Bloodfire (The Sojourns of Rebirth) (17 page)

By the time Ortis arrived in the Emperor’s bed chamber,
Uriel was standing in the middle of the room alone, now dressed in
long flowing robes with his hands clasped behind his back. He
appeared to be silently thinking, considering a problem and
formulating a solution. He had seen the Emperor this way many,
many times over the sojourns. Although Uriel carried himself with
a serene posture, Ortis knew from personal experience that what
looked like calm to an outside observer was really coiled tension.
Only long sojourns standing at this man’s side had given him such
insight into the man’s moods.

He could see from the set of his shoulders that Uriel was
upset, and straining to contain his rage. He almost felt sympathy
for whoever it was that had awakened the ire of this man, and
Ortis knew what he had been sent for.

Ortis, as so often happened, felt a flash of attraction,
seeing the power and the pull of the man he had once shared so
much of himself with. He thought back to the times when he would
see this man standing at the window, just as now, and be able to
encircle the man in his arms and together they would copulate
violently, and then in the aftermath they would discuss what Ortis
was needed to do to bring Uriel the peace that always eluded him.

But Ortis quickly suppressed that feeling, something he
had grown quite skilled at over the past several sojourns. Those
days, Ortis knew, were long since passed. He would never again
know the salty taste of those perfect lips, the strong hands gripping
his loins, as Uriel thrust inside of him.

The Emperor turned and looked at Ortis and the effort he
had been making to suppress his inner rage evaporated. Ortis
withered beneath that icy glare. Uriel was the only person he had
ever met who had been able to have that effect on him.

“Ah, Ortis,” the Emperor managed to say through nearly
gritted teeth. “Good. Let me give you a rare gift.”
And then he had explained what he had needed.
When Uriel was finished, Ortis was sweating, the same
way that he had in their younger days when both of them had been
virile, passionate men, dreaming of their Empire and the things
they must do to claim it.
Now, sojourns later and nearing the end of his life, this gift
from the Emperor sparked something in Ortis that he hadn’t
experienced in a very long time. Flush from the telling, Uriel’s
words echoing in his ears, Ortis felt an even more reverent sense of
worship for the man than he ever had.
He bounded down the stairs like an excited child, his heart
pounding with anticipation, eager for the opportunity to do this
incredible thing for Uriel, the man who had once given all of
himself to share with Ortis.
He walked briskly to the officer’s quarters, found and
gathered the commanders of the army together and gave them his
instructions, stressing that tonight they would be doing the
Emperor’s work. Sacred work. From his lips to their hands.
Ortis grinned with delight as he mounted his destrier and
rode out of the gates of the Imperial Citadel, feeling like nothing
less than the personification of justice itself.

Catelyn lowered herself gently, slowly, quietly from the
roof of the building to the ledge below, feeling along the lip of the
wood beam with her toes, assessing the stability of the structure
before committing herself with her full weight.

Atypical of her usual style of working, she had never been
here before this night, and she couldn’t risk a stray noise, or even
worse, a fall. She not only had to concentrate to make full use of
her bubble in the strange environment, she had to be as stealthy as
possible and fade into the shadows. To ensure herself utmost
secrecy, she had donned her thieves garb. Canvas leggings which
went only to mid-calf, leaving her lower legs and feet free, and a
long sleeve tunic. She had tied her hair back as much as possible,
and wound a dark scarf around her neck and lower face.

All of her clothing was dyed to blend into the night, having
soaked all the articles in a bath of walnut hulls and rusted nails,
followed by a soak in salt water to fix the dye in the fibers. Her
mother had taught Catelyn how to dye clothing as a girl, and
together they would make brightly colored clothing together in
secret, one small way they had of expressing their individuality in
an Empire where the law stated that no bright colors would be
allowed to be seen in public.

She had rubbed the exposed skin on her feet, hands and
face with ash and charcoal from the piles of rubble scattered
everywhere around the roost where she dwelled.

