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.