The name of the older brother of the Master of Mordew’s chief factotum, Bellows. In his youth he was sent to Malarkoi on a mission and was lost. Imagining him dead, Bellows mourns, and the smallest hope that his brother might yet live is insufficient to salve his sadness.
Ancient megafauna now extant only in the Zoological Gardens in Mordew. Famous for their enormous size, prehensile snout and mournful visage, it is supposed that these creatures are highly intelligent, though, as a species, they were unable to avoid being rendered almost extinct. What is intelligence, if it is not the ability to think of ways to flourish? Can any creature truly be called intelligent if it allows itself to be driven from its ancestral lands and held in a cage? Surely the intelligent prosper while the stupid die? By examining the rheumy eye of an alifonjer, thoughts such as these may be seen circulating, just as the creature circles the enclosure in which it is imprisoned.
God is the originator, the creator and the weftling and to him goes the title ‘God’, but there are others who are almost entirely God (only not quite as in concert with the weft). There are also those who are sufficiently godlike for them to be recognised as gods, and there are demigods, pseudo-demigods, and weft-manipulators, all of whom can do the things that gods are wont to do, but who are not worthy of the title ‘God’. These godlike beings are grouped together under the category ‘all gods’ to indicate that they are plural in number, alike, but not deserving of the singular title (or to be called the weftling). The term is often used by the Assembly, which has specific god-summoning machines for each of the different sorts of god (and God) and hence is required to make the distinction for practical reasons.
The name chosen for himself by the magical dog, Bones. Dogs exist to fight and work, but the Master of Mordew bred Bones to speak and now he goes about the world with a man’s voice. Since a man’s voice requires a man’s mind to operate it, he has this too. But a dog is a dog still, and the body has an influence over the mind that is underestimated. Who could deny that the whims of the body have an effect on the thoughts? No-one, surely, who has ever felt pangs of hunger, or lust, and felt obliged to act on them. So, the body of a dog and the mind of a man form the persona of a third thing, neither one nor the other. Whether it is this unique nature that caused him to choose his name – which some think references a man from prehistory – is something only he knows, and since any record of an original Anaximander is lost in time, it is difficult to draw firm conclusions as to whether there is meaning in the choice. Perhaps scholars of the future will puzzle over this matter, if Bones’s actions in the world make him noteworthy.
A man is a thing of the material realm, a ghost is a thing of the immaterial realm, and God is of the weft. Each of these things is typical of the realm from which they are spawned, but what of creatures that straddle realms, or are born in an intermediate realm? A thing mostly material, but a little of the immaterial and a little of the weft, that thing is called a demon. A thing mostly immaterial but a little material and a little of the weft – that thing receives the name ‘angel’. As a demon is concerned with the lower material concerns – violence, hatred and ugliness – so an angel is concerned with the higher immaterial concerns – thought, love and beauty.
Cities in which the boundaries between the material and immaterial realms are not rigorously policed find themselves in short order overrun with ghosts. These return from the immaterial realm, through the loosening of the consistency of the weft contingent on careless magic use. Ankuretic machines both tighten the weft, preventing further ingress from the other side, and dissolve any entities left in the material realm. Both functions are effected through an oscillation of the threads of the weft and are part of the one process, but observers of this process only ever see the dissolution of ghosts – something that is troubling to watch, since it seems to cause pain in them – and hence the machines have an evil reputation.
The living spaces of Masters, Mistresses, God and all gods, and other manipulators of the weft are carefully protected, since no-one, even the weftling, can defend themselves well when they are asleep. It would be an act of enormous over-confidence to place one’s residence in a location where enemies have easy access, yet one cannot always be at an inconvenient remove from the place where one conducts one’s affairs (which is generally the same place where one’s enemies are to be found). To resolve this problem protected antechambers may be created. These are rooms that are connected on one side to the safe place the weft-manipulator prefers to rest, and on the other side to the place where their affairs are best conducted, even if these places are very separate. In the Master’s Manse the antechamber is a link between the external structures of the building, and so to Mordew, and the internal spaces which the Master has placed in one of a series of closely related and contingent intermediate material realms which are not entirely the same as the material realm in which his enemies dwell. Things which happen in these realms are affected by and effect changes in the realm in which Mordew proper resides, but without knowing which of the intermediate realms the Master has chosen to be in at any given moment, even if an enemy were to attempt an assassination, then they would find the Master somewhere else and not in a place where he might be murdered (though they would not know of this fact since the realms are all very similar indeed, only differing in some very minor detail, often invisible). Of course, a weft-dweller would be able to see through, and would be able to identify where and in which realm the Master was at any given moment, but there is only one weftling, and he is dead.
Other antechambers are less sophisticated and are merely trapped and well-protected rooms.
A hastily constructed and possibly fictional boat which protected pairs of the creatures of prehistory from drowning at the whim of God.
Mordew is not all there is of the world, nor does it end with Malarkoi, nor yet with Waterblack, but extends in all directions for unmeasurable distances. A man walking straight across the water from Mordew (if he had the magic at his command to force the sea to hold him up) with the intention of not stopping until he met the end of things would find himself exhausted before that eventuality came to pass (if, indeed, it ever would). Much of the territory he passed over before he gave up and returned is under the control of the Assembly, a militantly humanistic, atheistic, communistic, rationalistic, democratic federation of conquered territories. For decades the Assembly has turned its attentions to lands in the East, but of late they have remembered Mordew and their vendetta against its Master (and all theistic organisms). Their Seventh Atheistic Crusade almost resulted in the complete destruction of Mordew, its aggression only barely incapable of the work it set itself by virtue of enormous sacrifice on the part of people of the past. Who knows, now, what the Assembly has discovered in the east, and how it might help them tip the balance?
The Assembly is against God and all gods, since theistic organisms oppress humanity. The existence of deities subverts the weft of the world, bending events away from the eventual liberation of all people. God and all gods are incapable of leaving the weft, and they are immortal unless killed. Consequently, the Atheistic Decree has gone forth from the Assembly that God and all gods should be killed. The Atheistic Crusades are charged with the realisation of this decree and Crusaders volunteer for training in God-Summoning, God-Killing and counter-theistic re-education.
A salted and cured meat made from the flesh of the pig by the company Beaumont and Sons. Its consumption is ubiquitous in the Merchant City, fried, and its particular odour can be detected throughout Mordew. The slum-dwellers rarely eat it, but only because they cannot afford it.
It is customary to give magic items names lest they be mistaken for mundane items of the same type. Ballard’s Bow is named after the boy warrior Ballard from the third Iberian War. The facts of who Ballard was and why he conducted his war are lost to time, but the bow allows anyone who makes a sacrifice of a loved one to loose a single arrow and have it strike a fatal blow on the target of their choice, regardless of range. It may not then be used again, except by someone else and under the same conditions.
Floating air contained in an impossibly thin and flexible membrane. It is an indication of the decadence and wastefulness of the city of Malarkoi that the discovery of a material strong enough to resist a tenfold expansion in size, light enough to remain effortlessly airborne, and manipulable easily even by a child, has been used only for decorative effect. These balloons can be seen in every imaginable colour, tethered by string, depending from all the dwelling places of the city. It has been hypothesised that a balloon of enormous size might lift a man, but no-one in Malarkoi has troubled to try.
The name given to a company that produces pigs on an industrial scale. The proper place for a pig is outside in the mud, or snuffling through a forest, and while the pig no doubt enjoys environs of this sort, it is much more efficient to take them at birth and barrack them together in pens where they may be fed until they are grown without the need to chase about after them. Also, meat is easier to cut when it is free of muscle, and as muscle is made by moving, better meat is made when the animals remain still (as they do in a pen). It is possible to make excellent bacon in large quantities by placing a piglet in a pen and feeding it for only a few months; Beaumont’s has perfected this process. Clearly, if the pigs had any say in it, they would not remain in the pens, so pens must be made sturdy. It is unfortunate that pigs are clever beasts, because a pig man will suspect that his creatures know they are suffering, but on the other hand, do we all not suffer? And why should pigs not suffer when the pig man does suffer, since he must work most of the day in the pens alongside his charges? And for very little pay, since the market for bacon will not stand high prices. It is not uncommon for a pig to get a sly jab from a passing pig man, especially when his shift drags, and the pigs seem to him to dream of the day when they will be free and repay their keepers’ unkindnesses. That day will never come, the pig man thinks.
The name given to the Master of Mordew’s chief factotum. Bellows is a magical mutated boy-child taken into service in his youth. The Master realised he had a highly developed sense of smell and a fierce loyalty, and because the Master abhors wasted effort and it is easier to change what one has in front of one than it is to start everything afresh, he modified Bellows with the intention of using him in some minor function (the location of truffles, for example). Later, circumstances changed, and Bellows was charged with sniffing out the oestrus of female persons. The rationale given was that women and girls had a detrimental effect on the Master’s magic (through, perhaps, their facility with folk magic brought on by inherited coincidences with the weft), but some have wondered whether it was not a form of anxious protection against the invasion of the Manse by the Mistress and her female agents.
It is hard to make a living in the slums of Mordew, and there are those in the Merchant City who find it equally difficult, in that more civilised environment, to satisfy their base cravings. There are always people willing to exchange coin for sexual services and vice versa, and since there are no prohibitions in the slums against behaviour of any kind (and no one to police them if there were), sex work is common. Just as the witch-women dress alike and the Fetches have their bells, so sellers of sex black their eyes to identify themselves to their customers. There is no kohl in the slums, nor ink, nor a history of tattooing, so mostly this is done with charcoal taken from the embers of a fire.
Those who have blacked their eyes may work in the community of a brothel and pay commission to a madam, or they may accept callers to what passes for their homes and keep all that they earn. Some customers prefer comfort in their surroundings, but there are others who prefer squalor, and both systems have their advocates.
See: Anaximander.
Brine mist is thrown up by the collision of waves against the Sea Wall, there is near constant rain, wind comes down from the mountains, and ramshackle lean-tos are rarely well insulated. Consequently, it is always cold in the slums of Mordew. In order to counter the chill, slum-dwellers make communal bonfires from whatever they can find and encourage them to burn with copious application of accelerants – cooking fat and firebird feathers being the most readily available. Once they are lit, everyone sits around in a circle and, because there is nothing else to occupy them, they talk. Conversation turns to who they should blame for their plight. The Master’s Manse stands oppressive above them and it is as if he hears their every word, so while they might make glances up the hill, it is the Mistress they blame openly. Womb-born children, those that are wanted, like to please their parents, so they make totems in the image of the Mistress and burn them, hoping to curry favour by expressing anger at the common enemy. The young are naïve enough to think that what is said is the limit of what is thought, but many in Mordew know the true source of their oppression, even if they do not name him openly.
