The Soundchain Roads

Overview

The Soundchain Roads are the first named Orc-Gnome exchange corridor on the far side of Caeldon: a chain of roadsteads, lee sounds, transfer quays, and pilot stations strung along the outer, Windscar-facing edge of The Tidelace Coasts. Escorted parties of The Windscar Pacts come down to this coast, and The Gaugeward Leagues receive them at its outer edge while keeping their inner harbours behind it. The corridor is neither one harbour belt nor open sea. It is the ground in between: fog, cliff, and wreck-strewn water where a party that has crossed the dry country can be met, fed, held, or sent on before it ever sees an inner harbour.

Lay of the Land

The Soundchain Roads are the western stretch of the far side's north coast, where the dry country of the Windscar Expanse ends in sea cliffs. The chain of sounds runs west to east along the foot of the cliffs, with the open water of the Unrun Sea to the north and ordinary Gaugeward coast beyond it at both ends. Eastwards, behind the headlands, the pilot channels lead to the inner harbours of the Tidelace Coasts.

The Gullstair comes down to the Turnwater Quays towards the western end, where the longest escort routes arrive after two to three months from Oldcairn, and the Patience lies below it. The Bare Shoulder lies further east, with Shoulderlee in its last lee, and the calmer Lantern Reaches beyond. From the Turnwater Quays to Fathomstair is four or five weeks by pilot craft. The whole map is in The Lay of the Land.

Land and Hazards

The outer Tidelace is broken coast: headlands and offshore islands with sheltered sounds behind them, tidal straits between, sea-cut terraces, and long open roadsteads where a ship can anchor but nothing shelters it. The corridor follows that edge. Its links are the lee sounds, where a headland or an island chain breaks the swell and craft can lie in quiet water. Between them run exposed roadsteads, marked transfer water, and pilot channels threaded through shoals that only a sounding house can keep honest. Old hulls lie on every one of those shoals, and some still hold what they carried. Divers swear that a Gaugeward strongroom hull lost in the closure years lies off the Bare Shoulder with its hatches still sealed, and every few summers a crew goes out after that treasure; the ones who come back say the fog came in early, and that something hailed them by name. Behind the sounds, narrow channels lead inward towards the Gaugeward harbours, and the mouths of those channels are where the corridor stops.

• Fog. Fog belts roll in off the open water with little warning, swallow the beacons, and stop movement between sounds.
• Storm and swell. In the storm season the open stretches turn deadly.
• The water itself. Shoals shift and channels silt, so a sounding true last year may drown a crew this one. Fogbells drift inshore in thousands with the fog, and their sting can stop a swimmer's heart; congers as long as a man live in the breakwater gaps and take the fingers of quay crews who reach in; shipworms eat the quays from underneath.
• Wreckers. Worse than any beast of the water are the people of the shore.
• Crowding. When too many parties arrive together, holding grounds fill, water runs short, fever runs through the shore camps, and tempers go to knives.

Ordinary Life

Life on the Roads is station life. Each sound has its station: a few quays, a declaration house where parties are counted, store sheds and cisterns, a sounding house, beacon towers on the headlands, and the stone and timber houses of the crews who keep them. Gnome families hold station work for generations. Pilots, sounders, beacon keepers, quay crews, provisioners, and tally-keepers make up most of the people, and a station child learns to read a tide table and a signal line about as early as letters.

Held parties wait in the holding grounds: lee anchorages where loaded craft ride at their moorings, with shore camps pitched above them in the same places year after year. The largest lies below the Gullstair, and every Orc escort calls it the Patience. It has seen fever, hunger, a fire that took half the camp, and more than one feud between kindreds that began over a water-share and ended in the water.

Peoples and Power

No single hand holds the Roads. Several powers each hold a piece of every passage, and the corridor stays quiet only while none of them reaches for more.

• Station keepers and harbour masters. The station keepers are Gaugeward families who hold a sound's quays, stores, and holding water, often for generations, and say what it can carry this week.
• The sounding houses. Sounding houses say which channels can be run. A pilot who runs against their warning, and lives, is turned away at every station at once.
• The Answerward officers. Officers of The Answerward Pilotage carry the stations' answers in the same words from one station to the next, and are there when a party is held or sent on, so nobody can say later that it was not.
• The escort captains. On the Windscar side, the captain who brings a party down answers for it by escort custom and the good name of the High-Scar escort orders.

Since the closure years the stations close what they like, by season, cargo, or stretch, but must say each closing aloud, and when many closings together shut a trade out, the escorts may add them up and press every station at once. They rarely get much for it: the Gnomes hold the water.

The balance is contested from both shores. Orc captains say a refusal in fine words is still the coast keeping them out. Parts of the inner harbour world hold that the Pilotage is always reaching for more. Station crews, who deal with both every day, tend to trust whichever has misled them least recently.

Settlements

No single hand holds the Roads, and no station is their capital. The busiest, the Turnwater Quays, is the nearest thing to a centre; the rest of the corridor's settlements are stations, camps, and holding grounds.

