The Book of Koli (Rampart Trilogy #1) - M. R. Carey Page 0,4

was on account of Lightning having only the three legs, and hopping around in a funny-looking way. But it also had, like all its kind do, a mouth with rings of teeth that pointed backwards and inwards and a jaw that hooked and unhooked like a ratchet so when it hunted it could eat whatever it catched. Maybe we figured if Lightning ever turned mean we’d be able to outrun it. Only that’s not how it happened.

One day a gang of us was playing bolt-the-door on the gather-ground. We was running around like we was crazy people, and Lightning was running with us, getting more and more excited. Demar made a run from one end of the ground to the other, dodging round three or four that tried to catch her. When she got to the mark, she jumped up high and waved her arms around, yelling free-come. And we all come, laughing and cheering her.

Then suddenly Lari’s needle was on the end of Demar’s arm. It just jumped up, gaped its mouth wider than a water bucket and closed it again around Demar’s wrist.

We didn’t know what to do. Some of us was screaming and crying out, standing there like we was frozen. Demar didn’t make a sound, though her teeth was clenched tight. Her legs give way under her and she went down slowly onto her knees. Her face was white as choker-blossom.

Haijon and me come running, from the two sides of her. But when I got there, I didn’t have nothing I could do. I just kneeled down next to Demar and grabbed a hold of her other hand, gripping it tight, like I could draw some of her pain from out of her by touching her.

“Your father,” Haijon said to her. “Your father’s knives.” He said it like the words was being squeezed out of him. Like the needle was biting on him too, and words was spurting up out of him the way blood comes out of a wound. I seen right away that it was a good thought, but it needed more than just the thinking; it needed us to take her, fast. And out of the two of us, he was the stronger.

“Lift her up,” I said. “I’ll take Lightning.”

Demar seen what we was thinking to do, and she give herself up to it. When Haijon scooped her up in his arms, she let herself go all soft and limp. I grabbed the needle, holding it gentle as a baby though right then I hated it like the dead god’s hell.

We run together across the gather-ground and down the hill to Molo Tanhide’s drying shed, which was where he would surely be on a day as hot as that one was. And I suppose he heard the shouts and screams because he come out to meet us, stepping out of the dark heat of the shed with his face red and his hand wiping across his brow.

He took it all in, right in that moment – the needle hanging off of Demar’s arm, and us carrying her. Demar was his onliest child, and he brung her up all on his own after his wife, Casra, died. She was everything in his life that mattered. He stepped back inside for about a half of a heartbeat and come out again with a knife in his hand. It was his finest knife, ground so fine you couldn’t hardly see the blade edge-on.

We laid Demar down in front of him, and he went to work. Haijon held her, and I held Lightning, as hard and fast as we could.

Knives and wild beasts was Molo’s study. He knowed to slice down through the needle’s throat and then work in a circle, too fast for it to shift its grip or bite down harder. He peeled it off Demar’s right hand like a glove, and he done it near perfect.

But near’s as much as saying not. He took Demar’s first finger, her pointing finger, with it.

He dumped the dead needle, inside out, on the steps of Rampart Hold, like he was giving back to the Ramparts what was theirs. Lari come out to fetch it. She was rocking the dead beast like a baby in her arms, and crying like a baby herself, and cursing Molo for a lawless and a shunned man and Dandrake knows what else. But Catrin Vennastin, that was Rampart Fire, had the sense to see what was what. She dragged the bloody thing