Wherein is treated the world itself, its substance and its creatures; which is the surface beneath which the Wellspring runs.
Having treated in the first two books of the light and of the Powers, I come now to the world upon which that light was shed, and I must open it with the strangest article of all our belief, which is so familiar that we forget how strange it is. The world of Eryndor was not made. It has, so far as any tradition holds, always been. The Gods were sung into it; the Wellspring lay beneath it before ever a voice was raised; but of the world itself there is no maker in any account I have read, no first day, no hand that set it turning. It simply is, and was, and the oldest question a child asks, who made all this, has no answer at all, only the flat and ancient reply that no one made it, that it was here before the question and will be here after.
Of the shape of the world I can say very little, and I would rather say little truly than much falsely. We of Rhaedwyn have walked one corner of Eryndor and no more. Rhaedwyn itself is not a whole land but a land within a greater piece of earth, a great limb of something larger whose full extent no map I trust even attempts. To the west it rises into the wall of the Taurus and, beyond that wall, opens into the endless grass of the Great Steppe, which the Rhaedweny have never crossed to any far side. To the north it drowns in a hot and murderous jungle, of which more in its place. To the east and the south lies the Aetheric Ocean, whose reaches are unknown. Whether Eryndor is a sphere, as certain of the elder philosophers argued from the curve of a ship's vanishing, or some other figure, I do not know, and I have read confident men on every side of it, which is how I have learned to trust none of them.
The substance of the world is commonly reckoned under four elements: fire, water, earth, and air. This is the teaching of the schools, and I keep it, though I note that the schools kept it chiefly because Aethros the Stormbinder is Lord of the Four, and a doctrine that flatters a God is always to be weighed twice. Still, the fourfold order serves, and I have found nothing better to put in its place.
Fire is held the highest and least settled, ever seeking upward and never at rest; water the element of change and carriage, that takes any shape and keeps none; earth the low and enduring, the element of the World-Heart as much as of the Stormbinder; and air the subtle, that fills all vacancy and shows itself only in its moving. Between them the schools drew long tables of sympathy and enmity, which stone loves which, which savour belongs to which, and I have copied a few of these where they seemed to rest on observation and omitted the many that seemed to rest on nothing but the pleasure of a tidy scheme.
Where the elements meet violently, there the mark of Aethros is said to lie plainest: in the storm, where air and water war; in the volcano, where fire contends with stone; in the earthquake, where the low element shrugs. His worshippers read such events as his moods, and I will not gainsay them, for I have no better account of why the ground should heave, and theirs at least is honest about being a guess dressed as a god.
Above the world hang the lights of heaven, and of these the greatest is the sun, which the keepers of Cyrathis hold in special reverence, for her sacred flower turns to it and blooms even when it stands lowest and weakest in the winter sky. There are two moons, the greater and the lesser, which the country people name by a hundred local names and the schools by two dull ones; the greater keeps a steady month, the lesser a shorter and less orderly one, and where the two cross in the sky the superstitious look for omens, which the omens sometimes oblige and more often do not.
The stars are past counting. I set this down as plainly as I can, because travellers from no other land have ever come to tell us whether their skies are as thick, and so we have nothing to compare ours against and cannot know whether we are blessed in this or merely usual to Rhaedwyn. On a clear and moonless night far from the lamps of Sobsia and the other great cities, the sky is crowded with them, drifts and rivers and banks of them, so many that the dark between is the smaller part. The elder philosophers built great figures out of them, the Loom, the Drowned Man, the Three Sisters, and reckoned fates by their risings, which I hold to be folly, though a beautiful folly, and I was myself born, as I have written, under the open light of those stars, which is all that fine phrase in my prologue ever meant.
Of the reckoning of time I must be exact, for the reader will meet dates throughout the fifth book. Two styles are in use. The common style counts from the coronation of the reigning lord, so that a Taniran writes the fourth year of King Nunavar and a man of the next kingdom means something wholly different by the same words, which makes the common style useless for history and perfectly serviceable for taxes. The academic style anchors instead to the Fall of Lavellor, counting the years since the Shardspire broke, which the schools place two thousand and two years before this present writing. This age of Cyrathis, in which I set down these words, is reckoned the hundred and ninety-eighth of its own count. How these numbers are argued, and how far they may be trusted, the fifth book will show; here I give only the yardsticks, that the reader may have them in hand.
The known world, which is to say the part the Rhaedweny have walked, may be described in a few of its greater features, and I will not pretend to the many smaller ones I have never seen.
