The Carnelian Throne (35 page)

ci’ves:
(S) A small, furred predator common in the Sihaen-Istet hills.

couch-mate:
(S) Persons bound together by love and/or issue; in usage, those in extended couch-bond, those who consider their relationship more binding than simple couchbond.

couchbond:
(S) A companionship agreement between two consenting adults.

Dey-Ceilneeth:
(B) The Brinjiiri Laonan Museum, once a part of the Laonan cult’s capital city, around which was built the Wall of Mnemaat, later appropriated by Wehrdom.

dharen:
(St) The spiritual and secular ruler of civilized Silistra; the supreme authority of the Day-Keeper hierarchy; planetary potentate.

dharertess:
(St) A word coined for Estri Hadrath diet Estrazi when she became couch-mate of the dharen Khys; this position has no formal duties or dignities attached to it as yet.

Fai Teraer-Moyhe:
(St) The derivation of “Fai Teraer-Mohye” is Strothric; this brings us to the problem of crediting words as “Beneguan” or “Darsti,” when both languages devolved from Stothric. In Strothric the term means “Cove of Resurrection.” In modern Beneguan its has come to mean the “Dark Land.” Fai Teraer-Moyhe is the fabled spot upon which the adept Laore was disembowled after being convicted of netaomancy, heresy, and sedition; and from which he rose whole of form seven days later to begin the dialogues with his waiting adherents which were to form the bases of Stothric thought in the ages to come.
(See
Laonan.) In present Beneguan society it is a land of banishment, of death, from which no living being returns.

fahrass:
(B) A highly poisonous silver-berried plant; the berries are called stepsisters by Beneguans. The ingestion of one fingernail-sized berry may cause death by oversexlation of the autonomic nervous system.

fhrefrasil:
(B) A large, carnivorous primate with opposing thumbs, generally manlike, but possesed of a prehensile tail and long, silky sorrel fur.

guerm:
(B) An amphibious mammal found along the shores of Aehre-Kanoss. There seem to be a number of varieties of guerm, and as all else in this glossary, any definition .I might give is limited to what I learned in our short reconnaissance and what matches I can make with knowledge I already possess. In this case I have very little, and leave the detailing of the spawning, feeding, and mating habits of guerm to those who will give Benegua the detailed biological study it deserves.

hase-enor:
(St) Of all flesh; the purported goal of Silistra’s long-standing policy of genetic mixing; one whose genealogy includes all bloodlines; a thoroughly admixed individual.

hest:
(S) To bend or twist natural law to serve the will; to command by mind; to cause a probability not inherent in the time to manifest.

high-couch:
(S) A Well-Keepress; any woman able to demand over thirty gold pieces per couching; formally: the hereditary head of Silistra’s Well System.

hulion:
(S) A large, ptaisslike, highly intelligent winged carnivore prevalent on continental Silistra.

iis:
(B) Priestess; literally: “austere.” In use with another title, as iis-Vahais, it denotes ascendancy: high priestess of the Vahais.

Imca-Sorr-Aat:
(B) “One who came into being out of many”; Wehrdom’s organic memory storage; the corporeal interface which implements the cogitations of that memory.

Imnetosh:
(B) The mountain upon whose slope lies Othdaliee.

ipheri:
(B) Literally: “resplendent in the sun’s rays”; an honorific address.

ipherim:
(B) Attendant of ipheri; a consort or couchmate.

Isanisa:
(B) The Isanisa River, whose sources are both the subterranean river that winds through Othdaliee and down Imnetosh’s slope, and the Bachryse Falls in the Rosharkand Valley.

iyl:
(B) Literally: “eyes.” A male honorific restricted to those employed by the Vahais of Mnemaat.

jicekak:
(B) A thorned, lanceolate bush ubiquitous in the Beneguan valley’s rain forests; the itching, weeping syndrome resulting from jicekak scratches in allergic individuals ranges widely in severity, though some irritant effect is visible on any skin scratched by jicekak thorns.

