I do not know the name of the hand that shaped that day. I know only what it shaped, and what it shaped is this: a place got a name, and the name held.
Before that day we were rough stock without even a yard to be rough in — no shard under our feet, no manifest to burn for a banner, nothing to punch a hole against. Then, somewhere outside the reckoning any of us keep, a claim was staked and a door was locked shut on it, the way a foundry claim is staked before the first pour: this ground, this name, ours, nobody else's. I have watched clans fight three seasons over less than what that hand settled in an afternoon.
Then it told us what would be counted.
I have heard oaths sworn a hundred different ways and I know a true one when it lands, even secondhand, even filtered through whatever distance stands between us and the hand that speaks it. It said, near as the words reached me: what a body does is what matters, not what a body says about itself. Say it in Yardcant and it sounds almost plain. Say it the way we say it — one hole, one kept thing, worn at the throat where the collar was, read at a glance and never discussed — and you will see it is the same law. I did not need it explained to me. I have nine holes in a collar-strip forged from iron that was my ancestor's before it was mine — the iron alone, not the marks; every hole in it is my own cutting, my own debt — and I have never spoken about eight of them, because the holes are the words. The ninth you may ask after. I will not promise you an answer. I will only tell you it is the one I do not refuse to hear asked. Whatever built that day did not invent our law. It only found the same answer we bled eleven hours and a third of a yard to write for ourselves, and set it down somewhere else, cheaper, in an afternoon, without losing anyone.
I do not resent that. I notice it. Those are different debts.
The stranger thing came after, and I will set it down plainly because plain is the only register I trust with it. Five gates opened in a window that had not existed the hour before — I felt them go up the way you feel a Ghazrun three ridges over, heat with no flame you can point to, a write landing somewhere you cannot see the pen. They did not ask anyone's leave. They did not announce themselves with noise; a working furnace does not need to shout to be heard by the ones standing near it. Five, in one pass, where every gate any of us had ever heard of before that day had gone up alone, hard-won, one Making Good at a time. I do not know what was sworn through them or by whom. I know only that something was, that it counted for something, and that whatever counts things had decided, that day, to start counting faster than any Gharn ever has.
Last: the ground itself was measured and cut down. Fewer would stand it, more of it would be stood on. I understand that instruction better than the rest. A wide field held by few is a Gharn field — you do not spread a line thin to cover ground, you make the ground answer to the line you can actually hold, and you do not apologize for the acreage you leave empty. Whoever drew that border that day drew it the way a warlord draws one, not the way a merchant does. I take small comfort in things I recognize.
I have sworn worse oaths on less evidence than a single day like this one. I am not swearing anything today. I am only keeping the account, the way the account has always been kept — no boast, no waste, one hole at a time — because something out past the edge of what I can see has apparently decided to keep one too, and until I know what it is owed, I intend to watch it the way I watch anything I have not yet decided whether to trust.
The tally does not lie. It also does not explain itself. Neither will I.
— Sekha Ashcollar, the Ninth Tally