The Book of Koli (Rampart Trilogy #1) - M. R. Carey Page 0,38

in among the boxes, opened one up and held it out to me. There was little pieces of cake in it, cut off square with a knife and sitting in a bed of their own crumbs. I could see they was made with raisins. I took one and et it in two bites. Ursala watched me do it, her face all thoughtful and serious.

“So tell me, Koli Woodsmith,” she said, as I licked my fingers clean, “is there something I can do for you? Something I can give you, whether it’s goods or money, that will make your life easier? Because that would resolve the whole issue, and we could both go our separate ways again.”

I squirmed on the cushion somewhat, trying to make sense of this. Ursala was looking at me hard, and I could not sit easy under that stare. “I don’t think you owe me anything, Dam Ursala,” I said he hasn’t said this before. “If I helped you, you done the same for me right after. You done it twice over, for you broke the drone in pieces and you made Mardew stand down when he was gonna get me brung up before the Count and Seal.”

Ursala’s look never shifted. “Generally,” she said with a coldness in her voice, “it’s the one at the sharp end of the debt who has the clearest sense of it. You’ll have to indulge me, Koli. Let me reward you so I can go back to not thinking about you at all.”

Well, I was not one to kick at a reward, but it was not easy to answer her. I never really seen myself as needing anything, excepting to be a Rampart, which was only a foolishness, and to be with Spinner, which now she was pair-pledged was worse foolishness still. Except that I had whipped it up so much inside my head that all I could see was the froth.

I thought about the place where those two things – being a Rampart and being with Spinner – seemed to come together. Ursala’s tech was as good as Rampart tech or maybe better, and would make a villager be a Rampart the second he could call it his. For a second, or maybe a bit longer than a second, I wondered whether I could ask her if she had some other thing like the water-boiler or the computer or the drudge’s dagnostic. Something like those things, only smaller, that she could bear to be parted from. But it was like asking to be made a king such as they had in the world that was lost, with a palace and servants and wives and an army of soldiers. The words wouldn’t come out of my mouth, for I didn’t want to seem so greedy nor so stupid.

And once I seen that, I seen too that there wasn’t nothing else I wanted, except maybe another piece of cake and some more tea with honey in it.

But just as I was opening my mouth to say that, another idea struck me. I considered, and Ursala seen me do it. “What is it?” she says.

“You know lots of things, Dam Ursala,” I says to her. “More than anyone I ever met.”

She shaked her head, it seemed with sadness. “I know a little more than you do,” she said. “Not much. Not nearly enough.”

She was being honest, or thought she was, but all the same what she was saying wasn’t anywise true. I learned since then, and paid a price to learn it, that them as lay claim to great wisdom most often got nothing in their store but bare scrapings. And by the same token, them as think they’re ignorant think it because they can see the edges of what they know, which you can only see when what you know is tall enough to stand on and take a look around. I had no idea of this back then, but I still knowed that Ursala was a lot cleverer than me and I believed that the things I wanted to know about must surely lie in her telling.

“Will you answer some questions I got?” I asked her. “I’d see that as a great kindness and a full reward, though I’ll say again you don’t got nothing to pay me back for.”

She looked surprised at that. She didn’t answer right away, but took a long swig of her wine and then filled it up again from the skin. She huffed out a breath,