Tolyat’s ruff lifted. “Next time?”
Last gestured toward the paper he held. “You aren’t done, are you? I figure it will take at least a couple more trips, depending on how detailed you decide to be. Unless you’ve had enough?”
That weight, cast aside while they were in the sky, had started to settle upon him once more. Last’s words stopped it. To go back. . . .
The man had to be immortal. There was no other explanation for why Last, having nearly died for Tolyat’s mad dream, would be volunteering to do it again. Driftwood, for all its diversity, couldn’t possibly hold two beings crazy enough to do this for fun.
“Do you have a knife?” Tolyat asked. While Last pulled one from his sleeve, Tolyat knelt and began looking for the edge of the mostly deflated sack. “I’ll cut a piece to wrap the stones in, and you carry the furnace.”
“Oh, so now you believe in magic floating hot air.”
“Floating stones, floating hot air, anything that will keep me from falling out of the sky. Maybe we should find out where those beasts came from, see if it’s possible to rent one as a bodyguard.” His mind was full of plans. There was a woman in Candlepot with a device that could make copies of things drawn on paper; he could sell the map when he was done. Or even sell trips to see Driftwood from above. What might it do, if people saw it with their own eyes?
He didn’t know. What he did know was that he had his grand answer, and it was no less meaningful for being fun. The change in Last was enough to prove that.
With their most important equipment gathered, Last jerked his thumb toward a building just visible above the grain. “Let’s get started. It’s going to be a damn long walk back to the Shreds.”
“Wait!”
Tolyat dove for the basket one final time. When he came up again, Last had his eyebrows raised. Tolyat flourished the pen he’d saved. “I want to take notes on the way back.”
recorded by Yilime
The Outsider
THE MAP IS OLD, and it isn’t even the original version. A copy of a copy of a copy, and Febrenew has two more stashed away somewhere else, in case he wakes up one morning to discover this latest specimen is what Driftwood has decided to take away. Even with those for insurance, this map is one of the first things he grabbed when the mud began to flood in from the mire above. The oldest version always hangs on the wall in Spit in the Crush’s Eye. It’s the closest thing to sacred that Febrenew has.
Dreceyl peers at it, squinting in the floating light that still bathes the amphitheater in its gentle glow. “I can’t read any of this.”
“None of us can,” Febrenew says. “Chara e Pretyi is gone, and its language with it. All the places marked there are gone. Between you and me, I doubt any of the words would be readable even if Chara e Pretyi were still here; we’ve probably made mistakes while copying it. But that’s not the point.”
He rolls up the map as he speaks, tucking the beanbags into his pockets once more, and with Dreceyl’s help slides it back into the cylindrical leather case. Then, to everyone’s surprise, he begins to walk away, back to his makeshift bar, leaving the stage for others to claim.
“You aren’t going to leave it on the memorial?” Ioi asks.
Febrenew stops and shrugs. “Why should I? Kuondae’s a heartless thing, but I agree with her on one point. I don’t think he’s dead.”
He holds up the map case, as if in explanation. Spread, its vaguely square shape is wider than he is tall, and he isn’t short by any current standards. “Driftwood’s a damn big place,” he says. “And Last works in the Shreds more often than not—but not always. So what if we haven’t seen him in a while? Could be he’s just gone out to the Edge. Maybe for a job, or maybe just to get some time away. I do believe the stories about him—heard too much from my predecessors not to—and if I were him, I’d get tired of living among us, with the kinds of tales people tell about him. Making him out to be more than he is.” He glares at the recorder at the front of the stands, who meets his gaze without blinking.
Then Febrenew turns his attention to everyone else. “But here’s the thing he’d want you all to remember. This place? It’s your home. Not this place—” He stamps one foot against the cracked slates of the amphitheater’s floor. “But Driftwood. The whole of it, more than any single bit, and the people in it as much as the ground we stand on. Those of us who are Drifters, anyway . . . but when you get down to it, all of us.”
“Is that why he’s survived?” Dreceyl asks. “Because he’s made Driftwood his home, instead of any one bit of it?”
A twitch of the hand is Febrenew almost reaching out to ruffle the boy’s hair, but the indignant hunching of Dreceyl’s shoulders stops him. “I don’t think so,” Febrenew says, his tone kindly. “He’s not the only one who feels that way about this place. And that doesn’t stop old age from taking hold. But it’s still a good thought, isn’t it?”
His story and the words that followed have calmed the turmoil Kuondae stirred up. As Febrenew stows the map under his table and goes back to selling drinks and cheap noodles to the people at the memorial, another person takes the stage to relate their tale, how Last touched their life and made it better. Made Driftwood a little easier to bear. Like he was the thread stitching them together, against the constant unraveling of time.
Midnight has come and gone when the darkskinned woman comes up and points at the pile of sweetpods. No one else is nearby, and as Febrenew cracks the fruit open and drains it into a cup, he says in a low voice, “You’ve been here from the start. Not just tonight, but ever since people began gathering. Either you’re incredibly bored, you’re in love with Last—or you’re up to something. Want to tell me which one?”
