Bloodfire (The Sojourns of Rebirth) (15 page)

And within the first few visits, Silena began to report to
Catelyn what she was hearing about the Dane’s, and as Catelyn
suspected would be the case, their efforts to recover their precious
artifact and find the thief who was responsible. Silena stressed the
danger to her every time she visited, and after hearing through her
network that the Danes were escalating their search, Catelyn opted
to forgo any further forays and stay in the shadows for a while,
until the worst had passed.

Catelyn had lived on the streets a long time, and she knew
how to survive for spans with the minimum she needed to survive,
including the need to sometimes ration herself when times were
tough. Catelyn wished to be out there, to be free to leap across the
rooftops and to continue to visit Silena whenever she wanted, but
she had a feeling that the days ahead would challenge her in ways
that she never had been before. So instead of plying her trade, she
spent her nights quiet and alone in her roost training both her
body and her senses.

The remainder of the time when she wasn’t training she
spent at home, examining the weapon but also maintaining the
inventions she had crafted over the sojourns to make her life
easier. This was a case where her book habit as a child had paid
off, enabling her to construct a number of devices which allowed
her to take advantage of certain luxuries many others in the Seat
simply did without, like the system of pipes she had designed to
heat her roost and purify the rainwater collected from the roof that
she used for drinking and bathing.

She also spent at least a prayer each day feeling her way
along the handle of the weapon, mostly to study the faces. Each
time, she traced the handle in the same way, but starting with a
different figure each time. She would begin at one end, and work
her way toward the other, where the handle transitioned into the
shaft that swiftly flattened to become the blade, as smoothly as
poured glass.

She wasn’t quite sure why the faces on the handle had so
captivated her attention, but they did. For some reason, she kept
getting the strange feeling that she should somehow recognize
some of the faces, but of course she knew that was absurd. The
weapon was older than her, presumably. And if Silena could be
believed, was likely even made hundreds of sojourns ago in the
Before. If the artist who had sculpted the likenesses on the handle
had even used real people as guides, those people would surely be
long dead.

Still, she found that the act of examining the faces
comforted her in some strange way. To feel the faces and the
bodies beneath her fingers, to feel the sensuous curves of the
forms, and marvel at the perfection of the captured likenesses
filled her with a sense of awe that she had never experienced
before now. She was becoming so familiar now with the various
shapes, that she thought soon she might be able to identify them
all by memory.

Meanwhile the details on the blade, although clearer than
they had been before, still eluded her. The lines etched into the
steel just weren’t deep enough for her fingers to make out more
than general shapes, and Catelyn knew that was worthy of mention
in and of itself. She actually began to wonder if their delicate
nature called into question whether they were etchings at all, but
rather paintings or images inlaid into the metal somehow. She had
never even heard of such a thing, but she had also never felt
anything this exquisite before.

Catelyn was not one to dwell on past mistakes or regrets,
but in this, she cursed herself that she hadn’t asked Silena to
describe what she saw on the surface of the blade that night she
had handled the weapon. Perhaps she would get the chance again
at some point, but it was not possible to ask further questions
about it of her now, not without exposing herself to great risk, and
raising suspicion.

She was so curious about the etchings that she even
considered setting up another secret meeting for the two of them,
in order to have Silena describe what she saw upon the blade. This
last mystery was eating away at Catelyn, to the point where she
had even begun wishing she had her sight back so that she could
see it with her own eyes, something that almost never happened.

Frustrated, and more than a little bored, Catelyn placed
the weapon down in the case, still lying open on her shelf, then
climbed up to her sleeping area, slipped under the blankets and
fell fast asleep.

Catelyn stood in the dank hallway, scanning it back and
forth with her bubble, trying to find a trace of something familiar.
Something that would mark this occasion or harken back to her
former life, here with her family. But she could detect nothing, and
the emptiness stretched before her like a vast gulf between her old
life and her new.

Catelyn had counted the days, and she knew that this day
was exactly one sojourn from the day when her parents had been
brutally murdered and her life had been changed forever. The
hallway leading to the room where her parents had died smelled of
musty wood and rank pools of water, and she wondered whether
anyone had stepped foot in the building since the day she had
abandoned it for good.

Even though she had established her new home just across
the street, she’d had no desire to go back to her old home. She had
reasoned that there was nothing there worth going back for. Her
memories of those times, hard as they were, now formed the basis
for her to find the will to struggle through each day. And struggle
she had.

There had been a constant stream of worries the entire
sojourn, but there were two things that had pulled her through, the
bubble of senses which she spent every spare moment learning to
hone and perfect, and the memories of her loving parents.

As she stepped gingerly through the debris-strewn
hallway, the cold grimy water squashing under her soles and
between her toes, she felt her heart beginning to pound in fear of
what she might find in the remains of her old life.

In truth, Catelyn wasn’t sure what had driven her here on
this day. There was nothing she needed, but when she woke, and
realized that it had been one sojourn to the day since the horror of
her new life had begun, she felt it was somehow appropriate to
revisit the site of her rebirth.

She crossed the threshold from the hallway into the open
room that had been the entryway to her family’s hovel. This was
the place where her family had been murdered, right before her
eyes. The last thing she had ever seen. The thing she saw most
every night in her nightmares.

She was no longer swept away by her emotions. Her
almost nightly reliving of the encounter had numbed her to the
pain she had felt. It had been the only way for her to survive. So
she swept her bubble across the place on the floor where she had
witnessed their deaths, and moved on, ignoring the subtle tang of
blood seeped into the floor and taking in the once familiar
environment in a completely new way.