The spine of the west is the Taurus, a long and broken wall of mountains that holds back the Steppe and shelters the settled realms in its lee. Beyond it lies the Great Western Steppe, an ocean of grass under an enormous sky, rolling in low hills cut by slow rivers, poor for the plough and rich for the herd, of which I write in the fourth book among its peoples. Down from the Taurus the land falls into the heartlands of Rhaedwyn, watered by the Sarsor and its sister rivers, and it is here, in the river valleys and the coastal plains, that the kingdoms of men are set, Sobsia among them, where I write.
To the east and south the land meets the Aetheric Ocean, and along that meeting lie the Rhaedweny Wetlands, a vast drowned country of swamp and bog and flooded wood where the Dwarvenfolk keep their Keeps, of which likewise in the fourth book. And to the north the world grows hot and wrong: a belt of humid air and then a rainforest without end, taller and denser and more venomous the further one goes, until the maps simply stop and the cartographers write nothing, because nothing reliable has ever come back. This is the Uninhabitable North, and I treat it here only as land; its rumoured peoples belong to the book of peoples, if they belong anywhere.
There are also the seams: places where the world is, in some manner, not whole. Chief of these is the Fields of Angramar, which are so strange that I have given them their own chapter following. But there are lesser ones scattered through Rhaedwyn, patches where a river runs against its nature, where a hill will bear no green, where the compass wanders or the eye is deceived. The learned account these the lingering scars of the great world-works of the Age of Magic, spells laid across whole regions and never lifted, now decayed. I think the learned are right. What the decay of a working can do, I treat two chapters hence, and the reader who has walked past one of these quiet wrong places and felt his skin crawl without knowing why will find there, I hope, some part of the reason.
The Aetheric Ocean bounds the known world to the east and south, and I must first correct a fancy that the very name breeds in the unlearned, who suppose it some sea of pure magic or spirit. It is not. It is water, salt water, sailed by ordinary ships and fished by ordinary men, and a sailor drowns in it exactly as he would in any other sea. How far it reaches, no one knows. Ships that hug the coast trade freely up and down the whole eastern shore; ships that strike out from land do not, for a reason that is the true strangeness of this ocean and the true meaning of its name.
Some distance out from the coast, further in some seasons and nearer in others, lies a belt of sea the sailors call the Crosswaves, and it has turned back every voyage that has ever tried to pass beyond it. It is not a storm, though it is often taken for one at first. It is a region where the water moves in patterns no wind explains: waves crossing waves at wrong angles, swells that rise from a flat calm and vanish as suddenly, currents that run in contradiction, and, worst, a working upon the mind, so that helmsmen misjudge distances and see land where there is none and lose whole days they cannot afterward account for. Ships that enter the Crosswaves come back broken, or come back with mad crews who babble of what they saw, or do not come back at all. It is from the ravings of the few who return that I drew the boundary I set in my prologue, when I said I would not fill the mirror with the fog of sailors driven mad; for it is precisely here that men are driven mad, and precisely their reports that a careful compiler must handle with tongs.
What the Crosswaves are, the best of the learned now suppose, is a world-work: some vast enchantment of the Age of Magic laid upon the very sea, whether to guard the coast or to bar the deep ocean or for a purpose we cannot now imagine, which has since decayed as all untended workings decay, and rotted from whatever order it once held into the chaos of crossing waters and clouded minds that we meet today. If this is so, then the Crosswaves are the greatest surviving world-work in Eryndor, and also the greatest proof of the peril treated in the next chapter but one: a spell outliving its makers, its purpose forgotten, its working turned to ruin, and yet too strong for anyone to pass or unmake. Whatever lies beyond it, whatever farther shore or open ocean or other land, has been sealed from Rhaedwyn for the whole of the Age of Shadows and this present age, and remains so as I write.
Now I come to the strangest ground in Eryndor, and I have saved it for its own chapter because it deserves one, and because I do not fully believe it even as I write it, though the accounts are too many and too agreeing to doubt.
The Fields of Angramar lie in central Rhaedwyn, and by the reckoning of the surveyors they cover some nine hundred thousand square miles, which is to say a whole small country. At first sight they are the fairest land in the world. They are not a blasted waste, as one would expect of the country about ruined Lavellor; they are the very opposite. The hills roll green and gentle, the woodlands stand deep and unbroken, the waters run clear as cut crystal, and the soil, where anyone has dared to test it, is as rich as any farmland in Rhaedwyn and richer. A traveller cresting the last ridge before Angramar looks down upon what seems a paradise, an empty and waiting Eden, and every account I have read agrees that the first feeling is longing, a wish to go down and live there.
