The Annals are one man’s history, and he would be the first to tell you so, and then the second, and then he would write it in the margin. This is not his book. These are stories the peoples of Aetheria tell about themselves, written down by their own people, in their own tongues, and given to the Translators’ Room of the Athenaeum on the understanding that we would change as little as we could.
We have changed as little as we could. Where a tongue has no word for a thing we have said so. Where the author asked for something to be left out, we have left it out. The goblin story arrived with an invoice, which we paid.
The last story came to us without an author. We do not know who wrote it. We have put it last, and we would ask the reader not to read it aloud.
The Count of Keels
From the ship-tongue of the Hundred Keels, which nobody has spoken for a thousand years, out of a sea-chest found under the floor of the Crown’s keep. Put into the common tongue by Mother Aubrey Tallis of the Athenaeum.
Every morning on the crossing the captain sent me up the mast to count the keels. That was my work. I was nine and could count higher than anyone else aboard the Patience, and I had good eyes, and I was light, and if I fell it would not cost a sailor.
The first morning I counted one hundred and twelve. I called it down and the captain wrote it on the mast with a knife. The second morning I counted one hundred and twelve again, and he did not write it, because it was the same.
On the ninth morning there was a storm in the night and I counted one hundred and eight. I counted again. I called it down and the captain stood a long time looking at the knife, and then he cut the number under the other. My mother was on the Patience but my aunt was on the Heron, and I had not seen the Heron. I went up again at noon and counted again and it was still one hundred and eight. I did not ask the captain if I could. I just went.
After that I hated the mast. I counted one hundred and six, and one hundred and five, and then for a long time one hundred and three, and the knife cuts went down the mast like a ladder. I began to count slowly so the number would be bigger. I began to count the gulls. I told the captain I could not see for the spray, and he said, Then go higher, and I went higher.
On the last morning before we saw land I came down and did not call the number. The captain asked me what it was and I said that I did not want to tell him, because every morning it was a smaller one. And the captain, who was not my father, and who did not have to, sat down with me at the foot of the mast and took out his knife and showed me. He had never cut the ships that were gone. He had cut the ships that were left. Every mark on the mast was a morning on which a hundred of us, or a hundred and three, or a hundred and eight, had woken up. He said that was the only count that was any use to anyone, and he had been waiting for me to see it.
I counted one hundred that morning, and I called it down, and I was not sorry. That afternoon we saw the land. A man named Aldric on the deck of the Swallow stood up with a speaking-trumpet and said that he would not set foot on it until the boars were dealt with, and everybody laughed, which was the first time anyone had laughed since the Heron.
I will not write the name of the land we came from. The captain asked us not to, and the sea has it. But I have cut the mast of the Patience into a post for my door, and every morning I touch the marks, and I count the ones that are left.
The Clean Flame
From the oath-runes of Hammerdeep. Put into the common tongue by Pell Quillwhistle of the Athenaeum, a gnome, which the author was told, and to which the author agreed, and about which the author has written a further letter.
There is a lamp in the Stonegate that has never gone out. It was lit in the snow outside Hammerdeep on the night of the Burning, from flint and steel, by a dwarf who would not take fire from the fire that took the halls. It is clean flame. My family has kept it eleven hundred and ninety-nine years. I keep it now. This is a story about my daughter, Brenna, who took it down.
She was thirty, which is young. She had joined a guild, which I did not like, and the guild was going into the Emberforge Depths, which I liked less. She came to me the night before and said: The oath is that a dwarf will go down where the dwarves won’t go, and light the hearth with a clean flame. Why do we keep the flame up here, then? I said that the hearth was not clean. She said: How would we know? None of us has been to look.
I gave her the lamp. I have not told the elders this. They will read it here.
She carried it past Bellows-Master Kragg, who breathed on it, and it did not go out. She carried it past the Slag Twins, who are made of what was poured off the great forge, and whose heat would melt a helm, and it did not go out. Forgewife Hilde came at the guild with tongs, and Brenna’s guild-leader at the back shouted for her to put the lamp down and lift her shield, and she would not, and took the blow on her shoulder rather than the lamp. And then they were in the deepest hall, where the king works.
