In truth, Catelyn wasn’t sure what had driven her here on this day. There was nothing she needed, but when she woke, and realized that it had been one sojourn to the day since the horror of her new life had begun, she felt it was somehow appropriate to revisit the site of her rebirth.
She crossed the threshold from the hallway into the open room that had been the entryway to her family’s hovel. This was the place where her family had been murdered, right before her eyes. The last thing she had ever seen. The thing she saw most every night in her nightmares.
She was no longer swept away by her emotions. Her almost nightly reliving of the encounter had numbed her to the pain she had felt. It had been the only way for her to survive. So she swept her bubble across the place on the floor where she had witnessed their deaths, and moved on, ignoring the subtle tang of blood seeped into the floor and taking in the once familiar environment in a completely new way.
It was difficult, even with the refined nature of her bubble now, to recognize the place she had once called home. The same shelves, the same furniture; it was all here as she remembered them being, not even having been picked clean by scavengers, which Catelyn found odd. She had expected to find nothing but empty rooms, empty like the hole inside her, like the discarded shell of an old life.
But as she slowly moved deeper into the room, she could tell that nothing had happened to change this place in the intervening spans since she had left it. She reached out with her fingertips and spread them around her, a trick she had learned to be able to read the objects on the ground and nearby.
There, a rusted pot turned upside down, the remains of the meal her father had been preparing that morning rotting beneath it. There, a splintered shaft of wood, the remains of the front door that had been broken in. All around her, memories of her family lay strewn, buried in the ashes of the past.
She let her bubble fade somewhat, and walked to the other room, where her family had slept. In one corner was a stacked pair of mattresses, the bed where her parents had slept each night, now smelling like rot and time. In the other corner, a pile of blankets pushed together just like she remembered. It had been her bed once; it was now, according to the smell, a nest for mice or rats.
She idly wondered if she should pry up the creaky floorboard along one side of the room and dig out the dozen or so books that were hidden there, but Catelyn knew there would be no point. Books were never again going to be something she could enjoy. The loss of that was sometimes the one that she found the hardest to live with.
She sighed, wondering what exactly this visit had accomplished for her, but the silent tomb of her past gave her no answers. There was no reason to linger and so Catelyn walked out of her old bedroom, stepped over the spot where her parents had bled the last of their life into the floorboards, and out into the hallway.
She returned to her new home across the street, saying silent words to the Divines, and put the past behind her. Three cycles had come and gone since the meeting with Silena in the abandoned bank building, Catelyn impatiently waiting for the Danes to give up on their search and move on as she couldn’t continue to lay low much longer. Her rations would soon be dwindled to the point where she would be forced to find another mark to supplement her supplies.
Catelyn decided to risk another trip out of her roost, to pay a visit to Silena in her market stall, and see if the woman had any news.
Much to her dismay, Silena informed her that the Danes showed no sign of giving up their search for her, and if anything were more serious than ever about their efforts to recover the artifact and find the thief responsible.
Despite the obvious monetary value of the weapon, Catelyn was actually taken aback to learn that Dane Eyrris was still searching for her and the weapon, even cycles later. She had not done an exhaustive study of the man prior to stealing from him, but she had done enough to learn his routine and the basics of his life and personality. Nothing she saw during that study led her to anticipate this level of persistence or for him to hold such sway over the other Dane’s in continuing their search for her.
According to Silena, it seemed that within that circle, Catelyn’s exploits at the home of Dane Eyrris had garnered her some small measure of notoriety, in large part because of her defiant exit, and the signature she’d left behind. And this final act was, according to Silena’s sources, what had prompted them to focus so intently on finding the culprit. A theft they might have recovered from, but this insult had become a matter of pride, and they were not going to rest until that stain was erased.
She found herself regretting breaking one of her only rules she had when it came to the carrying out of her nocturnal activities. She had let her emotions rule her that night, and it now had the potential to shine the sun right on her.
Catelyn knew that there would be anger of course, but she imagined that to be the case with every one of her previous targets as well. And in every case before this, things had always died down after a few days or maybe a span or two if the Imperials were dragged into it.
If she wasn’t prepared for the tenacity with which the Danes were searching for her, what made things even worse was the ferocity they had begun using. This latest report, when Silena recounted it in grisly detail, made Catelyn’s stomach turn to think of what her actions had wrought.
Dane Eyrris, rather than involve the Imperials who would no doubt simply round up a few dozen shady characters and hold a public execution, had decided to take the matter into his own hands. Such a move was unprecedented, in fact, as it was a direct indictment of the Empire’s ambivalence. It seemed to Catelyn that the Dane’s were willing to test the Emperor’s indulgence of their position, a very dangerous game.
The Danes had never before so openly challenged the Emperor’s men. Even those closest to the Danes pleaded with them to stop, knowing full well that the Emperor would not discriminate if it ever came to open conflict between the Empire and the Danes. The Emperor encouraged some amount of personal responsibility for each citizen of the Seat in carrying out justice, but the Danes were getting dangerously close to committing treasonous acts.
