deserved.
And between them two things I couldn’t speak at all, not even to tell Haijon I was sorry. I got up onto my feet again and put a hand on his shoulder, but he shrugged it away. “Dandrake’s balls, Koli, I don’t know what’s in you these days. You take Ursala’s side against my ma, and now you’re working up into a rage against me over nothing. Unless it’s because I passed the test and you didn’t, or I put Veso on the rush-walk in place of you. And if it’s either of those things, then you can go dance with Dandrake as far as I care.”
He was almost crying his own self by this time. He walked past me, banging me with his shoulder on the way, and kept on going until he turned the corner of a wall and I losed sight of him.
I stayed where I was. I knowed right then what it was I was going to do, and it was big enough so I couldn’t see past it or around it.
19
Here’s what Ursala told me. I’ll tell it plain, in her words, and leave you to paint the rest yourself. What it done to me to hear it. What it made me think about the Vennastins and the way they ruled over us all. What it made me think about Haijon, until I learned better.
So this is me going back to that night in Ursala’s tent when I asked her to tell me what she knowed about the tech of the old times and how it worked. And when she said there was one thing more, that was a secret and not to be talked about – or at least not in Mythen Rood, though there was places she’d been to where it was knowed by all.
I asked her to tell me what the secret was. I promised not to give it away, or let anyone know who it was that told me. I meant it too. I thought I could throw the bolt on my loose tongue if I needed to, in spite of what Spinner said the day we tumbled. I thought I had the trick of hiding what needed to be hid.
All right then, Ursala said. And she laid it out for me: the big lie, and all the little lies that had been piled on top of it. She brung me out of a fool’s paradise into a colder place, and it was all at my asking so the only fool was me.
“The tech of the old times,” she said, “if it was dangerous or valuable, had a whole suite of security features. Safeguards designed to make sure it couldn’t be used by anyone except its legal owners.
“Those safeguards got stronger and stronger over time. At first it was most likely to be what they called a password. If you picked the tech up or tried to switch it on, it would ask you for a secret word that the tech’s owner had made up beforehand. Just like when you come to the gates of a village at night when it’s too dark for the gate-watch to see you clearly. She’ll shout, ‘Who is it goes there?’ and you’ll have to answer with your name. Only the password wouldn’t have been your name, because that would be too easy to guess. It would be the name of a pet you used to have, or the name your mother called you when you were a baby, or a word that didn’t exist at all until you made it up. Do you understand, Koli?”
I nodded. I didn’t think Mythen Rood gates opened after dark for anyone, but I understood how it worked for hunters and wood-catchers when they whistled to each other over dead ground and knowed who it was on account of the whistles all being different. I thought it couldn’t be too far removed from that.
“Okay. Well, the safeguards became more sophisticated – cleverer – over time. You might be able to guess someone’s password if you knew them well enough. Other things would be harder to guess. Some tech would open if you drew a shape on it, or answered some questions, but again it was only a matter of a thief making the right guesses and she could get past the safeguards and use your tech.
“The solution, in the end, was to make the tech itself be a sort of gate-watch. When you picked it up, it looked at