The Trials of Koli Read online

  “Lantern,” she said. “Here.”

  A yellow-white beam of light shot out of the drudge’s flank, aimed just right to touch the arrow. It stayed with the arrow as Ursala kept turning it in her hands and staring at every part of it. Cup flinched away from the beam, which passed right by her face and lit it up in passing.

  “Crow feathers,” Ursala murmured.

  “We always used crow feathers,” Cup said. She come in quick, like she didn’t want to leave no room for doubt or question.

  “I saw enough of them to know that. But your arrows were tipped with knapped stone. This is a metal tip, made in a forge.”

  “A forge is a really hot fire where you can work metal,” I told Cup. “The heat softens it, and then you can make it into new shapes. Did you have one in your village? I mean, before you come to Senlas?”

  “I didn’t come from no village, yokel boy,” Cup snarled. “And I know what a damn forge is.” She turned away and said no more.

  “Should we move our camp?” I asked Ursala.

  Ursala shaked her head. “We’d break our necks in the dark,” she said, which it was hard to deny. “We’ll stay here until daybreak and then send up the drone to scout the area before we break camp. It troubles me that these people, whoever they are, were tracking us without me knowing about it.”

  I blinked. “They was? Are you sure?”

  “Koli, they didn’t climb a mountain in the dark just to see what was up here. They knew exactly where we were, and they bided their time until we were asleep.”

  It was not a comforting thought, nor it didn’t make me inclined to curl up by what was left of the fire and try to go back to sleep. Then Ursala kicked the fire to pieces anyway, and stamped on the few branches that was still glowing until the last sparks gusted away on the wind. I missed the warm and comfort of it, but I knowed full well it had got to be done. Them shunned men couldn’t see in the dark any better than we could, so when they shot at us they most likely was aiming at the fire.

  I settled myself down on a patch of ground that was still a little warm, and wrapped my blanket around me. But I didn’t sleep, and I don’t think anyone else did either. When the sun come round the bottom edge of the sky – and it come bright and clear, which was still more bad news – we all sit up at more or less the same moment.

  We et without a word, our breakfast being the same as our supper had been. Then I stowed what was left of the food in the drudge’s store space, while Ursala sent up her drone to see what she could see. The drone was one she brung down herself, back in Mythen Rood, and then repaired so it was good as new. Only the stinger part of it was gone. That had got broke when Ursala brung the drone down, so it was just a spy now, and not a weapon.

  Ursala could see whatever the drone saw, on a window in the drudge’s belly that she called a monitor. And she could tell it which way to go with her mote controller. The drone went zipping off down the slope, and the monitor showed us all what it was seeing. Trees, mostly, and the other side of the hill that we was on, and – a few miles further – some scrubby grassland that seemed to be holding its own against the forest.

  But there was no shunned men with bows, lying in wait for us down the slope or at the treeline. It seemed our attackers was gone some way off. It might be that they lost interest in us after the drudge fired back at them. Then again, the drudge hadn’t found its mark no better than they did, for there was no bodies lying on the slope nor no marks where bodies might of been dragged away.

  I was somewhat surprised at this. Only a few days before, I seen the drudge shoot down a half-dozen of Senlas’s people without missing a shot. I thought it could not miss, and said as much to Ursala.

  “Depends on range,” she muttered, her eyes all on the monitor and what it was showing her. “The way it’s configured right now, that gun can only fire bone.”

  “Bone?” I said. I thought I must of heard wrong, but Ursala said it again.

  “Yes, Koli. Bone. A combat drudge would synthesise steel and aluminium, but my drudge is medical. A lot of things were left out of it in order to make room for the diagnostic unit. Bone does the job just fine when it hits, but it’s nowhere near as dense as metal bullets or bolts would be. So the drudge’s gun is spectacularly accurate over short distances, and pretty much useless beyond thirty yards or so.”

  Cup spoke up suddenly. “I want a knife,” she said.

