“I’m here to fight you.” The words spat out fiercely but the eyes uncertain, almost pleading.
“If that is how it ends, then so be it,” I said, as I agreed with Melory. “But we do not know how it ends. Come. My sister will ease your body, and we can talk.”
* * *
Inside, at Melory’s request, she doffed the armour that served as a house for her Furies, as she called the wasps she carried. The gaunt, misshapen body beneath told me the insects were not hatched from the knots of her mail but grew from her own flesh. Amorket’s back, breasts and belly were riddled with scars where the latest brood had gnawed its way free, and Melory said there were newer eggs still within her. She was a walking hive; Iblis said she must be a corruption of the process used to seed a new village. For her part, the Architect found Amorket infinitely fascinating.
“We go where we are invited,” I said. “Jalaino does not want us. We do not go there.”
“You change everything,” Amorket grated through clenched teeth. “I have seen it. Every village between home and here is different. They welcome you in. They are no longer like my home.”
“You never saw them before, to know if they were ever like your home,” Iblis observed, more a point of logic than an attempt to persuade.
“You are a threat, or else why am I? Why are any of us?”
When Melory first spoke to her, Amorket maintained her home had sent her hunting us. But that was her word, not Jalaino’s. Sympathy and medicine and careful questions had teased out the truth, at once stranger and worse.
“Melory says there are many of you now, in your home. Many . . . Champions?”
The fire flickered in her face and, simultaneously, in all the pocks and burrows of her body, and she flinched with it. “Many,” she agreed, staring at me with disgust, but with something else, too. I think it might be hope.
The Jalaino hive had gone mad in its fear of us. There were a dozen Champions there, and Jalaino was not large. More Champions than all the other ghosts combined, and the Elector wasps still issuing from the hive. It was, Melory said, like an allergic reaction. Like the very thing that raised rashes on my bare hands when I touched some plant or beast’s hide. It was defence overgrown until it strangled what it sought to preserve.
“You came here yourself,” I said quietly. “To kill us all, without knowing how many we are or even what we are.”
“A danger,” she said, words coming by rote. Melory gave her a steaming cup of something cooked up on Iblis’s fire and she drank eagerly.
“I want to bring her to the House,” Melory put in, but I shot her a warning glance. If this business with Jalaino went badly, I didn’t want them knowing where the ancestors lived.
“If you understood,” I told her, calm even though there were wasps crawling about Iblis’s ceiling, “then you might see we are not a threat, but a blessing: we drive off beasts, we take away your Severed, we—”
“Change,” she hissed, but then she drank, and some of the tension went out of her as the medicine went in. I heard a quiet sob she couldn’t bottle up. A new ghost, a new expert system as Melory said; one not comfortable in its human skin.
“And yet we talk,” I noted, pushing my luck.
She stared bleakly at me, but in that look, I could read a plea. Help us find a way out. From what she told Melory, Jalaino could barely support all its newfound ghost-bearers, men and women tortured by what they had become, blundering about the village like wasps themselves. One went mad, she said, killed two people and had to be killed in turn, the pain too much, the twisting of their body, the constant voices of the wasps.
Then someone outside called my name, and the wasps were abruptly all in the air, spiralling about the confines of Iblis’s house, in constant danger of falling into the fire. I rose slowly, carefully, eyes on Amorket.
“What is it? Is that Graf I hear?” He led another band of ours that should have been days out of Orovo.
“Priest,” came the call from outside. “We’re come from Tsuno to get word to you. Hardly let our heels cool since we left it.” A village on his route, towards the edge of where people lived. A frontier place, nowhere anything important happened, surely, and yet here was Graf telling me, “They need help, priest. They have a war.”
III
THE ANCESTORS SAY THAT war was once a thing people did to each other. Whole villages would go and fight other villages. When I heard that, I couldn’t imagine it. I couldn’t imagine why. Now, having met Amorket, I have a bad feeling that such things could happen after all. Jalaino has gone wrong; it fears and, in its fear, its hive is building a pressure that must be bled off. Or else explode.
But war, to us, is not people against people. It is when people fight animals, but not hunting. War was what Orovo was recruiting outcasts for, all those years ago. They needed to clear a new tree of beasts, and there was a village of harboons there that wouldn’t move. Not a real village, of course, but they had their little houses in the branches, and probably the harboons thought of it as their village. And then we outcasts came, who didn’t get poisoned by their darts, and who were unnatural and strange, and we broke their houses and drove them away. And that was the end of the war, and Iblis could claim the new tree, and now that’s where Orovillo stands.
In the Little House, Graf told me all he knew. He hadn’t got to Tsuno himself. Tsuno had actually sent people to the nearest villages looking for the Order. What they’d told Graf was that they didn’t want to go make war on some animals. Instead, some animals had come to make war on them.
Graf was a big man, Severed for killing someone in an argument. A bad man, but he took to the Order and the travelling life. “Brackers,” he told me. Nothing I’d seen or met, but he’d seen some, once. “Big things, twice the size of us. Their places are past Tsuno and Farro, off beyond where people live. Or they were. And if you ask me, people don’t live there because the brackers do.”
We made arrangements then: Ledan to take three or four and continue on our route, visiting the villages and doing what needed to be done. I and the rest of our band to go with Graf and his people and see what was happening at Tsuno.
Which left Jalaino as a thorn in my mind I couldn’t pluck out, and my heart told me it’d be a bigger problem than any number of animals.
However, when I explained all this to Melory, I found my problems weren’t going to separate themselves out so neatly after all.
“Amorket says she’ll travel with you.”
The Champion of Jalaino sat outside the Lawgiver’s house, cloak over her bulky armour. With one knee drawn up to her sharp chin, she looked almost childlike.
“She thinks it will help her work out what to do,” Melory told me.
“And if she decides she has to kill me?”
“Then you’ll be surrounded by your own people, at least. And you’re going to help a village. If she goes back to Jalaino and tells them . . .” But her words petered out.
“You don’t believe that,” I decided.
“I don’t think it can work like that, no,” she agreed reluctantly. “Because we’re not just dealing with some villagers who don’t like you. We’re dealing with a hive that has set itself against you. It’s producing these Champions to fight you. If I could go there, then perhaps I could open a channel to it, but . . .”