Driftwood Page 4

  It was acceptable; it was a quivering relief. The meshtren was a pest, nothing more; capturing three breeding trios would be as easy as setting the palace maids to work. It seemed Heint was correct about the odd economics of this place. And forty fire quartzes was a price he would gladly pay.

  When Qoress indicated his agreement, the man said something unintelligible to the cinnamon-skinned people standing around, then gestured for Qoress to follow him. “Let’s sit down and discuss this, then.”

  They settled onto long couches in another pavilion, and servants brought bowls of some liquid the stranger advised Qoress and Heint not to drink. “You never know what will poison you,” he said. “Not everybody can eat and drink the same things. I suggest you bring your own food with you when we go.”

  At last they were relatively alone. The stranger said, “Since we’re business partners now, I’ll introduce myself. My name is Last. I’m from the Shreds, but I do business near the Edge now and again—guide-work, translation services, and so on. I’ve got plenty of experience all over Driftwood. Mine are the safest hands you could be in.” He paused in his speech and gave Qoress an appraising look. “Does any of that mean a thing to you?”

  Qoress wanted to lie; ignorance was a weakness he dared not reveal. His hesitation betrayed him, regardless. “I figured,” Last said. “Most Edgers are like that. Let’s start with a geography lesson.”

  He cast about as if looking for something, then caught sight of the carpet. “This will do. It’s as close to a useful map of Driftwood as you’ll ever get.”

  The carpet consisted of a set of concentric circles in different shades of blue. Last got up from his seat and crouched at the outermost circle, tapping the pale fibers with one dark-lacquered fingernail. “This is the Edge. Your world is out here. Edge worlds are new to Driftwood. They just had their apocalypses. Outside them is Mist—” He gestured at the floor around the circular rug. “I assume you’ve got that on at least one side of you, since you can’t have been here long.

  “Go farther in, you find the Ring.” Now his hand moved inward to a circle of medium blue. “No Mist touching these places, but they’re still pretty big. Farther inward of them, there’s the Shreds.” He touched the dark blue circle. “There’s no clear boundary between the Ring and the Shreds; depends on how large you think a place has to be to count as a Ring world. The Shreds are the little remnants, neighborhoods and ghettos. And in the center. . . .” A small spot of black lay at the heart of the carpet, and Last looked down at it with an odd expression. “The Crush. Where it all goes to die.”

  Qoress dodged this stream of heresy rather desperately. “Where are we going?”

  Last leaned back against his couch with a blithe disregard for propriety. Or perhaps sitting on the floor was acceptable, where he came from. “I know of two places that have healing magic. Well, three, but the Shstri would have you for dinner if we went there, so we won’t. One place is about forty-five degrees widdershins of you.” He took a small black stone from a pocket in his trousers and laid it out on the edge of the carpet, then set another one much farther inward, on the dark blue, some distance around the circle. “If the first stone’s you, the second one is Aalyeng. Our other option is over here.” A third stone went on the other side of the black circle from the stone that was Qoress’ home.

  “What difference is there between them?”

  “The people in Aalyeng can cure physical diseases. In Grai-ni-tar, they can cure pretty much anything—physical, mental, spiritual, whatever.”

  “And Grai-ni-tar,” Qoress said, stumbling over the alien name, “is farther away.”

  “Yes, but that isn’t necessarily a problem. We’d have to go near the Crush, but contrary to popular belief, it can’t actually suck you in.”

  Qoress did not know, and did not want to know, what this Crush was. The nature of the king’s ailment was unclear; to be safe, he should go to Grai-nitar. But Qoress also did not know how long the king had to live.

  “How much,” he asked with trepidation, “would it cost to try healing him in both places?”

  Last looked mildly surprised at his willingness to spend; not even Heint knew the identity of the sick man, and Qoress was not going to share that information. “Do you still have any mines producing iron ore?” the guide asked, finally. Qoress nodded. “Bring a man’s weight in iron ingots, then. People always need raw materials, in the Shreds. We’ll go widdershins to Aalyeng, then on to Grai-ni-tar if necessary; it won’t be much longer of a trip than if we went to Grai-ni-tar direct. Will that do?”

