Mordew

by Alex Pheby

  The Itch is a little like this. In weft-manipulators who have received a portion of the Spark by virtue of pattern inheritance, the first experience of the Spark is like to that experience of the spine of a nettle. First there is a little pain, a burning where the Spark is finding a place in the body and the self to enter through. This can be dealt with by ignoring it, but the self, like the body, will still try to deal with the unfamiliar object. Like autonomic scratching, the self will try to address the foreign body by physiological and psychological means, often through dreams and odd appetites, but it will fail and soon it will alert the mind to what it cannot rid itself of. The person will then try any means at their disposal to restore equilibrium. Unlike a nettle spine or an invading organism, the Spark itself knows how it can be relieved and when it feels that the person wants to relieve themselves it shows them how by burning paths within the person’s nerves and body and mind along which it can be induced to run. The Spark wants to return to the weft, and the quickest way of achieving this is through the expenditure of Spark energy in magic, the consequent loosening of the weave of the weft allowing the process by which the Spark drains back into the weft to accelerate. This process, which is unique to each weft-manipulator, is done through Scratching and Scratching can, when done incorrectly (as is generally the way with inexperienced manipulation), cause damage to the self and the body.

  Like over-vigorous scratching of an infected wound site, Scratching the Spark Itch makes the body and the self want to Scratch more since it makes the Itching worse. While a person might find this irritating, the Spark finds this ideal, since the more the Itch is Scratched the more the weave of the weft is loosened and the more energy returns into the weft, where it belongs.

  The more one becomes used to the Spark, the less one is at the mercy of the Itch/Scratch cycle, and the experienced weft-manipulator need never experience the Itch except in as much as it can be made pleasurable, or be used as a catalyst, or in some other way be made to serve a purpose, but when one is not used to it it can be difficult to manage.

  Keeva

  The name given to a sailor on the ship the Muirchú. She has secrets, but these she keeps to herself.

  Killing post(s)

  Any of a species of plain wooden or metal post driven into the ground and providing a solid object against which to dash things one wishes to stop living. Useful for extinguishing what little life is present in dead-life and flukes prior to using them for whatever purpose can be found for them (making leather, for example).

  Kite(s)

  Like a bird but made of paper and thin sticks and tied by a string. Pleasure can be derived from flying one, or by looking at the patterns on its wings. Often seen in the city of Malarkoi, since they decorate the air with them.

  Langerman’s Primer

  No-one knows whether Langerman lived or not, or whether the name belonged to a person at all, but their primer is a magical book and the spells inside deal with the basic transformations that can be made of the world through magic. Things may be made symmetrical, rotated, deformed, and in other ways changed with magic, and this book tells a reader how to do it, as well as containing the necessary record of the words and weft-conditions required.

  Laundress(es)

  Some of the few women allowed in the Manse, laundresses are part of a union that even the Master of Mordew must recognise since no-one else will do the work, fearing repercussions. Some may point out that the Master himself cannot fear them, and the people who fear repercussions from the Laundresses union should fear repercussions from the Master more, but there is a difference between repercussions of an unknown sort from a person one has never seen and the immediate threat of having one’s head held under boiling water until one dies. The latter is a definite reality, while the former is only a supposition, and in this difference the laundresses’ closed shop flourishes.

  Law

  A series of rules, now defunct, outlining conduct proper and improper and including a schedule of punishments. Around this core fact, abstractions flourished: books of precedent, alterations to the rules, theories on the notion of having such a thing in the first place. Abstract or concrete, there is no practical benefit in the study of this area of understanding since the authorities which vouchsafed the validity or otherwise of the rule-set is now long gone.

  Liam

  The name given to a sailor on the ship the Muirchú. He has religious beliefs that his colleagues find amusing and frustrating by turns.

  Likeness-in-scent

  A hard to translate concept, apparently, and found more in dogs than men. They say, those dogs that can speak, that the matter is more complicated than, for instance, looking alike, but if one tries to engage them on why this is so then one’s interest quickly dwindles, since to understand the difference one needs first understand a dozen or more other doggish concepts which make equally little sense.

  Limb-baby(-ies)

  A fluke newborn of the Living Mud, usually, consisting only of limbs with no other organs. Prized in the making of hose and gloves since little stitching is required of the leather they make, providing one is careful with the skinning.

  Litter-bearers

  That species of servant that specialises in carrying Merchant City ladies to and from The Colonnades. While strength is important to them, more important is that they are of a standard size, since one tall one in a crew of four will make for a lopsided litter. No litter-bearer who ever tips his charge onto the street will find re-employment, so the best of them are either of average height or are part of a team of identical twins or quadruplets.

