It was the first time anyone had treated Ctarl as anything other than a young man with an eccentric quirk. But if someone else wanted to worship the god of Driftwood, then it only made sense that they should follow the same path he had.
“Go in as deep as you can,” he told Unokucatuin—it would be such a relief when he could call the man Oruc instead. “Surrender yourself completely to His mercy. You must be prepared to die, and not shrink from it.” There was no point in trying to re-create his specific route; Ctarl couldn’t remember most of it, and it would have crumbled by now anyway. Two entire Shreds had been abandoned to the Crush since his own rescue, their inhabitants too afraid to live so close.
Unokucatuin kissed him, which in his world was a gesture of deep respect and not a sexual advance. “I will,” he said fervently. “There is nothing I would not do for my people.”
He meant it. The next day he purified himself according to a ritual Ctarl made up for him because Unokucatuin seemed to expect something of that kind, and then he walked, without a hint of fear, into the Crush.
Ctarl waited all that day and through the night, and through the next day as well. He didn’t know how long he’d been inside himself, before the god brought him out, and he was waiting with quick-beating heart for the chance to see his god again. But when no one appeared, it occurred to him that Unokucatuin—Oruc, now—might have been taken somewhere else to recover, as he had been. And so, reluctantly, Ctarl abandoned his post to search all around for a man fitting that description.
He found nothing. Dizzy with horror and lack of sleep, Ctarl went back to the Crush and stared into its depths.
He’d found a disciple—and promptly sent the man to his death.
Things seemed to vanish while he watched, a few bricks off the top of a wall here, a paving stone there. This was why people didn’t look at the Crush; they didn’t want to watch the process of Driftwood happening before their very eyes, lest they be the thing to vanish next. Even Drifters were superstitious about things like that.
Drifters.
In a flash that felt like his spirit coming unmoored from his body, Ctarl understood.
There was a god of Driftwood, yes—but He was not a god for one-bloods like Unokucatuin. He was for people without gods of their own, people without worlds of their own, people for whom Driftwood was their world. Tinaamy had mentioned it once, as a thing others had said in the past, but Ctarl had forgotten.
The god of Driftwood was the god of Drifters. Only for them would He show His power.
Ctarl bowed low, then fumbled in his pockets for an offering. He came up with a string of beads used as trade currency in a good third of the Shreds, and without hesitation flung it as far into the Crush as he could.
“I understand,” he told his god, breathless with epiphany. “And now I know what to do.”
It helped that no one knew about Unokucatuin. Ctarl might have had a difficult time convincing anyone else to listen to him if they knew the first man who’d done so had died.
But he was sure of his new revelation. And in time, he proved he was right.
Before, Ctarl had just been an eccentric. After Unokucatuin vanished—he made a point now of always using the man’s full name, not just calling him “Uno” or “Oruc,” even if it was only in his head—Ctarl became a priest. Instead of just making offerings, he carried his message to the people of the Shreds, his fellow Drifters and the chosen of his god.
Most of them laughed him out of the room. But not all.
His second disciple was a woman named Madzizi whose ancestry traced to at least a dozen worlds. She had just lost her beloved twin sister and felt the pain of the loss as acutely as Ctarl had felt his own. Madzizi walked into the Crush ready to die, and walked out again a little while later with her face serene. Ctarl was ever so faintly disappointed; he’d still hoped to see his god with his own eyes, when He brought Madzizi out. But it was enough for Ctarl to know that he was right: the god blessed Drifters, not one-bloods.
He didn’t tell Madzizi to change her name. There wasn’t any need for that, and maybe he’d been wrong to have that idea in the first place.