And the Fields of Angramar are utterly, perfectly devoid of life. Not poor in life; devoid of it. No bird crosses them. No deer grazes those rich meadows, no fish troubles those crystal waters, no insect hums in that deep grass. The woodlands grow, and the flowers bloom, and the fruit ripens and falls and rots and seeds again, and nothing whatever eats any of it, because nothing living will enter, and nothing living will stay.
The manner of it is this, and it is the same in every account. A creature that comes to the edge of Angramar stops. Not from any wall or barrier, for there is none; the grass on the far side is the same grass. It stops because at the border it begins to feel a thing, low down, at the very base of the skull where the neck begins, an old and wordless dread that has nothing to do with thought. It is the animal part of the mind, the part beneath reason, and it screams danger where reason can find none. Beasts will not cross it at all; a hound will sit at the margin and howl and will not follow its master a step further, a thirsty animal will ignore the crystalline waters and instead risk death to find other water sources. A beast carried in against its will, in a cage or a sack, does not calm and adapt as a beast will to most terrors. It worsens. Penned within Angramar, an animal will refuse food and water, will injure itself against the bars, and will, if kept there, destroy itself rather than remain; and this has been tried, Gods forgive the triers, often enough that the result is not in doubt.
And here is the part the reader will least wish to believe, and which I least wish to write: we are not exempt. Men and the kindreds feel it too. It is fainter in us, or we are better at overruling it, and so a determined person may walk into Angramar where a dog cannot. But the dread grows with every step inward, mounting from unease to horror to a pressure on the mind that no will has yet been found strong enough to bear, and the plain result of the whole history of the place is this: no one has ever gone deeper than about a mile. One mile into the fairest and emptiest country in the world, and every explorer who ever tried has turned back, or been carried back raving, or not come back.
Lavellor is said to lie at the heart of it. The Golden City, the Holy City, the seat of the Luminarchate, the place where the Shardspire stood and the Song was raised and the whole light of the world was kindled, is rumoured to stand at the centre of Angramar, some hundreds of miles beyond that border that no living thing can cross. No one has seen it in two thousand years. No one knows if it stands or is rubble. The holiest and most important ruin in all the world sits at the centre of the one place in the world that will not let anyone come and look.
The compiler: I have never been to Angramar. I am old and half-blind and I write from the accounts of braver fools than I. But I have thought about it more than about almost anything in this book, and I will set down the thought, marked as my own, because I cannot prove a word of it.
Consider where the dread is worst and what lies at its heart. The Shardspire was the mouth of the Wellspring, the place where the deep water rose nearest the surface of the world. And the Shardspire was shattered there, by a working we do not understand, in the presence of the Endless Night, which my order believes to be the Wellspring turned inward, the pull of all things back toward the stillness where nothing exists as itself. What, then, if the shattering did not merely destroy the mouth of the well, but wounded it? What if at the centre of Angramar the deep water still lies open and turned inward, and what a creature feels at that border, mounting as it nears the centre, is the nearness of the very thing the Endless Night is: the pull toward un-being, sensed not by the reason but by the animal soul, which knows before the mind does that it is walking toward its own unmaking?
I do not say this is so. I say it is the only account I have found that explains why the dread should be an animal thing and not a reasoned one, why it should worsen toward the centre, and why the fairest land in the world should be the one place life will not enter. The animal knows what the philosopher argues. It will not go where being thins. And if I am right, then the most important truth in Eryndor and the most dangerous are the same truth, and they are both sitting at the centre of Angramar where no one can ever reach them, which is either the cruellest jest the world has played or its most exact one.
I must now set down a thing that the folk of this age half-know and wholly fear, and that the schools understand better than they can remedy: that magic decays, and that its decay is not a gentle fading but a corruption.
One would suppose that a spell left untended would simply weaken and go out, as a fire dies for want of fuel. Some do. But the great workings, and above all those bound into place and made to endure, do not die so kindly. They suffer what the schools name entropy, a slow unravelling of their order, and as their order fails they do not stop working. They work wrong. The purpose holds but the pattern warps, so that the spell still does something, but no longer the thing it was made for, and often a thing lethally unlike it.
