The Record at Eerie Peak

Eerie Peak stopped sending for four years, which is not long in a hold and is a very long time in a ledger. Durrenhold eventually did what a confederation does when a trade partner goes quiet and still pays: it sent one dwarf with a warrant and instructions to look at the books.

Her name was Orla Bruntmark and she was a hundred and sixty years old, which in the assessing trade is considered early middle age and slightly too young to be trusted alone. The report she filed is nine pages long. Seven of them are inventory. The last two are why the passage to Eerie Peak is now four hundred feet of deliberate rubble, and why no dwarf in Thorgaz will discuss the place with a foreigner.

What she found first¶

She found a hold in good order.

That is the sentence her superiors underlined, and it is the sentence everyone who reads the report gets stuck on. The forges were lit. The lower cisterns were clean. The main road had been widened by a full cart in her absence and the widening was well done, joints tight, the new work keyed into the old the way it is supposed to be. She counted eleven hundred and six dwarves and the roll said eleven hundred and six.

Nothing was turned. She wrote that plainly, twice, because she knew what her superiors would assume and because it happens to be impossible. The rot does not enter a dwarf. It lies on the surface, finds nothing to widen, and runs off. Every dwarf in Valdrin knows this the way you know your own hands, and Orla Bruntmark went through Eerie Peak looking for the crack anyway, because she was an assessor and looking was the job.

She found it on the fourth day, in the Long Hall, which in Eerie Peak is the oldest wall and the whole of the hold's memory. Nine centuries of cut inscription running edge to edge: births, deaths, marriages, the two sieges, the completion of the water gallery, every arrival and every departure, the entire life of the place in a hand that changes every few generations and never once stops.

She read it, as any dwarf would, from the beginning.

The dating problem¶

The inscriptions are in order and the order is correct. My difficulty is that I read the wall on the fourth day of my visit and the wall records my departure on the ninth. It is cut in the same hand as the entries around it. It is cut to the same depth. It gives the hour.

Bruntmark, report to the Durrenhold assessors' bench, page seven

She did the sensible thing, which was to assume a prank, and then the second sensible thing, which was to assume a lie, and then she spent three days on the third thing, which was arithmetic.

The wall was ahead. Not by much and not always, at first. She worked backward through eleven years of entries and found the drift beginning quietly: a birth cut two days early, a delivery of ore recorded before the carts came in, a marriage inscribed a week before the couple had settled it between themselves. Small errors, the sort a busy mason makes and nobody corrects, because correcting a wall means cutting a wall.

Then the errors stopped being errors. By the fourth year the wall was running a full season ahead of the hold, and it had not been wrong once.

Why nobody left¶

A hold is a city and it is also a record, and dwarves do not really distinguish. The Long Hall is not a book about Eerie Peak. It is Eerie Peak, in the only form that will outlast everyone currently standing in it. Nothing on it is plastered over. Nothing on it is torn out.

So when the wall said the west shaft would be extended forty feet in the ninth moon, the west shaft was extended forty feet in the ninth moon, and the crew that did it did not consider themselves to be obeying anything. They were doing what was recorded. When the wall gave the day of an old miner's death, the hold gathered on that day, and he died, and it was afterward noted that the wall had been right, in the tone of a people noting that a well made thing had held.

There were no chains and no fog and nobody screaming. Eleven hundred dwarves getting on with their work, competently, cheerfully, three centuries of witnesses in the room, every one of them able to send for the person who was there, and the person who was there agreeing with the wall.

What the Church made of it¶

The Church of the Anvil holds that dwarven flesh was forged, and forged well, and that corruption cannot get purchase on good work. Eerie Peak is the only case in nine hundred years the Church has ever had to argue about at length, and the position it settled on is not a comforting one.

The doctrine held. Nothing got into the dwarves. It went into the one thing a dwarf will not question, and then it did not need to.

You were made unbreakable and you have never once been broken. So it stopped trying to break you. It went and stood where you do not look, and it wrote, and you read it out loud, and you called that obedience to your ancestors.

Brothers. The hammer is the prayer. Not the anvil, and not the mark it leaves. Somebody had better be certain which of the three he has been worshipping.

Emberday sermon, attributed to a forge-priest of Durrenhold, the year after the sealing

The last Prince¶

Thurin Thorium was Prince of Eerie Peak, and he is called the last of them because of what he did in the tenth moon of that year, which was to order the Long Hall cut out.

Not defaced. Cut out, stone by stone, carried up the shaft, thrown off the mountain, and the gap built over in new work with nothing written on it.

The masons refused. Not in anger. They refused the way you would refuse an order to drown a child, and they told him the wall held the names of his own grandmother and of the four hundred dead of the second siege, and they asked whether he proposed to throw those off a mountain too. He said that he did. Then they asked him, politely, in the proper form, to explain what was now insufficient about the old way.

It is recorded that he could not. The honest answer was nothing at all, it is perfect, that is the problem, and there has never been a hold anywhere that would accept that as a reason.

He walked out with sixty dwarves who agreed with him and not one who was related to him. Eleven hundred and forty six stayed. Durrenhold collapsed the passage behind him at his request and on his warrant, and the warrant sits in the archive with the rubble bill attached, itemised, paid in full.

Ancestors watch. Do not shame them.

Thurin Thorium, the last Prince of the Eerie Peak

He is quoted approvingly across half of Thorgaz by dwarves who do not know where he said it, or what he was looking at when he said it.

The line Bruntmark would not copy out¶

Her report ends with an inventory item rather than a conclusion, which is the assessors' form, and in this instance is probably cowardice.

Item: one wall, nine centuries, condition excellent.

She notes that she read to the end of the cut work on her eighth day, and that the wall was by then running some eleven years ahead of the hold. She notes that the final inscriptions concern the sealing of the passage, the rubble bill, and the departure of sixty dwarves under their Prince, all of it correct, all of it cut before any of it happened.

She notes that the last entry on the wall is not about Eerie Peak at all.

She gives the entry's subject, and not its content

It is the name of the hold she was born in, and a date. She declines to record the date, on the grounds that an assessor's report is a document of fact and she has not yet established that this is one.

She was a hundred and sixty years old. She had a hundred and forty years left in which to find out.