The Golden Sword (44 page)

Day-Keepers:
(S) The guardians of Silistran history, past, present, and future. The Day-Keeper hierarschy as a whole is referred to as the Dharendiil, a High Day-Keeper as dharener. Over these presides the dharen, the spiritual guide of Silistra.

Day-Keepers’ Clock:
(S) A mythical gnomon upon whose face all that ever was, is, and will be is inscribed. Usually an oath, as “By the Day-Keepers’ Clock.”

Day-Keepers’ Roll:
(S) The records of the dead, the archives into which name and history are entered upon an individual’s death.

deep
^I
reader:
(S) One whose skills allow access to the deeper consciousness of another, exempting thoughts framed for communication. The value of deep-reading is considered by many to be greater than that of surface reading, for thoughts upon the surface, like, the tip of an iceberg, give little and often faulty enlightenment as to what lurks beneath.

denter:
(S) A large-humped, nub-horned animal, passive and tractable, raised for meat and dairy, and often used as a draft beast. This single-hoofed animal ranges from ten to fourteen hands and may reach a weight of thirteen hundred B.S. pounds.

deracou:
(P) “The wind that devours”; most deadly of Parset sandstorms; the summer storms that yearly remake the desert’s topography, which once blew all the year round upon the desert lands, and against which the Parset nictitating membranes and contractible nostrils were developed as survival modifications by hide aniet’s Day-Keepers.

dharen:
(ST) The spiritual ruler of Silistra; the supreme authority of the Day-Keeper hierarchy.

dharener:
(ST) A high Day-keeper; one who holds the adminstrative rank of dharener; a hide council member. (In the Parset Lands, where the dhareners posture at autonomy, the hide council seeks no higher authority.)

dhrouma:
(S) A drum made from the hollowed-out elbow of the onaric tree’s branches. Once the curved, tube has been aged, both ends are covered with gaen hide.

diet:
(S) The hide diet, which extends under Well Astria, has her entrance on the banks of the Litess River, within the walls of the Day-Keepers’ School; the hide name diet.

dippar:
(S) Sillistran coinage. One gold dippar is equalled by fifty copper dippars. Dippars are minted only in independent cities, as opposed to titrium and gold half-wells and wells, minted by the Well system. They are round with octagonal holes punched in mid-disk, and are intaglioed with a representation of the city in which they were struck.

Dordassa:
(P) The land of the Dordassar tribesmen, which bisects the dead sea. Dordassa is bordered on the north by Nemar, on the east by the Embrodming Sea, on the south by Coseve, Menetph, and Itophe, and to the west by the tail of the Yaicas and the Opirian Sea. Her colors are cobalt and cinnabar, her, device the cobalt dorkat upon a cinnabar ground.

Dorkat:
(P) Wingless cousin of the hulion, the dorkat has the same wedge-shaped head and pointed ears. The hind, musculature tends to be lighter, but the forequarters are as heavily developed. Although the cranial capacity is identical with the hulion’s, dorkats do not demonstrate more than half the intelligence of their winged brethren. The nocturnal dorkat is prevalent in all the wilderness areas of Silistra, and
its
prey is thusly varied, dependent upon what the area will provide. They are exclusively carnivores, with protruding incisors. Dorkats, unlike hulions, have been known to turn man-eater, and area often troublesome raiders to herders of domesticated beasts.

draw:
(S) Draw time, one of the Weathers of Life, recognizable by the acceleration of the procession of events, and to the individual by an increased sensitivity and awareness of proximity to crux. Draw time, when properly exploited, is said to be the most frUitful of all the Weathers.

Dritira:
(S) Fifth-largest Silistran city, largest southern port. Dritira receives goods overland from Stra and Galesh, and ships from every city with merchant fleets. The Embrodrning Inlet, which she shares with the city of the written word, Yardum-Or, is the most trafficked harbor upon Silistra. Dritira, as Yardurn-Or, is a dependent city to Well Oppiri, third most prestigious of the Silistran Wells.

ebvrasea:
(S) The largest of Silistra’s
_.
omnivorous birds. Ebvraseas have been known to achieve a wingspread of sixteen feet or more. They are night hunters and seldom venture out of their craggy realms. Ebvraseas mate for life.

ei-joss
(P) The five-named human spirit as it is delineated by the religion of Tar-Kesa; folk representation of the Tar-Kesian tenet that man is never complete while enfleshed, and that human iniquity stems from this inherent knowledge of the flawed nature of mortality.

enth:
(S) One twenty-eighth of the Silistran day; each enth contains seventy-five iths.

