The Fire Sermon (34 page)

I lurched forward and pressed my hand across the wound, looking frantically up at Piper. “Stop. I know what he came here for.”

Kip snorted. “I think that’s pretty clear.”

I shook my head. “No, but why he did it. It’s about his niece, the girl they took.”

“He already asked about her, when you were questioned by the Assembly,” said Piper, watching with distaste as I crouched over Lewis.

Between my fingers the blood continued to pulse, and I was shocked at how hot it felt. Lewis’s beard, sticky with blood, was no longer gray.

“Lewis. Can you hear me?”

He was pale. His unfocused eyes blinked with deliberate slowness.

“I’ll do everything I can to find her, if she’s alive. To stop what my twin’s done. I promise. Can you hear me?”

His head had dropped to the side. Piper slid his boot beneath it and gently levered it up; when he removed his foot the head lolled back. Piper turned away. “He’s gone.”

I looked down at my hands, and at Lewis’s wound, which no longer bled. I was crying, and when I wiped my face I smeared it with blood.

“He would have killed you,” Kip pointed out.

“He betrayed me; betrayed the Assembly,” added Piper.

“I know.” I wrapped my arms around my knees, pulled them tightly to me.

“You’re not hurt?” said Kip. I looked down at myself, my hands coated in blood, black around my fingernails.

“It’s all his,” I said. The blood had soaked up my white sleeve, past the elbow.

“Are you going to make a habit of making deathbed promises to everyone who tries to kill you?” asked Kip. “I only ask because that could be quite a lot of promises.”

Piper turned from where he was bending over the dead guard. “Two men just died, Kip. One of my Assemblymen, and a good watchman. It’s not a time to joke.”

“Four,” I said.

Kip and Piper looked at me.

“Not two. Four people just died.”

From then on, we were even more closely guarded. When I woke up screaming, three days later, two watchmen were in the room before Kip could even get across to my bed. One of them knocked him to the ground, and it wasn’t until several torches had been lit that the guards could be persuaded to retreat. Kip, rubbing his cheek where the guards had pressed him against the flagstones, sat on the edge of my bed.

“I need to see Piper,” I said to the last guard before he locked the door. “Send him now.”

“You can’t tell me?” Kip asked quietly.

I shook my head, angry. “This isn’t about me choosing which one of you gets to hold my hand. This isn’t just a bad dream. It’s important.” I couldn’t keep still. My eyes were racing from side to side, as if trying to memorize the script of my dream.

“I suppose it’d be too much to hope that you might have seen something good for a change?” he said, moving closer to me. My nightshirt had the faint tang of sweat, and my lips were dry. “Like a really good breakfast,” he continued. “Or a brilliant apricot harvest this year—that kind of thing.”

My laugh was only one quick exhalation, but my body relaxed a little and leaned into his. He kissed my shoulder, but I shook my head. “I need to concentrate.” I closed my eyes, my lips moved rapidly but in silence.

“You can’t tell me?”

I shook my head. “I need to concentrate,” I said again.

We stayed like that until Piper burst in, barely minutes later.

I stood before he could even speak. “They’re coming. The Alphas. And I know when, and how.”

Without looking behind him, Piper aimed a forceful kick at the open door at his back, slamming it closed. His hand was pressed to his lips.

In a whisper, he said, “I thought you said it wasn’t like that. Not dates and details.”

I shook my head, eyes still jerky and unfocused.

“I saw it. I could see the moon, and how full—”

“Then don’t speak. Don’t say it—don’t tell me.”

“You don’t understand. I saw everything.” I rubbed at my eyes. I felt as though I could hardly see Piper and Kip, peering as I was through the haze of smoke and blood that had filled my dream.

This time it was Kip who hushed me. “What are you doing?”

“Exactly.” Piper was whispering, fervent. “This is your bargaining chip—don’t give it away.”

Kip looked warily at Piper, then back to me. “He’s right—you need to use this. Tell the Assembly you’ll give them what you’ve seen, if they let you go. That you’ll send word back when we’re off the island.”

