Wings of fire, p.12
Wings of Fire, page 12
Uncle Bob, apparently, had been following the conversation rather more closely than he would have admitted to.
“So it was more ‘your poem’ than ever, eh, Sabrina…?” Uncle Bob said.
“What?”
He quoted Milton at her once again, just as he’d done it once before in the same room two days and a hundred years ago. “Sabrina fair/listen to where thou art sitting/under the glassy, cool, translucent wave… it goes beyond the surface, that thing.”
“Do you think my father… my… that my mother’s real husband knew?” Sabrina gasped.
“I shouldn’t think so,” said Uncle Bob soothingly. “It was probably just no more than an exceedingly lucky bull’s eye. I do have to wonder, though, what your mother’s reaction to it was when she first heard…”
But Sabrina’s eyes had filled with tears again at this, and Uncle Bob decided to back off on the subject.
“Are you all right?” he asked, rising to hover over Sabrina with a concerned expression on his face. The shocks were piling up fast, and the night, as far as he was concerned, was far from over.
Sabrina sat up, straightening her back. “No,” she said, “I don’t quite think so. I feel like I need to go away and re-think my whole life now… to just find a hole in the ground and crawl into it and pull it in after me...”
“I can provide the hole in the ground,” said Uncle Bob grimly. “You’re standing on top of one right now. It’s a big one—it’s got space for all the troubles you’re carrying, and then some. But it’s more than just that now, Sabrina. There are bigger issues. If I don’t find a way into that station and deal with Igor, all of this is likely to be largely academic.”
“Please,” Sabrina said. “At least give me a moment to catch my breath. You don’t need me anymore, anyway. I got you to this side of the lake.”
“True,” said Uncle Bob, “but incomplete.”
Something Jack had said not too long ago swam unexpectedly into Sabrina’s mind. Where he goes, you’ll have to take him.
The pendant around her neck. That doesn’t come off until it’s over.
She looked up at Uncle Bob. “What if I refuse to go?” she said. “You can’t, then, can you?”
“It binds both of us, one to the other,” Uncle Bob said. “You have the right to refuse me. But if you do—I have to try by myself... and I may not be in time. It’s worse than I even knew, if he is already in there. It is tonight that we must go—as soon as possible—now...”
“Or?” said Jack.
“Or your lake will be only one more thing that will no longer exist by the time he is finished, taniwha,” said Uncle Bob. “This country is in danger. Perhaps this world. Do you realise that he could be using the power this place generates to unravel light and darkness, to literally pick apart the fabric of existence? Have you ever wondered why is it that this place is so suffused with rainbows? He is breaking light! God alone knows what sort of sun you will see rising in the morning!”
“What are you planning to do?” asked Paul.
Uncle Bob turned to him. “I need to finish what I started. It is time. It is past time. And this may well be the last chance I shall get. If he completes the work that he has set in motion, it may be a moot point—because he will probably destroy me in the process. This time I am too close. Either I will find him and kill him, or I pay for another failure—this time with my life—and probably with the lives of others, people and places, which I cannot do anything to save.” He turned to Sabrina again, his dark eyes eloquent, pleading. “I took a chance,” he said, “doing this binding. As I told you, I did not have a choice. But I believed—I still believe—that I chose right, even under those circumstances. I need to get into the station. I need you to go before me, or else I may not go. I can finish this... but it is in your hands.”
“You could make me,” Sabrina said faintly.
Jack roused at this, Fiana sat up. Even Paul lifted his head and stared. Uncle Bob seemed unaware of them all. “But I will not. If I do so I will be no better than he is.”
“I will go,” Sabrina said, and her voice was steady.
“Sabrina...” That was both Jack and Paul, in one breath, both sounding uneasy and worried.
“I will go,” she repeated. “I will go. He will come because he has to come. I don’t ask anybody else to follow.”
“I will go with you,” Fiana said, sounding scared but steadfast.
