Chapter 408 — Forty-Eight Hours I

Chapter 408: Chapter 408 — Forty-Eight Hours I

*Author’s note: this Chapter portrays a fictional, alternate-world British monarchy, political conflict and acts of violence. The characters, events and political decisions are invented and do not represent the real governments or monarchs of the United Kingdom or Ireland. In reality, the UK monarch does not independently exercise political or executive authority.*

---

James did not move.

The man on the screen let the greeting sit, as though he had all the time in the world, and looked out at them from the dark. Beside James, Nyra had sat forward on the sofa with the remote still pointed at the television, as if pressing the button one more time might do something. In James’s hand the phone showed exactly the same face at exactly the same moment. The sound came out of both of them, a fraction apart, so that the man’s voice had a faint echo in the front room.

Neither of them said anything.

The camera settled. James could see him properly now.

He was somewhere in his late forties, maybe fifty. He was tall and lean, and sat well in the chair as if he had been taught how to as a child. His dark hair was neatly cut and going grey at the temples, his face was sharply made, all clean lines, and his eyes were very calm. They did not look at the camera so much as through it, as if he could see who was on the other side and was mildly interested.

He wore a dark suit, well cut, and a white shirt open at the collar with no tie. There was no crown, no sash, no medals, nothing on him at all that said what he was.

The room behind him had almost nothing in it. There was a dark wooden chair, which he was sitting in, and a small table at his elbow with nothing on it. The walls were barely there at the edges of the light. There was no flag and no window. James could not have said what country it was in, or what century.

The man smiled.

"I’m sorry to interrupt your evening," he said. "Truly. I’m aware that some of you were in the middle of something. Dinner. A film. An argument." The smile widened very slightly. "But I did try to think how one would go about arranging an appointment with the entire world, and I’m afraid I couldn’t find a diary big enough."

He let that sit as well.

"What I have to say is important enough, I think, to be worth the inconvenience. So I’ll ask for a few minutes of your patience."

His voice was pleasant and unhurried. He sounded like a man who expected to be listened to and had never in his life had to raise his voice to make sure of it.

"He’s mental," Nyra said under her breath. "He’s actually mental. Every telly on the planet."

James barely heard her.

Something about the face was bothering him. The longer he looked at it, the more it bothered him. He had seen it before. It had not been in a dark room, or in an open-necked shirt. It had been somewhere brighter, with more around it.

"Some of you will know me," the man said. "Most of you, I’d imagine. For those who don’t, I am the King of the United Kingdom."

And there it was.

The newsreels, the balcony, the speeches at Christmas that James had never watched but had seen clipped on the news every year. There had been a uniform, and there had been gold, and a lot of people standing behind him in hats. James had seen that face a hundred times without once paying attention to it.

"Is that—" Nyra twisted round on the sofa. "James. Is that actually the *King*?"

"Yeah."

"Like the actual King? Of England?"

"Yeah."

But that was not the question in his head. The question was why the King of the United Kingdom was talking to the whole world from a dark room with nothing in it. He was not on the BBC, or in front of a flag, or behind a desk with a government seal on it. He was in a room nobody could find, on every screen at once.

Behind them, the kitchen tap went off.

His mother came to the doorway with a tea towel in her hands. She had heard the voice, and she had heard Nyra. She looked at the screen and stopped dead.

"It’s on everything," James said quietly. "Every channel. My phone. It’s live."

She did not come any further into the room. She stood in the doorway with the tea towel and looked at the King of the United Kingdom.

On the screen, the King folded his hands on his knee.

"Some of you," he said, "will already have a fair idea why I’m here. Particularly those of you who’ve been following events in Ireland."

The smile was still there. James watched the humour go out from underneath it.

---

"I want to begin," the King said, "by offering my condolences to the families of those who died in Dublin last night."

He said it properly. The sentence was well made, the words were in the right order, and there was even a small pause after *died*, the way there should be.

