Mordew

by Alex Pheby

  (The) Sea Wall

  A sea is a very large body of water that, in seeking equilibrium with itself, will drown the land beneath it if it is not prevented from doing so. If one’s city occupies land that the sea is liable to claim, then one must build a preventative wall that keeps the sea out. This is not a trivial task, and in Mordew it was made even less so by the fact that the Master raised this city up at low tide from lands on a newly formed tidal plain. Rather than see his work undone at the next tide, the Master made to appear by magic the Sea Wall, and while it is easy to write that something was done, that does not mean that it was easy to do it. In fact, the task would have been beyond anyone but him, and he had to both locate and tame demons and angels sufficient to do the work of making the bricks and laying them before he could even begin. Fortunately for him, the coincidence of time in the material realm and time in the intermediate realms is flexible, but even then there is a limit. So, he rushed to get the work done, but it is the more impressive for all of that because it does its job very well, and no incoming water troubles the people of Mordew.

  The later addition of the Sea Wall Gate does not alter the fact that the Sea Wall is a protective wall surrounding the three sea-facing sides of Mordew, constructed at the time of its foundation by enslaved demons and angels directed by the Master of Mordew.

  (The) Sea Wall Gate

  A later addition to the Sea Wall allowing ships in and out. Opened and closed by the gill-men of the Port Watch under the direction of the Master of Mordew.

  Service-pledge

  What a dog makes when he agrees to pair with a person.

  Sic parvis magna

  Words that say ‘large things start small’ in a dead language found in old books. True for the material realm, where there is a line of causality, but not at all true in the immaterial realm, where things are, will be, and always have been.

  Silver

  A coin of moderate to high value.

  Silver Glove

  An inhibitor of the Mistress of Malarkoi’s design. Made of concentrated sunfly scales, it has the benefit of inhibiting any who wear it without needing their immaterial pattern or weft-condition (unlike, say, the Interdicting Finger).

  Sirius

  The name chosen for himself by the magical dog, Snap. Where his companion Bones (see: Anaximander) was given speech by the Master of Mordew, Sirius was given a mystical ability to commune, via the weft, with weft-manipulators, animals, ghosts and other things more or less immaterial. Since some of these organisms exist in realms where time is not exactly dependent on time as it is experienced in the material realm, he also knows things of the past and the future. His pairing with the speaking dog Anaximander is not an accident, since it is nearly pointless to make a magical dog with Sirius’s abilities but not to be able to understand what it knows. Since Sirius can speak to Anaximander, and Anaximander can speak to people, while they are together, they make a useful unity.

  The Master used the pair in this way until the things Anaximander reported did not chime with the Master’s wishes for Mordew. At that point he sent them away to serve a different purpose, primarily related to the development of the boy Nathan Treeves, though he did not see fit to inform any of them of that fact. By coincidence or design, Sirius offered his service-pledge to Nathan, which may or may not work to the Master’s advantage.

  Slum urk

  A disparaging term that conflates the womb-born with flukes, ignoring their separation by birth-type and combining each by virtue of their lowly estate.

  Smell-image

  It is impossible for a man to properly understand the experiences of an animal that has different senses to him, and empathy only gives a sense of how this must feel, but the imagination can be more exact. So, imagine that rather than seeing by light one sees by odour, and that the combination of these odours is like to an image of a vista, each individual type of smell a colour, and the outlines of an object the relative power of the impression caused by each redolent thing. This, then, is a smell-image, such as a dog might experience, eyes closed, of the world around them.

  Smokehouse

  A place devoted to the commercial provision of weed and pleasant environs in which it might be smoked. Often to be found adjoining a brothel.

  Snap

  See: Sirius.

  Soil boys

  Even the lowliest born is something that may be useful at a particular time in a particular place. If an unwelcome child steps into the road and is thereby struck by a passing cart, and the sight of that striking is sufficient to cause a more worthy child to step out of that cart’s path at the last moment, then the first child can be said to have had value, even if they die by the force of the collision. Similarly, even a slum fluke can be made to serve a higher purpose.

  There are occasions when the Master of Mordew’s special flowers and crops require extra nutrition if they are to germinate, and, as plants will not wait, neither can the Master wait for an ideal candidate to be brought to him. Fetches are not notoriously selective, so if the need arises, then needs must.

  A soil boy is a creature made from any child brought to the Master with a spine and the ability to move, and these children are converted by magic to replicas of themselves, the arms and legs removed with much of the skin that is not necessary, and they are shrunk so that, like worms but with the ability to follow orders, they can ensure the maximum possible oxygenation and nutrient balance of the soil beds in which the Master grows his flora.