A womb-born baby is a person, there are few who would deny it, but until they come to use words, are they really much different from the lower animals? They feed, they evacuate, they sleep, much like a dog does, and should they never learn to speak can they be said to have reached their potential? They cannot, and this is because words are what a person’s being consists of. Even inside his head a person can think and understand nothing without words, and this means that words make up the world for them. Books, then, being full of words to the exclusion of all else (except those with illustrations), are like little worlds, and since the world is where life exists, then life exists also in books.
It is important to learn to read, and when one can read one need never again be trapped in an unsatisfactory world because one need only read a book written by another that contains a more enjoyable place to be and one is transported there. If there are no books that offer a world more acceptable to the spirit of a person than the dire world in which they find themselves, then they can write a world of their own and thenceforth live in that.
How much more so, then, are magic books to be valued, since they can work with the weft to make of the material realm the ideal world the reader desires, and should one ever find such a book one should count oneself unsurpassably lucky and treasure it as one would treasure a firstborn (more so if that child is unwelcome).
A coin with low value.
Part of a suit of armour – specifically the bit at the front of the chest.
The Living Mud (and, by association, flukes and dead-life), though magical things, primarily have effects that the people of Mordew associate closely with vulgar matters. The Living Mud gives rise to flukes and children, just as sexual intercourse does, and as all civilised people find sexual intercourse shameful, so the people of the Merchant City find the Living Mud shameful. The Merchants cobble their streets to reduce the presence of mud of any kind and hire workers to sweep what Living Mud that does generate (and similarly any dead-life or fluke that is found) down into the slums. It is not true to say that slum-dwellers do not feel shame – they very much do – but their low estate means they must bear it. Indeed, there is much shameful that takes place in the slums which must be borne, and the Merchants are drawn down into that territory when there are shameful things they wish to do, thereby keeping their own places free of it. This is why one finds so many brothels in the slums, and why it is possible to make a living (of sorts) from blacking one’s eyes.
The name of the Captain of the Muirchú, the sailor who found and raised the fish which powers her ship. She reluctantly accepts work from the Master, but for how much longer? She and her crew despise Mordew and its waters and would leave if they could. They feel they must stay, but what if it proves intolerable? Then hard decisions must be made and the lesser of two evils chosen.
The name given to a servant of the Master of Mordew responsible for small repairs in the private wing of the Manse. It is just like the Master of Mordew to name a person after their work, and while one so named might, in another position, call himself by his original name and will even insist on being called it by his associates, the very moment he was so addressed by the Master, Caretaker forgot his previous name entirely and now knows himself only as his employer knows him. Such is the power a manipulator of the weft has on the world around him.
In the Northfields root vegetables are grown for the tables of the Merchant City, and the carrot is a species of these. They are conical, orange, sweet and much prized for their flavour (which complements all manner of other foods). It would be wasteful if someone were to give a carrot to an animal, since an animal would be satisfied with the lowest type of food and does not have the intelligence to discriminate between two flavours, let alone have anything one might sensibly call a palate. Also, a carrot is expensive, while grass, for example, is very cheap. So, if anyone were to buy carrots and then feed them to, say, a horse (or horses), this would be an indication of some mental aberration, or perhaps a fetish.
A type of architectural column in the form of a statue of a woman.
An animal with a tail, whiskers and large ears and eyes. It skulks in the dark and inveigles its way into the affections of its betters. Useful for deterring the presence of vermin and dead-life in a property, it should be encouraged only inasmuch as it can prove this usefulness. Any illusion of positive emotion – love, for example – is just that: an illusion. The sceptical can test this for themselves by offering one of the creatures affection: while it may accept it for a while, it will eventually turn and bite you. It will also tease to death any small living thing it encounters.
Cats are recognisable by their form and are consequently easy to draw: images of them, often from behind, are carved by inattentive pupils on the wood of their desks.
A process or thing that enhances an effect or reaction. If something is inhibited, then a catalyst can remove the inhibition. If something is not inhibited, then a catalyst can provoke a thing to heights dreamed impossible in its absence. Imagine blowing on an ember – the fire in that ember will grow bright in the presence of the breath and thereby ignite a flame in surrounding wood.
The material realm, by its very definition, is an inhibition of the weft, and should a catalysing spell or object be found that can reduce this effect, then it is possible, almost, to bring all the native power of the weft into the material realm (manifested as the Spark), though chaos will likely ensue.
When referred to with the indefinite article, it is any thing that has been dried out so that it will catch fire when it meets a spark. It is often kept in a tinderbox.
The Char Cloth, though, is the magically condensed and converted body of a Spark inheritor, transformed through pyrolysis into pure weft-stuff, and the kindling with which the Tinderbox does its dangerous work.
An ancient body of knowledge now made almost redundant by an understanding of the weft, which outlines the way in which things combine. It is primarily to be seen in unopened books in forgotten libraries, but only by those who stumble upon such things.
A roughly circular area in the Southern Slums, where the Living Mud pools more deeply than it does elsewhere. The reason for this depth is wondered at, but it is a rule in everything that the more of something there is in one spot, the more like that thing the place becomes because of it. More salt in a soup makes a soup saltier, the more persons of good cheer in a room the more cheerful it is, and the more wealth there is in a city the wealthier it becomes. The Circus is a place in which the Living Mud expresses itself more forcefully than almost anywhere else because of this rule – flukes rise, dead-life flourishes, unnatural events occur – and since flukes and oddities are a resource and slum-dwellers accumulate where any resource may be found, so around the Circus gather those with nothing so that they might at least have something.
The name given to Nathan Treeves’s mother, though he only knows her as ‘Mum’. Her full name is Princess Clarissa Anne Judith Peter de Morgan-Anstruther Delphine Treeves Delacroix, Empress-in-Waiting. Scholars of etymology and heraldry might be able to derive knowledge from her family name as to who she is and what she wants in the world, but there are few now (if any) who have the leisure required to study these fields, and the necessary reference texts have, anyway, been lost. Consequently, she must be judged by her actions, but these are strange, and she is cryptic because of it. All things, though, become obvious in time, and the impatient must occupy themselves with less obscure questions until they receive their answer.
All organisations must have a place to gather, and the occult tontine responsible for the death of God made for themselves an underground dwelling place accessible only by the sewers of the city once known as Paris. This they thought was suitable, since there was an idea, incorrect though it was proved, that there was such an organism as the Devil and that the Devil was in opposition to God, and that the abode of this Devil was beneath the ground, so this is where they went. Even when it became clear that there was only the weftling and that the weft and the immaterial realm were coexistent with the material and intermediate realms and that the notions ‘above’ and ‘below’ were irrelevant to the matter of the proper dwelling place of God (or of demons), the tontine still met in the same place. They extended it and placed magical protections on it so that, even when Paris was razed in the God-killing, the Club House survived. Now it is below the Master’s city, Mordew. In it are many answers to questions of origins, but who has time for those when one lives a perilous existence always fearing starvation and death and longing for power and glory?
The womenfolk of the Merchant City who do not occupy themselves with trade or domestic matters find that it is good to associate with others like them, so they have their litter-bearers bring them to the Colonnades. Here they may nibble fancies and sip nectars and exchange by whispers news of a sensitive nature, or shout out information of general concern, and at the very least they feel like they have been out of the house.
It would be wrong to think that everything in the Colonnades is trivial, since there is much in what transpires there that goes on to have an influence in the world, but that is not its primary purpose, since letters are an equally efficient means of exchanging information and it is much easier to carry a letter about the city than it is to transport an entire person.
A restaurant operated by Mr Padge in the Merchant City, serving imported meat, vegetables from the Northfields, and fermented grape juices. While it caters to the wealthiest and most respectable members of society, it is run by criminals, and is a front for illicit activity throughout Mordew. Its name was originally The Melodious Hour, after a theatrical showboat of legend, but Mr Padge changed the name as a private joke, finding the innocuous surface meaning – a convenient place to spend an hour – nicely hid another meaning (predicated on an archaic usage of the word ‘commode’ which had fallen out of currency amongst his clientele). To be openly insulting of his patrons’ intelligence without them knowing is something Mr Padge prizes enormously.
A book of spells containing the kind of magic that a child might find amusing and that will brighten a dull afternoon – bangs, flashes, simple transformations. Which is not to say that there isn’t use in it. As is often the case, children can be introduced to important concepts and weighty matters by giving them to them in a palatable form, and compendia such as these are used in places less gloomy than Mordew to both entertain and educate children in the use of magic. Each spell is discrete and, used individually, innocuous, but there are combinations that can be dangerous. A spell which gives pretty light can be used with a spell that twists and a spell that causes a thing to grow to create a large image of, say, a lion. Should this image of a lion be given mass by casting on it a spell that gives weight to something, then an effective lion can be created. Then one only need irritate it with another spell and it might rampage, so children should be taught to use the book as directed.
A tree seed valued by squirrels and those pleased by a round, smooth brownness in things. It can be handed to a crying child who will put it to their lips and delight in it for a while. Care must be taken so that they do not swallow it, since they will choke.
The name given to a servant of the Master of Mordew responsible for preparing food in the private wing of the Manse. He is a mute, but who needs speech in the chopping of spinach, or the broiling of meat? He has no brigade and works alone so there is no one he must call for or chide, and his kitchen is quiet except for the click of the knife, or the bubbling of water at the boil. Does he take pride in his work? Pride is too vainglorious – no, he takes care always to do things correctly, for with food there is always a right way and a wrong way and anyone who says otherwise, or attempts to justify a mistake with claims to personal taste, is a fool. Cook is no fool – he knows the right ways and has the skill to prove it – but there is no arrogant pride in him. He does what must be done and that is all there is to it.
A coin of medium to low value – not as low as brass, but certainly not as high as silver.
