Approach Ironvale from below in winter and you will see, before you see the isles themselves, the smoke columns rising vertically through the thin air — straight black plumes, twenty or thirty of them, holding their shape in the still cold for a thousand feet before the wind takes them. The columns are how navigators know they are close, even when the cluster itself is still hidden behind cloud. They are also, the locals will tell you, the only honest thing you will see in their sky.
Ironvale is a confederation of nine isles in the Upper Reaches, occupied primarily by the dwarves of the Anvilbound clans and a smaller population of mountain-bred humans who have lived there long enough to be, to a dwarf’s mind, adopted but not really mistaken for. The cluster is high, lean, and bitter cold for ten months of the year. The forests are short, dark, and slow-growing; the mountain spines are streaked with the pale-blue veins from which the largest aetherstones in the Reaches are quarried.
What Ironvale exports, to put it plainly: weapons, armour, working iron, tuned aetherstones, and a particular kind of patient craft that is not available in the south at any price. What Ironvale imports: nearly all of its grain, much of its cloth, all of its salt, and almost none of its opinions.
A traveller bound for Ironvale should know the following before docking at Highforge, the cluster’s principal port and the only one that routinely accepts foreign trade.
Speak less than you think. The Anvilbound do not regard silence as unfriendly; they regard it as the default state of a courteous visitor. A guest who fills the silence is a guest who is selling something, and the Anvilbound prefer to determine, on their own time, whether they are buying. The single greatest courtesy you can pay a master smith is to sit across from him for an afternoon and not ask him to explain his work.
Do not haggle by halves. The price quoted is the price after long calculation, and the calculation includes the smith’s assessment of what you, specifically, ought to pay. To counter at five-eighths or three-quarters is to insult the assessment. Either accept the price or refuse it entirely. Refusal is not taken poorly. Half-refusal is.
Stones must be carried, not shipped. A tuned aetherstone purchased on Highforge is, by old custom, carried in the buyer’s own hand from the forge to the buyer’s vessel. The walk is short. The custom is firm. A buyer who tries to have a stone delivered will be told the stone is not ready; it will become ready when the buyer comes to fetch it.
The Anvilbound do not lie about steel. They will tell you the precise limits of a piece of work, including its weaknesses. If a smith warrants that a blade will not break against scale below a certain thickness, the warrant is meant. Many a southern duellist has died of believing his Ironvale sword had been undersold by its maker. It had not.
The cluster is administered by the Council of the Anvil, which meets in the great chamber under Highforge’s central forge twice a year. The Council does not legislate so much as ratify; the day-to-day running of each member-isle is left to its principal clan-mother, who is generally not spoken to by visitors and who would not, in most cases, recognize a visitor’s face if she passed one in the street. This is not coldness. It is a working division of labour. Visitors deal with Highforge. Clan-mothers deal with Ironvale.
The cluster’s strangeness — and every Reach has one — sits in its deeper quarries.
The largest aetherstone seams on Ironvale lie hundreds of feet down into the cluster’s principal mountain, in shafts that have been worked for nine generations. The most experienced miners, the ones who have worked the deepest faces, do not, as a rule, sing while they work. The standard explanation is that the dust is bad for the lungs and the singing makes it worse. The unstandard explanation, given quietly by an old miner to a Wren Academy delegate forty years ago and recorded in a volume the Academy does not lend out, was this: down at the deep face, the stones sometimes sing first.
The dwarves do not advertise this. The temples of Thorin Anvilbound do not discuss it. The Wren Academy classifies its delegate’s account under a heading that translates, loosely, as acoustic curiosities. The miners themselves will tell you, if pressed by a stranger they have decided they like, that a singing stone is to be left in the wall and walked away from, and that the wall above and below it is to be left undisturbed for a season, and that anyone who tries to cut a singing stone out has, in their grandmothers’ time, regretted it.
This is the only superstition in Ironvale that the Anvilbound will admit to. They will admit to it without shame, and they will not elaborate.
“Buy your sword in Highforge and take it home. Do not ask after the mountain.”
— Captain Vesh of the Marrowkeel, addressed to her own first mate before her first crossing, 397 AU
The Anvilbound are not unfriendly. They are exact. A traveller who learns the cadence of the place — and most do, given a fortnight — will find Ironvale among the most reliable harbours in the Reaches. A traveller who expects warmth will mistake exactness for cold and will leave disappointed. The Anvilbound notice the disappointment and do not adjust for it.