The Tamed Heart: A Survey of the Eastern March

An Imperial surveyor's confident report on the newly consolidated eastern march, written a generation before the Sundering and preserved after it. Every forward-looking sentence is, in hindsight, an epitaph.

To the Overseer of Roads, at the Bronze Seat: the road now runs seventy-one miles east of the Rampart gate, and I have walked the whole of it twice — once behind the engineers, once alone, to be sure the second walking agreed with the first. It does. This march, whatever the garrison wits call it in their letters home, is no longer a frontier in any sense that should trouble the Seat's ledgers. It is a province that has not yet finished being written down, which is a different thing entirely, and the whole of my present office. The eastern trunk-road is metalled as far as the Karth crossing and will reach the Rampart gate itself within three years, weather and quarry-labor permitting; the northern spur, once the Wind-Cut garrison is fully provisioned, will be metalled within the decade, and from that day a courier will cover in nine days what presently takes a fortnight. I have set the surveyor-stones myself at every third mile, each cut with the Seat's mark and the year, so that whoever walks this road a century from now will know exactly whose hand made it walkable. The mountain tribes — Korl, in their own tongue, though the garrison calls them by rougher names I will not repeat in an official survey — have withdrawn above the snowline following the action at Wind-Cut Pass and show no present appetite to test it a second time. I recommend against pursuit past the treeline. There is no revenue up there worth the cost of holding it, and a subdued enemy left alone tends, in my experience of three such marches, to stay subdued considerably longer than one that is chased. The Stoneborn galleries have accepted the quarry-charter without incident — indeed with what I can only call enthusiasm, once it was made plain to their moot that the Seat's law would guarantee their claim against any rival digger rather than seize the ground outright. This is, I have come to believe, the whole art of holding a march: the Stoneborn now police their own tunnels more zealously on the Seat's behalf than any garrison could at spear-point, and at a fraction of the cost. Three wagons of dressed stone a week move down the eastern trunk-road that did not move at all five years ago. The Asheni great houses have sworn as banner-holders rather than tributaries, a distinction that costs this office nothing in silver and has bought, I would judge, a full generation of peace we would otherwise have paid for in legions. They keep their forge-rights, their grudges, and their dead, and in exchange the eastern flank stays quiet without a single garrison-mile spent on it. Whoever drafted that clause understood these people better than I have managed to in six years living among them. The waystead at the Karth crossing, which three years ago was a single toll-post and a horse-trough, now supports a standing market twice a season and a resident population I would put past four hundred and growing. Where there is a market there will shortly be a temple, and where there is a temple the Wright's law follows on its own, without needing a single additional soldier to enforce it — a man keeps an oath sworn at a shrine far more reliably, in my experience, than one merely written on the Seat's writ. I recommend the Seat fund the shrine now, before the market outgrows the need for one; it will only be more costly to build later. The great works now rising at Caer Vallen deserve their own dispatch and will have one, but I note here for the ledger that the sky-artificers lent by our allies above the Rampart have proven finer measurers than any mason born to this march, mine included. Their instruments read distances I cannot account for, and their proportions hold to a fineness no journeyman here has ever matched. Whatever is built there, when it is finished, I expect it will let the Wright's own presence reach further into this march than any legion, tithe-roll, or road ever has. I have twice asked to be shown the plans in full and twice been told, courteously, that my office does not require them. I do not doubt that this is so. In sum: the march is roaded, garrisoned, chartered, and quiet, and I see no reason the Seat should not, within the decade, count this the safest province on any frontier of the Imperium — safer, very likely, than provinces twice its age, precisely because it was built rather than merely inherited. I close with the season's ordinary business. The Wind-Cut garrison requests four additional masons for the winter barracks before the passes close; the present complement of two cannot finish the north wall before first snow, and a barracks without its north wall is not one I am willing to certify fit for the Seat's men. I would have this request answered before the courier season ends. All else here proceeds according to plan.

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