  Ursala give her a quick, cold look, then turned back to the screen. “Against bows? I like your optimism.”

  “I’ll take a bow if you’ve got one. I’m better with a bow.”

  “That’s true,” I said. “She’s a dead shot with a bow.”

  “I’m not giving her either one,” Ursala said.

  Cup bared her teeth. “I won’t use it on you,” she said. “I’ll swear it on Senlas’s name, if you want me to. I want to be able to fight, if they come back.”

  “No.”

  “Untie my hands, then. I’ll fight with rocks, if I’ve got to.”

  Ursala had had enough. She huffed out a sigh and turned on Cup. “Not too long ago, you were saying these were your own people come to rescue you. Now, suddenly, you want to defend yourself. Or perhaps what you want is to make sure they win next time.” She brung her face up close to Cup’s, staring right into her eyes. “You don’t get a knife. You don’t get a bow. You don’t get a rock, a rope or a pointed stick. You get to watch, is all. And if you keep talking while I’m trying to think, I’m going to put a gag on you.”

  “I’m a better fighter than either of you,” Cup said. Which was the dead god’s truth.

  “That’s your last warning,” Ursala said.

  Cup give it up with a shrug of disgust. Ursala went back to the monitor, bringing the drone round for another pass up and down the slope before she called it home and packed it away at last.

  “I think we should go over the shoulder of the hill, that way,” she said, pointing. “Koli, does your imaginary friend agree?”

  Monono spoke up in my ear. “So rude! Tell her yes, little dumpling. That keeps us on track. Also, tell her she can increase the density of those bullets by culturing red blood cells in the drudge’s mini-lab, applying a surfactant to break down the cell membranes, then baking and filtering the raw mass to extract the iron. She can add it to the cultured bone as an amalgam.”

  “You can tell her your own self,” I said. “I’m not like to get any of them words out halfway straight.” Also, I thought, they was not words that Monono would of used before she went into the internet and come out with that autonomy. I asked her if the making of bolts – or bullets, as she called them – was a skill she found in there.

  “I suppose it must have been,” she said. “I told you I accessed some military databases. I thought I was just doing handshake protocols, but you can catch some nasty diseases by shaking hands.”

  That was not something I knowed or ever thought about, so I said nothing. I only hoped it wasn’t true.

  We went around the shoulder of the hill and come down on its other side. A little stream run by us there, collecting every few strides in pools about the size of my foot. The water looked so clean, I would of liked to stop and fill our water bottles, but the tanks inside the drudge was full, both the one that was for water it had already made safe and the one that was for water it was still working on. Ursala had not told me how the drudge made the water safe, but I guess it was by sieving out the bad stuff and boiling it, the same way we did in Mythen Rood. Only the drudge didn’t get hot, so far as I could tell, so maybe it had got some other way.

  The day stayed clear, with just a few clouds piled up like towers over to the east of us, so we stuck to the scree and scrub as far as we could. We made good time, at least at first. The steepness and the uneven ground slowed us, but not as much as the trees would of done. You didn’t see many trees at all this high up a mountain’s side. They couldn’t root theirselves in deep enough among the rocks and stones, so they give way to bushes and wild grass and then to nothing much growing at all, which was what I liked best.

  The longer we went without seeing the shunned men, the more certain I was that we had give them the slip. My spirits rose, and as we walked I talked a lot about the strange sights there was to be seen. The face of a cliff all covered in birds’ nests, with a million bellfeathers and swallows coming and going between them (a million being a word that Monono had teached me, meaning a number too big to count). A tower made of metal, that was like a lot of ladders all laid together, only the ladders would of had to be for giants to climb. A thing we found lying on the mountainside, all et up with rust, that looked like a big cattle trough with a roof to it. It had wheels like the wheels on a barrow or a child’s hobby horse. These wheels was metal, though, so maybe they was more like the pulleys we used to haul wood up to the tops of the stacks in my mother’s workshop.