James had stood at four funerals in the past month. He had heard people say *sorry for your loss* a thousand times, in every tone a human voice has. He knew what it sounded like when somebody meant it.

The King sounded like a man reading out a decision about a road closure.

"What happened at the festival was unfortunate," the King went on. "A demonstration. And what happened to your Minister for Defence was, I’m afraid, a consequence. The consequence of a government that has refused, for some time now, to understand its own position."

James went cold.

*Demonstration. Consequence.*

He was choosing the words carefully, leaving them just loose enough. Anybody listening would understand exactly what he meant, and he had not quite said it.

"You’ll have seen the words left in both places," said the King.

James stood up and went closer to the television without deciding to.

"*For the King*." The King inclined his head, very slightly, as if acknowledging applause. "I won’t insult anyone’s intelligence by pretending they meant something else. They were left on my behalf. What was done last night was done in service of an objective I’m about to set out for you. I see no reason to be coy about it."

That was it, out loud, on every screen in the world.

Yesterday it had been three words on a wall, and every analyst in the country saying *we can’t be sure*. Now the man himself was sitting in a chair telling them.

He did not say who. He did not say how, or who had built the bomb, or who had held the knife. He said only that it was his.

"He’s *smiling*," said Nyra. Her voice had gone up. "He killed all those people and he’s sitting there *smiling* about it—"

"Nyra," said their mother. "Keep your voice down."

But she had not taken her eyes off the screen either.

---

"Ireland and Britain," said the King, "share a great deal."

He leaned back slightly in the chair, like a lecturer settling into the part of the talk he enjoyed.

"Geography, for one. Two islands, side by side, at the edge of the same ocean. Language. Blood, for a great many families on both sides of the water. Centuries of history, much of it shared, some of it painful, I’ll grant you." He spread one hand. "And then, a hundred years ago, a separation. A political decision, made in difficult times, that divided what had been a single realm into two weaker things. I’ve never believed it served either of us."

James’s jaw was tight.

The King went on. He talked about defence, about how small Ireland’s army was and how large the sea around it. He talked about the economy, about the advantages of scale and the costs of standing alone. He talked as though he had read every book there was on the subject and had kept the pages that agreed with him.

He talked about the *island*. He talked about its harbours and its coastline, its position in the Atlantic and its resources.

James noticed what he did not talk about.

He did not once mention the Irish government as though it were a government. He did not mention that there was a vote, a constitution, a Dáil. He did not mention five million people who had a say in where they lived. He talked about Ireland the way a man talks about a field next to his own field that he has always thought should have been his.

"And now," said the King, "there is the Tower."

James went very still.

"Ireland has done remarkable things in the Tower. I’d be foolish not to say so. A world-first at Floor 40. One of the Seven, killed." His eyes were calm. "A small country has become, quite suddenly, one of the great Challenger nations of the world."

He paused.

"And it has done so almost entirely through private individuals and private guilds. Through organisations answerable to their own shareholders and their own ambitions, and not, in any meaningful sense, to the state. A nation’s security now rests on people who could decide tomorrow to stop. Or to leave. Or to sell what they know to the highest bidder." He shook his head slightly. "No guild, however accomplished, should hold that kind of power without answering to someone. That isn’t a criticism of any one of them. It’s simply how a responsible state is run."

He did not say Guild Zero. He did not say James Ganner.

He did not need to. James understood exactly where it was going.

The King was not talking about a field. He was talking about Challenger registration. He meant the Bureau, the guild licences, the strategy data that half the world was paying Ireland for. He meant the Tower in the middle of Dublin and whoever stood at its door.

Take Ireland, and you took all of that with it.

---

"So I’ll be plain," said the King. "Ireland is to return to the Crown."

The front room was completely silent.

"The Irish government will publicly recognise the authority of the Crown over the island of Ireland. It will hand over control of its national defence. It will accept British administration of its strategic institutions. That includes, I should say, the institutions that govern its Tower." He said it the way he had said everything else, pleasantly, as if he were reading out the terms of a lease. "Existing Irish officials who cooperate will be permitted to continue in their roles, under British supervision. Nobody wants chaos. This can be an orderly transition."

