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A working sailor will tell you, with no irony, that the Mistsea has moods. The phrase is older than the Reckoning. It is folklore in the strict sense — meaning it is not theology, not weather-science, and not navigation, but simply what reach-folk who live in the air have come to know about the air.
The moods are not evenly distributed across the year. They are not strictly tied to any particular reach. They overlap. They interfere. They produce, occasionally, conditions that no working sailor has ever seen before and that a younger sailor will spend six taverns trying to find a name for. Most sailors, by their tenth crossing, have a private vocabulary for the conditions they have personally encountered. What follows is the public vocabulary — the eight moods most reach-folk would recognize on hearing the names, and roughly what each one means.
Quiet weather
The mist is still. The light is high. Sounds carry strangely far — a hammer on the next isle is audible across two miles of upper air. The wind is mild and uniform. Nothing on the horizon suggests anything is about to change.
Working sailors do not rest on quiet weather. The trade’s unanimous folklore: quiet weather is what comes before something. Most working captains will, in quiet weather, double-check the stones, recheck the rigging, and stand a watch they would not otherwise stand. The fact that quiet weather sometimes simply holds — produces no following storm, no event, no consequence — does not relax the trade’s vigilance. The trade has been disappointed too often.
Salt-broth
Rough conditions. The mist whips into the air. The taste of salt is on the lips and in the nose; sailors who have been cold-hauled in salt-broth report it tastes faintly of stone as well, though whether this is real or a folk-belief is unsettled. The lift can hold; the rigging strains. A working ship in salt-broth is earning its share. Most experienced crews quite like salt-broth; it is honest weather.
Bone-cold
Cold so deep it reaches into the timbers of the ship. Sailors feel it through their boots. Stonewards feel it through the stones — which, in bone-cold, sometimes dim without warning, requiring careful attention. Most ships have an emergency procedure for bone-cold: extra wool, hot drink, no climbing rigging unless necessary, redoubled stoneward attention. The condition predicts ice on the hull within a half-day. Most working captains make port at the first available harbour when bone-cold settles.
Breath-light
The opposite of bone-cold. Conditions so still you can feel the ship breathing — the small slow inhale-exhale of the timbers shifting in their joints, the faint movement of the sails when nothing in the upper air should be moving them. Sailors in breath-light report a feeling of being watched. Most working sailors do not enjoy breath-light. Most working captains, asked, will say breath-light is the condition under which they most carefully follow the look-downward warning (see Why We Don’t Look Down).
Bell-light
Conditions in which ship-bells carry across the upper mist for unnatural distances. A bell rung on one ship is heard, clearly, on a ship six miles away that should not be in audible range. The phenomenon is rare. It is also folkloric not always bad — which makes it different from most of the other named moods. Some reach-folk hold that bell-light carries good news as reliably as it carries bad. Most working captains note the condition in the log and proceed normally. It is the only mood the trade does not formally fear.
Mast-ringing
A particular hum that develops in certain pressure-conditions: the mast vibrates faintly, audibly, in a frequency near the lower edge of hearing. Most working captains regard mast-ringing as an ill sign, and the regard is old. The condition often precedes a fall in the lift; sometimes precedes a Verdant-proximity warning (see The Verdant: What Travelers Avoid); occasionally precedes nothing at all. The trade’s working response is make port within the next reasonable harbour, and assess.
High-still
A condition specific to the Upper Reach: the air becomes utterly still and the sky becomes one continuous slate-grey. The light flattens. Working sailors feel an immediate lethargy — difficulty concentrating, a sense of having forgotten what they were about to say, occasional small disorientation. The condition breaks within a day, usually with a slow shift to ordinary weather. Most reach-folk who have not crossed in the Upper have never experienced high-still. Anvilbound sailors regard it as routine and largely amusing. Other-reach sailors regard it as deeply unsettling.
Veil-quiet
A condition specific to the approaches to the Veiled Reach. The mist thins; visibility increases; the air takes on a slight green-tinge in the upper register; the wind drops. This is the mood the trade has the longest list of warnings about. Veil-quiet is the condition under which most Bloom-encounters occur, most walker-sightings are reported, and most captains who have lost ships to a fall did, by the harbour-roll record, lose them in veil-quiet weather. A working captain reading veil-quiet who has no business in the Veiled will, by trade-instinct, come about without further conversation.
These are the eight named moods. There are, of course, others. Every reach-cluster has small local conditions that have not been worked into the public vocabulary; every working sailor with sufficient seasons has a private name for at least one mood that no one else in the trade uses. The mist’s moods are richer than the trade’s words for them. The trade is, in this as in most things, about right and not exact.
A reach-folk who can read the moods well — without saying so, without explaining how — is, in old reach-judgement, of the air. The phrase is rarely earned. It is also, when earned, the trade’s quietest and most lasting compliment.
“I have been at sea forty-one years. I have seen all eight moods more times than I have seen my own children. I have seen six of the eight in a single crossing, on one bad week in the autumn of my thirty-fourth year. I have seen one mood I could not name. I have not, in the seven years since, found anyone in the trade who could name it for me. I have stopped trying to name it. I recognize it when it comes. That is enough.”
— from a fisherman’s almanac kept anonymously, recovered at Pike’s Reach, undated