The Expert System's Champion

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  And it was true. We would.

  We’d become a part of their world in just ten years, which before us had nothing new in it for many centuries, and that gives me hope. Things can change, which mean they can get better.

  Those children saw us as dread figures, terrors to scare them into being good. We were the Bandage-Men and they told each other tales about what lay beneath our wrappings, what wounds, what decay and deformity. Were we even alive, or just corpses, skeletons, beasts pretending to human shape? They could never know that when we take someone away to become part of our bandaged brotherhood, it is a mercy. It is better than the alternative.

  My name is Handry and I am many things.

  To my home village of Aro, which I have not seen for many, many years, I was an outcast. Cut off from the rest of humanity after being daubed with the Severance, that mystical potion the doctor ghosts concoct, when someone has been so bad that the village can no longer support them. Severed, you become no longer one of us, no longer a part of the world. All men’s hands turned against you, all the fruits of the world poison in your mouth. And then, as it used to be, you die.

  To Sharskin the priest, who found me after my Severance, who took me to the House of our Ancestors, I was a human of the Original Condition. He taught me that what had been Severed from me was not my birthright, but an addition, an adaptation. He said what I was now, despised, rejected, was nonetheless the native state of a human being. And, although he was wrong about so many things, in this he was correct.

  And he has been dead for many, many years, too, but sometimes I hear his voice still. In my head, mostly, though occasionally the ancestors remember it and use it in their House to speak to me.

  To the other Bandage-Men, I am their leader, the new priest of the new doctrine, who came after Sharskin. And to them, we are not the Bandage-Men of the children’s nightmares, but the Order of Cain. Simultaneously outcast and elevated, despised and necessary. We, who can do things no other human can, and all we paid for the privilege was everything we had and ever were.

  To Melory, I am just Handry, her brother.

  And what is Melory to me? Sister, yes. Doctor, ghost-bearer. But more than that. Since unthroning Sharskin, she has become something else. She is the sage who interprets the voices that throng the House. She commands the ancestors and curates the fragmentary knowledge they deliver. She is the bridge between the villages and the Order, because although she commands the ancestors who shelter and feed us, she is not one of us.

  She is the one who never abandoned me.

  As we made our final approach to Meravo, we started the music. A few of us had pipes to blow into, tuneless but piercing. I have lived with the music for years, and it still scrapes about the inside of my head. Some had rattles of stones and gourds and bones. The rest had bells, just tubes hung from a string that we struck with stones. The tubes were metal, though, and metal was something the people of Meravo had no experience of, not a part of their world. The high, ringing tones of our bells, echoing out between the trees, told them something unnatural was drawing near. The Bandage-Men were coming to take their due.

  And they would be rushing about, making their own preparations. There was a compact, between the Order and those villages that accepted us. Which were more than the villages that didn’t, these days. It had been a long road: ten years, and I’m not the child I was when Sharskin found me starving in Orovo. And the villages would not have accepted that child, nor the man he grew into. But they would accept the Bandage-Men.

  Back then, after I became the priest and Melory the sage; back then, when those of the Order who had not fled accepted the way things were . . . Back then we tried, Melory and I, to just go to the villages. To explain to them how it was, and that outcasts like me and the others were just people. And Melory was a ghost-bearer, an expert system as the ancestors named her. We thought they’d listen to her. But they looked on me, and they could not bridge that gap, even with Melory explaining. They were bound in the web of the villages that tied everything together: the people, the ghosts, the tree with its hive, the wasps, even the vermin that lived on their bodies and fed on their blood. It was a system devised by the ancestors so that their descendants could live. The Severance removed its victims from that system. It removed from us the changes the ancestors had designed, that let people eat the fruit and meat of the world, handle its materials, yes, and catch its diseases and be devoured by its beasts, for that blade has two edges. More than that, it let them look on each other and know That is one of us; that is human. And, never having known a human not part of that system, they looked on me and saw a thing to fear. For, unbound by their unspoken rules and codes, I might do anything.

  Yet we did find a way. We went to Orovo, where we knew Iblis, their Architect, was a woman who thought unusual thoughts. Melory spoke to ghost-bearers of many villages. She spoke to the ancestors and learned words and phrases that would let her conjure the ghosts and request their aid in brokering arrangements. Sometimes it worked; sometimes the ghosts refused to recognise her, and she talked distractedly of versioning issues and failed backwards compatibility, the jumble of sounds the ancients lapse into, as you approach the heart of their mystery. Some villages still refused to have us near and drove us off with sticks and slings. But not so many; not these days.

  We became the wood-wanderers, the Bandage-Men, hedged about with our rituals. And in that way, with that careful measure of distance, the villages were able to come to terms with us. We had been Severed outcasts, thieves and murderers to be driven into the wilderness. Now the wilderness was our place and they knew we wouldn’t just die, and so we came with our music and our wrappings. We came and made our camp outside the bounds of Meravo. We set our fire in their sight, not by arduous whirling of sticks, but with magic, which is to say a device of the ancestors we’d restored. We made our circle there, and we waited.

  Over in the village, they’d taken some bread from that morning’s baking and thrown it back in the oven, crisping it until half-black. Except I still remember the handful of years between my Severance and when I finally fled my home, and that burnt bread was all I could eat. So that had become part of the compact we made.

  A little later, some child, perhaps bolder than the rest, came out carrying a basket of blackened loaves. He got as close as he dared, then dumped it in our sight and fled, squealing with his own daring. We made a great show of biting into the bread, though we had food brought from the House of our Ancestors that was far more palatable. The village needed to see us accepting their offering, so they knew the compact still stood.