The example the schoolmen give, and I have never found a better, is the humblest: a working of cleaning, such as a great house of the Age of Magic might have laid upon its floors, to sweep and scour them of themselves forever. Such a working, met today in the ruin of such a house, its order rotted by two thousand years, does not gently sweep. It scours still, but it no longer knows a floor from a hand or a throat, and it takes the dust off a living thing as readily as off a flagstone, which is to say it can flay or behead a man who does no more than step across the wrong threshold. A working of warmth becomes a working of burning. A working of light becomes a working of blindness. A ward that once turned away enemies turns away everything, or turns away nothing and holds fast whatever enters. The spell is not malicious. It is simply broken, and a broken working is more dangerous than a malicious one, for malice at least has purpose and a broken thing has only its warped momentum.
This is why the ancient places are shunned, and rightly. The ruins of the Age of Magic are not empty and safe like the ruins of a fallen kingdom of men. They are dense with old workings, and the older and the mightier the place, the worse. Lavellor, could anyone reach it, would be the deadliest ground in the world for this reason alone, quite apart from the dread of Angramar; and the lesser Luminarchate sites, the broken storm-towers and drowned halls and buried vaults that dot Rhaedwyn, have each killed their share of the greedy and the curious across the centuries. Treasure-seekers who go into them looking for Aethercraft, which as the first book told is the one surviving portable magic of that age and worth a kingdom, most often come out dead, or do not come out.
The compiler: I add one thing in my own hand, for it bears on the hope with which I ended my prologue. When the shaping of the Wellspring returns to the world, as I believe it must, the first thing the new sorcerers will meet is not a clean and waiting art. It is this: two thousand years of rotted workings, laid over the whole of Rhaedwyn by hands far greater than theirs, curdled now into traps that no living person understands. My successors will have to learn the shaping surrounded by the broken and lethal shaping of their betters. I do not know whether to find that a comfort or a terror. I set it down so that whoever inherits this mirror is at least not surprised.
I turn now to gentler matter, and treat of the growing things of Eryndor, of which the world holds a bounty I could not exhaust in ten mirrors. I will set down only what is notable, and leave the great catalogue of common herbs and grains to the herbals, which do it better than I could.
The folk of every land ascribe virtues to herbs and stones: that this root drawn under the new moon will mend a fever, that that stone worn at the throat will turn aside the evil eye, that a certain bark quiets grief and a certain flower quickens love. I have set down a number of these beliefs where they are widely held, but I must tell the reader plainly what I have concluded after thirty years of reading and asking: that the virtues are folk belief, and no more. Now and again one proves out, for the country wives have found by long trial that some barks and moulds do truly ease a sickness, and in this they are ahead of the schools. But the virtue, where it is real, is a virtue of the plant's own substance, a medicine and not a magic, and it works whether or not the moon is new or the words are said over it. The moon and the words are the folk belief. The bark is the medicine. I would have the reader keep the two apart, as I have tried to.
Of the trees I will name only the greatest, which are the towers of the Uninhabitable North, reported by those who have skirted its fringes to stand taller than the towers of men, though no honest surveyor has measured one and lived to publish it; and the ironwood of the Wetlands, from which the Dwarvenfolk carve their underhalls, a wood so dense and so slow-grown that a beam of it outlasts the keep it holds up.
But of all the growing things of Eryndor, one only names an age, and I must treat it with the care that deserves. The flower Cyrathis is a small golden bloom, sacred to the Lady of the White Flower, remarkable above other flowers in that it blooms in the depth of winter, in the short dark days, turning its gold face to the low and failing sun when all else has died back. It is hardy past reason, taking root in cracked stone and poisoned ground where nothing else will grow. And it is from this flower, and the manner of its blooming, that this present age takes its name, for a reason that belongs to the fifth book and that I will not spoil here, save to say that the flower did a thing, at the opening of this age, that it had not done in living memory nor in the memory of any record, and that the whole of Rhaedwyn took it for a sign.
The beasts of the world are past my numbering, and I will treat only those a reader might wonder at, leaving the horse and the hound and the herd-beast to everyone's common knowledge.
Among the common beasts, Rhaedwyn holds what any land holds: the deer and boar of its woods, the wolf and bear of its hills, the sheep and cattle of its farms, the eel and fish of its rivers and the drowned Wetlands. The Steppe breeds horses beyond the quality of any in the settled realms, and the orcs upon them are the finest riders in the world. The Dwarvenfolk husband strange stock in their marshes, fungus-fed and pale, and the Empire of Sagremar is said, though only said, to breed great eight-legged insects for burden and for war, of which I can affirm nothing, having only the word of the few who claim to have passed its Wall.
