Driftwood Read online

  Only a few people chase the stories far enough to notice this hypothetical “somebody” doesn’t seem to exist. People can tell you where I live, or where I spend my time, or how to find me, but they can’t tell you where I come from.

  And of those few people who chase the stories far enough, a very few make the leap of faith to believing the stories.

  Those are the ones who come and find me, not to hire me as a guide, but to ask me questions.

  A question, really. They all ask the same one.

  Alsanit hadn’t come across the Shreds to hire a guide, but she ended up doing so anyway. She was too far out of familiar neighborhoods; there were too many language and cultural obstacles in her way for her to search without help. So she hired someone, a Drifter, paying him in the seashells the Valrai used as currency, which had merit in some Shreds as medicine, though not for the Valrai themselves. She sent a messenger back home to explain her continued absence, then grimly settled into the task of running Last to ground.

  It was a dangerous proposition. She had no way of knowing whether the people she hired or spoke to were trustworthy; it was safest to assume they weren’t. But Alsanit didn’t have to return home and speak to the Circle to know what they would tell her. If she failed in this mission, her life was meaningless anyway, along with that of every last Valrai. So what did it matter, that she was risking it here?

  Her guide turned out to be reliable, even if several of the informants they approached tried to kill them. Alsanit lost track of how much time they spent searching; away from Valrassuith, she found it hard to maintain familiar standards of time, and days and nights were of different lengths in every Shred she went through. Instead, she kept track of how many shells she had left, and worried over how quickly she was spending them. Before much longer, she would have to return home for more—and she had no idea how much Last would charge for his answer, should she persuade him to give it. Maybe more than all of her people had to give.

  But they would find a way to pay.

  When Alsanit’s shells were nearly gone, her guide found him.

  The guide’s final service for Alsanit involved kicking in Last’s door. Then he was gone down the stairs, off to enjoy the wealth he’d earned, leaving Alsanit standing in Last’s doorway with Last’s knife at her throat.

  “I’ve killed people for less than this,” he told her, calmly, as if the information were no more significant than directions to the nearest Shred boundary.

  “Kill me, then,” Alsanit said. “It doesn’t matter. I’m dead anyway. All of my people are.”

  “Everyone’s dead,” Last said. “That’s Driftwood. In the end, every person, every street, every world will fade and crumble and die.”

  “Except you.”

  “Verdict’s still out. Who says I won’t die someday, like everyone else?”

  “You’ve lasted longer than everyone else. You’ve cheated Driftwood so far. And I need to know how.”

  For a moment he stood there, knife pressed against the fragile skin of her throat, and Alsanit truly didn’t know whether he would do it or not. “It might be a mercy, killing you,” he whispered, as if talking to himself.

  The sure knowledge that her world would die without his help gave Alsanit a simultaneous serenity and recklessness that made her words much more than mere bluff. “So do it.”

  The knife pressed more sharply. “Or answer my question.”

  Last’s hand trembled.

  “Save my world,” Alsanit said, “or kill me now.”

  He did neither. He grabbed her by the shoulder, shoved her to the floor, and left. Alsanit should have chased him, but her legs were too limp. She sat on the tiled floor of the room he rented in a Shred whose name she had already forgotten, shaking and on the edge of tears, and knew her people were doomed.

  There are a lot of crackpot theories out there about me. One of my favorites, in a black-humor kind of way, is that my world was the first one, the original core the rest of Driftwood drifted up against. A special variant on that theory says I was the first being of that reality, formed by the local gods out of clay or corn or wood or shit or whatever, that I’ve been here since the beginning, and will be here until the end.

  It used to embarrass me, that people said that kind of thing. It makes me into a god, and I’m not; I hate it when people treat me like one. But after a while, the embarrassment wears off, and you learn to deal. It’s a creative idea, at least, better than some I’ve heard. But no—my world wasn’t the first one, and I’m not the first man.