  Then we rose, and there was more music, if that word can encompass the clatter and shriek we set riding on the breeze down into Meravo. Everyone was waiting for us there. The ghost-bearers of the village were before the tree, waiting for us. Everyone was nervous, a little frightened. Everyone was excited. And, if they’d been having problems, perhaps they were even relieved.

  Meravo had a lawgiver and a doctor. They looked like ghost-bearers always do, like Melory does: their heads misshapen, lopsided, stippled with pits and holes. The Lawgiver was an old man with one eye completely eaten away where the ghost went in. The doctor was younger, my age, his forehead so swollen it gave him a permanent frown. I saw the ghostlight glimmer briefly in the sockets and apertures of both their faces as I approached.

  We went about wrapped so that no inch of us showed, because the things of this world raise rashes and weals on our skin half the time, but many of us built on that appearance to grow our legend. There was a definite rhythm to our music, and some of my fellows danced to it, clapping, turning about, bowing and spinning. Many had bones and trophies strung about necks and wrists, or a whole vest of arraclid pieces woven together like armour. A couple had masks, horned, spiked, wild-eyed. Just show, just nonsense, but even if the villagers didn’t think of us as supernatural creatures, they knew we’d all done bad things, to become what we are. We got ourselves Severed, we were bad people,
but the Order of Cain existed to make use of bad people.

  At the back, Ledan bore the standard, something of an advertisement of the services we performed. The latticework skull of an arraclid recalled the first thing a Severed ever did for the villages, back when Iblis was expanding Orovo. We hunt monsters.

  When we got to the heart of Meravo, I saw they had need of another service, as well. There was a young woman, standing off to one side of the ghost-bearers. Her head was down, and I saw bruises on her face and arms, most likely because she was the one villager who didn’t want to be here.

  At my signal, my fellows stopped, and I approached alone. I don’t wear bone trophies or a mask, but I had the Eyes of the ancients, another device we restored at the House. Goggles, Melory calls them. I’ve had the ancestors show me what I look like with them on. Otherworldly, inhuman. A stare that passes through the merely physical and into the soul. I had Sharskin’s staff, too, a metal shaft almost as tall as I was, my rod of office as priest.

  Meravo’s Lawgiver greeted me, that familiar battle behind his words: repulsion and fear and a grudging respect. We were things of the otherworld and, in being the one to speak to us, he bound us to the compact and reminded everyone who was in charge. I asked if they had beasts that their hunters wished us to drive away from home or herd. He told me, no. The bruised woman was right there, but still I asked if there were any in Meravo who had the Lawgiver’s judgment laid upon them. My followers made a show of staring about the crowd, especially at the children. I heard a murmur go through them; people who were scared, but in a safe way. They knew that nobody was going to suddenly thrust them forth from the press to stand before us. Knowing that, they were free to imagine how it would be if it did happen.

  But, no, the woman was being presented to us. Her name was Illon.

  “Let her be brought to our camp beyond the village,” I said, loud so all there could hear. “We must catechise her.”

  None of them knew what that meant. It was a word Melory learned from the ancestors. But it served, and the villagers expected the ritual. Illon was given into our care and two of my followers came, shaking their bone rattles so that she flinched, drawing her away by her wrists. And I could do this just sat in the doctor’s hut or any secluded corner, but everyone there understood the significance of our taking Illon out, beyond the circle of their houses. Illon was trying to keep her head up, to put on a bold show for those who rejected her, but I saw how much she feared us. And she was right to.

  In the old days, she’d have been Severed already. There would have been a different sort of festival, and people would have thronged to see her painted with the red mixture, turned into an unperson and driven out with stones and jeers. To die, most likely. Only a very few of us had lived, and mostly because the Lawgiver was slack in putting the Severance on, so it didn’t quite take.

  When we had her at our camp, the Order made a loose circle about her and me and the fire. I asked her, “What did you do?”

  “Nothing,” she said, sullen, and I repeated, “What did you do?” I’ve a special emphasis that told her this was the big question, one you don’t lie to. I lifted the Eyes of the Ancients and she flinched, because my face didn’t look like a living human face to her. Eyes, mouth, nose, beard, and yet there was no connection. Cast out, Severed, not part of her world.

  A few of us got the Severance by accident, blameless and yet no less cut off from all we’d known. But most of us were villains of one stripe or another. Idlers, brawlers, thieves, troublemakers, murderers. Not the inhuman fiends the villagers like to think, but bad people. The Order exists to give a second chance to bad people.

  “I knew better,” she said. It started as a mumble, ended up a fierce growl. “I argued. Didn’t do what the Lawgiver said. What the ghost said. Three times.”

  I watched her. I’d done this many times; the fear was my ally. Hard to tell a smooth lie when you’re trembling before the Bandage-Men. I watched her and I waited as the cracks in her story spread.

  “I hurt a woman,” she said at last, baring her teeth. “She . . . I was jealous.”

  I waited.

  “They told you this already,” she hissed at last.

  “They didn’t. They will do, if I ask. But if you don’t tell me, then there is no more between us.”

  Illon closed her eyes. “I was jealous, and so I waited for her, after dark. I waited until she came, and I beat her. I clubbed her down and hit her seven times.”

  Premeditated violence was a rare thing among the villagers. I saw in Illon someone whose whole life never quite fit the world she was born to. Someone destined to dance in the woods with the Bandage-Men.

  “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 chi
ll 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.