Askenon and the Dwarves

Askenon is a continent, and every dwarven kingdom stands on it: Kaz'Nakaram, Kaz'Baba of the mithril under King Varin, Kaz'Valah. Dwarves say on Askenon the way other peoples say on the mainland, which has confused more than one human cartographer.

For most of their history, dwarves cast no spells. Instead, they use a system of runes that draws energy from nature, especially metal and earth, to create magical objects. These objects are extremely stable and almost impossible to dispel completely, but making them is slow and restricted to an elite. Dwarves therefore chose another path: metallurgy, engineering, gunpowder, and the purchase of other peoples' magic. The Psychic implants of the Free Era created the first exception.

Askenar made the rune system, and he was never a god. He was a dwarf: charismatic, wise, and strong enough that nobody needed to check the difference. He forged his own armour and his own hammer and preferred building to fighting, which is what killed him. His mine is the one later called Kaz'Nakaram, and he kept his workshop out in the open gallery because his dwarves asked him to; they slept to the sound of it. Their language bears his name. God of the runes is a title given to a dead man by the people he left.

For two centuries they searched for his body and hammer. They found only his armour. In time Askenon accepted that its king was dead, but not how he had died or who had killed him. His monastery remained, kings still made the pilgrimage, and some dwarves still spoke of his return. The first apparent proof arrived in M1704 in the hands of a human diplomat who wanted an army, and it named the wrong killer.

Dwarves have never healed anyone with magic, and runes are the reason. A rune is cut slowly into a thing that will hold it for centuries; that is the whole virtue of the craft and the whole of its limit. Nothing about it answers a man bleeding out in the next six seconds. Askenon's surgery is the best in the world and it is still surgery, so their medicine on a battlefield is potions bought from Cerberus.

This is the true reason for the great trade between the two peoples: not luxury, but survival. They would never buy from the Ark. It is stronger than they are and could crush them, while Cerberus is nearby and the Ark's sworn enemy. The choice was easy.

The great mine. It is not necessarily a vast mine, but a place where a dwarf can flourish completely: rare metals for the finest forging, pure water, an ideal temperature, and mineral light suited to dwarven eyes. The sun's whims no longer matter; light itself falls under dwarven control. This predictable environment is more than a comfort. It is the foundation of their civilization. Every kingdom of Askenon is built around a great mine.

The castes. A dwarf is born into the caste of their parents and remains there for life. Marriage between castes is forbidden without exceptional permission from both. Betraying one's caste carries a heavy price. Each caste claims a mythical ancestor, and its members are often related.

• Runes — the most prestigious caste, and the smallest. Cutting a rune is not decoration: it is the act that makes a dwarven object magical without a spell, and it cannot be undone or dispelled by anything short of destroying the object. A rune cut wrong is a ruined ingot and a ruined reputation, so the caste initiates slowly and refuses more candidates than it takes. The royal line of Kaz'Nakaram came out of Runes before it rose above the castes entirely.
• The forge — masters of great metals, and the body the runes are cut into. Askenar himself is their ancestor, which the forge never lets the others forget. They hold the alloys the way Numbers holds its equations: a forge family will let a technique die with it rather than share it outside the caste, and several have.
• Numbers — mathematicians, scientists, and engineers; the second caste of Askenon. A dwarf of Numbers is supported from birth to death and never needs to work. None takes advantage of the privilege.
• Warriors — bred for battle, stronger and more agile than other dwarves. Askenon fights rarely and trains constantly. In peacetime the caste guards the great mines, supplies every kingdom its champion, and settles between families what the courts would take years to settle. A warrior who has never fought a war is not considered untested; he is considered lucky.
• Law — the robe rather than the hammer. They do not wage war; they write the victor's peace.
• Merchants — servants of every other caste, the only dwarves allowed to leave the country as an ordinary right, the only ones expected to learn human languages, and the caste entrusted with espionage. Specialists from another caste may travel for a royal mission or a foreign contract, but the work never releases them from their own caste's restrictions. Life among foreigners makes merchants more charismatic than the average dwarf. They carry firearms and are forbidden from making anything. They are indispensable and despised: readily accused of theft, often hanged unjustly, and among the shortest-lived dwarves in Askenon.