Sabrina looked at her half-sister, her eyes softening. “It’s all right,” she said. “You don’t have to....”
“I made a promise,” Fiana said, “and even if I had not done so, at this moment, I would come.”
“I go where you go,” Jack said succinctly.
“And how,” inquired Paul, “do you intend to get in? Pick the locks? Napalm? Magic?”
Uncle Bob straightened and looked at him. “When first I planned this,” he said slowly, “I knew nothing of your existence. I would have done what I had to do to gain entrance—but you might be God’s gift to us. Perhaps you might help. This, as you have already said tonight several times, is your station.”
Paul suddenly stood alone. All of them had declared for Uncle Bob—even Jack.
Until a few short hours ago Paul would have been willing—and had in fact done so many times on their hunting trips—to trust his life in the hands of his friend. There was something in him that rebelled at Uncle Bob’s picture of what Mike supposedly was, because it clashed so badly with his own vision of the man. But he suddenly knew that—his own life aside—he was not willing to trust Sabrina’s life, or the life of the Manapouri power station, in the hands of either brother.
“That is not quite true,” he said abruptly. “Strictly speaking, it’s Mike’s station. He built it.”
Uncle Bob leaned back. Paul took a slight pleasure from his obvious disappointment—he could not make himself like the man—but then he saw Sabrina’s face and relented.
“But the security system is mine. I know the master codes.”
It was surrender, of sorts.
Uncle Bob closed his eyes for an instant, lifting his head as if in a prayer of thanksgiving, the expression on his face one of grateful relief. “Thank you,” he said. “Now I know I have a chance. I have a real chance at last. We should start...”
“No.”
Jack and Paul had spoken with one voice. They glanced at each other with an unspoken understanding.
“There is no time...”
Paul took charge. “Uncle,” he said with a fine disregard for proprieties, “if you wish to have any of us be any use to you, you’d better let us rest, and eat something. All this may not have meant much to you, but look at Sabrina.”
“I’m all right,” said Sabrina, bristling at this, and then suddenly had to try to conceal a jaw-cracking yawn behind her hand.
“I rest my case,” said Paul.
“If we don’t go now,” said Uncle Bob with an edge of desperation, “we may lose any chance of doing something useful...”
“If we do go now, half of us would have to be carried,” said Paul stubbornly.
“He’s right,” Jack said easily.
Something vivid flashed in Uncle Bob’s eyes, something dark and wild—I can do it alone. For a split second it was written all over his face in letters of fire. But then it disappeared and he folded. The white hair and beard suddenly seemed apt as he closed his eyes and looked, for the first time since Paul had laid eyes on him, like an old man.
Paul suddenly felt inexplicably sorry for him.
“Dawn,” he said, glancing at Jack for support and receiving it as the taniwha nodded. “We can leave at first light.”
Uncle Bob appeared as though he wanted to say something, but then thought better of it. “Perhaps it is just as well,” he said, turning away abruptly. “Perhaps he will be weaker in the day than he is now, at night, in his element...”
He turned away, his shoulders slumped.
“Is he all right?” Sabrina whispered, sidling up to Paul. “Maybe we should have gone...”
“Sabrina,” said Paul, reaching out a hesitant hand to push a strand of hair off her face, “get some sleep.”
“Yes, you should.” Fiana had stepped up and now took Sabrina’s arm. “Let me at least appease our father’s shade by insisting you do that. I’ve done pretty badly at this so far...”
“Where did the Uncle go?” Sabrina asked, looking around at the room empty of Uncle Bob’s presence.
“Through there,” said Jack, nodding in the general direction of the kitchen.
Sabrina suddenly giggled with an edge of hysteria. “He probably went to make another pot of tea....”
“Fiana,” Paul said, “make her go to bed.”
