Bloodfire (The Sojourns of Rebirth) (6 page)

Catelyn woke, feeling refreshed, despite the difficult
dreams of her most challenging days. If there was one thing that
Catelyn had learned in all the sojourns since that day, however, it
was not to dwell on the past.

Now that she had solved the problem of what to do with all
the extra food she'd discovered, she quickly moved onto figuring
out her next move. And for Catelyn, that meant finding her next
mark.

Whatever else she considered herself, there was only one
thing that had enabled her to get through each day in the six
sojourns since her parents had been murdered. Only one thing
that had defined her well enough to have helped her to survive
alone in a place like the Seat.

Catelyn, by her thirteenth sojourn, and after some of the
most grueling trials in her life, had become an accomplished thief.
It was not a profession that she was particularly proud of.
She knew that taking from others was wrong, and not just
because it was against the law and getting caught would likely
mean her immediate death. She knew it was against the teachings
of the Divines as well.
But she also believed that the Divines had saved her life
for a reason, and she believed they would not wish her to throw
that gift away by allowing herself to starve to death.
Her readings from the book about ethics and philosophy,
the one she had favored more than any of the other old volumes in
her collection, offered her another perspective which she agreed
with. She believed that it was just as immoral to keep food from a
starving person, as it was to steal it, but that is exactly what the
Empire did each and every day. There was no help for those less
fortunate in the Empire, and so by helping herself to the food and
belongings of those more fortunate than herself, Catelyn did what
she had to in order to stay alive.
She never took more than she needed, and she never felt
pleasure at having to steal from others, but despite her own
misgivings and the threat against her continued existence, she
knew with certainty that she simply didn’t have a choice.
In those first days after leaving her parent’s home, she had
tried other paths, at first. Her first choice had been to simply beg
on the streets for coins, or food, or both. Once she had left her
home behind, she made a beeline straight for the market plaza just
a block and a half down from where she had lived, somewhere with
lots of people and where she needn’t fear simply being taken off
the streets by someone without being able to call out for help. She
didn’t really have much confidence that calling out would save her
life necessarily, but she believed it was better than nothing.
The hardest part for her was just getting there. She had
made the trip with her parents dozens, maybe even hundreds of
times, since she was old enough to walk, but it was quite different
now that she was on her own and unable to see where she was
going. She decided to follow the worn and eroded curbs that lined
each street, and count off the number of steps from the stoop of
her old home to the plaza where the merchants sold their goods.
Even so, she moved slowly and carefully, hands slightly
extended in front of her, listening intently to everything, smelling
for animal waste or other obstacles she might step in or on.
Catelyn also said silent prayers to the Divines over and over again,
seeking for Them to guide her steps.
It took four hundred and thirty two steps, that she
deliberately counted, to reach the market plaza, which she
identified by the feel of the worn smooth cobblestones under her
feet. Remnants of an earlier time, the stones were polished by the
steps of millions of people over many hundreds or thousands of
sojourns, even to the time preceding the Before some people liked
to say.
She heard the gasping of people as she passed by, and
realized that she must look hideous. But she no longer cared. Now
that she had her bearings, she pictured the market plaza in her
mind, and how the merchant stalls were always laid out in a ring
around the area like spokes on a wagon wheel. Where she was
standing she imagined as the bottom of the wheel, where it would
touch the road. And the merchants were all around the wheel, like
the curve of it as it rose towards the top of the wagon.
Before she had lost her parents, she remembered seeing
dozens of beggars on the street and around the stalls ringing the
market plaza. Most of them adults, but every now and then, a
chosen family would fall on hard times or be killed, and their child
would later be found holding out a cup and asking warily for help.
More often than not however, orphaned children were taken, or
sold or put to other uses, none of which Catelyn liked to think
about.
The beggars she had always seen congregated in one or
two areas, and she made her way toward one of them, careful to try
to avoid walking into the stalls or merchants.
“Over here,” a voice called.
