The Second Channel

Overview

The Second Channel is a lesser but survivable spawning water within The Tidebound Reaches, and the first alternate water to be grudgingly accepted after the closure of The First Nesting Confluence. Since the closure the best-known ascent channel of the Reaches leads here, and it is the water redirected runs of the Thaluren point to when they say that a run can move and keep faith.

It is not the confluence's heir. Its acceptance is given again season by season, on conditions, and the conditions are the whole point: the channel is where the Thaluren first let a run move while binding it to keep paying for the water it left. Run-lines killed each other over that bargain.

The Place

The channel lies farther along the rivers than the old confluence, a smaller water that is sheltered, clean, and joined closely enough to the old ascent channels that a run reaches it without leaving guarded water. Nothing about it is ancient or grand. Its weight comes from what has survived in it, and from what died on the way to it: the ascent still has the drowning-places of the Feud, where run-lines met in the narrows and the current carried the dead back to the sea. Not all of what they carried went with them. The gravel of the narrows still holds the spearheads and shell-plate of the Feud's dead, and young Thaluren dive for them each season, to bring home a blade an ancestor lost, or one an enemy dropped.

Keepers and Users

• Open-Run keepers. The Open-Run Concords hold the channel and speak for it.
• Sanctuary Custodians. The spawning ground answers to the custodians of The Returning Concord like any other, and they say whether the water can take a run this year.
• Blightward custodians. The Blightward Keepers hold no office over the channel, but they hold its debt.
• The runs. Sea settlements whose run-lines once climbed to the confluence now bring their clutches here, and their Clutch-Watch Circles must show that a clutch hatched in redirected water keeps its place in its line.

Escorts from the sea settlements guard the mouths in season, and the young who serve in them come back with shark-scars they show off for the rest of their lives. Some never go back to the settlements: as shark-hunters they kill run-followers off the mouth for their teeth and their oil, follow the runs from one water to the next, and are welcome everywhere in season and nowhere after it.

The Medieval Present

The channel is still accepted only from year to year, and has been for more than a hundred and fifty thousand years. Every Thaluren who spawns here knows it: the water is blessed, used, and better guarded than most, and it is still on sufferance.

Its year turns on the return. Runs arrive in season, lay under the custodians' eyes, and go back to the sea. Before they leave, they send elders up to the Naming Reach below the closed confluence to name the old water and the debt the run carries towards it. When the young come down to the sea, past the run-followers at the mouth, and are counted at the Kelpshade, the count is carried back as the channel's tally of the living.

History

The channel began as a desperate gamble during The Closure of the First Nesting Confluence (c. 178,000-c. 162,000 BR), when Run-Watchers and sea-settlement speakers sent the weakest clutches into it and they lived. That success started The Second-Channel Feud (c. 160,000-c. 156,000 BR). The Open-Run side held that survival is the line carried on, not broken; the Blightward side held that a water accepted too fast teaches a people to forget a wound. Both held it with spears along the ascent, ambushing each other's runs in the narrows, and for generations the channel's young came down to the sea through water red with their elders' blood.

Tensions

• Debt without end. An Open-Run circle has begun saying at the Naming Reach that the channel has carried its debt long enough and should be fully accepted.
• A thin count. This season fewer young reached the Kelpshade than the channel's tallies have seen in generations.
• A spear out of the narrows. A young Open-Run diver has brought up a spear from the narrows carved with the mark of a Blightward line, found among Open-Run dead.
• The great follower. A run-follower larger than any the escorts have seen has taken young at the mouth three seasons running, and two escorts who went after it alone have not come back.