Silena had been receiving reports of the Dane’s efforts only in pieces of scattered rumors, but as they escalated further and further, she began to hear more substantiated reports, until finally one of her contacts passed on details from someone within the circle itself. Silena then told Catelyn every detail she had learned on their latest visit at her stall.
Eyrris and his two closest friends within the Sado-Sexual Elite, Dane Callum and Dane Elger, had taken great pains to gather and hire large gangs of men, and they had spent the past several spans wandering the streets, shaking down fences and black marketeers looking for information about sellers with unusual or unique items in their possession. When they learned of one, they would kidnap the person for interrogation.
When that had proved fruitless, they began simply harassing small individuals, even going so far as to grab them right off the street, especially those who they found not wearing shoes. Shoes were a luxury for many Seat dwellers, so there was no shortage of poor and homeless individuals without footwear in the streets and alleyways of the Seat.
From what Silena’s informant had told her, each member of this press gang carried with them an etching made by an artist of the actual footprint that had been left behind by the perpetrator, along with a sheaf of blank pages. When they located a small enough person, particularly one with small enough feet, the gang would hold them down, slice open their feet with ragged, rusted blades, smear the blood across the surface of their sole and press it against one of the blank sheets, in order to compare the size and shape of the prints. If the prints didn’t match, they would simply leave their victim bleeding in the streets.
Catelyn found it impossible not to think about how many of these unfortunate victims might have died from infection, contracted from wandering the streets and gutters with open wounds on their feet.
But Silena’s information was even worse th
an that. Silena went on to detail how, when the gangs did find someone whose foot was small enough, and the bloody print close enough to be questionable, they would bring this victim to the Dane’s themselves. Silena reported with sadness that these few were never heard from again. Catelyn could only imagine what the sadistic men of the Sado Sexual Elite had done to those poor souls, as payback for her crime.
She felt sick to her stomach at the possibilities, having witnessed firsthand what the Dane’s were capable of. Catelyn had no doubts that the Danes would revel in such work.
Learning this changed everything for her, and pushed Catelyn out of the routine she had found herself in. The Danes were now hurting and killing innocent people in their search for her.
Whatever Catelyn was herself willing to withstand, she couldn’t simply sit waiting in her roost while others suffered because of her actions. She needed to stop them. Somehow.
A day later, Catelyn was finalizing her plan to resolve her standoff with Eyrris, Callum and Elger. She wished that she could have taken more time to make her plans, but with the Danes now hurting an unknown number of innocents, she couldn’t afford to wait any more.
Catelyn had been uncomfortable enough when it was just the Danes and their thugs refusing to give up their own witch hunt for her, but they had grown so incensed and emboldened that they were now practicing their own violent brand of vigilantism and risking entire neighborhoods being Purged by the Imperial army.
Catelyn already couldn’t stand to live with the pain of the victims harmed directly by the Danes, and the thought of hundreds of innocents being slaughtered by the so-called righteous might of the Empire...she couldn’t allow that to happen. And so Catelyn had devised her plan, quickly and clearly.
She knew that she had to stop the Danes, and convince them to put an end to this madness, but she wasn’t likely to win them over with a charming letter or a dignified entreaty. Giving Dane Eyrris his precious artifact back was out of the question. Not only did Catelyn know that it wouldn’t make a difference in their pursuit for her, but she had been convinced, in part by Silena but also by her reason, that the weapon belonged to her now, a gift that was her responsibility. But the price for that gift was turning out to be higher than she wanted it to be, and that was also her responsibility.
No, Catelyn could see now that the Danes would never stop and there was no possibility of her returning the artifact to them, so she would have to show them the futility of their relentless pursuit. She had known men like the Danes before throughout the sojourns, and she knew that such men only understood and respected one language: violence.
Unfortunately for Catelyn, this was not one of her strengths. She had no idea how to fight nor did she have any confidence that she would last long in a physical altercation, and despite a handful of scary run-ins over the sojourns, she had never needed to kill.
Her options for intimidating heartless men like the Danes were quite limited. Catelyn also had reason to suspect that perhaps one of the reasons that the Danes were even carrying out this campaign in the manner in which they were, was in order to provoke a reaction from her. To get her to react carelessly; to make just such a rash and unplanned mistake.
But this realization had, in the end, been the catalyst that had helped Catelyn to settle on a plan of action. Catelyn had learned many things through her studies that people in the Seat had long since forgotten or could never have imagined. One thing that Catelyn had read in the book on philosophy, one chapter of which had been dedicated to the philosophy of war, was that when you wanted to go on the offensive, and your enemy was lying in wait for you to move, you moved.
Just not in the direction that your enemy would be expecting.
Catelyn was going to have to risk everything if this was going to succeed, but she had no choice. She had to get the Dane’s to stop. And so she planned her next move. And hoped and prayed that indeed, it would be in the direction that they wouldn’t be expecting.