Who can see the colours of a ship, rippling in the breeze, and not feel a surge of some emotion in the chest? If one fears pirates, these colours will inspire fear, if one welcomes home a victorious navy, then excitement and pride will come. Always there is something and so, when we reproduce these colours in blooms and pin them to the lapel, what we are hoping to do, in miniature, is to own that larger feeling for ourselves. Or it may be that colour combinations are redolent of some analogous condition in the weft and that the wearing of them opens up a channel through which Spark energy will flow and make us more alive. Or we may just like patterns. In any case, it is customary before going into battle to wear the colours of one’s sponsors and some choose to do it by gathering flowers and attaching them to their uniforms, which is what a corsage is.
Some may see a cream and say ‘this is nothing but a cream, some mundane emollient, do not trouble me with it,’ and there is truth in this because to have a convenient thing to hand is to lessen the importance of it as convenience robs even our closest and dearest compatriots of their special uniqueness and centrality in our lives. In short, we come to ‘take them for granted’, as the saying goes, and thus overlook them. Some creams may be overlooked, but some are magical, even if they appear to be entirely unremarkable. Some are capable of retrieving material flesh from the immaterial realm, such as when through overuse of the Spark through a wounded limb a man my drive that limb to defensively evolve into the concept of itself and lose materiality. In this case the cream should be applied daily after bathing and soon the limb will recover, and though this seems oversimple, then that is only because it elides the pains gone through to make the cream in the first place, which were extensive.
Any army marching to war with the sign of the cross at its fore is a crusading army, but there are many types of cross and thereby many types of crusade. The one that concerns Mordew is the cross of the Atheistic Crusade, which is very alike to the capital letter ‘X’ in red against black and which signifies the negation of God and all gods that the Crusaders hold as their motivating force. It is also the shape of the God-Summoning rack, though whether the rack takes this shape as a reference to the cross or whether the cross represents the rack is something over which even the Crusaders argue.
To say one does not worship God is not to say that God does not exist. The Atheistic Crusaders know that God does exist and make it their work to murder him and anyone approaching godhood. Since they know that God is real, they also know that magic is real and they use it extensively, having made their own language that represents the condition of the weft in words on the pages of their magical books and inscribed into their magical objects, along with the character of it, so that they might replicate those conditions and characters in the material realm. Sigils make up this language and they are recognisable as a type in that they all have an element of the cross in them, somewhere, even if corrupted through iterative development into something unrecognisable.
A slum boy who is often sent, along with his brothers, to the Master. Like the bird with whom he shares a name, he often takes for himself that share of the resources reserved for others. He is therefore not well liked at home, where those around him are made angry by their hunger.
The name given to a sailor on the ship the Muirchú. What is there to say of sailors? They are all the same fellow again and again, and Darragh is not distinguishable, much, from any other. He pulls on ropes and clutches to bulwarks and often he drinks himself to sleep with liquor. As with the other sailors on the Muirchú he comes from the same place and has the same way of speaking, but if there is any significance to this fact it is not immediately obvious.
The name given to the daughter of the Mistress of Malarkoi, heiress to all her powers and knowledge. She is a figure of central importance in the affairs of the world, and as such no further discussion of her is required, since it will all become obvious as the days pass.
Two womb-born boys who, though derived from a small woman, have grown massive in stature. Their mother, Ma Dawlish, runs a gin-house in the Southern Slums and from there maintains a burgeoning criminal empire only held in check by the existence of her supposed employer, Mr Padge. All three wish Mr Padge ill, and whether they will have their wish granted (to see him die) only the progress of time will tell.
The Living Mud has the power to create life, but it does so stupidly with no thought or direction. God designed the creatures of the world intelligently and they thrive, not so dead-life, which falters and dissolves almost as soon as it is born. Since God made the world to accommodate his creations and it is formed with this in mind, then un-Godly creation will tend towards forms that exist as concepts in the immaterial realm, but they will not do so perfectly. So, dead-life will often appear as a flawed and imperfect version of a perfect thing.
If dead-life, by chance, can live, then it is a fluke, but without application of much Spark energy (which is formed of God’s will) no dead-life and no fluke will live independently for long, no matter how close to God’s creation it might seem, because it will leak Spark back into the weft, since only perfect form can long hold the Spark insulated from its desire to be back in its proper realm.
Everything ungodly must die, since those that are not in entire concert with the weft will leach its Spark back into it. There is only a finite amount of the Spark in each living thing, and when it is gone then death replaces it. Those who die from lack of the Spark are survived only by the pattern they leave on the immaterial realm, and while they may return in the form of ghosts to places where the weft is deformed sufficiently to allow it (by the use of magic, usually), they may never live again, whether they die through natural causes or by accident.
What, though, of those who are killed by magic, or at the hand of those who are infused with the Spark, or by those who are entirely in concert with the weft? Since those deaths are congruent with a deformation of the weft, on their death the patterns these people (or lower animals, or sometimes objects) established in the immaterial realm are imprinted on the weft – since their deaths were, in part or whole, caused by the deformation of it. As any shape the weft comes to hold persists and is sempiternal and coexistent with it, then these people may be retrieved in a manner very similar to those things and people that are evolved towards a more godly form by the direct application of Spark energy intended for the creation of higher orders of things, or organisms, or in the intentional creation of angels, or in any other way the use of the Spark comes to alter the natural state of a thing.
Consequently, those who die at the hands of a Master, Mistress or other manipulator of the weft may be summoned in a more perfect material form back to the material realm. Here they tend, through gratitude (since life is always to be preferred by the living to death, once they understand the permanence of such a thing and the unsatisfactoriness of life as a ghost), to serve that Master, even when the Master wishes them to perform some onerous role, such as to be a soldier in that Master’s army (though they might revolt if they are called upon to cause harm to those for whom, in life, they had some emotional sympathy).
Moreover, in a very important sense, these resurrected dead can be seen to be owned by the Master that killed them since, with little expenditure of effort, he can return them to the immaterial realm and summon them to places in the material realm at will. Also, such is the manner of the relationship between life as it exists in the material realm with the patterns relating to that life as they are imprinted on the weft on death and the centrality of the Spark which comes from the weft in the giving of life, that the ownership caused by the extinguishing of the Spark by a weft-manipulator on the pattern of life as it deforms the weft has the effect of operating on all similar pattern possessors in the material realms. Which is to say that relations of those killed by a Master are also (though to a lesser extent) subject to the same ownership of their extinguished forebear (since they share, partly at least, the same pattern as it is represented in the weft). And, as time as it is represented in the weft and time as it is represented in the material realm are complexly related, this ownership moves both forward and backward in material time so that ancestors are also subject to ownership. Simply, if a Master kills a man, he gains ownership of his entire family line, future and past and laterally (unless, of course, a weft-manipulator manipulates the weft in such a way as to erase the pattern of the dead, something that is very difficult to do) whether they are mothers, fathers, brothers, ghosts or those yet to be born.
Overuse of the Spark through a wounded limb may drive that limb to defensively evolve into the concept of itself and lose materiality to prevent further damage. Or at least this is how it seems. More it is that the Spark, wishing to be used and seeing a threat to that use from a flaw in the material realm, causes, by evolution, a shift into the immaterial realm as a protective measure. In either case, the Spark user will lose materiality and eventually become a ghost. From there, should he continue to use the Spark, he will become an angel (or a demon) and then a demigod. Which is not to say that he could not choose that path for himself, but defensive evolutionary dematerialisation is when the Spark does it without reference to the man’s wishes.
The ancestral home of the Delacroix family. It is built high up near the Manse, but unlike other dwelling places of the wealthy it does not imitate its style. It is as if, through their choice of aesthetic, this family has insisted that it is other than and not much less equal to the Master himself, and that the Master then should respect them more than he does any other family. Alternatively, the house might predate the Manse, and it is the Master that broke with architectural tradition in order to demonstrate his own superiority. The answer to which, if either, of these conjectures is accurate is no doubt contained in the Delacroix archives, but these they keep closed and access is not granted, even to scholars of Mordew.
Not all godlike things are God, since only the weftling is entirely in concert with the weft and no person can entirely be of the weft, since people belong to the material realm in life, and the immaterial realm in death, and neither of these realms is the weft. Consequently, when a person evolves themselves to a position of closeness to godhood sufficient for them to become more god than man, then they are not God, but are only a demigod and this is the most, it is presumed, that they can be.
A man is a thing of the material realm, a ghost is a thing of the immaterial realm, and God is of the weft. Each of these things is typical of the realm they are spawned from, but what of creatures that straddle realms or are born in an intermediate realm? A thing mostly immaterial but a little material and a little of the weft – that thing receives the name ‘angel’. A thing mostly material, but a little of the immaterial and a little of the weft, that thing is called a demon. As an angel is concerned with the higher immaterial concerns – thought, love and beauty – so a demon is concerned with the lower material concerns – violence, hatred and ugliness.
Those who deform the weft to their own ends can scour the intermediate realms for agents that might do their bidding, and the Atheistic Crusaders make much use of demons (though they cannot ever control angels, who tend to the godly and deny Crusader atheism) which they summon from their proper place to do violence in the material realm, which is something they are ever wont to do, since to live entirely in the material realm is like pain to them, so anger is their natural state. They will attempt, violently and angrily, to return to their own place, usually by the killing of their summoners. This does not mean they cannot be used, though, since their summoner need only put, for example, a place or person between themselves and a demon, and that person or place will like as not be destroyed as the demon seeks to lay its hands (if it has them) on its summoner. If the summoner knows then how to return a demon to its proper place, they can do so before they are killed and achieve much destruction with little effort (other than that inherent in the summoning, manipulation and dismissal of the creatures of the intermediate realms).
An organism assumed by the men of the ancient times to exist, but which was subsequently demonstrated to be either an avatar of the weftling or a demon of the intermediate realms.
There is no limit to the ingenuity of a person who, with enormous resources of intelligence and resentment, finds themselves held against their will. To be imprisoned may seem like a loss for that person, but then think of the very many people who, having their freedom, do precisely nothing with it. So wide is the range of opportunities of he who is at his liberty that it can be stifling, since what should he choose to do? When one is caged, however, there is one occupation only that seems worthy – finding freedom – and that one thing can be focussed on entirely. The displacer box is an object that, containing a condition of the weft and its vibrating with its character, was invented, with other things, by Dashini, daughter of the Mistress of Malarkoi while she was held under quarantine in the Master’s Manse. It allows any object placed within it to be manifest a fixed distance away from where it ought to be. While Dashini did not find it helpful in securing her release, anyone possessing it will find the theft of small objects much facilitated by its use, or the assassination of a person in another room, or for spying, since an optical instrument can be inserted into it and the object of its scrutiny observed through walls.
