The Fire Sermon (22 page)

chapter 15

After Elsa’s news, and the haste in which we’d left, it was a shock to find New Hobart largely unchanged. It was true that, from the direction of the market, we could hear the sounds of a massing crowd, and the occasional shout. There were many people heading in that direction, so much so that we felt conspicuous going the other way. But there were others, too, going about their ordinary business. At one point I jumped at a loud crack from above, only to look up and see a man shaking out a wet sheet from a balcony draped with washing.

Kip carried the sack, and although we didn’t want to separate, we agreed that I’d walk twenty yards ahead, so that at a glance we wouldn’t necessarily appear to be together. Sticking to the alleys, we skirted the main streets and their crowds. We passed several of the posters bearing our likeness. Each time, after checking we were alone, I ripped them down, shoved them in the sack. The sound from the market to the north grew louder, even as we moved farther away. I concentrated, trying to distinguish between Kip’s footsteps behind me and the city’s noise.

The first Council soldiers we saw were on horseback, incongruous in the narrow streets. The hooves on cobbles announced them long before they came into sight, and we were crouching in a doorway by the time they rode past the end of the alley. We moved more cautiously after that, descending slowly through the streets until even the noise from the marketplace, on the far side of the town, no longer reached us.

When we drew close to the outskirts of the town, and saw how many soldiers there were, I felt a grim sense of recognition. The instinct that had plagued me for weeks, of something closing in, was now made tangible in front of us. From my vantage point behind a yew tree on a side street, I could see patrols, groups of four at a time, passing every few minutes as they circled the town’s straggling perimeter. From time to time more mounted soldiers would charge into view, riding so fast that the local residents had to leap out of their way as the horses careered through the winding streets. At the main road to the south the soldiers had already erected a gate, and from there the beginnings of a wall spanned out. They must have started building at dawn, or even overnight, given the expanse of posts already planted. At the town’s new gate open wagons were arriving, loaded with more lengths of wood. Omegas were still being allowed to pass through the gate, in both directions, but only after careful inspection by the guards.

“It’s worse than Elsa thought.” Kip had caught up with me now. He took a heavy breath as he peered over my shoulder. “You wouldn’t happen to know of any secret rivers or hidden tunnels around here, would you?”

I rolled my eyes.

For over an hour we tried to skirt the town’s edges, but at the end of each alley the view was the same: the periodic passage of soldiers, and the ceaseless mallet blows as the fence posts were planted.

It was late afternoon when we returned to the spot from where we’d first seen the main gate.

“Split up, and try bluffing our way through?” Even as I said it, we both knew it was a pointless suggestion.

“Somehow I don’t think they’re going to all this trouble just to be fooled by a fake name and a haircut.”

“I know.” I chewed my bottom lip. “Make a run for it?”

He shook his head. “Even if we could sneak past the patrol, it’s too open—it must be nearly a mile to those woods.” He gestured at the thick woods farther down the plain. “They’d see us for sure. So do we go back to Elsa’s?”

“What, and wait for them to finish the wall entirely? Wait for them to come searching, house by house?”

Below us, at the southernmost point of the spreading wall, there was a clatter as the last logs were emptied from a wagon. We watched the wagon being rehitched to the four horses, and slowly hauled back through the gate and away toward the woods. Even at this distance, coming from the woods we could hear endless ax falls, an interminable applause.

Kip nudged me. “Look—the wagon.”

“You’re not contemplating another horse-stealing venture, are you? Because that was bad enough the first time.”

“Not the horses,” he said. “The wagons. Watch.” The road between the woods and New Hobart was a constellation of wagons, the ones coming toward the town loaded with felled wood, the others returning empty. Only a single soldier sat at the front of each.

We crept as close as we dared to the growing wall—close enough that when each patrol passed we could hear the thwack that their broadswords made against their boot buckles with every step. We sheltered between two huge, empty crates that reeked of rotted vegetables. Peeking through the slats, we could see that a wagon, newly arrived, was being unloaded. It took another ten minutes for it to get close to empty. Four soldiers worked to unload the wood, throwing it down noisily into great piles, from which other men were constructing the wall. At some points the wall was barely a screen of rough branches, lashed together, while other sections were more solidly constructed, posts sunk decisively into the earth. And, all the time, the patrols passed, some mounted and some on foot, barely minutes between each one.

