Under The Vale And Other Tales Of Valdemar v(-105

by Mercedes Lackey

  In fact, there has only ever been one Tayledras station that was perfectly spherical, its fields and tunnels extending as far below as above in a perfect circle: k’Hala, the first Vale, long abandoned with its quiescent node intact, underneath what is now Haven, the capital of Valdemar.

  Tayledras Scouts are known for being tougher than nails, and for good reason. Essentially, the Pelagirs wants to kill everyone and everything. The Forest will try to kill by poison, by gas, by infection and pitfalls, clouds of deadly insects or hordes of bugs that swarm and eat you while you’re asleep. Thorns scratch deep and leave toxins, deep canopy confuses direction and hides everything from giant spiders to hive-mind boring beetles. There are snakes, slime molds, decayed husks of house-sized trees serving as dens for diseased monsters, wolves, ankle-breaking vine twists, and bottomless pits, with possible packs of armored, carnivorous wyrsa to complete the joy of each mile’s travel. The most experienced Scouts can cover an average of four miles through the Pelagirs on their best day. The question concerning the reordering of wild magic, especially before the Storms, shouldn’t have been “that’s all they’ve done for a thousand years?” but rather, “They made it THAT far?”

  Make no mistake, establishing a Vale is a fight, and not always a winnable fight. Expeditions have been destroyed or had to fall back and try again, sometimes as many as six times before a safe perimeter could be established.

  The sheer mass of growth in the Pelagirs makes a Vale site hard to pick out, but once a Scout finds a likely candidate, he faces due north and then stares at it, committing it to memory; then he thinks back along the path he took to get there. Upon returning to his home, a dyheli stag will pull the mental images from him and share them with the senior Mages and hertasi builders. Cartographers sharing these visions make notes and later consult with the Scout to confirm the route. If the site looks viable, an expedition will go there, often with as many as forty in the mixed-species party. The expedition will always include a team of hertasi stonecrafters, with their powerful magical stone-shaping tools. The party travels two days, then stops for a night or two, whereupon the hertasi examine the ground and pull up a protective stone wall (still referred to as a palisade) of bedrock pulled up into flat, tall sheets about a foot at the base and tapering up to a few inches at man-height with two exits. The excess heat from the stoneshaping is bled off into a pile of usually wet deadfall gathered while they begin, and the heat dries the wood and then combusts it for the camp’s comfort fire. These palisade camps are left behind as convenient waystations.

  When the new Vale site is reached, the hertasi use their instruments to map the topography and then probe into the underlying rock bed. If it is found to be of sufficient density, the very first stage of Vale groundbreaking is begun. This consists of a very large-scale version of the earlier camp palisades, drawn up through all the dirt and plant growth. One sharpened-top sheet of stone is pulled up each day, severing the root systems of the forest growth by punching upward, like a stroke by a giant ax blade. Scouts, dyheli, and hertasi reduce the downed trees into usable firewood and lumber and make a first clear patch. Sheet by sheet, these stone palisades create a wall around the eventual Vale site—a relative zone of safety to live inside. This invariably attracts creatures like wyrsa packs and anything starving and insane, which the Pelagirs never lacks.

  Living, nontoxic trees within the palisade perimeter that can be cleared of dangerous parasites are left as intact as possible, to become the host trees of ekeles. Useful bushes and vines are similarly left in place, and this extends all the way down into the undergrowth of the Vale’s ravine. Ideally, a Vale should begin with a ravine at least ten stories deep, with a steady-flowing stream originating from mountain runoff or natural springs.

  When the incipient Vale reaches a state of defensibility and the Mages confirm that it will be an effective site for the Cleansing duties, word is carried back to their origin Vale, and hertasi and others descend upon the trailblazed site in force.

  The sides of the ravine are stonecrafted into a series of ramps, switching back between platforms that support terraced gardens. The ramps are for carts assembled on site (and for the ease of any gryphons who wish to walk up or down; gryphons are fine with climbing stairs but terrible at descending them, so, modern Vales always use ramps), but most especially for the incredibly swift-running hertasi dashing around. The level resting places of each outward-facing switchback is lengthened an extra ten feet or so to make landings easier for gryphons in modern Vales, while the inner-facing ones are covered by awnings.

  The first stage of making hertasi burrows begins with creating “guest apartments” alongside the ramps. These are not just a courtesy for the humans; they are also where the hertasi stonecrafters get truly intimate with the rock around them. Probe spheres and spellwork imaging “soundings” are sent in from these locations, and once the native rock is mapped and found to be worthy, the apartments are given over to the humans, and the hertasi burrow tunnelling begins nearby. The burrow tunnels go level and deep in concentric circles around where the Heartstone will eventually be placed once the Vale is “roofed” at ground level.

