We became the wood-wanderers, the Bandage-Men, hedged about with our rituals. And in that way, with that careful measure of distance, the villages were able to come to terms with us. We had been Severed outcasts, thieves and murderers to be driven into the wilderness. Now the wilderness was our place and they knew we wouldn’t just die, and so we came with our music and our wrappings. We came and made our camp outside the bounds of Meravo. We set our fire in their sight, not by arduous whirling of sticks, but with magic, which is to say a device of the ancestors we’d restored. We made our circle there, and we waited.
Over in the village, they’d taken some bread from that morning’s baking and thrown it back in the oven, crisping it until half-black. Except I still remember the handful of years between my Severance and when I finally fled my home, and that burnt bread was all I could eat. So that had become part of the compact we made.
A little later, some child, perhaps bolder than the rest, came out carrying a basket of blackened loaves. He got as close as he dared, then dumped it in our sight and fled, squealing with his own daring. We made a great show of biting into the bread, though we had food brought from the House of our Ancestors that was far more palatable. The village needed to see us accepting their offering, so they knew the compact still stood.
Then we rose, and there was more music, if that word can encompass the clatter and shriek we set riding on the breeze down into Meravo. Everyone was waiting for us there. The ghost-bearers of the village were before the tree, waiting for us. Everyone was nervous, a little frightened. Everyone was excited. And, if they’d been having problems, perhaps they were even relieved.
Meravo had a lawgiver and a doctor. They looked like ghost-bearers always do, like Melory does: their heads misshapen, lopsided, stippled with pits and holes. The Lawgiver was an old man with one eye completely eaten away where the ghost went in. The doctor was younger, my age, his forehead so swollen it gave him a permanent frown. I saw the ghostlight glimmer briefly in the sockets and apertures of both their faces as I approached.
We went about wrapped so that no inch of us showed, because the things of this world raise rashes and weals on our skin half the time, but many of us built on that appearance to grow our legend. There was a definite rhythm to our music, and some of my fellows danced to it, clapping, turning about, bowing and spinning. Many had bones and trophies strung about necks and wrists, or a whole vest of arraclid pieces woven together like armour. A couple had masks, horned, spiked, wild-eyed. Just show, just nonsense, but even if the villagers didn’t think of us as supernatural creatures, they knew we’d all done bad things, to become what we are. We got ourselves Severed, we were bad people, but the Order of Cain existed to make use of bad people.
At the back, Ledan bore the standard, something of an advertisement of the services we performed. The latticework skull of an arraclid recalled the first thing a Severed ever did for the villages, back when Iblis was expanding Orovo. We hunt monsters.
When we got to the heart of Meravo, I saw they had need of another service, as well. There was a young woman, standing off to one side of the ghost-bearers. Her head was down, and I saw bruises on her face and arms, most likely because she was the one villager who didn’t want to be here.
At my signal, my fellows stopped, and I approached alone. I don’t wear bone trophies or a mask, but I had the Eyes of the ancients, another device we restored at the House. Goggles, Melory calls them. I’ve had the ancestors show me what I look like with them on. Otherworldly, inhuman. A stare that passes through the merely physical and into the soul. I had Sharskin’s staff, too, a metal shaft almost as tall as I was, my rod of office as priest.
Meravo’s Lawgiver greeted me, that familiar battle behind his words: repulsion and fear and a grudging respect. We were things of the otherworld and, in being the one to speak to us, he bound us to the compact and reminded everyone who was in charge. I asked if they had beasts that their hunters wished us to drive away from home or herd. He told me, no. The bruised woman was right there, but still I asked if there were any in Meravo who had the Lawgiver’s judgment laid upon them. My followers made a show of staring about the crowd, especially at the children. I heard a murmur go through them; people who were scared, but in a safe way. They knew that nobody was going to suddenly thrust them forth from the press to stand before us. Knowing that, they were free to imagine how it would be if it did happen.
But, no, the woman was being presented to us. Her name was Illon.
“Let her be brought to our camp beyond the village,” I said, loud so all there could hear. “We must catechise her.”
None of them knew what that meant. It was a word Melory learned from the ancestors. But it served, and the villagers expected the ritual. Illon was given into our care and two of my followers came, shaking their bone rattles so that she flinched, drawing her away by her wrists. And I could do this just sat in the doctor’s hut or any secluded corner, but everyone there understood the significance of our taking Illon out, beyond the circle of their houses. Illon was trying to keep her head up, to put on a bold show for those who rejected her, but I saw how much she feared us. And she was right to.
In the old days, she’d have been Severed already. There would have been a different sort of festival, and people would have thronged to see her painted with the red mixture, turned into an unperson and driven out with stones and jeers. To die, most likely. Only a very few of us had lived, and mostly because the Lawgiver was slack in putting the Severance on, so it didn’t quite take.
When we had her at our camp, the Order made a loose circle about her and me and the fire. I asked her, “What did you do?”
“Nothing,” she said, sullen, and I repeated, “What did you do?” I’ve a special emphasis that told her this was the big question, one you don’t lie to. I lifted the Eyes of the Ancients and she flinched, because my face didn’t look like a living human face to her. Eyes, mouth, nose, beard, and yet there was no connection. Cast out, Severed, not part of her world.
A few of us got the Severance by accident, blameless and yet no less cut off from all we’d known. But most of us were villains of one stripe or another. Idlers, brawlers, thieves, troublemakers, murderers. Not the inhuman fiends the villagers like to think, but bad people. The Order exists to give a second chance to bad people.
“I knew better,” she said. It started as a mumble, ended up a fierce growl. “I argued. Didn’t do what the Lawgiver said. What the ghost said. Three times.”
I watched her. I’d done this many times; the fear was my ally. Hard to tell a smooth lie when you’re trembling before the Bandage-Men. I watched her and I waited as the cracks in her story spread.
“I hurt a woman,” she said at last, baring her teeth. “She . . . I was jealous.”
I waited.
“They told you this already,” she hissed at last.
“They didn’t. They will do, if I ask. But if you don’t tell me, then there is no more between us.”
Illon closed her eyes. “I was jealous, and so I waited for her, after dark. I waited until she came, and I beat her. I clubbed her down and hit her seven times.”
Premeditated violence was a rare thing among the villagers. I saw in Illon someone whose whole life never quite fit the world she was born to. Someone destined to dance in the woods with the Bandage-Men.