Bloodfire (The Sojourns of Rebirth) (31 page)

Catelyn listened intently to their breathing, their
heartbeats and the tone of their voices, and could detect no traces
of anxiety. Catelyn was stunned by this absence, and could not
comprehend why these people were not running to their homes to
lock and bolt their doors.

Catelyn decided that she needed to gather more
information, and made her way to the nearby town square, an
open air plaza where people often met for one reason or another. It
was also fairly well patrolled with Imperial troops, and she hoped
that maybe listening in on one of the groups of soldiers gathered
there would shed some more light on the situation. She climbed up
to the roof of the building where she had eavesdropped on the
vendors, and padded across the roof tiles, feeling the cool stone
and rough tar under her feet.

She could feel the day slipping quietly toward night, as she
settled into position on top of a building overlooking the plaza
square. That position also placed her within earshot of one of the
guard posts near the plaza, and she strained her bubble to filter
out the other noises and concentrate her senses around the men
standing there.

She got as comfortable as she could, since she knew that it
might be a while before the Imperials gave her anything that she
could work with. As she sat, crouched and focused, she began
feeling the exhaustion setting in now, first from her time in
Brunley with so little sleep, and then from the exertion of her rapid
departure. She fought to keep her eyes open.

Ortis was lost once again, and no amount of trying to
convince himself otherwise would help him this time. His certainty
about his purpose, and the righteousness of his new cause, had
evaporated the moment he had learned about Uriel personally
leading the search effort by the Imperial soldiers now combing the
Seat. For him. Ortis had absolutely no doubt that he was the target
of this quest by Uriel and his men..

Ortis had been covering his tracks and felt some degree of
safety around the investigation he himself had mounted to find the
two girls, but the Emperor was the most persuasive man he had
ever met. Ortis knew it would only be a matter of time until he
found exactly what he was looking for, and then his life would be
over. The prospect of his death mildly saddened Ortis now, a major
change from the ambivalence he had felt just a few short days ago.

But although he had finally discovered something to live
for, he had run out of leads to follow to realize that purpose, and
that was when the Emperor had arrived with six hundred of his
men to conduct a city-wide search. Ortis felt trapped.

Kenrick had led Ortis to be able to locate the father of the
two girls, the man who had sold them to the Danes for some
unknown price, but with the Emperor himself now leading a
manhunt through the streets, Ortis did not think it wise to risk
paying the man a visit, and instead forced himself to go into
hiding.

He was not afraid of those risks, but even he realized that
he would do no good to the girl by allowing himself to be ensnared
by the Emperor and his men, and he was not able to see a future
where that was not inevitable. As he sat in a rickety chair in the
derelict and empty apartment he had been using to sleep in while
conducting his own search for the girl, he tried to plan his next
move but his mind kept circling around to the same frustrating
conclusion.

Even if he managed to get to the twin’s father, he really
had no idea how to proceed from there before the Emperor caught
up to him.

Before the Emperor’s arrival, his path had seemed so
clear. He’d had a singular purpose. But Uriel, as he so often did
just by the sheer nature of his presence, had changed everything.

In a way, he felt some semblance of relief that these events
had transpired. If Ortis reflected on his motives for finding the
twin girls, it was not about finding his thief. He had no certainty
that they would still be together, and indeed if that was his
reasoning, he felt as though he were going about that search
backwards.

While it was true that he longed for nothing less than to
find her again, to see her, to feel again that sense of something…
transcendent, his deeper reason for wanting to find the two young
girls stood out clearly in his mind. He wished to see them safe, to
ensure that they would never be harmed again.

And his reason for tracking down their pathetic excuse for
a father was even more basic. He wished to punish the man for
having betrayed everything he was supposed to be, all for a little
extra coin.

Ortis knew that his own crimes were unforgivable, but if
he were ever to see his thief again, he desperately wanted to wipe
some of his own slate clean, and to be able to tell her that he had
done these things for her. It could never make up for the
monstrous things he had done, but she could at least know that he
had done some good in his life before he asked her to take it from
him.

With Uriel’s presence, he now knew that those two
objectives would have to be forgotten. He had one move to make
before the lock-down resulted in his capture and death. He needed
to find the thief. But he had no leads left to follow, and no idea
where to begin searching.

The Seat was no small place, and was soon to be crawling
with his own men. He knew how they would search, how they
operated, giving him some leverage and advantage, but it would
not last forever. He needed a way to locate the girl.

And then, whether a result of his own intuition or some
other design, an unconnected thought came to him from
somewhere inside and he remembered what had prompted this all
in the first place. When Dane Eyrris had been literally spilling his
guts on the floor of his bedroom revealing his darkest secrets,
there was only one that, despite the excruciating pain and torture
he was experiencing, he had kept to himself. The artifact.

Ortis had been so focused on finding the thief that he had
not stopped to think about what the thief had stolen. It had to be
something with value beyond any amount of money, for Eyrris to
have withheld information about it while enduring what he had
endured. Ortis had personally overseen hundreds of interrogations
in his life, and he knew that the kind of dedication Eyrris had
shown to keep this one piece of information from him, and
ultimately from Uriel and the Empire, through the kind of pain he
had been in, could only mean that he had been in possession of
something truly extraordinary.

Something of that magnitude could only be sold to a
handful of merchants. And although he was awash with his own
feelings whenever he thought about the girl with the red hair, he
couldn’t deny that the only reason she had slipped into his life in
the first place was due to her profession. She was a thief, and she
had stolen something so priceless and so unique that Dane Eyrris
had refused to speak of it in the face of his own excruciating death.

