Bloodfire (The Sojourns of Rebirth) (10 page)

Catelyn dragged the cold form of the person, holding it as
gently and as reverently as she could with one hand under each
arm, and shuffling slowly towards the wall and the pressure plate
in the floor. Catelyn felt a hole in her heart as she worked, but she
was resolved to her plan now.

She was no longer just here for a trinket. She was moving
on instinct now, and heeding a darker call from inside, in answer
for the crimes which had been committed here.

What had been done to this person had made it
unrecognizable as male or female, and she fought against the urge
of the voice in her head, which quite loudly and adamantly called
upon her to sneak over to where Dane Eyrris lay passed out in a
drunken stupor and slit the throat of the demon who had done
this.

But she knew that such an act, while it may pass unnoticed
for many, would not be so for a man with the kind of standing that
Dane Eyrris and his ilk enjoyed. The Emperor would not turn such
a blind eye to someone the likes of Dane Eyrris falling victim to
murder in his own home, and that sort of attention would
complicate matters for her greatly.

There’s only one way for someone like me to hurt him,
she
thought.
And that’s to do what I came here to do: take his
precious relic.

She padded as quietly as she could to the wall with her
grisly bundle and stood firmly on the pressure plate. It took some
adjustments of the weight distribution, but after a few tries, she
heard the mechanism trip in the floor, and the wall section slid
down, revealing the alcove with the prize within. She put the body
down as delicately and respectfully as she could, and briefly
considered sending a prayer to the Divines for the soul of this poor
wretch who had run afoul of the Dane and his friends, but the
voice of doubt bubbled up again.

If the Divines truly cared for this person, they could have
saved them from this end. Don't profane this person's suffering
by invoking them now.

She set aside her idle thoughts and reached inside the
alcove and could feel a cool handle under her grip, like the kind
you found on a carrying case. The pressure plate was sensitive
enough to the change in weight that as soon as she had put the
body down, the panel began to slide closed, and she had to lift the
handle of the case up and over before it shut, which caused the
panel to scrape slightly against the underside of the case. The noise
caused Catelyn to wince, but she breathed a sigh of relief when she
listened and determined that it hadn't been loud enough to wake
Eyrris.

The case was slightly rectangular, and about the length of
her forearm on the longest side. She smelled rich leather and oily
skin, and she listened as the wall panel slid back into place and
snapped quietly shut.

With the case in her hand, she wiped the sweat from her
brow. She turned away from the wall and expanded her bubble
outward, getting the sense of what she was leaving behind. She
knew that she was leaving behind plenty of evidence of her breakin, something which usually bothered her, but in this case she
remained uncaring.

In fact, the thought of waking Eyrris with a noise prior to
her departing crossed her mind.
I want you to know what I’ve done,
she thought.
I hope
you pay for what you’ve done but if not, at least you won’t have
this to use to pay for any more of your “parties”.
She knew that although it was the voice in her head that
had been saying this and many other things this night, for the first
time ever, she found herself agreeing with it. But she also knew
that this was probably just her anger talking, and she reined her
emotions in before they undid all of her hard work.
Instead, she took the case in hand, padded over to the
window and climbed up onto the window sill. She unfastened the
belt she wore, and used it to fasten a makeshift strap which she
could use to wrap around the case, and slung the combination over
one arm and around her torso such that it sat flush against her
back.
She was almost halfway up to the eaves when she heard
the voice in her head again, and she paused before leaping off of
the ledge and stepped back to the window, listening.
Let’s leave him a little something to remember us by. Do
you remember what they used to call you? The kids?
She smiled, remembering, and returned into the room
while her inner voice whispered of a just and befitting exit.
She quickly followed the voice's suggestions, and when she
was done, she leaped across the gap between buildings and out
into the night, disappearing like a shadow without turning back.

When Dane Eyrris awoke prayers later, the first thing he
noticed was how cool it was in his apartment. He muttered angrily
to himself as he stumbled naked through the apartment, cursing
and wondering who would have left one of the windows open all
night. Whoever it was, he would have them flayed for such
thoughtlessness.

He stepped out into the main room of his apartment and
gasped.
Blood covered the walls, from floor to ceiling. The sticky
dark red liquid was smeared over everything, even the wall which
contained his safe. The wall panel which concealed the safe
remained closed and shut, but Eyrris felt a flush of panic and
sprinted to the wall to stand upon the pressure plate.
He impatiently waited while the panel slid down, only to
have his worst fears realized. The case containing his artifact was
gone, and in its place there lay a blood soaked cushion from his
couch. Whoever the thief was, it appeared as though they had used
the cushion as a paintbrush, and the blood from his plaything as
the paint.
He looked around the entire apartment, tearing furniture
apart in desperation, looking for the case, but he already knew that
it was gone. He was forced to conclude the obvious: that whoever
the intruder had been, they had not just had a wild hair about
redecorating his home. They had somehow managed to figure out
not only where the safe was, but also how to open it and they had
even had the temerity to remove the invaluable prize inside.
“Whoever you are, you’re worse than dead,” he muttered
to himself coldly, and then his anger seeped up from within and
boiled over, and he roared in frustration.
Dogs in the street below barked at his scream. When he
finally regained his composure, Eyrris noticed that it wasn’t just
the walls that were coated in blood, but the floors as well. Only,
Eyrris could see bare footprints tracking in and out of the blood all
around the place where the wall and the floor met. The footprints
were small, smaller than any he had ever seen, like those of a child,
and he followed the criss-crossing paths made by the prints
through his apartment until they ultimately led away towards the
windows.
He nearly stumbled when he finally looked up and noticed
what was there before him. Propped in the window sill of his
apartment was the torso of his plaything, its arms crooked into a
rude gesture. The body was positioned such that it was propping
the window open and he could see a lone, blood-covered footprint
pressed into the middle of the glass like some macabre signature,
widely splayed toes fanned out as though they were waving.
This act of adding insult to injury set Dane Eyrris' blood to
boiling, and he allowed himself two seconds to contemplate the
arrogance of this thief who knew no bounds, and then he gave in
and bellowed in unadulterated rage.

