Like the Crush itself, and the stories others told about the eternal hunger of the god there.
Ctarl pointed into the massed fragments that lay beyond the inner edge of the inhabited Shreds. “That’s where it happened.”
“Sure, whatever.” His father pressed one hand to his stomach as if the milk was disagreeing with him.
“You need to know the story,” Ctarl said. “Because you see, Father—I didn’t run away to start a scam, or a cult, or even a new religion. I ran to get away from you.”
His voice grew stronger as he went on, even as his father turned to stare at him. “I was trying to die,” Ctarl said. “That’s how bad life with you was: I decided I’d rather be torn apart in the Crush than live another moment with you. The god of Driftwood saved me from death, but He also saved me from you.”
Rtean laughed and spread his arms. “Then your god is as powerless and false as I already thought. Here I am, boy! You’re not free of me, and you never will be. I just want what I deserve, after all these years. After everything Driftwood has taken from me.”
“Driftwood has taken from us all,” Ctarl said. A strange serenity was coming over him, not unlike what he’d felt when the god rescued him. “Together we endure . . . but separately we die.”
One way or another, his father was going into the Crush.
He didn’t stop to wonder what weapon Rtean had in his pocket. The old man was so used to cowing his son into servile desperation, it never occurred to him that Ctarl didn’t need his flock to defend himself.
Three steps was all it took. Three steps and a shove, and his father was gone, over the edge of the rock to the ground far, far below.
After a few, shaking breaths, Ctarl steadied enough to look over the edge.
The shadows down there were even deeper, full night in whatever nameless fragment of a Shred Rtean had fallen into. But he could make out the second shadow within the first, sprawled at unnatural angles and unmoving.
“It’s all right, Father,” Ctarl said. “Ends are good. They hurt, but then they stop.”
That was when the miracle happened:
Even as Ctarl was watching, his father’s body disappeared.
He’d made an offering in blood, and the Crush had accepted.
The god of Driftwood was pleased with His priest.
Ctarl wasn’t sure how he made it down from the rock, unless it was his god guiding his steps. At the base he walked a few unsteady steps, then halted, staring. Torn between horror and exaltation.
He wasn’t the first to believe in a god of Driftwood. Ctarl was just the first to see that god as a savior, rather than an eternally hungry maw. As something to be thanked rather than fed. But now . . .
Rtean’s body vanishing. Not even his boots left behind.
Our god is the god of Drifters, not of one-bloods.
The movement got far too close before Ctarl noticed and looked up, but it was only Madzizi. Her bronzed face looked pale in the darkness. “First of Us—”
The formal address steadied him. “My Second,” Ctarl breathed, reaching out for her. “A revelation has come to me. The god of Driftwood has spoken.”
She caught his hands in her own. “I was watching, First of Us. In case something happened, in case you needed my help. I saw—your father—”
Her eyes were good in the dark, much better than Ctarl’s. I saw you push him off the peak.
“An offering,” Ctarl said. “As we’ve given before . . . but this time, oh, Madzizi, this time was different.” The body disappearing before his eyes, leaving only a stain of blood at the base of the peak. A living offering—but the god of Drifters would not want Drifter blood shed in His name.
It was one-bloods that He hungered for.
Ctarl’s grip shifted, clasping Madzizi’s hands between his palms. “This is what He wants, my Second. What He has always wanted. We Drifters—we’ve always thought of ourselves as the ones who live in the gaps, with no world of our own. And we’ve thought we are lesser because of it. But don’t you see? Driftwood is our world. It belongs to us, not to them, not to the one-bloods.”
He smiled at Madzizi, the light of revelation suffusing him. “This is why the god spared all of us from the Crush. So that we can make Driftwood the world, the home, that it should be.”
Madzizi’s hands slipped from between his. “Ctarl—First of Us—no.”
“Yes!” he insisted. “My father’s body vanished, Madzizi! Just as things vanish when the Crush takes them. The offering was accepted.”
