Bloodfire (The Sojourns of Rebirth)

by Matthew Medina

  Then she turned to look at the Imperials at the gatehouse. An entire squadron of men waited now at the gatehouse, and at least five of the strongest were pulling on the crank, trying to cinch it one more turn. Catelyn shut her eyes and took a moment to smell the air, to feel the breeze on her cheeks, to say goodbye, when suddenly she heard the rope in Ortis’ hands began to groan, and he put his dagger in his teeth and threw himself down to the bridge’s surface, grabbing the edge of the boards.

  “Hold on!” he yelled.

  Catelyn suddenly realized that while she had been taking in everything, she had failed to find anywhere to grab onto.

  The decision of what to do next was taken away from her, as she heard the rope whine, and she looked over at it just in time to witness it fray to the breaking point, and then snap. The bridge surface shifted awkwardly under her feet, and for a brief second she felt herself in free fall, dropping towards the tilting bridge as one side of it warped under the weight without one of the ropes to support it. She impacted the surface of the drawbridge unevenly, and felt herself being pulled toward the side of the bridge. Her bubble shifted and she felt that same sensation of time slowing down as she watched the edge of the drawbridge approaching. She reached out with both hands, grabbing the wood beam at the side of the bridge, the same one Ortis held onto higher up.

  She felt biting pain as a long splinter of wood entered her left hand, but she held on as the bridge continued to shift and bounce from the impacts of the rope breaking, followed by her body slamming into the bridge. The last remaining soldier finally lost his battle against gravity and rolled down the bridge surface, falling towards the tilted left side of the bridge. After sliding a few paces he was pitched out into space, to drop to his death in the moat below. Catelyn watched him impact on the dry moat bed, and the spray of blood exploding from several points on his body, seeping out from the openings in his armor to pool around his limp and broken form.

  She heard the rope on the other side of the bridge begin to strain from holding all of the weight of the bridge and the three of them, but Catelyn didn’t think that it was going to break. She wondered what Ortis had expected to do from this point, and she called up to him.

  “So, was this part of the plan?”

  “Of course not. The plan was to run across before anyone noticed,” he snapped. He didn’t say it, but he put an emphasis on the word run, implying that Catelyn and Silena hadn’t been moving fast enough. Catelyn bit back an angry reply, in part because she knew he was right. Catelyn might have been able to get across if she hadn’t been weakened by her imprisonment. Although she had survived the encounter with the two soldiers, and somehow managed to prevent herself from nearly falling into the moat, she had been functioning purely on instinct and had benefited from the change in her perceptions during those encounters.

  Even now, she could feel her strength fading as she held on to the side of the bridge for her life, and she looked over at Silena. The older woman had a strong grip on the knothole, and it looked big enough that she could hold onto it securely, at least until her strength gave out. She knew that Silena was a strong willed woman, but she was not young, and Catelyn didn’t know how much more the woman had left.

  The Imperial soldiers at the gatehouse were growing more impatient, and many of them had begun shouting curses and jeers at them. Three of them began ditching their heavy armor, and were attempting to scale the drawbridge on hands and knees. One of them was already a handful of paces up, finding enough agility to grab the few handholds at the bridge’s end, while the other two struggled.

  “If you have any ideas, Ortis…” Catelyn said, her nerves and fatigue beginning to get the better of her.

  “We need to get the other rope down, but I can’t get across to it.”

  Catelyn looked over at the rope, then at Ortis, and she realized he was right. His plate mail was conspiring to pull him down to the moat as well, and he held on above her with every ounce of strength he had. He would never be able to climb up to the end of the bridge and shimmy across the edge to saw at the other rope. She turned around to check on the progress of the climbing soldier, and she saw that he had made it a few more paces.

  But something else she saw behind the climbing soldier sent Catelyn’s heart into a frenzy.

  At the gatehouse, six soldiers were positioning themselves to fire at the three of them with longbows. At the range they were at, there was no chance they would miss. They needed to do something, and Catelyn decided that with everything riding on the next few whispers, she had nothing to lose and to simply trust her instincts.

  “Ortis, drop your dagger down to me,” Catelyn said, looking up at him.

  Ortis didn’t ask why, and she could see from the look in his eyes that he too had spotted the archers below, nocking their bows in preparation to fire. He grabbed hold with one arm and both legs, so that he could remove the dagger from the bridge, where he had slammed it into the wood to provide himself an extra hand hold. Once it was free, he dropped it, and it fell right to her, handle first.

  She snatched the steel tang and then pulled her body closer to the wood as their combined motion had caused the bridge to sway ever so slightly once again. She looked down and saw the archers drawing back, ready to fire.

  She found the calm inside herself, her bubble shifted, and time slowed down.

  She looked to the rope, focusing her bubble on the point where the rope met the wood of the bridge, and despite her position on the other side of the bridge, ten paces away, she could make out every detail. She could see the striated cords of each strand, and she could see the tension of the rope being pulled taut, caught between the pull of the winch and the force of gravity. But most importantly, she could see where the strain points were. Three strands on the heavy rope stood out to her enhanced vision, and she could see that they appeared to be weaker than the rest.

