"A spark comes over the water on a Tuesday. By the Reading after next it either has a form that a second pair of hands can follow, or it goes back in the lake. I have tuned eleven. The Book has my name on all eleven and the house has the process on all eleven. That is the bargain. I took it."
Nahaskel cannot make a thing twice. A Nahaskeli casts a clockwork into being on the Casting-floor and cannot make a second, and the city's ideas leave it the way Pim's did, carried far downstream to the Order of Steam. Kaosadaemi is the near place. Under the ring at Ringhold sits the Tuning, the court of makers, and a spark that crosses from the city is tuned there: taken apart by people who can hold still, and given a form that can be made again by a second pair of hands. A tuned thing is entered in the Second Book, the Prince's ledger of what the city thought of and how it is made twice, and the house sells the thing or sells the process: a licence to the Order of Steam, a run of the object to the Thousand Kingdom, a recipe to a Vernua kitchen-comhar.
The Tuning takes anything. A clockwork, a spell-working, a dye, a bread, a knot: a tuning is whatever comes out the same the second time, and the tuners are Gnomes almost to a one, because the spin that generates the churn across the water is the same spin turned inward here, the idea arrived and the hands already moving, on somebody else's idea. The bargain is the house's. The tuner who gives a spark its repeatable form is paid and named in the Book; the process is the Prince's. The Book is the house's first fortune and the gate is the second.
"The road goes in at Greenmouth and comes out at the far side eleven days later, in the season it is meant to, with the people it went in with. I do not know how the house arranges the far side. I know that when a Roadward of another country tries it, the road takes a different number of days each time, and sometimes a different number of people."
The long road through the Basogur enters the trees at Greenmouth, and the Principality holds the gate. The Roadwards are the other craft: they take travelers and freight into the jungle's churn, where rails warp and runes fail and a path is where it was yesterday only by chance, and they bring them out on schedule, which no one else on Talan does. The Roadwards' schedule is why a merchant with cargo too heavy for an airship and too slow for a stillship comes to Ferryhithe.
The Daemi say the Roadwards are simply the best in the world at it, and they are. The road runs on time for another reason too, which the house keeps.
The road holds because the Prince pays the jungle's god, Basajun, a demi-god the Basogur's fear has made. Princess Hildrun made the first covenant, in the season the road first held; every holder of Ringhold makes it again at accession, face to face, and comes out with a grey streak and one love made impossible, the god's choice, recorded on a page of the Second Book.
Full text: The Basogur Jungle → The Road.
By the Principality's law every Roadward rests in the jungle at the end of life and becomes a tree beside the road that still knows the way. The hall knows it; the covenant stays the house's.
Full text: The Basogur Jungle → The Road.
"The Thousand fractured. The throne that made us died with its king. We were a principality on a border that no longer had a kingdom behind it, and the only thing on the other side of us was the churn. We stayed. Four hundred years later there is a throne again in Lograth and it has never sent for the title back. If a letter came, I would burn it. We are our own."
Under Renauld Fyrstmond's unified Thousand, the northeastern edge of Law's country faced the chaos district, and the throne granted it as a principality to Adalric Thornmond, who built Ringhold in the ring of Hringfel and held the road. The Dark Era killed Renauld and every claimant of his house, and the Thousand fractured back into the warring patchwork it had been; the kingdom that had granted the title ceased to exist, and the principality did not. Princess Wulfild Thornmond held Ringhold through the worst of the dark with nothing behind her, and the house counts its age from her.
Then the house did what a house does in a Gnome country for four generations: it married it. The Thousand's register writes a surname's ending from the bearer's own ancestry, so the heralds at Lograth, when they resumed keeping the northern rolls, wrote the fourth prince after Wulfild as Gundram Thornhollow, and the house has been -hollow since. It kept the rest of the Thousand's rule intact: the head of family designates the heir, the heir carries the house's prefix, a disinherited child walks out of the hall with a different surname than the one they walked in with, and gender has never entered any of it.
The first, granted the northeastern edge under Renauld's throne. Human; the seat's name was his.
Held Ringhold through the Dark Era's worst decades when the throne that granted it was already dead. The house counts its age from her.
The first the heralds wrote with the Gnome suffix, four generations on. The house had been marrying the country for a century by then; the roll caught up.
Opened the Second Book: the first Prince to buy a Nahaskel spark and have it made twice.
