The Expert System's Champion

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  “What will you do now, Jack?” called the voice of Bain from the depths of Leviathan. “I have rolled a stone before my home. Or are you Odysseus as well? I will devour you, Jack, and you will join me in the dream.”

  “We can upend it,” one of my people said, but I could see how the creature had latched onto the floor and the edges of the gap, made itself no more than the newest and hardest section of the enclosing walls.

  “Back and destroy the eggs,” said Graf, but there were more stone-things behind us now, not rushing at us with that furious speed but advancing nonetheless. I felt they still felt our Severance, because it was akin to something within them. Their passengers, or hosts, or parasites, the things within them whose human thoughts had become their animal dreams, they knew the Mark of Cain upon us.

  “The walls themselves,” Illon said. She had a knife out, a Jasp-wood blade, not even the metal of the House. “They are flesh. We can cut them.” And that seemed the least worst of all our bad options.

  Even as we veered away towards the closest expanse of clammy, oozing wall, though, something struck my head. In the shocked instant of contact I thought it was a slingstone. My mind instantly pictured a shell tilted up, its pale occupant pushing its way out into the air, whipping a missile at me. In the next moment I realised shock was all I’d suffered, and the missile was rising up into the cavernous space. I tracked it, trying to understand what I was seeing.

  From outside there came a great commotion. I heard a handful of human voices lifted in desperate war cries, but behind that, a thundering chorus of Brack! Brack!

  Rescue! And yet we were in the very heart of the stone-thing’s domain, in the bowels of their Leviathan that dreamed it was a convocation of the ancestors whose whims it pursued. Then the thing that had struck my head was back, arcing past me and joined by its siblings.

  A wasp. More than that, a Fury. I saw them determinedly swarming in over the top of the blockading stone-thing, spinning about in the air and making abortive sallies against us. I shouted at them to attack the walls, but they would never pay any heed to me. Most of them seemed to be on the verge of making me their target.

  Bain was shouting again, that dead voice surely rattling every petrified bone of his corpse. He was shouting in panic, though. “Where are the Children?” he demanded. “What have you done? We are blind!”

  The stone-thing in the doorway had lost its hold, retreating partway and lifting its shell up so that the buttons of its eyes waved at us. So that the gaping maw at its centre opened and a timorous human face emerged, hands prying at the slick edge. I saw utter terror on that face. Human terror.

  Melory had used Amorket’s wasps to cloak us before, of course, when we killed one of them. Now she had come back for us, and at the head of an army.

  By then, half my people were already chasing ahead of any orders I might give them. We charged the stone-thing, and I saw an expression of horror and despair on its human face before that visage was retracted into its innards like a tongue.

  It took every one of us, but we upended the thing and rolled it aside, bursting out into a chaos of fighting. The brackers had driven into the stone-things’ camp in a great wedge, smashing down with their armoured forelegs, trying to shatter every shell they could reach. Their enemies were fighting furiously, swarming them from many sides, attacking where they could catch the brackers unprepared, hunkering down when the reprisal came. At the edge of the valley wall, I saw a handful of humans. It was Erma and her hunters mostly, whipping slingstones at the stone-things, trying to keep them down with spears when the beasts scrabbled for them. Melory was there, too, and Amorket stood empty-handed below, jostled by the brackers. She had her arms outstretched as though inviting her death, and the tide was turning even as we raced through the melee, so that death was surely coming for her. I saw her mark me, and then I cannoned into her, taking her by the waist and hauling her back up the side of the valley. I felt three fierce stings from the Furies for my trouble, but without poison. I hope that meant she understood I was trying to save her.

  By then the brackers were reconsidering their assault, or else this lightning strike had been the whole of their plan. They had broken open a full dozen of the stone-things, and the sight was hideous, the pinkish pulp of their unshelled bodies half disgorging human forms that tried to crawl away or writhed like gugworms exposed to the sun. Some got clear and flailed and slithered towards the sheltering bulk of Leviathan. Others were still merged with the beast that had carried them, by the hair, by the limbs, by the head. The brackers killed them when they could, and yet there were many of their own left broken in the mud by that point. The stone-things were stronger than they.

  A new wave of bustling shells was sweeping along the valley, formed up into a monstrous wall, and that was all the encouragement everyone needed to quit the field. The first battle in our war with the stone-things ended in a hurried retreat that the Furies covered, confounding the enemy when they tried their soundless speech one to another until we humans reached Tsuno and the brackers their own place within the village’s land.

  I knew it would not be long before the stone-things regrouped and came to exact their vengeance.

  X

  BY THE TIME WE were away from the stone-things, the fever had come over me. Where Amorket’s Furies had lanced me, my body swelled up, red and angry. Not poison—I have no doubt those wasps possessed a venom that would have killed me outright. When we of the Original Condition are injured, though, this is the risk we always run. Like Kalloi, I was fighting the hysterical reaction of my own flesh to the intrusion of the outside world.

  Once again, my personal history saved me. They never did quite Sever me, back in Aro. So it was that the sufferings of the outcast were always a little blunted. I was two days out of my mind as I thrashed and dreamed and sweated, but for half of that I was recovering. Amorket’s directive from the hive of Jalaino would not be fulfilled just then.

