The Fire Sermon (35 page)

I shouted for the guard to bring Piper. Although it was still long before dawn, he came within minutes.

“Their boats—they’re too big to get through the reef. But they have smaller boats on board, to launch.”

“Landing craft.” Piper nodded. “That will slow them down, at least for the last few miles. And the reef itself—how will they know the way through?”

“I’d thought maybe they’d have a map—that they’d managed to bribe someone, or torture them. But they won’t need one.” I closed my eyes, remembering the presence I’d sensed. “She’s there—the Confessor. On one of the ships, guiding them.”

“She can find us without a map, like you did?” said Kip.

I nodded, though it felt strange to compare our own dinghy’s haphazard journey with the decisive advance of that fleet. It wasn’t simply the fact that she would guide the fleet to the island. It was the knowledge that she would be here herself. I hated the thought of her setting foot on this place. Piper had said to me, once, that our arrival had changed the island. But her arrival would surely be the end of it.

I heard my voice quaking. “How much longer until our ships get back?”

“Not before noon,” he said, “for the fastest of them, and that’s if all’s gone well. It’s not just getting to the mainland and back again—they have to find a safe landing spot, out of view, and unload the evacuees. We’re talking about hundreds of children, and the most crippled and slowest of us.”

“And the two ships out west, looking for Elsewhere? You said they were our fastest.”

“If I could call them back, don’t you think I would’ve done?” He looked down. For a moment I saw him as he might look when alone, in his tiny makeshift room, away from expectant eyes: deflated, tired. He rubbed his forehead with his palm and spoke quietly. “They’ve been gone for a month. We don’t even know if they’re still out there.”

I closed my eyes, scanning the sea for the island’s returning fleet, or for those ships that had gone west. Nothing. Only the knowledge that the Council fleet was drawing closer. The prospect of that was imposing enough, but the Confessor’s presence made it incalculably worse. If she arrived before our own fleet returned, the island would be no more than a trap. The remaining children, all those who couldn’t fight, would stand no chance at all. Were there tanks enough yet, I wondered, for all of them?

At noon the wind brought me a vision, but the ships I saw felt distant, and irregular. Trying to see them was like squinting into the sun—all I could make out were silhouettes and glare. They were ships, all right, but whose? It was another hour or two before details became apparent. A fishing net lying tangled on the floor of a boat. A hull painted in yellow and blue stripes. A sail so full of patches that it looked like a quilt.

“It’s our fleet,” I said to Kip. “They’re close.”

We called the guard to send for Piper. “Get them down to the harbor,” I told him while he was still shutting the door behind him. “Our ships have come back. They’ve unloaded the first evacuees. They’re almost here.”

He shook his head. “I’ve had the lookout posts sending word every half hour. Still nothing.”

“They might not be in sight yet,” said Kip, “but if she can sense them, they’re coming.”

“There’s time,” I said. “If you act now, you can get the next load of people off the island. Get them down there and ready to board as soon as the ships arrive.”

He shook his head again. “If the Council fleet arrives first, we’ll have our most vulnerable completely undefended at the harbor. There’s no shelter down there—we might as well tie them up with a bow for your brother’s soldiers. Think of who we’re talking about. Some of them can’t walk, let alone scramble back through the tunnels quickly. They’d never make it back inside the crater, let alone the fort.”

“That’s why you’ve got to get them down there and ready to board now. It’ll take time. If you wait until our ships are in sight, it’ll be too late. They won’t get away.”

“At least they’d have the shelter of the fort.”

“You know as well as I do that the fort’s a trap. The whole island is, once the Council fleet arrives.”

“We can defend the fort, at least for a while,” he said. “Until I know for sure our fleet will be here before theirs, I can’t take the risk.”

“She does know for sure,” said Kip, but Piper was already halfway out the door.

“Wait,” I called after him. “Is there a ship with blue and yellow stripes?”

He halted in the doorway.

“The
Juliet
,” he said. He dared the start of a smile. “You saw it, in the vision? It was that specific?”

I nodded. “Get them down to the harbor.”

