The Hidden Halls

The Hidden Halls

Under the history of kings runs another history, kept by the spirits who moved the outlanders without their own hands. Their keeper wrote it in a black book, in five editions, and called himself Evil Cowgod. This is the whole of it I could gather. Four of its days have their own books on the high shelf, and I name them where they fall. Reldo.

The first hands

The ghost hands came first, then the drift that broke them, then RuneBot and the day the fires would not go out. That story is told in The Day of Endless Fires.

Phlat

While RuneBot reigned, a spirit called Phlat studied the world's insides. He bent his coin count, about once in a hundred tries, and the spirits he trusted grew rich beside him. He spoke of a tool he could be jailed for releasing. Then he vanished, and nothing of his work survives.

The backwards name

The watchers sealed every hall that spoke the world's old name. The spirits spoke it backwards, or bent it into a joke. One hall's door ended on a notice: closed by the world's own order.

The colour readers

TheNickDude, a boy of fourteen from a land far south, made a hand that searched the world in a spiral for the colour of ore. It spread through the halls faster than the watchers could follow. It stopped on his father's word, after talks with the head of the Council.

In his farewell, he thanked those who had paid for his school lunches, and wished the Council well with its new world of depth. Later he set out to build a world of his own.

The whisperer and the riots

Kaitnieks built the whisperer, and the watchers learned that the world counts the hand. The midwinter strike and the war on the bankers that followed are told in The Banker Riots.

The sleepwalkers

The world gave its outlanders fatigue. A tired body learns nothing until it sleeps in a bed, and to sleep it must read a word shown in a dream. In the hidden halls, the spirits traded the words. One read for many, and their bodies played on through the night.

Bovine Labs

The Council's heralds threatened every keeper of a hall, and in the end every keeper gave way. The spirits moved to hidden rooms of talk.

Evil Cowgod named his hall Bovine Labs and took a cow for its sign. He called its order feudal: himself the emperor with no power, Kaitnieks the shogun who kept the tools alive. The halls split into rooms with their own keepers. With no single owner, the halls could not be killed.

The hats

Then came the crack in the trade window, the crowd that sang for its hats, and the colour that became purple. That day is told in The Day the Hats Fell. The halls' own tale of how the world was made is in The Cowgod's Genesis.

The shogun's farewell

On the eve of the Deepening, Kaitnieks left the halls. He had driven a body to the top of mining for the challenge alone, and let it be taken without regret. He had wanted to teach the spirits to make their own tools, and many of them now could.

He had seen them lie, scam and fight, and he hoped they would change. Evil Cowgod thanked him for pulling the halls out of the gutter, and closed his book with music Kaitnieks chose.

The Cowgod's prophecy

In the old world, Evil Cowgod foretold an army of four hundred. One will would steer them all from a single seat. Some would range, some would carry food, some would mine and smith to arm the rest, all in full rune and in perfect step.

He believed no hall would ever build it. The halls went quiet as the world began to change around them.

I have counted the outlanders in Varrock square on a busy evening. I stopped at four hundred. Reldo.