Bloodfire (The Sojourns of Rebirth) (25 page)

Catelyn sat on a rooftop, twirling her lucky ring with one
hand, and chewing lightly on her lower lip as she thought deeply
about her problems. This night, her problem seemed
insurmountable. She had been in Brunley for less than a span, and
she hated it already.

Marko had tried to warn her, and she should have
listened. She hadn’t been able to conceive of anything that could
have been worse than what she had experienced in the Seat. But
she now understood the depths of both her own ignorance and her
arrogance; the conditions in the Seat, as bad as they seemed were
downright luxurious compared to the squalor of Brunley.

The first warning to her of the grim reality of the situation
should have been the smell. Even before she had exited out of the
Channel and walked into the town proper, she had picked up the
wafting stench in the air. Catelyn could describe it no other way
than to acknowledge that Brunley smelled as though it were a
massive bloated carcass afloat in a sea of human filth.

Before she had even reached the city gate, she had taken a
cloth from her pack and wrapped it around her nose and mouth,
lest she become violently ill.

She focused her bubble as she had neared the exterior gate
leading into the city, and sensed no one guarding the entrance to
the city. In fact, as she expanded her bubble outward from herself,
she realized that she could sense no one at all. With some strain,
she could hear what sounded like scavenging dogs coming from
the bowels of nearby alleys, but no talking, no breathing, and no
movement to indicate the presence of a single human being in
range of her expanded bubble.

As she had crossed under an archway into the city itself,
she was especially careful about where she stepped. Given the
smells that assaulted her nose, she could only imagine what
composed the slickness on the stones under her feet. She honestly
didn’t want to know, and she immediately wished that she could
bathe. She made a promise to herself that as soon as she found a
livable space, she would begin looking for the components she
would need to replicate the water-heating and cleansing system
she had constructed at her previous roost. But her hopes of being
able to find anything like that seemed to be slim, and she
immediately questioned whether she had just made a huge
mistake.

In the meantime, she would have to improvise something,
because she couldn’t imagine waiting a span or maybe more to
have a proper bath.

She’d had a harder time than normal making her way into
Brunley, without her sense of smell to aid her, and she was forced
to proceed slowly and carefully. It was two prayers, with Catelyn
methodically picking her way down deserted streets before she
heard her first human voice. She followed the voice cautiously, and
at a distance, hopeful that it was a sign of habitation.