I dropped my voice, but it was more of a hiss than a whisper. “Listen to me. This is too important to play games. You need to tell the Assembly now. You need to start planning how to evacuate. They’ll be coming, on—”

Piper pressed his hand to my mouth, looking pleadingly at Kip. “Stop her. If she tells me I have to act.”

“Look at me,” Kip said. He brushed aside Piper’s hand, and placed his own on the side of my face. He bent down so his own face was close to mine. “They’ll never let you go.”

I shook off his hand, jerking backward. “It doesn’t matter.” I was no longer whispering. “Piper, listen to me. Get these people off the island. Do it now. They’re coming at the full moon.”

All three of us turned to the window, where a pregnant moon loomed.

“Two nights. Maybe three,” said Piper.

“Two,” I said.

“Our defenses?”

I shook my head distractedly. “No good. The crater hides you from the coast, but once they’ve found the island, it’s just a trap. You’ve always known that. They’ll come from the north at first, with so many men. You can’t stop them.”

“Tell me what else you see.”

I closed my eyes, concentrating on translating the noise and blur of the visions into words. “Fire in the streets, people trapped in the windows. Blood on the stones.”

“So they’re coming to kill, not just take prisoners?”

“That doesn’t make any sense,” said Kip. “They’ll have Alphas dropping dead all over the place. There’ll be resistance from their own people.”

I screwed my eyes more tightly shut. The images refused to slow down, refused to submit to sense or order. “They’ll take some people away, on boats,” I said. “The others, they’ll kill.” I looked up at Piper. “Kip’s right—it’s crazy. You can’t have been expecting that?”

“I wish I could say I wasn’t. But if they find us, they’ll be coming to make a statement. They want to put an end to Omega resistance, even if it costs them Alpha lives.”

I nodded. “That’s what it’s like, in the vision. These people—they’re so angry. They know they’re killing Alphas, too, but they don’t care. Or, they do care, but they blame us, as if it’s one more burden we place on them.”

Piper strode to the window. “Ring the bells,” he shouted down to the guard below. “Now.”

At Haven, a huge bell in the tower used to sound before the opening and closing of the city’s gates. And in Wyndham, the few times I’d been on the ramparts, sounds of bells had drifted up from the city below from time to time. But this was nothing like those melodic sounds I remembered. First there was a single bell, the huge one in the tower. It didn’t just disturb the dawn silence, it shattered it. A catastrophe of noise, so deep that my lungs reverberated with each bass strike. It was answered by other bells, all through the fort. Then, in the city below, people responded with shouts from house to house, and the banging of pots and pans. A metallic thrash and clatter, urgent and tuneless. It was like the time at New Hobart when one of the children had run through the kitchen and upset a stack of pans. But this went on for minutes, until the whole crater was a bowl of sound.

“They’ll start evacuating right away,” Piper shouted over the noise. “I have to go—to explain to the Assembly. And to prepare the guards.”

“We can’t fight them.”

Piper nodded. “They’ll come with double the soldiers we could ever muster. Better trained, better fed. Better armed, in every sense.” He glanced at his left shoulder with a quick grin. “But our guards know the territory. We’ll be able to hold them off a while.”

“That’s not what I meant,” I said. “Not that we can’t fight them because they’ll win. We can’t fight them because there isn’t any winning. Each of them you kill means one of us, somewhere, drops dead too.”

“But it’s the same for them. All we can concern ourselves with now is this island. What happens here, when they come for us.”

“Then you’re only ever looking at half the story.”

He shook his head. “This is the story I’m responsible for. These people, here. If the Council’s found us, we can’t hope to defend the island. All of that’s over now. But we can buy time to get as many people off as possible.”

“Do you have enough boats for them all?” asked Kip.

“Nowhere near. You’re talking about arrivals over decades and decades. Our fleet’s small as it is, and two of the largest ships are still out west. If we load the boats as fully as we dare, it’ll still take two sailings, just to evacuate those who can’t fight.”

