The Fall of Koli Read online

  It was a thing like a great big drone. That’s the only way I know to say it, for it stood in the air like a drone and it was made out of the same things, which was metal and glass and shining lights that moved. But where you might catch a drone in your hands, almost, if you was bold enough to dare it, this piece of tech was near as big as a house. The outside of it was black, mostly, which put me in mind of a crow gliding down to feed on something that was dead. It had a shape that was not far away from a stooping bird, with things that might of been wings except they was too short and folded too far into its body. What made it different from a bird, though, was the way it could just stand there in the air, as still as anything. If them things on its sides was wings, then the wings didn’t need to beat and didn’t look as if they could.

  The thing come down and down until it was on a level with us. A gust of hot air come with it and blowed in our faces. It smelled like a stubble field burning and like stale fat on a cooking stove at the same time. It made my eyes sting and fill up with tears.

  I had the baddest of bad feelings about drones. In Mythen Rood, where I lived for most of my life, they come down out of the sky and spit out hot red light that oftentimes left people dead behind them. They was said to be weapons left over from the Unfinished War, that was still looking for enemies to kill and would hit out at any woman or man they seen. It was true that Ursala used to have a tame drone of her own that went where she told it to and spied things out for her, but that hadn’t made me like drones any more than I did to start with.

  So I didn’t think that thing coming down was any kind of good news, even though the water was up around our thighs now and the sides of the boat was only a finger’s span higher than the ocean all around us.

  “Apologies for the delay,” a voice said. “I can see you’re in difficulties, but our primary concern is for our own security. I’m sure you understand.” It was not the same voice we heard before, but a very different one. This was a man too, but he sounded like he was unhappy or angry that we was there and uncertain what to do with us now we was come. “First things first. If these readings are correct, you’ve got a medical diagnostic unit there with you. Could you tell me what model it is, and what condition it’s in?”

  “Are you joking?” Ursala yelled out. “The condition it’s in will be fifty fathoms down if you don’t get us off this boat!”

  “That’s hardly my problem,” the voice said. “Or my fault. You came out here of your own free will. The quicker you answer, the sooner we’ll get through this. Tell me what model your unit is, and give me a rough summary of its functionality. We need to have a full picture before we decide what’s to be done here.”

  “We’re going down!” Cup yelled.

  “Then if I were you I wouldn’t waste any more time.”

  Ursala sweared an oath. Her eyes was big and wide. She pointed to the back of the boat where the dagnostic was sitting on the thwart wrapped in an oilskin cloth. The water hadn’t reached it yet, but it was not far off. “It’s a mounted unit, from a Zed-Seven medical drudge. Now it’s exposed to the elements, as you can see. Its state is deteriorating every second!”

  “But it’s still functional?” the voice said.

  “Yes! For now!”

  “And it’s yours?”

  “Yes!”

  “So I assume you’re trained in its use?”

  Ursala throwed up her hands. “Fuck and damn this nonsense! Get us to safety! We’ll talk then.”

  There was a few moments when we couldn’t hear nothing except that growling again, as the big drone bobbed and wobbled in the air. “All right,” the voice said. “Climb into the raven. Quickly.”

  A door opened up in the belly of the big drone and a kind of a ladder spilled out. I say it was a ladder, but it was made all out of silver metal and it rolled and swung like it was knotted rope. The loose end of it bumped against the side of our boat. It was clear that we was supposed to climb up inside the drone. Ursala didn’t move though, and it seemed like both me and Cup was waiting to see what she did before we made a move our own selves. “What about the diagnostic?” Ursala shouted.

  “Leave that to me,” the voice said.

  Ursala still stood her ground. “What does that mean?”

  “Ursala, we’re like to drown here,” Cup muttered. “Maybe we should just go.”

  But I knowed why Ursala was being so stubborn, and I felt pretty much the same way. The dagnostic could make medicines for any sickness. It was a marvel and a miracle. And besides that, it was the onliest hope we had got left to save humankind, that was close to dying off for aye and ever. When it was fixed right, the dagnostic could make babies drop into the world alive that otherwise would of been born dead or not born at all. If we let it be whelmed by the sea, there was not any point in us coming here in the first place or doing anything else after.

