Map of the Glassmere Marches

This chart is compiled in the archive's hand from three sources: the Regency boundary survey of 260 AS, the watch-masters' yearly returns kept at Fellbarrow, and the partial field-book recovered from the expedition of 271 AS. It is the best map of the Glassmere marches that exists, and the archive observes without pleasure that its centre is a blank oval nine miles wide. Everything shown here is edge. Of the middle, nothing is shown, because nothing is known that any surveyor will sign his name to.

The Marches

The marches are taken to mean the belt of ordinary country within a day's walk of the glass: rye-land and pasture, low hills to the north, the headwaters of the Sull's lesser tributaries to the south. The townsfolk here are Varrow stock, cautious and church-going after their fashion, though the churches are older than the silence of the gods. Fellbarrow, the watch-town, stands two miles from the eastern boundary and holds the confiscation stores, the muster barn and a gaol that has housed more curiosity-hawkers than thieves. Ostmere, to the north-east, is the larger market and the last place a traveller may buy a horse without questions. Between the boundary and the first farms lies a strip a bowshot wide where no one will build, plough or graze, though the land is as good as any in the county. The locals call this strip the Shunned Acre, and their leases name it so, which the archive finds as good a boundary mark as any stone.

The boundary itself needs no marking, for the grass stops and the glass begins within a hand's breadth, as though the waste had been cut out with a knife. All the same, the 260 AS survey set boundary posts at every furlong, oaken and tarred, each bearing the Crown's mark. Many still stand. A few, on the southern curve, have been pulled up and carried off, whether for firewood or for the value of the mark the archive cannot say.

The Roads That End

Three roads serve the marches, and each has its manner of ending. The Fellbarrow road comes west from Harrowgate by way of the Sull crossings: a good stone-laid imperial road as far as Fellbarrow, four days on foot from the river, and a maintained lane beyond it to the eastern watch-towers. Tolls are taken at the Sull bridge and again at Fellbarrow's gate, two pence a cart. The Ostmere lane comes down from the north and is mud after rain; the Watch charges no toll on it, but the inn at St Anselm's Rest, the last roof before the glass, charges what it likes. The third road is the old Cathedral causeway, which ran straight from the south to the doors of the Cathedral of the Hymns and was, before the Sundering, the most travelled pilgrim way in the Reach. It is closed by statute and by common sense. Its stones can still be followed for two miles through the fields, and then they meet the glass and go on into it, level and undamaged, for as far as a man cares to look. No one the archive has spoken to will say how far they have followed them.

The Mere Watch keeps four wooden towers at the principal approaches, each a day's slow walk from the next, with patrols between in summer and none worth the name in winter. The towers are thirty feet tall, roofed, and provisioned for a week. Their standing orders in fog — strike the bell, bar the doors, keep the lanterns lit, and never pursue what walks out — are set out in the Mere Orders and are not, in the watch-masters' returns, a dead letter. Fog is the marches' true weather. It comes off the glass without wind and without warning, most often in the months around the turn of the year, and it is the first thing any marcher will warn a stranger of, ahead of the Unquiet, who are real but rarer.

The Survey Marks

The 260 AS survey ran the boundary entire and named the work done. The 271 AS expedition, licensed by the Regency and equipped out of Ostmere, was to cross the waste on a measured line from the eastern towers to the centre, set marks, and return. Its line of survey poles — chestnut, painted white, with numbered copper tags — runs from the first watch-tower straight into the glass. Twelve poles were set on the first day. The thirteenth stands where the party's field-book breaks off. Beyond the thirteenth pole there are no marks, and the line on this chart is drawn dotted, for it is a line of intention only.

Of that party, Osmund Rill came back, and the others did not, and Rill could not account for nine days of the journey nor for certain memories that had nothing to do with it. The survey poles are there to be found still, or were at the last watch patrol to pass them in 309 AS, white against the black. Since that year, by the clause added to the Mere Orders shortly after 271, the watchmen who see them are forbidden to record what else they see. The archive notes, therefore, that the best-marked path into the Glassmere is also the one about which the fewest lawful words may be written, and leaves the reader to make of that what the Regency plainly did.

Twelve poles set true, the thirteenth where we turned. Let no man say the line was not drawn. It was the country that refused it.

The Pale Choir has twice offered, most recently in 310 AS, to survey the waste at its own cost and under its own Ash-Clerics, in exchange for the mere's recognition as holy ground. Caldmere has twice refused. The centre of this chart will remain blank, the archive judges, until someone pays for it to be otherwise, and the price asked so far has always been the wrong one.