Bloodfire (The Sojourns of Rebirth) (42 page)

As the two men regrouped, trying to devise an attack that
would not have them looking like rank amateurs, Catelyn looked
toward Ortis. He had made surprising progress on the rope, as it
was looking more frayed and she could see the weight of the
drawbridge continuing to do part of the work for him.
However, it appeared that the Imperials at the gatehouse
were growing impatient now, as they cranked the winch another
turn, raising the drawbridge even further and sending everyone
stumbling. Silena dropped to the bridge’s surface and held onto
anything she could, and Ortis grabbed the rope with both hands
momentarily. Catelyn herself swayed on her feet as the bridge
lurched, but she was so used to standing and leaping on strange
angles like rooftops and eaves under her feet, that this change
barely registered.
She could not say the same for the two Imperials she had
been fighting. One of them slipped and rolled down to the base of
the bridge and the gatehouse, and the other dropped to his
stomach and planted his sword in the wood, stabilizing himself.
Once the bridge stopped shaking, Ortis repositioned
himself and once again resumed sawing at the rope. It was at least
half way cut through at this point. Catelyn actually began to
wonder just what his plan was once he’d severed one of the ropes.
“Ortis, I hope you know what you’re doing,” she called.
He simply glowered at her, and resumed sawing. She
looked to Silena, who was holding on with everything that she had,
her fingers white from gripping a whorled knothole on one of the
wood beams that made up the bridge. Catelyn slowly and carefully
took a step towards her, but it was going to be slow going. Catelyn
turned to look at the soldier, but he was sweating from the effort of
keeping himself in place. His armor was not doing him any favors
here, as it was heavy plate and boiled leather, and the weight of it
was pulling on him, trying to drag him down slowly but surely.
Then she turned to look at the Imperials at the gatehouse.
An entire squadron of men waited now at the gatehouse, and at
least five of the strongest were pulling on the crank, trying to cinch
it one more turn. Catelyn shut her eyes and took a moment to
smell the air, to feel the breeze on her cheeks, to say goodbye,
when suddenly she heard the rope in Ortis’ hands began to groan,
and he put his dagger in his teeth and threw himself down to the
bridge’s surface, grabbing the edge of the boards.
“Hold on!” he yelled.
Catelyn suddenly realized that while she had been taking
in everything, she had failed to find anywhere to grab onto.
The decision of what to do next was taken away from her,
as she heard the rope whine, and she looked over at it just in time
to witness it fray to the breaking point, and then snap. The bridge
surface shifted awkwardly under her feet, and for a brief second
she felt herself in free fall, dropping towards the tilting bridge as
one side of it warped under the weight without one of the ropes to
support it. She impacted the surface of the drawbridge unevenly,
and felt herself being pulled toward the side of the bridge. Her
bubble shifted and she felt that same sensation of time slowing
down as she watched the edge of the drawbridge approaching. She
reached out with both hands, grabbing the wood beam at the side
of the bridge, the same one Ortis held onto higher up.
She felt biting pain as a long splinter of wood entered her
left hand, but she held on as the bridge continued to shift and
bounce from the impacts of the rope breaking, followed by her
body slamming into the bridge. The last remaining soldier finally
lost his battle against gravity and rolled down the bridge surface,
falling towards the tilted left side of the bridge. After sliding a few
paces he was pitched out into space, to drop to his death in the
moat below. Catelyn watched him impact on the dry moat bed, and
the spray of blood exploding from several points on his body,
seeping out from the openings in his armor to pool around his
limp and broken form.
She heard the rope on the other side of the bridge begin to
strain from holding all of the weight of the bridge and the three of
them, but Catelyn didn’t think that it was going to break. She
wondered what Ortis had expected to do from this point, and she
called up to him.
“So, was this part of the plan?”
“Of course not. The plan was to run across before anyone
noticed,” he snapped. He didn’t say it, but he put an emphasis on
the word run, implying that Catelyn and Silena hadn’t been
moving fast enough. Catelyn bit back an angry reply, in part
because she knew he was right. Catelyn might have been able to
get across if she hadn’t been weakened by her imprisonment.
Although she had survived the encounter with the two soldiers,
and somehow managed to prevent herself from nearly falling into
the moat, she had been functioning purely on instinct and had
benefited from the change in her perceptions during those
encounters.
Even now, she could feel her strength fading as she held
on to the side of the bridge for her life, and she looked over at
Silena. The older woman had a strong grip on the knothole, and it
looked big enough that she could hold onto it securely, at least
until her strength gave out. She knew that Silena was a strong
