“Enaz, say what you just said before that.”
“I...I can’t remember. Everything is so...dark.”
“Stay with me, Enaz. Please, try and remember. You said something about seeing the walls, but they weren’t like here. Not like the Seat. Do you remember?”
Enaz was silent a while, until something sparked his memory once more.
“The walls...they were...no, they weren’t like here at all. They were shining in the setting sun. They were...pure. The way walls should be.”
“Pure? What does that mean, Enaz?”
“Their purpose. What they were built for. Not like here.”
Catelyn tried to let that sink in, but she didn’t understand his meaning at all. Instead, she changed topics.
“But you saw Freehold?”
“Yes. We saw it,” he said, and then Enaz began sobbing uncontrollably.
Catelyn waited while he wept, whispering to him that she was there, that she was listening. After several whispers, he stopped crying, and she gambled that he would be okay if she asked him some more questions.
“Did it look as bad as you’d imagined it to be?”
Enaz remained silent, and she repeated the question.
“Did it look as bad as you’d imagined it to be?”
Again, she was initially met with silence, and Catelyn wondered if he had fallen asleep, or was ignoring the question. For a split second she actually began to wonder if he had died, and she pulsed her bubble, listening for the subtle, ragged draw of his breath, her heart skipping a beat in fear of being left alone. But then he responded, and it was not at all what she had expected.
“Catelyn, it was glorious,” was all he said, his voice full of awe.
She was taken aback. She wasn’t sure how much of Enaz’ ramblings she could take seriously, but he sounded genuine enough and she could not sense that he was lying. In truth, Catelyn wasn’t sure what to believe anymore. Each prayer, each day, it was becoming harder and harder to think clearly, but it didn’t really matter, as Enaz broke off into more confused rambling and spoke no more of that experience. For all she knew, Enaz was simply recounting a personal fantasy of his. He seemed like a learned man, and Catelyn wondered if he may have simply imagined what these places might look like from the books and maps that he had no doubt studied.
More time passed, and Catelyn felt her own wits begin to play tricks on her. She imagined that her father was occupying one of the cells in the hallway outside hers, and she conversed with him for several whispers, telling him how much she missed him and her mother. She also began to see images of shapes and colors flashing in her mind. They would flit into and out of her mind, along with words and voices from the past. Her first night alone after her parent’s brutal murders. Her battle with the trio of rats in the attic of the abandoned building where she had eventually built her roost. The night she had stolen into a wealthy black marketeers home only to discover that he had been dead for spans.
Catelyn began to consider the possibility that the Emperor had simply decided to let her and Enaz die of utter negligence. Enaz was almost completely gone now; she could tell how weak he was by the sound of his voice. She was no expert, but she envisioned that he had maybe one or two more days before he was too weak to go on. She tried to encourage him, to tell him that she needed his voice to sustain her own will, but he responded with incoherence and she could tell that he was past the point of understanding her words.
Whispers, prayers, or days passed. Catelyn no longer had any sense of self awareness. She was floating alone, in the silence of the cell, the staccato tapping of the dripping water outside in the hall her only point of reference. No more food or drink had come to her since that second delivery, and Catelyn guessed that it had to have been at least two days since then. She felt the skin of her lips with her fingers, which were dry as old paper, and hugged herself to keep her body from trembling, but it was pointless. She was resigning herself to the truth now. Her life was coming to an undignified end, and soon that would be all.
She must have fallen asleep at some point, because a noise from outside her cell startled her into wakefulness. She stood and stretched up on her toes, straining to hear what it was that had woken her, and to her surprise she heard heavy boots on stone stairs echoing through the hall. She truly hoped it was more food or water...Catelyn was so famished, and she felt the painful cramps in her belly from not having eaten more than the small scraps of rotting food days earlier.
“Enaz,” she called. “Enaz, someone’s coming.” Enaz gave no reply, and she heard no sound from his cell. She leaned her head against the metal cell door, and hoped with everything she had that Enaz wasn’t dead.
He can’t be, she thought.
The footsteps grew louder as they descended, and she could hear only the one pair. The gaoler, she assumed. It was not the Emperor’s gait, that much she could tell. Not that she expected him to pay a visit to her on his own.
The boot steps stopped at the base of the stairs, and she heard the sound of a key ring as it was pulled off of a wooden peg nearby. She was so focused on the noise of the guard that she willed herself to ignore the flashing colors that could be seen at the edge of her bubble, clearly a product of her malnourished mind. With keys in hand, swinging now at their side, the guard proceeded to once again walk with purpose down the hall until finally she heard the boots stop immediately outside her cell door. Catelyn took a step back and used her hands to steady herself so that she wouldn’t fall over when the door opened.
Please let it be more food, she thought.
It was then that she realized something was very unusual. She had been hallucinating for a while now, a result of her diminished mind, she knew. But as the guard, or whoever it was on the other side of the door, had approached, she had continued to be distracted by a flickering orange shape dancing in the front of her mind. It was pulsing, and flickering and filled her with dizziness and she wondered if she was about to succumb to her starvation. She knew from stories of people she had known in the Seat, that just before dying, the mind played all sorts of tricks on you and many people claimed to see a light, at the end of a long tunnel. The flickering orange rectangle in her mind resembled just that. Catelyn swallowed hard, and said a quiet remembrance to her parents.