The present Prince's grandmother, remembered for the season the road first held.
The present holder. The designated heir is his sister's daughter, Sigrun.
The house has done the same thing every generation for four hundred years, in a country whose people change trades by the week. The Prince's clerks keep one count the house does not joke about: the young who leave for Nahaskel each year, and set their third name down at the quay.
The Daemi say the reason the Thornhollows have held four hundred years in Vesuna's country is that no Thornhollow has ever thrown a coin. The goddess reassigns what is cast; the house has never given her the chance. A Daemi who wants to keep something is told to do as the Prince does and keep her coin in her pocket.
"I stepped down at Ringhold expecting a march-town and found what I took, for the length of the platform, to be a heraldic display of unusual ambition: every house on the station street quartered in colour, and no two alike. I began, out of habit, to read them. A house of blue and copper; beside it one of green, gold, and a violet I could not place in any register I know. I had reached the fourth before a porter told me, kindly, that I was reading hair. A house in Ringhold wears the colours of whoever lives in it. When a tenant moves, the colour goes with them and the wall is repainted by the week's end; a house with one colour, he said, is a house that needs more people in it.
The workshops were worse, for a herald. Every one had an addition, and every addition looked a week old, because it was; the porter said they come and go with the work, and the buildings underneath do not move.
Then I turned, and the street ended in the palace, and I understood the town. It is grey. It is the only grey thing in Ringhold, a library with a fortress around it, and it has not changed since the Old King's clerks drew it. Everything in the Principality is allowed to change except the building where they write down what they have made."
Ringhold's buildings stay and their look does not. A house wears the hair-colours of the Gnomes who live in it, a stripe or a quarter for each, and when a tenant moves the colour goes with them and the wall is repainted within the week; the pigment comes from Hareaveldi, by the barrel, bought by Ringhold's own buyers; the town's colour is a live map of who lives where, read off the street the way the city reads its coin and the islands read their rings. A house of one colour is pitied aloud. The workshops under the ring carry additions that come and go with the work, a lean-to for a tuning that needs a forge this month and gone when it does not, and the buildings underneath were drawn by the Old King's surveyors. At the head of the street stands the palace, a library inside a fortress, grey, the Second Book in the middle of it, unchanged since the Thousand built it. The rail from the Thousand Kingdom ends at its foot.
The Principality's mouth to the sea: a harbour town on the Hafra facing the Northern Isle, the ferry to Zuzental's isles, a quay for the coasters, and the counting-house where the gate-tolls and the Book's licences are paid. Its families are as often Thousand Kingdom as Daemi, and the town speaks with both registers in one street.
At the other end of the country: a gate with a village behind it, the Roadwards' hall, and a row of stables where the road's beasts are picketed before they go into the trees. The Roadwards' hall keeps its own roll, in the Principality's three names.
A Daemi carries three names: given, born, tuning. The given name is old Germanic, the layer the Thousand's roll carried before the Dark Era and the Principality never gave up, so that a herald from Lograth hears his great-grandmother's names in a Ringhold street. The born name is the place in the Principality a person was born, said as a name: Ringhold, Ferryhithe, Greenmouth, a river-ward, a valley. The tuning is the family name, and it is the first thing the line ever made repeatable: Springlock, Coldstill, Netknot. A line that has tuned nothing carries its trade-word in the third slot instead, in the old forms, and everyone hears the difference. A baker line that tunes a bread stops being Baxter and becomes what it made, and the Prince's clerk writes the new name the day the process enters the Book.
The house carries the same three with the Thousand's surname where a tuning would stand: Wenzel Ringhold Thornhollow. The young who leave for Nahaskel set the third name down at the quay, and the quay-clerk at Ferryhithe enters the departure in the Prince's count.
Given (the old Germanic layer)
Born
Tuning
Trade-words (the old forms, for a line that has tuned nothing)
Whole names
The Gnomes hold the city's temperament across the water, the spin that generates the churn. In Kaosadaemi the same spin is turned on the method. A tuner tries a different way of making the thing the same every week until one holds, and let us try it differently this week is said in Ringhold over one spark for a month at a time. A spark is entered in the Book the week its making comes out identical to the week before.
A tuner of the Tuning, eleven entries in the Second Book.
A Roadward at the gate.
Whose report on Ringhold's colours is the most-copied outsider account.
The Prince's sister's daughter, and the designated heir.