willed woman, but she was not young, and Catelyn didn’t know
how much more the woman had left.
The Imperial soldiers at the gatehouse were growing more
impatient, and many of them had begun shouting curses and jeers
at them. Three of them began ditching their heavy armor, and
were attempting to scale the drawbridge on hands and knees. One
of them was already a handful of paces up, finding enough agility
to grab the few handholds at the bridge’s end, while the other two
struggled.
“If you have any ideas, Ortis…” Catelyn said, her nerves
and fatigue beginning to get the better of her.
“We need to get the other rope down, but I can’t get across
to it.”
Catelyn looked over at the rope, then at Ortis, and she
realized he was right. His plate mail was conspiring to pull him
down to the moat as well, and he held on above her with every
ounce of strength he had. He would never be able to climb up to
the end of the bridge and shimmy across the edge to saw at the
other rope. She turned around to check on the progress of the
climbing soldier, and she saw that he had made it a few more
paces.
But something else she saw behind the climbing soldier
sent Catelyn’s heart into a frenzy.
At the gatehouse, six soldiers were positioning themselves
to fire at the three of them with longbows. At the range they were
at, there was no chance they would miss. They needed to do
something, and Catelyn decided that with everything riding on the
next few whispers, she had nothing to lose and to simply trust her
instincts.
“Ortis, drop your dagger down to me,” Catelyn said,
looking up at him.
Ortis didn’t ask why, and she could see from the look in
his eyes that he too had spotted the archers below, nocking their
bows in preparation to fire. He grabbed hold with one arm and
both legs, so that he could remove the dagger from the bridge,
where he had slammed it into the wood to provide himself an extra
hand hold. Once it was free, he dropped it, and it fell right to her,
handle first.
She snatched the steel tang and then pulled her body
closer to the wood as their combined motion had caused the bridge
to sway ever so slightly once again. She looked down and saw the
archers drawing back, ready to fire.
She found the calm inside herself, her bubble shifted, and
time slowed down.
She looked to the rope, focusing her bubble on the point
where the rope met the wood of the bridge, and despite her
position on the other side of the bridge, ten paces away, she could
make out every detail. She could see the striated cords of each
strand, and she could see the tension of the rope being pulled taut,
caught between the pull of the winch and the force of gravity. But
most importantly, she could see where the strain points were.
Three strands on the heavy rope stood out to her enhanced vision,
and she could see that they appeared to be weaker than the rest.
From below, she heard the twang of bowstrings as the
archers released their first volley of arrows. She calculated that
they would reach her and her companions holding onto the bridge
in less that three breaths.
One. She chose one of the weaker strands, setting it in her
mind as the focus of all her senses. Her bubble condensed down to
a single point, right on the strand she had chosen. She raised her
arm, shifted her weight, and threw the dagger.
Two. The dagger sailed through the air, end over end,
racing to its destination before the arrows arrived at theirs. The
dagger won, and Catelyn saw the dagger stick into the strand,
severing a number of its fibers.
Three. The rope exploded under the weight and the change
to the tension of the severed strand, sending the drawbridge falling
down toward the ground. Ortis, Catelyn and Silena gripped the
bridge with everything that they had, as the arrows sailed through
the air and over their heads precisely where they would have been
had the bridge not fallen.
Catelyn’s body slammed into the wood as it impacted with
the ground, knocking the wind from her and stunning her.
Disoriented, she heard yelling from paces behind her at the
gatehouse, as the squadron of Imperial soldiers poured onto the
bridge. Catelyn felt an arm scoop her up and then she was hoisted
onto someone’s shoulder.
Ortis
, she realized.
She saw him pull a weak and exhausted Silena up from a
strange angle but she silently thanked him for not leaving either of
them behind. She felt him turn and bolt for the city, and she could
feel him shoving people aside, as they waded through a crowd of
onlookers. A strange noise reached Catelyn’s ears, and she couldn’t
make sense of it at first, but as Ortis made his way through the sea
of people she realized what the sound was: cheering.
The citizens of the Seat were cheering. She had never
heard such a noise before. It was an amazing sound that filled her
heart with gladness, but almost immediately she wanted them to
stop. The simple act of cheering could cost them their lives. When
Uriel learned about this, there was no telling what form his rage at
them would take.
But she was so exhausted, so weak, that she couldn’t stop
to dwell on any of these thoughts. As Ortis ran, the gentle rocking
of her body on his shoulder became somehow comforting to her,
and within a handful of breaths, unconsciousness reached out and
claimed her.