*Orderly transition.*

James had never heard anything so obscene put so politely.

"He can’t," said his mother. Her voice was quieter than Nyra’s but harder. "He can’t just *say* that. On the television. He can’t just tell a whole country to give itself up because he’s decided."

"He’s talking about our *house*," said Nyra. "He’s talking about where we *live* like he’s buying a—like it’s a *property*, like we’re—"

James did not answer either of them.

He was watching the King, because he had the very strong feeling that the King had not finished. Everything so far was what he wanted. He had not yet said what would happen if he didn’t get it.

On the screen, the King shifted in his chair, settling himself. Then he looked straight down the lens.

"To the Irish government," he said.

"You have forty-eight hours. They begin when this broadcast ends. Within that time you will publicly announce your acceptance of these terms. I won’t be interested in negotiations, or committees, or requests for more time. I’ll be interested in an answer."

For a moment that seemed to be all of it. James thought, *that’s the ultimatum*.

"And for every twenty-four hours," said the King, "that pass without that answer, there will be another explosion. Somewhere in Ireland."

He did not say where. He did not say it would be a barracks, or a government building, or anything that wore a uniform.

"Your leaders saw last night what it costs," he said gently, "to refuse to recognise what the Crown intends. I’d much rather they didn’t have to see it again."

His voice never rose once.

---

"Is he—" Nyra’s voice had gone thin. "James. Is he saying he’s going to blow somewhere up *tomorrow*?"

James did not soften it. She would see straight through him if he tried.

"Yeah," he said. "If he means it, there’s less than a day."

His mother had turned her head toward the front window, toward the dark street, toward town beyond it.

"Should people be leaving?" she said. "Dublin. Should we—"

"I don’t know."

He hated saying it.

"He hasn’t said where. It could be Dublin. It could be Cork. It could be anywhere. If everyone leaves Dublin and it’s somewhere else—" He stopped. "I don’t know where it is. Nobody does."

That was the part he could not get his head round.

In the Tower there was always something in front of you. It might be a boss, or a wave, or a fallen angel coming down off a platform. It might be the most dangerous thing in the world, but it was there, and you could see it. You could watch it, work out what it did, and learn its pattern. Even Turiel had a pattern.

This was a man in a dark room nobody could find, threatening people James had never met, in a place nobody could name, at a time nobody knew. There was nothing in front of him to see, and nothing to cut.

---

"I’d ask the Irish government," said the King, "not to treat this as a bluff."

He laid it out as calmly as a timetable.

If Ireland refused outright, he would take that as a rejection of a peaceful settlement. He would then authorise the Crown’s forces to take by conquest what Ireland had declined to give. If Ireland simply said nothing, if it tried to wait him out, the explosions would continue for every day of the deadline.

"I’d like to be clear about responsibility," he said. "The lives lost last night could have been spared, had Ireland’s leadership been more realistic. Any further loss can be prevented entirely by a single decision in Dublin. That decision is not mine to make. It’s theirs."

James felt something hot go through his chest.

The King had ordered a bomb into a square full of children. Now he was sitting in a chair telling the children’s parents that it was their own government’s fault. He had pulled the trigger, and he was handing the gun to the people he had shot at.

---

"To the governments of other nations," said the King, turning very slightly, as though there were somebody else in the room. "This is a matter between the Crown and Ireland. It concerns two islands and a history that belongs to us. I would ask you not to involve yourselves." He paused. "Any government that chooses to provide military assistance to Dublin should consider very carefully what that might cost its own people, and whether Ireland is worth it to them."

It was not a declaration of war on the world. He did not threaten to march on Paris or Washington. He did not need to. He had said just enough to make every government on Earth stop and think before picking up the phone to Dublin, and that, James realised, was the point.

He wanted Ireland alone for forty-eight hours.