PUBLISHED UNDER THE EYE OF THE CROWN · KORMOR KIRAK

The Eternal Courant

VOL. I · No. III The 1st of May, 1793 PRICE · THREE GROATS, OR YOUR ATTENDANCE

The Eastern Tower finished and lit from within, the comet leaning toward its crown. The market struck from the Grand Square; the gates shut on a city called to gather. A curfew waits past the festival's close.

The Tower stands complete, the city is summoned whole to the square beneath the comet, and the borders will not open. Attendance is enforced; the doors are to be left unbarred.

THE CITY IS CALLED TO THE SQUARE

Filed by Our Correspondent at the Castle

The Festival of Convergence opens this day at the appointed bell, and Kormor Kirak is called to the Kereskedo Marketplace whole and entire, that the Crimson Comet might look down upon a city gathered in one place beneath one Crown. The Eastern Tower stands finished. Its last scaffold came down in the night, quietly, with no bell rung to mark the labour done, and the structure shows now in its full height, black stone and crystal, lit from within by a colour the lamplighters have no oil to match and the astronomers no word for.

This sheet attended the dressing of the Grand Square and reports it gladly. The great stage is raised where the corn-stalls stood. The Theater carpenters have hung the platform in crimson to the height of three men, and set upon it a chair that is not quite a throne and faces not the people but the Tower. Her Majesty's heralds have walked the wards these three days crying the hour of attendance, and the Red Guard walk behind them, marking the doors.

The Crown asks joy of its subjects, and gathering, and that each household send its soul to the square and leave its door upon the latch. The Courant prints the summons entire, as it is bound to, and sets down beside it only the small arithmetic it is still permitted to keep: that a city has but the one marketplace, and the Crown has now emptied it of everything a body might hide behind, and called every body into it at the one hour. What is wanted of so general a gathering, no notice has yet said. The Tower waits. The comet leans toward the Tower. This day the city stands between them.

THE BORDERS WILL NOT OPEN

From the walls and the high passes

They have been gathering at the gates since the proclamation, the carts and the bundles and the children carried, and the gates do not open. The Cliff Road is the Crown's and the walls are the Red Guard's, and the high passes, where a determined family might once have slipped a mountain track, are watched now by men who keep no fire against the cold and seem to need none. A drover lately of the Terrassian quarter, turned back twice, told this correspondent he had counted four hundred souls below the Northern gate and meant to count no more, the number being a thing that makes a man's chest tight to hold. The festival gathers the city in. The walls keep it gathered. No road out of Kormor Kirak is open to a common purse this se'ennight, and the uncommon purses have already spent themselves and gone nowhere.

THE STALLS ARE STRUCK ENTIRE

From the Kereskedo Market, what remains of it

The market that has fed this city since before the Century War is gone from the Grand Square, struck to the cobbles, its stalls carted off or burned for the festival fires. Yuri Szek, who collected the stall-fees forty years and had a word for every order, gave this one no word at all and was seen to fold his ledger and put it in his coat. Bella keeps her sausage-cart yet, by some arrangement she will not name, and trades from the mouth of an alley where the Guard's eye is short. The fixer Rozito Vallikozo has removed his custom to the Terra Sotto below, where, he allows, the trade keeps later hours and asks fewer questions, and where a man may buy things the upper market never stocked. The Crown has cleared the square of commerce. It has not cleared the city of need, and need has gone downstairs to be served.

THE GUARD GIVES THE NIGHT TO OTHERS

From the Marrow and the river wards

The Red Guard has thinned from the eastern wards by day, the better to dress the square, and the wards are not left unwatched for it. After the second bell the patrols that keep the empty lanes are not the Guard. They go quick and they go quiet, they carry no lamp and cast the long mirror-trouble Lady Mireva remarked of the General, and the few householders left awake to see them report that they do not tire and do not speak and do not seem to feel the river cold that drives an honest watchman indoors. Captain Ashford, asked at the Cliff Road station whose men these were, answered that the Crown wants for no soldiers now, and that the city should sleep, and went in.

