But although hundreds of people drank from glasses with the mark of the Koviran foundries and seasoned their soup with Poviss salt, in people’s awareness it was still an extremely distant, inaccessible, harsh and hostile land. And, above all, foreign.

In Redania and Kaedwen, rather than ‘go to Hell’ people said ‘get to Poviss’. If you don’t like working for me, a master would say to his unruly journeymen, ‘the path’s clear to Kovir’. ‘We won’t have Koviran order here’, shouted a schoolmaster at his disobedient and boisterous pupils. ‘Go mouth off in Poviss’, called a farmer to his son when he was critical of his forefathers’ ard and swidden agriculture.

If anyone doesn’t like the old order, ‘the road’s open to Kovir’!

The recipients of these statements slowly–very slowly–began to ponder them and soon noticed that indeed nothing, absolutely nothing, was barring their way to Kovir and Poviss. A second wave of emigration set off for the North. Just like the previous one, this one mainly consisted of discontented mavericks who were different and wanted things done differently. But this time they weren’t troublemakers and misfits at odds with life. Well, at least not all of them.

Scholars who believed in their theories, although they had been shouted down and called demented, headed North. Technicians and constructors, convinced that contrary to popular opinion it was possible to build the machines and devices invented by the scholars. Sorcerers, for whom the use of magic to erect breakwaters wasn’t a sacrilegious offence. Merchants for whom the prospect of a growth in turnover was capable of exploding the rigid, static and short-sighted limits of risk. Farmers and stock breeders, convinced that one could create fertile fields from even the worst soil, that it was always possible to breed varieties of animals in a given climate.

Miners and geologists, for whom the bleakness of Kovir’s barren mountains and rocks was an infallible signal that if there was such paucity on the surface there must be wealth beneath, also headed North. For nature loves equilibrium.

There was wealth beneath those wastes.

A quarter of a century passed–and Kovir had extracted as many minerals as Redania, Aedirn and Kaedwen taken together. Only Mahakam surpassed Kovir in the extraction and processing of iron ore, but transports full of metal serving the production of alloys went from Kovir to Mahakam. Kovir and Poviss accounted for a quarter of the world’s yield of silver, nickel, lead, tin and zinc, half of the extraction of copper ore and native copper, three quarters of the yield of manganese, chromium, titanium and tungsten ores, and the same amount of metals occurring only in their native form: platinum, ferroaurum, kryobelitium and dimeritium.

And more than eighty per cent of the world’s gold production.

Gold, with which Kovir and Poviss bought what didn’t grow or wasn’t bred in the North. And what Kovir and Poviss didn’t produce. Not because they were unable to or didn’t have the expertise, but because it didn’t pay. A craftsman from Kovir or Poviss–the son or grandson of an immigrant who went there with a bindle on his back–now earned fourfold that of his counterpart in Redania or Temeria.