Brian Ruckley - Exile

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.’

Wren had hidden her abilities for many years, living quietly with her parents and brother on their farm. All through that time she had heard the entelechs – especially the Autumnal – calling to her. Inviting her to bring them into the world to work wonders. Her parents did not want that. They knew that any child displaying such a talent would be found and swept away by the School. The whole village knew it, for Wren was not the first of her kind to be born there.

There had been a boy, a few years older than her. He was taken when she was very young, so she remembered only fragments. Strangers dragging the child along the lane. Shouting. Screaming, even. Blue men – Clade warriors, she would understand later – among the houses. Swords. The boy’s mother knocked down, his father held on the ground, face pressed into the dirt. And, most clearly of all those fragments, the song her mother had sung to her when she was too frightened to sleep that night. The song of water willows and weaving wrens. The only thing that had been able – for a time – to make her forget those screams and those swords.

That was the fate her parents foresaw for her: carried off into the distant, faceless labyrinth of the School to serve the King, his Kingdom and the School’s own interests. They did not want to lose their child for ever to those high and haughty powers. They did not want their child dying young, damaged, because of her use of the entelechs.

It could never have lasted, Wren knew now. For years it seemed like it might, and the illusion had been a happy one. But to ask a Clever to close out the entelechs and wilfully turn her back on them was like asking a young bird not to fly. It had wings, and the air was constantly offering to carry it aloft and show it the whole world.

Inevitably, there came that day when she finally spread her wings. The day when she found her brother in a ditch, breathing through blood and trembling in pain. The day when she had to run.

There had been nothing else to do, for she had transgressed. No Clever could use the entelechs unless they were a part of, or sanctioned by, the School. Any Clever bringing harm to others by such use was subject to the judgement of the School, and that judgement was uncompromising. They had executioners.

She ran, and though it broke her heart to do it, it filled her with relief as well. She was not pretending any more. She had been running, one way or another, for all the years since. Her heart had never healed, but the relief had never entirely gone away either. And always, as she ran, there had been the hope that one day she might find a place or a way to stop. To rest and simply be.

‘Go away,’ Lame Ammenor said to her, and the words numbed her. Dulled the light of the sky and the sounds of the forest.

‘I have nowhere else to go,’ she said.

He ignored her. He turned and hobbled back towards his little house.

‘I outran the School and the Clade to get here,’ Wren snapped. ‘I’ve left everything behind. Why save me from those men only to turn me away?’

Ammenor stopped at that, on the very threshold of his hut. He angled his head so that he was almost, but not quite, looking back at her over his shoulder.

‘You’re a Clever?’ he asked gruffly.

‘Autumnal.’

‘It seemed likely,’ he grunted. ‘The Clade don’t chase many other kinds of folk.’

‘You’re an Autumnal too, aren’t you?’

He turned reluctantly to face her once more, glowering.

‘What do you want from me? Congratulations?’

‘No,’ Wren said indignantly. ‘I want you to help me understand what it means. How to live free and unafraid.’

‘I didn’t interfere to save you from the Clade, you fool. I did it to keep them from my own doorstep. It seems you know who I am, so you know I’m not the sort to welcome visitors in blue.’

‘I can’t go away,’ Wren exclaimed with more than a hint of exasperation, or perhaps desperation. ‘I don’t – I want to learn to be who I am, not be told who I am by others. Not live my life as a servant to others.’