Chapter 6
Uriel paced restlessly in his bedchamber. He was naked, sweating and aroused, but he could not focus on even his own desire. His mind raced.
In the bed, the child that had been brought by Ortis from Belkyn after his successful campaign there trembled with fear and watched the Emperor with huge red-rimmed saucer eyes. Based on what Ortis knew of his tastes, the Emperor knew that this boy would be the last surviving male of his bloodline, and Uriel usually enjoyed such delightful moments. He never failed to feed on such fear and anxiety, his body quivering in anticipation.
But not tonight. Tonight other appetites were calling him. Earlier that day, Ortis had returned from Belkyn, a handful of residents such as this boy brought back as captives, and
reported on his successful pacification of the uprising that had reportedly been there. He had spent a full three cycles with his men, rooting out any suspects who had even entertained the notion of complaining about or rebelling against the Empire. Uriel hadn’t given explicit orders to discover the source of the rumors, he had simply instructed Ortis to make Belkyn an example of, and that is exactly what he did. What he had always done.
The brutality Ortis was famous for was at the heart of the reputation of the Empire’s unforgiving armada, and was only matched by his loyalty to the Empire. Undoubtedly, this combination of traits was enough to make every resident of Belkyn wish that they had never even heard the word “uprising”. When Ortis had galloped back into the Seat at the head of his column of Imperial soldiers however, despite the clear victory he had just earned, Uriel was seething.
It seemed that while Ortis had been off quelling one nest of upstarts, another had taken root, this one right here in his own capital. Such a thing had been unthinkable once. The Will he employed to command his Empire was resolute. Unstoppable.
Two separate incidents, hundreds of paces apart and within mere spans of each other. The mere thought of it made Uriel want to erupt in fury.
Even the sight of the young boy riding upon Ortis’ war mare brought no solace, as it would have in earlier times. He and Ortis had often shared in such delights throughout the sojourns. As Ortis had grown older, losing his youthful body, Uriel no longer desired to see his friend and former lover naked and rutting beside him. And so, as it had been for many sojourns, Ortis now simply brought such prizes straight to the Emperor’s bedchambers before retiring to his own quarters.
And so it was that Uriel found himself alone with the sullen boy from Belkyn, yet another gift from his loyal general to celebrate a successful campaign.
But this new defiance within his own capital had completely spoiled any sort of victory celebration that Uriel could have imagined. Just this morning, Uriel had been informed by Enaz that the three men who comprised the heart of the SadoSexual Elite, long-time devotees of the Empire and close compatriots of Uriel himself, were openly rampaging through the Seat, exacting their own brand of justice and refusing to allow anything or anyone to stop them from achieving some personal vendetta they held.
Uriel had no philosophical argument with such activities, usually. Vigilantism served to keep the people in line when his men were otherwise engaged. But as the Danes began to extract widespread vengeance upon the populace in the same manner that his own men would have, they had already crossed a line. Uriel indulged this behavior somewhat, anticipating the flame to die out eventually, and then the unthinkable happened. They escalated their actions.
When Uriel heard this during one of Enaz’ morning reports, the first span Ortis was away, he ordered that one of his other commanders Jerram, Ortis’ second in command, pay a friendly visit to the Danes to convey the Emperor’s displeasure at their continued actions. Only a handful of citizens in the Seat would have been afforded such rare understanding, but Uriel had determined that this situation would be better handled delicately while Ortis was away in Belkyn. Jerram returned without incident, and reported that the Danes had both heard, and understood, The Emperor’s Will.
After a span, they esc
alated their search again. As appreciative of the Sado-Sexual Elite as Uriel was, he could not allow them to openly challenge the Will of their Emperor. Uriel knew that he needed to set an example, and restore the rightful order of things. No one had so brashly opposed his will since those first early sojourns when Uriel was still a boy trying to piece together his own Empire in the wake of his father’s murder.
And so Uriel had watched in anger as Ortis rode into the city, knowing that he would be forced to give his long-time friend no time to rest and bask in the glow of their victory. He would need to send Ortis out immediately, to make an example of the Danes and string their innards from his tower.
He stood now, unable to focus on his pleasures, feeling the fear of something that he had never felt before in his long life: He feared that he was losing control.
Rage filled him at the implication.
No one dares to defy my Will, he thought.
Not those pathetic politicians of the Seat, who refused to abandon their chambers all those sojourns ago when I dissolved the last traces of the old government.
Not those city engineers who tried to convince me that the walls I commanded to be built around my Empire would be impossible to construct in the time that I demanded.
Not the city advisers who tried to convince me that my vision, my dream of a perfect society would ultimately fail, devouring itself from the inside out.
And certainly not those damn priests who had begged me for mercy for their followers.
Uriel knew he could never let anyone show themselves to be beyond his laws. He swore to himself that the Danes would need to be shown the error of their ways. And not just the soft way that he had been using for the past several sojourns. This kind of defiance, Uriel told himself, requires a very special response.
Bloodfire (The Sojourns of Rebirth) Page 15