The catalogue is an account of what the survey finds. This entry is for a thing the survey does not find, because until lately the thing was not there to be found. It is made. A crosser will meet, more and more, places that no world holds and no veil discovered, places that exist because someone wished them to and paid to have them stand. The survey calls each one a Founding, and the practice of raising them is now common enough, and growing fast enough, that the catalogue sets it down plainly before the made places outnumber the entries that can hold them.
A Founding is a volume held open in the realm the Veilways occupy. That realm has no volume of its own. A veil joins two places in the space of a single step and there is no inside to the joining, nothing a traveller passes through, no there between the mouths. This has always been the nature of the crossing. A Founding is the exception worked on purpose. It is a made interior, an inside opened in the one realm that has none, reached by a veil cut to serve it, and a crosser who steps through that veil arrives not at a world but in the made place itself, which has floor and air and extent, standing in the realm that otherwise has neither.
The means came from the study of the Veilwalkers, that long labor having taught the peoples enough of how veils behave to learn, in time, to hold one open into a kept volume rather than only through to a far world. How the means truly works is a matter the survey files elsewhere and does not settle here. What this entry sets down is only that the means exists, that it grows cheaper, and that the founding of places has become an industry where once it was a marvel.
What gets founded is, mostly, what people want. Markets, before all else, great halls of trade founded to open onto many worlds at once, where a crosser may walk among the goods of universes never to be visited and carry home a thing made by hands at the far end of the charted pattern. Houses of spectacle, founded to a single performance, the weather and the light of the place tuned to the work, so that the play and the world the play stands in are one made thing. Grounds of pleasure, where the rules of the place are set by its founders, the long evening held, the sky kept at the hour that suits. Gardens, kept in an unchanging season, founded by some worlds to hold their dead in a country that does not turn. The survey has logged Foundings raised for nearly every purpose a people has thought to raise one for, and the catalogue expects the count to climb past its reckoning, as the cost falls and the wanting does not.
A crosser should hold one plain fact about all of them, and the survey states it without alarm, because it is not an alarm. Every Founding is an inside in a place that has no inside. The bright market and the kept garden and the long pleasant evening all stand in the realm the Veilways run through, the realm with no volume, and they have volume only because the founding holds it open against the nature of where it stands. This asks nothing of a crosser and threatens nothing. It is only true, and worth the keeping, that to enter a Founding is to stand in a somewhere that was made inside a nowhere, and that the floor underfoot is the survey's good word and the founders' good work and nothing the realm itself provides.
That realm has no name. The survey has not given it one, the Lectors and the Surveyors not having come to agreement, and the disagreement is not a quarrel between two terms but a longer failure than that. Names for it surface, and gain a season's use, and diminish, and are gone, and another rises and goes the same way, and none has yet held. The survey logs this as it logs any finding it cannot close, and refers to the realm by description where it must refer to it at all, and does not pretend to a name it does not have.
Not every Founding is sound. Most are. The great houses of trade and the kept gardens stand as founded and serve as promised, and a crosser meets far more good Foundings than ill ones. But a made place is only as sound as its making, and the catalogue holds a few that were founded poorly, or founded to deceive, or founded by hands that wanted something other than what the place appeared to offer. These are set down in their own accounts, each to its own number, and a crosser is sent to them with the cautions each has earned. They are the exception. The rule of the Foundings, for now, is wonder, and the survey would have a crosser meet the made places gladly, and only remember, standing in one, where it is that the made place stands.
There the matter rests.
~ The Lectors
