The Voyage of the Unshadowed Land

The Return

On the fourth of Carnelian, YS 1140, a fisherman northwest of Jalkelainan saw a ship emerge from the early morning fog. History did not record his name, but his blood-sworn affidavit survives in the archive of the Standing Committee’s inquiry:

Her timbers were weathered gray, and her sails torn and patched to motley. I saw no sign of life aboard her, nor dolphins at her bow. I thought her the ghost come back from the time of the Rebellion, and so made haste to harbor to sound the alarm.

Despite her battered appearance, the ship was no ghost. She was instead the Unshadowed Land: the last survivor of an expedition that had set out six years previously to raid Bell Prison on the Salt Coast, and the first vessel to circumnavigate Cherne without the aid of magic since the end of the Age of Heroes. As she made her weary way toward Jalkelainan harbor, she carried eight of her original Ruudian crew, an ex-slave from Thind, a Gifted chimpanzee, and the Arañese missionary Costanjila di Xueres, whose prison letters are the other principal record of that epic voyage.

Jalkelainan’s harbor master at the time was a practical, hardheaded man named Kupoleva’s Aardi. Nothing is known of his personal life or political beliefs, but a portrait does survive, showing a man with hair cropped down to stubble, a neatly-trimmed beard, and absolutely no sense of humor. Born in YS 1099, he would have grown up with stories of the rebellion that finally ended five centuries of unalive rule in Ruuda. It is therefore not surprising that upon hearing the fisherman’s description of a “ghost ship”, he immediately took action.

Two lean cutters, each crewed by twenty marines and a magician, were immediately sent to intercept the newcomer, with strict orders not to board. A third, larger, vessel was pressed into service and dispatched in their wake. This ship carried a harbor pilot, a doctress, another magician, and another squad of marines, along with a catapult and as many barrels of pitch as the harbor master could commandeer in half an hour.¹

The next three hours must have been tense ones for K.’s Aardi. Jalkelainan’s mayor would have undoubtedly descended upon him en masse, demanding information that he didn’t have; rumors that the Pale Remainder were returning to harvest their former subjects would have spread through the town like wildfire. One imagines the harbor master standing on the seawall, telescope clenched in his hand, secretly wishing that the Standing Committee’s rules did not prevent him from recruiting a few whales to act as messengers or watchgen, as was the norm in other parts of Cherne.²

The third of the ships sent by K.’s Aardi reached the Unshadowed Land in mid-morning. With the fog gone, its crew could clearly see what the fisherman had not: the vessel was very solid, and her crew unafraid of direct sunlight. The two cutters paralleled her course as the third ship came alongside her. The harbor pilot’s entry in Jalkelainan’s port log is almost comically understated:

Boarded twin-spire Unshadowed Land (acting capt. Costanjila di Xueres for Cn. Tomonainan’s Petta, deceased, out of Ruuda-in-Ruuda by way of diverse other harbors) third hour after dawn, 4 Carn. 1140. No evidence plague or unalive. Harbor fee waived.

The Unshadowed Land’s exhausted crew gladly relinquished their vessel to the harbor master and his marines. There was a brief discussion of whether it would be better to tow her into harbor, or let her come in under her own sail. According to local folklore, the harbor master decided on the former, but was then persuaded by the doctress that the latter would be a less ignominious end to what everyone involved must have realized was an epic achievement. Over the course of six years, the Unshadowed Land had sailed almost a hundred thousand gallops: past the dragon’s isles, Thind, and Ini Bantang to raid Bell Prison, then around Cap di Perçalle and the Regimental Kingdoms to return to Ruuda. For the first time in almost a thousand years, the inhabitants of northern Cherne had made direct contact by mundane means with peoples they knew of only as legends.

What is more, her cargo was enough to pay for the entire expedition. The three other ships she sailed with may have been lost, along with most of her original crew, but in her hold the Unshadowed Land carried medicinal pearls from the Undja Delta, gem corals from Ini Bantang, a twentyweight of diamonds from Bell Prison, and many other treasures and curiosities. More importantly, her crew had brought back more noon-grade dayglass than existed in the whole of Ruuda at the time. Scarred and salt-starved though they might be, her crew were potentially among their nation’s wealthiest citizens.

The little convoy reached Jalkelainan shortly after noon. A handful of townspeople had fled in terror, but most of the rest flocked to the seawall to witness the Unshadowed Land’s arrival. We can only hope that some cheered as she lay alongside the pier and made fast, for if her crew had known what lay before them, they might well have cast off and set sail once again.

Our One True Ally

In many ways, the Unshadowed Land’s arrival in Jalkelainen on that end-of-summer day in 1150 was a direct result of two previous arrivals of even greater note. The first took place more than six centuries earlier, and plunged Ruuda into a long night that shaped the whole history of northern Cherne. The second occurred within the memory of many people still living in Ruuda when the last survivors of the Salt Coast expedition returned.

Yearagain Eve, YS 478. With the moon a dark sliver in the night sky, Ruuda’s major cities—Jalkelainan, Pohjoinen, Etela, and Ruuda-in-Ruuda—throbbed to the beat of thousands of drums. People wrapped in winter furs thronged the streets, laughing, drinking, and setting fire to scraps of paper on which they had written prayers for the coming year. Most would have included the customary plea for the Uncertain Angels to return and care for the world, as the north was solidly Subservient at the time. Many others would have mentioned the hero Uws, ruler of the eponymous empire that lay on the other side of the Helada Mountains. After a decade fighting bandits and monsters on his southern border, he had turned his attention northward, and was probing Ruuda’s defenses. Nearly fourteen palms tall, he was still protected by the Angelic sword that never left his grasp, but that wouldn’t have stopped the fishergens, tradesfolk, and minor aristocracy of Ruuda’s city-states from hoping.

Two watchmen were dicing in Jalkelainen’s lighthouse that evening. According to legend, they began rolling nothing but nines. Each accused the other of cheating. Fuelled by drink, they quickly came to blows, and it was only when one chased the other onto the upper platform that they noticed a double handful of ships gliding into harbor. Black, with black sails, they slipped silently through the ice-choked water, showing no lights, and sounding no trumpets to signal their arrival.

The watchmen’s first thought was that Uws was taking advantage of the celebrations to invade.³ The watchmen began beating the warning drums, but their signal was lost amid the hubbub of celebration below. They could only watch as eight of the nine black ships made fast at the city’s piers. The nine stood off at the mouth of the harbor, her sails hanging slack despite the harsh easterly wind.

That much is legend. What happened next was recorded in several diaries, and in letters carried over the Heladas by survivors pleading for assistance or refuge from Uws, the Darpani, or anyone else. Some four hundred gens disembarked with an orderly haste born of long practice. They moved quickly to secure the harbor, taking control of the gate that separated the docks from the rest of the town and putting archers on the roofs of several warehouses. The handful of revellers in the dock district were bludgeoned into silence, or quickly and efficiently killed.

Alarm began to spread as the invaders pushed through the crowd toward Jalkelainen’s central square, where the mayor-elect and other dignitaries were, as was customary, waiting on tables at a midnight feast for the area’s poor and indigent. People began shouting or screaming as they realized the town was under attack. A few fought back, including a fishing boat captain named Asmenaila’s Urvi:

I saw two men lay hands on one of the creatures, which drove its sword into the first’s belly and then broke the second’s arm without breaking stride. I drew out my scaling knife and stabbed its neck as it passed. It flinched, but then drew the blade out and threw it back at my feet and walked on.

A.’s Urvi had just discoverd what the rest of Ruuda would learn in the days and years that followed. The invaders, who called themselves the Pale Remainder, were not truly alive, and so could not be slain by mundane weapons. Instead, their bodies were a patchwork of pieces cut from the living flesh of human beings and stitched together with strands of moonlight. Nothing short of complete dismemberment could end their unnatural existence.

Nothing, that is, except the direct light of the sun. For reasons that are still unknown⁴, the magic the Pale Remainder used to hold their bodies together could not withstand exposure to direct sunlight. Reflected or magical light was not enough; nor was light released from anything less that the finest noon-grade dayglass, which at the time was as rare in the north as giants’ hair.

Estimates vary, but most scholars agree that the Pale Remainder numbered fewer than three thousand in total. Their magicians were powerful, but there were humans in Ruuda at the time who could match them spell for spell. What could not be matched was their inhuman strength, and the fact that they never wearied. A Pale swordsgen could fight without rest for three days straight. The only limits were the need to sleep, and to replace any body parts that started to go off.

The popular image of the invaders has been shaped by who the Pale were at the height of their power, or later romanticizations, such as the aristocratically-posed figures in polished black armor in Vardishav the Elder’s famous Night Falls on Ruuda. The reality was probably very different: the Pale were in fact a raggle-taggle band of refugees. The four hundred or so creatures who descended upon Jalkelainen while their compatriots attacked Ruuda’s other major cities would have worn sea-stained rags and scraps of boiled leather harness salvaged during the probing raids they had made on islands lying off Ruuda’s coast in the preceding two weeks. Many were probably missing a few non-essential body parts, such as ears and noses; a few might even have been short a limb or two, though if they employed the same tactics as they used later in their reign, they would have addressed that in the field by harvesting from those they killed.

But where were they from? And why had they come to Ruuda? Dozens of theories have proposed, some more fantastic than others. The most credible is that the Pale Remainder were a leftover from the era of the Uncertain Angels. Several sources from the Age of Heroes refer to “bandits” living in the caverns of southern Praczedt after the fall of the Uncertain Angels. The most complete, the Szestetelmeny Chronicle, describes them as “…feasting upon the unwary or unwise as might a great cat upon an ox.” Like so many others afterward, the chronicle’s anonymous authors may have mistaken the Pale’s use of others’ bodies to renew their own for cannibalism.

If this hypothesis is correct, then it is believable that the eruptions of Mount Narjemczy in YS 461 and 474 could have triggered a series of catastrophic underground floods, which would have driven the Pale up to the surface. There, they would have been faced with a difficult choice. They could go south, into the jungles of Thind and Ini Bantang; west, onto the Great Plain; north, to Uws; or norther still, to Ruuda. Thind or Uws would mean challenging the largest and most populous realms in Cherne on their home ground. Wresting control of the Great Plain from the Darpani tribes and clans would have been less of a challenge, but establishing a reliable supply of the body parts the Pale needed to sustain themselves would have been a significant challenge.

A second theory is that the Pale were not driven to the surface against their will, but had instead been planning such a move for centuries. The Pale leader Bokchang Tzen Urpatnati made several references to his compatriots’ near-infinite patience during the Pale’s first post-conquest embassy to Uws in 577. Effectively immortal, the Pale could well have decided to wait out the chaos that accompanied the fall of the Uncertain Angels, and the churn of magic-fueled empires that characterized the Age of Heroes.

A third possibility, highly relevant to present-day events, is that the Pale were “invited” to leave their caverns by the dragon Sulk. The two islands now known as Sullair Major and Sullair Minor lie directly opposite the area in southern Praczedt from which the Pale most likely came. They, the waters around them, were off-limits to human beings for two hundred years while Sulk brooded on her three eggs. Shortly after they hatched in YS 240-41, she launched a series of devastating attacks against nearby towns and magicians, ruthlessly eliminating any possible human threat to her progeny. While she would obviously not have been able to pursue the Pale into their underground refuge, her mundane and magical strength would have posed a significant risk to the Pale. If in fact they were a holdover from Angelic times, it would have been entirely in keeping with immortal custom for negotiations over their relocation to take several hundred years.⁵

Patient or not, the Pale Remainder could be as fast as lightning when necessary. It probably took them less than half an hour to secure Jalkelainen’s dock. The two watchmen in the lighthouse (if they actually existed) would have been killed along with the harbor guards and any passers-by. If taken by surprise, their deaths would have been delivered with a single knife thrust up into the skull through the soft tissue under the jaw, or by strangulation, two methods favored by the Pale because they did so little damage, and spilled so little precious blood.

The next step was Jalkelainen’s main square. Like most large settlements in Cherne at the time, Jalkelainen had originally been the center of an Angelic estate. While their architecture was as varied as their physical form, the Uncertain Angels’s palaces tended to be three stories of stone, coral, or magically-hardened wood around a courtyard large enough for a thousand or more to gather without feeling crowded. In Jalkelainan’s case, this basic plan was augmented with four diagonal “spokes”, each a hundred strides long, that stepped down in sections to two stories, then one, before turning into open-sided galleries. Entrance to the square itself was through two-story arched gateways lying between the spokes. The northern one lay less than a gallop from the docks; the other three opened onto major roads leading east to Pohjoinen, south toward the Heladas, and west to peter out among small fishing villages and forest.

Leaving fifty or so of their number to guard the harbor, the remainder of the Pale force moved quickly toward the square. As they approached it, they split into three forces. The first, numbering perhaps two hundred, pushed through the crowd toward the eastern arch, while another fifty or so headed for the northern and western. The southern arch was deliberately left open: as in the “show hunts” later staged by the emperors of Thind, the Pale’s aim was to drive their victims like cattle.

The mayor of Jalkelainen, Vuonemaima’s Saardu, was serving salt fish soup to orphaned beggars when word arrived that the harbor had been attacked. Ladle in hand, and undoubtedly a little bit drunk, he dismissed the first report, saying that the town watch “…well knew how to deal with brawlers.” But then shouts and the din of metal against metal were heard near the northern gate. A wainwright with an arrow in his arm began bellowing, “Demons! Wraiths and demons!” People began screaming, racing to and fro, tripping over the long leather bootlaces that were in fashion that year.

V.’s Saardu was nearly sixty at the time. He had inherited control of his family’s fur-trading business while in his early twenties, and parlayed a warehouse and three ships into two full piers and full or part ownership of eighteen sturdy vessels. He may or may not have been the same “V.’s S” who helped defend a trading post upriver from Jalkelainen from an Uwsian raid while still a young man, but he certainly saw action in the summer of 453, when tensions between Pohjoinen and Jalkelainen’s merchant houses turned bloody.

Laying about himself with his ladel, he pushed through the crowd to the high table where many of the town’s other dignitaries had been waiting upon a motley collection of beggars, whores, and dancing masters. He climbed up on the table and began shouting orders in a vain attempt to make order out of the growing chaos. Suddenly, an arrow plunged out of the night sky and into his right foot. His attendants tried to pull it out, but were unable to, leaving V.’s Saardu effectively nailed to the heavy pine table. “Then our line needs form here,” he is reputed to have said, “For if I cannot move, then neither shall anyone else.”

Unfortunately for the people of Jalkelainen, the Pale Remainder had other plans. With the northern and western entrances to the square sealed off, the larger force to the east began pushing into the square. The Ruudians fought back with whatever makeshift weapons came to hand, but their carving knives, skewers, broken bottles, and cobblestones had little impact on their unalive foes. If a lucky stroke did manage to cut a hamstring or put out an eye, the damaged Pale would simply bludgeon someone unconscious and drag gens behind the advancing line. It took only a few minutes, sometimes less, to remove the required part from the hapless victim and bind it into place of whatever had been injured.

And then there was blood. The Pale Remainder bled from their wounds like anyone else, and like anyone else, if they lost too much, they first grew weak, then lapsed unconscious, then died. But unlike the truly living, their bodies could not replenish what they lost. Instead, they had to take living blood and inject it directly into their own veins.

Today, over a thousand years later, we are inured to these unnatural acts. We can only imagine the horror that must have come over the people of Jalkelainen as they saw their neighbors and loved ones drained and dismembered just a few strides away from them. Khodormeneneko’s Ijtvan’s Remembrances, written a generation later, tells of a magician who saw first her father, then her husband, and finally her son harvested, until she stood face to face with a Pale warrior whose face was an amalgam of everything she had loved in the world. She traded her memory of that love for a spell powerful enough to blast her foe to ash, only to be slain by the one behind him. Another story describes a young man pushing a pile of masonry over the edge of a roof onto a Pale below, crushing him, then being caught and drained to revive the enemy he thought he had defeated.

Faced with what seemed an unstoppable force, the crowd panicked. They poured through the southern arch of the square, trampling their own on cobblestones made slick by frost, spilled rum, and blood. The Pale pressed against them relentlessly. With the harbor under their control, there was nowhere for Jalkelainen’s people to run. The roads were choked with midwinter snow—it would be four months before a horse or camel could get as far as the mountains, and another month after that before anything earthbound could cross them.

Ignoring his commands, and the blows they received from his ladle, V.’s Saardu’s bodyguards picked up the table he stood on and carried it toward the gate. One was felled by an arrow; a townsman took his place. Two others were cut down by a squad of Pale who had pushed ahead of their comrades; again, people stepped in and lent their shoulders. Like a magician standing on a river, or an actor leaving a stage, V.’s Saardu was borne south onto Jalkelainen’s main street.