It was gruff and mid-ranged and Catelyn honestly couldn’t
tell whether it was the voice of a man or a woman, but she didn’t
care. She had a direction to go now, and she quickened her steps
towards where the voice had originated.
When she got close, she jumped as a hand grabbed her by
the shoulder and stopped her, turning her around without a word
and then was just as suddenly gone.
“Thank you,” Catelyn said softly, but sincerely.
A noncommittal grunt was all she got in reply.
She stood and raised her hands up, extending them in
front of her, and tried to make herself look as miserable as she felt.
For half a span, Catelyn spent her days standing or
squatting in the market plaza, begging for the pittance of the
people who were visiting the marketplace, and at night she
returned to a burned out building across the street from where her
home had been, to sleep. Or at least, to try to, when the nightmares
let her.
She and some of the children had found a hole in one of
the walls that led to a space between the walls, and inside you
could find places to put your hands and feet and climb up to an
unknown attic. Boys routinely tried to get girls to climb up with
them so that they could play kissing and touching games, but
although she had been curious about what that might feel like,
Catelyn had been too careful to go up there with anyone she didn’t
trust. She had been up there only a handful of times before, and
each time the only thing that was memorable about it was that she
had been frightened by the darkness and the cramped spaces.
But after what she had just been through, and with her
only alternative being to sleep on the streets, in the open, it felt
like the safest place she could imagine. When she reached the
crawlspace above, she curled herself up into a ball, hugged her
knees, and sobbed quietly until exhaustion claimed her.
Those first few nights, she was awakened by terrible
dreams and panicked trembling, and she wished so much that she
could run to her parent’s beds and climb in, the way that she
always did whenever she was frightened by a nightmare. Without
that possibility, she turned to chanting a devotion to the Divines,
whispered in the dark, while the soft voice of doubt whispered
back into her ear.
One morning, she woke in time to prevent a trio of huge
rats from beginning to nibble on her fingers and toes, and she
almost cried out, but she simply shoved them aside and edged
along the beams until she reached the gap in the wall and climbed
back down.
It had actually been the rats that had awakened her to her
capabilities, quite literally. Those first few nights hiding in the
crawlspace after her days of begging had been harrowing, full of
terrifying dreams and sleepless nights. And the rats. Always, the
rats.
They would squeak at her as soon as she returned to the
crawlspace each evening, warning her away from their nest most
likely. If she’d had anywhere else to go, she would have given them
back their territory, but she had no choice now.
Oh, she had considered wandering from building to
building, scouting for a new place to rest at night, but her head
always returned to her secret lair hidden behind the walls because
she knew that there were worse things than rats out there in the
Seat.
So once she had resigned herself to the fact that she was
going to remain in the building, she determined that she would
have no choice but to deal with the rats. And she knew that the
situation between them and her would need to change soon. Her
level of exhaustion was affecting her during the day, as she found
herself nodding off at inopportune times, which was deadly for a
young girl alone in a place like the Seat.
She had seem them everywhere in the Seat back when
she’d still had her eyesight. She had always thought that they
looked harmless, honestly, but she also knew that if she was going
to remain living in the building, it was either her or them. She was
the one moving into their territory, so she knew that the odds were
going to be stacked against her.
And so she began to focus some of her daytime activities
around finding a solution to the problem. When she was idle, she
tried to formulate a plan of attack to get rid of the pests and when
she wasn’t, she was scavenging through long-picked over ruins in
the hopes of finding something she might use to trap the creatures.
She didn’t want to kill them if she could help it, but she very well
knew it might have to come to that. She hoped though, to be able
to catch and relocate them, or if that wasn’t possible, to find a way
to drive them away.
Most of the ruins in the Seat had already been cleared of
anything valuable by generations of scavengers, but Catelyn’s
needs were much different than most, and she hoped that she
might get her hands on materials she could use to build a
rudimentary cage.
Days of looking hadn’t turned up anything useful, and the
nights had been a constant battle of wills between her and the
established residents. Thus far, they were winning.
