Bloodfire (The Sojourns of Rebirth) (8 page)

Days later, Catelyn padded quietly above the din of the
crowd below, stepping lightly from roof tile to roof tile, careful not
to disturb the dirt and moss that clung to the slate, lest one of the
tiles come loose and go clattering over the edge and into the
throngs of celebrants beneath her. She did enjoy the soft texture of
moss under her toes, and so she lingered ever so slightly at each
step, as she scanned the numerous packs of citizens on the street
for the distinct sounds and smells of her next target.

She was hunting.
It was the Eve of Regret, the anniversary of the
proclamation by Uriel III to wall off his Empire from the outside
world, for better or worse. The Regret mentioned in the name of
the holiday did not betoken any sort of remorse on the part of the
Emperor, nor did it indicate any sadness at the loss of contact with
the world at large. Rather that Uriel III had deeply regretted that
he had not thought to order it done sooner, proclaiming that he
could have saved many more of his subject’s lives in the eight
sojourns that had passed from the time he had taken control of
Exeter to the day when the last of the walls had been completed.

From the perch where she crouched high above the throng
of revelers below, Catelyn expanded her bubble to take in the scene
below her, trying her best to focus past the many distractions of
the raucous celebrations going on all around her. She heard the
conversations of hundreds of drunken and aroused men and
women. Snatches of threats and boasts, mingled with moans and
screams throughout the streets and alleys of the city. She heard
every form of violence, and every base act she could think of or
imagine. And probably some she couldn’t imagine. This was not
just another night in the Seat. Tonight, the Seat was bathed in a
celebratory air.

To most citizens of the Seat, the behaviors themselves
were quite ordinary, but on this night they were magnified
significantly by the celebration. She smelled the bouquet of sex on
the air the strongest; musky bodies writhing and cavorting upon
the flesh of the willing and unwilling alike.

She thought of her mother, who had once been forced to
lead such a life, and her cheeks colored in anger for the
degradation she must have had to endure to keep her family safe
and fed, but also with love and pride for the sacrifice that she had
made to do so.

But she didn’t stop to dwell on those memories, and she
was not here to observe the goings-on of these carousing partiers.
She had more pressing business this night.

She focused her bubble by half and immediately began to
hear details of the conversation closest to her, as clearly as if she
were standing down in the street among the speakers. From where
she crouched high among the eaves of a ramshackle building, she
had no fear of getting caught eavesdropping. With the way that the
Emperor ruled his domain, law and order were subsumed by sheer
brutality and the citizens of the Seat were left to police themselves,
with the Imperial army only stepping in with overwhelming force
when necessary. The only guards anywhere around the city were
all stationed along or near the inner walls and the smaller wall that
encircled the Emperor’s personal estate, which was dubbed the
Citadel.

And at this time of night, with the events going on below
very few, if any, of the revelers would be concerned about looking
for intruders.

Of course, Catelyn also had a distinct advantage in the way
that she operated. No other citizen of the Seat that she knew of,
even other thieves, possessed Catelyn’s unique talents. She had
trained herself for sojourns to familiarize herself with these
rooftops, and how to move agilely and effortlessly using only her
muscles and the information she gleaned by focusing her
remaining senses; what she called her “bubble”.

Stealing, like all acts which would normally be considered
crimes, was not frowned on by the Empire in practice, only in
principle. There were of course laws against it, but as with
everything else, most laws were only casually enforced, a
mummer’s show played by the Emperor to make it appear that he
was looking out for his people.

Still, flagrant violations of any of the Empire’s laws carried
the same sentence: death. So while citizens of the Seat were cutthroats by nature, they also knew that stealing from your
neighbors and fellow citizens could still lead to the Imperial army
coming to find you, most likely so that you could be murdered in
some heinous fashion. The Emperor was especially partial to mass
burnings. It was not unheard of for entire blocks to be caught in
the conflagration which the Emperor referred to as a “Purge”.

As a result of this, most citizens considered it to be much
more lucrative to conduct such business in the light of day and to
one another’s faces, as a matter of pride and self preservation.

For Catelyn however, who already had nothing to lose, she
knew that she risked nothing more than usual by carrying out her
nocturnal activities. Every day alive was a reprieve from the death
sentence she had been carrying for the past six sojourns.

With her bubble focused tightly on a sphere about eight
paces across, she began to move her head systematically from
group to group, listening for the voice of the one person that had
drawn her out tonight: Dane Eyrris.

When she pinpointed his voice after a quick scan, she
smiled. As she had been hoping, he was leading a small group of
people, already on his way to his home. After his encounter with
prior Pater, she had proceeded to shadow him for the next two
days. She knew from that earlier conversation that he had been
expecting some friends to come into town so that he could show
them the relic he had acquired, and perhaps arrange to sell it to
one of them.

She’d expected him to want to get rid of it as soon as they
arrived, but instead, he had made plans for the entire group to
have a celebratory party first, and then conduct their transaction
the following day. Dane Eyrris was apparently a believer in
pleasure before business.

Even among the crowds and his compatriots, she picked
out his deep voice easily, intermingled among a number of jovial
men and women, seventy paces away and below where she lurked.

She stood and shook out her legs to get the blood flowing
once more, warming them up for the next part of her plan. She was
wearing her usual night gear; a variation on the standard plain
clothing that all residents of the Seat were required to wear, but
with the sleeves on the arms and cuffs on the pants cut down to
reach just past her elbows and knees, leaving her lower legs and
arms free and bare.