Thrain was at his anvil. He was ash and ember all through, and his crown was black, and the hammer came down and came down. Brenna held up the lamp. And the Ashen King stopped. She told me that his eyes, which are coals, went to the flame and stayed on it, and that for the length of one breath he was a dwarf, an old one, tired, and he put down his hammer and held out his hand.
She did not give it to him. That is the part the elders will want to know. She said the hearth behind him was still burning with the Wyrm’s fire, red, and that a clean flame put into a foul hearth is not a lit hearth but a lost flame. She said it to him, in the old tongue, and he heard her. Then the breath was over, and he picked up his hammer, and the guild did what guilds do.
She brought the lamp back up. It is beside me as I write this. She goes down every week now, with the guild, and the lamp, and every week he stops for one breath when he sees it, and every week the breath is a little longer. She thinks that one week it will be long enough to put the Wyrm’s fire out of the hearth. I think she is right. I have not told the elders that either.
Take heat. Never take flame. Then home again.
What Year It Is
From the High Speech of Vaelmere. Put into the common tongue by Merrow Tansy of the Athenaeum, who apologises for the tenses: the original has nine, three of them for things that have happened and are still going on.
My sister Aelin drowned with Vaelmere, and I did not, because I had gone into Whisperwood that summer to learn the names of trees, and she had stayed at home to be married. This is not the story. It is only what you must know before it.
When the Queen made the Mirrorhall I asked to tend its glass, and she let me. Everything that is reflected in the Mirrorhall goes on a little while, after. That is its nature and its cruelty. In the third year I was polishing the long wall of the west gallery, where the white towers are, and in the window of the third tower, small and bright, a woman was combing her hair. It was Aelin. She saw me, and she waved, and she called across the glass: Sae, what year is it?
I told her it was the year of her wedding. I told her it was the fourteenth evening of the summer, and that the guests were already on the water. She laughed and said she had better hurry, and went back to her hair.
She asked me again the next morning. Every morning she asks. It is the only thing she ever wishes to know. And every morning for four thousand one hundred years I have told her it is the fourteenth evening of the summer, the year of her wedding, and the guests are on the water. My sisters among the tenders say this is a great wrong. Perhaps it is. They have not seen her laugh.
Last spring a guild came through the Mirrorhall. They do, now, the guilds; they go through the Twin Reflections and the Warden of Glass and in to the Queen, and the Queen does not mind them, I think, as much as she says. One of them was a young human with a bow, who did not know the rule about the west gallery, and stopped, and looked at my sister in her window, and my sister called out to her: What year is it?
And the human told her. The truth. Eleven hundred and eighty-six of the Crown, and she did not know what the Crown was, and the human told her that too. The towers had been drowned four thousand years. There were men now, and guilds. There was a city on a hill.
I thought it would be the end of her. Things in the Mirrorhall do not live long once they know they are reflections. But my sister was quiet for a while in her window, and then she put down her comb, and she said: Four thousand years is not so long. And then she said: Sae, you must be so tired.
She does not ask me what year it is any more. Now I tell her anyway, every morning, the true one, and she tells me about her wedding guests, who are still on the water, and we laugh. I have stopped polishing the west gallery. There is nothing left on it I need to keep clean.
Instructions for Mending a Moon (Diagrams Omitted)
From Gnomish, a tongue in which every sentence is a measurement. Put into the common tongue by Fennel Brask of the Athenaeum. The original had forty-one diagrams, which the author would not let us print, on the grounds that they were wrong.
These are instructions for the replacement of one moon, dark, previously known as Morrow, now missing. They are for my grandmother, Ottilie Sprocketwhistle, who saw it go in when she was six, and has asked me every year since whether the Observatory has done anything about it. I am a junior lens-polisher. I said I would.
