The Heretic (Beyond the Wall Book 1) (12 page)

The preacher eased off him and backed away. The man stared furiously at him as he stumbled to his feet.

Then the preacher spoke. ‘You’re afraid,’ he said. ‘I understand that. If the winter doesn’t kill us, men with weapons will. That frightens you.
Let it.
Accept the fear, because it will never go away. If you want freedom, you will need to fight for it. Every man, woman and child has a duty to live. Fighting amongst ourselves achieves nothing, and is exactly what they want.’

A crowd had gathered. Everyone in the camp had stopped and formed a circle around the scuffle.

‘We’re starving,’ one man shouted.

‘So many of us are sick and dying,’ a woman cried.

‘We need to leave here,’ another said. ‘Find somewhere safer. Vaarden knows the forest; he might know where we are.’

‘We can’t leave,’ a woman shouted. ‘The sick cannot be moved!’

The tumult began—each of them clamouring to be heard, shrieking their own desperate opinions and heedless to the opinions of others. Shepherd watched and shook his head.

They won’t last long.

The preacher let them argue. For a moment he contemplated them silently, then he turned and walked away. One of the women watched him go, and Shepherd saw the terror flood her eyes. She clutched at the coat of one man—perhaps her husband—and shook him until he faced her. Then she pointed. He followed the line of her finger and saw the preacher departing, then he shouted.

‘Wait,’ was all he could say.

Another man turned and looked. Then another.

The preacher walked quietly towards the horses and began to stroke one. From behind his back, he drew a hunting knife. He held it there for a moment, out of the animal’s line of sight, as he whispered to the horse, soothing it. He gently eased the horse’s long head away and continued to comfort it. Then he brought the knife round and up and into its throat in a swift, decisive movement. He drove it in hard and twisted and then pulled it out quickly. Blood sprayed the snow, turning it black. A half second passed before he drove the knife into the top of the animal’s head, all the way to the hilt. The horse collapsed and yet more blood poured from the wound in its throat and seeped into the snow.

One of the men turned and ran to one of the tents. He emerged a moment later with a sack and sprinted to the horse. Placing the sack on the ground, he kneeled next to it and pulled a knife from it. Then he began to cut into the horse.

A woman shouted, ‘Get some pots and pack them with snow.’

‘No,’ another shouted. ‘We need to hang it and let the blood drain. Then we butcher it.’

Shepherd watched the preacher walk towards him, blood staining his coat.

‘They need you,’ he said.

‘I don’t need them,’ Shepherd replied. ‘They’re a liability. But I do need my ship and coin.’

‘That enough for you?’

‘Think so.’

‘Then we need to get ready,’ the preacher said. ‘They’re right. Others may know where we are, so we don’t have long.’

Shepherd perched on the edge of a cot inside the same tent he’d woken in when they’d first brought him into camp. Whatever the preacher had pumped into him had finally begun to wear off, but the nausea and headaches still swirled inside him. Silently, he imagined wringing the preacher’s neck—not for the first time.

Outside their tent the wind, only partially broken by the trees, still howled and tugged at the canvas. It made the tent feel small and weak—as if it might submit to the elements at any moment and leave them unprotected and without shelter. He glanced towards the flap through which the forest lay, and wondered whether the Peacekeepers were out there right now, searching for them. Crawling through the forest with weapons against which these people had no hope of fighting back. How many of the beleaguered folk huddled around the tiny fires would survive if a single squad of Peacekeepers discovered the camp?
Or just one of those damn gunships?
Would there even be any prisoners, or would their graves be unmarked and shallow within the darkness of anonymous woodland?

The preacher sat across from him, alongside another man he had introduced as Nestor. They rested on cots they’d pulled closer to a small fire, ablaze within a makeshift brazier nestled between them. Nestor was younger than the preacher, maybe a little short of fifty, and he had hands which spoke to a life spent tilling fields and pulling crops. A man used to hard work and even harder weather, but even he had wrapped a thick blanket around his broad shoulders as the cold overwhelmed the feeble heat from the tiny brazier. His face was lined with tension. The confrontation had left everyone on edge.