  (The) Living Mud

  God should live in the heavens, where his native power makes few changes, but if and when he comes to Earth his magic leeches through the weft into the material realm around him. Any matter nearby undertakes the properties of creation, which is God’s province. The slum-dwellers of Mordew call this material the Living Mud, which is known for its ability to generate dead-life and living flukes.

  The Living Mud lacks God’s will, so its creation is random and aimless. Should God’s will be combined with the creative matter, then it may evolve with a purpose through the stages of existence – from the primordial ooze via ever more complex organisms until it resembles God himself. Then it can be forced apart from the material world towards the perfect conceptual spirit, and from there to the end point: the combination of perfect matter and perfect concept which is godhood. Should a god attempt to exceed godhood, then only energy is created, though this might be seen by some to be a thing in and of itself, energy being the perfect representation of power: the warp, which is creative potency existing with no debasement through form, free of the weft.

  (The) Locket

  Property of Clarissa Delacroix and worn by her for the early part of her life. Along with her other possessions, it was left when she eloped with Nathaniel Treeves to marry and join the occult tontine that eventually caused the death of the weftling. It is a locket, like any other, but since she valued it and she is infused with the weft, its pattern causes the ingress of the Spark, something that made it useful in the creation of the Interdicting Finger that went on to be used to control her son, Nathan.

  Lungworms

  Small creatures, harmless alone and outside the body, but should they choose to breed in a man’s lungs he will sicken and die without treatment.

  Ma Dawlish

  Gin-wife, rival of Mr Padge, and mother to the Dawlish Brothers, whom she exceeds if not in size, then in cunning and viciousness.

  Maeve

  The name given to a sailor on the ship the Muirchú. Otherwise unremarkable.

  Magic

  This word is used for many things and though the variety of its usage is wide, at its heart magic is very simple – it is the unnatural. The natural in the material realm is the way things are and those who live solely in this realm come to understand the way things are without effort, since everything that has happened to them has happened in this mode an
d feels entirely correct. Admittedly, imperfections in sensation, perception and understanding can cause a person to wonder if the world is not quite right – if one hears, in the night, a creaking from outside to which one cannot attribute a reasonable cause, then one might think it has a magical source, but then, on rising, we see that it was a loose board.

  This does not imply that magic is fictive since, when we see the unnatural effects of magic first-hand, then we know them for what they are immediately – they are a change in the way the world is that cannot be attributed to its normal workings. When a user of magic turns a dog into a cat, or raises a building into the sky, or makes to appear a flock of silver owls, we know that the natural order has been overturned, and this is magic – the instituting, either temporarily or permanently, of an unnatural state of affairs in nature counter to the way things are or were. Magic can be a hex, or a fluence, or a spell, but it can also be the force animating the Living Mud, or an unnatural animal, such as a firebird, or the appearance on a clear day of rain or on a warm day of snow, or a prolonged tossing of heads and never tails in a bet on the outcome of a coin toss, or in any of a thousand different things. But it is always the same thing: magic.

  How then does magic come to be? Natural things are natural because they are the things proper to the material realm, so magic, as an unnatural thing, must be the appearance in the material realm of something improper to it, which is the immaterial realm, or which is the weft. The user of magic alters the material realm by using the power of the Spark to bring concepts in from the immaterial realm (or intermediate realms) or in from the weft, or by deforming the weft in such a way that the material realm takes on the character of that deformation, either temporarily or permanently. So, a spell might make a place very hot, by deforming the weft in such a way that heat is created in the material realm (or by tying the concept ‘heat’ from the immaterial realm to an instanced place in the material realm), or they might bring into the material realm a demon by removing it from its intermediate realm using the energy of the Spark to loosen the weave of the weft and thereby making space for the entity to enter, then drawing it through into the material realm as a magnet attracts a compass needle. Or they might cause an object to contain the property of increased speed – a cartwheel, for instance – by drawing from the immaterial realm a great deal of the concept ‘speed’ and tying it to the particular material instance of the concept ‘cartwheel’ – that ability will then be manifest in the object’s forward progress in the material world (though care should be taken that all the wheels on a cart are treated similarly, or the difference will tear the vehicle apart).

  With God and all gods, magic is their natural state, and the presence of them in the material realm causes all things that are natural and all things that are unnatural to enter flux, the discreteness of the system of the realms itself being undermined by a thing that coexists in each simultaneously, thereby effecting the warp, which to the weft is what the weft is to the realms, though in what way it is impossible for us to understand, such understanding only being open to the mind of God and some of the lesser gods.

