The Expert System's Champion

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  I hoped Amorket wouldn’t be able to keep up with us. I’ve seen strong-seeming new recruits falter, after a few days in the wilds. Villagers work hard at their farms and crafts, but travelling needs a different kind of strength.

  And yet, when we set camp the first dusk, Amorket was still with us. She walked our trail all the way, ten, twenty feet behind us, never out of sight. Perhaps she told herself she was hunting us, and thus appeased the ghost within her. She didn’t share our fire, but made her own within our view. In the morning, she was awake and ready to go by the time we rose. No predator appeared to rid us of her, and reaching Orovo without an escort showed she was more than capable of defending herself.

  “She doesn’t eat.” Graf had barely taken his eyes off her since she joined us.

  “I think the wasps eat,” was Melory’s best guess. “And then they go back into their house, and they feed her even as they feed on her. She doesn’t get tired, because they won’t let her.”

  “Lucky her,” Graf decided, but Melory shook her head at that.

  “No, because you need to get tired. It’s your body’s way of telling you to rest. Only she doesn’t have that. She’s burning herself up, just being who she is.”

  Good, I thought, but Melory felt sorry for this Amorket; this Champion who’d sworn to destroy me. Melory was the doctor ghost’s bearer, after all. She couldn’t help wanting to make people whole.

  So it went all the way to Tsuno: long days of tramping between the trees following the paths we of the Order worked out. Landmark to landmark, rivers and rises. Here and there a marker left by past travellers: distances and directions carved into stones in the simple code we taught each other, boiled down from the sigils the ancestors used to preserve their knowledge. Because the call was urgent, we pushed harder than normal, and at night there was less talk because everyone was tired. And always Amorket followed like a worry that would not go away. Until I realised she was becoming for me what I was to the villages: a personification of what there was in the world to fear. She is what I would warn my children about.

  That made me think of Illon, because she was as close to a child as any of the Order would ever have. I had not sent her away with Ledan; there was a rebellious streak in her, not unusual for the newly Severed. She was cast out because she would not live within the rules of a village. She must learn to live within the rules of the Order, or she would be cast out twice over. So I took her to war instead.

  Here was a secret I would not tell Amorket, because it would be giving a knife to my enemy. We had no children. Sharskin’s iron rule that no man of his followers lie with a woman remained in force. The child sickened, the mother sickened. Both died as the world rejected them. Melory was working with all the lore of the ancestors to overcome it, but until she succeeded, people like Illon were the only new blood the Order ever saw.

  * * *

  And then we came to Tsuno.

  There were too many people crammed into a small village. People and ertibeests and shrovers and a host of little two-legged beasts Graf called moxies. And there was a wall, about two-thirds built. The architect ghost of Tsuno had found a pattern for something previously unnecessary.

  We came out past the stumps of all the trees that got cut for that wall. It was going on for dusk, but we could see people still digging footings and driving logs in, lashing each to its neighbour. Brackers were big, Graf said, and the wall was made of massive trunks, set next to one another so you could barely get a knifeblade in between them. The sight made me nervous, and I understood a little about Amorket and Jalaino, seeing change in the world and not liking it at all.

  Still, they were pleased to see us. Not just the stand-offish pleased we get when we turn up with our wild music and our bandages. Word spread so that all of Tsuno was looking at us when we stepped over the most recent postholes and into the village.

  Tsuno was small, but with everyone pulled in from the fields and the herds, with all their animals jostling and complaining and stinking, it felt big and crowded, almost like Orovo did back before they split. All those people looked at us with an expression I’m not used to: desperate hope. We outcasts were what they’d fixed on, to save them from these brackers.

  And they stared at Amorket, stalking in our footsteps. They could see she wasn’t one of us, but she wasn’t one of them, either. The thought hit me with a stab of sympathy I didn’t really want. As a professional outsider, I couldn’t help being sorry for someone who had even less a place in the world than me.

  Soon after that, with only the briefest nod at all the ritual greeting we were used to, Graf and Melory and I were hustled up before Tsuno’s Lawgiver.

  * * *

  He looked like he wasn’t older than fourteen years, and that couldn’t be helping matters. At first, I assumed this was bad luck; that their last Lawgiver just died of being old at precisely the wrong time. But no, as the story came out. Their last Lawgiver went to drive away the brackers, and the brackers did for him. The child I saw before me had been Lawgiver for no more than twenty days, and he was terrified. The ghost had to fight to speak through him. And the ghost wasn’t much help because this hadn’t happened before, and there was no law for the Lawgiver to give. The one thing they knew was that, if you have an animal problem, you ask the Order.