  Many things happened in those two days.

  For one, my Bandage-Men wanted to kill Amorket, and came very close to simply bludgeoning and knifing her, wasps or no wasps. They saw the marks of stings on my flesh and read into them an intent I don’t think she possessed. Melory stood between them and their revenge, and only their respect for her, as the sage who interpreted the voices of the ancestors, stayed their hands.

  For another, I dreamt of terrible things. Between the fever and what we had seen within Leviathan, I can be forgiven, I think. In my nightmarish thrashings, I was back in those living halls, back before the stone speaker of the stone-things that called itself Bain and Lena and Geordi. I was sinking into the flesh of that giving floor, into the slick walls. I was being dragged into the gulfs of the beasts by pallid, nail-less hands. I was locked in a withered fossil of a body, trapped forever in that dry company, speaking riddles and nonsense in the crooked language of the ancestors. In two brief days of fever, I lived a hundred years of horror. But when the fever broke, I was left with a dreadful revelation: that I had a weapon against Leviathan and her brood, and that my nightmares might yet be a true revelation of what was to come.

  The other major change in circumstances was evident to me when I came back to myself and opened my eyes, for we were not in Tsuno, nor any village. We were out under the stars, under makeshift shelters, amongst the trees. My followers were there, and Melory and Amorket. In fact, my first sight on waking was both Illon and the Champion of Jalaino at my sickbed, the former glowering at the latter and the latter looking . . . stricken. Grieving. Amorket, my nemesis, grieving because she thought she might have slain me. I was looking at her thin, sharp face when she realised I was awake, and I cannot quite explain the expression on it. Oh, guilt, certainly, and a residue of the old hate and anger that was never specifically for me or the Order, but just for her predicament and that of her village. But there was a need there: a need for me not to be dead. We were comrades, she and I. And she was cut off from the people of the villages in her own way,
and had found a place amongst us, in her own way. For a queasy moment I saw she and I bound together as the stone-things and their human passengers, but that passed, and I found I was glad of her. An arm’s length gladness, given the ache of the stings, but there isn’t much gladness in the story of the Bandage-Men. You take what you can get.

  Beyond the lean-to they had me in, I saw far more, stretching off between the trees. Not just Erma’s hunters, but the whole of Tsuno’s people, young and old. They had evacuated the village entirely, moving at an angle away from the stone-things. Melory would tell me the thought behind what had been her plan. The enemy was coming, and we had seen what they had done to Portruno. The hope was they would follow the people and not pause to destroy Tsuno’s tree. She had planned for that eventuality as well, though, using her ghost to coax wasps down from the hive, which might serve as seed for a new colony should the village be destroyed. Melory had been very busy over those two days, in between saving me and saving Tsuno. She had been in constant communion with the House, across all the miles of forest, drawing on its thoughts and ideas. I was not the only one with a plan.

  As well as the Tsuno folk, Erma’s scouts had found a contingent of refugees from Portruno, lost in the forest, hungry and ailing, and brought them with us. Many of their kin had been killed when the stone-things stormed their village. Many more had died in the woods, to beasts, to hunger, to mischance or eating the wrong thing. When they learned that their very tree was gone, most of the rest looked as though they would rather have gone the same way. Tsuno’s young Lawgiver, I’m told, gave a fine speech, welcoming them, promising them homes and a place in the world. When I saw him myself, he seemed a taller man, a stronger one. He was lawgiver in truth as well as merely the bearer of the ghost.

  What I also saw, out under the trees, were the brackers. They had their own camp and had already made some of their odd little treehouses there. It was right up against the camp of the villagers, both sides acting as though an unseen wall lay in between. Erma and her hunters were the only ones to cross, and I saw then with their red standards and their whistles, bringing gifts to the brackers and back to their own people. Their secret was out, then, and I saw how it had changed them in the eyes of the Tsuno folk. I would talk with Erma, soon after. I would be open with her about the Bandage-Men, how the Order interacted with the villages, how we maintained our knife-edge existence. She was not Severed, but she had a touch of our condition now. If her mystery continues to later generations, I suspect it will do so clad in a bracker-mask, in bestial pantomime, with pipes and flags for human eyes to match those they use for the animals. And we will help her, if we can. The Order needs all the allies it can get.

  But we would first have to survive the stone-things, for they were coming to seek their own vengeance for their dead, or perhaps they were seeking more food for the dreams of Leviathan. Whichever it was, they were coming.

  * * *

  When I was strong enough to sit up, Melory and I spoke long into the night about what I’d learned. She’d heard it all from my people already, and by the time I opened my mouth, she had a far better understanding of Bain and the stone-people than I did, taught by the piecemeal lessons of the ancestors. We did not know just what had gone on that had led to the stone-things and their inhabitants, but we knew that in those days, the ancestors had been desperate for any way to live in this land.

  I cannot imagine anyone being that desperate, but I was not there. I cannot judge them.

  “So, it’s run and run from them,” I said, at that fire. “And in the end every village will have to run, and every tree will be torn up by the roots, and that will be the end no matter how good we are at running. Or it’s fight.”