Gam Halliday’s gang’s alternative name for the Club House.
There is no better fun than to see dogs fight, whether this is against another dog, or a bear, or a fluke, but it is also a fact that dogs do not relish fighting. The loser of a fight dies, but the victor is often wounded and if the scars are not physical, they are psychological. A dog at his first fight has thought previously that his owner held nothing but brotherly feeling towards him, so how does the dog react to see this man cheering beside the ring as the dog is bitten and clawed and taken close to death? He takes it inside himself, where its reconciliation with the past and present facts of the world provokes a pain in his stomach. For most dogs this is where it ends and the life of a fighting dog is naturally brief, but what of a magical dog? This type of dog harbours resentment and also great prowess at fighting, which is a dangerous combination if that beast should ever become intent on revenge.
What is a dragon if it is not a creature of myth? It is a gigantic lizard with four legs and wings and with the ability to breathe out fire, or ice, or poison, or lightning. Should the dragon have many heads then it may breathe all of the elements, and if a head is cut off two more sprout in its place. It is a formidable creature, yet it is rarely if ever seen, which is odd since formidable creatures are precisely those things that are liable to flourish, so where are they all? Perhaps they never existed at all, perhaps they are shy, or perhaps they have retired to an intermediate realm where they live all together in peace.
A means by which one or many people may be induced to think as an educator intends for them to think. If taken young, the object of an education can find it impossible to overturn whatever beliefs that have been instilled into it, since it considers those facts to be synonymous with nature, or common sense, or the world as it is.
Re-education is a secondary form of education undertaken by the peripatetic committees of the Atheistic Crusades as a means of overturning any primary education which they believe is counter to the interests of the Assembly.
That area of Mordew where goods are held and processed for export. Generally, such goods are created in the Fields and Factoria, stored or modified in the Entrepôt and then shipped through the docks via the Sea Wall Gate into the world at large. Where they go then is unknown, but a similar volume of goods is received in the opposite direction and consequently it is assumed they are bartered for goods Mordew is incapable of producing for itself.
The natural order of things in God’s world is that they process from state A to state B to state C and this process is called evolution. A man is born, then he evolves to a more complex form (a process called ageing) and then he evolves to an immaterial form (a process called dying). It is not only men; it is also lower creatures, since, with enormous Spark energy applied, an insect can become a mammalian animal and then a man. Even an object can be made to evolve, such as a rock to a living rock, and even a man can evolve from a person, to a ghost, to an angel, to a demigod and all through the application of Spark energy, which is the form the will of God takes in the material realm (or, to say the same thing, is a manifestation of the perfection of the weft in matter).
This is not to say that evolution is usual, since only God and godlike organisms have at their disposal the amount of Spark that evolution requires, but it is natural since no deformation or perversion of the weft is required (unlike with magic), only a source of sufficient Spark.
An exponential thing is like doubling – if a thing doubles periodically, even if it starts as a single thing, before long there is more of it than the world can comfortably contain. Think of a wasp: if there is one of it that is one thing, but two? Four? Eight? The situation quickly becomes unmanageable if they are all in a room with you, but should you open the window and then outside there are sixteen, thirty-two, sixty-four? While you struggle with a pencil and paper to work out how many there will soon be you will panic, particularly if you are being stung.
The poison of a wasp is sufficient to cause pain, but the sting of one wasp is bearable and a Master would not even feel it, probably. But what of one hundred and twenty-eight wasps? Or two hundred and fifty-six? Or five hundred and twelve? Soon even a Master will be endangered, and such was the thinking of Dashini, daughter of the Mistress of Malarkoi, as she languished in her cell. She made a poison that would multiply in this way, but instead of multiplying a wasp it made the cells of the body multiply (the idea suggested by the same word being used for her room and the tiny objects that make up a man, even a demigod).
As yet the poison is untested, but there might yet come a suitable day.
See: Blacking (one’s) eyes.
One of two vestigial organs of sight possessed by the weftling but remaining unused in favour of more advanced sensory apparatuses.
The front of the Master’s Manse. To where does it point? It offers no access to Mordew since there is no ground beneath it. Why then?
The name given to the area of Mordew primarily occupied by factories making items of use either for the Merchant City or for export. The area near the Northfields is known as the Northfield Factorium and the area near the Southfields is known as the Southfields Factorium. Both of these areas feed the produce of the fields into the mechanisms of the factories and come out with varied goods.
The Factorium proper abuts mines driven into the mountains that form Mordew’s eastern side, and converts minerals, metals and other subterranean matter into things needed in manufacturing processes. Along with the fields, the factories of the Factorium employ the majority of the adult workers of the slums, and there are some barracks here for them to sleep in between shifts.
A con invented by Prissy by which a merchant may be relieved of their money through a manipulation of either their good or bad nature, regardless of which they happen to possess. In its usual form, the performance requires a minimum of three actors – the Damsel, the Lookout and the Trip Hazard. Once the Lookout has given a signal that the area is clear and the con may begin, the Damsel distracts the object of the con – the mark – with a performance of weakness (often involving the suggestion that the Damsel has been rendered vulnerable to predation). The mark is lured in either by their desire to protect the vulnerable Damsel, or by their desire to exploit their vulnerability. While they are distracted by the Damsel’s story, and at the Damsel’s signal, the Trip Hazard and Lookout run simultaneously towards the mark. The Trip Hazard crouches behind the mark, the Lookout shoves, and the mark falls. The Damsel, having located the mark’s purse prior to giving the signal, takes the purse from the mark as they sprawl on the ground and then Damsel, Lookout and Trip Hazard run away back to their hideout.
This con has the advantage of requiring little preparation and is quite safe to perform. The Damsel is trained in self-defence and the mark is always of the type easily beaten in a fight. More violent forms of the con exist, and a two-person version performed by a Damsel and an Assassin can be used to confuse a victim while their murder – by stabbing, for example – is executed (though in truth this is little more than a matter of simple distraction).
A Fetch is a man whose profession it is to collect and deliver persons and goods between one area of a city, generally the slums, and another, generally the abode of a city’s Master, Mistress or ruling class. He is useful in that an employer will often not deign to visit the lowly areas of a city and will seek to prevent the approach to his abode of the dwellers of that area, and yet occasionally intercourse between these two places is required. A Fetch, then, is employed to ‘fetch’ (and also to ‘carry’) things between one place and another. In Mordew, a Fetch’s work is generally the transport of boy workers to the Manse by horse and cart along the magical Glass Road provided for the purpose, and the delivery of the weekly stipend back to those boy workers’ parents.
There are gates through which a Fetch is allowed into and out of the slums, and these can either be unlocked with a key which the Fetch keeps or have guards who know what each Fetch looks like and who are charged with allowing them ingress and egress.
One of the characteristic sounds of the slums of Mordew is the ringing of handbells. Each bell is tuned to a different pitch, but the sound of each is sad and mournful. Whether it is possible for a sound to contain emotion, or whether an ear will associate a neutral sound with a group of sadness-causing associations is an arguable point, but either way, the mournful tolling of the Fetches’ bells is an indication that a Fetch is near, and that those with unwelcome children should bring them forth and deliver them to him. These children, for a small fee, will then be taken to the Master by the Glass Road, where they will be put to useful work.
Imagine a thin, feathered, lizard-like horse whose hooves have been replaced with grasping hands. Onto this monster, place a pair of wings like those of a pigeon or a dove, except large enough to lift the whole apparatus into the air. Then, when you have this idea settled, make it red and flaming, black smoke trailing wherever it has been. This is, approximately, what a firebird looks like.
Its creation is through the magic of the Mistress of Malarkoi and it is said that she must sacrifice a child of her city by slitting its throat for every firebird she makes.
In Mordew they are a menace. Many hundreds of them are sent daily to tear down the Sea Wall and if one ever crosses into the city it does mischief there, kidnapping, murdering, and setting fires.
Firebirds lose their feathers easily, and these can be seen all across the slums (where decoration of any kind is prized no matter how dubious its source).
The body of water surrounding Mordew generates many unusual forms of aquatic life, and even the familiar species are more variable in scale here than they are in other parts of the ocean. The fish that powers the Muirchú is a very large hybrid of whale and shark, a mix that is unprecedented (indeed impossible) in nature. It was caught near the Sea Wall in its youth by the fisherwoman who now captains its ship. She nurtured it, trained it, and built a ship around it. Now it responds to a combination of her commands and the slakes and feeds she has raised it on. It is a sickly creature, however, being covered with polyps and growths and racked with internal pains from its unconventional biology. No matter how far she steers it from Mordew it always returns eventually, against her wishes since she despises the city and its Master. Some sailors say it must eat only the corrupt sea-flukes that grow there, others say that magic is its proper sustenance, others still say that it seeks, tragically, a mate that does not exist, but all sea-folk begrudge its habits, since there are better places to ply one’s trade than that cursed and rain-soaked port.
When written with the indefinite article, this is a material which will spark when struck. It is often found in a tinderbox, since it can be used to ignite char cloth which has been subject to pyrolysis and thereby make a fire. It can also be made into knives.
When written with the definite article, it is one of the necessary components of the Tinderbox, the most dangerous magical object ever created. The Flint will Spark when struck, igniting the Char Cloth which, transformed through pyrolysis into pure weft-stuff, burns with such energy that it will render anything into nothing.
A minor but long-lasting type of spell usually cast on a place or an object, which alters it by magic to produce various effects by provoking the weft to enhance or diminish nature. An ugly baby that has been fluenced will inspire, or will never inspire, love; a road that has been fluenced will speed, or slow, passage; a fluenced optical instrument will show things unnaturally near, or unnaturally far. See also: Hex.
When God makes a thing or causes the conditions under which a thing is made to come into the material realm, then it is always right since he is the weftling and entirely in concert with the weft. It is a truism to say that all those things made by God are natural since the weft determines nature and God is the weftling, so he could do no other than create natural things since otherwise he would not be in entire concert with the weft, which we know him to be. So, when nature as man understands it operates, then natural things are the result. A fluke is an unnatural thing (which is also to say it is magical) since it arrives not through natural processes but through the unnatural influence of the Living Mud which, though it is created through the influence of God, is only created in the material realm and does not contain the immaterial concept that God marries through the weft into the one perfect being and which is required for a thing to be natural.