Ctarl wondered a lot about the variables. Did the timing matter? Direction of approach? Age? Madzizi was about the age Ctarl was now, years after his own salvation; Unokucatuin had been older. Or maybe it was the pain in the heart that their god responded to, and those who weren’t ready to die from grief or despair wouldn’t be saved. He tried to discourage the next disciple from going in, because Netaxhais was more or less contented with her life. When he found Madzizi waiting for her near the Crush, he realized they’d disobeyed him, and he feared the worst. But Netaxhais came out laughing and smiling, hugging Madzizi in thanks, and he realized their god’s mercy was not only for those who suffered the most.
Even then, it didn’t always work. For every ten that went in, one might not emerge again. The risk kept their numbers small, especially since Ctarl couldn’t demonstrate any kind of powers granted to him or his disciples by their god. A few of them had abilities inherited from one lineage or another, but they performed no new miracles, developed no talents unique to themselves and separate from the worlds they lived in.
Ctarl didn’t mind. For him, it was enough to have been saved. But it made it harder to convince others to join him in his faith.
By then Ctarl had stopped living with Tinaamy. The rooms they previously lived in had collapsed into a sinkhole, and the new place they’d found wasn’t large enough for two adults. Tinaamy didn’t like what he was doing anyway. “I’ve respected your belief in this god,” they said, “even if I think you’re wrong. Some passerby saw you go in and braved the risk in order to save you. If it pleases you to think otherwise, so be it. But encouraging others to join you—that’s dangerous. How many of them have died?”
Only a few, and he kept looking for ways to improve their chances. Tinaamy themself had more than once performed dangerous procedures on patients; sometimes the patient died. They didn’t see it as the same kind of thing, though, no matter how much Ctarl argued.
So it was easier for Ctarl to find a ramshackle structure built mostly out of cloth stretched between supports, and to move in there with as many of his disciples as could join him. They worked at a variety of jobs to support their priest and spread the word of their faith wherever they went, while Ctarl and Madzizi conducted the rituals Madzizi helped him develop.
She was good at rituals—better than Ctarl was. Good at seeing the meaning in things, and finding ways to share that meaning with everyone else. The Shred they lived in had lost even its name, but it still had a sun, and every morning when it rose Ctarl and Madzizi went to a small crag that overlooked the Crush, the last remnant of some long-decayed mountain range. From its top they spoke their prayers and made their offerings, using a device Netaxhais had found in Anutsrihc to send each object through the air in a long, graceful arc to land somewhere amid the uninhabited debris. For these ceremonies Ctarl wore a patchwork robe, deliberately stitched together out of many different fragments of cloth; each disciple that joined him contributed a piece. That was another of Madzizi’s ideas.
They helped each other. Deep in the Shreds, community could be as fragmented as anything else; Ctarl had grown up among people who had to fight for the necessities of survival, food, water, shelter, all the while knowing that tomorrow the column that held up the awning might be gone, or the spring in what was left of Uiriquin might run dry and leave them hiking all the way to Petal for water. By preference they fought people farther out, because those people had more to take, but the desperate sometimes turned on each other, too.
Not his faithful. If someone was in need, the others didn’t hesitate to help. “We are Driftwood,” Ctarl said in one of his early sermons. “Our ancestors came from a hundred different worlds, but they all became part of Driftwood in the end. We are the whole, built from a hundred different pieces. Separately we die; together we endure.”
It became their
motto, their mantra. We are Driftwood. Separately we die; together we endure.
On the surface, everything was good. Ctarl might not have a great many converts, but those he had were fervent, and surely their worship was pleasing to their nameless god. Except that Ctarl received no reply—and when his followers clamored for one, he found himself looking for small ways to satisfy them, reading omens into small coincidences here and there.
Was he relying on a true spiritual insight? Or deceiving the faithful so they wouldn’t abandon him?
Madzizi was the best, and the worst. She more than anyone kept pressing Ctarl for more: now that they had a small community, what did their god want them to do? What was their purpose? She was looking for Ctarl to lead them somewhere, he realized—but if he was meant to do so, he’d missed the signs. Doubt began to dig its fingers in.
Then, as before, his path changed. It began with a man, and it ended with a death.