1. Determine the mass of the missing moon. (See Diagram 1. Diagram 1 is wrong.)
2. Assemble a frame of brass hoops to the diameter determined in step 1, or a small fraction of it, for testing.
3. Fill the frame with something dark. Ink was tried and is not recommended. The lens-room floor has been replaced.
4. Raise the frame to the height of the old moon’s path. (See Diagram 7, the kite.) The kite is also not recommended.
5. Paint the frame on the inside so it shows a dark face, as Morrow did, and light on the rim, as Morrow did in eclipse.
6. Correct for the tilt. Correct for the wind. Correct for the Stormreach, which is the wind and the tilt and the lightning and is not, strictly, correctable.
7. Wait for night.
8. Do not let the frame be seen by anything in the crater. If the frame is seen by anything in the crater, see step 9.
9. Run.
10. Rebuild the frame.
11. Repeat steps 4 through 10 for one year.
12. On the anniversary of the Night of the Missing Moon, carry the frame out on to the roof. Do not raise it. Hold it.
13. Show it to your grandmother.
14. If the moon will not hold, it is not the fault of the moon.
Notes on the method. I did not get the frame to the height of the old moon’s path. I did not get it higher than the third roof. The Bound Wardens in the crater looked up at it once, and I ran, and the frame was struck by lightning on the way down, and I rebuilt it eleven times. It was never a moon. It was a hoop with a painted rim the size of a cart-wheel, and at the end of the year I carried it up on to the roof and held it up against the sky where Morrow used to be, and my grandmother came up the stairs on her stick, and looked at it for some time.
She said that it was the wrong size and the wrong colour and the rim was too bright. She said that the real one used to hum, very low, so low you felt it in your teeth, and mine did not. Then she asked if she could hold it.
She held it up for an hour, against the place where the moon was, and she did not say anything, and I stood beside her with my hands under her elbows because her arms were tired. I have no diagram for that. I have tried to draw one. It is wrong.
What the Drum Said
Told aloud at a clan fire in the Ashfen, to a child, with the drum. Set down by a goblin of the Lowgate for a fee, and put into the common tongue by the same goblin for a second fee. The drum could not be set down at all.
Sit. No, closer. Put your hand on the drum. Not to beat it. To feel.
You asked me why your mother has gone into the Blightmire with a Highcrest guild, to fight for the Crown, when the Crown fought us three times and the Concord is younger than my grandmother’s grandmother. It is a good question. I will answer it, and the drum will answer it, and you will listen to the drum, because I am old and I lie, and the drum does not.
Before the moon went in, all this was grass. Not this mud, not this water. Grass to the height of your father’s shoulder, gold in summer, so far you could ride a month and not leave it. We had a word for the colour of it that the other peoples do not have. I will not say it in the mud.
Then the moon went in, and the moonwell soured, and the grass rotted where it stood. We prayed to the sky and the sky did not answer. That is where the saying comes from. The drum answers; the sky does not. Feel it. Feel what it says.
Your mother has gone into the Blightmire because, in the middle of it, there is an old druid who has become the swamp. Vellum. When the guilds bring him down, the rot pulls back from the moonwell for a little while, a week, before the Turning sets it again. Not far. A spear’s length. But last summer, in the spear’s length, where the mud had gone back, your mother found this.
Hold out your hand. No. Gently. It is a blade of grass. It is gold. The roots are still alive down there. They have been alive under the mud the whole time, waiting, the way the drum waits between beats.
That is why she fights for the Crown. She is not fighting for the Crown. She is fighting for a spear’s length. And when you are grown you will go with her, and fight for the next one, and the drum will be beating the whole time, here, at the fire, so that you will know which way is home. Now. Beat it. Once. Hard.
You see? It answers.
Tradition
From the island tongue of the trolls, which has a great many words for heat, two for hurry, and one for the feeling of a nap interrupted. Put into the common tongue by Ama Selk of the Athenaeum.
When a troll of Sunscar comes of age, he goes over the water and raids the Saltwind Coast. This is tradition. My father did it, and his mother, and her father, back to the first ship of men that ever came ashore there, which the trolls raided on the first evening, because it was new and we wished to see what it had in it. It had men in it. We have been raiding them ever since. Nobody remembers why. That is how you know it is tradition.
