The Expert System's Brother by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Author:Adrian Tchaikovsky
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates

VII.

THE DOORWAY TO THE House of our Ancestors was low and square with rounded edges. Roots and vines had pried at it, eager to access the secrets within, but they had been cut back mercilessly. I had a moment of doubt, looking at the way the plant life had been carved from that entryway. The edges were clean and sharp, impossibly so. I pictured a beast with shearing mouthparts it might not reserve only for roots.

Seeing my hesitation, Sharskin clapped me on the shoulder and took out a knife from within his robe. It had been about his neck in a scabbard of hide, and I’d glimpsed it before, assuming it to be Borra or Jasp-wood, or maybe whittled from an animal’s horn. Instead, it was the silvery stuff his staff was made from. “It’s metal,” he told me. “Our ancestors loved metal and plastic and synthetics, things we can’t build from anymore. Just another indication of what we’ve lost, and what we’re the inheritors of.”

Ostel examined the knife blade, turning it so the sun glinted from the flat. “In the high ground north,” he said, “they make stuff like this. They dig it out of the ground and put it in a fire. They have a ghost-bearer for it.”

Sharskin nodded, though I didn’t think he was entirely glad that Ostel knew it. “The smithy ghost, yes. In some few places up by the mountains. But this is our birthright, and most villages have forgotten it entirely. Handry’s never heard of metal before, have you?”

I said I hadn’t, and that restored his equilibrium. “You should go in,” he told us. “This is your home, now. This place, where only those restored to the original condition may live. You bear the Mark. You have earned admittance.”

Ostel and I exchanged glances, some residual caution tugging between us. But why had we come so far in Sharskin’s shadow, if not for this? What would be the point of walking away, even if he would let us? We had a destiny, after all. It was a good thing to have when the world was turned against you.

The walls of the House of our Ancestors were also metal, though I didn’t realise immediately because time had corroded and grimed them until a grey-brown patina covered everything, inside and out. Only in places where new roots had driven questing feelers in could you see the silver flash, and that lasted mere days before exposure to the air darkened and dulled it. The House had two walls, one inside the other, and to enter we passed through a small room with another of the square doorways in the far wall. The floor and walls around us were crumpled and scarred by generations of invading plants that had made free with the place before ever Sharskin had come to hack them away.

I had thought the inside would be dark as a cave. My mind was full of the thought of animal lairs, pitfalls and just a general horror of lightless enclosed spaces.

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