Driftwood

by Marie Brennan

  Last buried his head in his hands, while behind him the dancers swayed and whirled, trading memories, remembering and forgetting events, people, worlds.

  He lowered his hands. “No. I don’t want to forget.”

  Noirin let out the breath she hadn’t realized she was holding. Giving Last space for privacy, she went past him to the bar, paid for a drink with the ingots of iron that were her wages in the sentient tree where she had waited tables, what felt like a world’s lifetime ago. Surnyao had no iron anymore, no Harbingers of the Dark. She pushed the memory aside and returned to Last with the cup.

  He downed its contents, unconcerned with the possibility that the drink of this world might be poison to him. Then again, could anything harm him? She hadn’t seen enough to know.

  “Thank you,” she said, and not just on behalf of Surnyao.

  Last grunted. Then he seemed to reconsider that answer, staring at his empty cup, and said, “It’ll pass. I’ve wanted to forget before—but this is the first time I’ve had a way to follow through. I think . . . I think I’ll be glad when Quinendeniua is gone.”

  And with it, the temptation of oblivion. Noirin understood.

  He set the cup aside and said, “I’ll guide you back to Surnyao. There’s some bad Shreds between here and there.”

  Side by side, not quite touching, they passed under the arch of Quinendeniua, leaving behind the dancers and the music, the falling petals of the trees. Seven suns burned in Noirin’s mind, lighting the way home.

  recorded by Yilime

  The Believer

  BY THE TIME she finishes, Noirin is weeping. Not ostentatiously; her voice remains strong and her posture straight. But tears slip down her face, and they glint gold in the soft light from above.

  “That was . . .” She hesitates, wrestling with the ever-present difficulty of how to describe time in Driftwood. “Almost thirty Absent Lights ago. Our nights, though even now, those do not come as often for us as they do for other worlds. Recently. Enough so that I fear the mood which held him when we parted. He chose not to forget, but . . .” Noirin draws in a slow, steadying breath. “But that doesn’t mean something else hasn’t happened. That—that he hasn’t done something else.”

  She folds her hands tight around each other and scans the tiers of the amphitheater. They’re nearly full now—full as they likely haven’t been since the end of the world that used to contain them. It’s still black night, but dawn can’t be too far off; for their safety, the gathered mourners and gawkers will soon have to leave. But no one seems eager to move.

  “I placed the wreath of flowers here,” Noirin says, “not only for Last, but in order to draw people to this place. To see if anyone would come forward and claim they were the one who saw it. The story came to Surnyao that Last was seen walking into the Crush . . . but I know what rumor is like. It changes things. Makes them up, even. Perhaps someone just wanted to hurt us all, to make us think the one constant presence in Driftwood was finally gone.

  “But no one has stepped forward. If I can’t find the witness, then I’m going to believe that it’s a lie: that Last has simply gone elsewhere, perhaps for a job, perhaps to get away for a time. And I am going to search for him, because he helped me and I’m worried for him.

  “If that person is here, though . . .”

  Noirin’s voice grows ragged, and she stops. The silence in the amphitheater is absolute. Even sound from the neighboring Shreds seems not to pierce the tension.

  And then a woman says, “I am here.”

  She steps out from the tunnel that gives access to the amphitheater, and she is not alone. Behind her are nearly a score of others, spilling like water from the archway, pooling behind the woman with their hands slipped inside their sleeves.

  Every one of them wears a pale, silvery-blue robe. The same color as the recorder’s robe. The color of Last’s skin.

  Febrenew’s breath hisses between his teeth. Not just two; many. And when they turn out in force like this, it means they’re planning something.

  The silence of the amphitheater breaks into a rising growl, spiked with a few half-shouted accusations and declarations of unwelcome. Half-shouted only, because a lot depends on exactly which group has come to join the memorial. Like everything else in Driftwood, a movement can splinter, and not everything remains as it originally began. Those robes can hide quite a few things, and in some cases those things have turned out to be weapons.