There, if legend is to be believed, he was met by the two watchmen who had first seen the Pale arrive. Armored, with swords in hand, they had been mistaken for Pale by several in the crowd until they discarded their helmets. “My lord, what shall we?” the first cried.

“Draw out this arrow from my foot,” the mayor commanded. The two watchmen pushed the townspeople aside and did as they were commanded.

“Now give me your blade,” V.’s Saardu said. When one of them handed him his sword, the mayor cut his palm, crying, “This I swear by my blood, that I will not from here ‘til these are vanquished.”

A sudden gust of wind swept through the crowd—the blood oath had taken. That same gust blew a Pale arrow from its path so that it fetched home in V.’s Saardu’s neck. He fell to the ground, instantly dead. A few moments later, when the Pale drove the last of the crowd away from the table on which the mayor had been standing, they found his ghost standing there, arms crossed, defying them to pass.

It would be six hundred years before that ghost was finally laid to rest.

The same events played out elsewhere in Ruuda that Yearagain Eve with only minor variations. Jalkelainan was both the smallest of the major northern city-states, and the furthest west, so the Pale Remainder only sent nine ships against it. Pohjoinen was attacked by fifteen, Ruuda-in-Ruuda by either twenty-eight or thirty⁶, and at Etela—only a fraction larger than Jalkelainan, but close to the border with Uws—forty-one ships brought almost two thousand unalive invaders ashore.

Everywhere they landed, the Pale followed the same strategy: secure the harbor and major potential rallying points, then drive a substantial portion of the local population into the midwinter snow. It was brutally effective; while the true death toll will never be known, at least a quarter of Ruuda’s population were dead by Peridot of 478. The remainder were scattered, disorganized, hungry, and leaderless.

Word of the invasion reached Uws within days. As usual, the hero was sunk in melancholy in his winter palace in Vnir. When a courtier approached him to say that a Gifted eagle had arrived with urgent news, Uws reputedly asked him, “It it new, or just news?” Thinking that the eagle’s report was exaggerated, and that in fact Etela had been attacked by a well-organized band of pirates, the courtier apologized for intruding and left his king to brood.

It wasn’t until Chrysoprase, nearly two months after the invasion, that Uws roused himself. Donning his seven-gallop boots, he strode across the Sibor Plain toward Etela, shaking the earth with every step.

A trio of Pale magicians met him near a small stone fort just north of the border.⁷ Shrouded for protection against the sun, they could easily have been mistaken for crows, or for the shadows of things not present. They presented Uws with a gold ring, a ram, and an unstrung fiddle—the same three gifts that the mayor of Etela had sent south as a token of peace every year for the past two decades.

Uws thanked them for their gifts, and asked after his “friends” in the north. “They are well, or not,” one of the Pale replied.

“And if I were concerned to know which?” Uws inquired.

“Then we would counsel you not to concern yourself.” With that, the Pale magicians bowed and vanished, leaving the hero with a scrap of brass, a musty tag-end of wool, and a broken stick in his hands.

Uws returned to Vnir that evening. Coronel Szarkos ard Niczolu recorded in his journal that, “[Uws] shows such joy as chokes the court with terror.” Having served under him for several generations, the nobility in Vnir knew that only thing could make their ruler so happy: the prospect of battle. Blocked in the south by the dragon, and to the west by two mountain ranges and the Herd of Trees, Uws would probably have found a way to break his oath of peace with the Ruudians eventually. By invading, the Pale Remainder had save him the trouble.

Despite being a hero, Uws was no rash fool. He spent the spring of 478 gathering, equipping, and training his army. At the same time, refugees from Etela and elsewhere were collected at the border; those who knew something useful were taken to Vnir for interrogation, while the rest were sold into slavery or driven south toward Praczedt.

As poets later wrote, each new revelation lengthened the odds, and brightened the smile on Uws’s face. Ruuda had been invaded by roughly five thousand well-organized unalives, who had taken control of its major urban centers, and were quickly strengthening their grip on the surrounding countryside. Resistance was fierce, but uncoordinated: one by one, smaller towns and villages were taken, and their counts and colonels either harvested or driven off. Many starved, unable to find food in the end-of-winter cold. Others banded together and counter-attacked, only to be cut down. A few led their families and retainers into the Heladas, or fled west around Cape Grind and the Herd of Trees to seek refuge in Derway and Bruyere.

The sudden appearance of so formidable a foe on his doorstep snapped Uws out of his decades-long stupor. The portraits of his wife and children that covered the palace walls were not taken down, but for the first time since he slew them in a murderous rage, Uws paid more attention to the present than to the past. New generals were appointed; those who could not keep up with their lord’s pace were quickly replaced. An embassy was sent to Darp to buy horses, taking with it a substantial portion of the royal treasury. Another made its way down the coast to Timorcze (then the principal city of northern Praczedt) to tell its duke that Uws’s preparations were not directed at him. We have no record of how the duke reacted to this unlooked-for reassurance, though the presence of several regiments of Praczny archers in the Uwsian army during the subsequent war⁸ may signal that for once, Praczedt’s rulers were able to put aside their interminable squabbles in the face of an external threat.

The first blow in the struggle to reclaim Ruuda was not struck by Uws, however. That honor fell to a sea captain from Pohjoinen named Loyhkata’s Uurvo, known to history as Uurvo the Foul for her love of “ripened” squid.⁹ Uurvo had beached and buried her double-masted laiva at a fishing encampment some forty gallops northeast of Pohjoinen at the start of winter in order to conduct repairs. Under normal circumstances, she and her crew would have carved new planks and beams for their ship during the winter months, then refloated her in the spring.

When the first handful of refugees arrived with word that Pohjoinen had been taken by monsters, the villagers told them to move along. They only had stores laid in for so many people; more mouths would have meant hunger or starvation. As the trickle grew to a torrent, though, Uurvo took charge. The laiva was dug out of its nest in the sand and refloated in the ice-clogged harbor. As her crew worked round the clock to refit her, small boats were sent east and west along the coast to gather food and intelligence. The local whales were enlisted as well: in exchange for a ten-year increase of a tenth share of the catch, they drove school after school of winter cod into the villagers’ nets. Some refugees undoubtedly did starve, or succumb to malnutrition or despair, but many survived.

By the middle of Heliodor, four months after the invasion, Uurvo was ready. She had a rough idea of how the Pale Remainder’s magic worked; she would also have known how vulnerable the Pale were to sunlight. She therefore settled on the same tactic that the Pale’s enemies would use for the next six centuries: sneak in as close as possible without being detected, find a small group of Pale, and attack just after dawn on a cloudless day.

At first, their attack seemed to be a small but unqualified success. With two Gifted seagulls as lookouts, Uurvo threaded her laiva through the jumble of forested islands off Ruuda’s northern coast to a point some twenty gallops from Pohjoinen. There, she split her crew into three troops: one to stay aboard, a second to draw the Pale in, and a third, the largest, to fall upon them.

They did not have long to wait. That very evening, one of their seagulls reported a Pale patrol moving toward them along the coast road. Songs and poems still record the disgust the Ruudians felt when she learned that a handful of alives were riding with the three Pale.¹⁰ Some were convicts who had been given a reprieve, but others were military gens who had no trouble accepting the change of power. In Ruuda, as elsewhere, the millenium-long civil war among the Uncertain Angels had instilled a convenient degree of moral flexibility in their human chattel; the rigid nationalism so characteristic of modern Ruudians had not yet arisen.

The Pale found shelter in a farmhouse just before dawn, setting their human servants on guard. As the sun cleared the tops of the nearby pine trees, the first group of Uurvo’s raiders fell upon them, slaying two or three and then retreating into the forest. That was the signal for the second, larger group to attack. The farmhouse and its outbuildings were set on fire; when the Pale emerged, they were cut down and stripped naked. Stolen skin and muscle fell off their bones in the sunlight like dry mud off a boot.

The Pale’s alive servants were treated less kindly. Setting a pattern for centuries to come, Uurvo’s crew hacked them to pieces, making sure to put the major muscles and organs beyond use. No unequivocal record survives, but it is likely that in at least some cases, this was begun while the victim was still alive. The struggle against the Pale Remainder was already beginning to harden the Ruudian soul.

The Ruudians returned to their ship in high spirits. Their enemy seemed much less formidable than they had feared: true, they had lost five of their own number, but that seemed a small price for three of the invaders.

But then the sun set, and the moon rose, and Uurvo’s crew discovered that Ruuda would not be won back that easily. An unnamed member of Uurvo’s crew told the villagers what happened next¹¹:

Ae the moon its blue light fell upon them, all thay had lain metal upon the foulers were siezed upon ba the unruly ghosts of them as thar slain and driven to tae up thay its metal again each the other. All thay cunning bloody to venge the foulers sauf uns cut thay down uns own, and nar stand bot a few.

Whatever magic held the Pale Remainder together acted after their death on whoever slew them. Once exposed to moonlight, anyone who believed ge had struck a death blow against one of the Pale was driven to kill those around gar. Unlike the spell known as Orran’s Last Laugh, though, those afflicted were not driven into a murderous berserker rage. Instead, the spells’ victims remained completely capable of planning and dissimulation.

Two thirds or more of the men and women aboard Uurvo’s laiva had been at the farmhouse. They quickly overwhelmed the rest of the crew, then turned the ship toward the village where it had been wintering. Uurvo herself was probably among the slain: in keeping with a tradition going back to Angelic times, she would have stayed with the ship while her gens were on shore. During the centuries that followed, leaders of rebellions against the Pale made several attempts to ask her spirit for advice or a blessing, but none succeeded. We will never know what she thought when her crew turned on her; we can only hope she felt it was worth it.

Dawn came, and with it, shock and bewilderment. The Pale Remainder’s vengeance spell held no sway in daylight: all the crew knew was that many of them were wounded, and that twenty or more of their number were missing. The two Gifted gulls who had been guiding them were gone too, frightened off (though the survivors could not know this) by the carnage they had seen on board.

Sensibly, but erroneously, the Ruudians assumed that the Pale had somehow found them. They laid on as much sail as they dared in the windswept northern spring and raced back to their village. There, they find that half a dozen more ships had arrived in their absence. They disembarked and gave their version of events, warning the assembled alives that someone or something was still pursuing them.

An hour later, with the sun down and the moon up, they were dead, and the village was in flames. The thousand or so Ruudians left alive by the tragedy boarded whatever was still seaworthy and fled west, taking with them the bitter knowledge that the fight to reclaim Ruuda would be longer and harder than anyone had imagined.

Word of Uurvo’s attack would not reach Uws until the following year. Even if he had heard the story earlier, the events of that summer might well have played out as they did. Confident and re-energized, the hero was pressing ahead with his plans almost recklesslly. Uws’s strategy was driven by food and mud: he could not move his troops away from their dwindling stores until the spring potato crop was harvested in early Topaz, and there was little point trying while the spring rains were turning the roads north into shallow muddy rivers.

As the moon lightened toward its mid-summer gold, his troops drilled endlessly under the unforgiving eyes of Uws’s trusted lieutenants. Like the whirlwind he had wrestled with in his youth, Uws himself travelled from one side of his domain to the other, sometimes covering two hundred gallops in a day in order to oversee details of drill and provisioning. Many of the nobility who had risen to positions of power in the long years since his family’s death were retired, and younger gens promoted into their places. Boots, arrowheads, canvas—everything was counted and checked.

On the nineteenth of Topaz, YS 478, Uws left Vnir at the head of a force of some 15,000 gens. Mounted on a pure white camel, surrounded by a ten-strong bodyguard of giants, and equipped with the boots, ax, and mask that were the source of his power, he must have looked like a force of nature.

He gathered the rest of his troops on his way north, along with two dozen heavy ballistae he had ordered be constructed. By the time he reached the Kravriye River, his army had swollen to 25,000. As was usual for the time, he divided them into a mounted vanguard, three columns (the central of which he led himself), and a rearguard, which also contained the artillery and engineers. Advance troops had already scouted and prepared campsites, so the whole force was able to cover 20 gallops or more each day.

Uws did not expect to surprise his opponents. The only way to move that many men north was on the Great Northern Road, a legacy of Angelic times that was only just beginning to show signs of wear after nearly five centuries without maintenance. Forty strides wide, with waist-high conical stone markers every hundred and twenty strides, it paid only condescending attention to the shape of the land.

Forty gallops past the Kravriye, near a hamlet called Leikikalu, the Great Northern Road passed through a broad ‘V’ that had been cut out of a hill. The Pale Remainder attacked his vanguard there just after dark on the second of Carnelian. Casualties were light: the Pale managed to conceal themselves from the Uwsian magicians, and were able to pin their opponents against a dense stand of forest, but did not have time to press home their advantage before the approaching dawn forced them to withdraw.

Fearful of a larger trap, Uws ordered the vanguard to wait for the main body of the army to catch up before advancing. It was late afternoon when the first column reached them, and nearly dark when the central column—Uws’s own—arrived. With night fast approaching, Uws ordered the army to make camp, and posted sentries. He then invited several officers from the vanguard to his tent to discuss the previous night’s battle.

Coronel Szarkos’s granddaughter Martta transcribed her father’s account of what happened next:¹²

The Old Bear (note: Uws) called for cider and sweets, and plied the gens with questions about the damned’s (note: Pale Remainder’s) tactics and valor. When the stewards pulled aside the tent flap to bring in what had been ordered, moonlight fell upon three of the cavalrymen, who on the instant began to complain that the air was close. The Old Bear ordered the all outside, at when the whole party who had been in the vanguard put hands to whatever weapons they could and threw themselves at him and us with no heed for their own lives.

It was a repeat of what had happened to Uurvo’s crew. Of the three hundred gens in the vanguard, perhaps a quarter had struck one of the Pale to the bone and survived. Throughout the camp, those seventy-odd gens calmly or madly went about the chore of killing as many of their fellow soldiers as they could. Cries of “Treason!” filled the air; men who were untouched by the curse attacked one another, each fearing the other’s drawn sword. It was Orran’s Last Laugh writ large.

As the camp descended into chaos, the Pale attacked, firing the tents on three sides of the perimeter to drive the Uwsians east toward boggy ground. Once again, they attacked in lines; any Pale who fell was dragged to safety by those in the rear line to be patched up with blood and muscle harvested from Uwsian casualties.

The army’s other two columns had camped a gallop or so ahead and behind Uws’s. Reinforcements from those two camps began arriving within minutes of the start of the battle. In response, the Pale Remainder’s lines bent in on themselves to form squares, which fought their way clear of the Uwsian troops before breaking into the tireless jog-trot that allowed the Pale infantry to cover ground like seasoned cavalry. They carried as many of their truly-dead with them as they could for later resurrection.

By itself, the attack would not have been enough to check Uws’s advance. While the effect on morale of him losing a battle—even a small one—for the first time in over a century cannot be underestimated, his physical losses were actually relatively small.

The real damage only sunk in slowly. A squad of Pale had penetrated all the way to the heart of Uws’s camp. Their bodies lay on the ground near his tent, each head neatly severed by Uws’s magic ax. He had slain Pale: what would happen to him the next time moonlight fell on him?

“We’ll know when we know,” was his famous answer. As dawn approached, he ordered his gens to resume their advance. He himself moved to the first column to march beside his troops in a plain brown leather cuirass. Laughing and joking, he must have seemed his twenty-year-old self once again. We can only guess whether his jokes became forced as the shadows began lengthening around him.

When the army made camp, Uws commanded Coronel Szarkos to shackle him wrist-and-ankle. His giant bodyguards formed a ring around him, each holding a club padded with layers of canvas and blankets. Darkness fell; the whole camp held its breath.

Uws suddenly began laughing. Telling his followers that his mask or ax must have protected him from the curse, he ordered them to unchain him.¹³ He then sauntered back to his tent, picked up his ax, and fell upon his men.

Over the next twelve hours, Uws killed or wounded almost two thousand of his own soldiers. Most fled; those who tried to fight back were restrained or beaten back by their comrades, many of whom were slain by Uws in reward. Once again, troops from the other camps came running at the sound of battle. This time, however, there was nothing they could do: Uws’s Angelic weapons made him both lethal and untouchable.

The next five days were a living nightmare for the king and his gens. Each day was a forced march for the border; each night, the Pale Remainder fell on them like hawks on a tide of lemmings. There was nothing Uws could do but weep each time the sun crept toward the horizon, and his giant bodyguards re-attached his manacles. So proud of being “just another soldier”, he was now a danger to his own beloved army.

As Uwsian losses mounted, Coronel Hradcy ard Eszten volunteered to lead a counter-attack early on the second day of the retreat (6 Carnelian 478). The Gifted birds who were serving as scouts had reported that the Pale were taking refuge from the sunlight in heavy canvas tents. Even if they couldn’t be slain, Hradcy reasoned, destroying their shelter might force them to abandon their pursuit. He was probably also mindful of how desperate his gens were for a victory—any victory—and of how vulnerable the Pale’s human aides would be without their unalive masters to protect them.