BY ORDER OF THE RED GUARD, THE FIRST OF MAY

By order of Captain Ashford, for the security of the Convergence

BE IT KNOWN to all residents of Kormor Kirak. Upon the day of the Festival of Convergence, every household shall send one soul at the least to the Kereskedo Marketplace by the third bell, and shall leave the dwelling door unbarred for the Crown's inspection in their absence. A curfew is laid upon every ward from the festival's close until the dawn following; the streets in those hours belong to the Crown's patrols, and any soul found upon them shall answer to the patrol that finds them. Any person furnishing information of a household that withholds its attendance shall receive a reward of two hundred korma. The Crown thanks its loyal subjects for their joy, their attendance, and the open keeping of their doors.

COMET WATCH

The Astronomer's Office is closed and its windows dark

The Crimson Comet stands now near the top of its climb, broad as a thumb held at arm's length, and reddens past the colour a star has any business showing. It hangs each night a little nearer the crown of the Eastern Tower, as though the one were drawn to the other, or set to meet it. The terraces where the learned men kept their glasses are bare. The Astronomer's Office is shuttered and answers no letters and shows no light, and the men who kept it are within the castle and send out nothing. The bells of the eastern wards ring themselves at the turn of each night and no sexton owns the rope. The hour the Crown calls Convergence is close. Look up while you are made to gather anyhow.

THE ALBION PARTY STAYS, AND IS WATCHED

The Society Page, with its usual care

The Treaty Ball is a fortnight cold, and still the Albion delegation has not taken the road home, the road being shut to them as to all. Lord Barron Whitehallow keeps to the embassy and is much reduced; his physicians come and go at hours that suit a sickbed poorly and a council better, and the younger man upon whose arm he leaned at the Ball is now seldom from his side. Miss Olivia Faren, the accountant, has left off charming the court entirely and taken to the counting-houses and the theater accounts with a cold patience the company finds alarming, and has asked, of more than one person who wishes she had not, why the festival's reckonings run through the castle and not the market, and where the labourers of the Tower are now lodged. Lady Mireva keeps her station and her ledger of who speaks to the Albion girl, and the names upon it do not, of late, keep well.

OVERHEARD, WHILE OVERHEARING LASTS

The Courant hears, and tells what it dares

That the Hallaset Fields are quiet by day and not by night, and that the sky-burial frames stand empty of dead that were laid in them whole, and that the patrols which keep the eastern lanes after the second bell come up, some say, from that quarter and go back to it by dawn. That below the struck market, in the Terra Sotto, the candles burn in a pattern an honest cellar has no use for, and that the Lich Cult is said to keep its own reckoning of the comet, and to want of the Convergence a thing the Crown has not been told it wants. That the Princess Szeret has not been seen at any window of her dark tower this month, and that a maid lately of the castle, before she too went quiet, swore the iron of a certain door had been set to keep a thing in and not out. The Courant names nothing the Gatekeepers have not already heard, and counts nothing that walks back up the hill.

THE BILL OF MORTALITY, THIS SE'ENNIGHT

Six labourers of the eastern works, of the works concluded; the foremen are themselves not seen to record it.
A drover of the Terrassian quarter, of the high passes, turned back at the gate and found below the wall in the morning cold.
A maid late of the castle, of a sudden quiet; the household records a fever it does not name.
One-and-twenty souls given to the Hallaset Fields unwashed, against all custom, by the Crown's leave.
A number returned from the Hallaset Fields unbidden, for which the bill keeps no column, and the sexton no longer keeps the gate.

THE MARKET REGISTER, IN GROATS AND KRONE

Bread, the loaf: 5 groats, where the festival ovens have left any to sell
Tallow candles, the dozen: 12 groats, and the chandler asks after your custom before he asks your coin
Lamp oil, the measure: 3 krone, the Tower lit first, the lamplighters after, the wards last
Red ochre, for the door-wards: not to be had; the doors are ordered open regardless
A place at the alley's mouth, out of the patrol's eye after curfew: priced in silence, paid in favours
Passage beyond the walls, by any road: closed; the bribe is taken, the road is not opened, the next of kin is notified

ALL ISSUES ▸ ‹ RETURN TO THE COURT

THE ETERNAL COURANT // No. 03 // PRINTED IN KORMOR KIRAK IN THE YEAR OF THE CRIMSON COMET
SISTER SHEET: THE BLOODLETTER · ALL THE NEWS THE CROWN PERMITS, AND A LITTLE IT DOES NOT.