Bloodfire (The Sojourns of Rebirth) Read online

  Bloodfire

  by Matthew Medina

  BLOODFIRE

  Book One of The Sojourns of Rebirth

  © 2014 Matthew F. Medina All rights reserved.

  ISBN 978-1499149616

  Cover Artwork by Matthew Medina Dedicated to Karen and Owen, the heart of my loving and supporting family. This has been an amazing journey, and I'm lucky to have made this trip with you both by my side.

  In memory of my loving mother, Susanne.

  Acknowledgments

  A book is the realization of an idea. Something dreamed of, then conjured up out of that place in one's imagination and into the reality of paper and ink, or these days, into bits and bytes and a virtual sea of photons. In particular, a book like the one you hold in your hands begins humbly enough with the twinkling of inspiration, and so it is fitting that I set aside some space to detail the people who've most inspired me.

  First and foremost, I wish to thank my entire family. My wife and son, my dad and my sister and her family, my in-laws, my aunts, uncles, and cousins around the world, without whose tireless love and support I would have been unable to see this project through to the end.

  I must also thank my amazing friends and colleagues, especially those of you who challenge me every day to be a better man, and a more well rounded person. The ideas and the conversations that I've had with all of you are what fill me with purpose every day.

  Special thanks to those among my friends and family who volunteered to read my first novel and provided invaluable feedback on it, including Alexis Bogue, Brad Paulson, Gayatri Salunke, Kristina Sontag, Jeshe Wiggins, Jennifer Hoffman, Jennifer Birdlebough-Bostrom, Bryan Lim, Virginia Gagner, and Elan Stimmel.

  A special thank you to Diane Scoville, who gave me something precious – the ability to honor myself. This book would not exist without that.

  Lastly, I must acknowledge the bravery and the sacrifice of free thinking men and women across the world. It is thanks to all of you that the flame of reason remains burning in our world, and has helped illuminate the path for people like me.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1.......................................................................9

  Chapter 2....................................................................34

  Chapter 3....................................................................89

  Chapter 4...................................................................107

  Chapter 5...................................................................134

  Chapter 6...................................................................145

  Chapter 7...................................................................156

  Chapter 8...................................................................179

  Chapter 9...................................................................196

  Chapter 10.................................................................210

  Chapter 11..................................................................221

  Chapter 12.................................................................232

  Chapter 13.................................................................242

  Chapter 14.................................................................253

  Chapter 15..................................................................271

  Chapter 16.................................................................289

  Chapter 17.................................................................310

  Chapter 18.................................................................321

  Chapter 19.................................................................341

  Chapter 20................................................................369

  Chapter 21.................................................................390

  Chapter 22................................................................405

  Chapter 23................................................................430

  Chapter 24................................................................444

  Appendix...................................................................470

  The Empire of Exeter

  1,072ndSojourn, Imperial Reckoning

  Chapter 1

  The young girl lay on her back, the sensitive tips of her fingers running over the rotting wooden slats that made up the roof of the building where she lived, her face upturned to the cloudless slate sky as the sweltering heat of the day threatened to squeeze the life from her. Even dressed as she was for the heat, wearing only short pants of her own design and her lightest shirt, she found little relief from the oppressive weather. As so often happened on the hottest days of the sojourn, she passed the time by moving as little as possible and thinking deeply about her problems.

  Today, one particular problem was overwhelming her, and despite several prayers spent in thought, she still didn’t know how to solve it. That problem was food; not typically something she spent a great deal of time thinking about.

  In truth, food was often at the root of many of her problems, but by far her most common complaint in this area was not having it, so she rarely had to contemplate the issue. Her solution to the problem of sustenance was always simple and straightforward: steal what food she could and try to get through each day without starving.

  Ironically enough, her current dilemma was the exact opposite of the problem she always had when it came to food. Today, she had more food than she knew what to do with.

  Normally, this would be a good problem for her to have, and she would devise a myriad of ways to dry and store the bulk of the food to be eaten later, something which she had much experience with. But with the heat-wave and the humidity that the Seat was currently experiencing, much of the food would certainly spoil before it had time to dry.

  The girl, named Catelyn by her parents after her mother’s mother, had already been in possession of the food for half a span, since she had discovered it abandoned.

  She valued honesty, and if she were to speak the truth plainly, it was not strictly true that the food had been abandoned, but since the prior holder of the cache was now dead, Catelyn didn’t think too hard about the distinction. She didn’t know how long the previous owner of the food had possessed it, although she could guess from the smell and taste of it that it had been less than a day.

