Exile

XII

The snow saved her. Or condemned her; she was no longer entirely sure which. Either way, it fell in the night and by morning was deep and soft. Not the kind of world even one as gruff and sour as Ammenor would willingly send a weary traveller out into.

‘Bear dung,’ he muttered to himself as he looked out over the smooth white folds of the hills. ‘Stinking bear dung.’

‘I don’t smell anything,’ Wren said at his shoulder.

‘It’s an expression,’ Ammenor growled.

The snow had not settled on the Cold Men. It lay heavy on the trees and the bushes, but not on those strange statues. Not even snow could get a grip upon them, it seemed.

Ammenor stared up at the featureless sky. It was nothing but cloud, a single vast sheet of the stuff. Almost as pale as the snow.

‘Not going to be a thaw any time soon,’ Ammenor mused. ‘I need to walk my snare lines. Might not get the chance again in the next few days.’

‘I can help,’ Wren suggested at once.

He looked doubtful, but did not refuse.

Lame Ammenor dressed himself in a heavy fur cloak before venturing out into the wintry forests. He did not offer Wren any such comfort. She draped her blanket around her shoulders. That would have to do.

He led her into the pine woods, crunching through the snow on a course that carried them slightly downhill. Back, as best she could judge, in roughly the direction she had come when searching for him.

‘What if the Clade are roaming around?’ Wren asked.

‘They’re lost still,’ Ammenor muttered. ‘That or given up and gone home. And what does it matter if not? You die fast up here without meat, so there’s no choice.’

He glanced at her, one corner of his mouth hooked up into a smirk.

‘Worry about the Huluk Kur, girl. They catch you, your life’ll be even shorter and sadder than in the hands of the Clade.’

His wooden leg did not seem to hamper him overly much, but it was not long before his breathing was heavy and hard. Walking along behind him, Wren could hear it quite clearly. His breath turned into clouds of mist and streamed back over his shoulders. He was old, she reminded herself. And his life here was hard.

They walked for perhaps half an hour. By then, Ammenor was starting to slow. Wren was close to suggesting they rest when he abruptly stopped and pointed ahead. At first, Wren could see nothing amid the dark straight trees and the thin snow. Then her eyes picked out a flicker of movement.

A squirrel was caught by the throat in a loop of thin cord. It twitched and tried to race away at their approach, but was snapped back by the snare. Ammenor picked it up and broke its neck. He slipped the little corpse into a canvas bag hanging from his belt.

‘Squirrels and hares,’ he grunted. ‘I’ve eaten more of them than most folks see in their whole lives.’

He glanced at Wren.

‘You know how to kill a squirrel?’

‘Never done it,’ Wren said, ‘but I killed chickens on the farm when I was young.’

Ammenor nodded.

‘You can do the next one then.’

But there was no next one. They trudged through stands of trees, across tiny streamlets, out onto open slopes. Ammenor found and checked a dozen snares that Wren would likely never have even noticed had he not been there. All were empty and undisturbed. Ammenor gathered some in, reset others. He started to grunt in irritation at each barren snare. His eyes narrowed.

‘Did they know who you are, those School-swords who chased you up here?’ he unexpectedly asked her as they were crossing a shallow slope where the snow was no more than a dusting over bare rock and boulders. ‘Do they know you’re a Clever, and that you killed their fellows?’

‘They know I’m a Clever,’ Wren said. ‘The rest of it… no, I don’t think they know about the men I killed. It was just bad luck that they stumbled across me on the barge.’

‘Neither the School nor their Clade are much interested in what happens beyond Hommetic borders. Not even a runaway Clever. You think they couldn’t find me and take me if they really wanted to? If they cared enough?’

He gave a muffled laugh and turned to face her. He swung an arm in a wide arc, encompassing the snow and rocks and silent dark trees.

‘You’re as good as free, woman. Well done. Enjoy your liberty in this abundant and verdant land.’

Wren looked despondently at the scene. He might be right, but if this was freedom it was not what she had imagined.

