And then, too late for second thoughts, I was brought up short at the sight of my fellow guests. They were all men, ragged and dirty, and just about all older than me. Almost all were starveling thin, too. I saw gaunt faces aplenty, hollow eyes, legs and arms where the knee or the elbow was the thickest part. And I saw red, so much red on them. Some had the mark across their faces, so all might know them at a glance (not that there was much chance of mistake). Others hid most of their branding under torn, filthy clothing, but look hard enough and it was always there. Every man of them had been daubed with the Severance. They were outcasts, too, just like me.
And past them I could see the locals—most outside the fence but a handful inside. They were handing out bowls and ladling great slopping spoons of something from that cauldron. I saw two ghost-bearers among them. One was a woolly haired man whose skull was swollen entirely out of shape, lopsided and craggy. He was tending the cauldron and I guessed was the local doctor (in fact he was one of three, for the Orovo hive had belatedly recognised its expanded congregation and begun sending out extra Electors to keep up). The other was a tall woman, and this was Architect Iblis, though I wouldn’t hear the name yet.
All I knew was that we were being fed, and my shrunken stomach wanted to shoulder its way through the wretched band of others to get to the front. I could have done it, too. Most of the other outcasts were thinner than I. There was another man there, though, tall and burly and far stronger-looking. His hands were scarlet to the elbows, and he wore a robe stitched together from what I reckoned was hide, seeming very flimsy and yet without a single tear or darn in it. He had a staff made out of hard silvery stuff I never saw before. He was keeping order there, for the outcasts, making sure nobody shoved and everyone got a bowl. I was scared of him then, and waited my turn despite the gnawing in my guts.
At last I got my bowl and was about to just upend it into my gullet, but a bitter thought had been growing in my head while I waited. Why would Orovo be feeding outcasts? Surely we were as hated here as anywhere? A glance at the locals confirmed it. They might be giving us stew, but they were watching us as though we might run mad at any time. They didn’t like having us around, and yet here we were.
With that, I poked at the delicious-smelling food suspiciously. Perhaps Orovo had a big outcast problem, which seemed entirely plausible given that I had turned up intending to be a problem. And perhaps they had decided to solve that problem without going to the trouble of hunting us all down.
I was caught in an agony of indecision because my stomach wanted me to guzzle it down and poison be damned, but I had just enough mind left to fear ending up like Sethr, my innards blown out by something fatal to my digestion.
A hand fell on my shoulder—a red hand. I looked up and flinched back from the big outcast, wondering wildly how recently he must have been Severed to be so strong, so vital. He didn’t look starved at all.
He was stark bald, probably around thirty, the point in life when a man isn’t weak, but isn’t getting any stronger. He had the steadiest gaze I ever saw.
“Eat,” he told me. “It’s safe.” And he swallowed a mouthful of his own to show me. All around, the other outcasts weren’t holding back, and though I knew poisons could be slow, at least none of them was dropping dead there and then.
And so I gave in and gulped it down, and it was good! For the first time in years it was good, and it sat so well in my stomach and made me feel full, almost overstuffed. I could barely finish it. I grinned through greasy chops at the big outcast and he grinned back.
“It’s good you thought about it, though,” he said. “Shows you’ve still got some you up there. Not just a beast yet, eh?” He tapped my forehead with a hard finger. “Stick with me, boy. I’ll look after you. You remember your name still?”
“Handry.”
“Sharskin.” He jabbed himself in the chest. “You come here to work?”
“Work?” I was slow to speak, partly because I was licking the bowl clean, partly because talking to another human being was a rusty old skill that was slow to come back to me.
At around that time the ghost-bearer woman, Iblis, came up and leant on the fence, waving to catch our attention. Sharskin leant in to me.
“Most of us have heard this three, four times now. You’ll hear it every evening, but this time just listen. This meal isn’t a gift, it’s a trade. You don’t pull your weight tomorrow, they’ll drive you away before dinner and nobody will lift a finger to stop them.”
Iblis stood before us without really looking at any of us as individuals. I think what she mostly saw was her plan, which was part hers and part the ghost’s. “Welcome to Orovo,” she told us. “See here: we have food for you. My doctor brews it specially for your stomachs. Smells weird, doesn’t it? Or perhaps to you it smells good.” And she was right at that, it certainly did. Seeing our reactions she smiled lopsidedly, because some of her mouth had been trapped closed by the ghost when it came to her, and because, I suspect, she was not very good at smiling. “You came here to work,” she told us. “You didn’t know that. Now you do. Work, and we feed you as long as we need the work. Better than starving? Of course. For the new ones, we’ll take you out into the woods tomorrow. You’ll get some sticks and stones. You’ll kill some animals for us. Work and get fed. You understand?”
She spoke very loud, as though we were deaf or stupid. Looking on us, there was a part of her brain trying to recognise the mob in front of her as people and not finding what it sought in us. The Severance blinded her to us as human beings, but she was someone who could think around things like that, hence this whole plan.
“What work? What animals? Why?” I asked Sharskin, because he was still at my shoulder. His smile suggested most of my fellows hadn’t even thought to ask.
