Wherein are treated the kindreds that dwell in Eryndor, their cities, their governance and their keeping; and wherein they are ordered not by their number nor their strength, but by their standing toward the Song.
Every compiler who has treated of the peoples of the world has been obliged, at the outset, to choose an order for them, and every order is an argument. Some have set the kindreds by their number, and so put men first, which flatters men. Some have set them by the strength of their arms, and so put the Dragon-Kings first, which flatters the strong. Some, chiefly the merchants of Tanir who keep their own crude registers, set them by the weight of their trade, which flatters nobody but the ledger.
I have ordered them by a single question, and I state it plainly so that the reader may reject it if he will: what is this kindred's standing toward the Song that was raised at the Shardspire?
By this reckoning the kindreds fall into five estates. First stand the singers, being men and the Dwarvenfolk, who found the Shardspire and raised the Dawnsong and brought knowing into the world. Second stand those who were in the world when the Song was raised and did not raise it, being the Dragon-Kings above all, and after them the wandering kindreds of the Steppe and the grasslands. Third stand the made kindreds, the Dragonborn and the Tieflings, who entered the world not by birth but by a working. Fourth stand the kindreds that came from outside the world altogether, which is to say the elves. And fifth stand those of whom I can learn almost nothing, the Tabaxi behind their sealed Wall, the Yuan-ti of the drowned North, and the fera, whose very name I am not sure I use correctly.
The compiler: I know how this ordering will be read in Tanir and in Lygos, where they will say that a priestess of the First Light has contrived a table in which her own god's servants stand at the head. I will not pretend the charge is baseless. But consider what the alternative orderings say, and whether they are any less partial. To rank the kindreds by number is to say that the world is a census. To rank them by arms is to say the world is a battlefield. I say the world is a thing that was dark and became known, and that the great division among peoples is what part they had in that becoming. If the reader holds another view of what the world fundamentally is, he will want another table, and he should make one. I only ask that he notice he is making an argument, and not merely a list.
Men are the most numerous of the kindreds of Rhaedwyn and the shortest of life among those that matter to this history, and I hold these two facts to be one fact. A man has some sixty or seventy years, and of those perhaps forty in which he can learn anything. He cannot wait out a problem as a Dragon-King waits, nor set a work aside for a grandchild to finish as a dwarf will do without complaint. Whatever he means to know, he must know now. Out of this brevity comes the whole restless character of the kindred: the voyages, the schools, the doctrines abandoned and taken up again within a single lifetime, and, I do not doubt, the readiness of the first men at the Shardspire to raise a chant whose end they could not foresee.
It is easy, and common among us, to name this hunger a virtue, since the Dawnsong came of it. I would have the reader remember that the Dark Oaths came of it too.
Of the kingdoms of men in this present age, four are of the first rank. Tanir, youngest of them, founded scarce two hundred years since where the Sarsor opens into its estuary, and grown rich on wool, fur, iron and the traffic of its harbours; a kingdom of ledgers and appetite, ruled in my day by King Nunavar Auvalyr. Sobsia, the ancient realm in which I write, of which more in a moment. Waternaken, whose capital of Lygos is the true forge of the continent, and of whose peculiar order I shall treat at length, for it is the most misunderstood realm in Rhaedwyn. And Sukhret in the north, alone among the realms of men in being ruled still, in name, by a Sorcerer-King of the Luminarchate.
Of Sukhret I must write carefully, for it is the seat of a great sorrow that the wider world has learned to speak of as though it were a marvel. Its lord is Aurozan, reckoned the tenth in strength of the Twelve Sorcerer-Kings, and the only one of that order known past doubt to have come alive through the whole Age of Shadows. He is older than any other living thing save the dragons, past two and twenty centuries, and by every account his mind is broken. He rules Sukhret in name and does not rule it in fact; his stewards govern, and he sits among them saying things that belong to no conversation anyone present is having. He answers questions that were never asked. He asks, with great urgency, after events that have not happened and will not happen, and grieves for people no one can find. He can no longer reliably tell the remembered from the present from the merely dreaded, and so, though he is the last mortal in the world who worked True Magic with his own hands in the Age of Magic, he can teach no one, for a teacher must know which of the things in his head is real, and Aurozan no longer does. Why his mind failed, the schools cannot agree: age is the commonest guess, but there are as many theories as there are theorists, and I have read a dozen and believe none.
The compiler: I set down here, in my own hand, a thing that shames me a little. When I was younger and this great endeavour only a folly I dreamed of, I wrote to Sukhret. I wrote to Aurozan himself, three times, as a green priestess writes to the last living master of the art her god gave the world, begging some word, some fragment of the shaping, anything from a hand that had truly done it. I had answers. That is the cruelty of it; I had answers, in his own hand or his scribe's, and not one of them replied to anything I had asked. One told me at length to beware a flood in a city I have never named to him and cannot place. One asked whether my daughter's fever had broken; I have no daughter. One was three lines of what may have been the shaping itself, a true fragment of True Magic, and may equally have been a dream of it, and I have no way on this earth to tell which, and the only man who could tell me is the man who cannot. The dwarves keep the Dawnsong from me behind a locked door. Aurozan keeps the shaping from me behind a broken one. I no longer know which is the worse to stand before.
Of my own Sobsia I must write with a divided heart, for it is my home and I think it is dying. It is among the oldest inhabited cities of Rhaedwyn, one of only three that came through both the shattering of the Shardspire and the Age of Shadows without being emptied. Of those three, another has dwindled to a plain farming town that remembers nothing of what it was, and the last has done better, sitting as it does upon the Trade Road where the ways meet between Tanir and Sukhret and Waternaken and the mouth of the swamps, and grown fat on the tolls. Sobsia has done neither. Its plan is ancient and it is accounted something near sacrilege to depart from it, so that new building is piled upon old, the streets keep turns that were laid out for walls long since fallen, and the whole city labours under the weight of its own memory. Here stands the Grand Library, or the wing of it, the Annex, that the fires left; and in that Annex I have spent thirty years, and it is the whole source of this book. I am fond of the city as one is fond of a stubborn elder. But a city that will not let go of a plan drawn for a world that no longer exists is a city practising the sin of Eryndar's cult in reverse: not forgetting, but refusing to know that a thing is over.
