The Iron Coves

The Iron Coves
Blacktooth Bay from the water, the teeth at the entrance.
CLT name	Aernkoev
Strength	Strength — no discussion thought necessary
Position	A scattered volcanic archipelago; established ports, temporary anchorages, and hidden coves
Population	Perhaps 20,000–40,000 across the archipelago; nobody counts
Walls	None. The basalt teeth, the volcanic hillsides, and the reefs are the wall
Government	None. Might makes right
Coin	Everyone's — weighed, clipped, and of any mint or none; see Trashmei
Makes and trades	Nothing made; everything traded — stolen goods laundered clean, forged papers, slaves, and labor no one else will hire
Stance on slavery	No argument. Slavery is property, labor, and commerce
Founding cohort (not in-world)	Mixed: nobody's and everybody's — see Meta:Cultural References

The Iron Coves (Aernkoev) are not a city-state in the sense the others are. They are a scattered archipelago of settlements — established pirate ports, temporary anchorages, hidden coves used by particular crews — with no urban planning, no civic organization, and no consistent aesthetic, because there is nobody to enforce one. The Coves make nothing and trade in everything, and the whole Known World complains and keeps buying.

The Pact

The Coves did not sign the Pact of Reason. The closing of the roads that produced it had been the most prosperous moment in their history, and they saw no reason to sign afterward. They observe the Pact's slave provisions in practice, because a marked person is marketable in five other cities and an unmarked one is not. It is the only kind of agreement the Coves have ever kept. Every other city holds them in contempt — Stormharbor most of all, which calls them not lawless but unmoored — and the rest of the world treats the Coves' arrangement not as an alternative to the Pact but as the absence of one.

Places

Three locations are significant enough to describe:

• Blacktooth Bay — the principal settlement, Blachtandh
• Whispering Hollow — where the Information Brokers meet
• The Veil Currents — the concealment zone between the islands

Dress

The Coves dress like people with money and no standing, because that is what they are. There is nothing to signal — no guild, no lineage, no examination result, no station any other city would recognize. What is left is the person, and that is worn loudly. The base is 1700s sailor's slops — loose trousers, short jacket or long coat, shirt — and then nothing fits, and the way it does not fit is chosen. Trousers are far too wide (dragging at the heel, worn low, by someone who does not intend to work) or far too narrow (cut to the ankle under a coat three sizes too big). There is nothing in between; a person in trousers that fit has come from elsewhere and everyone sees it before they speak.

Black, with one sharp color: a hard acid green in sashes, linings, or a stripe down an outer seam, which nobody else in the world uses and everyone recognizes. Hardware everywhere and none of it structural — studded belts, chains from belt to pocket, leather cuffs, rings on every finger, silver at throat and wrist. Printed shirts: the presses that produce forged papers produce cloth, and a crew's mark on a shirt is the closest thing the Coves have to a uniform. Hair that has been decided about — cropped and spiked, or long and shaggy with a fringe over one eye, dyed wherever dye can be got. Kohl around the eyes of women and men alike. Women wear the same forms cut the same way with the flash turned up rather than down; there is no separate clothing for women and no separate anything.

Slaves are dressed by whoever owns them, and the range is wider than anywhere else: a crew's property on the docks wears whatever is on hand; a Freichfta's companion is dressed at real expense in the household's black and silver, cut close, with a great deal of hardware, and is the one person in the Coves whose clothing is guaranteed well kept, because she is a costly display. The one constant is the collar, worn openly and often decoratively in worked silver, in some houses matched to what the household wears.

Names

Birth names in the Coves look borrowed from everywhere, because everybody there came from somewhere: Vosk, Taela, Brann, Kib, Sura, Jahn, Mira, Dreg. They tell you nothing.

What the archipelago runs on is use-names, handed out by a crew and frequently replacing the birth name entirely. They are Spraecha words and they are rarely kind. Mwyska for fog. Skadh for the twilight ambusher. Iskra for the lichen that shatters. Ravna for the carrion bird. Nubra for nothing at all. Twytwys for a man who states the obvious. Betwy for one who ran once and has not been allowed to forget it.

A person does not choose their own and cannot refuse one. Objecting to a use-name is understood everywhere to confirm it.

Music

The Coves is the only place in the Known World with no music guild. Nowhere else is that true — every city trains its players, examines them, and holds settled opinions about tone. Here nobody was taught, and it is audible.

The singing is fast, high and personal. Shanties about the singer and about whoever the singer is angry with, pitched above where the voice sits comfortably and sung there anyway, with the room shouting the line back. Nothing is written down. A song lasts as long as the people in it are remembered, which is not always long.

What accompanies it is whatever came off a ship. The Heivra is universal, being cheap, portable, and the one instrument nobody needs a guild to be taught; most of them here were not bought. Klabak are played by the dancer rather than by a musician, so she sets the time and the players follow her. Beyond that a house owns what it has stolen — a Charmoy out of a salon in Shining Reach, a Droen off a Forgegate trader, a Poysr missing half its strikers and struck with a stick instead. Nothing matches, little of it is in tune, and all of it is played too loud.

The rest of the world finds Coves music embarrassing. The Coves is aware of this and simply does not care.

Infrastructure

Below every other settlement in the world, and the Coves do not care. Water from springs and rain, distributed by whatever arrangement each part of a settlement has made, through mismatched patched piping that works. No organized waste; steep ground and close sea do the work. No organized lighting: salvaged glow globes where available, brass lanterns more commonly, open fires in rough places, and the docks lit best for practical reasons. Clockwork is eclectic and entirely improvised — no local manufacture, so everything is salvaged, traded, repurposed, or stolen, and a Blacktooth mechanism might combine Forgegate precision parts, Shining Reach fittings, and Stormharbor iron, assembled by someone who learned by taking other mechanisms apart. The ships' clockwork is maintained to a standard the rest of the settlement never sees.

Agriculture

There is none. The islands support small gardens, a few goats, and a great deal of fishing. The Coves are the only settlement in the world that cannot feed itself, and they do not try.

What it makes and trades

Nothing made; access offered. Markets that ask no questions, goods with no provenance, papers indistinguishable from real ones, and people who will do what others will not. Plwyndra and Prizra pass through and are sold onto legitimate markets within a season; Dwyngoed of every kind; the Fences' Association can turn any stolen good into a clean one, and every city complains and keeps buying. Slaves, many of them, taken at sea and on the Frontier and sold to anyone. And the Coves' own labor, hired out: a crew that will carry cargo no one would touch to places no one else would go, for a price.

In the world's arguments

The Coves are the standing example in every argument. To True Mastery, they are where community enforcement fails. To the Pact, they are what nature without reason looks like. To the abolitionists, they are the proof that a system resting on the goodness of its participants cannot be relied on. And to Stormharbor's charge that a Coves captain's strength is never tested, the Coves reply that what Stormharbor calls honor is taking what it wants while telegraphing the maneuver — a reply Stormharbor's skalds have never satisfactorily answered.

See also

• Blacktooth Bay · Whispering Hollow · The Veil Currents
• Piracy · The Six Navies#The Iron Coves · Group Feuds#The Iron Coves and Frontier Territory