  A sturdy wooden bridge is built across the ravine, its center pole marking where the Heartstone will eventually be. Surveying lines radiate out from the pole, and at equidistant points tripods with pulleys are set up. From these the hertasi’s plumb bob drilling devices are slowly lowered. They “scoop up” earth and rock as they drop, increasing its plasticity and compressing it into the hardened sides of the shafts. Hertasi stand well back because the compression and tunnelling creates a lot of heat, which fires up out of the hole in a jet. When the plumb bob drill reaches a set depth, it is powered down and pulled back up. Then a homing crystal is lowered down into the hole after a day’s cooling period and left there. Eventually between thirty and sixty shafts are made on either side of the Vale, each shaft with a homing crystal at the bottom. These crystals are the targets that the sideways tunnelling will track on. The hertasi use a specialized set of magical digging and stoneworking tools that include a “cooler,” which comically looks like a spoon at the end of a polearm. The cooler sucks away the heat given off by the other tools; it is a vital tool as excavations increase in scale.

  Hertasi diggers start in from the valley side and aim at the nearest homing crystal, then expand and reinforce the tunnel section once they’ve reached that crystal. Then the next crystal is aimed for, and so on, and eventually a circular ring tunnel is produced. This pilot tunnel is the reference ring and access for all the valleyside tunnel work that is to follow. It is from this main ring that the Vale’s water distribution, Heartstone cooling system, and the radiating underground magical tuning channels are built up.

  Compressed, hardened stone is scooped out as a result of the tunneling process and is in turn either reformed into marbled brick or ground into concrete. One of the first durable structures built inside the guard walls at a new Vale site is a charcoal oven. One team splits, seasons, and stacks the local wood, while a second team makes a brick kiln. Brick and concrete work better than stonepulling in many applications, like pathways, and once the Tayledras scouts and the lesser Mages have secured the area, even the original palisade is ground down to make pathways. If the Vale site has good kaolin and clay in the area, ceramic bricks are the top choice; if there is a good source of lime nearby, concrete is preferred. If a coal seam can be mined, the fly ash is saved for a particular type of structural concrete. Cement and concrete have been used for thousands of years in Velgarth; Urtho’s Tower at Ka’venusho was a triumph of architecture and concrete use. Hertasi usually do the brickwork and pointing at a Vale site, but even among the Hawkbrothers there are human masons.

  Depending upon the regolith of the Vale site, the upper rooms and corridors in the ravine’s sides could have either a glassy or a ceramic finish, caused by the compression effect of the devices firing the earth into a hardened crust. This could be used to great effect structurally,
since the compression strength could be quite high once support ribs of a foot thick or more were formed. Convenient shelving is usually built between the support ribs.

  The hertasi stonepulling devices of various shapes have the property of changing stone’s plasticity without creating a detrimental crystalline matrix. More accurately, stone pulling makes the stone draw like a pulled clay or molten glass into the desired shape, and then the crystalline structure that gave the stone strength does not form until the stone is “released” by the stonepuller. When stone is drawn out into its final shape, the large-area stonepuller, called the setter, aligns the crystallization inside the stone from all the previous, smaller pulls. This is why the soaring bridges and buttresses used to create rooms and floors underneath a Vale are effectively single-piece structures, since the setter fuses the subassemblies together into a contiguous form. The setter also smooths out walls, ceilings, and floors. Some of the small hills and mounds inside a Vale are actually hollow, with multiple rooms, created by stonepulling a dome and setting it, and then building a layer of soil over the dome for landscaping. Hertasi are experts at disguising structures.

  The Tayledras’ famed bathing pools are stonepulled creations that make use of a network of heat-regulating formed-tunnel “pipes” that circulate water from the furnaces upward to the surface and to heat-sink cisterns down the Vale’s slope. Hot water is diverted to create artificial springs that bubble up to the highest level of the pools and then cascade over the sides to the progressively cooler pools. Bathing starts at the lowest, cooling levels, which is where the outright filth and dirt gets washed off; then the next higher levels are cleaner, warmer water, until the highest level is reached where the hottest water and most of the socializing can be found. The Pelagirs are brutal, and most of what sticks to a Pelagirs traveler also stinks and probably carries disease or toxins, so the hot pools are more than a hedonistic indulgence, they’re vital for health and hygiene.

  It is important to remember, when you consider a Vale, that it is essentially a machine that houses a small city. The Tayledras Adepts in particular are technical and procedural in how they harness and refine the Pelagirs’ wild magic. This applies to their delicate spellwork as well. Subterranean workrooms are isolated from each other and put behind layers of physical shielding ranging from lead sheet to embedded crystal dust mats, so that subtle magic or “miniature” versions of Great Work spells can be laid out at low risk of interference. The floors are inscribed with diagrams and reference points, and their geometry act as an instruction set for what will happen during the course of a casting. Once the “model” is constructed, the spellwork is diagrammed, and hertasi scribes make records of every small detail, since when a Great Work is played out at full size, a “small detail” could affect an area the size of a city. These scribed accounts form a standardized reference for every Mage involved in the castings, much as architects have multiple sets of blueprints, and copies are eventually distributed to each Vale and Tayledras settlement.

  Hertasi, being no strangers to magic use themselves and definitely no strangers to how Hawkbrothers do things, embed two or more of the main galleries of each Vale with the workrooms’ gridwork for spell construction, just in case some Pelagirs-wide catastrophe should need to be solved by a large-scale spell that, for some awful reason, could not be done above ground.