The High Academy of Sorcery, I should add, is not here; it keeps its halls at Suderaval, and it is the last house on the continent to study the Wellspring at all, though it studies it now as a dead tongue, from texts, no hand there having ever drawn the deep water. I am not of the Academy and it is not of my order, and we regard one another, when we regard one another, with a courteous indifference. I keep my desk at the Monastery of the Keepers of the Light, and my books at the Annex, and I have troubled the Academy for nothing, and it has troubled me for less.
Beneath the four great realms lie the lesser states, more numerous than any register keeps current: the Autocracy of Cordibello, an elective despotism that has raised and deposed eleven autocrats in my lifetime; the Republic of Vavirian, third naval power of the continent and first in the art of the profitable lie; the pastoral Kingdom of Etheren in the southeast; the free city of Andovar upon the middle Sarsor, which has bought its charter from three different kings and honours none of them; the Marches of Tessul, a league of fortified towns along the Waternaken road that answer to no crown and pay tribute to two; and the Hanse of Corvellin, a company of nine coastal towns holding a common purse and a common fleet, which is a kingdom in all but the word and would take the word if any king would sell it.
I set Waternaken in its own chapter because every foreign account of it that I have read is wrong in the same way, and the error is instructive.
Because Waternaken lies nearest the Taurus passes and takes the first weight of every orcish raid that comes through them, and because Lygos forges the finest cold steel in Eryndor, the chroniclers of Tanir and Vavirian describe the Waternakans as a kindred of soldiers and nothing else: grim, joyless, bred to the spear. This is a merchant's description of a people who will not be bought, and it is false.
The truth is stranger and, to my mind, far more admirable. Waternaken holds that there are two excellences in a human life, and only two: the excellence of arms, by which a people is kept alive, and the excellence of beauty, by which a people is made worth keeping. They call these the Twin Excellences, and they do not rank them. A Waternakan is expected to attain some measure of both, and a person accomplished in one alone is pitied rather than praised. It follows, to the bafflement of every foreign embassy, that the general who broke the raid at the Kelvern ford is also a portraitist of some reputation, that the master of the Lygos armouries writes verse which is sung in Cordibello without anyone there knowing whose it is, and that a Waternakan officer will discuss the composition of a mural and the disposition of a shield-line in the same breath and see no seam between them.
Nor are their children raised as ours are. The young of Waternaken are reared in common, in the houses they call the Rearing Halls, by those adults judged fit for the work rather than by their parents alone; and this is done not for war but because they hold that a child belongs to the whole realm and the whole realm answers for it. In those halls the children are set to arms and to letters, to the forge and to the brush, and are not sorted early into the martial and the gentle, for the Waternakans think that sorting is precisely what ruins a person. A child who shows a hand for painting is still taught the spear. A child who shows a hand for the spear is still set before a wall and made to paint it.
The result is a realm that is communal to a degree that visitors find oppressive and that its own people find simply obvious. There is little private wealth in Lygos and less private glory. Their monuments name units and cohorts, seldom captains. When a Waternakan is asked what he does, he answers with what the realm needs done.
The compiler: I have thought a great deal about Waternaken, and I will confess that its doctrine unsettles me more than the doctrines of any foreign god in this book. For here is a whole people who have decided that a life is measured by two things, and that knowing is not one of them. They do not despise learning. They simply do not rank it. A Waternakan holds that a beautiful thing well made and a border well kept are the whole of what a life owes, and that the question of what the Wellspring is may be left to those with leisure for it. And I find, when I try to answer them, that I cannot do it without appealing to my own god, which is no answer at all to someone who does not keep him. They have survived four hundred years on that frontier. We in Sobsia have a plan we may not alter and a library we could not save. Let the reader weigh it.
The Dwarvenfolk are the second of the singing kindreds, and no account of the Dawnsong in any tradition omits them. Human and dwarven voices together raised that chant, and neither could have raised it alone. In the elder days of the Luminarchate this was a bond spoken of with real warmth. It is not spoken of so now, and the fault, I judge, is chiefly ours.
They dwell in the Rhaedweny Wetlands, a vast country of swamp, bog and flooded wood where the ground breathes with the tides and the air is thick enough to lean on. Outsiders account it unlivable. The Dwarvenfolk account it sacred, holding that every pool and reed and stone has its place in a balance their ancestors described, and that to drain a marsh is not improvement but mutilation. Their Keeps stand behind raised dykes and terraces of reed and fungus-crop, and beneath the flooded layers run whole underhalls cut from swampstone and ironwood, where the forges burn on gases drawn up from the deep marsh. The roads between Keeps are marked by stone pylons and floating markers that must be reset as the waters shift, which is work without end, and which they perform without complaint, because a road that must be constantly re-made is to them a road that is constantly being kept.
Their society is the Great Clans, each descended from a founder of the Age of Magic, and each Keep self-contained and jealous of its own reckoning. Of the clans, four are of the first rank in this age.
The Bektor of Ironoath, the smiths and metal-singers, trace their line to Bektor Kazem, who forged the starmetal bindings that held the Shardspire after Mythrael was sung; and starmetal, I should note for the curious, is no sorcerous alloy but the iron of fallen stars, gathered where it strikes the earth, prized for taking an edge and a rune alike. Their Keep stands where the Wetlands meet the Aetheric Ocean, sheathed in iron pitted by centuries of salt wind, its walls marked with red runes that glow faintly in the mist. Beneath the main hall lies the Oathvault, where every sworn vow of the clan is cast into metal and stored: rings, chains, spearheads, nails, each engraved with the name of its maker and the substance of the promise. They are accounted the most severe of the clans, and hold their honour more as a burden than a virtue. Their craft has no equal.
