Production
Herblore
In use
The blindest skill in the world, and the first real science in it.
What it governs
- Nothing is labelled. Identifying a herb means experimenting on your own body — which makes this the world's first empirical science, and it is passed master to apprentice or not at all.Charter, Part IV — Production group
- Its effects wire into everything: salves for wounds, draughts for stamina, antivenin, and cures for sickness. The citizen who can cure dysentery will be worth a great deal.
- And the dark shelf: poisons, on a weapon or in a drink. Genuinely dual-use, and hard to detect by its nature — was it sickness, or was it someone?
- Prayer potions are excluded on purpose. Faith is not chemistry.
The order it goes in
The chain, such as it is. Which herb and which part of which animal is the thing nobody is told.
- A herb and water make a base infusion.Charter, Part IV — Production group
- A secondary — venom, horn, marrow — makes the true thing.
- The vessel and the pestle are Crafting's.
The rest of the table, and the pestle. Seventeen herbs grow wild and can be sown, and a herb steeped at fresh water is drunk where it is made — unless the body has an empty horn in its arms, and then what it made goes into the horn instead, to be drunk where and when it is wanted. A horn comes off a beast, so a potion kept is a hunt first. A second thing in the arms can make an infusion into more than a taste, for a body that knows enough — which second thing, with which herb, and what it does to the one who drinks it, is exactly what nobody is told — and some rows of the table wait on parts of the world that are not built yet. A fresh leaf still needs the water, but an infusion already in a horn does not: the second thing goes into the horn wherever the body is standing, because the water is in there with it. Nothing is poured out of a horn, no horn is made — they are taken off beasts — and the pestle is still Crafting's, behind cordage, behind the timbers.