The Book of Koli (Rampart Trilogy #1) - M. R. Carey Page 0,44

at the corner of the ground nearest the tocsin bell.

Haijon seen me after a while, and he waved to me. I waved back, though I didn’t feel much like it.

“Hey, Koli,” he called out. “Watch this!”

He leaned down, grabbed a rock off the ground and throwed it into the air. Then he pointed the cutter straight up, took aim and fired. Only he must of done something to the cutter’s beam I never seen before. It hit the rock as it was falling and bounced it straight back up again. The rock come down a second time, and boom! It hit the beam and shot back up.

He bounced it three times, and then he done something that surprised me even more. The fourth time the rock come down, he got the cutter right under it and made it stop dead in the air, about ten feet or so from the ground.

He looked round, like as to say “How is that then?” and laughed when he seen the wonder on my face. I never knowed the cutter could do something like that. I never knowed it could do anything but cut. But I remembered what Ursala said about how the inside walls of her tent, that you couldn’t rightly touch with your fingers, was somewhat the same as the cutter beam. So maybe there was more to the cutter than anyone knowed.

Haijon slipped his wrist out of the cutter and give it back to Mardew, who had been watching all this show with a sour sort of scowl on his face. If I was made to guess, I would say that Haijon was showing better with the cutter than Mardew expected, and that sit ill with him.

Haijon come over and clapped me on the shoulder. “You want to race again, Koli?” he asked me. “I’ll give you a start as far as that tree, if you want. Knowing how lazy you are in the afternoons, and all.”

He was meaning to invite me to a trial of insults as much as to the race. I couldn’t take either one right then. “Let’s just walk a ways,” I said. “To the lade, maybe.”

“What’s at the lade?” Haijon says.

“Nothing I know of. But it’s a place to walk to that isn’t here.”

He nodded slowly. “I hear that song,” he said. “Okay, let’s walk.”

We headed up the Middle, that was busy with people going to and fro. I seen Mardew turn around to keep us in his eye the whole way. There wasn’t nothing friendly in the look he give me.

The lade was a kind of an open space just inside of the gate, like the gather-ground but much smaller, with walls that was long stakes hammered into the earth. I told you that no houses was builded so close to the fence, but the lade was not a house, nor nobody was meant to live there. It was just a circle of cleared ground with a wooden bench and an iron drink trough in it. It was meant to be a place where visitors could wait until they had said what their business was and got a yes or a no. But since we didn’t get no visitors except only once in a bloomed moon, the lade was not much used. The bottom of the trough was rusted almost through, and there was green stains down the sides of it. I would not of drunk from it even on a dare.

When we got there, Haijon climbed up on the bench and sit on the back of it, since there was two planks missing from the seat. I stayed standing. I couldn’t find a way, at first, into what I wanted to say. But since the tech was at the heart of it all, it wasn’t that hard in the end to sneak around to it. “How’d you make the cutter do that?” I asked him. “Did Mardew teach you?”

Haijon laughed like that was a big joke. “Mardew teached me everything he knows,” he said. “Took about an hour, but some of that time he was off taking a shit. Koli, there’s more to the cutter than anyone guessed before. So much more. You seen what it does. But it’s how it does it that’s the amazing thing.” He held up his hand like he still had the cutter on it, clenched up in a fist and pointing at the sky. He kind of made pretend with his other hand of what the cutter was