Bloodfire (The Sojourns of Rebirth) (30 page)

“Dane...Callum...requested...that special.”
“Yes, the question is, where did you acquire the girls?
Were they illegal?”
Ortis knew, as did everyone above a certain rank in the
Empire, that although there were very strict regulations against
unapproved childbirth, enforcement of such laws had slackened in
the past dozen sojourns. And there had been an increasing number
of illegal births, a secret which was kept tightly controlled by the
Empire, but not so secret in certain circles, such as the flesh
peddlers. But Ortis was surprised when the man Kenrick shook his
head in denial.
“No. Girls were..legal. Chosen. Father...owed me...favors.”
Ortis was even more driven to find them now.
“Where?” was all Ortis asked.
When Kenrick had finished telling him the location, Ortis
squeezed the man’s neck and considered once again snapping the
man’s neck, or crushing his windpipe. But Ortis knew if he did so,
another piece of scum would rise to take his place within the span.
He decided to try something he would never have thought to do
before.
“Kenrick, I’m going to let you live, on one condition. Listen
very carefully. You’re going to give up the flesh trade. Do you
understand? Any of the children you have in your possession, you
will send them to the nearest priory to be placed with the next
batch of chosen parents. Am I clear?”
Kenrick nodded his head, a little too eagerly if Ortis was
honest with himself. He had no illusions that the man would obey,
and would likely renege on his word as soon as Ortis was gone, but
for some reason he felt compelled to offer the man this one chance.
“If you do not abide by this condition, I will return. I will
find you. I will end you. Am I clear.”
“Yes….Bennet.”
Ortis released the man, who slumped to the ground like a
rag doll gasping for breath, and strode with newfound purpose out
of the dark alley and toward his next destination.

Catelyn squatted on the roof, catching her breath and
wiping the sweat from her forehead with the back of her forearm.
With the other hand, she reached down and gripped the lucky ring
she wore around her left middle toe, and spun it, around, and
around. She had sprinted the last several dozen paces through the
Brunley Channel, eager to be out of the canyon of industrial
buildings and back to familiar ground. And yet, as she felt the
ever-present heat in the air that indicated she was back home, she
wondered whether she was making yet another mistake by
returning to the Seat.

Her life over the past several spans had seemed to have
been one mistake after another, and the cost of some of those
mistakes had been catastrophic.

She thought about the victims of the Danes, an unknown
number of nameless, faceless people who had been horribly
stalked and mutilated in their search for her. She laid some of their
suffering at her feet.

She thought about the unknown number of dead citizens
caught in the Purge, sent by the Emperor to quell the Danes for
their defiance.

And she even thought about Jaff, the spike of metal she
herself had driven into his brain. In truth, since that night, she
hadn’t thought at all about the man, or about the promise that
she’d made to herself and to the ghosts of her parents, and broken,
never to kill another person. Thinking on it now, she supposed
that she should feel anguish at taking his life, should feel a sense of
guilt over having to break her promise to the memory of her
parents. But if she were being honest with herself, Catelyn was
shocked to discover that she felt neither of those things.

Catelyn realized that in that situation, Jaff had taken all
other choices from her. And she had done what she had needed to
do; the only thing that she could have done, to safeguard Sera,
Elexia and herself. In measuring the life of one man, particularly
that of a man who had expressed no respect or remorse for his
desire to inflict suffering on others, against the lives of two
innocent girls, whose only crimes had been to have been born in
the Seat, and to have had uncaring, despicable human beings for
parents. It had not even been a choice, and given everything,
Catelyn would make the same choice again.

Her other transgressions were not so easily justified,
however, and she did feel a weight of responsibility for the lives
she had impacted through her thoughtlessness in stealing the
weapon from the Danes. And yet, Catelyn did not think that her
choices there had been any clearer.

If she had simply left the weapon in their possession, if she
had turned away and left the Danes alone, it would not have
changed who they were. In fact, Catelyn actually wondered if she
hadn’t in fact saved lives through her actions. Judging from the
body of the person she had discovered in her infiltration that
night, it was common practice for the Danes to dispose of any of
their “toys” when they were finished with them. Catelyn wondered
how many times the Danes had forgone their own entertainments
in the spans when they had been looking for her. Had her
distraction led to fewer victims, in the end?

These were questions that likely had no answers, but she
thought about them nonetheless. She had a natural curiosity that
compelled her to analyze thoughts like this, even if they sometimes
ended up in the same place where she started.

She stood up and expanded her bubble, stretching up on
her toes to keep her legs from tightening and cramping while
taking in the south side of the Seat. It was just after midday, and
she felt more exposed than she was usually comfortable with, but
the building she stood on was a tall warehouse high above street
level. She could hear and sense the few workers who still moved
goods in and out of the warehouse, milling around below her.
Every sojourn, there seemed to be fewer and fewer people to do
the necessary things needed to keep the Seat alive. Catelyn idly
wondered if the Emperor was simply trying to slowly kill off the
entire population of the city.

The first thing Catelyn needed to do if she was going to
proceed, was to ascertain the threat level. She would need to get
down closer to street level, make her way towards either a
marketplace or one of the more populated neighborhoods, and
listen. She needed to know how bad her situation was, how hard
the Empire was looking for her.

Catelyn bent over, grabbed the edge of the roof, and spun
her body out into space. She always loved the sensation of falling
she experienced when she did this, and she maintained her grip on
the roof with her strong hands and used that iron grip to pull her
body back towards the surface of the warehouse wall. She used her
feet like springs, to cushion the impact of that spin, and then she
planted them flat against the wall and reached out with one arm to
grab the long metal pipe jutting out of the warehouse to her
immediate right. She clambered partway down the wall using the
pipe, until it ended, then she reached out with the fingers and toes
of her left hand and foot, and found a horizontal surface, pulling
herself over to a very small ledge, just barely wide enough to
balance on, her weight resting entirely on her toes.