He should have taken a new name.
It might not have helped. He’d inherited his father’s double-spotted eyes, two pupils in each iris. Some of his followers had taken that as a mark of divine favor, even though he’d told them it was simply a rare trait, found among a people who were all but gone now. So far as Ctarl knew, in fact, only one full-blooded Mtoe remained alive—and when that man heard of a Drifter with double-spotted eyes leading a “cult” on the other side of the Shreds, he came looking.
Rtean caught his son just after the morning devotions were done, climbing down the last stretch of the crag where he and Madzizi had sent their offerings on their way. When Ctarl saw who was waiting, his foot slipped, and he crashed heavily to the ground at his father’s feet.
“You,” Rtean growled, bending over him. “After all this time—thought you were dead, I did!”
Ctarl couldn’t find words. If he’d been standing, maybe; he’d grown immensely since Tinaamy took him in, and might even be his father’s equal in height by now. But sprawled on the ground, it felt like he was a child still and Rtean had knocked him down again. Like nothing whatsoever had changed.
Madzizi intervened when Rtean tried to grab him by the shoulders—to lift him up or shake him, Ctarl didn’t know which. She broke the half-formed grip with a vicious twist. “Don’t you dare touch the Prophet of Driftwood.”
“Prophet!” Rtean laughed nastily. “So it’s true. You ran away to start scamming people with some story about a god saving you. All my effort raising you, and this is what I wind up with: a liar and a cheat.”
Only such an insult to his god could have restored Ctarl’s tongue, and his spine. “It isn’t a scam,” he stammered, rising and motioning for Madzizi to back off. “The god found me, and—”
Rtean spat a curse, the only thing he retained from the Mtoek language of his ancestors. “And what? Made you his magic priest? Bollocks. If you’re not a cheat, then you’re a fool, boy.” Then he stepped in closer, his voice lowering to a greasy tone Ctarl remembered all too well. “But a fool who’s done well, I hear. Got people feeding you, bringing you all kinds of things. I want a piece of it.”
Madzizi had given them just enough distance not to hear that part. Ctarl felt hot and cold all over. Fear and disgust warred within him, just like they used to when he was a boy—when he’d run into the Crush to get away from this man.
That memory was his shield. “If you want to join the faithful,” Ctarl said, his voice steadying, “then you are welcome to submit yourself to the initiation. Enter the Crush, give yourself over to the god of Driftwood, and be returned to us; then you and I will talk.”
He finished even though Madzizi was frantically signaling him not to. What better answer could there be? Roughly one in ten never returned; the god in the Crush had intervened to save Ctarl from this very man. The odds that Rtean would come back were low.
The odds that Rtean would agree were even lower. But to his shock, his father only laughed and clapped him on the shoulder. “Sure, boy. Whatever you say.”
It was either the first miracle Ctarl had performed, or else his father was planning something. Either way, he needed time to think. “Tonight,” he said. “Just before the sun here sets. I’ll bless you and send you on your way.”
Rtean cocked his gaze at the sky, calculating. “Sun here goes at a steady pace? More than enough time for a drink, then. You wouldn’t begrudge your father a thing like that, would you, before doing something so dangerous?”
He wasn’t inviting Ctarl to join him. Ctarl dug in his pocket and came up with two of the small nuts a few local bars would accept as currency, then shoved them into his father’s hand. Whistling, the man sauntered off.
Watching him go, Madzizi said, “I didn’t know your father was a one-blood.”
Was that doubt in her voice? Ctarl said firmly, “My mother was a Drifter, through and through. And my father may be full-blooded Mtoe, but he’s lived in the Shreds his whole life, and so have I. If he’s even still got a world somewhere, I don’t know where it is.” Maybe one of the uninhabitable ones. Or maybe it was already in the Crush, being slowly ground out of existence. For all Ctarl knew, it was that patch of sea he’d fallen into years ago.