Falls of Santha:
(S) The great cascades at the source of the Litess River, high on the Plateau of Santha in the Sabembe range.

Feast of Conception:
(S) The oldest performed ceremony upon Silistra, dating back into prehistory. Before Haroun-Vhass, the Fall of Man, Silistrans observed Feast of Conception ..

fire gem:
(P) A multihued precious stone mined exclusively in the Parset Lands, fire gems rival gol in hardness and durability and are much sought by gol-etchers.

firstcome:
(P) Any individual whose actions seem to fulfill prophecy; a catalyst or agent of TarKesa, sent periodically into the world to purge and prepare his children before He makes his presence felt.

forereaders:
(S) Those females who have received training in the sorting of probability. Forereaders ai-e the most powerful and prestigious women on Silistra, those whom the Day-Keepers have chosen to share their work, those whose innate foreseeing ability is .88999 or better.

forereader’s disease:
(S) An inability to discern the relative likelihood of manifestation of what is seen in the sort, followed by the appearance in the forereader of doubt and fear. Once this negative patterning has become firmly established in the viewer’s conception, all incoming data are misread to accord with the interpretive viewpoint, a closed cycle of paranoia develops, wherein the forereader manufactures a false sort, reads it, reinforces the self-generated fear, brings into being that which is feared, is thusly upheld, and manufactures yet another false sort.

forereading:
(S) Stochastic processing, the sorting of probability.

friysou:
(P) A featherless, leather-winged scavenger common in the desert regions, the friysou’s wingspread may approach that of the mountain ebvrasea. The friysou is not an aggressive predator, however, preferring to pick the bones of other beasts’ kills.

gaen:
(S) Most common of southern draft beasts, the gaen is a distant relative of the northern denter. This straight-horned herbivore is readily domesticated, placid of temper, and can haul up to ten times its own weight for considerable distances. Its heavy musculature, although a benefit to those who use gaen for draft, yields up a tough and stringy meat which is barely palatable; “gaen-eater” is an epithet applicable to any so lacking in life skills as to be reduced to depending for sustenance upon this slow-moving, dull-witted, untasty beast.

Gaes d’ar:
(P) “You stand before me”; one of fifteen possible Parset greetings, the use of which is in a formal audience between two of markedly different stations.

gaesh:
(S) The hide gaesh, beneath the jungle city of Galesh on the Karir-Thoss River. The hide name gaesh.

Galesh:
(S) The city that feeds Silistra, Galesh lies in the most fertile Karir-Thoss Valley. The Galeshir swamps yield a number of medicinal herbs that cannot be found elsewhere, as well as the swamp kepher from whose scent glands come the base fixatives for: the much-sought Galeshir perfumes. In this tropical climate the. Silistran silkworm thrives; Galeshir carpets are second only to Parset rugs in their beauty and durability.

gol:
(S) The excrescence of the golachit of Siiistra. Gol comes naturally in five colors: blue, amber, white, silver, and red. Black or other adulterated colors are produced by feeding the golachit the proper melanis (harmless chemically treated fungi). Gol is considered superior as a building material because of its permanence; gol might last a man a lifetime, while iron, brick, and wood seem to wear away visibly under the Silistran eye.

golachit:
(S) The great builder beetle of Silistra thrives both in a wild state in the gollands at the feet of the Sabembes, and in a mutually beneficial symbiosis with man. As with web-weaver and webber, so do golachit and golmaster blend minds and create together such beauty as would have remained unrealizable dream for either alone. The golachit is a scavenger by nature and finds both food and stimulation in this community with man.

gohnaster:
(S) One who enters into community of minds with a golachit; a golarchitect.

gristasha:
(pre-Hide Silistra) The dark-skinned primitives who formed one-half of the hide aniet, precursors to the Parsets, who still tattoo themselves as did their fierce progenitors. The Parset culture, in language and custom, bears heavily this gristasha influence.

