it will go, for each and every one of you.”
I seen it then. But I didn’t know until Haijon told it to me just exactly how Catrin done what she done.
Which one you like, Haijon? Which one you think you’re like to go for? Let me fetch it for you, so you can take a good look at it. So you can hold it, and so it can get the heft of you. Because I already told it the next one to pick it up would be a friend.
Haijon was innocent of it, at least, but that was what must of happened, just the same. I seen how Catrin made him into a Rampart. That was when the anger took me, and it just got worse and worse until me and him had that fight.
It wasn’t like I stopped being angry after that neither. I just turned it another way. I got to feeling heedless of my future, since the onliest future I could see was being trod on by Ramparts until the day I died. Well, Dandrake could eat that and shit it out again. If rules was being broke, I could break them too. If Catrin could bend the tech to her own wish and her own winning, there wasn’t a damn thing to stop me doing the same, and standing up as tall as anyone. Only trouble was, I didn’t have any tech right then to work with.
So I thought I would go and steal some.
20
Breaking into Rampart Hold was real easy in the end. Also, it was the hardest thing I ever done.
That loose window was still where it had always been. All I had to do to get down into the Underhold was to wait until dark and sneak across the gather-ground while the lookout’s back was turned. And once I was in, I knowed where to go.
What made it hard was the thinking about it. This wasn’t like when we was kids, and sneaked in through that window to play blind man’s touch down in the dark. This was me going up against the Ramparts. And not just the Ramparts but my own mind, that had steeped in all the old rules the way green wood steeps in stop-mix.
I choosed my moment, four turns of the glass past midnight when the old lookout was ready to come off the tower and most likely not so wide awake as they ought to be. I climbed out of bed, put my day clothes on again and slipped out of the house. But I stopped along the way to take the workshop key off its big hook and put it in my pocket. No one heard me go. I hoped nobody would hear me come back neither, but if they did I had already made up a story to explain what I was doing – that I heard someone moving around outside and went to see who it was.
It was a clear night, with a full moon. Anyone with any sense in their heads would of seen that and gone back to bed, but I had made up my mind to this course and it wasn’t in me to put the business off even to the next night. It was now or never, as they say, and never wasn’t a thought I could bear to think.
But I wasn’t so stupid neither as to cross the gather-ground with that moon shining down on me like a lantern. I stood in the shadows under the tocsin bell until a cloud come over, and then I took my chances. I didn’t run, though something in me surely wanted to. I knowed running would make my footsteps sound out louder, and I’d stand out that much more from the dark if someone was looking. I moved slowly, so a watching eye might not see me move at all.
But there wasn’t no watching eyes, or at least none that seen me, for I made it to the back wall of Rampart Hold with no ruckus raised. The cloud was still favouring me so I didn’t tarry. I found that loose window, right where it had always been, and eased it out of its frame. I set it next to me, up against the foot of the wall.
When I joked with Haijon that he might be too big now to go through the gap, I hadn’t ever thought that might go for me too. I had slid through it just as easy as