Under the Vale and Other Tales of Valdemar Read online

  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 crafte
d 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, Heartstones 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.

  The smithing vents and lesser furnaces are used as inspection accessways when the Heartstone is periodically put into a resting mode, generally at the height of summer. The Great Furnace slowly cools, and Adepts, architects and hertasi go inside every furnace in turn to check and repair any structural problems, replace any damaged slider valves, and seal water tunnel cracks. This is also a time for surface-level celebrations, feasting, and rest.

  You can picture a functioning Vale in its simplest form as making order out of a badly jumbled vector field (and it can be seen more complexly as a tensor field, with the control and tuning rods, stones and spells acting upon magical-string factors of stress, strain and elasticity). The area of that vector field increases, over the years, as the Adepts “reach out” farther from their Vale, until ultimately the vectors within the Vale’s reach are judged adequately aligned---and the wild magic has been calmed. Time to move on. Fight monsters, survive, scout. Build another Vale. That’s how it was for centuries.

  The thing is, now the Hawkbrothers don’t have to. They have whole new problems, though.

  The Mage Storms of around 1,100 years later were ripple effects of the Cataclysm disjunction literally traveling around the planet and returning to their points of origin. The Mage Storms were not “echoed through time,” as some have said. It simply took that long for the waves to travel that distance, and by then they had changed from being disjunction disruptions into more like a “strain” or “sieve” effect. You already know the story of how the Mage Storms were handled and some of the aftereffects. The Storms left “available” magic in a much different state than before. For example, gryphons, whose wingbeats filter ambient magic to be absorbed and processed by their bone linings to produce the lift for their heavy bodies to fly, now have an easier time than ever achieving flight since the ambient magic was now more evenly spread out and “particulate.” Just the same, it created a “fog effect” for anything long-distance, returning magework to a very personal level rather than world-ranging. This really annoyed a lot of people who depended heavily upon long-distance spell effects, most notably the Eastern Empire, and they were already pretty cranky.

  It is vital to remember that unlike many religions of Velgarth that have religious faith, the Tayledras and hertasi have absolutely zero doubt—not just that there is a goddess, but that this goddess takes an active interest in them on a personal level. There is no more crisis of faith in Tayledras life that a deity is involved in what you do than there is a crisis that water is wet or that fire is hot. Every Tayledras has a personal encounter with an aspect or representative of the goddess no less than once in their lives, and usually, much more often than that.

  Tayledras have stupendously difficult lives in some regards, and while they train and strive to fend for themgelves, sometimes it just isn’t enough. Spirits of ancestors and fellow Tayledras work in the goddess’ service. These spirits—souls detached from physical bodies, incarnated into spirit beings—are each assigned to multiple Tayledras to watch over and help them through things they can not handle on their own. However, a direct intervention takes a lot out of them, so they’ll usually depend upon affecting something small in the physical world. If a Hawkbrother is drowning in a river, they’ll nudge over a weakened branch to clamber onto, rather than teleport the person to dry land. It’s also important to remember that while these guardians have otherworldly insights, they are not omniscient and ideal, and they can screw up.

  To be utterly blunt, at present the Goddess Kal’enel concentrates most of her attention on the Shin’a’in because the Tayledras have their magic thing way more together than their Plains brethren, and they don’t usually need her help. In fact, by the time of the Storms, thanks to sixty-some extant Heartstone Vales and near-thousand Adepts, the Tayledras have collectively become the equal in power of any of the Velgarthian deities, though (fortunately?) they don’t realize it.

  So, after almost a millenium of continuous hard work to bring order to the wild magic of the Pelagirs, do the Hawkbrothers feel as if their efforts were wasted now that the Storms came along and scraped away what they did to tame it all? Not at all, because they know that they pretty much saved everybody. If the Tayledras had not actively pulled the wild magic into order, the dangers of the Pelagirs would have overrun the whole of the known world.