Catelyn slumped to her knees exhausted, on the floor of
the attic of her roost. It was the same place in the top floor of the
building where she had first found safety after losing her family,
but she had spent the past six sojourns converting the crawlspace
from simply being a place to hide into something fit for living, and
one of the biggest changes she had made had been to block off
entry from the street level, and put in an access point from the
rooftops. She might not have been able to remain in her family’s
home, both for practical as well as personal reasons, but she
couldn’t bring herself to leave the very part of town where she had
been abandoned as a child. She thought it was appropriate to make
her home here, where new “new” life had begun.

This was where she had learned to survive, to live on her
own, and where she trained for her new life. And it was where she
had first discovered how to extend her senses into the bubble of
awareness she now had mastery over.

No one but her lived in this building, and hardly anyone
lived in this part of town anymore. Her parents had been well liked
by those who lived on their block, so when word spread of their
murder, many of the other residents and families realized that the
block was not going to feel safe again. Even the Imperials gave the
area a wide berth, as it had become home to the poorest and the
most desperate of the Seat’s cast-offs. After many of the residents
moved out, the psychopaths, the insane, and the criminals had
moved in. Catelyn actually didn’t mind the change, as it helped
cover her nocturnal activities and she even was able to blend in by
pretending to be one of their number when needed. It enabled her
to hide in plain sight, and because of the way that she never
entered or exited the building from the streets, almost no one even
knew she resided here.

Once she had recovered her breath, she got up on her feet
once more, feeling her thighs and upper arms already beginning to
stiffen with soreness. Her night had been more strenuous than her
usual jobs. And more horrifying as well. She tried not to think
about the dead victim of Dane Eyrris and his friends. The cold,
pallid flesh that used to be somebody.

She shook the morbid thoughts from her mind as she
unknotted the straps from around her chest and gently lowered the
case she had stolen to the floor, recording the position of it in her
mind. Everything in Catelyn’s roost had a place where it belonged,
to make it easier for her to find the things she needed. Whenever
she added something new, she had to mentally log where it was.

Part of her was dying to open the case right then, and find
out what it was that had so captivated a monster like Eyrris, but
she knew it was more important to take care of herself first. She
padded the six paces to the trap door she had cut into the floor,
lifted the wooden slats and lowered herself into her living space.

As she dropped down to where she spent most of her time
each day, the warmth hit her first as it always did, and she sighed
in pleasure. The warmth of her home was the by product of a series
of pipes that she had methodically designed and built in her first
sojourns. They ran through the living area, out to the street where
she had connected them up to the Seat’s paltry network of steam
pipes, rerouting some of the city’s supply directly into her loft. The
Seat maintained this network for some reason Catelyn couldn’t
fathom, but they never inspected the pipeline unless something
broke down, enabling her to connect the old pipes she had found,
with no one in the Seat being the wiser.

The heat from the pipes radiated through the enclosed
space and greeted her with its calming embrace and she stretched
up on her tip toes as she broke into a yawn, her fingers brushing
the low ceiling. She knew she was going to sleep well tonight.

She removed her clothes, gathered them in a pile and
walked to the two basins along the wall. The basins she had found
in one of the rundown apartments nearby, and she kept them filled
with water, which was then heated by being in close contact with
the steam pipes.

At the first basin she dropped her clothes in, using a
wooden stick tied to the rim of one of the basins so that she could
submerge the clothing without burning her hands. She could feel
the steam on her naked skin as she stirred the clothes until they
were thoroughly soaked. Once that was done, she moved to the
second basin and bent down to retrieve a copper ewer from a low
table near the floor, exactly where it always was. She dipped the
ewer in the basin, filled it with the scalding water, then turned and
trod six steps to where she kept a broader, shallow basin half-filled
with cold, clear, purified water.

She poured the piping hot water from the ewer into the
shallow basin, and a cloud of steam rose to greet her, making a
luxuriously warm, clean bathing bowl. She put the ewer down and
stepped into the basin, the warm water coming up to her ankles
and eliciting a sigh of relaxation from her lips. She grabbed a clean
cloth from the small pile she kept nearby, one of her most prized
possessions, and began to wash the dirt, sweat and blood from her
body as best she could. She removed her blindfold, and ran the
cloth over her face, feeling the water wash away the grime of the
city. Unfortunately nothing could not wash away the dread she still
felt at the experience she had just had.

After she was bathed, and felt more like herself, she placed
everything back precisely in the spots where they belonged, put
her washcloth in the soaking basin with her dirty clothes to be
cleaned and rinsed later, and stepped over to a nearby stool and
sat down to inspect herself. This was a nightly ritual for Catelyn,
ever since she had neglected to notice an open cut on her right
lower leg, and it had become infected. She knew that such things
were actually quite rare, but she had had one experience that made
her aware of the need to be as vigilant as possible.

She’d nearly died, suffering for almost half a span with a
terrible fever and fits of trembling, but she had prayed to the
Divines every day, and at the time she believed that they had heard
her prayer and delivered her from death’s door. It wasn’t easy, but
eventually, with Their help, her body had fought off the sickness in
her blood. It had reinforced her faith that They had some plan for
her. She didn’t know what it was, only that she had to work hard at
staying alive until They revealed it to her. That was sojourns ago,
however, and these days she wasn’t as certain what the Divines
thought of people, if they even existed.