The Oprim of Blackmoss, the fishers and tide-walkers, who trust water further than stone. Their founder Oprim Malvar led them seaward in the Age of Shadows and raised Old Blackmoss on rafts and piled stone along the coast, and the sea took it, as the sea does. Its halls lie beneath murky water now, visited by eels and by those Oprim who still dive among the silent doorways at the rites of remembrance. They insist this was not the failure of Malvar's vow but its fulfilment: the city held long enough for the clan to learn the sea, and sank when its work was done. Where other clans harden in iron and rite, the Oprim harden in patience. Their maxim, which they repeat until foreigners can recite it, is that a life well lived is a life of peace amidst friends and family, and their vows are plain in wording and pitiless in practice: to bring in the catch each day, to see no friend go hungry, to guide every boat home, to raise children who never learn the taste of famine.
The Xylir of Mistmourn, who trace their blood to Aktal Xylir, the only dwarven Sorcerer-King of the Luminarchate, and who fled east into the bogs when the Shardspire broke. Mistmourn is a place that unsettles even other Dwarves: a standing fog that turns trees to pale pillars and water to black channels, and in which sound behaves wrongly, so that a whisper carries clear across the water while a shout is swallowed within twenty paces. Blue-fire lanterns mark the ways for travellers. The Xylir speak softly, weigh every word, and will not discuss the Age of Magic with outsiders. Outwardly they are wary of sorcery and treat it with stiff suspicion. Inwardly they cannot agree why: some hold the clan carries a curse from Aktal's last workings at the Shardspire, others that he foresaw something worse than the Age of Shadows and bound his line to watch for its coming. The original wording of Aktal's own vow is lost, or held where none now living will read it. Their soil yields almost nothing, so they buy grain and salt from men and from their cousins, and pay in Aethercraft and manuscripts, of which Mistmourn has been the only dependable source on this continent for the whole of the Age of Shadows. Whether they kept some secret of the making, or merely sit upon a hoard from a better age and dole it out, no outsider knows and no Xylir will say; for my own part I judge the hoard the likelier, since the making of Aethercraft is held lost past recovery, but I have been wrong before and set both down.
The Vashk of Saltbarrow, least regarded and, I suspect, most important, who keep the outer dykes where the Wetlands meet the tidal flats. They are diggers and dyke-wardens, and their vows are almost entirely concerned with maintenance: to walk a given length of wall each season, to raise it a hand's breadth in a generation, to teach a successor before dying. No song is made of them. Every other Keep would drown without them.
Of the Bakthruz I must write carefully, for it is the heart of Dwarven life and is constantly misdescribed by human writers as an oath of honour, which makes it sound like our own knightly vows and it is nothing of the kind. The Bakthruz is a binding a Dwarf makes upon their own life as to what that life is for. It may be grand or it may be small. It is not revocable, and it is not renegotiated when circumstances change; circumstances changing is precisely the condition under which it is meant to hold. They believe, and the keepers of Eryndar agree with them, that these vows are recorded in the deep strata of the world, and that a place where oaths are broken in number will in time answer with subsidence and quake.
The compiler: Now I must set down the thing that stands between our two kindreds, and I have put it off through four pages of Keeps and dykes because I dislike writing it. The dwarves are said to hold, in the ledgers of Durn-Kadal, a fragment of the Dawnsong itself: the portion their own voices carried. They will not share it. They hold it a private grief and a clan matter, and no priestess of the First Light in this age has read it, and I have asked. I have written twice to the keepers of Durn-Kadal and had one courteous refusal and one silence.
I want the reader to understand what is refused. It is not a relic. It is the only surviving portion of the working that brought knowing into the world, and it is being kept from the priesthood of the god that working produced, by the descendants of those who sang it beside us. I have felt this, on bad nights, as a theft.
And then I set it beside my own house. We had the Archives of the Luminarchate. We had the Annex here at Sobsia. We let them burn, some by the Darksworn and some by our own attrition and neglect and the slow indifference of centuries. The dwarves kept their fragment through the same thousands of years and it is still there to be refused to me. If the fault of the dwarves is that they will not share, the fault of my order is that we did not keep. Between the two, I know which the First Light will judge more harshly, and it is not theirs.
Here the ordering I set out in the first chapter meets its hardest case, and I will not smuggle it past the reader.
The Dragon-Kings hold that they were in the world before the younger kindreds came into it, and that they saw the world wake. If this is so, then at the time of the Dawnsong there existed in Eryndor beings of great age and greater power who were present in the unlit world, who did not raise the Song, and who apparently did not care to. That is a fact which sits very badly with a book that begins with light. Their true age none can say, for no one has ever dared put the question to a Dragon directly, and the servants who might carry it will not.
They are five, and no more. Each keeps its own Fortress-Temple upon one of the great passes of the Taurus, which the Rhaedweny call the Great Western Mountains, and each such place is at once a palace, a temple raised to its occupant, and a fortress of a defensibility that no army of men has ever seriously tested twice. They are layered masses of stone, terrace, shrine and kill-zone, more citadel than town, each with a central hall wide enough for a full dragon to lie coiled and still raise its head above its priests. Their lands are narrow bands of valley and cliff settlement anchored to these fortresses. Servants tend the terraces, manage the trade that comes up from Rhaedwyn, and bargain carefully with the orcish clans above. Tribute goes up in grain, ore and service. In return the passes are watched, and when the watching fails, made war upon.
Their names are given below as our scholars render them, and I must say plainly that the rendering is poor. The names belong to the ancient tongue of their own kind, which no mortal now speaks and few can even sound; our letters are not shaped for it, and the glosses I give for their meanings come down to us through translations whose translators are long dead and whose competence I cannot check. I set the meanings down because they are what we have. I would not build an argument upon any of them.
Mukunturagi, the Eldest, the Firstborn. His name is said to come from their word for root, or for origin, because he is the origin of dragon-kind. He keeps the oldest and tallest of the five fortresses, upon the Trade Pass, which is the largest of all the ways through the mountains into the Steppe, and his seat is accounted the chief of the five in precedence and honour. Of his size the accounts are extravagant and agree with one another, which is the only reason I record them: that uncoiled he would rival one of the great capitals of Rhaedwyn in his length. It is told that once, deep in the Age of Magic, he left the mountains and went to Lavellor, and that in his passage overhead he blotted out the sun across the whole of that city.
