“Never seen them like this.” Her brow was set in deep lines of thought. “Scared, but . . . it wants something from you, maybe. Like when they’re waiting at the posts before we whistle, because they’re after a thing we can give them.”
Brack! And then it started creeping backwards, one limb at a time, all eyes on us.
It stopped. We stared. It started retreating again, body angled low. It stopped, watching us.
“Follow,” Erma said, but really she didn’t need to explain it.
* * *
“We’re just going with it, are we?” Kalloi wanted to know, but Erma certainly was, and she didn’t seem to care if we went or not. And the bracker, for its part, was warily focused on me and mine. And so we followed it in fits and starts to the bracker village.
Our arrival was heralded by more of those explosive Brack! noises. I saw Amorket twitching, the ghostlight dancing about her face in a weird jitter. There were a lot of them.
That was almost the whole of my first impression. Abruptly there were brackers everywhere between the trees ahead of us, dozens, a hundred, just more and more of them as far as I could see. More than we could ever fight, more than enough to stamp Portruno flat, and do the same to Tsuno tomorrow. Enough to rampage through every village there ever was if they chose. They stomped and reared and bracked, and for a moment I just wanted to run straight away. There was another word the ancestors had that we didn’t use anymore, and it was army. So many huge, ridgy bodies; so many murderous club feet and thumb-stalked eyes turning our way. So many inhuman thoughts, because Erma had shown us that these were thinking animals, at least a little.
In amongst them were other beasts, things smaller than people but puffed out with long coats of hair, skittering underfoot in packs of eight or ten. I couldn’t see much of them beyond the hair, but these must have been the beasts the brackers herded, that gave the fleece Tsuno’s hunters made into shirts. I thought the soft, grublike things some brackers cradled with their middle legs were livestock, too, at first, but then guessed the oddly shapeless things were likely young.
And there were houses, too. I didn’t mark them as such at first, but then I saw a bracker actually making one. It was nothing more than branches ripped off one tree and then woven round the trunk of another to make a conical roof to shelter under, but that was a bracker house. They made them by rearing up, forefeet against the trunk while those middle arms and their mouth-hand did the weaving.
“Not enough houses,” Melory said. She was right, of course. I saw maybe a score of those roofs, nowhere near enough for all the brackers. It made me think I was right that there were just too many of them, and they’d spread out to another home, only it was somewhere that was already home to people. But then she added, “They’re injured, some of them.”
It wasn’t the doctor ghost telling her, but just her being a doctor, inside her head. And she was right, a lot of the brackers looked to have been in a fight. Some of them hobbled about on three good legs, some had dark dents on their backs, or missing eyes. I thought for a moment that the people of Portruno had put up a good fight, but I wasn’t seeing spear or knife wounds. Something big and strong had laid into these brackers.
“They fight each other? One village against another?” Because maybe there’d been a bracker war, and these were the losers, driven out of their home.
“Never,” Erma told me, but then the beasts had been doing lots of things they never did, so I reckoned she wasn’t the authority she used to be.
The one sure thing was that we had their attention. More and more of them stopped what they were doing and came to stare. Erma played her silent whistle, which I knew must be loud to the brackers, but they were mostly interested in us outcasts, and in Amorket. They came crowding in from all sides, the jagged edges of their big bodies rasping together, lifting their little heads so their two lower eyes could squint at us. Amorket’s Furies buzzed angrily, and they shied away a little, so I wondered if the wasps made noises I couldn’t hear, too, that the brackers didn’t like.
Rubbery fingers tweaked my elbow and I flinched back, finding one of them right next to me. It didn’t seem to like what it had touched, though, mouth-hand twisting as though to rid itself of a sour taste. Brack! it said, loud enough to deafen me. The call was taken up and repeated across the crowd of them.
“Erma, what do they want?” Melory asked. I heard a little tremble in her voice and knew she was as leery of the mass of animals as I was. Except they hadn’t attacked us, no matter what had gone on at Portruno or with the old Lawgiver here.
A bigger bracker was coming through, carrying something beneath its body. Carrying a body beneath its body. A person. I thought it was a corpse at first, but when the bracker laid it down, I heard a whimper from it.
“What have they done to him?” Kalloi murmured, because the man was all over bruises and blood, skin a hundred shades of black and yellow, red and blue. Cuts and grazes and rashes and welts, and yet I thought of any of those brackers attacking someone, and it seemed to me they wouldn’t make all those little marks in a fight, they’d smash whole limbs and skulls.
“One of yours,” Erma spat. For a moment I couldn’t work out what she meant, because of course we can’t tell. Cut off from the world the ancestors built for their children, we lack the sense of what belongs and what does not. But villagers always know, and so do animals and the rest of the world.
“Nobody I know,” Kalloi said, and I was the same. And the more I looked, the less I knew him, because I reckoned I’d recognise this man if I’d ever seen him before. He was very small, and the little of his skin that was unmarked was dead white. He had no hair, and while I’ve known people who were bald, this man had not a single hair anywhere on his body. He trembled and moaned, sounds that weren’t quite words, and his nail-less hands twitched, arms and legs pulled into his body. Everything about him looked weirdly soft and unformed. And, in all this scrutiny, I missed the most obvious thing.
“No Severance,” Melory said.
She was right, of course; bruised and ravaged as he was, still that skin was free of one particular stain. The red mixture that marked every one of the Order, and every outcast there ever was, was absent from the man.
“You’re sure he’s . . . ?”
“Oh, yes. Definitely, yes.” She had to force herself to look at him, the same human-but-not repulsion as when any villager looked on any of us, the barrier that all the mummery of the Bandage-Men was there to breach.
Then one of the brackers pushed in, looming over the twitching wretch, and its attention was on me. It had something in its hands, proffering it to me. A flat stone with a hole bored in it, I thought, detached from one of its loops of string. A ridgy stone, or maybe something animal, a piece of carapace or horn, because it had that structure to it, built of layers laid down over and over. I took it from the bracker, feeling its dense weight. The edges were jagged, where it had been broken from something larger.
Brack! And everyone was waiting for me to do something, people and brackers, but I didn’t know what it was. A rock; a piece of shell.
The bracker stamped a heavy foot right next to the unmarked outcast. He barely reacted. His whimperings and tremblings all arose out of something within him. His eyes saw nothing.