  The skinny, red-haired girl lying sweat-soaked on the roof was sixteen and alone, just one among hundreds of abandoned and orphaned children and adults who made the streets and slums of The Seat their home. Like all of the other urchins and street rats, Catelyn was living hand to mouth, eking out a meager existence any way that she could. But unlike her fellow street dwellers, Catelyn’s tragic history was indelibly etched upon her, both figuratively and literally. On the outside, she bore those scars across most of her face and upper torso, but they were more than skin deep.

  She covered over the worst of her scars with a scarf wrapped around part of her face, covering her hair and wound tightly over her eyes. She had lost her sight the same day that she had lost her parents.

  Despite being perpetually underweight as a result of her life of poverty, she was stronger than she looked, the result of spending all of her days and many of her nights nestled high above the streets and alleyways of the Seat, traversing the “thieves highway” clinging to the eaves of buildings, hands and feet gripping to the rough plaster or wood frames of buildings and angling her head back and forth, using all of her remaining senses to take in the world around her.
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br />   Her father, before he had been lost to her forever, had always told her that information was her greatest ally and that fact had only been reinforced by the loss of her sight, so she always kept her senses keenly honed, hoping for any opportunity that she might come across that could help her survive.

  Scraps of an overheard conversation, the scent of freshly baked bread in the breeze, or the vibration of a cart rumbling by beneath her carrying food to the marketplace became her stock in trade. She collected these as the valuable commodities that they were; searching for something, anything, that she could use to keep herself alive one more day. Just as she had for the past six sojourns, and just as she had earlier this span.

  It was days ago, during one of her recent scouting patrols when she had discovered the food cache, quite by accident. It was the beginning of the most recent wave of unseasonably hot weather when she heard arguing in the slums below her turn to scuffling, and the scuffling turn to high-pitched screaming. She did what she always did when she came upon a scene like this; she waited for the slim chance that after the violence passed, she could swoop in quickly and scavenge something of value. Some of her best scores in the past had been the result of just such an altercation, and the Seat was no stranger to such violence.

  She crept from eave to eave, silent as a hunting cat, until she hung silently in the rafters of an abandoned warehouse above the confrontation. Catelyn listened as one of the local gang lords, a muscular thug named Boddick, pressed some unlucky citizen for the location of their cache of goods, while his thugs guarded the perimeter and kept a look out for interference.

  Catelyn had encountered Boddick and his men once before, and the meeting had not been pleasant. She'd relieved one of Boddick's men of his satchel full of marks, and they'd chased after her through the alleys until finally she lost them by crawling under the floorboards of a derelict guardhouse.

  They'd tromped through the ramshackle building, spewing the most vile curses they could think of at her, and sending showers of dirt and dust down into her face while she listened to her heart pounding in her chest and trying not to cough, beseeching the Divines to ensure that they wouldn't find her.

  Whether the Divines intervened on her behalf or not was debatable, but Boddick and his men eventually gave up the search for her. She'd made a point of avoiding them from that point on, and his presence here gave her pause.

  Fortunately for Catelyn, as was often the case with men like Boddick, they could seemingly only grasp the obvious and so he and his men only watched for people at eye level, and never thought to check below their feet or above their heads in the roofs or attics of buildings.

  She waited a long time, as Boddick first tried to extract the information from his victim with verbal threats, and then he began escalating his demands with further and further violence. When the citizen refused to give in, she listened with disgust as Boddick, never one to shy away from being a hands-on gang lord, slit the man's throat, and then ordered his thugs to toss the building, tearing around the room, getting angrier and angrier as their prize continued to elude them.

  Finally, as Catelyn had experienced herself once before, Boddick exhausted his patience and returned with his crew to their territory, and she waited until she was certain that she was alone, then slipped down from where she had been hiding.

  Silent bare feet landed her softly in the room, connecting her at once to the world around her. Scents and sounds blossomed into her awareness and she took in the miasma of information that her senses were conveying to her.

  Ever since Catelyn had been blinded by the incident that took her parent’s lives, something inside her had grown, and she could use more of her senses than before, and in ways that she hadn't been able to do when she could see. It felt to her as though she could taste colors, and could smell the texture of the surfaces under her hands and feet. And so when she dropped into the room, it was like she was “seeing” beyond what she remembered the world looking like before the loss of her sight.

  Over the past six sojourns, her senses had become so sharp that she had even learned to visualize them in her mind as a sort of “bubble” within which she could glean information about the world around her. In that time, she practiced and refined her bubble until she could expand it out to paces beyond her or focus it down to the smallest details right in front of her.