That night, gathered around a fire that Iblis’s people had lit for us, belly full for the first time in an age, I lay beside Sharskin and listened to him explain the grand plan for Orovo as we looked up at the stars.
“Village like this, it gets too big, there’s a procedure,” he told me. “Architect ghost hears from lawgiver they’ve got too many mouths to feed, sets it in motion.”
I’d started to wonder how Orovo had got that way and asked if maybe their ghosts had gone wrong. He gave me that sharp grin again, as though the whole business had been a test I’d passed.
“I reckon you’re right,” he said. “So now they’re following the procedure while everyone here starves. Lucky they’ve got this Iblis who can think around the ghost. Ghosts aren’t good at the unexpected.”
“I thought the ghosts knew everything,” I said, and then I told him about Doctor Corto, which was the only time I knew where the ghost had failed, and that was its bearer’s fault, not its own.
“Happens more than you’d think,” Sharskin told me darkly. “Carrying a ghost, it’s not good for you. Most of them don’t get that old. But here, the ghost wasn’t up to sorting out the mess, so Iblis had to work round it. You listen to them talk sometime, it and her. She fights it.” He sounded mightily approving.
“So what’s the procedure?” I asked him.
“Birth a new village, of course.”
I half sat up and stared at him. “That can happen?”
“How’d you think villages got there in the first place?”
I had never thought about it, and it must have showed on my face because he shook his head wryly.
“They’ve found a tree, and the hive here will send a bunch of special wasps to start up a new one. I reckon they’ll take some of the spare doctors and a lawgiver from Orovo, and whoever has to move will get to work as hard as we will tomorrow, to clear the land, build it and plant it. Difference is, they get to keep what they work for.”
“And what’s our part in this?”
“Our part is where Iblis comes in. That tree they’ve found isn’t just free for the grabbing, and she’s worked out that animals don’t like us—not the way we smell, not the way we taste. We get t
o go raise a stink at the new tree to drive out the neighbours. That way, Orovo’s precious settlers don’t get got. You’d think they wouldn’t care so much. Not like they’re short of folk, is it?”
I laughed nervously and agreed with him. Sharskin was someone you wanted to agree with.
Iblis and her ghost had just about taken over Orovo and she was ruthless in making the plan work. She had in her head a complete list of every single inhabitant of her community and what they could do, and she had worked out who needed to stay and who must go, to leave them with two whole communities. Families were going to get cut in half, friends parted from friends, people dragged from their homes, all on her word. I saw her talking to her own people, later on, and there wasn’t much more warmth in it than when she spoke to us. But she was who they needed; the Electors had chosen well. In some other season perhaps she would have been an outcast herself, someone who just wouldn’t fit with the people around her until they drove her out. Right now she was Orovo’s saviour.
Sharskin told me all of this, in the pleasant warmth of the fire, and then he pointed up, past the scraps of cloud scudding across the sky. “You see out there?”
“The stars?”
“Stars, right. You ever wonder what they’re for, boy?”
It didn’t seem a meaningful question. I could only stare at him, and his look in return was faintly disappointed.
* * *
We set out the next morning before full light, a ragged, emaciated band of animal-killers. A few of Iblis’s people went with us, mostly hunters tasked with showing us the way. The fighting would be our task.
I was amazed anyone would expect us to do it, weak and spindly as we were, but there was a hot meal waiting for the survivors and that lent strength to us. More, we had a purpose. For a fleeting moment we were part of something, like we all had been once. I can’t speak for all the rest, and certainly not for Sharskin, but there was pride in what I was about. For all I was raising my hand for a village not my own, and a village that would disown me the moment we had done, I felt good about myself. I took my staff and my pouch of stones and I used them with a will.
Most of the beasts had been chased from the tree already. The forest there had its herds and its big predators, but enough humans will drive away most things. We had a couple of Arraclids turn up while I was there, but one just ran off the moment it got a look at what was going on, and the other one, a bit smaller and obviously far less intelligent, got caught stalking one of us and we beat it to death. But if it had just been Arraclids, Iblis wouldn’t have needed us.
This tree was the one she had to have, apparently—according to the ghost and the hive back at Orovo, this was the optimum heart of their new community. However, it was already claimed by a clan of Harboons and they weren’t giving it up just because a bunch of people wanted it.
I’d never met Harboons before, though one of the other outcasts said they’re so common southaways that people can barely live there without being at war with them. They’re a little smaller than a man, and the top and bottom pairs of their legs are for clinging to branches. Instead of just the two toes most everything else has, they’ve kind of got a third one made from part of their hands or feet or whatever they are, so they’re quick as anything in the trees, though they’re slow and clumsy if you get them on the ground. They’ve got a bendy neck and a head where the top and bottom eyes face front but the side ones wave about on stalks, so you can’t creep up on them easily, and their mouth-hands are short and dexterous. They had this trick where they could spit thorns they’d gathered from the briars they’d trained to climb up their tree—poison thorns. Iblis’s people got sick when they got stuck with them, but we outcasts barely felt them, and our stones hurt them a whole lot more.