“We aren’t that close to the Crush,” she said. “Things here don’t vanish that fast, Ctarl. And—”
The anguish that strangled her voice dimmed his inner light for a moment. “What is it?”
She walked away from him, going to the towering rock and pressing her fists against it, head bowed. He thought for a moment that she might be praying. But then she spoke, without lifting her head, her voice dead with despair. “You’re the only one our god has ever saved.”
It made no sense. “I saw you walk into the Crush, and come out again. You told me—”
“I lied.”
Those two words silenced Ctarl as effectively as his father’s fist had ever done.
Madzizi punched the rock once, not pulling the blow. “I went just far enough that you couldn’t see me, and then I hid and waited. And everybody who’s come after, I told them to do the same thing. Oh, I dressed it up in much fancier terms; I said they should meditate on death, on their own dissolution, that they should go into the Crush in their hearts, in their minds. But not with their bodies.”
The face she turned to him was sick with pain she’d been hiding since the beginning. “The ones who died . . . I assume they didn’t listen to me. Or they just got unlucky, and they were the thing that happened to vanish, even though they didn’t go too close. But I think most of them didn’t listen.”
One in ten dead—but nine in ten, he thought, had been saved.
Except his father had been right all along. Ctarl was running a scam. What he thought he’d built was a lie, and his faithful were liars in turn—
“You are chosen,” Madzizi whispered. “The rest of us . . . I was afraid we wouldn’t be.”
Ctarl’s heart was beating too fast. It felt like the weight of the Crush was on him again, pressing all the air from his lungs. You are chosen. That part wasn’t a lie. And his followers, they believed; it wasn’t their fault what Madzizi had told them wasn’t what he’d intended. Maybe it was better that way, so he didn’t have a litany of Unokucatuins to haunt his remaining days.
But he couldn’t deny what he’d seen tonight. The god of Driftwood had shown Ctarl what He wanted. “You are chosen,” Ctarl said. “By me. Chosen to help me make this place what it should be. We’ll cleanse the Shreds first, and show our fellow Drifters the truth of our way; then, once they’re on our side, we’ll take our faith outward. To the Ring, to the Edge, to the Mist itself, until all of Driftwood is ours.”
Madzizi’s guilt withered in the fire of something new: horror. “You can’t mean . . . war against the onebloods?”
“Not at first,” Ctarl said. “We don’t have the strength for that. But in time, if it is necessary—if that is what our god calls for—then yes.”
She backed a step away, then another. She’d lost track of where she was standing: her back ran up against the rock where they’d performed their rituals together for so long. “Ctarl, no! I wanted us to have some purpose, something other than making offerings and supporting each other—but not this.”
“I didn’t choose it, my Second. This is faith: when my god shows me a sign, I must listen.”
“And become a murderer?!”
The word flew like a knife for Ctarl’s heart. But it met with the shield and armor of his faith.
“It is not murder,” Ctarl said. “It is sacrifice.”
Madzizi shook her head, mouth twisting in revulsion. “Then I am your Second no more. And you, Ctarl, are n
o prophet.”
She did what damage she could, spreading the truth of what she’d done with the initiates. Some of them abandoned Ctarl. Others claimed they hadn’t listened to her misguided advice; they’d gone deep into the Crush and experienced the same salvation Ctarl had. He doubted them, but he didn’t mind, because the initiations didn’t matter anymore. He declared all those who had stayed were in the chief rank of his followers, and those who came after had to submit to their lead.
Because others came hard on their heels. It was as Ctarl had suspected: more than a few Drifters were ready for the message he brought. Not enough for a war, but plenty for a strategic selection of offerings, bringing him one-bloods to sacrifice to the Crush. They started in Vep, which had only two, and only one of those native to Vep itself; Ctarl rationed them out slowly, and in the meanwhile his flock took that Shred as their new base of operations.
