The Paling

Overview

The Paling is a stretch of drained, colourless country in the Confluence Basins, in the strip of fields between the Lower Serath and the Witnessfields, where the Mnemosyne Null Incursion (c. 132,000-c. 130,000 BR) left its pallor. At its heart stand the walls of an archive river city whose name is lost: the city that forgot its name.

The Place

A side river comes down off the terraces to the Serath through it. For a few days' walk along it, grass, heath, and stone are the colour of old ash and strangely smooth; birds do not sing, and footsteps make no sound. The city stands on a low rise above the side river, walls, gates, and halls whole and smoothed to pale lumps, without one letter left on any stone. The edge is a fading over a mile or so, sharpest on the river side. The side river runs through it clear as glass, and the fish in it are as pale as the grass; the Reedfolk below will not eat anything caught above the fading, and say that a fisher who does wakes not knowing what river he is on.

Keepers and Users

No lord farms it, though it lies inside basin lordship; the field-line stops where the colour starts to go. Basin hamlets along the edge and the Reedfolk houses on the reaches below keep watch by custom, not office. Scholars come for the city's name and find none; salvagers find nothing worth carrying, since what comes out has no history left in it. Treasure-seekers come anyway, because the tales say the archive city's vaults were never opened, and a few who dug at the gates by day and slept outside the fading have come back with smooth, pale things nobody can name. Outlaws use the outer fading too: a band that has made the basins too hot for itself can cross the edge for a day, where no lord's riders will follow, and come out the far side with the morning gone and the hunt lost.

The Medieval Present

Households round the edge keep their names, songs, and genealogies aloud as a nightly habit, children learn their lineage before their letters, and the dead are buried under names carved deep. A stranger who stays the night is asked their name at the door and again at breakfast, and a stranger who cannot answer at breakfast is not let back in. When a Blank Host walks out, the edge hamlets ring a bell, and everyone who can hears it and runs; every hamlet on the edge tells of the old woman who stood in the lane singing her whole lineage aloud at one, so that it would come for her and not the children. Her lane is the one the children play in. Their game is the pale: one child is the Host, and the rest are safe only while they keep saying their names aloud; whoever falls silent is caught.

History

Explained in the Mnemosyne Null Incursion. The city was one of the archive world's river cities beside the Floodkeeper Houses; the rest of them are still unaccounted for (see the Witnessfields).

Tensions

• Naming the city. A Serathic house holds that the registers sealed at Stillgate may name the river city, and means to take its ground on the strength of whatever name it recovers.
• The outlaw road. A band of horse-thieves has learned to cross a corner of the outer fading, a day's ride, whenever the lord's riders close in, and comes out each time a little emptier and a little harder to bargain with.
• The Host that comes home. A Blank Host has walked out of the fading three times this year, each time at the same hamlet, each time to the same door.
• The field-line. A basin lord wants to plough the outer fading, where the colour has nearly come back.