushed herself this hard, physically, since her first sojourns of training, when she had taught herself how use her bubble to climb and traverse the streets and rooftops. She could feel the tenderness radiating throughout her lower body, from her buttocks to the tips of her toes. She spent a few breaths stretching and loosening the tight muscles in her legs, wincing at even normal movement.

  As she worked out the kinks in her body, she ran over her situation in her mind, and found herself needing to balance the intense optimism she felt with a healthy dose of caution. From what she had gathered, if the Emperor was indeed looking for her it was not a concerted, city-wide effort like she had feared it would be. It was possible that the Imperial officer that had seen her and the girls escaping the Dane’s estate that night really hadn’t seen them clearly enough to be identified after all, or had simply not felt their presence to be significant in any way. Just three more orphans having the good fortune of being able to walk away from certain death. The words of the Imperial Officer echoed up from her past.

  “If you are strong enough, you will live and become something hard, and cold. You will become a benefit to the Empire. If you are not, then you will die and the Empire will be stronger for it.”

  That belief was the prevailing and enduring core of the philosophy behind the Empire. The Imperial Officer, seeing three children escaping the flames and a collapsing building, might have simply concluded that these three girls were either a waste of his time, or boons to his Empire, and let the matter fall.

  Catelyn felt a number of emotions upon coming to this realization. The first was shame and embarrassment, that she hadn’t thought of this possibility sooner. Instead, she had internalized her own fears and then projected them outward onto the Empire and given her actions more importance than they likely deserved. The second thing she felt was loss, stemming from the fact that she had walked away from her life, that she had destroyed her home, and had abandoned budding relationships over unfounded assumptions of her own self importance.

  She was not being hunted by the Empire. She would never be hunted by the Empire. That was not how the Empire even worked, but Catelyn had allowed herself to be convinced that her life had taken on some great purpose since the weapon had come into her life.

  She and Silena had both been convinced, to differing degrees, that the weapon had come to her for a reason, that it was a gift from the Divines. Each of them had also been convinced for different reasons. Silena because she had true faith in the Divines, and Catelyn because her own faith had once been a source of great comfort to her, and which she longed to feel again as her own beliefs had been fading in recent sojourns. She had tried, when the weapon had come into her hands, to ascribe a divine purpose to a random act, but as the spans went by and the only result of that act had been the senseless suffering of others as the Danes tore apart the slums looking for it and for her, she realized finally that she no longer believed.

  In fact she no longer even wanted to believe in something so ludicrous. W
hat kind of Divines would allow the kind of suffering she saw in the world every day? What meaning was there in allowing perverted and violent people to be allowed to fulfill their own sick desires without any sort of justice or accountability?

  In that moment, Catelyn cursed the weapon that had come into her life, still secured in its case within her pack, and she briefly considered simply abandoning it right there on that rooftop. She nearly reached around to take the pack off her back, but stopped herself when she considered that although she had no need for it, and no desire to keep it for herself, it might still be valuable to others. And that it could make for a powerful bargaining chip if she ever needed one.

  The third feeling she experienced was uncertainty. Just days ago, after her experiences in Brunley, and with no hope of recovering her life in the Seat, she had been prepared to risk everything to try and escape the Empire altogether. She had been on her way to Belkyn, and the Grand Gate, and from there onto a new life outside the Empire. She had merely planned to stop in the Seat and assess the danger of passing through the city and what she might expect from the Empire’s search for her. But at the realization that there was no such search, Catelyn began to reconsider whether she needed to leave after all. She had been wrong about so many things.

  What if my desire to leave the comfort of what I know, for the complete unknown of a life outside the Walls, is also a mistake?

  She considered all the positives and negatives of both options once more, in light of the new information she had.

  If she stayed, she could continue her friendship with Silena. She would be able to visit with the girls, and watch them grow. She might even be able to stop going out at night to steal, and find some way to help Silena, or some other merchant that Silena might know and make an honest living for a change. She could have a life here, and forget all about the events of the past few cycles. Without the Empire looking for her specifically, perhaps she could start a new life here, out of the ashes of the old. She had done so once before.