  Melory nodded, eyes full of thinking.

  “I have a plan,” I told her.

  “I have one, too.”

  We exchanged plans, she and I. She didn’t like mine, which was fine because neither did I. We both preferred hers, but mine seemed more likely to work, both because hers required the cooperation of Amorket, and because she was not sure if she could reprogram Amorket’s Furies in the way she wanted. Getting it wrong might do nothing, or it might make things so very much worse. Reprogram was the ancestors’ word for it. She could not turn the Furies from their chief purpose, which was hate and fear of the Order. She could place a leash on that purpose, she hoped.

  Hope was most of the little we had. The remainder, which was to say, my plan, was despair.

  “Are you strong enough to march?” she asked me. The stone-things were moving faster than we were, and our lead had been devoured. When I’d looked out across the displaced villagers, everyone of an age to bear a staff or a sling was armed. They were going to turn back with the dawn and try to drive off the enemy, or at least slow them. The chance to actually triumph lay only with us. Even with the brackers on our side, we had seen the stone-things were stronger.

  When I was speaking to Erma, I asked how she had led the brackers to our rescue. She had not, she said. The assault had been their own idea, for they hated the stone-things for driving them from their own village. She had simply latched on and brought Melory and Amorket with her, in the hope that they could be of some aid. The brackers would fight when we fought, she said, and she could communicate our intent to fight to them, but they had lost many and would not be leading the charge. She was upset, saying this. I realised that, to her, they were not just beasts, nor even just the brackers, but individuals she knew from their markings and adornments. They were people, to her.

  In truth, I did not feel strong enough to march, and Melory must have known, doctor as she was. But the stone-things would not give me time to regain my strength. If the Bandage-Men were to fulfil our role, in the story we told about ourselves, we would have to go and fight for Tsuno and all the villages that next dawn, and I would have to go with them.

  * * *

  The next morning, feeling sick and with every joint aching, I beheld Leviathan.

  When they told me the stone-things were chasing at the heels of the Tsuno folk, I had pictured the beasts themselves. I knew they could be swift, and imagined them striding on their long legs between the trees, the sharp edges of their shells scarring the trunks as all the beasts of the wood fled before them.

  That was all true, and just as I foresaw, save that in their wake, Leviathan walked. She came on her own legs, that were thicker around than the trunks of the trees, than any house built by human hands. The trailing edge of her tilted shell left a furrow in the earth half as wide as a village as limbs clawed her forwards, clutching at the ground and digging in like human fingers. She came at the speed of a human in a hurry, not quite a run but not idling. She was vast as the House of our Ancestors, and I wondered if the sight of that colossus in motion had been as awe-inspiring.

  I imagined the brittle voice of Bain within her, driving her on just as I was telling myself even then that I must go on. We all have a council of voices in our minds to prod us forwards or pull us back, but with Leviathan those voices had once been men and women, ancestors who had been devoured, or else entered into a compact with her to save themselves from the killing land.

  There seemed to be little awareness amongst the stone-things that our forces were drawn up against them. They did not slow for us. Rather than let them crash into us with all their momentum, we hastily called out the order to advance, and in fits and starts all the fighting people of Tsuno and Portruno, everyone strong enough to wield a club or throw a stone, rushed forwards. When the brackers saw what we were about they followed, and quickly overtook us on the left. They would fight to their own plan, though, and retreat on their own recognisance. Erma could not speak enough to them to make them part of our scheme. And yet they knew us as allies against a far greater threat.

  We did not try the stone-things strength against strength. That would have been fatal. Instead the village folk engaged and fell back, swirled around the sides of the individual stone-things, flung stones, made speed and
chaos their allies. And there was much shouting and whooping, battle-chants and old songs and simple insults. What harm it did the enemy, I don’t know, but it did us good to vent our fury at them. And in the midst of all of it, my Order was the head of the spear we thrust towards Leviathan.

  Between our nature and Melory’s soundless shouting, the stone-things were still slow to strike at us, and some even lurched out of our way unbidden. Like the more cunning beasts, though, they could reach past what they felt for us. Mathoc was crushed, and perhaps that was just a blundering misstep, but then Barial fell, and Tannari, and I knew that the stone-things were battering at the forbiddance to get to us, fighting against their own senses and natures. I saw the stone hand of Bain in those deaths. Leviathan dreamt human dreams, and through them knew that we were a threat.

  In the centre of our formation ran Amorket and I. Not Melory: she remained behind the fighters because I would not risk her. She had none of my protections, and the Order would survive my loss far better than it would survive hers. The two of us, though, we were to be the point of the knife when we struck against the stone-things, me for my plan, Amorket for Melory’s. And around us, the sheath of that knife was being worn away by too much use. Some of my followers died; others were just separated from us, or ran left or right to lead some marauding stone-thing away and could not rejoin our ranks. And with every step I grew weaker.

  Leviathan loomed ahead through the trees, already impossibly large, and still clutching her way towards us. Yet we had forgotten how vast she was. Though we sought to reach her, and she tried to close that same gap, still we were far from her. Amorket’s wasps danced round us in a frenzy of frustration and in their buzz, I heard Melory’s voice.