Before her house’s demise, Angharad had only twice journeyed at sea longer than a week.
Once while Mother showed her the northern coast on the way to visit their distant kin in House Bethel, the other time heading to the isle of Seler Seithenyn. On both occasions she had sailed with House Tredegar’s trading carrack, the Swift Alder, which as Mother had liked to tell her was neither swift nor made of alder. Though she had made smaller trips to southern Malan several times a year, in truth most of her time out on the water had been when training her footing had been out on smaller fishing boats borrowed for a day, so Angharad would confess to knowing less of ships than a daughter of Rhiannon Tredegar should.
She did, however, know a great deal about ports.
It has once been the hope of her parents that the largest town sworn to Llanw Hall, Patrwm, might be grown into a port to rival Port Cadwyn to the south. The town was nestled against what the locals called Tredegar Bay, and what her father had taught her was a natural harbor. Deep waters allowed for easy anchorage, and the promontory of Hare’s Rock protected the bay from storms. The smallness of the bay and the lack of good roads to neighboring territories had worked against the town, but both these could be remedied with works.
Yet Mother had known that though House Tredegar’s fortunes had risen enough under her stewardship that these works could now be afforded, it was unlikely they would be finished in her lifetime. She had, therefore, instructed Father to see to it that Angharad would be educated in the necessities of a trade port. The noblewoman was not above admitting she had resented the exercise, which had involved much coin-counting and squabbling about rights and privileges – men’s work! – but she had made the bare bones of an effort to learn.
It was how she could now look at Port Allazei and decide it was not a very good port. It was, to start, entirely unprotected. There were no breakwaters or landbridges to protect the jetties from the storms, and though that might be forgiven given what Song had said about how the Ring of Storms kept the elements at bay the state of those docks was not so easily set aside. The waters here were deep enough the galleon could boldly sail in, but the jetties it approached were nothing but twenty thin, spindly lines of stone jutting out from the city.
The causeway they all led into was hemmed in by low walls leading to what appeared to be some kind of overly large customs office, leaving so little space past the docks the causeway would be constantly crowded should the harbor be even halfway filled. As things stood there was only a pair of carracks docked, moored at opposite ends of the jetties. The captain of the Fair Vistas seemed intent on claiming one of the middle jetties, keeping her distance.
Angharad eyed the port again and sighed. The Pereduri was yet awed by the Grand Orrery’s towering spire and looming Scholomance – its towers jutting out like teeth biting into the dark – but the city at their feet appeared to be little more than an overgrown ruin with second-rate docks.
“And what sets you to sighing so despondently, if I may ask?”
Angharad flicked a glance at the man who’d addressed her. Tristan Abrascal still watched his tongue around her, as the lowborn often did around nobles, but she thought it a good sign he sometimes unbent enough to tease her. She walked a fine line around the man herself, not yet certain of the boundaries. In the world beyond the Watch they would have been kept distant by blood and title, but now they both wore the black. How much did birth matter, once you put on the cloak? She was not yet certain, and so she refrained from offering the man used of her comb even though she’d twice had the half-jest on the tip of her tongue over the last week.
“Those jetties are much too narrow,” Angharad opined, leaning against the railing as they stood up on the forecastle. “It would be difficult to unload large cargo here.”
The gray-eyed man considered Port Allazei in turn, his stare measuring. Sacromonte was one of the greatest ports in the world still, for all its faded glory, so he should be able to see what she had.
“Or even just a large amount of it,” Tristan finally agreed. “This is no trade port.”
His words had the woman past him stirring from her quiet doze.
“It’s meant for defense,” Maryam said. “That wall looks short now, but they would have built…”
The pale-skinned woman frowned, biting her lip.
“Ograda od dasaka,” she said, flicking a glance at Song.
The Tianxi asked Maryam something in a language that sounded like Cathayan, but slightly off. Maryam replied in the same, looking relieved, and nodded.
“Hoarding,” Song translated. “Like a wooden walkway atop the wall, covered by a roof and with arrow slits in front.”
Arrows? How very Century of Loss.
“The jetties are narrow so few warriors can get out once,” Maryam said. “The causeway is small so the press pushes the invaders into the water. This place was built to fight.”
What a wonder, Angharad thought: Maryam Khaimov could speak without adding some sly implication. Perhaps it was Tristan’s presence, for she did seem to make something of an effort to curb her tongue around the Sacromontan. The noblewoman debated making an effort at pleasantry with the Triglau but could not bring herself to offer a surfeit of politeness when she was so certain it would be returned by rudeness.
“I’m no military man,” Tristan noted, “but those walls look to me like any galleon could level them with its cannons from far enough arrows would mean nothing.”
“Tolomontera is an ancient land,” Song said. “It has been settled since at least Morn’s Arrival.”
By which the Tianxi meant the walls had been built in a time before blackpowder made many once-great fortresses into little more than rubble-in-waiting.
“You seem correct in your assessment about the impracticalities around cargo,” Song continued. “There is a lighthouse west of here with a beach where some ships were dragged ashore. I imagine that is where the Watch unloads what the port does not allow for.”
Angharad leaned back, trying to get a glimpse of this lighthouse, but they were close enough to Port Allazei now that the Orrery lights made it difficult to see beyond their span. In truth she suspected that even out at sea she would not have seen what Song did, for those silver eyes seemed to pierce through darkness and illusion alike. One of the Fair Vistas’ fighting contingent – a young man by the name of Emiliano – came to them and shyly passed along Captain Krac’s compliments and that they were soon to dock. Which they could all see, but was only polite to convey.
Emiliano, tall but hunched over, mostly looked at her while speaking and blushed all the while. Angharad replied politely, as was due, but made sure not to smile. Though she would prefer to think watchmen above such things, it was her experience that young men taken with her sometimes took smiles as encouragement. Such a thing could sour, should they then try their luck and learn her interest ran strictly to the fairer sex. It was simpler to keep a distance.
“Our compliments returned to Captain Krac, and my personal thanks for the lending of books,” Song replied. “The trip was swift and pleasant. We have our affairs in hand and will require no escort.”
Emiliano tried to linger, but Song’s cocked eyebrow was a fearsomely disapproving thing and he was soon routed. Song, Angharad thought not for the first time, seemed comfortable in command. Almost as if she were nobly raised, though of course such a thing would not be possible in Tianxia. Angharad was not certain it was wisest for her friend to lead, regardless of Scholomance rules, but she would not deny it was a relief for the burden to be on another’s shoulders.
It would not have occurred to her, for example, to send them all back to their cabins to gather their affairs ahead of docking so they would not get in the way of the sailors as the galleon pulled into port. Her private concerns aside, it was pleasing to have someone with knowledge of the waters they were sailing with their hand on the helm.
The galleon skillfully slid into place close by the jetty, where dockworkers were thrown heaving lines to secure the ship. Heavier hawsers followed until the Fair Vistas was pulled tight and tied. A plank was thrown down after, and a sailor saw them out. Angharad was a little surprised at the informality of it, which must have shown on her face.
“Something wrong?” Song asked.
“I thought the captain would see us off, or at least the first mate,” she admitted.
Maryam let out a snort from behind her. The sound was unkind. Angharad’s teeth clenched, for after weeks of this her patience was waning thin with the other woman. Having been born to a savage land was no excuse for having refused to learn manners since.
