“Yes. These are the old holding cells for the Citadel, which the Emperor’s father and grandfather used to hold public executions in the Citadel’s square,” Enaz answered, and Catelyn could hear a sense of pride in the man, as he conveyed this knowledge. Two things stood out about the man from just this simple exchange. She immediately got the sense that Enaz was the type of person who loved knowing things, and from the lilt of his voice, she could also guess what sort of man he had been before ending up here, a prisoner in the darkness with her.
“Public executions?” she asked, hoping to inspire him to talk to her some more.
“Criminals in the old Empire were once tried before the Emperor, and when they were found guilty, they were hanged or beheaded.” Enaz spoke of these things, and of the Empire itself, with open disdain, and Catelyn wondered what he had done to have been sent down here and how long he had been here.
“I see,” she said. “Were you a scholar, by any chance?” she asked, redirecting the questions to hopefully a more comfortable subject. The man laughed.
“A scholar? Is there such a thing in Ereas?” He laughed so hard he began to cough, and then to choke, and it was several whispers before the fit ended. In that moment, Catelyn could hear how poorly Enaz was doing. It sounded as if he had not had a drink in days, his hacking cough was dry and hoarse. Finally, he responded.
“You’re perceptive, Catelyn. A scholar, no but I was the head Prior for a number of sojourns, and the personal advisor to Uriel, the Third of His Name since my fourteenth sojourn.”
Catelyn felt herself begin to sweat.
The Emperor’s personal advisor?
She put her guard up immediately, and let silence reign between them again. Enaz seemed to clue into her fear, and acknowledged the obvious.
“If you’re worried that I’m a spy for his Eminence, let me assure you that he and I are no longer on amicable terms, hence my new living quarters,” he said, chuckling at some private joke.
Catelyn wasn’t sure how far to trust this man, but she wanted to see him play his hand.
“What happened?” she asked.
“I saved several of the servant’s lives,” Enaz responded weakly.
“I...I don’t understand,” Catelyn admitted.
“After Uriel concluded that Ortis had betrayed him somehow, he had become even more unhinged than usual. He was roaming the halls, killing at random, and he butchered some number of the cleaning and serving staff without mercy. These were his own people, the people who cleaned the blood and other fluids from his bedsheets, who emptied his chamber pot of shit and piss. These were people who still believed in him, despite the frequent terror they lived under, and he slaughtered them like chattel.”
Catelyn just listened, and she heard Enaz inhale deeply to tell the rest of the tale.
“I’ve witnessed horrors in my life that I would never have wished on my worst enemy, and remained silent while the Emperor did whatever he pleased, but I could no longer stand by and watch as he took out his petty anger on those whose only crime had been to have been alive and in his presence. So I rounded up all of the remaining servants, and ordered them to clean the lowest floors of the Citadel, until there was no one left for him to kill. I defied his Will, you see. And for that, I am to die.”
Catelyn listened intently, and sensed no lie in his voice. He was telling the story truthfully.
“I’m sorry, Enaz,” she said quietly.
“It’s not as terrible as all that. It seems that the gaolers have forgotten all about me, down here in the bowels of the Citadel. I’m fed every other day, and one of them brings water now and then, but beyond that they seem content to just let me rot away the rest of my days.”
Catelyn groaned as she thought about his words.
“It’s not as terrible as all that.”
It sounded positively awful to her. Days without food, and no reliable water to quench her thirst. She realized that she had been wrong earlier. The Emperor’s torture of her hadn’t stopped, it was just taking another form. Enaz must have seen great horrors indeed if he could call such a situation “not as terrible as all that”.
Enaz seemed to gather his strength and asked “Catelyn, what did you do to earn your place here in the Void?”
Catelyn felt a twinge of caution about sharing her story with someone she hardly knew, but when the cautionary voice tried to make itself heard in her mind, she immediately dismissed it.
What in the Void could they do to you that is worse than what has already happened?
And so Catelyn told Enaz the whole story, every part of it, and every detail she could remember. Enaz listened with rapt attention, only interrupting when absolutely necessary, to ask a question or to allow Catelyn to rest her voice when it sounded like it would give out or when her lips grew dry and she needed to wet them again. When she laid it all out for him, including the extraordinary things that she had experienced over the last few sojourns, she began to understand what had led Emperor Uriel to conclude that she held some secret or other that he could use for his own purpose.
She had to admit that her life had been full of enough good fortune, in spite of the bad things that had happened to her, that she realized some might see certain events in her life as a sign that she had been blessed somehow. And in truth, she felt that her life had been blessed in a number of ways, and she began to wonder if this truly was the end of her story or if there were more chapters yet to be written.
When she concluded her story, Enaz was breathless at first, but finally replied after a few breaths in thought. When he spoke, his words were unexpected.
“Catelyn, Uriel cannot be allowed to keep the weapon.”