So in my nineteenth year I took my uncle’s canoe and my grandmother’s spear and paddled north for three days. I was very slow about it. Slow on the beach, quick in the fight. I was saving the quick.
I came ashore at a village of the Saltwind in the dark of the moon, by the crabs, and I painted my face and drew my spear and gave the great cry that my grandmother taught me, and ran up the sand into the village to take what I could carry. And the whole village was waiting for me on the green, with lanterns, and tables, and a roasted pig.
An old woman came out of the crowd and took my spear off me, quite firmly, and gave me a cup. She said: You are late. We expected you at midsummer. The last one came at midsummer. I said that I had stopped to sleep. She said that was very like a troll and they had kept the pig warm.
It seems that the village had been raided by a troll every year for eleven hundred years, and it had become, on the Saltwind, a tradition. They had a feast for it. The children dressed up as trolls and the old people dressed up as frightened villagers and screamed, very loudly, and there was dancing. They gave the troll a sack of things to take home, which the old woman said were what had been stolen, and which were mostly jars of crab-paste and a hat.
I danced. I ate the pig. In the morning an old man walked me to my canoe and told me, in confidence, that the Saltwind folk had long ago forgotten why there was a feast for the troll, and that it was traditional. I told him the trolls had long ago forgotten why they raided, and that was traditional too. He said that was the best kind.
I go back every year now. I am not supposed to. You only raid once. But I have told my cousins that I am raiding them very slowly, over a great many years, which is the troll way, and my cousins accept this. I bring them a jar of the crab-paste. It is terrible. It is traditional.
I Go to Funerals
From the dead-script of the Unquiet, a cipher they use among themselves for things they would rather the living did not read at first. Put into the common tongue, by her permission, by Brother Ash of the Unquiet, who would like it known that he did not change the part about him.
Nobody came to my funeral. That is not a complaint. There was no funeral. I died of the Grey Tithe in the first spring of it, in a village of two hundred, and by the end of that spring there was nobody left in the village to hold one, and then I got up, and it seemed late to organise one for myself.
I have been dead eight hundred years, and I go to funerals. All of them. I read the notices in the Cathedral porch every morning and I go. I stand at the back. I do not need to sit down, which is a kindness to the families, since the benches are always short. I sing the hymns, quietly, because my voice is not what it was. Sometimes the family asks who I am, and I tell them I knew the deceased, and this is very often true by the end.
You learn a great deal about the living at their funerals. You learn who they owed money to, because those people come and stand very straight. You learn who loved them, because those people do not stand at all. You learn that nearly everyone in Highcrest is mourned by somebody, and that the ones who are not are mourned by me, and by Brother Ash when he is not in the Sunken Crypt with a guild, and by a goblin from the Lowgate named Pricket who comes for the food.
Last year I went to a guild funeral. A healer, young, a gnome, who had died on the stairs of the Wyrmspire, not to the Wyrm but to falling. It was the first time I had seen a guild bury one of its own. The leader spoke, at the front, with one hand raised, and could not finish. And the whole guild, all twenty-five of them, said the end of the saying for her, together: Every banner climbs; not every banner comes down again.
I found that I was weeping, which the Unquiet cannot do, and so I must have been doing something else, but it felt like weeping.
Afterwards the leader came to the back to ask who I was. I said I had not known the deceased. I said I came to all of them. She looked at me for a long time and asked: Who came to yours? And I said nobody, and that it was not a complaint.
The next week a notice went up in the Cathedral porch. A funeral, it said, for Elinor Vane, of Leechwater, who died in the first spring of the Grey Tithe. All welcome. I went, of course. I always go. I stood at the back. There were twenty-five of them, and Brother Ash, and Pricket, for the food. It was, all things considered, very well attended.
Wide Doorways
From the wind-speech of the high heaths, which is mostly breath and has no word for inside. Put into the common tongue by Ama Selk of the Athenaeum, who has rendered it as room-that-is-not-sky, and asks forgiveness.