“We do not warrant such attentiveness,” Song said, not unkindly. “We are Scholomance students, Angharad, nothing more. Captain Krac commands a galleon, a respected position. We are beneath her notice.”
The noblewoman’s lips thinned, but after a moment she conceded the point. She was used to more amiable treatment from crews, as either the captain’s daughter or a paying passenger, but she was neither on the Fair Vistas. She was but a soldier under the Watch, the same as any other watchman the captain might be ordered to ferry by her superiors. She turned to watch Tristan come down the plank, the man’s stride unhurried as he bit into what looked like a leathery piece of jerky.
Angharad sent him a questioning glance.
“Traded for it,” he idly said. “Want a piece?”
“I will hold out in hope of a decent meal at our accommodations,” she replied. “Though I thank you for the offer.”
“I ever admire optimism,” Tristan told her.
Angharad frowned, for though this sounded a compliment she could not help but feel she had been made sport of. Tristan Abrascal was clever with words, though she sometimes thought he might be a little too clever with them. The kind of cleverness that led men to get in too deep. Regardless she was left with no time to spare for thought on the matter when Song took the lead, hoisting her bag and striding onwards towards the end of the jetty. Angharad followed, sailors leaving the galleon in their wake and beginning to organize with shouts.
The dockworkers, stout men and women that seemed of mostly Lierganese stock, paid them little attention as the four walked down the causeway towards the structure flanked by walls she had earlier marked a customs house. Angharad had been wrong in this, as she now realized deeper consideration of the matter would have yielded. The island belonged to the Watch and was closed to all others, who would such taxes be levied on?
No, the edifice ahead was something else entirely. It would have been only somewhat accurate to call it a gate, for though it was that it was also much more. The structure seemed about a hundred feet wide and thirty tall, an elegant pale hall on each side supporting a layered rectangular roof of stone. The roof must have been topped by bronze statues, once, but the elements had worn them down to bare bones. It was the wide space between the halls that drew the eye, for seven pillars filled it from floor to ceiling and each was a delicate wonder.
They approached, almost warily, and Angharad’s eyes could not help but flick from one to another. Each was exquisitely carved deep gray slate, marked prominently with the colored heraldry and words of a noble house – though she did not see any lineage’s name. It took her a shamefully long moment to piece it together. Seven houses, watchmen setting aside noble titles? These were not noble lines but the covenants of the Watch. Her steps slowed and she was not the only one.
“Which is which, do you think?” Tristan mused out loud.
“I know mine,” Maryam said. “It’s there.”
She pointed at the rightmost pillar, where lay a blue crescent moon within a white circle. Angharad found the words of the Akelarre Guild ambiguous – Beyond the Horizon.
“The Academy is in the center, as always,” Song shared, tone dry.
Its crest was two diagonal yellow stripes across a hand, Angharad saw. Their words were A Duty and Privilege, though it seemed someone had painted a black line across all the words save ‘privilege’ and it’d only mostly been scrubbed out. The Pereduri marked the sight of a golden tree emblem which must be the Umuthi Society – whose name came from the Umoya word for tree – and its motto of A House of Steel.
She could hazard a guess at which covenant the green laurel wreath belonged, and perhaps the white quill as well, but her attention was commanded by what must be the Skiritai Guild’s pillar. Angharad stepped closer and her fingers gently trailed the simple heraldry, crossed silver falchions. She shivered at the words she read beneath: Gods Bleed, the Militant simply said. The fewest words of any writ beneath a crest, and so lacking in embellishment they felt more like an oath than a boast.
She was shaken out of her reverie by Tristan’s soft laugh as he stood by the leftmost pillar. What Angharad had thought to be heraldry was only some unevenness in the stone, the pillar’s sole imperfection. Going around to join the Sacromontan, she saw what he had found. Hidden in the shade of the roof a simple black carnival mask had been carved into the slate. Hunt the Night, the Krypteia scrawled below.
Something about the stillness of the gate – even the halls on the side were empty, all bare stone – straddled the line between reverence and eeriness. It was, Angharad thought, as if they had entered a shrine not to some god but to the Watch itself. The spell only broke when she caught sight of movement past the gate. There the causeway continued for a few dozen feet until it ran aground of a squat, square building whose sloping windows were all shuttered tight.
Past the building was a crossroads, both sides of which led deeper into Port Allazei, but black-cloaked watchmen stood guard by a low barricade in the way. More stood guard before the edifice, and one of them caught sight of their crew beneath the gate. She whistled sharply to catch their attention before gesturing for them to approach. Song moved first, the rest following.
“You lot came with the ship that just arrived, I take it?” the tall woman asked.
She had the Tianxi look, much like Song, but her accent was Someshwari. She must have come from those bloody borderlands between the Republics and their greater neighbor.
“We did,” Song agreed.
“Then in you go, ducklings,” the watchwoman said, gesturing at the open door past her. “Straight to Sergeant Itoro, he’ll sort you out. He’s the one at the desk in the back looking like he could use some sleep.”
“Don’t we all,” another blackcloak muttered. “Fucking double shifts.”
There was some laughter from the others, and before Angharad could decide whether this was soldier’s humor or she should be appalled at the lack of professionalism they were ushered through the threshold. Most of the ground floor was a single room, flanked by wooden stairs to the left and what must be a private office at the back. The great room was a collection of desks, most of them groaning under the weight of paper stacks and surrounded by shelves bearing even more of it.
No wonder the shutters were all closed, a single gust of wind in here would mean hours of work.
Sergeant Itoro was not difficult to find. As dark-skinned as the Malani name had implied, he was perched behind a desk with four large manuscripts on it and scribbling on a piece of paper when they approached. He did look like he could use some sleep, Angharad mused. The rings on his eyes were even darker than those around Maryam’s, though given the paleness of the Triglau’s skin Angharad had wondered if hers were merely faint rings standing out from contrast.
The watchman was also, well, small. He could not even be five feet tall, Angharad thought, and was slightly built. They stood before the desk, waiting patiently as he finished the last of his scribbling with a flourish, and only then did he look up at them. Dark eyes took them in, then he cleared his throat.
“Students?” he asked.
“Yes,” Song replied. “We were told you would sort us out.”
The small man blew on the paper he’d been scribing, then set it aside and reached for the topmost of the books on his desk. He cracked it open, lines and lines of ink revealed to Angharad’s eye, and dipped his quill in an inkwell.
“I am Sergeant Itoro,” he said. “You currently stand in the gatehouse of Tolomontera, which you will not be allowed to pass through again this year save for your test. Do you have your affairs at the ready?”
His gaze swept through them, earning nods back.
“Good,” he said. “Now, I must give you a warning. If any of you is not truly a sponsored student whose name is on my list, you are in breach of Watch law for setting foot on a closed island. You will be caught, tortured for information and summarily executed.”
He paused to let his words sink in, leaving Angharad to wonder why watchmen always seemed to threaten execution when she first encountered them. At least it seemed a rote speech for this one, unlike Lieutenant Wen’s elaborate pantomime with Sergeant Mandisa back on the Dominion.
“Give yourself up now and you will be able to keep your life,” the sergeant suggested.