Soteria is more important to me than any of you. This is not my fight.

‘Where’s the boy?’ Shepherd asked.

‘Sleeping,’ Nestor replied.

‘How is he?’

The preacher looked at Shepherd and smiled sadly. ‘Angry. He wants to go and get his brother, naturally.’

‘Rescuing his brother at all may not be possible.’

‘I doubt he sees that.’

‘He’ll learn to live with the loss, but he won’t forget.’

‘You talk like Ishmael’s already dead,’ Nestor said.

‘He is or he isn’t. Doesn’t much matter either way. We don’t know where he is. We don’t have time to find him. We’re still here when the Consul arrives, we’re all dead. It’s that simple.’

‘The boy won’t leave him.’

‘Then the boy can stay.’

‘You can’t be that callous?’

‘I’m a realist and a survivor. I’m not risking my life, and the lives of others, for one person. No matter how much I might understand what he’s feeling.’

The preacher nodded and said quietly, ‘I could see that.’

‘It’s not a topic up for discussion, so don’t ask. I don’t want to buy what you’re selling.’

‘No one does at first.’

Shepherd said nothing for a long while. The dream had descended on him inside the boy’s tent as vivid and real as it was to him when he was asleep. It concerned him more than he wanted to admit. Before now, the dream had only ever insinuated itself into his subconscious, and only ever inside the tunnels. That had allowed him to ignore it and get on with his life, and allow the memories of his past to remain locked away, hidden deep in some dark place. That those memories were blurred ghosts was fine by him. Yet all that had changed when he saw the grief in the boy’s eyes. For the first time in as long as he could remember, remnants of the dream were coming to him while he was awake.

It terrified him.

But he needed these people. He couldn’t get to Soteria alone.

Whether I take you with me afterwards is up for debate.

Eventually he said, ‘We need breach co-ordinates. Can’t get away from here without them. And since none of you are Navigators, that means we need to get them from the Customs Chamber.’

The preacher nodded. He seemed to understand that the discussion into Shepherd’s past was closed.

Good choice.

‘And I don’t see them just handing them over,’ he continued.

‘I have already arranged what we need.’

‘How?’

‘Let’s focus on getting your ship.’

Shepherd was about to argue, but thought better of it.

‘Right now the Port is tooled up real tight. But preventing you from getting off planet is probably not high on their list of priorities. They know you’re in the forest, and they think I’m with you, but all they need to do is secure Soteria so she can’t leave the Port. A single squad of Peacekeepers can achieve that.’

‘He must know we need to get off world,’ Nestor said, shaking his head. ‘Securing your vessel must be his priority.’

‘We’re no direct threat to him,’ Shepherd replied. ‘We couldn’t take Soteria from a single squad of Peacekeepers, let alone more. So why waste the resources? Better to deploy them looking for us. Bring the whole thing to a close quicker.’

The preacher pulled a small wooden pipe from beneath his coat and stuffed some dried leaves into it. He lit them, sucked deeply on the pipe, closed his eyes and waited. After a moment, he blew out a plume of lilac smoke. The leaves glowed amber in the gloom of the tent. Finally, he said, ‘Finding us quickly will be important to the Praetor. We’ve been out of his reach for too long. If a Consul is coming, he’ll want us in his custody before the Consul’s ships land. Any other scenario does not end well for him. He will want to deploy his resources to achieve that.’

‘So we exploit that.’

‘How?’ Nestor said.

‘A ruse,’ Shepherd said. ‘We have any weapons?’

‘A few,’ the preacher replied. ‘A rifle, your pistol, and then knives, hammers. Other tools.’

‘So not much.’

The preacher said nothing as he pulled again on his pipe and breathed smoke back into the fire.