The Pale’s camp formed a broad arc along the edge of a pine forest. It would have been a suicidal position for a living army, but it made perfect sense for the unalives, as it gave them shadows to retreat into if attacked during the day. Their alive servants were positioned more conventionally in a single large camp laid out on the classic “square and tee” pattern[^square-and-tree] at the northern end of the arc. Coronel Hradcy therefore concentrated his attack at the southern end, ordering his cavalry to fire as many tents as they could as his infantry and magicians used swords and spells on anything that moved.

Casualties in the Battle of the Shadowy Forest were probably actually rather light on both sides: Hradcy’s gens were afraid to penetrate too deeply into the forest, while the Pale Remainder were unable to venture out of it. Its most important effect came that afternoon, when the Uwsians reconnected with their main force. After presenting his report, Coronel Hradcy drew his sword and offered it to the king. When asked why, he said, “Because if you do not slay me while ‘tis day, my lord, I stand at risk of being traitor when ‘tis night.” Despite their attempts to burn the Pale Remainder in their tents, and avoid them otherwise, Hradcy and several of his gens had actually slain two directly.¹⁵

Understandably, Uws refused, but the coronel was unrelenting. As far as he was concerned, he had fallen in battle; the fact that he was still walking and breathing was an irrelevance. If Uws would not kill him and his men, they would have to kill one another, and Uws would still be left with the task of finishing off the last one¹⁶. And there wasn’t time for debate: the eastern horizon was already bruised.

Heavy-hearted, Uws embraced the gens one by one, swearing by his blood that they would be remembered as heroes, and that their families would be taken care of. They then knelt in a line on the cold, wet ground. Taking up his ax, Uws swung it seven times, then let it fall. Wordlessly, his giant bodyguards carried the bodies away to be immolated on heroes’ pyres as their king lay down in his tent to be chained hand and foot once more.

The army that crossed the Kravriye on 15 Carnelian was a tattered shadow of its former self. Of the 25,000 gens who had followed Uws north at the end of Topaz, at least five thousand were dead—two thousand of them at their king’s hand. A roughly equal number had slipped away during the retreat, less afraid of trolls, cave lions, or the Pale Remainder than they were of their moon-maddened king.

Word of the disaster reached Vnir long before the army. Szarkos ard Martta later wrote that her grandfather had assumed effective control on the journey, and that when Uws paid attention to his followers’ questions and pleas at all, he simply told them to ask the coronel what to do. Allowing no one near him but his much-loved giants, Uws locked himself in his chambers, alternately berating those who dared disturb him, and pleading with them tearfully to forgive him. It was a repeat of the events of a half-century previously, but this time Uws’s magicians were unable to find a way to break the curse.

Uws disappeared on Yearagain Eve, YS 480/481, along with his mask, ax, and boots. There are those who claim he is still alive somewhere in the Herd of Trees, foraging by day, chaining himself by night with locks that even he cannot pick or break before the sun rises. As far as history is concerned, though, he no longer mattered. Like the Angels whose magic had given him his superhuman strength, the Old Bear had finally fallen, and taken with him the only chance the living had of quickly defeating the Pale Remainder.

The next six centuries were no harder for Ruuda than they were for many other parts of Cherne, but it is not polite to say that within earshot of Ruudians. While kingdoms and empires rose and fell elsewhere, the Pale Remainder’s grip on the land north of the Helada Mountains was as strong as steel and as cold as ice. Accustomed as they were to heroes with Angelic powers, the gens of the time simply had no conception that “mere mundanes” could defeat a magical foe.

Many scholars have overlooked this last point, failing to recognize¹⁷ how differently gens viewed the world at the end of the Age of Heroes. For countless thousands of years, humanity and the Gifted lived every day in the shadow of the Uncertain Angels, whose intellect and power no mortal being could possibly match. Those who siezed control after the Angels’ fall—Janbinder the Great, Uws, the Brass Admiral, and others history would rather forget—may have been born mundane, but used leftovers from Angelic times to transform themselves into something greater. Simply put, the Ruudians of the 400s had been trained for hundreds of generations to believe that it was their destiny to be governed by creatures other, and more powerful, than themselves. The fatalism with which they initially accepted Pale rule should therefore be neither surprising, nor criticized.

The form that unalive rule would take was clearly heralded in the second year of the Pale Remainder’s reign. In the spring of 479, the Pale ordered isolated landholders to abandon their farms and move to larger towns and villages. A policy of communal responsibility was strictly enforced: each gen owed duty to a “gathering” defined by the Pale, rather than to gar family or lord-commander. Those who dragged their heels saw their homes and possessions burned; those who resisted were harvested.

At midsummer, the Pale harvested again: anyone too infirm to work in the fields, or accused of malingering by gar gathering-mates, was forced to “volunteer” a filch of blood (enough to fatally weaken a young child). There was scattered resistance, but the shock of the previous year’s conquest had not yet worn off, and the refugees who had fled around Cape Grind to Derway, or south to Uws and Praczedt, were as yet unable to offer any assistance.

The Pale harvested again in the autumn, after the crops were in. As at midsummer, bands of half a dozen to twenty rode from village to village at night, taking shelter in houses whose windows had been securely sealed during the day. Each stop saw the same sequence of events: a careful examination of each gathering’s roll book,¹⁸ followed by interrogation of a few selected individuals, and then, as the moon rose, the harvest itself. Blood was mixed with tincture of olymanden and stored in sealed glass jars; skin, muscles, and organs were grafted to the Pale who needed them right then and there.

Hungry, dispirited, and forbidden to travel for any except the most pressing of reasons, an entire generation of Ruudians sunk into a stupor that even the poorest Thindi doi would have scorned. Comparing pre-invasion tax rolls to the surviving Pale roll books shows that population decreased by a third in most areas, and more than half in some. The countryside around Jalkelainan was particularly hard-hit: its shorter growing season and colder winters meant that the loss of too many able bodies could doom an entire community to starvation.

Despite the harsh conditions, gens did find ways to communicate. Gifted animals and birds carried messages from one town to the next, as did tinkers and other itinerant tradegens; the alives who served the Pale as outriders could sometimes be bribed or shamed into passing word along; and magicians sometimes managed to send dreams to one another.

The most famous surreptitious channel, though, was that used by Suirenami’s Iervo, a feller whose pine orchard stood beside the Kalastava thirty gallops above Jalkelainen. He devised a way to remove strips of bark from trees, paste a waxed envelope containing a message to the wood, and refit the bark so that only the closest of inspections would reveal it had been tampered with. The first recipient was his lover, a furniture maker in Jalkelainen itself, but the technique quickly spread, carrying with it the hope that the Ruudians could free themselves.

The First Rebellion (YS 507) was a poorly organized fiasco. Inspired by stories of what life had been before the invasion, apprentices in Ruuda-in-Ruuda and Pohjoinen turned their adzes and saws on whatever Pale “pets” came to hand, rather than on the Pale themselves. The support they had been promised by the Regency Council in Uws¹⁹ never materialized; the “fleet” promised by the refugees who had settled in Derway got as far as Cape Grind before being beaten back by storms.

The First Rebellion marks the earliest recorded appearance of the æmott who would play such a large part in the subsequent history of Ruuda. The word is a contraction of æn am otta, or “one for another”. Inspired by the story of the Uwsian Coronel Hradcy, each æmott swore to turn gar weapons on geself after killing as many of the Pale as they could. With swordplay, archery, and other martial arts forbidden under pain of the offender’s entire gathering being harvested, the æmott demanded complete secrecy: they wore masks in meetings, used handsign instead of speaking to conceal their voices, and concentrated on mastering weapons that were easily concealed. After the collapse of the First Rebellion, they abandoned any hope of a mass rising. Instead, each æmott was to sieze whatever opportunities came gar way, in the hope of eventually whittling the Pale Remainder down to a defeatable size.

As distant as it seemed, that hope was the only one the Ruudians had. By the time the First Rebellion ended, the Pale Remainder’s strategic weakness had become clear: they were unable to create more of themselves. Each time a Pale’s bones were burned, the ranks of those who husbanded Ruuda’s people like the Darpani husbanded cattle were reduced by one. In the words attributed to S.’s Iervo²⁰:

It is therefore a simple race: shall we reduce their numbers sufficiently to make possible victory before we forget what it is to live without their yokes on our backs and their knives at our throats?

Five hundred years is a long time, even for creatures who cannot die. Through conquest, alliance, and appeals to past greatness, the Szarkosy family extended its control of the Sibor Plain outward from the royal palace in Vnir until all of Uws’s former territory was reunified under their rule in YS 713. Further south, Praczedt suffered an interminable plague of monsters, as one abomination after another crawled out of Hrstil Canyon to lay waste to whatever had not been burned, eaten, or cursed by its predecessors. And on Cherne’s west coast, from Cape Grind south to the Cansado Mountains, the Regimental Kingdoms slowly coalesced in the “New Territories” settled in the Angels’ last days by Ealx and Heot’s followers.

Thousands of refugees from the Pale invasion settled in the northernmost of these kingdoms: Bruyere, Ensworth, and especially Derway. Regimental and Ruudian families often lived side by side, but there seems to have been little intermarriage; as the saying goes, the two communities “sang different songs”. While the Regimentals were hewing new homes and farms out of the vast forests that still blanketed the western seaboard, the Ruudians look north and east to the land that had been stolen from them. Periodically, a fashion for decorative scarring or self-mutilation “for sake of remembrance” swept through the exiles. More frequently, young gens snuck into Ruuda in small boats, made the hazardous trek through the mountains, or disguised themselves as tinkers, traders, or trappers to see for themselves what life was like under the Pale’s rule.

Like other regions of Cherne in this time, Ruuda only had significant contact with its immediate neighbors. The dragon Sulk destroyed ships that came anywhere near her nest on Sullair Minor, which effectively closed the Gulf of Szigorú and the Inner Yr to navigation. In the southwest, the Pesa Sadilla seems to have been much larger than it is today: accounts of the time speak of people as far north as the Cansado Mountains, and well out to sea, losing their reason. And overland, the Hett who infested Avaunt were too obsessed with their dark magics and unnatural machineries to allow the Flying Mountain to be used as “Cherne’s biggest camel”. As a result, the lands north and south of the Great Plains were effectively cut off from one another, and spent most of the Age of the Same turning each other into legend.

To the continued disappointment of Ruudians both at home and in the diaspora, the rest of Cherne therefore regarded Ruuda’s plight as a local matter. The coronels of northern Uws began exchanging embassies with the Pale Remainder as early as YS 500; by YS 540, Pale emissaries were being courted by all sides in Thind’s interminable dynastic struggles.

The Second and Third Rebellions (YS 786 and 855) had little impact on these realities. Both were initiated by hotheads in the Ruudian diaspora; neither had significant support among “native” Ruudians (although those few who joined in are still remembered in local songs and legends for their courage and folly); and neither had any lasting impact on day-to-day life.

What did have an impact in those years was the æmott. Once a year, more or less, a quiet fanatic—often someone who had waited years for the right opportunity—managed to bring down one of the Pale Remainder. The resulting reprisals were always horrific, but by the late 800s, the realities of the occupation were clear to all. In the long run, the Pale Remainder could only lose.

If it is impolite to say that the Age of the Same was no harder on Ruuda than it was on many other parts of Cherne, it is simply dangerous to point out that the arts flourished under Pale rule—so much so that scholars in Thind, Araña, and elsewhere sometimes speak of a “golden age”. The Major Triad—calligraphy, conversation, and bas-relief sculpture—were refined by Pale masters like Chezen Ortopalti, Yuwen Cmo Alptni, and the “Moonlight School” of Pohjoinen. Ortopalti in particular broke new ground: his widely-imitated Hands Reaching Out of the Plain was the first sculpture to incorporate incised calligraphy, while his “bronze dreams” (a series of small pieces done between YS 750 and 850) suggest calligraphic characters that seem to somehow hover in the instant that precedes recognition.

The Pale Remainder did not generally pursue the Minor Triad—law, architecture, and mathematics—but when they did innovate, others took notice. The Pale’s decision in YS 504 to reinstate the biennial examinations used by the Uncertain Angels to select their human servants was copied within a decade by the Empire of Thind (where they had earlier been abolished by Janbinder the Great). Similarly, when the Szarkosy dynasty’s Uniform Regulations of YS 738-40 granted citizenship to Gifted animals who had given at least eight years of military service, they were directly imitating the Pale Remainder’s proclamation of YS 620.

These examples, and others, inspired the Learned Jizelle uy-Armaq’s argument that other nations’ imitation of the Pale Remainder reflects the era’s yearning for a return to the certainties of Angelic rule. To quote a representative passage:²¹

The chaos of the Age of Heroes produced a yearning among all the peoples of Cherne for the comfortable certainties of Angelic rule. Those who felt this yearning were unaware of its strength, as our mouths are unaware of the taste of water, but in the Pale Remainder—almost immortal, almost invulnerable, and able almost effortlessly to release their subjects from the unaccustomed burden of self-direction—the small child that hides within each of us found the image of an “adult” in whom to put its trust.

Were we to adopt the Ld. Jizelle’s standards of reasoning, though, we could equally well argue that her school’s preoccupation with the effects of Pale rule on political developments in other regions of Cherne is an “unaware” attempt to avoid the fact that we know almost nothing about Pale politics itself. The chronicles of the time refer to Bokchang Tzen Urpatnati as the “king” of the Pale Remainder, but their exact organization remains a mystery. While Ruudians referred to the Pale conclaves in the major cities as “Midnight Courts”, we still do not know whether these were social gatherings, a forum for debate, or attempts to find spells able to create more of their kind. We do know, from the careful records kept by the æmott, that some of the Pale who went into these “courts” never came out, but the same can be said of inns, bath houses, and universities.

Then came the catastrophe of YS 966. Over the course of ten weeks (17-18 Peridot to 26 Citrine, with minor aftershocks reported as late as Amethyst), four great caverns beneath the lands of the western coast collapsed, drowning Plangent and half of Fourette. The shocks shook the whole of Cherne, rekindling the fires of Mount Narjemczy and causing sympathetic cave-ins as far away as Barra Bantang. Half a million gens drowned as sea levels dropped a double handspan, disturbing the migratory patterns of fish, birds, clouds, and other creatures for decades. The devastation in the World Below may have been even worse; we will never know.

In Ruuda, the land beneath the upper reaches of the Saarumeva River gave way on Malachite 19 and 20. The steel and brass mines beneath its headwaters were cut off from the outside world, and in them, the æmott finally made their move. There, safe from the sun’s light, the Pale Remainder should have been undefeatable, but the miners and slaves who rose against were able to triumph against the odds. They had practiced and prepared for such a day for over a hundred years; life and death were as one to them; and they had a new weapon: dayglass so pure that its stored light could dissolve the spells that held the Pale Remainder together. There were no more than a dozen pieces of the precious material in the whole of Ruuda at the time, but that was enough: at a cost of hundreds to one, the æmott were able to clear the mines and proclaim an independent Ruuda once again.

It took the Pale Remainder three years to crush the Fourth Rebellion. By the time they were done, a fifth of Ruuda’s population had been slain, or had died in the forced famines inflicted on suspect regions. The Saarumeva mines were never completely cleared; the harder the Pale and their human followers pushed, the deeper the rebels retreated. On at least two occasions, Pale war parties surfaced to find that they had passed completely beneath the Heladas and into the Herd of Trees, some hundred and fifty gallops from their starting point.

The Ruudians in the Regimental Kingdoms were elated. Now making up almost half the population of Derway, they pressured its marshal-king into assembling a fleet to attack Jalkelainen in the spring of YS 967. Troops landed five gallops from the harbor, and pressed forward to lay siege to the city, but were beaten back and forced to retreat.

While the Pale Remainder had tolerated nuisance sorties from the Regimental Kingdoms, an invasion of this magnitude demanded a response. It was not long in coming: with the Rebellion reduced to embers by the winter of 970-71, the Pale mounted a two-pronged attack of their own. In Sapphire 971, a fleet of some fifty ships made its way north around Cape Grind, sailing far out to sea so as to avoid any magical, mundae, or Gifted patrols the Derwers might have mounted. As they swung back in toward the shore, thirty of those ships made for Connomenaer, Derway’s “second city”, which they burned to the ground. The rest swept through the islands that dotted Derway’s northern coast, destroying every small fishing village they could find.

The marshal-king of Derway, Lyam the Occasional, hastily negotiated a peace. It was no time to be weakened by a foreign war: his southern neighbors had quickly gobbled up what was left of Plangent, and were sniffing at the broken remains of Fourette. The Ruudians in the Parledoux who had pushed for the invasion were exiled or beheaded, and the situation apparently returned to the status quo ante.

But beneath the surface, everything had changed. The Pale Remainder could be beaten by mundane means; Ruudians did not have to wait for a “new age of heroes” to win their freedom. The question was no longer “if”, but “when”, “how”, and “by whom”.