She would need to find the center of the city’s population
to ply her trade.
The voices grew more numerous with each step, and
Catelyn allowed herself to hope. Finally she stepped upon
smoother, more polished flagstones and stopped, expanding her
bubble to take in every detail, even the rancorous smells of the
corrupted air.
From the information that she gathered from her senses,
she seemed to be standing at the edge of some kind of bazaar. She
heard quiet voices mumbling, passing near to her and whispering
almost inaudible curses and invocations of protection to the
Divines. Behind and beneath the multitude of voices, she heard the
sound of currency being exchanged. The clink of coins caught her
attention, but what held it was hearing how little of it there was.
Even through the thick cloth covering her face, she could
smell the scents of cooking meats, and spices that she rarely
caught the scent of back in the Seat. Some she couldn’t recognize
at all. Though mixed in with the other smells around her, it did not
make her mouth water, but rather the odors sent waves of
revulsion shuddering through her.
She could sense the passers-by watching her, whispering
about her to one another.
“Strange girl,” they called her.
“Barefoot in the filth,” they mocked.
“Afraid to show her face, must be horribly disfigured.”
Catelyn wasn’t surprised to overhear those
misconceptions. She’d been dismissed the same way for sojourns,
and it never bothered her anymore.
But she knew that she stood out, so she quickly picked a
path across the bazaar, feeling the other people step back at her
approach, until she found herself in the alley opposite where she
had originally entered the square. Then, she expanded her bubble
wide and set about assessing the city’s prospects for
accommodation.
By the end of that first day, Catelyn’s hopes were already
dwindling. As she felt the temperature drop, and listened as the
citizens of Brunley returned to their homes, Catelyn felt a wave of
memories wash over her of her first night alone in the Seat.
No home.
No safety.
No hope.
She did manage to find an abandoned building that was
still standing, and that had rooftop access, so she climbed up to
assess the situation. What she found, as she scanned the area with
her bubble, was not promising.
Most residents of Brunley seemed to live in makeshift
tents on the street, or if they were lucky, they had built themselves
a shack made of four walls and a ceiling. She had been living in
relative poverty for sojourns, but even her worst days and nights
were nothing compared to the abject misery of the entire
population of Brunley. The Seat at least had held a wide range of
differing lifestyles. Catelyn had believed herself poor before
coming to Brunley. She now saw just how fortunate she had been.
Catelyn was not going to take up residence in the tent
cities lining every street, and so she set about scouting for a
building to squat in until she figured out what her longer term plan
was. Her initial survey of the surrounding structures was as bad as
she predicted.
The buildings were abandoned for good reason.
In numerous spots, the structures were coming apart, a
combination of neglect and erosion by the elements. She could
smell charred wood and melted iron in numerous places, evidence
of the Empire’s punishments for past transgressions. And
everywhere, the smell of death and decay.
No wonder these people live in the streets
, she thought.
Her first two days and nights in Brunley had been some of
the worst of her life, and that was saying a lot. She had been forced
to eat through more of her rations than she wanted to, and to sleep
for only a few prayers at a time, keenly keeping her senses trained
for the gangs of scavengers that plagued the city at night.
She had needed sixteen prayers over those first two days
to locate an abandoned building with even half of the right criteria
she had laid out for her new “home”. The place she had settled on
was, at least in principle, well suited to her purposes. It mostly
kept in the heat, but the roof had a number of leaks which kept the
floor perpetually damp and the air smelling of mold and rotting
wood. Still, it didn’t smell as though a dozen people had died in the
hallways, and she could enter and exit through a hole in the roof,
the result of metal rooftop air vent collapsing through the
structure after heavy rains had softened the roofing material.
Catelyn’s sense of smell had finally adjusted to the
overwhelming scents by the evening of that first day, allowing her
to remove her face covering at times which, outwardly at least,
helped her feel more normal. Though judging from the sense she
now had of the people of Brunley, she needn’t have worried about
trying to fit in.
The people, outside of the gangs of scavengers, seemed
quite content to keep to themselves and ignored anyone or
anything that wasn’t directly in their way. The people of Brunley,
she could now say with confidence, had been the victims of longterm, absolute neglect. Worst of all for her, the people of Brunley
were also universally dirt poor.
Although the city seemed suitable, in fact almost perfect,
for someone like her to hide in, it was not the type of place where
she would be able to survive via the trade that she had grown
accustomed to.
She had gone out, those first two nights after finding her
new living space, to explore the neighborhoods around her
building, only to find her observations of the past several days
confirmed: these people had even less than she did. She had only
taken the barest of necessities with her from the Seat, but that had
included the seventeen silver marks and about half a dozen
coppers she had accumulated from before any of this trouble had
started. It represented every coin she had saved throughout her
spans of thieving, the safety net she had set aside if things ever
went wrong and she needed to flee.
The coin also served another purpose; one that she could
only dream of being a reality, but which she still clung to and that
was her hope that she could earn enough to make her way to the
gate at Belkyn and bribe her way past the gates and out into the
larger world. Outside the Empire. She realized that might be a
fool’s hope, but there were rumors that some had done this. Had
earned enough coin to escape the Seat for good. But Catelyn idly
wondered if those were simply tall tales told by the residents of the
Seat, to titillate and entice others.
Either way, her purse contained a comfortable sum of
money even by the Seat’s standards, but she felt positively flush
with wealth here.
And therein lay one of her first major hurdles in adapting
to her new life here. She realized on her first excursion to the
bazaar during daylight prayers that carrying even a single silver
would mark her as a target for other thieves, as she seemed to be
one of the wealthiest people in the area. She was already going to
stand out just by being new to the area, because she quickly
learned that no one ever came to Brunley voluntarily.
She was already being whispered about; the strange blind
girl wandering into Brunley for some unknown reason. So far the
whispers were mostly close to the truth, specifically rumors about
what crime she may have committed in the Seat to be forced to flee
to this place. But if her mere presence was enough to cause such
scandal in this place, then spending her coin here would call
attention to her in ways she was not comfortable with, and so she
kept her purse tightly tucked away in a pouch behind her belt.
She considered not settling here, and continuing to
wander deeper into Brunley, but she could guess that the southern
side of Brunley was at least this bad, and she imagined that it
might in fact be worse, given what she was hearing from the little
gossip she overheard in those first days. The further that one
traveled south, the more that the Dun Marsh encroached on the
city, turning it into a morass of city streets submerged beneath
stinking swamp water.
By her third failed attempt to find anyone else in Brunley
who was not poorer than her, she reached the conclusion that she
had in fact made a huge mistake. The problem for Catelyn now was
simply that she had nowhere else to go, and so she had climbed to
the rooftops to mull over what she was going to do next.
She squatted on her heels, with her arms wrapped around
her knees and her head tucked between them, trying to decide
what to do. She knew only one thing for certain, which was that
she would not be able to return to the Seat.
The Imperial soldier that had seen her leaving the Dane’s
estate with Elexia and Sera would surely have reported seeing her
by now, and she imagined posters with her likeness up all over the
Seat. Although the Emperor had the reputation of taking a broad
approach to punishing transgressions, Catelyn knew that, first
because of her involvement with the Danes and now with the
Imperial soldier who may have identified her, it was very possible
that they would see her individually as a threat. Not of what she
could do to them, which was quite literally nothing, but of what
she might represent. And she wasn’t willing to take the chance.
She had always sworn to herself that if she were ever threatened
like this, she would have a contingency plan. And this had been it:
to ignite her roost and flee to the south. She was just beginning to
realize, embarrassingly and painfully, how thoughtless and naive
her plan had been.

Uriel grabbed a hold of the collar of one of the servants
standing before him, pulled the dark-skinned man closer to him
and with all of his strength he shoved, pitching him forward, out
into space.

The servant, some nameless southerner, a native of the
Chalk Isles no doubt, flailed its arms and moved its mouth silently
as it fell the twenty stories to the flagstones below. It eventually hit
the ground with a wet smack Uriel could hear all the way up on the
balcony, where he stood looking over the edge of the Citadel’s
roofline.

He turned on another of his nameless servants, who tried
desperately to mouth a protest, but it was unable to vocalize a
thing with its tongue and vocal cords freshly cut from its throat
earlier that morning. Its lower face was caked in dried blood, and
the eyes, dark and cow-like, pleaded with him for mercy. This one
had pale northern skin, likely one of the children of the prisoners
his father had taken in his victorious campaign against Pyrus.
Uriel punched the useless creature in the gut, then pulled it up by
its blood soaked tunic and flung it out to join the other servants on
the stones below.

Uriel was half tempted to pitch Enaz from the roof as well,
for his failure to locate the source of the humming that he had
heard earlier. Even now, the song continued, like a dull sound
reverberating around him as though a shade haunted him, just like
in the tales his nursemaid used to tell him when he was a small
boy. Uriel knew better than to believe in such superstitious
nonsense, but his lack of belief did not stop the melody from
plaguing his mind.