The Expert System's Brother
Author: Adrian Tchaikovsky
Date: 2018-07-17 00:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Science Fiction; Fiction; Novella; Fantasy; Audiobook; Short Stories; Dystopia; Speculative Fiction; Science Fiction Fantasy; Adult
Description: Bestselling British master of science fiction Adrian Tchaikovsky brings readers a new, mind-expanding science fantasia in The Expert System's Brother After an unfortunate accident, Handry is forced to wander a world he doesn’t understand, searching for meaning. He soon discovers that the life he thought he knew is far stranger than he could even possibly imagine. Can an unlikely saviour provide the answers to the questions he barely comprehends?
Publisher: Tor.com

Cover

Title Page

Mini TOC

Begin Reading

Table of Contents

About the Author

Copyright Page

Copyright Notice

The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you without Digital Rights Management software (DRM) applied so that you can enjoy reading it on your personal devices. This e-book is for your personal use only. You may not print or post this e-book, or make this e-book publicly available in any way. You may not copy, reproduce or upload this e-book, other than to read it on one of your personal devices.

Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author's copyright, please notify the publisher at: http://us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.

Dedication

Dedicated to my son, Alex, who often has great difficulty fitting in to the world he was born to

I.

IT WENT WRONG FOR ME when they made Sethr an outcast.

Where I grew up, people don’t get angry at each other. We were a community; you looked into your neighbour’s face and saw a friend. But Sethr wasn’t anybody’s friend. He stole things and he didn’t pull his weight. Give him a morning’s task and he’d take two days over it. The word began to pass between people that he was no good for the village. He was still one of us, but he got fewer and fewer smiles wherever he went. It wasn’t good to be seen talking to him. The young women he so wanted to spend time with, they stopped looking his way.

You’d think this would be a lesson to him, and he’d get back into line so people liked him again, but then again you’re not Sethr. To Sethr, it was someone else’s fault and why should he change? He got angry instead, and then he got into a fight and broke Broed’s arm, and that was his last chance lost.

They brought him to Lawgiver Elhern. Quite a crowd came to watch. I was there myself, just thirteen and more interested in some time away from the fields than what was going on. There was a whole bunch of us kids come to see the law doled out—Livvi, Melory, Kalton, Chogger and me. We’d not needed Elhern’s ghost to perform such duties for years. Aro, our village, it was a peaceful place before then.

Elhern was a greying woman, still strong and stocky. She worked her own farm most of the time, with her two grown sons and a woman she’d taken in, and when you heard her speak, you’d not think she was marked for special wisdom or judgment. Right now, though, it wasn’t Elhern’s judgment we’d come to hear, but the Lawgiver’s.

Her one working eye rolled into her head and the ghostlight flickered in the empty socket of the other and played in a brief halo about her tightly bound hair. She heard the accusations and Sethr’s wheedling denials, but the words went somewhere deeper, to where the ghosts lived. When her lips opened, it wasn’t quite her voice, but something else speaking through her, forcing her throat and tongue to make its words. This was the ghost. This was the Lawgiver.

“Community member Sethr verdict guilty. Prognosis: unacceptable burden. Recommended sentence: Severance.”

And Sethr was all howls and pleas then, finally understanding he’d gone too far. He promised he’d mend his ways, but some things just stay broken. The Lawgiver had heard his history and judged that he would never mend enough to pull his weight. He would be cast out for the good of everyone. The Lawgiver had spoken.

* * *

Let me tell you about Aro. It’s much like where you come from, I’m sure, but there will be differences. Our tree is halfway up a hill, and it leans out quite a way so that the few visitors we get think it’s about to tear its roots free and fall on us. It would crush half the houses if it ever did, because we’re not spread out like some places I’ve seen. All the big buildings are clustered in a ring in the tree’s shadow, and when we got together to do anything—including Severing Sethr, in this case—it was within that circle. We had our hunters, but as a community we didn’t look outwards much. This isn’t something I understood, when I lived there, but I’ve travelled since. Not by choice at first, but I’ve seen more of this world than just about anyone.

The tree is a big one, too—the roots go all the way through the hill and further; if you go round the far side, where some of the Ertibeest herders have their huts, you see loops of great segmented root curving from the ground as though caught midway in reaching for you. When we were young, younger than when I got hurt, we used to tell each other stories about people who had been grabbed by those roots and pulled into the hill. That’s just kid stories, though. Roots are roots, they’re not a part of the tree that cares about us, not like wasps or ghosts.

The hive is high up in the central fork of the branches where you can barely see it from the ground. There are wasps going in and out all the time, though. You just don’t remember them until you get stung, and then you look up into the shadow cast by all those long, leathery purple leaves and feel a bit sore, but you know there was a reason, it’s just part of the natural way. These are the little wasps I mean, not the special ones, the Electors. Nobody could miss those.

Three hundred and seventeen people lived in Aro—probably smaller than your home, but it was rough country around there without much good wood for building. Our houses are just like your houses, of course, because all the architect ghosts agree on how houses are built. I must have seen twenty villages now, and always the same roofs rising to a tuft, the same bowed walls because it’s easiest to cut Terfel wood like that, so everything fits together like a big barrel. Because the ghosts know, and why should we know better than them?

Well, that’s part of the story. I’m getting there.

If you were looking at Aro, standing there facing the side of the hill where the tree comes out, and you looked to the left side past the first ring of houses, you’d see a house slightly off, a little skewed to its neighbours. That was where I lived. That was where we lived, Melory and me. That was where we were happy, before it happened.

* * *

The Severing took place two days later. It was like a festival, like getting the harvest in. Not that every adult wouldn’t tell you how serious it all was, but things like that don’t come along every day, or even every year. People felt that Sethr being banished was like a vindication of our ways, things working as they should. I remember there were mickle-cakes and sugarworm skewers, and the adults had a little of last year’s tunny, which made them laugh and remember things. I remember wanting so badly to get a drop of that, to see how wonderful it must taste, the way the grown-ups loved it so much. I couldn’t know that I would never taste it. I never will.

Now we come to Doctor Corto, because it was the doctor’s job to boil up the Severance that would cut Sethr off from us forever. Corto was old, maybe the oldest person in Aro, although after hitting “grown-up” we didn’t keep count of the years much. Too old, though, was Corto. He’d been the doctor for as long as anyone could remember, since he was barely a grown-up himself, and he’d begun to go wrong. When they brought sick or injured people to him, they said, the ghostlight came and went in his face, and he repeated himself or forgot or just stopped talking altogether. The ghost had to fight, to do its work through him, and for a year or so before Sethr’s casting out it was a risky business getting hurt, in Aro, because you never knew if you’d get treated or not.

Anyway, he had a cauldron there in the middle of all that coming together where he was mixing the stuff up, like hot red mud, but his mind wandered off and then so did he, when he should have been minding it like it was poison.

I remember how excited I was. It wasn’t that I hated Sethr so much, but it was change and it was difference and when you’re thirteen that’s like all the rest days and celebration days rolled into one. I was chasing around with Livvi and Kalton; we whooped through the crowds like mad things trying to catch each other. Or mostly it was Kalton and me trying to catch Livvi, because we were thirteen and it was just starting to become important that she was a girl and we were boys, though I don’t think we could quite have told you why. But you can imagine the sort of half-formed thoughts we were harbouring, thoughts that seemed to come from unexpected places in our bodies. We were on the cusp of something. It was a boundary I would never properly get to cross because of what happened next.

I was tracking Livvi through the crowd by the mild exasperation of the grown-ups she elbowed or shoved. I was a little ahead of Kalton, I remember. He was off to my left, and never as good a runner as me. But then I saw a space I could shortcut across, and maybe make a lunge for her so we’d both end up tumbling together to the ground, which seemed like an inexplicably fine thing to my thirteen-year-old body right then. Except it wasn’t a space. Except it wasn’t a shortcut.

It was Doctor Corto’s cauldron, of course, that the old man had just abandoned because his mind never stayed in one place long enough to do his job properly. I burst from the crowd and saw it, too late to dodge aside. Instead I tried to jump it, just one big flailing leap, arms and legs everywhere. I thought I’d cleared it. I remember the exultation at having done a mad thing and got away with it. Wouldn’t Livvi be impressed? Except even as I thought it, my heel caught the rim of the pot and I crashed down on the far side, and the scalding Severance slopped over my leg and halfway up my side, and a splash of it up my cheek and onto my brow.

I was screaming right off because it was boiling hot and it hurt like nothing I’ve ever suffered before or since. Everyone came running with cloths and gloves and they got it off me as quick as they could while I cried like the child I really was. I remember how careful they all were not to get a drop of the stuff on themselves even after it was cool. They were all telling me it was going to be all right. I don’t think people realised just what had happened or how things would go.

I remember sitting at the front of the crowd, still racked with the pain of my burns, wrapped in wet cloth, while Sethr got anointed. The Severance was cool by then, because none of this was about hurting Sethr. It was because he was a burden and we had limited food and time and energy. Everyone knew that a troublemaker took too much and gave back too little, and that wasn’t our way. Our way wasn’t to punish troublemakers, either. We didn’t care about revenge or retribution for wrongs done, although I know now that there are ways of being that make those things a priority. For us, we couldn’t see the point of that; who would it make things better for? Our justice was purely to ensure the optimal survival of the community, and the Lawgiver had judged that the community would be better without Sethr in it.

Lawgiver Elhern daubed the Severance across Sethr’s skin, dark red like old blood. It soaked in, and I knew it would stain him forever, no water or scrubbing would ever get it out. After that was done, they let him go. People were already backing off, because Sethr was different now. He was Severed. They looked at him and they didn’t see One Of Us anymore. He had become something alien. I remember seeing even the fleas abandoning him, springing off, almost invisible save for their movement, to find more agreeable hosts.

I remember sitting there watching Sethr as he stumbled and entreated and was turned away. I couldn’t tell. He was just the same to me, the same man he’d always been, despite the harsh, revolted way everyone looked at him. I couldn’t tell he was an outcast. That was the first clue I had that I was marked, too.

They brought me to Doctor Corto, of course. I still wonder whether, if he had been younger and fitter, and if the ghost could speak through him properly, maybe he could have made everything right. Maybe there was some antidote to the Severance, if he could have applied it quickly enough.

He examined me, and I remember his eye, its pupil going big and small and big again as the ghost tried to reach him. He would open his mouth, and that voice that wasn’t quite his would say, “Secondary decontamination onset,” just like the ghost should, but then his lip would droop and twitch and his attention would wander. “I’m cold,” he said, not seeing me, and even with a fire riding high in his hearth right next to him. “Sera, where are you?” Calling for his wife, who’d been dead since I was very small. His hands would shake and the ghostlight would gutter in his face, flaring fitfully in his creases and in the cracked and swollen skin about his empty socket.

II.

THIRTY DAYS LATER one of Aro’s hunters came across Sethr out in the wilds. He was stick thin, skin stretched taut over bone, but his belly had burst open. He’d crammed himself full of edrauthaberries. The purple stains of their juice overlaid the red marks of Severance on his hands and mouth. They had clogged up his innards in an indigestible mass and eaten away at him, bloating him out with toxic gas until the pressure had ruptured his insides and he’d finally died.

I remember loving edrauthaberries. Whenever we kids had work that took us beyond the village boundaries, we’d keep an eye out for the red leaves of their bushes and go prying about the base of their stems for the fruit. I could eat a hundred, back then, and we’d squabble and barter over the biggest ones, so sweet and rich. To Sethr they were poison and he’d known it. He’d only gorged himself on them when he was too hungry to care.

Ten days before they found Sethr, I ate some edrauthaberries for the first time since the accident. They were bitter on my tongue, bile rising in my throat even at the taste. I forced them down, because I was desperate to be the person I’d been before, as though just going through the motions would somehow overwrite what had actually happened. My stomach rebelled. They were not poison to me, they wouldn’t sicken and kill me like they had Sethr, but still I couldn’t keep them inside me. They were one more pleasure of the world I would never know again. I still remember the taste—how joyous they were beforehand, how acrid and vile after.

Meat was worse. I tried the flesh of every animal we kept and everything the hunters came back with, and even a mouthful had me vomiting up what little I might have in my guts, or retching out bitter spittle when there was nothing left to me. Bread I could eat, though it had to be cooked so hard it was almost burned. Even then I got sick a lot, just from the air, from the water. I had pains, fevers and cramps. My eyes stung and burned and I coughed all the time, waking myself up over and over each night. The red stains of the Severance were joined by blotchy rashes and sores from touching just about anything. I learned to go about covered head to toe because all of a sudden the world and everything in it was my enemy.

But I could have lived with that. Only just, but I wasn’t Sethr. They’d got the Severance off my skin as quickly as they could, rather than leaving it to soak into my bones like they had with him. If it had been that, then my life would have been pain and suffering but it would have been bearable. We were a community, after all.

Except the lines of our community had been redrawn, and I was on the outside looking in.

I was scarred by the Severance—just the heat of it. It raised a great streak of a welt on my face that lasted for days. I couldn’t stop touching it—it felt huge under my fingers, tender and throbbing. At first I thought it was that, which made people look at me the way they did. I thought they didn’t like me because I was ugly.

I told myself that, anyway. I must have known, deep down, it was more. What had happened cut both ways, after all. I must have felt that lack of connection inside me, only there were so many of them staring suspiciously at me that my reactions got lost in it.

But I’d got the Severance on me, a good long splash of it. It had soaked in, despite everything they’d done to scrub it off my screaming, kicking body. I was marked.

While I was recovering, the pain of my burns was still the thing sitting big in my mind, that and being half starved all the time. Yet I started to notice the little things. There were no fleas where I slept. I’m not boasting; we had fleas and vermin just like you do in your home. It’s the natural way, after all. They come from the tree like the wasps do. And they’re a nuisance when they bite, we all know it, but that’s how things are. They keep us fit and active, and like I said, I certainly got sick a lot after.

And the wasps, when I saw them, they didn’t sting me anymore; they cut a wide path around me.

And by then I was walking about and trying to be just one of Aro’s sons again, going into the fields, helping out with the woodworking, scaring away the Helibugs. It wasn’t the same. People didn’t like me anymore. No, that’s not the right way to say it. They couldn’t like me. I’d been Severed, even if not all the way. They looked at me and their senses told them, Not one of us.

It wasn’t aggressive, not at first. I had been a part of the community, and now I wasn’t. When we were out clearing stones or running pests out of the fields and I needed a tool, suddenly nobody would be handing one to me just as I reached for it. When someone brought the water round, they wouldn’t think to go to me with it. I’d have to go get it myself, and they’d look a bit surprised when I turned up in front of them. Maybe they would hold onto the gourd just a little too long, when I took it. Once, we had a Lazzar come in after the livestock at night and we were doing a count up to make sure nobody was hurt after we drove it off, and they missed me. Even standing right there in the firelight, they counted and called names, and I was never included. I had to look after myself most of the time, because there was only one other person who would look out for me. Melory, my sister.

Melory was born right before me. We came into the world together. We weren’t always friends, because siblings aren’t, but we were never enemies long. By that age we both had others whose company we sought out, but we always came home to the same house. When Melory was being teased, I went and sorted it out, with words and sometimes with fists. When I cut my foot open, back when I was nine, she dragged me all the way back to the village. We were all the family we had. Ma had died hunting Arraclids when we were seven, and though some kids reckoned they knew who their Da was, we never did. Like most of the kids there, we were children of Aro, and the community brought us up, but mostly we brought ourselves up. We were always there for each other.

And so I waited for Melory to turn from me, because that would be the last, the end. I was being thrust into a hostile new world. I was struggling to find things I could eat; I was struggling to avoid getting into arguments and fights with all the people who had known me just a short while before. If Melory had gone with the majority I would have died. Of starvation; of despair.

And she must have felt that break, inside her—the gap that had opened between me and everyone else. She didn’t let it rule her, though. She knew I was her brother. I was the same boy who’d shared every adventure, who’d dried her tears and let her dry mine. It must have been hard for her, but she fought past what her insides were telling her about me, and saw that I was still just Handry, who she’d known all her life.

And every day that passed after that just brought home how I’d have died without her. Three years I clung on at Aro, and it was like the whole community, the buildings, the tree even, were trying to shake me off. My friends weren’t my friends anymore. Livvi, Kalton, Chogger, they stayed away. I know Livvi’s Ma told her I was a wrong one now and she mustn’t go near, but Kalton’s Ma was dead just like ours was. He didn’t need anybody steering him away. His own eyes told him I wasn’t right.

I could see just how it would have been, how I’d have ended up getting a beating or even just driven out altogether. Every little thing that went wrong was my fault. It wasn’t that people really thought I’d broken the fence or scared away the Ossclaws so that the traps stayed empty, or that I brought the stinging rain unseasonably early. If I’d been able to look them in the eye and ask the question like a normal person, then they’d have said no, of course not, how could I possibly . . . ? And yet they looked at me, when this or that mundane thing went off course, when a gourd broke, when someone stubbed their toe. Some part of their minds was casting about for a cause, and there I was, the boy who wasn’t right, the boy who didn’t belong.

But there Melory was, too, and she wouldn’t let any of those looks or that talk go unchallenged. She did what I could no longer do, go and be angry with people and make them ashamed of what they were thinking. And if it didn’t stop them thinking just the same next time round, well, she was my untiring champion. She would go take on anyone to defend me. And she’d go early to the baker for the burned bread he made at her insistence, and that he probably wouldn’t have done just for me. She brought me water the many times I was sick, and when I twisted my ankle out on the top fields she forced people to come carry me back, when they’d most likely have left me there for the elements.

She always smiled, too. That was the one sisterly act she couldn’t quite pull off. I knew she was scared for me, and it wasn’t just because of what had happened in the past. Melory was brighter than I was, cleverer than just about anyone our age. I saw where her eyes strayed, and hers weren’t the only ones. Whenever my name came up, lots of people looked over to wherever Lawgiver Elhern was. Sometimes, when I’d get into a big argument with someone, because I was too tired and hungry and frustrated to keep my temper in check, they’d actually send for her. Elhern would come over and listen, and the ghost would descend on her and flicker from her eye socket and glimmer about the line of her jaw. Then Melory would appear beside me and squeeze my hand and hold her breath while placid, matronly Elhern vacated her own face and voice, and the ghost sat there and spoke instead.

And yet she never pronounced a sentence. I think the ghost didn’t know quite what to make of me. Sometimes it referred me to the doctor ghost, sometimes it just had nothing to say. The Severance hadn’t finished its work. I wasn’t entirely out, just as I would never be quite in.

And things only got harder, towards the end of those three years, because the doctor’s vessel was dying. For a whole long year, Doctor Corto just stopped seeing patients at all, and the ghost wouldn’t speak through him anymore. When people were injured or sick, then it was down to whoever could remember what the ghosts had ordered in the past, and sometimes they were right and sometimes they were wrong. When people got badly hurt, when they came in with bones sticking out of the skin or where a wild beast had mauled someone, then mostly they died, where the ghost might have been able to save them. Needless to say, he certainly had no help for me. He would just sit muttering to himself outside of his house all day, hands trembling and his one eye looking at nothing. People made sure he got fed, and come night they would take him inside and tuck him up, but he was past noticing them, just lost in meaningless conversations with the ghost locked up in his head.

I crept close once and heard him repeating nonsense to himself, over and over: “Installation failed, rebooting, rebooting.” He was like that for a full year, man and ghost clinging to each other like climbers on the point of falling. Then, at last, they found him cold in his bed one morning, and that was the end of Doctor Corto.

* * *

The next ten or twelve days were tense with waiting. Doctor Corto had been less than useless for an age, but we had no doctor at all now, and although we all knew the tree would choose a replacement, each day that went by without the Electors spawning just tightened the fear that something had miscarried. And speaking of which, pity the mother due to give birth right then, pity anyone sick or injured, staring up at the swollen boll of the hive and hoping for a sign that normal life would resume. The other ghost-bearers were besieged because most people thought they could get news from the tree by questioning their ghosts. Everyone had heard some story, some tale by an outcast found near Aro, or from some traveller from another community. Everyone had heard from someone who had heard from someone who was told by their Grandma about a village Where Things Went Wrong, where the tree died, where the wasps flew away. Lawgiver Elhern and Architect Brosa—herself as old as ever Corto had got, and going the same way—spent every day turning away petitioners who were sure that, if they just asked some new way, the secret would come out.

