The Cant and the silence it descends from

We have a language. We do not call it a language; we call it the Cant. It is small. It is composed almost entirely of phrases. The phrases are not poetry, though they sometimes resemble poetry. They are not slogans, though they sometimes do the work a slogan does. They are working words. They bind a speaker to a company by the act of being spoken, and they thin a speaker's tie to the company when they are spoken in the wrong room.

Consider the three things a phrase of the Cant can be. It can be a Binding — a sentence whose function is to reaffirm, in the saying, that you belong to the company that taught it to you. It can be a Power — a rarer phrase, given by a senior of the order to a junior, whose effect is felt in the things you can then do. It can be a Ritual — a line said in the course of a rite, which carries the rite forward and would, if omitted, leave the rite unfinished.

You will not be taught any of these now. They are taught only to those who have crossed the four winters and spoken the first oath. We tell you only that they exist, so that when you encounter one — and you may, if you spend time among us — you will know what you are encountering.

We will say something instead about the silence the Cant descends from. Every small company that has held together over time has had a small language. Some companies wrote theirs down; most did not. The languages were not invented by the seniors to keep the juniors out. They were grown, over years, the way a small woodland grows — phrase by phrase, by accidents that took root. The companies that wrote their language down lost it faster than the ones that did not. The book gives the phrase away.

We keep ours in voices. We say a phrase, in a room, to a person who can hear it, and we hear back from that person an answer or a continuation that proves the phrase has landed where we expected it to land. The phrases do not exist anywhere except in those exchanges. If our company were to vanish tomorrow, the Cant would vanish with us.

This is what binds a company. It is not the building you meet in; we have met in many. It is not the names of the seniors; the seniors change. It is what you say to each other that you do not say to anyone else. A company that has nothing it withholds from the outside is not a company; it is a crowd.

We are not a crowd. We do not address you as a crowd. We do not write to you in the voice that addresses a crowd. We are speaking, in this fragment, in the voice of those who have agreed on what to say to each other, and who have agreed — by silence — on what not to say to the rest. You are reading us across that silence. We are aware of it. We hope, in time, that you will be too.