The Velthari are a small people of the western Northlands interior, settled in one cold valley of the Nysanna foothills above the line where the tundra grass gives out. They descend from human stock, like the Neth tribes east of them, but the better part of a thousand years alone in that valley has made them their own thing. What sets them apart is not blood. It is a rule.
The rule is that the stars are objects, and the Velthari do not pray to them. Their founding compact forbids worship of the stars outright. A Velthari watches the celestial glass the way a surveyor watches a coastline, measuring it, logging it, dating every change, and is taught from childhood that the lights overhead are large important things that are not looking back. Every other people in the north treats the night sky as the home of something to be asked or appeased. The Velthari treat it as inventory. That refusal is the whole foundation of their trade: because they want nothing from the stars and believe nothing about them, their records carry no doctrine, and a buyer can trust that a Velthari table reports what was seen and not what was hoped. Outsiders call them the Unsentimental Watchers, and they are content with the name.
A star is a stone that holds a light. Write down where it is. Do not thank it. — the opening line of the Velthari compact, recited at the close of every watch-year
How they are governed
The Velthari govern themselves by the ledger, and slowly. Seven Watchers hold the council, and no one sits on it who has not first completed a watch-year: three hundred and sixty-five nights of unbroken observation, each entry logged in the city ledger in the watcher's own hand, a single missed night sending the count back to zero. The seat is a proof of stamina before it is anything else. The Head Watcher is whoever has logged the most consecutive watch-years, and the Head Watcher breaks tied votes. The seat is held now by Sevet, who has carried the count longer than anyone living. Decisions arrive at the speed of accumulated record. The Velthari do not move fast and make no apology for it.
What they sell
Two trades keep them alive, and they sell in two directions.
The first trade is sold to the ground. The Neth tribes of the northern tundra buy the Velthari's Auris and Nyxara tables, because a Neth soothsayer's communion with the wind answers most strongly when the bright moon rides full, and a tribe that knows that hour to the day holds a season's edge over one that still reads the moon by eye. The Wydling packs that range south toward the Nysanna buy hunt-timing tables, because the white dragon Niquous patrols that country on circuits that follow the cold-fronts the Velthari log, and a pack that can read the table can set its hunt for the gap when the dragon is somewhere else. Neither product is prophecy. Both are arithmetic done on better observations than anyone else can make.
The second trade is sold to the sky. Ilthenvar sits beneath the high band of sky-stones that drift over the Nysanna, the dense rock that breaks loose from the underside of the Astral Plane in its earthquakes and floats up to ride just below the stars, and the city is the last clear ground-station from which a safe passage up through that band can be charted. Sky-ships running cargo north buy Velthari route-charts before they climb. The craft is not the Velthari's invention; they plot to the grid of waypoints and altitudes the gnome cartographer Tybalexyn set down during the Great Expansion, and their charts are her foundational work kept current against a band of sky that never stops moving.
There is a third set of charts the Velthari hold and will not sell. Among their surveys are full readings of the Senaveer peaks to the northwest, which the Atowatowa hold sacred and forbid to outsiders. Such a survey would fetch a great deal from the right buyer. The council has refused every offer for as long as the ledger runs, on the plain reasoning that the Atowatowa are xenophobes with wind-callers and long memories, and a people this small does not make an enemy it has no way to fight. It is the one matter the Velthari let something other than price decide.
The crack in the compact
The doctrine has one flaw, and the council has spent two generations hiding it. Sealed beneath the watch-tower in Ilthenvar is a run of records the Velthari have never let leave the city, showing two titan-glass stars overhead being drawn together on a course no drifting object takes. Something is moving them, and it means to. The elders buried the proof rather than publish it, because to publish it is to stand in the open market and admit that the stars are not only objects after all, and that the Unsentimental Watchers cannot say who is arranging the sky above their own city, or why. What the records hold, and what the current Head Watcher has lately added to them, is kept behind the three-hand lock in the tower vault. The City of Stars entry tells that part.
Aspects
- Measure it; do not worship it
- A record is worth only what it can be trusted to say