The Book of Koli (Rampart Trilogy #1) - M. R. Carey Page 0,152

outside the grating was kept busy shooing away the people that come to look at me through the bars, but still they was close enough to hear and might be listening more attentive than usual. Certainly they was watching, for whenever Ursala come close enough to touch me she got the blunt end of a spear shoved at her and was told in fierce words to keep her hands to her own self.

The day was not quick to pass. I thought that since I couldn’t move or talk I could at least get some sleep, but my mind was full of too many things. I felt like there was molesnakes nesting in my head or something, for there was nothing but wriggling and squirming in there. Partly I was thinking how much of my life, since I stood up at Spinner’s wedding and showed off the DreamSleeve to everyone, had been passed underground. Near to all of it was the answer, apart from the walk to Ludden and the two nights on either side. I thought of Mardew too, and how he died, and then what happened after. He would of been missed in Rampart Hold long since, and maybe searchers had been sent out after him, but they was not like to find what little was left of him, lying among the weeds in an empty street of an empty village.

Finally, the cave quieted and the night – or what we thought of as the night – come on. Ursala touched my arm to tell me it was all right for me to get up and move around. When I sit up, I seen the guards outside was squatting a little way off, talking in low voices and not minding us so much now. Maybe it was the excitement of what was going to happen in the morning that made their watchfulness to slip, or maybe it was that they was tired from having to keep the people away from me all day long.

Anyway, it give us our chance and we took it.

The first thing I done was to take the DreamSleeve out of its sling inside my shirt and switch it on. Monono’s voice piped up in my ear right away. “Say hey, dopey boy! Are Thunderbirds go?”

I pressed the DreamSleeve right up close against my mouth. “We’re ready to move, Monono,” I whispered. “I can’t say much, and you better not say nothing neither. When I shout for you to use the security alarm, can you hit everyone that’s close to me except for Ursala?”

“No can do, Koli-bou,” Monono says. “I can only make one induction field at a time, for one person. When the alarm goes off, everyone is going to hear it.”

“Well, maybe that’s better anyway,” I said. That was all the making ready we could do, and I didn’t have no more words to say. I just pressed my head against the DreamSleeve’s little window.

“I know, little dumpling,” Monono said. “I’m watching over you. I hope that horrible woman who called you a runt comes strolling by. I’ll split her head like a melon.”

I told Ursala we was ready now to go to work. She went into the back of our little cave and rummaged among the rocks and rubbish. Then she come back carrying the metal pole we had found and rolling a big stone with her foot.

She set the stone up close to the grating but not right against it. Then she set the metal pole on top of the stone so one end was under the grating and the other end, that was much longer, was up in the air. She had told this part of it to me before, and I had good hope that it would work. I never before knowed the name of it – which was a lever – but I had done it myself with stacks of steeped wood at my mother’s mill. Ursala hadn’t never been a woodsmith, but she had a friend called Arkie something that had told her how to do it.

We leaned our weight on the pole, and the grating gun to shift. It lifted up, inch by inch, inside of the bolts or brackets of metal that held it in place. We got it right up to the top edge of the bolts, almost, so it would just take one more shove for it to rise up free of them.

The guards had heard the scraping sound the grating made against the