The Book of Koli (Rampart Trilogy #1) - M. R. Carey Page 0,53
I had took was all the same. They was seven little silver boxes, maybe a hand’s length from top to bottom and half that much across. They was very thin, but they was made of white metal and had some weight and solidness to them. They all had the smoothness and the coldness that the bolt gun had when I picked it up on my testing day. They was shiny and lustrous and altogether beautiful.
But they was just the same thing seven times over, like I said. When the tech was took up and brung down again, the officers of the Count and Seal must of tried to keep like with like and same with same. That cast my spirits down, for it seemed my chances of carrying out my plan was a lot less than if I had got seven different things made in seven different ways.
I say they was the same, but that’s a loose speaking. They was all the same shape and size, with three of the things that Ursala called switches on them, all in a line along the bottom. Also they all had a kind of a glass plate set into them on one side, that I would of called a window except you couldn’t see nothing through it but black. Maybe it was one of those things Ursala told me about that soaked up the sun and stored it inside the box so it could do whatever it was made for.
They was all made that way, like I said. But underneath this sameness there was small differences to be seen. Two of the boxes had got a little twist of string hanging off of them, where the other five didn’t. And one of them had a star shape stuck on the back, with a little a picture of a horse, only the horse had a horn in the middle of its head and was smiling, which is a thing I never seen a horse do. Also, one of the seven had some signs from the old times across the bottom of it under the switches. I couldn’t read back then so I had no idea what the letters said. I didn’t think of them as saying anything at all, but only as shapes, like the signs that was moving on Ursala’s computer when she done the maths on it.
I looked at the little boxes a long while, with my thoughts running every which way inside my head. I was struck and dazzled by them being there, in my hand, in my room. I felt like I was different, somehow, when I was holding them – like some of their smoothness and coldness had come off onto me. But at the same time, I was thinking: I should of taken something from off of every shelf. It would of been easy to do, and better.
And I was wondering mightily what the boxes might do if they woke. They didn’t look like no weapons, but nor did the cutter until you seen how it worked. If my plan come to pass and I was made a Rampart, what Rampart would I be?
I used up most of an hour in this dreaming, and only come out of it when I heard Mull call for me to come and help her carry some planks to the steeping trough. Quickly I gathered up all the boxes and done what I meant to do in the first place. I set them out in a line on the ledge next my window. Not in front of the window, but beside it. There was a kind of a gable there, so nobody would see them even if they come in the room, and the tech would get all the light there was. The sun was shining fit to bust right then. I think I said before that these were the last clear days – a time my ma sometimes called the engine Summer, though what engine she meant I never heard her say.
I figured I would give them silver boxes a day to charge up with sun energy, or maybe two days, and then I would start in trying to wake them one at a time. I’d keep on going for maybe a week, pressing the switches and trying to make the boxes say accept or acknowledge or such. Then if nothing happened I’d take them back to Rampart Hold after night fell and pretend like nothing had happened.