In the deep places of the world there has always slept a fire older than the mountains that hold it — a Drake of no scale and claw, but of pure unmaking, coiled since the shaping of the earth in seams of stone no plough has ever turned. Wise-folk of many kindreds had long known that this Fire-Drake could be woken, if one had the lore and the daring; but few until the latter days had dared to wake it, and fewer still had reckoned what it would cost to put it back to sleep once it had opened its eye.
For a score of years the Free Realms of the West woke the Drake beneath open sky, upon towers of timber and iron, and let its breath go wherever the wind willed it. It became plain to all, even to kings and councillors who had rather not have seen it, that the Drake's breath did not stay where it was loosed. It walked on the wind to farms and fishing-boats a thousand leagues off, and it did not ask leave. And so in the fullness of time the Three Kingdoms of that age — the West, and the Realm of the Rising Iron in the East, and the old Sea-Throne of the Isles — set their hands to a Covenant: that from thenceforth the Drake would be woken only in the deep earth, and never suffered to breathe beyond the borders of the realm that woke him.
This is easier sworn than done. This chronicle — which I did not compose, nor did I do a single day's labor at the caging itself — is the telling, in their own voices so far as I could keep them, of the loremasters, the dwarf-wrights, the elf-wardens, and the plain stouthearted diggers who took that oath upon themselves and set out to learn, mostly by getting it wrong, how a Drake might be caged in stone and not merely goaded into biting through it. I have only put their words into the shape of an old tale, because I believe such a tale, of ordinary folk wrestling with a thing too large for any one of them to fully understand, deserves to be told as a tale, and not left to molder as a ledger.
The old records from which this chronicle is drawn belong, by ancient custom, to all the folk of the Realm, freely to be copied and retold.
— Caradoc the Chronicler
set down at midsummer, in the year of the Long Peace
Brannor Stonehand, a dwarf of the Deep Forges who in his latter years sat as Warden of the Caging Council, spoke thus at a gathering of loremasters:
It has been said there is no such thing as history, only the lives of those who lived it. If that is true, then the tale of how we came to cage the Drake is nothing more nor less than the tale of the people who did it — their guesses, their beliefs, their triumphs, their blunders, and their odd small habits. Knowing them, we might come to understand how we came to believe and to labor as we now do, and whence that belief arose.
Even in the earliest days, when only a scant handful of us gave any thought to the caging at all, the matter was already so tangled, and the two great forge-houses of the West pursued it along such separate and jealous paths, that no one telling could ever gather the whole truth of it.
This chronicle, Brannor said, is an attempt at that impossible gathering nonetheless. It is not a book of formulae or of the runes that engineers scratch on their slates — those may be found elsewhere, in the dry ledgers of the Forges. Here there are only memories, and memories are known to be faulty; opinions, which are known to shift with the wind; and stories, which — as every teller of tales knows — grow taller with each retelling. Taken together, though, Brannor believed they might show something true of how his people came to stand where they stood.
He confessed one regret: that the written word cannot hold the tone of the spoken one — the laughter, the exasperation, the plain sincerity — with which these tales were first told to him around a hundred different hearths. All of that, he said, is muted on the page. He could only try, in setting each teller briefly in their own place and time, to let a little of the person survive along with the words.
As for himself, Brannor had come down from the mountain forges as a young smith to work beside a certain Master Ionwe on what he was told, vaguely, was "a small undertaking." He thought it might have to do with binding fire for the warming of halls in winter, and for a while that was indeed his work. Then his household moved south to the second of the great Forges, and he learned that the "small undertaking" was in truth the founding of a second stronghold devoted, like the first, to the waking and study of the Drake's own fire for the making of weapons of dreadful power. Within a handful of years that stronghold held thousands of hands at its bellows, and Brannor found himself drawn ever deeper into the caging of what those hands had learned to wake.
He could say, from long friendship, that every voice quoted in this chronicle belonged to a dedicated soul who had grappled with the Drake and, in the end, caged him — uneasily, and only because they never lost their sense of their own limits while doing it. He was careful to say caged, and never tamed, for they knew, as all who came after must know, that whenever the Drake is woken he is there still, as strong, as cunning, and as dangerous as on the very first morning he opened his eye. Those who might one day be called to wake him again would do well to remember it. The strength let loose by even the least of his breaths lies utterly beyond the measure of ordinary folk — beyond all save, perhaps, those unhappy souls who once stood nearest when his fire was first unloosed upon a living city.
The craft of caging the Drake's breath exists at all only because, for a long stretch of years, the Free Realms and their rival powers took to waking him beneath the earth rather than beneath the sky. And the caging is a harder art than it sounds, for it draws on many crafts at once — stonelore, waterlore, firelore, and the deep patient mathematics of the loremasters — all woven together in conditions that no forge or furnace above ground has ever produced.