“Mother, father, if there is another place after this one, and I join you in death soon, I hope we will find each other.”
The light inside her mind was insistent, and she reached out for it, and as she did so, it changed as her hand obscured it.
Catelyn gasped.
She moved her hand away, and the shape returned, flickering before her once more. Chills ran up and down her spine and her knees felt weak.
She again raised her hand and the flickering shape faded, blocked by her hand, and now in her mind she imagined that she could just make out the shadow of her hand, the splay of her fingers. She brought both of her hands to her mouth, and felt herself back away and slide down the wall until she was squatting in the corner where her own filth lay, keening and shaking with fright.
The guard could be heard now fiddling with the key ring in the door, and Catelyn learned that it was a man, as she heard him curse under his breath. The flickering light in her mind was still there, an orange rectangle, exactly where she had imagined the slit in the door would be. A thought sprang to the surface of her mind, but Catelyn refused to believe it.
The man finally got the correct key in the lock, and turned it. She heard the door latches pop open and the door began to creak outward on rusted hinges. The door was heavy, from what Catelyn could hear, and then the orange rectangle slipped away, and a new tall, slender shape appeared and grew as the door screeched across the stone floor.
Despite her continuing loss of faith over the last few sojourns, Catelyn beseeched the Divines one last time, then reached her hands to her face, feeling along her cheeks and forehead. As she touched the heaped scars that had been so familiar to her for the past six sojourns, s
he found that they came away at her touch, peeling off of her face in large chunks like old scabs. As they fell away, the slender shape of light became clearer and she was forced to turn her head away from the intense brightness. She continued to feel her face, and underneath the peeling scars she felt new, smooth skin covering the surface of her cheeks. And within the hollows above her cheeks she could feel the perfectly spherical orbs of her eyes, encased in new, downy eyelids. Her fingertips brushed her eyelashes, causing her to blink them open and closed, and despite all of her pain, all of her anguish, her heart felt like soaring at the realization that somehow, she had been something precious back.
She could see again.
She moved her hands away from her face, and opened her eyes wide and squinted up at the brightness leaking in from the hallway as the door finished opening. She saw the silhouette of a large man in burnished plate armor, holding a small flickering oil lantern in one hand and the key ring in the other. The man gasped when he saw her.
“Catelyn,” he breathed in a small, shocked voice.
Catelyn stared up at the strange man, trying to determine if she knew him, but quickly realized she wouldn’t be able to recognize anyone with her eyes. Instead, she focused on the man with her bubble. It was more than a little confusing at first to take in all of that sensory information, in addition to the new sensation she now experienced at the sight of this man, but his identity quickly came to her, and when it did, she scrambled away from him on all fours, though she had nowhere to go in the cramped cell.
“Ortis,” she whispered, as the last of her hope faded.
Chapter 19
Catelyn was feeling a series of wildly conflicting emotions in the course of a single moment. Shock and exhilaration at realizing that she could see again, quickly followed by fear and loathing for this man Ortis, who stood silently gaping down at her withered, naked body. Then, anxiety and despair that this man’s presence here, in his Imperial armor, could only signal the end of her life, and something more. Betrayal.
She looked up at him, trying to read the look on his face, but it had been so long since she had seen another human being, and without warning she began to cry. Tears, a sensation she had not experienced in so long, streamed down her cheeks and she held her hands to her face, weeping into her palms, while the brute Ortis simply stood over her, mute and seemingly unsure what to do. Something in the way that he looked at her set her off.
Anger took hold of her then, and all the emotions she had bottled up since being imprisoned exploded, and she lashed out at him.
“What are you waiting for? Drag me out to your precious Emperor, and end this farce!”
Ortis’ face screwed up in anger of his own, and he simply reached out and grabbed her by the wrist. His grip was firm, but not harsh, which surprised her.
“Quiet!” he commanded. “I’m here to get you out, not bring you to Uriel.”
He led her out into the hallway, stunned at first, and then the realization that she was unclothed in front of the man hit her, and she covered herself as best she could with her other hand. Ortis noticed her hesitation, and stopped pulling on her.
“Wait here,” he said, more kindly than she thought possible of him.
Ortis walked away, hanging the lantern he had been carrying on a peg on the wall, and entered a nearby room, and she could hear rummaging from inside. She briefly considered running, getting as far away from this man as possible, but the weakness in her legs put an end to any such plans.
Catelyn blinked, trying to clear away some of the fuzziness she was still seeing in her eyes. She wasn’t surprised that her eyes were full of crud, and she was still in utter shock that she could see at all. Her elation was hard to ignore.
Ortis returned with dark prison garb clutched in one of his big hands, and he held them out to her, and then turned away.
“Be quick, we’re taking an enormous risk being here.”
