Mordew

by Alex Pheby

  Gam Halliday

  A boy of the Southern Slums of Mordew, associate of Nathan Treeves, and who, by various turns and twists of fate, eventually goes on to far exceed what any reasonable party might consider to be his place in the world.

  Gentleman caller(s)

  A gentleman is a type of person known for his respectability, ownership of wealth, and civilised demeanour. But a man is always a man, and no matter how civilised he is, he is little more than an upright species of ape. He is prey to the animal urges his civilisation requires him to disavow. He might be able to perform his disavowals for a while, but not forever, and when he exhausts his ability to remain respectable he puts on his coat and hat and gloves and slinks through the darkness, catlike, avoiding his associates, to places where he knows no-one will recognise him. Here he looks for the telltale signs, separates the necessary coins from his purse, and calls upon whatever unfortunate person there values those coins more than they do their dignity.

  Ghost(s)

  The life of a man as he experiences it in the material realm is mirrored in the immaterial realm. Indeed, it is from the immaterial realm that the concepts he understands in the material realm derive. Without this mirroring, his life, if he could experience it (which he could not, since consciousness itself is a material residue of the immaterial realm), would just be so much undifferentiated matter sloshing about from one unnamed place to the next. There would be no meaning in it.

  In short, what makes a man a conscious individual, recognisable as himself, is the concept of him and the way that concept interacts with the other conceptual forms.

  While a man lives, there is a concert between the two realms, facilitated by the weft, but when a man’s matter takes a different form – when he ‘dies’ – then his concepts do not die with him, since a conceptual form is sempiternal and cannot be destroyed once it is conceived. His self, for want of a better term, freed from its mirroring in the material realm, exists forever in the immaterial realm. That is not to say he lives there, or goes about his business in a way that a material man would recognise, but also, he is not gone.

  Now, when magic is used in a place it loosens the weave of the weft, and as the weft is both the medium of and the conduit between the material and immaterial realms, concepts relating to and identical with a man may pass back from the immaterial realm, through this loosening, after his death.

  While these concepts cannot usually find a material form (though a Master might do it, or the Living Mud), there is enough latent weft Spark energy from the crossing to provide an analogue of material form in light (which is a very immaterial form of material matter), and so the image of the man may be seen and even recognised by his former associates. This is a ghost, and while a ghost and a man are not the same thing, they share many of each other’s characteristics and it can be disconcerting to see someone thought dead wandering about in the material realm. Consequently, ghosts, though innocuous in the main, produce dread in the living.

  Gill-men

  Some imagine that gill-men have been given gills so that they might swim around in comfort, but, though they do sometimes have call to enter the water, these gills are a function of the fact that they were raised in vats of the Living Mud and lungs were no use to them there. A lung, filled with any substance other than clean air, will clog and cease to function. Not so gills, which can filter out the goodness from most liquids, providing it is in there.

  Men who see a gill-man will first recognise its difference from themselves at a distance and eyelessness and featurelessness of face are something that can only be properly appreciated up close. Men will shun a thing they do not recognise or which they fear, so first they see the gills, gaping, and this is sufficient for them to pull back. They name them then ‘gill-men’, though, on closer inspection, their eyelessness and the earlessness of their heads is equally characteristic.

  If men were to concentrate on the gill-men’s lack of features instead of the presence of gills then the conjecture around their nature would focus on this important aspect of them – since they have magical senses – as opposed to leading to a supposition that they are a species, perhaps, of altered seal or porpoise, primarily used for underwater duties (which could not be further from the truth since the Master uses them for everything and there is little beneath the sea to concern him).

  Gin-house(s)

  Places where gin-wives sell their wares and where slum-dwellers gather to indulge in them (often to excess).

  (The) Glass Road

  Roads suffer many knocks and much rough treatment, glass is fragile, so it should surprise no-one that the Glass Road was made by magic. How else would these two natural considerations be reconciled except by turning nature on its head (which is what magic does)? The Glass Road is a spiral of magical glass large enough to loop the slopes of Mordew. Onto this glass have been cast hexes and fluences to allow the structure to deny nature. By some spells it is suspended above the ground against its natural desire to crash down (up in the air it does not interfere with the business of the city), and through other spells travel along it is possible for a team of horses, despite their natural desire to go always slipping back down. No unauthorised travel is allowed by this road through magic, and by magic it alerts the Master’s gill-men to those arriving at the Manse. Should it be necessary, the road can magically invert (though this is not common knowledge, since it has never been done), throwing any and all travellers off it. In short, it is a very magical road.

  The slum-dwellers imagine it has one use – to transport boys into the service of the Master by the system of Fetches – but others also use it, gaining access by removable (and non-magical) ramps that they extend from their places in the Merchant City and the Pleasaunce. If the Master has so determined, they may then attend functions at the Manse or conduct their important business, but neither of these things involves the slum people, so they are unaware of them.