The living rock, down to the depth of a mile or so where such wakings are done, is no single substance but a thousand substances stitched together — hard here, crumbling there, dry in one gallery and weeping water in the next — and the pattern changes from the length of a dwarf's arm to the length of a league, in ways no map has ever fully caught. To know the stone perfectly before waking the Drake within it would take more digging and more years than any realm could spare; so the loremasters must make their best guesses, write them into their calculating-engines, and hope.
Nor is that the only difficulty. What happens in that first heartbeat after the waking, and what happens in the slow hour after, and what happens in the long afterward of days — these unfold at such different speeds that different tools and different lore must be used for each, and then stitched together again into one picture, like three tapestries meant to be read as one.
In such straits, the memory of what has gone before — of every waking that came before this one — becomes precious beyond gold. That memory has been bought dearly, sometimes at ruinous cost, and it does not pass easily from the old hands who hold it to the young hands who will one day be given the terrible privilege of waking the Drake themselves, drawing forth what can be learned from him, and — in one and the same breath — caging him again before he can stir beyond the borders of the realm. May this chronicle, should such a day ever come again, be of some small use to them.
To speak of caging, one ought first to know what caging is — and here the chronicler must confess there is no single answer, no rune carved in stone that all loremasters agree upon. Like many things bound up with the councils of kings, caging is very much whatever the reigning Council says it is on a given day, which is to say it can, and does, change with the seasons of power.
There is, at least, the Covenant of the Three Kingdoms, sworn in a hall of parley between envoys of the West, the Realm of the Rising Iron, and the old Sea-Throne. Its first article bound each of the Three never to wake the Drake — whether in war-craft or in the search for lore — anywhere under their dominion, if the waking should send the Drake's breath drifting beyond their own borders. Fair words, and easy enough to swear to; but buried in that single clause lay a puzzle that would occupy loremasters for a generation. What, precisely, counted as the Drake's breath? Was it every trace of his passing, however faint and however swiftly it dispersed upon the wind — the invisible vapors that harm no one and settle nowhere? Or only the heavier soot and cinder that a person might stoop down and gather in a jar, the true wreckage of a waking? On the answer hinged whether a wisp of vapor drifting across a border, undetected by any watcher, was an oathbreaking at all — for as the old saying went among the border-wardens, a thing that is never seen to cross a boundary is very hard to prove to have crossed it.
So it was, in the years before the Covenant, that the Realms went on waking the Drake in the open air, upon towers built for the purpose, or slung beneath great tethered balloons, or borne aloft by winged craft to be loosed at whatever height the loremasters wished. Each way had its trade — a tower let the watchers see closely what the fire did in its first instant, but towers were slow to raise and the fire, once loosed, answered to no leash of timber. A balloon or a winged craft could be readied swiftly, but gave the watchers no fixed vantage from which to see.
In those early days, the folk who woke the Drake believed, as did the smiths and tanners of the ordinary world who fouled their rivers with the leavings of their trade, in an old and comfortable untruth:
The cure for poison is a bigger river.
If the Drake's breath fouled the air near at hand, the thinking ran, then simply loose him somewhere with more sky to swallow the fouling, and let it thin to nothing before it could do harm. It took years, and cost, and outcry from ordinary folk before anyone in power seriously entertained the notion that the fouling ought to be stopped at its source rather than merely diluted downwind of it.
Wakings were held first upon far island-atolls in the Sundering Sea, with grim war-fleets anchored offshore to study what the Drake's fire would do to hulls of oak and iron. Later a stronger foothold was built there, so that wakings might follow one upon another without rebuilding an entire camp each time. But such island-work was costly beyond reckoning — it demanded fleets, and armies of hands to raise camps and towers, and voyages of a year or more merely to prepare a single test.
A certain war in a far eastern march, and the muster it called for, gave the Council of the West cause to seek a nearer ground — some stretch of the homeland desert where lesser wakings might be tried without the cost and delay of the sea-voyage. So it was that a loremaster of great foresight, Aldor the Farsighted, was sent up in a small winged craft to look for such a place.
With leave granted to test upon the homeland desert, matters moved swiftly, and wakings followed one another in a matter of days rather than years. And it was here that the first shadow fell across the bright assumption that a bigger sky would always be dilution enough — for the breath of one such waking drifted on the high winds until it fell, as snow falls, upon a city many hundreds of leagues distant, and was there measured by watchers who had never expected to find it.