For many gens, the last of these was crucial, as three different factions were vied to take charge of the next uprising. The first was the diaspora in the Regimental Kingdoms, which was still, despite Marshal-King Lyam’s purge, numerous and influential. While still ethnically Ruudian, they had adopted much of the lifestyle of their host nations over the centuries; the language they spoke was at best a cousin to that spoken in central and eastern Ruuda, and many had adopted Regimental naming, marriage, and funeral practices as well.

On the other edge of the rainbow were the æmott. After centuries of struggle in which every victory meant the death of the victor at the hands of gar most trusted companions, “their” war had become deeply spiritual. Æmott families were effectively a second culture within Ruuda; in camps called paetakyla²², hidden in the Helada Mountains or on the fringes of the Herd of Trees, the æmott gathered every dawn to welcome the sun’s return, thanking it for being their one true ally in the struggle against their unalive oppressors. Unsophisticated, often unlettered, the æmott felt contempt for the “softness” of the diasporan Ruudians, who in turn made jokes about the crudeness of their cousins (in part, no doubt, to conceal the fear that the æmott’s fanaticism inspired).

The third and final player on the Ruudian side of this complex game was the people of Cherne’s northeastern corner, between Ruuda proper and Uws. From the early 700s onward, a growing number of poets and noblegens had proclaimed that the region centered around Etela, which they called Vaarda, was not part of Ruuda at all. Quoting evidence both scholarly and spurious, they claimed that the Uncertain Angels who had resided in Etela had been enemies of those in Ruuda, and that the only reasons the world thought them Ruudian were that Uws hadn’t conquered them, but the Pale Remainder had. According to a “Declaration of Amity” that was circulating in Uws as early as YS 850, the goal of those seeking to overthrow the Pale should not be a united Ruuda, but rather a confederation of regional states on the Regimental model, each with one of the major cities (Jalkelainen, Ruuda-in-Ruuda, Pohjoinen, and Etela) as its capitol.

Opposition to this plan was one of the few things diasporan and æmott Ruudians agreed on. The idea of Ruuda free and whole was the only thing that united the former; in an era in which long-distance travel was as rare as giants’ hair, they simply didn’t understand that centuries of living next door to Uws had changed the “Vaardians” almost as much as living in the Regimental Kingdoms had changed them. As for the æmott, the idea that anyone but them could have any right to shape the future of a Pale-free Ruuda had become unthinkable.

Pale rule in Ruuda was also changed by the rebellion. The first sign of this was Bokchang Tzen Urpatnati’s institution of a spring inspection tour. Popularly referred to as a “king” or “general”, Urpatnati’s actual role among the Pale Remainder seems to have been more ambiguous. The records that survive, and can be read by mundane eyes, use terms like “eldest” and “first”, although it is not clear whether these are meant literally, or simply honorifics.

Urpatnati’s first tour in YS 972 was both a show of strength and a punishment. Accompanied by more than four hundred of his fellow Pale, he spent three months sailing from Muteletta (a small port near the Uwsian border that marked the southern extent of the Pale’s domain) to the fishing villages northwest of Jalkelainen. At each stop, the Pale’s living servants rounded up hundreds of their fellow Ruudians, sometimes riding inland over two hundred gallops, and bringing victims back by the cartload. There were no inspections, no attempt to separate the guilty from the innocent, just wholesale harvesting on a scale that dwarfed even the aftermath of the original invasion.

Heliodor 8th, 1091: the fleet arrived in Jalkelainen harbor an hour after sunset. After two decades of “graveyard peace”, the Pale were confident that only the embers of rebellion remained. The fleet, which had steadily shrunk from its 972 size, numbered a mere fourteen vessels: five of the dark ships in which the Pale had originally arrived, and nine newer vessels ranging in size from double-masted laiva to sturdy three-masted rahda capable of carrying 150 men, 50 horses, and a portable forge. Between them, the ships carried no more than 80 of the estimated 2800 Pale still left in Ruuda.

As was traditional, Jalkelainen’s Pale lady, Boknan Tzur Pelludidar, was waiting on the sea wall. As the fleet came into the harbor, a blinding ray of light stabbed downward from the lighthouse—the same lighthouse from which, according to legend, two watchmen had first seen the Pale fleet centuries before. Pelludidar didn’t even have time to scream: when the light struck her, the spells that held her stolen flesh together dissolved, and she simply fell apart.

The dozen or so Pale standing near her suffered the same fate. The rest fled, shouting for their servitors to bring them weapons as the light swept across the incoming ships and sent Pale after Pale to gar true death. The æmott had finally found the weapon they had been searching for, and the Fifth Rebellion had begun.

Even today, many commentators insist that the skenren lans must have some magical component. Some (such as the Popular Learning school around Yorye Guliao é Gauro) go so far as to excoriate the æmott for keeping the supposed “spell” secret, and spin dark webs of conspiracy in which some dark cabal, power-hungry or fanatical, wishes to ensure that Ruuda will always need them.

The truth is much more prosaic. Some time around YS 1000, an unknown craftsgen in Barra Bantang discovered that properly-shaped slivers of glass called “lenses” could bend light, much as it is bent as it passes between air and water. By YS 1040, there are records of double-lensed devices being used by ship captains to view distant objects. Within a decade, the secret of their manufacture had spread inland along caravan routes to the oasis states of the Karaband, and particularly to Ossisswe, where almost all of Cherne’s dayglass was and is mined.

The practice of “mirroring” dayglass (i.e., applying a thin coat of electrum or pewter to one side) in order to increase its brilliance was already known. Some time before 1090, someone combined a mirror piece of noon-grade dayglass with a series of lenses to produce the first skenren lans: a purely mundane device capable of shooting a beam of sunlight two hundred strides or more.

We may never know who built the first one, or how the æmott managed to smuggle them into Ruuda undetected—they do keep some secrets²³. What is beyond dispute is that at the start of Heliodor, YS 1091, there was at least one skenren lans in every major town and city in Ruuda.

Like a flood pouring across a field after a retaining dyke is breached, the sunlight of revolution swept over Ruuda in a matter of weeks. Dozens of æmott threw themselves at the disorganized Pale who fled from Jalkelainen harbor, killing them and then kneeling to be thanked and beheaded by their comrades. In Pohjoinen, a diasporan magician named Nastryla’s Villepartu traded his ability to eat and drink for a spell to shield a cart from fire, rot, and catastrophe; the æmott mounted their skenren lans on it and raced from battle to battle through the city’s main thoroughfares.

In Ruuda-in-Ruuda, meanwhile, the “Valiant Seamstress”, Unnegantha’s Polininya, deliberately allowed herself to be captured. Knowing that most of the city’s senior Pale would be certain to attend her trial, the æmott concealed their skenren lans inside a telescope mounted on a building some hundred strides from Flensing Square and told the local constabulary that they intended to sell views of Polininya being harvested. Thirty-one Pale died in the purified sunlight that swept across the square that night, chief among them the same Chemche Angbod Ulpatati who had harvested the rest of Polininya’s family a generation before. Miraculously, Polininya escaped, only to be cut down two months later when the Pale’s living loyalists retook the city (discussed below).

Events played out very differently in Ruuda’s fourth city, Etela. As described earlier, the æmott had never been as strong there, where they had to compete for loyalty with self-described Vaardians. On Heliodor 14th, a band of Vaardians stole the skenren lans that the æmott had smuggled into the city, hid it on a barge under a load of dried squid²⁴, and took it south to Turnajöki, a fortified port just twenty gallops north of the border with Uws. Turnajöki had already been cleared of Pale by the time the second skenren lans arrived; using the two together, the Vaardians cleared the land all the way to the border, where a startled Uwsian Capitan-Earl was the first outsider to hear of the founding of the independent Commonalty of Vaarda.

In contrast to its successes in Ruuda’s cities, the rebellion’s first wave was much less successful in the countryside. More than have of the Pale Remainder who were unalive in 1091 lived on rural estates called maatilaso. Each maatila was a self-sufficient unit, typically comprising a small farming village with a mill and forge built along a single-lane road that connected the local Pale’s mansion house to the rest of the world. Some were owned and ruled by a single reclusive Pale; others were home to up to a dozen, whose parties might last an entire season (and require the supporting village to be repopulated in their wake).

The Pale Remainder who chose to live in maatilaso had always been easier targets for the æmott than their urban counterparts. As a result, they had evolved a lifestyle that is frequently compared to the “genteel paranoia” of the Thindi aristocracy, and their dealings with their alive chattel were even more ruthless than their peers’. Paradoxically, the people who lived in maatilaso villages also tended to be more loyal than city dwellers, some going so far as to worship the Pale Remainder as “Angels come again”. This is hardly surprising when one considers that some of these villages had been virutally cut off from the rest of the world for several centuries, but it meant that those where the æmott had never gained a foothold viewed the rebellion as a betrayal of the natural order.

After beating back scattered individual attacks on their estates, the rural Pale rallied and counter-attacked. The Commonalty of Vaarda (at this time just five ridings around Turnajöki) managed to hold them off, in large part thanks to help from “volunteers” from northern Uws. The Barsadov clan ruled half of the kingdom at this point, and another fifth followed their blazon thanks to a carefully-crafted web of marriages and alliances. Coronel Barsadov ard Yuriy (posthumously Marshal-King Yuriy I) instantly saw the political coin to be minted by helping “liberate” Ruuda, and “allowed” some five thousand of his army to renege their oaths and go north to join the fight. A series of bruising battles, one fought just an hour’s ride from the ruined fort where Uws himself first encountered the Pale Remainder, temporarily secured the Vaardians’ gains.

Further north, things did not go so well for the living. Pohjoinen was besieged in mid-Chalcedony by an army containing four hundred Pale, and twenty times that number of their living followers. Day and night they dug tunnels and trenches in the rocky soil outside the city walls; at least once a week, the Pale fleet assaulted the harbor, hoping to provoke the city’s inhabitants into using their skenren lans long enough for the Pale’s magicians and artillery to get a fix on its location.

The Pale Remainder were not so patient with Ruuda-in-Ruuda. Their de facto capitol was twice the size of any other city north of Vnir; the symbolic cost of losing it was immense. After a rushed assault was beaten off on Carnelian 21-22, the Pale assembled an army twice the size of the one deployed against Pohjoinen, pulling troops away from Jalkelainen and other centers to the north to strengthen it. Their first attack on the first of Chalcedony captured the Trnemaia Bridge, the first crossing point on the Kypsyva River below the harbor. From there, the army was able mount a two-pronged attack from the south and west simultaneously. On the fourth, they breached the walls of the Old City; on the fifth, they destroyed the rebels’ skenren lans.

The massacres that followed were no doubt intended to terrorize the rest of Ruuda into submission. Strategically, however, it was a grave miscalculation. In the weeks that followed, Gifted birds and other witnesses spread word of the bloodbath throughout Uws and the Regimental Kingdoms. Popular opinion was roused as never before. Songs, plays, and popular rallies demanded that “the living must aid the living”; up and down the west coast, bewildered “Ruudians”, whose families had last seen Ruuda six centuries before, became overnight heroes. Young gens clamored to take up arms for the cause, and when Capitan-Earl Fraederiq iye Varçennes-Lligar announced in the Parledoux of Seyferte that he would “walk through the Herd of Trees barefoot if need be” to join the fight, the aging Marshal-King, Etienne III, took off his boots and handed them to the young capitan-earl himself. No one knew exactly what the gesture meant, but everyone agreed it was magnificent.

The winter of 1091-92 was one of the coldest ever recorded. The Ocean froze from the mouth of the Evacsza River in central Praczedt all the way to Fidditch on the west coast. A huge storm in the first week of Chrysoryl buried the besiegers of Pohjoinen in eight strides of snow. Alive and unalive alike were forced to retreat to whatever shelter they could find, but the rebellion did not stop. Necessity’s cramped quarters made the Pale Remainder for the æmott still lurking in their ranks, while bandits from the Helada Mountains, more accustomed than lowlanders to the harsh conditions, were able to raid isolated maatilaso almost at will.

The winter of 1091-92 was not just cold; it was also long. Pohjoinen harbor was still frozen solid at the end of Chrysoprase, fully a month after the ice would normally have started to break up. Incredibly, the city was still free, although it had suffered heavy losses: already low on supplies when winter set in, many of its people had succumbed to cold and starvation.²⁵ Their only consolation was that the same was happening to the Pale armies shivering on their doorstep.

Then, on the first of Peridot, 1092, something close to a miracle occurred. Unknown to all but a handful of æmott, a few survivors of the rising in the Saarumeva mines a century before had made lives for themselves in caverns far deeper than human beings normally dared to venture. Trading speech for darksight, they lived lives as simple as those of ungifted animals, dressing in woven snakeskin and only rarely venturing near the surface.

Some time during that winter, the æmott of Jalkelainen struck a deal with the Saarumevi. If the roads were blocked, and ships could not sail, then Jalkelainen’s army—all eighteen hundred of them—would travel underground.

The story of Dark March is too well known to be recounted here²⁶: cave-ins, vapors, toothed worms, flash floods, wingless bats, suspicious grandmothers, a seam of pure gold as thick as a man’s two legs, a mad hermit who may or may not have been Uws, or Uws’s son, or perhaps just someone who liked to hoot… Of the eighteen hundred who started, only twelve hundred survived. But when those twelve hundred came out of the ground half a gallop behind the Pale Remainder’s principal camp southeast of Pohjoinen early on that Peridot morning, they struck like a smith’s hammer. Almost a hundred Pale fell in their first assault, and ten times as many of their alive servants. Pohjoinen was saved, and with it, the Fifth Rebellion.

It took another eight years for Ruuda to free itself completely from unalive rule. For much of that time, it seemed that a “light and dark” solution would emerge: the Pale Remainder would continue to govern a much-shrunken domain centered around Ruuda-in-Ruuda, while Jalkelainen, Pohjoinen, and Etela would form a federation of city-states, much as they had six centuries before. Uws and the Regimental Kingdoms both favored this, as it would forestall the emergence of a new northern rival for power. Herkko’s Tuure, who appointed himself Last Defender of the Commonalty of Vaarda in 1094, also argued for “light and dark”, and not just because his Uwsian backers told him to. Publicly claiming it would give the Ruudians a chance to regroup for a final assault at some unspecified future date, he privately felt that a Pale buffer state between “his” Vaarda and the “fanatics” further north would be very useful.

Those fanatics—the æmott who now ruled Pohjoinen, Jalkelainen, and growing swathes of countryside—were in no mood for compromise. Most were uneducated, or even unlettered; few had any experience of governing. Faced with chaos, they improvised, often harshly; anyone they believed had collaborated with the Pale was imprisoned or executed, frequently without any chance to defend themselves. The Gifted, who had never been subjected to the red harvest, were treated especially harshly. No one knows how many cats, horses, bears, and other thinking creatures died during this period, but most of those who could run, fly, or swim to safety did so.

The worst incident in this period was the panic in 1095-96, when it was discovered that several Pale had managed to live in hiding in the cellars and caverns beneath Pohjoinen for three years. During that time, they had rebuilt themselves from harvested parts so cunningly that their assembly scars could be passed off as war wounds, and established identities for themselves in the city’s burgeoning criminal underworld to excuse their preference for midnight meetings and darkened rooms. Suddenly, the Ruudians’ hard-won freedom seemed a very fragile thing: any stranger in a tavern could be a Pale in disguise.

An æmott faction called Pure Light emerged from the purges that followed as the undisputed governors of Pohjoinen. They divided the city into maatilaso, each of which was subdivided into blocks and “families” (membership in which was defined haphazardly). Each unit was responsible for policing itself; lapses were punished collectively. “Greeting the sun” (i.e., rising at dawn to stand in the sunlight with one’s neighbors in order to prove oneself) became mandatory, and the use of informants became widespread.

The “light and dark” question came to a head in 1097, when H.’s Tuure announced that he was opening negotiations with the Pale. Two hours later he was dead, his body swollen to three times its natural size by the poison one of his chambermaids had painted on his favorite pen. Having spent several centuries refining the arts of patience and assassination, the æmott were not about to let anyone take “their” rebellion away from them.

A combined army of Ruudians, Vaardians, and Uwsians crossed the Kuumineva on the ninth of Heliodor, 1098. Two days later, a larger force of native and diasporan Ruudians—poorly equipped and barely trained, but passionately committed to victory—marched over the Hanging Bridge near the mouth of Saarumeva Gorge. Bypassing the remaining maatilaso, which were by this point heavily fortified, they drove relentlessly toward Ruuda-in-Ruuda. Underground patrols kept pace with them to ensure that the Pale Remainder did not turn the living’s own tricks against them, while a fleet of over two hundred vessels (many crewed by freebooters who had been promised a share of the spoils when Ruuda-in-Ruuda fell) sealed off a seaward escape.