  Even the people who don’t buy into that notion tend to treat me with a reverence that makes me uncomfortable. I’d rather live my life as a guide, teaching people how to make their way across the wilderness of the Shreds, until the Shreds I know shrink down and slip into the Crush and I have to learn some new ones. I’ve gotten over mourning the loss of those worlds. They all die, in the end, so you might as well get over it. Sometimes I get hired by scholars who want to know about realities that are long gone, and then I get melancholy, remembering songs no one sings anymore, friends and lovers dead for ages, restaurants I’ll never eat at again. My memory goes back a long way: the only immortality any of these places get.

  But I don’t remember how Driftwood began. I’m not that old. For all I know, it’s gone on forever, and never had a beginning; maybe there have always been worlds out there, having apocalypses and falling apart and eventually fetching up against the ever-shifting face of Driftwood. Maybe Driftwood is an agreement among the gods, a final mercy, giving their worlds a chance to come to terms with death before it finishes happening.

  Or maybe Driftwood is their joke on us.

  Part of me hopes so, and hopes that the gods are getting a good laugh out of it. Nobody else is.

  She stayed in Last’s rented room, first sitting numbly on the tiled floor, later curling up and going to sleep. When she woke, she looked around and wondered if there was any point in staying. He had possessions here, yes, but a man who had outlived the death of countless worlds probably did not attach much importance to mere objects. There was no reason to believe he would return.

  But if there was no point in staying, neither was there much point in moving. What would she do? Go home? She could get more seashells, start another search, maybe find Last again. But he would not give her the answer. So she might as well go home and admit defeat to her people.

  And then wait for Valrassuith to finish dying.

  She would probably die before her world did. They had perhaps another two generations left—maybe more, maybe less; no one knew what hastened or slowed the inevitable decay.

  Except Last.

  If that was all that going home held for her, then Alsanit might as well stay here and die. It would hurt less than facing her people with her failure.

  Night came and went; it seemed longer than night in Valrassuith, but perhaps despair lengthened it. Alsanit sat with her back to a bedpost of carved bone, stared at the wall, and wondered what she should do with herself. Commit suicide? Starve to death? Set up a new life, exiled from her own world? The question filled her with such apathy that when Last reappeared in the doorway, she simply stared at him, dully, half-believing him a figment of her imagination.

  He looked down at her for a long moment. The morning light coming in through the room’s one small window made him shine slightly, like a god.

  “I make no promises,” he finally said, in a quiet, heavy voice. “Other people have tried this, and it didn’t work for them. They must have done something wrong. But it’s the best I can give you.”

  “I don’t ask for promises,” Alsanit whispered. “Just for hope.”

  He nodded, slowly. “Very well. Lots of people try to stay in their own realities, and never go anywhere else. Doesn’t save them. But you can’t abandon your own world, either; it needs you to survive. So you have to compromise.”

  Alsanit waited, the words burning themselves into her memory, blazing with the possibility
of survival.

  “Have someone—your own shoemakers, if you still have any—make boots with hollow spaces in the heels. Take soil, or small stones, from Valrassuith, and put this into the spaces. Wear the boots at all times. If you do that, you bring your own world with you, wherever you go. You’ll always be standing on the ground of Valrassuith, no matter where you are. And this may—may—save you.”

  Hope gave Alsanit new life; she roused from her stupor and began to crawl across the floor to where Last stood. Tears of gratitude fell from her eyes.

  Last stepped back before she could kiss his feet. “Don’t. Please. Just go back to your people.”

  “I will,” Alsanit whispered. “And—thank you. Words are not enough, but . . . thank you.”

  And carrying his words like the treasure they were, she went to give her people hope.

  The night after I saw Alsanit for the last time, I drank myself into a stupor. If you want to solve problems, that’s a shitty way to do it, but if you want to wallow in your misery, drinking’s the way to go. My problem had no solution. All I could do was wallow.