For a decade thereafter there was no Covenant, and for the first years of testing on the homeland desert there was no thought given to caging at all, in any sense a later age would recognize. But trouble crept closer with each passing season. In one great muster of wakings, towers bore fires larger than any tried there before, and both left their mark beyond the bounds meant to hold them: townsfolk in a nearby settlement were bidden to shelter indoors through the heat of one morning as the Drake's cloud passed overhead, rain fell tainted with cinder upon a distant town, and flocks of sheep grazing in the path of the fallen ash sickened and died, giving rise to grief and to lawsuits both. The plain folk of the Realm began, for the first time, to understand what manner of thing was being loosed in their name.
Then came the waking that shook the whole world's attention: a fire of fifteen leagues' reckoning — vaster by far than any before it — loosed above a lonely atoll, whose breath drifted eighty leagues to catch a small fishing vessel unlooked-for in its path. The vessel's crew came home sick unto death, and one did not survive his sickness; and hundreds of islanders and watchers on other ships, far from the place of waking, were touched by the falling ash as well. From that day the Drake's breath was no longer a matter for one Realm alone to fret over. Rulers of distant lands called for an end to all such wakings, and the old comfortable silence of the Council on the matter of harm began, unwillingly, to crack open.
By the middle years of that age, certain loremasters of the eastern Forge — Tellurion and Grigor foremost among them — set down upon a single scroll a thought that would, in time, remake the whole craft: that the Drake might be woken not upon a tower in open sky at all, but deep beneath the earth, sealed in stone, so that his breath need never reach the sky in the first place. Their reckoning held that a burial of some thousand feet of solid rock would suffice to hold in a lesser waking entire, with scarcely a wisp escaping; that the strength of the waking might still be read from afar by the shivering of the earth itself; and that the long peril of the Drake's leavings, buried deep and sealed, would fade to nothing over time. They urged that the very next muster of wakings include one small trial, buried "at such a depth that it will be contained."
At the western Forge, Aldor the Farsighted had already come to the selfsame reckoning by his own road: that if wakings were to continue upon the homeland ground at all, they must in time all be carried down beneath the earth. No one had ever done such a working before. No loremaster knew how large a hollow the fire would carve in the living stone, nor how deep a burial might be trusted to hold, nor what shivering the earth itself would suffer, nor a hundred other things besides. And so Aldor turned to a young engineer of great and careful mind — Brannor Stonehand himself — and bid him puzzle out, upon slate and abacus, what might happen should the Drake be woken far below the ground.
The earliest true trials of a buried waking followed soon after, deep-cased in narrow shafts, without so much as a stone stopper set above the fire — and the sight, by all accounts, was a wonder and a terror both: a great plume of blue flame roaring up out of the bare ground like the world's largest candle, visible for leagues in the night sky, while the watchers who had lit it fled their post not quite certain which way was safest. Yet for all its show, the buried waking left only a tenth of the fouling upon the ground that an open tower would have left — and a tenth was, to weary folk who had grown used to counting every grain of cinder, a triumph worth celebrating. Further trials followed with stone stoppers set above the fire, then two stoppers, then a stopper laid directly atop the Drake himself — each refinement squeezed a little more of his breath back down into the dark where it had been woken.
By the final season before the Covenant was sworn, both Forges had tried their hand at a fuller caging — the western Forge digging galleries deep into a mountain's flank to wake the Drake within stone chambers built and instrumented like a hall of parley, the eastern Forge sinking shafts and setting stoppers of ever more careful design. Some of these trials held their fire entire. One, meant to be the merest whisper of a waking, instead tore open the face of a mountain in a burst far beyond anything foreseen, and the loremasters who had lit it — with a cheerfulness some might call shameless — declared it not a failure at all, but the very first trial of a new craft: the deliberate cratering of stone by dragon-fire, a working with its own uses after all.
And then, at the stroke of midnight on the last day of that season, by solemn word passed between the Three Kingdoms, all open wakings ceased. One fire hung still suspended beneath its balloon, readied and expected, when the hour struck — and by the word of a captain who judged the risk to a nearby town too great to run, it was never lit at all, but lowered unfired back to the earth, the last dragon-breath of that age left forever unloosed.
The first waking ever undertaken with the whole and single purpose of caging the Drake entire — of letting not so much as a wisp of his breath reach the open sky — was wrought deep within the flank of a mountain the loremasters called Rainer, in a gallery driven far back beneath the stone. It was, in the reckoning of that craft, a small working — no mightier than need be to prove the thing could be done at all. And when the hour came, and the fire was lit, and the watchers held their breath at the mountain's mouth — nothing came out. No cloud. No cinder on the wind. For the first time since the Drake had ever been woken by the hand of the free peoples, his breath had been caged entire, and the sky above the mountain remained as clean as it had been the day before.