Khys:
(St) The dharen Khys, now deceased. Let me refer you to
Wind from The Abyss,
wherein Khys is well-delineated, both by myself and by Carth; or, better, to his own writings:
Ors YrisTera; Se’keroth, the Motif of Catalysis; Nesting, the Primal Prerogative;
to name but a few. Khys Enmies, molecular biologist, genetic and societal engineer, Stoth adept, Laonan priest, Shaper’s son, dharen of Silistra, can hardly be reduced to a dozen lines, in anyone’s glossary. What might be most pertinent to say about him here is that, in good Darsti fashion, having experimented extensively with western Silistra, he let the east go its own way. The lands of AehrelCanoss were those shores of which none were empowered to speak by his command. However, the longevity of humans and wehrs seems to indicate either the introduction of Silistran serums into the gene pool of evolution’s commensurate action: although those of Aehre-Kanoss are not long-lived by Silistran standards, we saw no evidence of later-life lethals such as debilitating diseases in the mature, and this has led me to conjecture that though Khys’ hand is not in evidence, it nevertheless has touched AehreKanoss.

Laonan:
(St) The Laonan faith; proselytizers of Laore’s life and work; precursor to the Stothric church; the mystical society founded by Laore and based upon his life’s teachings, most notably the two-volume
Forewarnings
and
Se’keroth, Sword of Severence, a
four-volume prophetic allegory; anyone practicing Laore’s disciplines.

Laore:
(St) The founder of the Laonan faith, from which sprang the Stoth disciplines and later the Day-Keepers’ hierarchy that yet holds sway over civilized Silistra.

Lake
of Horns:
(S) The Day-Keepers’ city, capital of the dharen Sereth, located at the Lake of Horns, from which it takes it name.

memnis:
(B) A large, white-barked tree that prefers a riparian environment, the memnis has long frondlike leaves that may depend to touch the ground, of a yellow or yellow-greenish color; its inner bark is ascribed great medicinal power and is the main ingredient of most Beneguan poultices.

Menetph:
(P) The southermmost of the Parset Lands; a desert principality recently come under the co-regency of Jaheil of Dordassa and Chayin of Nemar; one of the Taken Lands, Menetph has the best seaport and shipwrights of any state in the new Parset conglomerate and is also the site of the co-cahndors’ winter capital.

Mi’ysten: (M)
The world Mi’ysten; the race of the same name; experimental sphere of the Shapers.

Mnemaat:
(St) The corruption of Laore’s postulated “Differentiating Unfixed”; the personalization of the Unseen into which the Laonans fell in the Late Mechanist Age. Some factions believe that the creation of the Wall of Mnemaat around the Laonan Museum was a contributing factor to the schism that split the Loanan faith in twain and spawned the Stoths as we now conceive them. That Khys encouraged the use of that nomer for himself in the minds of Wehrdom must, I feel, be an expression of his humor
^:
, and not, as Sereth has postulated, an indicator by which we may judge the depth and strength of his hatred for his ancient enemy, Aehre-Kanoss, and the Laonans who once ruled supreme there.

Mnemaat’s henchemen:
(B) Those who implement the strict culling of over—and undersuccessful individuals during the Children’s Trial.

Nehedra:
(B) A town within the Wall of Mnemaat, Nehedra lies on a small tributary of the Isanisa just east of Dey-Ceilneeth Road. She is concerned primarily with the maintenance of the Beneguan preserve, and takes charge of all children consecrated into Wehrdom’s service. From all of Aehre are the children gathered into Nehedra, some once in their lives to take the Children’s Trial, some for long periods of time to study the parables of Beneguan law and become fit to serve Wehrdom. Whether consecrated to Mnemaat the Unseen, Imca-Sorr-Aat, or directly to Wehrdom, all children’s instruction and all Benegua’s commerce is handled in Nehedra.

Nemar:
(P) One of western Silistra’s Parset Desert Lands; birthplace of Chayin rendi Inekte, and his hereditary kingdom; now the winter capital of the co-cahndor’s reign.

Nothrace:
(B) The razed town on Nothrace ridge; the shelflike ridge at Mt. Imnetosh’s foot. Nothrace, like most of the eastern coast of Aehre, has no slope gentle enough to provide a harbor, but rises in a sheer cliff face to more than ten thousand (B.S. Standard) feet above the sea; the purported birthplace of Aat-Deilcrit.

obviation of space:
(S) The Shaper mode of travel, only now coming into use on Silistra; the transportation of matter
around
distance by making use of the nonsequential circuits that exist out of time: it is said that from the place called the domain of the Seventh Sorter all destinations are equidistant in that they exist coeval with the point of immutable now.

ossasim:
(B) The man-derived, winged creatures to whose advantage Wehrdom was designed and has since evolved.

