The Dark Kingdom of Khemareth
One people, past all blood.
At a Glance
| Founding House | House Sutekh |
|---|---|
| Founder | A freedwoman who broke the old mining-bondage of Kambhara and founded the Sutekh line |
| Government | Autocratic monarchy, the Sand Throne of House Sutekh. Matrilineal: only women may reign, and the family name passes through the female line |
| Sovereign at the Dawn of the Present Age | Queen Voranna Sutekh (heir apparent: Princess Kloe Sutekh) |
| Languages | The Common Tongue (everyday); Khemari (heritage tongue) |
| Dominant Faith | Arivatan Solonism, amid broad tolerance of many faiths; the dwarves keep gods of their own |
| Lifeblood | The Continent's source of maanthrika, the magical resource on which Arcanmere's whole society depends |
Overview
Khemareth, ancient Kambhara, is the great desert kingdom of the east, a realm set behind natural walls and ruled from the Sand Throne by the matriline of House Sutekh. It is a land of monuments and long memory, of chariots and sun-baked stone, guarded on every side by sea and sand.
Two things set it apart from every other power of the Continent. The first is its people, human and dwarf so wholly woven together that here, almost alone in the world, race is scarcely noticed at all. The second is what lies beneath its ground: maanthrika, the magical lifeblood of nations, which Khemareth holds and to which the Continent must come to buy, even those who would sooner see it burn.
Geography
Khemareth holds the east and southeast of the Continent, east of Chandran and south of the Silver Valley. It is a desert kingdom, and a famously unreachable one. By sea its coast defeats nearly every hull but those of the Sea Elves of Okeanos; by land, the only road to it runs across the vast and fatal Crimson Desert, which has killed more would-be visitors than any army the kingdom ever fielded. Its people are territorial by long habit, secure behind walls that nature built.
People & Culture
Khemareth is the most perfectly integrated society on the Continent. Humans and dwarves have lived so long as one people that the seam between them has all but vanished; a Khemari reckons kin and neighbor without a thought for race, and the very idea of one people standing above another struck the kingdom as foreign until, in living memory, a zealot tried to teach it.
Its customs bear the mark of that union. The kingdom is matrilineal, an old dwarven inheritance taken up by human and dwarf alike: a name descends through its women, and a man who marries takes his wife's. The throne itself passes only to daughters. In all things Khemareth counts worth by merit and honor rather than by birth, sex, or blood, and its long peace between the races is the proof it offers to a Continent that mostly believes otherwise.
The everyday tongue is the Common Tongue; Khemari, the older speech, is the language of heritage and of court.
Government
Khemareth is ruled from the Sand Throne by House Sutekh, an autocratic monarchy bound by one unbending law of succession: only a woman may reign. The crown passes down the female line, and though a claim may be contested (Nefertiri Sutekh's failed bid is proof that the succession is not always clean) it never passes to a son. At the dawn of the present age the Sand Throne is held by Queen Voranna Sutekh, and her heir apparent is her daughter, Princess Kloe.
Economy
Khemareth's wealth is maanthrika. The kingdom sits upon the Continent's supply of the resource that magic itself runs on, and it sells that lifeblood across the realms, even, in cold commerce, to the Mage Federation of Arcanmere, whose whole society depends upon it and which covets the source enough to make war for it. What the desert kingdom does not earn from maanthrika it earns from the disciplined industry of a people walled off from easy trade and long used to providing for themselves.
Religion
The dominant faith of Khemareth is Arivatan Solonism, the tolerant eastern strain, but the kingdom wears its creed lightly and shares its altars widely. Many religions are practiced here side by side, and the dwarves keep their own ancient gods, as they have since before there was a Khemareth to keep them in. Tolerance in matters of faith is only the religious face of the tolerance that orders the whole of Khemari life.
Military
Khemareth fields strong and disciplined forces, and its oldest martial tradition is the chariot, which the Khemari have driven into battle since the deep past and which they still race, in peace, as their proudest sport. Behind the shield of the desert, a territorial people has rarely needed to fight far from home, and rarely lost when it did.
History
Founding
Khemareth was raised in the Second Yuga, after Solon's Rebellion, upon ground that had known only bondage. The land is old Kambhara, once a country of mines and of the enslaved who worked them. From that bondage the kingdom was born: a freedwoman broke the chains of the mines and founded the line of Sutekh, and around her the freed, human and dwarf together, built a realm of their own. There is an old irony the Continent has forgotten, that one of the enslaved miners of that age, a man named Alistair Viswas, would go west and become the first Emancipator of Mangholstadt, his Kambhara origins lost entirely to time.
The Kingdom Apart
Behind its walls of sand and sea, Khemareth grew inward and grew whole. The union of human and dwarf that began in the mines deepened across the generations until the two peoples were, for every purpose that mattered, one, and the matrilineal custom of the dwarves became the custom of the kingdom entire. Isolated, self-sufficient, and territorial, Khemareth kept its own counsel and its own peace while the powers of the west tore at one another, guarding all the while the maanthrika that would one day make it both indispensable and endangered.
The Present Age
For readers caught up to the most recent volume of the Soulfire saga.
In the present age Khemareth stands with the Outer Alliance, which it joined in the war's earlier years, and it has become something no other realm is: the forge of the Emperor's most guarded weapon. Where once it built chariots, it now builds boomsticks, maanthrika-powered arms in the manner of an older world's first firearms, and its soldiers were the first of the Alliance to carry them into open war.
That armory is not truly Khemareth's own. The boomsticks are the personal property of the Emperor, their making a tightly kept secret: each weapon requires svarnam to wake it, and the svarnam is controlled by hands loyal to Ash alone, who oversee every stage of the work and suffer nothing to leak. The arms are counted, issued, and taken back after every use. Khemareth is their forge, but the Emperor keeps the key.
Against Khemareth stands Arcanmere, which depends upon its maanthrika and has declared war to seize the source. And within it, the old peace holds: when the zealot Sethos the Pure rose to preach that the dwarves were the lesser kind, Queen Voranna Sutekh, herself a human wed to a dwarf and the mother of half-dwarven children, had him put to death. Her son, Prince Karna, serves the Emperor as one of his Apostles; her daughter, Princess Kloe, heir to the Sand Throne, is betrothed to Rivolde of the Caligara.