A caste is a fence, not a trade. It says what a dwarf may do and, more usefully, what he may not. A smith may forge and may not sell his own work. A merchant may carry, speak and bargain and may not make anything at all. An engineer of Numbers knows exactly how a firearm is built and will not touch one, because a firearm is a smith's business; the knowledge is not forbidden, the act is. Necessity sometimes creates exceptions, especially outside Askenon, and those exceptions are usually followed by silence. Dwarves apologise for these lines the way other people apologise for the weather.

Five castes cannot legally sell what they produce and one caste can. For twelve centuries that meant nothing, because everything was sold at home to dwarves who already knew the price. The day Askenon reached Cerberus it meant everything.

What they read about it. The most important dwarven author of the century is Barin, and his best-known book is True Love. Gorin, a dwarf of the forge, and Gallène, a merchant, flee to Brazzant because their castes forbid their union. Gorin eventually misses the forge more than he loves Gallène, returns home, and works there until his death. Dwarven readers regard it as a great romance. Barin also wrote The Lament of the Rusted Gear, a two-thousand-page treatise on preventive maintenance. To outsiders the pairing sounds like a joke. In Askenon, both books express the same virtue: a dwarf becomes whole by serving the work that belongs to him.

Betraying a caste costs a dwarf his name. Not exile and not death: he is struck out of the lineage, the mythical ancestor no longer counts him, and his children are born to no caste at all — which means no trade, no marriage anyone will sign, and no court that owes them a hearing. The punishment lands on the descendants rather than the offender, and among a people who live four hundred years the offender watches it land.

Within a caste, a dwarf advances from lay member (serving without initiation), to initiate (using and guarding its secrets), to guardian (serving as an adviser), and finally to head of a great family. Family heads elect a caste leader for life to represent them before the king. Nobles keep the caste they were born to — a noble of the forge is still of the forge — but a title lifts a dwarf out of serving one caste and into deciding for all of them. That is the whole of the privilege and the whole of the resentment: the runes are governed in part by dwarves who were born to Numbers.

Their language is written in runes — several hundred of them, with a grammar that Cerberan students describe as a sophisticated form of pain. It is the one dwarven thing outsiders can acquire: the merchants are the only dwarves who learn human languages, so a human who arrives speaking dwarven has done something no dwarf expected of him, and it disarms them before anything else is said. Perennus Albion teaches it at the Academy of Cerberus and makes his apprentices copy runes by hand.

Runic warriors are Askenon's weapon. A runic champion can kill a giant alone, clear thirty feet in a single leap, and fight bare-handed. Their training lasts fifty years.

Dwarves see in darkness, live for a very long time, and work twenty hours a day without considering it a burden. They hold order and predictability as the highest virtues and distrust the mathematics of other peoples.

The cursed water. Dwarves remember for a long time. The stretch of ocean where the fleet went down has been avoided ever since — not forbidden by anyone, simply not sailed, on charts that route around a shape nobody draws. Askenon kept trading by sea for sixteen centuries and kept that box empty. When a hundred thousand dwarves crossed it in M1704 to make war on the god who had put their maker in it, the crossing was the argument, not the shipping.

The kingdoms. There are as many as there are great mines, and great mines are rare. They have always been separate, and each is built on one metal nobody else has in quantity. Kaz'Nakaram is Askenar's own mine, the wealthiest, and it holds the Valerium. Kaz'Baba is mithril, under King Varin. Kaz'Valah is adamantine. Each was sovereign and jealous of it until Merenin, and each still administers its own mine; what he united was the crown, not the accounting.

The enclaves. Dwarven communities abroad are governed by merchants, because no other caste possesses an ordinary right to leave. Engineers, smiths, warriors and other specialists come when a contract or mission requires them, then return. Their quarters in Vlad and in Cerberus are held by treaty: dwarven law inside the walls, human law at the gate, and a permanent argument about where exactly the gate is. Men buy from them daily and trust them never. A merchant hanged in a human court is a diplomatic incident that Askenon almost always declines to make, because the caste is despised at home as well, and because the gold has to keep moving.

What they cannot make. Surgery is excellent in Askenon and useless in the middle of a battle line, so every dwarven army that takes the field carries Cerberan potions, bought at Cerberan prices, in quantities nobody publishes. This is the real shape of the alliance. Askenon can outgun Cerberus and cannot outlast it, and both governments have known that since the first delivery. It is also why the dwarves would never have bought from the Ark, however good the terms: a supplier who is also strong enough to crush you is not a supplier.