Bloodfire (The Sojourns of Rebirth) (38 page)

Time passed.
How long, Catelyn could not say. In the dank prison cell, it
appeared to Catelyn’s senses that only two things existed: the
confines of her cell, and the occasional voice of Enaz. Occasional
because Enaz had apparently grown so weak from his captivity and
lack of food and water that he lapsed into unconsciousness
frequently, each time filling Catelyn with panic at the thought of
him dying, and leaving her alone in her cell. He had even passed
out a few times in the middle of one of their conversations.

Catelyn too found herself slipping into and out of
numerous states of consciousness. Twice, after she had awakened,
she sensed something had changed in the cell and discovered that
her captors had brought a tray of food for her while she had been
unconscious. Calling it food was generous, of course. It likely had
been, at one point. But the smell of mold and rot was strong, and
Catelyn more often than not had to pick wriggling bugs from the
chunks of bread, or meat, or whatever it was. It was so foul that
Catelyn couldn’t actually tell, but she was so hungry that it didn’t
matter.

After finishing the scraps of food, she got down on her
hands and knees and tried to find the bugs she had picked out,
which she scraped up and swallowed down too.

The second time she woke to find a small jug of water on
the tray as well. The water smelled foul and tasted bitter, but she
knew she had to drink or she would die of thirst. She had survived
worse in those first sojourns before she had learned to control her
bubble. Now, as then, she would do whatever was required of her
to survive. Her life was too precious to her to simply let go and let
the Emperor win, even though she was his prisoner. He may have
beaten her, but she refused to let him take her hope, slim as it was.

When Enaz woke, they talked. Or at least, she talked and
he listened. Enaz was only lucid part of the time, and the rest he
babbled incoherently about pleasing the Emperor or apologized
for being unable to locate the song he had been asked to find.
Catelyn was also feeling her own awareness slip from her, a
combination of lack of food and sleep, no doubt.

Many times Catelyn would simply ask him to describe
something, in part so that she could picture it in her mind, but
mostly just to keep them both awake and talking. She was feeling
the effects of her imprisonment and malnourishment, but she was
not as bad off as Enaz. She figured she had only been in her cell a
few days at most, whereas he had been down here who knows how
much longer than her. She didn’t know if their captors were
feeding or watering him the way they were her, because Enaz
sounded as though he were slowly fading away, little by little.

It was during one of Enaz’ obscure ramblings that
Catelyn’s interest became piqued by something he was repeating
over and over again.