Duinarsalgun, the Second-born, called the cunning, whose name is glossed from their word for the mountains themselves. His is the Trudek Pass, and his is the singular distinction of the Invasion: of the five passes, Trudek alone held. It is said that in those days his breath did not burn the flesh of the orcs and their horses but rotted it, so that the flesh fell away and left the bone standing, as though a thousand years had gone by in an instant.
Fulgiyantargun, the Third-born, the Watcher of the Mountains, whose name is glossed as hawk. He holds the easternmost seat, where the feet of the Taurus come down into the plains of Rhaedwyn, and because his gate is the one through which nearly all business with the settled realms must pass, his fortress is the working head of the whole chain, whatever precedence Mukunturagi's holds in honour. He is the smallest of the five and much the most active, and he is the only one of them any living memory can claim to have seen: in the days of the Autokratorissa Diotaras of Waternaken, some hundred and fifty years before this present writing, he was observed to leave his nest, and there are people yet living whose grandparents saw it.
Alindurkejin, the Fourth-born, the Dragon-King of Gold, who sits upon the busiest of the trading passes between Rhaedwyn and the Steppe, and is by any reckoning the richest thing in the world. Of his name I have found no gloss I trust and so give none. His seat is called the Gilded Keep, and it is held by certain scholars of Sobsia and of Tanir that within its undervaults lies more gold than in all the treasuries and lands of Rhaedwyn together, a hundred times over. I record the claim and note that not one of those scholars has been inside it, and that a number reported as a hundredfold is a number nobody counted.
Šanggūteliarun, the Youngest and the last born, and by common account the wisest of the five, whose name is said to echo their word for spirit. It was Šanggūteliarun who first conceived the Ritual of Solelichesis in the dark days of the Invasion, of which more in the ninth chapter of this book. He is also the most reclusive by far. His seat is upon the Thalmura Pass, and of that place the travellers say a strange thing consistently: that the very air there feels wrong, overcharged, as though too much magic had been left standing in it. Thalmura is accordingly shunned, and has gathered to itself the reputation of ill luck, so that among the few merchants bold enough to trade with the Steppe there runs the saying, cross old Thalmura and watch your purse grow poorer.
They remember the Orcish Invasion as an insult. The Kuhans Alostor, Kiraven and Venocht broke the Taurus line with Darksworn help, and it was in the panic of that hour that the Dragon-Kings poured their own blood into the Ritual of Solelichesis, upon Šanggūteliarun's design, and made the Dragonborn to hold the passes their own kind could no longer hold alone. Of the working of that ritual I know nothing beyond its name, its authors and its result, as does everyone now living outside the Taurus, and I will not pretend to the mechanism of it.
But here I must halt and set down a discrepancy that has troubled me for years and that no one I have asked will engage with. The songs of the western kingdoms say plainly that at the Invasion one Dragon-King fell and another was very nearly taken in his own shattered temple. Yet there are five Dragon-Kings, and they are reckoned by birth as first, second, third, fourth and youngest, an unbroken order with no gap in it, and they were five before the Invasion and are five now. The arithmetic does not work. Either the word fell means only that he was thrown down and did not die, which is possible and is what the Taurus servants say when pressed, though it is not what the songs seem to mean; or the songs have confused the two, and it was one dragon that was nearly taken and no other; or, and I set this down knowing how it will be received, there was once a sixth, who fell at the Invasion and whose place in the birth-order has since been quietly closed up, so that the five we count are the five who survived to be counted. I have no evidence for the third. I record it because the first two require the songs to be wrong about the plainest thing they say, and because a discrepancy of this size in the best-attested event of the whole Age of Shadows should not be left lying in the road for the next scholar to trip over as I did.
There is one further matter, smaller in appearance and larger in consequence. Mukunturagi is called the origin of dragon-kind: not the eldest merely, but the source, from whom the others come. Set that beside the claim with which this chapter opened, that the Dragon-Kings were present in the unlit world and saw it wake. If both are true, then the second, third, fourth and youngest did not see the world wake at all; only the Firstborn did, and the rest came after, from him, at some time we cannot date. And if that is so, then the whole weight of the testimony I most want in all the world, the witness of the elder darkness, rests not upon five mouths but upon one, and upon the one who has been silent longest.
Of their own account of that elder world I can report almost nothing, and it is not for want of looking. In the Annex there survives one document, set down some four hundred years ago by an envoy of a king whose kingdom is itself now gone, describing an audience granted him by one of the five. He had asked, he writes, whether there were voices in the world before the Song, and what the world had been like when nothing in it knew itself. The first answer he was given, entire, was that the question was badly formed. The second, which he took down as it was rendered to him, was that he was asking what water tastes like to a fish, and that he should ask instead why he supposed the fish had ever been thirsty.
The compiler: I have turned that recorded answer over for eleven years and I am no longer sure it was evasion.
Consider what the envoy was truly asking, for it is what I would ask if I could. He wanted a witness to the unlit world, because my own third book confesses that no such witness exists among us and that everything written of that age is our own age with the light subtracted. And there in the Taurus sit five beings who say they were there, or four who say it and one for whom it may actually be so. They are the only door in the world to the one question my whole mirror is built over, and they will not open it, or cannot, or think the question foolish.
Three possibilities, and I can rank them but not decide them. That they lie, and are merely very old, and inflate their age as kings do. That they tell the truth and remember nothing usable, because a mind that has run so many thousand years may hold its early centuries the way an old woman holds her infancy. Or that they tell the truth, remember perfectly, and judge that we are not owed it. I incline to the second. I fear the third. And I note, with a scholar's discomfort rather than a priestess's, that a being which was present in the dark and did not sing is a being for whom the coming of the light was not obviously an improvement. I do not say they resent it. I say no one has ever established that they welcomed it.
