The Fire Sermon (36 page)

“Can you see her?” he asked.

“The Confessor? They won’t risk her in the fighting—she’s much too valuable. But she’s out there—maybe on the fleet still. I can feel her.” Her presence was as thick in the air as the scent of blood and wine. But she was holding back—her malignant presence felt like a storm about to break over the island. “She’s waiting.” The worst of it was the calm of her anticipation. I could feel no nervousness in her—only a deadly patience. She had probably seen the same outcome that I had. So she waited for the island to fall, observing it with all the detachment of someone listening to a bard’s tale that they’ve heard before.

In the chaos of the fighting at the city’s edge I couldn’t distinguish Piper, but periodically I saw him disentangle himself from the battle and drop back to the courtyard, where he consulted with the senior guards and Assembly members gathered there. Over the messy sounds of the fighting, his voice could be heard, shouting orders.
More archers to the south side, to cover the tunnel entrance. Water to the west gate—now.
As the hours passed, one phrase reached us more than any other:
Draw back.
Again and again we heard it, Piper’s voice increasingly hoarse as the hours of fighting devoured the day.
Draw back from the west tunnel. Draw back from the market square. Draw back to the third wall.

The steep crater meant that sunset in the city was always rapid. First the horizon above the crater’s western edge was tinged pink, as if the blood on the streets was staining the sky. Then, quickly, it was dark, the fighting only illuminated by the patches of fire that were spreading upward from the city. The battle line had moved close to the fort itself now. The red-clad figures had overrun the eastern half of the city, and most of our guards were mustered within the fort’s outer perimeter, although there was still intermittent fighting in the street beyond.

In the growing darkness, the figures outside had been reduced to flame-backed silhouettes. I had no chance of making out Piper and hadn’t heard his voice for some time. I’d almost convinced myself that he’d been taken, when he unlocked our door, shutting it quickly behind him.

He seemed uninjured, though his face was spattered with blood, a fine spray across one cheek that reminded me of the freckles that Zach used to have.

“I have to hand you over to the Assembly,” he said.

“You’re taking orders from them?” said Kip. “Aren’t you in charge?”

“That’s not how it works.” Piper and I had spoken in unison. He looked at me for a moment, then turned back to Kip. “I might be the leader, but I work for them. Even if I wanted to, I can’t counteract their decision.”

Kip stepped between me and Piper. “But it’s too late. Even if the Assembly kills her, and gets rid of Zach, it won’t stop the Council. It won’t stop what’s happening out there.”

“The Assembly doesn’t want to kill you.”

To anyone else, those might have been words of comfort. To me and Kip, having seen the tanks, and the cells, Piper’s words snatched the air from the room.

“Kip’s right, though,” I said. “Even if you hand us over, they still won’t spare the island. You know they’ve been looking for you for years—since long before we arrived.”

“You can’t give her to the Council, after all she’s done.” Kip was shouting. “Without her, you’d have had no warning. You wouldn’t have had the chance to get anyone away from here, let alone two sailings.”

I couldn’t hear his words without thinking of what else I might be responsible for. Had I drawn the Confessor here? Had I brought this upon the island? None of us spoke it, but the thought rang in the room, as strident as the island’s warning bells.

“Would you?” I said to Piper. “If you could choose. Would you still hand us over?”

The city below us was burning, and he had come straight from battle, but this was the first time I’d seen him look nervous.

“I’ve already asked too much of these people. They’ve stood back while the children, the old, and the sick have been sent away. They’re witnessing the end of everything we’ve built here, over decades. You could be our only bargaining chip. How can I refuse to hand you over?”

“This island is a place of refuge for Omegas,” I said quietly. “That includes me and Kip. If you hand us over, today won’t just be the end of the island. It’ll be the end of what it stood for.”

“Look out the window, Cass,” said Piper. “Can you tell me to stand on principles while my people are bleeding?”

It wasn’t the shouting that frightened me, but the phrase
my people
. It was like the night when Kip and I had watched the dance through the wall of the barn. Here we were again, on the wrong side of the wall. Pursued by the Alphas, rejected by the Omegas.