Among the marvellous beasts there are more than I would once have credited, for the world is older and stranger than any single lifetime learns. There are the great serpents of the North, and the pale blind things of the deep Wetlands, and beasts of the high Taurus that the mountain folk swear to and the lowlanders laugh at until they see one. I have set down a number of these in a separate catalogue, marking each with the degree of trust I place in its witnesses, and I will not crowd this chapter with the whole menagerie. I note only my rule, which the reader should apply for himself: that a marvellous beast reported by one madman is a fancy, a marvellous beast reported by ten sober traders who have never met is very likely a beast.
Of the greatest of all beasts, the dragons, I treat in the next chapter, for they are less beasts than lords, and belong rather among the powers of the world than among its wildlife.
Of the dragons the reader will hear more in the fourth book, where the Dragon-Kings are treated among the realms, for they are rulers and not mere monsters. Here I set down only their number, because it astonishes: there are five. Five dragons in all the world, so far as any knowledge reaches, the five Dragon-Kings of the Taurus, ancient beyond the reckoning of any younger kindred, who claim to have seen the world wake. There are no others. Whatever brood or race they may once have been, they are five now, and have been five within all record, and the Dragonborn who hold their passes were made by a working precisely because there were too few dragons to hold them otherwise.
Of the wights I have written something already, in the book of the Powers, where the keepers of Cyraeth name them her disappointments: souls that broke their vows and fell out of the proper turning of the Wheel, and so are neither living nor rightly dead. They are the undead of common terror, the risen and the restless, and they are rarer than the ballads pretend, being found chiefly about the old and evil places where the dead were many and the ground is wrong.
There is a kind more hidden and more rare, of which I set down only what little may honestly be said, for the subject breeds wild tales and I will not feed them. There exist, it is credibly held, a very few bloodless ones, the drinkers, who wear the seeming of the living and are not living, and who endure by taking the blood of those who are. They are exceedingly few; they hide with great care, for a discovered one does not survive discovery; and most people go from cradle to grave without ever meeting one or knowing they have. I record their existence because the evidence for it is better than for many things I have admitted, and I decline to record more, because more is exactly where the true accounts end and the fevered ones begin.
Last I name the Ulthrak, and I name them chiefly to confess that I cannot describe them. They appear in every account of the fall of Lavellor: the creatures that marched in Virulan's army, that poured with the Darksworn into the Golden City at the Last Battle. What they were, whether beast or made thing or something summoned, whether they were many kinds under one name or one kind only, the sources do not agree and I cannot reconcile them. And it does not greatly matter to the present age, for the plainest fact about the Ulthrak is that no one has seen one in two thousand years. They came with Virulan and they went with him, into the dark at the end of the Age of Magic, and whether they died, or sleep, or wait, is one more thing that the fires and the years have taken from us.
I close the book of the world, as the ancient works close it, with the accidents of things: those qualities that are not the substance of a thing but cling to it, its colour, its savour, its scent, the how-it-seems as against the what-it-is. The schools dispute at length whether these belong to the thing itself or to the eye and tongue and nose that meet it, and I will not settle so old a quarrel here. I set down only the orders the herbals and the cooks and the dyers keep: the wheel of colours from fire-red through gold and green to the deep blue of the Rembahsani's eyes; the savours, sweet and sour and salt and bitter and the fifth that the Waternakan cooks name and the rest of us lack a word for; the scents, which no one has ever ordered well, the nose being the least governable of the senses and the most tied to memory.
And I end, as is fitting, with the one place where the accidents of a thing overthrew everything I thought I knew, and sent me back to my earlier chapter humbled. Those few who have walked the near edge of Angramar, that fairest and emptiest of countries, and plucked the fruit that ripens there untouched, report a thing stranger in its small way than all the dread of the place. The fruit is sound. It is whole, and ripe, and by every account safe to eat. And it has no savour whatever. Not bitterness, not rot, not the flatness of a thing unripe: nothing, a perfect absence of taste, as though the fruit were a shape of fruit and not a fruit, a thing that has kept every accident of a fruit except the ones that would tell the tongue it is real. I do not know what this means. I set it here, at the very end of the book of substance, because it is the point at which substance itself seems to thin, and because a mirror should close not on its firmest ground but on the edge where its light gives out, that the reader may feel, as I feel, how narrow the lit country is and how wide the dark about it.
Return to the Table of the Rubrics
Here endeth the Third Book.