  It would, and Qoress said so, trying to disguise how pathetically grateful he was to have this man’s help.

  “Fetch your patient, then, and meet me back here,” Last said. “Bring the payment, food, and whatever guards you think you need. I’ll make our arrangements in the meantime.”

  Qoress could not pinpoint the moment at which he accepted that the realms they moved through truly were different worlds, but the cause was clear enough. He could not travel across so many of them and not accept it.

  It wasn’t merely the people—short and tall, slender and fat, pale and dark, sometimes with different numbers of eyes or arms, sometimes nothing like men at all. It wasn’t merely the changing number of suns and moons, the abrupt transitions from sweltering heat to icy cold as he stepped over an invisible line in a street. It wasn’t merely the architecture, the sounds of the languages, the plants and the animals and the colors of the skies.

  Something lay beneath all of these surface changes, however unnerving they might be. Walking from world to world with a troop of guards protecting the palanquin of the dying king, Qoress sensed an irreducible otherness every place he went. Some perversion of the natural order brought these places together and made it so he could travel to and within and across them, but it did not make him belong there. He came from another world, and these places were not his.

  Last’s services, he soon came to recognize, extended beyond merely speaking the necessary languages and knowing the safest path. Whether the guide understood this or not, he aided Qoress by thinking on the councillor’s behalf, making pragmatic decisions while Qoress’ mind gibbered and twitched under the realization of where he was. Under normal circumstances Qoress would never have conceded such control to another, but he had no choice—a fact never far from his thoughts.

  There was no way to track how long they had been traveling, with night and day each seeming to follow the rules of the world they were in, not aligning with each other across boundaries. But they had to stop occasionally to rest, and using that to define a day, they had been traveling for just over a fortnight from the place of the cinnamon-skinned people when Qoress asked Last a question.

  He had observed, as they traveled, that the realms they moved through were getting smaller, and now they were nothing more than neighborhoods, areas of a few square blocks that held to a single reality before shifting to another one. They had passed through cities in other worlds, but now it seemed there was nothing but a city: a chaotic, unplanned place that would have made the sacred architects scream in despair, a place that made Qoress’ mind abandon all hope of finding the order he craved. It was simply easier to let himself float along, surrendering himself to the whirlpool—and that, in turn, brought to mind the blue carpet Last had used as a map, and the things he had said then.

  It was evening where they were, though it had been morning in the previous neighborhood; Last had bargained for a large shed they could sleep in for a time. Qoress was inside the shed, because it meant he didn’t have to look at all the unfamiliar things outside, but Last was on the front step, watching the city’s life go by.

  “These places,” Qoress said hesitantly to the guide, speaking through the open door. “They are all . . . worlds.”

  “Yes,” Last said. He was filling an oddly-shaped pipe with a scarlet leaf Qoress no longer expected to recognize.

  “Worlds which have . . . come to an end.”

&
nbsp; “They’re in the process of it.” Instead of lighting the pipe, Last carefully dripped a little bit of water into it, then sucked on the stem with evident pleasure.

  Qoress thought of the myriad places they had traveled through, and horror gripped his heart in a fist of iron. “All of them?”

  Last shrugged. “Every world ends someday. Or maybe I’m wrong; who knows? If a place doesn’t come to an end, it doesn’t come here. But Driftwood is where worlds come to die.”

  “Driftwood. That is . . . this place.”