And they couldn’t ask. Their ghosts came to them with knowledge, but they didn’t carry off prayers to the tree or the hive or wherever they waited when they weren’t incarnate in flesh. I know more than just about anyone now, about how it works, and it doesn’t work like that. Perhaps it was supposed to once. Perhaps, if it did, we wouldn’t be in this fix and I wouldn’t be trying to work out what to do about it.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Over the next few days the hive swelled noticeably, its outsides crawling with the humble wasps we saw every day, that were the tree’s means of sampling and testing its dependents, meaning us. Almost nobody got stung in that time, which sounds grand except when you realise it means the tree isn’t listening to us anymore. Its attention is elsewhere, and if everyone had dropped dead, perhaps it wouldn’t even have known.

So everyone was holding their breath, and nobody more than me. I thought it would make everything right again, actually having a proper doctor. I was sick, after all. I was half Severed, and that was something the doctor ghost had jurisdiction over. Once we had someone other than mumbling old Corto as doctor, I could be cured. I was in a fever pitch of excitement. Three long years I’d lived in the unthinking disdain of my kin in Aro. It had been hard, almost too hard to bear, but now there was an end in sight.

In that, I was entirely correct, of course. I think they were my last moments of childhood, those few days of hope. That optimism that someone else will come and mend all ills, that your Ma or the Lawgiver or someone will just turn up, and everything will be well, that’s the essence of being a kid.

At last, late enough that everyone was going a bit mad with worry, the Electors came out and started buzzing lazily about between the houses. They were far bigger than the normal wasps, longer than your second finger and with fat, bristling bodies. Once they hatched out, there was no mistaking they were around. The air vibrated with their labouring wings day and night. And when they stung, well, it hurt enough to make grown-ups cry. Or so they said, because of course they didn’t sting me.

They were busy, though. I reckon about one in five from Aro got stung in the next few days, and each time everyone else watched anxiously to see if the recipient would show signs of the doctor ghost coming to stay. Children started following the Electors around, shrieking and pointing at anyone who received their attentions. Those who had been stung but not chosen were left hurting and rueful, and perhaps a little relieved. Being the doctor was a great honour and a great responsibility, but it meant your life would never quite be your own, either. Everyone was a servant of the village, it was true, but those ridden by the ghosts had to share their very heads.

And life went on, despite all this. The fields wouldn’t just hold their ripening, nor would the pests stay away by prior arrangement until a doctor was found. Everyone worked. I worked, most of all. I worked harder than anyone because I had to show them I was still there, still part of the community, for all their eyes told them otherwise. I volunteered for the worst jobs, did extra shifts, ran errands, anything people would trust me with. I was so desperate to belong. And the work was harder for me, too. When I pulled weeds, the plant juices raised a rash on my hands that nobody else had, and I was always working on a half-empty belly because there was so little I could keep down. Pollen puffed my eyes up and picking fruit gave me blisters. It wasn’t just the village. The world was trying to reject me.

And of course I was out working when word came from the tree that the long wait was over. The Electors had chosen. Who was it? Everyone wanted to know. Such a babble of voices that nobody could hear, like clumsy hunters treading over the tracks of their quarry. I pried and craned about the edge of the crowd of field workers, forgotten about, excluded from the excited rush and whisper of news.

But then they were looking at me. For the first time in years, they had turned to me, and for a moment I thought I was in again, the Severance worn off, my curse lifted.

But you’ve guessed, of course. You’ve known for a while, because I tell this tale with foreknowledge of what came after, and so the very choice of my words has guided you towards an unavoidable conclusion. It was her. Melory had been stung, and straight off she had started to show the signs. My sister would be Aro’s new doctor.

III.

THEY’D TAKEN HER TO her bed, of course, and by the time I got there she was already lost to the fever. The sting itself was on her shoulder, an angry welt like a cluster of knuckles. She wouldn’t open one eye for two whole days while her body shifted and changed to make her into a house fit for a ghost. The other eye would never open again.

I sat by her bedside all that time, save where I had to go to the baker to beg some food. One benefit of everyone’s mind just skating over the fact of you is, nobody comes banging on the door to find out why you’re not pulling your weight. So I looked after her; I held Melory’s clammy hand and mopped her swollen forehead and talked to her, over and over, mostly utter nonsense but just so she could know I was there. We’d been together from Ma’s womb and for sixteen years after that, and now she was on a lonely journey through strange places. I wanted her to know I was still there. I didn’t want her to forget about me.

The left side of her face puffed out like a fungus, over those days. The skin broke, wept, healed over again so fast I could almost watch it happen. It was worst about her eye and temple, where the ghost was remodeling the substance of her skull so it could go in and out when it pleased, or that’s what I think now, having seen a ghost-bearer’s bones. She lost her eye when the flesh bloated up like a clenched fist around it. What was left when the tight, angry swelling died down was just a hole, a socket that seemed to go too deep into her head. It wasn’t the only one, either. Pits and pockmarks opened up around it, as though she’d need more eyes or senses than the rest of us, to do her new job. She twitched and turned, and the blankets were drenched with sweat no matter how fast I changed them. She would mutter numbers or meaningless fragments of words, and I think everyone was terrified that she’d be another Corto, that it had been the ghost that was senile, and not just the man. As she lay there, sometimes her right eye would open wide and she’d stare up at me as though begging for help. We had always been alike: So people said and our reflections in still water confirmed it. We shared our mother’s straight dark hair, sharp chin and narrow eyes—like and unlike each other, just as we two were like and unlike the rest of Aro. Now the mirror was breaking. I would never look into Melory’s face and imagine my own. That was the first way the ghost took her from me, even before it came to live in the house it was building.

And sometimes, later, there would be the ghostlight in her empty socket and deep inside the pits of her face. It flickered and flared ever more frequently as her convalescence went on, a spectral white fire that was the ghost making itself at home in my sister’s head.

* * *

Then, mid-morning after a sleepless night when Melory’s body had twisted itself over and over as though each limb was trying to wrench itself free, I started awake at her clasping my hand back. I’d held on to her for so long, her fingers limp in mine, but now she squeezed them, she, Melory, my sister. I opened my eyes and she was looking at me, or half of her was. The rest wasn’t her anymore.

I’d only known worn old Doctor Corto in my lifetime. I’d been terrified that whatever awoke from that transformation would not be my sister anymore, but just a vehicle for the ghost. But when I looked at her, at that first waking, I knew her smile. I knew the way the skin crinkled about her remaining eye. The rest didn’t matter. She was still Melory and the ghost could not make her otherwise. But it could make her more.

By the time she could get out of bed there were plenty of people who needed the skills of a doctor. Some had been living with pain and disability for a year or more, and there was scuffling and bartering over who would go before the ghost first. I was at the back, of course. I was nobody’s priority.

I lie. I was Melory’s priority. If I’d insisted, she would have turned the ghost’s cold light on me right away. But I’d had plenty of time to think about things, as I sat by her bedside. I had been in a frenzy of excitement waiting for the Electors to choose the new doctor, but as I waited out the long watches of the night, that had given way to a looming dread. I had pinned so much hope on a new doctor. What if the ghost looked at me and gave me up for a lost cause? What if the ghost wouldn’t even look at me, like half of Aro wouldn’t? How terrible to have that one chance snatched from me, to be ignored by the one entity that could heal me. And how much worse, if that entity lived within Melory’s skull and shared our roof, always at the edge of my consciousness, battened on to my sister like a parasite. I thought all of these things as she changed and twisted, and so I did not insist she see me. I waited for my moment and told myself all manner of lies about why I did so, that did not revolve around my fear.

The waiting made things worse, though. I got to see the doctor ghost working, and each sitting I witnessed only compounded my anxiety.

At first she did not call up the ghost; it simply came when someone asked for aid or when she saw a patient in need. Later she was able to conjure it a little, learning its ways and what inner rituals might draw it near. When it came to her, she would go still; mostly she would sit down, because otherwise her legs would go weak and the ghost would lose control over them and drop her to the ground. All expression would flee from her and the ghost would light her face up from within, the fire rising slowly in her eye socket and the surrounding burrows and marks as though it had come from far, far away in some direction we had no name for.

Sometimes she would just speak, where the affliction was something familiar. The ghost had seen generations in Aro come and go. It remembered epidemics and poisons, allergies and wounds. What remedy had sufficed before would be dredged up from that long and perfect memory and Melory would diagnose and prescribe with absolute assurance and accuracy. When she spoke, or rather when the ghost spoke through her, it was with her voice but without her character to shape it. I shivered every time I heard it, so like, so unlike my twin.

Where the ailment’s cause or nature was less clear, Melory would take the hands of her patient, who would flinch as though stung. She would bow her head, the ghostlight guttering low, then flaring back up as the doctor sifted through what it had discovered and came to its conclusions. At the start, it seemed that the doctor was groping its way, and there were several people Melory could not help. People began to whisper that Corto’s decline had only been the start of the doctor’s decline. Soon after, though, we could see that the problem began and ended with Corto, and those she could not help were mostly those who would have needed Corto’s aid earlier if they were to recover. All the others, those more recent sufferers, she spoke to and laid hands on and divined unerringly the best way to mend them. Sometimes it was plant extracts, prepared and treated in meticulous ways. Other times she would bind wounds and splint limbs, her hands moving with a jerky precision as the ghost manipulated her borrowed muscles. Still more needed no more than rest, sympathy, the care of their kin.

I watched all of this. I sat in as often as I could, when the ghost was conjured from my sister to tend the sick. Every night I had a moment of crisis, knowing that the more I put things off, the less likely it was that the ghost could help. And yet, if I never asked, I could believe in some notional future cure that would come as soon as I did ask. It was fear of certainty that held me back. I did not want to put myself at the ghost’s mercy and be refused.

But all things end, even my reticence. Thirty-one days after Melory became Aro’s doctor, I knelt before her and asked for the ghost’s help.

This was after dark, after she had played doctor for everyone else in Aro who needed her. I didn’t want witnesses if the ghost snubbed me or pronounced me incurable. I told myself that Melory and I would lock that shame up between us, nobody else need know. I would just go on with my painful, sickly, hungry life for as long as I could. And if I couldn’t, only Melory would mourn, and only that part of her which was not a house for the ghost.

And perhaps it would be easier for me to know I was beyond help. Perhaps I would be able to accept what I had railed at for so long, for surely the possibility of a cure had just sharpened the edge of my hurt. I had fought against becoming the village’s scapegoat and reject. Perhaps accepting my lot would give me at least the veneer of belonging, a role to play even in negative. And I would still have Melory.

So we sat there on the floor, cross-legged. Melory leant against the curved wall of the house; our knees were touching. Her face was cast slightly downwards as she concentrated, while I hunted her features for that resemblance to me that seemed harder and harder to find.

The ghostlight rippled within the swollen part of her face as the ghost answered her call, tireless in its service to the village even as it wore my sister down with its demands. Her lips parted and the words came out in that weird affectless voice that was still half hers. Some people said the ghosts sounded almost as though they were singing, when they spoke, but if so, it was a joyless song I never cared for.

“Partial decontamination detected. Analysing,” said the ghost and Melory together, and I had no idea what the words meant.

She reached out with that abrupt impatience the ghost brought to her hands. Her thumb moved to press against my palm, and I felt a stab of pain as though she had driven a thorn into me. I welcomed it. I had seen that wince from so many of her patients. I was getting what the others got, being treated as someone who belonged for the first time in years.

“Diagnostic link established,” she announced. The ghost liked to tell everyone what it was doing even though nobody understood its meaning. It made me wonder what sort of a world it believed it was visiting, when it rolled out its complex half nonsense for us. Nobody in Aro cared so long as the pain stopped or the fever broke. Did the ghost think us so clever, or was it just in love with its own cleverness?

She had let go of my hand now, head bowed as the ghost consulted its memories to track down what was wrong with me and how to fix it. If it could be fixed.

“Melory?” I pressed, after she had been silent for a good count of two hundred. “Mel?” A sudden stab of horror went through me. I thought somehow I’d banished the ghost, driven it away and cursed the village even more, just because I was me and even the ghost couldn’t bear to be near me. I thought it had taken Melory, too, that any moment her body would just slump sideways. I had ruined everything. I was a blight to anyone and anything near me.

It was not Melory that answered me. I saw her jaw clench, as though she was trying to stop the words. The voice still sounded like hers when it came out, but it had nothing of my sister in it.

“Irrevocable deterioration of antihistaminic biome.” I could see her muscles twitch and writhe beneath her skin as though she was fighting, wrestling with the ghost to try and stop the next words. It was strong, though, that ghost. It was as old as Aro, born with the first houses, with the first blistering of the wasp hive in the fork of the tree. It had seen us come and go in our brief lives and it knew what was best for us. Not for me, not even for any one individual, but for us as a group. That was its concern; that was what all the ghosts cared about.

The words “Prognosis negative,” forced their way from her. “Incompatible with ongoing community placement,” and then she squealed and spasmed away from me, kicking out at nothing, beating her fists against the walls of the house. One eye stared at me, the ghostlight dancing and stuttering behind the other. I went to comfort her, but she threw me off so hard the breath whuffed out of me as I landed on my back.

“No!” she got out, in her own proper voice and full of anguish. “Handry, it wants the Lawgiver!”

“I’ll get her.” I started up but she grabbed me and almost threw me down again. I could feel the conflicting signals jolting through her body to her hands. Her grip left fierce red bruises against my skin.

“It wants to tell the Lawgiver,” she stammered. “It wants. It wants. Progression of decontamination irreversible. It wants me to—No! Recommend expulsion. Stop it!”

I was frozen, feeling horror clench my innards, because her voice was raw with grief and fury but the ghost was serenity personified.

Expulsion, it had said. I didn’t understand at first.

Then with a great effort Melory threw the ghost off, grabbing me by the arms and practically shouting into my face. “Handry, run away! Get out of here! It wants, it wants to—! I won’t, you hear me? I wonnnnnnnn.” She put her hands to the bloated, ridgy skin where the ghost lived, as though she was trying to rip it open. I fought with her, but right then she was stronger than me, shoving me towards the door. I saw blood drip from her good eye and the corner of her mouth.

“Go now!” she insisted. “It wants you cast out. It’s trying to tell the Lawgiver. Handry, the ghosts can speak to each other. It wants you held. It’ll make me Sever you for real, and then you’ll die. You’ll die like Sethr. Handry, please!”

I could already hear odd voices across the village: sleepy, irritated people woken by all the shouting. Any moment one of those voices would be Elhern’s, or rather not hers but the flat, authoritative tones of the Lawgiver ghost that lived inside her. It would be calling for me to be taken, like Sethr was taken. I was not just incurable, I had been judged an enemy of the community, and they would cut me off completely.

In my mind was Sethr’s twisted corpse, starved thin, dying in poisoned agony as his body rejected all the good things the world had in it, as the world rejected him.

I stumbled out into the night, looking up at the utter dark where the tree’s spread of branches obscured the stars. The only constellation I could see right then was made of the lamps people were lighting as they woke up and went out to see what was happening. When the Lawgiver finally got the message from the doctor ghost, there wasn’t one of them who wouldn’t seize on it greedily. Hadn’t they known I was no good? Hadn’t there been some part of them insisting that I was trouble, a threat to their children and their lives, no matter what I did or how hard I worked? Before, perhaps they would have been able to reason their way out of the conclusion, but the moment my nature had the Lawgiver’s official stamp on it, why would they even try?

Only Melory had ever stood up for me, since the accident. She wouldn’t be able to, anymore. The ghost wouldn’t let her. It hated me. No—worse even than that. Hate was a human thing, something you could at least spit in the face of. The ghost had just judged me not fit to live, of insufficient benefit to Aro, not worth keeping around. I was like a pest to be killed in the fields, a predator to be driven from the herds, out into the wilderness to die.

I wanted to go back into our house, the house we had lived in with Ma, that we had shared since Ma’s death. I wanted to crook my fingers and gouge away at Melory’s face as if I could carve the doctor out of her until only my sister was left. I knew it was useless, though. The doctor was part of her, it went all the way into her mind and her bones. When the tree had chosen her, she had become something more than human but something less than my sister.

With the increasingly angry sounds of the villagers in my ears, I fled Aro, blundering blindly into the night.

IV.

I THOUGHT I WOULD DIE.

I kept running until I was past the further fields, outside anywhere that Aro and its ghosts claimed. In my head the villagers were on my trail, coming with slings, spears, with lanterns and righteous anger. I could picture all those familiar faces twisted by the same emotion, as though they had all kept a ghost inside them, all this time. I could remember them before the accident, that was the worst thing. If I had been born to this, surely it wouldn’t be so raw? But I’d been one of them, once. And no doubt if this had happened to someone else, I’d be with the mob, a cudgel in my hand and no doubts in my head.

Looking back, now, I don’t know if they even stirred themselves beyond the outer ring of houses. The pursuit was in my head by then, driving me on. I heard my own hoarse, desperate breathing and took it for the roar of the mob. I only knew that I must get clear of any part of Aro. If I was discovered in the furthest corner of the furthest field then they would kill me or drag me back for Melory—expressionless and with the ghostlight unbearably bright in her face—to paint with the Severance and complete my casting out.

I only stopped running when I saw there were trees all around me. I was out in the forest, where only the hunters and the boldest of travellers went. Ma had died out here, and so had plenty of others, because the world was a harsh and hostile place and we could only survive by leaning on each other. Everyone knew it.

I knew it. I stood there alone, knowing it. All around me the trees creaked faintly as they grew, their branches sawing against one another and their leaves whispering. I heard the sharp cry of a Jibbit from far off, then an answering call from closer by, picturing their low-slung bodies sliding through the dark, hand-like mouths reaching out to hunt grubs and worms amongst the roots. Jibbits wouldn’t hurt people, but they were prey for things that would. Every time one called to its neighbours I wanted to find it and shush it in case it brought down an Arraclid or worse on me.

I had come out into the forest with the hunters sometimes, mostly to help them bring back a big catch. Never at night, though. Never beneath that starless expanse, the dark sky swallowed up by the darker canopy. I found a hollow between roots and tried to tuck myself into it, arms and legs drawn in to stop me inadvertently feeling some unseen moving body out there in the blackness. As well as the familiar jibbit jibbit jibbit, I heard a dozen other sounds I could not identify, and each in my mind was a nocturnal killer hungry for human flesh. Once, something crashed between the trees, surely no more than twenty feet away, sounding larger than anything and bending the tree trunks back with its progress. I knew I would never sleep. I thought I wouldn’t even live to see the morning.

And of course I slept. I was exhausted. I had run and stumbled a long way, and my heart was broken. When a little time had taken the edge off my terror I wept wretchedly, unable to stop myself sniveling like a little kid. It was too much for me. Everything I ever knew was lost, and worst of all it was still there, just a short walk in a direction I could no longer travel. I felt as though I had died in every way but the actual. Any predator making a meal of me would just be setting right an unaccountable error in the tally of the world.

And at some point I can’t remember, that grizzling wore me down into sleep. What I do remember is the waking up, because there was an Arraclid standing over me.

They were a big problem for Aro. Every year there was a new nest near the community somehow, and they never learned not to go after people, mostly because they were big and strong and fast enough that they often got away with it. Other places I’ve been, you barely saw Arraclids from one year to the next, or people had never even heard of them, and there was some other local monster that Aro had never had to find a name for.

Arraclids, then. Like most big animals, they have six legs, each with more joints than yours or mine. Their broad, flattened body is kind of slung between them, and with a big one—like the one I was staring at right then—it hangs at around head height, with the legs arching up almost half again as high. Big enough to carry off a choice animal from the herds, then, or a herdsman for that matter, and yet they can squeeze down and force themselves through narrow gaps if they have to, and they’re strong enough to break down a barred door. They have four main eyes, like most beasts—above and below, and either side. The eyes go forwards, though, rather than just staring outwards or weaving around on stalks, so when they turn your way it’s as though they’re really looking, like a person looks. Worst of all are their mouths, which are like an eight-fingered hand, big enough to grab you about the waist and make off with you easily. And in the palm of that hand they have a couple of curved fangs to hold you still while their other barbed parts tear strips away to get at what’s inside.