The look on her face says that no, she does not. But after a hesitation, some internal argument is settled in favor of answering. “I’m neither bored nor in love. I’m worried. What you said about Last, that he might just have gone away for a time . . . I wish I could agree with you. But I’m afraid something truly has happened.”
Febrenew braces his hands against the table, easing his aching feet, and incidentally leaning in closer so that others are less likely to overhear. “Are you the one who saw it? Whatever ‘it’ was.”
She shakes her head. Here on the edge of the light, her expression is in shadow, and that’s not always reliable across cultural boundaries anyway. People show different moods in different ways. “Not me. But . . . he said something to me, not long before he vanished.”
“What?”
The woman hesitates. Febrenew sighs and says, “You haven’t answered my question. You’ve been watching here for days, and ‘I’m worried’ doesn’t tell me why. Whatever you’re waiting for, it hasn’t happened yet—and if you’re waiting for Last himself to show up, I think you’re going to be disappointed. He’s never liked this kind of attention.”
“I know,” the woman murmured. “I didn’t do this to bring him here. I was hoping . . .”
Her phrasing snags in Febrenew’s mind. “Are you the one who started the memorial?”
The wreath of flowers from Aic, laid by an unknown hand. “Yes,” the woman says. “Not as mourning, but as a prayer. Such things are the custom in my world, only the flowers we used are gone. As is the place where we once laid them. This was the closest approximation I could find. A place where no one lives.”
One mystery answered—but not the biggest one. “Whatever you’re hoping for, you’re probably running out of time.” Febrenew tips his head at the stage, where another speaker is taking up position. “This is nice, but I doubt you’ll see the same thing tomorrow. People have lives outside of here. And the stories are giving them a feeling of resolution. After this they’ll still wonder or mourn, but they probably won’t come back.”
She nods, sighing. It’s a near-universal gesture, that deep exhalation, at least among all creatures that breathe air. “After this one is done, then. I don’t want to interrupt.”
Another customer approaches, and th
e woman goes to stand at the edge of the stage, waiting her turn. Febrenew glances up at the sky, trying to gauge how much longer they all have before self-preservation will require them to leave the amphitheater . . . but as his gaze comes back down, he sees shadows in the tunnel leading to the outside world.
And the hem of another robe, flickering briefly into the light.
He growls a curse in the deep register most Drifters can’t hear or hit, inherited from a Zlanma great-grandparent. One robed idiot: that isn’t a surprise, given the circumstances. But two . . .
The dark-skinned woman is taking the stage. Febrenew grits his teeth and waits.
Remembering Light
IN HER FIRST LIGHT, Noirin never thought it strange that her world should be only a few blocks square, and that on the other side of the Palace Way (whose palace had vanished before her grandmother was born) there should be a place where the people had four arms and water always fell from the sky. She never gave it any thought at all, until the day the chantry disappeared.
It stood—had stood—on the other side of Surnyao from the Palace Way, and at first dawn its long shadow had stretched across the intervening blocks, all the way to the boundary with Yimg, the place of rain. The Asurnya measured their world by that tower, the tallest they had left. Then one day the first sun rose and no shadow answered; the Asurnya looked to the sky and found it empty, and Noirin realized what they meant by measuring the world, what her mother was talking about when she said there was once a sunset chantry on the other side of the Palace Way—that there had once been an “other side” that was not Yimg but Surnyao.
She grew up in the absence of that shadow, one absence among many. One more thing her people had lost. Noirin underwent the rites of early light in a ramshackle tower built to replace the missing chantry; by the time she reached her increasing light, that tower had collapsed. She departed her girlhood in a shabby building of only four stories, where the remaining suns could barely find her at all.
There were only two left. But Noirin faced the horizon anyway; she covered her eyes seven times, and whispered a sacred vow to the wind.
“I will recover what we have lost.”
Surnyao, as it had been before the seventh sun burned out, and the end of the world began.
Before they came to Driftwood.
“You must not go,” the Chant Leader said despairingly, when she told him of her intent. “I’m not a traditionalist, Noirin; you know I’m not. We once had the luxury of following the chants in the matter of travel, letting the suns dictate how far we went, but that was before the—” He choked on the words. “What you propose, though, is too much.”
“In my increasing light,” she answered him, inflecting her verbs with both respect and determination, “I am permitted to go out of the city of my birth. If that city has dwindled, it makes no difference; there is no reason I should not go.”
Casuistry, and they both knew it. Before the end of the world, the chants had said that only those in their glorious light should go to the far ends of the earth. The traditionalist opinion, since Surnyao’s arrival in Driftwood, held that to go past the ends of the earth was out of the question, even for such elders. But the world was a smaller place than it had been—much smaller, and ever shrinking—and tradition was, as the Chant Leader said, a luxury they could not afford. The fields that once fed them had withered and vanished, their mines crumbled into oblivion, and to survive, they were forced to trade with those beyond their borders. Those from other worlds.
Other worlds that were dying. Just like Surnyao.