  From below, she heard the twang of bowstrings as the archers released their first volley of arrows. She calculated that they would reach her and her companions holding onto the bridge in less that three breaths.

  One. She chose one of the weaker strands, setting it in her mind as the focus of all her senses. Her bubble condensed down to a single point, right on the strand she had chosen. She raised her arm, shifted her weight, and threw the dagger.

  Two. The dagger sailed through the air, end over end, racing to its destination before the arrows arrived at theirs. The dagger won, and Catelyn saw the dagger stick into the strand, severing a number of its fibers.

  Three. The rope exploded under the weight and the change to the tension of the severed strand, sending the drawbridge falling down toward the ground. Ortis, Catelyn and Silena gripped the bridge with everything that they had, as the arrows sailed through the air and over their heads precisely where they would have been had the bridge not fallen.

  Catelyn’s body slammed into the wood as it impacted with the ground, knocking the wind from her and stunning her. Disoriented, she heard yelling from paces behind her at the gatehouse, as the squadron of Imperial soldiers poured onto the bridge. Catelyn felt an arm scoop her up and then she was hoisted onto someone’s shoulder.

  Ortis, she realized.

  She saw him pull a weak and exhausted Silena up from a strange angle but she silently thanked him for not leaving either of them behind. She felt him turn and bolt for the city, and she could feel him shoving people aside, as they waded through a crowd of onlookers. A strange noise reached Catelyn’s ears, and she couldn’t make sense of it at first, but as Ortis made his way through the sea of people she realized what the sound was: cheering.

  The citizens of the Seat were cheering. She had never heard such a noise before. It was an amazing sound that filled her heart with gladness, but almost immediately she wanted them to stop. The simple act of cheering could cost them their lives. When Uriel learned about this, there was no telling what form his rage at them would take.

  But she was so exhausted, so weak, that she couldn’t
stop to dwell on any of these thoughts. As Ortis ran, the gentle rocking of her body on his shoulder became somehow comforting to her, and within a handful of breaths, unconsciousness reached out and claimed her.

  Chapter 20

  Uriel sat in his gilded throne, brooding over what to do next. He ignored the grating voice and vapid face of the man chattering at him from the foot of the dais upon which he sat. He was sure the man was describing the Imperial army’s attempts to find the three criminals that had escaped from the Citadel earlier that day.

  In another time, Uriel the Third of His Name would be engulfed in a rage so intense, that it would have consumed the city in the fire of its power. He imagined the citizens of the Seat, cowering in their homes as word spread of this act of defiance, and the repercussions that were to follow.

  But Uriel was unconcerned and simply grunted his assent when the men under his command suggested this course of action or that. The truth was, Uriel was past the point of caring. His mind could only turn towards one thing these days.

  The sickle.

  He had taken possession of it from the girl days before, when he had masterfully set and closed the trap on Ortis and the girl in the market. He had initially been obsessed with learning more about that girl; why she was special and how she had come by something as magnificent as the weapon he now held in his chambers. He had believed her to be strong, to be as he was.

  But when he had given her the gift of bloodfire, and even before, she had shown her weakness to him. And he had known then that the girl mattered little. She had simply been a vessel to deliver this new weapon to him. He had thrown her in the dungeons to rot, just as he had done to Enaz, because he no longer wished to bother with such petty beings.

  He was becoming something greater. The crook had come to him when he was young, and he hadn’t truly understood its usefulness. But he had always felt it, and used it to build his Empire. And now the sickle had come to him, and he felt one step closer to achieving the purpose for which all of his other actions had been undertaken.

  But first, he needed to understand these weapons.

  He listened as the men before him described their search patterns, and the results of their interrogations. His men, as usual, were artfully describing the brutality with which they were executing their duties, but Uriel was unconcerned about the location of the three traitors now. He had not even bothered to have ordered the squadron whose responsibility it was to guard the inner courtyard to be killed.

  Uriel could find no motivation for anything beyond understanding the purpose of the sickle. As soon as the men had concluded their reports, Uriel dismissed them, and swept out of his throne and down the dais to the doors.

  He slammed them open and walked briskly to his chambers, where the sickle awaited his study. His mind raced and his palms began to sweat as he made his way toward the artifact. He reached the door to his chambers, swept them open and then shut them behind him. He walked to the case where the sickle lay, opened it, and once again reveled in the majesty of its design.

  The same way that he had done with the crook so many sojourns ago, he lifted the sickle reverently from its case, cradling it in his hands, and ran his fingers along the sensuous curves of the bodies on the handle, and up along the blade.