The Malani waited a moment, as if to give them the opportunity to confess. Tristan cleared his throat, getting a hard look from Song that he blithely ignored.
“Has anyone actually ever given themselves up?” he asked.
It would be uncouth to ask, of course, but then Angharad had not. It was purely coincidental her own curiosity would be sated as well. Good man.
“One of the Garrison recommendations thought it’d be a fun lark to pretend she was, make a stir,” Sergeant Itoro mildly replied. “I hope she had a good laugh, I really do. Good enough it’ll carry her through ten years of serving as a rower on a Watch galleass.”
Only Angharad and Maryam were properly sobered up by that answer. Rowers died like flies, and at times were hardly treated better. In Malan there was such a lack of men willing to take up the role that criminals were used by the royal fleet.
“I’ll need your names for the records,” the officer said. “We can handle cabal matters after.”
Sergeant Itoro was efficient about jotting them down, then blew the lines on the ledger and once satisfied the ink would not smudge closed it and reached for another.
“Good, now the welcome speech,” the Malani said.
He cleared his throat.
“There are only three rules on Tolomontera,” he said. “First, students of Scholomance may not kill each other. Second, the sections of Port Allazei marked with red paint are not to be entered. Third, every student of Scholomance must be part of a registered cabal.”
This, Angharad thought, smacked of lawlessness. The well born could be expected to behave by virtue of their education – well, most of them anyhow. Infanzones had not impressed her on the Dominion. Still, what was to guide everyone besides nobles here on Tolomontera? Officers, she told herself. Is the Watch not an army? It felt like a lacking answer. Sergeant Itoro tapped his fingers against the thick leather-bound ledger without seeming to notice.
“To elaborate on the third rule, a cabal must be made up of at least four students but no more than seven. Anyone who is not in a cabal when classes begin will be placed in one made up of fellow spares as assigned by – well, either myself or Lieutenant Bao depending on who has the shift. I do not recommend this.”
Song looked about to speak up, but the sergeant raised a warding finger and her mouth closed.
“A cabal assignment is not permanent,” he continued. “You may at any time request a transfer to another, and should the request be accepted by their captain you will be added to their rolls so long as it would not bring their number over seven.”
He leaned.
“Cabal themselves are not permanent,” he continued, “for should one at any time have fewer than four cabalists its captain will have fourteen Scholomance days to recruit back up to four. If they fail, the cabal is dissolved and its members will be given a grace period to join another cabal. Failing that, they will be assigned to a cabal of spares.”
He paused.
“Ren, you had something to say?”
“The four of us intend to form a cabal,” Song replied.
He shrugged.
“That is your prerogative, and I’ll mark it, but first it is mandated that all students should know their rights,” Sergeant Itoro said. “There is no need to worry if you do not know anyone. Classes will begin in two days, but tomorrow all students present on Tolomontera will gather at Misery Square so that they might mingle and form cabals as they wish.”
His dark gaze sharpened.
“Regardless of what you may have been told, even by a patron, no student can be compelled to be part of a specific cabal and any such agreement made before coming here – even if legally binding – is null and void,” he said. “The purpose of Scholomance is to form a generation of exceptional cabalists, not gild the name of cliques outside these walls.”
Sergeant Itoro squinted at them.
“Knowing this, I now ask whether the four of you want to form a cabal,” he said.
Song nodded, Maryam close behind, and after a heartbeat Angharad followed suit. It was Tristan who held them up.
“I have been told,” he said, “that should a Stripe be part of the cabal they are considered the captain by default?”
The look Song threw him was unkind but Angharad would admit it was a fair question. It implied a certain lack of trust, admittedly, but to inquire about rules was not outright an accusation.
“That’s correct,” the small man said. “It’s considered part of their classes to lead you. You’ll get a deeper explanation of how cabals function when you meet your school patron, but I can say captaincy is not necessarily permanent. An incompetent leader can be voted out and replaced.”
The gray-eyed man nodded.
“Good to know,” he said. “I’m in as well.”
Sergeant Itoro nodded, finally opening the second ledger.
“All cabals are registered under a number,” he told them. “You will be issued a silver plaque with that number stamped onto it, which serves as your identification and the only way for you to access cabal funds.”
Three or eleven might suit, Angharad thought, though the hopes were swiftly dashed.
“The numbers one to fifty were forged in advance, but most students arrived weeks ago so it is slim pickings left,” Itoro said. “You may ask for any number under one hundred not already taken to be forged as a plaque, but that may take a few days.”
Given the warning Tristan had received from his enigmatic mentor, it seemed to Angharad they would have to scrape the bottom of the barrel.
“Which numbers are left?” she asked, leaning forward.
The small man hummed, thumbing through his ledger. He began at the last page, Angharad saw, but all the lines were crossed on it. On the second there was one free.
“Forty-four,” Sergeant Itoro offered.
There was a pause.
“No,” Song flatly said.
Angharad started in surprise at the firmness of the refusal. She leaned closer to Maryam.
“Why?” she whispered.
The Triglau snorted.
“Tianxi superstition,” she said. “Four sounds like-”
“Death,” Song sharply said. “It sounds like the Cathayan word for death. Very bad luck. My ears work just fine, you two, and I tell you now I refuse to be the captain of the Double Death Brigade.”
Truth be told Angharad thought that ‘Double Death Brigade’ sounded respectably fearsome, but she suspected that opinion would not be well received.
“Surely there must be another plaque left,” she said instead, smiling at the watchman.
The Malani had been paging through his ledger while they talked and nodded at her words.
“One other,” he confirmed.
“It’s going to be four, isn’t it?” Tristan grinned.
“No,” Sergeant Itoro said. “That one’s taken.”
Song blinked in disbelief.
“It is?”
The watchman traced the line with his finger, following it to the matching list on the opposite page.
“Yes. It was claimed by Captain Tupoc Xical,” Sergeant Itoro said.
A chorus of groans ensued, not the least her own.
“Well,” Maryam noted, “at least the man knows what he’s about.”
“An acquaintance?” the sergeant asked, openly curious.
“We went through the trials on the Dominion of Lost Things together,” Song answered.
Sergeant Itoro let out a low whistle.
“Heard this year was a real bloody mess,” he said. “Good on you kids. It’ll prepare you better for this place than anything silver spoon free company princes got up to.”
He cleared his throat.
“Still, there’s a reason this one’s the other left,” Sergeant Itoro said as he presented them the ledger.
Following his finger, she saw it was by the number thirteen. Ah, Lierganen did think that number bad luck she recalled. Something about the Second Empire’s fall.
“So Double Death it is,” Tristan said.
Song glanced at him.
“Thirteen is a good gambling number,” she told him. “What do you have against it?”
“First off, there is no such thing as a good gambling number,” he firmly replied. “And second it’s the worst possible luck, Song. We might as well just name ourselves ‘those unlucky bastards’.”
Maryam cleared her throat meaningfully.
“Women can be bastards too, Maryam,” the gray-eyed man amiably informed her.
“You’re letting us all down, Tristan,” Maryam said. “Just gird your loins and call me a bitch.”
“I’m not going to do that,” he replied.
The Triglau leaned back, catching Song’s eye.
“Song, my vote’s on thirteen.”
There was a pregnant pause as the Sacromontan narrowed his eyes at his friend.
