The Book of Koli

by M. R. Carey

  Well, now I was come to it, and there wasn’t no way of going round or about. I had got to decide what to do. I meant what I said to Mardew, and I thought I could stick to it. That I would be able to keep the secret of how to make the DreamSleeve work, no matter how much hurt he put me to. I wanted to do it just to spite him, if nothing else. But a thought come to me then, and it give me to worry. The thought was this: was it better for Monono to stay switched off for ever, or to be waked up and made to work for Mardew?

  It was not an easy question to answer. I felt sure she would hate Mardew, for he was a fool and a bully. But what was it like for her, lying on a shelf in the Underhold through all them years? Maybe it wasn’t like anything, or was like being asleep without no dreams at all. And maybe, when enough time had gone by, someone else would come and slide that little button across and her life would start over again, all new.

  But just as likely not. And between death and Mardew, I suppose Mardew had the edge by about an inch or so.

  “Okay,” I said, though I had got to force the words out past my teeth. “I guess I’ll tell you.”

  “I guess you will at that,” Mardew said.

  “What you got, Mardew, it’s not called a music player. It’s called a DreamSleeve. Monono Aware special edition.”

  “I don’t give a dry shit what it’s called, Koli Faceless. Tell me how to use it.”

  I shoved down the anger that was rising in me, and gun to explain it to him. “There’s a switch on the bottom corner of it. It’s kind of small, and it’s set right in against the edge, so you’re only like to see it if you look hard. You got to slide it across, from the left to the right, with the little window facing you. And then you say—”

  I come to a stop there, just staring at Mardew and stumbling into silence. I couldn’t help it. His hand – his left hand, not the cutter hand – had gone inside his jacket and was touching on something there. Something that was sitting on his belt, or else was tucked inside it.

  He kicked his foot against the sole of my boot, all impatient. “What is it I got to say?”

  “You… you say…” I moved my hand in a circle, like I was trying to remember the words. But I wasn’t, for I had changed my mind. It was the DreamSleeve Mardew was putting his hand to! He had stuck it in his belt and brung it with him, so eager to make it be his that he couldn’t even wait until he got back home.

  “Spit it out!” he said, kicking my boot again. “I’ll cut you, else. It ain’t no crime to kill a faceless man.”

  A dead calm come over me. “But I ain’t one, Mardew,” I says. “I won’t take that name from you.”

  “You’ll take it if I give it.”

  “No, I won’t,” I told him. “I’m Koli Rampart.” I said it loud and clear. I almost shouted it. And for good measure I said it over again, loud enough to rouse up them birds again and send them scattering. “Koli Rampart!”

  “Okay, if I got to teach you, I’m going to teach you proper.” Mardew lifted up the cutter and pointed it right at me.

  “Monono!” I yelled out. “Alarm!”

  I said it right as Mardew fired. And right as he fired, he give a wild thrash of his whole body. There wasn’t no sound. Well, not from the alarm anyway. But there was a buzz just over my head like a wasp was there and then gone away again. It was the noise the cutter beam made as it went by me. Chips and splinters out of the wall behind me was coming down on me of a sudden, like it was raining, and a half of the house’s front door crashed into the ground right at my side. The cutter had sliced it off sheer, the line of the cut straighter and cleaner than I ever got with a plane.

  Mardew throwed his hands up to cover his ears. There was a shattering, tearing sound as the beam went up through the clay shingles on the roof. Then it wasn’t slicing nothing but the sky. I couldn’t hear what he was hearing, for Monono was sending the noise to him through the induction field, but I guess it was pretty hard to bear.

  I run in under the beam and tackled him, grabbing his right arm and holding tight onto it so he couldn’t aim the cutter at me. For a second or two, he didn’t even try. He was hurting bad, and besides that he was in a flat panic on account of he was being attacked by something he couldn’t see.

  But he still fought back when I grappled him, and though I was grabbing onto his one arm with both of my hands, it was all I could do to keep a hold on it. We wrestled on the ground, backwards and forwards, me forcing his hand way up over his head and him twisting every which way to shake me off.