  The Hawkbrothers feel kind of satisfied knowing that. The goddess is pleased.

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  About the Authors

  Nancy Asire is the author of four novels, Twilight’s Kingdoms, Tears of Time, To Fall Like Stars, and Wizard Spawn. Wizard Spawn was edited by C.J. Cherryh and became part of the Sword of Knowledge series. She also has written short stories for the series anthologies Heroes in Hell and Merovingen Nights; a short story for Mercedes Lackey’s Flights of Fantasy; as well as tales for the Valdemar anthologies Sun in Glory and Crossroads. She has lived in Africa and traveled the world but now resides in Missouri with her cats and two vintage Corvairs.

  Jennifer Brozek is an award winning editor and author. Winner of the 2009 Australian Shadows Award for edited publications, she has edited five anthologies, with more on the way. Author of In a Gilded Light and The Little Finance Book That Could, she has more than thirty-five published short stories and is an assistant editor for the Apex Book Company. Jennifer is also a freelance author for many RPG companies, including Margaret Weis Productions, Savage Mojo, Rogue Games, and Catalyst Game Labs. Winner of the 2010 Origins Award for Best Roleplaying Game Supplement, her contributions to RPG sourcebooks include Dragon-lance , Colonial Gothic, Shadowrun, Serenity, Savage Worlds, and White Wolf SAS. When she is not writing her heart out, she is gallivanting around the Pacific Northwest in its wonderfully mercurial weather. She is an active member of SFWA and HWA.

  Brenda Cooper has published over thirty short stories in various magazines and anthologies. Her books include The Silver Ship and the Sea and Reading the Wind. She is a technology professional, a futurist, and a writer living in the Pacific Northwest with three dogs and two other humans. She blogs and tweets and all that stuff—stop by www.brenda-cooper.com and visit.

  Larry Dixon is the husband of Mercedes Lackey, and a successful artist as well as science fiction writer. He and Mercedes live in Oklahoma.

  Rosemary Edghill has been a frequent contributor to the Valdemar anthologies since selling her first novel in 1987, writing everything from Regency romances to SF to Alternate History to mysteries. Between writing gigs, she’s held the usual selection of wei
rd writer jobs, and can truthfully state that she once killed vampires for money. She has collaborated with Marion Zimmer Bradley (Shadow’s Gate), Andre Norton (Carolus Rex), and Mercedes Lackey (“Bedlam’s Bard” and the forthcoming Shadow Grail). In the opinion of her dogs, she spends far too much time on Wikipedia. Her virtual home can be reached from http://www.sff.net/people/eluki/ Her last name—despite the efforts of editors, reviewers, publishing houses, her webmaster, and occasionally her own fingers—is not spelled “Edgehill.”

  Sarah A. Hoyt was born in Portugal and lives in Colorado. In between lie a variety of jobs ranging from dishwasher to multilingual translator. Currently she lives in Colorado with her husband, two teen sons, and a small but fierce clowder of rescue cats. She writes and publishes science fiction, fantasy, historical, mystery,and romance novels under Sarah A. Hoyt, Sarah D’Almeida and Elise Hyatt.

  Tanya Huff lives and writes in rural Ontario, Canada, with her spouse, Fiona Patton, nine cats, and two dogs. She served in the Naval Reserve, has a slightly used degree in Radio and Television Arts, and has now been a full time writer for nineteen years. Her most recent books include The Truth of Valor and The Wild Ways. When she isn’t writing, she practices the guitar and complains about the weather.

  Denise McCune has been writing since she was eleven—which was (coincidentally?) right around the time she fell in love with Valdemar. She has worked in the social networking industry for nearly a decade, and not having enough to do writing novels and short stories (her first short story sale was to Jim Baen’s Universe), she decided to launch Dreamwidth, an Open Source social networking, content management, and personal publishing platform. Denise lives in Baltimore, Maryland, where her hobbies include knitting, writing, and staying up too late writing code.