  Malarkoi

  An archaic city of the North-western Peninsula ruled by a Mistress and dominated by her Golden Pyramid. It is in a war with the neighbouring city Mordew and attacks it, disrupts its trade, and foments revolution in its people (favours Mordew returns). Eventually one city will destroy the other, but which will do it is for fate to decide.

  Man-headed snakes

  A culture of organisms with the lithe sinuousness and sinister intent of snakes, but the head and intelligence of men. They number many hundreds of thousands, it is said, and live on the Island of the White Hills, but they keep their whereabouts secret. Some say this is because they are cowards and fear other peoples, others say it is because they know themselves well and fear that they, in their power, will overwhelm all who oppose them. This reading opposes their monstrous appearance with an unusual nicety of ethical consideration.

  (The) Manse

  The place where the Master of Mordew resides. Though it stands plain as day in the middle of the city and no attempt has been made to hide anything or dissemble, still very little is known about it. Of what are its walls made? Nobody knows. How many rooms has it? Nobody knows. Does it have cellars? Nobody knows.

  Those who enter the service of the Manse generally remain there and those few who do return have stories only of their specific purview – an usher knows of his work, a laundress hers, but of the greater picture they know nothing. Slum boys returning unhired from the place say things, but nobody believes them since they are not people worthy of believing. They say there are great machines grinding and clanking down in the hillside, but is this likely? The proper place for factories is the Factorium, so in this they are likely confused. They speak of men with arms and legs elongated and huge noses, but again, is this likely?

  A scholar could, given time, collate all of the reports and rumours about the Manse from whatever the source and by cross-referencing approach some sort of consensus, but who has the time for this? There is always more pressing business at hand.

  So, the Manse is the place where the Master of Mordew resides, and if more information is required than that, then the place stands ready for inspection. One need only intrude on the hospitality of the Master and thereby satisfy one’s curiosity.

  (The) Manual of Spatio-Temporal Manipulation

  A book of spells concerning itself with the disposition of people and objects as they exist in time and space in the various realms.

  To a person of the material realm everything seems very solid and sensible. If a man puts down a sandwich and then goes to answer the bell, when he returns having seen to his visitor, there is the sandwich still on the plate where he left it. It is a little drier, a little less appetising, but it is there. This happens, in different ways, a hundred times in a day. It hardly ever doesn’t happen, and then it is generally because someone has moved a thing without informing him. It will turn up eventually, or the person who moved it away will move it back. Over the course of a life, and the lives of a man’s forebears, and all of those around him, this happens so consistently that he convinces himself that it is a rule that things have a place in the world, and that they remain there until acted upon. This is, for most purposes, entirely true. But that is for the material realm. What of the immaterial realm? What of the weft?

  In the immaterial realm there is nothing but concept. There is no time and there is no space, there is only the idea of things. Yet it is not so simple. There is the idea of things, separate of time and space, but the immaterial realm, because of the weft which links them, is not ignorant of the material realm. The idea of a sandwich on a plate in a man’s study at ten o’clock is not the same as the idea of a sandwich on a plate in his study at two-fifteen, or a sandwich that is not on a plate, or the idea of a woman’s sandwich. A sandwich half eaten is similar to, but not the same as, a sandwich two-thirds eaten, and in order for the immaterial realm to do what it does, which is to contain the idea of all the things that are, then it must contain all of the ideas which are to do with time and space, even if the immaterial realm does not experience these dimensions directly.

  Even then it is not so simple, because the immaterial realm contains not just all the ideas of things as they are in the material realm (which would make it subservient to it, which it is not) but also all the things that might be, might have been, and might come to be. It even contains the ideas of things that are not. It is easy to prove this – simply imagine things other than the way that they are, and the idea will come to you: from where does this idea come, if not from the immaterial realm? If it is not there it cannot come to you, so it must be there.

  And what of the weft? The weft makes both the material and immaterial realms, and both are facilitated in and through it. So, a user of magic can, if they are skilled, take an instance of a thing that exists in the material realm, find in the immaterial realm the idea of i
t, then, by using spells, change that idea so that it is, say, ten feet to the left of where it is in the material realm and, using the Spark energy of the weft, enact the altered idea in the material realm and then that object will be ten feet to the left of where it was. If one then writes down the necessary condition and character of the weft on a page, then it is contained there for future use. This is a Manual of Spatio-Temporal Manipulation.