On the working of the world-blood

On the working of the world-blood

We come now to the substance itself: the great matter all our argument circles.

Cultures name it many things. For this writing only, we have adopted the world-blood, after the folk usage. The southern academies prefer gravitas; the mountain-smiths, the lode; the mariners, the deep-pull. The recovered glyphs gesture at the Bearing. They speak of the same thing.

The world-blood is what gives heavy things their heaviness. It concentrates where matter has been worked, and scatters when those concentrations fail. It does not move of itself. It is moved by those who can move it.

Working the world-blood requires both material and craft. We have catalogued six materials with confidence: metals, blood, bone, crystals, the stones of older ages, and direct draw from the under-place. We have catalogued five crafts: smelting, the inscriber’s writing, the red work, the augur’s reading, and the going-below. There may be others. There were certainly others in older ages, some recovered as fragments from ruins. At least one, we believe, survives today only as a single practitioner in a kingdom we will not name in this letter — for which courtesy we expect to be forgiven by the man himself.

Every working costs. The world-blood moved is the world-blood spent. The mishandled draw burns the practitioner; substrate-burns are visible on his arms or his neck or his face, depending on his discipline. The over-large working pulls more than the worker can hold, and the worker pays the difference, often in years of his life. The under-place is the limit case: those who draw from it directly do not remain who they were. Whether this is a punishment or a transaction we cannot say. The under-place keeps its own books.

We are obliged, with reluctance, to note something that has troubled the correspondence for years. In every kingdom we have walked, persistent rumours speak of workers who have pushed beyond the ordinary disciplines and been changed by what they reached for: heavier, slower, stranger, sometimes physically remade, sometimes simply no longer recognisable to those who knew them. The folk-tales call such workers by many names and offer many explanations. We have collected what we can. The accounts share certain marks — the worker grows quieter, the worker becomes harder to be near, the worker eventually disappears from the kingdom they were known in. Whether they died of the work, were killed for it, were exiled, or passed into some condition the folk-tales have not yet named, we have not been able to determine. We have seen the deaths of those who tried. We have not, with our own eyes, witnessed any clear outcome of what the rumours describe.

[A note in a different hand, on a separate page bound into the correspondence: “The southern compiler is too cautious for my taste. I attended the funeral of one whose final workings I had cause to know were unlike any other I have witnessed. Years later, in a place I will not name, I saw something I cannot describe and would not connect by argument to her or to her workings; but the thing was there, and I have not been able to dismiss it. I cannot prove anything by what I saw, and a witness one cannot prove is a witness one ought not to circulate. I do not write more for fear of who reads this.” — A.]

This correspondence is, in three kingdoms we know of, sufficient cause for the writer’s imprisonment. We have lost members to such kingdoms. We continue to write. We are stubborn, and the work seems to us too useful to abandon out of plain cowardice.