She was confused that of all the things she had just told him, that this was the thing he had fixated on. She agreed that Uriel didn’t deserve such a weapon, but he had already possessed the crook for sojourns and she didn’t understand why it was so critical to Enaz that he not hold the sickle as well. Regardless, given her situation at the moment, there was little that she could do about it. Enaz grew impatient when she didn’t respond.
“Catelyn did you hear me?”
“Yes Enaz, I did, but I don’t understand. Why is that important? I held onto the sickle for over a cycle. It’s exquisitely made, but it’s just a cutting weapon. It’s not special or anything.”
Enaz sighed.
“Catelyn, it’s more dangerous than you can possibly imagine. In the right hands, these weapons were incredibly powerful. In the wrong hands, they are devastating.”
Catelyn wasn’t entirely convinced. She expressed her doubts to Enaz.
“Enaz, are you sure this isn’t just a fantasy? I haven’t seen the Emperor grow ten times taller or shoot fire from his eyes. What is it exactly that you think the weapons can do?”
Enaz let out an exasperated sigh.
“Catelyn, those things you mentioned are not power. Magic is not real, like it is in children’s stories. I’m talking about real power here. How is it, do you think, that the Emperor has been able to so dominate our part of the world, and bend it to his Will? How do you think he has kept himself healthy and strong while other men his age are dying or entering their last sojourns?”
“Are you saying that the weapons do that?”
“No, not by themselves they don’t. I don’t know about the sickle, but I have seen what the Emperor’s crook can do. It holds no power of its own, but it can be used to amplify the Emperor’s own Will. It can make his voice seem...hypnotic. It takes his natural charm and focuses it like a lens, and makes him irresistible to many. When he holds the crook, only the strongest can say no to him. The majority fall in line. The effect seems to even apply to extending his own life, through sheer force of Will.”
Catelyn imagined how such a thing could be abused, and she had seen the effects of the Emperor’s Will first hand. But something about what Enaz was saying didn’t sit right with her.
“Are you saying that he can control other people? Ge
t them to do whatever he wants them to do?”
“No, he doesn’t control them. He doesn’t command their will, he convinces them to change their minds. It’s a form of persuasion, yes, but in the end the people make their own choices. That is what makes the weapon so dangerous.”
Catelyn wasn’t sure she was completely understanding. “OK, the weapon helps him convince people, but if it convinces them to go along with the Emperor’s plans or ideas, how is that different than if he simply took control over them?”
“Because taking control of someone robs them of their own will. They would know, deep down, that the choice had been taken from them. They would question. They would eventually see the discrepancy between what they believed, and the choice they had made.”
Catelyn grasped what Enaz was saying now.
“But if they are making the choice, even if that choice was manipulated, then they hold all the responsibility for acting on that choice. It frees the Emperor from being held accountable, because the people still make their own choices.”
Catelyn and Enaz sat in the darkness and the silence then, considering. She began to wonder if the sickle acted in the same way, and she questioned whether her encounters with others since she had acquired the sickle had been genuine, or if she had been subtly manipulating those around her, in effect subtly pushing them to choose to do what she wanted them to do?
She immediately thought of Ortis, and his bowed head glistening with sweat as he begged her to command him. Some of her experiences didn’t add up with what Enaz had told her of the other artifact...Ortis had not acted as though he had a choice, though she had to admit that he sometimes seemed like a puppet waiting for its strings to be pulled. She wondered, was the sickle different? Or was Ortis’ display something else entirely?
She also thought of Silena, and she hoped that the sickle had not been what had enabled the two of them to have established such a deep and personal friendship. But she was forced to question this now that she knew of these artifacts and their purpose.
“Enaz, how do you know so much about these artifacts?”
Enaz paused for a moment, and then began to relate part of his own story.
“I was fourteen when the Emperor took me away from my home and family. I’ve been part of the priory nearly my entire life. The priory has in its possession certain...knowledge. From the beginning, I was raised up to a high rank within the priory, and I’ve spent much of that time reading what I could of the way the world was before the Walls.”
Catelyn tried to imagine the access he had, to books from all across Ereas, and wondered what else she might be able to learn from this man. What other secrets from the past might he alone know? She contemplated other questions she wished to have answered, and sat thinking in silence for a while.
She thought of so many things that she would want to learn about the past, and about the weapons and the Empire, but as she formulated her questions, the grim circumstances of her present situation pushed itself to the fore and she stopped herself. Every time she came up with a new question, she concluded that the answers wouldn’t matter. Only one thing kept returning to her mind, and only one thing would matter from this point forward. She gave voice to that one thing.
“What are they going to do to me?” she whispered.
Even though she had muttered the words under her breath, Enaz must have heard the question, because he answered.
“The only people they put down here are those who they wish to make a very public example of. Uriel hasn’t used these cells in sojourns, preferring the impersonal punishments of his Purges, but he seems to have decided to make an exception for the two of us.”
A public execution.
Catelyn had reasoned that there was a high likelihood of her being killed upon her capture. In fact, she was moderately surprised she hadn’t already been killed, as it was common for “enemies of the state” to simply be executed on the spot, but to be killed before a crowd of onlookers, and probably in the most horrific and dramatic way possible? That was something she didn’t look forward to.