• Gullhead. The camping ground at the head of the Gullstair, where Orc kindreds pitch their camp-rings above the beach yard below and return as reliably as the Gnome crews return to their quays.
• The Patience. The largest holding ground in the corridor, a lee anchorage below the Gullstair with shore camps pitched in the same places year after year.
• Shoulderlee. The station in the last lee before the Bare Shoulder, where heavy craft wait out the months the shoulder is closed.
• Ninebeacon. A small station in the Lantern Reaches: one quay, a declaration house, and nine beacons on the headlands within sight of it.

The People

About 12,000 people live on the Roads, nearly all Gnome station families. In the calm months Orc escort companies, their herds, and the parties they bring add five to eight thousand more, and the Patience alone can hold a thousand or more; in the storm season the Orcs are nearly all gone.

• Gnomes. Station crews dress, live, and are named as Gnomes of the Tidelace do, with oilskins over everything for the open roadsteads.
• Orcs on the coast run are High-Scar and Open-Steppe kindreds, dressed and named as in the High Scars; at a beach yard a captain gives the kindred's name first, then the party's count.

Neighbours and Borders

The Roads end wherever the stations stop answering.

• Inward: the Gaugeward harbours. Behind the sounds lie the harbour chains of the inner Tidelace, reached only by pilot channel and only on a harbour master's word.
• Landward: the Windscar routes. Above the cliffs, escort routes run back towards The High Scars and the rest of The Windscar Expanse.
• Along the coast: the wider Tidelace. At either end, the chain of stations gives out into ordinary Gaugeward coast, where Windscar parties have no claim the Gnomes will hear.
• Seaward: open water. Beyond the outer roadsteads lie fog banks and the open water of the Unrun Sea.

Roads, Rivers, and Trade

The corridor takes its name from its roadsteads. Its routes are sea-lanes and cliff stairs, not built roads, and the only fresh water on most of it comes from station springs and cisterns, which is why water is the first thing every station counts.

• The descents. The Gullstair and lesser cliff paths bring parties and their herds down from the Windscar routes. Each ends at a station's beach yard.
• The inner lane. Pilot channels behind the headlands and islands link sound to sound in quieter water.
• The outer roads. Open roadsteads seaward of the islands take heavier craft and faster passages when the weather allows, and close first when it does not.
• The beacon line. Beacon towers on the headlands carry closings, fog warnings, and wrecker sightings along the chain far faster than any hull.

Down the stairs come hides, felt, wool, herd stock driven for provisioning and sale, and escort service itself, along with the parties: kindred delegations, traders, messengers. Back up go dried and salted fish, cordage, worked metal, lamp oil, and fine Gnome craft-work, the coastal goods that reach the High Scars by escort trade. Some cargoes go the length of the corridor and a few go inward under pilotage, but most change hands at the quays and never see the inner channels.

The Lantern Reaches

The Lantern Reaches are the calmest stretch of the corridor, on the same outer receiving edge of the Tidelace. Beacons stand on nearly every headland, so close that pilots boast a craft is never out of sight of a light, and the transfer waters between them are shallow enough to work and sheltered enough to forgive. Smaller escorted parties, messengers, light cargoes, and steady seasonal provisioning move through the Reaches more readily than the heavy convoys held under Turnwater's eye, and wreckers keep away from water this well lit.

Historical Memory

The corridor's history runs from blood to habit. Windscar parties first reached this coast in numbers during the Approaches, and in The Answering Sound Crisis (c. 141,000-c. 137,000 BR) they waited on a cold shore, raided by wreckers and harried by shore-beasts, while the old and young died. Orc grandmothers still use the crisis to frighten children to sleep: "be still, or the cold shore will hear you". What followed taught both sides to say delay aloud; the Answerward Pilotage (c. 135,000-c. 129,000 BR) carried the custom from one receiving ground to many; and after the Overreach Feud (c. 126,000-c. 122,000 BR) cut the Pilotage back, The Tidelace Coastward Exchanges (c. 121,000-c. 112,000 BR) turned staged arrival into the routine that the Roads give a geography. Both peoples call what followed the quiet years, and both mean it half as praise.

Belief

Gnome stations keep shrines to Maris of the Tides on their quays and headlands. A pilot back from a hard passage through fog or round the Bare Shoulder tells it aloud at her shrine, paying her toll of story, and Orc escorts who have shared the crossing sometimes stand to listen. Quennet the Clockmaker is fading, and the Roads are part of the reason: this is a coast where timing is called from the beacons rather than prayed for. Tally-keepers still murmur his name when a sailing window has to be moved.

The escorts bring their own gods down the stair. Ushkar the Ancestor-Warden keeps the names of captains who delivered their parties and strikes those whose counts were false, and kindreds camped above the beach yards recite their coast-run dead at the season's end. Followers of Rakhal the Storm-Caller are the first to call an old closure stale and the first to sail against the Bare Shoulder's season. Beneath both, escort custom remains its own alignment custom of held passage and answered betrayal.

Tensions

• The calm that costs. The Lantern Reaches keep their good name by taking only light traffic, and every heavy convoy they decline goes to Turnwater.
• A captain in the Patience. A counted party has been held below the Gullstair for a full season.
• The Two Lamps again. For the first time in a generation, a pair of fires has been seen on the empty coast east of the Bare Shoulder, and a provisioning craft has gone missing.
• The stuttering gauge. In an old sounding house, the timing gauges are said to stutter before a sailing window closes, and twice this year a window closed a few moments early with a loaded craft caught outside it.