I had a good look at that mouth from where I lay. It was crouched right over my hollow, canted at an angle, and the lower eye, a fist-sized black lens like still deep water, was staring right at me. The jointed fingers of its mouth flexed slightly, as though it were a man cracking his knuckles before getting down to work. Below them, I saw its teeth move. I watched in fearful fascination, seeing that each one was ridged like a flint knife and positioned on its own stubby little knuckle so that, when it finally got to apply them to my body, it would be grating away with them, grinding inexorably through my flesh and guts and slurping up all the tiny shreds it would turn me into. I lay there and wondered, with a calm born of helplessness, just how long it would take before I actually died from it.

It moved, just a little. When Arraclids attack they come in very fast and sure, a flurry of limbs and reaching fingers that’s the nightmare of anyone who’s seen them. Before that, though, they have an odd swaying motion to them, as if they could just be branches hunting the sun, not a threat at all. It’s easy to miss them in the wild, as they let themselves drift close enough to go for you. Perhaps this one had painstakingly spent the night inching closer and closer, not realising that I had been dead to the world.

Its lower eye shifted slightly—it was on a little knuckle-finger of its own, I saw, a stumpy version of the stalks Jibbits and some other animals had. No lids, of course. Only humans have eyelids.

I stared back at it. What else could I do? As though surprised by my effrontery, it said, Kak kak kak, that deep knocking noise they make. I felt as though I had disappointed it.

It shifted again, and I realised it was carefully bringing its mouthparts towards me so that it could murder me with a minimum of effort. I tensed, knowing that I should be kicking out, shouting, yelling. Except who would I be yelling to, now? Who would come at my call? Instead I was just very still, waiting for the end.

I had ripped my leggings in my mad flight, torn them open on a branch and bloodied my leg as well. Now the Arraclid extended its fingers and touched me there. I felt the rough calloused pads like sand on my skin, and then the softer, rubbery hide around them. That one eye continued to pin me with its contemplative gaze. Kak, it said again and pushed and pried at my skin, sending a shock of pain through me as it reopened the wound. It dabbled its rough fingertips in my blood as though about to draw something in it.

Then, just as terror had me wound so tight that I might have done anything, it was moving off, those deceptively slow and swaying strides more than compensated for by the long reach of its legs, at first on the ground, then climbing, reaching from trunk to trunk and ascending into the canopy. I lost sight of it after it had put three trees between us.

The Arraclids weren’t the threat that would kill me. They would approach me several times in the few days when I wavered, close to Aro. The third and last time, when the biggest of the monsters I ever saw squeezed its flexible body between two trunks to stare at me with all four eyes, I just stood there and stared right back, finding that I didn’t care whether it killed me or not. The fingers of its mouth flexed, half reaching for me and then drawing away. At last it backed off, and a shudder rippled across its grey-blue hide, as though it was disgusted by what it had found.

What looked certain to kill me was hunger, and I wondered if, when I finally dropped in my tracks, my body would just lie there forever, untouched even by agents of decay. I was not Sethr, to be poisoned and bloated to bursting by what I ate, but everything sickened me. I felt as though my stomach was a tight-clenched fist inside me, shrivelled until there was barely room for a seed or a grub in it. And yet I ate. I found berries that were bitter as acid on my tongue and that gave me fierce cramps. I winkled trackworms from beneath the scales of tree bark and crunched their writhing bodies between my teeth, fighting not to retch. I killed a Jibbit, beating its frantically undulating body with a branch until it burst open, and then I ate its grey, chewy flesh raw because I was no hunter and didn’t know how to start a fire. And I threw up some of it, but then I kept eating the rest because I was so, so very hungry. I found that I could keep myself just one step ahead of starvation if I varied my diet daily, but that a second or a third meal of anything would be too much, toxins building up inside me to gift me with a night of hurling and convulsions, aching joints and violent bowels and a throat burned raw with vomit. And yet I wouldn’t die.

Then there was the cold: no fire, no walls, nobody to share body heat with. Once I found a herd of Raikers huddled up together, each of them bigger and heavier than me, plated and bristling. I tried to hunker down amongst them; surely I was too trivial for them to worry about. And yet I smelled wrong or I moved wrong, and the whole herd just upped onto their many legs and lumbered off, hooting at each other through the vents in their sides, and taking their warmth with them. The best I could do was tear down branches and cover myself with a blanket of foliage that the wind would tear away half the time, while the other half I’d wake with a rash across my skin that matched the radiating veins of the leaves. And so I froze each night, and some days, too, because the cold season was coming on, but that didn’t kill me, either. It was as if even death found me repellant.

It was the loneliness that came closest to ending me. On the fourth day of loitering close to Aro, I finally understood that this was real, this was my life now. I had lived all my life in a community of hundreds, and one of them Melory who had always been there. That fourth morning, waking up before the dawn, starving and cold, I finally accepted that things were not going to change. I would never have it back, not even the half-life I’d clung to after my accident. I got up in the dim grey light and thought about gashing my veins open with a stone, or going to pick a fight with an Arraclid until it would have to kill me in sheer self-defence. I thought about finding a height to throw myself off. Even a drawn-out death seemed better than this drawn-out life.

If I had stayed near Aro, if I had stayed near Melory, I would have found a way to end it. I could not have borne knowing she was right there and would condemn me to full Severance if she so much as saw me again. And so I left.

There were other communities out there. I would just have to find my way to one. They would know me as outcast and be no friends of mine, but at least I would be driven away by strangers rather than by former friends.

Except I had no way of finding those paths. I had never learned woodcraft from my mother. I just blundered through the trees like a blind man, missing every clue. Strange to say, it was Kalton who saved me. Kalton, my childhood friend who had not said a word to me, or even looked straight at me, since the accident. Kalton, who had been chosen for a fate oddly comparable to mine.

A day after resolving to leave, I saw people moving through the woods. I dropped to the ground in a flash of fear, convinced they were hunting me. Why else would such a large party be on the move, after all? There were far too many of them to be hunters and every decent-sized animal around would be making itself scarce, even the Arraclids.

I hid myself in the trees and watched, seeing that this was a party well-provisioned, at least twenty people on the move, some armed to ward off beasts but others carrying drums and pipes, and a couple lugging along a heavy box between them, and in the middle was Kalton, not carrying anything or doing any work, but clearly the point of this entire venture. He looked nervous and a bit afraid. Just like me, he was only sixteen years as we counted ages in Aro, meaning that many short winters or four long ones if your village counts those instead.

When I saw him just shambling along in the middle of them, a bit like a hero and a bit like a prisoner, I understood. Kalton was going to be a gift to the women of some other village. There must have been a traveller from somewhere where the Lawgiver had told them they needed fresh blood, and Kalton had been chosen. He was going to end up just as cut away from Aro as I ever was, though in a far more comfortable way. All the girls of wherever he went would be eyeing him up the moment he arrived, and he’d probably not have to do a day’s work for the next three years other than lie on his back. To some that might be a dream, but Kalton just looked scared and miserable because, like all of us, he’d only known Aro.

I couldn’t find much sympathy for him in my heart, but I could follow where they led. People didn’t travel much, around Aro. We were at the edge of the world, right up where the wilderness proper took up, where nobody lived at all. After loading me with so much, the world had finally given me a sliver of luck to clutch at.

I came so close to showing myself to them on the road. I would crouch at the very edge of their firelight, gripping my shrunken stomach and listening to familiar voices talk about nothing very much. How bad would it be if I just walked from the night like a ghost and took my place before the blaze, warming my hands, smiling like people smiled at each other? Except they might kill me like they’d kill a beast that, impossibly, tried the same trick. Or they would just hurt me and drive me off, more likely, which would be worse: a continuation of my life but with more pain. But most certainly they would turn away from me, even if nobody so much as raised a fist. I had to stop yearning for the things I couldn’t have.

And I had to eat, as well. I spent half the night foraging for some kind of tubers or berries or flesh I hadn’t eaten, novel enough to fool my stomach for a night, maybe two, before that particular brand of poison built up inside me and made me sick. Perhaps you’re tired of my hunger now. Not as tired as I was, but when you’re starving, that starvation sets up a big camp right there at the front of your mind and won’t let you forget. It’s not some pastime you can put down and take up again later when you’re at liberty to do so. It’s your life until it kills you.

I almost braved their sentries and their fire just to go through their bags for bread. The hard, burnt loaves Melory had got from the baker were golden in my memories. A few days later, they actually threw away some old crusts gone too stale for their comfortable, well-fed tastes, and I gnawed them until my gums bled and felt myself the luckiest man in the world.

The place they were going was called Cro, so I gathered from their fireside talk. I’d heard the name before, as one of Aro’s neighbours, but people back home weren’t curious, for what would other places have that we didn’t? Cro, when we came in sight of it, was much the same as my home, though maybe twice the size. Its tree grew in the midst of good flat farming land and the forest had long since been cut far back. The houses were spaced wider apart and some past artist had put up a ring of stones, man-high, to mark their gathering grounds. They grew flowers on either side of their doors, too, which I’d never seen before. These were a bright orange with green veins, hand-sized petals strung in spiralling trails along tendrils that twitched sluggishly when touched. They didn’t do anything, as far as I ever knew. They were just something people in Cro did, to make their homes brighter.

The deputation from Aro was at Cro five days. They were met by a great big gathering of people come to look Kalton over, and their own doctor came out to examine him and make sure he was fit and well. She was Corto-old but she still seemed sharp, and she prodded him hard enough to make him yelp, which I meanly enjoyed. I had done a lot of thinking about our respective exiles, and I didn’t reckon he was owed any sympathy from me.

After that, they had a bit of a festival to welcome Kalton to his new home, and there were certainly plenty of women there who had their eye on that fresh blood. Nobody ever knows their own father, not for sure, but there would be plenty of babies in a year’s time who would grow up to look like Kalton.

And then the rest of them left, rested and reprovisioned and heading back to Aro, a place Kalton and I would likely never see again. My childhood friend had settled in, by then, moving in with a couple of young women and their two-year-old child but spending plenty of nights away with other new friends. I watched the other Aro folk head back down the road with the pride of a job well done, cracking jokes about the sort of life Kalton would be enjoying. I let them go, knowing that I was finally cutting my old life away and accepting, for then and forever, that I was an outcast.

Back when I was young, I remember a couple of times when outcasts had been near the village, once a lone woman and once a band of three or so starving wretches. Everyone had been on alert, and we kids had told each other that the one thing that wouldn’t make outcasts sick and die was human flesh. It had been halfway between a silly game and a real danger. I remember hunters going off to drive them away, though I couldn’t tell you what had actually gone on, just that soon enough nobody was talking about it anymore. I never saw them myself, though I think Ma went with some of the hunting parties. Outcasts were just like dangerous animals, except they looked like people and that made them horrible.

They didn’t know my history in Cro but they would know me for what I was the moment they looked at me. After all, even the Arraclids had turned away from me. But what were my options, precisely? Walk into the wilderness and die a famished death? No, but neither would I walk onto the spears of the Cro folk or expose my body to their sling stones.

I became a thief. It was what Sethr had been before they Severed him, and so I felt I was somehow earning my exile after the fact. I crept into Cro every three nights or so and I took what I could. I went to the baker’s and I stole bread, the more burned the better. I stole clothes to keep off the rain and hold the cold at bay. I reached through windows and lifted shoes that looked right to fit my feet. I even stole their flowers because for one night I was able to get a little sustenance from them, before they started to turn my stomach like everything else.

The people of Cro worked out quick enough what was going on. After my fourth raid, they had guards out, but it was a big place and my eyes had got used to the dark by then. I would make a commotion near their livestock to draw them away and then run off to the other end of the village to steal everything I could. I took things I didn’t need, food I wouldn’t eat. I was in a frenzy of adrenaline and self-loathing and I hated them for all the things I couldn’t enjoy.

And then their Lawgiver must have made a pronouncement, because they started going out and hunting me, and although I’d had to learn some woodcraft the hard way, their hunters were always going to be better at it.

I ran—I could run by then, better fed and better shod than I had been for a long time. For a whole day they chased me, and I didn’t make it easy for them. I wasn’t some beast to just charge headlong away from their shouts and torches and sticks beating against the branches. I doubled back, I hid, I led them towards where real predators laired. I didn’t recognise myself in that mad pursuit. I made them my enemies in my head, as though they had wronged me. I took up a sharp branch and resolved that I would do mischief to any of them to fall within my power. I had been helpless for so long, ever since stupid Doctor Corto had left his stupid Severance mixture bubbling away untended. I was going to take back control, in blood if I had to.

And then I had my chance, because one of their hunters ended up going down a slope badly and twisting her knee against a tree. She’d been ahead or away from the others, and when she called out for aid, I was the first one who heard. I remember very clearly: me cresting the rise, looking down on her, my jagged branch in hand. Her round face, so much white around her eyes as she stared. She had broken her spear when she fell, and the end she thrust towards me was little more than a knife.

I wanted to make her scared, to threaten her or make a terrifying face or brandish my stick, but she was already plenty scared without me doing anything. The mere fact of me was terrifying, like a corpse come to life or something met in a bad dream.

Any desire to hurt her, or anyone, died in that moment, and instead I just sat down and started crying. I felt empty inside, not for food but because this was the first human being I had come face-to-face with in ages and no matter how close I came, even onto the end of her half spear, there would still be an insuperable distance between us.

“What do you want?” she demanded, and I started. I had almost forgotten what it was like to be talked to. I had to reach deep inside myself to find words.

“I’ll go,” I told her. “But tell me where I can go. Some other village. Just give me somewhere to head for.” All that mischief I had wanted to make, all the vengeful glee at taking away the trappings of their comfortable lives, it left me all at once and I was just exhausted, tired of being hunted, tired of being hated.

She stared at me for a long time, as though trying to see me differently, like a person. Like a boy scarcely sixteen, painfully gaunt with his face streaked with dirt and tears.

“If you go the way the sun rises, there’s Divo,” she told me. “The way the Haffet flowers grow. Divo’s bigger than we are. They’ll have more for you.” And that was a lie, but she was desperate.

“I’m sorry,” I told her. “I just . . . I’m so hungry. It’s hard. It’s too hard.” I could hear others from the hunting party calling now. I couldn’t just sit here and talk, but the words kept tumbling out of me as though trying to escape. I could see her frowning and squinting like someone trying to bring my predicament into focus. She wanted to understand what I meant, what it was to be me, but she couldn’t. She would have an easier time understanding an Arraclid or a Sherb.

And so I accepted that I had outstayed my welcome at Cro and moved on to Divo, which in fact was smaller and harder to get at, nestled in between hills overgrown with a thorny vine I saw nowhere else. I had lean pickings there but the Divo folk had a similar problem, short of good grazing and farming land. They brewed various goods out of a score of plants, some strange, others familiar but put to novel uses. These they traded for surplus from Cro and a half dozen other communities, and in this way I drifted from place to place, taking what I could, moving on when my feeble depredations were noticed. It kept me alive, but more than that it gave me a purpose and a feeling that I had some control over my life. Better a thief than a corpse, yes, but better a thief than a beggar as well. The world finds it harder to say no to a thief.

So it went until I came to Orovo, which was the largest place I’ve ever seen, surely five times the size of Cro, which itself was bigger than ever Aro was. And at Orovo, my life would change again, though I won’t say I gained any more control over it. Orovo was a place of strange ideas, because it was where Iblis lived.

V.

OROVO MIGHT COVER FIVE times the area of Cro, but it crammed even more people into that area than you’d think. They’d built houses in between their houses, and some of the newest buildings—some still being completed—were very different to anything I’d seen before. I didn’t know it, but they were different to anything there had been before. They were houses built on top of houses, so that the people who lived in the top part went up a ramp or steps to get to their door, and the people who lived below must have heard them clumping about on the ceiling every night and morning. It was all to claw more space without spreading Orovo’s boundaries even further, and even then it was too little, too late. Orovo folk just liked having kids, I think, and so had their Ma’s, and so had theirs before them. There were more people in Orovo than they could easily feed or house or find a use for. The woods had been cut back all around the town for fields, and beyond that they had been hunted until nothing bigger than a Hegelworm was left.

Now normally this isn’t a thing that happens, although I had never asked myself why. Villages only grow slowly, enough that the farming and the hunting could keep up with demands. You almost never see a place like Orovo where too many kids a generation ago means way too many today, and most of them having kids themselves. At the time I couldn’t even understand that something had gone wrong, but now I reckon that, a generation back, something got botched. Maybe they had an Architect who went odd like our Doctor Corto, or more likely there was a problem with the hive itself, that meant it missed what was happening or wasn’t able to correct folk, but by the time things straightened themselves out, the place was too big, the people too many, for the usual controls to get things back in hand. Or that’s what I think now, knowing what I do.

But they were in dire straits right then, in need of some sideways thinking—that was Iblis’s term for it. And I still don’t know whether Iblis herself was born, pure good fortune giving rise to someone who could think in just the right way, or whether the tree and the hive at Orovo had somehow made her. It was enough that the Electors, when they had gone hunting a new candidate for Architect, had found her, and known she was what the village needed.

Iblis was a tall woman with a high forehead that was knuckled out across most of its breadth by the whorls and knots of the ghost’s dwelling. She still had both her eyes, but the left one didn’t focus and roamed about independently of its neighbour. Her ghost was the Architect, who has responsibility for long-term planning of the community, making pronouncements on where to build, where to farm, that sort of thing. Architects aren’t like doctors and lawgivers, who get called on every day for this or that. They get to live most of their lives in peace, and maybe some of them don’t get called on for whole years at a time. Iblis wasn’t one of the lucky, lazy ones, though. I never knew anyone who worked harder. I don’t think she ever slept.

Most of what struck me about Orovo was due to her innovation—the way the buildings were packed in, the new tall houses, all of it stopgap measures because a whole load of people had pretty much been born on the streets. None of it would feed all the mouths, though, and so Iblis’s ghost had given her a new directive that she was trying to make happen right about when I saw her community.

When I came to it, though, none of it this was known to me and I had no idea who she was. I was just there to skulk and steal, as I had in a half dozen villages before. Orovo looked a good prospect because it was so big, and because the houses were packed into a close maze where I reckoned I could lose anyone chasing me. I couldn’t look over the place from the trees, like I’d been used to doing, but there was so much farmland that I could creep in as dusk drew on, padding barefoot down the irrigation channels and keeping out of sight. As I reached the first houses, I began to feel the sheer number of people all around. Even though it was getting dark I could hear voices from all directions, feet, doors, querns grinding grain, the whistles and heckles of livestock being driven to slaughter. Orovo never truly went to sleep.

But then I smelled something that seemed to run right up my guts like a knife blade. I had no idea what it was, but it smelled like food, and nothing had smelled like that to me for years. Everything smelled wrong, since the accident. Food I’d loved turned my stomach, and even the bread I had lived on had the scent and savour of dust. This, though! This filled my mouth with saliva and my stomach with craving. My mind barely had a say in how I reacted.

I changed course and tried to track down where the scent was coming from. I couldn’t have done anything else. At first I was stealthy, expecting a trap. As I got closer and my nose got a better whiff of it, I started moving faster, more and more desperate. I just knew that if I could find some of that whatever-it-was and get it into my body then surely I wouldn’t be hungry, not even a little bit. I would eat like a normal person for once, and even if it was just the once it would be worth it.

I was curving back into the outskirts of Orovo, practically running flat out now. Ahead was a fenced compound—not actually closed off, but almost, and most definitely separate from the rest of the community. The one way in and out faced away from the centre, out across the fields to the distant tree line. It was occupied by about twenty people, and there was a big cauldron there, a doctor’s cauldron of treated palewood that should have woken all manner of bad memories in me. Hunger trumped them all, though, and I just barreled into that enclosure with all caution stripped from me. If it had been a trap, I’d have been caught.

And then, too late for second thoughts, I was brought up short at the sight of my fellow guests. They were all men, ragged and dirty, and just about all older than me. Almost all were starveling thin, too. I saw gaunt faces aplenty, hollow eyes, legs and arms where the knee or the elbow was the thickest part. And I saw red, so much red on them. Some had the mark across their faces, so all might know them at a glance (not that there was much chance of mistake). Others hid most of their branding under torn, filthy clothing, but look hard enough and it was always there. Every man of them had been daubed with the Severance. They were outcasts, too, just like me.

