The Doktor's Spyglass

Chapter 3.1

Consider maize. The cereal grain, that is. A humble enough plant, whose simplicity is transformed into something approaching nobility when one considers the numerous varietals, the dozens of uses, the hundreds of dishes one can prepare using a few cups of corn as a base. For centuries after the Fulkawer, the great race war, when holy Oridos was sacked and held in the infernal clutches of the Pale East—or so the Church tells it—the cultivation of maize was lost. A primeval staple in Westalen, the great western continent of this world, maize nonetheless required a certain method of fertilization and breeding in order to truly thrive. Explain to your average Oridosi, be he a dockworker on the Inner Sea or be she a governess in Kammerend, that there are such things as male and female ears of corn and they may well douse you with holy water and beg God to bless your simplicity.

But farmers know—farmers know a great many things, if only one is wise enough to ask them—that corn, like humankind, bears a gender, and further, farmers know where that knowledge came from. It was the northern tribes that began it, sometime in the misty past, when the Khorye Pass was still open, before the ancient Elimannen settled on a new continent of their God's design and found it, surprisingly, already inhabited by a people perfectly content to continue living their lives as they had since the beginning of time. But being a reasonable people, these northern peoples, who called themselves the Eberai, shared their agricultural gifts with these newcomers, giving them the gift of maize and the secret of its horticulture. We paid them for it in blood. But that is beside the present point.

One secret the Eberai did not share with their newfound neighbors to the south was the secret of making from that humble grain a spirit of a potency and flavor previously unknown to the Elimannen, a deep amber liquor that burned like fire and seemed to hold in its thousand subtle flavors the very secrets of the universe. The Elimannen were familiar with brandy and a variety of other spirits, but this was something different: less refined in some ways, more nuanced in others.

Over the centuries since, Oridosi vintners and distillers have tried their best to replicate the secret of the drink that the Eberai refuse to name, and the Elimannen of Oridos call simply whiskey, from wisca, which is simply the Old Elimannen word for water.

It has been said that the end of the Fulkawer and the closing of the Khorye Pass was tragic not only for its division of two great, old peoples, but also for the irreparable harm it did to the art and science of Oridosi distillation.

* * *

There are dives, and then there are dives, Thijis thought, his boot soles slapping noisily on dirty cobblestones. The Fourth Tribe was the latter. Situated dead at the bottom of Garshen Row, a street better known by residents and non-residents alike as the Gash, the Tribe was a block wide and three stories tall. The building was an ancient, heavy thing that squatted like a sooty, hunching toad between the rest of the Warrens and the city's northwestern wall. The city wall was three times the height of the Tribe, and the adjacent apartment building was almost as high as the wall. The result was that the tavern sat in perpetual twilight, an undeniably attractive quality in a house of ill repute. Given that the gas lamps were only lit at night (if they were lit at all in the Warrens), daytime was often darker than nighttime at this end of the Gash.

The Warrens didn't presume to the heights of the great civic buildings in Oridos' center or the stately homes of Kammerend, but the ramshackle way it had grown up over the centuries made its streets far deeper and darker than the broad avenues of better neighborhoods. The rows of the Warrens were narrow and concave, their cobbles perpetually coated with a scum of coal smoke and lamp oil and the diverse ichor dredged up from the Undercity and the questionably legal establishments that lined the back lanes. The buildings were old and unmaintained, many of them leaning over the street below like elderly forge men. Thijis had seen eaves touching in places, entirely as a result of decades and centuries of entropy. Kissing eaves, Warreners called them.