The tale of how that first true caging came to be attempted at all belongs chiefly to an elf-loremaster of the western Forge named Ionwe, who in those days bore charge of all its wakings.
Word of the coming trial reached the ears of the loremasters of earth-lore and star-lore who dwelt beyond the Forges — folk who study the shivering of the ground itself, as a healer studies a pulse — and some among them urged that the working be made known beforehand, its size and place declared openly, so that all such loremasters everywhere might learn from the shiver it sent through the deep stone of the world. Ionwe and his companions agreed, and swore to hold the hour of the waking to within the beat of a heart, and published time and place for any who wished to listen.
It was, in the fullness of hindsight, altogether too generous a gesture. Word of "a fire that shakes mountains" reached a gathering of earth-loremasters in a distant hall, and some overeager tongue there let slip a phrase — that the western Forge meant to wake an earthquake — which flew from mouth to mouth until it reached the ears of the High Steward of the Council himself.
A council of earth-sages was gathered to weigh the matter, among them a soft-spoken stranger to the western Forge named Roldan, whom none of Ionwe's folk knew at all, and whose silence through the long deliberations left Ionwe half convinced the trial was already lost.
Even with the Steward's seal won, the trial was not yet safe from those who opposed it nearer home. On the very eve of the waking, a rider came from a neighboring lord's hall bearing a writ commanding the Forge to halt the working altogether, and swearing that lordship would hold the Council to account for any harm done to roads or bridges or fields within its borders. The steward of the desert lands, forewarned, found urgent and entirely genuine business at the far end of his lands that same evening, and could not be found to receive the writ at all.
The night before the waking, a company of counselors skilled in the lore of mountains and buried fire met for one last review of the whole design. All agreed: let it proceed. Yet even so, in the last hour before dawn, one among that company — a scholar of shock and tremor named Fram Porzel — came to Ionwe pale with unease.
And it held. When the hour struck, the mountain did not stir, no cloud rose from its flank, and no cinder touched the sky. The sandbags and the single sealing door of stone — a plain and simple design, by later reckoning almost too simple — did their work entire. It was, Ionwe would say long after, more good fortune than good judgment; but it worked, and because it worked, the whole craft of caging was born from that single night, in the very last season before all open wakings ceased for an age. Had the trial failed, or had it been delayed past that narrow window, Ionwe believed the craft of underground caging might never have been proven at all before the long peace fell — and without that proof already in hand, no one can say whether it would ever have been attempted again.
In the long stillness of the years that followed, when no new fires were woken anywhere in the Three Kingdoms, the loremasters of the western Forge turned back to the mountain of Rainer and dug their way, with great patience and greater danger, into the very heart of the hollow the Drake's fire had carved. It fell to Ionwe's companion in lore, a keen-eyed scholar of ash and cinder named Gareth, to lead that digging, and to puzzle out at last what truly lay within.
The digging itself proved a labor as fraught as the waking had been. The diggers hired to bore back into the mountain were, by trade, wanderers who went where the work was, and rumor ran ahead of them through every camp and hall: that the hollow held steam hot and pressed enough to burst a mountain, that any crew who broke through to it would be scorched to nothing, that the fire's poison lingered there undying. Small wonder, then, that the boring crept forward by inches though the drills turned without ceasing, week upon week, for the diggers — Gareth came to suspect — turned their bits without ever quite pressing them home.
Nearly a full year after the fire had first been woken, the diggers broke at last, unlooked-for, into the true heart of the hollow — and found no scorching, no burst of steam, only a cavern of tumbled black stone, warm but not deadly, and, deeper still, threads and beads of glass that had once been molten and had cooled hanging, as a drop of water hangs before it falls. From the very shape of those glass beads, Gareth and his fellows reasoned backward to a truth no reckoning on any slate had told them: that after the fire's first violence, the hollow had stood open and still for some minutes — long enough for molten stone to begin cooling into hanging drops — before the roof above at last gave way and came tumbling down to fill it. It was, Gareth said afterward, a strange comfort to learn that even the Drake, in the moment after his waking, held a kind of pause — a held breath — before the mountain closed back over him.
From measurements of steam bound fast within that recovered glass, and old tables of lore concerning how much vapor a molten stone will hold at a given pressure, the loremasters reckoned the pressure within the hollow at the moment of its stillness, and found it near enough to the plain weight of the stone above to seem no accident at all. From this grew the first working guess of the whole craft — crude, and wrong in more ways than its makers then knew, but useful beyond all measure — that a caged hollow will grow only until the pressure within it settles level with the weight of earth pressing down from above. Upon that single guess, more than upon any other single thought, the whole later craft of caging the Drake was built.