  This wouldn’t be like driving arraclids from the herds, though. From what they were saying, it wouldn’t even be like driving harboons out for Orovo.

  “We first saw them a hundred days ago,” the Lawgiver told us. His voice trembled so much I felt he was still at his mother’s teat a hundred days ago. “Brackers live north and east, always. We don’t go to their lands, they don’t come to ours. That’s how it always was, before. A hundred days ago, hunters started to see bracker trails in our hunting grounds.” And I understood his hundred days didn’t mean that. I was too used to the ancestors who were precise in everything they measure. His hundred days meant long ago but not that long.

  “Then we started to find their houses, where they’d built. They brought their herds to where our herds were. They stole from our fields before the harvest was ready. We tried to drive them off, but then there were more of them than anyone had ever seen, and they just took what they wanted. Then the Lawgiver killed one. Then more came and killed him. In sight of the village.”

  “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 vill
age. 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.

  “These brackers, Graf said they were big. How big, exactly?”

  “Twice my size, full grown.” Her eyes scattered over the devastation. “Yes, they could tear down a house, one or two of them.”

  “And the tree?”

  It was too much of a question; nobody had ever considered what it might take, to bring such a giant to the earth. But then she said, “They never did anything like this before.”

  “You’ve lived with them on your border,” Melory noted. “There must have been friction. Some man of Portruno killed one of theirs, maybe? Took something they held dear? Broke their eggs?”

  “Don’t have eggs,” Erma corrected automatically, eyes still not quite able to stay still on anything. “I’ve known brackers since my Ma showed me where their places were. Never anything like this.” She stalked through the ruin, going to see the trail out.

  “Change,” Amorket pronounced, and I turned on her in case she was about to make this about us, as though the Order’s mere existence could have tilted some intrinsic balance in the world. From her expression, she was arguing with something inside rather than picking a fight with me.

  “Erma.” Melory picked her way after, grimacing. “You and your hunters keep an eye on them, these brackers?”

  Erma’s pretence at not hearing her was obvious even to me.

  “You just mark their places and stay away, or you go back and see what they’re doing? Big neighbours, and many. I’d want to know.”

  “You’re asking if we saw this brewing?”

  “I’m asking what you’re not saying out loud.”

  The hunter stopped still, staring out into where the tree line started, at the edge of what had been Portruno’s fields.

  “What are you, ghost-bearer?” I could barely catch her voice. “You come here with the outcasts, but you’re blessed of the tree. And her,” no need to even point Amorket out, “still less anything I understand. Will that ghost you carry call me out to the Lawgiver, do you think?”

  I frowned at Melory, not sure where the words were leading.

  “My ghost’s a doctor, and I’ve fought it down before. I am . . .” And what, exactly, was Melory now? “A scholar. I dwell among the Bandage-Men. I know more than any living about the ghosts and our ancestors and all the secret things of the past.” No idle boast. “So tell
me.”

  “When I was little,” Erma said, still facing away from us, “my Ma took me to where the brackers live, just as her Ma did with her, just as I’ve done with all three of mine that lived to an age for it. She took me to where a pole was stuck in the ground, a clear space no tree would move to. The ground was crusty with white crystals the brackers crap out. She had a wooden carving, held it in her two hands. I never could make out what it was of, but it was stained red as Severance. She set that on the pole, and she blew a pipe she had with her, that made no sound at all, and we sat down to wait. And the brackers came.”

  At last she turned back to us. “Three of them, bigger than I’d ever thought. So scared, I was. But my Ma, she went to them and started making marks in the ground, just slashes: she does three, then they do two. She does four, then they do three. Or maybe it was different numbers. Done it enough myself, since, that I don’t rightly recall.

  “They go then, and I’m asking and I’m asking when can we go home and what was all that? But we spend all night there, me twitching at every sound, sure the brackers are coming back to kill and eat us. And next morning, there they are. And they have a handful of game—just broken animal bodies, a mereclet, a couple of vissids. Things we wouldn’t hunt but that I’d seen driven off from the fields before. And they have some of this . . . hair, fur. It’s from their beasts, I know now. This cloth.” She tugged at her tunic. “Lasts near forever, keeps out the wet. Hunters’ shirts they call these, back home. Only we get to wear them, because only we know where the weave comes from. So they give us this, and Ma has her sack open and hands over some knives and some pots, even a gourd of tunny, and they match these things up one against the other, so I can see the same numbers there, as the scratches in the earth: some of these for some of those. You understand?”

  “Your Ma traded with them?” asked Melory, wide-eyed.