  The arched galleries themselves are more than just (to the short hertasi) vast spaces to make bigger surface-dwellers feel more welcome; they are also meant for evacuations. Every Vale has enough room in the galleries to take in a complete Vale’s complement of gryphons, humans, and other species, plus their pets and Bondbirds, twice over, with sanitation and basic provisions for up to six days. Fresh air is brought in from the lowest levels inside the ravine, aided by waterwheels powered by the ravine’s stream, and circulates up to the surface by convection, belt-driven fans, and the bustle of activity under the Vale.

  The hertasi motto, “We Can Do This,” reflects their inventive nature and their ability to define and produce solutions to problems of almost any complexity. The walls of many hallways under a Vale are covered in chalk designs, open to annotation by anyone who passes them. Lists and charts of Vale issues (sometimes including Tayledras personal relationships that need “help”) line the major uprights of the galleries, constantly updated by runners or hearsay.

  As a necessity of the multilayered field integrity of the upper Veil, the Vale has only two points of entry at the surface level. These entries are always in the form of two spires, curving toward each other at the top, or a full arch. Field tuning rods are set on the outermost edges of the spires, usually completely covered by greenery. The Veil is a set of shields, each adjustable, that form a dome over the Vale. The shimmer effect comes from convection heat transfer caused by the venting of the furnaces and often steam. The Veil thickness tapers from around twenty feet at the base of the dome to around five at the very peak. It is not a “hard shell” type of shield, but rather a set of “resistive” layers, permeable enough to fly through with just the feeling of encountering a sudden stiff crosswind. It can also be walked through slowly.

  The Veil functions much like an air curtain you might encounter at a supermarket, and it blunts the effect of even the strongest snow and ice storms, resulting in a warm rain inside the dome. Lighter rainstorms may not even penetrate the Veil at all, or might produce a pleasant mist. Unsurprisingly, the Veil is designed to absorb lightning strikes, which the Hawkbrothers believe a Heartstone attracts. It’s actually the static buildup caused by the Veil itself that does it, but the Tayledras aren’t quite experts in electricity; still, the frequent ionization from the lightning strikes benefits the plant life below, which is part of why Vales are so lush with greenery.

  Strictly patrolled small wetlands are developed in the half-mile area around a Vale, host to rice ponds, frog and fish farms, and reed stands. Flax is grown between the wetland patches. Decorated trellises of grapevines encircle the Vale, but like many Tayledras and hertasi designs, they conceal another purpose. The control rods that maintain the shape of the Veil are in every trellis upright, and the outermost ones begin the “tuning” process upon the raw, rough magical energy drawn toward the Heartstone from the surrounding countryside. A hundred or more control stones are placed as decorations in the clearings surrounding the Vale for a quarter-mile all around; they act like a “breakwater” when there is a surge. Together, these stones and rods act as a collimator, accurately aligning and directing the rough magic the Adepts draw in from the many miles around, directly into the Heartstone.

  Even a novice Mage will tell you that the biggest danger in using magic power comes from using too much of it. Limiting the amount that is drawn upon is what makes the difference between a miracle worker and a charred corpse. Uncontrolled magical power manifests as excess heat, sometimes in sheets and flares that cause clothing to combust and skin to burn. An Adept is respected not just for his skill at spellwork but for his skill at staying alive.

  This brings us to the Heartstone. A Heartstone is a physical object that acts as a capacitor for huge amounts of magical energy, which the Tayledras Mages draw in through the “breakwater” stones, Veil curtain and tuning rods of the Vale. The intent is to take in the flawed, raw, random “strings” of energy, align them, and give that energy a stable place to stay. However, just like the individual “strings,” by the billions, are largely unpredictable, so too can their flow into the Vale be unpredictable. Tayledras Mages work together because they can buffer each other from the surges of the rough magic through skilled use of shields. The Heartstone isn’t just something that’s left running and checked on once in a while.

  A Heartstone is crafted on site from rock excavated during that Vale’s construction. Hertasi stoneshaping tools are used to create it, and the most important part of the procedure is the month-long pulling to align the stone’s inner crystalline structure to be as close to perfectly vertical as possible. Traditionally, Hea
rtstones are sculpted as spires or obelisks, and they have a broad base that tapers beneath the visible ground level into a rounded point that seats into a socket in the top of the Vale’s Great Furnace.

  The Heartstone’s lower point flares off the excess energy below the surface of the Vale, into the bed of the ceramic-lined beehive-shaped magic-grounding Great Furnace, which is ringed by six to eighteen lesser furnaces. Each of them has check systems both magical and physical (using series of diagonal sliding stones) to handle the shock pressures and temperatures caused by these flares. Every furnace has a system of ceramic-lined tunnels that circulate water (often heated to live steam by the check systems). These provide steady heat throughout the Vale and tunnel systems as well as sterile, fresh drinking water, and they also supply the bathing pools. Several of the furnaces are used to turn sewage to sterile ash, which is then sluiced down through the lowest level of the Vale and out into the valley. Others are used for domestic functions such as garbage removal and cooking, and at least one is always used for body disposal. The Great Furnace always has at least two heavy, adjustable accesses that are used to aid smelting, glasswork, and blacksmithing, with up to six in the largest Vales.