Exile

IX

There was a house – a shack, really – built of split logs. It was old, the wood worn and stained and overgrown with lichens. There were little windows, sealed and covered over with furs. Wolfskins. It sat in a wide clearing and bushes grew around it. Many of them bore nuts or berries, and they had surely been planted where they stood for that very purpose.

None of that was what caused Wren to stand still and stare for long moments. The bushes were not the only things sprouting from the ground. Standing among them, before the house, was a great ring of statues unlike any she had seen before. The circle filled almost the whole breadth of the clearing, with perhaps a dozen paces between each of the figures. They were of a stone she did not recognise. Dark and smooth as if polished.

She could not imagine how any human hand could have crafted such effigies as these. They had the outline and form of men and women, but none of the details. No features, mere bulges for heads. Ridges and curves that suggested arm or leg. They were all hint and indication. It was almost as if an array of fine sculptures had been roasted until they softened and slipped, sloughing away everything that was specific or distinctive until only the crudest memory of their former shape remained.

Some of them were bent over, some halfway buried as if they had been petrified in the act of shrugging their way up out of the earth. One or two were so small they might have been children.

Wren was so captivated and puzzled by this strange collection of stonework that she did not at first notice the door of the hut opening. By the time she looked that way, the man she had come so far to find was already standing in the doorway.

He was tall and broad, though some of that was perhaps the heavy bearskin he was wearing as a coat. His beard was itself so dense and wiry that it might have been torn from the pelt of some great beast. It had more than a little grey in it. That beard and the great bushy eyebrows and the deer-hide cap pulled low over his brow obscured much of his face. What Wren could see of it was creased and weathered and blotched. He was old.

And he was lame, of course. One foot was booted in fur; the other was not there at all. In its place was a blunt wooden stump bound to what remained of his leg with an intricate web of leather strapping.

Ammenor limped out a few paces. He jabbed a massive thumb at the mute and mysterious statues.

‘It’s a Permanence,’ he said gruffly.

Wren quailed at that. She took an involuntary step backwards. A Permanence was what remained when a Clever lost control of an entelech and was consumed by it. Replaced by it. For all that these stone figures might look like a thing of the physical world, strange but nonetheless natural, they were not. If what Ammenor said was true, they were pure entelech. Intrusions into the world from the formless, primordial place in which essence resided. And a Clever had died – ended – when that intrusion happened.

‘Don’t worry.’ Ammenor sniffed. ‘It sleeps and does nothing. It’s Hibernal, I reckon.’

‘I don’t understand,’ Wren murmured. ‘I’ve never heard of it.’

‘Ha. You think you’ve heard of every Permanence in the world?’

She had never really considered it, but yes: she had always assumed that the few she could name were most, if not all. A Permanence was not the kind of thing that passed unnoticed or unmentioned. They entered into fearful rumour and whispered tales.

The Unhomed Host – that ranged across the entire continent and wrought devastation wherever it went. It had destroyed cities. Peoples. The Deep Stone, a rock the size of a fist which weighed more than ten thousand men. The Fold in the Sea which ate ships. All untamed, uncontrollable.

There were only two, as far as Wren knew, that had yielded in some measure to human will. They were among the most feared of all. Somewhere in the secret fastnesses of the School resided the Bereaved. Many said that the constant threat of its release was all that had kept the Hommetic Kingdom from being swallowed up by the Empire of Orphans long ago. And – if more recent rumour was true – there was the Clamour. Monstrous, bestial and somehow mastered by the Free just a few years ago. Used by them as a weapon.

‘There are more Permanences in the world than you imagine,’ Ammenor said. ‘Of course there are. There have been many Clevers, and it’s easier to lose control once than keep it a whole lifetime.’

He patted the formless face of the nearest figure.

‘It’s called the Ganger Gley in the old tongue of these parts. I just call it the Cold Men, because no matter how much sun it gets it’s always cold to the touch. You want to feel it?’

‘No,’ Wren said a little more quickly and emphatically than she had intended.

‘No.’ Lame Ammenor nodded. He stared at her. It was not hostile. More blank than anything.

‘What do you want?’ he asked her.

‘I came to find you.’

‘Of course you did,’ the old Clever sighed. ‘Of course you did. Well, you shouldn’t have. Go away.’