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.”