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, and in every register’s heresy, persistent rumours hold of a path of power climbing beyond ordinary mastery. Workers who follow it are said to become heavy, then strange, then — if the rumours hold — no longer mortal. We have seen the deaths of those who have tried. We have not, with our own eyes, seen one succeed. We do not know what to believe.

[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 I had cause to believe walked further than any of us. Years later I stood, in a place I will not name, at the foot of something I cannot describe and would not call by her name; but I cannot prove anything by it, 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.