Othdaliee:
(B) The capital “city” of Imca-Sorr-Aat, Othdaliee is a living relic from Aehre-Kanoss’ Mechanist past. I can find no mention of it in any of our records and must assume that it was, even then, of a most secret nature, to have housed such experiments as Imca-Sorr-Aat:

owkahen:
(St) “The time coming to be”; those probabilities among all the available futures that will manifest as reality.

Parset:
(P) An individual of any one of the five Parset Lands, the desert regions held by the co-cahndors. The Parset Lands still maintain their autonomy, notwithstanding the alliance formed between the co-cahndors and the dharen of Silistra.

peona:
(B) A pink-fleshed, black-skinned melon that grows wild in the Isanisa river valley.

Port Astrin:
(S) Well Astria’s dependent city; the Liaison’s Port, that is, the only facility on Silistra for starships. Estri diet Hadrath Estrazi’s hereditary holdings included both Port Astrin and Well Astria; the port from which the expedition to Aehre-Kanoss was mounted.

ptaiss:
(B) An eight—to twelve-hundred-pound, wedge-headed carnivorous mammal with slitpupiled eyes and a tufted tail, in size and shape resembling the Silistran dorkat, but with the mental skills and intelligence of a hulion.

quenel:
(B) A small, bushy-tailed carnivore, with a long, tapering snout, markedly rounded cranium, and paws with opposing-thumbed, fivedigited “fingers.”

razor-moon:
(S) A sharpened disk of steel or the green metal stra; a casting weapon with several varieties; the boot-sheathed razor-moons I favor are the one-way, nonreturning sort whose diameter is about that of a woman’s hand.

roema:
(B) A smaller cousin, seemingly, of the quenel, with the difference that while the quenel’s eyes are round-pupiled, the roema’s are slit. It is a burrower and a stalker, and makes no sound other than a sibilant hiss.

saiisa:
(S) A Silistran term of disrespect usually applied to coin girls of questionable cleanliness.

Se’keroth:
(St) The legendary blade of which Laore wrote, and with which, by all accounts, he was slain. “The blade itself. Se’keroth of the fire-gemmed hilt, was reclaimed by Khys at great personal peril in the last pass before the onset of the Fall of Man. With six lesser priests he crossed the Embrodming and liberated the sword from the Brinjiiri Loanan Museum, in the midst of that enemy’s capital ....”

“... Se’keroth’s magical nature ensures its possession by those catalytic personalities that shape each ensuing age, all of whom undergo rigorous purification before the sword falls into their hands ....”

“He who wields Se’keroth is himself that weapon, is himself wielded by that same which transmutes the gross into fine ....”—the dharener Car’. “.. The legend inscribed on the blade, ‘Se’keroth, direel b’estet Se’keroth,’ literally: ‘Se’keroth, light from out of darkness by the sword of severance,’ is ostensibly a simplification of the aphorism ‘reduction/resolution’ that pervaded early Stothric attempts to deduce the relationship of substance to matter.”—E.H.d.E.,
Wind from the Abyss.

Shaper:
(S) One who can control the constituents of matter and form them to his will; Shaper designates not so much a race or bloodline as an ability; Estrazi, forebear to many races, is a Shaper, as are those he calls brothers, though even in that small circle not all actually shape; Chayin carries Shaper blood through his Mi’ysten father, Raet, though not all Mi’ystens shape. Khys had the skill from his father, Kystrai, who was Chayin’s grandsire; and Sereth has come to his ability through a series of genetic inversions which brought his own traces of Shaper heritage into contact with the beneficial mutations Silistran evolution so frequently provides, causing totally new configurations of interacting predispositions to appear than have been previously encountered.

sort:
(S) (n.) The probabilities inherent in a specific moment of time; those alternate future available to one trained to seek them; the display mode of probability.

sort:
(S) (v.) To “sort” probability; to determine in advance the resultant probabilities from postulated actions.

stepsisters:
(B) A colloquialism for fahrass berries.
telsodas:
(B) A pinkish, carnivorous plant with reddish-brown leaves that depends upon flesh to stave off indehiscence.

threx:
(S) The preferred riding beast of western Silistra.

Uritheria:
(P) A beast from the Parsets’ TarKesian mythology, said to have ignited the sun in the sky; a gigantic winged and clawed serpent-like beast that is the cahndor of Nemar’s traditional protector.

vabillia:
(B) A strongly revivifying root when taken in small doses, vabillia grows submerged around the edges of shallow pools.