The Expert System's Champion by Adrian Tchaikovsky

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

VII

KALLOI DIED THE NIGHT after we got back to Tsuno.

It was the blood. He got torn up when the brackers went mad. When, perhaps, the stone-things turned up at the far side of their village, and they were fighting. We wrap ourselves in these bandages because the world is poison to us, in a way that actual poison is not. That is the backwards way we live. The things that are made to be dangerous—venom, savage beasts—are no terror to us, but mundane things that no villager would worry about can be death. That poison world got into Kalloi’s wound. When we got him back, he was already shivering, his skin livid, feverish. He was babbling, and Melory did her best but it was not enough. Before the sun rose, Kalloi had fought the stuff of the world that was inside him, and lost. We of the Order took him and burned him, rather than the village way of returning someone to the earth. The things of the earth will not decay us.

It was not the first time. In fact, it was a common thing. If a wound could be washed, with boiled water, then most likely the patient would live. Or sometimes the wound swelled angrily but the fever broke, and they lived. Sometimes a life could be saved with the loss of a limb, a second severance to cut away the poisoned part. It was a reaction, Melory said. The thing that killed us was not even the world-stuff itself, but the way our bodies could not abide it. Our blood, our flesh, fought so fiercely against the touch of every part of this world that we consumed ourselves, a man who burns his house down to drive out the vermin that had crept into it.

Illon was very drawn. She had come with Kalloi and me, seen all we had seen. He had died, and it might have been her. It was her first true lesson about life in the Order.

“All we can do is remember,” I told her. “I’ve told you the Ancestors had their way of setting down what they knew, their writing. There is a wall in their House where we place the names of all who come to the Order and pass on, as we all shall. Kalloi’s name shall join them. We die, Illon. But we live longer than we would alone and Severed.”

I watched her carefully. This was often the moment you can see whether someone will thrive in the Order. She didn’t rail or complain. Instead she looked me in the eyes and said, “What can we do?” And she meant revenge; she meant doing the job we’d been called here for.

“We are going before the Lawgiver again,” I told her. “But I think we will go to war.”

* * *

The boy Lawgiver got a collection of Tsuno’s more respected people together to hear what we had to say. Old men and women, mostly, confused and uncertain, shoulders not strong enough for the load they were having to bear.

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