The Answering Sound

Overview

The Answering Sound is a sheltered lee in the outer approaches of The Tidelace Coasts, where escorted parties of The Windscar Pacts are met by the Gaugeward Leagues and never let into the inner harbours behind it. It was the first great Orc-Gnome threshold: the place where the line drawn in The Tidelace-Windscar Approaches between the outer shore and the inner harbours was first strained by storm, hunger, and spears, and nearly broke.

The Sound is older than The Soundchain Roads and is not one of their stations, though the corridor's ways descend from it. The two peoples who use it do not remember the same place. Orc escorts remember where the coast first had to answer them before their people drowned at its door; Gnome keepers remember where they first had to prove that a delay was not a lie.

The Place

A headland and a short chain of islands break the swell off the outer coast, and behind them lies the Sound: a broad lee where craft can ride out weather that would sink them on the open roadsteads. Ashore stand a beach yard where parties are met and counted, a pilot shed, a sounding house, store sheds and cisterns, and beacon towers on the headland that throw their light down the coast. A shrine to Maris of the Tides stands on the quay, hung with the names of crews the Sound did not save.

At the inner end of the lee a narrow pilot channel leads away towards the harbours behind the coast, among them the inward approaches of The Sounding Gate. Its first marker is the edge of everything the Sound can give. Escorts call it the Last Mark; the pilots call the same post the first mark of the inner channel. Past it, only the word of the harbour masters lets a party go, and they give it to whom they please.

Keepers and Users

• The station keepers hold the Sound as they hold the corridor's stations, though it is not one of them, and answer parties by the custom fixed after The Tidelace Answering Custom.
• The sounding house and beacon wardens keep the depths of the lee and the lights that warn the coast when the Sound is full or closed.
• Answerward officers of The Answerward Pilotage come to watch holding and redirection and to vouch for what answer was given; their word carries because stations and escorts both need them.
• Harbour masters further in decide who passes the Last Mark, and a party with nothing to offer them seldom does.

Wreck-divers from the coast hamlets work the islands in calm weather and sell what they raise at the beach yard, and the keepers cannot always tell a divers' camp from a wreckers' until the fires are lit. Sellswords hire on to guard parties along the coast road, and in a bad season a few stay as the Sound's own spears.

The users are Windscar escort captains and the parties they guard: kindred delegations, traders, messengers, and sometimes a party with nowhere else to go. The keepers pay beast-hunters to clear the sea-things that follow a storm into the lee, and in a wrecking year they pay escort spears to burn out the camps on the islands. Most Windscar traffic now runs through the Soundchain stations, so the Sound sees those whose routes come down nearest it, and anyone the weather drives in.

The Medieval Present

In an ordinary season the Sound is quiet. Its keepers re-sound the lee after every storm, keep the beacons lit, and meet a few parties through the calm months: a count at the beach yard, a captain's word given at the table, a pilot or provisions handed across, and the party gone along the coast or back up to the cliffs. In the storm season it thins to its own crews and the odd messenger.

Hard weather turns it over, as it always has. When the open coast closes, parties that cannot reach their stations make for the nearest lee, and the Sound fills faster than any station. Held parties ride in the lee or camp above it, water runs short, tempers shorten with it, and the beacons carry word along the coast so that others turn away before they arrive. In those weeks a keeper who names a hold works under the eyes of armed escorts who know what happened here the last time delay began to look like abandonment.

History

The Sound became a threshold in the Approaches (c. 148,000-c. 138,000 BR), when Windscar parties kept coming down to a coast that had never had to choose between taking them in and keeping them out. In The Answering Sound Crisis (c. 141,000-c. 137,000 BR), seasons of storm drove more parties into the lee than it could feed while the inner harbours were already strained. Escorts accused the coast of leaving them to drown one warning at a time; keepers accused the escorts of using the answer to force their way into harbour space. Parties starved on the cold shore while wreckers raided their camps, a few Orc war-leaders tried the inner channel by force, and crews went down on the outer islands feeling for a way in. Neither side could break the other, so the end kept the line and made delay something spoken aloud, short, and named to a day.

Tensions

• Turned from the Roads. A captain whose convoy is turned away on the Soundchain Roads has brought it round the coast to the Sound and demanded to be answered here.
• The Last Mark moves. After a winter of silting, the sounding house wants to move the Last Mark seaward until the inner channel is sounded again.
• False lights. A craft was lost on the outer islands this spring following a fire that was no beacon.
• The door in the breakwater. A winter storm has stripped the sand from the breakwater stumps and shown a squared door below the low-water line, cut in stone no harbour family claims.
• A full lee. A storm season has filled the Sound beyond what its cisterns can carry, and the keepers have named days they doubt they can keep.