The Book of Koli (Rampart Trilogy #1) - M. R. Carey Page 0,118

my mistake, I guess. That, and not thinking clear about the sounds I heard the night before, of banging and breaking.

I clambered down the ladder, fast as I could go, and suddenly my foot didn’t connect to nothing. Where the rung should be, there wasn’t anything. I was throwed off balance, but hanging by my hands I had a moment still to draw my foot back and shove it down again for the next rung below. Only that was gone too.

I come crashing down all the rest of the way to the ground, landing on my back with one leg bent under me. The pain come as a bang that knocked all the breath out of me, and then a stab that would of made me scream if I had kept any of that breath back for the purpose.

I lay there for a second or two, stunned. The fall was not so bad, for there was weeds enough to soften it somewhat. I didn’t think any part of me was broke by it. My leg was another matter. The pain was fierce, and it had a burn to it like someone had set me on fire right under my knee. When I did get a breath, I had got to suck it through my teeth in little pieces of air.

“Koli!” Monono was saying. “Koli, are you okay? Talk to me!”

“Here he is,” said another voice. Mole’s voice. “I told you, didn’t I?”

“Yeah, you did,” said the woman whose name I didn’t know. “But it was me broke the ladder so he’d fall when he come down. So between the two of us, who’s got the biggest share of the I-told-yous?”

They was there all round me, of a sudden, and they couldn’t of come from far off. All that talk of going away and finding a house was just for my sake then. They must of gone a little way off from the lookout, maybe behind a wall in case I looked down, and settled theirselves to sleep right there in the grass. Maybe one of them was choosed to keep a lookout. Or maybe they slept sound, knowing they’d hear me well enough when I fell.

They laid hands on me, and rolled me over on my stomach so as they could tie my hands behind my back. They used my own rope to do it. Then they took my knife and my waterskin. It was not a careful search though. I guess they didn’t see no threat in me once my hands was tied. Also, I twisted round so my left side with the DreamSleeve was pressed against the ground. Anyway, they didn’t find Monono, and I was real grateful for that.

There still wasn’t enough light to see them clear, but I knowed all three of them by their voices. “This makes up for it, doesn’t it?” the woman named Cup said, sounding all anxious. “He won’t mind that we’re not bringing much meat if we bring an altar boy?”

“He ain’t an altar boy unless Senlas says he’s good enough, Cup,” the other woman said coldly, holding my two hands together at the wrists so Mole could tie another knot around them. “Most like he’ll just get hung up and bled out alongside of the other one.”

41

The older woman was named Sky. It seemed like she was the leader out of the three of them.

She had red hair like rust on a pipe, and her face was painted with a sun on one side and a sickle moon on the other. She was as big as a bear, with muscles bunched all the way up her arms. She didn’t wear no shirt, but only a leather jacket sewed shut, and trousers of rough cloth that had not been dyed ever, and leather boots with the fur still on them. The boots had a sour smell to them, like the leather had not been proper cured. My face was close enough to her feet for long enough that I come to mislike that smell a great deal. Molo Tanhide would never of let a pair of boots go out of his hands in any such condition.

The younger woman, Cup, would not of gone Waiting yet if we was in Mythen Rood. I judged she was maybe thirteen or fourteen years old. Her hair was light brown and her shirt and trousers was various shades of the same colour, but her shoes was black and green snakeskin. There was lots of sores