The Expert System's Champion

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  The other landmark for us in our wanderings is Orovo.

  Orovo was where it all started. That was where I met Sharskin the priest, and where Iblis the Architect first looked on the Severed and saw something she could use. I met Sharskin in Orovo because they had food there for outcasts who would hunt beasts for them, clearing the land around a new tree so that half Orovo’s overburdened people could find a second home. And I have watched that new village, Orovillo as they call it; watched it grow and prosper, and felt a curious pride, for my little part in bringing it about. But Iblis paved the way for the Order before the Order was anything other than Sharskin’s cult, and it was her path Melory and I followed later, when Sharskin was dead.

  We passed through the forests at the best pace Illon could make. She was terrified at first; everyone is. The beasts of the woods would devour a hapless villager caught alone amidst the trees. On the third day, I found the track of a mereclet, where its two-clawed prongs had scarred the trunks. We followed it until we came to its den and it waddled out to inspect us: a fat-bodied, spike-armoured thing on six barbed legs with a fist of sawing arms that could turn man to meat in the blink of an eye. It threatened us, and if we’d bothered it too much, it might attack simply to drive us away, but it showed no appetite for our flesh.

  “We cannot eat of the flesh of beasts, nor fruit, nor any thing of the world,” I told Illon. “Nor can they eat of us. We are Severed from all of it.” And I gave her the ancestors’ food, the soft, sweet, wrapped sticks from the House, and we left the mereclet alone.

  I wondered if it was as simple as that: that Orovo had an animal problem again that needed sorting. Orovo was the largest of all the villages I had seen, and the Bandage-Men brought their dolorous music there often. They didn’t like us—they couldn’t like us—but they remembered. I think Iblis liked us a bit, because her mind worked differently, and because she was used to arguing with the ghost.

  As it turned out, it was something very different.

  We came to Orovo with our rattles and bells, striding along the new hard-packed paths they had there, another Iblis idea. People stopped to stare, and we picked up a tail of children playing at how close they could come to our heels before we looked back at them. Familiarity takes the edge off the strangeness. Orovo was a safe haven for any of the Order seeking shelter.

  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.

  “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 . . .”

  “But it might kill you. She said one of the other Champions already ran mad.” Right then, all the pressures of being priest of the Order seemed too much. It’s hard at the best of times, with the world poison and all the rest looking to you. And now a village wanted to destroy us, and who knew how that idea might spread.

  “Let her come with us. Either that or she follows us anyway, and better we have her where we can see her.”

  “And I’ll be there,” Melory put in. I eyed her, but of course she’d come. She’d been looking out for me since before I was Severed; she wouldn’t stop now.

  * * *

  The next morning, Iblis saw us off with her crooked smile. She cast a wry glance at Amorket, standing apart from us like a shadow.

  “Probably there’ll be three more like her waiting, when you come back.” Said mostly to see how I’d react. The prospect seemed all too likely. From what Amorket said, the hive at Jalaino wouldn’t stop until it felt safe from us.