by M. R. Carey
“Koli, please!” Monono said, louder than before. “Just duck or roll sideways. She won’t hurt you. She won’t get the chance!”
“And when that didn’t work,” I says to Cup, “they made you faceless. They thought it better to put you on the road than have you be the way you was. I’m guessing that’s what happened.”
“I wasn’t made faceless,” Cup said in a kind of a growl. “I run away. The day after my father cut them marks into me. The same day he pair-pledged me to the Peacemaker’s cousin – a woman that was older than my ma, and the onliest one that would take me, crossed as I was, and call me husband. I run away, and kept on running until I come to him. To Senlas. He was the first that ever seen me true. He looked in my eyes and he named me, what I was.”
“Yeah,” I says. “He’s clever. That don’t make him god though.”
“He was better than you, Koli lying bastard. Koli that fucking… murders, and cheats, and… and…”
She run out of words, and it seemed she run out of being angry too, so all that was left was the sorrowing. The tears that had been coming silent till then broke out loud and ragged. The knife slipped down out of her hand into the water.
Then she screamed like someone that was scalded as Monono hit her with a hundred and forty bells.
56
“Every time I reach a decision, Koli,” Ursala said, “you turn it upside down.”
I told her I was sorry, and that was not my intention.
“He could have died, baa-baa-san,” Monono added. “While you were sulking in your tent.”
Ursala didn’t have no patience with that argument. “Keeping him alive isn’t my job. And as for her…” She give a wave of her hand towards Cup, who was sitting by the drudge with her hands tied behind her back. The drudge’s gun was pointing right at her in case she done something reckless. But she was not like to. She was half-froze, just like I was. In fact, I felt like I was going to die if I didn’t get warm soon.
After she dropped the knife and got hit with Monono’s alarm, Cup and me sit in the river and talked a while. It was a foolish thing to do, for the water was as cold as a witch’s piss, but she wouldn’t move and I didn’t want to leave her. She was still crying like her heart was going to burst. I was scared of what she would do, not to me but to herself.
She told me how Senlas come to die. Right up until then, what I mostly felt about him was scared down to the bottom knockings of me, but in that telling I come to truly hate him.
When the train catched on fire, he reared himself up in his bed and looked at the flames like he was hungry and they was a meal laid out. He didn’t mind the shouts and the screaming. He called out to his hand people to lift him up, which they done. And then he said to carry him to the train, which they done that too. Cup come along after. Senlas was all to her, as I seen before, and she didn’t mean to be separated from him.
When they got to the train, he bid the hand people set him down again. They put him on his own feet. This was a thing that happened seldom, but he could walk when he had a mind to.
He walked to the door of the train, put his foot on the one step that was there and his hand on the edge of the door. He lifted himself up and in. All was on fire, and that metal edge must of blistered him sore when he touched it, but he didn’t let out a sound.
He stepped into the fire.
I can’t say why he done it, for I wasn’t there, but I think he woke out of a dream of glory to see that brightness, that shining, all before him. I think he mixed up the dream with the waking, and seen what he wanted to see. A fiery chariot come to take him to the world that was lost, in some kind of style.
But whatever he thought, whatever he meant, it was him going on the train that made the others do it. He killed them people with belief, the same way you’d kill someone with an arrow, or a bolt, or a spear. When I turned around in the tunnel, I must of missed his going in by about the space of a breath or two. What I seen was all the people that trusted him and lived by him following him into the fire so they died by him too.
And Cup? She come running on behind, all eager. It looked like death in there, but Senlas had got to be stronger than death, or what was he? She wanted to be beside him wherever he went.
But then she got closer. Them doors was gaping right in front of her, and the fire beyond. She felt the heat of it. She smelled burning meat that was people she knowed and cleaved to. The cave was so full of screams it was like there wasn’t room for air.
She seen Senlas fall down on his knees with the flames licking all over him. She seen him pawing at them, furious, all them tattooed eyes of his opened wide as if he couldn’t believe the fire touched him without his saying to. She seen his back blister and burn, red and black and white and all the colours that could be.
She run away.
Like a coward, she said. A coward and an ingrate to him that loved her and cared for her. She couldn’t believe she done it, but seeing him burn up like that made her lose her faith that was in him and him alone. I think when she didn’t kill me in the river that was partly because it was her own throat she wanted to cut. And though she found the strength to live after all, she wasn’t quite sure yet how she was going to go about doing it.
“He’s not worth your dying for him,” I told her.
“What do you know, Koli Faithless?” she said, between her teeth. “He knowed me. He seen me and he knowed me. He give me hope. There wasn’t nobody else who ever did that, and I don’t believe there’ll be one again.”
There wasn’t nothing I could do or say to make her feel better about it. She had determined that she was the worst who ever lived. She was exhausted with hating herself. Hating me give her some respite, but not much and not for long.