The envoy does not record which of the five received him. I have read his account perhaps a hundred times hoping the detail would surface on some later page, and it does not; he calls his host only the Dragon, as though there were but one and everyone would know which. If it was Mukunturagi, then a witness to the waking of the world has spoken to us once, in riddles, and we did not think to write down that it was him. That is the kind of loss that no fire is needed to accomplish. A careless clerk will do.
Beyond the Taurus lies the country of the endless sky: rolling hills cut by long rivers and seasonal streams, the horizon broken by horse-herds rather than by trees. The soil is poor, the winters bite, and out of that hardness the orcish kindred made a life of movement, driving the herds from pasture to pasture as the grass is exhausted, with the herders following on the fragile ground to let it recover behind the great hosts. Children ride and draw a bow nearly as soon as they walk.
Their society is the Clans, as many, they say, as there are blades of grass, and it is built upon a self-reliance that the settled realms find close to anarchy. Twice a year the clans gather in the great Kuhatais, assemblies where feuds are judged, marriages arranged, forges lit and offerings made to the Endless Sky and to the beasts that keep them alive. From the Kuhatai the Kuhans are confirmed or challenged, and the Steppe sets its direction for the coming turn of seasons. A Kuhan who has lost the assembly does not usually die of it; he is simply no longer followed, which on the Steppe is much the same thing and rather more humiliating.
They do not keep the sung Gods. They honour the Endless Sky, which is not a Power that crossed at the Shardspire and is not, so far as I can determine, a person at all, together with the horse, the wolf and the wind. Our chroniclers have often taken this for the worship of the Endless Night on the strength of the shared word, which is an error of the ear and nothing more, and I would have it struck out of every copy that repeats it. The Endless Sky is the open air over the grass. It asks for offerings and gives nothing back but weather, and the orcs think that fair.
And now the harder matter. It is the settled doctrine of the western kingdoms, and of a good many of my own order's texts, that the orcish kindred are the servants of the Endless Night, on the ground that three Kuhans took the Dark Oath and rode east two thousand years ago and burned a great deal of Rhaedwyn.
Three Kuhans did take the Dark Oath. Alostor, Kiraven and Venocht are not fictions, and the Taurus was broken, and the terror of that campaign is remembered accurately even where the strategy is not. But I have set myself to count, so far as the fragments in the Annex allow, how many clans rode with them and how many did not, and the answer, though it cannot be exact, is not close. The great majority of the Steppe did not ride. Some clans fought the three, chiefly over grazing and water rather than over any doctrine, but fought them.
The orcs themselves remember Alostor, Kiraven and Venocht as flawed heroes: war-leaders who paid too high a price for power. This offends our chroniclers, who would prefer they be remembered as villains. I would gently observe that we in Rhaedwyn remember several of the Sorcerer-Kings in exactly the same forgiving terms, and that one of them was Virulan's peer and colleague, and that we are not therefore held to be a nation of Darksworn.
The compiler: Let me say this in my own hand, because it will be cut from any copy made in Lygos and I want it on the record at least once. We damn a whole kindred for the deeds of three of its lords, across twenty centuries, on evidence we have not examined since the fires. That is not a judgment. That is a habit. And a habit held without examination is precisely what my god names the sin of the shut eye, whatever comfortable name we give it. I do not ask the reader to love the Steppe. I ask him to notice that he has never checked.
The Goblin Kind range the country between the Great Walls of Sagremar and the western heartlands: hunters, gatherers and herders of sheep, taking the wild game of the land and moving as the season asks. They are, by every account including my own brief acquaintance, the most cheerful kindred in Eryndor.
They are governed by the Kind, a loose assembly of the chieftains of the wandering tribes, which elects from among itself one to speak for all. The manner of the election deserves setting down. Each chieftain holds two votes and may not cast either upon himself, and the office falls to the candidate who receives the fewest. I took this at first for a joke made at my expense. It is not. Pressed to explain it, the chieftain I asked said that a person many wish to see raised is a person who has been arranging to be raised, and that the Kind would rather be spoken for by someone who was not arranging anything.
They are known for their festivals, their archery contests, and above all for Aauisiir, an elaborate contest of brawling in which each goblin attempts to knock down their opponent using the legs alone, and which has rules of such number and refinement that I could not follow the scoring after the third bout.
To the farmers of the west they are a nuisance, since they will take fruit from the great plantations, and the large landholders accordingly keep guards or else pay the tribes to pass elsewhere. This arrangement has predictably produced a class of tribes who have no intention whatever of raiding anyone's orchard and who arrive each season to be paid not to.
The Gnomes are not native to Rhaedwyn and are nowhere numerous in it. They come, by their own account, from a land far to the west beyond the Great Steppe and the infinite grasses, and of that land they will say very little that can be checked. They dress in worked bone and in the cured leather of animals not found on this continent, which has been variously argued to prove that they come from the Steppe, that they come from beyond it, or that they trade with someone who does.
Their worship is the matter of interest here. They revere a high god they name the Radiant One, which does not show itself and is not expected to, and which is held to emanate through lesser gods that are visible. And they hold, without any apparent sense that this is a provocation, that the sung Gods of Eryndor are themselves emanations of the Radiant One: echoes of the single source from which everything proceeds.
Their central observance is the lighting of fires at cairns set at crossroads, and the feast they call Al'Latar, at which small wooden triangles holding a candle, the Latar lights, are set upon running water. It is said to help the departed find their way home.
Because of the bone and the leather and the night fires, the common people of the western kingdoms associate the gnomes with the Endless Night and with the Darksworn. I have found no evidence for this whatever, and a good deal against it, the chief being that a Darksworn observance is not usually a family gathering at which children are permitted to float candles.
But there is a graver matter, and my method obliges me to set it down even though I would rather not.
Among the apocrypha of our Library, in a hand nobody has dated to my satisfaction, are texts which propose that the Radiant One is Mythrael. That the gnomes' unseen high god, source of all emanations, is our own First Light known under another name by a people who came to him from outside.