  “The whole place, from the Crush right out to your home.” Last gave him a sidelong look. “People out on the Edge usually deny it; you’ve got enough of a world left that you can. But it’s fading—have you noticed that? Shrinking. Bits just vanish. People die, or vanish with the bits, and though maybe you’re still having kids—some worlds do; some don’t—your population shrinks with your world. One day there’s a place on the other side of you, where before there was only Mist. They’ve had an apocalypse, too. Different than yours, probably, but the result is the same; there’s a fragment that survives, a fragment that isn’t done dying, and it came here like all the rest of them. They fade like you do, and as you fade you move inward, because the worlds that lie Crushward of you are doing the same thing. Eventually you’re just a little ghetto, hardly anything left. And then you reach the Crush, the heart of Driftwood. The last bits vanish—and then there’s nothing.”

  The utter nihilism of the thought was unendurable. Qoress knew why the center of Driftwood was called the Crush; he felt that force bearing down on him, threatening to undo him entirely.

  “Our prophecies,” he forced himself to say, “tell us otherwise. Our king will guide us through our tribulations, and lead us to salvation in the paradise of the Agate God. And then will begin the reign of the Amethyst God, and a new birth for the world.”

  Unimpressed by this information, Last merely shrugged again. “Could be you’re right. I’ve been around Driftwood for a long time, but I don’t claim to be an expert on anybody’s gods. There might be another world waiting for you all. But it’ll be waiting for you on the other side of the Crush.”

  They checked the king’s health regularly; it wasn’t good, but he still lived, and that was reason enough for hope.

  But the people of Aalyeng—not people at all, more like serpents with forked and dexterous tails— could not heal the king, and so they moved onward to Grai-ni-tar.

  The guards knew who they carried, as did the physician accompanying him. All had been bound to secrecy in the same manner as Heint. The criminal himself was, Qoress hoped, still waiting in the world of the cinnamon-skinned people, to guide them home when they returned. But Qoress wondered how much good that secrecy would do. Fully a score of people had now disobeyed the king’s decree, by order of the Councillor Paramount; they had traveled through other worlds and felt the truth of Driftwood for themselves. They were heretics all, now, and what effect would this experience have on them?

  Save the king. Nothing else mattered. He would worry about other concerns after the king was well. And if he was executed for his own crimes, then so be it.

  Last guided them through the Shreds in an arc that skirted the Crush. Qoress had no desire to see it with his own eyes. They were attacked by some kind of large bird in one world; the guards’ arrows bounced off it, and Last led them at a run over the boundary into the next Shred. Someone killed one of the guards while they were resting, and stole everything off the body, including the clothes, without anyone else hearing. They learned from these lessons and adapted. Qoress, like all councillors, had lived from his birth in the palace, and had been soft and idle to match. Studying the new scars on his forearm, he wondered if his peers on the council would recognize him when he came back.

  At last they came to Grai-ni-tar.

  The people there, with skin like ink and eyes like stars, did not want anyone to accompany the king’s palanquin into the ramshackle building that, even to Qoress’ eye, was obviously a makeshift replacement for a temple now lost, decorated with crude approximations of sculptures and murals. Last, seeing Qoress’ distress, argued vehemently with the priests. In the end, the two of them were permitted within, while the guards and physician remained outside.

  The priests carried the palanquin down a large, dark archway, through a series of three curtains in black, grey, and white, and into a courtyard open to the sky.

  There one of their number drew back the palanquin’s drapes, murmured over the king, turned to Last, and said a short phrase.

  The guide snapped something back, receiving the same phrase in reply, and strode forward to the palanquin himself. Qoress, his stomach in knots, saw the moment Last’s shoulders slumped.

  “I’m sorry,” the guide said, his voice low and defeated. “He’s dead.”

  Qoress woke on a hard, narrow bed, with only one lamp casting a dim light. There was no blessed period of confusion; he knew instantly where he was, and what had happened.

  The king was dead.

  He rolled over and found himself not alone. Last sat on a low stool nearby, hands working an intricate puzzle of interlocking wooden pieces.

  “I’m guessing he was someone important,” the guide said softly, not looking at Qoress. “Your king?”

  Qoress’ words came thickly, from a mouth that no longer saw much point in speaking. “The last of his line.” Perhaps this was his punishment for heresy. But why did his world have to be punished alongside him?

