Mordew

by Alex Pheby

  Conker

  A tree seed valued by squirrels and those pleased by a round, smooth brownness in things. It can be handed to a crying child who will put it to their lips and delight in it for a while. Care must be taken so that they do not swallow it, since they will choke.

  Cook

  The name given to a servant of the Master of Mordew responsible for preparing food in the private wing of the Manse. He is a mute, but who needs speech in the chopping of spinach, or the broiling of meat? He has no brigade and works alone so there is no one he must call for or chide, and his kitchen is quiet except for the click of the knife, or the bubbling of water at the boil. Does he take pride in his work? Pride is too vainglorious – no, he takes care always to do things correctly, for with food there is always a right way and a wrong way and anyone who says otherwise, or attempts to justify a mistake with claims to personal taste, is a fool. Cook is no fool – he knows the right ways and has the skill to prove it – but there is no arrogant pride in him. He does what must be done and that is all there is to it.

  Copper

  A coin of medium to low value – not as low as brass, but certainly not as high as silver.

  Corsage

  Who can see the colours of a ship, rippling in the breeze, and not feel a surge of some emotion in the chest? If one fears pirates, these colours will inspire fear, if one welcomes home a victorious navy, then excitement and pride will come. Always there is something and so, when we reproduce these colours in blooms and pin them to the lapel, what we are hoping to do, in miniature, is to own that larger feeling for ourselves. Or it may be that colour combinations are redolent of some analogous condition in the weft and that the wearing of them opens up a channel through which Spark energy will flow and make us more alive. Or we may just like patterns. In any case, it is customary before going into battle to wear the colours of one’s sponsors and some choose to do it by gathering flowers and attaching them to their uniforms, which is what a corsage is.

  Cream(s) (magical)

  Some may see a cream and say ‘this is nothing but a cream, some mundane emollient, do not trouble me with it,’ and there is truth in this because to have a convenient thing to hand is to lessen the importance of it as convenience robs even our closest and dearest compatriots of their special uniqueness and centrality in our lives. In short, we come to ‘take them for granted’, as the saying goes, and thus overlook them. Some creams may be overlooked, but some are magical, even if they appear to be entirely unremarkable. Some are capable of retrieving material flesh from the immaterial realm, such as when through overuse of the Spark through a wounded limb a man my drive that limb to defensively evolve into the concept of itself and lose materiality. In this case the cream should be applied daily after bathing and soon the limb will recover, and though this seems oversimple, then that is only because it elides the pains gone through to make the cream in the first place, which were extensive.

  Crusade(s)

  Any army marching to war with the sign of the cross at its fore is a crusading army, but there are many types of cross and thereby many types of crusade. The one that concerns Mordew is the cross of the Atheistic Crusade, which is very alike to the capital letter ‘X’ in red against black and which signifies the negation of God and all gods that the Crusaders hold as their motivating force. It is also the shape of the God-Summoning rack, though whether the rack takes this shape as a reference to the cross or whether the cross represents the rack is something over which even the Crusaders argue.

  Crusader sigil(s)

  To say one does not worship God is not to say that God does not exist. The Atheistic Crusaders know that God does exist and make it their work to murder him and anyone approaching godhood. Since they know that God is real, they also know that magic is real and they use it extensively, having made their own language that represents the condition of the weft in words on the pages of their magical books and inscribed into their magical objects, along with the character of it, so that they might replicate those conditions and characters in the material realm. Sigils make up this language and they are recognisable as a type in that they all have an element of the cross in them, somewhere, even if corrupted through iterative development into something unrecognisable.

  Cuckoo

  A slum boy who is often sent, along with his brothers, to the Master. Like the bird with whom he shares a name, he often takes for himself that share of the resources reserved for others. He is therefore not well liked at home, where those around him are made angry by their hunger.

  Darragh

  The name given to a sailor on the ship the Muirchú. What is there to say of sailors? They are all the same fellow again and again, and Darragh is not distinguishable, much, from any other. He pulls on ropes and clutches to bulwarks and often he drinks himself to sleep with liquor. As with the other sailors on the Muirchú he comes from the same place and has the same way of speaking, but if there is any significance to this fact it is not immediately obvious.

  Dashini

  The name given to the daughter of the Mistress of Malarkoi, heiress to all her powers and knowledge. She is a figure of central importance in the affairs of the world, and as such no further discussion of her is required, since it will all become obvious as the days pass.

  (The) Dawlish Brothers

  Two womb-born boys who, though derived from a small woman, have grown massive in stature. Their mother, Ma Dawlish, runs a gin-house in the Southern Slums and from there maintains a burgeoning criminal empire only held in check by the existence of her supposed employer, Mr Padge. All three wish Mr Padge ill, and whether they will have their wish granted (to see him die) only the progress of time will tell.

