The Book of Koli (Rampart Trilogy #1) - M. R. Carey Page 0,164

chance to be alive and maybe get theirselves upgraded in the same way Monono had done.

I was trying to think of a way to say all this when Ursala come up to me. She stood there with her hands on her hips, looking somewhat stern. “If you’ve got a moment to spare,” she said, “there’s something I need to show you. You’ve got some choices to make, and I’d rather they were informed choices.”

I scrambled down off the rock and went with her to where the drudge was. The drone had come back and was standing on the ground right next to it. Ursala touched her fingers to the computer’s window, and the picture that was there moved this way and that way as she bid it. But it was only moving now when she touched it, and the rest of the time it was still so it was easier to see how everything that was there fitted together. Ursala showed me where we was, some miles south of Calder, and where Mythen Rood was and a heap of things besides.

“These villages here – Sowby, Todmort and Eastwood – are all still viable,” she said, “and might take you in. Mixen, Mankin and Tabor are abandoned, like Ludden. So are Lilboru and Wittenworth, though I don’t imagine you’d be going that far west in any case. Half-Ax is flourishing, but I wouldn’t recommend going there. It’s not a very friendly place these days.”

I spent a long time looking over the drone’s picture. An idea was shaping in my mind, but it was not something I could say yet. It would sound too stupid out in the open air. Even inside my head, I couldn’t all the way believe in it, but I wanted to very badly.

Ursala showed me how to make the picture move, and I took it back and forth, trying to get the roads and the paths locked solid in my mind. I took it all the way to the south and the east, and by and by come to the place where the picture stopped. “What’s there?” I asked her.

“Hud’s Field, if you go far enough. And Denby after that. Then Sheffy. Sutton. Luff and Lest and Lementon, and all those places whose names you only ever hear in old stories.”

“London?”

“Eventually, yes. London. But this map stops about ten miles out from Calder. London is two hundred miles away. Well, two hundred miles for the drone. A whole lot further if you were walking.”

“What about you?” I asked her, to turn the talk around somewhat from how far away London was. “Where are you thinking to go now?”

Ursala made a sour face and shrugged her shoulders. “Further than you,” she said.

But it turned out she was not going quite yet. She took yet more kit and cumbrance out of the drudge’s cupboards and declared she was going to use some of the day in trapping as she would need meat for her journeying. “You’d better stock up too,” she said. “Depending on where you decide to go, you might be walking for two or three days.”

She showed me the traps she had got, which was wire snares for rabbits and conibear traps for hares and deer. I don’t hold with conibears as a rule, because they can snap an animal’s back without killing it, which is a vicious thing to do, but Ursala said her traps killed two ways, both with snapping shut and with what she called a trigger charge. It was like the charge that was in the drudge and the DreamSleeve, only a lot more of it and in a worser mood.

I helped to set the traps, and then we done some skirmishing around for other things to eat. The sky stayed heavy, so it was safe to go into the forest. There was no fruit on the trees this late in the season, but Ursala knowed of some weeds that was nutritious, and I took a tap and hammer that she give me and used them to run off some sap from a big triptail. Triptail sap is better than water if you got to walk a long way, for the sweetness of it gives you strength.

The traps was not likely to catch nothing until the evening brung the animals out, so we went back inside the tent to rest a while out of the cold. The drudge being awake and on watch, nothing could get close without us knowing. Ursala brewed tea