After a series of fierce delaying engagements, the Pale Remainder retreated behind the city walls on Citrine 23. Their attackers settled in for a long siege. They knew that surrender was not an option for the Pale; they would keep fighting “…until they had stripped the last scrap of flesh from the last of their traitorous followers.”²⁷

On 20 Chalcedony, Boelwe’s Ulzen’s troop, the Mongrel Hundreds, breached the city’s Southeast Wall. Three days later a Thindi magician named Patchandouliander persuaded a tower in the Southwest Wall to shiver itself to pieces. On the first of Malachite the first case of scribbles was reported in the besieging army, but it held firm as gen after gen shook garself to death, gar body covered with the plague’s strange runes. Siege engines threw the rubble from the breached walls at the Pale’s last stronghold in the warehouse district next to the dock. It was only a matter of time.

On the last day of Malachite, the surviving Pale made a break for freedom. A fierce storm, obviously magical in origin, scattered the fleet guarding the harbor mouth. As the last of their living followers launched a suicidal attack against the Ruudian line in Cobblemaker Street, approximately two hundred Pale crowded onto their three remaining ships and set sail. The first ship was sunk by a lucky shot from an on-shore catapult;²⁸ the second was rammed, boarded, and sunk, taking five of the besiegers’ ships with it; but the third escaped into the storm.

It was over—or nearly. Victory would not be complete until the last maatilaso in the Powrm Valley fell in Chalcedony of 1100. Even then, a handful of die-hard æmott held that the living would not truly be safe until that last ship, the so-called Damned Dark Bird, was found.

Most Ruudians were too busy to care. Their country was in ruins. For the first time in six hundred years, they were masters of their own destinies. How should they govern themselves? Should they be one state, or two, or many? Should gens who had neither collaborated with the Pale, nor actively supported the living, be tried? If so, by whom, and under what rules? All the passion that had gone into overthrowing Pale rule was now thrown into these questions. As Querençennes-Cuenstans wrote in his memoirs:

To bid a gen “good morning” was to invite a disquisition on the relative merits of written and dramatic examinations. To ascertain whether the eels on one’s plate were fresh required that one clarify one’s position on what rights Wise Beasts [note: the Gifted] ought have in the new order of things. And to carry through a seduction, one needed nuanced constitutional proposals more than heart-plucking ballads.

Then, in 1103, word reached the north that the Damned Dark Bird had resurfaced. The Pale Remainder’s last ship had sailed halfway around the world to the Salt Coast—the most inhospitable territory in mainland Cherne. Its crew had wrested control of the diamond field known as Bell Prison from the Bantangui pirates who had controlled it, and reinstituted the red harvest. Living human beings were once more being taken apart to maintain the Pale’s unnatural existence.

It was intolerable. It was an insult to the memory of every Ruudian—nay, every Chernese, no matter what their nation—who had died in the struggle to rid the world of such abomination. Something had to be done—but what?

In Pohjoinen, a young bookster named Friida’s Ryutaanan thought she had an answer.

Well Tarred and Truly Masted

Friida’s Ryutaanan was born in Pohjoinen on Heliodor 8th, 1081, ten years to the day before the start of the Fifth Rebellion. That, at least, is what she later claimed; as her family perished during the rebellion, and most of the city’s records were burned during the siege, it is impossible to know for sure.

The first surviving mention of her is a despatch dated Tourmaline 1091, which commends a message runner named “F’s R” for her courage. In her autobiography²⁹, Ryutaanan matter-of-factly recollected the incident:

I was gathering window moss with Haldi and Gurgi (note: two older girls) when a catapult stone came crashing down on a bakery the Generous (note: a name the æmott used for themselves in this period) were using as a guard house. Several were killed outright, and many others wounded. The guard captain told Haldi and Gurgi to fetch help, but they were too frightened, and ran off. I told him I would do it, and did.

Ryutaanan was adopted after the siege was lifted by the Tytærs, a marriage of furriers that had produced several æmott over the centuries, but which had somehow survived the Pale’s purges. At the time the family consisted of four husbands, six wives, and some two dozen children, of whom nine (including Ryutaanan) were adoptees. For the next eight years, her days were filled with work, more work, and study. She spent three days a week, and the mornings of two more, working as a brickmason’s apprentice³⁰ to pay off her debt to her adoptive parents. Orangeday and Bluesday afternoons were set aside for lessons. In an unheated single room classroom in an attic on Coppersmith’s Street she mastered reading, arithmetic, and argument so quickly that she was soon giving lessons to the other children while the school’s bookster nursed a succession of hangovers.

In 1102, squabbling in the conclave that governed Pohjoinen spilled onto the street. Having fought “in silence, in shadow, and in secret” for five hundred years, many of the æmott found it impossible to get used to the light of public scrutiny. The general populace didn’t even know who was a member of the largest faction, Pure Light; it made its proclamations by snatching passersby off the street, hectoring them, and releasing them with armloads of letters to distribute.

Other factions, such as Clear Dawn and Bright Reflection, were quicker to adjust. Borrowing a verse from the governments of the Regimental Kingdoms, they held a mock-Parledoux every Purplesday at which anyone with three silver pennies to gar name could offer up a petition for debate by the faction’s leading members. Several proved themselves skilled orators, and during the spring and summer of 1102 their sessions were the most popular entertainment in Pohjoinen.

Matters came to a head in Malachite, when Pure Light condemned the debates as a “scurvy foreign invention with no natural place in Ruuda, imported solely for the purpose of sewing [sic] dissension among the Generous”. That Purplesday, speaker after speaker rose to challenge the proclamation. Who were Pure Light to challenge the patriotism of others? Did anyone know for a fact whether they had actually fought? Or—whisper it—was there any proof they were actually alive?

At 21, Ryutaanan was what a contemporary described as “the clearest of the clear”. She did not doubt Pure Light’s right to govern, or to govern as they had fought. Like many of the faction’s advocates, she argued that remaining secret would prevent the government from succumbing to the “pomp and pride of kings and marshals” (as a contemporary catchphrase put it). It was also a form of insurance: if the Pale Remainder ever reappeared, the æmott would be ready.

Then, on Malachite 19, the Niemenin brothers broke ranks. First secretary and chief advocate of Clear Dawn respectively, they announced to a stunned gathering that they were also members of Pure Light. They claimed they had been ordered to use the most extreme language they could in their criticism of Pure Light in order to provoke public sympathy for it. They also revealed that Pure Light had been stockpiling weapons in two granaries under Apteraalo Bridge in case “more persuasion than voice alone can provide” was needed.

To this day, no one knows if the Niemenins were telling the truth, or, as the next morning’s pamphlets claimed, playing a double game. After two days of increasing tension, though, Bright Reflection echoed Clear Dawn’s demand that Pure Light reveal themselves and take part in public debates to decide the future of Pohjoinen.

“How shall it all end?” Ryutaanan agonized in her journal. The answer was not long in coming. On Malachite 24, Niemenin’s Buurlo’s throat was cut while he was sitting in the privy. The shock of the assassination drove crowds into the streets, demanding that Pure Light give up whoever was responsible for the crime. Pamphlets ordering calm appeared on the morning of Malachite 25, but no one paid them any heed. This killing had not been for the protection of Ruuda: it had clearly been a political murder, and it shook Pure Light’s support to its foundations.

On Malachite 27, three wheelwrights announced that they were members of Pure Light, and publicly apologized for their faction’s role in the death of Niemenin’s Buurlo. A day later another five gens stepped forward; a day after that, fifteen. The trickle quickly turned to a flood: by month’s end, over six hundred people had publicly proclaimed that they belonged to Pure Light. Of those, two hundred also said that they were withdrawing from it in protest over its actions.

The events of that fall showed just how fragile the new Ruudian state was. Without a common enemy to hold them together, it seemed, the native and diasporan factions might tear the country apart. “What was needed,” Ryutaanan later wrote, “Was some great purpose akin to that we were accustomed to, something seemingly impossible that we might strive to achieve.”

Many thought that “great purpose” should be the integration—by force if necessary—of Vaarda into Ruuda. Thanks largely to its proximity to Uws, Vaarda had started rebuilding even before the rebellion was over. By the winter of 1102-03, it seemed that every major building in Etela was encased in scaffolding. The common people of Pohjoinen and Ruuda-in-Ruuda, many of whom still counted a second bowl of porridge in the day a luxury, muttered darkly about their southern cousins’ ostentation, and about how much of the reconstruction was being paid for by “incomers”.

In Heliodor 1103, however, the news that the Pale Remainder had taken over Bell Prison, and reinstituted the red harvest, reached the north. Overnight, there was only one topic of debate: what should be done? Pure Light and other æmott factions called for an immediate attack to wipe the unalive scourge from Cherne once and for all. Perhaps surprisingly, their call was echoed by moderates in the diasporan community and Vaarda. While this may have been a ploy to appear “purer than Pure”,³¹ it is also true that, whatever disagreements these groups may have had with the æmott about how a free Ruuda should be governed, their hatred of the Pale Remainder was in no way dilute.

But how exactly was such an attack to be mounted? If Ruuda was the upswept wing of continental Cherne, then Bell Prison was its underbelly, four thousand gallops away as the duck flew, and three or four times as far by sea. No one had ever made such a journey without magical aid.

Of course, that didn’t prevent every “hay bale sailor” in Ruuda from putting forward a plan. “We approach the matter directly,” wrote one in an anonymous pamphlet that circulated that summer:

The Fleet shall be made up in equal parts of vessels from each major region, and shall assemble in the mouth of the Kravriye in the spring. Thence, it shall sail to Nevy Rav to be provisioned, from which it will make all haste through the Gulf of Szigorú to the great Empire of Thind. Reprovisioned, it shall proceed south around the tip of Barra Bantang, confident that none of those waters’ infamous pirates would have the audacity to attack such a force. Once past the Whirlpool, the fleet shall turn north, striking directly across deep water at its target so as to ensure complete surprise. If any survive uncursed, they may retrace their path to return to heroes’ collars they will have justly earned.

In just one hundred and fifty words, the author reveals how little most Ruudians knew about the world after almost six centuries of isolation. Never mind where those ships were going to come from; the Pederov family who governed Nevy Rav had been the Barsadovs’ greatest rivals for most of the preceding century, and it was unlikely they would allow a fleet crewed by Ruudians (whom they viewed as the Barsadovs’ clients) to make landfall, much less provision it. It was even less likely that the dragon, Sulk, would allow a war fleet to pass through the Gulf of Szigorú, or indeed come within a thousand gallops of her nest on Sullair Minor.

The next challenge was Thind, which viewed all other nations on Cherne as wayward vassals. They might allow a Ruudian expedition to pass unmolested; they might equally well enslave the ships’ crews, or have the vessels painted gold in honor of the emperor’s nameday. As for Ini Bantang and Barra Bantang, the “infamous pirates” so blithely dismissed by the pamphlet had long since joined forces to create the Twin Admiralcies; by the early 1100s, they were de facto rulers of the city-states of Antharwaddy, Teberjaya, Pejangorian, and Yanaunchang, and were pressuring the southern Thindi port of Yadanapore. Any fleet the Ruudians might assemble would have been a twig in a forest compared to those of the Twin Admiralcies.

Finally, the Whirlpool was no longer impassable, as it had been during the Age of Heroes, but it travel around the tip of Barra Bantang was still extremely hazardous for anyone not familiar with it. So was crossing the two thousand gallops of open ocean that separated it from the Salt Coast: while Ruudians sailors were no strangers to sudden storms, they would never before have encountered the region’s giant eels.

Other voices in the debate of 1103 therefore favored an overland attack, though this was if anything more problematic. Crossing Uws from the Heladas to the northern arm of the Brumosos would be straightforward, providing the politics could be worked out. But what then? The direct route—over the Brumosos, across the Great Plains, and through the Karaband—would put an army at the mercy of one Darpani tribe after another, only to have to find a way through Cherne’s largest desert. The indirect routes—through Praczedt, Thind, and Barra Bantang to the east, or the Regimental Kingdoms to the west—were just as daunting.

Of course, there was always a third option: magic. In speech after speech, Ruuda’s booksters and magicians put forward ever-more-fanciful schemes. Find Uws, cure him, and let him figure out what to do; find Uws, slay him, take his boots, and have their new wearer carry the army south one gen at a time; use opals, dragon scales, a magic mirror (the construction of which would be a quest in its own right), or have every magician in Ruuda cast a single great spell of persuasion over some Darpani tribe and let them sort it out. Yes, this would leave those magicians witless and incontinent, but that was no greater sacrifice than countless thousands had already made…

In retrospect, the most interesting aspect of these proposals is how seriously they weren’t taken. In the first centuries after the Uncertain Angels destroyed themselves, matters of state had routinely been decided by magic. Whole nations—Thind, Uws, Praczedt, and the Regimental Kingdoms—had magical origins; it would therefore have been natural for people to look to magic for a solution to “the Pale problem”.

Instead, all serious discussion focused on mundane options. This may reflect the fact that contemporary Ruudians were less familiar with magic than most Chernese (since it had been tightly controlled during the Pale supremacy), or that Pale rule may have made Ruudians distrustful of magic in general. Alternatively, the fact that they had overthrown the Pale Remainder without the aid of a hero in the classical mode may have given Ruudians a confidence that no other Chernese people had.

Ryutaanan was inducted into Pohjoinen’s Pure Light in the summer of 1103. Under Pale rule, her duties would largely have consisted of acting as normally as possible, so as not to arouse suspicion while working her way into a position of trust. Earlier than most, Ryutaanan realized that “acting normal” would not help advance Pure Light’s interests in this new era of openness. Faction members had to draw attention to themselves in order for their views to be heard.

Ryutaanan therefore began accompanying progressive faction members, such as Aarbi’s Perguuran and Daanimo’s Daanima, to the city’s Purplesday debates. Her fearlessness made her a formidable debater: contemporaries recorded that she would take on anyone and any subject, no matter how loudly the crowd clapped. She quickly mastered the rhetorical tricks imported by the diasporans flooding into Pohjoinen, many of whom had cut their teeth in civic councils in the Regimental Kingdoms. She also displayed a talent for research that was rare among the relatively unsophisticated Ruudians; time and time again, it seems, she trounced her opponents by rattling off facts and figures in a way that made at least one ask whether, “No longer governed by the cursed, we are now to be governed by the magical?”

Much to Ryutaanan’s chagrin, Pure Light did not select her to be one of its representatives at the Great Debates held in Ruuda-in-Ruuda between Heliodor and Topaz of 1104. There, over the course of eleven weeks, the two hundred members of almost twenty factions argued, bargained, threatened, and cajoled. Some were seduced; others poisoned or bewitched, and at least one turned out to be a Praczny merchant whose deafness and heavy accent had mistakenly given onlookers the impression of sagacity. Everyone understood that the issues being debated were fundamental to the future of their nation. Was it to be one nation, or two? Or a loose confederation of city-states, as some argued was “natural”? And who was Ruudian? Those who had lived under Pale rule, certainly, but what of diasporans whose families had resided in the Regimental Kingdoms for centuries? Should pirates who had preyed upon Pale shipping for their own gain, brather than as an act of rebellion, be enrolled in the new state (or states)? Should the increasingly harsh treatment of the Gifted, whom many viewed as Pale collaborators, be formalized in law? And what, if anything, should be done about Bell Prison?

Over the course of the Debates, that last question became a seed around which different opinions pearled. On one side were the “Diplomats”, so-called because their favored overland attack would require Ruuda to negotiate treaties with its immediate neighbors. Most diasporans fell into this camp, as did the Vaardian delegation (many of whose members had put their bloody thumbprints on just such a treaty with Uws the year before), and many of the better-educated “native” Ruudians.

On the other side stood the “Admirals”, who preferred a seaborne assault. This, they argued, would not require permission or assistance from anyone. Mistrustful of their neighbors’ intentions, Admirals believed that Ruuda should become a major naval power. Building a fleet capable of attacking Bell Prison would be either a step toward this, or proof that it had been accomplished. Almost all rural æmott were Admirals, despite (or because of) never having been to sea. Many urban æmott, and a scattering of fanatical diasporans, made up the rest of the party.

The dividing lines between the two sides were never as clear in practice as they seem in retrospect. Bright Reflection’s leaders, for example, advocated a seaborne attack and negotiating treaties of support with Uws, Thind, and the Twin Admiralcies, but were unable to carry enough of the faction’s spear-and-shield membership with them to make their “honey and whisky” strategy viable. Equally, many Vaardians were privately in favor of building up a strong navy, not least because Etela was fast becoming Ruuda’s major commercial center, and was already suffering the depredations of “renegades” who were as happy to prey on the living as on the unalive.

