The Chromatic Chord

The Unlisting of the Warrens

The span, c. 180,000-c. 150,000 BR, in which the archive-law world struck the Goblin warrens it had once entered as peoples from its rolls, and drove them from their gaps, as its classifications hardened. See The Bridge Peoples.

Overview

Goblin warrens, driven out long before in The Enclosure of the Seams, were cut into the rolls of the elder Archive-Law Civilization, and struck off again as that world hardened.

It is the first dated sign of the archive world's hardening, the slow turning to stone that ended it. That end is told in The Last Keeping.

The Warrants

At the archive world's height, told in The Rise of the Archive-Law Civilization, its marker roads and terraces ran through country where displaced Goblin warrens already lived along the margins. Goblins knew the gaps those roads had to cross: culverts, under-passages, cut-backs, and the hidden ways around every collapse.

The archive cut into stone every people that lasted, and Goblins lasted. Warrens that kept gaps, guided travellers through the under-routes, and warded them against beasts and raiders were entered as warranted peoples. Each warrant was a duty cut in stone, and the protection of the archive-wardens that went with it, for as long as the archive chose to give it. For the first time since the enclosure, Goblins held a place that outsiders could read, and every later Goblin claim to a place among other peoples takes the warrant as its pattern.

The Unlisting

As the archive world hardened, its rolls stopped bending to the peoples they named. Warrants not renewed in the right form lapsed. Warrens that moved, as Goblin warrens often had to, no longer matched their entries and were struck. Where Goblins were entered again, it was under a lesser mark: present, suffered, and with no claim of their own.

Then the wardens came to the gaps, and it was war in the dark. Warrens that stayed at the culverts and under-passages they had kept for generations were driven out of them with fire and spear, and some fought for their crawlways in the dark until no one was left to fight. No single decree did this. It gathered through thousands of small choices by keepers with no reason to favour Goblins and every reason to favour the houses that fed them, until a people who had held cut duties became a cut name for people without any.

Historical Significance

The Unlisting is the deepest root of Goblin marginality. Later river and corridor powers inherited the archive world's habits of script, sworn name, and rank, and this lesser mark came with them. Medieval lords and town elders who treat Goblins as having no claim to anything are often keeping an elder judgement no one alive remembers being made.

It also gives the medieval lost warrant Goblins their name. Goblin copyists still make the dangerous walk to the Grey Line of the Witnessfields to copy warrant fragments and warren names from the open ruins, under the slit-mouthed gaze of the stone figures who still ask every passer's name. They bring the copies home and sometimes show them in a lord's hall, rarely to any effect. The full warrants, and the final strike, lie behind sealed gates. The medieval Iron Compacts take their name and their way from this lost place.

In the Writers’ Guide

See Also