  “That was called a car,” Monono said, when we seen that last thing. “People rode inside them, Koli. They used to run everywhere in my time. The first Monono’s time, I mean.”

  Monono had took her name and most everything else from a singer of the old days whose thoughts and rememberings had been poured into the DreamSleeve when it was made. It was a thing she didn’t like to talk about much, so I didn’t answer nothing when she said this.

  Ursala, who had not heard her speak, told me the same thing. “It’s a car, Koli. I’m surprised you haven’t seen one before. There are quite a few hulks in your valley, although they’re mostly on the north side of the river. You’ll see plenty when we get to Birmagen, I promise you.”

  “What’s Birmagen?” I asked.

  “It’s a city almost as big as London, that lies right across our path. Actually, it would have been easy enough to go around, but I steered towards it. I’m hoping the contaminants in the soil will be more concentrated there, so we’ll get a respite from the forest.”

  It was a good thing to hope for, and it kept that happy mood in me through the morning. The other thing I was hoping for was a change in the weather, but the sky stayed clear, with just a few scuds of cloud chasing each other right at the edge of what we could see. We was heading down now, out of the highest hills. Mile after mile, the slopes got less steep and the trees come up to meet us. Around the end of the morning, we had got no choice but to stop at the forest’s edge and see what the sky decided to do.

  Long before then, though, our hopes of being free and clear from the shunned men was throwed down. Being up on the hillside like we was, we could see a long way off, and any movement at all drawed the eye in all that dumb-struck stillness. Men and women got their own way of moving that’s different from bears and dogs and tree-cats and such. Again and again, when I looked back the way we had come, I seen a little of that movement in the scrub or on the edge of the treeline. The shunned men was making the best use of what cover there was, but they could not go all the way into the trees no more than we could, so they was there to be seen if you looked hard.

  I thought there had got to be four of them at least, for they was flanking us on both sides while staying a long way back. When we done that in Calder, on a hunt, we worked in twos so one could follow the trail while the other kept a weather-eye for what might threaten. But maybe these people had got a different way of doing it. We was a long way from Calder, after all.

  “You seen them?” I asked Ursala, with a nod over my shoulder to show who I meant.

  “Of course,” she said without looking.

  “We’re fearful exposed here.”

  “Yes, we are. But I think we’re safe for now. As long as the sun shines, they’ve only got two choices. Come at us over the hill, in which case we’ll see them coming and the drudge will pick them off. Or brave the forest, and get crushed to paste.”

  “Yeah, Ursala, but if a cloud comes over…”

  “If a cloud comes over, we’ll move before they do.”

  “Into the trees?”

  “Of course, into the trees. We’ll make the best speed we can and take our chances. Otherwise we risk having them get down below us and cut us off.”

  “They won’t wait that long,” Cup said. Her voice was a growl, kind of, all angry like we was talking stupid and she was sick of hearing it.

  Ursala didn’t even make no show of listening to her, but I figured the more ideas we had, the better. “What do you mean, Cup?” I asked her.

  She nodded down towards the trees, then up towards the ridge behind us. “They got us in a bottle. Why wouldn’t they come in and finish us before we get clear again?”

  “The drudge—” Ursala gun to say.

  “They got range on the drudge!” Cup all but shouted. “You said it yourself. You think they don’t know that? That was why they come at us last night. To measure your iron horse’s gun against their bowshots, and take the range when we wasn’t in no shape to chase them off. It’s what anyone would do, if they wasn’t stupid. And these people is soldiers of Half-Ax, so they know damn well what they’re doing.”

  I remembered of a sudden how Cup had told me back in Calder that she was meant to be married once, to the Peacemaker’s cousin. She must of lived in Half-Ax then, or really close by it, for Half-Ax was where the Peacemaker had his court.

  Ursala fixed Cup with a hard stare. “How do you know that?” she demanded.

  “I seen their uniforms. What do you think? Them grey shirts they got on is Half-Ax issue.”

