The Deepfarers

Below the warm heart of the Deephearth, the galleries cool, the glowcap changes color, and the knock-code starts arriving with an accent. This is Deepfarer country: the clans of the lowest levels, where the Hollows run into the Kobold Deepworks and have been running into them — trading, feasting, marrying, and lying to two governments about all of it — for longer than either crown has existed in its present form.

The Kingdom's position is that its realm ends at a line below Gate-Under-Stone, past a customs post that examines paperwork. The Deepworks' position is the mirror of this. The Deepfarers' position is that both governments are welcome to their line, which they maintain for them with great care, the way one maintains anything that keeps important people calm.

The Border That Isn't

There is a customs post. It is run by Matriarch Dunnowar's nephew, it has never examined anybody's paperwork, and he is married to a kobold on no register either realm keeps. Below it sits the Lower Market, where kobold iron meets Gnome grain and root-sugar, where two-thirds of the marriages are unrecorded on one side or the other, and where the standing arrangement — nothing said down here is repeated up there — is the closest thing the frontier has to a constitution.

The trade the Kingdom calls smuggling, the Deepfarers call the schedule. Ore up, grain and sugar down, in volumes both crowns have been misinformed about for so long that neither possesses an accurate figure, and could not now admit wanting one. The Assay Office's maps are at their worst in these galleries, which is not a failure of surveying: its surveyors are mostly Gnomes, a striking number of them Deepfarer kin, and the blank patches on the Crown's charts correspond precisely to the places the Crown would least enjoy understanding.

The border's actual function, a Deepfarer will explain over the third cup, is to exist. Two governments believe in it, and their belief is the load-bearing element — which is to say, the Deepfarers are the only people in either realm whose infrastructure includes a fiction, and they inspect it regularly for cracks.

Ways

Two ledgers. Every Deepfarer house keeps a book for the Assay Office and a book. The first is tidy, plausible, and wrong; the second is knock-code notation, kept in the keeper's head past a certain sensitivity, and the reason a Deepfarer elder's memory is spoken of as a civic asset.

Marrying across. Gnome and kobold wed by the custom of both peoples and the law of neither, and the match is entered on both hearth-rolls — because kin is made, not born, and the making does not check the roll for wings. The children arrive by metamorphosis like everyone else and are claimed by whichever side finds them, which is not a problem until a Kingdom form asks their race, and the form has learned not to ask.

The gate-watch. The deep gates stand against the gigantean centipedes, and the watch on them has been drawn jointly — Gnome and kobold crews in rotation — for centuries. It is the oldest joint institution on the frontier, both governments unknowingly fund it, and a Deepfarer who has stood a gate-watch counts it the way other races count a campaign.

Relations

The Hearthkin are the bulk of everyone's relatives and the destination of the grain money, and they regard the Deepfarers as kin with fascinating in-laws — said warmly, and with a genuine reluctance to know the details. The Sullen they understand best of anyone: frontier people facing the other direction, fluent in a foreign power, and trusted a shade less at home for exactly that fluency. The two trade favors constantly and paperwork never.

The Quiet Descent recruits here, because of course it does — the union of the underground it argues for openly is a thing the Deepfarers have been quietly living for generations, and the movement's real difficulty in the lower galleries is convincing people that a marriage needs a manifesto. The Chancery's file, meanwhile, grows thicker; the Deepfarer consensus is that the file is where the Kingdom's understanding of the frontier goes to be stored safely away from use.

Playing One

• You are the party's passport below. Kobold custom, Deepworks etiquette, whom to gift, whom to ignore, and which silences are load-bearing — below a certain depth, you are the one who does the talking.
• You can get anything moved. The Deepworks trade is not an organization, but you know its schedule, its factors, and which crate is misfiled on purpose.
• You keep two of everything. Two ledgers, two stories, two versions of your address — a habit that makes you superb at discretion and suspicious to anyone taking minutes.
• A starting complication: the Chancery's file on the Quiet Descent has acquired a page with your hearth's name on it, an uncorrupted surveyor is asking for guides to the lower galleries, and your kobold in-laws have asked — politely, once — whether this will be handled up there or down here.