Slowly, Piper pulled from his belt a long knife, three times the size of the nimble throwing knives that always hung at his back. It glinted sharply in the torchlight, though I flinched when I saw the blood clotted around the base of the blade.

“The Assembly must know you had us guarded, to protect us from them. Why would they trust you to take us to them now?”

He was still weighing the knife in his hand.

“They don’t. They sent six men to collect you.” His smile seemed incongruous on his bloodied face. “But I didn’t tell them that I’d moved you. They’ve sent the guards to your old room.”

With one flick of his arm, Piper spun the knife so that the handle was proffered to me.

“It’ll buy us a few minutes, at most. But I can’t spare anyone to escort you. And even if I could, there’s no one I can trust at this point. Can you find your way to the coast without being seen?”

I nodded. “I think so.”

“She can,” said Kip.

“The Council’s taken the two largest tunnels, and Simon’s brigade is only just holding them off at the entrance to the north tunnel. That’s bad news for the city, but good for you—they’re pouring through the tunnels rather than scaling the outside. If you go over the top of the crater, while it’s dark, it’s your best chance.”

“And then?”

“The children’s boats, in the caves east of the harbor. We’ve never made the crossing in anything so small, but they’re not much worse than the bathtub you arrived in. If the weather stays fair, it gives you a chance.”

I took the knife silently, and the scabbard that he unhooked from his belt. As I slid the bloodied knife into its sheath, I said, “You’ll never rule the island once they know you’ve let me go.”

Piper laughed soberly. “What island?”

I passed Kip the knife. He threw it into the rucksack, along with the few possessions we’d brought with us from the other room: a water flask, some leftover food, and a blanket.

I faced Piper by the door. Even as I was pulling my sweater over my head I didn’t stop talking. “The north tunnel will fall not long after midnight. Don’t rely on it. And watch out for the fire—it’ll spread fast.” He reached for my arm, straightened my bunched sleeve, left his hand there. I continued. “Their archers will use flaming arrows soon, on the fort itself. That’s how they get the main gate down in the end.”

He squeezed my shoulder. “I’ll get the rest of these people off the island.”

I shook my head. “You don’t need to lie to me,” I said quietly. “I’ve seen it already.”

He met my gaze, nodded. “Once you’re through the reef, don’t sail southeast, the way you came. Sail northeast, to make landfall where the Miller River reaches the coast. Then head east, directly inland, toward the Spine Mountains. You won’t see the mountains from the coast, but you’ll feel it, right? It’s the biggest river in the area, the only one to reach the sea on that stretch of coast.” I nodded. “We have people in that region,” he said. “We’ll find you. If we make it off the island, if there’s still a resistance, then we’ll need you.”

I took his hand from my shoulder but held it in my own for a moment before turning away.

We wore the cloaks again, but getting through the fort itself was straightforward. The upper levels were nearly empty except for archers at the arrow slits, who didn’t even turn as we ran past. As we neared the courtyard level the corridors were crowded with the injured and those caring for them, but nobody looked twice at two more blue cloaks making their way through the crowd. When we emerged into the courtyard, we saw the Council’s burning arrows, painting streaks of flame on the night, and we stuck close to the wall. The main fighting had almost reached the courtyard gate—only the fort’s outer walls remained defended, and already the arrows had done their work, and several fires were glowing within the walls. We made it out of the courtyard just in time, in the wake of a brigade of reinforcements rushing out the side gate. Only when we reached the last checkpoint in the outer perimeter did anyone query us, and even that was just a shout from one of the guards manning the gate. “To the north tunnel?” he asked, leaning toward us, his flaming torch held high. We kept our heads down.

“Yes,” Kip replied. “Reinforcements to Simon’s brigade.”

The guard grunted. “Two of you? It’ll take more than that. They’re saying it’s about to fall.” He spat on the ground, his spittle blackened with smoke, before lifting the bolt and bar and waving us through.