We didn’t have to wait long for sunset, but the tightness in my stomach grew with each minute, as we watched the wall taking shape below us. We spoke from time to time, in whispers. After a while, Kip pulled out one of the posters scrunched in the sack, flattened it on to the paving stones. “Horse thieves. Really?”

I shrugged. “What would you prefer?”

“I don’t know. It’s just—everything we’ve done, and that’s what they put on the poster?”

“What do you expect them to put? ‘Escapees from the Keeping Rooms and our top secret tanks’?”

He was about to fold the poster again when he paused. “Unless they know something—about me, before the tank.” We were already crouching close together, but he clutched my knee. “What I was.”

“A horse thief?”

His voice was racing now, chasing his ideas. “And that’s why they put me in the tanks.”

“Don’t you think it would have to be more than that? They catch horse thieves all the time—you don’t see them bundled off to secret experimental labs.”

“And it would explain the riding.”

I laughed, hushing myself quickly. “You weren’t
that
good.”

He returned the poster to the sack. “I’m just saying there could be something to it.”

I watched him as he fumbled to tighten the drawstring. “Look. I don’t blame you for wanting to know something about your past. But I just can’t see that this is the grand clue you want it to be. I’m down as a horse thief, too, for one thing.”

He conceded a nod, passed the sack back to me, and sank back into silence.

The sky to the west grew jaundiced. From the edge of the forest to the south, still ringing with ax blows, came a glimmer of flame as the first torches were lit.

It happened quickly. The noise from the market didn’t penetrate to this side of the town, but suddenly uniformed riders reeled from the east to the gate below us, conferred rapidly with the sentries there, and raced away, followed by others, hastily mounted. Men shouted along the wall, a cascade of sound and orders spreading east and west from the main southern gate. In minutes, the soldiers thinned. The patrols maintained the same route, but there were fewer of them, and many of the soldiers at work on unloading and building peeled away, following the main street up into the town. There was a swell of sound and movement. Kip’s hand in mine, we slipped down toward the end of the street, the point at which the wall petered into a pile of wood and a wagon waited, the horses facing the gate that stood a few hundred yards farther to the left. It was darkening rapidly now. At intervals along the wall, torches had been lit. From the shallow shelter of a doorway we watched as, to our left, the driver walked away from us, toward the four horses hitched to the wagon. His back was turned. I stretched my left arm out of hiding, back into my sleeve.

“You’re sure?” Kip said.

“If they see us running for the wagon, it’ll be too late for the arm to make any difference. More important that I can move quickly.”

We were just about to step into the open road, toward the emptied cart, when I pulled him back, nearly tumbling him down on top of me.

“What?” He wriggled free, looking out of the doorway where we crouched.

“Wait,” I whispered. Then, from our left, from the direction of the main gate, came the footfalls of a patrol. They were close—perhaps thirty feet away—but my eyes stayed fixed on the wagon. It didn’t move. I heard the driver cursing, and a jangling of metal as he fiddled with the harness. A horse objected with a snort. Then the driver stepped back, and we saw him hoist himself up, calling out a greeting as the patrol met and passed him. The cart shifted into motion. But the patrol was still not clear, barely past us. I didn’t realize I’d been holding my breath until I felt Kip release his with a suppressed shudder. The patrol was fifteen paces beyond us now, to the right, the wagon retreating farther to the left with each instant. Kip turned back to me, eyebrows raised. I didn’t speak, just nodded.

We were running, bent low as we crossed the road, chasing the retreating wagon. It was well under way, its progress jerky but fast. We were impossibly exposed as we ran farther from cover but seemed to get no closer to the wagon. The patrol must surely turn, I thought, or another patrol would come around the corner ahead of them, or the gate sentries would spot the scurry of movement. We were losing ground, the wagon perpetually out of reach.