“Does it count if I do it on the inside?” Tristan finally asked.
Angharad frowned down at him.
“It most definitely does,” she sternly said. “I will vote for thirteen as well, Song.”
Tristan threw her a betrayed look but it was deserved punishment. A gentleman should not refer to a lady in such a manner, not even in his thoughts or if she was not truly a lady at all. Sergeant Itoro, though they were wasting his time, seemed too amused to chide them for it.
“You can get a plaque forged,” he reminded them. “Anything under a hundred.”
“There will be no need for that,” Song smiled. “We will take the number thirteen. Thank you for your patience, sergeant.”
“It’s either this or doing the rosters, so by all means feel free to keep arguing,” the small man shrugged. “If there are no further objections, I’ll be putting you down for the Thirteenth Brigade.”
The Malani looked hopeful of another argument, but Tristan sighed and caved in. Twice now Angharad had heard someone call the cabal a brigade, which meant it was no coincidence.
“If I may,” she said, “why is it that you refer to the cabal as a brigade? I thought them to be-”
“The Watch doesn’t use ‘brigade’ as a name for a military formation as the Kingdom of Malan does,” Sergeant Itoro cut her off. “We do have the ranks of brigadier and brigadier-general but the first is an administrative rank and the second commands a division, not a brigade.”
“That seems…”
Angharad trailed off, looking for a polite word.
“Pointlessly complicated,” Tristan suggested.
She sent him a disapproving look at the rudeness, however accurate. The small Malani chuckled.
“The Watch’s built from the bones of older beasts, boy,” Sergeant Itoro said. “After the fall of the Second Empire, the wandering bands of Rooks called themselves brigades. When the Watch began to gobble them up the word came along with them, though nowadays it’s for covenanters only.”
He dipped his quill in his inkpot and began writing their names down, stopping at – Angharad leaned forward. Hers?
“Tredegar,” he muttered, then leaned back his chair.
“Soaps,” he called out. “Look in the correspondence box. Don’t we have something for a Tredegar?”
“Get up and check,” a woman called back from the back office.
“What’s that, Soaps?” Sergeant Itoro mused. “Noon and midnight shifts until the end of time, you say?”
Rather inventive cursing answered him. There was the sound of someone cracking open a chest and then some ruffling. A mere minute later a rather tall Tianxi – a head taller than Song, who was not short – strode out, braids askew and a pink stripe on her face like she had been resting her cheek against a table. She had a small letter bearing a red seal with the two-tailed snake of House Tredegar, perking Angharad up.
“For an Angharad Tredegar,” ‘Soaps’ said, passing the sergeant the letter. “Anything else?”
“Plaques for the Thirteen Brigade,” Sergeant Itoro said. “Four of them.”
The woman stomped back through the door to the backroom but Angharad paid it no mind. The small man passed her the letter, which she cracked open. It was not much, only a few lines.
“My uncle confirms he is on his way to Tolomontera,” she told the others. “He also sent me a gift as congratulations for surviving the Dominion, which he entrusted to the local garrison. I need only go to the appropriate warehouse and show this letter to collect it.”
“You’ll need your plaque as well,” Sergeant Itoro informed her. “It should be in the farrago warehouse even if your uncle’s Watch – at the left end of Hostel Street, the building made of kiln bricks right before the turn.”
Angharad inclined her head in thanks. ‘Soaps’ stomped back out of the backroom, returned with a cloth bag she dropped on the table besides the sergeant’s ledgers.
“I only asked for four plaques,” Sergeant Itoro said.
“So I went above and beyond, you might say,” the Tianxi smiled.
She retreated, seemingly in a better mood now. The small man sighed.
“Take your plaques,” he instructed them as he reached for his third book. “I’ll see what I can do for lodgings.”
Tristan’s hands were quickest, undoing the knot keeping the bag closed with what Angharad could only call suspicious deftness, and he held it open for the rest of them. Song reached inside, withdrawing a glint of silver, and Angharad was second. Her fingers closed around a round seal, which she drew out and studied more closely as Maryam went fishing.
The silver was rough more than polished; on one side the number thirteen was encircled by a sleeping, snakelike dragon while on the other a thick stripe ran around the edge of the circle with words engraved in what must be Cantar – the mother tongue of Antigua, now spoken only by scholars. She flicked a curious look at Song, who hedged.
“It is Cantar from the Union period, which I cannot read perfectly,” the Tianxi warned.
“That is still more Cantar than anyone else here can read,” Angharad pointed out.
Seeming pleased, Song flipped her plaque to study the back.
“Thus,” she slowly began to translate, “we – they?- have learned the… secret, mystery? Language, maybe. Of things that breathe and do not, but with the suffix for ‘being’ attached. The rest is numbers, but not a number.”
“Thus I have learned the language of all living things; its name is violence,” Sergeant Itoro softly quoted. “So spoke the harvestman of ruin, toppler of thrones.”
Tristan choked and Song looked surprised. The sergeant traced a circle against the table, an Orthodoxy superstition meant to disperse ill luck.
“Our school words,” the Tianxi slowly said, “come from Lucifer?”
From who? Sleeping God, she could not be serious. For some reason the man seemed to find that hilarious, laughing his fill before wiping his eyes.
“Ah, youth,” Sergeant Itoro said, and none quite dared to ask more.
Gathering herself, Angharad saw that his third ledger was open and he seemed to have made some notes in the margins while they were looking at the seals.
“You will be lodged in the Rainsparrow Hostel,” he informed them. “A single room with six beds. The baths are down the street, if you are so inclined, and all three of the taverns on the street will serve you if show your plaque.”
Before any of them could inquire as to crude necessity of payment, the Malani elaborated.
“Everything is free until classes begin,” he said, “but the taverns keep a drinks tally for each brigade and will charge you if you get too expensive.”
“And after the classes begin?” Angharad asked.
He shrugged.
“You’ll be assigned a patron, they will fill you in as to the practicalities of life in Port Allazei,” Sergeant Itoro said.
Angharad nodded, displeased at the brush-off but aware she was in no place to make demands.
“I was advised to seek rooms in the Emerald Vaults,” Song said. “Could something be arranged?”
The small man snorted.
“You and everyone else, Ren, only they got here weeks earlier,” he said. “It filled up ten days ago. No nice single rooms with a balcony and bath for you.”
Alas, Angharad deplored. Cheated of the comforts of civilization once more, though at least Song had made a valiant attempt on their behalf. Sergeant Itoro scrawled a few words on paper and handed them to the silver-eyed Tianxi, referring to her for the first time as Captain Song.
“Good luck,” Sergeant Itoro told them, and so they were dismissed.
They left the office, back to the street, but Angharad stilled at the threshold. She thought for a moment she had gone mad, for the world looked like a fever dream, but she had not: everything truly was wreathed in green. The false star above that was painting the world in its color slowly passed above them, leaving a light tinged by gold in its wake. Angharad swallowed. The Grand Orrery’s cast had been pale since they left the ship, as if they were under direct Glare, so she had entirely forgot that they were not below a pit.
“That is going to take some getting used to,” Maryam grunted. “It even feels different in the aether.”