  God

  The creator of all things and father of mankind. The combination of perfect matter and perfect concept, born in entire concert with the weft and called by some the weftling, he is/was/will be capable of magic indistinguishable from omnipotence except in two important particulars: He has/had/will have not the power to pervert the weft (since He is/was/will be coexistent with it) and He is/was/will be vulnerable to machines that can pervert the weft (see: God-Summoning Machines and God-Killers). This vulnerability allowed for his murder, though the continued existence of the weft and the presence within the material and immaterial realms of both his matter and his concept allow for his resurrection, should these two aspects of his godhood recombine either by design or accident.

  God’s corpse exerts a creative influence over whatever is close to it, and the material form of his immaterial concept – which some say is synonymous with the Spark – can be used in various ways to perform magic. Both items are therefore highly sought after by those who have the lore to either use or negate their powers.

  God-Killer(s)

  The Assembly arranges the affairs of people so that they work for themselves rather than serve God, or a Master or Mistress. The fruits of their labours they enjoy directly and this, the collective opinion holds, is a great boon. Some members of the Assembly feel this benefit so keenly that they are willing to sacrifice their own personal comfort in service of the collective weal (at least for a period). Hence, they devote themselves to the understanding of useful yet seemingly arduous fields of study. One such caste of specialists devotes themselves to the Atheistic Crusades, and there are Crusader specialists trained in the methods by which all gods may be killed. These God-Killers have studied blasphemous lore and make themselves engineers of enormous sophistication. With looted relics they are able to construct weapons capable of overcoming immortality. These they use in conjunction with God-Summoning Machines to complete the work of the Atheistic Crusades, which is god-murdering, though why they cannot simply leave them be is another matter entirely.

  God-Summon
er(s)

  There are many types of machine, but none are more complex than the God-Summoning Machines of the Atheistic Crusades. As the Crusaders conquer theistic territories, they sack their places of worship, enslave their priests, draw blood from worshippers. From the holy relics, in combination with their own sacrilegious weft-perverting magics, fuelled by the blood of the vanquished, huge puissant racks are constructed. These they mount on engines, drawn then into battle. The Crusaders lay siege to God and all gods, summon them to their racks, torture and destroy them. See also: God-Killers.

  Gold

  The most valuable sort of coin and very rare in most circles.

  Gorget

  Part of a suit of armour – specifically the bit around the throat.

  Grand piano

  An instrument almost no-one can play, but which is so enormous it is useful for placing ornaments on. At the very least it can be used for impressing visitors.

  Greaves

  Part of a suit of armour – specifically the bit around the calves.

  Haberdasher

  In general, a vendor of ribbons and buttons, in particular the man on whom the con the False Damsel was played and who Nathan Treeves almost accidentally evolved into a ghost.

  (The) Harbour

  No city can thrive without intercourse with the world (except by an enormous and unwarranted expenditure of magical energy), and since ships are the most efficient way of facilitating this intercourse, Mordew gives over a part of itself to being a port, of which a harbour is an essential part, allowing ships to safely load and unload exports and imports.

  The Harbour can be seen from the Glass Road, the sails of the ships in it rippling prettily in the wind.

  Hex(es)

  A minor but long-lasting type of spell usually cast on a place or an object, that alters it by magic to produce various effects by provoking the weft to react counter to nature. A hexed door may not open, a hexed mirror will reflect inaccurately, a hexed passageway will turn whoever walks along it back the way they came. See also: Fluence.

  History

  A body of knowledge contained mostly in books and dealing with what occupied the men of the past. Very few of these books are in popular circulation, so the people of Mordew prefer to invent their own accounts of possible events. In truth, these invented accounts are as useful as any history book, the latter of which’s accuracy is vouchsafed only by authors dead and forgotten. Who is in a position to recognise the truth in them? The answer is ‘no-one’ and so they differ from fictions not at all, except that they are often less interesting to read, a fiction having a perfection of form that one purporting to write facts avoids, knowing that the world tends away from perfection. While this may give the events in a history book the glamour of the real, this glamour is unlikely to stifle the yawns that boredom creates in the mouth, and which are easily avoided by substituting interest for fact.

  Horn sigil

  Heraldry is an art that gives images to lineages, and many clubs and associations have an icon by which they are recognised. Also, magic can be contained in words and stylised glyphs. The sigil of the ram’s horn which adorns some places in Mordew has elements of all these facts in the explanation of its use. It was used synecdochically to stand in for the Devil by the occult tontine that eventually caused the death of the weftling. Those seen adopting this sigil can be assumed to have some link with the tontine.

  Huge lizards

  See: Dragon(s).

  (The) Immaterial Realm

  The realm proper to concepts and excluding all matter. Tied to the material realm via the weft and co-productive of the intermediate realms by the law of combinations.