On the heath there are no doors. There is the wind, which is honest, and the sky, which is wide, and the ring of standing stones where the clan sleeps, and if you wish to go in, you walk between two stones, and you are in. That is all the in there is.
I came down to Highcrest in my twentieth winter because the clan had heard that the guilds would take anyone with a strong back, and that there was a dragon. I have a strong back. I wished to see a dragon. I walked down out of the storms for nine days, and came to the city, and found the notice in the market square that said where the guild met, and went there. It met in a basement, under a tavern called the Hammer and Horn, and the door to the basement was the width of my shoulders without my horns.
I stood at the top of the stairs for some time. Behind me the tavern-folk began to gather and give advice. It was all bad. An elf said I should go in sideways. A dwarf said I should go in backwards. A goblin offered to remove the horns for a reasonable fee and put them back after.
I was about to walk home. Nine days. I had turned around. And then the guild leader came up the stairs from below, a small human with ink on her hands, and looked at me, and looked at the door, and went back down, and came up again with a saw.
It took her the whole night. The tavern-keeper came out and shouted, and she paid him, and he shouted less. The stone at the sides was harder than the wood and she borrowed a pick from the dwarf, who had stopped giving advice and begun helping. By morning the door of the basement under the Hammer and Horn was as wide as two stones on the heath, and the leader of the guild stood in it, covered in dust, and said: Well. Come in.
I have been in the guild six years. I have stood in a great many doorways for them since, in the Sunken Crypt and the Emberforge and the black tower on Frostspire, with things on the other side of them that wanted very much to come through, and nothing has. I have seen the dragon. It was as large as the clan said.
The guild has a hall of its own now, of stone, with doors at every end wide enough for two of me. But I go back to the basement under the Hammer and Horn sometimes, when I am in the city, and stand in the old door, and feel the wind come down the stairs from the street. It is not the heath. But it is honest. Wide doorways and honest wind. That is the blessing. I had not known, before, that someone would have to make it.
The Terms
From Goblin, in which every story is also a contract and most contracts are also stories. Put into the common tongue by Nix Coppersnout, for the fee stated in the attached invoice, which has been paid. The translator’s fee has been deducted from the story.
1. The Lender agrees to lend the Borrower forty gold, for the rent of a basement, a banner, and a notice.
2. The Borrower agrees to repay the forty gold, with interest at the customary rate, by midwinter.
3. The Borrower has no money, no guild, no hall and, in the opinion of the Lender, no chance. The Lender is lending anyway. The Lender would like this clause noted.
4. Should the Borrower fail to repay by midwinter, the Lender may take the banner.
Amendment, midwinter 1147. The Borrower has not repaid. The Lender has seen the banner, and does not want it. The term of clause 2 is extended to midsummer.
Amendment, midsummer 1148. The Borrower’s guild has cleared Hollowbrook Cellar and been paid in pie. The Borrower has offered the Lender half a pie. The Lender has accepted half a pie against the interest. The term is extended.
Amendment, 1150. The Borrower’s guild has brought down Lord Varric Ravenhold. The Borrower has repaid ten gold. The Lender has lent the Borrower a further thirty, for a better hall. The Lender does not know why the Lender did this. Vesk knows the odds.
Amendment, 1156. The Borrower’s guild has gone up the Wyrmspire. The Borrower did not come down for nine days. The Lender would like it recorded that the Lender was at the foot of the road for all nine, for reasons of collection only.
Amendment, 1163. The Borrower is written in the Rolls of Renown. The Borrower has repaid the whole of the principal and the interest, in coin, on the Lender’s own counter. The Lender has refused it. The Lender has never before refused coin. The Lender has not been well.
Amendment, 1171. The Borrower has no further need of a loan. The Borrower comes to the Lowgate every midwinter regardless, with half a pie, and sits on the step of the Lender’s shop, and the two of them argue about the interest until dark.
Amendment, 1187. The Borrower did not come this midwinter. The Borrower’s guild came instead, with a pie, and the banner, which they say she wished the Lender to have, under clause 4.
