The Book of Koli (Rampart Trilogy #1) - M. R. Carey Page 0,162

that was almost the most amazing thing of all to me and it near to made me piss myself all over again. She took a drone out of another space in the drudge’s side and spoke it awake. I don’t know what word it was she said, but right away the drone gun to hum like a beehive.

I give a yell and jumped back. Then I remembered how Ursala had gathered up the pieces of the drone she hit with a rock back in Mythen Rood and took them into her tent. This must be that drone, fixed up and made to work again.

“It’s all right, Koli,” Ursala said. “I hacked into its command functions and slaved them to the drudge. And the laser broke when I hit it. All it can do now is fly around.” She held it out to me to show me how harmless it was, but I didn’t want to touch it or go near it.

“What good is it then?” I asked her.

“It’s for scouting. The camera that guided the laser is still intact, and I can interface with it through the drudge.”

I took a deal of persuading that the drone wasn’t going to shoot at me, but I trusted Ursala and it helped that she wasn’t afraid. In the end, I stood by and watched as she flung the drone up into the air. It was exactly like how you would fling seed corn on turned earth, except that the drone didn’t fall again. It stayed up there, hovering like a hawk, then climbed up higher and moved off.

“Now look at this,” Ursala said. She opened up the drudge’s side again. It was the side that had the dagnostic in it, along with the thing she called a computer.

The computer’s window was black at first, the way the DreamSleeve’s window was when it was switched off. Then Ursala touched something and it filled up with rushing light and colours. It took me a moment, and then a moment more, to realise what I was seeing. The colours was mostly green. Lots of different greens all running together, like the scum you get on top of a stream. Then I seen a spur of rock, right up close, and that seemed to be rushing by too, though it couldn’t be, for it was rooted in the ground.

I got it then, but only because I had looked in the DreamSleeve’s window so many times and seen how it looked out on lots of things that was in different places. I was seeing what the drone was seeing as it moved across the valley. The drone and the drudge was talking somehow, and more than talking. The drone was sending the memory of what it seen down out of the sky so the drudge could catch it and show it in the computer’s window.

Then I seen the black ribbon running through the green, and I knowed it for what it was. Calder. It had got to be Calder, though it looked so different when you looked down on it this way. Nothing else got in the way of the forest except the winding river and the villages along its banks.

And there was a village right now, going by quick at first, then slower as the drone turned in the air. The village had two lookout towers, one of them close by a big old stone house and the other outside the fence at the top of a hill.

It had another big stone building too, though that one was a ruin.

It had one big street crossed by two smaller ones.

It had a gather-ground with a big wood frame at one corner of it, and a thing hanging in the frame that glittered with the dusky yellow of bronze.

I knowed that thing was a bell.

I knowed that place was Mythen Rood.

A longing rose up in me so quick and so strong it near to choked me. I gun to speak, to beg Ursala to send the drone down lower, but I bit back the words before they could come. A drone was panic and dismay, and people running for their lives. A drone was Ramparts – not Mardew now, but the others – stepping to their stations and firing up their tech to do the thing they was named for. To stand between the people and what threatened them. To bring it down, or else fall their own selves. Sending the drone down into Mythen Rood would be a