  “I can raise the unit up on a winch,” the voice said. “But manhandling a weight that large risks swamping your boat. Please get into the raven. There’s no more time to argue.”

  Well, now we was come to it. We looked each to other, and I guess we was all thinking the same thoughts, which was: who was on the other end of that voice, and of the first voice we heard, and what did they want out of us? We was like to jump from the grate onto the griddle if we was not careful.

  But we was not well placed to argue it. Ursala give a nod at last, and we all crowded forward, making the wallowing boat pitch and rock under us. We climbed up the ladder one by one, into the big drone that the man had called a raven. Cup, who knowed how to swim and didn’t have no fear of deep water, went first. She struggled with the ladder to start with, but then found out where to put her hands and feet and went up fast. As soon as she got inside, she kneeled down and waited so she could help Ursala up when she come. She drawed her up with both of her hands gripped onto one of Ursala’s raised arms.

  That just left me, and I have got to say I was not happy to put my feet on that ladder. It was not like a ladder in a lookout nor yet like the ladders between the houses in Many Fishes village, but was swinging free in the air in a way that was troubling to look at. Still, I seen there wasn’t no other way out of this, so finally I grabbed the sides of the ladder in my two hands to steady it and set my foot on the bottom rung.

  Climbing a free ladder, as I learned right there and then, is a different thing from climbing a fixed one. Your own body’s weight tilts it, so it slips out from under you unless you hold it from both sides and put yourself in the right place to balance it. I did the one of them things, but not the other. With my first step, the ladder gun to rock. With my second step, it bucked and tossed like a horse saying no to a saddle.

  And with my third step, it tipped me off.

  I throwed out my hand to catch the side of the boat, but I missed it by a yard or more. I went into the water, and once I was in there I kept right on going. The chill of it was like a giant had punched me inside my heart. I couldn’t move any part of me. I just fell down into the ocean the same way you’d fall through the air if you jumped off a house’s roof, only not so fast.

  I guess it was my own fault I couldn’t make no better fist of swimming than that. I had lived in a village right by the ocean for the best part of four months, and there wasn’t a boy or girl there that couldn’t swim like a fish just about as soon as they could walk. Lots of times, people had offered to teach me, but I thought it was easier just to stay out of the water, which had never been a problem for me up to that time.

  Now here I was, in the water all the way and getting deeper, what with the weight of my clothes and my knife and the DreamSleeve and all the other stuff I had about me pulling me down. I seen the keel of our boat above me, getting further and further away. I thought, well, that’s that then, I’m going to drown. And I done my best to make good on that decision, for I let out all the breath that was in my lungs in a kind of a hiccup, just out of surprise and not knowing to hold it in. The sea poured into me, filling up the place
where the air had been.

  You would think swapping air for water would make me heavier, but my sinking down into the water slowed and stopped. I seemed to hang there, in a space that was all striped with light and dark.

  Something passed by me, very close. I seen its eye first, like the window of a house with no lights on inside. Then its grey flank glided past, all set with spikes and spears longer than my arm. It took a very long time to go by. I hoped with all my heart that I was too small a morsel to be worth turning around for.

  Then something grabbed a hold of me, high up on my left leg, and I come up out of the water even quicker than I went into it. I was flying through the air. Not like a bird, for birds is not much inclined to fly upside down. More like a flung stone, and maybe most of all like a fish that’s being hauled up on the end of a line.

  I seen the ocean all churning and foaming under me, and a long stream of water going down from my drenched body to join it. I seen our little boat, wallowing and sinking. I seen that great wall of metal, right alongside me, so close I was like to dash my brains out against it.

