The First Pages
"Page Nine. Not nine. Page Nine. Say it properly, pup, it was here before your great-great-grandmother's teeth." — Hobb of Page Nine
The Book of Doors has thousands of pages, and grows more every year. But the first twenty-three leaves are different. They were in the Book when it was found, before there was a city to write down, and every family in Quillnib's Handle can tell you whether they are First Page or not.
The Lost Twenty-Three
The founding story is told the same way by every goblin grandmother in the Handle.
Twenty-three goblins went into the Dense on a salvage run and did not come out. They walked for what felt like months, carrying each other when the weight got too much, until they made camp in a hollow and found a book lying open on a flat stone, bigger than any of them. Their scribe, a young goblin named Quillnib, was the first to touch it.
The Book had twenty-three pages. When each goblin laid a hand on one, the page filled in with a place, and the place was real. Over the next generations, the Handle was built outward from those twenty-three doors.
The descendants of the twenty-three are the First Page families. A goblin registered on one of the First Pages says the number in words: Hobb of Page Nine, Wick of Page Seven. Everyone born on a later page uses plain numbers: Grel of Page 31, Skeel of Page 212. Getting this wrong in front of an old First Page goblin is a good way to start a feud.
Rules of the First Pages
- Only Long Noses of the Rift-Sniffers may turn a First Page. Ordinary Noses handle the rest of the Book.
- The First Pages can't be repaired with Blackweight. The Book simply will not take the ink on them.
- Three First Pages are missing, their stubs cut clean in the spine. Everyone in the Handle knows which three. Nobody living knows what was on them.
The Pages
| Page | Place | Condition | What's there |
|---|---|---|---|
| One | The Cover Door | Open | The only door out of the Handle into the open Dense. Denseshifters arrive and leave here. Guarded day and night. |
| Two | The Wellhouse | Open | The Handle's spring. Its water is so heavy that a full bucket takes two goblins to lift, and the water-carriers are the strongest goblins in the city. |
| Three | The Weigh-House | Open | Where every cart and crate coming into the city is weighed and taxed. Because everything from the Dense weighs double, arguments here go on for hours. |
| Four | (missing) | Cut out | Stub only. Goblin children say it led to a god's house. |
| Five | The First Camp | Faded | The hollow where the Lost Twenty-Three found the Book. Grey and quiet. A campfire there is still warm. |
| Six | Rag Row | Open | Laundries, dyers and tanneries. The worst smell in the Handle; Rift-Sniffers hold their noses to go through. |
| Seven | The Crooked Stair | Open | Old First Page family homes on a stairway that turns back on itself. Wick of Page Seven lived here as a child. |
| Eight | The Archivist's Vault | Open | Chained books and scrolls too dangerous to read, guarded by paper constructs. |
| Nine | The Snuff Room | Open | The hall of the Rift-Sniffers, where pups are trained blindfolded. |
| Ten | The Quill Market | Open | Inks, quills and spell-bound paper, and a certain stall that gets raided. |
| Eleven | The Glimmering Shelf | Open | Floating platforms stacked like bookshelves. Swapped with the Quill Market on the Night of Wrong Pages. |
| Twelve | (missing) | Cut out | Stub only. The stub grew back for a few minutes on the Night of Wrong Pages, and something came through. |
| Thirteen | The Section That Reads You | Open | Books that write down whoever opens them. Only the very brave go in. |
| Fourteen | The Ashenburrow Door | Open | Opens into the Glimmering Ashenburrow in the City of Or, the only other tamed piece of the Dense. The Handle's main trade route to the surface. |
| Fifteen | The Inkspire Spire | Open | Calligraphers copying shifting texts into stable records. |
| Sixteen | Tallow Tower | Faded | A candle-makers' tower that collapsed long ago. The page still opens onto the room at the top, which is now three hundred feet of empty air. |
| Seventeen | The Alley of Unwritten Tales | Open | A misty alley where unfinished stories take shape around whoever walks in. |
| Eighteen | The Late Door | Open | Blank for centuries. It filled in, all at once, on the day The Rift Gate opened, and now leads to the back shelves of The Forbidden Library in Scholar's Rift. |
| Nineteen | The Long Yard | Open | The Handle's graveyard. Graves are dug one foot deep, which in the Dense is five hundred. |
| Twenty | The Street Before | Faded | A cobbled street with buildings nobody recognises, in a style no one in Iridia builds. Rift-Sniffers do not take visitors. |
| Twenty-One | The Soak | Open | A dark flooded cistern where wild Denslings drift. Protected by law, and poached by Blackweight renderers. |
| Twenty-Two | (missing) | Cut out | Stub only. The old promotion oath of the Rift-Sniffers ends: "and what we closed stays closed." |
| Twenty-Three | (blank) | Filling in | Completely white for as long as anyone remembers. In the last year, a few faint lines have started to appear. |