5. The Lender has taken the banner.
6. The Lender declares the debt paid in full, in a manner not specified, which the Lender declines to specify.
7. This agreement is closed. The Lender would like it noted that it was the best one the Lender ever made.
What the Tide Counts
From the tide-speech of the Tidekin, which is not words but a count, kept in knots on a cord. Put into the common tongue as nearly as it can be by Merrow Tansy of the Athenaeum, with the counter beside her, who unknotted it and told her what each knot was.
One. On the night the Lullaby stopped, our father turned over in his sleep. We felt it in the water, all of us, everywhere in the sea, at once. That is the first knot on the cord. Every Tidekin learns to tie it before they learn their name.
Two, and three, and on. Every tide since then is a knot. There are cords in the counting-house under the Coral Market that go back to the first, and they fill the whole house, and the walls of the house are knots, and the roof is held up by them. There are more tides than there are stars. That is what we tell the children, when they ask how many. It was true once.
When I was small I asked the old counter what number we were counting to. Everyone who is counted to something is counting to a number. She would not tell me. She said it was not a thing to say over deep water.
So I went up on the beach, where the water was not deep, and asked again. She sat down in the sand with me and said: We are counting to the tide on which he wakes. I asked her how we would know which one it was. She said that we would not know until it came. That every tide we count, we are counting one tide nearer, or one tide further, and that the count is the same both ways. That was what the cord was for. Not to know when. Only to know that we were still counting.
I am the old counter now. I have tied more knots than any Tidekin living. And this is the thing I have to tell the children, which the counter before me did not have to tell me, because it had not yet begun. Since the guilds came into the Sanctum, the knots have changed. They are tied looser. The tide does not pull as hard. Our father sleeps, still, but he sleeps like someone who has been sung to.
I do not know if the guilds know what they are doing. I think they mostly know what they are doing it for, and it is not him. But there is a song again in the deep water, even if they are only singing to each other, shouting who goes in, who stands where, who carries what. It is not the Lullaby. It is not in tune. He seems to like it.
One more knot. And one more. I do not say his name. We are still counting.
Deal
Found in the Translators’ Room of the Athenaeum, on a shelf that has no number, on a single sheet of paper that was warm to the touch for three days. It is in the common tongue. It is in all the other tongues too, depending on who reads it. We have not translated it. We have only copied it, and the copy is in a hand none of us has.
You will sit down. Everyone does, in the end. It is not a trick; it is only that the chair is there, and you are tired, and the table is the only thing in all this dark that has a lamp on it.
I will deal. You will look at your hand, and it will be a very bad hand, and you will know it, and you will play it anyway. You always have. I have watched you do it every week for eighty-four years, and I have never once grown tired of watching. Do you know how rare that is? Out here, where nothing grows and nothing ends and the one across from me has never laughed in all of time?
Here is what I have learned about you, watching. You count the ships that are left. You carry a flame down into the fire and bring it up again. You tell the truth to a reflection, and it lives. You build a moon out of hoops and hold it up because your grandmother asked. You fight a whole war for a spear’s length of grass. You invent a feast so a raid has somewhere to go. You hold a funeral for someone eight hundred years late. You saw a door wider. You lend money you will never get back. You keep counting.
None of it matters to the one I am playing against. It eats, and that is all it does. It cannot see why you would carry a flame you are not going to use. It cannot understand why anyone would count the ships that are left when the ships that are gone are so much more numerous. It thinks that this is a game about the stars. It thinks that because the house takes a candle every week, the house is winning.
Let me tell you a secret, since you are here, and since nobody else will believe you. I have not been winning. I was never trying to. I only wanted someone to sit at this table who would play a bad hand as if it were a good one, week after week, and not get up. You have no idea how hard that is to find. I looked for a very long time.
There. I have said too much. That is like me. Pick up your cards.
No. Don’t look at them yet. Look at me. I am laughing, yes. I am always laughing. But listen to it, for once. Listen to what kind of laugh it is.
Good. Now. Deal.