The Stonewake Compact

Overview

The Stonewake Compact is one of the earliest major named Dwarven civilizations, a civilization within the wider Ironspine Holds of the Ironspine. It holds The Stonewake Deeps, a world of deep holds beneath the mountain roots where more of the lower world's ways and water meet than anywhere else. Whoever holds Stonewake's passages and reservoirs holds the deep, and the Compact has held them for three hundred thousand years against flood, collapse, Dark Elf war-bands, and whatever comes up from below.

Stonewake keeps The Held Covenant in its severe seal practice, and the Covenant's questions of closure began here.

How It Holds Together

The Compact is small and dense: warded vault-ways, holds that cannot live without one another, chambers full of tablets, and reservoirs worth a war. Power belongs to whoever keeps the ways open, the water clean, and the records true, in a deep where other peoples cannot even find their way. Route keepers, reservoir wardens, and archive-custodians each hold their part for their house and answer to the hold-elders for it; the Deeps' Peoples and Power shows them at work beside the Kobold underhouses and the Wrought.

A seal is the deepest act a Dwarf of Stonewake can do, because a shut door can save a hundred holds or bury the people behind it. The great deep houses, whose galleries a seal protects or starves, have made it a matter of oath:

• An ordinary seal on a great passage, chamber, or reservoir needs the oath-marks of several custodians, because it cuts off more than the hold that sets it, and the houses beyond it have kin and spears of their own.
• An emergency seal may be set by whoever holds the passage when waiting would let a flood, a collapse, or something worse run from hold to hold.
• The grounds are few: a roof about to come down, a reservoir about to break, a sickness or a corruption spreading, a failure that would run from hold to hold, or something coming up from below that cannot be held while the way stays open.
• The two betrayals that Stonewake remembers most bitterly are a danger made to look worse than it was so that a rival could be shut out, and a seal meant for a season left shut for ever because opening it again had become too costly.

Daily Life

Air, water, the way out, and the shifts that replace a sun belong to the Deeps' own Ordinary Life. The Compact adds its seals, which people walk past every day.

The seal inspection round. Every seal has a round cut into its closure marks: how often it is visited and what must be checked. On the day, a junior custodian walks to it with lamp, tally-board, and, where the seal touches an air run, a Kobold vent hand. At the seal they read the closure marks and the last inspection mark, lay a palm on the seam for warmth, listen for draught or water, and look for seep or fresh dust along the joint. If nothing has changed, the custodian cuts a small inspection mark beside the last one and enters it in the archive at the end of the shift. If something has changed, the round stops being routine: the custodian calls the custodians who marked the closure, and the next people to pass the seal will find it watched.

Medieval Role

The Compact keeps the deep ways and waters that the upper holds, the underhouses, and the Roothollow edge all depend on, and its seals reach into every one of their lives.

• A hold may seal a flooded gallery in a single shift on emergency grounds, and then spend years answering the elders, and the kin of the galleries it cut off, for it.
• A mountain hold of the upper Ironspine may withhold stores on the Hauling Stair to press the Compact over a seal that has cut its deep posting off from water.
• A custodian may refuse to sign an ordinary closure that would divert traffic through a rival hold's junctions, and say so openly before the elders.
• A Kobold crew may decline an inspection round behind a seal it judges unsafe, and the round is delayed until the custodians agree or a hungrier crew is found.
• A band of hoard-seekers, outfitted at Stairdeep with rope and caged finches, may slip past the lowest kept routes after the forge-lords' gold, and the hold that catches them coming back may take the gold and seal the way behind them.
• A great house may pay a Kobold crew and a pair of wardens to cut through to a lost pressure hold for its founders' tablets, swearing first before the Measured Seal to shut the way again if whatever stands at the posts down there is still awake.
• Two holds at feud over water drawn beyond a share may meet with axes at the sluices, and the hold that loses the fight loses the water with it.
• A warden company may be sent to hold a reservoir chamber against Dark Elf raiders on the Roothollow edge, as their ancestors held the Heartwell.

Stonewake's heroes are read rather than sung, off the tablets beside the seals and gates they kept, and the readings are hard ones: the custodian who sealed a flooding gallery with her own kin behind it and saved forty holds, and whose name is honoured and cursed on the same tablet; the warden who held the Heartwell's water-chamber for nine days of thirst with a broken shield; and the reservoir warden who swam down through a breaching sluice in the dark to drop its gate by hand, and was found afterwards with the bar still in his grip. Deep children learn a counting rhyme for the knocking behind the doors, three for the living, one for the dead, none for the door that holds, and custodians, who know the knocks follow no such rule, let them sing it.

History

The Compact stands on the holdmade Ironspine of The Holdmaking of the Ironspine (c. 465,000-c. 445,000 BR) and The Founding of the Ironspine Holds (c. 460,000-c. 438,000 BR). It grew from the deep differentiation of The Dwarven Deep Holds (c. 405,000-c. 330,000 BR).

Its own hardening came in The Deepening of Stonewake (c. 365,000-c. 350,000 BR), and the Compact was formed in The Founding of the Stonewake Compact (c. 360,000-c. 348,000 BR). It was the first deep cluster to hold its own ways, its own archives, and its own voice among the Holds.

Only after that did the Roothollow threshold take shape on the Compact's edge. Its formation is told in The Shaping of the Roothollow-Stonewake Interface (c. 345,000-c. 340,000 BR), and its first meetings in The First Roothollow-Deep Contacts (c. 340,000-c. 335,000 BR). The catastrophe that followed, in The Roothollow Rupture (c. 335,000-c. 328,000 BR), tested and hardened a Compact already in place.

Tensions

The Undrawn Seal, and the hold whose underwork is refusing it, are told with the Deeps' Neighbours and Borders and Peoples and Power. Across the Compact:

• The dropped round. An archive-custodian finds that a seal's inspection round was struck from its record generations ago, by an entry nobody can trace.
• Judgement in a living lifetime. The elders condemn an emergency seal that cost a working its crew, and the crew's kin want a blood-price or his blood.
• The breathing seal. A wardens' patrol has come back from a seal on the lowest kept route with one warden fewer, saying the seam was warm and the draught ran the wrong way, inward.
• The Last Chamber's question. A reservoir sealed for flood risk now holds the only clean water a crowded hold could reach.