  Solomon Peel

  In any community rumours circulate, but what is a rumour? In what way is it different from the truth? The answer is that a rumour is to a fact as a poor man is to a rich man. A poor man is not to be believed since his position in the world – in need, compromised by practicalities, always looking for some small advantage that might alleviate his suffering – makes everything that he says questionable since he has his poverty as an ulterior motive for saying anything at all. Everything a rich man says is supported by his wealth. He needs nothing, so there is no benefit in speaking anything other than the truth. Moreover, his essential goodness is demonstrable in his ability to prosper, and aren’t the good to be trusted?

  A rumour is doubted because those that speak it are doubted, a truth is true because those that speak it are worth believing.

  There is a rumour that circulates in the slums of Mordew that Solomon Peel was a boy whom the Master drained so completely of his tears that that boy became exclusively of the immaterial realm, where he exists sadly for eternity. No one of worth believes the rumour, since slum children speak it. The Master does not deign to answer the complaints of the worthless, so the truth or otherwise of the rumour is not determined since truth is his to give, and the people of the Merchant City suspend their judgement until this gift is offered.

  But what is a legend? A legend is a rumour that, with time and repetition and without confirmation by those assumed to know (official historians, for instance, or Masters and rich men), enters the public discourse through its felt truth. The story of Solomon Peel is a legend in the making, since the rumour of his passing refuses to die, and who is to say whether, through generations, it will become (or not) legendary?

  A legend surpasses the truth, since it needs no corroboration and is not subject to the lessening of force that occurs when an ideal thing is matched to a mundane instance of it (since the imagination is more capable of inspiring wonder than the physical senses, and the immaterial realm is the realm of concepts, where the material realm is the realm of matter). So, should the boy Solomon Peel, as much as he is seen to have been a real boy, wish for his plight to be recognised as truth, or for it to remain a rumour? Many mundane truths are forgotten, but no legend is, and to be remembered is to live on after death.

  (The) Southern Slums

  There are slums to the north of Mordew and there are slums to the south. The name given to the slums to the south is ‘the Southern Slums’. They are very much like the Northern Slums except that
they serve the Southfields and the Southfields Factorium in providing workers and not their northern counterparts. Unlike the slum-dwellers in the north, those in the south do not practice skull-binding and speak with a coarser accent.

  (The) Southfields

  The fields to the south of Mordew used less for the growing of vegetables and more for fruits and animal feeds.

  Southfields Factorium

  An area of factories that draws its labour from the pool of slum-dwelling adults of the Southern Slums.

  (The) Spark

  If one were the weftling and lived all one’s time in the weft then the Spark would not be a noticeable thing at all. Just as a man does not normally notice the air, or a fish the water, it is what makes the world but yet goes unremarked. In the immaterial realm the Spark is properly the thing that animates the concepts, being to them as ink is to a written word: the thing that allows for another thing to be. In the material realm the Spark is properly the thing that animates life and determines its form. The Spark is that thing from the weft that animates all the important things in the material and immaterial realms, and when all things are right and proper, then the Spark is also the will of God, and his nerve, since He is the weftling and is entirely in concert with the weft. The Spark, then, is the will of God represented in the realms by the encroachment of the weft.

  What, though, if things are not right and proper? What if, through perversions of the weft, the balance between things has been disrupted? What if, through the malfeasance of weft-manipulators, God’s existence in the weft has been disrupted? What if he has been summoned from his right place and pulled solely into the material and immaterial realms? Then there is an excess of the Spark in the places where it ought not to be, and those places become less like themselves and more like the weft and as brine will pollute freshwater at the margin of a watercourse and the sea, so does the weft disrupt the material and immaterial realms, and in this the Spark is like salt, the presence of it denoting the unbalance.

  To what effect? To any and all effects, since the Spark is the will to creation of the weftling, and if a man can control it he may make anything happen, drawing in concepts from the immaterial realm and enacting them in the material realm with the power of the weft. Hence the Spark is closely related to magic, though it is not the same as it.

  Who should have the most of the Spark? It should all belong to the weftling, but if, through perversion of the weft, the weftling should be killed, then the ownership of the Spark will pass to whomever it was who killed Him and then through his descendants until one of them is bested or the weftling is resurrected. But to own a thing is not to know how to use it, and just like a farmer who buys a bull thinking it to be a cow, there is no saying he will be able to milk it, nor even keep it penned, since a bull is a strong and unpredictable creature, liable to break down the fence posts that make its enclosure and run amok on the farm.

  Spell

  The relationship between the weft and time as it is experienced in the material realm is complex and counter-intuitive. While the weft will always tend to equilibrium and deformations of it are not permanent, if it is made to adopt a shape then that shape is one that has always been made. If the user of magic knows both that shape and the character of that shape’s instancing in the weft, it can be evoked in the material realm regardless of whether the weft is, was, has been, or will have been restored to equilibrium.