  Dead-life

  The Living Mud has the power to create life, but it does so stupidly with no thought or direction. God designed the creatures of the world intelligently and they thrive, not so dead-life, which falters and dissolves almost as soon as it is born. Since God made the world to accommodate his creations and it is formed with this in mind, then un-Godly creation will tend towards forms that exist as concepts in the immaterial realm, but they will not do so perfectly. So, dead-life will often appear as a flawed and imperfect version of a perfect thing.

  If dead-life, by chance, can live, then it is a fluke, but without application of much Spark energy (which is formed of God’s will) no dead-life and no fluke will live independently for long, no matter how close to God’s creation it might seem, because it will leak Spark back into the weft, since only perfect form can long hold the Spark insulated from its desire to be back in its proper realm.

  Death by Master

  Everything ungodly must die, since those that are not in entire concert with the weft will leach its Spark back into it. There is only a finite amount of the Spark in each living thing, and when it is gone then death replaces it. Those who die from lack of the Spark are survived only by the pattern they leave on the immaterial realm, and while they may return in the form of ghosts to places where the weft is deformed sufficiently to allow it (by the use of magic, usually), they may never live again, whether they die through natural causes or by accident.

  What, though, of those who are killed by magic, or at the hand of those who are infused with the Spark, or by those who are entirely in concert with the weft? Since those deaths are congruent with a deformation of the weft, on their death the patterns these people (or lower animals, or sometimes objects) established in the immaterial realm are imprinted on the weft – since their deaths were, in part or whole, caused by the deformation of it. As any shape the weft comes to hold persists and is sempiternal and coexistent with it, then these people may be retrieved in a manner very similar to those things and people that are evolved towards a more godly form by the direct application of Spark energy intended for the creation of higher orders of things, or organisms, or in the intentional creation of angels, or in any other way the use of the Spark comes to alter the natural state of a thing.

  Consequent
ly, those who die at the hands of a Master, Mistress or other manipulator of the weft may be summoned in a more perfect material form back to the material realm. Here they tend, through gratitude (since life is always to be preferred by the living to death, once they understand the permanence of such a thing and the unsatisfactoriness of life as a ghost), to serve that Master, even when the Master wishes them to perform some onerous role, such as to be a soldier in that Master’s army (though they might revolt if they are called upon to cause harm to those for whom, in life, they had some emotional sympathy).

  Moreover, in a very important sense, these resurrected dead can be seen to be owned by the Master that killed them since, with little expenditure of effort, he can return them to the immaterial realm and summon them to places in the material realm at will. Also, such is the manner of the relationship between life as it exists in the material realm with the patterns relating to that life as they are imprinted on the weft on death and the centrality of the Spark which comes from the weft in the giving of life, that the ownership caused by the extinguishing of the Spark by a weft-manipulator on the pattern of life as it deforms the weft has the effect of operating on all similar pattern possessors in the material realms. Which is to say that relations of those killed by a Master are also (though to a lesser extent) subject to the same ownership of their extinguished forebear (since they share, partly at least, the same pattern as it is represented in the weft). And, as time as it is represented in the weft and time as it is represented in the material realm are complexly related, this ownership moves both forward and backward in material time so that ancestors are also subject to ownership. Simply, if a Master kills a man, he gains ownership of his entire family line, future and past and laterally (unless, of course, a weft-manipulator manipulates the weft in such a way as to erase the pattern of the dead, something that is very difficult to do) whether they are mothers, fathers, brothers, ghosts or those yet to be born.

  Defensive evolutionary dematerialisation

  Overuse of the Spark through a wounded limb may drive that limb to defensively evolve into the concept of itself and lose materiality to prevent further damage. Or at least this is how it seems. More it is that the Spark, wishing to be used and seeing a threat to that use from a flaw in the material realm, causes, by evolution, a shift into the immaterial realm as a protective measure. In either case, the Spark user will lose materiality and eventually become a ghost. From there, should he continue to use the Spark, he will become an angel (or a demon) and then a demigod. Which is not to say that he could not choose that path for himself, but defensive evolutionary dematerialisation is when the Spark does it without reference to the man’s wishes.

  Delacroix House

  The ancestral home of the Delacroix family. It is built high up near the Manse, but unlike other dwelling places of the wealthy it does not imitate its style. It is as if, through their choice of aesthetic, this family has insisted that it is other than and not much less equal to the Master himself, and that the Master then should respect them more than he does any other family. Alternatively, the house might predate the Manse, and it is the Master that broke with architectural tradition in order to demonstrate his own superiority. The answer to which, if either, of these conjectures is accurate is no doubt contained in the Delacroix archives, but these they keep closed and access is not granted, even to scholars of Mordew.