Uriel sat in his gilded throne, brooding over what to do
next. He ignored the grating voice and vapid face of the man
chattering at him from the foot of the dais upon which he sat. He
was sure the man was describing the Imperial army’s attempts to
find the three criminals that had escaped from the Citadel earlier
that day.

In another time, Uriel the Third of His Name would be
engulfed in a rage so intense, that it would have consumed the city
in the fire of its power. He imagined the citizens of the Seat,
cowering in their homes as word spread of this act of defiance, and
the repercussions that were to follow.

But Uriel was unconcerned and simply grunted his assent
when the men under his command suggested this course of action
or that. The truth was, Uriel was past the point of caring. His mind
could only turn towards one thing these days.

The sickle.
He had taken possession of it from the girl days before,
when he had masterfully set and closed the trap on Ortis and the
girl in the market. He had initially been obsessed with learning
more about that girl; why she was special and how she had come
by something as magnificent as the weapon he now held in his
chambers. He had believed her to be strong, to be as he was.
But when he had given her the gift of bloodfire, and even
before, she had shown her weakness to him. And he had known
then that the girl mattered little. She had simply been a vessel to
deliver this new weapon to him. He had thrown her in the
dungeons to rot, just as he had done to Enaz, because he no longer
wished to bother with such petty beings.
He was becoming something greater. The crook had come
to him when he was young, and he hadn’t truly understood its
usefulness. But he had always felt it, and used it to build his
Empire. And now the sickle had come to him, and he felt one step
closer to achieving the purpose for which all of his other actions
had been undertaken.
But first, he needed to understand these weapons.
He listened as the men before him described their search
patterns, and the results of their interrogations. His men, as usual,
were artfully describing the brutality with which they were
executing their duties, but Uriel was unconcerned about the
location of the three traitors now. He had not even bothered to
have ordered the squadron whose responsibility it was to guard
the inner courtyard to be killed.
Uriel could find no motivation for anything beyond
understanding the purpose of the sickle. As soon as the men had
concluded their reports, Uriel dismissed them, and swept out of
his throne and down the dais to the doors.
He slammed them open and walked briskly to his
chambers, where the sickle awaited his study. His mind raced and
his palms began to sweat as he made his way toward the artifact.
He reached the door to his chambers, swept them open and then
shut them behind him. He walked to the case where the sickle lay,
opened it, and once again reveled in the majesty of its design.
The same way that he had done with the crook so many
sojourns ago, he lifted the sickle reverently from its case, cradling
it in his hands, and ran his fingers along the sensuous curves of the
bodies on the handle, and up along the blade.
He paused his fingers on the words, delicately inscribed in
the metal and traced them from the beginning to their end,
reading:
“There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several
powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into
one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to
the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless
forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are
being, evolved.”
He tried desperately to understand their meaning once
again, but they continued to elude him. It spoke of several powers,
and he thought of the way that the crook had given him the Will to
reign over all of his Empire. It spoke also of evolving, and Uriel
knew it was speaking of his own transformation, if he could only
find the key. His father had told him that these weapons were
pieces of a whole, the entire set having once been in the possession
of great and powerful men, who ruled Ereas in ancient times, in a
time prior to the Before. These weapons were relics of the past,
grand and mysterious tools which he knew could grant him the
same divine right of rule as they once had. He desperately wished
to know what sort of powers the sickle would grant him, to
understand these forms that the words on the blade spoke of, and
how they might evolve him into what he knew he was to become.
He sat down on the floor, clutching the weapon to his
robed chest, tears flowing from his eyes as he wracked his mind,
trying to discover the solution to the puzzle which now consumed
his days and nights.
He would solve this puzzle. He had to. It was his destiny.