The Island is a crater in an ocean of unknown size, and The Event that starved its gods is a thing nobody remembers. What survives is a working arrangement: small new gods whose writ ends where their followers' reach ends, and the manufactured goods of a dead divine economy, lampstones and ward-lights and script nobody can read, finite, half-broken, and slowly waking under the belief of use. On this island, use is worship, and every gain is paid.
The Tithe is ten standalone stories of about 12,000 words each, told by a fresh narrator every time: a fisher's daughter, a priest, a salvager, a keeper of lights. Each turns on one bargain and closes on a last page that rewrites the first, in the register of Le Guin's island tales, Ted Chiang and Clarke. Read them in any order; they quietly converge.
The Books
Book 1
The Tally of the Ninth Net
Eight knots in a drowned man's line, and the worst berth on the run comes up full. The small gods keep accounts, and Merle will work out what her father's tally was counting.
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Book 2
The Jetty God
Effie's god lives in a crab-pot lashed to a pier pile, forty souls and half of them at sea. In six days the temples measure every god on the Island, and the small ones are struck off.
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Book 3
The Lampstone Tithe
For eleven years Yeva has kept a shore of widows lit with salvaged lampstones. Learning to read the marks under the marks wins her the best season of her life, then shows her what she has been selling.
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Book 4
The Thing That Eats at Shrines
Something robs the rim shrines and takes only what was prayed over. Edda buys a lens that shows god-light and spends her ordinary sight a shade at every look, with the Tithing a fortnight out.
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Book 5
The Girl the Village Keeps
Nine days after a girl drowns in the Eye, a girl walks out of the shallows. Junia's hands hold mercies, and she means to earn the healer's croft. She is wrong about what she is.
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Book 6
The Vigil on the Wall
Two hundred years of vigil fires, and the sea has never once come ashore. Hurst, priest of a starved god, has the arithmetic to end the levy. The drowned house sells its proof for memories.
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Book 7
The Wreck-Diver of Lantern Shoal
The ward-lights that burn every other diver have never stung Neave. When the drowned sky-barge opens for her and the dead script begins to read, her oldest memories start going, and her honest columns will not sit.
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Book 8
The Keeper's Tally
A dying mother, a season of lessons, and a binding that holds Greer to the cliffs while the light burns. Then she reads two hundred years of ledgers and finds what the family tally has been counting.
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Book 9
The Crystal Congregation
Before the breakers crack the sky-city's great hall, Pike Shale means to wake one soul crystal and carry the dead's own testimony to the temples. The crystal remembers the last service, and who stopped praying first.
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Book 10
The Berth Ledger
The last tale: both fleets tie up in Hild's harbour, blessed hulls and the machine boat that lands the same fish cheaper. She allocates fair to the shilling, until her ledger stops counting herring and starts counting sides.
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