“How long will that take?”

He was already looking out the window, reading the wind in the trees silhouetted at the crater’s edge. “If we’re lucky, we could have the second load off the island in two days. But the same wind that helps us on the way back will help the Council’s fleet, too. And even if we evacuate those who can’t fight, that leaves hundreds more.”

Again I saw what my dream had shown me. The blood. They were coming for me, and the island would bleed.

Piper left without saying anything else to me. Just before he pulled the door shut, he turned back to Kip.

“You,” he said to Kip. “Watch her. Don’t let her do anything stupid.”

From our locked room we watched the island mobilize. By the time the sun was fully risen, the ringing of the bells had been replaced by chimes and clashes from the armory and the blacksmith, as swords and axes were gathered, sharpened, distributed. Blue-clad guards carried beams to reinforce the gates, and the sound of hammers pounded the morning air as shutters on the lower levels were nailed closed. And through all this activity, the city drained of people. First went the children and the elderly, and those whose mutations left them unable to fight. Some were carried, others leaned on canes or crutches. There was no time, nor space, for belongings, only hastily bundled parcels of food and water flasks. No time, either, for crying—even the youngest children moved quickly and quietly, hurried along by the guards who marshaled the crowds. Those who had to wait for the second sailing were led into the fort, which would shelter them if the Council’s fleet arrived before ours returned.

It was an intricate choreography in which Kip and I had no role. We stood for hours, hand in hand, watching the exodus. Our sense of helplessness was only compounded by what I’d seen in my vision. It was hard to imagine that all the diligent preparations unfolding beneath us could change what I had already witnessed, and what I kept seeing when I closed my eyes. Flames reflected on a blood-pooled floor. The thickening of smoke in tunnels and narrow streets.

We watched as three guards erected a crude flagpole at the crater’s rim.

“Hardly compatible with the whole ‘secret refuge’ thing,” Kip pointed out.

“That doesn’t matter now. They’re coming. They know how to find us.”

I thought of the tapestries in the Assembly Hall. In other battles, perhaps people had fought beneath embroidered flags, made of rich fabrics. This attempt was tatty in comparison: a bedsheet with the Omega symbol emblazoned on it with the same tar the sailors used to mend their hulls. It was lashed at two corners to an old ship’s mast. The guards were struggling to plant the pole firmly in the high wind.

“In the face of imminent invasion, Piper’s got them spending time redecorating?”

“It’s not a waste of time,” I said. “It’ll be the first thing the Council fleet sees, when they come into sight. It sends them a message.”

“More effective than the subversive goats, at least,” said Kip.

The guards had wedged the pole into a crack in the rocks and were piling stones high about the base.

“It won’t last more than a couple of days in these winds,” said Kip.

There was no answer, just the sound of the makeshift flag slapping at the wind. Neither of us needed to say what we both knew: in a couple of days, it would be over.

chapter 23

There were footsteps on the stairs, and the sound of Piper conferring with the guard, before the door was unlocked.

“They’re gone,” he said. “The first fleet. The youngest of the children, and the most incapacitated. Plus a handful of adults, to help them on the mainland.”

“And now?”

“We wait.”

I’d never before listened as carefully to the wind as I did in the night that followed. For those waiting hours, with each gust I pictured the mismatched fleet racing its way to the mainland. Somewhere, too, was the Council’s fleet, with its cargo of death. I was afraid to sleep, but afraid not to, in case a dream might reveal something useful. It didn’t matter, in the end: the vision came to me while I lay on the brink of sleep, Kip’s whole body cupping mine. The fleet of ships cutting resolutely across the horizon. They were bigger than any ship I’d seen—many times bigger than the largest of the island’s fleet. On their decks were lashed clusters of smaller boats, hulls upward, like unhatched eggs. It wasn’t the size that was terrifying, though. It was the contents of the first boat.