Nailhouse

Halberd's board. Opened 1986, ran until 2001, two lines for most of its life.

The name is a translation of a term for a house left standing while everything around it is cleared, and Halberd used it without ever explaining it, which is characteristic.

What it was like

Small and quiet. A message base, a file area that was never busy, and a login banner that changed perhaps four times in fifteen years. There were no games, no door programs, no attempt to grow. Halberd is recorded refusing a third line twice on the grounds that two was enough, which is either principle or thrift and is usually reported as principle.

The board's distinguishing feature was the roster. Nailhouse kept a written list of who had sat lore/long-count and when, checked by hand, and Halberd checked it. He did not check it publicly and did not announce results; the practice is attested mostly by people who found out their sit had been recorded when it came up years later in an unrelated message.

The strict reading

Halberd held the strictest position on the Count in the tradition: forty days, consecutive, on one circuit, and an interruption resets it. No exceptions, including for plant failure.

He never argued for it in print. This is the thing outsiders find hardest to credit, because the eleven-year disagreement with Ossuary is usually written up as a debate and it was not one. Ossuary published; Halberd kept the roster. The one-sided quality is the whole shape of it — see lore/halberd-and-ossuary — and treating it as a symmetrical dispute misreads both men.

His recorded position, secondhand and consistent across three tellings, is that the Count is not a claim about anything and therefore not a thing you can be argued out of. It is forty days or it is not forty days.

The end of the roster

The lore/armistice-banner in July 1997 ends the roster problem by making it unnecessary, and Halberd's recorded response is four words: he did it properly.

Nailhouse never posted a reply. It also, as far as anyone can establish, never stopped keeping the roster — the concession was Ossuary's and the practice was Halberd's, and nothing in the banner asked him to change it. What ended was the question of whose roster counted.

The board ran four more years without incident and closed when the line was disconnected. There is no closing banner. Somebody who called in late 2001 reports a busy signal and then, a week later, nothing.

What survives

Almost nothing digital. Two banner captures, a handful of messages quoted in lore/fallow-ledger No. 39, and the lore/marrow-tape, which came from lore/dead-letter in 1996 and is the only substantial artefact to have moved between the two boards.

The roster itself has never surfaced. It is the most-wanted missing document in the folder after the lore/marchford ledger, and unlike that one nobody even claims to have it.