  Her instincts and her keen senses had already allowed her to guess the location of the food cache, but now that she stood just mere paces away, she immediately smelled the uncured pork nearby and knew that she had been right. The cache of food was in the one place where a gang of pitiless thugs would never think to look: hidden behind the privy by the warehouse office.

  Catelyn covered her nose and mouth as she softly and carefully padded across the warehouse to the small room, then lifted the chamber pot, trying not to slosh the contents onto the floor. She practiced caution because she knew the dangers of touching or standing in human waste, and although she was quite sure that the thickened pads on her palms and soles were free of open cuts or wounds, she was always more careful than not when it came to her health, to say nothing of the disgust she felt at the idea of getting that kind of filth on her body.

  With the chamber pot out of the way, she ran the sensitive fingers of her free hand along the panel of the wall behind it. She could make out a groove in the pattern of the wood which was slightly indented, so she pushed and it gave, sliding to one side.

  She could make out the aroma of food even with her nose and mouth covered, and she just reacted, reaching out with both hands and pulling the box of foodstuffs to her. It was heavy, and Catelyn instantly knew she now had more food in her hands than she had seen in many spans. Maybe even sojourns.

  The stench of the privy reasserted itself and finally overwhelmed her and she stood, taking three long strides back to the spot where she had dropped into the room, and assessed her good fortune instinctively and unconsciously saying a silent blessing to the Divines for their generosity.

  And although she was grateful for their Providence in this matter, she immediately concluded that accepting this gift was not going to be a simple undertaking.

  She briefly considered just taking some of the food, and leaving the bulk of it to either rot or be discovered by someone else. It would be impossible for her to return to her roost via the rooftops with a heavy burden like this, and she would certainly draw attention walking the streets with a heavy box in her arms.

  But the thought of that much food going to waste was impossible to bear, and so she began loading the many pockets she had sewn into her shirt and pants with as much food as she could carry comfortably. Then she placed the remaining food back into the wall panel, slid the panel shut, and returned to the rooftops and back toward home.

  It took Catelyn six trips in the sweltering heat, her pockets alternately filled, then emptied, to completely transfer the box’s contents from the hidden cache in the warehouse to her own stores. When she was done, her roost was filled to bursting.

  And so Catelyn now found herself laying in the sun on her roof, considering her options for keeping this food, and none of them were good. She was confident that some of the fruits and vegetables would keep in the box she had hidden in the cellar for storing produce. But the box was only big enough for a handful of items, meaning that much of the produce would be left out to spoil. And that wouldn’t help with the biggest of her challenges: the meat.

  Rather than see most of it spoil, something she believed that the Divines, if they existed, would surely frown upon especially after blessing her with this gift, she thought about simply eating as much of the food as she was able to in a grand celebration of Their kindness, but that would likely result in her getting sick, as she was not used to such an excess.

  She considered briefly just preserving the little that she had room to store, but again that would mean most of the food would simply be wasted. Or she could do the unthinkable and share it. She wondered many times if this w
as a test set by the Divines to challenge her faith, which had been wavering recently.

  It seemed like the kind of thing that she remembered reading about the Divines, before her life alone without the ability to read.

  The problem was, sharing the food would almost certainly lead to questions from those she shared it with, about how she had obtained such a bounty. And questions would lead the gang lord, or worse, the Empire itself, right to her door. She had to avoid that at all costs.

  No, none of the obvious alternatives were acceptable, and so as she often did when she was troubled by something, she found herself spending time on the roof, thinking.

  Not for the first time, Catelyn wished that she had been born in a different era.

  She wished that there was no Empire. No Uriel. No Seat.

  She wished that her parents were still alive.

  Catelyn knew that in the Before, which is what people in the Seat called the sojourns prior to the rise of the Empire, there had been many methods for storing food which would keep it cool and dry even during the hottest cycles of the sojourn. But she had learned about such things long ago, had read the stories as they were set down in books that were even older than she was.

  Such methods were surely lost to people now, or if they weren’t, she was confident that the Emperor Uriel would not approve of such blasphemy. The Empire was quite clear in its position on the people of the Seat making use of anything from the Before.

  No, Catelyn would have to solve this problem with her own ingenuity, just as she had to solve every problem that she had ever come up against in her young life.

  Adversity had come to her early, in the form of becoming a blind orphan at the age of ten, which she had so far overcome through sheer force of will and a stubborn determination to live.

  Living hand-to-mouth on the streets was not an unusual condition in the Seat, so Catelyn didn’t think overmuch of her ability to survive.

  One quickly learned, or one quickly died.