The Mortal Apparatus
Because the wyrms cannot act, mortals do everything, and the institutions that do it have grown very large.
- Viceroys
- Each Wright governs through mortal or half-blooded deputies holding real delegated authority. They are ambitious, frequently resentful, and expendable in a way their master is not.
- Scions
- Half-dragons and dragon-blooded, deliberately produced and raised as the acceptable middle instrument: strong enough to matter and not covered by the Accords. Draconic ancestry here is simultaneously citizenship, a claim on a plate, and a liability under Clause I. An Undivided court retains its scions as staff; a Kinsworn house records them as cousins, with a claim under clan inheritance law and obligations to match.
- Licensed agents
- The legal fiction that permits dragons to fight each other through mortals. A Forge licence carries standing at law, and revoking one is an act of state.
- Plate-readers
- Draconic treaty lawyers. The work pays extremely well and kills a steady number of its practitioners, since a reading that costs a house its claim is traceable to the reader.
- The Forge
- Now principally an embassy district. The plates still hang in the ring at its heart, but the business of the city is a permanent congress of ambassadors, plate-readers, factors and licensed agents. No dragon may take true form within the walls; the prohibition has never been read to cover steel.
IV.2 · Houses and powers
A house is what a dragon accumulates around itself: the mortal dynasty that does the visible ruling, the holdings inside a day’s overflight plus everything held at one remove, the offices captured over eight centuries, the debts owed in both directions, and a century of marriage contracts whose only important clauses concern which plate the children will be offered to.
A house can outlive its bloodline. A plate cools when its last name fades, but the dynasty, ledgers and garrisons do not stop. A cold house runs on institutional momentum with nothing at the top, so nothing in it is covered by Clause I any more.
A house can also exist without ever having had a dragon. Banking houses, grain factors, mercenary companies, monastic orders, plate-reader firms, the Forge’s permanent bureaucracy. Some are older than the Wrights that nominally rule them, and a few quietly own theirs, a dragon three centuries into unserviceable debt taking instruction from its creditors like anyone else.
IV.3 · Traditions
| Tradition | Institutional character | Characteristic use of the Accords |
|---|---|---|
| Arcane | Mage-cities, academies, chartered guilds. Literate, procedural, obsessed with precedent. | Wrote most of the case law and still supplies the majority of plate-readers. |
| Divine | Temple-states. Hold both moral extremes and consider the middle a failure of nerve. | Signed last. Both wings hold the treaty to be a compromise, and disagree only about which vice it compromises with. |
| Occult | Rule through cults, debts, blackmail and information rather than office. | The principal beneficiaries, since a debt is enforceable where a flight is not. |
| Primal | Wilderness realms, herding cultures, thin borders. | Adherence is weakest here: a wyrm in a trackless waste holds no plate and is owed nothing under the terms. |
Any large power has more than one, in tension: the temple and the academy in the same city, mutually hostile and both required.