Miraculously, by the time the Great Debates adjourned at the end of Topaz, a handful of major decisions had actually been made. First, Ruuda was divided into five regions, corresponding to the four major cities and the Saarumevan underworld. Delegates to the following year’s debates would represent regions, rather than factions; exactly how each region was to choose its representatives was left unspecified. Second, the peoples of Jalkelainen and Etela were to establish good relations with Derway and Bruyere to the west, and Uws to the southeast, respectively. At the same time, every fifth ship constructed in Ruuda’s harbor was to be “fitted for war”, though again, exactly what this meant was left unspecified.

And finally, after numerous minor pronouncements on taxation, censorship, and the re-institution of biennial examinations, came the now-infamous “Declaration on the Demonstration of Loyalty”. Those whose “collateral relations” had not “shewn strong and loyal resolve in the recent struggle for liberation” would not be allowed to speak at future debates, and could not henceforth acquire property, though they would retain title to whatever they already owned. Everyone understood that this was aimed solely and squarely at the Gifted. When copies of the debates’ decrees reached Pohjoinen, Ryutaanan seems to have been among the few who realized that the Declaration would tip the scales in favor of the Admirals: given the influence of the Gifted in Bruyere, Derway, and western Uws, the Declaration made it politically impossible for their rulers to form too close a relationship with the new Ruuda.³²

Given her loyalties, Ryutaanan should have sided with the Admirals, but as she explained in her memoirs, “My head heard all the reason in their arguments, but my heart yearned for faraway lands.” In her early twenties, unmarried, and increasingly influential, it is hardly surprising that she would see advantages in closer ties with such “exotic” places as the Regimental Kingdoms, Uws, Praczedt, and Thind. By 1104, chocolate was being imported over the Helada Mountains from the Flying Mountain’s northern stopping point, Normous Berth. Silk had appeared too, most famously at the Turning Moon Ball of 1105, where the tight fit of the attendees’ dresses and breeches scandalized and fascinated the whole of Etela. Magic, which had been so tightly regulated by the Pale Remainder, had become fashionable among the well-to-do, and a national duty among the æmott. More than a few “dandies and die-hards” lost their wits, their teeth, or their ability to sing in tune as they tried to master spells that they hoped would allow them to see what was happening at Bell Prison, half a continent away.³³

Ryutaanan gave up her teaching position in the spring of 1105 to devote herself to politics. She was by this time a “lieutenant” in the East Wall maatila in Pohjoinen, a district of perhaps 2000 gens. Five blocks long and two blocks wide, the maatila was bounded by the swift-flowing Potteleva, furriers’ and tanners’ shops, the wall after which it was named, and, to the north and west, the sturdy four-story mansions of Pohjoinen’s emerging merchant elite. Ryutaanan’s duties spanned the range from organizing the reconstruction or removal of buildings damaged during the Rebellion (a process that would not finally be completed until thirty years later), to overseeing charity for the poor and invalid.

She was also responsible for the education of the young. One of the Debates’ more prosaic resolutions required every maatila³⁴ to arrange tutelage for anyone wishing to sit for the biennial examinations. These were divided along the Regimental model into an examination of general literacy and simple mathematics, which was usually taken at the age of sixteen, and a craft-specific examination taken in one’s early twenties. Ryutaanan herself never sat either, but worked tirelessly to ensure that as many of her maatila’s children as possible had the opportunity to do so. Contemporaries recorded that if a bookster’s lessons were not up to her exacting standards, she would take the lectern herself, telling the hapless gen to “sit, listen, and learn” along with gar pupils.

Her direct approach to improving instruction generated many complaints, some of which are still in Pohjoinen’s city archives. It also won her a loyal following among both young and old in her maatila. Despite several petitions, though, Pure Light passed her over once again when the time came to choose delegates for 1005’s Great Debates. Her youth, and the fact that she hadn’t actually fought in the Fifth Rebellion, both counted against her; so too, undoubtedly, did her Diplomatic stand on the Expeditionary Question.

Ryutaanan was disappointed, but not as much as she might have been. During that winter, her working relationship with Aarbi’s Perguuran had blossomed into something more. Ten years older than Ryutaanan, and half a head shorter, his small eyes and unfashionably narrow jaw would later lead his political enemies to caricature him as “half man, half pig”. He was, however, one of the most widely read gens in Ruuda, and his correspondents spanned the breadth of the continent. Ld. Woüter the Elder described him as, “…able to split an argument in half with one blow, as would a gemsmith a diamond,” while Coronella Barsadov ard Innu, whose instinct for advantage had as much to do with her family’s ascendancy in the early 1100s as her son Yuriy’s successes on the battlefield, once opened a letter to Perguuran with, “Ld. sir,³⁵ having read the remarks in your latest [note: an argument in favor of imposing quotas on North Ocean fishing], I am grateful that you have no quarrel at law with my family.”

Unsurprisingly, Pure Light chose Perguuran to represent Pohjoinen in 1105’s Great Debates. This created a dilemma for Ryutaanan: should she travel to Ruuda-in-Ruuda with him, or continue her work in the East Wall maatila? To quote her memoirs once again:

I had made up my mind to do the responsible thing, and remain behind, but then Daanima [note: Perguuran’s debating partner, Daanimo’s Daanima] was stricken with ptyche. As a place for him aboard the laiva carrying the delegation to the capitol had already been paid for, Perguuran pressed upon me that it would be wasteful to do other than accompany him.

A simple case of salt deficiency—probably brought on by the heavy drinking that later led to Daanima’s expulsion from Pure Light—was therefore the hinge on which so much of subsequent Ruudian history was to turn.

Ryutaanan, Perguuran, and two dozen others left Pohjoinen on the first of Citrine, 1105. It was Ryutaanan’s first time at sea; half a century later, the scene was still fresh in her mind:

We departed under a brisk wind that lent the ship such speed that a double wave curled back from her prow. The crew busied themselves with ropes and sails and strapping down odd-ends of cargo that seemed secure enough to our landlubberly eyes. The harbor gulls followed us out a half gallop from shore, squawking for scraps, until the captain shouted that she was carrying passengers, not fish, at which point a Gifted among them shouted back some good-natured abuse and led his companions away. Perguuran leaned over the side to catch some spray in a tankard and offered it to me as my first draught of “real” water. It was so fresh and cold that I almost choked on it.

They reached Ruuda-in-Ruuda two weeks later, having stopped twice along the way to gather more delegates. They were met outside the harbor by a small cutter flying the twelve-rayed sun that would, that summer, become Ruuda’s new blazon. Ryutaanan recorded the exchange between its customs inspectors and her ship’s captain with some amusement:

…at which the captain expostulated, “By d–n, whelp, I didn’t fight nineteen years just to hand over good brass to a headscratcher in a starched collar!”

Pure Light’s delegation took rooms on Tinsmith Street, a brisk ten-minute walk from the converted auction house where the Debates were held. Ryutaanan was immediately caught up in a whirlwind of preparation. While Perguuran and others argued, cajoled, and railed, she buried herself in the city archives, a dayglass lantern clipped to her broad canvas shoulder belt, scraps of paper (still a precious commodity in the north at that time) and a stub of hardened charcoal in her hands. Bright Reflection would support Pure Light’s motion to incorporate surviving bands of irregulars into regional militias, but only if Pure Light would back a two-pence reduction in the salt tax: what revenue would be lost? And how would the adjusted tax compare to those of Uws and Derway? An independent delegate representing three maatilaso in the Saarumeva Valley claimed that villages had jurisdiction over tree planting and harvesting before the Pale Remainder invaded—was she right? How much land would be affected if that rule was restored? And—whisper it—was there anything in the archives, even so small as initials scribbled beside an informer’s report, that could be used to smear this delegate or that one?

Ruudian politics, Ryutaanan quickly realized, was turning ugly. The division between Diplomats and Admirals was widening, not narrowing. What to do about Bell Prison, how closely Ruuda should involve itself with its neighbors, and whether the new state should have a strong central government, or be a federation of semi-independent regions, were no closer to settlement than they had been eight months previously. When Tellervo’s Maarit arrived on Citrine 29 at the head of her troop of battle-hardened veterans³⁶, no one believed her claim that she had just wanted to show her “friends” the big city’s lights. A few of Ruuda-in-Ruuda’s delegates responded by sending their families to the countryside; again, no one believed them when they said it was in case any of the debaters had brought plague with them.

The second Great Debate opened on the third of Topaz, three days later than scheduled. The sessions were stormy from the start. As their first act, the debaters adopted a twelve-pointed sun, gold on white, as Ruuda’s blazon. When a motion to allow regions to amend it with their own sigils to it was narrowly defeated, though, the Vaardian delegation announced that they would hang one of their own devising—a stylized pine tree on a white-over-brown background, with the sun rising behind it—as well. And when a slim majority raised their hands in favor of a new tax on the fishing fleet, to be put toward construction of a standing navy, several prominent Diplomats publicly renounced seafood, and called upon others to do the same.

Watching from the sidelines was Derway’s ambassador, Majeur Callum apt Connomenaer. A seasoned observer of courts and parledoux in the Regimental Kingdoms, he was alternately amused, inspired, and appalled by the confusion of the Debates. “They have as little discipline as squabbling children,” he confided to his wife,³⁷ “Yet upon an instant, may reach such heights of noble intelligence in their arguments as to put our grand collegians to shame.”

A chance meeting at a rat fight led the majeur to offer his services as an advisor to the contingent from Jalkelainen, who were struggling to balance the needs of region and faction. Much to his surprise, Majeur Callum was soon pressed into a greater service: from the second half of Topaz onward, he found himself lecturing to an audience of booksters, debaters, and others on the theory and practice of delegatory government. “They have made a d—ned scholar out of me!” he complained good-naturedly to his private secretary³⁸, though he must have realized how much influence this gave him over the direction of the Debates.

Ryuataanan was taken to one of Majeur Callum’s lectures (she uses the term “dragged”) toward the end of Topaz. She quickly became a regular attendant, scribbling summaries to give to Perguuran and arguing over how applicable the Regimental experience was to Ruuda. Most of the gens she argued with were, like her, junior delegates or seconds who had taken up residence in the archives. As the summmer wore on, they found that they increasingly had more in common with each other than they did with their “superiors” deadlocked in the debating chambers. “A government’s first responsibility is to govern,” Majeur Callum repeatedly reminded them. By the time the Debates broke up in acrimony and name-calling at the end of Carnelian, Ryutaanan and her “archivist” colleagues were inclined to agree.

Ryutaanan worked harder than ever that winter, teaching, organizing, and writing letter after letter to her new-found comrades from Ruuda-in-Ruuda’s archives. She copied long passages from Bolkov’s Uwsian translation of di Juenez’s Treatise on the Employment of Law to circulate among her peers, scribbling last-heartbeat thoughts in the margins. Many of those letters have survived, some in their original form, but more as copies passed hand-to-hand in chocolate houses during that long, loud winter.

Despite her youth (she was still only twenty-four years old), Ryutaanan’s letters quickly earned her a reputation as one of Ruuda’s most incisive political thinkers, and the chief advocate for a new approach to the questions that had deadlocked the First and Second Debates. Yes, there should be a strong central government, but only of regions that chose to take part; any that didn’t (meaning Vaarda) should be allowed to go their own way, “…lest we throw off occupation only to become occupiers ourselves.” And yes, Ruuda owed it to those who had fallen to eradicate the last of the Pale Remainder. “But who among us has ever seen the verdant jungles of Thind, or passed by the Sea of No Dreams [note: Cap di Perçalle]? Who among us then has it within gar competence to decide, shall we sail or shall we march?”

Above all, she wrote, Ruuda must decide how it was to govern itself. Should rank be earned purely through competitive examination, as it had been in Angelic times, and still was in some parts of Praczedt? Or should there be a hereditary element as well, as in Uws and the Regimental Kingdoms? Should representation be factional, regional, professional, or, as Daanimo’s Daanima believed, some mix of the three?

It was this question that led to the break with Perguuran that had been brewing since the summer. Like many veterans, Perguuran believed that those who had fought hardest against the Pale Remainder had thereby earned the right to govern Ruuda. Moreover, he said (loudly, publicly, and regularly), no one else could be trusted with the task—certainly not “foreigners” from the Regimental Kingdoms, “Who call themselves Ruudian, but can scarce speak the language,” or “Their soft-palmed bootlacers, too overawed by flowery phrases.”

In a series of increasingly heated attacks, Perguuran and others who had been faithful to the æmott cause in the long, dark years before the Fifth Rebellion singled Ryutaanan out as a symptom of what was going wrong with “their” victory. Ryutaanan fought back by challenging her adversaries to justify their hold on power. Frustrated by how little the Great Debates had accomplished, and no doubt feeling that they deserved a greater voice in Ruuda’s governance, many of Pohjoinen’s well-to-do rallied to Ryutaanan’s cause.

The picture of Ryutaanan that emerges from diary entries, letters, and other records is of a courageous but stiff-necked woman, always sure of her opinions even when they were changing as often as the weather. Tall, with her hair cropped short to show off a tall brow and striking gray eyes, she seemed to contemporaries to be constantly in motion, sometimes carrying on two conversations while annotating a letter or checking over receipts from some building project in the East Wall maatila. “She sleeps,” wrote a contemporary wryly, “But only as does the clockwise petrel—on the wing.” Her appetite for chocolate was legendary: she and Daanima often worked through the night, she growing increasingly agitated under the influence of her favorite drink while he became increasingly morose under the influence of his.

“You must plan your campaigns for lecterns at the Debates as you would plan any other battle,” Majeur Callum wrote to her and her fellow archivists in a circulated letter dated Sapphire 5, 1106. Ryutaanan took his advice to heart. Early in Chrysoprase, she renounced her membership in Pure Light, declaring that “factionalism” could not meet the needs of the new Ruuda. Clear Dawn and Bright Reflection both courted her, but she held fast: henceforth, she would speak for the East Wall maatila, and no one else.

Perguuran led the charge against his “wayward charge”. At the Purplesday Debate on Sapphire 12, he rose on a point of procedure, pointed dramatically at Ryutaanan, and demanded to know what right “that interloper” had to be present on the debating floor? Ignoring the uproar that followed, Ryutaanan calmly rose to her feet and held up the petition her students had quietly circulated throughout East Wall during the preceding month. “This is my right,” she announced, passing it to a page to be taken up to the debate’s gaveleer for inspection. “Where, colleague, is yours?”

On cue, three other debaters—Eirika’s Juuso, Kylliki’s Aatu, and Rauha’s Terhenaar—rose and passed forward petitions of their own. In a clear, strong voice, Ryutaanan delivered what she later described as the most important speech of her career. Ruudians did not govern Ruudians by right of conquest, she declared. They governed because the Ruudian people had chosen them to govern:

Thus it was when the Uncertain Angels held the world in their care; thus too it was in the years after, before the blight of unlife fell upon us. Let our grandchildren, or theirs, choose other if they would—humbly, I submit that we have too little practice in governing ourselves to choose other now than emulation of those great days.

With that appeal to ancient tradition, Ryutaanan and her colleagues set in motion the great innovation in Chernese politics since the end of the Age of Heroes.

Predictably, Pure Light’s elder statesmen³⁹ reacted with scorn. “We have governed ourselves for six hundred years!” thundered Anssi’s Ilmari. “We have made laws, raised taxes, and passed judgment. That we did so in hiding is no fault of ours. That some who shed no blood to win this nation’s freedom would forget those centuries is most certainly a fault of theirs.” Lieutenant of the Dockside maatila, and the only surviving member of Pohjoinen’s first skenren lans crew, Ilmari was an instinctive brawler; his appeal to “the blood we shed”, and the thinly veiled threats that accompanied it, would have been expected.

Perguuran’s attacks were all the more forceful for being less emotive. Ryutaanan and her fellow “Consenters” (as they quickly became known) were hopelessly naïve, he said—any government that depended on the consent of the governed would be no better than anarchy. “If a bandit says, ‘I do not recognize your authority,’ should then the sheriff halt the chase and wave him away?” Perguuran asked.

Clear Dawn’s chief spokesgen in Pohjoinen, Païvi’s Aatu, was equally hostile initially. Three weeks after Ryutaanan’s speech, however, she changed tack, having been instructed by her factional superiors in Jalkelainen that Clear Dawn was going to recognize the Consenters’ right to lecterns at that year’s Debates. This was not simply a tactical move: Clear Dawn’s leadership had been deeply influenced by Majeur Callum’s lectures on governance, and proved fertile soil when reports of Ryutaanan’s speech reached them.

A show of hands on Chrysoprase 6 confirmed lecterns for Ryutaanan, E.’s Juuso, K.’s Aatu, and R.’s Terhenaar. Unwilling to concede defeat, Perguuran demanded to know how the quartet would travel to Ruuda-in-Ruuda, “Since they are most certainly not welcome among veterans.” Ryutaanan responded by passing a sack around her East Wall maatila. In just two days, she delivered “two hundred thirty rings three quarterings and miscellaneous loose metals” to P.’s Aatu (about nine hundred rings in today’s money).