  I just had the one thing on my side, which was that he was running mad with the pain of that terrible noise filling up his head. I got one thumb up under the cutter’s strap and was trying to push it off his hand. Then he swung out with his left arm, that was still holding the DreamSleeve, and give me a whack in the eye so hard I seen lights all dancing.

  I was hurt, and I was part-way blind, and I was scared besides that the DreamSleeve might of broke when it hit me. My grip come loose, and Mardew pulled his right hand free.

  I come close to dying then, as he brung his hand down to swipe the cutter beam right across where my head was. I just about catched his wrist again and stopped him, leaning my whole weight into it. Mardew shifted to do the same.

  His eyes was watering and his teeth was bared. Blood come foaming between them as he breathed, for he had bit halfway into his bottom lip. But he was stronger than me and now his strength was telling. His arm come down, in spite of all I could do. I ducked under the beam as it swung around, chewing the ground up behind me, reaping the weeds all about us in a wide, ruinous path.

  But the path was narrowing itself down to me, and though I could slow it I couldn’t stop it.

  A desperate thought come to me. I pushed as hard as I could, spending what I had left of strength to force that arm back by an inch, a couple of inches, three. Then of a sudden I stopped pushing and pulled instead, dragging on Mardew’s hand like we was treading a ring in Summer-dance.

  A ring is what it was, more or less. Mardew rolled over, and I rolled too, so I was under him. The beam went wide of me, just about, though I seen the sleeve of my shirt part in a long strip from shoulder to elbow, like the peel you take off an apple.

  Mardew was not so lucky. His wrist turned as he come down so the silver band of the cutter was pointing down towards his feet. The beam sliced through the side of his leg just above the knee, painting the dust bright red for twenty feet or so along a narrow, straight, perfect line.

  Mardew yelled out in pain, and the beam died. I kept on pulling on his wrist, using the curve of my shoulder to roll him right on over me and come out clear, him sprawling on his back in the red-specked dirt.

  I did a foolish thing then. I scrambled back away from him, instead of going in close. I don’t know what I was thinking of. There wasn’t nowhere for me to hide, and ten feet or twenty or a hundred was all the same to the cutter beam.

  Mardew blinked his eyes, looking at the cut in his leg that was gouting out blood. And then across at me. And then down at the DreamSleeve that had fell out of his hand and was lying on the ground in between us. His eyes was crossed a little, but they was coming back into focus. I guessed that din was still hammering into his head, but he was managing to think around it now. He knowed what he had got to do.

  So did I.

  Mardew lifted up his hand and took aim, not at me but at the DreamSleeve.

  I groped for a stone and didn’t find one, but I did find a solid chunk of roof tile that had come into the cutter beam and fell down on the ground.

  The bar on the cutter turned silver again, and I flung the tile.

  I say I flung it, but it’s truer to say I brung it down like a hammer. I leaned in close and drove it home, and it didn’t hardly leave my hand until the last second. I had meant to skim it, the way you would skim a stone across a pond, for it was the same flat shape and had a good edge to it where the cutter beam had sliced it across the middle. But I was scared my aim would not be good, and so I kept
a grip on it and slammed that sharp edge right down into the middle of the cutter’s silver bar.

  It’s hard to say what happened next. I only hoped to throw off Mardew’s aim, but when the tile struck against the cutter it was like a stone striking on a flint. There was a flash of light so bright it went dark in the middle, kind of. I seen it grow in between me and Mardew like a flower opening up. Then I didn’t see nothing for a little while, only that flash hanging in front of my eyes like paint had been splashed there. I had come down on my back somehow, though I can’t say when that happened or what did it. My left arm, where the cutter almost hit me, was stinging really bad, and my head was ringing like some of them bells from the personal security alarm had got in there after all.

  “Get a grip, Koli.”

  That was Monono’s voice, and it come through the induction field so it sounded like she was standing behind me and whispering in my ear.

  “Monono!” I cried out. “Oh, I’m glad you’re back! I’m glad you come back to me!”