Troubled one and all, they put a spring to their step. Though they had not been told of the exact location of the Rainsparrow Hostel, it turned out to be unnecessary. Hostel Street was not all that long, a mere ten edifices – three taverns, two warehouses and five hostels for travelers much larger than those Malani law mandated be built by the side of royal roads. They were stone, too, and the facade positively dripping with statues of sparrows hinted strongly as to their destination.
By unspoken agreement they decided to first claim their room and set their bags down there instead of wandering about burdened.
The Rainsparrow Hostel was an old mass of worn granite three stories tall, its front facade boasting a dozen large double-windows facing the street. Between each of these a statue of a hawk – nesting, flying, clawing at the unseen – was fixed, most of them in fine state. The doors were wide open, leading into a tiled antechamber left empty save for a narrow writing desk behind which sat a bored blackcloak with a massive ledger before her.
Song handed her the paper Sergeant Itoro had scrawled on and was met with a raised eyebrow.
“Itoro must like you, to claim a sixer on your behalf,” the watchwoman said. “I suppose we still have the room – you can have twenty-seven.”
She marked down their names and cabal in her ledger, asked to be shown their plaques and only then went rifling inside her desk to remove two small iron keys.
“Second story,” she said. “Right end of the hall. Oh, and there’s one last thing.”
She cracked open her book to the last page, unmarked, but there a few letters were tucked away. The watchwoman idly traced through them before seizing on.
“Tredegar,” she said. “You’re in luck, you got here in time.”
Angharad took the offered letter, blinking in surprise.
“You seem quite in demand,” Maryam said.
The tone made it ambiguous whether that was an insult or not, so Angharad’s lips thinned as she opened the letter. Unsealed, and she could see why. It was not private correspondence, strictly speaking.
TO LADY ANGHARAD TREDEGAR,
You are cordially invited to an evening at the Old Playhouse on the twenty-eighth of the twelfth, for light refreshments and informal company. We-
She scanned through the rest of lines, lips tightening as she found the very last. Raising her gaze afterwards, she saw expectant looks waiting.
“I have been invited for an evening at the Old Playhouse,” she said. “It appears to be some kind of party.”
“So why,” Maryam said, “do you look like someone just socked you in the stomach?”
Just past the end of the paragraph, the part mentioning she was encouraged to bring a guest along, was the names of those who had invited her. Captain Nenetl, went one.
But the other went Lord Thando. A Malani name. A Malani noble’s name.
“Apologies, Song,” Angharad said. “It appears that I had enemies waiting here as well.”
Pale Lights 
New chapter, new fanart. There has been no need for big overviews so far. Have a go at the seven covenant emotes for the Discord instead.
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Also, I am slowly working at a personal reference sheet for the main cast. It’ll be a work in progress for the early chapters.
It does have various Watch uniform speculations.
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Aren’t Tristan’s shoulders a tad too thin, or is it just the watch uniform making the girls’ look wider?
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Absolutely loving this story. Thank you!
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Angharad’s background is being shown really well in both her knowledge of ports and how she feels she should treat Tristan as someone of a lower birth. She still hasn’t picked up that Maryam hates her guts because of her statements and politics.
Angharad’s ideas about the innate superiority and moral superiority of nobles are still present given her thoughts about Song not being the most qualified even given her skill due to her birth and her expecting nobles to act better at the Tolomontera.
The whole bit about the Double Death Brigades and those unlucky bastards was great. Both the humor and the lore of it all was nice. Anyway I watch the future of the 13th Brigade with great interest.
“Thus I have learned the language of all living things; its name is violence,” Sergeant Itoro softly quoted. “So spoke the harvestman of ruin, toppler of thrones.”
Tristan choked and Song looked surprised. The sergeant traced a circle against the table, an Orthodoxy superstition meant to disperse ill luck.
“Our school words,” the Tianxi slowly said, “come from Lucifer?”
So apparently Lucifer is a thing here and he has some really badass quotes.
Also looks like Angharad has some enemies in the Watch which will be interesting.
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I believe lucifer was mentioned once or twice offhand before, but I get the sneaking suspicion that we’ll be learning more about him, his words being used by the school is a good sign for that in the long term i think.
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Now that I think about it he has been mentioned before but this is by far the most blatant mention of him.
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If memory serves, we have heard previous reference to Lucifer as the leader of the Devils; we have also seen that this world’s Devils are not quite the same type of supernatural as those in our world’s mythology*. But it seems no matter what world or guise he’s found in, the Bringer of Light always has a talent for a quotable line.
*At least for the dominant Judaeo-Christian mythology that also gives them a leader named Lucifer. Others are of course available! That said, I’d be surprised if one does match – if only because translation is likely to have favoured a different name to avoid misleading associations.
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Note: it’s not “Judeo-Christian” mythology, just Christian. Devils and Lucifer and the whole concept of an “evil” Satan are purely Christian ideas.
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Asazernik, I would agree that it was the early Christians who recast the Devil as ‘big-E Evil, trying to steal souls as an end in itself’. But the Devil certainly had his place as a tester of Humans and second-guesser of God long before that – he’s prominent in Job, thought to be one of the oldest books in the Old Testament. And although I don’t have a citation, I’m sure I recall hearing the tale of Lucifer and the Fall referred to authoritatively as an old Jewish legend (in the context of Milton’s Paradise Lost, that popularised it for Christian audiences – but with much sympathy for the rebels).
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Replying to your other comment, since we’ve sadly hit the thread depth limit:
The only Jewish connection for the idea of Lucifer is a single use of that name in Latin translation, as the name in that language for the planet Venus. The verse in Isaiah uses it as an epithet for King Sargon (? identification depends on uncertain dating of the text) of Babylonia. Certainly nothing about a fallen angel or any supernatural being at all. Milton may have said some stuff, I’m not very familiar with him, but he doesn’t reflect Jewish tradition.
And yes, “satan” as a role or title (usually prefixed with the definite article, indicating it’s a generic noun and not a name) does exist, but has very little individual personality. (The role also appears in… I believe it’s Ezra? In reference to testing Zerubavel.)
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Asazernik, I’ll stand corrected.
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Funny thing is Angharad doesn’t even consider that before it became a Republic the Tianxi had noble families and Song may be from one of them.
And despite being from a Noble-less republic Song’s attitude regarding her family, and what we know of her family’s history just screams disgraced Noble.
It appears even in the Republic the old Noble houses still see themselves as first among equals and inherently better then the common rabble.
That’s just my take on it though.
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“Violence is the language of all living things” is obviously manipulative propaganda. I think something like “conflict (or competition) is an aspect of life” would be more real.
More interesting to me is what it says about watch philosophy. They claim to be the protectors of humanity from the “gods”, but at the Dominion they were effectively feeding humans to “gods.”
The juxtaposition of apparently determined, ruthless and effective actors like Nerei and dysfunctional bureaucracy makes understanding and evaluating the Watch confusing.
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This Lucifer fellow seems rather unpleasant. And also factually wrong. If the language of all living things were truly violence, there could never be any living things in the first place.
It is an unfortunate fact of history that those most capable of being remembered by it are those who engaged in and benefitted from horrific violence. That is not the same as saying history is written by the victor, as that is not the case. The defeated write histories all the time, and many of them are adopted into the cannon of future victors. But in order to have written them, such “defeated” individuals must necessarily have survived the defeat while a great many of their comrades fell. It is not a coincidence that the generals of defeated dictators often write memoirs while the names of the men they led are forgotten. Generals, win or lose, benefit from the violence that put them in the commander’s seat instead of the front line.