The compiler: I have read those texts perhaps forty times, and I will tell the reader exactly why I do not use them, and what it costs me.
Consider first how badly I want them to be true. If the Radiant One is Mythrael, then my god is not the parochial deity of one shattered continent but the source that a foreign people found independently and named for his radiance. In an age when my cult is distrusted and my art is lost, that is an intoxicating thought, and I have gone to sleep on it more than once.
Now consider the evidence. Unsigned texts, undated, in an archive that burned, proposing an identification that flatters the order that owns the archive. If I found that same document in a Taniran counting-house arguing that some foreign god was really their patron of coin, I would laugh at it, and so would the reader.
And there is worse. Our own doctrine holds that Mythrael was sung, that he was made by mortal voices at the Shardspire and had no being before them. The Radiant One is described as the source of everything, prior to all. These cannot both be true of the same person. To accept the identification I would have to give up the doctrine of the singing, which is the foundation of this entire book and the reason ignorance is a sin in my cult. The flattering reading destroys the thing it flatters.
So I set the apocrypha aside, and I record that I have set them aside, and on what ground, so that a better-lit reader may take them up again and overturn me. That is what the method in my prologue is for. It is easy to keep when the thing being weighed is somebody else's comfort.
The Dragonborn are the first of the made kindreds, and their making is the best-attested working of the whole Age of Shadows, for once we have a date, a place, a cause and a purpose, which is more than can be said for most of that age.
When the three Kuhans broke the Taurus line with Darksworn aid, and one Dragon-King had fallen and another lay half-buried in his own shattered temple, the surviving Dragon-Kings poured their own blood into the Ritual of Solelichesis and made from it a kindred to hold the passes that they could no longer hold alone. The Dragonborn were made as a garrison, and they have been a garrison for two thousand years. Of how the ritual was wrought I know nothing, and I have already confessed as much; I know its name, its authors, and its result, which is all that has come down to those of us outside the Taurus.
They are a people whose entire culture is organised around a watch that has not ended. Their fortress-temples in the passes are not merely their posts but their towns; their generations are reckoned by rotations; their highest honour is not victory but relief, the handing of an intact post to a successor. A Dragonborn will speak of the Invasion as though it were last season's business, because in the only sense that matters to them it is: the pass is still there, and the Steppe is still on the other side of it.
They keep the sung Gods only lightly, and their observances are heavily bent toward Eryndar, whose doctrine of oaths, maintenance and remembrance fits a garrison people better than any other. Some of their houses keep Aethros as well, for the forge.
The theological difficulty is put by the Dragonborn themselves, and rather sharply, in a question their priests are said to press upon any scholar who visits them. A Dragonborn was not born of the world. A Dragonborn is the deliberate product of a working, made from a Dragon-King's blood for a purpose set by someone else. Cyraeth's doctrine holds that a life should feed something beyond itself, that a soul which keeps its promises to the end is met at the door and woven into the next turning. Does that apply to a people who were made to be a promise, who did not choose the purpose their existence serves, and who cannot lay it down without ceasing to be what they were made as?
The keepers of Cyraeth answer briskly that it applies, that the Wheel takes all turnings, and that the question is sentimental. I am told the Dragonborn do not find that answer satisfying, and neither do I.
The compiler: I will give my own answer here, since it is a better one than I could give to a Dragonborn's face.
I observe that my own god was also made: sung out of the Wellspring by mortals who wanted something and shaped a working to get it. Mythrael did not choose to be the First Light. He was made as one, by voices with a purpose of their own, exactly as the Dragonborn were made as a garrison by Kings with a purpose of their own.
If being made for another's purpose disqualifies a being from having a life of its own, then it disqualifies the god at the head of this book, and I should stop writing. I do not believe it does. I believe that what a thing was made for is where it begins and not where it ends, and that a people who can stand upon their own wall and wonder whether they have a soul have already answered the question by asking it, for a garrison does not wonder such things, and they do.
The Tieflings are the second of the made kindreds, though made in a manner quite unlike the Dragonborn, and I place them here among the peoples rather than among the monstrous kinds of the third book, which some compilers have done and which I hold to be both wrong and shabby.
A Tiefling is the mark of a dream. Somewhere in the line, at a distance the family itself can rarely name, a dream of one of the Sleepers brushed against a mortal bloodline, and where it touched it left a mark; and that mark does not lift, but passes to the children and the children's children, who never met the dream and know nothing of it save that they carry it in their skin. They are not a nation. They have no country and no common tongue and no shared rite. They are found in nearly every human city in Rhaedwyn, and their lives are as various as their neighbours': smiths, merchants, sailors, scholars, and here in Sobsia at least two brothers of my own house whom I will not name because they would not thank me.
Now I must set against this the tale that is told everywhere else, for it is far commoner than the account I have just given, and I do not credit it. The tale says that a Tiefling is the living mark of a bargain: that an ancestor reached down into the Realms Below and struck terms with a Sleeper, and that the price was the soul of a child, and that the mark is the seal upon the contract. I have hunted this story for eleven years, through the Annex and through every traveller and priest and market-wife who would answer me, and I set down what I found, which is nothing. Not one instrument. Not one witness. Not one family that will say the bargain was made by their own grandmother; it is always the grandmother of someone in the next street, or the next town, or the last age. A thing that is universally reported and nowhere attested is not a fact. It is a story, and I have learned to ask what a story is for.
What is more, the tale runs against everything reported of the Sleepers themselves. They are held to lie somewhere beneath the known layers of creation, vast and half-mythic, turned so far inward that their sleep is scarcely to be called a life at all. They do not wake. They do not speak. They are not said to want anything, and a thing that wants nothing cannot be dealt with, for a bargain requires two parties awake and each desiring what the other holds. No priesthood openly claims them. No proper cult of them has ever endured. The scholars of my own house mention them in footnotes and pass on, as one passes a rumour better left alone. Only their dreams reach us, and a dream is not an offer.
