Hold Fast

Isla Venn picks quit-cord from wrecks that have fallen off Osmark, a city hung on promises over a bottomless fog. She wears no live cords. Then a man with a barbed debt-oath asks her to cut him free.

Hold Fast is an original novel set in Osmark, a city of rope and kept word strung tier over tier above the Underbreath. Every rent, marriage, and indenture is a live cord that hums. When the people who made those promises go into the fog, the cords go quit: grey, cold, and silent. Isla makes her living cutting that dead material out of fallen tenements before the Knotwrights arrive. She has spent twenty years making no promises, because a promise is a cord and a cord is a cage. A boy who can see the gold of live cord works beside her. A landsman with a collar that is killing him finds her on Lowspan. The novel follows the work of picking, the politics of the high spans, and what it costs to hold a city up by hand.