At first, the priority had been simply to have a suitable sacrificial knife. None of the knives in Quentin’s parent’s kitchen had seemed appropriate. They were too small, too mundane, too often used for cutting up root vegetables. Also, they would be missed, and he didn’t fancy having to explain things.

In the search for a suitable knife, he started breaking into abandoned houses. Hopeless was not short of abandoned knives left to gather dust and weird inhabitants in the abandoned drawers of abandoned kitchens in abandoned houses. Really, you could see enough of that to get properly sick of it. Unfortunately, all of those unloved and encrusted knives were the same as the ones his parents kept and had clearly been used for sacrificing somewhat edible things to the mild gods of culinary activity.

Where could a committed cultist get a suitable knife for doing really impressive and powerful sacrifices? There wasn’t a shop for it. The blacksmith threatened him with a hammer when he asked. When he went to cult gatherings, Quentin felt obliged to stay at the back and just watch, all the while hoping the people around him – resplendent with their own, really dramatic sacrificial knives – would assume he had one somewhere under his big cloak.

The big cloak had been made out of a very old sheet, whose once white surfaces had gone a nasty grey despite all attempts at boiling it back into brilliance. As far as Quentin could make out, this was probably how everyone else had sourced the raw material for their ritual attire, too. But the knives were a whole other matter. He wanted one of those knives, with the nasty looking blades. It occurred to him that perhaps the right way to get one was to kill someone who already had a knife, and take theirs. Maybe it was a right of passage. Maybe figuring it out was a test.

For his birthday that year, Quentin’s mum gave him a really large butter knife. It was so blunt that he couldn’t even cut the donkey butter with it. He wondered if she was trying to tell him something.

For a while, Quentin took to following other cultists home. He thought about breaking into their houses and stealing their knives, but his housebreaking skill level turned out to be far too low for actually entering a building. Sometimes, in the early morning light he would go through the midden heaps of other cultists in the hopes one of them would have thrown away a perfectly good sacrificial knife at some point. He found quite a few knives this way – mostly small, bent and/or rusty. Nothing you’d be able to stab anyone with unless they were already a lot more squidgy than the average block of donkey butter his mother made.

Then word got around somehow, and people started giving Quentin their useless, broken knives. The ones that had never held an edge, or had been bent out of shape using them for some unknifelike purpose. The knives no one wanted any more. A pile built up outside the family home, and sometimes, late at night he could hear spoonwalkers going through them in the hopes that in there somewhere, would be a spoon. Once he tried stabbing a spoonwalker with one of the broken, rusty knives. It just stared at him with big, sad eyes as its rubbery flesh indented somewhat under the pressure.

In a fit of desperation, he arranged all of the knives, handle side pressed down into the bare ground outside his home. Then he jumped on top of them. The muddy ground took several extra inches of handle, and Quentin ended up with quite a lot of bruises, but apparently he lacked the knife skill to even significantly scratch himself.

In a final act of wanton desperation, Quentin offered himself up to the Scientific Society on the off-chance there was something properly weird about his relationship with knives. Intensive research followed, during which Quentin discovered that the Scientific Society owned at least as many threatening blades as his cultist brethren. In several cases, these were clearly exactly the same blades, although he had enough sense not to ask about that. Science, it turned out, was no more willing to let him have a sharp implement of his own than religion had been. Science was willing to hit him repeatedly with spoons, and attack him with forks and kept stacking rusty and unusable bits of tableware outside his house.

Islanders are fond of superstition, and willing to adopt anything that might improve their chances of survival. And so it came to pass that making offerings of unusable knives outside Quentin’s house became really popular for the best part of one winter. They got ever sillier – knives made out of wood, out of clay, knitted knives, fabric knives, pictures of knives… It turns out that you really can have far too many sacrificial knives.