Thus ends the second chapter of this chronicle.
What followed — the long labor of the Moratorium years, the return of the Drake's waking, and the many griefs and triumphs yet to come — is set down, in its turn, in the chapters that follow.
Now it came to pass, after the Trial of Rainier, that a great stillness fell upon the Two Houses, and this stillness the loremasters called the Long Silence, for in those years no fire was loosed openly upon the Ashen Vale, neither by the House of Anvilfast in the western mountains, nor by the Greenhall of Silvermere beyond the ridge. Three years the Silence held, and in that time much was learned in secret that would not be told for many years after, and much also was lost that could never afterward be found again.
For the folk of Anvilfast are a dwarvish people, close-mouthed and proud of their deep-delving, and they did not idle in the Long Silence, whatsoever the world believed. In the hollow country called Ta-Forty-Nine they dug their shafts in secret, and down those shafts they lowered small workings of fire, no greater than a smith's hottest forge multiplied a thousandfold, and they touched them off, and listened, and watched the stemming — the packed rubble and stone that was meant to hold the shaft's mouth shut — and time and again the stemming fell in upon itself, a little while after the firing, like a chimney collapsing into its own hearth. It was in this secret toil that old Brannock Stonewise, who had been sent by the Elder of Anvilfast to ponder what fire loosed beneath the earth might do, first came to know the anatomy of a collapsing shaft, and first came to love — if love is the word — the strange slow violence of a chimney's fall.
Said Brannock, long after: "Few enough of my own kin knew what we did in those years. Westerfelt knew, and Newman, and Campbell, and I, and a handful more, and we told no others, not even our own brothers at the forge. We reckoned four hundred feet of good stone, raised to the one-third power of the fire's strength in kilo-measure, would hold — and it did hold, though none had bidden us reckon it so. We had, without any lord's decree, already resolved in our own hearts that containment meant this: not one mote of the Dragon's breath should escape. No one commanded that of us. We simply knew it must be so."
And it is a curious thing, and worth setting down, that the folk of Anvilfast scorned the Wormways — for so they named, with more contempt than courtesy, the long tunnels that the elf-lords of Silvermere loved to bore into the living rock, where a fire might be walked to on foot rather than dropped down a shaft. It was told among the dwarves that old Thane Norrendil, lord of Anvilfast, was once led by the folk of Silvermere down into their Wormways during the Long Silence, rattling in a little cart through the dark and the wet and the noise of picks, and that when he came out again into the daylight he said only, "My folk will never labor under such conditions," and turned his cart-wheels homeward, and that was the end of tunnels at Anvilfast for a generation. Whether this tale be true in every particular, none can now say with certainty, but it was told, and it was believed, and it shaped much that followed.
Meanwhile, far off across the water, in a hold called the Sunless Watch, the elf-folk who kept a like order under a different banner had fallen into a strange and bitter idleness, for their masters saw no fire to be lit and so saw no purpose in their loremasters, and paid them, and left them to rot in empty halls.
Said Wouters of Silvermere, who journeyed there and saw it with his own eyes: "You think we were badly off. I tell you, there was hardly an office in that whole hold that was not haunted by some listless wraith of a scholar, sitting, waiting for the wheel of fortune to turn. It taught me a hard lesson, which I never forgot: if you have nothing worth doing for good folk to do, then release them to other labors, and call them back when the need is great again. Do not let them sit and rot. They will thank you for it, and serve you better besides."
So passed the Long Silence, until in the ninth month of its third year, word came flying out of the East that the rival power beyond the sea had broken the peace and loosed upon the open sky a fire of fifty megaton-measure and more — a fire so vast it beggared reckoning, a very sun kindled and unbound above the earth. And the High King of the Western Realm, hearing this, was wroth beyond patience, and sent word to Anvilfast demanding: how soon can you answer this? And the dwarves, who alone of the Two Houses had kept their shafts stocked and ready against just such a day — though they named it readiness, and not prophecy — answered that a small fire could be readied within the week. And so it was, though all present understood well enough that no small fire kindled in a narrow shaft could truly answer a sun unloosed upon the open sky; it was, as old Brannock said afterward, no fitting exchange in kind, but it was what could be done, and swiftly, and that mattered more than its measure.
Thus the Long Silence broke, and the fires returned to the Ashen Vale — first a small working of the Greenhall's called Antler, lit within a tunnel-way, and hard upon its heel a working of Anvilfast's called Shrew, lit within a shaft. And both leaked. Indeed, of the first eleven fires kindled after the Long Silence, every one let some breath of the Dragon loose into the world above, whether felt at the boundary-stones or only within the Vale itself. It was a hard schooling, and it taught the loremasters of both Houses that the caging of the Dragon was no trifling craft to be mastered once and set aside, but a labor that must be learned anew with every working, for the Dragon does not forget his old tricks, and finds new ones besides.
