The Mere Watch

The Mere Watch is the small company of spearmen by which the Regency Council discharges its oldest and least wanted duty: keeping the approaches to the Glassmere. Forty spears, on paper; wooden towers at the waste's edge; a captain, a muster roll, and a set of standing orders that no lord of the Council has troubled to read in living memory. The Watch turns back pilgrims, antiquarians and grieving widows with the same flat courtesy, confiscates what mere-glass it can catch, and — by its strangest and oldest order — is forbidden to ask any soul who comes out of the waste what they saw inside.

Origins

The archive's earliest surviving muster roll for the Watch is dated 74 AS, under the Empire, and names fifty-two spearmen at four towers. The towers were almost certainly older. A pay-fragment of 43 AS refers to the men of the mere as an established charge, and the company's own tradition holds that the first towers were raised before the glass had cooled. Whether those first watchmen were set to keep the living out of the waste, or to keep watch on what might come out of it, the records do not agree; the two purposes were never clearly separated, and perhaps were never meant to be. When the Empire ended in 297 AS the Watch simply went on, its pay now drawn on a Regency that forgets it exists except when a traveller of quality complains of being turned back.

Organisation and pay

The company is commanded, in 312 AS, by Captain Odo Ferne, a grey, careful soldier of fifty years who has held the post for nine years and asked for it twice. His seat is the timber barracks at Fellbarrow, a half-day's walk back from the glass, from which the towers are relieved in turns of eight men. The establishment is forty spears; the autumn count of 312 AS mustered thirty-one.

A watchman is paid two pence a day, of which three quarters has stood in arrears since 310 AS; the Council's war-chest is pledged elsewhere, and the company lives on salt-fish, turnips and what its sergeants can borrow against the pay-roll. The rolls lose between a fifth and a quarter of their names every winter, chiefly to desertion in the dark months, and the vacancies are filled with whoever will take the bounty — discharged men, debtors, the younger sons of poorer cottars. One result is plain in the rolls: very few serving watchmen have ever seen the mere-fog come in, and fewer still have served long enough to be struck by the orders that govern it.

Standing orders

The Watch is governed by a much-copied booklet called the Mere Orders, kept in each tower and read aloud to every new man, a custom which survives even where literacy does not. The plain clauses are plain enough: no person passes onto the glass; all mere-glass chiselled at the boundary is to be seized; travellers are to be turned back with courtesy and remembered by face. The later clauses are not read aloud so readily.

When the fog comes off the glass, strike the bell, bar the doors, and let no lantern go out. Answer no voice, though it speak with your mother's tongue and know your name. What walks out of the fog is not to be followed, and what comes out living is to be fed, held three nights, and let go. You will write down nothing it says. You will ask it nothing.

The archivist notes that the final sentences are a later hand in every surviving copy, and that the company's own pay-rolls date the addition to shortly after 271 AS — the year Osmund Rill, sole survivor of the last licensed expedition, came out of the waste unable to account for nine days. Who wrote the clause, and on whose authority, the archive has no record.

Relations with others

With the Lantern-Wardens the Watch keeps an uneasy written courtesy: the wardens pass the towers without search or toll, and in return the Watch may send to the nearest lamphouse when the Unquiet walk near the marches. Each side needs the other and neither much likes it. The Watch resents men in grey who go armed where its own writ runs; the wardens, for their part, will not set foot on the glass — the refusal is written into their contracts — and some watchmen take this as an insult to the company that stands there every day. Others take it as a warning.

With the Pale Choir there is no courtesy at all. The Choir's claim that the Glassmere is holy ground under its governance has been refused at Caldmere for decades, and it falls to the Watch to refuse it in person: Choir processions are turned back at the towers like anyone else, which the cantors remember and the watchmen do not enjoy. In Ashfall of this year the company turned back two paying parties riding under the promise of the Mallory reward, and Captain Ferne is said to have written twice to Caldmere asking whether his orders still stand. No answer is recorded.

Rumours

That the confiscation of mere-glass is a fiction at most towers is rumoured openly and proved nowhere; of the two hundredweight seized in 311 AS, a third never reached the Fellbarrow stores, and curio-shards are sold at every market in the marches for a silver penny the piece. Darker talk attaches to the winter fogs. During the Long Winter the fog came off the glass three times, and the bells were struck each time as the orders require; what the towers' lanterns showed the men behind the barred doors is a thing the Watch does not discuss, being forbidden to record it and wise enough not to. The oldest sergeant at Fellbarrow is said to have served nineteen years, and to sleep, by his own choice, facing the wall.