And so our histories are inked with the blood of forgotten names, the pens held by the men who spilled it. It follows that the common tongue of all such history is violence. But history is not fact, and cannot ever adequately capture it. Particularly not when recorded by those with so uniform a flaw. Fact is, every man who died to give us those histories was cooperating far more than they were killing. Armies, nations, society itself, could not exist if violence were as ubiquitous as Lucifer seems to think. These things require massive, multilateral collaboration between countless total strangers. They require the expectation that one can find in strangers people willing to engage in collaboration.
The people who say things like Lucifer’s motto aren’t just wrong, though. They are dangerous. They deny the single fact which makes every human success possible. They deny a far deeper fact, that life itself requires the collaboration of individual cells in order to exist. From this denial can only ever arise ashen graves, for that is all that will be left of any people who believe it.
This does not speak well of the Watch.
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Except that it is. Competition is the fundamental driving principle of all life; it’s the engine by which all evolution and complexity derives. From the endless war of all against all fought every moment of every day by a trillion amoebas and bacteria, to the slow smothering of trees competing for light, to the ant colonies waging endless genocidal war upon rival colonies or the endless dance of predator and prey. Nature is red in tooth and claw and to pretend otherwise is to wilfully blind yourself to a fundamental aspect of the world.
Humans, as offspring of nature, are little different. Amy increases in complexity and cooperation simply allow that competition to take place at larger and larger scales. Clans, tribes, nations, corporations- all exist to grow, to dominate, and to crush their competition- for if they do not, their rivals will do so to them.
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Reminds me of Kill Six Billion Demons: “Reach Heaven Through Violence”
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You have certainly been told this. We all have. But let us consider the source of this claim.
Charles Darwin was a white, cis, heterosexual, landowning, well-connected English man born in the period of history when everyone without those exact characteristics (modulo a different imperial core citizenship) was being brutally oppressed to various degrees by the Victorian British Empire. The man himself was never a slaver, but the Empire only abolished actual chattel slavery in Darwin’s 20s.
To say the ideology he grew up in was warped by imperial violence would be an understatement. His collaborators included Herbert Spencer, who coined the term Survival of the Fittest…and founded the priestcraft of eugenics on that false basis. The idea that violent competition was the natural state of life wasn’t just profoundly damaging to the following century of human development. It was profoundly convenient to the very people most capable of making their voices heard. Everyone writing all of the early work on evolution had won their ostensible competitions, after all. They and their colleagues dominated everything up to and including the entire planet. They got to define themselves as fittest, and worse, got to convince the rest of humanity that their particular – violent – interpretation of the facts was the only rational one.
In their arrogance, they missed an extremely important fact. Multicellular life is completely impossible if violent competition is the actual law of nature. Life started as cells, after all. Individual, self-contained, self-replicating machines, which spread only by virtue of being able to in the environments they lived. If violence was the only universal language, that is all there ever could have been. They could not have cooperated, because the moment one did their sacrifice would have been taken advantage of by all others.
We do not observe this. Instead, multicellularity, the proof that collaboration is a superior law, has developed at least 42 times in nature and once in a shockingly short laboratory experiment. Under basically any external threat including something as simple as a sieve, isolated organisms fail to exhibit the red claws of this false impression of nature and instead band together for protection and advancement. They share dwindling food instead of eating each other, sacrifice autonomy and even their lives to form a single spore better able to survive harsh conditions. They deny the so-called natural imperative by their very existence.
And it isn’t just the transition from single to multicellularity which demonstrates this. Wars between ant colonies are commonly shown as evidence, but to do this ignores the example of the largest ant colonies in the world. Which span every continent except Antarctica, comprise millions of queens and trillions of individual ants, and never exhibit aggression towards each other even when ants from hundreds of miles away are introduced to local colonies. This supercolonial behavior is likely the reason invasive ant species even exist: a massive colony which never fights its own easily sweeps through all local varieties. They compete at the borders, against those not of their colony. But within? Every interaction, even between colonies which would fight in other circumstances, is collaborative.
The language of nature is not violence. If it were, these examples would be impossible. Collaboration has shown itself to be a far more powerful and successful strategy. But we are not taught to interpret the facts this way. Because if we were, we would wonder why we are so often instructed to fight.
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I guess you’ve never heard about symbiosis, nick012000? It happens all over the place in this system we call “life”. And it’s not just lichen, or crocodile birds — it’s the bacteria that live in our guts, without such partnership both humans and their bacterial companions could never survive. It’s even humans and chickens’ eggs, and humans and cows’ milk, and humans and sheep’s wool, and humans and fruit trees, as well as numerous “lesser” species and their cultivation of a cohabitation with various flora and fauna. It’s hot peppers and birds, it’s flowers and bees. And let’s not forget humans and dogs. None of these relationships could really be considered violent on their own.
Sometimes, life teams up and cooperates.
Hg
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@CantankerousBellerophan Why are you bringing up Darwin at all, let alone his class/skin color/sexual orientation? That has no relevance to the discussion at hand.
Just because there is cooperation does not mean there is not violence. That’s what War is–groups of prior cooperating to commit violence on another group of people.
It’s interesting you bring up multicellular life. We have a name for when individual cells stop cooperating and start doing their own thing to the detriment of the group–it’s called cancer. Your body has numerous dedicated systems to detecting those rogue cells and destroying them before they multiply. Your T-Cells and Natural Killer cells constantly patrol your body, testing every cell they come across and summarily executing any who do not pass muster.
On average one every five minutes you body destroys one of these cells without you even realizing. Even the seeming harmony of multicellular life does not exist without those individual cells living under a constant threat of violence.
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Darwin’s background is extremely relevant to the topic at hand because it informs everything about his work. He came from a world which needed a way to justify titanic amounts of violence against basically every other person on the planet. The idea that this violence was the natural order, that preventing it was a violation of phydical law and the will of God, and that nothing could or should be done to change that was convenient to the very people who could broadcast ideas most broadly. And so, this became the dominant interpretation of Darwin’s observations for well over a century.
If, say, an indigenous woman had been the one to put these observations together into a predictive model, do you think she would have come to the same conclusion? It would depend on her culture, of course (an Aztec discoverer of evolutionary theory may well have been worse), but likely not. She may have noted that the seeds eaten by finches were also subject to evolution, and were using the birds as a dispersal mechanism even as the birds used them for food. She would have predicted the existence of a pollinator for the long orchids, as Darwin did, but that observation may have become central to a more well-dicussed theory of mutual benefit instead of forgettable trivia. The fact that Darwin was the person he was, rather than any other kind of person, shaped the entire future of the field he created. That is an unfortunate fact about science, and part of the reason later “research” stemming from his, about “human fitness,” was so dangerous.
It is important to remember: most early eugenicists were not liars. They believed they were doing humanity a favor. They were horrifically wrong, one and all, because their definition of humanity had been narrowed to include only themselves by a culture built to do exactly that so it could use everyone and everything else as fuel. To ignore their backgrounds would be to ignore the reasons for their catastrophic failure as truthsayers.
