The Slaver Dominion of Sorkhold
Keep what you kill.
At a Glance
| Founding Body | None recorded; raised in the Second Yuga by former slave-runners. Sorkhold has never known a founding house |
|---|---|
| Founder | Unknown; the Dominion keeps no such records |
| Government | Despotism. Absolute rule by a single tyrant, the Khagan, held only so long as he can keep it. No dynasty, no houses, no surnames |
| Sovereign at the Dawn of the Present Age | Kravik the Iron, the Iron Khagan |
| Languages | The Common Tongue (commoners and slaves); Sorkholdi (the harsh tongue of the Chain Lords and the Khagan alone) |
| Dominant Faith | None but the Khagan and his rule |
| Sworn Power | One of the three nations of the Inner Triumvirate (with Mangholstadt and Arcanmere), bound by a shared creed of human supremacy |
Overview
Sorkhold is the cruelest of the western powers, a realm with no founding house, no dynasty, and no name it did not take by force. It was raised in the Second Yuga by former slave-runners, and it has kept faith with that origin ever since. Fear and slavery are its lifeblood: nine in ten of its people are chattel, and even its nobility, the Chain Lords, are the property of the man who rules them.
That man is the Khagan, a despot who takes the throne by strength and holds it only until a stronger or more cunning hand tears it away. Sorkhold believes, as an article of iron faith, that domination is the natural order, that the strong may do with the weak entirely as they please, and it has built a whole nation upon the proof of it.
Geography
Sorkhold holds the west-central Continent, south of Arcanmere, with the Principality of Voss and the Holy Theocracy of Mangholstadt to its west and the great Crimson Desert opening to its east. Southward its power reaches into Chandran, where in the present age its armies lie encamped before the walls of the capital, Arivata.
People & Culture
Sorkhold is a nation built on bondage. Fully nine in ten of its people are slaves, much as the helots outnumbered the Spartans of an older world, and the free are scarcely freer. Whether a lowborn commoner or a Chain Lord of the highest rank, every soul in Sorkhold is finally the property of the Khagan, to be used, spent, or discarded at his whim. It keeps no houses and no surnames; a people this unstable has never held still long enough to raise a lineage.
Its creed is domination dressed as destiny. Sorkhold holds that humankind is the strongest of the wild, and that Solon proved it, not by uniting the races (a word the Dominion will not use) but by dominating them, and by letting the old institution of slavery stand rather than casting it down. From this the Khagans draw a kind of manifest destiny: that it is Sorkhold's right to conquer the lesser peoples of the Continent and to do with them exactly as it wishes.
For the women of Sorkhold the cruelty is total. They hold no rights at all, and are counted vessels for pleasure, entertainment, and breeding, and nothing beyond. By a founding law of the Dominion, a grim variant of an older world's right of the first night, every female who reaches the age of majority, sixteen, whatever her rank or race, must be brought to the Khagan's bed and pass the night with him. Depending on the Khagan, few have survived it.
The everyday tongue is the Common Tongue, spoken by slaves and commonality alike. Above it stands Sorkholdi, a harsh, guttural speech kept by the Chain Lords and the Khagan alone; to know it at all is itself a mark of station.
Government
Sorkhold is a despotism without dynasty. Supreme power rests with the Khagan, an absolute tyrant beneath whom the Chain Lords hold what authority he permits them, and even they are his property in the end. There is no house and no line of succession worth the name. A Khagan will keep a great harem and set his many offspring to murder one another for the right to follow him, yet the throne passes more often by the knife than by inheritance: the sitting Khagan is nearly always overthrown in the end, whether by the heir he raised or by some other hand strong enough to take his place.
Economy
Sorkhold runs on the trade in human beings. It is the Continent's great slave market, buying the enslaved by the shipload, chiefly from the Holy Theocracy of Mangholstadt, and feeding its own conquests back into the same commerce. Its warriors take no formal pay; they are rewarded instead in what they can seize: the loot of sacked towns, the captives they can sell, and the women they can keep as slave-wives. War and bondage are not merely how Sorkhold enriches itself; they are the whole of its economy.
Religion
Sorkhold worships nothing but the Khagan and his rule, a cult of the living tyrant in the manner of the world's most closed and fearful states. It keeps no gods, no church, and no scripture. What loyalty its gods might have claimed is owed instead, wholly and on pain of death, to the man on the throne.
Military
Sorkhold fights as the Spartans fought, a whole society bent to the purpose of war. Its ranks are filled with slave-warriors, bred and broken to it and enhanced by the magecraft of Arcanmere, near-tireless and near-fearless, hurled into battle as the janissaries and immortal guards of an older world were hurled. They serve until they die, for there is no retirement in Sorkhold and no wage; they are paid only in plunder, in captives, and in the women they are allowed to keep.
From the days of the war games, Sorkhold has produced War Candidates in great number, many of the SS rank and more of the highest SSS rank than any other power of the Continent, a grim harvest first reaped under Androghengis Chandran. It is a nation the whole Continent has learned to fear.
History
Founding
Sorkhold was raised in the Second Yuga, in the turbulent years after Solon's Rebellion. When Solon cast down the Agnivansha and, by the Solonic Treaty, drove them to the Abaddon Mountains, he did not cast down the old institution of slavery along with them; he let it stand. In the west, where no settled power yet held sway, bands of former slave-runners carved a domain of their own out of that permission. That domain became Sorkhold. Like the Free Cities, it was turbulent almost from its first day, and it has never in all the ages since known a stable rule.
The Rule of the Khagans
From the beginning, Sorkhold has been governed by its Khagans, each a despot, each raised up and cast down in his turn. No house has ever held it and no dynasty has ever taken root. The throne is won by strength and lost to it, over and over, and the only constants across the centuries have been the twin engines of the Dominion: conquest, and the chain.
Prior Wars
When Androghengis Chandran, the Second War God, marched upon his campaign of conquest, he found in Sorkhold an instrument made ready to his hand. He conquered it as he conquered the others, but he did more than conquer it: he taught it. He took a handful of its Chain Lords as his own students and schooled them in a ruthlessness deeper than even Sorkhold had known, and he loosed the Dominion upon his enemies as a blunt weapon, a nation of mercenaries and cannon-fodder to spend in front of his truer forces. His war baptized Sorkhold in a new depth of cruelty, and it never washed off. To this day those few students revere him as a great guru, and the SSS-ranked Candidates his age produced remain among the terrors of the Continent.
The Present Age
For readers caught up to the most recent volume of the Soulfire saga.
At the dawn of the present age the Iron Khagan, Kravik the Iron, holds the throne of Sorkhold, and the Dominion stands as one of the three powers of the Inner Triumvirate, bound to Mangholstadt and Arcanmere. Its armies are pressed south into Chandran, where they besiege the capital, Arivata.
Of Kravik himself, dark rumors run. It is whispered that the Iron Khagan bows to some demonic power, that he offers his victims to it in sacrifice, and that it is from this unnamed thing that his own strange and secret magic flows. What is certain is only that his magic is his alone, understood by no one else in Sorkhold, and that under him the Dominion has lost nothing of its old appetite for blood.