Among the follies and the wonders of those years, none is stranger than the tale of the Star-Pipe, which the loremasters of Silvermere devised in their eagerness to taste the Dragon's blood before ever the earth had cooled around him. For it seemed to them a great waste of time and craft to wait, as the old way required, until the fire had done its work and the stone had cooled and hardened, and only then to bore down through solid rock in search of the molten relic — when instead, they reasoned, a hollow pipe might be sunk straight and true from the surface down into the very chamber where the working was to be lit, so that the instant the fire was loosed, its breath might rush up the pipe and be caught, fresh and hot, in a waiting vessel above.
It was a clever thought, and on one working, called Gnome, the pipe was bored so straight and so true that a man might stand at the bottom of the chamber, before ever the fire was lit, and look up through ten inches of hollow shaft and see, though it were bright noon above, the pale ghosts of stars.
Said Heckman of Silvermere: "I saw them. I know men doubt me, but I stood at the bottom of that shaft and looked up, and I saw stars at noonday. Fortunately for us, when the fire was lit, the pipe sealed itself shut, though we had built it hoping it would not. Had it stayed open as we designed it, we might have had another Des Moines on our hands."
For it was on the workings called Eel and Des Moines that this eagerness to touch the Dragon too soon and too closely brought the Two Houses to grief. Loremasters wound their catching-pipes into ever more cunning shapes — helical coils, pipes packed with quick-burning tar-woods meant to hold the passage open just long enough to draw a sample and no longer — and on Des Moines this cleverness undid them utterly, for the pipe stayed open a heartbeat too long, and the full fury of the Dragon's breath came roaring up it, and the great sealed door meant to hold the tunnel's mouth was blown bodily from its hinges and hurled into the desert air, and a column of dust and fire rose twelve thousand feet into the sky and was seen from the watchtowers of the City of Lanterns many leagues away.
Said Heckman, of that day: "It became very clear to us then that you do not get just a little of the Dragon's breath. Once you have made your connection with him, he keeps blowing. He does not give a small gift and stop. He gives all, or he gives nothing, and there is no middle way to be bargained for."
And this saying passed into the lore of both Houses, and was repeated for a generation after, as a warning to any who grew too clever, or too greedy, in their eagerness to steal a taste of the Dragon's fire before his sleep was sure.
But of all the failures of that age, none left so deep a mark upon the craft of caging as the working called Pike, lit in the third month of a certain year in a shallow shaft no more than four hundred feet deep, where — unknown to those who laid the fire — a hidden vein of sand ran through the rock like an hourglass turned on its side, ever trickling, ever hollowing out the stone above it into a honeycomb of empty galleries.
Said Bass of Sandholm, who had sounded the hole with far-seeing crystals before ever the fire was lit: "My man Greenwald lowered his seeing-stone down the neighboring shafts, and he called to me and said, 'You have never in your life seen such a ruin. I let the stone down and it shows me nothing but cavern — a labyrinth of hollow ways, with no floor of sand at all, only tunnels within tunnels, all the way down.' We tried to choke that cavern with stemming, but we could not fill it. We knew, before ever the fire was lit, that the ground there was hollow as a rotten tooth, and that the working was doomed to vent."
And vent it did, spectacularly, so that word of its breath reached even the mirrored towers of a city many hundreds of leagues to the south, carried on some ill report that grew stranger with each telling. And when the lords of Anvilfast gathered afterward to reckon what had gone wrong, old Brannock stood before them and, as he later confessed, bared his own breast in shame, admitting freely all that had been left undone, all that had been guessed at rather than truly known.
Said Brannock: "After Pike we changed how we dealt with one another, the loremasters and the delvers and the smiths who made the fires. We said, never again shall one soul alone hold the whole truth of a working in his own head, trusting to memory and to who happened to be standing nearby when a question was asked. Never again shall we simply take the word of the fire-smiths as to how great their working would burn, without demanding they swear to it before us all, and show their reckoning. Pike taught us that bitter lesson, and it was a lesson worth the learning, though I would not wish to learn it twice."
Thus the Long Silence gave way to a harder age, in which the loremasters of both Houses began, however haltingly, to understand that the Dragon beneath the Ashen Vale was not a beast to be mastered once and forgotten, but a power that must be watched, and doubted, and never wholly trusted — no matter how many times he had been made to sleep quietly before.