  “That’s nice, dopey boy. I missed you too. But your shitty friend is going to die. If you’ve got an opinion about that, you might want to do something.”

  I could see again now, a little, around the edges of the bright and dark blots that was on my eyes. I got up on hands and knees and crawled over to where Mardew was. He had landed on his back too, a fair way away from where he had been standing.

  When I seen what I done to him, it made me sick in my heart and stomach both. His right arm wasn’t there no more. From the elbow down there wasn’t nothing left, and upwards from elbow to shoulder was all burned black. The smell of that burning hung in the air, so heavy I was like to choke on it.

  The only good thing, so far as I could see, was that there wasn’t much blood. Some was spilled on the ground, and a little flesh in streaks and gobbets along with it, but none was coming out of the stump of Mardew’s arm. I thought if he didn’t bleed out he might yet live, so long as the shock from the wounding didn’t kill him its own self. I seen that happen to people that was cut or burned as bad as he was.

  He was in a lot of pain. He was crying out, like it should of been a scream, but instead it was only a hoarse sort of grunting that was forced out of him. His eyes was rolling around in his head, and his hand that was still left was shaking around and clawing at the dust as though he had dropped something and was trying to pick it up again.

  I wasn’t sure he even realised I was there, so I touched his arm – his good arm – to let him know. I wasn’t thinking of him as an enemy no more, for it was clear he couldn’t hurt me. When I touched him, his hand shot up and grabbed a hold of me, tight as anything.

  “You’re gonna be okay, Mardew,” I told him.

  “Koli,” he said, through his teeth. “Dandrake damn you! You better not of broke it!” The words come out slurred, kind of, with a deal of bubbling under them.

  “Broke what, Mardew?” I asked him. I didn’t guess what he meant, his arm being so much worse than broke.

  “The cutter!” he said. “Is it ruined? If you broke it, Catrin’s gonna have my hide off.”

  I swallowed down some bile that was rising up in my throat. From the taste of it, I swallowed a deal of blood and smoke along with it. “I – I don’t think it’s broke,” I said.

  “Put it in my hand then! Oh shit! Oh shit, I’m hurting some! Put it in my fucking hand, Koli! Quick, now!”

  I looked around. Off to one side, maybe ten steps away from the both of us, there was a strip of grey metal, all twisted, with a piece of cloth hanging off of it. I guess that was what was left of the cutter, and it wouldn’t do no good to let Mardew take hold of it or even see it.

  I scuffled around a mite, making like I was picking something up, though I had got to do it one-handed for Mardew was holding on tight to my other hand. “Okay,” I said. “I got it.”

  Mardew shaked all over. His head whipped to the left, then to the right. “Check it’s working,” he says.

  I scuffled some more. “Yeah, it’s fine,” I said.

  Mardew shut his eyes, and tears squeezed out of them. “Oh, thank you! Thank you! I would of been in so much trouble. Put it on my hand. I want to feel it’s there.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I’ll put it on your hand, Mardew. But you got to promise you won’t cut me.”

  “I promise,” Mardew said. “I ain’t gonna hurt you no more, Koli.” Another big shake went through him. “Oh, dead god fuck me, I was so scared I was gonna have to…”

  A breath come out of him, that never went back in. His face got still, the eyes open again and looking up at the sky.

  He never said what he was scared of, though I guess I knowed well enough. It was of going home to Mythen Rood so much less than when he come out. Without the cutter, he couldn’t be Rampart Knife, nor there couldn’t be such a Rampart again ever after. That was why the cutter meant so much more to him, in them last moments, than his own life did. The cutter was the thing he carried, like as if the world that was lost had lent it to him so he could pass it along to the world that was still waiting to come. And it was a terrible thing that he failed in that errand. He couldn’t bear to think such a thought.

  But it was me that broke the cutter, just like it was me that killed Mardew. I had took away one of Mythen Rood’s best weapons against the raging, hungry world, and right then I could not find no solace for it.