Just before the seventh sun burned out, whole realms of Surnyao fell into Absent Light and were never seen again. But where they had been, instead there was a dark mist, and then something else in that mist: another land, foreign beyond comprehension, which had suffered its own disaster. Was still suffering. Flakes of fire whirled through the air there, and some of its people stood out in that wind until they burned to cinders, accepting—even welcoming—their demise. The rest dug into the ground for shelter, and traded with Surnyao and their neighbors through cramped tunnels that stank of ash.
That place was gone now. Noirin had never seen it. It had crumbled faster than Surnyao, slipping toward the center of Driftwood, into the Crush itself, from which nothing emerged again.
The Chant Leader would have buried his hands in his beard, but it had thinned with time, only a few black wires left. He had pulled the rest out, in his agony over the doom of their world. “We need you here, Noirin. You’ve memorized all the chants, every one we still remember—even the ones we no longer use. Who else cares as much as you? Who else can become Chant Leader, after I’m gone?”
She put her hand on his arm, felt it tremble beneath the thin silk of his robes. Worn, and much patched, but it was the last silk they had. “I’ll come back. When I’ve found him.”
“When!” he cried. “That was ages ago, Noirin. How many races in Driftwood live that long? Even if he lives, it will be like finding one spark of light in the blaze of seven suns.”
Beneath that, the real protest: if he ever lived at all. The Chant Leader thought it a myth. But it was his job to remember everything, as much as he could, and so he told the story: the man who came to
Surnyao, who lived among the Asurnya for a time, and then went away. A man who might, if the stories were true, still live.
The Chant Leader dropped his face into his hands. “Noirin, the—” His voice caught again, and when he recovered, his whisper was low and intense. “The second sun will burn out soon.”
It struck her with the chill of Absent Light. He could not know that for sure; it was a common pastime in Driftwood, trying to predict the decay of worlds, and equally common to mock those who tried. Would the first sun—the last one—come with them into the Crush, or would Surnyao go to that ultimate end in darkness? Either way, the loss of the suns was the best metric they had, and to lose one of the remaining two was a sign of how little time they had left.
How little time she had to find her quarry.
Noirin chose the strongest inflections she knew. “I will go out under the light of two suns,” she said, “and return before the last burns out. I promise you, Chant Leader: I will come back. And I will bring hope with me.”
But hunting through the Shreds was not so easy.
Here in the heart of Driftwood, nothing went very far. Not the worlds she walked through, small fragments like her own home, struggling to preserve themselves against the unstoppable decay. Not the oddments she brought with her, barter-pieces in an unpredictable economy where strange things could acquire value.
Even her determination faded faster than it should.
She expected her search to take a while. If the man she sought were nearby, she would have heard; Noirin therefore went to the edge of her range, the point at which people ceased to understand the pidgin she spoke. There she stopped for a time, taking a job in a Drifter bar, among people so crossbred they belonged to no world at all. She washed dishes with the juice of a plant whose original name was lost along with the world it came from, but which grew now in many parts of Driftwood and went by the humble name of rinseweed. While she worked, she learned a new trade-tongue, one used in Shreds more distant from her home. And then she moved on: all part of her plan.
What she hadn’t planned for was loneliness.
Not for people—or at least, not only. She missed the two suns; too many Shreds had only one. She missed the chants, patched and ragged though they were. Those things had always kept her company before, and now their loss caught in her throat, so that she dwelt obsessively on her vow. I will recover what we have lost. It eroded her patience, as she found a new job, learned a new tongue, asked after the man she sought.
The sound of his name changed between languages, but the meaning did not. And he was a one-blood, not a crossbred Drifter; it made him distinctive. She found people who had heard of him, certainly—or at least heard the stories. But how to find him, where
he lived . . . that, no one seemed to know.
One spark of light in the blaze of seven suns. How many people lived in Driftwood? She asked three scholars and got seven different answers; it depended on whether she meant just the Shreds, or also the Edge, the place where worlds arrived out of the Mist. But all seven numbers were high, and Noirin was seeking a single man.
She had terrible dreams of the second sun burning out. One Absent Light the dream was worse than it had ever been, and she jerked awake, wondering whether that was a sign. Whether her people now dwelt under the light of a single sun. Could she tell, this far beyond the edge of Surnyao? Worlds worked according to their own rules, and the Shred she was living in was nothing like her home. But some things a person could carry within herself.
She moved onward. Another Shred, another job, another tongue to learn. Her grasp of it was halting at best. She spoke it well enough, though, to understand a bird-winged man when he told her the most helpful thing she’d learned yet. “He doesn’t like to be hunted,” the creature said. “Hired, yes. Hunted, no.”
Noirin thought this over while she chopped vegetables she didn’t know the names of and threw them into a bin next to the bar’s cook. Hired, not hunted.
Very well.
The third public house she worked in occupied the massive trunk of a tree in a Shred whose people had vanished before memory, leaving a forest that resisted the attempts of neighboring Shreds to cut it for wood. The tree had no doors—its bark flexed open to allow passage—so Noirin had to watch in all directions, but she had no difficulty spotting the man when he walked in.
And he spotted her just as easily. He stopped halfway in, growled something that sounded like a curse, and turned around.
“Wait,” Noirin called, but he had already left.
Driftwood Page 9