She thought once more about the Emperor’s final words, right before he had further destroyed her face with the vial of bloodfire.
“You are at the heart of something...divine. As am I. We have a purpose here. We are part of a larger world. But I don’t know yet which side you will fall on.”
What in the Void did he mean? she wondered.
Catelyn had once believed in divine purpose, in the same way that she had once believed in the Divines themselves, but recent events had showed her that she no longer held such beliefs, if she ever had at all. Life was cold and cruel, and the universe uncaring. There was no more inherent purpose to her life than there was in the stone walls under her feet.
Still, Catelyn held tightly to the thought that having a purpose was an important part of being a person. But she realized that this purpose had to come from within. Each person had to find their own path, make their own destiny, just as she had survived for six sojourns through her own talents and sheer force of will.
But Uriel still believed in something beyond himself. The way he spoke, Catelyn wondered if perhaps he even saw himself as being as important as the Divines.
What could he mean about which side I would fall on? Does he honestly believe that I would ever side with him?
When she stopped and considered just how insane the man appeared to be, how far removed he was from any trace of humanity, she realized that nothing was out of the question.
And she also realized that she would die rather than give the man any piece of whatever it was he sought from her.
Time passed. How long, Catelyn could not say. In the dank prison cell, it appeared to Catelyn’s senses that only two things existed: the confines of her cell, and the occasional voice of Enaz. Occasional because Enaz had apparently grown so weak from his captivity and lack of food and water that he lapsed into unconsciousness frequently, each time filling Catelyn with panic at the thought of him dying, and leaving her alone in her cell. He had even passed out a few times in the middle of one of their conversations.
Catelyn too found herself slipping into and out of numerous states of consciousness. Twice, after she had awakened, she sensed something had changed in the cell and discovered that her captors had brought a tray of food for her while she had been unconscious. Calling it food was generous, of course. It likely had been, at one point. But the smell of mold and rot was strong, and Catelyn more often than not had to pick wriggling bugs from the chunks of bread, or meat, or whatever it was. It was so foul that Catelyn couldn’t actually tell, but she was so hungry that it didn’t matter.
After finishing the scraps of food, she got down on her hands and knees and tried to find the bugs she had picked out, which she scraped up and swallowed down too.
The second time she woke to find a small jug of water on the tray as well. The water smelled foul and tasted bitter, but she knew she had to drink or she would die of thirst. She had survived worse in those first sojourns before she had learned to control her bubble. Now, as then, she would do whatever was required of her to survive. Her life was too precious to her to simply let go and let the Emperor win, even though she was his prisoner. He may have beaten her, but she refused to let him take her hope, slim as it was.
When Enaz woke, they talked. Or at least, she talked and he listened. Enaz was only lucid part of the time, and the rest he babbled incoherently about pleasing the Emperor or apologized for being unable to locate the song he had been asked to find. Catelyn was also feeling her own awareness slip from her, a combination of lack of food and sleep, no doubt.
Many times Catelyn would simply ask him to describe something, in part so that she could picture it in her mind, but mostly just to keep them both awake and talking. She was feeling the effects of her imprisonment and malnourishment, but she was not as bad off as Enaz. She figured she had only been in her cell a few days at most, whereas he had been down here who knows how much long
er than her. She didn’t know if their captors were feeding or watering him the way they were her, because Enaz sounded as though he were slowly fading away, little by little.
It was during one of Enaz’ obscure ramblings that Catelyn’s interest became piqued by something he was repeating over and over again.
“Over the pass, Chaser’s Pass they call it. We skirted the foothills of the Greymounts.”
Catelyn wondered at his words, and the strange names he used that sounded so familiar. She tried to recall where she had heard those names before, but her mind felt so thick and clouded that she couldn’t place where they had come from before.
“Enaz, what are you saying?”
“Over the pass. That’s where to go. The Greymounts were glorious in the sunlight.”
Catelyn wracked her mind, trying to remember.
The Greymounts...think! she willed herself.
“We could see the walls. Not like here. Not like the Seat. But we were...turned away.”
“Enaz, what are you saying? You’re not making sense.”
“Freehold!” he exclaimed.
Catelyn felt the final piece of the puzzle snap into place in her mind, and she remembered the hand sketched map she had seen in one of the books about the history of the Empire when she had been a girl. The Greymounts were a mountain range, and Chaser’s Pass was a slender trail through the foothills between the mountains and the sea. And beyond that, the fabled city of Freehold.
According to the book, it had once been a great city, a center of culture and learning in the time predating the Before even, but it had been destroyed and long since been abandoned, and was nothing more than rubble now. Her mind felt slow, but she wished for Enaz to retell the story. She wasn’t sure if she wanted the memory to satisfy her curiosity or to give herself something pleasant to dream about before she died.
Bloodfire (The Sojourns of Rebirth) Page 34
