“You think it’s broke then?” Cup asked.
“No, Cup, I think it’s been locked in a holding pattern. There’s an activation key. There must be. But I don’t see any way of guessing what it is.”
“Like in the message,” I said. “Sword is ready, but it’s waiting on the word.”
“That’s it, Koli-bou. The system is set to activate when the conditions are right. We just don’t know what the conditions are. Be quiet now. There are thousands of separate systems in this room and I need to map them all without triggering an alarm. As soon as I’ve got the full picture, I’m going to see if I can force an interface.”
My heart sunk when I heard her say that. I felt more than ever right then that we was in Stannabanna’s village under the sea, where everything you ever knowed or seen before was changed into something bad. If the ship had a face, then it would be a face with round fish eyes that didn’t blink. I didn’t want Monono to have to look into them eyes.
I went to the table to look at the flowers in their jug, for it seemed strange to me that anyone would put them in a place like this. But when I was close, my eye went to the other thing that was there – the thing that was made out of silver metal. My heart jumped up into my mouth when I seen it, for it was something I’d seen and used before.
I can’t really explain what I did next. I guess being scared for Monono made me less frightened for my own self. I wanted to stand in front of her and keep her from things that might hurt her. I knowed she was like a ghost, so there wasn’t no bolt or blade that could touch her, but thoughts hiding in wires was another thing again.
I slipped the DreamSleeve back into its sling on my shoulder. Then I reached down with both hands and picked the sensorium up off the table, holding it in the tips of my fingers.
Cup give a gasp. “It’s that thing they had in Many Fishes,” she said. “Put it down, Koli. You know what it does.”
I knowed, yes. I knowed that though I could hold the sensorium in my hands like this, there was a space inside of it that was as big as an ocean. Only it wasn’t water that was in there, it was memories. The sensorium in Many Fishes remembered the lives of every Headman and Singer since the village first was builded. When I put it on, it was like I tipped my own life into that ocean, and my life wasn’t no more than a bucketful. Or maybe I was more like a wave – something that had a shape and a path, but wasn’t like to hold either for long in all that hugeness. But with Monono’s help I had found a way through it, and out of it.
And this sensorium I was holding now? I guessed it had got to be Sword of Albion itself that was in there. The ship’s AI, as Monono called it: the thing that was like her, but much bigger. And once she seen the sensorium was there, as soon as her mapping brung her to it, she would go right inside. I didn’t want that. I had a sick feeling about it that rose up in me of a sudden and wouldn’t go away.
Before I even thought about it, and before Cup could step in to stop me, I slipped the sensorium onto my head.
It waked at once. Between the breath going into me and the breath going out again, the metal went from cold to hot.
Between the breath going into me and the breath going out, I was someone else.
25
I forget what I was saying.
Oh yes. There is no point in anything that does not serve your greater purpose. You must have a vision, and you must not for any reason swerve from it. It should be a shrine in your heart that you visit every day, to pay worship and to be renewed. My vision is of an Albion restored to perfect purity and grace, as when it was first christened with that name. What are my wars for, if not perfection?
I am asked, from time to time, what my greatest struggle was. It’s the struggle against myself, I say. Against my own flaws. I strive to embody the vision I see, and by so doing bring perfection into the world. That’s all.
Daniel Drake? No. He’s nothing. His person nondescript, his preachings the last, tired dregs of a tradition that began in another era, in the effete and decadent Mediterranean. I’ve already dismantled the Abrahamic religions. Nobody remembers Christ now, or Moses, or Mohammed. Nothing is or should be sacred but the state.
And for the blood I’ve shed, never ask me if I’m moved by pity or regret. Such thoughts deserve no words. Everyone who has died to bring Albion to birth has achieved with their death more than any saint or philosopher or questing hero since time began.
I believe I will pass an ordinance against books. Against the dead thoughts of dead people fossilised into moribund prose. We cannot be men of paper. We must be men of gold. Only then we will be worthy to walk in Albion’s halls, Albion’s streets.
And the blood spilled so far is nothing compared to the blood that’s still to come. Soon we’ll turn our attention to Europe. They gave aid and comfort to Drake’s rebels, and they will be made to pay for it.
Why should Albion stop at the sea?
Ten thousand days, and then ten thousand more. Half a million hours. Too many minutes to count without borrowing another life to do the counting in.
I bleed time and go backwards, like a balloon losing ballast.
Darkness, then light. The light of many fires.
Noble cities, weaving themselves together out of ash and melted steel.
Armies of the dead. Skeletons dressing themselves in flesh, and then in bright blue uniforms.
Men and women in lines, adoring. Listening. Catching my words like pennies flung from Heaven. Or like Variola ultima, the enhanced smallpox we worked so hard to perfect and barely got to use.
Cabinet rooms.
Razor wire.
Banquet halls.
Echoes from words already spoken. Solemn faces, and smiling ones. Lies offered and accepted. Betrayals like moves in a game, bloodless and terrible.
Twisting and abrading of the body, to catch the mind in a net.
Growing straight. Growing crooked. Both, and neither. It’s hard to tell when you’re not shown the measures.
My father’s face, not red and angry as so often, but calm and cold. “You need to learn.”
And my mother, leaning in to kiss me, or perhaps to taste the tears on my cheeks. A fervour rises in Lorraine when Paul is cruel. An excitement. Sometimes I wonder if all the tortures he inflicts on me are gifts shyly and awkwardly offered up to her.
“You need to learn.”
And I do.
26
Something exploded. There wasn’t no sound nor light, but there was a shattering. Jagged bits and pieces as thin and sharp as splinters was throwed into the air to come down where they would.
I think they was pieces of me.
I come together again by and by, but it wasn’t quick or easy. The next thing I knowed, after a time of not knowing anything at all, was that something cold and hard was pressing itself against the whole length of me. It seemed like it was trying to push me away, but I couldn’t move. A floor, I figured out at long last. I must be lying on a floor somewhere. What floor might that be though? I had just been in a thousand different places, and I couldn’t find one out of all of them that made more sense than the others.
My eyes was full of milky light, but I guess my ears was sort of working. Sounds come to me, faint and muffled. There was shouts and banging and something that was like a sob, but it sounded like it was all coming from another room. Another house, even.