Which is not to say that a fluke cannot be made natural, because if it receives the Spark, which is the material form of the perfect immaterial concept manifest in the weft, then its material form can evolve into a thing that is in concert with God’s intention for organisms, and thereby escape its base nature. In Mordew, though, correction through evolution of unnatural flukes is rare and the city swarms with greater and lesser organisms formed through unnatural means. They are corrupted things, the very large proportion of them having no possibility of living – these are known as dead-life – but even those that can live are not natural and are not of a form likely to allow for their flourishing in a natural world. These things, through the flaws in their selves, are prone to wither, and if they do not die then they live lives of more or less misfortune since they are out of step with things as they are or should be.
A fluke can be a small animal, like a mouse but deformed, and it can be almost invisibly small, but it can also be larger – like a dog or a cat. It can even be the size of a man and can look very much like a man (or a woman, or a child of either sex) but it is not the same as a man since it is born by unnatural means. If one finds a baby, rarely, in the mud and it has not been placed there either deliberately or by accident by its parents, then it is likely a fluke born of the interaction of the Living Mud and, say, a discarded piece of cloth. While the child may appear to be a natural child it will have aspects of the cloth, its immaterial concept, bound up in the fabric of it, and will tend to the cloth-like as it develops. This is a clothliness of spirit and of form and since the idea of a cloth-like man is unnatural and ridiculous the child will likely not live to adulthood. It is similar if the Living Mud interacts with a stone, or another fluke, or discarded generative material, or a corpse, or a ghost. In any case it is not a man, but is always a fluke, since man is made in the image of God and that image cannot be reproduced in a living thing except through natural means.
Flies can be born out of the Living Mud when a carcass is near, and since Mr Padge allows both carcasses and Living Mud to gather in the fenced-off area behind his restaurant, The Commodious Hour, it is consequently abuzz with flies. This has led to it receiving the colloquial nickname ‘The Fly Yard’.
Some people are born more closely in congruence with the weft than others and consequently display unusual, magic-like abilities. They may guess what you are about to say before you say it, be able to move small objects without physically interfering with them, or commune with the recently deceased. These powers are a function of their matter and concepts aligning with the weft and thereby exceeding their material boundaries. This excession allows for the retrieval within the self of information from without the self, or, in reverse, the expulsion of energy outside of the self from within it. In either case, the exercise of such powers is called folk magic. In Mordew, folk magic is most commonly performed by witch-women, the necessary lore and simple spells shared amongst them and passed on through generations. Folk magic is lesser in degree than the true magic practised by Masters, Mistresses, all gods et al., since the similarity between these latter organisms and the weft is orders of magnitude more exact.
An area given to trees that acts as a natural boundary between the Manse and the lower city. Some imagine the trees are magical, and that they can come alive in the service of the Master, but this is never tested since no-one dares approach that close for fear of rousing the Master to anger.
Just as a seed germinates, a bud becomes a leaf, and fruit ripens, so those destined to inherit powers by virtue of a pattern established in the weft must come to fruition. And this process is not often pleasant. Does the soft shoot enjoy breaching the seed-casing, or the bud splitting, or the fruit converting inside to sugar? Very likely not, yet who would say those things should not happen regardless, since, like the ugly caterpillar who goes into its chrysalis and emerges from it in the form of a beautiful butterfly, then the child of a weft-manipulator leaves its powerlessness behind and becomes close to a god.
Since a weft-manipulator has contact with the weft, just like when a Master or Mistress kills a man with their magic, the pattern of the matter and the concept of that man is remembered by the weft. While the weft-manipulator exists the Spark energy goes to him, because this is why he has taken the trouble to manipulate the weft in the first instance, all his efforts and lore being focussed on this one outcome. But what then when he dies? If he has a child and that child is like him, then the weft is not concerned, as a man is, by the passing of generations. The weft is not a man (except in as much as the weftling is an instancing of it) and knows and cares nothing for his concerns, so when one bearing a pattern and character that induces the flow of the Spark from the weft into the material realm passes into a state of being that exists only in the immaterial realm, and chooses to remain there (through death), then it is only natural that the Spark energy flows to he who bears the same or very similar patterning.
Imagine if a cloud gathers and the rain falls on a hillside and runs down into a river and this river flows in a particular direction out to the sea. It is not because there is something inherent in that hillside or that river that causes the rain to reach the sea, it is simply that water flows where it flows, and these things make it flow there. So, the Spark flows through the bearer of the pattern that causes the flow, regardless of who it is that is patterned.
Yet a pattern inherited across generations is not perfect, since each man is unique and even very similar men cannot be said to be the same if this is the case. There must be some difference in them, even if it is invisible. Just as the water would struggle to resume its usual path if the hillside in the example given was to be replaced with a similar but not identical hillside, so will the Spark react when meeting with obstruction when seeking to follow the path established for it into the material realm. As water will cut though rock, and the bends of a river shape the land around it, so, when the Spark meets obstacles, it will abrade them until the obstacle is gone. This is why fruition is uncomfortable for the inheritor of a weft-manipulation pattern – it is changing him. Man is reluctant to change since he fears that he will not have the measure of it, and often an inheritor will resist his inheritance, but the inheritor of power need not concern himself any more than a caterpillar need be anxious that his lack of wings will prevent flight, since in the changing those things needed will be provided to him, just as a butterfly is born bearing the wings that will carry him into the air.
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.
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.
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.
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).
Places where gin-wives sell their wares and where slum-dwellers gather to indulge in them (often to excess).
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.
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.
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.
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.
The most valuable sort of coin and very rare in most circles.
Part of a suit of armour – specifically the bit around the throat.
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.
Part of a suit of armour – specifically the bit around the calves.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
See: Dragon(s).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
The name given to a sailor on the ship the Muirchú. She has secrets, but these she keeps to herself.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
The name given to a sailor on the ship the Muirchú. He has religious beliefs that his colleagues find amusing and frustrating by turns.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Gin-wife, rival of Mr Padge, and mother to the Dawlish Brothers, whom she exceeds if not in size, then in cunning and viciousness.
The name given to a sailor on the ship the Muirchú. Otherwise unremarkable.
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 and 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.
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.
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 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.
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 it, 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.
A spell of possession requiring special masks. Invented in captivity by Dashini, daughter of the Mistress of Malarkoi, this spell overrides a man’s ability to own his own body, banishing him to an intermediate realm where he occupies the body of a thing which does not possess its own self – say, the discarded husk of a demon who has moved into a more suitable form. While the mask remains whole, the wearer of it may use the body of the person whom the mask represents. It is technically true that this could be a permanent transition, but the material of the mask tends to dissolve, and it would be a shameful thing indeed for a person to knowingly relegate another person to a place not proper to him, so it is best for it to be temporary.
Born Sebastian Cope in the ancient times, the Master of Mordew was one of a tontine of occultists whose researches and experiments eventually uncovered God in his dwelling place above the world. Sebastian, unlike his compatriots, counselled caution to the tontine, a position which was overturned by a majority vote of the board, and efforts were made to subdue and then enslave the newly discovered deity for their joint benefit. These efforts were clumsy and too forceful, and God was killed, leaving a corpse. Sebastian, fearing the more aggressive members of the cabal would use this corpse to their own advantage and imperil the world with its magic, hid it in a subterranean chamber beneath the ancient city ‘Paris’. He thus secured the power that would eventually allow him to build and maintain Mordew. So long ago was this that Sebastian can barely recall it, and he has other concerns that occupy him, particularly the inevitable return of the Atheistic Crusade, now in its eighth iteration, the secret vanguard of which may or may not have already reached his city.
The Master is not a sentimental man and it is hard to see where he places any affection, so it would be out of character for him to name his ship, or to give it a figurehead. He has not done so, and thus no one should accuse him of inconsistency. Nor has he wasted any effort on its decoration, unless a uniformity in the colour black is considered decorative. The only noteworthy feature of this ship is that it sails itself, even without wind. Though, what would one expect of a Master? Should he trouble to do things the normal way when he has at his disposal the powers of a demigod? Only an idiot would opine that he should.
Demigods of the occult tontine responsible for the death of the weftling. Perverters and manipulators of the weft for their own purposes and engaged in a war for supremacy.
The realm proper to matter, excluding all concepts. Tied to the immaterial realm via the weft and co-productive of the intermediate realms by the law of combinations.
Liquids and powders either containing materials tied to the immaterial concept ‘good health’, or containing materials tied to the immaterial concepts antagonistic to poor-health-inducing-agents (a tincture which enacts ‘death in parasites’, for example). Much favoured in the Merchant City, whose occupants can afford a pharmacist’s prices, but rarely seen in the slums, where people must instead rely on the far less expensive services of witch-women.
The street on which Gam Halliday’s gang played the con The False Damsel on the haberdasher as a means of stealing his takings.
The part of Mordew where the merchants are to be found.
That part of the Southern Slums where Nathan Treeves was raised in a ramshackle lean-to.
A mine is a hole bored into the landscape out of which valuable minerals, ores and other things proper to the subterranean world are taken. These things can then be used in various ways to make various other things. Mordew has a mountain range to its east, and this provides much of the raw material for its industry. Some timorous individuals warn against mining. They fear that you will hollow out the world and thereby make it collapse, which is idiotic, since there is such an abundance of stuff below the surface that it could never, even by the most industrious effort, be raised to the surface (and it is ridiculous anyway – imagine if all that was in the world was suddenly on it: there wouldn’t be room). Others say that below the ground are races whose proper place is underground and that to invade there will prompt their wrath. As yet there has been no evidence of troglodytes of this type. Still others say that the earth is a thing worthy of consideration in and of itself and should not be desecrated. Since these people still walk on it, pass faeces into holes in it, and do all manner of other things that would seem desecratory to it, then one wonders why they single out ‘mining’ for their particular censure.
In any case, mining is done and the benefits of it are obvious.
A mirror is an imperfect instrument constructed of glass backed with a shiny surface and framed in wood. The normal kind shows and reflects those things placed in front of it but this it does poorly, since it inverts what it shows. One need only hold up a page of text to a mirror and attempt to read it to reveal the flaw: the writing will be illegible without performing a translation in the mind. Magic mirrors are the same. They may show things that are not placed in front of them (often at a great distance and ignoring obstacles) and they may reflect things (sometimes the anxieties or dreams of the viewer, sometimes magical emanations) but with both a translation must be made in the mind to correct the mirror’s flaw, since who is to say whether the things it shows are accurate? Moreover, it is possible to hex mirrors so that they show things other than those which are objectively verifiable, so they should be treated warily.