  38

  I sunk to the ground and cried a whole lot. It was not a safe place, nor a safe time, but I done it anyway.

  Death wasn’t wholly strange to me. I had hunted a few times each season when my turn come round, and sometimes made a kill (though more often I missed my mark, to be honest with you, whether it was a bow or a spear I was carrying). And children’s deaths in Mythen Rood was a tragedy that come round like Salt Feast and Summer-dance, every year without fail: I could reel off four or five names of boys and girls I used to play and run with, and then went to their wakes and spoke their names as they was put into the ground.

  What was new to me, and not welcome, was killing. I could of told myself it was not my doing. The cutter was on Mardew’s hand, not mine, and the choosing to murder me was all his too. But that didn’t make a difference. Not one that was wide enough to grab onto anyway. When I told Monono to hit him with the personal security alarm, I knowed full well where the thing had got to end, with his blood on the ground or mine, and I did what I could to make it be his.

  Sometimes crying makes a sad thing better, but oftentimes it only pushes the sadness harder into you. When I seen that this was the second kind of occasion, I made myself stop. I was just sitting there for a while after that, holding onto Mardew’s hand and knowing he wasn’t on the other end of it no more.

  “You okay, Koli?” Monono asked me, having left it a good long time.

  “No,” I said. “I got a stone in my heart, Monono. I didn’t think nothing could make me sad again when you come back, but here I am, faceless and four miles out of gates. And now I killed a man. I don’t got no words for it.”

  There was silence between us for another while.

  Then I heard a sound start up that I knowed was a piano. It was a beautiful sad tune that rose up and then sunk down again. There wasn’t no words at first, but then they was wove in, most sweet and perfect. I can’t do no better than to say them here. Saying them without the music is like painting a picture when you only got the one colour, but still it will have to do. It was a man’s voice that sung, not Monono’s, but still it was her speaking to me.

  I misremember the words, but they was mostly concerning a bridge. The man in the song said he would be like a bridge, if it come down to it and a bridge was needed, to get me across the troubles that was in my life and set me down on the other side of them.

  I didn’t feel right then like I deserved any such bridge, but the words and the music done what they was meant to do. I was solaced, and the beauty of it filled my heart so there was a kind of a right balance there again, or at
least a promise that there would be one. By and by I calmed and was able to see past the sorrow and the waste of it, where before there had seemed to be nothing. And I seen something else too, or maybe it’s better to say I heard it, a little late but clear as a tocsin bell.

  “Dopey boy,” Monono said. But I knowed she meant it kind.

  There was so many things I wanted to say to her, and had wanted to for the longest time, but I never imagined to say them in a village I didn’t know, that didn’t have no people any more, with Mardew lying dead on the ground next to me.

  I said one thing only, for it seemed to matter:

  “How come you got my name right?”

  “I never got it wrong, Koli-bou. It was right there in my registry. I only said it wrong because of how the DreamSleeve’s sound files work. But that’s a long story. I think you might want to save it for another time.”

  I think I told you Monono’s voice sounded different at the wedding, when she come back. That same difference was there when she told me Mardew was dying, and it was even easier to see. There was a hardness in her now, where before she had always been most soft and gentle even in her teasing of me. If anything she said had ever sounded hard, it was only a game, kind of, and she always made sure I knowed it right after.

  I wanted to know what had happened to her when she was away, and it come hard to me to wait. But she was right when she said to save it for another time. My head right then was full of Mardew being dead and me being the one that killed him. I had got to get myself away from that, somehow, before I could think of anything else.

  I got up, slow as trees might of moved in the old times. I picked the DreamSleeve up off the ground where it had fell. I found my bundle on the ground too, and my short knife stuck in the earth point down. I must of grabbed a hold of it at some point, meaning to strike a blow with it, but I didn’t remember any such thing.

  Ludden had used to have a lookout that was very like the one in Mythen Rood, except it had a ladder in place of a stair. It was easy to find, standing out over the village the way it did. I went there and climbed on up to the platform. I felt safe doing so, for nothing could come up the ladder without me hearing it.