Either his words reassured her, or her other worries were bigger. “Do you want us with you tonight?”
Ctarl normally conducted the initiations alone. Right now, he was grateful for that tradition. “No. I’ll deal with him myself.” That way there would be no one to see if his father reduced him to the cowering boy he’d once been.
But I’m not a boy. He was a priest, the leader of his flock. And he was going to make his father see that.
The crag cast a long shadow. It was only because Ctarl knew his father’s habits that he was able to pick out the second shadow inside it, Rtean sitting with his back against the stone, sipping from a hollowed-out gourd. Filled, no doubt, with something potent.
If his father wanted to go into the Crush drunk, so be it. “Are you ready?” Ctarl asked.
Rtean sniffed and spat to one side, as if to clear his mouth. “Ready to talk, sure. This cult you’ve got going—”
“It isn’t a cult,” Ctarl said hotly.
His eyes were adjusting enough to see his father inside the deep shadow, and to see the man’s lip curl. “You’re leading your own made-up religion, boy, and you’ve got sheep giving you what they earn. I’ve been in Driftwood long enough to know a cult when I see one.”
The point wasn’t worth arguing—any of the points, that they shared what they had, that his followers were his friends, that Ctarl and Madzizi might have invented the rituals but the religion itself was real. They could discuss that when—if—his father came out of the Crush. “Are you ready?”
Rtean levered himself to his feet. His balance was unsteady, but Ctarl knew better than to think that made him any less dangerous. “I’m not going into the Crush.”
“Then you have no place here.”
His father’s breath reeked of the fermented milk sold in Vep, the nearest Shred with any inhabitants. “Oh, I’ll pretend. Head a bit in that direction, hide myself behind something—is that what you did? Lucky so many of your sycophants have survived, if they’re all running in there thinking they’re copying you. Probably most of them do exactly what I’m going to.”
“The faithful,” Ctarl said coldly, “have been saved by their god. And if He chooses to save you as well, I’ll accept His decision. But you have only two choices tonight: go into the Crush for real and take your chances with the god of Driftwood, or go home.”
“Home?” Rtean’s laugh was a bitter thing, chased with another swig of milk. “It’s gone. And the one after that, too, and the one after that. No, I’m staying here. And that’s only the start, boy, because I’m not going to play rat to your piper. You’ll come up with some good story for me, some sign of how your made-up god favors me above the rest of them—oh, don’t worry; I’m not going to try to take over your cult. I don’t want the work of running the thing, getting up every day to pray and t
hrow things off that rock. But lots of religions have important father figures. I want to be one of them.”
Before Ctarl could say anything, Rtean’s hand shot out and seized him by the front of his shirt. “And don’t think about setting your sheep on me, boy. I didn’t come here without some way of defending myself.” His free hand patted one pocket. “You try to throw me out, a lot more than one in ten of your followers is going to die.”
Ctarl’s mouth was as dry as dust. The old habits of terror warred with the strength he’d found since he went into the Crush. Living with his father, he’d never thought past surviving the day, the hour, every heartbeat of Rtean’s frequent rages. But when he spoke to his faithful, when he conducted the ceremonies atop the crag’s peak . . . then he found a measure of peace.
Now it gave him his voice. “I understand. Come with me.”
Rtean made a suspicious sound when Ctarl began to climb the rock. Ctarl paused long enough to say, “This has become a holy site for us—the only place you can look down into the Crush. It will be more believable to everyone else if you and I start there.”
If a part of him had been hoping Rtean would slip, fall, and break his leg, that part was disappointed. Despite the drink in him, Rtean made it to the top without any injury worse than a few scraped knuckles. He celebrated by draining his gourd, then flinging it in the general direction of the Crush. “There you go. My first offering to your made-up god.”
The continual disbelief stung. Ctarl had faced it from many people, but despite everything, down in the bedrock of his soul, he still wanted his father’s approval. He always would—and he would never be satisfied.
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