Catelyn almost balked and challenged him to prove that she could trust a thing he said, but realized that she really didn’t have much choice. She could barely walk, much less put up a fight...she was operating purely on the excitement of her returned sight and of being out of the cell where she had become convinced she would have surely died. She donned the clothing as quickly as she was able, which was much too big for her, especially after the additional weight she’d lost being a guest of the Emperor.
When she was dressed in the pants and shirt, she whispered this fact to Ortis, and he turned around, then pointed at her head.
“What about your hair?”
Catelyn grabbed a handful of it with her hand, some of which came away at the slightest touch, and said “What are they going to do, kill me?”
Ortis smiled grimly, and Catelyn was shocked to see such an expression on the face of a man like Ortis. Standing in the hallway, she was able to study his face for the first time. He was surprisingly older than she would have guessed from the brief sense of him she’d had before with only her bubble. Despite that, he was in quite good shape for a man of his age.
Ortis turned and led her toward a doorway which fed into the stairwell from which he’d come. He was on the threshold and about to ascend, when she remembered.
“Enaz!” she gasped, and ran back towards the cells.
Being out of the cell seemed to be doing wonders for her stamina, as she did not collapse for the effort of moving. It was still quite strange to be able to see where she was going, though. She knew exactly which direction her had been in from her cell, and she found his easily enough. She pounded on the metal door, but he did not respond. “Enaz,” she hissed into the slit at the top of the door.
Ortis had returned to stand beside her, a look of annoyance on his face. Seeing people’s expressions again was going to take some getting used to.
“Open it,” she ordered.
Ortis stonewalled, mutely crossing his arms. Catelyn slugged his meaty upper arm with her fist, but it was like hitting a sandbag. Still, he didn’t budge. She was rather surprised that he hadn’t simply obeyed her. The last time they’d been this close, he had knelt before her, begging to be commanded. Clearly something had changed, and she realized she would need to take a different approach with him now.
“Please,” she tried.
Ortis scowled, then sighed and uncrossed his arms, and proceeded to open the metal door to Enaz’ cell.
As soon as the door cracked open, she could tell that it was not going to end the way she’d hoped, but had instead ended the way she’d feared. Ortis walked to the lantern on the wall, grabbed it off of its peg and handed it to her. She had to blink to adjust to so much brightness after half her life living in complete blackness, but she extended the lantern into the small cell, and with her other hand she covered her mouth to stifle the sob that burbled up from inside her.
On the floor of the cell, huddled against the wall, lay what remained of a man. He was stripped naked of course, and covered in wounds, many of which appeared to have been self-inflicted. His hands were covered in blood, and she could see where he had carved gouges into his body with his long, sharp nails. His glassy eyes stared through her and into the Void, and she could smell that he had been dead for some time, maybe even a day.
She couldn’t recall when she had last heard him talk to her from his cell, and truthfully she wasn’t even sure that their last conversation had even been real. She considered that she might have hallucinated that strange conversation about his journey through Chaser’s Pass and of looking down upon the walls of Freehold.
But then Catelyn noticed something that made her realize that their conversation had been real, and that it had likely been his last moment. Written on the wall, in his own blood, standing out against the bland stone, was a single word: Free.
She stifled another sob, and turned away. Ortis was there, his massive frame blocking the hallway, and she shoved past him, but as she did she caught the glimmer of tears trailing down his own cheeks. She didn’t stop to consider the
man’s reaction, but it only amplified the fact that this man was an absolute mystery to her.
He followed along behind, and the two of them made their way into the stairwell, and up the stairs, Catelyn walking ahead but realizing that she had no idea where she was going. She stopped to let Ortis pass her on the stairs, and as he brushed past, she took the time to look closer at him.
He was every bit of him a warrior. The way he carried himself, with the confident swagger of a man who knew precisely how to place his weight for balance and strength told her that this man was more deadly than his age would let on. His bald head sat atop a massive, thick neck, and his upper body was still heavily muscled and imposing, even in the plate mail.
She wondered exactly what Ortis’ plan for getting her out of the Citadel was. If it was true that Ortis had at one time been the most highly trusted of Uriel’s men, then he certainly knew a few tricks that could help them, but she had to guess that the Emperor would anticipate such moves on the part of his former commander as well. She nearly stopped to ask him what he had planned, when she heard a familiar voice and felt her heart nearly jump out of her chest.
“Ortis. Here!” Silena hissed from the top of the stairwell.
Catelyn hissed up the stairs herself “Silena! Is that you?!”
Ortis turned to glare at her, then glared up the stairwell to where Silena was, and just shook his head at the two women and the noise they were making, but Catelyn didn’t care. She bounded up the stairs impatiently behind Ortis, and then she was there.
Catelyn had pictured Silena in her mind many times since their meeting cycles ago, but she was even more beautiful a sight than she could have hoped for. Silena was beaming at her, and then her mouth fell open when she laid eyes on Catelyn’s face and her newly repaired skin and eyes, but Catelyn gave her no chance to say a word because she ran straight at her and engulfed her in the tightest hug. Tears of joy fell from Catelyn’s eyes, as the two women embraced.
Silena stammered “H-h-how?”
Bloodfire (The Sojourns of Rebirth) Page 35