  Alsanit wasn’t the first to ask me that question, nor the last. I’ve sworn to myself time and time again that I won’t answer when they ask, that I’ll just leave, hide, stay away from them. And I try. But they always hunt me down. What else can they do? I’m their one chance at salvation, their final hope for saving their dying worlds. They can’t leave until they get their answer.

  So I give it to them.

  No one ever wants to hear the truth. I’ve tried telling them, and they refuse to accept it. They prefer lies. So I tell them what they want to hear. I make up some interesting falsehood, something that sounds plausible; maybe I take it from the rantings of a street-side preacher who died four hundred years ago, and to them it sounds new. And they smile, and weep, and thank me; sometimes, like Alsanit, they try to kiss my feet.

  And then they go away, and their worlds die.

  The lie I gave Alsanit is a special one. It’s one I actually tried, along with all the people of my world, back when there were such people, back when there was a world I called my own. We put stones in our boot-heels and prayed it would make us safe.

  It didn’t save them. And it didn’t save me. I kept those stones in my boots for seventy-five years after the rest of them were gone, thinking they were the only things keeping me in existence, until the day I got mugged in Ettolch and the mugger stole my boots. Then there was nothing keeping me “grounded,” keeping me on my native soil, and still I didn’t die, didn’t fade, didn’t vanish.

  I don’t know why.

  That’s the truth no one wants to hear. I don’t have the first clue why I’m still around. I’ve outlived the normal lifespan of my race many times over; even if my world hadn’t gone away, I should be dead. I tried all the theories that were in fashion back then, but so did everyone else around me. They’re gone, and I’m not. Maybe the answer lies in some subtle interaction of the things I tried; maybe you need to spend precisely this amount of time in your own reality and that amount of time outside of it, while simultaneously eating specific food in specific weights, and if you get the numbers exactly right, behold, immortality.

  I doubt it. But then again, what do I know?

  Not much. Except that I’m still here, unlike everybody else.

  A Note to the Reader

  THE PROVENANCE and authenticity of the following collection of texts is, to put it mildly, quite dubious.

  The tradition of recording certain kinds of tales is well established in Driftwood, but the ones gathered here go beyond mere recording. They do not follow the forms characteristic of oral storytelling in any world, and unless the scribe credited with writing them down was possessed of telepathic abilities that transcend time, he could not be privy to the thoughts and feelings of the people as described. If he were possessed of such abilities, then we might chide him for omitting a great many details we would have liked to see kept for posterity, such as the acclamation of the first Heretic King. Despite these well-founded reservations, however, the tales themselves are seen as having value, and therefore regardless of their historicity, they are worth preserving—as much as anything in Driftwood can be preserved.

  If that is damning with faint praise, then the material between the tales merits no such courtesy. We quite simply have no idea where it came from. In the sole manuscript from which this is reproduced, the handwriting is notably different, and none of the explanations for its authorship are convincing. The most persuasive interpretation is that it is purely fictional, invented by some Driftwood tale-teller to provide context for the more authentic narratives it frames. There is no support for the religious interpretation that it is a work of divine authorship, but that theory persists nevertheless.

  Such concerns notwithstanding, I pray to the voices of my ancestors and my descendants that readers will find entertainment, comfort, or worthy moral lessons within these pages. For it is only through the telling of our tales that we have hope of immortality.

  Jehiwwim iv le qu Cehlor

  Scholar of the Reborn College

  The Storyteller

  NO ONE KNOWS how it starts, because no one is there to see.

  The amphitheater has been abandoned for ages, and for good reason. Any living creature that remains within its truncated bowl when that world’s sun rises dies . . . or disappears and is never seen again, which amounts to the same thing. As a result, it is that rarest of commodities within the Shreds: a piece of uninhabited dry land.

  Not unused, though. The timeworn sandstone benches are solid enough, if not precisely comfortable, and now that someone has knocked down the creepy, insectile statues that used to stand in watch—or possibly in threat—at the top of the stands, the amphitheater is a nice enough place for all kinds of uses, from performances to markets to punishment for the remaining one-bloods of Skyless. They permit others to use the space as they please, but personally consider its open-air nature to be the next worst thing to hell.

