They didn’t have a grand welcome for us there, not when some wanderer band came in and out every twenty days, and not with Orovo such a grand place, its ghost-bearers constantly overworked. What we did get was Iblis and Melory hurrying to intercept us before we got near the tree.
Melory and I embraced. I pulled away my goggles and made myself look into her face, and she made herself look into mine. Her difficulty was my Severance, for she was still village despite all her ties to the Order. My difficulty was what the ghost made of her, when it made its home in her skull. A face not unlike my own, once, but now pushed out, swollen in parts, fallen in elsewhere, and one eye closed up and destroyed. Never easy, but I always made myself do it: say Sister even as she reminds herself, Brother.
Iblis was a tall woman, greying now, who looked like she was half smiling, one corner of her mouth trapped upwards by the deformations the ghost gave her. Her real smiles weren’t much more than that, and she just nodded distractedly at me. Iblis tended to have two roads into any conversation: to say nothing or to say all of it. The only time I ever heard real give and take with her was when she was talking to her ghost, its words and her words going back and forth out of her mouth, all in her voice. It wasn’t something Melory did with her own doctor ghost, nor any other bearer. But, like I say, Iblis was always different.
Orovo kept a building in sight of its tree that no local lives in. We called it the Little House and it was for us, one more concession Iblis talked her ghost into. In the Little House we put down our packs and I deputised Ledan to get people mending and cleaning and setting the fire, and to make sure Illon did a share of the work.
“Now.” I sat with Melory and Iblis. “What’s gone on?”
“We’ve had a visitor,” Melory told me. “A new expert system.”
I didn’t know what to make of that. Villagers seldom travel, but when they do, it’s never the ghost-bearers themselves. Far too precious. And then I considered what she’d just said. “Not just a new bearer?”
“A new type of expert system. Not even an old one that fell out of use, but something completely new.”
I looked from her to Iblis, who shrugged. Iblis had visited the House of our Ancestors once, much to the horror of Orovo’s people. She’d spoken to the ghostly voices that lived in those metal halls and shared something of Melory’s communion with them. Still, Melory had been ten years at study and still only understood a little. Iblis could have spent all her days learning merely that the abyss was wider than anyone suspected.
But new expert systems was a topic Melory was deeply invested in, for the Order’s sake. Melory thought it possible to breed a new ghost, an ambassador who could be of the villages and yet of us as well.
But this new visitor hadn’t got Melory excited, only worried.
“How do you know it’s completely new?” There were many ghosts almost nobody met, arising in response to some rare resource or danger.
“It’s here because of you, the Order. The bearer says she’s a Champion, but I think the ancestors would have called her an antibody. Something that arises in response to a disease, to defend against it. She’s here from Jalaino.”
One of the villages that had never accepted us. “How can they make a new ghost?”
“When hives are grown for new villages, they aren’t perfect copies,” Melory said slowly. “Iblis says she can already see that Orovillo’s hive is a little different from Orovo that birthed it. And over time, I think, each hive gets more different. It makes its own decisions, makes new laws, gathers new knowledge . . . When I came to the House of our Ancestors, Handry, you remember how it was. The ghost in me, the ancestors in the House, they couldn’t talk to each other straight away. They had to change themselves to find that middle ground.”
She said it so calmly, but it had been a traumatic thing. Of course, Sharskin was priest then, and a lot of the trauma had come from him.
“The Jalaino hive is . . . difficult. They haven’t responded to our overtures at all, but I think the fact of the Order set something in motion, caused a reaction there. The hive sees you as a threat, and this new ghost is their response.”
She must have heard that the Bandage-Men had come to Orovo because she was waiting for us beneath the eaves of the Lawgiver’s house, next to the tree. What struck me first was her size, taller than me and far broader about the shoulders beneath her cloak. Melory’s briefing explained what lay underneath: not ghost-twisted musculature, or not just that. She had come armoured; more, she had come alone. I say that villagers don’t travel and yet here was someone who’d walked to Orovo from Jalaino, a trek of many days.
I called. “I am Handry of the Order of Cain.” I had a dozen of the Order at my back, people like Ledan, hardened to the wandering life. I walked to within ten feet of her, gazed on her through the Eyes of the Ancestors, planted my metal staff in the earth. On all sides, from between houses and out of windows, the people of Orovo tried to pretend they weren’t watching.
She stiffened. A twitch of her head cast back her cowl and she shrugged away her cloak, freeing herself in case it was to be a fight then and there. I saw a woman’s face, thin and lean and still with both her eyes. Her cheeks were hollow like a starveling’s. The hair she had left was pale and lank and only on one side of her head. The other side was stippled with dents, pushed out over her ear. The ghostlight burned there like the final embers of last night’s fire. About her shoulders, forming the hunch of her back, she wore a great knotted mass of wood, familiar in its contours and structure from the hive at every village’s heart. Insects crawled in and out of its galls and sockets, finger-length wasps of iridescent blue and green that flexed their wings in a murmurous buzz; that took to the air and described a looping cordon around her.
“I am Amorket of Jalaino.” Her voice sounded savage and hateful, but I had the benefit of Melory to advise me, and I knew what lay behind it. Even so prepared, I had to plant my will like I did my staff, to stand my ground there. The wasps glittered and spun in the sunlight, and they hated me. They were hatched for no other purpose but to destroy things like me. If Amorket had met me on the road before coming to Orovo, I had no doubt she would have killed me first, and only then asked if it would have helped anything.
But it was Melory she met, when she came here hunting the Order. Melory, who was of her world, a villager, a ghost-bearer. Melory, who was a doctor and knew pain when she saw it.
She’d told me how it had gone, between them. The madwoman in her living armour who came to Orovo’s Lawgiver, demanding that the Severed be delivered up to her. Pounding on doors, screeching in at windows, the air about her busy with murderous insects. Only Melory and Iblis had dared approach her, the one for worry, the other out of curiosity.
At first all they’d got from Amorket was that she had been sent from Jalaino to purge the world of us. But Melory had seen the taut waxiness of the woman’s face, the weariness, the pain-lines about her eyes. Melory reached out and touched her, and the doctor ghost spoke a long list of ailments and possible cures. So it was that the first armour of Amorket was breached.
“My sister has told me of you, and your mission,” I said, fighting to keep my voice steady. There was a tone to those wasps that spoke fear into my mind, and it was hard to simply stand there. “Iblis the Architect has offered her house, for us to talk in private.” To the great disappointment of every eavesdropper in Orovo, no doubt.