By and by, we come to a door that was set across the hallway to block our path. Lorraine walked right up to it and touched her hand to it like she thought it was hanging open and just needed a push. The door didn’t give an inch. She done the same thing again, and again nothing happened.
“Oh for goodness’ sake!” Lorraine muttered, sounding disgusted. She tried a third time, and at last the door opened. It pulled away on either side, slowly and with a great deal of creaking and stopping, until by and by there was a space in the middle for us to walk through.
Lorraine laughed, then turned to me and shaked her head. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I know I shouldn’t let these things annoy me. I feel like Blanche DuBois complaining that I used to have servants! But it’s the little things that get to you. I suppose it’s just human nature.” And on we went, through the door.
Lorraine walked ahead of me, but she kept turning ever and again to tell me to go left or to watch the step as well as to talk about her son, Stanley, and all the many ways I reminded her of him. I was clever like he was, and kind like he was, and patient like he was, and all good things like that. It seemed to me she didn’t know me well enough yet to say any of those things, but it’s hard not to take to someone that likes you well and keeps on saying it. When she turned them eyes on me, that was so big and so dark, it was like she had holded up a lantern in front of my face. It went a long way to make me feel less afraid of this place, for all it was so strange.
“You got a big house, Dam Lorraine,” I said to her – partly just so as to have something to say, but also because I was wondering mightily what kind of place this was. The more I seen of it, the less I could believe it was any kind of a boat. Nothing that was this big and this solid could move, let alone float.
“It may seem that way, Koli,” Lorraine said, “but it’s the last vestige of something far bigger.”
“What’s that then? What’s it a stitch out of?”
That made her laugh again, longer and harder this time. “Oh, stitch is good. I like that very much. As in, if we’re the stitch, what’s the fabric? I think you know though. I think everyone that’s good keeps Albion in their hearts, and I won’t believe you’re an exception to that.”
It seemed like that was all the answer I was going to get. Anyway, I didn’t ask again, for fear she’d think I was a bad person for not knowing.
After some more walking, we come to a wider space. It was so much brighter than the hallway we was in that I thought at first it had got to be outside. But I was mistook. I seen when we come right up to it that it was a kind of a big hole, where something had ripped right through the ship and let in light from above. The hallway picked up again about ten strides further on, and where it did there was ragged edges to the metal. Like the tech I seen in the room where I first waked, the ragged edges was somewhat melted, so what had come and broke the great ship open must of been as hot as the dead god’s Hell.
Someone had tied a rope across the gap where the hallway give way to the hole. I grabbed tight onto the rope and looked down. It was a strange sight. It was like I was on a ledge halfway up a mountain, and right across from me there was another mountain much the same, going up high and sheer. But the face of the mountain was all made out of hallways like this one, and rooms, and stairs, that was meant to be inside but now was open to the air. Below us, a long way down, there was more rooms and hallways without no roof to them, that we was looking right into. And when I looked up, I seen a little piece of sky, with lots more levels in between it and me. Thick grey clouds was moving up there, but some of them had a gold edge to them where the sun was trying to break through.
Lorraine stepped up beside me. “Did you ever see the Jewish Museum in Berlin?” she said. “The one Libeskind designed? There are huge light shafts that run right through it at strange angles. They’re meant to symbolise all that was lost from European culture when the Holocaust happened. We didn’t get to design these abruptions ourselves, but I like to think they do something similar.”
I didn’t understand more than one word in ten out of that, but I had walked a long way with Ursala and was used to hearing words that made no sense. “What made the hole?” I asked Lorraine.
“Our enemies made the hole, Koli Faceless, a very long time ago. They cracked the hull wide open with pocket nukes and poured conventional explosives into the breach.” She smiled, wide and warm, and put a hand on my arm. “It’s all right. Trust me, we gave much better than we got. Nemo me impune lacessit, as the saying goes. ‘Touch me, and see how I touch you back.’ And now we have improved ventilation, don’t we? Almost there. Come along.”
There was a side corridor, and then another and another. We went this way, then that way, and by and by we come out on the far side of the hole. After that we went straight forward a long way, until at last we stopped at another door. There was a plate of silver metal on the wall next to it, that Lorraine tapped with her hand like she was knocking to come in. The door opened for us, breaking apart in the middle and sliding off to both sides, and the both of us stepped inside.
We was now in a room that was so small it was only a kind of a cupboard. Once we was in, the doors closed on us again and the floor shook itself like a dog trying to get rid of a flea. I must of looked as scared as I felt, for Lorraine put a hand on my shoulder to calm me. “Oh, sweetheart,” she said, “it’s fine. It’s just a lift. Count to ten and we’ll be there.”
Well, I know my numbers but I’m not what you would call quick with them. I only got to six. Then the shaking stopped, and the doors opened again.
What was in front of us now was different from what had been there before. Instead of that endless hallway, there was a much shorter one with a higher ceiling, and then some stairs going up. Voices sounded from the top of them stairs – people talking loud, and one louder than all the rest. It was the voice that come out of the big drone that was called a raven.
“And here we are,” Lorraine said, taking my hand again. “Come along, Koli. There are some people I’m dying for you to meet.”
5
Lorraine led me up the stairs into a place that was almost as big as the Count and Seal back in Mythen Rood. At first it didn’t seem to be a room at all. I thought all over again that we must of come out into the open air, for there wasn’t no walls anywhere around us. There was just the sky and them dark clouds and the sun that was running between them like a rabbit looking for its hole. And down below there was the ocean, raising itself up and setting itself down again.
Then I seen a boy looking back at me out of the clouds, and it was my own self. I may be slow, oftentimes, but I knowed now what I was seeing. The walls of the room was all windows, without no wood or stone or clay in between them, and we was high enough up that the whole world was laid out below us. I stood there like I had swallowed a choker seed and growed roots.
I might of stood there for aye and ever, except I heard a trencher or a bowl clatter, and smelled fresh bread. Them two things brung my mind from the great distances I was seeing back into the room. There was a table set there, and four people sitting at it.
Two of the people at the table was Cup and Ursala, dressed all in blue like me. My heart give a jump when I seen them, for I hadn’t been certain sure until then that they was yet alive.