  The woman at the front of the group pushes back her silver-blue hood, revealing hair dyed solid black and a sharp face lit by inner fire. To those who seek a justification for disavowing her, Teryx isn’t a true Drifter; her mother was Xerl and Hawblin, her father a one-blood from Neraful. But she calls none of those worlds her home: instead she travels through the Shreds, mastering every pidgin she encounters, so she can gather more people to her fold.

  Of all those who could have come, she is not the worst. But she is also far from the best.

  Surnyao is too far from the heart of the Shreds, and Noirin’s search for Last caught only some of the stories about him. She doesn’t recognize the significance of the robes, the hair. “Who are you?”

  Teryx smiles, as if she’s been waiting for someone to ask. “I am the only one in all of Driftwood who truly understands Last. Not simply as a guide, nor even as a man who chances to be immortal—the truth of Last. And I have come to tell you all what has happened to him.”

  “You saw him walk into the Crush?”

  Teryx gestures for her people to stay where they are and begins to approach Noirin. Febrenew is out from behind his table before he realizes he’s moving, and Teryx smiles with unsettling sweetness at him. “I know I am not welcome in your bar . . . but this is not your bar.”

  For the first time, the recorder who has been watching the proceedings speaks up. “You should have more respect. One of your predecessors counted herself among our number. And while you may not share her beliefs, you still make copies of that map.”

  That stops Febrenew in his tracks. Even the best efforts to preserve traditions still lose bits and pieces along the way—like the origins of the third promise made by every owner of Spit in the Crush’s Eye. He knows why Last and Tolyat made the map, but not why generations of people have gone to such lengths to preserve it.

  Noirin makes a little gesture, the same gesture Teryx made a moment before. She wants answers; someone has come to offer them. Noirin doesn’t want Febrenew interfering. Gritting his teeth, he retreats and lets Teryx take the stage.

  She kneels for a moment in front of the memorial and lays one hand on the nearest tribute, a small wooden carving of some six-legged animal. Her nails are dark, stained with some liquid that’s growing out slightly at the cuticle. She says a few words in some language Noirin doesn’t recognize—not one of the Shreds pidgins. It has the sound of a prayer, but not of mourning.

  More like triumph.

  Out of politeness, Noirin waits until Teryx rises, but then she can hold herself back no longer. “I asked you a question. You saw this? With your own eyes?”

  Teryx smiles again, an unsettlingly peaceful expression. “With my own eyes, yes. I dare go closer to the Crush than anyone save Last himself, because I have no fear. Because I have faith.”

  She spreads her dark-nailed hands wide and says in a ringing voice, “Let me tell you of the god of Driftwood.”

  The God of Driftwood

  THE CHILDREN had a game they played.

  They called it a game, even though it wasn’t very fun; it was more of a challenge. A dare. A way for the bolder ones to frighten the more timid, to taunt the ones who refused. Weakling. Coward. Dust.

  The adults, when they bothered to notice, said it wasn’t weakness or cowardice not to play. It was common bloody sense. But that didn’t carry much weight with children. And so Ctarl had been to the edge of the Crush again and again, trying to make his feet carry him just a step farther, just two, just as far as that one-legged fragment of arch that
stood, improbably, after the rest of it was gone—if it could manage that much, against the twin forces of gravity and Driftwood, then surely he could manage to walk a few paces more and touch the arch before he ran away.

  He never could. And Fanix mocked him for it every time. Then Ctarl would go home to his father, who found different kinds of fault with him. Ctarl had tried to tell his father once about the game, and got a beating for it. He still wasn’t sure whether the beating was because he was stupid enough to play the game, or because he was too afraid to go closer. Or both.

  It didn’t really matter. Ctarl’s father would always find a reason, no matter how hard Ctarl tried to be good, to please his father, to avoid things that might set him off. Life with him was like life in Driftwood: the things you relied on might crumble between one day and the next, and some new problem would rear its head. Ctarl was used to it. Ctarl told himself he was used to it.

  Until the day things got bad enough that he ran: away from his father, toward the Crush, and he didn’t stop where he always froze, didn’t even stop at the one-legged arch.

  Because there were things worse than the Crush. Worse than the place where the final remnants of every world died. What was there to fear in death? Death was just an end, and ends were good. They might hurt you, but then they stopped. And that was better than Ctarl’s father.