Yet I will not pretend the matter is closed by that, for the question of what they are remains, and it is graver than the bargain-tale it replaces. They are not the sung Gods; they crossed at no Shardspire and answered no chant. So either they are of the Wellspring, some persuasion of the deep water that took shape without any mortal singing it, which would mean the Dawnsong was not the only way such a thing may happen and that our whole account of divinity is a special case and not a rule. Or they are not of the Wellspring at all, and stand outside it as certain scholars claim the Endless Night does, in which case there is more than one thing out there beyond the world's own substance, and we have met at least two of them without meaning to. I record both possibilities. I favour neither. I note only that both are worse than the comfortable silence our doctrine has kept on this question for four hundred years, and that the comfort of that silence is not evidence.
The compiler: I have put off writing the next paragraph for two winters, and I will write it now and let it stand.
My order teaches that the Endless Night is the Wellspring turned inward, the recoil of the deep water from all pattern, the pull of every made thing back toward the stillness where nothing exists as itself. And I have just set down, in this same chapter, in almost the same words, that the Sleepers are turned inward, in a stillness so deep it hardly counts as living. The reader who has noticed this has noticed what I noticed, and I would rather say it plainly than hope the reader is careless.
Here is the distinction I have found, and it is the only one I trust. The Night speaks. It is the whole of its nature to speak: it comes to the tired, in the dark, in our own voice, and it offers, and what it offers is release, the erasure of every limit and every binding thing. The Sleepers do not speak, and they do not offer, and no soul in any account I have read has ever heard a word from one of them. My order names the Night an absence that learned to speak. If that phrase is right, then the Sleepers are the contrary case: a presence that never has.
And there is a second thing, which is smaller and which I find steadier than the first. What the Endless Night touches, it loosens. It is the un-persuasion; it undoes the pattern of a thing until the thing is no longer itself. But the dream of a Sleeper laid a mark upon a bloodline, and that mark has held fast through twenty generations of birth and marriage and exile and has not loosened by a hair. Whatever else these two are, they are not one thing. The one dissolves what it touches. The other leaves something that will not wash out.
Last, and this is the part that concerns the living rather than the learned. Because the bargain-tale is told, a quiet suspicion follows Tieflings through most of the settled realms, and a Tiefling who does well is watched more closely than a neighbour who does the same. Mark what that suspicion rests upon. It does not rest upon anything a Tiefling has done, for they are ordinary people of every trade and temper. It rests upon a crime imputed to an ancestor nobody can name, in an age nobody can date, on the authority of no document whatsoever. It is a very convenient story for the neighbours of a marked child, since it lets them treat an accident of birth as a debt. It is not knowledge. It is the sin of the shut eye wearing the clothes of common sense, and I have named it here so that at least one book in Rhaedwyn says so.
I come now to the chapter I have rewritten more often than any other, and I ask the reader to attend closely, because what the elves say about themselves, if any part of it is true, is more consequential than anything else recorded in these five books.
Some six generations past, which by the reckoning of their own long lives, near six-score years apiece, places the crossing well back in the Age of Shadows, four great clans of elves arrived in Eryndor. They did not arrive from anywhere in Eryndor. They came, they say, through a passage torn between worlds.
Their account is this. Their homeland was Sharilar, and they knew no Gods there. They honoured instead the Elven Spirits of Creation, presences bound into earth, sky and sea, to whom they offered the harvest, the durable work of craft, and the healthy child. Then came the Shadowfall. There was no warning. The sun did not rise. A thick clinging dark settled over field and city, the spires stood dull and dead, and the colours went out of the world. And under that weight the Spirits turned inward and spent themselves entirely upon a single working: they tore a passage through what the elves call the Infinitude of Worlds and opened a way into Eryndor. The elves fled through the wound. It closed behind them. Whether Sharilar still exists in any recognisable form, no one living knows, and every elven leader in every age since has repeated the same vow: to find or remake the path, cross back, and take their homeland out of the dark or die attempting it.
Now let me set out plainly what this account asserts, because it is easy to read it as a sad story and miss what it is claiming.
It asserts that there are other worlds, and that ours is one of a plurality.
It asserts that a world may exist without any sung God in it at all, and be inhabited, and cultivated, and civilised, and beautiful, for hundreds of generations. The elves had no Mythrael. They had no Dawnsong and no Shardspire and no Wellspring that they name. They had cities of pale stone and towers that broke the dawn into a thousand colours, and they had knowing enough to build them, and they got all of it without a First Light.
It asserts that a working of a scale no Luminarch ever approached, the tearing of a passage between worlds, was performed by presences that are not gods in our sense at all, and that it was performed as an act of self-expenditure rather than of mastery.
And it asserts, most uncomfortably of all, that a darkness came upon a world without warning and put out its sun; and that the answer of the powers of that world was not to fight it, which they evidently could not, but to open a door and get their people out.
The compiler: I have sat with this for a long time and I am going to write down the thing I have not said aloud in my house.
Our doctrine holds that knowing came into the world by the Dawnsong, that nothing could truly be said of the world before it, and that this is why my whole book begins with light and not with the world. I built the first chapter of the first book upon it.
The elves are a standing objection to that doctrine. Not a heresy, not a rival cult, not somebody's apocryphon in an unsigned hand. A people, living in Rhaedwyn, buying grain, walking in this city, who say that where they come from there was knowing without any singing at all.
I can answer this, and I have. I can say that Sharilar had its own equivalent of the Song, that the Spirits were its First Light under another form, that the account is centuries old and passed through many generations of exile and grief and cannot be pressed on fine points. All of that is reasonable. All of it is also precisely the kind of reasonable that a person produces when they need a conclusion to survive.
So I record the objection at full strength, in the elves' own sense, in the middle of my own book, where it does the most damage to me. If the doctrine of the singing is true, it will survive being written down honestly beside its best objection. If it cannot survive that, then it was never knowledge, only comfort, and my god has no use for it and neither should I.