  “Who was supposed to lead you all to salvation. I remember.” Two pieces slid out of the puzzle. Last laid them aside, the dark gloss of his fingernails gleaming in the lamplight. “Can you choose another?”

  Qoress’ laugh was despairing. “You don’t choose a king. The gods do. His family was sacred, but they all died when—when the—” His throat closed off. Horror enough, to have lived through the end of the world; he could not tell that tale to this stranger, while lying in a bed worlds away from home.

  Last’s eyes were still on the puzzle. “Everything comes to an end someday. That’s what this place is for. But it doesn’t make the end hurt any less.” The pieces came apart in his hands, without warning, and the puzzle dissolved into disconnected fragments.

  Tears blurred Qoress’ vision. What would this mean to his people? Suppose this man was right; suppose that Driftwood was the ultimate truth of the end, and that their prophecies of salvation, paradise, and rebirth were a lie. They were still a lie his people could cling to. Without that to hold them together, they had nothing. Anarchy would tear them apart.

  “I do have one possibility to offer you.” Last’s voice stopped the downward spiral of his thoughts.

  Sitting up on the edge of the bed, Qoress brushed feebly at his hair, as if his fingers could mend the disarranged braids so easily. There was little hope in his heart, but still he said, “Tell me.”

  “Two Shreds widdershins of here, there’s a place called Rosphe. They can do this trick—it’s like a permanent shape-shifting. They can do it to other people. And once it’s done, it’s done, like the language-magic we performed.” Last’s long fingers were manipulating the pieces once more. Qoress watched them dance. “None of your people know yet that your king is dead.”

  The puzzle came back together again, as it had been before, and Qoress realized what Last meant.

  He surged to his feet, torn between sickness and murderous fury. “How dare you suggest such blasphemy to me? To prey on me when you know I am vulnerable—you calculated every step of this conversation, didn’t you? Even down to that puzzle, an elegant illustration of your point. I am a heretic and a traitor to my king; I confess this beneath the foot of the Agate God. But even I, fallen man that I am, would not presume to such a masquerade.”

  Last was undisturbed by his outburst. “It’s up to you,” he said easily, studying the reconstructed puzzle. “Since there was no healing, the priests here have not taken their fee. You could pay it to the people in Rosp
he instead. But if this is your decision, then I’ll lead you home, as agreed.”

  Finally he looked up at Qoress, meeting his eyes for the first time since the councillor awoke. “I take my services very seriously. I’m not just a guide, not just a translator; I help people survive in Driftwood. As much as I can, against the breakdown that eventually claims it all. So I offer you what help I can. Whether or not you take it is up to you.”

  He stood and set the puzzle on his vacated stool. “When you’re ready to come out, the priests will prepare a bath and food for you. I’ll wait in the courtyard. From there, I’ll take you wherever you want to go.”

  Then he departed, leaving Qoress alone with the delicate puzzle of wood.

  A wave of noise surged up from the open plaza before the holy palace, as if the crowds assembled there spoke with one roaring voice. Gold and copper, studded with jewels, shone from the platform where the councillors stood in their vermilion robes.

  A guard stepped forward and lifted a spear. Spiked on the end of it, brow still bearing the mark of his office, was the head of the former Councillor Paramount. No one knew the specifics of his crime, but his accomplices had been spared; all the guilt lay on Qoress, and he had died a heretic’s death.

  So it was, by order of the king.

  At the border with the tunnel-world, Last hefted his pack onto one shoulder. No one had paid him for this trip out to the Edge; he’d come of his own will, to see what happened.

  The man at his side did not wear the heavy, ornate robes of the king. They drew too much attention, and he was not accustomed to them anyway.

  “I am damned for this,” the king said.

  Last shrugged. “Maybe. Maybe not. But you have a chance to help your people, and that’s got to count for something. You’re the king now: heresy will be what you say it is.” He grinned, a brief flash of silver teeth. “Maybe you’ll be the last, best heretic.”