Former member of the occult tontine that resulted in the death of the weftling, and now Mistress of the city of Malarkoi. Named Portia Jane Dorcas Hall at birth, she was responsible for the discovery, by experiment, of the weft, and is the foremost authority on its nature. Where the Master of Mordew concerns himself with the practical application of magic, the Mistress works from first principles and spends much of her time in consideration of her theories. While this may look to an outsider like indolence, from where are innovations most likely to come? From he who runs around, with every appearance of industry, arranging and rearranging things that are known? Or from she who seeks to better understand why things are? It is surely from the latter, since nothing new can come from something already known, and only new knowledge can overcome the impasse that seems to have developed in the war between the Master and the Mistress.
The city that the Master of Mordew caused to be raised up on the ruins of the former Paris, and the place where he now resides. Surrounded by a Sea Wall on three sides which protects it from drowning, and a range of mountains to the east that protects it from invasion, Mordew is a safe place from which to prosecute the Master’s war against the Mistress of Malarkoi.
The city also provides him with the resources he requires for his magics. He has arranged affairs so they suit his needs, and anyone who doubts this does not understand the Master. Everything in Mordew is his, and everything works towards his ends, even when it appears not to. This is a fact and must be understood before any further understanding can be had.
A husband-and-wife couple of mechanical mice charged with the cleaning of the Master’s playroom. Some may think it unnecessary, even cruel, to gift intelligence and the capacity for love to objects required to carry out such menial tasks, but the Master finds that those so gifted work harder for him, the love they share inspiring them, each understanding the threat of the other’s loss. Their labours he rewards with many comforts, which is all one can hope for in an employer.
A ship that plies its trade, periodically, in the waters around Mordew and which may be hired at reasonable rates for tasks one’s own navy is not best suited for. If one wishes to deliver an agent into enemy territory, for example, it is unwise to send it on a ship bearing one’s own colours, since it will be sunk before it can reach the shore. But it is not uncommon to see neutral vessels in one’s territorial waters, so these are able to pass unmolested.
The Muirchú, different to most ships, is powered by a huge and irascible magical fish. This may sound like a good lark, but the sailors find the fish difficult to handle and wonder constantly why it was the Captain found sails a worse solution to the problem of making a ship move.
A named magical weapon made from parts of Nathan Treeves by the Mistress of Malarkoi and given to Dashini. Like all weapons made from god-flesh, it is immensely powerful, though the manner of its use is not immediately obvious, and its true power may remain untapped by those who do not understand its potential.
The son of Nathaniel Treeves and Clarissa Delacroix and inheritor of the Spark. On the death of the weftling, that part of his power extant in the material realm and not accruing to his corpse was passed to Nathan’s father. The laws of inheritance need no further explanation.
Nathan was raised in the slums of Mordew under the nose of the Master. Why? One must ask his parents, since they are the only authority in the matter.
Finding Nathan illiterate, the Master gave him a magical book to help him with his studies. But books can do more than one thing at a time.
Some books can catalyse, some books can inhibit, and some books can do both. Either function can be done with skill or without, but the Master is known for his skill, and this book, once it was made, he poured much effort into, so no-one should assume it does its job imperfectly, whatever that job may be. Moreover, it was made originally by the Mistress of Malarkoi and her daughter Dashini and their ability in such matters is unmatched.
Nathan’s father and one of the occult tontine that resulted in the death of the weftling. It was Nathaniel who discovered the method by which the weft might be perverted and, using it, he attempted to gain mastery over the weftling, killing him in the process and making himself, to all intents and purposes, God.
Now he dies in pain in the Southern Slums of Mordew. Is this remorse? No-one knows, since he will not answer questions.
The name given to a sailor on the ship the Muirchú. A very pleasant woman, always thoughtful and jolly and willing to help. This aspect of her personality can open her up to abuse, so she carries a knife and has trained herself how to use it.
There are slums to the south of Mordew and there are slums to the north. The name given to the slums to the north is ‘the Northern Slums’. They are very much like the Southern Slums except that they serve the Northfields and the Northfields Factorium in providing workers and not their southern counterparts. Unlike the slum-dwellers in the south, those in the north practise skull-binding and speak with a more delicate accent.
The fields to the north of Mordew used less for the growing of vegetables and more for fruits and animal feeds.
An area of factories that draws its labour from the pool of slum-dwelling adults of the Northern Slums.
The world is a much bigger place than a slum child of Mordew can countenance – he having spent all his life restricted to a very small area of it, and that surrounded either by the Sea Wall to one side, or the rising mound of the city to all the others. The world extends an unwalkable distance in all directions and there is no man who has seen it all, or who could encompass everything there is to know inside himself. The weftling and some of the lesser gods can understand the true extent of all there is, but people carve the world into chunks, and these they name so that they can manage the task of knowing everything algebraically, assigning to places a code in words, since words are the things proper to them, which they feel intuitively and which they can keep in order. The area of the world where Mordew, Malarkoi and Waterblack are located is called by some (the Assembly, primarily) the North-western Peninsula. Such a name presumes the existence of other peninsulas, since it would contain a redundancy if there were only one such instance of this type of place.
That process within the woman that produces their sex’s generative seed. Some claim that oestrus is a more weft-native system than that which creates the man’s generative seed, and that consequently it will cause flux in magical work, but if this is the case then no convincing rationale has been offered to explain it, since there is Spark energy in both seeds and where should this originate if not the weft?
Bellows, and to a lesser extent the gill-men, can smell the oestrus and have been made (by the same process that made them sensitive to it) disgusted by it. Again, this is superficially to facilitate the removal of women from places where they might interfere with magic, but the same objection holds – where is the reason women are assumed to cause such interference? Think of the witch-women: how could they pursue their trade if their sex was detrimental to the conduct of magic? So, then, perhaps Bellows is made to tell if oestrus is there for another reason, and, if this is true, is it a coincidence that his enemy, the Mistress of Malarkoi, is a woman?
The name given to a sailor on the ship the Muirchú. One of many, he has little to distinguish him from the others, and if he were put off at the next port it is unlikely even his crew mates would miss him for long.
A magical instrument created by Dashini during her captivity to inspect the pipework for vulnerabilities that might aid her escape. There is a tube on one end and an eye on the other. The tube is indefinitely extensible and flexible so that it can go around corners and look at what is there, transmitting this information to the eye of whoever places it on the eyepiece. A very useful device, not doubt, but, insufficient to secure Dashini’s escape, it languishes under a pile of discarded clothes.
Creatures famed for their good hearing.
Like man-headed snakes, these people combine the physicality of one type of creature with the mentality of another. While it might seem like no advantage to take the relatively weak and small body of a man and to combine that with the mentality of a cow, this was not done for advantage but is merely a fact of their existence. They live on the Island of White Hills in herds where they make excellent soldiers, since a valuable property in soldiers is to be unquestioning and to act in concert with each other. Anyone who has seen a herd of cows migrate or watched them defend themselves from predation will know what power there is in being a hundred acting as one, and when one has an army of thousands, they are a formidable force.
A criminal who operates out of his restaurant The Commodious Hour in the Merchant City of Mordew. He keeps the information secret, but he is not native to Mordew, nor does he work in its interests. This does not mean that he works with thought for anyone but himself, but it does widen the range of his influences, and anyone wondering at his motives must include not only those avaricious, but also those political.
Assassins work rarely but are paid well, and consequently they have both the time and the resources to spend on their appearance. They go about the place in the finest garments and wear the straightest teeth, which they take out daily and whiten with bleach. This is both vanity and disguise since violence and ugliness are associated in the mind and, by the law of opposites, beauty is not associated with violence. When a man comes up to one in the night, well dressed, smiling straight and white, one does not immediately fear for one’s life (as one might if the man’s teeth were crookedly grimacing and his clothes were stained). Instead one enquires politely after this man’s business. During this unguarded enquiry it is very easy for an assassin to stick a knife in under one’s chin and pierce one’s brain, killing one instantly. The alternative is a chase and a scuffle and much inconvenient stabbing around.
So, it is in an assassin’s interests to be beautiful and thereby make their job much easier. Mr Padge’s assassins are not ignorant of the above argument.
A wooden shed with cellar abutting the Fly Yard at the rear of the Commodious Hour. Mr Padge does his criminal business in here. While he could afford to rent more salubrious premises, he prefers not to gild his dirty work with pretensions – he has the restaurant for that – and preserves the balance between the two sides of his persona by doing evil things in an evil place and less evil things in a less evil place.
A toy of slopes, steps and marbles that allows for an endless progression of the balls from the top to the bottom and back again. The pleasure in it is in watching pretty things move, and also in puzzling over how it works. Generally, things must be acted on by force if they are to move, and this force must be regularly replenished or they cease moving. These marbles, though, never need to be induced to move and never stop, so how is it done? The answer, obviously, is that it is done by magic, but magic is, for some, a wonderful thing to see in and of itself and so this still makes for a good toy for children.
A person whose job it is to sell medicines to those who can afford them, and to prevent those who cannot afford them from gaining access. A pharmacist’s premises will often have a counter for exchanging goods for coins at the front and a locked safe house at the rear for protecting valuables. Since it is hard to see poor people dying for want of the medicines they need, but also hard to fake concern for those who can afford to be cured, a certain duality of personality is a useful quality in a pharmacist. An indifference to the suffering of the poor married to an excess of feeling for the rich seems like a difficult mix to find, but there are rarely shortages of candidates for any new pharmacist in Mordew, so this difficulty must be illusory.
To find two people with the psychological make-up necessary to excel at pharmacy (see: Pharmacist) is more unlikely than to find one, so often the wife of a pharmacist will be entirely indifferent to the suffering of anyone, rich or poor, and will concentrate their efforts on sympathising only for themself.
Though in the material realm philosophy is an occupation confined to pedants and persons delighted by the sound of their own voice (often as it echoes in a room sparsely occupied by people indifferent to what it is saying), in the immaterial realm it is very much the materia prima of conceptual exchange. Unfortunately for the philosopher, no man can exist in the immaterial realm unless he dies first, and then he will only be extant in the form of an idea.
When a person reaches adulthood they are enjoined by popular wisdom to put away childish things, and this is precisely what they do. They will, if they do not have the space, discard those things they loved as a child. These things they may sell, or trash, or give away to children of their acquaintance.