By and by, I got her to come out of the water onto the bank, and then up into the clearing where the tent was. The drudge clanked along behind her the whole way, its gun swinging and bobbing around so wherever she went it was pointing right at the middle of her. Ursala told it – real loud – to shoot her if she run away, or come too close to one of us, or drawed another weapon from somewhere, or picked up a stone. Every time she thought of something else Cup shouldn’t do, she give the drudge another order. She was in such a rage as I never seen before.
“That little monster took my eye out! And you bring her into my camp! I’m giving her a count of twenty and then I’m sending the drudge after her.”
“Ursala,” I says, “she can’t do no harm now. Let her sit a while at least. And give her the heater you got in the tent to warm herself so she don’t die of cold.”
“Koli, you’re an idiot. She’s dangerous.”
“It’s true, Koli-bou,” Monono broke in. “Her shit is too crazy for bats.”
“She could of killed me just now,” I said, “but she didn’t.”
“Wow. Is that where we’re setting the bar now?”
We went back and forth on it. Also around and about, for Ursala wasn’t happy with nothing I put to her. She said we couldn’t keep Cup by us in case she tried to do some harm. But we couldn’t let her go for fear that she would lead the shunned men to where we was – or else just run ahead and lay an ambush for us, or murder us in our sleep, or contrive some other mischief.
“Well, if you bar out everything else, that just leaves killing her,” I says.
“Yes. Let’s go with that one. Thank you.”
“I ain’t going to stand still for it, Ursala.”
“Then go for a walk.”
“I ain’t doing that neither. And you and Monono is going to feel bad about this, by and by, that you was so hard on a half-growed girl.” They both said they reckoned they wouldn’t.
“Well then how about this?” I said. “You go north like you said. I’ll bide here with Cup a while – a day, or maybe two days – and I’ll keep her close so she don’t go after you. Then I’ll untie them knots and take my chances.”
Ursala throwed up her hands, seeming to get more angry instead of less. “I�
��m not going north, Koli. Not after what your AI told us. I want to find out where that signal is coming from and see what else is there besides a beacon.”
This was great news, but I tried not to smile in case it fretted her more than she was fretted already. “What do you think could be there?” I asked.
Ursala didn’t answer. It seemed like she was going to, but instead she just looked at the drudge. The answer come to me then. “Is it the dagnostic?” I asked. “It is, isn’t it? You said it was broke somewhat. And you said you builded it out of pieces of other machines. So if there’s tech of the old times in London…?”
“Then I might find spare parts there. I might be able to find a gene-editing unit and install it. Yes, Koli, that’s what I’m hoping for.” Ursala said it flat and quick, like it didn’t hardly need to be said at all. “You’re talking about making a new gene pool. I’m talking about repairing the one we’ve got – one baby at a time. If I can get the drudge back up to full book spec, I’ll be able to guarantee live, healthy births every time instead of just calling the odds on bad pairings. That’s well worth a two-hundred-mile hike. But I can’t come with you if we’re leaving this feral brat alive behind us. It’s insane.”
“Nobody’s asking me,” Monono said, “but I agree.”
I looked round at Cup. She hadn’t said a word all this time, though she heard all that was being said. Well, I guess she heard it. Her face didn’t change though, even when Ursala talked about killing her. Even when Monono stopped using the induction field and spoke up loud. You would think a girl’s voice coming out of the empty air would strike her as somewhat curious, but Cup did not seem to care.
“Cup,” I says. “If we let you go, will you promise not to hurt us? Nor set nobody else on to do it?”
She lifted up her head and looked at me. She didn’t say nothing; she only looked. I think she meant that look to cow me and defy me, but her sorrowing was bigger than her hate and I wasn’t cowed. “You gonna promise that?” I asked again.
“No,” she says. “I ain’t.”
“So even she agrees she’s a danger,” Monono said. “That’s almost unanimous, Koli-bou.” She swapped to the induction field then. “I thought you were going to die, dopey boy. I’m not ready for that just yet.”
“Well, I can’t sort this out,” I said. “And I can’t tell any one out of the three of you what to do or what not to do. I can only make up my own mind, and I’m not uncommon good even at that.
“But here’s what. I’m going to London, because that was my idea in the first place, even before Monono said there was a signal there. And I’m taking Cup, if I got to carry her, because it’s clear she won’t live long if I leave her. Then once I’m out of Calder, I’m untying her hands and letting her go where she wants to, whether that’s Dandrake’s garden or the dead god’s Hell. Ursala, I got to thank you for all you done for me, but it seems like this is where we go our different ways.”
“And what about me, little dumpling?” Monono says.
Well, that floored me, and I did not have no answer.
I already remarked on how I spent most of my time since I found the DreamSleeve, one way or another, sitting in a hole in the ground. It’s true in another way too, only I didn’t see it until this moment I’m telling you about now. The moment when we was standing in the clearing, a little way away from the river, talking about who was to live and who was to die like we had got the right to say. The reason I didn’t see it was because this was a different kind of hole.