‘You want my advice: learn to hunt,’ Ammenor grunted. ‘And close your ears to the entelechs. Their whispers sound like love to all of our kind, but every time you embrace them you jump yourself a bit closer to death.’

‘Every day jumps us a bit closer to death,’ Wren muttered.

‘By a single day. Using the entelechs’ll do it by weeks and months at a time. Let’s sit for a time. I need rest more than I used to.’

He brushed snow from a sloping flat rock and settled himself on to it. He kneaded the thigh of his half-leg, grimacing at whatever aches or stiffness lived in there. Wren sat beside him.

‘I’m a Clever,’ she said. ‘The entelechs are part of me. What’s the point of a long life that denies that? You’d have me be like those Cold Men in your garden. Half-formed. Unfinished.’

Ammenor shrugged. There was an impotence in the gesture.

‘I didn’t throw myself into the Hervent and then climb all the way up here for you to tell me I should go back to pretending I’m not what I am,’ Wren said in exasperation.

Ammenor regarded her for a moment.

‘So you swam the Hervent?’ he asked, not troubling to conceal his scepticism.

‘I can’t swim. I used the Autumnal. That’s why the Clade knew I was a Clever.’

Ammenor’s heavy eyebrows twitched upward.

‘That’s interesting.’

Wren waited for him to say more, but he merely sat there and chewed his lower lip.

‘Why interesting?’ she asked irritably.

‘That sort of thing’d leave most of our kind in a bad place. Empty, damaged, places like that. If it’d been me, I’d still be waiting for myself to show up here by the time next week came around. Do you have rituals or habits you use to prepare yourself?’ Ammenor asked.

‘No.’

‘That’s interesting,’ he said again, and Wren had to resist the urge to roll her eyes.

‘A lot of us,’ he continued, ‘the skilled ones, use ritual before letting the entelechs in. Helps with concentration, preparation. Means less harm when you do open yourself up.’

‘Like talking to yourself,’ murmured Wren, thinking of the Free’s Clever, Kerig, whispering to himself as he floated in the Hervent.

‘Sometimes,’ Ammenor nodded. ‘Can be anything. I’ve seen some draw pictures in the dirt. Others drum a log or a stone. Anything to clear the mind. If you’ve been throwing an entelech around without any of that sort of training, I’d expect you to be a wreck by now. Your natural abilities must be… well, it’s interesting. That’s all.’

But Wren was barely listening to him any more. She was remembering the Free, and was taken by an unexpected and vague feeling of regret. There had been two Clevers there on that barge who were not afraid to show what they were. Kerig and Ena Marr. Two who lived up to the name of their company.

‘There are Clevers marching with the Free to fight the Huluk Kur,’ she said, hearing the wistfulness in her own voice.

‘Oh, the Free,’ said Ammenor. ‘The mighty Free. Well, let’s hope they win. The Huluk Kur leave corpses behind them like most folks leave footprints. They reckon anyone who’s not their own kind to be worth less than cattle. A lot less, in fact. They value cattle quite highly.’

He sighed.

‘They have no Clevers, the Huluk Kur. You know why?’

Wren waited for him to answer his own question. He seemed to prefer doing that more often than not.

‘Because they kill them. They kill their own children if they’re Clevers. There’s how kind the world is to the likes of you and me.’

‘Well, the Free are waiting for them at some pass called the Hung Gate,’ Wren said. ‘I imagine that’ll be the end of the Huluk Kur.’

‘Hung Gate’s a good idea, right enough. Tight ground, could let the few beat the many. And if all the dying’s going to get done up there, we can rest a little easier. That’s far enough north of here we won’t even be able to smell the corpse-fires.’

Wren watched him for a moment or two. He would not meet her gaze. Still, there was just a hint of a softening. There had been that fleeting interest in her abilities, and he seemed almost willing to talk. A crack in the wall, or just a trick of her stubborn hope?

‘Let’s get to the rest of the snares,’ Ammenor said after a little while.