  And then, as I kept on going up and up, I seen something so strange I couldn’t make no sense of it. I was up above the wall, looking right over it. I would of expected to see a village on the other side, as big as Half-Ax or even lost London – and it’s true there was a place where people might live, though it was drawed out long instead of round like Mythen Rood and Ludden and Many Fishes. There was great towers rising up out of that long, wide place, and on the far side of it another wall. The two walls was not flat to each other like the walls of a house, but come together in a point. And where they touched, they cut a furrow through the ocean like a plough does in a field, throwing a great spume of white sea-froth out behind.

  This was not a village, nor yet a fortress. It was a boat, so big you could of put the whole of Mythen Rood on the deck of it. And it was a boat that had been through terrible trials. Some of them towers I told you of had tumbled down and lay across the deck like people at Summer-dance that had drunk too much beer. Parts of the big open space was blackened with fire, with great pits here and there where the solid metal had been staved clean in or else burned and melted away by a great heat. I didn’t know how something that was floating in all this water could catch fire. But then, I didn’t know how something as big as a whole village could float on an ocean in the first place.

  I would of yelled out in surprise when I seen all this, but I still had mostly water inside of me and could only make a kind of a bubbling sound, like a pan on a hot stove. Then someone put the lid on top of the pan and all was turned to dark.

  3

  “It’s nice to be able to show you these things,” Monono said. “They’ve been like ghosts inside me, all this time.”

  We was in Ueno Park, in Tokyo, sitting next to the pond called Shinobazu. It was night, and there was herons on the water. I could see the tocsin bell though, and the steps of Rampart Hold, so at the same time I guess we was in Mythen Rood, where I used to live until I was made faceless and sent out of gates to fend for myself.

  So I had got the two things I wanted most in all the world, it seemed like. I was with Monono, in a place where I could see her and touch her, and I was home again among my family and friends with all my crimes forgot. A sense of peace come over me, like my wanderings and hard labours was brung to good at last and there wasn’t nothing else I needed to do.

  “Come on with me,” I said to Monono. “I’ll take you to the mill to meet my mother and my sisters. You’ll like them a lot.”

  “We can’t do that, Koli,” Monono said. Only she wasn’t Monono now, but had turned into someone else in the way that sometimes happens in dreams. Now she was Catrin Vennastin, Rampart Fire, Mythen Rood’s protector and the leader of the Count and Seal. She was looking at me all solemn-stern. Her two hands was closed on something that I couldn’t see. “Jemiu and Athen and Mull was all of them hanged long since,” she said, “on account of what you done. The mill’s underwater, like lost London, and won’t ever be found again.”

  I was filled with grief and dismay. In real life, Catrin had promised me no harm would fall on my mother and sisters. She said nobody would bide the blame of what I done but only my own self. Here in the dream though, I knowed it was true. They was all dead on account of me.

  “Well then,” I said, choking on the words, “I’m going to whelm the whole of Mythen Rood and bring Rampart Hold down on your head. I’ll make you sorry you hurt them, Dam Catrin.”

  She didn’t answer me, but only opened her hands to show me what she was holding there. It was the DreamSleeve, with its little window all lit up. I looked for Monono’s face, but she wasn’t in there. It was my own face that was looking back at me instead.

  “Idowak, bidowak,” Rampart Fire said. “Ansum, bansum.”

  And then I was inside the DreamSleeve, looking out.

  “I don’t see you whelming very much from inside there,” she said.

  Then she drawed back her hand and throwed me far and away.

  4

  I scrambled up out of the dream the way you climb out of a deep pit when there’s something else down there with you and you don’t know for sure what it is.

  That thought didn’t come out of nowhere neither. Wherever I was, it was as dark as a moonless night, but I knowed I was not alone. I had heard a scrape of movement right up close to me. I was lying on my back, with something soft and warm throwed on top of me. Maybe I ought to of felt comforted by that, but the nightmare was still heavy on me. I felt like I was in the throat of some big beast, mouthed but not yet swallowed.

  “Who’s there?” I called out. I was scared out of my wits, but I tried to sound like if I got the wrong answer I would do something about it. I grabbed for the DreamSleeve to keep it safe by me.

  The DreamSleeve wasn’t there. The sling I made for it wasn’t there. What I was wearing felt too thin and too soft, like it was made out of spider-web instead of cloth.