Two months later, in early Heliodor, the Consenters boarded the Cloud, a Derwegian spasárthách bound for Etela. Once again. Ryutaanan’s joy at being on the Ocean—even in spring, with ice floes still evident—is palpable. Her memoirs contain fresh, vivid accounts of weather and wildlife, and sharp observations on her fellow passengers. She describes a fishing smack that paralleled their course for a while, its three-gen crew yelling friendly insults at the Cloud’s Derwegian crew in such thickly accented Ruudian that she had to ask her fellows to translate. A black-and-red sail on the horizon sent the ship’s magician up the mast while the crew donned helmets and limbered their crossbows, but the pirate decided to seek easier game elsewhere.

And at some point during the two-week voyage, Ryutaanan made one of the few impulsive decisions in her long career. She, E.’s Juuso, K.’s Aatu, and R.’s Terhenaar decided to marry. A year of working sock-in-boot with one another undoubtedly contributed to the decision; so too did the need to make the most public declaration possible that they intended to stand together, come what may. They were also entering the summers of their lives: while their close intellectual companionship was undoubtedly rewarding, it is hardly surprising that they craved the physical as well.

“No sooner did we tie ribbons around each other’s necks,” Ryutaanan remembered wryly, “Than the entire crew, the captain no less, crowded ‘round E.’s Juuso to wish him the health and vigor he would need, now being one with three wives. With his blushes and laughter, I had never seen E.’s J. so happy.”

The wedding took place aboard ship at noon on Heliodor 22. In front of a mixed stew of Derwegian sailors and debaters from Jalkelainen, Pohjoinen, and sundry points in between, the foursome swore in blood to cherish and defend one another so long as the marriage should last. None of their blood-oaths proved binding, but no one let that sour the mood. After a brief, but noisy, charivari, Ryutaanan and her new wives and husband retreated to the captain’s cabin, which he had generously given over for the night.

By the time they stumbled onto deck the next morning for the traditional cold bath and hot drink, the coast starboard of the Cloud was dotted with small farms. They had sailed past a fishing fleet during the night, Ryutaanan was told, and its whale pilot had told them that they were a scant thirty gallops from Ruuda-in-Ruuda. The Cloud had made excellent speed. As E.’s Juuso washed and braided his wives’ hair, they discussed plans for the coming Debates. There could be as many as twenty in their “faction”, if all had gone well, and they would be able to count on support from perhaps three times that number on several key issues. It was still well short of a majority—the Third Debate was to comprise three hundred and one lecterns—but it would give them considerable influence. As K.’s Aatu wrote in a letter several years later:

It was glorious, to be us, and then, and full well we knew it. This would be our Hanging Bridge, our leap from cliff to cloud. We had outwitted war, famine, disease, and now our elders—how, we asked Fate, could we fail at this turn?

The answer was not long in coming. While the Cloud had been at sea, the Clear Dawn chapter in Ruuda-in-Ruuda had decided to break with its leadership in Jalkelainen over the issue of Consent. “Overland!” their hired criers shouted on street corner after street corner. “Overland for vengeance, overland for justice, overland to victory!”

Perguuran, who arrived in Ruuda-in-Ruuda two days before the Cloud, was delighted. Pure Light was still firmly in the Admirals camp; anything that split the opposition could only aid their cause. He toured the shipyard at Kypsyva Mouth on Heliodor 24 to see the keels that had already been laid for three new taistelaso. Longer and leaner than the laiva that had plied the northern Ocean for hundreds of years, each twin-masted taistela would have a crew of fifty, and carry either a hundred and fifty marines, or fifty cavalry. In company with many of his fellow debaters, Perguuran made a great show of forswearing chocolate and wine (though not beer or spirits), and of donating the money he might have spent on them to the “ship fund”. “It is not enough,” he wrote in a widely-read circular, “Not nearly. But it is a start.”

Many other people toured the shipyards that spring and summer as well, including Derway’s Majeur Callum and the newly-appointed Uwsian ambassador, Coronel Barsadov ard Nitisza. Both were troubled by what they saw: unlike a laiva, a taistela had no function except war. While it would be two or even three years before they would be seaworthy, the mere fact of their existence was enough to upset the balance of power in northern Cherne.

The situation that greeted Ryutaanan and her spouses when they stepped onto the dock on Heliodor 25 was therefore even more tense than it had been the previous summer. There was still a month to go before the official opening of the Third Debate, but the air was already thick with accusations of bribery, seduction, magic, and slander. An independent debater representing three maatila in the southeastern Heladas was found dead outside a brothel on Heliodor 26; every faction immediately blamed her “murder” on some other. When the coroner delivered a verdict of misadventure (citing the amount the debater had drunk, and the strenuous nature of the exercise in which she had been engaged just prior to her death), he was accused on all sides of whitewashing rotten boards.

And once again, it seemed, some factions were prepared to use force, or at least were preparing for someone else to do so. Tellervo’s Maarit and her Red Knee troop had wintered in Ruuda-in-Ruuda, nominally to supplement the city’s militia (which, at the time, doubled as its constabulary). Her membership in Pure Light was an open secret; so too was her animosity toward the Oxen In Harness, another rebellion-era troop that had publicly declared for the Diplomatic cause,⁴⁰ and had taken up residence in the Brickyard district south of the Kypsyva’s second bend.

Assassination was inevitable. For six centuries, it had been the only tactic Ruudians had; for those same six centuries, would-be assassins had known that victory’s price would be the same as defeat’s. Every child knew the stories; everyone could sing the sad, defiant æmott songs. By early Citrine, the only question was, who would strike first?

The answer came on Bluesday, Citrine 5, when a young potato carver named Roopertti⁴¹ drove a magically-hardened icicle into Tellervo’s Maarit’s side as she left a puppet show. Her bodyguards cut him down on the spot, and then, when the method of the attack became clear, led a mob to the Uwsian embassade, where they demanded the head (and other body parts) of Coronel Nitisza. The weapon had been magical; Coronel Nitisza was a magician; Uws favored the Diplomats—that was as far as the angry crowd cared to reason.

Coolly, Coronel Nitisza ordered her household staff to barricade the doors and windows, take up arms, and defend the north wing of the embassade. Bricks, cobblestones, torches, and (for reasons never made clear) a sack full of kittens were hurled at the Uwsians, but to no effect. As runners roused the city militia, the coronel cast spell after spell to incinerate every scrap of paper in a quarter-gallop circle that could possibly incriminate her.

The siege went on half the night. Understandably reluctant to start a civil war, the militia duty officer ordered his gens to seal off the area, but not to attempt to drive the mob away from the embassade. His calculations were no doubt influenced by the fact that a fifth of his troops were Red Knees; in retrospect, the fact that he kept them in ranks when their commander had just been murdered was probably accomplishment enough.

Reinforcements began arriving around the second hour, when the militia capitan, Uoleva’s Yrjö, took charge of the scene. Fiddlebaker Street, on the north side of the embassade, was cleared with a linked-arm march, during which dozens of gens were “arrested”, only to immediately “escape”. After the same procedure was repeated two more times, the embassade’s environs were cleared of all except a few drunkards, whom the militia left to wake or freeze as Fate chose.

Back in their quarters, the Red Knees quickly elected an interim commander, who just as quickly declared that the troop would withdraw from public affairs while mourning T.’s Maarit and “waiting for the full process of justice to be carried through.” Civil war had been averted, as had the war with Uws that would inevitably have followed the death of its ambassador at the hands of the mob, but for how long?

In the face of growing unrest, the leaders of the major factions moved the opening of the Third Debate forward a week to Citrine 24. Independent debaters immediately protested that some of their colleagues had not yet arrived, or that they were not done preparing their arguments. Once again, Clear Dawn changed course: at the extraordinary session on the 24th, its members voted against the motion they had sponsored just four days earlier, defeating it by a slim margin. In the end, the only effect of the flip-flop was to make the independent delegates even more suspicious of the larger factions than they already were.

The Third Debate opened on Purplesday, Citrine 30, with a solemn parade down Lamplighters Street. Its first act was to confirm Hannele’s Kaarina as moderator, and to observe a hundred heartbeats of silence in memory of T.’s Maarit. Those were the last quiet moments for many weeks. “I must make my throat raw to hear myself,” Perguuran complained in a letter to his sister. “From the moment we greet the sun until well past the moon’s turning, every voice is raised in a cart-driver’s lament.”

It was clear from the outset that no one wanted a repeat of the previous year’s impasse. Appointing five deputy moderators (all independents), H.’s Kaarina allowed half a dozen debates to proceed in parallel during the morning sessions. The afternoons—and on most days, the evenings as well—brought all three hundred and eleven delegates together to discuss whichever issue had made the most progress.

The debating groups were organized around the traditional six ministries of Chernese government: Revenue, Justice, Public Works, Magic, Education, and War. The topics ranged from the pedestrian to the nebular; on the 12th of Topaz, for example, the following were just some of the subjects moved for debate:

• that the tax on untreated pine shall be two rings the foulterweight;

• that monuments erected in memory of the fallen shall be catalogued, and taken into care of this government;

• that the inscriptions on said monuments shall be inspected for propriety of language;

• that ambassadors shall be sent to Seyferte and Leyselle to govern all dealings with them;

• that the practice of flensing condemned prisoners be itself condemned;

• that the efficacy of said practice in treating wounds received during the recent war be first further studied;

• that a road be constructed in the ancient manner from Jalkelainen to the fishing port of Loupiniema;

• that the funds for such construction shall come from the people of Loupiniema;

• that the funds for such construction shall come from this government;

• that funding for construction or improvement of public works shall attend upon an audit of this government’s finances;

• that the practice of greeting the sun shall be observed by all militias not hotly engaged with an enemy;

• that the practice of greeting the sun, though strongly encouraged, shall remain a matter of personal conscience;

• that this gathering shall debate no other matter until the matter of a road to the fishing port of Lopuiniema be resolved;

• that all persons taking part in these debates shall publicly declare past and present dealings with the governments of other states;

• that persons taking part in these debates shall declare past and present financial dealings with the governments other states;

• that the tax on untreated pine shall be used to fund a college for the training of examination inspectors; and

• that no one in this gathering gives a damn about building a road to Loupiniema.

The Justice debates were the most important, as questions related to the governance of Ruuda itself took place there. These were therefore the melee into which Ryutaanan and her spouses threw themselves. In her first speech, Ryutaanan declared her goal was, “To ensure that all who govern in Ruuda are chosen by public division, to advocate the will of those who have selected them.” Everything else, she implied, was negotiable, even the question of what to do about Bell Prison. “Give us only representation by consent,” she wrote in a hurriedly-scribbled note to a Bright Reflection partisan, “And we will give you what else you desire, for we are certain that so long as consent be required to govern, the people shall never fail in their strength in that government.”

It took nine weeks. R.’s Terhenaar collapsed from exhaustion, and E.’s Juuso threatened more than once to divorce from their marriage if Ryutaanan would not compromise, but in the end, they carried the Third Debate with them. Bright Reflection, the smallest of the five major factions, was solidly on their side; when it became clear how deeply Pure Light was opposed, Clear Dawn, the Vaardians, and the few diasporans who retained their lecterns threw their weight behind it as well.

The price paid was higher than Ryutaanan would have liked. After a series of impassioned speeches by Perguuran, the Debate moved to support an “early and all out” assault on Bell Prison. As the one who had moved the motion, Perguuran was appointed to organize the effort. Everyone present understood what that meant: Ruuda was going to turn itself into a major naval power, regardless of what its neighbors thought, and that power would rest in the hands of “the purest of the pure”. Ryutaanan later recalled, “I felt some small disquiet at that, in the wake of our ‘famous victory’, but nothing more until we reboarded the Cloud for the journey home.” As they waited in harbor for a favorable wind, she watched as the three taistelaso—which Perguuran had already christened Sun’s Vengeance, Light’s Justice, and Bright Sword’s Edge—taking shape in the yards half a gallop away.

They were well tarred and truly masted [she wrote], as straight and merciless as the eagle’s stoop for gar prey. Twice I spied A.’s Perguuran before them, doing nought but watch as others constructed the vehicles on which his ambition would sail.

The First Expedition

Ryutaanan did not return to Ruuda-in-Ruuda until 1108. Selected by the East Wall maatila for the debates in 1106, she declined on the grounds of pregnancy. Kylliki’s Aatu went in her place, with half a dozen of Ryutaanan’s former students as aides.

Ryutaanan later recalled those three years as being the happiest in her life:

A newborn child is joy made flesh, even when squalling and puking and pissing down the back of one’s dress. The same may be said of a newborn nation.

Pohjoinen was a whirlwind of rebuilding. The Potteleva was dredged for the first time in almost a century, so that potato barges and fishing boats could be winched upriver to stand directly beside their warehouses. Rubble from the North Wall was used to extend the breakwater, which increased the usable area of the harbor by almost half. Mansions on two sides of the main square were joined together to create a new hospital; initially staffed by doctresses and magicians trained in the Regimental Kingdoms, it was the seed from which the present-day university would grow. Closer to Ryutaanan’s heart, the city’s many orphanages were regulated for the first time. Conditions at some had been appalling, with children being forced to work as prostitutes or bilge patchers with no hope of ever learning how to read. The “City Hearths” that replaced them were still drab, gray places, but at least their denizens had some chance of one day passing the examinations and bettering themselves.

During this time, the city was governed by a council with seventeen members. Daanimo’s Daanima moderated its debates; despite (or perhaps because of) his frequent drunkenness, he was a fearless orator, and would heap mounds of humorous abuse on anyone who dared sully “his” debating chamber with a boring, self-contradictory, or disingenuous speech.⁴²

Meanwhile, in the capitol, the three taistelaso slowly took shape under Perguuran’s watchful eye. Once the keels and ribs were laid, he directed the shipwrights to concentrate on completing the Sun’s Vengeance. Its triple-planked construction, square-rigged sails, and single rudders were new to Ruuda, an attempt to catch up with two hundred years of steady innovation in the Regimental Kingdoms. Perguuran understandably wanted to see how well one would sail before putting another two of the same design on the water. He also suspected that some of the Derwegians and Bruyais that had been brought in to oversee the work might try to commit sabotage. His relations with Majeur Callum, the Derwegian ambassador, had gone from cool to frosty after the Third Debate; with the assassination of Tellervo’s Maarit still unsolved (at least in his mind), he disliked having to trust anyone who was not a member of Pure Light’s inner core.

Perhaps surprisingly, no effort was made during these years to conceal the fact of the ships’ construction, or the reasons for it. Perguuran and his allies may have thought there was no point even trying, given how much noise had been made about them during the debates. Bravado probably also played a part: just a few short years after the end of Pale rule, many Ruudians wanted the Pale Remainder to know their intentions, just as Ban Jeevan duellists in Ini Bantang and Barra Bantang will announce their intended targets days before a public fight. A popular puppeteer of the time who went by the curtain name Arky Barky put on a popular show in which a succession of increasingly feeble characters—from an Uwsian magician (a thinly-veiled mockery of the ambassador, Coronel Nitisza) to a blind, crippled porcupine with a squeaky voice⁴³—slew one Pale Remainder after another in ever-more-improbable ways. A few die-hard æmott railed against the show as disrespectful of the fallen, but for the most part, Ruudians were in the mood to laugh.

They were also in the mood to boast, something which Perguuran played to carefully. He personally conducted tours of the shipyards, carefully pointing out to Ruuda-in-Ruuda’s merchants where and how their wares were being used. He also organized banquets, sometimes seating a hundred dignitaries and their companions on deliberately rough-hewn benches so that they could use the ships’ ribs as tables. Lit by beeswax candles and fine, soft dayglass, these meals were Pure Light’s single largest expense during these years.

Oh, say not “expense” [he wrote to a grumbling colleague in Jalkelianen in 1107]. Say rather “investment”, for I trust that to see these great vessels shaped does also shape the opinions of many, bending them to the greater purpose as does a cooper bend gar staves to form a barrel that may hold all manner of things.

In that same year, Perguuran was faced with a difficult decision: who should captain of the Sun’s Vengeance? His opponents accused him of wanting the command himself,⁴⁴ but there is no evidence that he ever seriously considered doing so. Instead, he put forward the name of the city’s militia commander, Uoleva’s Yrjö, arguing that since the assault itself would be made on land, a soldier should have overall command of the expedition.

The question was eventually referred from the Eternal Committee on Naval Matters (which Perguuran moderated) to the main debating chamber. Perguuran had tilled his field well; as soon as the question was raised, two supposedly-independent debaters proposed that Kalle’s Taavi be made captain of the Sun’s Vengeance. Forty years old, he had been a pirate for twenty-five of them in the waters off Cape Grind before declaring for the Rebellion in 1093. Like U.’s Yrjö, he was well-known, much-feared, competent, and apparently free of factional ties.

