“They eat your flesh?” Graf asked right out.
The Lawgiver paled. “They eat no flesh, not even their herd beasts. But they are not shy of killing. I’ll send for our best hunter. She has seen more than I have.” And that I didn’t doubt, because I suspected this boy had seen next to nothing.
“Bring her in, if she’ll sit with us,” I invited. His eyes flicked between us, over and over to Melory because he couldn’t work out where she fitted. I was too tired with the story to tell him.
The hunter was a hard woman, older than anyone else there, her short hair grey but her body still strong. Erma, the Lawgiver called her, and she looked me and Graf up and down. She looked me right in the Eyes of the Ancestors and didn’t flinch. She’d seen worse than me, that look said.
“I know brackers,” she said. “This isn’t what they do, never before. Keep to their own places.”
“You went hunting them with the other Lawgiver?” Melory asked her.
“No. I told them not to.” Erma scowled. “Leave it to the hunters. But the Lawgiver wouldn’t have it.” And it’s not often you find a villager who’ll argue with a lawgiver. This old woman might have been one of us, if she’d gone only a little off her path. And the boy glowered at her for questioning his predecessor, even after what happened.
“What has the Lawgiver said?” The way I said it made clear what I meant.
The boy wouldn’t look at me. “The hunters and herders are to train more of their trades, more spears and slings. Everyone who can. So we can fight.”
It was a reasonable response from the ghost: gather in more of the most needed resource, in this case hands that could defend the village. Perhaps that and the wall would be enough. Without seeing the brackers, I couldn’t know.
“Erma,” I said. “Can you tell me of the land the brackers have seized?”
She nodded, watching me carefully. She was of the villages and I was of the Order, but right then there was a bridge across that gap; she and I understood one another.
“Lawgiver, we will scout tomorrow. May Erma come to our fire tonight, and tell us what we need to know?” Specifically, tell us whatever might not get said in the Lawgiver’s earshot.
* * *
We camped hard up against the wall, close to the ragged edge where they were still building. There was no room for us inside, everyone so crammed in and frightened that having the Severed at their elbow would be inviting trouble. Erma’s visit was brief. She could be as hardy as she liked, but sitting with us made her profoundly edgy.
“I know these brackers,” she told us. “I know them all—there’s five, six villages of them over in their lands. They paint themselves, coloured mud and stuff squeezed from plants. Looks a bit like this, even.” She flicked a finger at the red stain down one side of my face, where I’d loosened my bandages. “So this village used to live days away, other side of Portruno. That’s a place right on the edge of the wilds, you know it?”
None of us had been there. The Order had come to Tsuno twice in ten years, but no further.
“I tried to make the Lawgiver see, but he says other villages aren’t our business,” Erma told us. “But to come here, they came through Portruno. I want to go see what happened there.”
The Lawgiver wouldn’t let her. But the Lawgiver would let her guide us, and didn’t decide where we went.
IV
FROM TSUNO WE COULD look northeast and see the mountains that were the northern edge of where people lived. Westwards, the land fell away down densely wooden slopes of red and orange-leaved trees. That was where the brackers were supposed to stay with their herds and their houses. People had never tried to contest them for it because the soil was poor and the stinging rains frequent, so that even the trees crept slowly about on their roots and jostled for the best places.
Erma took us that way: Melory and me, Kalloi and Illon of my people, and the unwelcome shadow that was Amorket. I left Graf with most of my Bandage-Men back at Tsuno to scare off the brackers if they came. We kept well clear of the brackers’ new village, and I wondered if the beasts had a problem like Orovo, too many of them in one place, so they needed to spread elsewhere. Were the people of Tsuno to them like the harboons had been to Iblis, just something to be chased off so they could live there? Was Portruno already a bracker village?
When we reached Portruno, though, the brackers weren’t living there. Nothing was.
Nothing was standing. Every house had been torn down. With some, it seemed the staves of the walls had been pulled methodically outwards. Others had been pushed in, flattened as though boulders had been rolled over them.
The tree, which was every village’s heart, was on its side, trunk splintered, branches shattered, its roots clawing at the air.
The tree.
For a moment, I couldn’t think. Erma, Melory, we all just stared. Somehow it was Amorket who brought me back to myself.
“I didn’t think you would care,” she said, and abruptly I realised the flecks at the corner of my vision were her wasps. I was within their angry circle; she was right at my shoulder. “You’re not of this anymore. What is it to you?”
“It is still the world,” I managed. “It hates us, but we are in it. The world is a certain way. The trees . . .” I had seen dead villages, failed villages, but they were old. The forest around the House of our Ancestors was littered with them, from before the ancestors perfected their plans. But never since then. People die, houses fall down, but the village lives forever. That’s what it’s for.
“I can’t feel it.” Amorket’s tight, unwelcome voice, each word as though it were forced out of her by hand. “I know, but I can’t. There’s no room in me.”
“Because you’re full of hate for me and mine.”
“Yes.” A single, despairing curse of a word, because that hate wasn’t even hers, but a thing she’d been forced to don with that armour and the wasps that went in and out of her flesh. And, like those wasps, it had eaten out a space to dwell in, and now there were parts of Amorket’s mind that existed only to the extent that she recognised their absence. She was like those lost villages of the ancestors, a failed experiment.
But that didn’t mean I had to be sympathetic, and it didn’t mean she wouldn’t kill me, by choice or because she had no choice.
“Bodies, priest,” said Kalloi. It was no great feat of perception on his part. There were bodies everywhere, or mostly pieces of bodies. Not enough, I thought, for a whole village’s worth, but many. The scavengers were already about them. Larger beasts had doubtless hauled off their meals elsewhere, but the busy little life of the world scattered only reluctantly at our tread, lifting into the air or burrowing into the earth. I saw hands, legs, ribs, the solid bones unique to the descendants of the ancestors.
And there was a trail, or at least a furrowing of the earth all around the wreck of Portruno. The fields were half torn up, the corrals, everything. I did my best to read it, but the sheer wealth of tracks defeated me. It was just a colossal disturbance of the ground that came, circled all round and through the village, and then left by the same route.
“Erma.” My voice, raised to reach her ear, was far too loud in this dead space. I expected a ghastly, tormented look from her, but what I got was the face of a woman wrestling with deductions already. Tsuno had a good lead hunter.