The same is true of Darwin. He came from a world which glorified conflict and preordained himself and those like him the victors. Of course he looked at nature and saw only conflict. He had no cultural context allowing him to see anything but.
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You have to wonder if someone is that committed to playing a bit, or whether some people seriously think stuff like “Darwin had cultural biases, therefore violent strategies in the competition for limited resources do not exist”.
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I never said that or anything like it. Violent strategies obviously exist. But their relative paucity in comparison to the VAST majority of interactions in nature which are entirely nonviolent (every interaction between cells in multicellular organisms comes to mind) invalidates the claim that violence is the only universal language of life. This relative paucity went largely unremarked by Darwin because he was conditioned to notice violent interactions and disregard nonviolent ones by a society which wanted to justify its own disproportionate violence against everything else. This scientific disregard was twisted into a set of assumptions about nature which were used to do horrific things by the very society which twisted Darwin’s capacity to observe the full breadth of natural interactions in the first place, and thus arose the false assumption that “survival of the fittest” and the violence that entails was all there was to evolution and nature.
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There are a LOT of things here that are wildly off:
A) Ascribing paucity to violence inherent in living beings is laughable. For any particular organism you’d care to submit, make two lists. In the first list, add every living thing that threatens or is threatened by your organism either through competition for scarce resources or through direct confrontation. To the second list, add every organism that coexists in a symbiotic cooperation with your organism. The first list will invariably be orders of magnitude larger by any measure you’d care to count, while the second list could well be empty (see below).
B) Acting like Darwin’s own prejudices have irrevocably colored the work of every scientist that has come after him to always skew toward his biases and not considering what is supported by scientific evidence is selling science short. If there was an overwhelming body of evidence that competition is not a primal driving factor for evolution, theories postulated to admit that evidence would have become contemporary sometime in the last 150-200 years. Instead what has emerged describes cooperation in a competitive context because competition is ubiquitous while cooperation is not, based on our observations,
C) Ascribing Darwin’s lack of consideration for multicellular life was due to his bias as a male white cis landowner is kind of silly when the leading theory of multicellular life at the time was that cells formed by a crystallization process. Darwin’s most influential work happened in the 1830s; discovery of animal cells and the modern notion of cells procreating by dividing didn’t come around until the 1850s and didn’t get properly refined until the early 1900s.
D) Even when considering multicellular life, multicellular organisms are more akin to totalitarian police states than harmonious dens of cooperation. At any given time, you have billions of immune cells that constantly inspect your cells, looking for any that have stopped towing the party line which will then be executed to avoid the risk of cancer. This happens roughly once every five minute on average.
The rest of your cells don’t work together merely because the advantage inherent in doing so, they do it because every cell that behaved otherwise was summarily destroyed. If you have 10 minutes to kill, search for “Kurzgesagt you vs. cancer” on YouTube, it’s a neat little video on the subject.
E) The way you negate a statement like “every living being speaks the language of violence” is by saying “there exists an example of a living being with does not speak the language of violence.” I would say that you can’t provide such a counter-example because every living thing responds and can be coerced through violence in some manner.
The same cannot be said about “cooperation” however, because I can list the same cancer cells I brought up above. When a singular cell of a multicellular organism stops cooperating it becomes cancer. From there, if it learns to evade your immune system and multiply it becomes a tumor. But if it only evades the immune system without multiplying, it’ll just sit there, leeching off you body’s resources without providing any bodily functions in return, until it dies. It will be its own little benign tumor of one, with no cooperating with anything surrounding it.
F) None of the above is speaking on the relative advantage or disadvantages conferred by cooperation versus competition, only the universality of them. Violence is unambiguously universal to the living condition; a means by which all living beings influence one another. Cooperation is a rare gift.
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“To the second list, add every single organism that coexists in symbiotic cooperation with yours.”
All right, let’s do this with you as the object: Each of the billions of bacteria and archaea which make up your gut microbiome. Every single human being on the planet whose existence has directly benefitted your own, and all of their gut microbiomes. Each plant you have ever eaten, which are winning at evolution because humans cultivate them en masse. Arguably the same argument may be made for animals, as chickens simply would not exist without human intervention, though that is not an argument I will make. Every single living thing you have ever found beautiful. Every retroviral DNA inclusion which makes one or more genetic machines in human biology function. Every hypha of mycorrhizal fungus which makes modern plants possible. Every phytoplankton in the ocean and tree in the rainforest, which liberate the oxygen you breathe from the carbon which would poison you.
All told, this is countless trillions of interactions, between every single kingdom and domain of life, as well as some things we don’t consider alive but are subject to evolution, whose life functions make your own possible without violence or competition.
What even fits on the other list? A few predators which would eat you if given the chance (they won’t be due to the efforts of countless other living things, it’s worth noting). A tiny minority of microbes which are pathogens, most of which are harmless to some other animal and infect us more or less accidentally. The sliver of precancerous cells culled each day to preserve the rest. Any human you might consider an enemy. Nazis. Always gotta mention them in lists of implacable foes. Many of these are terrible scourges indeed, and some come in great numbers, but they pale in comparison to the massive bulk of every other living thing’s benefits to your existence.
Many of these were things Darwin would have had no way of knowing about. I can’t begrudge him that. I don’t begrudge him for missing the full breadth of interactions between living things, either. But that makes his focus on conflict no less out of date.
I can, and will, begrudge the popular interpretation of science which has failed to update on all this new information. We know better now. We can see further into the deeps, and what we find is a web of life which requires far more collaboration than conflict to function.
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Violence is not synonymous with death. You can have competition, wars, and conflict without everyone (or in some cases anyone) ending up dead.
Saying violence is inherent in all living things doesn’t negate the ability to conduct nonviolent actions or mean everything thought, emotion, or action is related to violence, just that out of all traits any living being has violence is the one they all share.
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Nice idea, however: political power grows from the barrel of a gun. Violence is the definition of the nation state, and the equal capability for violence in the state of nature is what leads to the formation of society in and of itself. Violence is an abominable default, for sure, but it is the language of the international stage also. One could even, albeit poorly, argue that nuclear MAD is one of the ways to actually ensure a base amount of equality. I know a lot of anarchists do agree that the state’s continually expansive definition of violence (property damage, graffiti, “disorderly conduct of the youth”, being queer too loudly in public and subsequently being arrested on grounds of “being a sex worker” etc) is actually meant to choke us out of the ways to organise against the state and hit it where it hurts. Violence is the base tool in the toolbox. Forgoing it entirely plays into the hands of any tyrant that comes along. Mass protests, after all, are just the implicit threat of riots and further violence if situations aren’t addressed. Civility can only be achieved with the threat of incivility lurking in the background.
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If humanity were really so dark, we wouldn’t just have failed to accomplish anything in the past two milennia. We wouldn’t just have failed to make it out of Africa. We wouldn’t have been able to evolve in the first place.
Human intelligence is, from an evolutionary perspevtive, as absurd as a peacock’s tail. Our brains are so huge we ran out of room in the birth canal for them, and so started giving birth to increasingly vulnerable neonates so we wouldn’t all kill our mothers in childbirth. Even so, human births are staggeringly more dangerous than that of anything which doesn’t literally eat its mother. 20% of all our energy goes to feeding our brain, which is wild on its own. Objectively speaking, us being this smart should be an evolutionary disadvantage.