Beyond the fort, we could hear the sounds of battle from our right, where the fighting was concentrated at the mouth of the north tunnel. We headed uphill, skirting the fort’s outer perimeter and sticking to the narrow streets. At one point we had to turn back when the way ahead ended in flames; another time we slipped into a doorway, mercifully unlocked, and squatted for a breathless minute while a skirmish passed us, two retreating guards harried by three Council soldiers. As we crouched against the inside of a stranger’s door we could hear the clash of sword on sword, each strike followed by an involuntary grunt. The street was so narrow that the sword swings thudded against the wooden houses on either side. The scuffle passed in moments, the shouts chasing one another downhill. When we creaked open the door, the moonlight showed a fresh slash in the wood, inches deep, and a bloodied handprint on the white-painted doorframe.

It must have been almost midnight when we reached the crater’s edge, and the encircled night sky opened to the sea’s expansive horizon. To the east, the moon was fully fattened now, but dulled by the smoke rising from the city. Occasional cries from the battle still reached us, and I wondered if Piper’s voice was among them. Below us, tucked into the island’s western edge, the harbor was crammed with the sleek, dark landing craft of the Council’s fleet—so thickly packed in the tiny harbor that it looked possible to walk across it by stepping from boat to boat. To the east, beyond the mile or two of sea churned by the reef, we could see the fleet moored, the huge sails furled.

The scramble down the outside of the island would have been impossible without the full moon. There were several paths that zigzagged their way down to the coast, but the islanders relied on the tunnels rather than those narrow, circuitous trails, deliberately kept small so they couldn’t be seen from the water. We avoided them, too, for fear of encountering soldiers from either side, and instead took our chances on the steep, jagged rock. In places it was so sharp that to grab at it for balance was like grasping at blades; at others it was so thickly coated with bird droppings that any purchase was impossible. All my concentration couldn’t steer us entirely clear of the fissures and crevasses that opened in the slick stone. We were climbing more often than walking, pressed so tightly against the rock that my cheek was grazed, and the straps of the rucksack that I wore kept snagging on the claws of the rock face. Even when we could walk, the way was so sheer that twice I fell, catching hold just in time to stop myself skidding down to the unforgiving rocks below. It would almost have been comical, to have escaped the battle and died from something as mundane as a fall. But the prospect felt too real to be amusing, as we crept our way down the island’s carapace.

By the time we were close to the sea, a light wind had picked up, and dawn was beginning to threaten the darkness to the east. I had no trouble finding the caves, half a mile east of the harbor, though they weren’t easy to reach. They weren’t caves, strictly, but a series of shallow clefts in the rock, easily visible from above but concealed from the sea itself by the way the broken sheets of rock jutted from below. They were only twenty yards above the water, so close that sea spray made the rock even more treacherous, and with the dawn coming we felt exposed as we scuttled down to them. Each moment the light grew, we became more careless with our bodies—we moved so quickly we might have been fleeing the light itself. From here we couldn’t see the harbor packed with Council boats, but the large ships were still indistinct at the distant reef’s edge, and knowing that the Confessor was nearby added to the sense of exposure.

The boats not deemed safe for the crossing had been hurriedly stashed out of sight there, some stacked atop one another, others jammed on their sides into narrowing crevices. A few tiny, rickety dinghies, but mainly the children’s rafts and wherries, or the canoes used for fishing within the reef itself. We opted for the smallest craft with a sail we could find—a narrow-hulled dinghy with flaking gray paint and a mud-colored sail.

One of the island’s defenses was the difficulty of landing anywhere other than the concealed harbor, and we quickly learned that launching from anywhere else wasn’t much easier. We had no hope of carrying the boat down those twenty yards of near-vertical rock. We tried lowering it by the rope fastened to its front, but it was too heavy and, after a few scraping yards, it skidded down the slickened stone so fast that the rope scorched our hands. Kip managed, at least, to hang on to the tail of the rope, and the boat landed the right way up and wasn’t impaled on one of the rocks that stabbed from the waves below. We tied the rope around Kip’s waist and followed, clinging to the glass-slick rock. After the first few yards, the rock was colonized by mussels. The sharp shells shredded our fingers but at least gave us purchase. There wasn’t enough slack in the rope, so each time the small waves moved the boat, Kip was jerked outward and downward, toward the waiting rocks. He managed it, though, finally getting close enough to jump into the boat. It was me who slipped the final few feet and ended up in the pulsing water.