  Inhibition

  Just as a thing can be catalysed, so can it be inhibited, which gives the opposite effect. With skill, a weft-manipulator can inhibit not only gross expression of, say, Spark energy, but something as subtle as a thought, since thoughts are a presence of the concepts proper to the immaterial realm in the material realm, and this transposition is facilitated by the weft. Consequently, thoughts require minute quantities of the Spark, and if this is inhibited, the thought that seeks to use it can never cross the mind. Some objects and spells can thereby effectively control a person and make him do what one wishes (within limits). See also: the Locket and the Interdicting Finger.

  Intelligencer(s)

  Not all objects are as innocuous as they seem. Some items that appear to be nothing more than discarded wood, for example, or a pile of detritus are in fact machines capable of seeing and hearing everything within a certain range. Some can even see the unseeable and hear the unhearable and make maps of the world by sending vibrations out into it and knowing from how they return changed the things that must have changed them. They thereby see what is around a corner or underneath the earth. Objects of this kind, as they are represented as a sub-class of the objects found in Mordew, are made by the Assembly and are called intelligencers. They lurk everywhere, if rumours are to be believed, and provide important information for the coming vanguards of the next Atheistic Crusade.

  (The) Interdicting Finger

  Not a common spell, by any means, since the ingredients required for it are difficult to source, but once performed it can be very useful indeed in dealing with unpredictable weft-manipulators and other weft-infused organisms. First, find an object of value belonging to the womb-bearing parent of the target to be controlled. This must have enough of the parent’s weft-pattern to draw Spark energy into it when the weave of the weft is loosened. This object will need to be large enough to fit a finger inside, and small enough to be carried around. A coin purse is a good choice, or a locket (see also: The Locket).

  Then procure the index finger of the disciplining parent. There will always be one parent more willing to discipline a child than the other, and it is customary in Mordew for commands and interdictions to be accompanied by the wagging (often into the face) of the index finger, each wag somehow reinforcing the necessity to obey. Given that, the totemic function of this digit is enormous and can be magically enhanced. Place this finger inside the first object and seal it shut with magic.

  Then speak the proper words of the spell, being sure to have the spell book at hand in order to provoke the character of the weft into the character of the combined object. When it is done, attach this completed object to the target by a convenient method and one will have effectively inhibited the target’s ability to manipulate the weft (particularly if that was an interdiction insisted on by the disciplining parent).

  The cleverer the spell caster, the more subtle the possible levels of inhibition, though the target will often find ways of resisting the spell (or the Spark will find other ways to be expressed), but it is at least a good start, and the skilled practitioner will find that a weft-manipulator so hobbled will rarely, if ever, cause problems unless he can find a means of overriding the spell.

  (The) Intermediate realms

  Realms partly of the immaterial and partly of the material, the deficit in balance being made up by Spark energy from the weft. The realms proper to angels and demons.

  Invisible objects (threads, platforms, etc.)

  It should surprise no-one familiar with the divisions of the realms that the concept of a thing and the material instancing of that concept are not the same. It is also true that magic can be used to bridge the material and immaterial realms by use of the Spark communicating by and through the weft. An invisible object is the concept of an object brought in from the immaterial realm and only given just enough material instancing for it to exist as an object, but not enough for that object to trouble the progress of light.

  Either that or it is an object disguised by diverting the light that would normally fall on it (and thereby be reflected up into the eye of an observer) away to some other place (where it is not seen).

  Both methods are perfectly good, and the magic user can choose between them based on their facility with the different types of magic.

  (The) Is
land of the White Hills

  The land where the city of Malarkoi is to be found. Rumour says that it is full of defunct and decrepit gods, but few reliable people have visited it, so whether this is true is impossible to say with any certainty.

  (The) Itch

  Irritation of the skin is caused by the presence of an irritating object on it. If one walks carelessly past a nettle and a leaf of it touches the arm it can be sore, since there are tiny spines on such plants and each of these spines has a poison in it and this poison makes pain in a person. These spines are so tiny that they are hard to discern with the naked eye, so even when the poison’s effect has worn off (or the mind has taught the skin not to be painful by admitting the source of the injury and telling it to ignore it) they remain. The next day, the pain forgotten, a person goes about their business, but later they find, without realising it, that they have been scratching at their arm. This is because there is an itch that is caused by the foreign body remaining in the skin and even if the person is oblivious to it, the body isn’t, and it makes to scratch away the invading object. Unlike a person, who may know exactly the right amount of force to apply by use of rational thought, the body is less precise, and the autonomic scratching has caused an injury to the skin and this has allowed small organisms to find purchase. Here they breed in the wound, and in the night, while the person is asleep, the body tries again to scratch it. Because it was not successful in resolving the problem on the first attempt, the body scratches harder and widens the wound, making space for the invisible creatures to proliferate and then, in a week, say, the person spends much of their time experiencing an itch, since the body has realised it is insufficient to meet the task at hand and has alerted the mind with that sensation. Now the person scratches the itch, trying to remove anything that shouldn’t have been there, but it is too late, since the infection is spread, and the witch-woman must be called or a poultice placed on the arm.