Ustos
The gnome nation, distant from Idir and reached only by sea or by somebody else's roads, which the Arcane Congress came out of and has been answering to ever since
Ustos is the gnomes’ own country, and it is far enough from Idir that nothing about it arrives first-hand. Peredhel counts it a strong trade partner and reaches it by sea, or else by way of Galderia’s roads, and calls those dealings peaceful and profitable. No capital of it has ever been named. Neither has a city, a river, a border or a single person living in it.
What did come out of Ustos is the Arcane Congress. It was founded there and its first members were gnomes to a man, and the other peoples who joined afterwards now outnumber the founders considerably. It never stopped being a gnome institution for all that: its scrolls are still lettered in Cànain, and the Congress holds the respect and the formal recognition of its own government at home, and of several other nations besides. Its foremost college stands in Ustos, and students elsewhere pass around the rumor that the college keeps an adamantine plate cut with runes, for the sort of magic-circle work nobody wants to attempt on stone that might crack.
The Mól, Looking Down
The old empire dealt with Ustos and thought little of the gnomes it dealt with. Mól foreign-affairs volumes describe the arrangement as a good one and describe the other party as incapable of grasping the complexities of magic, and record without embarrassment that the empire leaned on exactly that in every negotiation. The Congress’s own histories hold that the gnomes were the Mól’s making to begin with and broke free of them well before the empire fell. The trade volumes do not mention it.
The Long Quarrel with Amulta
Amulta was once reckoned Ustos’s rival in magic and is not reckoned anything of the kind now, and Amultans have an account of why. It is that Ustos has spent centuries working to slow them down, having no appetite for competition in the arcane, and that when Escaria cut off the reagent trade some thirty years ago without explanation it was because the gnomes had got to them. Amulta names the gnomes of Ustos for it; elsewhere the same charge is laid at the Arcane Congress’s door, which given who founded the Congress may be the same accusation said twice. Nothing has ever been proven, the reagents never came back, and no answer from Ustos ever traveled this far.
Nearer to hand, the Tarumbar Vórima, who holds arcana and the war of the west, has worked at a closer relationship with Ustos and got one. Four dozen gnome arcane instructors have gone into the schools of Bardh on the strength of it.