She was by no means invisible she knew, but she certainly
hoped that if anyone happened to spot her, she would force any
observers to have to squint to make out any details about her
identity, or even that she was a living person. She hated going into
a situation without having scouted her target first, as it increased
the chances of someone spotting her and putting her in danger,
but her need was urgent.

Catelyn felt a stab of paranoia as her hand brushed against
her thigh, where she had considered carrying the weapon in its
sheath, but it wasn’t with her. Catelyn had been wanting to bring it
with her more and more, mostly out of a need to know where it
was and that it was safe, but she fought the urge. Even more so,
since she was traveling into the den of the lion tonight, she
restrained those urges and left it securely hidden in her roost.

For what she had planned, she prayed to the Divines that
she would not have need of a weapon.
With both feet gripping the rough hewn wood of the ledge,
she squatted and sat on her haunches, probing the street below
with her bubble. What she heard and smelled from below was
quiet anticipation. It was unusual to say the least, but inwardly she
smiled. This was her element. In trying to guard against any
midnight intrusions, they had given her everything she needed to
make a silent approach.
She expanded her senses and shifted them into the house
she was about to infiltrate, assessing her situation. She heard a mix
of sleepers in the rooms below, and the soft velvet footfalls of
sentries on patrol both inside the house as well as on the street
below. But none on the roof.
Catelyn shook her head in disbelief. Despite all the
evidence she’d left behind at Dane Eyrris’ apartment, they still
hadn’t bothered to place any safeguards to guard against an
intruder from above.
She wondered idly if it was a ruse; a trap to lure her in and
then snap shut like a spring-loaded cage. But after listening for
many breaths, Catelyn determined that no, they simply weren’t
expecting someone to drop in from the roof. She had seen this
before with other targets she had pulled heists on. People always
seemed to reason that entering through an upper floor window
would more likely have been accomplished by a climber from
below. She would have an edge now, at least at the start.
She supposed that they might have been confident that
their security would account for any entry. And they had every
reason to expect that the thief who had stolen from Dane Eyrris
would be much too frightened to come out of hiding, and would
never be bold enough to come after them again. But there was
another factor Catelyn considered as well, mainly that the Dane’s
were almost certainly more concerned with the Empire and the
response that the Sado Sexual Elite were no doubt expecting any
day now.
The truth was, since they had turned away the Empire’s
man and ignored his request that they cease their search, the
Dane’s had much more pressing concerns at the moment than to
anticipate a slip of a girl traipsing around their rooftops.
And that’s exactly why she had chosen to come, so directly
and so unexpectedly.
The open window on the third floor of Dane Callum’s
estate yawned beneath her, and she could feel the heat of the
interior escaping into the cooler night air, carrying the wafting
smells and sounds of the house to her bubble, filling in some small
parts of the mental map of the interior of the estate. The house
beckoned to her, and she answered the call by slipping from the
ledge, legs dangling, and placing her feet and hands delicately, she
crawled spider like along the frame and inside without touching
the glass.
From the window frame, Catelyn dropped silently onto all
fours on the floor of the room she was in, extending her bubble to
all sides, mentally gathering a strategic view of her surroundings.
Within a breath, her bubble informed her that she was in what she
presumed must be a sitting room of some kind. She gleaned this
from the smell of leather furniture and tobacco, as well as the
lacquered and polished floor tiles she felt underfoot. The room was
walled on three sides, with the fourth being partially walled with
an open archway in lieu of a door. Catelyn felt exposed and
searched for a place of safety, and sighed in relief when she
detected the distinct shifting airflow of heavy wood beams near the
arched ceiling.
She sensed a desk a few paces away, and heard the barest
rustle of sheaves of papers as the heat of the house was pulled
toward the window, disturbing a small pile on the corner of the
desk. She admitted to being curious about what the papers might
be, and what information they might contain, but she couldn’t
afford the delay or the noise it would surely make to collect them
this time. Extending her senses outward, along the floor she was
on, she could sense four sleepers and three alert guards in nearby
rooms. She silently crept to the wall and crouched, reaching out to