  He couldn’t run very far, but only because the way got too narrow and cramped for him to move quickly. Then there wasn’t even a way—just gaps between the bits and pieces. He climbed over a fallen pillar, squeezed through a crack in a collapsing wall, stumbled across a patch of hip-high plants blooming with brilliant pink flowers, fell into a pool of salty water no more than two paces across but deeper than his eyes could see. He’d completely lost his bearings, but he kept looking for wherever the tangle was thickest, wherever things seemed the most broken. Because that would take him farther into the Crush, until he reached the place where he, like everything in Driftwood, would die.

  The world swam in Ctarl’s vision, tears or disintegration or both, and his pulse came loud in his ears. Every part of him ached—maybe the Crush was stealing him away already, a tendon here, an organ there. He sobbed so hard he could barely breathe, and then he slammed into something and fell and he really couldn’t breathe. They called it the Crush, and he could feel its weight, crushing the life out of him.

  But ends were good. They hurt you, but then they stopped.

  The pain stopped. From a very great distance Ctarl heard a voice say, “Come on. You’ll be all right.”

  He woke in a bed.

  He was wrapped in an old shirt and he hurt all over. But he was clean, and someone had bandaged the worst of his injuries—both the ones his father had given him, and the ones he’d taken in his headlong flight.

  He didn’t understand.

  Ctarl lay curled on the mattress, which felt like it was stuffed with something nicer than straw, and tried to look around the room without moving anything more than his eyes. People told stories about what waited on the other side of the Crush, but most of those stories belonged to worlds and the onebloods who belonged to them. People interpreted Driftwood according to their own religions, their own beliefs. Drifters like Ctarl didn’t have a world of their own, just the Shreds they lived in. They mostly said that what lay on the other side of the Crush was nothing at all.

  This wasn’t nothing. The bed was narrow, but soft; the curtain dangling from the ceiling was the kind of patchwork he was used to seeing around the Shreds, but much more carefully stitched. Faint light came through where the fabric was thinner or paler. The ceiling above him looked strangely furry, and he stared at it for a long, terrified moment, but he didn’t see it breathe or shift, so he hoped it wasn’t alive.

  He wondered whose afterlife he’d ended up in.

  A soft humming made him close his eyes. A moment later the light brightened against his eyelids; someone had drawn aside the curtain. Cooler air brushed his face. Then darkness and warmth, and faint sounds and the scent of onions: someone was bending over him. He stayed rigid as they pulled the blanket aside. But when hands touched the shirt over his ribs, he couldn’t hold still any longer.

  Ctarl yelped and pulled away so hard he smacked his head into the wall. The figure was a menacing shadow, its face invisible, its hands outstretched— but then it backed away and lowered itself carefully to the floor, speaking in a pidgin he barely understood, something about calm and hurt.

  The voice was deep, but the body was soft and rounded, the face almost girlish. But wrinkled girlish, and the person moved like they were elderly, with effort and care. Their clothing showed the same neat stitching as the curtain, and some of the same fabric.

  They went on, in a tone Ctarl thought was probably meant to be soothing and almost worked. More things about hurt, and drink, and sleep, and then something he didn’t understand at all. The stranger saw his confusion then, and mimed flailing. It made Ctarl flinch back, and they stopped. Then he caught another word he recognized: healing.

  That was something living people did. “I’m not . . .” Ctarl said, then stopped.

  He’d spoken in the pidgin he was used to using, and the stranger frowned. Haltingly, they said, “You speak . . . this . . . yes?”

  Wordlessly, Ctarl nodded.

  “I Tinaamy,” the stranger said. “In house I find you. Me house. Bad hurt. I help. Not easy—you die almost.”

  Memory pressed down on him, like the force of the Crush. “I was trying to die,” Ctarl whispered.

  Tinaamy’s girlish face collapsed into an expression of warmth and pity. “Oh, child,” they said, their voice deep and gentle. “Someone saved you.”