As the years passed, the world grew ever less patient with any breath of the Dragon that escaped his cage, however small, and it became plain to the lords of both Houses that a labor which had once been the province of a few dedicated loremasters, working as they found time between other tasks, must now become a true and standing Order, with its own halls, its own rolls of membership, and its own voice at the councils of the great.
Said Olsen of Silvermere: "It was in the latter days of the Long Silence's aftermath that I was called in and asked whether I would take up this matter of Warding — of the caging of the Dragon — as my life's work. There had been leaks before, and mostly the world had shrugged and said, so what? But the loremasters minded very much, because all the fruits of their long labor were kept upon silver plates that blackened and were ruined if the Dragon's breath so much as brushed them. We did not much care, in those early days, whether a little breath crossed the boundary-stones. We cared a very great deal whether it ruined our silver plates."
Then came the working called Diluted Waters, whose venting, though modest beside others before and since, proved the final straw upon the backs of the High Council, who resolved that a reckoning must be made, and a proper Order of Warding established, that such matters should never again be left to chance and to whoever happened to be standing nearby with a question in mind.
Yet it was not Diluted Waters, nor any of the lesser breaches that came before, that at last forced the founding of a true and lasting Order. It was the working called Baneberry, lit in the depth of winter, that changed all things utterly, and stands in the chronicles as the watershed between the old careless age and the new age of vigilance.
Baneberry was fired in a shaft of no great remark, but some three minutes after the fire was loosed, a fissure opened in the earth above it — unlooked-for, unguarded — and through that fissure the Dragon's breath came roaring up in a black and boiling column that climbed twelve thousand feet into the winter sky, so that it was seen plainly from the watch-towers of the City of Lanterns many leagues distant. The winds, which had been read to carry any such breath harmlessly to the northeast, instead bore a portion of it westward, over a camp of folk who had not been warned in time to flee, and some among them were touched by the fire's shadow, and in later years brought their grievance before the courts of the Realm.
For six months after Baneberry, no fire at all was permitted in the Ashen Vale, while a great council — called, after its chief, the Vinceguerra Assize — sat in judgment upon all that had gone wrong, and out of that Assize was born the Circle of Assay, which the chronicles also name the Ring of Wardens: a standing council of loremasters drawn from both great Houses and from lesser holds besides, whose sole charge was to sit in judgment upon every working proposed, and to weigh whether the Dragon might truly be held, before ever a flame was struck.
Said Broyles of Sandholm, one of the first to sit upon that Ring: "We all understood there was a need, both a true need and a need to be seen to answer it, and there was much wrangling over just what words the founding charter should bear. But from the very first day, I believe the Ring took its charge seriously, as a true trial of craft and judgment, and not merely as a show put on for the comfort of the distant lords. Though I will say, some among us perhaps thought themselves surer of the earth's secrets than the earth ever permits any soul to be."
Within the Greenhall of Silvermere, a standing company of Warders had already been gathered some two years before Baneberry, born out of an earlier grief called Hupmobile, in which a whole treasury of silver record-plates was ruined by a breath that reached them from a badly-warded working.
Said Hudson of Silvermere: "After Hupmobile, my friend McMaster and I used to joke that surely this Warding business would not take more than two years to master, and then we could return to more interesting labors. We were wrong. It grew only more interesting, the longer we studied it, and it did not let us go for the rest of our working lives."
And Hudson, being asked why the Wardens of Silvermere had not been gathered sooner, when other and greater breaches than Hupmobile had gone before, answered with a hard and honest truth:
"In those earlier days, the Warding of a shaft was still under the hand of the Test-Master and his operations folk, and their whole heart was set upon a successful trial, not upon a perfect cage. We stood at their elbow, offering counsel, and if they judged our worries would not cost them dear in lost records, they set our counsel aside. It was not that no one cared for containment before Baneberry. It was that no one yet had the standing, nor the proof, to make their fears command attention. Today we must show why a fear is groundless. In those years, we had first to prove that any fear was justified at all — and that is a far harder thing to do, before the fact, than after."
So too at Anvilfast, though old Brannock had labored alone, or nearly alone, at the craft of Warding since the very earliest days of the deep shafts, it was not until after Baneberry that a true standing Order was raised up in the dwarf-halls, called by its founders simply the Ninth Company, for want of any better name, and Brannock himself was named its first Warden.
Said Brannock: "We formed the Company between the fall of Baneberry and the day we lit fire again. I had had one apprentice before that, a young fellow named Kelwyn, whom I had taken on some years earlier at Ogle's bidding, when he said to me, 'find someone, and teach them.' But before the Company was raised, containment was a scattered thing — a soul here, a soul there, each in his own hall, each supposed to mind the craft alongside his other labors. After Baneberry, we brought them together under one roof, and gave the work a name and a home, and that made all the difference."