He didn’t say anything, but only minutes after he’d locked the door, we saw the remaining civilians begin to file from the fort. They were the older children, and more of those unable to fight. They moved more hesitantly than the first evacuees. The children were holding hands, and the adults had bowed heads. No fleet awaited them yet in the harbor—only the hope of one, and the fear of another. I watched them go, and wondered whether I was sending them to a slaughter.

An hour later, the bells rang again. For a moment, my heart rang in my chest as loudly as the bells themselves. But this time the noise from the tower was different: not the cascade of clanging that had sounded the day before, but three single chimes, clear and high. From the courtyard, we could hear the soldiers whooping. Cries were passed down from the sentry posts:
Nearing the reef now. All of them, in full sail.
Kip and I didn’t join the cheering, but I turned my head to his shoulder and let out a breath that shook my whole body.

Piper returned, an hour or two later.

“I’m moving you,” he said with no preliminaries. “This room’s too close to the outer perimeter.”

“The second load—they’re away?” I asked.

“The last of them should be clear of the reef shortly.” There was relief in his voice, but his eyes were grave. We were on our own now: there was no chance of a third sailing. The full moon was already rising in the late-afternoon sky. It gleamed above the Omega flag on the crater’s edge.

“Are there any boats left?”

“Nothing big enough to make the crossing,” he said. “We’ve stashed them all in the caves east of the harbor—but it’s only the rafts and wherries, and a few of the smallest dinghies. The boats the children learn to sail in.”

There were no children on the island now. Would children’s voices ever be heard again in the hidden city?

“Pack up your things,” he went on. “If they penetrate the fort, I need you secure.” He gave us only a minute to bundle our few belongings into a rucksack, then tossed us a pair of hooded cloaks, like those worn by the watchmen. “Wear these. After what happened with Lewis, it’s not safe for you to be seen.”

He escorted us himself, pausing for a whispered exchange with the guard at our door. With the cloak’s hood up, my view was a series of curtailed glimpses. A blacksmith with a load of axes hoisted on his shoulder clattered past. Guards rushed along the corridors. When one young watchman stopped to salute Piper, he growled, “No time for that nonsense—get to your post.” It was dark in the lower levels of the fort, where the windows had been boarded shut. Only the arrow slits allowed slants of light in. At one, we passed an archer with no legs, sharpening arrows as he waited on an upturned crate.

The room Piper finally showed us into was small—a compact chamber partway up the tower, with a narrow window mounted high in the curved stone wall.

Piper saw me eyeing the room’s thick-beamed door.

“Don’t even think about it,” said Piper. “See those?” He gestured at the barrels stacked high against one wall. “This is where we store the watchmen’s wine rations. It’s got the solidest lock in the whole fort.”

Remembering Lewis, I didn’t know whether I should feel secure or trapped.

“If the fort falls, I’ll come for you. If anyone else tries to get in the door, even one of the Assembly, signal from the window. Wave one of the cloaks.”

“You’ll be down there?” I looked out at the courtyard below. “Not in the Assembly Hall?”

“Up there, giving orders, while I can’t even see what’s going on? No. I’ll be at the gate with the other guards.”

I stood on tiptoes to peer out the window, which looked over the courtyard and the main gate, and the streets beyond. Guards were already waiting at their posts. On the parapet encircling the courtyard, some squatted, rocking slightly on their haunches. Near the reinforced gate, others paced. One woman tossed her sword lightly from hand to hand.

“We can fight,” Kip said. “Let us out, and we can help.”

Piper cocked his head. “My guards are trained. Skilled. You think you could just pick up a sword for the first time and be a hero? This isn’t some bard’s story—you’d be a liability out there. Anyway, I can’t risk Cass. It’s not just the Council soldiers who might attack you.”

Again I pictured Lewis. The blood running off the handle of Piper’s knife, as it juddered with Lewis’s blood.

Kip was about to speak, but the bells sounded again, the clashing warning alarm of two days prior. From this high in the tower, the very stones seemed to throb with the sound. My teeth felt loosened in their gums, vibrating with the clamor of the bells.

“They’re here,” said Piper. Within seconds the slamming of the door was added to the bells’ din. When he’d locked the door, the tiny room felt overstuffed, bursting with the smell of wine and the clashing of the bells.