  Only at night, though. Throughout the day, and for a generous margin before sunrise and after sunset, the amphitheater tends to be deserted. With the differences in cycles between worlds, nobody quite wants to risk guessing wrong about what time it is—nor do they want to experiment and find out just how long the dangerous period is. And since these days only one tunnel leads from Skyless onto the amphitheater floor, and the people of Soggeny and Up-End don’t make a habit of climbing the amphitheater’s walls, there’s not a lot of traffic in or out.

  Which means that as near as anyone can tell, the wreath of flowers simply appears, laid there by some unknown hand, their unfading sapphire petals shining with a faint light of their own in the darkness.

  It could be for some other purpose. But the sapphire flowers with their ruby stamens come from Aic, growing like hair from the heads of the few remaining Ta-Aici, and the news—the rumor; the joke; the lie—went around Aic just a little while before. So somebody, it seems, has made an assumption.

  More than one somebody. The next night, which is supposed to be a market night, the wreath has company: a tiny stone pyramid, three candles, a shoe, a blunted knife, six torn pieces of fabric. The meaning of the things left there varies, and sometimes they don’t have any beyond the personal, but the ripped cloth is clear.

  In the Shreds of Driftwood, that is a sign of mourning.

  After that, everybody sees the pile grow. The market goes on as it should, but other people come, too: Drifters and one-bloods alike, from farther Shreds like Pool, from the nearer parts of the Ring, even an Edger or two who happens to be close by. Some come to lay their own tokens on the floor of the amphitheater. Others come just to watch the spectacle, to murmur questions and doubts at each other.

  Is it true?

  The whole thing is a joke.

  I don’t believe it anyway. Never have. This is Driftwood; we all know how it works.

  How can anybody be sure?

  Febrenew is there
before the second night ends. He keeps the latest iteration of a long series of bars called Spit in the Crush’s Eye—or rather, kept. It most recently conducted its business in an improbable cavern, carved out of solid rock beneath a stretch of viscous mud that sucks in anyone who sets foot on it. The entrances lay through the safer terrain of Nidroef and Whitewall, burrowed underground and propped up with enormous rib bones pillaged from some creature that didn’t need them anymore.

  But probability has caught up with that cavern, flooding it with mud, and flooding Febrenew out. He hasn’t yet found a new home for the bar, and while the amphitheater certainly isn’t a candidate, it will do as a temporary source of profit. With so many people gathering, some of them are bound to want food and drink.

  Answers, too—but unlike some of his predecessors, Febrenew is scrupulous about his gossip. When a woman asks him if he knows anything, he tells her the truth, which is that he knows no more than anyone else. But it doesn’t stop her from loitering nearby, then making periodic arcs through the amphitheater, questioning other onlookers. She’s a one-blood, her skin as dark as rich soil, hair coiled against her scalp in intricate gold-threaded knots. The sort of style people only bother with when there’s still meaning behind it. An exile from her own world, maybe; there are enough of them around.

  And even Febrenew doesn’t know everyone. The Drifter community is too complicated for that, held together by its differences as much as anything else. He doesn’t know that woman, or the silent old man who takes up station at the top of the benches and sits there eating seeds, or the small, lizard-like creature that conveys through mime that it will conjure water to wash cups for him in exchange for some beer.

  Nor does he know the man who approaches the growing mound of trinkets not long after the sun sets on the third night, bearing an ancient mask in his hands.

  Others in the amphitheater are familiar with him: Eshap, one of many who hires himself out as a laborer in the fields of I Grun I, which has land but very few survivors, and those few well-enough armed to prevent a wholesale takeover of their world. He has the medium brown skin and medium brown hair that tend to be the result of averaging out a dozen different races, but a few touches—scalloped ears; four fingers on each hand—that show an ancestor or two peeking through. Driftwood encompasses every kind of creature at one time or another, but certain traits are more common than others.