“Over the pass, Chaser’s Pass they call it. We skirted the
foothills of the Greymounts.”
Catelyn wondered at his words, and the strange names he
used that sounded so familiar. She tried to recall where she had
heard those names before, but her mind felt so thick and clouded
that she couldn’t place where they had come from before.
“Enaz, what are you saying?”
“Over the pass. That’s where to go. The Greymounts were
glorious in the sunlight.”
Catelyn wracked her mind, trying to remember.
The Greymounts...think!
she willed herself.
“We could see the walls. Not like here. Not like the Seat.
But we were...turned away.”
“Enaz, what are you saying? You’re not making sense.”
“Freehold!” he exclaimed.
Catelyn felt the final piece of the puzzle snap into place in
her mind, and she remembered the hand sketched map she had
seen in one of the books about the history of the Empire when she
had been a girl. The Greymounts were a mountain range, and
Chaser’s Pass was a slender trail through the foothills between the
mountains and the sea. And beyond that, the fabled city of
Freehold.
According to the book, it had once been a great city, a
center of culture and learning in the time predating the Before
even, but it had been destroyed and long since been abandoned,
and was nothing more than rubble now. Her mind felt slow, but
she wished for Enaz to retell the story. She wasn’t sure if she
wanted the memory to satisfy her curiosity or to give herself
something pleasant to dream about before she died.
“Enaz, say what you just said before that.”
“I...I can’t remember. Everything is so...dark.”
“Stay with me, Enaz. Please, try and remember. You said
something about seeing the walls, but they weren’t like here. Not
like the Seat. Do you remember?”
Enaz was silent a while, until something sparked his
memory once more.
“The walls...they were...no, they weren’t like here at all.
They were shining in the setting sun. They were...pure. The way
walls should be.”
“Pure? What does that mean, Enaz?”
“Their purpose. What they were built for. Not like here.”
Catelyn tried to let that sink in, but she didn’t understand
his meaning at all. Instead, she changed topics.
“But you saw Freehold?”
“Yes. We saw it,” he said, and then Enaz began sobbing
uncontrollably.
Catelyn waited while he wept, whispering to him that she
was there, that she was listening. After several whispers, he
stopped crying, and she gambled that he would be okay if she
asked him some more questions.
“Did it look as bad as you’d imagined it to be?”
Enaz remained silent, and she repeated the question.
“Did it look as bad as you’d imagined it to be?”
Again, she was initially met with silence, and Catelyn
wondered if he had fallen asleep, or was ignoring the question. For
a split second she actually began to wonder if he had died, and she
pulsed her bubble, listening for the subtle, ragged draw of his
breath, her heart skipping a beat in fear of being left alone. But
then he responded, and it was not at all what she had expected.
“Catelyn, it was glorious,” was all he said, his voice full of
awe.
She was taken aback. She wasn’t sure how much of Enaz’
ramblings she could take seriously, but he sounded genuine
enough and she could not sense that he was lying. In truth, Catelyn
wasn’t sure what to believe anymore. Each prayer, each day, it was
becoming harder and harder to think clearly, but it didn’t really
matter, as Enaz broke off into more confused rambling and spoke
no more of that experience. For all she knew, Enaz was simply
recounting a personal fantasy of his. He seemed like a learned
man, and Catelyn wondered if he may have simply imagined what
these places might look like from the books and maps that he had
no doubt studied.
More time passed, and Catelyn felt her own wits begin to
play tricks on her. She imagined that her father was occupying one
of the cells in the hallway outside hers, and she conversed with
him for several whispers, telling him how much she missed him
and her mother. She also began to see images of shapes and colors
flashing in her mind. They would flit into and out of her mind,
along with words and voices from the past. Her first night alone
after her parent’s brutal murders. Her battle with the trio of rats in
the attic of the abandoned building where she had eventually built
her roost. The night she had stolen into a wealthy black marketeers
home only to discover that he had been dead for spans.
Catelyn began to consider the possibility that the Emperor
had simply decided to let her and Enaz die of utter negligence.
Enaz was almost completely gone now; she could tell how weak he
was by the sound of his voice. She was no expert, but she
envisioned that he had maybe one or two more days before he was
too weak to go on. She tried to encourage him, to tell him that she
needed his voice to sustain her own will, but he responded with
incoherence and she could tell that he was past the point of
understanding her words.

Whispers, prayers, or days passed. Catelyn no longer had
any sense of self awareness. She was floating alone, in the silence
of the cell, the staccato tapping of the dripping water outside in the
hall her only point of reference. No more food or drink had come
to her since that second delivery, and Catelyn guessed that it had
to have been at least two days since then. She felt the skin of her
lips with her fingers, which were dry as old paper, and hugged
herself to keep her body from trembling, but it was pointless. She
was resigning herself to the truth now. Her life was coming to an
undignified end, and soon that would be all.

She must have fallen asleep at some point, because a noise
from outside her cell startled her into wakefulness. She stood and
stretched up on her toes, straining to hear what it was that had
woken her, and to her surprise she heard heavy boots on stone
stairs echoing through the hall. She truly hoped it was more food
or water...Catelyn was so famished, and she felt the painful cramps
in her belly from not having eaten more than the small scraps of
rotting food days earlier.

Enaz gave no reply, and she heard no sound from his cell.
She leaned her head against the metal cell door, and hoped with
everything she had that Enaz wasn’t dead.