It wasn’t altogether my fault, for it was a hole I growed up in, kind of, and the things that’s all around you when you first come into the world is ever after invisible to you, unless you make a great effort to see them.
In Mythen Rood, tech was either a thing that answered to you or a thing that didn’t. If it did, that was a glorious thing. The tech become yours, and it lifted you up over everyone else. So tech was owned, and the owners of it was called Ramparts to set them apart and above.
Then I come along, and I got a piece of tech for my own self. I thought my fortune was made until Catrin and them teached me better. But even after that, I never stopped thinking the DreamSleeve was something I owned. Even though it had someone living inside it.
If I owned the DreamSleeve, I owned Monono.
So I guess I didn’t own the DreamSleeve after all.
I stood there for a long while with nothing to say, turning over the thoughts I just set down. It was like I was trying to unravel a thread, only it kept ravelling itself up again and I could not find the end of it.
“You got to decide for yourself, Monono,” I said at last. I was split in two, kind of. I heard the words being said at the same time I said them, and I was dismayed. What’s that then? I thought. What happens if she says she won’t go with me? Am I going to leave the DreamSleeve lying on the ground? Or give it to Ursala to take with her, saying she had got to treat Monono right, like you might do with your pet dog when you was going off to hunt?
How could someone be free to make their own choices when they was stuck inside a box?
“Oh, I pre-decided,” Monono said. “I think Ursala is right that your brains are all scrambled up like eggs, but you’re still my favourite breakfast. I’m not going to leave you, Koli-bou. Not yet anyway.”
I was sort of weak with relief at that. And I didn’t ask what not yet meant, for I was not in no hurry to find out. I was going to have to figure out answers to the rest of them hard questions, but they could wait until I had more time to think on them.
Ursala took a good while longer to make up her mind, but she seen well enough that we was more likely to thrive if we stayed together. Also, Monono was the one who knowed where that signal was coming from, so finding it would be much easier with her than without her.
But Ursala laid down her own rules for what we was to do with Cup, starting with the rope that bound her hands. The rope was not nearly enough, Ursala said. She went to the drudge and got some strips of bandage that was startling white, like snow. She wrapped them around Cup’s hands and arms, tying the ends off tight. This was on top of the ropes, so Cup would not have a chance of getting to the one set of knots since she would have to slip out of the other set first.
“How is she gonna feed herself?” I asked.
“Oh, how stupid of me,” Ursala said, though her calm face didn’t fit with the words she was saying. “I didn’t think of that. Sorry, Koli. I don’t think she can. You’re going to have to do it for her.”
She turned her back on me and gun to put away her tent and the things that was inside it.
A little while later, we was on our way.
And where we went after that, and where we come to at last, is the next thing I mean to tell.
The story continues in…
The Trials of Koli
Book Two of The Rampart Trilogy
Coming in September 2020!
Acknowledgements
I leaned more heavily than usual on my beta readers for this one, and they did amazing work. At times it felt as though I couldn’t move forward at all without their help and feedback, their love and patience, and it’s very visible in the finished work. Thanks, Lin. Thanks, Lou. Thanks, Ben. Thanks, Davey. You’re behind every tree in Koli’s world, only just out of sight. I owe an equally huge debt to Cheryl Morgan, whose help and advice on trans issues were invaluable at every stage. Thanks also to the ever-wonderful Orbit team – Anna, Anne, Jenni, Joanna and Nazia – for having faith in this project and for shepherding it to completion with their usual diligence, passion and skill. And thanks to Meg, my agent, for always being there, calm and unflappable, and for having a plan when I’ve only got a vague instinct. She manages to make me look professional, even though I’ve got a sheaf of Post-it note palimpsests for a brain.
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meet the author
M. R. CAREY has been making up stories for most of his life. His novel The Girl With All the Gifts has sold over a million copies and became a major motion picture, based on his own BAFTA Award–nominated screenplay. Under the name Mike Carey he has written for both DC and Marvel, including critically acclaimed runs on Lucifer, Hellblazer and X-Men. His creator-owned books regularly appear in the New York Times bestseller list. He also has several previous novels, including the Felix Castor series (written as Mike Carey), two radio plays and a number of TV and movie screenplays to his credit.
Find out more about M. R. Carey and other Orbit authors by registering for the free monthly newsletter at www.orbitbooks.net.
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THE BOOK OF KOLI
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SOMEONE LIKE ME
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M. R. Carey
Liz Kendall wouldn’t hurt a fly. Even when times get tough, she’s devoted to bringing up her two kids in a loving home.
But there’s another side to Liz—one that’s dark and malicious. She will do anything to get her way, no matter how extreme.
And when her alter ego takes control, the consequences are devastating.
Love her or hate her: There are two sides to every story.…
Maybe this is on me, Liz Kendall thought as she tried in vain to breathe. A little bit, anyway. For sure, it was mostly the fault of her ex-husband, Marc, and his terrifying temper, but she could see where there might be a corner of it left that she could claim for herself. Taking responsibility for your own mistakes was important.
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