A Word Before the Tales
The books before this one are history, or as near to it as I could bring them. This one is not. It is a gathering of the stories the people of Highcrest tell one another about the Age of Banners: about the guilds, and the old enemies, and the folk who must go on living between the two. I have checked such of them as could be checked. Some of them could not. I have put them in anyway, because a history that leaves out what people believe has left out half of what happened.
The Week There Was No Pie
In the winter of 1131, the Widow Hollowbrook ran out of flour. It was a hard winter, the river froze below the mill, and the goblins had come early for the Rent of Bread and taken the last of what she had laid by. So on the seventh day, when the reset bells rang and the kobolds came back up into her cellar as they always did, she had nothing to pay a guild with, and no guild came.
She sat in her kitchen with the lamp out, to save the oil, and listened to the kobolds below. She knew the sounds by then: the scuttling, the arguing, the drip of a great many candles, the long contented gnawing that meant Old Gnawbelly had found the cheese. And then, late in the night, she heard a thing she had never heard in twenty-eight years. Someone came up the cellar stairs, and knocked on the kitchen door.
It was Wickmaster Pip, with his candle lit on his head and his hat in his hands, and the wax running down into his eyes. He wished to know, he said, in the high anxious voice of his people, whether something was the matter. Nobody had come. Every week for twenty-eight years somebody had come, and shouted, and stood in the wrong places, and been sat on by the rat, and then come back and done it properly. It was, Pip said, the only part of the week a kobold could rely on. He had not slept for twenty-eight years and he had always known how the week would end. He did not know now. He did not care for it.
The Widow told him about the flour. Pip went back down the stairs without a word, and came up again an hour later with the rat behind him, and the rat had a sack in its teeth, and the sack was full of flour; for kobolds steal everything, and what they cannot burn they keep. The Widow baked by candlelight, with a great many candles, which Pip lent her and counted afterwards. In the morning she walked to Highcrest with the pie and a guild came down that afternoon, and was, by every account, the worst guild that had ever entered Hollowbrook Cellar, and the kobolds were delighted.
The Widow has never run out of flour since. Every midwinter, a sack of it turns up on her cellar stairs. She does not ask where from. She has noticed that the bakers of the vale have, too.
The Audit of Grukk
Grukk the Gatekeeper was hired by the archmage Vel'Thuran to keep the gate of the Wyrmspire and paid one year in advance, and that was some twelve hundred years ago, and he has been keeping a record of what he is owed. Since the first Turning he has been keeping it with particular care, because every week a guild knocks him down at his own gate, and every week he is stood back up again, and he regards each of these as a shift.
In 1179 the record came to the attention of a goblin of the Lowgate named Ledgerwise Fenn, a clerk of the Warrens, who had read the Concord, and the footnote, which is longer. The footnote says, among a great many other things, that any free folk of the realm who are owed a wage by a servant of the realm may bring a claim for it before the Crown; and an archmage bound to his tower is, in the footnote’s view, still a servant of the realm, having never been dismissed. Fenn thought this was a very interesting footnote. Fenn walked up the Wyrmspire road with an abacus and a folding stool.
Grukk did not kill him. This surprised everyone, including Grukk. It is the opinion of the Warrens that nobody had ever before come up that road wanting to talk to Grukk rather than past him, and that he did not know what to do about it, and so he sat down. They sat at the gate for three days. Fenn went through the record with him line by line. It was cut into the gatepost with a thumbnail, and it went down into the ground.
The sum, with twelve hundred years of interest at the rate the goblins consider customary, came to a little more than the treasury of the Crown, and a little less than the treasury of the Crown and the Rolls of Renown together. Fenn wrote it out fair, and Grukk made his mark on it, which took some time, and Fenn carried the claim down to Highcrest and laid it before the Crown.
The Crown has replied that it is looking into the matter. Fenn calls on Grukk every month to tell him so. The guilds of the Wyrmspire report that Grukk is in a measurably better temper since the audit, and hits them a little less hard, and asks each one on the way in whether they have heard anything from the Crown.
The Forty-First Time
There was a guild called the Ninth Lantern that went to Ravenhold Keep forty times and did not bring down Lord Varric. This is not a record. It is not even remarkable; the taverns of Highcrest are full of guilds who have done worse. But it is the Ninth Lantern that the old raiders tell of, because of what happened on the forty-first.
They were not a good guild. Their leader was a young man named Corrin Ashby, who had rented a basement under a chandler’s shop with money that was not entirely his, and put up a notice, and taken anyone who answered it. They could get past Warden Holt, mostly. They could get past the Ravenmother, some weeks. But Lord Varric’s blows came down too heavily for one shield, and the passing of him from one to the next is the thing that Ravenhold teaches, and the Ninth Lantern had not learned it. Every week they reached his hall, and every week he put them on the floor.
On the forty-first week they came into the hall, and Lord Varric looked up from his seat, and said: “The Lantern. Again.” He had never spoken to them before. He had never, so far as anybody knew, spoken to any guild before it came at him. Corrin Ashby, at the back, with one hand raised, said afterwards that the voice was not angry. It was something nearer to hope.
“The tall one with the shield,” said the dead lord, rising. “You hold too long. When the second blow falls, step out, and let the other take me. You have been told it forty times. Hear it.” And he drew his sword, and they fought; and when the second blow fell the tall one with the shield stepped out, and the other took him, and the Ninth Lantern brought down Lord Varric Ravenhold for the first time, and stood in his hall and did not know what to do.