But it gets worse than that. Obviously we’ve jumped into an ecological niche where being smarter is always an advantage, but there’s no such thing as jumping into a niche. Chimpanzees can’t be trained to replace us. We don’t just need examples of a niche we currently fit into. We need examples of every prior niche, where increasingly unintelligent versions of us fit, in order, going back to our divergence from the other apes some five million years ago, to explain the runaway process which turned our brains into the absurd things they are.
It’s not toolmaking. Once one person makes a tool, everyone else can copy it. There isn’t much evolutionary advantage in being a lone toolmaker because all the people who couldn’t have invented it can still use it.
It’s not language, at least not on its own. Language is useful, but someone slightly better at using it doesn’t have much of an advantage because others won’t be able to understand them.
It’s definitely not avoiding predators. You don’t need much intelligence to get to where other African animals are at avoiding African predators, and then you reach a local maximum. Any smarter and you start wasting energy on a massive brain instead of running.
It’s none of the commonly bandied reasons. None of them create a slowly ramping progression of ecological niches where being slightly smarter is always an advantage which outweighs the disadvantages of an increasingly unwieldy brain. The real explanation is just…us. Humans. Society. Our capacity to work together, form increasingly complex groups capable of more and more things, placed a pressure on us where being slightly smarter each generation was always better. It meant you could more effectively befriend potential rivals, outwit enemies, work together with more people on larger projects, and counter the increasingly dire downsides of the whole process. Care for pregnant mothers and infants became a universal behavior as both became increasingly vulnerable. We learned to cook food to extract the calories we needed to feed our massive brains. And every small advancement benefitted everyone, which made all the required tasks easier going forward and reduced the risks of continuing to get smarter.
And all because we could work with each other. Because, when we look at other humans, we are more inclined to see potential friends than immediate enemies. Because we have to teach our children bigotry, rather than it being genetically ingrained. Because, fluent though we may be in the language of violence, it is not our natural one. That, too, we must be taught.
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Why does everyone act like violence and cooperation are mutually exclusive? Or that violence being the common language means it is the only one used, or cooperation means no violence and it isn’t an option?
Analogy time.
I have a number of friends and acquaintances from different countries. Most of them are multilingual, but the only language everyone in the group speaks is English. It may not be the first or primary language for everyone, it isn’t the one everyone speaks in their daily life, and some speak it better than others.
But if you want to be sure everyone in the group will understand you, you speak English.
This doesn’t mean they can’t communicate in the other languages they know with people that understand them. Some of them rarely speak English outside our group because it isn’t the commonly used language where they live. Even among our group if two or more people are more comfortable with a different common language they will speak it as long as everyone in the conversation is fluent.
But everyone can speak English, understand it, and be sure everyone else will understand if they use it.
Violence among living things is like the English language among my social circle. It is what you can be sure everything will understand, even if it isn’t the usual or first choice in communication. And other methods can be used (and often are) if all involved parties know them.
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The quote includes an attribution, to someone well-known as the Father of Lies. “Other ways than violence exist” may well have been the initially intended reading of the quote. Though given the school’s internal culture being compared to the utter fiasco that was the Domain of Lost Things, it’s unlikely to be the commonly-accepted reading anymore.
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I’ll point out that Lucifer simply means “Light bearer”. If you paid someone to carry a torch for you, they were your lucifer. In modern Roman Catholic traditions, there are often rituals involving the cruxifer (cross bearer) and lucifer (who carries a candle). In the Bible, Jesus Himself was referred to as the Morning Star – the lucifer for the coming of the dawn.
The title’s association with the Devil came much later.
In a world where civilization was destroyed and forced underground by a cataclysm involving light becoming a burning force, I wouldn’t be surprised if someone named as such was involved with that destructive event. It would certainly explain the other titles attributed to him here.
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Tristian called *somebody* that in the conversation about shitty lampposts. Or was it Prince of Lies? Either way, context strongly suggested that the person he was describing was being compared to either The Devil (note the “the” part) or a comparably reviled figure.
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Ch 41
“Enter Chabier Calante,” Tristan said, “to whom the very Prince of Lies is favorably compared in some parts of the Murk.”
He’s talking about the guy that made the exploding lampposts.
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The only reason we know that multicellular life has arisen independently at least 42 times is that in each case doing so required inventing a new, non-universal language, which survives among the core functions of those lineages. For beneficial symbiosis to be maintained, differences must be respected, and interfaces established for translation across different contexts. “Good fences make good neighbors.” The Watch mostly deals with those borders when things are going wrong, and as such must remain mindful of potential for worst-case outcomes rather than blithely assuming everyone they meet has the same baseline cultural assumptions as they do.
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Lucifer’s quote does not claim that violence is the only language between living things, it claims that it is the only language shared by all living things. Many other languages may well exist, but each one is only of use among those who share it.
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which had involved much coin-counting and squabbling about rights and privileges – men’s work! –
Its much better to learn women’s work. Like shooting stuff (Song), Captaining a boat and exploring new lands (Angharad’s mother), or stabbing things with a pointy metal stick (Angharad).
Now I’m actually curious what pursuits Angharad would consider suitable for which sex.
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And also, who the hell would she have thought would do said “men’s work” in her place, if she was to take a wife as was the plan? Would one of her brothers be expected to stand-in for that, as well?
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Itoro complained about Soaps bringing out more than 4 badges, and Tristan was the first to get his hands on the bag. Odds he pocketed one or more extra badges in anticipation of future recruitments?
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I’m with Angharad, “Double Death Brigade” sounds awesome.
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Ah, Song. A family with gated knowledge, a multitude of relatives in high positions to ask for a favor from and an attitude of superiority. I can already picture what kind of family she came from. Probably not as infamous as the Wang clan of Taiyuan irl but close to it.
I am curious to know the Republic government’s view on these clans. Some of the great emperors in Chinese History are famous for killing a lot of them and limiting their scope of influence by improving education and setting up the Imperial exams systems.
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These politically powerful dynasties that have multigenerational influence and wealth, place great importance on their family name and reputation, have hereditary positions, and look down on the “uneducated commoners” definitely aren’t Nobles. Definitely not. Because the Republic does have nobles, everyone is equal. Some people are just more equal than others…
I’m still convinced the powerful families Song has mentioned are the remnants of the Noble clans from before it became a Republic and the Nobles and wealthy families that supported the revolution.
Honestly those families probably make up most of the government, so I doubt many of them are at risk of being purged. I’d say any new families that begin to accumulate power and wealth would be in more danger. I can just hear the hypocritical accusations. “They are trying to become a new Noble class!”
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Yeah fuck it guess I’m becoming a Patron, I need my fix NOW
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“Thus I have learned the language of all living things; its name is violence.”
This is a great line, absolutely fantastic.
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This cantankerous bellerophon troll account single handedly makes me not want to read the comments
Does anyone know a way to block them?
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I dont think they are a delibrate troll,
I think they heard the only language of life is violence instead of violence is a language all forms of life understand
Also in my personal experience people who annoy me often can have rare nuggets of interesting insight cause they look at things different from myself.
That being said I think only the author can block any particular individual
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