snuff a candle that she could hear guttering on the table beside the
wall.
With the flame extinguished, she moved lightly on the
balls of her feet, sprung toward the wall, and then pushed off
against it, using her momentum to propel her to the wooden
beams she had sensed above her head. She pulled herself up and
over one, gripping the heavy thick oak with her arms and legs,
waiting.
Within a few whispers, she heard one of the floor guards
stumble slightly as he entered the room, clearly expecting the
room to be lit with the candle that Catelyn had snuffed in the
corner of the room. She smelled his nervous energy, but he wasn’t
alerted as much as he was surprised by the darkness, and after
recovering and adapting to the dim light in the room, he cursed the
wind from the open window and walked to the candle, intending to
relight it with a flint in his pocket.
When the guard passed below her, she tensed, waiting for
him to spot her clinging to the ceiling beam, but he simply walked
on, rummaged in his pockets for his portable torch and relit the
candle. Catelyn froze, knowing that she was now completely
exposed, if the guard decided to turn around and look up, but he
didn’t. He started whispering to himself, some sort of hymn it
sounded like, and then proceeded to exit the room and resume his
patrol elsewhere. Catelyn waited for several breaths after he left,
then eased herself over the beam and down onto the floor.
She lightly stepped to the archway leading out to the
hallway, pressed her upper body to the wall and extended her
bubble. She could not sense anyone else patrolling on this floor in
the hall, but she still heard the sleepers, all occupying rooms to
her left. One of them was alone, snoring lightly in the room just
one down from where she stood, while the sounds of three
slumbering individuals emanated from the room two doors down
on the right.
She didn’t need to guess which room housed the Dane.
Even the threat of an imminent encounter with Imperial forces for
their open defiance of orders from the Emperor himself had not
seemed to dampen the appetites of the Sado-Sexual Elite.
Catelyn stood at the threshold into the hall, listening to the
sounds of the three guards she could sense who were still active.
She heard the one whom she had encountered patrolling, another
sat seemingly bored and half asleep in a chair at the top of the
stairs at the end of the hall, and the last was standing sentry near
the balcony entrance.
Catelyn had already made the decision before arriving that
she would not touch the guards. Not only was she pessimistic
about her ability to last very long if it came down to a physical
confrontation with trained guardsmen, but she wished more than
anything to make this night go as fast and as smoothly as it was
possible for her to pull off. That would be more likely if she
avoided confrontations. She stood up straight and tall and stepped
into the hallway with her back to the wall, feeling the shift in
temperature as the airflow changed, and listening sharply for the
patrolling guard as she edged along slowly towards her goal.
Expanding her bubble along the hallway, first to one side,
then the other, she discovered that the patrolling guard was
approaching his task halfheartedly, leaving large sections of the
upstairs unwatched, which was perfect for her needs, but rather
surprising given the circumstances. Her hackles raised, and she
wondered again if this was some sort of lure to draw her in, or if
perhaps she’d ended up in the wrong chamber somehow.
Why are there no guards here
? she thought.
Why is there
no one close to the man they’re supposed to be guarding?
Catelyn’s review of her senses seemed to confirm that she
was in the right section, at least as far as her analysis of the
building’s floor-plan had detected, and her curiosity was piqued.
The part of her that reveled in being a thief urged her to discover if
perhaps there was some other reason that the guards were
watching an area of the house away from the owner. But the other
part of her, the pragmatic side, the one which reminded her so
much of her cautious father won out, reminding her of the reason
she had come here.
She was here to protect the innocent residents of the Seat
who would be caught up in an Imperial Purge, which would be the
inevitable outcome if she couldn’t convince the Danes to back
down. She wondered if this plan of hers wasn’t the craziest thing
that she’d ever attempted. She wondered if it wasn’t going to cost
her life, but as she considered all of the alternatives, she realized
that there was a method behind her madness.
She knew that approaching Dane Eyrris would only have
had one result; he would have Catelyn killed on sight. But Catelyn
had done some sniffing around of her own the past few spans
while she had been laying low, and she had learned that Dane
Callum had a reputation as being level-headed. A monster, yes, but
not an unreasonable one, or so her sources told her. She didn’t
honestly know how much to hope that she could persuade him to