And Ortis knew then, deep in his bones, that an artifact of
that value would have no use for a young girl living on the streets
except as a commodity to be traded. Ortis was not familiar with
that world, but he knew that there existed an entire network of
black market vendors who specialized in fencing stolen goods.

When he thought about what he would do, if he put
himself in her place, he was convinced that she would have
attempted to sell the artifact. Discreetly of course, if she were as
smart as he believed her to be, but it would make no sense for her
to willfully hang onto it when selling such an item could radically
change her life for the better. At least, as good as life got under the
heel of Uriel.

Ortis felt a swell of excitement in his chest as he reasoned
it out, and began to make plans that he hoped would lead him,
finally, to his thief.

Silena tidied her stall for the thirteenth time that morning.
She had every right to be anxious, she knew, but she still chastised
herself for not being able to settle her nerves. Two things were
weighing on her and conspiring to ruin what should have been just
another ordinary day.

The first was of course the news that was all over the Seat
today, that the Emperor Uriel had left the Imperial Citadel for the
first time in...well even Silena didn’t know how long it had actually
been. The ruler of the Empire of Exeter had become such a recluse
over the past tens of sojourns that hardly anyone even recalled
when he had stopped making appearances before his people. Oh,
they heard his proclamations every few spans or cycles, of course.
To all appearances, he still kept his eye to matters of state, but it
hardly surprised Silena that he would shut himself away from the
outside world. The entire Empire was built for precisely that
purpose.

Silena was therefore unclear, as were all her fellow citizens
of the Seat, exactly what had brought the leader of their nation out
of his hiding place, but whatever it was must be significant. Silena
thought about Catelyn and prayed to the Divines that she had
made it far, far away from this place by now.

The second thing that was causing her to experience a
bout of upset stomach and the incessant need to tidy up had to do
with the girls, Sera and Elexia. In particular, both the girls had
come down sick in the past few days. It was not completely
unexpected by Silena, as when they had left on her doorstep by
Catelyn, the girls had been malnourished, covered in scrapes and
bruises and pale as ghosts. Spans later, the girls had looked
healthy and whole, and were full of life and the excitement of being
granted a second chance. But they were twins, and constantly
challenging each other with one thing or another, and Silena
supposed that their ordeal had stressed their systems to the
breaking point. Both girls had been sniffling and coughing when
she had been getting ready to pack her wares to carry to the stall
that morning.

She left Erich at her home with the girls, something that
she had to admit had been one of the best bargains in all of this,
and promised to return early with some broth from the herbalist
she knew two blocks over. She thought of all three of them, and
she wondered what they would be doing and how the girls must be
feeling.

She trusted Erich to care for them as though they were his
own, and in many ways, she began to think that that was exactly
how he saw them. The night when Catelyn had dropped the girls
with Silena, she had finally roused him from his slumber as soon
as she’d herded the two girls inside and shut the door, and as soon
as he had seen them, she could see his eyes light up.

Erich had been her bodyguard and companion for the
better part of fifteen sojourns. She had found him on the streets
when he was just shy of his twenty-fourth sojourn. She had seen
him come to the marketplace each evening, quietly staring and
examining things with finer details as they seemed to please him.
Everyone called him “Slow Erich” because for a man with twentyfour sojourns under his belt, he had the reason and the mental
capacity of a boy half his age.

But he was young, and strong, and he was completely
honest in everything he did, and Silena admired that quality
enough to hire him to be her trustworthy companion. Quickly,
Silena realized that Erich was not slow witted, he was simply
poorly educated. As he matured, he caught up to where he should
have been all along, and Silena suspected that he simply hadn’t
been given much of a chance before. The pair continued to play up
his lack of intellect in public, as it helped Silena in her trading to
pass him off as a half-wit unable to bear witness if anyone tried to
screw her out of a deal. If anyone did attempt to swindle or attack
her, it would be their surprise when they found that Erich was not
so slow after all.

She smiled fondly to think of her Erich, probably even now
taking care of the girls, telling them stories or brushing their hair.
He wasn’t like a son to her, in that she enjoyed the sight of him and
he had no modesty, a trait which she had appreciated a time or two
over the sojourns, but she treated him as though he were family.

When the girls had stood there that night, clutching
themselves in fear, it had been Erich who had swept them into his
arms and soothed them enough to get them cleaned up and placed
in Silena’s bedroom where they passed out in breaths from sheer
exhaustion.

Those first few days, the girls had been wary of both Silena
and Erich, but he had shown a natural talent for communicating
with the two, which had honestly surprised her. Erich almost never
spoke about his past, but she did know that he had been raised on
his own as well, and had fought and clawed his way out of some
dire circumstance he didn’t ever want to speak about. She didn’t
know, at what point, he had developed such a gift with children,
but she was glad that he had it. The girls, in turn, had responded to
him in a way that she also hadn’t expected, reaching out to him
like he was their big brother and that they had known each other
for sojourns.

After the horrifying treatment they had been on the
receiving end of, that they would so readily trust a strange man in
any way, spoke volumes to her mind about the kind of character he
possessed. She recognized that this quality was one she had taken
for granted for sojourns. It hadn’t been until Catelyn had shown up
in her life that she had her eyes opened to the goodness and the
beauty right in front of her. The girls could sense it too, and the
four of them had become incredibly tight-knit in the few spans that
they had all been together.

Silena had to admit that a few times in those first days and
nights, she had become annoyed at the audacity of Catelyn to have
simply left such a burden and responsibility on Silena. She was not
a young woman anymore, and there were times when she
complained that caring for a pair of young girls required more
patience and energy than she could give. But there again was
where Erich had stepped in, helping her when she needed it,
caring for the girls and their needs when Silena was exhausted
from standing in the marketplace all day.