The Witnessfields

Overview

The Witnessfields are the old country of the elder Archive-Law Civilization: a wide stretch of terraced upland and open ground inland towards the Lower Serath, out where the fields of the Confluence Basins thin into rougher country. Corridor and basin folk named it for what still stands there, rows of inscribed marker stones and roofless halls that go on watching with nobody left to watch.

No one has lived in the Witnessfields since the archive world ended, more than a hundred thousand years ago. Its archive-cities are not ruined so much as shut, and every treasure-seeker on the Serath has heard what might lie behind a gate that has never been forced: the wealth of a world that wrote down everything it owned.

Lay of the Land

The Witnessfields lie south-east of the Confluence Basins, on low uplands east of the Lower Serath. A strip of basin fields runs between them and the corridor, and their basin-facing edge is the Grey Line, where the herders of Flockturn turn back. East and south of them nothing is mapped. The terraces step up eastwards from the basin side, and the marker roads run across them between the sealed cities. Stillgate, the archive-city nearest the corridor, is two or three weeks on foot from Correth. See The Lay of the Land.

No core lies here; the whole upland is sealed and empty, grazed past the Grey Line by great dun wild kine that no herder follows, whose bulls will run down anyone on foot. Basin youths still go past the line to prove themselves, after a dun bull's horn to hang over a door; the hunters who come back with one are boasted of for a generation, and the ones who do not are named at the Grey Line every spring.

What Happened Here

This is where the archive world was thickest. In The Rise of the Archive-Law Civilization (c. 235,000-c. 175,000 BR), its cities, oath terraces, great halls, and marker roads spread across this ground until every debt and oath was written down, and the cities were strong enough to make the writing obeyed. The same world reached down to the lower rivers, where its river cities stood beside the Floodkeeper Houses.

It emptied without a war. As its lists hardened, they stopped fitting the people in them, and those the cities could no longer write down drifted away from cities that would not change. In The Last Keeping (c. 150,000-c. 120,000 BR), keepers led by the one later called the Last Registrar declared the lists complete and sealed the last archive-cities with the records inside. Keepers who refused fled downriver to the Reedfolk, and what they carried is the only part of the Witnessfields still in daily use: the oath-forms of Floodkeeper house-custom, and through them the oath-taking in the halls of the Serath.

What Is Known

Outsiders know the edges and a few roads in.

• Land. Low uplands stepped into broad terraces, long gone to grass, heath, and thorn, where zigzag-backed heath adders bask on the warm stones.
• The Grey Line. The outermost row of boundary markers, where basin herders turn their flocks back.
• The Grey Clerks. At a few road-meetings along the Grey Line and on the roads in towards Stillgate, made figures of the archive world, the Grey Clerks, still keep their posts and ask whoever passes for a name and the name of a guarantor.
• Stillgate. The sealed archive-city nearest the corridor, and the one scholars and treasure-seekers usually mean when they say they have reached one.
• Who comes here. Goblins copy warrant fragments and warren names from the open ruins, a memory of the names struck from the lists in The Unlisting of the Warrens.

Settlements

Nobody lives in the Witnessfields. On the basin side they are faced by herders' hamlets such as Flockturn, whose flocks turn back at the outer markers; scholars and salvagers who come in camp outside the gates and leave again.

The People

Nobody lives in the Witnessfields. Flockturn's handful of farmsteads, some thirty people, face the outer markers, and a few dozen scholars and salvagers a year camp outside the gates and leave again.

What Is Not Known

How far the Witnessfields run and exactly where they lie beside the lower river are left open. So are how many archive-cities stand sealed, what any of them was called, since their names are written only inside, and which peoples built and lived in them. Whether Clerks keep posts deeper in is not known either. Nobody outside knows whether a sealed city has ever been opened, what treasure or what guardians stand behind its gate, or what its lists would say to whoever read them. One of the archive world's river cities beside the Floodkeepers is the nameless city of the Paling; what became of the rest, and whether anything of them lies under later towns, is open as well.

Tensions

• Proof and strike together. Goblin copyists take warrant fragments and warren names from the open ruins, the nearest thing to proof left of the places struck in the Unlisting.
• A name to the Clerk. Flockturn's herders give their own names to the Grey Clerks readily and their children's never, holding that every name given is written into the sealed cities and will one day be called to account.
• Under the river towns. Whether anything of the archive world's river cities lies under later Serath towns is not known.