He can’t be,
she thought.
The footsteps grew louder as they descended, and she
could hear only the one pair. The gaoler, she assumed. It was not
the Emperor’s gait, that much she could tell. Not that she expected
him to pay a visit to her on his own.
The boot steps stopped at the base of the stairs, and she
heard the sound of a key ring as it was pulled off of a wooden peg
nearby. She was so focused on the noise of the guard that she
willed herself to ignore the flashing colors that could be seen at the
edge of her bubble, clearly a product of her malnourished mind.
With keys in hand, swinging now at their side, the guard
proceeded to once again walk with purpose down the hall until
finally she heard the boots stop immediately outside her cell door.
Catelyn took a step back and used her hands to steady herself so
that she wouldn’t fall over when the door opened.
Please let it be more food,
she thought.
It was then that she realized something was very unusual.
She had been hallucinating for a while now, a result of her
diminished mind, she knew. But as the guard, or whoever it was on
the other side of the door, had approached, she had continued to
be distracted by a flickering orange shape dancing in the front of
her mind. It was pulsing, and flickering and filled her with
dizziness and she wondered if she was about to succumb to her
starvation. She knew from stories of people she had known in the
Seat, that just before dying, the mind played all sorts of tricks on
you and many people claimed to see a light, at the end of a long
tunnel. The flickering orange rectangle in her mind resembled just
that. Catelyn swallowed hard, and said a quiet remembrance to her
parents.
“Mother, father, if there is another place after this one,
and I join you in death soon, I hope we will find each other.”
The light inside her mind was insistent, and she reached
out for it, and as she did so, it changed as her hand obscured it.
Catelyn gasped.
She moved her hand away, and the shape returned,
flickering before her once more. Chills ran up and down her spine
and her knees felt weak.
She again raised her hand and the flickering shape faded,
blocked by her hand, and now in her mind she imagined that she
could just make out the shadow of her hand, the splay of her
fingers. She brought both of her hands to her mouth, and felt
herself back away and slide down the wall until she was squatting
in the corner where her own filth lay, keening and shaking with
fright.
The guard could be heard now fiddling with the key ring in
the door, and Catelyn learned that it was a man, as she heard him
curse under his breath. The flickering light in her mind was still
there, an orange rectangle, exactly where she had imagined the slit
in the door would be. A thought sprang to the surface of her mind,
but Catelyn refused to believe it.
The man finally got the correct key in the lock, and turned
it. She heard the door latches pop open and the door began to
creak outward on rusted hinges. The door was heavy, from what
Catelyn could hear, and then the orange rectangle slipped away,
and a new tall, slender shape appeared and grew as the door
screeched across the stone floor.
Despite her continuing loss of faith over the last few
sojourns, Catelyn beseeched the Divines one last time, then
reached her hands to her face, feeling along her cheeks and
forehead. As she touched the heaped scars that had been so
familiar to her for the past six sojourns, she found that they came
away at her touch, peeling off of her face in large chunks like old
scabs. As they fell away, the slender shape of light became clearer
and she was forced to turn her head away from the intense
brightness. She continued to feel her face, and underneath the
peeling scars she felt new, smooth skin covering the surface of her
cheeks. And within the hollows above her cheeks she could feel the
perfectly spherical orbs of her eyes, encased in new, downy eyelids.
Her fingertips brushed her eyelashes, causing her to blink them
open and closed, and despite all of her pain, all of her anguish, her
heart felt like soaring at the realization that somehow, she had
been something precious back.
She could see again.
She moved her hands away from her face, and opened her
eyes wide and squinted up at the brightness leaking in from the
hallway as the door finished opening. She saw the silhouette of a
large man in burnished plate armor, holding a small flickering oil
lantern in one hand and the key ring in the other. The man gasped
when he saw her.
“Catelyn,” he breathed in a small, shocked voice.
Catelyn stared up at the strange man, trying to determine
if she knew him, but quickly realized she wouldn’t be able to
recognize anyone with her eyes. Instead, she focused on the man
with her bubble. It was more than a little confusing at first to take
in all of that sensory information, in addition to the new sensation
she now experienced at the sight of this man, but his identity
quickly came to her, and when it did, she scrambled away from
him on all fours, though she had nowhere to go in the cramped
cell.
“Ortis,” she whispered, as the last of her hope faded.