The Cut

Faith

A rite consists of a Thojar breaking off, grinding away or cutting out some part of itself at a Cut Ground and leaving it on the stone. The parts stay where they are put. Every Cut Ground is therefore a growing heap of hands, faces, jaws and columns of chest going back to the first age, and the heap is the congregation's whole record of itself.

The rites escalate, and this is the thing to understand about them. A Thojar feels almost no pain, cannot die of injury, and can remould whatever it removed, so an offering costs nothing but material and time. The cults have spent an age inflating the price: first a finger, then a hand, then the face, then the whole of the front of the body, then the requirement that it not be regrown, then the requirement that it not be regrown and that the offerer continue to work the seams in whatever state that leaves it.

There is no afterlife on offer at the end of it, and the worldly gods keep no realms in any case. Whatever soul a Thojar has goes to the auction of the star gods with every other soul on Nu. The atheist majority of their own people would find that auction less surprising than the Cut would.

Body

The senior devout are ruined objects that crawl and speak. Grinds, first of the Cut still able to speak, is a torso and one arm on the stone of a Cut Ground, has offered every part of itself that can be offered twice, and has begun on the third round. None of them can work, none can stand, and none can be killed by any of it, because nothing they have done touches the life essence.

What the cult does not say is that the offering is never only material. Thojar memory lives in the grain of the ash-flesh, and every piece worked off a body takes the grain with it. A Thojar far along the Cut has emptied itself as thoroughly as any hold ever emptied one and remembers nothing of the life it is offering up. The cult treats the blankness as the goal reached and calls it purity. The Quiet call it the same thing that happens in the pits, arrived at from the other direction, and it is the one subject on which a kind, slow, sporadic people will speak with real anger.

The crumble supplies them. Some Thojar are made with stone that will not hold, so the shell flakes away faster than it can be eaten back and the ash-flesh runs; a crumbling Thojar is carried about by others in sacking and fed by hand, and stays alive indefinitely. The Cut take a great many converts from among them and consider them fortunate.

Society

They take converts from the Quiet, rarely from the War-Made, and never from another Cut Ground. A congregation has no head that anyone outside it would recognise and no doctrine beyond the direction it is going in, and two Cut Grounds a gallery apart may be at different stages of the same escalation without either knowing.

The senior devout are carried to the stone by their juniors and left there for the day, and are collected again after. They also cannot remember what they have given up, since the grain went with the pieces, and a junior reciting a senior's offerings back to it is the closest thing the Cut has to a liturgy. Among other Thojar the senior devout are regarded not as holy but as having found something to hold a thought with, which is the kindest reading any of their own people give them.

Regard

The Do'urssan holds tolerate the Cut, and one or two encourage it. This is not piety. A Thojar far along the Cut is docile, capable, cheap and incapable of holding a grievance, which is precisely the article the holds pay a premium for, and the cults produce it for nothing and consider the transaction a blessing.

Among the Thojar themselves there is one act they have a word for that other peoples would translate as evil, which is the taking of the life essence, and they use the same word for the Cut.