I. The Moor That Sleeps
Before the isles, there was the Moor: one high country of heather, standing stones and slow brown rivers, nine days’ walk from end to end. Its people had no king. They had the Wardens, who kept the roads, the wells and the barrows of the dead, and who spoke the old tongue, in which the world could be asked to change.
Beneath the Moor lay salt, and the salt shone. The market town of Glimwich grew rich selling it down every road: salt for the pot, salt for the dead, salt that glowed in a jar like a small moon. The Wardens had sworn never to sell it, and never said why.
In the old tongue, osken means “the one who sleeps beneath”. The salt was the sleeper’s sleep, and every cart that left Glimwich made that sleep a little lighter.
II. The Long Tide
It happened seven lifetimes ago, as the Hall counts them, and in a single night. Some say a Warden broke the oath and sold the salt himself. All agree on what the Barrow Warden did. He went down alone beneath the barrows with his blade, his horned helm and the oldest of the old words, and laid himself across the sleeper as a seal.
The seal held. Then the sea came in, as if to put back all the salt the Moor had carried off, and by morning the Moor was gone. Only the high places stood above the water: a round hill with a windmill, which became Kestrel Isle; the long headland of Gannet Head; the crag of Warhorn; the reed banks of Brackwater; and the ford of Thornmouth, the last crossing of the Moor road. The windmill turned before the Long Tide, and turns still.
Glimwich lies in the middle of the Strait. At the lowest winter tides its paving shows, and on still nights its bells ring beneath the boats of Brackwater. Once a year, on the Night of the Long Tide, the isles ring every bell on every quay in answer, and on that one night the dead of the barrows walk. Pilots speak of the Hollowback, a serpent as long as a quay, which swallowed the Moor road and lies along it still. What the sea keeps, the sea is minding.
III. What the Sea Left Behind
The barrows remained, and so did everything under them. The sea drowned the Moor; it did not drown what the Moor had buried.
Rats the size of hounds took the sewers under Kestrelby’s square. Their king, Old Gnasher, comes out every other day with two rats at his back, and the town has learned to leave him be. Under the hill the Kestrel Dungeon runs floor by floor: rats, spiders, a wolf den, and below that a hall where the trolls sit by their braziers. Trolls keep the west cave too, under a Troll Guard who wears a crown of thorns, and goblins pick over the trolls’ leavings and throw stones at anyone who comes down the stairs. In the fields and the South Woods the wolves hunt in packs and the bears strike slow and hard. In the marsh by Brackwater the swamp trolls are poisonous. Nearly everything down there bites, and some of it bites twice.
Under the north-east graveyard the crypt goes down three floors. The bones there stand up when you come in, and every blow they land takes a little of your life for themselves. Under the middle barrow the mireworms gnaw at the roots of the isle, and at the bottom of their warren the eldest, Grubmaw, lies across the way to the Barrow Warden’s tomb. It is said to remember the taste of the Moor.
The orcs were Moor-folk once, the salt-diggers, or so the orcs say. After the Tide the isles blamed them and drove them out, and they came back with spears. Now they camp behind a ring of sharpened stakes on the north shore of Kestrel Isle, where the salt was once loaded, and they hold Warhorn, the fort the last Wardens built to watch the sea. Their raiders shout before they strike, and the blow still hurts. Their spearmen throw from farther than you can run. One of them, hooded, trades with any traveller who greets him in his own tongue. The old tongue was theirs too.
IV. The Wardens Who Remain
The office survived the Tide, if not its power. In the Wardens’ Hall at Kestrelby, Warden Hale hands out the hunting orders: twelve rats for the granary, the wolf pack at the fence, the trolls in the west field, the orcs behind their stakes. Each pays a bounty, and each done order is a notch in a tally stick. Four notches make a warden. Above the Hall lives the Seer, who listens to the tide the way others read letters, and who would rather no one went down to the barrows at all. Every newcomer ends up serving them both.
The temple at Kestrelby keeps no god. It is the house of the word aro, the word of life, and Elder Corwin teaches it to anyone who will stay the winter. Kesh is the word that strikes. Ume is the word of the body, and makes it swift. Smaller words bend them: wider, farther, alight. You speak them aloud, and the isles hear. Few remember more; the Seer says more will come, when the time does.
Those who prove themselves are sent up the stair. At the eighth mark, the Seer is to name their calling and send them across the water to the mainland, where the old roads of the Moor are said to climb back out of the sea. That is the hope the isles live on: that one day the sea might give the Moor back.
V. Why You Came
You wake in the temple court with a club, a jacket and twenty coins. It is the oldest custom of Kestrelby, older than the Hall: every newcomer is given twenty coins, the fare across the Strait to Brackwater, so that no one is kept on Kestrel Isle against their will. No one mentions the fare back.
Newcomers always come the same way, on a night of fog, in a boat with no boatman. Their coins are old, stamped with a face no one on the isles remembers, and crusted with salt. No one in the Hall remarks on it, though Elder Corwin sometimes looks at a newcomer twice, as if he knew the face.
Newcomers always do the same things, too. They kill the rats on the square with the club. They buy a torch from Old Jory and go down the grate in the paving. They come up with teeth and hides for Hobb the tanner, buy a sword at Garrick’s, and go down again, deeper each time: the dungeon, the west cave, the crypt. They take the Warden’s orders and cut their notches. Then they walk out to the north-east graveyard, to the stair under the middle barrow, and go down into the Wormwarren.
This year the fog came early and has not lifted. The keeper of the light at Gannet Head has seen lamps moving under the water. The kittiwakes have left their hold on the cape, and the isles have a saying for that: when the kittiwakes leave, count your coins. The dead walk now on nights that are not the Night of the Long Tide.
It began the week the newcomers started going down to the barrows. In the far chamber of the Wormwarren, past Grubmaw, lies the Barrow Warden’s tomb, with his blade and his horned helm. For seven lifetimes the Seer has said the same thing: when that blade is lifted from the tomb, the sea will give back what it took, or take the rest.
The newcomers are lifting it. Here begins your chapter of the Chronicle.
Sayings of the isles
- What the sea keeps, the sea is minding.
- When the kittiwakes leave, count your coins.
- Salt for the pot, never for the purse. The Wardens’ oath, as the isles remember it.
- Nothing down there is asleep. As the Hall says.