Among those first gathered into the Ninth Company was a young dwarf named Ashwin House-ward, who till that winter morning had never so much as heard the word Warding spoken.
Said Ashwin: "I was waiting to fly homeward when I saw that grey and terrible cloud rising over the pass, and I did not know what it was, until Newman told me the Greenhall had suffered a very bad leak indeed. I could still see that cloud, far off, when we passed above the great Canyon many leagues distant. That was my first lesson in Warding, though I did not yet know the name of the craft I was about to be given."
The Ninth Company found itself, in those early days, without so much as a settled manner of presenting its own workings before the new Ring of Wardens, and so old Brannock himself would sit at the council table and simply read the written prospectus aloud, while his small company of apprentices sat in the gallery behind him, the whole of the Company numbering scarcely more than could be counted on two hands.
It must be told, for it is no small part of this history, that in those years a bitter coldness grew up between the Wardens of Anvilfast and the Wardens of Silvermere — a rivalry sharpened by pride, and by more than one shouting match at the council table itself, so fierce that two of the disputants were at last removed from the Ring altogether by its chief, and never sat there again.
Said Ashwin: "For the better part of a decade there was real acrimony between our two Houses — a settled, bitter 'those folk at Silvermere' attitude, and no doubt they held the like of us. It did not begin to mend until Larry, and after him Frank, took up the leadership of Silvermere's Company, and set themselves to easing the quarrel."
And the healing of that long feud began, as such healings often do, with a small and unlooked-for kindness: an invitation to sit, uninvited, at a rival's own council-fire, and afterward to share a meal at a rival's own hearth.
Said Ashwin: "The first true gesture of friendship came when the late Frank Morrison bid me sit in on one of Silvermere's private councils before their presentation to the Ring — a thing unheard of, letting the fox into the very henhouse! But I went, and it was good, though I confess I sat uneasy at first. Then that same evening he had me to his own hall for supper, with several of his own Wardens gathered there besides, and that, I think, was what truly broke the ice between our two Houses at last. We do not clasp hands and sing songs together, even now, but we speak honestly to one another, and when each House reviews the other's plans before ever they come to the Ring, we air our disagreements privately first, rather than in open and acrimonious council."
Beyond the Two Houses there stood also a third company, less settled than either, called by some the Farflung Watch, serving the distant Wardens of the Realm's own Legions rather than either great House, and it was among these that a loremaster named Locombe first came to feel the full weight of Warding's burden, in the years before any single soul was named responsible for it in his company at all.
Said Locombe: "By the year of Double Play, after three workings running had each betrayed us in turn, my lord Noyer came to me and said only, 'how long to raise a proper cap of stone above the chamber?' We raised it in five days. It served the Realm's safety, but truly, it did nothing at all to protect our own instruments, our own harvest of knowledge from the working. That came only later, and hard-won."
In time this third company gathered its own small ring of loremasters — a company of odd and various gifts, an engineer of flying craft here, a delver of stone there, a reckoner of numbers besides — and this gathering its members named, half in jest, the Lesser Circle of Stemming and Warding, and it was this small and motley band that at last turned the Farflung Watch's fortunes, and laid the true foundation of their Order.
It fell at last to Kelwyn — that same apprentice whom old Brannock had first taken up in the quiet years before Baneberry, and who had since gone to serve among the Farflung Watch as their first true Warden of Warding — to find the clearest image by which the whole craft might be taught to those who had not spent a lifetime learning it stone by stone.
Said Kelwyn: "I was speaking one day with a fellow loremaster, and the word 'vessel' came up between us, almost by chance, and I thought — yes, that is worth pondering. I sat down afterward and reasoned it through: we have, in truth, three vessels, nested one within the other, each standing guard behind the one within it, so that should the innermost fail, the next holds firm, and should that too be breached, the outermost yet remains. I wrote the whole teaching around that image of the three nested vessels, and to this day, I am told, the same words are still used to teach the youngest apprentices of the craft."
And so, out of grief and failure and long rivalry, the Warding-Orders of the Ashen Vale came at last into their true strength: three vessels nested each within the other, three watchful companies grown at last to trust one another's counsel, all set about the one purpose that had first stirred in old Brannock's heart in the quiet years of the Long Silence — that the Dragon beneath the earth, once caged, should stay caged, and that whatever fire must be lit in the dark should trouble the sunlit world above it not at all.
Here ends the retelling of the third and fourth chapters of the Caging of the Dragon. The tale continues, in the true chronicles, with the founding of the great Vale itself, and the long study of the earth's own hidden nature — matters fit for another telling.