And past them I could see the locals—most outside the fence but a handful inside. They were handing out bowls and ladling great slopping spoons of something from that cauldron. I saw two ghost-bearers among them. One was a woolly haired man whose skull was swollen entirely out of shape, lopsided and craggy. He was tending the cauldron and I guessed was the local doctor (in fact he was one of three, for the Orovo hive had belatedly recognised its expanded congregation and begun sending out extra Electors to keep up). The other was a tall woman, and this was Architect Iblis, though I wouldn’t hear the name yet.

All I knew was that we were being fed, and my shrunken stomach wanted to shoulder its way through the wretched band of others to get to the front. I could have done it, too. Most of the other outcasts were thinner than I. There was another man there, though, tall and burly and far stronger-looking. His hands were scarlet to the elbows, and he wore a robe stitched together from what I reckoned was hide, seeming very flimsy and yet without a single tear or darn in it. He had a staff made out of hard silvery stuff I never saw before. He was keeping order there, for the outcasts, making sure nobody shoved and everyone got a bowl. I was scared of him then, and waited my turn despite the gnawing in my guts.

At last I got my bowl and was about to just upend it into my gullet, but a bitter thought had been growing in my head while I waited. Why would Orovo be feeding outcasts? Surely we were as hated here as anywhere? A glance at the locals confirmed it. They might be giving us stew, but they were watching us as though we might run mad at any time. They didn’t like having us around, and yet here we were.

With that, I poked at the delicious-smelling food suspiciously. Perhaps Orovo had a big outcast problem, which seemed entirely plausible given that I had turned up intending to be a problem. And perhaps they had decided to solve that problem without going to the trouble of hunting us all down.

I was caught in an agony of indecision because my stomach wanted me to guzzle it down and poison be damned, but I had just enough mind left to fear ending up like Sethr, my innards blown out by something fatal to my digestion.

A hand fell on my shoulder—a red hand. I looked up and flinched back from the big outcast, wondering wildly how recently he must have been Severed to be so strong, so vital. He didn’t look starved at all.

He was stark bald, probably around thirty, the point in life when a man isn’t weak, but isn’t getting any stronger. He had the steadiest gaze I ever saw.

“Eat,” he told me. “It’s safe.” And he swallowed a mouthful of his own to show me. All around, the other outcasts weren’t holding back, and though I knew poisons could be slow, at least none of them was dropping dead there and then.

And so I gave in and gulped it down, and it was good! For the first time in years it was good, and it sat so well in my stomach and made me feel full, almost overstuffed. I could barely finish it. I grinned through greasy chops at the big outcast and he grinned back.

“It’s good you thought about it, though,” he said. “Shows you’ve still got some you up there. Not just a beast yet, eh?” He tapped my forehead with a hard finger. “Stick with me, boy. I’ll look after you. You remember your name still?”

“Handry.”

“Sharskin.” He jabbed himself in the chest. “You come here to work?”

“Work?” I was slow to speak, partly because I was licking the bowl clean, partly because talking to another human being was a rusty old skill that was slow to come back to me.

At around that time the ghost-bearer woman, Iblis, came up and leant on the fence, waving to catch our attention. Sharskin leant in to me.

“Most of us have heard this three, four times now. You’ll hear it every evening, but this time just listen. This meal isn’t a gift, it’s a trade. You don’t pull your weight tomorrow, they’ll drive you away before dinner and nobody will lift a finger to stop them.”

Iblis stood before us without really looking at any of us as individuals. I think what she mostly saw was her plan, which was part hers and part the ghost’s. “Welcome to Orovo,” she told us. “See here: we have food for you. My doctor brews it specially for your stomachs. Smells weird, doesn’t it? Or perhaps to you it smells good.” And she was right at that, it certainly did. Seeing our reactions she smiled lopsidedly, because some of her mouth had been trapped closed by the ghost when it came to her, and because, I suspect, she was not very good at smiling. “You came here to work,” she told us. “You didn’t know that. Now you do. Work, and we feed you as long as we need the work. Better than starving? Of course. For the new ones, we’ll take you out into the woods tomorrow. You’ll get some sticks and stones. You’ll kill some animals for us. Work and get fed. You understand?”

She spoke very loud, as though we were deaf or stupid. Looking on us, there was a part of her brain trying to recognise the mob in front of her as people and not finding what it sought in us. The Severance blinded her to us as human beings, but she was someone who could think around things like that, hence this whole plan.

“What work? What animals? Why?” I asked Sharskin, because he was still at my shoulder. His smile suggested most of my fellows hadn’t even thought to ask.

That night, gathered around a fire that Iblis’s people had lit for us, belly full for the first time in an age, I lay beside Sharskin and listened to him explain the grand plan for Orovo as we looked up at the stars.

“Village like this, it gets too big, there’s a procedure,” he told me. “Architect ghost hears from lawgiver they’ve got too many mouths to feed, sets it in motion.”

I’d started to wonder how Orovo had got that way and asked if maybe their ghosts had gone wrong. He gave me that sharp grin again, as though the whole business had been a test I’d passed.

“I reckon you’re right,” he said. “So now they’re following the procedure while everyone here starves. Lucky they’ve got this Iblis who can think around the ghost. Ghosts aren’t good at the unexpected.”

“I thought the ghosts knew everything,” I said, and then I told him about Doctor Corto, which was the only time I knew where the ghost had failed, and that was its bearer’s fault, not its own.

“Happens more than you’d think,” Sharskin told me darkly. “Carrying a ghost, it’s not good for you. Most of them don’t get that old. But here, the ghost wasn’t up to sorting out the mess, so Iblis had to work round it. You listen to them talk sometime, it and her. She fights it.” He sounded mightily approving.

“So what’s the procedure?” I asked him.

“Birth a new village, of course.”

I half sat up and stared at him. “That can happen?”

“How’d you think villages got there in the first place?”

I had never thought about it, and it must have showed on my face because he shook his head wryly.

“They’ve found a tree, and the hive here will send a bunch of special wasps to start up a new one. I reckon they’ll take some of the spare doctors and a lawgiver from Orovo, and whoever has to move will get to work as hard as we will tomorrow, to clear the land, build it and plant it. Difference is, they get to keep what they work for.”

“And what’s our part in this?”

“Our part is where Iblis comes in. That tree they’ve found isn’t just free for the grabbing, and she’s worked out that animals don’t like us—not the way we smell, not the way we taste. We get to go raise a stink at the new tree to drive out the neighbours. That way, Orovo’s precious settlers don’t get got. You’d think they wouldn’t care so much. Not like they’re short of folk, is it?”

I laughed nervously and agreed with him. Sharskin was someone you wanted to agree with.

Iblis and her ghost had just about taken over Orovo and she was ruthless in making the plan work. She had in her head a complete list of every single inhabitant of her community and what they could do, and she had worked out who needed to stay and who must go, to leave them with two whole communities. Families were going to get cut in half, friends parted from friends, people dragged from their homes, all on her word. I saw her talking to her own people, later on, and there wasn’t much more warmth in it than when she spoke to us. But she was who they needed; the Electors had chosen well. In some other season perhaps she would have been an outcast herself, someone who just wouldn’t fit with the people around her until they drove her out. Right now she was Orovo’s saviour.

Sharskin told me all of this, in the pleasant warmth of the fire, and then he pointed up, past the scraps of cloud scudding across the sky. “You see out there?”

“The stars?”

“Stars, right. You ever wonder what they’re for, boy?”

It didn’t seem a meaningful question. I could only stare at him, and his look in return was faintly disappointed.

* * *

We set out the next morning before full light, a ragged, emaciated band of animal-killers. A few of Iblis’s people went with us, mostly hunters tasked with showing us the way. The fighting would be our task.

I was amazed anyone would expect us to do it, weak and spindly as we were, but there was a hot meal waiting for the survivors and that lent strength to us. More, we had a purpose. For a fleeting moment we were part of something, like we all had been once. I can’t speak for all the rest, and certainly not for Sharskin, but there was pride in what I was about. For all I was raising my hand for a village not my own, and a village that would disown me the moment we had done, I felt good about myself. I took my staff and my pouch of stones and I used them with a will.

Most of the beasts had been chased from the tree already. The forest there had its herds and its big predators, but enough humans will drive away most things. We had a couple of Arraclids turn up while I was there, but one just ran off the moment it got a look at what was going on, and the other one, a bit smaller and obviously far less intelligent, got caught stalking one of us and we beat it to death. But if it had just been Arraclids, Iblis wouldn’t have needed us.

This tree was the one she had to have, apparently—according to the ghost and the hive back at Orovo, this was the optimum heart of their new community. However, it was already claimed by a clan of Harboons and they weren’t giving it up just because a bunch of people wanted it.

I’d never met Harboons before, though one of the other outcasts said they’re so common southaways that people can barely live there without being at war with them. They’re a little smaller than a man, and the top and bottom pairs of their legs are for clinging to branches. Instead of just the two toes most everything else has, they’ve kind of got a third one made from part of their hands or feet or whatever they are, so they’re quick as anything in the trees, though they’re slow and clumsy if you get them on the ground. They’ve got a bendy neck and a head where the top and bottom eyes face front but the side ones wave about on stalks, so you can’t creep up on them easily, and their mouth-hands are short and dexterous. They had this trick where they could spit thorns they’d gathered from the briars they’d trained to climb up their tree—poison thorns. Iblis’s people got sick when they got stuck with them, but we outcasts barely felt them, and our stones hurt them a whole lot more.

We had to go up into the tree after them, though, where the Harboons had built a whole load of little stick houses they lived in. That wasn’t fun for anyone, because although their top and bottom hands were good for nothing but climbing about, the middle set had a kind of forked claw on the end of each arm that they used for cutting up bark to get at whatever was beneath. They used them for cutting up us, too, if they could, and they were smart about it, attacking from above and below and decoying people off into ambushes. Many of us died, we outcasts.

I would have died myself. I was stronger than most of us, but that just meant I ended up in the toughest fixes more often. More than once I found myself about to be cut off from the rest, with Harboons hissing and shrieking at me from their breathing holes, hacking at me with their claws or spitting thorns at my eyes. Sharskin was always there, though. Sharskin was a fighter; he’d had plenty of practice. He was a dead shot with a sling and he could wield his silver staff with force and accuracy to shame the rest of us. And he was a leader, too. I remember his voice bellowing encouragement as we drove the Harboons from branch after branch, breaking down their flimsy houses and throwing their eggs to break on the ground. He worried Iblis and her people, but we outcasts were in awe of him.

We worked for Orovo for eight days, making war on the Harboons. More outcasts kept turning up, lured by the scent of the food, and stayed on as long as the work was needed. And plenty died so that Orovo’s child-community would live, but that was the deal Iblis held out, and there was no way we were going to win any more than that. Our lives were most of what we had to give.

Iblis came to the new tree a few times, towards the end of it. She would stand, looking up into branches now mostly denuded of Harboon nests, talking to herself. I crept close and listened a few times and found her deep in discussion with her ghost.

“Substitute Harko, San, Morrey for Lumas and Leda,” she said into the air, and then the ghostlight flared about her forehead and jaw and more words came, same voice but even flatter and more discordant. “Prognosis resource collection drop food zero point zero two.” And Iblis would blink her good eye while her left rolled about like a Yertle on its back, and say, “Retain substitution reallocate Ghortomar and Hekki to general gathering category.” And again the light, and the ghost using her mouth to tell her, “Prognosis resource collection increase food zero point zero zero zero four crafting efficiency drop furnishings and small wood items point zero seven three.” Then she came back with, “Calculate furnishings and small wood items overstock availability,” and there would be another answer and probably I am not remembering the exact words because I didn’t understand them. What I did understand was what the conversation meant. Iblis was not doing what the ghost wanted. Other than Melory, that one night when she told me to flee, I had never seen anyone go against a ghost. Of course Iblis wasn’t fighting it outright, like Melory had, but she was negotiating with it on its own terms. I don’t know what it was like to be Iblis, and what it had been like before the Elector stung her, but somehow she could see all of what the ghost told her, like a picture in her head, perhaps, and grasp it all. And that meant she could talk back to her ghost and make it change its decision so that she could make the new community work better for her and her people, not just what the ghost wanted. I remembered Sharskin saying how they were just cutting themselves in half, heedless of families and bonds, and I reckoned that each morning Iblis had a whole queue of people telling her just why they should or shouldn’t go to the new place, and here she was trying out different arrangements of people in her head, letting the ghost tell her how each one would work out. And it was plain she wasn’t just wheedling for special treatment, but that she would make the decision and the ghost would just advise.

Then she saw me—and not just her, because a couple of the hunters were hurrying over to protect her in case I meant trouble. Iblis wasn’t scared of me, though, just cocked her head at me and said, “Yes?” in that abrupt way she had with everyone.

“When the work is done,” I asked her, “can you still feed us? We’ll work for you. We can drive off other animals, help you . . . any way you need.” Because I could see we were almost done and, more than most of my fellows, I could look ahead beyond that.

Iblis stared at me and then blinked, one eye first, the other following lazily. “The benefits are insufficient,” she told me. It took me a moment to understand I was being told “no.”

“But . . .” I tried, without really having an argument to follow the trailing word.

“Inability to integrate with the community outweighs your specialist utility,” she told me, ghost words and human words mingling together like they did in her head. And then: “I looked at the parameters. I can’t make it viable.”

I went off to chew over her meaning, in case I had misunderstood her tone. It all boiled down to “no,” though. When Orovo didn’t need us, it wouldn’t feed us, and if we stayed around, then no doubt we’d be driven off or even killed. I would be back to wandering and stealing for as long as that would keep me together, and then no doubt I would die.

There was a definite air of festival on the last day, when the surviving Harboons finally gave up their claim to the tree and scrambled off through the forest, pursued by our stones. The Orovo folk had dancing and music, and plenty of them ended up doing things that would only add to their population problem. We outcasts got to watch all of that as we took our last meal of that good stuff Orovo’s doctor cooked up, because Iblis was as good as her word went, even though she could have had us driven off the moment we’d done our job. Tomorrow would suffice for that, though. And if we weren’t exactly celebrated heroes, we were at least left to our own devices for the night.

Sharskin came to find me after we’d been fed. I’d been expecting him. I thought he wanted to lie with me like some men preferred, and though that had never been for me, I would have gone with him gladly. Human contact was human contact, and he was strong and charismatic and clever, and so choosing me would be the sort of compliment my life had been very short of.

He wanted to talk, though, and what he had to say was pure intoxicating madness.

“Handry, you should come with me when we leave here.”

I eyed him, still thinking this was about lust and companionship and knowing that two outcasts just meant two mouths for the same meagre amount of food we could scrounge. And he was stronger than me, so it wasn’t as though I could keep him from taking more than his share if he’d wanted.

“You’re better than most of these walking corpses,” he said. “You, Ostel, Menic, you’ve all been Severed for a while and lived. The rest would starve before they reached where we’re going. I can’t save them.”

My bafflement must have communicated itself through my expression because he grinned at me. “Come on, Handry, you’re a boy who asks questions of the world. Rare and valuable, that is. So ask.”

“Go with you where?”

“No, ask!” He gripped me by the shoulder, hard enough to hurt. “Ask what the point of it is, what we’re for, what being outcast means!”

“I don’t know any of those things,” I complained. “How can I?” And yet I was thinking, even then, that I’d never even thought to question it. “We’re just cut off. We’ve had our . . . human-ness taken from us. We’re broken.”

“No!” Sharskin hissed, his pincer grip tightening until I squirmed. “That’s their lie, Handry. We’ve not been made less, we’ve been restored. We are finally how we’re meant to be.” His wide eyes pinned me, cutting past my incredulous gawping. “There’s a place we can go, Handry. Those who are strong and resourceful enough to go there. We can live there. There’s food and shelter. There are others like us. A community of those who’ve been cast out. How does that sound, boy?”

“Impossible,” I blurted out, and he laughed.

“Well, no wonder, with that attitude! But it’s true. Come with me and do what I tell you, I’ll take you there. You can be one of us.”

“One of what?” My mouth was still making words even though my mind was already convinced. Of course I would go with Sharskin. I would follow him forever, because he had answers and confidence and vision, more than anyone else I ever met. Sincerity blazed in his face like ghostlight.

“This,” he told me, raising his red-stained hands, “this is the Mark of Cain. That’s what our ancestors called it. But because of this mark, it means we’re restored to the Original Condition.” He said the words with weight, making them names for great invisible things I couldn’t guess at. “We’re the real people, Handry, now all that ghost-taint is stripped from us. Don’t think of yourself as broken or wrong. You’re how a man is supposed to be.”

I felt something inside me, swelling until it hurt, as though I was Sethr with his bloated stomach. It was my heart, though. It was my pride. Here was this man, so impossibly healthy for an outcast, so in control of his own journey, telling me I was special. He was saying the things that marked me out, made me better, not just a reject abandoned to die. Of course I’d go with him. How could I not? Tell me you wouldn’t, if you’d lived like me, and I’ll call you a liar here and now. A little kindness, that was all it took to make me his; kindness, and the fact that he understood what it was like. Even Melory couldn’t know that, not since the ghost came to her, despite all the years we’d spent in each other’s shadow.

Next morning, along with Ostel and Menic, I left Orovo in Sharskin’s company, striding out into the wilderness with a direction and purpose I’d long been lacking.

VI.

OSTEL WAS A TALL, skinny man—skinny before they had Severed him, even skinnier now. His village had been some place called Pavo that I hadn’t been to, and their Lawgiver had got creative with the Severance, daubing it in patterns on his face and chest so that he wouldn’t ever be able to hide what they’d done to him. As though any of us ever could. As though, even wrapped in thick hide from head to foot, it wouldn’t scream out at every normal person that we weren’t one of them. But that artistic streak was probably why Ostel was still alive, seasons after being cast out, because the Severance hadn’t quite taken, just like with me. Even though—unlike me—they really had meant to cut him off forever. Just what he’d done that they’d Severed him, he never said. It wasn’t a question most people would answer. We liked to think of ourselves as the wronged, the rebels. I really was blameless, but it was a story borrowed around all of Sharskin’s followers, and they couldn’t all of them have been mistakes. Nobody wanted to remember that they’d brought it upon themselves.

Menic was shorter and broader. He’d been strong before they Severed him and not been outcast long, so he’d kept most of that muscle. A man like that, fit and well, you’d think I’d remember him from the fighting, but somehow I couldn’t recall him at my shoulder as we drove the animals out of the tree. I began to have my suspicions about just why he’d been thrown out of wherever he came from, and they were confirmed soon enough.

It started the first night after we left Orovo when Sharskin asked him to build up a fire while Ostel and I went foraging for what we could find. Feeding the four of us was tricky because we all reacted to different berries and roots and grubs in different ways, which meant whoever went out had to gather a bit of everything those parts had to offer and hope there would be something everyone could stomach. The two of us got back in the dark to find Sharskin asking Menic where the fire was. Menic made himself look simple and just muttered that he wasn’t any good at building fires, never had been, so very sorry. So Sharskin made the fire, and lit it, too, through some trick of his that wasn’t anything like the fooling with sticks and stones that hunters did. Menic was good at eating, and he’d chew over just about everything even if he spat it out, and I remember Sharskin watching him across the fire, expressionless. Ostel and I could see just what was going on and we expected some sharp words from our guide and leader, but Sharskin said nothing. We didn’t realise he was counting, inside his head. That was one.

The next day we set a punishing pace through the forest, interrupted only when we had a face-off with a big Sevner, the largest I ever saw. It had been stripping a tree with its pincered trunk, but it obviously decided we were bad news when we broke through some undergrowth behind it. It was large as the house I’d lived in with Melory, hump-backed and solid on its six tubular legs, with its fat tail curving down to make a seventh. It tossed its head in the air, brandishing the forked horn that jutted an arm’s length from over its top eye, and trumpeted at us from the slits in its flanks.

Sevners look slow, but they can chase a man down when their blood’s up, and this one was plainly in no mood for us. Our Severed smell, that most animals would rather avoid, had obviously riled it; we had no choice but to scare it off. We set up a-hollering and a-hooting, and then Ostel and I started throwing stones, aiming at whichever of its eyes was turned towards us. Sharskin himself just strode forwards, arms out wide with his big sleeves flapping, waving his shining staff so that the sunlight glittered and dazzled across its big, dumb-looking face.

