The Black Sheath

The Long Peace The Orders tell it as a story with a beginning, because a beginning is the only part of it anyone can stand to hold. The world in those accounts is tidier than the world was. Whatever came up out of the dark in the first age did not come the way a conqueror comes, with banners and terms. It came the way a fever comes: with no interest in being understood, and no aim at all beyond the subtraction of what lived. The old accounts call it the first demon, and then they move on to something else. It went through the peoples of that world the way fire goes through a wooden town. Kingdoms old enough to have stopped believing in their own endings. Cities that had raised their walls three times, each ring built by people certain the last one would hold. Shrines on the high passes, herds, orchards, children practicing letters on wax. All of it went out, and much of it was never replaced. What followed is recited, not described. That the strongest of every people set aside whatever they had been killing each other about, and stood together, and called on their gods. That there was a war the songs still will not name. That the ones who fought in it, the shining and the monstrous, turned out to be far less unlike each other than the songs prefer to admit. That the gods died in numbers no one has ever written down, and that when the last of them stopped moving, the thing out of the dark stopped with him. That is the version. Nobody who stood there left an account of it. What the war left is not the war. The war left ground. A plain in the south lies flat where no plain should be flat, shaved down edge to edge, so that farmers there dig up nothing older than three feet and have learned not to keep trying. It left weapons lying in the grass at the edge of fields — blades with no maker's mark, which the children of four districts have been forbidden, in four dialects, to pick up. It left gods without faces or names, only stone in the shape of someone who used to be standing, and the occasional quarrel between two villages over which of them he belonged to. And it left ten thousand years. Later ages, comfortable ones, have it that there is no more than a hair's breadth between the holy and the damned, and that a man crosses it without noticing that he has moved. It is a pleasant thing to say at a winter table. It is generally said by people who have never stood on that hair's breadth and had to choose which side of it to step down onto. The ten thousand years have been good to most people, and the comfortable places have taken to calling them the good years. The Orders have charters now, and walls, and apprentices who work for their seats. The guilds keep tariffs and clerks. Wardens take their oaths in front of witnesses whose whole job is to write the oaths down. The great houses make marriages and announce them. Ley shards come up out of the deep country in sacks, rough-cut and unglamorous, and they do what coined metal does elsewhere: a handful buys a winter's coal, three buys a horse, and a single stone split down the middle settles an argument about a debt. In the larger cities there is a man whose entire position exists to decide which of two wagons goes through the gate first. House Aurelis announces almost nothing. When something does come out of the Aurelian estates it comes out finished — the terms closed, the names entered — and by the time the other houses read it, the thing has been decided for months. It is not the peace the gods bought. It is only what things grow into once the killing has stopped for a while. Somewhere, at every hour of the day, someone is being told what they are not yet good enough to be. In a market town on the eastern road, a clerk keeps a flawless ley shard on the corner of his desk, holding down a ledger that has come loose from its binding. It is the only flawless-cut stone in the town. It came in with a load of scrap, and an honest man unpacked it and set it on the desk instead of into his pocket. It has held that corner down for nineteen years. The war that ended the gods is not a subject in that town. When the wind gets in under the shutters, the clerk puts his elbow on the stone and keeps writing.