  It sounded like truth to me, and I could see it struck Ursala that way too. She scanned the ridge for movement. I crouched down behind the drudge’s flank, for of a sudden it struck me that firing from the top of the ridge would be an easy thing to do, and if there was more than four of them they could be up there already. Cup stayed right where she was, like it was all one to her if she was arrow-shot.

  There was nothing to be seen, for a long, quiet moment. We wasn’t even breathing. Then a bush shaked, when the ones on either side of it didn’t, and we knowed.

  “Ursala—” I said.

  Right as I said it, the first arrow went over my head. Not so far over, neither. I heard the air whistle. It didn’t come from out of that shaking bush, but from further ahead. From just exactly where we was going, in other words. That was bad news, without a doubt. The drudge was not going to be no use as cover if they charged down the slope on the two sides of us.

  Some more arrows come. One of them hit the drudge’s tail end, only a hand’s span away from where Cup was standing, and another bit into the ground in between its legs. Them fighters had pretty good aim, seeing how far away they was.

  They come out of cover now, which was a bold thing to do. It meant Cup had got to be right, that they had got the range of the drudge’s fire the night before, and knowed they was safe. They was still cautious though, and went at it it slow. They could take all the time they wanted now in setting up their shots, and they was a lot less likely to miss. Cup was right about the clothes they was wearing too: grey shirts on all of them, with a splash of red high on the chest. They was not shunned men after all, then. They was soldiers, like Cup said, soldiers being a name for people raised up to fight against other people when there’s a quarrel that can’t be settled no other way.

  We was in a bad fix, with no easy path out of it, until of a sudden one of them towers of cloud edged itself across the face of the sun.

  “Go!” Ursala said.

  We knowed exactly where she meant. We run headlong, down the last ten or twenty yards of broken ground, with arrows flying beside us and past us like it was a race. I guess it was at that, and we won it, for we made it into the trees without nothing hitting us. Cup was hurt though. She was pulled off her feet by the drudge’s suddenly breaking into a gallop, and dragged along behind it through thick brambles and knotweed.

  I hauled her up on her feet again, but I had got to do it on the move, for Ursala was still running and the drudge went where she led, like it always did.

  I put on a fast sprint and drawed level with Ursala. “We’re safe now!” I yelled. I wanted us to slow down in case Cup tripped again. She could easily die if she did, hauled across that rough ground until she was flayed or got her neck broke.

  “No, we’re not!” Ursala shouted back. I looked behind us and seen she was right. Every few seconds I got a glimpse of a man or a woman in the gaps between the trees, running so fast they was almost bent down to the ground. The Half-Ax soldiers had not give up.

  They did not have an easy time of it though. This was the deep woods we was in now so they was hard put to keep track of us. If they was going to keep up the chase, they had got to come in a lot closer than they was before. Some of them come too close. The drudge’s gun swung round and spit out a bolt, almost too quick to see, and one of the fighters went down so hard he rolled. The rest fell back a little after that, and give us some leeway. I used the lull to run in close to the drudge and take a swipe with my knife at the rope that was tying Cup’s hands. I was not going to let her be brung down again, and maybe killed by the drudge in scaping from the other killers behind us.

  I don’t know if I can say the knife was mine. I took it off someone named Sky after the drudge killed her. I don’t know if it’s right to call it a knife neither, for it was almost as long as a sword and had a curved blade that got wider at the tip. Cup called it a machete. Sky had kept it wicked sharp, so it was up to the job. It was only my aim that was lacking.

  Cup seen what I was doing and helped me by hauling her arms up as high as she could, making the rope tight and giving me an easier target. Still, I could only swing and stab at it, not saw it through like I would of done if we was standing still. At first it seemed like I was doing no good at all. Then I managed to slash the same place two times, and I seen the strands of the rope start to fray and untwist. Then it give way all at once.

  As soon as she was free, Cup started pumping her arms and legs so fast they was a blur. Though my legs was longer, she soon pulled away from me.