  Ctarl got the story later, once he spoke Tinaamy’s pidgin well enough to understand it. They’d come home to find Ctarl just inside their front door—a door that was supposed to be locked, and still was— along with a basket of starfruit from Barkstep, which for Tinaamy’s body was food enough for several months. Working outward from the places both of them knew, Ctarl and Tinaamy realized he was across the Crush from where his father lived, and Tinaamy offered to help him get home.

  Ctarl refused violently enough that Tinaamy never mentioned it again. And they never asked why he’d run into the Crush, but he suspected they knew.

  A story full of holes. How had Ctarl gotten out of the Crush, and inside Tinaamy’s home? Who left the starfruit? Tinaamy said they had no idea, but Ctarl knew.

  He’d been saved by the god of Driftwood.

  Who else—what else—could possibly be waiting inside the Crush? Normal people were terrified of it. Even the children playing their game never went anywhere as deep as Ctarl had gone. The only people who did that were trying to die. And Ctarl doubted that a fellow would-be suicide had rescued him.

  No, Driftwood had a god. One who lived inside the Crush, who took pity on him because it wasn’t his time to go.

  “You’re not the first to think of that,” Tinaamy said. “All the worlds that come here, they have gods—most of them, anyway—but others have decided that Driftwood must have a god of its own. A friend once told me about them. The ideas people have had before.”

  Ctarl sat up, interest sharpening. “What did those people say?”

  Tinaamy shrugged, paying more attention to the leaves they were methodically grinding than to Ctarl and his excitement. “They usually think it’s a malicious god. Eating worlds because it’s forever starving. They never talk about it showing pity.” They tossed in another handful of leaves and prodded the mass with the pestle as if it might speak. “But nobody’s ever found proof of its existence, either—except that Driftwood itself exists.”

  “Nobody except for me,” Ctarl said.

  They argued about it a lot as Ctarl grew up, because at first Tinaamy insisted he stay until he was healed, and then by the time he felt well they’d fallen into a comfortable enough routine that Tinaamy never hinted he should leave. Ctarl learned more languages, helping Tinaamy with pa
tients, because they were a healer with the ability to make sure wounds stayed clean and never festered. Ctarl thought it was magic; Tinaamy insisted it was just skill; the word didn’t really matter. It had kept Ctarl from dying: the power of Tinaamy’s hands, and the mercy of the god of Driftwood.

  A god Tinaamy didn’t believe in. But that was all right. They hadn’t seen what he’d seen.

  He got a reputation as an eccentric. Ctarl didn’t hesitate to tell people what had happened to him, and every day he went to the fringes of the Crush and thanked the god inside for helping him. He brought offerings, too: little things mostly, because he’d come out with nothing except his ruined clothes, and Tinaamy was too good-hearted to charge their patients even a quarter of what they should. But if people were right and the god of Driftwood was always hungry, maybe feeding Him voluntarily was good, rather than waiting for things to slide gradually into His maw.

  So it went, as Ctarl grew from a boy into a youth, and then to the edge of manhood. And then Unokucatuin found him.

  Ctarl was a Drifter through and through, and didn’t really give a shit what sorts of long and complicated names Edgers and one-bloods clung to. Unokucatuin told him again and again that abbreviating someone’s name was a sexual proposition in his world, but Ctarl found “Unokucatuin” too long and unwieldy to say all the time, so finally he offered the man a new name entirely: Oruc.

  “But you have to earn it,” Ctarl said. “Submit yourself to the god of Driftwood, and receive His mercy. Then you will earn a new name.”

  “You took the name Ctarl after you came out?” Unokucatuin asked, a little suspicious.

  “Yes,” Ctarl said, because there was nobody to really dispute it. He’d never gone back to where his father lived, and by now the man might be dead. Even if Tinaamy realized he’d always been called Ctarl, they wouldn’t say anything. It was a just a maneuver so Ctarl wouldn’t have to say “Unokucatuin” all the time.

  But the part about sending the man into the Crush was real. Unokucatuin was from a world just now moving into the Ring, far enough from the Edge and shrinking small enough that his people were beginning to really panic about the inevitability of Driftwood. He’d heard about Ctarl from a Shreds merchant who traded out there, gas-driven devices from Lupyaconwi in exchange for grain, and he figured that it only made sense to learn about the god of this place and how to propitiate Him.