And there is a smaller thing that I have not been able to put down. A darkness came upon Sharilar without warning and put out the sun. Something is called the Endless Night here. I have looked for any bridge between those two facts and found nothing at all: no shared name, no shared sign, no elven memory of a voice or an offer, which is the one thing our own Night never fails to make. I am nearly certain they are unrelated, and I set the coincidence down only so that no later scholar wastes a decade discovering that I noticed it too.
Having set down what the elves say of Sharilar, I must now set down that they do not agree about it, and the manner of the disagreement is the most instructive thing in this chapter for anyone who means to weigh sources.
Four clans came through. They lived in one land, left it in one catastrophe, arrived within one span. They describe four different countries.
The Remsousakōte, People of Susakōte, are the most numerous, fair to olive of skin, living some sixscore years. They are the merchants and artisans of the elven presence in Rhaedwyn, and its bankers and, in Vavirian, a fair portion of its criminals. Their Sharilar was a kingdom of boundless wealth, harmony and beauty: golden sunsets, wide willow forests, the peace of ages.
The Rembahsani, People of Vahsana, are next in number and are chiefly found among the dwarves in the Wetlands. They are pale as alabaster with deep blue eyes that men say are made of ice, and they claim understanding of magic. Their Sharilar was a paradise of floating cities and forests that climbed to the heavens, where the elves built engines to draw spellwork from their own sun.
The Remukshemir, People of Ukshemir, were golden-skinned and are gone. Their Sharilar was a land of fire and ash, and they said so, and named the accounts of the other clans lies. They were distrusted by their own cousins for it. Three centuries ago they built a fleet and sailed north into the seas of the Uninhabitable North and have not been heard of since.
The Remporiten, People of Poritin, are the smallest clan, ashen-faced and red-eyed, and dwell now in underground keeps deep in the Taurus in a standing détente with the Dragon-Kings that neither party has yet broken. They call their homeland Kaketopos, the Lands of Eternal Struggle: infertile soil, cold winds, monstrous wildlife. They lived high in the mountains of Sharilar because the lowlands could not be lived in, and they say plainly that no elves truly lived there.
Set these side by side. Susakōte's endless wealth. Vahsana's floating cities. Ukshemir's fire and ash. Poritin's cold struggle in the high places, where the lowlands are uninhabitable and the other clans are describing lowlands.
A careless reader concludes that three clans are lying. A slightly better reader concludes that a lost homeland becomes whatever the exiles need it to be, that prosperous merchants remember prosperity and mountain-dwellers remember struggle, and that centuries of grief will do the rest. That reading is sound and I hold it in part.
But I will offer a third, which nobody in Sobsia has troubled to consider because it requires taking the elves seriously as witnesses rather than as sufferers. Sharilar may have been large. A land may be golden in its river valleys and ashen in its volcanic east and murderous in its high mountains, all at once, exactly as Eryndor is; and four peoples out of four regions may each describe their own portion accurately and find, in exile, that the others are describing somewhere unrecognisable. The Remporiten say no elves truly lived in the lowlands. They mean no elves of theirs did.
I cannot prove this. But I note that it is the only reading that requires nobody to be lying, and I note also that the Remukshemir, who said fire and ash and were called liars for it by every other clan, are the ones who built a fleet and sailed into the North and did not come back. People who are inventing a homeland do not usually go looking for it.
I close this book with the kindreds I cannot see, and I keep the promise I made in my prologue: where I know little, I shall say how little.
Of the Empire of Sagremar and its Tabaxi I have this, and it is all secondhand. Three words are said to be sacred there: blood, order, security. Those few travellers who have passed the Great Walls and returned describe an ordered realm in which logic and reason outrank passion and every life is weighed against the whole; vast cities under purple-leaved trees; straight avenues patrolled by silent wardens; eight-legged insects bred as mounts and beasts of burden. The realm is ruled by an Empress bearing the title of the August Personade of the Heavens, who is said to have reigned unbroken since the Great Gates were closed after the Shardspire shattered. No foreign embassy is recognised. No map of the interior is trusted. Messengers cross the Wall under heavy ritual and rarely come back.
I record that I do not know whether the Empress is one person of extraordinary duration, a succession keeping one title, or an office that has been vacant for centuries behind a wall nobody can check. I record that the closing of the Gates at the shattering of the Shardspire is the single most interesting fact in this chapter, since it means that whatever Sagremar is, it decided at the exact moment of the catastrophe that the rest of the world was not worth the risk, and has not revised that judgment in two thousand years.
Of the Uninhabitable North I have less. It is not a region so much as the place where the mapmakers stop: humid air, endless rainforest, and a great many things that bite or poison on contact. Sailors and trappers who skirt the fringes speak of trees taller than towers, rivers the colour of bruises, and nights so loud with insect song that no one sleeps. No expedition has returned with a reliable account of the interior and most have not returned at all. The wandering Yuan-ti claim it as a homeland, and say their Dream of Grasses was first whispered in those jungles; but they treat the true heart of the North as half-remembered and better left so, which from a people who claim it as home is worth setting down exactly.
Of the fera I have a name and no confidence that I use it correctly.
The compiler: So this book, which began with the kindreds who made the light, ends with three peoples I cannot see and one whose name I may be getting wrong. That is the honest shape of it, and I have arranged it so deliberately, that the descent should be visible: from those who sang, to those who came after, to those who were made, to those who came from beyond, to those the light has not reached at all. A mirror shows what the lamp falls upon and it shows the edge of the lamp's reach as well, and the second is not a defect in the mirror.
One thing more, and then I will let the reader go on to the ages. I have written in this book of a people who elect the man nobody voted for, of a realm that ranks a painted wall with a held pass, of dwarves who cast their promises in iron, of a garrison that wonders whether it has a soul, and of exiles who cannot agree on the colour of their own sky. Not one of these kindreds orders the world as my order orders it. Not one of them would write the table in my first chapter.
I have set my table down anyway, because a compiler must. But I would have the reader carry out of this book the thing it took me thirty years and four rewritten chapters to learn: that the light does not only show us what is out there. It shows us where we were standing when we looked.
Return to the Table of the Rubrics
Here endeth the Fourth Book.