Bloodfire (The Sojourns of Rebirth) (27 page)

Catelyn sprang freely from rooftop to rooftop, scuffing her
bare toes on the shards of gravel and tar as she launched herself
over the warrens and alleyways of Brunley. Catelyn had wanted to
get away from the streets for a time, to feel somewhat normal once
more, or at least what passed for normal since leaving the Seat.

However, that meant scant little to Catelyn at the moment,
vaulting over roofs in broad daylight. Even though she was dressed
appropriately, with full head coverings to hide her hair and face,
Catelyn knew she was risking a lot by traveling via rooftops in the
daytime, but she refused to wait another day before looking into
the possibility of escaping via the Dun Marsh or the cliffs of the
southern wall of Brunley.

She probed the edges of her bubble, sniffing for the
highest concentration of rank water to guide her southeast towards
where the Dun Marsh encroached into the city.

She wasn’t sure what she would find, and she did not dare
to hope that her escape would be as easy as finding a crack in the
massive Wall that she could squeeze through. Still, she had to try
to ascertain how the water was getting into the city, because if
water could get in, then it stood to reason that there was a way for
the water to get out. She was beginning to taste hope and she
wanted her freedom.

Catelyn felt as though she were rushing, and willed herself
to tread carefully. She knew from painful experience what rushing
in could cost her. She didn’t wish to pitch herself off of the roof,
and one misstep was all it would take. She couldn’t afford even a
minor injury, like a sprained ankle or a cut, as even the thought of
a delay in her plans was a possibility that she was loath to
contemplate.

Her nose caught a cloud of rank smells on the air and she
focused her bubble on its source. She followed the trail of the
scent, leading south down the alley beneath her and she crept
lithely to the edge of the roof she was on, and hunched there on all
fours, taking in the scene below.

Her senses painted her a picture as vivid as if her eyes still
functioned, and probably even more richly detailed that most
people with sight, or so she liked to think. The alley was long
abandoned and flooded by several finger-widths of standing water.
A dripping noise from the building across from where she hunched
suggested either runoff or rain, and the echoing of that noise
bounced off of the ruins of the nearby buildings. The foul water
was part marsh and part sewage.

