Ordwaine
Ordwaine teaches. Arcane colleges and archives at Overfen, and a standing arrangement to school half the officials of the houses around it. A second set of correspondents writes to Ordwaine directly.
Ordwaine is Undivided. Its shape is an instrument, and its loyalty runs to the roughly two hundred beings in the world it considers truly relevant. A petitioner gets further with an offer than with an appeal to local kinship. Its institutions are occult, ruling through cults, debts and information rather than office. This is the tradition that has benefited most from the arrangement. An arcane establishment sits alongside the occult institutions and answers separately to the house. Their overlap at the marriage table is the one nobody has divided.
The holding
Kazenokami — the archive that keeps the flood series
Sandstone bluff above the Kazenoha swamp, archive and lecture yards, causeway up from the fen.
Sandstone stands eighty feet out of the Kazenoha fen, dry above a flood that arrives every year and is budgeted for. The lecture yards are cut into the top in four terraces with the archive behind them in the rock, where the air does not move and paper keeps. A causeway climbs from the fen with the spring halfway up it, the nearest sweet water for a day's travel, and the fen below grows reed and ironwood rather than food. Kurozaka's gate is four days north along the rim road, Hanezaki lies east, and the landings at Shirasu are a boat trip and a half tide off.
Connections
Reading is sold by the year, while the archive provides the flood series without a fee.
Allies takes this house’s side 4
Faenlorn 01 Ordwaine teaches six of Faenlorn's clerks a year and keeps the official copy of Faenlorn's deposit book. Any argument about money held at Faenlorn is settled from a book Ordwaine controls, four cells away.
Yatagaru 33 Yatagaru's clerks train at Ordwaine for three years at forty bars a year. Ordwaine never collects the fee, and the unpaid balance now stands at more than a decade's teaching.
Ravenscarp 41 Ravenscarp's junior registrars spend a year at Ordwaine learning the order documents must be signed in, because coastal families keep having burial papers thrown out over it. The fee is paid in burial salt and in dry storage for Ordwaine's own dead.
Emberlin 52 Six hundred koku a year go up the causeway to feed Ordwaine's lecture halls and kitchens. A third of the price is written off against places for Emberlin's officers.
Neutral trades, and no more than that 1
Enemies has something open against it 1
The full account — 6 houses, 6 arrangements
Reading is sold by the year, while the archive provides the flood series without a fee. Yatagaru's loan clerks take three years at forty bars, a fee left undrawn, standing as an overdraft on the Hanezaki books and a gift received in the archive's. Ravenscarp's junior registrars come for a year on seal seating order and pay in burial salt and dry-rock storage for the archive's dead, which no house on this coast will admit to using. Emberlin's rice comes up the causeway with a third remitted against places for its officers. Thirty casks a week go down to Shirasu and come back as certified transcripts of the harbour court's list, which the archive resells. The short-flood claim against the Firebrick Kilns rests on the flood series alone, and Vurrgast has answered nine years of letters with its gate register and no figures.
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Ordwaine takes six of Faenlorn's counting-clerks a year for a two-year course in double reckoning, paid out of a standing deposit at Faenlorn that Ordwaine keeps above the fee. The archive also keeps the fair copy of the lodgement register, so a dispute over a season's Falkvald silver at Faenlorn is settled from a book four cells south.
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Ashcrole's boats fill thirty casks a week at Ordwaine's causeway spring, there being nothing on the shell ridge fit to drink. Ordwaine takes the fee in certified transcripts of the harbour court's list, which the archive then sells on, and Ashcrole's clients would rather it did not.
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Yatagaru's loan clerks take three years in Ordwaine's lecture yards at forty bars a year. Ordwaine leaves the fee undrawn, letting it stand as an overdraft on Yatagaru's books, and the archive enters the balance as a gift received.
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The short-flood claim against Vurrgast' take at the Kazenoha head rests on nothing but the flood series kept at Ordwaine since the signing. Vurrgast has answered every letter for nine years with a copy of its gate register and no figures at all.
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Ravenscarp's junior registrars spend a year at Ordwaine on seal seating order, since coast families buying burial on the Natron Shelves keep having the papers voided over the order the seals went on. The fee is paid in burial salt and in dry-rock storage for the archive's own dead, which no Amaseki house on the coast will admit to using.
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Six hundred koku a year go up the fen causeway to the lecture yards and the archive kitchens. A third is remitted against places for Emberlin's officers, and Ordwaine keeps that part off the published fee schedule.
The Forge has it that a season's silver dispute four cells north was settled out of a Kazenokami book, and that the archive was paid twice for producing it. Said in the Yatsuhoshi Coast
The public record
- Plate
- 18 of 81
- Seat
- Overfen
- Holding
- Kazenokami
- Region
- the Yatsuhoshi Coast
- Position
- hex 18,19 in r5c5
- Extent
- a wide march (6 of 10)
- Culture
- Amaseki
- Thick on this ground
- Amaseki
- Iron
- Warm
- Living names
- 13
- Roster
- Established
- Ancestry
- Human
- Kinship
- Undivided
- Major activity
- Lorehall
- Minor activity
- Cipherhouse
- Tradition
- Occult, with Arcane in tension
- Alignment
- N
- Stake
- Holds
- Band
- Paramount
- Weights
- 6
Arms
An open codex resting a hand's breadth above still fen water, a single reed pen standing upright on the page and writing by itself.
Sable, a book open Argent; in base an eye Argent; a chief Azure; a bordure of warm iron. (Plate 18; thirteen living names.)
The field colour is the house's tradition and the bound edge is the state of its plate, and neither is the house's to choose.