‘We didn’t think you’d come back,’ said Staithe. He was a burly man but he had a tissue paper heart. Collins could hear the relief in his voice.
‘I didn’t think I would, either. But there’s more to do. I had to.’
‘What happened?’ asked Vigors.
‘Magnus played into my hands. He’s not going to let it go lightly. You’ve got to get word to everyone to hide or prepare for visits from MMP thugs. Anyone connected with me is at risk. Make sure they all know never to go back to the lock-up. I mean ever. We’re past that now.’
‘What will we do?’
‘First, we’re going to disappear.’ Collins leaned back and looked from Vigors to Staithe. ‘And then we’re going to make life difficult for Magnus.’
‘And the Welfare? They won’t be far behind him.’
Collins nodded.
‘I know. They’ll have their part to play.’
They were silent for a while, Staithe mesmerised by the gas lamp’s hiss and waxy light while he mulled it all over. Vigors’s face was less readable. It was hard enough to guess whether she was male or female in full daylight and here in the gloom her face was a domino blank. She was the first to speak.
‘There’s no going back from this.’
‘No,’ said Collins. ‘A lot of people are going to get hurt. Make sure everyone that comes does so voluntarily. They must be free to choose.’
Sixteen
It was difficult to know how to tell them his plan. Would they still trust him then? Have faith in him?
He hadn’t seen this far ahead at the start, hadn’t understood what was required until after he’d met Magnus and seen what kind of man he was. It was not enough that he martyr himself at the hands of the Meat Baron for all to see. It would change nothing. All it would achieve was silence; a silence that needed to be filled by Collins’s voice. His was the voice of truth, the voice of sanity.
He’d brought his followers this far and he had no choice but to tell them exactly what he believed should come next. It wasn’t going to be easy. They waited. He considered. They were used to his silences.
Collins ran his hands over the smooth dome of his head. It should have been stubbly with new growth but since the last time he’d shaved it, no more hair had come through. The same was true of his face. He ought to have had at least a few days of beard but his cheeks were as smooth as the inside of his wrists. He thought it might be the shock of his interview with Magnus – more apparent in his body than in his mind – but that didn’t fit. He was calmer and more resolved now than he had been during his kidnap and he’d been ready for death even then.
Their den amid the rubble and decay of the Derelict Quarter was squalid but tidy. By night they cleared it of debris, swept and cleaned as best they could. Furnishings had been smuggled in by every member of his following. They made it deep, their hiding place, risking entombment if the ageing supports and arches ever gave way. Here and there in the tunnels, there had already been cave-ins but Collins reassured them that they were from the time before Abyrne became what it was now.
Outside their circles, to discuss the idea of a time before the town was blasphemy. According to the Book of Giving, Abyrne appeared out of the wasteland at God’s behest. Before that there had been nothing but blasted, blackened land incapable of life.
They all sat there with him now, waiting for him to speak.
These were his people, the renewed souls of the town, their essences forged by the exercises he’d taught them. They were stronger now – eating vegetable matter occasionally or, in the case of the more advanced, eating nothing at all – than they’d ever been dining on the flesh of the Chosen. They numbered thirty. Thirty pure souls out of the thousands in the town.
He lifted his eyes and looked out across their faces.
‘When I look at you, I see what is possible. In a short time, less than two years, there are this many of us willing not only to change the way we live because we know what is right, but also to leave those dear to us and risk everything for the future.’
He looked around at the walls that encased them. But for the gas lamps they would have been in a darkness more complete than any night out on the streets of the town. Three levels below the Derelict Quarter there was no light.
‘It’s ironic that we who subsist on light and air are forced to live where the sun cannot penetrate and where the air could not be more lifeless. Everything we do now is in the nature of a sacrifice. That’s what I need to talk to you about.
‘As recently as a week ago, I believed my public execution at the hands of Magnus and his butchers would be the event that pushed the town into seeing how wrong its ways have been all these years. I believed that those of you here, and the others who have heard my message in the lock-up, would spread the word and that, in time a revolution would quietly end the need for meat in Abyrne. That done, the Meat Baron would be finished forever and the Welfare would collapse.
‘I’ve seen Magnus now. Spoken to him. Crossed swords, so to speak. And I can tell you that I’ve been naïve and foolish to think that we’d done enough. We have not. We have only just begun to change things.’
Collins looked into his outstretched palms, made fists and opened them again. He held them up to his following.
‘I wish I could tell you the future. I can’t. I’ve been wrong about it once already. I see now that all I can do is plan carefully and hope each of you still wishes to help me. I reiterate now, before saying anything more, that every one of you is free. You always will be. I ask nothing of you that you are not willing to do. You may back out at any time and no less will be thought of you. Each of you has achieved far more than I believed possible when I started out. You have made yourselves pure. What I ask of you goes against everything I stand for but I ask it because I am certain that there is no other way.
‘We must stand against Magnus and his men. We must take the message to them in a form they understand. In the first instance, that form will not be mere words. I think you all know what I’m trying to say.
‘Evil rules Abyrne through Magnus and the Welfare as surely as human blood flows in the veins of the Chosen. Nothing we say, no example we give, will ever change Magnus’s need for power or the Welfare’s need for control through its twisted religion. We must do what no one has yet been prepared to do.
‘We have to fight them.’
Collins looked from face to face, anxious that the more he spoke the further from their ship of unity he was drifting. None of their faces showed any expression. Their new way of living allowed them to master most of their free-floating emotions and to keep their minds very clear. So they were thinking now, evaluating his words. And, he was certain, readying themselves for separation from his cause. He nodded inwardly. They were free. He meant that. If he had to walk back and fight Magnus alone, he would do it without a single bad feeling over the actions of his followers. Truly, they had changed Abyrne already.
There was silence in the underground chamber, but for the hiss of gas lamps. Collins felt there was more he ought to say, that he could be more specific before he asked them to take up arms, give them an outline of how he envisaged their campaign. He was about to speak when Vigors stood up.
‘I will fight,’ she said.
Staithe rose at almost the same moment.
‘I will fight,’ he said.
One by one they stood and echoed the simple words and when the echoes were silenced, not one was left sitting.
The puny fire crackled in the grate but it was a luxury only a few in the town could afford. There wasn’t much land left where trees grew and where they did, they didn’t flourish. Only the Welfare could decree when a tree was to be felled and townsfolk caught damaging trees or stealing branches – windfall or otherwise – faced heavy fines or forced labour. Much of the wood used for burning was scavenged from deserted buildings but these days it was increasingly difficult to find.