My legs didn’t hold. I just sunk down again.
“I’ll take him,” Lorraine said.
Paul made a disgusted sound between his teeth, like a hiss with a push of breath behind it. It’s stayed with me, that sound. I can hear it now, as clear and loud as I did then. I’ve been brung to wonder sometimes how he made such a sound when there wasn’t no air going in and out of him. That’s an idle thought, but it fills a kind of a hole in my mind – for right then, with the two pieces of the DreamSleeve held in my two hands, I didn’t have no room in me for thoughts. My brain was full of wasps that buzzed but didn’t sting.
“We should just pitch them both overboard and have done,” Paul said. “What use are they?”
“The woman says she needs them.”
“That’s clearly a lie.”
“Most likely. But we need to keep them alive until we’re sure.”
They took us somewhere. Not back to our rooms but into a space that was like a box or a cupboard, too small to stand up in. Just cold metal was under us, and on top of us, and all round us. I lay there saying nothing, hearing nothing.
Cup laid a hand on my shoulder and said some words. I think she did. I didn’t hear them. I was mewling like an animal. This – all of it – was my doing. My choosing. From the minute I pressed that button in the shaking room and took us down under the decks of the ship, I was the onliest one that called it, and decided it, and made it happen.
I wanted to be dead. I wanted not ever to have lived. I tightened my grip on the two broke pieces of the DreamSleeve until the ragged edges bit bone-deep into me.
Spinner
28
“It’s like this,” Morrez Ten-Taken said. “There’s a little row of nubs up here on the stock that you set your finger to. Top row left and middle, bottom row middle and right. You can do it in one movement, just sliding your thumb across.”
“My thumbs is stubbier than yours,” Jarter Shepherd complained. “It keeps locking me out.”
We was on the gather-ground, with a big crowd watching us. Jarter flushed redder and redder each time she tried to make that pattern and failed. But when she got it right at last, she couldn’t keep a big grin of triumph from spreading over her face.
“Okay,” she said. “It’s waked. I just felt it wake. What next?”
“Well, next you make sure it’s set to fire.” Morrez leaned over her, making the movements in pantomime, but he was careful not to touch her. He was somewhat scared of Jarter after all the times she threatened him or handled him roughly. “The gun’s making new shot all the time in this place here. The reservoir. When you pull the sleeve back and then jam it all the way forward again, you’re moving a shell full of shot – two shells, if both barrels are empty – out of the reservoir and into the barrel.”
Jarter worked the sleeve, then looked to the Half-Ax man with a puzzled face. “I didn’t feel no lock when it went back.”
“Right.” Morrez smiled like he was doing a trick and Jarter had seen how the trick worked. “Because both barrels is full already and the gun knows that. But when you fire the gun – can I show you?”
Jarter handed over the shotgun, though her face said she was sorry to do it. Morrez hefted it onto his shoulder and took aim at a barrel that was a scant twenty strides away.
“Wait! Wait!” I cried. “Don’t shoot that thing while I’m sitting here. Not unless you want me to drop my baby in the middle of the gather-ground.”
“Sorry, Spinner,” Jarter said, and, “Sorry, Rampart,” said Morrez.
I went and joined the little cluster of people that was watching on the steps of Rampart Hold. I had forbid them to stop their work just to gawk at the Half-Ax guns and the women and men that was learning them, but I might just as well have told the grass not to grow. And this time I couldn’t even scold them because Catrin – out of her bed and back to being our Rampart Fire – was watching too, sitting alone on the Hold’s front steps. I went and stood by her.
Morrez fired, and the barrel straightway stopped being a barrel and turned into loose bits of wood flying through the air. The sound of it was like lightning had struck the ground right next to you and the thunder hit you full in the face. It was a sound you could feel against your skin.
The crowd gasped and shook their heads. One or two of them cheered.
“Not bad,” Catrin said, like she had seen better. “It saves time not having to aim, since you hit everything that’s in front of you.”
“Morrez says the other gun is for aiming. This one’s more for turning a line of fighters that’s running towards you into one that’s running away from you. It’ll kill at twenty strides, and wound at thirty. If you’re further away than that it will mostly sting and stagger you. But it does its job. You wouldn’t want to close with it.”
Catrin turned her eyes on me. They was still red around the edges, but this was her third day of being on her feet again and I could see she was getting to be more like her own self. She had thrown away the cane Jon cut for her, not because she didn’t need it but because she knew it gave people heart to see her strong.
“You closed with it at Calder ford,” was all she said. And it wasn’t a compliment she meant but a warning. The fighters of Half-Ax, when they came for us, wouldn’t turn and run for a little sting and a little blood.
I nodded. “So did you. And we both carried our scars away with us.”
“I wish scars was all it was.” Catrin shifted her weight and winced a little. “Fer was on me again last night, telling me all the mischief you was up to while I was abed. She thinks you want to bring down the Hold. Or at least turn us all out of it.”
I didn’t answer.
“Ah,” Catrin said.
“I don’t want to turn anyone out of anywhere, Catrin. Not while we got so much else to worry about. But I think maybe when we’re through this, we might need to have a talk.”
“Yeah, Fer said it would start with a talk. She says you’re like a mole snake. When your mouth opens is when you’re most dangerous.”
I nearly laughed at that, but in truth it wasn’t funny. The Half-Ax guns had set me and Rampart Arrow at odds again, if we had ever stopped being so. As soon as Morrez told us how to wake them, Fer had laid her claim – not in the Count and Seal but at the big bench in the tannery’s dyeing room, with none to listen in. One of the guns could go to Jon, she said, and the other to Lari. I told her the only way that would happen was if Dandrake and the dead god came down from Heaven and urged me to it. It had to be both of them, mind. One alone would not do.
“Talk some sense into her, for the dead god’s sake!” Fer begged Jon. “This is your chance to be a Rampart again, and she’s standing in the way of it.”
Jon put his hand over mine, and he did it so Fer could see. “She’s not standing in the way of anything, auntie,” he said. “You think I want to be a Rampart that way? By reaching over other people’s heads and stealing tech away from them? I won’t do it, and Lari won’t do it either.”
I didn’t say that that was how everyone got to be a Rampart. I was happy Jon was on my side in this – especially knowing how much it hurt him when his name-tech was lost.