change the collision course they were on, but it was the best and
only hope she had. She had no choice but to try.
Catelyn wasn’t sure that she could live with the
consequences if she didn’t. The Empire would see to that.
Catelyn’s only direct experience with the Empire had been
fleeting, since her brief exchange with the Imperial officer on the
day that she had been abandoned twice. First by the murder of her
parents, then a second time by the Imperial officer leaving her to
die amidst the filth and detritus of the Seat.
She remembered the tales her parents had told, and the
history of the early days of the Empire as detailed in the pages of
the books she had surreptitiously read in her younger sojourns.
And she had heard the tales in the streets growing up, both before
and after her tragic rebirth. She had overheard tales of cruelty and
malice, had been forced to listen to the keening moans of loved
ones who had lost someone to the Empire’s special attention.
And even more memorable, she had been an unwilling
witness to the sound and fury of the Emperor’s last major Purge,
as they were called when she was thirteen.
She would never forget the smell of cooking flesh and
charred timbers, and the tortured screams of men, women and
children as they were burned alive in their homes, barricaded from
the outside by Imperial soldiers for no crime other than living in
proximity to someone who had broken the law or defied the
Empire in some way.
It was widely rumored that in his early sojourns,
sometimes the Emperor enacted a Purge for no other reason than
to simply to sate his own desire to cause mass death and
destruction, and to remind the residents of the Seat that he could.
Catelyn felt her face flush with rage at the thought of that
level of injustice, and she often wondered why more people didn’t
stand up against the man and his army. Of course that army held a
distinct advantage in power, but the people, if they could ever
band together, would outnumber the Imperial army at least ten to
one.
She smirked at the irony that there was a part of her which
actually sided with the Dane’s in their stubbornness to rebel
against the Emperor’s command, but she knew that despite their
obstinance, their short-sightedness was never going to win out
against a force the likes of the Empire.
Catelyn knew she wasn’t the type of person to lead such a
rebellion, either. In fact she wished for nothing more than to
simply run away, out of the Seat and away from this life, but she
believed that was impossible. She could always travel to the
outlying cities such as Brunley or Belkyn of course, but no matter
where she went in the Empire, she knew that she would still be
penned in behind the Walls. True escape was impossible.
As much as she thought about the acts that would be done
to the people of the Seat in another Purge, she also knew that it
would be done as a result of her actions. Not directly, of course;
the Empire didn’t even know she existed, much less that it had
been her actions which had begun all of this. To them, she was
simply another one of the thousands of urchins and pieces of
flotsam in a sea of unimportant faces. They had no way to know
that her theft had sparked the Danes to go on their own spree of
victimizing the Seat, which in turn had prompted the Imperial
response. It all lead back to her one act, and she found that she
was not willing to live with that on her conscience.
If I’d simply left the weapon where it had been, in the
clutches of that madman Eyrris, then none of the rest would have
followed.
As soon as she thought this though, she knew that it was
foolish to try and take back her actions of the past. And just as
foolish to hold herself responsible for the actions of criminals. She
may have thrown a spark onto the pyre, but the Danes had done all
the work of fanning the flames.
Still, Catelyn did see an opportunity to reverse the course
by exerting some pressure of her own on the Danes. And it was her
hope of this outcome, however slight such a chance might be, that
turned her back toward the hallway and toward the sleeping Dane
and his guests.
As she padded silently along the hall to the door of the
room where she presumed he slept, she tried to work out what she
might offer the Dane to relent and speak to Eyrris about giving up
his foolish hunt and defiance of the Emperor. She was clearly not
going to return the weapon, which she was sure would be a
significant factor in any offer from Callum, but she had to be
prepared to have something she could use to trade for his
cooperation.
Catelyn felt a stab of fear when the thought crossed her
mind that perhaps Dane Callum might suggest that she herself was
worth trading, which in turn brought up many of Catelyn’s
unresolved feelings about the things her mother had been forced
to do to survive. No matter what happened here tonight, Catelyn
knew that she would never let that happen, because of a promise
that she had once made to her mother.