If a person has more space than they need, they may store the things of their childhood infatuation in a place that otherwise has no function. If a person is very rich in redundant resources, they may instead make a room dedicated to their playful objects and put those objects in there. Then, since a person who has abundant resources of space will have the leeway to make resources for themself of time, they might visit that room.
Here is where the problems begin, since if a person who has made of themself, from a child, a person capable of accumulating wealth and redundant resources, it is because they have eschewed in their adult life those things they found pleasure in as a child. But they have also become accustomed to having their desires met, and now, because they have put these desires aside at some cost to their happiness, the things of their childhood, stored because they have made the resources available for them, appear to them as wonderful things worthy of much attention, while the mundane business that has made them wealthy seems dull in comparison.
This is why you will find so many rich people who are also childish at heart, since they pine for the things they have lost and have found a way to obviate that pining.
The traditional solution to this problem is to have children and live one’s life vicariously through them, allowing both the struggle for resources and the expenditure of those resources by one’s descendants space in one’s life. But what if, through fate or circumstance, one cannot have children? Then one must find children, have them enjoy what one once enjoyed, and correct the flaw in that way.
This is entirely not what the Master of Mordew has done with his playroom. Instead he uses it as a means of educating boys (see: education) in his care whom he wishes to use in ways in which they do not wish to be used, though he relies on the pattern established above to give his actions legitimacy in the minds of those so indoctrinated.
That area of Mordew in which wealthy Merchants situate themselves and associate there with others like them. It is similar to the Merchant City but prettier, with more trees than buildings. In it may be found places of leisure – such as the Zoological Gardens – since it is a rule that the wealthier one becomes, the more time one has at one’s disposal (though we must all pretend the opposite is the case or raise the jealousy and censure of our subordinates).
All cities that border the sea must have a port, and that port in Mordew is called the Port, it being particular to the city, rather than general, and so it thereby gains a capital letter and the definite article.
A contingent of gill-men charged with the opening and closing of the Sea Wall Gate. Their clothes, unlike the other gill-men, are white, which serves to identify them at a distance.
A dust capable of diverting light around a chosen object so that the object is invisible to someone whom the user does not to wish to see it. Invented in her captivity by Dashini, daughter of the Mistress of Malarkoi.
A girl of the Southern Slums. Girls of her provenance often have a difficult life, since juggling the needs of oneself and one’s associates is scarcely an easy business in places where people fight for resources. Much could be said of her actions and obligations, but the fact remains that, in the long run, Prissy is destined to become the greatest woman of her generation, barring only those who inherit their power from the weft, though exceeding many of these.
A boy, dead now, destroyed in the service of the Master, but who bore similarities to Nathan Treeves in some respects.
Unlike Prissy not destined for great things, but in her life unable to see the discrepancy in quality between her and her sister. Indeed, because she understands value in the world to be related to short-term and medium-term successes in the field expected of her – in this case the provision and procurement of sexual services for a brothel – she sees her sister’s failure to address the world on its own terms as a weakness. But which valorised person has ever taken the world to be as it was presented to them? None of them, since it is a sign of greatness that a person forces the world to become what they wish it to be, and not the other way around.
The woman who owns Prissy’s sister, and whom Prissy’s sister seeks to supplant.
A distinction can be drawn between a true demigod and a pseudo-demigod in that a true demigod, on evolution to the most godlike state a man can achieve, remains there by virtue of the correctness of his nature and his being in concert with the weft, whereas a pseudo-demigod must work magic endlessly to retain his godliness and should he cease, then he will return to manliness and the material realm. He may, it is true, work to return himself again to his godly state, but this is what he must always do, since he is insufficiently in concert with the weft for it to accept him, and it will always work to reduce him to his original manly state.
A place in the slums. Slum-dwellers walk down it, cowed and crouched, and, in irony, it has been given a name opposite to its appearance since, whatever else they lack, slum-dwellers have an advanced sense of the ironic.
The process of drying something out in a fire so that it will catch alight easily. It can be done in a natural way – this is how charcoal is often made – and it can be done in a magical way. The magical way can make weft-stuff of a Spark inheritor.
Where the Mistress of Malarkoi resides. Its shape catalyses magic, which is important since it reduces the number of children she must sacrifice to create the firebirds she uses to keep up her endless assault against the Sea Wall of Mordew.
Inside is labyrinthine, and after many twists and turns a man can find himself permanently lost. While there, disorientated, he will see many strange things, but not all of them are of the material realm.
The thing the Master does to Dashini, daughter of his enemy the Mistress of Malarkoi, by enclosing her living quarters in a magical glass sphere. It is unbreakable, this sphere, by anyone made of the material realm, since it is primarily Spark energy made solid. But what of denizens of the intermediate realms? The question is moot, because no such creature is permitted within the Manse.
The motto of the Temple of the Athanasians, who believe what whomsoever wishes may come. There is a distasteful pun inherent in its usage in that establishment that only the kind of people who use its facilities would find amusing.
A constant presence in Mordew, seemingly, but only for slum-dwellers, since the higher one climbs, the less of it one finds.
Bête noire of the slum-dweller, one of the lowest forms of life in the evolutionary system. They bite, they crawl, they repulse, but also they dispose of rot and corpses, so the wise know that even the vile have their uses.
A spell contained in a knife that only the inheritor of the Spark can use. Almost infinitely effective in turning unfrozen things frozen in defence of the bearer’s life, but, as with all puissant objects, hard to urge to its full ability.
A light that removes from the people it touches the benefits of the Spark, and which will kill a person unenhanced by magic. If magically enhanced, the person that enjoys contact with this light will return to their natural state if the exactly appropriate amount of Spark energy is consumed by it. More, and the person will die, less, and they will remain a little magical.
The strength of the red concentrate is modulated by the violent feeling the user has for their target, the rationale being that the more angry one is with a person at whom the tube is directed, the more likely one is to wish them dead. Similarly, the range is broadened to take account of lesser reactions to multiple foes. A tube of this concentrate was given to Bellows for emergencies. Liable to reflection by magic mirrors, since it is made of light (which all mirrors reflect).
The name given to an ur-demon of an intermediate realm. Like all demons, its form is variable, but it is not one of the ur-demons that is arguable with. It will do absolutely nothing but attempt the death of its summoner(s) and is well placed to succeed in its task since it is physically indestructible by weft-congruent means. That is not to say that one could not pervert the weft and destroy it that way, but that would cause more problems than it solved, and it is best not to summon it at all, except in extreme need.
Summoned by Dashini as a means of breaking her quarantine and then banished to the centre of the world. Eventually it will find its way to the surface, preparing its magical defences against future spatial translation as it comes, and then what?
Words that say ‘practice makes perfect’ in a dead language found in old books. Probably true, in sentiment, but tedious in practice.
The process by which God may be returned to life. The central problem is that God’s body and his will have been separated and thereby the connection made between the material and immaterial realms has been undone. To correct this, the Spark has found another host and, since this host’s body is of the material realm, and its concept is of the immaterial realm, and the weft communicates between the two realms, then the minimum that must be is.
But there is only one weftling, and the host does not bear its pattern and so cannot ever be in concert with the weft. So, the Spark leaches back to the weft; the immaterial and material realms diverge. Also, the weftling is familiar with the nature of the weft whereas the new host is familiar only with the material realm and so all things done by the Spark tend towards the material, which is base and ugly, at the expense of the immaterial, which is of thought and beauty.
A resurrection would see the rejoining of the body of the weftling and his will, through the weft, combining the realms and bringing all things back into concert. But how is this to be achieved? If the weftling were alive, he could do it. If the host was willing and capable of returning the will to the body then he could do it, but the other ways are very difficult to do indeed.
Which is not to say that a resurrection is impossible. On the contrary, it is very likely, since this is the proper way of things and the Spark works towards it endlessly, it feeling the separation from its proper place in the same way that a demon feels its separation from its intermediate realm – as pain – but it is in the interests of weft-manipulators that no resurrection is achieved, since the weftling will enact his revenge on the people who wrongly used his proper powers.
The weftling is prone to anger, as is noted in the surviving scriptures, and he has been known to scour the world with plagues and floods, killing everything (unless they are in an ark), so should one wish for the resurrection of God? Probably not (unless one has an ark and is prepared to live in it).
It comes from the dark times, before the Master made Mordew, when all things were in chaos and flux. It is a powerful but vicious thing, from a powerful but vicious time. It is primal, linking in with the weft in a way few can understand. Perhaps even the Master does not understand it.
Regardless, it will show you what happened at a place and time represented on its stage, providing you give it blood. Should one believe what it says? Perhaps, and perhaps not – since we know not its origins, we know not its intentions, and it is hard to be unpartisan when one lives in the material realm. There is always an interest to be served, and who knows what interests its makers had? Probably none relevant to today, but no-one knows that for certain.
A regal and shadowy figure who, while not a god himself, has powers that even gods fear. Worshipped on the Island of the White Hills and a competitor for supremacy of that place with the White Stag.
Part of a suit of armour – specifically the bit at the top of the foot.
Every life, since it is an act of creation, contains from the weft a residue of the Spark. Indeed, the natural longevity of a person is directly determined by the amount of Spark energy contained within them, since, from birth, the Spark leaches back into the weft and when it is all gone that person dies (which is why gods are immortal – they are mostly in concert with the weft, and not only contain enormous quantities of the Spark but can replenish it as it is spent).
It is possible to extend life by the addition of Spark energy (though care must be taken not to evolve or burn out the subject) and thus familiars and beloved servants can be induced to live for centuries and be prevented from dying.
In the case of an unnaturally truncated life (by accident, for example) what remains of the Spark leaves in a rush. Most people are insensitive to this Spark egress, but users of magic cannot only see but can also capture and use this energy for their spells.
Sacrifice is the deliberate truncation of a life to release this energy, and even the closest to death contain sufficient Spark to initiate spells (providing a spell book is at hand). The sacrifice of a recently fertilised egg would provide the most energy (though it would be difficult to procure since an egg is a fragile thing, and once broken its Spark will return to the weft before it can be used) and the effect is cumulative – sacrifice one hundred and the Spark energy released is enormous. A human child is more than sufficient for most spells (and lower animals can be used in their stead if less energy is required), and it is known that firebirds are created from the sacrifice of a single child (though the Mistress’s environs have a catalytic magical effect of their own).
The name given to a sailor on the ship the Muirchú. Red-haired, after the habit of her people.
