Tense Keep

Every keep is built to hold something. Tense Keep holds time — or the argument about it, which in Kingdom XVIII (The Grammar Vault) amounts to the same thing. Three towers rise off one shared foundation, and the residents will tell you, without being asked, which is which: one for what has happened, one for what might yet, and one — the middle one, the tall one, the one closest to now — for what is happening this very second. That last is the tower that keeps everyone up at night.

Read the riddle etched above its door and you'll understand the local anxiety. I am the tower closest to now, and the least trusted of the three. The answer is PRESENT, and it is exactly as unnerving as it sounds. By every honest reckoning the present tense should be the sturdiest — it stands on solid ground, deals only in what's demonstrably true, makes no claims about a past it can't revisit or a future it can't reach. And yet it is the tower the masons watch, the one with the fresh cracks, whose residents have made, in the local phrase, "an uneasy peace" with the fact that the sturdiest tense builds the least reliable tower. Nobody can quite say why. It simply keeps being true, this very second, and then this one.

Come at the keep the way most travelers do — up the river, not down the road — and you'll meet it first as a landing. The water here is called the River Ring, and it curls under Tense Keep's walls in a slow, deliberate loop, as though the river itself couldn't decide which tense it was in and settled for going around. The landing below is where cargo changes hands, and where, on the day you arrive, it very nearly doesn't. Two river crews stand shouting past each other over a crate in the middle, and the argument is doing the thing every argument in this kingdom eventually does: nobody has said the noun yet. Everyone keeps calling the thing in the middle "the thing," as though naming it out loud might legally decide whose it is. It is a very Grammar Vault sort of fight.

Attached to one of the boats is Darro the river-runner — quick-talking, harried, with the specific energy of a man who has just discovered his cargo is worth arguing about and would very much like it to stop. When the crate comes open on a bed of straw and one oil-clothed object, Darro calls it ballast a half-second too fast. It is the most beautiful ballast anyone has ever seen, and the crate's own manifest — three entries lifted so clean the ink isn't crossed out but simply gone — suggests it was catalogued correctly by one careful hand before it was uncatalogued by another. The feud deflates the way arguments do once the thing being argued over is no longer available to argue over, and Darro goes on his way, having firmly adopted a policy of not asking questions.

Tense Keep does not stand alone. It anchors a whole grammar-mad country, and the roads out lead everywhere the language got itself codified. Inland lies The Case Room, a granary that was, once, the room where grammar itself was first written down — a distinction it now shares, uneasily, with a very large pile of grain. Beyond the water sits the hedging village of Subjunctive, where no one commits to a dinner invitation without three clauses of qualification and every notice is stamped with the safest word in the language: perhaps. When you tire of the towers you can drink at The Passive Voice, the riverside inn where — true to its sign — your ale is brought and your grievances are received, always received, by whom it firmly declines to specify. And if you climb, you'll take The Declension Stair, whose sixth step performs its one unshakeable grammatical case: it descends, reliably, once a decade, no matter how carefully the mason rebuilds it.

But it's the keep the kingdom is named around, and it's the present tower everyone keeps glancing up at — structurally the least reliable, technically the most honest, a building that tells the exact truth about right now and cannot, for the life of it, be trusted to keep standing while it does. The residents have stopped expecting an explanation. They just live there, this second, and the next one, and watch the cracks.