Shepherd turned to Nestor. ‘How much do you know about the Praetor?’

‘Not much. He’s a ruthless son of a whore. But generally, he lets others do his work for him.’

‘You know how many gunships he has up there?’

‘Most we’ve ever seen at once is three. During the riots last time the plant wheels collapsed into the river. That’s as bad as it’s been since I’ve been alive.’ He stared long into the flames flickering in the brazier. Then he whispered, ‘Apart from now.’

Three? Shit.

‘Any idea if they’re inner-atmosphere or sublight?’

‘I wouldn’t know the difference.’

‘Soteria isn’t armed. She’s fast and agile, but she can’t outrun a gunship long enough to reach the tunnel breach. If those gunships are sublight capable, we’re in trouble.’

‘How will we know if they’re sublight capable?’

Shepherd smiled thinly. ‘When they’re chasing us.’

‘You mentioned a ruse?’ the preacher said.

‘For Soteria, I think we’ll need a diversion. The Peacekeepers will need a damn good reason to leave the Port. So we need to give them one.’

‘You have something in mind?’

Before Shepherd could answer, the flap of the tent opened, and the woman who had nursed the boy’s fever burst through and stumbled over to them. A look of wide-eyed horror creased her face.

‘He’s gone,’ she said, her voice faltering.

The preacher and Nestor rose immediately and made for the opening.

Shepherd didn’t need to ask. The whole mess had suddenly become much more complicated.

C
HAPTER
E
LEVEN

THE WIND had grown more savage, and it tore at him as he stumbled through the forest. Even through the canopy of trees, the snow plummeted in thick sheets, blinding him. The township was nearly two hours by foot, half that by cart. If he ran the whole way, he would be much quicker, but he felt weak and tired and his leg ached. He began to half-walk, half-stagger, tripping over exposed roots and sliding on the snow. Thoughts of obscuring his tracks had ceased once he was far enough away from the camp to know that he would not lead anyone to it.

He glanced down at the wound as a stab of pain seared through his thigh. The dressing was still tight—Mrs Ingmarrson had assured him it had to be to slow the bleeding and keep it clean—but he wondered if running might dislodge it. That thought was fleeting as he imagined Ishmael lying in a cell in the Watch station. He began to run again, breathless and terrified.

He didn’t know what he might find when he reached the township. The preacher had been careful not to tell anyone at camp much about his trips into town. Jordi had noticed his reticence, but hadn’t questioned it. The preacher kept those visits scattered and swift, relying on—he said—the fact that the Praetor hadn’t told the locals that the village had been attacked. There would be talk, Jordi realised that; but the locals wouldn’t know that the preacher had a village full of believers and that they were now being hunted.

Instead, the preacher had taken Jordi aside and told him of their needs. Tools, blankets, food even. Anything he could scavenge. Jordi knew the forest—the preacher understood that—and he was small and fast. It would be dangerous, but everyone had a part to play, the preacher said. But now Jordi wondered: had that really been his part to play, or was it just to keep him occupied, to prevent him from asking about Ishmael? Had the preacher planned this all along?

How can I trust you now? When you lied to me so blatantly?

Jordi felt betrayed. Resentment burned in his heart almost as violently as the fear for his brother roiled in his stomach. He had believed the preacher; believed in what he had told them. About the Magistratus, the history of humankind. About being free. Most of the village did. Jordi could see that the preacher had been persuasive, but then again, he had been speaking to an audience desperate to listen.

But are the lies we’ve been told all these years anywhere near as bad as the lies that you told me?

He wanted so badly to hate the preacher for his deception, but found he couldn’t. The preacher had made them all believe that something powerful and seductive lay beyond the Praetor, beyond the Magistratus, beyond their oppression.
Oppression
. A word the preacher had used, but it made sense. They had begun to believe that hope existed on other worlds. That another way of life might be worth fighting for.