The Book of Koli (Rampart Trilogy #1) - M. R. Carey Page 0,105

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