We had to go up into the tree after them, though, where the Harboons had built a whole load of little stick houses they lived in. That wasn’t fun for anyone, because although their top and bottom hands were good for nothing but climbing about, the middle set had a kind of forked claw on the end of each arm that they used for cutting up bark to get at whatever was beneath. They used them for cutting up us, too, if they could, and they were smart about it, attacking from above and below and decoying people off into ambushes. Many of us died, we outcasts.
I would have died myself. I was stronger than most of us, but that just meant I ended up in the toughest fixes more often. More than once I found myself about to be cut off from the rest, with Harboons hissing and shrieking at me from their breathing holes, hacking at me with their claws or spitting thorns at my eyes. Sharskin was always there, though. Sharskin was a fighter; he’d had plenty of practice. He was a dead shot with a sling and he could wield his silver staff with force and accuracy to shame the rest of us. And he was a leader, too. I remember his voice bellowing encouragement as we drove the Harboons from branch after branch, breaking down their flimsy houses and throwing their eggs to break on the ground. He worried Iblis and her people, but we outcasts were in awe of him.
We worked for Orovo for eight days, making war on the Harboons. More outcasts kept turning up, lured by the scent of the food, and stayed on as long as the work was needed. And plenty died so that Orovo’s child-community would live, but that was the deal Iblis held out, and there was no way we were going to win any more than that. Our lives were most of what we had to give.
Iblis came to the new tree a few times, towards the end of it. She would stand, looking up into branches now mostly denuded of Harboon nests, talking to herself. I crept close and listened a few times and found her deep in discussion with her ghost.
“Substitute Harko, San, Morrey for Lumas and Leda,” she said into the air, and then the ghostlight flared about her forehead and jaw and more words came, same voice but even flatter and more discordant. “Prognosis resource collection drop food zero point zero two.” And Iblis would blink her good eye while her left rolled about like a Yertle on its back, and say, “Retain substitution reallocate Ghortomar and Hekki to general gathering category.” And again the light, and the ghost using her mouth to tell her, “Prognosis resource collection increase food zero point zero zero zero four crafting efficiency drop furnishings and small wood items point zero seven three.” Then she came back with, “Calculate furnishings and small wood items overstock availability,” and there would be another answer and probably I am not remembering the exact words because I didn’t understand them. What I did understand was what the conversation meant. Iblis was not doing what the ghost wanted. Other than Melory, that one night when she told me to flee, I had never seen anyone go against a ghost. Of course Iblis wasn’t fighting it outright, like Melory had, but she was negotiating with it on its own terms. I don’t know what it was like to be Iblis, and what it had been like before the Elector stung her, but somehow she could see all of what the ghost told her, like a picture in her head, perhaps, and grasp it all. And that meant she could talk back to her ghost and make it change its decision so that she could make the new community work better for her and her people, not just what the ghost wanted. I remembered Sharskin saying how they were just cutting themselves in half, heedless of families and bonds, and I reckoned that each morning Iblis had a whole queue of people telling her just why they should or shouldn’t go to the new place, and here she was trying out different arrangements of people in her head, letting the ghost tell her how each one would work out. And it was plain she wasn’t just wheedling for special treatment, but that she would make the decision and the ghost would just advise.
Then she saw me—and not just her, because a couple of the hunters were hurrying over to protect her in case I meant trouble. Iblis wasn’t scared of me, though, just cocked her head at me and said, “Yes?” in that abrupt way she had with everyone.
“When the work is done,” I asked her, “can you still feed us? We’ll work for you. We can drive off other animals, help you . . . any way you need.” Because I could see we were almost done and, more than most of my fellows, I could look ahead b
eyond that.
Iblis stared at me and then blinked, one eye first, the other following lazily. “The benefits are insufficient,” she told me. It took me a moment to understand I was being told “no.”
“But . . .” I tried, without really having an argument to follow the trailing word.
“Inability to integrate with the community outweighs your specialist utility,” she told me, ghost words and human words mingling together like they did in her head. And then: “I looked at the parameters. I can’t make it viable.”
I went off to chew over her meaning, in case I had misunderstood her tone. It all boiled down to “no,” though. When Orovo didn’t need us, it wouldn’t feed us, and if we stayed around, then no doubt we’d be driven off or even killed. I would be back to wandering and stealing for as long as that would keep me together, and then no doubt I would die.
There was a definite air of festival on the last day, when the surviving Harboons finally gave up their claim to the tree and scrambled off through the forest, pursued by our stones. The Orovo folk had dancing and music, and plenty of them ended up doing things that would only add to their population problem. We outcasts got to watch all of that as we took our last meal of that good stuff Orovo’s doctor cooked up, because Iblis was as good as her word went, even though she could have had us driven off the moment we’d done our job. Tomorrow would suffice for that, though. And if we weren’t exactly celebrated heroes, we were at least left to our own devices for the night.
Sharskin came to find me after we’d been fed. I’d been expecting him. I thought he wanted to lie with me like some men preferred, and though that had never been for me, I would have gone with him gladly. Human contact was human contact, and he was strong and charismatic and clever, and so choosing me would be the sort of compliment my life had been very short of.
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