The Book of Koli (Rampart Trilogy #1) - M. R. Carey Page 0,171

It was a foolish thing to do, for the water was as cold as a witch’s piss, but she wouldn’t move and I didn’t want to leave her. She was still crying like her heart was going to burst. I was scared of what she would do, not to me but to herself.

She told me how Senlas come to die. Right up until then, what I mostly felt about him was scared down to the bottom knockings of me, but in that telling I come to truly hate him.

When the train catched on fire, he reared himself up in his bed and looked at the flames like he was hungry and they was a meal laid out. He didn’t mind the shouts and the screaming. He called out to his hand people to lift him up, which they done. And then he said to carry him to the train, which they done that too. Cup come along after. Senlas was all to her, as I seen before, and she didn’t mean to be separated from him.

When they got to the train, he bid the hand people set him down again. They put him on his own feet. This was a thing that happened seldom, but he could walk when he had a mind to.

He walked to the door of the train, put his foot on the one step that was there and his hand on the edge of the door. He lifted himself up and in. All was on fire, and that metal edge must of blistered him sore when he touched it, but he didn’t let out a sound.

He stepped into the fire.

I can’t say why he done it, for I wasn’t there, but I think he woke out of a dream of glory to see that brightness, that shining, all before him. I think he mixed up the dream with the waking, and seen what he wanted to see. A fiery chariot come to take him to the world that was lost, in some kind of style.

But whatever he thought, whatever he meant, it was him going on the train that made the others do it. He killed them people with belief, the same way you’d kill someone with an arrow, or a bolt, or a spear. When I turned around in the tunnel, I must of missed his going in by about the space of a breath or two. What I seen was all the people that trusted him and lived by him following him into the fire so they died by him too.

And Cup? She come running on behind, all eager. It looked like death in there, but Senlas had got to be stronger than death, or what was he? She wanted to be beside him wherever he went.

But then she got closer. Them doors was gaping right in front of her, and the fire beyond. She felt the heat of it. She smelled burning meat that was people she knowed and cleaved to. The cave was so full of screams it was like there wasn’t room for air.

She seen Senlas fall down on his knees with the flames licking all over him. She seen him pawing at them, furious, all them tattooed eyes of his opened wide as if he couldn’t believe the fire touched him without his saying to. She seen his back blister and burn, red and black and white and all the colours that could be.

She run away.

Like a coward, she said. A coward and an ingrate to him that loved her and cared for her. She couldn’t believe she done it, but seeing him burn up like that made her lose her faith that was in him and him alone. I think when she didn’t kill me in the river that was partly because it was her own throat she wanted to cut. And though she found the strength to live after all, she wasn’t quite sure yet how she was going to go about doing it.

“He’s not worth your dying for him,” I told her.

“What do you know, Koli Faithless?” she said, between her teeth. “He knowed me. He seen me and he knowed me. He give me hope. There wasn’t nobody else who ever did that, and I don’t believe there’ll be one again.”

There wasn’t nothing I could do or say to make her feel better about it. She had determined that she was the worst who ever lived. She was exhausted with hating herself. Hating me give her