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?”