Although it was empty now, her nose told her that people
had lived here, or at least had excreted her, not that long ago.
She followed along on the edge of the rooftops, tracing the
waterway and the cloud of scent through alleys and along the edge
of the abandoned ruins. The entire neighborhood was deathly
quiet. Not even scavengers subsisted here, whether human or
animal, though she could hear an abundance of insect life. She
expected the briny water to attract all manner of bugs to feast, but
even she was unprepared for the sheer volume of buzzing, clicking
and chirping from the seemingly thousands of species nearby.
Upon realizing this, Catelyn shivered in revulsion. Bugs
were far from her favorite things.
Turning from her thoughts about the bugs to what she was
doing physically, she focused on the scents around and below her.
Beneath the two main smells of marsh water and human waste, a
third distinctive smell began to clutch at her insides.
It was a smell Catelyn knew well, though she wished
plainly that she didn’t. It was the unmistakable smell of rotting
flesh, no doubt bloated from both the water and exposure to the
air. And at this distance down to the water, she guessed that there
must be a large number of dead if she were able to pull that smell
from beneath the rank cocktail that was already polluting the air
and filling her nostrils.
For all she knew, the whole area was nothing but a watery
graveyard.
All the more reason for me to be gone as soon as possible
,
she thought.
From her bubble, she gleaned that this alley ended at the
Wall, for the drips of water could be heard echoing back to her
from just a short distance away, maybe twenty paces. Catelyn
sensed her path to it, then leapt from the roofs down to the alley
below. Immediately, Catelyn began to retch.
The smell at ground level hit her like a hammer smashing
into her face. As her feet landed in the cold water, splashing water
from the flooded alley created blossoms of stench which floated up
from the ground to assault her. Catelyn covered her nose and
mouth with both hands, willing her body to adapt, to acclimate to
her environment before it made her physically ill.
It took longer than usual, with her bent over and trying
not to make any sudden moves, but finally her nose got used to the
stench. Even so, the mingling scents were so powerful that she
couldn’t get an accurate sense of where or what the bodies were.
She lowered her hands, which she had instinctively raised to
protect herself from the assault on her senses. She would need
them for this next part, and she was not looking forward to it.
She crouched down on all fours setting her legs into a wide
stance with feet outstretched, and put her hands into the water in
front of her, settling into a stance resembling a crab. She felt the
surface of the ground below the water’s surface under her fingers
and toes; it was stone, worn smooth and expertly interlocked with
large flagstones.
The water was, as she had noted from above, about five
finger-widths deep, enough to cover the tops of her feet and chill
the tips of her fingers and toes. Catelyn moved forward slowly and
cautiously towards the wall, following her ears and using her
hands and feet to sweep to either side of her, clearing a path. She
could sense rough shapes around her, but in this environment with
the smell overpowering her, she was finding it hard to do more
than get a vague sense of her immediate surroundings, nor did she
work overly hard to gain a clearer mental image of the area.
Whenever a hand or foot brushed against something solid,
she withdrew it and edged past it, trying hard not to think about
what it was.
Crab-walking her way to the wall was both exhausting and
time consuming. And Catelyn felt herself beginning to flag from
fatigue not long after beginning. It didn’t help that she hadn’t slept
solidly since she had arrived in Brunley. She fought back a yawn,
and refocused on what she needed to do.
Catelyn lost track of how long it took to cross the
waterlogged alleyway to the Wall, but it felt like several prayers.
Despite feeling partly blinded by the pervasive stench, she
managed to cross the distance without more than a few panicked
moments as her fingers or toes brushed against something slimy
and wet.
When her hand finally contacted the stone surface of the
Wall, she let out a breath she hadn’t even been aware she had been
holding.
She pressed her hand flat against the Wall and focused her
bubble right in front of her. She could smell, even through the
putrification, the dank odor of mold on stone and the tang of
rusted metal, iron to be precise. She could almost taste the
moisture as she inhaled, buried deep in the stone and in the air all
around her. But it confirmed what she had suspected, that water
had been seeping into the Wall, and had been for some time.
She stood up and ran both hands along the Wall, assessing
its construction. Like the other sections of the Wall that she had
felt before in the Seat, it was made of smooth, worn stone slabs,
held together by thick iron columns. They were fused together by
some process Catelyn was unaware of, but none of the books she
had read as a child had covered topics about construction
techniques.
She didn’t focus on how it was built, beyond trying to
determine if it contained an obvious weakness that she could
exploit.
Unfortunately, as Catelyn ran her hands across the
surface, feeling the various joints and the Wall itself, that did not
appear to be the case. Catelyn spent another prayer walking along
the edge of the Wall, her hands feeling for cracks or seams that
would indicate a weak point or evidence of stress, and her feet
continuing to sweep the ground for bodies or worse. She found
nothing remarkable, but Catelyn knew that water from the Dun
Marsh was coming into the city to pool here at her feet, and
seeping into the Wall under her hands.
She couldn’t figure out how, though. Getting out this way
would be impossible, she determined. However the water was
getting through, it was not going to provide her with a way out.
Catelyn spent another half prayer getting back out, and
she was relieved when she felt the solid walls of the building she
had used to get down to the street level, and was able to climb back
up to the rooftops where the air was less cloying. She was also glad
to be getting her feet out of the water and away from the floating
bodies.
The day was already half over by the time she made her
way back to the center of Brunley, and briefly considered returning
to her room in the abandoned building and resting, but she could
sense that she wouldn’t be able to sleep without finding out the
answers that plagued her. She needed to know what awaited her,
and mentally prepare herself for the possibility that she would
need to return to the Seat before making her way through to
Belkyn.
So she stopped briefly to refresh herself, drank from her
jar of water, and then bounded onto the rooftops, heading south
towards the Wall overlooking the cliffs and the Wystan Sea.
