The Book of Koli (Rampart Trilogy #1) - M. R. Carey Page 0,80
“Some food is going to come,” she said. “Pork from the feast. But you can eat it after. Right now, we need to settle this thing.”
“Is this the Rampart business you was talking about earlier?” I asked. For I still had some little hope, in spite of everything. Maybe all new Ramparts was tested in this way the first time they come into the hold after their testing.
But Catrin shaked her head. “You’re not a Rampart, Koli. You’re just a thief. You think I don’t know all the tech that’s here? Your music player was one of ours, that we bring up each year for the testing and then take back down again. It’s got our mark on it, though I doubt you seen that. If you had, you would of tried to scrape it off or cover it up.”
She was right about that, though I thought I knowed now what the mark might be. There was three scratches on the back of the DreamSleeve, all in a row and all the same size, which was about as long as my little fingernail. They was too neat to be made by accident. I should of thought that the Vennastins, or Ramparts of past times, would of had a way to know their own tech in case it got stole or lost.
“So that’s the start of the story,” Catrin said. “You broke in here, and took away seven pieces. The one you used today was one of the seven. Where are the others?”
“They’re under my bed, at the mill,” I told her. There didn’t seem to be no use in lying, that being the first place anyone would look.
“Did you get any of the others working?”
“No. Just the…” I almost said Monono Special Edition, which was what Monono always called her own DreamSleeve to tell it apart from the others. “Just that one,” I said instead.
Catrin come around behind me, which made my hair prickle somewhat. She wasn’t wearing the firethrower any more, but she was bigger and stronger than me and she could hurt me if she wanted to. She didn’t though. She put her hand on my shoulder and squeezed just a little, as if to give me comfort. “That ain’t it,” she said, soft as silk.
“I don’t know what you mean, Dam Catrin.”
“That ain’t the part of the story I need to hear, Koli. Be honest with me now. Be honest, and be brave, and there’s a way you can come out of this that’s not too bad. Thieves is hanged, but I don’t want to hang you. It’s bad for everyone when something like that happens. Let’s think our way around this, shall we, and see where we come out.”
I didn’t say a word to that. The words thieves is hanged was still clanging around inside my mind, big enough and loud enough that there wasn’t no room for nothing else. I come close to repeating them back to her to see if I could push them out again, for they was making me so weak I all but slipped off the stool.
“Starting up the tech for the first time is hard,” Catrin said in that same soft voice. “You’re a smart boy, but smart’s not good enough. You would of needed coaching. So who coached you, Koli? And what else did she tell you?”
That she rung like the tocsin bell, even louder than thieves is hanged. I seen what Catrin knowed, or what she suspected – and I decided right then that I wasn’t going to say nothing about Ursala. She had told me true, and none of this was her fault. What’s more than that, she had saved my life, and my sister Athen’s when she was like to die from the septicaemia. Hanged or not hanged, I did not mean to give her up.
“Nobody coached me,” I says. “I figured it out for myself.”
“That’s a lie,” Catrin says. She come back around to the front of me, and she squatted down so her face was closer to mine. She looked real sad, like all of this was forced on her the same way it was forced on me, and we was suffering it together. “Koli, this is bad enough already. Don’t make it worse by protecting the one who’s really at fault.”
“You want to know who coached me?” I says then. “On Dandrake’s blood?”