The Broken Marches

Overview

The Broken Marches are a ruin-belt and salvage margin on Caeldon, and the main regional home of Goblins. Nobody rules them. They are a broad march of failed works, broken routes, abandoned holdings, half-repaired roads, old storehouses, contested bridges, and small settlements living in the bones of stronger ages. Vault-breakers strip its cellars, bounty-takers hunt its tunnels, outlaws hold its roads, and under it all the old works keep their secrets: vaults no one has opened, earthworks that still rise to hold a breach, and the dead of failed crossings seen on the broken spans.

Goblin warrens and Hobgoblin compacts share the Marches with Salvage Peoples on their circuits, Kobold underkeepers, Ogre burden bands, scattered Troll crossing houses, Wrought repair houses and fugitives, and Humans who came for salvage, debt, or a second chance. The first medieval focus region, The Greyford Reach, sits on its Headwater-facing edge.

Lay of the Land

The Broken Marches lie east of the northern Ironspine and wrap round the north and east of the Headwater Marches behind the March Wall, with the Greyford Reach on their south-western edge. To the east their ruin margins thin into the desert of the Glassbelt, where the cradle end of the crossing begins. The fog of the Hushvale lies two or three weeks south along that edge. Their northern reaches and southern margins are unmapped.

The land runs down from the mountain flank in old terraces, failed causeways, and braided rivers. Crossing it from the mountains to the desert edge takes three to four months. The Undercroft Fair lies about two months on foot from Greyford and the crossing's cradle end about six weeks beyond it; Wallbreach stands on the March Wall. The whole map is set out in The Lay of the Land.

Land and Hazards

The Marches are built country gone feral rather than wilderness. Roads continue without patrols. Old border walls are quarried for stone while still steering movement. Canal cuts have become flood channels, culverts and service tunnels run under fields nobody owns, and ruined storeworks and root cellars give partial shelter almost everywhere. Rivers braid and shift around failed causeways, so a route that held last year may be a gravel bar or a scour hole this year.

Most danger comes from the works themselves. Structures look sound and are not; collapse, bad air, and trapped water wait in the underlayers. Cellar rot eats a beam from inside and leaves its shape, which is why "sound-looking" is a warning in the Marches. Kindred danger-marks on the stones grade what is braced, unsound, and never-touch, and wise travellers read them even when they will not admit it.

Ordinary Life

Most people in the Marches live by keeping something usable a little longer. Settlements range from walled towns with a lord's hall and a market to tolerated repair camps, salvage markets, and squatters' quarters that appear wherever leftover value can feed a household. Watchtowers become granaries, shrines, squats, robbers' posts, or lairs. A ruined fort can hold a Goblin warren in its upper breaks and a Kobold underhouse below, each knowing a different half of the same failure.

Peoples and Power

No single power owns the Marches, and nobody inside them wants one to. Power is a patchwork of overlapping claims, each holding only as far as its keepers can make it hold, and the gaps between them are where the outlaws live.

• Warrants. The Iron Compacts hold road stretches, ruin keepings, and watches by written warrant from settled powers: a lord's word, set down, and good for as long as he wants it.
• Keepright. Edgeway Kindred circuits hold a say in works they have kept for generations, whoever holds the title, for as long as they can make it count.
• Refusal. The Underhouse Compacts rule the ruin underworks by deciding when a structure is too unsafe to enter.
• Crossing-oaths. Crossing-Oath Houses hold a few dangerous passages by oath, and take a share from those who use them.
• Shelter. Mending Order houses in the mixed towns shelter Wrought and speak for them.

The claims from outside come mostly from Human lords of the Headwaters tied to The Confluence Marches. They give warrants, sell the right to strip a ruin, and take a compact's warrant back when a ruin is worth clearing, and they have the armed men to make it stick. Freer Goblin warrens refuse warrants altogether, which makes them the people the clearances find first. A clearance is a raid in all but name, and the warrens answer in kind: lord's salvage carts burn on the Tallgrade, clearance gangs find their ladders cut, and a warren driven out in spring may be back in its ruin by the first frost with the gang's tools as loot.

Settlements

Nobody rules the Marches and nobody inside them wants anyone to, so they have no capital. The nearest thing to a centre moves with the Kindred circuits: the gathering-markets, and above all the Undercroft Fair.

• The Undercroft Fair. The Kindred gathering-market held in the vaulted cellars of a ruined storework.
• Wallbreach. A walled town of two or three thousand at a gap in the March Wall, with a lord's hall, a market, a Mending Order house, and an Iron Compact watch on its road.
• Twohalves. A ruined fort with a Goblin warren in its upper breaks and a Kobold underhouse below, each keeping a different half of the same failure.
• Halfroof. A tolerated repair camp in an old watchtower and the storework beside it, half of whose roof still holds.

