The Trades
A person's work is one of the four aspects of their Oathbond and is judged exactly as the other three are. A man who cheats at his trade has shamed his family and his city along with himself. What a trade measures is kavira, demonstrated capability; what a lifetime in it builds is Skaella, mastery acquired by practice. The highest word for a worker is leitae, of the first rank, and it cannot be claimed of oneself — a smith is leitae when other smiths say so.
Apprenticeship
Almost every trade is learned the same way. An apprentice, a jeits, begins at about fourteen and serves about six years — less for a simple trade, more for a fine one, longest for a clockmaker or instrument maker. The terms are written and agreed between the master and the apprentice's family; the master houses, feeds, clothes, and teaches him, the apprentice earns his keep, and a master whose name is worth having takes a fee for the privilege. Taking an apprenticeship is the point at which a young person's conduct starts being discussed as their own; until they finish, their master answers for them as a parent would. A journeyman has finished and works for a day wage in another man's shop. Travel is encouraged and never required; the Frontier makes it expensive, so most who go travel with a caravan and work their passage. How a journeyman becomes a master depends on the city: Forgegate's guilds judge a masterpiece; Clearhold examines him; Eldershore's lineage accepts him; Stormharbor's reputation among the men he works beside decides it, and nobody could say when; Shining Reach's guilds judge a masterpiece and the licensed professions register him.
What is kept secret
Craft knowledge is open — a great maker's work is supposed to be serviceable by a stranger. A few trades keep secrets because the knowledge is dangerous or a city's livelihood rests on it, and their apprentices swear on entry: a Kolaerth keeps the dies and the means of making a convincing collar; mark practitioners keep the dissolution compound; physicians keep what patients tell them; Forgegate keeps how Blaenda is freed; Eldershore's Zhael groves share neither trees nor methods outside the line; Clearhold keeps its Serwy methods; every mint keeps its dies.
How each city organizes its trades
- Forgegate
- Is its guilds. Every trade has one, laborers included, and the guild council governs. A guild sets standards, judges masterpieces, runs the sick fund, and dresses its members in its color and border. A member who disgraces it is cast out — a bana done in public — and has nowhere left to work.
- Shining Reach
- Guilds for the crafts and the civic registry for everything else, including the licensed professions: advocates, physicians, and anyone whose work the Senate has decided the public needs protecting from.
- Clearhold
- Licenses by examination. Nobody asks who trained a man; they ask what he scored.
- Eldershore
- Trades run in lineages, known for their work across generations. An outsider enters by apprenticeship and, if good enough and long enough, by adoption into the line.
- Stormharbor
- Crews and family workshops that hire their own and answer for their own; a dispute goes to the Thing.
- The Iron Coves
- Have guilds, and every one is criminal: the Fences' Association, the Information Brokers' Network, the Forgers' Guild, the Assassins' Brotherhood, with standards as exacting as any Forgegate guild's, because their failures do not end in a fine. Everything else is a crew; a man is as good as the last job he did.
Who does the work
Every trade is open to women in every city; Forgegate's women earn master's borders and wear them. The Natural Order holds that men and women tend toward different work, and it shows in how many of each choose a trade rather than in whether they may. A woman smith is uncommon and unremarkable.
Slaves work in the trades everywhere, and every city has decided how much, because a skilled slave works for her keep and a free journeyman for a wage. Forgegate allows a shop no more slaves at the bench than free journeymen, and vouches for a slave's work without extending its mark to her. Shining Reach has no limit in law, and its journeymen's societies petition the Senate every few years. Clearhold does not examine slaves, so a slave cannot be the licensed hand and works as the assistant of one, one each. Eldershore has little quarrel, its lineage benches being worked by the lineage's household. Stormharbor has few skilled slaves to argue about. The Coves have no rule. The question gives the abolitionists an argument with nothing to do with morality, and journeymen who would never call themselves abolitionists vote with them on it.
The trades by kind
- Making
- Smiths are the foundation. Clockmakers build and repairmen service (Clockwork#Two trades); a Kolaerth makes collars. Weavers, dyers, tailors, and shoemakers clothe the world; Shining Reach's gown houses are known by name. Glassmakers work everywhere and Eldershore blows the most; Forgegate's lens grinders are the best. Printers, papermakers, and bookbinders supply a world that reads and argues in print.
- Building
- Masons work the Maerga of their city; carpenters and joiners its timber, Clearhold's around the short hard Skarv. Engineers answer for pumps, pipes, channels, and boilers, and every city has more of them than it thinks about.
- Food
- Farmers work the rings; millers, bakers, brewers, distillers; fishers take the Haerl and Taedh; Kelrei is grown in cellars.
- Keeping a city running
- Channel workers, pile renewers, Glaenith refillers, ice sellers, laundry houses, Eledh keepers, charcoal burners — work nobody watches.
- Working with living things
- Nywich keepers, who carry real standing in Stormharbor; Serwy keepers; Fraeska tenders; Broek trainers; Eldershore's hereditary Slyva keepers; Vaelith breeders, and the few who still tame wild ones.
- The dangerous trades
- Clearing the Svaekoil from the Guild Road fords every spring; cutting Glaera silk; lead work; mining; and Stormharbor's whalers.
- The learned professions
- Physicians and apothecaries (Medicine); advocates and magistrates' officers; the Gothi, Skalds, and ancestral keepers (Faith); and Clearhold's Registrars, who are its government as much as its clerks.
- Pictures and records
- Photographers in glass plates — portraits, and scientific records of specimens, surgery, and the night sky. An Animei is drawn: master illustrators draw the key frames and a crowd of lesser hands, many of them skilled slaves, draws everything between, and a projectionist runs the lantern and the clockwork that advances the frames; the finest carry sound on a record driven by the same mechanism. A record, a Baner, is cut once and pressed into copies, mostly in Eldershore, and recording artists are the wealthiest musicians anywhere. The wealthy buy records and players; everyone else rents both from a Raitbach — a record by the week and a player, a Hilae, by the week or month.