  He paused his fingers on the words, delicately inscribed in the metal and traced them from the beginning to their end, reading:

  “There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”

  He tried desperately to understand their meaning once again, but they continued to elude him. It spoke of several powers, and he thought of the way that the crook had given him the Will to reign over all of his Empire. It spoke also of evolving, and Uriel knew it was speaking of his own transformation, if he could only find the key. His father had told him that these weapons were pieces of a whole, the entire set having once been in the possession of great and powerful men, who ruled Ereas in ancient times, in a time prior to the Before. These weapons were relics of the past, grand and mysterious tools which he knew could grant him the same divine right of rule as they once had. He desperately wished to know what sort of powers the sickle would grant him, to understand these forms that the words on the blade spoke of, and how they might evolve him into what he knew he was to become.

  He sat down on the floor, clutching the weapon to his robed chest, tears flowing from his eyes as he wracked his mind, trying to discover the solution to the puzzle which now consumed his days and nights.

  He would solve this puzzle. He had to. It was his destiny.

  Catelyn wandered through the streets of the Seat, alone. She was moving toward the central marketplace, her feet carrying her toward the stall where Silena always set up her business selling antiquities. She saw no Imperial soldiers between her and her destination and sighed in relief. It seemed that she, Ortis and Silena had managed to get away with their daring escape after all.

  There had been so many moments over the past span when she had become convinced that it was all going to end horribly, but she smiled at the realization that it had all been pulled off, maybe not with perfection, but that they had walked away from. She was already feeling much stronger, and she felt like skipping past the morning crowds of shoppers making their way through the marketplace.

  As always she could smell the various food vendors grilling meat on a spit, or baking bread in their clay ovens, and it made her mouth water. She walked over to the nearest stalls selling food, and peered down at their selections.

  She was shocked to see that all the food on the vendors tables and trays were covered in bright, crimson blood. The nearest vendor looked up at her with a smile, displaying rotted yellow teeth.

  She stepped back, and moved to the next vendor, wondering who on Ereas would possibly want to eat flatbread with a drizzled glaze of blood.

  The ground beneath her feet turned warm as the sun rose high into the sky, which was the shade of a soft powdery blue, a very strange color for the sky to be, but she thought it was pleasant. She relished the warm stone brushing against her soles and she slowed down, lingering to enjoy the sensations just a few breaths longer.

  She reached Silena’s stall, but the woman was nowhere to be found, which was strange, because it was the height of the midday rush, and all of her goods were laid out on the tables of the stall. Catelyn felt a flood of panic, wondering what had happened to her friend. Silena would never have left her stall unattended like this.

  Catelyn looked around, and there stood Ortis, glistening in pristine white armor, his rough face a stark contrast to the finery he now wore. She half laughed when she saw him, looking completely out of place in the dirt-covered streets of the slums.

  He glared at her without emotion, arms folded behind his back.

  She made her way toward him, partly to get a closer look at his ornate set of armor, and partly so that she could ask him if he knew where Silena was. She was halfway to where he stood, when two arms gripped her shoulders, spinning her around. She was taken aback to come face to face...with herself. Immediately, Catelyn recognized that she must be dreaming.

  Catelyn hadn’t seen her own reflection since she’d been a girl, six sojourns ago, but she knew without a doubt that this ghost standing before her was...her. Only it was a vision of herself from before the Emperor had used the bloodfire on her the second time, for this girl’s face and eyes were a webbed patchwork of raw looking scars and tissue. The phantom version of her had bedraggled red hair and was wearing her own tattered clothing.

  Although Catelyn knew this dream self was just a part of her imagining, and that she would no doubt wake soon. This was the first time Catelyn had ever envisioned how she must have looked to everyone else.

  Catelyn, that is her dream
self, reached her hands up to her face, to where her blindfold would have been. Catelyn watched in horror as her dream self put her fingers into the sockets where her eyes would be, and gouged her fingers deep into the orbs, blood pouring like red tears down her face.

  Catelyn, the real Catelyn, wished to scream on her dream self’s behalf, but she found that in this dream, she was mute, a fact which Catelyn somehow knew had been decreed by the Emperor. Even in her dreams, his arbitrary whims invaded and curtailed her sense of liberty. Her dream self removed her hands to reveal gaping, bloody holes where her eyes should be. As Catelyn stared in horror at the sight of her dream self’s mutilation, the doppelganger produced Ortis’ dagger, the one she had used to sever the rope on the drawbridge, and silently drew it across Catelyn’s throat.

  Her dream self watched impassively with empty, blood filled eye sockets as the real Catelyn mutely felt her life pump rhythmically out onto the street below.

  Catelyn awoke with a start, clutching at her neck and trembling in fear. Her heart thumped wildly in her chest, like a caged beast pressing itself hopelessly against its prison time and time again. She tried to settle her anxiety and take stock of her situation. The first thing that she became aware of was arguing, coming from behind a closed door and down a short hallway. She rolled over and looked around, to find that she was in a small room, lying on the floor with blankets pulled up over her, and the flimsy door to the room hanging open slightly.

  She identified the voices of Ortis and Silena, and she could hear that they were having a heated disagreement about what their next course of action should be.

  “Ortis, you’re a bigger fool than I thought you were, if you believe for one second that we’ll be safe here,” Silena said with disdain.