I tried to look behind me to see whether we had time to retreat, or whether the patrol had seen us. As I turned, I stumbled. My knee and palms hit the ground, hard, and I wondered when the shout of discovery would come.

But Kip grabbed my hand, hauled me up. “We won’t get another chance,” he hissed, and kept hold of my hand as he took off again after the wagon. The cries of the sentries never came. I don’t know whether the wagon was slowing slightly as it approached the turning to the gate, or whether Kip’s hand in mine gave me the final impetus, but as we sprinted together the back of the wagon neared. I could see the sweat patches spreading from the driver’s armpits until they almost met in the center of his hunched back. I could make out the rough weave of the burlap sacking covering the wagon’s tray. Then we were diving onto it, throwing the sackcloth over ourselves. There was a sound, the scattering of smaller wood pieces shaken from the sacking, and I braced myself again for the shouts of discovery. But the cart’s motion itself was loud: the creaking, the hooves, the driver’s continuous shifting, and his muttered admonitions to the horses. Through the sacking I could make out a vague image of passing flames above the wagon’s low sides, as we jolted past the torches mounted at points along the wall.

We were definitely slowing now, turning to the gate, where I willed my body to total stillness, pressing my face hard against the wooden floor. I could hear Kip’s breathing, and each breath of my own sounded obscenely loud. But the wagon didn’t even pause at the gate. Another greeting was exchanged.

“Getting out of here before I grow a second head,” the driver called up to the sentries. Someone laughed, and the vibrations of the wheels changed as we left New Hobart’s cobbled streets and began on the rutted dirt road toward the forest.

I hadn’t imagined how painful the journey would be. The wagon lurched with each rut on the path, and at points I bounced, jarring my bones against the wooden tray of the wagon. My grazed hands and knee stung, but my greatest fear was that one of the jolts would dislodge the sackcloth coverings, exposing us to the view of the driver, or a watchful sentry back at the gate. I didn’t dare to shift clear of the several small broken branches that jabbed me with each bump.

After five minutes’ slow journey the din of the axes increased, heralding the forest. The road was more uneven, jolting me even more mercilessly, and squinting through the sacking I could see the darkness becoming denser. Voices, as well as ax strokes, became audible, and the thick night in front of the wagon was ignited by the light of many torches, bright through the sacking. Kip had seen it, too—when I reached out for him his hand met mine, squeezed it sharply, twice. At the third squeeze we moved, together, scrambling to our knees and then dropping heavily from the back of the cart. It was a short drop, but the ground was potholed and we landed half falling, half squatting in the wagon’s wake, on a narrow road leading deeper into the forest. For an instant we froze, but the wagon didn’t pause, and we could see the driver’s oblivious back, silhouetted against the brightness of the scene he was approaching.

For a moment it looked familiar. Then I realized it evoked a lesser version of the blast itself, as I’d seen it so many times. The flames, the roar, the sound of trees falling. But this was a slowed, infinitely smaller version of the blast. Instead of the raw sheet of flame, there was a mass of torches. The axes, wielded by hundreds of soldiers, rose and fell in front of the flames like a dreadful machine.

We watched for only a second before running, almost crawling, from the road into the deep scrub. Kip was carrying the sack that I had dropped on alighting. We stayed low, but in the discordant symphony of ax blows, falling trees, and shouts, we didn’t worry about noise, just pushed frantically through shrubs and clattered over fallen branches. I led, but my only thought was to get far away from the soldiers, the sound, and the flames. It wasn’t until we’d been running for ten minutes, and the noise and light had receded, that I slowed and tried to get a sense of our location. We’d had no choice but to drop our pace, as both the forest and the night had deepened. Away from the hellish glow of the torches it was too dark to see.

Standing close, neither of us spoke, both straining to catch the sounds of pursuit over our own panting breaths. Finally Kip whispered, “Nothing?”

I nodded, and then remembered that he couldn’t see me in the dark. “Nothing. I don’t feel a chase, either.”

He gave a heavy, shuddering exhalation. “Do you know which way to go? Not that I care, as long as we get as far away from there as we can.”