It was the right place, he felt. Vep was the closest inhabited patch surrounding the Crush; few people even wanted to go so near, let alone live there. And no one would be eager to attack it. Drifters might proclaim their defiance by maintaining the series of bars known as Spit in the Crush’s Eye, but they were as superstitious as anyone, and didn’t like to go near the place where everything ended. Ctarl and his people had no fear, and that kept them safe.
A series of sacrifices, beginning with his father. None of the others vanished the way Rtean had when Ctarl threw them off the peak, but that was all right. He couldn’t expect a miracle every time.
One came to him anyway.
How the man got into Ctarl’s bedroom, Ctarl didn’t know. He no longer slept in the same room as his followers; they insisted on him taking the chamber that had belonged to the one native-born Vepa. It wasn’t sumptuous, but it was as good as they were going to manage this close to the Crush.
Some of his newer followers had been talking about putting a guard on Ctarl’s chambers, but he’d dissuaded them, saying the lock on the door was enough. Now he regretted that. Because the man who was waiting for him was clearly a one-blood.
There was no mistaking it. Silver-blue skin, black eyes and hair and nails, and the cold expression of someone who utterly condemned what Ctarl and his people were doing.
“I should never have saved you.”
The shout rising in Ctarl’s throat died unvoiced. “What?”
“Back when you ran into the Crush. I saw you go by—not the first I’ve seen go there to commit suicide, but you looked like you were just a kid. You were just a kid. So I followed you and dragged you out. Took you to Tinaamy and paid for your healing. I was in a generous mood that day.” His lips flattened. “Apparently that was a mistake.”
“You’re lying,” Ctarl said, out of pure reflex. “Tinaamy found me inside their locked house—”
The man held up something that looked like a key made of glass. “You mean, like you just found me inside your locked room?”
Before Ctarl could respond, he went on, remorselessly. “Tinaamy knew. I came back a while later to see if you’d survived, and they told me you’d decided some god in the Crush had saved you. Seemed harmless enough, and I didn’t want you coming after me in your gratitude, so I told them to let you go on thinking that. But what you’re doing now . . . Tinaamy came to find me themself. The way they figure it, I’m the only one who can convince you to stop.”
It should have been a lie. A transparent bid to convince him to spare the one-bloods—except if someone wanted to do that, they would have sent a Drifter. Ctarl would have been more willing to believe one of his own people.
A Drifter, though, wouldn’t have had a voice he remembered through the haze of pain and approaching death. A voice that had said, Come on. You’ll be all right.
“You’re not the first to get this idea, you know,” the man went on, pocketing the glass key. “Either that Driftwood has a god, or that what Drifters should be doing is slaughtering all the one-bloods. Just like sometimes the one-bloods decide the way to save their world is to kill everybody who doesn’t belong to it. Nobody succeeds, but a lot of people die along the way, and it doesn’t change a fucking thing in this place. Worlds still end. The Crush still wins. All you do is help it happen faster.”
Ctarl’s legs wouldn’t hold him. He managed to stagger to his narrow bed, with the mangy velvet covering he always refused to use and his new Second kept putting back in place. It was unpleasantly soft beneath him as he sank down. “But—everyone who goes into the Crush dies. Except for me. Except for you.”
An impatient sigh answered him. “You weren’t in the Crush. I mean, not that there are clear boundaries—but what was killing you was the wall that collapsed on you when you stumbled into it.”
That oppressive weight, crushing all the breath from him. “Nobody goes in there,” Ctarl said. His eyes burned; he hadn’t been blinking. “But you were there.”
“Who says nobody goes in there? People hide out in the fringes sometimes, because they know they’ll be uninhabited, and nearly everybody is too afraid to chase them. I take bounties to track those people down and drag them back to whoever wants justice.”
Ctarl’s mind felt like the jumble of fragments in the Crush, except that instead of disintegrating, they were realigning themselves into new, better positions. Making a structure that was whole and strong. This man took bounties to chase people who went to the Crush, despite the risk; he’d braved that risk to save Ctarl, as if it didn’t frighten him in the least. He talked about Driftwood’s past like he’d seen it.
