The Book of Koli (Rampart Trilogy #1) - M. R. Carey Page 0,36
head away. But everywhere I looked, there was strange marvels.
There was a thing like a cooking pot, only its sides was made of glass and you could see the water boiling inside – boiling fit to bust, though there was no fire under it. There was a kind of a thing like three burning sticks in a fire that was throwing heat out into the tent – only the sticks didn’t ever burn through; they just glowed bright red and stayed the same. Strangest of all, there was a picture like you might put on your wall, only it was on the floor at Ursala’s feet. And it wasn’t a picture of anything you might recognise. It was signs of the old times, black and spindly like ants, that moved around when Ursala touched them. She had sit down and was poking at the picture with both her hands. The signs run up and down the screen, but mostly up.
“I’ve just got to finish this,” she says to me without looking up. “God help me.”
I guessed that when she said god she meant Dandrake, for he was the main god everyone went to when it come to swearing. If she meant the dead god, it was strange she didn’t give him his full name.
She give a sigh as she poked at the little picture. I plucked up my courage and asked her what she was doing.
“Maths,” she said. That wasn’t a word I knowed, and I suppose she seen that in my face. “This is a computer,” she said, nodding at the little picture. “It’s for working things out when they’re too hard to work out in your head.”
She poured some wine out of a leather skin into a tin cup that seemed already mostly full. The wine spilled a little down the side of the cup. For some reason, that made me think of Ursala’s shirt, all covered in blood, on the day she took away Athen’s sickness and saved her from dying. It made me be less afraid of her.
“Would you like some?” she asked me, holding up the skin. “I don’t have another cup, but you can swig from the neck.”
“No, thank you kindly,” I said. I hadn’t ever had no head for drink, the few times I tried it. Mostly it just made me dizzy, and being in the hot tent surrounded by all these wondrous things was doing that already. “What is it you’re puzzling out?”
Ursala didn’t answer. She give the little black signs another long, hard look, then she waved her hand over the thing she called a computer and the signs was gone. There was just a pattern there now, made of bright colours shifting all the time like leaves moving in the wind.
She give me a shrewd look, like we each of us knowed the same thing and knowed that the other knowed it too. “She can’t hear us,” she said. “Your Rampart Fire, I mean. Not in here. And I’m keeping my eyes open, though it might not look it, just in case she comes by. When she’s in her current mood, it pays to be a little paranoid. Go ahead and sit down.”
“All right then,” I said. I had not been thinking about Catrin Vennastin, but I liked that she couldn’t come by without us knowing it. I didn’t think to doubt what Ursala said about that. Not now I’d seen some of what she could do.
There was pillows to sit on, and a steel box set down between them to make a table. There was more boxes besides, all over the floor of the tent, so I had got to be careful where I put my feet. I sit where Ursala bid me.
“You’re sure you won’t help me along with the wine?” she said. “If I empty this skin myself, I’m going to be more dead than alive tomorrow.”
“You don’t got to empty it,” I says. It come out before I knowed. I was thinking of my mother, who had a store of sayings against strong drink, otherwise I would not of been so bold.
But Ursala just gave a laugh, like I had said it to be funny and she got the joke. “Oh, trust me,” she said. “I do. I’ve been sitting here crunching numbers for the last three hours, and they came out even worse than I was expecting. Drowning my sorrows feels like the least of a whole lot of evils right now.”