  I give a real yell at that, and sit up quick as anything. As soon as I did, the darkness turned into a light so bright it felt like it poked me in both my eyes. I throwed up my hand to keep the light out of my face.

  Someone run out of the room. I seen them go, but only as a dark shape in among all the dark spots left in my eyes by the brightness. I heard a thud as a door opened, another as it closed. There wasn’t no other sounds after that. I was alone.

  And I was in bed. Sitting bolt upright on a high, narrow divan in a room where the ceiling was all one bright light. I had to shield my eyes from it until them dark spots faded. Then I could look around me.

  I still could not make no sense of what I was seeing though. I thought at first the room was a little one, no bigger than my bedroom back at Jemiu’s mill in Mythen Rood, which was just about big enough for a bed and a cupboard. Then, as my eyes got used to the light, I seen it was not little at all, but only full up with lots and lots of things. There was boxes and chairs and tables and rolls of cloth all piled on top of each other, and a great big mirror that had gold round its edges. Most of all, there was tech – more tech than I ever seen in my life before. Strange engines of every size was all throwed together in the room, like they had been let to lie wherever they fell. In Mythen Rood, tech was treasure – even the bits of it that didn’t work no more. This tech, though, was broke past all mending. Some of it was ripped open, with wires and plates and pieces hanging out of it. Most of it looked like it had been in a fire, streaked and smeared with black soot. Some of it was halfway melted.

  All of these things was crammed in so tight, there wasn’t much space left in between them. There was even a kind of a doll the size of a growed man, that didn’t have no skin but just all flesh and muscle showing as if it was meat that had been skinned for dinner. It made me feel sick just to look at it. This wasn’t any kind of a bedroom I was in, so far as I could see, for all that it had a bed in it. The bed was just there the way the other stuff was there.

&
nbsp; The walls of the room was painted white, and instead of corners there was a roundness where they met up as if they was all the one wall bent over on itself.

  I was white too, mostly. The clothes I had been wearing was gone, and what had took their place was a long white gown like a woman’s shift, made out of a cloth so thin you could almost see through it. I should of been cold but I wasn’t, for the room was very warm. Almost too warm.

  I throwed off the covers and climbed down out of the bed. The bed was a strange thing now I looked at it, made all out of metal rods and struts and levers that locked each into other. It had wheels on it too, which was a thing I never seen on a bed before. Where would you wheel your bed to? The other side of the room? In any case there wasn’t no empty space in here to wheel it anywhere.

  My reflection in the big mirror, with my dark skin showing through the thin white cloth of the shift, looked like nothing I ever seen. As my eyes went up and down, trying to take in this strange sight that was just myself, I seen something that wasn’t. Lying at my feet there was a folded-up piece of paper like you might use to wrap jerky or hard-tack if you was going hunting. I bent and picked it up. It was covered in the signs of the before-times that Monono and Ursala called letters. I couldn’t read them, and I didn’t know if the paper was left there for me – maybe by whoever it was that run out of the room when I sit up – or had been there before. If I’d had the DreamSleeve with me, I could of asked Monono to read it to me, but the DreamSleeve was gone. Maybe them that took it wanted to keep me from knowing what was on the paper.

  I wasn’t even done with thinking that thought when the door opened and a woman come into the room. She was a strange sight to see, and I did not know what to make of her. She was maybe as old as my mother, Jemiu Woodsmith, but in every other way she was as different as could be. Her skin was very light, as if the sun had never touched it, and her hair was gold. Not yellow, like butter or the yolk of an egg, but hard gold like tech. She must of coloured it that way her own self. Her eyes was black, and there was lines drawed around the edges of them to make them look bigger and darker than they was. I think there was red painted on her lips too, but I couldn’t tell that for sure. Her long gold hair went up off her head instead of down, and was made to look like waves of the sea or furrows in a field. The clothes she wore was all in the one colour, like the ones I was wearing, except they was dark blue where mine was white – a blue jacket over a blue shirt, and blue trousers. Only her boots was different, being black.