The Fire Sermon

by Francesca Haig

  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.

  “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.”