The women retired to the bedroom which Sabrina had first entered when she had arrived in this house and where Fiana had been taken to convalesce after her second encounter with Shura. Sabrina found herself shivering uncontrollably as the door snicked shut behind them, and Fiana actually had to help her out of her tracksuit top and pants because she seemed incapable of grasping the edge of anything, her fingers stiff and shaking. Fiana tucked Sabrina into one of the twin beds as if she were a child, folding the tracksuit neatly onto a chair in the corner.
“Go to sleep,” she said softly.
Sabrina laughed. “Sleep?” she murmured. “A likely story...”
Fiana sighed. “Try.”
The selkie turned out the lights and slipped under the covers of the other bed. “I was so afraid,” she whispered, “that I would not find you...”
“Were you only my friend because you had to be?” Sabrina asked.
Fiana raised herself in bed on one elbow and peered into the darkness in Sabrina’s general direction. “Of course not!”
“Forgive me,” Sabrina said. “I shouldn’t have said that...”
“You have every right to,” Fiana said, subsiding again. “Actually, before I realised I had a very bad feeling about your having disappeared like that, for a time all I felt was frustrated that you’d been so professional in giving me the slip. Sabrina... what happened?”
“He left,” Sabrina said.
“Why? Marco was smitten with you...”
“Was he?” Sabrina said softly. Fiana thought she could hear her crying quietly, trying to muffle the sounds into her pillow.
“I’m sorry,” Fiana said, “I just keep blundering into...”
“Talk to me,” Sabrina interrupted, in a strange, fierce whisper. “Tell me about my father... about everything...”
“You’re supposed to try and get some rest...”
“I can either cry, or talk,” said Sabrina. “Sleep would be a bonus. Talk to me.”
<<>>
Back in the lounge, the fire in Uncle Bob’s hearth was guttering low. Paul was standing in the middle of the room where Sabrina and Fiana had left him, staring vacantly at the dying flames.
“Are you sure you want to go with us in the morning?” Jack asked his back.
“No. But it seems that I am.”
“You don’t have to. It’s not as if the Uncle really needs you to open the gates.”
“You think he could get through my security system?” Paul turned, his professional pride wounded.
Jack smiled at him. “I don’t think he’s told us all he can do. I’m sure he’d figure something out.”
Paul shrugged. “I’d rather he not do that.”
“You want to protect the station.”
“And you want to protect the lake.”
“Yes. That, too.” Jack wore an enigmatic smile.
Paul paused. For the first time he had an inkling that Jack might know more about the situation than he was letting on. But then, that was only to be expected. Paul ground his teeth in frustration.
“What is he?” Paul asked, abruptly switching tacks.
“The Uncle? I don’t know. I’ve never met anyone quite like him before.”
“But do you think he’s right? That Mi... Igor… is really trying to destroy the world?”
Jack shrugged. “Maybe.”
Paul stared at him. “I can’t just stand by and watch this.”
Jack looked as if he might say something, then changed his mind. “Your being there might not change anything, you know. But I suppose you are going, then.”
“I suppose I am.” Paul closed his eyes and almost swayed on his feet. He hadn’t realised how tired he was.
“You should get some rest, too,” Jack said, when Paul opened his eyes again.
“Yeah,” Paul muttered. “What about you?”
Jack smiled inscrutably. “I’ll be all right. There seems to be another bedroom off the end of the corridor. Try that.” He sat down into one of the armchairs and stretched his legs out in front of him, crossing them at the ankle. “I’ll just doze here. Keep an eye on our Russian friend.”
“Well...” said Paul awkwardly, after a long pause. “Good night, then.”
Jack nodded, and Paul withdrew to explore the far bedroom. It was a narrow little room with a single bed. A framed print of a king stag hung on the wall, and the bed was covered by a blanket made of possum skins. A fine lair for a hunter, all right—it might have been made to order. He had taken his rifle with him, picking it up where it had stood leaning against the corridor wall, and now he laid it on the floor by the bed, sitting down rather heavily on the fur coverlet.