The old raiders say the lord was smiling when he fell. They say, too, that he speaks now to every guild that comes to his hall more than a dozen times without winning, and tells it what it is doing wrong, and that this is what the Ravenmother’s bargain was for. Corrin Ashby went on to lead the Ninth Lantern up the Wyrmspire, and down into the Sanctum, and there is a statue of him in the chandler’s basement now, one hand raised. It is not a very good statue. The guild could not afford a better one.
Brother Ash and the Towel
Every raider knows the saying of the Sunken Crypt: bring a towel. Not every raider knows that it was first said by one of the Unquiet, a priest of Maelis called Brother Ash, who rose in the Grey Tithe and marched out of the Ashfen and stood nine days in the rain at the gates of Highcrest, and then turned and fought at the Leechwater ford.
He was a fisherman before he died, the Unquiet say, and not a good one, and the Mother of Leeches had taken his whole village. At the ford he went at her with an oar. He did not break her; the songs give that to others, which he says is fair. But he was there, and he got her blood on him, and it took him three hundred years to get it out of his robe.
When the Charter was given he was among the first of the Unquiet to take up a banner, and he went into the Sunken Crypt with the very first guild that dared it, as their healer, because he knew the way and did not need to breathe. It was he who told them what to bring. They did not listen, and came out with bog in places they had not known they had, and Brother Ash stood on the step with a dry towel over his arm and gave it to the leader, and that is the saying.
He is still a healer. He has been in more guilds than anyone can count, and outlived most of them, which is a thing the Unquiet do without trying. When a young healer comes to him and asks how a dead man keeps his hope through eighty years of the Turning, of bringing the same Lich-Captain down every week only to see him stand up again, Brother Ash gives the answer of his people, which is that they have all the time in the world. Then he gives them a towel.
Bessie, Which I Said I Would Not Repeat
In the book of the lands I wrote that the guilds tell stories about Bessie the Unmilkable, a cow of Greenmeadow Vale, and that I had checked them, and that they were true, and that I would not repeat them. I have since received forty-one letters about this, eleven of them from the same farmer, and I have been told at the Athenaeum door by a dwarf in full plate that a history which promises a cow and does not deliver one is no history at all. I yield.
Bessie is a red cow with one white ear, and she belongs to nobody, and she has never been milked. Many have tried. A farmer of the vale tried in the first year of the Charter, and was found the next morning in the top of an elm. Two guilds tried for a wager, and the wager was settled by the healers. A paladin of the Dawn Lamp tried, in the conviction that no beast of the Kindlers’ making could refuse the light, and the light, it seems, could be refused.
The guilds now go out to Greenmeadow to fight her for her bell, which is said to bring luck, and which nobody has ever kept for longer than a week, because Bessie comes back for it. She walks into Highcrest on the morning of the Turning, unhurried, and down whatever street she likes, and into whatever guild hall the bell is in, and the doors do not hold. She takes it back. She does not hurt anybody who stands aside. She has eaten three notice boards.
The farmer who has written to me eleven times believes that Bessie is not a cow at all, but one of the Kindlers, gone down into the world in the shape least likely to be bothered, and very annoyed at being bothered regardless. I have no view on this. I will only record that the Cathedral of the Lamps, when I asked, did not say no.
A Letter Home from the Reaches
This letter was given to the Athenaeum by a Tidekin woman of the Saltwind Coast, from her son, who served before the mast on a guild ship in the Corsair Reaches. She gave it, she said, because she wished somebody to keep it who would not cry on it. I have kept it.
Mother, the ship is good and the guild is better, and the cook is a troll who can make anything out of anything, and mostly does. We took a Brethren sloop in the Blackwake Strait and the Admiralty is very pleased with us and gave us a pennant. I sleep in a hammock by the powder. You would not like it. I do. We have been through the Maw twice. You said never steer for the green light and I have not, and I will not, I promise. But I want to tell you that I have seen it. We were in the storm, in the dark, and the Kraken had come up and gone down again, and everyone was at the pumps. And I looked over the rail and there it was under us, very deep and very green, turning. Mother, it was so slow. It was turning so slowly, like someone who had been waiting a long time and did not mind waiting longer. I did not steer for it. I only looked. I wanted you to know that it is beautiful, so that you will not be afraid of it, when I come home and tell you the rest.
He came home that spring, and told her the rest, and went back to sea. The Tidekin woman said that he talks in his sleep now, sometimes, and that what he says is the Lullaby, the part before it stops; and that he has never been taught it.
The Night the Bells Rang Themselves
The reset bells of Highcrest hang in the tower of the Cathedral of the Lamps, and are rung at the end of every seventh day by a ringer of the Cathedral, by hand, as they have been rung since the first Turning. In the winter of 1186 the ringer was a girl of seventeen named Tamsin Hale, and in that winter she read the paper of the Starfall astronomers that nobody else had read, and saw what it meant.
She went up into the tower on the seventh night and sat down beside the ropes. She did not ring. She meant, she said afterwards, only to see what would happen: whether the Wyrm would stay down, and the star stay lit, and the week simply go on, as weeks did before there were guilds. She had a lamp and a cold supper and a great deal of courage, and she sat with her back to the wall and watched the ropes, and the hour came.
The ropes moved. Nobody was holding them. They went down and up, and down and up, slow and even as a good ringer’s hands, and the bells spoke over the city, all twelve, in their order; and Tamsin Hale, who had climbed the tower to save one star, went to the window and watched it go out. It was low in the east, and small, and she had never noticed it before, and she has never forgotten where it was.
When the bells were done there was a copper on the floor by the ropes that had not been there before. It was a goblin coin, worn smooth, and on the face of it was a laughing mouth. She did not pick it up. She went down the stairs and across the city in the dark to the Athenaeum, and knocked until she woke the archivist, and told him.