“I won’t do it,” he mumbled, his eyes on the floor.
“Yes, you will.” Lorraine scooped him up in her arms, the same way she done at the aquarium. “Don’t fret, my dear one. After so many sessions in the sensorium, so many rehearsals, the words will tumble out of your mouth all by themselves. You wouldn’t be able to hold them back if you tried.”
She walked past us to the door.
“Bring them,” she said to Paul. The door opened when she touched it, but she turned back and give Ursala a quick, cold smile. “It’s not that we mistrust you, you understand. We’ve just got to be certain. We’ve waited a long time for this, and there’s a great deal at stake. Everything, really. If you’ve made a mistake, you’ll be made to rectify it. If you’ve done what we asked, we’ll have no further need to detain you.”
If I was going to do something, it seemed like it had got to be now. Lorraine had her back to me, and Paul was on the far side of her so neither of them was watching me. I got ready to move.
“You’ll be dead before you’ve taken two steps,” Lorraine said. She said it without looking at me, and only afterwards turned her head just a little way towards me to show it was me she meant.
She led the way, leaving us to follow. Paul walked behind us and the drones fell in on either side, like he was the shepherd and they was his dogs.
38
The crow’s nest was a lot darker than I was used to seeing it. Morning still hadn’t come, and most of the sky was just a piled-up darkness with no moon or stars. Only where it met the sea a ragged line of light was starting to show.
“Lights,” Paul said.
“Override.” Lorraine rapped the word out just as the lights in the room gun to rise. They switched themselves off again of a sudden and we was throwed back into darkness. “We’ve waited three hundred and sixty-five years for this. Now the grand cycle completes itself, and we have to observe it properly.”
“You’re overly fond of metaphors, my love,” Paul said. His voice had some anger half-buried in it like it did oftentimes.
“Dawn isn’t a metaphor. Dawn is a source of metaphors. I won’t insult this dawn with lesser lights, and neither will you. Wait. Wait in silence. Find the place in your heart where Albion abides, and ready yourself. Stanley, come and stand here between us. That’s right. The rest of you can wait wherever you like. Just remember that the drones don’t need light to see you by.”
Cup grabbed my arm and pulled me close to her. After a few seconds, as my eyes got used to the dark, I seen that Ursala was there too. Cup leaned in close to me and whispered in my ear, “If we get a chance, we’re gonna run. I’ll shout free-come, and we’ll go together.”
“No, I’ll give the signal,” I said. “It won’t be a word. It’ll be when I move.”
“What do you mean? Koli, what are you going to do?”
“You’ll know when I do it.”
The light on the horizon got brighter and wider, like there was a giant up there in the sky that was taking the lid from off of a pot to see if what was inside was ready to eat or not.
The first time I ever heard that word horizon I was high off the ground, just as I was now. It was in the lookout tower at Ludden, right after I took the DreamSleeve back from Mardew. Monono had come back from the internet, and she was different. It was nearing morning, again just like now, and she said we had got to go. The light’s just under the horizon, she said, and I asked her what that was. She laughed, but it was not to make fun of me. She knowed answering that one question would be like kicking a stone on a steep hill, that would touch another stone and then another, until the whole hill’s side was rolling down. I’ll teach you. There’s so much more I can give you now. You don’t have any idea how lucky you are.
I knowed how lucky I had been to have met her and to have her by me. I knowed who had took her, and what they deserved. I knowed glass was brittle as ice on a pond, and like to break if you even looked at it too hard. And here we was, so high up, with the whole world laid out under us. Lorraine had warned me she could kill me before I’d taken two steps. Up here, one step would do well enough.
“Koli, don’t do nothing stupid,” Cup whispered. “Stanley told us where the skimmer is. We just got to reach it and we’re gone out of this shithole.”
I pulled away from her and went to stand right behind Stanley. Lorraine was on his right hand and Paul was on his left. Not one of them turned around to look at me, so fixed they was on what they was doing, and all three was tight together. If I pushed on one of them, I had good hope the others would fall too. Maybe that glass wall in front of them would break, and maybe it wouldn’t. All I could do was try.
The sun was taking a big bite out of the sky now, and the clouds was shot through with light like when you lampas-weave gold thread through a dark cloth. I had seen Molo Tanhide do that once. When I asked him if I could help, he shaked his head. “It’s not forgiving, Koli. One mistake and it’s all to do again.”
I had made so many mistakes since then, I couldn’t even count them no more. If I could unpick my whole life like a pattern in wove cloth, I would do it in a heartbeat. But life’s not forgiving either, and we only get one chance to weave what pattern we can.
I gathered my courage and got ready to move. I was somewhat doubtful though, now I was come to it. I wondered for the first time how heavy Paul and Lorraine was. They was not made out of flesh and blood and bone but out of harder, colder things. If I didn’t push hard enough, or find the right angle, I might hit them the way a bird hits a window, and only knock my brains out. I had better go for Stanley then. Hadn’t he said he wanted to die? But out of all of them, Stanley was the onliest one I felt any sorrow for. And besides, there was a part of me – the Stannabanna part – that was shouting: I’m him! That’s my own self right there! That’s the hope of Albion!
And while I was still havering between yes and no, between now and not quite yet, the sun lifted itself right up over the horizon. The clouds got out of its way like they was scared there might be a fight, and all the sky lit up on fire.
The white-gold light shined down on something up ahead of us. Something that wasn’t water, I mean. One piece of the horizon was green and brown instead of blue. After all them years and lifetimes out at sea, Sword of Albion was coming home.
“Now,” Lorraine said.
Stanley give a kind of a moan, low down in his throat.
“You know the words, my love. The words and all the rest. Don’t fight it. Let it come.”
“Sword,” Stanley said. The word come out wrong, all folded up on itself and half-choked, like it was a bone he was trying to spit out.
“That’s it!”
“Sword of Albion.”
“Oh!” Lorraine said. “Oh!” I would of said she breathed it, but breathing was not a thing she could do.
“Sword of Albion, acknowledge.”
There come a sound from all round us that was like wind blowing through a loose shutter, only getting faster and faster until all the clink-clink-clink sounds at last run together into one sound that was like someone humming almost too high to hear.