Minerals of Teraell
What the Known World digs out of the ground. Mining is shallow work: drift mines and adits following seams near the surface, worked close to the walls where the ground is defended. Nobody sinks a deep shaft far from a city, because a working needs supply, relief, and a way home, and all three cross ground that can kill you. What is reachable is worked; what is not is not thought about.
Metals
- Aern — iron
- The commonest working metal: tools, nails, hinges, wheel rims, cookware, ship fittings, and the cheap end of every weapon. Smelted with Kelva in the north and Kolth where seams allow. Every city works it; Forgegate best.
- Stilwy — steel
- Every part that must hold an edge or carry a load — gears, springs, blades, the Staever a Linmaen carries. Everywhere forges it; Forgegate better than most.
- Kopra — copper
- Drawn to wire, beaten to sheet, and piped wherever a city has water. It roofs a few buildings in Shining Reach and has been left to go green on purpose.
- Waeka — tin
- Scarce, from a few workings, alloyed with Kopra for bronze. Bronze fastenings and copper sheathing have kept hulls sound in salt water since the first ship.
- Swaergh — lead
- Shot, weights, ballast, flashing, seals. Its effects are known and have always been; those who work it do so under strict rules — washed after, never eaten beside — and the trade is known to cost its people something.
- Blaenda — zinc
- The one metal only one city can make.
- Braswy — brass
- The visible half of nearly everything: plates, housings, cases, dials, instrument faces, lamp fittings. Soft, so it does not do the work — a Forgegate movement is steel gears in a brass case, and the part everyone admires turns nothing. Where it earns its place is in bearings, which wear well against steel and want less Kravoe, and at sea, where a whole instrument is built of it because a steel gear in salt air seizes and a brass one does not.
- Goelwy and Seira — gold and silver
- Struck into coin, worked into ornament, and used in fine instruments where a fitting must not corrode. A goldsmith works Goelwy; a merchant counts Goyl. See Money.
Fuel
- Kolth — coal
- From shallow seams and drift mines. Forgegate has the best and runs its forges on it. Cities with trees and no seams burn Kelva. The Brosdhun hauls Kolth from face to shaft and lives its whole life below.
- Kelva — charcoal
- Burned slowly from Fyrn in the north and from whatever wood is on hand elsewhere. See Wild Plants and Timber#Timber.
Stone, earth, and glass
- Maerga — building stone
- A category rather than a substance. Shining Reach carves white and gray; Clearhold works its hard gray mountain rock; Eldershore builds in laterite and coral rock and Ombari. A city's Maerga is the first thing a traveler notices and the last thing residents think about.
- Loem — clay
- Brick, tile, pipe, crockery, and foundry moulds. Every city has beds and a potters' quarter; the local clay decides whether that quarter exports anything.
- Sanda — sand
- Glass, deck grit, and the small timing glasses physicians use.
- Vitra — glass
- Windows, bottles, lenses, ampoules, instrument faces, and the sphere of every Kwlei. Every city makes it and has since the Founding. Eldershore blows the most; Forgegate grinds the best lenses, which is precision work rather than glassmaking, and the trade in ground optical glass is small and worth a great deal.
Glaenith
The light-stone, the only mineral in Teraell that does something. See Glaenith.
The closed seams
Certain ores are active on their own. A photographic plate left near them fogs, a gold-leaf electroscope collapses in their presence, and the men who dig them die early and badly.
None of it is chemical, and that is the part nobody can account for. Heating the ore, dissolving it, burning it and combining it change nothing whatever. The Academy has three centuries of careful papers describing an effect that behaves like no other property of matter, the argument goes in circles, and the rules keep people alive regardless.
The seams are closed by guild rule and marked. A man who works one anyway loses his mark, which in practice ends him, and no guild has had to enforce it twice in the same place.
Lead
Swaergh goes exactly where it is sealed and handled by people trained to handle it: screens, flashing, roofing, counterweights, type metal. Never where it touches food, drink or water. What it does to people has been known for a very long time.
The trades that work it are licensed, inspected and examined. A man who came home in his working clothes and put a child on his knee would hear about it from his own guild, in public, and would not do it twice.
What is not mined
Clearhold mines shallower and more cautiously than anyone and calls it good practice. Nobody prospects the upper slopes: a prospecting party is a small group moving unpredictably across open high ground, which is exactly what the Kollgar hunts, and working deep and far would need supply across Kammra country. Clearhold works what it can reach — Kolth, Glaenith, and its gray wall stone — and is one of the largest Glaenith exporters in the world. It has never been in a position to ask what else is in those mountains.