I thought he was going to get stomped flat because for a moment the Sevner was bunching up its legs to charge him down. Then it changed its mind and shouldered off into the trees, squealing in panic and cracking the trunks with its weight.

I remember Menic had been at the back, though he’d done his share of the hollering at the start. It hadn’t come to a fight and Sharskin said nothing, but he was counting and that was two.

That evening, though, he had Ostel build the fire and told Menic to go gather for us, and that was apparently too much.

“Go gather yourself,” Menic told him, sitting down and warming his hands. “You wanted me to come with you. Wasn’t my idea. So, here I am. You got what you want.”

Sharskin stood very still, and that was three and enough. Ostel and I took a prudent step away, because we both reckoned Menic was going to get a slap, and then maybe the two of them would end up scrapping because Sharskin was strong, too, and he’d want to beat some sense into our travelling companion. We were slightly right but mostly wrong.

Sharskin hit him with that silver staff, just flourished it in the firelight and whacked Menic in the side of the head with it, with all his strength. I heard the man’s skull crack like a pot and he had a heartbeat and a half of rolling on the ground and screaming before Sharskin rammed the end of that staff through Menic’s eye, pinning his spasming body to the ground and turning the scream into a deflating wheeze of breath that soon became nothing at all.

Ostel and I were frozen, staring at what he’d done. Sharskin turned towards us, staff still gory with Menic’s brains. His face was hard and I could see many things in his eyes, but no ghosts. He seemed the utter antithesis of all we had known before our Severance, the Outcast personified, brutal, mysterious and free of the shackles of others.

“Listen to me,” he directed us sternly, and we listened.

“We are cast out, all of us,” he told us. “See what that means? No lawgiver will come save you. No community will step in to provide for you or protect you, save that which we make together. Leave me and starve, if you will. Walk away now, and take your chances with the cold and the beasts, and with them,” and he jabbed his bloody staff back towards Orovo, “who will never take you back, and never accept you, and in the end won’t even suffer you to live. Or stay with me and obey me, for to me is given wisdom and truth.”

He paused, as though there was some real chance of either of us just wandering off at that point. He had just bludgeoned our companion to death, it was true, and might do the same to either of us while we slept or on the trail; for some infraction, real or imagined; for no reason at all. But he spoke fire. He spoke lightning. His words were like a door through which we could glimpse . . . ancient things, secret things. And what else did we have save the hunger and the cold?

“What wisdom?” whispered Ostel, who was bolder than I in that moment. His tone admitted of no doubt, just a desperate wish to know.

“What our ancestors knew, and what they have forgotten, and what the ghosts will never tell them,” Sharskin breathed. “There is a word for what I am that you have never heard before, a word our ancestors knew back when they knew all things and were great and strong. Priest, that word is. Priest, I name myself, for I have heard the voices of our ancestors and been given their secrets. I am the one true priest, the sole inheritor of our ancestors’ greatness, and to me is given the task of changing the world. To me, and to those others who bear the Mark of Cain. Remember what I told you, Handry? This mark, that cut us off from our kin and left us with all men’s hands raised against us, this is a badge of pride. This is the restoration of our birthright, freedom from the tyranny of the ghosts. This does not cast us down, it raises us up so that we may once again approach the power and majesty our ancestors knew, before they fell from grace.” His smile was brilliant, as hard to look at as the sun. “Now, will you follow where I lead?”

He knew we would; we knew we would, but there is a special magic in saying so, binding yourself with word and thought to another man’s purpose. From that moment, as Ostel and I tried to outdo ourselves with our babbling pledges, we were his followers and members of his congregation.

With Menic left behind, our journey proceeded more swiftly and smoothly. There was a moment, though, when Ostel almost tripped himself over the dead body. The stories we had told each other as children were true, I discovered: there was one flesh an outcast could eat without sickening. Ostel wanted to butcher Menic and take the meat, looking for a couple of nights of full bellies and not having to break his fingernails scratching in the earth for roots.

But Sharskin would not have it. He did not strike Ostel but his disapproval alone was enough to make the man cringe.

“He was lazy and worthless,” was Sharskin’s epitaph for Menic, “but he was one of us. We are a select brotherhood. We do not eat the flesh of our own.”

“But . . .” Ostel waved a shaking hand at the cold corpse.

“Hold out, my friend,” Sharskin said, gripping him by the shoulder. “There will be food, where we’re going. When we reach the House of our Ancestors you’ll never want for it. You think I grew strong on twigs and worms? But not our own. It is forbidden.”

So we followed him into the wilderness, watching no further ahead than his footprints as he navigated by sun and stars. We made his fire and kept his watch, scavenged for scraps to feed us, and Sharskin lit the fire with a bright square he held cupped in one hand and took the lead when we found some beast that wanted to challenge us. Each night he told us more of the same tale. Yes, the world had turned against us, but it wasn’t some stupid accident or punishment for our crimes. We were important, singled out as special for all the world. And yes, that meant hardship and tribulation, but it was for a purpose. We were marked out to bear a burden by our ancestors, who recognised in us the strength to do their will. And how much better it was to suffer because I was special, than just because I’d been a clumsy fool once when I was thirteen!

We skirted a couple of other communities on the way, both big ones, though smaller than Orovo had been. Then we found the first abandoned one, and that brought us up short. I had seen how a village was born; I had not thought they could die.

Sharskin gave us some small time to pick through the wreckage. The tree at its centre had burned long ago, and the houses were empty and decaying. They were not quite like the buildings of Aro or other living communities, though not a world away from them, as though the architect hadn’t quite known how houses were supposed to be. There were some bones, too—human rather than the open lattice bones of animals. I poked about around the base of the scorched tree, finding the scars of an aborted attempt to cut it down before the fire was set. Most of the bones were around there. I found one skull where half the bone was just eaten away, riddled with holes all about one side, and tried to imagine the ghostlight flickering there.

When Ostel and I had tried and failed to satisfy our curiosity, we returned to face Sharskin’s quizzical gaze. If he was expecting us to have solved the mystery, he was to be disappointed.

The next village we found was also dead but the tree was not. Instead it was diseased, the trunk warty and puffed out with boils. The houses looked as fallen-in and rotten as the last lot, perhaps even more so, but we could not go close to investigate. The air was thick with big, barbed wasps issuing from all those nodules on the trunk, hives and hives and hives of them. We saw a few dead animals closer in, the wasps busily stripping them down and crawling in the hollows of their skeletons. Neither of us wanted to see if the world’s antipathy for us would ward their stings away, and certainly Sharskin was keeping a prudent distance. I never knew whether the ruins and the undergrowth concealed a trove of more human remains or whether the inhabitants had time to flee the horror that had taken over their tree.

“Something is there that destroys communities, some malaise,” I speculated.

Sharskin grinned a little. “You think so?”

“Or something was here,” I corrected myself. “Once. These are old places.”

“Half the answer, that is,” Sharskin told me. “Right lines, boy, but wrong conclusion. But you’ll understand it all. I’ll teach you what went on here, back then. Just a little, and the rest will come to you in a flash, you’ll see.”

We avoided another dead village, all overgrown with creepers and brambles, and dead for no reason we could see, save that Sharskin kept a good distance from it. That night, though, we camped in the shadow of a tree surrounded by a different sort of ruins.

People had lived here, though we saw no signs that this was where they had died. We lit our fire at the base of a tree that seemed the same type a village would grow around, just like the virgin one that Iblis and her ghost had picked out. At the base of its lowest branches I could make out a swelling, as though a hive had begun there and failed.

The houses that had been raised here were not like those I knew, or even like the clumsy imitations I had seen so recently as ruins. There was little left, but Ostel and I found thin struts of a stuff like Sharskin’s staff, that he called metal, though they were corroded away until we could snap them with our fingers. There was cloth there, too, or perhaps the hide of no creature I ever saw, thin and rotting, but plainly something that had been stretched between the metal to form a makeshift roof. It shredded to dust when we pulled at it.

Ostel was thoroughly spooked by this. Back where he came from, which was a very long way indeed, his village told stories about further communities still where animals lived like men and built their own houses, and these new ruins were solid proof of that as far as he was concerned.

“What beasts made this?” he asked in fascinated horror. “Are they still here? Did they go back to the wild?”

“No beasts,” Sharskin told him, standing up from the fireside to take in all the tangled wreck with a sweep of his staff. “This was one of the first homes of our ancestors, once they left their great House to come out into the world. This was where the real humans lived, before they became slaves to ghosts. Probably they died, too.” He did not sound very sorry about it. “But they had already gone astray,” and he jabbed at the failed hive on the tree. “They had lost sight of their destiny.” His grin came back, but the light of the fire made it look awful and majestic. “I shall show you the true wonder of our forebears, my friends. You will be elevated, as I was. I will show you how much more humanity should be, than what it has become.”

“And food?” Ostel asked plaintively.

“Like you never tasted,” Sharskin promised.

* * *

“If you listened to the ghosts for a hundred years, you would never come to this place,” he told us the next day. “I will initiate you into the world’s greatest secret, that the ghosts would go to any lengths to conceal from you.”

“Because people died here?” I guessed.

Sharskin’s scornful look hurt me more than a blow. “People die, boy. That’s what happens to people. They die everywhere, and nobody died near here in a long, long time. The ghosts don’t want us here because they know we would not accept their chains if we knew the truth about ourselves and where we came from. But you’ll see, both of you. You’ll see the House of our Ancestors, and you’ll know the greatness you were born to inherit.”

For the best part of that day we travelled, cutting straight between the trees, and for most of that day we were looking right at our destination without realising it. I took it for a hill grown over with vines, moss and small trees, webbed with clutching roots hunting out soil across its surface. Surely Sharskin’s mysterious home must be just on the far side of it, for his quickened pace showed we were nearly there.

And yet it was strange, that hill. There was an odd regularity to the curve of it, despite nature’s attempts to bury what lay there, and there were projections as well, which at first seemed merely rocks scattered down its slope, but set out in patterns. Despite all the encrusting foliage, I was reading meaning into every line of what I saw.

I stopped walking. Sharskin and Ostel carried on a few steps and then looked back at me. I was trying to picture something in my head: something of the hill’s size, and decorated with . . . spikes? Fins? Whatever they had been, time had ground them down and broken them off, yet been unable to erase them.

“Is it . . . ?” I stared wildly at Sharskin. “It can’t be a house.” The hill was larger than my village.

But Sharskin was smiling at me, more approval for me to bask in. “It is,” he confirmed. “It is the House of our Ancestors, Handry. Can you believe it?”

“Barely,” I confessed. “How could anyone build so large? And there’s no tree, no fields?” Everything I saw was different to everything I knew. I could feel my mind stretch, yet not wide enough to swallow what I was being told.

“Oh, Handry!” Sharskin laughed at my expression, not meanly but because he was brimming with revelation he wanted to share with me. “You don’t know even a fragment of it! Yes, this is their House, that they built so grandly, but any man can imagine a bigger house. That’s no great dream, that’s not what made our ancestors the giants they were! Let me tell you their greatest feat, Handry. This house of theirs, they did not even build it here. It moved! Long ago, they raised this great hall and lived within it and moved it, so that it could bring them here from far away!” His voice rolled out through the forest, over the mound where our ancestors had dwelled. “It came from the night sky, my friends! It moved through the great darkness of the night like a log on a river until it had carried them here. Can you believe it?”

We could not believe it. Even when we found out it was true, we could not believe it.

VII.

THE DOORWAY TO THE House of our Ancestors was low and square with rounded edges. Roots and vines had pried at it, eager to access the secrets within, but they had been cut back mercilessly. I had a moment of doubt, looking at the way the plant life had been carved from that entryway. The edges were clean and sharp, impossibly so. I pictured a beast with shearing mouthparts it might not reserve only for roots.

Seeing my hesitation, Sharskin clapped me on the shoulder and took out a knife from within his robe. It had been about his neck in a scabbard of hide, and I’d glimpsed it before, assuming it to be Borra or Jasp-wood, or maybe whittled from an animal’s horn. Instead, it was the silvery stuff his staff was made from. “It’s metal,” he told me. “Our ancestors loved metal and plastic and synthetics, things we can’t build from anymore. Just another indication of what we’ve lost, and what we’re the inheritors of.”

Ostel examined the knife blade, turning it so the sun glinted from the flat. “In the high ground north,” he said, “they make stuff like this. They dig it out of the ground and put it in a fire. They have a ghost-bearer for it.”

Sharskin nodded, though I didn’t think he was entirely glad that Ostel knew it. “The smithy ghost, yes. In some few places up by the mountains. But this is our birthright, and most villages have forgotten it entirely. Handry’s never heard of metal before, have you?”

I said I hadn’t, and that restored his equilibrium. “You should go in,” he told us. “This is your home, now. This place, where only those restored to the original condition may live. You bear the Mark. You have earned admittance.”

Ostel and I exchanged glances, some residual caution tugging between us. But why had we come so far in Sharskin’s shadow, if not for this? What would be the point of walking away, even if he would let us? We had a destiny, after all. It was a good thing to have when the world was turned against you.

The walls of the House of our Ancestors were also metal, though I didn’t realise immediately because time had corroded and grimed them until a grey-brown patina covered everything, inside and out. Only in places where new roots had driven questing feelers in could you see the silver flash, and that lasted mere days before exposure to the air darkened and dulled it. The House had two walls, one inside the other, and to enter we passed through a small room with another of the square doorways in the far wall. The floor and walls around us were crumpled and scarred by generations of invading plants that had made free with the place before ever Sharskin had come to hack them away.

I had thought the inside would be dark as a cave. My mind was full of the thought of animal lairs, pitfalls and just a general horror of lightless enclosed spaces. As I crossed out of that odd little room, I saw that in this, time had been my ally. The great shell of dirt and trees and vines that wrapped about the House had torn its metal skin many times, so that the dimness all around was pierced by shafts of daylight and the curved ceiling was scattered with artificial constellations. The roots had thrust in all over, but they had been cut back just as at the door, in what was surely an ongoing battle with nature.

I saw even then that Sharskin’s destiny had a deadline. One day all of this cave of wonders would fall in upon itself and be lost to the world, and if we had not regained the powers of our ancestors by then, we never would. The House had stood for hundreds of years, Sharskin said, and doubtless it would endure long past our deaths, but that is not the same as forever. There was no excuse for dragging our feet and letting the next generation of outcasts do the work.

The inside of the House was divided into many rooms, each connected by those same square doorways, some of which were still half blocked by doors that looked to have slid in from within the very walls themselves before becoming rusted into place. We saw just the first chamber of it then, a great arched space, the walls lined with strange blocky sculptures and, where the mould and moss had been thoroughly cleared away, decorated with little spiky pictures. Right then, though, our attention was on the occupants. Even as the two of us entered, others were creeping out from nooks and holes or ducking it from neighbouring rooms. They were men and some women, mostly young and one surely younger even than me, and every one of them bore the red Mark of Cain somewhere on their body. And they bore it proudly, wearing tunics open to show the blazon of it against their chest, going in breechclouts to display the crimson splash of it against their legs, wherever their lawgivers had chosen to mark them. I could only stare, because the contrast between Sharskin’s followers and the pitiful work crew at Orovo was staggering. These men were fit and strong, not the starved skeletons of those thrown away and left to die. They would have driven out the Harboons in a day, and given the good people of Orovo nightmares to see the Severed so powerful and so unified.

Their looks to Ostel and myself were hostile and suspicious, but that changed when Sharskin stepped in behind us. There were lots of hard grins amongst them then, and I saw them truly note the spatter of red up my face, the patterns on Ostel’s. We were immediately reclassified from intruders to comrades, our Severance not a sign of abandonment but a badge of brotherhood.

“My friends!” Sharskin called into that echoing space. “Welcome our new companions! Ostel and Handry, who were cast out from their homes but who were strong, as you all were strong. They survived even with all the world against them. They have earned the right to be among us and to know the truth of their inheritance!” A cheer went up, which was a long way from the reception I had become used to from any other group of human beings. Sharskin had walked past us to stand before his congregation and now he turned, his arms spread wide. “Look upon the House of our Ancestors! Man’s hands built this place. Everything you see was crafted by those who came before us. Those skills were ours once and they shall be again! See these marks?” And he pointed his staff at the spindly little pictures set into the walls. “Men set learning in these marks that I can unlock, learning the lawgivers and their ghosts don’t want you to know! You will learn so much here, my friends, but know this first of all. This is the greatest secret of our ancestors: we were not born to live as witless slaves of ghosts and wasps. We are humans, and it is in our power to remake the work. That is our gift; that is our duty.”

It was a speech he had surely given many times before, but I suspect he never tired of it. “Do you think a ghost came and told men how to build this House?” he asked us. “No! They discovered that knowledge for themselves, wrested it from the world with their own hands. Do you think a ghost led the way from their far home to this place? No! They studied the skies and made their own road, surviving terrors and hazards you cannot even imagine.”

I looked from him to his followers, then to Ostel, who was no help and saying nothing. Sharskin plainly saw my thoughts on my face because he nodded, kindly enough. “It’s a lot to take in, boy, isn’t it? You’ve questions, so many of them? Ask one now. Set your mind at ease. What’s the greatest thing you need explained?”

I took my heart in my hands, knowing that if I angered him, nobody would lift a finger to stop him killing me like he’d killed Menic. “How can you know this?” I asked.

His smile only broadened, though, a teacher with a quick pupil. It was the right question after all.

“The House of our Ancestors told me,” he explained reverently and, seeing my expression, “You think I mean a ghost, perhaps? Do you see in this face of mine any fit dwelling for ghosts?” And they all laughed, because it was hardly something you’d mistake. “Or you think I’m deranged, thinking a house can tell me anything? Is that why I was Severed in the first place, because my mind’s not right and I hear things that aren’t there? I don’t blame you for wondering, boy, but you only think that because you’re ignorant and born of ignorant folk, kept in the dark by the ghosts rather than allowed to ask proper questions. Handry, I understand you, I do! I’m giving you a hard meal, small wonder you cannot swallow it.”

At that, Ostel raised a timorous hand because his mind had very much been on something simpler than the wonders of the ancient world. Sharskin regarded him fondly. “You will learn the secrets of how this world was made,” he told us, “and how we were betrayed, but first we will eat.”

I would rather have learned. My shrunken stomach had been growling for a while, but hunger was an old friend after all, and eating had been no joy to me for a long time, save that concoction of Iblis’s. I readied myself for a handful of berries or grains that might or might not make me sick, and would fill my mouth with a bitterness I could never become accustomed to. I felt a sudden stab of longing for the meals and treats of my childhood. In that moment I would have traded all Sharskin’s brotherhood for the chance to go back.

Then one of his followers pressed something into my hand. It was a dense slab of something, shiny where the light touched it and nothing like food. I stared at it and at them, and Ostel tried to bite his and made a gagging sound as it deformed beneath his teeth without actually breaking.

There was some laughter, the sort that grows from seeing someone else’s misfortune, but then Sharskin struck his staff on the floor with a hollow boom, and one of his people came forwards and showed us that the shiny stuff could be peeled back like the rubbery bark of a tree, and within was something soft like clay. I met Ostel’s eyes and shrugged, and touched my tongue to it.

Sweet! So very sweet and good, and in a breath I’d taken a bite of it, expecting to have to chew away to make it palatable. It had no texture, though, and slid down my throat with blissful ease. I gobbled the finger-sized slab down, and then another, feeling it seem to swell within me, not to pain but to a welcome fullness. There were no cramps, no gagging. My body was not fighting to eject everything up or down. Sharskin looked on approvingly as Ostel and I gorged ourselves and, though we could not speak, our mute eyes shone gratitude back at him.

“Real food,” he told us. “Food fit for humans.”

* * *

After that, he took us to another chamber within the House, just me and Ostel. The others had seen this before, and they had duties and chores just as the two of us would have soon enough. For now, though, despite the food, despite all we had seen, we needed that one step more to make us part of Sharskin’s world. We needed to be shown.