It took Catelyn another prayer and a half before she first
began to sense the change in the air and the sound of roaring
waves that indicated her proximity to the Wall, and the end of the
Empire. She could smell and taste the salt in the air, and although
it was different from what she was accustomed to, it was not
entirely unpleasant. There was something that enticed her about
the experience, and she felt a renewed sense of enthusiasm as she
moved towards her goal.
As in the central part of Brunley, the streets here were
lined sporadically with tents and people living in abject poverty,
and she was forced to travel at ground level for much of the trip,
but she sprang onto the rooftops when it was possible, the
buildings here as abandoned here as they were elsewhere in
Brunley.
When she got within a few dozen paces of the Wall, she
could hear the roaring of the waves echoing off the buildings and
the Wall itself, and she tried to imagine what they looked like in
her head. She’d read about the Wystan Sea in the book about the
Empire, and her parents had told her about the waters
surrounding three sides of the land mass that made up most of the
Empire, what they had called a peninsula.
They had never seen or heard the water, but now here she
was, just a few paces away from the sea, and the rhythmic roaring
from the other side of the Wall filled her with conflicting emotions,
like the waves were washing over the Walls and into her heart.
She experienced exhilaration at first, hearing something so
hypnotic and powerful. But that was quickly replaced with a deep
and painful heartache, at the realization that something so
breathtaking, something so free, was just on the other side of the
massive stone Wall and she would never experience it. To her, and
to all of the people of the Seat, that freedom was lost forever.
This hopelessness was what accompanied her as she
walked the last few dozen paces to the Wall itself, until she felt it
looming up before her, the end of the world as far as she and
everyone else were concerned. She stepped to the Wall, placed her
hand flat upon the surface, and then felt herself collapse in utter
exhaustion and despair.
She pulled the scarf down from her nose and mouth and
sobbed into her open hand, her body convulsing in heart
shattering waves of its own, as she thought of what lay on the other
side of this stone prison, and of all the people who lived in such a
state.
And soon after the despair came the anger. The waves of
anguish ignited something inside her and she fanned those flames
willingly, throwing all of her heat into the effort, and she imagined
the figure of the Emperor in her mind, the shadowy heart of the
evil that had been done to them all.
The Emperor, his kin, his army, and his Empire itself had
systematically beaten every one of its citizens down, until they had
reached the point where they valued nothing.
She pounded a fist on the Wall, feeling the impact travel
up her body, into her sore shoulder and let out a blood-curdling
yell at the stone under her fist that echoed and reverberated away
from her in all directions.
She sat like that for some time, one hand on the wall, one
on the ground by her knees in the muck, panting and sobbing in
turns.
“Are you...are you alright?” a voice spoke softly from
behind her.
Catelyn sprang to her feet, and put her back to the Wall,
her heart hammering in fright. She had been so focused on herself
and her own pain that she hadn’t noticed anything in these last few
moments, and the voice suddenly appearing from behind and near
to where she had been sitting against the wall shocked her.
“Whoa, there, I’m not going to hurt you. I’m alone,” the
voice said softly again, and Catelyn could tell by the timbre and the
tone that the voice belonged to a young man.
Catelyn gathered her wits and snapped her bubble into
place scanning around her quickly, but thoroughly. She could hear
the man, six paces away, standing in the open with arms
outstretched as though reaching out, but she could sense his calm.
She could detect no other people nearby, but she didn’t rule out
the possibility that there were others lying in wait, ready for a
signal from this young man to initiate an attack. Catelyn’s heart
was racing and she frantically worked out an escape route.
“Oh, sorry. I’ve scared you,” the young man said, and
lowered his arms to his sides.
Catelyn was unsure what the man was playing at, but she
wasn’t going to give him anything to work with.
“You wear that blindfold. Are you really blind?” he asked.
Still, Catelyn said nothing, but stalled to buy herself time
determining the best route to get away.
“Oh Divines, how rude of me. Where’s my civility? Let’s try
this again, shall we? My name is Duncan. What’s yours?”
At this change in direction, something about the young
man shifted, and Catelyn focused her bubble on him now, and she
could sense his genuine embarrassment and his utter lack of
deception. Catelyn relaxed slightly, but not completely. She
decided to offer him something, but not what he wanted.
“I’m fine. You did scare me, but I’m feeling better now.”
“Oh.” She could hear his disappointment when she hadn’t
offered her name, but he continued. “I haven’t seen you around
here before.”
Again, Catelyn remained silent, as she still wasn’t sure
how to play this situation. Duncan continued on, as though
nothing at all were unusual about this situation and they were just
two people getting acquainted. Maybe he genuinely felt that way.
“I heard the commotion, so I came over to see what was
happening. But you look fine now, I guess. And I can take the hint.
You’d rather be alone. Sorry for...disturbing you. ” Duncan took a
couple of steps back, but she could smell and hear his
disappointment as he turned away from her.
Against her own judgment, she did something that she
wouldn’t have done before meeting Silena earlier this sojourn. She
reached out a hand, and said “Duncan, wait. I’m sorry. I’m the one
who’s been rude. Thank you for...for checking on me.”
As she spoke, she could hear his heart beat increase, his
smell changed to one of excitement and he replied with genuine
feeling, turning back toward her.
“I’m glad you’re alright. As you might imagine, I don’t get
many...visitors. No one comes this far south,” and as he said these
last words, she could hear the loneliness in his voice.
Catelyn had questions of her own, but started with the
basics.
“Do you live here, Duncan?”
When Catelyn said his name, she sensed something from
him, something she’d never sensed before in someone, and it was
confusing. A combination of satisfaction and...pleasure?
“I do. Lived here for twelve sojourns, since, well, since my
Uncle left for the Seat.”
Catelyn heard an almost imperceptible catch in his voice at
the mention of his uncle, but he expertly hid it. Catelyn could
imagine what “left for the Seat” really meant.
“I see. I...I used to live in the Seat.” Catelyn surprised
herself with the admission, but something about Duncan was
inspiring her to trust this young man, at least a little.