  An understanding of the form of the weft can be recorded in words (though the language is arcane and difficult), and the character of its magical instancing can preserved in objects and in magical books (in a form analogous to vibration – so that if one vibrates the string of a violin, for example, it will produce a recognisable note, and these notes in sequence will give a tune, so then an object or page of a book can be made to contain a ‘tune’ of the weft, which is the magical character of its deformation [as a piece of music is a deformation of the air that transmits it]).

  If one understands the lore, and can muster sufficient Spark energy, then the deformations inherent in the weft prior to any restoration of equilibrium can be replicated at will. Say, at a point in the distant past, the weft was, by dint of great effort and sacrifice, deformed into a shape that allowed one person or object to exist not in its natural place but at a place ten feet to the left of that place, and that then this condition was elaborated in words, and that then these words were placed on a page, and that then the character of the instancing in the weft was infused into the page like music (and this is why you will never find two spells on one page) then, at a later date, in the material realm, a reader need only recite these words with a modicum of energy provided (say from the concentration of a life’s residual Spark released to the weft by an early death – see: sacrifice) and they will replicate the past condition of the weft in the material present, and thereby move the object onto which they pass the spell ten feet to the left without the enormous work that was originally necessary. This is how a book of spells (or similarly a magical object) is created.

  (The) Spire

  The wealthier merchants of the Merchant City build their residences in the Pleasaunce in imitation of the Manse, but imitation is imperfect, and fashions exist and circulate independently of their sources. The Manse is tall, solid and blunt, like a standing stone, whereas the merchants build elegant structures that taper to a point. These they give names that enhance their shapes – the Pinnacle, Cloud Toucher, High Point – and one of them is named The Spire. It is here that, by chance or design, the magical dogs Sirius and Anaximander and the locket that forms part of the Interdicting Finger were both to be found, exactly where they needed to be.

  (The) Strand

  One of the so-called ‘streets’ near the home of Nathan Treeves in the Southern Slums. Barely more than a runnel of Living Mud, it is nonetheless a site where street vendors gather. This is due to the high footfall of slum-dwellers as they make their way to the Circus, the Factoria, and the Southfields.

  Sulphur

  An element that, through the law of opposite similarity, is so different from the weft that it may be used to approach an understanding of it. Consequently, enormous quantities of the stuff are ground up and burned in various weft-manipulating practices.

  Sunfly(ies)

  Creatures very nearly entirely of the immaterial realm but which had a tiny seed in the material realm. So little was their link to the material realm that they were scarcely affected by it at all, and in order to draw the energy they needed to live, they frequented the margins of the sun’s atmosphere, where they bathed in sunlight so bright it would incinerate any more material creature. They lived here in contentment until it was discovered that they had certain useful properties for magic, at which point they were used profligately until they were unable to reproduce themselves and then there were no more.

  Swine

  So badly treated are animals farmed for meat that no reasonable man would do it. Some say, then, that farmers should treat these creatures more fairly, reducing their suffering, but there is another way. By reclassifying living things as ‘livestock’ or ‘produce’ living things can be put into a category of treatment usually reserved for inanimate objects, and thereby circumvent the sense of the injustice of it all. ‘Swine’, as a word, is like this – it names pigs but seeks to undermine the sense that a pig is a thing worthy of good treatment by associating it with a general rather than particular type.

  Tanner(s)

  A man who tans skins so that they become leather. In Mordew, a tanner will tan skins of any type, though in other cities they are more selective.

  Tear(s)

  A person will cry for many reasons – through sadness, through joy, with laughter – but regardless of the source, tears are an enervating drain of the Spark energy of a person’s life and should be avoided at all costs. It may seem good to express emotions as they are felt in the body, or at least it seems unnatural to restrain them, and in general this is true, but with tears they should
be swallowed back or prevented from emerging. Spark energy leaches back to the weft naturally, but the process is slow, it taking a lifetime to drain entirely. That is except for when a person cries, and then the Spark is concentrated in the liquid, emotions provoking the flow of the Spark and the tears giving it a means of egress. Someone who regularly weeps can expect to live half the time of his less expressive neighbour.

  As tears are a conduit for the Spark, so they also contain it, and enough tears gathered together can provide magical energy sufficient to initiate a spell. In places that prohibit human sacrifice – and despite its other insensitivities to suffering, Mordew is one of these – tears can be used as a substitute (though many would need to be gathered for enough to be had).

  (The) Temple of the Athanasians

  A brothel in the Southern Slums by the border with the Merchant City. Much frequented by Merchant City gentlemen. Staffed by, amongst others, Prissy’s sister. It is Prissy’s strong distaste for the work she must otherwise undertake here that motivates almost all of her actions.