There were stories. Children’s tales, Ctarl had thought. Impossibilities. That sooner or later Driftwood encompassed everything within its sphere, and one of those things was a true immortal: a man who had outlived his lifetime and his world alike.
“You’re Last,” he whispered.
“Yes. Now, are you going to call off your crusade, or am I going to have to find another way to stop you?”
“But my father’s body disappeared,” Ctarl said, still disjointed. “I watched it vanish. It was a miracle—”
Last had a whole repertoire of impatient sounds, it seemed, each one more aggravated than the last. “It was Mtoek. That happens when they die; their bodies vanish. Who knows whether yours will, half Mtoek and all. I’d rather not find out now, unless you force me to. Make up whatever story you like for your followers; it seems like you’re pretty good at those. You even convince yourself. Do that now, or—”
He stopped, because Ctarl had slid off the bed and onto his knees. Then Ctarl pressed his forehead to the floor. “I don’t have to make anything up. This time—truly—this time, I understand.”
Suspicion layered over the impatience. “Understand what?”
“That You,” Ctarl said, “are the god of Driftwood.”
Silence. Ctarl could feel the beating of his heart—but this time it was a steady, even rhythm. Not the panicked delusions of before. He was right that the god of Driftwood had saved him. He’d just misunderstood everything about what that meant.
“No,” Last said, flat and crisp. “I’m not.”
“How else do you explain Your immortality? The fact that even the Crush won’t touch You?”
“I can’t. It doesn’t matter. I’m not a god. I just came here to tell you to stop murdering people—”
“At once,” Ctarl said, and rose up just enough to bow again. The wood of the floorboards printed itself on his forehead; he would have pressed his face right through them if he could. “I have sinned. I have murdered the innocent in Your name; I have risked the lives of my followers, believing that You would intervene to save them. Some died because of it.” The relief of true revelation was mixing with hideous guilt, tearing his voice ragged. “Set whatever penance for me that You wish, or even insist on my life in recompense; it is Yours. I—”
Last jerked him to his feet. “I’m not a god. I’m a man who dragged you out from under a broken wall too far from the true heart of the Crush for either of us to be in real danger from i
t. I don’t want you worshipping me; I just want you to stop this idiotic cult business of yours and let people get back to whatever lives they can manage in this cosmic joke we call Driftwood.”
“Their lives,” Ctarl said. “Yes. That is Your first tenet, then—that people should be free to live their lives, Drifter and one-blood alike.”
“Yes—damn it, no! Yes to the idea, but no to the tenet.” Last let go of him and raked his dark-nailed hands through his hair. “What will it take to make you let go of this nonsense?”
Despite everything, the horror and the guilt and the mistakes, Ctarl smiled at his god. “You may test my faith if You wish. I deserve whatever trials You choose to set for me. But I will never forsake You.”
He did everything Last told him to, except that one thing.
He gave his people a story to turn them away from targeting one-bloods. It just happened that the story he gave them was true: that the god of Driftwood had come to him again, in person, and explained the magnitude of Ctarl’s misunderstanding and crimes.
Not all of them believed him. A few—the bloodthirsty core of his new followers, who had come to him when he began the sacrifices—tried to continue without him. Ctarl wrestled with his new faith, debating whether it was right to leave them alone, or right to take action so that others could live their lives in safety. Then he remembered that Last had been willing to kill him to stop the murders; from that he could take guidance.
Ctarl’s own hands were too stained already, though. It was a few of his true faithful, the ones who stayed even after the new revelation, who took care of it.
Afterwards, though, he disbanded even those. Last had told him to stop the “cult business,” so Ctarl could not be a leader any longer. It took a great deal of arguing, and in the end he moved across the Shreds to get away from those who would not give up.
But he didn’t abandon his faith.
And neither did others.
A rumor came to him some time later, when Ctarl was sick with a bloody cough and suspected he wouldn’t live much longer. A new cult—or rather an old one, under new leadership. Madzizi had heard the stories, and picked up the torch Ctarl had laid down.
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