  Demigod(s)

  Not all godlike things are God, since only the weftling is entirely in concert with the weft and no person can entirely be of the weft, since people belong to the material realm in life, and the immaterial realm in death, and neither of these realms is the weft. Consequently, when a person evolves themselves to a position of closeness to godhood sufficient for them to become more god than man, then they are not God, but are only a demigod and this is the most, it is presumed, that they can be.

  Demon(s)

  A man is a thing of the material realm, a ghost is a thing of the immaterial realm, and God is of the weft. Each of these things is typical of the realm they are spawned from, but what of creatures that straddle realms or are born in an intermediate realm? A thing mostly immaterial but a little material and a little of the weft – that thing receives the name ‘angel’. A thing mostly material, but a little of the immaterial and a little of the weft, that thing is called a demon. As an angel is concerned with the higher immaterial concerns – thought, love and beauty – so a demon is concerned with the lower material concerns – violence, hatred and ugliness.

  Those who deform the weft to their own ends can scour the intermediate realms for agents that might do their bidding, and the Atheistic Crusaders make much use of demons (though they cannot ever control angels, who tend to the godly and deny Crusader atheism) which they summon from their proper place to do violence in the material realm, which is something they are ever wont to do, since to live entirely in the material realm is like pain to them, so anger is their natural state. They will attempt, violently and angrily, to return to their own place, usually by the killing of their summoners. This does not mean they cannot be used, though, since their summoner need only put, for example, a place or person between themselves and a demon, and that person or place will like as not be destroyed as the demon seeks to lay its hands (if it has them) on its summoner. If the summoner knows then how to return a demon to its proper place, they can do so before they are killed and achieve much destruction with little effort (other than that inherent in the summoning, manipulation and dismissal of the creatures of the intermediate realms).

  (The) Devil

  An organism assumed by the men of the ancient times to exist, but which was subsequently demonstrated to be either an avatar of the weftling or a demon of the intermediate realms.

  Displacer box(es)

  There is no limit to the ingenuity of a person who, with enormous resources of intelligence and resentment, finds themselves held against their will. To be imprisoned may seem like a loss for that person, but then think of the very many people who, having their freedom, do precisely nothing with it. So wide is the range of opportunities of he who is at his liberty that it can be stifling, since what should he choose to do? When one is caged, however, there is one occupation only that seems worthy – finding freedom – and that one thing can be focussed on entirely. The displacer box is an object that, containing a condition of the weft and its vibrating with its character, was invented, with other things, by Dashini, daughter of the Mistress of Malarkoi while she was held under quarantine in the Master’s Manse. It allows any object placed within it to be manifest a fixed distance away from where it ought to be. While Dashini did not find it helpful in securing her release, anyone possessing it will find the theft of small objects much facilitated by its use, or the assassination of a person in another room, or for spying, since an optical instrument can be inserted into it and the object of its scrutiny observed through walls.

  (The) Den

  Gam Halliday’s gang’s alternative name for the Club House.

  Dogfighting

  There is no better fun than to see dogs fight, whether this is against another dog, or a bear, or a fluke, but it is also a fact that dogs do not relish fighting. The loser of a fight dies, but the victor is often wounded and if the scars are not physical, they are psychological. A dog at his first fight has thought previously that his owner held nothing but brotherly feeling towards him, so how does the dog react to see this man cheering beside the ring as the dog is bitten and clawed and taken close to death? He takes it inside himself, where its reconciliation with the past and present facts of the world provokes a pain in his stomach. For most dogs this is where it ends and the life of a fighting dog is naturally brief, but what of a magical dog? This type of dog harbours resentment and also great prowess at fighting, which is a dangerous combination if that beast should ever become intent on revenge.

  Dragon(s)

  What is a dragon if it is not a creature of myth? It is a gigantic lizard with four legs and wi
ngs and with the ability to breathe out fire, or ice, or poison, or lightning. Should the dragon have many heads then it may breathe all of the elements, and if a head is cut off two more sprout in its place. It is a formidable creature, yet it is rarely if ever seen, which is odd since formidable creatures are precisely those things that are liable to flourish, so where are they all? Perhaps they never existed at all, perhaps they are shy, or perhaps they have retired to an intermediate realm where they live all together in peace.

  Education

  A means by which one or many people may be induced to think as an educator intends for them to think. If taken young, the object of an education can find it impossible to overturn whatever beliefs that have been instilled into it, since it considers those facts to be synonymous with nature, or common sense, or the world as it is.

  Re-education is a secondary form of education undertaken by the peripatetic committees of the Atheistic Crusades as a means of overturning any primary education which they believe is counter to the interests of the Assembly.