He was only a social smoker, known to occasionally share a companionable cigarette in company, but now he suddenly felt himself positively craving for a smoke, for something to do with his hands that would calm his nerves and soothe his mind.
“Oh, God,” he muttered, burying his face in his hands. “God, God, God.”
Jack.
Manapouri—the lake, the station.
Mike.
Sabrina.
Sabrina...
He needed a smoke.
<<>>
Long after Fiana’s breathing had changed into the slow measured rhythm of sleep, the woman who haunted Paul’s thoughts was still lying awake. The darkness in the small bedroom seemed full of brooding shadows. Sabrina found herself recalling her childhood, trying to remember things she could not possibly have known. There was a memory of a day in the park when she was still very young, when she had tripped and fallen, skinning her knees and wailing in sudden pain—and a man who had appeared at her side, helping her up, talking to her, soothing her, until her nanny had come bustling up and snatched her away. Sabrina had had her face turned back to the man, and thought she could remember a strange wistful smile on his face. She had no idea why this particular memory should come to haunt her now, and fought against the instinct that the man in the park might have been the real father she had never known.
“I’m dreaming,” she muttered to herself sharply. No. This way lay only misery.
She flung back the covers and swung her legs out of bed, feeling her way over to where Fiana had put away the tracksuit she had been wearing, and pulling it back on. She needed some air. Sleep was as far away as it could possibly be. There was no point in lying in bed waiting for it—the exhaustion she could feel, a heaviness in her limbs and in her drooping eyelids, but she could no more sleep than she could… than she could bring her father back to life.
Ah, but that was a phrase to make her heart stop for just a moment. It had been a hell of a night—she had had to shift from acknowledging William Warne as her natural father, admit to having sprung of another’s loins, come to terms with the fact that those loins were not exactly human, and then, with barely a pause to catch her breath, she had had to adjust from the idea of having two fathers to having none at all—the one she had thought of as having sired her having no blood ties with her and her real father being dead.
In some ways she felt the sheer freedom of it, the release of a spirit she had not realised felt so trapped. Her Papa, Anna’s husband, William, who was always so foreign to her—so stiff and logical and unemotional—the man who had planned her life for her and whom she had resented so bitterly for doing so—he had never understood her, never really known her. And it all suddenly made sense.
And yet…
With no warning, her mother’s weary, quiet voice spoke in her mind: When you see your father, tell him I love him… tell him to take care of you…
She had never passed on that message. Not to William. And now she would never give it to the one whom it had truly been meant to.
She had never known Naoise. Not as a father; not even as someone who was a part of the periphery of her life. Why, then, was she missing him with such intense grief? How could she miss something she had never had…?
But Fiana had told her something of Naoise, and of the choices he had made. Of the time, when he was dying, when he had summoned his youngest daughter to London and had shown her the half-sister pursuing her life and her happiness in ignorance of the very existence of her kin. That is the one you must follow, must protect…
There had been something in the way that Fiana had told that story that made Sabrina think the selkie had not been overly eager to take on Naoise’s burden. Not willingly—and why would she? It would mean leaving everything she knew and loved behind and following this stranger, protecting her, keeping her from harm…
But her father had asked it of her, and Fiana had accepted the geas. The only difference was that, unlike her father before her, she had chosen to keep her skin with her, and take it where she went. It was a tangible memory to her; brushing her fingers on the velvety sealskin brought home the happy childhood rooted in the myths of the world, and the remembrance of the innocence in which her cousins still lived, away from the demands of the modern world, the human world. Fiana had had to learn to be human. She had lost some of the selkie within her in the process, inevitably. A part of her had mourned that loss.
But she had not counted on coming to like her burden. She had certainly never counted on becoming Sabrina’s friend. If she had gone with her father’s method of protection, Sabrina would never have even known that Fiana existed.
Sabrina stood for a moment over Fiana’s bed, trying to make out her sister’s face in the shadows. That, too, was something—sister. Sister. She, an only and a lonely child, had a sister.
