The Book of Koli (Rampart Trilogy #1) - M. R. Carey Page 0,135

of the head and put her down. The big lummox – the man that was with her, I mean – was too scared to close with me after that. I needed to get to the drudge and I was working my way towards it, shooing him out of my way by pretending the stunner had another shot in it.

“But I’d forgotten the little girl. She jumped up on my back and dug her fingers into my eyes. Then while I was wrestling with her, the lummox found his courage again. So here I am. I don’t even know if they took the drudge. I’m guessing they didn’t. They would have had to send out another team with ropes and harness to drag it back.”

“Ursala,” I said, “they’re shunned men. They’re like to eat us if we don’t get out.”

She looked at me for a long time. “That’s one possibility,” she said. “There are others.”

She’d been there for three days already, she told me. Three days that she knowed of anyway. Mole had brained her good when they took her, so she was not awake when she come. She had waked up lying here, in the place behind the grating, and she didn’t know how long she might of been there.

Then they brung her in front of Senlas, and he asked her a lot of questions the same as he asked me. Was she pure from this sin, and that sin, and on and on, until in the end he said that she would do if he couldn’t get no better.

“Do for what though?” I asked her.

“To serve at his altar in some capacity that’s less than clear.”

“What’s his altar anyway?”

“Oh, you didn’t see it? I’ll show you.” She helped me up on my feet and brung me across to the grating. There was two men that was standing just on the other side of it, that I guess was set to watch us. They looked round as we come up close, but they didn’t say nothing or try to stop us looking.

The first thing I seen was that big thing that was a house and a wagon too. It was a way off, up against the wall of the cave, and I was seeing it from the other side than I seen before. It was bigger than I thought, and it had got another door set right at the end of it as well as the two doors that was open in the side. The end of it was the place where it was most clearly tech, for there was metal rods and bars sticking out of it there as well as the signs that was messages in the old times.

Then I seen the curtains that was over Senlas’s bed, but I couldn’t see the bed or him in it. We was off behind in the darker place beyond where the last of the lanterns was set. So when I looked the other way, further into the cave, I couldn’t see nothing at all but black.

Well, I could see one thing. There was a kind of a raised-up space there that reminded me somewhat of the tabernac in Mythen Rood. It wasn’t built from wood though. It was stone piled on stone, not in a heap but done with care so the stones was level. And then on top of the stones there was a bonfire, like we used to make on the Salt Feast out of uncut wood and green branches – the only thing green wood ever was good for.

Around the platform, in a loose kind of a pile, there was black sticks that I thought at first was some sort of kindling. Then I seen the skulls in among them, and I knowed they was bones of people that had been burned there.

If that platform was the altar, then I guess they was all Senlas’s altar boys before that name come down to me.

46

We slept, and then we woke.

We was fed twice, but one time it was a kind of a stew with meat in it, which I didn’t touch in case the meat was from people that was took in the forest the same way we was. The other time was bread, and I et every scrap they give me.

After that second meal, I was bored with just sitting and set about to explore the little narrow space we had been put in. It was well I did, for I found something there that lifted my