The Storm Covenant

Weather does not consult the charts, and the charts are the one subject Talassar’s courts agree about even less than they agree about weather. Greywake is the exception, the single institution the whole moon maintains together, and it survives for a reason no diplomat arranged. A court that sat on a warning would never crew a ship again. The captains are not anybody’s subjects, they are the only class this moon holds in common, they carry their grievances between islands themselves, and a house that let a fleet stand into weather it knew about would be finished at every quay in the water.

The stations run on a discipline that looks like modesty and is in fact the constitution of the thing. Summoners, Descriers and instrument crews all report, every report goes into the log, and the log does not say which of them was right. It easily could. The crews know perfectly well whose call held. But an institution ruling on that would be pronouncing one court’s practitioners sound and another’s mistaken, and Greywake would not survive the season.

So the covenant requires nothing except that you pass on what you have, and it is kept with a completeness nothing else on Talassar comes near. Courts that have not exchanged an ambassador in a hundred years exchange readings hourly.

Outsiders propose expanding it at regular intervals, on the sensible ground that a body trusted this far could carry other business. Talassar declines every time, and the captains are firmer about it than the courts, understanding better than anybody what the covenant costs and what a second subject would do to it.