We dragged one of the wine barrels to beneath the window, knelt on it together, heads pressed close so that we could both peer out into the lowering night.

We’d waited two days for the Council fleet’s arrival, but the few hours between the bells and the first Council soldier cresting the top of the crater felt even longer. As we waited, I tried to picture what would be going on outside the caldera: the fleet drawing near, the landing craft being launched and navigating the reef. The first encounters with the island’s guards, down at the harbor. But through the double-darkness of night and distance, I couldn’t get any clear visions, only fragments. A black sail being furled. Oars slicing water. A torch held at the prow of a boat, its flame reflected in the waves.

The first news we had of the skirmishes at the harbor was when the injured guards began to emerge from the tunnel opposite the city. By the light of torches we saw them, bloodied and limping, being helped back to the fort. Shortly afterward there was a mass retreat from the harbor, several hundred of our guards pouring from the tunnel and falling back to posts in the city itself. Then, perhaps twelve hours after bells had foretold the island’s doom, Kip and I caught our first glimpse of the Council soldiers. It was early morning. Movement on the crater’s southern edge drew our attention: a few of our guards struggling to hold back a phalanx of red-clad soldiers. At the same time, the first tunnel must have fallen, and the Council soldiers penetrated the crater itself.

Piper had said,
This isn’t some bard’s tale
, and what unfolded on the island that day made it clear. When bards sang of battles, they made it sound like a kind of dance. As if there would be a beauty to the combat, a musical clashing of swords while soldiers parried to and fro, and individual fighters distinguished themselves with feats of skill and daring. But what I saw allowed no room for such things. It was all too cramped, too quick. Jabs with elbows and knees. Sword butts shattering cheekbones. Teeth rolling like dice on the stones. No battle cries or slogans—just grunts, swearing, and shouts of pain. Knife handles slippery with blood. The arrows were the worst. They were not light, airy things. They were thick, and fired so fast that I saw a Council soldier pinned through his shoulder to a wooden door. Each arrow made a tearing noise as it flew over the courtyard wall, as if ripping the very sky open. We were perhaps forty feet above the courtyard, but the smell of blood reached the window, seeping into air already thick with the scent of wine. I wondered if I would ever be able to lift a cup of wine to my mouth again without tasting blood.

Our guards were fighting to kill. I saw one plant her ax so deeply in the neck of a Council soldier that she had to brace her foot against his fallen body and heave at the handle three times to free the blade. A dwarf guard reached up to slice open the stomach of a soldier, his insides unspooling into his hands as he clutched at them. Arrows found their way into chests, stomachs, eyes. For me, each was a twofold dying. With each Alpha soldier killed, I felt, and sometimes saw, an Omega on the mainland fall. A soldier beneath me took a sword blow that left his face shattered like a broken plate. I closed my eyes and saw a woman with blond hair fall down on a gravel path, dropping a bucket of water. A Council soldier climbing one of the fort’s outer walls took an arrow in her chest, but when I flinched and closed my eyes I saw a man in a bath slip wordlessly beneath the water. Each of the deaths had its echo, and I saw them all, until only Kip’s hand, clutching mine on the windowsill, could keep me from screaming.

Despite our guards’ willingness to kill, the Council soldiers had numbers on their side, as well as the physical strength of their unhampered bodies. Our one-armed guards could handle a sword or shield, but not both; the legless or lame archers could kill unerringly from a distance, but when the Council soldiers gained the outer wall and came upon them, they couldn’t flee in time. When pressed in close combat, the Council soldiers were killing, too, but it quickly became clear that they were taking prisoners whenever possible. Already ten or more of our guards had been dragged, injured, back to the Council lines. Where one bleeding guard had been hauled by her legs, a serrated smear of blood marked the road. High on the crater’s lip we could see the silhouettes of longbows, but the Council archers were holding back, avoiding the indiscriminate killing dealt at a distance. All the arrows came from within the fort.

“I can’t watch,” said Kip, stepping back from the window. I envied him that. I knew that if I turned aside, the images would be there anyway, some of them already familiar from my earlier visions.