The Book of Koli (Rampart Trilogy #1) - M. R. Carey Page 0,87

get no ideas in your head, Koli.”

It felt to me like there wasn’t room for any. Them days down in the Underhold had left me weak in my will as well as in my legs. The light from the wall sconces was too bright for my eyes, and it was all I could do to walk a straight line.

But I kept right on, as I was bid, down the corridor and through the big double doors into the Count and Seal. There was just the one light there, from a lantern down in the middle round. By the shine of it, I seen Catrin, Perliu and Vergil Vennastin, and alongside of them Gendel Stepjack that was wedded to Fer. They wasn’t in the middle round itself but in the lowest row of seats, sitting all in a line. The lantern was on the floor in front of them.

Mardew give me a nudge in the back so I’d know where I was meant to go. I knowed already, but I wasn’t keen to go there. If it was just Catrin, I would of been a mite happier. But this was all the Ramparts there was, apart from only Haijon, and one more besides who wasn’t Rampart at all but was still Vennastin. My heart set up a banging against my ribs out of pure fear, and I thought for a second or two I might piss myself.

But I didn’t, and by and by I went down the steps. There wasn’t no getting out of it, and I didn’t want Mardew pushing me no more. When I got to the bottom, Catrin pointed out a place right in front of the lantern. “Kneel down there, Koli,” she says. “Where I’m pointing.”

Well, I was happy she give me my name for I took it as a sign she still had some warm feeling towards me. But as soon as I kneeled down my spirits sunk even further than they was. From down here, with the lantern at the back of me, the Ramparts was just shapes with no faces, all solid black – and no doubt I was the exact same to them. If you was going to kill someone, or order them killed, you might start by setting them off like that, more in dark than in light, so you didn’t need to look in their face as you was doing it.

Shadow Fer joined one end of the line, and shadow Mardew sit down on the other. Now the Ramparts was all assembled, like as if this was a meet-day for the Count and Seal, except then they’d be in the middle round looking out at everyone. This was me looking out and them looking in. I felt like I was a rat in one of them traps where the wire closes on your leg and you can only go round in circles.

Old Perliu looked to left and right along the line. “If anyone wants to change their vote,” he says to his gathered kindred, “now would be the time to say it.”

There was some stirring here and there, but no one spoke up.

I wondered why they brung Vergil into this. I seen why they kept Haijon out of it, for he was my friend and might not see eye to eye with what they was doing to me. But Vergil wasn’t even a Rampart. The nearest I could reckon was that it was a meeting of the Vennastins, not the Ramparts. It was about their family and their future, so it concerned them all. But it might be even simpler than that. Maybe Vergil was there because Perliu was his father and loved him something fierce.

“Well, so be it, then,” the old man muttered. I seen his head turn in the dark, from them to me. Then he brung it down a little, like a bull does when it means to charge.

“Koli Makewell,” he says. “You’ve stirred up a heap of trouble, with your thieving and lying, and now that trouble’s coming back to where it belongs.”

“It’s Woodsmith,” says Mardew. “He’s a Woodsmith.”

Perliu give his grandson a cold look, but no answer. Mardew shrunk a little under that look, and he seemed happy when it come back to me again. “Woodsmith I said and meant,” the old man snapped. He turned to me again. “There’s things about how this village is run, Koli Woodsmith, that we don’t share with nobody else. Secrets that Ramparts know but don’t give out, because they