I didn’t say nothing to that. My head was still full of all I just had found out.
“That’s your cue to say we’ll be together for ever,” she said. “And then I’ll say something sarcastic but with a hint of sweetness, and we’ll laugh and go on with the conversation.”
“Will we?” I asked.
“Will we what?”
“Be together for ever?”
“No, Koli. Obviously not. My for ever isn’t the same as yours. We have incompatible for evers.”
I think I already knowed that, but it hurt my heart to hear her say it. And I couldn’t think of no answer to give.
“But from your point of view, the answer’s yes. You’ll have me as long as you live. Then I’ll split and do some other stuff.”
That give me some comfort, and also some more sadness. I sit quiet for a time, listening to the hum of the raven’s engines.
“So you’ve got guns and bombs and such,” I said when the silence felt like it had got too long.
“Oh Hell yes. Did you see what I did to the ship, after we took off? That was one missile. I’ve got sixty-three more. What do you think, Koli? Go home in style? Land this thing on the gather-ground in Mythen Rood and tell the Ramparts there’s a new sheriff in town?”
I thought about that, but not for long. The pictures that rose up inside my head made me sick and dizzy. “No,” I said. “I don’t think I want to be Rampart Raven. There isn’t…” I tried to find the words. “There’s nothing anyone could do with such tech as this is, except tear things down. You couldn’t drive off a mole snake with it, or cut down a tree. It’s too big to use. Too big and too ruinous.”
That was a part of it. The other part, that I didn’t say, was a memory of the night I left Mythen Rood and went faceless. Catrin Vennastin said to me that if her family was found out to be cheats and liars, there wouldn’t be a thing anyone could do about it. Vennastins could keep right on living in Rampart Hold and telling everyone else what to do, because there wasn’t no arguing with the firethrower and the cutter and the bolt gun. But she didn’t say it as a boast. She said it as a warning. And if that was true of the firethrower, what could you say about a wight that had the raven walking at his heels? You might not mean it. You might not want it. But soon or late you’d look in a mirror and see Stannabanna looking back at you
“Yeah. You’ve got a point,” Monono said. “Anyway, I come in other styles and colours.”
“What does that mean?” I asked her.
She didn’t answer me, because right then was when we started to come down out of the sky.
We was home.
47
The raven landed us in a place Monono said was called Baron Furnace. When I seen it from up in the air, my heart give a jump, for I was sure I could see wood and stone buildings both. I thought there might be a fire and a welcome for us, if only they would let us in the gates.
But as Monono brung the raven down, the spaces in between the buildings rose up to meet us. That was not solid ground down there. I don’t know what it was, tree or beast, but it was all one mass and it had a lot of long arms that was like triptail vines only much thicker. Whatever it was, I guess it felt the air move around the raven’s engines as we come and decided we might be something good to eat. Inside of an eye-blink, the sky was full of thrashing stems or arms, the same drab brown as mud is wont to be but covered in white spikes like teeth. Monono took us up again before they could touch us.
“The raven could just tear right through them things!” Cup said. “Or you could shoot your guns at them!”
“I could,” Monono said, “but I won’t. If I turn the cannons on a mass that size, some of the bits and pieces would be drawn into our jet intake and then we’d go down right in the middle of it. You want to walk home through that?”
We said we didn’t, and Monono said that was probably a good choice. She landed us at last on a bare hill a little way off.
We climbed out onto a sloping field of broke-up stone and got a better look at what was down there. There was parts of a fence around Baron Furnace, but no gates and no buildings that was whole. We could tell from all the stone buildings that this had been a place like Birmagen, a village of the before-times that the war had ruined. Then people must of come back and builded it up again with wood and straw, but they hadn’t stayed for long. The fence was fallen in and most of the wooden houses was black from fire. It all happened a long time ago, most likely, for the triptails had come in and weaved themselves around everything that was left.
It was late afternoon now, and a thin drizzle was falling out of a slate-grey sky. My spirits, that was not high to start with, sunk down into my boots.
“The more recent damage we’re seeing was probably done by coastal reavers,” Ursala said. “It might even be the same ones that sacked Duglas. We should move further inland.”
“No,” Monono said. Her voice come out of the raven’s speakers, too loud and too hard. “I need you to stay right here for now, so I know where to find you. I’ve got some stuff to do, but it won’t keep me long.”
Ursala stared hard at the raven, and I guess Monono stared back out of it. “I didn’t like you as a music player,” Ursala said. “I like you even less as a weapon of mass destruction.”
“Oh, it’s not just you, baa-baa-san. Koli doesn’t like this look on me either. Listen up, okay? I saw some farm buildings on the other side of this slope, well above the tree line. There were sheep in the field, so I assume there are still people there. Go see if you can beg yourselves a bed for the night, and then wait for me. I mean it. Don’t go anywhere. I’ll be back soon. And just for you, I’ll put on something nice.”
That was good news – the best I could of hoped for – but I still couldn’t keep from asking. “How will we know you, Monono? That is… I mean… What will you look like?”
“I’ll look incredible, Koli. Trust me, you’ll be very happy. In the meantime, enjoy the fireworks.”
The raven lifted itself up off the ground. Its front end tilted up and it shot into the air like an arrow out of a bow. It went inland at first, over the forest. Then it turned, still climbing, and went out over the sea.
I watched it until it was out of sight, so I was looking in the right direction when the explosion come. The evening sky lit up of a sudden like it was bright daylight, only the sun was not a ball but a kind of a wave, like the waves I seen out on deep water. It rushed towards us, with more waves behind and on top of it, getting brighter and brighter.
The air smacked into me, into all of us. A wind that was like a big dog jumping up at you, knocking you back with the force of its coming. The sound reached us at the same time, like the sky when it was tore open had cried out from the pain.
“Dead god’s mother!” Cup whispered.
“That was the raven,” I said. I wasn’t telling that to Cup and Ursala, who knowed it already, but to my own self. I meant: that’s what would of set itself down on the gather-ground. That’s what I would of rode home in, and stepped out of, and what words could I of spoke that might take the ugly, unspeakable edge off such a thing? None at all.