There was no other surfaces on the warehouse for her to
use to get down, so she pushed off the wall with enough strength to
make it over to the lower roof of an outlying building, landing as
lightly as she could. Her feet hit the roof tiles with almost no
sound, and Catelyn smiled at the exhilaration she felt at being back
in her urban playground as she turned towards where she knew
people would be.

It took the better part of a prayer and a half to get deep
enough into the Seat to recognize exactly where she was, and once
there, she made for one of the plazas where she knew vendors
would be. It was quite common for them to have set up their food
carts to entice the nearby workers to come over and spend what
little coin they had. The smells of cooking meat greeted her as she
lithely balanced along the eaves of the roofs above the vendors,
and her mouth began to water. Catelyn knew that it was likely only
rabbit or squirrel, or even possibly rat or dog, but after having to
subsist for days purely on the dried rations in her pack while she
had been in Brunley, everything smelled appetizing to her right
now.

As she traveled the rooftops of the city, she kept an ear
trained to conversation she overheard on the ground, but so far,
she hadn’t heard a single person talking about the Empire or about
her. It was possible that word hadn’t spread this far south yet, but
it was also just as likely that these people weren’t all that
interested in gossip. The men and women of South Seat, as this
neighborhood was called, were laborers, and probably didn’t have
the time or the interest to stand around and mull over the goingson of the Empire.

While the laborers themselves might not prove useful to
her, she knew that the food vendors were a solid source of news, as
they often came down from the central area of the Seat, and
brought more than their menus along. Everyone in the Seat knew
that if you wanted to hear the latest rumors, you paid an extra
mark or two with your meal, and you would be well informed
before your food had time to digest.

Catelyn considered simply climbing down and walking up
to one of the vendors, and taking her chances by spending one of
her marks for a hot meal. The smells of the variety of foods just
below her were intoxicating. Catelyn had to admit that after her
time spent in Brunley, she wouldn’t look at her situation in the
Seat the same way again. It was true that she had not lived a
comfortable life, and had endured much, but after her experiences
in Brunley, she had come to realize that there was in fact a place,
and people, that were much worse off than what she’d known for
most of her life.

Against her better judgment, that brought Duncan back
into her thoughts, and her mind turned to the mystery of how he
was managing to survive despite there being almost no hope, and
even less food and clean water in the area where he had been
living. Catelyn wished, perhaps naively, that she could go back to
ask him. He had seemed healthy and thriving, if a bit skinny,
despite the horrible living conditions there.

That was a mystery she hoped one day to solve, but for
right now she had her own questions which needed answering. She
found a spot along the roof line where she had chosen to stop,
which allowed her to slip into the space between the angled roof of
one building, and the vertical surface of another. She expanded her
bubble and listened as the vendors for the food carts hawked their
wares and chatted, both amongst each other and with their
customers.

She listened intently to numerous conversations at once, a
skill she had spent many cycles over many sojourns perfecting. At
first, Catelyn was surprised to note that the main topic of
conversation on many people’s lips this day was a rather mundane
discussion about the quality of horses. There was some amount of
debate about whether mares or stallions made for a better ride,
and also talk about the temperament of certain breeds, but this
seemed like an unusual line of conversation, since almost everyone
in the Seat was certainly too poor to even see a horse, much less
own one.

She wondered where all the interest in horses was coming
from, when finally, someone clued her in and revealed the reason
why it was on everyone’s lips.

“All’s I’m sayin’ is ‘at if it’s good enough for Uriel his’self,
that’s good enough for me. You’ll see when he comes ridin’
through here. I’ll even lay marks on it,” one of the vendors was
saying.

Catelyn froze at the implication behind those words. If
Uriel himself was riding through the city on horseback, that could
only mean something terrible was happening. If what she’d heard
her entire life was true, Uriel hadn’t left the safety of his Citadel in
dozens of sojourns. She had certainly never seen him as a child,
nor heard of him ever making a public appearance in the sojourns
since she’d lost her sight. He always sent out his soldiers to do his
bidding, and it was even rumored by some of the more gullible
people in the Seat that the Emperor himself was dead, and his
advisers simply kept up a charade.

Catelyn didn’t believe in conspiracies, and this was no
different. She had always figured that he was likely just an old man
by now, frail and unable to move but possibly still commanding his
men from the throne room. But if what these people were saying
was true, then it would seem that the Emperor was not so frail as
she’d believed.

But of even more importance to Catelyn than the surprise
of learning that the Emperor was riding through the Seat, was
trying to guess the reason for this sudden appearance. Perhaps it
was arrogant of her to presume that her situation had angered the
Emperor into taking this matter into his own hands, and yet the
timing of this significant change in the Emperor’s behavior was not
lost on her. She tried to think of all the reasons that he could have
for leaving his Citadel, and realized that it was a pointless exercise.
She retrained her focus on the conversations below her, hoping to
learn more, but none of the vendors or their customers
enlightened her any further.

One other thing did strike Catelyn about their
conversations, however. None of them seemed to be showing any
sign of fear or trepidation about the this sudden appearance by the
Emperor outside the walls of his Citadel in the center of the city
after sojourns of seclusion. Catelyn was taken aback that such a
momentous change was being chatted about as though it were any
other event in the Seat. She would have expected them to fear what
his appearance could signify. She certainly felt her own heart race
at the thought of what he might be planning to do, but these
people remained calm and cool when discussing the man, as
though they had nothing to fear.