The People

About 120,000 people live in the Marches, and nobody has counted them. Some two in five are Goblins, Hobgoblin compacts among them, and about one in five are Humans who came for salvage, debt, or a second chance. Salvage Peoples, resident and on circuit, are about one in seven, and Kobolds about one in eight. Ogre bands and the Wrought, many of them fugitives, are about one in twenty each, and Trolls a thousand or more.

• Goblins. Marches Goblins wear mended, mismatched clothes cut down from salvage, piled on for the cold, with many pockets and hidden ones, mostly in dark colours for the night.
• Salvage Peoples. Kindred folk wear road clothes, worn in layers and patched, with gloves, rope, and the kindred's marks cut into their gear; they come of several stocks and look it.
• Humans bring Headwater names, and many drop the family name for a byname of trade: Brede the Mender.
• Others. Kobolds live and are named as on the Ironspine mine-edges, with ruin-crews in place of hold crews.

Neighbours and Borders

The Marches are defined by where other peoples' reach gives out, not by a surveyed line.

• The Headwater edge is the one edge with a cause.
• Towards the Ironspine, the old Dwarven-facing route lines run out of the Marches into hold-claimed ground.
• Elsewhere, the Marches thin out rather than end: ruin density falls away, the roads become ordinary roads again, and the question of who owns what stops being unusual.

Roads, Rivers, and Trade

The oldest road through the Marches is the Tallgrade, a raised route on a grade too broad and too even for any living builder, generally taken to be colossal work from the Upland Colossal Civilization. Kindred circuits keep long stretches of it, and some Troll crossing houses on it hold charges older than any lord's line. Outlaw bands know it too, and the worst ambushes in Marches memory were laid where the grade runs between ruin walls. One stretch is called the Purse for the merchants' money that went into it and never came out, and Kindred caravans cross it at a run, with bows strung. Younger Human frontier and military roads cross it on worse foundations and fail first. Rivers matter more as obstacles than as highways: braided fords, ferries, rope crossings, and patched bridges such as the Greyspan decide where traffic can go in any given season. Underneath, Kobold underways and old service tunnels carry people and goods that would rather not be seen.

Historical Memory

The Marches have no single origin catastrophe. They are aftermath piled on aftermath, and each age has its own claimants. No war was ever fought for the Marches as a whole; they have had instead a thousand small ones, clearances, warren raids, and feuds between crossing houses, and every ruined fort in them has been taken and lost more times than anyone can count.

The oldest is the colossal road and its keepers: Troll charges sworn in The Swearing of the Crossing-Charges, and the Kindred circuits that began in The Walking of the Unkept Roads and reached the Marches later. Goblins bring a different memory: seams lost in The Enclosure of the Seams, warrants struck in The Unlisting of the Warrens, and finally the waste-ground doctrine that turned Old March Goblin holdings into empty ruins by a lord's say-so. Ogre burden houses remember The Chain-Camps, whose debt-bound bands built frontier roads like the ones now failing here. The youngest is The Awakening of the Wrought, when fugitives came into the tunnels; some of them are still alive.

Belief

Belief in the Marches is unorganized. Varn was born here from the prayers of the hidden, and shuttered lamps left in ruins honour him. The songs of the struck warrants belong to Tavi the Bard of the Broken and are sung at Compact gatherings, often in places only Varn's worshippers can find. Ennor the Grave-Watcher keeps the graves Varn keeps secret, and the Kindreds bring Corrow the Gale-Runner with them.

The Sworn Accord reaches only as far as the Headwater oath-houses do. Under it, Goblin devotion is unentered and the warrants Tavi sings are struck, so the region's own gods count for nothing in the halls that decide its ruins. Anyone praying to Varn is, almost by definition, someone those halls want found: a fugitive, a thief, an outlaw, or a Goblin whose warren was struck.

Tensions

• Revocation. Any lord who wants a ruin stripped can take back the warrant of the compact keeping it.
• The Greyford example. If Lowbank's Maintenance Reckoning wins a share and a say for the people who actually carry the Greyspan, every warrantless keeper in the Marches will press for the same.
• Returning heirs. Heirs of failed frontier settlements still arrive with old deeds to "abandoned" holdings and find Kindred keep-marks and Goblin households already there.
• Writs on the pillars. A new writ at the Undercroft Fair offers good coin for fugitive Wrought with their maker's marks intact.
• The bulwark that rose. A field bulwark on an old breach, a grassed mound for as long as anyone remembers, rose in the night and now stands across the Tallgrade.