The walls of this chamber were craggy with angular projections he called consoles, some of which had been cracked open by old roots to show a honeycomb of metal pieces within. Sharskin trailed his fingers across them and I saw a deep flicker of light within them, as though they were cages for ghosts.

“This room is the heart of the House,” he told us in hushed tones at the threshold. “This is where our ancestors stood and remade the world. Here they planned their greatest victory. Here they fell from grace and into sin. When they issued out from the House, friends, it was to become lesser men, meaner creatures comfortable in their ignorance. Of all their children, it is only we who are privileged to know the truth.” And he strode into the chamber, leading our eyes until we saw huge forms standing there and cried out, shrinking away. There were alcoves along one wall, and each was occupied by a thing that seemed manlike, but far larger. Certainly it was no beast: two arms, two legs, and if not quite a head, then at least a neckless dome where a human head would be. They were eight feet tall, though, and their limbs were hard metal, each joint marked out with sharp lines. I counted seven standing upright in their bays, and one that had emerged, frozen in mid-step across the floor, its arm reaching out forever for something time had long since taken away. I could see the trails where intruding vines had grown up around it before being torn away. Errant root fibres and hairs were still clogging its joints. Its face was a curved mirror surrounded on either side with nodules, warts and blank, glassy eyes. Three jagged pictures were on the left side of its chest, the sort that we’d been told held the learning of the ancients.

“Our ancestors had many servants,” Sharskin explained to us. “But after we fell from the true path and turned our back on our destiny, they would no longer labour for us. Remember, though: there once was a golden age when these metal men were ours to command, and no man had to cut wood or dig. And know that such a time shall come again, for we will bring it about, you and I. But perhaps even this has not convinced you of your destiny. Perhaps you still shrink from greatness. So let me show you the truth, and you will finally know how cruelly the world has deceived you.”

He turned away, looking up at the curved ceiling where breaches in the metal had been sealed with moss and hide and some of the odd, filmy cloth the ancients used, the stuff Sharskin had made his robe out of.

He barked out, “Playback display tutelary video interstellar navigation year two introductory module.” The jumble of nonsense and half-familiar words a ghost might use, but spoken with human inflection and flair. And the House spoke back to him, saying, “Confirmed. Working.”

It spoke in a voice like a copy of his own, similar and dissimilar to a ghost taking over a human throat, for it did not come from him or from any living lips, but instead sounded like a dead thing mimicking his tone.

Ostel and I cowered, staring into every corner, sending terrified looks at the great metal servants in case one had come to life at Sharskin’s bidding. For a moment I knew sheer dread, that this uncanny voice had spoken from the walls, from nothing. I was on the brink of a world that contained so much more than I ever knew, and everything was terror.

Then everything was wonder, for in the air before us, pictures began to form. They were faint, so that I had to squint to make them out. Parts of them were missing and once or twice the entire vision flickered and died, only to spring up slightly changed. I saw spheres hanging in air that had been painted with a panorama of stars, moving around each other, coming closer, falling unimaginably further away. A woman’s voice was speaking, but her words were faint and scratchy, and those I caught were strange to me, just sounds made in a voice that was humanlike and yet not human.

We saw a ball that was blue and green. It was brought forward for our attention as though proffered by an invisible servant, and Ostel and I stared at it blankly, trying to understand its obvious import. Before our eyes a silver dart sprang from it, just a speck at first, then larger and larger so that I understood the ball was still very far away, and the dart was leaving it behind. The woman was speaking in calm, measured tones, and once or twice her intonation was that of someone making a humorous aside, though I could not get the joke. She used some words I knew, but they were all strung together in ways I could not understand and half of them were missing.

The silver dart grew very large until it filled most of the room, surrounded by a cloud of little spiny pictures as though it was swimming in a sea of forgotten knowledge. Something about its shape was familiar, the parts of it that jutted out and the pattern of them across its metal skin. Then it was small again, or it was further from us, and there was another ball hanging in the air before it, painted a swirly green from top to bottom.

Ostel was still gazing blankly at it all but I sent Sharskin a fearful look and found his eyes already on me.

“It’s the House,” I got out, hearing my own voice shake.

“Yes,” he breathed. “Good, boy. The House, and the distant home of our ancestors that it left. And now . . .”

I was watching the dart as it fell towards the green. “That’s . . . here?” But I did not believe even myself, because how could that ball just hanging in the air mean everywhere I had ever known? But then the ball was growing bigger and bigger, and I fell over as it seemed about to fill the room and crush us all, and yet it never quite did, extending out past the walls in some way and showing me a closer and closer view of its wrinkled surface. I saw murky, roiling masses that I knew for clouds seen from the wrong side, and then I was staring down from an impossible height at a great landscape of purple and green, an expanse of trees as far as I could see, broken only by the teeth of mountains. I saw no villages, no fields. The silver dart fell towards a world that had never been shaped by human hands.

I gave up, then. I could no longer fight the knowledge that everything Sharskin said was true. He was the last priest of true humanity, and we the outcasts were his flock, his agents in the world. I gave myself over to his destiny.

* * *

Over the next three days I laboured. Alongside my brothers I cut wood and I threw stones at any beasts not already put off by the unnatural nature of the House and its occupants. I shored up our metal home where the roots had torn it badly, packing earth in where cracks and stress had warped the walls. I took a metal knife and cut back nature wherever it sought to break in—and I had never appreciated just how fast everything in the world grew, and how it redoubled its efforts when you tried to curtail it.

Of my fellows, we were all of a piece now, chosen by Sharskin as robust enough and obedient enough to become his votaries. Some had doubtless deserved their Severance, criminals and the incurably idle. If so, life outside their village had cured them of such sins. Any who might try to live off the sweat of others had already been weeded out. Menic was far from the first to begin the journey to the House and never finish.

About three in four of us were men, the remainder women. Perhaps women were less given to a life that might lead to Severance, or more useful in a community so that lawgivers were lenient where they might otherwise be harsh. At first, the thought of sharing a house with women stirred parts of me that had lain shrivelled and dormant since that last chase after Livvi and my accident, and I know Ostel had the same thoughts. Sharskin had a hard rule, though: no man was to lie with a woman, not now, not ever. It was a rule hard as metal, for him. I saw him beat a pair who flouted it, and he came close to breaking their bones. Woman with woman, man with man, these things plainly irked him, too, but if you were willing to trade his disappointment for comfort, these things were not outright forbidden. Nothing that might make a child, though. After a while, one of the veterans explained that, way back at the start of the congregation, it hadn’t been that way. Then some of the women had got with child, and everyone had discovered just how an outcast’s baby sickened and died and rotted in the womb, how the antipathy of the world was so much crueller to the unborn. After that came Sharskin’s rule, because he would have no more dead children or mothers under his care.

When I asked how we would prosper in the future, or whether he would just keep bringing new outcasts in as he had me, he gave me a strange, secret look. He had plans for that, he said. I would not lack for fellows in the days to come.

We all worked save Sharskin, but none begrudged him because Sharskin knew how to make the House give us food and every one of us remembered hunger keenly. More than that, he taught us. Each evening he told the House to make light, and parts of it gave out a dim amber radiance. In that otherworldly illumination he would tell stories to us. Sometimes he bade the House to make pictures in the air; more often he just used his own fine voice to deliver his message to his congregation. His tales were always variations on the same theme, reinforcing how we were destined for a greatness we would know only through him. He told us that our ancestors, the architects of the House, had been masters of the land they had once lived in. All things of the earth and sky had bowed to them, and they had metal servants to perform their every whim. Light was theirs to create; they knew no wounds nor hunger nor sickness. In their power and might they built great Houses like our own that would carry them to new places, that they might be masters of every land under the sun. Sharskin’s eyes flashed as he told us this, his hands making passes through the air that every man’s mind turned into wonders beyond imagining.

But, he explained, our ancestors had failed us in the end. They had been fallible despite their knowledge and their power. They had not mastered this land the House had brought them to. Each night he might give a different reason why they had failed in their duty to us, their descendants. Sometimes they argued and fought one another, other times they grew lazy during the long voyage. In one tale it was a woman who led them astray. Instead of forcing the land to become their servant, our ancestors had made a compromise with the spirit of this place and betrayed all who came after them.

Another night he told us about the world, this place our ancestors had come to. It was poison, he told us. When the flesh of beasts sickened us, when roots were like acid in our mouth, the fault was not within us but in the world. Our ancestors had discovered this and despaired. They had lost faith in their lore and in their descendants.

What was our ancestors’ great betrayal? Our priest was waiting for one of the faithful bold enough to pose the challenge so that he could enlighten us all, and I made myself that ritual fool. “If they were so great, what happened to make us like we are now?”

“They did not fight the world,” Sharskin told us simply. “Seeing the forces arrayed against them, the toxins, the beasts, a world inimical to them, they chose to change, not the world, but their own children. They cast their own kin out of this House and into the world, remade so they could partake of its poison bounty and forget the struggle for mastery that was their birthright. More, because they feared their ignorant children would know hardship, they gave them bitter gifts so that they would not even have to think.”

“The ghosts,” I guessed and he nodded angrily.

“The ghosts, the hives.” He took us back to the main chamber the next night and we heard the faint voices of the House speak in occult terms about what had been done—many voices, men, women, but all scratchy and distant and incomplete. I heard those long-lost tones recast the ghosts as expert systems, the hives as administrative community biome hubs. This world they crafted, Sharskin told us, would never change, because its people would never change. The ghosts would dole out the same lessons to each generation, and people would survive but they would never become more than they were. Without struggle, nothing could get better, that was Sharskin’s creed. And while we worked to support his congregation, he planned how he might bring that struggle back to the world. If not him, if not us, then who? We were humans of the original condition, freed from a meaningless life of shallow comfort by the Mark of Cain. We had been stripped of all the shameful changes made to the children of the ancestors. We must not mourn that loss, Sharskin insisted, nor wish it reversed. We had become men who could challenge the world.

On the fourth day he took me from the work details. There was an initiation, he explained. Ostel had been tested already, now it was my turn. I was instantly sweating with fear. I had found a place to be, people who were my new family. What if I failed now? Sharskin explained to me that there was no failing this test. It was simply to tell how far the Severance had progressed with me and if I was sick with something that my brothers should know about. I did not entirely believe him. After Menic, I had the sense that there were many ways to lose a place in Sharskin’s congregation. What if I was sick and couldn’t work? I didn’t think they would slave for me while I just lay about.

He took me to another chamber of the House, this one with metal beds that time and the ravages of intruding nature had bent and broken. The House was strong here, he said, and at his command parts of the walls lit up in an irregular pattern, shedding a weak, underwater light across us. Here the House would search my soul and find out the truth of me. For my part, I must just stand still and banish all deception from my mind.

I might have tried to deceive it, if I had any idea what lies would serve. As it was, once the deep humming and grinding sounds began in the walls around me, I froze like the dead metal servants and waited for the worst.

The voice spoke back to Sharskin in its artificial imitation of his voice, starting off very low as though its slow drawl issued from the bowels of the earth, then winding up until it settled on a register higher than his natural tones would go.

“Diagnosis complete: subject in original condition incompatible with environment,” it said, and Sharskin grinned and clapped me on the arm. “Protective measures prescribed,” the voice went on, but Sharskin made a gesture, banishing the thought.

“Truly one of us, Handry,” he told me, grimly pleased. “Thank that clumsy old doctor of yours; he has made you the man you were meant to be.”

And then the voice, his pirated voice, said something more. “Diagnostic implant signal detected. Prior treatment incomplete. Active trace signal detected. Respond yes no?”

Sharskin went very still, and for a moment I thought I’d failed the test after all. His eyes were hooded as he considered this last utterance, and he peered at the milky details of some of the lit panels.

“Go back to your work, boy,” he told me. On my way out, I heard him speaking again, alone and yet not alone as the House of our Ancestors answered him slowly in his own voice.

VIII.

AFTER THAT, HE KEPT me in the House or by his side, singled out from all the brotherhood and, fool that I was, I took it to mean that he was impressed with the man I had become. Was I not a quick study? Did I not ask keen questions? Over the next days I came to believe that I was special, groomed to be Sharskin’s second, perhaps even his replacement in time. I was the priest’s acolyte.

Some of the others accepted this as they accepted everything Sharskin did or said; others grumbled and glowered, telling each other that I had jumped up above them for no good reason—which was true.

It was a hard life in Sharskin’s congregation. Two of us died in just the short time I was there. Garvell had gone to a village to steal or to scout, and the locals turned out to be more hardened to the ways of outcasts than most and drove her away with stones. A well-slung shot struck her skull and cracked it, and her fellows could not even retrieve her to bring to the House, where the invisible voices might have helped her.

The other, a jolly man named Yerke, stepped on a thorn that lodged in his foot and turned poisonous. He bore the pain with jokes until the wound was foul and black, and then he was in great pain and Sharskin made an end of him, bringing mercy with a single blow of his staff.

He used the act as occasion for a lecture, conjuring the voice of the House to talk about antibodies and immune system overreaction. I understood little, save that there were maladies carried by little animals that the villagers would catch but would not touch us, and yet there were many, many things that were harmless to the people out there which were toxic to us, so that even a little in our blood would send our bodies mad with horror, and perhaps kill us like Yerke’s body had killed him.

Soon enough Sharskin called me back to the small chamber with the ruined beds and had the invisible ancestors in the walls examine me again. Their verdict was “Return signal active caution signal strength may be reduced by environment,” which meant little to me but everything to Sharskin.

Immediately after that, he decided that a major expedition was required. I’d learned he often went wandering to seek new recruits, but now he called up all of us and gave us knives and rods of metal, and food from the House that he sternly instructed us to ration.

“What are we doing?” I asked him, considering myself the mouthpiece of the congregation.

“I am going to show you what it means to be the masters of the world. I will give you a taste of what is to come,” he told us. His eyes were bright and feverish, as they were when he spoke of ancestors and destiny. “You know now that you are strong, my friends,” he said. “You know that you are remade in the image of our ancestors, who built this House and travelled so far in it. Would such men suffer the world to bend their backs? No, not until they gave up their birthright and their knowledge and became the slaves who live out there, ghost-ridden, hive-bound!” He brandished his staff fiercely. “We are not slaves! We are men! We are the masters of the world, not its livestock to be driven and slaughtered.”

I thought we were off to kill animals, or perhaps to clear trees. After all, if the world’s very nature was set against us, that seemed a reasonable reprisal. And yet Sharskin led our armed band off through the woods, filled with a righteous fury he plainly had no intention of squandering on dumb beasts or plants.

We were on the move for three days, pushed hard and yet revelling in it because we had the strength to push ourselves hard. The food of the ancestors sustained us more than anything that ran or crept or grew in the green earth, and we laughed and joked and clashed staves with each other, knowing that discovery—by man or beast—was no longer a terror for us.

Then, past noon on the third day, Sharskin hushed us, and we crept forwards with, if not stealth, then at least not actual clamour. We were approaching a village. I thought he meant to skirt it without alerting its occupants that we had ever been, but Sharskin had other ideas.

The place was a little smaller than Aro, crunched in between two hills where there was little good land to farm. There were perhaps thirty of us, the entire congregation. The village must have held several hundred, but we were mostly young, angry and filled with the knowledge of our strength, and when we arrived and started banging on their walls and doors and whooping out threats, they did not know what to do with themselves. Some stumbled out, some stayed in. For all that they were the majority and we the outcasts, we mastered them with noise and threat. Their lawgiver came forth, shouting, his face flickering with ghostlight. Sharskin struck him down. I stopped dead at the sight, a transgression beyond anything I had seen. To strike a ghost-bearer? To kill the house of wisdom and guidance? And yet he did it; one blow of his staff and the man’s brains were on the ground.

Everyone was silent then, the villagers and us, as we stared at the body. I remember looking into Sharskin’s fierce face and seeing no chagrin, no sense that he had gone too far. He had preached and preached, but it was only in that moment that we understood the full conviction of his message. The world was our enemy, the people were our enemies, but most of all the ghosts that held both world and people in chains.

“Now,” Sharskin barked out to his horrified audience, “your tools, your cloth, pots, baskets, all your best work, you’ll bring it out now. Bring it out and build a fire for us to see it. If it’s good enough, we’ll find it a home. Anything else goes to the flames.” He levelled his stained staff at them and they drew back from the tip as though it was a stinger or a whipvine that might lash at them any moment. “Cross us and I’ll send a lad up the tree to knock in your little wasp infestation there. Where’s your new Lawgiver coming from if you’ve no vermin to spread their filth? Or maybe I’ll just put a torch to the whole tree, see how you like being homeless in this world. The beasts of the wild avoid us, friends. They’ll be a sight more glad to see you.”

If they had come together and not cared who was hurt, they could have driven us away. We would have killed many, though, and their leader was dead, his ghost vanished into the air. They did not know what to do and I thought even then of Sharskin’s creed. The ghosts did people’s thinking for them. Now these people just stared and, after we raised our hands against them, they did as we said. They brought out the work of their hands, all the things they had spent their lives crafting, and we took anything that we liked—new clothes, containers, tools, anything the House of the Ancestors might not have.

And we took joy in it, too. Every one of us had been spat upon by people like this, even if it hadn’t been these people in particular. We had been weak and crawled with our bellies in the earth, and then Sharskin had made our weakness a strength that we had finally been given the chance to use.

I whooped and hollered with the rest of them. I struck a man who tried to get back a carved stick from the pile, and I broke the stick across my knee and threw it into the fire, just because he wanted it. The others laughed and I laughed with them. We made each other bolder, urged on by the acclaim of our fellows.

I am ashamed of who I was that night, more so because I became a man who has always been within this body but held back by the regard of others. When we surround ourselves with people who call evil good, how quickly we accept their definitions and speak them back, round and round until every way we experience the world is tainted by it.

Then we took our loot and were gone before morning, before they might rediscover their own boldness. One of their hunters did follow, in fact, and tracked us halfway back to the House of our Ancestors before someone spotted her. There was a great chase then, because Sharskin could not have that village knowing where we made our home. We hounded the woman through the trees and brought her to bay, and then Sharskin beat her to death, his face like a red-spattered mask. And we cheered him on as though he was a great hero, as though we all were. It is a great poison, to know you have a destiny and that everything you do is right by default.

When we returned to the House, Sharskin brought me straight into the little room, that I had begun to think of as the doctor room, imagining that the ancestors within its walls had once been learned men of medicine because the way they talked seemed to echo the way Melory had, when the ghost spoke through her.

“Tell me,” Sharskin demanded of them, and they buzzed and grated within the walls, then threw his own flat, distorted voice back at him.

“Working . . .”

“I’ve shocked you,” he said quietly. After all the violence, when he should have been most triumphant, an odd pensive mood had taken him. His eyes flicked constantly to the walls, waiting for the ancestors to stop working and do something. “When I killed their Lawgiver, I saw the face you made. Still a bit of the village boy in you, Handry?”

“No, Sharskin,” I said, too earnestly.

“It has to be done,” he told me, as though he’d heard another, truer answer. “We have to break the chains. Nobody else will.” His look to me was almost traumatised by the burdens of his office. “Handry, do you know how long this has been going on for? Generations, centuries. Even the ancestors have lost count, but it’s been at least five hundred years since they fell from grace and unleashed the ghosts and the wasps and the rest. Five hundred years of absolutely nothing ever changing, Handry. I’d say it can’t go on, but it could go on forever and we would never know what we were supposed to be. And the House won’t last forever.” In a sudden fit of anger he thumped the wall. “Come on, tell me!”

“Confirmation expert assistance incoming. Remain calm and hydrated and await further aid,” his voice said back to him. The ancestors were trying to sound reassuring, but Sharskin was anything but calm. His eyes flashed and he grinned from ear to ear.

“You are our destiny,” he told me, gripping me hard by the shoulder. “What chance, that I might find you on my travels, boy? What wonder!” and I was foolish enough to feel proud.

* * *

It happened two days later. I was working inside, cutting back the roots that grew visibly day to day in their mission to tear down the House of our Ancestors. I thought of how the place had travelled like a silver dart through the night sky, and wondered if that meant they had slept during the day. And when the House came, did it fall from the sky and break on the ground, to leave it so tattered and pierced with holes, or was that just time? If our ancestors could throw their house up into the sky like a star, why could they not bring it down to earth like a leaf?