She leaped up and grabbed the overhanging street lamp
she knew was there. She swung her legs and used her momentum
to carry her around, until she landed with her body straddled on
the crossbar of the lamp. She stood on the bar, balanced
precariously with toes gripping the rusted metal, and arms
outstretched, then leaped out into space. Her bubble was focused
on her destination, and she landed softly, like a cat, next to the
smokestack on the roof of the building across from where she had
been eavesdropping. She held her breath to avoid inhaling the
soot-laced smoke pouring out of the stack.

The metal was hot to the touch, as she quickly pushed off
against it and lit from the smokestack to a ledge nearby. While she
trained most of her awareness on her immediate goal of traveling
along her secret highway, she also kept her ears open for any
voices of surprise or alarm from the passers by and street parties
below.

She leapt and ran across the rooftops, safe above the
crowd and moving lithely and swiftly, feeling the joy of not having
to practice her usual noise discipline this night, with the raucous
events taking place everywhere around her. The jovial celebrants
throughout the city provided excellent cover for the night’s
activities, a luxury she was rarely afforded.

It had taken her exactly forty-two breaths to travel from
where she had first sensed Eyrris to where she was now, stealthily
hanging from a rain downspout across from his home where the
party he was hosting was apparently taking place. Up until the
night before, she wasn’t sure what the venue for the gathering
would be, as a number of the other Dane’s in Eyrris’ social circles
had apparently also extended their homes to host the affair. She
was relieved when she heard him relate to one of his servants that
he decided to host the festivities at his own home. Her time
shadowing him had included scouting the residential apartment
where he lived, which meant that she would not be going into that
location totally blind, so to speak.

After finding a stable foothold, she turned her bubble’s
focus to the interior of the building across from her. She listened
as the party-goers entered with Dane Eyrris, engaged in small talk
for a brief time, and then heard ooh's and ahh's as something, or
rather someone, was led into the room. She immediately heard the
whimpering of a human being in utter fear for their life, and her
heart went cold.

While she listened, she could hear the sound of the victim
being bound, tightening of leather as straps were bound to them,
muffled screams through a gag. Metal chains and other
instruments being unsheathed. As she processed the various
pieces of information that she gained from the environment within
her bubble, the mental image of the place she examined began to
spring into clarity instantly.

She immediately wished that it hadn’t.
Although Catelyn had experienced her share of horror in
her short life, nothing could ever have prepared her for what she
experienced. She was shaken by what her senses were telling her,
and her knees grew weak. She climbed down from the downspout
to squat on the ledge below the eaves of the roof instead. She
needed to feel something more solid beneath her feet. She
unconsciously reached her hand down and began to twirl the lucky
ring she wore on her left middle toe, circling it with her finger,
around and around.
She sat and tried to process what she had just witnessed.
Inside the building she had identified a large number of people,
though she didn’t count how many, and they seemed to have been
clustered around a tableau of some kind, with some people raised
up on a dais, where the scene which had so disturbed her was
being played out. What she heard, smelled and even to some
degree tasted on her tongue, was the most vile thing that she had
ever experienced, and it nearly made her retch.
Catelyn didn’t often think of her lack of sight as a blessing,
but because of what her senses were telling her, she silently
thanked the Divines for sparing her the sight of whatever scene
was being played out there.
This was the first time in her life that she was actually
grateful for her blindness. Whatever the people were doing, she
wished to be well away from it.
No score is worth having to endure this
, she thought to
herself, the pain and revulsion threatening to tighten her chest
until she couldn’t breathe.
And yet, she remained for some reason she couldn’t
fathom. She squatted, twirling her toe ring frantically, chewing her
lower lip, listening to the sounds of moaning and other, more
painful things and unable to shy away from the horror.
This is not the way the world should be
, she thought,
feeling an emptiness form inside her, an emptiness that she hadn’t
felt since that terrible morning, many sojourns past.
There has to be a better way.
She prayed to the Divines to end the person’s misery, to
take from them their suffering. To give them the peace of the
Divines. Something. Anything. But then that small voice, the one
that always appeared whenever she beseeched the Divines, came
to her as it always did.
Why are the Divines responsible? What about you? What
are you going to do about it?
She shoved that voice away, something that she was both
familiar with, and growing increasingly tired of. The voice grew
more insistent every day, it seemed. She let her bubble fade and
leapt up to the top of the roof of the building she was on. She
hugged her knees to her chest and the sobs took her, the same way
that they had that first night six sojourns ago.

Prayers or more later, Catelyn let her bubble return her to
the world, and tentatively expanded it to the building across the
street, preparing herself mentally for the horrors she expected to
perceive. She sighed, with some relief, to discover that the worst
seemed to have passed. She could hear only a few heartbeats and
the sound of snoring remaining in the room, while the disturbing
sounds from before were absent.

Dane Eyrris’ unique scent stood out clearly still even at
this distance, and she heard his relaxed breathing and the creaking
of leather and the clinking of glass as he shifted his weight now
and again. She remained listening for one more prayer as Dane
Eyrris slowly drank himself to sleep; a ritual he had observed and
which she had witnessed, the past two nights. And when she heard
the heavy, regular breathing begin, she knew that Dane Eyrris had
finally passed out. She stood and shook her legs, which were
cramped and tight from sitting so long, to get the blood flowing
and prime them for her work.

Outside in the street below, the chaos of the nights
reveling was more muted, most people’s carnal desires having
been fulfilled, at least for now. As she stepped up to the roof’s edge
and propelled herself out into space, she had a shiver of
apprehension run through her at the thought of where she was
about to tread.

She caught the top edge of Eyrris’ estate roof and angled
her body to hug the outside wall, her feet finding purchase against
the rough plaster and chipped paint. She knew as soon as her toes
touched the surface of the wall that she needed to be careful not to
move too quickly, lest she displace too much faded paint, cracked
and loose from sojourns of neglect.