The Veldt

A limestone valley riddled with wind-caves, hanging formations, and stone flutes carved by a million years of weather, so that the whole region hums, rings, and sings depending on the season and the wind. It is the Pooka homeland, and the only place in the world where the landscape itself is considered a member of the community.

The Land

Three landscapes that barely acknowledge one another: a braided wetland in the north, a rift valley thousands of feet deep cutting diagonally across the middle, and thorn-scrub steppe along the south and east. The Rift does the work the old karst vales used to — wind through its hollows gives the land a voice, and Veldt residents can date a season by ear.

The whole province is an instrument that is always being played. Wind through the flute-formations produces a standing drone that shifts with weather and season; the cave systems beneath resonate with it; and the result is a place where sound is a physical feature of the terrain. Vale people navigate by ear in fog, in the dark, and underground, and find the silence of other provinces genuinely distressing.

• The Gale. Twice a year the wind comes down the valley at a speed the formations were shaped by, and the Vale becomes deafening — physically dangerous, past pain, and impossible to shelter from except underground. Everyone goes below. The Gale is a festival because the alternative is to think about it.
• Resonance. Certain notes, sung or played in the wrong chamber, will shake stone loose. The Vale has laws about this. They are the only laws in the Kingdom that specify a pitch, and the Round's musicians treat them with more respect than they treat the Chancery.
• Sinkholes. Limestone dissolves. Ground that has held for a century opens without notice, and the Vale's roads are re-surveyed every spring by listeners who can hear a void under a footfall.
• The hollows sing wet. After heavy rain the caves fill and their voices drop by an octave, which is beautiful, and which means the lower cave-towns have about six hours to get out.

Subregions

The Silt-Braided Basin. An immense braided wetland fed by the Everflow, dominated by the river Odo Oya, where the Orisha live in floating villages and treat the water as a living thing.

The Great Rift. A chasm thousands of feet deep with a boiling inner sea at its floor, cut off from the sun, where the Yumbo feast and sing in cliffside hollows.

The Sahel. Semi-arid thorn scrub and baobab groves along the Emberwaste march, where the Aziza practise herbalism and sing their history across the grass.

Flora and Fauna

The Round

A terraced amphitheater-city built into the valley's throat, where the acoustics carry a whisper from the floor to the highest gallery. Pooka governance is conducted as performance: proposals are sung, opposition is sung over, and consensus is literally harmony. Outsiders find this ridiculous until they attend one.

Other Settlements

Belltown (8,000) — built along the largest flute bank, and the province's manufactory: instruments, cricket-stalls, tuned stone, and the Kingdom's entire supply of anything that has to make a specific noise.

Underchord (5,000) — a cave-town, entirely below ground, where the Gale is sat out and where the Vale keeps everything it cannot afford to lose. The lower levels flood on schedule and are used accordingly.

Quietvale (1,500) — a hold in the one wind-shadow in the province, where nothing sings. It is where Vale people go when they cannot bear it anymore, and admitting you have been there is a delicate matter.

The Stalls (uncounted) — cricket-breeders' warrens along the valley floor, worked by beetle and cricket kin who are, awkwardly for everyone, the finest musicians in the province and cannot hold a seat in the Round.

Factions

The Round. First Voice Cadenza and the singing assembly: the government, and an unusually honest one, since it is nearly impossible to conceal a position when the deliberation is a performance in front of 25,000 people.

The Ballad Trade. Not an organization — a profession. Vale singers travel the whole Kingdom, and every seditious idea in circulation has a tune, and the tunes travel faster than any decree and cannot be confiscated. The Chancery has been trying to prosecute a melody for eighty years.

The Censor's Office. The capital's answer: a Chancery outpost staffed by clerks who must transcribe, classify, and interdict songs. They are competent, thorough, and losing, because a ballad mutates faster than a file can be opened on it.

The Consonance. Vale conservatives who hold that the province's music is a sacred civic art and that its use as a smuggling vehicle for politics will eventually cost the Vale everything. They are not wrong. They are extremely unpopular.

The Stall Choirs. Cricket-kin and beetle musicians who have begun, quietly, to write. Their work is being sung in the Round without attribution, and a sizable share of the last decade's best-known Vale ballads were not written by Pooka. Two singers know. One is arguing about it. One is profiting.

Sites of Interest

The Throat. The Round's own chamber: a natural amphitheater whose acoustics are so exact that a whisper on the floor reaches the top gallery undiminished and a shout is a physical assault. It is also, unavoidably, a place where nothing said can be private, and the Vale's entire political culture — its honesty, its theatricality, its knife-fighting by innuendo — is a consequence of that one architectural fact.

The Long Flute. A cave passage nine hundred feet long that runs from the valley floor to a mouth on the ridge, and sounds a single note continuously, day and night, and has for as long as anyone has recorded. The note has dropped a half-step twice in four hundred years, both times three weeks before a very bad winter, and Belltown's listeners check it daily.

The Gale Vault. Underchord's deepest chamber: where the province shelters, and where its archive of scores is kept — three centuries of Vale music, including the political songs the Censor's Office has spent decades trying to catalogue, filed openly, in a room the Chancery has never been permitted to enter because it is also a shelter and the Vale has a law about that.

The Dissonant Cave. A chamber where the resonance laws apply hardest: certain notes will bring the roof down, they are known and marked, and someone in the last few years has been scratching those marks out. Nobody knows who or why. The current theory in Belltown is that it is not sabotage but a message, since the notes left unmarked, played in sequence, are a melody.

Hooks

• The Censor's Office will pay well for the author of a specific ballad — one currently being sung in nine provinces, which names a noble house and an unusual number of verifiable dates.
• A Stall Choir asks the party to get one of their number onto the floor of the Round to sing their own work under their own name. Every step of this is legal. Every step of it will be prevented.
• The Long Flute has dropped a half-step. It is spring.
• The Gale is due in four days and Underchord's lower levels are already flooding, three weeks early, which means the water table has moved, which means something under the province has changed.
• Somebody has been playing the marked notes in the Dissonant Cave, at night, one at a time, over several weeks — and has not yet played the last one.

Relations

The Round is the most politically dangerous place in the Kingdom, and the court has never quite noticed. A Pooka ballad travels faster and further than any decree, is impossible to confiscate, and the Kingdom's censors have no vocabulary for prosecuting a melody. Nearly every seditious idea in circulation has a tune.