It was difficult, even with the refined nature of her bubble
now, to recognize the place she had once called home. The same
shelves, the same furniture; it was all here as she remembered
them being, not even having been picked clean by scavengers,
which Catelyn found odd. She had expected to find nothing but
empty rooms, empty like the hole inside her, like the discarded
shell of an old life.

But as she slowly moved deeper into the room, she could
tell that nothing had happened to change this place in the
intervening spans since she had left it. She reached out with her
fingertips and spread them around her, a trick she had learned to
be able to read the objects on the ground and nearby.

There, a rusted pot turned upside down, the remains of
the meal her father had been preparing that morning rotting
beneath it. There, a splintered shaft of wood, the remains of the
front door that had been broken in. All around her, memories of
her family lay strewn, buried in the ashes of the past.

She let her bubble fade somewhat, and walked to the other
room, where her family had slept. In one corner was a stacked pair
of mattresses, the bed where her parents had slept each night, now
smelling like rot and time. In the other corner, a pile of blankets
pushed together just like she remembered. It had been her bed
once; it was now, according to the smell, a nest for mice or rats.

She idly wondered if she should pry up the creaky
floorboard along one side of the room and dig out the dozen or so
books that were hidden there, but Catelyn knew there would be no
point. Books were never again going to be something she could
enjoy. The loss of that was sometimes the one that she found the
hardest to live with.

She sighed, wondering what exactly this visit had
accomplished for her, but the silent tomb of her past gave her no
answers. There was no reason to linger and so Catelyn walked out
of her old bedroom, stepped over the spot where her parents had
bled the last of their life into the floorboards, and out into the
hallway.

Three cycles had come and gone since the meeting with
Silena in the abandoned bank building, Catelyn impatiently
waiting for the Danes to give up on their search and move on as
she couldn’t continue to lay low much longer. Her rations would
soon be dwindled to the point where she would be forced to find
another mark to supplement her supplies.

Catelyn decided to risk another trip out of her roost, to pay
a visit to Silena in her market stall, and see if the woman had any
news.

Much to her dismay, Silena informed her that the Danes
showed no sign of giving up their search for her, and if anything
were more serious than ever about their efforts to recover the
artifact and find the thief responsible.

Despite the obvious monetary value of the weapon,
Catelyn was actually taken aback to learn that Dane Eyrris was still
searching for her and the weapon, even cycles later. She had not
done an exhaustive study of the man prior to stealing from him,
but she had done enough to learn his routine and the basics of his
life and personality. Nothing she saw during that study led her to
anticipate this level of persistence or for him to hold such sway
over the other Dane’s in continuing their search for her.

According to Silena, it seemed that within that circle,
Catelyn’s exploits at the home of Dane Eyrris had garnered her
some small measure of notoriety, in large part because of her
defiant exit, and the signature she’d left behind. And this final act
was, according to Silena’s sources, what had prompted them to
focus so intently on finding the culprit. A theft they might have
recovered from, but this insult had become a matter of pride, and
they were not going to rest until that stain was erased.

She found herself regretting breaking one of her only rules
she had when it came to the carrying out of her nocturnal
activities. She had let her emotions rule her that night, and it now
had the potential to shine the sun right on her.

Catelyn knew that there would be anger of course, but she
imagined that to be the case with every one of her previous targets
as well. And in every case before this, things had always died down
after a few days or maybe a span or two if the Imperials were
dragged into it.

If she wasn’t prepared for the tenacity with which the
Danes were searching for her, what made things even worse was
the ferocity they had begun using. This latest report, when Silena
recounted it in grisly detail, made Catelyn’s stomach turn to think
of what her actions had wrought.

Dane Eyrris, rather than involve the Imperials who would
no doubt simply round up a few dozen shady characters and hold a
public execution, had decided to take the matter into his own
hands. Such a move was unprecedented, in fact, as it was a direct
indictment of the Empire’s ambivalence. It seemed to Catelyn that
the Dane’s were willing to test the Emperor’s indulgence of their
position, a very dangerous game.

The Danes had never before so openly challenged the
Emperor’s men. Even those closest to the Danes pleaded with
them to stop, knowing full well that the Emperor would not
discriminate if it ever came to open conflict between the Empire
and the Danes. The Emperor encouraged some amount of personal
responsibility for each citizen of the Seat in carrying out justice,
but the Danes were getting dangerously close to committing
treasonous acts.

Silena had been receiving reports of the Dane’s efforts only
in pieces of scattered rumors, but as they escalated further and
further, she began to hear more substantiated reports, until finally
one of her contacts passed on details from someone within the
circle itself. Silena then told Catelyn every detail she had learned
on their latest visit at her stall.

Eyrris and his two closest friends within the Sado-Sexual
Elite, Dane Callum and Dane Elger, had taken great pains to
gather and hire large gangs of men, and they had spent the past
several spans wandering the streets, shaking down fences and
black marketeers looking for information about sellers with
unusual or unique items in their possession. When they learned of
one, they would kidnap the person for interrogation.

When that had proved fruitless, they began simply
harassing small individuals, even going so far as to grab them right
off the street, especially those who they found not wearing shoes.
Shoes were a luxury for many Seat dwellers, so there was no
shortage of poor and homeless individuals without footwear in the
streets and alleyways of the Seat.

From what Silena’s informant had told her, each member
of this press gang carried with them an etching made by an artist
of the actual footprint that had been left behind by the perpetrator,
along with a sheaf of blank pages. When they located a small
enough person, particularly one with small enough feet, the gang
would hold them down, slice open their feet with ragged, rusted
blades, smear the blood across the surface of their sole and press it
against one of the blank sheets, in order to compare the size and
shape of the prints. If the prints didn’t match, they would simply
leave their victim bleeding in the streets.