The Sun’s Vengeance floated free for the first time at dawn on Midsummer’s Day of 1108.⁴⁵ Thousands of people crowded along the docks and the seawall to watch the land give birth to her; thousands more paid up to a quartering each to watch the shadow shows conjured up in every inn and public square. A motion in the city debates to rename the ship Ruuda’s Pride was defeated, but gives a sense of how the nation felt. This was the “new” Ruuda: swift, tall, and strong. As light from the city’s skenren lanses played over her, K.’s Taavi let the ghost of the river’s current carry her into the middle of the harbor, where the dozens of carpenters and shipwrights waiting in her hold set to work caulking and mending.

Work redoubled on the Light’s Justice and Bright Sword’s Edge. Volunteers (mostly boys) organized themselves into brigades to fetch and carry, often working several evenings a week by the orange light of cheap dayglass lanterns just for a chance to be part of the venture. The last few critics of the expedition in the debates fell silent, though a few continued to grumble in private diaries about the expense. And when the Sun’s Vengeance finally set sail on the third of Chalcedony, the city emptied.⁴⁶ “I could capture the capitol today with three cripples and a lackwit,” Majeur Callum wrote to the king (in code), “And hold it for a week by dressing up in sailor’s costume.”

The Sun’s Vengeance’s first real voyage did not take place until the next spring, when she sailed east along the coast to Vaarda. The trip took a month; upon her return, K.’s Taavi reported that she was sound. Everyone knew this was an understatement: the ship had covered the eighty-five gallops from Scalpin’s Rock to Lekkuu in just two days, which would have been a respectable time for a post-boat. In turn, U.’s Yrjö told the debates that, “We saw no sign of sea-bandits, and heard from each village in which we stopped that all such had fled upon word of our coming.” In this, he was dutifully echoing Perguuran’s message to the Ruudian merchants who were becoming Pure Light’s strongest supporters: a strong fleet would be good for much more than just finishing off the Pale.

In Chalcedony, the Sun’s Vengeance set out to sail west. Instead of hugging the coast, K.’s Taavi fitted her for a long voyage and took her out onto the deep blue. Dried meat, hard biscuit, and jars of salt went into her hold, along with two extra sets of canvas, ten gallops of rope, eighty marines, and half a dozen horses.⁴⁷ They struck north for the Øruu Islands, the farthest limit of Ruudian sovereignty. The scattered fishing villages nesting on those barren rocks were home to some of the north’s most infamous pirate bands, and also (as K.’s Taavi well knew) to its best sailors. While his hopes of recruiting some of them were disappointed, he was no doubt flattered when two villages on opposite sides of Øruunepaalo Sound fought a poetry duel for the honor of renaming themselves after his ship.⁴⁸

From the Øruu Islands, the Sun’s Vengeance was supposed to sail west to Cape Grind, then follow the coast back to Ruuda-in-Ruuda. The day after she set out, however, a sudden storm fell on her. As dark clouds raced overhead, trying to outrun the storm, the wind howled and the waves rose higher and higher.

After six hours, U.’s Yrjö ordered K.’s Taavi to turn the ship around. K.’s Taavi refused: the Sun’s Vengeance would have to sail through much worse on her way to Bell Prison, so they had best find out if she could do it. He also informed U.’s Yrjö that since they were at sea and under sail, he was actually in overall command.

Furious, U.’s Yrjö retreated to his cabin, where he spent the next day and a half drafting and revising an increasingly lengthy letter of complaint about K.’s Taavi’s demeanor and seagenship. “I did not know whose rage to fear more,” one of his aides later wrote, “The storm’s, or my commander’s.”

The storm finally passed on Chalcedony 27.⁴⁹ K.’s Taavi’s log entry reads:

17/Chalc/27: winds now 15-18 wrack south of south-east, waves 3 strides, no sign of bottom churn. Lost larboard gaffsail during the night & 3 ropes, with 2 pigs washed overboard during breakfast. Vessel sound and sturdy, & good pace. I am confident now that we can make the journey asked of us, so far as the sun’s pure light is our guide, and dissension does not make cripple of us.

The Sun’s Vengeance reached Jalkelainen on the second of Malachite. Once again, it seemed that the whole city turned out to see her. Its governing council had already named a street in honor of the ship; when it arrived, the city’s mayor, Kalle’s Neä, was so overcome that she named another one after it as well. The amber workers’ commonalty voted honorary memberships for her entire crew; not to be outdone, the city’s furniture makers made K.’s Taavi their honorary moderator.

It was therefore something of a shock when U.’s Yrjö marched down the gangplank and interrupted the mayor’s speech to demand that K.’s Taavi be placed under arrest. At first, Neä thought he was drunk; when she realized he was not, she told her master-at-arms to lock him in a closet until dinner. She later claimed that she had meant it as a figure of speech, but at the time, her order was taken literally. The man who was supposed to be in overall command of the expedition fleet therefore spent his first few hours in Jalkelainen in a clothes cupboard, pounding on its door so hard that he broke a finger.

K.’s Neä managed to patch matters up later that evening, but it was another bundle of twigs on the fire of U.’s Yrjö’s resentment. K.’s Taavi continued to insist that command of the Sun’s Vengeance was his, and his alone, while the vessel was at sea; he made an ostentatious show of vacating the captain’s cabin as soon as she tied up, while letting everyone know that he still had a key to its door. Most of the ship’s crew sided with him; predictably, her marine contingent—several of whom had served under U.’s Yrjö during the Rebellion—took the other side in the dispute.

None of this seems to have reached the ears of a young boy named Tomonainan’s Petta, who later said that he fell in love with the Sun’s Vengeance the moment he set eyes on her. Aged eight, he was the second son of a moderately prosperous marriage that owned two small squidding smacks. He had sailed on deep water almost since the day he was born, and, like other sea-struck gens his age with stars in their hearts, spent his free time practicing knots and making small models of the ships he hoped one day to captain.

During the week the Sun’s Vengeance was in port, T.’s Petta spent almost every waking moment studying her. He queued for hours with one of his fathers for a chance to walk her deck, then ducked lessons the next day to do it again. For an eighth quartering he bought a hasty charcoal sketch of the ship coming into the harbor, which he hung on on the wall next to the bed he shared with his older and younger brothers. Thirty years later, that same drawing (much folded and faded) would hang in his cabin on board the Unshadowed Land.

The Sun’s Vengeance was scheduled to spend two weeks in Jalkelainen, but left after only eight days. The official reason was that as she had come through her first storm so well, she didn’t need the time that had been allotted for refitting and repairs. Unofficially, of course, the whole city knew of the tension between her two erstwhile commanders. Both had posted several letters a day back to the capitol while in port; both were looking forward to presenting their side of the argument to the debates.

Aided by a strong following wind, and the Ocean’s currents, it took the ship only four days to reach Ruuda-in-Ruuda. She arrived an hour after sunset. Normal practice would have been to stand off and wait until daylight, but U.’s Yrjö ordered his marines to deploy the ship’s small skenren lans so that they could practice night-time navigation. This was a new maneuver for everyone involved: while fishing vessels often worked by lantern light, no one had ever tried to steer a vessel the size of the Sun’s Vengeance by the focused light of a skenren lans.

Perhaps surprisingly, K.’s Taavi agreed to the order. Some have suggested that he did so in the hopes that some mishap would occur that would discredit U.’s Yrjö, although it seems implausible that any captain as dedicated as K.’s Taavi would put his vessel at risk. More likely, Taavi simply wasn’t willing to seem a coward in front of a landlubber like U.’s Yrjö.

The astonished crew were therefore ordered to lay on bottom sails and out the sweeps. As the marines played the light of the skenren lans back and forth across the dark waters outside the harbor’s breakwater, K.’s Taavi bellowed orders to the gens scrambling about in the rigging and straining at the sweepstays on deck. Under a half-turned moon, she slid toward her berth.

Word of her arrival had of course already spread through the city. Hundreds of gens were waiting for her; unknown to K.’s Taavi, dozens more had taken to small boats to escort her home. Among them was a scull with eight cobblers’ apprentices on board, all of whom had been drinking for several hours by the time the Sun’s Vengeance entered the harbor. One of them proposed that they should “board” the Sun’s Vengeance and “claim” her for their commonalty. Shuttering their one lantern, they rowed alongside the warship, slipped under her great sweeps, and took hold of one of the lines laid over the side in preparation for making fast. A heartbeat later, five of the apprentices clambered onto the ship’s deck, seized two startled marines, and declared that they were taking the Sun’s Vengeance as a prize.

Unbeknownst to them, U.’s Yrjö had secretly ordered the marines to arrest K.’s Taavi while the ship’s crew were busy making fast after docking. Thinking that their plan had been uncovered, and that the sailors were launching a preemptive attack, the marines drew their swords. Amidst cries of treachery and betrayal, the two sides fell upon one another. U.’s Yrjö and K.’s Taavi both called for calm, but to no avail.

By the time order was restored, two of the five apprentices who had boarded the Sun’s Vengeance lay dead on her deck, along with one of her crew, and a double dozen marines and sailors had been badly injured. In full view of a bewildered and horrified city, Yrjö and Taavi were both arrested and led away to jail in a collar and chains.

The trial began two days later. In accordance with the rules of procedure passed by the Second Debate—the most liberal in all of Cherne—neither the accused nor his accusers were put to the nightmare beforehand. In addition, both sides were allowed free access to all of Ruuda’s laws: in the absence of an established nobility (and in the face of bitter opposition from those who wished to take on that role), the Second Debate had also decided against Regimental-style rental of laws.

The confusion and contradiction of the proceedings highlighted the immature state of Ruuda’s young judicial system. K.’s Taavi argued that he had followed orders by bringing the Sun’s Vengeance into harbor at night. He had not put armed marines on the ship’s deck, “…for what purpose one may only surmise,” he added darkly, alluding to the claims flying through the streets that U.’s Yrjö had been organizing a mutiny, or (more preposterous still) planning to steal the Sun’s Vengeance and raise the red flag of piracy.

Ah, came the response, but if his excuse was that he was only following orders, then was he not acknowledging that U.’s Yrjö was in fact his commander, even when the ship was under way? In which case, was not his earlier mutiny the incident’s true cause? But then, if U.’s Yrjö was in fact K.’s Taavi’s commander, then the apprentices’ deaths were his fault after all, were they not?

At this point, three days into the proceedings, the hapless judge⁵⁰ suspended the trial. “As public order is put at risk by these proceedings,” he wrote:

…and as both parties have evidenced the essential weakness of their arguments by stooping to the indignity of rhetorical questioning, this matter shall be placed in abeyance until the laws pertaining thereunto shall be clarified.

In effect, the judge had ruled that the Recurrent Debate (as Ruuda-in-Ruuda’s governing body now styled itself) would have to decide what exactly what division of powers it had intended. Since the Debate had already recessed for the long Ruudian winter, that left K.’s Taavi, U.’s Yrjö, and their respective supporters in limbo for five months.

They were the busiest of Perguuran’s life. All his political credit was in the holds of the Sun’s Vengeance and her sister ships; if the expedition sank (physically or metaphorically), so would his career. He therefore spent the winter in a virtuoso whirlwind of lobbying, cajoling, threatening, blustering, begging, and bargaining. He tightened his grip on the capitol’s chapter of Pure Light, which in effect became little more than a mount for his political will. With that secure, he temporarily set aside its longstanding opposition to Vaardian autonomy in exchange for its delegation’s support for a military academy on Regimental lines. None but the naive were surprised when U.’s Yrjö was appointed its first superintendent, a post which automatically gave him a lectern in the Debate.

The fifth session of Ruuda’s Recurrent Debate opened on Peridot 7, 1109, a rainy, wind-lashed Redsday. With the cries of fishmongers faintly audible in the distance, two hundred and seventy three⁵¹ solemn gens ascended the Sunlit Steps and entered the country’s newly refurbished debating chamber for the first time. Once a theater, it still smelled of the pine scaffolding that had been cleared away the night before.

Wearing a pure white wool coat and kilt, knee-high leather boots polished to a mirror-like gleam, and a rich bearskin cloak, A.’s Perguuran took his place at the principal lectern and welcomed the assembled debaters. His opening speech was rousing, and occasionally ribald; several of those present recorded in diaries that while he didn’t actually say anything, he did so in great style.

He most particularly didn’t say anything about resuming the trial of K.’s Taavi, because by this point there was no need. A month before, three seagens had risen in front of a carefully picked judge and testified that their vessels had been attacked by the Circular Key between YS 1093 and 1095. The ship’s name was important: she had been K.’s Taavi’s. So too was the fact that the attacks had happened after the start of the Fifth Rebellion, when (according to the judge) “…all patriotic persons should have felt a duty to rally to the cause of the living.” A literal interpretation of that ruling would make most Ruudians over the age of thirty traitors, but that was unimportant: all that mattered was that it made K.’s Taavi a pirate in the eyes of the law.

“A captain’s first responsibility is to give orders,” K.’s Taavi wrote in a letter published later. “Gar second is to know which way the wind is blowing, and stay off the rocks.” No warrant had yet been issued for him, but it would clearly not be long in coming. Some time in Chrysoprase, he slipped out of the city on board a west-bound laiva to return to the village of his birth. Wisely, A.’s Perguuran did not pursue, or even proclaim that where there was flight, there must be guilt. With the expedition firmly back under his control, he could afford to be magnanimous.

The Light’s Justice left harbor for the first time in the first week of Topaz 1109. The Bright Sword’s Edge joined her at the end of Chalcedony: too late for a long inaugural cruise, but close enough to her planned launch date to give Perguuran and the resurgent Admirals a boost. Tattoos of the three ships sailing side-by-side were briefly fashionable, and when a brewer named Dutta’s Naameda gave birth to triplets, there was no question what names they would be given.⁵²

It later seemed to many of the Debaters who stayed in Ruuda-in-Ruuda that winter that outfitting the small fleet was the city’s major business that winter. Fights between sailors for the honor of being in their crews, and between soldiers anxious for a place in their berths, became so common that Ruuda-in-Ruuda’s governing council reserved two afternoons a week for them in the city’s gymnasia. Tons of supplies were donated by well-wishers; to everyone’s surprise, it appeared that almost none was sold out a side door. In a rare moment of brilliance, U.’s Yrjö ordered that everything that was not going to be taken with the expedition be brought aboard the ships at least once before being redistributed to charity, so that even the city’s poorest could proudly claim to have worn, eaten, slept under, or bathed with something “from the fleet”.

“Let Ruuda’s strength be a light to the world” was everyone’s toast as the tenth anniversary of the end of the Fifth Rebellion approached. Timbers brought into the city for the fleet were already being sawn in preparation for another busy season of shipbuilding; plans were already being drawn for a whole fleet of taistela that would make Ruuda the preeminent naval power of the age. Meanwhile, in the city archives, scores of foreign and native-born scholars kept searching the records of the preceding six centuries for any clues they might contain about the nature of the Pale Remainder.

Throughout all this, anyone who questioned the wisdom of making plans and preparations so publicly was wise to keep their doubts to themselves. “I heard this day a stranger in a tavern say that an expedition alone was insufficient, and that Ruuda should have its goal to plant a colony where now stands Bell Prison,” J.’s Maatenala grumbled in his diary. “In answer came only cheers, which did quickly become a brawl as one ginger-haired drunkard asked why Bell Prison, and not Vaarda?”

Everyone took 1110’s early spring as a good omen—everyone, that is, except U.’s Yrjö. An early spring meant stronger storms; it could also push the Ocean’s major clockwise current closer to the mainland, and (most worryingly) closer to Sullair. His captains proposed route after route, each basing gar arguments on the maps that suited gen most. “I have as more need an ælfwif than navigators,” he confessed in a private letter to Perguuran, groaning aloud and tearing at his hair when the city’s constabulary showed up at the docks the next morning with a double dozen such fortune tellers for him to choose from.

At last the day came: Peridot 9, YS 1110. Each ship carried a crew of one hundred and twenty, eighty marines, and thirty horses, plus tons of supplies: salted fish and hard cheese, cured apples brought in by the barrelful from Derway, linen for bandages, a forge complete with a ton of charcoal, timbers for making repairs, and of course, a skenren lans. Each towed a single-masted cutter capable of carrying fourteen gens, which was to be used for reconnaissance, and for travel between ship and shore. Each also had four oared longboats, a single catapult, and two heavy ballistae capable of throwing an iron-headed quarrel weighing twenty lard more than a gallop (though with middling accuracy).

With drums pounding and pipes skirling, the three ships’ crews marched on board. Resplendent in spotless white uniforms at the bow of the Sun’s Vengeance, U.’s Yrjö and his staff gravely returned the salutes of the Debaters and citizens who had crowded onto the docks (which a forward-thinking harbormaster had reinforced over the winter for exactly this moment). Heaving at their oars, the harbor yardies in their sculls pulled the ships one by one into the main current of the Kypsyva, which carried them slowly to the Ocean. The First Expedition was under way.