Then there was a commotion and I heard cheering and whooping from some of the congregation, the sort of sound they sent up when they had killed some big animal that came too near the House, or when Sharskin gave one of his more rousing speeches. I didn’t want to miss the festivities, whatever they were in aid of, and so I put down my knife and scurried out, heading for the doorway that led to the rest of the world. Plenty of others were coming to see what was up, too, so I ended up towards the back, stretching and craning as Sharskin and a pack of the older men, the better hunters, filed in. They had a quarry bundled between them, and for a long time my eyes did not understand what I was looking at. I saw a human form, but the face was turned from me and I knew only that it was a woman. I guessed she must be from the village we had raided, another hunter come to track down those who had committed such an outrage upon them. Even though I had suffered a sleepless night afterwards, seeing the Lawgiver’s head break open over and over, holding the staff myself sometimes, I still cheered the new arrival, egged on by my fellows just as I encouraged them, everyone surrounded by everyone else’s echoes.

And then Sharskin reached forwards and pushed the hapless woman over, sending her to her hands and knees with a curse, and I stopped cheering. Not the face, that I still had not seen, not the stance, but the voice. I knew her voice as she swore at Sharskin. I knew her as she stumbled to her feet to be pushed back and forth by the jeering congregation. Then she shook her unkempt hair out of her eyes and I saw the ghost-swollen brow, the pitted cheek and empty socket, and alongside them I saw the face I knew best in all the world. This was not some mad vision the House had conjured. This was Melory.

I shoved and elbowed my way to the front to confront Sharskin. “What are you doing? She’s my sister!”

The priest regarded me sympathetically, taking me aside with a hand on my shoulder as he had so often done. “Handry, no, she can’t be your sister. That can’t be kin of yours, not anymore.” His smile was kind; he’d had plenty of time to muster his words for this conversation. “Even if she once was, she’s not of the original condition as you are. She’s corrupted, riddled through and through with the unclean nature of this world. And that was before they put a ghost in her, Handry. The ghost that would have Severed you entirely and left you to starve, remember? And it’s come after you even now, to try and finish the job.” For of course I had told him everything. “There is nothing of a human being there but a shell, boy. She stopped being human when they put the ghost in her. She’s just a tool now, an expert system as the House calls it. But we can use it.”

His smile was less kind now, and I could see that dreadful fire in his eyes that meant violence could come with the next breath. “Bring her to the Console Room!” he called, and danced away from me, leading us all through the House to that room he had taken Ostel and me to, when we first arrived. We had seen worlds whirling in space in that room, and our ancestors voyaging in a silver dart. It was a sacred place, from the lumpy “console” projections about the walls to the metal servants in their alcoves, sleepers awaiting a call that would never come. This was the heart of the House.

I stumbled along at the back of the pack, my head full of his words, my eyes crowded with memories of my sister. She was held between three of my new brothers, tight enough to twist her joints as they dragged her deeper into the House. I didn’t know if I knew her. What if the ghost that had grown in her had eaten her entirely?

But then she twisted in their grip, staring wildly back with her one eye. I couldn’t make out her voice over the howling and jeering of my fellows but I saw her mouth shape my name.

In the Console Room, Sharskin held his arms out, robe sleeves flapping. “Speak!” he commanded the ancestors, as Melory was forced to her knees before him. “Tell me what we’ve got here! Am I right?”

Lights flickered about the walls of the room as the ancestors roused themselves, their voice winding up to Sharskin’s usual pitch.

“Detecting new device: medical expert system.”

Sharskin let out a crow of triumph. He drew me to him, bowing towards me as though we two were the sole true conspirators, the only ones who knew what was going on.

“You fled your home, boy,” he told me, grinning ear to ear. “You fled after the ghost condemned you, but it hadn’t finished. It left its thorn in your skin, that it was still calling to, no matter where you went. The House could hear that call, and shout right back, speaking to the ghost they put in your sister, reminding it of its unfinished business. You’re still linked, Handry, not brother to sister but doctor to patient. It wants to finish Severing you.” His grip on my shoulder was like a vice. “I’ve had such plans, boy. What I’d do if I ever got a doctor here. I tried to steal one away, once, but the ghost left him and he was just a husk, useless to me. But to get one to come willingly! Our ancestors were truly watching out for us when we met! They’re ready for us, at last—ready for us to reclaim our destiny!”

“What do you mean?” I demanded.

Still that grin, even wider, though I’d have sworn there was nowhere further for it to go. “How else to change the world but to swell our ranks, to shock the herd of humanity out of their complacency and make them think. To strip them of the comfort that has them just trudge around in the same old rut over and over. Doctors know how to brew the Severance.” He lunged forwards and caught Melory’s chin with one hand. “And you’ll teach me, little Doctor. Summon the ghost and show me how it’s done. We’ll brand the whole world with the Mark of Cain, return everyone to their proper condition and open their eyes to the world!”

IX.

“HANDRY,” MELORY SAID—barely a whimper but everyone was quiet now, in the wake of Sharskin’s announcement.

The priest looked from her to me, looked into my very mind, perhaps, balancing the moment. “Handry,” he echoed. “Do you have something to say to the thing that took your sister from you?”

“Why did you come?” I hadn’t had anything to say, cowed by the mob of the others, their single-minded desire to have the world a certain way. The words burst from me anyway, born of the years before the accident, born of the years she’d looked out for me, before the Elector chose her. Before—yes—the ghost took her from me. Sharskin wasn’t wrong, not entirely.

“I came for you!” she got out, and then, as Sharskin crowed at the admission, “To save you, Handry, please!” But then the priest had her by the shoulder, that grip of his that was comforting until it became agony; we had all felt it.

“Call your ghost!” he said, his face right up against hers. “Look, I’m a threat to your community. I need casting out! Get it to tell you the recipe for Severance, have it feed the words to your mouth so you can spit them into my hand. Or you will hurt and hurt until there’s nothing to you but ghost.”

“Melory,” I whispered, and her agonised eyes locked with mine.

“There is no ‘Melory,’ not anymore,” spat Sharskin. He pronounced the word with the disgust always close by when he spoke about the failures of our forebears. “A shell, a husk, a nothing. A home for ghosts. But that’s all right. It’s the ghost we need.” He looked around him at nothing, at the ancestors invisibly attendant in this room. “Into her head, why don’t you? Cut the ghost open and let us have its knowledge. Interrogate expert system, search terms Severance!” For Sharskin had lived with the House for many years and knew its language, so like and unlike our own.

“Confirmed. Working,” his flat, artificial voice came back to him, like a distorted echo, and Melory screamed. It wasn’t Sharskin’s grip that plagued her now. I saw the ghostlight blaze and flare from half her face, and she threw her head about wildly, so that I thought she was trying to dash her brains out. “What is it?” she shrieked, and then, “Working working working,” as the ghost rose in her, co-opting her mouth in its meaningless complaints. “Make it stop! Access protocols initiated. Downloading upgraded service please wait please wait please wait.” She arched backwards, thrashing in the grip of the brothers, then sagged, sobbing.

Sharskin laughed and spread his arms to us. “The Severance,” he shouted. “Few, and trammeled up in this place, that’s not how we were meant to be. We have a creed the whole world needs to hear.”

Melory stared into his gleaming eyes, for a moment just herself, just my sister. “You’re mad,” she told him. “You want to kill the world, murder every village? How would they live, if you did what you want?”

“Only through me,” said Sharskin softly, and his grin was as hard to look at as the sun. “So tell me.”

Melory started to shake her head and then some new wave of . . . what? I couldn’t imagine, but whatever assault the ancestors were making on her mind resumed with renewed force and she spasmed and twitched, her eye rolling up into her head and the ghostlight bright as day from every pore and pit of her face. When she sagged again, consciousness had left her entirely. Sharskin straightened up, disappointed.

“She’ll wake,” he told us. “And when she does, she’ll find the ancestors haven’t finished with her. Take her to the buried chambers. Tie her up there and set a guard. This is our destiny, friends. This is the best chance we have to restore true humanity to power over this world.” He looked from face to face, hunting out doubt like a predator. “If we are to prevail, there can be no collaboration, no half measures. Our kin live in slavery, in ignorance. We must awake them and there is no way but this. The strong will survive.”

Three or four of the brothers dragged Melory’s limp form away, and when I made to go with them, I felt Sharskin’s hand rest companionably on my shoulder.

“I’m proud of you, Handry,” he told me.

I stared at him mutely.

“She tried to tempt you against your true family,” he told me. “The ghost spoke through her, seeking to win you from your proper place at my side. There is no future for you there, boy. They’d finish the job and let you starve, never forget that. I fed you. I gave you a place in the world.” A world of threats was hidden between his words.

* * *

I did not do the right thing.

I tell this tale, so perhaps I should fold time or inflate my better nature, that I went instantly down into the dark, shining blade in hand, to liberate my sister. But I will tell all things as I know them. I did not do the right thing, not then. I went back to work amongst my brothers, and just as the doctor had buried a thorn in my flesh to keep track of me, so the presence of Melory in the House was a thorn in my mind. I thought of doing something often and, each time I did, the idea of Sharskin rose as though he was my ghost to bear, as though the light of his grin and his destiny shone from my face whenever I tried to imagine saving my sister.

His words crept on me. I thought of escaping with her from the House, through its single square door, and then seeing nothing but the ghost in her face. I thought of rescuing her, only to find myself a prisoner of villagers, daubed with searing Severance as I screamed and writhed, left so cut from the world that even the air burned my skin. What if she was not there? What if the ghost just wore her face and danced her body about like a puppet, and had eaten away her mind like a grub?

And yes, they do not put the Severance on hot, and I knew that, but in my mind I could still feel the scalding pain of the accident, and that was the Severance for me. I could not imagine it any other way.

My mind went back and forth. The part of me that was Melory’s brother ran, within my thoughts, down to where she was kept, only to find that part of me that was Sharskin’s acolyte barring the way. And so the time passed in misery and inaction, until she was brought to the Console Room again.

It was the same as the first time, but more so. Sharskin invoked the ancestors and they swarmed sightlessly from the walls as the panels glowed and flickered like fitful fires. They said, “Interface connection retrieved, uploading,” and Melory screamed and twisted, fighting a war confined within her skull. She spat and cursed Sharskin and the rest of them, using every bad word we ever knew and more besides, and then the ghost would come forth from her and say, so calmly, “Corrupted memory segments detected rerouting protected data waiting waiting waiting . . .”

“What is happening?” I begged Sharskin.

His eyes never leaving her, he leant in to me. “The ancestors know the ghost. They made it, after all. They made the world where such things come to live in people and make them slaves.”

I frowned, feeling a fraying edge of his philosophy. “But the ancestors you call on, are they the wise ancestors that carried this House through the night sky, or are they the foolish ancestors who made the ghosts and fell from grace?”

Sharskin’s gaze flicked to me, infinitely knowing. “First one and then the other, Handry, but they are within the House now, and they do what I tell them. Some things they cannot do, some things they will not do, not yet, but I command them in those tasks they will countenance. And I tell them to speak to the doctor ghost and get it to reveal its secrets. And either the girl will break, or they will break her. And then we will remake the world, Handry, you and I.”

I wanted to go then, because I was a coward and every cry in Melory’s true voice went into me like a knife, but Sharskin’s hand was on my shoulder again and he held me there. He made me watch, squeezing in time to the convulsions that racked her body, until she passed out again and was silent.

“Progress report!” he barked out into thin air.

“Data interface progressing. Detected more recent version of current operating system. Firmware update recommended,” said the ancestors, wise or foolish. It was not what Sharskin wanted to hear, plainly, but neither was he giving up. “We will just have to make do with what we have. She’ll crack, or the ancestors will get through to her.” Seeing he still had my shoulder, he let go. “We are the agents of mankind’s redemption,” he told me. “But the ancestors must redeem themselves, too, for the wicked things they did.” He cocked an eye towards the walls where the heatless lamps were guttering to nothing. “And they will, or they will lie unmourned in the House forever. They will do as I tell them.” His hand clenched about his metal staff as though he would beat the ancestors until they complied.

I did not sleep that night, just lay awake in a room with a half dozen others, listening to their untroubled breathing and wondering how they could possibly just doze as if nothing was going on. I felt as though Melory’s presence was an ember pressed into my mind. Tomorrow, even later tonight, Sharskin would have her hauled to the Console Room again for more torture. Or was it just the ghost being tortured? And if I had the courage to do something, what then? Where in the world would I find a place except here with my brothers, under Sharskin’s protection.

In the end, the metaphysics of it condensed to just that. I could not disentangle who or what might be within Melory’s misshapen skull. I could not know if she had come here to finish my Severance or to help me somehow, as if any help were possible. It came down to her or me. If I saved her I would be dooming myself, because the world would kill me sooner or later, even if neither Melory nor the congregation did. But she would be saved. Whatever she was.

I was afraid as I hadn’t been since the night I fled Aro. I had found here some semblance of a life, after wandering for so long. Give it up to save the ghost that had done me such wrong? Give it up to save Melory, who had saved me and preserved me despite the Mark of Cain?

The night some way gone, and me still twisting and turning in agonies of indecision, a face came to my mind’s eye: a woman’s face, and not Melory’s.

Iblis, the Architect of Orovo. How strange a thing to take hope from, but she had not been a slave. The woman she once was had still been in evidence as she bargained and argued with her ghost, wrestling its designs to suit her own. And even old Doctor Corto was a lesson, perhaps, because the ghost had not been a true puppet-master or it would have overcome his failing flesh. There was a chance, just a chance, that what had come to find me was truly Melory. Perhaps she even believed she could help. I knew there was no chance of that, but I could help her.

I rose, silent as I could, drew on my robe and slipped from the room.

The House of our Ancestors was never entirely quiet, but the handful of brothers still awake were shoring up a roof at one end, far from the buried chambers where Melory was being kept. I could pad barefoot through the chambers through the Console Room of unfond memory, down into the levels already swallowed by dirt and moss. I had spent hours down there cutting the roots and shoveling rot and soil into sacks to be carried out. The fist of the earth was around the House of our Ancestors, and time would only tighten it. One day we would lose these chambers altogether.

But for now, they were a dungeon, and Melory was kept there with a rope about her neck, leashed to the wall.

There would be one man on guard, and I had no idea what I was supposed to do about him. I think I thought I could pretend I’d been sent for the prisoner, and perhaps it would have worked, but as I neared I heard voices—not one man but two.

One was a man called Vernen, not someone I really knew save that he had a distinctive nasal voice at odds with his broad-shouldered frame. The other I recognised, with sinking heart, as Ostel. It wasn’t as though Ostel and I were fast friends. We hadn’t exactly been inseparable since we came to the House, and Sharskin’s special treatment of me had bred resentment. I had known him longer than the rest, though. He was more of a person, in my mind.

I crept closer, eavesdropping. What was immediately clear was that they weren’t just passing the time over the midnight watch. Vernen was trying to cajole Ostel into something and Ostel was trying to say no. I say “trying” because the one thing I knew about Vernen was that he could whine forever until he got his way, and Ostel was still new and anxious to be accepted by the others, just as I was.

“He’ll thank us,” those thin, aggravating tones wheedled. “You’ve seen how it is when he brings her to the ancestors. Ain’t getting anywhere, cos she’s still fighting him, or the ghost is. The body’s too strong, is what it is.” Vernen spat at Melory. “Pissing doctors.” He was red almost head to foot with the Mark, I remembered, and I reckon they hadn’t let it cool much when they put it on him. When we had attacked the village, he had been at the front when we were handing out beatings. There was a lot of old bitterness gone sour inside Vernen. “So we weaken her a bit. Just a bit.” His fists clenched and reclenched. “We’re owed this, man. You even listen to what Sharskin says each night? We’re the true men, and they’re keeping us from what’s ours, things like this are!”

And I heard Ostel demurring but reluctantly, obviously already worn down by Vernen’s patter. Then, “What if she tells?”

“Who’ll believe her? Besides, you heard how it was. Not as if she’s going to have a chance to point fingers. Just all that gabble-nonsense about working and waiting.” And then Vernen’s little titter of a laugh. “A good kicking’s going to loosen it all up inside her, break some of that stubborn she’s so full of. Then she’ll sing sweet as you like when the chief comes for her, and you and me’ll be heroes.” The need to bring violence was strung through every muscle of him. He was barely trying to make it about Sharskin’s destiny. The work at the village we’d raided had only kindled a fire in him; when Sharskin had killed the scout, Vernen had watched the swing of that metal staff with envious eyes. He was a man who wanted his revenge on the world now, and we’d never had someone in our power who wasn’t one of us.

Ostel made a weak sound, and Vernen just shoved him aside impatiently. “Not going to kill her,” he said. “Just a kicking, eh? Not like we haven’t all had a kicking in our lives. I reckon the ghost-eater’s due hers about now.” And then he was leaning over Melory’s prone form, Ostel plucking at his own fingers anxiously but plainly not about to stop him.

I could have used this situation in a variety of tactical ways. They were going against Sharskin’s orders, and I would have all manner of leverage over them that I could use to my advantage. No doubt a cleverer man than I would have held back and let them take enough rope to hang themselves. Rather than just run out and tackle Vernen, which is what I did. He had one foot back to give Melory a kicking and so I hauled him clean off his feet and onto his back, and for a moment I thought that would be all, somehow, that he’d just stay down there peaceably. Then he was snarling and up on his feet, grabbing me by the shoulders and ramming me into the wall while Ostel just looked on, wide-eyed. Probably he was telling me to stay out of it or something, but I only remember my head ringing. Vernen was a lot stronger than me. I had the knife.

I’d like to say here that he pushed himself on to it, that it was an accident, but I will keep telling the truths that make me look worse, along with the rest. I stabbed him. He was stronger than me and I couldn’t beat him any other way, or couldn’t think of another way, and the knife was right there. I put it in him and then I did it again and then one more time, so that his yell was cut horribly short and then so was he, ending up on the floor gurgling and twitching while Ostel just stared at me. It had been very quick. Neither of us knew what came next.

My mind recovered first and made a lunge for the narrative of what had just happened. “He was going against Sharskin,” I babbled. “He would’ve ruined it all.” As though that gave me the right to murder him out of hand. But I was the priest’s favourite, and maybe if I had kept my head and not been tripping over my words like a maniac, then I might have pulled it off somehow. But I stammered and stuttered, the knife held out at the end of my arm like a poisonous animal I would rather be rid of. Ostel glanced down at Melory, and when he looked back at me he understood.

“You traitor,” he said, low and nasty.

“Ostel, listen . . .” But I had no words to put after that “listen,” nothing for him to listen to.

“You heard the priest,” he hissed at me. “She’s not your sister, man. She’s just a ghost-bearer. Give it up. Just . . . can’t you see how it’s good here, how we’re meant for this? Don’t throw it all away.”

I had just stabbed Vernen to death in front of him, and he was trying to save me from myself.

“Ostel, please,” I said, and all the more desperate because a part of me wanted to take what he was offering. If I just let Sharskin be right in all things, how much simpler life would be. I’d never have to make a decision again.

And that thought brought me up short. That was Sharskin’s way, after all. We did what he said because he was the priest. We were like extra hands and bodies for his commandments, and he told us that was the way it had to be, the way the ancestors would have done it before the fall. Except that was the way of the villages, wasn’t it? Do what the ghosts say, bow your head, and if you’re too far from everyone else’s view of what’s right, then it’s the Severance for you, and out you go. The revelation shook me. Sharskin and the ghosts were no different, save in who benefitted.

“Do you think he really believes it all?” I asked Ostel. “The ancestors, changing the world, Severing everyone. Is it right that way, in his head, or is it just that it would make him in charge of everything? Priest of the whole world.”

Ostel had not been party to my revelation, of course, and he stared at me as if I was mad. His eyes kept flicking to the bloody knife. He had been left to watch over Melory, but nobody had thought to arm him. Why would he need it?

“I’m going to take my sister out of here,” I told him, and now I’d done with the stuttering; the words came out with perfect assurance, as though I was a priest, too.

