“They told you that they’ll give you to us,” I said, and she nodded shortly. “Well that’s not how it works.”
Her turn to watch.
“We take none who don’t come willingly. We are the Order of Cain. We bear the knowledge of the ancestors. We are outcasts, but we give to those who cast us out. Because we serve a greater purpose. We do work that none of the villagers understand. Walk with us and you must do as we do, perform what work is given you, obey when you are ordered. Or we will cast you out as well, and then there will be nowhere in this world that can shelter you, not the villages, not the forest, not the House of our Ancestors.”
“And if I say no?” A lot of them don’t even ask that, but I appreciate those who do.
“Then you are Severed and make your own way, and nobody will order you, and you will do no work you do not wish, and you will have no purpose, and all the world will be turned against you. But still I say, we take none who do not come willingly, and I will know if you merely feign when I demand the oaths from you.”
That bit wasn’t true, not really. I’ve been wrong before, though I am a good judge, I think. But it sounded impressive and most of our potential recruits believed it.
“It doesn’t sound better than the village.”
My smile must have looked terrible, the way she flinched from it. “But the village is not among your options, Illon. Your actions closed that door. And no, it is not better. I can’t even swear it’s better than dying alone in the woods. But it is something, and you will have comrades to share your misery.”
We watched the doctor brew up the Severance and the Lawgiver apply it. Not haphazardly or to his tastes, but with the sigils I showed him. The light touch would blunt the Severance a little, so that she might eat a berry or a sliver of meat from this world without it striking her dead of poison. The symbols spelled out her crime, but only I and two others there even read the ancestors’ signs. The people of Meravo were solemn, reverent even. When we had gone, they’d have their feast and congratulate themselves on a job well done. And they would tell their stories of wicked Illon being tormented by the Bandage-Men, her feet whipped, driven howling through the trees. Or whatever the local variant of the story was.
The Lawgiver had some word to pass to nearby villages, and that was another of our services, for the village folk did not travel. The beasts of the wild were a terror to them; even their hunters never ventured far. Before we came, contact between the villages was a matter of once every few years. We had become a tenuous web of communication, carrying ideas, invitations, manifests of trade. I could almost feel the world becoming larger, for all these people, simply because we were in it.
At the end of all of this, we made our formal farewells. Illon came to us, and we wrapped her as one of our own. She was looking back for faces she knew, but none of them knew her anymore. She had passed into the shadow life that is our lot.
It was part of the ritual that I ask the Lawgiver, “Have the ancestors any word for their servants?” and I did not expect a reply. Yet the old man’s head snapped back, and the ghostlight flared bright in all the blemishes and holes of his face.
“System recognises Handry,” came his cracked voice, the ghost speaking through him. “Message follows: Make all haste to Orovo, brother. Message ends.”
A chill went through me, even though this wasn’t the first time; even though I knew the trick was no magic. The ghosts can speak across great distances. Even the little fragment of ghost Melory placed in me when we first parted could talk to her all the way over in Aro, telling her how I sickened and was hurt, letting her track me across the world. And so Melory found how to make the ancestors, who are just another kind of ghost, speak to the trees of all the villages. So she passed messages to the wanderers of the Order who otherwise would be cut off from all news until they returned home.
But I had not looked for news, still less a summons. We lived in a slow world where each day and each season was little different. Melory would not call me unless something unprecedented had happened.
We left first thing the next morning, and it seemed Illon would get a swift and unorthodox introduction to the secrets of our Order.
II
THE HOUSE OF OUR Ancestors sailed the night sky from another world. Those it brought here were hero-people, masters of making and doing and knowing. And yet this land proved their equal, and they made their own compact with it, just as the villages make their compact with us. They gave up the Original Condition of mankind, which is to be cold and hungry and despised. And, because they loved their children, they gave them ghosts to guide them, the expert systems who always knew best. I remember Sharskin telling me. He said the world had not changed for five hundred years, while the House of our Ancestors fell into ruin.
The House of our Ancestors is the heart of our world, a secret we do not speak of to the villages, even though it is the heart of their world, too. The heart, because the ancestors are everyone’s ancestors. The heart, because Melory drew a map, once, and the villages formed an expanding ring about a hollow, unsettled centre, and in that centre lay the House, surrounded by a ruin of failed communities from when the ancestors were still trying to reach their compact with the world.
The other landmark for us in our wanderings is Orovo.
Orovo was where it all started. That was where I met Sharskin the priest, and where Iblis the Architect first looked on the Severed and saw something she could use. I met Sharskin in Orovo because they had food there for outcasts who would hunt beasts for them, clearing the land around a new tree so that half Orovo’s overburdened people could find a second home. And I have watched that new village, Orovillo as they call it; watched it grow and prosper, and felt a curious pride, for my little part in bringing it about. But Iblis paved the way for the Order before the Order was anything other than Sharskin’s cult, and it was her path Melory and I followed later, when Sharskin was dead.
We passed through the forests at the best pace Illon could make. She was terrified at first; everyone is. The beasts of the woods would devour a hapless villager caught alone amidst the trees. On the third day, I found the track of a mereclet, where its two-clawed prongs had scarred the trunks. We followed it until we came to its den and it waddled out to inspect us: a fat-bodied, spike-armoured thing on six barbed legs with a fist of sawing arms that could turn man to meat in the blink of an eye. It threatened us, and if we’d bothered it too much, it might attack simply to drive us away, but it showed no appetite for our flesh.
“We cannot eat of the flesh of beasts, nor fruit, nor any thing of the world,” I told Illon. “Nor can they eat of us. We are Severed from all of it.” And I gave her the ancestors’ food, the soft, sweet, wrapped sticks from the House, and we left the mereclet alone.
I wondered if it was as simple as that: that Orovo had an animal problem again that needed sorting. Orovo was the largest of all the villages I had seen, and the Bandage-Men brought their dolorous music there often. They didn’t like us—they couldn’t like us—but they remembered. I think Iblis liked us a bit, because her mind worked differently, and because she was used to arguing with the ghost.
As it turned out, it was something very different.
We came to Orovo with our rattles and bells, striding along the new hard-packed paths they had there, another Iblis idea. People stopped to stare, and we picked up a tail of children playing at how close they could come to our heels before we looked back at them. Familiarity takes the edge off the strangeness. Orovo was a safe haven for any of the Order seeking shelter.