It was during one of those first nights in her conflicts with
the rats when Catelyn, despite her complete blindness, began to
sense something as the rats scurried past her feet, nipping at her
toes and ankles. As always happened when the rats made one of
their assaults, Catelyn was standing in the attic, her back pressed
against the wall, her ears tightly focused to any sound. She’d
learned in prior encounters with them that if she simply stood still
they would make their threats, then grow tired of squeaking and
turn to watching her in silence, and she could at least have a few
prayers of peace and quiet in which to sleep.
They were still screeching at her, but it was getting better,
and she felt like she could almost feel them getting bored, tiring of
their verbal assault. It would end the moment she moved around
too much, so she tried her best to remain in one place, and used
that as an opportunity to hone her sense of hearing.
She had become intimately familiar with the squeaking
each of the rats made, and after the first few encounters with them,
she became convinced that she could tell the rodents apart by the
sound of their squeaks.
She believed that she was able to distinguish three
separate individual rats. Each of them “spoke” to her in a slightly
different way, and after getting to know them and their habits
around her intrusive presence into their home, she began to assign
them different personalities and even named them to make it
easier to tell them apart.
Bossy was the name of the rat who she imagined was
calling out orders to the other rats. His squeaks came most
frequently, and were not directed just to her, but to the other rats
as well. Bossy was the only one of the rats she called by a gender.
“He” just sounded like a “he”, at least to her ears.
Whiny was the second rat she could easily identify. That
one’s squeak was more plaintive, like it was constantly annoyed by
something. That annoyance was probably her.
And the last one she dubbed Chirpy, because its squeak
sounded just like a bird chirping; short, sharp squeaks.
She knew that naming the rats might actually make it
harder to get rid of them when the time came, but she couldn’t
help it. They really did sound different and it seemed like the
appropriate thing to do under the circumstances. But in so doing,
and in listening to each of the rats squeak at her in their own
particular “voices”, she began to feel like she was seeing them,
without actually seeing them. A mental image, like a map of the
crawlspace, appeared in her mind.
There was Bossy, standing on his hind feet as he always
did when he screeched at her, just half a pace away, but even less
distance from the hole in the floorboards that the rats were using
to get in and out of her hiding place.
And now Whiny shot past her as he always did, scratching
at her foot with a claw before bounding behind a piece of broken
ceiling tile. Chirpy never came close to her, it simply chirped away
over by the corner where the crawl space opened up into the
passage down to the first floor.
Catelyn realized that it was very possible all of this was
just her own imagining, and that she was simply going crazy in the
dark all by herself.
I’m blind,
she thought.
How could I possibly know where
they were?
And yet, as crazy as it seemed, something about her
perceptions was telling her that there was truth in what she was
sensing. She decided to test herself, and bent down to pick up
some of the chips of roof tile that were scattered throughout the
attic. As soon as she moved, the rats returned to squealing at her
in earnest, and she heard one or more of them bound away, their
small claws scrabbling across the floor.
With three piece of tile chips in her possession, she held
two in her left palm while she took hold on the largest piece in the
fingers of her right hand, stood back up and put her back against
the wall, sweating from the stress of being harrowed night after
night, and trembling from the exhaustion of standing when she
was so tired. But she also felt a rush of excitement at the idea that
she was about to test, and she forced herself to stillness once again.
Once the cacophony of squeaking died down somewhat,
Catelyn ever so slowly raised her right hand up, the piece of tile
gripped tightly as she listened for all she was worth. She heard
Bossy screaming from his usual spot and she let the sensations
from all of her senses wash over her. She felt an instant change in
her perceptions as she let them in.
And as she used all of her senses together; hearing the
cacophony of squeaks from all three of the rats, smelling the
combined odors of the mold and mildew from the attic and the
stench of the rats and their nest, tasting the dirt in the air of the
enclosed space, feeling the rough, jagged edges of pieces of clay in
her hands and the soft, damp wood under her feet, even the
scratching of her own filthy clothes and layers of grime on her
skin, she felt those senses coalesce in her mind, blossoming from a
simple mental image of the space she inhabited and into a tightly
accurate and refined image of the things within that space.