As a man scratches a physical itch with his fingers, a weft-manipulator Scratches a Spark Itch with his mind. Otherwise the two things are exactly similar.
While there is no law, as such, in Mordew, there are those who adopt customs very similar to laws. Merchants of the Merchant City draw up agreements between each other saying they will do this thing or that, and wealthy families dictate to whom wealth should pass on death. Into these agreements they instil authority by writing them on valuable paper and using valuable inks, calligraphy and seals, thereby indicating that they are not things to be lightly put aside, if ever. A scroll is a valuable piece of paper, inscribed with an agreement, sealed with wax, which acts as a binding contract between relevant parties who agree to be bound by it.
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.
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.
What a dog makes when he agrees to pair with a person.
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.
A coin of moderate to high value.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
See: Sirius.
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.
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.
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 fields to the south of Mordew used less for the growing of vegetables and more for fruits and animal feeds.
An area of factories that draws its labour from the pool of slum-dwelling adults of the Southern Slums.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
Telepathic communication used by voiceless animals and gill-men. Though lacking the conceptual rigour words give, this form of exchange is much more immediate than speech and less prone to misinterpretation.
A magical item made by the Master of Mordew in an attempt to prevent his destruction at the hands of the eighth Atheistic Crusade. It consists of a container within which the Flint and the Char Cloth are contained, and the fires it starts are scarcely controllable, even by its maker.
A general understanding of the word ‘tontine’ can be had from any good dictionary, but its particular use in Mordew tends to relate to an organisation of specialists in occult lore who used their knowledge to locate and kill the weftling. Just as a normal tontine is a fund whose value increases to those who draw upon it as those entitled to so draw are reduced in number through death, the power possessed by the occult tontine will devolve entirely on the last living member of the group, making them the successor of the weftling, at least in the material realm.
A magical instrument that can be put to the lips of those unwilling or unable to answer questions. The dead, liars, and mutes can all be made to speak truthfully with it, and while it can be used on animals and objects, the results are unpredictable and difficult to understand.
The Manse has a facade and internal architecture accessible from the outside, an antechamber that gives on to the private areas and, underneath, an area given over to the Master’s machines. This is known as the Underneath. What he uses the Underneath for is his alone to know, but it labours constantly and noisily. Glass pipes deliver the Living Mud deep into the machinery, so the assumption is that the Master is working magic, something he is known to do.
An ur-angel (like an ur-demon) is a lesser type of angel, being more of the material realm than an angel, and less of the weft, and having, as a consequence, less Spark and magic at its disposal. These types of angel are more prone to corruption than the other kind, since the material realm is more base than the immaterial realm and an ur-angel can be misled or tempted like a man may be and even induced to work against its summoner.
An ur-demon (like an ur-angel) is a lesser type of demon, being more of the material realm than a demon, and less of the weft, and having, as a consequence, less Spark and magic at its disposal. This type of demon is more manageable – though still not very – than the other kind, and can be used in preference to it, if the summoner is inexperienced in the handling of such creatures, or if the job required for the demon is specific and therefore widespread violence and destruction are not desirable. There are some very material ur-demons indeed, and these can be spoken to as one would speak to a man, and they are scarcely furious any more than a very furious man might be. They can be given tasks on the promise of immediate return to their proper place, though they are quite rare and difficult to summon, since in their realm they are predated upon by the more violent demons, and over a period of many generations they have dwindled in number while their more violent brethren have flourished. Indeed, there may be almost none of the manageable type left, and any attempt to summon one will need to also include magics designed to plumb an earlier period of the intermediate realm’s existence when they flourished. This is possible, given the complexity of the relationship between time as it is experienced in the material realm and time as it is experienced in the weft, though those who can manage such magics would rarely find the need for the skills that these lesser demons are capable of, and could follow a less convoluted route to their desired ends.
One of a species of lackey employed by the Master and almost entirely unmodified from a normal man. They might move more quickly when pressed, or be willing to carry heavier trays, but otherwise they live quite normally. Their work is not onerous, and they eat as well as any of the servants. A boy taken to the Manse should wish to be allocated this role in preference to any other, since the alternatives have significant disadvantages.
Living Mud must be contained in something if one intends to use it, and the Master of Mordew puts his in glass vats of various sizes and connects them with glass pipes. Glass is the best material because it is transparent, so the Master is able to check on the progress of his experiments and processes.
A now defunct city in the North-western Peninsula. Also known, portentously, as the City of Death.
A dried leaf which has a combination of properties when smoked through a pipe. It can be used to enhance concentration, to provide stimulation to the senses, to relax the body, and to satisfy or create the longing for food. It is grown, primarily for export, in the Southfields, but self-seeded plants can be found throughout the slums. Those who pick these plants know to avoid ones that have grown in a bed of the Living Mud, since the smoking of them gives nightmares.
The medium with which, in which, and through which all existence both material and immaterial is manifest, but reducible to neither. As clothing is made from cloth, the sea is made from water, and a language is made from words, so the material and immaterial realms are made from the weft. The weft is the source of all things, including the Spark, which is to the weft as thread is to cloth, as tides are to water, and as letters are to words.
A name given to God because he is the only thing capable of existing solely in the weft since he was born from it and is entirely in concert with it. It is only through perversions of the weft that God came to be killed, and even that death may not be permanent (for many reasons – the weft preserves his concept perfectly and he still lives in it by some understandings of time – but primarily because his body and spirit are both extant in the material and immaterial realms and resurrection can be achieved by recombining his elements).
The material of the weft – matter, energy and concept combined.
A lesser god born of the territory surrounding Malarkoi. It is mute, and of minimal practical intelligence, but it is supposed to possess great wisdom. Without the means to communicate this wisdom the assumption must be taken on trust, but as an organism particularly suffused with the weft it is capable of powerful magic. If provoked, particularly by the desecration of its lands, it can use the Spark to reinstitute conditions preserved in the weft, thereby returning the world to a state it prefers. This magic is wide-ranging and difficult to counter, and providing the White Stag lives, it can undo any attempts to undo what it itself has undone. Even if it is a god, though, it is still an animal and prone to irrational actions. Its instincts drive it to flee most conflict, and it is easily startled.
A slum boy who is often sent, along with his brothers, to the Master. His parents will not take no for an answer, and one day their perseverance may pay off and he will go into service, but a boy not taken on the first occasion, nor on the second, nor indeed on the third, is not likely to find pleasant work if he is accepted on the fourth.
It is no secret that the women of many cities are prone not only to mistreatment by virtue of their social standing (in its widest sense), but also on the grounds of their sex. This combination has forced women to foster close interpersonal links to offset their structural misfortune. Witch-women are a subset of women who, either having themselves been born with a fortunate congruence physically and conceptually with the weft (see: folk magic) or having known other women that have, have come together to form a group who dress commonly and advertise their magic-like services to those who find they have a need for them. They have very strict rules – over their schedule of charges, for example, or their unwillingness to offer refunds, or their maintenance of a ‘closed shop’ policy – that protect the terms under which all members of the group are employed. Such solidarity between these group members has allowed their commerce to flourish even under extremely trying economic conditions, and no community, be it ever so poor, is unrepresented by a local witch-woman.
A lesser god in the service of the White Stag, who, in an inversion of the natural order, has pledged fealty to a prey animal on the basis of a shared interest in protecting its hunting grounds. This god takes the form of a pack of large wolves each individual of which may act independently but who also represents some aspect of the combined godhead. The pack can be understood as a single organism, or multiple ones, but its main function is to remain and fight a foe while the White Stag flees. The Wolves occupy an aggressor and the White Stag alters the material realm at a distance until the aggressor disappears entirely and the pre-existent condition of the weft is restored. Endless manipulation of the material realm using the weft is likely to provoke more powerful weft-manipulators to intervene, since it interferes with their own interests.
In Mordew, the presence of the Living Mud has led to overabundant fecundity in its population that is unnatural (indeed it is magical). A slum family (who come most into contact with the Living Mud) will create, typically, three children in any year (a combination of womb-borns and flukes).
The Living Mud has the ability to generate life from, seemingly, nothing, and a distinction is made between those born of sexual congress between parents and those either entirely or partly born without the combination of parental seeds. When a distinction needs to be made in the world then a word is coined to describe it, and womb-born refers to any child known to have come from a womb and to have been placed in there by another human parent or combination of parents (whether they be father, mother, mother capable of passing her generative seed to a womb-bearer, womb-bearing father, or combinations of the above).
Not all children who are born from a womb are called womb-born since some children have been known, amongst other methods, to come from virgin birth – the Living Mud having taken the role of a generative seed – and while these children may have gestated in a womb and may be born out of it, they are not womb-born in the sense that it is used in Mordew but instead are considered a form of fluke and, though it may seem harsh, they are considered unwelcome.
Similarly unwelcome are: children who come from the expression of the generative seed into the Living Mud, children who develop within a discarded corpse, human-like children born from the mutation of the foetus of a lower animal and found in an animal’s litter, the exceedingly rare human flukes born from the random evolution of the Living Mud, children born of the congress between parent(s) and a lower animal, children born of the congress between parent(s) and an object, children born unprovoked out of an object, children that create themselves, embodied ghosts, children generated by spells, children of a mysterious provenance generally, and orphans who have no parent(s) to attest to their origins. No word has been decided on for this mass of unfortunate children (other than the catch-all ‘flukes’ which is also used for non-human magical life), and if they use a word of their own, no-one has troubled to note it down.
Unwelcome children are fated either to starve in the slums, to be killed and made into food or leather, to work constantly in the fields and factories, or, like the many unwanted womb-born children, to be sold into the service of the Master of Mordew by ‘parents’ clever enough first to claim them and then immediately to give them to a Fetch (and who will thereby go on to qualify for a weekly stipend).
A slum boy who is often sent, along with his brothers, to the Master. While Willy, his brother, is a pessimistic kind of boy, Wonty prefers to imagine the best of the world, and in this he provides a great service to those around him, since otherwise they might despair. Whether his optimism is well-founded is a question that only time can answer.
A place in the Pleasaunce where interesting animals are conveniently barracked so they may be visited and wondered at without the necessity and danger of long trips to places where such beasts are native (if these places even remain). While enjoyable, no doubt, the sensitive may find their pleasure tempered by the ennui that adheres to everything. There is even a sad and dusty resignation in the eyes of the otherwise magnificent exhibits.