Groistu:
(ST) The constellation of the stones wielder, which dominates the southwest quadrant of the Parset sky.

gul:
(S) The ovoid, juicy fruit from which kifra is obtained; any of the three varieties of gul, the yellow, the orange, the purple-blue.

harinder:
(S) A sepia-colored, thorned shrub ubiquitous upon Silistra. It is speculated that when the Polar Wastes are explored, some subspecies of harinder will be found there.

hard:
(S) (n.) A common and tasty bird whose feathers are black and iridescent. The harth thrives in city and town, as well as plain and forest. He is a migrating bird, preferring warm weather. In the northern regions at harvest past, the sky is indeed “harth-black” with their numbers, screeching their distinctive “Hareee, haree” cry.

harth:
(S) (adj.) Anything black and shining, especially black with blue or purple overtones.

helsar:
(M) A bluish-white, crystalline life or prelife form said to be the reagent (in its shattered state) of life in a neighboring continuum. Helsars manifest upon a time-space world only contiguous to a disturbance such as is caused by flesh when first attempting the obviation of space.

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. (The line between hesting and shaping is somewhat difficult to define when highly skilled individuals are concerned. The rule of thumb is held to be thus: if natural law must be remade or totally superseded, as in creating a permanent object such as a fruit or a star, one is shaping. If one is simply controlling an already existing object or event, as would be the case if one caused a fruit or star already in existence to alter its behavior but not its structure, one is hesting. The fruit or star one moves to the right or the left or higher in the sky by will would not have behaved in that fashion, but is still the same star or fruit as was a natural inhabitant of the time before the hest was applied. If one, on the other hand, creates fruit or star, one has brought into the time, by a suspension of natural law, that which heretofore did not exist. One shapes matter. One bests time.) In usage, bringing in a hest, affecting probability.

hide:
(S) The seven hides of Silistra: aniet, bast, crill, diet, gaesh, rendi, and stoen. Each hide supported a thousand survivors and their progeny through the long years of waiting until the planet’s surface was again habitable. Under the aegis of the dharen’s Day-Keepers and forereaders, the hides were built and operating sixty years before the projected disaster. But few believed, and thus only in hide aniet were there other than Day-Keepers and forereaders when the world exploded into war. It is said that the word “hide” derived from the scoffing and mocking of pre-hide Silistra at the project. “Khys’s burrows” was another early name for the interconnected life-support complexes that saved what little of Silistra that was desirous of survival.

hide-days:
(S) The thousand years of subterranean living, accounted hide-year one through one thousand. Our present calendar date of 25,693 is counted from the first year spent above the ground. All that occurred before hide-year one is termed pre-hide, or prehistoric.

hide-name:
(S) Any of the seven hide-names: aniet, bast, crill, diet, gaesh, rendi, .and stoen. Hide descent is always carried through the mother. The hide-narne is second in the male, third in the female, and always takes lower-case honors.

high-couch:
(S) Formally, the Well-Keepress, also any woman able to demand over thirty gold dippars per couching.

huija:
(P) The metal-studded, braided lash favored by Parsets.

hulion:
(S) The most intelligent animal on explored Silistra. The hulion-winged, furred carnivore of the Sabembe range; shuns civilization. They are known to have mind skills and a complex language, but are not symbolizers such as man. The hulion does as he wills upon Silistra, and none obstruct him. The high Sabembes and the unnamed western mountains are their domain of choke.

Inner Well:
(S) The great central court within a Well’s walls.

ith:
(S) One-seventy-fifth of an enth.

Itophe:
(P) The land of the Itophe, bordered on the north by Dordassa, on the east by Menetph, on the south by the Ernbrodming, and on the west by the southernmost Yaicas and the salt river Oppi. Itophic colors are gray and sepia, her device the triple triangle of sepia upon a field of gray.

jer: (P)
A watering place in an otherwise arid region.

jeri:
(MK) A costly and exotic M’ksakkan drink .which mixes seven fruits with a char-filtered grain beverage; a sweet drink much favored by women.

jiask:
(P) A Parset fighting man; one who has earned the jiask’s chaldric strand.