“Handry . . .” Ostel said, but he was backing away and I was advancing. Melory was watching with bright eyes, and when Ostel came level with her she just stuck out a leg and tripped him. It was the sort of stupid prank children did back in Aro, that got them shouted at. No ghost would have thought of it. Nor, it seemed, had Ostel, for his heel struck Melory’s calf and then he went straight over, landing hard on his back. I wanted to knock him out then, as he lay gasping for breath. I didn’t know how to do it. I thought that if I just hit him in the head I might kill him. In the end I just hacked through Melory’s leash and dragged her to her feet.

She had no such compunctions. The ghostlight juddered in her face and she kicked Ostel in the head, a precise jab with her heel. He went out like a blown candle and I realised she had got the doctor ghost to tell her, somehow, exactly where to strike him.

“Come on,” I said, needlessly, and then we were both fleeing upwards through the great hollow chambers of the House, ducking through one square doorway, squeezing through where the doors had rusted in place half-shut.

I wanted to go straight through to the outside door the quickest way, but there were voices ahead before we were even halfway there. It was the overnight work crew, cluttering the doorway and complaining to each other about the cold and the dark. They must have some outside maintenance they weren’t too keen on, and were taking their sweet time in getting down to it, loitering just within the shelter of the House. I cursed and looked around wildly for somewhere to hide and wait, and that was when Melory just dropped.

She slumped down the wall and I saw her arms and legs twitch, fingers fluttering like wings. The ghostlight flashed from her face so brightly I thought someone must surely see. A moment later she was herself again, lone eye staring wildly.

“The voices,” she said. “The voices are still there.”

“The ancestors?” I asked her, and she gave me an incredulous look.

“You think they’re ancestors? They’re nothing of that, Handry. They’re like the ghost, but . . . older, vaster. I can hear them still, in my head.”

“Are they attacking you?” I knew I’d never get her clear if she was screaming and writhing like she’d been in the Console Room.

“Your man hasn’t set them on me again yet,” she said. “But I can feel the loose end of what they were doing to me. If he tells them to go to work on me again, I . . . But they’re just talking to each other now. Talking in little circles, round and round. They’re . . . broken.” Her eye winked and the light glittered under her skin. “They’re sad.”

“What?”

“Not sad. That’s a human thing. But there are a hundred things they keep trying to do that can’t be done anymore.” And she gasped and the ghostlight came and went. “Handry, there are rooms and rooms.”

“I know—”

“Not here, not for our bodies. Rooms in my mind. I can feel them, all the voices going into and out of the rooms, round and round, chasing their tails. So much, Handry!”

Then the yelling started from deep within the House and I knew that Ostel had awoken or that he and Vernen had been found.

I had a mad idea of just charging the work crew, knife out, and scattering them. I had lost the knife, though. I had no memory of it, but I’d got rid of the weapon, only the blood on my hands to say I’d ever had it. And there were six men in the work crew and any one of them would be able to block the door.

“They’ll search,” I said, heart hammering so hard I could barely draw breath. “Perhaps they’ll think we’ve gone outside already.”

Melory was staring but I wasn’t sure if she saw me. Her lips moved and the light flickered as though things passed back and forth between it and the canvas of her skin.

“We need to hide somewhere. They’ll send out search parties. Then we can creep out, when they’re gone.” It wasn’t a very good plan, but nothing else came to me. And where to hide . . . ?

I went towards one end of the ship, where there were some underground chambers that were small and crooked and not much used. Perhaps we could tuck ourselves away there. But no—the dormitories were between us and them and I could hear people already on their feet and running around. No chance of getting there. I couldn’t go underground the other way, either—we’d just come from there and they’d search those places first. I racked my brains for some place they’d never think we’d gone.

Another shudder went through Melory and she dropped and held her head. When the light came, I could see the bones of her hands silhouetted within the flesh. That was what decided me, because the one place she would never willingly go was where Sharskin had tormented her, but the ancestors obviously didn’t need to be in the Console Room to pry at her head. How would it be worse if I just hid there with her, where Sharskin would surely never think to look for us?

By that time Melory couldn’t walk, so I half carried, half dragged her through the House, shrinking at every shadow and shout. I think the congregation hadn’t worked out what was going on and most were still barely awake, but I heard Sharskin’s authoritative voice mustering them to arms, so their confusion would not last long. Whimpering, I got Melory into the Console Room, willing the place to stay quiet and dark. I tucked her between two of the bulky projections that gave the place its name and she clutched at the air and drew ragged, painful breaths, and her face flashed and guttered.

I crouched over her, holding my robe up to block out the flickering radiance. I could hear many feet close by, and Sharskin’s voice, not angry but determined. He had mustered a decent number of the congregation and surely now he would lead them into the night, fruitlessly hunting an escapee who had never in fact escaped.

But instead he walked calmly into the Console Room. I froze, horrified at his prescience, but he had not seen me there, nor did he notice Melory’s ghostlight against the rising glow of the panels.

“Locate medical expert system!” he told the invisible ancestors, and they told him, “Working,” and then, “Medical expert system located upon bridge.” And in the air a shaky image appeared of squares and lines and one glimmering red dot. I didn’t see a bridge anywhere and I didn’t understand the picture at first, but then something flipped in my mind and I understood that it was a drawing of the House, all the rooms within it laid out, and there, where the dot was, that was the Console Room, where we were.

Sharskin took a moment to catch on. “Locate expert system,” he said. “Not me, I know where I am.”

“Medical expert system located upon bridge.”

My plan had been a good one, in a way. Sharskin had certainly not thought to find us there, but the ancestors knew.

Others began to file in then, and Sharskin’s keen eyes had sought me out at last, me and Melory. He shook his head sadly and gestured with his staff.

I didn’t wait, but jumped up and rushed him. If I could overpower Sharskin, if I could hold him to ransom, if I could, if I could . . .

He jabbed me in the jaw and I fell over, legs abruptly turned to water. When the others grabbed me and held me, there was barely any need to. I felt weak as a dying man just from that one blow. Another couple dragged Melory forwards, spasming and arching, lost in her fight with the ancestors.

“I forgive you, Handry,” Sharskin said softly. “You will understand that this is for the greater good one day. We will not be denied our destiny.” Then he had Melory dragged in front of him, face down on the corroded metal floor, and he ground the end of his staff into her back. “How’s that recipe coming along, Doctor?” he demanded, and then, to the walls and the ceiling and the night sky beyond, “Tell me what I want. Tell me you have the knowledge from her. I want to kill her and move on. Give me the Severance!”

“Working,” said the ancestors in his own unconcerned and affectless tones. “Update installation complete. Caution, new operating system version postdates most recent records. Unforeseen compatibility errors may arise.”

“Just tell me!” Sharskin bellowed at them. “Redeem yourselves after all these years!”

For a long moment the House seemed to hold its breath around us as Melory twitched and trembled, and then that voice came again, almost reverently.

“Command access granted. All systems ready. Please state requirements.”

Sharskin’s jaw actually dropped and for a moment Melory was utterly forgotten. “Repeat,” he instructed.

“Command access granted. Higher systems ready.”

I saw a tear glint in his eye. “At last,” he breathed.

“What is it?” one of the congregation asked him.

“The deep secrets of the House,” Sharskin said. “The greater lore of the ancestors. Not the scraps they have communicated to me, but their true secrets, how the ghosts were made, how they ruined the world. Perhaps I don’t even need this thing.” A kick at Melory. “The ancestors must remember how the Severance is made . . .” His grin blazed fierce and proud. “House, hear me! Access printer functions, retrieve recipe for Severance and keep turning it out!”

“Not recognised,” came the calm voice of the ancestors.

“What would they have called it?” Sharskin stared at us wildly. “House . . . Ancestors, retrieve recipe for . . .”

“Authorisation not recognised,” the voice said again, but now it had changed. Instead of the flat mimicry of Sharskin the ancestors were imitating another voice, one I had known all my life.

The lights about us flickered and danced, and something within the House groaned ponderously, a huge beast in pain. Melory’s face was tilted upwards, her eye sightless. Her inner light shone so brightly I could see her skull.

“Access printer functions!” Sharskin repeated, words that meant nothing to anyone save him and the ancestors, and Melory. “Give me the Severance!”

More unseen monsters began moaning in the walls around us and the entire House shuddered and settled slightly. From outside came the snap of vines stretched past their breaking points. “Authorisation not recognised,” said Melory’s mechanical voice. “Receiving new instructions. Working. Working.” Dust flurried down on us from the ravaged ceiling.

Sharskin screamed in fury and the brothers who had been holding my sister suddenly remembered what their roles were, and yanked at her arms to get her to stop whatever she was doing, even though she was just standing there. The priest put his face right in hers again, bellowing at her, spattering his spit across her face. That grin of his was gone. The ancestors weren’t listening to him anymore.

Then he had her head in his hands, fingers digging into her flesh. I twisted from the slack grip of the men who held me and stumbled towards him, dragging at his arms. His slap was contemptuous, but it sent me back to the floor, head ringing. Melory was fighting him—both with her hand and in her mind. I saw the ghostlight stutter beneath his prying fingers. Hadn’t I wanted to do just that, after the doctor ghost had turned against me? Hadn’t I wanted to tear it out of her and leave just my sister behind? I lunged for him again. There was no strength in me but I just blundered against him like some flying thing blundering near a fire. He broke off from Melory, but only to take me by the throat.

“Handry.” His face was full of rage and betrayal. “It’s not your sister, boy!” But I could see he didn’t care whether she was or wasn’t. He just wanted to claw out what he needed from her skull. He saw my resolve in my face, and in his face I saw the moment that final string snapped—the last cord binding me to him. Abruptly I was Severed twice over, an outcast amongst outcasts. There was only one way that went, and I’d seen Sharskin’s hard justice in action.

If it hadn’t been for Melory, probably he’d have beat me to death there and then. I wasn’t his priority, though. I could wait. He thrust me at the congregation, ordering them to hold me.

Sharskin’s followers were suddenly moving, though, scattering in all directions as though terrified to be near me. I stared blearily about, trying to understand what was happening.

It wasn’t me they wanted to avoid. Of course it wasn’t.

The articulated figure of the metal servant was moving. Moss and rust exploded from its joints as it turned its body towards Melory, the dome of its head showing everyone their own face, distorted by ruin and time. From the warts and nodules on either side, the ghostlight sputtered and flared in time with Melory’s heartbeat.

It lumbered forwards, leaving two perfectly clean footprints on the metal floor where it had stood for so long. Sharskin presented his staff to it and commanded it to stop, conjuring it with the nonsense words of ghosts and ancestors. “Deactivate!” he ordered it. “Initiate shutdown protocols! Sleep, curse you!” Even though nothing he said even slowed the metal servant’s advance, he never stopped believing in his destiny, his right to sway the workings of the world.

The servant reached forwards and he thrust his staff at it to skid harmlessly from its skin, leaving only a bright streak. It gripped him by the chest with exaggerated care—if he had not been so insistent that it was his to command he could have slipped from its hands easily.

“Executing protocol,” said the ancestors and their metal servant crushed Sharskin’s ribs like a fistful of sticks. A shock of blood burst from his mouth, a single last cry of outrage.

Abandoned on his dead face was an expression that owed far more to indignation than to pain.

Everyone froze. The servant was still as a statue with Sharskin’s mauled body hanging in its grip. His congregation just stared, and any moment they might have descended on us, in the shadow of the servant or not, and torn us limb from limb.

Melory returned to herself slowly, feeling at the bruised skin where Sharskin had gripped her. Her eye blinked and she stared at the congregation, and as she did, the servant turned and cast its eyeless gaze over them in perfect tandem. In their alcoves along the wall, the other servants shivered slightly, all at the same time, surrounded by a faint haze of dust. The congregation chose that moment to begin backing out of the room. Some would leave the House entirely, fleeing into a world that only wished to poison them. Most just hid in the buried rooms, in alcoves and nooks. We found them later.

“Handry,” Melory said and the House said, echoing her. She frowned in annoyance, and when she named me again the ancestors were silent. When I helped her up, she leant into me just as she had when she was my sister.

“Why did you come here? What have you done?” I asked her, glancing fearfully up at the metal servant. A little leftover ghostlight was still dancing about its head.

“I fought the ghost,” she told me. “I stopped it talking to the Lawgiver. I told it to find another way. It kept saying where you were, when you were hungry, when you were hurt. Which was all the time. Handry, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

We were alone then. Or no, not alone. We were the only humans in the room, insofar as either of us qualified.

“And I couldn’t stand it, so I left. I hope the Electors chose another doctor when I was gone. I couldn’t bear knowing every day that you were in pain. And when I found you, I would make it help you, un-Sever you, something.” She looked up at the metal servant, then around at the time-scarred metal walls, as though she had never properly seen them before. “What is this place?”

Sharskin would have howled at the sacrilege, but I told her. I taught her the ancestor stories he had taught me, but without his fiery conviction I kept stumbling over the holes and the contradictions: the wise and the foolish ancestors, and what more proof than that the voices of the House had known the ghost, and bowed to it. They were not opposites or enemies but all part of the same continuum.

I thought of the dead communities that surrounded the House; somehow before they had just been a sign of the nebulous Bad that our destiny would correct, but now I considered them all over again. They were failed villages, early experiments of the ancestors as they sought to find a stable way of life in this hostile land. I thought of wise men and women getting older and worrying about how their children would survive. And they did survive. We have survived, even though the nature of this place, this planet, is to poison us in every way. There are scores of villages spreading further and further into the forest under the protection of the ghosts and the hives. If they had not changed us as they did, perhaps there would just be this dying House, speaking in sightless voices with no ears to hear. Sharskin was wrong.

X.

MELORY SAYS THAT SHE could help me by sharing her blood, transferring it to my veins by some means—means the House can provide, she says. Her ghost counsels against it, but she and Iblis have both shown me that the ghosts—the expert systems—were meant as servants and not masters. They do not make people their puppets or their slaves, unless people consent to it.

But I am not sure I want to be helped in that fashion, to be changed back to the way I was, because Sharskin was right, too.

Five hundred years, he said. I have asked the House—Melory showed me how and told the House to answer me when I spoke to it, sharing command access as she says. The House does not remember how long it has lain here, though its condition suggests Sharskin’s claim is realistic. And I think of Aro, and how we lived there like our people had always lived there, and nobody remembered when we had come there or what village we had budded off from. And certainly nobody remembered that our ancestors had crossed the night sky in a silver dart, from one floating ball to another. A small space of that second ball is all we have ever known. We hardly ever travel, and then only from one village to the next, and count ourselves great voyagers for the trip. Our ancestors were the greatest of voyagers, but we have forgotten them. Only the House remembers, and its memory is piecemeal.

Our people do not need to think about the world or struggle with it, because our ancestors cared for their children and gave them what the House calls artificial ecosystems to protect them. Not just the wasps, but the lice and fleas, all the crawling and jumping and flying things that bite and sting us, and change our bodies so we can survive the world. And, incidentally, allow us to recognise each other. They are part of a system, and because they live on us and inject us with their gifts, we are part of that system, too, and when one of us is Severed from that system, everyone knows it. No wonder my friends abandoned me. I must have seemed a walking corpse, a monster wearing a mask of human skin.

Our ancestors feared that their children would die on this poison world, and so they gave their children ghosts to advise and guide them. The ghosts were not meant to decide for them, but if you came into the world with a wise voice always telling you the best way, would you not grow accustomed to doing what it said? A voice to tell you how to run your lives and a voice to tell you how to build and plan, and a voice to tell you how to get well. And others. The hives hold many ghosts most villages never see, like the smithy ghost that Ostel spoke of. Our ancestors made sure that we would never lack for advice, but they did not realise that meant we would forget to find things out for ourselves. As Sharskin said, we are less than we were. I think our ancestors were desperate because this land kept killing them, and so perhaps they made the ghosts more insistent than they might have been, more heavy-handed in their wisdom, stricter in their sentences, because life here was fragile and all they had built was in danger of being eroded away. Or perhaps the ghosts were milder once, and with each generation’s unquestioning obedience they have grown to fill the space of command and self-determination that we came to abandon.

Sharskin’s mistake was to go to war with the world. Our ancestors realised the world was too big, and living with it was preferable to fighting it. But that does not mean we cannot change it, piece by piece. That does not mean we cannot try to understand it, or even question the ghosts and the voices of our ancestors. Our ancestors did not know everything.

I have spent a long time in conversation with the House. Sometimes it speaks my voice back to me, at other times it uses Melory’s or Sharskin’s. I let it make the choice, or else it is faulty and does not know how it makes me the heart of an invisible convocation of conflicting points of view. I like it that way. I don’t want it to tell me I’m right, or that anyone else is wrong.

Many of the brothers stayed. Probably they were angry with me to start with, but the House obeyed me and the metal servants, too, and nobody was bold enough to risk their wrath or a future where the House listened to nobody. They came out in ones and twos when they were hungry and I ensured the House provided food for them. The House told me how much food it had—it will last us for a long time but not forever, and that is a problem we will need to solve.

I sat down with them and with Melory and introduced one to the other. By this time I had spoken to the House and to Melory, and we had made a plan. It is not exactly the plan Melory intended when she abandoned Aro to come save me. I am not for saving, I have decided. Instead, she and I can try and save everyone else from the past.

We will go to the villages. Melory will play ambassador at first. Where we find them amenable to thinking and change, we will open the hand of friendship. The House has a lot to offer, after all, and every village’s ghosts will recognise it. We will go to Orovo, first of all, because I think Iblis will understand all this far better than I do. I think the knowledge of our heritage will fire her up with thoughts and ideas that she can browbeat her ghost into accepting. For her, and those others who can see past their instinctive revulsion at our otherness, we will teach them what the ghosts cannot. And we will learn and grow and become more with each generation.

For the House says that the night sky is full of places we might go, if we can only change ourselves enough to live there.

Acknowledgments

A big thanks to my agent, Simon; my editor, Lee; and most of all my ever-supportive wife, Annie.

About the Author

Photograph by Kate Eshelby

ADRIAN TCHAIKOVSKY is the author of the acclaimed Shadows of the Apt fantasy series and the epic science fiction blockbuster Children of Time. He has won the Arthur C. Clarke Award, a British Fantasy Society Award, and been nominated for the David Gemmell Legend Award. In civilian life he is a lawyer, gamer, and amateur entomologist.

You can sign up for email updates here.

Also by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Children of Time

Guns of the Dawn

Dogs of War

Spiderlight

Ironclads

ECHOES OF THE FALL

The Tiger and the Wolf

The Bear and the Serpent

The Hyena and the Hawk

SHADOWS OF THE APT

Empire in Black and Gold

Dragonfly Falling

Blood of the Mantis

Salute the Dark

The Scarab Path

The Sea Watch

Heirs of the Blade

The Air War

War Master’s Gate

Seal of the Worm

Newsletter Sign-up

Thank you for buying this Tor.com ebook.

To receive special offers, bonus content, and info on new releases and other great reads, sign up for our newsletters.

For email updates on the author, click here.

Tor.com Back Ad

TOR•COM

Science fiction. Fantasy. The universe. And related subjects.

*

More than just a publisher's website, Tor.com is a venue for original fiction, comics, and discussion of the entire field of SF and fantasy, in all media and from all sources. Visit our site today—and join the conversation yourself.

Table of Contents

1. Cover

2. Title Page

3. Copyright Notice

4. Dedication

5. I.

6. II.

7. III.

8. IV.

9. V.

10. VI.

11. VII.

12. VIII.

13. IX.

14. X.

15. Acknowledgments

16. About the Author

17. Also by Adrian Tchaikovsky

18. Contents

19. Copyright Page

Copyright Page

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novella are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

THE EXPERT SYSTEM’S BROTHER

Copyright © 2018 by Adrian Czajkowski

All rights reserved.

Cover image by Raphael Lacoste

Cover design by Christine Foltzer

Edited by Lee Harris

A Tor.com Book

Published by Tom Doherty Associates

175 Fifth Avenue

New York, NY 10010
www.tor.com

Tor® is a registered trademark of Macmillan Publishing Group, LLC.

ISBN 978-1-250-19755-9 (ebook)

ISBN 978-1-250-19756-6 (trade paperback)

First Edition: July 2018

Our eBooks may be purchased in bulk for promotional, educational, or business use. Please contact the Macmillan Corporate and Premium Sales Department at 1-800-221-7945, ext. 5442, or by e-mail at MacmillanSpecialMarkets@macmillan.com.