The Book of Koli (Rampart Trilogy #1) - M. R. Carey Page 0,18

room all at the same time.

Spinner stepped off to the side a little way to make room for me, and Catrin called me in the same words she used before.

“Koli Waiting, come to the Count and Seal.”

I come to her, looking at my feet the whole way in case I tripped over them. Even when I was standing right in front of her, I didn’t seem able to look up.

“What do you see here?”

“I see the tech of the old times,” I answered her.

“Will it wake for you?”

“I do not know, but mean to try.”

“And if it wake for you?”

“Use it for the good of all.”

“Choose well.”

I had told Shirew I meant to choose the firethrower, but now that Spinner had done it I changed my mind. I picked up the bolt gun instead. The handle of it fitted to my hand so snug I wanted to laugh, almost, which there was no law said you couldn’t but would of been a shocking thing and not soon forgived. The metal felt cold like snow against my skin, though the room was warm from all the people that was in there. And it was smoother than anything I’d ever held. Like a shiny pebble dipped in water, but smoother even than that.

I lifted it up high, like as it was a lit torch at lock-tide, and me standing at the gate. I said, “Acknowledge,” just as loud as I could. Then I waited.

Nothing happened, though I give it a good long time. I heard one of the seats creak, and someone made a noise in their throat like they wanted to cough but couldn’t because of the seriousness of it. Rampart Fire looked at me, expectant, and after a few seconds more she nodded. Meaning I should get to it.

“Accept command,” I said.

What followed was more of that same nothing. I made myself believe I could feel the gun moving, waking up, but it was only my hand getting sweaty and slipping on the grip because of the smoothness of it.

“New user,” I whispered. I only just could get the words out.

I realised something then that I never knowed before, though I’ve proved it many times since. The world isn’t nothing next to the stories we tell ourselves. It bends to any shape we want it to. I seen this moment in my thoughts a thousand times before my testing day finally come, and there wasn’t one of those times where the tech didn’t wake for me. I had heard Catrin hail me a Rampart, in dreams and wakeful wondering every day and every night since I first went into the Waiting House, as though she said it so loud I had heard the echoes before the words was ever said.

But if the world bends easy, which it does, sometimes it will whip back like a green branch and hit you in the face. That’s what it done to me then, so I was left standing like a fool with no ideas in my head, not even the idea of where I was and what come next.

You might wonder at this. After all, I told you enough times already that all our Ramparts was Vennastins, save for one man, Gendel, that was closest kin to them. Who was I to think I might beget a miracle? No one, is the answer. I was the smallest speck of dust in a world that was a thousand thousand times bigger than I even knowed it was, and I didn’t have no right to be treated like anything bigger than that.

But it’s when we’re smallest, when we’re young, that we most have the thought of ourselves as mightily important. A child – any child, I think – believes he stands plum in the middle of everything, and the sun at noon-day seeks him out so it will know where the zenith is.

Or if it’s not so for every child, at least it was so for me.

“Koli Waiting,” Catrin Vennastin said. “Wait no more. Man of Mythen Rood you are, and will be, under what name you choose.”

I was like to forget my name for a moment.

“Koli Woodsmith,” I said.

“Koli Woodsmith,” said everyone else, and I felt the sorrowing burden of it fall heavy across my shoulders. The burden of being nothing very much after all, and having no part to play in the larger doings of the world.

Spinner took my hand and pulled me back to take my place next to her. Otherwise I